Displaying items by tag: Arthur Crabtree

HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM

UK, 1959, 95 minutes, Colour.

Michael Gough, June Cunningham, Graham Curnow, Shirley Anne Field, Geoffrey Keen.

Directed by Arthur Crabtree.

With Hammer Studios moving into horror with Dracula and Frankenstein in the mid to late 1950s, there was a movement towards horror films in British production. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom appeared in 1960.

While very dated, very, this film is part of that horror movement in the UK which was to flourish in the 1960s and 1970s. Surprisingly the Dir is Arthur Crabtree who had significant films in the 1940s and 1950s, especially at Gainsborough studios, starting with Madonna of the Seven Moons.

The star of the film is the younger Michael Gough, a blend of the charming and the sinister, in many films but becoming internationally known for his role in Penny worth in the Batman films of the 1980s and 1990s. Here he portrays a journalist and author, specialising in crime, always in contact with Scotland Yard, appearing at scenes of crimes, but with his own Blackcap Museum (Scotland Yard having its own such Museum) with all kinds of bizarre instruments and tableau is of crimes. He has an assistant who is completely under his control, played by Graham Curnow.

There is a series of gruesome murders, especially in the opening sequence with a glamorous young blonde looking through a pair of binoculars and her eyes being pierced. And there are several other murders throughout the film, including the elocution of the doctor, and the Revelation that the journalist is in control of situations, creating crimes, especially committed by his assistant, even on an outing at a fair with his girlfriend, played by Shirley and field.

Geoffrey keen is the leading Detective. June Cunningham has a long sequence interacting with Michael Gough and then going to a bar and dancing as if another Diana doors with dance movements like Rita Hayworth’s Gilda.

In a British pulp fiction kind of way, the film is interesting but, it is more of a curiosity of British filmmaking in the late 1950s.