Apocalypse Later Film Reviews

Director: Gerald Thomas
Writer: Talbot Rothwell
Stars: Sidney James, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Roy Castle, Joan Sims, Bernard Bresslaw, Peter Butterworth, Terry Scott, Angela Douglas and Cardew Robinson

It’s hard to explain to anyone not brought up in the UK just how much of an institution the Carry On team were and still are, even if they haven’t made a movie since 1992 or a decent one since at least 1975. It’s especially hard to explain to Americans how they got away with that sort of material in the 1960s, when the Hays Office routinely stripped out dialogue that had to do with sex, but they even had Christmas specials on television in the UK. You see, Carry On movies are a mixture of double entendre and dirty joke, the seaside postcard brought to life, and they’re a uniquely British thing, a descendant of the music hall. There were 30 original Carry On movies made, plus a 31st that’s new material wrapped around clips; there were also four Christmas specials, a thirteen episode TV show and three stage plays. All were produced by Peter Rogers and directed by Gerald Thomas. The majority were written by two writers: the first six by Norman Hudis and the next twenty by Talbot Rothwell, who would have been one hundred today.

How Rothwell got involved with the series almost sounds like the script for a Carry On movie. He was a Royal Air Force pilot in the Second World War; after being shot down over Norway, he was imprisoned in Stalag Luft III, the Luftwaffe-run officer camp that was made famous by the films The Wooden Horse and The Great Escape. He started to write as a POW, for concerts that aimed to both keep up morale and drown out the noise of tunnel digging. He befriended actor Peter Butterworth in the camp and partnered on those concerts; he would later introduce him to the Carry On series, in which he would become a regular, appearing in 16 of them. Rothwell wrote a spoof of this sort of thing, Carry On Escaping, but it was never made. Having held ‘respectable’ jobs like town clerk and police officer before the war, he turned to writing as a career in the fifties, penning comedy sketches for TV shows featuring established comedians like Terry-Thomas, Arthur Askey and Ted Ray. His first feature film scripts were dotted around the mid-1950s. However, he didn’t write Carry On Sergeant in 1958, or the next five films in what became a thematic series; Hudis did.

Carry On Sergeant was intended as a standalone film. It was adapted from a play by the historical novelist, R. F. Delderfield, and stars the first Doctor, William Hartnell, and Bob Monkhouse, so it’s hardly what the series became. If anything, it’s a 1958 Police Academy, merely with conscripts into National Service rather than policemen. However, the cast list did include Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Connor, Terry Scott and Hattie Jacques, who all became regulars in the Carry On films that were spun out of this film’s success. The first four were still around for this sixteenth film in 1968; Jacques appeared in fourteen between 1958 and 1974 but not this one. At that time, Carry On movies tended to throw respectable professions into a comedy framework, following quite closely the formula of the first, such as Carry On Nurse, Carry On Teacher and Carry On Constable. However, they would soon begin to take on British institutions, traditions and tropes, especially after Rothwell replaced Hudis as the series writer.

While Rothwell wrote the eighth film on spec, Carry On Jack, it was made after Carry On Cabby, which he hadn’t written as a Carry On film at all; he’d submitted it to Peter Rogers as a standalone picture, Call Me a Cab. Rogers liked his work and brought him on for the series. To my mind, it took him a while to warm up, Carry On Spying and Carry On Cleo being overrated entries in the series, even if the latter did feature what has been voted the greatest one-liner in movie history, which Rothwell admittedly borrowed from the radio show, Take It from Here. Kenneth Williams, portraying Julius Caesar, shouts out, ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!’ To me, Rothwell hit his stride in 1966 with Carry On Screaming!, a spoof of Hammer horror movies, because the next half dozen are great bawdy fun. Personal favourites of mine include Carry On Henry (about Henry VIII’s wives), Carry On Dick (about highwaymen) and Carry On... Don’t Lose Your Head (about the French revolution).

While fans argue about which is the worst feature in the series (many vote for the last, Carry On Columbus, released fourteen years after its predecessor to tie in to the 500th anniversary of Columbus reaching America, but I’d suggest either of the two that came before it, Carry On England or Carry On Emmannuelle), it’s almost universally agreed that Carry On... Up the Khyber, is the best. In fact, the British Film Institute included it in their list of the 100 greatest British films, in 99th place just above The Killing Fields. It’s hard to argue against it being the most quintessential, partly because it featured most of the series regulars in some of their best roles but partly because it focused around a subject that was ripe for ridicule in 1968: the colonial era of British expansion, in which we waltzed into other countries and proudly proclaimed that they were ours, and the Kipling-esque adventures that glorified it, like the 1939 version of Gunga Din. The time was right, the people were right and the end result was hilariously right.

We’re in India in 1895, with the British in charge but the natives restless. Her Majesty’s governor of Khalabar, in the northwest of the country bordering Afghanistan, is Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, in the form of the irrepressible Sidney James, so good at playing a dirty old man with an even dirtier laugh. His foil is Randy Lal, the Khasi of Khalabar, the local rajah, played by Kenneth Williams. It’s worth mentioning here that the humour is thoroughly English, to the degree that many jokes will fly over the heads of those from other countries. For instance, ‘khazi’ is military slang for a toilet and the film’s title, in addition to referencing a real location, is an example of Cockney rhyming slang, in which a word is obscured by shortening a phrase with which it rhymes. For instance, ‘use your loaf’ means ‘use your head’ because ‘head’ rhymes with ‘loaf of bread’. Of course, this is often used to obscure words not usable in polite company, such as ‘cobblers’ from ‘cobbler’s awls’ or ‘balls’ and, here, ‘Up the Khyber’ from ‘Khyber Pass’ or ‘arse’.

Rothwell defines the state of affairs perfectly at a polo match. The Khasi tells his daughter that Sir Sidney is the British governor, ‘whose benevolent rule and wise guidance we could well do without.’ Why does he smile at him so favourably? ‘Because in these days of British military supremacy, the Indian must be as a basket: with two faces.’ Meanwhile, Sir Sidney tells his wife, Lady Joan, that the Khasi would like to massacre him and ‘every other Britisher in India’. Why does he smile at him like that, then? ‘Because as a top-ranked British diplomacist, I’m as two-faced as he is.’ They do say that the best comedy is based in truth and there’s much truth here, not least in the final scene, in which the native Burpa tribe attacks the Governor’s Residence and, while the men fight outside, the Governor sits down to a black tie dinner, with orchestra, and everyone ignores the battle, even with the room being destroyed around them. This is the most ridiculous yet still truest example of ‘stiff upper lip’ that has ever been filmed.

But how do we get there? Well, Sir Sidney’s province is defended by the 3rd Foot and Mouth Regiment, colloquially known as ‘the Devils in Skirts’ because they are said to wear nothing under their kilts. Rothwell suggests that this is the primary reason why the natives have not revolted. In the words of the Khasi: ‘Think how frightening it would be to have such a man charging at you with his skirts flying in the air and flashing his great big bayonet at you!’ But the local warlord Bungdit Din, surely the best role for the 6’ 7” Bernard Bresslaw in 14 Carry On movies, flashes his scimitar at the cowardly Private Widdle who promptly faints at the sight. Because it’s so important, he looks under the man’s kilt to discover that he’s wearing large underpants beneath it. He takes them to the Khasi, who sees the possibility and, sure enough, it soon escalates to the point where he can convince the Burpas that there is nothing to fear from men who wear such garments under their skirts and a native uprising begins.

This set-up is perfect for a Carry On film and it’s aided by a host of fortuitous circumstances, because budgets were never high for Carry On films. This one cost a mere £260,000, even with a dozen or so regular cast members; even the biggest stars, like Kenneth Williams, were only paid £5,000 per film. Rogers planned Carry On Dallas in 1980, a spoof of the TV show, but had to ditch the idea when Lorimar Productions wanted twenty times the entire production budget as their royalty fee. Carry On Cleo was the greatest beneficiary of circumstance within the series, able to use expensive costumes and sets created and built for the Elizabeth Taylor version of Cleopatra but abandoned when production moved to Rome. However Carry On... Up the Khyber also lucked out, as all the kilts were re-used from the Alec Guinness film, Tunes of Glory. The Governor’s Residence is Heatherden Hall, a Victorian country house located within the grounds of Pinewood Studios. The Khyber Pass scenes were shot on Mount Snowden in Wales.

Rothwell’s scripts were generally written with series regulars in mind for specific characters, which is why Roy Castle’s one and only appearance is in a role clearly intended for Jim Dale, but this one features what are arguably the best roles for many of those regulars. Sid James was top billed in 17 of his 19 Carry On appearances and Kenneth Williams was the most regular of the regulars, appearing in 25 of the 30 films, but these are quintessential roles for them. Beyond Bresslaw as Bungdit Din, I’d suggest that Joan Sims, Terry Scott and Peter Butterworth never got better roles either as the common-as-muck Lady Joan Ruff-Diamond, the gruff Sgt. Maj. MacNutt and the lecherous missionary, Brother Belcher, respectively. Other regulars, such as Charles Hawtrey, Angela Douglas and Julian Holloway, are also well cast and Cardew Robinson is perfect in his sole series appearance as an inept fakir. The consistent quality of these actors and Rothwell’s scripts are the two primary reasons why this series did so well.

And Rothwell was never better than here. Some jokes are truly awful but perfect for the moment, such as when Brother Belcher, horrendously disguised as a Burpa chief, carries on with a harem girl in a jewelled bra. ‘Are those rubies?’ he asks her. She replies, ‘No, they’re mine.’ When the British prepare to defend against the natives, Capt. Keene issues the command to fire at will. Brother Belcher comments, ‘Poor old Will! Why do they always fire at him?’ As the ceiling falls in on Lady Joan during the native uprising, she laughs it off. ‘Oh dear, I seem to have got a little plastered!’ Some are mildly rude, such as an exchange in which the Governor politely receives the Khasi’s compliments with succinct responses, which lead to, ‘And may his radiance light up your life!’ ‘And up yours!’ Many are dirty jokes indeed, like one during the introductory conversation at the polo match. Talking about the Khasi, Sir Sidney tells his wife, ‘I wouldn’t trust him an inch,’ to which she saucily replies, ‘Neither would I.’

Some jokes are situational, such as when Private Widdle paints a thin red line across the courtyard of the Governor’s Residence, a reference to the Battle of Balaclava when a thin line of red shirted Highlanders scared off a Russian cavalry attack, ‘the thin red line’ becoming a symbol of British stiff upper lip. Having the Khyber Pass, ‘the gateway to India’, be a traditional British sheep gate with ‘Please shut the gate’ on it, is priceless. More topically, the Khasi is dismissive when one of his men announces the arrival of Sir Sidney by sounding a gong, uttering the line, ‘Rank stupidity!’ This film was distributed by the Rank Organisation, whose ident is a similarly dresed man sounding a gong. Ultimately it all comes down to the final scene, when Sir Sidney and his officers ask the ladies if they can leave the dinner table, after the natives finally breach their gate. They saunter outside to the battle and treat the whole thing as a polite game. ‘Permission to have a bash, sir?’ asks Maj. Shorthouse, before leaping into the fray.

These final scenes are the Carry On series in microcosm. We British are always good at laughing at ourselves and that pervades the history of our humour. It was a rare Carry On film that didn’t target a traditional British institution, from Hammer Horror films to the National Health Service, from caravan holidays to Brits abroad, from the armed forces to the trade unions. The British Empire was a logical target, but it allowed Rothwell to really hone in on what it meant to be British. These final scenes both celebrate and lampoon the heart of the British mindset. We’re brave, we’re cultured and we’re cool under pressure, but we stand on ceremony, we make a ritual out of everything and we take things to ridiculous extremes. I can’t say that this movie is perfect: not every joke hits, there are slow bits throughout the middle and the plot could have been tighter. However, as a proud Briton who wears a kilt every day, this is part of who I am. It’s an institution in itself, just like the entire Carry On series.

Director: Preston Sturges
Writer: Earl Felton, from his own story
Stars: Betty Grable, Cesar Romero, Rudy Vallee and Olga San Juan

I’ve enjoyed a lot of Preston Sturges comedies, some more than once, but then I’ve only seen the first half of his career. He started off incredibly well with The Great McGinty, Christmas in July and The Lady Eve, then somehow got even better, with Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, movies as universally acclaimed as they are criminally underseen. However, he made thirteen features and I hadn’t got past the middle one, Hail the Conquering Hero, which is just as strong as its predecessors. The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend sits firmly within the second half of his career, an era that critics often pretend doesn’t exist, unless it’s to acknowledge The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, the film that saw Harold Lloyd come out of retirement after nine years away. I hadn’t seen any of these last half dozen until now and this bodes poorly for the rest, even with Betty Grable and what the poster calls ‘the biggest Six-Shooters in the West!!!’ Yes, three exclamation marks for Betty, who would have been a hundred today.

In fact, the poster sums up the picture pretty capably: it over-suggests but under-delivers. The Modernaires sing the theme tune behind the opening credits to set Grable up as a ‘hard tootin’ , freebootin’, high falutin’, rootin tootin’, six-shootin’ beautiful blonde from Bashful Bend’, which is enough to believe that this whole thing started with the song, but it really came from a story by Earl Felton, writer of a whole slew of Richard Fleischer pictures, as varied as Armored Car Robbery, The Narrow Margin and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I wonder what brought him to Fleischer’s attention, as this broad farce wouldn’t seem to be a likely candidate! I see this mostly as a great example of getting what you wish for. Grable’s boss at 20th Century Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck, had tried to push her towards more substantial roles but she successfully fought him on it, continuing on in bright and cheery musicals with paper thin plots summed up by how critic Bosley Crowther described That Lady in Ermine: ‘a bright and beguiling swatch of nonsense’.

And this is as surely bright and beguiling as it is a swatch of utter nonsense at first glance. At a second, it’s not much better, but it’s a little more forward looking than people have generally given it credit for. It has a feminist edge, not only because it has a female lead but because she’s clearly able and willing to take care of herself. The scene that kicks the film off is eye-opening today because it features a six or seven year old girl being taught how to shoot; at the time it was eye-opening because it features a girl not a boy. Little Winifred just wants to play with her dolly, but her grandfather makes her practice with her pistol first. ‘It won’t get you into trouble,’ he suggests, ‘but it may get you out of it.’ Now, that’s irony because it does precisely nothing but get her into trouble and we simply wouldn’t have a film without that, but it does give her a confidence that allows her to survive in a world dominated by men. As uneducated as she may be, she’s fully in charge throughout, whoever she’s facing off against and with what.

It’s also notable today that this white woman who passes for a Swede has a Spanish-speaking boyfriend and a Hispanic companion who passes for Native American. No wonder the Hays Office had problems with this script as, after all, miscegenation was against the Production Code! Certainly Joseph Breen, the head of the Code, had as much trouble with Judge Alfalfa J. O’Toole indulging in an illicit relationship with someone named Conchita as with him having extra-marital relations in a old west saloon’s hotel room. Irony abounds here. While Olga San Juan, who plays Conchita, seemed as Hispanic as her nickname of the Puerto Rican Pepperpot suggests, she was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Puerto Rico, a US territory. However, Cesar Romero, as the Latin lover who so upsets our heroine, had Cuban parents, even if he was born in New York and raised in New Jersey. How Puerto Rican (ie American) blood falls foul of the Production Code’s miscegenation rule but Cuban (ie not American) blood doesn’t, I have no idea.

Then again, Betty Grable, born in St. Louis, Missouri, but with Dutch, Irish, German and English ancestry, spends half of the movie masquerading as a Swede. Her star has faded over the decades, partly because she was insecure enough about her talents to make fluff that hasn’t dated well but also partly because it was a very bright star at the time. If we think of her today, it’s usually because of a cheeky 1943 photo that was the most popular pin-up poster for GIs serving in World War II. Maybe that also sparks a memory that her studio had insured her legendary legs, so prominent on that poster, for a million dollars; she’d even made a movie called Million Dollar Legs in 1939. What we don’t tend to remember is that she was the best paid actor (of either sex) in 1947 (some sources call her the highest salaried woman in America), or that she was a top ten box office draw for ten years running (only Clark Gable and Bob Hope had had longer runs). She even topped that poll in 1943 above Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello and Bing Crosby.

Here, she’s the grown up version of that gunslinging kid, Little Winifred. Now she’s Freddie Jones, a saloon singer who plays cards and drinks as well as any of the guys at work. Presumably she can still shoot too, but her gun has just got her into trouble. You see, her boyfriend, Blackie Jobero, is a wolf who thinks he can bring a fancy girl called Roulette into her bar and waltz on upstairs with her. Freddie sees red and sidles off stage during her number to grab her gun from behind the bar, follow them, singing all the way, and break into their room to shoot the lowlife dead. Surely we should be with her, but there are two reasons why not. One is that this all unfolds during one of those annoying Hollywood musical numbers which defy the laws of physics; there were no wireless microphones in the Old West (or 1949, for that matter)! The other is that she doesn’t shoot Blackie at all; she accidentally hits the Honorable Alfalfa J. O’Toole instead. ‘Right in the caboose,’ as the doctor says. That he’s played by Porter Hall just makes it funnier.

Hall, a regular in Preston Sturges comedies, is only one recognisable face here. His wife, Elvira O’Toole, is an uncredited Margaret Hamilton who plays the shrew to perfection, especially when Conchita flounces in to ask her sweetie, ‘Why is your mother upset?’ Musical number aside, I had a lot of fun with the first half hour of this film and the cast are a lot of the reason behind that. Casting Hugh Herbert as the mostly blind doctor trying to retrieve the bullet is genius! No wonder the judge is boiling, but he calms down when Freddie shows up. She apologises very well and he might even be about ready to forgive her. After all, she was just mad at a man she slaved for ‘playing puss in the corner with some beezle’! Unfortunately, then they bring in Blackie and Roulette and, after saying that she’s the mild type, she promptly grabs a gun and tries to shoot him again. And guess what? Somehow the back end of Alfalfa J. O’Toole manages to get in the way for a second time! So, off go Freddie and Conchita to skip town on the next train.

