One Of Terry's Corners Of the Online World

Sal, Jamie, Sarah E and I wandered down to ACMI, the Australian Centre For The Moving Image last night to see the first night of the Cinematheque season. The programme was sweet. The first Hammer Dracula movie starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Michael Gough overacting outrageously, Night Of The Eagle, the 1962 Brit film based on Fritz Leiber's Burn, Witch, Burn. For value added we had three short films by Georges Melies (the grandfather of genre cinema) and an early silent version of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde. The details are here. I can also recommend visiting Cafe Chinotto across Fed Square from ACMI where they do a kick-arse smoked salmon, rocket and sun-dried tomato salad.

Loved the movies. Sarah, being the major Hammer fan she is, loved Dracula but for me Night of the Eagle worked a lot better. Peter Wyngarde was never better as an actor in this, and as Jamie pointed out, he was a hunk in those days. Janet Blair is spookily good as his wife Tansy and Margaret Johnston brings bucketloads of eerie, neurotic ickiness to the role of Flora Carr. The eagle attack was done extremely well given the effects limitations of the day and the film builds a great atmosphere of eery, other-worldliness which slides the viewer into accepting that magic, at some level, works.

I loved the Melies shorts, too. One of the graves Sal and I visited at Pere Lachaise in 2004 was his. Not as popular as Oscar Wilde or Jim Morrison, but I got a bigger kick out of seeing the verdigrised bronze bust of the seminal ancestor of genre films than either of those more popular internment points.