Mountains of the Moon

Mountains of the Moon (Bob Rafelson, 1990) A recent book about the quest for the source of the Nile River, "River of the Gods" by Candice Millard tells of the epic journey of British explorers John Hanning Speke and Richard Francis Burton to solve that mystery. It was a quest as perilous and fascinating as that of Lewis and Clark, with two distinctly different personalities of men heading the expedition, which, after surviving travails and hardships on the journey, descended into bickering and enmity when they returned to what they supposed was "civilization."

 

Yeah, well, I've seen that movie. Bob Rafelson, he of Head and Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, and The Postman Always Rings Twice, was as unlikely a person to tackle this international tale that rivaled fiction, but he managed to pull it off. Not only that, it's one of, if not his best movie. And no one went to see it. And I dare say, very few people know about it. Talk about trying to find something that's "lost."

Burton: "...tends to mingle."

In 1854, Speke (Iain Glen) arrives on the East African coast on leave from the Indian Army with the purpose of hunting big game, but as he is informed, the coast "is closed", and it's suggested that he hook up with Richard Francis Burton (Patrick Bergin, easily his best role and his survey party with the Royal Geographical Society, which has been given permission to go deep into Africa. The RGS has bankrolled Burton's journey in order to find "the true source of the Nile"—that river being so important to British trade, it's beginnings will assure King and Parliament that trade will continue to flow not risking any disruptions to the economy.

Speke: his character in one shot. It will provoke an attack on the camp.

Burton just wants to find it and he'll use any excuse: "Every westerner's curiosity has been met with torture, mutilation and death. The river is shrouded in mystery. Who will be the first to discover its source?" For Burton, embarking on such an exploration is just as challenging as mastering another language (he would eventually speak 29) or translating a text ("One Thousand and One Nights," the "Kama Sutra" and "The Perfumed Garden") and for him the journey is as important as the destination as he was always gathering and noting facts, which is why he became one of the few non-Muslims to visit Mecca.

But, if Burton is there to get the lay of the land and everything set upon it, Speke just wants to hunt it. Burton needs a game hunter to supply food en route and Speke is a crack shot—he's hired immediately—but the two men couldn't be more different. For Speke, the goal is the thing, always interested in the target; for Burton, it's the journey, the process, the evidence. Each man will be tested, physically (both suffering from injuries that are horrendous—Burton, his face pierced through both cheeks by a native lance and Speke stabbed multiple times during a native attack) and mentally on their way to find the Nile's source. And despite their differences, they will prove essential to each other. Indeed, one wonders if either of them could have survived without the other.

One sub-plot of the movie is treachery, which both men will find in Africa and in England, belying the British chauvinism towards the African nations when they are equally capable of such behavior themselves, something Burton, in his studies of other cultures and his lectures, is trying to impress on a reluctant class-based society. But, those treacheries, both in Africa and England, will create circumstances that will challenge another major theme—loyalty. 

Burton and Speke are bound to each other in mission and friendship, and neither one would weaken their mutual trust were it not for the machinations of others. For all the tragedy—and triumph—that the two discoverers will encounter on their journey, it is only the influence of others that manages to come between them, sewing discord, and ultimately ending their partnership.

If the movie has a failing, it is that it tends to favor Burton's point of view over Speke's to the latter's detriment. It's easy to see why, though: Burton is a renaissance man, far before his time, and outside the status quo of those of his countrymen. His life was a constant quest for knowledge of the Earth and its peoples and seeking means to communicate similarities than promoting the stereotype of "the other." The movie could have made something of Burton's ego and his way of intimidating others, but he is pretty much given the benefit of the doubt in the movie.

And Speke has the disadvantage of class—too much of it, perhaps. He didn't seek adventure or Burton's loftier schemes (although he inherited Burton's zeal), he sought sport, and circumstances just conspired that he would make history. Mountains of the Moon has Speke being fooled by the manipulations of others, and, once having discovered the subterfuge, only doubles-down on his claims lest he lose his newly-found reputation. It lays the blame for the two men's disputes entirely on him, when the truth is probably more nuanced.

But, there's a lot to admire, not only in performances—Fiona Shaw is amazing as Burton's wife-to-be, Isobel, and Bernard Hill has a lovely turn as the legendary Dr. Livingstone, and one corker of a scene where he and Burton compare wounds they'd received on their travels—but also on the technical side, as well. The whole thing was photographed by the now-renowned Roger Deakins, edited by the ubiquitous Thom Noble, sound design by David Lynch's sound-man Alan Splet, with a resounding score by Michael Small. That's a lot of talent behind the scenes, making what's up on the screen so impeccable.

