The Prime Ministers

The Prime Ministers: Stories and Anecdotes from Number 10
Edited by William Douglas-Home, written and researched by Jennifer Browne
1987 (reprinted 1993) • Barnes & Noble Books
287 pages / ISBN 1566193559 (hardcover)

With the recent entrance of David Cameron as British Prime Minister, I decided to familiarize myself, once and for all, with his predecessors. This involved breaking open a title that was on my bookshelf for years. There is a first time for everything.

Originally published in 1987, The Prime Ministers: Stories and Anecdotes from Number 10 is a 287-page leisure title that sketches everyone who has held office from Robert Walpole to Margaret Thatcher. There has not been a second edition of this book, which leaves us four PMs short, but it covers the British premiership with an ease and briskness that is not often found in historical writing.

The book was edited by William Douglas-Home, a brother of Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, who served from 1963 to 1964. William himself ran unsuccessfully for seats in parliament and was known mainly as a dramatist and screenwriter. With research assistance from Jennifer Browne, The Prime Ministers offers a snapshot of each PM in history, including a page-long biography and select moments from his or her life.

Douglas-Home and Browne did not intend to write political commentary. Government issues are mentioned, but their book is purely leisure reading; the PMs are discussed as average individuals rather than as parliamentary figures. Douglas-Home makes this clear in his humorous, nine-page introduction, which attempts to rid the topic of its unpleasantness. Each PM's background, including his or her childhood, family life, and pastimes, is spiritedly described using letters, diaries, and other contemporary sources.

While The Prime Ministers never offers itself as a book of politics, it could have supplied a bit more in this area. I find it interesting to read about leaders' challenges, but these were minimized by Douglas-Home and Browne in order to sketch the PMs as regular human beings. Readers with larger political interests might wish that these facts were included.

Many earlier lives also feel dry and repetitive through no fault of the authors: these PMs seem to have eaten, slept, written letters, attended meetings...and not much else. Lives were simpler in those days and perhaps certain interesting details weren't talked about as freely. As a result, I didn't feel the book picking up steam until that renowned era of Disraeli and Gladstone. Newer PMs grabbed far more of my attention, especially when covering the twentieth century and meeting figures like Henry Asquith, Clement Attlee, and Harold Macmillan.

Yet even with these shortcomings, it is impossible not to learn a thing or two when reading Douglas-Home and Browne's heavily-researched book. The Prime Ministers follows a clear line of succession from 1721 and leaves you knowing a little something about everyone - including why Archibald Primrose dropped out of Oxford and how Henry Campbell-Bannerman felt about writing his name. It is recommended for anyone with an interest in politics or dynamic people and can serve as a handy reference.

The Prime Ministers was first sold as a British hardback by W. H. Allen in 1987 and reached America through Barnes & Noble Books in 1993. Used copies are still available at various sources on the Internet. Hopefully, it will be updated at some point to include all PMs from 1721 to 2010.

The Ascent of F6

The Ascent of F6
by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood
1936 (reprinted 1946) • Faber & Faber
123 pages (hardcover)

Can the abilities of two writers combine into a truly strong work? Some have launched projects with the hope of achieving this, but the results have usually left us with more questions than answers. Whenever artists decide to work together, there are problems caused by their egotistical trade. Two minds with a clear sense of what they're about will almost certainly bang together.

Wystan Hugh Auden and Christopher Isherwood are men who overcame some differences to write plays for London's Group Theatre in the 1930s. The plays have been commercially and critically viable since their first productions and overshadow many twentieth century dramas that have come and gone. By the authors' talents alone, The Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent of F6, and On the Frontier will probably remain on stage boards for years to come.

Billed as a 'tragedy in two acts,' The Ascent of F6 was first published in September 1936 and enjoyed its premiere in February 1937. Its original production featured Ashley Dukes as director, Robert Medley as stage designer, and Benjamin Britten as composer of incidental music. Successful with audiences from the beginning, F6 has undergone several book printings and revivals by theater groups, including at the Old Vic.

F6, the second of three plays co-written by Auden and Isherwood, is one of many works that have succeeded despite major flaws. Audiences, especially those living in the social hardships of 1930s Britain, have related to its subject matter and appreciate the poetic skills that both men owned. The idea that Auden and Isherwood's talents would be visible in F6 is a no-brainer. F6, however, lacks a cohesive plot and a clear sense of what type of play it wants to be. Auden and Isherwood tried their darnedest to make the whole better than the sum of its parts, but they seemed unable to escape the issues that have spoiled many a partnership.

