HoopTober 8: Mosquito Takes Mandragon

Movie 63
***FOR THOSE THAT LIKE TO DO EXTRA WORK: WATCH The Skull

This might seem a strange comparison, but The Skull really reminded me of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant. Aside from the obvious difference in subject matter, there’s not even much of a preoccupation with interpersonal relationships in The Skull, whereas Bitter Tears drew from a deep psychosocial well. However, what they both have in common is that they are films which face the challenge of remaining visually stimulating when most of the action takes place in one small room.

This is a challenge of cinematography, primarily. Fassbinder turned Petra’s apartment into an unceasingly changeable space simply by varying angles, blocking, costume and even just rearranging furniture. Freddie Francis – a noted cinematographer himself before he turned to directing – does pretty much the same thing. Although he has one or two more sets to work with, the time spent in them is minimal, and he has to get seriously creative with his photography and lighting, also using props to great effect. Seriously, this film contains a montage sequence of Peter Cushing reading a book – and it goes on for quite some time. And you know what? They actually make that non-event feel a bit cinematic. It’s quite an achievement.

Francis isn’t helped by the script either, though. It has to be said, very little actually happens in The Skull. We’re talking about a haunted object, basically. Cushing plays a collector of antiquities who comes across the skull of the Marquis de Sade, which turns out to possess strange powers – projecting a malevolent psychic influence on whoever owns it and, in the most action packed scene of the film, an ability to float slowly through the room with an eldritch motive power.

So how does this film end up being so entertaining? I suspect some kind of black magic – maybe Milton Subotsky sold his soul to Mephistopheles – but the cast sure doesn’t hurt. If you’re going to ask two actors to inhabit Victorian drawing rooms and muse on the awesome powers of the supernatural to each other, you can’t do much better than Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. My disc contains an interview with Kim Newman – who is always worth listening to when it comes to cult cinema – and he makes the point that Cushing never phoned in a performance in his life, no matter how cruddy the film was that he found himself in. Lee, he notes, did sometimes rather cruise through roles he felt beneath him, but he always brought his A-game if he was performing opposite Cushing. I think he has a point. Although my nominations for Lee’s two best performances are in films without Cushing (The Wicker Man and I, Monster), he was always amazing in Cushing’s presence, and this is probably down to the immense professional respect they had for each other as well as the risk of getting outshined if you don’t step up to the challenge.

This was an inadvertent Patrick Wymark double feature for me, too, having just seen him in Blood on Satan’s Claw. He has a smaller role in The Skull, as the wheeling and dealing antiquities procurer for Cushing’s compulsive collector, but when he exits the storyline, it feels like we lose a bit of life from it. Again working with thin material, Wymark turns his character into an incredibly compelling presence. Francis compensated by introducing some more metaphysical scenes like Cushing’s Kafkaesque dream sequence, which also strongly evoked to me Agent Cooper’s Black Lodge sojourns in Twin Peaks.

The Skull is a very strange and unusual British film from the golden age of its horror genre output. Given the slight premise, it really is quite remarkable how satisfying it ends up being as a feature film – I’m still not entirely clear on how they pulled it off!