Plans to bring Leicester's Il Rondo back to life

The Leicester Mercury has a story, but doesn't know the half of it:

New live music venue hopes for former board game cafe in Leicester city centre

An empty unit in Leicester city centre could be given a new lease of life as a late-night entertainment venue.

Generic Leisure Ltd has lodged an application seeking a licence for indoor sports events, plays, films, and live and recorded music at the site at 22 Silver Street.

Former board game cafe be damned. This was once Il Rondo, where some of the top Sixties bands played, naming it as their favourite venue in the city. 

It's the large red-brick building in the thumbnail above – play the video to hear more about its history. 

For many years it housed a branch of the Italian restaurant chain Prezzo. That occupied the ground floor: I'm told the stage and dancefloor are still in place upstairs.

The Malcolm Arcade stands on the site of what was once The Royal Opera House, Leicester.

Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood: Some Velvet Morning

The most 1967 track of all? More 1967 than David Hemmings Happens?

These random paragraphs from a Believer article by Madeleine Watts may explain what is going on:

Nancy Sinatra had, until the mid-sixties, been the favorite daughter of her famous father and a mediocre pop singer without a hit. Hazlewood changed that. He wrote “These Boots Are Made For Walking” for Nancy. He wrote “Sugar Town” for Nancy. And he wrote “Some Velvet Morning,” a song that Rolling Stone, The Daily Telegraph and other publications have called one of the greatest duets ever recorded.

Phaedra is a woman who loses her reason. In Euripides’ version of the story, Aphrodite compels her to fall in love with her stepson, Hippolytus—but Hippolytus spurns her advances. When Phaedra can no longer bear the guilt and the force of her feelings, she takes her own life. Full of fury, Phaedra leaves behind a note telling her husband, Theseus, that Hippolytus, has raped her. But Hippolytus never touched her.

Before Nancy, Lee Hazlewood was a cowboy of sorts. Born in Oklahoma to an oil wildcatter and a housewife, he grew up in Arkansas, Louisiana, and, finally, Texas. After serving in the Korean War, Hazlewood landed a job as a late-night radio DJ in Phoenix, Arizona. There, he started the label Viv, signing the twangy instrumentalist Duane Eddy and writing and producing tracks like “The Fool” for Sanford Clark and Al Casey’s “Surfin’ Hootenany.” In 1963, Hazlewood moved to Los Angeles and recorded his first solo record at Western Studios, Trouble Is A Lonesome Town. It was a concept album that told the stories of the residents of Trouble, hard-bitten songs laden with all the misfit character and southern gothic ennui of a Carson McCullers novel, and all the cheap sentiment of bad Hollywood Westerns. It sounded, and sounds, like nothing else. 

The velvet morning that is promised in Hazlewood’s song is predicated on the male vocalist being “straight.” But straight can mean a great many things.

Straight: Not crooked, direct, undeviating, in unbroken sequence. Of a person, well-conducted, steady. Of a drug-user, high.

In his essay 'Old Songs in New Skins,' Greil Marcus suggests, “One of the ways songs survive is that they mutate…. Sometimes this happens subtly, around the margins, in soundtracks or commercials. The song is moved just slightly off the map we normally use to orient ourselves – but in a way that, in a year or ten, may completely change how we hear it, what associations we bring to it. Pop songs are always talked about as the soundtrack to our lives, when all that means is that pop songs are no more than containers for nostalgia. But lives change and so do soundtracks, even if they’re made up of the same songs.” 

Maggie Smith: "I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey"

Here's the late great Dame Maggie Smith being interviewed by Mark Lawson in 2017. They talk about Alan Bennett, the fame brought by Downton Abbey and the awfulness of waiting on a Harry Potter set in a silly hat.

I remember a remark by David Hemmings to the effect that anyone can learn to act, the harder thing is learning to wait.

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Andrew Chandler makes a Liberal case for the right to die with dignity: "There’s a peculiar cruelty in forcing someone to live in unbearable pain for the comfort of others."

Last year, Ofsted investigations revealed the existence of more than 900 mostly single-occupant illegal children’s homes in England, over six times the number it had found three years earlier. And The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found a council spending £29,000 per week to place a vulnerable 10-year-old in one of them.

Keith Frankish, a philosopher looks at what it is that large language models are doing. (The link will download a pdf.)

