Paranoiac (1963)

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

The acting in this movie is really good.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Well plotted black & white psychological thriller from Hammer is loosely based on Josephine Tey's "Brat Farrar". The legendary Oliver Reed stars as Simon Ashby, a snippy, sardonic young man set to inherit a sizable amount of money from his late parents. Part of his problem is his tendency to grossly misbehave. He gets ever so much worse when a man (Alexander Davion) claiming to be his brother Tony shows up. You see, Tony supposedly committed suicide two years ago. Meanwhile, Tony and Simon have a sister (Janette Scott) who is also quite fragile.Screenwriter Jimmy Sangster keeps the twists a-coming in this effectively paced little film, directed capably by talented Freddie Francis. Even if the viewers figure out where this is headed well before the finish, Sangster, Francis, and company do keep you entertained with their stylish telling of this tale. It's very nicely shot in widescreen by Arthur Grant, with fine use of locations and some genuine moments of tension.The main draw are an array of excellent performances, especially from Reed, who doesn't have to stretch himself very much by playing a character who's a bit of a hell raiser. Scott and co-star Liliane Brousse are quite lovely to look at, with Scott earning our sympathies as the girl desperate to have her brother back. Sheila Burrell is appropriately icy as Aunt Harriet, and Maurice Denham (as the family lawyer), John Bonney (as his son), and John Stuart (as the family butler) all lend some valuable support.If you're a fan of Reed or Hammer films in general, you should dig it.Eight out of 10.

A memorial service is underway in a small coastal community for John and Mary Ashby who were killed in a plane crash eleven years ago. In attendance are their two surviving children: Eleanor (Janette Scott) and Simon (Oliver Reed); their Aunt Harriet (Sheila Burrell) and Francoise (Liliane Brousse); a nurse caring for Eleanor who appears to be going insane. Her other brother, Tony, committed suicide soon after their parents deaths and she has never recovered from this and, recently, she has sworn to have seen Tony lurking around the gardens of High Tor, the family estate, at night. Simon is all too keen to have his sister certified because he knows that would entitle him to her share of the family estate, which is due to mature in a few weeks time. Then the man Eleanor saw, Tony (Alexander Davion), shows up and he manages to convince the family lawyer, Kosset (Maurice Denham) and Aunt Harriet that he is who he claims to be. Naturally, Eleanor is overjoyed but, in reality, the man is an imposter planted by Kosset's son, Keith (John Bonney), so he can plunder the family fortune himself. Meanwhile, Simon is not prepared to lose the money so he makes a murder attempt on both Tony and his sister. Tony finally reveals that he is an imposter to Eleanor, but he has fallen in love with her and she with him. Eleanor's sleep is disturbed by the organ in the family chapel playing in the middle of the night with a child's voice singing, which is very similar to that of her dead brother's. Tony and Eleanor go to investigate and find Simon seemingly in a state of trance sat at the organ. But, the chapel door flies open and a figure in a clown mask attacks Tony with a meat hook. Who is this person and what are the reasons for these rituals in the chapel? Is Simon hiding a guilty secret from long ago and did Tony really commit suicide all those years ago?First of three psychological thrillers - or "mini Hitchcocks" - that Oscar-winning cinematographer turned director Freddie Francis made for Hammer. This was his third feature but his debut for the studio and it was this film's success that firmly identified him as a horror director much to his chagrin. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that he was loved by fans of the genre as much as those who admire him as one of this country's leading lighting cameramen rather than as a director. It is certainly not among his best work in the latter capacity since for a film of its length - 83 minutes - it is rather slow moving and while it may have been bone marrow freezing stuff back in 1964 it isn't today. Nevertheless, it is still worth watching for the excellent cast: Oliver Reed in particular who is stand out as the drunken, thuggish Simon Ashby who has a skeleton in his family's closet and stops at nothing to lay his hands on his little sister's money. Check out a scene in a pub where in a drunken rage he nearly starts a brawl - his aggression in playing this scene is utterly convincing and frightening, I assure you! While Reed is suitably over the top, Scott is lovely as the fragile, vulnerable woman being driven insane yet her performance is restrained as is Burrell's as the Aunt so they go neatly together. There are some sequences shot in the awesome visual style that distinguished his better genre films. For example, the scene where Simon has killed Francoise and put her body in the pond. There's an inventive under water shot designed to give the impression of it being from the dead woman's point of view with Reed peering into the pond and dropping a pebble in with her. There is a particularly suspenseful scene where Eleanor's car slides over a cliff with her inside as a result of Simon sabotaging the breaks and Tony has to get her to safety before the vehicle crashes hundreds of feet into the sea. The night time scenes with the organ playing as the camera prowls around the country mansion are suitably eerie and Arthur Grant's b/w camera-work and Elizabeth Lutyens' music combine to create an air of the sinister and mysterious.

