Born
in England in 1920, he attending acting school at a young age before
finding work for BBC radio in the 1950s. Business instincts lead him to
set up his own radio company,
Towers of London,
selling radio shows overseas. Inevitably he progressed into the early
commercial television stations in Britain, producing a number of low
budget series which would then be sold overseas to the American and
Oceanic markets. The market for television productions was still rather
limited in the early 1960s, but cinema was as popular as ever and
Towers used his tried and tested exploitation techniques to make films
quickly and cheaply, but with enough draw that they would sell widely.
To this extent, he filmed all over the world to find the cheapest, but
best looking locations, and appreciating the pull of a marquee name,
always made sure to have at least one big name in the cast - his
internation co-production deals meant that he tried to get cast members
from all of the funding countries, leading to some unique
partnerships. It was during this time that
Towers met a young Austrian actress called Maria Rohm, looking to make
her break into cinema - they married, and for over a decade she starred
in over twenty of his films, before moving behind the camera as an
associate producer. Towers was a big literary fan, and from his
first films
Coast of Skeletons (1962) and
Death Drums Along the River
(1963) based on Edgar Wallace characters, he would base almost all of
his productions (many of which he scripted himself) on an incredibly eclectic mix of writers, from iconic
names like the Marquis de Sade and
Edgar Allan Poe to pulp adventure writers like Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace and H. Rider Haggard.
Through
the 1960s, Towers placed himself firmly at the centre
of exploitation cinema, making lucrative co-production deals with
some of the big international studios.
The Face of Fu Manchu
(1965) was his first large scale production, working with the
German company Constantin Film, and was a reserved sucess - enough to
mark Towers as a new name on the European cinema scene, but not enough
to secure himself as a major player, and he would rarely get to work on
such a large scale again. A lot of the film's success was contributed
to the casting of British horror icon
Christopher Lee in the starring role, and they would go on to work together on 11 more
films until the end of the decade. A variety of films followed, from a pair of Fu
Manchu sequels, to the Victorian space-age comedy
Rocket to the Moon (1967), until Towers met the Spanish director
Jess Franco, who's film
Succubus
(1968) recently gained international acclaim at the Berlin Film
Festival. Franco was familiar with low budget environments, well
read and was happy to explore the opportunities that increasing
liberalisation offered for exploitation cinema. He was quickly put to
work on the forth Fu Manchu film,
The Blood of Fu Manchu
(1968), and effectively proved his worth. Eight more films followed,
and and alongside some noticably commerical productions like
Count Dracula (1970) and
Marquis de Sade:Justine (1969), Towers gave Franco free reign to experiment with free-form erotica, leading to
Venus in Furs (1969) and
Eugenie (1970) - films that heralded many of Franco's later works.
After
pushing exploitation cinema to its limits at the turn of the decade,
Towers' next productions were unexpectedly family friendly.
However,
Treasure Island (1972),
Call of the Wild (1972) and
Ten Little Indians (1974) showed Tower's continuing adherence to his old rules - shot on the cheap (
Indians
was filmed in pre-revolutionary Iran), they still boasted marquee
value Anglo-American names (Orson Welles, Charlton Heston and Richard
Attenborough respectively) along with a supporting cast of European
actors who would carry name value in their domestic markets. He
continued to produce some mass market films, including an incredibly
loose adaptation of H.G.Wells'
The Shape of Things to Come (1979), but also started to return to the adult markets with
Black Cobra (1976), starring Jack Palance and Laura Gemser (
Black Emmanuelle) and
The End of Innocence
(1976), which marked the final appearance of his wife and frequent
leading lady Maria Rohm. At the start of the 1980s he found a
luctrative niche in low budget, soft-core adult movies, intended to be
shown on US television - titles like
Black Venus (1984) and
Love Circles
(1985) are rather tame today, but memorable for a generation of young
men growing up in the days before the internet and cheap home video.
It
was the rise of home video in the late 1980s that saw a big rise in
demand for low budget films, intended primarily for the VHS market.
Towers quickly showed that he had lost none of his form - trash action
movie
Skeleton Coast (1987)
was filmed in South Africa on a tiny budget, yet it starred Oliver
Reed, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Vaughn and Herbert Lom. More films
followed including a trio of low budget
Edgar Allan Poe tales shot on the cheap in South Africa, and an elaborate adaptation of
Phantom of the Opera (1989) starring slasher movie icon Robert Englund, and a follow-up,
Dance Macabre (1991). Re-uniting with
Christopher Lee,
Towers produced a pair of television movies starring the actor as
Sherlock Holmes, with Patrick Macnee as Watson. Alongside
such notoriously bad films as
Delta Force 3 (1991), he managed to secure actor Michael Caine to play his classic Harry Palmer character (from
The Ipcress File
(1965)) in a pair of espionage thrillers shot in Russia. This form
continued until the end of the decade and into the 21st Century with an
increasing variety of low budget, straight-to-video productions,
including a revistation of the works of Sax Rohmer in the space fantasy
Sumuru (2003), and
High Adventure
(2001) which saw the introduction of Chris Quartermain - the grandson
of H. Rider Haggard's character Allan Quatertmain. He died in July 2009, while working with British director Ken Russell on an adaptation of Daniel Defoe's classic novel
Moll Flanders.