The so-called F6 is a mountain dividing two regions in Sudoland, a fictional land known for its coffee trade. Great Britain, which has kept a stronghold over the native population for decades, now finds itself threatened by Ostnia, a rival nation that occupies some of the territory. Wanting to make a political statement, both countries aim to scale F6, a rock face thought insurmountable. Local legend has the mountain occupied by a demon that makes it impossible for any person to climb. The Ostnians are using this tale to their advantage, telling natives that the first White man to climb F6 will rule all of Sudoland for a thousand years.

British social powers who are desperate to maintain the status quo - royalty, the government, the military, and the upper classes - call upon Michael Forsyth Ransom and his team to reach the summit. Called 'M. F.' by his friends, Ransom is a young mountain climber who parallels real-life men like Sir Edmund Hillary and Auden's own brother John (the dedicatee of the play), who explored and mapped the Himalayas.

It is clear from the opening scene that F6 was written in a Marxist-Freudian train of thought. Instead of portraying Ransom's climb as an act of valor, Auden and Isherwood put this bravery in relief to social, political, and mental issues that are far more overwhelming. Ransom is a well-travelled and well-educated man who does not readily buy into his country's wishes. He is drawn to eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and repelled by such things as national conquest and the use of heroism for political gain.

Ransom is torn between the desire for a quiet life of reflection (as shown by his talk with a monastery abbot) and the feeling of obligation to his homeland, colleagues, and family. Cartoonish figures such as Lady Isabel Welwyn and Lord Stagmantle apply pressure to Michael in upholding the British race. He is also competing for his mother's love against Sir James Ransom, a brother and colonial officer who has suggested Michael for the F6 campaign. This 'mother conflict' is of the Freudian type and dominates Ransom's psychological outlook.

F6 is divided into two acts with a total of eight scenes. Act I is a tapestry of social and economic forces in the British Empire's waning days, while Act II is centered upon the hopes and anxieties of Michael Ransom and his four colleagues - Shawcross, Gunn, Lamp, and Dr. Williams. Throughout the play, this F6 tour is contrasted with the everyday lives of 'Mr. and Mrs. A.,' an ordinary British couple who live from one paycheck to the next. Their doldrums and half-hearted interest in the F6 climb are seen in a box adjacent to the stage. Taking place in an opposite box are radio broadcasts with characters such as Lady Welwyn, Lord Stagmantle, and an unnamed announcer who serve up their tired clichés.

Auden's verses and Isherwood's prose are, for the most part, in top form. The authors have created genuinely moving episodes, including the day-to-day anxieties of Mr. and Mrs. A., the deaths of Ransom's colleagues on the rock face, and Ransom's awareness that he will never make the summit. This inability of Ransom to reach a higher plane is oddly in keeping with the men and women who struggle to make ends meet several thousand feet below.

Auden and Isherwood, both in the neighborhood of age 30 when F6 was written, made a terrible mistake by including satirical episodes within the tragedy. In these scenes, Auden and Isherwood are reaching out to a general audience, but it totally kills off the play's effectiveness. At the end of Act I, for example, Ransom's mother sings a ditty on the power of mothers over their children. And there is the play's final scene, an allegory that mixes choruses, the play's characters as men in a chess game, the monastery abbot donning a judge's wig, and James Ransom garbed as a dragon.

This finale is along the lines of Gilbert & Sullivan's Trial by Jury, which found its way into other dramas. There are so many important issues being dealt with in F6 that any comical approach to its themes just doesn't belong. In a 1965 lecture, Isherwood flatly admitted that 'the end of the play was always a terrible mess.' Attempts were made to improve the scene in revivals, but this problem of a farcical ending in an otherwise serious play has never been cleared up. The scene is so out of place and inept that it single-handedly discredits the entire work.

The play's better scenes are not free of problems, either. One example is that moment on F6 when a human skull is found, the authors' silly reference to Hamlet. Ransom also surrenders to his colleagues' hopes and begins climbing F6 when he seems on the verge of walking away from it. We are never supplied with a reason for this mind change, other than the suggestion of a Freudian mother-complex: Ransom must climb F6 to please his mother, above all else. There are times when Ransom's motivations are vague and the authors are caught up in their own rhetoric.

