by Mark Kermode
Here’s what really happens.
During that early scene with Barbara Werle, her character Charley meets the manly Maximilian Schell on the gangplank and gives him her card, boasting that she is a popular singer available for ‘Weddings, Social Occasions and Smokers’ – whatever ‘smokers’ were (and even before I knew the answer to that question, they sounded saucy). It is also established that her partner Harry (Brian Keith) is a diving expert of some renown and is embarking upon this voyage in order to earn money through his legendary salvaging skills. She is flirty; he is grumpy; they are both broke. And thus, when they retire to their cabin below decks, they begin to bicker. We, meanwhile, find ourselves hiding in the closet (oo-er) in which Ms Werle promptly starts to hang her clothes, the camera peering out in an eerie pre-echo of Kyle MacLachlan’s peeping Tom from Blue Velvet while Harry playfully badmouths Charley’s singing career.
‘You were so lousy,’ he says dismissively, throwing himself fully clothed on to his bed, ‘you put your piano player to sleep!’
‘Maybe,’ she says with a minxy smile, slamming the closet doors shut.’But I knew how to keep you awake, Harry.’
And suddenly, this putative disaster movie turns into a musical, replete with non-diegetic orchestral accompaniment as Charley grabs the end of the four-poster bed and starts to sing, swaying suggestively.
‘I’m looking for an old-fashioned boy,’ she trills, ‘who’s looking for …’
The camera angle changes and there it is! There’s the shot I remember; the shot with the man lying prostrate on his back, seemingly disabled (by sleep, or booze, rather than injury), his head to the left of frame, her body in the background, the camera skulking behind the bed, peering out from the skirting board.
‘…an old-fashioned girl.’
As she sings this last line, Charley turns her bustle toward the bed and (let’s not be coy) gently shakes a tail feather, looking over her shoulder as she does so, slightly lifting the hem of her jacket to accentuate the ribbon tied somewhere other than around the old oak tree.
Harry yawns theatrically, but I’m starting to doubt his disinterest.
‘Just a nice old-fashioned girl like me.’
Stirred from feigned slumbers, Harry reaches out his hand (as I had remembered, only quicker, and with far less ambiguity) and pulls on the ribbon with practised dexterity; in a flash the ribbon comes undone and the camera follows the falling skirt swiftly to the floor, revealing ample light-blue petticoats beneath.
He yawns again, and then snorts like a braying horse.
Hmm. This is a lot racier – and a lot less ‘symbolically suggestive’ – than I had remembered, No wonder they upped the certificate from U to PG for the DVD.
Back to the action. Charley kneels to pick up the red dress and starts to walk away from bed, singing ‘I want a boy who’s happy that I …’
On the word ‘I’ she gives a suggestive dip and holds the discarded skirt up to her bosom, apparently hiding behind its crumpled pleats in a gesture that stretches the boundaries of coquettishness.
‘…can blush, because I’m bashful and shy …’
And with that she drop-kicks the skirt across the room toward the bed, its silky folds opening in mid-air like a giant crimson butterfly as it soars straight toward the camera which rests once again behind the man’s bed.
From here on in, it’s effectively a well-behaved striptease, with Werle shedding her jacket top, the arms of which she waves like hoofers’ tassles before draping it upon Harry’s tutting head. He moves to throw it away, but winds up using it as a pillow, while all the time continuing his Benny Hill-style parody of sleepiness – the man tired but tempted, the woman needy and naughty, a dynamic which seemed to be the norm for all nudge-wink ‘family entertainment’ in those days. The clothes continue to come off, but there’s little chance of nakedness – after five minutes of theatrical undressing Ms Werle is still covered from head to foot in the most modest of undergarments which seem to exist in never-ending layers of mystery. If she walked out down the street like this today she’d still look overdressed.
Suddenly the sound of castanets fills the air and things take a decidedly Latino turn. Hola! Harry bangs his head on the bedstead – things are hotting up. He laughs. Charley sings some more. She caresses her corset and deftly drops her petticoat revealing pink garters with little blue bows on. Harry is undone. She drops the petticoat on to his chest and starts to slip one of the garters of her leg. Harry is clearly aroused. He lifts the petticoat toward his face – to do … what?
