Metropolis (1927)

Stuart's Nite
CPK Pizzas, Cookies
Special Guest: Lisa Ottotique

Film Forum: Inspired (or so legend says) by his first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline, Fritz Lang's visionary work of science fiction redefined the term "super-production" - in the process nearly bankrupting Ufa studios - with its thousands of extras (cheap, in the era of Weimar hyperinflation); already-monstrous sets inflated to the gargantuan by cutting-edge camera trickery (including the first use of the legendary Schüfftan process, whereby miniatures and live action are filmed simultaneously); and eye-popping special effects extravaganzas, including the explosion of the "heart machine;" the Frankenstein-like genesis of the robot girl; and a cataclysmic, multitude-engulfing flood.

A legend and a byword almost from first release, Metropolis was seen as Lang conceived it only by the earliest Berlin audiences ("positively overwhelming" raved the Variety critic after the premiere) - and then the cutting began, by the U.S. distributor Paramount, by Ufa itself, and so on, down to a 1984 "restoration" that ran only 87 minutes.

Roger Ebert: Generally considered the first great science-fiction film, ``Metropolis'' (1926) fixed for the rest of the century the image of a futuristic city as a hell of scientific progress and human despair. From this film, in various ways, descended not only ``Dark City'' but ``Blade Runner,'' ``The Fifth Element,'' ``Alphaville,'' ``Escape From L.A.,'' ``Gattaca,'' and Batman's Gotham City. The laboratory of its evil genius, Rotwang, created the visual look of mad scientists for decades to come, especially after it was mirrored in ``Bride of Frankenstein'' (1935). And the device of the ``false Maria,'' the robot who looks like a human being, inspired the ``Replicants'' of ``Blade Runner.'' Even Rotwang's artificial hand was given homage in ``Dr. Strangelove.''

What many of these movies have in common is a loner hero who discovers the inner workings of the future society, penetrating the system that would control the population. Even Batman's villains are the descendants of Rotwang, giggling as they pull the levels that will enforce their will. The buried message is powerful: Science and industry will become the weapons of demagogues.

``Metropolis'' employed vast sets, 25,000 extras and astonishing special effects to create two worlds: the great city of Metropolis, with its stadiums, skyscrapers and expressways in the sky, and the subterranean workers' city, where the clock face shows 10 hours to cram another day into the workweek. Lang's film is the summit of German Expressionism, the combination of stylized sets, dramatic camera angles, bold shadows and frankly artificial theatrics.

The production itself made even Stanley Kubrick's mania for control look benign. According to Patrick McGilligan's book Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, the extras were hurled into violent mob scenes, made to stand for hours in cold water and handled more like props than human beings. The heroine was made to jump from high places, and when she was burned at a stake, Lang used real flames. The irony was that Lang's directorial style was not unlike the approach of the villain in his film.

Other dramatic visual sequences: a chase scene in the darkened catacombs, with the real Maria pursued by Rotwang (the beam of his light is like a club to bludgeon her). The image of the Tower of Babel as Maria addresses the workers. Their faces, arrayed in darkness from the top to the bottom of the screen. The doors in Rotwang's house, opening and closing on their own. The lascivious dance of the false Maria, as the workers look on, the screen filled with large, wet, staring eyeballs. The flood of the lower city and the undulating arms of the children flocking to Maria to be saved.

Much of what we see in ``Metropolis'' doesn't exist except in visual trickery. The special effects were the work of Eugene Schuefftan, who later worked in Hollywood as the cinematographer of ``Lilith'' and ``The Hustler.'' According to Magill's Survey of Cinema, his photographic system ``allowed people and miniature sets to be combined in a single shot, through the use of mirrors, rather than laboratory work.'' Other effects were created in the camera by cinematographer Karl Freund.

``Metropolis'' does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world. The ideas of ``Metropolis'' have been so often absorbed into popular culture that its horrific future city is almost a given (when Albert Brooks dared to create an alternative utopian future in 1991 with ``Defending Your Life,'' it seemed wrong, somehow, without Satanic urban hellscapes). Lang filmed for nearly a year, driven by obsession, often cruel to his colleagues, a perfectionist madman, and the result is one of those seminal films without which the others cannot be fully appreciated.

Cinematographer Karl Freund went on to a long Hollywood career, Oscar Bio: Born in Königinhof, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Dvur Kralove, Czech Republic). At the age of 15, Karl Freund began his long, illustrious career in motion pictures as a projectionist. Within two years, he had graduated to camera operator and received a variety of assignments, including newsreels and shorts. In the 1920s, Freund worked at the UFA studios during what has become known as the Golden Age of German cinema. Collaborating with such film artists as Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Paul Wegener and E.A. Dupont, Freund helped to create some of the most beautiful and highly regarded films of the silent era. In 1924, he worked on THE LAST LAUGH with Murnau and screenwriter Carl Mayer. Mayer collaborated closely with Freund to write a script exploiting the potentials of a moving camera. The camera became an integral part of the narrative, interpreting and visualizing the central character's state of mind. To film one scene where the main character is intoxicated, Freund strapped the camera to his chest, batteries to his back for balance, and stumbled about like a drunken man.

In 1925, Freund worked on VARIETY, directed by E.A. Dupont. Once again, Freund's expressive camerawork drew a great deal of praise. Faced with numerous inquiries about the innovative camerawork, Dupont wrote an article for the New York Times explaining the "photographer's ingenuity" in making the film. In 1927, Freund worked with Walter Ruttmann on BERLIN - THE SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY. To achieve greater flexibility in difficult shooting situations, Freund developed a special high-speed film stock. The entire documentary was reportedly shot without a single person spotting the camera.

