The Last Days of Disco (1998)

“There’s something really sexy about Scrooge McDuck.”

Set “sometime in the very early 80s”, The Last Days of Disco heralds the end of an era and hints at an oncoming catastrophe. While there’s some talk in the film (and actual experience) of sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhoea and herpes, there’s something far worse looming on the horizon. Advertising bod Jimmy (Mackenzie Astin) says to Des (Chris Eigeman), the manager of the movie’s ultra-select nightspot at one point, “I have a very bad feeling about the club, Des – it’s like a meteorite is headed straight for it, it’s going to destroy everything.”

Now, he’s actually referring to financial misdemeanours but there is subtext, I feel. I mean, doorman Van (Burr Steers) informs some of the club’s habitués, “People just don’t go out like they used to. They’re tired; some are sick, strung-out.”

Regardless of what actually caused the death of disco, a palpable threat rears its head throughout the film. For instance, we witness rock music fans prowling the streets wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the legend Disco Sucks. We see footage of ‘Disco Demolition Night’, held during a baseball fixture at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, during which a box of disco records is blown up. Cue an unanticipated riot. (This event actually took place in July of 1979 but this is a film, not a documentary – the discotheque is a sort-of Studio 54 that is located in a nearly New York.)

The Last Days of Disco has resonance today, not least because the root cause of the unrest could be seen as growing anti-‘other’ sentiment. Discos were considered by more conservative folk to be a breeding ground for ‘deviancy’ – homosexuality, for example. And the music genre in question actively – but by no means exclusively – involved the participation of people from Black American and Latin cultures. As for disco music itself, many deemed it as unnatural, machine-like – the antithesis of ‘proper’ music.

All of this notwithstanding, this 1998 drama, the third from Whit Stillman (before he embarked on an extended movie-making hiatus), isn’t some kind of anti-racism/homophobia treatise – the above-mentioned circumstances are rather obliquely inserted into the narrative.

Not unsurprisingly, Stillman makes films about what he knows; i.e. the lives of preppy Americans. Nevertheless, it comes across that he’s a big fan of disco. Born in 1952, he’d have been the perfect age to fully embrace that particular music and nightlife scene. And there’s no doubt he’s speaking through assistant district attorney Josh (Matt Keeslar), when he makes the following rallying call…

“Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this that was this big, and this important, and this great, will never die. Oh, for a few years, maybe many years, it will be considered passé and ridiculous. It will be misrepresented, caricatured and sneered at, or worse, completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits and platform shoes and going like this *strikes Travolta-as-Tony Manero pose*. But we had nothing to do with those things and still loved disco. Those who didn’t understand will never understand. Disco was much more and much better than all that. Disco was too great and too much fun to be gone forever. It has got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes.”

It’s deeply ironic, then, that Josh plays such a significant part in the club’s closure, something that equates to the apex of what is so important to him on a personal level.

Disco plays a big part in the film even if it’s not usually the subject. If we’re not watching scenes set in the unnamed but highly exclusive nightclub, the characters are looking forward to their next visit and feeling anxiety about the possibility of not getting in. And the music itself… the film’s songs are impeccably chosen, with a particular emphasis on Nile Rodgers-Bernard Edwards-produced material, which is just as it should be. (And I love it when Chic’s Good Times is used properly, as it is here – it can signify halcyon days, of course, but it’s also a great song to point up life’s bittersweet moments.) And there’s something about disco music that lends itself well to both drama and comedy – its heightened aesthetic, the marriage of discomposure and positivity that is governed by a mathematical sense of timing.

In the film, disco tunes provide the backdrop to the lives of a bunch of Ivy League/Hampshire College graduates that are, mostly, trying to scale the professional ladder with varying degrees of success. The storyline mainly focuses on Alice (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) but there are a bunch of characters that pass in and out of the narrative. The Last Days of Disco is as much concerned with the fluidity of relationships as it is about upwardly pointed 20-somethings frequenting an elite nightclub.

It’s also about how our lead characters try to fit in, which means that sexual liaisons and the search for solid relationships are not necessarily mutually exclusive and are, in fact, often messily entwined. (Oh, and the film touches on money laundering, drug dealing, living with mental illness, socialising-as-career advancement, among other things.)

