Who?

Cast: Elliott Gould, Trevor Howard, and Joseph Bova

Director: Jack Gold   

93 minutes (PG) 1974

Powerhouse (Indicator)

Blu-ray region B

Rating: 9/10

Review by Steven Hampton  

Questions and theories about personal identity form a major subgenre theme of science fiction, especially in the mind-expanding New Wave that sprang to prominence from the influential writing of novelist Philip K. Dick, who mapped the field’s peculiar authenticity with special regard to humanity in several original books. Cult movies like French horror Eyes Without A Face (aka: Les Yeux sans visage, 1960), and John Frankenheimer’s curio drama Seconds (1966), helped to create an intriguing and ongoing cycle of genre cinema that’s as varied in its scope and character traits as Warren Beatty’s reincarnation fantasy Heaven Can Wait (1978), Ridley Scott’s seminal Blade Runner (1982), Paul Verhoeven’s splattery satire RoboCop (1987), John Woo’s Face/Off (1997), Pedro Almodovar’s body-horror The Skin I Live In (2011), and Tarsem Singh’s actioner Self/Less (2015). There’s also a number of TV series, from Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner (1967), and Donald P. Bellisario’s Quantum Leap (1989-93), to Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse (2009-10), adding yet more diversity and multiplicity of roles to screen stories that interrogate unique identity.

An identity crisis often explores complex philosophical puzzles about the nature of human consciousness, any practical criteria for sentience, and individuals seemingly cast adrift in space-time, that confront the difference between facts and truth, so that vital distinctions - whether depending upon official papers or gleaned from genetic codes - become a fluid reality. Doppelgangers, avatars, and clones or twins, along with mind or body-swaps and telepathy, bring dramatic puzzles and supplementary confusions to SF about the political order and social necessity of identifiable personae. 

“It feels wonderful to be back.”

Written by John Gould, adapting the book by Algis Budrys, spy-fi drama Who? (aka: The Man In The Steel Mask, 1974), delivers a quite fascinating mystery and so it’s recognised today as something of an overlooked classic. Who? is the Kafkaesque flip-side to Lamont Johnson’s thriller, The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972), about an amnesiac man suspected of sabotage. Clearly, the original novel, Who? (1958), and Jack Gold’s fascinating movie offer a stylised sci-fi variation of 17th century French mystery The Man In The Iron Mask (often filmed, but to variable effect). Who? concerns a man so horribly disfigured, after a burning car crash, that his lost face is now a blankly robotic mask, his prosthetic head is a sculpted alloy dome, while his new cyborg body encases a nuclear-powered pacemaker in his chest. Is he really a dead man returned to ‘life’, or merely the robotic simulation of an individual, apparently created for the nefarious deception of espionage?

The metal-man is greeted by FBI agents at a German border checkpoint. Are they able to welcome home scientist Dr Lucas Martino (Joseph Bova), the same American genius from a top secret Neptune Project? Suspicious federal investigator Sean Rogers (Elliott Gould) acts with increasing paranoia after learning that a Soviet bloc spymaster, Colonel Azarin (Trevor Howard), was the overseer of a Russian medical salvage effort that has resulted in a Frankenstein-like enigma. Is this new Martino a ‘red spy’ who came in from the Cold War? Cleverly, and rather wittily, the movie’s various flashback scenes comprise notable examples of a first-person cinematic view-point and so, with this camera-work, we never actually see the original scientist Martino’s face on-screen. Can such a mystery be solved or, at least, reach a fully satisfying conclusion? Would any uncertain ending be a cop-out or a tragic disappointment? 

Who? is a genuinely uncanny tale of subtle ambiguity where doubts remain, because, for disbelieving minds, trust is like a very fragile eggshell. In the old nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty, the shattered visage of a broken icon might never be put back together, despite the efforts of “all the king’s men”. Perhaps, without any objective code of recognition, he can only be an imposter. The movie probes the essential mystery of whether any person is, or can be, identified as more than just the sum total of their own memories or human experiences. Even after many interrogations and examinations, the FBI agent is worried that this metal-man’s identity cannot be scientifically proven, nor positively determined. The importance of Who? within the cross-genre field of SF and spy dramas is marked by the challenging aspects of its complexity and originality. Although queries about identity have been dramatised many times since, especially in movies inspired by this one, Who? is a solidly constructed intriguer, and it remains one of the most impressive mysteries of its type. 

