By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit they deserve. In this installment: director Douglas Hickox, who helmed Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Theater Of Blood and Zulu Dawn.
“I think of myself as an interpretive director,” the late Douglas Hickox said in 1970 upon the release of his first feature film. “I’m a narrative director, basically. An audience should become totally involved in the film, the actors and the story. They shouldn’t be aware of the director at all or of how things are done.”
With a statement like this made right at the beginning of his directorial career, it should come as no surprise that Douglas Hickox has been largely under-celebrated for his relatively small but consistently intriguing body of work. And while this statement from the director himself would appear to instantly exclude Hickox from any claim of being an auteur, there is an unmistakable line of thought, theme and style that can be traced through his handful of feature films and large roster of TV projects. There is a dark humour and sense of perversity rife in many of Hickox’s films, while his skill for creating tension and excitement is undeniable. Like nearly all “craftsman” or “journeyman” directors, however, there is something else at play in the work of Douglas Hickox; he was certainly much, much more than just a filmmaker turning out material in a random or haphazard way.
Douglas Hickox was born in London in 1929, and was educated at Emanuel School, before making his entry into the world of filmmaking at the age of just seventeen, where he worked at the legendary Pinewood Studios as “a thirty bob a week office boy.” From these humble beginnings, Hickox eventually moved upwards, and worked extensively as an assistant director and second unit director throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. A true hard-graft director, Hickox churned out various musical shorts and worked on a wide range of live television variety shows while also directing commercials, for which he received many awards. In amongst this work, Hickox also helmed two music-based features, 1964’s It’s All Over Town and Just For You, which mixed slight, throughline fictional storylines with musical performances from acts like Frankie Vaughn, Acker Bilk, and Freddie And The Dreamers.
Douglas Hickox made his feature debut proper in 1970 with Entertaining Mr. Sloane, a savvy, cutting adaptation of the controversial play by Joe Orton, the gay, rebellious, riotous and eventually murdered playwright immortalised in Stephen Frears’ classic 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears. The story of an enigmatic young man who comes between the male and female members of a slovenly family when he enters their house as a lodger, Entertaining Mr. Sloane is awash with Orton’s characteristic perversity, pitch-black humour, unconventional characterisation and savage social provocation, and Hickox shies away from none of it, while also driving Beryl Reid, Harry Andrews, Peter McEnery and Alan Webb to excellent performances. Though Hickox appears to be wholly in tune with the material, that was surprisingly not the case. “Orton is not a subject I would have picked normally,” the director told The Guardian on the film’s release, “but it was my opportunity.”
Remaining on provocative, difficult ground, Hickox went from Joe Orton to 1972’s Sitting Target, a tough little thriller that seems strangely prescient today considering the current and tragic proliferation of domestic violence cases in which angry men attack or kill their former female partners. In a typically ferocious performance, the always frightening Oliver Reed is a very nasty convicted murderer who breaks out of prison with his slightly less unnerving friend (played by Ian McShane in a great piece of double-act casting) and makes an enraged beeline for his wife (Jill St. John), who is pregnant with the new man in her life. Trying to staunch the potential blood flow is Edward Woodward’s determined cop. Hard-bitten, uncompromising and incredibly spare, this is the kind of mean, nasty little British crime thriller that should have seen Hickox elevated to far more vaunted status.
Hickox doubled down on the nastiness of Sitting Target with his next, and perhaps most notable, film. The recipient of a considerable cult, 1973’s Theater Of Blood should actually have a much, much bigger one considering its deliriously entertaining, high-concept premise and its bravura, over-the-top central performance by the great Vincent Price. Summoning all of his trademark wit, camp and insouciance, Price is Edward Lionheart, an ageing titan of Shakespearean theatre who becomes so incensed when he is passed over for a major award that he wreaks inventive, sadistic, murderous havoc on the panel of critics who so disavowed him. Something of a fantasy piece for actors everywhere, Theater Of Blood unfortunately exists somewhat in the shadow of Price’s beloved The Abominable Dr. Phibes, with which it shares many similarities. That said, Hickox’s horror film is a mad, raging beast all of its own, filled with perverse wit, black humour, kill scenes aplenty, and a very strong line in inventive cruelty.
After these first three films – all nasty, imaginative, black-hearted little gems – Hickox’s resume begins to fragment and soften a little, with the director leaning more heavily into his impressive skills for crafting action and spectacle. Hickox was drafted in to direct John Wayne’s 1975 Dirty Harry-esque fish-out-of-water actioner Brannigan, in which The Duke’s tough Chicago cop is seconded to London to bring back an American crook. It’s a fun cop show, and Hickox punches up the humour and gets great performances out of an into-it supporting cast peppered with legends like Richard Attenborough, Mel Ferrer and John Vernon. Hickox’s next film was equally as action and adventure focused, with 1976’s rollicking Sky Riders featuring James Coburn and Robert Culp headlining a kidnap thriller hinging on an imaginative rescue carried out via hang gliders.
Hickox’s next film would undoubtedly be his biggest, with the director taking the reins on 1979’s Zulu Dawn, a prequel to the 1964 classic Zulu. Considerably more balanced in its thinking than its predecessor, Zulu Dawn details the infamous battle of Isandlwana in 1879, where the British imperial forces were grimly outnumbered by the fierce warriors of Africa’s mighty Zulu Nation. Featuring impressive performances from a strong cast (Peter O’Toole, Burt Lancaster, Simon Ward, Denholm Elliott, Bob Hoskins, John Mills) and a host of impressively staged action set pieces (all crafted, of course, without the assistance of CGI, and enjoying the sense of immediacy that kind of 1970s realism affords), Zulu Dawn is a big, thoughtful battle epic that amply showcases Hickox’s ability to work on a much larger canvas.
Unfortunately, Zulu Dawn did not see Douglas Hickox move onto bigger films, but rather prompted a move back to television, with the director getting behind the camera on a long list of TV movies and mini-series. There was no lapse in quality, however, with the likes of 1983’s The Hound Of The Baskervilles (featuring Ian Richardson as a very effective Sherlock Holmes), 1984’s The Master Of Ballantrae (an historical drama with Richard Thomas and Michael York) and 1985’s Blackout (a tight, highly entertaining serial killer thriller with Richard Widmark, Keith Carradine, Kathleen Quinlan and Michael Beck) rating as particularly strong small screen features.
Douglas Hickox very sadly passed away in a London hospital following a heart surgery operation at the age of just 59. Though his first three films are certainly his best and most interesting, Hickox displayed a winning flair for the perverse (and great skill for crafting action and adventure) throughout his entire career, and he should at the very least be recognised far more widely as an impressive and highly original cult director of the British cinema.
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