Previously on For Malcontents Only, I featured the movie Melody (alternatively known as S.W.A.L.K), a British film from 1971 that Wes Anderson took as inspiration for Moonrise Kingdom. The titular Melody was played by Tracy Hyde and the post gave me the chance to reference The Wondermints’ gorgeous tribute track Tracy Hide (yes, that’s the correct spelling), more on which later. In the course of the post, I mentioned that I hadn’t yet seen 1981’s The Orchard End Murder which Tracy starred in, but intended to seek it out.
And now I have.
This is a drama that clocks in at an awkward length, too long to be a short and too short to be a feature. It lasts just under fifty minutes and so the best it could hope for was to find distribution as a B-film in Britain.
GTO Films, an offshoot of GTO Records, which started out by financing a couple of glam rock related cheapies, Never Too Young to Rock and Side by Side picked up on it. They successfully managed to place it on the bill with several longer movies, namely Dead and Buried, a 1981 chiller, crime film The Hit and even Nightmare on Elm Street.
The film kicks off with a crane shot of a cricket match being played on an idyllic village green bordered by an apple orchard. The camera slowly drifts across a road towards a zippy wee red sports car parked in the middle of the orchard and onto a young couple kissing on the grass. And then onto a creep spying on them.
This was shot by Peter Jessop, who collaborated frequently with Pete Walker on movies like Frightmare and House of Whipcord, and also even joined the crew of Jamaica’s first ever full length film in 1972, midnight movie favourite The Harder They Come.
His camerawork is very impressive throughout The Orchard End Murder and might just be the best thing about it.
It definitely isn’t the script.
Okay, Pauline Cox (Tracy Hyde) is a 22 year old from Sidcup who takes up the offer of watching her potential new boyfriend Michael (Mark Hardy) play cricket in the Kent countryside. Believe me, I would have definitely have suggested something more exciting myself.
It’s 1966, though apart from Pauline’s leyline dress and Mary Quant hair, director Christian Marnham does little to evoke the period.
Unlike Ray Davies, Pauline doesn’t remotely love the village green. Bored senseless with men aiming balls at wickets – and I can relate to that – she wanders off, coming across the cottage of an eccentric stationmaster (Bill Wallis) whose garden is decorated by garden gnomes, one of which bears a striking resemblance to him.
He invites her in for some tea, and she agrees to join him.
The garden gnome lookalike talks in cliches and the pair engage in some small talk. Their little tête-à-tête comes to an abrupt end with the arrival of hulking and dim-witted Ewen (played by Clive Mantle in his first screen role). He certainly knows how to make an entrance. With a manic glint in his eyes, he stands holding a large white rabbit, which Pauline takes a fancy to.
Suddenly, he slams the poor creature’s head down onto the table, killing it in an instant. He produces a scary looking knife. Outside he skins the dead animal and Pauline finally shows some sense by making her excuses and leaving. Maybe watching cricket wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
And wasn’t Ewen the one spying on Pauline and Mark earlier?
Distraught, she rushes through the orchard, comes across an unseen angry dog, and then bumps into an apologetic Ewen, who in the meantime has filled a fancy basket with apples for her. Quick work.
The pair begin picking more apples and soon they’re kissing, a scenario that is just plain dumb to the point of absolute unbelievability. This is a shame as before too long there’s a very disturbing scene set against piles of rotting apples with both actors performing admirably.
In an accompanying feature on the BFI release, Marnham claims the film is a black comedy. ‘It’s intended to be amusing.’
I can’t say I thought of it in this way as I watched. At no time did I remotely feel like laughing. Yes, the station master’s character could be seen as having something in common with some of the League of Gentlemen regulars but the whole harrowing murder sequence was filmed too realistically for the rest of the story to hold any comedic value for me.
As the credits roll, the usual disclaimer proclaims ‘The story, events and persons portrayed in this production are fictitious, and any similarity between anyone living or dead is purely coincidental’. Yeah sure, the characters may be invented, but the story is based on a real-life murder of a young woman in the South of England some years earlier. A fact that makes the idea of comedy in connection with it even more distasteful.
In conclusion, this isn’t one that I’d recommend, albeit it’s an interesting enough watch if you’re keen on obscure British dramas of the time.
As for Tracy Hyde, I get the feeling she never desperately attempted to pursue a long and sustained career in acting. She did appear in a number of TV series in the 1980s like Dempsey and Makepeace and The Bill, but she dropped out of acting before the dawn of the 1990s and apparently now runs her own business.
She’s interviewed in the BFI Orchard End Murder release but the only time in recent years that she has appeared publically – as far as I can tell – was at a celebrity autograph convention in Blackpool in 2015.
For more on the film click here.
I’ve only belatedly found out about the death of Nicky Wonder (Nick Walusko), a founding member of The Wondermints, an act who also frequently acted as part of Brian Wilson’s backing band. Wonder died on the sixth of August and Wilson praised him as ‘my favourite guitar player ever’.
He formed The Wondermints with Darian Sahanaja in 1992, after they’d bonded over their love of Smile and Brian Wilson in general. As John M. Borack puts it in his book Shake Some Action: ‘The [Wondermints’] Beach Boys influence is particularly up-front on Tracy Hide, a comely, almost ethereal ballad whose evocative lyrics and sweet, sweet melody are both kissed with longing; it’s sure to make any fan of wispy ’60s pop smiley smile.’
The song first appeared on their eponymous debut album of 1996 although I reckon this (cover) version – which appears on Wonderful World of The Wondermints – is even more hauntingly beautiful. See what you think.
Finally, a recent release from Japanese band For Tracy Hyde, who claim to have taken their name from The Wondermints’ song rather then the actress, despite the spelling of their name.
This is 櫻の園, and just as Tracy Hide evokes The Beach Boys at their baroque best, this recently released song displays a distinct late period Cocteau Twins feel.
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