No Orchids For Miss Blandish

Cast: Jack La Rue, Hugh McDermott, Linden Travers

Director: St John L. Clowes

92 minutes (PG) 1948

Powerhouse (Indicator)
Blu-ray region B

Rating: 7/10

Review by Richard Bowden

“The most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion, sex and sadism ever to be shown on a cinema screen.” Thus did The Monthly Film Bulletin judge St John Clowe’s film adaptation of No Orchids For Miss Blandish (aka: Black Dice) upon its appearance in 1948, reflecting the almost universal shock and disapproval of the British critical fraternity. Not until the equally vehement rejection of Peeping Tom, over a decade later, would a film face such an onslaught. Audiences, it must be said, found the movie to their liking despite, or because of, the opprobrium and where it was shown, takings were excellent. 

Today, passions have cooled somewhat but, while Michael Powell’s masterpiece has since been reclaimed by fans and admirers, No Orchids For Miss Blandish still remains outside looking in at the party, a guilty pleasure to some, an embarrassment of cinema to others. Never to my knowledge aired on UK TV, and only recently granted a DVD release, it’s a film which has received some limited reassessment in recent years. Based on a novel by James Hadley Chase, then in turn made into a theatrical production, No Orchids For Miss Blandish tells the story of a rich heiress, kidnapped by a small-time mob, only to be captured from them in turn by the much stronger Grisson gang. Slim Grisson is in love with Miss Blandish and loses interest in the kidnapping as she lingers under his roof. In turn, the rich kidnap victim falls for the crook, starting a doomed romance.

Meanwhile, a newspaper man turned private investigator manages to crack the case. No less a critic than George Orwell praised the original novel as “a brilliant piece of writing.” The movie attempted to carry over the transatlantic gangster milieu of that book intact, right down to having the entire cast, American or not, speak with an accent, while also incorporating ‘authentic’ settings and idioms into the action, and so on - probably the first film made in England with a purely American setting, as one commentator noted. 

Violent and (for its time) sexually suggestive, lurid and melodramatic, nothing St John Clowe’s picture contained pleased critics happier with a realistic tradition of filmmaking, or middle-class literary adaptations for discriminating audiences. In retrospect, the categorisation of No Orchids For Miss Blandish seems less problematical. Neither sophisticated literary screen transposition nor completely convincing gangster piece, laced with titillation, and with roots in trash culture, I’d suggest that the movie is best seen as a landmark of British crime exploitation cinema. 

At its heart is a love story: that between Slim Grisson and Miss Blandish. It’s a tragic tale too; not just because of the end which awaits the couple, but also in that Grisson is shown as being a fervent, secret admirer of the heiress from the very first scene (his distinctive double-dice emblem on the card accompanying flowers), and so, ultimately, is just as much a victim of events as she. His tragedy is that he soon finds himself overseeing the kidnapping of the woman he loves, while Miss Blandish has the misfortune of falling for someone entirely unsuitable, socially or morally.  

But without the sexual experience he brings she would, it seems, be condemned to eternal frigidity. It is no accident that, early on, her fiancé refers to the “ice in her veins” that needs ‘melting’. Indeed, one of the many things critics found unacceptable in the movie was the depiction of a woman’s sexual awakening, particularly when tied to a liaison out of her class - something miles away from the usual Noel Coward-type drawing room infatuation. It’s a scenario helped by some sensitive direction by St John Clowe, in a work characterised over all by some fluid camerawork. 

Some have criticised the director for clumsiness, but I can’t see it. To give a standout example: although we know Grisson is ‘stuck’ on the heiress, nothing is said between them, except for a barely perceptible nod at her by the hoodlum after their first shock meeting. At a crucial moment later, St John Clowe has Grisson, clearly thinking of the woman, walk slowly up his nightclub stairs, a fairly long crane shot. His impassive face is briefly superimposed onto hers. Then in the love scene which follows she leaves him, wavers, and comes back after a tense delay - events mostly off-screen. We still do not see them together, merely (for the second time) some orchids, and his words of relief spoken over the held flower shot. For a film so explicit elsewhere, the restraint and sensitivity of direction here is striking. 

As Grisson, Jack La Rue is impressive; more so when one remembers that it is almost half an hour before he is first seen on screen at all. A performance over-indebted to George Raft maybe - his habitual dice throwing recalling the American star’s famous coin-tossing trademark - but still touching as a lovelorn thug and whose regular lack of expression and stolid soulfulness says more than any amount of mugging could do. As Miss Blandish, Linden Travers has attracted good words, too.

Others in the cast, even allowing for the variable American accents, are admittedly less strong. Ma Grisson (Lilli Molnar), who starts out, Ma Barker-fashion, as the leader of the gang, is less menacing that one might have wished; ‘Doc’, the Sydney Greenstreet-type among the supporting cast, is too much of a stereotype to be convincing. However, mention ought to be made of Walter Crisham’s Eddie, Grisson’s frightening henchman, a very intimidating and malevolent presence. While some aspects of No Orchids For Miss Blandish have been ridiculed, the budget was obviously quite a reasonable one; the nightclub fairly expansive and convincing for instance, allowing the director a chance for multiple set-ups. 

