Anyone with an interest in horror movies probably knows something about "Hammer horror", the strain of movies put out by the English production house for some twenty years beginning in the 1950s, which produced its own versions of the classic Universal monster films and made cult stars of such actors as Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Hammer had its own wayward, dark cousin--the films made in the 1960s and 1970s by Amicus Studios, which might easily have been mistaken for Hammer product by twitchy-eyed buffs on a misspent matinee weekend, or later, by kids parked in front of the TV on a Saturday. As Will Hodgkinson recalls, Amicus was the result of a handshake deal between "a socially inept scriptwriter called Milton Subotsky and a fast-talking hustler called Max J Rosenberg". Subotsky was the hands-on, on-set presence during the company's salad days. Everyone who met him seems to remember him as a very sweet man and a bit of a social misfit and oddball--which kind of figures, very sweet men being in short supply in film production circles. Ironically, he is also remembered as a true horror buff, in contrast the the bosses at Hammer, who happened to find a commercial niche and beat it into an assembly line. "Had it dealt in garbage disposal," the director Freddie Francis once said, "it would have been just as successful." And Subotsky, Hodgkinson writes, was "driven by a deep-rooted hatred for Hammer. In 1956, Hammer had rejected a script he wrote called Frankenstein and the Monster, only to go on and have huge success with a similarly themed film called The Curse of Frankenstein. To Rosenberg, this proved there was money in British horror movies. To Subotsky, the gauntlet had been thrown down." It must have pleased him considerably to feel that he was eating into Hammer's market share, making films pitched to Hammer's audience that sometimes featured actors who were identified with Hammer, such as Cushing and Lee, while telling interviewers that his own stuff was better.

While Subotsky wrote scripts and hung out on sets overseeing the filming and driving the directors crazy, Rosenberg stayed in America, cutting distribution deals and shoveling money across the Atlantic. Not that he shoveled in great quantities; Amicus gave their movies a top-grade look while pinching pennies by hiring actors, ranging from horror stalwarts such as Cushing, Lee, and Vincent Price to the likes of Jack Palance, Burgess Meredith, Denholm Elliott, Terry-Thomas, and Joan Collins, by hiring them for only a few days at a time. Their first real production, the 1965 Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (directed by Francis and written by Subotsky), was an anthology film, with five short stories contained in a wraparound framework with Cushing telling the fortunes of a group of men in a train car.

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A strange concatenation of circumstances hit me today -- it's Christmas Day 2008 at 9:45 AM as I write this.  One was obvious, and one was tenuous, but both had a deep impact in my consideration of this, the last film I watched several weeks ago for the Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon and the last Christmas film I'll be posting about this year.  The first was the discovery that a friend of mine, who hosts an excellent radio show in Chicago on the nexus of politics and popular culture, recently presented a special Christmas episode in which the central question was:  has A Christmas Story replaced It's a Wonderful Life as America's most beloved Christmas movie?

On the surface, it's a pretty strange question.  As often as it's shown -- and that's pretty damned often -- Bob Clark's endlessly re-watchable, terrifically funny tale of a young boy's Midwestern holiday misadventures in the late 1940s has never had the cultural ubiquity that Frank Capra's classic had during the years it was out of copyright.  It can hardly be called contemporary anymore; it was made 25 years ago (as celebrated in a deluxe new DVD release that's highly recommended by this writer) and was set only a few years after It's a Wonderful Life.  And the older film is a genuine four-star cinematic acheivment, directed by one of the towering talents of the Golden Age of Hollywood, made for a significant amount of money and starring some of the greatest screen stars of the day.

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Harold Pinter, who died at the age of 78 on Christmas Eve, was very likely the only writer ever to win the Nobel Prize, the French Légion d'honneur, and inspire an episode of Seinfeld. He was also a towering enough figure in modern theater to lend his name to a word: "Pinteresque." It was most commonly used in reference to the famous pauses written into his plays, and many a theater lover born during or after Pinter's first period of success knew long before discovering his plays that describing the sight of an actor daring the audience to wonder if he'd just forgotten his lines as Pinteresque was an easy way of seeming smart. More generally, and more and more as Pinter's career went on, it came to stand for the whole mysterious, threatening world he created on stage, a place where everyone seemed to be nursing a secret grudge and perpetually squaring off against and testing each other, and the balance of power kept shifting. Pinter, who attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948, entered theater as an actor and spent twelve years struggling to get by as a member of various repertory companies; for about half that time, he performed under the name "David Baron." His time as a starving young actor in London overlapped with that of Michael Caine, and Caine has often enjoyed telling interviewers about the time good old "David" stormed out of the pub, saying that he was bloody sick to death of this bloody business and was going home to try to write something.

