the audience applauded

That was an excellent one.

An Exercise In Nonsense

A Major Disappointment

First 45 minutes are pretty flat, despite lots of jumpy editing.The female character shows a strange contrast between her winsome imaginary world and the calculated deception she uses to get out of her mother's house and off to London. She uses submissiveness to get her way, but it's not all that interesting and I didn't sympathize with her.Early '70s London is good to see - grotty and groovy at the same time.The male character is well acted. But a lot of the dialog between the leads is Q&A, which I thought was unnecessary. Less is more, and I bet the actors thought a few more silences or unspoken thoughts would have conveyed the meaning better. The seduction is patchy - "give me your hands" is a perfect line, but what is she wearing when she knocks on his door at night? Didn't even make an effort.The two-hander psychological drama picked up when he confronted her over stealing the dog, and the possibilities multiply, but the story didn't exploit them. Both these characters are shallow and manipulative, but in the end we get a bleak good v bad showdown where he's evil and she's innocent.I was hoping they'd make the perfect couple - psychotic and psychopath settle down and live happily ever after. Toward the end there's a police hunt that could have ended in black humor if they'd turned up on the doorstep only to be told by the woman they're looking for to get lost.Couple of absurdities: the carpet knife is not much good for stabbing and that awful wig she wears to "look pretty" - it was the fashion back then, but I cheered when he removed it from her head.At the beginning I was expecting a cross between Looking For Mr Goodbar and Performance, but this falls in between and way short because of a weak script.

Straight on Till Morning is certainly one of the most atypical films that Hammer Studios ever produced. It begins like a social realist kitchen-sink drama, replete with fragmented snapshot montage editing similar to Ken Loach's Up the Junction – incidentally, a film remade by Peter Collinson the director of this film. And for the first third of the film it seems like this is going to be another such gritty drama, however, it takes an unexpected detour when it suddenly turns into a psychological thriller. It's an extremely unusual combination that isn't entirely successful but definitely interesting. In actual fact it's one of Hammer's more intriguing efforts in my opinion because it's so weird.The story is about a naive young girl called Brenda who moves to London to try and find a man. She winds up staying with a very strange foppish man called Peter who is in fact a serial killer of women.The social realism and montage heavy editing is entirely at odds to anything else Hammer ever put out. This is a film that has way more in common with the British New Wave than it does with anything previously produced by the famous studio. None of the characters are particularly likable, with the men in particular very creepy and/or deeply unpleasant people with appalling haircuts. The central relationship between Brenda and Peter is, to put it mildly, bizarre. It's difficult to see what either of them sees in each other; while Peter's strange issues with beauty are a little hard to fathom. Nevertheless, I thought this one was not bad at all. It wasn't predictable in the way that most Hammer films tend to be. It was pretty bleak and overall a commendably uncommercial offering. Definitely worth a look if you like downbeat psychological dramas.

This one is perhaps Hammer's most incongruous film - a flashily-directed modern suspenser with pretensions; actually, the horror brand-name is only displayed at the very end (even if the credits themselves are unmistakable) - whereas the trailer proudly advertises it as "A Love Story From Hammer"! While the film features gratuitous nudity (virtually a Hammer mandate by this stage), in spite of a number of murders occurring throughout, it's surprisingly bloodless for this studio.Director Collinson's fragmentary style is appropriately disorienting at times and actually proves quite economical - for instance, in the course of the first couple of minutes, we get to know practically the entire back-story of the two protagonists - but it also becomes irritating very quickly! Rita Tushingham and Shane Briant are quite good in their roles, the former typically kooky and the latter effectively disturbed; lovely Katya Wyeth appears as Tushingham's colleague/room-mate, an unfortunate association which ends in her brutal murder.The title (and title tune) are inspired by "Peter Pan" and, in fact, the script makes several references to J.M. Barrie's popular tale: the leading characters call one another Peter and Wendy when their names are really Clive and Brenda; Briant is a bit the boy who never grew up, whereas Tushingham's relocation from humdrum Liverpool to Swinging London (cue some horrid 70s fashions and hairstyles) can be seen as the equivalent of the journey to Neverland. The film ends rather abruptly on a downbeat note.The Rita Tushingham Audio Commentary (moderated by Jonathan Sothcott), unsurprisingly, is not up to the level of tracks I've heard for other Hammer films - given the star's limited connection with the company. However, she displays a winning sense of humor throughout and her recollections prove engaging enough to make it a worthwhile listen nonetheless. Incidentally, here it's mentioned that STRAIGHT ON TILL MORNING was released as the A feature in a double-bill with another Hammer thriller - FEAR IN THE NIGHT (1972) - which I also recently watched for the first time and is, ironically, the superior effort!

I hadn't seen this movie for decades because it hasn't been shown on terrestrial TV for years, but I decided to buy the Region 1 DVD release (there's no official Region 2 UK release as yet) and I thoroughly enjoyed it.Well it's difficult to dislike Rita Tushingham in any film, but it's directed in such a great style by the late/great Peter Collinson (director of The Italian Job (1969)fame), with a bleak beginning that could only be Britian of the 1960's/1970's and with a real snap shot of how things were in London back then.This is a very different type of film from Hammer, when compared to their usual offerings and must have been truly shocking back then with it's level of cruelty, but it's a classic movie you simply have to own and the fact it's unavailable in the UK (the very place it was made & with an all British cast) is scandalous.