Don’t mistake appearances for the reality, baby.

The Avengers

3.19: The Wringer

A first-rate little screws tightener, as Steed not only comes under suspicion but is also found guilty of treason. He’s accused of exposing the Carinthia pipeline (a route for spies on the Austro-Hungarian border), leading to the deaths of six agents. While The Wringer is guilty of a sin common in the series – having the villains discuss their plan and reveal themselves early on, when there might be more to gain from keeping motives and machinations unclear – there’s much to enjoy here, including Steed coming under full-on psychotropic conditioning and a marvellously deranged performance from Terence Lodge (as the titular character).

Charles: The disposal of agents who have outlived their usefulness is not a matter we concern ourselves with – very closely.

Paul Whitsun-Jones returns for the second and final time as Steed’s boss Charles, and he’s entirely lacking in endearing qualities, particularly since he’s so quick to find our hero guilty and have him sent to his death, merely on the say-so of Anderson (Peter Sallis; Wallace, of course, some dreadful long-running comedy about hurtling down hills in bath tubs, and Penley in The Ice Warriors). Who has been conditioned by the Wringer and his off-message associates at the organisation’s now-rogue highland interrogation centre.

The Wringer: Time is what you care to make it, baby. Reality is merely a causal affair; we all know that. In reality, there is only the void.

Lodge (three roles in Doctor Who, two of them directed by producer Barry Letts who plays Oliver here, most notably as Moss in Planet of the Spiders) was memorable but a little erratic in the opening scene of Man with Two Shadows, required to switch multiple personalities over the stretch a few minutes. Here, though, he’s in full flow, relishing the chance to dive into a sinisterly enthusiastic beatnik operative with a penchant for hipster patois and mind expansion, questioning the nature of reality, dropping Wittgenstein into conversation, inducing his only little MK-Ultra, and crowing that “We could go on forever. No one in the service trusts each other”.

The Wringer: Don’t mistake appearances for the reality, baby.

Sallis is also very good, as a man who has lost his memory in resistance to the implanted lie of Steed being a traitor; Steed refers to Anderson as reliable, although he shouldn’t be, since he’s lousy shot and can’t swim. Also on hand is Gerald Sim (the Rector from To the Manor Born as well as four other Avengers appearances, including one in The New Avengers).

We’ve had Steed come under suspicion earlier this season in The Nutshell, and Martin Woodhouse’s teleplay wisely doesn’t labour the interrogation side. Rather, it’s a case of Steed being assaulted by sound and vision recordings, including familiarly psychonautically swirling concentric patterns, lapping waves, explosive assaults, and manifest darkness accompanied by sinister pulsating sounds.

If there’s a weakness, it’s that Cathy infiltrates and springs him remarkably easily (albeit she gets shot in the arm, and they come up through a convincing storm drain set). It’s nice to see her righteous defence of Steed, however (“If there’s any clearing up to be done, I suggest it’s on your side” and asked where Steed is, she rebukes “I imagine he’s doing your job for you”).

A memorable ending too (well, aside from the subsequent business of Cathy struggling to pour tea), as the clearly unhinged Wringer is unapologetic for his behaviour, repeating the mantra “Question of time, isn’t it? Question of time, it’s all a question of time”. One of the best of the season.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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