What is that young woman doing tied to the railway line? She’ll break my engine!

The Avengers

4.8: The Gravediggers

Do you dig The Gravediggers? Yeah, it’s all right. Actually, it’s more than all right. While the series has been up to its eyeballs in eccentricity prior to this, this episode furnishes us with the particularly eccentric eccentric living in his own private fantasy world, and as part and parcel of this, stylistic conceits entirely take precedence over any notions pertaining to logic or naturalism. It’s an episode that revels in its absurdity.

It’s also Mac Hulke’s penultimate contribution to the show (his last came four years later), and one wonders how much of the wackiness was added by Brian Clemens, since its fairly atypical of Hulke. The Gravediggers begins in fairly traditional manner too, albeit an antenna rising from a grave announcing its leanings. The plot, and the masterminds, are revealed tout suite; a jamming signal will leave the country open to missile attacks without warning. Dr Palmer (Aubrey Richards) helpfully tells Steed and Mrs Peel that no one could achieve this. Why, it was the life’s work of Dr Marlow (Lloyd Lamble), who died four weeks prior. What’s more, any potential device would have to have emanated from the village of Pringby…. Where Marlow was laid to rest.

So there’s no real mystery. It’s the unfolding that’s the thing. It’s even established that Marlow is misguided rather than bad (he just wants to continue his research, and has been misled by the rotters).

Steed: Whilst you’re waggling your thermometer, I’ll tackle Sir Horace Winslip.

Emma goes undercover as a nurse (she’s making good use of that uniform this season) at the Sir Horace Winslip Hospital (for Ailing Railwaymen) while Steed decides to speak to the generous donor himself, played in full fettle by Ronald Fraser (The Happiness Patrol) on enormously endearing form. On arriving, Steed (representing The Footplateman’s Friendly Society) is welcomed aboard Sir Horace’ carriage, a stationary affair rapidly assuming the illusion of locomotion thanks to dedicated butler Fred (Charles Lamb), who rushes about shaking the carriage, presenting (literally) rolling countryside and an approaching tunnel as the affable Horace offers the Avenger sustenance, explaining “If I attempt to eat a meal without the gentle rocking and the scenery flashing by, I get the most dreadful indigestion”.

Like many an Avengers’ oddball, Sir Horace yearns for halcyon days. His particular penchant, as a rich railway man, is to see trains returned to their rightfully eminent place, since they “made civilization possible, you know…” And for the motor car, his desire is to have “the evil vehicle banished from the Queen’s highway”.

Sir Horace: What is that young woman doing tied to the railway line? She’ll break my engine!

Sir Horace’s particular quirk also leads to Steed rescuing Mrs Peel from certain doom in one of the series’ most inspired action climaxes, as she is tied to the tracks of a miniature railway with a fast approaching train. Silent movie music pipes up as Steed first casually waits at the (miniature) station before engaging in fisticuffs across not-so-fast-moving train carriages.

One-time director Quentin Lawrence handles the action with aplomb. True, Steed’s stunt double is never less than undisguised, but that’s a given in the series. The rescue of Emma, Steed changing the points in the nick of time, is especially well-executed, and earlier sequences includes a fine single shot of undertakers racing aboard a hearse as it speeds off into the distance, and a tidy fight scene on Steed’s initial visit to the hospital (“What a remarkable recovery” he notes as a man in a plaster cast reveals a gun and full mobility).

Steed: Mrs Peel, have you ever heard of an undertaker booking funerals months in advance?

Another inspired piece of lunacy finds a fully prepped operation going ahead… on a (unseen) jamming device, with Dr Johnson requesting “Forceps, scalpel, blowtorch”. Mrs Peel later taking the place of Miss Thirwell (Caroline Blakiston, Mon Mothma in Return of the Jedi) in the operating theatre is a bit daft, since it’s immediately evident to all present that she’s an impostor, but I guess that’s at least a credit to recognising what a daft idea it is.

Also featuring are Wanda Ventham (Image of the Fendahl, The Faceless Ones, and Sherlock’s mum) and Steven Berkoff (the man in the plaster cast). The coda scene is a fun one, with Steed driving the train backwards as he tells Emma he always felt he was cut out to be an engine driver, but the family objected (“No sense of security, always on the move”).

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

Comments

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 .

Isn’t it true, it’s easier to be a holy man on the top of a mountain?

The Razor’s Edge (1984) (SPOILERS) I’d hadn’t so much a hankering as an idle interest in finally getting round to seeing Bill Murray’s passion project. Partly because it seemed like such an odd fit. And partly because passion isn’t something you tend to associate with any Murray movie project, involving as it usually does laidback deadpan. Murray, at nigh-on peak fame – only cemented by the movie he agreed to make to make this movie – embarks on a serious-acting-chops dramatic project, an adaptation of W Somerset Maugham’s story of one man’s journey of spiritual self-discovery. It should at least be interesting, shouldn’t it? A real curio? Alas, not. The Razor’s Edge is desperately turgid.

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

Schnell, you stinkers! Come on, raus!

Private’s Progress (1956) (SPOILERS) Truth be told, there’s good reason sequel I’m Alright Jack reaps the raves – it is, after all, razor sharp and entirely focussed in its satire – but Private’s Progress is no slouch either. In some respects, it makes for an easy bedfellow with such wartime larks as Norman Wisdom’s The Square Peg (one of the slapstick funny man’s better vehicles). But it’s also, typically of the Boulting Brothers’ unsentimental disposition, utterly remorseless in rebuffing any notions of romantic wartime heroism, nobility and fighting the good fight. Everyone in the British Army is entirely cynical, or terrified, or an idiot.

It’s not as if she were a… maniac, a raving thing.

Psycho (1960) (SPOILERS) One of cinema’s most feted and most studied texts, and for good reason. Even if the worthier and more literate psycho movie of that year is Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom . One effectively ended a prolific director’s career and the other made its maker more in demand than ever, even if he too would discover he had peaked with his populist fear flick. Pretty much all the criticism and praise of Psycho is entirely valid. It remains a marvellously effective low-budget shocker, one peppered with superb performances and masterful staging. It’s also fairly rudimentary in tone, character and psychology. But those negative elements remain irrelevant to its overall power.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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