Gary A. Sherman
Auteur de Dead & Buried [1981 Film]
A propos de l'auteur
Œuvres de Gary A. Sherman
Raw Meat 2 exemplaires
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 6
- Membres
- 69
- Popularité
- #250,752
- Évaluation
- 3.0
- Critiques
- 1
- ISBN
- 1
This is the first feature from Chicago born, ex-commercials director Gary Sherman and he imbues his film with a dark, gritty reality. Conceived by Sherman during a late night tube journey, his film is full of dread and underpinned by a range of startling images. These include a bravura unbroken tracking shot where the camera crawls excruciatingly slowly through the underground tunnels against a brilliant piece of sound design featuring dripping water and the moaning wail of an unseen creature before arriving at the pathetic form of ‘The Man’, the last of the underground dwellers in all his Neanderthal, wart-covered, maggot-ridden glory. Sherman’s approach is stark and he doesn’t shrink away from depicting an underground world of feasting rats and putrescent corpses hanging from walls. His American eye is also highly critical of the politics of the British class system – so we’re presented with Victorian workers abandoned as it would be too costly for the capitalists and the “captains of industry” to assist their rescue, resulting in those on the lowest on the rungs having to literally prey on each in order to survive. These class issues are played out in the guise of Inspector Calhoun and MI5 agent Stratton-Villiers (Christopher Lee in a two minute cameo). The authoritarian Stratton-Villiers mocks Calhoun’s working class background and leaves Calhoun in no doubt as to who is in control: “Mind you don’t become a missing person yourself,” he admonishes. Interestingly, Calhoun, although contemptuous of Stratton-Villiers, fully accepts the superiority of the MI5 man and his own lower placing within the social order. Pleasance’s performance is excellent – weird, eccentric and full of strange ticks and unpleasant mannerisms, including an all-consuming passion for tea (perhaps a sly comment by Sherman on the British passion for the beverage?) Lee’s two minute turn is there simply to underwrite the class dichotomies and, no doubt, to add a bit of marquee value. It is Hugh Armstrong as ‘The Man’, however, who delivers the most compelling performance both horrifically menacing and utterly tragic. The scene where his female partner dies and he tenderly strokes and moves her is strangely heart-breaking and touching as is his repeated, pathetic mewling of the words “mind the doors… mind the doors…” – presumably words he’s heard and assimilated from the world above.
“Death Line” is an excellent, compelling, thought-provoking horror movie and one of the most important British films of the early ‘70s. It is gory, unflinching, political and in some ways could almost be viewed as an art-house film. It captures something of a society intent on “eating itself” and is a chilling, grisly classic, made all the more horrific by its subtext on the class system and it critique of pre-punk Britain.… (plus d'informations)