The Deadly Bees

The Deadly Bees is a 1966 British horror–thriller film based on H.F. Heard's 1941 novel A Taste for Honey.^[1] It was directed by Freddie Francis, and stars Suzanna Leigh, Guy Doleman, and Frank Finlay.^[2] It was released theatrically in the United States in 1967 and was featured in a 1998 episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.^[3]

Heard's novel, which was a sort of Sherlock Holmes pastiche, had been previously adapted for television as a 60-minute drama episode of The Elgin Hour: Season 1, Episode 11 under the title "Sting of Death" (22 February 1955), starring Boris Karloff as the detective character from Heard's novel, Mr Mycroft.^[4] According to H.F. Heard's official website, kinescopes of this TV dramatization survive, and, in 2014, it was made commercially available for home video as one of several features in a DVD, released by Synergy Entertainment, titled Sherlock Holmes - The Archive Collection - Volume One.^[5][6]

Plot

The film opens with two men from an unnamed ministry commenting on a spate of letters from a beekeeper claiming to have developed a strain of killer bees. They dismiss him as a lunatic, though his letters claim he will start killing people if he is not taken seriously.

Meanwhile, pop singer Vicki Robbins (Suzanna Leigh) collapses from exhaustion on television, and is sent to recuperate in a cottage on Seagull Island. The reason for this is that her doctor knows Ralph Hargrove. The proprietors of the "rest home" are a depressed and disgruntled couple, Ralph and Mary Hargrove (Guy Doleman and Catherine Finn). Ralph is a beekeeper, as is his neighbor, H.W. Manfred (Frank Finlay).

Vicki begins noticing a spate of mysterious happenings. Mary Hargrove's dog and later Mary herself are attacked by the bees and killed, leading Vicki to suspect Hargrove. She and Manfred begin to snoop around. Manfred keeps his bees in an apiary within his home, behind a pair of doors which open to view the bees. He claims to control them via a tape-recording of a high note made by a death's head moth, of which the bees are afraid. He encourages her to search through Hargrove's papers. In doing this, she finds that Hargrove has managed to isolate "the smell of fear" into a liquid form. Manfred tells her this must mean that Hargrove has been baiting the bees with this substance.

Vicki's snooping methods do not go unnoticed; she soon gets attacked by bees in her room at the cottage. She eventually escapes to Manfred's house, where she decides to stay until she can catch the next boat off the island. Manfred begins acting suspiciously, so Vicki decides to do some more of her own detective work. She discovers his secret laboratory, which leads him to admit that he indeed is the one who has been causing this all along. He tells Vicki he has been intending to kill Hargrove all along, but now that she knows the secret, he will have to kill her too.

She thwarts his attempt, leading him to be stung to death and crash through the stair-rail,and her to set the house on fire. She escapes the burning house, and leaves the island the next day just as someone in a bowler hat from the ministry finally arrives to investigate the deaths.

Cast

• Suzanna Leigh as Vicki Robbins
• Frank Finlay as H.W. Manfred
• Guy Doleman as Ralph Hargrove
• Catherine Finn as Mary Hargrove
• John Harvey as Thompson
• Michael Ripper as David Hawkins
• Anthony Bailey as Compere
• Tim Barrett as Harcourt
• James Cossins as Coroner
• Frank Forsyth as Doctor
• Katy Wild as Doris Hawkins
• Greta Farrer as Sister
• Gina Gianelli as Secretary
• Michael Gwynn as Dr. George Lang
• Maurice Good as Agent

The television sequence toward the beginning features a performance by British pop group The Birds (not to be confused with American group The Byrds). The group's lead guitarist is Ronnie Wood, later of The Faces and The Rolling Stones and the sequence was filmed on 14 January 1966 at Shepperton Studios.

Production

Though the script was originally adapted from Heard's novel by noted author Robert Bloch, best known for Psycho, critics invariably derided the film, citing its uninspired acting, ludicrous special effects (including plastic flies glued to actors' faces to show them being "stung"), and continuity errors.

Bloch blamed the film's poor showing on the fact he wrote it for Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff (to reprise his performance from the TV version), who were both unavailable due to scheduling difficulties; and on the fact that director Freddie Francis and writer Anthony Marriott had decided to 'improve' Bloch's script. Bloch had written the screenplay featuring Mr Mycroft from Heard's novel; this character was now removed under instruction from Amicus. According to Bloch: "I still felt the story and characters strong enough to warrant preservation, and tried to retain as much of the basic plot and atmosphere as possible, working with a synopsisation Milton Subotsky provided...I did put my kindly old villain in a wheelchair - which made the part right for Boris Karloff of course - and my red herring character was designed for Christopher Lee. But while the producers were away (or so I've been told) the director decided to improve my work; besides, Karloff and Lee were too expensive anyway...My concept was a far cry from what emerged as Frank Finlay's part. When the script was re-written the result was, in my opinion, a hybrid affair with no inner consistency or logical story-line: the bees were menacing but the characters were not. I'm sure that if Freddie Francis and I could have sat down together and discussed our disparate approaches we might well have come to an agreement which could have resulted in a stronger film; unfortunately, that wasn't feasible...as with Caligari and The Couch, I shudder every time this item is mentioned or shown...Everything in pre-production had been planned for it, and they didn't have the money to scrap all the preproduction sets, so they had to go ahead with it that way. That came off I think rather badly. This is no reflection on Anthony Marriott, the writer who took my script over there and did the rewrites, He did what he was told, and I'm sure he's very competent man, but it didn't come off in the slightest as I had written it." ^[7]

Bloch wrote in his autobiography: "Once the completed screenplay arrived in England, the problem of matching stellar schedules - and salaries - put the roles into other hands and the script itself into the hands of its director. As is often the case, he decided to improve it, with the aid of a writer called Anthony Marriott, but apparently without the knowledge of Rosenberg and Subotsky [Amicus Films' producers], who left prior to production. Both of them had liked my original version, but by the time they returned, the screenplay had been improved past recognition and the shoot was already beginning. Sometime during 1966 the film was released under a new title [which implies Bloch's script was titled, as the novel was, A Taste for Honey] The Deadly Bees. As such it soon buzzed off into critical oblivion, unwept, unhonoured and unstung" ^[8] Bloch is reputed to have been so annoyed by the interference with his script that he never bothered to see the completed film.

Critical reception

• Allmovie gave the film a negative review, writing, "there's little in Bees worth watching."^[9]
• Referencing The Birds, the New York Times regretted "Mr. Hitchcock would never have sanctioned a sloppy, raucously framed little thriller like this"^[10]

DVD

The Deadly Bees was released to Blu-Ray on October 27, 2015 by Olive Films under license from Paramount Pictures.^[11]

References

External links

• The Deadly Bees at the Internet Movie Database
• The Deadly Bees at AllMovie
• The Deadly Bees at the TCM Movie Database
• The Deadly Bees at the American Film Institute Catalog
• The Monster Shack's review