Paranoiac is directed by Freddie Francis and loosely adapted to screenplay by Jimmy Sangster from Josephine Tey's novel Brat Farrar. It stars Oliver Reed, Janette Scott, Sheila Burrell and Alexander Davion. Music is by Elisabeth Lutyens and cinematography by Arthur Grant.The Ashby family has been blighted by tragedy. 11 years previously the parents were killed in an accident and their younger son, Tony, was so grief stricken he committed suicide by leaping off of a nearby cliff into the sea below. However, Anthony's body was never found. The remaining siblings, Eleanor (Scott) & Simon (Reed) have been raised at the family mansion by their aunt Harriet (Burrell), and neither of them have grown into stable adults. So when an adult comes into their lives claiming to be Tony it further opens up neurotic wounds and dark family secrets.Skeleton in the closet.Hammer Films tag onto the coat tails of Hitchcock's Psycho with this slick and moody psychological thriller. The studio would become synonymous with reinventing the creature feature sub-genre of horror that encompassed the likes of Dracula & Frankenstein. What often gets overlooked is that in the 60s they were producing some excellent thrillers, little seen gems that didn't even get home format releases in Britain until over 40 years later! Paranoiac is one such gem, it forms part of the thriller splinter involving someone either going insane or being driven so by unscrupulous bastards.Paranoiac thrives on slow burn pacing and atmospheric black and white photography, and features a roll call of characters who are either up to no good or are clearly skew-whiff in the head! Perfectly filmed out of the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, England, where the jagged cliff faces match the fragmented state of minds of the principal players, it's a film that benefits greatly from the acting on show. Reed is an oily drunk and a bully, Scott expertly portrays a timid gal clinging onto to her last bit of sanity and Burrell puts a shifty cynicism into mollycoddling Aunt Harriet. Pleasant surprise here is Davion as the man claiming to be Tony, not a well known name but he does a great job in a tricky role, with cards held close to the chest he handles a big shift in the character's fortunes with a smoothness that's most impacting.It's no Psycho (what is?) and it has some minor flaws in the writing, such as an incestuous thread that is never expanded on, but this is still a moody little cracker of a thriller. Slow burn for sure, but always holding the attention right up to the deliverance of a joyously macabre finale. 7.5/10

It's "Brat Farrar", of course.Encountering a character called 'Simon Ashby' was jolt enough; but when it comes to a sister called Eleanor, a brother who supposedly drowned himself eight years ago, a mother and father dead in a plane crash, and even the precise wording of Patrick/Antony's suicide note, the plot coincidences have to be more than just an accident. It's ironic that so much credit is given to the ingenuity and originality of the plot, when not only the basic set-up but so many of the details stem directly from Josephine Tey's classic novel. And once one recognises the source (which, to be fair, took me a while: Eleanor's instability and ghost-sightings don't fit the pattern), it does inevitably rather diminish the suspense.Not entirely, though: enough has been changed to make the ultimate outcome uncertain. This is "Brat Farrar" Hammer-style, with heaving bosoms, sinister organ music and skeletons in the closet -- and minus the horses which play so significant a part in the action of the original. (As a result, while he clearly shares Brat's basic honesty and decency, the un-named impostor here has to duck the question of his history and motivation with the excuse that it would all take too long to explain!) Janette Scott, in a fairly thankless role, plays Eleanor as pretty much a standard Hammer maiden-in-distress, with a tendency to long flowing robes -- although re-casting the character as a mentally unstable hero-worshipper of her elder 'brother' adds a far stronger impact in this version to her distress at realisation of the sexual attraction between them. It is Oliver Reed who is outstanding here, as the attractive, vindictive and carelessly cruel Simon: as the film opens, he is presented almost as the hero, an unconventional breath of fresh air in a household stifled by appearances. By the end he is pure charming sociopath. (It was also a real eye-opener to see those unmistakable features morphed by youth and lack of dissipation into striking good looks: it had never occurred to me that one could simultaneously look like Oliver Reed and look handsome!) As the resurrected Tony, Alexander Davion provides a sensitive, grounded contrast to Simon's bravura display, managing to do far more than just walk through what could have been a very wooden part -- most of Tony's reactions and feelings are unspoken, but he holds his own against Reed as a screen presence, and presents Tony as the one stable anchor in a world of neurotics. John Bonney is also good in the minor role of flashy Keith Kossett, playing the Alec Loding part as semi-crooked originator of the imposture: this is one part of the rewrite that works well, providing convincing motivation for the scheme while economising on a lot of back-story. I'm afraid I didn't find the character of Aunt Harriet as a sort of incestuous wicked-step-mother particularly convincing. She bears no relation to gentle Aunt Bea in "Brat Farrar", and it is possibly as a result that the script never seems quite consistent in what it wants to do with her.Unfortunately it has to be said that the end of the film, where it abandons the tensions of the source material altogether to resort to more lurid melodrama, is probably the weakest. The Hammer "Hound of the Baskervilles" pulls off this sort of source-grafting to pretty good effect, but here the killer-clown and body-in-the-basement additions are in retrospect a bit weak, coming across as an attempt to provide some manifest horrors to please the punters rather than making much sense in the plot. (Guilt complex? Simon??) Also, the special effects were clearly a bit low-budget by this point.Still, it's quite an effective little chiller in its own right, with some blackly comic sequences: memorable chiefly, I suspect, for Oliver Reed, although this isn't entirely fair to the rest of the cast.