The Shout

This reminded me of 'Whistle and I'll come to you..' It's interestingly shot and the sound is interesting too. It's very British and very 70s. All these are things that recommend it! The pace may be slow for some, but I enjoyed it very much. It certainly treads a good line between horror and craziness. And for me it didn't tip over into cheesiness at all (which is what you often fear when beginning to watch old horror films).

I had never heard of this film but once spotting Alan Bates from Women in Love and Whistle Down the Wind I immediately gave it a go. The success of this film is three-fold: the excellent casting and subsequent performances along with the highly inventive and obscure storyline. Alan Bates is absolutely excellent as the lead role, with a highly charged and sexual performance that complements the character faultlessly. The rest of the cast are also excellent, resulting in a movie that is quintessentially English laced with a complex and innovative script.

Great film. Alan Bates oozes benign menace as mysterious wayfarer Crossley. He puts the viewer into a delicious trance broken only by 'The Shout' itself!

It's always strange how a short story - 20 pages in my book - can be stretched to a full-length film, but it just about works. And it's worth it just to see Mrs James Herriott play a village seductress.

The backdrop to this startling tale is that bastion of English civility: the cricket match. Going to the wicket here are the staff and inmates at a mental asylum. Keeping score is a young intern and Crossley (Alan Bates) a man whose needs are special and very possibly insane. During the course of the game he describes to his fellow scorer how his life have come to such a pass. He claims to have been living amongst Aborigines for eighteen years, and to have learned to kill by shouting. In flashback we are taken to Devon where he takes up with a young rural couple (John Hurt and Susannah York) who are sceptical of this and most of his other scary stories. Unsurprisingly considering that, as narrators go, they don’t come much more unreliable than mental patients.

Thematically this is similar to The Wicker Man with its challenge to Christian beliefs, though it’s much more layered and with less of a narrative thrust. Bates gives a performance of great power, rather then the quietly smouldering persona we are used to. Hurt and York are both excellent, particularly the latter as she succumbs to the madman’s charms. Director Jerzy Skilomoski’s takes Robert Graves’ story at face value and introduces an east European art-film aesthetic into what could have been a Hammer horror. Like much of the best of ‘British’ - Withnail and I, The Ruling Class, Summer of Love and Skilomoski’s own Deep End - The Shout benefits greatly from an outsider’s perspective.