Flipside 6: Man of Violence & The Big Switch

[stephan73]

Seems two more Flipside discs are announced.
Man of Violence and The Big Switch, both directed by Pete Walker..

http://dvdsleuth.blogspot.com/2009/07/p ... -from.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Only Man of Violence seems to be having a pre-order.

http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/4-/10770923 ... oduct.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Ashirg]

Man of Violence and The Big Switch will be on one disc

[MichaelB]

The Big Switch (aka Strip Poker) is only just over an hour long, and would have been shown as a double-bill supporting feature at the time - so it made sense to give it the same status here.

[MichaelB]

Oh, and for the record, August's Flipside releases are in a similar batch of three to May's, with Man of Violence/The Big Switch joined by Don Levy's Herostratus (more info here) and Gerry O'Hara's All The Right Noises.

I don't know the spine numbers as yet, but can confirm that all three discs will be region-free.

[MichaelB]

Full specs revealed:

MAN OF VIOLENCE (aka MOON) (1970)
A film by Pete Walker

In a world of gangs and villains, one man - Moon - will stop at nothing to get the girl and take the spoils. Pete Walker's affectionate low-budget homage to the gangster thriller is packed with sights and sounds from a Britain about to swing out of the Sixties and into a somewhat less optimistic decade. It offers not only rare glimpses of a world gone by, but also some unexpected twists on generic convention. The cast includes Hammer girls Luan Peters (Lust for a Vampire, Twins of Evil) and Virginia Wetherell (Doctor Jekyll & Sister Hyde, Demons of the Mind).

Presented here in a stunning new High-Definition transfer from the original negative, this release also includes Pete Walker's earlier thriller The Big Switch (aka Strip Poker).

Special features:
• Both films newly transferred to High Definition from the original negatives
• The Big Switch (aka Strip Poker) (1968, 67 mins): Pete Walker's pulp thriller which includes a climactic shoot-out in the snow on Brighton's now destroyed West Pier
• Alternative, export cut of The Big Switch (1968, 77 mins) (Blu-ray exclusive)
• Original trailers for Man of Violence and The Big Switch
• Alternative Moon title-card
• Extensive illustrated booklet featuring newly commissioned contributions from Pete Walker, novelist Cathi Unsworth, producer and critic David McGillivray, and film historian Julian Petley

DVD: DVD9 | Original aspect ratio 1.33:1 | PAL | Dolby Digital mono audio (320 kbps)
Blu-ray: BD50 | Original aspect ratio 1.33:1 | 1080 | 24fps | PCM mono audio (48k/24-bit)

UK | 1970 | colour | English, optional subtitles for the hearing-impaired | 104 minutes

[MichaelB]

BluRayDefinition.com has the first review (I think).

Just to clear up one point, the disc's technical supervisor has asked me to point out that the reviewer has got the terms DVNR and DNR mixed up:

HD-DVNR is a digital restoration tool we use for scene-by-scene de-spotting before frame-by-frame picture restoration. DNR implies we "sharpened" the image artifically during or after transfer from film, which is something we almost never do, and did not do for this release.

[MichaelB]

Beaver.

[MichaelB]

DVD Times - which helpfully clarifies that the "export version" of The Big Switch could just as accurately be called the "gratuitous nudity version".

[MichaelB]

DVD Outsider.

[cdnchris]

Blu-ray review

[doc mccoy]

Saw both these films last night. I should add that these are the first Pete Walker works that I have seen.

Big Switch - very poor script and the male lead has no charisma whatsoever. Some nice shots of Brighton though. Still, an interesting curio from the late 60's and I'm grateful that the BFI included both the domestic and export version of the film - there is one scene in the export version that differs from the domestic and you could see how it could land the film in trouble with the censors.

Man of Violence aka Moon - a better film, but the plot is too convoluted and the whole Marrakesh sequence does not really add anything to the proceedings. The story has an identity problem in that it wants to incorporate several genres without fully realising any of them: it starts out as a gangland thriller, then introduces political, social and international subplots and then finally incorporates the sort of bluff and double bluff which would not be out of place in film like Where Eagles Dare. I don't think it completely works, as I did not feel a sense of bitterness and injustice which I suspect the ending was supposed to provoke. But it is a noble effort and I did like some of the dialogue in this.

Although it certainly does not punch its weight when up against the great gangland thrillers, I am surprised that this film fell through the cracks for one reason - it has an extremely nasty murder sequence, which none of the greats can compete with, and when I write nasty - I am not referring to gore, but to the sheer cruelty of the scene - the close-ups back and forth between the gangsters taking sadistic pleasure and the bloodied face of the victim with terror in his eyes, and him screaming - the scream does not merely reflect pain, but the victim's terror at what is happening to him and that there is nothing he can do to prevent his fate. Pete Walker certainly knows how to chill and unsettle on the strength of this scene alone.

[colinr0380]

My copies of these discs are still on order at the moment (I've also picked up a copy of Walker's penultimate film, the underage sex drama Home Before Midnight in anticipation of a triple bill of some of his non-horror work!), but I'd certainly recommend House of Whipcord which is, despite its salacious title, an extremely dark (in a number of senses!) film, and one that in a particularly ironically foiled escape attempt captures a sense of utter futility unlike any other film I've seen apart from Night of the Living Dead.

Spoilers for a more detailed discussion of this scene:

SpoilerShow

The film starts off with a sobbing, semi-clothed girl being picked up by a truck driver in the middle of the night. Unable to speak and as the trucker drives her to assumed safety we go into the flashback that comprises the bulk of the film. We eventually come out of the flashback to find that our kindly truck driver has brought the girl back to her eldery, decent-seeming torturers. After he is bid farewell, the girl is immediately hanged and the film takes a turn into Psycho territory for its final third as we are left with the girl's friend and boyfriend trying to find out what happened to her.

[MichaelB]

Exhaustively detailed review from the Wilson Bros (DVD Active).

[MichaelB]

Mondo Digital.

[knives]

Amazon just sent me an e-mail saying that Man of Violence on Blu is OOP. Any truth to that?

[ccfixx]

I received the same e-mail about "Herostratus."

Don Levy "Herostratus and Don Levy Shorts [Blu-ray] [1967][Region Free]"
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002EAKWB6" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Our supplier has informed us that this item is no longer available.

[knives]

I hope this is just a case of second printings being for dual styles.

[criterionsnob]

I received the same email for The Decameron and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

[Murdoch]

They're all available from Moviemail still, Amazon (both UK and US) has been weird with their stock the past few months.

[knives]

What's moviemail's US rates? A bit tight this month.

[Murdoch]

International shipping
Initial charge of £1.50, then £1.50 per DVD plus 75p for every extra disc on a multi-disc title, or £2 per video

I ordered from them once and didn't have any problems.

[tenia]

They still seem to have plenty of them on zavvi, since it has been for £5.85 for the past 3 months.

[MichaelB]

I hope this is just a case of second printings being for dual styles.

It is indeed - full details here.

[MichaelB]

This will be reissued as a Dual Format edition on October 24 - details here.

[colinr0380]

"Really Nixon: faceless tycoons, tawdry protection rackets, dirty little wallets. You ought to be Dean Martin's scriptwriter"

Man of Violence, or Moon under the title card it plays with here, is an interesting curio though not one that I find particularly successful. This is an extremely unecessarily confusing gangster film-cum-spy thriller-meets-travelogue with a huge network of characters all regularly referred to by their surname only (for the tough gangster guys) or their nicknames (for the girls, or our hero) getting introduced with strange divergent plot twists that occur every five minutes or so until my head was spinning trying to keep up.

Our 'hero' Moon (we know his name because it gets said about twenty times in the first ten minutes) is a lowlife Yojimbo-esque amoral antihero (and, I'm choosing my words carefully here, complete asshole!) who gets hired by both sides to watch over the other in some sort of Northern-Southern dispute over a construction racket and nightclub scam dispute. Yet this smalltime dispute between two bosses and their thugs plot gets embellished upon until it is almost unrecognisable as Moon finds out (through going to a gay club to interrogate a Diplomat and when he can't get the information from him, instead doing come hither looks and pumping his gabby, flamboyant young aide for information in the bedroom, in a scene which seemingly unintentionally throws bisexuality as a tool for information gathering into a spy's arsenal. Let's see James Bond do that in one of his cases!) about a teetering North African state whose gold reserves have gone missing, visits the embassy and meets up with the heroine who caused the whole convoluted plot by working in a nightclub in Marrakesh where she got involved with the President's son and when he was overthrown and executed came back to the UK with the President and all the gold reserves of the country and stupidly told the gang bosses all about them, so they are now fighting over who gets the money. This all gets thrown at the audience in nonchalant exposition dump scene as the hero and heroine, who've known each other for all of five minutes, casually get undressed to go to bed together in a seedy hotel room.

Then the film for some reason decides to throw in one of the bosses also managing some sort of boy band as a front to bring the gold back to Britain by getting them to go on a North African tour in their Volkswagen van with the band name "Flossie and the Crush" stuck on the side of their Mystery Machine. Why do we need the scene of him bereating his teenage daughter for falling in love with the Liverpudlian-accented member of the group? Is it just that it wouldn't be the tail end of the 1960s without a internationally famous Liverpool boy band in there? I guess the group's apparent fame works in allowing Moon to distract a group of (30-something looking) teenage squealing groupies to barricade the band inside a building so he can steal their van for himself!

All the above bizarre narrative stuff would be problematic enough, but the whole film is performed with dialogue that is so arch and winking, whilst obtusely skirting around anything that would come close to seeming like an actual conversation that two human beings would have, that it makes the film even tougher to sit through. For example see this exchange that takes place when one of the gang bosses has captured the heroine and is about to torture her (through forced lesbianism, which she seems pretty nonplussed about, so the threat of that seems to have missed the mark somewhat) for information:

"Humphrey Bogart will be remembered for those immortal lines "spill the beans". You might like to save Mr Bogart the embarassment of turning in his grave to hear me mutilate the majesty of those words"
"Very funny"
"Tell me everything you know sweetheart, or better still everything that Moon knows"
"He's as wise as I am"
"There are 26 letters in the English alphabet. Arranged in a motley manner they can be arranged to impart certain information. Which they shall!"

There is some fun to be had from the arch, pretentious dialogue, especially in the way that almost everything is done in the form of one-liners that don't really hit the mark at all, resulting in some excrutiatingly lame jokes hanging dead in the air. Combine that with the way that nobody else (especially the strangely blank female characters, even the, and I'm choosing my words carefully here, stunningly thick heroine) reacts in any normal way to anything that gets said (not even a "what the hell are you talking about!"), and it is like the film is existing in some strange parallel universe in which the all of the terrible fashions, mannered line readings, hateful protagonists, cut price off season package holiday tourism and lame puns are treated as the epitome of uber-cool gangster chic and globe trotting adventure to rival James Bond.

I'm left with so many questions for the filmmakers: it is nice at first, but why use that blaring theme tune to punctuate every moment of action, or between scenes? I guess it is to show how exciting events are but it just makes the film play like a television episode such as The Avengers or The Persuaders, for all its heavy handed underscoring. Why did the filmmakers decide to use sped up motion for a couple of the action scenes, which makes what should be some of the more tense moments play out like Keystone Cops? Is the hero meant to be a cool loner or a horrible selfish monster? (I'm going with monster as only the worst kinds of people refer to themselves in the third person. Although wardrobe-wise I suppose Moon is able to pull off a salmon pink shirt and lobster red tie combination very well!) And what is the reason for the film's fascination for women's navels and liquids being shot at or smeared into them? Which gets replaced in the Marrakesh scenes with a similar fascination for every character holding single flowers to their noses and twirling them around during their dialogue scenes?

But I don't think such questions should really be asked of this film. It is the kind of film where the main character is introduced in a scene wiping blood from his face in the reflection of the glass of a picture, when there is a perfectly good mirror just feet away he could have used! Or where the hero again decides to abandon the Mystery Machine in Marrakesh, removes the "Flossie and the Crumbs" tacked on paper signs from the sides of the van, takes off the number plates and then just drops them in a heap on the ground next to the van! Why go to the bother! Those strange bits of business emphasise to me the way that the film is all about 'cool' postures and actions, in the same way that the dialogue is presumably meant to play like 'cool', sophisticated and sparkling repartee. Yet there is no actual thought behind exactly why the characters are doing what they're doing, except just to look 'cool'.

It sometimes feels like an improv gangster film in that sense, in which you can see all of the actors making up what their characters are doing from moment to moment. Perhaps best emphasised in the final showdown double crossing scene which somehow just peters out with half of the characters just slinking out of the scene at a loss for words!

Writing the film up I'm being harsh on it but it is certainly a unique film! I did particularly like the incredibly bleak ending that really seems to prefigure the final twist endings of Pete Walker's (much better) horror films, particularly that of House of Whipcord in the way that both films end wth the characters being led away to police cars. It is great to get a chance to see some of Walker's non-horror films, and to find out that this film has some of the same ideas within it.

It does also work as a very strange off kilter example of the kind of low-rent sex and violence British gangster film that was soon going to be utterly destroyed by Performance, and weirdly has a lot of similar obsessions to Performance in its bisexual sex, threats of sadism (as the heroine briefly gets threatened with a belt whipping when the lesbianism isn't having the desired effect) and bizarre halfway turn from urban gangster film to, in Moon's case a pop-star inflected trip to another country. But Moon handles its weird material more generically compared to Performance's extreme abstraction and fractured trip into the interior of a gangster's psyche.