In 1929, Freund came to the United States to work on an experimental color process for Technicolor. Shortly thereafter, he went to work for Universal Studios, shooting DRACULA (1931) and MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932). While under contract at Universal, he directed several films, including THE MUMMY (1932). He went on to work at MGM and Warner Brothers, receiving an Academy Award for his cinematography for THE GOOD EARTH (1937). Freund's work in the United States, including such diverse films as KEY LARGO (1948) and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1940), reflected his tremendous range and versatility.

Freund on inventing the techinque of the four camera filmed sitcom for I Love Lucy (Does this sound familar, Pamela?):

To film each show we use three BNC Mitchell cameras with T-stop calibrated lenses on dollies. The middle camera usually covers the long shot using 28mm. to 50mm. lenses. The two close-up cameras, 75 to 90 degrees apart from the center camera, are equipped with 3" to 4" lenses, depending on the requirements for coverage.

The only floor lights used are mounted on the bottom of each camera dolly and above each lens. They are controlled by dimmers.

There is a crew of four men to each camera: the cameraman, his assistant, a "grip" and a "cable man." Unlike TV, where one man generally handles the camera movements and views the results immediately, this technique requires absolute coordination between members of the crew.

Every movement of each dolly is marked on the floor for every scene. And since all the movements of the camera are cued from the monitor box, the entire crew works from an intercom system.

As for myself, I utilize a two-circuit intercom. This allows me to talk separately to the monitor booth and the camera crew on one; the electricians handling the dimmers and the switchboard on the other.

Retakes, a standard procedure on the Hollywood scene, are not desirable in making TV films with audience participation. Dubbed-in laughs are artificial and, consequently, used only in emergencies. Close-ups, another routine step in standard film-making, were discarded since such glamour treatment stood out like a sore thumb.

The public acceptance of "I Love Lucy" and "Our Miss Brooks" has been a source of great inspiration for me. The challenge has been a real one -- one I have found both stimulating and exciting.

Danel Griffin: Consider the city itself—an ocean of buildings almost gothic-like in their cathedral shapes, and the airplanes that buzz constantly through the air like small, insignificant bees. Or the underground world of machines that make sure the city runs. This underground workplace is a fortress unto itself, inhabited by faceless, soulless drones who have accepted their fate as the ones who feed the wealthy city above. Some of the first shots that Lang is the back of these men’s heads as they shuffle along to their workplaces, and the image produces goose bumps in its ability to strike us with awe and pity at the same time. Once these images begin, Lang casts a spell on us that is never released, and just when we think that Metropolis has created the ultimate visual achievement, it tops itself with another, and then another (I have two personal favorite images: 1) The clock-like machine in which the protagonist chooses to operate, and 2) the socialist retelling of the story of Babel, with the ocean of bald, moaning heads).

Richard von Busack: Director Fritz Lang makes this an intoxicating mix of dripping romanticism and Biblical fury. It's the cinema's most articulately expressed case of future shock. Metropolis is as pungent as a brilliant editorial cartoon, and it's not dated either. The drones marching into the city's dungeons still chafe the conscience.

Metropolis' repeated motto urges compromise: "Between the mind and the hands, the heart must mediate"--that only common decency can end the war between the haves and the have-nots. This ending was despised by the right and the left alike. Today, it seems insipid--and patronizing too: who decides whether someone's born a "head" or a "hand"?

Fritz Lang Interview:In 1972 my friend, Michael Gould, and I had just graduated from the film program at York University, Toronto, where the school had hosted a number of such luminaries. When we decided to visit Los Angeles together, Michael arranged a number of interviews.

The LA summer was already very hot when we arrived, and Summitridge Drive, high in the Beverly Hills, seemed like a dusty path in some small town on the edge of the Mojave Desert. Fritz Lang's house was small, but it evoked his famous Bauhaus mansion of his UFA days in Weimar, Germany.

Lang welcomed us warmly, smiling and extending both hands, one to each of us, in a gracious gesture full of old-world charm. Surprisingly, considering his reputation on the set, he was a pussycat—soft-spoken, thoughtful and very patient with his two young fans. He served us coffee and delicate cookies from a Viennese pastry shop. Lang had recently undergone a major operation and was recuperating at home. He was tired, but gave freely for several hours, generous with his thoughts and emotions in discussing everything from the art of film to the politics of the '60s.
....
LC: In your work in Germany, you dealt with fantasies and fairytale-like romances, but with M you made an abrupt switch to realism.

FL: Not quite correct. I was born in Austria, yes? I became interested in the German human being. I wanted to make a film about the romantic German human being in Destiny; or the German after the First World War, with the Dr. Mabuse films; or the German of legend with Die Nibelungen; or the German of the future with Metropolis. And then I became a tiny bit tired, which had something to do with my private life, about which I don't want to talk.

Michael Gould (MG): In Metropolis when Maria, the robot, dances for the men in formal attire, there seems to be a series of jump cuts. Were these in the original?

FL: Darling, no. There are no jump cuts. I'll tell you what happened. People cut one film, two films, frames. I don't know. When I was in East Berlin they wanted to reconstruct Metropolis and I couldn't help them because I don't have a script. [Note: the current reconstruction retains these cuts.]

MG: Your German pictures were some of the most expensive films made at the time.

FL: There has been written a lot of lies about Metropolis. There were never thousands of extras. Never.

MG: What was the number?

FL: Two hundred and fifty, 300. It depends how you use a crowd. After the first World War there was an inflation, you know? In Die Nibelungen, I think I had 150 knights. The uniforms would have cost a fortune, but when it came to paying it was no more as if we would have paid one knight at the beginning of the film. It was the first time, I think, in history that a country had such inflation.

MG: Were you anxious to begin making sound films?

