Revenge (1971)

My thoughts on the Network BluRay of the 1971 British melodrama.

In 2013, the American film Prisoners and the Israeli movie Big Bad Wolves both dealt with grieving parents who kidnap suspected child murderers/molesters and set about getting brutal revenge.  In 2010, two Canadian films – 7 Days and The Tortured – came out with near-identical premises.  All very zeitgeisty, but in 1971 a British film played out precisely the same situation.  Strangely, that year, producer Peter Rogers, director Sidney Hayers and screenwriter John Kruse made two films about serial rapist-murderers of schoolgirls, Assault (also a British Film Collection release) and Revenge.  Why the theme should suddenly take the fancy of the usually jolly Rogers — who made Carry On At Your Convenience and Carry On Matron that same year — is a questions that’ll probably never be answered, though it’s worth noting that something must have been in the air since Sidney Lumet’s more prestigious The Offence (1973) has a similar, seedy feel, with a disillusioned police officer confronting a self-hating suspect in an interrogation room.

After the funeral of his murdered daughter – a riot of PVC mourning macs and drizzle –  High Wycombe publican Jim Radford (James Booth) slinks back to the Crown with wife Carol (Joan Collins) and teenage children by an earlier marriage, Lee (Tom Marshall) and Jill (Zuleika Dobson).  Harry (Ray Barrett), father of another victim, barges in, seething that the police have let their chief suspect –  weirdo loiterer Seely (Kenneth Griffith) – go free for lack of evidence.  Jim, Lee and Harry get in an estate car and tail the creep, whose circuitous route to the shops always takes him past the school at break-time (‘there he is at the gate, pretending he’s cleaning his glasses’).  They pull off a bungled, impulsive abduction, dragging the squealing victim back to the pub, where he is stashed in the cellar.  Carol catches on at once and has to be restrained from scratching Seely’s eyes out.  In the melée, Jim throttles the pathetic creep; but, the next morning, tempers have cooled and the prisoner is still alive …

In Hitchcock manner, Revenge manages decent suspense scenes: while snatching Seely, the kidnappers are harried by a dog which gets a grip on their tartan car blanket, and the racket alerts the inevitable curtain-twitching busybody; Carol is left alone to cope with the prisoner, when a pair of cheery delivery men turn up with a consignment of booze she has to talk them out of taking down into the cellar.  For most of the film, Seely skulks in the cellar, evil influence spreading throughout the pub: Jim takes to the bottle, Harry cops out and goes to Manchester, Lee is impotent with his understanding barmaid girlfriend Rose (Sinead Cusack) because he keeps having memory flashes of the pervert in the cellar, Jill finds out what the grown-ups are up to and keeps threatening to free Seely (who can’t keep his eyes off her legs) and Carol constantly clashes with her stepchildren (‘your real mother walked out on you … that’s how much of a damn she cares’).  The third act goes for wild melodrama: Lee and Carol (who have been eyeing and hugging each other while Jim is getting drunk) argue in front of Seely, and Lee rips off Carol’s night-dress with ‘I’ll show him what a grown woman looks like … convert him’.  The couple then engage in rough sex on the cellar floor, the actors’ modesty imaginatively preserved by having the scene shot through Seely’s shattered spectacles.

The police devote more time to investigating the disappearance of a local oddball than the serial murders of schoolgirls – and even then their casework mostly consists of sitting in the bar being overly polite while Jim squirms.  A few too  many plot twists are signalled by newspaper items – though there’s an excruciatingly well-acted stretch as it’s reported that another man has been arrested and Jim tries to cajole Seely into being reasonable about this regrettable mess with a nice cup of tea and offers of money.  Griffith, who chews the scenery in Hayers’ Circus of Horrors, is perfect casting as the sleazy suspect (he has a Psycho-like shrine to his dead Mum) and – for a change – underplays the whining and sulking, occasionally making desperate attempts at pathetic ingratiation as if shaking a packet of sweeties at a schoolgirl and flashing what might be a grin of pure evil.  James Booth, Ray Barrett and Sinead Cusack are solidly professional as well-intentioned, yet credibly inept ordinary folks in a situation getting out of hand.  Harry tries to get Jim to commit murder with ‘Just a wheelbarrow’s ride in the dark, Jim.’  Joan Collins, who plays one scene in peach-coloured underwear, gives her all despite getting the clunkier lines (‘I don’t know what’s happening to all of us, we’ve all gone raving mad’) and an unflattering hairdo.

If ever there was a year to make a film about Britain cracking up, it was 1971 – everything here is horrible: the flat beer and stale bar snacks, the pub bores who won’t leave at chucking-out time (licensing hours are vital to the plot), the ghastly wallpaper and tatty sweet-shop, the News of the World headlines about raped schoolgirls, the ‘understanding’ Rose has learned from sex manual paperbacks, the pokey little cars, the drab grey streets where it always seems to be a long wet Sunday afternoon with the pubs not open yet, the feeble excuses for ducking responsibility.  It’s gone by a host of titles – before release, it seems to have been called After Jenny Died (much more distinctive than Revenge, which has been used on too many other films) and it’s been sold aptly as Behind the Cellar Door, Terror From Under the House and Inn of the Frightened People.