At Last the Legend of the White Rhinoceros is Fulfilled: Notes on Prehistoric Women (1967)

Martine Beswick as Queen Kari and Edina Ronay as slave girl Saria 

in Prehistoric Women (dir. Michael Carreras, 1967)

 

 

I. 

 

I like a good cavegirl flick as much as the next man, particularly when it deals with pressing social and political issues to do with class, ethnicity, and sexual relations. If the film also involves the religious worship of a giant white rhino, then that only sweetens the deal as far as I'm concened.

 

I couldn't, therefore, pass up the opportunity to watch Prehistoric Women when it was shown on Talking Pictures TV yesterday ...

II. 

 

Directed by Michael Carreras, Prehistoric Women was a fantasy adventure produced by Hammer Films, that was initially released in the US in 1967. An edited version, entitled Slave Girls, was released in the UK the following year. 

 

It starred Michael Latimer in the lead male role of David Marchant, a British explorer on safari in Africa; Jamaican-born beauty and Bond girl Martine Beswick, as Queen Kari; and the Anglo-Hungarian actress (who became a fashion designer) Edina Ronay, as the pouting blonde slave girl Saria, with whom David, all-too-predictably, falls in love.  

 

Central to the plot is the division of an all-female tribe into a ruling class of brunettes and a subordinate class of blondes. David, having accidently found himself caught up in the middle of things, is wanted by the beautiful dark-haired queen as her mate. He, however, appalled by her cruelty towards inferiors, spurns her advances. 

In fact, he has the hots for Saria and is soon encouraging her and her fair-haired comrades - as well as the men who are all kept as prisoners in a cave - to revolt against Kari, and against the Devils, a tribe of black Africans with whom she is in league (and who worship a large white rhino carved in stone). 

Long story short, this slave revolt against the dark-haired matriarchal order is a success and the rhino-masked devils are driven off. What's more, Kari is impaled and killed by the horn of a charging white rhino that mysteriously appears out of the jungle in a terrible temper.

 

Despite proclaiming his love for her, Saria tells David that her world is not his world and insists that he return home, which, via an act of iconoclastic magic he does, thereby fulfulling the legend of the white rhino.  

 

Once back at camp, David wonders whether it was all a mad dream - or he had really traveled back in time to reunite a lost African tribe and end a million-year-old legend ...? He begins to think it was probably the former, but then finds the white rhino brooch given to him by Saria in his pocket. So, it was true and it had happened!

 

The film ends on a happy romantic note: David is asked to greet some people joining the safari from London and, to his astonishment, one of the guests, called Sarah, is a reincarnation (or certainly a pretty good lookalike) of Saria.  

 

 

III.

 

What, then, do we learn from the film? 

 

Well, one takeaway could be that strictly enforced class divisions will invariably result in social tension and violence. That seems quite a progressive political message.

 

On the other hand, however, we might also note how the unconscious bias of the filmmakers results in fair-haired and light-skinned people being equated with beauty and goodness, whilst dark-haired, dark-skinned people are invariably portrayed as cruel, savage, devil-worshippers. 

 

A movie that promotes social justice can, it seems, still perpetuate racial stereotypes - and, indeed, sexual stereotypes. Because what Prehistoric Women confirms above all else is something established in One Million Years B.C. (1966). Namely, that barefoot cavegirls wearing fur-lined animal skin bikinis will forever find a place in the (male) pornographic imagination [1].

 

 

IV.

 

Critically panned and commercially unsuccessful, I still rather enjoyed watching this (politically suspect) Hammer film; not least of all for the sensual (and at times sadistic) scenes involving Martine Beswick. Push comes to shove, I'm not sure I wouldn't have chosen Queen Kari over Saria had I been in David's shoes.

 

There's something about a domineering dark-haired woman with a whip who also knows how to handle a knife and worships a rhinoceros, that excites even more than a virtuous blonde slavegirl (even when they look like Edina Ronay). 

 

It's arguable, in fact, that without a little coldness and cruelty a woman lacks character and I suspect that, ultimately, a great hunter like David would soon be bored by Saria/Sarah and seek out a woman more like Kari. 

 

For as Zarathustra reminds us, the brave man desires two things above all else: danger and distraction: 'And for that reason he wants a woman who will be the most dangerous plaything of all.' [2]

 

 

Beware the lash of the savage goddess Kari - ruler of a world

where men are chained, tortured, and made slaves to desire!

  

          

Notes

 

[1] Evidence of this can be found on the Dangerous Minds website: click here for an excellent entry on prehistoric cheesecake and the curvaceous cavewomen of B-movie cinema. 

