A dank night in London’s Docklands. After clocking off a shift at a nearby magazine, I’d ducked into dinky and wood-pannelled Limehouse pub The Grapes for a jug of Landlord. Waiting for the quiz to start, I heard a gasp from the back room. Rounding the door and padding the corridor in slippers and gown traipsed Sir Ian McKellen. Compering the quiz is an ad hoc predilection of the great actor – it’s his pub – but I was, along with a cohort of shocked tourists, rather starstruck.
It wasn’t the vision of Gandalf, pilfering chips as he drifted towards the bar, that did it. Nor the definitive King Lear, mellifluously barking questions on spaniel breeds. Instead, what startled was the sudden presence of Dr Theodor Cuza: scleroderma riddled Jewish historian and protagonist of The Keep. This 1982 horror flick set in the Second World War was Michael Mann’s maligned second picture, McKellen’s worst ever performance, and one of the more batshit films of the past half century.
A longtime Mann apathist, there’s no revelatory nostalgia to my love of The Keep. It existed ambiently in my life for years before I bothered watching it via its artwork – a woozy blue/purple approximation of the title fashioned into a blocky castle – intermittently popping up on Netflix, subsumed by the platform’s morass of crap. One evening I pressed play, and I’ve been transfixed by the thing since.
On paper, The Keep is objectively fantastic. Visually stupefying, with a fine ensemble cast and a rollicking Tangerine Dream soundtrack, it sees a battalion of tired Nazis diverted from the Russian front to a remote Transylvanian village. Here, they accidentally release a primordial force beneath a bizarre castle, which takes corporeal form as it nobbles the fascists, and must be returned whence it came.
Alongside McKellen, Das Boot’s Jürgen Prochnow plays Wehrmacht captain Klaus Woermann, wracked with contempt for the perversions of the Reich. Gabriel Byrne is the boot-clacking and sadistic Sturmbannführer Erich Kaempffer, sent in to neutralise the village partisans who the German high command supposes are killing Woermann’s troops. Alberta Watson plays Eva Cuza, McKellen’s beleaguered daughter, who falls for Scott Glenn’s Glaeken Trismegistus. The cosmic sentinel and mirror figure to the castle’s malevolent antagonist – Molasar – compelled to sort the whole lurid mess out, Glaeken is the weirdest of the lot. His purple irises are otherworldly, but the contact lenses stymied Glenn’s peripheral vision, so he had to stare dead at his interlocutors. His laboured diction, meanwhile, was the result of Mann‘s fondness for spinning Laurie Anderson records at the time. He instructed Glenn to take on something of her oddball cadences.
Behind the camera, a redoubtable visu…
