THE ABOMINABLE DOCTOR PHIBES / DOCTOR PHIBES RISES AGAIN
By Simon Bucher-Jones
It was Saturday the 9th October 1971 that I first
became aware of the predations of the notorious, and some would say (though my
defence of him will follow) abominable, Doctor Anton Phibes.
I was seven years, one month and three days old. Too young, surely you will think to learn,
and if learning, too young to understand, Phibes’ devilish vendetta against the
men who allowed his wife to die upon the operating table. I was, however in some ways, an unusual
child. For a start I was an avid
listener to Radio 4, a fact to which I attribute the fact that I never ever
spoke in a Liverpudlian accent (except perhaps for the word ‘bath’ or when I’m
in a taxi in Liverpool), and it was the Radio 4 programme Film Time
broadcast just after my return with my family from shopping (Runcorn Shopping
City) that first told me the name of Phibes.
I lived then with my mother (Mum!), and her parents
(Grandad, and Grandma!) in a three up, three down, council house in Hurstlyn
Road in Liverpool, and I went to Booker Avenue school. I had barely spoken before my third year – my
mother would often tell the story of her trying to entice me to speak: “This is
a Tiger, the tiger’s name is ‘Tig’. What is the Tiger’s name”. Blank stare,” but, when I did, I did in
sentences, at length, and in BBC English.
My school reports lovingly kept by my mum and still alarmingly in my
possession tell in part, along with my “brave but sadly unavailing” attempts at
sport, that “I had improved in class now that I understood I was not the only
person of importance in it,” and that my written work remained good, but
“rather fanciful”. This was true enough,
and a topic like ‘what you did in your holidays’ would always produce from me a
ghost, aliens, a sighting of Nessie (I had never been farther north than Lytham
Saint Annes), or a murder.
That evening I watched the film SHE on BBC 1, but my
young heart was not turned by Ursula Andress in a version of the story that I
rapidly determined was not a patch on the book – in any event I preferred the
Alan Quatermain stories – but was brooding on the idea of Phibes.
I liked his name from the start, it reminded me of Phobos,
the moon of Mars, whose meaning is fear – which name I’d encountered in Edgar
Rice Burrough’s ‘Under the Moons of Mars’ and his abominations and his
doctorate recalled to me my grandfather’s hardback copies of ‘The Mystery of
Doctor Fu-Manchu’ and ‘The Devil Doctor’. I hadn’t got a firm grasp of whether Phibes
was alive or dead, and how appropriate that would turn out to be! But I understood he would be a character I
would enjoy. A mad scientist, a monster!
I was allowed to stay up quite late, and go to the pictures
with my family, but it would be some years before I would actually see the film
that so intrigued me.
I can pin-point all of the above precisely, because of my
trick memory for things I’ve read and heard, but also because of the BBC genome
website that lets me lock down those events to the date. It is of less help tracking Phibes himself,
as neither The Abominable Doctor Phibes (1971) nor its sequel Doctor
Phibes Rises Again (1972) is listed as being shown on the BBC between 1971
and 2009, although I can find Vincent Price being interviewed on Kaleidoscope
in 1989, and the pop group Doctor Phibes and The House of Wax Equations
on the John Peel Sessions in 1993.
I’ve never heard them, but as soon as I finish writing this I’m going
to, if I can!
I must have seen the films on ITV (Slumming!) but I know I’d
seen the first film at least before I was 14, that’s because on Friday 29th
December 1978, I got to stay up late and see Theatre of Blood and for
all that many people believe that it be a better film, I found it in comparison
to Phibes, deeply disappointing.
Phibes has all the magic of period dress. It’s set not in
the grimy 70s that I had to live in, but in the marvellous 1925s – and its
score is enlivened with the rag-time strutters ball, and the haunting melody of
‘It’s quarter to two, there’s no one in the place except me and you’ played by
the sinister clockwork figures of Phibes’ mechanical orchestra. True, I would later learn that the song
wasn’t even composed until 1940, but then Phibes was a composer as well as a
mechanical genius, who’s to say his notes weren’t later discovered by Harold
Arlen, and Johnny Mercer when they were looking for a hit song for Fred
Astaire’s The Sky’s the Limit.
The Abominable Phibes had style by the bucketful, while
Theatre of Blood had winos and tramps dragooned into supporting players in the service
of a man whose grounds for vengeance were petty and egotistic. I’m a writer now, I hate bad reviews as much
as any thespian, but as a reason for a wave of murders? One murder, yes, maybe two, but a wave? Even Diana Rigg couldn’t compare to me, in
her role as Lionheart’s daughter – with the mysteriously silent Vulnavia
(Virginia North, The Abominable Doctor Phibes, Valli Kemp, Doctor
Phibes Rises Again), whose utterly unexplained presence in the films, sets
the mind racing through weird conjectures.
I recall being convinced during the first film that she
would be revealed at the end as simply the greatest of Doctor Phibes’
mechanical creations (Doctor Phibes Created Woman! – if you will) and the scene
where her face is destroyed by the acid Phibes intends for Doctor Vesalius’s
son is crying out for a disclosure that never comes. An unmade script for a
third film, has her as supernatural spirit of vengeance allied in some way with
the Greek Gods who are invoked by Phibes – that seems a step too far perhaps,
but the mystery and the silence in the two films we have is eerie and
satisfying.
