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Murderers and Meths Drinkers: A strange, grim tour of ‘The London Nobody Knows’

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The great actor James Mason stands in a Victorian urinal in London talking about goldfish. Here, Mason says referring to this Holborn convenience, is true democracy as “All men are equal in the eyes of a lavatory attendant.” It’s one of the many quirky moments in an excellent documentary called The London Nobody Knows.

Another instance is Mason turning up at the door of a resident on Hanbury Street to view the garden where Jack the Ripper brutally murdered Annie Chapman. The streets look little changed in the seventy-nine years since her killing—dark, derelict, and foreboding.

Mason was a major box office star when he fronted this delightful short. He had recently starred in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and was yet to make the few ill-considered choices that briefly dimmed his star at the start of the seventies. Between acting commitments in early 1967, Mason donned his brown brogues, wool cap and camel jacket to play—or rather perform—the role of inquisitive tour guide across the cobbled lanes, the dereliction, the people, the buskers, the down and outs, the nooks and crannies of a radically changing city.

The London Nobody Knows is a delightful yet oddly haunting film. The tone is set at the beginning when Mason visits the derelict Bedford Music Hall—the favorite venue of the legendary Marie Lloyd, the queen of music hall. As Lloyd is heard singing “The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery,” Mason recounts how the ghost of a little known performer Belle Elmore was said to haunt the theater. Belle, Mason explains, was better known as Cora Turner—wife and victim of one Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen—the notorious murderer. This mix of the comic and the darkly tragic filter through the whole film—as can be seen by the later sequences of down and outs and meths drinkers—those poor unfortunates who sought inebriation—and usually blindness and death—in the consumption of denatured alcohol. Even an almost picturesque scene by the River Thames is tinged by the tale of pirates chained hand and foot by the edge waters to drown. Locals came and ate picnics while watching these poor brigands die.

As a side note: the Bedford Music Hall was where Peter Sellers parents performed and Sellers was born and raised in a tenement apartment next to the theater. Sellers later claimed he was a reincarnation of another Bedford artiste—Dan Leno.
 
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Now, when I said Mason performs as “tour guide”—he is in fact giving his interpretation of Geoffrey Scowcroft Fletcher—a journalist, writer, artist and long forgotten pioneer of what is now ponderously termed “psychogeography”—on whose work the film is based. Fletcher wandered London drawing its inhabitants, noting down events, sights and things of historical importance which he then wrote up in a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph. Fletcher’s books—The London Nobody Knows (1962), Down Among the Meths Men (1966) and a pinch of London’s River (1965) are the source material for Mason’s journey. (The Situationists were, of course, also known for taking similarly drifting “revolutionary” strolls, which they termed “dérive.”)

The London Nobody Knows was directed by Norman Cohen and produced by Michael Klinger. Cohen went onto make his name as a director of hit British comedy films like Till Death Us Do Part (1969), Dad’s Army (1971), and Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall and the series of seventies sex comedies—-Confessions of a Pop Performer, Confessions of a Holiday Camp and Confessions of a Driving Instructor. While Klinger who produced Roman Polanski’s early films Cul-de-Sac and Repulsion went on to produce Michael Caine in Get Carter and Pulp and the Lee Marvin/Roger Moore feature Shout at the Devil.
 

 
If there’s one thing you are going to watch today then make it this—as it’s a rewarding look back at a world long gone (London during a year change) the year of so-called psychedelia and the “summer of love.” As can be seen from this film—that world was media hype—the world of The London Nobody Knows was very, very real.
 
Watch ‘The London Nobody Knows’ after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.08.2016
09:46 am
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This moody 1953 animation of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ was the first X-rated cartoon
10.22.2015
09:42 am
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I first read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” during library class at the local Catholic school I attended in Edinburgh. I was about nine or so, and had this devilish love of horror stories, detective adventures and science fiction. Each week our class was told to bring a book we liked to help encourage our reading—this was the one subject for which I needed no encouragement, my only problem was having enough time to read all the books I wanted to read. It was really a free period and usually a cinch for the teacher.

It was nearing Christmas holidays—the first snow had fallen and the trees were blackened fish bones against the sky. Our teacher, a florid Christian brother with squeaky shoes wandered round the class checking-up on what we were reading. He stopped at my desk, and pushed back the book’s cover for approval.

“Edgar Allan Poe? Edgar, Allan, Poe.” It didn’t sound like a question—more like a terminal diagnosis to an unsuspecting patient. “What would the Holy Father say?”

I had no idea the Pope was a literary critic, and so brightly enquired—what did the Holy Father think of Poe?

“Don’t be impudent, boy. That’s the kind of talk that will get you six of the best,” he said, meaning six wallops with a belt, “And this,” holding the slim paperback aloft between finger and thumb, “isn’t the kind of thing you should be reading in class. It’s unsuitable, far too macabre. I’ll have to confiscate it.” The book quickly disappeared into one of his pockets. “Now next time, bring in a proper book. I don’t want to see this sort of thing again.”

