#5 Man overboard!

Hornblower, a dustbin on wheels and a frankly terrifying interrogation

Welcome back to The Christopher Lee Project, in which I spend a year tracking down every film made by Christopher Lee and watching them all. I’m Emma Hughes: a journalist, an author, and if you stick with today’s audio you’ll hear a voice which isn’t mine! I wonder if you can guess whose…?

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been fuming all week about Rank not renewing Christopher’s contract because they think he’s too tall, too “foreign looking” and not famous enough. Today they’d be telling him he didn’t have enough followers on Tiktok.

“We’re all trying to find the guy who cast you in terrible films that went nowhere” – Rank, to Christopher Lee

Although he had a reputation for never saying no, Christopher was not a doormat. The opposite: this was a man who, during the Battle of Sicily, spotted a notorious bullying seargeant who had made his life a misery and, having since been promoted above him, broke off from whatever he was supposed to be doing to order his old nemesis to heave a load of heavy stuff out of the sea and dry it all off. He was never going to throw in the towel just because Rank told him to. So he gets a job in the menswear department of Simpsons (now Waterstones Piccadilly) and starts looking for parts which a tall, “foreign looking” and not-famous actor could play. Soon enough, he lands one…

9) Prelude to Fame (1950)
An odd little tale of an Italian child music prodigy, based on an Aldous Huxley story. I’m not crazy about Aldous Huxley, or about stories of women being driven vengefully mad by infertility, so the omens weren’t great. Christopher also appears so briefly that I couldn’t even get a proper screencap.

Anyway, there I was, twiddling my thumbs for the best part of an hour and a half, and I’m sorry to say that, sucker that I am for a man who looks like he lives off double gins and the engine fumes from his Spitfire, my head was turned.

Folks, please give a warm welcome to Guy Rolfe, who in his day was a) very prolific and b) very hot. A descendant of Pocahontas (!), he would also go on to do some horror turns for Hammer and others, as well as playing Sherlock Holmes in 1984. His wardrobe in Prelude to Fame is the best thing about the film: somebody had a great time dressing him up as an Englishman abroad whose Neapolitan tailor has coaxed him into looking just a little more flamboyant with sharper shoulders, tighter waists and skinnier belts.

‘Why does nobody look like this now?’ I asked various group chats (responses included ‘the smoking ban’, ‘central heating’ and ‘Keir Starmer’). I then did a bit more digging and it turns out the reason Guy Rolfe had such incredible cheekbones in this film is because he was recovering from TB. Oh dear.

Where were we? Ah yes, Christopher. He plays a debonair Italian newspaper reporter. He is not sitting down here but is bending down to address a seated person; innovative! He looks smashing in a dinner jacket, even better than Guy Rolfe, and that is as far as my very objective academic appraisal of this film goes.
Rating: 5/10

10) Hornblower (1951)
My grandmother, who started her career as a reporter on the Daily Express, used to tell a story about being sent to interview Gregory Peck when he was in London promoting a film in the late 1940s. Aged just 18, she was shown into the hotel suite where the Hollywood star was receiving a procession of journalists, whereupon she was so struck by his famed good looks that she completely lost the ability to speak. She just sat there with her notebook on her lap and stared at him.

Gregory was by all accounts a nice man, and this had clearly happened before, so he proceeded to obligingly answer the standard interview questions she wasn’t actually asking. “I’m having a lovely time in London… my favourite thing to do here is walk along the Thames… I’ll never get used to how you British take your tea, though!” Mmhmm! said my grandmother absent-mindedly, writing down the odd word in between doodling hearts in her notebook.

Now, I can’t swear to the truth of this tale, but if I work backwards from myself it feels plausible – there is a recording somewhere of me telling Richard E. Grant three times in the space of a twenty-minute interview that he ‘definitely doesn’t look sixty’.

Anyway. Hornblower! The stirring tale of a British Navy officer besting the French during the Napoleonic Wars. Greggers P is a tank with one gear (Commanding With A Good Heart), which works well here, as do the ships, which must have cost an absolute fortune to assemble at Denham.

What does not work well is the make-up, frequently dicey in early Technicolour but a million times worse here when applied to British actors playing Central American and Spanish characters. Far better-qualified writers than me have tackled this subject elsewhere; all I will add today is that I cannot tell you much about the first third of this film because I watched most of it behind a cushion, shrieking in horror. It feels scarcely credible to me that anyone, even in 1951, watched the rushes and went ‘yup, that is how people’s faces are in real life, nailed it’.

