Dead Pictures

HAPPY BIRTHDAY: DAVID BOWIE ON THE TONIGHT SHOW

2012-01-08T13:47:00.001-08:00

It's hard to believe, but rock chameleon David Bowie turns sixty-five today. In honor of the occasion, here's a clip of his September 5, 1980 live performances of "Life on Mars" and "Ashes to Ashes" on the final ninety-minute episode of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show. Between songs, the James Dean-channeling artist says, "Richard, it's great to have you back, man." He was addressing his fellow guest Richard Pryor, who was making one of his first public appearances after recovering from severe burns sustained in a horrific freebasing tragedy on June 9 of that year. Happy Birthday to the Thin White Duke!

IN MEMORY OF MICK KARN: CANTON

2012-01-05T08:44:00.000-08:00

It was a year ago yesterday that musician Mick Karn (1958-2011) lost his battle with cancer. In memory of this remarkable artist, here's a live rendition of his old band Japan's classic instrumental "Canton." This performance, documenting part of a superb November 1982 concert at London's Hammersmith Odeon (now the Apollo), is drawn from the group's posthumous 1983 live album and video release Oil on Canvas. Karn's acrobatic fretless basswork made this composition a highlight of the band's 1981 studio album Tin Drum, and the live version is even better. (When I was a college deejay, I always began my show with a twelve-inch single of this concert classic.) Also featured are Japan's David Sylvian, Steve Jansen, Richard Barbieri, and adjunct member Masami Tsuchiya. Oil on Canvas was directed by Tony Lawson. Enjoy!

ALL NIGHT TELEVISION: THE PICTURES IN MY HEAD

2011-12-31T12:27:00.000-08:00

I can't sleep--I got my eyes wide open
I can feel the radiation
Vertical lines on video
It's three a.m., there's no distractions
Can't sleep 'cause all the stars are on now
Should I move to change the station
Having fun watching my tv
It's the center of attraction

When I was a lad, I was obsessed with attempting to stay up all night long. This act of adolescent willpower entailed watching plenty of after hours television, an action that scarcely distinguished me from other young knuckleheads. I spent Friday evenings with my grandmother, who gave my hardworking parents a well-earned respite from my usual mischief and prepared for me delicious tv dinners that took a now-almost-inconceivable thirty minutes to cook in those pre-microwave wonder years. Grandmother Pagan also allowed me to watch The CBS Late Movie, a memorable series that formed a substantial part of my film education. Sometimes she watched, too, though more often than not she fell asleep. Those weekend viewings included everything from Elvis Presley extravaganzas (a word I use very loosely) to Hammer horrors. Occasionally I fell asleep myself while watching the pictures--I remember being bitterly disappointed, out of all reasonable proportion, after dozing off mere minutes into Jacques Tourneur's The Comedy of Terrors (1964), which I would not encounter again for decades--but, more often than not, I remained wide awake and wanting more, more, more. There was something liberatory, and not a little addictive, about being up while everybody else was in bed.

CBS was the first American network to devote its late-night programming to cinema. For several years, it had aired The Merv Griffin Show after the 11 o'clock news, but on Valentine's Day 1972 it switched to film broadcasts, often running what the series' Wikipedia entry politely describes as "movies not well-suited for prime time due to content." In other words, my type of entertainment. A February 28 screening that year of a heavily-edited version of Luchino Visconti's originally-X-rated The Damned (1969) was vigorously protested by bluenoses from the Christian Life Commission and the Southern Baptist Convention, and actually resulted in CBS' then-president John A. Scheider's appearance before a Senate subcommittee. Alas, I missed that particular broadcast (it was on a school night, curse the luck), but Visconti's Nazi epic was undoubtedly emasculated for the protection of delicate viewers. The Late Movie also featured plenty, and I do mean plenty, of public service announcements during its interminable commercial breaks, perhaps most memorably the Ad Council's "Keep America Beautiful" anti-pollution spot in which the bogus Indian Iron Eyes Cody emerges from his canoe just in time for some litterbug to toss trash from a speeding vehicle at his beaded moccasins, which the actor reportedly wore on almost all occasions. Cody was actually Italian-American, and not, as he insisted, Cherokee/Cree; the tear he wept at this ecologically-incorrect indignity was in reality glycerine. To my knowledge, though, he never had to appear before a Senate subcommittee. Grandmother Pagan, bless her heart, called him "Crying Eyes Coyote."

The Friday Late Movie schedule was, for several years at least, especially enticing, and had me drooling in anticipation as I scrutinized the newest number of my family's TV Guide. Here CBS screened such warped wonders as Barry Shears' dystopian Wild in the Streets (1965), Roy Ward Baker's gender bending Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971), and Kinji Fukasaku's surreally schlocky The Green Slime (1968). The show's theme, Morton Stevens' haunting horn-driven "So Old, So Young," combined with the multicolored pentagram graphics (were the Christian Life Commissioners and Southern Baptist Conventioneers still watching?) to promise amazing things to come. Unfortunately, in 1976 the network began broadcasting, in addition to its film library, NBC Mystery Movie reruns (McCloud, McMillan and Wife), as well as repeats of such series as Hawaii Five-O (whose celebrated theme Stevens also composed) and The Rockford Files. Although these were fine programs, I was less than enthusiastic about the change, but, during the summer break, I could always switch over to NBC's Tonight Show and watch Johnny Carson or one of his numerous guest hosts, followed by Tom Snyder's Tomorrow hour. CBS later, as if in atonement for these unwelcome changes, enlivened Friday evenings with rebroadcasts of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, as well as terrific British series (both The Avengers and The New Avengers). Here's a reconstruction of the Late Movie's opening from 1975, when the network ran Edward Ludwig's riveting ecological revenge epic The Black Scorpion (1957). I watched this exact broadcast.

Our local CBS affiliate, WFMY, was already airing Friday double features when the Late Movie premiered, and for a year or so afterwards, the station continued to schedule a 1 or 1:30 a.m. film. This was WFMY's Late Late Movie, which recycled Stevens' theme. Although it was sometimes difficult for me to stay awake until the very end, I vividly remember three of the pictures I saw during that time slot: William Castle's The Night Walker (1964), which scared the bejeezus out of me (I was actually afraid to turn off the television, lest Hayden Rorke's disfigured specter molest me in the dark), and two Hammer chillers: John Gilling's Shadow of the Cat (1961), which as a young ailurophile I greatly appreciated, and Terence Fisher's 1962 remake of The Phantom of the Opera--the first version of Gaston Leroux's classic novel I ever saw; it starred my favorite Phantom, Herbert Lom, whose soulful torment and subterranean style enchanted me. This cinematic double shot lasted until between 2:30 and 3 a.m. It wasn't all night, but by Jove it was close enough. WFMY would then sign off with the national anthem and switch not to a test pattern, but to static.

It was into the arms of Morpheus that I reluctantly went, fantasizing about what secret messages might be hidden in that static, what mysterious images were being beamed into the homes of those souls stalwart enough to watch. This must have been a relatively common curiosity for those of us nursing at the glass teat, as witness the haunted television set in Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982), or the snuff film channel materializing on wee hours cable in David Cronenberg's same-year Videodrome. Sometimes--this was several years later--when one station went off the air, I could dial in another channel from far away, painstakingly manipulating my parents' antenna clicker as if it were a magic wand. During the summer of 1978, I distinctly remember viewing a snowy-but-watchable broadcast of Jean Negulesco's The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) one Sunday overnight; the station, if I recall correctly, was based somewhere in Virginia, and may well have been Charlottesville's NBC affilliate WVIR. I imagined I was receiving an occult transmission from the gods of late night.

Inevitably, The CBS Late Movie's Friday programming became less adventurous over time. The network did, however, screen Michelangelo Antonioni's fascinating metapolitical misfire, Zabriskie Point (1970), which, like, blew my adolescent mind, man. The Late Movie was also where I originally encountered, on other evenings, Mario Bava's Baron Blood (1972), Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), and Brian G. Hutton's Where Eagles Dare (1968). As the Eighties era of cable and satellite encroached, the program offered thanks-but-no-thanks reruns of Lou Grant and The Jeffersons, as well as feature films edited with a chainsaw to fit into an eighty-minute time slot. (I shudder to recall a severely-abbreviated version of Boris Sagal's The Omega Man [1972]; now, there was literally "no phone ringing, damnit!" for machine-gun-wielding star Charlton Heston.) The series had become an utter joke, and was regularly mocked by David Letterman during his tenure at NBC. In 1985 the program's title was changed to CBS Late Night, but I had tuned out by then. Here, astonishingly enough, is a complete episode guide. And I thought I was obsessive....

http://epguides.com/CBSLateMovie/

ABC's Wide World of Entertainment premiered in the same time period on January 8, 1973, offering a rotating selection of made-for-television mystery movies, talk shows, concerts, and comedy specials. The movies were shot on videotape and, if my memory serves me correctly, seemed like oddball soap operas; it's doubtful that many of these photoplays have been preserved. The program was retooled three years later as ABC Late Night, offering reruns of such wrist-slitters as Starsky and Hutch and The Love Boat, as well as The Tuesday Movie of the Week. The only programming that really stands out in my mind are a 1975 Monty Python's Flying Circus compilation that resulted in litigation from member Terry Gilliam, and the 1978 broadcasting, over several evenings, of a five-part 1975 English-Italian Mafia miniseries called The Legend of the Black Hand. But, thank the stars, there was always local programming to fire, quite generously, my imagination.

Saturday nights in particular were full of mystery. Our local ABC affiliate, WGHP, aired Shock Theater from the mid-Sixties until sometime around 1981. This series was originally emceed by horror host Dr. Paul Bearer (impersonated by the legendary Dick Bennick), but he was long gone by the time I watched my first installment in 1974. The station now resorted to an animated opening, which featured the pounding of a human heartbeat, represented onscreen by pulsing blue blobs. As cemetery gates creaked open, an offscreen announcer intoned "Channel Eight presents--SHOCK THEATER!" Cartoon bats flapped their wings while damned souls wailed for all they were worth. Deplorably, I can find no trace of this opening online; for all I know, it's not even in the video vaults of WGHP, which became a Fox affiliate in the mid-Nineties. The first film I saw on this program was Ray Harryhausen's giant octopus classic It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), which thrilled me to no end even though the creature possessed, as a budgetary constraint, a mere six tentacles. My parents did not normally permit me to stay up past eleven on Saturday nights, so convincing them to let me watch this thriller (stills of which I'd seen in Famous Monsters of Filmland) was--to my small brain--a substantial achievement.

The second movie I saw on the program, perhaps a month later, was Laszlo Kardos' The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957), which centered around a women's prison whose staff stays eternally young by electrically sucking the life out of its inmates. (As I age, that no longer seems like such an appalling idea.) Shock Theater aired double features off and on during the Bad Doctor's tenure, but reverted to a single film when he departed; it would return to its twofer format in 1975, at which point my parents kindly allowed me to stay up late more frequently. My favorite of all those double bills was a May 1976 screening of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's King Kong and Son of Kong (both 1933). The local fishwrap advertised the event in its tv section with a photo of the giant ape atop the Empire State Building, and I and many other children could scarcely wait for 11:30 to roll around. Would those imbecile newscasters ever stop gabbing about weather and sports! The following Monday morning, almost every boy in my fifth grade class was rhapsodizing about this incredible broadcast and ignoring our schoolwork. The Eighth Wonder of the World and his albino offspring were infinitely more important than the multiplication of fractions.

My mother told me how much Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World (1951) had spooked her when she was a girl, so I proceeded with caution when the film aired several months later, watching this Cold War masterpiece with an icepick I removed from a kitchen drawer. I didn't really expect James Arness' "intellectual carrot" to come out of the screen and kill me, of course, but I thought it wise to have a little, shall we say, insurance. Shock Theater usually ended somewhere between 2:30 and 3 a.m. All the other stations were off the air by that time, but WGHP would follow the fright flicks with a Community Bulletin Board and the obligatory national anthem. Then it was (sigh) bedtime.

Fortunately, the local NBC affiliate, WXII, came to my rescue with Nitelite Theatre. This program, which aired from June 1976 to November 1979, appeared at 2:30 a.m. after The Midnight Special. Johnny Carson was on for ninety minutes in those years, as was Burt Sugarman's weekly musical program. Nitelite originally ran until seven in the morning, but was later cut back to 6 a.m., the hour relinquished to For You, Black Woman and Big Blue Marble. WXII had whetted my appetite the week before with an all-night, four-film festival which began at 1 a.m., preempting the Special. That weekend I watched rapt from the bed in my grandmother's guest room as Joseph Adler's Revenge Is My Destiny (1971), George Montgomery's Ride the Tiger (1970), Robert Day's The Big Game (1972), and Jean Yarbrough's The Devil Bat (1940) unreeled. I'd previously seen the last movie on the station's classic Bob Gordon Theater, which aired on weekend afternoons, but it's a picture I never get tired of. At long last, all-night television had arrived.

WFMY had in fact set things in motion a few months earlier with its own all-night Friday film festival, which preempted The CBS Late Movie. Unforgivably, I passed out during the first picture, Abraham Polonsky's Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), sleeping straight through the other four features, so Nitelite was a welcome presence, indeed. The series was originally hosted by Art Neal and Zacahry Gibson, who performed groan-inducing skits, but they were soon gone, and, like Shock Theater, the program now had no emcees. Its theme music was an instrumental ditty somewhere between Julius Fucik's Entrance of the Gladiators and John Williams' "Cantina Band" tune from George Lucas' Star Wars (1977); however, try as I might, I've not yet been able to track down this piece online. The program always kicked off with a movie, followed by episodes of old tv shows (The Twilight Zone, I Spy, The Invaders), followed by (in its early days, at least) yet another feature. The program officially debuted with Harry Horner's eschatological talkfest Red Planet Mars (1952) and Guiliano Montano's 1967 caper classic Ad Ogni Costo ("At Any Cost," retitled Grand Slam for English-speaking audiences); over the years, it screened such treasures as Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1941), Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1957), and Theodore J. Flicker's paranoid masterwork The President's Analyst (1967). I particularly remember one 1979 broadcast of Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), in which the feature was presented without commercial interruptions--a rare delight. The series came to a quiet end, possibly because I was the only fool who stayed up to watch it, and even I fell asleep from time to time. That was it for all night television until the fall of 1980, when WFMY became a twenty-four-hour station.

When my family moved across our small town in 1976 into a new home, we were finally able to pick up--usually only at night--WBTV, a CBS affiliate in Charlotte, and WRAL, an ABC affiliate in Raleigh. In lieu of Friday's edition of The CBS Late Movie, which must not have generated much of a local audience, WBTV ran a terrific program at 11:30 called Those Were the Years. This show was hosted by the station's then-weatherman Mike McCay (who later wound up spinning classical discs at WDAV 89.9), and aired episodes of old tv series like The Outer Limits, Love That Bob, and The Cisco Kid. The station also screened Flash Gordon serials, as well as occasional films. Its original theme was Singin' Sam's "Reminiscing," but that song was replaced by Steely Dan's more contemporary, and certainly more ironic, "Reeling in the Years." WBTV aired a feature after the show, and it was here that I received further introductions, along with occasional Shock Theater selections, to the European Cult Cinema: Claudio Guerin's entrancingly bizarre A Bell from Hell (1973), Carlos Aured's Horror Rises From the Tomb (1973), and so forth. Here's a 1976 news item on the program:

http://btmemories.com/articles/programs/those_were_the_years/those_were_years.html

In the Seventies, WRAL scheduled an annual all-night, horror-hosted fright film festival on the Friday before Halloween. The first Spook Spectacular I dialed in was also in 1976; it began with Benjamin Stoloff's Night of Terror (1933), a preposterous old-dark-house thriller with a truly outrageous ending which I won't reveal for fear the Maniac will climb into my bedroom window tonight and tear me limb from limb. The station later aired a program on Friday evenings called Chiller Theatre, which had an impressive opening: a POV shot of someone racing fearfully and breathlessly through a cemetery. (Once I dreamed I finally saw the face of the person running, and--shiver me timbers!--the shock was enough to wake me in the middle of the night.) Screenings that particularly stood out for me were Edward Ludwig's The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1934) and Edward Dmytryk's Captive Wild Woman (1943). With so much amazing programming, it was sometimes difficult to settle on one particular station--and nobody around those remote parts had VCRs. The best we could come up with were audio cassettes.

I later experienced the same cultural dilemma on Saturdays. As I grew older and became aware of Saturday Night Live, Shock Theater had some serious competition, especially when the program featured such musical magicians as Devo, Blondie, David Bowie, and Gary Numan. WXII ran Don Kirshner's Rock Concert immediately after SNL; Kirshner's robotic introductions to the various acts were always highly amusing, especially given Paul Shaeffer's marvelous impersonation of the impresario. Often I would watch SNL, switching to WGHP during commercial breaks for my weekly dose of horror. When the comedy show wrapped up, I would then catch the second creature feature, but by the decade's end, Shock Theater was reduced to merely one picture, followed by an episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, a series I adored.

Rock Concert moved to Sunday nights before being cancelled a year later. For too brief a while, WXII aired its own version of Shock Theater after SNL from the late winter to midsummer 1982. The program's opening was a white screen, down which stage blood trickled while Giorgio Moroder's "The Myth" composition, with Bowie humming ominously, played. (Paul Schrader's remake of Cat People had recently been released.) The series' host was a bearded gentleman in a black suit and black wraparounds who would be startled by the screams--and, later, organ music--that sounded whenever he uttered the name of the show. At one point, he went in search of the studio's organist to permanently silence the maestro. The program's producer began to appear midway through the series' run, and the two men performed amusing sketches. During a screening of George Mendeluk's Stone Cold Dead (1980)--an admittedly odd selection--they appeared from time to time discussing the picture a la Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on Sneak Previews. Another sketch involved a stand-up gynecologist. It wasn't Evelyn Waugh by any stretch of the imagination, but I emitted my fair share of teenage chuckles.

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to mention USA's Night Flight, which aired from 1981 to 1988. (Cable ultimately arrived, better late than never, in my hometown in summer 1982.) This program ran from 11pm to 3am on Friday and Saturday nights, then repeated from 3 to 7am. The series aired episodes of New Wave Theatre (hosted by the late, great Peter Ivers, who was murdered in 1983; the crime remains unsolved), as well as music profiles, concerts, and cult films (some of which were ruinously edited, among them Andy Warhol's Frankenstein [1973] and Dracula [1974]). My all-time favorite presentation was an hour-long British documentary, Blitz, on England's New Romantic movement. Like those exotic poseurs across the pond, I had nostalgia for the future as well as the past.

Always talking to me
My tv got personality
Maybe it is watching me
Eye to eye with my tv

Allow me, if you will, to return to the subject of commercial interruptions before I conclude this interminable exercise in nostalgiazing. I didn't care for the spots, of course, but there was nothing I could do about them, and they did allow me time to refill my soda and grab another fudge round. But commercial-free public television was off the air by 11:30 p.m. at the latest, so I was stuck with the infernal ads. Plus there were other pains to endure: panning and scanning or just plain old dead centering for widescreen features, cropping half the bleeding image, as well as censored prints for more recent films. Because cable for my rural county was still a few years away, Home Box Office's uncut features did me absolutely no good at all. I never thought I'd be able to see widescreen pictures in their original aspect ratios in the privacy of my family's living room, but these days almost everyone has that option. The landscape has completely changed. As cable found its way into more homes, there was correspondingly less use for overnight film programming; videocassettes, of course, changed the game entirely. Once I earned my driver's license, I was soon substituting the big for the small screen, attending midnight movies at local cinemas, and once I procured a VCR, I found myself settling less and less for what television movie broadcasts (late night or otherwise) had to offer.

Today's all night television, with the exception of Turner Classic Movies, is depressing stuff, indeed, consisting as it does of C.S.I. reruns, inane chat shows, and infomercial scams with convicted felon Kevin Trudeau. (Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas referred in a spot-on recent editorial to "the tyranny of Paid Programming.") Rebroadcasts of Today, of all the confounded things, occupy WXII's old Nitelite Theatre time slot. TCM Underground premiered in 2006 with an admirable selection of cult favorites, but the program's underwhelming host, Rob Zombie, was soon gone. I had high hopes for the hellbilly rocker, but he never seemed entirely comfortable introducing the movies; the series now opens with footage of a grungy, dreadlocked Zombie surrogate running around some nameless city, but mercifully he never opens his mouth.

Mr. Zombie didn't last long on TCM.

There's very little sense of discovery these days, I fear--at least on the small screen. Lucas suggests using YouTube to while away the wee hours on DirectTV. I did exactly that over the holidays, viewing some old Nitelite Theatre selections (William Cameron Menzies' Drums in the Deep South [1952] and Bob Wynn's The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler [1971]) and a ton of Tomorrow clips on my in-laws' humongous television. Back here at home, some of my recent DVD double bills have included Frank Perry's Rancho Deluxe (1975) and Michael Ritchie's Prime Cut (1972). I don't stay up all evening any more, but late enough to satisfy my after hours fix. These nights I, rather than some local programmer, supply the pictures in my head. Once upon a time our late show revelations were communal--we were, after all, part of the great confraternity of night owls--but today that sense of community has, as with far too many traditions, all but evaporated. The cinematic underworld of my youth was a special one, and I frankly miss that world and all its mysterious gods, whose secret messages to me ran the gamut from black scorpions and devil bats to green slime and men who reclaimed their heads.

Holding horizontal
Static lines in one dimension
Late show revelations
My tv stays on forever
--3-D, "All Night Television" (1980)

THE EYES HAVE IT: TERRIFIED

2011-10-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

Lew Landers' cinematic swan song Terrified (1963) is yet another low-budget shocker that has taken up apparently permanent residence in my damaged brain. The picture's opening cemetery sequence of a poor fool being buried alive in cement by a well-dressed, giggling fiend with a black stocking over his face is the stuff of adolescent nightmares, and I'm pleased to report that this late-night perennial, viewed for the first time in several decades, is still potent. Absurd, to be sure, but most assuredly potent.

The masked maniac is making life miserable for people who live near a ghost town by trying to run them off the road when he's not burying them. The model for his cement overcoat, Joey (Robert Towers), survived the ordeal, but "his mind snapped like a rubber band" and he's currently in the bughouse, although he later escapes in a completely unnecessary revenge subplot. His cocktail-hostess sister Marge (Tracy Olsen), who works at ex-vaudeville ventriloquist Wesley Blake's (Stephen Roberts) cafe--Marge's father, incidentally, was murdered, while her mother perished in a suspicious car crash before the picture even begins--is torn between two college students: her brother's best friend Ken Lewis (Rod Lauren), who's writing a mid-term paper on "the strength of the human mind to resist terror," and the older David Baker (Steve Drexel), who admits that, even though he lacks his romantic rival's intelligence, at least "[knows] enough to come out of the rain and not to sit on a hot stove." The county caretaker and local wino, "Wild" Bill Clark, had secretly witnessed Joey's torture, so Marge and Baker visit Ghost Town to interview him, where they're spooked by an unseen organist playing Frederic Chopin's "Funeral March." Rather than beating a hasty retreat, they stick around to investigate, only to discover the caretaker's corpse impaled on a cemetery fence--drunk again, I'll wager.

Just as Marge and Baker are finally leaving to alert the police, Lewis himself arrives to wander around the disused western set, manfully fighting his own fear while attempting to find out who reduced his pal Joey "to a slobbering oyster." Lewis, you see, is haunted by the fact that his father considered his son cowardly because the boy preferred reading books to playing with the no-doubt uncultured neighborhood kids. The killer supplies him with plenty of good material for his mid-term, attempting to drown him, shooting at the student, and finally frightening him to death before Lewis can complete his paper by covering him with graveyard dirt. He also knocks Baker unconscious and abducts Marge to an abandoned mine shaft when the pair return after, incredibly enough, stopping at a diner and gabbing with some friends, but luckily Sheriff Dixon (a clean-shaven Denver Pyle) materializes in time to plug the murderer, who, unsurprisingly, turns out to be Blake, who's been lusting after Marge all along, even though he claims "she's almost like a daughter" to him. Wild Bill, meanwhile, is still stuck on that fence at the film's conclusion, presumably forgotten in all the brain-cracking excitement.

Producer Richard Bernstein's script is preposterous, but that's an integral part of the picture's oneiric, wee-hours appeal. Landers, who died shortly before the film's release, earlier helmed (as Louis Friedlander) one of the most outrageous Universal thrillers, The Raven (1935); here he creates a bare-bones but believably creepy atmosphere, immensely aided by the stark noirish cinematography of Curt Fetters, who primarily worked in television. The opening moments pack a visceral punch: Blake's eyes seem almost aglow through the holes of his hood, and his taunting laugh is merciless--he's not only empowered by spreading fear, he's released by it as well. The film's animated titles are eerily effective, as are Terrified's visually rhyming shots of car headlamps blazing like Blake's demented stare. (Daylight doesn't exist in this picture.) Blake, of course, is immediately suspicious when first we see him without his hood--ventriloquists are, as a rule, up to no good in the thriller genre--but Roberts plays him with pluck, lustily telling Marge that she'd "make a man's heart sing just to look at you" and pleading for "one instant of love" with her before the sheriff shoots him. Olsen and Drexel (here resembling William Campbell with a gene splice of Chuck Woolery) are relatively colorless, but Lauren remains just brooding enough ("Terror is what the world is," he glumly informs his companions, referencing the various atrocities of the Second World War) to be interesting.

In retrospect, the actor's life was interesting as well. Lauren, born Roger Lawrence Strunk, emerged as a minor pop vocalist (his 1960 recording of "If I Had a Girl" briefly charted on Billboard) before his singing career evaporated in the face of the new breed of British rockers. He switched to acting, appearing in such schlock favorites as Herbert L. Strock's The Crawling Hand (1963), and eventually married, after well over a decade of courtship, the Filipino performer Nida Blanca, whom he met while filming John Derek's World War II melodrama Once Before I Die (1966). Blanca became a star in the Phillipines while Lauren's new career similarly faded. The actress was beaten and stabbed to death in a San Juan City parking lot in 2001; two years later, authorities charged Lauren with hiring her killer after she threatened to divorce and disinherit him. He moved back to Tracy, California, where a district judge dismissed an extradition case against him. Lauren worked as a camera operator for the city's public access station, but leapt to his death from a hotel balcony in 2007.

Terrified has surfaced on home video several times, beginning with the second volume of Rhino's Horrible Horrors Collection. I myself have copies of the film on two different DVD sets, where it shares disc space with other Crown International features. The first set, BCI/Eclipse's Drive-In Cult Classics, Vol. 2, was released in 2008 (the same year the label folded); the second, Mill Creek Entertainment's Gorehouse Greats Collection, appeared in 2009. The grainy fullscreen transfers, which contain a fair amount of frame damage, are identical and clock in at eighty minutes. The film is paired in the Gorehouse set with Bud Townsend's Nightmare in Wax (1969); alas, my used copy obstinately locks up forty-nine minutes into the story, although its co-feature plays just fine. Fortunately, the Drive-In version (which allots Terrified a side of its own) is glitch-free, but neither set contains a trailer. BCI/Eclipse's platter offers eight chapter stops, as opposed to Mill Creek's measly four. The muddy sound on both releases hampers Michael Andersen's savvy score, which encompasses everything from ominous western-themed piano chords and tubular bells to bouncy cocktail jazz. The Drive-In collection additionally includes a nice booklet containing liner notes for each film, wherein is related the tragic story of Mr. Rod Lauren.

ANOTHER MAN'S TREASURE: GRAVEN IMAGES

2011-09-27T05:44:00.001-07:00

"If I'd only known how much you were going to love movies," Grandmother Pagan assured me many times, "I'd have saved all that stuff at the Patovi." This was a downtown cinema where she worked until the business was demolished in 1972 to make room for, depressingly, a parking lot that I don't ever recall seeing full. It was within those wondrous walls that Grandmother looked after me during the day, while my parents labored mightily and before I entered the public school system. I remember this picture palace well, particularly its screen, which was situated in the front, rather than the back, of the building. When I asked her why in the name of sense the Patovi threw away all its promotional materials, she shrugged. "We didn't think the movies would last."

Apparently a lot of people didn't think so, for reasons which completely elude me. But last the silver screen has, and I shudder to imagine how many fortunes in film memorabilia were unceremoniously ripped up, crumpled, and tossed into the nearest rubbish bin. Several of the posters in Grove's superb monograph, Graven Images: The Best of Horror, Fantasy, and Science-Fiction Film Art from the Collection of Ronald V. Borst (1992; 240 pages) suffered similar indignities, as witness the misadventures of Borst's title lobby card for 1931's Svengali (attic insulation) and his insert card for 1932's The Mask of Fu Manchu (shoved under a cinema carpet, "where patrons had stomped and spilled their drinks on them for more than thirty years"). One's blood boils simply imagining such desecrations, but the admirable Borst has spent decades locating and restoring these lost treasures, and this remarkable volume, edited in collaboration with archivist Leith Adams and documentarian Keith Burns, offers a fine introduction to his incredible collection. Borst secured one-sheets for such classics as Destination Moon (1950) for a single dollar, and he left the teaching field in 1979 to open his own movie memorabilia store--where he met his future wife and fellow Graven Images compiler Margaret--in Tinseltown. "When it was embarrassingly corny or unfashionable to display posters on my walls in the Sixties," this great collector reports, "I hung them anyway." Borst has remained faithful to his childhood love of the fantastic, and it's a pity that Grove has allowed this book to pass out of print.

Movie posters, observes Stephen King in his preface, "are part of a time-honored tradition that isn't quite theft or con game but has elements of both." The novelist pronounces these items "the grandchildren of advertisements for traveling medicine-show wagons, carnivals, revival meetings, and freakshows"--horror posters in particular. It is here that the frequently anonymous illustrators let their imaginations run riot, and the result was often box office alchemy. American International Pictures (originally American Releasing Corporation) found great success with their promotional posters; indeed, King notes that "it was the only studio that ever saw filmmaking as secondary to advertising." AIP's strategy was to contrive an intriguing title (e.g,. The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow [1959]; alas, Graven Images doesn't contain a reproduction of this particular poster), which the studio then submitted to distributors and cinema chains. Artists created poster treatments for well-received titles; if the buyers liked the art, AIP would make the movie, usually in two weeks and for less than thirty grand.

This policy presented a minor problem for the studio during the filming of The Beast With a Million Eyes (1955). While the titular creature's poster rendition didn't contain the requisite amount of orbs, it included enough of them to challenge AIP heads, who had spent every penny of the budget. The studio's solution was to employ a hand puppet as the extraterrestrial invader, while its spacecraft was a Woolworth's teakettle. Exhibitor Joseph E. Levine guffawed at the result, but was willing to pony up money for reshooting the picture's climax. Ever economical, AIP honcho James Nicholson simply scratched lines over the film's negative, markings which covered up the pot while masquerading as deadly rays. The movie made money, so everybody was happy. While King admits that Beast is certainly no masterpiece, "it does go a long way," he avers, "towards fulfilling the amazing, tantalizing promise of the poster that accompanied the film. It isn't really coherent, either, but are dreams ever really coherent?" Mine aren't, at any rate.

Robert Bloch's chapter on the Nineteen Teens and Twenties maintains that "movie theaters had a different smell" in those distant days. Refreshments were not available in cinema lobbies, "so if you detected an odor it probably emanated from the picture instead of the audience." Bloch recalls his boyhood bijoux, where "the washrooms alone were larger than an entire multiplex unit today, and a damned sight cleaner." He praises the professional organists of the period, but deplores that "domestic filmmakers"--in marked contrast to the German Expressionists--"kept groping for horror and hesitating to come to grips with it. Afraid of apparitions, they often settled for apes," such as those found in 1929's Stark Mad ("one of the worst alleged horror films ever made"), whose colorful red poster, replete with a smiling Satan who does not actually appear in the picture, is reproduced within. Bloch concedes that the era's thrillers, "aside from shrieks and creaks...offered little that was new," but he and his peers "were quite content with the milder monsters and marvels in those days when films were almost as innocent as we were."

Ray Bradbury's essay on the Thirties (whose pictures the thrilled-and-chilled youth often viewed "from under the seat or my brother's armpit") recounts, many years afterwards, the author's running into an assistant theatre manager who frequently admitted the boy to movies for free. Boris Karloff's performance in Frankenstein (1931) propelled him "peeing up the aisle to the Men's [room]," while King Kong (1933) was a life-altering experience for Bradbury and his budding animator pal, Ray Harryhausen. Bradbury estimates he saw Werewolf of London (1935) an impressive twelve times, "paying twice and freeloading the rest," while he was one of many boys who had "their souls shaken" by Things to Come (1936), recalling on Pearl Harbor Day H.G. Wells' "terrible gift of prophecy." Fritz Lang's M (1931) was another milestone in the young fantasist's cultural development--in fact, the monocled maestro wanted to film, but never did, Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, but the two men, the author confides, years later shared "countless martinis." They also developed an idea for a television series about a time-hopping traveler who would interact with various historical figures, but, sadly, nothing ever came of that, either.

Harlan Ellison, in his chapter on the Forties, identifies the decade as "the fracture point....The juncture at which we lost our innocence and became the brutes we are today." What brutes, you ask? For one thing, "mean and selfish creatures who can tolerate the random brutality of Terminator films," and, inevitably, "the demon television." The excitable author, whose excellent fiction is often quite disturbing, has a surprisingly low tolerance for movie violence, ostentatiously storming out of a Writers Guild Film Society Committee screening of Brian DePalma's Blow Out (1981) to protest the director's alleged "woman-hatred." Fortunately, the Forties remains an incantatory time for Ellison, principally a minor but charming Fleischer Brothers animated feature called Mr. Bugs Goes to Town (1941), so this reminiscence finds him in a less rambunctious mood. The author's tribute to the lasting impact the film had on his childhood self (he heroically several times slipped out of bed to see the picture at a nearby cinema, only to be apprehended by his family after each attempt) is enthralling, and one of the best non-fiction pieces he's composed. Ellison didn't see the entire Mr. Bugs for many decades, but he writes movingly of his adult fascination with the film. Sometimes, he tells us, "my wife has emerged from sleep in the wee hours to find me sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, watching insects."

