DVDs
DUFFER/THE MOON OVER THE ALLEY BFI Flipside
www.bfi.org.uk/flipside
Whichever angle you care to approach it from, Joseph Despins and William Dumaresq’s debut feature Duffer (1971) is an extraordinary piece of work. Shot on
short ends of 16mm black and white film stock, boasting a memorably impressionistic score by Galt MacDermot (co-composer of Hair) with electronic sound effects provided by Delia Derbyshire and The BBC Radiophonic Workshop and populated by a cast of unknowns, Duffer is a bizarrely unsettling creation where the surreal and the banal collide to great effect in a downbeat tale of the central character’s sado- masochistic relationship with his disturbed and manipulative gay lover Louis Jack (played by Dumaresque) and the conflicting attentions of the motherly prostitute Your Gracie. With voice-overs replacing dialogue this dark fable unfolds against the unremarkable background of Notting Hill and Westbourne Park in the early ’70s and brings with it hints of underground beat cinema, Cocteau and, during the scene where Louis Jack pulls live worms from his mouth, Dali & Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou. The second half of the double bill comes
in the form of Despins and Dumaresque’s BFI-funded ’75 feature The Moon Over The Alley. Shot in a flat realist style, the film follows the interwoven fortunes of a disparate group of characters living in a Notting Hill rooming house that has been earmarked for demolition. Punctuated with songs by Galt MacDermot and William Dumaresq, in its distinctively low-key way The Moon Over The
Alley vividly captures fragments of daily life in a Portobello Road now long gone. Grahame Bent
GINGER BAKER’S AIRFORCE: LIVE 1970 BAKER GURVITZ ARMY: LIVE 1975 Both Gonzo Multimedia
www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk All aboard for the great Ginger Baker DVD bonanza! Originally broadcast on German TV’s Beat Club in October 1970, this rarely seen high quality colour
performance footage of the short-lived Ginger Baker’sAirforce is only now making its first appearance on DVD. Featuring the third and final of the Airforce line-ups following the departure of Steve Winwood, Rick Grech, Chris Wood and Denny Laine, Ginger is seen calling the shots from behind his trademark double bass drum kit while his old sparring partner Graham Bond chips in impressively on alto sax and Hammond. With their ambitious blend of jazz, rock and African rhythms the free-wheeling groove-based sound of this eight-piece edition of the Airforce is best captured here on impressive versions of ‘Early In The Morning’, ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ and ‘12 Gates Of The City’. Fast forward five years and Ginger once again finds himself in the Beat Club studios, only this time in the company of his then current band, Baker Gurvitz Army. Recorded in February ’75 when the band
were touring in support of their second
album Elysian Encounter, much of this footage is only now being seen in its entirety for the first time. Though much more straight forward rock than the Airforce material, Baker Gurvitz Army’s set nevertheless includes a surprise reworking of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Freedom’. Grahame Bent
JACK BRUCE: ROPE LADDER TO THE MOON Gonzo Mutlimedia
www.gonzomultimedia.co.uk Made as a sequel of sorts to his landmark ’60s TV
documentaries All My Loving and Cream’s Farewell Concert, the raison d’etre behind Tony Palmer’s Rope
Ladder To The Moon was to introduce Jack Bruce the solo artist to the wider public after Cream’s whirlwind two and a bit year career. Filmed in 1969 and originally broadcast on the BBC’s Omnibus slot in February ’70, Rope Ladder To The Moon offers a revealing portrait of Bruce the man and the musician who at the time was working on his debut album Songs For A Tailor. Rather than following the standard
interview format the film is narrated by Bruce himself and follows him as he visits selected landmarks in his native city of Glasgow including his childhood home of The Gorbals, the Barrowland market, taking in an Old Firm game, getting away from it all on his recently purchased island off the west coast of Scotland and, among other things, playing Vidor on The Albert Hall organ. In between times Bruce offers his take on everything from the grim reality of living conditions in the slums of Glasgow to the impact of the highland clearances.
“Are you awake?” David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave in Morgan, A Suitable Case For Treatment Interspersed with all this is performance
footage of Bruce putting his then current band featuring Dick Heckstall-Smith, Chris Spedding and Jon Hiseman through their paces on material from Songs From A Tailor. Interestingly, in the accompanying interview Tony Palmer reveals that he originally intended to make three films following the post-Cream career path of Messrs Bruce, Baker and Clapton. However, the Jack Bruce documentary was the only one which made it onto celluloid. Grahame Bent
MORGAN, A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT Optimum Classic
www.optimumreleasing.com With a screenplay by David Mercer based on his television play of the same name originally broadcast in 1962 on the BBC’s Sunday Night Play slot, Karel Reisz’s
Morgan, A Suitable Case For Treatment (’66) tells the off-kilter tale of the troubled proletarian artist of the same name and his twin defining obsessions of gorillas and Karl Marx.
Played with all the prerequisite edginess
by David Warner in, incredibly, his only leading role, the film charts Morgan’s various doomed efforts to rescue his crumbling marriage to socialite Leonie, played by Vanessa Redgrave in her first starring role. Ably supported by a cast of memorable British character actors including Irene Handl, Arthur Mullard and Bernard Bresslaw, Warner excels in his performance as Morgan, wreaking havoc in the polite circles inhabited by his wife and her gallery owning husband to be. Memorable scenes include Morgan and
his mother (Irene Handl) visiting Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery and the gorilla- suited Morgan running amok at Leonie’s chic al fresco wedding reception. With its heady mix of reality and fantasy (Reisz intercuts sequences from King Kong and the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan films to underline Morgan’s identification with both characters), its memorable use of the London cityscape, its innovative treatment of class, revolutionary politics and social anthropology, and its Johnny Dankworth score, Morgan – like John Schlesinger’s Billy Liar – remains a key film of the period and a reminder of that brief moment during the early to mid-60s when the British film industry was punching well above its weight. Grahame Bent
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