The Snorkel
Casting has always seemed to me to be a tricky business. You’d have producers sticking their oar in demanding certain people, quite possibly terrible people, have to be in the movie because the punters know who they are - even if what they know them as is terrible (because better the terrible you know, I suppose?) - And you’d also have directors holding another oar, insisting that a particular pillock is hired because they were simply wonderful in their last collaboration, even if they’re a rage fuelled alcoholic in search of one last bridge to burn. But then you may also be the person that looked at Peter Cushing and thought ‘Frankenstein?’ and basically gave birth to a film studio, and that’s got to be worth coming into work for.
But let’s face it, the risk of making the wrong decision is high. And when you put the wrong person in the wrong part, you can scupper the whole movie and there’s not an oar around that will save you. Like, for example, in The Snorkel where Hammer needed a child in the lead role, but cast a tall and gangly teenager instead. It’s possible that the girl they cast may have been the closest thing Britain had to a child star (I can see how being the kid that sang Nelly the Elephant would qualify) and they were doing that thing that Hammer sometimes do where they basically ask the audience for a favour. In this case - Look, can you just pretend this teenager is a kid? She’s not an adult is she? You might as well, or you won’t enjoy the movie and you’ve paid for it now haven’t you?
But whichever way you slice it, having a tall teenager be referred to as ‘the little girl’, or having other characters talk to her like a toddler when she’s above their eye-line is, at best, off-putting and weird. But when the gangly teenager talks like a six year-old and refers to her dead parents as ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ it just careers into full-blown annoying. Because then what you’re left with is essentially an episode of Columbo with an overgrown and grumpy toddler trying to solve the mystery. Imagine Hercule Poirot accusing someone of murder at the beginning of the story, and then spending the rest of the time stamping his feet in a fit of pique saying ‘But he did do it! I swear he did!’ while everyone else around ignored him and put his accusation down to needing a good nap.
Because, if it had been cast properly and she was a child, then there’s a great story here. It would be a Roald Dahl like tale of a smart kid coming up against the scourge of cruel adults, and the bottomless capacity of other adults to be lazily and willfully ignorant in the name of a quiet life. And then her accusations and protestations wouldn’t look like a tantrum but the struggle of a child who, despite apparently speaking the same language as everyone around them, can’t seem to get anyone to understand.
There’s a great bad guy too - an exact cross between a matinee idol and a Nazi - who’s supposed to be trustworthy and warm despite clearly possessing a thick German accent. And anyone who spots a family and says: ‘They seem well off, I think I’ll befriend them, then murder the father, before marrying and then murdering the mother’ deserves some sort of bad guy award for patience at the very least.
It’s just that the whole film boils down to a gangly teenager saying ‘he did it!’ over and over again. It would have been different if she had deduced anything herself. Instead she discovers how the Nazi idol did it only after the policeman flat-out says ‘I can’t do anything until you prove how a man survives in a room full of gas’ and then a bit later the answer to that somewhat leading question (whoever wrote it would definitely get booed in script-writing class) is literally put on a poster outside her bleeding window. All I’m saying is I can see why the sub-genre of ‘whinging detective’ never took off.
The ending suffers from this ‘Well, you get the idea’ approach to film-making too, which is a bit of a shame as it had sort of settled into a snappy little thriller with a sleazebag bad guy, beautiful locations and a bit of genuine menace. But at the end, when the Nazi idol is trapped in his hiding place, there’s potential for a brilliant scene that could have made up for everything before. The girl not only makes an adult decision to be righteously vengeful, but also at the very, very end shows an even more grown-up capacity for mercy. It would have been a fine ending to the movie and done a lot to erase how weird the world’s tallest toddler had been. Or it would have been if they’d figured out a set design that didn’t leave me wondering whether wooden floor boards are really that impossible to break. Now, fair enough, I’m just a bloke watching the movie and am not exactly what you might call ‘au fait’ with floor construction of Italian villas in the 1950s - It probably is bloody hard to break wooden floorboards when you’re in a cramped space - But I also know people in movies cut their own hands off to get free, so I require a little more determination from a bad guy than just a few shoves at the trapdoor before giving himself up, know what I mean?
Sometimes, I suppose, even if the idea for a film is good, your casting decisions have to be spot on or you can get lost at sea. It just goes to show that you should always take your time with the important decisions to make sure you make the right one.
Speaking of which, another pint?
