THE LONG SATURDAY OF THE SOUL

Unclean Cults: Land of the Lost and Howard the Duck

2011-04-30T14:11:00.001-07:00

This week, two attempts to translate cult favorites to the language of film, with gibberish the results.

When do you first get the feeling that Land of the Lost is in trouble? Not counting when you first saw the trailer. When? Immediately.

In the movie's first post-title scene, crackpot scientist Rick Marshall (Will Ferrell) is flogging his new book on "The Today Show" and his interview with Matt Lauer, playing himself, isn't going well. Lauer gets the movie's first laugh and I wondered if Ferrell and director Brad Silberling really meant for Matt Lauer to set the pace.

Dr. Marshall believes that movement between dimensions and alternate universes is possible, but he doesn't attempt a field test of his tachyon gizmo until encouraged by Holly, a hot young science student from England (Anna Friel). They experience "the greatest earthquake the world has ever known" and, along with a redneck doofus named Will (Danny McBride) wind up in a place where anything dreamed up by sitcom writers can happen.

After flopping down on a patch of lost-land desert containing a Viking ship and what could be Amelia Earhart's plane, they meet Cha-Ka, a Sleestak, sort of a 2001 australopithecine reject (Jorma Taccone). From there, the movie is essentially a series of sketches and concepts, most of which don't work very well stretched out over 93 minutes.

So what do we get? Lots of aimless running and screaming—the farce's traditional demand for "louder, faster, funnier." Two of out three, anyone? There are some CGI dinosaurs. Several gags based on bodily excretions, especially numbers one and two. Some of the throwaway gags worked for me. As the tachyon gizmo first hums to life we see Dr. Marshall looking down at it, his face lit by a soft blue light. "It's beautiful," he gasps in a moment that perfectly parodies Paul Freeman's Dr. Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark just before his head melts.

If only TV writers Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas could have come up with more stuff like that, Ferrell wouldn't have to fall back on re-cycling his standard movie persona. Yes, earlier movie comedians have mined one character for all s/he was worth, but audiences saw them only once or twice a year. With basic cable, On Demand and DVD, we can see Will Ferrell, or any movie star, so often it's easy for them to become over-exposed.

Matt Lauer ends the movie with another solid laugh. Who knew? Maybe Land of the Lost isn't really a Will Ferrell picture at all. Maybe it's a Matt Lauer movie and Ferrell just hogs most of it. Maybe theyshould have cut out all that unfunny Ferrell stuff for the DVD. That would leave us with a five-minute movie full of LOL material instead of an intermittently amusing 93-minute one. Sounds good to me.

And now for something almost exactly the same, the movie equivalent of The Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic, the non plus ultra of big budget bad movies, the one, the only . . .

Howard the Duck.

Re-visiting older films you once panned is good for the critic's humility. You frequently find that The Movie in Question isn't as bad as you thought it was. Maybe that's because you've seen so many even stinkier floppiles since the initial viewing. Maybe you're just mellowing. Maybe senility is taking over.

Well, I'm here to announce that I am not mellowing and senility is not yet my dominant mental condition. Howard the Duck is just as bad as it ever was. Time has not blossomed nor custom improved its unique blend of over-production and cheap-jack special effects, nor its lousy acting, insulting script, and hapless direction. If you were watching "Jeopardy" and the category was "Rotten Movies," the correct response to every clue would be Howard the Duck.

Adapted from the super comic book created by Steve Gerber, this mess of a movie was produced by George Lucas, who apparently learned nothing from the derision he received over the little people in teddy bear costumes in Return of the Jedi in 1983 and allowed Ed Gale, whose subsequent career included stunt doubling Chucky in the Child's Play series, to don a risibly unconvincing duck suit. Howard, who is transported against his will from the Duck Planet to Earth, is supposed to be a master of Quack Fu but can barely waddle around.

Arriving on Earth, he is abused, laughed at and smacked around—no one has sense enough to grab him and rush him to the nearest Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. Finally, he comes to the rescue of second rate rock singer Beverly Switzler (Lea Thompson) who takes him home with her and, maybe, falls in love with him. Together, and with the help of lab tech Phil Blumburtt (a hideously overacting Tim Robbins) they save the world from an invasion of Dark Lords of the Universe, led by a possessed Dr. Jenning (Jeffrey Jones).

The opening getting-to-know-you segment lasts way too long, the Dark Lords section is played too straight, and the film's last two reels are nothing but explosions, screaming, and the kind of stop motion animation that was amazing in King Kong but was sadly antiquated by 1986. The picture was directed by Lucas' buddy Willard Huyck and written by Huyck and Gloria Katz. Why the hell didn't they get Steve Gerber to at least chip in? The man, who died in 2008, was a terrific comic book satirist. Maybe Lucas and Co. were just set on turning out a family comedy instead of the R rated burlesque of comics, movies and life in general the picture would have had to be in order to duplicate the real Howard. The missed opportunity is as painful as a kidney stone the size of a duck egg.

But one good thing came of it all. The film's box office failure was so severe it forced Lucas to sell the Lucasfilm animation department in order to keep the rest of the empire afloat. He sold it to Steve Jobs and it became Pixar.

Howard the Duck was such a massive flop it must be seen to be believed, so take a look next time it shows up on cable—but for the sake of your soul, don't buy it. People have gone to hell for a lot less. Poor Howard deserved better than this. You will believe a male duck can lay an egg.

Dark and Stormy Night (2009)

2011-04-28T11:10:00.001-07:00

Charles Ludlam, late founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, once wrote a play the dialogue of which consisted of the punch lines of old jokes. No, I don't remember the title. Jeez, do I have to do everything around here?

Larry Blamire, creator of one of this century's great cult classic films, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, pulls off something just as challenging and funny with Dark and Stormy Night, in which everything is a dark-old-house spook-movie cliché: plot, characters, props, setting — everything. The dialogue is a thing of beauty, comprised almost entirely of stream-of-unconsciousness non sequiturs. One character asks the butler to provide sherry for the guests, and "Bring me an iced tea sandwich."

The relatives — and assorted strangers, servants and one guy in a gorilla suit — have gathered for the reading of the will, then they start dropping like lead bon mots. Blamire's usual gang of thesps, with a quartet of guest actors who have been in movies you've actually heard of, deliver their senseless lines as if any of this had any meaning beyond tickling your nostalgia for Hollywood Poverty Row thrillers until it hollers, "Uncle!"

Blamire's talent for absurdist burlesque is immense and I'd like to see it rewarded with mainstream recognition, but if that meant he'd have to stop making these low-budget masterpieces, well, screw that. A wider multiplex audience could never love him like we do.

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

2011-04-24T08:34:00.001-07:00

Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, working from his own story, combines the names of the Virgin Mary and Eva Braun (Frau Hitler) to create a character that one critic said represented the postwar Germany of the "economic miracle"—dragging itself up from the hideous and shameful disaster of war to an attractive creature wearing jewels and expensive clothes, but totally without a soul.

Maria (Hanna Schygulla) marries her German soldier Hermann Braun (Klaus Lowitsch) as the world turns to a blasted outhouse around them. The Justice of the Peace tries to escape the bombing but the almost-married couple runs after him through the street, tackling him as explosions go off all around them, and force him to sign the legal document. The next thing we know, it's the following day and Hermann has been sent to the Russian front. Maria will say later that she is fully married—after the ceremony she and Hermann had a half day and a full night before he was shipped out.

After the war, her best friend Betti's (Elisabeth Trissenaar) husband Willi (Gottfried John) returns with the news that Hermann was killed. Maria chooses to disbelieve this story and determines to prepare for the day of her husband's return by accumulating as much money as possible. To this end she buys the best dress she can and becomes hostess at a bar catering to American occupation troops. Having learned to survive the war, Maria now has to learn how to survive the peace. She takes up with Bill (George Byrd), a black soldier and becomes pregnant by him. This affair ends suddenly in a character defining moment when Hermann proves her right by showing up again.

Even with proof of Hermann's survival, Maria follows in the footsteps of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and continues to do what she needs to do in order to improve her situation and keep the money coming in. Brecht preached the gospel of survival at any cost—grub first, he wrote, and then morals—but even after she is able to support herself well, Maria seduces and then goes to work for half German, half French factory owner Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny) and becomes a partner with Oswald and his accountant Senkenberg (Hark Bohm).

Maria will be accused of cynicism, but in the world of German reconstruction cynicism is reality. "It's not a good time for feelings," she says. "And that suits me." Over lunch in a fine restaurant, Oswald fears she's grown bored and will soon leave him. She denies any possibility of unpleasantness. "You were brought up well," she says, "and I pretend that I was."

The film combines the rags-to-riches plot of American films like Baby Face with an eye for historical detail and the upscale melodramatics of Douglas Sirk, a German director who immigrated to Hollywood and made a series of silky women's pictures for Universal in the 1950s. That's not a criticism. Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life and All That Heaven Allows are as good as most other genre films of their time, and much better than most.

What Fassbinder and leading lady Schygulla add is a pinch of Dietrich from The Blue Angel. Maria only displays emotion when she wants to, whether she's actually feeling it or not. At one point late in the film, she shows up in her underwear, and it's an almost perfect dominatrix outfit. A touch of masochism has been noted in many of Fassbinder's men.

The Marriage of Maria Braun is the first movie in what is seen as a loose trilogy of pictures dealing with strong women finding out what it takes to live through Germany's 20^th Century, one hundred years of national horror, humiliation and hubris. It's a key film in the movement known as "New German Cinema."

Casino Royale (1966)

2011-04-20T07:53:00.001-07:00

I have no cinematic guilty pleasures, so when I enjoy a movie like the absurd James Bond burlesque Casino Royale, I don't feel guilty about it. I feel stupid, sure, but not guilty.

Cooked up by six directors (Ken Hughes, John Huston, Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, Richard Talmadge, led by Val Guest), and with three credited and seven uncredited writers — including such heavyweights as Ben Hecht, Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Terry Southern and Billy Wilder — there's no way this could be anything but a train wreck, and that's what it is. But who ever said train wrecks weren't fun to watch? It's like that old Dennis the Menace cartoon in which the kid mixes root beer, ketchup, peanut butter, and assorted other gastronomic favorites into one concoction on the theory that if each one of them tastes good alone, blended together they must be super yummy. Sure.

Based on Ian Fleming's first 007 novel — yeah, like The Origin of Species is based on the Book of Genesis — the comedic premise is that Sir James Bond is called out of retirement to best SMERSH's financier, Le Chiffre (Orson Welles), at cards. Why? What, you're expecting a plot? Okay, if you insist: Le Chiffre has been gambling with SMERSH's money and British Intelligence wants to break him. Happy, now?

To confuse the enemy — not to mention the audience — just about everyone on the side of the good guys is called "James Bond," so David Niven, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen, among others, are all JBs. Sir James (Niven) also enlists the aid of his love-child daughter, Mata Bond (Joanna Pettet), and sexy spy Vesper Lynd (Ursula Andress).

Hating each other, Welles and Sellers refused to be on set at the same time, so their scenes had to be shot separately and then welded together. It must have been pure hell. The enmity, at its core, seems to have been the result of Princess Margaret (the Queen's sister) visiting the set one day and fawning over Welles while ignoring Sellers, who would hold up filming by disappearing for days at a time and was finally fired before filming completed. He was replaced by a cardboard cutout.

If only the whole movie could have been welded together. It's truly a near-incomprehensible catastrophe, but it's saved by being so stupefyingly mid-1960s. Watch for a cartload of cameo appearances, including ones from Peter O'Toole and William Holden, and the score by Burt Bacharach fits the idiocy perfectly, especially in the Berlin section.

It's the Berlin sequence, directed b y Ken Hughes (who would soon do penance by directing the film of Ian Fleming's Chitty Chitty Bang Bang two years later), that holds together best. In Berlin, Sir James visits the Mata Hari Dance and Spy School to see his daughter. The set design in the school is a pitch perfect parody of German Expressionism, as are costumes, makeup and (over) acting styles. Bacharach's bouncy Berlin theme sounds as if it would be right at home in a production of The Three Penny Opera. Such spot-on satire seems out of place in the middle of all this silliness, but it is a welcome moment of genuine comic filmmaking.

Maybe you had to be there in the mid-1960s to dig this psychedelic zaniness (one reviewer at the time called the film "an electronic vaudeville show") and if you were, you'll probably have fun going back for a couple of hours.

Brass Monkey (1948)

2011-04-17T09:13:00.001-07:00

This is a Brit version of a type of movie that enjoyed a brief vogue in America—the filmed radio comedy show. Fibber McGee and Molly, Edgar Bergen, Fred Allen, The Great Gildersleeve and Jack Benny all made movies like this, pictures that brought their radio personalities and supporting casts to the screen. They are almost universally disappointments to their radio fans, B movies with little of the charm that made the radio programs so much fun.

Brass Monkey stars "Britain's favorite Canadian," Carroll Levis. Levis moved to England in 1935 and ended up putting together and hosting talent shows for the BBC—"American Idol" in London for people who played Stephen Foster songs on the saw or "Flight of the Bumblebee" on the accordion. (In 1957, Peter Sellers played Wee Sonny MacGregor, host of a radio talent show in the wonderful farce The Naked Truth, aka Your Past is Showing. I wonder if the satire contained a poke or two at Levis.) Anyway, in this movie Levis, playing himself, and not too convincingly, is the stereotypical Canadian—colorless, boring, doughy, and totally lacking in anything that could even mistakenly be called charisma.

He's returning from a trip to the Far East when an old friend of his, Kay Sheldon (Carole Landis) gives him a brass monkey as a good luck charm. What we know and they don't is that the monkey is one of three from an ancient Buddhist temple in Japan that is worth a fortune. Kay got it from her crook fiancé Max (Edward Underdown). It's destination in London is a rare objects d'art shop from which it will be sold to a collector (Ernest Thesiger). It's all a farcical conglomeration of plot elements from The Moonstone, The Maltese Falcon, and probably half the Sexton Blake thrillers ever written.

The story is nonsense. If the movie has any interest for modern viewers it comes from the supporting cast. Herbert Lom is his usual dark and sinister gangster self, but without the comic edge he would display so well in The Ladykillers. Terry Thomas (without the identifying hyphen) plays himself, dropping in a couple of times to perform some unbelievably unfunny music hall turns. Levis-program regular Avril Angers is the funniest person in the movie playing her radio persona, a Dumb Dora whose dialogue is mostly malapropisms and non sequiturs.

This was American B movie actress Carole Landis' last film before her suicide at age 29. Landis was an attractive blond and the American performer who clocked more time entertaining the troops during the war than anyone else. She became depressed that her movies never seemed to rise above the B level or attract much critical respect. "You fight just so long and then you begin to worry about being washed up," she said. "You fear there's one way to go and that's down.
I have no intention of ending my career in a rooming house, with full scrapbooks and an empty stomach."

Directed by the American Thornton Freeland (whose only major credit is the Astaire/Rogers musical Flying Down to Rio from 1933), Brass Monkey is second rate in just about every category. When it isn't second rate, it's third. For the curious only.

Bugs Bunny Superstar (1975)

2011-04-16T08:46:00.000-07:00

It's possible to be a movie lover and not like Greta Garbo or John Wayne or W.C. Fields, and still retain some credibility — but turn your nose up at Bugs Bunny and hell hath no depth too deep for you, you humorless poseur.

Too harsh? Not harsh enough, doc.

Director Larry Jackson celebrated all things wascally with the documentary Bugs Bunny Superstar. It contains live-action footage of the cartoonists and their staffs acting out stories before the animation began — Tex Avery was a hoot — but it's mostly long on cartoons (a good thing) by including nine full-length examples from the 1940s, only six of which star Bugs. It's short on documentary factoids about the history of the character and the gang who created and developed him in a creaky building called Termite Terrace on the Warner Bros. lot.

This anecdotal back story material is presented to us primarily by Bob Clampett, one of Bugs' papas. The picture's worth watching for Clampett's hideous hairpiece alone. It looks like something Elmer Fudd might have shot on one of his hunting expeditions when his rifle misfired. He explains that a major reason the cartoonists caricatured the Warner Bros. stars they did was that those were the guys who stopped by Termite Terrace pretty regularly to see what was going on and to shoot the breeze with the animators and their staffs. James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were favorite visitors.

Included also are snippets from vintage interviews with Friz Freling and Tex Avery. From Avery we learn where the question "What's up, doc?" came from—he was quoting someone he knew, just as a relative of his used to grumble, "Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin," which found its way into Daffy Duck's vocabulary.

It's these reminiscences, especially from Clampett, that generated some hurt feelings when this film was released. While Clampett had complimentary things to say about Chuck Jones, Jones — who could nurse a grudge like Silas Marner could nurse a nickel — accused Clampett of being a credit hog. The thing is, when this picture was made, almost everyone from the days of classic animation was looking for credit for the work he'd done for hire in the 1930s-1950s, so a lot of exaggeration was going around.

But you can ignore this backstory and enjoy the film for the comedy it contains. Especially fun are the undeniable classics The Wild Hare (1940), A Corny Concerto (1943), My Favorite Duck (1942) and Hair-Raising Hare (1946). The movie is narrated by an obviously-in-on-the-joke Orson Welles.

My favorite from this collection is the Clampett directed A Corny Concerto. It's one of those 'toons that is all jolly good fun on the surface, covering at heart a wicked satire of Disney's 1940 Fantasia—just the sort of thing you'd expect from a Frank Tashlin script. It is divided into two parts, each part introduced with a brief appearance from Elmer Fudd playing a combination of Igor Stokowski and Deems Taylor. Wearing an ill-fitting tux and sporting a five-o'clock shadow that looks more like 9:30, he leads us through the music with observations like, "Wasn't that wovewy?" just before his flapping celluloid dickey snaps up and smacks him in the face.

The first story concerns Porky Pig and a dog hunting Bugs Bunny to "Tales From the Vienna Woods," and the second is a variation of "The Ugly Duckling" to "The Blue Danube." It's the duckling segment that contains the most blatant moment of Disney satire. When one of the characters whooshes past a pair of weeping willows, their branches whirl around frantically before the anthropomorphic trees end up hugging each other, an image that could have been lifted right out of a Silly Symphony.

For some reason, this isn't one of Clampett's favorites from among his own cartoons. Granted, it isn't as funny as his toupee, but it comes pretty damn close.

He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

2011-04-12T13:50:00.001-07:00

April 1, 1883, is the birthday of Lon Chaney, whose stardom in movies puzzles many film lovers. How, they wonder, could a man with average looks, who never won the gal in the last reel, and who specialized in characters who were physically and psychologically repugnant have remained a box office giant for a decade? He was only 47 when he died on August 26, 1930, still at the peak of his powers and popularity. He made only one sound film, The Unholy Three (1930), and that was a remake of one of his silent successes. His two most famous pictures—The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925)—are more "known of" than watched.

But his fans, even today, are legion, and I count myself among them. To celebrate his career let's spend a few days looking at three of his lesser-known movies. We'll start with a picture that answers a trivia question: what was the first movie that used Leo the MGM lion as part of the studio logo?

In He Who Gets Slapped, Chaney worked with the great Swedish director Victor Sjostrom (Victor Seastrom in America). The film is based on the symbolist drama by Leonid Andreyev.

Chaney plays Paul Beaumont, a research scientist who has spent years working on an outré theory as to the origins of life on Earth. He and his wife Maria (Ruth King) are supported by the patronage of Baron Regnard (Marc McDermott, who made 195 films between 1909 and his death in 1928). But what Paul doesn't know about the Baron is that he is having an affair with Maria, and when it is time to present Beaumont's theories to the Academy of Science, the Baron claims them as his own, dismissing Paul as a starving student who was hired as a research assistant.

When Beaumont objects, the Baron slaps him and the members of the Academy laugh at his humiliation. Beaumont's grip on sanity has never been too secure, and when Marie spurns him with the words "Fool! Clown!" his fingers finally slip away and the abject figure makes the connection between getting slapped and generating laughter.

Seastrom concludes this episode by cutting to a laughing clown who watches a spinning globe, an image he will repeat to separate the film's sequences.

"With a supreme gesture of contempt," the intertitles tell us, Paul becomes a circus clown. Several years go by and the scientist, now known as HE, the clown, has become an international success. His act? Pontificating about the nature of the world to an academy of clowns and being knocked to the ground for his profundity. His clown/friend is Tricaud (Ford Sterling, best remembered now as the perpetually harried chief of the Keystone Kops), who reminds him that "There's nothing makes people laugh so hard as seeing someone else get slapped."

A down-at-the-heels Count Mancini (that brilliant character actor and eventual veteran of 197 movies, Tully Marshall), who is as much scam artist and blackmailer as he is minor nobility, enlists his lovely daughter Consuelo (Norma Shearer, whose 25^th film and fourth pairing with John Gilbert this was) as an equestrian. She and her co-performer Bezano (a pre-Garbo John Gilbert) soon fall in love.

There is a visible ease to Gilbert's and Shearer's work together. Shearer was 22 but seemed younger; Gilbert was 27 but seemed older. Chaney was 41 but seemed older still. HE is also is love with Consuelo but the difference in their ages prevents anyone from seeing the depth of his affection for her. The theme of a psychologically or physically scarred older man in the thralls of unrequited love for a younger woman repeats itself in Chaney's films—Quasimodo and Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Erik and Christine in The Phantom of the Opera, Sgt. O'Hara and Nurse Dale in Tell It to the Marines, Alonzo and Nanon in The Unknown, Tito and Simonetta in Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Chaney's woeful characters in these films pined for actresses as young as the 22-year old Joan Crawford, and Loretta Young, who was 15.

Just as we think that the pain of love will be HE's alone, the Baron returns to the story. Of course, he finds Consuelo fascinating and, dumping Marie with a large check and no kind words, the Baron strikes a bargain with Count Mancini for Consuelo's hand. Bezano is furious, but seemingly helpless when faced with such a powerful class distinction. HE, unrecognizable in his clown makeup, torments the Baron. "I hate clowns," the villain snarls. "I hate Barons!" HE snaps back.

Alone with her, HE confesses his passion for Consuelo, who is stunned and a little repulsed by this news. But HE is so serious, the young woman assumes he must be joking. She gives him a playful slap and laughs at him. Knowing that life holds little for him, HE devices a plan to rid the young lovers of the Baron and the Count, and Chaney's character, as they did so often, sacrifices himself for the normalcy of romance.

One of the legends that has grown up around Chaney's body-twisting performances is that the actor tortured himself to get just the right look. Certainly the legless Blizzard in The Penalty required some painful contortions, but stories about the weight of Quasimodo's hump and the hooks that were used to flare Erik the Phantom's nostrils are exaggerated or false. Perhaps these yarns were originated by studio publicity men, but I suspect they have been so readily believed because of the connection made by audiences between their entertainment and the masochism endured by Chaney's characters. He Who Gets Slapped is a clear statement that someone else's pain can be our pleasure, and that we are fascinated by the misfortune of others. To a large degree, isn't that the appeal of many movies?

Yojimbo (1961)

2011-04-08T11:03:00.001-07:00

There is a sort of perverse existentialism at play in Yojimbo. A lone ronin (masterless samurai) walks into a small town. The buildings are just barely hanging together and the streets are dusty. If the place reminds viewers of the hardscrabble hamlets of the Old West, that's because American westerns, especially those of John Ford, were a powerful influence on director Akira Kurosawa's approach and visuals. The samurai, who, after looking out a window at a field of mulberries, will tell someone his name is Kuwabatake Sanjuro ("Mulberry Field thirty-year-old"), learns that the town is ruled by two criminal families. They are equally matched in strength and fighting ability—not to mention brutality, arrogance and stupidity—so their constant skirmishing prevents any kind of real progress, but keeps the coffin maker busy.

It's not hard to tell what kind of a place this is. One of the first things Sanjuro and we see is a dog running down the street with a human hand in is mouth.

Sanjuro realizes that he can rent himself out as a bodyguard (yojimbo), first to one family and then to the other, playing both sides against the middle until the two families wipe each other out. At first glance we may think he is doing this to free the town of its merciless bosses, but it quickly becomes apparent that his real goal is his own amusement. There is a tall guard tower in the center of town, with a warning bell at the top, and Sanjuro likes to climb to the top so his view of the stabbings and fist fights will be unimpeded. Like any good existentialist, he knows that any meaning he can find in life is merely in the living—but the only meaning that means anything to him is the macabre pleasure of siccing two rabid dogs on each other. As Popeye's pal J. Wellington Wimpy used to say, "Let's you and him fight."

He does perform on good, altruistic deed. A farmer and his wife have been separated by one of the clans and the wife turned into a pleasure girl for one of the sparing punks. The farmer and his son (maybe four or five years old) can only watch this happen for fear of death. Despite an apparent lack of affection or respect for this couple, and an equal disgust at the blubbering of the traumatized child, Sanjuro kills six men who have been guarding the woman, thereby allowing her to reunite and skip town with her family. When the villains discover what they consider to be his treachery, he is beaten almost to death.

When Sanjuro causes trouble resulting in people killing each other—and most of these minions seem far more stupid than evil—all goes well with him and he enjoys himself immensely. When he does a good deed, he gets the crap beaten out of him. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

Toshiro Mifune is Sanjuro, and he delivers the most natural performance in the film. Everyone else exists in the realm of caricature, but that may be due to conventions of Japanese comedy—it could even be a sly parody of John Ford's penchant for broad comic interludes in his westerns.

Yojimbo is Kurosawa's most popular movie in Japan. He and Mifune followed it up with a sequel, Sanjuro, which is even more a recognizable comedy. And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Yojimbo was unofficially remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars. Leone's film looks like a blatant steal, but Kurosawa admitted that he had taken the plot from Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op detective novel Red Harvest. There is nothing new under the sun, whether it's a Son of Italy or the Rising Sun.

Obsessione (1943)

2011-04-08T10:27:00.001-07:00

Being a long time fan of James M. Cain, I don't know why it has taken me so long to watch Luchino Visconti's adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Obsessione. Made in 1943, it beat Hollywood to the punch, the John Garfield/Lana Turner version of the novel not coming out until 1946.

Here's the plot: Giovanna lives in a shabby restaurant with her husband, the gruff and not terribly bright Bragana (Juan de Landa). One day a hobo named Gino stops in and cons Giovanna out of a meal. When Bragana catches him, the bum offers to perform some repairs around the place. He stays and he and the wife fall for each other, hard. He asks her to run off with him; she refuses; he leaves without her. They meet again in the city, decide they can't live without each other, and plan to murder Bragana. Nothing good comes from their crime.

Neither this nor the American movie packs the wallop the novel does, but the American film comes a little closer. Visconti's seediness is seedier than Tay Garnett's seediness and the garage/hash house in which the lovers meet is certainly hot and dusty, but leads Massimo Girotti and Clara Calamai, as Gino and Giovanna (Frank and Cora in the book) are not convincing as a pair so desperately in lust they are willing to do whatever it takes to stay together. Cain called it "the love knot" and it was the plot device that drags his protagonists to hell in this story and its literary doppelganger Double Indemnity, both of which were based in part on the Judd Gray/Ruth Snyder murder of Snyder's husband in 1927, a stupid crime so ineptly carried out, Damon Runyon dubbed it "the dumb-bell murder case."

Whether or not you believe in the kind of blind, ravenous passion that rips its victim's guts out is entirely up to you, but I didn't see it in Girotti and Calamai. Calamai is certainly an attractive woman and was a big star in Italian cinema of the time, but we see nothing in the way Gino reacts to Giovanna that is a convincing motive for murder.

I suspect part of the problem may be that Visconti wasn't particularly interested in the sordid crime part of the story. While Gino is separated from Giovanna he meets lo Spagnolo (the Spaniard), a street vender who preaches Marxism—but subtly enough to get around Fascist censors—and appears to have more than a fraternal interest in Gino. I sense that Visconti, a homosexual Communist, would rather have spent more time with Spagnolo (Elio Marcuzzo), a character who has no equivalent in Cain's novel.

The real attraction of the film is its look and feel. It is one of the earliest examples of neo-realism, the style Visconti pioneered and championed before moving on to the romantic luxury of films like Senso and The Leopard.

Violette Noziere (1978)

2011-04-05T12:35:00.001-07:00

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about Violette Noziere (Isabelle Huppert) as a character in Claude Chabrol's film is that she is so ordinary. As you can see from her photo, the real Vilolette was no beauty; as you can tell from her story, she was no evil genius. She was just a plain girl in her mid-teens who lived a somewhat awkward life with her lower-middle class parents in Paris in the early 1930s, who slipped out and pretended to be older so she could carry on with older men. She met a slick, useless young man with whom she fell completely in love and to whom she gave money and emotional support. When he threatened to leave her, she poisoned her parents, killing her father and nearly killing her mother.

