An Auteur’s Folly: Michael Powell's Honeymoon (1959)

• This article was originally published as part of the accompanying booklet for Network on Air's release of Honeymoon, available here: Honeymoon / Network On Air

When Michael Powell was shooting Honeymoon in 1958 the word auteur was fresh in the minds of a new generation of young French critics and filmmakers, but still a relatively niche concept to most film enthusiasts. Three years later, the critic Pauline Kael would tear Andrew Sarris to shreds in response to his 1962 essay titled ‘Notes on the Auteur Theory’, a meditation on creativity that was directly inspired by Truffaut, Godard and the rest of the French Cahier du Cinema set. Kael rightly pointed out that Sarris’s theoretical framework was inconsistent, that his analysis prioritized rhetoric over content, and that, besides, film production simply didn’t work that way. Sarris’s analysis signalled quite a shift in direction for film appreciation and criticism in the United States, particularly given that in the Classic Hollywood Cinema, it was the studio, not the director, that was king. Undeterred, six years later Sarris would write The Great American Cinema, a tome that reconceptualised American history via the filmographies of directors who, he argued, had worked against the confines of the Hollywood system by infusing their works with their own artistic visions.

The concept of the ‘great director’ had existed in European cinema for some time, and Michael Powell was perhaps one such figure. By 1958, he was well regarded, alongside his partner Emeric Pressburger, as the creative force behind some of British cinema’s most notable films, including Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). The UK Pressbook for Honeymoon, Powell’s Spanish remake of The Red Shoes, is certainly keen to foreground his credentials as an author-director, noting that: “Powell is a perfectionist who supervises every phase of the productions he is involved in. Working on HONEMOON, he wrote the story, produced, directed, gathered the talent…and, as usual, left his unmistakeable signature on the film’s lavish canvas.”

But as well as representing the achievement of a creative director with a clear authorial vision, film is a complex industrial product. What is a great director without his or her crew? They are no director at all, as Powell found out the hard way during the stressful and incoherent production of Honeymoon. In his autobiography, Powell writes:

On Honeymoon I was so convinced of my talents as a showman. I had been made so arrogant by the worldwide success of The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, The Tales of Hoffmann, that I thought I had done it all myself, although I knew jolly well that I hadn’t.[1]

He hadn’t, but he had believed his own hype. Honeymoon is part romance, part ballet fantasy and part travelogue. We follow married Australian farmer Kit (Anthony Steel) and his wife, the retired ballet dancer Anna (Ludmilla Tchérina) on their honeymoon tour through the vast, craggy landscapes and charming villages of the Spanish countryside. On their travels they meet the flamboyant and hot-tempered dancer Antonio (the famous Spanish dancer Antonio Ruiz Soler) who attempts to coax Anna out of retirement, much to Kit’s annoyance. Kit wants Anna to settle down with him on his farm, but Antonio encourages her to follow her passions. Anna is treated to Antonio’s fancy footwork and impressive peacocking on numerous occasions, first at a village tavern, then during a ballet performance, and finally in her dreams. She begins to fall for him, even though he is married to Rosita (Rosita Sergova) and this escalates into an intense love-quadrangle which is mirrored in Antonio and Rosita’s staged performance of the flamenco style ballet El Amor Brujo later in the film.

The ‘travelogue’ is something of a dead genre that we lack a shared framework for understanding in a society where international travel is open to many of us. Whether Honeymoon was intended to exist as a travelogue in its final form is another matter, but the significant issues faced by Powell during the production and editing stages of the film undoubtedly contributed to the end result, which is a confusing hybrid of travel promo and musical extravaganza. The film was cut and re-cut several times for UK release, with many of the dance sequences truncated in these re-edited versions. After its 1959 release at Cannes, the film disappeared and reappeared three years later in 1962, in its original Technirama form, but with 20 minutes missing. This version was apathetically reviewed in Monthly Film Bulletin in January 1962, and by this point Powell had fallen out of favour with British film critics following the release of his ‘disgusting’ psychological horror film Peeping Tom in 1960. For this reviewer, Honeymoon was confirmation of Powell’s ‘recent decline’ as a director, even though Honeymoon had been released one year before Peeping Tom (and British critics would later apologise en-masse for their treatment of latter film, which was retrospectively hailed as a masterpiece). The MFB reviewer characterises Honeymoon as ‘an enormous travel poster of the most blatant kind’ and while the dancing and the musical score receive some praise, the writer was unimpressed by bad acting, a thin story and ‘awkward, fussy décor’.[2] Another critic writing for Sight and Sound lamented the ‘mangled’ version of the film that British Lion distributed in the West End that year, and questioned the ‘lunacy’ of dismembering Powell’s ballet scenes and then advertising the film in cinemas using posters that included stills from the scenes that were cut![3]

