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Trick or Treat?

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EMI Films and the Limits of British Cinema
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Abstract

EMI's shift to a more transnational approach to filmmaking was confirmed with Cohen’s release of Murder on the Orient Express, with its international cast and crew located within a British murder mystery tradition. This chapter argues that its phenomenal international success marks the moment that the relationship between EMI and British cinema becomes skewed, and in which it first became a truly transnational company. This pointed the way forward for Delfont’s vision for the company, but at the moment of Cohen’s greatest triumph he had also marked the end of his time as Head of Production. For as this chapter shows, his return to more parochial films afterwards suggested that he was yesterday’s man, and the disastrous failure of Trick or Treat?, which was abandoned halfway through production, is analysed at the end of the chapter as the moment when Cohen’s Midas touch finally leaves him.

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Notes

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    ‘Family Life.’ Ken Loach Collection.

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    EMI Annual Report (1974). London: EMI, p. 5.

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    EMI Annual Report (1976). London: EMI, p. 36.

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    Smith, J. (2012), p. 274.

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    EMI Annual Report (1975). London: EMI. p. 5.

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    EMI Annual Report (1975), p. 36.

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    Screen International (25 October 1975). Gavrik Losey Collection. Exeter: Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

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    Connelly, R. (September 1976).

  48. 48.

    Undated script, Trick or Treat?. London: BFI

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    Losey, G. (29 June 2018), Interview with the author.

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    Production budget (January 1976). Gavrik Losey Collection. Exeter: Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

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    Spicer, A. (2004). ‘The production line: Reflections on the role of the film producer in British cinema.’ Journal of British Cinema and Television, 1(1), p. 33.

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    Harper, S. and Smith, J. (2012). ‘Boundaries and taboos’, in Harper, S. and Smith, J. (eds.) British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 153.

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Moody, P. (2018). Trick or Treat?. In: EMI Films and the Limits of British Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94803-4_7

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