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Dis­cov­er this new­ly restored Hitch­cock aping cult horror

01 Feb 2021

Words by Anton Bitel

A woman with curly blonde hair holding a chimpanzee, both looking directly at the camera. The image has a vintage, sepia-toned appearance.
A woman with curly blonde hair holding a chimpanzee, both looking directly at the camera. The image has a vintage, sepia-toned appearance.
With its sur­re­al premise and zoo­log­i­cal themes, Richard Franklin’s Link remains a most curi­ous creature.

In 1960, at the impres­sion­able age of 12, Richard Franklin saw Alfred Hitchcock’s Psy­cho in his native Aus­tralia, and it changed his life for­ev­er. His first two fea­tures – The True Sto­ry of Eski­mo Nell and Fan­tasm – may have been at the sex­i­er end of the Ozploita­tion wave, but he soon formed a fruit­ful work­ing rela­tion­ship with the screen­writer Everett de Roche mak­ing down under the decid­ed­ly Hitch­cock­ian thrillers Patrick and Roadgames.

Con­se­quent­ly he was lured to Amer­i­ca for his dream gig helm­ing Psy­cho II, a belat­ed sequel that per­haps few want­ed, but whose immense qual­i­ties and improb­a­ble wor­thi­ness of the orig­i­nal took every­one by sur­prise. Franklin had now earned him­self a priv­i­leged posi­tion as a direc­tor, and was quick to cap­i­talise with the well-received fam­i­ly espi­onage film Cloak & Dag­ger, and then with Link. The lat­ter revived his col­lab­o­ra­tion with de Roche, but its crit­i­cal recep­tion was poor, and, at least tem­porar­i­ly, dam­aged Franklin’s career.

After a cred­it sequence show­ing paint­ings of apes in jun­gle set­tings, and end­ing on an ape locked in a com­bat with a human hunter, Link opens with that sta­ple of the slash­er, a POV shot in a park at night. This aligns our view with that of a voyeuris­tic prowler, ini­tial­ly draw­ing our eyes to two shops – one a fast food out­let, the oth­er a strip club. Food and sex. These are basic dri­ves that, for all our sup­posed civil­i­sa­tion, remain the link between us and the low­er’ ani­mals, and as our creep uses a trel­lis to scale the out­er wall of a build­ing – echo­ing the begin­ning of Bob Clark’s ur-slash­er Black Christ­mas, but also the ape’s cli­mac­tic ascent in King Kong – we remain unsure to which end of the evo­lu­tion­ary scale this unseen men­ace belongs, or indeed which par­tic­u­lar kind of appetite he longs to satisfy.

While a vul­ner­a­ble lit­tle girl lis­tens ner­vous­ly in her bed (by a half-open win­dow) to the sounds of vio­lence on the roof, her par­ents are down­stairs, obliv­i­ous­ly watch­ing tele­vi­sion. The film play­ing on their small screen is Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus, and more specif­i­cal­ly it’s the sequence where a goril­la is led in chains through a crowd­ed night club, only to tear off its mask and reveal a sul­try, singing Mar­lene Diet­rich under­neath. Here the dis­tinc­tion between humans and oth­er pri­mates is being care­ful bro­ken down before our eyes – even as a chimp on the roof makes its own fast food of a cat and some caged pigeons.

The inter­rupt­ed scene from Blonde Venus serves as an invert­ed state­ment of intent from Link itself. For while apes in cin­e­ma were typ­i­cal­ly stop-motion mod­els or (wo)men in masks, Franklin opt­ed to ignore the old show­biz adage of nev­er work­ing with ani­mals, and insist­ed on using only actu­al apes (trained by Ray Berwick) for this simi­an thriller.

So when Amer­i­can stu­dent Jane Chase (Elis­a­beth Shue) agrees to help anthro­pol­o­gist Dr Steven Phillip (Ter­ence Stamp) run the iso­lat­ed sea­side home that he shares with his three research chimps – Link, Voodoo and the cat-killing Imp – these are the real deal, even if, in a bizarre case of blind cast­ing’, alpha male Link is in fact played by an orang­utan (Locke), made up to look more chimp-like with dyed fur and pros­thet­ic ears. An old ex-cir­cus chimp who likes to dress in human clothes and who has been trained to be a mas­ter of fire”, Link is due to be put down, but instead spots an oppor­tu­ni­ty to elim­i­nate his human mas­ter Steven and to become lord of this Eng­lish manor him­self, lead­ing Jane to find her­self locked in mor­tal com­bat with this mighty, mur­der­ous apex predator.