I can't recommend this movie enough. It's a great adventure story like The Man Who Would Be King or even Lawrence of Arabia, made without compromise and in some startling locations. I've always found Rafelson a little indulgent as a filmmaker. Not here. This is an amazing tale, well told by some of the best artisans of the movie-making craft.

 

It may be difficult to find, but the journey will be worth it.

 

 

The real Burton and Speke
 

Gideon of Scotland Yard

Gideon of Scotland Yard (aka Gideon's Day, John Ford, 1958) You think you know a guy. Take John Ford. I couldn't have been more surprised to see Ford listed as an executive producer (along with King Kong producer Merian C. Cooper) on that mixture of cowboys and "Kong" stop-motion/live action hybrid, Mighty Joe Young (with effects work done by King Kong magician Willis O'Brien and a young apprentice by the name of Ray Harryhausen). It featured Ben Johnson, one of Ford's stock company, so I shouldn't have been too surprised.

But, years after being escorted off Mister Roberts and making his masterpiece The Searchers, there is this curiosity that Ford produced and directed in Britain, far afield from his westerns and military dramas. Soon after making The Bridge on the River Kwai (and starring in Ford pal Howard Hawks' Land of the Pharoahs), Jack Hawkins was picked by Ford to play Scotland Yard sleuth George Gideon from John Creasey's series of novels starting with his "Gideon's Day," written in 1955.

Now, Gideon is a Detective Chief Inspector and with that goes a lot of responsibility. But, that doesn't mean that you're immune from the vagaries of life, like getting enough time in the bathroom in the morning, or parking tickets from too-earnest young bobbies, family matters like making it home in time to attend your daughter's concert—her first (she's played by Anna Massey...and it was her first...film), or acquiring the salmon for the dinner you have to have with the in-law's...if you're not held up at the office by the demands of the job.

For Gideon, on this day of days, has to deal with the possible bribery charges of one of his sergeants—and that will mean personally interviewing the informant (if he can find him), the escape of a violent sex maniac rumored to be on the road to London, not to mention a couple attempted murders, bankroll robberies by a dinner-jacketed mob...and that bobby, who pops in Gideon's Day like the proverbial bad penny.

The film is an oddity, but only because it should be more well-known, as Ford, the picture-maker is working on high-gear here...with some sterling talent in the British film industry: T. E. B. Clarke (The Lavender Hill Mob) wrote the screenplay, premier art director Ken Adam designed the look, and it was photographed by master cinematographer Freddie Young. With such talent behind the scenes, the film would at least be a curiosity, but it's directed by Jack Ford, which warrants a must-see for those who "like them the way they used to make them," or need to be convinced that Ford could do more than westerns...or work with John Wayne.

Those who know Ford's work know that there is a constant struggle for the appropriate tone: Ford, especially in his later years, was fearlessly tackling darker material—making him somewhat unpopular with his studio's—while balancing it with comedy, whether it's the popping of societal balloons or muddying stuffed shirts, or merely exposing the follies of the needlessly pretentious. Characters are in constant danger of barking "Lighten up!" both to their on-screen film-peers but also to the film at large. 

Given the material, Clarke's script provides Ford an almost seamless balancing act between familial follies and often deadly serious police work, showing the pressures of maintaining a civil head while dealing with the lowest of criminal creeps. Yes, the family stuff can be a bit frothy—Anna Lee (mentioned here two days in a row!) plays Gideon's wife, hailing as she does from the county of Kent—but contrast it with the escaped rapist, which Ford films in a way eerily similar to Hitchcock's sense of dread.

Also, unusual for Ford, is a little narrative side-track of what makes a man. Now, this was something he might not have been able to try in his American Westerns...and certainly not around his apprentice, Wayne. When a vicar of a local parish is jeered by the local children for being "a sissy," he stoically turns the other cheek, refusing to talk about his commando service in order to not glorify war, but when he is attacked by a criminal, he does what he has to do to stop the violence. Both he and Gideon are appalled by violence—one preaches against it and one tries to prevent it—they face and take action when confronted by it, but, in their separate ways, avoid resorting to it.

It's a good film, by a master film-maker, but try to see it in color—that's the more complete British version. The U.S. version is in black and white.

Oh, one other thing: at the time Ford was in London filming Gideon's Day, he had the opportunity to meet one of his biggest fans, a Japanese director named Akira Kurosawa.

Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm, actually Karlheinz Böhm) is never without his camera—a camera of some kind, still or film. A shy young man, he works as a "focus-puller", hoping to become a film-maker. In his other job, he takes pin-up shots of models to be sold "under the counter" in plain brown envelopes. Photography is his passion, his aspiration, his raison d'etre. But, it is also a means to end.

