Basil Dearden
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I’m in awe of Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson for reviving the Ultra Panavision 70 process used on Ben-Hur in 1959 and defunct since Khartoum in 1966—curiously dispatched in service of what is essentially a filmed play, most of which takes place indoors.
AND on top of all that, film geek and aficionado Tarantino has shot the film on film in Ultra Panavision, a process using lenses last employed in 1966 for the Cinerama Roadshow Khartoum.
Much has been made of Tarantino's decision to shoot the movie in Ultra Panavision 70, a wide-screen format last employed nearly 50 years ago on a Charlton Heston epic called Khartoum .
(There hasn’t been a movie shot with these Ultra Panavision lenses since “Khartoum” in 1966.)
Not since the 1966 movie "Khartoum," with Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier, has a film been shot in Ultra Panavision 70 format.
The 70mm release certainly represents a very particular type of film buff event (the last “Cinerama” film to be shot on Ultra Panavision 70 was Khartoum in 1966), but how special it will be to a generation accustomed to Imax 3D and other modern experiential sensations remains an open question.
(For a subtler journey through such gradations, I recommend “The League of Gentlemen,” a British caper from 1960, about a gang of ex-soldiers, of varying ranks, who perpetrate a heist; in the opening shot, one of them emerges from a manhole, clad in a tuxedo, and gets into a Rolls-Royce.)
The words “homosexual” and “lesbian” are never once uttered, presumably a reference to the fact that the word “homosexual” was never used in a film until 1961’s Victim , which was subsequently banned in the UK and US because of it.
Its nastiest sight gags — a dead man’s head comfortably buried inside a smashed television set, a swimming pool filled with fresh corpses, an Alsatian leg twirling lovingly over a patio fire — recall the show “The League of Gentlemen,” which was both pitch black yukfest and demented horror.
Show Comments Dodgy Geezer Sounds a bit like the film: “The Man who Haunted Himself” 1970 (starred Roger Moore, from the book “The Strange Case of Mr Pelham”) This film is also dark, psychological, and concerns a staid and upright company director who suddenly develops a separate physical alter ego who is everything he is not – who likes mistresses, fast cars and runs businesses on the edge of legality and morality.
But British films about the perniciousness of the criminal “stigma” attached to homosexuality prior to 1967 have been around at least since “Victim” (1961), and the trifling amount of skin shown here is now quite tame.
The movies have been making the argument that this is harmful to everyone since at least 1961’s “Victim,” in which Dirk Bogarde starred as a lawyer being blackmailed over his homosexuality.
The film was directed and co-written by Sarah Smith, a producer on the British sketch comedy "The League of Gentlemen" - and a practiced hand at black comedy.
Smith and Baynham come from daft grown-up British TV comedies like "The League of Gentlemen," "The Armando Iannucci Shows," and "I'm Alan Partridge," while their producing partners are from Aardman Animations -- i.e., the Wallace and Gromit people.
This sparkling bauble comes courtesy the folks at Aardman Animations (Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run), and writer/director Sarah Smith (Brit sketch comedy The League of Gentlemen) who have sprinkled the film with sly adult humour that will flurry over the heads of the younger audience members (including fun sight gags like a well-placed canister of “chimney lube”), ensuring that each repeat viewing is sure to unearth new comedic gems to appreciate.
Dirk Bogarde played a gay lawyer in 1961’s Victim, a melodrama with the moral dread of something from Hammer Films ’ mid-period.