Christopher plays a Spanish captain, so he too has fallen foul of the fake tan, although to a lesser degree than some of the other actors: I was able to put the cushion down for long enough to watch him fight a duel, something he learned to do at the Rank Charm School. Possibly due once again to trouser supply issues he is wearing leggings, which is suboptimal for a man of his stature, or indeed any man of any stature.

What else? I like how they all call each other ‘Mr’, more of this please. Oh, and Hornblower has a love interest who should have been thrown overboard for bringing fever onto the ship as well as being an absolute wet wipe. I am yet to watch a film for this project in which a female character has even two dimensions, let alone three. Virginia Mayo, a talented comic actress, does the best she can but her dialogue is dire. “Is that what you really want? A swift passage?” she has to coo at Hornblower at one point, which set me off all over again. When they meet she’s engaged and Hornblower is married, but luckily his wife does the decent thing and dies in childbirth, leaving him a note expressly telling him no hard feelings and he ought to get back out there ASAP. Lovely. Next!
Rating: 5/10

11) Quo Vadis (1951)
The highest grossing film of 1951! Also the longest: almost three hours. Ha ha ha. My life is a theatre of torment. I do not enjoy doing anything for three hours, and although I generally love the swords-and-sandals vibe – I actually gave myself tinnitus last year by listening to the Ben Hur theme too loudly – there are limits. I got the ironing board out for this one and just sort of let it wash over me.

Quo Vadis is famous for two things: Peter Ustinov’s scenery-chewing turn as Emperor Nero, and having employed 30,000 extras. This is, obviously, a remarkable feat of cinematic logistics, but also a real pain for yours truly. Where the hell is Christopher? Driving a chariot according to IMDB, although only briefly, as he explains in Tall, Dark and Gruesome.

I said, ‘Oh yes. I'm licenced for all vehicles’. Two days later I was sitting in this dustbin with two very aggressive horses. I didn’t stay in it for long.

This was to be the first of many occasions on which he did his own stunts, often with calamitous consequences – over the next few years he will break multiple ribs and almost lose a finger to Errol Flynn, which is a story for another time.
Rating: 4/10 (although I did get a lot of ironing done)

12) Valley of Eagles (1951)
I have to be honest, by this point I was flagging: Quo Vadis really took it out of me. I had also declined an after-work invitation “because I need to go home and catch up with Christopher” – I know part of the point of this project was to go out less, but this still felt like crossing a not necessarily positive Rubicon.

I would describe this as a B-film with aspirations: barely more than an hour long but shooting for noirish thriller territory, with a Swedish scientist’s wife stealing his invention and trying to sell it to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately this is totally eclipsed by footage of a reindeer stampede and then what appears to be a real avalanche. Did the director (our old pal Terence Young) somehow get all of this in some kind of job lot and then build a film around it, like when you accidentally order 5kg of carrots from Ocado rather than 500g and spend the rest of the week making everything carroty on BBC Good Food? These were the questions I pondered as I tried to resist the temptation to double-speed the playback.

And then!

Christopher appears, playing a detective to quite extraordinarily chilling effect, as you’ll hear at 10:38 if you press play at the top. I really believe that if this performance had come 15 years later and been given more airtime in, say, a Lindsay Anderson film about the sadistic rot at the heart of an English public school, critics would still be talking about it. As it is, it’s a brief glimpse into the future, in which we can see… menace. Truckloads of it.

There’s just one tiny problem, though: he’s meant to be one of the good guys. When I realised this I let out an actual guffaw; it’s such an outrageous hijack, like walking onto the stage for your X Factor audition and blasting the judges with Wagner’s Ring Cycle. And if this was the least sinister take, I imagine there was at least one more, after which Terence Young tiptoed out from behind the camera and said nervously “…that was great, Christopher! Really great! Could we try it again with just a little less venom, though? Twenty, maybe thirty percent…?’”
Rating: 8/10

So, there we are. A month in and we’re finally getting somewhere. The direction of travel – scaring the pants off people – has become clear, although it will remain hidden from our hero for a while yet. About 30 more films, to be precise. Gulp.

Next week on The Christopher Lee Project: the beatings continue