Inspector Morse: The Wench is Dead (1998)

Following on from the appearance of ‘The Bell Ringers‘, here’s another of Charles Ahrens’s coin-operated machines.

This one is a little more ghoulish; it takes the form of the front wall of a prison, through the door of which we get to watch a condemned prisoner being hanged.

Just as ‘The Bell Ringers’ fitted perfectly with the catholic sensibilities of Graham Greene’s story in Brighton Rock, ‘The Executioner’ suits the themes of The Wench is Dead, one of the later episodes of Inspector Morse, which sees the Oxford detective re-examining a 19th century murder which resulted in the hanging of two men—wrongly, according to Morse.

Gregory's Girl (1981)

Wandering around in the background of Bill Forsyth’s charming comedy is a lost boy in a penguin costume. He doesn’t serve any part in the story, and his presence is something of a mystery.

In an interview with The Times, Forsyth explained that the idea came from watching someone at Abronhill High school, where the film was shot, carrying a papier-mâché head down a corridor “and no one batting an eyelid; a school is a place where anything can happen.”

Inside the suit was Christopher Higson, son of production manager Peter Higson. It seems to have been his only credited acting role, but rumour has it that he went on to be a model-maker for the Lord of the Rings films.

Went the Day Well? (1942)

There is a rumour going around that Christopher Lee makes a very early appearance in the 1942 war film Went the Day Well? The rumour seems to have originated with the IMDb listing for the film, which features the actor in an uncredited part.

Given that the film was made several years before his first generally recognised credit, and that even posters on his official website are sceptical, it’s probably safe to say that, went the day well or ill, it almost certainly went without Christopher Lee.

There is also the possibility that it’s somebody else of the same name; the IMDb listing appears to have been amended to support this theory.

The Twilight Zone: Where is Everybody? (1959)

In the first episode of The Twilight Zone, airman Mike Ferris stumbles around a deserted town, unable to either recall who he is, or work out where everybody else has gone.

The town itself should have been familiar to him, though perhaps not as much as it is to film viewers today. The episode was filmed in the Universal Studios backlot known today as Courthouse Square. The set was built in 1948 for An Act of Murder, and by the time this Twilight Zone episode had been filmed, it had already been used for the Ma & Pa Kettle films, as well as B-movies It Came from Outer Space and Tarantula (compare the picture above with the second photo in our post about Tarantula).

The square was later used in To Kill a Mockingbird (which led to it being known temporarily as Mockingbird Square), and in the eighties it appeared in Knight Rider and Gremlins and, most famously, the Back to the Future films, which gave it its current name. You can see the courthouse itself in the still below, albeit without the clock tower: like many features of the square, the clock has come and gone as needed by the various productions.

Brighton Rock (1947)

In Brighton Rock, just before gangster Pinkie Brown goes to record his charming gramophone message for new wife Rose, we see Rose operating a slot machine.

The machine, apparently (and logically) called ‘The Bell Ringers’, was operated by dropping in an old English penny, and played a short mechanical performance of figures in a church ringing bells.

‘The Bell Ringers’ was designed by German Charles Ahrens, a well-known name in the world of penny arcades. His model ‘The Executioner’ turned up in The Wench is Dead, an episode of Inspector Morse.

These moving models are now highly collectable, and there are several museums that specialise in them. National Jukebox have restored a broken-down Bell Ringers, and there’s a short video of it in action below.