A book written with passion and devotion but perhaps too much detail. No one can fault Kinsey’s research but it feels very “cut and pastey” – slabs of censorship reports and interviews put in. The censorship stuff is interesting - particularly the challenges faced by the lesser known films made by Hammer such as Never Take Candy from a Stranger, and the swashbucklers and war films (I also love how the censorship readers felt obligated to pass artistic judgement on the movies); but it might have been better served as an appendix in the back.
The book concentrates as the title suggests on Hammer’s life at Bray, although not all the films covered were shot there. There are some diagrams and pictures – after having read the book on Errol Flynn’s house at Mulholland I felt that might have been a better format, colour pictures and lots of them, than what is used here. Or a straight up encyclopedia. Still it’s a fresh approach.
I don’t want to be overly-critical: I enjoyed the book and will no doubt be flicking through it in years to come. Full of useful information and great stories: the ship collapsing on The Devil Ship Pirates, the joys of doing a nude scene with Susan Denberg during Frankenstein Created Women, the over-amiable dog on Hound of the Baskervilles.
A worthy companion to Marcus Hearn's books and the Johnson/del Vecchio encyclopedia.
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