Peter Viney's Blog

The Trap
1966

The 60s films revisited series continues… .

1966

Directed by Sidney Hayers
Writer David D. Osborn
Music by Ron Goodwin with Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

CAST
Oliver Reed – La Bete
Rita Tushingham – Eve

with
Rex Sevenoaks- The Trader
Barbara Chollcott – The Trader’s Wife
Jon Granik – No Name
Merv Campone – Yellow Dog

How did this one come to join the list? Karen has a long fascination with books about pioneer everyday life in North America. Willa Cather, of course, The Little House On The Prairie, then there was the TV series where three families had to build log cabins, fence land, plant food, cut logs and were then judged on whether they would survive winter in the Rockies: answer, none of them would. So she’s been reading Ruffles on My Longjohns by Isabel Edwards, on the pioneer experience in 1930s British Columbia. She said it reminded her of The Trap which she saw in 1966, and which she recalled in surprising detail. I’d never seen it.

The book that inspired us to watch it

It’s a Rank Organization film, with filming in 1965 divided between British Columbia locations, a Vancouver studio, Scotland and Pinewood Studios, and you can see the joins in places.

News that the red-haired lady is for sale excites La Bete (Oliver Reed). The mute Eve (Rita Tushingham) looks on disapprovingly.

We start in a small town where the steamship comes but rarely, this time bearing mail order brides. One middle aged tearful woman is left over and goes up for the highest bidder for $700. Enter La Bete, a French-Canadian trapper played by Oliver Reed, and beastly he is. He speaks only a pidgin grunt with some reference to French-Canadian (though he pronounces Quebec in English). Excited by the bidding, he offers $1000 for her, unaware that bidding has ceased.

The trader’s wife (Barbara Chilcott) decides to cash in and sell him the mute girl, Eve.

So a woman (I assume the “trader’s wife”) offers to sell their mute serving girl to him. This is Rita Tushingham as Eve, and it must have been relaxing to play the part as she has not a line to learn in the entire film. Eve was struck dumb when Native Americans … hang on, it was1966 so they said “Injuns” … raped and murdered her family in Montana, in which order I’m not sure. What with her being dumb, and La Bete being extremely inarticulate, dialogue is not the film’s strongpoint.

The call of the wild …

Right … from that point it’s virtually a two person Oliver and Rita show. The Beast whisks her off in his canoe to his log cabin where he snuffles and inhales bits of meat while she has to sleep on the floor. He swigs rum from a gallon flagon, which presumably has to last him the winter.  I did wonder about the light canoe and how he carried enough ammunition and rum to last the winter in it. She resists all attempts at intercourse.

He teaches her all about fur trapping. She’s a little squeamish about shooting animals, but finally manages to kill a deer.

Yellow Dog and No Name attack her. I don’t know which one was No Name because they never mentioned their names.

While he’s off on one such excursion, two nasty (and inarticulate) Injuns turn up, No Name and Yellow Dog. They’re an unpleasant pair traumatized by their awful names perhaps. They decide to tie her up and presumably to have their wicked way with her, but the Beast returns and dispatches both of them in short order.

At one point he gets cheerful and dances and plays harmonica, and she dances too. He thinks, ‘Ah, this is the moment …’ but she resists him at knifepoint.

The Beast having fun with harmonica …

… forcing Eve to defend her virtue with a Bowie knife …

So he’s off trapping. They have a problem with cougars … Eve got chased by one. Being distracted by a cougar, he puts his foot in one of his own bear traps. In the most exciting sequence he struggles back to the cabin, attacked by a pack of wolves (or possibly well-trained Alsatian dogs at Pinewood studios). Whichever, with several of them going for him at the same time, I’d be worried about even well-trained stunt dogs reverting to wild nature.

The canine attack is brilliantly done

He sends her off to find an Injun village where there will be help, and we see her (or a double in heavy furs) trek across snow, ankle deep, then waist deep, then shoulder deep. She gets to the Injun village and climbs into a lodge through the smokehole to find a frozen dead body.

The Indian Lodge … Rita Tushingham in the snow

If only the Injuns had waited 100 years or so for global warming! I wondered if this was an exceptional winter because you’d think that as locals they’d be equipped to survive it,

No matter, off she goes back to the Little Log Cabin On The Lake (not a sequel to The little House On The Prairie.) His leg has had it and gone green. She will have to amputate it with an axe and only a mouthful of rum is left.

Action with a chopper. My leg! Make sure it’s my leg … Lobby card gave the game away

He recovers, and he gets quite sentimental about wanting children. Not in an articulate way, more along ‘Me want children’ line.  After a night of intimacy,  she decides to flee his attentions to the town in the canoe. We’re told that she spent two months recovering and lost the child she was carrying. We see her set up for marriage to a chap with an elaborate hairstyle, but memories of the big chopper in the log cabin (!) cause her to go back and find him with his wooden peg hopping about. His final lovable line is “Clean house, woman!” No wonder she returned.

Overall? It stands up surprisingly well. We can tell some of her canoeing through rapids is back projection, but even so it gives a sense of time and place, if not language.  The location photography is stunning at times. They avoid the obvious cliché of her speech returning too, which I was waiting for. Rita Tushingham has “the face” for it … The Knack and Dr Zhivago come to mind. Oliver Reed is a natural for playing a macho, inarticulate trapper who drinks rum from the flagon and looks as if he was last washed shortly after he was born.

Halliwell’ Film Guide sums it up fairly:

Primitive open air melodrama with good action sequences; well-made but hardly endearing.

SOUNDTRACK

Ron Goodwin with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. I saw several of their Christmas concerts, and in 1966 I used to go to see the BSO a lot. I knew nothing about the soundtrack. It’s all good. The cover pictures suggest a far bigger cast.

The Trap much later became the theme tune for BBC’s London Marathon coverage.

DVD TRANSFER is awful. You can either get Panavision with a long narrow box on the sceen surrounded on four sides by huge borders, or switch to 4:3 TV picture shape with wide bars either side, but at least you can see people. Someone should have re-formatted it to normal widescreen.

RITA TUSHINGHAM

A Taste of Honey (1961)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
The Trap (1966)

THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …

A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)