Spin-offs by other
hands suggest that she is the mistress with whom Phibes was dallying at the
time of his wife’s accident, but I have never been convinced by that: adultery
is simply not (to my mind) Phibes’ brand of evil.
When I wrote Phibes into a story for the anthology Lin
Carter’s Anton Zarnak: Supernatural Sleuth, which I co-wrote with James
Ambuehl, but the bits with Phibes were all mine, I wrote:
“Some people have that strong, personal magnetism, that
absolutely clean, non-sexual but nevertheless compelling charisma. Phibes was
one and Zarnak was another.”
This too, is a thing
that endears the films to me, I hate almost all the slasher and sex-beast
strand of cinema horror. (I am willing
to make an exceptions for The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, where the
killing is after all done by the Queen, and which almost feels Doctor Phibes
like at times).
I like my monsters to kill for cleaner reasons, for revenge
on specific men, or on all the villainies of mankind.
I was probably in my early teens then, when I saw the two
Phibes films for the first time. They’re
my favourite work by Vincent Price, and he’s my favourite of the three big
horror stars of my youth: the other two,
in order for me, being Boris Karloff and Peter Cushing, with Peter Lorre coming
in just outside the top three.
What a brilliant piece of casting is Vincent Price here, his
masterly and versatile voice standing in for all the eyebrow play and twitching
that his ghastly face (even when masked behind his own made-up features) was no
longer in character able to display. His
is a voice able to put disdain, and loss, and hatred into a single word – as
when in the second film he cries ‘Bierderbeck!’ on discovering that the body of
his dead wife has been stolen before he can put in motion his plan to resurrect
her. Everything you need to do a Doctor
Phibes imitation, and everything you need to know to write the character is in
the acting of that single word.
So, what was it that appealed so much to the early teenage
Simon Bucher-Jones (then Jones): the historical setting, the gruesome deaths,
the mysterious beautiful women, the master class in acting?
Yes, all those – but also, the films are very, very funny,
and stand in a position exactly between the more po-faced of the Hammer horrors
(themselves almost always trembling on the edge of parody but failing to
embrace camp) and the best of the Carry On comedies: Carry On Screaming. The sequence in Doctor Phibes Rises
Again (1972) in which the protagonist/victims are lured over the horizon by
the sounds of an approaching relief column of British soldiers only to find a
single one of Phibes clockwork musicians dressed as a soldier with a
gramophone, is almost exactly the same as the sequence in Follow That Camel (1967)
in which the Carry On team play the same trick to escape trouble when
outnumbered by the Sheikh’s men, but in Doctor Phibes Rises Again it
ends more gruesomely, and the British do not have the upper hand. Phibes is not coded like the ‘other’ as
Fu-manchu and so many other villains are – he’s not a stereotype - but he’s not
English/British either. His wife dies in Switzerland, his name is foreign
sounding, he has the mid-atlantic voice of a great American stage actor (well
quite!).
You may consider my sense of humour macabre, but who wouldn’t
chortle as the greatest Police double act ever Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey)
and his Sarge Tom Schenley (Norman Jones) struggling to remove a unicorn head
that fired by a powerful catapult has impaled one of the threatened
Doctors. “I think it has a left-hand
thread sir,” Tom says plaintively before we see them – from the other side of
the door – turning not the head, but the body so the man’s legs come into view
like the hands of a clock, or Trout explaining to his boss Superintendent
Waverly (John Carter) in the sequel, that a ship’s captain can’t just have
happened to have fallen overboard when the body is inside a giant bottle. To these actors are given some of the
greatest throw away lines in all horror, and a lot of comedy.
“I never thought he’d come back”
“It’s Phibes, Sir, he always comes back!”
…
“You know what they say Trout, if you make a better mouse
trap the world will beat a path to your door.”
“Every time we make a better mouse trap, Phibes makes a
better Mouse.”
I have no time for the modern films that could be said to
follow in this path: the protagonist of Saw and its follow-ups may have
planned ghastly traps and tasks for his victims, impelled by self-righteous
anger, but did he have a set of clock-work musicians? Did he
ever do anything as appropriate as imprison a big-headed Doctor in a clockwork
frog mask that gradually crushed his skull, in a marvellous musical sequence?
No, it’s all grubbing about in basements and being chained
to iron pipes. No class, no class at
all. The trouble with the Saw
films isn’t that they’ve been made on the cheap, their trouble is that they
will always, no matter what they try, be Priceless.
To Phibes, in the sequel, as be poles the gondola through
the secret waterways beneath the great pyramid that will lead to the waters of
life, and resurrection for his beloved must go the last word. In a song played through the throat-chord fed
gramophone that is all that remains of his voice – another song that later song
writers ill-advisedly will steal from his estate - “Somewhere over the
Rainbow”, he croons. What an exit. That’s being played at my funeral. Which I will insist be held at a quarter to
two, before I rise again!
[Written for 'YOU - goes to the movies' - so far as I know it never appeared in print.]
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