What the Dickens? Magazine

Just a quick post to clue you into a great online magazine called What the Dickens? It started up in 2011, and is ostensibly a literary/writers magazine, but is really more about creativity in general - writing, art, theatre, film, and so on. At the moment it's only available online for free (or on Kindle for 99p), but the editors are working very hard to get something on tangible paper by the end of the year.

I was contacted by Editor/creator/writer Victoria Bantock a few weeks ago about writing a literature/film based article for the 5th issue, which is out today and is titled 'The Sunflower Edition'. It's packed full of great stuff (including an interview with Miriam Margolyse) and you can have a read through it for free here (I'm on page 87 with a piece about The Hunger Games).

What the Dickens? Magazine also welcomes submissions, so if you'd like to get involved take a look at the Submissions Page.

In other news, I went to see The Dark Knight Rises yesterday - but I'm not going to give away what I thought of it just yet, as when I get a spare hour I'm planning to review it, right here on KINOLENS.

The Dark Knight Rises Shooting: Blaming the Movies

On July 20th 2012, an incident took place at a movie theatre in the town of Aurora, near Denver, Colorado. A man dressed in black protective gear, including a bullet-proof vest, gloves and a gas mask, walked into a late night screening of The Dark Knight Rises and began randomly shooting at the cinema patrons. Reportedly, the gunman set off two devices which released some form of tear gas into the theatre before starting to fire.

According to some of the surviving cinema patrons, the gunman (thought to be James Holmes, a 24 year old medical student who is currently being held by police) started firing during a shootout scene, causing confusion amongst his targets. Ten people were killed in the theatre itself; another two died in nearby hospitals. More than fifty other people were injured.

This terrible happening has sparked upset and anger from many quarters. Some have spoken on the need for greater gun control in the US, while others are concerned with more social issues; we still don’t truly understand why people decide to commit this type of mass murder, or how to prevent them from doing it.

As with many other atrocities committed by young people with guns, the discussion has inevitably turned on cinema itself. This particular gunman’s selection of a film screening for the scene of his crime, as well as his carefully chosen combat attire, is hard to ignore; once again, people are blaming it on the movies...

To read the rest of this article, head over to Movie Farm

Malevolent Machinery: The 5 Scariest Movie Robots



A young Bilbo Baggins at Space Camp



There’s nothing worse than a piece of evil or malfunctioning machinery. What could be scarier than a machine that is not only crazy enough to turn against humans, but also has superhuman strength and no moral qualms about randomly murdering you and your friends just because it needs a serious virus scan and restart? Especially if said piece of machinery happens to look uncannily like a normal human being? Not much.

The movie Gods worked this one out quite some time ago; almost since the earliest days of cinema, evil androids have been enthralling film fans the world over, thrilling and terrifying by turns. Here are five of the scariest, deadliest robots you will ever find on your screen. Which one terrifies you the most?

To read the top five, head over to Movie Farm...

The Dark Knight Rises Viral Campaign Continues

The Dark Knight Rises, expected to be this summer’s biggest scoring blockbuster, turned its viral marketing campaign up a notch this week with the release of three pages from the Gotham Observer, Gotham City’s daily newspaper (priced at a very reasonable one dollar). Fans of Christopher Nolan’s iconic Batman films have been avidly scanning the pages for any and all clues to the plot of the movie, in which Christian Bale will return as the disgraced superhero vigilante tasked with facing down new arch-enemy Bane (Tom Hardy).

To read my breakdown of the Gotham Observer (and find out what Batman's star sign might be) head over to Movie Farm...

Sex, Lies and Censorship: Last Tango in Paris

Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, Last Tango in Paris, 1972

Bernardo Bertolucci’s most infamous film, Last Tango In Paris, was premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 14^th, 1972. With its explicit portrayals of violent sex and emotional turbulence, the film instigated a critical uproar. Beginning with walkouts and denunciations, escalating into boycotts and bans, and climaxing in an obscenity trial, the backlash seemed to know no bounds. And yet, even in its earliest reviews, Last Tango In Paris was recognised and commended as a work of cinematic genius. Forty years later, questions are still being asked about the film’s true nature; is it a brilliant psychosexual exploration, or simply a glorified piece of pornography?

You can find the rest of this article at Subtitled Online...

