Tag: Anthony Nicholls

The Omen (1976)

Extremely silly horror with a great score, more interested in inventive deaths and genuine fear or dread

Director: Richard Donner

Cast: Gregory Peck (Robert Thorn), Lee Remick (Katherine Thorn), David Warner (Keith Jennings), Billie Whitelaw (Mrs Baylock), Patrick Troughton (Father Brennan), Leo McKern (Carl Bugenhagen), Harvey Stephens (Damien Thorn), Martin Benson (Father Spiletto), Robert Rietty (Monk), John Stride (Psychiatrist), Anthony Nicholls (Dr Becker), Holly Palance (Nanny)

“Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.” One of the sweetest things about The Omen is that the number of the Beast was considered such an unknown concept to original viewers, that its painstakingly explained to us. In some ways The Omen is quite sweet, a big, silly Halloween pantomime which everyone involved takes very seriously. If The Exorcist was about tapping into primal fears, The Omen is a gory slasher (with a cracking score) that’s about making you go “Did you fucking see that!” as actors are dispatched in inventively gory ways. It’s brash, overblown and (if we’re honest) not very good.

Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck, selling every inch of his innate dignity for cold, hard lucre) is an American diplomat told one night in Rome that his pregnant wife Katherine (Lee Remick) has given birth to a stillborn child. “Not a problem” he’s told by an absurdly creepy Priest (Martin Benson) – just so happens there’s another motherless new-born child in the hospital tonight so he can have that one, no questions asked, and his wife need never know. Flash forward five years: Thorn is Ambassador to the Court of St James and young Damien (Harvey Stephens) is a creepy kid, with few words and piercing stare. In a series of tragic accidents people start dying around him. Could those people warning Thorn that his son is in fact the literal anti-Christ himself, be correct?

Want to see how powerful music can be? Check out how The Omen owes nearly all the menace it has to it imposing, Oscar-winning score from Jerry Goldsmith (wonderfullyGothic full of Latin-chanting and percussive beats). It certainly owes very little to anything else. The Omen is an exploitative, overblown mess of a film, delighting in crash-zooms, jump-cuts and extreme, multi-cut build-ups to gore. Richard Donner never misses an opportunity to signpost an approaching grisly death, by cutting between the horrified face of the victim, the object of their demise and then often back again. For the best stunts – including a famous demise at the hands of a sheet of glass – Donner delights in showing us the death multiple times from multiple angles.

This slasher delight in knocking off actors – people are hanged, impaled, crushed and decapitated in increasingly inventive manners – is what’s really at the heart of The Omen. None of this is particularly scary in itself (with the possible exception of the hypnotised madness in the eyes of Holly Palance’s nurse before her shocking suicide at Damien’s birthday party) just plugging into the sort of delight we take in watching blood and guts that would be taken in further in series like Halloween (which owed a huge debt to the nonsense here). Donner isn’t even really that good at shooting this stuff, with his afore-mentioned crude intercutting and even-at-the-time old-fashioned crash zooms.

With Goldsmith’s score providing the fear, The Omen similarly relies on its actors to make all this nonsense feel ultra serious and important. They couldn’t have picked a better actor than Gregory Peck to shoulder the burden of playing step-dad to the Devil’s spawn. Peck has such natural authority – and such an absence of anything approaching fourth-wall leaning playfulness – that he invests this silliness with a strange dignity. Of course, Atticus Finch is going to spend a fair bit of time weighing up the moral right-and-wrongs of crucifying with heavenly knives the son of Satan! Peck wades through The Omen with a gravelly bombast, managing to not betray his “for the pay cheque” motivations, and investing it with his own seriousness of purpose.

Peck’s status also probably helps lift the games of the rest of the cast. Lee Remick may have a part that requires her to do little more than scream (and fall from a great height twice) but she does manage to convey a neat sense of dread as a mother realising her son is not quite right. David Warner gives a nice degree of pluck to a sceptical photojournalist (while also bagging the best death scene). Troughton and McKern ham it up gloriously as a drunken former devil-worshipping priest and an exorcist archaeologist respectively. Best in show is Billie Whitelaw who filters her Beckettian experience into a series of chillingly dead-eyed stares as Damien’s demonic nanny.

The Omen does make some good hay of its neat paedophobia. Harvey Stephens with his shaggy hair, impish smile and pale skin (not to mention darkly sombre wardrobe) looks like your worst nightmare – he’s creepy enough that the film doesn’t need to gift him a vicious rottweiler as well. Donner’s decision to never have Damien show a touch of any real emotion for most of the film also pays off, meaning even something as silly as Damien inflicting slaughter from behind the pedals of a child’s tricycle seems scary.

Of course, if Damien was savvy enough to present himself as a bright and sunny child perhaps Troughton, Warner, McKern and co would have struggled to convince Peck he was the Devil’s seed. In that sense he takes after his dad: Satan loves an over-elaborate death, and from a storm herding one victim to a fatal impalement under a tumbling church spire to popping the handbrake of a glass-bearing van for another, no trouble is too much for Satan when bumping off those who cross him. (The Omen could be trying to suggest that maybe everything is a freak accident and Thorn goes wild and crazy with grief – but that Goldsmith score discounts any possibility other than Damien is exactly what we’re repeatedly told he is.)

The Omen trundles along until its downbeat, sequel-teasing ending, via a gun-totting British policeman who sticks out like a sore thumb in a country where the cops carry truncheons not pistols. Donner balances the dialled up, tricksy, overblown scares with scenes of po-faced actors talking about prophecies and the apocalypse, all shot with placid straight-forwardness. There is a really scary film to be made here about finding out your beloved son is literally a monster, or how a depressed father could misinterpret a series of accidents as a diabolical scheme. But it ain’t The Omen – this is a bump-ride of the macabre. The Devil may have the best tunes – but he needs to talk to his Hollywood agent.

Victim (1961)

Dirk Bogarde takes on both blackmailers and the vilest of laws in Victim

Director: Basil Dearden

Cast: Dirk Bogarde (Melville Farr), Sylvia Sims (Laura Farr), Dennis Price (Calloway), Nigel Stock (Phip), Peter McEnery (Boy Barrett), Donald Churchill (Eddy Stone), Anthony Nicholls (Lord Fullbrook), Hilton Edwards (P.H.) Norman Bird (Harold Doe), Darren Nesbitt (Sandy Youth), Alan MacNaughton (Scott Hankin), Noel Howlett (Patterson), Charles Lloyd-Pack (Henry)

Victim is both a film of its time and hugely daring. It was released in 1961, six years before homosexuality was decriminalised. It feels slightly old-fashioned and coy in its language and style – but at the time would have been almost unbelievably daring. It not only presented gay people as normal people (and not limp-wristed comic figures) but sensitively and sympathetically argues that the law (or “blackmailer’s charter” as the Chief Inspector calls it) was morally wrong.

Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde) is a married lawyer, about to be offered the position of Queen’s Counsel. One day he rebuffs the entreaties of a young man named Barrett (Peter McEnery). The man later hangs himself in police custody, the victim of blackmail. Farr held deep feelings for Barrett – but cut himself off from contact, having been haunted by his consciously suppressed homosexual feelings. Heartbroken and angered by Barrett’s death, Farr decides to take on the blackmailers – even if it means destroying his career and endangering his marriage to Laura (Sylvia Sims).

In 1961 Dirk Bogarde was one of the most popular actors in the country, a romantic leading man, best known for a series of light British comedies. He was also a gay man, who lived for decades with his manager and partner Anthony Forwood. It’s almost impossible to understand today how brave it was, how much of his career he put on the line, to play Farr. At a time when many people (including characters in this film) considered the very idea of homosexuality a revolting aberration, for Bogarde to play this role could have been career suicide. When even today Hollywood actors are afraid to come out for fear of damaging their careers, here in 1961 was an actor who was actually gay, playing a gay lawyer, at a time when that part of his life was a crime.

What’s particularly impressive about Bogarde’s performance is its calmness, its control. Farr rarely raises his voice, and never hectors us or the characters about the morality of the law. Only once does he show real rage – punching another man after a comment too far about a university “friend” who committed suicide. Bogarde’s Farr is a man, who (the movie implies) has constantly denied that part of himself (much to his pain and of those closest to him). His decision to take a stand is as much accepting a part of himself, as it is doing the right thing.

It’s the scenes with his wife where Bogarde excels. These are deeply, searingly painful scenes of a man struggling to express to his wife his own feelings. Farr makes it clear he ended contact with Barrett because he desired him, because he loved him – more (or rather in a different way) than he loves his wife. Bogarde allegedly wrote his own lines for this key scene, effectively Farr’s coming out. It’s a powerful scene of a man letting a burden fall from his shoulders, of finally saying something he could barely admit to himself.

The relationship with his wife is one of the central points of interest in the film, the story developing in a way that feels natural and unforced. Sylvia Sims is equally good as a woman who is sympathetic, but can’t completely comprehend the depth of Farr’s feelings. There’s no condemnation or recrimination – but there is a low-key feeling of something being broken, of the two of them realising that they have companionship and a platonic love – but not the passion that marriage should have. It’s a testament to the un-showy realism of the film, that it avoids outbursts and fury in these scenes in favour of a quietly powerful, mutually supportive uncertainty.

The rest of the film treads a fine line between polemic and procedural. It’s a well-written, heartfelt piece that wears its research lightly. It’s crazy to think this is first film to actually use the word “homosexual”. The characters are a neat snapshot of the personalities of the time. Some of the straight characters are violently opposed to the “degenerates”. Others, such as the lead Inspector, enforce the law because they must. The homosexual characters are similarly wide-ranging: some are dignified, many are deeply scared, some have a patrician smugness and arrogance (it’s telling Farr gets more angry at these than anyone else in the movie).

There are wonderful opportunities for a host of character actors. Charles Lloyd-Pack (as barber Henry) in particular suddenly unleashes a heartfelt, achingly sad speech of defiance in which he says he has been to prison twice for what he is, and will not go again. Norman Bird’s bookshop owner Harold is a mix of guilt, frustrated feeling and fear – a man deeply confused by his feelings. Nigel Stock is also marvellous as a car dealer terrified of losing out on an inheritance from his father-in-law should the truth be known.

I also loved Noel Howlett’s quiet dignity as Farr’s assistant – and his matter-of-fact statement (after learning the truth) that he has never doubted Farr’s integrity and sees no reason to do so now has a brilliant stiff-upper lip emotion to it. The film contrasts this subtly with Alan MacNaughton’s thinly veiled disgust as Farr’s brother-in-law when he learns the truth.

The film wraps its careful research into the issues of the homosexuality laws – and the dangers of blackmail they expose people to – within an engaging whodunit mystery, set in a very real-feeling London of the sixties. The film has a wonderful eye and ear for the social life of the time, and it throws enough red-herrings and police detective tropes in there to keep the film entertaining. Despite its constant references back to the laws of the time, and the criticisms it makes, it never feels like a polemic – it’s first and foremost a human story.

Yes it is a little dated – very much of its time, and it’s shot with a careful conservatism by Basil Dearden, though he has an expert control of pace and there is no doubting his passionate commitment to this film and its subject matter. That’s what you need to remembe: how daringly, unbelievably controversial this film would have been to make. All the major players put their careers on the line here: and it pays off. It would be six years before the revolting laws were repealed, and this happened for many, many reasons – but this film was a genuine help for making people see the wrongheadedness of these laws.