Speaking to The New York Times' Mel Gussow many years later, Pinter would recall that, as an actor, "My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into." As an actor, he--like his American counterpart, Sam Shepard--brought to his writing an inside understanding of the charge that actors get out of the kind of menacing game-playing and shape-shifting that would go on in his plays, and how easily they can impart their excitement in those kinds of roles to the audience. He joined that kind of showmanship to a modernist sense that the hostility he put onstage might seem all the more haunting for seeming oblique in its motivating force, and to a poetic sense of spoken language that immediately joined him, in the minds of critics and the public, to his friend Samuel Beckett (who, as it happened, also died shortly before Christmas, nineteen years ago).

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THE GOOD FAIRY (1935)

Ferenc Molnar's prolific output (around 40 plays) was plundered (often in radically altered and/or watered-down form) by everyone: Rogers & Hammerstein got Carousel out of his Liliom, and Billy Wilder's fleetest farce, One, Two, Three updated (apparently unrecognizably) another play. Often forgotten is 1935's The Good Fairy, a triumph of clever dialogue and expert performances over William Wyler's typically ponderous, absurdly slow direction. In keeping with the good "production values" Wyler stolidly brought along for his whole career, things move way too slow. For no good reason, Preston Sturges' adaptation retains cumbersome faux-Hungarian street-name signs, presumably in the name of reminding audiences what cultivated terrain they've stumbled upon whenever an actor gets slowed down by a word. But Sturges keeps throwing away funny lines and faux-ponderous diction in every direction, and the movie's a blast despite all that. "Unhand me, varlet, lest I cleave thee to the brisket!" yells a drunk aristocrat. "I will scale yonder precipice alone!" And he's never heard from again.

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Paul Benjamin, who died this week at the age of 70, was a character actor in the all but lost tradition of classic Hollywood comedies, the missing link between the likes of Mischa Auer and Franklin Pangborn and the counterculture improv theater of the 1950s and '60s. With his lanky frame and elongated jaw--the result of a childhood illness--he seemed to have been built for a career in the Sunday Funnies, and when he spoke, he had a special gift for seeming both professorial and slightly insane. In one of his earliest film roles, in Milos Forman's Taking Off (1971), he counseled a meeting of middle-class parents trying to figure out how to better understand their teenage kids on how to smoke marijuana. He followed that up by playing sidekick to Alan Arkin in the little seen Deadhead Miles (1972), which was written by Terrence Malick; gave Christianity a bad name as a frontier clergyman with the sniffles in Jeremiah Johnson (1972); lectured partygoers on the tribal mating rituals in Up the Sandbox (1972); helped Bruce Dern pass for normal as one of the California rotary club types in Smile (1975); helped David Warner pass for almost sort of normal as his Teutonic butler in The Man with Two Brains (1983); and tried to school Matthew Broderick in the art of film as the immortal Professor Arthur Fleeber in The Freshman (1980). He was also a recurring figure in the Christopher Guest mockumentary industry, with small roles in This Is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, and A Mighty Wind (2003). For all that, he was probably best known to most people as the giddily unsocialized Mr. Bentley on The Jeffersons, a job that he held down for ten years from 1975 to 1985, and one that left most of the country stubbornly convinced that Benedict, who was born in Silver City, New Mexico, was English. He also had a recurring role as the Number Painter on Sesame Street.

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NEW YORK: Anthology Film Archives commences its salute to Jerry Schatzberg tonight with screenings of the director's firat features, the 1970 alienation-fest Puzzle of a Downfall Child (starring Faye Dunway) and the 1971 The Panic in Needle Park, costarring Al Pacino, in his first starring role, and Kitty Winn as a young couple of heroin addicts. Schatzberg, who seems to be more or less retired, had an erratic career, and to his other problems, he'll probably have at least one chance during his personal appearance at this retrospective to patiently explain that, no, he isn't Joel Schumacher. But as a filmmaker he had a broad curiosity about different milieus and kinds of characters, and his pictures have generally had texture and weight. Needle Park retains interest as a deep quaff of '70s New York at its most confoundingly ungovernable, and Schatzberg can boast of having directed Pacino in both his last performance before The Godfather made him a star and the first picture he made afterwards, the 1973 road movie Scarecrow co-starring Gene Hackman. When Schatzberg made the New York-set Street Smart fifteen years after Needle Park, he had to shoot it in Toronto, but once again he helped launch the movie career of a major star, this time someone who'd been working for decades and would turn fifty the year the picture was released: just a couple of years earlier, Morgan Freeman had been reduced to holding down a job on Another World, but his terrifying performance as a pimp who emerges like a monster from the id to turn pampered reporter Christopher Reeve's life into a pretzel earned him his first Academy Award nomination and a long-belated measure of the industry stature he'd long deserved.

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With Kenneth Branagh's disastrous re-imagining still fresh (if that's the word) in the minds of the few who bothered to see it, I suppose now is as good a time as any to remember when the title Sleuth wasn't synonymous with suckitude. Branagh's film shares with Joseph L. Mankiewicz's awesome 1972 original — the source of last week's quote — little more than a star (Michael Caine) and the basic plot as laid down by author Anthony Shaffer.

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