Hammer and Niall

The Snorkel

All my life I’ve wanted to see The Snorkel (1958). Well, maybe ever since 1966 when I was eight-years-old and found it in Steven Scheuer’s The TV Key Movie Guide (Bantam, 1966), an ancient paperback bible predating Leonard Maltin’s TV Movies by a couple of years and my first link to cinemaphilia. For surely if Mr. Scheuer spent all that time reviewing all those movies (his capsule format was copied by Maltin), I could not be alone in my passion. And an odd title like The Snorkel can haunt you if you’re that young, as can the unconventional name of its star, Peter van Eyck, whom I’d later regard as The Poor Man’s Karl Boehm — who, to belabor the digression, could be considered The Poor Man’s Hardy Krüger. Now with Hammer Films: The Icons of Suspense Collection, a six-film, three-DVD set, The Snorkel makes its debut on home video only to have me realize that I had seen it… decades ago! I’m not certain when or where, but the image behind the opening credits is impossible to forget.

    Best known for their Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee horror movies, Britain’s Hammer Films dabbled in sundry mysteries and thrillers, many of them done on modest budgets with b-level stars. Without Dracula or Frankenstein or some crazed monster lumbering about, these smaller pictures afforded their makers a degree of creative indulgence. In reworking Gaslight down to the toxic air itself, The Snorkel transforms a farfetched murder story into a cat-and-mouse dance between van Eyck’s icy dad and his suspicious stepdaughter (Mandy Miller). What they lack in depth as human characters is rectified by a screenplay (co-written by Peter Myers and Jimmy Sangster) which breezes through a series of outrageous situations. We may not care much about the girl’s dodgy mental state or deep personal losses, but her pursuit of the killer is handled with blind conviction by director Guy Green, a hired gun who made one of my guilty pleasures, Once Is Not Enough (1975), late-period Jacqueline Susann swill featuring Alexis Smith and Melina Mercouri as a pair of lesbian lovers.

    Although a viewer’s interest (or tolerance) for the collection could depend on their sex and date of birth (male Baby Boomers may have an advantage), there are a couple of nuggets here of historic and aesthetic significance. A film I doubt either Leonard Maltin or Steven Scheuer ever reviewed in their books, Never Take Candy From a Stranger (1960) stands as a potent exploration of child molestation, mob mentality, capitalist corruption, the flawed legal system (complete with cult favorite Niall MacGinnis as an unscrupulous barrister), psychological trauma and the loss of innocence. How this ever got made or released fifty years ago is anyone’s guess. Felix Aylmer plays the queer duck patriarch with a hankering for pubescent girls, fumbling around like a post-breakdown vision of Michael Powell’s dad from those creepy home movie scenes Karl Boehm groans over in Peeping Tom.

    The crown jewel of the set, however, is These Are the Damned (1963), also new to DVD. Joseph Losey directed this loosely structured parable of post-Hiroshima, pre-Armageddon Britain faced with growing apathy and violence, under a government eager to send the human race into a radioactive future. (Watch it back-to-back with Kiss Me, Deadly and blow your mind.) Bearing no relation to the popular SF movie, Village of the Damned (1960), the script by Evan Jones, from H.L. Lawrence’s novel Children of Light, is a tossed salad of metaphors, bookended by Macdonald Carey’s drifting American hedonist and Viveca Lindfors’ East European abstract sculptor, with punchy asides to teddy boys (fronted by a suitably dour Oliver Reed), incest (Oliver’s a tad too fussy over sis Shirley Anne Field), impotence and living dead children under the watchful eye of Big Brother Alexander Knox and a song extolling the virtues of black leather. Whew! You gotta see this one.