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Deadline - USA (1952)

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Director: Richard Brooks
Writer: Richard Brooks
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore and Kim Hunter
This review is part of the Second Annual Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. This is my Ethel Barrymore review; watch out for John tomorrow and Lionel on Wednesday.
Ah yes, the Barrymores. I’m a fan of all three siblings, who had very different careers in film. Lionel was most prolific, finding his way to the big screen early and staying there for a long time. John was most prominent, the Great Profile commanding attention, but he waned quickly in the sound era. Ethel was most reluctant, but she made it to film and did amazing work. For this three day blogathon, I chose a film from each of them which I hadn’t seen before, that filled other filmography gaps for me beyond just the Barrymores and which are connected not merely by their presence but by another theme: that of writing, appropriate given that I’m doing my duty as a writer in reporting on them. So pay attention over the next three days for Ethel Barrymore in one of my few Humphrey Bogart gaps, a fifties drama called Deadline - USA, John Barrymore in a Carole Lombard comedy I’ve somehow not seen called True Confession and Lionel Barrymore in The Yellow Ticket, a precode melodrama with a pre-Frankenstein Boris Karloff.

I was pleased with that plan, but it almost came a cropper immediately. It turns out that Ethel Barrymore isn’t actually in Deadline - USA much, even though she’s prominently placed on the poster and on the screen, right after the title card, alongside Kim Hunter. It’s testament to her reputation that she be so highly billed, given that lead actor Humphrey Bogart came to this from The African Queen and Hunter to it from A Streetcar Named Desire. By comparison, Barrymore came to it from a trio of 1951 movies that I hadn’t even heard of, though I have every intention now of tracking down Kind Lady and The Secret of Convict Lake, if not perhaps It’s a Big Country: An American Anthology. She does get a few scenes of power, as the widow of a newspaperman. ‘Girls these days have stuff,’ she tells Bogart, ‘but they’re brittle, break more easily.’ That’s a telling line from a stage actress who could easily be described as a gentle battle-axe. Bogart’s character jokingly proposes to her. ‘You’re too old,’ she replies.
She’s Margaret Garrison, the widow of John Garrison, the founder of a serious newspaper called The Day. It’s about to be sold to its competitor, Lawrence White, who will close it down. Garrison’s daughters just want the money from the sale because they have no interest in running a paper. Margaret is too old to do so and she initially agrees to the sale too, but she’s a wildcard as she knows it has importance and she remembers her husband’s passion for it. Ed Hutcheson, the current managing editor, has that passion too, and Bogart sells it magnificently. We see his tone quickly, in his treatment of what the town’s other papers see as sensational front page news: the discovery of ‘a nude in a fur coat’ who has been drowned in the river. They plaster photos on page one; he chooses to run a more sedate story inside and without imagery. That’s an important decision, partly for demonstrating what sort of a man he is and partly because it becomes a plot point later in the film, as the story becomes important for reasons nobody knows yet.

It’s clearly Bogie’s film quickly and effectively, even if we start with Martin Gabel as a local mafioso called Tomas Rienzi, dismissing whatever questions a senate subcommittee throws at him. When a Day journalist, George Burrows, asks Hutcheson if he can stay on Rienzi, he tells him that ‘we’re not detectives and we’re not in the crusading business.’ However, they soon become both, once Rienzi’s thugs send Burrows to the hospital and Hutcheson discovers the fate of the paper upstairs from the heirs and lawyers. He prowls that room, polite but demonstrative, quoting the front page of the first edition from memory. He dominates effortlessly and Ethel Barrymore lets him. Margaret clearly feels guilty at this point, knowing that he’s a good man and a good reporter who runs a good paper. Her spine will return later in the film, but his never left. As he goes back downstairs to sweep into his office, a colleague tells him that the mayor is on the phone. ‘I’m busy,’ is his response, because he has bigger things on his mind.
He’s far from the only actor to impress early on. Jim Backus gets a great scene in the bar, as The Day’s journalists all go to get drunk and mourn the loss of the paper; his monologue is characterful and memorable. Audrey Christie was already impressive before we got to this point, but she gets another great scene in the bar. She was my big discovery here, as I’d forgotten her dark journalistic wit in Keeper of the Flame, released a decade earlier in 1942 but still her previous film. She was primarily a stage actress with plays on TV a prominent sideline and features a distant third in her priorities. She only made ten over three and a half decades, even if they did include Carousel, Splendor in the Grass and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. There’s also Ed Begley (Senior not Junior), who was always reliable and both the featured ladies, Barrymore and Hunter, get moments. The latter is Hutcheson’s ex-wife; she does still love him but knows he’s married to his paper. To quote Margaret about John, he loved her ‘passionately, but between editions’.

Technically, the crew back up the cast superbly, with only a few obvious rear projection shots detracting from the film’s power. It has a decent, if conventionally dramatic, fifties score from Cyril Mockridge, sharp editing from William B. Murphy and a suitably restless camera, courtesy of Milton Krasner, who had been Oscar-nominated the previous year for All About Eve, his second of six nominations; he would win in 1955 for Three Coins in the Fountain. The most obvious name to call out, though, perhaps after Bogart but perhaps not, is that of Richard Brooks, who wrote and directed; he’d go on to direct Bogie’s next picture too, Battle Circus. Of all his screenplays, which include Key Largo, Blackboard Jungle and Looking for Mr. Goodbar, along with adaptations of The Killers, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and In Cold Blood, this may be one of the closest to his heart, as he used to be a reporter in New York with Samuel Fuller and we know what that was like from the latter’s magnificent Park Row. They took the news business very seriously.
This often felt like Fuller to me, but that’s presumably because Brooks brought something very similar to it. Clearly the philosophy uttered from the screen by Hutcheson as managing editor of The Day could have been uttered by Brooks or Fuller off screen, just in private conversation. ‘It may not be the oldest profession,’ Hutcheson tells one wannabe journalist, ‘but it’s the best.’ And he’s just told us what a profession is: it’s ‘a performance for public good’. Some of the dialogue is more conspicuously written for Bogart. In one scene, a Day photographer bemoans putting himself at risk for a paper that’s about to close and Hutcheson promptly fires him. ‘Everyone knows we’re washed up,’ he suggests. ‘That’s your mistake,’ replies the editor. ‘But I worked here four years!’ complains the photog. ‘That’s my mistake,’ quips Hutcheson. That’s surely dialogue tailored to Bogart, as much as the hilarious back and forth in Rienzi’s car. ‘Not a drinking man?’ the kingpin asks him, when he refuses refreshment. ‘Not in an armoured car,’ he replies.

This may be Bogart’s most traditional scene because, frankly, was there anyone in Hollywood better equipped to stand up against a bully of a crime boss in the latter’s own vehicle? The only actor I could think of who could have played this scene better than the Bogart of the fifties is perhaps the Bogart of the forties; he’s as utterly at ease being threatened as Rick in Casablanca and his lines are just as snappy. ‘I think I like you,’ says Rienzi. Hutcheson simply fires back, ‘Why?’. ‘I’d like you to be my friend,’ offers Rienzi. ‘I’ve got a friend,’ he replies. Martin Gabel does a great job as the mafioso but, while he’s neither a Cagney nor a Robinson, Bogart is still Bogart. ‘Never beat up a reporter,’ he tells the crook. ‘It’s like killing a cop on duty.’ He blisters into him, with infuriatingly simple lines that bite, all while watching him like a hawk. When Rienzi finally realises that he can’t dominate this newspaperman and slaps him with a copy of his own paper, Hutcheson finally grins. He’s got him. This is quintessential Brooks and Bogart.
this film partly on location at the New York Daily News, using both their newsroom and their printing plant, with many real employees fleshing out the backgrounds, so it looks and feels authentic. They did reproduce the newsroom on set, but the difference isn’t noticeable. It wasn’t based on that paper, of course, The Day apparently being an amalgam of a pair of other New York papers, The Sun and the New York World. The former was a serious broadsheet that had been founded by Benjamin Day in 1833, but it had just printed its last edition under its own name in 1950. It was a city editor at The Sun who famously said that, ‘If a man bites a dog, that is news’; ironically, his name was John B. Bogart. The latter paper had been gone longer and was less serious, having pioneered yellow journalism under no less a publisher than Joseph Pulitzer. However, when it ceased publication in 1931, his heirs went to court to sell it to a competitor, Roy W. Howard, who promptly closed it down and laid off its 3,000 employees.

So this tells quite a lot of newspaper history, wrapped up in a fictionalised setting, and that discovery perhaps weakens the ending, which is left open, the future of The Day left to the minds of readers. History tells us precisely what happened and it wasn’t good. It also spins a good story itself, with Bogart magnetic as an editor who finds himself crusading against a bad man in order to keep his paper alive and the twists and turns of that crusade fascinating to watch. There’s also an odd romantic angle, which is woven into the wider story superbly. Hutcheson is a very capable juggler, able to keep many balls in the air at once; he frequently skips from one strand of dialogue to another like lightning. However, he’s dropped what Hollywood would usually see as the most important ball of them all, his marriage, and when he tries to pick it up, it’s too late. What’s telling is how little this really affects his drive, as he’s a newspaperman not a husband. As Margaret suggests, ‘You wouldn’t have had a wife if that newspaper had beautiful legs.’
That brings us neatly back to Ethel Barrymore, who I know mostly from the 1940s, when she was in her sixties. We remember that she resisted the call of Hollywood for a long time, unlike her brothers who became as important on the big screen as on the stage, but she actually made a string of thirteen silent movies in only six years, starting in 1914. But then she left again and returned only rarely, making just two features over almost a quarter of a century. The twenties saw only Camille and the thirties Rasputin and the Empress, albeit a major event with all three Barrymores acting together for the first time. It was only with None But the Lonely Heart in 1943, which won her an Oscar, and The Spiral Staircase, which won her a further nomination, that she really became an actress of film. I’ve seen a few of her pictures from the forties, in which she hasn’t yet disappointed, but this was my first experience of her a decade later. As brief as her appearance here was, it highlights how she was just as powerful in her seventies.

True Confession (1937)

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Director: Wesley Ruggles
Writer: Charles Binyon, from the play, Mon Crime, by Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr
Stars: Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray and John Barrymore
This review is part of the Second Annual Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. This is my John Barrymore review after Ethel yesterday; watch out for Lionel tomorrow.
In 1934, Howard Hawks directed John Barrymore in a pioneering screwball comedy called Twentieth Century. The star played Oscar Jaffe, a notorious Broadway producer who had created a legendary star, Lily Garland, out of an underwear model, Mildred Plotka, only to lose her to Hollywood; the picture recounts his shenanigans to win her back while they both travel on the train of the title. Barrymore was a massive name at the time, a stage legend who had become a screen legend. His leading lady (and Hawks’s second cousin) was less known, hoping that the ‘61st time’s the charm’ after a long and relatively undistinguished career thus far; she had progressed to leads but hadn’t found that perfect role in which to shine. She was Carole Lombard, who had appeared in an earlier film with Barrymore, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, but both as extras: Barrymore was a chariot race spectator (with his elder brother and many other recognisable stars); Lombard was a slave girl (alongside Myrna Loy, Janet Gaynor and maybe Fay Wray).

I mention all this for two reasons. One is that life imitated art, given that the fictional star created a new fictional star and the film in which it happened did likewise. The other is that during the brief span between the two titles, only three years, the world had turned upside down. This time out, Lombard was the star and Barrymore the wild character actor in support; as her career grew, his shrank to the point where life imitated art once more by placing him so frequently into a bar to get sloshed. In only five years, he’d be dead of cirrhosis of the liver; a lifetime of heavy drinking had already rendered him old before his time, but it wouldn’t be long before it would do him in. Of course, Lombard would beat him to the grave by four months, but not through her own doing, her untimely end the result of a plane crash as she returned from a war bond drive. While Barrymore had descended to B-movies and guest slots, Lombard had been choosing her own leading roles, including My Man Godfrey and Nothing Sacred.
And she chose this one too, which suits her to a tee. If Barrymore was playing true to life as a drunk, Lombard was playing close to it too, as a wild and wacky creature called Helen Bartlett. She had built something of a reputation for practical jokes and it’s easy to see that side of her in Helen, but Helen inhabits her own reality as a compulsive liar, albeit in entertaining fashion, somewhat like a suburban housewife version of Baron Munchausen. She’s an aspiring writer, appropriately channelling her wild imagination into fiction, but her books aren’t published and her typewriter nearly gets repossessed. Fortunately her husband, Kenneth, is a lawyer, but unfortunately he’s an honest one, which means that he keeps refusing clients that they need to survive. Of course, a screwball comedy like this plays into that wonderfully; Helen sends her husband a new client, Tony Krauch, accused of stealing a carload of hams. Kenneth accepts his innocence until Krauch explains that he can’t pay him until he sells the hams.

Carole Lombard is magnificently alive here. She’s very dynamic but, for the most part, entirely natural. She makes great faces and she has a whole repertoire of little motions that add nuance to her many flights of fancy. Her best friend, Daisy McClure, is played by Una Merkel, and the two bounce off each other with panache. Sadly, the script by Claude Binyon, based in turn on the play by Louis Verneuil and Georges Berr, doesn’t understand what to do with her, so Merkel’s vast comedic talents are restricted to being an odd combination of long suffering sidekick and human prop, mostly for Barrymore to use in a highly successful demonstration of the art of scene-stealing. At least she gets some time to strut her stuff before he shows up fashionably late and steals the picture out from under her and everyone else. It’s almost the forty minute mark when we first see him and this is a short feature that runs just under eighty-five minutes. To be brutally honest, though, once he’s here, we quickly forget that he took so long to arrive.
I found the first half of the picture, which constitutes the set-up, particularly fascinating. Lombard plays natural and Merkel does likewise but the leading man, who is Fred MacMurray not John Barrymore, is an odd character indeed: an underplayed caricature. I didn’t grow up watching MacMurray on My Three Sons, but I have seen and appreciated him in a variety of film roles, from Double Indemnity and The Caine Mutiny to The Apartment and The Shaggy Dog, not to mention his previous screen partnerships with Carole Lombard: this was the fourth and last of their films together, after Hands Across the Table, The Princess Comes Across and Swing High, Swing Low. I don’t remember disliking him in anything, but I didn’t like him here. He’s tall and thin and young and he has the sort of moustache that doesn’t suit him at all. He’s also overtly acting, which renders some scenes uncomfortable. ‘I can’t stand a liar,’ he tells Helen, after she spins a web of lies around the attempted typewriter repossession, but she’s real and he’s playing a part.

My better half found Helen’s continual flights of fancy annoying but I adored them, perhaps because I’m a writer too, if not one of fiction. I found Kenneth annoying instead, as he clearly hasn’t figured out his wife, even though he’s bombarded with incentives to do so. There’s none so blind as won’t see, I guess, but I felt that his character was horribly wrong, beyond understanding why he’s so honest; it’s both neatly ironic for his profession and crucial to keep his wife at least partially grounded. Now, if I was married to Helen and had to deal with all this, I might find her infuriating like, say, Darsey the cop, soon does, but, from the other side of the screen, I found it all both endearing and hilarious. She’s a pixie and a fantasist and a contrary soul and I only wish I could do it all as well as she does. I’m jealous! Kenneth, on the other hand, offers little positive to the story, instead serving mostly as an anchor to prevent Helen’s ripping yarns from soaring too far away from reality when I wanted her to fly like a dragon and him to help.
Case in point: he’s a male chauvinist who equates her earning a salary with him being unable to provide for his wife, so he forbids her from taking a ‘theoretical’ job as a private secretary to a broker. Of course, she goes to see Otto Krayler, who may really be an old friend of the family, to interview, even though she knows full well that she can’t do anything remotely secretarial. Needless to say, Krayler doesn’t care, because he just wants a sweet young thing to bounce on his knee, and after a quick chase round his large rooms, she escapes. She goes back with Daisy to retrieve her hat, coat and purse, only to be caught up in the police investigation as Krayler was murdered right after she left and the cops are sniffing around. It’s old time comedian Edgar Kennedy who does what I wanted Kenneth to do: as Darsey, he tries to trap her into confessions, only to find her conjuring up scenarios alongside him, just as mental exercise, oblivious of the fact that she’ll be arrested for whichever one rings truest, charged with premeditated murder.

At least, Kenneth finally gets some opportunity to shine because, naturally, he defends his wife, believing her to have killed in self-defence, but he’s immediately hamstrung by a pair of hilarious performances by others. One is by Porter Hall as Mr. Hartman, the emphatic prosecutor who wants to put Helen in the chair; he knew all his co-stars, having starred in The Princess Comes Across with Lombard and MacMurray and Bulldog Drummond Escapes with Barrymore and he plays to their strengths. The other is Barrymore, a player in the game at last who steals scenes immediately and with abandon and relish. He squeezes in next to Daisy in court and distracts everyone with balloons. While Helen is disconnected from reality, as ably highlighted by her line when Hartman begins to attack her in court (‘Why don’t you pop him?’ she asks her husband), Barrymore, as Charley Jasper, the self-proclaimed ‘utmost in criminologists’, is orbiting a completely different planet, rather like Claude Rains playing Hamlet playing Charlie Chaplin.
At this point, I was still jarred by the fact that we had one overtly natural lead and one overtly stylised one, with a natural actor in support utterly overwhelmed by a grotesque but frankly hilarious caricature. What tone was this film going for? Twentieth Century did some of this, but it was consistent in tone and everyone played into the wild situation comedy of the piece. Here, it’s like these actors were appearing in different pictures that belong to different genres. Lombard plays yet another of her screwball heroines, MacMurray feels like he’s appearing in a drama in college, Kennedy is back at Keystone working slapstick, Barrymore channels his stage background to chew up the scenery like an army of termites and Merkel struggles to find something to do after he shows up. And the plot still has to work its way through the court case, then its unexpected aftermath and eventually to the weird romance between a talented teller of tall tales and an honest lawyer who hates liars, all surrounded by blackmail, perjury and layers of lies.

Eventually it trips itself up and drowns in Lake Martha, with an oddly misogynistic ending that doesn’t feel right at all. If I adored the first half, I found that I despised the sweep of the second, even if I got a real kick out of some of its performances. Perhaps the original play, Mon Crime, flowed better; it was French, after all, so could get away with much that American equivalents couldn’t. I wonder if the inevitable remake does a more consistent job; it was retitled Cross My Heart and was released by Paramount in 1946 with Betty Hutton in the lead as Peggy Harper. I’d have to watch this movie afresh to see if I had problems with the editing of Paul Weatherwax, but I think he did fine and the problems all stem from either Claude Binyon’s script or his source material. Certainly Ted Tetzlaff, Lombard’s regular cinematographer, does as capable a job as always and it’s all professional enough otherwise. I put the fault mostly with the script with a little reserved for Fred MacMurray’s approach to Kenneth Bartlett.
Ironically, it would be MacMurray who went on to success while Barrymore faded quickly away and Lombard was ripped from us in one destructive night. She only had seven films left in her, but they included excellent titles like In Name Only, Vigil in the Night and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, with the fantastic To Be or Not to Be wrapping up her career posthumously in 1942. Conversely, Barrymore’s best films were in his past, often a distant one. He had already appeared in two Bulldog Drummond movies and he had a third to go, but the most notable films left in his career were sad ones like The Great Man Votes and The Great Profile, which served primarily as reminders of what he once was, both those films (and their titles) riffing on his former stature and nicknames. I mostly know him as a silent or early sound star and I shocked myself by realising that this is the latest I’ve seen him. I should continue on to see how his career ended, but I’m firmly aware that Twentieth Century may well have been his last great picture and this his last hurrah.

The Yellow Ticket (1931)

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Director: Raoul Walsh
Writers: Guy Bolton and Jules Furthman, from the play by Michael Morton
Stars: Elissa Landi, Lionel Barrymore and Laurence Olivier
This review is part of the Second Annual Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. This is my Lionel Barrymore review after Ethel on Monday and John yesterday.
Welcome to day three of the second annual Barrymore Trilogy blogathon, hosted by In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. I enjoyed my three picks, selected not just to cover each of Ethel, John and Lionel Barrymore but to follow a further theme: that of writers. On Monday, I explored Deadline - USA, in which Ethel and her screen daughters sell a newspaper while a very determined Humphrey Bogart fights to keep it alive. Yesterday, I watched John the consummate scene-stealer chew up as much scenery as he could find in True Confession, in which a fanciful Carole Lombard attempts to write novels, while other invented stories change her life. Here, I’ll wrap up with Lionel in The Yellow Ticket, an unabashed melodrama with Laurence Olivier as a newspaper reporter on assignment in Russia, where he meets one young lady who shakes up everything he thought he knew. It’s a fascinating picture but one that was clearly made much too late. It must have felt almost as out of date in 1931 as it does today.

Really it’s a propaganda piece to warn us that the people who run the Russian Empire really aren’t very nice, but it was released in 1931, when the Russian Empire was long gone and those paying attention were worrying more about a new leader finding his way to power a little further to the west. In 1914, when Michael Morton wrote a play called The Yellow Ticket, it was topical. Europe was about to stumble into war and this play was set only a year earlier. It ran for 183 performances between January and June, starring Florence Reed and John Barrymore, Lionel’s younger brother. In 1916, when Edwin August adapted it to film, initially as The Yellow Passport and, later in re-release, The Badge of Shame, it remained topical because the scuffle that people suggested would be over by Christmas was raging through its third year and Tsar Nicholas II was still in power in Russia. Even in 1918, when filmmakers made two further adaptations, The Yellow Ticket in America and Der gelbe Schein in Germany, the Russian Revolution was still resonating.
But 1931? It was a different world. The heavy-handed anti-imperialist propaganda misses its target because that target, the Tsar, had been in the grave for fourteen years. In fact, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks who had ousted and executed him, was himself seven years dead, with Joseph Stalin consolidating his positions of power and getting ready to begin the Great Purge later in the decade which saw at least half a million and maybe over a million people murdered by the Soviet government. Maybe Raoul Walsh, who had played John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation and built quite a career as a director, with films such as The Thief of Bagdad, What Price Glory and The Big Trail to his name, should have taken on Stalin instead, but no, this was to be one last pot shot at the empire of the long dead Tsar Nicholas with Lionel Barrymore personifying it through the role of Baron Igor Andreeff, a severe man with fingers in many pies but presumably including running the police force, perhaps also the secret one.

Before we get to him, though, we need to experience his Russia from a different perspective, that of Marya Kalish, a teacher and a Jew, which religion is being persecuted by the Cossacks. It’s 1913 and martial law is declared, with all Jews confined to ghettos. No love can be found for those Cossacks in her classroom! After casually mentioning to her children that Russia is so big that it houses 200 million Russians, so many that every time you take a breath one of them dies, little Milva starts breathing quickly just to speed up the process. Her brother arrives home from St. Petersburg, where he was imprisoned for six months for non-payment of unjust taxes, and he brings news of their father, Abraham, who’s seriously ill there. Marya must go to him, but the authorities won’t allow a Jew a passport. Fortunately, by observation of other Jews being allowed onto trains, she discovers another way: the yellow ticket of the title, effectively a license for prostitutes. ‘You can go anywhere with it,’ says Fania Rubinstein. ‘Anywhere there’s men.’
There’s much worthy of note here, both good and bad. A local madam in Kiev signs one for her for 50 roubles with a very pre-code line of, ‘Take that to the police. I’m well known there.’ That reminds that we’re in 1931, a time of freedom from American censors, something that becomes very apparent when some actual nudity shows up, in a St. Petersburg prison, after Marya is locked up for fifteen days for failing to register with the local police, having forgotten about the yellow ticket once it had served its purpose; it’s apparently not as easy to get rid of one as it is to acquire one to begin with. It’s also very melodramatic in the way that many early sound films were, their stories sourced from stage plays. However, if the melodrama fit the time, the action doesn’t. Most of those adaptations of plays were static affairs, focused around wherever the studio could hide the large microphones of the time. This, on the other hand, is a surprisingly dynamic affair, which refuses to sit still for long, leaping around Russia with abandon.

Surely much of the credit here goes to James Wong Howe, the cinematographer, who was still freelancing at the time. He’d started in film as far back as 1923 and wouldn’t john MGM until a decade later. He would be notable for much of his work for them, but the Academy didn’t acknowledge him until 1939 when he shot Algiers and received an Oscar nomination for doing so. He didn’t win for that film, indeed not until The Rose Tattoo in 1956, but he ended up with two wins from nine nominations, his last being Funny Lady as late as 1975. He uses some interesting filmmaking technique to highlight how lively it is at Madam Petrova’s brothel and there’s more when Marya gets to wherever her father is. Presumably it’s a prison, but it looks more like a cross between a deep mine and one of Dante’s circles of Hell. It gets more traditional as it runs on, but it’s never stagebound, never boring and never remotely like the usual adaptations of stage plays to Hollywood screens in 1931. This is a textbook of how it was possible to move the camera.
Of course, the leads have to cross paths sooner or later. ‘Isn’t there someone I could go to?’ Marya asks a fellow prisoner, who tells her that the yellow ticket will follow her to the grave. ‘Someone who’s at the head of all this?’ We cut immediately to the name of Baron Andreeff, to whom we’re about to be introduced. Soon he rides off to a Moscow park with his nephew, Count Nikolai, so he can abuse Boris Karloff, three films away from Frankenstein and escape from bit parts like this. IMDb calls him a ‘drunken orderly’, but he’s really a soldier tasked with taking care of the horses of his betters. He’s no orderly, but he’s certainly drunk. After picking himself back up off the ground, he tries it on with Marya on a park bench. Count Nikolai promptly rescues her so he can try it on with her instead, merely with panache. ‘Not only your hands,’ he suggests, ‘but your lips are shaking.’ The Baron then rescues her in turn, so he can try it on with her as well, but the Count retrieves her purse and very prominently returns her yellow ticket.