30th Anniversary: Blade Runner

Long before Ridley Scott was making confusing and badly scripted prequels, he was conjuring up one of my favourite films of all time; Blade Runner. Based on the Philip K Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner was first released in the USA exactly thirty years ago today on the 25th of June, 1982 (in the UK, it was released on the 9th of September, 1982). In honour of this auspicious occasion, I'm going to take a quick look at a few of the things that make it so good.

Neo-Noir

Blade Runner is set in 2019, a mere seven years into our own future. Billed as both a science fiction and an action film, it is in fact (like Scott's Alien) a chilling combination of the two. However, what made the film so unique was the added genre ingredient of neo-noir. Neo-noir draws inspiration from the classic 40s/50s film noir genre, famous for hardboiled detectives, femme fatales, chiaroscuro lighting and lots of booze, sex and cigarette smoke. Blade Runner has all of these and more, adding a glossy yet gritty layer of cinematic goodness to what would otherwise have been a rather different style of sci-fi.



Swirling cigarette smoke and shadowy Venetians are just a
couple of the neo-noir touches to be found in Blade Runner



More Human than Human

Androids are robots that look like humans. Whole books have been written about why we are fixated on building exact machine replicas of ourselves, and they are full of intriguing and complex psychological concepts - but we don't have the time to go into all that here. Cinema is replete with 'human-looking robots' - mostly because they are very easy to construct and film, what with them looking exactly like normal humans and all. Ridley Scott explored the idea of the indistinguishable android in 1979's Alien; in Blade Runner he takes it to the next level. Replicants, as they are known, are so close to being human that it is impossible to tell the difference without strenuous testing. The Nexus 6 Replicants, which our anti-hero Deckard (Harrison Ford) is hired to 'retire', have begun to think for themselves. On a mission to extend their four year life spans, they team up to kill their way to the answer using their enviable strength and fighting skills. Forget the Terminator; never have androids been so cool, or so deadly.

Pris, 'your basic pleasure model'

Roy Batty

"If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."

"Quite an experience to live in fear isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die."

Roy Batty - machine, murderer, madman and philosopher

Played by Rutger Hauer, Roy Batty is the leader of the Nexus 6 Replicants. Technically, he's the bad guy - but even though he's a machine, a murderer, and deranged, we find ourselves starting to sympathise with his cause; all Roy wants to do is to keep himself and his friends alive. Rather than blaming Roy for his crimes, we start to blame ourselves - after all, we were the ones who created Roy; we gave him the ability to think and feel (or at least, to 'think' that he is 'feeling'), and then slapped him with a four year year life span. That's why he goes around breaking fingers, crushing skulls, and philosophising while he's at it.

The Birth of British Cinema

Cinema, in the form we would recognise today, was born in France in the 1880s. That makes it well over a century old. In the years since, cinema has changed many times. Practically every decade has brought a new and exciting upheaval; the switch from silent to sound, and from black and white to colour; the advent of 3D, CGI, digital and motion capture. Film is an art form that, although it stays essentially the same, is constantly evolving alongside new trends, new ideas and new technology. But what about the way that viewers actually watch films? Has how we experience films evolved too? Or, when we purchase our cinema tickets and sit in a movie theatre in the 21st century, is the whole experience still pretty much the same as it was one hundred years ago?

For the rest of the article, head over to Movie Farm

5 Disney Films We Want Re-Released

After viewing the 3D re-release of Beauty and the Beast the other day, I was consumed with love for all things Disney - hence, this list of the top five Disney films I'm sure we'd all love to see back in the cinema.

Walt Disney Pictures have gone re-release crazy. First, it was The Lion King, which was re-released last year in 3D for a limited time. After its run at the cinema in North America had finished, it had managed to take in over $94 million dollars – and a further $78 million worldwide. This prompted Disney to announce that it would be re-releasing a further four features in 3D; Beauty and the Beast (which is in cinemas now) Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and The Little Mermaid. This has prompted Movie Farm to think about which of our favourite Disney Classics we would like to see on the big screen again, possibly with an added third dimension. Do our favourites match up with yours?

Head over to Movie Farm for the top five...

