I'm often asked which film is my favourite film. (I'm not, I'm usually asked "Are there any films that you don't like?" To which I usually answer "Of course: I don't like "Apocalypse Now", "The Exorcist", "The Godfather" or any of the "Star Wars" films. There's usually a fight. I'm often called "a professional contrarion" which is inaccurate: I'm never paid for these opinions. Or anything else for that matter.)
So, if I'm rarely asked to name my favourite film I have had stock answers for years: "A Matter of Life and Death" (I'm not sure that's even my favourite Powell & Pressburger film now) or "Valerie and her Week of Wonders". Both great films to be sure but not the films I watch the most. That peculiar honour belongs to "The Horror of The Black Museum". In terms of sheer watchability it destroys the competition like a BBC producer rigging the results.
It starts well; the rigged binoculars are literally blinding and open up some of the charged and tin-eared dialogue that binds the entire production together: the seam that runs through this film like fat through bacon is dunder-headed, clumsy and often unecessary exposition, most obviously in the tin-mouth of Shirley Ann Field who invests lines like "I certainly hope I can come again because some day soon I expect to be part of Rick's life" with a sort of sing-song lifelessness; like an echoing chorus of a skipping song from a long abandoned play-ground. She is equally, remarkably, dreadful in Edmond T Greville's "Beat Girl" a year later and in "Peeping Tom" the year after that (though Michael Powell cannily cast her as an excruciatingly bad actress in that one!). At the other end of the spectrum is a truly apoplectic performance from Michael Gough; swivel-eyed, limping, lip-smacking and sneering Gough has clearly decided that the only way to get the bitter taste of the dialogue out of his mouth is to spit it like chewing tobacco into a spittoon.
Gough plays Edmond Bancroft; true-crime writer and professional gadfly to the local police. Indeed we know he's a bad egg from the very off so the only real mystery to this film is why the police keep allowing him into their headquarters, crime-scenes or parties. He turns up, limps around a bit, calls them cocks and toddles off again. A series of terrible murders are baffling the police and of course it's Bancroft who's doing them. In the safe confines of his own self constructed Black Museum ("better than the police's")he details his plans to his dozy ward Rick (Graham Curnow). For a crimial genius he leaves a lot of loose ends lying about: the woman he buys his horror-props from and whom later attempts to blackmail him (she meets a sticky end). The blousy girlfriend who calls him half a man (another a sticky end). The doctor who recognises a link between his heart palpatations and the crimes and follows him back to his evil lair (a sticky end followed by a very clean end). He's right to mock the police - they haven't got a clue!
There's so much to enjoy here: the Welsh madman the police interrogate over the murders ("I have a death ray in my eyes!"), the transatlantic accents used to indicate tough-guy hepness, June Cunningham's suicide blonde performance as Bancroft's bought woman, including a cha-cha-cha for one in an empty fifties saloon bar. Rick's Jimmy Dean bomber jacket and gargoyle death-mask combination. The fact that Bancroft's Black Museum appears to have both a working laser and acid plunge pool (it really is better than Scotland Yard's!)and that he has invented a Jekyl and Hyde serum! In most films that would be the plot - here it is barely even mentioned! That's the strength of this film - it is truly organic, it buds and grows off in all sorts of directions as and when it feels like it! The ending feels like a parody of King Kong! Why not? That neatly sets Crabtree and Gough up for their next endeavour - Konga!
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