1939. (1989) A SWEDISH WW2 MOVIE REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.

1939. (1989) DIRECTED BY GORAN CARMBACK.

STARRING HELENE ENGLUND, HELENE BERGSTROM AND PER MORBERG.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

This is a magnificent film to look at, set as it is in neutral Sweden during World War Two. Firstly, on the subject of being neutral during World War Two. Winston Churchill, a decent enough cove, accused Sweden of ignoring the greater moral issues of the war and playing both sides, the Allies and the Axis Powers, for profit.

She (Sweden) provided Germany with steel and machine parts, and permitted German soldiers on leave to travel freely through her country on their way to Norway or Germany. This doesn’t sound like Sweden was neutral exactly, but just saying she was neutral to get out of the conflict while favouring Germany slightly.

Before the war, Sweden refused to take in European Jews seeking even temporary refuge from the far-reaching arm of the Third Reich. When the tide of war shifted in favour of the Allies, however, she changed her tune a bit. Two Swedes, Count Folke Bernadotte and diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, are famous for having saved thousands of Jews’ lives towards the end of the war.

In fact, overall, again towards the end of the war, Sweden saved large numbers of Norway’s and Denmark’s imperilled Jews, so you could say that she maybe made up somewhat for her treatment of Jews before the war.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about neutrality myself. Has any country the right to remain ‘neutral’ while someone like Hitler is marauding across a continent and destroying it with fear, hatred, prejudice and ignorance? Not really…!

That’s why I kind of can’t understand why America aren’t wading in right now and helping Ukraine to defeat the Russians, who surely aren’t much better than Hitler and the Nazis? Are they afraid of starting the Third World War, and do they fear losing it also…?

Don’t worry, this isn’t a case of the pot calling the kettle black. I’m aware that my own country, the so-called Emerald Isle (ahem), was ‘neutral’ too during the war. A lot of folks, however, still think that we were pro-Germany.

We refused to close our German and Japanese embassies and, on the death of Hitler, our then Taoiseach (pronounced Tee-shock) Eamon de Valera visited the German ambassador in his official residence and GAVE HIM HIS CONDOLENCES ON BEHALF OF THE IRISH PEOPLE…! F**king hell. Eyebrows were raised Stateside, I can tell you.

We were apparently indifferent to the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, and refused to take them into the country on the grounds that they would steal Irish jobs, houses and food and cause anti-Semitic unrest wherever they landed.

We’ve made up for it a bit, years later, by taking in literally any and every Ukrainian person who fled here after the war with Russia was declared, but we should still be disgusted with ourselves for our collective behaviour during the Second World War.

After all that, now onto the film! It’s the story of an attractive young blonde Swedish woman (is there any other kind?) called Annika who, in 1939, leaves her childhood home on the farm in rural Sweden and travels to Stockholm, the Big Smoke, to start a new, hopefully more exciting life. Here, she meets the two most important people in her life: Berit, her best friend in the whole world, and her husband, Bengt.

Annika and Berit work in a hotel restaurant kitchen, share a flat together and live a wildly sociable life of parties, dates and dances together in neutral Sweden during the early years of the war. The men aren’t all away fighting Hitler (like they maybe should be?) and so the two pretty young ones have no shortage of willing, horny suitors.

Berit is played by the beautiful Helena Bergstrom, who portrayed Astrid, Bill Nighy’s gorgeous but pissed-off Swedish wife, in STILL CRAZY in 1998. Berit is a tragic and fragile figure, brought up without a mother. Now a bubbly brunette, she’s tough on the outside, but as soft as butter inside. She’s devotedly loyal to Annika, and would do anything for her.

She’s desperately gay- in the original sense of the word!- and laughs and giggles her way through life and work. She’s man-mad, of course, and when she becomes pregnant with a baby that has as many as three possible Baby-Daddies, she’s determined to go through with the pregnancy and keep the child, while knowing that it’s gonna be hard, real hard.

Meanwhile, Annika is married to her dream guy, Bengt, the athlete son of a rich merchant, who can afford to keep Annika in furs, jewels and fancy hats. It’s quite distasteful watching Annika wear her gorgeous fur coat, a gift from hubby, while thousands of Jews and others are perishing in the concentration camps.

In fairness to Annika, I don’t think she knows much, if anything, about concentration camps, even though her cousin Hans was put in one for being a communist, but she doesn’t seem to care for her new finery and fripperies much. She values her friendship with Berit more, much, much more.

The dream marriage turns into a nightmare when Bengt shows himself to be a domineering bully of a husband, the kind who says, show me your phone, and where have you been till now? He thinks Annika has had too much independence up to now, going drinking and dancing with that pregnant slut Berit, and he intends to curb that independence, with force if necessary.

What will happen to Annika and the poor love-starved Berit? Where will they be when the All-Clear finally sounds over a relieved but battered Europe? I sincerely hope they stay together, as friends who are practically family.

1939 is an excellent film, with some gorgeous sweeping views of Sweden, great costumes and make-up and hairstyles. Helena Bergstrom wins my Best Actress accolade, and then of course there’s the whole question of neutrality to mull over as well. Happy mulling…

IT AIN’T HALF HOT, MUM. (1974-1981) A CLASSIC COMEDY SERIES REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

IT AIN’T HALF HOT, MUM. (TELEVISION SERIES: 1974-1981.)

WRITTEN AND CREATED BY JIMMY PERRY AND DAVID CROFT.

STARRING WINDSOR DAVIES, DONALD HEWLETT, MICHAEL KNOWLES, MICHAEL BATES, DINO SHAFEEK, BABAR BHATTI, MELVYN HAYES, DON ESTELLE, GEORGE LAYTON, CHRISTOPHER MITCHELL, JOHN CLEGG, STUART MACGUGAN, KENNETH MACDONALD AND MIKE KINSEY.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Shuuuuuuuuuuuuut up!’

‘Don’t be such a silly arse!’

‘Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’

‘Move yourselves, move yourselves!’

‘Land of hope and glory, mother of the free…’

‘Meet the gang ‘cause the boys are here, the boys to entertain you…!’

I bloody love this television series, one of the best and funniest I’ve ever watched and certainly the one with the biggest heart. The camaraderie, affection and even love between the characters and the actors who play them is just wonderful to witness, and the laughs and ridiculous shenanigans helped my kids and I through the rather grim months of April and May of 2021, the last uncertain days of Ireland’s third – and hopefully last- coronavirus lockdown.

The series will no longer be shown on television, as it doesn’t conform to modern standards of political correctness. It’s racist, sexist and homophobic, according to these modern standards, but it was the way people talked back then and we can’t pretend they didn’t.

My kids and I simply looked at each other and remarked, you couldn’t get away with that nowadays, whenever a character said or did anything outrageous by today’s standards, and then simply went back to enjoying the genuine laughs, jokes and witticisms with which the show is chock-a-block.

The show is set in Deolali, India, and then Burma, in 1945. The characters are soldiers in the British Army, but they’re soldiers with a difference. ‘They is a bunch of bloody poofs,’ as their largely intolerant Sergeant Major Williams would say, or, if you prefer, they are artistes in the concert party, putting on shows for their fellow soldiers to keep up morale and whatnot. Courtesy of ENSA, or the Entertainments National Service Association, or even ‘Every Night Something Awful,’ as screenwriter Michael Armstrong once rather wittily put it…!

The theme of Imperialism runs through the show, as the British are still occupying India for the first half of the series, and then the action moves to Burma after the war in Europe is technically over, but the Japanese seemingly never read the memo and are still fighting away until a certain bomb, lightly handled in the show, puts a definite stop to all that.

The concert party are somewhat privileged in that they are excused the usual duties of soldiers- fighting the enemy, being killed and sent home to Blighty in a box, etc.- in order to dress up as women and dance and perform variety acts and sing all the old show-tunes for the benefit of the demoralised British troops still in India and Burma.

Sergeant Major ‘Shut up!’ Williams, magnificently played by the barrel-chested Windsor Davies, is always bawling and screaming at them and trying to turn them into proper soldiers by means of rigid army discipline, drills, inspections and PT, but mostly he just despairs of them and their unseemly transvestism and ‘parading around dressed as tarts,’ as he so sensitively puts it.

 He loves ‘em too, though, deep down- very deep down- especially Gunner Parkins whom he suspects of being his son from a dalliance with an English bird twenty-something years ago. Gunner Parkins- ‘Parky’- is the concert party ventriloquist and resident comedian (not a very good one, mind) and has a fine pair of shoulders, bless him, and will really make summat of himself one day, what wiv ‘im being so good-looking an’ all.

Gunner- later Bombadier when ‘Solly’ Solomons gets demobbed back to England- Gloria Beaumont is the concert party’s producer and resident diva. He is effeminate and highly prone to ‘getting historical’ (‘I can’t take it anymore! Is there no end to this green hell?’), but apparently not a homosexual, despite the Sergeant Major’s frequent assertions, merely a transvestite who adores to dress up as Ginger Rogers…!

