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  • The Portmanteau. What happened to it?

    Fora few years at least, there were films made up of 4 or 5 stories within a common framework. Hence the expression - Portmanteau.

    Here's a great example that I was reminded of recently. With an interesting mixture of original scoring and sound track.


       

  • Yes, that is a good one. Two great British character actors who are absolutely mesmerizing.  Also the music which has all kinds of imaginative scoring detail that you really hear, but it does not intrude.  It is perfectly done.  I remember I saw Asylum at a drive-in when it first came out, back in the old days when drive-in movies were different from ordinary in-house ones. 


  •  This supernatural anthology approach was to some extent a British specialty, since it started with the great "Dead of Night" that was the inspiration for countless later productions. 


  • You reminded me of, and I would suggest listening to the music of the first few minutes of Dr. Phibes Rises Again (from 2':42" onwards), pretty impressive especially for that kind of film category.


           

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    @William said:

     This supernatural anthology approach was to some extent a British specialty, since it started with the great "Dead of Night" that was the inspiration for countless later productions. 

    It was; but actually take the production company Amicus that did Asylum. They  were a couple of Yanks based in nothing more than a shed over at the Hammer complex. I think it was the Hammer complex. [*-)] - but it was definitely a shed.

     Erik reminds me of Vinnie - haha. Vincent Price reinvented himself and no one could ham it like VP. One of the interesting features (including the great fun of Dr Phibes which we loved watching in the cinema when we were .......young) was the part Vincent Price played in a film called Witchfinder General. Shot over in Suffolk it's a great story in itself on the director (who was about 24) and the cast. The director didn't want Vincent - he actually wanted Donald Pleasance in the role. But in the end VP did the bizz as they say. Strange film.

    Round that time he did another one with Diana Rigg. Forget the name but it was a sort of portmanteau of horror with a lot of humour. The humour aspect is very important otherwise any film can be mind bendingly boring. Even  the most  serious subjects - like say, WW1 had enormous amounts of humour in reality - so why not portray that in a film? Even Psycho is full of humour - albeit Hitchock's particular brand of personal weirdness.


  • Yes the Amicus group made a very good attempt at doing their own Hammer films and I always remember the last episode in that one, that had little evil dolls attacking the head of the asylum, didn't it?  The Witchfinder General was a somewhat horrid film.  Price was great in it, but that director (who later committed suicide) was deliberately baiting him and irritating him constantly.  That was very strange given that Price's own behavior - like his great friend Boris Karloff - was always very charming and old-world gentlemanly.  They were both according to all accounts very cultured and polite, despite the raving homicidal lunatics they usually played. 

    You are right on Psycho in that Hitchcock actually described it as a comedy!  He said he found the entire film extremely funny.


  • Yes indeed. Witchfinder General is completely destructive in it's nature. There is no definitive proof that the director committed suicide. It was probably an accident with barbiturates. He did bait VP unjustly so, I would think - and just recently and purely by accident I was driving into the next county to do some photographic assignment bollocks and had the radio on.

    The BBC radio play of an hour or so, was a dramatized version of the making of Witchfinder General and highly entertaining and educational...almost.  I wish there was a way you could get that but I don't think it's possible.

    Hitchcock was one of the worst for baiting actors. Actors in my view are never responsible for bad films. But they take a lot of credit when the films are good.


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