"While cranes have been elevated by rarity, gulls were once quasi-angelic, their clinging to inhospitable coastal rocks evoking the monks who established their cells at the extreme edges of these islands. Now diminished in popular perception, they are seen as gutter-life, scavengers on the trash-tides of our consumerism." Amy-Jane Beer reviews The Cuckoo's Lea by Michael Warren - "a magical ornithological history of Britain."

"The third 'fun fact' about Truro Cathedral is that it’s one of three Cathedrals in the UK with three spires. This is bollocks. I have no idea why people say this. There are four spires. I will elaborate later, but I have become a Spire Truther." Jay Hulme looks round - and climbs - Truro Cathedral.

Film-Authority.com watches the 1977 British thriller The Squeeze: "[Michael] Apted died not so long ago, and while his obituaries found much to discuss in his ground-breaking 7 Up documentary series, or his Bond movies, his first feature film is a fearsome beast, recommended but with the strongest of warnings; this really ain’t a pretty sight."

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"Part of this is down to the increasing centralisation of politics. The prime minister’s role has expanded dramatically over the decades, and cabinet government has been a fiction for a long time (Nigel Lawson claimed that cabinet meetings were the only time during the week that he got a rest). Even minor departmental decisions now have to be signed off by the centre and slotted into a communications grid." Sam Freedman on the rise and rise of political advisers.

Luke McGee suspects Putin is up against his biggest opponent yet - Trump's ego: "Trump clearly wants something that looks like a peace deal so he can show off what a great negator he is. If Trump now sees Putin as the block to a deal, that is a problem for Putin, as he has to make a choice between looking weak domestically or losing whatever goodwill he had with Trump’s White House."

"Yes, Pecksniff and Trump are bullshit artists of the highest order and neither ever experiences the least bit of remorse." Robin Bates argues that Charles Dickens, with Mr Pecksniff from Martin Chuzzlewit, anticipated Donald Trump.

Ray Newman watches Some People, which was made in Bristol in 1962 with a young cast including Ray Brooks and David Hemmings: "The church opened in 1956 and was typical of the space age houses of worship built on overspill estates all over the country in the post-war period. Unfortunately, though it looked astonishing, it was plagued with structural problems and was demolished in 1994, which only adds to the value Some People holds as a record of a time and place."

Benjamin Poore says that Shostakovich spoke truth to power - both Nazi and Communist - through his Babi Yar Symphony.

"Without any particular training, the animals - like human babies - appear to pick up basic human language skills just by listening to us talk. Indeed, cats learn to associate images with words even faster than babies do." Christa Lesté-Lasserre discusses a study that supports my view that cats are much cleverer than they choose to show us.

Michael Crawford paints a picture of the young David Hemmings

This blog's hero David Hemmings first made his name as a singer, being the first boy to play Miles in Benjamin Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.

One of the boys he beat to the role was Michael Ingram, who is known to us as Michael Crawford. Later, they were to alternate the role of Sammy in an English Opera Group tour of Britten's Let's Make an Opera.

In his memoirs Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied with String, Crawford paints a picture of Hemmings in those days:

David Hemmings ... was more precocious, and far more adventurous than I would ever have dreamt of being. When I was fourteen, David was fourteen going on 30! He was always disappearing into the bathroom with his girlfriend: I imagined that they were 'doing it', but I didn't have the faintest idea what 'doing' it entailed. David was a gentleman, never indulging in locker-room confidences. Still, we all knew that whatever it was he and his girl were doing behind the bathroom door, you could bet your life that she'd emerge with a smile on her face.

In fact David would arrive anywhere as if he had just come from doing it. He had a rolling gait like Robert Mitchum's in Build My Gallows High, and had the upturned collar too. His voice was always a little deeper than mine: he sounded as though he'd been smoking from birth. 'I think it's bloody,' he'd say. It was his favourite phrase - he said it about everything. It's difficult to appreciate just how cool that phrase sounded. He was everything I wanted to be. 

Whenever there was a woman around he was there first. And what a dancer! I remember he moved his hips a lot inside his very sharp trousers. David was doing the lambada before anyone ever thought of it. I admired him enormously. Looking back now, I think David was in the process of re-inventing himself - he was standing outside himself, trying on new personalities for size, tongue in cheek all the while.

