He’s an objectionable young man.

The Avengers

2.14: The Big Thinker

With a plot revolving around a super computer, one would be forgiven for thinking we might be due a proto-Proteus, a WOTAN, a Colossus or a Joshua. Instead, The Big Thinker is all about a big performance, and Anthony Booth more than delivers as abrasive, narcissistic, angry young Dr Kearns, plugging the gap where the teleplay falls short on outright intrigue.

Cathy: I see what you mean about the boy wonder... Are you always like this, or haven’t you had breakfast?

Booth has the dubious claim to distinction of playing Sidney Noggett in the Confessions… movies during the ‘70s, but is probably best known as the lefty son in Till Death Us Do Part. Here he fully embraces the plum, scene-stealing part of a young scientist vital to the functioning of Plato, a cryogenically powered computer. Kearns knows his value is intrinsic, so has no compunction in treating his colleagues like dirt (he’s guilty of “rudeness, irresponsibility, a lack of maturity”), except for Cathy, whom he attempts (badly) to charm. He loses interest in her on finding she is married, regains it on learning she is widowed, even slurs her beloved anthropology and loudly drops hints in public as to the top secrets things they are doing (“I’m ballistic, sweetheart. I’m ballistic”).

Martin Woodhouse previously contributed the standout Mr. Teddy Bear to Season Two. The Big Thinker isn’t up to that standard, lacking clear focus, but it is at least distinctive. This was director Kim Mills first of ten episodes, and his work is reasonable, if failing to give a sense that “Plato is this building – the whole building”.

Cathy: Snap! Would you like me to try for an ace? I expect you’ve trimmed the short side for the aces.

Much of the proceedings are preoccupied with the activities of a trio of card sharps, whom Cathy, professedly intent on using the computer to translated dead languages, must put off their game (Kearns is racking up debts with them). Broster (Allan McClelland), Blakelock (Ray Browne) and Clarissa (Penelope Lee) intend to squeeze Kearns once he owes them a shedload, leading to a satisfying scene in which Cathy trumps the sharp, immediately figuring out how he is loading the deck (“Clever, dead clever” responds Broster, moments before Cathy offers a judo chop to his arm and walks out with the winnings).

Steed: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. The amateurs are still hard at it.

Later, when Bakelock and Clarissa break into her flat to snoop around, she handles them deceptively casually (“Would you like a cup of tea” she asks Clarissa, before the latter flees). They return for thirds (well, Broster and Clarissa), and this time Steed is on hand to put them in their place (“My dear, that is quite ineffective beyond a range of three feet” he advises of Clarissa’s gas gun).

Steed’s very much on the fringes here, overseeing how Cathy does on her own, it seems; he keeps claiming to be off to the Middle East but never actually departs, and playfully irritates Cathy by referring to Kearns as her boyfriend. He also has a new pooch, Freckles having been replaced by Sheba, calls the police under the name Caruthers, and persuades Cathy to cook him a plain omelette. Finally, he lets her keep the five hundred pounds she recovered from the sharps; having near frozen when trapped in the main computer room, Steed suggests “Buy yourself a fur coat. You know, you might have another cold snap”.

The episode features a range of good performances, from Lee and McLelland to Walter Hudd as benign chief scientist Dr Clemens, Marina Martin (Drahvin One in Galaxy Four) as Janet, besotted with the brash boy wonder (Cathy has a scene convincing her she is no threat to her would-be man), and Tenniel Evans (Major Daly in Carnival of Monsters) as Dr Hurst.

Farrow (David Garth, Solicitor Grey in The Highlanders, a Time Lord in Terror of the Autons), a recent addition to the team, immediately comes across as suspiciously genial (he’s using Plato to calculate star velocities?) so it isn’t exactly out of the blue when he’s revealed as the saboteur. Although, his last minute hack attempt with a crowbar is a rather hasty bodge even for The Avengers. The motive, Steed surmises, is that the computer is best used for missile defence – which certainly is a very common plot motivator – but this isn’t exactly foregrounded. I was also unclear if he was supposed to be connected to the card sharps.