The Fifties were a seminal time for science fiction cinema, whose films echoed "the real life" that Peter Straub "carried within" himself. Straub's essay, easily the most somber of the bunch, explores the genesis of his non-autobiographical short story of child molestation in a movie theatre, "The Juniper Tree," confessing that he "wondered if anyone would talk to me after the story was published." He also recounts being "literally killed, for at least a minute or two" by an automobile in 1950, the same year his family moved to the suburbs. Straub perceives that the films which fascinated him constituted "some kind of objectification of my sense that ordinary life was a fearful proposition," his unsettling awareness that "real horror"--whether in the form of being hit by a car or enduring childhood's "ring of fire"--"could suddenly engulf you and leave you changed for good." These crucial pictures include the first Cinemascope science fiction feature, Walt Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) (the reanimated boy admired Captain Nemo's "polite megalomania" and coveted the skipper's Nautilus), Them! (1954), and Invaders from Mars (1953), whose "monsters fooled you by looking like everybody else." By the decade's end, however, Straub had discovered Thomas Wolfe, his parents moved far from the nearest theatre, and he "cultivated what must have been a very bookish version of hipster arrogance."

Speaking of hipster arrogance, Clive Barker's chapter on the Sixties is presented in the form of a dope-smoking dialogue with the Spirit of that swinging decade, exploring the author's fascination with kitsch in his contention that Cleopatra (1963) is "a work of fantasy" whose "re-creation of ancient Egypt is as unlikely as Oz and twice as beautiful." (There's no poster for the film, however.) Barker seems to be channeling Camille Paglia here, especially in his boast that he saw a double-bill reissue of Hammer's She (1964) and One Million Years B.C. (1966) three times in one week--a mind-altering submission to goddess power, surely. He also recollects catching the eerie Japanese masterpieces Onibaba and Kwaidan (both 1964) at, of all places, a Liverpool porn cinema ("given the choice between copulation and agitation, I'll always choose the latter"), and affirms he "learned to dream" in the Sixties, having "never lost his appetite for it."

Legendary Famous Monsters of Filmland editor Forrest J. Ackerman's afterword declares that there were only "thirteen Golden Years of fantastic genre films" (1923-1935), but magnanimously lists standouts through the subsequent decades. The Ackermonster worries that, when it comes to today's special and makeup effects extravaganzas, "the tail is wagging the werewolf" and "the unique artistry of [such] solitary geniuses" as Lon Chaney, Sr., Jack Pierce, and Harryhausen is a thing of the past. CGI, when it's done well, is impressive, but I'm too much of an old fogey myself not to pine for the glory days of greasepaint and stop motion.

Admittedly, the authors' personal reminiscences have little to do with posters, but each conveys the power of film to produce magic in our minds, as well as evoking the various picture palaces, from Bloch's Chicago Theater to Ellison's Heights and Barker's sex cinema, where their memories were imprinted. There's little discussion of the artists themselves, but Grove's layout, courtesy of designer and historian David J. Skal, is sumptuous. Outstanding specimens include one-sheets for the original Phantom of the Opera (1925), whose deformed-but-dashing Erik is rendered without his mask; Dracula's Daughter (1936), a 40" x 60" This Island Earth (1955), and Borst's favorite one-sheet, Karoly Grosz's marvelous artwork for Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). There's also a two-page spread of RKO Radio Picture's deluxe pressbook for King Kong ("The Answer to Every Showman's Prayer!"), as well as pre-production trade advertisements for such never-made films as Universal's Cagliostro, which was ultimately revamped as The Mummy (1932). Of especial interest are promotional ads for Frankenstein, when Universal still hoped to star Bela Lugosi, and not Karloff, in the role of the scientist's monster, and for The Invisible Man (1933), which was originally to feature Karloff, rather than his fellow Englishman Claude Rains. Borst's book contains a helpful glossary, aiding novices in their understanding of such esoteric terms as those splendid one-sheets, insert and window cards, and the magnificent-sounding British quad posters. It's a time capsule of an age in advertising art that is now largely, and lamentably, lost to us. Here's to Borst for preserving an important and often overlooked part of our cultural heritage, when cinema was, as the creator of Norman Bates discerns, almost as innocent as the children filling the seats.

ELECTRIC LIGHT ANGER: RETURN TO THE PLEASURE DOME

2011-07-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

Kenneth Anger's Inaguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954) The '78 Eldorado Version from Mondo Justin on Vimeo.

Kenneth Anger's 1978 reconstruction of his 1954 masterpiece Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome is so rare it had to be sent back to the kitchen. The director's revised "Sacred Mushroom Edition" of the picture substitutes the Electric Light Orchestra's 1974 concept album Eldorado for the film's better-known soundtrack, a recording of Leos Janacek's marvelous Glagolitic Mass. The ELO score, whose over-the-top electropop offers an amusing alternative take on Anger's fantasia, was originally screened at the 1978 Boston Film Festival before vanishing into the Mists of Time. Hats off to Mondo Justin for resurrecting this obscure version, which certainly whets the appetite for his upcoming Projection Booth podcast on Anger's Magick Lantern Cycle.

HERETICS ON MARS: CONQUEST OF SPACE

2011-07-06T08:22:00.000-07:00

George Pal's rocket ride as a producer of science fiction epics encountered severe commercial turbulence with 1955's Conquest of Space. The picture, inspired by the bestselling non-fiction book of the same title by writer Willy Ley and artist Chesley Bonestell (which Arthur C. Clarke once suggested "perhaps did more than any other to inspire a generation of would-be space cadets"), arrested the momentum that Pal had achieved with his 1950 hit Destination Moon and his subsequent special effects extravaganzas When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), and the ecological revenge epic The Naked Jungle (1954). Conquest's box office failure foiled his plans to adapt Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer's sequel After Worlds Collide, ensuring that the producer would not return to the science fiction genre--triumphantly, as it transpired--for five years with another H.G. Wells adaptation, The Time Machine.

There's no "plot" as such to Ley and Bonestell's book, so screenwriters Phillip Yordan, Barre Lyndon, and George Worthing Yates eventually fashioned, through numerous rewrites, a fairly realistic storyline which borrows heavily from Wernher von Braun's The Mars Project and manages to incorporate both a deadly oedipal conflict and crowd-pleasing, scantily-clad dancing girls borrowed from, of all things, a Bob Hope movie. In what was, at the time of the film's release, the Near Future, a circular space station not terribly dissimilar from the one in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) orbits Earth while, nearby, a rocket is being constructed for lunar exploration. The station's Captain, Samuel T. Merritt (Walter Brooke), must contend with the hazards of his men falling victim to space fatigue, as well as with his homesick son Barney (Eric Fleming), who was married a mere three months before heading for the stars and has put in for a transfer home (which his father categorically denies). After the astronauts' dinner is interrupted by a meteor shower, tossing everyone all over the place, dapper Dr. George Fenton (William Hopper) arrives with orders from the U.S. President that the rocket's new destination is Mars; he also promotes Merritt to a General.

It seems exceedingly odd not to visit the Moon first, but of course producer Pal had already accomplished that feat in 1950. The normally gung-ho General is distressed by this change of plans, even though his dejected son is actually ecstatic at the prospect. Merritt reluctantly agrees to proceed with the mission, selecting four men to accompany him after first informing the candidates "that no one but an idiot would volunteer": Captain Barney and Sergeants Imoto (botanist Benson Fong), atrocious comic relief and alleged electronics whiz Jackie Siegle (Dick Wesson surrogate Phil Foster), whom the General tells point-blank, "I don't think there's a man on the Wheel with less formal education than you possess," and medicine man Andre Fodor (a German-accented Ross Martin in his film debut). Merritt doesn't wish to take his too-adoring friend Sergeant Mahoney (Mickey Shaughnessy) with them because he's "twenty years too old" (although the Sarge is merely three months younger than the General), but the big lug smuggles himself aboard the rocket anyway, and the men are off on their interplanetary voyage.

It's at this point that the picture takes an unexpectedly religious turn, as the General unpacks his King James Bible and ponders the wisdom of the expedition. After Fodor's airline is accidentally severed during a spacewalk and his corpse drifts away, Merritt ratchets up the religiosity, engaging in a philosophical debate with his son as if he's channeling space exploration opponent C.S. Lewis. "The biblical limitations of Man's wanderings are set down as being the four corners of the Earth," he insists. "Not Mars, or Jupiter, or infinity. The question is...what are we--explorers or invaders?" The General submits that the intrusion of man "into the sacred domain of God" constitutes a virtual "act of blasphemy," but Barney doesn't buy it: he sees a divine pattern in the "too perfect to be accidental" coincidence "that at the very time when Man's resources on Earth are reaching an end, Man develops the ability to leave his own world and seek replenishment on other planets," assuring his father that "the universe was put here for Man to conquer." Merritt becomes increasingly skeptical as space fatigue exacerbates his previously-lapsed faith, and finally attempts to sabotage the mission by accelerating the rocket just as it's coming in for its Martian landing. Later, as the other astronauts are exploring the planet, Merritt tries to dump the ship's fuel; when Barney returns, his father fires a pistol at him and the two men struggle, with Barney accidentally killing the General.

Mahoney, who already resents the General's son because he doesn't believe he measures up to the old man, arrives in time to witness Merritt's death, and promises the Captain he'll pay dearly for his actions. Meanwhile, the crew are stuck on Mars as they must wait a year for a launch window. There's no water, and the astronauts' spirits weaken, even though Imoto sows a symbolic seed in the Martian soil. Mahoney pronounces the mission "cursed," while Siegle laments their lack of liquid "on a lousy, dried-up ball in the corner pocket of nowhere." Fortunately for the crew, a decidedly unlikely Christmas snowfall--another too-perfect-to-be-accidental coincidence--provides them with water, and the seed sprouts a flower. There's a climactic earthquake, which the astronauts escape in an emergency liftoff that leaves them bleeding from their ears, mouths, nostrils, and I shudder to think what else. Once they've recovered, Mahoney decides to let bygones be bygones with the knowledge that General Merritt will be remembered historically "for [being] the man who conquered space," rather than a religious fanatic.

The spiritual aspect of the picture places the film squarely in the curious sub-genre of Christian science fiction cinema, a select group which includes such fantastic fare as William A. Wellman's The Next Voice You Hear (1950) and Harry Horner's Red Planet Mars (1952), though Conquest lacks the obsessive anti-Communism of the latter movie. The metaphysics may have been a bit unusual for audiences at the time--indeed, the film's subplot comes, like its meteors, out of nowhere--but it's worth noting that several real-life astronauts have experienced everything from mental breakdowns to mystical awakenings, which, as J.G. Ballard perceived, "[suggests] that more may have been taking place than we realized" in the Apollo program. It's highly improbable that Conquest's Space Corps would place such a zealot in orbit, but the scenarists craft a reasonably absorbing psychological case study nonetheless. Merritt's mental disintegration, in fact, prefigures another sub-genre--that of the Disturbed Astronaut--which found its fullest flowering in William Peter Blatty's cult psychodrama The Ninth Configuration (1980). There's no explicit anti-Christian bias on display here; rather, the General is rendered as well-intentioned but dangerously deluded, and it's strongly implied that Divine Intervention is responsible for the astronauts' unexpectedly Merry Christmas.

A surprisingly pivotal character is that of Sergeant Imoto, who functions as the conscience of the film. Earnestly arguing for the Mars mission by recalling the imperialism of his native land, he admits that Japan's aggression "was bad...but there were reasons....To the Western world at that time, Japan was a fairybook nation [of] little people living in a strange land of rice-paper houses--people who had almost no furniture, who sat on the floor and ate with chopsticks. The quaint houses," he continues, "...were made of paper because there was no other material available. And the winters in Japan are as cold as they are in Boston. And the chopsticks--there was no metal for forks and knives and spoons, but slivers of wood could suffice. So it was with the little people of Japan, little as I am now, because for countless generations we have not been able to produce the food to make us bigger." Imoto predicts that "Japan's yesterday will be the world's tomorrow: too many people and too little land." The Martian expedition is thus a first step towards "provid[ing] the resources the human race will need if they are to survive." When the General, who's plainly affected by this rather dubious speech, assures Imoto that he's "not a little man," it's a sure indication on the filmmakers' part that the West must move on from the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki towards the utopian goal of interstellar exploration--as long, of course, as the United States is in charge of all this resource-gathering expansionism. The multiracial Wheel crew, incidentally, anticipates the cast of Kurt Maetzig's First Spaceship on Venus (1959), David Bradley's 12 to the Moon (1960), and Antonio Margheriti's Assignment Outer Space (1961).

The dumbfounding appearance of the costumed dancers, who cavort on the station's enormous video screen during the astronauts' recreational downtime, temporarily transports Conquest of Space into the realm of the musical--indeed, their pulchritudinous performance is excerpted from Claude Binyon's 1953 comedy Here Come the Girls. The ladies, led by an uncredited Rosemary Clooney, are lovely but ludicrous, though their rendition of "Ali Baba (Be My Baby)" is superior to Woody Woodpecker's contribution to Destination Moon's film-within-a-film. The acting is largely standard for the genre, but Shaughnessy is laughably obnoxious and almost as bad as Foster (who, exactly like Destination's Wesson, "entertains" his fellows with a harmonica). Byron Haskin, who had previously helmed The War of the Worlds and The Naked Jungle for Pal, here directs less vigorously, but there's only so much he can do with the awkward script. He does, however, capture not only the wonder of space travel but the miserable tedium as well of life amongst the stars, which to my knowledge no other film of the time duplicated.

Paramount's 2004 DVD presents Conquest of Space in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and is anamorphically enhanced for widescreen monitors. The eighty-one minute picture contains fourteen chapter stops; unfortunately, there are no extras, not even a blessed trailer. As with many of Haskin's pictures, the Technicolor is vibrant, serving well the palette of cinematographer Lionel Lindon, which also has the unfortunate effect of making the visual effects (by, among others, Ivyl Burks and John P. Fulton) look even more artificial than they must have appeared on theatre screens. Bonestell, for whom a Martian crater was named, provides his usual memorable background art, though he later admitted he never even saw the finished film. Here's that missing trailer.

THE PLEASURES OF NYOKA: JUNGLE GIRL

2011-06-01T07:57:00.001-07:00

William Witney and John English's fifteen-chapter Republic serial Jungle Girl (1941) is the type of politically incorrect entertainment Hollywood studios don't make any more, if they know what's good for them. Allegedly based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Cambodia-set 1932 novel--originally titled The Land of Hidden Men--the picture in fact has nearly nothing in common with its source material, other than a jungle backdrop. It's the kind of movie where the African natives are plainly Caucasian actors in ludicrously comical blackface and Afro wigs, and contains dialogue guaranteed to elicit multiculturalist conniption fits (e.g., "The rest of you can stay here," one character chastises his confederates in the midst of a tribal siege, "but I'm not going to see a white man thrown to the savages." For that matter, Jungle Girl's memorable tagline, "Mistress of an Empire of Savages and Beasts," probably wouldn't pass muster with the multiculties, either). The serial is a rip-roaring relic of its time, racially insensitive and hang the consequences. It's a window on a lost cinematic world, where the Saturday afternoon matinee reigned supreme. I enjoyed every cliffhanging moment, and wish I had a combination-riding-crop-and-blow-gun like Slick Latimer's.

Frances Gifford is Nyoka (Swahili for "snake"), who lives with her father, Dr. John Meredith (Trevor Bardette), among the Masamba tribe. Unbeknownst to her, Meredith has an evil twin, Bradley (also Bardette), an ex-convict who's supposedly dying in a nearby outpost, and who inspired the good doctor's self-imposed exile. Meredith reluctantly agrees to see his brother, but naturally it's all a ruse and he's murdered by Bradley's oleagenous partner in crime, Latimer (Gerald Mohr), so that Bradley can assume his identity after the doctor refuses to participate in his sibling's latest scheme. (Bradley also pretends to be recovering from a head injury, which conveniently explains his general confusion about medicine and other important things.) Latimer and the iniquitous impersonator are flown back to the village by studly Jack Stanton (pencil-mustachioed Tom Neal), who's unaware of the villains' plot to loot the natives' diamond cache in the mysterious Caves of Nakros. The twin and his fellow miscreants contrive with the tribe's incompetent witch doctor, Shamba (Frank Lackteen)--who resents Meredith's superior Western juju--to get their mitts on the stones, which are guarded by "lionmen" (sentries in skins). Shamba also schemes to claim the Lion Goddess amulet which Chief Lutembi (Al Kikume) gave to the doctor after Meredith saved the leader's life, thus allowing Shamba to control the tribe. Nyoka and Stanton must endure everything from flamepits to avalanches to set matters aright, and the couple are aided in their endeavors by Nyoka's loyal lad Wakimbu the Wild Boy (Tommy Cook) and Stanton's sidekick Curly Rogers (Eddie Acuff, the brother of country crooner Roy Acuff), an amateur ventriloquist whose hobby comes in handy outwitting the lionmen.

Jungle Girl's pacing is brisk, its melodramatics florid with maximum ooga-booga. The California location shooting never convinces us we're anywhere near the dark continent, but that's part of the picture's primitive charm. A perpetual limitation of the serial format, of course, is its blatant resort to cheating at the beginning of chapters to resolve the climactic predicaments of previous installments, as, for example, when a hero is shown plunging in his automobile off a cliff at the conclusion of one chapter, but somehow manages to leap from the vehicle to safety in the following week's adventure. Chapter Nine is a prime specimen of this chicanery, but the remainder of the serial (composed by no less than six screenwriters) is substantially less flagrant, and practically every installment is pleasingly packed with mid-chapter perils. The stuntwork by Yakima Canutt, Helen Thurston, and David Sharpe is outstanding, with Thurston's somersaults undoubtedly inspiring a generation of girlhood injuries.

Gifford, a mere nineteen years old at the time of this production, makes a fetching heroine; sensational in form-fitting leopardskin dress, she's plucky and resourceful, even if she does shriek when a man in a gorilla suit gets too close in Chapter Ten. (The actress later helped Johnny Weismuller defeat Nazi paratroopers in one of the best RKO vine-swingers, Tarzan Triumphs [1943].) Neal, best remembered for his lead in Edgar G. Ulmer's nightmarish shoestring noir Detour (1945), provides the requisite machismo, casually digging a slug from his shoulder in Chapter Fourteen as if it's all in a day's work. Both performers, as the disc's credits supplements detail, fared poorly offscreen: Gifford's injuries in a 1948 car crash precipitated an emotional breakdown, leading to a two-decades-long stay at several sanitariums, while the hot-tempered Neal effectively sabotaged his career by cracking the skull of actor Franchot Tone in a quarrel over actress Barbara Payton; he later killed his (Neal's) wife and served several years in Wire City. Mohr, an ersatz Humphrey Bogart if there ever was one, is an eminently hissable but well-dressed antagonist who's never without his stylish cravat, no matter how high the temperature climbs. Bony Bardette is simply marvelous: innocently idealistic as the doctor, alternately ruthless and obsequious as his crooked brother (especially when he's at Latimer's mercy--it's amazing how unglued the rascal becomes when stranded amongst the Masambans). Kay Aldridge replaced Gifford in the 1942 sequel, Perils of Nyoka, in which our mistress searches for the Golden Tablets of Hippocrates; the character later appeared, off and on, in comic strip form.

VCI's 2001 DVD offers Jungle Girl on two discs: ten installments on the first platter, the remaining five on the second. The second disc additionally contains an astonishing twenty-four trailers for sundry other serials. VCI's print is taken from England's National Film and Television Archive, where the picture was released, a bewilderingly belated eight years later, by British Lion Film Corporation. Violent footage was excised from chapters Ten, Eleven, and Fifteen of British Lion's version, but has been restored for this presentation; alas, the final chapter's shots of Latimer's henchmen with spears in their backs are still missing, while Latimer's fatal plunge from Stanton's plane remains incomplete, cutting away before his dummy hits the ground. Frame damage in several shots is obscured by the utilization of artificially slowed motion, but for the most part the two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-minute fullscreen print is in excellent condition. The set additionally contains several lobbycard and photo reproductions, but, regrettably, no riding crop.

REQUIEM FOR THE ROLLINADE: VIRGINS & VAMPIRES

2011-03-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

Jean Rollin's death in December 2010 at the age of 72 brought down the final curtain on a remarkable, and remarkably unconventional, career in cinema. The French fantasist, who himself considered his work to be a "marginal" one, was, as Peter Blumenstock observes in his introduction to Rollin's long-out-of-print 1997 art book-slash-memoir, Virgins & Vampires (Crippled Publishing, 153 pages), "an outsider of the most extreme kind." He was a poet of fetishistic pulp, an iconographer of necks and nipples, and a surrealist somewhere between Clovis Trouille--the director's favorite painter--and serial maestro Louis Feuillade. Few filmmakers' first features actually precipitate a riot, as Rollin's Le Viol de Vampire did in the tumultuous year of 1968; even fewer of them move back and forth between the avant-garde and pornography like restless shades. Rollin was a steadfast crosser of zones, a voyager in dreamlands where aristocratic ladies drink bull's blood, lovers drift out to sea in caskets, and the undead emerge from grandfather clocks.

Virgins & Vampires collects the director's reminiscences on the majority of his features, as well as an interview with Rollin conducted by Blumenstock and which had originally appeared, a year earlier, in Video Watchdog Number 31. There are over six-hundred-and-fifty photos from his private archive, including numerous behind-the-scenes shots from Rollin's films, as well as a gallery of poster reproductions--indeed, the illustrations for those early efforts comprise some of the most amazing artwork, courtesy of the great Philippe Druillet, I've ever seen. The filmography ends with the director's then-current Les Deux Orphelines Vampires ("The Two Orphan Vampires," 1995), though, happily, more "Rollinades" would materialize in the ensuing decade-and-a-half.

The five-year-old Rollin saw his first picture, Abel Gance's Capitaine Fracasse, in 1942. Immediately entranced, he declared then and there that he wanted to make movies. Ten years later, he began to compose small screenplays on a typewriter his mother gave him. Rollin admired Cecil B. DeMille, but was "really obsessed" with Hollywood's cliffhanging serials, whose "spirit, structure and contents" constitute "the key to" Rollin's work. Blumenstock suggests that artists entering the horror genre "[seem] to have experienced awful things as a child," but Rollin, refreshingly, remembers his childhood as being totally different: rather than aggrievedly recounting his tortured youth, the director's "reflections of it are very romantic, sweet and utterly transfigured. Like recalling one's first love, 20 years later." Rollin was a light and happy artist working in a medium whose often contrived darkness never made him lose his essential sense of wonder at the world. In this sense, he was certainly a magician. Whether at the margins or in the mainstream, we could use more creators like him.

Rollin edited footage for Claude Lelouch in the French Army's cinema department, eventually directing his debut short, Les Amour Jaunes ("The Yellow Lovers") in 1958. Significantly, the shooting site was the beach at Pourville-les-Dieppe, a location which would become mythically ubiquitous in subsequent Rollin features. The artist also served a one-film term as Assistant Director on Jean-Marc Thibault's Un Cheval pour Deux (1962; "A Horse for Two"), an experience he found somewhat restricting ("I wanted to work spontaneously, without any regulations in my head"), and, short of funds, he had to abandon what would have been his debut feature, L'Itineraie Marin ("The Sea Route," 1960), after unsuccessfully attempting to salvage the picture with novelist and directress Marguerite Duras. He seems to have felt no significant attachment to the Nouvelle Vague ("I was always most attracted to traditional old French cinema"), though he met many of its key figures. Rollin's work never achieved anything near the critical acclaim accorded his contemporaries, but if his work wasn't always as accomplished as, say, Claude Chabrol's or Francois Truffaut's, it was every bit as personal, and often pronouncedly more oneiric.

Rollin made a rare foray into political filmmaking with 1964's Generallismo Francisco Franco documentary, Vivre en Spagne ("Life in Spain"), running afoul of Spanish authorities in the process and "[managing] to cross the border back to France just in time." Rollin, in fact, largely eschewed agitprop, though he concedes that, by and large, "the fantastic film is always political, because it is always in the opposition. It is subversive and it is popular, which means it is dangerous." The director published his own fiction around this time, writing novels (most of which remain untranslated into English) for many years. He also collaborated with artist Nicholas Devil on an experimental adult comic, Saga of Xam, and published a two-part appreciation of Phantom of the Opera author Gaston Leroux for Eric Losfeld's legendary Midi-Minuit Fantastique magazine.

Rollin recounts that he "packed [Viol] with as many images and ideas as possible" because he "was not quite sure I would get the chance to make a second film." Admitting that "the result was a sort of dadaist mess," the auteur believed its insanity would be favorably received in the merry month of May 1968. He was sadly mistaken. The striking soixant-huitards felt no connection to Rollin's work, and "even my collaborators thought the film was lousy." Rape of the Vampire (as the title bluntly translates) was a bizarre mishmash: the original film was a mere half-hour, originally intended as a co-feature for distributor Jean Lavie's revival of Sam Newfield's Dead Men Walk (1943) at the Scarlett and Midi-Minuit cinemas. Rollin's financial backers liked what they saw so much that they persuaded him to extend his surreal short, which contained a definite ending in which all the characters died. The director surmounted this obstacle by literally resurrecting his original cast, and resuming where he'd left off, seriously ratcheting up the surrealism. When producer Sam Selsky screened the picture for theatre owners, Rollin remembers, "he was constantly talking to them, disturbing their concentration. So, whenever they said they couldn't understand why this-or-that happened, Selsky replied that they had missed a very important plot twist because of his talking and that they shouldn't worry because it made perfect sense!"

The filming of Rollins' second feature, La Vampire Nue ("The Nude Vampire," 1969), was a nightmare of bounced checks, with the director, who was recovering from being struck by a car--not, hopefully, one operated by an enraged moviegoer--hobbling to the studio to edit the picture, and discovering no one else was working on the film as "they weren't being paid." The picture's release was once again met with derision, particularly the Pourville sequence in which a vampire crawls out of a box. "This is one of the most unusual images in my cinema," Rollin declares, "and despite [audiences'] whistling and heckling, it's there that true strangeness lies." The making of Le Frisson des Vampires ("The Shiver of the Vampires," 1970) was considerably less nerve-wracking. Cinematographer Jean-Jacques Renon was in rare form ("Never before did [he] use more dazzling, baroque, phantasmagoric lighting"), his imagination fueled by masssive quantities of "white wine which he found indispensable to the creative process." The splendid Castel twins, Catherine and Marie-Pierre, with whom the director had first worked on Nue, shone in this particular picture, and would return the following year for Requiem pour un Vampire ("Requiem for a Vampire"). The motif of two mysterious women, each completing the other, would become the dominant one in Rollin's oeuvre.

The cordial-imbibing Renon "often had to be supported by technicians" while photographing Rollin's minimalist, cemetery-centered La Rose de Fer ("The Iron Rose," 1972), which the director laments as "certainly my greatest commercial failure." Lead actor Hughes Quester, Rollin complains, "took himself terribly seriously, which I detest. We are bear trainers, stall hands and nothing more." Nevertheless, Rollin took the project seriously enough to be severely shaken by its hostile reception; though he doesn't mention it in the book, he was booed offstage at the film's premiere. (One would think he'd have been used to such reactions by this time, but hope springs eternal in the human breast.) His next effort, the Expressionistic shipwreck chiller Les Demoniaques ("The Demoniacs," 1973) fared much better, although initially "all the young actors and students in Paris refused" to appear in the movie, as false rumors had spread that Rollin "was running a clandestine prostitution ring," with the result that he was "forced to make do with whoever was available."

The explosion of hardcore cinema led to Rollin's pseudonymous (as "Michel Gentil") Phantasmes (1974), aka The Seduction of Amy. Rollin had secured a magnificent chateau and a willing cast, but he faced an uphill battle bringing his vision "of a cursed Satan forced to kill the women he loves" to the screen. The director imagined "elaborate scenarios" for his erotic visions, but gave up because "fans of these kinds of films want X and nothing else...My film wasn't hardcore enough," he sighs. Rollin's other pornographic excursions, whether under his Gentil or Robert Xavier aliases, are listed in his filmography appendix, but no additional chapters are devoted to them; it's obvious he was simply collecting a paycheck, a not-uncommon practice for such Eurocult figures as Jess Franco and Aristide Massacessi. Absent as well are chapters on the patch-up jobs--writing, directing, and so forth--he performed on such grindhouse wonders as Zombie Lake (1980) and Emmanuelle 6 (1988). Rollin claims in his interview with Blumenstock that "Jess Franco just didn't show up" to direct the undead Nazi feature (Eurocine manager Marius Lesoeur has denied that Franco was ever involved with the picture), while Bruno Zincone "couldn't cope with shooting [the Emmanuelle sequel] in South America," and Rollin's script revision "tried to make some sense of the whole thing, which was quite a hopeless attempt."

Much as David Cronenberg had daringly cast Marilyn Chambers in 1977's Rabid, Rollin employed adult film star Brigette Lahaie in the following year's Raisins de la Mort. (They had previously worked together on the director's hardcore Vibrations Sensuelles ["Sensual Vibrations," 1976].) This seminal French gore movie, better known stateside as Grapes of Death, melded George Romero's zombie apocalypse with "the disaster movies that were en vogue at the time." Rollin rather defensively protests this this picture "has nothing to do with Night of the Living Dead, as has been foolishly suggested." Although Raisins is thematically distinct from Romero's debut feature (it's closer in some ways to his later The Crazies [1973]), I fear that here Rollin is deluding himself. Though his "zombies" are not actually reanimated corpses--they're villagers disfigured and demented by a new pesticide, rather like the victims of Romero's "Trixie" virus--the societal breakdown scenario is plainly influenced by Night (as, for that matter, was Rabid). This forthrightly commercial picture is also one of Rollin's strongest works, combining gruesome makeup effects with a grimly beautiful lyricism and surprisingly deep emotion.

Lahaie returned for Rollin's next two efforts, Fascination (1979)--arguably his masterpiece--and the vaguely Cronenbergesque La Nuit des Tranquees ("Night of the Hunted," 1980). Rollin notes that, during the latter film's production, "I was particularly bothered by the disdain that the mainstream movie people displayed towards their porno colleagues," so he deliberately packed the picture with X-rated performers. Rollin, however, vacillates between respect for the idea of hardcore cinema and disappointment at its frequently pedestrian execution: "Sex, pleasure or simply nudity are subjects that are just as serious as any others," he asserts. "It all depends on one's outlook. Unfortunately the most common attitude is that of a pig." Night, unsurprisingly, was not a success ("It was booed at the Festival in Sitges"), and Rollin "couldn't prevent his producers from inserting two or three short sex scenes." The director achieved his greatest commercial reward with 1982's marvelous La Morte Vivante ("The Living Dead Girl"), following it with such oddities as the serial hommage Les Trottoirs de Bangkok ("Streets of Bangkok," 1984)--"a film that was as crazy as it was incoherent"--and the hallucinatory Perdues dans New York ("Lost in New York," 1991). The essays conclude with Les Deux Orphelines Vampires ("The Two Vampire Orphans," 1995), based on Rollin's novel, itself inspired by Adolphe d'Ennery and Eugene Cormon's 1875 Les Deux Orphelines. Rollin describes the movie as "certainly my most accomplished and professional film"; it earned him Fantafestival's Special Jury Prize for Life-time Achievement.

Virgins & Vampires' behind-the-scenes photographs are themselves worth the price of the book alone. There are shots of a nude Lahaie jokingly menacing Rollin with a dagger, the young director sporting a temporary flower tattoo on his brow, and Viol's Jacqueline Siege in lizard headdress, smiling seductively into the camera as stage blood leaks from her lips. And, of course, there are key shots from his features: a scythe-wielding Lahaie, clad only in cloak and boots, the shocking-but-artfully-composed scissors-through-the-eyeballs hospital victim of Nuit, and the mysterious masked girls of Perdues. The cover design, taken from Shiver, perfectly conveys the power of the director's eerily erotic imagery.

By the end of the 1990s, Rollin was on dialysis, severely restricting his cinematic output. A mere handful of his films had made it to the States in the 1970s--most notably, Requiem, amusingly retitled Caged Virgins by American distributor Harry Novak--but mail-order company Video Search of Miami began bringing out "special" editions of Rollin's movies in 1995. Unfortunately, the quality of their videotapes was merely watchable. (Video Watchdog publisher Tim Lucas generously described them as "always adequate-looking.") VSoM's cassettes were two generations away from the thirty-five-millimeter masterprints (no internegatives were domestically available at that time), but were at least uncensored. Those releases also included camcorded introductions to the films by Rollin himself, which are naturally absent from Redemption, Synapse, and Shriek Show's far superior DVD transfers.

Crippled Publishing's first book was issued in a limited edition of three hundred autographed copies (mine is number 120); a used volume is currently available on Amazon for the exorbitant sum of four hundred dollars. The book contains a bonus compact disc of Philippe d'Aram and Ars Antigua's score for The Two Orphan Vampires. Although this picture is one of the director's more restrained efforts, the twenty-track platter's enchanting electronics serve the film admirably. (The soundtrack is also available as a supplement on Shriek Show's 2002 DVD.) It's unlikely that Virgins & Vampires will ever be reissued, and the definitive Rollin biography remains to be written. Lucas' loving tribute to the director, "The Man Who Befriended Death," appears in the current number (161) of Video Watchdog.

Near the conclusion of his interview with Blumenstock, Rollin expresses grateful surprise at renewed interest in his work. Looking back on the world of the fantastique, however, he glumly predicts that "the genre is about to die, as is cinema in general. The films being made today have nothing to do with my understanding of cinema." As studios churn out increasingly bloated productions inspired by and emulating video games for viewers with dizzily diminishing attention spans, those words are strikingly prescient. Rollin, however, remained resilient in the face of severe personal setbacks, sustained critical ridicule, and general audience indifference. Like his vampire protagonists, this outsider rose again and again. Rollin made movies because he had the blood of cinema flowing through his veins. The body of work he left behind constitutes an antidote to all the alleged blockbusters of our dismal age, which lack imagination and cretinize, if not downright zombify, their patrons. Hail and farewell to the Rollinade!

