I recently read the source novel for the first
time, which is advisable if you want to make sense of the film as there is so
much more characterization, psychological depth and general meat on the bone in
the book. In comparison the film is like a jigsaw puzzle where many of the
pieces are missing, and those that are present don't actually fit together all
that well.
Doctors Wear Scarlet concerns Richard Fountain, a
promising young Oxford Don who effectively flees to Greece in order to escape
the domineering influence of his provost Walter Goodrich, who is grooming
Richard as both his successor and as a fiancé to his daughter Penelope. While
in Greece, Richard falls under the influence of a sultry temptress called
Chriseis, who draws him into her world of vampirism and the occult.
Necessitating that Richard's friends, Piers Clarence, Captain Roddy Longbow and
Anthony Seymour travel to Greece in order to extract Richard from the Chriseis
situation and avoid a scandal. Vampirism aside, it had clear autobiographical
elements for the notoriously caddish Simon Raven, whose career in the military
and higher education was marred in controversy, and no doubt had his own run
ins with the Walter Goodrichs of this world. Pears Clarence is likely based on
Raven's younger companion Bungo Partridge. While the anti-Semitic incident that
is in the book, but isn’t ported over to the film, likely relates to Raven's
publisher Anthony Blond, who was Jewish and is said to have suffered badly on
account of it whilst at Eton. Reflecting Raven's personality and tastes,
Doctors Wear Scarlet is all about the allure of scandalous men. Richard's
motivation for striking up a friendship with Piers is the trouble that will arise.
Similarly Richard himself proves to be source of much male adulation, due to
the aura of controversy that surrounds him. Marc Honeydew can't get enough of
watching Richard's conflicts with Walter from the sidelines, and Richard first
comes to Anthony Seymour's notice by beating up an anti-Semitic school bully.
An incident that marks Richard out as the man Anthony wants as his study fag.
Boys will be boys, and play with toys, so be strong with your beast.
Judging by the book, I'm guessing that production
of the film ran into problems once it left Greece and relocated to the UK. The
Greek portions of the film follow the book relatively faithfully. It is the
first and third acts of the film set in the UK, where so much has clearly gone
unfilmed and what they did get in the can was awkwardly pieced together. About
the first 100 pages of the book are compressed into the first couple of minutes
of the film. It would really need a TV miniseries to do justice to the story of
Richard Fountain. Short of giving you his inside leg measurements, the book
goes into every aspect of his life, his military service, his adventures in the
Congo, his days as a Study Fag, his antagonistic relationship with Walter
Goodrich. I think where the film initially drops the ball is how little of
Walter Goodrich there is in it. We never see enough of Walter to understand why
Richard hates him so. Whereas in the book, Walter is a manipulative, ruthless
control freak with a need to dominate every aspect of Richard’s life. The first
time the word ‘vampire’ is mentioned in the book, isn’t in relation to
Chriseis, it’s in relation to Walter wanting to drain Richard of his
individuality and have Walter’s personality flowing in Richard’s veins instead.
Richard escapes to Greece, but he only succeeds in jumping from one unhealthy,
domineering relationship to another, replacing Master Walter with Mistress
Chriseis. Another shortcoming to the film is how little there is of Marc Honeydew,
who in the book is this wonderfully waspish old queen who thrives on other
people’s conflicts and gossip, particularly that of a sexual nature. ‘Mother
Honeydew’ as he nicknames himself, might well be my favorite character in the
book, and one you strongly suspect Simon Raven had much fun in writing. Yet,
you see so little of Honeydew in the film that the actor who plays him, William
Mervyn, might as well as not bothered to show up on set. Which is frustrating
because you sense that Peter Cushing had a Walter Goodrich performance in him.
While Mervyn had played a very Honeydew type role in a TV series called ‘Mr.
Rose’, so it’s a certain he had a Marc Honeydew performance in him, but either
Hartford-Davis didn’t get it on film, or it ended up on the cutting room floor.