It’s once they arrive in Snake City that the quality starts to drop. They get there because Conchita steals a couple of travelling bags which drop them into new identities. So Freddie Jones becomes Hilda Swandumper from Wauwatosa, WI, the new schoolteacher in Bashful Bend and Conchita is her ‘little Indian maid’. You can just imagine the political incorrectness that leaps out to play with that situation! Yes, the ticket collector tries it on with her immediately. ‘You leave mama and papa home in tepee?’ he asks. ‘How would you like to go with me and see white man’s choo-choo. Puff puff engine, huh?’ The moment they alight from the train, Mr. Hingleman, the chairman of the school board, pinches her cheek, calls her Little Firewater, and asks, ‘Everything heap good back in wigwam?’ Now, I do get that we’re setting up contrasts in Snake City: half the town are redneck miners and cowboys who howl like wolves at the purty ladies while the other half are respectable citizens, but it’s the latter spouting idiocy like this.

I should add that these lower class citizens are played by some formerly major names in western movies, such as Kermit Maynard, Tom Tyler and Tex Cooper for a start. Richard Hale is also uncredited, oddly given that he gets a decent amount of screen time as Mr. Gus Basserman, an ornery local who proceeds to start a gun battle in town and lynch a couple of people to boot. You’re getting that this is a comedy, right? Well, one of the reasons that it may have failed both critically and commercially at the time (though it did eventually make its money back) is because it’s really not the usual late forties musical. The tone of the piece is inconsistent to crazy degrees. The first third is farce, but written rather cleverly. The middle third, as our fake Swede tries to outwit Basserman’s two idiot kids, is so far into pantomime that I expected someone to shout ‘He’s behind you!’ The final third is a very slow Keystone comedy and slapstick was long dead in 1949. Then again, Chester Conklin and Snub Pollard are here too. This cast has everyone!

And, if you hadn’t guessed, this makes the last two thirds very silly indeed. Naturally, the inept authorities fail to realise that their wanted woman has just hopped down the track a ways and the one man who does is Blackie Jobero. So, her story comes out while those pesky Basserman boys are camped outside the window, dressed as Indians, and she sets them up to knock her boyfriend out. This long scene feels like a stage farce with its long takes in a single location, its lights going on and off (not always in sync) and its wildly overblown ‘death’ scenes. Then it’s Keystone fight time, merely with guns instead of pies. One bad guy gets shot off of the top of an outhouse and gets back up four times to rejoin the battle. Another picks up his hat four times after it’s shot off. A third is stationed in front of a cattle trough; every time he shoots his gun, the water erupts into his face and he starts trying to outwit the water. If anyone expected the clever wit of early Preston Sturges in this picture, they must have been utterly lost.

What’s more, not one person gets hurt. It doesn’t matter how much lead flies and there’s a great deal winging its way down Main Street. It doesn’t matter how close a shooter is to his target. It doesn’t matter even when we know that they got hit, like the judge, whose wounds set the whole story into motion. Nobody gets hurt and not one lick of blood is spilled. It’s like watching an episode of The A-Team, but with musical numbers and Betty Grable periodically stripping down to her abundant underwear to show us her pair of million dollar legs. Even when we want someone to get hurt, like the highly annoying Basserman boys, they don’t, even as Freddie gets serious about disciplining them on her first day in class as Hilda Swandumper. She pulls out her gun to shoot a bottle out of one’s hand, a cigarette out of the other’s mouth and then a couple of ink bottles off the tops of their heads. Now I’m seeing how Donald Trump could get elected President; lily livered liberals would never stand for this sort of discipline!

For all the silliness, Betty Grable is a lot of fun here and she works well with Olga San Juan. I haven’t seen much of either of them before but I left this film confirmed fans of both. To be fair, they’re the only actors who are really given parts to play; the rest of the cast are given routines instead, mostly the ones they were already justly known for, like Herbert, Hamilton and Holloway, to name just three beginning with the letter H. Cesar Romero is holding back, perhaps to leave the girls in charge. Rudy Vallee is so forgettable that I haven’t talked about him once and it doesn’t matter. The Basserman boys are even more overplayed than their screen father and that’s saying something; I felt like Richard Hale was about to turn on me for looking at him cross-eyed and call me out for a good ol’ fashioned gunfight. He was so ornery here that I expected the film to turn into a commercial for something soothing. After all, if can sooth the temper of Gus Basserman, imagine what it can do for you!

Apparently Betty Grable didn’t like this film at all and said so. If that’s true, she kept it from affecting her performance, which is a delight, even when the film gets silly. One reason why she does so well is that she was able to play up her status as a bona fide sex symbol but appear to be just one of the boys. The theme can call her high falutin’ all it likes, but she’s thoroughly down to earth. I could fantasise about meeting a Marilyn Monroe character, but it’s unrealistic in the extreme. Yet, if I found the saloon that Betty Grable sings at in this movie, I could totally believe buying Freddie Jones a drink. Of course, she’d probably fleece me at poker too. Her career would last six more years and eight more movies, including How to Marry a Millionaire, but she was probably very happy to retire. Preston Sturges, on the other hand, probably wanted to keep on going, but he’d never direct another Hollywood feature. His final film was Les Carnets du Major Thompson, shot in France in 1955 and it was ignored even more than this.

Director: Roy Ward Baker
Writer: Brian Clemens, based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stars: Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick

Watching in 2016, this film seems surprisingly timely. The last decade has seen a strong rise in the number of folk who understand what LGBT means (though it’s far from fully inclusive and I’ve seen many more letters added). However, this film, which came out (pun well and truly intended) in the year I was born, foreshadows that conversation. Yes, it’s the old Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story by Robert Louis Stevenson, but instead of Hyde bringing out Jekyll’s dark side, this time it’s Hyde bringing out Jekyll’s female (but not necessarily feminine) side. To make this work best, Jekyll’s transformation wasn’t achieved through make-up effects being applied to Ralph Bates, it was achieved by casting an actual woman as Hyde, Martine Beswick. The usual battle for control ensues and these two different aspects start to merge into one. There’s a vast potential here to explore the different sexualities of men and women and the film does start to walk down that road, but it’s a long road and we haven’t found the end yet.

What surprised me most about Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is that it wasn’t what I remembered at all. I saw most of the classic Hammer horrors when I was knee high to a grasshopper, watching late at night on my sister’s television, this one included and I remember their movies of the seventies as being more and more obsessed with sex. Now, that’s hardly a bad thing, says the red-blooded teen that I was when I saw these, but over time they blurred together and I tend to remember the boobs a lot more than the drama. For the iconic stories, I remember their fifties and sixties pictures instead, with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee reinventing all the classics for a Technicolor age. Yet, this has surprisingly little nudity, especially given the sexual subject matter, and it’s far from a cheap excuse to show Beswick’s boobs. There has been talk of a remake and, for once, that’s a good idea as, done right, it could be fascinating. And no, neither Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde (a teen comedy) nor The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckel & Ms. Hyde (a porno) count.

There are other imaginative changes here too, that make Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde forward-looking. In the 21st century, we’re used to creative concepts like the mashup, in which existing stories are transposed into a new genre; the crossover, in which multiple characters from diverse sources are combined into a new story; and remix culture, which can include both the above and also add in real people from history as well. This is nothing new as, after all, Dracula met Frankenstein, Abbott & Costello met everyone of importance on the big screen and Jesse James even met Frankenstein’s daughter, but the way that this film ties reality and fantasy without apparent comment feels a little ahead of its time. For instance, the central story is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but this ties them both to Burke and Hare and to Jack the Ripper, real British graverobbers and murderers from the Victorian era, and I wonder how innovative that felt in 1971. Jekyll as Jack? Nowadays, it just feels like an episode of Penny Dreadful.

The stage is set well. We’re in Whitechapel and a gentleman with a tall hat and black cloak follows a prostitute into the foggy back alleys away from the lively pub and its mournful street singer; the whore screams before he stabs her and the arterial spray neatly splashes the £200 wanted poster. The murderer hasn’t gone far when a policeman’s whistle blows and a blind hurdy gurdy player in trippy glasses points the pursuers in the right direction. None of this should be surprising, of course. Hammer had a long string of horror movies by this point and the folk involved knew exactly what they were doing. The screenplay was by Brian Clemens, an experienced hand in film and especially TV who also co-produced the picture; the cinematography was by Norman Warwick, who had just shot The Abominable Dr. Phibes; and the director was Roy Ward Baker, who had made a number of iconic films for Hammer, including Quatermass and the Pit, The Anniversary and The Vampire Lovers. He would have been a hundred years old today.

Unlike today, when directors often end up stuck in a particular genre, the Hammer directors were a versatile bunch and Baker was no exception. He started out for Gainsborough Pictures, moving up from teaboy and runner to assistant director in only a year. His first directorial credit was as third assistant director on the Will Hay title, Boys Will Be Boys, and his most important film there was surely Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes in 1938, for which he was the assistant director (never mind ‘third’ at this point). World War II got in the way of further movement, so he joined the Army Kinematograph Unit to shoot documentaries for the war effort. One of his bosses there, novelist Eric Ambler, gave him his break after the war, insisting that Baker direct The October Man from his novel. The success of Morning Departure led him to Hollywood, where he directed Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Peck and Robert Ryan, but his greatest success came back in the UK: the Golden Globe winning A Night to Remember, from Ambler’s screenplay about the Titanic.

It was his television experience that got him into the horror genre, because he knew how to do a lot with a little; budgets on shows like The Baron, The Avengers and The Saint were not high but he made them go a long way. Hammer combined one of his episodes of Journey to the Unknown with another for their feature length Journey to Midnight and put him to work on original movies: Quatermass and the Pit; The Anniversary, with Bette Davis; and Moon Zero Two. Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde was the third of a second batch of features at Hammer, including The Vampire Lovers and Scars of Dracula, by which time Amicus wanted him too and he continued to shoot for both of them for a number of years, though he focused in on television towards the end of his career, retiring after three episodes of The Good Guys in 1992. The wildest movie he made is surely The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, a co-production between Hammer and Shaw Brothers in Hong Kong, which he co-directed with Cheh Chang. I was very tempted to choose that film for this project!

In the end, though, I stuck with this one because it resonates for a number of reasons. One is the choice of leads: both Ralph Bates and Martine Beswick. Bates, who had already made three horror movies for Hammer during the previous year (Taste the Blood of Dracula, The Horror of Frankenstein and, his least favourite of all his films, Lust for a Vampire) was so appropriate a choice to play Dr. Jekyll that I wonder if Clemens factored his family history into the script. You see, he was the great-great nephew of Louis Pasteur, the French scientist regarded as the ‘father of microbiology’. Beyond the process of pasteurisation which bears his name, Pasteur pioneered vaccination, which had been invented by Edward Jenner, and he created the first vaccines for both anthrax and rabies. Jekyll, in this film, is working on an anti-virus he calls the ‘universal panacea’, one cure for many diseases: diphtheria, cholera and onwards. The trigger for the plot is the observation that there are too many, so he realises he needs to create an elixir of life.

Beyond extrapolating neatly on Pasteur, Bates looked the part. He had dark hair and a pale complexion, which makes it easy to see him as a member of a goth band. That look continues down the cast; his bandmates could easily be Byker, the necrophiliac coroner played by Philip Madoc, and Hare, of Burke and Hare, played by Tony Calvin. Fortunately, they don’t haul out their instruments to launch into a music video, but there were points where I half expected that to happen. More to the point, he’s clearly male but also androgynous enough in that haircut to morph believably into Martine Beswick, whose well defined cheekbones have never looked more severe. At points she seems cadaverous and could easily be the singer in that goth band! The transitions, either handled with the aid of props, like a broken mirror and textured glass, or through clever overlays, are excellently handled and Beswick’s ‘shock’ at discovering she has female parts is incredibly well done.

Everything comes back to this sex change and the ramifications that it brings. The concept has validity: Jekyll realises that women live longer than men, on average, so uses female hormones to try to extend the male life span. The source is young corpses but, as the supply is limited, he lowers his morals to allow for the supply to continue. At least it works, with flies; while they should live for a couple of hours, he demonstrates one to his friend, Prof. Robertson, that has survived for three days under a bell jar. He’s clearly a genius, though his arithmetic is awful; that only translates into two hundred years in human terms if life expectancy at the time was five. Naturally, the next step is a human trial and who better to experiment on than himself? Sadly, he skips over the importance of his discussion with Robertson; he knew the fly was male, but Robertson points out that it’s laid eggs. He must be dedicated if an outrageous side effect like an impromptu sex change doesn’t stop him from trying his serum out on himself!

Now, Jekyll doesn’t merely change from male to female; there are other changes too, like his sexual appetite. Susan Spencer, living upstairs, clearly has designs on the good doctor and she’s not hard on the eyes, but he’s too wrapped up with work to acknowledge her. He declines when she invites him up to dinner because of a ‘prior engagement’ and her brother Howard suggests that he may be ‘impervious to women’. The ensuing transformation, which the Spencers hear through the ceiling, prompts their investigation and Susan is livid to discover that Jekyll passed them over for a woman until he mentions that she’s his sister, a widow named Mrs. Hyde, the name plucked from the front page of the paper. Howard is much happier about this new arrival and we find ourselves in the odd situation where Susan wants Jekyll but her brother wants Hyde, each unaware, of course, that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same. This leads to great dialogue. ‘How’s your brother?’ Howard asks Hyde. ‘He hasn’t been himself of late,’ she replies.

The knowing dialogue shines around the most telling scene in the film. We’ve got to the point where confusion reigns. Robertson thinks Jekyll is having a relationship with Hyde, Susan believes she’s his sister and we have to wonder quite what Howard must be thinking about Jekyll, even as we know what he’s thinking about Hyde. He bumps into Jekyll, as the latter leaves a clothes shop for women, and asks how his sister is. Jekyll, with a notably immobile face, replies, ‘Fine. Excellent. I am in excellent health.’ Then he reaches out tenderly as if to touch Howard’s face. ‘Howard,’ he sighs, almost pleadingly. Only then does he realise that he’s Jekyll and not Hyde and rushes on, leaving Howard dumbstruck in his wake. After this scene, Robertson tells Jekyll, ‘One day you’ll look in the mirror and you’ll be a changed man.’ Before it, he tells a cop, ‘It’s a queer business, sergeant. Very queer.’ This has been an interesting film throughout but suddenly it leaps into thesis territory.

In the classic story, Jekyll and Hyde are moral opposites. At its simplest, this manifests as Jekyll being good and Hyde evil, although novelist Vladimir Nabokov pointed out that Jekyll was hardly morally good by Victorian standards. Like anything Victorian, class is part of the discussion, with an easy reading that Jekyll is a respectable member of the upper class, maintaining control as required by polite society, while Hyde is a thoroughly disreputable member of the working class, eager and willing to explore every one of his base urges. This includes sex, of course, because the hypocrisy of the Victorian era is ably highlighted by what biographer J. R. Hammond described as ‘outward respectability and inward lust’. Jekyll can maintain the boundary between the two, while Hyde is either unable or unwilling to do so. It’s not only sex, though, because Hyde gets up to a lot more than just sexual deviance, even in Stevenson’s original novella, not least murder. Here, Jekyll prompts murder before Hyde ever appears, so it’s all about sex.

And, given that it was the first picture to use a scientific experiment to examine what happens to sexuality as the genders change, blending both genders and the sexuality of both genders into a single character, I really shouldn’t complain that it only starts that conversation. The problem with the Jekyll and Hyde framework, of course, is that it’s a dichotomy: you’re either one or the other and, if you try to be both, those two sides will fight each other until one wins out for good. Science nowadays suggests that human sexuality is far from a dichotomy; it’s a sliding scale and we all have a little of both. The logical remake of Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is one where neither side wins and the title characters come to terms with each other, coexisting as halves in a yin yang fashion. It’s surely time for a movie where Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde share a knowing partner, especially if they change back and forth during a sexual act rather than outside of it. Talk about a challenging role for an actor though!

Ralph Bates had good reason to remember this movie because it’s where he met his second wife. She’s Virginia Wetherell, who he murders on screen; she plays Betsy, a whore who takes Jekyll to her place, only for him to slice her right after her corset laces. He divorced his first wife in 1973 and married her; they remained together until he died in 1991. Martine Beswick made many more movies than Bates, who struggled after Hammer horrors fell out of fashion, but she never managed to eclipse her two James Bond roles, in From Russia with Love in 1963 and Thunderball two years later. Hammer helped perpetuate her sex symbol image by casting her in One Million Years B.C. and Slave Girls aka Prehistoric Women, but this was a much better use of her acting talents. The film itself has the potential to outlast them both, as well as Clemens, Baker and others who worked on it because it was just a beginning. We don’t have the end in sight yet, but it’s going to be a fascinating road to get there.

Director: William Grefé
Writer: Al Dempsey
Stars: Joe Morrison, ‘special singing guest star’ Neil Sedaka, Valerie Hawkins, John Vella, Jack Nagle and Doug Hobart

In 2017, if anyone asks me what Facebook is for, I’ll reply that it’s clearly for sharing brief clips of bikini-clad teenagers gyrating to the groovy sounds of Neil Sedaka singing about jellyfish. Thank you, Gary, for letting me know of the existence of Sting of Death, a 1965 movie from filmmaker William Grefé, who went on to such legendary bad films as Death Curse of Tartu, which somehow got a great distribution (I own a VHS copy on PAL) and Mako: The Jaws of Death aka Killer Jaws. This one is so bad that I’d have to go back to my days writing Cinematic Hell reviews for Cinema Head Cheese to find something worse. The battle is now on to determine the worst Florida Everglades monster movie; is Sting of Death worse than Don Barton’s Zaat or is that one shot wonder out there on its own? Right now, six years adrift from my last viewing of the latter, I’d honestly plump for this one because it has the usual bad elements: horrible script, horrible monster and horrible acting, but adds in that ‘special singing guest star’, Neil Sedaka.

There’s another thing that can’t be ignored here either, which is the incredible ineptitude of the manly men protecting a bevy of beauties on Dr. Richardson’s unnamed paradise island in the Everglades. Everything will be fine, say Richardson and his assistant, Dr. John Hoyt, because they have guns. Sure, they have guns, but they also have a habit of protecting these ladies by leaving them alone so the monster can get them. At one point they even go diving with one, who’s promptly snatched away underwater by our monster, and they don’t even notice. They just get back on their airboat and return to base, sans one damsel in distress. It’s pretty bad when our educated scientists can’t even count to one. It’s very possible that the only thing that they notice at any point in the movie is a door that was open but is now mysteriously closed. How they can acknowledge such subtle plot points but not the major ones like missing girls, screams from upstairs or the most obvious villain in movie history, I have no idea.