At the end of the tour I was sent back to Oakfield kicking and screaming all the way. Predictably, I returned to the classroom as David Hemmings, swaggering in, collar turned up. First period of the day: geography. Mr Steele addresses the class. 'The Suez Crisis - what are we to make of it?'

From the back of the class I offer, 'I just think it's bloody'. My classmates turn away, sniggering loudly.

'It's bloody alright', Mr Steele agrees: 'Get out!'

Interestingly, one of Hemmings' obituaries said he seemed to be playing a different role - actor, business tycoon, director - every time you met him.

Julie Walters' first screen appearance is on YouTube - and Don Warrington is in it too

A thousand thanks to the Classic British Telly YouTube account - like and subscribe - for posting this television play from 1975

Julie Walters, in her very first screen appearance, works behind the bar in a club, while the star is Don Warrington, already famous from Rising Damp. Their exchange about education looks forward to Walters' role in Educating Rita, and once again I am left mourning the disappearance of the single television play.

As Warrington was born in Trinidad and came to England at the age of six, it was a stretch for him to play a young Jamaican man newly arrived in Handsworth. But then, in Rising Damp. Philip knew no more of Africa than Rigsby did.

Club Havana was shot by the BBC at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham and screened as part of its series Second City Firsts. It was written by Barry Reckord, a pioneering Jamaican playwright whose work was widely produced in London.

I've heard of him because on of this blog's heroes, David Hemmings, appeared in his play Skyvers at the Royal Court in the early Sixties.

There's nothing unique about the tradition that you don't reveal whodunnit in The Mousetrap

Much is made of Mousetrap omerta - the taboo against revealing the identity of the murderer in Agatha Christie's record-breaking play. But it never used to be a unique tradition.

Whodunnits were one of the staples of weekly repertory theatre, and it was common for such plays to end with one of the cast saying something like:

"We hope you enjoyed the play and will tell your neighbours about it - but please don't tell them who the killer is."

An example of this comes in one of the funnier anecdotes in David Hemmings' memoirs.

The summer of 1960 saw him in rep at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. This doesn't sound like the top of the tree for a young actor, but he was 18 and wanted to be with his first wife Jenny Lewes. This newspaper cutting comes from that summer. 

To make the sometimes very ordinary plays more fun, the cast had evolved a game where they had to pass an apple to each other without altering an action of the play. So if you had the apple, passing a letter to another actor would present a perfect opportunity for getting rid of it. And the actor left with the apple at the end of the play had to buy the first round of drinks.

In one performance of a whodunnit, Hemmings was the detective. Alone on the stage with the victim's corpse, which was under a sheet, he was giving the final speech, explaining how the murder had been done. As the corpse had the apple, he reckoned he was safe.

Suddenly, the corpse reared up, dragged itself across the stage issuing horrible guttural noises, passed the apple to Hemmings under cover of the sheet and then died again at his feet.

After that, says Hemmings, it didn't seem worth asking the audience not to reveal the ending of the play - it would never end that way again.

If you do want to know the murderer in The Mousetrap, there's Wikipedia. Or you can listen to Tom Holland blurt it out in one of the better editions of The Rest is History.

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Helen Coffey argues that The Traitors, where intelligence is a hindrance that should be hidden at all costs, is a metaphor for society's increasing suspicion towards, and rejection of, intellect, especially when it comes to those in charge.

"It’s really nice when we get people through the yard – the positives far outweigh the negatives ... Farms are very isolated places. It used to be tens of people working on this farm and now it’s just me and my husband." Patrick Barkham meets some of the growing number of farmers who are joining forces with right-to-roam campaigners to boost public access to the countryside.

Harriett Baldwin, a former chair of the treasury select committee, argues that the power afforded to 11 Downing Street can have unintended and negative consequences for democracy.

"For some, school meals evoke memories of austerity and control, as in Daniel’s recollections of being forced to eat everything on his plate. For others, they represent moments of community and care, as Julia’s experience of encouraging her children to embrace school dinners illustrates." Heather Ellis and Isabelle Carter introduce their oral history project on school meals.