For all of Honeymoon’s technical and artistic failings, the film does combine some beautiful choreography with Spanish cultural history and folkloric legend. The first (almost self-contained) ballet sequence in the film, El Amor Brujo (The Bewitched Lovers) is an adaptation of the ballet by Manuel de Falla (sometimes translated as ‘Wedded by Witchcraft’). The story follows a young woman, Candela, who is haunted by the ghost of her dead husband, who appears to her at night and engages her in a series of beautiful and macabre dances.[4] But if Candela wants to pursue her true love, the young and handsome Carmelo, she must find a way to exorcise her husband’s ghost, and she does this by arranging a fatal meeting between the ghost and his ex-lover, Lucia. In the film, this sequence is by turns haunting, beautiful, ridiculous, and punctuated by awkward technical issues. The ballet is performed in the open air for Anna, Kit and a small audience of locals, who sit watching among the cavernous ruins of the Spanish landscape. The sequence is more of a fantasy than a performance, and this is emphasised by the fact the audience are offered no static point-of-view from which to watch this sequence unfold. We follow the dancers as they move from the communal stage through a series of small, cavernous rooms and, finally, to an impressive mountain range that spirals upward like a ragged staircase, set against an expressive painted backdrop of the night sky. Demons, ghosts and witches writhe to an atmospheric symphony as Candela and Carmelo pursue their doomed romance, and if this all sounds impressive, it is undermined by tacky costumes, cheap sets and (on occasion) unsteady camera movement.

Ludmilla Tcherina had played Irina Boronskaja in The Red Shoes as well as performing the title role in Powell and Pressburger’s Oh… Rosalinda!! (1955), but she was not the actor Powell originally had in mind when he embarked on the project.[5] In fact, it was Moira Shearer, the star of The Red Shoes, but after reading the script Shearer turned down the part. In his autobiography, Powell wrote that he was not at all bitter about this rejection. However, he was bitter about various factors which never quite came together during the film’s planning and production stages. A few of these issues have been documented by Charles Doble, who writes that Powell’s creative practice did not gel with the priorities and working practices of his Spanish crew.[6] Powell also believed that the only artist who could bring the pivotal ballet sequences in the film to life was Joan Miro, but Miro was apparently less convinced. Powell travelled to Mallorca and camped outside his Villa in an attempt to persuade him, but he was unsuccessful (in the end the design for these scenes were done by Catalan painter Durancamps).

Honeymoon wasn’t a total loss – the film won the Technical Grand Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, and Powell was nominated for the Golden Palm Award. The film was released in Technirama, a new process, and was one of the first films screened in England (and possibly the first) to be made for the ARC120 projection system. This involved projecting two film strips simultaneously and ensuring they met in the middle of a large, curved cinema screen (and according to Charles Doble, who restored the film from its original elements in the early 2000s, the adaptors and heavy lenses necessitated by this process caused picture shake, and this may account for some of the odd, unsteady shots we see in certain scenes).

Powell dedicates very little space to Honeymoon in his almost 700-page autobiography Million Dollar Movie (in fact, he writes only a few paragraphs about Honeymoon, as opposed to the several pages he includes about a love affair he enjoyed with a young Spanish woman while he was making the film on location). But the scant details he does offer provide the reader with a partial story of a doomed production that began as one of his most ambitious projects and ended up becoming one of his greatest disappointments. Powell’s final word on the film is this: “The elements were alright, but the organisation was raw, and the whole thing never quite came together. I should never have taken it on."