FL: No. When I made Woman in the Moon it was my own company, and the release was UFA. One of the higher echelon from UFA was in the United States and had heard sound on the first Jolson film. He came back and asked me to make sound when the rocket starts. And for me, it was wrong. It was breaking the style of the film. So I said no. And UFA said “If you don't do it, we break our contract; we don't pay you anything!” I said ‘Okay, we'll see.' Then my lawyer said to me “Look, Fritz, you have to deliver everything which you promised.” I didn't get paid for eight or nine months, and UFA hoped that I would finally collapse, but I didn't.
....
FL: I admire all film which is good. But you can learn only from a bad film, not from a good film. I prove it: if you are an audience, you go to a good film. Period. If you see a bad film and you say “What is this? That is wrong. I wouldn't have done it that way,” then you have learned something.

Metropolis Film Archive:
There have been many such assessments over the years which praise the film and recognise its landmark status, or are severely critical and dismissive of it as populist kitsch. Such reviews have become more common with the passage of time. However, just as there were glowing reviews, so also scathing criticisms appeared in the press of the day. The most notorious and vitriolic of these was undoubtedly that published in the New York Times on 17 April 1927 by the well-known English science-fiction writer H.G. Wells. He called Metropolis:

...the silliest film. I do not believe it would be possible to make one sillier... That vertical city of the future we know now is, to put it mildly, highly improbable...The hopeless drudge stage of human labour lies behind us. With a sort of malignant stupidity this film contradicts these facts...Then comes the crowning imbecility of the film - the conversion of the likeness of the Robot into Maria...

Thea von Harbou (December 27, 1888 – July 1, 1954) was a German actress and author of some noble Prussian descent.

In 1905, she published her first novel in the Deutsche Roman-Zeitung. However, she then started to work as an actress, starting in 1906 in Düsseldorf, then moving to Weimar (1908), Chemnitz (1911) and Aachen (1913). In Aachen she also met her first husband, the actor and director Rudolf Klein-Rogge, whom she married in 1914.

In 1920, she wrote her first movie script Das indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, Mysteries of India), together with Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang became her second husband in 1922, and they collaborated a lot in the following years, for instance in writing the screenplay of the famous film Metropolis together. They separated in October 1931 and got divorced in 1933.

In 1932, one year before Adolf Hitler came to power, she joined the NSDAP. This presumably led to the divorce from husband Fritz Lang who left Germany in 1934 for Paris after his latest film Das Testament des Dr. Marbuse had been declared illegal by Nazi officials because of its criticism of Nazi ideology.

Harbou wrote the script for "Der Herrscher" 1937, directed by Veit Harlan and starring Emil Jannings. The movie celebrates unconditional submission under absolute authority, eventually finding reward in total victory.

After the war she was detained by the British military government, and then did some unskilled labor, like cleaning up the rubble from the bombing. After receiving a working permit she did some synchronizing of movies, but also continued to write scripts.

In 1954 She killed herself jumping from a New York City skyscraper.

Control Room (2004)

Unofficial MovieNite (Stuart sick)
Incredibly late pizza, Ice Cream

Columbia Journalism Review: Samir Khader, a senior producer for the controversial Arab network, is an equally complex figure, motivated by an apparent mix of cynicism and idealism. “You can’t wage a war without news, without media, without propaganda,” he declares. Khader presses for war coverage that emphasizes its human toll, including casualties inflicted on Iraqi women and children. Nevertheless, the Iraqi-born journalist later confesses that he dreams of moving to America. “Between us,” he says, “if I am offered a job with Fox, I will take it.”

These vignettes lend Control Room an endearing quirkiness that has no doubt contributed to its popularity on the film-festival circuit. But they also underline director Jehane Noujaim’s humanistic message — about the elusiveness of objectivity, the validity of clashing points of view, and the urgent need for the Arab world and the United States to find common ground. A film essay by a journalistic outsider, Control Room focuses on both control of the news and, ironically, lack of control — most evident in the tragic bombing death of an Al Jazeera Baghdad correspondent who may or may not have been targeted by U.S. forces.

Noujaim, a young Egyptian-American filmmaker best known for co-directing Startup.com, majored in both visual arts and philosophy at Harvard, and Control Room is at least partly an epistemological meditation. At its heart is the Qatar-based and financed network that, in its eight brief years of existence, has managed to enrage both Arab dictators (who have frequently censored and suppressed it) and top U.S. officials. In Control Room, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a recurrent hectoring presence, scoring Al Jazeera for “playing propaganda” and neglecting the truth about U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Al Jazeera’s version of the truth has unquestionably won it a big following — 35 million or more viewers — on the so-called Arab street, symbolized in the film by the coffee houses of Doha, Qatar. Launched by former BBC employees, the network, as seen through Noujaim’s lens, defies easy categorization. It features decidedly untraditional female anchors and producers in Western dress, simultaneously translated interviews with non-Arab sources, and a panoply of grisly and unsettling images generally eschewed by the U.S. media: of injured Iraqis, dead U.S. soldiers, and dazed U.S. POWs. Noujaim offers no narration, but her view seems clear enough: If Al Jazeera is biased, its biases are certainly no worse, and no less understandable, than the nationalistic biases of Fox News and other U.S. outlets.

Interview with Jehane Noujaim: "Rail: I imagine reporters at Al Jazeera would definitely be motivated to think about it. But how was Al Jazeera going to help you figure it all out? They were declared enemy propagandists by the U.S., and lots of Arab leaders banned it.

Noujaim: Yeah, but if they’re hated by everybody, there has to be something interesting going on there. The people who go to Qatar, leaving state-run journalism in countries like Jordan and Sudan, to live in a desert in the middle of nowhere… you have to think that these people will be like revolutionaries. I was inspired by these people who are trying to create an understanding on both sides. I’ve spent my whole life trying to bring the two worlds together. Living back and forth between Egypt and the U.S., I was always looking at what one side thinks and then what the other side thinks. There were very different stories being told about the same subject. We forget how perspective means everything. Where you stand, I mean literally stand, means everything. I wanted to make a film about this issue of perspective.