Would this lousy conclusion and many of the rough edges have disappeared if one person were creating F6 instead of two? Collaboration is an issue that authors have long struggled with. In his 1965 lecture, Isherwood notes that he'd 'done a great deal of collaborating during [his] life and with a very wide variety of people' and found that 'under certain circumstances, particularly for the theater, it's stimulating.' There is perhaps no better experience than working on drama with W. H. Auden. But is collaboration a path to artistic achievement or only the byproduct of great conversation?

Stephen Spender, a friend to both men, gave his more objective view on Auden and Isherwood's plays in 1938. 'One may suspect,' he wrote, 'that [a] collaboration itself is responsible for some [ ] faults: each writer hopes that the other is going to try harder than himself...neither writer feels as responsible for the criticism which the play may arouse as he would if the work were entirely his own. More important, it must be very difficult in a collaboration to construct the unique, hemmed-in, and claustrophobic atmosphere, which is essential to a play.' Perhaps, then, an argument can be made for having just one person behind the steering wheel.

Knowing its stronger points, F6 is not a complete loss. The play is an interesting result of two writers who shared common ideals, however briefly they may've held onto them. Both men, particularly Auden, had an on-again, off-again relationship with Marxism before its pivotal failure in the Spanish Civil War. Auden later embraced Anglican Catholicism while Isherwood held ongoing interest in eastern mystics. Politics aside, the conflicts of Ransom can make for exceptional drama and there is much to be said in F6 for human friendship and man's strength in the face of adversity. It makes several of these points without heavy-handedness, rare for plays of this type and era.

F6 has been printed repeatedly by Faber & Faber (who released the original volume in England) and by Random House, Auden's U. S. publisher. It can be found on its own or in combination volumes with Auden and Isherwood's other plays, all of varying years and varying formats. Used copies can be found on the Web, especially through Amazon and antiquarian book dealers.

Unfaithful

Unfaithful
* * * out of 4

- 2002 • released by 20th Century Fox
- directed by Adrian Lyne
- written by Alvin Sargent and William Broyles Jr. (after the film La femme infidèle by Claude Chabrol)
- starring Diane Lane, Richard Gere, and Olivier Martinez
- 124 minutes

Compared to other directors of his ilk, Adrian Lyne's résumé is extremely short. From his debut film Mr. Smith in 1976 to Unfaithful in 2002, Lyne has only nine titles to his credit. This has been a matter of quality over quantity: Lyne is selective with his material to the point of being overtly fussy, but it encourages his painstaking detail and thorough execution.

As a prime example of the gaps in Lyne's biography, Unfaithful is still his most recent film after eight years. The film seems an epilogue to his long-time focus on sexual relationships that peaked with Nine ½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction, both major successes in the 1980s. Unfaithful, using similar material, was also a top box office attraction despite mixed reviews from critics; it has pocketed $122 million worldwide and an Oscar nomination for Diane Lane's performance.

Lyne had long admired the work of French director Claude Chabrol, particularly in his 1969 drama La femme infidèle, which became the starting point for Unfaithful. For years, Lyne tossed around the idea of building on Chabrol's theme, but left matters alone. This changed, however, when the premise of La femme was expanded by writers Alvin Sargent (Julia, Ordinary People) and William Broyles Jr. (TV's China Beach). This new screenplay gave the affair considerably more detail and told the story with a frankness that is only nowadays possible.

The plot of Unfaithful is painfully simple, yet it touches upon a great many emotions and sentiments. Diane Lane plays Connie Sumner, a suburban New York housewife who has been married for several years to Edward (Richard Gere), the owner of an armored car company. Connie has borne one child, a son named Charlie (Erik Per Sullivan), who attends grammar school. The middle-class family appears stable and free of conflict, but it is painfully ordinary: the large house, the Mercedes, and the shaggy dog look far too neat for problems not to exist beneath the surface.

Connie is a former city resident who has yearned - at least in fantasy - for the bohemian life that Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez) represents. Martel is an antiquarian book dealer who plies his trade from a Manhattan loft. In striking relief to Connie's loving but dull husband, Martel embodies a raw, unbridled sexuality that draws her interest. Through a chance meeting on the street, Connie and Paul settle into an affair that is far more carnal than affectionate.

