| DEUX ANGLAISES ET LE CONTINENT : Robert Fuest's 'And Soon the Darkness' (1970) [5/10] |
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| Saturday, 24 June 2006 | |
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Back in the late sixties, the team behind TV smash The Avengers (including producer/writer Brian Clemens and director Robert Fuest) decided to branch out with a big-screen project. After initially attempting to get an Avengers movie off the ground (we had to wait until 1998 for that notorious Ralph Fiennes / Uma Thurman debacle) the gang then decided to try something completely different: a straight, non-campy thriller/chiller about two English girls on a cycling holiday in the French countryside who are stalked by a psychopath. The result was And Soon the Darkness, a disappointingly lukewarm affair which suggests that Clemens and Fuest were better suited to tongue-in-cheek material - an assessment supported by the latter's deliriously OTT pair of Dr Phibes pictures which followed soon after. He does his best with Clemens' script (co-written with Dalek creator Terry Nation), but the cast of characters is simply too small to maintain our interest: there are only two potential victims (one of whom is offed around the halfway mark), and a very small number of potential culprits. What transpires therefore feels padded-out (even at what should theoretically be a brisk 95 minutes) and repetitive, building a rather rushed and clumsy twist climax. Performances are also somewhat patchy, although there's nothing wrong with the two female leads, Pamela Franklin (with her bobbed hair, looking a bit like Avengers star Linda Thorson) and Michele Dotrice (strikingly resembling a young Joan Allen here, and given an infinitely sexier role than her best-known character of Betty from Some Mothers Do 'ave 'em) as well-spoken twentyish nurses Jane and Cathy - the fact that both share names with Bronte heroines is presumably intended as a rather high-falutin' in-joke (Fuest's previous picture had been a badly-received version of Wuthering Heights.) The supporting turns are more mannered and/or hammy, with Hungarian Sandor Eles (who over a decade found a measure of fame as Crossroads' smarmy Paul Ross) required to glower behind sinister/trendy shades as 'Paul' - who may or may not be a surete agent and whose menacing demeanour and behaviour consistently hover at the edge of caricature. He's much more bearable than the other (mainly non-French) actors playing the various hicks encountered by an increasingly-distraught Jane after Cathy goes missing: John Nettleton as a seemingly-kindly gendarme, Hana-Maria Pravda and Claude Bertrand as a farming couple and John Franklyn, gratingly annoying in his mercifully-brief appearances as Nettleton's aged war-veteran papa. It doesn't help that this lot converse in a kind of French which sounds very much like literally-translated English sentences rather than dialogue which paysans might actually speak (as when the gendarme says he will have "une verre de rouge"). This gives proceedings a somewhat unfortunate whiff of 'Allo 'Allo on occasion, especially when the 'French' characters attempt to speak heavily-accented English for the benefit of the monolingual Jane - "Je ne compris pas," is about the limit of her range - though it was a good idea to dispense with subtitles, thus placing non-Francophone viewers very much in Jane's chaussures. This 'Englishwoman abroad' stuff does, however, become more interesting if the political background of the picture is taken into account: filming took place in 1969, shortly after the resignation of French President de Gaulle removed the main obstacle to the UK's joining what was then the European Community (formerly EEC, now EU). Not that any British voter watching And Soon the Darkness would come away thinking that greater ties with le continent were a particularly good idea - and as Danny Peary notes in Guide for the Film Fanatic, "if Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda convinced hippies not to cycle through America's South [in Easy Rider], then... Franklin and Dotrice should convince young woman not to bicycle through the French countryside." It would seem unwise to take And Soon the Darkness quite so seriously, however - it's a modest enough little chiller whose main impetus seems to have been to get as far away as possible from the standard Gothic horror settings so beloved of British studios like Hammer and company. As Hitchcock showed with the legendary "crop-duster" sequence North By Northwest, an apparently "empty" countryside can hold just as much suspense and terror as the most byzantine and claustrophobic haunted house - perhaps more so (the film can also perhaps be read as a pre-echo of George Sluizer's Spoorloos - it's interesting that a previous victim of the killer happened to be a Dutch girl, although it's unfortunate that Clemens and Nation seem to think that 'Jan' is a woman's name in the Netherlands.) If Clemens, Nation and Fuest were performing an "experiment in fear" with their picture - set over the course of one sunny day - it can only be judged the most qualified of successes: pulling off one single sequence, as Hitchcock did, is one thing, but stretching it out to feature length is quite another. Fuest does get some opportunities to show off the visual flair for which his Avengers and Phibes work were both noted - when the characters enter shadowy, indoors environments very late on - but Darkness doesn't play to his strengths. The pace is allowed to slacken far too often, despite the best efforts of Laurie Johnson's frenetic score to valiantly persuade us that what we're watching is a taut, urgent thriller rather than a slow, underdeveloped curio. Neil Young 24th June, 2006 AND SOON THE DARKNESS : [5/10] : UK 1970 : Robert FUEST : 95 mins (timed) seen at Pictureville cinema, National Museum of Photography Film and Television, Bradford (UK)- 'Fantastic Films Weekend', 17th June 2006 - public show (paid £0.00 - complimentary ticket)
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