SOURCES

Blumenstock, Peter. "Jean Rollin Has Risen from the Grave!" Video Watchdog No. 31 (1996).

Hood, Donald E. and Curtis Fukuda. "Eurocine: The Best Little Horror House in France." Video Watchdog No. 63 (September 2000).

Lucas, Tim. "Jean Rollin: The Man Who Befriended Death." Video Watchdog No. 161 (March/April 2011).

Lucas, Tim. "Versions & Vampires: Jean Rollin on Home Video." Video Watchdog No. 31 (1996).

Puterman, Brian and Todd Tjersland. "Art, Sex & Vampires: The Erotic Undead World of Jean Rollin." Guilty Pleasures Volume 1, Number 1 (Fall 1996).

Tohill, Cathal and Pete Tombs. Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Movies 1956-1984. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.

WAR-DOGS OF THE DEEP: TERROR BENEATH THE SEA

2011-02-13T20:28:00.001-08:00

Hajime Sato's Terror Beneath the Sea (1966), originally titled Kaitei Daisenso, was never released theatrically in the U.S., debuting instead on television five years later, but I don't remember it playing on any of the stations in my neck of the woods. Legend has it that the film was intended for the small screen by producers Walter Manley and Ivan Reiner--hence its predominantly Western central casting--who lensed it at Toei Studios for economical exotica. The picture ultimately unreeled in Japanese, and at the very least Italian, cinemas (as indicated by the above poster), to no appreciable damage that I can determine. Dark Sky Films brought this cartoonish fantasia to DVD in 2005 in a colorful, albeit no-frills, transfer. It's chock-full of outrageous villainy and preposterous gizmos, and positively zips along at seventy-nine minutes.

Reporters Ken Abe (Shinichi "Sonny" Chiba) and Jenny Gleason (Peggy Neal) assemble with other journalists aboard a U.S. submarine for a demonstration of the Navy's new "Bloodhound" homing torpedo off the coast of Japan. During this exhibition of American might, the shadow of what everyone assumes is a man passes across the sub's monitor; because the vessel is at such a great depth, the commanding officer, Brown (Franz Gruber), suggests the figure is a corpse. Pacific Command cannot locate the body, however, and the next thing you know Ken and Jenny are scuba diving for it. Jenny encounters an amphibian humanoid, but although she has the presence of mind to photograph the creature, accidentally drops her camera. By the time Ken comes to her aid, the gillman is long gone and Commander Brown's skeptical about the whole incident. The reporters return to search for Jenny's camera, winding up in a cavern where several of the silver-scaled beings take them captive. Abe and Jenny are held in an immense undersea city, three thousand feet below the surface, by totalitarian mastermind Dr. Rufus Moore (Erik Nielson), a rascal in Roy Orbison wraparounds who's recruited various eggheads to create a race of "water cyborgs" from human beings. The Bad Doctor's "a hundred years ahead of" modern science, and he attempts to convert Ken to his cause because the journalist is a "specialist in propaganda." (How this makes Abe significantly different from other reporters is, of course, difficult to distinguish.)

Ken refuses to help Moore in his plans for the futuristic city, so the supervillain gives the Fourth Estate duo the water cyborg treatment. He also abducts the couple's scientist friend, Dr. Howard (Andrew Hughes), but the elderly gentleman isn't very cooperative, either. Meanwhile, Commander Brown sets out in a sub to find the missing reporters, stumbling in the process across a tremendous number of atomic waste barrels, which Moore is using to power his city. The undersea tyrants engage Brown in a battle, but the commander means business. One of his missiles damages the control circuit board for the cyborgs, causing them to go berserk and attack Moore and his henchmen. Ken and Jenny, who are in the early stages of the transformation, scramble out of the disintegrating city before the Big Boom, depriving the wounded Moore of his escape vessel, and Dr. Howard reverses the water cyborg process so that the reporters can once again scuba dive in pristine condition.

Terror Beneath the Sea is fiendishly entertaining, from its fierce overacting (particularly Neal, who shrieks in the grand B-movie fashion, and Gruber, who delivers his lines as if be can barely contain his intensity) to the flamboyant electronic lounge score by Shonsuke Kikuchi, who composed several Gamera soundtracks. (Dark Sky's dubbed edition features the velvet voice of Brent Morrison in several, if not most, male roles.) Kohichi Ohtsu's script, plainly inspired by Jacques Tourneur's then-recent War-Gods of the Deep (1965), contains such priceless lines as "Let's just say the alternative won't be too pleasant" and "Not the X-4! You'll blow up the whole ocean!" Sato, a Mario Bava disciple masquerading here as "Terence Ford," later directed the incredible Goke--Bodysnatcher From Hell (1969), though Terror--while as ambitious as its low budget allows--lacks that picture's apocalyptic frissons. Martial artist Chiba sports a notable unibrow; Neal, who later appeared with Gruber in Kazui Nihonmatsu's wonderfully wacko The X From Outer Space (1967), is beautiful but bland--at least until she screeches. The picture's most amusing scenes involve her hysterical reactions to her extremely mild transformation: the reporters merely appear to have gel slathered on their cheeks and hands, but the actress carries on as if she's experiencing full-blown Cronenbergian body horror. The film opens on a freeze frame of the American title, callously omitting the screenwriter's name, and several credits actually overlap, as if the producers are in a hurry to get things going. I suppose I would be, too.

Dark Sky's disc, which is letterboxed at an anamorphically-enhanced 1.85:1, brings out the Bava-esque spectrum of Kazuo Shimomura's cinematography. Several sources cite a six-minutes-longer Japanese version, but, although the story jumps around manically, nothing really seems to be missing, unless it involves an elucidation of the two reporters' relationship. (They appear to be lovers, but this is never spelled out; perhaps the Asian male/Caucasian female pairing was taboo for the time, Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour [1959] notwithstanding.) There's no trailer, not even a Japanese one. The disc contains optional English subtitles, and Dark Sky's lurid yellow keep case is one of the label's more memorable designs.

HAIL AND FAREWELL: R.I.P. JOHN BARRY (1933-2011)

2011-01-31T09:29:00.000-08:00

The silver screen lost one of its titans yesterday with the passing at age 77 of composer John Barry. Barry, who appropriately enough served as a teenage projectionist in his father's cinema, will forever be remembered for his dozen James Bond pictures, whose scores combined surf guitar with lavish strings and horns for truly voluptuous effect. Monty Norman might have written the original 007 theme, but it was Barry whose archetypal arrangement transformed the piece into the stuff of cultural folklore. He also boldly incorporated synthesizers into his compositions, notably on his work for Peter R. Hunt's On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) and his scintillating theme for ITC Entertainment's 1971-72 teleseries, The Persuaders--the latter constituting a veritable analog bubblebath. Barry's lush orchestrations enthralled me as a lad, and I can scarcely recall my adolescence without mentally hearing those jazzy strains, along with Ennio Morricone's spaghetti western masterworks, as a soundtrack of the times. Barry made music to spy by. Other Swinging Sixties gems include his scores for Never Let Go (1960), Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), and The Ipcress File (1965); a sample from this last theme was memorably integrated into the trip hop duo Mono's 1996 debut single, "Life in Mono." Barry won five Oscars, two for Born Free (1966), and one each for The Lion in Winter (1968), Out of Africa (1985), and Dances With Wolves (1990). In 1998, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the artist was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire the following year. The music of the Twentieth Century is frankly unimaginable without him. Hail and farewell!

DISTAFF DYSTOPIA: CAT-WOMEN OF THE MOON

2011-01-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

Science fiction cinema, much like its literary counterpart, has seldom lacked for outrageousness; indeed, it's its strength. The genre is, as one of its genuine titans, J.G. Ballard, observed, "the pipeline to the unconscious." What red-blooded male hasn't imagined a world ruled by the fair sex, and wondered how--or if--he would fit in? Camille Paglia suggests that "the myth of matriarchy may have originated in our universal experience of mother power in infancy....As history," she continues, "the idea...is spurious, but as metaphor, it is poetically resonant." Our planet's nearest satellite is a traditional female symbol, which brings me to Arthur Hilton's Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), a prime specimen of the subgenre that film historian David J. Hogan dubs "the 'cinema of lost women.'" This delirious distaff dystopia was one of the first 3-D features, and, although it's available only in a disappointing two dimensions on Image Entertainment's 2001 DVD, the picture packs a generous plenty of testosterone-versus-estrogen camp thrills into its economical sixty-three minutes. It may not be precisely poetic, but by Selene, it's surely resonant enough.

The four-man, one-woman crew of Moon Rocket 4 hurtle towards their destination after a lift-off audiences never witness. The first thing navigator Helen Salinger (Marie Windsor) does after recovering from g-forces is pull out a compact mirror and fix her hair, which prompts engineer Walt Wallace (Douglas Fowley, father of music impresario/Runaways producer Kim Fowley) to gloat, "Oh, brother! Am I gonna collect some bets!" Stuffy Commander Laird Grainger (Sonny Tufts) reminds his fellow astronauts that "this is a scientific expedition"--glancing significantly at his lover Helen--"and not a stunt." There's the usual in-flight hazard: in this instance a meteoroid, which somehow winds up, when the crew's not looking, embedded in the rocket's rear section. The astronauts successfully dislodge the object with centrifugal force, but there's a nitric acid spill in ship Sector 5 and take-charge co-pilot Kip Reissner (Victor Jory) collapses after containing it.

Helen protests that her relationship with Grainger on this mission is strictly "scientific," but Reissner, recovered from his exertions, informs the navigator that "it's hooey. You can't turn love on and off like a faucet." Leaning in close, he assures her that "if I ever fell in love with you, baby, I'd chase you across the world, round the moon, and all the way stations in-between." Helen's plainly affected, but she's also distracted: earlier, when the astronauts take turns at the radio greeting the citizens of Earth, she announces, "Hello, Alpha. We're on our way." Who Alpha is Helen has no idea, but her woman's intuition tells her that the spacecraft should touch down in a valley on the dark side of the moon. The crew had planned to study the bright side first, as any sensible astronauts would, but Helen's adamant that her selection "is the perfect landing place," although she confesses that she "[doesn't] know why I know it." It transpires that she's actually receiving telepathic transmissions from the mysterious Alpha (Carol Brewster). The crew disembark, discovering oxygen in a cave and discarding their pressure suits. Reissner packs a pistol, and, even though Grainger complains that "there's too much infantile romanticism in this crew," the weapon comes in handy when the astronauts are attacked by a pair of pitifully-unconvincing giant spiders (actually, one puppet masquerading as two), which dangle from wires--I mean webs--and shriek girlishly when injured.

The crew arrive at a subterranean temple comprising Doric columns with female statuary atop their capitals, as well as a central sculpture suspiciously resembling the male Hindu deity, Chandra. Reissner realizes that their spacesuits have vanished, and radio operator Doug Smith (William Phipps) is jumped by a Siamese-looking woman in tights while Helen "just [stands] there watching" the assault before wandering off on her own. When the other men rush to his aid, Reissner is set upon by three more of the meow mistresses. Smith tackles one of them, Lambda (Susan Morrow), but she dematerializes before their eyes (cameraman William Whitley simply stops rolling), and the others scatter when Reissner fires his rod. Helen, meanwhile, encounters Alpha and several more ladies, including her second-in command, Beta (Suzanne Alexander). The cat-women not only look decidedly human, they speak English and all other Earth languages. When Helen asks why the moon maidens selected her, and not the other crew members, for contact, Beta contemptuously replies, "We have no use for men."

That's putting it mildly. Alpha discloses that the Moon's atmosphere is steadily disappearing, prompting androcidal population reduction. Even that extreme measure hasn't helped, however, so three of the Sapphic circle have appointed Helen to take them with her to Earth, where they plan to control half the population's minds and "rule the whole world," thus demonstrating the mother of all mother power. The cat-women deliver Helen to the rest of her crew, providing refreshments for the astronauts. The Siamese sirens promise to return their spacesuits the following morning, but Reissner's skeptical and observes with disdain the other men's interactions with their hostesses. Lambda disavows her gynocentrism after falling hard for Smith when she learns he has no "special Earth girl." Greedy Wallace is stabbed in the back by Beta in the Cave of Gold; she also accidentally calls him "Doug," but nevermind. Reissner determines that Helen's under Alpha's command, and Lambda is slain by Beta when she attempts to stop the two ladies from leaving with Helen in the ship. Reissner plugs Alpha and Beta (offscreen), and the crew return to Earth, with the co-pilot replacing the commander as the object of the navigator's affections.

It's difficult to believe that anyone would place a nincompoop like Grainger, rather than the far more competent Reissner, in charge of a terrestrial expedition, much less a lunar one. Reissner--the script's real Alpha male--is certainly a better match for Helen than Grainger (the navigator admits to preferring him, but reveals the cat-women chose the commander for her because "Laird knew more"), and he's not fooled by the lunar welcome. Grainger, in fact, is constantly reminding Reissner that he's in charge, but don't you believe it. Roy Hamilton's screenplay abounds in amusing sexual metaphors: in addition to all the misandric shenanigans inside the womb-like underground city, the opening narration intones that Man "is barely able to penetrate [the] unknown secrets of space" and that "sometime, someday, the barrier will be pierced." The phallically-shaped rocket achieves this goal, and by the picture's finale speeds, angled at a triumphant tumescence, through the stars.

Hogan, in his 1986 survey Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, laments that "there is something disquieting about [this subgenre's] insistence upon the adversary aspect of man-woman relationships, and the crass way in which they reinforce stereotypes," even going so far as to describe such pictures as "separatist and misogynistic...foster[ing] nothing but puerility and prejudice." While this obligingly reflects the feminist weltanschauung, I submit that, as laughably lunkheaded as these pictures often are, their scenarios nevertheless distill the masculine anxieties of classical myth for contemporary audiences. (The cat-women's names are, of course, derived from the Greek alphabet.) "Sexual geography," Paglia contends, "alters our perception of the world. Man is contoured for invasion, while woman remains the hidden, a cave of archaic darkness. No legislation or grievance committee can change these eternal facts." The "lost women" of celluloid not only manifest male fascination with female mystery, they communicate uncomfortable truths about gender and nature. The cat-women constitute a self-contained, pseudo-Amazonian unit; while Hogan considers such myth-making puerile and prejudicial, Paglia maintains that "[d]read is the proper response to beings of hieratic purity." The lunar ladies' two-million-year-old civilization is rapidly succumbing to entropy, symbolically exposing the barrenness of their culture, and they must be defeated before spreading it to Earth.

Cat-Women of the Moon takes so little advantage of the 3-D process, aside from stray meteoroids, that one wonders why the filmmakers even bothered with it. Be that as it may, the full-breasted felines are fetchingly stylish in their jumpsuits, and wouldn't have been out of place on a Roxy Music album cover. Tufts--the former "Male Sensation of 1944" whose career was stalled by several drunken misadventures (among them, biting the upper left thigh of stripper Melody Carol)--is comical to watch, as his acting largely consists of constantly rubbing his legs and the back of his neck, occasionally gripping the belt loops of his britches for variety; it's a pity he didn't channel his real-life aggression into the role of Commander Granger. Jory, best remembered as ruthless Jonas Wilkerson in Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939), is a curmudgeonly joy. Windsor, the tougher-than-a-fifty-cent-steak gangster's widow in Richard Fleischer's The Narrow Margin (1951), lacks the New Wave elegance of the cat-women and, while certainly likable, is too drab for the proceedings; although she's a superior performer to the six "Hollywood Cover Girls"--in fact, Windsor was one of the greatest noir actresses--here, alas, she shares their splendid dimensions but, strangely, none of their pizazz. Betty Arlen directed the ladies' daffy dance sequence, Chesley Bonestell provided another memorable moonscape, and Elmer Bernstein (whose name is misspelled in the credits) contributed an impressive early score. The astronauts' pressure suits are left over from Destination Moon (1950), while the rocket's interiors return from Project Moon Base (1953). The film's science is completely ludicrous; my favorite example of foolishness occurs at the dividing line of light and darkness on the Moon when Grainger, illustrating the (imaginary) danger of exposure to sunshine, causes a cigarette to burst into flames where there's no atmosphere.

In a remarkable fit of pettiness, producer Al Zimbalist actually sued the makers of the then-popular radio show My Little Margie for allegedly having "disparaged, ridiculed, parodied, mimicked and libeled" his masterpiece by having the series' characters attend a screening of a psychotronic potboiler called "Cat Women From Outer Space." This million dollar lawsuit was reportedly, or at least hopefully, unsuccessful. The movie was remade in 1958 as Richard E. Cunha's Missile to the Moon (minus 3-D, but retaining Wah Chang's infamous arachnid), and many years later, it served as the basis for Les Caulfield's play of the same title, which premiered--giant spider and all--at the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival.

Cat-Women of the Moon was released in a steroscopic format by Rhino Home Video in 1993, but I've not seen the company's cassette. Image's disc, yet another entry in the label's Wade Williams Collection, contains a dozen chapter stops and the film's original trailer. The fullscreen print is in reasonably good shape, though not quite as good as that of the Hollywood Cover Girls. They're the cat's pajamas, I assure you.

SOURCES

Hogan, David J. Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film. North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 1986.

Medved, Harry and Michael. The Golden Turkey Awards: Nominees and Winners--the Worst Achievements in Hollywood History. New York: Perigee, 1980.

Paglia, Camille. Sex, Art, and American Culture. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991.

THE SOUND OF WAVES: R.I.P. MICK KARN (1958-2011)

2011-01-05T10:37:00.000-08:00

This post has nothing and everything to do with film. I was deeply saddened to learn that musician Mick Karn succumbed to cancer yesterday at his London home. Karn, born Andonis Michaelides, remains my all-time favorite bassist, from his early years with the legendary art-rock/New Wave band Japan to his solo and collaborative efforts with Peter Murphy and David Torn. Karn's primarily instrumental compositions possess a distinct cinematic majesty, unfolding like scores to imaginary movies. My favorite of his many creations remains "The Sound of Waves," the B-side to his 1982 solo single, "Sensitive." (Almost unbelievably, this sweeping, exquisitely-textured masterpiece did not appear on the vinyl version of Karn's first solo album, Titles, but was eventually released as a bonus track on the CD reissue.) The tidal synthesizer washes and African flute effects are a prelude to the gathering storm of Karn's fretless bass, which, which finally unleashed, progresses with acrobatic grace, like some magnificent creature penetrating the depths towards its destiny and delighting in its own existence. The scope of this piece is positively Herzogian.

Farewell, Maestro! You were a magician of my youth, and you will be much missed.

THE GRAVES OF ACADEME: BURN, WITCH, BURN

2010-12-03T07:47:00.000-08:00

Fritz Leiber surely wasn't the first man to suggest that all women are witches, but, to the best of my knowledge, he was the first fellow to write a novel about it. Leiber's 1943 classic Conjure Wife has been filmed three times, first as Reginald Le Borg's Inner Sanctum entry Weird Woman (1944), then--borrowing its handle from an A. Merritt thriller--as Burn, Witch, Burn (1962; U.K. title, Night of the Eagle), and finally lampooned in Richard Shorr and Herbert L. Strock's sporadically amusing Witches' Brew (1980). Sidney Hayers' early Sixties adaptation remains the best of this bunch, coming far closer to its source material than the earlier, bare-bones version, and offering chthonian theatrics aplenty.

Sociology professor Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde) doesn't realize that his wife Tansy (Janet Blair) has been waging an occult battle on his behalf at Hempnell Medical College. Taylor's students, you see, have a higher scholastic average than other instructors' pupils, and this accomplishment has, not surprisingly, bred resentment at the school, particularly among the faculty's overbearing wives. Taylor, of course, is oblivious to all this, involved as he is in his daily struggle against "the morbid desire to escape reality" of the superstitious masses. One evening, after the Hempnell gang's weekly bridge game, the professor discovers a dead spider in a jar in a dresser drawer, where he's searching for a clean pair of pajamas. Tansy explains that the object is simply a farewell gift from a witch doctor named Curubius, whom the couple had encountered on a Jamaican field trip, where Taylor nearly perished in an accident. The professor is mollified, but soon another charm turns up in his jacket collar, and he finds to his chagrin that his wife has hoarded a veritable treasure trove of the talismans. He convinces her to burn the items--among them, a locket with his photograph inside--and his comfortable life commences to disintegrate.

The first crack in the microcosmic egg is a telephone call from Taylor's pupil Margaret Abbott (Judith Stott), a moony blonde who urges him, "after you've undressed me with your eyes," to "take me in your arms." The student--who is crippled Dean of Women Flora Carr's (Margaret Johnston) ward--later turns up in Flora's office, accusing Taylor (who has moments earlier barely missed being run down by a delivery van) of violating her. She subsequently confesses that "something came over me," but there's more mischief in the form of Margaret's jealous boyfriend Fred Jennings (Bill Mitchell), a complete imbecile who accuses Taylor of "deliberately bas[ing] your tests on lectures I've missed." Jennings even pulls a gun on the professor, but Taylor slaps him and gets the weapon away from the hysterical lad.

That night, Taylor receives in the post a recording of a Manchester lecture he recently presented. Believing it was sent to him by his dean--the accompanying letter, however, contains no signature--he plays the tape for Tansy's instructional benefit. The reel emits a psychedelic hum (no Dolby digital noise reduction here, alas), and the increasingly anxious Tansy (who shrilly demands of her husband if he's "going to give me the benefit of your brilliant logic?") turns it off. The telephone rings immediately, but the only sound is the mysterious hum. The power fails as Tansy covers her ears, she snatches the phone from Taylor's hand, and suddenly there's a bloodcurdling cry and the ominous flapping of wings at the front door. She yanks the phone out of the wall, and, as her husband approaches the door, a tremendous wind forces it open, knocking the professor against the wall. An eagle's shadow appears subliminally, vanishing in darkness as lightning illuminates one of Hampnell's several eagle statues scattered across the school grounds.

Once things temporarily settle down, Tansy drugs Taylor's drink ("Now we're joined in spirit"), and late the next morning he awakens to discover that she's decamped, having left a message on their reel machine that "I've gone away so that this terrible curse can no longer touch you." After learning from a colleague, Hilda Gunnison (Jessica Dunning), that her husband earlier spotted Tansy taking a coach--presumably to the couple's seaside cottage--Taylor crashes his car trying to stop her transit. Dazed but adamantly refusing to see a doctor, he borrows another vehicle and heads for their retreat, where his wife plans to drown herself at the stroke of midnight. Discovering a helpful note on curse destruction inside Tansy's copy of Rites and Practice in Black Magic, Taylor grabs some candles--naturally, his flashlight batteries are dead--and hoofs it first to the shore and then a nearby cemetery, unknowingly rushing past his wife, who leans trancelike in the shadows against a rock. Unable to locate Tansy, he breaks into a mausoleum and, in utter philosophical desperation, Crosses Over to the Other Side by sprinkling graveyard dirt over a picture of his beloved that he removes from his wallet. The spell works, and Taylor's waterlogged wife appears, clutching the accursed tape reel, in the crypt entrance.

Tansy eventually emerges from her trance, but back home she abruptly wakens, sits straight up in bed (never a good sign in horror films), and attempts to stab her husband with a butcher knife as the camera cuts to a female hand pressing a blade into a voodoo figurine. The telepathically-controlled Tansy also prominently limps, which reminds Taylor of the orthopedically-impaired Flora. They struggle, Tansy faints, and the professor heads with the distorted tape to Flora's office. "Why did you try to drive her out of her mind?" he asks, to which she mockingly responds, "I knew you were naive, but I didn't know you were as naive as all that. After all that's happened, do you mean to tell me that you still put it down to natural causes?" Taylor believes Flora's hypnotized Tansy in order to jeopardize his position at Hempnell--he and her husband Lindsay (Colin Gordon) are candidates for the college's Sociology chair--but Flora sets him straight by erecting, then setting fire to, a house of Tarot cards on her desk. In the meanwhile, the Taylors' black cat leaps upon a window ledge (or, more accurately, is tossed by someone standing offscreen), knocking a flowerpot onto an oil stove and causing the couple's nice home to erupt in flames. "Burn, witch, burn!" Flora commands her disintegrating cards as Taylor hurries outside.

Now unspools the most spectacular part of the picture. Flora cues Taylor's lecture tape, which thunders over the school's public address system. As the professor runs across campus, there's a flapping sound and the camera zooms in on the stone eagle guarding the entrance to his classroom building. The statue comes alive, and a real, enormous eagle launches itself at him. Taylor stumbles into the building and locks the door behind him, but the creature bursts through in pursuit. As the monstrous bird advances upon Taylor in his lecture hall, Flora's husband fortuitously enters her office and switches the sound button from the p.a. system to the tape speaker. The creature vanishes (as does the damage it's caused), leaving behind a completely discombobulated Taylor, while Flora, looking exceedingly stricken herself, stops the tape. Taylor returns to his engulfed home to find that Tansy's made it out safely, and, as the Carrs depart from the campus, Lindsay informs his wife that Hempnell's awarding the Sociology chair to Taylor. She's sarcastically skeptical, but the stone eagle tumbles from its perch and crushes her to death, so there. As the closing shot lingers on the partially-unreeled tape, the film asks, "Do You Believe?"

After all that excitement, it's difficult not to. Burn, Witch, Burn mischievously turns the conflict between science and magic inside out. Taylor, whose given name denotes the norm, represents the masculine laws of Nature, while Tansy (a flower, from the Greek athanasia [immortality]) and Flora (derived from the Roman flower goddess) symbolize female Supernature. Science is Appollonian; magic, Dionysian. To Taylor, superstitions spring from "primitive beliefs" and constitute "a science devoid of all empirical values," one that is "completely based on a priori observation." Yet, to the professor's credit, he is keenly aware that, even though genuine science contains "feats which put our old-fashioned magicians to shame," it also encompasses a daemonic capacity for destruction: "Today we can press a button and the whole of mankind is obliterated." Taylor's pessimism reflects the thematic concerns of technology and chaos so prevalent in post-Hiroshima/-Nagasaki filmmaking. In the final analysis, however, reason remains for our sociologist the only game in town, but the diabolic drubbing he's just endured ought to make for a rather interesting lecture. Whether he'll deliver it is, of course, another matter entirely.

Tansy adores her husband, but complains that his "stuffy old books"--all written by narrow-minded men, I'll wager--"invade every corner of our lives," and she teasingly threatens to burn the volumes. Taylor, for his part, avers that "if we were to investigate all the strange rituals performed by women based on their so-called intuition, half the female population would be in asylums." Yet Tansy is willing to sacrifice herself for Taylor's career ("You have so much to offer this world"); indeed, her character is one of the most devoted wives in the entire history of cinema. Her selfless attempt to drown herself is a return to liquid nature. Fortunately for her, once Taylor surrenders to unreason, Tansy is reborn from, rather than obliterated in, the oceanic womb. Flora, at the opposite extreme, is the Divine Mother in her aspect of violence and death. As she grins, skull-like, above an office lamp at Taylor, her ghastly underlit mouth constitutes a vagina dentata. It's appropriate that her drab husband's androgynous name is Lindsay, for Flora, despite her schoolmarmish dress, demonstrably wears the pants in their relationship; indeed, it's obvious there's more than a little repressed desire for the virile Taylor partially motivating her spiteful spellwork. Flora's left side limp symbolizes left-hand path magic, sometimes referred to as Vama Marg, the Way of Woman. Ironically, as is true in Tansy's case, her witchery is all on behalf of her spouse; these women live through their husbands' accomplishments, or perish through the lack of them. However, in Hayers' adaptation of Leiber's tale, only Tansy and Carr seem to possess actual secret powers. Significantly, Tansy's development of her abilities is the result of her encounter with the Third World warlock Curubius, which spiritually reverses the evangelical imperialism of the colonial powers.

The employment of witchcraft as a metaphor for academic politics is charmingly cheeky and scarcely imperceptive. The Hempnell coterie, composed as it is of what Tansy derides as "petty scholars," is a poisonously envious bunch; in fact, one of Taylor's colleagues jokingly inquires if the professor's "sold [his] soul to the Devil," which supposedly accounts for his success. Sorcery here is the radical upstart in Academe, as the old scientific paradigm reverts to "new" magic, whose classical elements (earth, air, fire, and water) are all put to artful use in the scenario. Hayers' film arguably fires an early shot in the West's ongoing culture war(s), indulging postmodernism's disdain of rationalism while celebrating the survival of a pagan metaphysics that monotheisms have never been entirely able to extinguish.

On a more intimate level, Burn, Witch, Burn facilitates Taylor's headlong confrontation with his irrational feminine side. When the professor moves towards the door after the mysterious phone call, Tansy orders him not to open what is plainly the door of his unconscious, because she knows that her husband cannot face what lies beyond. At the beginning of the film, Taylor writes the words "I do not believe" in all capitals on his classroom blackboard, but when the giant eagle corners him against the board, he accidentally erases part of the sentence with his back, altering the declaration to "I do believe." His desire to hang onto his empiricism at all costs reflects, as Flora points out, Taylor's fear "of being wrong." Her homicidal utilization of his lecture is an almost-successful attempt to turn the professor's words against him and destroy his "Aristotelian mind," as well as his sculptured body.

Reginald Wyer's black-and-white cinematography is striking, from the shot of Tansy spinning the fringe of a lampshade in search of a charm Flora has left behind to the superimposition of flames over Tansy's face, foreshadowing the climactic house fire (which is also adumbrated in the bridge evening when Taylor's house of cards collapses). As Taylor desperately searches for his wife, he's literally framed in darkness. Tansy's descent into the sea recalls a similar moment in Jacques Tourneur's I Walked With a Zombie (1943), and, though it's clearly a day-for-night shot, the shore sequence shimmers with oneiric ambience. The entire cast is excellent, with Wyngarde (who later, hippie-haired and mustachioed, rocketed to U.K. fame as ITC's Jason King [1971-72]) radiating a particularly rugged intelligence; American torch singer Blair and London stage actress Johnston are equally splendid. My only disappointment is that the great Kathleen Byron (best remembered for her role as the sexually-crazed Sister Ruth in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Black Narcissus [1947]) as "middle-aged Medusa" Evelyn Sawtelle has so little to do in the film, though her brief appearances are memorably malicious, deploring as she does Taylor's "manag[ing] to charm better grades out of his idiot students" than the rest of the Hempnell nonentities. Muir Matheson contributes a sonically disorienting score, and Hayers, who previously helmed the engagingly lurid Circus of Horrors (1960), directs with vigor, especially in his staging of the eagle sequences. "I felt sorry for the poor thing," he later recalled of his beleaguered avian actor "...but I was very pleased with the result. I remember going to see the film with an audience at the Odeon in Leicester Square, and afterwards in the toilets I eavesdropped on these two guys saying how scared they'd been."

An amusing, William-Castle-inspired prologue was added to the film for its U.S. release. "Ladies and gentlemen," the legendary four-octave voice artist Paul Frees gravely intones over a blank screen, "the motion picture you are about to see contains an evil spell." Frees hammily proceeds to "dispel all evil spirits that may radiate from the screen during this performance" by invoking various dark deities to "cast a protecting shield above those gathered here present." It's flamboyant stuff, and certainly puts the viewer in the mood for some supernatural thrills.

The picture's authorship has been a subject of considerable dispute. The screenplay is credited to Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont; Matheson even provided an audio commentary for Orion/Image Entertainment's long-out-of-print 1995 laserdisc. However, novelist George Baxt's name appears as a co-scenarist in Europe and Asia. Asked about this discrepancy in Filmfax, Baxt contended that "Beaumont asked [producer] Sam Arkoff, 'Please don't put anybody's name on our credits, we've written everything alone.' And Sam said, 'I've got to give Baxt credit--he wrote the whole script. It has no resemblance to what you wrote.'" Baxt claimed to have composed "at least ninety percent" of the film, and--furthermore--he "did it in four days." ("The script was an embarrassment," he alleged. "Sidney Hayers was near tears when he got it.") Those remarks did not at all sit well with historian Christopher Koetting, who wrote to Filmfax that he has access to the original script. "I have checked the claims Mr. Baxt makes regarding the scenes he supposedly added," Koetting stated for the record, and "I have found him to be wrong on every count." Rebutting Baxt's protestation that he "'hated that goddamn eagle they had," the historian asked, "Then whose idea was it? The statue monster was originally a gargoyle--not a bird."

Orion/Image's disc presented a near-mint print of Burn, Witch, Burn in its original aspect ratio of 1.75:1, while MGM's now-deleted videocassette counterpart was released in fullscreen only. The disc also contained a letterboxed version of Night of the Eagle's title sequence, in which Baxt is listed as co-writer, Wyngarde is billed before Blair, and Ms. Blair's eye is presented in closeup, as opposed to the painting of the organ used in American International's release. The ninety-minute film was issued in the UK under its original title on a 2007 Optimum DVD, but I've not seen this edition. United Artists announced a remake of Conjure Wife, under Billy Ray's direction, in 2008, but thus far nothing has materialized, ectoplasmic or otherwise. It's high time for Image to reissue this spellbinder stateside.

SOURCES

Bradley, Matthew R. "Baxt Stabs Back: Real Horror Hotel(er) Tells How to Write Horror Right." Filmfax, Number 50 (May/June 1995).

Koetting, Christopher. "Re:EDITS," letter. Filmfax, Number 54 (January/February 1996).

Rigby, Jonathan. English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema. London: Reynolds & Hearn Ltd., 2000.

Schreck, Nikolas. The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide to the Devil in Cinema. London: Creation Books, 2001.

Winters, Joseph. "Witchcraft Through the Cinema." Scary Monsters Magazine, Number 74 (April 2010).