Rail: Interestingly enough, you didn’t end up taking sides with Al Jazeera. You show Lt. Josh Rushing, who is the U.S. military’s press officer also based in Qatar, as a complex character. He speaks about being disgusted when he saw Al Jazeera’s controversial first broadcast of U.S. POWs, until he remembered that he had seen similarly graphic images of Iraqi soldiers killed the night before and hadn’t felt disgusted.

Noujaim: When I was introduced to Lt. Rushing, he basically blasted every stereotype I had about the military. I thought that they wouldn’t be able to talk about how they felt about what was going on. I was very intrigued by him. I knew he would be challenged constantly because his job was to explain the U.S. presence in Iraq to people that were very hostile to it.

He said to me, 'I wouldn’t be able to do this job if I didn’t really truly believe in what I was doing.' And I believed him when he said that. I came to respect him for engaging the other side. He didn’t give flat answers. He talked to Al Jazeera journalists for hours. He didn’t have to do that—he could have given them the military line that he had for that day.

This Blog is Five Years Old!

I came across the first post to this blog, on November 11, 2000. You can see it here.

The Innocents (1961)

Peter's Nite
Pizza, Salad, Fresh Baked Cookies

Note the crossovers with other recent movienites. Jack Clayton also directed Room at the Top. Freddie Francis (DP) shot The Elephant Man. John Mortomer also did the adaptation of Bunny Lake is Missing. Pamela Franklyn (the little girl making her debut) was the manipulative young student in The Prime of Miss Jean Brody.

New York Times Pamela Franklin bio:
Pamela Franklin was born in Japan, where her British father was a busy importer/exporter. Spending her early years in several Far East ports of call, Franklin was bundled off to England to study at the Elmhurst School of Ballet. At age 11, she made her motion-picture bow as the enigmatic "possessed" child, Flora, in 1961's The Innocents. Her American TV debut occurred in the 1963 Wonderful World of Disney two-parter "The Horse Without a Head." There was nothing Disneyesque about Franklin's portrayals of teen murderesses in both 1964's The Third Secret and 1965's Our Mother's House. Her first grown-up role (near-nude scene and all) was as the kidnap victim in Night of the Following Day (1969), but she was back to adolescents in Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) as the rebellious, sexually inquisitive private-school student Sandy. Though still active in TV, Pamela Franklin made her last film in 1976.

Bright Lights Film Journal:
Kerr’s acting, regardless of the role, had always evinced a basic sensuality (it’s what kept her from turning into another Greer Garson), and while it may be hard to believe her Miss Giddens has never engaged in our most basic of mating rituals, it’s very easy to believe that she’s been fixating on them morning, noon, and night.

Kolya (1996)

Nora's Nite
Salad with chicken

Libeled Lady (1936)

Pamela's Nite
Four cheese penne with roasted tomatoes and fresh basil and salad
Our last movenite on Willaman drive. Truly the end of an era.

Peeping Tom (1960)

Stuart's Nite
CPK Pizza Assortment, Coconut Cake

Via The Powell & Pressburger Pages:
The Archers Manifesto

As outlined by Emeric Pressburger in a letter to Deborah Kerr to explain why she should join them for The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

One, we owe allegiance to nobody except the financial interests which provide our money; and, to them, the sole responsibility of ensuring them a profit, not a loss.

Two, every single foot in our films is our own responsibility and nobody else's. We refuse to be guided or coerced by any influence but our own judgement.

Three, when we start work on a new idea we must be a year ahead, not only of our competitors, but also of the times. A real film, from idea to universal release, takes a year. Or more.

Four, no artist believes in escapism. And we secretly believe that no audience does. We have proved, at any rate, that they will pay to see the truth, for other reasons than her nakedness.

Five, at any time, and particularly at the present, the self respect of all collaborators, from star to prop-man, is sustained, or diminished, by the theme and purpose of the film they are working on. They will fight or intrigue to work on a subject they feel is urgent or contemporary, and fight equally hard to avoid working on a trivial or pointless subject. And we agree with them and want the best workmen with us; and get them. These are the main things we believe in. They have brought us an unbroken record of success and a unique position. Without the one, of course, we should not enjoy the other very long. We are under no illusions. We know we are surrounded by hungry sharks. But you have no idea what fun it is surf-bathing, if you have only paddled, with a nurse holding on to the back of your rompers.

We hope you will come on in, the water's fine.

From the screenonline biography:
Michael Powell was born in Bekesbourne, near Canterbury, Kent, on September 30 1905. He left Dulwich College to work (briefly) in a bank before his father, a hotelier on the French Riviera, secured him an introduction to the Hollywood Irish director Rex Ingram, who was working at the Victorine studios in Nice. Powell worked for Ingram as a bit-player (The Magician (US, 1926)) and general assistant, then entered the nascent British film industry as story analyst and stills photographer....
Without Pressburger (but with Leo Marks), Powell made a late masterpiece, Peeping Tom (1960), at once a lurid horror film and a profound meditation on the unhealthiness of cinema. Powell's personal investment is obvious from his own appearance as murderer Karl Boehm's blameworthy father and casting that includes a star he had made (Shearer), the daughter of another old comrade (Anna Massey) and, in a crucial role, his own son Columba. Though it attracted a torrent of critical abuse, the film probably did less harm to its director's subsequent career than his conservatively patriotic The Queen's Guards (1961), which seemed to fly in the face of the radical zeitgeist of the 60s.

Powell reunited with Pressburger for an Australian odyssey - They're a Weird Mob (Australia/UK, 1966) - and for a children's fantasy - The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972). Neither film did anything to restore Powell's reputation, and his final film, Age of Consent (1969) - also made in Australia, with James Mason and a young, often nude Helen Mirren - was misunderstood and critically maligned.