Her story is the kind of sordid affair that frequently inspired fiction by James M. Cain, whose protagonists also found themselves tied up with emotional Gordian Knots. But Cain's hapless lovers/killers were snakes, beguiling us with the intensity of their stares as they looked in each other's eyes—Violette is a lizard, a colorless Gila monster crawling along from moment to moment. She fascinates us not because we wonder how she can escape her fate or what will happen when her passion finally bursts forth, but because we know that she is neither imaginative nor smart enough to avoid slouching toward the guillotine.

The film moves along with the same relentlessness. The crime is not presented in the larger than life manner of a Bonnie and Clyde shootout, but just as another episode in another day in another life of silent desperation. Mother Germaine (Stephane Audran) seems to be always on the verge of admitting to herself that something is wrong in the way her husband, Violette's father Baptiste (Jean Carmet), relates to the girl. (We see Violette and Baptiste chatting casually as she is topless and he has a hard time controlling his eyes.) Violette visits her doctor, who tells her she has syphilis. When her parents find out about it, she convinces them that the only way she could have contracted the disease was by inheriting it at birth from them. They swallow her story and what she tells them is medicine. It's the poison.

We also spy on Violette with some friends of near her own age. They claim to be students but they do have plenty of time to hang out at cafes—the mall?—sipping drinks and conversing about nothing in particular. This is how she meets Jean Dabin (Jean-Francois Garreaud), the counterfeit millionaire who soon reveals his need for money and his entire lack of interest in earning it. Violette supplies it by stealing from her parents and blackmailing older men of her acquaintance.

It's remarkable that Chabrol is able to bleach all the sensation from what was one of the most sensational crimes of the Parisienne1930s and still keep us fascinated. Written by Odile Barski, Herve Bromberger, and Frederic Grendel, based on the book by Jean-Marie Fitere, the film is not the overheated crime, but the clinical autopsy. Director of photography Jean Rabier and production designer Jacques Brizzio remind us that things and places are not colorful and exciting merely by virtue of being historical.

There's a creeping ennui to Violette, a lethargic dullness which allows us to see life through the girl's eyes. Before she meets Dabin she feels trapped in her parents' bog of an existence and nothing really seems to matter to her. After she falls in love—if that is really what it is and not just a desire for love that is so strong because everything else is so weak—she has to follow the path of least resistance because that is the only way she knows how to go.

It's a fine and observant film, and an exhausting one.

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)

2011-04-05T06:58:00.001-07:00

I suspect that the very first joke about marriage went like this: Two cavemen met one day and the first one said, "Who was that giant ground sloth I saw you with last night?" and the second one answered "That was no giant ground sloth; that was my wife."

Well, it used to slay the boys at Lascaux.

The movies have provided a means of relating the marriage joke from the earliest days of fictional one-reelers. The image of wife-dom usually suffered most through these quick anecdotes, which is only to be expected since men were telling the stories. The onscreen husbands, played by almost every silent and pre-code talking comedian at one time or another, were just regular guys looking for a little extra-curricular fun. Their wives were the spoil sports, taking the idea of being a civilizing influence way too seriously.

The screen's first comedy team specialized in these mini-situation comedies. John Bunny and Flora Finch made something like 100 shorts for Vitagraph between 1910 and Bunny's death in 1915. Only a handful of these pictures survive. They weren't all domestic comedies but that genre dominated their output with titles like And His Wife Came Back, Mr. Bunnyhug Buys a Hat for His Wife, Thou Shalt Not Covet, and Which Way Did He Go? (in which Bunny's character is named "Mr. Henpecko")..

Bunny, a native New Yorker, was short and heavy while London-born Finch was tall and thin. After Bunny's death, Finch stayed in movies—her last role being an uncredited bit in The Women (MGM, 1939) before her passing in 1940—but she never again achieved anything like the popularity she'd garnered as Bunny's screen wife. Her post-Bunny comic chops are on display as Aunt Susan in Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary (Universal, 1927)..

Bunny and Finch mark a good place to start looking at the marriage joke in early films because in at least one way they lived the joke themselves: they weren't really man and wife, but they hated each other anyway..

In the best known of their few surviving one-reelers, A Cure For Pokeritis (1912), they are George and Mary Brown. George enjoys a weekly night out with the boys for a poker session. Their meeting place is the clichéd masculine den of impropriety: guys are sitting at tables shuffling and dealing, their shirt sleeves rolled up and ties loosened. Many wear eye shades; cigars and cigarettes are plentiful. All the place lacks are a pool table and a sinister coachman to be Pinocchio's Pleasure Island..

George consistently loses at cards. This night, he even has to borrow trolley fare home. He staggers in late, disheveled and looking like he's on the far side of a two-week drunk. Mary is sitting up waiting for him, growing angrier each minute she's forced to wait. He arrives and swears contrition. He'll never play poker again..

A week later, one of his friends comes up with a plot. George will pretend to join a lodge called "Sons of the Morning" that meets every Wednesday night. Mary believes him—not the first mistake she's made in this marriage, including answering "I do." The scheme would work well if George didn't talk in his sleep. We are to assume that a) he's never done this before, b) Mary has never noticed it before, or c) we're not to think about it..

At this point, the second familiar element of the marriage joke becomes apparent: the wife's relative. Be they lazy, inept, greedy, vice-ridden, unemployable, smarmy, or just plain stupid, wifey's relations are the stuff of domestic misery. In this case, the bane is Cousin Freddie, a dandified wuss who flutters his hands and rolls his eyes as Mary fills him in on George's skullduggery. To make all husbands in the audience like this guy even less, he enlists the aid of his Bible class in spying on George. How much less of a real man can you be than a Bible study participant?.

The dénouement arrives after heaping helpings of deceit, disguise and distrust. Apparently George has learned the lesson Mary set out for him. All will end well with George and Mary embracing. What hubby doesn't know is that Mary is responsible for breaking up his poker gang by uncovering his deception and then going him one better. Each of them is a trickster and neither really has any reason to believe the other. The loving clinch at the end is merely convention. We all know that if George can come up with another trick, he'll use it to reorganize his poker night..

We're also left to ponder this question: why does Mary go to such lengths to break up George's fun? Yes, he loses every week but we see nothing that indicates his poker losses are doing anything to undermine the Browns' financial stability. He's not stealing to cover his debts. He's not contemplating taking any winnings to run off with the office steno girl. The missus seems to want to put a halt to his night out just because it is his night out. Maybe she wants to make the emasculation complete by having him take up studying the good book, like Cousin Freddie..

Just as with a stand-up joke, there is no back story to this little movie. Mary does what she does because it is in the nature of wives to prevent their husbands from having any fun that doesn't include them—which from the male point of view is no fun at all.

Sweeney Todd (1936)

2011-04-03T17:45:00.001-07:00

The world-sweeping rage of Sweeneymania that Warner Bros. hoped for with the 2007 release of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street didn't occur. The film's mix of black humor, unhumable melodies and blood-drenched melodrama didn't attract either the audience for musicals or the fans of gore. Perhaps the DVD availability of a solid 2006 BBC production starring Ray Winstone was another trip wire on the stairway to paradise.

But there was an earlier movie version of the story, much different in detail than the Tim Burton film. Its star was Tod Slaughter, Britain's answer to Karloff, Lugosi and Hollywood's other actors of the macabre in the 1930s. The puzzlement of Tod Slaughter's films, as even his most enthusiastic fans have to admit, is this: are his peculiar performances enough to let us recommend his movies when "by any objective standard they are cheaply-produced rubbish." (britishpictures.com).

If you want to try one, Sweeney Todd should be it. The long journey of Sweeney Todd from blood and thunder stage melodrama to Broadway musical began in an urban legend. One of Sweeney's stops along the way was a "quota quickie," a movie made in England on the cheap with at least 75% of the paid cast and crew being English. These came about because of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which was enacted to help the British film industry compete with American movies at home.

Slaughter was born in 1885 so by the time he made Sweeney Todd in 1936, just his third picture, he was already in his 50s. He'd spent his early years on the provincial stage, touring England in the kind of be-whiskered melodramas much beloved by the Victorians and kept alive by shamelessly barnstorming theater companies. George King, a producer and later director of quota quickies, discovered Slaughter and decided that he would be as successful in films as he was on stage if he performed in the same kind of story, and so cast his new aging star in Murder in the Red Barn. It clicked with less demanding audiences and Slaughter began his cinematic reign of terror.

In Sweeney Todd, Slaughter plays the title roll of a demented barber in Victorian London who uses a tricked-out barber's chair to "polish off" his wealthier customers. A gentleman sits in the chair, Todd pulls a lever, and the chair and platform on which it rests swivel backward dropping the victim through a hole in the floor and into the cellar. If the fall doesn't kill him, Todd soon will.

The barber shop shares its cellar with the shop next to it, Mrs. Lovatt's bakery of meat pies. The movie never explicitly points out that Mrs. Lovatt (a deliciously pinched-face Stella Rho) cuts up the bodies of Todd's customers and bakes them into her pies, but several hints are dropped along with the corpses. In one scene, a supporting character is eating one of the pies as he ponders on why the corpses of the murdered men are never seen again. Either cannibalism was a taboo that could never have gotten past the censor or it was assumed that the British public already knew what the Todd/Lovatt connection was.

As the film opens, a solid British sailor named Mark Ingerstreet (Bruce Seton) is being greeted on his return from the sea by Johanna, his one true love (Eve Lister). Unfortunately, Mark sails for Johanna's father, one of those Victorian paters who would never consider a mere employee to be an acceptable suitor for his daughter's hand (D.J. Williams). Yes, dammee, it's too bad. We see Todd standing in the shadows, watching for a likely customer he can murder and rob. "I love my work," he cackles, slapping his hands together and wringing them. "Money!" he hisses with all the subtlety of an ocean liner hitting an iceberg when he sees a wealthy nabob come ashore.

Todd invites the man into his shop for a close shave and before dropping him through the hole in the floor, he sends his young apprentice Tobias (Johnny Singer) next door for a pie. As fate, and melodrama, would have it, Todd knows Johanna's father and wants to invest in his next voyage. Of course, he also has his beady eyes on Johanna and determines to win her either through wooing or through skullduggery, preferably the latter. (I am reminded of the fella in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man who asks Larson E. Whipsnade (W.C. Fields) if he wants to earn an honest dollar. "Does it have to be honest?" Whipsnade replies.)

Weeks pass and Mark sets out on the very voyage in which Todd has invested. The film now offers a diversionary segment in which the captain of the ship is killed by rampaging natives and Mark assumes command. When he returns to London he has with him a sack of pearls (hence the story's title, The String of Pearls, in its original penny dreadful incarnation in 1846).

Todd sees him disembark, lures him to the shop and attempts to kill him. This time, the fall doesn't "polish him off" and, after Mrs. Lovatt spies Todd stealing the pearls so he won't have to divvy up with her, she helps Mark to escape. Mark then decides to disguise himself as an old country farmer and goes back to Sweeney's shop. He's dropped into the cellar again and with the assistance of another sailor he figures out exactly how Todd performs his evil deeds.

Now we get to the wild-as-a-March-hare conclusion. Johanna discovers what Mark is up to so she disguises herself as a young boy and goes to Todd's in case she needs to rescue Mark. Todd figures out who she is, knocks her out, and locks her in the closet. He has already killed Mrs. Lovatt, offstage, and in order to cover up his crimes, he sets fire to the shop. Back rushes Mark and smashes his way into the building to look for Johanna. As he pulls her from the closet, Todd returns to kill him. Todd ends up in the blazing cellar, Johanna ends up in Mark's arms, and the ill-gotten gains end up spilled in an alley.

It's been said that if the Victorians could have made movies, the product would have looked like Tod Slaughter's pictures. Obviously, there isn't much in the plot to attract anyone born after 1902 and the production values (except for the costumes) are laughably low. The acting from the supporting players is actually a notch above what you find in poverty row American films of the era—but then there's Slaughter.

He's so hammy his performances should have been condemned in Leviticus. His smile is so wide you know his characters have to be faking their bonhomie, and the smile is never reflected in his eyes, which are unmoving and dead. He does a great deal of acting with his hands, double gesturing, wringing, and rubbing palms together. He often speaks in a throaty, raspy whisper that makes him sound like the host of a radio horror series. He doesn't seem to have figured out that you don't have to play everything so broadly in front of a camera.

But there's no denying that Slaughter is a one-man time machine. Watching him transports you to another era. In fact, you may find yourself hissing the television. I suppose, though, that the real pleasure comes from watching a performer who seems to genuinely love what he's doing. I know a critic shouldn't try to slide by with saying, "I can't explain it any better than that," but hell, I can't explain it any better than that.

Let me go out quoting britishpictures.com once again. "A new generation of fans have stumbled onto his work [seeing it on late night British TV] and asked the question 'What the bloody hell was that!'"

What indeed. So is this version of Sweeney Todd's gruesome journey a good movie? Oh, hell no. As a work of cinema, it's abysmal. Okay, do I recommend it? I just can't. I want to, but I can't. But if you've read this far, you know I recommend Tod Slaughter. Forget what I say and read what I mean. Seek him out.

Bubba Ho-tep (2002)

2011-04-01T07:39:00.001-07:00

"Come and get it, you undead sack of shit."

If your taste runs to oddball concepts but away from horror movies, go with this one anyway. There isn't that much in it of a horrific nature—there's a re-animated mummy who sucks the souls out of aging convalescent home patients through their assholes (yes, another one of those movies), but the soul-sucking takes place off screen. Bruce Campbell stars as an old Elvis Presley, probably, although he could be an Elvis impersonator named Sebastian Haff, and Ossie Davis co-stars as Jack, who thinks he's John F. Kennedy dyed black and hidden away in an East Texas nursing home by Lyndon Johnson. When the home both men live in becomes besieged by the mummy, these guys know they have to protect the defenseless.

Written for the screen and directed by Don Coscarelli, and based on a short story by Joe R. Lansdale, the picture is as peculiar as it sounds, but it isn't a horror satire a la The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It's mostly humorous, but it's also a study of aging, missed opportunities, and the shabbiness of pop culture celebrity.

Both leads are terrific and they work together wonderfully. Davis was 84 when he made the film, which alone proves the movie's point about the retention of value in old age, and Campbell is so good as a grouchy King it makes you wish the guys who hand out acting awards weren't such clutch-butts.

Re-Animator (1985)

2011-03-24T13:34:00.001-07:00

"Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow."

I don't know what was in the water in 1985, but I could sure use a glass of it now. Come on, August 16 brought us RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, and two months later RE-ANIMATOR came along. Laugh? Brother, you'll just die.

Herbert West is a third-year student at the Miskatonic University Med School. His specialty is death—or more correctly, the reversal of same. His roommate Dan Cain agrees to help him with his experiments but things get out of hand and pretty soon the rest of the cast is killed and brought back to life, and killed again, and so on.

Jeffrey Combs became a horror icon as West, Bruce Abbot is a wonderfully frazzled Dan, Barbara Crampton enters the Scream Queen Hall of fame as Dan's girlfriend (the Dean's daughter), and David Gale becomes the maddest scientist of all time.

Written by Dennis Paoli, William Norris and director Stuart Gordon, the film has everything from a dis-embodied head going down on a bound, naked coed to a cameo by James Cameron's father. It's a high-gore-level gumbo of sick humor and creepshow parody served up by those mad missionaries from the Church of Splatter Day Saints.

Fans of ZOMBIELAND should definitely check it out, but don't think that the relatively tame gore of the newer film will in any way prepare you for the floor-to-ceiling ick of this masterpiece. And there's the added bonus of the scrumdiddilyumptious good-sport nudity of Ms Crampton.

Five Star Final (1931)

2010-12-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

The newspaper business took a beating on stage and screen during the late 1920s and early '30s in plays and films like Ink, Man Bites Dog, Front Page Woman, Chicago (remade in 1942 as Roxie Hart), and most famously The Front Page. The height of the press' infamy was epitomized by the ghastly snapshot of murderess Ruth Snyder dying in the Sing Sing electric chair on January 12, 1928. Working for The New York Daily News, reporter Tom Howard strapped a cheap camera to his leg. Just before the juice hit Snyder, Howard bent forward, pulled his pant leg up and clicked the pic of the husband-murdering 33-year old sighing "Goodbye, cruel world." James Cagney's Danny Kean pulls the same stunt in Picture Snatcher (1933).

One of the angriest of the yellow-journalism productions was Louis Weitzenkorn's play Five Star Final. Time reviewed its opening on Broadway like this, in an unsigned piece dated January 12, 1931—interestingly, three years to the day after Ruth Snyder's execution: "Five Star Final is this season's newspaper play. But, unlike its more cynical predecessors, it is an earnest paean of hate directed against tabloid journalism. The play has undeniable vitality and provides a good deal of technical information on the inner workings of a gum-chewer sheetlet."

The play and film should be technically accurate. Author Weitzenkorn was at one time editor of the New York Evening Graphic (nicknamed by more responsible journalists the Porno Graphic). The Graphic was the most sensational of all the tabloids during its brief existence between 1924 and 1932. It went out of business because an editor tried to clean up its image and New Yorkers quit buying it. Weitzenkorn began his career as a reporter for the New York Times in 1919. He died in 1943 when he managed to set himself on fire while making a pot of coffee—a tab story if there ever was one.

Five Star Final was adapted for the screen by Robert Lord and written by Byron Morgan. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, it was nominated as Best Picture of 1931 (losing to Grand Hotel).

In the movie, the Evening Graphic has become the Evening Gazette. The picture opens as a pair of goons on the paper's staff trash news kiosk because the owner refuses to put the Gazette on the top of the newspaper stack. These guys are not aiming to help win a Pulitzer. In the Gazette offices, the paper's owner Bernard Hinchecliffe (Oscar Apfel, who appeared in 163 films from 1929 to his death in 1938) complains about Editor-in-chief Joseph W. Randall (Edward G. Robinson) printing cables from the League of Nations instead of featuring photos of girls in their underwear. "We're losing the bubble gum trade," Hinchecliffe snaps, and Randal responds by calling his publisher the "Sultan of Slop." The argument is ongoing and seemingly without end.

"There's some guys who furnish the manure and some guys that grow the flowers."

Soon a reporter-hopeful comes to Randall. She's Kitty Carmody (Ona Munson, Belle Watling in Gone With the Wind), a sexy little trick from out of town. "He knows I've had a lot of experience in Chicago," she boasts to Randall's secretary. Miss Taylor (Aline MacMahon ) glares back "Yeah, you look it."

The next time editorial meets to plot out where they want the paper to go in the days ahead, the subject of a recent love nest murder comes up, which reminds someone of the 20-year old Nancy Voorhees case, in which a cute young stenographer fell in love with her boss and ended up pregnant. When he refused to marry her, she killed him. Randall agrees to run a serial rehash of the case as a cautionary tale. If a girl gets into trouble, it's decided, the paper should interview her mother. If the mother had told daughter the facts of life, this will be a warning to daughters. If she hadn't, it's a warning to mothers. Either way, the paper has performed a good deed for society.

Randall wants to introduce every installment of the story with a few paragraphs from a clergyman, so he calls on the Rev. T. Vernon Isopod, and this is where Boris Karloff enters the picture.

Isopod is one of Karloff's most unusual characters. He now works for the paper but was once a divinity student who got kicked out the seminary for sexual misconduct similar to that of Nancy Voorhees' old boss. He wears a black suit and hides behind empty eyes. "You're the most blasphemous looking thing I've ever seen," Randall tells him. "It's a miracle you're not struck dead." He's oily and unctuous, as sincere as a cut-rate mortician, but can hardly keep his eyes off of Kitty Carmody's legs. (Later, the two of them will share a ride and Kitty tells Randall, "I rode in a taxi with him and I darn near don't have any skin on my knees." Randall asks sarcastically if the two were praying together.)

Passing himself off as a real minister, Isopod talks his way into the apartment of Nancy Voorhees, who is now Nancy Townsend (Frances Starr). When he enters the flat, his eyes dart around as if he's trying to memorize every detail. He's not sure why Nancy and her husband Michael (H.B. Warner, who played Jesus in the silent King of Kings) agreed to see him, but soon figures out that they think he's connected to the wedding of their daughter Jenny (Marian Marsh, Trilby in Svengali) to the socially elite Phillip Weeks (Anthony Bushell, Ralph Morlant in The Ghoul) the next day.

Isopod solicits information from the Townsends they would never willingly give a reporter, and even makes off with a photo of Jenny. As soon as he leaves, the parents realize what they've done. They know that if Nancy's past is publically dredged up, it will ruin Jenny's chances for marriage and happiness. No one, not even Jenny, knows Nancy's story.

When Isopod returns to the office drunk, his eyes are heavy and deader than ever. His lisp is slurred. "This murderess," he manages to get out, "is marrying her daughter to an innocent boy. I was shocked!"

Pleading on behalf of the two newly-weds-to-be is of no avail and Nancy and Michael can't face the future. Isopod, who is corrupt to his core, comes up with the idea that the Gazette can pay Jenny for permission to turn her mother's tragedy into a faked "My Story by Nancy Voorhees" 1st person narrative.

The film's final shot is of a copy of the paper, bemucked in a gutter.

Karloff is in the opening credits as the eighth lead, but his significance to the plot and general atmosphere of newspaper hypocrisy and sleaze is invaluable. His patented gauntness and Uriah Heepish servility—repeated 15 years later as Master George Sims in Bedlam—add a touch of genuine creepiness to an essentially realistic story. You come away from the film not only despising the paper for what it's done to the Townsends, but for hiring people like Isopod to make certain it gets done. This is one of, incredibly enough, 16 movies Karloff made in 1931, including a 12-part serial, a Wheeler and Woolsey farce, and that little monster flick over at Universal. And to think that some folks don't even watch 16 films in a year.

"My wife has good taste," Karloff once told the press. "She has seen very few of my movies." Hopefully, Five Star Final is one of the exceptions.

Never Take Candy From a Stranger (1960)

2010-09-30T05:30:00.000-07:00

This may be the creepiest movie you've never seen. Made by Hammer Film Productions, it isn't one of their gothic romps. Those pictures are a lot of fun and you can enjoy yourself immensely either pretending to be scared or just wallowing in their nostalgic glow, but this one is a different manner of ick entirely.

Based on a play by Roger Garis called The Pony Cart, and with a screenplay by John Hunter and direction from Cyril Frankel, Never Take Candy From a Stranger (aka Never Takes Sweets From a Stranger), the film is the story of Peter and Sally Carter, with their pre-adolescent daughter Jean (Patrick Allen, Gwen Watford, Janina Faye) who have moved to Canada so Peter can take up the post of headmaster at the local high school.

One night, Jean tells her parents that she and her friend Lucille (Frances Green) had visited the Olderberry mansion because Lucille knew there was an elderly man there who would give them candy. Clarence Olderberry, Sr. (Felix Aylmer) promised to give the girls sweets if they would remove all their clothing and dance for him. The girls do (all this is offscreen) but now Jean is worried because she knows they shouldn't have done it.

When the Carters complain to the police they are told that the Overberry family owns the town and it's best to just forget about the old man's little problem and warn Jean never to visit him again. The Carters want more, for the sake of all the town's children, and force the police to bring Overberry to trial, where the defense counsel (Niall MacGinnis) twists everything Jean says on the stand and makes her look unreliable, at best.

Overberry is acquitted, as the Carters were warned he would be, and before they can move out of town Jean and Lucille go walking in the woods, and guess who they meet? His pursuit of the girls through the woods is chilling, mainly because Alymer, as Overberry, never speaks a word throughout the film. His aging pervert is not so much evil as he is stuck mentally in an evil place. He could easily be in the throes of early dementia. He shakes, he dribbles, he smiles vacantly, and when he sees little girls, he desires one thing only.

If the film were merely the story of a sexual predator on the prowl for children ("merely"?) it could easily be dismissed as exploitation of the worst kind—what a lot of viewers would expect from Hammer. But it's a true horror movie, the horror enhanced by the town's willingness to take chances with the lives of children if it can keep the factory open and the citizens working. This is a plot device that has become familiar in scary movies—think of the mayor insisting on the beaches staying open in Jaws—but, somehow, adults getting eaten by a fish is less upsetting, and a lot more playfully entertaining, than an elderly child abuser terrorizing young girls.

Lunacy (2005)

2010-09-13T11:07:00.001-07:00

If you're looking for a pleasant night out to help your mom celebrate her birthday, unless she's Irma Grese, the Bitch of Belsen, you better look elsewhere.

On the surface, Jan Svankmajer's surrealist black comedy is about a man who may or may not be insane and his adventures with a Marquis who may or may not be insane as they tour a madhouse run by a staff that may or may not be insane. Odds are that they're all lunatics, but that's just my opinion and, according to this movie's underlying point of view, I may or may not be insane, too.

We tend these days to use some variation of the word "surreal" in place of "it was weird and I don't have a clue what it meant." You know, like an off-the-cuff joke from George W. Bush.

But sometimes "surreal" still refers to an avant-garde art movement, and that is the surreal that describes writer/director Jan Svankmajer's 2005 film Sileni—Lunacy, to you non-Czech speakers.

The film opens with a brief prologue in which Svankmajer addresses us directly, telling us that we are about to see a horror movie, with all of that genre's attendant degeneracy. He warns us that he has borrowed motifs from Poe—he calls his movie an "infantile" tribute to the American gothicist—and adopted the blasphemy and subversion from the Marquis de Sade.

We join the film as a young man named Jean is having a nightmare in which two bald and burly sanitarium attendants are smilingly attempting to put him into a strait-jacket. This dream incorporates some stop motion animation of a shirt crawling across the floor. Many of the film's most intense moments are interrupted by this animation, usually consisting of tongues and eyeballs cavorting on their own to the accompaniment of carousel music.

Jean soon meets the Marquis, an 18th. Century man in the 21st. Century world. Jean is invited to stay a few nights at the Marquis' castle. He accepts, but when he spies the older man conducting a blasphemous parody of the Mass one night, complete with naked altar servers, he decides to take the innocent village maid the Marquis seems determined to corrupt and run away with her.

Instead, he is talked into accompanying the ignobleman on a tour of the local insane asylum where he finds out that the innocent maid is in fact the head nurse. She tells him that the chief doctor and the Marquis are actually inmates who led a mutiny. Now the real hospital staff is locked in the underground dungeon and the loonies are in charge.

By the time the story ends, if it does, telling who's insane and who's lying is impossible so we settle for believing that, as in Alice in Wonderland—a story Svankmajer filmed in 1988—we're all mad here.

It's clear that Svankmajer sees the madhouse as a suitable symbol for modern life. One of the doctors believes in severe corporal punishment and one believes in letting the patients do whatever they want to do. Conservatism and Liberalism, anyone? But since nothing works, who cares?

There is much black humor at work here, and despite the claim that it's a horror movie, Lunacy is never scary on a visceral level. If it creeps you out, it'll probably be due to self-recognition. This observation does not apply to me, of course.

White tie is optional. Strait-jackets are required.

In This Our Life (1942)

2010-09-10T07:14:00.001-07:00

Few things in nature are more wonderful and terrifying than a Bette Davis character in the throes of pure petulance and malice. That being the case, you can't do better than spend an evening with In This Our Life.

This was John Huston's second directorial assignment and while he doesn't seem as close to this material as he was to the hardboiled milieu of Dashiell Hammett's mean streets in The Maltese Falcon, he's having one helluva good time with Ellen Glasgow's southern gothic lite as scripted by Howard Koch.

The story takes place deep in the heart of The Land of Sociopathic Women. Davis is Stanley Timberlake, one of old Asa Timberlake's (Frank Craven) two daughters. Olivia de Havilland is the other one, Roy. The male names are not explained in the film and I haven't read the source novel. As the film opens, Stanley is about to be wed to a champion-of-the-oppressed local lawyer, Craig Fleming (George Brent). At the last minute, and for no apparent reason, Stanley abandons Craig almost at the altar and runs off with Roy's husband, young Dr. Peter Kingsmill (Dennis Morgan, who acquits himself nicely and may come as a surprise to viewers who know him only from his musical roles).

Stanley and Peter leave town and Peter gets an intern's position at a hospital. His salary is meager and his new wife is quickly and easily bored. Her constant nagging leads Peter to take Drastic Action, and soon Stanley is back home, where by now Roy and Craig have become an item. These southern girls don't let the grits grow under their feet, by cracky.

Of course, Stanley sets out to re-capture Craig and there is some chance that she may be able to do it. She makes an appointment with him to meet at a bar that night at 7:00. While waiting, she tosses back a few and when he hasn't shown up by 7:30, Stanley speeds off in her roadster. We've been told that she drives too fast and now we find out that with a few drinks in her she's capable of hit and run driving. When the cops find out that the car involved was hers, she tries to put the blame on Parry Clay (Ernest Anderson), the son of the Timberlake's black maid Minerva (Hattie McDaniel).