Louise Brooks: An American in Europe

Louise Brooks was one of the most talented and iconic actresses ever to grace the silver screen. Her work in the late 1920s with Austrian director G. W. Pabst was largely ignored at the time, but was rediscovered by French film historians in the 1950s. Her uncompromising flapper style and hypnotic, emotive screen presence have entranced later generations of fans, gradually gaining her the recognition and praise she never knew in her prime. In short, Louise Brooks was the best actress no-one ever heard of...

For the rest of the article, head over to Subtitled Online...

Women in Film: The Bechdel Test

The origins of the test in Alison Bechdel's comic strip

I’m getting bored. I’m getting bored of going to the cinema and watching film after film about male identity. The solitude, the honour, the silent strength of the male psyche.

I don’t much care about the male identity anymore. In the world of film, men seem to have collectively morphed into that really annoying person at parties who can’t shut up about themselves, their work, their problems, their opinions on everything. It makes me want to reach my hand through the screen and pinch their lips closed; “Shut up, sweetheart. Just shut up. Even for five minutes. Please? For all of us? Nobody gives a fuck about your mid-life crisis, your sex life, or your thoughts on the Middle East. Just pipe the fuck down.”

Edward Norton in classic male bonding flick Fight Club

Movies about women, or ‘women’s issues’ are called ‘chick flicks’. If a woman dares to presume to become an active participant in the narrative, rather than just passively submitting to the penetrative male gaze, then she, and the film she is in, must be denigrated with a cute little term; pigeon-holed back into place so that the men, who make up most of the movie-going audience, don’t feel threatened. Then they can watch the movie, safe in the knowledge that none of this horseshit matters anyway, because it’s only a chick flick.

That’s right. Films made by, for or about women are considered a niche area. A pocket, if you will. A side-track for us all to flounce down when the boys are in the next screen over watching Transformers, or whatever Michael Bay has boiled up in some fevered region of his frontal lobe this month (of course, that’s not to say that women can’t enjoy action movies. I love action movies. What I don’t love are abominable reels of liquid shit, like Transformers).

Transformers - an abominable reel of liquid shit

Women in film are just fine – as long as we’re there just to be gawked at like an exhibit. We’re not allowed to speak too much, take too much charge of a situation, or even interact with other women – unless of course, we’re getting off with each other (apparently that’s totally dandy).  

We may have clawed back some semblance of equality in our daily lives, but in film? In film, we are still the Other; a great squalling writhing mass of terrifying maniacal female energy which ideally needs to be herded into the attic with a broomstick and left to cackle and scratch its fingernails down the walls forevermore.

I kinda want one of these badges...

Anyone ever heard of the Bechdel Test? Yeah, me neither. I’m a feminist with a Film degree, so really I should have heard of the Bechdel Test long ago. In fact, I didn’t hear of it until one of my friends mentioned it in conversation last year; I thought it was very interesting, but then promptly forgot about it.

The Bechdel Test is simply this. Think of a film, or a book, or a play, or some other narrative-based thingamabob, and answer these three questions.

1.       Are there two or more female characters with names?

2.       Do they talk to each other?

3.       If they talk to each other, do they talk about something other than a man?

This, my friends, is the Bechdel Test. If you can answer yes to all three of the above questions, then the thingamabob in question has passed the test. If not, it’s a big fat fail (although of course, there are varying degrees of failing).

Franka Potente saves her boyfriend's ass in Run Lola Run

Obviously, the Bechdel Test has massive flaws and can’t really be used as an accurate measurement of how ‘feminist’ a film is – for example, Run Lola Run would fail the Bechdel Test, even though Lola is a strong independent female character who spends the whole film trying to save her feckless boyfriend – she’s pretty much the only woman in it, and she never talks to another woman, so technically, it fails.

Other fails include Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Fight Club, Reservoir Dogs, Blade Runner, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Muppets, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Godfather, and many more.

More than you’d believe, actually, considering the bar is so low. Surprisingly, Transformers just about manages to pass. But even Sigourney-centric Alien only scrapes a pass due to Ripley and Lambert taking a few seconds out of their busy day to discuss the fact that they are about to be ripped to shit by a slavering monster (something that would certainly take precedence over girlish gossip about Captain Dallas).

"Whaddaya reckon Ripley, hot or not?"

The test is not really meant as an accurate indication of anything, nor is it intending to condemn any film that fails it – if the story isn’t about women, then it isn’t about women, and that’s that.