On the face of it, then, this is a more of science fiction tinged episode, but it’s actually very down-to-earth; the characters and performances drive The Big Thinker for the most part, and it only really falls down in some of the execution.

Comments

Duffy. That old tangerine hipster.

Duffy (1968) (SPOILERS) It’s appropriate that James Coburn’s title character is repeatedly referred to as an old hipster in Robert Parrish’s movie, as that seemed to be precisely the niche Coburn was carving out for himself in the mid to late 60s, no sooner had Our Man Flint made him a star. He could be found partaking in jaundiced commentary on sexual liberation in Candy, falling headlong into counter culture in The President’s Analyst , and leading it in Duffy . He might have been two decades older than its primary adherents, but he was, to repeat an oft-used phrase here, very groovy. If only Duffy were too.

You know what I sometimes wish? I sometimes wish I were ordinary like you. Ordinary and dead like all the others.

Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) (SPOILERS) Bryan Forbes’ adaptation of Mark McShane’s 1961’s novel has been much acclaimed. It boasts a distinctive storyline and effective performances from its leads, accompanied by effective black-and-white cinematography from Gerry Turpin and a suitably atmospheric score from John Barry. I’m not sure Forbes makes the most of the material, however, as he underlines Séance on a Wet Afternoon ’s inherently theatrical qualities at the expense of its filmic potential.

Mondo bizarro. No offence man, but you’re in way over your head.

The X-Files 8.7: Via Negativa I wasn’t as down on the last couple of seasons of The X-Files as most seemed to be. For me, the mythology arc walked off a cliff somewhere around the first movie, with only the occasional glimmer of something worthwhile after that. So the fact that the show was tripping over itself with super soldiers and Mulder’s abduction/his and Scully’s baby (although we all now know it wasn’t, sheesh ), anything to stretch itself beyond breaking point in the vain hope viewers would carry on dangling, didn’t really make much odds. Of course, it finally snapped with the wretched main arc when the show returned, although the writing was truly on the wall with Season 9 finale The Truth . For the most part, though, I found 8 and 9 more watchable than, say 5 or 7. They came up with their fair share of engaging standalones, one of which I remembered to be Via Negativa .

A ship is the finest nursery in the world.

A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) (SPOILERS) An odd one, this, as if Disney were remaking The Swiss Family Robinson for adults. One might perhaps have imagined the Mouse House producing it during their “Dark Disney” phase. But even then, toned down. After all, kids kidnapped by pirates sounds like an evergreen premise for boy’s own adventuring (more girl’s own here). The reality of Alexander Mackendrick’s film is decidedly antithetical to that; there’s a lingering feeling, despite A High Wind in Jamaica ’s pirates largely observing their distance, that things could turn rather nasty (and indeed, if Richard Hughes’ 1929 novel had been followed to the letter, they would have more explicitly).

You have done well to keep so much hair, when so many’s after it.

Jeremiah Johnson (1972) (SPOILERS) Hitherto, I was most familiar with Jeremiah Johnson in the form of a popular animated gif of beardy Robert Redford smiling and nodding in slow zoom close up (a moment that is every bit as cheesy in the film as it is in the gif). For whatever reason, I hadn’t mustered the enthusiasm to check out the 1970s’ The Revenant until now (well, beard-wise, at any rate). It’s easy to distinguish the different personalities at work in the movie. The John Milius one – the (mythic) man against the mythic landscape; the likeably accentuated, semi-poetic dialogue – versus the more naturalistic approach favoured by director Sydney Pollack and star Redford. The fusion of the two makes for a very watchable, if undeniably languorous picture. It was evidently an influence on Dances with Wolves in some respects, although that Best Picture Oscar winner is at greater pains to summon a more sensitive portrayal of Native Americans (and thus, perversely, at times a more patr

My Doggett would have called that crazy.