The other major player is the Timberlake girls' grating Uncle William (Charles Coburn). William is their maternal uncle and it's well known that he partnered in his brother-in-law's tobacco company, then forced Asa out. Now he enjoys calling on the Timberlakes in their modest house and rubbing everyone's nose in his dishonorable success. His only fan appears to be Stanley, who flirts with him because he's the rich relative.

Coburn was 65 when he made this picture and Davis was 34, and still the characters play the "I've got a surprise for you in one of my pockets and if you find it you can keep it" game. It's creepy, no doubt about it.

The picture is a hoot, with everyone playing just one notch above where people actually exist—not close enough to reality to turn this into drama but not so far up the wall that the whole thing becomes more camp than a field full of tents. Every time I watch this one, I'm wearing a huge grin on my face.

The Screaming Skull (1958)

2010-06-18T06:23:00.001-07:00

Recent DVD and theatrical releases of movies by Dario Argento have started me thinking about that oddball breed of cinema we know as "cult movies," or "guilty pleasures." I'm one of those people who don't usually use the latter term because if I enjoy a movie I don't see any reason I should feel guilty about it. Hell, if I felt the need to apologize every time I enjoyed The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra or a Wheeler and Woolsey comedy, I'd be more weighed down by guilt than Judas Iscariot wearing an SS uniform while clubbing baby seals with a burning cross.

Actually, not all guilty pleasures are cult movies. To be a cult movie, a picture has to be appreciated by a number of people and is generally thought to be "so bad it's good," making cult movies at least a subset of camp. Guilty pleasures—or as I like to call them, "what I watch on Friday nights"—may be totally unrecognized by others and don't have to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever beyond the perhaps perverse pleasure they provide for me personally.

I've thought many times that I'd like to write a series of pieces—part reviews, part criticisms, part appreciations, part apologetics—on these movies from closer to the bottom of the cinematic barrel in hopes of scamming, uh, encouraging you to cultivate your inner movie slob. No, seeing every new Adam Sandler movie on its first weekend of release doesn't count. That's just conformist bad taste and I know you can do better than that.

Let's begin 50 years ago, at childhood, that time in life when a person's tastes—good and bad—are formed. The theater is The State, on the square of the small Texas town in which I grew up. The State played "B" movies and, on Saturday mornings, pictures in Spanish for the farm workers who came into the city for a few hours. But what I loved there best were horror movies like …

The Screaming Skull (1958)

You can tell which schlockfest "B" horror movies manipulate the basic accoutrements of the genre best by the degree to which they scare the bejeezus out of small children, and one of the things that has great power to create a seat-wetting problem is the human skull. You don't even have to give the ridges over the eyes that Harryhausen touch to make them look more sinister, but it can't hurt.

I had just turned nine when I saw The Screaming Skull for the first time, and it scared the breath out of me. Fifty years later I can still remember being so frightened I couldn't yell. Ah, those were great times … Macabre came along later that same year, with House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler (both 1959) soon to follow. We adolescent horror hounds, readers of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" all, were convinced that William Castle was the greatest filmmaker of all time. Even Psycho (1960) couldn't pull us away as it was a little too adult—but we still read everything by Robert Bloch we could get our sweaty little hands on.

I don't know if journeyman actor Alex Nicol, who directed The Screaming Skull in an effort to expand his career possibilities, could have beaten Castle into our hearts had he continued to make shockers. (Can you imagine a grown man still considering such a question? Neither can I.)

I've re-visited TSS several times over the decades. It used to show up on late night TV with some regularity, until even the tube outgrew such hack work, and more than one DVD distributor carries it in the catalogue. No, the original fear is long gone—I wish I knew a nine-year old I could convince to watch it in a dark room just to check out the reaction—but the memory is intact.

In the film, a newly wed couple come to the house the groom lived in with his former wife, the haunting Marion, who died in a sudden thunderstorm when she slipped on a wet leaf and stumbled by the lily pond, cracking her head open on a stone wall and then drowning. I'd think that this plot construct was an accidental reference to Ibsen's Rosmersholm except for the fact that composer Ernest Gold—yes, the same man who would win an Oscar for scoring Exodus in 1960—borrows the same brooding Sabbat theme from Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique Stanley Kubrick used in The Shining (1980).

Maybe this movie is smarter than it has any right to be. John Kneubuhl, who would later write the "Pigeons From Hell" episode of Boris Karloff's TV program Thriller, wrote the script based on the legend of the screaming skull of Bettiscomb Manor, in England.

But setting references to classier stuff aside, Eric and Jenni Whitlock attempt to settle into the house. As he introduces her to the grounds, Jenni spots a small outbuilding and asks what it is.

"That's where Mickey keeps his gardening things," Eric replies.

"Who's Mickey?"

"The gardener."

Or maybe the movie isn't any smarter than it has to be. But you know that feeling you sometimes get, the feeling that the filmmakers are playing around a little because they know the kids that make up their audience aren't going to get it, anyway? TSS engenders that feeling often.

Soon, Marion's great friends, Reverend and Mrs. Snow, drop by for dinner and via some pretty unsubtle dialogue we learn that a) Mickey is still devoted to Marion and thinks her ghost haunts the house and grounds, b) Jenni had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium when her parents were killed in an automobile accident, c) she is wealthy, and d) John Hudson, as Eric, is either the most ham-handed actor of the 1950s or he has been directed to make it clear to even the most naïve members of the audience that he wants to gain control of his new wife's fortune.

Later that night, Jenni awakens to discover that Eric is missing, a window is banging in the wind, and Marion 's self-portrait looks creepy in the moonlight. The next night, this scenario is replayed, only this time Jenni finds a skull in a cabinet. She tosses it out the window, but on her way back to bed she hears a knocking on the door and, yes, it turns out to be the skull.

It's not much of a spoiler to admit that Eric is behind all the, uh, skullduggery, but whether or not there is a real ghost on his trail I will leave to you to discover for yourself. If you've ever read a pulp magazine weird menace story, or watched an episode of "Scooby-Doo," you'll have no trouble figuring out the late night mumbo-jumbo.

Hudson, who was Capt. Hobart in G.I. Blues (1960) and Virgil Earp in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) was certainly a better actor than this script calls for, and I suspect he was playing the evil genius with deadpan irony. Peggy Webber, as Jenni, looks a bit too robust to make a convincing Mrs. de Winter clone. Like almost every other actor in the film, she found her greatest success on TV. Leading roles in movies were out of the question—bless her, she looks like Nicholas Cage in drag, but with heftier boobs.

Russ Conway, who had unremarkable roles in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967) gives Rev. Snow a quiet, patient demeanor even though he looks fit enough to beat the crap out of Eric. Tony Johnson, as his wife, has no other credits on IMDB.

Director Alex Nicol, who plays Mickey, will be better remembered from his small roles in movies, including The Man from Laramie (1955). He later went to Europe to take part in the spaghetti western boom, coming home for a turn as George Barker in Roger Corman's Bloody Mama in 1970.

In TSS he shows a nice camera eye for the clichés of the genre. His camera roams the empty halls of the house, creeping up on certain doors and importing to them a sense of dread that makes us both want to enter and run screaming away. I suspect that the movie would still work its dark magic on young kids, but many of them would be repelled by the questionable acting and black and white photography.

The film exists as a link between gothic chapbooks, dime novels, spooky radio shows, the pulp horror magazines and EC comics, and TV horror shows like Thriller and The Twilight Zone. Moments in it seem to have influenced Freddie Francis' The Skull (1965), which, since it was based on a story by Robert Bloch, takes us back to where we started.

The Screaming Skull can't possibly scare adults, and unless you saw it when you were young it won't have any nostalgia appeal. But honestly, I've known several grown-ups who did see it back in the day, and they all remember it fondly as one of the scariest movies they've ever seen. Maybe we should let it go at that.

Jeepers Creepers (United Artists, 2001)

2007-10-03T13:27:00.000-07:00

“Jeepers Creepers,” is a horror flick from writer/director Victor Salva, and it’s two-thirds classy thrills and one-third example of how not to make a horror movie. The fact that both these sections occur in the same picture is a fairly remarkable feat of filmmaking. In class, you can show the first part as an example of the tricks of the fear-inducing trade and then show the second part to display how horror directors go wrong.

As the movie begins, Trish and Darry (Gina Philips and Justin Long), brother and sister, are driving the back roads on their way home for a visit from college. Trish likes to look at the countryside. They are briefly pursued by an enclosed truck, the unseen driver of which seems determined to scare them spitless. Finally, the truck passes them.

Sometime later, they see the truck parked beside an abandoned wood frame church, surrounded by trees, its yard overgrown. The siblings see the driver of the truck carry a bundle that looks suspiciously like a dead body wrapped in a crimson-stained sheet. “The Creeper” deposits the bundle into a large pipe sticking out of the ground. They slow down and he dumps another one.

The Creeper spots them and the chase begins again. Darry drives off the road into a field, and the truck continues on its way.

The kids go back to the pipe to make sure of what they saw and to convince themselves that if bodies there are, they are all dead.

Darry thinks he hears someone down in the hole, and, of course, is determined to climb down for a closer look.

“You know that place in horror movies where someone does something really stupid and everybody hates him?” Trish asks. “Well, this is it.”

Of course, Darry falls into the hole and, of course, we think The Creeper is coming back at any moment and, of course, the hole is more full of corpses than a cheesecake is full of calories. From this point on, the film becomes a conventional killer chases kids thriller.

It holds up well up to the point Darry and Trish bring the cops into the picture. It’s at this point our understanding of what The Creeper is begins to change. The more we know about him, the less frightening he is.

Do you remember watching monster movies as a kid and feeling less scared when the monster was already on the screen because you knew that if you could see it, it couldn’t jump out and yell “Boo!”

Salva has forgotten that basic point. John Carpenter, in “Halloween,” reminded us that you can’t kill the bogeyman, but you shouldn’t take too much time trying to explain him, either. That kills him more effectively than blades or guns.

As long as The Creeper remains unseen, or seen in shadow, he represents that potent, visceral force of the Unknown. When he hunts, does he do it for fun or is there a solid reason for all the corpses he’s dumped down the pipe? Why all the incisions? Why is the catch phrase for this picture “What’s eating you?”

And what’s the significance of the number “23”? You’ll know what I’m talking about if you ever see the flick. And there’s a legend that ties into the plot. Is it a real legend or one manufactured for the movie? If we’re going to be offered some degree of explanation, let’s have enough to make sense.

The movie is left open for a sequel—what kind of horror movie would it be if it couldn’t develop into a franchise for United Artists—but that’s not the main reason many viewers will find the ending unsatisfactory. I can’t go into that, but I will say that a soap opera on Friday leaves you with much the same feeling.

But when Salva is clicking during the movie’s first 50 minutes or so, he runs the thing like an expensive watch. Sure, a lot of the shocks come from pop-ups and loud noises, but these work so well because the director has set them up so nicely. First he attaches the electrodes, then he pushes all the right buttons.

The two leads are just fine. When they talk and argue as siblings, they sound real. The screenplay gets across a lot of background information via the humdrum talk of any long car trip. These kids are more than potential monster-fodder.

“Jeepers Creepers” is creepy and horrid without being gratuitously gory, but it never really moves from average to being worthy of a solid recommendation. It’s worth seeing, but I’m not sure it’s worth a special trip to the video store to rent. Maybe if you pick it up when you go to get something else. Or the next time it runs on cable. Or you could forget I mentioned it.

Ed Gein (Tartan Films, 2000)

2007-10-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

If black humor refuses to capitulate to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it also refuses to take them seriously. We can only contemplate death soberly if there is some means of avoiding it. When faced with the inevitable, laugh, clown, laugh. And the more spectacular the death, whether in total numbers or intensity of the individual event, the darker the laughter.

Consider the films that are based to a greater or lesser degree on the ghoulish career of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin part-time handyman and full-time psycho. Everyone needs something to do to fill the hours of the day. It’s just that Gein’s choices were eccentric, to say the least. They were also such stuff as cinematic nightmares are made on.

But the oddest thing about the films that draw on the Gein story for their plots is that so many of them are comedies. Dark comedies, to be sure—comedies that may make you choke on your own laughter—but comedies just the same.

The most faithful to fact of them all is “Ed Gein.”

The picture opens with snippets of newsreel footage of Gein’s neighbors in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. The consensus of opinion is that he was a nice guy, maybe a little eccentric but certainly harmless.

Next we’re taken to the Plainfield Cemetery after dark. We see a teen couple, the boy eager to begin what he came here for. The girl hears noises, and then the boy does, too. They get spooked and leave quickly. The shot changes and we see Ed’s head emerge over the rim of a grave he’s opened.

At home, Ed has a disinterred corpse stretched out on a table. His head tipped back, he speaks a few words over it. He is inviting the body to return to life, but we don’t know if he expects a literal resurrection.

It’s a moment in the film, like many others, that doesn’t seem to go anywhere because it doesn’t link seamlessly with the scene that follows, but we will be introduced to his mounting madness through flashbacks and vignettes like this one.

Next up is a scene in which two young boys visit Ed at home. Later we will learn that some parents trust Ed to baby-sit. The youngest of the boys slips away from Ed and goes upstairs, just to snoop around out of idle curiosity. He finds heads hanging from the bedroom door. Ed will later explain that they are shrunken heads sent to him by a relative during the World War, but we can see what the boys, perhaps, don’t notice—they are too large to be shrunken. The room also contains a lamp made from a spine, and masks made from human skin.

The boys appear frightened, but no more so than Ed himself. He tells them to leave and not come back.

We then see him at a roadside bar, essentially off to himself but chatting sporadically with his twentysomething friend Pete Anderson (Craig Zimmerman). Most of the talking takes place between two bar regulars and Mary Hogan (Sally Champlin). Mary is a large woman, middle-aged and full of racy innuendos. Ed is clearly both attracted to and repulsed by her behavior and language.

As he listens to the goings-on in the bar, he flashes back to his mother Augusta (Carrie Snodgress) and her warnings about the whorishness of most women. We have seen earlier examples of her religious zeal as she read from The Book of Revelation to Ed and his brother as they grew up.

We also see Ed’s reluctance to assist his parents as they slaughter a hog. The animal is hanging by its back feet from a rafter and the sight terrifies young Ed. His father accuses him of being a sissy and then smacks Augusta for bringing him up badly. She then turns on her son and berates him for being a panty-waist. The poor kid, approximately ten years old, is visibly upset at being accosted by both parents.

Back to the present, and Ed is having dinner with his friends, the Andersons. Ed decides that nothing goes better with country cooking than a discussion of the changes the human body endures as it rots. Even his friend Pete wants him to drop the subject.

We see him taking a woman through his house, avoiding certain rooms. He has apparently approached her about exchanging houses with him since he lives alone and has no use for a two-story farm house. His evasive manner and the house’s general creepiness result in her turning down his offer and asking to leave as quickly as possible.

His behavior with people doesn’t change so much from beginning to end, but his interior madness is beginning to run away with him. He presents the same dead, half vacant smile throughout, but the visits from Augusta become more frequent. We realize that his moonlit trips to the cemetery have resulted in several corpses disinterred and brought home.

Finally he snaps and returns to Mary’s bar after closing. He shoots her, drags her out to his truck, and drives her home. Doing nothing to mend her wound, he ties the woman to the bed and allows her to die.

At this point in the film, we see Ed at his craziest. He emerges from the house one night wearing his woman suit. His face is covered by a mask made from the skin of one of the disinterred corpses. He wears a vest made from skin on which he has attached two breasts which dangle from the front. A vulva hangs from his crotch. Topped by a wig, he dances in the moonlight, yammering in falsetto.

Steve Railsback, who first jolted audiences as Charles Manson in the 1976 TV movie “Helter Skelter,” delivers a fingernails-on-the-chalkboard performance as Gein. I mean that in a good way. It’s the character who clog dances on our nerve ends, not the actor.

Railsback’s is also a gutsy performance. This is a man about whom the audience is hard-pressed to think anything positive. The nicest thought the average viewer would have said is, “Well, they guy is certainly messed up, but it isn’t his fault.”

We will see Gein trying on noses—real noses—like the world’s most deranged circus clown. He will murder one more woman who reminds him of Augusta after inviting her to go to a movie with him and being rejected. He is now seeing his mother, and she rides in his truck with him and encourages him to “do the Lord’s work.”

His insanity doesn’t make him fearless. He’s afraid of getting caught although his attempts at jokes almost trip him up. When Pete Anderson talks about Mary’s odd disappearance Ed tells him that the woman isn’t missing. “I’ve got her up at my place. Mary’s hanging out there right now.” Pete is startled for a beat, then laughs and tells Ed he has a mighty strange sense of humor.

The murder of his second victim, a storekeeper, results in his downfall. The film ends with newsreel footage of the real Ed Gein being put into the back of a police car. The end credits are interspersed with Railsback, as Gein in the asylum, smiling the smile and telling the camera that he doesn’t remember everything that happened.

So what was Edward Gein really like? This is the movie that stays closest to the facts and does a good job of presenting the man’s madness. He was born in 1906 and died in 1984. Mary Hogan was killed in 1954, Bernice Worden (called Collette in the film) was murdered in 1957.

What fascinated the first person to translate Gein’s life into fiction—novelist Robert Bloch, who immortalized Gein as Norman Bates in “Psycho,” was the fact that he lived so long in a small community and no one noticed his mania. If he never quite fit in with the common fold of Plainfield, he never stood out, either. For his trips to the cemetery, he enlisted the aid of a man named Gus, a peculiar loner who ended up in an asylum before Gein did. (Gus is omitted from every one of the Gein films.) Even with this association, no one saw through Ed’s smile.

The joke about the murdered barmaid is real. A few weeks after her disappearance, Ed told a sawmill owner with the unlikely name of Elmo Ueeck, “She isn’t missing. She’s at the farm right now.”

What do we make of this emotionally retarded man, in life and in this film? He’s not a guy most of us would have to fear because his interest was in older women only. The main sources for our fear are his psychology and the way it manifests itself. We can deal with the extremes of his oddness only through dark laughter. How else can you react to his woman suit? The horrible fact of the matter is that when he minces out the front door, his pot belly poking out under the vest, there is enough of the humor of an awkward man in drag to generate a laugh. But when we see what it is he’s really wearing, the laughter gets stuck in our throat.

“Ed Gein” is not designed to generate laughter, but the only sane reaction we can have to some levels of real-life horror is black humor. After his arrest, sick jokes known as “Geiners” began to circulate throughout the Midwest, some of which I suspect were used by Robert Bloch in his novel and later by screenwriter Joseph Stefano in his script for “Psycho.” “Mother is, how do you say it, not quite herself tonight.”

But black humor isn’t just a distancing device that allows us to contemplate the world’s horrors without collapsing into a morass of despair and inertia. It’s also a means for saying that the world can be as horrible as it wants to be—or as our fellow humans make it—but we have moved beyond caring. It’s either a perfectly rational response to an irrational universe, or a perfectly insane response to a sane universe when sanity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“The Empty House” (Algernon Blackwood, 1906)

2007-10-01T08:33:00.000-07:00

Despite the fact that this tale was first published in 1906, it’s a wonderfully cinematic examination of a notoriously haunted house. Blackwood wastes no time, jumping in immediately with a paragraph that defines what a haunted house is and describes the effect it has on anyone brave, ignorant, or foolish enough to enter it.

“And, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent cause.”

That, to coin a phrase, says it all.

In the story, Jim Shorthouse receives what appears to be a semi-urgent request from his Aunt Julia that he come to visit her at once. She’s acquired the keys to an infamously haunted house on the other side of town and she wants Shorthouse to accompany her while she goes exploring. She makes him promise that he will not leave her side even for a minute because “persons who had spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die than enter them again.”

As the two ghosthunters enter the old house, Aunt Julia relates a brief history of the brutal crime that initiated the haunting.“’It has to do with a murder committed by a jealous stableman who had some affair with a servant in the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and when everyone was asleep, he crept upstairs to the servants' quarters, chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come to the rescue threw her bodily over the banisters into the hall below.’"

’And the stableman—?’

"’Was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder.’”

Blackwood then takes us on a regulated tour of the house, first downstairs and then up. He is an absolute master at describing everyday items in such a way that they assume personalities, and none too pleasant ones at that. He evokes that feeling that things change as soon as you look away from them—“There was the inevitable sense that operations which went on when the room was empty had been temporarily suspended till they were well out of the way again.”

The tension continues to build as Shorthouse and Julia are certain they hear a man sneeze next to them. Shadows are cast when there is nothing there to cast a shadow. Every time they turn a corner or move from one room to another, you wonder what they are about to encounter. Shorthouse “felt as if his spine had suddenly become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice.” The aptness of the simile is dazzling.

Then it happens, with a sudden jolt as powerful as the one that accompanies the first appearance of the old woman in “House on Haunted Hill,” a movie moment which may very well have been inspired by this story.“Facing them, directly in their way between the doorposts, stood the figure of a woman. She had dishevelled hair and wildly staring eyes, and her face was terrified and white as death.

“She stood there motionless for the space of a single second. Then the candle flickered and she was gone—gone utterly— and the door framed nothing but empty darkness.”

This is one of the most effective old school haunted house stories you will ever read. Take a look at it here -- http://www.litgothic.com/Authors/authors.html -- and you’ll know why Algernon Blackwood was one of H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite writers.

The Haunting Hour Volume One: Don’t Think About It (Universal, 2007)

2007-10-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

Lots of people, i.e. adults, are still trying to figure out the appeal of R.L. Stine’s ubiquitous creepfests for the younger set, the Goosebumps books particularly. (Stine also produces some other series, including Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, The Nightmare Room, and Fear Street, which actually predates the emergence of Goosebumps. We’re talking something like 300 million books sold worldwide.)

The made-for-DVD movie “The Haunting Hour Volume One: Don’t Think About It” may or may not have drawn its plot from a tale in one of Stine’s Haunting Hour books, which are apparently a series of short story collections. I’ve not read anything from this series. Dan Angel and Billy Brown are the credited screenwriters.

Emily Osment (15-year old younger sister of Haley Joel Osment) stars as Cassie Keller, gothy new girl in school. She doesn’t get along with her parents or her kid brother, and as soon as she strikes up a conversation with the boyfriend of Priscilla (Brittany Curran), Female Big Cheese on Campus, she finds herself on the outs with this “Mean Girls” wannabe as well. In a scene purloined from “Carrie,” Cassie humiliates Priscilla at the Halloween dance.

Curious about a place called The Halloween Store, Cassie enters to find the kind of set decoration any kid in thrall to the icons of horror movies would love. It’s dark. It’s cobwebby. The walls are covered with masks, skulls, skeletons wearing wispy shrouds. And it’s owned by a long-haired creep with a soft voice (Tobin Bell, of the “Saw” franchise).

He sells her a book called “The Evil Thing.” That night at home, she unlocks the clasp that holds the covers together and reads the doggerel incantation that would cause The Evil Thing to come to life if the jingle were to be read aloud.

Halloween night, stuck with sitting her annoying little brother, Cassie does read the verse out loud. The Thing appears so she and Sean, Priscilla’s disgruntled boyfriend (Cody Linley) spend the next few hours rescuing little brother Max (Alex Winzenread), Priscilla, and an unlucky pizza delivery guy from the beastie and its horde of ravenous offspring.

Directed by Alex Zamm, this surprisingly entertaining little picture is clearly aimed at the upper elementary/lower junior high set. The first half contains some nicely suspenseful moments, but after the monster makes its appearance the movie gallops towards comedy. Perhaps that’s so as to not really frighten its audience, or it may be because the budget didn’t call for anything like realistic monster effects so Zamm decided to ramp up the camp.

The acting is decent in that overdo-it-just-a-little-for-the-chillun style that is de rigueur for kiddie TV. Osment is the main attraction and she could go on to an adult TV or film career. It’s hard to tell how these young actresses will age.

This is a pretty good little movie for kids who want to see “something scary” that isn’t really scary at all, but adult fans of R.L. Stine’s work, assuming there are any, may be a bit disappointed. After all, some of the Goosebumps books, especially the ones about ghosts, can generate a true frisson that is totally lacking here.

“The Monkey’s Paw” (W.W. Jacobs, 1902)

2007-10-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

I couldn’t guess how many times I’ve read “The Monkey’s Paw,” W.W. Jacobs’ brilliant and chilling short story, but I can tell you how often it’s cast a dark spell over me—every time.

Originally published in 1902 (and available now online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12122/12122-h/12122-h.htm, among other places), TMP is the essence of the classic horror story—unhappy people bring more misery upon themselves, and their attempts to escape their fate opens the way for things best left alone.

Mr. and Mrs. White live with their adult son Herbert in Laburnam Villa on a quiet and deserted road. The old couple apparently does no work, leaving the breadwinning to Herbert, who is employed at a mill.One night they are visited by an old friend of Mr. White’s, Sergeant-Major Morris, who is coaxed into telling them the story behind an odd talisman he carries in his pocket, “what you might call magic, perhaps,” “an ordinary little [monkey’s] paw, dried to a mummy."

The weird object had had a spell put on it by an Indian fakir. For three owners, the paw would grant three wishes each. Morris admits to having made three wishes himself, but he grows nervous and doesn’t tell what he wished for. When asked how the first owner used the charm, the sergeant-major replies, "The first man had his three wishes. . . I don't know what the first two were, but the third was for death. That's how I got the paw."

Morris tosses the thing into the fireplace but it is retrieved by White who asks if he can retain it as an odd keepsake. Mrs. White playfully wishes she had four arms so her house work would be easier for her, and Morris hastily warns her that if the Whites are going to do any wishing, they better be sensible about it.

After Morris leaves, the Whites wish for 200 pounds to pay off their mortgage, and everything begins going downhill from there.

Jacobs’ yarn is a variation of the old tale story about trying to outsmart the devil with your wishes, but his take on the basic story has become the dominant one for over 100 years. “The Monkey’s Paw” has been dramatized for stage and screen, radio and comic books—you name the medium and it’s a good bet some version of TMP can be found there.

So familiar has the story become, even if you’ve never read it before you’re likely to get a feeling of literary déjà vu. Ignore it and read to the end. You’ll never find a better evocation of unseen horror than you will from “The Monkey’s Paw.”

Dead Silence (Universal, 2007)

2007-10-01T08:23:00.000-07:00

My original review of this picture began like this: “This movie is going to break my heart. I like it. A lot. And it’s going to bomb. A lot.” It took in less than 18 million at the worldwide box office, a.k.a., me being right.

What’s worst was that its weaknesses, and there are two—maybe three--big ones, didn’t sink it. Its strengths did.When you see that the Universal Pictures logo that opens this movie is the version that was used in the early 1930s, you’ll know that this isn’t going to be another torture porn hunk of splatterpunk.

On a dark and stormy evening, young James Ashen (Ryan Kwanten) and his wife Lisa (Laura Regan) find outside their apartment door a large package with no return address. It contains an old ventriloquist’s dummy named Billy. Lisa thinks it’s a hoot; James is creeped out.

While he’s gone to retrieve some take out, weird stuff starts happening in the apartment—a disembodied voice whispers to Lisa and then something we can’t see attacks her. James comes home to find her dead with her tongue cut out.

He becomes the only suspect in the case. Homicide cop Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), with no solid evidence, lets him go and James takes off to his home town of Ravens Fair because he’s remembered the legend of Mary Shaw, a local ventriloquist from the 1950s who had been accused of kidnapping a child and was killed by the missing kid’s relatives. She was buried with her dolls, all 100 of them.

James interviews an old man named Henry, the town undertaker (Michael Fairman), who has a crazy wife. She hides in the cellar with her stuffed raven. James talks with his own father, Edward (Bob Gunton), with whom he has been angry for years. Ella, Edward’s new young wife (Amber Valletta) is right by the old man’s side.

It’s all just gothic as hell—old house, crumbling theater, ghosts, dead bodies that come to life, cemeteries, dolls that, whenever we stop looking at them, seem to move, and lots and lots of rain. Director James Wan (“Saw”) handles these traditional elements as if he’s seen every horror movie made in the 1930s, which I’m sure he has. His writing partner and “Saw” co-creator Leigh Whannell has snatched up as many pieces of these old movies as he can and stitched them together.

If you like those creepy old flicks, which, surprise, I do, you can have a lot of fun with “Dead Silence.” What you might not appreciate is Wan’s determination to make a film that is stylistically as unlike “Saw” as he can. Instead of the hyper kinetic camera work of that earlier film, this time everything is rock steady and framed perfectly. The camera is always in the most effective place and when it moves, it moves for a cinematic reason rather than just because jolting the camera is a post-“Blair Witch Project” horror movie cliché.

Weaknesses?

Kwantan is bland in the lead and Whalberg, who was convincingly intense in “Saw II,” is miscast here as a ‘40s style smart mouth cop. Also, the film builds to a double-whammy ending and the first whammy is ham-handedly introduced. Maybe Wan and Whannell did that on purpose to misdirect the audience into thinking that there would be only one jolt in the last reel. Whatever. It’s weak.