In his last twenty years, Powell was recognised by disciples and critics as a major filmmaker, to the point where this once-despised figure now seems too comfortably swallowed by the accepted canon. But no-one greenlit the many projects he would like to have made, from The Tempest to The Fall of the House of Usher. Powell married Thelma Schoonmaker (the editor of his American champion Martin Scorsese's films) in 1984, and completed two fine volumes of autobiography. He died in Gloucestershire on February 19 1990.

Leo Marks, Cryptographer & Screenwriter:

Leo Marks, the son of a Jewish bookseller, was born in London on 24th September, 1920. Marks joined the British Army in January 1942. Trained as a cryptographer he was assigned to the Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Marks became an expert in cryptanalysis (making and breaking codes and ciphers) and eventually became head of SOE's codes and ciphers with a staff of 400 people. It was Marks's responsibility to provide agents with the ciphers with which to send information to London by radio.

These ciphers were often based on famous poems or brief passages of memorable prose such as the Lord's Prayer. Marks argued that the enemy might know the poem or the prose passage and would then be able to break the cipher. To overcome this problem Marks provided unknown poems for his agents. This included the poem The Life That I Have, that had originally been written for his girlfriend, Ruth Hambro who had been killed in an air crash in Canada. He later gave the poem as a cipher to the SOE agent Violette Szabo when she was sent to France during the war.

When agents based in Holland began sending messages without any errors, Marks suspected they had been arrested by the Gestapo. To test his theory he sent indecipherable messages to the agents. When they did not complain he knew that the short-wave morse transceivers were under the control of the Germans. His warnings were ignored by Maurice Buckmaster and agents continued to be sent to Holland where they were arrested and in most cases executed.

On 23rd June, 1943, three key members of the Prosper Network, Andrée Borrel, Francis Suttill and Gilbert Norman, were arrested by the Gestapo. Noor Inayat Khan reported back to the Special Operations Executive that she had lost contact with the rest of the group and feared they were in the hands of the Germans. Jack Agazarian, who was on leave at the time, told the SOE that if this was the case, he suspected that they had been betrayed by Henri Déricourt, a former pilot in the French Air Force, whose job it was to find suitable landing grounds and organize receptions for agents brought by air.

Gilbert Norman continued to send messages to London. Marks, was convinced that Norman was under the control of the Gestapo. Major Nicholas Bodington disagreed and persuaded Maurice Buckmaster to let him go to France to find out what had happened. Jack Agazarian was recalled from leave and the two men were taken to France.

Messages from the wireless owned by Gilbert Norman were still being sent to the Special Operations Executive in London. Instructions were passed on to Bodington by the SOE to arrange a meeting with Norman at the address he had sent them. Bodington later claimed that he and Jack Agazarian tossed to decide who should visit the address. Agazarian, who was convinced it was a trap, lost, and when he arrived at the address he was immediately arrested. Agazarian was tortured by the Gestapo for six months at Fresnes Prison before being sent to Flossenburg where he was kept in solitary confinement.

After the war Marks became a writer for stage and screen. This included writing the script for Peeping Tom. Directed by Michael Powell in 1960 it tells the story of a serial killer who films young women as he stabs them to death. Condemned as pornographic and evil, it was not shown on television until 1997.

Marks also had trouble with his autobiography Between Silk and Cyanide, that challenged the official history of the Special Operations Executive written by M.R.D. Foot. Although written in the early 1980s it was blocked by Whitehall and only appeared in 1998. He also published The Life That I Have in 1999. Leo Marks died on 15th January 2001.

Writing Peeping Tom: The script for Peeping Tom was penned by Leo Marks who recalled in Michael Powell: Interviews, "I wanted at some stage or other to do a study in scoptophilia. The idea of a young cameraman who uses his camera as a method of murder and as a symbol of murder came at the same time as thinking about doing a subject about peeping toms. I'd been introduced to Michael Powell because we wanted to do another subject altogether which was the life of Freud. But we soon discovered that another producer [John Huston] had acquired the rights and Powell said have you anything else that might interest me? So I told him the whole theme of Peeping Tom, and he listened in silence - and he has a habit of looking into the middle distance when he's interested - I didn't know it at the time, I thought it meant that he was bored - but it always means he's concentrating, and he stared into the middle distance and then he said, 'That's mine, go and write it.'"

In his autobiography, Powell remembers of Marks, "Leo was an ideal creative partner. He knew nothing about films or the theater, but a very great deal about men and women. He was malicious, inventive and unshockable." They even named their central scoptophiliac character "Mark" in homage to Marks.

And the critics went wild:
"Neither the hopeless leper colonies of East Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay nor the gutters of Calcutta -- has left me with such a feeling of nausea and depression" vented Len Mosley of the Daily Express.

The Observer's Caroline Lejeune crowed, "It's a long time since a film disgusted me as much as Peeping Tom."

Derek Hill at the Tribune topped even those with "The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer."

BBC: Actress Anna Massey collects CBE

Massey won a Bafta for her role in Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac
Actress Anna Massey has been awarded a CBE for services to drama.

Massey received the honour from the Queen during an investiture at Buckingham Palace.

The 67-year-old actress - who is best known for her Bafta-winning role in Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac - has been a stalwart of UK productions.

Her film credits include 1960's Peeping Tom, Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy in 1972, comedy The Tall Guy in 1989 and The Importance of Being Earnest in 2002.

'Wonderful tradition'

Massey - the daughter of Canadian actor Raymond Massey, best known for his role as Dr Gillespie in the TV series Dr Kildare - was named in the New Year Honours list.

"I am absolutely thrilled to receive this," she said at the time.

"It was a lovely surprise to have my name put forward. We live in a country full of tradition and this is a wonderful tradition.