With a husband and son waiting at home, it is only a matter of time before things start to unravel and hearts are broken. Infidelity is a topic worked to death by cinema, which made Unfaithful a considerable risk to produce. Sargent and Broyles, however, tell the story from both Connie and Edward's viewpoint, leaving empathy for both characters. Tension also reaches high levels through the screenplay's effective plotting and dialogue.

Diane Lane's performance was nominated for several acting awards, including the Oscar and Golden Globe. All three adult leads are very good, but Lane is the person who truly shines. Her performance is intense, nuanced, and without a moment's doubt of her character. Gere and Martinez are effective, particularly in a key scene where the two gentlemen meet. Lyne has done superb work in converting Gere from his usual grittiness to a more vulnerable figure.

The one substantial flaw of this movie is that Paul Martel does not entirely work as a character. We have seen the French man of mystery a bit too often and Olivier Martinez is forced to climb uphill against the sarcasm that his character draws. Luckily, Martinez takes firm hold of the material and works to dispel the stereotype. It also seems that Erik Per Sullivan deserved more screen time as the couple's son, but he fills the child role excellently.

Music duties went to Jan A. P. Kaczmarek, who has since won an Academy Award for Finding Neverland in 2004. Kaczmarek's soundtrack uses regular orchestration, is unobtrusive, and effectively colors the given scenes. Unfaithful is also the first Lyne project edited by Anne Coates (Lawrence of Arabia, Becket). Cinematographer Peter Biziou (Nine ½ Weeks) has returned to Lyne after an extended absence and costume designer Ellen Mirojnick (Fatal Attraction, Jacob's Ladder) stays on board.

Unfaithful is frequently aired on television and there are plenty of DVDs to get your hands on. The 2002 release from 20th Century Fox is packed with extras, including a film-length commentary track with Lyne, commentary from Lane and Martinez on specific scenes, 11 deleted scenes with Lyne's remarks, cast interviews, a 15-minute featurette on Unfaithful's production ('An Affair to Remember'), and an editing featurette with Coates.

The film is presented in anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. Dubbing is offered in Spanish and French, along with subtitles in Spanish and English. Both the video and audio of Unfaithful are solidly treated. Lyne's commentary offers useful background on the production, especially on why scenes were dropped or changed. The deleted scenes include a moralistic ending that was pushed by 20th Century Fox executives but later dropped in favor of Lyne's version. Decades on, adultery is still a popular subject for filmgoers and Lyne's newest project (not to mention Lane's performance) is definitely worth seeing.

Babbitt

Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis
1922 (reprinted 1991) • Signet Classic
336 pages / ISBN 0451523660 (paperback)

Sinclair Lewis, the son of a Minnesota doctor, is known primarily for his novels that examined American ways of life during the 1920s. While commercially successful, his books also reformed American letters at a time when sociology and economics were transforming across the nation. Lewis, America's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, enflamed his reading public with such novels as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry during an era of breakneck prosperity and social recklessness.

America can be a very ironic place and Sinclair Lewis's triumphs of the 1920s are a shining example. Lewis's novels sold hundreds of thousands of copies, yet he was continuously smeared by the literary establishment and those outside of it. Lewis was judged by many critics as out of touch with the prevailing American spirit. He felt this disfavor in 1921, when the Columbia University Board of Trustees overturned Main Street in favor of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence for the Pulitzer Prize. In a provocative move five years later, Lewis refused his Pulitzer for Arrowsmith, noting that American authors were forced to be 'safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.' After the wide publication of Elmer Gantry in 1927, he received death threats and condemnation from religious leaders.

The atmosphere presented in Babbitt is anything but safe or polite; rather, it is smug, suffocating, and duplicitous. When Babbitt first appeared in 1922, the United States was undergoing vast and seemingly effortless growth after the First World War. The sky was apparently the limit for American expansion, but Lewis, a social critic who seemed to inherit his father's medical precision, was able to cut through several layers of hubris and realize that all of it was a sham. Babbitt startled its first readers accordingly, receiving simultaneous praise and criticism while becoming a major success in both America and Europe.