I was supposed to feel chastened, but didn’t. If anything I felt his whole response absurd, and for the first time realized books could be dangerous, and reading subversive.

Undaunted, the following week, I chanced my luck with an Algernon Blackwood, which only merited a tut and a sigh.
 
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In 1953, esteemed actor James Mason narrated an animated version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, which was the first cartoon to be given an “X” certificate by the British Board of Film Censors. It’s a rather splendid animation which was nominated for an Academy Award—though sadly lost out to Walt Disney’s Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. It’s a creepy and highly atmospheric little film that fully captures the terror and madness of Poe’s classic tale.
 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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10.22.2015
09:42 am
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‘Mandingo Redux’ brought to you by Thunderbird Wine

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Thunderbird is the crack cocaine of wines. It’s fortified with additional alcohol to get you drunk quicker. If you drink enough of the swill it will turn your tongue black, incinerate your gut and napalm your liver. The Gallo Wine Co. designed their firewater with the ghetto in mind. Their radio ads featured a song with a proto-rap vibe, “What’s the word? / Thunderbird / How’s it sold? / Good and cold / What’s the jive? / Bird’s alive / What’s the price? / Thirty twice.”  It is said that…

Ernest Gallo once drove through a tough, inner city neighborhood and pulled over when he saw a bum. When Gallo rolled down his window and called out, “What’s the word?” the immediate answer from the bum was, “Thunderbird.

In a move that seems almost surreal, actor James Mason was recruited by Gallo to pitch its poverty punch. He was given a Rolls Royce as payment. Years later, Mason went on to star as a vicious slave owner in the soft-core blaxploitation potboiler Mandingo. Thunderbird shill to sleazoid slave owner ain’t much of a stretch character wise and probably didn’t earn him any dividends in the karma department.

The first ad in the following video tries to glamorize Thunderbird as a sexy, hip and happening cocktail for young stylish Blacks. The second is Mason trying to keep a straight face as he describes Thunderbird as “not quite like anything I’ve ever tasted.’

Apparently James had never drunk gasoline.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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08.25.2010
02:54 am
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Nicholas Ray: I’m A Stranger Here Myself

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After Rebel Without a Cause, my next exposure to director Nicholas Ray probably came through Lightning Over Water, Wim Wenders’ incredibly moving documentary on Ray’s last days before succumbing to lung cancer.

Then came Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, and, most recently, Criterion‘s bang-up resissuing of 1956’s Bigger Than Life.  James Mason plays a milquetoast school teacher, who, thanks to the “miracle drug” Cortisone, releases with near-tragic consequences his inner Übermensch.  You can watch a great, Mason-hosted trailer for the film here.

If you haven’t seen Bigger Than Life, please do—it remains one of the more scathing critiques of the “American Dream” ever committed to film.

After dying 31 years ago this month, Nicholas Ray popped up again in yesterday’s NYT.  During the years preceding his death, Ray devoted himself to his experimental film, We Can’t Go Home Again.

Made in collaboration with his college students at the time, segments of the film pop up in Lightning Over Water, but now Ray’s widow, Susan, in honor of what would have been her husband’s 100 birthday, is assembling a full print of We Can’t Go Home Again for next year’s Venice Film Festival:

“It was an experimental film, a difficult film and I think a visionary film that is particularly important today,” Ms. Ray said from her home in Saugerties, N.Y., where she has also been organizing the storehouse of original scripts, notes and movie storyboards for a sale.  Ray worked on the project from 1972 to 1976 with students he taught at Harpur College at the State University of New York at Binghamton.  An early version was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray continued to revise, reshoot and re-edit it until his death.  The film employs what Ray called “mimage” (short for multiple image), in which a number of camera images are simultaneously projected on the screen.

In certain respects his ideas were ahead of their time. On screen Ray and the students play versions of themselves, a conceit that smoothly fits into this era of reality television. Today’s digital techniques would also make it easy to create the effects Ray painstakingly tried to achieve on a shoestring budget.  Ray and his students, for example, used Super 8 millimeter and 16 millimeter formats and early video technology, projected the images onto a screen and then refilmed these multiple images using a 35 millimeter camera.

Jean-Luc Godard famously called Ray, “the camera,” and for a man whose conflicts—bisexuality, drug and alcohol abuse—always seemed on the verge of overwhelming his talents, it’s not surprising the director’s life was the subject of more than one documentary.

What follows is another look at Ray, ‘74’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself.  Directed by David Helpern Jr. and James C. Gutman, the doc covers Ray’s Harpur College teaching years, and features several sequences of Ray working on We Can’t Go Home Again.  Remaining parts follow at the bottom.

In light of Dennis Hopper’s recent passing, it’s also definitely worthwhile checking out Wenders’ The American Friend.  Hopper plays Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, and Ray, in the opening scene, contributes a small but impactful cameo as a painter who’s faked his own death.  That scene, restaged with a frail and sickly Ray, opens Lightning Over Water.

 
I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Part II, III, IV, V, VI

Reclaiming Causes of a Filmmaking Rebel

 

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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06.18.2010
07:15 pm
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