This is screening as part of Iain Sinclair's 70x70 season, the film adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's famous novel, shown in an East End music hall.
"Brahm’s film is a minor classic, a shotgun wedding of expressionism and surrealism: barrel organs, leering pawnbrokers, cor-blimey-guv urchins. Linda Darnell enthusiastically impersonates a knicker-flashing singer with flea-comb eyelashes and hair in which you could lose a nest of squirrels. There are two mindblowing sequences: the bonfire on which the faithless Netta is incinerated, while a mob of Ensor devils howl and chant – and the concerto, when a raving Bone hammers away at a blazing grand piano. Bernard Hermann, Hitchcock’s composer of choice, soups up a fabulously pastiched score that drives the whole nutty phantasmagoria along: a candlelit steamer plunging over a frozen waterfall. The film has nothing to do with Patrick Hamilton’s novel, apart from using that evocative title as the excuse for a purgatorial nightmare of the kind the burnt-out writer might have experienced in his last, glazed, dry-retch, schoolgirl-fixated, beaten- with-cricket-bat, English seaside days."
Iain Sinclair
Here (and above) is an extract.
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