[1] Powell, Michael (1995) Million Dollar Movie, London: Random House, p. 418. [2] Luna Del Miel, Monthly Film Bulletin; Jan 1, 1962; 29 [3] Film Clips, Sight and Sound; Winter 1962; 32, 1 [4] These sequences were choreographed by Leonide Massine, who also plays the ghost of Candela’s dead husband. Leonide Massine was 60 at the time. [5] Tcherina deserves some credit here for introducing Powell to the legend of ‘The Lovers of Teruel’ (according to Charles Doble). She later incorporated the ‘Teruel’ ballet into some of her stage performances, and was also involved in the making of the 1962 film of the same name by Raymond Rouleau. [6] See The Powell and Pressburger Pages, http://www.powell-pressburger.org/Reviews/59_Honeymoon/Charles.html

The NHS as you've never seen it before: The National Health (Jack Gold, 1973)

Like many great British films made in the social realist tradition, The National Health was adapted from a successful stage play. But Peter Nichols’s play is also something of a curio in that it began life as a television script which was subsequently adapted for the stage, following an indifferent response from producers. The play had its first run at the National Theatre in 1969 and became an instant success, winning the Evening Standard award for Best Play and considerable critical acclaim. Nichols was wary of the creative compromise involved in letting go of the film rights (he had been burned in the past) but with director Jack Gold the film was in a pair of hands which were, if not safe, then certainly appropriate. Gold was a filmmaker with a strong preference for social and political subjects. Prior to The National Health his credits included realist drama The Bofors Gun (1968) and the The Reckoning (1969), a brutal, penetrating dissection of the British class system. But Gold’s stated preference was for working in the medium of television rather than film, and it is easy to see why: television production offered greater creative freedom and the ability to tackle more controversial subjects. And Gold also had something of a knack for coupling the humorous with the provocative, as he did with the outrageously subversive The Naked Civil Servant for Thames Television in 1975.

Given that a key theme in The National Health is the disintegration of the NHS, it was a stroke of brilliance to set the film in a derelict East-London hospital which was scheduled for demolition after shooting. A studio set would have been satisfactory, but the obvious dilapidation of the building adds a tenor of authenticity to a hospital ward which is running thin on resources, staff and compassion (one doctor has been on duty for 29 hours and keeps falling asleep on the job, while the senior staff are more interested in showing around foreign dignitaries than they are in the patients).

A television in the day room broadcasts ‘Nurse Norton’s Affair’, a mawkish soap opera in the vein of Days of our Lives which couldn’t be further from the reality of hospital life. But it’s at this point in the film that our expectations are really disrupted: the camera zooms in to the television set and the real and the fictional merge in a kind of disorienting dream sequence, with hospital staff from the actual hospital ward appearing in the television soap opera. Jim Dale plays ward orderly Barnett in real life and the handsome Doctor Neil Boyd in ‘Nurse Norton’s Affair’, while Lyn Redgrave stars as a glamourous nurse in the fictional show (and an exploited drudge in reality). Sheila Scott-Wilkinson plays Nurse Powell in reality but in the fictional soap she plays the star of the show, a young black nurse who must overcome racial prejudice in order to win the heart of the handsome Doctor Neil and the respect of Neil’s father, Senior Surgeon Dr Boyd (Donald Sinden).

Shortly after the establishment of the NHS in 1948, films set in hospitals tended to be government-sponsored propaganda of the type that was designed to inform the public about the government’s healthcare reforms. But in 1951 the new Health Service had its first notable cinematic outing in Pat Jackson’s White Corridors, a compelling drama which follows the fight of doctors to save a little boy from blood poisoning. Strangely enough, however, from the 1950s the subject of NHS hospitals was more likely to lend itself to comedy subjects rather than to tragedy. Doctor in the House, the 1954 comedy masterminded by the husband-and-wife team of Ralph Thomas and Betty Box, was so profitable at the box office and so popular among the public that it spawned six sequels, a television show and a radio series. The success of the film paved the way for the British hospital comedy and pointed to one inalienable fact: the NHS was box-office gold. Carry On Nurse reinforced the point in 1959 when it became the most profitable British film at the box office of that year. Ralph Thomas put the popularity of hospital comedies down to their relatability, arguing that: ‘People used to hold medicine in great awe... In our film, people liked and identified with the funny situations they had seen happen or which had happened to themselves as patients, doctors or nurses.’[1]