Lofty Sugden is the smallest and feeblest of the concert party, and is therefore the one who hilariously gets stuck with all the worst and most dangerous jobs. (‘Well, ta-ra then!’) He has a beautiful tenor singing voice, and is the pride of the concert party, next to Gloria’s show-stopping razzle-dazzle Busby Berkeley-style full costume numbers.

Gunner ‘Atlas’ Mackintosh is aggressively Scottish, and ‘a big butch hairy haggis,’ according to Gloria. He’s the concert party’s resident ‘strong man’ and tears telephone directories in half on stage. His funniest moment on the show is when he’s dressed as Marlene Dietrich and singing ‘Falling in Love Again’ in the most Scottish accent imaginable. ‘I cannae help it…’

Gunner ‘Nobby’ Clark does lovely bird impersonations and has a great face for comedy, especially when he’s pissed off or taking gentle(!) abuse from the Sergeant Major. Gunner ‘Nosher’ Evans does a paper-tearing act and his main hobby is eating.

‘Mr. La-di-dah Gunner ‘Paderewski’ Graham is ribbed and imitated mercilessly by the Sergeant Major for having a bald head and a super-posh voice due to his ‘university heducation,’ but sometimes he has good ideas that get the gang out of the crazy scrapes they find themselves in in every episode. If his ideas fail, well then, ‘bang goes that theory!’

The ‘hofficers’ next. Colonel Reynolds and Captain ‘Tiffy’ Ashwood are English toffs, basically kind-hearted but they consider themselves a cut above the soldiers and the Indian and Burmese ‘hoi-polloi’ and end each day with cocktails on the veranda.

When there’s a food shortage and they have to break into the maraschino cherries and olives to escape starvation, Captain Ashwood hilariously remarks, in the middle of the jungle, in a horrified voice, ‘what if someone pops round for drinks?’

Colonel Evans is splendidly embroiled in an extra-marital affair with the wife of a fellow officer who’s away in the Punjab. Tiffy, with a brilliantly affected posh voice to rival Gunner Graham’s, is a supposedly uxorious hubby who wouldn’t dream of being unfaithful to his wife Fiona, that is, until a particularly juicy ‘Chinese bit,’ as the Sergeant Major calls her, happens along…

The ‘hofficers’ are humorously portrayed as being work-shy, selfish, idle and cowardly. They go out of their way to avoid confrontations with the war-like Japanese, and they unashamedly pass all the dirty work onto the Sergeant Major, who lives for the Army and wouldn’t dream of shirking any duty, however unpleasant.

The English are definitely as much figures of fun as the Indian characters they look down on. In fact, the three constant Indian characters are constantly taking the piss out of ‘we British,’ and they get a good few clever little digs in about their imperialistic overlords. People only seem to see the racism directed against the ‘damned natives,’ but I’m telling you the so-called ‘coolies’ get their own back neatly at times. Racism is a two-way street, you know.

For the first five series, an Anglo-Indian actor, Michael Bates, portrays Bearer Rangi Ram, the Indian narrator of the series who ends each show on a piece of native wisdom. He was chosen for the part because he spoke fluent Urdu and had been a captain in the Gurkhas, and in any case the producers were unable to find a suitable Asian actor for the role.

Muhammad is the lovely, cuddly char wallah, which means he’s in charge of the tea, and Rumzan, the punka wallah, is responsible for pulling a string all day which turns a fan which keeps the officers cool in their quarters.

Yes, it’s a horribly demeaning job, and people often feel entitled to kick him as they pass by to gee him up a bit work-wise, but he’s dryly sarcastic and sees more and knows more than his dopey British overlords give him credit for.

His ‘thing’ is to speak fluent passages of Hindu ending with a pithy epithet in English that exactly sums up the situation ongoing in the army camp at the time. Who’s laughing at whom, exactly? I tell you, it’s a two-way street, this.

June Whitfield from the CARRY ON movies and ‘Nineties sitcom ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS plays the spicy little Captain Tollemache, the visiting welfare officer for the soldiers, in one very funny episode. It’s funny because she’s more interested in the welfare of a certain Captain Ashwood’s than in anyone else’s, lol, but the- mostly- faithful Captain Ashwood is horrified by her close attentions.

Apart from Daphne Waddilove-Evans, the pipe-chomping Colonel’s occasional love interest, and Ling Soo, the ‘Chinese bit’ – not my words!- that’s pretty much it for the women, except for the odd mention of Gunner Parkins’s ma, who was once the Sergeant Major’s sweetheart. Once being the operative word, if you know what I mean…

I’m glad I decided not to let feelings of political correctness stop me from enjoying this lovely, big-hearted comedy series. It was a different time, that’s all. They were men of the ‘Seventies making a show about men in the British Army stationed in India during the war. You’d have to expect some wildly colourful and even racist, sexist or homophobic cracks. Remember, the term ‘woke’ back then still referred to the time you got up. Don’t let it ruin your enjoyment of this excellent show.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Vampirology. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

The sequel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS LATER,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books:

DEAD SNOW (2009) and DEAD SNOW 2: RED VS. DEAD (2014): A DOUBLE BILL OF ZOMBIE MOVIES REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

DEAD SNOW (2009) and DEAD SNOW 2: RED VS. DEAD (2014). DIRECTED BY TOMMY WIRKOLA. WRITTEN BY TOMMY WIRKOLA, STIG FRODE HENRIKSEN AND VEGAR HOEL.

STARRING VEGAR HOEL, STIG FRODE HENRIKSEN, CHARLOTTE FROGNER AND ØRJAN GAMST.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Help! Emergency Services? We’re being attacked by Germans from World War Two…!’

‘Well, lick my soft little man-pussy…!’

The sequel you did NAZI coming…!

Ein, Zwei… Die…!

I liked these two comedy horror films, although I didn’t love them, and of the two, I preferred the original film to the much bigger budget, cast-of-thousands sequel. The first one has quite an EVIL DEAD vibe to it.

It sees a bunch of Norwegian medical students taking their Easter vacation in a log cabin, owned by one of them, in the Norwegian mountains. They’re happy enough to party the night away, until a mysterious stranger arrives without explanation and proceeds to harsh their buzz by telling them the history of the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War Two.

He heavily implies that the area is haunted by National Socialist zombies, which blows the kids’ minds. But when the vacationing students find a box of genuine Nazi gold under the floorboards in one of the bedrooms, a long-dormant curse is awakened and bam! The hills are suddenly alive with the sound of music, if by music you mean the delightfully discordant cacophony of Nazi zombies groaning.

There’s quite an eerie feeling to DEAD SNOW, and plenty of spooky moments in which you could almost forget the film is meant to be a comedy. The first appearance of Standartenfuhrer Herzog, the leader of the Nazi zombies whose job it was to police the occupation of the area in WW2, is chillingly memorable.

Anyway, the sole survivor of the Nazi zombie massacre in Film One, one Martin Hykkerud, is blamed in Film Two for the murder of his friends, and he’s also still being pursued by Herzog and the Nazi zombies.

The zombies have a new agenda now. Now that they have their precious gold back, they are free to carry out a heretofore unfulfilled order of Adolf Hitler’s: to annihilate the town of Talvik. Can Martin put a stop to this perfidy single-handed? Well, not exactly single-handed. He’ll need help from the following:

A. A trio of ‘professional’ zombie hunters in the form of three geeks, one male and two female, from the good old US of A, on their first ever zombie hunting outing;

B. The hilariously emo clerk of the World War Two Museum, and finally;

C. The hordes of long-dead Russian POWs killed in the war by Herzog and now lying mouldering in the local graveyard. By the way, Martin can raise the dead now, which, I think you’ll agree, is a rather nifty skill. It’s probably his main weapon in his fight to the death against the evil Herzog and his men.

The Norwegian cops, woefully inept and pitifully cowardly, raise a lot of laughs while Martin is busy raising the dead. And doesn’t the Norwegian language, when coming from the mouth of the head cop, sound like so many farmyard chickens furiously clucking…?

I’ll probably be ‘cancelled’ for saying that, but it’s the kind of language that makes you want to throw chickens and an assortment of vegetables up in the air and do impersonations of the Swedish chef from the Muppet Show…!

Check out the Nazi field hospital, in which casualties are stuffed with straw like the Scarecrow in THE WIZARD OF OZ before being immediately shunted back into battle, and the final scenes in which the film’s Heathcliff goes looking to be re-united with the film’s Cathy… with a shovel…!

So, there you go, anyway. Two fun films, excellent- if disgusting and vomity- special effects, and a believable plot, if anything with zombies in it can ever be deemed believable, lol. Oh, and there’s a ridiculous amount of disembowelling in both films, with miles and miles and miles of yucky intestines on show, and a big zombie free-for-all at the end. Go for it, if you’re so inclined, and happy viewing!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

Her debut romantic fiction novel, ‘THIRTEEN STOPS,’ is out now from Poolbeg Books.

