The Saint 3.10 – The Imprudent Politician

Hey, it’s Jean Marsh and Michael Gough! Reckon they’re up to no good? Just look at them.

Back when I first started watching The Saint in 1986-87, “The Imprudent Politician” became one of my favorite episodes, in part because of the story and in part because Marsh and Gough were in it and I knew who they were from their roles in sixties Doctor Who. In time, I’d come to recognize most of the great guest cast, including Anthony Bate, Moray Watson, and Mike Pratt. And in the spring of 1988, after reading a little bit about the Profumo Scandal of 1961-62, I caught that guest star Justine Lord is being a little bit Mandy Rice-Davies in this story about blackmail that involves an accidental death and a country house full of suspects.

So no, for the small number of you hoping our kid would recognize Lord after seeing her in another episode just four days ago, he didn’t. This one took a little more work, and a little backtracking after we got started, than I would have thought. It seemed simple enough: a politician’s being blackmailed because he has a cute mistress and once passed her some insider stock information. I overlooked the reality that the kid has only a vague idea of what a mistress is or why anyone would want one, and no clue at all what insider trading is. But I wasn’t going to let this one collapse because he didn’t understand it, so we got it all cleared up and once he understood there’s a big country house full of brooding visitors who don’t seem to like each other, he said “Okay, it’s like Clue,” and he was good to go.

Mike Pratt plays one of the blackmailers in this, and you’ll remember how, as Jeff Randall, the poor guy lost just about every fight he got in? He coshes Simon Templar from behind about halfway through this story, and that’s it for his luck. He gets thrashed to within an inch of his life later on. When Monty Berman and Dennis Spooner were putting together Randall and Hopkirk, they might’ve looked at this episode and said “That’s our man!”

Doctor Who: Battlefield (parts three and four)

The end of part two certainly scared our son, but otherwise he really enjoyed this story. It’s full of swordfights and explosions and knights and soldiers brawling. As ever, there aren’t enough extras and stuntmen – and what is with that one knight of Morgaine’s stomping around in red pajama pants? – but the stuntmen that they did employ got blasted and blown up and did somersaults in the air quite magnificently. So he loved the action and all the gags landed with bullseyes. He particularly loved the Doctor interrupting two fellows’ fight by walking between them like a comedian from the silent film era.

Jean Marsh gets a great finale during her final argument with the Doctor, although – and I say this as a huge fan of the Seventh Doctor and the fellow who portrays him – I’m afraid that Sylvester McCoy’s long experience in fringe and experimental comedy leaves him pretty far in the dust in a big, important scene against the classically-trained Marsh. I have no idea what he even looks like in this scene because you can’t take your eyes off Jean Marsh, who does more with disbelief in her eyes and a twitch of her lip than McCoy does with all his yelling. The writer, Ben Aaronovitch, gave the Doctor a great speech, but it’s how Morgaine responds to it that sells it.

So season 26 continued the trend of the crew taping way, way more than they had time to broadcast. I’ve never actually watched the “special edition” cut, which is about six minutes longer and I believe contains my favorite scene, which was cut from the broadcast edit (it’s in the More Than Thirty Years in the TARDIS documentary, which we’ll watch next month). About my only grumble with the otherwise splendid DVD range is that they re-edited a few stories into extended-length movies instead of into an original-but-longer episodic format. That said, we will be watching “The Curse of Fenric” in its full-length version next weekend, because it kind of demands to be seen in full.

Doctor Who: Battlefield (parts one and two)

And now we travel to 1989 – possibly – as Morgaine Le Fay invades our dimension from whatever realm she came from. Jean Marsh had previously played a witch queen in the films Return to Oz and Willow, and decided to make it a hat trick here. It’s also her third appearance in Doctor Who. Uniquely, Marsh played a guest star and a companion and a villain in the show.

I’ve never thought Ben Aaronovitch’s “Battlefield” was all that well realized, but behind its many poor line readings and stagings and a couple of diabolically bad performances – stop laughing, Mordred – there’s a good story here that comes across much better in Marc Platt’s novelization for Target Books. Later on down the line, David Tennant’s Doctor was completely baffled and stumped to meet River Song for the first time when she knew him already. That’s precisely what happens here – all these knights of old know a future Doctor and call him Merlin – and Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor understands it immediately. Maybe McCoy’s Doctor read the book The Time Traveller’s Wife and then erased his own memory.

It’s set a few years in Ace’s future, but we never learn exactly when Ace’s present is – there’s no reason to think it’s 1987 – and yet here we are in 2019, still without a king on England’s throne and without five pound coins. We were just talking today about old TV and books getting their future predictions wrong. And of course, Nicholas Courtney is back as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and this story is so set up to be his grand finale with a valiant death in episode four that when it doesn’t happen, it ends up feeling like they forgot to tape something important.

Incidentally, both Marc Platt’s novel and a subsequent title in Virgin’s New Adventure range establish that the future Doctor, the one who regularly had scraps with Morgaine and Mordred at King Arthur’s side, is a Doctor with red hair. If we ever do meet a red-haired Doctor on television, about nineteen of us are going to call him Merlin.

So what did our kid think? We gave him a crash course in King Arthur today to make sure he knew what was going on. He mainly reported that he thinks that Lancelot might have been like Tony Stark and Gawain like the Hulk. He was enjoying things just fine until episode two’s cliffhanger, where the Doctor and Ace set off a trap and a very 1980s computer effect hisses around the room and attacks them. I would never, ever have thought this moment would have been anywhere near Who‘s most frightening cliffhangers, but it scared him so badly that he left the room and ran to the top of the stairs. I’m always amazed by how he reacts to something I took for granted.

Willow (1988)

You can add Willow to that long list of fantasy films from the eighties that I never cared to see at the time, and like most of them, it turned out to be more entertaining than I expected. Directed by Ron Howard from a story by its producer, George Lucas, it’s a movie that many people I’ve known have seen and enjoyed. Glad to see they weren’t wrong.

But our kid… he completely loved this. It’s a movie with lots of chasing and lots of fighting and he loved them all, especially a scene where Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer – and the baby that they’re protecting – are rocketing down a snow-covered mountain on a runaway sled. There’s also a recurring gag about a sorceress who was transformed into a rodent many years ago, and Willow’s attempts to reverse the spell just results in her changing into different animals. That went over extremely well.

The sorceress had been stuck in that body by the evil magic of a wicked queen played by Jean Marsh. She had been Princess Mombi in Return to Oz a couple of years before and would play Morgaine Le Fay the following year; I suppose this was Marsh’s Witch Period. Marsh has kind of a one-note character, though. The heroes, led by Davis and Kilmer, along with a couple of three inch-high “brownies” and, once she decides to betray her evil queen mother, Joanne Whalley, are much, much more interesting. This isn’t a movie for those of us who like compelling villains, but the swordfighting, mayhem, and wit are good enough.

I was also surprised by how dark this film starts. Our heroes are protecting this baby because a prophecy says that she’ll overthrow the evil queen, and before the titles have finished, the mother is executed and the midwife who spirited her away is eaten by wild dogs. The baby floats far downstream to a village of little people – the great Billy Barty is the village’s wizard and apparent leader – and eventually, the villagers decide that they need to find some humans to whom they can return this kid. Since Willow and his family found the child, he gets tasked with taking it to the Daikini (humans), before any more wild dogs get its scent and rampage through their homes.

I was pleased that I was able to predict just one single thing this movie did. Granted, I really try not to spend any little gray cells on guessing where stories will go the first time that I watch a film, as I prefer to be caught up and taken for a ride, but I figured the guy with the skull helmet was going to kill the guy with the beard, and that was it. At one point, a spell goes awry and there’s a monstrous, two-headed fire-breathing thing that Ray Harryhausen would have found acceptable raining nine kinds of hell on an army of evildoers, and I couldn’t have been happier. I’d say that was two hours well spent, but our son says that was two of the most awesome hours ever.

Return to Oz (1985)

Between Child Catchers and Drashigs, Mad Hatters and Sleestak, Bigfoots and all manner of witches, especially the ones who use boiling oil, our son has seen down the most nightmare-inducing imagery that the world of movies and TV can throw at kids. He’s left the room in tears a few times, but all of these frights mean that ours is the planet’s toughest seven year-old.

This is a good thing, because anybody who shows a seven year-old Return to Oz without giving them a good education in frights beforehand is just asking for trouble. Mother of Mary! If I had seen this when I was seven, I wouldn’t have slept for a month. This is a really good movie, but but you want to know about nightmare fuel? There’s a part where we meet a character with multiple heads. We’ve been down this road often enough to know that a bit later, those heads are going to wake up and start screaming. I’m not spoiling anything, because it’s that obvious. You could set your watch by it.

And yet when those heads start screaming… well, I’m a middle-aged fat man now and yet I’m pretty sure I’m not going to sleep for a month.

I was “too old” for Return to Oz when it was released in 1985, in that horrible teenage boy period I’ve mentioned here before when we all just had no time for kids’ stuff anymore. It’s always seemed to share some cultural overlap with some of the other mid-eighties fantasies, especially Labyrinth, but it’s never really had the same kind of championing or love. If Time Bandits is a prickly film, then this is downright spiky. It’s extremely well-made, but surely nobody finds it comforting.

The story goes like this. Dorothy goes back to Oz, as she did many times in Baum’s original novels and all the zillion tie-ins and cash-ins, and finds that a Nome King, played by Nicol Williamson, has wrecked the Emerald City, turned its people to stone, and captured the Scarecrow. Played by Fairuza Balk (who, at ten, is a much more age-appropriate Dorothy than Judy Garland), Dorothy finds some new allies but gets on the wrong side of a witch called Mombi, who is played, in part, by Jean Marsh.

Design-wise, it’s a very, very eighties movie. Mombi looks like she’s ready for a night on the town with… well, with Labyrinth‘s Goblin King, actually. Her servants, the Wheelers, are (a) completely horrifying, (b) strapped into what must surely be the most uncomfortable costumes ever worn by anybody in film history, and (c) look like they reported to the set just after making music videos in New Zealand, “Manic Panic” in their hair and all. Jack Pumpkinhead, who was brought to life in part by Brian Henson, is wearing a remarkable pink shirt that would never have been sold in any other period. And there’s Claymation. Quite a lot of it!

But while I giggle at the costumes and makeup, just like I do when I watch pretty much anything from the mid-eighties these days, the sets are pretty remarkable and show a wild attention to detail. There’s a great bit where the lumbering Tik-Tok leaves footprints in a dusty floor as he stomps, and the camera sensibly ignores it, leaving the audience to suddenly ask how long it took to reset the stage between takes. Mombi’s palace is full of mirrors, emphasizing the witch’s narcissism, and then there’s the sanitorium where the movie begins.

As with MGM’s original movie, some of the actors do double-duty as characters in both Kansas and Oz. If Jean Marsh is a little garish and scene-chewing as Mombi, she’s an all-business rod-in-her-spine harridan as the head nurse in Kansas. This is where the movie starts to get under your skin. The whole experience is framed like a horror film, with the quiet squeaking of hospital gurneys and distant screams of the incarcerated making viewers uneasy as the music insists this is not a kiddie movie at all.

Our own kid will be going to sleep in about seventy minutes. Maybe he’ll let me sleep in his bed tonight if I get too scared. Pleasant dreams, everyone.

The Twilight Zone 1.7 – The Lonely

I’m enjoying watching our son’s physical reactions to shows when he likes or dislikes a program a little more one way than the other. If he’s happy, he’s moving around a little, energy building up to a big action scene. If he’s unhappy, he’s as quiet as the grave. And tonight’s trip to The Twilight Zone was as crypt-like as you can get.

He was really unhappy with this story about a convict sentenced to fifty years of solitary confinement on an asteroid. After four years, he’s given a robot for companionship and is initially cruel to her, thinking that the supply ship commander who visits every quarter was mocking him. But he eventually… but wait, this was a program made for family audiences in 1959. He eventually comes to think of her as a real woman. He certainly doesn’t fall in love with her. The sponsors would have choked.

(Oh, another point from 1959: the word robot is consistently pronounced “row-butt,” as it usually was back then.)

There’s not a “twist” to this story in the way that Zone became famous for employing, just an unexpected dilemma and a sad conclusion. And the story was a little sad for our son already; he is too young to understand just why the convict is so mean to the robot when they could and should be happy together. Eventually they get there, which made the conclusion even sadder for him. No, he didn’t enjoy this one at all.

But what a cast it has! Jack Warden plays the convict and Jean Marsh is the robot. She had appeared in a couple of American productions in 1959. Unless I’m mistaken, she may be the only Doctor Who companion to appear in any of the various Twilight Zone series. John Dehner, who had appeared in my all-time favorite Maverick episode the year before this, has a small role as the supply ship’s commander. I think that it’s a very good little half hour, even if my boy does not agree.