It is tempting to view The National Health as a slightly morbid Carry On film. Indeed, one Time Out reviewer even described it as ‘A would-be blackly comic Carry On Doctor that never manages to work itself free from the deadly grip of Peter Nichols' script.’ Given the added presence of Jim Dale (star of Carry On Doctor), the comparison is perhaps unavoidable. Peter Nichols had realised what Carry On producer Peter Rogers had long known: that the beauty of the hospital setup is that it allows the writer to situate characters from all walks of life in one room and see how they interact. But in The National Health this clash of personalities takes on a serious, rather than comedic, tone.

There are obvious signs that the film isn’t just playing for laughs: the lack of dignity afforded to a patient who accidentally relieves himself in the middle of the ward, the relationship between socialist Foster (played by Bob Hoskins) and upper-class patient Mr Mackie (David Hutcheson), which takes on a real tinge of hatred, and the obvious debilitating pain of Mr Mackie, who has terminal cancer. But the real satirical bite arrives in the form of a Christian evangelist woman who wafts around the ward announcing the ‘Good News’ and cheerfully trilling ‘there is no death!’ to increasingly bemused patients. The darker subtexts at play can be seen in cheerful ex-public schoolmaster Mervyn Hatch’s none-too veiled ‘interest in boys’, as well as in Barnett’s inappropriate monologue about how to prepare dead bodies for transport. Indeed, Jim Dale’s performance as Barnett is one of the most striking of the film because it is so layered. Barnett is no Jim Kilmore. He jokes and laughs, but he also hides a sociopathic streak which becomes evident in his macabre stories and in the secret contempt he has for his patients.

The idea that The National Health is limited by its origins in theatre seems like an unfair accusation. If anything, the film adaptation is able to lend the parodic soap opera storyline a great deal of visual intensity. In the film Gold is able to employ hyper-dramatized television soap opera techniques, clichéd music, fast pans along corridors and close ups of actor reactions. One issue is that this does feel slightly jarring, and this is partly because, in the stage production, these fantasy sequences are clearly signposted to the audience. In the film, they are not, and the overall effect can be a little disorienting.

The juxtaposition of the sparklingly clean environment of the soap opera and the grim reality of an NHS hospital is certainly stark, and this lends the scenes in the ‘real’ hospital a certain grim poignancy. The lack of non-diegetic music in the ‘real’ hospital scenes and the use of an extremely dramatic non-diegetic soundtrack in the soap opera scenes emphasise that contrast between realism and fantasy. British cinema embodies a long historical tradition of realism, a fact which can be traced to the documentary movement of the 1930s but also to the strong literary tradition which has run through British cinema from its beginnings. Some of the greatest works of British social realism have been adaptations of novels (such as Love on the Dole, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey). Conversely, formalist, non-realist styles have often occupied an uneasy place in British cinema. This goes some way towards explaining why Hammer’s gothic horrors never really captivated the critics, why films by the creative producer/director team of Powell and Pressburger (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus) were released to mixed responses and only rehabilitated as ‘classics’ retrospectively, or why My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) is widely seen as being one of the best British films of the 1980s but the brilliant psychological horror-fantasy The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) is not. But The National Health doesn’t just engage with fantasy; it tries to engage fantasy and social realism together in the same visual space. It is no small wonder that the competing styles do not sit comfortably with each other, but the effect is interesting.

