It seems we have two Arthur Peevers. One dead, one learning to swing a dainty foot.

The Avengers

4.19: Quick-Quick Slow Death

Coming straight after The Girl from Auntie, it’s impossible to ignore the similar “villains cover their tracks by whacking wacky eccentrics” structure, but since I’m a sucker for such Avengers tales, it scarcely matters. Robert Banks Stewarts writes, but particular laurels are due James Hill for his deft touch during the musical climax.

The episode’s main thrust concerns a dance school “for infiltrating foreign agents into the country”, in which the students are offed and replaced with trained operatives. This eventually explains the dual Arthur Peevers, the one found dead in the teaser, in a pram in full evening dress, and the one who shows up at the dance school Terpsichorean Training Techniques Inc (James Belchamber).

The dead man’s inked arm leads to the first in a mounting series of dead bodies, as Emma visits tattooist Fintry (Alan Gerrard, Bovem in The Dominators). Diana Rigg seems genuinely amused during her scenes with Gerrard, as he recounts with gusto the most popular designs (“I love whoever it is” and “a mother’s loving touch”) and how a certain inscription needs sufficiently sizeable clients or the results can be undesirable (“So it ended up ‘What is home without a moth’”). When Fintry is shot in the head, he still has the wherewithal to tattoo his Italian sausage with vital information about the murderer before expiring (“Killer has tattoo on right wrist”).

Steed: You’ve seen pictures of those Russian diplomats?

Huggins: Hmm.

Steed: Well, where do you think they get those terrible clothes from?

Steed, posing as a representative of Baggy Pants Limited, who do “top secret work – Diplomatic Corps only”, visits Litchen & Co and attempts to mine information on Peever from Huggins (Graham Armitage, Barney in The Macra Terror), who is stabbed in the changing room, much to his colleague’s alarm (“Why, without us, Ascot would look like a nudist convention!”) He then finds his way to Mulberrys Bank, where the manager (Ronald Govey, Relf in Ultraworld) is most upset about losing a client (Manager: Bad. Steed: Very bad. Manager: Very, very bad”), and his next lead sends him – nowhere. Opening the door to Purbright & Co onto an empty space, he very nearly plummets to his doom.

Peidi: Such expressive feet. Look, ah they talk-a to me. You naughty little chatterboxes, you.

Diverting, undoubtedly, but Emma’s on the receiving end of the best encounters in this one, particularly as the Italian sausage isn’t the only dubious European in Quick-Quick Slow Death. At Peidi’s shoe repair, Peidi (David Kernan) feigns a continually slipping Italian accent as he obsesses over Mrs Peel’s feet (“So pale, so tender, so exquisitely elegant… Oh senora, they’re a poem, they sing and they soar”) and gets quite excited over what he might be able to make for her once he has cast them (“A pair of slippers for the boudoir? Wellington boots in the kinkiest black leather?”) Peidi doesn’t end up dead, but his assistant Bernard (Colin Ellis) does, drowned in plaster of Paris.

Steed: Now you, Mrs Peel, back to your pupils, and be quick-quick slow about it.

After this succession of curious characters, the main action at the dance school isn’t, initially, quite as scintillating, with Emma posing as an instructress and Steed brushing up on his technique. Eunice Gayson (Sylvia in the first two Bond films) scores as the head of the school, Lucille Banks, and has some particularly fine interaction with Macnee (she notes his good English name, and he replies “Came over with the Vikings. They were between raids and discovering America at the time”).

Lucille Banks: Are you attempting a reverse, double clip feet?

Steed: With you, Miss Banks, I reach for the rainbow.

Lucille Banks: You mad, impetuous man!

However, the grand finale at the gala dance contest, as Steed is targeted for elimination and Emma proves more than effective at turning the tables, is a delight. He shows off his acumen to Miss Banks as he and Emma warn each other of dangers (“You’re Number Nine”: “And you’re dancing with garlic sausage!”). Each time someone dances around the back of the dance floor, they mess up their adversaries’ plans. Emma changes Steed’s 9 to a 6, 9 being the identifying number of the intended target. Steed turns Ivor Bracewell’s (Maurice Kaufmann – the tattooed killer) 6 to 9. She dances with Ivor round the back so the spy coshes him, and Steed consequently coshes the spy, with Emma dispatching the drunken commander Chester Reed (Larry Cross): “Keep ‘em coming”.

Other amusing moments include the opening sequence, in which Steed, who has been shooting empty beer cans, hits a full one Emma has let fly (“That was my lunchtime refreshment”). John Woodnutt (Terror of the Zygons, The Keeper of Traken, Jeeves and Wooster) is on top form as Captain Noble; having survived an attempted choking to death, he can only croak at Steed (and, we are informed, phone Emma via whistling Morse Code at her).

The laugh off is also particularly good, with the duo dancing into the darkness as Emma delivers a breathless sentence:

Mrs Peel: Steed.

Steed: Mrs Peel.

Mrs Peel: Did you know they’ve just arrested a band leader for being drunk in charge of a pram containing a man in full evening dress with a plaster cast on his dead, tattooed on his right wrist, clutching a dance diploma in one hand and a garlic sausage in the other?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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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