So, no chance of salvation there! She’s stuck with her yellow ticket, even if it’s brought her nothing but misery. It didn’t get her to her father, as he was dead when she got to St. Petersburg, but it did get her into jail and now it’s got her into acute embarrassment in front of the most important person she’s ever met in her life, ruining her chances of escaping her brand of a ‘crooked woman’ in the process. So she takes the train back to St. Petersburg and finds herself sharing a carriage with British journalist Julian Rolfe. We’re almost half an hour of set-up into the story, but we’re about to really get moving in a number of directions. For one, she’s a revelation for him, someone who has read his work and appreciates it, if only he would reveal the Russia that she knows. ‘I’m sure there’s a lot you haven’t seen,’ she tells him, so he hires her as his secretary. For another, she’s a beautiful young lady with whom he quickly falls in love, proposing marriage within a couple of weeks, not that she’s ready to accept given her circumstances!
Rolfe is played by no less a name than Laurence Olivier, in only his second American film. He’d taken a two picture deal with RKO for $1,000 a week, against the advice of Noël Coward, who had become a mentor to the young actor after putting him to successful work in Private Lives. First up was Friends and Lovers and then Westward Passage, but in between the two they loaned him out to Fox for this picture. He plays Rolfe like many of his early stage notices: dynamic but light. While Elissa Landi, playing Marya, allows the plot to weigh down on her like an albatross, Olivier as Rolfe naïvely shrugs it off as nothing that could possibly affect him. Cultural historian Jeffrey Richards suggests in Visions of Yesterday that he really played Ronald Colman playing Julian Rolfe, right down to a mimicked moustache. On one hand, this is a problem, because the material is heavy and pretending otherwise doesn’t change it in the slightest. On the other hand, the material is heavy so Olivier’s light touch works as a breath of fresh air, a welcome break.

At least Olivier was playing a character of his own nationality. Fox did go to some trouble to make this feel authentic, painting the various signs in Cyrillic. However, Elissa Landi was an Italian actor with a cultured accent who comes across more as Scandinavian than Russian. She’s too erudite to work as a common woman, even if she’s educated and taught for a living. Lionel Barrymore isn’t as interested in playing a Russian police chief as he is a movie villain, so his voice, which sounds just as it usually was when playing Americans, isn’t as important as it might otherwise have been. What matters is that he’s a bad man, a ruthless man and an entitled man, even if he’s also a punctual man. The first thing he does in the film is to receive a prison warden who has brought him a set of cases recommended for mercy. These men are up for execution the next day but Andreeff growls, ‘I haven’t time to wade through all this,’ and promptly tears them all in half. Rumour has it that he wears a steel corset and we can understand why.
It’s hard to describe The Yellow Ticket today. At times, it’s contemporary social comment, but at others period historical drama and, of course, fluffy romance masquerading as adventure. When the Baron introduces the cabinet full of the tools used in assassination attempts against him, we wonder if it’ll become a Eurospy flick. Whatever else it’s doing, it’s melodramatic, often outrageously so. We didn’t need Landi screaming, ‘You’ll pay!’ at the people who sent her to see her father without telling her that he was a corpse. We didn’t need Barrymore’s suggestion that, ‘Russia really needs a new Herod! We need to slaughter the innocents!’ We certainly didn’t need Olivier punching out the Greek who wants to pay Marya for services in her carriage. We understood these archetypal roles immediately. How overtly Walsh hammers his points home underlines how this is really a propaganda film, merely one that loses most of its power for being delivered at least a decade too late. Down with the Tsar who’s already six feet under! Down, I say!

23 Paces to Baker Street (1956)

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Director: Henry Hathaway
Writer: Nigel Balchin, from the novel The Nursemaid Who Disappeared aka Warrant for X by Philip MacDonald
Stars: Van Johnson and Vera Miles
I’ll be posting a flurry of centennial reviews at Apocalypse Later this week, with three due in three days. I’ll be celebrating Martha Raye and George Montgomery on Saturday, while today marks a hundred years since the birth of Van Johnson, who shared a wife with my last subject, Keenan Wynn. In fact, Johnson married Eve Abbott, a stage actress, the day after her divorce from Wynn was finalised. To be fair, she later explained that the whole thing was conjured up by MGM, as Louis B Mayer wanted a big star like Van Johnson to have a wife to hide the fact that he was gay, so ordered what was known in Hollywood as a lavender marriage. The star remained a big name, even in 1956 after he had been dropped by MGM. He’s still justly remembered for movies like Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and The Caine Mutiny, but I chose this little gem from 20th Century Fox that gifts him with the opportunity to portray a blind playwright, who overhears a conversation that leads him into a race to save a kidnapped child. Its a dream of a role.

He’s Phillip Hannon, an American living in self-imposed exile in London, where he writes by dictation, capturing his work on a reel to reel tape recorder for Bob, his assistant, to type up. His first words are rather telling, partly because they’re minor revisions to a hit play he’s bringing from Broadway to the West End rather than anything new and partly because they reflect the bitterness that has eaten him since he became blind. ‘Sorry?,’ he barks into his mike. ‘What have you been to be sorry about? You didn’t make the world and neither did I!’ When Jean Lennox promptly arrives from New York, he pours bitterness all over her too. She’s clearly an ex from her first appearance even though she just as clearly doesn’t want to be, although 1950s Hollywood weakened what should have been a relationship between a boss and his secretary by making them actually engaged. ‘And then it happened,’ she tells Bob. ‘He didn’t like having me around. So I was fired.’ And so Hannon is even more of an ass than he should have been.
Jean is played by Vera Miles, who is a soft spoken delight in this picture, which arrived at a crucial point in her career. Only a year earlier, she was a Miss Kansas playing the love interest in Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle, but then she gave a great performance in Revenge, the pilot episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television show. That prompted Hitchcock to cast her opposite Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man, later in 1956, then Vertigo (though she was replaced because of pregnancy by Kim Novak), and, of course, Psycho. She’d starred with John Wayne in The Searchers immediately before this picture and John Ford would later cast her between Wayne and Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. She lives up to that promise immediately. When Bob asks if she’s a friend of Mr Hannon’s, she replies simply, ‘Well, I think of myself as one,’ a line that superbly explains their relationship at this time. When her former fiancé takes her onto the balcony to point out to her the sights of London, she deliberately looks only at him instead.

Of course, the script has to find some way for Hannon’s bitterness to be somewhat abated, because we don’t want to watch him for ninety minutes like this, and the next scene sets that up beautifully. He heads over the road for a double scotch at the Eagle and to listen to the world. Initially it’s just a gentleman playing a pinball machine, but then it’s a pair of enticing voices within the Ladies Bar right behind him. A lady pleads not to be forced into a crime by her companion, who sounds rather like Peter Lorre trying to be the Godfather. His hearing enhanced by his loss of vision, Hannon nonetheless strains to hear this conversation and remember the dialogue, so that he can promptly record it after returning to his apartment, in turn so he can replay it later to the police. He believes that the woman was a nursemaid to nobility and she is being forced to get something from Mary to give to Evans on the upcoming 10th of the month. A robbery? The kidnapping of a child? ‘It’s something,’ he says. ‘Something very wrong.’
I’m going to pause for a moment to return to that concept of lavender marriage. The unnamed barmaid who serves Hannan is the wonderful Estelle Winwood, a stage actress who made few films over her long life (she was the oldest actress in the Screen Actors Guild when she died in 1984 at 101). She was married four times and at least one was a lavender marriage, to gay theatre director Guthrie McClintic, whose further lavender marriage of forty years to the lesbian stage actress Katharine Cornell is often cited as a prime example of the practice; theirs is the photo which illustrates the Wikipedia article on the subject. I tend to think of Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, he being gay and she bisexual, though that may have returned to mind as I remember Winwood as Lanchester’s nurse in Murder by Death. Winwood was one of the Four Riders of the Algonquin, with Eva Le Gallienne, Blyth Daly and Tallulah Bankhead, her best friend for decades. All were lesbian or bisexual and some considered or joined lavender marriages.

Even though gay marriage has only recently been made legal in the United States by the Supreme Court, most of us are aware that gay people exist, probably because we know them and may even be related to them. It’s hard to believe that people didn’t actually know that Liberace was gay, for example, but that’s because it was an underground concept at the time. Back in the early years of the twentieth century, public opinion made it nigh on impossible to be both gay and have a prominent career in Hollywood, which was notably awkward for the many people who were both. Most maintained the latter by hiding the former and there was never a better way to hide homosexuality than getting married. Most outrageously, this was often not by choice but because some studios placed morality clauses in contracts, which prompted the downfall of some and the impetus for others to be forced into lavender marriages. Times have certainly changed; we don’t even have separate rooms in which ladies must drink in pubs any more!
Back to the film at hand, both the characters and the story have just leapt into motion. The police listen politely to Hannon’s story but dismiss his interpretation of the conversation entirely, albeit more because he’s a dramatist than because of his blindness, as it could be argued that his very job description tasks him with imagining things. ‘Is that all there was, Mr Hannon?’ they ask. And so, as tends to happen in such tales, he must become an amateur sleuth and solve the mystery himself. Crime fiction is full of unlikely detectives but what makes Hannon special is that his blindness doesn’t merely hinder his ability to investigate, the very case itself provides the spark he’s needed to come to terms with it. It also brings Jean back into his life, because he connects the perfume the lady was wearing with what she used to wear when they were together. She soon becomes his right hand again and explains to the police why it’s important. ‘You see,’ she tells them, ‘this is the first real thing that’s brought him to life in a long time.’

In other words, this mystery provides him with both a constant reminder of his disability and a number of reasons to live his life as best he can anyway. There are points where he simply forgets to be bitter, wrapped up as he is in the hunt, and Johnson does well at suggesting that without ever making it obvious. In many ways, he’s playing a character who’s playing a part but gradually losing connection to that part and becoming himself again. He even finds benefits to being blind, which he would never have considered even so recently at the beginning of the film. ‘Oh, you people with eyes!’ he tells Jean when she fails to hear or smell what he does. ‘You’re so busy looking, you never notice anything!’ Clearly, this script takes Hannon’s blindness seriously, not only as a gimmick but also as a means of deepening both his character and the mystery that he’s driven to solve. That’s very Hitchcockian and it’s yet another reminder of Rear Window, made two years earlier, to which this often warrants comparison.
The screenplay was written by Nigel Balchin, a novelist before he ever became a screenwriter. At this point, two of his novels had been adapted to the screen and a third for the stage. One of them, The Small Back Room, which had popularised the term ‘back room boys’, was filmed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. He didn’t write the source for this picture though, adapting one by Philip MacDonald, another novelist whose work had been frequently adapted to film, hardly surprising given that his father was a writer and his mother an actress. In fact, two of his novels had been filmed by Michael Powell, underlining a connection between MacDonald and Balchin. This was the fourteenth adaptation of a MacDonald work and the second of his novel, The Nursemaid Who Disappeared, also known as Warrant for X. This was the looser adaptation, given that it removes the detective who investigates the crime, Anthony Gethryn, and renders the playwright blind, so this story would seem to be as much Balchin’s as MacDonald’s.

Beyond the script, the film adds other worthy elements. It was shot in Cinemascope, so it’s big and wide from the opening shots of the Thames, and it was shot by someone who knew how to put that format to good use. He’s Milton R Krasner, who had, two years prior, shot Three Coins in a Fountain, which won him the first Oscar awarded for cinematography in a widescreen film. It was shot in London, so the opening panoramas of the Thames were original location footage rather than spliced in material borrowed from a stock vault. MacDonald was well known for writing visually, but Krasner and director Henry Hathaway set up a number of highly impressive shots, including one where the blind playwright has been suckered into a partially demolished building and is about to walk off the edge of a room into nowhere. There’s also clever use of the London fog, both visually and within the story, given that the very title comes from directions Hannan can give to someone with sight who’s rendered just as blind as he is by the fog.
Generally, this is a solid thriller from an era of solid thrillers. It bears strong comparisons to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, not only Rear Window, which also centered around a crime only believed by one man with a disability, but others too. The downside is that it needed Hitch to ground it better. Balchin’s script is capable and includes much that’s praiseworthy but it relies on two things. One is the twist, which I saw through immediately, partly because I’d seen a more famous film that features the same twist (admittedly it didn’t arrive for another year but was based on a hit play from 1953, in turn based on a famous short story from 1925). The other is the progression of discoveries, because we have to rely entirely on Hannon for these as they’re not the sort we can figure out in advance. This isn’t a mystery for us to solve along with the protagonists; it’s a procedural where we watch the protagonists solve it and thrill to the cleverness of it all. As long as we’re OK with those caveats, it works well, but if we’re not, they’ll hurt the film.

Hellzapoppin' (1941)

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Director: H. C. Potter
Writers: Nat Perrin and Warren Wilson, based on an original story by Nat Perrin, suggested by the stage play, Olsen & Johnson’s Hellzapoppin
Stars: Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson and Martha Raye

I knew that Hellzapoppin’ had a reputation for being, shall we say, off the wall, but I wasn’t prepared for how off the wall it actually was. I wonder how well prepared audiences of 1941 were, because this is so far ahead of its time that it took everyone else decades to catch up. Sure, we can see some progression from the Marx Brothers, Busby Berkeley and vaudeville, not to mention the wacky world of cartoons, but this goes beyond them to remind of The Goon Show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Blazing Saddles, to pick on just three insanely influential titles from future eras that clearly owe a major debt of gratitude to Olsen and Johnson, who I’m now realising were more than just another double act from the thirties, a lesser Abbott and Costello. I’ve seen a little of their work, like Ghost Catchers, and been impressed, but nothing so far had suggested the sheer insanity of Hellzapoppin’. This is because their brand of madness was hindered by film and best performed on stage, where they could imaginatively interact with the audience.

Indeed, this was sourced from a stage revue, which, by all accounts, was more outrageous still than this film adaptation. It began in 1938 and was a huge hit; its 1,404 performances over three years made it the longest-running Broadway musical at the time and it went on the road too, initially during the original run, but again after it: twice in 1942 and again in 1949. Olson and Johnson wrote the show, or as much of it as wasn’t improvised on the spot, and led the cast for much of its original run and for the Hellzapoppin of 1949 tour. The cast of each version was fleshed out by a wild variety of vaudeville performers and the material was updated often in order to remain topical. Its irreverent nature is ably highlighted by the opening newsreel clips of a Yiddish Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini in blackface and then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt reciting gibberish. It continued on with what Celia Wren called a ‘smörgåsbord of explode-the-fourth-wall nuttiness’. Given what’s in this picture, especially as it begins, I can buy that absolutely.
What I got from this film is that Olsen and Johnson, the only cast members who transferred over from the stage revue to the film adaptation, never found a rule that they didn’t want to break. The revue had clotheslines strung above the audience, which had a variety of stooges carefully placed to interact with the show, which often left the stage; chorus girls danced with members of the audience or even sat in their laps. Some signature gags made it into the film: a woman wanders around shouting, ‘Oscar!’ while a man does likewise trying to deliver a plant to ‘Mrs. Jones!’, a plant that keeps growing throughout the show. In the revue, it even continued on after the show had ended, as he was found stuck in a full sized tree in the lobby as audience members left the venue. Obviously, that end couldn’t be realistically transferred to film; neither could the buzzers that were fitted to random seats in what sounds suspiciously like what William Castle would call ‘Percepto’ when exhibiting The Tingler two decades later in 1959.

Universal did impose a little structure onto the picture, at least once we get into the main thrust of it which starts around thirteen minutes in. So much happens in the prior time that I gave up taking notes, even though I type at 160 wpm, and tried to absorb the insanity instead. I replayed those thirteen minutes to my son, who wouldn’t dream of watching a 1941 musical even if he got paid to do it, and saw him grin his way through and suggest that he wouldn’t mind actually seeing the picture. That’s how ahead of its time this stuff is. In fact, anyone who enjoyed the honest digs that Deadpool hurled at its own genre would recognise the approach here, 75 years earlier. ‘It’s a picture about a picture about Hellzapoppin,’ the director explains. ‘It’s a great script. Feel how much it weighs.’ The stars aren’t impressed. ‘Listen, buddy. For three years we did Hellzapoppin on Broadway and that’s the way we want it on the screen.’ The director disagrees: ‘This is Hollywood. We change everything here. We got to.’ The simple reply is, ‘Why?’
The layers aren’t merely deep, they’re Escher-esque. The entire film starts with Shemp Howard as a projectionist called Louie who kicks off the film from his booth. We watch him watch a traditional, glamorous musical number on his screen, before the staircase they’re descending folds in on itself and tumbles them straight down to Hell behind the opening credits. Now we’re watching the surreal musical number of the title, with its telling lyrics: ‘Hellzapoppin’! Old Satan’s on a tear. Hellzapoppin’! They’re screaming eveywhere. See the inferno of vaudeville; anything can happen and it probably will!’ Into a landscape of acrobatic dancing devils tormenting elegantly attired ladies and gentlemen who look like they might have wandered over from a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers picture to be jabbed with pitchforks, turned on spits or canned for future consumption, ‘our prize guests’ show up by taxi. ‘That’s the first taxi driver who went straight where I told him to!’ Ole Olsen mutters.

After burning up the taxi in a special effect, they ask Louie to rewind the picture so they can see that part again. ‘Don’t you know you can’t talk to me and the audience,’ he tells them, but rewinds it anyway so they can redo the effect and transform the cab into a horse instead, with a tic-tac-toe board on its butt. Does anything here make sense? Well, they then promptly walk off the set and argue with the director. ‘You’ve got to have a love story,’ he insists. Why? ‘Because every picture has one!’ He wants the studio’s writer, Elisha Cook Jr., to write one in and, after walking through a variety of sets with instant costume changes but a consistent running conversation, they sit down to watch what the studio wants in a photograph that turns into a interactive video, eventually adding Olsen and Johnson into the frame. They’ve been talking to characters in the photo, then overdubbing them with dialogue as if they’re robots on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now they’re in the picture within a picture and we can finally maximise.
I adored those thirteen minutes of sheer cinematic genius and still have trouble believing that I’m watching something from 1941. It isn’t just the age, but the Production Code. We’ve spent most of the time in Hell, with an army of devils torturing the young and beautiful, and we’ve experienced at least one casual murder, one casual suicide and one casual animal killing. Sure, they’re all off-screen, but that’s not the point. Now we’re about to move onto mass theft, destruction of museum property and, eventually, rape, even if it’s a woman ravishing a man. That still counts and it was rather subversive in the Production Code era. I’m shocked at how much Olsen and Johnson got into this movie, all while showing us how Universal wouldn’t let them do what they want. It’s hard to quantify how surreal it was watching this introductory sequence and, to only a slightly lesser degree, the rest of the picture, but I had an absolute blast doing it, again not something I tend to have watching classic era musicals.

Of course, there are jokes, which come thick and fast, thicker and faster even than Mel Brooks delivered in Blazing Saddles. It’s fair to say that a decent amount are obviously set up gags that we can see coming: the balloons, the cactus, the kitchen sink. Others are just plain awful, like the coat of arms. Some are neatly topical, like the sled they pass walking through an eskimo set with the word ‘Rosebud’ painted on it. ‘I thought they burned that,’ comments Chic Johnson. Many are neatly self-deprecating. The man with the ever-growing plant interrupts the stars as he searches for Mrs. Jones. ‘We’re making a movie!’ they protest at him. ‘That’s a matter of opinion,’ he replies. The lady shouting for ‘Oscar!’ first appears asking for Olsen and Johnson’s autographs, but rudely snatches her autograph book back when she realises who they are. That suicide was of a cameraman trying to avoid the torment of making this very picture. The edgier the humour, the more important it is to be aimed as much inward as outward.
Now, this hasn’t sounded too much like a musical yet, the opening number really just a theme tune, but we do get there in the end. The romantic plot that Universal are so keen on introducing revolves around a simple love triangle, but it unfolds at a mansion in Long Island that’s packed full of people for a Red Cross benefit. It’s the Rand estate and the ‘disgustingly rich’ and beautiful young Kitty Rand is at the heart of that love triangle. One of her beaus is Jeff Hunter, a playwright who’s staging a revue called Broadway Bound in her spacious backyard, with its stage the size of a Busby Berkeley set; she loves him and he loves her, but he won’t marry for money. ‘That’s crazy,’ suggest our stars. ‘That’s movies,’ insists the director. The other is Woody Taylor, Jeff’s best friend, who has the eye of Kitty’s parents, perhaps because he’s also disgustingly rich. I can’t argue that this nod to convention doesn’t hurt to ground the outrageous humour but it also aids it in ways I didn’t expect and that impressed me.

The actors in this love triangle are well cast. Jane Frazee is a delightful young lady whose work here appears to be effortless. She’d previously appeared in a number of musicals, occasionally with her sister Ruth with whom she’d been performing for many years. She had a busy 1941, beginning it as the leading lady in Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates and ending it here as the leading lady in an Olsen and Johnson movie. In between were Sing Another Chorus, Angels with Broken Wings and Moonlight in Hawaii, all musicals, as was San Antonio Rose with its odd comedic double act of Shemp Howard and Lon Chaney Jr. Lewis Howard plays Woody Taylor like an honest but dumb waste of space, which is appropriate for the story but unfortunate for his chances to do much. It’s no surprise that Kitty ends up with Jeff Hunter, as Robert Paige is the epitome of the bland romantic hero musicals adored. He’s just like Allan Jones in the Marx Brothers films, a good looking prop with a good voice who couldn’t steal a scene from the stars if he tried.
If only all those other films did what this one does with these beautiful people. As Kitty and Jeff share a suitably soporific number on the empty backyard stage, a note is plastered up on the screen over them: ‘If Stinky Miller is in the audience, go home now!’ it reads and I howled with laughter. After another message is ignored, they interrupt the song to reinforce it themselves, imploring the kid directly, as does Hugh Herbert, who pops around a theatre curtain. And, sure enough, Stinky Miller stands up in silhouette and walks out. I have enough trouble with classic musicals anyway, but I’m going to ache for a recurrence of this scene in all that I see from now on. Further comedic manipulation of musical numbers ensues, but they’re livened up generally through most being sung by Martha Raye, who would have been a hundred years old today, 27th August. I haven’t seen many of her pictures, but I did enjoy her performance here because she provided a bridge between the comedy and the songs.

Raye was a real character, born to vaudevillian parents who started her out in their act at the age of three. She sang for orchestras and on radio, eventually finding her way to film in 1934. Her debut feature two years later was alongside Bing Crosby in Rhythm on the Range and, like Frazee, she came to this from a 1941 Abbott and Costello movie, this time Keep ’em Flying. She was so well known that Warner Brothers caricatured her as a jazz singing donkey in a 1937 cartoon, The Woods are Full of Cuckoos. Her prominence was something that stayed throughout her career, helped by her relentless work for the U.S.O., which saw her described as the female Bob Hope. My better half knew her best playing up her ‘Big Mouth’ nickname in a set of annoyingly omnipresent commercials for Polident denture cleanser. In her private life, she was a conservative Republican and devout Methodist who taught Sunday School classes, but still managed to marry seven different people, divorcing six of them within just over two decades.
She seems to have had a lot of fun here and the most memorable musical numbers are hers, especially Watch the Birdie, which sees her pausing the picture at key moments during the song. Oddly, given that Jeff’s words to her screen brother, Chic Johnson, when he sees her are, ‘Don’t tell me you brought her?’ she gets a good proportion of the singing time in his backyard revue. Given that the wild situation comedy leads Olsen and Johnson to sabotage Jeff’s show under good intentions, that involves Raye singing while inhaling sneezing powder, being stuck to flypaper and even being chased by a man trying to read a pulp in her spotlight. I have no idea how these apparently disconnected performances were supposed to gel together, but I enjoyed the sabotage, not only the bit where they nail the antebellum skirts of a bevy of beauties to the stage and they walk right out of them. Raye is even thrown into the audience, after the introduction of tacks, only to be thrown back on by the Frankenstein’s monster!

At the risk of letting this review keep going forever, there’s much more here that’s worthy of comment. As befits a show rooted in a vaudeville revue, there are a collection of talented folk doing impressive things. Some are actors, as you might expect for a film; I’ve mentioned Shemp Howard and Elisha Cook Jr., but Mischa Auer and Hugh Herbert get plenty of screen time too. The former is a real nobleman pretending to be a fake one for effect and he’s the character who’s surely raped by Martha Raye’s. The latter plays a private detective for no reason I could ascertain, except to give him a vague excuse to wear more disguises than can comfortably be imagined. Others are performers, such as the Olive Hatch Water Ballet, who put on a Busby Berkeley style show in the pool, and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, credited as the Harlem Congeroo Dancers, who perform what appears to be an insanely dangerous dance routine to the accompaniment of Slim and Slam, both musicians and dancers sadly having to pretend to be exuberant servants.
What I have to come back to most, however, is just how much Olsen and Johnson play with the traditional filmgoing experience. At one point, Shemp Howard’s projectionist is trying to get it on with an usherette, only for her to bump the projector. Suddenly, the stars are separated on screen by the projector showing half of consecutive frames in a device I’ve only ever seen done in cartoons before; they even fix the problem themselves by reaching up and pulling the frame down, a move I might expect of Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck rather than a pair of comedians in a 1941 musical. Then they’re upside down. Then the cavalry rides through as they’re in a completely different picture, which magically interacts with them. ‘The big dope!’ Olsen says of a native American with a rifle, who promptly changes his aim to shoot the star. I have to call out the visual effects of John P. Fulton for special praise, as many of them are seamless, including the zany extension of concepts that he had first explored in The Invisible Man.

To suggest that this film surprised me is an understatement. While I’ve seen many of these actors before, this was easily the most I’ve seen our birthday girl, Martha Raye, and I’m eager to explore how versatile she was in pictures as varied as Never Say Die, The Phynx and Pufnstuf. I’m also now highly aware that I’ve overlooked Olsen and Johnson’s contributions to thirties comedy. The gags aren’t all as original as they sound, not only because of a host of cartoons but because of silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton too; Sherlock Jr. especially came to mind while watching. However, I’ve never seen the lunacy of the Marx Brothers ratcheted up this high before and I’m intrigued as to how much this double act managed to get this across on the more inherently restrictive medium of film, as compared to the stage. I want to revisit Ghost Catchers and especially find Crazy House. IMDb credits might suggest that Olsen did little except co-write You’re in the Army Now, but this film proves otherwise. Now let’s watch it again!

The Iroquois Trail (1950)

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Director: Phil Karlson
Writer: Richard Schayer, loosely based on the Leatherstocking Tales novels by James Fenimore Cooper
Stars: George Montgomery and Brenda Marshall
Wikipedia may say that George Montgomery was born on 29th August, 1916, but his gravestone says the 27th, so I’ll go by that. I’ve too few Montgomerys under my belt, but I wrote in my review of Masterson of Kansas that he was known not only for westerns, but also for playing iconic characters in them. In that film, directed by William Castle before his gimmick days, he was Bat Masterson, a legendary Sheriff of Dodge City. He also played Pat Garrett, one of the Ringo Gang and even the Lone Ranger in a serial made long before the TV show in 1938 (well, sort of). I focused instead on the year of 1950, in which he played a couple of famous trappers: he was the title character in Davy Crockett, Indian Scout, and here he played Hawkeye, the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s pentalogy generally known as the Leatherstocking Tales. While this film does follow the general sweep of the most famous of them, The Last of the Mohicans, it’s far from an adaptation, not least because it changes most of the names and leaves out the title character entirely.