"In our profession, you get quite a lot of rejections so to receive something like this is lovely."

Laura Mulvey: Peeping Tom is a summation of Powell’s life in the cinema, perhaps particularly his polemics and his disappointments. The film also suggests that there is always more to cinema than meets the eye. Powell’s project was to make visible on the screen the invisible, the intuitive, and the hidden in human life through films that were “composed” out of all the aesthetic elements of the cinema. It is the spectator’s task to decipher the hieroglyph that the voyeur may see but cannot understand.

Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)

Peter's Nite
Salad with chopped chicken, Crossont selection, Lemon Torte
Special Guest: Lisa Ottobique

All Movie Guide on Otto Preminger: Originally a law student, Otto Preminger got his first acting experience with Max Reinhardt's theater company while studying for his degree. He entered the theater as a producer and director, came to America as a director in 1935, and was hired by 20th Century Fox. After leaving the studio for Broadway at the end of the '30s, he returned in the early '40s, specializing in Nazi roles despite his Jewish faith. Preminger got back into the director's chair with Margin for Error, an adaptation of a play that he had directed on Broadway. Laura, based upon the hit novel and play by Vera Caspary, was to have been made by Rouben Mamoulian; but he was fired soon after production began, and Preminger took over finished the film, which went on to become a huge hit. The director's most important subsequent movie at Fox was Forever Amber, which failed at the box office but enhanced his reputation nonetheless.

In the early '50s, Preminger became an independent producer/director, and immediately began making a name for himself through a series of successful challenges to the restrictive production code, which forbade the use of various controversial subjects onscreen. His sophisticated comedy The Moon Is Blue broke through the barrier with regard to sexual subject matter with its relatively frank treatment of such topics as virginity and pregnancy, while The Man With the Golden Arm was the first major Hollywood film to deal with drug addiction. Preminger's Carmen Jones proved to be a critically successful venture into musicals, which led directly to being chosen by Samuel Goldwyn to direct the screen adaptation of George and Ira Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess.

Preminger's box-office record was rather scattershot during this era and included the notorious disaster Saint Joan and the hit Anatomy of a Murder.

His early-'60s movies grew in size and pretentiousness, and included such epic-length releases as Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, and In Harm's Way, but, by the middle of the decade, he had receded in ambition and success with Bunny Lake Is Missing, Skidoo, and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. The '70s saw the release of the failed thrillers Rosebud and The Human Factor. He died in 1986, several years after the onset of Alzheimer's disease brought an end to his career.

Always a flamboyant personality, Preminger was one of the more visible and better known director/producers of his era, and also became known to an entire generation of children with his portrayal of the villainous Mr. Freeze on the Batman television series.

The dark side of Preminger as Mr. Freeze: Batman Exec producer William Dozier: " Otto I had known for a long time, and he called me from New Your and said ' Bill, I must do a Batman. If I don't do a Batman, my children wont let me come home.' He hadn't acted in 17 years since Watch The Rhine on Broadway. They (guest villains) all got the same amount of money: twenty five hundred dollars. Thats what they got, period."

Adam West: Mr Freeze was out cold on the floor and Batman was supposed to run in and pick him up. In most case an unconscious actor will help the person trying to pick him or her up. They'll go with that person, move the shoulders, bend at the waist, do something, Not Otto. When I ran to pick him up, he stiffened like a sand bag and literally dug his nails into the floor. I couldn't lift two hundred pounds of resisting weight. I dropped him down and we tried again. Same thing. On the next take, my foot accidentally stepped on his hand . He yelled, but he got the message and we were able to continue. As terrible as he was, he still had enough pull in Hollywood where no one would tell him off. There are stores about him where he treated women with great disregard, commented on their breast size and would ask men if they were gay.

There is justice sometimes however, The screen Actors Guild found out he was performing and demanded $11,000 in unpaid dues. The last time he performed before Batman was in Stalag 17 (53). His disposition and general jerk attitude is the reason for the next Mr Freeze episode he was replaced with Eli Wallach.

Chris Fujiwara on Preminger: It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space." (3)It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space." (3)

The primary appeal to Reason made by every Preminger film thus acknowledges, in a second movement, its own provenance in the irrational to which, in a third, it returns. Reason is a fiction that is constructed to explain the inexplicable events of the narrative (Bunny Lake Is Missing [1965] is the ultimate demonstration of this process).

Preminger is an increasingly attractive figure. He represents the beauty, arrogance, and mystique of classical American cinema and embodies its highest values of craftsmanship and respect for the audience. He also represents - at a high level of formal complexity - a configuration of power, the visual, and loss that still defines cinematic seduction.

Chris Fujiwara on Preminger: It would be easy to say that Preminger was also an artist, but this is not precisely what needs to be said. "His enemies have never forgiven him for being a director with the personality of a producer," Andrew Sarris wrote. (1) Preminger presents himself through his works as someone essentially detached, impersonal, and objective. In his impassive long takes, different ideologies and points of view battle for dominance; his films emphasise pragmatism but gravitate toward irony, doubt, and enigma. The audience leaves Exodus, as Gary Indiana wrote, less certain about the issues surrounding the formation of the state of Israel than when it went in. (2)

To the critics of Cahiers du cinéma, Preminger was almost a mystical figure. In 1954, Angel Face and The Moon Is Blue moved Jacques Rivette to ask "What is mise en scène?" and to give this definition, which sums up what attracted the more intellectual French cineastes to American cinema: "the creation of a precise complex of sets and characters, a network of relationships, an architecture of connections, an animated complex that seems suspended in space."

The primary appeal to Reason made by every Preminger film thus acknowledges, in a second movement, its own provenance in the irrational to which, in a third, it returns. Reason is a fiction that is constructed to explain the inexplicable events of the narrative (Bunny Lake Is Missing [1965] is the ultimate demonstration of this process).