For his hobby is terrorizing and killing women.

Mark is one of those people who, during a newscast of a lurid incident, it is always remarked "he seemed like such a nice young man—kept to himself." The intensity is never mentioned, though, or the creepiness. But, just  the fact that Mark ALWAYS has a camera with him should raise an alert.

It certainly should tip off Dora (Brenda Bruce), a prostitute Mark follows one night. Or maybe it shouldn't. He hides his movie camera under his coat (hmm..I sense a metaphor-based film thesis in the works) and we see what happens from the point of view of the view-finder, as he encounters on the street, follows her to her flat, and then murders her, filming it, then skulking off to his house, where he develops the film and watches it, transfixed...or turned on...or what? It's difficult to say exactly what is going on with this monster, but since we're watching the film...we're accessories. 

Peeping Tom (as the title suggests) is about voyeurism at it's cruel dark little heart. Mark "likes to watch." Not participate, really, but watch. To record and see it over and over again. He's a vicious killer, a sociopath, but as long as the camera is between him and his victims, there's a filter there, responsibility-once-removed, and all for the sake of "art," his footage is to be part of a documentary he is making—or at least recording—paralleling his experiences as a child as his father (played by director Powell) runs psychological experiments on him, while a documenting camera records the events. It is suggested (filmicly) that Mark is merely doing what he knows and is familiar with in his growing up. But, if so, where did he learn to kill?

And—like Mark—we watch, complicit in his actions. It adds another dimension to the experience of the movie. Perhaps it's a feeling of generated guilt that we're watching what he's watching—compounded by Mark's compulsion and utter lack of guilt—which gives us the universal experience of feeling out of control in the passive experience of watching a movie. You feel helpless when your instincts are challenged. This is a familiar feeling to anyone who's ever watched Hitchcock's voyeuristic classic, Rear Window.

And (it seems) you can't discuss Peeping Tom without also mentioning Hitchcock, whose film, Psycho, was released just two months after Powell's film.* Michael Powell had worked closely with Hitchcock during the director's "British"period, working as a still photographer on his shoots and the two were somewhat close throughout their careers. That they should simultaneously direct the most lurid films of their careers has more to do with the loosening of restraints in subject matter for film at the time than anything else. For Powell, whose career—as part of "The Archers" in collaboration with Emeric Pressburger—was a prestigious one, the subject matter of Peeping Tom was a departure from, say, The Red Shoes** or A Matter of Life and Death, although, it isn't too far afield from the hysteria of, say, Black Narcissus. But, the nuanced approach, the vital color palette, should be familiar to anyone familiar with the films produced by "The Archers."

Even as the movie makes us implicit voyeurs, we are also innocent bystanders, shocked by the new and the unexpected, looking for some sense of normalcy amidst all the creepiness. Peeping Tom provides this downstairs from Mark's austere flat—far more elaborate is his film room—where he rents out the ground floor of his family home to Helen (Anna Massey—who would be a victim in Hitchcock's Frenzy ten years later) and her blind mother (Maxine Audley) whom she cares for. Helen is empathetic towards the damaged, so she is drawn to mark for his shyness, his past—he shows her his father's home movies of his psychological experiments—and because she knows that he spies on her.

He might be drawn to her, too—or it's just because she shows him attention, which he's not accustomed to. Ego is a facet for both killers and film-makers, and perhaps she satisfies that need. Or she's just another victim for his secret hobby.

There's an added element to the murders that are noteworthy. Peeping Tom is full of reflections and refractions both in the film and the viewer's reaction to it. But, Mark's murder weapon is his own camera—one of the tripod's legs contains a sword with which he slays his victims—it serves double duty as both weapon and recorder. But the camera also holds a mirror to the victim, so they can see their own death, which own enhances the terror that Mark wants to record.

Peeping Tom is the complex daddy of the slasher films of the 1970's—which scaled the concept down to just a voyeuristic POV, unknowable killers and shock-cuts—but, even with the artistic sensibilities of Powell in play, it's still a creep-fest, that compels one to take a shower afterwards—that is, if Psycho isn't also on the double-bill.

* Peeping Tom received a critical thrashing in the press when it was released. Perhaps this is why Hitchcock did not have press previews of Psycho when it was released, instead emphasizing a "not-to-be-revealed" mystery in the film in its marketing to the public.

** The inclusion of the star of The Red Shoes, Moira Shearer, led to some controversy , as well.

Bunny Lake is Missing

Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1966) It starts normally enough. Most nightmares do.

American Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), newly moved to London following with her brother Steven (Keir Dullea) who has moved for a prominent new job there, goes to pick up her daughter Bunny at the private school she's just enrolled her in. 

But, she can't find her. Nobody at the school remembers her, and can't recall seeing her. The teachers (including Anna Massey) are trying to deal with a crush of new kids starting off to school, so it's a little hard to pin-point the one individual child from the pack. But Ann is insistent, almost to the point of hysteria, and Steven is no help, poking around and questioning the odd woman (Martita Hunt) who lives above the school, berating the teachers and being oddly, vaguely threatening. Fearing a "bit of a row", the police are called in to investigate.

In walks Superintendant Newhouse (Sir Laurence Olivier) and his adjutant Williams (Clive Revill). Newhouse is a bit fusty, a might impatient, trying to understand a situation he doesn't quite fathom. He has an hysterical mother, a "helicoptering" brother, and a "missing person" that no one seems to have seen. It's all quite queer. He presses for details that seem to be there but no corroborating witnesses. He starts a line of inquiry that begins with a search of Steven and Ann's apartment.

When they get there, all traces of "Bunny Lake" are gone. No clothes, no toys, no dolls. Nothing. There isn't a sign that a child has ever lived there. Ever. Newhouse begins to suspect (as do we) that "Bunny Lake" is not only missing, but never existed in the first place. She may just be a figment of Ann's imagination, and the investigation changes from a "missing person" case to an investigation of Ann's psychological state. Steven volunteers that Ann had an imaginary friend as a child that was named "Bunny," and that steers Newhouse to try a different line of inquiry.

He takes Ann to a local pub where he begins an odd line of investigation. He asks Ann about "Bunny" and their history, hoping to liquor her up to find the truth. He learns that, while in the States, Ann had a boyfriend who got her pregnant and skipped out and Ann kept the baby, whom she called "Bunny." Steven was livid at the boyfriend's behavior and had even threatened him, but decided, instead, to get Ann out of that environment, taking a job in London and moving there with Ann and the child.

If the move had improved Steven's temper, it isn't noticeable when he storms into the pub and accuses Newhouse of trying to "railroad" his sister, and, instead of trying to find "Bunny," of trying to prove his sister is crazy. He warns the police to stay away from her...and him and do their jobs finding the missing child. Newhouse demurs, but he widens the search to find out what he can about the Lakes...all of them. 

Meanwhile, for the audience, the list of possibilities grows with every scene. That crazy old lady in the school's attic apartment doesn't seem the most stable of people, the cook who took charge of "Bunny" in the morning goes missing as well. Then, there's the actor-neighbor of the Lakes (Noel Coward), who can only be described as "pan-sexual," making a pass at Ann when they're alone. Maybe there is a "Bunny Lake," given all the potential suspects that would be handy to commit the crime. Maybe there isn't. And maybe Ann is being "gas-lit," led down a particular path to drive her crazy.

Adapted by John Mortimer (he created "Rumpole of the Bailey") and his wife Penelope (The Pumpkin Eater)—with a reported assist from Ira Levin—from a novel by Marryamm Modell, Bunny Lake is Missing is directed by Otto Preminger, a director who vacillated between prestige projects and controversial ones, to the point where one wondered whether he favored making good movies or headlines. But, he rarely played it safe, except in matters of budget. Here, he combines the genres of noir (with which he was all too familiar, having directed one of the classic ones, Laura) and the psychological drama, which Hitchcock had exploited successfully before and who had reached the box-office apex with Psycho.

Since 1960, Preminger had produced and directed big budget blockbusters with novel credibility—Anatomy of a Murder, Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, Exodus, and In Harm's Way. With Bunny Lake... there was budgetary down-sizing, so that less money was at stake, but Preminger's reputation was such that he could still get actors like Olivier and Coward, even if the film was small in scope and less than seemly in content. He changed the book's location from New York to London (probably for budget reasons, but also to benefit from an unfamiliar British cast and enhancing the disorientation of the "Ann" character). And somewhere along the way, they also changed the ending of the book to lend an extra element of surprise. 

Preminger favored long "takes," getting the most mileage out of his actors and his shooting day, editing being dictated by how things went on stage—nothing fancy. Preminger, who favored black and white for cinematography whenever he could, filled the screen with rich areas of darkness, learned from his early noir's.
Bunny Lake is engaging, fairly engrossing for most of its length with odd curiosities along the way. That it doesn't quite fulfill the promise of maintaining it might be a bit in the playing of it, rather than in the preparation.