To be fair, it’s clear right from the start, even before our good doctors show up, just what we’re getting ourselves in for. A lovely young thing by the name of Ruth is sunbathing in the shade, listening to KFUN’s award-winning news, which tells her and us that fishermen are vanishing all over the Everglades. We naturally wonder if this could be connected to the odd hand we just saw use a screwdriver and a borrowed cartoon explosion effect from the Batman TV show to destroy a radio. It’s black, smeared in red slime and there are tendrils dangling off it. That’s less impressive than the destruction, given that he stuck the screwdriver into a gizmo that isn’t even attached to anything. He must be a magical monster! Anyway, as the news ends and Ruth applies her suntan lotion, we see that this monster is wearing a wetsuit, flippers and what appear to be long strings of flexible neon light tubes. It drags her into the water and back to its lair; the latter are the best shot scenes in the entire film, which unfold behind the opening credits.

Yes, folk, it’s all downhill from here. For a start, with Ruth gone, we need new people on this island, so a boat promptly arrives at her jetty containing a bunch of bimbos in high heels, who IMDb politely list by name and hair colour, just in case we might have thought they had something beyond looks to contribute to the film. There are five of these ladies, who arrive with their hosts, Dr. Richardson and Dr. Hoyt. It’s Richardson’s island, on which these scientists enjoy their much needed seclusion to experiment with ‘sealife and evolution’. They’ve obviously given that seclusion up for a couple of weeks, while Karen, Richardson’s daughter, takes her midterm break from college in the company of her friends. What’s more, the good doctors invited the biology department too for a welcome back party. They’re already partying hard on the boat when they arrive twenty minutes later with beer bottles and dance moves and are so eager that they dance on the dock, which is hardly big enough for a couple of dozen revellers!

These scenes establish a few things. We learn that the Florida youth of 1965 want nothing more than an opportunity to jiggle their butts and the film crew want nothing more than an opportunity to capture them on camera. The cameraman occasionally feels he should have delusions of artistic grandeur, so rotates the camera so we can even watch those butts jiggling upside down! We learn that college students in Florida are a number of years older than the American norm but they all think that they’re eighteen, even if they’re thirty. We learn that Dr. Hoyt is an idiot. Sure, he’s a grad student assigned by the university to help Richardson’s work, but he honestly thinks that women can get ready for a party in a quarter of an hour. We learn that Egon has a habit of ‘appearing suddenly’, which is either a shock for the ladies because he has a disfigured face or because the disfigurement varies in severity as the film runs on. And we learn that Egon is a valuable worker but nobody listens to him, even when he’s being overtly sinister.

We learn this when Sheriff Bob pops over with a dead fisherman for the doctors to look at and suggest what might have killed him. They identify the welts on the body as just like those caused by the Portuguese man o’ war, a creature resembling the jellyfish that has venomous tentacles. They know this because they work with them every day, but these welts are far too big for creatures that never grow above eight inches. The doctors fluster around trying to reconcile the obvious with the impossible, ignoring Egon and his knowing pronouncements that it’s entirely possible to grow them to giant size. ‘You can understand it, doctor,’ he explains, ‘if you’d just listen to me.’ But no, everyone dismisses Egon, whether they think he’s a nut, a freak or a retard, or whatever term was in vogue in 1960s Florida. Soon those biology students will actually surround him like he’s a cornered animal and poke at him until he breaks free and runs away. What are they, six years old? But hey, that’s how this monster movie is built.

Well, that and Neil Sedaka. The clip that drew me in to this debacle was a dance scene featuring whichever biology students hadn’t coupled up and vanished into empty bedrooms already. They jiggle their butts just like they did in the previous dance scene and, in fact, some of the shots are exactly the same. I recognise those butts! I also realise that a couple of the girls most frequently used in close-ups aren’t actually at this party, which is surprising given that there are plenty of jiggling butts that were. What makes it so surreal, though, is the song, which has to be heard to be believed. Neil Sedaka was a pop star in the early sixties, but he peaked in 1962 with Breaking Up is Hard to Do topping the charts for a couple of weeks. His style of music was rendered utterly obsolete by the arrival of the Beatles and, as Wikipedia subtly puts it, ‘In 1964, Sedaka’s career began a sharp decline.’ Surely nobody has ever fallen faster because only a year later, biology students in bad monster movies are dancing to his magnum opus, Do the Jellyfish.

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this scene now, but I’m still not convinced I’m not dreaming. There are only two lines and a chorus, repeated over and over with minor changes, but the poetry of the piece cannot be understated. ‘Well-a,’ he begins, ‘I’m saying fella, protect your Cinderella.’ Can’t argue with those rhymes, right? ‘And do the jella, the jilla jalla jella.’ OK, Neil, I’m sensing some floundering now. ‘It’s really swell-a to do the jella-jellyfish.’ I should add that a few of the dancers may be trying for actual jella-jellyfish moves here. ‘Monkey, don’t be a dunky, it’s nothing like the monkey.’ At this point, I’m not sure if Sedaka was on drugs; I have no idea what a dunky is and what lyricist would rhyme a word with itself? ‘It isn’t funky or anything you junky.’ I think we’d better go back to something safer, Neil. ‘It’s something swell-a, the jilla-jalla-jellyfish!’ No, how about you pretend it’s a dance? ‘Hey, it isn’t hard to do so you can learn it too. Hey now, let’s do it now. If you don’t know the way then I’ll show you how.’

So, do you want to c’mon and do the jellyfish now? I think I’ll pass too. How about you, ‘Louise, dark redhead’? ‘Oh, that killed me!’ she comments and we realise the level of genius that the script by Al Dempsey, with uncredited assistance from Herschell Gordon Lewis regular, William Kerwin, was working at. Guess what’s about to happen to Louise? Yep, she leaps into the pool, against every suggestion thrown at her, and is promptly stung viciously by the jellyfish man who’s been hiding in the transparent water during that dance scene. Nobody notices until the deed is done, but one bystander who stands around the pool like a lemon gets stung too before the jellyfish man escapes. What’s most hilarious is that Ben has to be taken to the hospital on the mainland immediately but Louise stays behind to be treated on the island. Why? They have the same injuries and, if they’re taking one person, why not take the other one too? I actually wondered about sixties sexism for a moment here, but the truth is a little more mundane.

You see, Grefé didn’t have much of a budget and Dempsey didn’t have much of a clue. We’re just over half an hour into an eighty minute movie and we have a substantial cast of characters clogging up the story. What better way to get rid of most of them than to send them off by boat on a serious errand and have the jellyfish man promptly hole it with an axe to spill them all out into the water? As it sinks, one of the ladies points at the various collections of balloons floating along the surface and cries, ‘Jellyfish!’ In most movies that would have been redundant, but in this one it’s actively useful because nobody in their right mind would think that these things are living creatures. They do look a little better when shot from underneath, with their trails of beads, but wow, not from the surface! I thoroughly enjoyed these hilarious scenes of mass slaughter because I was firmly with the monster at this point. These biology students are getting their just desserts. Kill them all, Portuguese Man o’ War Man! Kill them all!

Once this is done, we realise that we’re back to the core group exactly, except that Louise stays upstairs in bed while the rest eat. The actors were mostly either starting out or are known only for William Grefé movies. Jack Nagle was debuting on the big screen as Dr. Richardson after a single episode of Everglades on TV back in 1962. He’d retire in 1976 after Mako: The Jaws of Death for Grefé. He made more films than our lead, Joe Morrison, who was ending his career here after four features with only a couple of episodes of Flipper still to come. Neither are remarkable in any way, but the ladies are far more notable, if mostly because they’re wearing bikinis. Valerie Hawkins, playing Karen Richardson, did play the Texaco Girl in a series of commercials and she was able to land roles on a number of TV shows, from Get Smart to I Dream of Jeannie. This was her debut, but she’d be done by 1970. Three of her four friends started and ended their careers here, which leaves only ‘Jessica, honey blond’ to find a real place on the screen.

She’s Deanna Lund and she’s not the first to go. She and Donna accompany the doctors to Egon’s place and the latter has to return to the boat to retrieve the cigarettes she didn’t put in her dinky little purse. That allows the jellyfish man to creep up on her in the wide open space around the boat and stalk her screaming into the everglades. See, smoking kills, folks! She is game for this scene, at least, and it’s actually believable for this character to fall over every two yards for perhaps the first time in film history. It’s far less believable for John and Jessica to fail to hear her screaming herself hoarse, but they do finally catch on and head on out in the airboat to find her. They find her scarf and dive, but those incredible protectors, Drs. Richardson and Hoyt, apparently forget that Jessica is even with them. They fail to notice when the monster pulls off her mask and it’s like she was never in the picture at all. They surface when their air runs out after five minutes (huge tanks these) and eventually head back home on their own.

Lund was a busy girl as her career began. She made four thoroughly varied pictures in 1965: this monster movie; Once Upon a Coffee House, a folk singing extravaganza released on DVD under the glorious title of Hootenanny a Go-Go; an Italian comedy called Run for Your Wife; and the most expensive A.I.P. movie at the time, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, playing one of Vincent Price’s bevy of golddigging robots. She kept busy for a few years until her big break arrived, hired by Irwin Allen to play Valerie Scott on Land of the Giants. After two years of that show, she’d married Tim Matheson and cut back her roles substantially. I can’t say that she was great here, but she was clearly not only the best actor of the bunch but the only actor of the bunch. It’s not surprising to find her the only one who would go on to better things. I should add here that John Vella, who plays Egon on land, isn’t the John Vella who would appear with the Oakland Raiders in Super Bowl XI, whatever IMDb happens to say; he was only fifteen at this point.

There are two surprises to come and neither of them has to do with who the jellyfish man is. The island contains two doctors, one daughter and four lady guests, all four of which are killed off by the end of the picture - and Egon, the traumatised, possibly brain damaged wannabe scientist who is the only one to believe that Portuguese man o’ war can be bred larger than eight inches across. Anyone who fails to see that he’s the monster after his first ten seconds on screen hasn’t been watching enough monster movies. One surprise is that a thoroughly family friendly horror film like this suddenly decides to have Blanche Devereaux (‘Susan, frosted blond’) strip off to be murdered by the jellyfish man in the shower. Now, we only see this naked frosted blond from behind frosted glass, but still. The other is just how hilariously awful the monster costume is when it’s fully revealed. Yes, folks, the scariest thing to people in the Everglades isn’t an alligator or a venomous snake, it’s a man in a wetsuit with a plastic bag on his head.

At the end of the day, the clip from this movie that serves as a music video for Do the Jellyfish is quaintly hilarious and the trailer is horrible and funny, but the film itself is a painful experience. It’s badly acted, badly scripted and badly directed. The characters are annoying, the rules of cinema are broken and the laws of physics are ignored. The monster is laughable and his lair, which has its very own natural airlock in the floor, is even more laughable. I’m presuming that the camera didn’t record sound, so dialogue was dubbed in later and doesn’t always quite match lip movements. There’s a great deal of repetition and, dare I say it, there’s also a lot of redundancy. Most of the script doesn’t make the remotest sense if we think about it and we can only be distracted by ladies in bikinis for so long. The very last line is the most telling of all. Once the girl and the day are saved, Dr. Richardson proclaims that, ‘Someday man will find an answer!’ There’s no question in the film to answer, so he can only be talking about why Grefé made it!

Director: David Miller
Writers: Frank Tashlin and Mac Benoff, based on a story by Harpo Marx
Stars: The Marx Brothers, Ilona Massey, Vera-Ellen and Marion Hutton

Ten years ago today, I decided that I’d enjoyed the previous year of writing about movies on my own website and so it was time to set up a real blog on the subject. Those ten years have been an absolute blast and they’ve led to much more than I ever expected. I thought I’d just be writing about movies on the web, but Apocalypse Later Press just published my fifth book today and I founded a film festival last year, the Apocalypse Later International Fantastic Film Festival, which will be back for a second year in October as a two full day event. I’ve programmed Mini-Film Festivals at a couple of dozen conventions across the American southwest, helping great short films to find new eyeballs, and I’ve even appeared in a few movies; in bit parts, of course. It’s been a great decade! Oh, and I’ve also written 2,305 reviews too, here at Apocalypse Later, and a few elsewhere as well: movie reviews at Apocalypse Later Now! and book reviews at The Nameless Zine. And it all started ten years ago to the day with a review of a Marx Brothers movie.

That was A Night at Casablanca, released by United Artists in 1946, and it was the twelfth of the thirteen films they made together. I had already seen the first eleven, so that just left one to go, this one, and, while I have no idea why it took me ten years to find, it’s the logical choice to kick off my second decade at Apocalypse Later. I should add here, before completists take umbrage, that these are not quite all. Their first film wasn’t actually The Cocoanuts in 1929, it was a two reel short called Humor Risk, shot in 1921, shown once and never released theatrically; it’s thought to be a lost film today. In 1931, they contributed an original skit to The House That Shadows Built, a 47 minute promotional history of Paramount Pictures, made to celebrate the studio's twentieth anniversary. Finally, The Story of Mankind in 1959 features Groucho, Chico and Harpo, but in separate cameos rather than all together. Outside of film, these same three also appeared on television together in The Incredible Jewel Robbery, an episode of General Electric Theater.

This picture revolves around jewels too: the famous Romanoff diamonds, collected into a necklace, worth a cool million bucks and also lost. Groucho Marx is our narrator, Sam Grunion, Private Eye (he has a painted eye on his window and a blank business card to show how well he keeps secrets) who has been on their trail for a decade. So has Madame Egelichi, who has married and divorced eight husbands in three months as part of her search. We join the film as she, in the elegant form of Ilona Massey, prepares to get hold of them, secreted within a tin of sardines, labelled with a maltese cross, and sent to importers Herbert & Herbert, purveyors of ‘the finest food for the finest people’. However, they end up instead with Harpo Marx, a mute thief who helps customers to cars while he secretes half their purchases within his ample pockets. He thinks he hits the jackpot by sneaking onto the street elevator and raiding the store’s stores, but really it’s that tin of sardines that he swipes from the pocket of manager Lefty Throckmorton.

Now, you might wonder why this picture is called Love Happy. Well, it’s named for a musical production run by Mike Johnson, one of its dancers, and this serves as the primary location. It’s a shoestring affair; nobody’s being paid until they ‘open and click’ and the one backer who isn’t actually in the show, Mr. Lyons, keeps trying to take his costumes and scenery away because of concern over the lack of other money. Chico Marx joins the show, playing a mind-reader called Faustino the Great, because he improvises an effort to keep Lyons on board for a little longer. One of his real life brothers soon shows up, because Harpo only steals to feed the cast and crew; he’s head over heels for Maggie Phillips, the show’s leading lady. Maggie’s boyfriend is Mike Johnson and her best friend is Bunny Dolan, another cast member and minor financier, who has sunk her last three hundred bucks into the show. Groucho doesn’t leave his office until late in the picture, but he does join in scenes with his brothers after that.

While all these brothers (and there were five of them all told) were talented and experienced vaudevillians and they came from a talented and experienced vaudeville family, we’re used to seeing the fast-talking and wise-cracking Groucho as the lead, with his greasepaint moustache and ever-present cigar. However, this is clearly Harpo’s movie, with Chico in support and Groucho adding narration and colour. In fact, Harpo wrote the original story for the film, though it was adapted into a screenplay by Frank Tashlin and Mac Benoff. Now, given that Harpo never spoke, he’s a rather unlikely lead for a sound movie, but the ever-inventive brothers played that up. At one point, Harpo, who has been kidnapped by Madame Egelichi, manages to reach a phone. He rings the theatre and Faustino answers, but the conversation clearly can’t be straightforward. Poor Madame listens in to a collection of whistles and honks, from which she can make absolutely nothing, except that Faustino does mention the theatre.

The plot is as threadbare as usual for a film that exists as much to showcase talent as it does to tell a story. The people behind Love Happy are struggling financially but there’s a million dollar necklace floating around their theatre and a rich woman willing to do whatever it takes to obtain it; it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how the plot will move forward. But nobody watches a Marx Brothers movie for the plot, they watch for the antics, the skits and the performances. This one delivers on all those counts, with one in particular standing out for me. That’s the duet, or perhaps I should call it a battle, between Faustino the Great on piano and Mr. Lyons on violin. He likes gypsy music, apparently, so they riff around that and veer off in every direction possible, musical and emotional. It’s a great example of how virtuoso musicians can enjoy their skills and turn them into comedic art. Lyons is Leon Belasco, who led an orchestra before becoming an actor and who often played musicians in his films.

Groucho gets surprisingly few moments and he seems a little slower than usual in the early scenes where he’s flying solo. He’s still himself, unlike his final outing in Skidoo, but he’s not the Groucho he used to be. His best moment arrives late, as two recognisable actors show up to his office. The first is Eric Blore, frequent butler for Fred and Ginger and the Lone Wolf. These scenes are flimsy and we wonder why Blore is even there (he’s Grunion’s ‘operator’, Mackinaw) or how the pair escape from the assassin who takes them prisoner (we never find out). The other is Marilyn Monroe, who sashays in to hire this PI because, ‘Some men are following me.’ Grunion replies to us. ‘Really? I can’t understand why!’ This was early days for her and she auditioned for the $100, one day part with two other girls. Producer Lester Cowan had all three walk and asked for Groucho’s thoughts. He said, ‘Are you kidding? How can you take anybody except that last girl?’ One year later, she was in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve.

It’s Harpo who gets most of the moments in this picture. He’s the first of the Marx Brothers we see acting with anyone else, given that Groucho’s first appearance is just a solo introduction. Harpo runs his cons, steals his food and fills his pockets with abandon, the laws of physics be damned; he must have a TARDIS in each one. That plays out at length when Madame Egelichi has her goons search him; they pull out a working barber’s sign, a mailbox, a block of ice, a sled, a large dog, you name it. Bonus fun comes from one of those henchmen, Alphonse Zoto, being played by Raymond Burr. I’ve long been fascinated by Burr’s career, which is wildly varied even if everyone knows him as Perry Mason or Ironside. He has to torment Harpo here and it’s obvious that he had trouble keeping a straight face. So do we, especially given that Groucho introduces the scene with, ‘Meanwhile, Madame Egelichi, wearing the pants of the dreaded Catwoman, was desperately trying to make Harpo talk!’

