Maniac
Everybody’s worked for an incompetent boss, and there’s a definite art to dealing with an idiot who has been inexplicably placed in charge and, while it is fiendishly hard to achieve anything worthwhile when a bonehead has the final say, it is definitely possible to do some good. An excellent example of this is Hammer’s The Maniac which is actually not too shabby, despite being directed by a man for whom shabby would be Shangri La - Michael Carreras.
Now, I have seen enough Carreras films to know that while he may have been many things, including the son of the founder of Hammer, a talented director he was most certainly not. But The Maniac proves that one of the best things about Hammer is what footy commentators refer to as ‘strength in depth.’ In other words, everyone involved with Hammer was so good at their job, that the bumbling inadequacies of Carreras stumble past without drawing too much attention to their honking awfulness.
To be fair, Carreras does his best to derail things right from the off, during the opening sequence where a girl is assaulted by a weirdo in the bushes. You see, Carreras makes the boy - who cycles away from the assault to go for help - easily old enough and strong enough to, at least, at the very bleeding least, wander over to where the girl is being assaulted and, I don’t know, shout something? Because intervening in any way at all, would have stopped the horrible crime. If it had been a small boy (as recommended by the casting director, I guarantee it, but overruled by Captain Bonehead for sure, probably because child actors are more costly and difficult) then it would make sense that he races off to get help. But this is an older teenager, and even at home I was yelling at the screen as he jumped on his bike: ‘What are you doing?! Just walk over there you flipping pillock! Walk over there, yell at the weirdo old man, and he’ll stop!’ But when an idiot boss doesn’t see something, sometimes you can’t make him see. You just have to get on and do your best.
Fortunately, the rest of the movie is packed with enough best to turn Maniac into a nice little thriller. There’s a script by Jimmy Sangster who knows how to set up weird and intimate mysteries, full of desperate people and memorable moments; like the murder that overshadows the characters’ lives in the film that’s so visually horrifying even Captain Bonehead can’t mess it up. And the whole film takes place around this tiny, little, nothing bar in a tiny, little, nothing town, conjured up by Sangster as the perfect place to maroon a man who doesn’t know where he belongs. The set is great too, so cluttered and worn that you simultaneously want to be a part of its cozy familiarity, while also feeling sorry for anyone trapped there.
All of this is helped by some terrific cinematography. While Carreras was presumably arguing about how much the crew’s sandwiches were costing, the Director of Photography must have set up the camera on the beach, at the bar, in the caves just in time that when the idiot boss finally wandered over he could look at the frame and say ‘Yes’, because even a bonehead would look at those set-ups and be impressed.
The cast does their bit too, the two leads, especially, are smouldering all over each other so much that, even though one of them is obviously scheming and one of them is obviously naive, you really believe in them. It makes you feel like maybe they are not just a foreshadowing of their eventual fates, but that there’s something real between them - maybe they will make it out of this together. The daughter does a lot of good work too even though she has the thankless task of being mostly grumpy, and then apparently OK with ending up with some bloke who chucked her over for her mum. Carreras does his best to ruin her too mind you, by insisting that she wears a pretty diabolical wig. Everyone else in the film looks great, so it’s not anyone else’s fault that her hair looks glued on. It’s so out of place against the natural raggedness of the other characters that it reeks of boneheaded interference. For all I know, that’s her real hair and Carreras just made her get her hair cut like that. But as with the rest of the movie, the girl and everyone around her are too good to let it stop them.
Sadly, even if you can sometimes stop an idiot boss doing bad things, you can’t turn him into someone with good instincts. The end of Maniac suffers from not having a good director, because somebody needed to stop Jimmy Sangster from having his last big twist. I like Sangster’s writing, but I’ve also seen his directing, and he can be overly fond of throwing in twists because he loves those big ‘Oh no! No way!’ moments a little too much. And the final twist in Maniac makes you go ‘Oh no! No way!’ for about three seconds before you pretty swiftly realise ‘Hang on, doesn’t that mean the whole film leading up to this point makes no bloody sense at all?’ A good director would have cut the twist, and kept the movie’s logic intact.
But there was no good director, there was only Michael bloody Carreras. And if Maniac is any fun at all to watch, and I genuinely enjoyed it, it’s because the cast and crew were Hammer through and through - professional and passionate enough to weather the boneheaded storm above them. And if you can do enough of your best that the idiots in charge don’t ruin things too much, well those are the sort of people the world can always use. I suppose the lesson here is you don’t always have to do what people tell you; unless, of course, it’s a good idea.
Speaking of which… another pint?
