Tales That Witness Madness (1973), Dir. Freddie Francis, 90 mins, Talking Pictures TV (SD)
It was the cast that made a fool of me, suckered me in. Its an old film gambit that invariably works, and why some actors were paid well and always got work- past glories lending their casting some weight to undeserving movies. You’d think I’d learn by now. But I saw Kim Novak, Jack Hawkins, Donald Pleasence, Joan Collins and Michael Petrovitch in the cast and thought that it might be worth a watch… well, lets just say that this film is hardly the finest cinematic hour for any of them. The hard truth is, while some of us film fans like to think of film as an important art and craft with historical worth, for most of the folks in the business its just a pay cheque to keep the wolves from the door. Quality might even be accidental; I wonder if any of the thespians etc behind this film later looked back on it and thought, “that was my new car I bought back in 1974” or “well that paid for the swimming pool extension that year” and nothing more than that. Is that, after all, all that films are?
The only slight plus is the irony of as wooden an actress as Joan Collins playing a wife competing with a dead tree for her husband’s affections… and losing. Its like some cruel microcosm of her career.
Mind, often even bad old movies have some worth to them, maybe some element of fun. Not so here with this frankly excretable horror feature from 1973. Watching it, I wondered what people thought, actually paying hard-earned cash back then to watch rubbish like this in town cinemas. Maybe they expected less from movies; this film is terribly, nonsensically written, poorly cast, edited, directed, a stinker of the first order. I don’t know what the shooting schedule was like for films like this back then, but what, maybe two weeks, maybe? It looks like it was made by people tired of making movies,
Tales That Witness Madness is one of those portmanteau horror films that were popular back then, telling three of four short stories tied together by some over-arching narrative. In this case, its Dr. Tremayne (Donald Pleasence) working in an asylum recounting to his summoned colleague Nicholas (Jack Hawkins) the case histories of four patients whose cases he has brilliantly ‘solved’. I don’t know if I actually fell asleep and missed something at the end, but I stuck with the film for just two reasons – a) to see what Kim Novak was doing in it (the buggers knew what they were doing, holding her segment till last) and b) to see what this cunning ‘solution’ actually was, that was the reason for the tales, hoping for some kind of clever twist. But as might have been expected, there’s no such genuine explanation, only a nonsensical cop-out in which Nicholas somehow gets attacked by the suddenly no-longer-invisible tiger from the first story. Its so stupid, I’m surprised the bar for what amounted to releasable films was so low back then- no wonder the industry was in dire trouble, it was hardly competing with television with dross such as this. Maybe audiences were more forgiving, too?
the ghost of 82 