PETE WALKER
INTERVIEW WITH PETE WALKER
by Will Hodgkinson
Pete Walker gave British cinema cannibal housewives, homicidal priests and teen pimps - and what did it give him in return? Piles.
Pete Walker doesn't look like a corrupter of youth. The former film director, who tormented both critics and the moral majority in the late 1960s and 70s with a series of self-financed sex and horror movies, is currently preoccupied with the fact that his rather foolish dog has scampered off somewhere in a panic, quite possibly as a reaction to having his home invaded by a journalist from a liberal newspaper. "If you were from the Daily Mail, this would never have happened!" shouts Walker in a panic, as his wife conducts an emergency search for their confused pet. "Our dog is clearly a Tory. He must have heard the Guardian was coming."
Thankfully, the dog returns and calm is restored. In 1982 Walker gave up making B-movies - whose titles included House of Whipcord and Frightmare - for the more lucrative business of buying and restoring cinemas. Now he is a model of respectability, with a house in a smart Surrey cul-de-sac large enough to indulge his passion for Victorian slot machines. He doesn't miss the old life. "Every time I made a picture, I'd get piles," he says. "I haven't suffered from those kind of ailments since 1982."
Walker made his name with films that hooked in audiences with sex and violence before testing their limits by turning pillars of the establishment into objects of fear and ridicule. In 1974's House of Whipcord, a judge and a disgraced prison warden subject beautiful young women to imprisonment, torture and even execution for what they imagine are their loose morals. In 1976's The Confessional, a sin-obsessed priest turns the sacraments into weapons of murder. "I was really hoping to get into trouble on that one," sighs Walker. "I mean, he kills people with a communion wafer, which is meant to be the body of Christ in Catholicism. I made that film because I went to a Catholic school where hellfire and damnation were rammed down my throat. I was waiting for a blasphemy charge from the Vatican. But it never came."
Walker came from what he calls the "kick, bollock and scramble" school of film-making, where there's not much concern for such high-minded concepts as quality and taste. Born in 1939 to a chorus girl and a music-hall comedian, he learned his craft making TV commercials in the mid-60s before seeing a window of opportunity. Walker gambled on making independent films on a very low budget. Guessing that there were enough young people out there who would pay to satisfy their naive curiosity about the opposite sex, he borrowed some money from the Pall Mall branch of Lloyds bank and shot his first feature, I Like Birds, over eight days in 1968. It turned a profit and he kept going in a similar vein for the next 15 years.
"I was the uninvited guest to the British film industry. Nobody wanted to know me," says Walker, in a tone that suggests a certain amount of pride. "I knew I wanted to make films, but I would see these serious-looking guys going around with scripts under their arm, spending three or four years trying to get their films made. I couldn't be like that - I had to make a living and I wanted to get behind a camera and shout "action". So I would go out and shoot something like School for Sex - God, that was a terrible film - and a few weeks later every cinema in the country would be showing it."
The first film to make an impact was 1969's Cool It Carol, in which a teenage couple leave their Midlands village to gatecrash the twilight days of swinging London. Before long the boy has pimped out his girlfriend, but rather than drag the couple down into a decline as a punishment for their permissiveness Walker sends them back to rural safety and happy domesticity, turning the whole saga into a jolly romp. It was the first sign of the mischievousness that was to colour his later films, and it infuriated critics at the time.
"Cool It Carol was based on a true story I had read in the News of the World," he explains. "But I gave it a happy ending, which annoyed everyone because apparently I was encouraging people to be promiscuous. I just saw it as pragmatic. Strangely enough, Cool It Carol did get quite good reviews and some critics even called it a serious piece of film-making. I think that's going too far, but it was certainly cynical: Swinging London was coming to an end and the film was showing that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be."
In the early 1970s, Walker moved into horror. Then he discovered his ace in the hole: a sweet old Scottish jobbing actress called Sheila Keith who had an uncanny ability for playing depraved maniacs. Their working partnership began in 1974 with Frightmare. Keith takes the role of Dorothy Yates, a middle-class, tweed-clad, Home Counties mother of two whose thatched cottage holds a dark secret: her insatiable appetite for human flesh. In House of Whipcord, she plays a sadistic prison warden whose repressed lesbianism has driven her to torture beautiful young women for kicks. In The Confessional she steals the show as a one-eyed housekeeper and partner in crime to the film's murderous priest.
"Sheila Keith was a lady who lived a quiet life with her dogs and her cats and came into work to do, brilliantly, whatever was asked of her," says Walker. "She was like your nice old aunt who would serve you cucumber sandwiches before ripping into a dismembered limb - without complaining."
Sheila Keith
Keith specialised in depraved characters who committed acts of extreme brutality while sermonising on the virtues of a good and moral life. She came to symbolise the running theme through all of Walker's films: the abuse of authority. "At any given time at my school, 50% of the masters had their hands down boys' trousers," he claims. "Prison wardens must have an in-built sadism, otherwise why would they do that job? Judges do a holier-than-thou act every day. How dare these people pontificate to the rest of us? They're getting off on it!"
Walker then launches into a tirade against Tony Blair, Catholic priests, Mary Whitehouse and pretty much every authority figure who has ever lived. Once he calms down, I point out that House of Whipcord begins with a dedication "to those who are disturbed by today's lax moral attitudes, and eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment", which rather goes against his libertine philosophy. "I worked with a great writer called Freddie Shaughnessy," says Walker, reclining into an anecdotal position in his armchair. "He was an Eton-educated pillar of the establishment - the Queen's first boyfriend, actually - and he gave me some very good advice: never let them know which side you are on."
Nobody could accuse Walker of toeing the party line. The evil authority figures in his films usually get away with it, and the heroes and heroines almost always die. Walker stopped making films when, aged 41, he felt the cries of outrage begin to wane. He only became aware of the cult surrounding the films two years ago, after being invited to give a Q&A in front of 500 students and being asked about the subliminal themes of Frightmare and Cool It Carol. Did his films have hidden depths? "Of course they didn't. But recently I had to record commentary for the DVD releases, so I saw the films for the first time since making them, and you know what? They're not as bad as I thought. But searching for hidden meaning ... they were just films. All I wanted to do was create a bit of mischief."
- Friday March 11, 2005, The Guardian
