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Forget the booze and the betting and the nicotine addiction. Sid James’s vices have already been analysed, demonised and dramatised countless times. His skills as a performer however, and the bedrock of believability he brought to so many roles, have been largely overlooked. The recent release of The Man in Black and, to a lesser extent, Quatermass II, may help to redress that oversight, but despite starring in seven Hammer movies he’s seldom seen as a stalwart of the studio. Let’s face it, for the majority of people he’ll always be Carry on Sid. Fair enough. There are worse ways to be remembered. But here we’re shining a light onto the nature of his extraordinary success, as we attempt to look beyond his Carry On capers and uncover Sid James’s real secret.
It’s time to celebrate villains! The silver screen has given us countless big bad wolves who’ve howled and hounded our heroes, brazen with their brutality and spite. But here we’re looking at another type of evildoer, focussing on those wry, sly smilers who plot and plan behind a mask of kindness, who in the words of Shakespeare’s Richard III, are able to ‘seem a saint when most I play the devil’.
In recent weeks we’ve looked at various Hammer movies and their ramifications, the careers of their stars, specific eras within the studio’s history and indeed, what lies ahead for the company. But here we’re focussing on just 73 seconds; on a single scene that changed cinema forever - the moment when Christopher Lee announced to the world, ‘I am Dracula!’
It’s recently been announced that the next title to be restored and released by Hammer Films will be The Man in Black (1950), a thriller directed by Francis Searle and starring Betty Ann Davies, Sheila Burrell and Sidney James. We caught up with Hammer’s Steve Rogers to tell us all about the film…
In part one of this two-parter we looked into Tom Conway’s colourful early life, from pulling a sidearm at school to his days mining and ranching in Africa, through to his early years as an actor, taking him from am-dram in Manchester to his big break in Hollywood. Having starred in RKO’s fourth Falcon movie with his brother, the studio was amazed by his popularity and he was given the responsibility of taking the series forward. Tom Conway was finally making his mark on the silver screen, but more astonishing times lay ahead…