HEIMAT: A CHRONICLE OF GERMANY BY EDGAR REITZ. (1984) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

HEIMAT: A CHRONICLE OF GERMANY. (1984) WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY EDGAR REITZ. STARRING MARITA BREUER, HENRY ARNOLD, SALOME KAMMER, MATTHIAS KNIESBECK, MICHAEL KAUSCH, NICOLA SCHOSSLER AND JAN DIETER SCHNEIDER.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘All soldiers go to Heaven and get a white robe.’

‘I hear that gypsy women shave themselves down below. Is that true?’

‘And now we see our women bed down with Frenchies.’

‘They call me a French whore. Must I pay forever because there was a war?’

This magnificent series, composed entirely of eleven feature-length films, is the brainchild of Edgar Reitz, born in 1932 with a skilled craftsman for a father, like his protagonist Paul Simon. Yeah yeah, you can call him Al, lol. Get it out of your system now, ye messers.

Anyway, properly entitled A CHRONICLE OF GERMANY, it tells the story of a German family from 1919 to 1982. They live in the fictional rural village of Schabbach and their quiet country life is offset against the wider political developments in Germany, which was known as the Weimar Republic from 1919 till the early 1930s.

The Weimar Republic was famous for its cultural revolution. The Arts were fully embraced during this period and women also began to Americanise themselves, cutting their hair short, smoking and shortening their hemlines to match their jazzy hairstyles. The cultural revolution of the Weimar Republic was known as a Golden Age for Germany. Many marvellous films were made here then, books written, music composed and pictures painted.

The word HEIMAT itself means ‘homeland’ or ‘home place,’ but there’s no exact English equivalent. I know what you guys are all dying to ask and that’s this: Is Hitler in it? Is he in HEIMAT? Believe it or not, Hitler didn’t just spring fully-formed from the mouth of hell in 1939, just in time to start the Second World War. That’s what we kids used to think in school. Even as early as 1919, he was working away in the background, doing stuff.

Between 1919 and 1928, the timeline for the first film of HEIMAT which we’ll look at today, Hitler was a busy man. He was gaining a reputation for himself as a great public speaker, setting up the Nazi Party, and taking part in the Beer Hall Putsch, writing MEIN KAMPF (MY STRUGGLE) while languishing temporarily behind bars for his part in the Putsch.

He was also meeting and befriending Goebbels, who was later to become his reviled Propaganda Minister, and making his first hate-filled speeches against ‘the real enemies of Germany,’ the Jews. Obviously he did many more things as well. This is just a broad outline of what he ‘achieved’ in this time period.

Although it’s something of a dubious recommendation, Hitler himself would have adored this first film of HEIMAT, known as FERNWEH or THE CALL OF FARAWAY PLACES. He loved all things rural and had an idealised vision of Germany where shirtless, sweaty men worked and tilled the land and fed the nation while women with shiny flaxen plaits breast-fed the babies and looked after the home and their men.

He had a real thing for women in traditional old German dress, and was never happier than when Eva Braun put on one of these flouncy-aproned, puffy-sleeved frocks for him at the Berghof, his beautiful mountain hideaway in the Obersalzberg mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps above the market town of Berchtesgaden.

He loathed anyone smoking, especially women, so Eva Braun had to have her puffs in secret, and he also hated women who were caked in heavy make-up. One imagines, therefore, that he wouldn’t have been happy about this short-haired, more mannish new look women were embracing during the period of the Weimar Republic’s cultural revolution.

At the start of HEIMAT, we see the protagonist Paul Simon (yeah yeah, where’s Art Garfunkel…?) coming home from the Great War. He’s young and handsome and appears physically unharmed at least, unlike his friend (HEIMAT‘s narrator) Glasisch Karl, whose hands are all over scabs and rashes from the mustard gas used in World War One. What an awful thought.

At first, Paul seems completely out of it. He feels like a stranger amongst his large family and the wider community of villagers. His parents own a farm and a forge and, now that Paul is back, he’ll be expected to work at one or the other or at both. ‘Father wants me in the forge and in the fields, to carry on his work.’

His sister Pauline does both housework and farmwork and his semi-invalid older brother Eduard (‘Eduard, your lung!’) has an obsessive love of photography. (The story of HEIMAT is told through the hundreds of photographs he takes.) Many friends and relatives are constantly hanging around the farmyard kitchen, the central or focal point of the narrative, so, as you can imagine, there’s not much opportunity for quiet reflection.

We quickly discover Paul’s main talent and biggest interest. He spends hours up in the loft fiddling with radio wires and batteries for his radio transmitter. In the early days of radio, Paul, who learned Morse Code during the war, wants ‘to make a short-wave radio receiver with which he can listen to the whole world.’

He does manage to pick up Mass from Cologne Cathedral during a village picnic in the ruins of an old castle and the old folks are thrilled. There’s nothing old folks like more than a good Mass. Except for maybe a good Confession, haha. Nothing like a nice spiritual enema for clearing the crap out of you. Shudder.

Meanwhile, Paul’s older brother Eduard, already an amateur but extremely enthusiastic photographer in his spare time as we’ve said, is trying to cash in on the massive monument business that grew up after the end of the War. So many German men died in that war. Now they must all be commemorated by having their names chiselled permanently onto huge memorial stones lugged from the quarries, which are doing great business these days.

Eduard is unveiling at this particular memorial stone ceremony not only the monument itself, but also his top-secret patented invention for unveiling monuments. It’s so funny, this bit. It’s something I never gave any thought to before, the fact that so many mens’ deaths had to be commemorated via a monument of stone that someone actually invented a contraption for their smooth unveiling.

It’s really just a series of pulleys and whatnot rigged up to lift the sheet off the monument, which looks like a giant ghost reaching up towards the sky. It turns into quite a beautiful and moving scene, with the umbrellas and the rain and the choir of schoolgirls singing angelically to commemorate all the fallen soldiers. Karl Glasisch comments irreverently here: ‘If I’d fallen in Flanders, I’d be on this memorial and people would lift their hats to me.’

What’s most memorable, however, is the speech being made here by the local bigwig. At the time, Germany, having been deemed to- ahem- have been responsible for the First World War (no waaaaaay…!), was being crippled by the terms of the Versailles Treaty.

They had to pay x amount of money in reparations (whatever it was, it was humongous) and were positively forbidden from re-arming themselves. Of course, when Hitler came officially to power he said ‘fuck this shit for a game of soldiers’ and, just like that, he threw the whole thing out the door like an old carpet, the whole Versailles treaty. But for now, the Germans were feeling the pinch, and what the officiating bigwig says at the monument-unveiling ceremony is actually eerily prophetic:

‘Germany will one day arouse the genius of its blood who will deliver us from this dungeon of humiliation like a Saviour. Already we sense his shining presence in the distance, then peace will come. A peace necessary for the strong future of our state and which will influence world history. Our loved ones did not die in vain…’

Well, he’s literally just predicted the coming of Hitler but whatevs, let’s move on. Time passes and Paul marries a local girl called Maria and they have two baby sons together called Anton and Ernst. It’s obvious to the viewer that Paul’s still madly in love with a dark-haired girl called Apollonia who’s had a child by a Frenchman, leading the prejudiced natives to call her a gypsy, a whore and a traitoress. Nice people, eh?

Apollonia offers Paul the chance to run away from Schabbach with her, but he can’t leave his radio battery and his precious wireless. He could always have taken them with him, but no. He’s not far-sighted enough to work this out. Oh well, it’s his loss, and Maria’s waiting in the wings anyway, for her own chance to nab Paul.

Hitler would have hugely approved of the women singing at their looming and weaving, and of the man who says at the village picnic in the grounds of the old ruined castle, quoting a favourite idea of Uncle Adolf’s: ‘What we need today are really feminine women and masculine men, inwardly and outwardly.’

Come to Schabbach and meet the boy whose brother put his eye out with a fork at their Confirmation, the baker who lost three sons in the Great War and, my personal favourite, an old geezer who can unfailingly tell the weather from the condition of his cellar steps.

You can also meet Paul’s sister Paulina Simon’s older husband, Robert, a jewellery-maker who can fashion wedding rings from your own gold and who shares a house with Jewish businesses, whose windows are already being shattered by hooligans as early as 1923.

There aren’t really any Jews in the village of Shabbach, so we only hear about their fate in World War II second-hand, such as when Maria’s handsome blonde younger brother, Wilfried Wiegand, who’s in the SS, makes a casual reference at a party to how ‘the Final Solution to the Jewish problem’ was continuing at a galloping pace, with the Jews all going ‘up the chimney,’ with an accompanying ‘poof’ sound. Paulina asks her brother what he means by people’s ‘going up the chimney,’ but he doesn’t explain and she doesn’t push the issue.

The years go by, anyway, as they tend to do, and Katherina and Mathias Simon, the original materfamilias and paterfamilias of the family, grow older and eventually go to the churchyard.

Paul goes off to America and later returns, Eduard marries Lucie, the ambitious former madam of a brothel who’ll push him farther than he probably would have gone on his own, and World War II happens.

