The Ballad of Tam Lin (1971)
Director: Roddy McDowall
Solid: Ava Gardner, Ian McShane, Stephanie Beacham & Joanna Lumley
Format: Blu-Ray
Run Time: 107 minutes
Launch Date: tenth October 2022
Jamie Havlin lastly will get the possibility to see a cult British movie directed by Hollywood actor Roddy McDowall.
Often known as The Satan’s Widow, The Ballad Of Tam Lin was a challenge clearly near Roddy McDowall’s coronary heart. To be able to direct it, he even turned down the possibility to reprise his position as Dr. Cornelius within the second movie of the Planet Of The Apes sequence, earlier than returning for the following three sequels.
The movie is an updating of a centuries outdated folks story involving the rescue of younger Tam Lin of the Elves from the Queen of the Fairies by a maiden known as Janet. Set within the Scottish Borders, it has since been retold with variations many, many occasions. Most famously, Robert Burns wrote his personal model of the supernatural ballad within the 1770s, and this might need been an enormous consider interesting to McDowall, who had an enormous Scottish connection by his father (no shock with that identify) and probably turned conscious of the legend by him.
I’ve heard The Ballad Of Tam Lin known as a folk-horror, which it incorporates parts of, and even categorised as ‘hagsploitation’, which may be very unfair on Ava Gardner, who was solely in her late forties on the time and nonetheless a hanging girl. To place her age in context, at this time’s equal Hollywood stars of an analogous classic would come with the likes of Charlize Theron and Angelina Jolie.
Right here she performs Michaela ‘Micky’ Cazarat, a girl who’s ‘immensely rich’ and likes to encompass herself with far younger pals, as if to vampirically preserve herself younger.
Shot in 1969, the film begins in London with Micky and a sure Tom Lynn (Ian McShane) sharing a mattress, with a mesmerized Tom proclaiming his love for her. Sure, there’s nonetheless a particular sparkle in these inexperienced eyes of hers however, as we’ll uncover, Tom must be extra involved with the green-eyed monster that lurks inside her.
Micky rounds up her younger entourage, and declares it’s time for them to go on the highway. Accompanied by The Pentangle’s The Finest A part of You, a quartet of flashy automobiles depart north, a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow with Micky and Tom Lynn its solely passengers main the way in which, the remainder cramming into the opposite automobiles.
‘Oh, what very forgettable ruins this city will make,’ Micky declares, whereas viewing some nameless trying workplace blocks by her yellow tinted sun shades (and from early within the movie, these sun shades are flagged up as one way or the other essential). The small cavalcade is quickly crossing the Tyne Bridge and by dusk has handed Hadrian’s Wall and arrives at Carterhaugh, a fortified mansion presumably owned by Micky – Traquair Home close to Innerleithen in Peeblesshire, in case you’re .
It’s summertime and the residing is ridiculously straightforward. The next day, the younger folks laze round, bouncing alongside on large blue house hoppers, ingesting, throwing frisbees and participating in tarot readings, their solely responsibility to amuse Micky.
Janet Ainsley (Stephanie Beacham), an harmless lady who lives close by along with her vicar father, first encounters the in-crowd when she brings a pet on the market to Carterhaugh. She has her hair in a prim ponytail and wears a brown cardie and skirt – in distinction to the extravagantly dressed Carterhaugh females similar to Georgia (Joanna Lumley) and Georgia (Jenny Hanley), who appear like they’re participating in a vogue shoot for Biba.
Mockingly, the actual life Stephanie Beacham was seemingly the forged member with the most important counterculture credentials: she’d lived in a commune, tried mescaline and her solely remorse about being forged in The Ballad of Tam Lin was that she needed to miss out seeing the well-known Rolling Stones free Hyde Park outside pageant which occurred in the course of the shoot.
Janet’s entranced by the carefree atmosphere she witnesses. Tom Lynn is immediately captivated with her, and he or she appears smitten with him, albeit much less eager on exhibiting it. Micky may even make a huge impact on her. ‘She seems like a Goddess,’ she later gushes to her father (performed by Cyril Cusack). ‘And sort too.’
