Barbara Shelley

This week's movie on the Scary Spirits podcast, Quatermass in the Pit from 1967, examines the age-old question, can you be a Hitchcock blonde without being a blonde? Barbara Shelley embodies all the qualities.

She has the icy facade.

She is a victim of mind control.

All right, Karen.

Tell us everything you really enjoyed on this Hammer production released via 20th Century Fox and Seven Arts Association or something like that.

Starring the very handsome Barbara Shelley.

Well, I guess I should first start off by saying this isn't my thing.

These science fiction ones, it's just not my thing.

We've already mentioned in our earlier episode that Kurosawa has acknowledged taking much inspiration from European and American cinema, and in this sequence he's acknowledged the influence of a rather unexpected source, a 1964 Hammer movie called The Gorgon.

Probably not one of Hammer's greatest movies, despite a sterling cast including Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Barbara Shelley, The Gorgon is rather let down by its titular monster.

But Kurosawa has recalled seeing the film as a child and being completely terrified by the female antagonist, saying, quote, The Gorgon does nothing.

She just comes forward without a sound and stands quietly beside them.

These are the monsters that they have created.

Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Ingrid Pitt, Veronica Carson, Oliver Reed, Madeline Smith, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gow, Hazel Court, Bartine Beswick.

These are the people that faced the horrors.

Jimmy Singster, Terrence Fisher, Michael Carreras, Peter Sazdy, John Elder, Evan Jones, Anthony Hines.

Yes.

And so brought into, brought into, uh, kind of try to preserve the skeletons or, uh, Dr. Roni and his assistant Barbara in.

And eventually they kind of become a team with equator mass, uh, both in trying to preserve the specimens, understand them, but also kind of deal with the horrifying revelations that come out out of the discovery of these things.

So it's, it's a, a familiar kind of setup for this sort of story.

Yeah.

That's I think that's a very good point.

So Roni and Barbara determined that these are way older.

than they had originally thought the skeletons were.

Yep.

We cut to a ball, and that's where we've got Barbara Shelley as Sonia.

Yep.

With Peter Dinsdale Landon.

It's like, oh, it's him.

Yeah.

And we've got Captain Scarlet and Barbara Shelley.

Barbara Shelley doesn't do as much in this film as I thought she would.

Now we've got these people.

What's Barbara Shelley? Barbara Shelley in this world is too old, so we have Jenny Hanley because she's in her 20s.

It's just such a waste, I think.

The thing is, you're actually saying about there's a problem with them writing juvenile roles, but that's the major disconnect because these people were writing really good juvenile roles back when they were juveniles.

She did become synonymous with the company, which is very odd.

We, you know, I, like I said before, I always think of the queen o- of Hammer as being Barbara Shelley.

Barbara Shelley.

Because she was in more.

Mm-hmm.

Welcome to Cobwebbed Classics, where I dust off a lost, forgotten, or just plain unappreciated film and introduce it to, or maybe just remind you about it, so your spooky Saturday night might run a little creepier.

This week's Cobwebbed Classic is 1966's Dracula: Prince of Darkness, directed by Terence Fisher, starring Christopher Lee, Barbara Shelley, Andrew Keir, Francis Matthews, Susan Farmer, and Philip Latham as Clove.

This is the third film in Hammer's Dracula run, the first for Christopher Lee to return, and the first for Peter Cushing not to.

I covered the second film, Brides of Dracula, on Cobwebbed Classics on episode 144, if you care to give that a listen In 1895, four English tourists traveling in the Carpathian Mountains find themselves trapped in the abandoned castle of Dracula, who has been dead and gone since the original film's conclusion, Horror of Dracula, or so it was called here in the States.

Mm-hmm.

And then we need a leading lady as well, so we got Barbara Shelley here.

I'm not sure you could have got-

Yeah

Yeah, just change the story and, you know.

Mm.

Uh, 'cause you think, you have Francis Matthews, Susan Farmer, Barb... nah, yeah, Barbara Shelley's in it, Christopher Lee, so at least four of them are the same actors in both films.

Mm-hmm.