To put it over his head so he can go back to sleep.
Clearly he’s impotent. Or gay. Or English.
It’s time to bring out the big guns. Charley drapes herself around a four-poster pole, raises a knee, and pulls on a straw boater.
And that does it. Forget the corsets, the frocks, the petticoats, the garters, the ribbons, the laces, even the red shoes which I notice now she still has on. It’s the straw boater that finally seals the deal for Harry.
And clearly for me. Because now, after all this song-and-dance hanky-panky, we finally get the other bit of the scene which I remember; the bit in which the woman walks away from the man, apparently done troubling him, at which point the man, who up till now has been so reticent to get involved, calls her back by reaching out and catching hold of the lace which trails behind her.
Only, that’s not what happens. Not quite. Clearly I’ve transposed the bit with the lace from earlier in the scene when he was whipping off her skirt – with her consent, of course. By now, however, Harry has clearly gotten off his horse and drunk his milk and is in no mood for namby-pamby niceties. No Sirreee Bob. Now that his bloodlust has been inflamed by that damn straw boater it’s time for manly action. So as Charley turns to walk away in something approaching an unsatisfied strop, Harry reaches out, grabs her by the wrist, and hauls her giggling with gaiety on to the bed where the happy couple are finally conjoined in three seconds of laughter-filled canoodling climaxing in him patting her once again on the bum.
Cut to the engine room, and a shot of huge pistons pounding in and out, up and down, in an orgy of mechanical thrusting and pumping.
Really.
I stop the DVD, and take stock.
All said, it’s pretty depressing. There was I imagining that my young mind had somehow latched on to something profoundly Freudian and symbolic, something which would have suggested a deeper appreciation of the mysteries of the adult world than befitted a six-year-old boy, something which proved that even at an early age my eyes were looking beyond the screen to the story behind the picture.
The truth is far more mundane; at an early age I watched Barbara Werle stripping down to her corset and petticoat and showing off her garters and clearly I have never got over the impenetrable longings which that experience provoked.
This is emblematic of so much of my early life, and the sooner I face up to the fact that my entire adolescent world view was informed by the fairground thrills of exploitation cinema the better.
In my formative years, everything I knew about politics I had learned from Planet of the Apes.
Everything I knew about pop music I’d learned from Slade in Flame.
Everything I knew about heartbreak I’d learned from Jeremy.
Everything I knew about religion I’d learned from The Exorcist.
And, apparently, everything I knew about ‘adult matters’ I’d learned from Krakatoa: East of Java.
And you thought you were messed up.
Chapter 2
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY LIFE
Just as watching movies defined my childhood, so writing about cinema became an early obsession. At around the age of nine or ten I brashly embarked upon an unauthorised novelisation of 2001: A Space Odyssey (not realising that Arthur C. Clarke had beaten me to it), cramming my own messed-up memories of the entire movie into four badly typed pages for which I then constructed a ‘hardback’ cover using cardboard and Sellotape. I don’
t have a copy of that magnum opus any more but I remember that it didn’t make much sense – although you could say the same of Kubrick’s movie (but not, crucially, of Clarke’s novel). From here I graduated to compiling ‘books’ of film reviews which I would then place casually upon bookshelves around the house in the forlorn belief that someone would start reading them without noticing that they were home-made. It wasn’t until my teenage years, however, that my written work became available outside of my own home and, like so many wannabe journalists in the seventies and eighties, the first thing I ever wrote that actually got published was a schoolboy letter in the New Musical Express. Although it was nearly thirty years ago, I can still remember clearly the substance of the letter, which took the form of a short play (I was a pretentious arse even back then). This Beckettian gem, which was essentially a rip-off of the surreal ramblings of genius cartoonist Ray Lowry, took the form of an argument between two of the NME’s most flamboyant (and therefore greatest) writers: Paul Morley and Ian Penman. If memory serves, these two journalistic behemoths were portrayed as squabbling in fluent lavatorial Goon Show gibberish before the fey arrival of Japan frontman David Sylvian who announced simply ‘I have no make-up’ and then died. At which point, the entire NME cast turned up ‘dressed as Monty Smith’s stomach’ to sing an enthusiastic roundelay of ‘Show me the way up my own bum’.