Of course the club, Grisson, and his followers, are a world away from Miss Blandish’s previous social circle. In a way characteristic of British noir and thrillers, the film has a firm idea of class; not only in the separation of crooks and toffs, but upstairs and downstairs (the working class lovers overhearing the conversation of their betters from the basement, at the start), as well. Even the underworld has its social structure, one which the ‘success’ of the Grisson gang is contrasted to the smaller group doing the initial kidnapping. Only love, it seems, can cross these boundaries, but then such romance is fraught with risk. For Miss Blandish, her new relationship brings ‘freedom’, this from the “first man I’ve ever met,” - a slight emphasis on ‘man’ when she speaks implying the anaemia of the class she has just rejected.

Freed from the documentary-style and improving moral rhetoric of much contemporary British cinema product, fore-fronting violence, female sexual fulfilment, and apeing a lowbrow American genre to distracting effect, No Orchids For Miss Blandish quickly became a byword for all that was wrong with cinema, with no chance of any artistic recognition (as quipped future PM Harold Wilson: “No Oscars for Miss Blandish!”). Today, when it’s shown at all, it still receives a degree of scorn - especially from Americans principally unable to get past the accent issue, or those who prefer Robert Aldrich’s remake, The Grissom Gang (1968). To those who wish to discover what all the fuss was about, I can say that the film may be variable, but it’s entertaining and memorable, and certainly an important document of Britain's cinematic underbelly. 

Disc extras: 

• Miss Blandish And The Censor (2019): ex-BBFC examiner Richard Falcon discusses the controversial film’s history.
• Interview with producer Richard Gordon, and actor Richard Neilson (35 minutes)
• Soldier, Sailor (51 minutes): World War II docudrama, conceived by writer-director St John Legh Clowes
• Original trailers
• Image gallery
• Limited edition exclusive booklet with a new essay by Robert Murphy, analysis of the different versions of the source novel, an extract from an essay on No Orchids For Miss Blandish by George Orwell, news accounts of the controversy surrounding the film’s release, an overview of contemporary critical responses, and film credits.

Destroyer

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Toby Kebbell, and Sebastian Stan

Director: Karyn Kusama

121 minutes (15) 2018

Lions Gate Blu-ray region B

[Released 27th May]

Rating: 8/10

Review by Steven Hampton

After a rough night, homicide detective Erin Bell (Nicole Kidman, Aquaman) ‘drags anchor’ to daily work... Ominous music. Telling details of a moral decay. Pointed questions earn blunt responses. She’s back on the case of gangster Silas (Toby Kebbell, Fantastic Four), while giving a hand-job to an informant. In-between drunken mopping alone in bars, there are several flashbacks to Erin’s undercover work as a sheriff’s young deputy, alongside FBI agent Chris (Sebastian Stan, Avengers: Infinity War). A reluctant daughter, under-age Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), gets her wild-child on, while Erin is failing again at responsible parenting, and simply ignoring urgent police calls from her present-day partner. 

An exhausting night chase uphill results in further clues for the walking punch-bag of a heroine who’s finally and truly had enough of questions while dealing unsuccessfully with low-life types living in wealthy privilege. Surveillance, off-duty, on gangster’s moll Petra (the violent hysteria brand of Tatiana Maslany, Orphan Black), leads Erin into confronting a bank robbery that ends in the frenzy of a gunfight. Having kidnapped the bloodied Petra to save her from police arrest, Erin digs herself into deeper holes of failure, on both sides of the law, skimming from loot, and trying to buy back personal trust for her broken relationships.

With a tremendously bold performance by Kidman, this is a stunning crime thriller about a crooked cop struggling to make right all of her most terrible mistakes, with a desperate vigilante action as the only viable solution to overwhelming problems. As director Karyn Kusama (maker of Aeon Flux, Jennifer’s Body) here seems firmly intent upon presenting us with authentically classic movie styling, instead of the far slicker production values of other, similarly female-led, pictures such as Atomic Blonde (2017). 

Unearthing a buried, but unforgotten past, Destroyer embraces its fatalistic odyssey of a character study with a supremely gritty assurance, to prove that some degree of existential repentance might be possible, even when forgiveness of any sort is nowhere to be found. 