The X-Files 9.4: 4-D I get the impression no one much liked Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), but I felt, for all the sub-Counsellor Troi, empath twiddling that dogged her characterisation, she was a mostly positive addition to the series’ last two years (of its main run). Undoubtedly, pairing her with Doggett, in anticipation of Gillian Anderson exiting just as David Duchovny had – you rewatch these seasons and you wonder where her head was at in hanging on – made for aggressively facile gender-swapped conflict positions on any given assignment. And generally, I’d have been more interested in seeing how two individuals sympathetic to the cause – her and Mulder – might have got on. Nevertheless, in an episode like 4-D you get her character, and Doggett’s, at probably their best mutual showing.

You’re a disgrace, sir... Weren’t you at Harrow?

Our Man in Marrakesh aka Bang! Bang! You’re Dead (1966) (SPOILERS) I hadn’t seen this one in more than three decades, and I had in mind that it was a decent spy spoof, well populated with a selection of stalwart British character actors in supporting roles. Well, I had the last bit right. I wasn’t aware this came from the stable of producer Harry Alan Towers, less still of his pedigree, or lack thereof, as a sort of British Roger Corman (he tried his hand at Star Wars with The Shape of Things to Come and Conan the Barbarian with Gor , for example). More legitimately, if you wish to call it that, he was responsible for the Christopher Lee Fu Manchu flicks. Our Man in Marrakesh – riffing overtly on Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana in title – seems to have in mind the then popular spy genre and its burgeoning spoofs, but it’s unsure which it is; too lightweight to work as a thriller and too light on laughs to elicit a chuckle.

The best thing in the world for the inside of a man or a woman is the outside of a horse.

Marnie (1964) (SPOILERS) Hitch in a creative ditch. If you’ve read my Vertigo review, you’ll know I admired rather than really liked the picture many fete as his greatest work. Marnie is, in many ways, a redux, in the way De Palma kept repeating himself in the early 80s only significantly less delirious and… well, compelling. While Marnie succeeds in commanding the attention fitfully, it’s usually for the wrong reasons. And Hitch, digging his heels in as he strives to fashion a star against public disinterest – he failed to persuade Grace Kelly out of retirement for Marnie Rutland – comes entirely adrift with his leads.

I tell you, it saw me! The hanged man’s asphyx saw me!

The Asphyx (1972) (SPOILERS) There was such a welter of British horror from the mid 60s to mid 70s, even leaving aside the Hammers and Amicuses, that it’s easy to lose track of them in the shuffle. This one, the sole directorial effort of Peter Newbrook (a cameraman for David Lean, then a cinematographer), has a strong premise and a decent cast, but it stumbles somewhat when it comes to taking that premise any place interesting. On the plus side, it largely eschews the grue. On the minus, directing clearly wasn’t Newbrook’s forte, and even aided by industry stalwart cinematographer Freddie Young (also a go-to for Lean), The Aspyhx is stylistically rather flat.

Just wait. They’ll start listing side effects like the credits at the end of a movie.

Contagion (2011) (SPOILERS) The plandemic saw Contagion ’s stock soar, which isn’t something that happens too often to a Steven Soderbergh movie. His ostensibly liberal outlook has hitherto found him on the side of the little people (class action suits) and interrogating the drugs trade while scrupulously avoiding institutional connivance (unless it’s Mexican institutional connivance). More recently, The Laundromat ’s Panama Papers puff piece fell fall flat on its face in attempting broad, knowing satire (in some respects, this is curious, as The Informant! is one of Soderbergh’s better-judged films, perhaps because it makes no bones about its maker’s indifference towards its characters). There’s no dilution involved with Contagion , however. It amounts to a bare-faced propaganda piece, serving to emphasise that the indie-minded director is Hollywood establishment through and through. This is a picture that can comfortably sit alongside any given Tinseltown handwringing over the Wa

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