Many of these Harpo moments are with other people, such as a fantastic game of charades as Harpo tries to explain to Faustino the Great that Egelichi is planning to murder Maggie Phillips. The most outrageously cinematic, though, involves him being chased by Egelichi’s three hoods on the rooftops of the city, a chase which involves a wide variety of neon advertising signs. Initially, they’re just there, such as the GE Lamps sign, but then he starts to interact with them. He blows out the light the boy’s holding on the Fisk Tires sign to escape in the dark, rides the moving pegasus in a Mobilgas and Mobiloil sign and swings on the pendulum on a Bulova ‘Watch Time’ sign, turning it in the process into a weapon. After he flies into the smoke-issuing mouth of the penguin in the Kool Cigarettes sign, he’s mastered that approach. This is fantastic and imaginative and it’s well executed. Oddly, his weakest moment is probably his solo spot on the harp, which doesn’t have any of the spice of Chico and Belasco’s musical battle.

Some of the other actors get moments too, even if they’re fewer and further between than those given to the Marx brothers. The two leading ladies are Vera-Ellen, playing Maggie Phillips, and Marion Hutton as Bunny Dolan; given that Vera-Ellen’s nickname was Bunny, it wouldn’t surprise me to find that Marion’s was Maggie. Vera-Ellen had already made a few movies but was about to hit the big time; her next picture, released the same year, was On the Town, sixth on the bill under Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, and by 1954, she’d be fourth credited in White Christmas, after Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney. She gets a ballet number to establish her connection to Harpo and a versatile and well-choreographed number with the men’s chorus that begins and ends with them as American GIs but features some as South Pacific natives too. As you can imagine, it’s half jazz, half exotica and there’s a good deal of that musical exploration going on in this picture.

The latter, the elder sister of Betty Hutton, gets an eye-opener of a musical number. It’s called Who Stole the Jam? and it features Bunny Dolan playing mother to three large rag dolls, one or all of whom has perhaps stolen her jam and she frankly abuses them something awful trying to figure out where it’s gone and who took it. Initially, I watched this with wide eyes, but the addition of Harpo to the mix here too brings it back down to earth. I’ve never been a big musical fan and this routine made me wonder how much more I’d enjoy musicals if there was a Harpo Marx in every routine. I enjoyed both Vera-Ellen and Betty Hutton in this film, though I did blur the two together at points because there’s hardly much substance to their roles. Even then, they do better than the men. The opening credits ‘introduce’ Marilyn Monroe, Paul Valentine and Bruce Gordon. Monroe makes herself noticed, but Valentine is a nonentity of a leading hunk and Gordon only manages to be the henchman next to Raymond Burr.

With a quick last minute nod to Harpo’s little shack, with musical instruments built into everything, including the water dispenser, and a penguin in a hat and coat for no discernable reason other than it’s a penguin in a hat and coat, I’ll suggest that this is a flimsy but thoroughly enjoyable late entry into the Marx Brothers filmography. The Big Store had been intended to be their final picture, back in 1941 at the end of a long stretch of prolificity. They’d started in 1929 with The Cocoanuts and continued to release one film every year until The Big Store, missing only the two years around 1935’s classic, A Night at the Opera, as they shifted from Paramount to MGM. However, after their regular run was over, they returned to the screen only for two final pictures at United Artists, both made to help alleviate Chico’s gambling debts. They’re not the classic Paramount pre-codes but both A Night in Casablanca and Love Happy are a great deal of fun and proof that the brothers still had it in copious quantities. Thanks, folks.

Director: Ron Carlson
Writer: Ron Carlson
Stars: Sophie Monk and Anya Lahiri

Every time mankind conjures up a day of celebration, a horror filmmaker introduces a massacre to make it memorable. That trend has held true for a long time, especially at Christmas, which I’ve never quite understood. Why are we so drawn to make Christmas horror movies? Are all horror filmmakers traumatised by elves as much as they’ve persuaded us to be traumatised by clowns? I’m not sure, but we seem to get a dozen new Christmas horror movies each and every year. However, while Christmas does dominate the horror calendar, many other holidays are represented too and I’ve felt like exploring them for quite some time. So, during the coming year, I’m going to celebrate holidays by reviewing the horror movies that are set on them. I’m going to attempt to avoid the obvious choices (though that’s not entirely possible, of course) and include some surprising holidays too. If only Eben McGarr would finish his film, Hanukkah, about the son of the 1983 Hannukiller, before we actually get there.

So here’s the first picture in this new project, because what better way is there to celebrate New Year’s Day than with a couple of lesbian vampires? In this instance, they’re also both models and members of girl groups, which suggests the level of acting that’s going to be on offer. One is Sophie Monk, born in London but raised in Australia, where she made two albums with Bardot, which was created out of the Popstars reality TV show. She won The Celebrity Apprentice Australia in 2015 and served as a judge in 2016 on Australia’s Got Talent. The other is Anya Lahiri, also born in London but of Indian and Finnish heritage. She represented the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest, singing with the band Precious, who also recorded two top ten singles. More recently, she’s worked as a fitness instructor, working at Barry’s Boot Camp to train celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Natalie Imbruglia. Both are well known as models, Monk being a mainstay in various lists of sexy women in Australia for over a decade.

I can hear you wondering: what sort of horror movie is going to star a couple of ladies with those credentials? Well, you’ll be right a little but wrong a lot, if you’re anything like me. Ron Carlson, who wrote, produced and directed, clearly didn’t want to do what so many other exploitation filmmakers had previously done. I did have a whole slew of problems with this picture, but originality wasn’t one of them. Carlson had some good ideas and he managed to get some of them up onto the screen for us to see. There are sections here that I didn’t just enjoy, I actively felt gratified that someone chose to put them in a film. Now, to be entirely fair, I’m not convinced that all those were due to great judgement on his part, as some of them may tie more to who’s always willing to act in his movies. I’m thinking that some ideas, like the casting of Danny Woodburn as a deputy sheriff, are a combination of both. He is possibly the best actor here, but he’s also four feet tall and surely doesn’t usually expect to play someone in law enforcement.

The most obvious idea, though, revolves around the presence of God, or the character who’s described here as the ‘creator of the universe’. In Carlson’s world, that’s a woman, played by the lovely Angela Lindvall, who emerges from a whirlwind of cloud to be the angel of death for Rhea’s girlfriend. You see, Rhea is pure and honest, so God has plans for her, but her girlfriend Brooke, isn’t, so God disintegrates her on the spot. As a red-blooded male, I’m hardly going to complain about the visuals here, but I’m still not a hundred percent on the theology. Sure, purity and honesty would appear to be good subjects for God and I have no problems with Him being a Her, but I’m not sure how purity applies when we’re staring at her boobs through her flimsy see-through blouse and she’s kissing a lesbian on the lips. Aesthetically, I have no concerns; theologically, I think we’re on rather shaky ground. Purity is something that ought to run a lot deeper than whether you murdered someone in the previous scene or not.

And here’s where New Year comes in. We begin at a New Year’s Eve party in 1968 (even though it says 1969; continuity is not this film’s strong point), as Rhea and Brooke are making out in the bathroom. Topless girls dance to Mellow Yellow and arrogant pricks attempt to convince them into bed. The most arrogant of these pricks is surely Warren James, apparently an important actor. He’s full of himself and guys watching should not copy his pick-up lines. ‘Ladies, don’t let me choose someone else. Who’s it gonna be?’ is not charming, trust me. Fast forward until almost midnight and he has a mostly naked Carrie Lane asking him to ‘Please stop’ as she cowers in the corner. He sounds like Donald Trump in that video. ‘You may suffer some emotional damage,’ he suggests as he places a bar of soap inside a sock, but, ‘Who would believe you?’ That’s when Brooke finds them, sees what’s going on and, right as Auld Lang Syne begins, she stabs him in the throat with one of Carrie’s hairpicks. Eighty-seven times.

That’s why Rhea and Brooke are chasing down the empty Pearblossom Highway in the wee hours of New Year’s Day like a couple of grindhouse heroines. That’s why it feels ominous when other bad things happen, like the possum that comes out of nowhere to be crushed under the wheels. That’s why Rhea insists that Brooke pull over because she doesn’t want any more death. And that’s why scantily-clad God shows up in a personal dust devil, gives Rhea a lingering kiss on the lips to endow her with eternal life and explain how she’s going to become an angel, tasked with destroying the wicked. Being that pure and honest soul, Rhea asks God to bring Brooke back and she does, with the observation that, ‘She ultimately will be your true test.’ Into the ground they both go, to wake from glowing cocoons in the desert forty years on as New Year’s Day continues for them in 2009. Again, I’m for this idea but wonder how their dresses are gone but their lipstick is pristine. Preservatives? And how does Rhea know what year it is?

More than anything, when did angels gain the traditional characteristics of vampires? I’m all for mashups of mythology but that’s an odd one indeed! Rhea and Brooke also figure things out rather quickly. As one of the film’s producers stops his pickup to see if they need any help, out there in the desert in the middle of the night, Brooke quickly feels the urge to bite his throat out. And the hitch-hiker who shows up conveniently at the exact same time? Yeah, him too! That’s when she finds her super-speed. And, once they get to the Murder World convenience store just as the sun’s coming up, they both realise that they should get in there quick and sharpish if they don’t want to turn into crispy critters. And so that’s where they spend New Year’s Day, with the blinds down and the drama threatening to take them with it. This time, I’m sure you’re way ahead of me. I’m all for the concept here. What a great idea to lock us into a single location, but who the heck calls their convenience store Murder World? I mean, what?

I’ll quit running through the synopsis here and introduce you to some of the many recognisable actors who join our story. Who’s that as the chauvinistic local lawman, Sheriff Tillman? Why, that’s Charles Napier, in movie number one hundred and something for him but still not looking too different from the Russ Meyer movies he made forty years earlier like Cherry, Harry & Raquel. His deputy, Felix Shoe, is Danny Woodburn, who is a revelation here, highlighting how he deserves to be remembered for more than just Splinter in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot or Mickey on Seinfeld. Rounding out the department is Jennifer Tung, a well experienced actress who’s one of the least recognisable actors in this film, even if many are faces we know that belong to names that we don’t. The biggest star today is probably Scout Taylor-Compton, who plays Carrie Lane as a very believable rape victim; it isn’t a big part for her, compared to that of Lita Ford in The Runaways or Laurie Strode in Rob Zombie’s Halloween remakes.

At points, watching this movie became a game of, ‘Where do I know him from?’ I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen Iranian actor Marshall Manesh, on TV and in film, though I’ve probably never referenced his name until now. He’s one of those character actors who are always reliable, whatever the quality of the material they’re given to work with. Here, he’s married to Gina Gallego, who’s also guested on every TV show known to mankind. They’re a couple who stop off at Murder World (oh, that name) and thus end up in our story. Even the young man arguing with his girlfriend in the middle of the desert at the end of the film is someone I know from a short film called Black Gulch, shot here in Arizona back in 2003, which I’ve screened at a few Apocalypse Later events. He was Stephen Taylor then and he’s Stephen Monroe-Taylor now, but he’s yet another recognisable face. The exception to prove the rule is Patrick Renna, who is really the male lead, as Dan the clerk at Murder World (I so want to see the commercials).

Now, you probably figured out some of where we were going three or four paragraphs ago, right? Rhea’s our heroine and Brooke is our villain. If that’s a spoiler, you should avoid reading the back cover blurbs of DVDs because you’re going to be frequently and sorely disappointed. The value here really doesn’t come from the leads, because they’re far from the greatest actors in the world, probably not even at Murder World (hey, is that trademarked?) and certainly not in this movie. They’re surely here because they have substantial fanbases, for more reasons than because Sophie Monk has fantastic breasts and Anya Lahiri has magnificent eyes. I have to say that I much preferred the acting of the latter in this picture; she really tried and managed to carry much of her part. Monk made Brooke come across as annoying, which I don’t think was what Carlson was going for. Evil? Sure. Seductively twisted? Absolutely. But annoying? I don’t see why he’d go for that. I didn’t need much reason to stay on Rhea’s side but that helped.

Of all things, I left this lesbian vampire movie thinking that Carlson had created a rather refreshing police department. It isn’t just the actors he cast to build this team or the dynamics of pairing a politically incorrect old John Wayne wannabe with a little person for a deputy and and a Chinese American lady for an officer. It’s the sheer routine of their work, even when dealing with a rather unusual crime. Deputy Shoe, in particular, has to spend his New Year in the sun directing Pearblossom Highway traffic around the crime scene we saw Brooke create in the wee hours. I remember Danny Woodburn in comedic roles or in minor parts like Bad Ass or Watchmen. It was great to see him in something more substantial, especially playing a character whose size wasn’t ever brought up. He was great running through police routine out on the road and he’s even better when he finally ends up at Murder World (let's come up with a jingle for this place). No, the police department isn’t the core of this film but they’re arguably its grounding.

So there’s Life Blood, a horror movie set predominantly on New Year’s Day. Its leading ladies, Rhea and Brooke, are ended with the old year and begin the new year as something different, albeit forty years later. It’s a confused picture and one with enough that doesn’t make sense that it won’t take eagle-eyed goof trackers to start constructing mental lists. However, it does aim for a rather different take on a lot of things: God, angels and of course, the exploitation sub-genre of lesbian vampires. I enjoyed it, not just for the glimpse of God’s boobies, and even though I mentally threw my hands up in despair on a number of occasions. What don’t you name a convenience store in the middle of the desert? All together now! Murder World! You also don’t leave the door unlockable just because you never close. At times, Ron Carlson, the director, should have slapped Ron Carlson, the writer. It’s not a good film but it tries and it’s a good way to kick off a new year and a new project together. I hope you enjoy my Horror Movie Calendar!

Director: Tom Schiller
Writers: Tom Schiller
Stars: Zach Galligan, Apollonia van Ravenstein, Lauren Tom, Dan Aykroyd, Imogene Coca, Anita Ellis, Eddie Fisher, Sam Jaffe, Bill Murray, Paul Rogers and Mort Sahl

Over the years, Apocalypse Later became a place for me to review the sort of films that most people don’t. I figure that there are a multitude of sites that serve as guides to what’s worth watching at the multiplex, so folk don’t need me for that purpose. Instead, I hope I serve more as a means of discovery, to highlight films that you may not know exist or even believe exist, subjects that may have passed you by and filmmakers, on both sides of the camera, who deserve their turn in the spotlight. Nothing Lasts Forever falls into every single one of those categories. It was made by a man, Tom Schiller, who missed the film career he deserved. It starred a variety of actors, some big at the time and others whose heydays had passed or had yet to arrive. It was a major studio film, made as recently as 1982, that was shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio, predominantly in black and white and with mono sound. It has never been released theatrically, let alone on home video, though it has screened occasionally at festivals, retrospectives and on TV.

The lead is Zach Galligan, a high school student in 1982 who actually earned class credit for making this picture. His career at that point was this film and an hour-long educational piece screened on ABC Afterschool Specials about gonorrhea. Two years later, he’d appear on many walls belonging to teenage girls as the lead in Gremlins, his first released picture, before going back to college. He appeared on a few television shows during that time, but returned to theatre screens with Waxwork in 1988. He’s done good work in his time, but this is early on and he was cast to seem lost, not least because of who he was tasked to act with. His leading ladies were as inexperienced as him: a Dutch actress with the glorious name of Apollonia van Ravenstein, had a single film behind her, Seraphita’s Diary, though it was a one-woman feature; and Lauren Tom, who was nobody at the time but is now well known as an actress and voice actress. However, most of the rest of the cast were names before the leads were even born.

The reason they all joined the film is surely the promise that came along with writer/director, Tom Schiller. At this time, he was a gag writer for Saturday Night Live, a job that won him three Primetime Emmys and which gave him access to a wide variety of great talent. Lorne Michaels, another Saturday Night Live writer (with fourteen Primetime Emmys) was willing to produce the movie and he had a development deal at MGM. For whatever reason, the studio ignored the production, so Schiller found that he was able to ‘make a personal film with a studio crew’. Three prominent Saturday Night Live regulars agreed to roles: Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray and John Belushi. Sadly, the latter died in March 1982, a mere six weeks before production began in April, and Galligan explained to the Little White Lies website that the shoot felt like a funeral rather than a party. Murray especially was clearly affected by his friend’s death and wasn’t the easiest person to get along with during the shoot.

The picture would feel like an old one, even if it wasn’t shot to appear that way, with considerable use of footage from older films, as the feel matches. Galligan is Adam Beckett, who starts out on the stage at Carnegie Hall playing Chopin. He’s a temperamental pianist, we see, because he rushes off stage in tears after playing his last note. His support team of old faces crowd around him and urge him to return to play his encore. But, as he stumbles, the audience realise that he’s seated in front of a player piano and they rush the stage to wrap him in the paper the device uses to play. He’s a fraud and, next thing we know, he’s on a train in Europe, being asked for his tickets in French. A Swedish architect talks to him about dreams, suggesting that, while he’ll get everything he wants in his lifetime, he won’t get it in the way that he wants. And, as we head into newsreel footage to ground the story, this feels like a Frank Capra movie that plans to run us through an emotional story with an uplifting ending. Capra-corn, they called it.

That feeling never quite goes away, but the newsreels change things notably. Los Angeles has been destroyed in an earthquake. A hundred day strike has crippled New York; the Port Authority is now in charge and there are extra checks for Adam as he returns to his aunt and uncle’s place in Manhattan. What does he do, they ask? He wants to be an artist, he says. Well, he’ll need to visit the Port Authority Artists Testing Center, they reply, within the next couple of days, and, if he can’t prove that he’s an artist of worth, they’ll kick him out of Manhattan. ‘It’s getting to be like Nazi Germany,’ says one relative, and Germany is not the only reason that we conjure up Metropolis. As the film runs on and Adam’s kindness to local tramps leads him to a subterranean world ruled over by Father Knickerbocker, Metropolis, with its dystopian world of those above who have and those below who don’t, becomes more and more applicable as a comparison. The leading lady’s name is Eloy, surely a nod to a similar concept in The Time Machine.