Anton and Ernst go off to war and come back and Maria, their mother, has a child called Hermann with their pre-wartime tenant, engineer Otto Wohlleben, who comes to the Hunsruck area to build the highway, and later defuses Allied bombs for the benefit of the German army.

The action in HEIMAT goes all the way up to 1982, and ends with a scene of Heaven on earth in the town hall during a village fair that leaves me blubbing like a baby every time I watch it. Be warned. It’s a five-Kleenex ending, at least…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline.You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

THE BUNKER. (1981) DEFINITELY NOT A FILM ABOUT GOLF!!! REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE BUNKER. (1981) BASED ON THE BOOK BY JAMES P. O’DONNELL. STARRING ANTHONY HOPKINS, SUSAN BLAKELY, CLIFF GORMAN AND PIPER LAURIE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I loved this made-for-television film rendition of Hitler’s last weeks and days in the Bunker, the little underground kingdom in the nearly ruined gardens of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin where the doomed German dictator ended his life and reign of terror simultaneously.

Anthony Hopkins was brilliant as Hitler, as you might expect, because Anthony Hopkins doesn’t do anything by half-measures, but what really fascinated me here was the timing of the gradual emptying out of the bunker as the Russians came ever closer to taking Berlin and ending the Second World War, the worst war in the history of the world.

At first, when Hitler first descends in January 1945 to its murky depths, life in the Bunker is relatively civilised. Hitler takes tea at four every day with his secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, and Constance Manziarly (played here by Pam St. Clement, aka Pat Butcher from EastEnders!), his treasured cook, who is able to create both the bland vegetarian diet he preferred but also the home-made cakes for which he has a weakness. O-ho, so somebody likes cakes, eh…? Lol.

Hitler treats his captive female audience to the long boring monologues for which he is notorious, speeches about dogs (his dog Blondi has puppies while in the Bunker), his vegetarianism (which caused him to suffer excessive flatulence, and I’m sure the ladies would have noticed!) and the evils of smoking.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda and head toady and boot-licker, is present full-time in the bunker at this stage. So too is Martin Bormann, one of Hitler’s top men, Otto Gunsche, Hitler’s personal adjutant, Rochus Misch, the guy who works the all-important switchboard, getting messages in and out of the Bunker, and Hitler’s personal doctor, Dr. Theodor Morell, pops in and out, administering the highly unorthodox injections and (allegedly!) the cocaine eyedrops that keep the dictator going.

The situation conferences around the big table to discuss the progress of the war take place daily, and Hitler’s generals, like Guderian, Keitel, Jodl & Co. are either issued with wholly impractical orders or bawled out publicly for not having carried out the last batch. Of wholly impractical orders, lol.

Hitler in the last days of the war is moving armies around on his little maps that no longer exist, because they’ve been wiped out by the Russians, but he keeps up his outward insistence that the tide could still turn in Germany’s favour.

These situation conferences become more and more stressful for all concerned. Towards the end, when time has lost all meaning and no-one in the Bunker any longer keeps to a schedule, they could start at 1am and go on till daylight.

Hitler frequently loses his temper with his generals, whose failure to win the war for him feels like a betrayal, and his screaming fits are legendary. You can’t have a Hitler film without the little guy with the funny moustache and the queer hairstyle throwing a good old screaming fit in it.

In the last few weeks and days of April 1945, when even Hitler knows that the war is lost, things become incredibly tense and gripping to watch. Hitler’s staff beg him to leave the Bunker and flee to the relative safety of his mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, in Bavaria. He’s adamant that he won’t leave Berlin, however.

His long-term mistress Eva Braun has joined him in the Bunker by this stage, and even her forced air of desperate oh-look-how-frightfully-gay-we-all-are has had the shine well and truly worn off of it.

She won’t leave Berlin either, however, or her Fuhrer. Whatever fate is mapped out for her Adolf, she will share it, even unto Death. She gives an expensive fur stole of hers to one of the secretaries. ‘Think of me when you wear it,’ she trills gaily. Hmmm. Even for the secretaries, who survive the war, there won’t be any opportunities to wear that fur stole for a while.

Albert Speer, Hitler’s pet architect and the Minister for Armaments, features heavily in the film. Knowing now that their dreams of rebuilding Germany together after the war are as dust in the wind, Hitler puts Speer in charge of his despicable ‘scorched earth’ policy: destroying what’s left of Germany so the Russians won’t get their hands on it. Not just bridges and military installations, but houses and shops and farms and factories as well.

The German people will have nothing left to live on when this policy has been carried out. That was probably partly what Hitler wanted all along, to take everything with him when he himself went out in a blaze of glory, like in Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods or the Götterdämmerung he’d always admired and wanted for himself and Germany.

Also, the German people had let him down, hadn’t they, by not going all out to help him win the war, so maybe they didn’t deserve to live on after he did. What a mindset. I’m fucked so all you lot are fucked as well. It seems like a pretty typical Hitlerian mentality.

Luckily for the German people, Speer in the end only pretends to Hitler that he’s been carrying out this disastrous policy. He doesn’t believe that the fate of Germany should be tied inextricably to that of one sick and twisted individual, and he’s right. He confesses to Hitler what he’s done as he’s leaving the Bunker and saying goodbye to his former Fuhrer forever, but Hitler is too far gone to give a shit by then.

Poor Hitler. His health is wrecked, his friends are deserting him right and left, his bezzy mate Himmler has actually crawled into bed with the Allies, his trademark glossy black locks are as grey as a badger’s arse now and his lovely dream of the Thousand Year Reich is in ruins.

Oh, and Eva Braun’s pregnant sister Gretl’s husband, Hermann Fegelein, has been caught trying to scarper without permission and is now paying for his crime by being left to dangle on a meathook. (Other film versions have Fegelein being shot.) What’s to live for now?

The Bunker inmates can be divided into those, like Speer, who choose to leg it while Hitler is still alive, and those who hang on till the bitter end. These include Eva Braun, Gunsche, Goebbels and his wife Magda and their six children, who are all living in the Bunker by this stage, Misch the transmissions technician, Constance Manziarly the cook (who was never seen or heard from again after the war) and the secretaries.

On the night before their joint suicide, Hitler marries Eva Braun. The next day, they say goodbye formally to their remaining acolytes, and then they retire forever to bite into cyanide capsules (previously tested on Hitler’s beloved dog, Blondi), and Hitler also shoots himself in the head for good measure. He won’t let himself be captured and hung upside-down and naked in the town square, which is what has happened to his crony Mussolini, the Italian dictator, and Mussolini’s missus.

Otto Gunsche carries the bodies outside, then sets them on fire as per Hitler’s wishes. Magda Goebbels poisons her six children with cyanide capsules, then allows her husband to shoot her dead outside in the garden before in turn shooting himself.

With the bigwigs gone, it’s every man for himself. It’s the moment when the musicians playing ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ on the Titanic pack up their instruments, wish each other well in a gentlemanly fashion and then scramble desperately for a place on a lifeboat.

The Bunker descends into chaos as Gunsche, the secretaries, Martin Bormann and assorted others pack up and try to make it through the Russian lines to the British armies, who don’t seem to be as terrifying to the Germans as their Russian counterparts.

The secretaries paint lipstick spots on their faces to give themselves the appearance of smallpox. ‘Do you want to be raped (by the Russians)?’ one says to the other. Her terrified friend promptly yanks the lippy out of her hands…!

When even the loyal and dutiful Rochus Misch eventually leaves his post and the final transmissions squawk their contents to the empty air, there’s a definite feeling in the Bunker that the fat lady has well and truly warbled her last note.

The Bunker is empty, the Fuhrer is dead, Berlin is in ruins, the war is lost and the Russians are knocking- none too politely- on the doors of the Reich Chancellery. Years and even decades in Russian prison camps await some of those fleeing from the Bunker.

What ghosts would haunt the silent corridors of the Bunker today, if it still existed, which of course it does not? Hitler is supposed to have told an underling, a young man, that his spirit would remain on duty within its walls for all eternity, keeping an eye out for those pesky Russians.

A pretty pathetic story, probably not true, but I still wouldn’t have ever wanted to be down there alone in those days after the war ended when the Bunker was dark, waterlogged and filled with the flotsam and jetsam of all those disappeared lives.

It must have been a bit like being alone on the wreck of the aforementioned Titanic. This film captures that eerie feeling perfectly, which is why I loved it. Historians are fascinated by the events that took place in the Bunker. Watch this film and you’ll get a fair idea why this is.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

THE WOMAN IN BLACK: ANGEL OF DEATH. (2014) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

THE WOMAN IN BLACK: ANGEL OF DEATH. (2014) A HAMMER FILM PRODUCTION. DIRECTED BY TOM HARPER. STARRING PHOEBE FOX, HELEN MCRORY, OAKLEE PENDERGAST AND JEREMY IRVINE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Whenever she’s seen, and whoever by,

One thing’s sure; a child will die.’