BLACK SEAS OF INFINITY: THE CALL OF CTHULHU

2010-11-11T05:31:00.000-08:00

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was the greatest writer to emerge from the American horror pulps, but faithful adaptations of his dark fantasies have, alas, been few and far between. Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace (1963) masqueraded as another of the director's Edgar Allan Poe thrillers, but was actually an estimable reworking of Lovecraft's novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Other efforts have been considerably less inspired (David Greene's The Shuttered Room [1967], from an August Derleth "collaboration," in especial), while one of the better Lovecraft-derived pictures, Stuart Gordon's delightfully outrageous Re-Animator (1985), feels less like the Weird Tales wizard and more like Frank Henenlotter. The Call of Cthulhu is, along with At the Mountains of Madness, one of the Gentleman from Providence's two most canonical works, and the H.P. Lovecraft Society's 2005 production of this classic chiller truly serves the author well. It's by far the best filmed treatment of his work, and--in a shrewd stylistic move--appears to arrive from the year (1926) in which the antiquarian composed his story for J.C. Henneberger's legendary magazine.

According to the insert sheet accompanying the Society's Microcinema DVD, the association arose in 1987 as a circle of live-action Lovecraftian role-playing gamers. The Society has progressed from publishing a newsletter to operating a website and producing radio and motion picture adaptations. Here the filmmakers employ the miracle of "Mythoscope" to recreate the look and the texture of silent movies, utilizing speckles and the occasional writhing projector gate hair to suggest ancient silver nitrate, not terribly dissimilar to Woody Allen's tactics on behalf of his magnificent mockumentary, Zelig (1983). The trick photography, forced perspective, and stop-motion animation of bygone times combine with modern digital compositing in a startlingly vivid feature that runs rings around much of today's depressingly reflexive "imaginative" cinema.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think," Lovecraft's Francis Wayland Thurston begins his bleak narrative, "is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far." Lovecraft created a baneful macrocosmos which is largely and happily hidden from our sight, but remains ready to burst through at any moment. His abominable alien zones are populated by unspeakable interstellar entities--the Great Old Ones--whom human beings, in all our intellectual limitations, mistake for deities and demons. In his wildly entertaining The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture, Jason Colavito credits the fantasist with inadvertently inspiring the notorious "ancient astronaut" subgenre of pseudoscience by synthesizing the "Golden Age" esotericism-slash-humbug of Madame Helena Blavatsky, Ignatius Donnelly, and Charles Fort with Arthur Machen's yarns of "primal mysteries." Lovecraft's literary mixture remains an intoxicating brew which has, ironically but predictably, clouded the minds of many occultists and conspiracy theorists, who insist, for example, that his entirely fictitious grimoire, the Necronomicon, is the Real Deal. Ergo, the contrivances of such confidence men as Erich von Daniken dishearteningly reflect humanity's desperation to remain the spiritual center of the universe in the depths of our materialistic malaise, but Lovecraft will have none of that wishful thinking; if anything, Colovito argues, he "preached a cosmic indifference, where the aliens were utterly unconcerned with mankind, where humanity was simply a cog in the great machine that was the mindless cosmos." The Call of Cthulhu, well-adapted by Sean Branney under Andrew Leman's accomplished direction, definitively dramatizes the author's keen sense of existential dread.

Thurston (nameless in this version and well-played by Matt Foyer) is shaken by the disclosures in his late great-uncle George Gammell Angell's (Ralph Lucas) papers, which reveal an alternative reality beyond any anyone's most demented imaginings. Angell's first manuscript, "The Horror in the City," documents the Semitic Languages professor's encounters with a disturbed artist named Henry Anthony Wilcox (Chad Fifer, who also contributed to the film's vigorous symphonic score), who has fashioned a bas-relief of a mysterious creature called Cthulhu, which has come to him in a successive series of nightmares. Not coincidentally, the planet is plagued during the course of the artist's dreams by everything from earthquakes to riots. ("VOODOO ORGIES MULTIPLY IN HAYTI" and "HYSTERICAL LEVANTINES IN MIDNIGHT MOB," shriek headlines in a good old-fashioned newspaper montage.)

The second document records the exploits nearly two decades earlier of wax-mustachioed Inspector John Raymond Legrasse (David Mersault) as he trails a murderous doomsday cult through the Louisiana swamps and recovers a sculpture of a weird being with a tentacled face--which an anxious Professor William Channing Webb (Barry Lynch) recognizes when Legrasse reveals the icon to several scholars, Angell among them, at a 1908 gathering of the American Archaeological Society in an effort to learn more about the statue. Webb had in his young manhood lost an eye to an Esquimaux shaman (Dan Novy) for daring to touch a similar statue, and the Inspector recounts his brutal-but-futile interrogation of Castro (Clarence Henry Hunt), a grotesque mestizo, who warns the authorities that "Great Cthulhu waits dreaming in the sunken city of R'lyeh. The stars will again be right, and He shall return."

These sequences are quite impressive, laying a firm foundation for the third manuscript, which Angell's grandnephew himself tracks down after reading by chance of a bizarre incident in the Sydney Bulletin. The pages relate the story of First Mate Gustaf Johansen (Patrick O'Day) of the Emma, whose tempest-tossed New Zealand schooner encounters a derelict fishing trawler, the Alert, in the South Pacific. The crew members, whose own vessel is flooded, commandeer the trawler and learn from the ship's log that its missing sailors had set course for an unknown island in nearby uncharted waters. They also discover a box containing a Cthulhu icon and a severed finger. The ship steers to the island, which is dominated by a seemingly abandoned and--to borrow a favorite Lovecraft adjective, Cyclopean--city whose geometric structures are insanely non-Euclidean. Cthulhu waits below, of course, and when he emerges from his portal the colossal, squid-faced, clawed extraterrestrial makes short work of the men. Johansen escapes with sailor Briden (Matthew Q. Fahey) to the Emma, but that scarcely prevents Cthulhu from pursuing them. The gargantuan charges into the ocean as the desperate Johansen rams the creature, which howls with rage and retreats underwater. When the First Mate turns around, his completely unhinged shipmate has expired, extravagantly bleeding from his eyelids. Soon he himself will be dead, along with Angell, Legrasse, and even poor Thurston. In the denouement, the grandnephew (who's been recounting these incidents from an asylum--Thurston, however, is not institutionalized in Lovecraft's novella) urges his doctor (John Bolen) to destroy the papers. He has, like his predecessors, voyaged too far in those black seas, but there's the implication that another excursion into the unknown, on the part of his auditor, will soon begin. As Thurston so memorably puts it at the conclusion of his narrative, "Some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee to the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Cthulhu's brief appearance is striking; although he exhibits the herki-jerkiness of such stop-motion creatures as those of The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933), he also inspires the shivering awe that audiences must have felt upon seeing those celluloid wonders so many decades ago. The Caligari-esque design of R'lyeh (Lovecraft's Atlantis), which Expressionistically renders the abode of a being outside our own space-time continuum, is especially admirable, constructed as it is of scaffolding, solid cardboard, and used canvas. (Black-and-white perfectly serves this film, as color would only emphasize its low-budget sets.) Another noteworthy sequence is Professor Angell's visit to the Fleur-de-Lis building in Providence in search of Wilcox: the structure is specifically cited in Lovecraft's story, and displays the same exteriors it did when he wrote it; through digital magic and the use of models, the filmmakers seamlessly suggest that actor Lucas has somehow traveled back in time. Leman's outstanding cast sport the androgynous pancake of their silent pioneers, while adeptly communicating the theatrics of those period players.

Microcinema's fullscreen DVD (which sternly warns that "violators of HPLS copyrights may have their eyes plucked out by byakhee as they sleep," so beware, ye pirates) contains several interesting supplements. "Hearing 'The Call'" (25 minutes) offers behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with cast and crew members. Cinematographer/editor David Robertson admits that he possessed only "a very peripheral knowledge of Lovecraft" before tackling the project (he "knew the name from high school and some of the geekier kids"), and confesses he's never read the author. Deleted material includes green- and blue-screen footage of the Cthulhu model, and improvisations from the various actors, most notably Fifer, who memorably channels Dwight Frye's Renfield. The disc also offers black-and-white production stills, color set photos, a trailer, and a prop PDF of the April 18, 1925 Sydney Bulletin. Amusingly, the article describes the Emma sailors as being attacked by "a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes" when they encounter the Alert, which, although taken verbatim from Lovecraft's tale, directly contradicts events in the picture's abandoned ship sequence. The file additionally reproduces an assessment of explorer and geologist John Walter Gregory's largely-forgotten eugenics treatise, The Menace of Color, whose anonymous reviewer remarks that "...assimilation is the only alternative to an upheaval which many observers consider immanent; but in the process North America will be turned, like South America, into a half-caste continent, with what effect nobody can foresee." Those words will undoubtedly distress delicate sensibilities, but the two pieces certainly complement one another in light of Lovecraft's apprehensions about Anglo-Saxon endurance in the face of Western degeneration.

Intertitle options are available in an extravagant twenty-six languages, from Catalan and English to Turkish and Welsh. The score of this forty-seven minute feature, which contains five chapter stops, is available in both tinny "Mythoscope" and Hi-Fidelity. The intrepid filmmakers are currently in post-production on a sound adaptation of Lovecraft's 1931 yarn, The Whisperer in Darkness (a trailer is available online), and I eagerly await the Society's latest rendition of this seminal writer's fantastic fiction. In the meantime, Cthulhu fhtagn!

SOURCES

Colavito, Jason. The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture. New York: Prometheus Books, 2005

Lovecraft, H.P. More Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. Annotated by S.T. Joshi and Peter Cannon. New York: Dell, 1999.

I'LL BE SEEING YOU, SUSAN: THE PROWLER

2010-10-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

The career of Joseph Losey (1909-1984) is traditionally divided into two discrete halves: his early years as a Hollywood director, and his more celebrated resurgence in Europe as a blacklisted expatriate and arthouse auteur. The latter period produced some astonishing work, particularly with Losey's greatest leading man, Dirk Bogarde (The Servant [1963], Accident [1967]; both films were also collaborations with playwright Harold Pinter), as well as an amazing Hammer science fiction drama (These Are the Damned [1961]), and several intriguing misfires (Modesty Blaise [1966, again with Sir Dirk], Figures in a Landscape [1972]). Losey's earlier period is, however, if not equally accomplished, at least extremely impressive--and, for my money, too often overlooked--from his allegorical fantasy The Boy With Green Hair (1947) to his 1951 noir The Prowler.

A sultry blonde, naked except for a towel, gasps and pulls the shade when she spots a peeping tom--whom, significantly, the viewer never sees--in her yard. Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) phones the LAPD, and Officers Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) and Bud Crocker (John Maxwell) investigate. The tom is never caught, but bachelor Garwood is immediately drawn to the woman, so much so that he later pays a call, still in uniform, after his shift to see how she's doing. It transpires that the two hail from Terre Haute, where Garwood was his high school's star basketball center. He claims to have endured "lousy breaks" ever since those glorious hoop days (a public quarrel with his college coach cost him his athletic scholarship), but, despite his bitterness, the officer dreams of achieving middle-class respectability by owning a Las Vegas motor court. Susan, herself once an aspiring starlet, is unhappily married to John Gilvray (Sherry Hall), a radio disc jockey (blacklisted scenarist Dalton Trumbo provides the character's on-air voice) who signs off his evening broadcasts with "I'll be seeing you, Susan"--and before you can say James Cain, Garwood's moving in on the wife, despite her initial, thoroughly unconvincing protestations. Gilvray, whose sterility has frustrated Susan's desire for a child, quits his job when he suspects that his wife's two-timing him (she discloses to her lover that he's threatened to kill her), and Garwood breaks up with the woman, purely in an attempt to further wrap her around his trigger finger. The officer has secretly examined her husband's will; now he plots the man's murder by pretending to be a prowler, luring Gilvray outside to check for the intruder, then gunning him down.

Garwood uses Gilvray's pistol to graze his own arm, making the crime appear to be self-defense. The inquest jury clears him with a verdict of accidental homicide, even though the devastated Susan accuses him at the hearing of deliberately killing her husband--she is, however, loath to admit her adulterous involvement with the officer. Deep down, she still wants Garwood, so much so that wedding bells ring when he gets back in touch and assures her that Gilvray's death was unintentional. Furthermore, the champion sharpshooting officer has resigned from the force, piously informing Susan that "I couldn't bring myself to touch a gun again as long as I live." Garwood uses the will money to purchase his dream property for the couple, but there's a problem: Susan reveals she's four months pregnant with the officer's baby, and the two have officially claimed not to have had any romantic contact with each other before Garwood plugged Gilvray--in fact, the dead man's brother William (Emerson Treacy) has previously assured Garwood of the radio host's sterility. Panic sets in, and Garwood holes up with Susan in the ghost town of Calico ("the tail-end of Creation"), enlisting a local doctor (Wheaton Chambers) to deliver the premature baby, as well as scheming to murder the physician so he won't talk. Susan, however, realizes Garwood's plan when she glimpses her new husband's pistol, and warns the doctor after she gives birth, prompting him to flee with the infant to alert the local police. Garwood races after him, but who should he run into--in a frenzied, near-slapstick sequence--but his former partner Crocker and Crocker's wife (Katherine Warren), who are returning from a geology holiday. The authorities arrive to arrest Garwood, who's fatally wounded fleeing from them to the top of a hill.

It's grim stuff (quite frankly, I half-expected the couple's child to be born dead), albeit amusingly so as Garwood embarks on his idiotic scheme. Heflin specialized in obsessive, deeply-flawed characters, as in his superb turn three years earlier as the dubious war hero of Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence. His Garwood's a cunning sociopath contriving to Make Something Of Himself, but Heflin never overplays the officer, tempering his ruthlessness with an arachnid charm that, as his given name suggests, easily ensnares the impressionable, dimwitted Susan. Keyes' character is alternately vulnerable and self-centered (she pointedly feels more guilt over her adultery than pain over her husband's death); these two richly deserve each other, even if they never achieve the grand operatic excesses of John Garfield and Lana Turner, or, for that matter, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. Trumbo's script (credited to "Hugo Butler," and drawn from a story by Robert Thoeren and Hans Wilhelm) darkly satirizes the relentless obsession with status that permeates American society, as Garwood will do anything to achieve his goal, and is painfully self-conscious that his life hasn't turned out the way he planned. (When Susan tells him that, as a teenager, she used to clip his photo out of the newspaper and wonders, "Who'd ever have thought--," the officer immediately interrupts, "That I'd turn out to be some dumb cop, huh?") Garwood's the type who can never stop wanting more; indeed, he blatantly ogles a comely female guest at the couple's motor court as her older husband spirits her from his sight.

The scenario is well-structured (aside, that is, from the implausibility of Garwood and Susan's unholy matrimony not raising the Gilvray family's eyebrows), allowing Trumbo and Losey to make great mischief with Gilvray's broadcasts, which offer an unconsciously ironic commentary on his wife's infidelity. "That was 'Stolen Fun,'" says the host of the disc he's just spun while Garwood and Susan lounge at the couple's hacienda, "and what could be sweeter'n that?" Gilvray's extensive album collection is actually the collected recordings of his programs, preserved "so he can improve his diction," Susan confides. When, tucked away at the ghost town, Garwood plays for Susan what he thinks is a regular album, it turns out to be yet another Gilvray broadcast, a beyond-the-grave signal ("I'll be seeing you, Susan") that the couple's future is running out like sand into the desert around them.

Two-time Oscar winner Arthur C. Miller's camerawork is splendidly claustrophobic, employing stygian lighting during Garwood and Susan's dance in the Gilvrays' living room, as if the couple are literally waltzing into darkness; the energy between the two leads sizzles with barely-suppressed sexual tension. Another magnificently-composed moment is the shot of Garwood shining his patrol car's headlamps into the couple's bedroom to summon Susan as she sits up in panic. (It's Old Hollywood, of course, so husbands and wives sleep chastely in separate beds.) By the time Garwood scrambles dustily up the hill, Miller's tight framing suggests he's scaling a smoldering volcano to some classical doom. Losey's direction is equally tight, and cultists will be interested to know that his assistant on this picture was Robert Aldrich, who four years later would helm one of the greatest of all noirs, Kiss Me Deadly.

Regrettably, The Prowler remains unavailable on home video, but Turner Classic Movies premiered a handsome fullscreen print of this ninety-two minute gem--lovingly restored by the heroic preservationists at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and funded by the Film Noir Foundation and the Stanford Theatre Foundation (with a "special thanks" to the Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction himself, James Ellroy)--in September. Happily, TCM will air this classic Losey thriller again on Saturday, November 13 at 8:30am EST, so, as the picture's poster instructs, watch out for The Prowler.

WHY DON'T YOU STAY HERE?: SOMETHING WILD

2010-09-27T11:13:00.000-07:00

Jack Garfein's 1961 Something Wild patiently awaits rediscovery. Adapted by the director and Alex Karmel from the latter's 1958 novel Mary Ann--and not to be confused in any way, shape, or form with Jonathan Demme's 1986 black comedy of the same name--the picture is an oddly impressionistic soap opera that vaguely prefigures John Fowles' The Collector (faithfully filmed by William Wyler in 1965), and even (in a non-supernatural sense) Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962). The film has never been released on home video, but--as with so many other obscure-but-fine productions--occasionally materializes, like a lonesome ghost, on Turner Classic Movies.

Garfein's then-wife Carroll Baker stars as Mary Ann Robinson, a Bronx teenager who is dragged into the bushes and raped on her way home from school. She doesn't report the crime, but returns late to the house she shares with her domineering mother (Mildred Dunnock) and stepfather (Charles Watts--not, I hasten to add, the Stones drummer), creeping upstairs to her bedroom and trying to make as little noise as possible. Mary Ann bathes her wounds and destroys the clothing she wore during the assault, but becomes increasingly withdrawn as the film progresses, declining to kiss her mother goodbye when she leaves the next morning and not wanting to be touched. She faints on the subway and is escorted home by a policeman, which scandalizes her mother. Mary Ann drops out of school, takes a tiny apartment in a tenement managed by psychotronic cinema favorite Martin Kosleck (House of Horrors [1946], The Flesh Eaters [1964]), and operates a cash register in Woolworth's while her mother searches for her. The five-and-ten's no picnic, however: after being surrounded and jeered at by her harpy co-workers (including a surprisingly slim Doris Roberts), Mary Ann attempts to commit suicide by jumping from Manhattan Bridge. She is thwarted by Mike (Ralph Meeker), a rough-around-the-edges garage mechanic who, concerned that she might try to kill herself again--indeed, he prevents the dazed woman from walking into traffic--convinces her to rest at his Lower East Side basement apartment while he returns to work.

He also locks her in the apartment and, when he staggers drunkenly back to the flat, attempts to paw Mary Ann, who shrieks and kicks him in the eye with her high heel. Mike eventually loses the eye, but the brute was so plastered during the assault that he assumes he received the injury in a barroom brawl. His increasingly desperate captive finally sets him straight after being imprisoned--although, significantly, not touched again--for several months. ("So we're even," he observes somberly.) Mike departs in shame, deliberately leaving the door open so that Mary Ann can escape, even though he's told her that she's his "last chance" and that he wants to marry her. Finally freed, our heroine wanders through Central Park, breathing fresh air, sleeping on the grass, and seeing the world in an Altogether More Positive Light. She returns to Mike and, in a climax situated somewhere between co-dependency and Stockholm Syndrome, agrees to marry him. In an epilogue, she reconciles with her mother, informing her that the couple are going to have a baby. Well, another baby, if you count Mike.

We never learn the reasons why Mary Ann constitutes her future husband's "last chance," but it's easy to see that the man has made a complete hash of his life. Meeker's performance is excellent, revealing the vulnerability behind his trademark tough-guy persona; the mechanic is what his more famous Mike character--the private eye Hammer (in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly [1955])--might have become if he hadn't gone into the gumshoe trade. (His constant suggestion to her, "Why don't you stay here?", is alternately oppressive and poignant.) Baker communicates genuine alienation; as rendered by Eugen Schufftan's lens, she's a frozen beauty, light years away from her nymphette title turn as Elia Kazan's Baby Doll (1956). Jean Stapleton contributes a small-but-memorable role as Mary Ann's obnoxious neighbor Shirley Johnson, and Clifton James is amusing as the police detective (named Bogart, no less) who endures Mrs. Robinson's badgering on behalf of her missing daughter.

The real star of the film, of course, is New York City itself, majestically rendered in black-and-white by Schufftan (who won an Oscar for Robert Rossen's same-year The Hustler and also shot George Franju's hypnotic Les Yeux Sans Visage ["Eyes Without a Face," 1959]) and jazzily, jauntily scored by none other than Aaron Copland. Copland's composition (which the maestro partially recycled for 1964's Music for a Great City) combines with Schufftan's sharply-edited shots of traffic, pedestrians, pigeons, and architecture--pure visual geometry comparable to Karl Freund and Gunther Ritten's Metropolis (1925) cityscapes (to which Schufftan also contributed special visual effects)--for another memorable Saul Bass title sequence. Garfein doesn't shy from displaying the darker aspects of the city, from Mary Ann's graphic-for-its-time rape to vagrants slumped in doorways. The Bronx is captured at a time of increasingly diverse population density, and the borough's concomitant decline. ("Honestly, I don't know what's going to happen to this neighborhood!" Mrs. Robinson complains to her daughter.) The picture's many silent passages possess an otherworldly ambiance, as if the viewer is suspended with its anomic protagonist somewhere between dream and nightmare. It's a shame that Garfein, who earlier directed an adaptation of Calder Willingham's End As a Man (the edgily homoerotic The Strange One [1957]) and himself survived imprisonment at Auschwitz, never released another feature, returning instead to the theatre and teaching. Northwestern University Press published the octogenarian's Life and Acting: Techniques for the Actor in June 2010.

Something Wild was briefly and heroically revived at New York's IFC Center in early 2007, but once again the picture seems to have quietly slipped back into celluloid limbo. It's scarcely a total success--the long captivity stretch is sometimes sluggish--but the film is well worth a look. Garfein's second and final feature may not be precisely "wild," but it's certainly unusual, and TCM offers a striking fullscreen print of this 112-minute psychodrama. Watch for it Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 11:30 p.m. EST.

ONE SMALL STEP: PROJECT MOON BASE

2010-09-08T07:54:00.001-07:00

The moon, as Robert A. Heinlein so poetically put it, is a harsh mistress, but the crashed crew of his Project Moon Base (1953) doesn't seem to have it that bad. They're marooned until help arrives, certainly, but the two surviving astronauts are, despite their earlier, thoroughly contrived differences, deeply in love, and their Communist antagonist is better dead than red, so we know that everything will turn out all right in the end. Besides, one of them (Donna Martell) is even called Bright Eyes. (That's Colonel Briteis to you, soldier.) It may be one small step, but it's a step nonetheless.

Project originated as an unsold television series called Ring Around the Moon, but was reworked by producer Jack Seaman for theatrical distribution instead, making it Heinlein's second cinematic effort after Irving Pichel's superior Destination Moon (1950). This time, alas, there's no color, and Destination's outlandish carnival-balloon costumes have been replaced by Jack Miller's tee-shirt-and-gym-shorts outfits, complete with skullcaps; these decidedly Devo-esque uniforms cry out for, at the very least, Cinecolor. The actors look absurd, of course, but Ms. Martell is rather charming in her spacegirl getup, plus the film is a merciful sixty-three minutes. It's a politically-incorrect time capsule, but one definitely worth opening.

Project is set in the then-far-off year of 1970, when the United States Space Force's General "Pappy" Greene (Hayden Rorke, the long-suffering Dr. Bellows on I Dream of Jeanie) assigns the Colonel (promoted from Captain after making the first orbital flight) and Major Bill Moore (Ross Ford) to survey the appropriate site for a lunar landing. The government already maintains a space station, which the third member of the team, Doctor Wernher (Larry Johns) schemes to sabotage. Wernher, you see, is actually an impostor; the true Doctor is being held by the Enemies of Freedom. Major Moore realizes his fellow astronaut's a fake when the double doesn't get a reference to the Brooklyn Dodgers (a downright un-American gaffe); the two men duke it out in slow motion and, in the ensuing mini-chaos, their orbit's destabilized and their Magellan craft is forced to make an emergency landing on the dark side of the moon. The anti-Wernher subsequently switches sides (a distinctly atypical action, as his suicidal mission was to crash the Magellan into the station) and ventures with Moore to set up a radio relay on a mountain ridge several miles away. This allows the astronauts to reestablish contact with Earth, but the impostor conveniently falls to his death and Moore barely manages to make it back to the ship before exhausting his air supply. Spacecom's a little late with the news that Wernher's a saboteur, and, as it will be months before a rescue craft can reach them, General Greene proposes that the couple marry immediately for publicity purposes; after all, the Brave New World of 1970 can't take a chance on the impropriety of sin-living astronauts, now can it? People might talk.

The picture is packed to the oxygen tanks with militaristic propaganda, courtesy of novelist Heinlein, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and former Democratic entrant in the 1938 race for the California State Assembly. Heinlein, not completely surprisingly, had a socialist skeleton in his closet: he once edited Upton Sinclair's EPIC News, but turned right during the Cold War; in fact, Thomas M. Disch observes of this amazing American Original in his superb survey, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World, that "no hawk could boast sharper talons." (Heinlein championed nuclear deterrence in several newspaper advertisements in the late Fifties, advocating "Patrick Henry Leagues" to this end and even proposing a tax increase to support them.) General Greene, who's never without his sidearm, frankly admits that "if we hadn't played the science angle" of the circumlunar mission (the excuse for the civilian Wernher's participation), "we wouldn't have gotten the authorization--nor the money." He furthermore boasts to reporter Polly Prattles (Barbara Morrison) that "the most important thing in the world to me is the security of the United States, and I'm not in the least bit apologetic for my attitude." Like his predecessors in Destination, Greene understands that the first country to reach the moon can control the Earth with missiles. The General's a bombastic wheeler-dealer, and Rorke plays him with gusto.

Project's treatment of women, on the other hand, is as comically dated as it was in Kurt Neumann's Rocketship X-M three years earlier. General Greene informs Briteis that it was only her small frame that facilitated her orbital accomplishment, pointing out that "if [Moore] weighed ninety pounds instead of a hundred and eighty, he'd be a Colonel and a public hero--and you'd still be a Captain." When she balks at going on a mission with the "jealous" Moore ("The big lug hates me"), Greene actually threatens to spank her (and he looks as if he'd do it, too, the bounder). Meanwhile, the flirtatious, horizontally-challenged Prattles is fascinated to learn from Greene that the space station is currently in freefall: "It would be so lovely to weigh nothing at all," she exclaims wistfully. Briteis' gender is awkwardly withheld from viewers until her first appearance, and, in the picture's biggest "surprise," the President, who congratulates the newlyweds via monitor, turns out to be a woman (Ernestine Barrier) as well. Significantly, Briteis agrees to the marriage only after Greene promotes Major Moore to Brigadier General of Moon Base Number One, because being married to an inferior officer just won't cut it. (She earlier apologizes to Moore, after panicking upon realizing the extent of their predicament, for "going female on you"; it's a safe bet this film's not one of Ursula K. LeGuin's favorites, and even Heinlein disowned the picture.) Perhaps the author's most endearing quality is his ability to be all over the map sociopolitically: while his authoritarian space operas were incensing leftist critics, his libertarian consciousness fueled large segments of the neopagan counterculture, most notably Oberon Zell-Ravenheart's Church of All Worlds (but not, contrary to popular mythology, Charles Manson).

Director Richard Talmadge, a former actor and stuntman, does what he can with this material, but the real amusements are to be found in Jack R. Glass' low-budget special effects and William C. Thompson's (Ed Wood's cinematographer, no less) compositions of space station staff walking in magnetic shoes on ceilings and walls; these latter trick shots predate a similar sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The station's interiors are usually photographed at a forty-five-degree angle, as if the cameraman had one too many before reporting to the set. There's also a hilarious gaffe--one worthy of the infamous Wood--when Major Moore communicates via the Magellan's giant television monitor with General Greene at the space station: when Moore stands, he inadvertently casts his shadow on Greene because the monitor is simply a large hole in the wall. Take-offs, too, are a regular riot, with the men sweating profusely, their distorted faces ululating like the souls of the damned. (Briteis, on the contrary, seems positively orgasmic as g-forces accentuate her bullet-bra torso.) Herschel Burke Gilbert's delightful score is heavy on the theremin, and the Magellan's interiors were economically reused by Arthur Hilton for his same-year 3-D camp classic Cat Women of the Moon. It's also worth noting that the Eagle landed a mere year before the events in this film; Heinlein was impressively prescient.

Image's 2000 fullscreen DVD is another entry in the label's outstanding Wade Williams Collection. The print is in excellent shape, minus a brief line or two, and the disc offers a dozen chapter stops, as well as the film's original trailer. Project Moon Base (there is no compound word in the onscreen title) is also available as part of Image's four-disc "Weird Worlds" set, which additionally contains Destination Moon, William Marshall's The Phantom Planet (1961), and the abbreviated U.S. cut of Kurt Maetzig's First Spaceship on Venus (1959).

SOURCES

Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: Touchstone, 2000.

Doherty, Brian. "Robert Heinlein at 100." Reason (August/September 2007).

FORMALDEHYDE BLUES: GARDEN OF THE DEAD

2010-08-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

Zombie completists with an hour to kill, or at least batter, will want to examine John Hayes' agreeably awful Garden of the Dead (1972), which secured a general release two years after the fact when it served as supporting feature to the director's far superior Grave of the Vampire (1974). That fanged fantasia boasted strong performances by Michael Pataki and William Smith; unfortunately, performers of such cultish caliber are conspicuously absent in Hayes' earlier thriller. Garden was occasionally unloaded on unsuspecting audiences over the next several years; in fact, I first heard of the film in the early Eighties, when Sneak Previews' Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert selected the picture as one of their "Dogs of the Week" (a badge of honor if there ever was one), and I remember being mildly disappointed that the movie did not make it to my neck of the woods way back when. Thankfully, Retromedia's now-out-of-print 2002 "Drive-In Theater" DVD briefly revived this shoestring shocker, which clocks in at a tolerable fifty-eight minutes.

Garden, one of countless ersatz Night of the Living Dead (1968) entries, is set at a flimsy-looking prison camp (lensed in Topanga Canyon and consisting of little more than barbed wire) ruled by a ruthless warden (Philip Kenneally, resembling a mafia mortician). For some damnfool reason, the inmates are manufacturing formaldehyde, which the incarcerated morons constantly sniff for cheap highs. The way they huddle around each other, ecstatically inhaling fumes from a hose, one half-expects the gathering to degenerate into an orgy. The camp, whose guards are oblivious to all this hysterical huffing, is scheduled for closure in three months (a letter from the Department of Corrections informs the no-nonsense warden that he "is not oriented enough in their new system"); meanwhile, several inmates decide to check out ahead of time by escaping, but are gunned down by pursuing officers. The formaldehyde fiends are buried in unmarked, shallow graves by other prisoners, but--reanimated by the chemical compound--return to the prison with garden hoe and weed whacker for revenge.

Quite honestly, it's difficult to dislike such a preposterous picture. While the red stuff is in regrettably short supply (no flesh-eating here, I fear), the undead inmates look appropriately creepy in their ghoulish raccoon eyes and grotesque green facepaint. The film lacks the nihilistic intensity of George Romero's work, but its use of an industrial agent to revive the dead anticipates the ultra-sonic-sound-reawakened zombies of Jorge Grau's superb Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974; aka Don't Open the Window, Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue, and innumerable other retitlings). Hayes stages his action sequences for the most part indifferently, though the scene of one of the (living) inmates' waitress girlfriend (Susan Charney) shrieking as the undead prisoners surround her motorhome after butchering her neighbors is certainly memorable, and would have given my prepubescent self bad dreams for a week--nay, a fortnight. The zombies moan and groan, occasionally leaping through the air and swinging axes as if they were Indian braves on the warpath, but are easily terminated by shotgun blasts and even the prison searchlight, which causes them to drool rabidly and their flesh to decompose rapidly. Jack Matcha's anti-drug script is heavy-handed, but reflects the mind-blown, instant gratification madness of the times; even in their living death, the creatures cannot get enough formaldehyde, wallowing in the stuff and actually transporting a barrel of it to the climactic showdown. I especially enjoyed the totally unsuitable jazz soundtrack, which consists of library cues that would be more appropriate for a Mike Hammer yarn.

Retromedia is notorious for its cheap prints, and once again the label delivers the bads. The fullscreen transfer of this 1.85:1 trasher appears to have been culled from an old videocassette, though I can't imagine that Garden ever looked even halfway decent; indeed, the picture's poster boasts, or at any rate confesses, that it was "filmed in dead color" (by one H.A. Milton). Titles and credits unreel over freeze-frames, and the camera constantly cuts away from the carnage, presumably to secure the picture's PG rating. (Does a longer version exist in some cinematic cemetery? The film was also released as Tomb of the Undead.) Garden is introduced by Akron's WAOH horror host Son of Ghoul (Kevin Scarpino), who advises the viewer that he may want to smash his television set after watching the feature; to this end, he induces filmmaker/professional wrestler/Retromedia mogul Fred Olen Ray to toss a bowling ball into a tv screen. The back of the keepcase--which, although promising "sex-crazed zombies," offers "no naked girls"--claims to include Garden's original trailer, which on closer inspection turns out to be a most-welcome coming attractions reel for Grave. Retromedia's disc contains six chapter stops, as well as a link to the label's website, which sports a provocatively-posed still of cheesecake model Miss Kim.

HAPPY TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY: VIDEO WATCHDOG #157

2010-07-14T12:41:00.001-07:00

This summer marks the hard-to-believe twentieth anniversary of the inaugural issue of Tim and Donna Lucas' Video Watchdog. "The Perfectionist's Guide to Fantastic Video" began in 1985 as Mr. Lucas' column for Video Times, then migrated to Gorezone, and finally the Cincinnati couple set out on their own in 1990 as publisher-editors. "Why devote a consumer-oriented guide to fantastic video?" Lucas asked in the first installment of his "The Watchdog Barks" column. "The answer is simple. This genre gave birth to motion pictures, yet no other kind of motion picture is so consistently subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous editorial meddling; horror films in particular. Foreign horror films, even more particularly." In addition to identifying so much monstrous meddling on the Scissors Circuit, Lucas has in the intervening decades answered, many times over, his own call for "the writing devoted to the genre to become more enlightened. Enlightening." He has, quite frankly, set new standards for genre scholarship.