"What 1969-70 means is loads of background (and foreground) material beginning with Steve Winwood’s involvement in Blind Faith and ending with King Crimson’s third album, Lizard. Among those featuring heavily are Spooky Tooth, Free and Mott the Hoople, three classic early Island rock bands whose largely student and mostly male following tended to sport ex-army greatcoats, along with plimsolls, loon pants and cheesecloth shirts." Richard Williams reviews the second volume of Neil Storey’s The Island Book of Records.

Casmilus watches the 1971 film Unman, Wittering and Zigo, which stars David Hemmings and is set in a minor public school: "Like all films set in such locations, it gives an insight into the early character formation of the men who play a large role in running Britain for the next 50 years."

David Hemmings in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (BBC, 1980)

Made by the BBC in 1980, this is a superior telling of the tale. It features David Hemmings in the two title roles, with support from Lisa Harrow, Ian Bannen, Clive Swift, Toyah Wilcox and Diana Dors.

The change in Hemmings when he transitions from Jekyll to Hyde is a remarkable one. The baroque facial hair of a Victorian gentleman falls away, revealing the glamorous film star beneath. A few years later Hemmings was to look more like Jekyll than Hyde in real life, but in 1980 he was still recognisable as the lead in Blow-Up.

A problem with the story is that the revelation that Jekyll and Hyde are the same man was the climax of the original story, whereas that is now the one thing that everyone knows about it. So those who adapt it have to introduce a new ending. The one here, as Jekyll loses control of when he turns into Hyde and then of what he turns into, does not disgrace the original.

And, let's face it, any film with Hemmings in is worth a look.

Eric Portman proposes a murder in West 11

Before Michael Winner became awful he was rather good. West 11, the postal district of Notting Hill at its seediest, tells the story of a drifter, played by Alfred Lynch, who falls under the influence of a criminal played by Eric Portman.

Lynch is persuaded to travel to Dorset to murder Portman's aunt, so that Portman will inherit her money. What could possibly go wrong?

Diana Dors plays Portman's moll and Lynch's landlady is played by Freda Jackson. In an ideal world, all films would star Eric Portman and Freda Jackson.

That's what I wrote when choosing West 11 as one of my 10 British films that should be better known. I should have mentioned that there's also a walk-on part for David Hemmings.

Here you can see Eric Portman first proposing the murder to Lynch. Portman did seedy wonderfully well later in his career.

Last Resort (2000): Paddy Considine, Margate and magic

Written for Terence Towles Canote's 11th Annual Rule, Britannia Blogathon.

I saw this film at the Renoir, an arthouse cinema near Russell Square in London, in 2001. I remember being attracted by a quote in the window, which I suspect was this one from Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review:

This is a British film with pertinent things to say about contemporary Britain, urgently and powerfully expressed in a cinematic language far from the callow, Lottery-nurtured idiom of Tepid Britannia comedy thrillers.

He might have added – as it was the year 2001 – that most of those tepid thrillers were directed by mockneys with expensive private educations.

And Bradshaw was right: Last Resort was a very good film. It offered a tender love story, political criticism and a portrait of contemporary Britain that made it seem at once familiar and strange.

Tanya (played by Dina Korzun), is a romantic Russian artist with two failed marriages behind her. She arrives at Heathrow with her 10-year-old son Artyom (Artyom Strelnikov) in tow, expecting to be met by her English fiancé. When she sees no sign of him at the airport, she panics and claims political asylum.

The authorities send Tanya and her son to a bleak seaside resort while her claim is considered - a process. she is told, that can will take “between 12 and 16 months”. Forbidden to leave the town, they are housed in a decaying tower block – the town is thick with barbed-wire fences and surveillance cameras. When Tanya finally manages to make contact with her fiancé from a phone box, he ends the relationship.

Artyom falls in with a gang of local children who smoke, drink and steal, while his mother tries to earn money from an online pornographer. When she tells the authorities she wants to withdraw her claim of asylum and go back to Russia, she is told that even this could take six months to process.

The two – first Artyom and then Tanya – are befriended by Alfie (Paddy Considine), a former prisoner who manages an amusement arcade in the town. He helps redecorate and refurnish their flat and takes them out for a day on the seafront. He and Tanya develop a romantic relationship, but she decides she has to stop dreaming and get back to Russia. (The more streetwise and cynical Artyom thinks they would be better off sticking with Alfie.)

