Harry Alan Towers (1920 - )
Related: British cinema - exploitation - exploitation film - European exploitation
Biography
Harry Alan Towers (born in London on October 19, 1920) is a film producer and screenwriter, who produced over a hundred feature films.
He sometimes used the pseudonym Peter Welbeck.
A number of his films and scripts have been based on the works Sax Rohmer (Fu Manchu, Sumuru) and Edgar Wallace.
He collaborated with Jesus Franco during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He is married to the actress Maria Rohm, who has appeared in many of his movies. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Alan_Towers [Nov 2005]
Edgar Wallace and Sax Rohmer in the public domain?
Franco was brought to the attention of Harry Alan Towers by his 1967 surrealism-tinged opus, "Succubus". The producer was mining a lucrative seam by adapting the public domain works of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace for the screen, and was looking for a suitable director to helm a feature based on the work of the Marquis de Sade. The dreamlike eroticism of "Succubus" convinced him Franco was the man for the job! The director was set to work on the latest in a series of Fu Manchu films ("The Blood of Fu Manchu") while Towers thrashed out a screenplay under his pen-name, Peter Welbeck. The film was eventually shot in Barcelona amid buildings designed by 19th century architect Antonio Gaudi and a virtual who's who of Euro-cult cinema. It's one of the most sumptuous looking Franco movies but is ultimately a rather stilted affair; even the eroticism is rather discreetly done, and the film ends up feeling not really representative of either Franco or de Sade. --http://www.horrorview.com/Marquis%20De%20Sade's%20Justine.htm [Jul 2005]
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