The 1960s was a halcyon time for the British film industry, which was riding high on an unprecedented wave of funding from major Hollywood studios keen to benefit from competitive UK tax breaks. However, by the early 1970s American companies had withdrawn their financial interests. British domestic production, which had enjoyed something of a creative ‘boom’ period in the 60s, soon consisted of low-budget adaptations of television sitcoms like Steptoe and Son and On The Buses, as well as bawdy sex comedies like Stanley Long’s Adventures Of… series. In a 1973 survey of the industry, The Board of Trade found that it was impossible for most British films to make their money back in the domestic industry alone. International sales had always been a key avenue of recoupment for independent producers, but now the ability to sell a film abroad was crucial to its ability to break even. This renders the The National Health even more of a curio in that its subject (the National Health Service) is too regionally specific for it to have hoped to achieve wide audience abroad. And unfortunately, the film never enjoyed more than a limited run at a few select North American cinemas.

While American audiences might have some trouble understanding the vagaries of a public health service designed to be universal and free at the point of use, some of the racial issues explored in the film would presumably have translated. In ‘Nurse Norton’s Affair’ the racial politics are caricatured (‘this is greater London and in Greater London it is not common practice for a white skinned senior doctor to be seen off duty with a black-skinned nurse!’) while in ‘reality’ they are all too painfully recognisable in the character of recovering alcoholic Edward Loach, (played by Colin Blakely) who hurls abuse and racial slurs at the doctors and nurses (‘no blackie orders me around!’).

The release of The National Health came nine years after Life in Emergency Ward 10 had portrayed an interracial relationship between surgeon Louise Mahler (Joan Hooley) and Doctor Giles Farmer (John White). Perhaps what is most notable about The National Health is just how relevant it feels to us today. It’s a jumble of race and class politics which never really seems to land its blows, but there’s still a lot to like about this curious, unapologetically idiosyncratic film.

[1] See Brian McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema 1997 p. 557.

Mind the Doors! Death Line (Gary Sherman, 1972)

• The following essay was published in the accompanying booklet to the 2018 Network on Air release of Death Line on Blu-ray. The film is streaming via Network on Air as part of Kim Newman's Nightmare Night In from 4pm on October 23 2020.

Death Line is a favourite among horror fans but is less well-known among the uninitiated. According to Marcelle Perks, this is testimony to the way that critics and distributors have historically ‘mishandled our [British] Gothic heritage’.[1] Robin Wood, one of the few British critics with something good to say about Death Line, noted that in general the critical response to the film upon its release was ‘insensitive in the extreme’.[2] Wood was perhaps referencing reviews like that by Cecil Watson of the Daily Mail, who wondered how 'such a sick and sick-making film came to be made’ (in his own review Wood had called Death Line ‘the most horrible horror film ever’, although this sentiment was expressed in tones of admiration rather than disgust).

For decades critics simply did not understand British horror, and the resulting ignominy has left many a brilliant film languishing near the base of the canonical pyramid of national cinema. In the case of Death Line this seems particularly unfair. Gary Sherman’s film is a harrowing, brilliantly shot and genuinely terrifying example of the genre but it’s also so much more than that; this is a richly detailed, highly engaging film which develops complex themes about class, corporate irresponsibility, modernity and alienation. And cannibalism.

When two students, Alex (David Ladd) and Patricia (Sharon Gurney) exit the last train to Russell Square they find a man (James Cossins) lying on the stairs of the station, apparently drunk. This is not an unusual occurrence, although the man is a very high-class drunk: he is well-dressed and his card reads ‘James Manfred, O.B.E.’ Patricia insists on informing a police officer despite Alex’s emphatic reluctance, but when the officer arrives at the scene Manfred is gone. Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasence) is called to investigate and finds that Manfred is one of a handful of people who have recently gone missing from Russell Square station.

In a seemingly unrelated aside, during the investigation veteran Inspector Richardson (Clive Swift) tells Calhoun and his partner Detective Rogers about a cave-in that took place during the building of Russell Square station in the 1890s, in which a number of workers were trapped underground apparently left to rot. As Calhoun investigates further, he is warned away by the pompous intelligence office Stratton-Villiers (Christopher Lee), and this causes the fiercely working class inspector to double down in his efforts. Meanwhile, in the bowels of Russell Square station, a plague-infected man (here known only as ‘The Man’) grieves for his beloved partner who has died in childbirth. He is the last of several generations of the original cave-in victims, and the grief of losing his only companion threatens to drive him to despair…

Made in Britain, Born in the USA.