So the three hide in a beached boat to defeat surveillance, and when the incoming tide lifts it they sail along the coast until they are well clear. Alfie arranges a lift to London for them and they part, with Tanya giving him the painting she had brought with her from Russia.

Dina Korzun and Artyom Strelnikov are both perfect for their roles, but the actor who stood out for me was Paddy Considine. I was so impressed that I will still watch a film just because he’s in it. I used to wonder what it was that was so different about him, but now suspect  it’s just that he’s a working-class actor in an industry where that has become a rarity.

A word too for Lindsay Honey, who plays the pornographer who offers Tanya work and makes him a human, even likeable, character. Honey, under the name Ben Dover, was a star of pornographic films, and is the father of Tyger Drew-Honey from Outnumbered. 

If Considine has a rival as the standout star of Last Resort, then it is Margate, the town where it was filmed. Since then, the Turner Gallery has been opened there, in the hope that it would spark an economic revival in what had once been a prosperous resort. The Dreamland pleasure park, seen lying near-derelict in Last Resort, has been revived too.

A year later, the star-packed cast of Last Orders were to arrive in Margate to shoot the final scenes of that film. One of them, David Hemmings, has been persuaded by his parents to enter a singing contest there and won it, which was the first spark of a career that saw him as a boy opera star and then a film actor and director.

Perhaps most remarkable of all is the way the film was shot by its director Pawel Pawlikowski:

When he first landed in Margate with his skeleton crew, Pawlikowski had little more than a loose semi-autobiographical story to go on. (He came to Britain from Poland with his family when he was 12). 

"Initially Alfie [played by Paddy Considine, a former boxer who made a startling screen debut in Shane Meadows's A Room for Romeo Brass] was to be a much more ambiguous, slightly threatened character, but the chemistry with Dina was magical. Paddy is a real phenomenon. 

We all lived together during the shoot, that is part of my method, so we were able to improvise scenes and come up with new ideas in the evening and over dinner. I am an insomniac, too, so I just kept writing all night sometimes. That is the way I like to work."

In other hands, you suspect, such an approach would result in a mess of a film, but Pawlikowski and his cast produced something magical.

In the 24 years since Last Resort was made, nothing has improved in the way Britain deals with asylum seekers. The last Conservative government effectively ceased processing applications at all in an attempt to stoke a sense of crisis that they hoped would benefit them at the polls.

This is what Pawlikowski found when he discovered the perfect location for his film:

"When I first when down to Margate, my first contact was with the Roma, the Gypsies, who were the only refugees really who interacted with the locals. Even with them, what struck me was how little their world extended beyond what they called Margatta. They would make epic journeys to a strange place at the far end of their known world called Greyvas End. 

"You don't have to be there long to realise that most of the asylum-seekers are clueless peasants. They are Kurds and Afghans mostly. Some have not even lived in cities before. They are all stunned, many don't move because they don't know what to do. 

"When the local Margate kids go round spitting at them, you can see their shock because they come from cultures were people have manners, where strangers receive hospitality. To me, they looked like they were living inside a Kafka story."

I will leave you with this clip of him talking about the remarkable film he made there.

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He may be writing for Conservative Home, but William Atkinson has no comfort or advice for the party in the wake of Thursday's defeats: "Well, perhaps one small suggestion. Have you tried sticking underpants on your head and pencils up your nose?"

Andrew Cockburn argues that the media has failed Julian Assange: "WikiLeaks took away the filters through which we are normally directed to view the world. Without it, we would have little idea of the number of civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan during the American invasion, or of the United States’ war crimes, such as the execution of eleven handcuffed people, including five children, in a 2006 raid on a house in Iraq."

"A 2016 study, conducted in the USA, found that just 33 per cent of employees had complete faith in their management team. And a 2008 poll found that 25 per cent of American workers considered their bosses to be outright dictators. Less than half believed their workplace fostered creativity." Joss Sheldon makes the case for workplace democracy.

Thomas Leatham on how Antonioni's 1966 Swinging London film Blow-Up destroyed censorship in Hollywood.

"Cricket of this early period required players literally to bowl the ball along the ground, hoping that a clever bounce from a speedy ball would get past the batsman; for his part, the batsman held a curved wooden bat that now brings to mind more a hockey stick than a modern cricket bat; the stumps are two in number, with a single bail balanced atop, the target being appreciably wider and squatter than the modern three-stump wicket." A Latin poem dating from 1703 gives what may be the best picture we have, says an article on Antigone.

