Hammer Glamour: Classic Images from the Archives of Hammer Films
Author: Marcus Hearn. Design: Martin Stiff. Publisher: Titan Books, London.
Price $29.95. Publication Date: September 25th 2009.
Specifications: 9in x 11.6in, 160pp, Color.
There was a time, back in the mid-1970s, when the only available book on Hammer Films was Lorrimer Publishing's The House of Horror: The Story of Hammer Films, edited by Allan Eyles, Robert Adkinson and Nicholas Fry. With forewords by Michael Carreras, Terence Fisher, Christopher Lee, and Peter Cushing, the book was published in 1973, just as the studio began its decline - it was so current that a note at the beginning states: "The title of Dracula is Alive and Well and Living in London has been changed to The Satanic Rites of Dracula." Mostly in black and white, with one color signature at the center, the book introduced many a happy 16 year old to the delights of Ingrid Pitt, Yutte Stensgaard, and the Collinson twins in various stages of undress.
Since then, we've had Jack Hunter's House of Horror: The Complete Hammer Films Story, a 1994 revision of the Lorrimer book (updated in 2000), the appositely titled Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography by Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio in 1995 (an update is promised); Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes' officially sanctioned The Hammer Story in 1997 (updated in 2007), Wayne Kinsey's outstanding two part Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years (2002) and Hammer Films: The Elstree Studio Years (2007); and A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer from former graphic designer Denis Meikle in 2008, among others.
Recently, as a direct offshoot of all this activity, new titles have tended to delve more deeply into specific areas, Hammer Film Scores and the Musical Avant-Garde by David Huckvale looks closely at composer James Bernard and his colleagues, placing their work in the context of the European modernism, while Hammer Films - A Life In Pictures: The Visual Story of Hammer Films by Wayne Kinsey concentrates on little seen images from the Hammer archives, uncovered when they were donated to the British Film Institute.
Now we come full circle to Hammer Glamour, Marcus Hearn's sumptuously illustrated hymn to the genius of the Carreras family and producer Aida Young for finding starlets at the right point in their careers and making them into global icons. From Raquel Welch, pushing back her hair in a fur bikini, through the wide-eyed innocence of pneumatic cover girl Madeline Smith, to Ingrid Pitt and Valerie Leon's lustful pouts, Hearn goes beyond the stunning photographs to the background detail behind them, including one story involving a resentful Welch, shot by Pierre Luigi amid sulphur bomb smoke on the Canary Islands, returning home to find that she'd become an international superstar a mere six or seven weeks later.
Any minor quibbles – no room for Dana Gillespie (The Lost Continent) or Pippa Steel (The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire) – are more than made up for by Hearn's erudite, in-depth text giving details of the actress's work with Hammer and their careers afterwards and the aforementioned images which, for better or worse, sit at the more chaste end of the spectrum.
Highly recommended for all fans of Hammer films and old-school glamour in general. Available for $19.77 from amazon.com
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