What it does is make you think a little bit about just how skewed towards the male our culture is. Essentially, there is nothing wrong with a few films failing the Bechdel Test (Reservoir Dogs would make no sense if Tarantino had stuck a random woman in for no reason, likewise Fight Club). There IS something wrong when almost every film is failing it. When the majority of films are disregarding women, the fact that women talk to each other, and that women have personalities which do not exclusively revolve around men, it is clear that we have a problem.

Can you imagine if the situation were suddenly reversed? If almost every film contained only women interacting with each other about, oh, I don’t know, politics? Or war? Or drugs? Do you think men would let this go by unchecked? There’d be blood running river-like in the streets.

"MS Pink?! Oh HELL no..."

Minorities have always been marginalised within mainstream film; that’s nothing new. The token character is a trope we are all very well acquainted with; the token black character, the token gay character, the token woman. But now I am going to tell you something which may well blow your mind, so hold onto your hats, kids.

In the paragraph above (the one you just finished reading), I referred to women as a MINORITY. Did you even bat an eyelid? Did you hell.

I’m sure that gay people and anybody who isn’t white are also sick to the back teeth of being referred to as minorities, but no matter what race or orientation they are, there’s still no getting away from the fact that women currently make up about 50% of the planet’s population. That’s approximately three and a half billion vaginas. That’s a pretty big minority, my friend.

And yet, it is somehow still deemed acceptable to throw us up onscreen as comic relief or disposable eye-candy, and damn any films we might create ourselves with the faintest of praise. Film is an artistic industry first and foremost; it is not the responsibility of art to remake the world into some kind of equal opportunities utopia. I’m not saying that this is what film should be trying to do. What I am saying is that not only is the film industry (like most other industries) still denying career opportunities to women, it is also still perpetrating the idea that women are not equal to men on screens all over the world.

It’s 2012 now, people. I’m getting bored.

The Multiplex Vs The Indie Cinema

Watching a film in a theatre is all about the cinematic ‘experience’; the big screen, the surround sound, the effects of IMAX or 3D (or even both). There is a wide variety of cinemas to choose from in the UK, but does the type of theatre actually make much of a difference? When it comes to the multiplex vs. the independent cinema, is one really better than the other?

Film critic Mark Kermode went through so much trouble while queuing at his local cinema complex that in the introduction to his book, ‘The Good, the Bad and the Multiplex’, he was moved to write:

‘I was suddenly filled with a vision of a great gaping void… This was presumably the void of which Nietzsche was thinking when he warned us that “when you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks right back into you.” Right now, the abyss was indeed looking back into me, apparently eager for me to get out of the way so that it could look long into the person standing behind me in the queue, who probably wanted two tickets and an industrial-sized vat of popcorn.’

Many hardened film-goers will be familiar with these sentiments; sometimes a multiplex cinema can seem a little too much like a fast food restaurant, shovelling films down the throats of the masses in easy to swallow chunks. But what are the real differences between the multiplex and the indie theatre?

To read the rest of the article, head over to Movie Farm

Catching up with the Future: A Sci-Fi Timeline

Apparently, the world is going to end this year. To be exact, it’s going to end on the 21st of December 2012. Cineastes the world over are already bemoaning this utter catastrophe; it means we will survive just long enough to be able to catch a screening of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (which will be released in the UK on December 14th), but have absolutely no chance of being around for the sequel, There and Back Again (which won’t hit the cinemas until 2013). Still, we wouldn’t worry about it too much – as film fans, we already know that the world can’t end in 2012. In fact, it’s impossible; science fiction tells us that our future is only just beginning...

Read more at Movie Farm...

Violence in the Films of Michael Haneke

Film violence is one of the most highly contested issues in cinema. The problem of what can or should be depicted onscreen, and how explicit it can be, is the source of dispute among filmmakers, censors, critics, and viewers alike. Often the most insightful thought comes from filmmakers who are able to articulate their views through film itself. As director and critic Jacques Rivette wrote, “The only true criticism of a film is another film” (Cahier 84, 1958). For Austrian director Michael Haneke, violence and ideas surrounding its cinematic depiction are crucial.

Click on link below to read more...