From what we’re told, Nothing Lasts Forever screened once to a test audience, in Seattle, and that didn’t go well. It’s easy to see why, because it’s hard to figure out exactly what this film is doing. It looks like an uplifting throwback to the forties but it’s phrased as a dystopian science fiction film, utterly unlike the sci-fi movies that were doing well in the early eighties. The Empire Strikes Back this emphatically isn’t. And then it turns into an art film, both in style and content. Capra’s films often helped characters become who they could, and probably should, have been all along; Schiller channels this approach into a search for artistic identity with Adam struggling against trends, gimmicks and the sort of Kafka-esque lunacy that Terry Gilliam would master in Brazil. When he checks in to be tested at the Port Authority, they throw him into a cubicle and give him three minutes to draw a nude woman from life, continually interrupting him as if to deliberately mess with his artistic focus.

It’s notable that Adam rarely discovers anything himself; he’s shown everything by other people. Most obviously, Mara Hofmeier, who works with him watching cars inside the Holland Tunnel and becomes his lover and guide, takes him to a wild variety of wild art performances. She’s a dadaist by nature (he has to look it up), so we watch a topless German muscleman walking mechanically on a treadmill while counting to a million and motionless guitar strummers playing noise art. Their favourite bar plays what feels like a remix of the old Doctor Who theme tune while screening Un Chien Andalou on monitors. The epitome of this surreality comes when she interrupts her orgasm because the miniature TV in her apartment is showing the Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. No wonder Adam is confused. But others are guiding him too and soon he’ll catch a bus to the moon. Yes, you heard that right and, if we have a villain of the piece, it’s surely Ted Breughel, the steward on this bus, played by Bill Murray.

Schiller clearly created this film out of different eras of cinematic art. It looks like a thirties or forties movie, but it’s riddled with scenes from silent pictures and cast with names from the fifties. Now it leaps into exotica territory, taking it into the sixties. The trip to the moon is nothing like the one we saw from Georges Méliès or even Flash Gordon; it’s a regular city bus (on the outside) but an Alpha Cruiser on the inside, complete with its own lounge bar with Eddie Fisher singing and a Galaxy deck where they can serve dinner. How about a Lunartini, folks? While the style is already late fifties/early sixties, native girls of the Moon underline that, welcoming passengers with a hula dance. The message is all seventies consumerism and eighties conspiracy theory, though, making this a second cousin to They Live, whose aliens could well be running the Moon-o-Rama Carousel of Consumer Values in the Copernicus Consumer Zone, located in the Sea of Tranquillity, just down from the kitschy Apollo exhibit.

Oh, and if you hadn’t figured it out, this is a romance, between two people from different worlds who have never met but whose homes include pictures of the other that were there when they moved in. It’s easy to say that this is schizophrenic, but it’s wildly so and the result is as much of an experience as it is a motion picture. It’s like a trip through the previous sixty years of cinema in some sort of mash-up. It’s a little like Amazon Women on the Moon, but if that had an overarching story to tie all the skits together, and a little like the Firesign Theatre’s J-Men Forever, which re-dubbed unrelated old Republic serials with a new storyline. What’s left is the abiding question of why, and it all comes down to a quest for artistic identity. It’s not hard to see Adam Beckett’s quest representing Tom Schiller’s own quest. Sadly for him, the picture was suppressed by its studio, even when it was accepted twice to screen at the Cannes Film Festival. MGM said no and that was that, for this and, it seems, for Schiller’s big screen career.

Most critics who have suggested that Nothing Lasts Forever was ahead of its time, like Richard Brody of The New Yorker, cite modern filmmakers like Wes Anderson, Guy Maddin and the Coen Brothers as following in Schiller’s cult footsteps. I can’t argue with those three choices, but another picture that sprang to mind while I was watching this was The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, which was a braindump of everything that had influenced Rob Zombie to be a filmmaker. I got the impression here that Schiller was not only creating new art, he was also dumping out of his brain everything that had influenced him. I wonder if some of the people he got to appear in the film, as much as period props as actors, were part of that, people who he had grown up watching or listening to. I knew quite a few but I’m at least a decade younger and hadn’t become aware of all of them. To me, this has value in this cast even beyond what it does with story and ideas, because of the almost historical placement of how they’re put to use.

For instance, Adam’s aunt is Anita Ellis, a singer who provided the voice for Rita Hayworth’s performance of Put the Blame on Mame in Gilda, and his uncle is Mort Sahl, a pioneering comedian: the first entertainer to appear on the cover of Time magazine, the first to record a stand-up comedy album and the first host of the Grammy Awards. These characters are named Aunt Anita and Uncle Mort, as if to deliberately blur the lines between fiction and reality. Father Knickerbocker is portrayed by a charismatic Sam Jaffe, in a role that could be seen as Prof. Barnhardt in an alternate version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, where Klaatu failed and it was up to him to find peace in the world. The versatile Imogene Coca, a fifties TV star opposite Sid Caesar, tells secrets to Adam, and her husband is here too. That’s King Donovan, veteran of sci-fi flicks like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Magnetic Monster. There’s even a very brief appearance by Lawrence Tierney, in which he smiles like a Frank Capra Santa.

These are actors and entertainers towards the end of their careers; in the case of King Donovan, he was returning to the screen a couple of decades after his previous picture, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. And, while they all seem to throw themselves into their parts, we can’t help but wonder if they were wondering why they were in a picture like this. Eddie Fisher, playing himself, gives a voice to this, when he asks a steward, ‘How the hell did I wind up singing on a bus to the moon?’ Of course, with this being a highly multi-generational cast, others were just starting out their careers. Most obviously, there’s Lauren Tom, as the moon girl Adam is sent to fall in love with. At this point, she’d just done a couple of episodes of The Facts of Life, but she kept busy till the mid-nineties when she fell into voice acting. Hello Amy Wong from Futurama and Minh from King of the Hill! Howard Shore, David Cronenberg’s composer of choice at the time worked for someone else here and would go on to win three Oscars for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I can’t say that Nothing Lasts Forever is a great movie, but I can say that I enjoyed it. I can also say that it’s a thoroughly original film, a groundbreaking one in many respects and an important one for a number of its cast and crew. It’s a real shame that it’s therefore not available. How many of us grew up watching Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd movies in the eighties and thought we’d seen them all? Well, here’s another one, folks. There’s not a lot of the latter here, but the former has a major part and could easily be seen as Adam Beckett’s nemesis, the last obstacle blocking him from realising his artistic identity, and the world can always benefit from a fresh Bill Murray feature, even if it’s over thirty years old. Murray, more than anyone, has kept this alive, insisting on its inclusion in retrospectives of his work, and there are periodic rumblings that it’ll finally see a release. I wouldn’t count on it, because of the rights issue with the older footage. However, I do hope that you can locate a grey market copy so you can take this trip too.

References:
Richard Brody - A Lost Comedic Masterpiece from 1984 (newyorker.com)
Aisha Harris - Bill Murray’s Unreleased 1984 Sci-Fi Comedy is Now Online (slate.com)
Stephen Saito - Nothing Lasts Forever, Yet This Bill Murray Movie Persists (ifc.com)
Adam Woodward - An Unreleased Bill Murray Sci-fi Comedy from 1984 Has Resurfaced (lwlies.com)

Director: Henri Xhonneux
Writers: Roland Topor and Henri Xhonneux, based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade
Stars: Bien de Moor, Gabrielle van Damme, Philippe Bizot, Bernard Cogniaux, Olivier Decheveau and Pierre Decuypere

This review of part of a series to look at the strangest films of all. Here's an index to my Weird Wednesdays reviews.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a Weird Wednesdays review but, if Apocalypse Later has become a place of discovery for films you may not know about, it’s the purest Apocalypse Later project there is because these are movies that you may not even believe exist! For instance, would you believe that someone would dare to make a movie about the French revolution with a key focus on the Marquis de Sade, who’s locked up in the Bastille writing pornographic novels? That’s weird but perhaps not weird enough for Weird Wednesdays. How about if all the human actors appear as anthropomorphic animals, aided by freakish masks that journey deep into the Uncanny Valley? Yeah, that’s a little more like Weird Wednesdays territory, but we need something more to seal the deal. I know! What if the most prominent character is Colin, the Marquis’s gigantic penis, with whom he chats at length and depth, their relationship being the most important one in the picture? Yes, now we have Weird Wednesdays material!

I should mention quickly that this is not the outrageous comedy you may expect. There are comedic elements, of course, most of them utterly surreal, but it doesn’t reach for laughs and there’s as much history and tragedy as there is comedy. It’s nothing like we might remember from Spitting Image or Meet the Feebles, to name but two easy comparisons. Also, those are both puppet shows, whereas this is really acted by human beings, merely in masks that completely cover their heads and often parts of their bodies, a sort of un-furry version of the furry community. The story is also full of outrageous topics, but they’re not played exploitatively. If anything, most are underplayed, especially rape, a core plot element that affects a few of the characters. One was raped before the movie begins and is pregnant because of it; for political reasons, scenes are staged to suggest a more palatable rapist to the public. Circumstances prompt the same character to be raped again, during the film, but that isn’t shown on camera.

And while I did just describe the Marquis as ‘a more palatable rapist’, not a description I ever thought I’d type, he’s a philosophical chap here, far from a ravenous beast. Most of the characters are given animal forms to mirror their personalities, like Ambert, the guard who appears rat-like both inside and out. The Marquis is given dog form, looking somewhat like a sedate old spaniel, and he can’t seem to get worked up over anything. Now, I’m no expert on the Marquis de Sade, but I really doubt he was quite so sedate a pervert as he appears here. Sure, he happily writes his twisted erotica, some of which we see brought to life in claymation form: a ram, for instance, which literally splits his naked body in two before one of its horns transforms into a black snake which spits out semen-like venom. But in this film, the Marquis is merely eloquent, whether his words are spoken or written; it’s Colin, his chatty appendage, who wants action. They’re two halves of a single personality, making this a sort of schizophrenic buddy movie.

It’s important that Colin, whom we might see as having the most animalistic nature of any character in the movie, given that he’s always trying to persuade the Marquis to stick him into holes, even they’re slits in the stone walls of his cell, is the only character who looks remotely human. Sure, he’s a huge phallus, jutting from between his master’s legs like a hobby horse, so large that the Marquis could fellate himself without even leaning over, but he has carefully crafted and animated features and a dome that looks like a human brain. And, of course, he wears a turtleneck, because this is a French film and, apparently, the Marquis wasn’t Jewish. It’s hilarious to consider that American audiences might have more issue with the fact that Colin has a foreskin than anything else in the movie, but that’s an aside. What’s important is that the dog-faced Marquis is all about restraint, or at least the channeling of urges into deviant literature, while the human-faced Colin is a real hound dog. Their relationship is deep (no pun intended).

There are other prisoners in the Bastille beyond the Marquis, who has been locked up for a peculiar form of blasphemy (defecating on a crucifix, presumably in a place of worship). There’s Pigonou the Grave, the hog that his name suggests, who was ironically put into prison for circulating bad pork; apparently cutting off his own leg in recompense didn’t go far enough. He apparently shares a cell with Lupino, a member of the Patriotic Citizens who are pledged to revolution, and the owner of much more intellect than his dim-witted cellmate. I’m not sure if he’s really a ram or a goat, but the other prisoner of note is Justine, who is clearly a cow. She’s the lady who was raped and by no less a personage than the king. She’s pregnant with his child and the powers that be are keen to scotch any sort of rumour in these turbulent times. That’s the preening rooster of a governor, Gaetan de Preaubois, and his priest, Dom Pompero, who appears in the form of a camel, presumably for a reason couched in French culture which eludes me.

The cast of characters is small and focused, but not quite that much. Beyond Ambert, the guard rat, who wants nothing more than to be buggered senseless by the Marquis, there’s also Juliette, another Patriotic Citizen, whose attempts to break Lupino out of the Bastille have led her to become the governor’s dominatrix of choice. She’s a horse, or perhaps a mule because she’s single-minded, while her co-conspirators are Jacquot, a parrot, and the boar who runs the Wounded Nightingale where they meet. The financier of the group, whose name I never caught, is a relaxed monkey, who claims to be a cousin of the king. There are so few characters that the filmmakers have time to explore their motivations, but this clearly aims at being a fable, telling a historical story through the use of archetypes represented by the animals they most resemble. In other words, they’re simple characters with little depth. Only the Marquis, as befits the title character, has any real substance and that’s explored through him talking with his penis.

And I can’t highlight how important that is. It sounds like a joke, a skit or (dare I say it) a gag, but it’s the foundation of this picture. Whatever the filmmakers had in mind, it was rooted (yes, I do apologise for the unintentional puns) in a conversation between the head with a brain and the head without. And I can’t help wonder why they thought that it was such a bright idea to create the film. The writers were Roland Topor and the director, Henri Xhonneux. The latter was Belgian and he made a few other films, including a 1970 feature with the suggestive title of Take Me, I’m Old Enough. His most relevant other work, though, is an animated pastiche of TV news that he made with Topor for French television called Téléchat in the mid-eighties, starring a cat and an ostrich. The style is different but not greatly so and at least one of its regular voice actors, Valérie Kling, returned here to voice the lead penis. It aired between 1982 and 1986, running for 234 episodes, so it’s not hard (there I go again) to see this as the next logical step.

Except that that step took them into some rather wild territory. The most outrageous scene involves a crawfish, some mayonnaise and a jailer’s buttocks, because even Colin has to say no sometimes, even if he’s already committed himself. However, this is taken from the life and work of the Marquis de Sade, so even the tame parts aren’t that tame. Justine, who becomes quite the aficionado of his writings, tells him that Hitting Low with Two Dying Nuns is her favourite. One claymation interpretation involves a quartet of monks being pleasured by naked women while another attempts to balance on top of a vast pole, only to fall and die mangled in a conveniently placed pile of thorns. There’s even an orgy scene, in which the governor’s confessor reads the Marquis to the ladies under his cassock and those writhing around him, all wearing outrageous masks carved like spreadeagled women. It’s here that he commits to stealing the prisoner’s work to sell to the fish-faced journalist Willem von Mandarine for publication.

And yet it all comes back to Colin, who complains to the Marquis about how many verbs he uses and, really, this is what’s the most shocking thing. It’s not the torture, suicide or rape. It’s not the BDSM, though a leather-clad horse caning the backside of a rooster is not something I can honestly claim to have seen before. It’s not even the scene where Justine starts to suck the blood off Colin’s previously bandaged head, before Ambert steals her away to milk her on the rack. It’s the fact that this picture ought to play like degenerate pornography but is instead full of history, literature and philosophy. It’s like a porno movie made by the Amish or the Mormons, but with all the porn taken out, so that what remains is a more accessible artistic layer hiding something that was never meant to be family friendly. Beyond the frequent presence of a vast talking penis, who is either erect or hidden from view, this is surprisingly tame for something so decadent and depraved. It’s like the art actually matters.

Xhonneux’s collaborator, both on Téléchat and Marquis, was Roland Topor, a multi-talented Frenchman. I knew his name from the 1964 horror novel he wrote called The Tenant, which was later filmed by Roman Polanski, and as the actor who played Renfield in Werner Herzog’s version of Nosferatu. Others know him as a collaborator with René Laloux on such pictures as Fantastic Planet. His career is full of tantalising moments though; he designed the magic lanterns for Fellini’s Casanova, wrote songs for The Butcher, the Star and the Orphan (among many other roles) and contributed monstrous drawings for the opening credits of Long Live Death. This is the filmography of an artist, someone who wrote, painted, composed, drew, acted, animated and filmed. This film is certainly a creation of artists who have more concerns about critical acclaim than financial reward because, let’s face it, the latter was never going to happen; it still hasn’t seen a Region 1 release and, frankly, probably never well.

It fits much better into the context of gothic novels like The Monk, recently filmed in France by Dominik Moll with Vincent Cassel; The Fables of Jean de la Fontaine, published in France in the second half of the seventeenth century; and, of course, the writings of the Marquis de Sade, a French aristocrat who is more relevant today than when he died in 1814 in the Charenton lunatic asylum. I find it fascinating that most people think of de Sade as a sexual deviant, whose works and teachings have found a welcoming home in European exploitation films, but his legacy is just as relevant in philosophical circles, foreshadowing existentialism, surrealism and even psychoanalysis. Perhaps a movie like this, which seems utterly weird to my English eyes and to the American eyes of my better half, might be worthy of family discussion in France, where hardcore pornography has been broadcast on late-night TV for decades. Like the work of de Sade, it will fascinate and repel, often at the same time, but hey, can’t that be said of all the best art?

Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Writer: Norwan Corwin, based on a story by François Campaux
Stars: Jane Wyman, Charles Laughton, Joan Blondell, Richard Carlson, Agnes Moorehead, Don Taylor, Audrey Totter, Cyril Cusack, Everett Sloane and Natalie Wood

I had a blast last year remembering those born in 1916 who contributed much to the cinematic arts by reviewing interesting films from each of their careers on what would have been (or what actually were) their hundredth birthdays. I recently collated these in book form as A Hundred in 2016, now available in print from Amazon. Only a short while into that project, I knew that I’d continue it on in 2017 and this will be the first of many reviews this year, given that even more cinematic notables were born in 1917 than in 1916. It’s 5th January, which would have been the centennial of Jane Wyman, the only U.S. President’s wife to win an Academy Award, even if she’d been divorced from Ronald Reagan for over thirty years when he was elected to the White House. In fact, he was her third husband and she’d marry and divorce Fred Karger twice after that. I mention her five marriages only because she seemed to play a lot of characters who got married a lot (or almost got married a lot) and this film is a great example.

While she won her Oscar for Johnny Belinda in 1948, she landed her third of four nominations for this picture and a number of her obituaries suggest that it was her personal favourite. I wonder if she ever got to see it again, after its initial release in theatres, as it’s one of those major films that has never seen a release on home video: not on DVD, BluRay, LaserDisc, you name it. Only 16mm film copies are out there and nobody has yet ripped one to digital format, so all we have to go on is a copy recorded on video from an apparently illegal television broadcast on KNXT Los Angeles during The Late Show. The only clip most people today have seen of the film is as footage used as a flashback in Falcon Crest, one of Wyman’s big successes later on in life; she’d retired from films after 1969’s How to Commit Marriage. There are reports online of people asking her about The Blue Veil and her replying that she would be very happy to see it again. I hope she managed to watch one of those 16mm prints at some point before she died in 2007.