Peter Hutchings notes that ‘Death Line’s main achievement lies in its refusal to reject or be repulsed by the ‘monstrous’.[4] But as unapologetically gruesome as the film may be, it was inspired by some even more horrifying legends. In his depiction of ‘The Man’ and his deceased family of cannibals, Gary Sherman was inspired by the Scottish folklore myth of the Highwayman Sawney Bean, the head of the medieval cave-dwelling clan that supposedly captured, dismembered and ate passing travellers. Whether intentional or not, the story also recalls the fateful Donner expedition, led by a band of American pioneers who set out for California in 1846 and fell victim to a series of mishaps that left them no choice but to resort to cannibalism to survive.

Combined British and American cultural influences run through Death Line like the writing in a stick of Blackpool rock. On the production side the film is British (it was produced by British companies and shot in London) although it was directed by the Chicago-based Gary Sherman and stars an American actor, David Ladd. Death Line draws from British history and culture, but in tone it is closer to something like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) than it is to the British gothic tradition. In this, Death Line was part of a trend in 70s British horror: Hutchings argues that financial difficulties in the industry in this decade led to a slew of low budget horrors which drew on the ‘central metaphors’ of American cinema, films like Frightmare (Pete Walker, 1974) and Prey (Norman J. Warren, 1977).[5]

Gary Sherman was a relatively untried director, but he landed in London at a time when British horror was attracting young men with limited experience and excellent ideas, and with Death Line Sherman was following the example of directors like Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General, 1968), Peter Sykes (Demons of the Mind, 1972) and Peter Sasdy (Hands of the Ripper, 1971). Variety called the film a ‘sleeper hit’ on its first release in London, which seems kindly euphemistic. It was more aggressively marketed in the United States, where it was sold under the more evocative title Raw Meat and successively billed with James Kelley and Andrea Bianchi’s Night Hair Child (1971) and Ivan Reitman’s Cannibal Girls (1973). Though the exact box office figures are unavailable, it is likely that Death Line was slightly more successful in the US, a market which has always been, on the whole, far more receptive to low-budget genre product.[6]

‘I’ll be in this movie, if I don’t have to wear teeth.’

According to Gary Sherman, Christopher Lee was having dinner at producer Paul Maslansky’s flat when he read the script for Death Line and said ‘I’ll be in this movie, if I don’t have to wear teeth’. This was not the only reason, however; he was very keen to do a film with Donald Pleasence, and as such he was willing to accept a considerably smaller fee than he could command at that time as one of the most successful leading men in horror.

Sherman had always had Donald Pleasence in mind when he wrote the script, and for his part, Pleasence was taken by juxtaposition of the horror and the comedy of the Inspector role (he rarely got to do comedy) and enthusiastically accepted.[7] Marlon Brando agreed to play ‘The Man’ (he had just finished filming another British horror film, The Nightcomers, also produced by Alan Ladd Jr.) but after his son became ill prior to filming he dropped out and was replaced by Hugh Armstong (Prudence and the Pill [Fielder Cook, 1968], How to Get Ahead in Advertising [Bruce Robinson, 1989]).

Donald Pleasence’s performance is a delight to behold. As Calhoun he is sarcastic, acerbic and by turns lackadaisical and bursting with energy. He can go from deadpan gurn to manic grin in less than 0.5 seconds. This is unnerving, and this is absolutely his intention; he knows how to bait and manipulate in order to extract information. The pompous Villiers (played by Lee) is an interesting counterpoint to Calhoun’s tough, earthy, working-class persona and an effective goad to his motivations. David Ladd’s performance is slightly less polished, however, and this is a point on which critic Roger Ebert lingered in his review of the film, noting the contrast between Ladd’s ‘painfully inept’ performance and Donald’s Pleasence’s ‘fully formed, believable character’.[8]

Hugh Armstrong’s ‘The Man’ also deserves a special mention here. As the lonely grief-stricken monster, ‘The Man’ embodies the emotional (as opposed to visceral) horror of the film, and his grief is played with such realism that as the camera lingers on his pain we begin to feel uncomfortable, almost as though we are intruding in an intimate, sacred space. He also impresses on us his frustration and his desire to be understood rather than reviled, which makes his attempts to communicate with Patricia using what little language he has gleaned from tube announcements (‘Mind the doors!’) all more poignant. He may be no Boris Karloff, but Armstrong’s ability to inject a level of emotional depth into a mostly mute character who communicates mainly by grunting is nothing short of remarkable.