I will say that the film is well cast, and if you see the film first then read
the book, you will have Patrick Mower in your head when you read about Richard
Fountain, you will have Peter Cushing in your head when you read about Walter Goodrich,
right down to cast members like Imogen Hassall and Edward Woodward, even though
they don’t match up to how their characters are described in the book.
A radical departure from the book, which the film
makes, is to drop the character of Piers Clarence and replace him with Bob
Kirby, an African student of Richard’s. A very early example of race swapping
in movies. Although I don’t think this is out of step with the Richard Fountain
of the book, who gravitates towards Piers because people think that they’re a
pair of gays, which causes problems for Walter who is trying to pair Richard
off with his daughter. So, I can buy into the idea of Richard befriending a
black man, because it turns heads, because it rattles the cage of the
establishment. The Congo section of the book, and the language Raven uses
there, does inadvertently illustrate amount the racial prejudice around in the
circles that Richard would have travelled in. Since there is so little
back-story in the film though, I don’t think you really get the sense that
Richard’s relationship with Bob is another way of him striking back at Walter,
which is I suspect why Hartford-Davis cast a black actor in the role.
Considering that this was an era when racially themed films like 'To Sir, with
Love' and 'In the Heat of the Night' were big box-office, something an astute
character like Hartford-Davis would have been aware of, very little is made of
Bob’s skin colour….unless you speak Greek. From what I’m told the Greek
language yelling that the old woman does in the scene where Bob gets beaten up
by the Greek thugs is extremely racist, and would never have made it onto
British TV, had anyone at ITV understood Greek. That scene is also the subject
of one of my all time favorite, unintentionally hilarious front of house
stills, which depicts one of the Greek guys charging into Bob’s mid-section and
Penelope becoming hysterical in the background. Trouble is that, what with
Bob’s facial expression and the Greek guy's head being buried in Bob’s
crotch….at the risk of sounding like Marc Honeydew….it does rather look like
Bob is getting a blow-job. Which is doubly-unfortunate given that….again at the
risk of sounding like Marc Honeydew…someone connected to this film is rumored
to have died whilst being fellated. No names from me, but I’ll put everyone’s
mind at ease by saying it wasn’t Peter Cushing.
A couple of Hartford-Davis’ other casting decisions have an air of favoritism to them. By having Penelope Goodrich along for the Greek trip, rather than keeping her in the UK as per the book, he was able to increase the screen time of Madeleine Hinde, an actress he was into promoting at the time, and the star of his previous film ‘The Smashing Bird I Used to Know’. This does feel like a betrayal of Simon Raven’s book and its boys only attitude of ‘tally ho chaps; we’re off the Greece to rescue dear Dickie from the clutches of a beastly woman’. You can tell from the book that Raven was the product of a predominately male society, where women were largely excluded or regarded as a nuisance, Raven does have a wicked fondness for comparing Penelope Goodrich to a cow, dumbly grazing at social occasions with her heaving bosom and ‘cow eyes’. Hartford-Davis also always loved to use David Lodge in his movies, so comes up with an entirely new character, Col. Stavros, in order to shoehorn Dave Lodge in there. However Lodge is far less memorably utilized here than in Hartford-Davis’ earlier film Corruption. You’ll leave Corruption never being able to forget Lodge’s character in that, I don’t think you can say the same about Col. Stavros.
Although the passing of time has likely robbed the book of its freshness, in its day Doctors Wear Scarlet must have been a game changing work that freed the subject of vampirism from its Gothic trappings and explored its relationship with sex and sadomasochism. In the book, Richard is drawn to vampirism due to his need to be dominated, due to his inability to have regular sex. The film makes those connections to an extent, but the book also draws comparisons between how victims of vampirism can go onto take on the vampire role themselves, in the way that the victims of sexual abuse can often go on to be abusers themselves. This is made clearer in the book, especially as there are scenes of sexual abuse in it, which would be completely unfilmable. Wild, gratuitous and random as the ‘psychedelic orgy’ scene in the film is, that’s vanilla compared to what its standing in for in the book. In which Chriseis encourages parents to sexually abuse their children, in order that she can then drink the blood of fleshly corrupted children.