The novel was a historical romance, written in 1826 but set in 1757 during what North Americans call the ‘French and Indian War’ but Europeans the ‘Seven Years’ War’. Most of it is spent in the wilderness of upper New York. The French, under the command of General Montcalm, are besieging the British garrison of Fort William Henry on Lake George, but the daughters of Colonel George Munro, the fort’s commander, are on their way to him, accompanied by a relief column led by Major Duncan Heywood. Both sides in this conflict are reliant on Native American allies but Magua, the guide for those reinforcements, is a traitor who’s working for the French and he tries to lead the British into danger. Luckily they meet up with the frontiersman, Natty Bumppo; his travelling companion, Chingachgook; and the latter’s son, Uncas, the titular last of the Mohicans. From there, the novel involves deception and disguise, intrigue and action, battle and massacre. It’s one of the most popular and enduring works of American fiction.
The film retains little but the sweep of it all. We’re still in the Seven Years’ War and Britain is still battling France. Montcalm is still in charge of the French but while he is planning to attack Fort Williams, he hasn’t done so yet and the focus is initially on another fort at Crown Point. Renaming Fort William Henry to Fort Williams isn’t the only namechange on offer. It’s Colonel Eric Thorne in charge there now and he only has one daughter travelling with the men, Marion rather than Cora or Alice. Major Heywood is now Captain Jonathan West, who has loved her for years; Magua is now Ogane, but is otherwise just as treacherous; and Natty Bumppo, the hero of the story, becomes Nat Cutler, even if he’s still regarded by the Native Americans as Hawkeye. His companions shrink down from two to one, Uncas vanishing entirely and Chingachgook now the presumably easier to pronounce Sagamore; he’s also now a Delaware rather than a Mohican. The film’s title, at least, is fair because the consistent road north is the Iroquois Trail.

Those familiar with the source material will see it changed so much that it’s almost a different story, while those who haven’t read it probably won’t care, as it will play just like any other historical adventure they’ve seen from Hollywood. We often laugh today at the historical inaccuracies of Hollywood, as epitomised by Peter Traquair’s famous line about Mel Gibson’s William Wallace being a ‘wild and hairy highlander painted with woad (1,000 years too late) running amok in a tartan kilt (500 years too early)’, but this is a time honoured problem. Only eight years before this film, George M. Cohan attended the premiere of Yankee Doodle Dandy, a biopic of his life and is reported to have said, ‘Good picture. Who’s it about?’ I’m sure many who saw The Iroquois Trail in theatres had read The Last of the Mohicans in school but I wonder how many connected it to the film, especially as the credits cite Leatherstocking Tales as the source rather than any particular one of the five novels that that title includes.
I found it an odd mixture of ambition and laziness. The canvas is painted much more broadly than the Hollywood norm, perhaps as a consequence of Hawkeye not being a traditional hero. Natty Bumppo in the books was usually in the thick of it but rarely as a real lead. The critic Georg Lukacs compared him to ‘the middling characters of Sir Walter Scott’ in that he’s a mechanism for Cooper to explore history without actually writing it. Modern audiences might think instead of R2D2, who is there for everything important in the Star Wars universe, even though he’s hardly a romantic lead to drive the traditional action. George Lucas famously borrowed that approach from Kurosawa and The Hidden Fortress, but I’m sure someone has written a thesis on how far back it goes, perhaps to Shakespeare. What it means here is that we see the war from the macro scale (disconnected generals sending dispatches that take days to arrive) and the micro scale (as seen through Nat Cutler being a personification of the common man) but not in between.

If that approach suggests a worthy story that we can get our teeth into, I have to disappoint. While we do feel like we’re caught up in the sweep of history during a time in which characters feel that history is being made around them, it’s mostly just a backdrop for the usual Hollywood shenanigans: a traditionally iconic leading man and the inevitable love triangle. I liked Montgomery a lot here, but he’s going for that. He’s only half playing the character of Hawkeye and half playing a matinee idol playing Hawkeye. His boyish good looks and easy going charm reminded me of Elvis Presley enough that I half expected him to break out into song, but a number of other names came easily to mind too. His Hawkeye is a swashbuckling hero who’s too laid back to buckle any swashes, somewhat like Charlie Sheen playing Errol Flynn, but there is a serious undercurrent that shows up occasionally that reminds of a young Lawrence Tierney and that sense of danger that he so ably carried with him.
From the beginning, he’s a man apart. Nat Cutler is a frontiersman who’s been adopted by the Delaware tribe, though he still has a periodic hankering to come home to see mama in her cabin in the woods. By sheer coincidence, his younger brother, Tom Cutler, who had signed up with the British army since he saw Nat last, is the recruit chosen to carry an important dispatch north. General Johnson back in Albany wants Colonel Thorne at Fort Williams to reinforce Crown Point because it’s a clear target for the French. By sheer coincidence, this ride takes Tom right by his mother’s cabin and he’s just popping over the field to see her when one of his companions shoots him in the back and retrieves the dispatch. By, you’ve guessed it, sheer conicidence, Nat finds Tom’s body and brings him home to the cabin, where he lives just long enough to set the spark of the story in motion. The British think Tom’s a traitor, his own killer setting him up for that fall, so it’s up to Nat to both seek revenge and save the day for the good guys.

Given that he’s a talented frontiersman, he soon tracks Tom’s killer and he presses him for information but is forced to kill him and escape the scene on a stolen British officer’s horse. Now the British have a thousand dollars on his head, dead or alive, and he has to sign up with them to follow Ogane, the only lead he has left. He and Sagamore seize an opportunity to ride north alongside Captain West and Marion Thorne, not to help out the British or fight in their war but to see what Ogane is up to. The fact that the two goals end up in alignment is mere coincidence from his perspective. Of course, he ends up saving the lives of the other leads. Of course, he scuppers Ogane’s plans on more than one occasion. Of course, his disobeying of orders prompts the British to listen to the trusted Ogane over him. As we head towards the famous massacre, the script becomes even more predictable and it’s both easy to see where we’re going and easy to follow Hawkeye into such predictability with relish.
Brenda Marshall plays Marion Thorne in her final film role, only a decade after her career began. She started out in 1939 with an uncredited role as a secretary in Blackwell’s Island, moved up to the female lead slot for Espionage Agent and The Man Who Talked Too Much, then firmly established herself as a romantic lead in The Sea Hawk, playing opposite Errol Flynn in one of the all time greats of the historical adventure genre. This would have seemed like familiar territory, even separated by so many degrees of latitude, and she’s able to do more than I expected her to get away with. While she is absolutely a damsel in distress, literally being fought over by two strong men (‘Mine!’ proclaims Ogane, pounding his chest in front of four Huron warriors), she does try to avoid the stereotype by fighting back when attacked and even reloading for Hawkeye during one gun battle, because he’s busy rowing a kayak at the time. I appreciated Marshall’s attempts to give Marion actual value but this role is still beneath her.

If Marshall couldn’t do much with Marion because she’s a weak character, Glenn Langan does less as Capt. Jonathan West because he’s just another British officer and he just does what a thousand other actors would have done in his shoes. He isn’t bad, but he’s unable to do anything memorable. That’s really left for the Native American roles, because this is 1950 and Hollywood was still as racist in its casting decisions as the British are to the ‘colonials’ for the majority of this film. There were Native American actors in classic Hollywood, just as there were Asian actors and actors of colour, but that didn’t stop the studios from relegating their talent to the lower characters on the credits list and giving white actors the bigger parts. Filmgoers are usually horrified nowadays by the idea of white actors in blackface, but seem surprised by similar concepts like yellowface and redface, which is personified here by a horrendous showing by Sheldon Leonard as Ogane. Monte Blue, on the other hand, is surprisingly decent as Sagamore.
I’ve seen Leonard in other pictures and enjoyed his work, but then the parts I’ve seen him in were more suited to his middle class New York Jewish upbringing. He played a lot of thugs and heavies in forties crime series, including the Thin Man, Falcon and Joe Palooka series, but he also got odd parts in classics like To Have and Have Not and It’s a Wonderful Life. I don’t remember that he ever played a role as inappropriate as this one, but he was cast in it and he certainly gave it a shot. I don’t even blame him because he’s memorable in his portrayal, but he should never have been cast as a Native American. Ironically, Jay Silverheels had just begun to break the mould in popular culture as the first real Native American star, even if it was through playing Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s stereotypical sidekick. It doesn’t help that whenever Ogane goes back to his tribe, we watch him talk to them but, after he’s fired them up into a frenzy, we cut to overt stock footage of whoopin’ and hollerin’. This and poor rear projection shots hurt the film.

Monte Blue does better as Sagamore but that’s mostly because he was more appropriate for the role. He started in Hollywood back in the teens and worked as an extra or stuntman in early films as important as The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. He grew to play romantic leads opposite many of the leading ladies of the day, like Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow. He was memorable in Orphans of the Storm and White Shadows in the South Seas, amongst a long list of credits. By this point in his career, he’d made over two hundred and fifty movies, which span the map of genres and include titles as prominent as Dodge City, The Mask of Dimitrios and Key Largo, but he was increasingly cast in westerns. All that I knew, but what I didn’t realise until now was that Monte Blue was really Gerard Montgomery Bluefeather, at least a quarter Native American, given that his father was half French and half Cherokee or Osage. Monte Blue brought a grounding, patience and tolerance to this picture that was sorely needed.
The film begins with routine setup, characters and actions slotting together like jigsaw pieces, but when Nat Cutler joins the story by discovering his brother, Sergeant Tom Cutler, shot by traitors, it gains some power and depth. There’s action and intrigue and betrayal, all the things that we might expect from an adaptation, however loose, of James Fenimore Cooper. Hawkeye has to play along with the war to wreak revenge on the unknown man behind his brother’s death and, as poorly as he takes orders, I enjoyed that process as much as I did the performance of George Montgomery. If the war is the background and Blue the grounding, then Montgomery is the heart of the picture. He’s both part of the story and apart from it, hanging around only as long as his story and ours coincide but doing so with a charm that is difficult to ignore. He’s a quintessential Hollywood movie star cast for his matinee idol looks, but even if he’s performing rather than acting, he’s still well worth watching. Happy birthday, George!

Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965)

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Director: Norman Taurog
Writer: Elwood Ullman and Robert Kaufman, from a story by James Hartford
Stars: Vincent Price, Frankie Avalon, Dwayne Hickman, Susan Hart, Jack Mullaney and Fred Clark
In high school, he joined a science fiction fan club alongside Forrest J. Ackerman, with whom he produced a fanzine centred on the fantasy genre. After graduation, he managed two movie theatres in Omaha, NE until being made redundant when the chain which owned them went out of business, but he moved on to run revival houses in Los Angeles. He joined Realart Pictures and was tasked with inventing advertising campaigns for re-releases of old movies. A threatened lawsuit from Alex Gordon about similar titles led to a meeting with the latter’s lawyer, Samuel Z. Arkoff. They became friends and, later, business partners in a distribution venture initially called American Releasing Corporation but soon renamed to American International Pictures. Arkoff handled the business end, while he handled the creative angles. Often he would conjure up entire ad campaigns, with titles and poster art in place, even before scripts were written. He was James H. Nicholson and he would have been a hundred years old today.

A.I.P. generally released low budget indie movies, often capitalising on new youth trends, packaged in double bills for the drive-in market. Their first film was The Fast and the Furious in 1955, starring and co-directed by John Ireland and produced and co-written by Roger Corman. It made $250,000 in box office receipts against a $50,000 budget and the new company was off and running. The average fan of exploitation cinema will have seen a whole bunch of A.I.P. movies in a whole bunch of genres: not merely the usual sci-fi and horror pictures but also juvenile delinquent movies, rock ‘n’ roll movies, biker movies, beach movies and hippie movies. I selected Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine to celebrate Nicholson’s centennial partly because I hadn’t seen it before but partly for the reason that it seemed to be the quintessential A.I.P. picture. At heart, it’s what’s called a spy-fi movie, mixing up the spy genre with sci-fi, but it’s populated by a slew of regulars from the beach pictures and stars Vincent Price from Corman’s Poe films.
As such, it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste. It’s dumb, it’s ridiculous and it’s unrealistic to the extreme. It’s culturally attuned to its time, so that it appears today less like a film and more like a cinematic time capsule. It’s so politically incorrect that modern audiences will be shocked at its viewpoints. And it’s not a good movie whatever criteria you choose to judge it by, except that the presence of Vincent Price is automatically a plus because he would be magnetic even if he was reading the back of a cereal box. It was the most expensive A.I.P. picture at the time, the first to cost over a million dollars to make, but it plays just like the others so the extra money wasn’t well spent. It has been argued, by some of those involved, that it would have been better had the original plan been adhered to, namely to make it a camp musical. ‘It could have been fun,’ said Price, ‘but they cut all the music out.’ Susan Hart said that removing Price singing about the bikini machine ‘took the explanation and the meat out of that picture.’

Of course, Jim Nicholson, who co-wrote the film under the pseudonym of James Hartford, was far more interested in showcasing Hart. Her first major role in a feature had come the year before, when she appeared opposite Tab Hunter in Ride the Wild Surf, and when Nicholson saw rushes from that picture, he promptly snapped her up for an A.I.P. contract. Shortly thereafter, he snapped her up for a marriage license and James Jr., now a composer in New York, was born in 1965. I have to say that Hart, who appears early and often, looks amazing for someone who had given birth that year, and it’s her movie until Vincent Price arrives. Never mind that we’ve seen as much of Frankie Avalon, one of the two A.I.P. beach movie stars (the other, Annette Funicello, has a neat cameo locked in a pair of stocks), it’s Susan Hart that we’re watching. Of course, she has the advantage of being a bulletproof and car-proof beauty wearing a gold bikini (under a raincoat) who flirts outrageously in a southern accent. Frankie who?
Avalon is Craig Gamble, apparently a spy for Secret Intelligence Command, but a completely inept one. D. J. Pevney, Gamble’s boss and Uncle Donald, calls him 00½ to begin with, but downgrades that during the movie to 00¼ because the boy is accident prone and he ends up on the worse side of those accidents. He won’t even let the poor spy carry a gun! The obvious comparison is to Maxwell Smart, but given that Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine was shot in the summer of 1965 and Get Smart launched on 18th September, I presume that they combined James Bond and Inspector Clouseau independently rather than influence each other. Avalon isn’t a bad bad spy but he seems to be playing someone else; in the beach movies, he owned the role and anyone else trying the formula elsewhere seemed to be playing him. He’s in the film because Diane, the bulletproof beauty in the gold bikini, seems eager to chat him up and get him home, something he’s hardly going to argue with, given that his date walked out on him for being cheap.

Unfortunately for him, it’s all a case of mistaken identity. Diane is really a robot working for the mad genius, Dr. Goldfoot, who has just tuned in to discover that he isn’t watching #11 roll around the floor with Todd Armstrong, the world’s most eligible bachelor. ‘Fye on you!’ Vincent Price tells his assistant, inevitably named Igor, ‘You’re an idiot!’ Beyond being a magic line I should program my alarm clock to use, it marks Price truly taking ownership of the film. Sure, Susan Holt is delightful as Diane, changing accent at the drop of a hat. Sure, there are also similarly clad beauties #1 to #9 to feast our eyes upon. Sure, the sets are gloriously familiar, all decked out with old dark house gimmicks and spy-fi gadgetry, including what does look like the pit and the pendulum from The Pit and the Pendulum. But all this is subservient to Mr. Price, who stalks his underground lair in gold slippers and smoking jacket, wringing his hands, hurling out cheap gags and telling Igor to shut up. He’s what keeps us watching.
That’s not to say that those robot girls in gold bikinis aren’t spectacular. They’re a suitably diverse lot, which in 1965 means a bevy of white beauties with different coloured hair, plus a token black girl (Issa Arnal) and a token Asian (China Lee). Most of them were regulars in the beach movies and didn’t go on to long careers outside the genre, the notable exception being Deanna Lund, soon to become famous as Valerie on Land of the Giants. Three of them were Playboy Playmates of the Month: Marianna Gaba in September 1959, two years after winning Miss Illinois; China Lee in August 1964, becoming the first Asian-American Playmate in the process; and Sue Williams, who was the first Playmate under five feet and the first to get breast implants, though apparently not the first to commit suicide, as has been frequently reported. It has to be said that Gaba was fluent in three languages and Salli Sachse earned a masters degree in psychology, but this is 1965 so they were hired to look cute in gold bikinis. That’s it.

Oh, and three of them are related to Jim Nicholson. Beyond Susan Hart, his new wife and mother of his son, at the time only a few months old, there are also Laura Nicholson and Luree Holmes, his grown-up daughters by his first wife, Sylvia. Luree was less than a year younger than her new mother-in-law, whose first A.I.P. role was in the very same picture, 1964’s Pajama Party, that Luree’s daughter appeared in as a topless baby model. That makes Joi Holmes, Nicholson’s granddaughter, older than James Nicholson Jr., his eldest son. Boy, those family get togethers must have been a blast! I wonder how long they continued after Nicholson died of a brain tumour in 1972. Certainly, A.I.P. continued on for a few years before his partner, Sam Arkoff, got bored with the movies and sold his stake to Filmways for $4.3m. I’ve documented the shenanigans that went on with the rights to their films in my review of Naked Paradise aka Thunder Over Hawaii, a Corman picture that Hart now owns and apparently refuses to release.
But back to Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, a title that might seem unwieldy until you hear the incredibly catchy theme song by no less a recording sensation than the Supremes, still with Diana Ross in 1965, as it will stick in your head and prompt you to start singing it out loud at random moments. The story starts out relatively focused, but it gradually veers out of control, into what can only be described as slapstick comedy territory. By the time we end up in a substantial chase scene through San Francisco in what seems like every mode of transport known to mankind, usually accompanied by horrendous rear-projection, I was half expecting the Keystone Kops to join in. It’s hard to pin down what goes wrong because there’s so much going on and so much of it makes us laugh and roll our eyes at the same time. The chase would have impressed me a lot more if I hadn’t been reeling from the motion sickness induced by the script screaming back and forth like a cat that’s overdosed on catnip.

Price is the traditional lead, as mad scientist Dr. Goldfoot, who’s attempting to get rich by using robots to seduce the wealthy into marriage and the subsequent signing over of all their assets. These are golddiggers in gold bikinis and rather blatant ones at that! Diane lands Todd easily enough but won’t even sleep with him on their wedding night until he signs over the stocks she stole out of his safe. Today’s word is ‘pre-nup’, friends. While Dwayne Hickman is highly billed as Todd, Avalon is the real support, playing the inept spy, Craig Gamble, in a mostly unfunny secondary plot that undoes much of Price’s deliciously camp evil. Fred Clark has far more talent than is shown here as nothing but the victim of Frankie Avalon’s unwitting idiocy. You might think that this would be easy enough to follow, but the scriptwriters focus so much on misogynism and in-jokes that they almost become a plot of their own. Did anyone notice or care that Avalon and Hickman played the same roles in Ski Party a year earlier, merely reversed?
Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine seemed to be a timely release, justifying a new high for A.I.P. budgets, riffing on 1964’s Goldfinger and many of the company’s successful series: the Poe movies and the beach movies, many of which featured very similar cast and crew. However, for some reason it didn’t find the audience it sought in its home territory, though it did find a surprising audience in Italy, where it was a huge hit. That prompted the sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, to be shot in Italy, with Italian stars and an Italian director to back up the returning Vincent Price. That director was Mario Bava, whose work was redone for the English language release; given that his next film was the glorious spy-fi romp, Danger: Diabolik, A.I.P. clearly lost out. The stars are Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, a pair of comedians who had already spoofed Goldfinger themselves, in 1965’s Goldginger. Even as a big fan of Mario Bava, I’m not feeling the need to follow this up with that. I’ll just sing the theme tune to myself again instead.

Doctor Syn (1937)

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Director: Roy William Neill
Writer: Roger Burford, from the novel by Russell Thorndike, with additional dialogue by Michael Hogan
Stars: George Arliss, Margaret Lockwood and John Loder

Alfred Hitchcock was hardly one to heap praise on his actors, whether or not his famous quote about actors being cattle was ever spoken or not. However, after working with Margaret Lockwood on The Lady Vanishes, he was highly complimentary of her talents. ‘She has an undoubted gift in expressing her beauty in terms of emotion,’ he told the press, ‘which is exceptionally well suited to the camera. Allied to this is the fact that she photographs more than normally easily, and has an extraordinary insight to get the feel of her lines, to live within them, so to speak, as long as the duration of the picture lasts.’ He was optimistic about her future as well, albeit in oddly paradoxical fashion: ‘It is not too much to expect that in Margaret Lockwood the British picture industry has a possibility of developing a star of hitherto un-anticipated possibilities.’ How an un-anticipated possibility could be thus anticipated, I have no idea but I’m not going to argue with the master, especially on what would have been Lockwood’s hundredth birthday.

To celebrate her career on such an auspicious day, I selected the first film adaptation of Russell Thorndike’s stories of the Kentish smuggler, Doctor Syn, made in 1937 by the British company, Gainsborough Pictures. Doctor Syn apparently enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the thirties, the original novel of 1915 starting to generate sequels: two in 1935 and another in 1936, with three more following this film version. I picked it in part because it was a major stepping stone for Lockwood, who stepped in when Anna Lee dropped out and earned a three year contract with Gainsborough for her troubles, but also because it’s the last movie role for the fascinating actor, George Arliss, who was the first Briton to win an Academy Award and the first actor from anywhere to win for portraying a real person, Benjamin Disraeli. I’d like to see a lot more Arliss movies than I have, but two have especially remained with me over time for his performances in them: The Green Goddess and The Millionaire. He’s memorable here too.
Some might see this as a mystery, but they’ll be sorely disappointed because it’s pretty clear from moment one what’s going on. It is 1800 and the very first thing we see in Dymchurch is the gravestone of Captain Nathaniel Clegg, pirate, who was hanged at Rye. We pan up and jump into the church above it to discover a packed house with an eager warden taking collection. Imogene Clegg, the lovely young beauty played by Lockwood, is batting her eyelashes at Denis Cobtree across the aisle and J. Mipps, stone mason and coffin maker, is watching the surrounding area with a telescope from the bell tower. When he spies a detachment of revenue agents from the Royal Navy on their way, he rushes down to warn Dr. Syn, the local parson, who’s about to begin his sermon. The first thing that we wonder as we get underway is why everything seems to be about Captain Clegg when the movie’s title is Doctor Syn and the answer we give ourselves is the obvious one. When Hammer remade this in 1962 they called it Captain Clegg.

It’s pretty clear that Dymchurch is a hotbed of smugglers. While we never actually see any smuggling, we certainly see the things they’ve been smuggling and we watch them talking over them about whether to dump all this fancy French liquor into the sea or run the risk of being rumbled by Captain Howard Collyer and hanged. Nobody hides behind masks; we know who these people are and we watch them move through their secret passages and run rings around the investigators. This isn’t a mystery, it’s more like the origin story of a folk hero. Dr. Syn explains that half the population of Dymchurch was sick and poor when he arrived to begin organised smuggling; now there are neither and there’s a new schoolhouse to boot. If anything is clearer than that Dymchurch is ripe with smugglers, it’s that people are pretty happy about its effects and the continuation of those effects is placed into jeopardy by the extra man that Collyer brings along with his sailors.
He’s generally referred to as a mulatto, though Dr. Syn, hardly politically correct for all his benificent aura, calls him ‘yellow man’ at one point. He’s played by Meinhart Maur, a Hungarian actor active in Jewish theatre, who moved to England to escape the Nazi menace rising in Germany in the early thirties. This is hardly an opportunity for him to demonstrate his command of the English language, as his character had his tongue ripped out immediately before the film begins. We join it as he’s being tied to a tree on a South Sea island and left to die, the sign above his head declaring that this is what happens to those who betray Captain Clegg. For him to arrive in Dymchurch with the revenue agents is the one thing that really worries Dr. Syn, who naturally recognises him, as he’s really... no, I’m not going to give that spoiler even though it’s so obvious that anyone who misses it surely has to be kidding. Maur reminds of George ‘The Animal’ Steele and Tor Johnson. I presume he could act circles around them but not in this film.

If the stirring up of a smuggling town by revenue agents and the real risk of exposure of Dr. Syn’s former life isn’t enough, we get a few subplots to keep this 78 minute feature brisk. Imogene, the daughter of a notorious pirate (not that she apparently knows it) and Denis, the son of Sir Anthony Cobtree, the local squire, are madly in love but clearly from different classes so their future isn’t certain. The aptly-named Samuel Rash, the local schoolmaster, is madly in love with Imogene; he’s ready to have their banns read even though she can’t bear to be around him. In fact, Rash isn’t too popular with anyone, it seems. He butts heads with Dr. Syn on how to keep Collyer and his men away from their goods. One of his students, the unfortunately named Jerry Jerk, hates him with a passion and that leads to both tension and hilarity later on. When the film bogs down in the middle, it’s Graham Moffatt who picks it back up again as Jerry. Most of his films were with Will Hay, but this is a welcome exception.
Moffatt is just one of the actors who infuses this film with character. He may be too old and too big to be particularly believable as one of Mr. Rash’s students but he’s great fun, even when he’s not having conversations with himself. ‘Am I a liar?’ he asks himself for Dr. Syn late in the film. ‘Sometimes. But not now.’ He comes across like a too tall hobbit and I adored him. Muriel George plays Mrs. Waggetts, Jerry and Imogene’s boss at the Ship Inn, and she plays her so well that I recognised the character in at least half a dozen people I grew up with, even though I was born on the other side of the Thames. She doesn’t take lip from anyone, whether it be the kids working for her or the naval captain who’s searching her pub from top to bottom looking for illicit liquor. And then there’s Wilson Coleman, who plays the most unfortunately named character in a movie that includes sinful Dr. Syn, rash Mr. Rash and, well, Jerry Jerk. The latter has to shout ‘Dr. Pepper! Dr. Pepper!’ in the marshes but that’s only hilarious through hindsight.