Myths and Monsters

Credit for this must also go to Sherman and cinematographer Alex Thompson. We are introduced to ‘The Man’ via a six-minute tracking shot which, in its almost painful slowness, takes in every tiny detail of the monster’s underground lair: furniture, debris, decorations, jewellery, severed limbs. As Robin Wood notes in his review for Monthly Film Bulletin, ‘The core of the film is contained in that shot… The circular movement of the camera in a constricted space … creates the claustrophobia of this appalling world, both prison-cell and womb.’[9]

The extended sequence of ‘The Man’ grieving and the sentimentality of his behaviour (he decorates the corpse of his wife with trinkets) has the effect of making the cannibals seem sympathetic. They do not eat their own, and they engage in ritualistic mourning when loved ones die. In essence, grief is what separates cannibal from monster in Death Line. ‘The Man’ may be physically repulsive and he may ooze corruption from every pore, but like Frankenstein’s monster, the pain and trauma he suffers ultimately holds up a mirror to an uncaring contemporary society. In Death Line, it is the numbness of feeling brought on by the disconnectedness of modern living which is monstrous.[10]

As a low budget cannibal horror film that draws on American sensibilities, Death Line seems a far cry from the Victorian gothic horrors of a few years before. In fact, the film is a slice of pure Victoriana, but it is more informed by 19th century society and culture than by sumptuous costumes and set design. Victorian fiction was obsessed with contradictions, such as man’s capability for good and evil (Jekyll and Hyde) and the physically monstrous as a representation of our basest fears (Frankenstein) and these are themes that Sherman attempts to explore in Death Line.

The juxtaposition between upper class and lower class in the film also recalls the downtrodden Morlocks and the pampered Eloi of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (see also the lesser known The Sleeper Awakes). In Victorian England such fiction played on general anxieties about the human cost of industrialisation and the logical consequences of unchecked capitalism. The danger was that the rich would get richer, while the workers would suffer and become so downtrodden that they would become subhuman, literally relegated to live underground.

Death Line's raw, visceral and unflinching take on the monstrous leads us on an exploration of grief, modernity and corporate irresponsibility. It is not difficult to see why the film has become an underground (excuse the pun) classic of British cinema.

Notes:

[1] Marcelle Perks, ‘A Descent into the Underworld: Death Line’, in British Horror Cinema, ed. by Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley, (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 145. [2] Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 40 n. 46 (January 1973), p. 6. [3] Marcelle Perks in British Horror Cinema, pp. 145-146. [4] Peter Hutchings, ‘The British Horror Film: An Investigation of British Horror Production in its National Context’, (University of East Anglia: unpublished doctoral thesis, 1989), p. 393. [5] Hutchings, ‘The British Horror Film’, p. 313. [6] Death Line was marketed in the US with more emphasis on ‘guts and gore’ as a selling point. However, the suggestion for ‘exploitation’ in Raw Meat’s press book – that posters for the film be placed in the windows of Butcher’s shops – was possibly a step too far. [7] Read the full interview at http://www.comingsoon.net/horror/features/840773-how-marlon-brando-was-almost-the-monster-in-death-line#8pM3ElZmwLVjk74w.99 [8] See https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/raw-meat-1973 for Ebert’s full review. [9] Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 40 n. 46 (January 1973), p. 6. [10] Peter Hutchings argues along similar lines, further analysing how the ‘monster’ cast out from society functions in Death Line as a redemptive force. For more details see his brilliant Hammer and Beyond: the British Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).