The end of a Preminger shot often has a hallucinatory, fantastic power, as if the scene, suddenly vacated by the narrative, were exposed to the threat - constantly present in Preminger - of the insignificant (cf. the smashed clock at the end of Laura and the camera peering down at a garbage can at the end of Anatomy of a Murder). At the end of the dance-hall sequence in Carmen Jones (1954), after Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge) and Joe (Harry Belafonte) have gone offscreen, the camera stays on the front of the house, through the curtained windows of which we see people dancing inside. Or, at the end of the party scene in Advise and Consent, Van Ackerman (George Grizzard) approaches the camera and beckons to his offscreen driver as the shot dissolves. The entire final section of Angel Face is a terrifying descent into nothingness. The threat of such a collapse haunts Bonjour Tristesse, with its repeated dissolves between color past and black-and-white present.

Preminger is an increasingly attractive figure. He represents the beauty, arrogance, and mystique of classical American cinema and embodies its highest values of craftsmanship and respect for the audience. He also represents - at a high level of formal complexity - a configuration of power, the visual, and loss that still defines cinematic seduction.

SAUL BASS (1920-1996): was not only one of the great graphic designers of the mid-20th century but the undisputed master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger and Martin Scorsese.

When the reels of film for Otto Preminger’s controversial new drugs movie, The Man with the Golden Arm, arrived at US movie theatres in 1955, a note was stuck on the cans - "Projectionists – pull curtain before titles".

Until then, the lists of cast and crew members which passed for movie titles were so dull that projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. But Preminger wanted his audience to see The Man with the Golden Arm’s titles as an integral part of the film.

The movie’s theme was the struggle of its hero - a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra - to overcome his heroin addiction. Designed by the graphic designer Saul Bass the titles featured an animated black paper-cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it – rather than Frank Sinatra’s famous face - as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.

That cut-out arm caused a sensation and Saul Bass reinvented the movie title as an art form. By the end of his life, he had created over 50 title sequences for Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, John Frankenheimer and Martin Scorsese. Although he later claimed that he found the Man with the Golden Arm sequence "a little disappointing now, because it was so imitated".

Even before he made his cinematic debut, Bass was a celebrated graphic designer. Born in the Bronx district of New York in 1920 to an emigré furrier and his wife, he was a creative child who drew constantly. Bass studied at the Art Students League in New York and Brooklyn College under Gyorgy Kepes, an Hungarian graphic designer who had worked with László Moholy-Nagy in 1930s Berlin and fled with him to the US. Kepes introduced Bass to Moholy’s Bauhaus style and to Russian Constructivism.

After apprenticeships with Manhattan design firms, Bass worked as a freelance graphic designer or "commercial artist" as they were called. Chafing at the creative constraints imposed on him in New York, he moved to Los Angeles in 1946. After freelancing, he opened his own studio in 1950 working mostly in advertising until Preminger invited him to design the poster for his 1954 movie, Carmen Jones. Impressed by the result, Preminger asked Bass to create the film’s title sequence too.

Now over-shadowed by Bass’ later work, Carmen Jones elicited commissions for titles for two 1955 movies: Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife, and Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch. But it was his next Preminger project, The Man with the Golden Arm, which established Bass as the doyen of film title design.

Over the next decade he honed his skill by creating an animated mini-movie for Mike Todd’s 1956 Around The World In 80 Days and a tearful eye for Preminger’s 1958 Bonjour Tristesse. Blessed with the gift of identifying the one image which symbolised the movie, Bass then recreated it in a strikingly modern style. Martin Scorsese once described his approach as creating: "an emblematic image, instantly recognisable and immediately tied to the film".

In 1958’s Vertigo, his first title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock, Bass shot an extreme close-up of a woman’s face and then her eye before spinning it into a sinister spiral as a bloody red soaks the screen. For his next Hitchcock commission, 1959’s North by Northwest, the credits swoop up and down a grid of vertical and diagonal lines like passengers stepping off elevators. It is only a few minutes after the movie has begun - with Cary Grant stepping out of an elevator - that we realise the grid is actually the façade of a skyscraper.

Equally haunting are the vertical bars sweeping across the screen in a manic, mirrored helter-skelter motif at the beginning of Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. This staccato sequence is an inspired symbol of Norman Bates’ fractured psyche. Hitchcock also allowed Bass to work on the film itself, notably on its dramatic highpoint, the famous shower scene with Janet Leigh.

More on Saul Bass: One marked characteristic of the Bass title is that its images undergo a journey whereby they are transformed into the unexpected. A famous example is the flower petal in the opening sequence to Bonjour Tristesse, which transforms several times before resolving into a teardrop. In the opening to Hitchcock's North by Northwest, bars of text ascend and descend, mimicking elevators in motion, white lines invade the screen, simulating the grid pattern in the skyscraper that dominates the opening shot. Another of Bass's famed transformations is the eyeball that swirls into the vortex at the opening of Vertigo.

Saul Bass. Did I actually make l1 films with Preminger? After the sixth, I stopped counting. Otto had a vision. A true artistic, visual vision. He believed that he knew what he knew and he believed that what he knew, together with what would come out of our work, was worth defending to the death. He also had the bullheadedness to take that position and the clout to pull it off. Stanley Kubrick is that way too, but I don't know anybody else quite like it. There are many directors today who have enormous clout, but they don't have a graphic vision. They care about the advertising, but they don, t start with a point of view. And if they have a point of view, they're not sure enough about it, or don't care enough to make a federal case out of it. You can see the result in the state of film graphics and advertising today. In many cases the advertising is quite effective, but ultimately, unmemorable.

