A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO ASSEMBLING THE PERFECT TV CREAM FILM

4 - THE CONCEIT

Well, we've got a serviceable front end on our ideal film now, so we can't really put this off any longer. We're going to have to fish about for a decent conceit, a basic plot type we can sand down, oil up and festoon with characters, dialogue and what we film academics call "stuff like that", in a homely "Build the Red Baron`s fighter plane" way. But where to start? It's important - if you haven't built on solid foundations, you could end up in a whole heap of trouble - just ask Wes Anderson. In our usual milk-and-potatoes manner, we're going to take as read fancy stuff like classical allusions, social critiques and "it's a metaphor for the Vietnam War"-style credibility-adding trappings, and strip our fave films to the basic chassis of the plot, and more specifically the often amazingly contrived conceit that sets up the plot in the first twenty or so minutes of the film, allowing the subsequent action to spool smoothly out according to the needs and taste of the filmmakers. So, let's sally forth into the many and varied mechanical plot contrivances available to the film scribe, and see which model most consistently tickles our fancy.

First and perhaps most brazen of these conceits is the unbidden zany scheme - you know, the ones that say "Look, bear with us here, we've got shenanigans aplenty coming up, we just need to get this tiresome set-up out of the way first". At the risk of including AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS for the third time running in this feature, we have to point out that Jules Verne was the master of this sort of thing - "I'll wager that you can't go off round the world and get into enough exciting scrapes to conveniently fill a novel!" Its all-star comedy spin-off set the ball rolling for a spate of similarly wafer- thin premises - MAGNIFICENT MEN, MONTE CARLO OR BUST, IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD, TRADING PLACES, and the like, all shamelessly contriving their structure in the first twenty minutes before proceeding to do exactly what they say on the tin, or rather the elaborately-animated title sequence.

Also Verne-pioneered is the "look, there's an evil genius who gets his money from - cough - somewhere, who wants to destroy the world. Don't ask how" conceit, from Captain Nemo and the Creamguide- favoured airborne daftness of MASTER OF THE WORLD, in which multi- millionaire mastermind Robur (Vincent Price in hearty goatee) aims for world peace by bombing boats from his odd-looking dirigible, as Charles Bronson and pals go after him. With this sort of plot you're set up for a good mid-film hour or so of "penetrating the evil fortress" folderol, with henchmen/monsters/pitfalls aplenty on the way, just about getting away with an episodic series of sketches. Your JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH (Ooh, Verne again! Father of action cinema or what?), your Bond films by and large (YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE probably has the largest dollop of this stuff), STAR WARS rather inevitably, and a goodly percentage of Spielbergiana like RAIDERS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS all go for the "trespassing on scary land" excitement-builder. Of course, if you get bored with it by half time, you can always change ends, and make the characters have to escape again. You can even tart it up with some existentialist trappings if you like, cf APOCALYPSE NOW, but it's still the same old plot warhorse underneath.

Another pleasingly stupid one-by-one linear plot is the "themed serial killer" - you know, the one who, for some reason, just can't help peppering his murders with handy clues as to the next one, and gets in some grandiose "story arc" to the killings to boot - and gives no reason at all! And why should he? He's, well, mad. From silly, silly European comedy WHO IS KILLING THE GREAT CHEFS OF EUROPE? (chefs knocked off in the style of their signature dishes) to modern stuff like the over-long, over-serious, underlit SEVEN, it's a lovely device when done with just the right amount of style and wit, and a clunky "look, this would never happen!" pain in the arse when presented as a po-faced clever-clever piece of "Chinese puzzle" sombre theatre. The best of these? It's a toss-up between the excellent THEATRE OF BLOOD (lambasted ham actor offs various members of the catcalling critic's circle in the manner of various Shakespeare plays, because... well, he's an actor) and THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (deformed widower surgeon kills the various doctors who didn't save his wife in the manner of various biblical plagues, because... well, you've got to have a system!) The fact both these films feature one Vincent Price as the perpetrator should in to way be taken as a signifier of our cripplingly tiny spectrum of cinematic interest - there are plenty of those elsewhere in this article.