That first issue featured Lucas' survey of the prolific and bizarre oeuvre of Jess Franco, "How to Read a Franco Film," which he had already begun to examine in issues 78-79 of Fangoria and issue 5 of Gorezone. "You can't see one Franco film until you've seen them all," Lucas aphoristically observed, plunging himself and his readers into the wild world of this heretofore neglected Spanish auteur. The issue also included amusing excerpts from journalist Lucas Balbo's interview with Franco, who opined that "we make a film first and, afterwards, it becomes a masterpiece but, in Spain, most directors think they are making a masterpiece. Every shot for them must be perfect and, in the end, this only results in unbearable films and terrible headaches." Lucas prominently raised the profile of Senor Franco, significantly expanding the critical perspective on this Eurocult maverick, who recently won his nation's Goya de Honor Lifetime Achievement Award.

"Franco considers himself a 'marginal' director," Lucas pointed out in that article, "and, I must admit, a great deal of his cumulative allure comes from my own realization that I am a 'marginal' filmgoer." Video Watchdog is in many ways a diary of Lucas' esoteric obsessions, and there's undoubtedly a lot of himself in the nameless protagonist of his superb 1994 debut novel Throat Sprockets, who visits a decaying movie palace--now reduced to screening pornography--during his lunch hour for flashes of artistry that elude him in what passes for mainstream cinema. ("Adult films," the narrator asserts, "...had a peculiar knack for capturing the listlessness I found at the core of real life, better than so-called 'legitimate' films.") The true cultist is always on the fringes, and Lucas' dispatches from these shadowy zones reverberate with intelligence and style.

Subsequent issues examined the butchering and restoration of Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973); the plundering of Rados Novakovic's 1963 Operacija Ticijan ("Operation Titian") for no less than five Roger Corman productions; and Soviet film historian Alan Upchurch's full-length study of Russian director Aleksandr Ptushko's work--incredibly, the first of its kind to appear anywhere. (Lucas later, in issue 22, movingly eulogized Upchurch, who died far too young at 37.) Especially memorable recent articles include David Kalat's "Stranger Than Truth: The Rise of 'Fictuality'" (issue 149) and Michael Barrett's analysis of "Millennial Unreality" (152). These are powerful, thought-provoking pieces.

Lucas encouraged his readers to become watchdogs themselves, and they helpfully obliged by pointing out film retitlings and particularly egregious examples of censorship. Issue 27's newsdesk recounted the persecution of Winnipeg, Manitoba's James Butters--a VW subscriber, no less--who was arrested by that city's Sex Police and "charged with the possession and distribution of 15 titles found to be obscene under Canadian law." (Among the forbidden films were Radley Metzger's sadomasochistic classic The Punishment of Anne [1975; aka The Image] and Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik shockers [1987-91].) Mr. Butters was, VW reported, "fined $4,600 in addition to his legal fees." An editorial in the previous issue addressed the outrageous attempt of the Cincinnati prosecutor's office to charge the Pink Pyramid, a local bookshop, with pandering obscenity. The store's crime? Offering a videocassette of Pier Paolo Pasolini's notorious swan song, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), for rental. (The film was "about one thing and one thing only: the sexual torture of teenagers," complained the city's numbskull safety director, completely ignoring Pasolini's scathing critique of Benito Mussolini's murderous republic.) Happily, Hamilton County Municipal Court Judge William Mallory, Jr. threw the case out of court.

Lucas' editorials are my--and probably many readers'--favorite part of the magazine. In issue 9, he recalled attending a revival of Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940), whose sequence of Lampwick's donkey transformation disturbed a child in the audience. "Instead of quietly assuring her that everything would be all right," Lucas wrote, her father immediately removed the girl and her sister from the theatre, where they went "screaming up the aisle." He astutely observed that "parents, instinctively shielding their children from apparent dangers, sometimes forget that all great children's films have a dark side...and that this darkness serves a moral purpose." In an age of overly protective parenting, adults would do well to remember the author's wisdom.

Lucas has never been afraid to call attention to the singular lack of imagination that far too many filmmakers exhibit, pointedly remarking in issue 20 that "science fiction films should be experimental and adventurous, but they are more often timid and nostalgic....And when the odd, progressive movie does come along, it's typically remade to death, until the original becomes stale by association." In issue 21, Lucas remembered greeting the revelation of Darth Vader's siring of Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) with a yawn: "the idea of crossing swords with an adversary who turns out to be your father dates back to Sophocles," which eventually led him to "accept that very little about the cinema is ever genuinely new, and that our society's myths must change their clothes from time to time, in order to bridge the centuries and hold our attention."

One amusing column that stands out in my mind is issue 33's editorial addressing a kerfuffle with actress/producer Barbara Steele, who, in an "open letter" in the January/February 1996 number of Films in Review, expressed her "fury" at the Lucases for allegedly "mass-mailing" a 1995 Christmas card sporting her on its cover with the couple. (In FIR's accompanying picture, Ms. Steele looks as mad as a wet hen and, verily, ready to hurl maledictions.) The Lucases had published a calendar for that year devoted to Steele's legendary Mario Bava thriller, Black Sunday (1960), the cover of which bore the actress' autograph, and the seasonal card in question was taken from a Polaroid of Steele with the Lucases at an October 1994 Chiller Theatre convention, and was mailed only to several of the couple's friends. By venting her spleen in Films in Review, the actress inadvertently publicized the card, prompting some of Video Watchdog's readers to contact the Lucases for copies (which, naturally, weren't available). I felt the Lucases' pain, because I revere Ms. Steele, and would certainly hate to have her angry at me.

Other memorable "Watchdog Barks" pieces include the magazine's first post-9/11 column in issue 77, in which Lucas considered the "bitter irony" that that dreadful day's atrocities--and, let us not forget, its astonishing heroism--"had their only parallel in the annals of our popular entertainment. Events such as these were so inconceivable to us that they belonged exclusively to the realm of fantasy...but no more." An amusing-in-hindsight column in issue 38, several years earlier, offered Lucas' less-than-enthusiastic first response to the DVD revolution that would overwhelm laserdisc and videocassette: "...everything that we've heard and read about DVD has fallen far short of the expectations excited in the public by the hucksters [italics mine] of the 5" format." But my all-time favorite piece is Lucas' tribute in issue 153 to his late mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. It's a heartbreakingly beautiful column, and I greatly admire Mr. Lucas' courage in writing it.

The magazine has come a long way since that first issue, which was indifferently cut by its original printer, whose "paper stock [was] just a step up from shirt cardboard." (The Lucases switched to Crest Graphics for the second, and all other, issues.) Douglas E. Winter's always-essential "Audio Watchdog" column commenced in number 22, VW switched from a bimonthly to monthly format in 2000, and made the leap from black-and-white to full color for its 100th number. (Mrs. Lucas' art direction, of course, makes each edition a joy to behold.) In issue 155, Lucas, who is also devoting much of his time to a screenwriting career, disclosed that "my passion for horror and fantasy cinema has diminished over the past couple of years," and the magazine has returned to its bimonthly format, allowing him to catch his breath and, as he put it in the following issue's column, "follow my Muse into new avenues of thought."

Number 157 features Lucas' epic revisitation of Franco's early work ("In many ways, Franco's sprawling filmography exists outside the realm of film proper. It is film improper"), as well as David J. Schow's fascinating "review and case study" of Danny DeAngelo's now-withdrawn Features from the Black Lagoon, a work of, apparently, breathtaking plagiarism. (Author Schow was one of several sources pilfered by DeAngelo; why publisher McFarland and Company didn't scrutinize this book is incomprehensible.) Lucas and his merry band of contributors (Charlie Largent, Kim Newman, Rebecca and Sam Umland, et al) have made this digest a distinct pleasure for many years now, and I confess that his, and their, work has had a substantial impact on my own meager scribblings. Special thanks to my friend Nathaniel Thompson--another terrific VW contributor--at Mondo Digital for introducing me to this wonderful magazine so long ago. Here's to the new avenues of thought in the next twenty years!

PURE TIME: THE MOMENT OF PSYCHO

2010-06-15T10:15:00.001-07:00

Half a century after Alfred Hitchcock inspired audiences to reassess the wisdom of shower-taking, we're still reeling from Psycho. Norman Bates remains the schizoid stuff of American folklore, as does his grotesque inspiration, homicidal transvestite Ed Gein. The Master of Suspense's 1960 thriller continues to reverberate throughout cinema, as well as other media--perhaps most notably, stretched frame-by-atomistic-frame, two a second, the length of an entire day as the subject of Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho videowork (first unveiled in 1993), an installation which itself chillingly bookends Don DeLillo's latest novel, the moodily minimalistic Point Omega. Hitchcock's film plunged a blade into our collective psyche, where it has lodged ever since, but getting the project greenlighted took some considerable maneuvering.

The Nineteen Fifties witnessed a staggering growth in television ownership, from four million sets at the beginning of the decade to nearly forty-eight million at its end. Not coincidentally, average weekly film attendance fell precipitously, from eighty-two million in 1946 to thirty-five million in 1958; by that time, annual box office receipts were less than a billion dollars. People were glued to their small screens, and increasingly reluctant to venture into the Bijou. Hollywood countered with Cinemascope and 3-D, but even the Master saw the writing on the wall; the result was his weekly teleseries, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-65), which made him a sardonic fixture of the American living room. One studio, however, was making money with its shoestring emphasis on hot rods and horror: American International. Hitchcock wanted a piece of the action.

In his book-length essay, The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder (Basic Books, 2009; 183 pages), film historian David Thomson explores the making and the meaning of this seminal picture. The studio heads at Paramount, firmly entrenched as they were in their "middle-aged decorum," weren't at all keen on an adaptation of Robert Bloch's then-recent fiction. Hitchcock's original followup to North by Northwest (1959) was to have been another innocent-man-hounded-by-the-law story (No Bail for the Judge, based on Henry Cecil's novel), but star Audrey Hepburn was concerned about an attempted rape of her character in one scene, plus she was pregnant, so the project was scuttled. Hitchcock was particularly taken with Bloch's book, the film rights to which had been secured for nine grand when MCA acquired Universal. The director's agent, Lew Wasserman, assuaged Paramount's financial jitters over this culturally disreputable endeavor by arranging for Hitchcock to direct Psycho on a low budget (not to exceed eight hundred thousand dollars) and to forgo his salary in return for sixty percent ownership of the picture. (Wasserman also suggested that the movie be shot not at Paramount, but at Universal, just as North by Northwest had been lensed at MGM.) This strategy made Hitchcock enough of a mint for him to bid goodbye to prissy Paramount, his home for many years. It was definitely their loss, which they would feel keenly.

James Cavanaugh, who had written for Hitchcock's show, began work on the screenplay, but Joseph Stefano--who subsequently produced The Outer Limits (1963-64)--replaced him; indeed, he would revisit, with diminishing returns, the character of Norman Bates for 1990's Psycho IV: The Beginning. Stefano later confessed his "disappointment" when he read Bloch's novel, as he disliked Bates and felt the book "certainly wasn't a Hitchcock picture." Bloch's conception of his deranged motel owner was, in the novelist's words, "the equivalent of a Rod Steiger type"--a fat, fortyish man who read Aleister Crowley and P.D. Ouspensky; one unlikely, at any rate, to suggest the popular Anthony Perkins. Stefano revamped the character, allowing Perkins to lend his edgily delicate otherness to the project; indeed, it's difficult, if not impossible, to imagine anyone else playing the killer, as Vince Vaughan definitively demonstrated in Gus Van Sant's disastrous 1998 remake. Perkins had, in fact, arguably laid the foundation for Norman Bates with his bizarre-but-fascinating miscasting as the father-dominated, bipolar Red Sox center fielder Jimmy Piersall in Robert Mulligan's Fear Strikes Out (1957).

Stefano also significantly expanded the character of Marion Crane. Janet Leigh was cast as the absconding secretary after the director had rejected Hope Lange and Eva Marie Saint, who had just appeared with Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Lana Turner, battling back from scandal, was also considered. Hitchcock originally wanted Stuart Whitman for the role of Sam Loomis, but Wasserman proposed future U.S. Ambassador to Mexico John Gavin, Ms. Turner's boyfriend in Douglas Sirk's lavish Imitation of Life revision (1959). Vera Miles, who co-starred in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956), and whose pregnancy cost her the role of Judy Barton in Vertigo (1958), was Crane's sister Lila, while Martin Balsam was ill-fated private investigator Milton Arbogast. Hitchcock even perpetrated a rumor that he was casting the role of Norma Bates, in order to keep everyone in the dark regarding the movie's climactic revelations. Perkins' pal Paul Jasmin supplied "Mother"'s voice, as did Virginia Gregg and Jeanette Nolan, while Margo Epper actually wielded the knife in the shower sequence; all four are uncredited in the film.

Psycho's celebrated, James Allardice-scripted trailer, in which Hitchcock conducts a tour of the Bates Motel (and which featured Miles, not the unavailable Leigh, shrieking in the shower), reflexively lampooned "story, advertising, and the whole apparatus of coming attractions," building momentum for the picture's immanent release. Wasserman, attempting to preclude any negative press, made the then-unprecedented move of opening in Los Angeles and New York, then circulating the film in as wide, and swift, a national release as possible. Taking a cue from William Castle's gimmicky Columbia promotions, no one was admitted to the movie after it began (Pinkerton guards enforced this policy at early engagements)--and who could ever forget the image of Hitchcock on some of Psycho's posters, imploring viewers, "Don't give away the ending--it's the only one we have"?

The film shattered so many taboos that Thomson somewhat melodramatically proclaims it a work of "insurrectionary defiance." Leigh appeared prominently in slip and bra ("a good 36 D-cup," he estimates), as well as in a flesh-colored suit for the shower scene (model Marli Renfro, also uncredited, served as her stand-in for several shots), and a toilet was photographed in all its scandalously flushing glory. Thomson, then but nineteen, first saw the picture with a sparsely-populated audience at London's Plaza; he recalls that "somehow the solitude added to the intensity." The author had recently entered film school, where he soon found himself at odds with the faculty's "social realist tendencies." Thomson "was certain that Psycho was the film of the year," but his sycophantic instructors were all gooey over Guy Green's The Angry Silence, which (yawn) examined British union issues and was (surprise) produced by the head of the school. This lack of vision accurately reflects the American and English criticism of the times, whose reviewers and scholars lagged significantly behind the French; their writers had lionized Hitchcock for years, and had even devoted the entire October 1954 number of Cahiers du Cinema to him. Back home, alas, the director was regarded as a mere "entertainer," one "excluded from gravity by such things as nuns in high-heeled shoes, the wicked use of national monuments, and"--most damnably--by "that old sneaking habit of dainty murder." Hitchcock's malicious "meringue of style" was an obstacle to any deep English-language appreciation of his work, but, beginning in L'Hexagone, the critical tide was turning.

And what, finally, of the film itself? While it's ridiculously hyperbolic to assert that Hitchcock taught us to love murder, Psycho is most significant to the more mature Thomson for opening, in its first forty minutes, a window onto "a grasping, devious, and ordinarily nasty nation." The author maintains that Marion Crane's murder "grows out of the grim unkindness of the world we have seen, not from the lurid casebook of the Bates family." He treasures the doomed affair of Crane and Loomis, an unhappy pair trapped "between romance and money"--to him, the couple "[act] like a man and a whore, or like two lovers who must not be seen." As Thomson construes him, the alimony-plagued Loomis "is not that desirable a husband;" moreover, his "emotional reluctance" to marry Crane causes the desperate woman to take Tom Cassidy's (Frank Albertson) money and run to him. "Most films of the '50s are secret ads for the American way of life," Thomson contends, but this movie "is a warning about its lies and limits." The couple are lost in the limbo of "lunchtime hotel rooms": Loomis lives in back of his hardware store, while Crane, the author suggests, could easily have been a prostitute in her previous life. Her realty employer, George Lowery (Vaughn Taylor), "is a rat," and Lowery's sleazeball "bullfrog" client Cassidy blatantly propositions the woman. Only the fragile, bird-stuffing Bates truly connects with Crane.

Camille Paglia, in her monumental survey Sexual Personae, cleverly links Psycho to Honore de Balzac's novella The Girl With the Golden Eyes, identifying Marion as "an art object vandalized and abandoned" by a "megalomaniacal but phallically impotent cultist," but Thomson, I daresay, would have none of this: it is our "noir society," and not sex-crossing, son-devouring mother psychosis, that is the real culprit. Indeed, he several times describes the film's employment of Bates' schizophrenia as--an interesting choice of words--"cockamamie." Thomson doubts that Hitchcock "ever believed in this idea of a character taking over another--only in the ways it would be filmed." (Why, then, does Mother rush out of Cabin 1 after killing Crane, if she doesn't want her son to see her? Scenarist Stefano was certainly a believer.) For Thomson, the remaining sixty minutes of the picture fail to fulfill the promise of those first forty, degenerating into Freudian shock (schlock?) effects and constituting "an hour that is as fabricated and spurious as the first hour is solid and resonant." After Crane's slaughter, in other words, there's nowhere for the film to go but downwards. Thomson even proposes an alternative shower sequence, one in which the killer's secret identity is immediately revealed ("her" face is shown in Saul Bass' original storyboards), and Crane is stabbed only once--which, he believes, would be more realistic, and would make "Mother" less preposterous. (Crane is actually decapitated in the novel.) Frankly, I find this proposal dubious. We are in the lethal realm of sexual violence, whose manifestations of personality malfunction are seldom if ever dainty. The Domineering Mother is one of Hitchcock's recurring themes, and here the director takes it to darkly comic extremes. Carping about realism seems curiously irrelevant.

Stefano, who was then in analysis regarding his own mother, introduced the character of Dr. Fred Richmond to explain Bates' madness; he also recommended Simon Oakland for the part. (It is Loomis who, after meeting with a police psychiatrist, performs this task in Bloch's book, sharing with Lila what the authorities have been able to piece together.) Hitchcock reportedly "thanked [Oakland] for saving the picture," though Thomson argues that "what needed to be 'saved' was the film's and Hitchcock's indifference to the stated content." I have seen Psycho many times, and, for the life of me, I cannot discern this mysterious "indifference"--it's not, after all, as if the picture has been deformed beyond recognition. One may as well, and just as unfairly, blame Bloch for the construction of his story.

Of course, Psycho would not have achieved its artistic heights without Bernard Herrmann's score, whose archetypal shrieking strings "[reach] out for the fusion of film and opera," thus catapulting the thriller "past realism and into mythology." Hermann's contrapuntal main title and tense ostinato passages are perhaps the most famous notes in film history, but--incredibly--the composer was not even nominated for an Oscar, although others were: television cinematographer John L. Russell (whose black-and-white lens revealed "a new acid-rural poetry"); Joseph Hurley, Robert Clatworthy, and George Milo (Art Direction); and Hitchcock received his fifth Best Director nod. Perkins was ludicrously passed over for Best Actor, although Leigh was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. The film itself was not even recommended for Best Picture; that year's Academy Award, in case you're wondering, went to Billy Wilder's The Apartment.

Thomson pads his book with a chapter on films he believes felt the ripple effect of Hitchcock's masterpiece, from James Bond adaptations to Brian De Palma and Jonathan Demme shockers. "The extended significance of 'the moment of Psycho' is not just the impact of an isolated sensation," he explains, "but the spreading influence it exerted on other films, especially in the treatment of sex and violence, and the room it opened up for the ironic (or mocking treatment) of both." Thomson admits that his list "is not exhaustive," and I was frankly disappointed to see that there's no mention of Castle (whose genderbending Homicidal [1961] pays direct hommage to the Master), nor, for that matter, of any Hammer film or Mario Bava, the godfather of Italian fantastic cinema, who in many ways initiated the "body count" genre with such chillers as Sei Donne per l'Assassino ("Six Women for the Murderer," 1963; U.S. release, Blood and Black Lace) and Ecologia del Delitto ("Ecology of Crime," 1971; U.S. release, Twitch of the Death Nerve)--and, mamma mia, where is Hitchcock's most obsessive disciple, Dario Argento? Their omission is not completely unexpected, however, as Thomson predictably disparages Tobe Hooper's Gein-inspired The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) for "requir[ing] that we regard such dangerous nonsense as 'good, clean fun'" and "leav[ing] us filled with rueful nostalgia for the days when Norman Bates could put an elegant sentence together." (This completely misses the mark of Hooper's frightful deconstruction of the American frontier.) He even derides Hitchcock's pride in the shower scene's relative "restraint"--a "piety less than warming or admirable"--and, in an absurd fit of association fallacy, complains that the director's said piety is "too close to the technical pride taken by gas-chamber engineers and too removed from the plain and undeniable impact of that work." The author's senior decorum, I submit, is plainly showing.

Nevertheless, Thomson is a compelling, challenging critic, and it's obvious that Hitchcock's classic has haunted him for decades. Not unlike artist Gordon's epic video piece, he rigorously breaks down Psycho to examine its inner workings from opening to closing shot, encouraging us to revisit the film and see it through his reality tunnel. As Gordon illustrated, even a solitary frame of celluloid contains myriad worlds. The nameless gallerygoer of Point Omega appears day after day to experience the picture. "What he was watching seemed pure time," DeLillo writes of his mysterious, obscurely menacing character. "The broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time. How long would he have to stand here, how many weeks or months, before the film's time scheme absorbed his own, or had this already begun to happen?" It began to happen, for all intents and purposes, fifty years ago, but the moment of Hitchcock's masterpiece is eternal. Whenever we watch it, we are never wholly ourselves, and our time is never entirely our own.

SOURCES

Bloch, Robert. Psycho. New York: Overlook Press, 2010.

Caminer, Sylvia and John Andrew Gallagher. "An Interview with Joseph Stefano." Films in Review Volume XLVII, Number 1/2, (January/February 1996).

DeLillo, Don. Point Omega. New York: Scribner, 2010.

Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. New York: Vintage, 1991.

BRIDE OF THE BEAST: THE MAGICIAN

2010-05-25T11:01:00.001-07:00

Oh, my stars and garters. I can scarcely believe that Turner Classic Movies recently aired Rex Ingram's 1926 occult chiller, The Magician, but indeed they did, thank Horus. This loose but lavish adaptation of Somerset Maugham's 1908 novel was feared lost for many years, but there it was, flickering on my television screen--a picture I wondered if I would ever see. I fervently hoped that no prominent film person would shuffle off this mortal coil and interrupt the network's regularly scheduled programming with a tribute, and, fortunately, no one did. Maugham's novel was notorious in its day for fictionalizing the misadventures of mountebank mage Aleister Crowley, who appears as Oliver Haddo in the book. The Great Beast himself, masquerading as Haddo, published an essay in Vanity Fair the same year as Maugham's roman a clef, in which he accused the author of plagiarizing, among others, Crowley, H.G. Wells, and Eliphas Levi (whom Crowley pompously claimed to be the reincarnation of in Magick in Theory and Practice). Maugham, for his part, unconvincingly avowed in a later preface to the novel that Haddo "was by no means a portraiture of" the Beast, who pronounced the book "an amusing hotchpot of stolen goods."

Rex Ingram's silent adaptation is less lurid and downbeat than Maugham's novel, but definitely delivers the requisite sulfur. Paul Wegener, best known for starring in and co-directing such Teutonic classics as The Student of Prague (1913) and Der Golem (1920), headlines as Haddo; sadly, this was his single Hollywood venture. Haddo, a "student of medicine" and former asylum inmate, appears as a spectator at a packed Parisian operating theatre where hotshot American surgeon Arthur Burdon (Ivan Petrovich) cures the paralysis of artist Margaret Dauncey (Alice Terry, Ingram's missus), who was pinned to her studio floor by the collapse of a monstrous faun she was sculpting. ("This man Burdon is nothing short of a magician," exclaims one admiring doctor to another, to which Haddo, looking half-crazed, cries "Nonsense! The saving of human life is a comparatively simple matter. On the other hand, the scientific creation of life does indeed call for the powers of a magician.") Naturally, doctor and patient fall in love, but, inconveniently for them, Haddo needs Dauncey's virgin blood to animate the homunculus he's alchemically produced. The betrothed beauty falls under the magician's hypnotic spell, and soon she's hallucinating a pas de deux in the underworld with a nearly nude satyr (Folies Bergere dancer and painter Hubert Stowitts). The sculptress marries Haddo instead of Burdon, and next the entranced bride is winning big at the gambling tables of Monte Carlo, presumably because her husband is unable to conjure money out of thin air. The newlyweds hole up at Haddo's mountaintop stronghold, which comes complete with regulation dwarf assistant (Henry Wilson), and the necromancer very nearly sacrifices Dauncey before Burdon and her uncle, Dr. Porhoet (Firmin Gemier), storm the tower and Haddo maladroitly tumbles into his furnace.

This is deliciously strange wine. John F. Seitz, who also photographed Billy Wilder's noir masterpieces Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Blvd. (1950), composes stunning Expressionist images, from the amazing sequence of Dauncey's statue self-destructing (as its head moves, it seems as if the sculpture's come magically alive) to the menacing shadows of Haddo's tower, which plainly influenced James Whale's vision for Universal's Frankenstein (1931) and its first sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Henri Menessier's art direction is similarly spectacular, while Dauncey's enormous faun--constructed by Paul Barde, who cameos as a bearded sculptor--is so magnificent it's somewhat depressing to watch it collapse. (What a shame, however, that we never see Haddo's artificial creature; the book's description of his sundry homunculi anticipates the later abominations of H.P. Lovecraft.) Ingram directs his cast to underplay their roles, which throws the flamboyance of Wegener's diabolism into high relief; the actor's so intense it's comical--he rules the picture with, if not an iron, then at least a ham fist. ("He looks as if he had stepped out of a melodrama," Burdon comments to Dauncey of the caped conjurer.) Wegener is a veritable wonder to observe, showing off at a fair by allowing a snake charmer's viper to bite him and causing the wound to vanish, wearing his hair in horns in the satyr sequence, and, in the climax, advancing upon the camera like a demented thing as he prepares to remove his bound bride's pounding heart.

In Maugham's novel, Dauncey dies by degrees, and her spinster friend Susie Boyd plays a more prominent role, but Ingram's script relegates Boyd's portrayer, Gladys Haven, to the background. (She does, however, have a comical bit in the opening studio section where she changes the title of the vaguely cubist painting she's completed from "Sunrise on the Seine" to "Sunset on the Seine"--it's a mild dig at the Modernism that was then discombobulating the art scene.) The underworld interlude is an miracle of erotic mania, with Pan playing his pipes while splendid nymphs cavort around a fiery cauldron, and purportedly scandalized the Nice locals where the film was shot.

Ingram, after directing Rudolph Valentino to stardom in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), also helmed such swashbucklers as The Prisoner of Zenda (1922) and Scaramouche (1923). The Magician, unlike those epics, was not a commercial success, and he would make only three more features. (The director, who operated his own production company, so disliked MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, in fact, that the film is credited as "a Metro Goldwyn picture.") Unimpressed with talkies, Ingram returned to his earlier love of sculpting, and later converted to Islam. It's worth noting that his assistant director here was none other than the soon-to-be-legendary English filmmaker, Michael Powell (Black Narcissus [1947], The Red Shoes [1948]), who also appears, uncredited, as the man with a balloon in the snake charmer sequence.

According to Nikolas Schreck in The Satanic Screen, Maugham, "in typically malicious fashion...let it be known that he disliked Ingram's adaptation," while the director retorted "that he had done the best he could with such poor material." And long after the author first encountered Crowley in a Parisian restaurant, he received a telegram from the perpetually destitute Beast requesting that he send him twenty-five pounds. "I did not do so," Maugham reported with a certain grim satisfaction, "and he lived on for many disgraceful years."

The Magician, both book and film, mark the first fictional appearances of Awful Aleister, who also popped up as idealized versions of himself in such Crowley novels as Diary of a Drug Fiend and Moonchild (wherein he savagely, hilariously lampooned his fellow Golden Dawn members MacGregor Mathers and William Butler Yeats). Later he would serve as the model for such celluloid sorcerers as Boris Karloff's Hjalmar Poelzig (The Black Cat [1934]), Niall MacGinnis' Julian Karswell (Night of the Demon [1957; U.S. release, Curse of the Demon]), and Charles Gray's Mocata (The Devil Rides Out [1968; U.S. release, The Devil's Bride]); he's also the obvious inspiration for Mark Strong's Lord Henry Blackwood in 2009's Sherlock Holmes. It's curious, however, that no one has--yet--mounted a serious biopic of this infamous rascal sage.

TCM's restored-and-tinted fullscreen print of this seventy-nine-minute thriller would flatter the Eye of Horus. Robert Israel's score supplies perfect accompaniment, incorporating music from Mussorgsky's "A Night on Bald Mountain" and, over the titles, the Second Act of Tchaikovksy's "Swan Lake." The latter piece should certainly be familiar to genre buffs, as it also plays over the opening of Tod Browning's Dracula (1931). Maugham's novel remains in print, and, though it's usually considered one of his minor works, is highly recommended. Hopefully, if the network plays its (Tarot?) cards right, we'll see a home video release of The Magician sooner rather than later. 93 Skidoo!

SOURCES

Crowley, Aleister. Magick in Theory and Practice. New Jersey: Castle Books, 1991.

Maugham, Somerset. The Magician. New York: Penguin Books, 1967.

Schreck, Nikolas. The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated History of the Devil in Cinema 1896-1999. London: Creation Books, 2001.

Sutin, Lawrence. Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2000.

NONE CAME BACK: ROCKETSHIP X-M

2010-04-22T05:43:00.000-07:00

After the commercial success of producer George Pal's Destination Moon (1950), filmmakers quickly set their sights on Mars. Foremost among them was German emigre Kurt Neumann, whose same-year feature, Rocketship X-M, was shot in a then-record time of three weeks after he learned of Pal's lunar project. Neumann's independent effort actually beat Destination Moon into theatres by four months, and--despite its shoestring budget and amusingly risible dialogue--endures as one of the most daring, and downbeat, films of its era.

Doctor Karl Eckstrom (John Emery) leads a four-man, one woman crew on what begins as a trip to Earth's nearest satellite (X-M stands for Expedition Moon), but ends as a tragic visit to the Red Planet. This plot contrivance allowed Neumann to forgo costly construction of a soundstage moon-set in favor of simply shooting the picture in the Mojave Desert near Palm Springs. The astronauts--Eckstrom, pilot Colonel Floyd Graham (Lloyd Bridges), navigator Harry Chamberlain (Hugh O'Brian), engineer Major William Corrigan (Noah Beery, Jr.), and chemist Doctor Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen), who's done "pioneering research with monatomic hydrogen"--are endangered when their jettisoned tail section nearly smashes into the second stage of the craft (flagrantly violating the law of physics), and it further transpires that they've used too much velocity to escape Earth's orbit. As a result, the rocket drifts while Graham attempts to woo Van Horn by quoting Rudyard Kipling's "Tomlinson" and making romantic moon chatter.

Hardline feminists will likely frown upon the film's early dialogue, which is rife with the sort of talk that nowadays risks the wrath of the Gender Police. "Unless you look like a test tube or a chemical formula," Graham informs a reporter of Van Horn before the X-M lifts off at White Sands, "you haven't got a chance" with the scientist. Later, when the lovely chemist wonders aloud if Graham believes "that women should only cook, and sew, and bear children," the smitten man responds, "Isn't that enough? There's such a thing as going overboard in the other direction, too, you know." Then, while the rocket is temporarily stalled, Van Horn argues with the professor over his (correct) fuel mixture calculations; she apologizes and he asks, "For what? For momentarily being a woman?"

Such politically-incorrect banter is mercifully put to an end by the occurrence of a meteor shower, the components of which resemble giant cracker jacks. The X-M escapes unscathed, and the astronauts finally break free of their drift, but are rendered unconscious by g-forces. Earth's orbital velocity, added to the rocket's own power, causes the craft to zoom completely off-course into deep space. "So we made a little detour," Graham remarks flippantly after they recover. "Now we've gotta double back to that last road sign." The crew discover to their astonishment that they're in fact heading towards Mars. Eckstrom muses that "there are times when a mere scientist has gone as far as he can. When he must pause and observe respectfully while something infinitely greater assumes control. I believe this is one of those times." The team decides to land, just as a rainstorm--of all things--erupts.

The Martian sequence was tinted red for its original release and certainly evokes the Roman god of war. Our astronauts, wearing oxygen masks and mountaineering gear in lieu of unflattering pressure suits, explore the planet with pistol and rifle while Ferde Grofe's theremin wails. Soon they stumble upon the radioactive remains of a city. "The mind of man, wherever you encounter it--Earth or Mars--the finest attainments of human intellect--always diverted to self-destruction," Eckstrom somberly observes. The crew are attacked by murderous Stone Age-type mutants, who quickly whittle them down to a trio. Graham, Van Horn and the dying Chamberlain flee to their ship; they take off immediately, but--as was Luna's predicament in Destination Moon--there's not enough fuel for them to land. Via short-wave, they warn their fellows of what they have experienced. As the rocket plummets over Nova Scotia, Graham and Van Horn bravely embrace. They are killed in the crash, a climax that must have been profoundly disturbing for 1950--indeed, the film's original title was None Came Back, which Neumann nixed so as not to spoil the ending.

In a brief epilogue, mission director Doctor Ralph Fleming (Morris Ankrum, who earlier comments on establishing a moon base "to control world peace") assures the press that the space mission was not a failure, that much knowledge (including "information which may well mean the salvation of our world") was gained, and that "tomorrow, we start construction on R-X-M II." The denouement evinces the essential optimism at the base of all tragedy, but it was a point of which audiences could justifiably feel dubious.