When I began to do titles many many years ago - the dark ages, when designers lived in caves - I went through a very intense learning experience with some extraordinary film-makers. I'm referring to the Wylers, the Wilders, the Hitchcocks, and the Premingers. It was an extraordinary experience, cutting your eye teeth within that framework. So I began thinking about what to do at the beginning of a film. Obviously, the point of any title is to support the film. As you know, I created a lot of stuff, which, it would be fair to say, constituted a reinvention of the film title.

My initial thoughts about what a title could do was to set mood and to prime the underlying core of the film, s story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it.

I had a strong feeling that films really began on the first frame. This was, of course, back when titles were strictly typography - mostly bad typography - and constituted the period when people were settling in, going to restrooms, or involved in chitchat. I just felt that this was a period that could work for the film. Otto Preminger agreed with me and we took a shot at it.

My actual entry into film began when Otto asked me to design a title for The Man with the Golden Ann. This opportunity grew out of my having designed the original graphic symbol for the film. The symbol for the film turned out to be about as difficult to accept as the film itself. It also broke from the general point of view about how you sold films. The notion that a single visual element, good, bad, or indifferent, could become a statement for a film is not a notion that existed before The Man with the Golden Arm. Before that period, almost all film ads, no, all film ads, used a potpourri approach. Advertisers threw everything into the pot, using the theory that, as a filmgoer, you would find something in the ad that would inspire you to see the film. I used to call this the "See, See, See" approach: See the missionaries boil in oil. See the virgins dancing in the temple of doom. See Krakatoa blow its to - that kind of thing. If you didn't like one image, you'd like another. The idea of having a film expressed within the framework of one single, reductive statement was a very daring notion in the 50s. It was a particularly scary notion for distributors and filmmakers alike. You were saying, of course, that you could make one statement that would be sufficiently provocative and true to the film, and that would sell the film. At the time, and this was to Otto's credit, he didn't flinch when this occurred.

New York Times: Cleveland-born Keir Dullea found himself in the thick of Manhattan's intellectual scene when his parents took over the management of a Greenwich Village bookstore. Dullea attended Rutgers and San Francisco State, then launched his acting career in regional theater. He made a spectacular film debut in The Hoodlum Priest (1961), playing a born-to-hang juvenile delinquent.

He was more sympathetic but no less emotionally disturbed in 1962's David and Lisa; as late as 1965, he was still playing mentally unstable youths in films like Bunny Lake is Missing. The biggest film hit with which Dullea was associated was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in which he played the time-and-space-travelling astronaut Bowman. He repeated this characterization (and answered several of the questions posed by 2001) in the 1984 sequel 2010. Though he'd been active on the New York stage in the 1950s, Keir Dullea did not appear on Broadway until 1970, when the 34-year-old actor portrayed a twentysomething blind man in Butterflies are Free.

Cinematographer Denys Coop: Entered film industry at the age of 16 under apprenticeship to Freddie Young at Elstree Studios. Worked at Pinewood Studios and Denham Studios. Served in the Fleet Air Arm. Was transferred to the Army Kinematograph Service near the end of WW2. Re-entered the industry at Shepperton Studios under contract to Alexander Korda. Became freelance in 1956. Ph commercials dir by Dick Clement, Tom Bussmann, a.o. Was member and president of the BSC.

Awards: BAFTA Film Award nom [1964] for 'Billy Liar'; BAFTA Film Award nom [1965] for 'King and Country'; BAFTA Film Award nom [1967] for 'Bunny Lake Is Missing'; 'Oscar' AA 'Special Achievement Award' [1978; shared] & BAFTA 'Michael Balcon Award' [1979; shared] for 'Superman'.

'Kordas, Reeds and (especially) visiting Yanks - it reads like a potted history of better class British cinema. Unfortunately there is no better class British cinema any more, and Coop now films boring asylums and other vaults of horror. And there is also the question of the colour. Without wishing to put down Coop's recent colour work too drastically, it hasn't even remotely matched the perfectly measured blacks and whites of 'Bunny Lake Is Missing' or the additional greys of 'King & Country' and 'This Sporting Life'. British cinema will no doubt stick to the belief that colour and only colour is beautiful. Obviously, this is no fault of Coop's and quite probably he regrets the situation as much as we do.' [Markku Salmi in Film Dope, No. 8, October 1975.]

Screenonline on John Mortimer: Educated at Harrow and Oxford, barrister-author John Mortimer has had one of the most eclectically prolific careers of any British writer of the latter half of the 20th century. Most famous now as the creator of TV's irascible Rumpole of the Bailey (ITV, 1978-79, 1983, 1987-88, 1991, 1992), he also wrote such other series as Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981), one of TV's greatest succès d'estime, and Paradise Postponed (ITV, 1986), as well as the autobiographical stage play, Voyage Round My Father (1971, with Alec Guinness; on TV, 1982, with Laurence Olivier).

His cinema work has been comparatively limited: as a scriptwriter with the Crown Film Unit during WW2, he worked on such films as Children on Trial (d. Jack Lee, 1946); he contributed dialogue to Ferry to Hong Kong (d. Lewis Gilbert, 1959) and The Innocents (d. Jack Clayton, 1961); two of his plays were adapted to the screen, Lunch Hour (by himself) and The Dock Brief (both d. James Hill, 1962); and he wrote several other screenplays over a long period, including the surprisingly sentimental Tea with Mussolini (UK/Italy, d. Franco Zeffirelli, 1999).

He married two women called Penelope: the first the novelist Penelope [Fletcher] Mortimer (b.North Wales, 1918) with whom he co-wrote the screenplay for Bunny Lake Is Missing (d. Otto Preminger, 1965) and whose novel, The Pumpkin Eater, was filmed in 1964 (d. Jack Clayton); the second Penelope Glossop, mother of Emily Mortimer. He was made a CBE in 1986 and knighted in 1998.