Raymond Blackmore, my protagonist in The Puppets, is (of necessity) a bit loose-leafed and inclined to introspection. Then again, who isn’t a bit ‘semi-detached’ these days? He is the central character in this particular variation of an old story about madness, manipulation and mute despair.
This time around, it features not one, but two ventriloquial figures; Spiro and Zero, who torment Raymond in a malign double act. You will also meet a sophisticated, manipulative impresario named Patrice Bray, and the sweetly enigmatic, but extremely intelligent, Cressida Pepper.
The premise of the tale, the relationship between the unbalanced ventriloquist and his malicious mouthpiece dummy (more properly called a ‘figure’), hasn’t been new for decades. It is still routinely recycled as a psychodrama of the split personality, with its concomitant paranoia and its inevitable descent into madness.
There are numerous examples, although Michael Redgrave’s performance in Dead of Night (1945), in the The Ventriloquist’s Dummy sequence is an obvious influence from an altogether a much deeper tale.
Interestingly, John Baines, the scriptwriter credited with that story is himself a shadowy and elusive figure in cinema history. Is it mere coincidence that Ben Hecht, temporarily blacklisted in Hollywood and working intermittently in England, had previously co-written the script for a previous movie The Great Gabbo (1929). Curiously, it also featured a callous, calculating ventriloquial figure with a disruptive personality of its own.
The location for The Puppets is an out-of-season coastal resort a little down on its luck, and it constitutes a character in itself. It is presented here as an additional source of melancholic antagonism and a secondary strand of homage to an especially English mise-en-scène. It evokes a peculiar kind of disaffection; one that hangs in the air like soul-dampening doubt, and clings to your wet clothing like the creeping mists that drift in from the English Channel.
The third strand of homage is implied more than it is stated, and references the origins of Spiro and Zero themselves. There have been many makers of ventriloquial figures, but only a few whose names are historically synonymous with this peculiar craft. They were often quiet, private men whose work has remained esteemed, respected and valued by the ventriloquial community. Yet they still tend to be obscure, formless personalities in the otherwise extrovert narrative of entertainment history.
I also allude in passing to the legacy of Victorian illusionists such as Maskelyne, Pepper, Dircks, Robert-Houdin and Anderson. All of them applied inventive, scientific minds to solving problems that only existed because they sought a solution to them.
Somehow, I feel that their work is illustrative of a cultural continuum that helps us to better understand what connects us all in common appreciation and unspoken celebration of our short and often bittersweet lives. Perhaps, more importantly, it is one of life’s enduring lessons to see a trick of the mind for what it is; at best a bit of harmless fun, and at worst, an especially nasty sort of manipulation.
T.Ff.
the foggyley book company 