It’s easy to see why she’d remember it well. It’s clearly a women’s picture and it ends in notably tearjerking fashion. She’s also not only top-billed above a stellar cast, she’s the only name above the title because she’s the only character who’s in it for more than a few scenes. She’s Louise Mason, a war widow, and, after her child dies in hospital soon after birth, she becomes a nurse who takes on the care of the children of other families. The big picture revolves entirely around Louise and the little pictures around each of the families for whom she works. Only Cyril Cusack, as the crotchetty owner of a toy shop, does more than appear and disappear. Wald/Krasna Productions only made four films, all distributed by RKO, but they clearly had access to great actors and the pockets to hire them. Joan Blondell was also Oscar-nominated for her appearance, but the film also features actors of the calibre of Charles Laughton, Agnes Moorehead, Everett Sloane, Audrey Totter, Vivian Vance, Harry Morgan and even a young Natalie Wood.

We’re on Louise’s side from the outset, because of how she’s treated in hospital. I was shocked at how the babies were handled and wonder, if this is anything to go on, how many babies went home with the wrong mothers. First thing in the morning, all the brats are wheeled into a maternity ward on a shared trolley, bawling in disharmony, and handed out to their respective mothers. Louise is missed out and has to ask why before a doctor arrives (the first man we see in the film) to explain, without even taking her into a private room, that, ‘We do all we can. Sometimes we just don’t know why it happens.’ That’s a twisted way to kick things off and it could easily send a widowed woman into despair, but Louise is made of tougher stuff and she soon seeks employment, accepting a short-term assignment for Fred Begley, Jr. Yes, I wondered if that was deliberate as well, as Ed Begley, Jr. was two years old at the time but I don’t see that Charles Laughton ever acted alongside Ed Begley, so perhaps this is mere coincidence.

Begley is also widowed, as his wife died in childbirth, and Laughton plays him with the class we’d expect. He’s a good soul, but he’s also lonely and very clearly lost when it comes to bringing up baby. We’re surprised that it takes him a year to get round to asking her to marry him. By the time he turns down the fifth permanent applicant for the job, Louise is almost furniture, knitting on the couch while an odious old woman spouts on about all the demands she’d have once hired. When Alicia, his secretary, comes round with a corset for him to inspect (he runs ‘the fourth largest corset house in the east’), he automatically asks Louise for her opinion. Of course, once she declines his hand, he promptly marries Alicia instead, who already dotes on little Freddie and, as soon as they return from their honeymoon, that’s it for Louise’s employment. She is nicer about it than she needed to be, but it’s a tough scene and Wyman does a great job of keeping her composure while showing us how much it hurts to have to leave Freddie.

That segment sets the stage for more to come. Laughton gets his moment to shine, as does Vivian Vance as Alicia; she would begin her long run as her famous role of Ethel Mertz eleven days before The Blue Veil hit theatres, in the first episode of I Love Lucy. But as the Begleys’ story begins, Louise Mason’s moves on. Next stop is the expansive mansion of Mrs. Fleur Palfrey, portrayed by Agnes Moorehead, hardly a lightweight to follow on from Laughton. Unfortunately, she gets less to do because the proposal this time out doesn’t come from the boss. Louise is tasked with taking care of Robbie, who’s perhaps six or seven years old; we join them as his elder brother, Harrison, returns from school in the company of a tutor because he’s not keeping up. I’m not sure how capably he’s home schooled because Gerald Kean seems much more interested in the nanny. Moorehead’s best scene has her warn Kean about rushing into things with Louise, who fortunately figures that out for herself soon enough and lets him move to Beirut alone.

Family number three are the Rawlins. Joan Blondell is Annie Rawlins, who sings and dances on stage where she’s keeping working even as she ages beyond the costumes which she’s given to wear. She looks good here, still slim a decade before Angel Baby. She’d bloat up in her later years, so Annie’s battles against age here are easily believable. While she’s busy with work, Louise handles her daughter, Stephanie, a precocious twelve year old played by the precocious Natalie Wood, who was thirteen at the time but eight years and seventeen films into her screen career. As the kids get older, the inevitable parting gets harder and this one is difficult for a number of reasons. Both Wood and Blondell do fine, though I was expecting more from the latter. She deserved many Oscar nominations but only ever got this one. Then again, Edward G. Robinson, her co-star in 1966’s The Cincinnati Kid, for which she got her next major nomination (for a Golden Globe) wasn’t Oscar-nominated for any film, surely the Academy’s greatest omission.

On we go, working through what Bosley Crowther described in his New York Times review as, ‘a series of parchedly sunlit episodes, contrived to squeeze the heart and present this lady as a quivering-lipped saint’, to the one that really counts. There is purpose to this form of slow torture for Louise Mason, because it escalates the heartbreak to the point where she could be described as mad as hell and not gonna take it any more, if only she wasn’t so polite. Up until that moment when she breaks, in front of Everett Sloane playing a District Attorney, she really was given a major hagiography. After she lost her husband in World War I and her baby in the hospital, she seems rather determined not to live her own life. She moves in with family after family, taking care of children who aren’t her own and, inevitably, leaving those homes and those families. All she has to show for those many years of service, it seems, is a photo album, which she describes lovingly as containing ‘all my children’.

Of course, this is the point, but it’s hammered home a little hard. The script was written by Norman Corwin, an accomplished radio writer and producer, who also wrote a number of screenplays, notably Lust for Life, the Kirk Douglas biopic of Vincent van Gogh. It was an adaptation, of Irving Stone’s novel and this was also an adaptation, what seems like a relatively close one of a French movie from 1942 called Le voile bleu or The Blue Veil, with Gaby Morlay playing Louise Jarraud. The original script was written by François Campaux, who later wrote a play called Cherie Noire that was adapted to film no less than three times in a single decade. I can’t say whether the saintly aspect of Louise came more from Campaux or Corwin, but it’s probably a combination of both. Things change over time and Louise was surely more believable in 1951 than today, when audiences are more likely to feel sorry for her than to identify with her. Who can afford live-in nannies any more? The Kardashians?

Surely the intent at the time was to showcase the dedication of a woman who selflessly gives her life and service to others. Today, we wonder why she didn’t marry any of the many men who proposed and settle down with them, find another one, or ignore all the useless men and live her own life. Sure, single mothers were a social stigma back then, so neither pregnancy nor adoption are viable options, but even within the sexist standards of the time, she had the possibility of making something of her life. Why waste it bringing up other people’s children? Well, we can’t really say it was a waste, especially when we see the ending, which is classic tearjerker material, but I personally felt sorry for what she lost more than I felt for what she gave. I can say, at least, that it could have been much, much worse had the role been given to someone less able to gift it with power. Jane Wyman is much better than she had any right to be, given the material. She even ages well, though that’s hard to tell given the quality of this copy.

Perhaps she had more of a connection to the material than would initially be obvious. The theme is clearly defined by a supposed quote at the beginning: ‘Who raises a child of his own flesh lives with nature; who raises a child of another’s lives with God.’ Here, that’s exemplified by a nanny or governess; I’m not sure where one becomes the other. However, it carries different meaning for me, as a stepfather of three and a step-grandfather of five. I’d guess it meant something else again for Wyman, because she was a foster child. Born Sarah Jane Mayfield, her parents, Manning and Gladys, divorced when she was four and her father died a year later. Instead, she was fostered by Richard and Emma Fulk, whose surname she took unofficially. Richard died when she was only eleven and she was brought up by Emma, but when she began a singing career on radio, she did so as Jane Durrell. She became a Wyman by marriage at sixteen and kept that name after divorce at eighteen.

Hard as it is to believe now, it took her a while to really find her place in Hollywood. She was uncredited in twenty movies before gaining a credit as a hatcheck girl in Smart Blonde, the first Torchy Blane movie. Eight years later, she’d play the title character in the ninth and last film in the series, Torchy Blane... Playing with Dynamite. Still, her most notable moment in the thirties was the kiss she shared with Regis Toomey in You’re in the Army Now, which lasted for three minutes and five seconds, the longest kiss in movie history. It was The Lost Weekend in 1945 that really gave her quality material to play with. Her first Oscar nomination came a year later, for The Yearling; two more years and she’d win, for Johnny Belinda, in the process becoming the first person in the sound era to win an Oscar without speaking, as her character was a deaf mute. After that, she had her pick of roles and she took a variety of them, including Stage Fright for Alfred Hitchcock, Here Comes the Groom for Frank Capra and Magnificent Obsession for Douglas Sirk.

I’ve seen her in many films over the years, but mostly those from the late thirties and early forties that didn’t challenge her much at all. I enjoyed her in Larceny, Inc. with Edward G. Robinson, for instance, but it’s hardly her greatest moment. I’ve seen less of her films from the late forties and early fifties, when she did her best and most demanding work. She had a habit of taking roles which our 21st century sense of cynicism would suggest were shoe-ins for Oscar nominations, like a deaf mute rape victim, an alcoholic’s long-suffering girlfriend or a shy crippled sister. They’re heavier pictures, to be sure, but she was able to meet the challenges they brought. And really, it’s that decade of cinema that’s most worthy of being her lasting legacy, rather than a television soap opera or her choice of third husband. I mention him again now because they had three children together, the third of which, Christine, was born premature and died the same day. That was 1947, four years before this film. No wonder it was her favourite.

Director: Donald Siegel
Writers: Knut Swenson and Richard Collins, from a story by Ben Markson and Knut Swenson
Stars: Cornel Wilde, Victoria Shaw and Mickey Shaughnessy

I’ve been wanting to get my teeth into a project I call Dry Heat Obscurities for quite some time now and here’s where I get going with it. I’ll be alternating it going forward with my Weird Wednesdays project, so expect one review from each of those projects every other Wednesday. This one grew out of a conversation with local Arizona film critic Bill Pierce at the Haunted Hamburger, during the first year of the Jerome Indie Film & Music Festival, and it revolves around all those other films that were shot here in Arizona over the decades, that weren’t the westerns that everyone expects. The spark for the conversation was my viewing of an obscure 1968 thriller called The Name of the Game is Kill!, which had been shot in Jerome, Clarkdale and Sedona, with Jack Lord and Susan Strasberg. I knew there were others, as I’d already reviewed Violent Saturday, a Richard Fleischer picture shot in Bisbee in 1955 with Victor Mature and Lee Marvin, but how many? Well, Bill threw out some intriguing titles and research led to more.

This picture is a great example of what I was hoping to discover through this project. For a start, I’d never heard of the film, even though it was a big deal. It was released by a major studio, Columbia Pictures, in 1959. It had a famous director, Don Siegel of Dirty Harry fame, credited here as Donald Siegel. It starred actors I knew, though I’m talking less about Cornel Wilde, Victoria Shaw and Mickey Shaughnessy in the lead roles and more about character actors like Edgar Buchanan and Jack Elam; the latter is a local boy, born in Miami, a small town near Globe that’s been getting smaller since the thirties (it’s the location of the short film, Black Gulch). It’s an interesting, though flawed, thriller which becomes all the more interesting because of a strong use of Arizona scenery. The opening credits highlight that it was, ‘filmed at one of the Wonders of the World, the Grand Canyon, in CinemaScope’. It puts the towns of Kingman and Oatman to good use too, in which Clark Gable and Carole Lombard married and honeymooned respectively.

In fact, it goes further than merely using Arizona scenery to use real Arizona history, not least the short lived exploitation of the Bat Cave guano mine by the US Guano Corporation. The cave was discovered back in the thirties by someone who was boating the Colorado river. Guano is bat shit, but it’s valuable as fertiliser because it’s rich in nitrogen. A mining engineer estimated a deposit of 100,000 tons, much less than the 500,000 tons that Jack Elam’s character suggests in this film but much more than there turned out to be in reality. Most of the cave was actually filled with limestone rubble, with a mere 1,000 tons of guano. US Guano bought the cave in 1957 and spent 14 months building a cableway to carry the guano 7,500 feet across the river and 2,500 feet upwards. Columbia shot a number of key scenes on the ‘dancing bucket’ tram car, including the finalé, but the mine closed a year later. At $100 a ton, US Guano could only earn $100,000 of their $3.5m investment back, making it a loss as a mine but a gain as a location.

We take a while to get there, because we kick things off by running a car off the rim of the Grand Canyon. Burnett Guffey, Siegel’s cinematographer, had already been showing us just how vast the Grand Canyon is by panning his CinemaScope camera around as the opening credits rolled. Once they wrap up, Siegel introduces a couple of actors. One of them stops his car to look over the rim with binoculars, while the other sneaks out of nowhere, releases the handbrake and pushes the car right at him. Surprisingly, it’s the prospective victim who survives, albeit not for long. He’s soon found hanged in the old Kendon Mining Company office up in Oatman. Police Deputy Les Martin might have stopped the murder if he’d listened to old Eli’s ranting about someone up there, but old Eli tells these tales all the time and so Martin chases the speeding Janice Kendon down the winding roads to the bottom of the mountain instead. This works well to kill off our mystery man, set Martin up for future trouble and introduce the leading lady.

In fact, Edge of Eternity starts very well across the board. The scenery is amazing, especially in colour and a format as widescreen as CinemaScope. Cornel Wilde is a laid back but clearly capable deputy and the small town feel only builds as he starts to investigate in Kingman. A description gets him a name, R. E. Wallace, and a hotel, the El Trovatore; Wallace’s room has been ransacked. The El Trovatore still operates today, located on historic Route 66 which at this point is known as Andy Devine Avenue, because the actor, who was born in Flagstaff, was brought up in Kingman from the age of one; the town also holds an annual Andy Devine Days rodeo and parade, the latter of which is usually over two miles long. The early scenes use Kingman magnificently, with other prominent locations such as the Mohave County Court House (there’s a later goof when this is referenced as the more expected ‘Mojave’, the Spanish spelling) and a few local businesses that may or may not still exist.

Best of all, of course, is the US Guano cableway, for a whole slew of reasons. It’s awesomely cinematic, for one, and it actually looks like Cornel Wilde and Jack Elam are right there on the edge, watching the tram car slowly rise towards them. The biggest problem with the early scenes is the rear projection work, mostly during the ‘high speed’ car chase, which on these winding roads means a blistering 45mph (even if the speedos say twenty). That problem isn’t apparent up on the rim looking down at the Bat Cave mine and the tension we feel that high up is exactly what we should feel. Elam is young here, not to mention tall and rangy, surprisingly so as he’d already reached the second half of his career, by film count. Comparing him here to The Night of the Grizzly, a mere seven years later, is unreal; he’s exactly as we expect him in the latter film but nothing like it here. He gets a decent amount of time too, which he puts to good use. I mentioned in my review of The Villain that he deserved bigger roles; this certainly backs that up.

The problem is that the story takes its sweet time to move forward. We almost feel for Sam Houghton, the County Attorney, when he excoriates Deputy Martin on the stand for getting nowhere, partly because he’s right and partly because there are three bodies at this point in the story, but Houghton’s too much of an ass and Martin is too much of an honest man. I think we’re supposed to be more on his side than we actually are, but it’s really his burgeoning romantic interest, Janice Kendon, who breaks the case in a few different scenes. Some synopses suggest that they team up, but that never really happens; it’s just that Martin rarely progresses in scenes that don’t revolve around her explaining something important. She’s Victoria Shaw, an Australian actress who also starred in The Crimson Kimono the same year for Sam Fuller. She’s flighty here, especially compared to Martin, and we wonder if he’d liven up or she’d settle down if the relationship continued. She’s good at flighty but it’s hard to get a grip on her because of that.

I don’t want to spoil the movie, though where it goes is never really surprising. I will say, though, that the story revolves around gold because that’s key to the Arizona setting as well. Janice’s father heads up the Kendon Mining Company, at whose office R. E. Wallace’s body was found hanging, and her brother Bob is a geologist, even though he spends the majority of his time drunk as a skunk down at Scotty O’Brien’s bar. Mining is in the family blood, it seems, and Janice surprises Deputy Martin up at Oatman with an explanation of why the town is empty of people when there’s still $20m of gold under them. I looked this up and she’s talking about War Production Board Limitation Order L-208, which in 1942 restricted the mining of ‘non-essential metals’. Miners moved to copper mines, because that could be used for shells and bullets. The last working gold mine in Arizona shut down in 1998 and it was the Gold Road mine in, you guessed it, Oatman. We see the Gold Road in Edge of Eternity.

I was fascinated by these little historical details, which had extra spice for being outlined by the leading lady rather than her male counterpart. I was less fascinated by the mystery, which is so slow in progressing that we’re likely to forget about it on a number of occasions, like when we puzzle instead about Les and Janice’s date night. After a quick stop at Scotty’s, if I wasn’t hallucinating, they track down what must surely be the world’s only cha-cha dance floor in a Chinese restaurant with a Mexican band. Kingman must have been a hip and happening place back in 1959! There are other diversions too, like the skeleton of an antique car that Eli drives or the periodic trips by plane through the Grand Canyon, which run on far longer than they should but are still glorious to watch anyway. There’s even an amazing scene in which the bad guy, who I won’t name, actually hits exactly what he’s aiming at, holing the engine of the only car that can pursue him and from a moving vehicle too! But at this point, the mystery is solved.

It’s here that we launch instead into our action finalé and it’s a peach. The villain, who has kidnapped Janice, finds that his escape route has been cut off so detours to the US Guano cable head right up there on the rim of the Grand Canyon, so that he can hijack its tram car to carry him across the Colorado river. Deputy Martin catches up right in the nick of time and leaps onto the back as it sets off, no less than 4,750 feet up in the air. Don’t forget the tram car’s nickname: the ‘dancing bucket’. Imagine, if you will, what that translates to when the hero and villain face off over the damsel in distress, while attempting not to fall to their deaths so far below. Like the earlier, much safer, scenes with Wilde and Elam, some of these are obviously real and the product of stuntwork, though the close-ups are still rear projection. IMDb lists Chuck Couch, Rosemary Johnston and Guy Way as stunt performers and I salute them from the safety of my chair, where vertigo is not an option. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like way up there!

