Six Characters in Search of an Actor: Cushing Curiosities on Severin Films Blu-ray

It seems only natural that Severin Films would follow up its two Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee box sets with a collection of some of the more offbeat entries in the filmography of Peter Cushing, Lee’s legendary Hammer Films co-star. Cushing Curiosities collects five films and the remaining episodes of a TV series that highlight the diverse aspects of Cushing’s always authoritative on-screen persona. Featuring crisp new 2K restorations sourced from original elements, Severin’s compelling new set comes complete with loads of bonus materials, including some priceless audio interviews with the man himself and commentaries by historians, as well as Peter Cushing: A Portrait in Six Sketches, a 200-page book by film historian Jonathan Rigby.

Cushing appears as a stiff-necked yet urbane airline pilot in 1960’s Cone of Silence, a modestly compelling exposé based on the actual investigation into a 1952 airplane crash. Reprimanded for a crash that killed his copilot, seasoned Captain George Gort (Bernard Lee) is nevertheless allowed to return to duty because he’s more adept at flying a newfangled jet airliner than younger, less experience pilots. His fitness, disputed by Cushing’s exacting Captain Judd, is defended by Captain Hugh Dallas (Michael Craig), whose own objectivity is called into question owing to his romantic interest in Gort’s daughter, Charlotte (Elizabeth Seal).

As directed by Charles Frend, Cone of Silence, adroitly juggles elements of courtroom drama, intrigue, and domestic melodrama. Its emphasis on the jet set plays out as a lot of B-roll exoticism—stock footage of various cities and airports—enhanced by sets that do their best to capture the local flavor of international bars and hotels. To the film’s credit, it gives some refreshingly nonjudgmental screen time to the indigenous employees, in particular a plum role for Anglo-Indian actor Marne Maitland. Cone of Silence also fleetingly hints at aspects of corporate malfeasance in the person of aircraft designer Pickering (Noel Willman), who temporarily holds back the critical findings of a report. Ultimately, however, the film is a reassuring balm: Lives are saved, reputations vindicated, and young love triumphant.

Roy and John Boulting’s Suspect, also from 1960, is an excellent example of what a little style and craftsmanship can bring out in what was intended as a disposable “quota quickie” espionage thriller. Ace cinematographer Max Greene takes advantage of the production’s largely set-bound nature to invest it with all the shadowy ambience of a vintage film noir. A deep-stacked cast brings out the nuances in Nigel Balchin’s literate adaptation of his 1949 novel A Sort of Traitors, leavened by contributions from Roy Boulting and Jeffrey Dell, who were likely responsible for the film’s more satiric-comedic elements. These extend from the opera buffa presence of TV staple Spike Milligan clowning around with a mischievous chimp to the far cheekier tweaking of MI-5 in the person of absentminded Mr. Prince (Thorley Walters).

The film’s political message attempts to have its cake and eat it too. Research scientist Bob Marriott (Tony Britton) chafes at a political embargo of the top secret work he’s done on disease prevention under Professor Sewell (Cushing), so he decides to smuggle it out and donate it to an international scientific exchange program. But when that program is represented by the eminently shifty Brown (Donald Pleasence), Marriott should probably think twice about where his research is liable to end up but of course doesn’t. True, the British government, embodied by Sir George Gatling (Raymond Huntley), a bloviating stuffed shirt, wants to weaponize the discovery, if only for so-called defense purposes. But, the film suggests, things would be a lot worse were “foreign powers” (read: the Russkies) to get ahold of it first.

Quentin Lawrence’s The Man Who Finally Died, from 1963, shows the distinct influence of Carol Reed’s The Third Man on its story of a jazz musician, Joe Newman (Stanley Baker), summoned to Germany upon the death of his father. Trouble is, Joe believes his father died 20 years earlier during World War II. The story comes complete with fraudulent funerals, aggressively helpful local authorities, and a grieving love interest. After meeting his father’s young widow, Lisa (Mai Zetterling), and best friend, Dr. Peter von Brecht (Cushing), Joe slowly comes to believe they have something to hide. Admittedly, “slowly” is the operative word here, since the pacing remains deliberate throughout. Still, the story is pretty clever in the way it keeps flipping the script on who’s up to what and working for whom.

Embedded in the unfolding mystery are bits of sociopolitical commentary. Von Brecht appeases his guilty conscience by providing medical care at a camp for displaced persons near the border with Poland. The story’s MacGuffin turns out to be a world-weary rocket scientist (Harold Scott) whose desultory conviction that both sides are equally flawed—that it hardly matters which one finally gets him—reveals a kind of jaded realpolitik that wouldn’t be out of place in a John Le Carré novel. Adding a certain frisson for genre fans, the film’s rousing climax, in which Soviet agent Niall MacGinnis runs afoul of a moving train, seems to reference both Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes and Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon.

Severin’s set also includes the six episodes that weren’t wiped by the BBC of the 1968 Sherlock Holmes TV series, in which Cushing returns to the role he first portrayed 10 years earlier in the Terence Fisher’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. The series also features a two-episode adaptation of the Conan Doyle novel, making for an interesting comparison with the film. The latter is faster paced and more action-oriented, while the series benefits immensely from the location shooting on the Devonshire moors. Cushing’s Holmes changes too: In the film, he’s aloof, abrasive, even a bit cold-blooded, while in the series he’s less flinty, even though, when required, he seems to take great relish in reading the riot act to a recalcitrant malefactor.

Of the remaining episodes in the set, two others also adapt novels, “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Sign of Four,” but they tend to suffer from compressing an entire book into a 50-minute episode. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t good things to be taken from them, especially a delightful turn from Paul Daneman as dandified Thaddeus Sholto in “The Sign of Four.” The two episodes based on stories, “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and “The Blue Carbuncle,” are more satisfying, the first benefiting from some atmospheric location shooting, and the other playing out as an almost light-hearted Christmas episode sans any overt sentiment.

A tattered crazy quilt that suffers from the ill-starred nature of its production, Robert Hartford-Davis’s Bloodsuckers (a.k.a. Incense for the Damned), from 1971, remains fascinating for taking an unconventional approach to its titular creatures. As in George A. Romero’s later Martin, vampirism is treated as a manifestation of deep-seated psychological disturbance, except Bloodsuckers goes deeper into the realm of the psychosexual by linking the vampiric “disease” to impotence, sadomasochism, and other perversities. The film’s eroticism is foregrounded early on, when we’ve barely made the acquaintance of its lead characters, by the sudden insertion of a jaw-dropping psychedelic orgy sequence that goes on for nearly 10 minutes.

One big problem is that the film’s first act, which could have introduced us to those characters in their native habitat of Oxford, remains almost entirely nonexistent, with glaring gaps in continuity clumsily patched over by voiceover narration and some odd split-screen. Before we’re quite sure who’s who, we’re whisked off to Greece, where the search is on for Richard Fountain (Patrick Mower), a brilliant Oxford don who’s disappeared while researching a book on mythology. Turns out Fountain has taken up with a native girl, Chriseis (Imogen Hassall), who leads the aforementioned orgiastic cult with a penchant for ritualistic human sacrifice.

But it’s when the action returns to Oxford that Bloodsuckers introduces its most subversive aspect: An august group of scholars, led by the imperious Dr. Goodrich (Cushing), in fact constitute their own variety of bloodsuckers. As with much else in this frustrating muddle of a film, it remains entirely unclear whether that’s meant metaphorically or otherwise, because the scenes that would’ve expanded on the notion just aren’t there.

Easily the most curious title collected in Cushing Curiosities, Pierre Grunstein’s Tender Dracula, from 1974, is the intriguingly reflexive story of horror star MacGregor (Cushing), who wants to abandon genre material in order to pursue more romantic lead roles. The producer (Julien Guiomar) of MacGregor’s long-running Dark Shadows-like TV series sends two screenwriters, Boris (Stephane Shandor) and Alfred (Bernard Menez), along with two “creatures from an erotic dream,” Maddie (Nathalie Courval) and Marie (Miou Miou), to the actor’s remote gothic castle to persuade him otherwise. What follows is a deeply surreal lost weekend that recalls the films of Jean Rollin when it comes to the atmosphere department.

Tender Dracula goes meta in a number of ways. Right off the bat, the producer’s office is lined with horror movie posters, many of which starred Cushing. The film nods to the 1931 Dracula when MacGregor first greets his quartet of guests decked out like Bela Lugosi in that film. Later on, MacGregor appears with slicked-back, dyed-black hair and thick dyed eyebrows in obvious emulation of Lugosi. Grunstein also folds in references to Cushing’s career by filling MacGregor’s scrapbook with stills from earlier Cushing films.

The dividing line between actor and role remains delightfully porous throughout the film, especially since it remains entirely unclear whether MacGregor actually is a vampire—or merely a cracked actor who imagines he’s one. Ultimately, Grunstein’s film proves to be an erotically charged love letter to horror cinema in general and Cushing’s work in particular. As such, it’s the ideal film to close out the intriguing grab bag that is Cushing Curiosities.

Cushing Curiosities is now available from Severin Films.