Val Guest

[DB7]

I do not wish to criticize Val Guest - he is a favorite of mine But:

Kind of sad that he ended up helming Au Pair Girls and Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

[helvis]

Kind of sad that he ended up helming Au Pair Girls and Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

You think that's sad... how about 'The Boys in Blue'

[john audley]

Probably not .... I certainly don't.



The introduction to the film is just as important (often more so in some cases) as any other scene in the film. I cannot see how lopping off the first twenty minutes makes the film 'sharper' if what you have done has made no significant impact on the rest of the film. Also, why the necessity for it to make 'quicker sense', for me part of watching a film is to see events unfold and see how the characters react to them. To simply drop Johnson into the situation is to take him out of his personal context, thus robbing the viewer of seeing possible character motivations that might have been subtley placed in the introduction by Val Guest.



It's a bit like taking the scenes of Insp Martineau's home life and the backstory with Don Starling out of Hell Is A City, or removing the introductory scenes in the house from Jigsaw. It wouldn't disrupt the plot too significantly but would lessen the viewer's knowledge of the characters and their context therefore reducing their enjoyment of the film



Bats.

Absolutely agree Bats! I only did it for personal satisfaction (you could try in with a second video yourself) I can't think of any other film that I would do this to although a few minutes or moments cut from some would be advantageous and - in the case of Quatermass 2 - I think he himself has cut to much from the original script. I would have put ten minutes more myself.

Back to the film. I do feel that Johnson is fully explained as the film plot unfolds and, personally, I feel that the rather frivolous

start fails to link with the main plot of real disaster pending.

[sladdin]

Why did he always shoot a lot of his films in b/w ?

[DB7]

Probably not through choice but because he was often employed on low-budget films or b-movies.

[Gerald Lovell]

Presumably because many of his films dated from an era when films were mainly in black and white. All of his later work was in colour.

[julian_craster]

This is a non-issue, I think !

Most directors filmed most of the time in B/W in the 1940s and 1950s - and Guest's early films like Penny Princess, Men of Sherwood Forest, It's a Wonderful World and Dance Little Lady were all in colour !

[Film Man]

Well done julian...I was trying to think of an answer without blowing a fuse!
Film Man.

[DB7]

This is a non-issue, I think !

Most directors filmed most of the time in B/W in the 1940s and 1950s - and Guest's early films like Penny Princess, Men of Sherwood Forest, It's a Wonderful World and Dance Little Lady were all in colour !

And they don't come more colourfully bonkers than Toomorrow.

[Gerald Lovell]

Val Guest sometimes adopted a semi-documetary style to his films and black and white probably aided that approach.

[smudge]

Val Guest sometimes adopted a semi-documetary style to his films and black and white probably aided that approach.

Quatermass II being a classic example...

The Day The Earth Caught Fire being another...

Smudge