Alice comes across as a genuine sort of person and as such, she isn’t naturally inured to opportunists that want to bed her and rivals that want to undermine her. And while she’s not as forthright as Charlotte (and certainly not as conniving) she’s no wallflower – she’s more of a listener, an observer. She’s our point-of-view character and is trying to figure people out and understand how life works. And so Josh is a much better match for her than likeable yet shifty Des, whom Jimmy describes as, “a person of some integrity” except in his “relations with women.”

So The Last Days of Disco is a relationship drama, a film that charts a transitionary phase, during which college days have only just been left behind and when dreams and aspirations are still very much alive and personal freedoms are being further explored.

And as with Metropolitan and Barcelona, Disco is a very talky movie. For one thing, there’s a quite lengthy discussion about the real meaning behind Lady and the Tramp. Actually, there are a lot of references to comic-book/animation properties, such as Spider-Man, Green Hornet and Bambi – and yet another Disney mainstay, which is quoted at the top of this review. And while Disco is a drama, it’s also comedy and the repeated gag about Jimmy being kicked out of the club because owner Bernie (David Thornton) hates advertising people is pretty funny. (“That’s like something out of the Nazis!” says a dumbfounded Jimmy in one scene.)

Really, there’s a lot going on in the screenplay, which means that the film might seem to lack focus. Essentially, Stillman pours into it his young-adult life experiences and his pop-culture influences. And the narrative strands, when tied together, provide more than enough combustible material to blow a loosely based social collective wide apart. Everyone comes out of it relatively unscathed (well, anyone that really matters) with ambitions recalibrated and newly asserted.

I like that Stillman has Alice and Josh, the film’s most unadulterated characters, come together at the very end – and they don’t have to say a word. They walk the walk while others talk the talk. Actually, they do more than just walk – they dance. Dancing’s good, it’s positive, it’s life-affirming and it’s contagious. And so the very last sequence, which runs into the closing credits, sends a chill down my spine and puts a smile on my face just thinking about it.

The Boy Friend (1971)

It’s rather clever of Ken Russell to adapt The Boy Friend for the cinema in such a way as to allow the viewer to peek backstage – so that we get to see the people behind the performances. It also means that he has free rein to engage in flights of fantasy that are far beyond the means of any theatre.

Ken Russell (centre) directs Christopher Gable and Twiggy

The movie epitomises that integral show-must-go-on ethos: performances replete with wide eyes and big smiles, even if all is not well off stage.

The cast is uniformly excellent. It would be invidious to pick out any one performer in particular because there are no weak links. However, I’m going to do it, anyway.

Antonia Ellis is totally on her A-game as limelight-hogging ‘Maisie’, who sees herself as the real star of the troupe.

Tommy Tune and The Boy Friend’s ‘other’ leading lady, Antonia Ellis

And Christopher Gable is utterly winning as ‘Tony Brockhurst’. His charismatic performance typifies stagecraft at its very best, and the fact that he was instrumental in the film’s mesmerising choreography speaks to his undoubted artistic abilities.

Christopher Gable and Twiggy – tripping the light fantastic

There’s even an extended cameo from Glenda Jackson who, despite limited screen time, goes through a satisfying character arc.

Glenda Jackson – more than just a cameo

It’s great to see actors who, later in life, became defined by a single character or genre, such as Brian Murphy. It’s easy to forget that many of these people are/were very talented performers, capable of doing all manner of thesping.

Tommy Tune, Graham Armitage, Antonia Ellis, Brian Murphy and Murray Melvin – all important members of a fine ensemble cast

Doctor Who: Shada (1979/2017)

Not a film, I know, but it did have a limited cinema run, and is now presented on Blu-ray in feature-length form.

This sadly abandoned, Douglas Adams-penned story would have made a fitting end to seventies’ Time Lord shenanigans (and composer Dudley Simpson’s long association with the programme) but, in the world of Doctor Who, the story’s never over. Whether or not Shada counts as a film is entirely moot because this official completion is more than a qualified success.

Although I have the DVD that features the early 1990s’ reconstruction, I’ve never been able to get very far with it. This is mainly because – despite Tom Baker’s sterling linking narration – there isn’t quite enough extant footage to properly convey the story as a whole. The problem is further compounded by Keff McCulloch’s music, which just feels wrong for something of a 1979 vintage.

Shada 2017 is a different beast, however. First off: Mark Ayres’ score is fabulous. It’s possibly my favourite aspect of the whole production. He perfectly invokes the spirit of Simpson – using City of Death as a hopping-on point – but does something that is entirely his own. Honestly, it’s so good!

