There’s an horrific scene in Ben Wheatley’s latest film, the truly excellent A Field in England, which proves the merit of the old adage that the most gruesome moments in any movie are more effectively achieved when they are suggested rather than revealed.

In this particular scene, the character Whitehead (superbly played by Reece Shearsmith) is tortured by the diabolical O’Neill (another excellent performance from Michael Smiley). Rather than showing what happens, Wheatley audaciously keeps any physical violence out-of-vision, leaving only Shearsmith’s terrifying screams to suggest the worst, the very worst. It is one cinema’s genuinely horrific and visceral moments, and yet nothing is ever seen.

A Field in England confirms Ben Wheatley as the most talented and original film-maker to come out of Britain since the glory days of Ken Russell, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson and John Boorman in the swinging sixties.

Unlike most young directors who show flair with one type of genre film before going on to make variations of the same time-and-again, Wheatley has shown with his first four films that he is an immensely talented and important film-maker, whose movies defy easy categorization yet engage their audience with intelligent and sometimes disturbing ideas.

His first major film Down Terrace was a blackly comic tale of murder and violence set in a working class family home, which Wheatley co-wrote with the film’s star Robin Hill. It was described as being like The Sopranos as directed by Mike Leigh. It’s a nice soundbite but doesn’t quite encapsulate the thrilling intelligence that was at work behind the camera.

Wheatley’s next film was the brutal, disturbing but utterly brilliant Kill List, which contained one of the most harrowing endings ever committed to celluloid. Kill List was written by Wheatley and his wife, the writer Amy Jump, and starred Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring and Michael Smiley.

Having shown his aptitude for gangster and horror films, Wheatley then made the black comedy Sightseers, written by the film’s lead actors Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, in conjunction with Amy Jump.

Wheatley’s latest film A Field in Englandwas also written by Jump, and together this talented duo have created an intelligent head trip, a radical genre-bender, that mixes alchemy and the occult, with history, horror, psychedelia and folk tales. Starring The League of Gentleman‘s Reece Shearsmith, along with Peter Ferdinando, Richard Glover, Ryan Pope, and a terrifying Michael Smiley, A Field in England is certainly one of the best films of 2013-14.

Without giving too much away, the movie centers around four men escaping from a battle during the English Civil War (1642-1651), when the forces of democracy or Parliament (the Roundheads) fought against the Royalist armies (the Cavaliers) for control of England. The main players in this war were the Cavalier, King Charles I and the Roundhead, Oliver Cromwell, and the poor canon fodder in-between.

Wheatley’s interest in this momentous period of English history came through his work with the Sealed Knot Society, a group of individuals who specialize in reconstructing battles from the English Civil War.
 

 
‘A Field in England’ is in cinemas now, or can be watched from Drafthouse Films here.
 

 
The interview with Ben Wheatley follows after the jump…
 

 
Hervé Villechaize, famous to all Americans during the 1970s and 1980s as a malevolent twerp in The Man with the Golden Gun and most particularly as “Tattoo” on the long-running ABC television series Fantasy Island, was a pretty interesting dude. His thick French accent and vaguely exotic countenance suggested a pint-sized “Most Interesting Man in the World” type years before the Dos Equis ad campaign. The truth wasn’t that far off: despite the physical handicap of “proportionate” dwarfism, Villechaize studied art at the Beaux-Arts school in Paris and had a successful exhibition after his graduation. He moved to Manhattan in 1964 and worked as an artist, painter and photographer. He acted in a Sam Shepard play, in Oliver Stone’s directorial debut Seizure, in Conrad Rook’s Chappaqua (with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg), and (much later) in Richard Elfman’s delirious avant-garde cult movie Forbidden Zone.

Villechaize was infamous for constantly macking on his female co-workers, and he dated his fellow Forbidden Zone actor Susan Tyrrell, who told Michael Musto in 1983, “Herve’s a brilliant man, hilarious sense of humor, who’s very paranoid. He carried a gun and a long knife all the time. I loved him very much. You ask any woman he’s been with—he’s a very sexual man. He knows what to do!”