And they say satire is dead.
The worst thing about this hideously smug and faux anarchic missive was the fact that I had clearly thought about it for a long time before sending it, hence my word-perfect recall almost three decades later. I can’t remember a single line of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats or any of the other immortal poets and playwrights whose wonderful works I studied at O level, A level, and university. But can I remember every sodding word of a stupid letter I sent to the NME back in the late seventies? Of course I can. I’ve got a head so full of junk there’s no space left for the good stuff to go.
Equally shameful is the amount of effort I expended attempting to appear utterly ‘off the cuff’ and hilariously flippant. Plus, the entire satirical aim of the piece was clearly not to mock the writers in question at all, but to appear somehow ‘in’ on the gag in a way which would make me appear to be ‘one of them’. People ask me nowadays why I’m so vitriolic about anything which could be described as vaguely quirky or madcap and the honest truth is that I cannot forgive any sin in which I am so deeply steeped.
I signed that letter ‘Henry P’ which was an obscure reference to my favourite band of the time, Yachts, whose frontman Henry Priestman I idolised. By a peculiar twist of fate, that name stuck thanks to the mocking derision of my very close friend Simon Booth who saw the letter and knew at once that it was from me. Some time later I would move to Manchester, where nobody knew me, and where the university was awash with people called ‘Mark’. So, for the first few weeks of the academic term people would politely ask my name, and I would reply ‘Mark’ and they would instantly forget because they already had fifty other ‘Marks’ backed up in their ‘which one are you?’ cranial databanks. Then, sometime around week three, Booth came up to visit me in Manchester and was overheard to refer to me as ‘Henry’ – of which there were few others. So the name stuck. And for the rest of my six years in Manchester I was known almost interchangeably as ‘Mark’ or ‘Henry’, or even occasionally ‘Mark Henry’ which sounded like some moonshine-drinking dungareed mountain-dweller from The Waltons. After a while I got used to it, and convinced myself that I had acquired the ‘Henry’ nickname after Jack Nance’s generously bequiffed screen icon in the cult movie Eraserhead – more of which later.
Getting into Manchester University had proved something of a slog because I was not much cop at school and had unimpressive grades to prove it. In fact, on my first UCCA form (known now as UCAS, I believe) I got five flat rejections, being turned down by everyone including my ‘sure-fire safety net’ fifth choice which the good folk at careers advice assured me ‘never rejected anyone’. I didn’t just get rejected– they asked to see me in person before deciding that I was not the sort of chap they wanted cluttering up their esteemed seat of learning. This was an important life lesson, because it taught me that if someone isn’t sure that they want me to do something, whatever it may be, then actually meeting me will merely confirm their worst fears. To this day I have never got any job for which I have had to be formally interviewed or do an audition.
Never.
Ever.
I think that says a lot about how charming I am in person.
Anyway, after a brief and foolhardy flirtation with the entrance examiners for Mansfield College, Oxford (who also told me to get lost, but in a very nice and affirmative way – I was apparently their ‘top rejection’) I applied again to Manchester and finally got in which was great because it was the only place I really wanted to go, having read all about it in the NME. On my first day there I trotted down to the Hacienda club (brainchild of Factory supremo Tony Wilson) and obtained my beautiful yellow and silver constructivist-style designer credit-card membership ID. These cards are apparently now valuable collectors’ items, and I would happily sell mine on eBay were it not for the fact that I cut it up to make plectrums after falling upon hard times during an intense ‘rehearsal schedule’ with my never-to-be-famous band Russians Eat Bambi. No, nobody else has ever heard of them either.