Funny how the words The Woman In Black conjure up much more frightening images in people’s minds than, say, The Woman In The Sort Of Beigey-Fawn Cardigan or The Man In The Electric Blue Shell-Suit. I’ve no complaints with the title.

As to the rest, it pains me to speak ill of a Hammer film but this one isn’t great. It’s only about half as good as the original film starring Daniel Radcliffe which preceded it. It could have used some sharper scripting, that’s for sure, and maybe some livelier characters too. The characters here are very ‘meh.’ You wouldn’t go out of your way to save a single one of them from being hit by a runaway rickshaw, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, it’s 1941 and London is very busy indeed being bombarded daily- and nightly- by Uncle Adolf’s Blitz. Drippy young schoolteacher Eve Parkins and her snotty headmistress Jean Hogg are shepherding a group of frightened kiddies to the countryside to get them away from all the nasty bombs-es. (Gollum to Hitler: ‘You’re ruining it…! You’re ruining London!’)

Guess where they’re being evacuated to, by the way? This is a hoot. Eel Marsh House, in the isolated market town of Crythin Gifford, where Harry Potter was first terrorised by the spectre of the Woman In Black.

Jennet Humfrye lost her beloved only child, Nathaniel, in a drowning tragedy back in the Victorian times and, being of a vengeful nature, she’s making damn sure it’s everyone’s problem. (She particularly blames her respectable married sister Alice Drablow, who took Nathaniel from the unmarried Jennet and adopted him.) The presence of the children in the house on the damp, misty causeway is all it takes to wake her once more…

Eve is particularly sensitive to the presence of the spectral female because she has something in common with her, something heartbreaking, a desolate secret. She’s the first person to come to the rather chilling conclusion that there’s ‘someone else’ living in the house with them, a ‘tenant’ who hasn’t yet been properly identified.

The ghost has her eye on a particular chubby little fellow called Edward, because he’s just become orphaned and is traumatised and refusing to speak. Time after time, the ghost comes for little Edward and, time after time, is batted resolutely away by Eve. How long can Eve keep up this militant stance against what SKYMOVIES.COM refer to as ‘one of British cinema’s scariest creations…?’

The ghost isn’t terribly scary this time round, I’m sorry to say. Some of the bleak scenery is far spookier. I love the deserted village, although not the madman who resides there. What’s he living on, by the way, rats’ tails and flies? It doesn’t look like there’s much sustenance to be found in the scrubby little village gardens any more.

Come to that, what are the children, Eve and Jean eating up at Eel Marsh House? Not once have we seen a boy on a delivery bicycle wind his way up the causeway path before the sea washes over it and covers it again till low tide. There’s no telephone in Eel Marsh House either, so how do the two women get in touch with the undertaker when they need him, eh…?

I nearly forgot to mention Eve’s boyfriend, possibly because he’s so forgettable. He’s an RAF pilot based at an airfield nearby to Eel Marsh House, and we know for sure he’s a pilot because he always wears the furry collar of his leather jacket turned right up. It’s like he’s afraid to turn it down- even a little bit- in case it means he’s not a pilot any more. What a muppet. Thinks he’s Elvis, lol.

This pilot fella, Harry Burnstow, who has the blankest face, has his own back-story and tacked-on secret, for which he’s seeking redemption. Maybe he’ll find it looking after Eve and the little evacuees and protecting them from the Woman In Black. Or maybe the film-makers will forget to finish his storyline altogether. He’s such a mannequin I honestly wouldn’t blame them.

Having said that this sequel isn’t much to write home about, I would like to see at least two more films in this franchise which, after all, started out very well. One set in the ‘seventies, maybe, with a hippie commune (free love and natural childbirth and all that) coming to live at Eel Marsh House, and one set in modern times, in which a young married couple, together with their child, find out that they’re now the sole descendants of the original owners and decide to come and live in their house themselves rather than sell it. I’d watch the hell outta both of those, lol. Thankfully, there’s life in the old dog yet. (In the franchise, I mean, not in me! There’s loads of life left in me and the franchise yet, lol.)

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: THE SCREENPLAYS. E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL. (1972) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

MICHAEL ARMSTRONG: THE SCREENPLAYS.

‘E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL.’ (1972)

PUBLISHED IN 2019 BY PAPER DRAGON PRODUCTIONS.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Michael Armstrong is creating history by being the first film-maker to publish his entire screenwriting output. With the original uncut screenplays in print for the first time ever and peppered with a mixture of wildly entertaining anecdotes, astounding behind-the-scenes revelations, creative and educational insights and brutal ‘no holds barred’ honesty, these books are guaranteed to provide a completely new kind of reading experience while offering a unique insight into the movie industry. Starting from his first professional screenplay written in 1960 when he was only fifteen and which he subsequently directed in 1968, the books will ultimately encompass a career that has spanned over fifty years. The books will include not only those screenplays which made it onto a cinema screen but, for the first time ever, all those that didn’t- and the reasons why…’

http://www.michaelarmstrong.co.uk/publications

http://www.paperdragonproductions.com

You may have heard me mention this up-and-coming young fella before, this Michael Armstrong fella whose career as a film director and screenwriter is currently being immortalised in the form of some of the most beautiful books I’ve ever owned, books of all the screenplays he’s ever written, and he’s written a lot of screenplays. His productivity over the years puts most other writers to shame, and writers hate being put to shame, you can take that from me…! It makes us edgy, and we’re on edge enough of the time as it is.

Whether they were made into films or not, the screenplays are all being transformed into gorgeous books by Michael’s publishers, Paper Dragon Productions, and they really are the perfect present for film buffs of all ages. Well, not exactly all ages, lol. Some of ’em are a little blue…! Here are the films for which he’s penned the screenplays:

THE DARK- 1960.

THE IMAGE- 1964. Starring David Bowie in his first screen appearance.

THE HUNT- 1965.

MARK OF THE DEVIL- 1970.

THE SEX THIEF- 1973.

ESKIMO NELL- 1974. A riotous sex comedy starring beloved English actor Roy Kinnear and a young and handsome Michael Armstrong himself.

IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU- 1975.

THREE FOR ALL- 1975.

ADVENTURES OF A TAXI DRIVER #2- 1975.

ADVENTURES OF A PRIVATE EYE- 1976.

THE BLACK PANTHER- 1976. The story of Donald Neilson, the British armed robber, kidnapper and murderer who abducted wealthy British teenager Lesley Whittle in 1975.

HOME BEFORE MIDNIGHT- 1979.

SCREAMTIME- 1981.

HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS- 1982. The only film in the history of cinema to star horror legends Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price and John Carradine all together.

LIFEFORCE- 1983.

Impressed much…? Thought so, heh-heh-heh. Now to E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL, the title of which you’ll see contains the acronym ENSA. What was ENSA? There’s a definition in the book’s Glossary Of References which will do perfectly nicely for our purposes, and here it is:

ENTERTAINMENTS NATIONAL SERVICE ASSOCIATION: Popularly known as ENSA; it was an organisation set up in 1939 by Basil Dean and Leslie Henson to provide entertainment for British Armed Forces personnel during World War Two. Infamously, quality of the shows varied considerably due to an insufficient number of good professional artistes to accommodate the number of shows required by the troops spread out fighting across Europe. As a consequence, ENSA became inundated by substandard acts and eager untalented amateur performers to such an extent that the troops created the acronym E.N.S.A. as ”Every Night Something Awful…!”

In other words, you’d be praying for a Bob Hope, a Marlene Dietrich, a Vera Lynn or a Glenn Miller, but you’d end up with some bozo playing the spoons. Still, I’m sure every act, no matter how amateur, gave it their very best shot and I’d personally maintain that any entertainment, however dodgy, is better than none at all. There was a bloody war on, after all. What right did anyone have to be picky…?

‘E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL’ (1972) is the hilarious story of one such company of wartime entertainers. Headed by flaming queen Ivor Short, they’re putting on a variety show for the lads called ‘Red, White And Blue,’ whether the troops want them to or not, and it’s bound to be Fab. U. Lous, darling. (Channelled my best Craig Revel Horwood from Strictly there…!) Or is it…? I think you already know the answer to that, readers.

There’s a really funny bit in the beginning where someone’s travelling to a top secret army camp in the New Forest and needs to ask directions from a local farmer and the farmer says: ‘But if it be the secret army camp you’re after?- That’s along there- about half a mile. You can’t miss it. You’ll see their sentries hiding behind the trees.’ So much for army confidentiality, anyway.

French heart-throb and international singing star Pierre Lamorisse, the main attraction of Red, White And Blue, is aghast to find that the English soldiers in this ‘top secret’ army camp don’t even have real weapons. I just have to include here the genuinely funny exchange between Pierre and one of the soldiers:

Soldier: Sorry, sir, I didn’t recognise you. I wouldn’t wander too far away, if I was you- just in case one of us mistakes you for an invasion force in the darkness.

Pierre: Oh yes… thank you. I wouldn’t want to get shot.

Soldier: Oh, no fear of that, sir. We ‘aven’t got real rifles- and even if we had, we ‘aven’t any bullets for ’em. No, all the real stuff’s over with our boys abroad. (He holds up his ‘rifle’ to show Pierre.) Not bad, is it? Looks like the real thing from a distance. Yeah, they’re makin’ ’em at Pinewood Studios; churnin’ ’em out, they are- tanks an’ all.

(Pierre stares at him in complete amazement.)

Pierre: Tanks?

Soldier: Only the outsides, mind you. Yeah. Make ’em out of hardboard, they do… spot of paint- looks all right from a long way off. Get a few ‘undred of ’em wheelin’ about on the cliffs makes old Jerry think twice about invadin’.

Pierre: But if they do invade, what will you fight them with?

Soldier: Well… we could always bash ’em over the ‘ead with one of these. They’re good and solid. You feel that. (He hands Pierre the ‘rifle’ to feel the weight.)

Pierre: It’s just wood.

Soldier: Yeah, but feel the quality. That’s good quality wood, that is. Jerry gets one of them round his mush, he’ll soon give up, I can tell you. Anyway, best be gettin’ back to my rounds. Can’t be too careful, you know. There’s spies everywhere, so we’re told. Been a right pleasure talking to you, sir. Have a nice night.

(And moves off as Pierre quickly calls after him:)

Pierre: Excuse me-?

(The soldier returns, so that Pierre can hand him back his ‘rifle.’ The soldier gives a rueful grin.)

Soldier: I’m always forgetting where I put it.

Talk about a Carry On…! However did England win this war anyway…?

Anyway, the company of entertainers includes the above-mentioned Pierre; Ginger, an attractive singer and femme fatale with a string of broken relationships behind her who just might be the perfect woman for Pierre, if they both but knew it; Bertie Rich, a jaded comedian who feels more dead than alive; Marilyn, a faded blonde bombshell whom Michael Armstrong envisoned being played by Diana Dors if the script had been made into a film (excellent choice, by the way); Constance, an older married lady with a theatrical repertoire, who never realises when she’s boring people (she also never uses the Horne when she’s performing); and Madam Merlin, aka Priscilla Clipthorpe, a lady magician (or should that be magicienne?) who never travels without her two bunny wabbits. It’s a motley crew but a good one.

Here’s what happens when French Pierre questions why he has to wear an Arabian Nights costume:

Pierre: Ivor, this is stupid. Why do I have to wear this?

Ivor: It’s part of a themed medley, sweetie: an exotic Arabian Nights fantasy… Ginger’s Scheherazade, I’m the cruel Sultan, the girls are my wives, Jack’s the Golden Slave and you’re a singing eunuch.

Pierre: Eunuch? What is that? I don’t get it.

Ivor: Neither did they, petal.

Bah-dum-tish, lol. This company of elite entertainers must travel abroad to a top secret destination (so secret not even the ship’s crew know where they’re going!) to dazzle their fighting boys abroad with their expertise and chutzpah. I love when Ivor says to Sally: Take it from the top again- and Sally dear, do try to make her sound more like an innocent young virgin and less like Gracie Fields? Heh-heh-heh. Lovely woman, Gracie Fields. Immensely talented.

Here’s what Bertie tells Madam Merlin to describe his feelings of jadedness and ennui:

Forgive me, dear girl, but after you’ve died in front of as many audiences as I have, you eventually cease to regard yourself as a living being anymore. Then: Actually, it was on the eve of my fiftieth birthday that I realised I was dead. Had been for some time, in fact. Just never really noticed it before.

Poor Bertie. And they say that showbusiness is glamorous… The main thing is that the show must go on, as the old showbiz motto goes. But can the show really go on when the troupe is in Rome but their band and props have somehow ended up in Norway? And why does everyone burst out laughing when Constance bursts forth with the song, O, for the wings of a dove?

What prompts Ivor the director to say: I know, to most people, I’m just a funny old queen but even funny old queens have feelings? There are some really touching moments amongst the comedy and quickfire one-liners which Michael Armstrong fires off with the ease of someone doing something they find really easy, lol. Good metaphors are not always readily available, even to a quicksilver brain like mine own. Michael Armstrong would probably have found a good one.

The troupe at least have each other, but what about the troops? Note the rather clever play on words there. Here’s the exchange between a sergeant and a young lieutenant when the ENSA party bus hoves into view of a little European village, where a garrison of soldiers is stationed like a sitting duck:

Sergeant: Think it could be some kind of enemy trick, sir?

Young Lieutenant: Worse, Sergeant. I think it’s ENSA…!

Sergeant: Oh, my God! Better warn the men, sir.

Young Lieutenant: Quite. Carry on, Sergeant.

Carry On, indeed…! All joking aside, folks, on page 192, you’ll find a scene that’ll show you the true worth of ENSA (popular as it may be to poke fun at them) to exhausted, demoralised soldiers far from home who just want to see their families again. I cried buckets at this scene, and you will too.

Can Pierre get to the root of Ginger’s commitment phobia and seeming inability to be faithful to one man? On page 236, he finally nails it. Will Marilyn get her man, or will she retreat gracefully from the arena so that the dreamily swoonsome Fabio can be with the woman he really loves? No woman’s that generous and big-hearted, surely? By the way, do you guys know what the words MINAS TERRESTRAS mean, because ENSA sure don’t…! And finally:

‘And here we have it!… A spectacular musical revue called Red, White & Blue… Ivor Short and Company: Jack Adair, Ginger Lawrence, Sally Meadows, Bertie Rich, Marilyn Turner, Constance Blythe with Speciality Madam Merlin and special guest star, Pierre Lamorisse. Acting understudy and ASM, Edith Nightingale. Band: Billy Rainbow & His Big Band. Touring Company- Category B.’

E.VERY N.IGHT S.OMETHING A.WFUL, in addition to THE MAZE and ROBIN HOOD, is available to buy now from Michael Armstrong’s website and his publishers, Paper Dragon Productions. Don’t waste any time. Go get ’em!

http://www.michaelarmstrong.co.uk/publications

http://www.paperdragonproductions.com

By the way, Sherlock Holmes had his Irene Adler and Mr. Spode from Bertie Wooster his ‘Eulalie.’ If you ever want to see a grown man cry like a little girl, you have but to whisper one word into Michael Armstrong’s shell-like… Ryman…

See you guys next time!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

1945: IN CINEMAS NOW. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS.

1945. (2017) DIRECTED BY FERENC TOROK. ADAPTED FROM THE SHORT STORY ‘THE HOMECOMING’ BY CO-SCREENWRITER GABOR T. SZANTO.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I saw this one in the cinema today and I loved, loved, loved it. Those of you who know me well know that I love a good black-and-white subtitled Czech or Hungarian movie from any era, modern or vintage, and if it’s a good miserable watch as well, so much the better, lol.

Now that probably makes me sound like I revel in other peoples’ misery and wallow in it the way a piggy-wig rolls in muck but I can assure you that that’s not the case. I just can’t seem to get to grips with comedy. I genuinely prefer to have my heart-strings tugged than my funny-bone tickled.

There’s not much to laugh at here but this is the best new film I’ve seen all year, seeing as THE MEG and JURASSIC WORLD 2: FALLEN KINGDOM weren’t as brilliant as I was expecting them to be…! Ah well. Often, when you watch something for the second time you actually like it better so we’ll see what happens with these two summer blockbusters in the future.

1945 is the story of one day in the life of a small rural village in Soviet-occupied Hungary, namely the twelfth of August, 1945. The war’s been over for several months and Hitler’s been dead since the end of April, unless you’re one of the people who think he survived the bunker and the Fall Of Berlin and went off to live happily in Antarctica till he was an old man…!

The years following the end of the war must have been hugely disruptive and sort of transitional as well, as half of Europe seemed to be on the move. There were millions of displaced persons wandering around the place, as soldiers, partisans, prisoners-of-war and inmates of concentration camps were all trying to get home to their own countries, never mind their own homes.

I remember the writer Primo Levi, an Italian Jew who was sent to Auschwitz by the Nazi regime, saying in his co-joined books IF THIS IS A MAN and THE TRUCE that it took him about a full year to get back to his home in Italy from Auschwitz on foot, while having many adventures and meeting many extraordinary people en route.

If I remember correctly as well, he was one of the lucky ones who arrived home to find some semblance of a house and family still remaining. It was sadly very different for many other Jewish people, who arrived home to find complete strangers living in their houses and running their businesses. I don’t know how many Jews managed to grab back their own land and/or property but I do know that many never did.

In 1945, the town clerk, a fat bald cigar-chomping busy man who’s seemingly the tiny town’s most prominent citizen, is preparing for the wedding later that day of his son.

He’s- Pops, that is- rushing around playing the big ‘I am’ with the local peasants, accepting drinks and distributing largesse and congenial greetings to everyone he meets. He’s the town bigwig and this wedding is presumably going to be the best he can afford for his boy.

Pops’s wife is depressed and deeply unhappy with the upcoming nuptials. She thinks the bride-to-be, Roszi, is a gold-digger who just wants to get her sweaty mitts on the son’s shiny new drugstore, of which she’ll become the proprietress after today.

Well, I don’t know if that bit’s true or not but I can tell you that she’s right to be suspicious of Roszi because Roszi, excuse my French, is a dirty trollop who’s having a sexual affair with the town’s hottest guy, Jancsi. Well. The dirty strumpet. Humph! So maybe a happy ending is never really on the cards for Roszi and Arpi, her intended groom. We’ll have to see.

Besides the wedding, the big news of the day is that two Orthodox Jewish men, father and son perhaps, have landed at the town’s train station and they’re making their way slowly into town, walking behind the horse and cart that’s carrying their two big trunks.

The news of these two men, one old and bearded and the other young, dark and clean-shaven, has struck terror into the hearts of the townspeople, who are quickly made aware by the railway stationmaster that the two Jews are making their way into town slowly but steadily. Why should the villagers be this frightened?

Well, let me explain a bit of the back-story. Hungary was practically swept clean of its Jewish population by the Nazis in World War Two. I think about 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to ‘camps in the East’ which, of course, was merely Nazi-speak for concentration camps in Germany or Poland, many of which were not only places of detention but death camps as well.

And what happened to the houses, businesses, furniture, clothing, even the domestic pets and children’s toys that they had to leave behind? Often, they had very little advance warning that they were going to be getting on the deportation trains, so the stuff they were forced to leave behind far outweighed the meagre possessions they were able to take with them.

Well anyway, in many cases their non-Jewish neighbours, the ones who were not deported by the Nazis because they weren’t Jewish, simply helped themselves to the vacant houses, apartments or businesses. In some cases they were able to procure documents to say that they’d acquired the properties legally but morally, they were no more entitled to them than you or me would be today.

In the film, half the village is terrified by the impending arrival of the two Jews because some of them- the villagers- are living comfortably in the Jews’ old houses, using their cookware and sitting around on their furniture.

The drugstore supposedly ‘owned’ by groom-to-be Arpi, son of the town clerk, is the property of one such ‘disappeared’ Jew, a family man by the name of Pollack, whose dusty old family photo album is still in the shop somewhere.

I’ll tell you this one thing I’ve picked up in my researches. If you didn’t much care for a particular Jewish person back then or if you took a liking to his fancy apartment or his thriving business, you could report him to the Nazis and, when the Nazis inevitably deported the Jewish person and often his whole entire family with him, it was very likely that you could get to keep his apartment or his business for yourself. Greed was a big factor in many of these ‘reportings.’

This is exactly what’s happened here in the case of the Pollack family. Half the village has seemingly put their names to a signed paper of accusation that saw the family being deported and maybe murdered as well.

Now they’re scared shitless- excuse my French again- that the two Jewish men who are walking towards the town are representatives or relatives of the Pollacks, come to see their rightful property returned to them. Their rightful property which the townspeople seem to have divvied up quite neatly between them…

Cracks are appearing in various relationships in the town as husband accuses wife and wife accuses husband of having been greedy enough to send the Pollacks to their death and take their property for themselves. Some people are actually rushing around madly hiding bits of crockery and shit. It’s disgusting to witness, such petty, petty thievery.

Some of the villagers are desperate to hold onto what they mistakenly tell themselves is ‘theirs’ now, whereas others, to give them their due, are crippled with the guilt of what they’ve done and they simply can’t live with themselves any longer.

In the meantime, the two silent, solemn-faced Jews are making their way steadily towards the town from the train station and the fact remains that the worried villagers don’t actually know for a fact what these two men want.

What will happen when they find out for sure? The ending is visually stunning and the film itself is well worth seeing. Just don’t expect any laughs, lol. I certainly didn’t expect any and I was more than satisfied.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

CHURCHILL. (2017) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

CHURCHILL. (2017) DIRECTED BY JONATHAN TEPLITZKY. STARRING BRIAN COX AND MIRANDA RICHARDSON.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

CHURCHILL (2017) and DARKEST HOUR (2017), which I reviewed recently as well, are actually quite similar to each other. They each tell the story of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as he prepares to face one of the two most troubling and problematic- yet ultimately victorious- events of World War Two.

DARKEST HOUR shows us Winnie, whom some people still regard as the greatest Briton who ever lived, fretting himself half to death over the monumental event that became known as Dunkirk, when thousands of British soldiers were rescued from the French coast by English vessels, many of them civilian crafts, getting them out just before the Germans were able to swoop in and cause a massacre.

Though the whole operation must have been rendered necessary by a mistake or failure on the part of the Allies- why else would so many Allied soldiers have been so nearly turned into sitting ducks for the Nazi forces in that one handy area of France? I’ll probably be reviled for pointing this out but one can’t help wondering why it was ever allowed to occur in the first place!- Dunkirk made heroes out of many hundreds of ordinary courageous British civilians, and rightly so. See, I’ve finished that point on a high note. Call off your (bull?)dogs, lol.

CHURCHILL sees Winnie, Field Marshal Montgomery (Monty) in his trademark little beret and duffel coat, and the American General Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower preparing for the momentous event that they termed OPERATION OVERLORD.

It became known as D-Day or the Normandy Landings and it involved thousands of American and British soldiers, in the biggest land-sea-air operation of the entire war, landing in France with their tanks and guns, all fired up for the liberation of France from the Germans.

OPERATION OVERLORD managed to bring about the very turning point in the war it was hoping to achieve, although the three lads, Winnie, Monty and Ike, were terribly afraid that it mightn’t work. The weather was a crucial factor in whether or not the gambit would succeed.

After much faffing about and discussion of meteorological charts, it was decided to make a run for it, as it were, during a break in the stormy weather and, mercifully, it worked. God and Mother Nature were clearly both on the side of good that on that fateful day, June the 6^th, 1944.

Germany, of course, would not capitulate until the 8^th of May, 1945, about a week after the suicide of Adolf Hitler, so there was still nearly a full year of the war left to run.

This was bad news for the millions of prisoners-of-war, political prisoners, Jews, Roma gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and so-called ‘enemies of the Reich’ who still languished in concentration camps across Germany and Poland, in appalling conditions and with almost no hope of a return to normal life.

Still, D-Day probably marked the official beginning of the end for Hitler and his short-lived Third Reich. They managed to do an awful lot of damage though, didn’t they, in the twelve short years they were in power? Books are still being written about that period and films like this one have never been more popular. We’ve had about three of them- these two, and DUNKIRK- out in the last year or two. Not bad going for twelve short years…

Anyway, Winnie is openly critical in CHURCHILL of OPERATION OVERLORD. He thinks that the soldiers will be massacred as they land in France. He’s thinking very much of Gallipoli, in the First World War, for the failure of which he himself was blamed. It’s clear that he’s agonised over this failure every day of his life since and he still can see the blood mixing with the foam of the waves and hear the anguished cries of dying men.

I’ve always found the whole Gallipoli thing to be hard to understand but here’s what happened, to the best of my limited knowledge. Winnie was the First Lord Of The Admiralty back then. Hoping to knock Turkey, Germany’s ally, out of the war for good, he and his colleagues arranged for a humongous amphibious Allied Landing- oh, one of those, lol!- on the Gallipoli peninsula, which was part of Turkey.

As far as I can make out, it was a massacre as the Turks were much better prepared for this Landing than the Allies knew of. As well as British and French casualties, so many Australians died during this campaign/battle that the Australians’ commemoration of Gallipoli on the 25th of April, known as ANZAC Day, is the biggest date in the calendar every year.

Winston Churchill resigned from the Admiralty as a result of the Gallipoli disaster and, even though he obviously went on to become the British Prime Minister in later years, he was always understandably sensitive from then on to the notion of ‘amphibious landings’ of huge amounts of Allied soldiers on foreign war-torn shores.

Winnie comes up against Field Marshal Montgomery and General Eisenhower, the actual Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe who later became the American President, on the subject of the D-Day Landings. He thinks that the whole thing is sheer bloody madness and nothing more than an invitation to a mass slaughter.

Monty and Ike, however, maintain that this Landing has been planned for weeks now, it’s the right thing to do and, furthermore, they’re not going to let an old duffer like Winnie put a spoke in the wheel at this late stage.

Luckily for them, it does turn out to be the right thing to do but it’s a bitter pill for Winnie to have to swallow, especially when these top Army lads make out that he’s an anachronism left over from the First World War, as out-of-date as a piece of period furniture or something.

In CHURCHILL, he and the then King, George the 6^th who is the father of the present-day Queen Elizabeth (in 1944, ‘Lillibet’ was just eighteen years old), bemoan together the face that they have to sit quietly at home, like a pair of superannuated geriatrics, waiting to hear the results of OPERATION OVERLORD from other people.