There’s much to enjoy here, even if the mystery isn’t remotely mysterious. It played to me as a quintessential slice of the British equivalent of Americana. I don’t know if there’s a word for such a thing, but this is so British through and through that it’s easy to see why Talbot Rothwell parodied it so capably in Carry On Dick, one of the better instalments in a series that consistently speared British organisations and institutions. I knew that the title, double entendre aside, referred to highwayman Dick Turpin, another inappropriate British folk hero, but the story is clearly hijacked from Dr. Syn. Sid James merely plays a highwayman who happens to be masquerading as a parson rather than a... no, I still won’t spoil the obvious reveal. I’ll let Capt. Collyer do that when the time is right, because thankfully Roy Emerton is a jovial captain who isn’t quite as dumb as he makes himself out to be. He could easily have played this like the usual inept authority figure but he’s thankfully much more of a worthy character.
Everything here felt like home, with the British character emanating from the good folk and the bad. There’s great hospitality at the squire’s mansion, especially to the drunken doctor. There’s a thriving inn in the middle of town because everything revolves around it as much as the church. There’s organised sticking it to the tax man, which we accept because it’s generally used for the benefit of the people. The smugglers use secret passages, pretend to be marsh phantoms and switch signs around in what should feel dangerous but really feels like jolly good fun. Even the bosun’s bunions are somehow traditional. And, of course, young love surely makes any heart feel like it’s home. Margaret Lockwood and John Loder could have been given much more substance here but they’re both enjoyable to watch and at least the former gets more to do towards the end of the movie than in the build-up to it. Of course, above, behind and on top of everything in town is the title character, played by George Arliss.

I’ve been fascinated by Arliss ever since I saw The Millionaire, a 1931 pre-code that I watched for Jimmy Cagney but left as a fan of George Arliss. He’s an odd duck who doesn’t quite seem real. His head is too big for his body, which sometimes makes him appear to be a walking caricature, but we only laugh with him when he wants us to and we never laugh at him. He underplays for most of the film’s running time; he’s relentlessly calm, even when things aren’t going his way, and he lets others act around him and take the spotlight throughout. Yet we can’t stop watching him, because there’s a presence to him that’s impossible to miss. He’s always the most important person in the shot, whatever the scene and whatever he’s doing in it. As a man with a number of huge secrets, he’s the one who sits there and listens while others sit there and talk, but however quiet he gets and however close Capt. Collyer’s investigation gets, we never believe that he’s not in charge of the situation with a backup plan for his backup plan.
I like that this film marked the end of one career but the ascendance of another. Arliss had made 25 films over 17 years, playing an impressive array of historical figures, including Benjamin Disraeli, Alexander Hamilton, Voltaire, the Duke of Wellington and even Cardinal Richelieu, so many that his fictional characters like Dr. Syn feel as grounded in reality. Margaret Lockwood, however, had only been in film for four years and her most important pictures were still ahead of her: Bank Holiday and The Lady Vanishes in 1938 and, turning her persona upside down, The Man in Grey, The Wicked Lady and Bedelia in the forties. She did well in film, becoming the highest paid actress in British cinema in 1952, but she increasingly returned to the stage. 21 years after Cast a Dark Shadow, she was talked out of retirement for The Slipper and the Rose, a retelling of Cinderella that gave many big names a last hurrah, and even with only that one picture made in the last sixty years, she’s still well-remembered and well-respected today.

The Bobo (1967)

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Director: Robert Parrish
Writer: David R. Schwartz, from his own play, in turn based on the novel, Olimpia, by Burt Cole
Stars: Peter Sellers, Britt Ekland, Rosanno Brazzi and Adolfo Celi

Such are the dangers of selecting pictures that I haven’t seen for my centennials project! Today would have been the hundredth birthday of Rosanno Brazzi, an Italian actor who became a success in the English language too. His international fame was sparked by Three Coins in the Fountain in 1954, quickly followed by a lead role opposite Katharine Hepburn in David Lean’s Summertime. He made prominent pictures with prominent actors: South Pacific opposite Mitzi Gaynor, The Story of Esther Costello with Joan Crawford and The Barefoot Contessa with Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner. Aiming more at interesting but more obscure titles, I thought about Legend of the Lost, in which Brazzi hires John Wayne to guide him towards a city of gold, but I’d heard bad things. He was the lead in Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, but I have a bunch of horror movies coming up. So I picked The Bobo, a Peter Sellers comedy, in which he co-stars with Sellers’s wife of the time, Britt Ekland. It’s a fascinating film to review, but Brazzi is hardly in it!

The script was written by David R. Schwartz, as an adaptation of his play of the same name, but the novel upon which it was based was called Olimpia, the name of Ekland’s character; she’s prominent early and often and is inextricably woven into the plot. Sellers plays the lead, of course, which role involves many scenes with his wife. Brazzi, however, third credited, gets less screen time than Hattie Jacques, Ferdy Mayne or Kenneth Griffith, who all languish down in the ‘with’ section of the opening credits. His part is also far less substantial than that of the remaining ‘co-star’, Adolfo Celi, who does at least drive the plot. Of all these, Carlos Matabosch of Matabosch Tractors, who is only in the film so that he can lose his new Maserati to Olimpia, is the easiest to lose and so Brazzi is the easiest to replace. He may be in the final shot, but that doesn’t mean that this is about him in the slightest. I’ll need to go back to his career and pick out a more appropriate title when I collate these reviews into book form at the beginning of next year.
We’re in Barcelona, Spain and Olimpia Segura is a piece of work. In the admittedly beguiling shape of Britt Ekland, she wears mini-skirts, drives fast cars and does a powerful job of keeping her many older, richer beaus at arm’s length. The friend of one describes her as ‘the most desirable witch in Barcelona’. According to Pepe Gamazo, he had ‘two ecstatic months together’ with her, but now she’s kicked him out of the apartment his grandmother left him and changed the locks. She drives his sports car and won’t let him anywhere near it. He’s a complete wreck and not only because Kenneth Griffith’s Spanish accent is far from pristine. She has such power over him that, before he knows it, he’s playing a journalist for her to blackmail another sucker, Silvestre Flores, into giving her that Maserati, a special order that took nine months to acquire for Matabosch and cost 800,000 pesetas. He does get a new key for his troubles, but it turns out that it doesn’t fit the lock to the apartment. What a piece of work she is!

Into town and into the cafe opposite Olimpia’s apartment, where Pepe Gamazo blubbers like a broken man, comes Juan Bautista, a matatroubadour as he puts it. ‘I am Spain’s greatest singing matador,’ he pronounces with authority, and he’s here to audition for Francisco Carbonell, the impresario who runs the local theatre, even if Francisco Carbonell doesn’t want him to. In a film with two thoroughly unsympathetic leads, I found Adolfi Celi’s portrayal of Carbonell the most traditionally enjoyable. He channels Sidney Greenstreet as a relatively static but highly characterful character and his expressions while a captive audience to Bautista’s song in the cafe are priceless. I even liked his office, given that his window is part of the vast billboard to his theatre. And it’s Carbonell who places our story into motion, even if he’s inherently absent from its development and returns only once it’s done to start the process of wrapping things up. I know Celi from Thunderball and Danger: Diabolik, but I’ll remember him from The Bobo too.
I should pause to attempt a definition of the title, which is never explained in the film beyond a supposed gypsy proverb quoted at the beginning that, ‘It is said in Barcelona, ‘A Bobo is a Bobo!’’ I doubt it’s real but know it isn’t helpful so I googled around to find a better explanation. Dictionary sites suggest that it’s ‘a member of a social class of well-to-do professionals who espouse bohemian values and lead bourgeois lives’, the word taken from ‘bohemian’ and ‘bourgeois’. In Ghana, it’s the name given to a child born on a Tuesday while, in the Philippines, it’s a fish trap made of bamboo. My better half knows it as a carny term for someone who uses insults to get customers to pay to throw balls at him, in hope of dunking him into something, but the web identifies that as a ‘bozo’. I know it as the pet name we had for my granddad, taken from my cousins playing peek-a-boo behind him. None of these fit, so I’ll go with the Spanish word that translates most politely as a ‘fool’. Why Sellers would name his yacht after that, I have no idea.

With that in mind, we wonder who the fool is in this film. Is it Francisco Carbonell, who is pressured into giving Bautista a chance at landing a week’s contract for 2,000 pesetas when he’s clearly told this matatroubadour to go back to his village? Is it any one (or even all) of the various men of means who Olimpia has so capably wrapped around her finger? Is it Bautista himself, who takes on the challenge of conquering such an unconquerable woman, specifically to remain in her apartment for long enough for the lights to go off and remain off for an hour? Is it Olimpia herself, who has no idea that she’s being used for someone else’s benefit just like she’s used so many others? Arguably, it could be applied to every character in the picture who has a line of dialogue, except only Eugenio Gomez, who runs the cafe. Al Lettieri, an Italian American actor playing very much against type, given that he portrayed so many villains and heavies in seventies Hollywood, may here play the only character who isn’t a Bobo.
I’d start talking here about the story finally finding its way, given that Sellers doesn’t even show up for ten minutes and Carbonell doesn’t issue his challenge until almost half an hour into the picture, but we’re about to be detoured into an odd diversion. Just as Bautista begins to win over Olimpia, we’re ripped away to watch a five minute chunk of flamenco. Patrick Boone, writing at From the Sidelines, ably describes the sudden prominence of Antonio Santiago Amador, known as La Chana, and Los Tarantos Flamenco Company, as a misstep we would see as ‘unforgiveable if it weren’t for how hypnotically fascinating La Chana’s staccato footwork is.’ I couldn’t tell if this Catalan gypsy was in severe pain or the heights of ecstasy, but she’s so magnetic that I couldn’t look away. Boone astutely points out that, ‘Unlike the filmmakers’, every one of her steps is executed with amazing power and precision.’ I’d second that, because there isn’t another magnetic moment in The Bobo unless we watch it not as a film but a layer over reality.

As she tells it, Britt Ekland was a fat and ugly Swedish child who used humour to get past her looks. After some travelling theatre and a brace of bit parts and walk on roles, she was cast in a small role in Guns at Batasi, which was shot at Pinewood Studios. Over at MGM British Studios, Peter Sellers was finishing up a fraught shoot for the second Pink Panther movie, A Shot in the Dark. The story goes that he saw her picture in the paper and knocked on her door at the Dorchester Hotel to invite her to his suite. Next morning, he took her to Kensington Palace to meet Princess Margaret and ten days later they were man and wife, a marriage which Ekland has said she should never have entered into. This was their third of three films together, after a TV movie called Carol for Another Christmas and After the Fox, but as riotously funny as the latter was, the marriage had found rocks almost immediately, crippled by Sellers’s jealousy and paranoia. Even when Victoria Sellers was born in January, 1965, things didn’t get better.
Like many comedians, Sellers was a highly troubled man and Ekland has suggested that he was bipolar. Certainly he clashed with many of his directors and fellow actors. He had trouble understanding Vittorio de Sica, the director of After the Fox and attempted to have him fired. He had trouble with his wife’s performance in the same film and arguments escalated to his throwing a chair at her. He left his next film, Casino Royale, before completing the shoot because of clashes with Orson Welles; he demanded that they never share the same set. Before quitting that film, he was honoured with a CBE but an argument the day before his investiture at Buckingham Palace required a make-up artist to cover up the scratches on his face from Ekland’s nails. Three weeks into The Bobo, according to Ed Sikov’s Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers, he’d already had the script girl fired when he told director Robert Parrish, ‘I’m not coming back after lunch if that bitch is on the set.’ He was referring to his wife.

Kenneth Griffith, a friend of Sellers who played Pepe Gamazo, told Sikov that when he arrived on set, Sellers was directing rather than Parrish. Asking the latter how this had come to pass, he was told, ‘He just announced that he was taking over and I felt that I had a duty to sit quietly and be a servant to the film. You know, the number one job is to get this film finished.’ It cost a friendship and Parrish’s wife explains that they saw the film as ‘a disaster that we considered a death in the family and never mentioned.’ In such a light, it’s hard to hurl barbs at Parrish or his writer, David R. Schwartz, who was, after all, adapting his own play. Sellers is surely the appropriate person to take the credit or blame, depending on how you view the film. And, to focus back on my point, I found that this knowledge flavoured my take on the movie to the degree that its real value is neither as art or comedy but as the documenting of a powerful love/hate relationship.
I should note that I make no suggestion that there’s a parallel in how their relationship begins. Ekland told the Daily Telegraph that, ‘I was very young and he swept me off my feet. He gave me a puppy for God’s sake.’ She can’t explain why. ‘What was he thinking? And what was I thinking? You can’t bring up a dog before you’ve brought up yourself.’ Olimpia, on the other hand, is easily conned because her Achilles heel is so obvious: money. Her unashamed gold-digging heart visibly perks up when he unfurls words such as ‘royalty’, ‘wealth’ and ‘position’, while suggesting that his master, the Count of Something or Other wants to pay her to meet with him. No, it’s in how this real life couple interact on screen that the honesty shines past the fiction. In a scene at a romantic retreat, there’s real charisma between them, suggesting that they really cared for each other, but in another, an argument over a 275,000 peseta fur coat at Castillo’s, shows how much they also hated each other too. They divorced soon afterwards.

What makes these scenes so powerful is that they appear to be honest. Outside these moments, I never bought into Juan Bautista as anything but an act. Sure, Juan is lying through his teeth for most of the film, but I never felt like I saw the real character once, just Sellers putting on a Mediterranean tan and a dubious accent. The only times I bought into what I was seeing was when I was watching Peter Sellers rather than Juan Bautista and, to a lesser degree, Britt Ekland rather than Olimpia Segura. For all the great talent of the man, Ekland did the better job here for no better reason than I think she wanted to. And that said, both of them were easily outdone by Adolfo Celi, Hattie Jacques as Olimpia’s maid and Ferdy Mayne, whose own centennial I celebrated in March, as the car dealer, Silvestre Flores. Only when both these unlikeable and unsympathetic characters are taken down a peg or two are they really enjoyable to watch. I was fascinated for an hour and a half but I only really enjoyed Juan and Olimpia towards the end.
So, this is a really odd film. It’s not particularly funny, Sellers trying too hard without particularly getting anywhere. I felt like he was often flogging a dead horse with his dialogue because each explanation was so overdone. It succeeds much more as a tragedy than a comedy, the well-deserved come-uppances providing a belated grounding to the characters that was so sorely missing for so long. The sets are immersive, but most of them are obviously sets, this being shot at Cinecittà Studios in Rome rather than the memorable streets of Barcelona, regardless of how much of them we see behind the opening credits. The retreat, at least, is wild and wonderful, a grotto bathed in blue light until we pan over to lush red interiors. The music is forgettable and the direction no better, given that the film seems to exist primarily to let Sellers do his thing while his wife serves as decoration. No, this is much more interesting a film than it is enjoyable. Watch if you’re more interested in Sellers and Ekland as people than as actors.

The Shiralee (1957)

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Director: Leslie Norman
Writers: Neil Paterson and Leslie Norman, from the novel by D’Arcy Niland
Stars: Peter Finch, Elizabeth Sellars and Dana Wilson
I’m a sucker for Ealing films, so this was an easy pick for me to celebrate what would have been the hundredth birthday of Peter Finch. It was made halfway through his career, a long time after his early Australian films for director Ken G. Hall, such as Dad and Dave Come to Town or Mr. Chedworth Steps Out, but just as long before his Academy Award win for playing Howard Beale in Network. Until Heath Ledger won over thirty years later for The Dark Knight, Finch was the only posthumous Oscar-winner in a performing role. He was also the first Australian actor to win an Oscar, though that depends on how you look at nationality. Technically, Finch was British, born in London to an Australian father and a British mother. However, in his forties, he learned that his father wasn’t really his father; he was the result of his mother’s affair with an Indian Army officer who, with a name like Jock Campbell, surely hailed from Scotland. He grew up first with his grandmother in France and then his great-uncle in Sydney, Australia.

He arrived in Sydney in 1926, when he was ten years old; by the time he moved back to England in 1948, he had surely become an Australian in heart and mind. He toured the country as a stage actor and became a major name on radio, the first to portray Ruth Park’s Muddle-Headed Wombat. The Second World War interrupted his nascent film career, as he enlisted in the Australian Army, serving as an anti-aircraft gunner as well as an actor and director touring army bases and hospitals in 1945. He was also allowed to keep making films while serving in the army, many of them propaganda shorts, and he continued his screen career after the war, but he was sent to Britain by Laurence Olivier, who put him under contract; he built a name for himself in movies as varied as The Miniver Story (the sequel to Mrs. Miniver), Othello (opposite Orson Welles) and Father Brown (as the villain). His contract completed, he shot a number of films down under for Rank: parts of A Town Like Alice in 1956, then Robbery Under Arms and The Shiralee in 1957.
This is unmistakeably an Australian film, the vast spaces of that country depicted in beautiful black and white by cinematographer Paul Beeson, very early in his career and long before his Primetime Emmy nomination in 1974 for the mini-series QB VII. The local vernacular is put to good use, without ever seeming like someone from another country had simply borrowed words to make it all appear authentic, even if screenwriters Neil Paterson and Leslie Norman were Scottish and English respectively; the latter was the father of Barry Norman, the UK’s best-known film critic. They were adapting an Australian novel though, written by D’Arcy Niland from Glen Innes, New South Wales, and many of the cast were Aussies too, including the film’s only Aborigine, Gordon Glenwright, whose character is treated just like any other. Yes, people call each other ‘mate’ and ‘sport’ and the ‘real bonzer kid’ is ‘a bit crook’, but the line that spoke to me most was, ‘I wouldn’t touch them with a maggoty cat,’ an interesting phrase to google.

However, it’s really a British film which merely happened to be shot in Australia and that’s not difficult to see either. It feels like a British drama, even before we get to the well-enunciated Rosemary Harris, who was born in Suffolk and sounds like it. This is early for her too, only her second feature three decades before her most famous role as Aunt May in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man pictures. It plays consistently with the other Ealing dramas I’ve seen from this period, which comes close to the end of Michael Balcon’s era at the studio. Surely the most recognisable actor on screen is Sidney James, a British institution, the star of nineteen Carry On films and the top billed name in seventeen. Coincidentally, I introduced my better half to Carry On Dick, James’s last film, this week, as it had borrowed so freely from Doctor Syn, which I reviewed earlier this month for Margaret Lockwood’s centennial. I had no idea he would be in The Shiralee or that cinematographer Beeson also handled the camera for Disney’s version, Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow.
More than anything, it’s an eye-opening portal into another era and I don’t merely mean that of the swagman, an Aussie word that we know from the unofficial Australian national anthem, Waltzing Matilda. Swagmen like Jim Macauley, the character Finch plays, were gentlemen of the road, like hobos and tramps. The opening narration explains that, while some are bludgers or scroungers, others are honest working men who prefer the freedom of living under the ‘friendly sky’, as Mac later puts it. I get the impression that Aussies have more romantic respect for swagmen than Brits do for tramps and perhaps Americans do for hobos, as walkabout is a quintessentially Australian concept, but it’s hard to find sympathy for Mac when we realise that his marriage has broken down because he’s only spent six months with his wife and daughter in Sydney in the five years since the wedding. When he finds a man with his wife, he beats him up, bundles his daughter under his arm and walks out, not saying a single word, and we’re in motion.

Buster is the difference between Macauley and other swagmen, an eight year old girl slowing him down and getting in his way. It’s not difficult to see her as a penance for his dereliction of marital duty, his ‘special cross’, his ‘burden’, his ‘shiralee’. The title really refers to the swagman’s bundle or pack, which we also know from the song as his matilda, but something that weighs him down is apt as a metaphor, especially early on when Mac has to carry Buster often. She’s a scene-stealing young actress called Dana Wilson and she debuted here in a powerful way. She would only go on to two more pictures, 1958’s A Cry from the Streets and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1959, before retiring at the ripe old age of ten. As great as Finch is in this picture, and the liner notes of my DVD suggest he later described it as his favourite role, I’m going to remember it as much for Dana Wilson as for him. She sells her part magnificently, bringing it to life through both little moments and the grand sweep of her performance.
Of course, the story is going to find a way for Buster to humanise her father at least to a degree, but I’m not going to spoil just how that happens. Let’s just say that it unfolds in a very believable fashion that avoids both Hollywood sentimentality and a Hollywood ending. Early on, we wonder why he even took her, given that he neither needs nor wants a child on the road. Certainly, he walks ahead of her as much as beside her and he isn’t exactly a beacon of conversation. ‘I like it when you talk to me,’ Buster says late on but that’s surely as much for the rarity of his speech as the content of it. These characterisations are deep, so there’s much debate possible about motivations but I presume that Mac took Buster as much out of spite as any of his wife’s notably spiteful and bitchy actions. Discussion about who creates this situation and who reacts to it, not to mention who has the right to act and react in such ways, renders The Shiralee perfect for anthropological studies as much as cinematic ones!

You see, Mac is very much a man’s man. He thinks of himself as a decent soul, someone who’s willing and able to work for a living; he often says that he ‘won’t scrounge off anybody’ and he lives up to his words. He’s no muscleman but he’ll stand up to anyone to further what’s right and scupper what’s wrong and, some pretty terrible choreography aside, can use his fists to good effect. He’s loyal and has a set of strong friendships that survive the infrequency of visits. Finch sells the physical side of this picture capably, believably a man who shrugs off the uncomfortable and walks on. He also sells how much Mac has excised the sentimental side of his character, to the degree that we wonder why he ever got married. Even things that could be read as sentimental really aren’t. When his daughter goes down with a fever and he spends an uncomfortable night breaking it, it’s because it’s a job that has to be done rather than because it’s his daughter. He doesn’t seem to know what love is, though the story shows how he learns.
A friend of mine talks about how America has changed over the last few decades because men nowadays aren’t brought up by men any more. He doesn’t say that to be macho or sexist; he’s just making an intellectual point that makes a lot of sense, especially with any political subtext removed. It used to be that boys were brought up outdoors, taught by their fathers how to do everything that we see boys doing in old movies: hunting, fishing and camping for a start but also, on a far deeper level, learning how to do things that aren’t safe. Buster is thrown right into this sort of upbringing and, with only a touch of sentimentality, enjoys the heck out of all the freedom that it involves. However, it’s glaringly obvious that this sort of thing would be difficult to put on the screen today. I’m not even talking about the naked butt of an eight year old girl in a shower scene or the lead rubbing eucalyptus oil on her chest when she’s feverish, things that would spark a debate nowadays because someone would interpret them sexually.

Talking about the film, my better half suggested that men would appreciate The Shiralee much more than women. I can see exactly what she means, because women watching today aren’t going to care about walkabout and swagmen and the romanticised road of freedom, they’re going to see Marge as a neglected woman and anything she can do to Mac as justified. However, the point of the story is to show this quintessential man’s man that there’s more to life than working and moving on, that emotions are important and that relationships aren’t just for buddies. Have we moved so far away in sixty years from this rough world of masculinity that the lessons Mac learns just aren’t enough any more? I haven’t seen the 1987 mini-series based on the same source novel, starring Bryan Brown as Mac, but it seems to reprise the same territory without any updates to cater to modern sensibilities and it was the most popular show of that year. Maybe in traditionally masculine Australia, this conversation is still active.
There are subplots to both keep things moving on and deepen the plot but I won’t spoil them. Suffice it to say that each character, each location and each scene has resonance that gradually and collectively builds into the force to change him just a little. It’s fair to say that, while Mac is the most masculine, stubborn and uncompromising male character, those properties are active in each of the others too. We’re really shown a scale of masculine behaviour and asked to figure out where the marker should be set. Mac is too masculine, apparently unable to truly love, so it should be shifted well away from him. However, it shouldn’t be moved as far as the opposite end of the spectrum, which is Donny, the successful coward who’s been having an affair with Marge while Mac is away. Should it be set to the helpful Jim Muldoon, the loyal Beauty Kelly or the charismatic Luke Sweeney? Perhaps it should be set to the honourable W. G. Parker, a successful working man who can lay down the law but also admit when he was wrong.

If we’re following that train of thought, we can ask the same question about the women. Marge may be a wronged wife but she’s a bitch with no apparent redeeming features beyond Scots actress Elizabeth Sellars looking rather pleasing to the eye. The opposite end to her may be Lily Parker, who is very much a woman though one who often acts like a man, making decisions and riding the range on horseback to herd sheep on her father’s ranch. There aren’t too many female characters in between, but one is certainly Bella Sweeney, who runs a bed and breakfast with her husband and rules the roost with her cheeky grin. As politically incorrect as their conversations often are, the Parkers are good people: loyal, caring and willing to speak their minds. ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea is a delight here as Bella and she was a discovery for me here, even if untold millions saw her as the other guest on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 that introduced America to the Beatles, the most watched show ever on American television at that point in time.
I really wonder how modern audiences would see this film because there are so many things that they’re not going to be used to seeing. The morality isn’t clear but not because the filmmakers wanted to go dark and moody but because it’s a slice of time and a starting point for discussion about topics like masculinity and femininity or freedom and responsibility. With our modern mindset, we often wonder who we should sympathise with, when the answer is everyone, just not all the time. Surely the most sympathetic character isn’t Mac, especially during the first half of the film; I’d suggest that it’s Buster, the title character, who is thrown into a tough situation at an extremely impressionable age but comes through it all with a smile. The biggest problem may be in just how free range she’s forced to be. Everyone watching today would rail at Mac’s choice to leave Buster fishing in a billabong with a poet while he goes looking for work in town. Things like this impact our ability to empathise, especially given what happens next.

Australia, of course, looks great here and the bush sounds just as enticing as it looks, even outside of any attraction of the simple if tough life that the swagman leads. I’ve long been a fan of the cinema of Australia and New Zealand, but little of what I’ve seen goes back to this era. I know the seventies and the eighties pretty well, especially in genre film, but should look further back, especially as Australia produced the first feature film ever made, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, and was a prominent player in the 1910s, before falling prey to cheap American imports in the 1920s, a cycle of over-production and under-production that continued for a long time. One of its most enduring problems is that whenever it generates new stars, they’re easily drawn away by Hollywood. It happened recently with Mel Gibson, Hugh Jackman and Geoffrey Rush, Cate Blanchette, Nicole Kidman and Toni Collette, but that isn’t a new thing. Go back through the decades and it happened with Errol Flynn, Rod Taylor and Peter Finch.

The Tattered Dress (1957)

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Director: Jack Arnold
Writer: George Zuckerman
Stars: Jeff Chandler, Jeanne Crain, Jack Carson and Gail Russell

I’ve been very busy this week getting everything shipshape and Bristol fashion for the first annual Apocalypse Later International Fantastic Film Festival, which is tomorrow night in Phoenix, but I have another deadline to pay attention to. On 14th October, Jack Arnold would have turned a hundred years old, so I have a movie to review to celebrate his life and career. He began that career as an actor, appearing on and off Broadway in the late thirties and early forties, but made the switch to direction during the Second World War, after working under Robert J. Flaherty of Nanook of the North fame. His theatrical feature debut was the obscure Girls in the Night in 1953, but he soon found his niche, making some of the very best of all the fifties sci-fi movies: It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula and, above all, The Incredible Shrinking Man. I initially planned to cover the glorious comedy, The Mouse That Roared, for his centennial, but ended up going with this one instead.