The Quatermassian radioactive/chemical attack producing a progressively debilitating disease has to rank among the cheekiest of "will this do?" ready-made premises, but like Plutonium, what matters is how you handle the stuff, determining whether you end up with the rather nifty THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN or the rather niffy THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN. The "science fiction short story strung out a bit with a couple of action scenes and maybe a romantic subplot of sorts" thrift store vibe is there in abundance. Of course, in Cronenberg's prosthetic hands, the teleportation fingernail-shedding decline of THE FLY becomes a metaphor for AIDS (or was it cancer?) while still conveniently serving as the same old default plot progression tool as it did when David Hedison, scientist nephew of Vincent Price ("House!") was driven to press his own vomit-slurping head in the straightforward original. But the very fact writers feel compelled to load this creaky old warhorse up with baggage to get it out of the paddock these days (see also the "consumerist satire" of THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING WOMAN) suggests this might be too much of a morceau d'urine for us to start sticking decals on.

If you fancy something a tad more challenging than that, though, with a possible side-order of Cold War metaphoric fun, some guaranteed weirdness and a handy obviating of the need to come up with a proper, satisfactory ending to the damn thing, may we recommend the Paranoia Plotline? With this little fella installed at the top end of your script, you can throw all manner of oddball characters, outrageous sets and wibbly interludes at your hero, armed safely with your "Ah, but perhaps he's imagining this bit all along, eh?" Get Out of Continuity Free card. All responsibilities thrown to the wind, this genre turns out to be a lot of fun, with such larks as THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST, BRAZIL and THE STUNT MAN among its ranks. On the arthouse side of things, Peter O'Toole's toff tumbles off his cross in THE RULING CLASS, demented German Amazon wish list AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD sees conquistador Klaus Kinski go out of his mind on a slow raft to Macchu Picchu with a couple of dozen monkeys for company, while Anthony Perkins pegs it all over the place in an expressionist East European concrete hell in Orson Welles' top rank THE TRIAL, almost certainly the high water mark of this wayward format. Mind you, even that sort of peters out and ends with an explosion in lieu of any proper resolution (although to be fair, Franz Kafka didn't get round to penning one in his original story either). We love these sorts of films, but the abnegation of plot duty - at the climax of most of these, you half expect Kenny Everett to bound into view beaming "Well, that's the end of the show!" - means we can't really plump for this one.

So let's nip swiftly away from the door marked "indulgence", pare back the excess and keep things minimal. Discipline is the half- brother of great art, and all that twaddle, so how about taking all the hither and thither out of the film and locking the characters up together? Thoughtful, ruminative, like. No end of serious-minded think-ins to choose from in this category, from Peter Sellers mini- budget underground prisoner of war harrower THE BLOCKHOUSE (no daylight, plenty of booze, drunken sobbing, suicide etc.) through to UNMAN, WITTERING AND ZIGO (schoolmaster David Hemmings is threatened with murder by his evil class, heavy air of menace hangs over everything, film's cult status goes through the roof). For the less theatrically inclined, plenty of sci-fi takes this isolated route, from SOLARIS (endless Soviet mental musings in ricketty space lab) through SILENT RUNNING (heartbreaking tiny robots save the trees) to the hopeless SATURN 3 (tiny-headed horny robot goes after Farrah Fawcett, falls in pool of slime, Martin Amis sheepishly pockets cash). And it constitutes the biggest and best portion of JAWS too - no rubber fins, no dolly zooms on the beach, no corpses peeking through portholes, no wholesome kids arguing about Cheerios, just three mismatched blokes comparing scars and getting their hands burned by raffia rope - that's the game of golf for us.

