Cruel Britannia (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jan 03, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Ted Hooker/Jack Cardiff/Freddie FrancisRelease Date(s)
1971/1973/1974 (October 29, 2024)Studio(s)
Harbour Productions/Fanfare Films, Ltd./Glendale Film Productions (Vinegar Syndrome)- Film/Program Grade: See Below
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
The amusingly-titled Cruel Britannia brings a trio of hard-to-see obscurities from Britain, horror pictures not made by Hammer or Amicus or Tigon, but by lesser, forgotten indies. Of the three titles—Crucible of Terror (1971), Penny Gold (1973), and Craze (1974)—I had only seen Craze, and that was 30-some years ago on VHS (in preparation for an interview with that film’s producer, Herman Cohen). Crucible of Terror is quite terrible, and has the weakest of the three video transfers, but Penny Gold isn’t half-bad, and Craze offers the same kind of loopy amusement as I Was a Teenage Frankenstein and Konga, Cohen’s earlier, notorious features.
Crucible of Terror, by far the weakest of the three titles, has struggling art dealer John Davies (James Bolam) at last finding some success selling works acquired through Michael Clare (Ronald Lacey), the bitter, alcoholic son of reclusive Cornwall artist Victor Clare (Mike Raven), whom in the film’s pre-title sequence is shown creating a statue by pouring molten metal over the unconscious body of a young woman, forever encasing her in bronze. Michael, for his part, has actually stolen the statue, the artist not having exhibited any of his work since the war.
Desperate for more of Victor’s art, John and Michael, along with their wives, Millie Davies (Mary Maude) and Jane Clare (Beth Morris), travel to Cornwall, where Victor operates out of a small house and studio that sits atop an abandoned tin mine. Victor lives there with Marcia (Judy Matheson), his regular model, and Dorothy (Betty Alberge), Victor’s once beautiful wife, now disheveled and acting like an idiot child.
From here, the movie essentially becomes a proto-slasher/body count horror film, with someone gruesomely knocking off the guests one per reel. Though Victor is the obvious suspect because of that pre-credits sequence, it’s clearly not him, and the picture’s resolution seems almost arbitrary and makes no sense at all.
Partly, the film was intended as a vehicle for would-be horror star Mike Raven, a former DJ and in real life something of an eccentric not far removed from his character here. He was featured as Count Karnstein in Hammer’s Lust for a Vampire and Amicus’s I, Monster, and after this production appeared in Disciple of Death his last film. Clearly, Hammer cast Raven because of his resemblance to Christopher Lee—Raven has a similar facial structure, particularly Lee’s eyes—but Raven also had Karloff’s lisp and a speaking voice that, when agitated, suggests Daffy Duck with an English accent. He was dubbed in Lust for a Vampire, and his real voice in Crucible of Terror hints at why his career stalled almost as soon as it had begun. He’s not much of an actor, either.
However, even in the cheapest of British films from this period, fine actors were easy to come by. James Bolam, a TV star since the 1960s best-known in Britain for his sitcoms and, internationally, for the series New Tricks, is good as the more-or-less protagonist. Ronald Lacey was equally busy, though his oily, unusual features generally limited his roles to eccentrics and villains; he’s remembered as the Peter Lorre-like Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It’s interesting to see them working in their early middle-age, and even then were obviously better actors than the amateurish Raven. In an odd bit of discontinuity, Bolam must have paid a visit to the dentist midway through production: in the opening scenes he’s missing several teeth while others have ugly fillings, etc., but in later scenes shows off a pearly-white set of perfect choppers. Horror fans will also note Melissa Stribling in the cast. The widow of director Basil Dearden, she played Mina Holmwood in Hammer’s original Dracula. (Film rating: D+)
It’s a little disconcerting watching cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s stunning Technicolor cinematography one minute, as featured in Made in Britain: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, and, in another, Cardiff as director slumming through the likes such a low-budget thriller as Penny Gold (1973). Actually, the film is far from terrible; it has a mostly good cast of British veteran actors and an okay, sometimes clever script. I was easily able to guess the crux of its mystery, though writers David D. Osborn and Liz Charles-Williams took the expected twist ending one step further, which I hadn’t anticipated.
The picture is something like a missing link between the Merton Park-produced Edgar Wallace short features produced a decade earlier, and grittier British TV cop shows like the very entertaining The Sweeney made soon after. Detective Inspector Matthews (James Booth of Zulu) and his partner, Detective Sergeant Rogers (Nicky Henson) investigate the brutal murder of model Diane Blachford, her face bludgeoned beyond recognition at a modeling studio where she worked.
Though his superiors dismiss the murder as a simple robbery-gone-wrong, Matthews quickly determines the murder is somehow connected to her estranged twin sister, Delphi (Francesca Annis) and their stepfather, (Joseph O’Connor, Mr. Brownlow in Oliver!), wealthy stamp collectors, they particularly coveting a priceless stamp known as the “Penny Gold,” of which only one is known to survive since the war.
Produced on a budget not much more than the later Hammer or Carry On films, Penny Gold is the type of film that, with a slightly bigger budget and a bit more care might have been a nifty little neo-noir. As it is it’s not bad, but the rushed production compromises its effectiveness. Instead of sets, almost everything is shot, interiors as well as exteriors, at real locations, and apparently there wasn’t money to properly loop a lot of dialogue in dire need of re-looping. In one scene, Matthews is chatting with (former?) superior Jones (Joss Ackland) while they play racquetball, and the audio is so cacophonous one can hardly make out what they’re saying. John Scott, a composer who mostly wrote music for low-budget British films at the time, was capable of good work, but his score here sounds just as rushed as the rest of the picture.
