Article: Navigating The Small World of Sammy Lee

Sometimes I find myself reminded of, and exasperated by, Britain’s neglect of its own cinema heritage. Chasing the American dollar has British modern filmmaking leaning on the Hollywood market for years. Our best talent often leaves for greener pastures overseas. British cinemas appear uninterested in their own product. Award Ceremonies like the BAFTAs only serve as a precursor to the Oscars. In the modern age, British film is only seen in piecemeal, with older movies feeling unheard of by anyone born past 1995.

1963’s The Small World of Sammy Lee, directed by Ken Hughes, didn’t shine at the time of its release. It found itself forgotten for decades, outperformed by weightier “kitchen sink” films of the era. Hughes and star Anthony Newley had seemingly high hopes for their “serious” tragicomedy, which has one foot in the emerging pop art cinema of its era, all the while glancing back to the noirs of previous decades. The Small World of Sammy Lee didn’t make its splash much to the dismay of Hughes, who was said to have bristled at being more known for the likes of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). 

You’d think there would be room for Sammy Lee in a country that bangs on about Only Fools and Horses all the bleeding time. ‘Sammy Lee’ is a gem of sixties noir, that now encapsulates a London that to me is both familiar and foreign at the same time. Imagine a sixties set Good Time (2017) or Uncut Gems (2019) before the Safdie Brothers were twinkles in their father's eye. A precursor to those unhinged crime tales, ‘Sammy Lee’ is a film centring on a man nourished by addiction and desperation. He adores standing on the edge of the cliff. Wondering how close he might get to falling. There’s an unsettling feeling that he wouldn’t mind being pushed. 

 ‘Sammy Lee’ starts with its titular character getting absolutely trounced in a poker game. Losing £150 during this game has increased his six-month outstanding debt to £300. With five hours to locate and pay off the bookies, Sammy spends his time dodging, dealing and hustling in the streets of Soho, searching for ways to pony up his bill. 

While The Safdies lock viewers in with frantic, tightly framed visuals and hysterical barrages of overlapping arguments, ‘Sammy Lee’ distils a different kind of tension. A slow creeping, quiet desperation that inhabits ‘Sammy Lee’. Often displayed in simple images. Early on, we catch a glimpse of a previous victim bearing a Chelsea grin. There’s a look of abject misery on Sammy’s face as his plan slides further into anguish. Then there’s Soho itself. The film opens with a wry visual metaphor of the grime being washed away from the Soho streets in the early morning, while the interior strip clubs are smoke-filled tombs, filled with suited men leering at half-naked women whose dreams have met their limit. It’s almost like everyone has fallen into a greasy pit with no desire to escape. 

The Small World of Sammy Lee is a run-all-night film. Other examples of this would be After Hours or the previously mentioned Good Time. Procuring a deceptively unattainable financial goal is often the struggle of these protagonists. The problematic flaws that inhabit the antihero only exacerbate matters. Sammy Lee is a great run-all-night movie, although much of it occurs during the day. Sammy needs £300. This kind of money isn't the hardest to obtain. But with only 5 hours to retrieve the cash, it’s a target that’s just enough to be out of reach for a chancer like Sammy. When you see this low-rent compere working out the finances of his scheme, you witness someone whose addiction to the rush of playing the game helps impede his goal. Sammy repeatedly refuses help from people. It would be the easy way out. So swift is he in denouncing nine-to-fivers as mugs for earning their crust. He loves the complications of the creative breadline. 60s Soho is the perfect location for this master of ceremonies. It's a type of place where money feels loose enough to be borrowed, but difficult to claim back.

Sammy tries all manner of ploys to reclaim his debt. Borrowing from family, bargaining with the local merchants. Wheeling and dealing against the bookies, all the while, a naïve young girl, Patsy (Julia Forster), who’s travelled from the north to be with him, develops in the background. He juggles all this while telling his lewd-lite jokes at the strip club he works for in between. This is an absolute showcase for leading man Anthony Newley. The acclaimed Renaissance man was already highlighting how ahead of his time he was with surrealist sitcom The Strange World of Gurney Slade (1960). His turn as Sammy is equally as infuriating and affecting. Newley never hides the fact that Sammy, for lack of a better term, is a prick. Yet his charm and wit are infectious. Patsy makes a questionable decision, travelling from Bradford to London on the vague belief of a grounded, honest relationship with Sammy. But his charisma accentuates why someone like Pasty would bypass the soon-to-be-clear red flags and make the trip. Kudos go to Forster’s performance, which is light but holds just the right vulnerability to be affecting. 

