Isn’t it funny how an entire scene from a film can linger in the mind forever, even after the very name of the film itself has faded from your consciousness? This is especially true of films glimpsed in childhood, particularly those screened on television, in the days before digital TV, with it’s fancy info bars, enabled us to know what we are watching at the mere press of a button. Back in them days, if you caught something halfway through, and didn’t have a Radio Times handy, you might not never find out what it was. Ever.

A friend once told me about a scene from a film he had seen on telly once as a kid. In the scene, a London Underground train pulls into a station, only for everyone waiting on the platform to be absolutely stunned when they see that every inch of the entire train, and every one of it’s passengers, have turned bright yellow! Unfortunately, for reasons similar to those mentioned above, my friend couldn’t remember what the film was in which this scene appeared, but I never forgot about his description of it. It sounded so weird, so creepy, so brilliantly eccentric, that I just had to find out what the film in question was.

Asking fellow film fans yielded no answers, and nor did trawling the internet, but one day I did finally stumble upon what I had been referring to as ”The Film With the Scene in Which All the Passengers of a Tube Train Turn Yellow”; by complete chance and in the most unlikely of places, too.

I - like anybody who considers themself a “proper” film fan should be - am a big fan of the films made in collaboration between British director Michael Powell and his Hungarian producer/writing partner, Emeric Pressburger. Responsible for a handful of the most memorable and widely admired films ever made (The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes), I am something of a completist when it comes to the duo, and have seen practically everything they ever made. As well as their celebrated masterpieces, Powell and Pressburger also made a fair few curiosities in their time, especially towards the end of their careers. The most obscure film they ever made, arguably, was their final collaboration, a near impossible to find children’s film called The Boy Who Turned Yellow.

It wasn’t until after I’d paid (way, way) over the odds for an ancient VHS copy of The Boy Who Turned Yellow that it began to dawn on me that it just might be the fabled ”Yellow Tube Train” film itself, so it was with great excitement and anticipation that I sat down to watch it for the first time. And, sure enough, that long searched for scene soon appeared in all it’s barmy, eye-popping glory, and well worth the wait it was too! Just as I had pictured it in my mind all that time, the scene perfectly captured the spirit of the sort of inspired, attention-grabbing, oddly psychedelic fare they used to think it was acceptable to show children in the 60s, 70s and 80s, and is now sadly absent from our cinema and TV screens (the frankly mesmerising In the Night Garden being a possible exception).

As for the rest of The Boy Who Turned Yellow, it might be somewhat cruel to say it, but it isn’t really worthy of a place in the Powell/Pressburger canon. A perfectly passable and pleasant children’s film it is (with the magical power of electricity being harnassed to help a truanting schoolboy find his lost mice in the Tower of London… Hang on, that makes it sound amazing), but that one Tube-based flourish of playful, dreamy visual magic aside, a classic it is definitely not. Still, it was made for the worthy and much-missed Children’s Film Foundation, so you can’t really hold it against the great men for giving it a go. The Boy Who Turned Yellow is also comfortably miles better than Powell’s 1969 solo effort, the turgid sex comedy Age of Consent, which is easily the worst film either man ever put his name to.

I couldn’t find the scene in it’s entirety, sadly, but look below and you can glimpse a sizeable portion of it. This is one of those fan-made music video thingys, in which someone edits a film and puts it to music. But as the music here is Stevie Wonder’s ‘Confusion’, we shouldn’t really complain.

You can see the scene I’ve been rabbiting on about right at the very start. Enjoy!

Do you remember I told you about the fantastic musical collaboration, as scorching as it is unlikely, between Neil Young and Devo? Unfortunately, at the time I told you about it, it had been removed from YouTube, so I couldn’t invite you to take a peek at it.

Well, now it’s back! And for a limited time too, no doubt. So let’s not waste any time in making it today’s Scene of the Day!

The reason that this scene keeps getting snatched back into the void is probably something to do with the fact the film in which it features, Human Highway, is notoriously hard to find. Neil Young is an infamously cagey character, and it’s not hard to imagine him ordering every copy of his directorial debut (in a narrative style, anyway, he had a shot a few concert films previous to this) to be seized and destroyed in order to protect his reputation. You see, on it’s release, Human Highway was mauled by critics, who regarded it as a messy, pretentious failure. And even though he had directed it under his career-long pseudonym, Bernard Shakey, Young still couldn’t escape the blame.