What’s more, the animation is a marked improvement on the similarly resurrected Power of the Daleks (1966/2016), which I have to admit I was somewhat disappointed by – although, I understand that the animators were hamstrung by an unrealistic deadline, so the results are perhaps understandable given the circumstances. Shada, though, makes for a much smoother viewing experience. I was surprised to discover that the surviving location film and studio video material and the animation gel together pretty seamlessly.

I can now say that I have finally managed to watch the ‘original’ Shada – and I enjoyed it very much indeed.

The House That Dripped Blood (1971)

This is the third of Amicus’ portmanteau movies and the first that the British studio released during the 1970s. Its individual stories are linked by John Bennett’s Detective Inspector Holloway – who is investigating the disappearance of horror-movie actor Paul Henderson (Jon Pertwee). The policeman’s inquiries ultimately lead him to the address at which Henderson was last known to reside – The House That Dripped Blood, if you will. Oh, and there’s a character called A J Stoker (John Bryans), an estate agent who, it could be argued, doesn’t do the best job of marketing his properties.

The first segment is Method for Murder and concerns a couple – writer Charles (Denholm Elliott) and his wife Alice (Joanna Dunham) – that moves into the isolated country home. Charles is a horror writer (I bet his work is published by Pan Books!) and he’s found the perfect place to churn out more tales of the macabre. The creepy-old-house environs inspire him to come up with an antagonist called Dominic, who starts to become more fact than fiction – or perhaps he’s just a figment of the writer’s increasingly febrile imagination.

On the face of it, it seems like an odd choice casting smoothie Tom Adams as Dominic, who looks like a character from Carry on Screaming that ended up on the cutting-room floor. (He’s not so much Oddbod – or Oddbod Jr – as, maybe, Oddbod’s slightly more handsome cousin.) Anyway, he’s quite creepy – certainly, the way director Peter Duffell shoots him, providing the audience (and Charles) with brief, unsettling glimpses that are never long enough to allow the viewer to get too much of a fix on him.

I’ve seen The House That Dripped Blood at least two times before but I still managed to forget the bloody twist. And there’s another one after that. Good stuff!

Waxworks is probably the least substantial of all four stories but it does provide the opportunity for viewers to see Peter Cushing and Joss Ackland act together; not something to be sniffed at. Ackland hasn’t quite gotten to the stage in his career where he’s in larger-than-life mode but there are inklings of the kind of unhinged intensity that he can and will bring to a role. As for Cushing, he could play the most boring person alive and still be compelling.

This one is about two men who loved and lost a lady they both knew. Cushing’s character then finds what looks like a facsimile of her head in a nearby house of wax…

Here, Duffel changes up the direction and there’s a quite modern style of editing going on in some sequences. However, this vignette doesn’t feel properly developed.

Next up is Sweets to the Sweet, which is possibly the best of the set. Chloe Franks plays Jane, the introverted young daughter to severe-yet-terrified John (Christopher Lee). Franks imbues the little girl with a natural, sweet charm while being unaccountably disturbing. Nyree Dawn Porter makes a welcome appearance, playing a kindly, concerned nanny who can’t understand John’s flinty relationship with his daughter. Of course, we learn his reasons in due course…

I’ve played a lot of vampires in my time but I’ve never actually bitten anyone before!”

Just one of the zingers that Pertwee’s petulant, pompous film actor delivers throughout The Cloak, which concerns the aforementioned Henderson, a staple of low-budget horror fare who is trying to acquire exactly the right kind of garment for his latest vampire flick – a cloak that will help him to get into the part. He picks up the titular item of clothing at a bric-à-brac store run by a chap played by Geoffrey Bayldon – who is an absolute delight in this. As it turns out, the cloak does more than put Henderson in the right frame of mind, it actually turns him into a vampire!

There’s much humour wrung from the tacky film set scenario, in which yet another tawdry British horror movie is being churned out, much to Mr Henderson’s chagrin. Ingrid Pitt co-stars as Henderson’s, erm, co-star and squeeze. She injects some nice humour into the part of Carla (which is presumably riffing on her Carmilla/Mircalla role in 1970’s Countess Dracula, made by rivals Hammer).

This last segment feeds – please excuse the pun – into the wrap-up, which sees Holloway discover the undead duo of vampiric actors in the house’s basement. In that sense, it follows the precedent established by Asylum. And, of course, we get another direct-to-camera address by one of the characters, in this case, Mr Stoker.