While Sammy Lee didn’t make a splash as expected, it’s easy to see why. Sammy is tough to love, and his world is easy to dislike. The likes of Bosley Crowther found the film monotonous in its execution. It certainly isn’t a complicated picture.  Sammy needs to find that money. His relationship with Pasty may blossom. But the film isn’t one with airs and graces. However, Hughes' film is an exercise in mundane stress. The stakes aren’t huge, and yet with Sammy, they feel so high. Not many mugs would engage with such desperate, seedy life. And it's difficult love a man who runs on exploitation.  Yet what’s so engaging is what Sammy is willing to give up keeping the charade up for what may only be another day. One late scene is a wonderfully crafted moment in which Sammy gives in to sacrificing something of sentimental value. The moment is executed in one take and involves information handed to us in some seemingly throwaway lines earlier. But when the weight of Sammy’s decision lands, it’s a quietly saddening affair.

Hughes film flitters skilfully between the saddening and the sincere. Tap dancing amongst puddles of sleaze and tension. It is a film which highlights what British film does so well if left alone to play with genre. Sammy Lee is a heady blend of multicultural, kitchen sink and noir that doesn't get much airtime anymore. It hops from Soho to Whitechapel, showcasing a rare glimpse into British Jewish life, just because it can. For the most part, the action lingers around Soho, revealing (and revelling) in a sub-culture of cheesy MCs, lonely white-collar workers and London thuggery which has all but disappeared in the now much more gentrified district.  With the 1960s Soho now gone, films like Sammy Lee become a unique postcard to what had come before. If the audience cared a little more back then, we might have had more Sammy Lees and fewer Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs. If we cared more about the Brit films of the past, maybe we’d see greener fields on our own turf. Much like Sammy, we can all but dream.

The Small World of Sammy Lee is available on Amazon Video. 

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Article: Rewatching The Hitcher

Roger Ebert hated The Hitcher. His zero-star review shows more disgust with it than a finger in French Fries. But Ebert's abhorrence is why I find The Hitcher effective. It stands within the transgressive space, which Ebert sometimes had little time for. His review shows frustration at Robert Harmon’s film for its murderous antagonist having no perspective. Believing there is something gross between the symbiotic relationship that quietly grows between Jim Halsey (C. Thomas Howell), the young motorist whose life takes a catastrophic turn when he decides to pick up John Ryder (Rutger Hauer), the titular Hitchhiker. But the unrepentant and transgressive identification with evil that the film has brings an unsettling allure to the viewer. Provoking the idea that evil is far more seductive than we may like to think, and we often do well not to succumb to it.

With certain films, I don’t feel that forces of nature need a motive. The desire for clear-cut intention can often be cloying. A quiet need for control amongst chaos. Something to explain away so we can all be safe when the book closes or the credits roll. I’ve always loved how The Hitcher eschews this. It keeps you off kilter. Installing more fear than a multitude of slashers released around the same time. The Hitcher’s screenplay was the brainchild of writer/director Eric Red, who had a successful run of notable screenplays such as Near Dark (1987), Cohen and Tate (1988) and Blue Steel (1990). His stories often have a knack for having people relate to the seductive nature of violence. The Hitcher has this idea in perhaps its purest form. Its story is distilled to that of a Grimm fairytale. In the Momentum Pictures Region 2 DVD release of the movie, the extras disc features Red talking about The Hitcher in a documentary entitled: How do these movies get made. Red labels Ryder as a “tough and resourceful” murderer who wishes to pass on to this impudent youth a “sense of survival”.

Red’s fascination with the allure of violence appears throughout The Hitcher in complicated guises. It’s easy to contemplate a lesser film with Rutger Hauer as a more simple-minded psychotic. Roaming around with the typical bloodlust, no different from many horror movies. However, Hauer’s Hitcher is constantly throwing strands of ambiguity, even empathy, to his character. Huger pushes scenes of this character into areas of discomfort. Not romanticised but almost bordering on something like understanding. He loads the character with a myriad of unexpected expressions which fracture our expectations of such a character. Whether it was Ryder’s impressed smirk when first thrown out of Jim’s car, the look of distain Ryder has for Jim when he threatens him with an empty gun, or the pained look of fear and resignation late on, when about to kidnap Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a trusting young waitress who believes Jim’s story of the disturbed traveller stalking him like the angel of death. Hauer’s performance is disturbing due to how Hauer quietly manages to make his maliciousness strangely enticing. From the film’s first moments, it’s clear that Jim doesn’t want to murder anyone. Yet this aggressive fight for survival with Ryder slowly unlocks something primal within him. Eerily suggesting that Jim isn’t too far removed from John. What's scary isn't just the grisly nihilism on display, it's the unsettling idea of how well Jim, and by extension us, start to identify with such torturous despair.