Violence in the Films of Michael Haneke at Subtitled Online


Above is an article I wrote for Subtitled Online, a great website with the aim of getting more English speakers to fall in love with foreign film (let's be honest, we really don't make enough of an effort). I've always been really interested in the concept of screen violence and the effect it has on both film and viewer; Austrian director Michael Haneke is also preoccupied with this theme, so I wrote an article looking at the way he depicts and analyses violence in his films.

Also, the final count for The Hunger Games opening weekend was $155 million, making it the third highest opening of all time, beaten only by The Dark Knight at $158.4 million and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 at $169.2 million)

Three reasons why The Hunger Games has gone stellar

Avatar: The Revolution of the Real

Vaguely considering going to see Avatar in 3D at the Kingston IMAX this week - I have seen Avatar before, of course, including once at the BFI IMAX, but Avatar is the kind of film it's worth taking the opportunity to see on the big screen when it rolls around. The below is an article I wrote in January of 2010, just after Avatar's original release.

The narrative is unoriginal and predictable, the characters are one dimensional, and the complex combining of the various themes just doesn’t quite square. Even so, Avatar, the film we were told was going to revolutionise cinema, is undoubtedly a visual feast. Sitting in the cinema I had a viewing experience which was entirely new to me; I found my eyes sliding from level to level, looking through the screen in a way I never had before. But has Cameron really managed to pull off what so many others couldn’t? Has he produced what everybody seems to be on the lookout for these days, the single perfect revolutionary film which will change the face of cinema forever? Has Avatar heralded the day that we take the old regime, throw it against a wall and shoot it with, in Cameron’s case, a three foot long poison tipped arrow? Is this really what Cameron was trying to do, anyway? Can we say that he’s failed, if he wasn’t even making an attempt? And of course, the biggest question of all the questions that are thrown up by this film, does it even matter?

It didn’t quite achieve what many conjecture to be the ultimate aim of cinema; that is, virtual reality style immersion. It never made me forget that I was in a theatre, but it did at times make me forget that what I was looking at wasn’t technically ‘real’. It always surprised me when I periodically remembered that these were not big blue people I was watching run through a forest and scrunch their toes in the soil. These were, essentially, animated characters, albeit animated characters being played by humans. There are no blue people; there is also no forest, and more than likely no soil. If The Matrix films showed us the desert of the real, then Avatar has shown us the revolution of it. Let’s face it, watching Jake Sully and Neytiri do something as simple as walk through a forest beats even ‘The Burly Brawl’ (in which Keanu Reeves fights off hundreds of Hugo Weavings with nothing more than his wits and a big metal pole) all to shit. Digital effects have become famous for their contrariness; without wishing to denigrate The Matrix too much, digitally duplicating an actor over and over again becomes a relatively simple procedure when compared to getting a character’s pupils to contract correctly, or their hair to blow convincingly in the wind. When it comes to digital effects, the devil is in the details. The 3D isn’t even a factor when simply considering the ‘reality’ of the effects, and is probably no less a gimmick now than the last umpteen times the attempt was made to introduce it into mainstream cinema. Avatar looks pretty stunning with or without 3D, but without it there is much less of the afore-mentioned ‘sliding’ of the vision through different layers of celluloid. Look carefully through, not at, but through, any given scene on the planet Pandora, and you will be able to count anywhere from three to six or seven different ‘levels’ for your eyes to latch onto. 3D, like Cameron’s new ‘e-motion capture’, is itself simply another layer of the attempt to make Avatar realer than real, until the indentations in Jake Sully’s skin become more authentic to your eyes than the ones on your hand three inches in front of your face.

However, there is a confusing contradiction inherent in films such as Avatar; while you are watching something that seems infinitely more ‘real’ to your eyes and brain than say, a gritty eighties drama, you are at the same time watching an incredibly artful and calculated artificial world. As we progress toward the future of film, it seems that we as viewers need more and more technical tricks to fool us into accepting that what we are seeing is ‘real’. This is no easy task, especially considering the media saturated age in which we live. To make us forget the cameras and the crew, and to train our brains into accepting that nothing is ‘real’ beyond the edges of the screen can be a laborious and thankless task. One wonders whether that is how Cameron now views his latest creation. Tearing down the giants of cinema with a single sentence is a popular practice; Avatar was slated from the second it was released, and deservedly so. It’s too long, it’s predictable, the acting isn’t exactly stellar, and it’s self indulgent in the extreme; it has even been labelled racist by some, and given a new name by the internet gossips, the inspired ‘Avatard’. The general consensus has been “sure Jim, it looks pretty, but how about hiring some decent writers?”

