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Post by dem on Mar 28, 2011 9:30:18 GMT
Alexander Thynne - Blue Blood (Star, 1974) Blurb: Possessed by the devil in a MANSION OF MADNESS
An English Lord who covers the walls of his stately home with erotic art...
A beautiful wife caught up in the maelstrom of being a film star and international jet. setter...
A butler who can turn his hand to anything, until you wonder what he might turn his hand to next...
A young simple-minded nanny, a stranger in a still stranger setting...
And, at the centre of the mounting suspense, a young daughter whose mysterious cuts and bruises suggest the presence of forces beyond the imagination...
Thynne's violent psychological thriller leaves it open until the final freakish finale when subtle suggestions of indefinable menace become reality.Despite ridiculous globes-enhanced cover, Milan has failed to palm this off on me until now, but early indications are it's some bizarre take on Hugh Walpole's The Silver Mask with added bad sex, toytown Satanism and hallucinogens. Author is the colourful Lord Weymouth of Longleat, who gets things off to an unpromising start with his dedication, a two page Lullaby for Lenka (his daughter) complete with musical score. Anybody seen the film?
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Post by killercrab on Mar 28, 2011 10:01:32 GMT
Yeah it's a very weird film - Reed is great as the manipulative butler.
KC
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Post by Johnlprobert on Mar 28, 2011 11:20:57 GMT
Alexander Thynne - Blue Blood (Star, 1974) Anybody seen the film? Oh goodness me what do you think?  It's a very weird picture, not entirely satisfactory but definitely worth a view or three if you're a WeirdBritHorrorTrash fiend. I think the original title of the novel was 'The Carry Cot'. The movie was shot on location at Longleat somehow (how do they get permission to do this sort of thing? Of course Harry Alan Towers used to pretend they were filming an historical epic and would hurry off the naked breasts and bottoms and bring on a specially employed actor dressed up as, eg, Abraham Lincoln when the owner of the house came to view the shooting of what was actually something like House of 1000 Dolls) and features Oliver Reed as the disturbing butler, Meg Wynn Owen as the nanny in whose mind it might all be, Derek Jacobi as their weak boss and Fiona Lewis as the posh nudity. I've seen it twice and I still don't really know what it's about, especially those sepia-toned satanic bits in the middle somewhere. Delighted to know there was a film tie-in though - another one for me to look out for! |
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Post by dem on Mar 28, 2011 11:41:21 GMT
Oh goodness me what do you think? I'd have put money on it! How they came to get permission to film there is surely down to the ever-snazzily attired author who owns the place (am guessing the novel preceded the flick?) so he had a better idea than most what they'd be shooting. The book comes in at a slick 165 pages so will make a start over next couple of days. The cover is so cheap and sleazy I can't believe it took me so long to realise its potential.  |
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Post by noose on Mar 28, 2011 11:53:43 GMT
The Marquis of Bath wrote this?
Ye Gods, wonders never cease!
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Post by andydecker on Mar 28, 2011 16:55:24 GMT
wow
just wow!
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Post by dem on Mar 28, 2011 19:39:12 GMT
Even without the tip off on the inside cover, I doubt it would have taken us long to work out who this 'Lord Widgeon of Swanbrook House' character might be based upon as he gives us plenty of hints - fifty pages in and it is reading like an auto-biography with occasional, slightly sinister dramatic interludes. Lord Widgeon is a dope-smoking painter who affects a dress sense that owes much to beatnik/ hippie influences. The young aristo is married to a movie star, Lys, whose career keeps her away from the estate ten months out of every twelve. This set up suits him ideally as he would like nothing more than to have fifty children by fifty wives and seeks women who share his fluid approach to wedlock and fidelity. Lys has no problem with his extra-marital affairs just as she is free to take as many lovers as she wishes. Lord Widgeon relies upon his manservant, Tom, to attend the day to day running of the estate while he gets on with the serious business of completing his Kama Sutra-inspired mural in the bedroom ( see it here). Tom, a London hard-nut, is a former Teddy boy whose own dress sense has mutated into "something halfway between hippydom and a caricature of a Dickensian Gentleman's gentleman." With the birth of a daughter, Katya, a young nanny is added to the staff. June, plain and seemingly devoid of a personality, hardly strikes us as ideal although Widgeon is pleased enough with her work - until he notices the infant is seldom free of cuts and bruises. She seems to get on well enough with Tom but then everybody does, even his Lordship's latest lover, Carlotta the cover model, who digs his groovy pot-smoking orgies in the servants' quarters. Widgeon wonders if maybe he's let Tom have too free a run of the estate ... That's about it for the set up. When we join the action the worst has already happened and Lord Widgeon has been confined to a prison or lunatic asylum - he can't remember which - after things got out of hand. More to follow ... |
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Thana Niveau
Devils Coach Horse
We who walk here walk alone.
Posts: 109
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Post by Thana Niveau on Mar 29, 2011 8:15:19 GMT
Thanks, Dem. Lord P subjected me to this film last night after your thread reminded him of its BritHorrorTrash weirdness. I loved the camp game hunters/park rangers and of course Oliver Reed is always watchable, even if he always unnerves me. (He gave me nightmares as a child.) I squirmed and said "Eww!" whenever he threatened the ladies with his massive Kitchener moustache and I liked the scenes shot on the roof. Other than that, the film is fading like a very weird dream and I have no idea what it was about.  |
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Post by Johnlprobert on Mar 29, 2011 13:35:20 GMT
Lord P subjected me to this film last night Honestly, would I dream of doing such a thing? It was very interesting to watch again knowing it was actually written by the chap who lives there. Dem, your academic analysis of the book itself will prove invaluable in my serious study of this particular work of BritCrud. Btw - I remarked to Lady P that the review of this in World of Horror magazine when it originally came out said 'this has been doing the circuit with Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things which is even worse. Stay home.' I suspect I'm probably the only one who yearns for the days when cinemas were so desperate for product that this sort of thing regularly made it onto the big screen. Mind you, for every ten of these you did get an Argento Inferno or Sergio Martino Torso so I hope I'm not entirely alone. |
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Post by David A. Riley on Mar 29, 2011 14:11:35 GMT
Cinemas, especially the smaller ones, were always the most interesting years ago. They could show some really strange stuff - and delve back decades sometimes too. I remember the Princes in Accrington - one of these small independents that flourished once over - doing a week of horror double bills, which included a good number of Universals old classics, like The House of Dracula and The House of Frankenstein in a double bill. That week was bliss.
I remember too going to watch a double bill of Mexican horror films - titles forgotten. They were so bad I walked out halfway through the second one. You would probably have loved it.
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Post by pulphack on Mar 30, 2011 12:54:47 GMT
of course you're not alone in yearning for those days. direct to video kind of took over, i suppose, but you couldn't stumble across that quite so easily on a double bill - you had to cough for the hire first.
of course most of it was rubbish. but is it not true that the rubbish tends to be more FUN and lingers in the memory longer than so-called 'quality' - most of which looks dull thirty/forty years later, whereas the tat still has that 'WTF??' appeal.
and Thynne used to have loads of wives he called 'wifelets' with a stunning lack of charm (if my childhood memory of Weekend and Titbits is anything to go by).
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Post by dem on Mar 30, 2011 16:02:44 GMT
Sadly, any "academic analysis" will have to wait until I am reincarnated as a higher literary life form, but having burnt through The Carry Cot/ Blue Blood in two sittings, I'm wondering how much of Thynne's novel actually made it into Andrew Sinclair's screenplay - it can't have been the easiest novel to dramatise. Essentially, Thynne has cast himself as male lead in a contemporary Acid Gothic (© Karl E. Wagner)- but their are lengthy periods where the spot-the-baby-basher plot plays very distant second fiddle to 'Gregory Widgeon, Lord Amesbury's ruminations on marriage (wife-lets), art, society and the government's obligation to its people to improve the quality of recreational drugs (!). I'm taking it from Lady P's comments that "the camp game hunters/park rangers" have far more prominence in the screen version than they do here. An elderly night-watchmen and gamekeeper - an "intensely introverted dwarf" who reminds Widgeon of an "animated mushroom" - are mentioned in passing early on, but we hear no more of them until their participation in the "satanic ritual". Nor is there any suggestion of Tom raping the Nanny.
From those few reviews of the movie scanned, the general consensus seems to be that it makes little sense, but the novel is easy on the brain until the final twenty pages. It's become increasingly apparent that somebody in the household is battering baby Katya. All the circumstantial evidence points to the Nanny until she deflects the blame onto his Lordship who, she claims, has been trying to force himself upon her since she entered the household. She doubts that he is even aware of his actions; he has been under so much pressure to satisfy his lawyers and trustees with a male heir that the birth of Katya has triggered a breakdown. To the reader, these ludicrous claims only confirm her guilt (his Lordship may be randy, but he has no problem finding attractive partners when the need takes him and he dotes on his daughter). It is only when Tom, his ever-loyal butler seemingly takes the Nanny's side, that Widgeon begins to wonder if dropping acid may not be advisable for a man of possible paranoid schizophrenic tendencies. Despite this, he chooses the eve of an investigation by social services to take a massive hit of LSD before embarking on a midnight prowl of his ancestral home. Wandering the top floors he hears chanting from the courtyard below - it's trusty Tom and his massive erection presiding over a Satanic orgy! And what's with the tiny bundle on the altar? Surely they're not going to sacrifice the baby?!!! Even as his Lordship launches himself headlong through the window comes the understanding that we've been sympathising with a maniac all along ....
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Post by weirdmonger on Mar 30, 2011 16:05:54 GMT
sadly, any "academic analysis" will have to wait until i am reincarnated as a higher literary life form, I'm pleased to say I find you already to be a 'higher literary life form' based on your posts. There is no escaping. |
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Post by dem on Apr 14, 2011 13:42:44 GMT
Btw - I remarked to Lady P that the review of this in World of Horror magazine when it originally came out said 'this has been doing the circuit with Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things which is even worse. Stay home.' Here's the longer item from World Of Horror #9 (1972) |
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Post by franklinmarsh on Jul 24, 2016 21:48:48 GMT
Sure my brother (a big Ollie Reed fan) had this book way back when and I must have read it but can't remember it at all. Have just seen the film. Waiting 40 odd years to see a film is inevitably going to make it a disappointment. The ending is anti-climactic to say the least, and Derek Jacobi's (he's the Lord) wardrobe and Ollie's accent nearly sink it early on, but it does exude a strange fascination. I remember the World Of Horror article. The film was co-written and directed by Andrew Sinclair , an odd cove who gave us The Breaking Of Bumbo (novel and film - the latter featuring genuine 1969-70 skinheads right at the end and Joanna Lumley's clothes falling off - Gawd bless Channel 4) and a film of Under Milk Wood (featuring Ruth Madoc' s clothes falling off, Welsh viewers, as well as Richard Burton, mercifully keeping his clothes on). Some great comments here, and a word of appreciation for the red-nosed burglars of Fiona Lewis who also enhanced that other Richard Burton classic, Villain. Echoes of The Servant somewhat, possibly The Innocents, the Devil worship that features in the ads is sadly underused, and may possibly be imaginary, but the class war element and the presence of Please Sir's Richard Davies and a camp safari park attendant make you proud to be British. Sort of.
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