Martin Gordon, bassist on the 1964 Sparks album Kimono My House, takes us behind-the-scenes of this classic album in the latest edition of The Strange Brew podcast. For the album's 50th anniversary, he shares details about rehearsals, studio sessions and interactions with the band members and the team involved.

David Hemmings, David Warner and Felicity Kendall in Ken Russell's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

This is a find. Ken Russell's two 1978 television films about the Wordsworths and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, co-written with Melvyn Bragg, have long been difficult to see. But both are currently on YouTube.

The first, William and Dorothy, is about the relationship between the siblings William and Dorothy Wordsworth. In its most famous scene, Dorothy faints as her brother is married. As a result, he carries her over the threshold rather than his bride.

This is the second film, which centres on Coleridge and his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As well as David Warner and Felicity Kendall as William and Dorothy from the first film, it stars this blog's hero David Hemmings.

If Hemmings chews the scenery rather, then you feel Coleridge was very like that. And his reading of Frost at Midnight to his infant son is beautiful.

My overall impression of both films is that they are much more coherent than those Russell made for the cinema in the Eighties.

Looking back on 'Satanic ritual abuse' and The Turn of the Screw

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Like the December one before it, the Christmas issue of Fortean Times has an article from the era - the late Eighties and early Nineties - when the concept of 'Satanic Ritual abuse' flourished.

Its author, Bob Rickard, is most interested in the way this modern form of witch hunting took on the ideology of the medieval form of the pastime. But I am more interested by the way a humane modern view risked turning supposed child victims into suspects.

Rickard writes:

Where Lady Butler-Sloss's 1988 inquiry into child abuse recommended that a child's allegations "should always be taken seriously", it seemed reasonable that this meant deserving a 'proper' investigation. However, some social workers and childcare professionals sought to interpret the injunction as to believe a child's account literally and as wholly factual.

If a child's account of events had such high status, it was inevitable that it would be the supposed child victims who were grilled rather than the supposed abusers. 

It felt as though what was being sought from them was not so much a witness statement as a confession. There was an anxiety or an insistence that the child should 'disclose' abuse, as it was termed, and everything from browbeating to bribery, according to Rickard's account, was used to obtain it.

I am reminded of the importance of a suspect's confession in Softly, Softly: Taskforce and the varied ways that Chief Superintendent Barlow would set about achieving it.

But. even more, I am reminded of the ending of Henry James's ghost story The Turn of the Screw. where the boy Miles has to name Peter Quint even at the cost of his own life. Whether anything untoward had really happened or it was all in the mind of the governess who narrates the story is debated to this day.

A report from the shooting of Running Scared at Braunston in 1971

Running Scared, David Hemmings' first film as a director, did not receive a general release. The consensus at the time seems to have been that it was too consciously arty for a popular audience, with Hemmings heavily influenced by Antonioni, who had directed him in Blow-Up.

This report from the making of the film appeared in the Coventry Evening Telegraph on 23 July 1971:

Hustle and bustle replace the quiet of a Rugby village. All of a sudden it is a hive of activity as strangers with sinister-looking equipment mingle with the locals.

Braunston has become the focal point of a film crew's activities. The international star David Hemmings is directing his first picture, a thriller called "Running Seared." and the canal (above) at Braunston is one of its principal locations. 

Hemmings is pictured left having a word with the actor Robert Powell who plays a leading role. Powell is better known for his role as Tobias Wren in the television series "Doomwatch." 

Chosen to double for Powell during the making of the film is Robert Smee of Braunston. They are pictured together below. 

In the bottom picture, the camera crew prepare for another take - and so the demanding business of making a movie goes on.

I have borrowed one of the photos mentioned: it shows David Hemmings and Robert Powell. You will see that Hemmings still favours white jeans some years after Blow-Up.

Among the family photographs I have inherited are some of a canal holiday from the summer of 1971, when we passed through Braunston. I must have a careful look at them.

Stage: The lost David Bowie film directed by David Hemmings

Wandering around Braunston a couple of weeks ago, I thought of Running Scared, the lost David Hemmings film that was shot there.

Released in 1972, that was his first film as director, But there was another Hemmings project from the Seventies that is never seen.

The Bowie Bible explains:

The London concerts were also filmed, and were to be part of Stage, a planned 90-minute documentary on Bowie’s Isolar II tour. Bowie and director David Hemmings hoped to have the film in cinemas later in 1978, but it was still unfinished in early 1979. ...

According to Hemmings, "At the end of it he didn’t like the cut, or he didn’t like the fact that we had to cut in between numbers in order to get all the coverage. So he never released it."

In 2000 Bowie said of the film: "I simply didn’t like the way it had been shot. Now, of course, it looks pretty good and I would suspect that it would make it out some time in the future."

This documentary includes some of the concert footage Hemmings shot as well as clips of interviews with both Hemmings and Bowie.

Jane Street-Porter can be seen dancing in the club scene in Blow-Up. Hemmings must have thought she was stalking hem.

Noel Coward, The Actors' Orphanage and The Italian Job

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Who directed The Italian Job?

I couldn't have told you until the other day, when I came across a page about the films of Peter Collinson. It has an unnerving habit of telling you what the people it mentions expired from, and Collinson himself was only 44 when he died in 1980.

Starting in television, Collinson went on to make his name as a director with two 1968 releases: Up the Junction and The Long Day's Dying. The latter, which is the most substantial David Hemmings film I've yet to see, won him the job on The Italian Job.

That seems to have been the highpoint of his career, as his later films tended to be filmed in exotic locations and star Oliver Reed, but there may be some forgotten gems among them. 

Besides, by the early Seventies there were hardly any British films being made that weren't sex comedies or adaptations of television sitcoms, so Collinson did well to maintain a directing career at all.

Collinson's life story explains the surprising but welcome presence of Noel Coward in The Italian Job.

 As that page says:

Collinson was the son of an actress and a musician who more or less abandoned him to live with his grandparents before being raised at the Actor’s Orphanage from ages eight to 14. 

Noel Coward was president of the orphanage at the time and became Collinson’s godfather, guiding him through his failure to enter the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts but into other theatre jobs, then tv and film.

It was Collinson who got Coward the role: the original plan had been to cast Nicol Williamson.

The picture above, which was taken in 1939, shows Coward entertaining some of the children at the Chertsey orphanage. There's lots about its history on the Actors' Children's Trust site.

Coward's presidency and guidance of Collinson was the subject of a radio play' Mr Bridger's Orphan, which you will find below.

I don't know how true its story of Coward as a reformer is, but the childcare charities were a force in the land early in the 20th century and did tend to favour large, barrack-like homes for their young charges.

Equally, the play's version of Coward's fellow trustee Sir Cedric Hardwicke may be a libel, but it's not unusual to find people using the privations of their own private education to make light of the mistreatment of children in care.

Rival explanations of why Blow-Up is so difficult to understand

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Part of the allure of Antonioni's 1966 'Swinging London' film Blow-Up is the feeling that, if you watch it just once more, it will give up a deeper secret.

I have come across two radically different online explanations of why the meaning of the film is so elusive.

The first is in an interview with Peter Bowles, who played the agent of the lead character Thomas the photographer. He was played by David Hemmings.

Bowles explanation runs:

I had been given the script by Antonioni, and what excited me very much was a scene I had with David, after he'd done the blow-ups and had come looking for me. I'm at a party, a very druggy party in the middle of the night, and in this scene I had a speech that was the absolute hinge of the movie, which was marvellous of course.

This scene was to be my very first night's shooting, so I arrived on set, a house in Cheyne Walk, and went into makeup. As I sat there, Piers Haggard, who was working as Antonioni's assistant, came up and said there had been some rewrites, which is quite usual on a movie. But then I saw that this speech had been cut. 

And in my innocence, and no doubt arrogance, I thought that a terrible mistake had been made. So I said to Piers that Antonioni mustn't cut that speech, that it was essential to the whole film. I demanded to talk to him about it. Piers said, "You must be joking! Nobody goes and talks to Antonioni about the cuts he's made." But I said I was sorry, but that I was serious. I threatened to walk away unless I could speak to Antonioni.

So in the end, Piers took me next door. There was Antonioni is this very large room, which he'd cleared of about 300 extras, all of whom were sitting on the stairs. He always did this after he had shot a scene, he would clear everybody out and then talk to his lighting cameraman about the next shot. Piers went in, very nervous. Then he came back and said: "Antonioni will speak to you." So I went in.