Sadly, Hervé Villechaize took his own life in 1993.

Incredibly, another woman in his life was Greta Garbo. In late 2012 a painting went up for auction with the following description:
 

An acrylic on panel painting of white and yellow flowers on a green background, with three embedded circular mirrors. Signed lower left “Hervé Villechaize.” Given by the actor to Greta Garbo as a gift.

 
Here is that painting:
 

 
Not many people know that Garbo herself tried her hand at painting as well. In the same auction, these two canvases by Garbo went up for sale:
 

 

 

Mansfield in her pool, surrounded by one of the odder experiments in early celebrity merchandising, hot water bottles made in her likeness
 
In addition to her rubber-necking beauty, Jayne Mansfield was known for a lot of things. There’s the famous side-eye from Sophia Loren, though that’s obviously nowhere near the most exposure her breasts received (Hugh Hefner was arrested for publishing her nudes). The gory details of her death are also the subject of much obsession—while she was not decapitated as is often rumored, the car wreck that took her life was horribly grisly. And she was romantically attached to a string of powerful and famous men, including Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Anton LaVey (which lead to wild stories about her death as the result of occult activities).

I prefer to think of Mansfield as a delightful eccentric, with a warmth and charisma that bubbled rather than smoldered—sort of a free-spirited bombshell with a girl-next-door sweetness. Nothing quite so beautifully encapsulates her explosive personality like these photos of her Los Angeles home, which she named, “The Pink Palace.” Mansfield purchased the 40-room Mediterranean-style mansion in 1957 and immediately began renovating. She didn’t stop at painting the exterior pink—think of an entire bathroom furnished in pink shag carpet, walls and all. As clever as she was lovely, she wrote to furniture and building suppliers requesting samples for her new home; those “samples” totaled over $150,000 ($1,246,742 in 2014 dollars). The house itself cost only $76,000 ($631,682 in 2014 dollars).

At the end, you can see video of Mansfield’s second husband, former Mr. Universe Miklós “Mickey” Hargitay, showing off his line of freeweights, poolside. Jayne also does a little demo of her own exercise routine, choosing not to remove her high heels—the camera quickly switches angles to shoot her from below in an obvious cinematic ogle.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Messy Nessy Chic

The Melvins with Lori Black in the foreground, some creepy guy named Kurt lurking in the back

Shirley Temple Black became famous so young that when she died late last night, she was only 85, even though she seemed like a figure from the era of silent movies, practically. It’s well known that Temple represented a case of a child star not flaming out in adulthood. She became a prominent Republican and served as U.S. ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia as well as Chief of Protocol of the United States, whatever that is—it sounds impressive.

Credit the metal website Metal Sucks (whose tagline is “Mustaine: Australian for Putz”) with a great scoop on the breaking story of Temple’s death: her daughter spent several years as bassist for The Melvins, the legendary sludge-rock band from the Pacific Northwest. She played on three Melvins albums: Ozma, Bullhead and Houdini, as well as the Eggnog EP. According to Metal Sucks, she went by “Lorax” Black during that time and was probably dating Buzz Osbourne.
 

 
Here’s The Melvins—with Lori—playing “Heater/At a Crawl” at Seattle’s Central Tavern in 1989:

 
Here’s The Melvins—with Lori—covering Pink Floyd’s “The Nile Song” at UCLA in 1993:

 
Thank you Jarrod Zickefoose!

 
Taking a page from Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? which re-dubbed humorous dialogue over a Japanese spy movie to make the plot about a recipe for egg salad, René Viénet’s 1973 film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (“La Dialectique Peut-Elle Casser Des Briques?”) did the same sort of thing, but here the cinematic Situationist provocateur is less out for laughs (although there are plenty of them) and more about the political subversion.

The raw material for Viénet’s détournement is a 1972 Hong Kong kung fu flick titled The Crush (唐手跆拳道) directed by Tu Guangqi. In Viénet’s hands, the movie was turned into a critique of class conflicts, bureaucratic socialism, the failures of the French Communist Party, Maoism, cultural hegemony, sexual equality and the way movies themselves prop up Capitalist ideology, all in a manner that would turn such a product against itself, using Situationist aphorisms, arguments and in-jokes.
 

 
 

 
“The Amputee” is a short, one-shot film directed by David Lynch, featuring his longtime associate Catherine Coulson (aka “The Log Lady” from Twin Peaks).

The film was made for AFI in 1974 to test two different stocks of black and white videotape, so there are actually two versions, a four-minute take and a five-minute take (both can be seen on Hulu Plus). Lynch was in “downtime” at this point on making Eraserhead, which was having funding difficulties.

Coulson—who co-wrote the script with Lynch—plays about a woman writing a letter (we hear her thoughts as she composes it) while a female nurse (Lynch) gives medical attention to her stumps. After a point, the viewer tends to tune out the Coulson character’s thoughts in favor of concentrating on the nurse’s activities.

According to anecdotal Lynchian legend, when an AFI exec saw this rather peculiar short film instead of more conventional camera tests, “that Lynch” was immediately thought to be responsible.
 

 
Late last year I was casting about for a good book to read, and I inquired on Facebook which J.G. Ballard book is the right one to start with. (I read The Atrocity Exhibition many years ago.) DM’s own Tara McGinley weighed in with alacrity, urging me to try High-Rise, which I directly went and did. I found it just tremendous, and I kept running into Ballardian resonances of the novel while I was reading it, news stories and the like. It’s a marvelous, anomic novel, counterintuitive in all its surface premises and yet emotionally and psychologically true every step of the way.

According to Wikipedia, “For over 30 years, British producer Jeremy Thomas has wanted to do a film version of the book. It was nearly made in the late 1970s, with Nicolas Roeg directing from a script by Paul Mayersberg.” Instead Thomas ended up producing David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of Ballard’s Crash instead.

Ballard fans can rejoice (or cringe) at the news that a high-profile version of High-Rise is officially in the works. Director Ben Wheatley, whose last two efforts were A Field in England and the pitch black comedy Sightseers, today tweeted that principal photography on High-Rise is now set to begin in June. Wheatley is also directing the first two episodes of the upcoming season of Doctor Who, so he is being entrusted to introducing audiences to Peter Capaldi in the main role.

Starring as Dr. Robert Laing in High-Rise is Tom Hiddleston, best known for playing Loki in the Avengers movie franchise. This adaptation of High-Rise is likewise being produced by Jeremy Thomas.
 

HIGHRISE. shooting June. Starring Tom Hiddleston! pic.twitter.com/ue66t3rWbT

— mr_wheatley (@mr_wheatley) February 5, 2014

 
High-Rise is a formidable challenge for any director, and we’ll just have to wait and see how well it comes out. Certainly, if we can judge by the poster art, we have substantial reason for optimism.

Here’s a peculiar “adaptation” of High-Rise by Mike Bonsall executed in Google SketchUp:
 

 
via Den of Geek

 
Truman Capote said he started writing In Cold Blood to test out his theory that a writer could produce a novel out of factual material.

“This new adventure of mine, the experiment, is what I call ‘the non-fiction novel.’

“A non-fiction novel being a genre brought about by the synthesis of journalism with fictional technique. In other words, the end result of it being this new book of mine, In Cold Blood.

“In Cold Blood is the story about the murder of a family, in a small town in western Kansas. A Mr. Herbert W. Clutter, and his wife, Bonnie Clutter, and their two teenage children. This was an especially strange and brutal murder in 1959, in which the family were shot to death for no apparent cause or motive whatever.”

His experiment was a success, and made Capote perhaps the best known novelist in the world. But it came at very high price, for Capote was never to equal the quality of the writing he achieved with In Cold Blood ever again.

Produced, filmed and edited by Davis Maysles, Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, this brief film A Visit With Truman Capote (aka With Love From Truman) captures the author at his Long Island hideaway, during an interview with Karen Gundersen from Newsweek magazine.
 

 
Part 2 after the jump…

 
There’s something in celebrities ‘fessin-up about how they became clean and sober that has replaced the witch trials as popular entertainment. Once it was naming familiars and butt-sex with the coven, now it’s mea culpa on Oprah, with tie-in book and a ten-minute-work-out DVD. (Of course, the conspiracist might take this just a wee bit further by pointing out the date of the first Salem witch hanging was June 10th, 1692; while Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on June 10th, in 1935.)

To be frank, I’m not too impressed by hoary old tales of some star’s drink and drug excess, as I don’t think it important, especially in today’s culture of such ubiquitous and casual drug use. Haven’t we all been down that rabbit hole numerous times before, and all lived to tell the tale?

Of course, once it was novel and even considered revolutionary, but now drug taking is as commonplace as a franchise outlet. Blogs send out their hacks stoned or tripping to interview the dull and unwary, while our favorite TV chefs are exposed by trial to have allegedly snorted their way through the housekeeping money. (The most scandalous part of that last tale was not the alleged drug use, but the fact nearly a million dollars goes missing and nobody thought it important enough to investigate? How the 1% lives, eh?)

Of course, there has always been an element of pretend machismo in how many grams, pills, and shots one can take—like those would-be-writers who once daily stood wreathed in cigarette smoke at the end of the bar, downing pint-after-pint-after-pint, short-after-short, as if alcohol consumption were some Herculean challenge. Ah, we’ve all been there—no?

Dennis Hopper was there in spades. By all accounts he should have died from his excessive indulgence of drugs and booze. He didn’t. He went briefly mad instead, and ended-up in a mental hospital, where it is claimed Hopper was exhibited as a (barely) walking “Just Say No” advertisement (One can imagine the scene.)

Then Hopper got clean and sober and told everyone about it. You could say he switched his addiction for self-gratification to an addiction for work, acting in virtually every film, TV show, and video game he was offered. His aim was to be a grown-up, and provide for his family. This meant acting in a lot of duff films, such as playing King Koopa in Super Mario Brothers.

After seeing Super Mario Brothers, Dennis’ son Henry asked his father, “Why did you do that?” Dennis smiled and replied, “To buy you shoes.” Henry didn’t smile back at his father, “I don’t need shoes that badly,” he said.

It must have been galling for the clean and sober Hopper to see so many ill-conceived and poorly written movies get made (no matter the size of the pay-check), especially as he had tried for many years to make his own movies when he was under-the-influence. I know which ones I prefer.

In 1994, Dennis Hopper was the focus of this documentary for the BBC series Moving Pictures. It’s a star-studded, access-all-areas program, richly informative with a great central interview with Hopper, who happily ‘fesses up to just about everything.
 

 
Last week I posted the opening credits to the sub-Bond spy film The Liquidator, featuring the amazing theme song composed and orchestrated by Lalo Schifrin and sung by Shirley Bassey. Here’s another favorite—and also very Sixties—title sequence and song, Ann-Margret’s va-va-voomy vamping that opens The Swinger.

In The Swinger, Ann-Margret plays “Kelly Olsson” (her actual last name) a would-be writer of racy stories for a men’s magazine. Annoyed that they won’t publish her work, innocent small town girl Kelly concocts a “swinging” public persona for herself that she then has to try to live up to, for instance, throwing a staged orgy that ends up with her covered in psychedelic paint (and then arrested).
 

 
I have no proof of this, but I would imagine that the term “sex kitten” was probably first coined to describe Ann-Margret. And if it wasn’t, well… it should have been.

If this clip reminds you of Bye Bye Birdie, there’s a good reason for that, it’s the same director, George Sidney (who also directed Ann-Margret and Elvis in Viva Las Vegas) and cinematographer, Joseph Biroc, who did her iconic pre-credits dance number in that film. Sidney took thousands of 35mm photographs for the montage sequences in The Swinger.