We’re going to ignore that stuffy bunch of critics, however, cos Human Highway is a hoot, and the grumpy ol’ “Godfather of Grunge” has nothing whatsoever to be embarrassed about. In fact, he gives an astoundingly good slapstick (you read that right) performance in the lead as Lionel, a hapless mechanic trying to find love in and around a small town diner. This surreal twist on white picket fence Americana makes Young’s film a close cousin of David Byrne’s True Stories, even if Human Highway isn’t nearly as aesthetically or intellectually rich as the Talking Heads man’s movie. It’s still well worth checking out, though, even if it is just to see Neil Young goofing around in a pair of bottle-thick comedy glasses.

Future Blue Velvet buddies Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell (who co-directed with Young) flesh out the cast in quirky supporting roles, but the real show-stealers are Neil’s fave new wave combo, Devo, who appear as workers in the local nuclear power plant.

This sets the scene for the collaboration in question as Lionel/Neil gets twatted in the head with a spanner and for some reason dreams he is performing a simply blistering version of ‘Hey, Hey, My, My’ with the Devo boys, whose lead singer, Mark Mothersbaugh, is dressed up as his creepy alter-ego, Booji Boy.

Rock ‘n’ Roll may never die, but this clip might well get taken off YouTube again. Rock out while you can!

Couldn’t find a UK poster for Death Line anywhere, so unfortunately the visual accompaniment above is the poster for it’s US release, under the rubbish title of Raw Meat.

Given the sheer scope for subterranean transport-based terror, I think it’s a crying shame that there isn’t a truly classic horror film set in the London Underground. 2004′s vacuously nasty tube tale, Creep, certainly couldn’t be described as anywhere near ”classic”, and neither could 1972′s Death Line, despite boasting as it does today’s Scene of the Day.

Don’t get me wrong, Death Line isn’t a bad film, it’s infinitely better than Creep, for example. It’s just that it’s not deserving of quite the high level of esteem it is sometimes held in on the grounds that it’s not a particularly well put-together film.

Directed by American Gary Sherman (whose only other film of note is the rather good Video Nasty, Dead & Buried), Death Line offers up the cracking premise that the rabid patriarch of a cannibalistic family, descended from underground workers trapped and abandoned in the fictional “Museum” tube station some 60-odd years before, has found a way to pop out onto the platform for some fresh meat, namely groovy Swinging Londoners of the early 70s.

Sherman sadly botches this idea at several turns, however, stumbling out of the traps by blowing the mystery behind the murders a mere 10 minutes in, following police inspector Donald Pleasance’s (oh, yes) investigation into the very first slaying. The film is also overly-concerned with rendering it’s commuter munching monster a touch too sympathetically. This is most obviously apparent in a painfully arduous and amateurish (though, strangely celebrated in some circles) ten-minute tracking shot through the cannibal’s dank lair. There is also the small matter of his supposedly blood-curdling, though in actuality rather hilarious, battlecry of “MIND THE DOORS!!!”

But while Death Line is nowhere near as good as it perhaps could or should have been, it is still a very entertaining watch, and thanks in no small part to the warped novelty that is a byproduct of it’s often cackhanded realisation. Will Malone’s creepy, kinky electronic score will surely linger in the mind for quite some time, but perhaps it’s the raft of kooky performances that prove most memorable. The aforementioned Pleasance is at his playful, waspish best in the lead, while many will recognise Norman Rossington from A Hard Day’s Night, playing his sidekick. Christopher Lee pops up in a near pointless cameo as an MI5 agent, but when I watched it at least, the biggest cheer was reserved for the appearance of Clive Swift AKA Richard from fucking Keeping Up Appearances (I love it when random sitcom staples turn up in 60s/70s British horror films, see also; Paul “Jerry from The Good Life” Eddington in Hammer’s The Devil Rides out and, most unsettling of all, Bill “Compo from Last of the Summer Wine” Owen in Pete Walker’s bonkers slasher, The Comeback).