Babbitt is a novel of 34 chapters with varying subdivisions, all centered upon George F. Babbitt, a real estate agent based in the Midwestern city of Zenith, which compares to Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and Omaha. Though Lewis does not specify the exact location of Zenith, it serves as a prototypical American city that is undergoing major economic developments. This prosperity, however, is not freely shared in Lewis's world; a brief member of the Socialist Party, he sensed a gross inequality between the upper and lower classes. And to make matters worse, the rich were (and still are) as equally miserable as the poor.

As Lewis biographer Mark Schorer adeptly points out, the ruling classes of Babbitt are radically different from those in the American literary tradition of James, Dreiser, and Tarkington, who laid the country's economic power entirely in the hands of tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and John Jacob Astor. By the 1920s, American commerce was dominated by 'middlemen' who do not propel forward an industry, create a product, or offer anything of tangible value. These men, who include real estate dealers, attorneys, stock brokers, and bankers, have only cleverness and a gift for conversation as their selling points.

The middlemen may be turning vast profits at the lower classes' expense, but don't readily assume that they're so happy. In Lewis's America, those of higher social strata only exist for profit's sake. While driving a shiny car and living with a neat family in the suburbs, these nouveaux-riches live emotionally and intellectually crippled lives that are overshadowed by American conformism. Several institutions play a role in this castration of personality - Lewis delves into government, family structure, civic organizations such as the Rotarians and Elks, religion, and America's one-shoe-fits-all system of education.

Babbitt is not so much a novel as a series of vignettes. It is a trail of episodes placing Babbitt and his acquaintances in everyday dilemmas that reflect America at large. Any semblance of plot is not noticeable until chapter 21, after dear friend and inspiration Paul Riesling shoots his wife and finds himself in prison. A novel without clear plotlines would fail miserably if written by an author of lesser talent than Sinclair Lewis. But Lewis accomplishes a major feat by injecting enough significance into the chapters for each one to stand on its own. The story is presented through a witty, third-person narrative and is often pathetically funny, unlike earlier social novels.

Lewis was interested in socialism but actually lived as a bourgeois through the success of his writing. In Babbitt, Lewis hints - rather skeptically - at workers' movements as a possible solution to the American malaise. He sympathizes with the working classes to an extent, but his middle-class upbringing still causes him to portray those of lower social strata as ignorant and uncouth. This inner conflict feels similar to that of W. H. Auden, who dabbled with Marxism during the 1930s but was too much of a middle-classman to remain for long. Lewis, in fact, doesn't seem to possess much hope for America's future at all. The novel concludes with a possibility of Babbitt's college son Ted overcoming the constraints of older generations, but this is a large question mark. In fact, America may be so bogged down in its conformity and anti-intellectualism that to reform American thought means to destroy its very existence.

The dilemmas seen by Lewis in the 1920s continue today and seem far worse after eight decades. With such factors as the globalization of commerce, the advancement of women and minorities in the workplace, the further polarization of urban and rural dwellers, and the complete amorality of those in power, the situation is a hundred times more complicated and not an inch closer to being solved. Now the question needs to be asked if it's worth trying to solve America's problems at all or if we should just ride out the steep decline.

For those who can stomach these issues (even after my depressing review), Babbitt is a unique experience in American novels. Babbitt has been republished several times, including as a small paperback by Signet Classic (451-CE2366), which hit shelves in 1991. The widely-circulated Signet edition is 334 pages long, including a brief afterword by Mark Schorer; a one-page bibliography follows the main text. Signet designed a bright cover for the edition and the novel itself is presented in clear type. The type, however, is rather small and crammed onto the pages. Signet editions have been popular amongst students, but older readers may want to find a larger-sized version. No matter its size, Babbitt is a ground-breaking novel that fits the higher ranks of American literature.

The Cat O' Nine Tails

The Cat O' Nine Tails
(Il gatto a nove code)
* * * out of 4

- 1971 • released by Seda Spettacoli
- directed by Dario Argento
- written by Argento, Luigi Collo, and Dardano Sacchetti (from a story by Bryan Edgar Wallace)
- starring James Franciscus, Karl Malden, and Catherine Spaak
- 112 minutes

Dario Argento does not look fondly upon his second effort as a director. The middle installment of a trilogy that uses animal references in its titles, Il gatto a nove code AKA The Cat O' Nine Tails is admired by giallo enthusiasts but doesn't have Argento's full support.