While I agree completely with this view, I believe I would have to relinquish my status as a film geek if I wasn’t more than willing to let Cameron off the hook. In the same way that the idea of cinema was invented long before it could be actualised, and early filmmakers were forced to wait for the technology to catch up with the concept before they could really begin committing their ideas to the screen, Cameron formulated Avatar years before the technology was anything like as advanced as he needed. While the product of his gargantuan effort may not be perfect, you have to look at it for what it is; Cameron was essentially making it up as he went along. The art of film and filmmaking, which, especially within the Hollywood system, can be an incredibly ingrained and systematic process, is advanced only by those who are brave enough to risk utter ruin by pioneering new technologies, new techniques, and new ways of seeing. Often whether these new techniques ‘work’ or not is irrelevant. Film, like any other art, is constantly developing, changing, and attempting to convey something new, and in a world where most people consider film as nothing more than a Friday night’s distraction, let alone an artistic pursuit, it can be very easy to forget that.

Let’s sit back for a moment and look at what Cameron has actually achieved here. Whether he was really trying to revolutionise cinema is a question that only he can answer, and we have already agreed that even if he was trying he hasn’t succeeded – but what he has done is make a pretty damn spectacular action movie, with its own unique visual aesthetic, that whatever critics might say looks like nothing any of us has ever seen before. Has Cameron changed the face of cinema forever? The answer, in my opinion, is no. Sure, people will follow in his footsteps, the technology will develop even further, and I’m sure that a lot sooner than you think you’ll be able to sit in a cinema, turn your head around 180 degrees, and still see trees behind you. But the cinema is not a perfectible art; as Andre Bazin wrote even in the early 20^th century, there is no ‘total’ cinema, no ultimate goal that filmmakers are working towards, even if they think that’s what they’re doing.  Any filmmaker trying to make ‘perfect’ cinema will get to what they think is the top of the mountain and find a whole new cliff face waiting for them. If Avatar has failed at an impossible task, then it really hasn’t failed at all. My advice to those who would, based on its faults, dismiss Avatar completely, is this; come back and talk to me again when you’ve had a try – then maybe you’ll cut Cameron some slack.

As to whether Avatar, or any of the issues related to it, really matters as far as contemporary and future cinema is concerned – this is a matter of personal opinion. But for those of us who live and breathe for the big screen, the occasional appearance of films like Avatar is why we get up in the morning.

Bloody Footprints

(Another re-post from my old blog, continuing the fashion/film theme. Apologies for the changes in font/size, but I'm far too busy and important to type it all out again so that it looks pretty)

‘Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up bloody footprints.’ – Alfred Hitchcock

I’ve always been obsessed with films, style, and being blonde, so it’s no wonder really that I fell into that wide chasm of cinema created by Alfred Hitchcock. I say chasm not because I dislike Hitchcock films, quite the opposite in fact, but because once you get sucked into a Hitchcock binge it’s very difficult to get back out again; it’s far easier to just keep going until you emerge from the other side, a little bloodied up and probably with your shoes missing and your stockings torn. Serial killers, suicides, fake suicides, murders, affairs, and demonic birds; yes, Hitchcock has it all. He is one of ‘those’ directors, an auteur, who seems to leave almost too much of himself in his films, until it becomes vaguely embarrassing to watch them, as though you were reading his diary with the complete works of Freud sitting open next to you.

His use and abuse of blonde women is extensive and complex. Several theories about this have been suggested, some by Hitchcock himself, such as his claim that audiences will be less suspicious of a blonde, having been trained by cinematic tradition to see the blonde as the innocent, virginal heroine, or just that their colouring worked better on black and white film. Hitchcock obviously wouldn’t have made a tradition out of having blondes in his films if he didn’t feel some attraction to them, but it is also obvious that this is a very strange attraction. On some level, Hitchcock seems to truly hate his blondes. In Rear Window, he has Grace Kelly climb into the apartment of a suspected murderer and nearly get murdered herself for her trouble; in Psycho he brutally stabs Janet Leigh to death in the shower, stuffs her body in the trunk of car and sinks it into a swamp; he nearly blinded poor ‘Tippi’ Hedren for real in The Birds, and in Vertigo he not only subjects Kim Novak to the dangerously obsessive whims of Jimmy Stewart, who at one point forces her to bleach her hair, but also throws her out of a church belfry...twice. When it comes to perpetuating hatred of blondes, or what I have come to term ‘blondism’, Al Hitchcock ranks above even a certain Barbara Millicent Roberts. Then again, even Barbie has been sold in a stylish green skirt suit with three plastic crows artfully stuck to her person, so it seems as if there is no end to the abuse.