James Booth was a decent enough actor, never quite the star he perhaps should have been but who, like Annis, always seemed to find work, including on American television and the occasional Hollywood feature (Brannigan, Airport ’77, etc.). Perhaps only the embarrassment of riches of British leading men of his generation (Michael Caine, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole) left him more with a career comparable to someone like Edward Judd than what he was capable of. He’s not bad, either.
The trainspotting-like cast overflows with familiar faces, including Una Stubbs as Matthews’s wife, Sue Lloyd as a model, Marianne Stone as a housekeeper, Penelope Keith as a stamp collector, and, in his film debut, John Rhys-Davies as a rugby player. (Film Rating: B-)
Craze (1974) returns producer Herman Cohen and co-writer Aben Kandel to their 1950s exploitation roots. Though Cohen occasionally deviated from formula, the plurality of his movies worked from the same central premise: a crazed older man (often a scientist) dominates a helpless, subservient and handsome young man, who acts as either an unwitting partner or instrument of the older man’s gruesome serial murders, films including Cohen’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, How to Make a Monster, Konga, and others. Cohen himself was, reportedly, homosexual, and these stories had a rather obviously gay (if also sadistic) subtext. Reworked again for Craze, Cohen’s final film, this subtext is even more obvious than before; it’s pretty clear nutter antiques dealer Neal Mottram (Jack Palance) and live-in “assistant” Ronnie (Martin Potter, the star of Fellini Satyricon) are lovers.
Mottram worships The Infernal Idol—the name of Henry Seymour’s original story—a large wooden statue of the African god Chuku, occasionally holding ceremonies with other worshipers in his antique shop’s storage room basement. After killing a witch (Kathleen Byron, light years from Black Narcissus), Mottram discovers this human sacrifice has made Chuku happy, the god rewarding him with a handful of gold coins he immediately finds after, tucked away in a drawer of a forgotten antique.
Hungry for more riches, Mottram begins a killing spree targeting young women (including Julie Ege) and his wealthy, doddering Aunt Louise (Edith Evans). For the latter, he sets up an air-tight alibi wooing an old girlfriend, Dolly Newman (Diana Dors). The police, led by Det. Inspector Wall (Michael Jayston) and Det. Sgt. Russet (Percy Herbert), are baffled by the gruesome, ritualistic murders, but Wall is certain the cocky, confident Mottram is the killer.
Michael Gough, Cohen’s go-to guy for over-the-top crazies since Cohen’s move to England, must have been busy that week, yet Jack Palance fills Gough’s shoes perfectly. Where Gough played such parts with an unpardonably hammy shrillness, Palance plays Mottram as a seething, wild-eyed lunatic, with Palance’s signature malevolence, like a panther ready to rip your head off at any moment. Played with utter sincerity despite Craze’s ludicrous script, Palance is very enjoyable to watch.
With British cinema at its lowest ebb in 1974, Cohen was able to pack the film with major actors. Michael Jayston had only recently starred in the lavish Nicholas and Alexandra, Hugh Griffith (as Aunt Louise’s solicitor) was an award-winning character star of hugely successful films like Ben-Hur, Tom Jones, and Oliver! Trevor Howard, of The Third Man and Brief Encounter, among many other great films, appears as Jayston’s superior at Scotland Yard. And on and on. Few pictures this crummy have so much A-list talent.
Director Freddie Francis was a better cinematographer (of such films as The Innocents and The Elephant Man) than he was a director, though in that latter capacity he was mostly limited to horror films. It’s competently made, slightly better than most cheap British productions of the mid-‘70s, but not by much. The screenplay is absurd, but it crudely conforms to the murder-a-reel exploitation form efficiently enough. In one of the murders, Palance briefly wears a scary rubber mask which may have been the same one worn by Peter Cushing at the beginning of Hammer’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed! (1969). (Film rating: C+)
Vinegar Syndrome’s compact Cruel Britannia places Penny Gold and Crucible of Terror on one disc while Craze and the bulk of the extra features are found on the second. All three films are presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, with Craze and Penny Gold looking great, remastered in 4K from the original 35mm camera negatives, while Crucible of Terror is derived from a 2K scan of a 35mm vault positive. It’s watchable, but lacks the crisp detail of the other transfers, drawn from original negatives. It also has the weakest audio, with all three DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono, with optional English subtitles provided on these Region-Free discs.
The bountiful supplements consist of audio commentaries on all three films by Kim Newman and Stephen Jones (Crucible of Terror and Craze), and Newman and Barry Forshaw (Penny Gold). A second commentary track on Craze features David Del Valle and David De Coteau. Video features include interviews with actors Judy Matheson (Crucible of Terror), Richard Heffer (Penny Gold), and an archival, career-spanning interview with the late Michael Jayston, that running 50 minutes compared with the 10-minute lengths of the others.
While none of these could be considered lost classics, Craze is amusingly over-the-top and ridiculous, with Jack Palance fun to watch, and Penny Gold isn’t a bad little film that could have been better with more time and care than was available to its makers. Crucible of Terror is awful, but not without interest, and to see these pictures at all is welcome. Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV