Confession is good for the soul

“Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned.”

“When was your last confession?”

“Er, dunno. I only confess when I think I’m not going to get away with it.”

“Fair enough. What is your confession?”

“Well, I coveted my wife.”

“That’s allowed. It’s your neighbour’s wife you can’t covet.”

“Oh, got you. What about the guy three doors down; can I covet his wife?”

“No. Just your own. Now what’s your confession?”

“I kind of haven’t watched any movies for a couple of days.”

“Get the fuck out of my confessional!”

“But, blog, I was reading. And … and … I was working on a short story.”

“Hmmmmm. But I’m going to get some reviews out of you pretty damn soon, right?”

“Yeah, blog, sure thing, whatever you say.”

“And you’ll do me a nice little Hammer horror mini-season, won’t you? Between the 29th and 31st of this month. To tie in with this.”

“I sure will, blog, wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Good. Now get out of my confessional.”

“But what’s my penance?”

“Say five Hail Marys, ten Take Him To The Trees, and post something film-related this evening. Even if it just a blatant plug for the new Shane Briant book.”

“Consider it done.”

Shane Briant resources

Wrapping up two weeks celebrating the work of Shane Briant, it’s worth mentioning his recent second career as a best-selling author. His first novel ‘The Webber Agenda’ appeared in 1994: an old-school plot-driven thriller that you imagine flowing from the pen of Alistair MacLean or Robert Ludlum. It’s fast-paced globe-trotting narrative mirrored the locations Briant was visiting for a movie he was shooting at the time!

It was followed by ‘The Chasen Catalyst’ (1995), ‘Hitkids’ (1995), ‘Bite of the Lotus’ (2001), ‘Graphic’ (2005), ‘Worst Nightmares’ (2009) and ‘The Dreamhealer’, published this year. ‘Hitkids’ could almost be a precursor of the pre-pubescent killers in ‘Kick Ass’, with the son of a mob hitman taking on his father’s mantle, while a vengeful associate tries to trap him through the internet. Hi-tech, compellingly contemporary and unflinching in its subject matter, it confirmed the promise of Briant’s first two novels and demonstrated that he’s a writer with his finger on the pulse of popular culture.

‘Worst Nightmares’ – fittingly enough for an actor inextricably associated with Hammer – is a psychological horror novel centring on a novelist who comes into possession of a diary of dreams and murders, which he initially considers a heated but compelling work of fiction. A bit of research suggests that (a) the murders mirror actual cases, and (b) the author is dead. Against his better judgement, but struggling with writer’s block, he publishes the work as his own … and quickly comes regret it. ‘The Dreamhealer’ continues the story, as Briant steers the narrative from Paris to LA.

Go here for Briant’s Fantastic Fiction page, and here for a video trailer for ‘The Dreamhealer’. Elsewhere on the net, Robcrankey’s channel provides a wealth of archive Briant material, including trailers, montages, interviews and extended footage from some of his key performances. Of particular interest are a series of short films directed by Robert Kenchington where Briant reprises his iconic roles from ‘Straight on Till Morning’, ‘Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter’, ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’ and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’.

Shane Briant on the small screen

A great actor will excel in any medium. Shane Briant earned comparisons to John Gielgud and Michael Redgrave before he’d ever stepped in front of a movie camera. It was a natural transition from the stage to the silver screen. It was also inevitable that he’d shine on the small screen.

I’ve already written about his deliciously amoral turn in the ‘Sweeney’ episode “Chalk and Cheese”, but his work for television goes beyond that highpoint in 70s drama.

Briant followed his cinema debut in ‘Straight on Till Morning’ with an episode of the long-running ‘Armchair Theatre’ entitled “Franklin’s Farm”, notable for being directed by British TV stalwart Peter Hammond (Hammond went on to direct episodes of classic series ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’, ‘Tales of the Unexpected’, ‘Inspector Morse’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’.

A year later, Briant gave what is arguably the definitive account of Oscar Wilde’s louche but tragic anti-hero in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, directed by Glenn Jordan and also starring Nigel Davenport and Fionnula Flanagan. Niftily sidestepping the oh-so-polite costume drama elements of Albert Lewin’s lavish 1945 MGM version, and mercifully not making any of the mistakes that blight Oliver Parker’s egregious 2009 travesty, Jordan’s made-for-TV production – for all that it was a quickly made, low-budget piece – pays attention to the importance of the performance, the acid wit of Wilde’s writing and the importance of absolutely the right person in the lead role. With his debonair style, good looks and ability to conjure an ironically removed characterization, Briant was most certainly the right man for the job.

In the same year that he made his Hollywood debut alongside Paul Newman and James Mason in John Huston’s ‘The Mackintosh Man’ (a poundingly unsubtle but satisfactorily old-school adaptation of Desmond Bagley’s novel ‘The Freedom Trap’), Briant appeared in two very different but quintessentially 70s TV shows. In the ‘Crown Court’ episode “The Inner Circle”, he gave a highly memorable performance (go here and here for all the evidence, pardon the pun, you need); while in “Season for Love”, a season two episode of ‘Van der Valk’, he retains a commendable professionalism in the face of chocolate box production design and some notable scenery chewing by the show’s leading man.

1975 saw Briant appear not only in the aforementioned ‘Sweeney’ episode, but two notable TV movies: Stuart Burge’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Under Western Eyes’ and Jack Gold’s unforgettable Quentin Crisp biopic ‘The Naked Civil Servant’, in which Briant’s turn is every bit as memorable as John Hurt’s – and compliments don’t come much higher than that!

Shane Briant has remained active in film and television (most recently starring in the acclaimed Australian dramas ‘City Homicide’ and ‘Rogue Nation’) but it’s key to his enduring appeal that he put in such great work in the 70s – perhaps the key decade in TV drama.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Although the Frankenstein franchise notched up almost as many entries as Hammer’s Dracula series, it never quite captured the popular consciousness the way the caped bloodsucker from Transylvania did. Maybe because Peter Cushing wasn’t as dangerously sexy as Christopher Lee. Maybe because reanimated corpses aren’t as darkly appealing as aristocratic vampires.

What the Frankenstein films can lay claim to, however, is that they didn’t suffer the drop-off in quality that beset the latter Dracula titles, particularly when Hammer took the decision to update the Count’s milieu to a horribly psychedelic version of 1970s London. Hard to imagine Baron Frankenstein swanning around Carnaby Street in a velvet smoking jacket, doing LSD and listening to the Velvet Underground.

Just as well that the studio allowed Frankenstein to go out in fine style, unrepentant in his experiments in playing God, against a particularly apposite Gothic backdrop. Sure, ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’ is saddled with a lurid title that suggests Hammer were scraping the bottom of the barrel, but it scores highly in virtually every respect.


The film starts with a grubby bodysnatcher (Patrick Troughton) only just evading the clutches of a passing constable as he makes off with an unofficially exhumed corpse. He delivers said item to the house of Dr Simon Helder (Shane Briant), who greets him with a raised eyebrow and the satirical homily, “That smell: is it you or him?” Immediately, this touch of mordant humour establishes Helder as a likeable character even if his experiments are macabre.

Inspired by the works of Frankenstein, whose publications he owns, Helder is attempting reanimation. His attempts are short-lived as the bodysnatcher is promptly arrested and sings like a caged canary. The police come calling on Helder, he’s hauled up in court and the judge – who previously sentenced Frankenstein for similar offences some years earlier – loses no time in sentencing Helder to a period of five years in an asylum for the criminally insane.

It’s at this establishment, nominally run by Adolf Klauss (John Stratton), a licentious alcoholic hiding a dark secret, that Helder meets the asylum’s doctor, Karl Victor (Peter Cushing) and realizes that Frankenstein, long believed dead, is using the anonymity of the facility to continue his experiments. Initially drawn to the older man as a mentor figure, Helder eventually comes to the reluctant conclusion that playing God has its consequences.


Although beset by a budget as small as its title is misleading, ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’ injects some new blood into the formula. Helder’s character arc – from arrogant and self-confident scientist to a man who discovers his humanity when faced with the greater and more amoral urge to scientific gain of his supposed hero – is contrasted with both that of Frankenstein, initially a benign presence who saves Helder from the heavy-handed treatment of Klauss’s goons, but whose hold over Klauss comes only at the subjugation of angelic mute Sarah (Madeline Smith). Frankenstein’s plans for Sarah in the last act cross a line Helder cannot tolerate.

Another interesting juxtaposition is that of the creature (Dave Prowse) to the two scientists. Created from the body of a thug, the hands of an artisan and the brain of a genius, the disparate elements rebel against each other, causing the creature physical, emotional and cerebral agonies. Never mind the horrible “monster from hell” part of the title, Prowse arguably conjures one of the most pitiable incarnations of Frankenstein’s monster put on screen; that he does so from behind a plastic mask that is simultaneously groteseque and almost laughable only proves how good a job he does. One of the best scenes segues from Frankenstein and Helder, sharing a drink to celebrate the creature’s resurrection, to the create itself, abandoned, alone and desperately melancholy.

In fact, the performances are uniformly good. Cushing never took the easy way out in playing Frankenstein: there was nothing self-deprecating about his performance, nary a wink to the gallery. He always played the character straight, and never more so than here. Briant’s Helder is not just a foil to Frankenstein, but the opposite side of the coin. Helder could easily become Frankenstein; inherit his mantle. The drama is in the dichotomy between Helder’s scientific curiosity and his sense of humanity.

The closing scenes toy ironically with the old concept of the lunatics running the asylum, a melee which it requires Frankenstein’s aristocratic air of authoritarianism to rectify. In consolidating Frankenstein’s status as both instigator and invigilator – as well as delivering a gut-wrenching climatic scene that says as much about the human condition as any art film – ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’ asks some probing questions about mortality, science, advanced knowledge and intellectual responsibility. If only Hammer could have rethought the title!

Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter

Talk about potential. ‘Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter’ had all the elements to make it one of the Hammer’s finest horror movies, the curtain raiser to a franchise to rival the Dracula or Frankenstein franchises.

The film ticks the right boxes in its traditional period setting, its embrace (and subversion) of vampire tropes, its third act narrative development that links it to the Karnstein trilogy, its bevy of beauties (including Caroline Munro, Wanda Ventham and Susanna East) and its mysterious anti-hero, the titular Kronos, an aristocratic military type who has survived a vampire bite and dedicated himself to kicking vampire arse from one end of the British Isles to the other. He’s moody, enigmatic and handy with a sword. The ladies like him, too, hence he spends a certain amount of screen time conducting a fleeting romance with the voluptuous Carla (Munro). Pretty cool dude, right?

Unfortunately, the problems start with the casting of Horst Janson as Kronos. Although an accomplished actor in his native Germany, Janson never seemed quite at ease in English language roles; and while there’s no doubt that he has the physicality and aristocratic looks required to play Kronos, he doesn’t bring the character to life.

This, is turn, damages the relationship, central to the narrative, between Kronos and his partner Dr Marcus (John Cater). The hump-backed and sometimes self-pitying Marcus is a different beast to the usual “sidekick” stereotype: he’s there neither to provide comic relief or deliver screeds of expositional dialogue, but functions as a cerebral and rigorously determined vampire hunter in his own right. Sadly, with Janson unable to flesh Kronos out into a three-dimensional protagonist, there is no inkling of what keeps these very different men together.

Likewise, the relationship between Kronos and Carla is by-the-numbers, shoehorned in and lacking any real chemistry. A shame, since the striking and eminently likeable Munro is reduced to mere set dressing.


Fortunately, when ‘Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter’ gets things right, it does so iconically and interestingly enough to give us hints of the film it could have been. The treatment of vampirism does things differently: attacks occur in the daylight, the cross is useless unless its wearer is devout to begin with, and the victims are drained not of blood but of their youth. Kronos’s philosophy of vampire hunting seems to be tinged with Eastern mysticism and he openly admits that “there are different ways to kill different vampires”. The black-hooded figure whose appearance presages the attacks is iconic and properly macabre. The attacks are over quickly and not eroticized in the manner of, say, the Christopher Lee Dracula films.

The film also makes an interesting juxtaposition between the transient Kronos – a man who seems to have no home, no family and only one friend (which is not to say we should in any way feel sorry for someone who gets to enjoy a dalliance with Caroline Munro) – and the Durwards, an ostensibly close-knit family but with one mother-humper of a secret in the closet.

The Durwards are held together by siblings Paul (Shane Briant) and Sara (Lois Daine). Given their closeness and Sara’s androgynous looks, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s a touch of the Emil/Elizabeth relationship from ‘Demons of the Mind’ percolating away in the background. But the focus seems to be more on their ailing mother Lady Durward (Ventham), still grieving the death of her husband from the plague. Paul blames surgeon Grost (John Carson) for not saving Durward’s life. Meanwhile, Grost – horrified at the recent attacks – joins forces with Kronos.


It almost goes without saying that Briant’s turn is the standout (closely followed, arguably, by Cater). He brings a similar degree of vulnerability to the role as he does as Emil, but without Emil’s capacity for sociopathic behaviour. Sadly, it’s a very limited role and the denouement sees Paul sidelined while the rest of the cast get stuck in.

Hammer dropped the ball with ‘Captain Kronos’: with Briant in the title role, Munro’s part beefed up and better execution of the swordplay (the duelling scenes are pretty bad!), it could have been a classic. Kronos himself might have taken up the mantle from Van Helsing. It’s sad to reflect that what we’re left with is, at best, a watchable intimation of what could have been.

THE SWEENEY: Chalk and Cheese

Shane Briant’s four iconic appearances in Hammer productions are the main feature of Shane Briant week here on The Agitation of the Mind. But let’s take a mid-week break and consider his deliciously amoral turn in “Chalk and Cheese”, the first episode of series two of ‘The Sweeney’.

I’m going to throw out a statement here which might sound like fan-boy rhetoric, but I can assure you it’s not mere opinionism but a statement of fact. Ready? Here it comes: ‘The Sweeney’ was British TV’s finest hour. With Patrick McGoohan’s ‘The Prisoner’ (I spit on the remake) and ‘Inspector Morse’ coming joint second. Two of these shows starred John Thaw. Coincidence? I think not.

‘The Sweeney’ debuted in January 1975; for purposes of comparison, the cosy ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ was still on air, in its penultimate season. ‘The Sweeney’ kicked down the doors of staid and generic TV, came charging in with pistols pulled and put the finger on complacency, cliché and moral exactitude. It depicted a world in which coppers were as dirty as the blaggers and nonces they took down; where the bad guys sometimes outwitted them; where the rule book was torn up, fair play didn’t exist and violence was an occupational hazard.


‘Hill Street Blues’, ‘Miami Vice’, ‘NYPD Blue’, ‘CSI’ – fuhgeddaboudit! ‘The Sweeney’ got there first – and if anyone reading these pages remembers John Thaw solely as the opera-loving, poetry-reading, real-ale savouring Inspector Morse, then they might need a stiff drink before exposing themselves to his boozing, brawling attitudinous incarnation of the hard-as-nails Jack Regan.

It was a characteristic of the series that the opening credits juxtaposed hard-hitting imagery with a pulsating, edgy theme tune, while the closing credits were a slower, more melancholy variation on the theme, accompanied by shots of the protagonists in more contemplative mode. The creative talent behind ‘The Sweeney’ weren’t afraid to end episodes on a sour note, or leave a shard of discontent in the viewer’s mind.

In “Chalk and Cheese”, the melancholy subject is a father’s grief at a son going down the wrong path. Tommy Garrett (Paul Jones) is vaguely embarrassed by his gruff but honest father (David Lodge) and out of his depth with society girlfriend Caroline (Lesley-Anne Down). Caroline has hooked Tommy up with upper crust playboy Giles Nunn (Briant), and together they pull robberies on upper classes Giles knows socially. Tommy wants money (flash car; high maintenance girlfriend); Giles needs it (gambling debts). Tommy still has some shred of conscience that he’s plagued by. Giles, however, is louche, amoral and not above playing hide the salami with Caroline behind Tommy’s back.


With Detective Inspector Regan (Thaw) backgrounded for much of the episode, the dynamic is driven by Detective Sergeant Carter (Dennis Waterman)’s friendship with Garrett’s father – a friendship that threatens to become compromised when Carter suspects Tommy is up to no good – and by the increasingly volatile relationship between Giles and Tommy … the chalk and cheese of the title.

Briant and Jones are well matched, the latter delivering a performance so much better than his turn in ‘Demons of the Mind’, while Briant revels in Giles’s elegant villainy. “Bright boy, good looking in an androgynous sort of way,” is how one of Regan’s informers describes him. Giles is a kind of Dorian Gray but with a poor run at the tables, a line of credit that it would be ungentlemanly not to settle, and a taste for using firearms when the robberies get a bit dicey.

Lesley-Anne Down does a nice line in ice maiden as Caroline – “a snotty bit from Kensington” – while Lodge invests his role with gravitas. ‘The Sweeney’ always benefited from high calibre supporting players (Colin Welland in “Faces”, for example, or James Cosmo in “Hard Men”) and “Chalk and Cheese” is no exception.

Demons of the Mind

Technically Shane Briant’s first film – completed with “and introducing ~” credit – although ‘Straight on Till Morning’ ended up being released ahead of it. On the surface, ‘Demons of the Mind’ inhabits a more generically Hammer milieu: a gothic castle, a carriage and horses thundering through the woods at dusk, hidden family secrets, heaving bosoms, grisly murders, torch-bearing villagers and a mad priest.

Scratch the surface, however, and it goes into some of the darkest territory of any Hammer production. The elements enumerated above are merely trappings – the real business of Peter Sykes’s alternately dream-like and brutally cynical film is a study of the family dynamics gone sickeningly wrong. It’s a story of incest, guilt, desperation and inherited madness. With some torch-bearing villagers and a mad priest thrown in for good measure. Imagine the bastard mutant child of ‘Through A Glass Darkly’ and ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ that grew up reading horror comics and lusting after its sister. That’s the kind of film we’re talking about.

The setting is some unspecified part of Austria, probably during the 1800s. Nobleman Zorn (Robert Hardy) keeps his son Emil (Briant) and daughter Elizabeth (Gillian Hills) under lock and key, concerned that (a) the sociopathic tendencies he recognizes in himself are manifesting in them; and (b) they have an unhealthy sexual interest in each other.



Summoned from Vienna (where Elizabeth had earlier escaped his care), Dr Falkenberg (Patrick Magee) makes haste to Zorn’s estate to attempt to find a cure for the siblings. En route, he shares a coach with earnest young student Carl (Paul Jones) who brings up the thorny subject of Falkenberg’s recent discrediting: “Haven’t you fallen from grace?” “Fallen?” Falkenberg thunders. “Thrown! Hurled! E-jec-ted!” It’s a ripe bit of overacting from Magee and sets the tone for every scene he subsequently appears in. Worse: he seems to inspire Hardy to ever greater heights of scenery-chewing.

But I digress. Carl’s antipathy towards Falkenberg is piqued by the fact that, following Elizabeth’s brief escape from Vienna, he enjoyed a fleeting romantic interlude with her and is still a tad sore that Zorn’s thuggish footman Klaus (Kenneth J. Warren) effectively abducted her just as he was really starting to get to know her. (That’s “know” in the Biblical sense, by the way.)

Meanwhile, a crazed, mumbling priest (Michael Hordern) comes stumbling out of the woods and rallies the local villagers – whose numbers have been decimated by a series of disappearances – into fighting the evil that has blighted them. It’s no surprise that, come the full-throttle melodramatic ending, these various parties with their various agendas converge at Schloss Zorn and conflict ensues.

‘Demons of the Mind’ is a compelling and often queasy slab of Gothicism, albeit flawed. The performances by Hardy and Magee make hard work of too many scenes, and Hordern seems hell-bent on joining them, only pulling his characterization back from the brink in the climatic scenes where he leads the villagers against Zorn; in these scenes, the ham is carved away and what remains is a properly intense bit of messianic fire-and-brimstone. There is a staginess to many of the interiors, as well, and the score is about as subtle as Magee sticking his face right in the lens and ranting for extended periods.



Let us be thankful for small mercies, then. Two of them, in fact: Shane Briant and Gillian Hills. Ladies first: Hills, radiant and dreamily photogenic, invests Elizabeth with an otherworldly quality that transcends mere romantic interest or set decoration. Her ethereal calm contrasts well with Briant’s masterfully underplayed evocation of Emil’s inner turmoil. Without ever resorting to the retinue of tics and bulging eyes and chest-beating that many of Hammer’s regular players would have brought to the performance, Briant turns the disturbed and yet strangely pitiable Emil into a multi-faceted, three-dimensional character. He makes the shoddy antics of other cast members look all the worse by comparison.

Straight on Till Morning

Hammer = horror, right? The way Ealing = comedies, or Platinum Dunes = unnecessary remakes.

But just as Ealing also produced gritty crime movies (‘The Blue Lamp’), historical dramas (‘Scott of the Antarctic’), slices of social realism (‘It Always Rains on Sunday’), war movies (‘Went the Day Well?’) and one of the most accomplished horror portmanteau films (‘Dead of Night’) ever made, so Hammer’s output – including Bernard Mainwaring’s lost satire ‘The Public Life of Henry the Ninth’, Vernon Sewell’s moody thriller ‘The Black Widow’ and Val Guest’s classic sci-fi ‘The Quatermass Experiment’ – spans genres and iconography beyond the classic horror archetypes the studio became synonymous with.

When Peter Collinson’s ‘Straight on Till Morning’ was released in 1972, however, it was these very archetypes that defined Hammer. The Dracula franchise had reached its seventh instalment with the spectacularly lurid (and contemporarily set) ‘Dracula AD 1972’, the Frankenstein series had chalked up six titles, and the Karnstein trilogy – ‘The Vampire Lovers’, ‘Lust for a Vampire’ and ‘Twins of Evil’ – had stirred a hefty dollop of Sapphic shenanigans into the mix.

Audience expectation was always going to work against ‘Straight on Till Morning’. The opening credit sequence confounds and intrigues in equal measure. Opening on a tight shot of terrace rooftops, soot-stained chimneys and a grubby diesel loco jerking a passenger train across a railway bridge, the immediate aesthetic is that of a kitchen sink drama of the previous decade – an Alan Sillitoe or Barry Hines adaptation, maybe. This sense is reinforced, albeit briefly, by the instantly recognisable tones of Rita Tushingham (herself British cinema’s go-to actress for social realism) in voiceover.

And immediately the first of the film’s many subversions. Tushingham’s character, the cripplingly shy Brenda, is narrating a fairy story. It is quickly established that she has written this twee tale. Scenes of her scribbling away at a small table in an equally small room are jarringly intercut with a confrontation between Brenda and her mother. Brenda announces that she’s pregnant and is leaving for London where she hopes to meet “a father for my baby, someone who’ll love us both”. Her mother’s imprecations not to leave fall on deaf ears. A taxi arrives. Brenda leaves home.



In London, Brenda fetches up at a crowded labour exchange. She secures a low paying job at an oh-so-trendy emporium owned by the predatory Jimmy Lindsay (Tom Bell) and strikes up a tentative and unlikely friendship with promiscuous shop girl Caroline (Katya Wyeth) while trying to catch the eye of cynical co-worker Joey (James Bolam). Meanwhile, the impossible handsome and ethereally calm Peter Clive (Shane Briant) goes about his daily business of buying cigarettes and looking cool in his E-type Jaguar while flashing back to the woman he murdered in his flat the previous evening. All of these plot-strands, set-pieces and character introductions are effected in a dizzyingly extended sequence achieved with the kind of hyperkinetic intercutting and mind-bending visual juxtapositions that wouldn’t be out of place in a film by Nic Roeg or Alejandro Jodorowsky.

This from the guy who directed ‘The Italian Job’!

Essentially – and this is to take the film at its most basic level – ‘Straight on Till Morning’ is about the relationship between two people who live in fantasy worlds and how they drawn together by their very different attempts to function in the real world. Brenda’s fantasy world is the most obvious of the two: it is a world of fairy tales, her very own handsome prince and their baby (in case you haven’t guessed – MINOR SPOILER – Brenda’s pregnancy is a fiction), a world into which the actuality of cheap rooms, mundane jobs, social ineptitude and wrenching loneliness continually intrude.

The nature of Peter’s fantasy world is the thornier subject; a dichotomy that lends the film its power to disturb. With his Dorian Gray-ish looks (Briant was a natural to play Wilde’s ironic anti-hero in a TV production a couple of years later), his life of leisure (the source of his cash-in-hand income is never really explained) and his zen-like tendency to seem utterly removed from his surroundings, Peter never quite seems suited to the ostensibly real world of newsagents, cul-de-sacs and nocturnal walks with the dog along the South Bank (never mind that Collinson shoots the South Bank so that it looks like an alien landscape).



This, it is hinted, is the fantasy world to which he does his best to pretend he belongs. The real world – hammering away at his aloof façade and sliding knife-edges of memory into his waking consciousness – consists of the murders he has committed, an absent but devastatingly powerful mother figure, and a fairy tale of the beautiful prince driven to sociopathic hatred by his own beauty; a story Peter recounts to Brenda, in a reversal of the storyteller/fantastist role, in one of the film’s key scenes.

Collinson loads the film with symbolism: mirrors are everywhere; androgyny is rife; the surface image is challenged and fractured time and again (most notably in a scene where Brenda’s makeover renders her a grotesque and sexless caricature); and a sense of troilism permeates. Brenda initially introduces herself to Peter as “Rosalba” (the name of the princess in her fairy tales); he later renames her Wendy (the ‘Peter Pan’ analogy hardly needs belabouring).

’Straight on Till Morning’ presents a strange, disconcerting and never less than chilling fusion of genres and film-making tropes – from the warped character study of Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ to the visual dissonance of ‘Performance’ by way of an on-location aesthetic in its production design and cinematography that recalls ‘Poor Cow’ or ‘Up the Junction’ – that coheres into a haunting and challenging piece of work, nasty but surprisingly bloodless, with the power to linger in the mind long after much gorier fare has faded. It’s one of those films that gets under the skin. You can never unsee it. And I can’t think of a better recommendation than that.

Shane Briant week on The Agitation of the Mind

Robert Kenchington, the man behind the Shane Briant Tribute Site, recently provided me with review copies of his pictorial biographies ‘Shane Briant: a Talent for Terror’ and ‘Shane Briant: the Hammer Years’. The latter gave me a yen to revisit the four (very different) films Briant made for Hammer between 1972 and 1974.

Actually, scratch “revisit”. Two nights ago I watched ‘Straight on Till Morning’ for the first time. It’s one of those films that’s been on my radar for a while but which, for reasons I can’t even fathom, I’d never got round to seeing. All I can say is I’m glad I made the effort: a disturbing and multi-faceted film, I’ll be posting a review tomorrow.

In addition to the Hammer productions, I’ll be rounding off Shane Briant week with a look at his appearance in the ‘Sweeney’ episode “Chalk and Cheese” (he’s on the subject of one of Inspector Regan’s most memorable arrests).

First up, though, Robert Kenchington’s biographical volumes. These glossy, lavishly illustrated volumes (available online here), provide an excellent introduction to Briant’s career for the newcomer as well as offering a wealth of archive material – including many stills from the actor’s own collection – sure to be of interest to the seasoned Briant fan.

It’s perhaps some marker of how critically overlooked Briant remains amongst his contemporaries (although the hero’s welcome he regularly receives at events tells a different story!) that Kenchington’s books together form the first biographical overview of his life and work.

‘A Talent for Terror’ succinctly guides the reader from Briant’s early triumphs onstage (his Hamlet was compared to Gielgud’s and Redgraves) to his iconic work at Hammer, a big-screen proving ground that gave him the springboard to appearances in big Hollywood productions. His small screen work in timeless ’tec shows ‘The Sweeney’ and ‘Van Der Valk’ is also considered.

‘The Hammer Years’ does exactly what it says on the cover and considers ‘Straight on Till Morning’, ‘Demons of the Mind’, ‘Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter’ and ‘Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell’. As such, the stills on offer in this volume capture Briant at his most iconic (and, sometimes, demonic); better still, Kenchington’s informed analyses of the films are peppered with witty and evocative recollections from Briant himself.

Tomorrow: Briant excels in the dark fairy tale/psychological drama ‘Straight on Till Morning’

Shane Briant Tribute Site

Anyone who has followed Cinebeat’s articles on cult British actor, novelist and artist Shane Briant will already be aware of Robert Kenchington’s Shane Briant Tribute Site.

I knew Robert many moons ago in my pre-blogging days when a shared love of classical music and an appreciation of convivial drinking establishments defined some memorable evenings in Nottingham, Birmingham and London. After Robert’s move from the Midlands, I was remiss in keeping in touch and we fell out of contact for a while.

Then Robert’s email – with the appropriate subject line “a blast from your past” – landed in my inbox a couple of days ago; he’d recognized me from Agitation (despite the addition of a few years, more than a few pounds and a different haircut on the profile picture) and dropped me a line about his Shane Briant site.

For anyone who’s not visited and has the remotest interest in cult movies, go here. If there’s a more comprehensive Shane Briant resource on the web, I must have missed it!