But this isn’t another plea for some respite from the ‘dumb blonde’ jokes, the car horns or the disdaining looks, or even the kitchen knives. Let’s face it, it isn’t just blondes who are often on the receiving end of violence or ‘light hearted’ sexual abuse, it is in fact women in general. But for some reason, in the world of the cinema it always seems to be the blondes that get given the fuzzy end of the lollipop, to put it mildly. Apart from the Hitchcock canon, whose shades range from Janet Leigh’s mussed dirty blonde crop to Kim Novak’s ‘lavender’ iciness, blonde women and their cinematographic hair have always been a movie mainstay. Jean Harlow, Brigitte Bardot, Marlene Dietrich – the list is almost endless. But the true home of the blonde, as Hitchcock knew, was in the horror film. And, in true Hitchcock style, the characters they play are usually evil, weird, brutally done-in and abused, or all three together. Mia Farrow’s pretty blonde-bobbed innocent in Rosemary’s Baby is subject to the evil machinations of a satanic cult, eventually giving birth to the son of the devil. Talking of Satan’s spawn, how could we forget poor Lee Remick in The Omen, unknowingly bringing up the son of Satan in the form of five year old Damian, who viciously scratches her face when she tries to take him into a church, and drives his toy bike sadistically into a chair she is standing on so that she falls over a balcony, eventually plunging to her grisly death from a high window. Damian’s dark haired shenanigans don’t stop there; in the second instalment of the Omen trilogy he murders his blonde best friend and cousin using his psychic powers. It is interesting to note also that the young Harvey Stevens, cast as Damian in the first film, had his naturally blonde hair dyed black for the role. In eerie thriller Don’t Look Now, blonde Julie Christie loses her even blonder daughter in a drowning accident, before running into her lookalike in Venice, who, in what must be one of cinema’s strangest ever surprise endings, turns out to be a sadistic serial killing dwarf who then slashes open her husband’s (Donald Sutherland's) throat. Britt Ekland is also worth mentioning here, for her creepy performance as Willow MacGregor in Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man, helping to lure to Edward Woodward’s Christian policeman to his fiery death. Even the queen of blondes herself, Marilyn Monroe, was not totally exempt from the blonde Curse; chillingly murdered in Niagara, emotionally ruined in The Misfits, and hovering dangerously near the borders of insanity in Don’t Bother To Knock.

The continuing fascination with the blonde, in my opinion, is mostly to with their style. They may have committed suicide, been insane, evil, murderers, murdered, raped, and attacked by mad birds, but they looked damn cool while they were doing it. Kim Novak and Grace Kelly are my two personal favourites; Novak’s iconic grey suit in Vertigo, along with her long white coat and black gloves she wears when she throws herself into San Francisco Bay are the height of melancholy elegance. The first time we see Grace Kelly in Rear Window she looks exactly like Disney’s Cinderella dressed for the ball, and is immaculate in every scene, even when shinning up a fire escape (and let’s not forget that in the end Kelly managed to achieve the difficult task of becoming a real princess). Marilyn Monroe always looks stunning, whether she’s singing, being murdered or having a nervous breakdown, and even as Lee Remick falls off a balcony, her hair and makeup are perfect, her outfit matching flawlessly. They continue to be abused in spite of their fashion sense. As we all know, fear of a minority often equates with hatred of it. You might well ask what there is to fear from a blonde, but we can be pretty creepy when we want to – I know that when I was a child I certainly looked uncannily like an extra from Village of the Damned, especially in photos with a tendency towards red eye. It seems that blondes in the cinema are forever destined to be portrayed as either virgins or whores, both states being of course, equally punishable.