It’s hard to imagine what Edge of Eternity would have been like either, had it not been shot in such a spectacular location. We begin and end with the Grand Canyon as our backdrop and, even as we detour into Kingman and Oatman, it’s never far from our minds. Strip it out of the picture and we don’t just lose the finalé, we lose the majesty of the film, leaving just a minor story with a mildly interesting set of characters. Burnett Guffey’s cinematography would have been strong in any other location (he’d had one Oscar already for From Here to Eternity and he’d pick up another for Bonnie and Clyde), but a hole in the ground as big as the Grand Canyon is a gift to someone of his talents. Yet, Wilde plays Deputy Martin like he’s in a B-movie and he doesn’t fit with Shaw’s channeling of Deborah Kerr. Edgar Buchanan and Jack Elam are great in minor roles, but Mickey Shaughnessy doesn’t get enough to justify his third billing and the script by Knut Swenson (Marion Hargrove) and Richard Collins lets them down instead of building them up.

The big winner here is clearly the state of Arizona and its scenic northwest, which I was very happy to see. There were other films shot in Arizona earlier than Violent Saturday and this. Lust for Gold also explored our gold-mining history by pitting Ida Lupino, Gig Young and Glenn Ford against the famous Lost Dutchman Mine in 1949; Edgar Buchanan showed up for that one as well, which saw scenes shot in Apache Junction, Florence and Phoenix, as well as the Superstition Mountains, the Lost Dutchman National Park and the Agua Fria National Monument. As unlikely a candidate for an Arizona shoot as David and Bathsheba, with as unlikely a candidate for King David as Gregory Peck, was shot in Nogales in 1951 with 6’ 8” Lithuanian wrestler Walter Talun as Goliath. I may go back to take a look at those, but I’m mostly going to work forward from the late fifties to my cut-off year of 1987 because Raising Arizona made it kind of obvious that films other than westerns were shot here. See you in two weeks for The Mountain Road!

Director: Arthur Lubin
Writers: Kurt Siodmak and Eric Taylor
Stars: Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi

It’s 1940 and Boris and Bela face the worst horror of their careers: camping outside Walmart the day after Thanksgiving to bag one of them there big screen TVs! Well, not quite. This isn’t that Black Friday, it’s just another Friday the 13th which looms heavy on a calendar behind the opening credits. Once they’re done, we visit Boris Karloff in his prison cell as he readies to start his procession to the electric chair. He’s Dr. Ernest Sovac, though most of the characters seem to call him Ernst, and he appears to be a pleasant old man. It’s surely telling that he’s dressed in white and everyone else is in black. Even the guards seem to respect him and allow him to hand his notes to one of the journalists present; the only one who was fair to him, he explains. And, as he walks off screen to his death, that journalist opens them to read and we launch into a feature length flashback to explain why the good doctor is about to be executed. And, whether it’s Friday the 13th in the prison or not, it certainly is when we leap into the flashback.

Dr. Sovac’s notes are titled Notes on the Case of George Kingsley and it’s Prof. Kingsley teaching poetry at the University of Newcastle. It happens to be the end of the semester and he explains to his avid students that he may not return the next year, though that has precisely nothing to do with the doggerel he quotes from Sir Joshua Peachtree, who I believe was invented for this film. ‘Thou who breakest glass will find Fate can be, oh, most unkind: under ladder walkest thee, most unlucky thou wilt be; each dread Friday do take care, else thou fallest down the stair.’ It’s supposed to be because a ‘very large university in the east’ is interested in him, but we can’t ignore all these superstitions, right? It’s Friday the 13th and Kingsley is tempting fate with poetry in a movie called Black Friday. We shouldn’t forget that it’s Karloff the Uncanny who’s going to drop him at the train station because he doesn’t drive; the Sovacs are family friends; Dr. Sovac’s daughter, Jean, is even one of Kingsley’s students.

I liked all these little hints that something’s going to go horribly wrong, only for everything to be perfectly fine. The best is when Margaret Kingsley warns her husband to watch the traffic; halfway across the road, he drops his umbrella, bends down to retrieve it, turns round to wave at her through the passing cars but still makes it safely over. I also liked the stuntwork when he gets his, as we knew he always would. There’s a gun battle between two cars, barrelling along together, and one knocks Dr. Kingsley over as it ploughs into the building behind him. It’s very capable stuff indeed. And, with that relatively fast disaster done with, we promptly set up the next, much slower one, which regular viewers of Universal horror movies will find to be rather odd in its approach and for two reasons: one because of how the central idea affects the story and the other because of whose story this is. While the stars are Karloff and Lugosi, almost a decade into their horror careers, all this really revolves around Stanley Ridges.

Who is Stanley Ridges, you might ask? Well, he was a British actor, like Karloff, who had taken his career to the States. Beginning on Broadway as a song and dance man, he became a capable romantic lead but struggled to translate a stage career to the screen. He found his place as a character actor in the late thirties, knocking out eight films in Hollywood’s golden year of 1939, including Union Pacific, Each Dawn I Die and Espionage Agent. He’d do even better in the forties, with memorable roles in Sergeant York, To Be or Not to Be and The Suspect, not to mention the 1943 B-movie, False Faces, in which he played what may be his one and only lead role, but, arguably, the two parts for which he’ll be best remembered are the two that he plays in this movie: absent-minded professor, George Kingsley, and vicious gangster, Red Cannon. How come he gets two roles? Well, Dr. Sovac is a brain surgeon and he’s eager to save his friend’s life; he does so by transplanting the brain of the gangster who ploughed into him into Kingsley’s body.

And here we pause, because most of you are going to be questioning that. If we’ve learned anything from a hundred horror flicks built around brain transplantation, it’s that everything that makes a man is stored in his brain and that doesn’t change even if you transplant that brain into another body. When Dr. Frankenstein placed a criminal’s brain into his nascent monster, it directed the creature’s actions in an aberrant fashion. So, when Dr. Sovac moves the brain of Red Cannon into the body of George Kingsley, it must be Cannon who wakes up from the surgery? Well, not here! It’s Kingsley in control with Cannon lurking somewhere behind him, ready to come out when needed. We rail against this for most of the picture until we’re let in on the fact that only part of Red Cannon’s brain was transplanted. That’s not what it says in Dr. Sovac’s notes so I wonder if they ‘fixed’ it later and hoped nobody would notice such an obvious problem. Maybe that’s why co-writer Curt Siodmak would revisit the idea with Donovan’s Brain.

Of course, the oddest thing here is the casting. According to Glenn Erickson’s review for DVD Savant, Karloff was supposed to play the double role of Kingsley and Cannon, while Lugosi was to be Dr. Sovac. I can see that, and it would have made more sense at the time than bringing in someone like Stanley Ridges who wasn’t known for the horror genre in the slightest. However, Karloff was unconvinced that he could do justice to two quintessentially American characters, a small town professor and a fiery gangster, and so decided to play the doctor instead. He’s great as Dr. Sovac, of course, but it’s hardly a stretch for him and Lugosi, even less likely to be believable in that prominent double role, was relegated to the much smaller and less important one of Eric Marnay, who had worked for Cannon but then orchestrated his murder so he could take over his gang instead. We’re never given a reason why this New York gangster should have an eastern European accent, but then Lugosi ran into that problem in at least half of his films!

What stood out most to me was that the morals are different from the norm. Usually, it’s the act of transplantation that prompts us to see a character as the bad guy because this whole subgenre of horror came from Frankenstein, a pre-Victorian gothic novel with a religious subtext that pits science against religion. Sure, many of us know people who have benefitted from kidney or even heart transplants, but back then it was surely beyond the pale because Man shouldn’t be playing God! That mentality lasted in the horror movie genre for decades and still hasn’t quite vanished, but Siodmak’s script, written with Eric Taylor, never judges Dr. Sovac for transplanting a brain. It’s illegal, that’s for sure, but we never really get into the morality of it and it’s certainly not why he’s on death row. The suggestion is that he performs this surgery for the best of reasons, to save his friend, but only later discovers that Red Cannon has half a million dollars hidden away somewhere and that discovery sets him on an inevitable path to his downfall.

You see, this is really an unwitting Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, with Prof. Kingsley playing a much loved Jekyll and Red Cannon taking the villainous Hyde half of that personality. The two battle for dominance, of course, with Cannon taking firm advantage of his new disguise to get revenge on those who attempted to murder him; Kingsley just gets more and more confused at the whole thing, because he keeps losing time and can’t figure out why. The why of it all is Dr. Sovac, of course, because he’s dazzled enough by the prospect of a fortune to further his work to put his friend at serious risk. When he realises that Kingsley is exhibiting signs of Cannon coming through, he pushes that hard. He takes his friend to New York and books them into Cannon’s regular rooms at the Midtown Hotel, where he throws pointed questions at him as Kingsley falls into sleep, so that he’ll wake up with the gangster in control, whom he believes he can blackmail into sharing the location of that money. So his downfall is greed, not playing God.

I enjoyed Karloff’s performance here, though Lugosi’s is far from his best. I won’t spoil his worst moment, but the man who played Count Dracula pleading in a broken voice is a pitiful thing indeed. He does try, but he can’t find his feet as a New York gangster the way that his cohorts can. William Kane is Paul Fix, the marshal from The Rifleman, who was just as good in villainous roles as he was in heroic ones; Frank Miller is Edmund MacDonald, well known for film noir roles with dark sides; even Raymond Bailey does what he needs to do as Louis Devore, even if we don’t recognise him as Milburn Drysdale a few decades later. Lugosi could look tough in his sleep, but that thick accent hurts him here and we never buy into him taking over the gang from Cannon, who Ridges plays so well that we have trouble initially believing that it’s the same actor we’ve been watching as the gentle Prof. Kingsley. Perhaps he’s aided by the make-up needs being for Kingsley rather than Cannon, but most of it his him; it’s a superb contrasting performance.

And, frankly, Ridges steals the film, which is no small feat for someone tasked with acting with both Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; it has to be mentioned that the latter two don’t share a single scene. I utterly bought into Ridges’ confidence as Cannon; there are some wonderful scenes where he visits his old flame, a singer called Sunny Rogers, and carries on with her as if nothing had ever changed, even though he’s literally in a completely new body that she fails to recognise. Siodmak handles all the little details that confirm him as Cannon superbly. I also utterly bought into Ridges’ absent-minded act as Kingsley, who’s well established with the audience before Ridges ever becomes Cannon. The best scenes are ones where he blurs the boundaries between the two. Cannon has a favourite bellhop at the Midtown, for instance, who uses the distinctive knock he’s mandated. When Kingsley uses it too, he starts to leave, realises what happened, pauses, starts again and almost walks into Boris Karloff. That’s an awesome combination!

Karloff and Lugosi made seven features together, eight if you count Gift of Gab, but this isn’t the double act that we know from Son of Frankenstein, The Raven or The Black Cat. It’s well worth watching for Karloff and it’s interesting for Lugosi but, of all of their films together, this is the one to watch for someone else. I wonder if Universal ever asked Stanley Ridges back for another horror; they wouldn’t cut their output until later in the decade and could easily have used someone with the skills he ably demonstrates here. From what I can tell, the only other horror movie he made was a Republic picture called The Phantom Speaks in 1945, in which he plays a doctor whose body is taken over by a murderer; it’s a different story but with obvious similarities. These old horror movies work because they were cast from quality actors who happened to be playing horror; Ridges is another Claude Rains, who could do The Invisible Man and The Wolf Man, then switch to Casablanca and Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Sadly he didn’t have as much opportunity.

Happy Friday the 13th, folks! And, remember, there are two Friday the 13ths in 2017, so come on back for another one in October which also doesn’t feature Jason Voorhees.

Director: Ricardo Ribelles
Writer: Ricardo Ribelles
Stars: Juan Carlos Romeu, Helena Lecumberri, Alejandro Ribelles, Xavier Bertran, Irene Belza, Gerardo Arenas, Eva Barceló, Susana Palma and Paulina Gálvez

Much of the joy of my Weird Wednesdays project is in finding movies, watching them and trying to figure out who the filmmakers thought their audiences might be. I really have no idea about this one, because it mixes a few very deliberate approaches that I’m pretty sure I never expected to coincide in a movie. For instance, as the usual English language title, The Baron Against the Demons, suggests, this feels like a tokusatsu picture at heart, with foam latex suits, imaginative monsters and bizarre tale about a futuristic organisation dedicated to fighting evil. That it was made with Spaniards rather than the Japanese is one reason why that doesn’t quite ring true, but there’s also the BDSM comic book aesthetic and the gratuitous gore effects, which suggest that this was never meant for kids, and the most important aspect is the overriding Catholic dogma which drives the whole thing so fundamentally that this can only be a Christian metaphor dressed up for sexual deviants who like the Power Rangers. You know, that sort of film!

Oddly, for a movie so overtly about good and evil, we’re never quite sold on the good and evil bit. Sure, the villain is Satan himself, visiting from the Ninth Planet to witness the birth of the Antichrist, which here means a man in a rubber suit, conceived from seed stolen from a chained hero by a leather clad dominatrix with gigantic knockers, who’s birthed by a hermaphroditic stick monster. We may be relatively safe in assuming that they’re the bad guys! But who represents the side of good? Initially, we might presume that it’s Exorcio Deus Machine, a late 21st century band of Spanish Inquisition commandos sharing their steampunk space satellite with an alien race of muppets, from which lair they combat evil. After all, that’s who our hero, the titular Baron, works for. Yet, if he’s clearly on their side, they’re not quite so clearly on his, as the man in charge, Coronel Doménico, dreams of dropping an atom bomb on his head. What’s wrong with the usual Triumph of the Will inspired awards ceremony for heroes? No, atom bomb it is.

So, are we to see the Baron as our hero or just some rebellious heretic? I have no idea. He certainly appears to be a hero, not least because he saves the day almost single-handedly, the useful contributions of Exorcio Deus Machine comprised of one woman who succeeds in rescuing him from the deviant underworld of Scotland, even though she was only sent because the Coronel wants her vaporised by the same atom bomb as the Baron. However, unlike most sci-fi action films, the phrasing forces us to read it from the standpoint of Catholic theology too and it’s hardly a stretch to see the Baron as a Christ figure, most obviously because he actually describes the quest this picture is for him as his Via Crucis. For those who don’t expect their genre flicks to periodically drift into Latin, that refers to the Stations of the Cross, those fourteen iconic moments which Jesus endured from death sentence to burial. You know, the procession of brutality from The Passion of the Christ. This is just like that but with more biomechanical parasites.

So, if the Baron is really a post-apocalyptic Jesus, what does that make the organisation he thinks he works for but which secretly aims to see him extinguished? Are they true defenders of God’s Word, the New Crusader Legion commanded by the Inquisitorial Committee? Or are they just a sorry bunch of religious fanatics? Frankly, is there even a difference between those options? Well, there lies a dilemma, surrounded by all the invisible detail that writer/director Ricardo Ribelles carefully omitted just to keep us confused. He’s willing and able to craft dynamic dialogue, but he doesn’t appear to grasp that ‘dynamic’ doesn’t have come at the expense of meaning. For instance, when Coronel Doménico tasks Lt. Ira Bowman with rescuing the Baron, we wonder who she is. Well, she’s a human with no special powers, but she has a score of 77 in the Danger Room! Wait a second! What’s a Danger Room and is 77 a good score or a bad one? Is that 77 out of 80 or 77 out of a million? It’s dynamic but it’s also meaningless.

The entire script is so dynamic but so meaningless that I wanted to transcribe every other line of dialogue but couldn’t figure out what was going on for about an hour. I could blame poor subtitles, given that I don’t speak Spanish, but they seem to make sense, as far as the script lets them. I just don’t know where to start. For instance: ‘Justice was the one who had the fetus in her entrails’ should be the title of a black metal album. Justice here may be one of the wildly endowed bondage mutants we find and massacre, but we’re never really introduced. ‘A curious funeral rite for satanic androids’ is enticing. I’m still not sure how androids can find religion but it happens here, just too quickly, so the Baron massacres all his followers before he realises they’re following him. He isn’t too bright, but he’s flamboyant with soliloquy: ‘Blind, Black Faith!’ he shouts at the sky. ‘The faith that moves those who died without washing their souls that resurrects the eyeless dead!’ No, I have no idea what that means either and I watched this movie.

Occasionally, there’s a sliver of explanation. For instance, we first meet the Baron and his sidekick, Lt. Alexander, as they battle an onslaught of Chattering Laughers in northern France, but he vanishes, mysteriously showing back up again in the evil clutches of Doña Pervertvm in her evil lair called Pandemonium, which to space Catholics is apparently located in the Perfidia Caverns below Inverness. Now, I’ve only travelled through Inverness but it seemed to be a nice place, devoid of any ‘sub-world with necromantic roots created under the command of a two-headed leader.’ I’m also very sure I’d have noticed anyone wearing an outfit like Doña Pervertvm’s, given that it appears to be a leather bikini so narrow that it had to have been glued to her labia, with skimpy straps and a massive brass bra that looks like it was crafted from a couple of missiles. Jane Russell, eat your heart out! Then again, Jane Russell wasn’t tough enough to tie her hair back with scavenged intestines. That would have improved The Outlaw considerably!

Doña Pervertvm likes the sound of her own voice just as much as the Baron likes his, so we start to discover some of the details we need to understand the movie here in Pandemonium. She’s keen on extracting the Baron’s blessed sperm so she can use it to make the Ragnarok-Beast pregnant. And time is short; as Sgt. Burkina Fasso explains to the Coronel up on the space satellite, ‘Ragnarok’s still in heat. If this infernal beast doesn’t perpetuate his species before the Winter Angelus, he’ll eat himself as punishment.’ I may not have grasped the point of this, partly because I have no idea what the Winter Angelus is, but it seems like the space inquisition only need to stamp out bestiality underneath Inverness and they’ll be golden. Shame the Baron gets himself captured, huh? Doña Pervertvm interrogates him, rapes him (without actually undressing him first, which is a neat trick), then stabs him in the crotch with a carved dildo so that he can spurt all over her face in a bloody shower. ‘This is my blood,’ I guess, ‘which is given for you.’

Clearly Doña Pervertvm is the mistress and slave of Ragnarok, nesting with him under the Sign of Pluto, and clearly she has a plan. I just wish I understood everything else going on here. For a start, why does she have an army of cackling midget android clowns? Why have they already started to convert to the Baron’s unspoken ideology before he even gets there? Why do they believe that blessing themselves, confining themselves to coffins and throwing those coffins into the ocean is a good way to demonstrate their devotion? It’s no better up on the satellite. For example, why has Dr. Michas, a muppet alien from the utterly unexplained planet of Belfídia and the head of the Revolutionary Prototype Dept., replaced Lt. Alexander’s clown-bitten arm with a prosthetic that is useless except to threaten the satellite? Why do they even have this department? And why does every woman in the film have to dress in a bondage leotard, whether they’re in combat or the lab? Suddenly. chainmail bikinis seem wildly realistic.