 

[2] See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Section XVIII of Zarathustra's discourses on 'Old and Young Women'.

 

 

Bonus: click here to watch the official trailer for Prehistoric Women (1967). 

 

The Nanny (1965)

Original film poster with artwork by Tom Chantrell

 

Apparently, The Nanny (dir. Seth Holt, 1965) is far superior to the novel (of the same title) by Evelyn Piper upon which it's based. 

 

I can't vouch for that, as I haven't read the book. But I can well believe it, as this British suspense thriller - with elements of real horror, as one might expect of a Hammer Film production - is an exceptionally fine little film that ticks many of the boxes I'm looking to have ticked when it comes to a movie of this kind. 

 

These include, for example: Bette Davis in psycho biddy mode as a kind of anti-Poppins; Pamela Franklin playing a worldly fourteen-year-old obsessed with boys and cigarettes; and Jill Bennett in the role of a sexy aunt.  

Whilst we're speaking of the cast, mention should also be made of Wendy Craig, as Virginia, the neurotic mother of dead daughter Susy and disturbed son Joey (played by ten-year-old William Dix); it's always nice seeing Craig on screen as she reminds me of my own childhood - as does Harry Fowler, who puts in a brief appearance as the milkman.   

 

Now that Talking Pictures TV show this film every now and again, I would encourage readers to catch it if they can - the last Hammer production in black and white and containing one of Jimmy Sangster's best lines: 'He's looking up your skirt, the dirty git'. 

 

To watch the original theatrical trailer: click here. 

 

 

Taking a Trip Through The Beauty Jungle

Press ad for The Beauty Jungle (1964)

The most colourful and exciting film of the year

The good people at Talking Pictures TV have found another absolute gem of a movie: The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964), starring (60s and 70s stalwart) Ian Hendry as local journalist Don MacKenzie and (lovely Lancashire lass) Janette Scott as the typist-turned-beauty contestant Shirley Freeman.

Also putting in appearances are Tommy Trinder, Sid James, and a 21-year-old Maggie Nolan as just one of the mulitude of leggy-lovelies gracing the screen, so obviously a film with instant appeal for viewers like me (although it's interesting to note that promotion for the film was aimed primarily at a female audience in the belief that it was the sort of film women will want to see; the sort of picture women will want to talk about).   

Essentially a moral tale - or, rather, a sexploitation movie masquerading as a moral tale - it purports to expose the sordid and corrupt world of beauty pageants. MacKenzie, acting as a manager and image consultant to Shirley, is desperate to also become her lover. Unfortunately for him, having left her home, her job, and her boyfriend and transformed from a happy young brunette into a glamorous and ambitious blonde, greedy for ever-greater fame and success, she isn't interested and spurns his advances.         

Of far more interest to Shirley are playboy filmstar Rex Carrick (played by Edmund Purdom) and sauve international beauty pageant promoter Armand (played by the French actor Jean Claudio). She tries to seduce the former, only to discover he's either gay or asexual; and she (mistakenly) agrees to sleep with the latter in the (vain) hope of becoming Miss Globe (a title that goes to Miss Peru, played by a former Miss Israel, Aliza Gur). 

Having failed to make it to the top, Shirley is reduced to working as a celebrity judge back on the local beauty contest circuit - until, that is, she sees her younger sister paraded before her (and under the management of MacKenzie). This forces her to walk away from the industry for good and presumably back into a life of obscurity and nine-to-five normality; just another victim of the beauty jungle and its brutal, primitive law (though one who was happy to be complicit so long as she was winning). 

What feminist critics or members of the #MeToo generation would make of such a film heaven only knows; one imagines they'd be triggered (perhaps rightly) by the unabashed sexual objectification and abuse of young women by powerful and unscrupulous older men.

But the film has such quirky British charm - not only, as I said earlier, do Tommy Trinder and Sid James appear, but Lionel (Give Us a Clue) Blair and cheeky chappie Joe Brown also pop up on screen - that such sleazy behaviour is normalised, humanised, and made entertaining. Maybe that's the thing with vice and immorality - we find it so damn seductive (and excusable) if it's carried out by people with a twinkle in their eye!

And, what's more, I fully appreciate why girls like Shirley Freeman set out on the path to fame and riches, prepared to do whatever it takes in order to escape being little Miss No One from nowhere - for who wants to peel potatoes and scrub floors when you can drink champagne and travel the world in style?


Notes

To watch a trailer for The Beauty Jungle (dir. Val Guest, 1964): click here.

To see the astonishing press kit released to help promote the film visit the William K. Everson Archive (NYU): click here.