It was not revealed until several years ago that blacklisted scenarist Dalton Trumbo, and not Herr Neumann, wrote the screenplay--in fact, the erstwhile Communist Party card-carrier penned several uncredited pictures when he wasn't being fronted by Millard Kaufman (Gun Crazy [1950]), Guy Endore (He Ran All the Way [1951]), or Ben Perry (Terror in a Texas Town [1958]). Trumbo's script carries a potent anti-war sting in its tail, as one would expect from the author of Johnny Got His Gun. The film openly agonizes about the genetic effects of radiation, reflecting post-Hiroshima and -Nagasaki anxieties, and is the first genre feature to broach the subject, predating even Arch Oboler's Five (1951).

Of course, Rocketship X-M is loaded with scientific nonsense (e.g., Mars' gravity is thirty-eight percent of Earth's, and not, as the picture claims, fifty percent; also, the distance between the moon and the Red Planet is over thirty-four million miles, rendering a Martian landing completely out of the question), but logic is seldom the strong suit of space opera; indeed, it often gets in the way of the story. Neumann's film celebrates the heroism of the generation that had just defeated the Axis Powers and would move steadily towards the stars, while at the same time emphasizing that technology far too often outdistances our humanity: the mechanization of the soul is the principal risk of modernity, and the rest is radioactive rubble.

In 1977, film distributor Wade Williams replaced--not without controversy--the picture's V2 rocket footage with several model and matte shots courtesy of future Oscar winner Dennis Muren and other George Lucas confederates. The new material is well-integrated, however, and Williams' makeover has become Rocketship X-M's standard version, as Neumann's original cut has been withdrawn. Theobold Holsopple's production design and art direction, in conjunction with Jack Rabin's special photographic effects, retain the power to impress, in spite of such hilarious goofs as rocket launch transparency (through which the pad and other props can plainly be perceived) and sideways clouds glimpsed outside portholes. Karl Struss' camerawork, particularly in the White Sands segments, is dramatically noirish; he would reteam with the director six times, most notably for Kronos (1957) and The Fly (1958). Image Entertainment's 2000 fullscreen "50th Anniversary" disc, part of the label's Williams Collection, is in excellent shape, and the seventy-seven-minute picture, sporting appropriately Martian sepia tints, has a dozen chapter stops. The only extra is the original trailer, in considerably coarser shape, which contains the V2 footage.

NIGHTMARE IN HOLLYWOOD: AN AMERICAN DREAM

2010-03-31T10:14:00.001-07:00

"The tragedy of many people," Norman Mailer contended in Cannibals and Christians, "is that they don't find love not because their bodies are inadequate for love, but their minds are. Love is an enormously complex matter, and we have absolutely no preparation for it in this country." The assertion is debatable--the author had a marked tendency to overstate his case, or he wouldn't have been Norman Mailer--but certainly some of the most unloved and unprepared characters to be found in all of our nation's fiction prowl the pages of his remarkable fourth novel, An American Dream, which kicked up a devil of a fuss in 1965. Feminist critic Kate Millett, with the customary confusion of the perpetually aggrieved, castigated the book as "an exercise in how to kill your wife and be happy ever after," and the inevitably emasculated Hollywood adaptation materialized a year later. The rampaging writer had stabbed his second wife, painter Adele Morales, with a penknife several years earlier at what must have been an especially memorable party, so it's difficult, if not impossible, to perceive at least a little of Mailer in his homicidal protagonist Stephen Rojack, a Hemingwayesque anti-hero lost in the shadow side of machismo. (The Prisoner of Sex subsequently spent seventeen days in the bughouse and received a suspended sentence for assault; Morales refused to press charges, but did divorce him.) It's also easy, and perhaps not completely unfair, to infer that Mailer's crime, coupled with his by-then legendary propensity for making a public spectacle of himself, from pugilism to politics, must have negatively influenced some of his most vociferous detractors in that bra-burning doozy of a decade.

Mister Rojack--a Korean war hero, one-term Congressman, professor, talk-show host, certified public intellectual, and all-out raging alcoholic--hallucinates the voice of la Luna commanding him to leap to his death from a balcony at the party of a friend who may or may not have slept with his estranged spouse, Deborah Kelly. Our Renaissance maniac doesn't commit suicide, but departs instead to confront Deborah in her high-rise duplex. The couple quarrel and Rojack strangles her, later tossing her corpse over the parapet after first satisfying his lust with Deborah's German maid, Ruta, who's actually a spy. The police don't believe Rojack's claim that his wife killed herself, but there's not enough evidence to hold him, so off he wanders on a bender into a nightclub where chanteuse Cherry--who was a passenger with her mobster pals in one of several vehicles crashing into each other when Deborah hit the pavement--warbles Cole Porter in the wee hours. The new lovebirds hide out at her Lower East Side tenement (Rojack admits to the singer that he murdered his missus, and she's entirely comfortable with that), but their erotic idyll is rudely interrupted by the arrival of Cherry's ex-beau, Shago Martin, a violent Negro entertainer who was earlier blacklisted, so to speak, by Deborah when he turned down an opportunity to perform at a benefit she had organized. The boys duke it out, then Rojack--who has in the interim been, most reluctantly, cleared by the police on Orders From High Up--has a man-to-man at Deborah's penthouse with her fatcat stepfather, Barney Oswald Kelly--who was once (stay with me, dear reader) another of Cherry's lovers--confessing his crime to the big shot before nearly being pushed to his death by him when he guiltily walks the parapet where Deborah was dumped. It's hinted that the late Mrs. Rojack had intelligence connections, which explains the presence of Fraulein Ruta, so the investigation of her death is officially closed, and Rojack returns to Cherry's pad, only to find her expiring from a beating by an acquaintance of Martin's. (Shago is also slain.) Rojack skips Deborah's funeral and heads west to commune with the moon, then packs his bags for some postmodern soul-searching in Guatemala and Yucatan.

If all that sounds demented, you may rest assured it is. It's also potent, stinging stuff, but Mailer's vicious vision quite obviously posed a whale of a problem for the television veterans responsible for the film version. All too often, of course, the adapter (Mann Rubin, in this instance) functions as a kind of reverse alchemist, transforming literary gold into base celluloid metals. Mann's screenplay devolves Rojack's character from a man in the middle of a psychotic break--and, frankly, one erotically energized by homicide (murder, the war veteran asserts, having killed several Germans in combat, "is never unsexual")--into a cowardly victim of circumstance, all to minimize the danger that the picture's audience will not identify with, or, worse, actually detest, him. Mailer's first-person narrator hurtles us ass over teakettle into his madness, but the cinematic Rojack--especially as portrayed by poor Stuart Whitman--merely invites our contempt. He's a dreary buffoon, and Whitman was far more convincing as a child molester seeking redemption in Guy Green's The Mark (1961) (or, for that matter, battling giant rabbits in William F. Claxton's Night of the Lepus [1972]) than he is here, reduced to the miserable parody of a television call-in host hounding seemingly untouchable mobster Eddie Ganucci (Joe De Santis, resembling a Bowery Boy in geezer drag); there's no way we can take this imbecile seriously as an egghead. His deadly encounter with Deborah (Eleanor Parker, piercing as any screech-owl; she even takes imaginary scissors to Rojack's manhood lest we miss the point of her hysteria) becomes an all-out slugfest, with the enraged redhead giving as good as she gets. Their struggle spills onto the balcony, Deborah hurls a rock from her garden at Rojack, and they grapple on the parapet, but Rubin wimps out, and--in a Theodore Dreiser-inspired instant--she teeters on the edge and Rojack lets her fall, unconvincingly shrieking her name as she plummets like Mel Brooks taking the acrophobic plunge in High Anxiety (1978).

I must admit, however, that the sequence which immediately follows--Rojack dashes downstairs, but can't locate the night watchman to let him out of the locked high-rise, so he has to watch the aftermath behind glass and through the legs of gawking bystanders--is most amusing, and rhymes well with the film's opening moments, when Deborah teasingly telephones his call-in show to deflate her husband's pomposity. Whether his medium is the idiot box or a lobby window, Rojack is an absurd talking head; his outrage against the Mob is merely, as Deborah informs her latest lover, "what any red-blooded, two-fisted TV hawk would do around option time." The viewer never stops feeling this is all low farce, and, surely enough, Rojack's interrogation by the police is the stuff of slapstick. (The boys in blue, not surprisingly, deeply resent Rojack's public criticism of them for not being more diligent in busting the elusive Ganucci, though Deborah's death has substantially simplified matters.) Over the course of the film, Rojack drifts into and out of the police station in the freewheeling style of Dwight Frye roaming the grounds of Edward Van Sloan's asylum in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931). Soon he's hooking up with Cherry (Janet Leigh in platinum locks), whom the rascal doesn't even remember romancing in Vegas before he married Deborah ("For the record," she reminds him, "...I was almost the mother of your child").

Meanwhile, Deborah's estranged father (Lloyd Nolan, who seems to have drifted in from dinner theatre) descends on Los Angeles only to learn that the Catholic Church won't condone, or eulogize, a suicide. He pulls some strings and the police rule his daughter's demise "death by accident." Rojack finally confesses his guilt to Sergeant Roberts (the always-reliable Barry Sullivan, who's appropriately frustrated, either at the machinations around him or Mann's script), but it's too little, too late, and the angry, powerless officer suggests he tell it to Kelly. In Mailer's novel, Kelly has his own guilt to confess--an incestuous desire for his stepdaughter which lead to his confining her in a convent--but here he's simply another cynical businessman more concerned with form than feeling. "It was a brutal allegation," he says of Rojack's suicide alibi. "I'd have been denied [Deborah's] funeral, just as I was denied her wedding."

Rojack, for his part, weasily protests that his wife's death was suicide "in a way. She wanted me to kill her, when I didn't want to kill her." Kelly doesn't buy it, and suggests his son-in-law is a gutless slob who's "afraid to live, and equally afraid to die." The parapet sequence, so chilling in the novel, is here reduced to ridiculousness, and Kelly departs in disgust. Rojack attempts the vertiginous walk, but stops to crawl and finally gives up as the film further degenerates into unintentional hilarity.

Events worsen, if that's possible, when Cherry is abducted by Ganucci's goons and rats him out. Mobsters and chanteuse return to her hideaway as Rojack, unseen, observes them from the roof. The boys settle into her apartment to await him, while Cherry steps outside and allows Rojack to use her pistol against the henchmen. "Think of me sometime," he tells her before being gunned down--it's depressingly plain that studio conventions require that Rojack mustn't be allowed to get away with his offense, but he's such a sad sack it's worth watching him stop some Mafia bullets. The ending also provides Leigh with what is by far the film's best line: midway through An American Dream, while the couple admire the dismal view from Cherry's rooftop, Rojack urges her to take another chance on him "because you're turning into a whore. What do you call it when money in the bank comes first?" Then, just before he perishes, he asks Cherry why she betrayed him. She's silent, but after the gangsters have executed him and filed outside, she ripostes, "What did you expect from a whore?"

Mailer was wisely warned by friends not to see Warner's film of his work, and he couldn't possibly have been pleased with the prospect of it becoming a potential camp classic. The opening titles, with their screen-filling image of satin sheets, immediately signal that we are in Ross Hunter territory, and couldn't be further from Mailer's mood. An American Dream's killing moon brilliantly bookends the novel, but the author's employment of this powerful female symbol is nowhere to be found onscreen, depriving the narrative of its underworld (in both senses of the word) feminine force. Mann's dialogue is ruthlessly risible ("I'm uptight, baby, and I'm bailing out," Rojack barks at Deborah before their fatal fight), and Mailer's dark deconstruction of James Truslow Adams' national vision is, in the screenwriter's paws, obvious to the point of pain--the three telephones that Rojack answers on his television show are even, I swear to you, red, off-white, and blue.

Kelly informs his son-in-law that "the usual explanation for the terrible state of the world is that God and the Devil are having a war. Ordinarily, people don't pay much attention because it's taken for granted that the Devil will be smashed at Armageddon, the dead will rise up, and everybody will shake hands like gentlemen. It's characteristic of the human species...particularly in this country, to believe that everything will come out all right in the end. It's the American dream." He then proceeds to tell Rojack that this war is "about you. Who is to get final custody of you?" Mailer's tale is thus downgraded to a banal battle between Jehovah and Satan. Coming from Nolan's Kelly, it's as unconvincing as any televangelist's prattle. The United States may well be, in the minds of its True Believers, the New Jerusalem, but the filmmakers haven't a clue what to do with this idea. Furthermore, there's no reason for them to shift the novel's New York setting to La La Land, other than studio convenience. Mailer himself complained that the book's "whole psychology was New York....a guy just wouldn't push his wife out a window in Los Angeles--for one thing, there aren't that many high windows!"

Robert Gist, who helmed episodes of such teleseries as Naked City and Route 66, directs mechanically, but Sam Leavitt's photography brightens the proceedings somewhat. Susan Denberg, Playboy's August 1966 Playmate, is wasted as Ruta--she scarcely has a line of dialogue and seems better suited as eye candy for Dean Martin's Matt Helm--but, fortunately for her, she would shine the following year as the reanimated Christina (the role for which she is best remembered) in Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Woman (1967). Shago, all too typically, undergoes a Caucasian transformation, but it's for naught, since Paul Mantee, so moving as the marooned star of Byron Haskin's Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), is mere mobster background. Murray Hamilton as Rojack's television producer is simply awful.

An American Dream flopped at the box office, and was reissued theatrically with the rather desperate title of See You in Hell, Darling, but once again audiences sensibly stayed home in droves. The picture did, however, attract the attention of Oscar, as Paul Francis Webster and Johnny Mandel were nominated for Leigh's song, "A Time for Love." They didn't win, but the tune received a Golden Laurel award in 1967. Turner Classic Movies resurrected the picture, in its original 1.85:1 ratio, in late February, and this deservedly obscure film is now available as a Warner Archives DVD. If there had been no source novel, An American Dream might have been a comical misfire, but, as it stands, this is one of the worst adaptations of a major novel ever committed to celluloid. Mailer's own early cinematic misadventures (Wild 90, Beyond the Law [both 1968], and Maidstone [1970]) remain stubbornly unavailable domestically (CineMalta issued them in France), though his 1987 adaptation of his book Tough Guys Don't Dance remains in print as an MGM disc. Now that An American Dream has been unearthed, when will we finally see these weird wonders?

SOURCES

Mailer, Norman. An American Dream. New York: The Dial Press, 1965.

Mailer, Norman. Cannibals and Christians. New York: The Dial Press, 1966.

Mailer, Norman. The Prisoner of Sex. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971.

Stafford, Jeff. "An American Dream (1966)."
http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=276933

THE NEW INTERNATIONAL BEAT THAT'S ROCKIN' THE WORLD: POP GEAR

2010-03-08T12:41:00.001-08:00

Frederic Goode's Pop Gear (1965), or Go Go Mania! as the film masqueraded stateside, is one of those now-obscure music revues which were relatively common for their time. The picture was briefly available through Optimum Home Entertainment in the U.K. as a Region 2 DVD, which, I fear, does me absolutely no good because I lack the appropriate player. Fortunately, American Movie Classics--before that channel went totally into the toilet with commercial interruptions and censorship--aired, ad-free, the complete picture in 2000 during their Independence Day Rockstock festival, and I thank the gods I recorded it. Some of the acts remain more esoteric and less gripping than others, but the elegant simplicity of the lip-synched performances, as photographed in lustrous widescreen by Geoffrey Unsworth (who also lensed Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]) never fails to delight me. This forty-five-year-old time capsule deserves a U.S. release ASAP.

Pop Gear's big draw in its day was, of course, the Beatles, whose live renditions in Manchester of "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout" bookend, along with their hysterical female followers, the film; indeed, this was the first movie in which the Fab Four appeared in color. The performers are, alas, introduced by Jimmy (now Sir James) Savile, the annoying deejay and host of Jim'll Fix It fame whose cretinous coiffure--a wig, one hopes--and goofball theatrics make for stressful viewing, indeed. Mercifully, his appearances are relatively brief, allowing us to enjoy the tunes without too much trauma.

Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas are first out of the gate, performing their chart-topping "Little Children" against giant alphabet blocks. Susan Maughan follows with "Make Him Mine," then the Four Pennies with "Juliette" (they later return with the grim folk piece, "Black Girl"), but things really hum with the Animals' masterful "House of the Rising Sun." (This segment occasionally appears as a stand-alone video on VH1 Classic, so watch for it.) Eric Burdon's magnetism is tremendous both here and in their other number, "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," and one wonders where filmwork with Richard Lester or John Boorman might have led these gritty Newcastle lads. (They also memorably covered the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" in D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop [1968]).

The Fourmost are next with "A Little Loving," which they render against a striped water-wheel. The Rockin' Berries' (named in hommage to American wildman Chuck) "He's in Town" features gorgeous falsetto vocals and particularly good drumming, as does their subsequent "What in the World's Come Over You." The Honeycombs--with a woman, Honey Lantree, banging the traps--vigorously run through "Have I the Right" and "Eyes." The instrumental Sounds Incorporated make some noise with "Rinky Dink" and a revved-up "William Tell." Peter and Gordon lament "A World Without Love," while Matt Munro--the British Sinatra, for all intents and purposes--delivers the haunting "Walk Away." Munro, best known for crooning "From Russia With Love," is certainly the odd man out here, but his suave, seductive baritone is welcome nonetheless. He returns with "For Mama," and closes out the studio portion of Pop Gear with the picture's perky theme.

Herman's Hermits hamper the proceedings with the woefully-mistitled "I'm Into Something Good," but make no mistake: Tommy Quickly and the Remo Four's grating "Humpty Dumpty" is by far the worst of these songs, and may have you reaching, a la the Hillbilly Cat, for your revolver; really, it's nothing more than nursery rhymes indifferently strung together. Billie Davis' "Whatcha Gonna Do"--mimed in what appears to be an art gallery--is much better, and the Spencer Davis Group's "My Babe" is mesmerizing rhythm and blues, with guitarist Stevie Winwood's soulful shouting and tasty riffing--he was such an amazing musician that it's tragic his solo work would become bland as beans. The Nashville Teens contribute not-unlistenable ersatz country with "Tobacco Road' and "Google Eye," and the picture is padded with two John and Joan Shakespeare-composed dance pieces reminiscent of NBC's Hullabaloo.

The studio sets for these bands contain an almost Japanese minimalism, and Unsworth's palette--sometimes muted, sometimes lush--comes oddly close to the so-called "color expressionism" of Douglas Sirk's most celebrated soaps for Universal. Pop Gear lasts a too-brief seventy minutes, and AMC's print is letterboxed at 2.35:1. The film received U.S. distribution through American International, which makes me wonder if MGM has the current rights, though, sadly, that studio is now up for sale. At any rate, the picture has made sporadic appearances through the years on Showtime's Flix, and would be a perfect selection for Turner Classic Movies, which programs a wide variety of rock-themed wonders.

THE AWE WE TOOK FOR GRANTED: TRASHFIEND

2010-02-17T13:30:00.001-08:00

"As adults," Scott Stine observes in the introduction to his 2009 collection Trashfiend: Disposable Horror Fare of the 1960s & 1970s, Volume One (Headpress, 321 pages), "we rarely experience the awe we took for granted as children. As we grow older, we gradually become more desperate to relive such moments, and we find that only through the very things that sparked our collective imaginations as children can we even come close to this now-elusive wonderment." The vehicles for such an endeavor constitute a figurative form of time travel--or, if you prefer, sympathetic magic, for the objects that obsess us possess all the weight of relics. Stine's obsessions range from films to toys and comics, but they all center on that perennial fascination of the small set, monsters. Children, natural magicians that they are, have a powerful sense of Otherness, as manifested in their love for the numerous creatures who patrol the nights of their wondrous worlds. Stine's compendium, an outgrowth of an earlier fanzine, allows us to explore his own enchanted evenings.

The book's opening section, "It's Only a Movie...," analyzes an array of horror and science fiction oddities, from Peter Newbrook's amazing The Asphyx (1972)--inspired, Stine informs us, by the Nineteenth Century French scientist Hippolyte Baraduc's alleged ectoplasmic photo of his late wife taken twenty minutes after her death--to Del Tenney's voodoo mishmash, Zombies (1964), which distributor Jerry Gross notoriously, and misleadingly, retitled I Eat Your Skin for the picture's 1970 revival as the companion feature to David E. Durston's memorable rabies rampager, I Drink Your Blood. The reader is treated to trivia on such arcane delights as Kinji Fukasaku's mind-bending The Green Slime (1968) (this surreal space opera's Zappaesque theme, which has haunted my head for several decades, was belted out by Bel-Airs and Challengers drummer Richard Delvy, who died February 6 of this year), Emilio Paolo Miraglia's The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave (1971) (Stine does not, however, mention the gimmicky "bloodcorn" sold at concession stands by the giallo's American distributor), and Jeff Lieberman's ecological revenge shocker, Squirm (1976), undoubtedly the greatest worms-on-the-warpath epic of them all. "I desperately wanted to see the film," the author recalls of this last thriller, "but my parents--besides having no interest in sitting through it themselves--thought it would only contribute to my morbid inclinations." It certainly contributed to mine.

Unfortunately, Stine erroneously credits--as do several other sources--Mario Bava with the co-direction of Anton Guilio Majano's facial restoration farrago, Seddok, the Heir of Satan (1960; U.S. release, Atom Age Vampire), but, whoever producer "Mario Fava" actually was, he surely wasn't the great Bava. For that matter, Bryan Edgar Wallace, son of the more famous English mystery novelist, had nothing to do with the screenplays for Dario Argento's so-called "Animal Trilogy" (The Bird With the Crystal Plumage [1970], The Cat o' Nine Tails [1971], and Four Flies on Grey Velvet [1972]); indeed, he is not even mentioned in Maitland McDonagh's definitive Argento study, Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds.

"The Darker Side of Soul Cinema" scrutinizes the brief seventies run of blaxploitation horror. William Crain's Blacula (1972) is, of course, the most prominent representative of this field, and watching the film on television was obviously epiphanic for the preadolescent Stine: "Forget that It's a Small World After All crap. If black people, too, could be monsters--especially one as groovy as Blacula--then they were alright [sic] by me." The two Prince Mamuwalde movies many trashfiends will remember, but who among them has seen William Girdler's 1974 Exorcist rip-off, Abby? Stine has, by gum, but I regret to report that he pronounces the picture "one of those efforts that is more impressive as a lost film than, well, a found one." (Warner Brothers sued American International for copyright infringement, and Abby was immediately withdrawn, though it occasionally materializes as cruddy bootlegs.) The most amusing entry is on Jamaa Fanaka's Welcome Home, Brother Charles (1975), in which a wrongfully-convicted drug dealer seeks soul vengeance by strangling his white oppressors with his monstrously-mutated member (which also has the power to hypnotize the fair sex). They definitely don't make them like that any more.

Trashfiend also contains interviews with such genre players as Cal Bolder (Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter [1965]), Richard Cardella (The Crater Lake Monster [1977]), and writer-director John Stanley (Nightmare in Blood [1976]). Boulder (nee Earl Craver), was an LAPD motorcyclist who entered show business after fortuitously ticketing the man who became his agent. He appeared as a heavy in various theatrical and television oaters, but is best remembered for his turn as the reanimated boy toy in William Beaudine's sagebrush shocker. Bolder later became a novelist; when asked what, of his acting days, was his "greatest regret," he reveals that he turned down an offer from another, prospective agent "to go to Italy and shoot a string of western movies" because "I was doing fairly well with the agent I had." As fate would have it, those same spaghetti shoot-'em-ups turned Rawhide's Clint Eastwood into an international icon.

Cardella, who spent a quarter of a century with the Encinitas Fire Department, collaborated with director William Stromberg on several short films; the two stop-motion enthusiasts then crossed over into features with Crater Lake, but the "machinations" of distributor Crown International--who insisted the dinosaur spectacle was losing money at the box office, when, in truth, it was not--wore the men down. Stromberg never made another feature, and Cardella "just went on being a fireman and looked at it as something to bring up at parties: 'Did you know I was once an actor?'" He retired as Fire Captain in 1986, and has since appeared as background ("the politically correct way to say extra") in such pictures as Wolfgang Petersen's Outbreak (1995) and Frank Darabont's The Majestic (2001).

Stanley rose from copy boy to writer and editor at the San Francisco Chronicle; he also published several novels and hosted Sacramento's Creature Features on KXTL-TV from 1979 to 1984. This series blossomed into Stanley's Creature Features Movie Guide, which went through six editions. He also found time to edit the 1989 biography Them Ornery Mitchum Boys, which was, from the sound of it, a difficult experience because "John Mitchum just wouldn't tell the full truth about his brother Bob and, as a result, I think readers know the book is a sham." Stanley is also less than enthusiastic about his vampire-terrorizing-a-convention metahorror, Nightmare in Blood, which "[took] up too many years of my life" and "suffers too much from weak production and story."

Stine profiles comic book creator and filmmaker Pat Boyette, whose pseudonymous, bargain-basement Dungeon of Harrow (1962) must be seen to be believed. Boyette also wrote and penciled strips for Charlton and Warren Publishing, and Trashfiend contains nearly as much information on comics (including a lengthy appendix) as on psychotronic cinema. Stine interviews writer/illustrator Bruce Jones, who declares of his fellow artists, "Comics were looked upon with general disdain by the public at large, but we didn't give a damn. We were out to change the world. The brevity of youth, you know?" Marvel's various black-and-white horror magazines, from Dracula Lives! to Monsters of the Movies, are exhumed as well, and the author additionally examines such sixties' horror digests as Fear! and Shock, publications which valiantly attempted to revive the pulp traditions of Weird Tales but languished at newstands. (The covers of these periodicals, incidentally, are enormously entertaining, with lurid paintings aplenty and such sensational story titles as "Lash of the Avenger" and "Satan's Mistress.") Marvel even attempted to enter the literary field with The Haunt of Horror, which lasted a mere two issues before being recycled as another of the publisher's black-and-whites; these more adult comics briefly featured the largely-forgotten Gabriel the Devil Hunter, an ex-priest who "[spent] each issue going through the motions, having turned exorcism into a rather dull, predictable science." Strip writer Doug Moench, obviously hoping to exploit the alleged deviltry which surrounded the creation of The Exorcist (both novel and film), editorialized that "he was plagued by a series of obviously supernatural occurrences" while scripting Gabriel, and Stine wryly remarks that Moench's "tongue in cheek assertions are a much better read than many of the stories themselves."

Other Stine obsessions include Arthur Rankin's and Jules Bass' animated Mad Monster Party (1967), Topps' infamous Mars Attacks! trading cards (replete with Wally Wood's rare, grisly wash and pencil studies), "monsterabilia" (Creepy Creatures jigsaw puzzles and Schaper Manufacturing's Voodoo Doll Game), and the now-obsolete realm of eight-millimeter horror. I confess I feel rather like a child myself admiring Stine's reproductions of Ken and Castle Films box art. These two- to five-hundred-foot highlights from classic and not-so-classic pictures were heady stuff in the pre-home video era. My father bought copies of House of Frankenstein (1944), The Beast With Five Fingers (1946), Varan the Unbelievable (1958), and Dinosaurus! (1960), and would, when I badgered him enough, fire up the family projector so we could watch soundless ten-minute selections from these features in our living room. The most sought-after of these boxes are, not surprisingly, the rarest titles "with the most lurid covers," and Stine admits to "fighting tooth and nail" for them on eBay. He discusses storage and preservation methods, and oddly misidentifies the reproduction of Frankenstein Conquers the World as L'Amante del Vampire (1960; U.S. release, The Vampire and the Ballerina), while the caption for Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967) claims the film is Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965)!

The most moving section of Trashfiend chronicles Stine's heroic quest for information on KIRO-TV's Nightmare Theatre, which aired Fridays from 1964 to 1978 on CBS affiliate Channel 7 in Everett, Washington. Stations across the country once employed horror movie hosts, some of whom (such as Vampira, Zacherley, and the aforementioned Stanley) attracted national notice. KIRO's entry was helmed by Joe Towey, in full vampire regalia, as the Count. Precious little footage of Nightmare Theatre survives, however, as the two-inch videotape reels used to shoot the show were extremely expensive. The series was canceled by station president Lloyd Cooney because--according to floor director Dave Drui--it embarrassed the affiliate: "Here we were in the seventies, with KIRO trying to be on the cutting edge with all their fancy news gimmicks...but they still had shows on the air that were throwbacks to the fifties." Although the series was quite successful, "management couldn't wait to pull the plug."

Stine's quest was complicated by his search for a new residence, financial worries, and the catastrophic crash of his computer--Trashfiend, in fact, had to be reconstructed from the author's notes and cache file fragments. This disaster befell him mere weeks before the manuscript was due at Headpress, and Stine's "desire to retreat into a childhood that spoke of simpler times increased." Although e-mails from Towey's son and KIRO stage manager Derik Loso arrived too late to meet the author's deadline, he asks his readers to "stay tuned" for further developments. (Loso, I'm sorry to say, leapt to his death from the Aurora Bridge in November 2008.) Stine was able to interview Drui, as well as cameraman Chuck Lindenberg, in regard to the show, and his webpage tribute (complete with program schedule, articles, and fan letters) is accessible in the interim at www.nightmaretheatrenw.net. It's a genuine labor of love, and Count Towey could not ask for a better Renfield.

Although he can recreate the series' weekly presentations with video double features, and sit like a boy again in front of his television screen at the magical hour, Stine laments that he can "never recreate the moment when these films first revealed themselves to me." But, culturally speaking, he has accomplished much more than that, pluckily rescuing a fanged horror host from the fog of history. If there is treasure in trash, then Stine, I submit, has found it. Over the course of this collection, the vision of the child, his eyes wide in wonder, shines through. Unlike far too many adults, the author never takes his awe for granted. I enjoyed Stine's book immensely, and I very much look forward to Volume Two.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING: DESTINATION MOON

2010-01-25T08:56:00.001-08:00

It was not until the 1950s that science fiction emerged as a prolific film genre. There had been sporadic excursions into the unknown throughout the preceding decades (prominently among them Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1925] and William Cameron Menzie's Things to Come [1936], as well as the Flash Gordon [1936-40] and Buck Rogers [1939] serials), but it was only sixty years ago that production of these features went into overdrive, alchemically blending new, often ominous, technology with the purest pulp fantasy to produce cinematic gold. The romance of machines quickly dominated the motion picture industry, just as rock and roll would soon rule radio, and our collective unconscious would never be quite the same again.

Even at their most cynical, these fantasias reflected the fears and fascinations of their times. There was a subgenre for nearly every theme imaginable, from nuclear paranoia to time twisters, alien invasion to space opera. Like its cousins, this last category combined reds-under-the-beds hysteria with an explicit sense of wonder. As the super powers began reaching for the inner solar system, thematic concerns of totalitarianism and impending disaster would persist until the end of the Cold War, while their mutant offspring, the Special Effects Extravaganza, has outlasted both space and arms races to become the cultural norm.

Although Kurt Neumann's exploitation quickie, Rocketship X-M (1950), beat producer George Pal's same-year Destination Moon to the screen by four months, it is Pal's film which is generally considered to have inaugurated the Hollywood Space Race. Directly inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's fondly-remembered juvenile novel, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)--in which three enterprising teens and a Manhattan Project physicist refit a mail rocket and journey to the moon, where they foil, of all things, a Nazi plot--Destination Moon eliminates the fascist foofaraw to become a hard-science, no-frills affair, which is both the picture's strength and its weakness. Accordingly, it stands out from the more fanciful films that monopolized the field of interstellar travel; Heinlein himself mercifully vetoed "a version of the script which included dude ranches, cowboys, guitars, and hillbilly songs on the Moon, plus a trio of female hepsters singing into a mike."

Airplane manufacturer Jim Barnes (John Archer) and Army General Thayer (Tom Powers) convince a skeptical group of investors to defy the peacetime inaction of the (obviously Communist-infiltrated) U.S. government and fund scientist Charles Cargraves' (Warner Anderson) lunar rocket. "Why go?" one of the moneybags asks Barnes. "We'll know when we get there," he replies matter-of-factly. "We'll tell you when we get back."

To drive their message home, Barnes screens for the men, and audiences everywhere, an amusing Woody Woodpecker short which demonstrates the feasibility, as well as the necessity, of an American moon shot. General Thayer seals the deal with a Red Scare scenario in which a foreign power reaches the moon first and controls Earth with missiles. Silence. Lionel Lindon's camera pans across a sea of identically somber faces. The businessmen cough up the capital.

Of course, there is the inevitable federal intervention, as the space pioneers are forbidden to test their atomic engine in the Mojave Desert. Meanwhile, the Fourth Estate manufactures public protest. "Somebody's out to get us," Barnes declares. (Nameless saboteurs have already exploded an experimental rocket in the film's opening.) The industrialist decides to launch almost immediately; when Cargraves points out that no flight crew has been trained, Barnes counters that the take-off is fully automatic. The intrepid trio add insufferable comic relief Joe Sweeney (Dick Wesson) to their team when his fellow technician falls ill, and depart just before dawn and the arrival of a court injunction.

Numerous factors must be contended with: g-forces, the influence of which causes the astronauts to pull the sort of distorted faces (actually masks) most often seen on hammy guitarists; ghastly noises as their direct flight ship, Luna, breaks the sound barrier; spacesickness; and Sweeney's heinous harmonica interludes. When it is discovered that the radar antenna is frozen solid--Luna cannot land without it--Cargraves, Barnes, and Sweeney embark upon the cinema's first spacewalk, and a magnificent accomplishment it is. Dangerous, too: the scientist drifts off the rocket and has to be rescued by Barnes, who ingeniously operates an oxygen tank to reach him.

Like Apollo 11 in real life, Luna nearly runs out of fuel before it sets down on the moon. Barnes and Cargraves descend to the desolate brown-and-grey landscape while Leith Stevens' music swells, and Cargraves solemnly claims our nearest neighbor: "By the grace of God, in the name of the United States of America, I take possession of this planet on behalf of, and for the benefit of, all mankind." (Neil Armstrong would strike a not terribly dissimilar note nineteen years later.) The astronauts take photographs and perform a mineralogical survey, but their work, regrettably, is all for naught, as Barnes has wasted reaction mass on their touchdown, so the men have to strip the ship to its bare essentials before they can return home. For a while it looks as if one of them (Sweeney volunteers) will have to remain behind, but Barnes eventually figures out a way for all of them to depart, minus their radios, harmonica, and carnival balloon spacesuits. (These colorful outfits were presumably found by explorers from the Red Planet and recycled for Lesley Selander's Flight to Mars [1951]). As Luna hurtles through space, Earth looms onscreen. "This Is The End," the credits inform us, "Of The Beginning."

It was, indeed, especially for Pal, who would carve quite a name for himself in fantastic cinema. His efforts would improve throughout the decade; the sometimes mundane realism of this film was jettisoned in favor of more imaginative releases such as his following feature, When Worlds Collide (1951). However, Destination Moon remains a groundbreaking work; the straightforward script--Heinlein himself was a co-writer with Alford "Rip" Van Ronkel and James O'Hanlon--together with the superb astronomical art of Chesley Bonestell, Ernst Fegte's marvelous sets, Lee Zavitz's deservedly Oscar-winning special effects, and the technical advice of rocket man Hermann Oberth, all combined to take viewers on a surprisingly prescient voyage, and the significance of that expedition endures more than half a century later, despite former character actor Irving Pichel's sometimes workmanlike direction. (He also provides uncredited narration for the Walter Lantz cartoon.)

The moon adventures that immediately followed offered outrageous alternatives to Pal's and Heinlein's clear, courageous vision, and it would only be with Robert Altman's Countdown (1968) that the subject of a lunar landing would again be realistically rendered. In retrospect, the actual U.S. touchdown, although obviously a splendid achievement, was itself curiously anti-climactic. "Science fiction got there first," J.G. Ballard melancholically observed in 1993, "just as it has anticipated so much of our lives, effectively taking all the fun and surprise out of existence." The genre, it appears, has done much of our living for us, while the Inner Space advocated by the British New Wavers of the Sixties remains largely uncharted.

Image's 2000 "5oth Anniversary Edition" DVD is part of the Wade Williams Collection and sports attractive Technicolor (the spacesuits are especially vibrant), as well as an acceptable amount of grain and scratches; reel changes, however, are particularly rough. In worse shape is the film's re-release trailer, which ridiculously raves about "the black, airless void of terror-stricken space." The ninety-one minute fullscreen transfer offers fifteen chapter stops, as well as dust jacket liner notes which are supposedly continued inside the snapper case; my copy of the insert sheet, alas, does not contain them.

A WEB OF WICKEDNESS: THE SPIDERS

2010-01-14T07:38:00.001-08:00

Six decades before Indiana Jones first cracked his whip, there was Kay Hoog, the playboy protagonist of Fritz Lang's fourth feature, Die Spinnen ("The Spiders") (1919-20). The all-American sportsman/adventurer--how ironic it is that the German auteur chose a U.S., rather than Teutonic, hero--appeared in the first two installments of a projected four-part series; the remaining half of this ripping yarn, unfortunately, was never completed, and Lang moved steadily towards his future greatness with the subsequent multi-part masterworks Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and Die Nibelungen (1924). Both chapters of The Spiders, however, are self-contained units, and stand on their own as splendid early examples of the Monocled Maestro's art--accomplishments all the more satisfying when one considers that Lang forewent directing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that same year in order to helm the Decla serial.

The first installment, Der Goldene See ("The Golden Lake," 56 minutes), memorably opens with a ragged Harvard anthropologist escaping from his Incan captors and tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean, before he is executed by one of the natives. The professor has discovered a lost city full of treasures beneath the so-called "Holy Sea," and his message is found by the yachting Hoog (Carl de Vogt), who cancels his participation in a regatta race for the Golden Trophy of San Francisco to locate the city ("the golden treasures of the ancient Incas are far more inviting"). Along the way Hoog must spar with the Spiders, a criminal organization obviously modeled on the villains of Louis Feuillade's seminal serial, Les Vampires (1914), who leave an artificial tarantula on their victims' corpses. The organization's leader, Lio Sha (Ressel Orla), proves to be a mighty match for our protagonist, even if she's no Irma Vep. Hoog journeys to the lost city, where he rescues its Sun Priestess, Naela (Lil Dagover), from a prowling anaconda. Lio Sha--whose name inspired the handle for a character in the second Indiana Jones adventure--is hot on his heels with her gang of gauchos, but gets abducted by the high priest, who commands the reluctant Naela to sacrifice the criminal mistress. Hoog saves both Lio Sha and the priestess before sparks from holy candles explode, flooding the treasure-filled cave where the cowboys have worked themselves into a gold frenzy. Hoog and Naela escape to civilization, as does Lio Sha, who subsequently murders the priestess in retaliation for Hoog's refusal to hand over a document he's earlier snatched from the Spiders in a Cuitcatlan saloon, and join the villainess in her underworld quest.

The second installment, Das Brilliantenschiff ("The Diamond Ship," 81 minutes), was released several months later. The titular vessel (referenced in the document that Hoog snatched in Part One) sets sail in search of a legendary Buddha-head stone. Our hero, seeking vengeance on the Spiders, penetrates a secret underground Chinese city in Shaky Town, and learns of Lio Sha's passage on the Storm Bird. Captured by the Spiders, Hoog improbably escapes when the water flooding his cell loosens the prison's bars. Ludicrously but amusingly, Hoog then has himself transported in a crate (replete with wine, library, and electric light!) aboard the ship, emerging from it in black hood and costume--looking remarkably like a Spider himself--to intercept an urgent transmission to the Storm Bird's telegrapher. The Spiders, you see, have employed an Indian yogi to supernaturally divine the stone's whereabouts--an Argentinian treasure map is in the unknowing possession of English diamond magnate John Terry (Rudolph Lettinger)--and the arachnid antagonists kidnap Terry's daughter, Ellen (Thea Zander), to ensure his cooperation. Hoog resolves to rescue the woman, and soon our intrepid aristocrat--now definitely resembling Dr. Jones in his spiffy explorer gear--is battling the Spiders in the Falklands as everyone stalks the fabled stone in a forgotten cavern. Lio Sha and her henchmen conveniently perish from volcanic fumes at the film's climax (one wonders how the serial would have fared without her infernal presence), and Hoog is left to romance his new Naela surrogate.

All that remains, regrettably, of the third and fourth installments are their tantalizing titles, The Secret of the Sphinx and For Asia's Imperial Crown. Although the first two chapters made considerable money, producer Erich Pommer preferred to concentrate on other projects, and Hoog docked his yacht for good, while Lang, who had become increasingly dissatisfied with Decla, switched his allegiance to Joe May's studio. Emil Schunemann lensed the first installment, but Karl Freund shot the second part, thereby commencing the greatest of all Expressionist director-cinematographer collaborations. Of course, an adventure on this epic scale is heavily dependent on its sets, and Hermann Warm's and Otto Hunte's stylized renditions do not disappoint. Lang himself was trained as an architect, and the picture consistently conveys his powerful sense of space; the Incan temple, created at Hagenbeck Zoological Garden in Hamburg, is especially elaborate, and would have done D.W. Griffith proud.

Lang's screenplay, careering from horse opera to exotica, slam-bangingly explores the web of occult supervillainy that he would so brilliantly expand in his monumental Mabuse trilogy (1922-60): in this instance, however, the machinations are of Eastern, rather than Western, origin, undoubtedly reflecting the influence of Sax Rohmer, whose Fu Manchu debuted in 1912 (though looming over all these cinematic malefactors is Marcel Allain's and Pierre Souvestre's Fantomas). The organization employing the Spiders is identified as the Asian Committee, while the long-lost Buddha diamond's powers will purportedly allow the Orient to eliminate colonial oppression when a mysterious princess returns the stone. Like their creation myth counterparts, the Spiders weave a world of their own, and foreshadow the mesmeric manipulations of Dr. Mabuse by placing Ellen under hypnotic control in their scheme for global domination. The yogi sequence, meanwhile, anticipates a similar plot contrivance in the script Lang wrote for May's 1920 diptych, The Indian Tomb.

Hoog, who starred in the director's first couple of films (Halfbreed and The Master of Love, both 1919), makes an appealing paladin, and Orla, although lacking the lithe loveliness of Les Vampires' magnificent Musidora, is a formidable foe. The great Dagover, returning from Lang's same-year Madame Butterfly adaptation, Hara-Kiri, delights as a charming, albeit patently phony, South American priestess--in point of fact, the entire cast is unmistakably Aryan, which suffuses The Spiders with an additional sense of unreality, in which the entire scenario unfolds with all the glorious illogic of a fever dream.

Image's fullscreen transfer looks as if it was recovered from the lost city. David Shepherd, working from a positive print (the negative no longer exists) unveiled his heroic restoration in 1979, and the picture looks as good today as it probably ever will, though it is in desperate need of a digital cleanup. The transfer offers the original tints, as well as a veritable wealth of grain, scratches, and splotches. Footage from this two-hour-and-seventeen-minute movie is missing at 2:04:12, when a fistfight between Hoog and one of Lio Sha's henchmen abruptly ends with Hoog lighting a cigarette. Lang's first two features have not survived (Hara-Kiri itself was feared lost until the 1980s), so we should be grateful that this fantasia has at least endured. Gaylord Carter's Wurlitzer score, originally recorded for the early home-video distributor, Blackhawk Films, provides an appropriately buoyant accompaniment. The liner notes on the back of Image's dust jacket are supposedly continued inside the snapper case, but were nowhere to be found in my Amazon-ordered copy. The 1999 disc contains twenty-three chapter stops, as well as a Lang filmography, but pointedly lacks an audio commentary. A feature-length analysis of The Spiders by the appropriate scholar would be just what the doctor (Mabuse) ordered.

THE NATIVES NEVER FORGET: BLACK MOON

2009-12-09T13:01:00.001-08:00

Voodoo was the sensational subject of several early shockers, among them the Halperin Brothers' White Zombie (1932) and Val Lewton's Jane Eyre revision, I Walked With a Zombie (1943). Turner Classic Movies recently treated viewers to an obscure Columbia entry, Black Moon (1934), in this extraordinary subgenre. The topic is invariably suffused with enough racial and religious heresies to raise the hackles of any Sensitivity Policeperson, and Roy William Neill's film of an obscure Clements Ripley potboiler is a case in point. ("Love Battling Against the Sorcery of the Jungle!" bellowed the movie's memorable poster.) That this minor but fascinating picture is unavailable on home video is indeed a pity, but perhaps TCM's noble programming efforts will bring it back into some corner of the public consciousness.

Jack Holt headlines as businessman Stephen Lane, whose neurotic wife Juanita (Dorothy Burgess) was initiated into the Afro-Caribbean path as a child on the island of Saint Christopher by her native nurse Ruva (Madame Sul-te-Wan, the first black actor to sign a motion picture contract), after her parents were murdered in the island's most recent native uprising. Juanita, against the wishes of her uncle, Dr. Perez (Arnold Korff), journeys back to St. Christopher with her tiny daughter Nancy (Cora Sue Collins), Nancy's nursemaid, Anna (Eleanor Wesselhoeft), and Lane's secretary, Gail Hamilton (Fay Wray, who secretly loves her employer), in tow. Danger's already afoot in the States, where the overseer of Dr. Perez's sugar plantation is knifed by a native at Lane's office before he can warn the husband of what awaits Juanita on the island. Mrs. Lane, you see, is still in thrall to the Voodoo clan, which requires a blood sacrifice every now and then, and the next full moon is three weeks away.

Juanita first appears in closeup, her face ominously half-shadowed, playing a rada for Nancy as the camera cuts to worried reaction shots of her house staff. ("She's at it again," one of them remarks.) She's a woman torn between two worlds, who feels "only half-alive" under the influence of her "cold" European-American heritage. Juanita assures her uncle that "the past is dead" and "the natives have forgotten long ago," but, as he corrects her, "the natives never forget." Mrs. Lane comes alive only when she's reunited with Ruva and St. Christopher's holy man, Kala (Laurence Criner). Soon Anna turns up dead in the local lava pit, and Ruva, who encourages the child to play with knives, replaces her as nanny. (The island's wireless operator has earlier been hanged after telegraphing Lane.) Juanita's husband shoots Kala as the high priest prepares to sacrifice the ladyfriend of the Georgia boatman, Lunch McClaren (Clarence Muse), who brought him to St. Christopher--unbelievably, the cultists do not immediately set upon the men--and blood restitution must be made by Juanita, who, after herself executing the schooner captain's gal, is expected to slay her husband, and--when her efforts to drug him fail--her daughter. The natives invade Perez's mansion and bring Nancy to the sacrificial site, but Lane plugs his wife before she slaughters the child so that Ms. Hamilton can assume her rightful place at his side.

Black Moon mightifully manifests the Caucasian fear of "going native" among African populations, as well as--more mutedly--the dread of miscegenation. Burgess adeptly projects Juanita's duality, warm one minute and darkly distant the next; she's an early and dramatic specimen of postmodern white pathology, entranced by the call of the Other. Although repulsed by the thought of sacrificing Nancy, she's nevertheless willing to kill the girl, and her ultimate objective is to rule St. Christopher once she has her uncle eliminated for oppressing "my poor natives." "Tragic woman is less moral than man," Camille Paglia asserts in Sexual Personae. "Her will-to-power is naked. Her actions are under a chthonian cloud." Juanita is Underworld Exhibit A, and she's certainly one of the more interesting villainesses of Hollywood's Golden Age, comparable to Myrna Loy in such culturally disreputable delights as Thirteen Women and the incredible Mask of Fu Manchu (both 1932). Proud and magnificent in peekaboo priestess gear, she writhes ecstatically as the red sect celebrates her, while her husband observes, hidden and humiliated.

Wray, who spent the first half of the decade hopping from island to island (The Most Dangerous Game [1932], King Kong [1933]), makes a charming surrogate mother for Nancy, but Holt (who previously starred with Ms. Wray in Frank Capra's Dirigible [1931]) has little to do except look bewildered--and, in the case of his secretary, act oblivious. Korff is quite convincing as a man navigating the minefield of another potential uprising ("Six times the blacks have tried to wipe us out. I suppose you're acquainted with the Negro superstition that seven is their lucky number"), lapsing into Lugosian intensity as he recounts of Burgess, "She tasted blood!" at a childhood sacrifice. He rules his island, three-fourths of whose population consists of "hill bandits--fugitives from Haiti," by force, and possesses as much contempt for the natives as they have for him. Muse, who appeared in White Zombie and also held an international law degree, bulges his eyes in the best Mantan Moreland tradition, while Madame Sul-te-Wan is a model of understated menace.

Multiculturalists may cringe, but it's significant that the natives want Juanita, rather than one of their island sisters, for their Queen Mother; it seems that the trophyism of European beauty prevails even in the densest jungle. Voodoo, alas, is depicted in the most negative light, though arguably the diasporic polytheism suits the natives better than the alien belief system of Judeo-Christianity which has colonized the spirits of so many Third World peoples--and, for that matter, Western Man. There's also an abundance of intraracial superiority on the part of the Georgia native Lunch, who ridicules the islanders as mere "monkey-chasers" (which doesn't, however, stop him from wooing one of them). He's especially prone to crooning "Roll, Jordan, Roll," further opposing Voodoo with That Old Time Religion, but enthusiasts of the faith will at least be relieved that no zombies are employed.

Neill, who followed this film with such classics as The Black Room (1935), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), and several Sherlock Holmes adventures, keeps Wells Root's script moving at a brisk sixty-eight minutes. Louis Silvers supplied the uncredited music, a hypnotically harmonious mix of drums and chants. Joseph H. August's cinematography superbly employs positive and negative spaces; particularly pleasing are his compositions of the sacrificial ritual as the natives tremble in possession of their ancestor archetypes, as well as a smoke-filled siege in the island's tower. Black Moon isn't goody-goody by any stretch of the imagination, but this bungle in the jungle offers an amusing, and illuminating, look at a bygone era of filmmaking.

SCARRED FOR LIFE: HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS

2009-10-26T12:48:00.001-07:00

The editor of Screem devoted the most recent issue to "Films That Scarred Us for Life." Contributors' examples included the usual suspects (The Exorcist [1973], Jaws [1975]), as well as several surprises (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang [1968], The Day of the Locust [1974]). The first movie I remember that frightened me half out of my wits was Dan Curtis' House of Dark Shadows, the producer/director's 1970 revision of his cult soap opera (1966-1971). I was so unhinged, to be perfectly frank, that my mother and grandmother had to remove my screeching five-year-old self from the theatre screening the picture. I still vividly recall trying to settle down in the lobby, and it was not until the summer of 1976 that I saw the full film--minus the usual television edits and interruptions--on the CBS Late Movie. The scene that most traumatized me was the moment in House when Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) ages a century-and-a-half after being overdosed with the anti-vampirism vaccine the lovelorn Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) inflicts upon him in a jealous fit. (The undead one's fallen hard for Collinwood governess Maggie Evans [Kathryn Leigh Scott], whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his lost love Josette.) The image of this alarmingly ancient creature--like lots of children, I thought the elderly were ugly enough to raise haints in a graveyard--strangling the spiteful doctor, then biting his beloved Maggie, was too much for my nerves, which were becoming progressively raw as the film unfolded. I had never found the ABC series to be so intense, and, of course, it wasn't. MGM's feature release upped the violence ante considerably and emphasized Barnabas' romantically ruthless villainy, while writers Sam Hall and Gordon Russell drastically compressed several months' worth of their original storyline. Events, in truth, hurtle past at breakneck speed, occasionally to the point of incomprehension, but, quite happily, the picture never fails to thrill me, even if it no longer provokes a screaming spell.

Cretinous handyman Willie Loomis (John Karlen), convinced that the legendary Collins jewels are hidden in the family mausoleum, unwittingly liberates the slumbering vampire from his hundred-and-fifty year confinement. Barnabas, posing as an obscure English cousin in those pre-googling Seventies, spends his time restoring the "Old House" on the Collins estate and courting Maggie, when he's not vampirizing the rest of the cast. Dr. Hoffman, who's researching the Collins family, realizes that Barnabas is undead when he casts no reflection in her compact mirror, and struggles to reverse his curse before giving him the business after learning the object of his affections. His handsome visage rejuvenated by a sanguinary feast, Barnabas plans to wed the entranced Maggie in the family's abandoned chapel, but her artist boyfriend Jeff Clark (Roger Davis) intervenes with a crossbow at the altar, accidentally shooting Loomis in the back. Loomis, who also adores Maggie, manages to stake Barnabas before he expires, and Clark finishes the job. You can't keep a good vampire down, however, and Barnabas turns into a bat after the credits.

Test audiences complained of the film's pacing, so Curtis removed approximately twelve minutes of footage--material which, unfortunately, appears to be forever lost. (The 1971 sequel, Night of Dark Shadows, suffered a similar fate, losing an astonishing thirty-seven minutes.) The opening sequence, in which the titles distractingly appear over a fair amount of to-ing and fro-ing, excised a scene in which Maggie's charge, the bratty David Collins (David Henesey), pretends to have hanged himself in order to shock his governess. This action, coupled with the unwillingness of the boy's father Roger (Louis Edmonds) to locate the little monster, motivates Maggie to leave Collinwood for good. The studio feared that impressionable youngsters would either be distressed by, or attempt to duplicate, the child's prank, but the scene's removal obscures Maggie's reason for packing. (Barnabas, of course, convinces her to stay.) A conversation between Maggie and Jeff in the Collinwood greenhouse was also eliminated, causing further confusion. In the theatrical release, Barnabas tells Loomis that he's "done something for" Jeff, but the audience has no idea that Barnabas has recommended his rival to a local gallery so that the artist won't interfere with his plans for the governess. Finally, a sequence of Dr. Hoffman's associate, Professor Stokes (Thayer David), learning from Loomis that Barnabas is indeed undead was deleted, blunting the impact of the Van Helsing stand-in's later confrontation with the vampire at the Old House. (Stokes abruptly, almost randomly, sprouts fangs near the picture's climax, as does Roger Collins, while Roger's sister Elizabeth [Joan Bennett] retreats into a fugue state and disappears; ideally, House should have been two hours, not ninety-six minutes, long.)

MGM released this film and its sequel on videocassette in 1990, following with a double feature laserdisc three years later (all are out-of-print), but the pictures have yet to debut on DVD. The original series is available on disc, as is its 1991 NBC resurrection. Fullscreen transfers of both 1.85:1 features, sporting the same ludicrously unconvincing day-for-night shots found in theatrical prints, appear from time to time on Turner Classic Movies. Warner Brothers has announced plans to revamp Dark Shadows for the big screen with director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp, so perhaps House and Night will eventually return, like Barnabas, from their home video limbo.

I hereby apologize to all those patrons, including my family, whose enjoyment of House of Dark Shadows I spoiled nearly four decades ago.

SOURCE

Gross, Darren. "Closed Rooms in the House of Dark Shadows" and "Illuminating Night of Dark Shadows," Video Watchdog No. 40 (1997).

SONS OF NIGHT, AND MAIDS WHO LOVE THE MOON: MIDNIGHT MOVIES

2009-10-20T08:47:00.001-07:00

Alas, the lost pleasures of midnight, that witching hour when androgyne and undead walked the earth. The age seems as distant to us now as the silent cinema was then. There was a palpable sense of community, of shared secrets which only a subculture could comprehend and appreciate. Home video altered everything, and the delights we experienced in the darkness of the Bijou are these days relegated to the sanctity and solitude of our living rooms--ironically, the very place where many midnight cults began, absorbing--and, in extreme instances, emulating--the archetypal images beamed like spells through cathode rays. Those fantasias all had their mysteries to disclose, and, in the classic compendium Midnight Movies (Harper & Row, 1983 [338 pages]; revised edition Da Capo, 1991 [348 pages]), J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum tell us how the message(s) ran.

"If the origins of art are to be found in religion," the authors argue, "the movies are surely the universal secular faith of the twentieth century." Theatres are cathedrals, reinforcing the wisdom of sociologist Edgar Morin's dictum that "no one who frequents the dark auditoriums is really an atheist"--a word, incidentally, that Alain de Benoist identifies, in his magisterial On Being a Pagan, as being "practically meaningless" in the world of antiquity. Movie palaces were and remain polytheistic temples, for the gods and goddesses of the silver screen will never tolerate the totalitarianism of a lone desert deity. Divinity in the Bijou is diverse, and diversity is divine.

Hoberman and Rosenbaum identify France's Cinema MacMahon, with its enormous lobby photos of the "Four Aces" (Fritz Lang, Joseph Losey, Otto Preminger, and Raoul Walsh), as the first theatre to harness the energy of cultism. Late shows were mounted at the Cinematheque Francaise and the Styx, which specialized in horror films, as well as at London's Electric Cinema and the Paris Pullman. In the United States, exhibitors programmed spook spectaculars and New Year's Eve revels. On the smaller screen, broadcasters needed to fill late-night air time, and motion pictures--particularly the killing kind--were an obvious solution. Human beings, hard-wired as we are for worship, require constant nourishment in our faith. How we hungered for the wee-hours appearances of Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and all the other stars who seemed to come alive, like satellites and vampires, only at night. The counterculture vultures who subverted the Sixties were famished for visions that told them where they came from, what they were, and where they were going. Enter the underground. Andy Warhol was there in silver hair, as were George Romero's flesh eaters and John Waters' "filthiest people alive."

The authors dissect these artists chapter by chapter, beginning with the seminal efforts of such dark angels as Drella and his collaborator Paul Morrissey, as well as Kenneth Anger, Ken Jacobs, and Jack Smith. New York's Bleecker Street premiered Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) and other freak-outs, but filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas claimed that the theatre's managers were worried that the "low quality of the underground" was tarnishing the Bleecker's reputation. His defiant response was a manifesto celebrating the "Baudelairean Cinemas" of the new auteurs ("a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh") and their marginal appeal: "There is now a cinema for the few, too terrible and too 'decadent' for an 'average' man in any organized culture." Epater la bourgeoisie!

Mexican mage Alexandro Jodorowsky "[asked] of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs." His self-styled "quest for sainthood" El Topo (1970) reversed the polarity of the New Western, cross-pollinating Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah with Panic Movement perpetrator Fernando Arrabal and rascal guru G.I. Gurdjieff. Jodorowsky, his ego inflating to heroically mammoth proportions, maintained that "'there was no difference between filming and reality," and expressed his "'hope [that] one day there will come Confucius, Mohammed, Buddha and Christ to see me. And we will sit at a table, taking tea and eating some brownies.'" John Lennon was so affected by the picture that he convinced his manager Allen Klein's Abkco Films to procure what would become the pivotal midnight headtrip. Ben Barenholtz was suitably impressed to book the movie for his Elgin Theatre, where El Topo played for six-and-a-half months, enrapturing pothead audiences but dividing critics. Vincent Canby belittled Jodorowsky as "an intellectual William Randolph Hearst," while Peter Schjeldahl proclaimed El Topo "a monumental work of filmic art."

Unfortunately, Jodorowsky's subsequent release, 1973's The Holy Mountain (a work superior, I submit, to his preceding effort), was outshone at Cannes by Marco Ferreri's notorious La Grande Bouffe, and failed to duplicate El Topo's financial success. It had, however, an impressive sixteen-month run at Manhattan's Waverly. Jodorowsky, nonetheless, was never again able to pack so many seekers into theatres, and his following features--among them, the memorably gruesome Santa Sangre (1989)--faired poorly at the box office. Another film, 1980's Tusk, was barely even released, but the artist took everything in stride: "What I am doing is making my masterwork, which is my soul."

Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) marked a well-acknowledged turning point in horror cinema. "Until the Supreme Court establishes clearcut guidelines for the pornography of violence," Variety complained in that year's October 16 number, "Night...will serve nicely as an outer-limit definition by example." The Sixties were coming apart at the seams, and Romero's Image Ten troupe were documenting the decade's self-destruction. Indeed, Hoberman and Rosenbaum opine that the picture's title "could have been a beatnik poet's metaphor for the 'CBS Evening News'" in what was supposedly "the most violent year in [U.S.] history since the end of the Civil War." Romero's zombies remain potent symbols of a disintegrating society, though the director's conception of his ghouls has evolved significantly over the years, culminating in the post-9/11 (re)visions of Land of the Dead (2005) and his "fictuality" reboot, Diary of the Dead (2007).

Romero's first few follow-ups to Night--There's Always Vanilla (1971), Jack's Wife (1972), and The Crazies (1973)--made little critical or commercial impact, and masqueraded under various titles (e.g,. The Affair, Season of the Witch, and Code Name: Trixie). The Pride of Pittsburgh fared better with 1976's vampire character study Martin, which ran for forty-three weekends at the Waverly (where it faced stiff competition from David Lynch's Eraserhead). Romero hit paydirt again with Dawn of the Dead (1978), which shifted the Anubian siege from farmhouse to shopping mall. (Dawn, incidentally, was my first midnight movie experience, and it occurred--most appropriately--in a now-demolished mall.) Night has endured two remakes, while Dawn and Day of the Dead (1985) have weathered one each. The inevitable Crazies reworking is scheduled for winter release.

Waters' "prison and...pleasure dome were American suburbia." The Pope of Trash's Pink Flamingos (1972), with its infamous coprophagic climax, threw down the transgressive gauntlet. The director's remark that "if someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like a standing ovation," may be wishful thinking, but there's no doubt that Waters touched a nerve in the damaged American psyche. The authors examine his stock players (Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Edith Massey--several of whom spawned their own cults) and chronicle his celluloid misadventures from Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964) to Polyester (1980). Flamingos, of course, towers over Waters' oeuvre, flopping at midnight at New York's Orpheum, but playing for five nights a week for fifty-eight weeks at the Elgin, as well as forty-five weeks at the New Yorker. Inescapably, an element of danger crept into these screenings. "The audience was very bad," Barenholtz bemoaned. "[Flamingos] started getting Jersey and Brooklyn crowds, especially these gangs coming in and saying, 'Let's see the fag eat shit,' and throwing things at the screen.'" Waters went relatively mainstream with 1988's Hairspray, which became a Broadway musical and was itself filmed in 2007. The Court TV narrator is currently threatening a sequel.

Barenholtz also booked Lynch's hallucinatory urban horror Eraserhead (1977) at the Cinema Village where, after a slow start, the picture scrambled brains for a year. The film additionally had significant runs at San Francisco's Waverly (ninety-nine weeks) and Los Angeles' NuArt (over three-and-a-half years). Rosenbaum points out that Night and Eraserhead are rooted in "the fortress mentality of the fifties, an attitude becoming more prevalent again today" in our balkanised culture. Hoberman identifies Lynch's film and Derek Jarman's Jubilee (1978) as "the only midnight movie[s] which [have] really addressed" the Seventies, and, in an intriguing footnote, the authors connect the industrial nightmare to New York's seminal punk bands--particularly Richard Hell and the Voidoids' anomic anthem, "(I Belong to the) Blank Generation," which they contend constitutes "a striking analogue to" the film. Eraserhead's mutant infant--whose special effects secrets Lynch, like a good magician, has never disclosed--reflects the double anxieties of delivery and abortion, and the film chillingly charts the dubious destiny of a decaying world.

Lynch's Oscar-winning sophomore feature, The Elephant Man (1980), performed admirably at the ticket booth--scoring singularly well with inner-city audiences--even as efforts to resurrect Eraserhead at theatres screening the John Merrick biopic were unsuccessful. The director belly-flopped with Dune (1984), but returned to popular myth-making with Blue Velvet (1986), the Twin Peaks teleseries and film (1990-1992), and the magnificent Mulholland Dr. (2001). The authors ascertain "a modified pop Hinduism" in Lynch's work--he's also a prominent transcendental meditation advocate--and, of all the artists profiled in their volume, the Missoula, Montana Eagle Scout comes closest to approximating the spiritual surrealism of Senor Jodorowsky.

Admittedly, no survey of midnight cinema is complete without an analysis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). The gender-bending musical really took off at the Waverly, where disciple Louis Farese, Jr.'s so-called "counterpoint dialogue" (in the hallowed tradition of the Glass Teat's horror movie hosts) was picked up by his coreligionists, and soon spectators began arriving for the picture dressed as cast members. Toronto's Roxy preceded their late-night screenings with cartoons (Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jeckle), while the Neptune accompanied Charle Chaplin shorts with the tight harmonies of the BeeGees. Frank-n-Furter personator Tim Curry's erotic energy galvanized viewers, and Hoberman and Rosenbaum proclaim him "the very embodiment of Andre Breton's polemical desire to 'change my sex as I change my shirt.'" Homosexual audiences flocked to the film, especially on Saturdays at San Diego's Strand. A newspaper article on the midnight spectacle attracted the attention of what cultist/ethnographer Margery Walker Pearce described as "hard-hat types" (not, apparently, of the Village People variety), who arrived at the theater shouting obscenities and "threatening to 'kill the faggots.'" Ultimately, the lads fell in line, and Richard O'Brien's and Jim Sharman's glam slam miraculously continues to unite very discrete groups.

Other chapters survey Punk Cinema (Beth B. and Amos Poe), Camp (Mommie Dearest [1981]), Gore (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974]), Drugs (Reefer Madness [1940]), and Agit-Prop (Tod Browning's infamous Freaks, of which Hoberman amusingly observes that "the most militant counterculture film was made in 1932"). An especial delight is the book's conclusion, in which the authors discuss the then-state of the late-night nation. Midnight movies aren't so much born as (to borrow an old tagline) kicked out of Hell, but different films reflect the concerns of different socio-economic orders. Dawn's audience, for example, is distinctly--though not exclusively--proletarian, whereas El Topo's eminence "was predicated on the existence of the kind of marginal leisure class that wouldn't think twice about going to see a midnight flick in the middle of the week."

Hoberman and Rosenbaum offer their choices for great unsung midnight movies, and impressive ones they are: Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished Ivan the Terrible trilogy (1944-58), "which intermittently comes across as the greatest Flash Gordon serial ever made." Other possibilities include such "epic, environmental" experiments as Warhol's twenty-five hour **** (1968--screened only once, at the New Cinema Playhouse) and Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (1971; a mere twelve hours and forty minutes). Rosenbaum nominates Frank Tashlin's "prophetic avant-garde masterpiece" Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), and Hoberman suggests "a two-hour combination of Busby Berkeley's greatest hits."

Rosenbaum deplores such canonical splatter platters as Blood Feast (1963) and Basket Case (1982) ("neither of which I would have seen if we hadn't been doing this book"), but Hoberman wonders if gore cultists "[identify] with a lumpen, vengeful, rebellious element in popular taste," and laments that films "have turned out to be...a 'passing amusement.'" This is especially evident in the new millennium, an age whose youth prefer the virtual violence of video and computer games to traditional artistic experiences. Perhaps, in the final analysis, films aren't interactive enough, despite the call and response of the midnight mentality. As the authors note in their 1991 afterword, the enchanted era was ending by the time of the book's first edition "and we were speaking about a historical phenomenon." The mainstream sucked in the surreal, leading to a double-edged victory: Rosenbaum remarks "that midnight movies succeeded rather than failed" as their creators went Hollywood, "but it's a kind of success that resembles failure on certain fronts; it's like saying that socialism in this country succeeded rather than failed when it became part of the New Deal." Today's audiences, at any rate, crave more immediate sensations, and pushing a button or manipulating a joystick are, for them, less passive than watching a film or reading a book. The sons of night, and maids who love the moon, have, I fear, for evermore exchanged the midnight flower for the eye of vulgar light.

SEANCE: SEDUCTIVE CINEMA

2009-08-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

The first time I heard Judith Evelyn speak in a motion picture--she was the drunken Eloise Crandall who goes over the railing in Joseph Pevney's delirious Female on the Beach (1955)--I was mildly disoriented. Ms. Evelyn seared her way into my adolescent consciousness as the deaf-mute ticket seller whose husband (Phillip Coolidge) frightens her to death in William Castle's audacious The Tingler (1959). The couple operate a revival house specializing in silent cinema, and, as Coolidge terrorizes her in a memorably surreal sequence, Ms. Evelyn emotes like a silent film actress who has escaped from the screen in the pair's downtown theatre (where, later, the titular creature, liberated by acid-dropping coroner Vincent Price, will make serious mischief). For this viewer, Ms. Evelyn embodies the essence of silent movie melodramatics, and listening to her voice in other pictures--she was often cast as an Agnes Moorehead surrogate--always rings a bit artificial. For her every moment in The Tingler, she is silent cinema, propelling Castle's film beyond its pre-Cronenbergian body politics and backwards into the great world, now lost to us, of soundless mysteries.

James Card (1915-2000) was fortunate enough to experience these seminal shadow plays firsthand. As he remembers in the preface to his remarkable memoir, Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994 [319 pages]; reissued by University of Minnesota Press, 1999 [336 pages]), "When dialogue arrived and the silent film almost vanished, some of us were so infuriated that we actually refused, for many months, to even look at a talkie." The epic theatres of Card's Ohio youth, where moviegoers "dressed to watch Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo as they would to attend a concert of the Cleveland Orchestra," offer a striking contrast to today's shoebox cinemas and their backwards-baseball-capped spectators. Theatres were magical palaces, as opposed to places to gab, text, and tweet mindlessly while high school projectionists screen computer-generated images through projectors deliberately dimmed to lower electricity costs. Concession stands were unheard of in Card's youth, while showtimes were so obscure that audiences "did not know what had gone on before the moment of being seated" by white-gloved ushers. The atmosphere was one of ritual anticipation, and the author set out to possess the sacred images unfolding on the silver screen. In 1921, our cinephile, who admits his "own hell would be to have a projector and all the films [in the world] but no one around to see them with me," acquired a hand-cranked Keystone Moviegraph whose thirty-five-millimeter reels held a mere twenty-five feet. Several years later Card's erector-set ingenuity allowed him to progress to thousand-foot reels, and he was soon swapping items with his fellow fanatics. Providentially, a friend's city court judge father treated the Shaker Heights lads to material censored by the Buckeye State's morality guardians. (In an amusing sidenote, Card reveals that Jesus' intertitle in Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 King of Kings, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," was stricken from Illinois screenings because censors had forbidden the word "sin.") The excised material offered the author his first glimpse of "greasy man" Erich von Stroheim, the magnificent scoundrel and self-mythologizer whom Card considers a wildly overrated talent, and certainly a better actor than auteur. Soon Card was reading Kirk Bond's New York Times essay, "Lament for the Cinema Dead," which introduced him to Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). The author became obsessed with finding this film, a compulsion "that changed my life and shaped what would ultimately become a kind of career."

Card began renting movies for his Theatre Guild, screening such masterpieces as Fritz Lang's 1924 Siegfried (the Knopf edition incorrectly dates this picture to 1922) in a high school auditorium. (Lang's film constitutes the first half of Die Nebulungen, but Card offers no word on whether he programmed its same-year companion piece, Kriemhild's Revenge.) The author finally tracked down a nitrate print of the elusive Caligari in 1933, screening it for "my family and a few of their dispproving friends"--as well as the projectionist, who hated the film. Card attended Western Reserve University, then ventured on a scholarship to the University of Heidelberg, where he gorged on Teutonic cinema. His procurement of a nine-point-five-millimeter Caligari exhausted his college funds. After a "somewhat misguided" attempt at filmmaking, Card journeyed to Danzig to document the beginnings of the Big One, running afoul of the Gestapo in the process. He made it back to America, directing a New Deal documentary, then wound up as "buck-ass [Army] private" at Astoria Studio, pulling KP with the likes of George Cukor.

By war's end Card's collection had grown by leaps and bounds. After hiring on with Kodak, he boldly used his treasures as "bait" to finagle a position as assistant to the curator at Eastman House. Card scaled the ladder to become assistant director, and was soon a driving force in American film preservation, particularly when contrasted to Iris Barry, the Museum of Modern Art's first conservator, a crusty English critic primarily interested in British cinema. "Imagine," Card urges us, "a film archive headed by...John Simon, saving only those films considered worthy by its curator!" It would be a nightmare, unquestionably, and Barry's standards were especially severe, because the studios' bottom line was ownership, not preservation. Nitrate negatives would either disintegrate or cause spectacular blazes. While producers maintained positive prints for the purposes of remakes, the "tiniest whiff of decomposition" was enough to doom the negatives, thus ensuring the loss of thousands of films. A "no" from Barry was a death sentence for "unworthy" titles. Fortunately for posterity, Card--like his French counterpart, Henri Langlois--cast a wider net.

Card was especially entranced by Herbert Brenon's 1924 version of Peter Pan, and one of the book's highlights is his decades-long quest for a copy. Card was introduced through an old soldier friend to Chum Morris, recording man for the Eastman Philharmonic. Morris had stumbled across a cache of lost treasures in the Eastman Theatre's student organists' screening room. Musicians had practiced with these prints, learning to play in time to the unspooling images. Peter Pan was only one among many movies stored in this forgotten section of the theatre; others included John S. Robertson's 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Morris showed to Card's "almost unendurable joy." The author convinced Morris that, if they didn't act to duplicate these rare pictures, they would be forever lost once safety experts learned of their existence and sent the reels to their oblivion in silver reclamation tanks. (Nitrate from X-ray film had been blamed for a 1929 Cleveland Clinic fire which killed over a hundred patients, though Card believes that poison war gas was being developed at the clinic and was the true culprit.) The men's scheme, which Card rationalizes as a combination of cultists' obsession and post-war liberation fervor ("For the allies," he writes, "the term 'liberation' came to be extended beyond a purely political sense") was derailed when Philharmonic conductor Guy Fraser Harrision remembered the Eastman cache, and one of its jewels, Henry Kolker's 1921 Disraeli, was resurrected for the theatre's silver anniversary.

Card traces the origins of film preservation to Boleslav Matuzewski, royal court cinematographer to Tsar Nicholas II, an early subject of the Lumiere Brothers and "the world's most highly placed movie buff of the nineteenth century." Matuzewski documented everything from the Russian royal family to surgeries at the imperial hospitals, and in 1898 he published an exceedingly rare book, La Photographie Animee, describing his work and arguing for the historical and educational value of film. He and the Czar attempted to establish, in the City of Light, an international cinema archive chain, but endowments for this then-relatively-new art never materialized, and Matuzewski's archive fared poorly during the Bolshevik Revolution.

The critic Burns Manthe also called, in 1921, for a cinema archive, but such as existed at the time contained specialized films held by the major military powers, in order to review battles and armaments. Finally, in the 1930's, Britain, France, and Germany combined their collections to form the FIAF (Federation Internationale des Archives de Film), and MoMA installed the merciless Ms. Barry. Card observes that, due to her cultural unfamiliarity with the country, Barry cared little for American pictures, and cites as an example her dismissal of Edward Venturini's The Headless Horseman (1922) as "difficult to view without boredom." The author admonishes her obliviousness to the film's employment of a Negro youth to rescue Ichabod Crane (Will Rogers) from a potentially lethal tarring-and-feathering (a scene, incidentally, nowhere to be found in Washington Irving), arguing that, for the time, "such noncaricatured use of a black character is without parallel in American movies." "For many years," Card notes disdainfully, "the British enjoyed castigating Americans for their cultural mistreatment of blacks--through the years before the wholesale immigration of Indians to the British Isles." He also takes to task American Marxists who considered any Soviet film, "however stupid, [to be] a splendid example of 'the people's art.'"

Indeed, the author has plenty to say, little of it positive, about the business of film studies. Card challenges former music critic Siegfried Kracauer's thesis in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) that the bulk of German cinematic masterworks "harbor the sinister principle of National Socialism," and points out that Kracauer's most "ominous examples" were actually created by Jews. Herr Kracauer's low command of English, Card submits, "was just sufficiently obscure to make his points ambiguous enough to delight the pipe-smoking elbow-patch English professors of our universities. After all, ambiguity is their way of life." Semiology, Card insists, is even worse, leading him to wonder if its practitioners are "prisoners of inferiority...hid[ing] themselves in the jungles of jargon, where they are protected from the awful responsibility of lucidity."

Card further notes that the crowds who attended silent films came not for the directors, but for the stars, and Seductive Cinema is rife with his reminiscences of such actresses as Joan Crawford and Ms. Swanson. He is, however, gentlemanly discreet regarding his relationship with Louise Brooks, the G.W. Pabst siren whose reputation Card resurrected in the Fifties. (He also restored and popularized their dismembered 1927 classic Pandora's Box.) Recalling his first encounter with Crawford, Card confesses that he didn't recognize "the short, freckle-faced girl who answered the door" of her home. Swanson he met at a department store luncheon for the actress, who was promoting her Forever Young dress line, and Card "had just sense enough not to tell her I'd been watching her in films ever since I was a little boy."

The author examines the world of "Vanished Vamps," from Alice Hollister and Theda Bara to Negri and the bewitching Garbo. But women were not the only stars. Card evaluates the work of John Barrymore, wondering if the Great Profile's maddeningly erratic performances were the result of either "despair over [his] failing powers, or a deep doubt of the ultimate merit of what he had accomplished in his most serious efforts." (Barrymore's real passion was not acting, but illustration.) Card scrutinizes the oeuvre of DeMille and Josef von Sternberg, highlighting DeMille's obscure 1915 classic, The Cheat, and devotes several amusing pages to such irregular talents as Stroheim ("the realism touted in his films is nonexistent") and D.W. Griffith. He scolds scholars whose celebration of these artists is "so utterly irrational as to be comparable only to religious fanaticism."

Of course, any discussion of Griffith will inevitably involve The Birth of a Nation (1915). "A dedicated woman seeking to improve the social climate in Rochester" requested from Eastman House a series on bigotry for a combined black and Jewish audience. Card gave it to her with both barrels, programming Griffith's adaptation of Thomas Dixon's notorious novel and play The Clansman (the film's original title), and incensing this mistress of uplift. "'When I came in here tonight,'" she told Card "in a voice trembling with emotion," "'I was an enemy of all censorship and felt that I would be ready to put my life on the line against any threat to freedom of speech or expression.' Her voice suddenly grew strong, and she almost shouted: 'But that film should never be shown anywhere to anyone!!'" Card recounts a visit he received by black community leaders, who informed him of the NAACP's staunch opposition to Birth's public exhibition, which he had scheduled for the Dryden Theatre Film Society. The delegation's leader told Card "that if I persisted in the plan to show the film, the chances were very good that I might not survive the protests of their more activist groups." Card defied their bullying, and the movie was screened without mischief. Griffith's epic was banned for a time in the author's home state, and MoMA was so intimidated by the picture's controversy that it withdrew Birth from circulation, but fortunately the film has not become extinct like too many other silents.

Seductive Cinema is an exquisite appreciation of a glorious art that Card considers a "seance." The necromancy of pre-sound imagery endures, even if silent films will never attract more than a small audience. It is enough for those of us who remain core followers to communicate with the spirits of the Bijou. I've been privileged to attend several of these seances through the years, beginning with the late Lee Erwin's marvelous accompaniments, on a Robert Morgan pipe organ, to the exploits of Ms. Swanson and Rudolph Valentino at my city's downtown revival house. Every October this theatre screens Rupert Julian's 1925 version of The Phantom of the Opera, and every year I watch the images unreel to the virtuosity of a live keyboardist. I open myself to seduction, to "that delightful state that," in Card's words, "can come very close to one's private definition of love." His, surely, was one of the world's great romances, and Seductive Cinema is a compelling, and deeply moving, billet-doux.

TWERTLE SOUP AND A BOX OF TOOTHPICKS: PINOCCHIO IN OUTER SPACE

2009-08-27T13:07:00.001-07:00

One of my earliest childhood memories is of watching, in a state of some mesmerisation, the mysterious creation that is Fred Ladd and Ray Goossens' Pinocchio in Outer Space (1964) on the late show. I was spending the night at my maternal grandmother's house, which meant I was allowed to stay up at all hours, or at least until local television stations signed off the air in those Dark Days Before Cable. The animated fantasia's surreal images of flying whales, giant crabs, and other creatures have rattled around in my skull to this day, which brings me to Image Entertainment's 2003 DVD. This U.S.-Belgian revision has been dismissed by several Internet commentators, but--however far the story strays from Carlos Collodi's original satirical conception--Pinocchio in Outer Space deserves revisitation, if not precisely reverence.

The boy's continued mischief has motivated the Blue Fairy to turn the child back into a puppet, who lives with his father Geppetto and dog Fedora in the old man's toy shop. Pinocchio wants to be a boy again, but he's not making much headway in his studies: "The planet Venus is twenty-six million miles from Earth. Mars is thirty-five million miles away. I wish school were a million billion miles away!" Meanwhile, the just-launched Cosmos II satellite has been destroyed--the third in a week's time--by the picture's Terrible Dogfish/Monstro surrogate, an interstellar rogue whale named Astro. When Pinocchio sets off for school the next morning, he's waylaid by the Fox and the Cat (called in this version Sharp and Groovy), and winds up parting with his lunch money for a hypnosis primer. He later encounters interplanetary operative Nurtle the Twertle from Twertle-D, who's overshot his orbit and imagines he's on Mars, where he's been sent to investigate atomic energy on the presumedly dead world. Pinocchio, hoping to haul in Astro with hypnosis and (not incidentally) get out of going to school, climbs aboard Nurtle's spacecraft, and the two journey to the Red Planet.

At this point, Pinocchio in Outer Space becomes quite interesting. Our adventurers, after encountering a magnetic storm, touch down on Mars and spot a mysterious city, which resembles a futuristic Disneyworld, in the distance. After narrowly escaping being devoured by colossal, drooling sand crabs, Pinocchio and Nurtle explore the city, which upon closer inspection is deserted and disintegrating. The puppet suggests that Astro must be responsible for the destruction--indentations in the ruins reveal ominous whale shapes--and Nurtle agrees that "there's something fishy here, all right." The pair examine the city's underground chambers as organic-looking machines hum eerily. They discover a flowing canal, as well as pits of regular-sized crabs and scorpions, and deduce that the contraptions dispensing radioactive food to the creatures are mutating them into giants. Other monstrosities, including enormous spiders and turtles, make their presence known, and the astronauts flee down a long tunnel. (How this subterranean sequence fired my prepubescent imagination!) The pair also encounter a pod of whales, from which Astro has undoubtedly escaped. A colossal sandstorm begins to blow, and Pinocchio and Nurtle take off in their spacecraft before sand reaches the atomic reactors and the city explodes.

Astro, of course, awaits with snapping jaws to consume the ship. As the duo drift among swallowed satellites, seemingly doomed to be digested, the Blue Fairy appears to the puppet, inspiring him with the idea of exiting through the creature's spout. (In a nice touch of swish humor, Pinocchio cries, "That's the Blue Fairy!" and Nurtle--to whom she's invisible--skeptically replies, "Sure it is, and I'm the Queen of the Moon.") The ship's stabilizer, alas, is damaged in its trip through the darkened spout, causing the craft to spin. "By the time we get back to Earth," Nurtle informs Pinocchio, "I'll be twertle soup and you a box of toothpicks." Astro is awakened by the commotion and gives chase, only to be hypnotized by the brightly-twirling ship and captured. But re-entry into Earth's atmosphere is deadly, and Pinocchio sacrifices himself to save both the spacecraft and the planet by reversing Astro's spout. Fortunately, the Blue Fairy returns to resurrect him in flesh and blood.

It's fluff, admittedly, but compelling fluff nonetheless. Some reviewers have found the picture's trio of songs intolerable, but I must confess a grudging admiration for the Fox's ditty, "Doin' the Impossible." Pinocchio is voiced by Peter Lazer, while Nurtle is rendered by Arnold Stang of Top Cat fame. (Most, if not all, of the cast were drawn from radio.) Image offers a colorful transfer of this sixty-five minute feature, with odd bits of grain here and there. Supplements include a still gallery containing poster, lobby card, and production boards. Universal's original six-minute U.S. prologue, which tours the Milky Way, is also included, and the opening "Little Toy Shop" sequence is available for inspection sans titles. Martin Caidin, whose novel Cyborg inspired television's Six Million Dollar Man, is credited as the film's technical advisor.

Ladd's audio commentary redundantly describes the onscreen action, in addition to praising Animation Director Goossens' work and pointing out the various performers. (For some reason, he identifies Lazer twice.) The film's narrator, Bret Morrison, who was radio's Shadow, is best remembered among cultists for his trailers voicework for Radley Metzger's Audubon Films erotica; he, rather than Fox personator Conrad Jameson, also renders "Doin' the Impossible," as the studio preferred Morrison's silken stylings. Ladd observes that the obliterated city's mushroom cloud took four months to complete, while the feature required four years. He further notes that the cosmic clouds in the background of the penultimate space sequence were often invisible in dense theatrical prints, but Image's transfer renders them distinctly. A separate commentary is included for the prologue, which combines government and privately-made footage with impressive animation effects. Pinocchio in Outer Space appears in its original 1.78:1 ratio (enhanced for widescreen sets), and contains fifteen chapter stops. Image's Dolby Digital Mono disc is as easy on the ears as Mr. Morrison himself.

A VISIT TO THE PLEASURE DOME: KENNETH ANGER AT P.S.1

2009-08-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

I recently vacationed in New York, and visited P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center's Kenneth Anger exhibition. The installation, located in the second floor Kunsthalle, focuses entirely on eight of the nine films in the maestro's Magick Lantern Cycle (1947-1980). A conscientious effort has been made to recreate the atmosphere of Anger's films, so that visitors will feel they have indeed entered the director's Pleasure Dome. Fireworks (1947), Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Scorpio Rising (1963), Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969), and Lucifer Rising (1980) cast their spells on large video screens, while Puce Moment (1949), Eaux d'Artifice (1953), and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965) are disappointingly relegated to much smaller monitors, impairing the overall impact. (Fireworks and Inauguration unreel in separate, curtained rooms.) The biggest letdown, however, is the glaring omission of Rabbit's Moon (1950), either in its original or condensed form. The films' scores occasionally overlap, but fortunately this is a minor distraction. P.S.1's exhibition employs red and silver vinyl partitions, as well as coverings for walls and floor, and appropriately ritualistic lighting. Well-worn copies of the Hollywood Babylon books, as well as Alice Hutchison's 2004 Anger monograph and Jack Hunter's 2002 essay collection on the filmmaker, Moonchild, are available for perusal. All prints are apparently drawn from Fantoma's recent two-disc restorations. The installation, which began February 22nd of this year and ends September 14th, 2009, is organized by Susanne Pfeffer.

THE DARK GODS OF THE TENDERLOIN: SLEAZOID EXPRESS

2009-07-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

Some filmmakers have their fingers on the pulse of the movie-going public, others down its throat. The latter group constitutes the rogues' gallery of Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford's Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square! (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 2002; 315 pages). Landis, who earlier published a splendid biography of Luciferian auteur Kenneth Anger, and wife Clifford vividly recreate the lost world of Manhattan's 42nd Street, the former cesspool which now serves the Big Apple's international tourist, as opposed to its rough, trade. Landis (1959-2008) pulled several years as a projectionist/manager at sundry fleapits, braving a workplace where "muggings and bloody needles were the order of the day." His legendary fanzine helped legitimize the grindhouse genre, earning him the enmity of underground heavyweights Jonas Mekas and Ken Jacobs, while endearing him to Mr. Anger. (Anger later feuded with Landis over his unauthorized bio, but that's showbiz.)

The tour ranges from the stylized kink of the Olga trilogy (1964-66) and other early roughies to women-in-prison epics and mondo movies. Their creators are creatures of the night: shadowy, often pseudonymous people who move with hand-held Bolexes through the margins, where magic usually happens. Film distributor Stan Borden "was slobbering, but he was personable." Producer George Weiss "had a Jungian feel for the sordid American S&M unconscious." Andy Milligan made movies for as little as $750, and the costumes for his gory period pieces were loudly colored so as to survive the blowup to thirty-five-millimeter. Once, when his Sweeney Todd ripoff Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970) was resurrected at the Lyric, a censored throatslitting--performed to appease the MPAA--resulted in the hurling from the balcony of a small refrigerator. "The crowd became agitated," Landis notes dryly. These were dangerous places to displease an audience.

The Cameo purveyed industrial-strength hardcore, while the Anco "sat on a nest of rotten eggs." Genderbenders from Ed Wood to Doris Wishman unreeled while "Latino junkies on the lam after a quick strongarm robbery slumped in the aisles." The Rialto programmed an unrelenting gore apocalypse; the Roxy's blaxploitationers "were as inflexible and distinct as the troublemakers sitting in the audience." These theatres form an infernal roll call as the authors invoke the Dark Gods of the Tenderloin.

Of course, conjuration demands sacrifice, preferably bloody. Roughie pioneer Michael Findley was decapitated in a helicopter crash atop the Pan Am building. Laurence Merrick, director of 1972's Oscar-nominated Manson documentary, was murdered several years after the film's release, as was interviewee Ronni Howard. The toll was also psychic. William Sanderson, best known today as hillbilly Larry from Newhart, hanged a black pastor's wife in Fight for Your Life (1977), a picture "calculated to drive inner city audiences berserk with rage." He told Clifford he was afraid the film would come back to haunt him. (Landis, who was present at an Empire screening, reports that "white patrons tried to leave the theatre as unassumingly as possible"). Many filmmakers never made any money from their work. Distributors sold prints to subdistributors, who could reissue them with impunity while their creators received no residuals whatsoever. Roger Watkins was unaware for years that his pseudo-snuff Last House on Dead End Street (1977) was actually playing somewhere and even turning a profit, as well as stomachs. The Dark Gods have a voracious appetite.

The title of Larry Buchanan's High Yellow (1965) "was so offensive you had to call the boxoffice." David Durston, director of Boy-napped (1975), spent a night in the pokey after star Jamie Gillis ran through Little Italy with a pistol, alarming the locals. Bob Roberts' 1976 porno take on the Patty Hearst saga, Patty, was closed by court order after only one week. Landis and Clifford enthusiastically convey the grit and the grime of psychosexual cinema in the funniest Deuce memoir since Josh Alan Friedman's Tales of Times Square.

This is not to suggest the book is without faults. The authors perpetuate the myths that Milligan directed 1964's The Naked Witch (it was Buchanan), and that celebrity monologist Spalding Gray appeared as the depraved El Sharif in Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976). They also claim that Ruggero Deodato's Cannibal Holocaust (1980) was the director's response to Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox/Make Them Die Slowly (1981), when it's the other way around (though Lenzi did inaugurate this notorious subgenre). Ivan Rassimov, and not Massimo Foschi, is listed as the star of Deodato's The Last Survivor/The Last Cannibal World (1977), and so forth. These are curious errors for film cultists to make, and Sleazoid Express would have benefited from tighter editing.

To take this tour, however, is to experience by proxy the movies' anti-canon, a refreshing alternative to that puffed-up mainstream that imagines As Good As it Gets (1997) is as good as it gets. The socially disreputable sorcerers of cinema remain as vital as ever in this age of Hollywood product whose innovations are inversely proportional to their stratospheric budgets. Really, now: Wouldn't you rather watch I Drink Your Blood (1970) or White Slaves of Chinatown (1964) than the latest groaner from Jerry Bruckheimer? (Video companies are helpfully appendiced.) See them and die a thousand deaths.

PART OF THEIR WORLD: PHASE IV

2009-07-06T09:14:00.000-07:00

Ecological revenge constitutes one of the most lurid and magnificent of film subgenres, visiting vicarious vengeance on mankind for its desecration of Terra Mater. Whether the agent of retribution is a reawakened dinosaur or an army of tarantulas, humanity must pay in full for its transgressions against the planet. From land development to runaway pollution and nuclear testing, the eternal penalty is blood, straight from the tap.

Consider the avenging ant. The power of this mighty soldier has been well-represented cinematically by the Marabunta invasion of Byron Haskin's The Naked Jungle (1953) and--more memorably--by the atomic mutations of Gordon Douglas' Them! (1954). Saul Bass examined the world of these (anti-) social insects in 1974 with Phase IV, which Paramount, in association with Legend Films, has recently released as a no-frills DVD. The picture, which took the Grand Prix at the following year's International Festival of Science Fiction Films in Trieste, was a commercial failure in its time, but a cult has steadily grown around it in the intervening years, and Phase IV is ripe for rediscovery.

Bass, best known for his incredible title sequences for Otto Preminger's The Man With the Golden Arm (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), later directed the Academy-Award-winning short Why Man Creates (1968), but Phase IV remains his only feature. It is an experimental work, absorbing the surreal vision of 1972's Oscar-netting pseudo-documentary, The Hellstrom Chronicle (along with its microcameraman, Ken Middleham), while adding a dash of (then-) New Wave style. An intentionally vague interstellar event has somehow advanced the intelligence of various ant species, who put aside their traditional antagonisms to evolve strategies against human beings in the American Southwest. Biologist Ernest Hubbs (Nigel Davenport) and information specialist James Lesko (Michael Murphy) investigate the disappearance of the insects' primary predators, as well as the mysterious erection of several eerie anthill towers (recalling the 2001 monolith), from their hive-like experimental station in the Arizona desert. Several families have already been forced out of the area by the insects, and the creatures stage an assault on the remaining Eldridge family's farm, ingeniously floating--like soldiers on a raft--on a piece of bark across the fuel ditch the family has dug as a defense, and devouring the very structure of the family's house until it collapses. The ants also attack the station, forming a chain of insects to short-circuit the truck powering the biosphere's generator.

The Eldridges' car is totaled in the chaos after ants invade the vehicle, and the farmer, his wife, and their farmhand are poisoned by the defensive insecticide shower the scientists rain upon the creatures. Only their granddaughter Kendra (Lynne Frederick) survives, rescued by Hubbs and Lesko as they emerge in their protective suits and insect-eyed goggles to inspect the carnage. The girl goes ballistic when she spots Hubbs' test ants in their glass maze, shattering the glass and causing Hubbs to be badly bitten. As his arm swells and his health--physical and mental--deteriorates, the creatures prepare for the next move in their human-insect competition, a game the smug, technocratic Hubbs savors. "We challenge with yellow chemistry," he says admiringly of the insecticide-adapted army, "and they respond with yellow creatures."

Davenport's performance of the lead scientist is pitch-perfect in its detached ruthlessness, recalling his military survivalist in Cornell Wilde's No Blade of Grass (1970). Murphy offers an effective emotional counterpoint, the warm American to Davenport's cold Anglo, and Frederick is appropriately understated as the withdrawn Kendra. Mayo Simon, who scripted everything from Judy Garland's final film, I Could Go On Singing (1963), to the underrated Futureworld (1976), here turns in his best work, exercising considerable restraint and sustaining an increasingly dark mood of meditative ambiguity. Too few science fiction films since the Seventies have explored ideas, but Phase IV is actually about something: it's ecology at its artistic deepest, outlining a grave new world in which mankind is but a minor inconvenience--mere human insects, as it were--in the Great Chain of Things. The film offers an ironic spin on the eternal battle of the sexes, as Hubbs realizes that, in order for the ants to be defeated, their queen must be destroyed. "It is she who speaks," the delirious man intones, but he is too far gone in his faith in scientific know-how to realize that she must be obeyed. An ant matriarchy is rising as the human patriarchy collapses like all great civilizations. "We knew then we were being changed and made part of their world," Lesko observes in voiceover as he and Kendra somberly await their new roles at film's end. "We didn't know for what purpose, but we knew we would be told."

Dick Bush's photography coats the screen in eerily vivid Technicolor (especially striking are the saturated blues of the biosphere at night), while Middleham's microcameras capture the insects patrolling their earth tunnels like cave warriors in some sword-and-sandal epic. One astonishing sequence--a pan of rows of dead yellow ants that the surviving blacks have arranged--is unexpectedly moving in its formalization of ritual and respect. Perhaps the film's most celebrated image--and the one referenced in the picture's deceptively tawdry poster--is the shot of ants emerging from three holes in a corpse's hand, a powerful hommage to a similar moment in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalou (1929). In hindsight, it's a shame there's no title sequence for Bass to work his wonders on, but the absence of one is certainly in keeping with Phase IV's understated atmosphere. According to Jay Cocks' Time review (October 14, 1974), Bass deleted the film's original ending--"a montage of hallucinatory images suggesting man's destiny after the ants have had their way"--because it was "too abstract." A fair amount of computerized psychedelia is present at the climax, however, and the picture's closing shot of the rising sun is effectively elegiac. Brian Gascoigne's score (realized in conjunction with David Vorhaus and supplemented by Stomu Yamashta's montage music) is anxiously ambient, occasionally employing fretless bass to acrobatic effect.

The 84-minute film is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, an approximation of its 1.85:1 theatrical ratio. Bass died in 1996, but the main actors are still with us, so it's regrettable that no audio commentary is provided. For that matter, there's no trailer, either, even though one is available on Volume Three of Synapse's 42nd Street Forever: Exploitation Explosion compilation; Paramount and Legend's omission is frankly inexplicable. The transfer reveals occasional grain (especially evident in the amazing montage of Lesko--resembling an extra from George Romero's The Crazies [1973]--scattering insecticide on his anguished trek to the queen ant's chamber), but is scarcely a distraction. Paramount's DVD, which contains a dozen chapter stops, is a definite improvement over the label's earlier videotape version, but the absence of supplemental material is a major disappointment. Perhaps, one day, a label like Criterion will treat Phase IV to the definitive edition that this film deserves.

ALL MEN SUSPECT THEIR WIVES: THE KISS BEFORE THE MIRROR

2009-06-18T13:04:00.001-07:00

James Whale is best remembered for such classic fantasias as Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), though he himself preferred his 1936 version of the venerable musical Show Boat. One of Whale's more obscure efforts is 1933's The Kiss Before the Mirror, William Anthony McGuire's adaptation of a Ladislaus Fodor play, which the director remade a mere five years later as Wives Under Suspicion. Unlike the public domain retread, the original is currently unavailable on home video, but TCM premiered a lovely fullscreen print of this pre-Code melodrama on April 26, 2009.

Universal wanted Charles Laughton and Claudette Colbert for the leads, but they were otherwise occupied, so Frank Morgan and Nancy Carroll were loaned from Paramount. Morgan stars as Viennese attorney Paul Held, who defends his friend Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) against the charge of murdering Bernsdorf's adulterous wife Lucie (Gloria Stuart, whose early exit from the film was considered startling for its time). Bernsdorf follows Lucie to the home of her nameless bachelor lover (Walter Pidgeon), then shoots her through a window as she disrobes in silhouette. (Pidgeon also exits the picture at this point, never to return, and--for all the chatter of betrayal--seems largely forgotten.) Morgan's politically-incorrect defense strategy is that Bernsdorf was driven to the point of madness by his wife's infidelity, and thus was not responsible for his actions. Bernsdorf's first inkling that his wife was seeing another man occurred less than an hour before the murder, when the devoted professor canceled his evening lecture to return home to his beloved, only to endure her look of disgust at him, in stark contrast to her earlier emotion, as he kissed her neck and shoulders at her makeup mirror. ("You've ruined my hairdress!" she rants.) Lukas is believably anguished as he recounts the frenzy that overtook him, a frenzy immediately infecting Held.

Most appropriately for a film with "mirror" in its title, Held and Bernsdorf, as well as their wives, reflect one another. It transpires that the lawyer's spouse Maria (Carroll) is also unfaithful to her husband, though she feels considerably more guilt about her affair than the late Lucie. As Held observes her making herself up in the looking-glass, he suddenly realizes the truth about his wife, later trailing the anxious woman to a rendezvous with her lover (Donald Cook). Held's scheme, which he confesses to the horrified Bernsdorf, is to get the professor acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity, then immediately murder Maria. "All men suspect their wives," the enlightened Held assures the professor. Significantly, both men are considerably older than their spouses, while the women's lovers are closer to their own ages. Held already seems to be feeling the press of time, as he praises the opera Faust for its idea that "one could look forward to the years with such complacency if one knew that at the age of seventy, a kindly devil would touch him on the shoulder and make him young once more."

Maria attempts to break off her affair with her (nameless) paramour, while being driven around the bend by her obsessed husband. Held requests that she be present in the courtroom when he delivers his closing address ("I want to see your face when I speak"), and a memorable summation it is. His antics are enough to get any attorney ejected from the courtroom--especially when Held flourishes a revolver to Maria's terrified shrieks--but the largely male jury rules in the professor's favor, and the lawyer finally regains his senses. (Bernsdorf spends much of Held's speech hiding his face in his hands, and makes an amusing contrast to the hysterical counselor.)

The Kiss Before the Mirror functions as a footnote in Whale's horror and science fiction cycle. The countryside set through which Bernsdorf trails his wife is cannibalized from Frankenstein's exteriors, while the accused's cell suspiciously resembles the room in which Colin Clive kept Boris Karloff. Karl Freund's camera is appropriately Expressionistic, as befits the greatest of all German cinematographers; particularly memorable is the scene in which the eerily-lamplit Morgan explains his mad scheme to Lukas, as well as a 360-degree pan of the courtroom as Morgan delivers his closing argument. Stuart, who found renewed fame many decades later as the octogenarian Kate Winslet in James Cameron's Titanic (1997), returns from The Old Dark House, and would later play Claude Rains' fiancee in The Invisible Man.

Whale's film fairly sizzles with sexuality, as Morgan harps on Lucie's disrobing in her lover's bedroom as often as the judge and the censors let him get away with it. When the distraught Maria asks Held if Lucie's murder is justifiable "because she loved someone," Held counters that it is "because she lied." "That's no reason why she should've been shot down like a mad dog," Maria protests, to which he smoothly replies, "That, my dear, is a matter of taste." The director works in a homosexual newspaper sketch artist for between-the-lines followers of his films, while Held's office manager Hilda (Jean Dixon) is a definite free spirit who makes veiled reference to her randy private life: questioned by Maria as to whether she's "a lawyer or a new kind of woman," Hilda responds that she's a lawyer by day, but "at night--well, you might be surprised." (Such forthrightness is not to be found in the Wives remake, which recasts the cuckolded lawyer as a District Attorney.) Whale packs all this outrageousness into an economical sixty-eight minutes. The Kiss Before the Mirror is eminently worthy of DVD release, and hopefully TCM's screening will facilitate this.