It’s a film noir from that golden year of 1957 and it’s a neatly cynical one to sit alongside other cynical films like A Face in the Crowd, Paths of Glory and Sweet Smell of Success. If 1939 was Hollywood’s greatest year, then 1957 was the equivalent for world cinema, with The Seventh Seal, Nights of Cabiria and Wild Strawberries merely the pinnacle and The Bridge on the River Kwai, Throne of Blood and Night of the Demon nipping at their heels. Calling out world cinema doesn’t exclude Hollywood though, as it produced 12 Angry Men, 3:10 to Yuma and Witness for the Prosecution, amongst many other classics. Jack Arnold contributed to that great tally in no uncertain fashion; he began 1957 with The Incredible Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson adapting his own novel to the screen, then continued on with three lesser known but fascinating titles starring Jeff Chandler: The Tattered Dress, Man in the Shadow and The Lady Takes a Flyer. That pictures as good as these appear way down most people’s lists just highlights how strong the competition was in 1957.
Chandler, an underrated actor at the worst of times, is in superb form here and he needed to be. The script by George Zuckerman, best known for Douglas Sirk dramas like Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels, gifts him with an incredibly deep character, a challenge and an opportunity for an actor; Chandler seizes the former and proves up to the latter. He’s James Gordon Blane, a very talented New York lawyer who has achieved great success at the cost of his conscience. He wins a lot of cases but that only means that he’s got a lot of guilty clients off and put a lot of innocent people behind bars. He’s become rich off that practice but he’s lost his marriage in the process. We meet him on a train taking him out west to Desert Valley, 150 miles from Las Vegas, and he’s soon getting off briefly to say hi to his estranged wife and kids at a stop on the way; only when he gets back on the train does he realise that he didn’t bring anything for them. Clearly his conscience is alive, but hardly healthy and apparently not being fed.

He’s been summoned to Desert Valley to represent another guilty man, this one called Michael Reston. We know he’s guilty for we watched him murder a man in cold blood during the opening scenes. He’s angry when his trophy wife arrives home in the tattered dress of the title, ripped during a wild dalliance with a local bartender, so he bundles her back into her car, drives her back whence she came and shoots his wife’s lover in the back as he tries to run. None of these folk are prizes. Reston isn’t merely a murderer, he is a rather arrogant one to boot: he isn’t worried about jail because he knows precisely how good a defence his money can buy. The victim obviously knew he was sleeping with a married woman and, of course, she’s an unrepentent adulteress. ‘Are you a faithful wife?’ Blane asks her. ‘In a fashion,’ she replies.’ When he asks whether she wanted him to assault her, she answers, ‘Let me think about that.’ She’s low enough to hit on her husband’s new lawyer, even though he’s defending him for killing her last illicit affair.
As well set up as all that is, it would only make for a relatively routine film noir. This one elevates itself by going much deeper. We have to look at Blane too, the attack dog of a lawyer who defends the worst of the worst, just so long as they can pay him the large fees he commands. In the early scenes, he’s given the opportunity to show a positive side but he can’t seem to manage that. He fails with his family; he fails with Charleen Reston; he even fails with the journalist who built a career off his because, just as he’s asked if he’d consider taking on the case of a wrongfully imprisoned man, he distracts himself over to a random brunette who walks into the dining car on the train. Blane is very sharp in court, as talented as his reputation and his fees suggest, but he’s hardly a hero. If we had to conjure up a hero from these early scenes, it would probably be the Desert Valley sheriff, Nick Hoak, in the neatly jovial form of Jack Carson. He’s just the sort of sheriff a small town might want. Or at least so he appears at this point.

It doesn’t last. Blane destroys Hoak on the witness stand and wins the acquittal of Michael Reston but, as Blane celebrates another victory, Hoak arrests him for bribing a juror. It’s all a set-up, of course, perpetrated for revenge on a number of fronts, but it’s the real beginning of the film because now we have to wonder a great deal about where our sympathies lie. Are they with Blane, who is a good lawyer but a bad man, getting his at last even if it’s for something he didn’t do? Or are they with Hoak, who doesn’t only feel wronged personally for his treatment in court but also on behalf of the murder victim, Larry Bell, who was a protege to him? We come to realise that we feel for the plight of each of these two men but not for them personally. Instead our sympathies are with Lady Justice, whose own dress is tattered here, and we keep watching so we can root for her, hoping that the script can find some way in which she can be fair to each of the characters who wove this tangled web and each of those caught up in it.
If the film belongs to Jeff Chandler, Jack Carson matches him step for step. They’re two thoroughly different characters, one sleazy and vicious but the other quiet and folksy, but they share much because they’ve both sold their souls and don’t struggle too much with the knowledge. The game they play moves in both directions, so each of these two men gain the upper hand and lose it again. Having effectively two leads alternating between being on top and on the ropes gives the story a vast amount of depth and both of the actors plenty of opportunity to delve into their own characters and shine. I’ve talked often at Apocalypse Later of my difficulty appreciating films, from Gone with the Wind on down, in which there is simply nobody to sympathise with. It’s tough to stay focused on the characters in that scenario, rather than shift my appreciation to the actors or another technical aspect, like costumes, score or cinematography. Here, I was absorbed, not because I wanted to see anyone win or lose but to see if justice could be won.

Those in support receive less opportunities but they do precisely what’s needed in their more restrictive roles. Most are relatively familiar faces: Jeanne Crain and Gail Russell, Edward Platt and George Tobias. Russell is surely the best known of these, though her career was shorter than we might expect and she would be dead in four years at only 37, of a heart attack surely brought on by an abiding alcoholism. Ironically, given that she drank to combat stage fright, it’s her fear that shines brightest here. She’s one of the characters caught up in the grand game between Blane and Hoak and she’s very believably frightened for much of it. Crain, on the other hand, is quietly composed even when times are toughest. She loves her husband, even with what he’s become, and she’s the rock on which he gets to stand. I was especially struck by her eyes, which are limpid pools to dive into, but she’s worth more than that. She’s sharp too and she gets better and better as the film runs on, as her part becomes more substantial.
Platt is the film’s conscience as journalist Ralph Adams, which means he’s the quietest character in the entire film. However moral he is, he’s still benefitted from the travesties of justice that litter Blane’s trail, to the tune of a Pulitzer Prize for his writing on him. We can’t help but wonder how insightful he must be if he hasn’t yet twigged to the true impact of this lawyer’s career thus far. He either wears blinkers, in which case he’s not a good journalist, or he sees what’s going on, in which case he’s not the moral centre we think he is. Tobias is the film’s comic relief, as a professional comedian in Las Vegas who owes Blane big time because he saved him from both conviction and death row for killing his wife a decade earlier. He’s never particularly funny, but he carries a lighter touch to the material than anyone else in the cast and that’s more than welcome. Even Phillip Reed is spot on as Reston, but he’s a minor character, even if most films would have focused on his story and made him the chief support.

My discovery here was Elaine Stewart, the lady who plays his wife, Charleen. She smoulders her way through this picture with a knowing sensuality. She’s the shallowest character in the film, the beauty of the femme fatale without any of the bite. She’s good looking enough to hook any man she wants, and she’s clearly been doing that for a long time, but she has nothing beyond that at all. I’ve seen her before without realising it, stealing moments in films as varied as Singin’ in the Rain and The Bad and the Beautiful, but I’ll have to find something in which she was given more substance to play with and see if she was able to live up to that. She’s obviously a scene-stealer but she had scenes stolen from her here, initially by a great little gimmick rather than another actor. It’s the scene where she swaggers home in her tattered dress to be confronted by her husband. What’s neat is that this happens on the other side of a sliding glass door, so that we’re kept in the dark as to what specific words are hurled but voyeuristically in on what they mean. She goes in sassy, backed by a stereotypical sexy score, and comes out cowed; it’s a superbly set up scene.
I could easily see some viewers believing that the film lessens as it goes on. The later scenes could certainly be seen as being more predictable, more stereotypical or more emotionally manipulative, but I’m fine with them all. I see this script as taking a lot of the traditional elements of the film noir, the legal thriller and the small town drama, then throwing them all into a mixer to churn up a fresh story that digs deep into what role justice plays in each. Films of the era that looked at justice each tended to focus on one aspect, whether that be the jury in 12 Angry Men, the lynch mob in The Ox-Bow Incident or courage in High Noon. This one looks at a whole slew of aspects and that’s what makes it special. Maybe Blane explicitly calling out the double meaning of the title in court was a bit too blatant but I can forgive that. This isn’t as deep or as wild as Touch of Evil, released a year later by the same producer, Albert Zugsmith, but it perhaps digs deeper than Anatomy of a Murder, released two years later with some notable similarities.

There were downsides for me, though I have to add a caveat to one. The cinematography felt very weak but, as this is still a rather obscure title never made available on home release, I had to make do with a VHS rip taped off the TV that was clearly re-formatted using pan and scan techniques that shatter the vision of the cinematographer, Carl E. Guthrie, who had learned on pictures as big as The Adventures of Robin Hood, working the first assistant camera, and became responsible for shooting others as gorgeous, if low budget, as House on Haunted Hill. Less explainable is the score, by Frank Skinner, which is much more stereotypical than the rest of the film. I won’t complain too much because it did a capable job, just a capably clichéd job. Perhaps that’s not Skinner’s fault or at least not entirely his fault, as the stock libraries were certainly plumbed to pad out the score and it may be that otherwise decent snippets by Henry Mancini are really the clichéd bits, spliced into Skinner’s score. I didn’t delve that far.
Like Guthrie, Jack Arnold moved on to wrap up his career mostly in television. He’d already dabbled in the medium, making four episodes of Science Fiction Theatre in 1955 and 1956, but it would become more frequent as the years went by. It somehow seems to be odd that a massively talented director who had elevated otherwise cheap material like Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tarantula and High School Confidential! would become better known as the director of 26 episodes of Gilligan’s Island, 15 of The Brady Bunch and 8 more of The Love Boat. I don’t want to demean classic American television but to go from directing some of the best genre movies of the fifties to episodes of The Mod Squad or The Fall Guy, let alone shows I haven’t even heard of like Make Room for Granddaddy, The San Pedro Beach Bums or Holmes and Yo-Yo, feels like a really bad call on the part of American culture. Maybe he elevated those too, but I’m not particularly interested in finding out. I’ll keep tracking down his more obscure movies of the fifties instead.

The Dark Eyes of London (1939)

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Director: Walter Summers
Writers: Patrick Kirwan, Walter Summers and J. F. Argyle, from the novel by Edgar Wallace, with additional dialogue by Jay Van Lusil
Stars: Bela Lugosi, Hugh Williams and Greta Gynt

Looking back just over three quarters of a century on, the big name here is that of Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian actor who emigrated to the United States via Germany and found his future in 1927, appearing as Count Dracula on the Broadway stage. Adapting that role to film for Tod Browning and Universal in 1931, he revitalised the Universal horror movie for a new decade and became the first true heir to the throne of Lon Chaney. The Dark Eyes of London, however, came eight years later, at a time when horror films were being reduced in number at the major studios, and so Lugosi was finding himself mired in B-movies of decreasing quality. Even though it would be released Stateside by Monogram, this British picture, made by Argyle Productions and shot at Welwyn Studios in Hertfordshire, must have felt like a break for him. Certainly he sailed out on the Queen Mary to star in it, a holiday on the way to work. Perhaps he’d also enjoyed making The Mystery of the Marie Celeste in the UK a few years earlier for Hammer.

As much as Argyle were keen to capitalise on Lugosi’s legendary performance as Dracula in their advertising for the film, he was not the biggest star associated with the project, that honour surely going to Edgar Wallace, who had written the novel upon which the film was based. Sure, the script was adapted by three screenwriters, one of whom was the film’s director, Walter Summers, in a much more gruesome style than the original novel, but it was an Edgar Wallace picture nonetheless and that’s hard to miss. The success of Wallace, whose name is hardly remembered today, cannot be understated. In 1928, it was joked, believably, that one in four books being read in the UK came from his pen and he churned out material at an amazing rate, even for the pulp era. By the time he was done, he had written over 170 novels, 18 stage plays and almost a thousand short stories, reaching 50 million sales in the process. Over 200 films have been based on his works, though he’s mostly remembered today for creating King Kong.
Having read some Edgar Wallace, this rings mostly true to his novels even though it’s much more horrific. Wallace helped to shift British detective stories away from private investigators like Sherlock Holmes and towards policemen; the string of river murders is investigated here by Det. Insp. Larry Holt of C.I.D., the Criminal Investigation Department of the British police force. There are many scenes that explore the routine of police work, including the projection of crime scene photographs and tests run on a body to ascertain stomach contents. It’s also a fantastic opportunity for Bela Lugosi, who plays a double role well enough that it doesn’t even seem like a double role for the longest time. Monogram released the film in the States as The Human Monster, and while that title surely includes a nod to the morality of Lugosi’s character, Dr. Feodor Orloff, it really shifts the focus of marketing to Jake, a supporting character played by Wilfred Walter, though a few years later it would surely have been given to Rondo Hatton.

I’m watching today, however, for Greta Gynt, a Norwegian actress who lived in the UK as a young child and moved back again as her acting career got under way. She was a regular face in British films of the forties, often playing the female lead; she retired in the early sixties on a high note, playing the lead in The Runaway. She would have been a hundred years old today and, to celebrate, I chose one of the two films she’s best known for. While she was certainly not typecast in genre film, she’s remembered mostly for Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror, with Tod Slaughter, and The Dark Eyes of London, often cited as the first film to be awarded the H for Horrific certificate by the British censor. That’s not strictly true but it ought to be, given what goes down at Dearborn’s Home for the Destitute Blind, an agreeable cover for the sordid goings on of Dr. Orloff. Most H for Horrific films are released as PG today, but this one still carries quite a punch because of that setting and what goes on there.
Gynt doesn’t appear for quite a while, as the story gets established through a number of plot strands. At Scotland Yard, the C.I.D. wonder if five missing persons showing up drowned in eight months is a coincidence. They’ve found no connections thus far but ‘the Home Office is kicking’. Three of those five were on Det. Insp. Holt’s watch, as the Commissioner is happy to point out, so he’s eager to break the case. Elsewhere in London, Dr. Orloff loans Henry Stuart $2,000 under the banner of the Greenwich Insurance Company. He trusts him, he says, because he can read it in his eyes. Meanwhile, on his way back from the States is a forger called Fred Grogan, being extradited and delivered into Holt’s custody. Bringing him is Lt. Patrick O’Reilly of the Chicago P.D., who will follow Holt around to study the methods of the British police. He’ll become the film’s comic relief, even if the Commissioner has a deliciously dry sense of humour. ‘I’ll attach him to you,’ he tells Holt, ‘so he won’t learn anything.’

So far, this feels very much like a detective story, the sort of thing that someone like, hey, Edgar Wallace might write, but there’s an edge that gradually grows as the picture runs on, one that’s quintessential early American horror. It reminds us that there are people out there in our world, not somewhere far away like Transylvania but right here in our town, that are not like us. They’re usually seen as sinister just for being different and the best movies that tread this territory use it as a means to examine what it is to be human. Lesser films merely conflate physical deformities with mental ones, suggesting that anyone different from us must be a monster, but the real classics like Freaks and Island of Lost Souls, highlight that the freaks can be more human than those we’re conditioned to see as their superiors, regular able-bodied folk who can be and often are the real bad guys. The Dark Eyes of London isn’t of the calibre of those two classics but it does try and it succeeds more often than not.
It helps that the ‘deformities’ are mostly ones that we don’t see in a horrific light any more. Orloff supports Dearborn’s Home for the Destitute Blind, where Rev. or Prof. Dearborn, depending on the source, blind himself, tries to rehabilitate the blind by giving them food, shelter and work. Having them shuffle around like zombies isn’t realistic but it certainly contributes to the freaky tone that’s being cultivated. Maybe they’re all newly blind and so haven’t yet found the sixth sense Dearborn suggests will develop. No, I don’t believe that in the slightest but maybe the scriptwriters did. Blindness isn’t the only lost sense here, as Orloff’s secretary is surely mute, as is Lou, the blind violinist who plays in the street outside Orloff’s office and delivers notes for him to Dearborn’s. At the home is Jake, who is not only blind but also looks like a cross between a werewolf and an acromegaly case. After the war, actor Wilfred Walter would have a leg amputated, highlighting in real life the difference between ‘physically different’ and ‘monster’.

The scam that’s going on behind all this isn’t hard to figure out and we follow the details of it through Henry Stuart, the imminent victim that will break the case for Det. Insp. Holt. His eventual death scene is fantastic, the abstraction required in 1939 adding to the effect. Jake looks rather like Leatherface as he lifts his apron, Stuart turns to run and Orloff closes the door on both him and us so that the scream echoes at us from the other side. The cinematography was by Bryan Langley, who had a decade behind him; he had co-shot Number Seventeen for Alfred Hitchcock in 1932. There are a number of highly effective and varied shots, including one shot through an archway and another through a doorway, both of which focus our attention magnificently. Some of the scenes at Dearborn’s are gorgeous too and they make the film often feel reminiscent of Bedlam, which wouldn’t be made for another seven years. Nicholas Musuraca’s camerawork there is legendary but I wonder if he saw this as an influence.
What breaks the case for Holt is the fact that Stuart has a daughter, Diana, something that Orloff hadn’t factored into his plans at all. Through the time honoured art of coincidence, she’s already on her way home from America and Holt actually treads on her foot when she alights from the train right before Fred Grogan; he’s immediately smitten and will have plenty of contact, starting at the morgue as she comes to identify her father’s body. Greta Gynt doesn’t get a huge amount of screen time but she does get to do quite a lot with it, because the role takes her through a variety of situations rather quickly. One minute she’s a potential love interest, the next she’s called on to deliver dramatic reactions, before being sent undercover in a police investigation. I enjoyed her performance but it’s not as consistent as it could be and would have benefitted from more screen time to allow Gynt to find her feet in each scene. When she gets that, she’s great and she’s a fun damsel in distress; without it, she’s not as good.

Lugosi makes the best of his double role, which is surely one of the best such performances of the era. As Orloff, he’s overdone in the traditional Lugosi style, hypnotising with his eyes and going all moody and dangerous when things don’t go to plan. However, his other role, which I won’t name to avoid spoiling the film for you, is thoroughly different and the costume is simple but neatly effective. To be fair, the biggest reason he gets away with it is that the voice of his alternate persona is dubbed by another actor, because Lugosi’s accent was not something he could switch off at a moment’s notice, but he lip synchs very well. Hugh Williams is the actor unenviably tasked with playing the routine, albeit talented, character in a film full of grotesques and so isn’t particularly memorable as Det. Insp. Holt, even though he does exactly what he needed to do. It’s always the case that the outrageous roles dominate in pictures like this and there are a whole slew of outrageous roles stealing those scenes.
Most obvious, of course, is Wilfred Walter as Jake, who would become the focus of the American marketing campaign. If Dr. Orloff is a human monster in a moral sense, Jake is certainly a human monster in the physical one. That’s his visage on the poster, under Bela Lugosi’s name; I wonder how many American filmgoers were confused when they saw The Human Monster in 1940 and found that Lugosi wasn’t playing Jake. While Walter is spot on as the lumbering assassin, I was impressed by Arthur E. Owen as Lou and Alexander Field as Grogan. The former initially seems like a throwaway character, but he keeps finding moments of importance, eventually writhing around on a hospital bed like he’s become Renfield. The latter nails the feel of polite disrepute that Leonard Rossiter epitomised much later on. He’s making the most of his fame, as dubious as it is, lording it over the cops who never fail to be in charge. He gets a memorable final scene too, which I also won’t spoil.

For a 75 minute B-movie that relishes its gruesome inventiveness, this is surprisingly effective and stands up well today, both as a detective yarn and a horror flick. Bela Lugosi had made some incredible movies in the thirties but he’d also made others that were horrific in ways that they never intended. I haven’t seen everything he made after this but I have seen the vast majority and it’s a rare one indeed that’s better than this. It could be argued that there are only two, The Wolf Man and The Body Snatcher, making this an important film in his career, the last of his good work of the thirties. I wonder if part of that was because this was a British film; while that meant that it didn’t have to cater to the American Production Code, the British censor was notoriously tough on horror and I’m honestly surprised this crept through their net. Destroying the hearing of a blind mute and then murdering him in front of our bound heroine is brutal and not what would be allowed at a time other than when the H certificate was brought back in.

Johnny O'Clock (1947)

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Director: Robert Rossen
Writer: Robert Rossen, from an original story by Milton Holmes
Stars: Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes

It’s ironic that the title of this film is never fully explained. It’s a catchy one, especially when compared to the relentlessly generic titles that were usually given to films noir, and it sticks in the brain. It surely contributed to my choice of this picture, which I had not seen before, to remember the career of Evelyn Keyes, its leading lady, on what would have been her one hundredth birthday. Yet, beyond being the current name of its lead character (he has others, for reasons never explained but clearly dubious), it never finds a real purpose. Mostly it just serves to keep time in mind, as do the superb opening shot of a man checking his watch against the large clock above him and the importance of a pair of expensive watches within the story. The title is much catchier than the movie itself, a lot more memorable and, arguably, of a higher quality than the material it advertises. After all, it did a great job of suckering me in, as I’d heard it before often and so sought it out for this project.

I’m happy that I watched Johnny O’Clock though, because it’s an important and interesting film, even if the importance is mostly in the presence of Robert Rossen as writer and director; he wrote the script from an original story by Milton Holmes. He was already known as a writer, having penned a host of screenplays for Warner Brothers in the 1930s, including Marked Woman, Racket Busters and The Roaring Twenties; his greatest up to this point may have been A Walk in the Sun. However, this was his first time to sit in the director’s chair and, while he would never be prolific there, his ten films as a director include classics like All the King’s Men and The Hustler, both of which landed him Oscar nominations for Best Director; the former won three from its seven nods, including Best Picture, but Rossen lost to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives. I wonder how much of a learning experience this was for him, given that he was firing on all cylinders later in 1947 with Body and Soul, a film which he directed but did not write.
To my mind, Rossen is the weakest link here. While he (and perhaps Holmes) deserve great credit for the quintessential film noir dialogue which fills the script to bursting, this is methodical direction of a methodical script and there’s just no passion in it, even when the actors do their best to generate some. Methodical works well for Lee J. Cobb who, as the capable Inspector Koch, drives everything through his investigations of the various deaths that pepper the story. It doesn’t work well for Dick Powell as Johnny O’Clock or for the other key characters: his partner, his assistant and the three ladies with important parts to play in proceedings. Each of them, in different ways, feel like they’re bridling at the steady pace which Rossen forces onto them and aching to break out of it and into their own momentum. Two of the ladies want to speed things up while the third wants to slow it down. Johnny wants control just because, while his partner is alternately active and passive. None are happy with the pace as it is.

That’s not to say that the script isn’t cleverly written. The first nine minutes are spent at Johnny’s hotel in only two scenes: one in which Charlie, his personal assistant, wakes him up and another in which Harriet Hobson and Insp. Koch, separately but together, meet him downstairs. In other hands, this would be throwaway material but, in Rossen’s, everything has a purpose. They set the stage with a murder, establish the characters of five important people (one of whom we haven’t even met yet) and set in motion the events that will constitute our story, the latter from a number of different perspectives. It’s textbook stuff and the only issue is that it misleads us to believe that the core of the movie will contain a man named Chuck Blayden. Blayden is a dirty cop, one who has just shot a gambler as he supposedly resisted arrest. Johnny knows Blayden (and the gambler as well), Harriet loves him (and wears the bruises to prove it) and Koch wants him off the force (and Johnny to help make that happen).
Another clever aspect to the script is what meaning is brought by the three ladies of importance. Harriet is the first of them, a girl who checks hats and coats at the club which Johnny helps to run. She’s a lovely little thing, played to glorious effect by Nina Foch. She’s always reminded me of a more angelic, less Teutonic Marlene Dietrich but that works especially well in this film as Harriet is a simple girl, both in outlook and, perhaps, in mind too. ‘Old enough. Not smart enough,’ explains her sister. She’s a good girl, but she loves a bad man and can’t stop loving him. That leads to her suicide which, of course, isn’t any such thing. She can be seen as the present for Johnny O’Clock, clearly a man of dubious history who is nonetheless doing an honest job with a clean record. The film noir genre, perhaps more closely associated with black and white than any other, never saw things in anything but shades of grey. Most characters here are straightforward, but Johnny is fashioned from quintessentially deep film noir complexity.

If Harriet is his present, a moment in time where he’s a good man doing honest work, Nelle Marchettis is his past. She’s the trophy wife of Johnny’s partner, Guido (pronounced Geedo), a more traditionally slimy businessman who may or may not be operating in isolation from organised crime. Given that actor Thomas Gomez was 42 and weighed nearly three hundred pounds, but vivacious actress Ellen Drew was a decade younger and reminds of both Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth, it’s hardly surprising that Nelle has a thing for Johnny instead, who buys a fresh flower every morning for his buttonhole and is played by the dapper Dick Powell, who doesn’t look a year older than Gomez even if he was. I don’t believe that it’s ever said outright but it’s certainly firmly hinted that Nelle and Johnny had a relationship in the past and her attempts to restart that are so overt that it’s difficult to believe that her screen husband doesn’t realise it. That’s one reason why Guido acts like he’s Johnny’s boss but we never buy it.
Our birthday girl, Evelyn Keyes, arrives just shy of a third of the way into the film. She’s Nancy Hobson, Harriet’s elder sister, who flies into town after her death to take care of affairs. She meets Koch first, who’s ahead of everybody else throughout, but falls for Johnny. While the ‘club’ he runs with Guido looks much more like a casino, he tells her that he’s no gambler. ‘Gambler’s a guy who takes a chance,’ he says, though he soon takes a chance on her. Nancy’s first scenes hint at her being a femme fatale, but that role is much better played by Nelle Marchettis. Really, she’s the future in this triptych, the possibility of one for Johnny that’s entirely above board. They’re quick to fall into romance, perhaps much too quick, but we can buy into it happening and the various things happening around it that flavour it in film noir terms. Nancy isn’t the looker that Harriet was but she’s hardly bad on the eyes and she has the depth that was denied her screen sister. Keyes played a substantial character, if not a substantial part.