Argento, the son of an Italian producer, turned heads with his first directorial gig, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, in 1970. An impressive effort for any first-time director, Bird won critical praise and even topped the American box office for a week. The following year, 30-year-old Argento teamed with screenwriters Dardano Sacchetti and Luigi Collo on The Cat O' Nine Tails, which fits a premise from Bryan Edgar Wallace (the famed novelist's son) into modern-day scientific research.

Like Bird, The Cat O' Nine Tails is far removed from Argento's later projects, including Deep Red and the otherworldly Phenomena. Argento was still working in the crime and slasher genres with formulaic plotting, but also with a great deal of style and competence. Only two films into his directorial career, Cat is evidence of a full-fledged moviemaker who receives strong performances from his cast and assembles a satisfying final product.

As with his debut film, Argento recruited major talent for Cat in James Franciscus (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) and Academy Award-winner Karl Malden (A Streetcar Named Desire, Patton). Franciscus plays Carlo Giordani, a newspaperman who reports on the burglary of a Rome genetics institute geared to wealthy clientele. Though nothing appears to have been stolen, his interest is heightened by the company's secretive ways of doing business and the mysterious death afterwards of a biochemist working in its labs.

Giordani receives unexpected help from Franco Arno (Malden), an ex-reporter who was blinded in an accident several years before and is now using his sense of touch to design word puzzles. Arno and his young niece Lori (future dubbing voice Cinzia De Carolis) have stumbled upon information that may lead to the killer, providing Giordani and Arno can stay alive. While the police run their own investigation, Giordani and Arno use their journalism skills to examine the institute's strange goings-on, chaired by Fulvio Terzi (Tino Carraro) and his alluring daughter Anna (Catherine Spaak).

Cat relies a great deal on Argento's 'first-person' techniques, including hand-held camera shots and unusual angles. Very effective are sequences from the killer's point of view, which project feelings of uneasiness and despair in tense situations. Argento also has fun with clichés such as a femme fatale, a car chase, a gay pick-up bar, and of course, a serial killer. Though its dialogue is awkward (at least in English), Cat's screenplay is efficiently written; the story moves at a reliable pace and tosses in moments of humor.

The lead cast plays their roles effectively. Franciscus uses a laid-back approach that makes his character very likable. Malden, who was portraying a blind man for the first time, gives an energetic performance and is matched by an impressive child outing from Cinzia De Carolis. Catherine Spaak, who plays the film's offbeat love interest, makes good use of limited material. The supporting actors are a usual mix ranging from fairly good to very bad; Rada Rassimov and Horst Frank are two names who stand apart.

Argento, who dislikes this film because of its parallels with the American action genre, made Cat his second project with composer Ennio Morricone. Morricone's soundtrack again relies on serial technique, but is even darker and more restrained than his music for The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Scenes of chaos and suspense are helped once again by Morricone's fertile imagination; the soundtrack plays a key role in heightening emotion without being pushy or intrusive.

The Cat O' Nine Tails, a film recommended for thriller fans, was released on DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment in 2001. Viewers should have a lot of fun with this offering: the film is presented in widescreen (2.35:1 aspect ratio) with Dolby 2.0 audio in Italian, English, and French. The disc has extras galore, including Tales Of The Cat, a 14-minute featurette with Argento, Sacchetti, and Morricone; the U. S. and international theatrical trailers; TV and radio commercials; radio interviews with Franciscus and Malden; and a gallery of posters and stills.

Anchor Bay presents the film with a tidy appearance; colors are distinguishable without being overtly strong, preserving Cat's muted atmosphere by cinematographer Erico Menczer. There are occasional artifacts, but these are usually not noticeable. The English language track, always a problem in international co-productions, acquits itself; dialogue is generally clear, while Foley effects and Morricone's scoring are distinct.

If you don't know very much about Argento or The Cat O' Nine Tails, you certainly will after pouring over the extras. Many aspects of this film are covered in detail, with Franciscus and Malden's interviews especially interesting. I found this DVD as a $1.99 clearance in my local supermarket, which will be our little secret. The disc also circulates on web sites (especially Amazon) and a newer release is available from Blue Underground.