The Hitcher was a debut feature for Still photographer Robert Harmon, who quickly moved into T.V. not long after. Hard not to see this as unfortunate, as The Hitcher does a formidable job of showcasing Harmon as a genuine creator of atmosphere. Shot by Oscar-winning Australian cinematographer John Seale, The Hitcher is hideous in theme but beautiful in its visualisation. It’s early, tightly framed car shots are suitably claustrophobic. When the film allows the beautiful Californian vistas to enter the movie, there’s a feeling that you might be able to breathe again, if the film weren’t so relentless. It is as propulsive as it is repulsive. Shifting gears from existential horror to full-blown action western with little trouble. While its set pieces, even now, are still eye-widening. The jewel in the crown is still the grisly, often-noted sequence involving a character bound between a truck and its trailer hitch. The moment not only subverts the expected outcome but stages the set piece in an almost Hitchcockian manner. Harmon mines the tension so well that people believe they’ve seen more than they do.

The old complaint that 'we don't make them like we used to' is tiresome. Writers like me need to refrain from saying a phrase so tedious. But watching the remake of The Hitcher many moons ago, I sharply realised how much secret sauce that made the original idea exhilarating seemed to have disappeared. Movies like this work due to their weirdness. Their resistance to playing by the rules. The otherworldliness they bring. Studios sense money like the smell of blood to sharks. And when the reboots, remakes and sequels come calling, that strange essence is first to go. The Hitcher feels like lightning in a bottle. Is it a surprise that the glossy Platinum Dunes retread is little talked about? The 1986 Hitcher draws from so much. An unbridled nature is developed between Eric Red, Robert Harmon and Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher that other movies cannot compete with. But most movies aren't looking to become an urban legend cum mythical neo-western actioner, this movie is. In the eyes of Robert Harmon, The Hitcher isn't even a horror story.  He's not even interested in the genre. Despite this, Harmon has crafted one of the films that has helped define the genre for many. That’s some feat.

The Hitcher is available on various streaming platforms. 

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Article: Flash to White - A Re-watch of Miracle Mile

Let's start this new year with a film about the end of the world. The low-budget nuclear thriller Miracle Mile, directed by Steve De Jarnatt, has a semi-similar conceit to Kathryn Bigelow's multi-focal-point feature A House of Dynamite (2024): What happens in the immediacy of an impending nuclear attack on a city? Only here, the launch is discovered accidentally, via pay phone, by nebbish Trombonist Harry (Anthony Edwards). A love-stricken young man who may have stumbled on thermonuclear destruction while doing what he could to reconnect with his recent date, Julie (Mare Winningham). With time rapidly decreasing, Harry has an hour to track Julie down and reach safety before impending Armageddon.

I found myself watching a batch of end-of-the-world movies in 2016 for some reason, and Miracle Mile was one of my favourites. It asks the question: What if Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1986) were apocalyptic? It has the same late-night vibe of Scorsese madcap, night owl farce, with Anthony Edwards sharing the same hapless energy that surrounds Paul Dunne. What I find most absorbing about Miracle Mile is the similarities to later apocalypse films such as These Final Hours (2013) and Last Night (1998). They are outlandish dramas and thrillers that hold acute examinations of the human condition. None of the films is afraid to lean into the bleakness of impending doom. But what also drives these films is often the feeling of love. Many of us will not choose our final moments, but if it were possible, we would like to envision them with the people we care about. And we would push every second to ensure that.

Starting with a meet-cute and ending up somewhere quite startling, Miracle Mile plays out like an anxiety-inducing nightmare. Never truly revealing until the end, whether what’s playing out is happening for real or a lurid fabrication. The film’s tone teeters between black comedy and paranoid thriller, but always preserves an entertaining balance.  Some of the film's wobblier dialogue and performances are quickly forgiven for the film’s relentless push towards its climax. This is a film that doesn’t stop once it gets started, and its cast gets whipped up into the film’s energy. From a filmmaking craft perspective, it’s a shame Steve De Jarnatt never became a more prolific filmmaker. Miracle Mile is shot with great care. Jarnatt stuck to his guns and remained director, even when big studios wished to take the film from him and make something more commercial. The outcome is something that remains quite unique in execution. For a film so small, there’s a sense of scale that modern films twice the budget would struggle with. Its visuals are vivid and punchy, and the fact that Tangerine Dream are wrangled in to score the movie is another bonus. With the group riffing on their Risky Business score, the film is given a soundscape that feels both immediate and large-scale.

But Miracle Mile is intimacy at the edge of the world. At 88 minutes, it’s astonishing just how much the film packs into it. From one of the tenderest first kisses made by a couple in a movie, to the film’s final waterlogged moments of both Harry and Julie, bathed in doom-laden red light. The film, for the most part, plays out in relative real time, so you feel for this pair in the relatively brief moments they spend together. By the time the film ends with a flash to white, there’s a realisation that time is too short. Julie’s words ring so true: “I don’t want this!” She exclaims. If you fell for these guys from that first kiss, neither do you.

 Miracle Mile is available on Amazon Prime and Blu-Ray. I recommend the wonderful Arrow region B Disc

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