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

Michael Gough gets to grips with June Cunningham in a 

publicity still for Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

When the Museum of Modern Art inducts a British horror film from the 1950s into its collection at the behest of Martin Scorsese, you simply have to watch it when the opportunity arises, as it did, the other night, on Talking Pictures TV (the vintage film and television channel available on Freeview).

Horrors of the Black Museum (dir. Arthur Crabtree, 1959), is the first in what critic David Pirie dubbed Anglo-Amalgamated's Sadean trilogy; i.e., movies that placed an emphasis on sexual violence and cruelty, in contrast to the supernatural elements found in the Hammer horrors of the same era [1]. 

Written and produced by Herman (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) Cohen, the film exploits his personal fascination with the criminal memorabilia collected in Scotland Yard's so-called Black Museum and stars English actor Michael Gough as the mad, misogynistic murderer Edmond Bancroft: No woman can hold her tongue! They're a vicious, unreliable breed!

Originally, Cohen had wanted either Vincent Price or Orson Welles for the role, but the Hollywood stars would have demanded fees way outside of budget. And so Gough got the part and his scenery-chewing performance betrays the same bitter resentment of the evil cripple that he later demonstrates as the wheelchair-bound mad scientist, Dr. Clement Armstrong, in a famous episode of The Avengers [2].

Whilst the ingenius murders - committed with spiked binoculars, a guillotine, antique ice tongs, and even a laser beam of some kind - are all très amusant, by far the most memorable scene features London-born starlet June Cunningham playing Bancroft's blonde bombshell mistress, Joan, dancing provocatively to a bar room jukebox and having just about as much fun as a girl can have without taking her clothes off: click here.

Cunningham may not have been the most talented actress or the most beautiful, but in this red-hot scene she cha-cha-chas her way into cinematic immortality ... 

Notes

[1] See David Pirie, A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema, (1973). A revised edition was published in 2008 as A New Heritage of Horror (I. B. Taurus).

The two other Anglo-Amalgamated films identified by Pirie as Sadean in nature are Circus of Horrors (dir. Sidney Hayers, 1960) and Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell, 1960).

 [2] The episode to which I refer is, of course, 'The Cybernauts', from Series 4, (Oct. 1965).

As noted on TV Tropes, the evil cripple is a morally and physically compromised figure, though often possessing a genius intellect. The linking of disability, or physical deformity, with a predisposition towards madness, criminality, or vice, is, of course, an ancient device that regrettably reinforces negative cultural stereotypes.


To watch the original theatrical trailer for Horrors of the Black Museum (1959), click here.

Cover Girl Killer (1959)

Sex and horror are the new gods 

in this polluted world of so-called entertainment

I.

There are many reasons to love the black and white British film Cover Girl Killer (dir. Terry Bishop, 1959).

For one thing, it stars Harry H. Corbett in a pre-Steptoe role that demonstrates what a fine dramatic actor he was; one trained in Stanislavski's system (famously developed as method acting in the US). He may never have become England's Marlon Brando, as some critics predicted, but he coulda been a contender, could've been somebody, instead of a rag-and-bone man ...

      

II.

The film is set in the seedy but seductive world of post-War Soho; a world of strip-clubs, brothels, and dirty bookshops, where it was de rigeur to wear a raincoat whatever the weather.

Corbett plays a psychopath who hopes that, by killing the young models who appear on the cover of a notorious glamour magazine, he may free himself from his unsavoury obsessions and the lustful images that corrupt his thought.  

(It's always shocking to be reminded that murder and misogyny are often regarded as less shameful than masturbation by puritans who, as a matter of fact, have been driven insane by their own moralism, rather than corrupted by pornography.)

Having killed several young women - including Gloria, the showgirl with the most on show - Corbett's creepy character is lured into a trap set by the police and the publisher of Wow magazine, with the very lovely Felicity Young (as June) providing the bait. This results in a pervylicious climax to the movie, as the latter is chased around backstage at the Kasbar theatre in her underwear ...  

Cover Girl Killer may not be a great film - it's no Peeping Tom, Michael Powell's masterpiece that was released a year later - but it is, arguably, a seminal one that anticipates the direction that cinema (and popular entertainment in general) was moving: sexually explicit and ultra-violent; two decades later and the slasher movie was a staple of the horror genre and Mary Millington was starring in The Playbirds (1978).  

Well done to Talking Pictures TV (Sky 343, Freeview 81, Freesat 306) for deciding to broadcast it as part of their superb archive of films.

Harry H. Corbett and Felicity Young in Cover Girl Killer (1959)

To watch the trailer to Cover Girl Killer (1959): click here.