So, with the sloppiness of Death Line and the actors therein in mind, let’s have a look at the scene in question. The trickiest sequences in horror can often be those leading up to the big fright, the scene in which tension and forebooding often culminates in an attack and bloody murder. The pratfalls are numerous, and many hack directors often manage to kill all that hard-won tension completely by having one of their characters take an unscheduled trip to the toilet, say, or something equally transparent and protracted.

What Gary Sherman chooses to do before a major set-piece triple murder in Death Line, however, is build up tension by inserting the most surreally mundane and awkwardly delivered conversation between two characters in horror history. Unfortunately, no one else seems to love this scene as much as I do, so I couldn’t find a clip solely comprised of it. However, if you kindly fast-forward to exactly 4 minutes in on the Death Line clip below, you will see this bizarre exchange in all it’s glory, right before the hapless conversationalists are bloodily dispatched.

I guarantee you’ll be quoting it for the rest of your life!

Hello again, dear reader. As you may have heard from my dear comrade Aneet, I have been on me holidays recently (two, in fact, sunny Valencia and not-so-sunny Northern Ireland), so I do apologise if you’re feeling as though I have abandoned you like an unwanted infant of late.

However, whilst I was on my travels I got to thinking about how I could keep you lot informed about fantastic films more regular, like. Even when I’m not too busy slurping sangria or gobbling down potato farls, I do like to get somewhat in-depth about my films. Therefore, how could I go about hitting you with some film fun that’s a little bit more fast-paced, and on an (almost) daily basis?

Then it hit me… It’s time for a new feature; Scene of the Day! The cinematic equivalent of Aneet’s awesome Single of the Day, because after all, if you think about it, are “scenes” not to films what “singles” are to albums? OK, don’t think about it too much…

Everyone’s got their favourite scenes, sometimes even regardless of whether they like the film as a whole or not, so from here on in you’re going to find out what some of mine  are (and please tell me about some of your favourites, too). But, what could I do for my inaugral Scene of the Day?

Well, an opening scene would be good, and all very appropriate, to boot. There’s an almost literal infinity of great opening scenes in cinema history, and of those, many feature a great song parping away excitingly over the introductionary action. Sometimes that song is so well chosen, and that piece of music accompanies the opening reel so perfectly, that the two are destined to be forever linked in the celluloid ether (ok, so a song can be memorable in any scene of a film, but opening sequences have the highest strike rate; Reservoir Dogs, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy etc.).

The greatest, most legendary example of this is Mean Streets. Who, after all, can’t hear the heart-stopping opening drum beat of ‘Be My Baby’ without immediately picturing Harvey Keitel’s troubled head falling back on the pillow? More recently, of course, you might also think about the wig-wearing, gun-welding, soiled genius who wrote and produced that song for The Ronettes, but remarkably Phil Spector almost demanded ’Be My Baby’ be taken off the start of Mean Streets.

Seemingly Martin Scorsese had included the girl-group classic in his film without first seeking the necessary permission (a common practise back then; see also the legal nightmare that engulfed Charles Burnett’s similar Killer of Sheep), and when an irate Spector was shown an early release print by none other than John Lennon, he demanded that Warner Bros. pull the whole thing. It was only after Lennon (who dearly loved the film) talked him round that the mole-like mogul relented, and agreed to let the studio continue to distribute the film, but he stayed bitter about it for many years to come. In the warped world of Phil Spector the inclusion of his song was to become solely responsible for the future success of both Scorsese and his young star, Robert De Niro.

That opinion is rather far-fetched, of course, but you can’t deny that Spector’s music and Scorsese’s brilliant use of fuzzy, evocative home movies melded to create the perfect calling card for the director. Scorsese had used music marvellously in film before (check out his underseen debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door), but Mean Streets was to announce him as a hugely influential and pioneering pop-picker.

‘Be My Baby’ serves as the perfect overture to this seminal mob morality tale, perhaps the greatest comi-tragedy (coining a variation on the phrase there, as the former eventually outweighs the latter) ever to take place on New York’s famous “Mean Streets”. As I’m sure you’ve all seen it (and if you haven’t, tut, tut, tut), I’m just going to invite you all to kick back, enjoy, and welcome to Scene of the Day.

All together now… “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Oh, and… “What’s a fuckin’ mook?”