Woman reading a book whilst a chimpanzee sits on the table beside her.

You’re a girl,” responds Steven dis­mis­sive­ly when Jane approach­es him about becom­ing his assis­tant, That’s impos­si­ble.” The indig­nant Jane replies: Well what about the laws against sex­u­al dis­crim­i­na­tion?” It will turn out that the amused Steven had been adver­tis­ing for vol­un­teer sperm donors. He still hires Jane to help him at home, but sex remains an issue. Steve is open­ly flir­ta­tious with his assis­tant, and cer­tain­ly the pals of Jane’s boyfriend David (Steve Pin­ner) assume that Steven and Jane are doing more than just work­ing togeth­er. This is impor­tant, because Jane’s emphat­i­cal­ly fem­i­nine pres­ence also has an effect on the bal­ance of rela­tions among Steven’s ani­mals (of whom only Voodoo is female).

Var­i­ous expla­na­tions are giv­en in the film for Link’s aber­rant behav­iour, includ­ing – absurd­ly, if you think about it – a desire to avoid being euthanised. Yet far more straight­for­ward­ly ani­mal­is­tic’ motives are avail­able: Link wants to be top dog, dis­plac­ing Steve and oth­er males (human and ani­mal) from their posi­tions of dom­i­nance; and he wants Jane as his new mate. He is obvi­ous­ly jeal­ous of Jane’s affec­tion for Imp, and there is even here an equiv­a­lent to Psycho’s show­er scene, as Link tries insis­tent­ly to observe Jane naked in the bath.

Jane’s flesh, evi­dent­ly, is not just for eat­ing. This sex­u­al theme is fur­ther sug­gest­ed by the dis­tinc­tive­ly vul­val open­ing of the cave through which, via an under­ground tun­nel, Jane repeat­ed­ly escapes the house. Jane is, as it were, being reborn, even if, in one key scene as she reen­ters the cave to face her pri­mal fear, she is fig­ured as atavis­ti­cal­ly return­ing to the womb. Despite his sex­u­al inter­est in Jane, Link does kill women as well as men, and Jane – named as much for the explic­it­ly ref­er­enced chimp expert Jane Goodall as for Tarzan’s lover – must think like an ape to out­wit her assailant.

In a sense Link is a trag­ic fig­ure. One can only imag­ine the abuse that he suf­fered in the cir­cus when his han­dlers grotesque­ly dressed him as a per­son and forced him to play with fire and go against his nature in oth­er ways. Link’s con­fu­sion, shared by the film, between human and ape has made him a psy­cho, in a large prop­er­ty that notably resem­bles the old Bates place. Yet even as Franklin’s film looks back to Hitch­cock – and to the hand-hold­ing, knife-wield­ing chimp in Dario Argento’s Phe­nom­e­na – it also proves the miss­ing link in the evo­lu­tion of cin­e­ma future as much as past.

I used to babysit,” declares Jane, para­dox­i­cal­ly antic­i­pat­ing Elis­a­beth Shue’s next star vehi­cle Adven­tures in Babysit­ting (released the fol­low­ing year), while Link intro­duced a spate of films – Jonathan Kaplan’s Project X, George A Romero’s Mon­key Shines, Hugh Parks and Tom Logan’s Shak­ma – that used liv­ing, breath­ing pri­mates to bring real­ism to their oth­er­wise genre-bound scenarios.

Franklin is a fan­tas­tic direc­tor, and Link pro­vides plen­ty of siege and sur­vival thrills to accom­pa­ny its sur­re­al pithe­coid premise. Jer­ry Goldsmith’s jaun­ty score, how­ev­er, while cer­tain­ly intro­duc­ing an appro­pri­ate cir­cus-like atmos­phere, also envelops every­thing in a light, play­ful tone that nev­er quite match­es the stalk-and-slash mate­r­i­al. Per­haps, though, Link is a human com­e­dy after all, show­ing us our not alto­geth­er ele­vat­ed place on the evo­lu­tion­ary chain.

Link is avail­able on Blu-ray, DVD and dig­i­tal from Stu­dio­Canal on 1 Feb.

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