After reading the book, you have to wonder how anyone thought there was a film in it, Doctors Wear Scarlet is a stubbornly un-cinematic book. Very leisurely placed, very much a raconteur’s book, mainly related in the form of anecdotes, conversations, personal correspondence and even poems. Even the title doesn’t lend itself well to a film, Doctors Wear Scarlet is the kind of enigmatic, cryptic title that a book can get away with, but film titles generally have to be bolder, and more forthcoming about what they are selling. Very much in the way that ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ is a great book title and ‘Blade Runner’ is a great film title, but it wouldn’t work the other way around. I can’t imagine a film called Doctors Wear Scarlet would do much business at the Drive-Ins or the horror section of VHS shops, on the other hand I struggle to imagine Simon Raven using Bloodsuckers as a book title, even Incense for the Damned would likely have sounded too schlocky, and unbecoming to the likes of him.
Maybe Hartford-Davis just fancied a holiday in Greece, and adapted the nearest Greek themed book he had to hand. I’ve often thought that Hartford-Davis had a shooting style that falsely suggests he had a background directing ITC shows. He didn’t, but in his hands Doctors Wear Scarlet does end up looking like an episode of The Saint, The Protectors or if you’ve feeling ungenerous The Adventurer…sunny foreign holiday location work and manly fist fights are the order of the day here. An illusion that’s added to by the casting, which leans towards small screen heroes. Alex Davion was the co-star of Gideon’s Way, William Mervyn was Mr. Rose, Patrick Macnee was John Steed, and Edward Woodward is here taking a break from Callan. Even Patrick Mower was destined to be more of a TV heartthrob than a movie star. In his autobiography, Mower tells of how Imogen Hassall successfully won a £10 bet with several crew members that she could sexually arouse Mower during their love scene. “Method actor though I am, a block of ice I am not. And Richard the prig was becoming Bruce Banner- only it wasn’t the Hulk that was growing larger”. Although the camera operator stiffed Hassall on full payment, remarking “call that a stiffy? I’ve seen more meat in a Potato pie; I’m only paying a fiver”. Mower also recalls being vigorously pursued by a Turkish belly dancer during the making of the film, who ‘gave me one of the best nights of sex in my life’, only for it to emerge that she had mistaken him for Patrick Macnee. “I only make love to the star of the film” she told Mower after whacking him around the head. As much as Bloodsuckers has its fair share of name actors, Hartford-Davis did have a Michael Winner like talent for spotting up and coming talent and putting them in films they’d later come to regret. Maureen Lipman famously hates the Hartford-Davis film she is in, The Smashing Bird I Used to Know. Writing about the same film in his autobiography, Mower recalled him and Dennis Waterman getting shitfaced drunk after seeing The Smashing Bird I Used To Know, on account of it being “such an unmitigated load of old tripe”.
I still have a bit of nostalgia for Blood Suckers, it takes me back to a time when I was discovering then obscure and undocumented movies on late night television. After exposing myself to the source novel, I do now have a greater understanding of what the film was trying to say, but I also have to concede that they did make a pig’s ear of saying it, and it is difficult to forgive the film for its lack of Marc Honeydew.
For a 1960 book, Doctors Wear Scarlet was ahead of its time in many respects, and likely felt more relevant when the film was made in 1969. What with its themes of disillusionment with the older generation, young people dropping out and seeking freedom, only to discover that the counterculture itself had a dark side. Chriseis is a warning that those in Charles Manson’s obit should have taken heed of. Choose your gurus, and study fags, wisely. Not all Greek women are as nice as Nana Mouskouri.