But if that's a bit too restrictive, then what? Bung everything in the pot and see what happens, perhaps? It worked in DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER, a handy gazetteer of Bond plots thus far, all mixed up in a bucket with the fried eggs on top. Yep, it's cross-genre pollination gone loopy, where disbelief suspension reaches Isambard Kingdom Brunel-esque heights. If it's not the result of a Hollywood studio committee meeting gone wrong (as it is in a lot of the Bonds) it's yer 'maverick visionaries', ("Knights of the magic-al light!") scripting up a smorgasbord. Just about any Alex Cox film could be stuffed in this category, and REPO MAN's as all over the place as any. But as far as we know, only one film manages to plunge itself into the pick-'n'-mix plot pantechnicon, go all the way through to insanity, then pull back to a meaningful ending at the last possible moment - BRAZIL, of course, with the last 30 seconds (which, inevitably, the Americans wanted to cut out) upending everything that took place in the mish-mash of the previous half hour or so. Nice, if you can pull it off.

A lot of these plots tend towards the episodic - the repetitive, even - and quite often, no amount of fancy trimming will obscure the steady chunter-chunter of that plot dynamic slowly thudding away beneath the characters' feet. So what about plots which actively embrace the artificiality of the scene-by-scene film? Outright portmanteau films (which are a different kettle of fish really) aside, one unashamedly vignette-heavy type of film is the ensemble character piece, which sets up the various disparate characters' plot strands and switches between them to keep interest up, contriving to bring them together at the end in a one big all-in resolution - if you're lucky. All the CARRY ONs follow this path, with the odd-job themed ...REGARDLESS being perhaps the most brazen, as well as other all-star Britcoms like the well nigh directionless THE BEDSITTING ROOM, where the characters barely interact with each other at all (this also ties in with the radioactive disease plot), or the scavenger hunt-themed YOU MUST BE JOKING! in which Terry-Thomas puts Bernard Cribbins, Denholm Elliot and Lionel Jeffries through various initiative tests, including a proto-beastie Boys theft of Rolls- Royce bonnet ornaments. A genre within this genre is the inheritance romp, which uses the diktats of an eccentric will to enforce the characters on their respective ways, leaving the lure of cash to provide motivation. The many incarnations of BREWSTER'S MILLIONS, a hardy perennial of a plotline if ever there was one, or Hugh Griffith running Alistair Sim and George Cole ragged in the underrated LAUGHTER IN PARADISE (which was recycled in the grim legacy of Reginald Perrin, but schtumm on that one, if you'd be so kind).

There is a rare and special sub-strain of even this arch format, however, which manages to slyly dig at the repetitive nature of itself along the way. We're going, of course, to mention SILVER STREAK here, and, yes, Gene Wilder's best "not again!" despairing expression is put to good use as detrainment follows detrainment, the plot advancing as slowly as the titular express does rapidly. Time travel almost inevitably rears its ugly head when you start referring back to matters temporal, but wittily done stuff like BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE and, best of all, TIME BANDITS manage to bridge the gap between proper, grown-up narrative film and pissabout sketch show with consummate ease. However, for our money, possibly the most knowing, smart and unique plot conceit in modern filmdom has to be - yes - GROUNDHOG DAY. The ultimate "run with me here, won't you?" wink-wink plot (no attempt is made to explain Bill Murray's entrapment, and, of course, none is required), it's arch, knockabout, warm, witty, clever and stupid all at the one time. We've never met anyone who doesn't love it. In fact, so many writerly cakes are had and eaten on the way to the genuinely heartwarming conclusion that there can't be a scriptwriter alive who hasn't watched this film with a mounting sense of "Why the hell didn't I think of that?", so we have no hesitation in nicking this plot conceit as the one to go toward our Creamguide Perfect Film. How Nat Cohen manages to shoehorn a cartoon Rodney Dangerfield into it is another matter entirely, of course.

Red Skelton takes the plunge in the introductory montage for Magnificent Men (which has more plot that the actual film).

"Set the controls to... episodic!" At The Earth's Core tunnels under its own narrative conceit.

Lavishly-tooled schemes and clockwork plotting n The Abominable Dr Phibes.

Journey to the centre of madness with heavyweight German oddness Aguirre, Wrath of God.

Sir Rich's disease is about all that progresses in The Bed-Sitting Room.

Perfection, courtesy Danny Rubin, from Groundhog Day.