Antonioni was grace itself, quite beautifully mannered. He said, "Peter, you are worried because I have cut this speech. Could you tell me why you are so concerned?" So I launched into an explanation of why he shouldn't cut the speech. He listened, and listened, until finally I ran out of words. There was silence. So I said, "Erm, sir, are you going to put the speech back in now?" 

He replied, "No. Because, Peter, you have explained to me exactly why I should cut it. If I leave the speech in, everyone will know what the film is about, but if I take the speech out, everyone will say it is about this, it is about that, it is about the other. It will be controversial." So it was cut. 

But there is a speech, which I have, which explains exactly what the film is about. It is all there in the film, if you know where to look, but I can't disclose specifically what it is.

That sounds conclusive, but then you read a letter from the Irish actor Ronan O'Casey that is quoted on the website of the late American film critic Roger Ebert.

O'Casey plays the grey-haired man who meets Vanessa Redgrave in the park and is surreptitiously photographed by Hemmings. And if we believe there was later a body in the park, that was him too.

He writes:

The screenplay, by Antonioni ("just call me Michelangelo"), Tonio Guerra, and Edward Bond, told the story of a planned murder. But the scenes depicting the planning of the murder and its aftermath -- scenes with Vanessa, Sarah Miles and Jeremy Glover, Vanessa's new young lover who plots with her to murder me -- were never shot because the film went seriously over budget.

The intended story was as follows: the young lover, armed with a pistol, was to precede Vanessa and me to Maryon Park in London, conceal himself in the bushes and await our arrival. I pick up Vanessa in a nice new dark green Jaguar and we drive through London - giving Antonioni a chance to film that swinging, trendy, sixties city of the Beatles, Mary Quant, the Rolling Stones, and Carnaby Street. 

We stop and I buy Vanessa a man's watch, which she wears throughout the rest of the film. We then saunter hand and [sic] hand into the park, stopping now and then to kiss (lucky me). In the center of the park, Vanessa gives me a passionate embrace and prolonged kiss, and glances at the spot where her new lover is hiding. 

He shoots me (unlucky me), and the two leave the park intending to drive away. Their plans goes awry when he notices Hemmings with his camera and fears that Hemmings has photos of her. As it turns out, he has.

None of this was ever shot. There were other scenes, such as those between Sarah Miles and Glover, that also went unrealized (unreelized?). (Sarah tried to get her name off the film because she ended up with so little screen time.) Some of the scenes that were shot pertaining to the murder plot ended up in the film, but are completely puzzling to the audience. 

For example, in the film there is a scene with Vanessa and Hemmings at a cafe. A young man approaches her, notices that she is with Hemmings, and runs away. That's Glover. This makes for an odd, mysterious moment because the audience is completely ignorant of his identity.

The trouble with this latter account is that the sources seem to agree that the screenplay was exceptionally sparse. And in his memoirs, David Hemmings recalls being no clearer about Blow-Up's meaning after he had read it.

Still, O'Casey does give us a reason for watching the film again. Can we spot more pieces of this abandoned conspiracy?

David Hemmings at the Royal Opera House, Leicester

The actor David Hemmings met and became engaged to his first wife Genista Ouvry, who acted under the name Jenny Lewes, during a two-week repertory engagement in Leicester in 1960. 

You'll know that if you've read a 2016 post on this blog about the obscure punk single Bored by The Stains.

And, sure enough, here is an advertisement for the play they were both in from the Leicester Chronicle of 21 May 1960, though I see Jenny Lewes came out as Jenny Lewis.

There is a piece of Leicester theatrical history in that advert, because Leicester's Royal Opera House had already closed once, and apparently for good, in 1953. 

However, the building proved impossible to sell and, when the Palace Theatre in Belgrave Gate closed in 1959, the Opera House reopened for a Christmas pantomime.

It stayed open for a few months more after that, and the final play to be staged before it went dark for ever was Five Finger Exercise, which you see trailed in the notice for Hemmings's play.

You can read about the history of the Royal Opera House, Leicester, on the Arthur Lloyd site. 

I've come across a couple of films about how theatre was kept alive in the city after Royal Opera House closed, leaving no commercial venues there, and will blog about them soon.