They’re too old, for one thing and, for another, as the Prime Minister and King of England respectively, they owe it to the people of England to keep themselves safe and not to get their heads blown off in a battle somewhere across the Channel as they’ve actually been thinking of doing. I can understand that they both feel useless but with great power comes great responsibility. Tough titty, in other words, lol.

Miranda Richardson plays Clementine Churchill here. She has two modes: she’s either shaking her head fondly at Winnie’s naughtiness and eccentricity and stubborness or being terribly passive-aggressive about the fact that he has hardly any time for her now that he has the troubles of the whole world on his shoulders.

Well, she should probably have expected that when she married him. Statesmen and kings and Prime Ministers have to do the job they signed up for or else they’ll be letting their people down. It’s hard on the wives and families but I’m sure that there are a lot of material compensations to make up for it, and I bet they wouldn’t volunteer to give these up either, lol.

Both films, DARKEST HOUR and CHURCHILL, see Winnie fighting his war with the brilliant, impassioned speeches that are still quoted to this day. I don’t like, however, that both films try to get humour out of an old man’s eccentricities and his physically ageing body in his nightshirt and bare feet.

DARKEST HOUR was particularly guilty of this, showing Winnie’s bare legs as he hopped nekkid out of the bath and ran across the landing in the nip while his young female secretary hovered, mortified.

I’m surprised they didn’t go the whole hog and show him clipping his horny old toenails and breaking wind in the jacks as well. Or maybe they’re planning on putting these scenes into the next big film on Churchill. Leave the guy some dignity, for Chrissakes.

I’ll be eternally grateful to both films, however, for teaching me the difference between Dunkirk and D-Day, two things I’d mixed up for literally years. In the first scenario, Allied soldiers were rescued from the coast of France and in the second, Allied soldiers were transported to the coast of France in order to carry out the liberation of this country. And I’m sure those snooty French peeps were eternally grateful, lol, and lived happily ever after and never ever looked down their noses on the rest of the world again…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

BLACK FRIDAY, BLACK DRAGONS and SCARED TO DEATH: A TRIO OF BELA LUGOSI FILMS REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

BLACK FRIDAY, BLACK DRAGONS AND SCARED TO DEATH: A TRILOGY OF BELA LUGOSI HORROR FILMS REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I love everything that the mysterious Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi ever did. If he’d advertised cat food, I would have loved those adverts as much as anything else he ever made. He and Boris Karloff, the two Lon Chaneys (father and son), Christopher Lee, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing are the Kings, the undisputed Kings, of the horror movie genre.

Everything that Bela does, every movement he makes, every word out of his mouth, is fascinating to me. I love the way he’s nearly always playing a mad scientist or a mad doctor who’s trying to take over the world with his eye power or clawed hand power, or maybe by building a monster or some kind of unholy army of the night, and it’s up to a feisty newspaper reporter and his best gal to stop him from attaining the world domination he always seems to crave, lol.

In BLACK DRAGONS (1942), he’s a mad medic once more, a Dr. Melcher, who pulls off possibly the most amazing feat of plastic surgery since, well, since I don’t know when. He travels to Japan to turn six members of the fiendish Black Dragon Society, all Japanese, all in cahoots with the Nazis, into six upstanding American industrialists, all through the magic of plastic surgery.

The real American industrialists will, of course, be killed, leaving the six Japanese impostors to step neatly into their lives in America. It’s the most improbable scheme ever devised and no foolin.’ Dr. Melcher, meanwhile, has to remain imprisoned in Japan so that he doesn’t give the game away.

But, in America, someone is killing off the fake industrialists one-by-one. Who could it possibly be? Nobody knows their true identities, except for Dr. Melcher and the lads back in Japan who commissioned the life-swapping plastic surgeries.

Each of the murder victims is found clutching an exquisite and obviously expensive-looking Japanese dagger, so I say look for the man who owns a Japanese dagger shop or who otherwise has access to an unlimited supply of Japanese daggers somehow.

Good thing there’s a reporter on the trail, and a young lady whom he likes called Alice, whose Uncle Bill is at the centre of the murders. The film contains the most blatant sexism I’ve ever seen in a ‘Forties movie, and ‘Forties movies are already pretty damned sexist. But just wait till you hear this little lot. It’ll make your jaw drop.

The reporter wants to keep Alice safe and away from all the commotion occasioned by the murders. He says something at one point along the lines of: ‘I wish we were married, so I could beat you up and then you’d have to stay home and you’d be nice and safe.’

There’s a lot I could say to that right now that I’m not gonna say. Just keep telling yourself, ‘that’s the way it was back then, it was the style of the times, all relationships were like that back then, fuhgeddaboutit, things have changed since then…’

BLACK FRIDAY (1940) sees Boris FRANKENSTEIN Karloff performing the almost obligatory surgery as a Dr. Ernst Sovac. This time, he’s transplanting part of the brain of a criminal called Red Cannon into the brain of his friend, Professor George Kingsley, who’s been badly injured in a car accident caused by the criminal. Fair enough, I suppose, lol. And it’s very FRANKENSTEIN-y too, isn’t it?

Anyway, though, the criminal part of his friend’s brain keeps asserting itself over the nice scholarly part of the friend’s brain. It’s like when Homer Simpson from THE SIMPSONS finally gets his longed-for hair transplant, but the thick luxurious quiff of hair has come from the show’s resident criminal and petty thug, Snake, who’s just been killed in the electric chair.

Every now and then, Snake’s thuggish personality comes out in Homer, much to the alarm of Homer’s son Bart, who’s unfortunately on Snake’s to-kill list. In BLACK FRIDAY, Red Cannon’s evil brain vies for supremacy over George Kingsley’s much more moderate one.

Dr. Sovac observes these transitions back-and-forth from evil to good and back again with interest. Red Cannon apparently stashed away a half a million bucks before he died and Dr. Sovac allows greed to get the better of him.

He wants to find that money for himself and use it to further his scientific research, no matter what the consequences for poor old George Kingsley, who’s supposed to be his oldest and closest friend. For shame, Dr. Sovac, for shame…

Bela plays a criminal called Eric Marnay in this film. He’s one of Red Cannon’s gang, even though you might have expected him to play the lead role, that of the mad scientist-doctor. He often was made to play second fiddle billing-wise to Boris Karloff, with whom he doesn’t play any scenes here.

He was included in films frequently just so that the film-makers could say, hey, lookee-here, Bela Lugosi’s in this flick! Sometimes, the roles were actually quite small and didn’t reflect his status as the man who’d played the most famous role of all time, Universal Studios’ DRACULA in 1931.

Anyway, Marnay’s desperate to get his hands on Red’s cash, and when members of Red’s gang start being mysteriously bumped off one-by-one, just like the fake Japanese industrialists in BLACK DRAGONS, Marnay is initially complacent. More dosh for me, is what he’s obviously thinking. But his time will come too, and maybe sooner than he thinks…

SCARED TO DEATH (1947) is the strangest little film I’ve ever seen. It looks a great deal older than it is and it’s filmed in something called ‘natural colour,’ so it has the distinction of being Bela’s one-and-only colour film.

It’s based on a play called MURDER ON THE OPERATING TABLE by Frank Orsino, and at times the film actually looks like a play, but a kind of scrappy one where everyone keeps chiming up at the wrong time and nothing makes a lick of sense.

George Zucco, who’s played Moriarty twice in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce SHERLOCK HOLMES movies, portrays a Dr. Van Ee, whose daughter-in-law Laura has somehow died of fright and the flashbacks are going to try to explain how.

Dr. Van Ee’s son Ward has been trying to get an unwilling Laura to divorce him and Dr. Van Ee has been treating Laura for mental illness. As she’s a reluctant patient, you can see that a lot of suspicion should really attach to both Van Ees for her sudden death-by-fright. They both want her out of the picture, after all.

Bela plays a visiting cousin of Dr. Van Ee’s called Professor Leonide. Resplendant in a red-lined black cloak (just like Dracula’s!) and wide-brimmed black hat, he apparently used to be a stage magician in Europe. He’s accompanied by a little malignant dwarf called Indigo and, together, they present a source of terror for Laura, the wife of Ward Van Ee. What’s the deal with that, we wonder?

A floating green mask appears to be the main source of horror for the beleaguered Laura, however. Who’s behind these ghostly apparitions, and what does it mean for the three Van Ees, locked together in a ghastly dance of death and mutual dislike?

The plot is further complicated by the intrusion of a nasty newspaperman, desperate for a story, who is absolutely horrible to his ditzy blonde girlfriend. From what I’ve seen of these ‘Forties relationships, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the ditziness turned out to be caused by repeated blows to the head from her tyrannical newspaperman boyfriend…!

Anyway, Bela is marvellous in all three films, no matter how small or bizarre the roles he plays. I love him in anything he does. He was the best Dracula ever filmed- as well as one of the first- and he’s credited with turning Bram Stoker’s creation into the handsome, suave, sexy, domineering lust-object later perfected by Christopher Lee in the HAMMER HORROR films. Good old Bela. May he never be forgotten.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor