HOW DID YOU GUESS?

 

From Tarkan: Sword Of Mars (1969), an early entry from a series of preposterous but enjoyable Turkish historical adventures featuring an invincible and beautifully coiffured Hun warrior.

THE PRESENCE OF PLEASENCE

It's a ridiculous five years since we last celebrated the appearance of the Donald Pleasence in a cinematic role, so let's get straight to it. 

Arthur? Arthur! (1969) gives the Worksop Wonder two rare opportunities: 1. the lead, and 2. the chance to overtly exercise his considerable gift for comedy. Donald plays Arthur, a bald Wallace-like inventor who, fed up with his tedious life and lack of success, reinvents himself as a switched on hirsute swinger who is, naturally, irresistible to the ladies.

I know it sounds promising but, sadly, it's a flat, muddled, silly film that was never released theatrically. Nevertheless, Donald's does quite a lot with what he's given, including providing some groovy go go dancing and, on a couple of occasions, stripping down to just his underpants. He is surprisingly and unnervingly buff.

DANCE AWAY

 

It's 1969 and, in Canada, hipsters are starting to transform into hippies. Jean Beaudin's psychedelic study Vertige captures a select few - not necessarily freaking out, but certainly cutting a rug with various degrees of commitment. 

LIFELONG PLEASURE

As I write this, and as you read it, there is an episode of Star Trek playing in a hundred different places in the world, and that’s how it should be. I grew up in the 1970s, where you were never more than a week away from an episode, and it forms some of my earliest televisual memories. I’m not a Trekkie by any means, but I have a deep and abiding love for the original series, partly from familiarity, but mainly because it’s just fantastic telly.

I’m just watching the third and final season now, and enjoying it enormously. The characters are so familiar at this stage that you can see what they’re thinking and the format established enough that it can be stretched and mutated and psychedelic optical effects can be inserted at regular intervals. Even the obvious budget cuts of this last series work in its favour, making it tighter and more reliant on sets, creating an occasionally surreal world of light and shadow, flat studio walls and fibreglass rocks. If some of the messages are a little heavy handed then that’s how Star Trek rolls, baby, and these were heavy times.

I humbly present some snapshots from the first few episodes of Season 3, a simple parade of images that particularly appealed to me. I’ll be back with more analysis – perhaps – the world isn’t exactly short of this sort of thing, after all.

INVOCATIVE

Invocation Of My Demon Brother, d. Kenneth Anger (1969)

Magick, Satanism, homoeroticism, psychedelia, a convicted murderer, Mick Jagger, a cat funeral. What more can you ask from a ten minute film?

THE PRESENCE OF PLEASENCE

In William Klein's rambunctious pop art protest film Mister Freedom (1969), Worksop born Donald Pleasence plays Dr. Freedom, a cross between the American president, a televangelist and Baron Frankenstein. He was always good at mad authority figures, perhaps because his most prevalent characteristic is a menacing blandness: he seems innocuous, but you never really know where you are with him. Only ever seen on a flickering TV screen, here he talks passionately about democracy and liberty and decency whilst overseeing the violent overthrow and destruction of anyone who disagrees with him. Freedom, like peace, is clearly worth fighting dirty for.  

THE DEVIL IS A FRENCHMAN

Pierre Clementi has a brief but striking cameo in Luis Bunuel's 1969 film La Voie Lactee (The Milky Way) playing either the Devil or the Angel of Death, depending on how senior you think he looks with his bum fluff beard and trendy suit. In any event, he is responsible for the death of a man in a flaming car crash, simply because another man wished him ill and the forces of evil and chaos apparently hang around waiting for opportunities to do bad things. It's a weird little vignette, but then this is Bunuel, the greatest surrealist in cinema, and Clementi, an actor who always went out of his way to find interesting films to be interesting in.

THIN AIR

The Body Stealers, d. Gerry Levy (1969)

How to disappear: get aliens to help you.

YOU'RE FADING IN AND OUT I

It's 1969 and, in Crystal Palace Park, David Bowie prepares to emerge.