Inanimate objects in movies that start moving around creep me out. If that works for you, and you have a taste for gothic horror that is heavy on atmosphere and light on gore, give this one a try. But if your appetite for contemporary horror has been sharpened by “Saw” and you expect more of the same from Wan and Whannell, leave “Dead Silence” for those of us who still like that little chill that all too rarely runs down our spines.

“Uncle Silas” by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1865)

2007-09-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

We forget sometimes that writers were producing popular literature hundreds of years ago, especially when a novel that’s been around for a century or two is still in print. Longevity makes it a “classic,” but readability and a thumping good narrative are what give it longevity.

Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s “Uncle Silas” was one of the last significant attempts at a full-blooded gothic novel after Maturin’s “Melmoth the Wanderer” in 1820 and before the phenomenal revival of the form with Stoker’s “Dracula” in 1897.

As the story opens, young Maud Ruthyn is living a blandly idyllic life (you figure it out) with her wealthy father. When he dies suddenly, she is told by his odd Swedenborgian friend Dr. Bryerly that she must go to live at the run-down estate Bartram-Haugh, the home of her paternal Uncle Silas. Silas will care for her until she reaches her majority, at which time she will inherit her father’s money. In the intervening years, Silas will be paid out of the estate for her upkeep.

One problem: if her own father was eccentric, Maud’s uncle is nuttier than a rest stop at Stuckey’s. In fact, most of his neighbors think that, years before, he slaughtered a Mr. Clark, to whom he owed money, as Clark slept in one of Bartram’s guest rooms.

Two problem: if Maud dies before she gets her inheritance, Silas gets it all. If she marries Silas’ repulsive son Dudley, Silas gets it all by taking it away from Dudley.

The novel is an interesting blend of the gothic—detailed landscape description, characters who wear evil the way Paris Hilton wears stupid, and a crumbling, near-ruin of a country house—and the more popular for the time sensation novel—a domestic setting, mysteries to be solved, and a sinister servant in the person of the French tutor Madame de la Rougierre. LeFanu plays with the supernatural—he is the author of the wonderful vampire story “Carmilla,” so he could play with the best of ‘em—but the book is really a study in psychological suspense.

Yes, the dialogue can get pretty stilted in that patented second-tier mid-Victorian author sort of way, and the three-volume stretching is all too obvious when Maud and Silas have confrontation after confrontation that are all cut from the same pattern: Maud accuses someone in the house of tormenting her, Silas listens and then dismisses her complaint as coming from just a silly little girl, she becomes angry, he becomes sullen and insulting, she rushes from the room. It’s the sort of thing that comes with the territory, but it is more than made up for in the parts that LeFanu could really get into to—those subtle hints that the mold and rot of the house and grounds have infested the souls of Silas and his household.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the corruption and madness that have been growing in Silas all his life have tainted his physical surroundings.

Every fan of modern horror owes it to him/herself to look backward now and again to see where the contemporary genre came from. Many of the original gothic novels are deadly slow and about as chilling as a midday hike across Death Valley, but “Uncle Silas” isn’t one of them. Many of today’s go-for-the-jugular grossout-a-paloozas aren’t near as creepy.

“Suburban Legends: True Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Minivans” by Sam Stall (2007)

2007-09-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

One of the surprise movie hits of early 2007 is a teen variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window called Disturbia. The title is a hybrid of “disturb” and “suburbia,” and the picture’s tagline is: “Every killer lives next door to someone.”

According to Sam Stall’s Suburban Legends, it’s not just killers that put the “br-r-r-r” in “suburban.” To hear him tell it, America’s small towns and bedroom communities are jam-packed with ghosts, disguised aliens, poltergeists, cryptozoological monsters, gardens/basements/walls hiding rotting corpses, and enough sickening depravity to make Eli Roth reach for a barf bag. Imagine Wally and the Beaver chopping Ward into manageable chucks and feeding them into a wood chipper, and then keeping June locked in the basement, only letting her out to be used as the sacrifice in a Black Mass. And then blaming their actions on the suspicion that their house was built on the site of an Indian burial ground.

And we escaped from the inner city for this?

Stall, who is a solid, amusing if not overwhelming professional writer, divides this collection of petit guignol anecdotes into seven sections, each one emphasizing a particular horror to suburban homeownership—“Inhumanly Bad Houseguests” (spooks), “The Ghoul Next Door” (murder), “Hellish Commutes” (haunted highways), “Backyard Beasts” (non-human spooks), “Really Desperate Housewives” (mad mamas), “Lawn of the Dead” (buried bodies), and “Sundry Cul-de-Sacrileges (everything else).

All of these stories are “true” and many of them are overly familiar from Travel Channel spookshows and A&E’s true crime lineup. In fact, some of Stall’s short chapters are so brief I suspect all the research he did was watch “Weird America” and “City Confidential.” That said, if you like this kind of thing, you may appreciate having these tales collected into one easily and quickly read volume. In the grand ol’ American way, there is far more violence here than sex so this is a pretty safe buy for kids who are passing through that love-the-macabre stage.

The biggest pleasure I got from the book was finding the source stories for some stuff that has been sold as fiction. For instance, there’s a tale here of a haunted windbreaker that was sold on eBay for $31.50, the obvious inspiration for Joe Hill’s first novel Heart Shaped Box. There are also several what-the-hell-is-going-on-here stories that appear to have been fed into Tobe Hooper’s movie Poltergeist. And the adventures of a man named John List, who murdered his entire family and then just moved on to wed and start another one, look like they may have had an influence on Donald E. Westlake’s screenplay for that terrific, underappreciated thriller The Stepfather.

My favorite, though, has to be the tale of poor, sad Philip Schuth, who lived a Geinishly lonely existence with his home-bound mother. When she died, he put her corpse in the freezer and kept it there for four-and-a-half years. She was discovered after Philip got in trouble with the neighbors for smacking a kid who was trespassing on his property. Schuth went to prison, where he acquired the nickname “Frosty.” He was immortalized when an entrepreneur began selling refrigerator magnets with the catch line “My Mom is Cooler Than Yours.”

The book is fun and Stall’s ironic narration lets you know that he doesn’t take all this stuff too seriously, nor does he buy every ghost story at face value. Reading the book is like sitting around the backyard grill when the sun is going down and Uncle Doug starts telling the kids why the old DeFeo house two streets over is said to be haunted. Everyone has a chuckle until Aunt Alice finds a fingernail in her burger.

"I Walked With a Zombie" (1943)

2007-09-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

“Actually, it's very difficult for a reviewer to give something called ‘I Walked With a Zombie’ a good review.” So wrote producer Val Lewton in a letter to his sister. It’s one of the few times his instincts about film failed him. Nothing could be easier than writing positive things about any of the nine horror films he produced—and frequently wrote under one of his several pseudonyms—for RKO between “Cat People” in 1942 and “Bedlam” in 1946.

“I Walked With a Zombie,” admittedly a title that only a pulp magazine editor could love, was the second of Lewton’s films as producer of RKO’s newly formed horror movie unit. The idea then as now was to make chillers on the cheap that would return healthy profits. To keep costs down, Lewton relied more on lighting and sound to create an atmosphere of dread and unease.

The film begins with lush, romantic theme music more appropriate to a woman’s picture than a tale of voodoo. “Zombie” is what might be called now a “re-imagining” of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.” Frances Dee stars as Betsy Connell, a Canadian nurse who takes a job caring for the wife of a sugar plantation owner in the West Indies. On the boat taking her to her new home, she meets Paul Holland (Tom Conway, who appeared in two other Lewton thrillers). Holland is suffering from acute weltschmertz and tells Betsy that the beauty of nature only serves to disguise “death and decay.” She has no idea that he is her employer or she might have been tempted to return to Canada.

Just about the time the audience begins to think of Paul as Byronic, someone in the film describes him with just that word.

During her first night at the plantation, Betsy is told that she will meet the wife for whom she is to care the next day. Paul tells her nothing of Jessica’s condition, which just adds to the atmosphere of disquiet. Later that night, Betsy awakens to the sound of a woman weeping. Looking out her window, she sees a thin, blond woman in white wandering in what appears to be a trance around the garden. She follows the woman into an old tower. Inside, the woman begins to stalk her, completely without reaction as Betsy screams. Paul and some servants show up and the woman is led away. Betsy explains about trying to find out who was weeping and why, and Paul tells her that she must have been dreaming.

The next night, Paul’s brother Wes (James Ellison) and his mother (Edith Barrett) join the dinner party. The brothers get into an argument about what’s best to do for Jessica, who was the woman Betsy followed into the tower, and it becomes clear that Wes is in love with his brother’s wife. The subject of voodoo comes up and Paul dismisses it by saying that “superstition is a contagious thing.” He is repressed and soulfully unhappy, but Betsy is falling under his sway.

Betsy finds companionship with the servants, who are all happy and content. What at first seems to be a sad period stereotype is soon seen to be a disguise adopted by the house crew to hide their involvement with voodoo. Alma, the maid (Teresa Harris), suggests that a voodoo priest might be able to help the non-communicative Jessica (Christine Gordon). Betsy, knowing that Paul would never approve but thinking that it couldn’t hurt, decides to take Jessica to a voodoo ceremony that night.

The journey of the two women through the fields of sugar cane constitutes the film’s most celebrated sequence. Betsy is dressed sensibly and Jessica is wearing her standard loose fitting and flowing white gown, her blond hair whipped by the breeze. Director Jacques Tourneur puts no music behind this dark walk. We hear the wind as it moves through the cane. The camera moves with it, showing us the women as they progress along a path through the stalks.

The wind picks up as Betsy and Jessica move along from the safety of the plantation deeper into the heart of darkness. They pass the corpse of a goat, hanging from a tree, swaying across their path. They see an animal skull, and then a human one. Betsy’s pace increases as does the sound of the wind. Perhaps the sequence’s greatest shock comes with the sudden appearance of a skeletal male zombie blocking the trail. Given the proper signal supplied to Betsy by Alma, he allows the women to pass.

At the ceremony, the true nature of Jessica’s ailment is revealed.

Later, at the plantation house, Wes admits that he believes Jessica to be one of the walking dead. Paul denies this, believing just as fervently that the loneliness of living on the island has driven her mad. Since he has now fallen in love with Betsy, he demands that she leave so the same fate won’t befall her.

From this point, final secrets are revealed, the inevitable occurs, and the film hastens to its romantically gothic conclusion.

There are no sudden shock moments in “I Walked With a Zombie,” but that wasn’t Lewton’s idea of how a horror movie should be constructed. He believed in building tension from the opening scene, and everything in the movie is one more brick in the final structure. Cues to upcoming scares are not given on the soundtrack. The unexpected appearance of the thin zombie on the path to the voodoo ceremony is not underscored by an orchestral bang any more than turning around in a dark house to suddenly be confronted by a walking dead man would be emphasized by any sound other than your own gasp in real life. The wind and the steady drone of the surf are enough.

Lewton wasn’t interested in scourging the skin from your bones—he just wanted to get under it. Fans of the modern no-holds-barred horror movie may find his films slow and too quiet to be effective, but connoisseurs of psychological chillers will find much to admire in his approach.

This is definitely not Romero or Fulci, but Lewton wasn’t interested in making audiences scream and then forget their phony movie fears on their way across the parking lot to their cars. He wanted to make the experience of walking in the dark as terrifying outside the theater as it had been inside. The bleak, melancholy dread of “I Walked With a Zombie” stays with you for a very long time.

"White Heat" (1949)

2007-08-28T06:34:00.000-07:00

Although he considered it just another throw-away gangster movie, James Cagney put everything he’d learned about acting into his performance in “White Heat.” If you’ve ever seen anything else like it in an American film, you must have been watching a movie made after 1949. “White Heat” is a black comedy for the ages.

By the time he made “White Heat,” James Cagney (1899-1986) was fifty years old and was sicker than ever of gangster and tough guy roles. He’d begged his home studio, Warner Brothers, for a greater variety of characters to play (they gave him a few—Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” zany screenwriter Robert Law in “Boy Meets Girl,” and hoofer Chester Kent in “Footlight Parade), but he’d washed his hands of Warners and walked away from his contract twice, the latest time being in 1943.

Working as an independent producer, he made four films between ’43 and ’48. None of them are spectacular, but three of them are worth watching. Avoid “The Time of Your Life.” It won’t be.

So by 1949, Cagney was back at Warners with a new contract in hand and a commitment to make yet another gangster movie.He liked to hang out with the writers and the story is that he dropped by the office of scripters Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, stretched out on the couch and asked, “Okay fellas, what’s it gonna be this time?”

Goff and Roberts, working from an original screen story by Virginia Kellogg and borrowing mobster lore from the careers of Ma Barker and her brood, fashioned Cody Jarrett, easily the most brutal gang leader in Cagney’s repertoire since Tom Powers in “The Public Enemy” (1931). And Cagney, thinking that the entire enterprise was nothing but a pumped up “B” movie, added some touches of his own to the character. The result is the most stunning performance of Cagney’s career and a screen villain that still has the power to make jaws drop open over 50 years later.

Note: There are spoilers galore from this point on.

The opening sequence gives us the Jarrett gang holding up a train. Cody is not a big city gangster, but an outlaw of the open road. Criminal gangs had moved to the Heartland during the Depression. Think John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde. During the robbery, a member of the gang slips up and calls Cody by name, necessitating the cold blooded murder of the engineer and fireman. No time is wasted in letting us know that Jarrett is no decent guy forced into a life of crime, a la Eddie Bartlett in “The Roaring Twenties.” Jarrett has “thug” written all over him.

Cody travels with his “Ma” (Margaret Wycherly) and his wife, Verna (Virginia Mayo). Big Ed (Steve Cochran) is the most vocal member of the gang and the only one Ma and Cody suspect wants to take over—and that includes taking over with Verna.

To avoid going to prison on the train robbery and murder raps, Cody confesses to a hotel robbery in another state that occurred at the same time as the train caper went down. The authorities know he’s guilty of the more serious offenses, but they can’t prove anything.

Hoping that Jarrett will let some self-incriminating word slip, they plant an undercover agent named Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien) in his cell. Fallon insinuates himself into Cody’s good graces, and when Jarrett breaks out he takes the spy with him.

On the outside, Big Ed has killed Ma Jarrett and taken up with Verna. Cody returns to settle the score and during the climactic robbery of an oil refinery Fallon is recognized by a hood he once arrested. In a fruitless bid to escape, Cody climbs a gasoline storage tank. As flames shoot up around him, Cody, wounded and hopelessly insane, shouts the Jarrett family motto to the ghost of his mother, “Made it, Ma. Top of the world!”

I know. Just looking at the plot synopsis it’s hard to see just how different the character of Cody Jarrett is from Cagney’s earlier mobsters. He’s more savage, and we get the feeling that even if he were not involved in crime, he’d still be a sadistic brute.

The surprises on screen come from a post-war atmosphere of despair—“White Heat” isn’t purely film noir but it’s frequently cited with films noir—from Cagney’s disgust at being given what he saw as the same old same old, and from director Raoul Walsh’s willingness to go along with his star’s crazy ideas for character development.

Cagney decided that if Jarrett was supposed to be crazy, by God, let’s make him crazy. He snarls, he growls, he pounds his forehead with his palms as he drops down with debilitating headaches. (To gain Ma’s attention when he was young, he pretended to have skull-splitting migraines, and as an adult the fantasy has become real.)

One of the film’s four unforgettable moments comes with the first headache. Out of reach of the law in a mountain hideout, Cody’s head begins to throb. He goes into the bedroom so the rest of the gang won’t see him in his weakened condition (Ma’s suggestion). As the pain recedes, Jarrett sits on Ma’s lap as she rests in a rocking chair. It’s momentarily difficult for the audience to accept what it’s seeing. A 50-year old man, beginning to grow stout, sitting on his mother’s lap with his arm around her shoulders. What’s the reaction? Do you wince at the infantile pitifulness of the character or celebrate at the audacity of the actor?

Cagney later wrote that he didn’t tell Margaret Wycherly what he intended to do. Cinematographer Sid Hickox knew, as did Walsh, who approved. I don’t know what audiences in 1949 thought they were seeing, but I think it was a definite step on the road to Norman Bates.

Another of the great moments comes in the prison mess hall when Cody first learns that Ma Jarrett is dead. Again, Cagney didn’t tell anyone but Walsh what he intended to do. He just asked that the biggest extras be dressed as prison guards and situated at the end of the dining table. Then, on having the bad news whispered in his ear, Cody emits an agonized, feral wail. He grabs the shirts of the men near him. He crawls up on the table and rushes toward the guards, kicking plates and bowels onto the floor. He leaps onto the guards and begins thrashing around like a starving coyote in a hen house. They carry him out of the room as he howls, “I gotta get outa here!” over and over again.

Sometimes when I watch this scene, I laugh. Sometimes I’m scared shitless.

My favorite Cagney moment comes after the prison break when the gang is leaving its hideout. A prison rat who tried to kill Cody at Big Ed’s behest has been brought along in the trunk of Jarrett’s car. The script called for Cody to shoot the man through the trunk lid, but that wasn’t macabre enough for the star.On the day the scene was shot, Cagney had seen one of the crew members gnoshing some fried chicken for lunch. Cagney asked the man if he had a drumstick and, if so, could he have it. The fella was willing to oblige one of the nicest and most decent actors in the business, so Cagney got his drumstick. He saved it for the cameras and is seen nonchalantly gnawing away on the meat as he blasts a man’s life away.

The final scene, with Jarrett atop the gasoline storage tank, is the film’s most celebrated. It’s the culmination of the lead character’s rampaging insanity. There’s hardly anything human left in Cody Jarrett as he laughs hysterically and rushes doom so he can be with Ma once again.But behind Cagney’s last bravura moment in the picture is Walsh’s genius in setting the scene on top of the tank—one that is round, like a globe. A murderous madman stands “on top of the world” as it is engulfed in an inferno of apocalyptic proportions. The atomic bomb imagery couldn’t have been lost on the post-war audience.

Do I sound like a fan of “White Heat”? Uh, yeah. It’s my favorite film and I never tire of it. Cagney’s performance provides the greatest delight for me. I know I haven’t mentioned those of any of the rest of the cast, and I don’t mean to disparage them, but if they are solid and believable, that of the star is astonishing. If you want to see a brilliant example of what can happen when script, direction and acting merge perfectly, this is it, Ma. Top of the world!

“Clara Bow: Discovering the ‘It’ Girl”

2007-08-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

Everybody’s a critic. No, I’m not complaining--just stating what seems to me to be an obvious fact. Everybody has an opinion and most of us have friends or family to whom we can express it. Having an opinion makes you a critic. Telling others what it is makes you--well, I guess that depends on how vociferously you do the telling.

Having said all that, I know you’ve, at some time or other, suffered the frustration of hearing someone tell you that he or she has never seen/read/heard the thing you’re recommending, but “I know I wouldn’t like it.”

Grrr . . . I hate that.

But I have heard it many times because one of my passions when it comes to watching films is silent movies.

Watch out now. Some of you were tempted to click that Favorites icon and move along just on seeing the words “silent movies.” I know the acting style is very different to the naturalistic one developed for sound films--emotions and thoughts that couldn’t be expressed through words had to be made clear through gestures and facial expressions, and when it wasn’t done with a degree of subtly that stuff can be hard to take.

But if you never experience at least the best the silent screen has to offer, you’re going to miss films and performances that would touch you dearly. Trust me on this. You really are.

Some silent film buffs recommend that newcomers to the art begin with the great comedians. That’s not a bad entry point for people who know they want to give the silents a try.

But if you’re still a little hesitant about it all, dip your toe in the water by watching some short documentary films about the star performers of the early cinema. You’ll not only see what they looked like, but you’ll get a notion of what their styles were like and the kind of movies they made. You know, if you get the giggles when you watch a modern heavy-panting, romantic melodrama, you don’t want to start with Rudolf Valentino.

Someone asked me not long ago if I’d seen “Bridget Jones’s Diary” ( I saw the sequel and reached my limit on the spot) and I was reminded of one the silents’ biggest stars. In fact, for much of the later 1920s, she was the most popular star of them all.

Her name was Clara Bow, and she was never less than adorable. She made 58 films between her debut at age 17 in 1922 and her retirement from the screen in 1933. Ten of those films were talkies, and Bow’s voice was just fine despite the “mike fright” which led her to a nervous breakdown in 1931. She even sang.

But Bow will forever be linked to one movie, 1927’s “It.” No, it’s not a horror story. “It” is often defined as sex appeal, but that’s only part of what “It” is. There’s a casualness about that sex appeal, as if it’s not anything to be concerned with. Bow’s character doesn’t vamp by design--she’s too real for that Theda Bara foolishness.

I think “It” can best be thought of as are some Asian philosophies--if you don’t recognize it when you see it, there’s no way anyone can explain it to you.

But whatever “It” is, Bow had it.

Her life was never a pleasant one, from the agonizing poverty and abuse of her childhood in Brooklyn through her years of stardom to the eventual fear that she might end up like her mother and grandmother, who both spent years in the same mental asylum. “This is a funny game,” she once said about Hollywood. “Here and today and gone tomorrow. Let’s have a drink.”

Spend an hour with Clara Bow by watching the documentary “Clara Bow: Discovering the ‘It’ Girl.” I think you’ll find both the film and its subject fascinating.

If not, please keep your opinion to yourself.

"Ab-normal Beauty" (2004)

2007-08-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

“Ab-normal Beauty” (Sei mong se jun), written by Oxide Pang and his twin brother Pak Sing Pang, and directed by Oxide alone, explores ground already investigated by Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell and, almost concurrently with “Ab-normal Beauty,” Takashi Shimizu (whose “Marebito” was released a few weeks before Pang’s film). “Rear Window” and “Peeping Tom” both present metaphors for our fascination with seeing on film things too awful to see in person. The camera, like a murder weapon, is neutral until a use is found for it.

Jiney is an art student living with her mother. Her best friend—and we come to suspect more than best friend—is Jas. They are both photographers and the roam about the city of Hong Kong snapping pix of whatever catches their attention. A young man named Anson (Anson Leung) has a crush on Jin. She rebuffs him gently; Jas tells him to bugger off.

Jin’s mother leaves town on a business trip, planning to be gone about a month, and left alone at home Jin allows her boredom with life to show. One day she happens upon a fatal car crash. The appearance of corpses on the street overwhelms her and she begins to take pictures furiously. Jas helps her develop them and is repulsed by the images of blood and injury. “Death,” Jin says, “is the ideal photo—scary and exciting.”

She starts to unravle. She makes a skin-tight mask—when worn, it is death’s face. She begins to see blood where these isn’t any blood. Visiting an outdoor market, Jin pays a butcher to kill chicken after chicken so she can photograph them as they die. Her darkroom becomes cluttered with shots of dead birds, dogs and fish. Her excuse to Jas is that she just wants to add a new element to her work.

She buys a collection of death photos gathered together in a book. She thinks the pictures are beautiful. “Pressing the shutter is like death in that it stops the subject.” Her greatest thrill comes from seeing a potential suicide atop a tall building. When the girl jumps, Jin follows her descent, snapping pictures all the way to the sidewalk.

Why, suddenly, has this passion for death seeped to the surface of Jin’s psyche? She tells Jas about the time when, as a young girl, she was molested by three boys and her own mother’s failure to believe her story. But is that enough to make the change we see in her believable? Is it just the sight of bloody death by traffic accident that sets this terrible change in motion?

When we hear, and see in flashback, the story of her youthful rape, we expect the film will move along with that new plot element to explain what is happening with this lovely and talented young woman, but suddenly the picture takes a sharp turn into more standard thriller country.

Jin finds on her doorstep a video tape. “Take a look” is scratched on the box, and when she does she sees a moment right out of “feardotcom”—a young woman is chained to a chair, begging for release, when a masked man (we assume) beats her to death with a length of lead pipe.

We’ve been jolted as severly as Jin has. What has this movie become? Are we to think, as the girls do, that Anson is responsible for some kind of sick joke? Is Jas secretly a sadistic killer? Is Jin, or is the masked man on the tape a reflection of her own madness? Jin has already expressed the fear that she might lose control and really kill someone for the sake of taking pictures of the body. The sudden shift in plot emphasis is jolting, but perhaps the Pangs are telling us that it takes a change from art to reality to shake us out of our routine existence.

The Pang Brothers insinuate themselves into the film by casting sisters in the roles of best friends/possible lesbian lovers. Race Wong, as Jiney, and Rosanne Wong, as Jas, are the two halves of the Cantopop music duo “2R.” As their characters become involved in reproducing life in photography and painting instead of living it, so have the Pangs made a similar choice.

Strictly on the level of thriller, the film has nice moments during the first story line as we watch Jin’s descent to madness and wonder what will happen to her, and others during the last third or so as the gore level increases considerably and the intellectual pondering of the first part give way to a more visceral reaction.

And the Wong sisters are superb as Jin and Jas. Apparently, Jin (the younger of the two) is having a more successful film career, although they have made films as co-stars. One made a year before “Ab-normal Beauty” is a parody of the international hit cop thriller “Infernal Affairs,” recently remade by Martin Scorsese as “The Departed.” The Hong Kong comedy is entitled, sublimely, “Love is a Many Stupid Thing.”

But here in “Ab-normal Beauty” the sisters are terrific. They are both quite lovely, but neither of them relies on looks to win our affection. More often than not, they appear just like students, attractive but not made-up or dressed to kill. They sell the friendship and, on another level of unease, the more-than-friendship convincingly. Jas is not just the disposable friend of the protagonist about whom we really don’t care too much. She works her way into our affection as completely as does the character with the interesting problem.

So many American horror films are concerned almost exclusively with dying and dying badly. “Ab-normal Beauty” is about preferring a bad death to an even worse life.

"Putting Pants on Philip" (1927)

2007-08-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

The first dialogue card in “Putting Pants on Philip” (1927) informs us that we are about to see “The story of a Scotch lad who came to America to hunt for a Columbian half-dollar -- his grandfather lost it in 1893,” but that’s not what the film is really about.

Yes, Stan Laurel is Philip, fresh off the ship from Scotland, but the printed narration is a diversion. The real joke is Philip’s kilt. You’ll be relieved to know that he does sport underwear beneath. We know because at one point, he loses them.

This two-reel farce has frequently been billed as the first Laurel and Hardy picture, but that’s misleading, too. They’d appeared in over a dozen shorts together by the time this one was shot. If anything, PPOP is the first time they were beginning to develop the characters we know as The Boys. We see the famous nitwit duo here only in flashes. There are times when we can actually see them thinking.

Stanley is much more aggressive in the film, and Ollie is more dapper and capable of living in the real world. But is this the real world? The street scenes, of which there are plenty, look like a mid-sized, middle class area of Los Angeles or one of its near neighbors, but if Philip has just arrived by ocean liner from Scotland, he wouldn’t be docking on the west coast.

Of course, no subliminal message was intended by the filmmakers--it’s just the usual marriage of convenience and economics—but it presages the moments of mini-surrealism for which Laurel’s gags would become famous.

We open on the Hon. Piedmont Mumblethunder (Hardy), who is waiting on the docks to meet his sister’s son, Philip, arriving from Scotland. We see that sis has sent a letter by way of introduction and she warns her brother (hereafter called Hardy because if I have to type Mumblethunder too many times I may just forget the whole thing) that Philip (Laurel) has but one weakness—women.

Philip disembarks with another Scotsman, and the ship's doctor (an uncredited Sam Lufkin) insists on giving him a quick physical. As the doc probes and gropes him and tries to search his hair for lice or worms, the crowd on the pier begins giggling. This crowd includes Hardy who, despite the fact that he knows he’s meeting a Scot and Laurel is wearing a kilt, pities the poor sucker who's stuck with meeting his nitwit. Ollie's slow realization who the sucker is, is vintage Oliver Hardy.

Other than the kilt, there is no joke in their appearance. Hardy is in a natty sports coat and boater. Laurel is wearing a tam, but both of them have clothes that are clean and well-fitted, unlike the tight suits that Hardy will later adopt.

Pulling his nephew away from the chortling crowd, Hardy asks Laurel what he wants to do, when SHE (Dorothy Coburn, uncredited) walks by—and She is a leggy flapper with bobbed hair and a pert attitude. Laurel, instantly smitten, delivers the first of many scissor-jumps and Hardy has to grab him to keep him from pursuing her.

Walking down the street, Hardy insists that Laurel stays several steps behind him as he is an influential citizen and he doesn't want anyone to see him strolling along with a man in what looks like a dress. Every time Laurel catches up to him, he links arms with his uncle and the following crowd erupts in laughter. When Hardy asks a cop for help in keeping the crowd from ridiculing them, the cop laughs, too.

Then She passes by again, up jumps Laurel, and the chase is on. This time it ends with a slightly larger crowd gathered in the middle of the street. Hardy drags Philip away again, and as Laurel walks over an air vent in the sidewalk, his kilt flies up (a la Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch”). This happens a couple of times before Hardy moves him away from the vent. Laurel then decides to take a sniff of snuff and when he sneezes, his drawers, unnoticed by anyone, fall down.

Cut to the crowd. We can't see what happens to Laurel and his kilt, but several women pass out or move away in horror. Note that this action takes place in front of what I assume is a pub called "The Pink Pup." The boys could be risqué when it suited them. And it suited them more often than you may remember.

A passing stranger retrieves Laurel’s underwear—how times have changed—She returns, another scissor jump, more pursuit.

Hardy has had enough and he takes Laurel to a tailor to get him fitted for trousers. There is some foolery with measuring the inseam, with Laurel's reactions becoming more exaggerated each time. As the tailor (Harvey Clark, uncredited) becomes more and more frustrated, Hardy offers to help. Eventually, all three of them wind up rolling around on the floor.

Getting serious, Hardy removes his coat and follows Laurel through some curtains hanging in a doorway. He chases Laurel back and forth, the doorway being used as a frame for their action. Finally, Hardy emerges disheveled. His vest is pulled up and he has to straighten it. Then Laurel emerges, also mussed up. His tie is loosened. Here Laurel indulges in some superb silent face acting.

You can see his despair as his uncle has "undone" him. He has been seduced and betrayed. Laurel sits on a chair screen left, and Hardy stands beside him on his left. Their attitudes and expressions superbly parody melodrama of the she-is-more-to-be-pitied-than-censored variety.

The tailor brings them the pants, and Laurel goes into a dressing room to put them on. He sees HER legs pass by (he can see out a basement window at eye level), and he goes after her, still in kilt.

Once more, uncle, nephew and She end up together on the sidewalk. She has tried to slip unnoticed past the two men. She does get by them and when Laurel attempts pursuit once more, Hardy grabs him and, in an attempt to sooth his nephew's passion, asks him if he wants to meet the girl. Yes. Hardy strolls over to her as only he can stroll, and in that overly polite manner with which we will become familiar, is chatting her up when she thumps his nose and walks away.

She marches to the place where the sidewalk meets the street at an intersection. There is a large puddle in the street. Laurel rushes over to her, takes off his kilt and spreads it over the puddle. "An old Scottish custom," he tells her. She makes a quick leap over the kilt and puddle and we cut to her on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. She performs a scissor-jump, and walks away laughing.

Hardy comes up to Laurel, chortling. When Laurel bends to pick up his kilt, Hardy stops him with one of his grandiose gestures and indicates that he will go first. "An old American custom," he says. When he steps on the kilt, we see that it covered a waist-deep pit and Hardy goes completely under before re-emerging, soaked to the skin top to bottom. As he stands in the pit, chastened, a crowd comes running over, this time to laugh at him.

He has become what he least wanted to become.

The film’s pace is brisk and the jokes run the gamut from the expected to the oddball. Clyde Bruckman directs with a sure hand. Now remembered only by aficionados of early comedy, Bruckman was once at the forefront of screen farce. He worked again with Laurel and Hardy on “Battle of the Century,” and with W.C. Fields on “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” and “The Fatal Glass of Beer.” He’s the credited co-director with Buster Keaton of “The General,” and he made three talkies with Harold Lloyd.

The end was not kind. In 1955, after eating a meal in a restaurant that he could not pay for, he shot himself with a gun he’d borrowed from Keaton.

This film’s supervising director was Leo McCarey, who would win two directing Oscars. It was photographed by George Stevens, who would also go on to claim two Oscars for directing, and the intertitles were written by H.M. (Harley M. “Beany”) Walker, who wrote stories, titles and dialogue for 309 pictures.

Film historian William K. Everson once listed what each of the great movie clowns was best at, and he wrote that what The Boys did best was deliver more laughs per reel than anyone else. No sentimentalizing, no intellectualizing—just funny.

This is where it started, folks. This one’ll kilt ya.

"Tarzan of the Apes" (1918)

2007-08-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

I was right there for the big Edgar Rice Burroughs boom of the early 1960s. When I was 13 years old, no one could have convinced me that ERB wasn’t America’s greatest writer. And when the movies were in their adolescence, Burroughs first came to the screen in “Tarzan of the Apes,” directed by Scott Sidney, who directed 69 films before his death in 1928. No, you’ve never heard of any of the others.

The fact that you have heard of #33 on the list owes everything to its source novel and little to Sidney’s skill. If ever a director made a negligible contribution to a finished product, this is that director and this is that product. The film’s only memorable visuals are several shots in silhouette, presenting the central images as it they were interior illustrations from one of the pulp fiction magazines in which the Tarzan stories were first published. Other than that, the pictures are mostly dull, static medium shots, the acting is bombastic, and the plot has been stripped of any psychological interest it might have contained.

John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (True Boardman) sails to Africa to put a stop to the Arab slave trade there. Accompanying him is his wife Alice (Kathleen Kirkham). A mutiny occurs on their ship and the two passengers are set ashore on a jungle coast. One of the sailors, Binns (George B. French) argues with the mutineers for their safety, but he is ignored and later returns to England.

Lord and Lady Greystoke build a small cabin but they soon succumb to the rigors of their castaway status. Alice dies in childbirth and John soon follows her. In death, not childbirth.

In a cross story, Kala, the great ape, loses her child. She hears the young Greystoke heir crying for food. Curious, Kala enters the hut and, seeing the helpless human baby, exchanges the corpse of her own infant for the human. Named Tarzan by his adopted family of apes, the boy has no idea that he is any different from his primate clan until as a boy he sees his reflection in a pool of water.

Here it’s time to pause and point something out to the movie trivia buffs. Elmo Lincoln, who plays the adult Tarzan in this picture, is not the first actor to essay the role. The boy actor who portrays the young ape man is Gordon Griffith and he is actually the first screen Tarzan. He’s also more energetic and convincing than Lincoln. Keep his name in mind and you can win some bar bets with it.

So Tarzan finds the ruined hut of his parents, with its picture books and, more importantly, a knife. He discovers the use this tool has and suddenly he is as dangerous as any of his primate fellows.

Back in England, the guilt-heavy Binns convinces a group of Greystoke’s relatives and a party of scientists to travel to Africa on a rescue mission. Remarkably enough, they land on the coast just where John and Alice had been abandoned and find the cabin. One of the group, Greystoke’s nephew (Colin Kenny) proposes to the young woman Jane Porter (Enid Markey), but she rejects his affections. In a rage, he makes to attack her. The adult Tarzan reaches through the cabin’s window, grabs the young man, and shakes him.

As if the tale up to this point hasn’t been melodramatic enough, the movie explodes from here like a bombshell packed with implausibilities. They are all pure Burroughs, but reading them doesn’t create the same urge to head-scratch and grin stupidly as the seeing them enacted by third-rate thespians. Binns is captured by Arab slave traders, and escapes, and teaches Tarzan the basics of readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic. Jane is captured by the local native tribe, the leader of which smiles like Gene Simmons and has to be taught his place by the White Lord of the Jungle. Jane is rescued but then is just as terrified by the hulking Tarzan as she has been by everything else that crawls, growls, flies, swims, bites, or has rape on its mind.

She will come to appreciate Tarzan’s manly and noble qualities, of course. “His great love’s courage shielded her from all harm,” a title card reads. Yeah, that and his knife. Lincoln actually killed a lion when it got a little too rambunctious during one of the wrestling scenes. The producers had it stuffed and it made the publicity tour.

All this jungle jive comes from Burroughs’ novel, there’s no denying that. ERB’s imagination always operated at the most elementary level. Hell, the man died in 1950 while reading a comic book in bed. But one approaches a Burroughs book—at least, one does the second time—with an expectation of the wildest kind of escape-and-capture pop fiction. The author’s magic lay in the fact that he could make the most absurd fantasy seem possible for the length of time it takes to read the book.

Movies can do the very same thing, but this “Tarzan of the Apes” doesn’t pull it off. Everything about it is pedestrian at best. If it had been made 20 years later, you’d swear it had been cobbled together from bits and pieces of other movies. There is no cohesion.

You can overlook the guys from the New Orleans Athletic Club who donned grotesquely inadequate ape costumes to play the tribe of Kala, knowing that nothing else could have been done in 1918. But Lincoln doesn’t look right. Hell, he’s not even tanned. (Truly frightening is the report that Clark Gable was considered for the part for the 1932 version that eventually starred Johnny Weissmuller. Gable was deemed too unknown. Whew. Hollywood.)

“Tarzan of the Apes” should be seen by fans of the character and lovers of silent movies, but be warned that it is impossible to take it seriously. One always hopes that a silent film can be approached in the spirit of its times and enjoyed as more modern pictures are, but this one, unfortunately, will only generate condescending laughter. Too bad. That magnificent pop genius Edgar Rice Burroughs deserves a better adaptation. Thank goodness he later received it.

"The Mask of Fu Manchu" (1932)

2007-08-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

Ravening hordes of (gasp, choke) ORIENTALS are amassing in Asia with but one goal—to take over the world. Wait, make that two goals: take over the world and despoil white women while they do it.

Yes, it’s the pulp-infected world of Sax Rohmer brought to the screen for the 27th time by 1932, when “The Mask of Fu Manchu” was unleashed by MGM. Rohmer’s trashy but surprisingly readable novels and stories have provided the basis for over three dozen films, serials, and TV programs (Stephen King has him beat by over 50 titles, but King may not have the staying power.).

There are powerful stirrings in the East and British authorities fear that if a potent symbol of Oriental unity is discovered—say, oh, the legendary lost mask of Genghis Khan—unstoppable waves of the Yellow Peril will flow over the West and Civilization As We Know It will be submerged for generations to come.

Note right off the bat that the mask of Fu Manchu is really the mask of Genghis Khan, but we can’t let little things like that stand in the way of a good time.

Anyway, Scotland Yard worries that the mask could fall into the hands of the arch fiend, the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Devil Doctor, Chinese genius, doctor of philosophy, medicine, theology, and just about every other damn thing you could be a doctor of, so top cop of the Empire, Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) is sent to find the mask first.

That last sentence was long enough so I didn’t add the parenthetical thought “before James Bond” to the idea of the top cop, but the relationship isn’t that far off base. Watch Nayland Smith and Fu Manchu try to outwit each other and then think about Bond and Dr. No. You’ll see what I mean.

Okay, so Nayland Smith sets out with a team from the British Museum to find the mask and bring it back to London while Fu Manchu and his “insignificant daughter” Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy) want to use it to encourage their followers to take over the western world.

To this end, they lie, cheat, steal, murder, kidnap and torture (she’s especially fond of this as the pain of men brings her at least to the point of orgasm).

What happens will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever sniffed the pungent aroma of decaying pulp magazines, and whether or not you enjoy the journey to film’s conclusion will depend greatly on your appreciation of or tolerance for 1930s melodrama that is more camp than a field full of tents.

“The Mask of Fu Manchu” was one of nine pictures Boris Karloff made in 1932, and the evil genius was his first horror movie role after “Frankenstein” the previous year. He and Loy, 18 years his junior, are famously on record as saying that neither of them could take anything about the film seriously, and many’s the take that was ruined when one of the other of them got a fit a giggles over the script’s ludicrous dialogue.

As a general rule, that kind of insistent corpsing (theatrical slang for laughing on stage during serious moments) is amusing for about five minutes and then becomes a pain in the ass, but none of Karloff’s and Loy’s incredulous amusement wound up on the screen.

Which is not to say that you can’t see any of it. Both of them try so hard to sell their characters’ villainy it must be because they know that if they can’t make themselves believe in their own decadence, no one else will, either. They snarl, they leer, they open their eyes as wide as Cecil Holland’s slant-eyed makeup will let them. Karloff waves his opulent fingernails gracefully and Loy quivers with the expectation of torturing white men before turning them into sexual playthings.

The film is an acquired taste, but once acquired it becomes a cornucopia of period movie delights. Truly is it said that some pictures you come to love not in spite of their weaknesses, but because of them.

Most films that have aged this badly have disappeared. This one survives because it has Karloff in it. Loy is always a plus, and it’s a treat to see her in one of her pre-“Thin Man” exotic vamp roles, but most of the movies in which she played the wicked seductress have gone to that great celluloid recycling dump in the sky.

Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books have managed, just barely, to stay in print, but the interest of readers alone wouldn’t have kept a movie this dated alive and on television for over 70 years.
No, I suspect it’s Karloff’s presence combined with Cedric Gibbons’ simple but evocative art direction—and the repeated reproduction of curiosity-inducing stills from the film in early 1960s issues of “Famous Monsters of Filmland”—that have kept this one’s pulse thumping.
“The Mask of Fu Manchu” is still entertaining, even if, for most viewers, it’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, it remains today what it always was: a pretty lousy movie.

But if you still get a kick, or even a small thrill, from “Doctor. X,” “The Mystery of the Wax Museum,” or “The Vampire Bat,” and you can overlook the painful stereotypes and clichés that make up the Yellow Peril subgenre, Rohmer’s criminal genius may be able to cast his spell on you.

"Freaks" (1932)

2007-08-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

“Freaks” is a movie that has to be seen more than once. It generates a kaleidoscope of reactions when seen for the first time, and it’s impossible to sort them all out. A single viewing will overwhelm you emotionally, but it takes repeated visits to this surreal masterpiece to determine an intellectual response.

It’s a movie that's rich with anecdotes. One has Irving Thalberg, the film’s uncredited producer, telling director Tod Browning that he wanted to make the horror movie to end all horror movies, and then saying, when he saw the finished product, “Well, I asked for it and I got it.”

One story has it that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was under contract as a writer at MGM when the picture was made, bolted from the studio commissary and threw-up when the unusual cast came in for lunch. Another version has it that Fitzgerald felt more at ease with the cast of “Freaks” than he did with the studio big shots and so sat with them and lunched at their table.

Some say that Tod Browning exploited the cast (only Olga Roderick, the Bearded Lady, went on record later as saying she regretted her participation in the production) while others claim that Browning, a former circus and sideshow man himself, befriended the performers and set them up for life by turning them into international celebrities.

One thing is certain: no other Hollywood movie has ever generated legends like these.

As the story opens, we are moving slowly through a sideshow. The indoor talker, who bears a striking resemblance to Tod Browning, begins to tell his audience the back story of the show’s most unusual attraction. He and his audience gather around to top of a walled pit from the interior of which a light is shining up. Then we slip into the past . . .

A well-tailored dwarf named Hans (Harry Earles, who had worked with Browning in the silent version of “The Unholy Three”) is engaged to Frieda, another dwarf (Daisy Earles, Harry’s sister in real life). Despite his betrothal to Frieda, Hans is smitten by Cleopatra, the circus’ star aerialist (Olga Baclanova). Cleopatra encourages the little man’s attentions because he is willing to loan her money and buy her presents.

Cleo’s casual cruelty is the talk of the circus. Everyone knows that she is playing Hans for a sucker except Hans, who continues to harbor the delusion that she likes him.

Unknown to Hans, Cleo is actually romantically involved with Hercules, the strong man (Henry Victor). We first see Hercules as he wrestles a bull, the animal’s horns representing both the phallus and the traditional crown of the cuckold.

Finally, Frieda confronts Cleopatra and begs the big woman to leave Hans alone. She lets slip that Hans has inherited a fortune and we can see on Cleo’s face that she decides to change her amused encouragement of the little man to a determined attempt to woo him. She soon maneuvers Hans into a proposal, which she accepts with a plan to poison him and steal his money.

The wedding feast provides the background for the film’s most celebrated and quoted scene. Cleopatra, Hercules, the freaks and the other normals with the circus who have befriended them are gathered around a large table under the big top. Cleo and Hercules think the event is one huge joke, knowing as they do what they intend for Hans.

But then another dwarf stands on the table and brings a loving cup to everyone gathered. They each take a sip while chanting the words that make Cleopatra a member of their community--“Gooble gobble, we accept her, one of us.” When the loving cup is thrust toward Cleopatra she rises, the full horror of what they’re saying dawning on her. “You. Dirty. Slimy. Freaks!” she screams, stilling the crowd.

Obviously, the party is over and soon the only ones left at the table are Hercules, Cleopatra and Hans. The drunken strong man lifts Hans from his bench and puts him on Cleo’s shoulders telling the woman to give her new husband a horsey ride back to his wagon.

Hans soon falls ill, but the freaks have overheard the plotting of Hercules and Cleopatra. Off screen they tell Hans what his wife and her lover are up to and one dark stormy night the freaks take their revenge.

The film ends back at the indoor sideshow. A woman looks down into the pit and screams. Then Browning shows us the nature of the freak’s revenge. Cleopatra is now a freak herself, the Human Duck Woman. Legless and covered with feathers, she stands on her hands and emits quacking sounds.

Absurd? Oh yeah. Effective? You better believe it.

An overview of the plot, which is a standard morality/revenge tale, does nothing to prepare you for viewing the film. The cadre of freaks is made up of dwarfs, microcephalics (referred to in the movie as “pinheads”), Siamese twins, people who are armless and legless—and in one case, both—a bearded lady, an hermaphrodite, and persons the description of whom are beyond my vocabulary.

The characters play their reaction to the sideshow performers several ways. Some of the normals abuse them. Some are casually cruel and some are deliberately so. Other normals befriend the freaks. Wallace Ford and Leila Hyams are Phroso the clown (a name used by Lon Chaney in Browning’s silent “West of Zanzibar,” also with a circus background) and Venus, the bareback rider, who, while sometimes a bit patronizing, are intended to represent acceptance.

More problematic is Browning’s attitude as evidenced in the film. We first see the freaks, described as “children” although several of them are anything but, frolicking on a picnic. As they skip around in a circle they look all the world as if Browning wanted to parody the fairies in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Of course, Max Reinhardt’s film of that play wouldn’t be made for another three years, but the suggestion of Arcadian fantasy turned into a sick joke is inescapable.

In fact, any joke involving the freaks must come across as black humor. One of the Siamese twins, Daisy Hilton, is married to a clown (Roscoe Ates) and the second twin, Violet, becomes engaged. The two men ask each other to bring their wives over for a visit.

But sometimes the joke is used to suggest that there isn’t much difference between one world and another. We first meet the half-man/half-woman Joseph Josephine as s/he strolls between the wagons and Roscoe is changing out of the costume of a Roman lady. The male/female combination is emphasized.

And occasionally the humor is just as bizarre as the visuals. When Phroso comforts Venus, who has just broken up with her boyfriend, she tells him, “Say, you’re a pretty good kid.” “You’re darn right,” he responds. “You should have caught me before my operation.” Whatever that may mean.

There really isn’t much of horror in this horror movie, although there is a lot of unease beginning when the freaks figure out that Hercules and Cleopatra intend to murder Hans. Everywhere the big woman turns, there are two or three of her unusual enemies watching from the shadows.

Things turn more grotesque during the climactic storm when the wagons carrying Cleopatra and Hercules tip over in the mud. One of the little men throws a knife at the strong man, dropping him and allowing several more freaks to attack him. Cleopatra rushes off into the woods before she is brought down.

Originally, Browning intended a tree to fall on Cleo, thereby giving the freaks the opportunity they need to carve her up. Hercules was supposed to be seen in the epilog singing like a counter-tenor, having been emasculated. As the film now stands, Hercules is last seen being swarmed under. Only Cleopatra survives to become truly, “one of us.”

But perhaps as shocking and horrifying as the appearance of the freaks to audiences of 1932 is the film’s sexual innuendo. Cleopatra is blatantly sexual. When Hercules comes to her wagon, she offers to cook some eggs for him. She turns to him, puts her hands on her hips, thrusts her breasts toward him and asks, theoretically about the eggs, “How do you like them?”

Pre-code audiences were used to stuff like that, but they hadn’t been exposed, in mainstream films at least, to the necessity of public sex when Siamese twins cohabitate with their husbands. The idea of a dwarf and a “big woman” having a sexual relationship can still generate some ribald snickering, but there’s undeniably off-putting in the mental image as well.

Part of this problem springs from the tragic gut-feeling that the freaks are somehow less than human, a delusion that the movie tries so hard to correct. But the question is: can it? Can any film move audiences completely beyond the unwanted and unwarranted notion that there is something unnaturally wrong with people who look so different?

Browning’s camera jumps in and out, and tracks with the movement of the characters with a freedom he had rarely allowed himself previously. But during those last moments, when the freaks wreak their vengeance, the camera stands still, their faces lunging at us in close-up, and even the most sensitive ones among us are likely to push backward in our seats to put as much distance as possible between us and the grotesque image on the screen.

“The Boogie Man Will Get You” (1942)

2007-07-30T10:19:00.000-07:00

There is one comic bit of surreal silliness in TBMWGY that endears it to my heart. Peter Lorre stars as Dr. Lorentz, who is town coroner, sheriff, mayor, justice of the peace, and just about everything else. He is the grandest of grand Pooh-Bahs. He wears a black frock coat and stiff hat with a short crown and wide, circular brim. And he never goes anywhere without putting a Siamese kitten in his inside coat pocket.

Fortunately, no explanation is ever offered for this nuttiness, nor is the kitten ever to put to any use—not even as a paperweight, as is the one in “You Can’t Take It With You.”

Boris Karloff is Lorre’s co-star. King Karloff plays Prof. Nathaniel Billings, a crazed but amiable scientist who works in a “B” movie lab in the cellar of a rapidly fading colonial inn. He uses traveling salesmen in his experiments, attempting to—it’s been a week since I last saw this movie and damned if I can remember what it is Prof. Billings is trying to do. Doesn’t matter. It’s just silly.

His money running short, Billings sells the inn to perky Winnie Slade (Miss Jeff Donnell), who wants to turn the place into a working hotel. She is followed by her ex-husband Bill Layden (Larry Parks) who wants to talk her out of the deal but then decides to stick around, Nancy Drew style, to uncover The Secret of the Old Inn.

Assisting the professor as house and groundskeepers are Amelia and Ebenezer (Maude Eburn and George McKay), she obsessed with the chickens she doesn’t have and he with being mysterious.

When Bill stumbles over what he takes to be a corpse in the basement, he calls the local police and Lorentz shows up. By the time the official gets to the inn, the body is missing.

From this point on, the action is farcical, nothing makes much sense and it doesn’t matter.

Karloff and Lorre seem to be having a good time spoofing the kinds of films they were better known for, although my teeth starting grinding every time Karloff had to stoop and pick up a corpse—he had severe back problems from “Frankenstein” on. Parks, who later became one of the actors most damaged by HUAC when he admitted to having belonged to a Communist cell from 1941 to 1945, is boyish and was undoubtedly held in adoring awe by junior high girls. Donnell, whose second film this was, continued as a “B” movie queen until she moved to TV in the mid-1950s. And “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom adds his trademark air of punchdrunk je ne sais quoi.

The movie was directed by Lew Landers, who followed Donnell’s career path and ended up directing over 150 “B” films and TV shows. He’d partnered with Karloff on “The Raven” in 1935. Landers (who worked under his birth name--Louis Friedlander—for his first 9 pictures, 1934-36) is one of the few guys in Hollywood who turned out so much product with so little inspiration. Only Bela Lugosi’s over-the-top raving and Karloff’s understated masochism in “The Raven” give that sole Landers’ effort a chance at immortality.

As for TBMWGY, well, this one is for old school horroristas on holiday and small children who want to see “a scary movie” that isn’t really scary at all.

"The Raven" (1935)

2007-07-27T06:36:00.000-07:00

At the pinnacle of his insanity in “The Raven” Bela Lugosi, as the mad surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin, screams out, “Poe, you are avenged!” But who will avenge Poe for the misuse of his name in this monster mish-mash of mad scientist, torture chamber, haunted house, and ugly-faced butler clichés?

When the first pairing of Karloff and Lugosi in “The Black Cat” (1934) turned out to be a hit, Universal concocted a story “suggested by Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal classic” “The Raven.” Unfortunately, the new script, credited onscreen to David Boehm alone, although there were seven other contributors, including Dore Schary and Guy Endore, was one of the most insipid from Universal’s golden age of horror.

Lugosi is Dr. Vollin, whose reputation as a brilliant surgeon proves to be more a curse than a blessing. When Jean (Irene Ware), the daughter of Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) crashes her car and her life is in the balance, the young woman’s doctors tell her father that Vollin is the only man who can save her life. Vollin has given up his practice to devote himself to research and at first refuses to help. Thatcher plays on his vanity and Vollin agrees to operate.

Within a matter of weeks, Jean is up and perfectly well again. Vollin misreads her gratitude as passion and determines to wed her. Thatcher, at first thinking like Vollin that Jean loves him, tries to dissuade the older physician from encouraging her attentions. When he realizes that it’s Vollin who is doing the chasing, he become horrified and warns the doctor to keep away.

The good-natured Jean, who is a ballerina, choreographs a dance called “The Spirit of Poe”—dressed in a costume that makes her look like a Margaret Brundage “Weird Tales” cover girl--to show her appreciation to Vollin, who is such a admirer of the writer’s that he has created life-sized replicas of the torture devices mentioned in Poe’s tales.

Discovering the extent of Vollin’s fanboyism is one of those hold-the-phone moments. This is a man who boasts about building and owning working torture devices and no one appears to find it in the least peculiar. Books, okay. Miniatures, okay. But a full-sized pit and pendulum set-up? “Death is my talisman,” he says. He first saw Jean lying still as death on the operating table, as good a stand-in for a morgue slab as the wealthy necrophile can find.

Paging Dr. Krafft-Ebing—call for Dr. Krafft-Ebing.

Now it’s time for Karloff to make his entrance into the story. He is Edmond Bateman, on the lam from the law after shooting his way out of prison and killing two policemen in the process. He’s also shoved a burning acetylene torch in some fella’s face, pretty much on a whim. Yes, he’s the one we end up feeling sorry for, which just goes to show what a fiend Vollin is.

Bateman is in some kind of dive or speakeasy. We can’t hear what’s being told to him, but we find out later that he is in search of a doctor who can alter his face enough to avoid recapture. He goes calling on Vollin.

Why? When a killer needs a crooked doctor, why does Vollin’s name enter the conversation? Vollin agrees to help Bateman when he gets the idea that if he makes the escaped con look ugly, he will be more apt to perform ugly acts. Vollin takes Bateman to his hidden operating room and reassures the con that a simple operation on the nerve endings of his face will alter his appearance, and it will take only ten minutes. The desperate Bateman agrees.

When the bandages are removed we see that the right side of Bateman’s face has been altered, but not for the better. Thanks to an uncredited Jack Pierce, Karloff’s face seems to have been melted. The actor completes the image by tipping his head slightly to the right, as if the neck muscles could no longer hold it upright. He hunches his shoulders forwards to create a stooped, hunched look.

Bateman first sees his new face in a series of mirrors that have been installed around the walls of the circular room. Each is behind a curtain, and the curtains are drawn one by one revealing a curved line of reflections. The moment is effective, but the question arises, why would Vollin have such a place in his house unless he’s made a hobby of distorting people’s faces and then forcing them to stare at repeated images of their new ugliness.

From this point on the film becomes more and more a reflection of Vollin’s mind, and as such it becomes less and less sane. The doctor lures Jean, her father, and her fiancé to the house for a weekend party—along with two other couples of such lesser importance it is difficult to fathom why they invited along unless they represent a plot development that was cut from the final film.

But now the house, with its secret doorways, hidden torture chamber, steel shutters, and traps in the floor, becomes huge. There is no end to the torture chamber, which goes on forever into the shadows.

Vollin straps Judge Thatcher—named as he is for a representative of solid American respectability and sanity in “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”—onto a slab under the swinging pendulum, and he locks Jean and her fiancé (Lester Matthews) into a steel-walled chamber that will crush them to death.

Vollin and Bateman have the inevitable falling out over the girl’s fate and only those who deserve a horrible death receive one.

There are two attractions to “The Raven.” One is the pairing of its two stars, both of whom are credited at the film’s opening by their last names only. They are still working well together although Lugosi’s over the top hysterical mania is less convincing than Karloff’s soft-spoken, hesitant, almost reluctant murderousness and masochism.

The film’s second pleasure is its heedless rush to barking madness. Director Louis Friedlander’s (later billed as Lew Landers) lack of restraint stands out in a field that has since given us “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” as the benchmark of cinematic no-holds-barred lunacy.

“The Raven” is a 12-year old boy’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe, all they-think-I’m-crazy-but-I’ll-show-them-how-sane-I-am-heh-heh-heh screeching and posturing. It’s not possible to take it seriously, nor is it in the least frightening at the visceral level. But it is fun and, taken with “The Black Cat,” it makes a nice showcase for its two leads.

"Dodsworth" (1936)

2007-07-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

Adapted from Sinclair Lewis’ satirical novel by playwright Sidney Howard (“Gone With the Wind”) and directed by three-time Oscar winner William Wyler (“Mrs. Miniver,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Ben-Hur”),” Dodsworth” is one of the forgotten treasures of American film. Walter Huston and Ruth Chatterton star as Sam Dodsworth and his wife Fran, two middle-aged Americans vacationing in Europe. Sam, a recently retired auto parts manufacturer, is the man he’s always been, but Fran is in the midst of a mid-life crisis and is terrified of growing old. As old world gigolos start following her around, her capacity for self-deception becomes boundless and Sam drifts into the orbit of Mrs. Cortwright (a luminous Mary Astor), an American ex-patriot living in Italy.

Chatterton’s performance is particularly gripping as Fran is foolish, vain, and delusional. The actress was 43 when she took on the role and her film career was almost finished, but she made of the self-destructive pseudo-sophisticate the kind of woman whose sad, lonely future is pitiable but her own fault just the same.

Astor, who won the Supporting Actress Oscar for “The Great Lie” in 1942, is probably best remembered for her role as the duplicitous, creepy Bridget O’Shaughnessy in “The Maltese Falcon,” but if Bridget exists in a middle-earth between camp over-acting and a total contempt for the intelligence of Bogart’s Sam Spade, Edith Cortright is the nearly perfect woman for a man like Sam Dodsworth. She says she’s living in Italy because it’s less expensive than living in the states, and yet she appears to have enough money to cross the Atlantic in style whenever she wants to. There seems to be something sad in her background, and yet she’s getting over it. Cortright/Astor’s face in the film’s last shot is radiant and nearly as memorable as Chaplin’s at the conclusion of “City Lights.”

When you see enough of Walter Huston’s movies—“The Virginian,” “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy”—you’ll lament again over the way Hollywood takes its great character actors for granted. He won the National Board of Review’s Best Actor award for “Dodsworth,” copped the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” and supplied a nifty in-joke, uncredited cameo to “The Maltese Falcon.” In this picture, he brings an underplayed seriousness and melancholy to Sam Dodsworth, matching Chatterton’s edgy tension with a quiet understanding that is heartbreaking.

When the 70-year old “Dodsworth” was showcased at the Telluride Film Festival in 2006, the festival program planners called it “a redemptive tale of American self-revulsion and the quest for eternal youth,” and said of it that it is “a high point of Wyler’s fruitful, 20-year-long partnership with producer Samuel Goldwyn. “Dodsworth” proves that sharp-witted, literate films never go out of style.”

"Savage Pastimes" (2005)

2007-05-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Revealed wisdom is that violent entertainment, whether via TV, movies, comics, video games or books, is bad for children. In fact, most people assume that too much of it will turn kids into felons at the drop of a Stetson with a bullet hole in it.

Not so, says literature professor Harold Schechter, who spends his afternoons teaching 19th century American lit at Queens College in New York and his mornings writing crime novels starring Edgar Allan Poe, or drop dead readable mass market true crime books on the lives and careers of serial killers.

His message in "Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment" is, not only is contemporary pop culture not more violent than it used to be, it’s actually less violent—and even if it were just as violent, that would be a good thing. Following Gerard Jones’ 2002 book "Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, "Schechter makes a strong case in favor of the idea that humans are just too near, in evolutionary terms, dropping down from the tree or crawling out of the swamp to be completely civilized. We need the outlet of violent entertainment to keep from being violent in fact.

“One of the main functions of the popular arts,” he writes, “is precisely to supply us with fantasies of violence, to allow us to vent—safely, in a controlled, socially acceptable, vicarious way—those ‘undying primal impulses which, however outmoded by civilization, need somehow to be expressed’ (as Leslie Fiedler puts it).”

Most of the book is spent conveying anecdotal evidence (not too convincing) and in relating the history of violent entertainment through the ages (very eye-opening.) There was a time, he tells us, that even the church used the latest special effects technology to make medieval mystery plays gruesomely spectacular.

“No celebration of Christian martyrdom would be complete without at least one fiery immolation—a requirement satisfied in The Acts of the Apostles by the burning of St. Barnabas. For added verisimilitude, the stand-in dummy was stuffed with animal entrails. As the figure blazed, the offal spilled onto the stage. By this clever means ‘the stench of roasting flesh complement[ed] the sight of the body being consumed by the flame.”

This is stuff even Mel Gibson didn’t think of.

None of Schechter’s ideas are exactly new. He quotes Edmund Burke’s 1757 tract on the Sublime and Beautiful to the effect that the citizens of his day would rather watch a real execution than an imitation one performed by the best actors.

The good thing, Schechter believes, is that we have become civilized enough to happily settle for the imitation. This is why he says that modern pop culture violence is considerably less than it used to be. We may still execute criminals, but at least we don’t do it in public.

Quoting critic George Stade, Schechter writes that “People are fascinated by representations of murder because, in the first place, they want to kill someone and, in the second, they won’t. Surely one function of narrative is to allow in the imagination what we forbid in the flesh.”

Schechter has little use for the professionally outraged, those letters to the editor writers who see damaged young psyches behind every thumb and forefinger bent to form an imaginary gun.

“The problem with moral crusaders,” he writes, “is an almost willful blindness to the fundamental realities of human behavior, accompanied by a sweeping ignorance of cultural history that prevents them from seeing supposedly unique manifestations of modern depravity for what they really are—i.e., simply the latest versions of perennial phenomena.

“The pattern is always the same. A new medium of mass entertainment comes along that is aimed at—or embraced primarily by—kids and the working class. Very quickly, high-minded reformers begin to denounce it as a sign of social decay, a corrupter of the young, a threat to the very existence of civilization as we know it.”

Schechter doesn’t follow through on the key concept here—that it is not just the children that “need to be protected,” but the less-smart-than-we members of the working class that also need the guidance of people who demonize pop culture, schools and libraries, and then heroically volunteer to step in and solve the problem only they saw in the first place.

Certainly many moral reformers are concerned with morals—but many others see these “problems” as a means of gaining political control.

"Savage Pastimes" is clumsily edited, with names misspelled and words repeated in sentences. If Schechter wanted the book to be used in classrooms, he should have done a little more scientific research and relied on anecdotes, but as an introduction to the, for some, heretical notion that violent entertainment is as inevitable as violence itself—and a lot less destructive—this is a good place to start.

"West of Zanzibar" (1928)

2007-05-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

Lurid. Now there’s a word you don’t see very often.

And that’s a shame because it calls to mind some images and feelings that, if you didn’t use the word, would require complete sentences to convey. Plus, how can you write about the Tod Browning/Lon Chaney film collaborations without using the term “lurid melodrama”? Maybe you can do it, but you’ll be sweating blood before you’re through.

“West of Zanzibar” and “The Unknown” are the most lurid of the team’s productions, and among the most lurid mainstream Hollywood movies of all time. In the former, Chaney stars as Phroso (a name re-used by Browning in “Freaks”), a vaudeville magician in a baggy clown costume. As we watch Phroso perform what will become his signature trick—making a woman disappear from a coffin-shaped box standing upright on the stage—Chaney emphasizes a comic way of moving. He shuffles along, then stops to look back over his shoulder at us in the audience.

Browning, an old carnie veteran himself, cuts to the rear of the coffin so we can see how the trick is done, with a revolving back panel that allows Anna, Phroso’s wife (Jacqueline Gadsden—her name has also been given as Jacqueline Hart and Jacqueline Daly; such is fame in the movies) to exit the box while a skeleton swings around as a substitution.

Backstage after the performance Anna reveals to the magician that she is leaving him to run away with Crane, a dealer in ivory (Lionel Barrymore). Phroso pleads his case but gets into a shoving match with Crane, who causes the performer to lose his balance and fall from the second story onto a table below.

Over a year passes and we rejoin Phroso. As a result of the fall, he has lost the use of his legs and now gets around by scooting himself along on a board with wheels under it. He receives a message that Anna has returned with a baby and that he can find them at a church. He rolls up to the altar where Anna lies dead. The baby girl sits next to her.

From here we jump forward eighteen years. Phroso, now known as “Dead-Legs,” has moved to equatorial Africa where he lives with Doc, an alcoholic physician (Warner Baxter) and two factotums, Tiny (Roscoe Ward) and Babe (Kalla Pasha).

Phroso has changed, and not for the better. His head has been shaved and he dons stubble on his face and pate. He has become hardened and cruel, berating his companions—especially Doc—and treating the natives, who regard him with some awe because of his reliance on stage magic, like slaves. It must be said that Browning’s depiction of native Africans is far from sympathetic. They are cowardly, childlike, and brutal, and are only in the film to provide an unreasoning danger always ready to break out.

Anna’s baby, Maizie, is not part of this uber-dysfunctional family. Phroso, despising her for her entire life as the offspring of his unfaithful wife and Crane, has shipped her off to be raised in a brothel/dive in Zanzibar. As you can see, I didn’t emphasize the word “lurid” for nothing.

But now Maizie has grown into a surprisingly innocent young woman (the beautiful but unfortunate Mary Nolan), and Phroso has sent Tiny to retrieve her with the promise that she can finally meet her father. Tiny, pretending to be a missionary, brings her back to Phroso’s camp, where the crippled man treats her like dirt. He gives her clothing to the native women, he makes her eat off the floor, he humiliates her however he can and gets her addicted to alcohol. Tiny and Babe act as if this bizarre behavior is perfectly normal, but Doc, smitten with her beauty and decency, wants to rescue her.

Just as we come to assume that Maizie’s fate is to be reduced to sub-human status by Dead-Legs’ sadism, we, along with the girl, witness a native ceremony and learn that whenever an important male in the village dies, he is cremated along with his wife or daughter. Then we learn that Crane is in the area trading for ivory, and all becomes clear.

Dead-Legs has been hijacking Crane’s goods and deliberately letting him know how he can be found. Crane shows up to deliver a warning to desist. The relative hierarchy of whiles over blacks is made clear as Crane is carried over a mud puddle by his native workers so he can avoid staining his white trousers.

When he meets Dead-Legs and realizes who he is, Crane slaps his hands together and lets out a whoop of joy. As cruel as the man in the wheelchair, he takes pleasure in his old rival’s devolution into a crawling, sweat-stained creature of the jungle. When Dead-Legs introduces him to Maizie, the old magician rejoices in his brutal treatment of the young woman. Crane himself thinks Phroso is keeping the girl as his mistress and gets a kick from what he must see as a sado-masochistic ménage.

To continue discussing the film’s plot at this point would reveal some of its secrets. It’s a relatively short picture and the final reel speeds by. Perhaps the movie’s brevity is the result of material censored from the final cut. Scenes of Phroso’s dehumanization were excised—him begging for money and being beaten, as well as the debasement of being forced to work as a carnival geek (his employment as a human duck was re-used by Browning in “Freaks”). Shocking as these scenes would have been in 1928, their inclusion would have gone a long way toward explaining the man that Phroso becomes. Without them, the extremity of his hatred of Maizie seems bizarre, but it is what makes the film more than just a sordid revenge tale.

“West of Zanzibar” exists beyond reason. Its ferocity is akin to that of the most hideous Jacobean revenge tragedies, crossing the border at times that separates horror from black humor. The screen practically drips with sweat, and madness seems to be the norm.

Chaney’s performance is remarkable, and not just on the physical level. Dead-Legs is a masterpiece of evil and insanity. Every smile is forced; every gesture of kindliness is a calculation. And it isn’t a performance that is grounded in Chaney’s grease paint and false beards. It springs from Phroso’s psychological make-up.

Chaney and Browning would approach this level of perversion only one other time, in the gob-smacking “The Unknown.” But “West of Zanzibar” may be a more subversive film.

You can’t watch “The Unknown” and not be aware of the Chaney character’s profoundly abnormal psychology. You can watch “West of Zanzibar” and think that you’re reacting only out of pity to Maizie’s plight, or that the acting is keeping you riveted. If there’s anything else at work in the back of your mind, you don’t want to know about it.

“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1936)

2007-05-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

The puzzlement of Tod Slaughter’s films, as even his most enthusiastic fans have to admit, is this: are his peculiar performances enough to let us recommend his movies when “by any objective standard they are cheaply-produced rubbish.” (britishpictures.com) If you want to try one, “Sweeney Todd” should be it.

The long journey of “Sweeney Todd” from blood and thunder stage melodrama to Broadway musical began in an urban legend. One of Sweeney’s stops along the way was a “quota quickie,” a movie made in England on the cheap with at least 75% of the paid cast and crew being English. These came about because of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which was enacted to help the British film industry compete with American movies at home.

Slaughter was born in 1885 so by the time he made “Sweeney Todd,” just his third picture, in 1936, he was already in his 50s. He’d spent his early years on the provincial stage, touring England in the kind of be-whiskered melodramas much beloved by the Victorians and kept alive by shamelessly barnstorming theater companies.

George King, a producer and later director of quota quickies, discovered Slaughter and decided that he would be as successful in films as he was on stage if he performed in the same kind of story, and so cast his new aging star in “Murder in the Red Barn.” It clicked with less demanding audiences and Slaughter began his cinematic reign of terror.

In “Sweeney Todd,” Slaughter plays the title roll of a demented barber in Victorian London who uses a tricked-out barber’s chair to “polish off” his wealthier customers. A gentleman sits in the chair, Todd pulls a lever, and the chair and platform on which it rests swivel backward dropping the victim through a hole in the floor and into the cellar. If the fall doesn’t kill him, Todd soon will.

The barber shop shares its cellar with the shop next to it, Mrs. Lovatt’s bakery of meat pies. The movie never explicitly points out that Mrs. Lovatt (a deliciously pinched-face Stella Rho) cuts up the bodies of Todd’s customers and bakes them into her pies, but several hints are dropped. In one scene, a supporting character is eating one of the pies as he ponders on why the corpses of the murdered men are never seen again. Either cannibalism was a taboo that could never have gotten past the censor or it was assumed that the British public already knew what the Todd/Lovatt connection was.

As the film opens, a solid British sailor named Mark Ingerstreet (Bruce Seton) is being greeted on his return from the sea by Johanna, his one true love (Eve Lister). Unfortunately, Mark sails for Johanna’s father, one of those Victorian paters who would never consider a mere employee to be an acceptable suitor for his daughter’s hand (D.J. Williams).

We see Todd standing in the shadows, watching for a likely customer he can murder and rob. “I love my work,” he cackles, slapping his hands together and wringing them. “Money!” he hisses with all the subtlety of a jackhammer when he sees a wealthy nabob come ashore. Todd invites the man into his shop for a close shave and before dropping him through the hole in the floor, he sends his young apprentice Tobias (Johnny Singer) next door for a pie.

As fate, and melodrama, would have it, Todd knows Johanna’s father and wants to invest in his next voyage. Of course, he also has his beady eyes on Johanna and determines to win her either through wooing or through skullduggery, preferably the latter. (I am reminded of the fella in “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” who asks Larson E. Whipsnade (W.C. Fields) if he wants to earn an honest dollar. “Does it have to be honest?” Whipsnade replies.)

Weeks pass and Mark sets out on the very voyage in which Todd has invested. The film now offers a diversionary segment in which the captain of the ship is killed by rampaging natives and Mark assumes command. When he returns to London he has with him a sack of pearls. Todd sees him disembark, lures him to the shop and attempts to kill him. This time, the fall doesn’t “polish him off” and, after Mrs. Lovatt spies Todd stealing the pearls so he won’t have to divvy up with her, she helps Mark to escape.

Mark then decides to disguise himself as an old country farmer and goes back to Sweeney’s shop. He’s dropped into the cellar again and with the assistance of another sailor he figures out exactly how Todd performs his evil deeds.

Now we get to the wild-as-a-March-hare conclusion. Johanna discovers what Mark is up to so she disguises herself as a young boy and goes to Todd’s in case she needs to rescue Mark. Todd figures out who she is, knocks her out, and locks her in the closet. He has already killed Mrs. Lovatt, offstage, and in order to cover up his crimes, he sets fire to the shop.

Back rushes Mark and smashes his way into the building to look for Johanna. As he pulls her from the closet, Todd returns to kill him. Todd ends up in the blazing cellar, Johanna ends up in Mark’s arms, and the ill-gotten gains end up spilled in an alley.

It’s been said that if the Victorians could have made movies, the product would have looked like Tod Slaughter’s pictures. Obviously, there isn’t much in the plot to attract anyone born after 1902 and the production values (except for the costumes) are laughably low. The acting from the supporting players is actually a notch above what you find in poverty row American films of the era—but then there’s Slaughter.

He’s so hammy his performances should have been condemned in Leviticus. His smile is so wide you know his characters have to be faking their bonhomie, and the smile is never reflected in his eyes, which are unmoving and dead. He does a great deal of acting with his hands, double gesturing, wringing, and rubbing palms together. He often speaks in a throaty, raspy whisper that makes him sound like the host of a radio horror series. He doesn’t seem to have figured out that you don’t have to play everything so broadly in front of a camera.

But there’s no denying that the guy is a one-man time machine. Watching him transports you to another era. In fact, you may find yourself hissing the television.

I suppose, though, that the real pleasure comes from watching a performer who seems to genuinely love what he’s doing. I know a critic shouldn’t try to slide by with saying, “I can’t explain it any better than that,” but hell, I can’t explain it any better than that.

Let me go out quoting britishpictures.com once again. “A new generation of fans have stumbled onto his work [seeing it on late night British TV] and asked the question ‘What the bloody hell was that!’"

What indeed.

So is it a good movie? Oh hell no. As a work of cinema, it's abysmal. Okay do I recommend it? I just can't. I want to, but I can't. But if you've read this far, you know I recommend Tod Slaughter. Forget what I say and read what I mean. Seek him out.

"Psycho" (1960)

2007-04-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

Note: This piece was written for Halloween, 2006.

Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read, assuming that you don’t hate pieces that begin “Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read” and go on to something else instead. This is where I tell you that something you know about PSYCHO is dead wrong. I’m writing it, but I don’t know if I believe it or not.

Well, hell, it’s Halloween and if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween, when can you? Oh yeah, St. Patrick’s Day. Okay, if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day, when can you?

Here’s the bit of revealed wisdom about PSYCHO, and I mean revealed repeatedly, in just about every critical essay ever written about the film: the least involving, most boring, most unnecessary scene in the entire movie is the penultimate one in which Simon Oakland, as psychiatrist Dr. Fred Richmond (you never knew the character had a name, did you?) tells the cops, Lila, and Sam that all is not well with Norman’s inner child.

Wait a minute—you have seen the film, haven’t you? If not, don’t read further, even if you can’t resist pieces in which the fourth paragraph admonishes you “don’t read further.” Beyond this point are spoilers. And I promise that I won’t use that gag again, the one in which I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning, even if you tell me that you love it when I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning.

Anyway, that scene in the movie is universally reviled as being unnecessary because it spells out in agonizing detail what the audience has already figured out, i.e., that Norman is a member-for-life of the Ed Gein Fan Club.

But I would like to suggest that in 1960, when the film was new and the world was still able to keep the mask of sanity in place, audiences may not have known as much about what ailed the kid as we do now, and that we know more about it today because Norman introduced us on a pop culture level to this type and degree of mental aberration. Putting oneself into the mind set of obviously historical characters is hard enough and yet still easier, in some ways, than recapturing the thinking of characters who were contemporary when the film was made but have retreated into history since. Norman looks, talks, and acts enough like us now that we see him as a 21st. century man, but he is far from that.

Okay, now we come to my particular hobby horse, the theory that appeals to me greatly while at the same time lacking in rational believability. For this it’s best that you watch the scene, but I’ll try to describe the relevant action.

Richmond enters the room in which his audience is gathered. He comes in from the left and crosses to a central position in the room. Over his right shoulder we see a picture on the wall and, above that, a light fixture. The fixture has two prongs for the light bulbs, reaching out to left and right from a sort of metal centerpiece.

Oakland doesn’t move around much because Richmond wants to remain in the center of our, and his listeners’ attention. He occasionally takes a step or two toward the camera to speak directly to Lila (Vera Miles) or to react to something Sam (John Gavin) says, but before he returns to his original spot in the room, he moves a little closer to the light, allowing us to see more of it. Then he will take a step toward us and resume talking.

His explanation of Norman’s peculiarities is loaded with psychobabble, but whenever he has a point to make that he thinks is particularly telling—“So he began to think and speak for her,” “After the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep,” “These were crimes of passion, not profit”—the lamp on the wall appears directly over his head, sometimes even forming glowing horns.

Here’s what I see: a cartoon in which someone is expounding an idea he thinks explains the ways of the world, with a light bulb coming on over his head to let us know how bright he thinks he is.

It’s as if Hitchcock, whose earliest job in films was providing illustrations to adorn the dialogue title cards in silent movies, is winking at us, letting us know that he thinks all this psychiatric gobble-de-gook is just whistling in the graveyard to hide our fear of the boogie man.

As Richmond snaps a cigarette out of a pack to light up and take a bow, Hitch cuts to the outside of the room and follows a policeman carrying down the hall a blanket for the chilled Norman. We cut to the inside of the room where Norman, as Mother, sits before a blank wall. As Richmond delivered his monologue in front of a wall with a couple of items on it—one of which served to ridicule everything he had to say—Mother delivers her monologue in front of a wall that is blank, as empty as a serial killer’s conscience, as spotless as a freshly cleaned bath tub.

There it is. Do I really believe Hitchcock intended the scene with the doctor to be read this way? I wish, but no. I think it’s there to explain to the unworldly what the hell has been going on. But do I think Hitch was aware of the cartoon cliché regarding the light bulb over the head? Sure I do. Maybe he set and blocked the scene the way he did because unconsciously he wanted to suggest that Dr. Richmond was just too content living in his jargon of earthly delights.

You can’t have too many ways of looking at a film as rich as PSYCHO. And it is Halloween. Trick or treat.

Spicy Mystery Stories, May 1936

2007-04-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

“Spicy Mystery Stories” was one of the Culture Publications pulps, and you just can’t get more ironic than that. The Spicies sold for a quarter and in most cities they resided under the counter. The cover art gave the game away. Sex, violence, and death all in one nifty semi-surrealist H.J. Ward painting. Dali should have been working for the pulps.

This issue, reprinted by Adventure House, is from May, 1936, and provides a terrific introduction to the world of weird menace storytelling. “Weird menace” is a particular subgenre of the horror story in which, generally, a gothic atmosphere is established, usually in a paragraph or two, and some sort of incredible danger is introduced. This danger will more than likely come in the form of a human monster, a zombie, a ghost, a being returned from the past, or just an all-round, slavering, lecherous, humanoid BEM. The kicker is that, as in the gothic novels that came before them and Scooby-Doo who came after, weird menace villains always turn out to be some demented-murderous-greedy yahoo who wants the mansion-fortune-beautiful gal all for himself.

This issue contains nine tales, all of which are fun. Each seems placed where it is in order to top the previous one in whacko plotting.

The first is “Death’s Diary” by Arthur Wallace, and it’s about a mad scientist who has developed a means of transferring a soul from one body to another. In a similar vein, Clint Morgan’s “Blood of a Dog” features another less than sane man of science, this one creating a fluid made from the essence of beast. Inject it into a human and the result is . . . what? In “She Who Was Dead” (nice title) by Jerome Severs Perry a beautiful, mad girl rises from the dead—or does she? Jerome Severs Perry was a popular penname for Robert Leslie Bellem, about whom more later.

Now we get to Mort Lansing’s “Green Eyes” and the plotting takes a turn toward the seriously bizarre. In this one, a mad painter (to give us a break from mad scientists) kidnaps people to contort their bodies into tableaux of torture of pain. Prospective patrons of the bloody arts wander through his gallery looking at these living mannequins of death and when they see a pose they like, they pay the artist to paint it for them. Eli Roth, I have a story you might want to take a look at.

In “Death Shows the Way,” by Tay Philips, a man escapes from an asylum to return to the place of his wife’s death only to find her three-year old corpse waiting in bed for him.
With “Cord of Cowardice,” by Cary Moran, we return to the relative normalcy of a man dressed as a medieval Viking who puts his wife’s death mask on a young woman so he can consummate his nuptials. Seems his virgin bride died before he had the chance three years ago.

In the brief “The Crowded Coffin,” by Dennis Craig, lovers pass along a disease that makes hair grow five feet a night and drains males of strength until they die. It’s Samson in reverse.

Finally we come to Robert Leslie Bellem under his real name, creator of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, and one of the bedrock writers of the Spicy line. In “Cavern of the Faceless,” a woman who has been scarred hideously in a beauty parlor accident (!) kills herself. Her husband then buys the place where her injury occurred despite the fact that four of the employees have disappeared. It appears that he is a mad revenger, but not only is this a weird menace story, but it’s a weird menace story by Robert Leslie Bellem. I can’t give too much away but trust me; wilder plots than this one, they just don’t write.

This issue concludes with John Bard’s “The Second Mummy,” a story about an American detective who is called by an old friend to Mexico to find a missing object d’art. This one has a nice punch in the ending.

Oh, and as for the “spicy” bits, here’s a typical passage from the Bellem story:

“With infinite tenderness, Kendrick Westfall pressed his mouth upon her parted lips. His hand stole upward along her side; his arm crept about her slim waist. As he drew her close, he could feel, through the thinness of her summery frock, that firm half-globe of sweet flesh, the ripple and play of her muscles—the tremor of her soft breast against him. His whole being ached with ecstasy at her response . . . “

We all know what those three dots at the end represent, and that’s about a titillating as it gets. The Spicies indulged in a little kinkiness, but it tended to be more underplayed than that appearing in such hard-cored weird menace titles as “Horror Stories” and “Terror Tales.”

I can’t dismiss this issue of “Spicy Mystery” by saying that the stories are silly. Of course they’re silly. Anyone over the age of 12 in 1936 knew they were silly. And the objection to that is . . . ?

"Tourist Trap" (1979)

2007-04-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

I once heard on the radio a couple of guys chatting about classical music. One of them said that people frequently ask him to name his favorite composer, and he replies “Do you mean just real music or can I include Elgar?”

In the world of film-lovers this kind of thing is covered by the term “guilty pleasure,” by which is understood to mean those movies which have little if any recognizable artistic merit, but we love them anyway. Not just watch with pleasure—love.

Personally, I’m not big into the concept of guilty pleasure because I hate having to offer explanations or, even worse, make excuses for spending time at the bottom of the “B” movie barrel. That stuff is not all I watch, but I do find myself down there with more frequency as I age. I think that’s because a) my taste has widened—and I hope deepened, but I’m not making any bets, b) I like looking for the wee bits of gold among the dross, and c) many of these films can be connected to my childhood years, when I first discovered the joys of watching movies and everything was grist for the mill.

Which brings me, finally, to a throw-away horror picture from 1979—well past the years of my childhood, alas—called “Tourist Trap.” It began life as a 30-minute student film by director David Schmoeller (“Crawlspace,” 1986; “Puppet Master,” 1989) at the University of Texas. “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was only five years old then and my guess is that many film students at UT hoped to strike another vein of Lone Star horror gold.

The feature version of the film stars Chuck Connors, an actor born to work in TV and “B” pictures, as Mr. Slausen, proprietor of a wax museum that has been bypassed by the new highway. His younger brother, Davy, was the sculptor, but Slausen tells us that he lives alone and that the large house behind the museum is now empty.

Who’s he talking to? A carload of young adults who have taken a wrong turn, had a flat, and are now looking for help. Woody (Keith McDermott), whose face opens the film, is seen rolling the flat down the road—you could be forgiven for thinking that Woody is returning to his car with the tire repaired as it appears to be all aired up—to Slausen’s combo museum/gas station/café.

But no one is there.Woody enters the café and, looking for help, enters the back room. The door slams shut behind him. It’s locked. He crosses to an open window only to have it slam down and lock. A mannequin crashes through the other window. What appears to be someone asleep on a cot turns out to be another mannequin, this one rising up to laugh at him. Things start flying around the room. This cacophony of action and noise ends when a piece of pipe hits Woody, inserting itself into his back. Suddenly, the only sound we hear is the blood running through the pipe and dripping onto the floor.

This occurs at the five-minute mark. Schmoeller and screenwriter J. Larry Carroll waste no time with set-up or exposition. They want to grab you by the hair, pull your head back, and put the blade to your throat before you’re comfortably in your seat. We have no idea who these kids are nor where they’re going, and we never come to care. We have the attachment to them we naturally have for attractive actors playing screen characters we know are victims, but as far as true empathy is concerned, forget it.

Soon Eileen (Robin Sherwood), the gal traveling with Woody, gets a ride with three friends in another car and they all end up at Slausen’s where they meet the man himself. He’s a big fella (Connors was 6’5”), he packs a shotgun and he’s a little on the eccentric side, but his speech and actions seem harmless. He invites them into the museum and promises to get his tools to help them when their Jeep stalls out.

Someone—either Slausen or an unknown person—appears to have telekinetic powers. The first clue that Davy may still be alive comes when Slausen tells his guests that his brother was a whiz with anything electrical and we assume that a clue to the “telekinesis” has been given to us.

Could all the mysterious movement by inanimate objects be due to electronic jiggery-pokery? Or will it all turn out to be part of a shared insanity?

Not that it hasn’t already, but from here the plot follows a well-trod path. Slausen’s wife was a beauty and the joy of his life, but she died young. He has a wax figure of her that, when touched, feels as if it were covered by skin. Someone crazy is running around killing off the kids. It’s a tall man, say around 6’5”. He wears a plaster mask. Slausen says that it’s Davy. It all finally turns into a monster mash of “Psycho,” “House of Wax,” and the aforementioned TCSM.

The movie shows its influences clearly, but it’s just as obvious that it has inspired others as well. Spotting elements that will later turn up in the “House of Wax” remake and “House of 1,000 Corpses” is fairly easy. Schmoeller carried his animated mannequins over into “Puppet Master.” According to Henri Bergson, mechanical movement is supposed to be funny. I guess he was never stalked by a killer doll. Freud came closer when he wrote that children want dolls to come to life but adults are terrified of the idea.

Personally, I find signs of life in inanimate objects to be pretty damn creepy, if not overdone to the point of Bergsonian chuckles. Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist dummy in “Dead of Night” and the clown doll in “Poltergeist” are scary; Chucky is a hoot. This film is full of, and perhaps too full of, mannequins with moving eyes and whispering mouths. This surreal element is far creepier than the physical imperilment with which the lunatic threatens his victims.

The cast wanders back and forth across the line that divides competent performance from overwrought hackery. Connors, despite his stated desire to become the Boris Karloff of the 1980s, seems frequently to want to drop character and say “Come on, how can anyone take stuff like this seriously?”

Among the potential victims, Jocelyn Jones, daughter of character actor Henry Jones (he was the nasty maintenance man in “The Bad Seed” in 1956) is the best of the group as the mousy good girl. Jon Van Ness is Jerry, the guy who isn’t Woody, and Tanya Roberts, just barely pre-“Charley’s Angels,” is relatively convincing as Becky. Or maybe it’s just the shorts and tank top. Whatever, it works.”

Tourist Trap” is the creepiest—not scariest, but creepy is good, too—movie to come from producer Charles Band’s slush pile. Schmoeller knows what he’s doing and if this had been his third or fourth picture instead of his first, it would be a solid “B” classic. He has a good eye for the details that make a moment, as you’ll see in the last shot. Take a good look at the face of the person driving the jeep.

When you’re in the mood for schlocky “B” horror, you could do worse.

"Bambi" (1942)

2007-04-13T12:13:00.000-07:00

No, it doesn’t make me cry and yes, I would admit it if it did. “Dumbo” still gets to me and “Pinocchio” turns me into a quivering mass of reconstituted childhood trauma every damn time, but “Bambi” is just too obviously manipulative to work on a big, tough bruiser like me. Besides, venison is delicious.

Okay, we had to get the deer hunting joke out of the way, but honestly I don’t remember ever becoming misty-eyed over “Bambi.” How can that be? Disney used to re-release the animated films every seven years or so on the theory that that time span allowed a new generation of kids to crop up. “Bambi” was released originally in 1942, which means I could have seen it around 1956, when I was seven. Since the movie is a checklist of childhood horrors—random violence, separation from the mother, death of a parent, a distant and aloof father, being cooked and eaten—not being affected by it seems unlikely. Maybe it was just too frightening.

The picture opens with a moving multiplane shot that takes us into the forest, where all is lush, damp, and deeply verdant. You can feel this place in your bones. It’s nature stunningly realized until Friend Owl flies into the frame and suddenly we’re in the midst of a cartoon.

The animals of the forest—the nice ones, anyway (no bears or wolves; just cute bunnies and birds and moles)—gather to see the new young prince, the fawn that will turn out to be the title character. Special interest is taken in him by Thumper a young rabbit who was modeled, they say, after the child actor who supplied the voice, Peter Behn (no other credits). Behn’s over-done voice acting is one of the reasons the movie is considered by many to be too precious. It’s a cutesy performance that, to give the young fella credit, is exactly what Disney wanted, but every time Thumper opens his mouth you can sense the glee with which the certifiable cynics at Termite Terrace—the shack in which the Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes were concocted—rubbed their hands together and dreamed of parody.

The script is by Larry Morey, who had already written the lyrics for “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Morey’s observation of the behavior of children is very sharp as portrayed in Thumper. Always offering advice and making politically incorrect observations about Bambi’s clumsiness, Thumper is every slightly older know-it-all.

Bambi ages and the seasons change. There is no real narrative to the movie, again at Disney’s behest. We see a series of vignettes of life in the forest and on the meadow, places that are Paradise for the animals until the arrival of man, who brings his fall from grace with him.

As new spring grass pops up, Bambi and his mother venture out into the meadow. All seems well, but then Edward Plumb’s music darkens and the camera creeps closer to mother and son in what may be one of the earliest uses of the stalking camera technique later used so effectively by Bob Clarke in “Black Christmas” and then popularized by John Carpenter in “Halloween.” Shots ring out. Bambi runs back to the woods but his mother doesn’t make it. We don’t see her bloodied body, although that was originally included in the planning stages, but we know she is dead.

Then, with a sprightliness that seems almost callous, a perky little song springs up and all is joy again, as if grief passes in the blink of an eye. Certainly the death scene is powerful and for many viewers it’s the only one they remember, but it passes quickly and isn’t referenced again.

But now Bambi is a young adult and he meets again Faline, the doe he knew as a child but developed into a Cervidae Rita Hayworth. He battles for her with another lusty young buck and then the hunters come back, this time with dogs. Disney began working on the film in 1936 so it’s unlikely he had Nazi collaborators in mind, but if he did they would be hunting dogs. If Bambi lost his mother to a lone shooter, this hunt is like Custer sweeping through an Indian village. And then, when the dogs are evaded, a fire begins in the hunters’ camp.

But we’ve had all the death we’re going to get and the forest will emerge from the conflagration for an spell of rebirth.

As is usual with Disney animated features from this period, the actors are given no screen credit. Donnie Dunagan, who played Peter von Frankenstein in “Son of Frankenstein,” voices young Bambi. Ann Gillis, who was Becky Thatcher in 1938’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and whose last role would be as Poole’s mother in “2001,” is the mature Faline.

David D. Hand was the supervising director, each sequence being directed by a different animator, and the source novel was written by Hungarian Felix Salten, who would also contribute the books Disney later filmed as “Perri,” a live action movie about a squirrel, and “The Hound of Florence,” which would later emerge as “The Shaggy Dog.”

“Bambi” was and remains a miracle of 2-D animation. It was intended to be Disney’s second animated feature but its creators took such care with the details it was beaten into theaters by “Pinocchio” and “Dumbo,” and that perfectionism shows in every cell.

Its lack of a strong narrative structure hurts it, leaving sentimentality to do the work usually performed by story, but taken purely as a year in the life of the forest and its denizens it’s still hard to beat. See it as a child and when the memory of it ceases to haunt you, see it again.

"The Screaming Skull" (1958)

2007-04-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

You can tell which schlockfest “B” horror movies manipulate the basic accoutrements of the genre best by the degree to which they scare the bejeezus out of small children, and one of the things that have great power to create a seat-wetting problem is the human skull. You don’t even have to give the ridges over the eyes that Harryhausen touch to make them look more sinister, but it can’t hurt.

I had just turned nine when I saw “The Screaming Skull” (1958) for the first time, and it scared the breath out of me. Almost 50 years later I can still remember being so frightened I couldn’t yell. Ah, those were great times . . . “Macabre” came along later that same year, with “House on Haunted Hill” and “The Tingler” (both 1959) soon to follow. We adolescent horror hounds, readers of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” all, were convinced that William Castle was the greatest filmmaker of all time. Even “Psycho” (1960) couldn’t pull us away as it was a little too adult—but we still read everything by Robert Bloch we could get our sweaty little hands on.

I don’t know if journeyman actor Alex Nicol, who directed “The Screaming Skull” in an effort to expand his career possibilities, could have beaten Castle into our hearts had he continued to make shockers. (Can you imagine a grown man still considering such a question? Neither can I.)

I’ve re-visited TSS several times over the decades. It used to show up on late night TV with some regularity, until even the tube outgrew such hack work, and more than one DVD distributor carries it in the catalogue. No, the original fear is long gone—I wish I knew a nine-year old I could convince to watch it in a dark room just to check out the reaction—but the memory is intact.

In the film, a newly wed couple come to the house the groom lived in with his former wife, the haunting Marion, who died in a sudden thunderstorm when she slipped on a wet leaf and stumbled by the lily pond, cracking her head open on a stone wall and then drowning. I’d think that this plot construct was an accidental reference to Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” except for the fact that composer Ernest Gold—yes, the same man who would win an Oscar for scoring “Exodus” in 1960—borrows the same brooding Sabbat theme from Berlioz’ “Symphonie Fantastique” Stanley Kubrick used in “The Shining” (1980).

Maybe this movie is smarter than it has any right to be. John Kneubuhl, who would later write the “Pigeons From Hell” episode of Boris Karloff’s TV program “Thriller,” wrote the script based on the legend of the screaming skull of Bettiscomb Manor, in England.

But setting references to classier stuff aside, Eric and Jenni Whitlock attempt to settle into the house. As he introduces her to the grounds, Jenni spots a small outbuilding and asks what it is.

“That’s where Mickey keeps his gardening things,” Eric replies.

“Who’s Mickey?"

“The gardener.”

Or maybe the movie isn’t any smarter than it has to be. But you know that feeling you sometimes get, the feeling that the filmmakers are playing around a little because they know the kids that make up their audience aren’t going to get it, anyway? TSS engenders that feeling often.

Soon, Marion’s great friends, Reverend and Mrs. Snow, drop by for dinner and via some pretty unsubtle dialogue we learn that a) Mickey is still devoted to Marion and thinks her ghost haunts the house and grounds, b) Jenni had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium when her parents were killed in an automobile accident, c) she is wealthy, and d) John Hudson, as Eric, is either the most ham-handed actor of the 1950s or he has been directed to make it clear to even the most naïve members of the audience that he wants to gain control of his new wife’s fortune.

Later that night, Jenni awakens to discover that Eric is missing, a window is banging in the wind, and Marion’s self-portrait looks creepy in the moonlight. The next night, this scenario is replayed, only this time Jenni finds a skull in a cabinet. She tosses it out the window, but on her way back to bed she hears a knocking on the door and, yes, it turns out to be the skull.

It’s not much of a spoiler to admit that Eric is behind all the, uh, skullduggery, but whether or not there is a real ghost on his trail I will leave to you to discover for yourself. If you’ve ever read a pulp magazine weird menace story, or watched an episode of “Scooby-Doo,” you’ll have no trouble figuring out the late night mumbo-jumbo.

Hudson, who was Capt. Hobart in “G.I. Blues” (1960) and Virgil Earp in “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957) was certainly a better actor than this script calls for, and I suspect he was playing the evil genius with deadpan irony. Peggy Webber, as Jenni, looks a bit too robust to make a convincing Mrs. de Winter clone. Like almost every other actor in the film, she found her greatest success on TV. Leading roles in movies were out of the question—bless her, she looks like Nicholas Cage in drag, but with heftier boobs.

Russ Conway, who had unremarkable roles in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) and “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” (1967) gives Rev. Snow a quiet, patient demeanor even though he looks fit enough to beat the crap out of Eric. Tony Johnson, as his wife, has no other credits on IMDB.

Director Alex Nicol, who plays Mickey, will be better remembered from his small roles in movies, including “The Man from Laramie” (1955). He later went to Europe to take part in the spaghetti western boom, coming home for a turn as George Barker in Roger Corman’s “Bloody Mama” in 1970.

In TSS he shows a nice camera eye for the clichés of the genre. His camera roams the empty halls of the house, creeping up on certain doors and importing to them a sense of dread that makes us both want to enter and run screaming away. I suspect that the movie would still work its dark magic on young kids, but many of them would be repelled by the questionable acting and black and white photography.

The film exists as a link between gothic chapbooks, dime novels, spooky radio shows, the pulp horror magazines and EC comics, and TV horror shows like “Thriller” and “The Twilight Zone.” Moments in it seem to have influenced Freddie Francis’ “The Skull” (1965), which, since it was based on a story by Robert Bloch, takes us back to where we started.

“The Screaming Skull” can’t possibly scare adults, and unless you saw it when you were young it won’t have any nostalgia appeal. But honestly, I’ve known several grown-ups who did see it back in the day, and they all remember it fondly as one of the scariest movies they’ve ever seen. Maybe we should let it go at that.

"The Locket" 1946

2007-04-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

Laraine Day sheds her goody two-shoes image with her surprisingly effective performance as a kleptomaniac with murder as a sideline, and Robert Mitchum plays the argumentative and difficult painter who first falls in love with her. It’s a far better movie than its status as an unknown would indicate.

Day is Nancy, secretary to the wealthy Mr. Bonner (Ricardo Cortez). He encourages her to take drawing lessons and she meets Norman Clyde (Mitchum), a portrait painter down on his luck. They fall in love but Norman begins to doubt her character when he discovers that’s she glommed onto another woman’s diamond bracelet at a party.

Nancy speeds through Clyde, who suspects that she may have committed a murder in order to appropriate more jewels, and when they separate she meets psychiatrist Harry Blair (Brian Aherne). They stay together for the duration of WW II, but her old habit of carrying off the jewelry of other women leads to divorce.

These stories, as well as one Nancy tells about her childhood and the reason she’s become addicted to diamond theft, are presented by way of flashbacks. Willis tells one to Nancy’s latest conquest on the day of their wedding. Imbedded in his tale is Clyde’s story, and that one includes Nancy’s relating of her youthful adventure. In other words, it’s a flashback inside a flashback inside a flashback.

Following the thread of the narratives is never difficult, but the feeling that somebody along the line must be lying just can’t be shaken off. It’s an odd narrative structure to say the least, but it works. The original script is by Sheridan Gibney and the picture is directed by one of the many minor league Hitchcocks that proliferated during the 1940s, John Brahm—but Brahm is one of the most notable ones. “The Locket” comes at the end of his most fertile period, having just completed “The Lodger” in 1944 and “Hangover Square” a year later.

Gibney, who contributed to the screenplays of films as varied as “The Story of Louis Pasteur” and “I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang,” comes up with some nice dialogue, the kind of sharp cynicism Mitchum was so good at selling, although in this film much of it is given to Day. I especially liked the moment when Clyde is pestering Nancy to send back the bracelet she stole. When she indicates that she’s willing, he says questioningly, “Your conscience is bothering you?” and she flashes back, “No, your conscience is bothering me.

”Seeing Mitchum play the good guy, a fella so tormented by his love for a psychotic woman that he can’t adjust to living without her, is a little odd. He was fine in the white hat but when we see him so completely the victim of someone else’s evil, it comes as a shock.

The biggest shock of all is Laraine Day. It’s not that what she does is so terribly different than her usual girl next door characterizations, it’s that she is so convincing when Nancy slides from cheerful lying to angry plotting. At times it is impossible to tell whether or not Nancy believes what she’s saying. As she walks down the aisle with her new husband to be, and her past life comes rushing to meet her, it seems that she must have been deceiving herself as completely as she had been the victimized men in her life.

The supporting cast, including Gene Raymond, Henry Stephenson, Reginald Denny and Lillian Fontaine, mother of Olivia DeHaviland and Joan Fontaine, is just fine.

Saying that “The Locket” plays out as if it could have been written by Robert Bloch is about the finest compliment one can pay to any film in the psycho-noir subgenre. You’ll have to be in the right place at the right time to see it, but if it’s running on TV at three o’clock some morning, it’s well worth setting the VCR to catch.

"Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn" (1935)

2007-04-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

“Murder in the Red Barn” was the perfect vehicle for Tod Slaughter’s introduction to movie-goers. It was one of the Victorian melodramas in which he had been barnstorming the provincial theaters for years, the play having been based on an actual 1828 murder case. Since he had been portraying the villainous Squire Corder so long on the stage, Slaughter had made the hypocritical landowner his own.

The film is introduced as if it were a play. A host walks on stage from the wings and offers to introduce the characters. Each is greeted with applause. Even Corder takes a bow under the proscenium to the approbation of the theater audience. This literal stage-setting, which will never be referred to again, only adds to the film’s time-machine feel. Just as the movie’s creaky plot and characterizations take us back to British neighborhood cinemas of 1935, the faux theatrical introduction would have removed audiences of 1935 back 70 years to the days of mid-Victorian melodrama.

At the village dance, Squire Corder appears to be the very soul of amiable generosity. Surely then as now audiences knew not to trust any man in a melodrama who seems to be that pleasant and courtly. He will certainly prove to be Up to No Good. Actually, you can see it in Slaughter’s body language. He stands stiff-backed, head erect, arms held oddly in front of his torso looking for all the world as if he were a praying mantis.

All goes well for Corder at the dance until he makes the mistake of allowing a gypsy woman—where would these pictures be without gypsy women—to read his palm, in which she sees death and the Squire hanging from the end of a rope. Talk about your mood killers . . .

Next we cut to a humble cottage and see the lovely village maiden Maria Marten (Sophie Stewart)—where would these pictures be without village maidens—telling her mother that she is off to choir practice. But—cue the organ—she is really sneaking off to Corder’s manor house because the cad has been promising her a life of luxury and respectability in London after he weds her, which he has absolutely no intention of doing after he gets what he wants from her. Have some Madeira, m’dear.

When Maria’s father (D.J. Williams) finds out that there was no choir practice that night, they gypsy lad Carlos (Eric Portman), who is smitten with our heroine, lies to Farmer Marten and says that he was with Maria. He’s trying to protect her but it isn’t made clear why spending night time hours with him is better than anything else she could have been doing.

Livid, Farmer Marten calls on the Squire and asks him to run the gypsies out of town.

This scene is a grand one for Slaughter as he gets to scale the heights of justified hypocrisy. He paces back and forth in his parlor, his steps stiff and forced as if he were counting “one, two, three, stop, turn, speak, pace back, one, two, three.” He dabs gently at his nose with his handkerchief, then paces to the bell cord, tugs on it manfully, and deliberately paces back. It’s stage movement of the most mechanical sort but it is oddly mesmerizing.

Slaughter is like the modern computer generated Scooby-Doo at the heart of the drama. He’s too large for the other actors. He stands out because he doesn’t seem to be quite real, and yet all the other characters in the movie accept his presence. His hand-wringing and eye-rolling, his way of underlining every laugh and condescending lip-curl are the most unsubtle ways of virtually commanding center stage. This is a Tod Slaughter film the way John Wayne’s later pictures belonged entirely to the Duke. He exists on his own plane, and the spotlight follows him wherever he goes.

Now we cut to a gaming room in London where Corder is experiencing a terrible run of bad luck at the dice table, losing toss after toss to a dandified Dennis Hoey (later Inspector Lestrade to Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes). So busted does Corder become, he determines to marry a wealthy, plain, psalm-singing old maid for her money. When the winner of his fortune gives him but one month to pay up, it becomes clear that poor Maria is old news.

Of course all sexual action has taken place off screen but we can tell by Maria’s shamed demeanor that she and the Squire have been involved with some slap and tickle, and soon it will become obvious to the entire village. Her father, declaring her a “wanton,” throws her out of his house. She hastens to the manor to claim what is her due by former promise, but Corder dismisses her distress with a delicious “I meant what I said at the time.”“

You shan’t kick me into the gutter,” she cries, thinking her despair will melt his cold heart. So certain is she that Corder will do the right thing, she drives away the love-struck Carlos, who offers to marry her.

The Squire tells Maria to meet him that night at the red barn and they will slip away to London. When they meet, a storm is raging. Where would these pictures be without raging storms? Maria senses that all is not well with Corder. Slaughter allows his shoulders to hunch as he hisses, “Didn’t I promise to make you a bride? You shall be a bride, Maria. A bride of death!”

She screams. He shoots her with a dueling pistol. He digs a hole in the barn and buries her as thunder and lightning crash and flash. Director Milton Rosmer even places his camera in the grave so we can watch Corder as he shovels dirt onto our faces.

From this point on the movie hastens to its close. Maria is missed by her grieving parents. Carlos is tracked down and accused of causing her disappearance. He remembers seeing her with the Squire on the last night anyone saw her. The town officials take Corder and Carlos to the barn where Corder’s dog Tiger begins to sniff around a patch of disturbed earth. Corder offers to dig around to prove that there is nothing amiss and he digs up the pistol he had inadvertently dropped in the grave.

When the corpse is exposed—not to us but to the characters on screen—Slaughter give us a nicely overwrought mad scene right out of Edgar Allan Poe. “Don’t stare at me like that, Maria,” he gibbers. He is finally led away, barking mad, by the authorities.

But he has one last horrible indignity awaiting him as he is led to the gallows. He doesn’t see it coming—if people in old-fashioned melodramas like this had an ounce of imagination or self-restraint, there wouldn’t be any old-fashioned melodramas like this—but you’ll spot it as soon as you hear that the hangman is too sick to attend to his duties and so a “volunteer hangman” has been procured for the day.

As it is with other of Slaughter’s lead roles, in the end there’s a grandeur in Squire Corder’s evil. He covers all the bases: snobbishness, vanity, lechery, violence, greed, hypocrisy—he’s the complete villains of Charles Dickens all rolled into one. Slaughter is sui generis, and you wouldn’t want to have it any other way.

"Red Riding Hood" (2003)

2007-04-05T13:09:00.000-07:00

If ever a movie was easy to hate, this is it . . . and yet there’s something about it. Determining whether or not “Red Riding Hood” is successful on some level—any level—may require more time than most people would be willing to devote to the task, but that’s why film reviewers are allowed to exist.

The film opens all over the place. First we hear voice over from a talking head news reader. Then a man who is being interviewed on the steps of some official-looking building gets shot in the head at point blank range. Then a man who is a thief gets hit and killed by a van. Then the V.O. changes to that of a young girl.

At this point, it would be hard to blame any viewer for throwing the DVD box across the room while mumbling “What the hell . . ?” And it isn’t going to get any easier for awhile.

We meet 12-year old Jennifer McKenzie (Susan Satta), who lives by herself in a plushy flat in Rome. She has no use for her mother and she holds it against her dad (David McKinney) that he has left her on her own. She is very odd.

Before we go any deeper into this, I need to warn you that this is a movie about which writing is difficult without giving away some plot points. The fact that it falls neatly into the giallo genre pretty much reveals who the villain will turn out to be, especially given the paucity of suspects when the killing starts, but if you’re not familiar with the conventions of giallo, or if you couldn’t tell by looking at Clark Kent that he was really Superman with glasses on, you might want to skip reading the rest of this review.

Jenny seems happy enough living alone, although she does have abandonment issues. She has a hot twentysomething tutor named Tom (Robert Purvis) who drops by every so often to discuss “Don Quixote” with her, and she chats with her imaginary friend, George.

But trouble arises when her grandmother Rose (Kathleen Archebald), an actress from New York, flies to Rome to take her home to the states. This possibility makes Jenny very nervous. So nervous, in fact, that she and George follow a young woman they see shoplift a bottle of wine and George, at Jenny’s command, stabs the woman and cuts off one of her hands.

Later, Jenny will realize that her friendly dentist is swapping saliva with his hygienist. She and George will pay the couple a visit in their hotel room and dispatch the pair of them with a nail gun. By this time, we’re all getting the point. Transgress Jenny’s personal moral code and wham!, right in the eyeball.

Director Giacoma Cimini (using the pseudonym James K. Cimini) begins by playing cat and mouse with what he allows us to see of Jenny and George together. We know that Jenny has an interest in the Red Riding Hood story, but only as it is told from the wolf’s point of view. George is a tall fella wearing a black cape and hood, like hers, and a stylized wolf’s face mask. They both ride their bicycles to the scenes of their crimes.

Early in the film we may see both of them in the same shot, but never in the same frame. She rides across the screen from left to right, and when she exits the frame, he rides across. Later we see both of their hoods at the same time, and later still we see all four of their feet. Most viewers will assume that the child is a little psycho and will be watching to see when Cimini gives that fact away with his camera.

Genre conventions demand that Jenny will do something to keep Rose from carting her back to New York (she binds the older woman to the bed and invites George to drill her kneecaps), and she will have to tell us that she is falling in love with Tom so she can catch him on a date with a woman his own age and vengeance can be plotted.

As a giallo, “Red Riding Hood” has little to offer. The gore exists at about the level of a clever high school production and Cimini’s gift for creating and maintaining suspense is nil. There are touches of black humor from the screenplay by Ovidio G. Assonitis (using the name Oliver Hellman) and Andrew Benker. After all, how many films have you seen in which a grandmother has severe peanut allergies and her granddaughter attempts to kill her by spreading crunchy peanut butter on her face?

The acting is marginal at best. Young Satta appears to have been cast merely on the basis that her eyebrows are wolfishly thick and dark, and Archebald doesn’t do much to convince us that, hey, having your kneecaps drilled by your granddaughter’s imaginary friend kind of hurts.

So viewed merely as a genre film, the picture is mediocre at best. But at this point, the “ . . . and yet . . . “ kicks in.

The movie’s last reel knocks the props out from under everything that’s gone before. The identity of George isn’t difficult to figure out, but the nature of Jenny’s madness is. Jenny and Tom had discussed a central question in “Don Quixote”—is the old man mad from page one, or does he begin the book acting crazy as a rational life style choice, only to genuinely crack up later?

It’s a question that can be asked about Jenny as the movie wraps up. Did any of it really happen or have we spent 90 minutes in Dr. Caligari’s cabinet with an adolescent lunatic?

Whether or not the last five minutes of a movie can salvage the whole thing is a matter of individual choice. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. How’s that for critical guidance? The goofy ending of “Red Riding Hood” supplied a light that, for me, made the experience worth the candle. It might not work for you. In fact, if you’re in any doubt, watching the movie would probably be a waste of your time.

"The Penalty" (1920)

2007-04-05T12:56:00.000-07:00

Lon Chaney’s breakout performance in “The Miracle Man” came in 1919, a year in which he made seven pictures, including his first one with Tod Browning, “The Wicked Darling.” He followed that up with six films in 1920, the first in which he was the top-billed star being “The Penalty.” The mutilated villain Blizzard would set the stage for a long line of deformed and defaced bad men to follow.

The movie opens with a traffic accident. A young is carried to his family’s tenement apartment and a rising young doctor named Ferris is called to attend him. Ferris is certain that the only way to save the boy’s life is to amputate both legs just above the knees. This he does quickly, with the best intentions, before an older and more experienced physician shows up to advise. The older man realizes that the amputations were unnecessary but tells Ferris that he will lie to support the younger man’s diagnosis. The now-legless boy overhears their conversation but when he tries to tell his parents that Ferris admitted to making a mistake, the older doctor says that due to the operation and a possible contusion, the boy merely imagines that he heard Ferris’ confession.

Twenty-seven years later.

The boy has grown into San Francisco’s master criminal, Blizzard. He moves around with the help of crutches, the stubs at the end of his legs covered by thick leather patches. Chaney strapped his legs up behind him, an excruciating contortion that allowed him to film just a few minutes at a time. He also wore an extra-long coat to cover his bent legs.

Law officials have been on Blizzard’s trail for years, but they’ve never been able to pin anything on him. They finally decide to send a female undercover agent named Rose (Ethel Gray Terry) to work for the criminal who, for some reason, has dozens of dance hall girls making straw hats. Rose, seated comfortably and smoking a cigarette in her superior’s office, agrees to accept the assignment.

We see Blizzard in his lair next to the hat-making shop. His current favorite girl is with him. He hops over to the piano to play. Having no legs, the young woman sits on the floor and manipulates the pedals with her hands. Director Wallace Worsley (“Ace of Hearts,” “A Blind Bargain,” “Hunchback of Notre Dame,” all with Chaney) gives us the perfect portrait of domestic sado-masochism.

Dr. Ferris (Charles Clary) is now a successful and high-priced surgeon with a daughter named Barbara (Claire Adams) who is a sculptress. Barbara’s boy friend Wilmot (Kenneth Harlan) wants her to abandon her artistic leanings and marry him. She wants to create a bust of Satan and promises Wilmot that if she cannot pull it off, she will quit.

Blizzard sees an ad in the newspaper inviting men who look satanic to drop by Barbara’s studio. Blizzard, plotting revenge against Ferris through his daughter, shows up and gets the modeling gig.

The idea of avenging an old wrong by visiting some form of torture on the daughter of the offending party will reappear in Chaney’s 1928 collaboration with Tod Browning, “West of Zanzibar.” Perhaps a nation that had recently emerged from The Great War—all wars being a form of taking vengeance on the younger generation for the sins of the older—felt a particular affinity for this plot device. Certainly undamaged survivors of the war could see in Chaney’s multiple prosthetic deformities mirror images of soldiers butchered in Europe before returning home to lives of bitterness and loss.

To complicate Blizzard’s woman problem, Rose, pretending to be a girl of the streets, moves in with him and becomes his new pedal pusher. It doesn’t take her long to discover a hidden basement to Blizzard’s house, one that contains well-stocked operating and recovery rooms.

As Blizzard poses for Barbara he tries to ingratiate himself into her affections. His naturally sardonic appearance and Wilmot’s instinctive distrust of him don’t help, but he finally works himself up to proposing to the young beauty. She recoils in repugnance, rushing to Wilmot for support, and Blizzard leaves the studio more determined than ever to seek revenge.

While this main part of the plot is unfolding, we cut to the police officials who are still trying to figure out what Blizzard is up to with the hat-making. They await a message from Rose, not knowing that one of the gang chief’s henchmen has intercepted it and taken it to his boss.

In a rage, Blizzard informs an underling that he has assembled 10,000 foreign agitators who are prepared to commit a rash of terrorist acts at his command. They will each be wearing identical straw hats so they can recognize each other. They will rampage through the outer streets of the city, breaking and entering, assaulting citizens and shooting policemen. Then, when the authorities have sent every available officer to the suburbs to quell the rioting, the central city will be deserted and Blizzard can loot it.

It is one of the most implausible ideas in the entire history of sinister plots, kin to Goldfinger’s plan to contaminate the gold in Fort Knox, but even goofier. Obviously, this mainstream criminal part of the story isn’t what made the film a success.

No, it was the strength of Chaney’s acting combined with the even more extravagant revenge plot. Blizzard now phones Wilmot and tells him to hurry to a certain address—Blizzard’s lair—if he wants to save Barbara from an evil fate. He then summons Dr. Ferris, telling him that Barbara needs his help as a physician.

His plan is to have Ferris amputate Wilmot’s legs and graft them on to his own stumps.

With this revelation, we are finally in Lon Chaney country, that place where psychological horror, physical deformity, elaborate revenge plots, and black humor meet. Nothing like this had been seen in the fledgling motion picture business before, and never has it been presented so consistently by one auteur performer since.

At this distance in time the real reason Chaney gave us so many of these twisted characters may remain a mystery. Was he drawn to these human monsters because he had the talent to represent them so well? Was he merely giving the audience what it wanted? (If so, it’s the audience we should be studying.) Or was he illuminating a part of his own being, creating a psychological autobiography in grease paint and prosthetics?

Incredibly enough, “The Penalty” works itself out to a relatively happy ending. The film’s conclusion is certainly its weakest link, but the commanding presence of Chaney more than makes up for it. As competent and/or attractive as the other players in the movie are, one’s eyes are glued to Chaney every second he is on screen. He is nothing short of magnificent.

“The Penalty” gives us Chaney’s first overwhelming lead character. For all the crudities of its overly-melodramatic plot and the implausibility of its romantic ending, it remains a strong film well worth seeking out. For fans of Lon Chaney, it is a must. For prospective fans, it’s a good place to start.

“Bedlam” (1946)

2007-03-30T06:08:00.000-07:00

Boris Karloff was always publicly grateful to the horror genre and its fans for making him a star and allowing him to maintain that status, even if most of the films he starred in were far from memorable for any reason other than his presence in them. But he also made no secret of his preference for historical melodrama, a love he carried over into movies from the stage plays in which he had performed for so many years before Hollywood beckoned. He reveled in pictures like “The Black Room,” “The Strange Door" (with Charles Laughton doing his best Tod Slaughter impersonation), “Tower of London,” and two of his Val Lewton-produced thrillers, “The Body Snatcher” and this one, “Bedlam.”

Lewton, too, has come down to us as a horrorista—and like Karloff, he was a damn good one—but he preferred costume dramas. It’s no wonder, then, that they made two of their best films together.I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for “Bedlam.” The first time I saw it was late one Friday night or early one Saturday morning. I was spending the night with a pal. He and his big brother had both fallen asleep before the weekend horror movie came on television. I would have been more likely to sleep through a meal than I would have to miss an old horror picture on television, especially one starring the Master of Horror, the great King Karloff.

My friend had a TV in his bedroom, rare in those days, but I remember lying on the bed on my stomach so my face would be close to the screen and I could watch the movie with the sound turned down low. Do you remember the bitter frustration as a kid when some post-horror phase adult would make you turn off the movie in the middle because it was too late at night to still be watching television? I did what I had to do to avoid that fate.

Okay, I know I’ve drifted pretty far from the boat with these soggy memoirs, but recalling that night is part of the experience of “Bedlam” for me. I’ll stop it now and get to the film itself.

Anna Lee (“The Man Who Changed His Mind,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”) stars as Nell Bowen, a pretty but too clever young woman in the London of 1761. Nell is the current favorite of Lord Mortimer (Billy House), a pudgy, would-be wit and preening fop who makes up in ready money what he lacks in charm. Nell is his jester, at least (perhaps more but if so, any more personal relationship is sub rosa). He enjoys listening to her abuse society. Her satire is as cold as her sense of justice.

One day, Master George Sims (Karloff) comes to call. Sims is head of the asylum of St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, a name abbreviated in the English manner to Bedlam. In his spare time, Sims, too, is a wit and author of poems and masques. It is hinted that he has been able to assist Lord Mortimer in the past by “accidentally” incarcerating enemies and troublemakers. We learn that an inmate we saw earlier fall from the roof of the asylum and die during an escape attempt was in fact a rival poet Sims managed to confine in the hospital.

To curry favor, Sims offers to lend his “loonies” to Mortimer to serve as entertainment at a party the peer is giving. To complete the evening, Sims will compose a masque for the Bedlamites to perform. Mortimer loves the idea, but Nell, while professing no great pity for the insane, pooh-poohs the idea out of dislike for Sims.

Soon after Sims’ visit to Mortimer, Nell pays her first visit to the asylum. For tuppence, anyone can tour the wards and be amused by the human wreckage they contain. She enters a hall filled with the insane. Some are quiet—one young woman is nearly catatonic, standing stock still by the doorway. Others babble or shriek. Many are seen in attitudes drawn from the William Hogarth plates that inspired the film, collectively titled “The Rogue’s Progress.”

The scene begins with a close-up of Nell’s face, then the camera pulls back to reveal the terrible contents of the room. Nell is shocked and dismayed by what she sees, and she leaves the place after striking Sims with her riding crop and telling him that he is “an ugly thing in a pretty world.”

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Sims is the Quaker Hannay (Richard Fraser). Hannay is a stone mason. He’s applied for a job at the asylum but Sims refused to employ him unless the upright young man would kick back some of his salary. At first, he has little use for the haughty Nell, claiming that she is as hard and shallow as Sims and Mortimer.

But her veneer breaks at last the night of Mortimer’s party at Vauxhall Gardens when a mad boy, gilded from head to foot by the unfeeling Sims, suffocates while attempting to recite his lines. Nell convinces Lord Mortimer, who is on Bedlam’s board of directors, to work to improve conditions at the hospital, but Sims reminds him that improvements cost money and will cause his property taxes to go up. Mortimer balks, and then decides to renege on his promises to Nell. In a rage, she tells him off.

Later, Sims offers to bring her before the Commission of Lunacy and Mortimer agrees. When asked by the Commission what she considers to be absurd questions, Nell uses her wit to answer. Her cleverness and contempt work against her and she is committed to Bedlam.

With Nell’s interment, Lewton and co-writer/director Mark Robson (Lewton using his Carlos Keith penname) have some fun blending black humor with the horrors. Ian Wolfe plays the self-proclaimed greatest lawyer in London locked up by his enemies, and Jason Robards, Sr. is Oliver Todd, a writer who has had himself committed to prevent him from hitting the bottle and thereby not being able to support his family. These are the People By the Pillar, the inmates closest to sanity and therefore the cream of asylum society.

Of course all will work out well for Nell and ill for Sims. Anyone watching the film for the first time will quickly figure out that his ultimate fate will somehow be left in the hands of his charges, but I won’t go into detail about what happens.

The film is interesting on a number of levels. It was Robson’s fifth film as director, all four of his previous movies made with Lewton over the course of four years after editing “Cat People,” “I Walked With a Zombie,” and “The Leopard Man.” His lighting is Expressionistic and the cast in his mad room interior represents the character types utilized by Hogarth. The film is set just three years before the birth of the gothic with the publication of Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” in 1764, and Robson blends gothic with Age of Reason elements nicely on a miniscule budget.

Karloff delivers one of his best and oiliest performances. Sims is cynical and superior. He’s a forerunner of the kind of condescending but controlled madmen in which Peter Cushing would later specialize. It’s a pleasure to watch Karloff force smiles as Sims flatters Lord Mortimer and drops evil suggestions in his ear, only to give expression to the most withering contempt when his patron’s back is turned.

But the grand old man of horror also gets the opportunity later in the film to wheedle and plead for his life, begging the inmate to pity him because he’s just as miserable a victim as they are, forced to do what he does out of fear of the way the world would react to him if he was powerless. It’s to Karloff’s credit that this cynical and self-serving defense almost works on us.

“Bedlam,” for all its horrific content, is less a traditional horror film and more the kind of historical melodrama Boris Karloff liked so well. It’s also, in its odd way, an attack on middle managers who abuse those under them in an effort to make themselves look good to upper management. At that level, the film is timeless.

"All Wet" (1924)

2007-03-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve read that this very funny one-reeler is just the surviving half of a two-reeler, but nothing connected to the DVD release of this film indicates that it is incomplete. Given the fact that some of its elements seem pretty disjointed, learning for sure that there was more than currently meets the eye would come as no surprise.

Charley Chase was among the most popular stars of short comedies in the late 1920s. Some have written that he was the most popular after Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd moved on to features. It’s easy to see why his style of comedy outshone that of the Sennett stable. The A-listers working for Hal Roach all fell under the influence of Leo McCarey, who appreciated situation comedy rather than the slapstick for which Mack Sennett is best remembered. McCarey’s approach could be riotous enough when called for, but he could also take his time and allow a story, simple though it usually was, to unfold. Watch the slow build in a McCarey silent with Chase or Laurel and Hardy, then compare it to the pacing of “The Awful Truth” or even “Going My Way.” Even the Marx Brothers, in “Duck Soup,” took some advantage of McCarey’s deliberation. Check out the scenes with Edgar Kennedy.

“All Wet” (1924) opens in a family boarding house, a species of communal domicile perhaps unknown to young viewers today. Think of it as a combination apartment complex and hotel. We’re told that this is “One of those places where you can tell what day of the week it is by looking at the tablecloth.” (A different meal was served every day, but it was the same meal every Monday, every Tuesday, etc.)

A telegram arrives, which, of course, means bad news. Who would pay the cost of a telegram to send good tidings? “Somebody must have died,” one of the elderly lady boarders says to another. “I hope it wasn’t serious.”

Everyone abandons lunch, rushing upstairs to deliver as a group the message to young go-getter Jimmie Jump. (This is just one of the dozen Jimmie Jump comedies Chase made in 1924, among his 30 films from that year. He’d been in pictures for ten years, and this was his 110th.) Jimmie is as nervous as everyone else as he tears open the envelope, and then laughs heartily when he finds out that he is to pick up a litter of puppies at the train station at 2:40 Wednesday afternoon. These dogs have no bearing on anything and are either just a means of getting him out of the house or are an indication that some film footage indeed is missing.

As his disappointed neighbors go mumbling back to their meals, Jimmie grabs his hat and leaves the house.

Chase, whose real name was Charles Joseph Parrott, was a thin 6-footer. Not spectacularly handsome, he had a long, open face that was better at conveying realistic laughter than tears. Usually dressed in a light suit and boater and wearing a reasonable mustache, he was an outgoing everyman, not quite as boyish as Harold Lloyd but never as serious as Keaton. His screen character was consistently the victim of the kind of bad luck that forced him into embarrassing situations. The comedy of humiliation and frustration was his specialty.

And Jimmie’s bad luck begins as soon as he leaves the shelter of his home and ventures out into a world full of thoughtlessness and trickery.

He steps off the sidewalk and gives the handle of a parked car a quick twist. As he stands erect to enter the vehicle and drive away, another motorist (William Gillespie) scoots in ahead of him and drives away. Jimmie’s chance for the last laugh comes quickly as he, in the right car, catches up to the man whose auto is now stuck in a mud puddle.

This must have been a fairly common occurrence on the streets of L.A. at that time as Jimmie, too nice a guy to revel in this jerk’s misfortune, is prepared with a tow rope. He tosses it to the other man, who ties it around his windshield. Jimmie slowly ooches forward, freeing the other car. Then, when Jimmie finds himself stuck, the other man tells him that he has an appointment and no time to give him a hand. Rather than flying into a rage, Jimmie seems to accept this as just another instance of ingratitude. His reaction is low-key and realistic.

Jimmie gets out to push his own car and slips into the mud. There is a feel of familiarity here as JJ reacts normally to wet and slush. Here is another perfect opportunity for over reaction but, once again, McCarey and Chase let it go.

Next comes a pure McCarey bit. A piano mover (Jack Gavin) comes along carrying a piano on one shoulder. JJ calls him and he drops the instrument on the grass. Our stranded motorist gives him a silver dollar to push the car out, and when he does the machine inches forward only far enough to slip into a sinkhole and disappear. The two men watch the car go under in the kind of careful, long take from mid-long range that Laurel and Hardy would make their own. Cut to the men’s accepting faces and hold for a beat before the mover returns the dollar and walks off.

This action is being watched by a kid sitting in front of a garage. When he sees that Jimmie is still stuck, he calls out, “Another sucker,” and a man in a tow truck (Martin Wolfkiel) pulls out of the garage. He backs up to the edge of the puddle and offers to retrieve Jimmie’s car. Since JJ is already soaked, he agrees to go into the water to attach a tow line to the submerged car. Rescue seems inevitable, but the tow truck mechanic only reels in JJ’s rear wheels.

Now Jimmie has to re-enter the water, dive under, and re-attach the wheels. The following segment lasts about 90 seconds and its zany surrealism comes as a complete reversal of the everyday reality that has preceded it.

As JJ works underwater, the mechanic sits on dry land. Jimmie’s hand emerges and points to a wrench, which the mechanic gives him. Hand goes back under. Comes up again and points to a hammer. Back under. Pause. Re-surfaces and points to another wrench. As the mechanic reaches for it, the hand waves him off and more emphatically points to another one. Back under. Pause. The mechanic, wanting to light his pipe, calls for a match. JJ’s hand reaches from below with a match. The mechanic accepts it, lights it, and fires up the pipe. He then asks for the time. Hand up. The mechanic takes a look at Jimmie’s watch, nods his thanks and receives a wave in response.

It’s a gag sequence that elicits laughter not just because it’s funny but because it seems to come out of nowhere. We haven’t been prepared for anything this off the wall. It’s a moment of classic absurdity performed to perfection by an actor we can’t even see, although Chase will vanish in other films and allow his hands alone to carry the scene.

Jimmie’s final frustration comes when he arrives at the train station and asks a worker there the inane question, “What time does the 2:40 come in on Wednesday?” The man replies without missing a beat, “2:40 tomorrow. This is Tuesday.”

This little gem of a one-reeler was photographed by Len Powers, who would do the same job for Laurel and Hardy in 1932 when he shot “The Music Box,” the Boys’ only Oscar winner. Somewhere among the boarding house’s inhabitants is an uncredited Janet Gaynor.

Little movies like this one, especially when they feature comedians whose stars have since waned, are easy to overlook in our enthusiasm for big themes in big stories, but there’s much to be said for the little guys. And while we may never be able to identify with the mania of the Keystone Kops, locating what we have in common with a genial fella who suffers from wretchedly bad luck for most of an afternoon is as easy as getting stuck in the mud.

"Strait-Jacket" (1964)

2007-03-27T06:52:00.000-07:00

By 1964, the year “Strait-Jacket” was unbuckled and America tried it on for size, producer/director William Castle had a half-dozen horror movies under his ample belt, and none of them were “A” pictures. He’d seen “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” 17 times, pointing to the screen each time while mumbling, “I want one of those.”

He grabbed writer Robert Bloch, whose novel “Psycho” had worked brilliantly for Alfred Hitchcock a few years before—after “Homicidal” in 1961, Castle had broken ties with screenwriter Robb White, who had delivered five of his horror scripts—and Bloch set to work on a story loosely suggested by the Lizzie Borden axe murders of 1892.Bloch was the author of some great short horror stories, a couple of terrific novels, and scores of mediocre scripts. Screenwriting earned him most of his money, but it didn’t produce his most memorable work.

Perhaps Castle saw the approaching wave of “hag horror,” generally “B” creepers starring fading actresses who still had the big name but could no longer command big parts in big movies. He signed Joan Blondell for the role of axe murderess Lucy Harbin. Before shooting began, Blondell had an accident that prevented her from making the movie, and Castle went after one of the stars of “Baby Jane,” Joan Crawford.

Crawford was willing to accept the part, but she demanded cast and script approval. Castle agreed. So arrogant was Crawford, she gave the small role of Dr. Anderson, Lucy’s psychiatrist, to Mitchell Cox, a vice-president of Pepsi Cola, a non-actor but a personal friend, without telling Castle what she was up to. It’s to Cox’ credit that he comes across on screen no worse than many professional actors in “B” horror flicks, and he seems to be having a great time. He’s no Boris Karloff, but he’s no Paris Hilton, either.

Anne Helm was cast in the important role of Lucy’s estranged daughter Carol, but Crawford didn’t like her and out she went. Diane Baker had worked with Crawford in “The Best of Everything” (1959), and with Susan Hayward in “Stolen Hours” (1963), so she knew her way around a diva. Crawford liked her and “suggested” her for the role.

The movie opens with a flashback, a trick Robert Aldrich, the director of “Baby Jane,” would use for his second foray into hag horror, “Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte,” later that year. We see Lucy’s husband (Lee Majors in his first screen role) flirting and drinking with a young woman. He invites her to his house because his wife is out of town and not expected back for a day or two. The adulterer and his lover make a little whoopee, unaware that they are being watched by three-year old Carol (Vicki Cos).

Then Lucy comes home early.Crawford makes her first entrance in a way that she must have loved. The camera is aimed at the steps that come down from the passenger car of a train. When Crawford steps into the frame, all we see are her legs—and nice looking gams they are still for the 58-year old former dancer. The shot also gives us our first dose of Robert Bloch’s signature black humor. Stenciled above the steps, just below Lucy’s feet, is the admonition “Watch your step.” Listen, too, for lines like “She’s dying to meet you,” and “Sanity is relative.”

When Lucy returns to her house, she finds hubby and his gal in bed. Shocked, she stumbles from the house and trips over a tree stump, imbedded in which is an axe. Bracelets jangling, she pulls the axe from the wood and goes back into the house. We see the outlines of the sleeping lovers in shadows on the wall as Lucy hoists the axe above her head and takes off each of theirs with two manic blows. She then goes to work in earnest.

There is absolutely nothing realistic about these murders. The heads are severed from the bodies too easily and there is no blood splatter as Lucy whacks away. Since Castle cuts a couple of times to close-ups of Carol’s terrified face, maybe we are seeing the crime as the little girl saw it, with full emphasis on her mother.

Okay, Lucy goes to an asylum and Carol is sent to live with her mother’s brother (an amusingly jovial Leif Erickson) and his pinch-mouthed wife (Rochelle Hudson) on a farm somewhere in the Midwest. (Bloch has more fun by letting us know that Lucy’s maiden name was “Cutler.”)

Twenty years later, Lucy is declared sane and she comes to live with the Cutlers and Carol. Carol shows her around the farm and you have everything you need to know to plot the rest of the picture yourself by the 20 minute mark.

Carol decides, in a move reminiscent of “Vertigo,” to re-make her dowdy mom in the image of what she was when she wielded the chopper. Lucy starts wearing loud print dresses, dangling bracelets, and a black wig with a mid-‘40s hairstyle. Then she begins hearing voices chanting “Lucy Harbin took an axe and gave her husband 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave his girl friend 41.”

One night she wakes to find two disembodied heads and a gory axe in her bed. Not too surprisingly, she takes to drinking a wee bit too much.

On the afternoon she meets Carol’s fiancé Michael (John Anthony Hayes), Lucy gets tight and flirts shamelessly with the younger man. This scene is the most memorable for viewers who like the picture for the wrong reasons—i.e., its camp value—as Crawford pulls out all the stops. She drapes herself over Hayes and even runs her fingertips around and between his lips. This was apparently not in the script nor the direction, and Hayes wondered what God had wrought, and he wondered it in a big way.

To make matters worse, Lucy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, shows up on his way to a fishing trip and the former patient gets upset. Lucy runs off and the doctor goes outside to look around. He soon looses his head over the place to the accompaniment of the sound of jangling bracelets.

Handyman Leo Krause (a wonderfully dim and degenerate George Kennedy) finds the doctor’s abandoned car and blackmails Carol into letting him keep it. He, too, is soon headed off, and then the film rushes to its conclusion with villainy revealed and honesty triumphant.

You don’t really know the movie is working as well as it is until you get to the murders and find yourself growing apprehensive. Castle’s best moment comes in a scene that finds Lucy watching Leo decapitate a chicken. The sound of the spinning blades on the weather vane builds throughout the brief scene until it reminds you of the jangling of Lucy’s bracelets. By the final reel, every time someone bends slightly at the waist, you expect an axe to enter the frame.

I suspect the participants had four ways of looking at “Strait-Jacket.” Crawford saw it as a star vehicle, while the supporting cast saw it as a paycheck. Castle saw it as an entry to “A” filmmaking, and Bloch saw it as a huge, sick joke. Viewers today don’t care much about what the supporting cast thought. Castle was wrong, while Crawford and Bloch were dead right—especially Bloch. It’s in the joke that the film is still most enjoyable.

Sadly, as a vehicle for Crawford, it’s really just the first step toward “Trog,” and there’s nothing funny about that.

dgb

Playing With Bloch's

2007-03-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

In the coven made up of the mothers in my neighborhood when I was a kid, my mom was the only one who allowed copies of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" magazine into the house. This made me very popular — and it was the only thing that did — at least on the Saturdays after the new issue hit the street.

My pals and I loved looking at pictures from monster movies, and it didn’t matter whether or not we’d seen the flick, or ever would. In those pre-home-video days in that small town, we had no hope that we’d ever be in a position to see films like the silent "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" or even the Lon Chaney "Phantom of the Opera."

Which brings us at last to Robert Bloch, who frequently used FM as a bully pulpit to introduce us kids to the fading grandeur of silent horror films — or those pictures that passed for horror films before sound. I had no idea at that time that Bloch wrote fiction. I don’t remember now how I found out, but it was probably at the time Hitchcock’s "Psycho" came out and suddenly Bloch’s books were on every paperback spin rack in town.

Okay, here’s where I embarrass myself by admitting that I was too scared to see PSYCHO on it first run. Here’s why: I’d read Bloch's novel on the assumption that no book could be as scary as a movie. Word circulated around the horror-movie fan underground in town that this movie was the goods, more terrifying than a William Castle picture, and that would make it scarier than all hell on a rainy weekend.

So my plan was to read the book so I’d know what the story was and I could bluff my friends into thinking I’d seen the movie, just in case I wasn’t, you know, able to see it. Damn good plan for an 11-year old, except for one thing: Bloch’s novel is not the standard mystery/thriller, like Hitch’s film is not the standard horror movie.

The book scared me. Badly. Profoundly. Everlastingly. So much, I was even more afraid to go to the movie than I had been in the first place.

I’ve cleared my conscience.

So, this Bloch guy pulls the plow, huh? Oh, yeah. By 1960, he had been sharpening his blade since he published his first "Weird Tales" short story, “The Secret in the Tomb,” at age 17 in 1934. He had been on the fringes of the H.P. Lovecraft circle since 1933, when he initiated a correspondence with the old gent that lasted until Lovecraft’s death in 1937.

Honestly, in those early stories, derivative of HPL’s concepts and frequently overwrought style, Bloch didn’t show much promise that he would ever be anything more than a precocious acolyte.
If stories like “The Feast in the Abbey“ and “The Shambler from the Stars“ rely too heavily on Lovecraftian themes and atmospherics, Bloch soon found his own voice. More than one, actually. After all, what kind of schizophrenic has only one voice whispering in his ear?

And Bloch’s best imaginary friends were schizos, serial killers, mass murderers and just all-around boy-or-girl-next-door psychopaths. They dispatched their victims with butcher knives, scarves, axes, saws, shoves off of cliffs, and even the unimaginative handgun. He more than made up for that last with a death by gorilla costume. Of course I’m serious. Joe R. Lansdale selected Bloch’s “The Animal Fair” for the 2004 anthology "My Favorite Horror Story." Check it out.

Bloch never lost his affection for Lovecraft, and even as late as 1978, his novel "Strange Eons" was in honor of his mentor, but after the publication of his first novel, 1947’s "The Scarf," he was wedded to psychological horror in the public’s mind. Short stories like “Lucy Comes to Stay” and “Final Performance” – which is wonderfully ghastly and receives a tip of the hat in the current horror film "Dead Silence," showing up regularly in everything from the crime pulps to "Playboy" – kept that association alive.

He missed out on the screenplay assignment for "Psycho," but Bloch scripted for radio, films (including two for Castle), and television. He finally linked up with Hitchcock, sort of, by writing 17 episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." In all, Bloch provided scripts for 19 series, including "Star Trek," "Thriller," and "Night Gallery."

Many of his best post-"Scarf" stories are a blend of supernatural and psychological horror. “The Cheaters” is about a pair of eyeglasses that allow the wearer to read people’s minds, and what they think is scarred by greed and lust. “Catnip” is about a high school punk who accidentally burns down an old woman’s house and is then stalked by her cat. I’ve always been a big fan of “Sweets to the Sweet,” about a little girl and her favorite voodoo doll. Very nasty ending to this one. Yummy.

He wasn’t a perfect writer. Having published more than 200 stories and two dozen novels means there are several clinkers in the bunch, but when he was clicking, he was as good as anyone.

One more thing I have to mention: Bloch was one of the funniest horror writers ever. He was a popular emcee for science fiction and horror conventions, and in print, his stuff is littered with sick in-jokes and unexpected puns. Remember all those sick gags in the movie version of "Psycho"? “Mother isn’t herself tonight” and “A boy’s best friend is his mother” both originated in the novel. I still remember the pleasant chill I felt the first time I re-read the book and Mrs. Bates accuses the effete Norman of being “only half a man.” Heh, heh, heh.

Bloch once famously said of himself, “People think I must be a monster, but really I have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

But my all-time favorite Bloch moment comes in an otherwise disposable British film from 1966 called "The Psychopath," in which a sick, aging German war widow who collects dolls sends her feeble-minded but physically strong son out to murder the men she thinks killed her husband. In the film’s climax, the son injures his back while being pursued but manages to get home. The police show up to arrest him and his mother. Mom puts up a small struggle and the son, who is hiding in the attic, hears what is going on and begins howling. The police open the door and we are faced with the now-paralyzed young man seated in a chair. His fruitcake mother has powdered his face to remove his natural coloring, and rouged his lips and cheeks to make him look like a giant Kewpie doll. A tear runs down his cheek as he sobs, “Momma. Momma.”

Comic shocks don’t come any sicker than that.

Robert Bloch died of cancer on Sept. 23, 1994. Every time a new anthology of horror or crime stories is published, I look to see if it includes a new story by him. It’s a silly habit I don’t want to break.

dgb

Volume 1, Number 1

2007-03-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

Why Saturday? I’m an aging 12-year old and I remember Saturday as the day for watching cartoons, going to the movies, checking the drug store to see if the new issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland was in yet, and reading the latest Edgar Rice Burroughs release from Ace Books.

So am I confessing to arrested development? To a degree, but I am old enough now to know that the pop culture artifacts I love are not necessarily representative of the best the human race has to offer. When I was 12, Burroughs was the greatest writer of all time. Now he’s only in the top dozen. Just kidding. (Sort of.)

What can you expect to find on this blog? Reviews, commentary, opinions (lots of those), stupid opinions (lots and lots of those)—generally a continuing love of the things most people expect to find around the bottom rungs of the pop culture ladder. I love pulp magazines, vintage comic strips, movies old and new, detective stories. I adore and have strong feelings about the norms--comedy and drama—but for reasons that may or may not become clear to you and me in time, my heart truly belongs to the extreme forms of farce and melodrama. I suppose that makes me an outlaw critic. I’ve realized over the years that other reviewers hold several of my passions beneath contempt. To those people I say . . . well, I’ll say it as we go along.

I’m already posting on some other blogs and websites—efilmcritic.com for movies, bookgasm.com for books and comics, and a couple of others—but this is the place at which all my stuff will be gathered. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. And vice versa.

dgb