I don’t think that Amicus ever dropped the ball with any of its seven anthology films that spanned nearly a decade. (I can never quite figure out which is my favourite.) This, I believe, is because the studio changes the formula in subtle ways, without breaking it entirely. For instance, The House That Dripped Blood ends on an overtly comedic tale, while the last of the series, From Beyond the Grave – its final tale is a real outlier. Sometimes the film will feature a ‘host’, and sometimes it won’t – Holloway and (more pertinently) Stoker are the closest we get to that here. In this particular entry in the series, it’s the female characters that hold the upper hand in each story. Sometimes there’s a bit of sci-fi (see The Torture Garden). Sometimes we’re witnessing premonitions that could, in theory, be prevented – or the last days of lives that are played out continuously on some infernal loop.

Basically, Amicus never rested on its laurels, which is why From Beyond the Grave (1974) is as fresh and enjoyable as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965). Actually, it could be argued that the films got better, which is pretty unusual, not to say remarkable, when it comes to a horror film series.

Arabesque (1966)

I think I’ve seen this film before but, if I have, I’ve all but forgotten it. I’ve certainly watched director Stanley Donen’s other glamour-tinged thriller, Charade. I have to say that while Arabesque was a nice surprise (I wasn’t really expecting much), I will admit that I understood very little of what was going on. The performances and visuals were so engaging, however, that it really didn’t matter.

I doubt that many reviews of this movie go by without the epithet Hitchcockian being bandied about but it would be churlish not to mention it. It’s intriguing to ponder how The Master of Suspense would have tackled the screenplay. This was at a time, after all, when he was making Torn Curtain and would go on to direct Topaz. I must confess that I’ve so far avoided both films because of their rather dour reputations. It’s interesting that, whether by design or happenstance, Hitchcock went down the straight-laced, Cold War route, as if deliberately eschewing pointedly heightened thrillers such as North by Northwest (which Arabesque more closely resembles) or psychological fare like Vertigo, Marnie and, er, Psycho

Gregory Peck, at least, has Hitchcock pedigree and so it’s fitting that he should play the male lead. Sophia Loren, the film’s top-lined female star, is a perhaps a bit of an outlier, though (she’s a brunette for a start). Composer Henry Mancini comes up with a genre-appropriate score (that is so of its era – in a good way) that features a memorable main theme. Hitchcock would go on to hire Mancini for Frenzy (1972), before deciding he didn’t like the music he was coming up with.

Alan Badel makes for an enjoyably silky villain, the sort that has a preternatural awareness of other people’s business, and there is good support from the likes of Duncan Lamont, John Merivale and George Coulouris.

All the archetypal Hitchockian thriller elements are in place, pretty much. There’s even some unfortunate ethnic impersonation going. While not especially ideal, it can be regarded, at least, as an uncomfortable example of racial ignorance of the times.

As I already mentioned, I didn’t/couldn’t follow the plot – maybe there wasn’t one to follow… Perhaps the film’s supposedly all-important cypher is just one of many MacGuffins that renders a supposedly meaningful narrative, well, meaningless. In that sense, I suppose, the title of the film is fairly apposite.

The distinguishing quality that Donen brings to this kind of flick is the dazzling way in which he directs. He uses mirrors and reflective surfaces almost all of the time. Otherwise, he points the camera through glass in a bid to make things look as interesting as possible. In this respect, he certainly succeeds – and with the net result of often doubling the action and providing more coverage, allowing us to see the faces of, say, Loren and Peck and the situations they are observing. The choreography of the action and the restlessness of the camera go a long way towards disguising any and all plot deficiencies.

I liked Arabesque quite a bit and was surprised to find that Peck actually possessed comedic chops. The ending made me break out into a broad smile, too. Bravo, Mr Donen.

The Lady Eve (1941)

What a tangled love story The Lady Eve is. Even by the film’s end, things aren’t resolved in the way one might expect. Is guileless (and very wealthy) Charles (Henry Fonda)’s attraction to beautiful con artist Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) merely skin deep? After all, he also falls head over heels for her sister Eve, a member of the British aristocracy who has a list of beaus as long Jean’s rap sheet. Of course, Jean and Eve are one and the same. Not that Charles knows this. Perhaps he subconsciously sees through the deception and right into the heart of the woman he loves, and who loves him. Irrespective of the twisted hoops Charles has to scramble through, the chemistry between Stanwyck and Fonda positively fizzes off the screen, leaving us in no doubt that the mismatched pair will finally get together.