Keyes was a capable actress who successfully avoided typecasting but failed to escape her most famous role; it eventually found its way into the title of her autobiography, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood. The affairs documented within it include those with three of her fellow 2016 centenarians: Glenn Ford, Sterling Hayden and Kirk Douglas; though none of those featured amongst her four marriages, she did wed film directors Charles Vidor and John Huston. It’s debatable as to whether her life eclipsed her career, but the latter didn’t take off to the degree it deserved. Her favourite of her own films was Mrs. Mike in 1949; given that she plays the Bostonian wife of Dick Powell’s Mountie in the remote north of Canada, it’s not difficult for the more romantic among us to see that as an alternate future to Johnny O’Clock. Certainly, it would be tough to argue against the ending of this picture being weaker than the events which led up to it.
While many of her career highlights were in lead roles of B-movies, she did good work in some major films too. After playing that supporting role of Suellen O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she landed a contract with Columbia, who had her play an ingenue in Here Comes Mr. Jordan and the female lead in The Jolson Story, amongst others. Personally, I’d call out The Face Behind the Mask, a dramatic crime story from 1941 with a tinge of horror, in which she gives great support to an even better Peter Lorre. Her versatility is ably highlighted by this film noir coming right after The Jolson Story and right before The Mating of Millie, a comedy in which she played the title character. She retired in 1956 after playing Tom Ewell’s absent wife in The Seven Year Itch, but she never really quit acting. Her final film role was as a witch in Wicked Stepmother, also a final film for Bette Davis, and she still had a third appearance to come on television’s Murder She Wrote, playing different characters each time out.

As a versatile actress of consistent quality, it’s perhaps appropriate that she’s consistently good in this film, even in support of an actor who has a little more trouble with his role. There are points where Dick Powell is nuanced and perfect, but others in which I wasn’t convinced he understood his character (or the script’s take on it). Perhaps he had trouble being the lead but not the driving force behind the film; that’s Insp. Koch all the way. Johnny is one of those hardboiled characters who sits back and lets things be as they must be, but usually those characters were pulling strings behind the scenes and he isn’t. For half the film, I imagined Johnny as being rather like Rick Blaine from Casablanca as played by William Powell; that’s not quite as palatable as it is intriguing and he’s not given the grounding. Powell is great while standing up to Koch and delivering fantastic film noir dialogue, whether talking to cops or ladies. He’s less believable during emotional scenes, where he’s too cold, or during the end, where he’s out of character.
That ending is a down point. As carefully as the plot is constructed, it’s not complex enough to mask whodunit and why. The finalé needed more than the solving of a crime but what’s provided doesn’t feel satisfactory. Mostly it’s the writing and I can understand if the acting errors came from that. There are a number of other details that don’t feel resolved either. Clearly Johnny wasn’t born an O’Clock but we’re never given his real surname or any reason why he chose this particular one, especially as it screams to have meaning. Perhaps it was just one of many elements to focus on a theme of the passage of time, which was promptly written away from without the due diligence done in clean up to avoid misleading us. That leads us back to Robert Rossen, an established writer of screenplays who debuted here as a director. I wonder if the best of this picture was due to his experience as the former but the worst was due to his lack of experience as the latter. Certainly it works best as a starting point to his career.

Horrors of the Black Museum (1959)

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Director: Arthur Crabtree
Writer: Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel, from their original story
Stars: Michael Gough, June Cunningham, Graham Curnow and Shirley Anne Field

I was rather shocked to find that I hadn’t seen Horrors of the Black Museum before. I grew up on this period of British horror movies, watched on my sister’s TV late at night after I was supposed to be asleep, and I’ve seen most of them, including the other couple of pictures in what David Pirie called in his book, A Heritage of Horror, the ‘Sadian trilogy’ of horror thrillers from Anglo-Amalgamated: Peeping Tom and Circus of Horrors. That’s an interesting trio, very different in style and approach but with a common theme of cruel violence, and there’s plenty of that on offer here. Being British films from the tail end of the fifties, they’re polite and courteous in their aberrance and so they occupy a curious midpoint between the amoral excesses of the Grand Guignol and the twisted torture porn of today. In doing this, they were massively influential and it’s fair to say that, without them, we may not have had Vincent Price in eight Edgar Allan Poe adaptations from American International, who coughed up half the budget for this picture.

In fact, Herman Cohen, in his role as producer of the film rather than that of a co-writer of the script, wanted Price in the lead, or at least Orson Welles, but Anglo-Amalgamated successfully lobbied for a British actor, partly because of cost and partly because of the Eady Levy. This was a tax on the box office whose proceeds were divvied up between exhibitors and qualifying British movies; the aim was to support the British film industry by keeping money within it. To qualify for such funding, administered through the newly formed British Film Fund Agency, at least 85% of a picture had to be shot in the United Kingdom or its Commonwealth and there could only be three foreign salaries . Cohen took up one of those slots already, so hiring a British lead avoided an immediate second; Michael Gough was born in Malaysia, but it was British Malaya at the time. He’s a fantastic choice for the role of Edmond Bancroft, the arrogant and quite deranged journalist and author of books on true crime. He would have been one hundred today.
Gough had a long career, debuting on film in 1948 and television as far back as 1946. Originally, as British actors have a tendency to do, he made adaptations of classics. That first TV movie was George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion and that first feature was Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in support of Vivien Leigh and Ralph Richardson. However, most know him from fantastic film, probably for his repeated role as Alfred in no less than four Batman movies, two for Tim Burton and the following two that we pretend don’t exist. When I think of Michael Gough, I think of the villainous Celestial Toymaker in Doctor Who and the murderous Dr. Armstrong in The Avengers, two iconic characters in two iconic TV shows, as well as the mad scientist, Dr. Charles Decker, in Konga. Oddly, his first horror movie saw him play an entirely sane character, Arthur Holmwood in Hammer’s Dracula in 1958, third billed after Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, but filmmakers quickly realised that he was even more fun as the bad guy, the villain or the lunatic.

He’s particularly unhinged here as Bancroft, especially as the film runs on. His final scene is gloriously memorable but it’s only one of many because it’s a gift of a character to an actor with classical training who’s willing to ham it up in a horror movie. Bancroft is a writer, the author of many successful books on true crime (his latest is Terror After Dark) and a journalist who stops in regularly to cock a metaphorical snook at Scotland Yard. It seems that one-upping the peelers is something of a hobby of his and he revels in it. We watch both those aspects of his character often, signing books for fans one moment and politely tormenting Supt. Graham the next. As the film runs on, we also get to see his more twisted side. You see, there’s a killer in town with three victims in two weeks to his name, all women and ‘each murder more horrible than the last.’ Bancroft describes the most recent, conducted with a pair of binoculars with a concealed pair of needles to pierce through the eyes into the brain, as ‘fiendishly clever’.
More importantly, he suggests that the inspiration for such a gruesome device must have come from a similar pair that are stored in the Yard’s own Black Museum. As unlikely as it may seem for a location lauded in the title of a horror movie, this is a real place. Officially named simply the Crime Museum, it was founded in 1874 and contains a vast array of relics of real crimes, including the From Hell letter, supposedly written by Jack the Ripper, to the fake Millennium Star diamond placed into the Millennium Dome to outwit jewel thieves. It isn’t just famous stuff; it also includes other items of interest, such as shotguns disguised as umbrellas and, oh yes, a pair of binoculars with hidden spikes. These, according to Cohen, were sent by a young stable boy back in the thirties to his master’s daughter. He was in love with her but was fired for having sex with her in a stable and taken aback when she refused to have anything to do with him. When she focused the binoculars, the spikes emerged, skewered her eyes and pierced her brain.

What’s important to note is that the Black Museum, housed today in Room 101 at New Scotland Yard, is not open to the public and never has been since its founding. With the exception of a recent exhibition of selected items at the London Museum, you have to be a policeman, a lawyer or some other professional with a valid reason, to tour the exhibits. It’s funny to watch Supt. Graham and Insp. Lodge rebut Bancroft’s suggestion that a visitor to the museum might be responsible for these new murders and hilarious to watch the police fail to realise that the writer overtly taunting them might be the killer. Actually, he isn’t, not directly, but it can’t be considered a spoiler for me to bring that up. His doctor thinks that he should be hospitalised for ‘unnatural excitement’, a state which he reaches after each murder. ‘It’s my favourite subject,’ he tells Aggie, who runs an antique shop, as he buys a long dagger from her. And it’s only a quarter of an hour in when we visit his own Black Museum, full of weapons and torture devices.
It’s much more than that though. Any horror fan will recognise the characteristics that Gough so gloriously exhibits. He walks with the aid of a cane, leans forward to orate with passion and has hair greying on the sides. In another movie, he’d be distinguished; in this one, he’s clearly involved. It’s less than half an hour in when we see the real killer and immediately piece together most of the plot points we need to figure out everything. This isn’t a movie to surprise us, it’s a movie to shock us with what might honestly be described as the depths of depravity in a British film from 1959 or, to be fair, from anywhere, much nastier in tone than anything that Hammer had shown but keeping their glorious Technicolor. Especially in this sense, Horrors of the Black Museum predates such pictures as Jigoku in Japan, Black Sunday in Italy and Blood Feast in the United States. Today, of course, it seems tame, not to mention old fashioned, and, frankly, it would have felt that way in the mid-seventies, but Gough keeps an edge on it.

As fantastic as Gough is in this movie, he’s not the only reason to watch. The murders here are more clinically twisted than sexual, unlike Peeping Tom and Circus of Horrors, but there is a sexual element that invites us to be voyeuristic. Bancroft is keeping a young lady (and keeping her cooped up); her name is Joan Berkley and she’s played by a curvacious June Cunningham who knows how to use her curves and gets plenty of opportunity to do so. After a heated argument with Bancroft, in which she gets rather vicious in her verbal attacks, she swans off to the pub to dance in front of the locals but leave on her own. She’s such a tease! We’re set up to expect her death, but she’s safely escorted home by a couple of gentlemanly policemen. There she teases us by disrobing for bed and is murdered when she least expects it. I won’t detail how, because there are surprisingly few deaths in this film and I feel that I shouldn’t spoil them. It’s a pivotal moment for this film, though, half an hour in that sets the rest of the plot in motion.
If Gough steals the film and Cunningham gets the opportunity to steal a couple of scenes from him, the rest of the cast are, as was so often the case with British film, thoroughly able support. There are less recognisable faces than usual, though Supt. Graham is a capable Geoffrey Keen, well known as the Minister of Defence, Frederick Gray, in no less than six James Bond films, and to horror mavens as the lead in Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula. His boss here, Commissioner Wayne, is Austin Trevor, who was the first actor to play Hercule Poirot on screen, in three films back in the early thirties. Also recognisable is Shirley Anne Field, a mainstay in the sixties, with key roles in The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Alfie; She was also in Peeping Tom. However, the most memorable is surely Howard Greene, because he’s the only one to overact. To be fair, he does so deliberately because he plays a madman who confesses to the murders, promising that he’ll use a death ray on the next one. He’s a hoot.

Technically, only the script is really problematic. Arthur Crabtree did everything he could with it as a director and did really well for the most part; he was known more for his comedies for Will Hay and Arthur Askey rather than genre movies, but this, his final film, came right after he directed Fiend without a Face, a sci-fi horror movie whichwas even more financially succesful than Horrors of the Black Museum; it made back thirteen times its budget rather than the mere seven that this film managed. Desmond Dickinson was responsible for shooting the film and he did a great job without ever attempting to be flash. His camera is content to sit back and watch, often panning or dollying through a room with subtle voyeuristic tendencies, not only in Cunningham’s scenes. There should be a shoutout for the production design crew, because I loved the sets. I want to buy Bancroft’s mansion and fill it with the stuff that Aggie has for sale in her antiques shop. I’d keep Bancroft’s dungeon and study, of course!
For all the great dialogue and outlandish murder, the script is poorly paced and too easily distracted from its sadistic goal; the film is only 78 minutes long and would have been much more memorable had there been an extra twelve of murderous death gadgets. Instead, Jim Nicholson added a gimmick, as was the current trend in genre film. William Castle, the maestro of such gimmicks, had begun a year earlier with Macabre, handing out a $1,000 life insurance policy with every ticket in case the customer died of fright, but got more and more elaborate. For House on Haunted Hill, he sent a skeleton over the audience on a wire; he attached vibrating motors to the underside of some seats for The Tingler; and, for Mr. Sardonicus, had the audience decide if the title character would live or die. Castle’s pictures weren’t the only ones with gimmicks; screenings of Crabtree’s previous film, Fiend without a Face, had a ‘living and breathing fiend’ in a display case front of house, twitching its spinal cord and menacing the public with sound effects.

For Horrors of the Black Museum, Nicholson invented Hypno-Vista, because every cinematic gimmick had to have a hokey name. This involved a twelve minute prologue presented by Emile Franchele, a registered psychologist and hypnotist, who later hosted a TV show in California called Adventures in Hypnotism and spoke as a hypnotherapist in a 1975 documentary, Death: The Ultimate Mystery. Franchele explains what hypnotism is, accompanied by basic special effects and the inevitable Archimedes spiral, then proceeds to hypnotise the audience. First, he has us hold their hands together so he can generate enough suggestion to part them against our will, but eventually uses sound and enforcement to persuade us that we’re in London, ready for the film to begin with red double decker buses and recognisable landmarks. Yes, we the audience become part of the movie, ready to be in the room when poor Gail Dunlap triggers the needles in the binoculars she’s been sent and falls lifeless on the carpet.
Well, that’s the idea anyway. Needless to say, it’s completely ludicrous but audiences apparently lapped it up back in 1959, when it was almost expected to have a hokey gimmick to spice up the movie. It’s certainly not the worst thing about this picture. Beyond a troubled script, there are some truly awful make-up effects that supposedly age the murderer but only serve to lessen the impact of what should have been a relatively cool Jekyll & Hyde type subplot; there’s plenty of convenience for the sake of art, such as the thoroughly useful vat of acid that suddenly shows up at the right moment, having never been set up in an early scene; I could also include the bra that Shirley Anne Field wears as Angela Banks, the illicit girlfriend of Bancroft’s assistant, Rick, because it’s notably distracting and could easily have put someone’s eye out. What’s more, for an apparently intelligent crime writer with delusions of grandeur, Bancroft is a complete moron when it comes to covering his tracks.

I won’t say that it’s easy to forgive those flaws, because I’d love to see a version of this without them, but they aren’t as important in a film like this as they would be in something of another genre. This begins with a thoroughly memorable murder, proceeds to enforce that it’s not a one off so setting us up to expect the intricacies of future crimes. In this, Horrors of the Black Museum sets the stage for Theater of Blood, the Dr. Phibes duology and, down the decades, even the Saw franchise. The flaw that matters most here is the one that takes us away from that, neglecting to set up another such murder every thirty, twenty or even ten minutes. It’s easy to just ditch the Emile Franchele intro sequence and leap straight into the feature, especially as it isn’t included on most versions available on home release, but it’s sadly impossible to replace it with the twelve minutes that should have been included to begin with. It’s an important, pioneering film and birthday boy Michael Gough is glorious, but it pales in comparison to Theater of Blood.

The Hypno-Vista intro with Emile Franchele can be watched for free on YouTube.

Curse of the Queerwolf (1988)

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Director: Mark Pirro
Writer: Mark Pirro
Stars: Michael Palazzolo, Taylor Whitney and Kent Butler

By the time 2016 ends, I’ll have reviewed 35 pictures to remember important contributors to cinema on what would have been (or, in two instances, were) their centennials. Curse of the Queerwolf, released in 1988, is the most recent of them and by far the cheapest to make. Low budget pioneer Mark Pirro shot it on 8mm film for an estimated $10,000, which was four times what he spent on his debut feature, 1983’s A Polish Vampire in Burbank. That picture grossed over half a million dollars in home video and cable TV sales, allowing him to shoot Deathrow Gameshow on 35mm for $200,000 and see it distributed worldwide by Crown International. I own it on PAL VHS, a tape which contributed just a little to the million and a half dollars that it made. Perhaps because Pirro had to sue Crown for royalties due to him, he leapt back down the budgetary scale to shoot this, his third feature, which grew out of a small character role in A Polish Vampire in Burbank of a queerwolf in a hot tub.

Now, which ‘important contributor to cinema’ could be in a $10,000 feature called Curse of the Queerwolf, you might ask? Well, that would be Forrest J. Ackerman, the original fan, whose importance to fandom cannot be underestimated. He coined the term ‘sci-fi’ and invented cosplay. He wrote for the first fanzines and lent his name to a character in the first Superman story (published before the comic book). He co-founded LASFS, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, the oldest continuously operating sci-fi club in the world; in addition to running LosCon, it also owns Westercon, a regional sci-fi convention which my better half is chairing in 2017. He published Famous Monsters of Filmland and represented some 200 authors as a literary agent, from luminaries like Ray Bradbury to outsiders like Ed Wood. He also collected everything he could and, over half a century, exhibited it to over 50,000 fellow fans at his house, known as the Ackermansion. The fact that he appeared in over 210 films is almost a footnote to his incredible career.
One of those is Curse of the Queerwolf, in which he plays an alcoholic named Mr. Richardson. Seeking treatment for his addiction at the Sweet Holy Mama Therapy Clinic, he’s hooked up to a machine that feeds him an ounce of booze every few seconds, while the therapist, Richard Cheese (he goes by Dick), waves his dirty socks under his nose. It’s aversion therapy and, hey, it might work, if only Mr. Cheese didn’t get distracted by his best friend, Larry Smallbut. Poor Mr. Richardson explodes and that’s the end of Uncle Forry’s part. He appeared in bigger films than this one and in more substantial roles too, but this felt right as a choice to celebrate his career because he was such a fan of Z-movies. Sure, he played the US President in Amazon Women on the Moon, Dracula in Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold (and Dr. Acula in many films) and a club patron in Vampirella, a movie based on a character which he named, but this is the underground cinema that he adored. He returned for Pirro’s later My Mom’s a Werewolf and Nudist Colony of the Dead.

I love Z-movies too, when they’re made with imagination and passion. It’s been so long since I’ve seen Deathrow Gameshow that I’m unable to remember much about it but I do remember that I laughed aloud a lot while watching it and I did the same with Curse of the Queerwolf. The story is the standard werewolf legend we know from The Wolf Man and Curse of the Werewolf, among many others. Pirro even nods overtly to the classics that came before by giving torches to the men who trail the queerwolf (or dickenthrope) at the outset (that’s torches with fire like villagers always carried to Frankenstein’s castle rather than torches like British flashlights). Sure, this is a contemporary story and one of these modern ‘villagers’ is wearing sunglasses, but they still have old school torches which they never extinguish, even while travelling by car. Either Pirro couldn’t afford pitchforks too or they were too dangerous to have sticking out of moving vehicles. It doesn’t matter. The torches rocked.
Their victim is a young lady named Paula McFarland, played in lingerie by a young lady named Cynthia Brownell, but the story has the character be a male transvestite, Paul McFarland by name, who had been bitten by a queerwolf and so turned into one himself. Another nod to The Wolfman is the tagline, repeated a couple of times during the picture: ‘Even a wrist that is strong and firm and holds up straight by day may become limp when the moon is full and the queerwolf comes your way!’ I should mention here, just in case you hadn’t noticed, that this is hardly politically correct. Sure, it’s almost three decades old but it was notably over the top in 1988 and it’s still there today. It isn’t just the fact that gays and transvestites are the same thing in this film, but other running jokes are willing to go to places that most filmmakers wouldn’t dream of visiting. One involves Larry accidentally killing at least three puppies, one by microwave. This isn’t Troma so we don’t see it happen but the sound effects are impressively gruesome.

I should add that Larry is a nice guy, but he’s easily led. He’s managed to land a lovely girlfriend, Lois, and things seem to be going really well for them. He loves her, he cares about her and he wants to settle down with her, but it’s a scary proposition, leaving his bachelor days behind, and his best friend, Richard Cheese, really doesn’t help him to move forward. Dick is a complete lech, who is convinced that he should keep Larry from falling into matrimony. So he takes him to strip clubs (‘We just got here four hours ago’) and bars to pick up girls. Larry does feel guilty doing this but he gets talked into it anyway; it’s how he finds himself necking with a young lady on Dick’s couch who turns out to be Paula McFarland. It’s only after she bites him on the ass that he realises that she’s a man pretending to be a woman. The four ‘villagers’ with their torches promptly invade the house and chase poor Paula out into the night so we can tie into that opening scene and start to move forward with Larry as the new queerwolf.
This is a wild comedy but the actors wisely play their parts completely straight (pun not intended). Pirro is known for re-using the same cast members over and over again, but many of the key ones here are new. Michael Palazzolo, who plays Larry, has no other credits on his filmography at all, but he’s well cast nonetheless. Cynthia Brownell, playing the transvestite dickenthrope who bites him, only has one and that was in a small part in Pirro’s previous feature, Deathrow Gameshow. Taylor Whitney, playing Lois, would go on to work for another director, but only once, acting alongside Erik Estrada and a cast of porn stars in a women in prison flick called Caged Fury. Only Kent Butler, the deliciously dry horndog of a best friend, made more than two movies, but almost all were for Pirro. He was the casting director for Deathrow Gameshow, in which he also played a stage manager; he was a still photographer on Nudist Colony of the Dead; and he appeared in Buford’s Beach Bunnies, which starred Tom Hanks’s younger brother Jim.

Not all the cast were this inexperienced, of course, and I’m not just talking about Forry Ackerman’s 210 bit parts. Another victim of Richard Cheese at the Sweet Holy Mama Therapy Clinic is Conrad Brooks, a legendary Z-movie actor, best known for playing a cop in Plan 9 from Outer Space. He made a bunch of pictures for Ed Wood and also worked for Coleman Francis on The Beast of Yucca Flats in 1961, before calling it quits on his screen career. It was Pirro who talked him back for his debut, A Polish Vampire in Burbank, and he’s appeared in many of Pirro’s films since. He’d also go on to work for other modern day B-movie legends, such as Fred Olen Ray, David DeCoteau and Donald G. Jackson, among many others, in a filmography that is packed full of movies with outrageous names that are either awesome or awful or both. Ackerman may not have seen Dr. Horror’s Erotic House of Idiots, The Saturn Avenger vs. The Terror Robot or Test Tube Teens from the Year 2000, but he would happily have done so and probably enjoyed the heck out of them.
My favourite character in Curse of the Queerwolf is the gypsy woman who Larry accidentally runs over with his car. She’s Madame Muddyooch and she’s played by Sharon Alsina, who went on to be an anime voice actor and appear in a serious film that I would love to see called Mr. P’s Dancing Sushi Bar. She’s far from serious here, of course, and the joke at which I laughed the loudest came after she sees the pansygram in Larry’s hand, marking him as a queerwolf, just as she saw one on Paul McFarland’s hand before him. With her suitably exotic gypsy accent, she tells him, ‘I see all!’ and he replies, utterly deadpan, ‘Did you see the car coming?’ No, this is hardly sophisticated comedy but it made me laugh long and loud and I always appreciate movies that do that. I also enjoy comedies that are able to laugh at themselves, which this does often. ‘Fourth night in a row we’ve had a full moon,’ Dick tells his current squeeze, Holly. ‘Poetic license,’ she replies.

My reviews often act as recommendations, somehow even when I’m writing what I think are negative ones, but this film is going to polarise people without any commentary on quality. Some people are going to read this, be horrified that such a picture exists and make sure never to watch it. Others are going to seek it out just because they now know that it was made; I’m certainly going to lend it to the gay couple in my family who didn’t just enjoy The Gays but laughed uproariously at it. I’m sure that some won’t be able to buy into the fact that a feature shot on 8mm for $10,000 could contain anything of quality, but I’d suggest that there’s quite a lot, even in places you wouldn’t expect. Every werewolf movie has to have a transformation scene, for instance, and this one has the one you might expect, with Larry watching in horror as his wrists go limp, but it also has a very believable shot of fingernails extending, complete with bright red nail polish. It’s not Rick Baker’s An American Werewolf in London but I was still impressed.
I loved this movie, far more than I expected to. Sure, it’s often inconsistent, usually stupid and sometimes not as funny as it wants to be. It also loses its focus, mostly mirroring the classic werewolf story but veering off on occasion just because. I don’t just mean the gloriously named Det. Morose from Homocide (geddit?) with a loose Sean Connery accent that comes out of nowhere, I mean the way that the parody veers off into other movies. There’s a scene that parodies Deliverance, set to the Beverly Hillbillies theme in lyrics reworked to better suit the occasion, but that diversion can be accepted as a nightmare. The eventual shift into The Exorcist isn’t as appropriate because, even though it’s written carefully enough to wrap up the story, it’s not the parody that we followed for most of the picture and diversions only work if we come back from them. However, my takeaway from this film was to watch Deathrow Gameshow again and track down everything else Mark Pirro made. Thank you, Forry, for everything, including this.

Dear Dead Delilah (1972)

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Director: John Farris
Writer: John Farris
Stars: Agnes Moorehead, Will Geer, Michael Ansara, Dennis Patrick and Patricia Carmichael
It’s well known that Agnes Moorehead preferred to be recognised and remembered for roles other than Endora in Bewitched, a role she took reluctantly, expecting that the show would end after one season. Outside of primetime TV, film fans tend to associate her with the Mercury Players of Orson Welles, for good reason. They met on radio, where she was a notably versatile actress, and they were two founding members of the Mercury Theatre on the Air. After their infamous 1938 interpretation of The War of the Worlds, she and her colleagues moved into film, with a string of movies that still resonate today. Is there really a better place to start a film career than Citizen Kane? She followed it up with The Magnificent Ambersons, which earned her the first of four Oscar nominations, three of them in the forties. Unfortunately, she was so great a character actor that it took her until the other end of her career to be given a top-billed part, that of the title character, Delilah Charles, in Dear Dead Delilah, released in 1972.