The latter is an opinion which she is going to rapidly revise.
She and Tom develop ever nearer and inevitably fall in love, which completely infuriates Micky. Micky isn’t to be dropped. She does the dropping.
Elroy, her shadowy personal secretary (Richard Wattiss) invitations Tom into his workplace to inform him ‘two little tales’, revealing the destiny of a few Micky’s former beaus, who each occurred to die in grotesque automobile accidents. ‘Work it out for your self,’ he says, reasonably than spelling out that Micky was behind each deaths.
Hell hath no fury like a Fairie Queen scorned, and it’s time for Tom to go away Carterhaugh, which could not be as straightforward as he initially imagines.
The Ballad Of Tam Lin is not any traditional however Gardner is completely forged as Micky. As marvelously menacing as she is gloriously glamorous, she steals the present however Ian McShane, who seems like a younger George Finest, shines too and, though in a a lot smaller position, Richard Watiss is on terrific kind.
What was the importance of the sun shades? I nonetheless don’t know. The place have been the alternative ‘coven’ of hip children assembled from at such brief discover? No thought. Who thought that the snake appeared remotely real looking?
It is a actual oddity, however regardless of its flaws, it stays persistently fascinating to look at and it’s an actual pity that it languished for a number of years earlier than gaining a launch, by which era it should have appeared a little bit dated with the dying embers of the Swinging ’60s having been extinguished within the time since its wrap. It’s a pity too that this was to be Roddy McDowall’s first and final shot as a director.
The cinematography by Billy Williams is a delight all through and the Scottish Lowlands look splendidly inexperienced and makes me wish to go to. Stanley Myers’ soundtrack works properly and is punctuated with segments from Pentangle’s model of Tam Lin, though Fairport Conference’s tackle the monitor was utilised extra imaginatively by Kevin Macdonald in 2013’s How I Dwell Now.
There’s definitely additionally quite a lot of enjoyable available seeing early appearances from actors who would go on to larger issues.
McShane was paired with Richard Burton for 1971’s Villain, and his profession has continued to take pleasure in a excessive profile to today by exhibits like Lovejoy and Deadwood. Bruce Robinson, who performs Alan, a snivelling ex of Micky, is finest remembered not as an actor however for writing and directing a movie about actors, Withnail and I. Stephanie Beacham after which Joanna Lumley each went on to play Jessica Van Helsing in Hammer’s last two instalments of their Dracula franchise earlier than occurring to seek out wider fame as Sable Colby in Dynasty & The Colbys, and Patsy Stone in Completely Fabulous; and I’ll point out right here that Martin Scorsese is an enormous fan of The Ballad Of Tam Lin and helped champion a restoration for an American video launch in 1998. It might, or could not, be a coincidence that fifteen years later he forged Joanna Lumley in The Wolf Of Wall Road.
The Ballad Of Tam Lin is the forty fifth and newest within the British Movie Institute’s Flipside sequence of releases charting ‘the untold historical past of British movie.’
Particular options listed here are quite a few. They embody an meticulously researched audio commentary by BFI Flipside co-founders William Fowler and Vic Pratt; interviews with Ian McShane, Stephanie Beacham & Jacqui McShee, the lead singer of Pentangle; Ballad of a B-Film: Revisiting Tam Lin (2021): an interview with McDowall biographer David Del Valle; Pink Pink? Pink (1971, 34 minutes): a examine of some tiresome hippies residing in a commune in Devon within the early Seventies, and with the primary urgent solely, an illustrated booklet.
Along with the bodily launch, there will probably be a screening of the movie on Monday 31 October on the Rio Cinema, Dalston, London with particular company Ian McShane and Stewart Lee.
For extra on the discharge, click on right here.
~
All phrases by Jamie Havlin. Jamie has written a few brief movies screened on British TV and at worldwide festivals and he often contributes to the glam rock fanzine Wired Up! Extra writing by Jamie could be discovered at his Louder Than Battle writer’s archive.