Like Hunter S. Thompson’s San Francisco in the mid-sixties, Manchester in the mid-eighties was ‘a very special time and place to be a part of … whatever it meant’. Part of what being in Manchester ‘meant’ was getting caught up in the heady tide of hard-left student politics which swept along the Oxford Road and guaranteed that at any time of day or night your passage could be impeded by balaclava-clad protestors demanding equal rights for Latvian yoghurt farmers, angrily stamping on Nestlé chocolate bars, and threatening to burn down Barclays Bank. Along with its fashionably industrial music scene, Manchester was the UK’s premier hotbed of sub-Trot NUS militancy – no wonder the New Statesmandubbed it the ‘crucible [in which] a generation learned its politics and went on to become the heart of New Labour’. Today, people still talk of the role of the ‘Manchester Mafia’ within modern politics, since so many of those who were radical young turks in the eighties grew up to be rather less radical old farts in the nineties and noughties, helping to put Blair and Brown in power (hey, thanks for that!).
As for me, I was always going to be a sucker for revolutionary politics because I’d spent so much time watching Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. So, with my usual flair for moderation in all things I mutated during my time in Manchester from snot-nosed NME-reading angsty teenager to red-flag-waving bolshie bore with a subscription to fight Racism fight Imperialism and no sense of humour. I also developed an addiction to stern gender politics which made me both unfunny and unattractive – a real double whammy. Whilst many of my more well-adjusted peers were taking drugs, having sex, and experimenting with new and exciting forms of liver abuse, my student years were defined by a profound belief that a hard rain was indeed going to fall and this was no time to be enjoying oneself. In the words of Withnail & I’s prophetic guru Presuming Ed, we had spectacularly ‘failed to paint it black’ and there were going to be a lot of casualties …
In my defence, I’d like to say that you would have had to have been a fully paid-up piece of pond life not to have got the impression that something was profoundly wrong with Britain in the mid-eighties. The evidence of impending Bastille-storming upheaval was everywhere – and nowhere more so than in Manchester. When the Home Secretary Leon Brittan visited Manchester University’s Students Union in 1985, thirty-two people were arrested (and others injured) as the police battled protestors blocking the entrance to the building. The resulting debacle made the national news and seemed to us to represent a throwing down of the gauntlet by Manchester Police’s then chief constable, James Anderton, a man who was famously on first-name terms with the Almighty. Unaffectionately nicknamed ‘God’
s Copper’, Anderton made headlines at the height of the AIDS panic with comments about people ‘swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making’ – comments which helped turn him into a near-mythical bogeyman for those of a liberal persuasion. Indeed, anyone drifting even idly toward the radical left needed only to take a cursory glance at Anderton’s more outrageous outpourings to spur them on to man the barricades forthwith.
In my case, the ‘barricades’ were a series of anti-deportation campaigns which centred around Viraj Mendis, a Sri Lankan activist whom the government were attempting to repatriate despite well-supported claims that he would be persecuted for his political beliefs (he was a passionate advocate of the Tamil Tigers) if sent back to his country of origin. Viraj had a lot of support in Manchester, where he had lived for several years, and his campaign to stay in the UK grew in size, importance and popularity throughout the eighties, becoming the focus of numerous similar anti-deportation battles. In December 1986, things cranked up a gear when Viraj went into sanctuary in Hulme’s Church of the Ascension after a deportation order was issued against him by the Home Office. He stayed there for 760 days, publicly defying the authorities who finally ordered the police to batter down the doors of the church and forcibly remove him in the early hours of 18 January 1989.
During the years of Viraj’s ‘voluntary’ incarceration, his support team the Viraj Mendis Defence Campaign (VMDC, of which I was an active member) fought and won a number of other anti-deportation cases whilst simultaneously maintaining a twenty-four-hour vigil at the Church of the Ascension. Once a week, each of us would get to stay up all night in the dingy foyer of that church discussing the inevitable decline of capitalism (thus combining my two favourite obsessions – religion and politics) with Viraj’s comrades in the Revolutionary Communist Group (not to be confused with their sworn rivals the Revolutionary Communist Party, or indeed the Judean People’s Popular Front) and in my case writing rude and satirical songs about James Anderton.