It wasn’t quite her final appearance, as she would give voice to the Goose in Charlotte’s Web a year later and appear in a bunch of TV movies: Rolling Man and Night of Terror in 1972, Frankenstein: The True Story in 1973 and, finally, the ridiculously titled proposed pilot, Rex Harrison Presents Stories of Love in 1974, the year she died. However, Delilah was her last on screen feature film performance and she had a blast with it, which would be hardly surprising to anyone who’s followed her career. Delilah, you see, is an old, dotty and irascible matriarch in a wheelchair and a pearl necklace, who likes brandy, talking to her dead father and belittling her relatives. It doesn’t hurt that those relatives, old and dotty themselves, are played by other capable character actors like Michael Ansara, Anne Meacham and Dennis Patrick. Each did their time on soap operas, in Days of Our Lives, Another World and Dallas respectively, which is appropriate background for a Southern gothic like this. Patrick was the most qualified, because of a long run on Dark Shadows.
If you think that something like Dark Shadows, with all its vampires and werewolves, would be too outrageous for a movie starring Agnes Moorehead and Grandpa Walton himself, Will Geer, you’d be mistaken. In fact, it starts bloody and only gets bloodier on out, though this proto-slasher is set firmly in a Southern gothic framework rather than the soon to be traditional cabin in the woods. It can’t lay claim to inventing anything, as Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood predates it by a full year, but it was certainly ahead of its time; the opening scenes remind very much of Halloween, itself massively influential on the slasher genre but which wouldn’t be filmed for another six years. Those scenes are our prologue, in which a pregnant young lady talks to her dead and partially dismembered mother in her bloodspattered white dress, then, many years later, is released from Tennessee’s Correctional Rehabilitation Center for Women. She’s Luddy Dublin and she’s reminiscent of nobody less than Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester.

In the form of Patricia Carmichael, doubling her credits after playing a teenage girl in a single episode of Petticoat Junction in 1964, this clueless character is clearly set up to be our insane killer. That’s aided by a bizarre accident in which she gets knocked silly by American football players whom she’s attempting to sketch; well meaning bystanders can’t take her home because she has none, so two of them drive this grinning lunatic to Aunt Delilah’s mansion instead. The crazy driver is Richard and Delilah’s niece, Ellen, is his girlfriend, while the mansion is South Hall Plantation. How better to stir up an inward looking family than to introduce some crazy murderer into the mix? We’ve seen that movie before many times and can surely write the rest of the script ourselves. Well, not quite, because writer/director John Farris, even though he only had $200,000 to play with, sets a notably mad tone, starting as he introduces his cast of characters; not one of them has a full complement of marbles, whether they think they do or not.
Delilah is merely the most prominent. Richard describes her as ‘wasting away at the top of her voice’, which is a great description for someone with a fantastic line in bitter dialogue. However, while she’s the character most easily defined as nuts, given that she likes chatting with her father, who’s been dead for twenty years and remains only in the form of an oil painting, she’s also clearly the sharpest. Even though the plantation has dwindled in size over the years, from 5,000 acres down to a mere 24, the building is still worth a million bucks (even in 1972 money) and the trust is worth even more, so she brings the family together to announce both her imminent death (‘I have Papa’s word on it that I’ll soon be joining him’) and her new will, which leaves them only $5,000 each. The plantation itself will go to the state, along with a suitable sum to maintain it. This announcement, needless to say, is not well received by the family, and we can’t help but think their outraged reaction was most of Delilah’s point.

However, Delilah has more with which to stir them up; she’s found ‘Papa’s horse money’. Family legend suggests that, during the Depression, he burned his stable for the insurance money, but took care to swap out the valuable thoroughbreds beforehand for run of the mill horses. While worthless animals died, he sold the valuable ones south of the border and hid the proceeds, so there should be $600,000 in cash somewhere on the property. And so off they all wander to figure out where it might be. Had this film not begun in true slasher style, we might read this as an Agatha Christie sort of murder mystery, but the blood and the wildly off kilter tone of the entire picture suggest different. That approach screams slasher flick and we eagerly anticipate each succeeding death scene, while mildly attempting to figure out who’s behind it all. The suspect list includes everyone in the cast, including the black manservant, Marshall, for no better reason than he doesn’t seem crazy but must be for continuing to work at South Hall.
Luddy Dublin is the obvious candidate but she’s too obvious to take entirely seriously. Once in the house, she’s hired on by Ellen to be Delilah’s new maid and companion, even though she’s just owned up to murdering her mother and spending most of her life in an asylum. That should tell you plenty about Ellen’s mindset, but I’ll add her response for context: ‘Most of the people who lived in this house,’ she says, ‘either went to jail or to deserved to go.’ In addition to Ellen, the family is comprised of Delilah’s two brothers and one sister, with their lawyer cousin Ray Jurroe inexplicably representing all the above. There’s Dr. Alonzo Charles, who isn’t allowed to practice medicine any more, presumably because he’s a drug addict. There’s Grace Charles, who’s a horse-riding lush; what else she likes to ride I’ll let you discover. And there’s Morgan, an inconsequential opportunist with a wife he calls ‘baby duck’; her dresses epitomise everything that was wrong with the seventies. I’m cringing once more just remembering them.

It’s quickly obvious that none of these characters either likes or trusts anyone else, all the way to Richard and Ellen, who have the best reason to, given that they’re an item. It’s also quickly obvious that such a lack of trust is well and truly deserved. Dr. Alonzo’s addiction is presumably what leads him to constantly fluster about as if he’s about to transform into a werewolf, but I did wonder for a while if that was really going to happen. By comparison, Grace is an ice queen who looks daggers at everyone and receives them right back. Morgan dominates his wife, who is honestly called Buffy, but she steals most of his scenes because Ruth Baker is more than willing to overact with abandon. I don’t remember her from her previous film, Marat/Sade, but it was set in an asylum, so her casting is perhaps typecasting. Even Robert Gentry, playing Richard, often reminds of the conniving Christopher Reeve in Deathtrap. Not one of them is likeable but that just means we’re happy to see them gradually and bloodily decreased in number.
With the growing death count probably the best reason to watch this film, I won’t talk about the how and why, beyond suggesting that many people of my generation may find a surprising amount of satisfaction in seeing Grandpa Walton stumble out of Delilah’s stable to die, his severed right hand held in his left. It may not be a vision any of us expected to see and this may be the only place to see it (while he was more versatile than many might think, I believe this was his sole horror movie), but that merely adds spice to the vision. The effects are cheap but relatively effective, given that the budget was minuscule, and they’re of the sort that stick in people’s minds. Those who saw this at a young age on television as part of an Avco/Embassy package of Spanish horror movies (this was the only English language inclusion) have probably forgotten the picture and its title, but may get flashes of some of the death scenes every now and again and wish they could remember where they came from.

Beyond that, the two main reasons to watch this feature today are Agnes Moorehead and John Farris. The latter is a well known author today and wasn’t unknown even in 1972. He already had fifteen novels to his name, the first published only a year after he graduated from high school in 1955. Four years later, he had a million seller, Harrison High, which he continued in no less than five sequels. However, he’s known best today as a horror writer, not only for his best-selling 1976 novel, The Fury, which he adapted to film two years later for Brian De Palma, and its own three sequels, but for a whole string of further unrelated books dating from the eighties onward. This feels like an early hint at where he wanted to go with his career, in choice of material at least, if not as a medium of choice. Before this, only When Michael Calls really plays with horror but nowhere near as overtly as Dear Dead Delilah; it was coincidentally filmed in 1972, but Farris wasn’t involved with that one.
According to a fansite, Furies and Fiends, maintained by John David Scoleri and David J. Schow, Farris also spoke to the lack of real budget. ‘The actors mostly worked for nothing,’ he said, ‘including Moorehead, who would have destroyed me if she’d wanted to but instead was extremely supportive and helpful.’ Given how bitter and blistering she made Delilah, it’s easy to see her doing that but the worst anyone seems to have said about her was Bewitched co-star Dick Sargent calling her a ‘tough old bird’. What’s more, it wasn’t public knowledge at the time but she was already terminally ill with cancer, quite possibly from shooting The Conqueror just downwind from a nuclear test zone in Utah, and she probably thanked Farris for puting her in a wheelchair for most of the movie. He remembered that, ‘She gave me everything she had, and a short course in what film acting is all about.’ Going back through her career, she seemed to do that with every film. This is far from her best picture but she did stellar work within it nonetheless.

10 Rillington Place (1971)

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Director: Richard Fleischer
Writer: Clive Exton, from the book by Ludovic Kennedy
Stars: Richard Attenborough, Judy Geeson and John Hurt

Somehow I let this feature get past me and I have no idea why. I can safely get a pass from seeing it on initial release because I was too busy being born, but it must have played on British television while I was growing up and, as a boy who had both an interest in true crime and a tendency to read the Radio Times each week to figure out what I wanted to watch (this was in the dark ages before VCRs let alone DVRs), I would surely have noticed it. After all, the address of the title is a standard trivia question in the UK. Where did John Christie commit eight murders between 1943 and 1953? That one’s a gimme. However, I find it more chilling that I’d also let the importance of what the film, and the book by journalist Ludovic Kennedy upon which it was based, has to say get by me too. Perhaps like many, I’d associated it with murders rather than hangings and it’s the latter that has more resonance. Put simply, the hanging of Timothy Evans, an innocent man, is a key reason why capital punishment was abolished in the UK.

Contemporary critics didn’t like 10 Rillington Place because it didn’t do what they expected. It’s not a thriller, surviving on its use of tension and suspense; neither is it a traditional serial killer story, in which we delve into the mind of a madman. It’s an exercise in inevitability and that’s entirely the point. It follows the inexorable path towards a miscarriage of justice that cannot be undone or even mitigated and the fact that the guilty man was eventually hanged is only a small saving grace. It’s not an enjoyable picture to watch in many ways, though film fans can’t fail to appreciate the performances, especially those of Richard Attenborough as John Christie and a young John Hurt as the man whom he manipulated so easily. The direction, which is what disappointed those critics in 1971, is impeccable too, courtesy of Richard Fleischer, who would have been a hundred years old today, and I was as stunned by his directorial restraint as I was by Hurt’s bravado portrayal of an illiterate Welshman in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The script, adapted from Kennedy’s book by Clive Exton, who had the benefit of the author’s technical advice during production, is relatively close to the accepted course of real events. It even boldly states as it begins that, ‘This is a true story. Whenever possible the dialogue has been based on official documents.’ That doesn’t mean that it tells the whole story, of course. The murder that we watch as the film begins is Christie’s second murder rather than his first and a great deal is compressed at the end, all for the sake of narrative flow, but it doesn’t depart from the pertinent facts in any dangerous way. Also, like its source book, it makes a number of educated guesses, but none of them ring false. This was a problematic case, in that the innocent man, for reasons that we’ll soon get into, made three official statements to the police, two of which were untrue. While he’s honest on the stand, his credibility has been shot and he’s missing certain key information that would have backed up his case. Are you confused yet? Well, let us begin.

John Christie, in the recognisable form of Richard Attenborough, is at once a creepy and calming fellow, an odd mixture that helps us understand why so many women trusted him. He’s a short man with a severely receding hairline who wears glasses and speaks so softly that his voice could be described as a whisper. It’s a highly unthreatening combination, though one more sinister today as pop culture has associated this look with the Nazi officer next door. It’s simple to suggest that Anthony Hopkins borrowed some of this performance for his famous take on Hannibal Lecter, but it’s misleading too as there’s none of his dominant genius here nor a hint of his devilish good taste. I’ve always pictured Brian Cox rather than Hopkins whenever Lecter (or Lecktor in his instance) is brought into conversation, but I can see myself blurring Attenborough’s Christie and Hopkins’s Lecter together because I’d dearly love to have seen Attenborough portray Hannibal the cannibal as the shabby little man he makes Christie.
We begin in London during the Blitz, but the air raid siren seems to carry an additional warning, pleading with Muriel Eady not to trust John Christie to cure her bronchitis using his ‘special mixture’. It turns out to be Friar’s Balsam to mask the influx of domestic gas, which has a strong carbon monoxide content. ‘You may feel just a bit dizzy,’ he tells her, as he puts a makeshift mask over her face; when she fights, he holds it until she drifts into unconsciousness. After he strangles her, it’s implied that he sexually assaults her, then he buries her in the communal garden behind his terrace. We see that she’s not the first body to go into this ground. We then skip forward five years to meet the other key players in this sordid and sorry saga: Tim and Beryl Evans, who move into a flat upstairs with their baby daughter, Geraldine. The war is over, but Rillington Place still looks shabby, even in the daylight. And it’s worth mentioning that this really is Rillington Place, even if had been renamed to Ruston Close and they shot at number 7 not 10.

The Evanses are recognisable faces too. John Hurt looks scarily young as Tim, even though he was a decade into his film career and I’ve seen him five years earlier in A Man for All Seasons. By comparison, Judy Geeson looks old as Beryl, because I tend to picture her as the schoolgirl she played in To Sir, with Love in 1967; I really should delve more into her work of the seventies. Both are excellent in this picture, matching the quality of what could easily have been a dominant performance from Attenborough. Geeson, the Meg Ryan of her day, is eminently desirable and easily led, attributes which would have been seen as complementary at the time; but it has to be said that she’s rather annoying, the catch in her being a catch, as it were. She sells both aspects of Beryl Evans capably in a way that seems passive but still avoids her being overwhelmed by the more overt performances of her male co-stars. After all, it has to be said that Christie and Tim Evans are gifts of parts to actors who know what to do with them.
Attenborough is the lead, playing a role that he knew he wouldn’t enjoy. ‘I do not like playing the part,’ he explained to The Times, ‘but I accepted it at once without seeing the script,’ adding, ‘I have never felt so totally involved in any part as this.’ He thoroughly inhabits the character, not once letting his creepy calmness lapse. The chilling nature of the man is there in the way he smiles and the way he hovers. It’s in the way he’s constantly helping people in ways that enforce his own importance; he might seem like the landlord but he isn’t. And, more than anything, it’s there in his quiet manipulations, like when he realises that Beryl wants to have an abortion and plants the seed that he used to be a doctor and could take care of it on the cheap. The scene where he’s preparing to conduct that abortion is blistering; he’s killed already but he still shakes, whether from nerves, anticipation or both. There are workmen outside but he just can’t resist the temptation to take one more victim.

And, if Attenborough is chilling as Christie, Hurt is award-worthy as Evans. I’ve seen him in so much over the years that I’m aware just how much of a talent he has, but he plays very believably stupid here and that’s really tough to do, especially for an actor who so believably plays professors and other educated men. Evans wasn’t inept, idiotic or imbecilic; he simply had a below average IQ and little enough education that he was illiterate and even more easily led than his wife. It’s in his eyes and in subtle movements of his head. It’s in his overblown reactions to his wife’s hints and barbs, because he can’t argue his way out of such situations and thus has to scream and shout, even if he wakes up the whole terrace. And, of course, it’s in the moments in which he uses physical strength to reinforce his dominance. He may not be a killer, but he’s a violent man with a violent temper. Hurt plays those scenes as well as the happy or bewildered ones. I can’t remember seeing a more credibly lost man than Hurt late in this film.
Holding these exquisite performances together is Fleischer’s direction, which is utterly controlled and was misunderstood at the time. An anonymous Variety critic praises Hurt and Fleischer, calling 10 Rillington Place‘an absorbing and disturbing picture’, but fails to acknowledge the point, even expressing surprise that people might find more interest in Evans than Christie. The point is not that Christie killed people but that Christie killed people and persuaded the powers that be into hanging a mental midget for those crimes instead of him, even testifying on the stand in front of the man he was setting up. By comparison, Vincent Canby, a critic for The New York Times, nails the film’s purpose, starting his review with the fact that Evans was executed but posthumously pardoned, an act which prompted the abolition of the death penalty. However, he suggests that the ‘small, unimaginative people’ lessen the film’s entertainment value, whereas I’d counter that the dreary killer in working class grime heightens it.

You see, Fleischer steadfastly refuses to sensationalise any aspect of this case. Christie wasn’t remotely as clever as he thought he was and he made a string of stupid mistakes, but none of them were caught by the police, who were hindered by being brought in through an obviously false confession by Evans. This is another masterpiece scene for Hurt, because it’s a real mess of a confession that, incredibly, aims to protect his wife’s killer, because he believes him to be a friend who merely tried to help them and failed to keep Beryl alive through the abortion procedure. ‘He’s a bit simple,’ one cop tells another. Caught out by inescapable truth, he has to come clean on his second attempt which, of course, isn’t believed in the wake of the first. Even though many of us know what is to come, we still root for the poor simpleton, not because he’s remotely sympathetic but because we know that he’s innocent. The whole point of the film is for the hangman to not listen to us in the cheap seats screaming at him that he’s hanging the wrong man.
The hanging of Timothy Evans is an incredibly brutal scene, not for any of the reasons we might reasonably expect with our 21st century history with brutal film, but because it’s so quick. The camera shifts to handheld as Evans is walked from one room to the next and, before we know it, it’s all over. There’s no procession, no prayer, no last words. There’s no ritual at all and we can fairly believe that, given that Albert Pierrepoint, the man who hanged both Evans and Christie, advised the production to ensure that it would handle the scene accurately. Evans is there to be hanged and that’s what happens, quickly and efficiently, to the degree we can reasonably accept that, even as it’s happening, he still can’t believe that it will. What’s more, as Evans falls to his death, we’re shifted in a truly twisted segue to Christie straightening his bad back two years later. Canby calls that a common cinematic trick, but I thought it epitomised the film because the death of an innocent man had been utterly accepted and forgotten.

Fleischer, an American by birth and residence, must have been interested in the subject because he addressed it in more than one of his films. In 1959, he directed Compulsion, a drama based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which they’re saved from the hangman’s noose by an impassioned speech given by their lawyer, played by Orson Welles, against capital punishment. In 1968, he made The Boston Strangler, with Tony Curtis as Albert DeSalvo, who was convicted not for a string of thirteen murders, to which he had confessed, but for a series of rapes. His lawyer had the death penalty removed as a possibility in exchange for admitting guilt in a plea bargain. DeSalvo later withdrew his confession and nobody has been convicted of any of the murders that he is suspected to have committeed. Capital punishment is an odd focus for a man who was born into the film world, the son of Max Fleischer who is still my favourite American animator; I’ll take his Snow White over Walt Disney’s any day of the week.
Then again, the Oscar he won in 1948 wasn’t for any of the films for which he would later become known. He made films noir like Armored Car Robbery and The Narrow Margin; big budget blockbusters, like Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Tora! Tora! Tora!; action films like Violent Saturday and Mr. Majestyk; sci-fi classics like Fantastic Voyage and Soylent Green; fantasies like Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer; period pieces like The Vikings and Barabbas; and crime films like The Last Run and The New Centurions. He was a versatile director, who even ventured into odd territories for Che! and Mandingo, but none of those won him an Academy Award. That Oscar came for a documentary feature he produced in 1948, Design for Death, to explain Japanese culture to American soldiers occupying Japan. It was written by Theodore Geisel and his wife; Geisel is, of course, better known to us today as Dr. Seuss, an odd fact that mirrors how odd it was for it to be what the Academy would remember Fleischer for. We remember him for much more.

The Villain (1979)

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Director: Hal Needham
Writer: Robert G. Kane
Stars: Kirk Douglas, Ann-Margret and Arnold Schwarzenegger

It has to be said that The Villain is unique as a live action film. Beyond being a true statement, I keep coming back to that as it may be the greatest success the film can boast. Certainly it’s an interesting movie, but it’s also a trainwreck that unfolds at such a slow pace that we’re effectively watching it crash and burn for ninety minutes. I watched it in befuddlement, with my mouth open as I tried to figure out who thought that this was such a great idea and where it all went horribly wrong. After much thought, where I ended up is that it is a great idea and it’s cast amazingly well for the most part, but it’s directed with such lack of understanding of what it actually is that I have to wonder if the Hal Needham credited as director is really the Hal Needham who brought us Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run and, the same year as this film but earlier in this project, Death Car on the Freeway. It could always be a outrageous typo for Alan Smithee, the name that takes credit when the people who earned it disown their resulting film.

Given the cartoon logic that’s applied to this live action movie, it’s also within the bounds of possibility that the film was directed by its lead character, Cactus Jack Slade, who is as inept as he is dedicated. He’s Wile E. Coyote brought to life and, in the first great casting choice, he’s played by Kirk Douglas, who is celebrating his one hundredth birthday today and still going strong. That’s not surprising, given that he was an amazingly spry 62 years young when leaping around in this film; perhaps he’s really dyslexic and thought that he was 26. His effortless performance here reminded me of Douglas Fairbanks, Senior rather than Junior, decked out to play Zorro but actually playing a cartoon character instead. It’s not merely that Douglas’s 62 year old body is still in great shape, it’s that it seems to be infused with a boundless energy that mere years can’t diminish and mere flesh shouldn’t be able to contain. I’m assuming that some of his falling off hills and being crushed by giant boulders was done by stuntmen, but still. It’s impressive.
Cactus Jack, and his scene-stealing horse sidekick, Whiskey, are an endearing partnership if not a particularly successful one. The first time we see them work is when the outlaw leaps onto a moving train from a great height in order to rob it. Unfortunately, he misses the train completely and so lands face down in the gravel between the tracks, apparently uninjured through application of the last of nine golden rules that Chuck Jones compiled to govern the Roadrunner cartoons: ‘The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures’. Writer Robert G. Kane (no, not Bob Kane of Batman fame) followed many of these rules, excepting the ones that apply only to the Roadrunner. We have a live action Wile E. Coyote, but he’s not chasing a live action Roadrunner in this picture. Maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger is playing Sam Sheepdog, the foil of Wile E. Coyote’s clone, Ralph E. Wolf. Maybe he’s just an archetype from old time westerns rather than a cartoon character. Both his name and his role are Handsome Stranger.

Everything else can be extrapolated from those two sources. We’re in the old west for an old western with a simple plot and black and white characters. Nobody has any depth here at all; they’re all playing either archetypes or cartoons. And the unfolding story is governed by cartoon rules. At one point, Cactus Jack resorts to that old Wile E. Coyote faithful: painting a tunnel on a mountain and hiding behind a tree until the roadrunner crashes. Sure enough, Handsome Stranger drives his carriage straight through this imaginary tunnel which promptly ceases to exist when Cactus Jack tries it out himself. At another, he leans off a hillside to better spy on the leading lady, Charming Jones by both name and nature, when the grass or whatever he’s holding rips away. Instead of simply falling, he looks at it first in disbelief before his recognition of his fate kicks the laws of physics back into motion and he plummets into the river. That’s rule eight: ‘Wherever possible, make gravity the coyote’s greatest enemy.’
Initially, things feel really strange, because we’re breaking the sixth rule: ‘All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters - the southwest American desert.’ Instead, we follow Cactus Jack into town, which I recognised as Old Tucson from the mountains rather than the buildings, as this predates the fire in 1995 and my time there is all this millennium. It’s called Snakes End in this picture and Cactus Jack is there to rob the bank, of course, because that’s what bad guys do. He’s so dedicated to his archetype that he even reads a chapbook called Badmen of the West to tell him what to do. However, even though it guides him through the steps needed to dynamite the safe, it doesn’t work. The safe remains stubbornly intact, though the entire rest of the building is blown to bits. I looked but didn’t see Kane and Needham following rule seven with their dynamite: ‘All materials, tools, weapons or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.’ Maybe they didn’t own the rights.

Other than moments like that, things don’t feel like a cartoon in town; they feel like a cheap comedy. Handsome Stranger helps an old woman over Snakes End’s main street, which is dangerously packed with horses and carriages; it turns out that she was on the right side to begin with. Mel Brooks could have got away with this but Needham fails dismally with it. Before he was a director, he was a stuntman and one of the best there was, founding Stunts Unlimited, introducing innovative equipment to the business, and even licensing a toy in 1977, the Hal Needham Western Movie Stunt Set, which is scarily rare but looks absolutely awesome. To be a stuntman you have to have impeccable timing, but that’s technical not comedic timing, which is what’s sadly lacking here; Arnie had no idea either, so the whole thing falls flat. The best comedic timing comes from Mel Tillis, as he uses his trademark stutter to tell the heavily accented Handsome Stranger, ‘You talk funny.’ Not politically correct, but hilarious.
Tillis is only one of many recognisable faces who show up briefly in The Villain to get our story in motion. Foster Brooks is the bank clerk who has to deal with Cactus Jack’s villainous robbery attempt. Strother Martin is Parody Jones, a mine owner who’s sending his daughter into town to pick up some money. Jack Elam is the best of them, as the villainous Avery Simpson, who’s lending that cash and wants it back again; if it’s stolen en route, then he’ll get Parody’s mine. He’s much more dapper than I’ve seen him, with an awesome hat and a wonderful demeanour as he frees and hires Cactus Jack all at once. I’ve seen Jack Elam many times, but he’s becoming a firm favourite of mine and I just wish he was given more to do, in many pictures but especially this one. Sadly, we get little of any of these folk, focusing in as we leave town on Cactus Jack, Handsome Stranger and Charming Jones. Of course, I can’t complain too much, because that means lots of Kirk Douglas, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ann-Margret.

If Kirk Douglas was perfectly cast, then Ann-Margret followed suit. She’s a delightful young lady from the first time we see her, as the boys on her train know. And she knows they know it too. At the Snakes End station, she leans over to show dangerous cleavage and ask Handsome Stranger, ‘Would you mind taking hold of these?’ She means the suitcases that aren’t even in shot, but this sets in motion a running gag that, once again, Mel Brooks would have had a field day with but Needham mangles horribly. By escorting his daughter home with the money, Handsome Stranger is repaying Parody Jones for saving his life. That daughter would happily thank him in turn by jumping his bones but he just can’t see her attempted seduction. Sure, he’s a dunce (Mel Tillis steals his steak at the Broken Spoke by telling him that the five mile crossing is only half a mile down the track), but how could anyone not launch into a dozen sexual fantasies while accompanied by the Ann-Margret of 1979, especially when her lines are all come-ons?
Arnie looks the part, as much as anyone can in a cowboy outfit that would have worked for Marty McFly if he was 6’2” tall; it’s pale blue, it magically repels dirt and it’s as dumb as the character that wears it. I can’t even say that he doesn’t play the part the way it was given to him; he’s a good guy but a stupid guy, one who’s utterly oblivious to everything. He plays that well and, had the film been sped up either through direction or through editing, he would have been fine. Still, he’s always the third wheel when scenes feature Douglas and Ann-Margret. They could act around him in their sleep and almost had to, given how slow the whole film got. Arnie plays along with the pace, plodding consistently forward, getting more wood for the fire every time his companion attempts to get him into the sack. There are a number of scenes where I’m sure his co-stars are laughing not at what they were shooting but at how things played out off screen. At least they seem to have enjoyed the shoot!