Iron Sky: The Coming Race

Cast: Lara Rossi, Vladimir Burlakov, and Udo Kier

Director: Timo Vuorensola  

92 minutes (15) 2019

101 Films Blu-ray region B

Rating: 7/10

Review by Christopher Geary

Iron Sky (2012) was a knockabout, positively ramshackle pulp satire that sometimes feels like a remake, but isn’t. Showcasing survivalism of the mightiest WW2 fanaticism as a lingering threat (as in They Saved Hitler’s Brain, 1963), it’s a flipside to politically conscious sci-fi like Harry Horner’s Red Planet Mars (1952); and a geek gala from Timo Vuorensola, the Finnish director of cult genre parody Star Wreck (2005). A feast of Naziploitation set in 2018, Iron Sky began with a black American astronaut as POW in a German secret base on the dark side of the Moon. Achtung! From ‘Swastika City’, der Gotterdammerung flies as a 21st century WMD, ordered by new loony Fuhrer (Udo Keir). Brave soldier Adler (Gotz Otto, ‘Stamper’ from Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies) pilots the Luna UFO to NYC, with his bride-to-be scientist Renate (Julia Dietze) as a stowaway sidekick.

They face-off against a Sarah Palinesque/ teabag US president, and the femme fatale PR manager who mimics the existing spoofs of those ‘Hitler reacts to...’ clips; infamously re-subtitled from Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004), then being favoured - ad nauseum - by You Tube jesters. It’s a moment of recycled japery that is dizzying as a twisty pop-art meme. Even with formalities of prep for an absurdist Fourth Reich’s long-delayed invasion fleet, led by flagship Siegfried, launching a meteor blitzkrieg of Earth set to Wagner’s anthemic ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, this is not seriously pro-Nazi propaganda, of course, as it gamely spoofs Independence Day, and pokes fun at all national warmonger brands.

Its feverishly comical delirium seems crazy as a Dr Strangelove + Mars Attacks combo. Sharper and wittier than Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow, much better fun (as the proverbial moon menace movie) than the crappy pseudocumentary Apollo 18, the various skits of Iron Sky deliver a delightfully farcical twilight of the gods last gleaming and tells us this is the way the world ends, not with a whimper but a twinkly-eyed wink; and a space-war spectacle of hysterical alt. future history that could have made Roger Corman turn a shade of Hulk-green with envy.

Crowd-funded sequel Iron Sky: The Coming Race is set 20 years after the apocalyptic war. The bitten sphere of the broken Moon was never the same after the nukes fell, and the remnants of humanity finding refuge on the dark side are reluctant to welcome some Russian refugees arriving at the crumbling Moonbase sanctuary where Lunar-quakes rock the closed system. The resident i-religion followers of digital cloud-master Steve Jobs live in fear losing wi-fi and bricked devices, yet their beliefs are not simply ‘intelligent design’ when they claim to be flawless.

Elsewhere in the decaying colony, the poverty of inequality crushes human hope until the leader’s daughter, brave engineer Obi Washington (Lara Rossi), teams up with annoying warrior-wannabe and newcomer Sasha (Vladimir Burlakov), and a hunky local lunk-head, lucky Star Trek red-shirted Malcolm (Kit Dale), for a somewhat Gilliam-esque UFO flight. They discover a mysterious race of shape-shifting reptiles, alien Vril, and a hollow-Earth mythology offers salvation, but a planetary nuclear winter extends ice-sheets far beyond Antarctica, where their last operational spacecraft enters this promised land, a splendid ERB-styled underworld.

There’s a parody sketch of the ‘Last Supper’, a tableaux featuring humanoid Vril versions of Caligula, the Pope, Stalin, Palin-ish POTUS, Maggie Thatcher, Korean Kim, Zuckerberg, bin Laden, and Hitler, chow and chatter with similarly despicable (upper echelon) leaders or ghastly celeb types, mostly dead ones. Highly amusing action effects include our band of plucky heroes on a mission to steal a ‘holy grail’ that powers a Pellucidarean miniature Sun, followed by a dinosaur chariot-race, and later the Fuhrer (Udo Kier playing two Nazi roles) riding a T-Rex into an unexpected kung fu showdown, fighting against a proverbial Amazonian woman on the Moon.

In place of the first movie’s clunky post-war tech and steam-punk retro influences, Iron Sky 2 explores a witty parody of von Daniken’s ancient ETs, remixing satirical skiffy with hectic adventures of the decidedly Ripleyesque/ Lara Croft mannered heroine. One droll ditty playing over the closing credits recalls that comically mismatched ‘Benson, Arizona’ theme song from John Carpenter’s classic Dark Star (1974). The epilogue of destination Mars sets up another sequel, of course. Let’s hope that creative director Vuorensola can muster up enough financial support for it.