Die! Die! My Darling! AKA Fanatic
I have never had the impression that there were many Dream Projects at Hammer; no long-held ambitions to do a werewolf-only Twelve Angry Men, or finally persuading Laurence Olivier to play Satan’s Haberdasher. No, I always picture a little office somewhere in a drab building where a few of the Hammer lads got together to ask themselves the question ‘so, what do we do next?’ Because of course Hammer films were never anyone’s dream exactly; if the people in that office couldn’t come up with something, then nothing would get made. These weren’t the sort of movers and shakers who could pick up the phone to their bank and speculate “Vampire Julius Caesar?” and expect a wheelbarrow full of money to show up on their doorstep the next morning. Every movie they would have to start again, trying to scrape together something from whatever odds and ends they could get their hands on. I imagine a bunch of cards pinned to a board in that little office, displaying the names of young actors who might make it but hadn’t yet, old actors who were past it but they could still get, writers who could be relied upon to adapt something good into something cheap, and any director who could throw all these things together with a little style. And I imagine it was one of these all night brain-storming sessions involving loosened ties, overflowing ashtrays and well rubbed temples that allowed a movie like Die! Die! My Darling! to get made.
How else do you explain greenlighting a film from the writer of I Am Legend, the director of Georgy Girl, starring an unknown Donald Sutherland and the acting legend Tallulah Bankhead in her final role? And what’s even more remarkable is that it, sort of, works. It seems to be a comment on the swinging sixties youth being held hostage by the outdated morals of their older generation. Never mind pensioners tutting at you for playing loud pop music, what about gun-wielding old ladies locking you in the attic for wearing red? There’s also a nice modern touch where the woman in peril doesn’t faint at the first sign of danger, or meekly accept her fate. She schemes and fights and never gives in. Even when it looks like she’s surrendered, she’s only pretending as part of another plot. It’s a rather splendid way to deal with the inertia of an imprisoned lead, and shows that by defying convention you get to live a little more. Which is sort of the point of the movie in a way, now that I think about it.
Everyone is really good in this one too, except for Sutherland; whose developmentally disabled handyman has not aged well, although honestly it looked like it started curdling as soon as it hit the camera. But the lead is tough, smart and believable, and there’s even a young Grouty from Porridge as an unbeatable mixture of slimy and tough, managing to be menacing and cowardly, sometimes in the same scene. But really, it’s all about Talullah. As I was watching her stealing the screen and turning it from a Hammer Producer’s crumpled index card into cinematic gold, I found myself wishing that they’d found her a whole bunch of films, because her Hollywood golden age charisma and unforgettable voice (at least due to the 120 cigarettes she apparently smoked a day) deserved more than a single movie where she played a mad old biddy. She should have been a female Frankenstein, a vampire Countess, another magnetic lead Hammer could have hung a franchise on. There was too much talent on screen for just one movie, and I found myself longing for a parallel universe where that talent was given a castle to roam in, a village to terrorize, and unrealistic demands to make of producers begging her to return for a sequel.
The only thing really wrong is the music, which only goes to prove how hard it is to pin a bunch of cards to a board and emerge with a hit movie. Because while the Hammer producers working late that particular night got nearly everything else right, for some reason they picked a composer who believed the best instrument to properly convey unease, dread and terror was a pigging harpsichord. It was bloody ‘diddle-diddle-dee’ all over the damn shop like it was one of those British movies where, I don’t know, some daft hippy inherits a magical bus that makes squares’ trousers fall down. Eventually the correct ‘dum-dum-dum’ music appears (I can only hope they tied the composer to his harpsichord and threw them both into the sea) and you can settle in to enjoy a good little horror towered over by Tallulah.
No, they may not have had big money or big stars, but Hammer deserves an awful lot of credit for consistently emerging blinking into the sunlight holding a hodgepodge of talent that would, more often than not, be transformed into a very nice little picture. I suppose the lesson here is, don’t be afraid to work late until you know the work is done.
Speaking of which, another pint?