With a quick shoutout for Gary Combs, who had the unenviable task of being a stunt coordinator in a film directed by a legendary stunt coordinator, and his team of stuntmen who all did great work here, the technical side really isn’t where this film shines; the camerawork is adequate, the music clichéd and the editing ridiculous. At least there was nine-time Emmy-winner Bob Mackie to design costumes for Ann-Margret; I have no idea how she didn’t fall out of that dress but I kept waiting for it to happen. I hated the Indian outfits though and, talking of Indian outfits, the one that Avery Simpson enlists is run by no less than Paul Lynde as a very nervous Nervous Elk. It’s another slice of genius casting but, for some reason, it doesn’t work at all. I often wished that Paul Lynde would have played the part but instead we got Paul Lynde. The problem certainly isn’t lack of talent or an incompatibility with the role, so I’m going to plump for bad direction again. Whatever it was, Lynde just couldn’t make Nervous Elk funny.
That leaves one actor still worthy of mention and his name is Ott. He’s the horse who plays Whiskey, in what IMDb suggests was his final performance. Back in 1971, he’d played Black Beauty in the film of the same name, and the Black Mustang in a couple of episodes of Lassie. Other films and television shows followed until this one, which came after he was the title character in a dozen episodes of his own series, Thunder, on NBC. He won three PATSY awards, the equivalent of the Oscar for animal performers (the acronym originally stood for Picture Animal Top Star of the Year), but I wonder if he ever before had the opportunities he had in this picture, both to shine as a performer and to steal scenes from his co-stars. He saves Cactus Jack’s life at one point, but he also drops him right in it on more than one occasion for no better reason than because he can. The only thing he doesn’t get to do is to ride at speed, which underlines yet again how slow this movie is.

And so everyone moves gradually closer to the ending, which I won’t spoil but is at once inevitable and yet somehow surprising. I can’t say I didn’t like this but I hated it too. It’s too bad to be a guilty pleasure, but the concept is a peach and I’d suggest that it be revisited except that it would be done with CGI and that would be horrible. Perhaps a low budget filmmaker without too much to risk could make this with real stuntmen doing real stunts and create a cult hit. The only reasons that this one would be recalled in the event of a similar movie done right are Kirk Douglas’s energy, Ann-Margret’s cleavage and the way that everything flies over Arnie’s head just like Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s totally within character for Handsome Stranger to suggest, ‘Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast!’ If only Hal Needham had shot the film like those reflexes. There’s a great twenty minute short film here, maybe half an hour, but it’s stretched far too thin for an hour and a half. Watch it on fast forward!
I research the movies I pick for my centennial reviews ahead of time. I try to find interesting films that well represent the star in question and allow me to talk about a facet of film history, without just lumping for the obvious. Often, these interesting films are also great ones but this is a solid exception to that rule. It’s far from great but it is a great Kirk Douglas movie. Regardless of what he happened to be shooting, he gave it his all and, in doing so, created a character who may well leap to mind for some viewers if the name Kirk Douglas is mentioned in passing. Of course, it’s far from the only one and there are a number of others that I could easily have picked for this project. I could have chosen his debut, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, made as long ago as 1946, or the French TV movie, Empire State Building Murders, a ‘doc-crime-drama’ and tribute to film noir that sits at the other end of his career in 2008. In between, I’m completely spoiled for choice, both for interesting movies and those which generate opportunities.

After such varied classics as Out of the Past, A Letter to Three Wives and The Glass Menagerie, there’s a vastly underrated gem by the name of Ace in the Hole, made by Billy Wilder in 1951, that would have allowed me to talk about newspapers in the movies and how far ahead of its time this one was. After more classics, such as The Bad and the Beautiful, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Lust for Life, there were a string of films produced by Bryna Productions, a production company Douglas established in 1955, including an anti-war movie in 1957 called Paths of Glory, directed by an up-and-coming director named Stanley Kubrick. Three years later, Douglas helped to break the Hollywood blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus, with an overt on-screen credit. On we travel through his filmography to see classic after classic, each movie different from the last and each notable in its own regard, such as Seven Days in May, There Was a Crooked Man... or The Man from Snowy River, the latter of which gave Douglas a double role.
It’s a heck of a career, especially for someone who started out during the studio system era as a Golden Age star because it’s free of the routine stuff that almost every major name at the time got to churn out in between the films for which they’re remembered. It bears deep exploration, whether through binge-watching or a more relaxed examination, unlike almost any of his peers. And that isn’t bad for a man who spent his early life in poverty. He started out as Issur Danielovitch in Amsterdam, New York, the one male child of seven born to a couple of Jewish immigrants from what is now Belarus. He became Izzy Demsky and then Kirk Douglas, the name he joined the US Navy under during World War II. He worked over forty different jobs to raise funds to pay for acting classes but only made it into the American Academy of Dramatic Arts through a special scholarship. One classmate was Betty Joan Perske, who, after changing her own name to Lauren Bacall, enabled his transition from stage to film by recommending him to Hal Wallis.

The rest can mostly be watched on screen. He did turn down two Oscar-winning roles in his time, those which eventually went to Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou and William Holden in Stalag 17, but he was nominated three times, for Champion, The Bad and the Beautiful and Lust for Life, before eventually receiving an honorary award in 1996 ‘for 50 years as a creative and moral force in the motion picture community’. He also received three nominations for Primetime Emmys and even a Razzie nomination for Saturn 3 in 1980, among many other nominations and wins. Yet, even as a Hollywood star, he’s consistently refused to fish in only one pond, which is why he has more books to his name than I do, mostly written during the last couple of decades; his eleven titles include fiction, non fiction and memoirs. What’s more, he hasn’t quit yet and, like Olivia de Havilland in June, is still with us to celebrate his 100th birthday, which is today, 9th December. Happy birthday, Mr. Douglas!

Psychout for Murder (1969)

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Director: Edward Ross
Writers: Biagio Proietti and Diana Crispo, from a subject by Oscar Brazzi
Stars: Adrienne la Russa, Nino Castelnuovo, Alberto de Mendoza, Idelma Carlo, Renzo Petretto, Nestor Garay, Rossano Brazzi and Paola Pitagora

On 18th September, I reviewed The Bobo at Apocalypse Later to celebrate the centennial of Rosanno Brazzi. It seemed like a decent choice and indeed it was, for Apocalypse Later, just not for Rosanno Brazzi because he was hardly in it. Sure, he appeared third on the bill, right behind the two leads, Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland, but perhaps that was merely an acknowledgement of his stature. After all, he was an important European actor who had starred in one of the biggest hits of the previous decade, South Pacific. Still, he was hardly in it, so I needed to find an alternate. There are plenty to choose from, given that Brazzi made 120 films in all, which doesn’t touch on his television work, though many are difficult to track down today, not least because he spent the first half of his screen career in Italy. I’m not sure what the survival rate of World War II era Italian films is but I hope there was an equivalent to the Phantom of the Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois, who saved so many French films during that same period.

Brazzi’s first English language film was MGM’s Little Women in 1949, by which time he had 36 Italian pictures behind him, including We the Living, a 170 minute adaptation of Ayn Rand’s novel that soon fell foul of Mussolini’s political watchdogs. Other titles of note, based entirely on reading about them, include a 1942 spaghetti western called Girl of the Golden West, a historical romance set in the 11th century called The Gorgon and a Pushkin drama in 1946 called The Black Eagle, which prompted a sequel in 1951. On he went in Italy, turning out drama after drama, many of them historical or romantic in nature and often both at once, such as Milady and the Musketeers, a version of The Three Musketeers told from a female perspective. Inevitably though, Hollywood called loudly enough to summon Brazzi over the ocean, but even with hits in 1954 like Three Coins in the Fountain and The Barefoot Contessa, he continued to make films in Italy with just a few American titles here and there to dot his filmography like confetti.
The easiest place from which I could grab a title is the late fifties, because he shot seven English language films in a row, from Loser Takes All in 1956 to Count Your Blessings in 1959. This is the time of South Pacific and it included titles with John Wayne, Sophia Loren and Joan Crawford. The Crawford picture, The Story of Esther Costello, looks particularly interesting, but I found myself drawn to the late sixties instead, not just western movies I knew like Krakatoa: East of Java or The Italian Job, but Italian genre flicks like Seven Men and One Brain and Psychout for Murder, not only for their subject matter but because Brazzi didn’t merely act in them; he wrote and directed them both too. The former looks like a rather wild Eurocrime thriller but it doesn’t seem to be available in subtitled form, so I chose the latter instead, a psychedelic giallo originally titled Salvare la faccia and also known as Daddy Said the World Was Lovely. Brazzi plays an important on-screen role but I’m even more intrigued by what he did off screen.

He’s not listed in the opening credits as crew. The director is Edward Ross, generally accepted as a pseudonym for Brazzi, but who wrote the film is a little trickier to identify. The opening credits list the screenplay as by Biagio Proietti and Diana Crispo, working from a subject (or story idea) by Oscar Brazzi, who was Rossano’s brother and the film’s producer. Wikipedia only has a page on its Italian site for Salvare la faccia, but that backs up what’s on screen. IMDb omits Proietti entirely, odd given that he wrote a lot more than Crispo, but adds both Renato Polselli and Piero Regnoli as writers, with Rossano Brazzi listed for both screenplay and story. It may be that IMDb is misleading us, which wouldn’t be for the first time, but other sources share its suggestions. However much or however little he contributed to the writing, however, he was clearly interested in directing pictures that were different from the films he’d acted in. In particular, there’s a stylish, experimental edge to this one that helps to flavour it well.
Back on screen, Brazzi plays an industrialist called Marco Brigoli, a very important character, as ably highlighted by the first scene in which his new factory is opened to great fanfare by an aspiring politician whose wife, Laura, Brigoli is doing on the side. He isn’t the lead, however, that role going to Adrienne la Russa as Licia, his youngest daughter. We’ll soon discover that she’s the only key player absent from the ceremony, as her boyfriend Marco has talked her into spending the day in bed with him instead. While it’s not overtly called out, they’re apparently in a brothel, hence why a scandal arises after the police raid the place and a half-naked Licia is photographed trying to escape onto the roof. It’s all a set-up, so Marco can successfully blackmail Brigoli and get out of his cheap apartment. The downside is that, to quieten the scandal, Laura talks Brigoli into announcing that Licia is sick and thus must spend some time in an asylum to recover. Ah yes, the overblown drama of the rich and powerful.

Of course, Licia, who swans around in the wildly colourful mini skirts of the late sixties with her long hair floating in the breeze, as free as a bird, is far from comfortable in austere white gowns and ponytails. We don’t know how long she spends inside, but we do know that she hates every moment of it and she leaves with a serious grudge. If she wasn’t crazy when she went in, she is after she gets out and, in a giallo, that doesn’t bode well in the slightest. One of the successes of Psychout for Murder is its editing. It’s shot well by Luciano Trasatti, but it’s how those shots are cut together by Amedeo Giomini that turns up the style. It’s overt editing, obvious in scenes like the one where Licia is driven to the asylum. We jump around frenetically between three scenes which represent her past, present and future: the factory opening, which she didn’t attend but can imagine if it might undo the past; the car, a notably uncomfortable present; and a small Licia in white against a big wall, hidden away from everything in the asylum.
Another success is the performance of Adrienne la Russa, who dominates this film. She changes wildly, in ways that often torment the people around her. One minute she’s both childlike and childish, floucing around an empty estate destroying flowers in a fit of pique; while the next she’s clearly an adult, teasing her sister’s husband from a distance with sexual allure, only to vanish when he decides he might want to do something about it. There’s a great scene in which she switches from one to the other and back: she’s going into town with daddy and he stops his sports car to open the gate. She suddenly gets acutely serious, takes off the handbrake and lets the vehicle roll towards him, screaming as it goes, then stops it just in time and leaps out for a big hug to give thanks that he’s still alive. Oh yes, she’s dangerous, as she tells Mario. She lies in wait for him at his new place, spins around in a vast chair and points a empty gun at him. ‘I can kill you whenever I want to,’ she says. ‘I’m mad, remember?’ Then she pulls the trigger.

I didn’t recognise Adrienne Larussa, as her surname is usually spelled, but she made three Italian pictures in two years, her two in 1969 being notable; the other was The Conspiracy of Torture, a non-horror from Lucio Fulci that many deem underrated and unfairly obscure. She fits this material wonderfully, epitomising that free European spirit but turning psychotic whenever a scene calls for it. Given that, I was wildly surprised to find out that she didn’t in the slightest. I didn’t expect her to have been born in New York or to have ended up as a real estate agent in Beverly Hills. I hadn’t realised that I’d seen her before (in The Man Who Fell to Earth) or that her best known role was on an American daytime soap, Days of Our Lives, in which she played ‘the scheming Brooke Hamilton’, as IMDb would have it, for three years. I was particularly shocked to discover that she was married to Steven Seagal for four years in the eighties. All these things are true, but none of them seem remotely likely. Well, except for the scheming part.
The scheming part is everywhere here, as is appropriate for a giallo. In Italy, ‘giallo’ is simply the local word for thriller, regardless where such things happen to be made. However, it’s taken on a more specific meaning to film fans, namely a recognisable style of murder mystery with psychological overtones, consistent cinematic elements and touches of horror, violence and eroticism. This is an early giallo but it checks all the boxes, even if it doesn’t contain quite as much death as the seventies would soon condition us to expect and it’s much easier to figure out than many of the more complex movies to come. It also builds relatively slowly, easing us into the world of the Brigolis and gradually isolating us there; that’s helped by a scene in which Licia, freshly released from the asylum, wanders round town and realises that everyone sees her differently now. It’s not important whether that’s real or just in her mind; the effect is the same, which is to bring her, with us in tow, back to the Brigoli estate to fester.

Even when we leave the estate, we’re still firmly stuck in this family’s grip. We wander with Brigoli over to Laura’s house so they can get it on and lay plans that will elevate everyone in prestige and wealth. We leap with Licia into Paterlini’s car, Brigoli’s right-hand man, so she can set him up and derail those plans. We gyrate with the teens during the dedication of a swimming pool which ends with a reputation neatly sabotaged. Gradually, though, we focus in on the estate, watching Licia set her traps and waiting for everyone else to fall into them. What’s surprising is how closely all the traps spring, because they’re mostly left until the final act, which is blistering. I won’t spoil the final scene, but it’s a beautifully shot demonstration, sans dialogue, of both victory and defeat, the inevitable conclusion to one bad decision. Well, there may have been more bad decisions, as there are certainly undercurrents here, but it’s all framed as one quest for revenge spawned from one inappropriate action.
Given where we end up, I wonder why Rosanno Brazzi was drawn to this material, even if he didn’t write it. Perhaps it appealed to him as a combination of old and new. The old is most apparent in the story, the classic European tale of the rich and famous doing what they want but eventually coming a cropper for it. The new comes in the choice of style and genre; this could not be mistaken as a film from any other era, partly because of the costumes and wild score but also because it feels naturally like a giallo without a deliberate effort to adhere to the iconography of the genre. Sure, it’s about madness and murder, violence and voyeurism, but it’s short on gore and nudity and the protagonist is female. It’s more stylised than regular films, with the opening credits unfolding to extreme close-ups of eyes or lips, but it’s not stylised to the degree of having an Argento colour palette. The editing is spot on for giallo but the story is too focused. Italian genre cinema is a fascinating beast and I wonder if Brazzi was caught up in its changes.

Maybe he wanted to comment on such changes by abstracting them onto the screen. There could well be social commentary going on here but, if there is, I can’t speak to it beyond highlighting how the various roles are all archetypes. There’s no depth to any of these characters except for Licia. Her father is Brigoli the industrialist, ever set on improving the family’s lot. Laura his mistress is even worse, orchestrating everyone else, including her husband, the politician who is never given a name. Licia’s sister, Giovanna, is nothing but Licia’s sister, just as her husband, Francesco, is nothing but a man to steal away. Paterlini is just a businessman and the Monsignore is just the Monsignore, put on screen not as a character but as the encapsulation of the Roman Catholic Church. It falls to Licia, the young and vibrant creature who just wants to live and love, to stir everything up because she’s too free to fit into an easily categorised box. Maybe it’s about generational warfare at the time of the counterculture, but maybe I’m stretching.
Oddly, I haven’t called out any of the actors, but that’s because this isn’t an actors’ film. Sure, Paola Pitagora gives great reaction as Giovanna and Alberto de Mendoza looks like an Italian cross between Robert Vaughn and Bruce Campbell, but there’s little to talk about on the acting front. With the notable exception of Lucia, this is all about story, direction and style, which means that Brazzi is all over the film even when he’s not on screen. He cares about this more than he did other wild movies like Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, in which he plays the lead, and I can only assume it’s because he had a lot more to do with this than simply act. There are better gialli out there and better dramas, but this is fascinating stuff and I’m keen to follow up with the other two films that Brazzi wrote and directed: Seven Men and One Brain, a Eurocrime flick from 1968, and The Christmas That Almost Wasn’t, a 1966 seasonal film with his wife, Lydia Brazzi, playing Mrs. Santa Claus. Never mind South Pacific, Brazzi in the late sixties is where it was at.

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

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Director: Terence Fisher
Writer: John Elder, from the novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore
Stars: Clifford Evans, Oliver Reed, Yvonne Romain and Catherine Feller

Horror movies have often focused on duality, not only in obvious examples like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In folklore, both vampires and werewolves sprang from the same concept of duality, though not just to highlight good and evil in a moral sense but also on a deeper level, comparing man with his God-given soul with the savage beast without. Such thoughts were surely fresh in the minds of producer Michael Carreras and director Terence Fisher after they had made The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll in 1960. A year later, they found themselves in need of a new script, because they’d built substantial sets for a film set in Spain. Some sources say that it was going to be about the Spanish Civil War but the co-production deal fell through, while others suggest that it was about the Spanish Inquisition and the script was rejected by the censors. Either way, Hammer had sets but no story to flesh them out at a time when they had just successfully resurrected Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy (in 1957, 1958 and 1959 respectively).

So, in addition to shooting sequels, they expanded their repertoire of famous monsters: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll in 1960, The Curse of the Werewolf in 1961 and The Phantom of the Opera in 1962. Of course, all these had antecedents in the Universal horrors, but their sources were in public domain novels so there was little likelihood of being hauled up for copyright infringement. Well, except for this one, because Universal’s The Wolf Man was based entirely on an original script by Curt Siodmak. Hammer therefore sought out a different source, transplanting the action of the 1933 novel, The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, from France to Spain. They also eviscerated all its historical and political subtext and crafted it into what is surely as archetypal a werewolf movie as the one it was so careful not to copy. This one is slow and short on werewolf action (we don’t even meet the grown up werewolf until halfway in), but it handles the dual nature of man and beast impeccably. From that angle, it has perhaps not been surpassed.
Almost every key moment in the film is the result of the bestial nature of man and it all begins with the Marques Siniestro, a name which translates from the Spanish as ‘sinister’, a word derived from the Latin for left-handed, so playing up duality from the start. It’s a public holiday in the Spanish town of Santa Vera and all the townsfolk are ‘rejoicing’; the Marques is getting married and he’s literally ordered them to rejoice. The reason they’re not happy about it is because they’re footing the bill for the wedding and the lavish feast at the castle, to which none of them are invited. The beggar who walks into town on this day tries his luck there, only to find cruelty instead. The Marques invites him in and torments him in front of everyone. When his bride asks him to stop as she sees him as a man not an animal, he suggests that she keep him as a pet, flinging ten pesetas at him as the purchase price. He plies him with wine but refuses him food, making him dance and fall over for the entertainment of those assembled.

This is a blistering scene, not only because it sets the stage for the entire film to come, but because it’s performed by two perfectly cast actors. Because this is a British film, even the ragged beggar, who becomes more ragged after being thrown into the dungeon and forgotten, is a Shakespearean actor, Richard Wordsworth, the great-great-grandson of the poet, William Wordsworth. It’s an appropriate choice, because this beggar has no skills and has to resort to oratory to persuade folk into parting with their money. A better foil could not be found for him than Anthony Dawson as the Marques Siniestro. Dawson was a Scottish actor whose greatest role thus far had been the man paid to murder Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This was a fantastic opportunity for him even if his part is over relatively quickly, and it surely helped him land his next role, as Professor R. J. Dent, the geologist working for Dr. No in the film of that name. He would be a hundred years old today.
The tormenting of the beggar and his abandonment in the dungeons is the first example of many a bestial act which begets a cycle of evil. Years later, now a recluse, the Marques has his jailer’s mute daughter thrown into the same cell for not speaking to him. It can’t be too surprising that the beggar, driven insane by years of isolation, promptly rapes the girl who had fed him through those years. Released the next day to ‘entertain’ the Marques, she murders him and escapes into the countryside. Her own bestial act is punished by the fact that the rape resulted in pregnancy and, to make matters worse, the child is born on Christmas Day. ‘For an unwanted child to be born then,’ suggests the housekeeper of the man who rescues her, ‘is an insult to Heaven!’ That the mother dies in childbirth surely can’t help. Just to drum home where we’re going, we hear a wolf howl right before we hear the newborn cry and a wolf’s head seems to appear during the child’s baptism, though it’s really the reflection of a gargoyle in the font.

And so we have a werewolf who was cursed rather than bitten, even if that was partly due to the censors thoroughly rejecting the idea of a werewolf rapist, and a curse can be lifted while a bite can’t be undone. It helps that this orphan is raised by loving parent substitutes: the man who found his mother, Don Alfredo Corledo, and his housekeeper, Teresa. However, his nature will manifest itself soon enough, even if young Leon seems to be a perfect child. He’s such an animal lover that when Pepe, the nightwatchman, takes him out shooting, he can’t bear to shoot a squirrel; when Pepe kills it instead, he tries to kiss it better, tastes the blood and finds it very much to his liking. This adds the bodily changes wrought during puberty to the various metaphors for lycanthropy in this film, though the curse remains paramount. Clearly Leon is the young wolf who’s responsible for the string of deaths of local goats, not least because he gets shot at one point for his troubles, but he doesn’t know it himself; he thinks he’s merely dreaming.
The Curse of the Werewolf is a great movie in many ways but it’s also a very flawed one and the most obvious flaw is in its pacing. I’m on board with that long opening scene at the Marques’s castle, but we continue with drawn out scene after drawn out scene all the way until the halfway point. Only then does the young Leon, looking rather like a vampiric version of Damien from The Omen, stop his bestial attacks on the local wildlife, partly because he can’t break through the bars that Don Alfredo has installed on his window and partly because he’s being brought up in a loving household that weakens the curse until it appears to be completely nullified. Only then does the grown-up Leon appear, ready to set out on his own and find his place in the world. Within two minutes, he’s at the gates of Gomez Bodegas, Don Fernando’s winery, where he finds work in the wine cellar, bottling and labelling the product. It has to be said, with a sly wink, that this job was perhaps inevitable, given that the grown-up Leon is played by Oliver Reed.

Reed was a force of nature far more than he was an actor. It has been said that he’s the only British film star who never worked on stage before transitioning onto the screen, becoming what a National Portrait Gallery show in 1980 called Britain’s ‘only pure film actor’. However, he was a hugely important film star who was responsible for a whole slew of firsts. In 1966, he starred in I'll Never Forget What's'isname, a Michael Winner film infamous as the first mainstream movie to use the F word. It was also denied an MPAA seal of approval because of an implied sex scene; Universal’s choice to distribute it through a non-MPAA subsidiary helped to end the Production Code. In 1969, he wrestled Alan Bates nude in front of a fireplace in Ken Russell’s Women in Love, the first time that full frontal male nudity featured in a mainstream film. In 1972, he starred in Sitting Target, apparently the first British movie to be rated X on the grounds of violence alone. This film was a first too: Oliver Reed’s first starring role.
He’s a force of nature in this film too, both literally and metaphorically. The cast is consistently strong, from the top-billed Clifford Evans as Don Alfredo, through Reed to the various other recognisable faces further down the credits list. There’s one scene where one famous British sitcom actor berates another; that’s Peter Sallis from Last of the Summer Wine as the town’s mayor, Don Enrique, complaining to Warren Mitchell from Till Death Us Do Part that his nightwatchman, Pepe, isn’t keeping the wolves away. The catch, of course, is that they’re all English and it has to be said that this is a notably English Spain. It’s not just the accents (Dawson could get away with that as the believably foreign-educated Marques, but Mitchell can’t; Spaniards called Pepe just shouldn’t sound like they’re from Norfolk), but the attitudes. Leon falls for his employer’s daughter, Cristina, who’s to be married to a quintessentially English toff. ‘Oh I say!’ simply isn’t a line that helps set a provincial Spanish mood.

Even if we can forgive the Englishness of this film, Reed still stands out above his peers. Only Evans really matches him, because he has the internal fortitude to match Reed’s external vitality. He seems to be in the vibrancy of youth and the best of health, which is good not only for the ambitious young man but for the beast he becomes. Though he loves Cristina and Cristina loves him back, his friend, Jose Amadayo, talks him into visiting a local brothel. That’s when his bestial side returns, because the morality that governs lycanthropy in this film suggests that love and kindness lessen the curse but sex and depravity heighten it. What’s more, distance is a factor: with Cristina, Leon can control himself, but when he’s separated from her, he can’t. And, two murders later and Leon in jail, the endgame is quickly in sight, one that’s flavoured by repentance and sacrifice. Characters who have sex (even unwillingly) all suffer or die in this film, while those who remain chaste survive untouched. It’s slasher morality taken even further.
If Reed doesn’t appear as much as he should, he is at least a highly memorable werewolf. The script is ruthlessly chronological and quite a few early scenes should have been trimmed or cut entirely to make room for more scenes featuring him later, both in Roy Ashton’s excellent make-up and out of it. While this was his first lead role, it was his third film for Hammer and he’d go on to make another five. What he did after that is the stuff of legend, both on and off the screen. Hammer themselves thrived for another ten years before they started to struggle in the different cinematic climate of the seventies. While the decade arguably saw their most interesting pictures, their heyday was clearly behind them and their prominence had waned; they closed their doors after their remake of The Lady Vanishes in 1979. As for Anthony Dawson, our birthday boy today, he never quite found the career he deserved, his most important contributions to film coming in the fifties and early sixties.

Oddly, his most memorable moment on screen was in a film for which he wasn’t even credited. He started out uncredited in 1940, but that’s relatively standard for a new actor. By 1963, he wasn’t new any more and wouldn’t have expected that. He’d appeared in a string of solid if relatively unknown British films, such as The Way to the Stars, School for Secrets and The Queen of Spades, working his way up the credits list. He had strong roles in pictures as varied as The Wooden Horse, Dial M for Murder and Grip of the Strangler. He’d set this film off not only on the right note but in the direction his character defined, remaining memorable even though he’s killed only twenty minutes in. And he’d become a Bond villain, working for Dr. No. That movie’s director, Terence Young, cast him often, including as the first appearance of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in From Russia with Love. The character’s voice belonged to Eric Pohlmann but the body and the famous hand stroking a white cat belong to Dawson. There are worse ways to be remembered.
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