Duck!

4 Comments

• Paul says:

  May 4, 2010 at 11:01 am

  The British Cinema, Directors and Directions, 1929 to 1968 or until whenever.….you should write that book.

• Peter Nellhaus says:

  May 4, 2010 at 11:23 am

  I’m still hop­ing for a fully restored ver­sion of “Expresso Bongo”. I also recently saw “Bees in Paradise”, one of Guest’s early films, and a strange little com­edy at that. At this point, I’ll go with “Expressive Esoterica”.

• Griff says:

  May 4, 2010 at 1:57 pm

  I really admire Guest’s abil­ity to struc­ture a pic­ture and tell a story visu­ally. You can clearly notice this in Hammer’s X THE UNKNOWN, the stu­di­o’s unof­fi­cial follow-up to the early Quatermass fea­tures helmed by Guest. While the movie, dir­ec­ted by Leslie Norman, is atmo­spher­ic­ally shot and worth a look if you’ve nev­er seen it, the film just does­n’t com­pare in pacing, design and exe­cu­tion to Guest’s QUATERMASS XPERIMENT/THE CREEPING UNKNOWN or QUATERMASS 2/ENEMY FROM SPACE. [I real­ize that the Nigel Kneale stor­ies that inspired the Quatermass pic­tures are far bet­ter than the Jimmy Sangster script for X THE UNKNOWN; I’m just address­ing the dir­ec­tion here.]
  Guest dir­ec­ted an astound­ing array of movies; it’s hard to imme­di­ately think of anoth­er dir­ect­or who handled such a vari­ety of films so deftly. I some­times day­dream about a little film he made late in his career which aired on PBS as …AND THE BAND PLAYED ON, about a daffy group of eld­erly small town musi­cians who played whatever notes they cared to play and the frus­trated young con­duct­or who tried to rein them in. A small, quaint gem I’d like to see again.

• Steve Winer says:

  May 4, 2010 at 4:15 pm

  In con­sid­er­ing Guest’s career, it’s inter­est­ing to note that before he became a dir­ect­or, he was one of the best British com­edy writers, work­ing on many films for such top Brit com­ics as Will Hay, George Formby and Arthur Askey. None of these stars is well known here, but they were funny men and the films Guest co-wrote for them are gen­er­ally their best.