Schmollywood Babylon

Movie of the Week: Scream, Pretty Peggy (Gordon Hessler, 1973)

Gordon Hessler was (or is, he's still alive) one of my favorite directors. Sure he's a hired gun, a working man, doing what he's suppose to do, but his elegant form of storytelling and eye for macabre details made him one of the best. He had a pretty interesting career, working for TV - especially Alfred Hitchcock, then made a bunch of black, nasty genre films in England, often with Vincent Price, then turned to TV-movies and finally, at the end of his active career, became some kind of ninja/martial arts director! How's that for a filmography? But he always did it as a professional and Scream, Pretty Peggy might hardly be original, but it's still a fine little TV-shocker...

The story is written by a favorite of this blog, Jimmy Sangster - and would be dishonest to not mention that it reminds me of a lot of other script he's written, and it's something about it that makes me thing it's a remake. It has an obvious inspiration (which I won't mention, it will spoil the film), but it still has a few other details that I've seen before. Some of them could have been used in Freddie Francis Paranoiac, starring Oliver Reed. I'm not sure really. Anyway, this is about Peggy (a very likable Sian Barbara Allen) who finds the perfect job, in-betweeen her studies, at a big spooky mansion outside town. It's just and old lady, played by Bette Davis, and her son (fine performance by Ted Bessell). Soon Peggy understands they're not alone, an insane daughter is also living in the apartment above the garage... and she might be involved in the disapperance of the girl that worked for them before Peggy! Soon Peggy will scream, a lot...

Scream, Pretty Peggy, is a basic made for TV movie, but that doesn't mean it's bad in anyway. The script focuses mostly on scenes in and around the house, with more dialogue than scares. This is good, its not a bad thing - because it elevates above a lot of other more sensational scripts and gets spooky without showing much at all. Now, I like graphic violence and spectular scares, but these hardly belong in a ABC's Movie of the Week. It's all about the story and Sangster has done a terrific job. The creepy moments are plenty and this film also includes some of the most grotesque statues I've seen. I can't even imagine why anyone would like to have them in their house! 

The actors are all superb, but I think Ted Bessell makes the best performance of the show. Very naturalistic and sympathetic, which a daring thing to do in such a short movie. Characters in these productions often is a bit edgy, to catch the attention fast from the stressed audience in from of the TVs. There's often no room for boring people, but Bessell surely breaths a lot of life into his part. Bette Davis, one of the major legends of the silver screen, is good - but she seems a bit far away from somewhere. Which is a bit unusal, she's often very good even in small parts or in low budget productions. Maybe she took the job just for the money and wasn't fond of the script? Could be, because her character is a bit underwritten and less interesting than usual. 

If you wanna see an original and fresh TV-movie that delivers something you never seen before, this is not the movie for you - but it's still highly competent, intelligently written and with a couple of very creepy scenes and an OK twist at the end. I've seen better, but remember that these productions has a very high lowest point. 

Movie of the Week: A Cold Night's Death (Jerrold Freedman, 1973)

The 70's was the golden age of TV-movies, but I was born in 1977 and therefore wasn't affected by this culture. Add to this that I'm from Sweden and it feels like very few of the older TV-films was on our public service television during the 80's. I do, however, have a few vague memories of something that probably was a American TV-movie - and it scared the shit out of me as a kid. But I will discuss that memory later on, in another article. 

Jerrold Freedman (who also directed two episodes of The X-Files later in his career, Born Again and Ghost in the Machine) brings one of the finer, darker and downbeat productions in this genre. It's important to understand for those who never seen a movie like that this that the budget wasn't high and the shooting schedules wasn't long, so instead the energy went into smart and original teleplays that could be produced during circumstances like this. A Cold Night's Death is a excellent example of budget filmmaking for TV. 

The film is more or less only Robert Culp and Eli Wallach getting on each others nerves in a polar station. They go there to see what happen to a collegue. When they arrive they find him frozen to death and the whole place is a mess. Slowly Robert and Eli cleans up the place and continues the experiements, but someone... or something... is disturbing the peace there. Especially at night. The paranoia between our two heroes grows bigger and outside it's just getting colder. 

Oh, I love shit like this. Just two awesome actors talking with each other. It could have been a stage play, if it wasn't for the use of the whole base. This is quality, there's not one single scene that's not meant to be there and the dialogue and twists all serves a purpose. I have nothing against padding out movies with stuff that doesn't belong there, just to keep up the interest or make 'em longer, but when the opposite is done right the result is A Cold Night's Death. Like many of the these films it's a final twist in the end - and it's not like today when everyone is dead, or it's a dream, hallucination or what ever crap the writers come up with, here it's a real twist - even if it's absurd and bizarre and unlikely. But I mean, what the hell! It's a movie, it's imagination - a twist can be totally bizarre and not be a dream or completely made up in the end. 

The one in this film is a good one. It has it's degree of silliness and it can be interpreted as just madness in work, but we all know - I know - that it's the real deal here. Or else the movie would never work. And the talent involved knows better. I'm hyping it now, but it's not that special - but it gets better the longer you think about it. And I still think about it, so it must have been a good one. 

A Cold Night's Death is not, what I know, out on an official DVD. I just wish that someone (the heroes at Warner Archive is not forgotten, I LOVE their releases) would make it available in a restored version so more folks could see it.

Movie of the Week: Mongo's Back in Town (Marvin J. Chomsky, 1971)

While the ABC Movie of the Week most time, for us geeks, means strange and twisty horrors and murder mystery thriller starring old movie stars, there was from time to time also hard-hitting crime dramas - like Mongo's Back in Town. And I mean, wow. Look at the cast: Joe Don Baker, Telly Savalas, Sally Field and Martin Sheen - the last two so young they look like their mother gave birth to them just days before shooting this movie! Also starring, which is very cool, the short actor Angelo Rossitto - who starred in Tod Browning's Freaks and later in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Most of his work is pretty interesting and he was a wonderful character actor in his own right.

Joe Don Baker have always been a favorite of mine, even if he entered the cheese factory with 1985's Final Justice, playing Deputy Sheriff Thomas Jefferson Geronimo III, looking like this: 

To be fair, that's one of the few parts where he entered silliness. He's excellent in Walking Tall (I never been a fan of Bo Svenson's version), Framed is a fantastic revenge film and when he later become a supporting actor in the late eighties and nineties I loved his parts in the James Bond films. He's done a lot of good shit except these titles of course, just choose and pick!

Mongo's Back in Town is bascially a christmas mvoie (and it was released december 10th, 1971). Mongo (Joe Don Baker) is a brutal hitman called home by his brother who wants to hire him to kill another gangster who threatens his business. Sally Field is Vikki who also comes home for christmas and falls in love with the quiet Mongo and against her will gets drawn in to his family business when his brother is killed by gun... and acid! In the middle of this are two cops, Tolstad (Savalas) and Gordon (Sheen), who are trying to figure who's gonna kill whom and when. 

This is a production that oozes quality. The cast is superb, the story might not be original - but written with intelligence and wittiness by Herman Miller. There's scene after scene of brilliance. My favorite is when Mongo tries to get his brother to pay him more to make the kill, but just sitting there and thrown burning match sticks on him. Like a child, but still with a strangely comforting cruelty. Mongo is also a rather complex character, which becomes more visible in the end when it's quite clear he's not really comfortable with doing what he does - he's just doing it to get money and this time, to get some kind of revenge. It's a daring move for this kind of production, but that also - think - kinda characterizes the Movie of the Week concept: the stories could be a bit downbeat, the twists often have a slightly cynical feeling to them.

It's interesting, because you would expect it to be the opposite during the 70's, the cinema would deliver the darkness and television the relief. 

 Regarding the other actors... Savalas is bascially doing his Kojak stuff, but it's very interesting to see Field and Sheen, young and hungry, doing very fine jobs with quite under-written characters. Field comes of as the naive young girl, falling in love with a dangerous man and Sheen like the sidekick to the main star - we've seen it before, but both of them clearly tried to do something special with their parts. Field was actually on Jimmy Kimmel and she mentions Mongo's Back in Town, saying twice she think it was a great movie - but mr Kimmel starts joking about the title and she never gets a chance to elaborate on the subject.

Like all interesting TV-movies this is hard to get, at least officially. You can download it or get a bootleg. That's it. I wish it will find it's way someday to us in a restored edition...