Frankly, I gave up trying to figure out the plot. There’s a war, for Pete’s sake, complete with bagpipes and wicked masks and some little general whose body appears to have been removed from the nipples down, which is why he zooms around in an invisible jet pack. And, even if the script is lunacy on acid, these visuals are actually pretty cool, both in how they’re imagined and how they’re animated. That’s especially true, given the date. The Baron Against the Demons was released in 2006 and it incorporated a short film by the same writer/director, Exorcio Deus Machine: La misión, made a full decade earlier. Yet, the majority of the gadgetry, weapons and even spacecraft are notably steampunk in nature, making this aesthetic, surely taken from Jules Verne’s submarines, notably ahead of the curve. I adored the modelwork, which is intricate and ingenious, though some of the other effects work is ridiculous in the extreme, especially the gore effects, which are as wildly enthusiastic as they are utterly inept.

So, is this the story of Jesus? Maybe it’s just one of the Gospels of the New New Testament, to be discovered between now and the end of the century, when this is set. If Ribelles made another three movies, telling the same story from different angles, I’d watch every one of them. Maybe by then it might make sense. This feels like an incomplete tale with much more to tell; there’s so much action that he could double the length of the film without it feeling slow, but there are so many gaps that he’d have to double the length of the film just to fit in all the explanations he needs. In reality, it’s a short film that grew to feature length, but it plays like a twelve episode serial shrunk to a quarter of its size. As far as I’m aware, the international versions are the same movie, just with new, more misleading, titles. Its latest is Star Troopers, which fails to describe this adequately at all. In France, it’s Battleship Pirates, which is even worse. The Baron Against the Demons works best because, never mind just the title, that’s the perfect synopsis too!

And so I wonder what Ricardo Ribelles was trying to do here. What audience was he trying to reach? I can’t help but feel that the logical audiences for its component parts wouldn’t be happy with the others. Tokusatsu fans may love the wild aliens and blissful miniatures, but would probably throw their hands up in despair at all the pontificating on theology while being stabbed. Catholic action fans (is that a genre?) may dig the fact that it has no problem with staging a new crusade a century into the future but I’m not convinced it makes any liturgical sense whatsoever and it suggests that Jesus is cool and all but his church has lost the plot. I have no doubt that the outrageous leather bikinis will appeal to readers of European fetish comics but they only like religion if it means that monks can do unspeakable things to nuns or demons can, well, do unspeakable things to nuns. There aren’t any nuns to be found here, so I have no idea what they’d think of the scenes that don’t feature leather bikinis and/or the Ragnarok-Beast.

I’d argue that there’s certainly an audience for this sort of insanity, but it’s mostly people like me who are looking for this sort of insanity. It’s full of bizarre and engaging imagery but I honestly think I’d have got as much out of it if I’d turned the subtitles off and attempted to figure out the foreign language dialogue. Perhaps that would have been my better option, because I’d have had to conjure up my own story to explain what I saw and that can’t have made any less sense than the one Ribelles actually wrote. I would have failed to rustle up the levels of Catholic guilt and inevitability of self-sacrifice that Ribelles seems to bathe in, but I’d have imagined the Baron as a wild escapee from a live action anime, an old school knight who wants everyone and everything to fight him. I don’t think the rules of journalism would allow me to review the movie that would have played in my head had I had the foresight to switch the subtitles off, but, by Doña Pervertvm’s brass bazongas, I was greatly tempted to do so.

Director: Robert Aldrich
Writer: Christopher Knopf
Stars: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Keith Carradine

Thus far, every one of the film luminaries whose lives and careers I’ve been celebrating on what would have been their hundredth birthdays is someone I discovered through watching movies. Some I first saw when I was a kid but others not until later. However, 24th January marks the centennial of an actor I grew up watching on television. It’s Ernest Borgnine, an Academy Award-winning actor whom I initially discovered playing Dominic Santini in the mid-eighties action show, Airwolf (hilariously, my grandkids may have first encountered him on television too, in the even cheesier part of Mermaid Man in SpongeBob SquarePants). Of course, as time went on, I realised that he had a little bit more of a resume than backing up Jan-Michael Vincent on primetime TV. His Oscar was for Marty in 1955, but I caught later films first, pictures like The Black Hole, The Dirty Dozen and Escape from New York. Over time, I’d see him over and over, in films as varied as Johnny Guitar, The Catered Affair and The Devil’s Rain. He was certainly versatile!

To remember his work, I selected Emperor of the North Pole, later released as simply Emperor of the North, for a few reasons. One was that he plays the villain of the piece, the sadistic conductor of a depression-era steam train, who uses brutal means to kick off any hoboes who think they can ride it for free. Another is that his co-star, playing one such hobo, is Lee Marvin, another favourite of mine and another Academy Award-winner (for Cat Ballou); Borgnine and Marvin made six pictures together; the others being The Stranger Wore a Gun, Violent Saturday, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Dirty Dozen and its made for TV sequel, The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission. The setting was a bonus too, because subcultures are one of my favourite subjects and this film promised to delve a little into the world of hoboes, of which I’ve read a little. And the cast includes such favourites as Simon Oakland, Elisha Cook, Jr., Sid Haig and, in an uncredited role so deep that I couldn’t find him anywhere in the movie, a young Lance Henriksen.

As such a cast might suggest, the script plays on a clash of ideologies between the old, as portrayed by the massively experienced double act of Marvin and Borgnine, and the young, in the form of Keith Carradine, appearing not only in his first starring role but the first that was given a name. He’s Cigaret, which is more than the obvious step up from ‘Cowboy’ or ‘The Young Gunfighter’ of his previous films, because Cigaret happens to be one of the tramp names used by novelist Jack London when he lived on the road around 1894, the year in which he spent thirty days in the Erie County Penitentiary for vagrancy. London is important here, as the script, by Christopher Knopf, is based in part on The Road, the memoir London wrote about that period of his life, and From Coast to Coast with Jack London by Leon Ray Livingston, a famous hobo known within that community as A-No.1. London tracked him down and, in the words of Livingston, during that period was ‘faithfully acting the role of the dog who adopted his master.’

In many ways, that’s precisely what happens here, except that Carradine’s character is far less sympathetic than London probably was in real life. In Emperor of the North Pole, Marvin plays A-No.1, an aging hobo who slips onto the No. 19 steam train heading north to Portland. He seems to know his stuff: he acquired a live chicken before we first meet him and he has to fight off three youths to keep it; he escapes by climbing into an empty freight car on the No. 19 without being noticed, settling down for the duration. The catch is that Cigaret follows him, abandoning his younger colleagues in the process; his lack of skill means that he’s noticed before he even makes it in and the hoboes are promptly locked inside. A-No.1 has to set fire to the back of the car, which is made of wood and filled with bales of hay for animals, so that he can break through the sides of it to escape from his escape, live chicken and all. But Cigaret knows talent when he sees it, so he sticks to A-No.1 like glue, as often as the older man tries to shake him off.

If there’s conflict between the veteran A-No.1 and the rookie Cigaret, there’s a lot more between the hoboes and the Shack, which is the name of Borgnine’s character. He’s the conductor of the No. 19 and it’s his train, as far as he’s concerned; he’ll be damned if he lets a hobo take advantage of his run. He won’t politely ask them to disembark at the next stop and he won’t simply throw them off either; we know what he does to unwelcome guests because we watched him dispose of one ahead of the opening credits. The ‘goddamn ’bo’ slips on after the train pauses for water and settles down in between cars with a sandwich; the Shack finds him and sends him under the wheels with a well aimed sledgehammer. The train keeps a rollin’ to display the body on the tracks behind it, literally cut in two by the wheels. And the Shack grins, because he’s not just good at what he does; he really enjoys his work. ‘He’s gonna be a mean son of a bitch now,’ says one of his men, after seeing A-No.1’s fire. ‘What was he before?’ replies another.

The script follows two battles. One is the war between A-No.1 and the Shack, after the former takes on the challenge of riding the No. 19 all the way to Portland, and the other is the battle between A-No.1 and his young stalker, Cigaret. I’d argue that both were parallels to what was going on at the time, something that seems fundamental in a story that is otherwise about a highly personal war between two men who have never previously met. London and Livingston wrote about their travels in 1894, but Knopf takes their work and updates them to 1933, the heart of the Great Depression, when the unemployment rate was peaking at 25%. We’ve seen more personal stories from this era often enough, in movies like The Grapes of Wrath, but it’s the abstractions of the era which stand out best. Emperor of the North Pole is a truer abstraction than even Bonnie and Clyde, given that A-No.1 has to face off against the establishment that brought him down, personified by the Shack, and dangerous but immature youth, in the form of Cigaret.

As a two hour film, this often moves with the pace of the steam trains that we follow. In the film’s theme tune, Marty Robbins may be singing about a man and a train trying to run as fast as they can, but the pace of these engines seems rather relaxed to me in my 21st century world of speed. I appreciate the stuntwork done on top, underneath and around the train by the lead actors, but they aren’t going too quickly even when the Shack has the engineer ‘highball it out of the yard’. That doesn’t mean that it’s boring, for the scenes at that point are shot in early morning fog with a mail train due and the tension is palpable. But the train just keeps on rollin’ as the action unfolds on it, with chains, spikes and two by fours, not to mention an axe, all used in the battle to be ‘emperor of the North Pole’, which, to hoboes, means being in charge of a situation that gains you nothing but a title; A-No.1 puts his life on the line for nothing but bragging rights, even if those betting on him may strike it rich in the process.

Marvin struggles through, Borgnine rages and Carradine annoys, in a voice that seems utterly wrong but isn’t really; it neatly adds to his ability to annoy us just as he annoys A-No.1 or whoever else he’s interacting with. It helps that those supporting members of the cast are stellar, even if many are the sort of actors you recognise but can’t name. The most prominent of them is surely Charles Tyner, who plays the brakeman on the train, Cracker by name. Many will know him from Cool Hand Luke or The Longest Yard, but he made a lot of films memorable, including this one. One of the key yardmen is Vic Tayback, who won two Golden Globes for his role as Mel, the owner of the diner in the TV show, Alice, reprising his role from the film, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Accomplished scene stealer Simon Oakland plays a cop who chases A-No.1 after he steals a turkey from a rail yard, ending up in a scene that feels rather like something that Quentin Tarantino might have written. Of course, director Robert Aldrich is hardly a nobody either!

As you may have noticed, all those names are male. There are almost no women in this testosterone-fuelled film at all. Only Diane Dye is credited, in her one and only big screen appearance, and then simply as ‘Girl in Water’. Surely we find A-No.1 preparing for baptism in a river because the church is offering celebratory food, but it prompts a clever scene in which the pastor asks him if he has sinned, all while he’s staring goggle-eyed at the breasts of the girl in front of him through her wet and transparent baptismal gown. Most of the great scenes go to Borgnine, though, even if Marvin is clearly the lead. I’ve always enjoyed watching him play villains because he can hate more effectively than most actors of his era. He’s blistering here, introduced as brutal but given a little more depth as the picture runs on. He’s an archetype, just as Marvin and Carradine are, but these aren’t simple good guy vs. bad guy roles. Cigaret is out of his depth immediately but the other two are worthy opponents unable to escape their positions in life.

I should add here that it’s not all grue. The scene with Simon Oakland, frankly hilarious in Kolchak: The Night Stalker, is far from the only moment of comedy on offer and there are many light hearted scenes in and amongst the suspense. I especially appreciated the yardmen, people who have jobs but know that they could be replaced in a heartbeat, so they work alongside a man they don’t like or agree with, even if they respect his authority like professionals; the scenes in the yards are full of fascinating dialogue. This never delves as deeply as I had hoped into hobo culture, but Knopf does gift us with some of that and also some of what it means to be a yardman. When A-No.1 is talked into taking the No. 19 to Portland, the announcement is scratched onto a water tower at the depot. It’s no spoiler to say that the hoboes are bounced off the train but a continued announcement on a fresh tower further up the line tells everyone, yardmen and hoboes both, that they’ve caught up and it’s all back on again.

Emperor of the North Pole seems a little dated today, not because it’s a period piece but because it has that seventies movie feel, but it’s a strong drama that isn’t as simple as it might play at first glance. Marvin is magnificent in the lead, a couple of decades into a solid career with only a dozen movies left. I had the impression that his career was fading at this point but he’s at the top of his game here and he had The Klansman, The Big Red One and The Delta Force still to come. Carradine is annoying, but appropriately so, at the other end of his career; his Oscar was only three years away but that was for a song, I’m Easy from Nashville, rather than an acting performance. I knew the Carradines were an acting dynasty like a junior version of the Barrymores, but it was always his brother David who comes to mind when I hear the name; incidentally, he was riding the rails only a year earlier in Boxcar Bertha, made for Roger Corman. Yet Keith really rocked the seventies, with a thoroughly interesting set of well chosen pictures.

But I’ll leave this with Ernest Borgnine, the snarling heart of the picture. He started late, beginning his screen career at 34 in 1951, the same year as Lee Marvin but in different pictures. His first role was, of all things, in yellowface, as Hu Chang, the owner of the Green Dragon gambling club in China Corsair, but it didn’t take long for him to graduate to more important films. Two years later, he had a notable role in From Here to Eternity and another in the highly underrated Johnny Guitar. Two more and he’d win an Oscar for playing Marty the lovable Bronx butcher in a year that also saw him appear in Bad Day at Black Rock and Violent Saturday, as an Amish farmer. Maybe his career didn’t initially maintain the levels it should have after such a promising start, but he gave more memorable performances in movie after movie. The mid-sixties saw his star rise again, partly because he landed the lead in the popular TV show, McHale’s Navy, which was adapted to the big screen in 1964, but partly because of a string of feature hits too.

While I first saw him in Airwolf, I soon saw him in many of these films on British television: The Flight of the Phoenix, The Dirty Dozen and Ice Station Zebra. In between were other varied pictures, such as Barabbas, The Oscar and The Wild Bunch, with Borgnine lower in the credits or part of an ensemble cast. By the time the seventies arrived, he was thoroughly recognisable but still able to play the gamut of roles, a much wider range than most of his peers. What’s more, he kept on going. If you recall, Lee Marvin started out in the same year as Borgnine and he acted up until his death at 63, but that was in 1987. Borgnine still had 44 feature films left in him, not to mention a string of TV movies and a host of roles in TV shows. He also kept acting until he died, in 2012 at the ripe old age of 95. Many will know him for movies made a decade after Lee Marvin died, like Gattaca, or even two decades, like RED. He nearly got to celebrate his centennial with us, but we can celebrate for him. Thanks for seven decades of movies, Ermes Effron Borgnino!

Director: Barry Caillier
Writers: Tim Noah and Barry Caillier, from a story by Tim Noah, Creed Noah, Mary Noah and Barry Caillier
Star: Tim Noah

Yes, that’s the real title and it’s enough to suggest that this short 55 minute feature is prime material for me to review as a Weird Wednesdays entry. But wait, there’s more! The film is a solo performance for Tim Noah, who has done almost nothing, according to IMDb, and comments there and elsewhere suggest that it’s a particularly surreal trip. ‘Try to imagine Pee Wee’s Playhouse in the Guggenheim without Lawrence Fishburne or any other entertainment value,’ writes one IMDb reviewer. ‘Is this what inspired the Just Say No campaign in the 80’s?’ asks a shocked viewer. ‘Saving it for the next time I drop acid,’ suggests another. It seemed like an utter obscurity, best appreciated by people who were already stoned by the time they pressed play. That it’s a musical comedy for children performed by a man who is far older than he should be only adds to the weirdness. And I can’t deny that it really did live up to all those expectations within the first twenty minutes. But then something strange happened: I started to dig this.

Now, I am still trying to figure some of it out, as there are some things going on that play very oddly, but I delved deeper into the history and reception of the film and found a lot that surprised me. For a start, it apparently won four Emmys, which is four more than, say, Star Trek, which was nominated for thirteen of them but didn’t win one. Now, I can’t seem to find any information about which Emmys it won because the Emmy website doesn’t mention it at all, so it’s likely that these are Northwest Regional Emmys, like the dozen which Noah won a decade and some later for a children’s TV show entitled How ’Bout That. His IMDb credits are also misleading; it’s fair to say that he’s a versatile and busy talent, merely not on the big screen, as his one feature, 1990’s Daredreamer, utterly failed to set the box office on fire. He’s recorded albums and written books. He’s toured exotic countries and even founded his own performing arts center, the Tim Noah Thumbnail Theater in Snohomish, WA.

What’s more, the lack of reviews at IMDb (there are only two, both of which give this one star out of ten) is more than made up for by the profusion of praise that dominates the DVD page on Amazon (87% gave it a maximum) and in the many testimonials Noah is happy to plaster across his website. Apparently this began life as an album, Noah’s debut, in 1983; it won the Parents Choice Award and the American Library Association listed it as a Notable Children’s Recording. This film version is really a long form music video for the album, which was aired on KOMO TV, an ABC affiliate in Seattle, and later HBO, the Disney Channel and even the BBC. Then again, the BBC brought us the Teletubbies, so that’s not entirely a given! It would appear that a sizeable audience watched it on TV, happily bought the VHS tape and proceeded to wear the thing out through repeated viewings. This is a genuine cult hit, merely a cult hit that’s not mentioned in the circles which rave about filmmakers like Herschell Gordon Lewis or Alejandro Jodorowsky.

So, what’s it about? Well, having just watched the film in entirety, I’m not entirely sure I can answer that question! At heart, it’s an attempt to connect to kids who aren’t having the greatest time of it and help them to escape their dull routines by exercising their imaginations, but then so’s every other show for children, right? Whatever this is, it can’t fairly be dismissed by dumping it into a basket with a host of other shows; for all its faults, it’s notably original. For a start, it’s focused utterly on Noah himself, as the only human being we see in 55 minutes of running time. Yes, we hear his mum’s voice and he interacts with a plethora of puppets, but mostly it’s him in a single set. Beyond acting, he showcases his singing in a variety of styles, all of which thankfully predate today’s pop trends. He bounces around a lot, in a mild but energetic combination of dancing and acrobatics. He pantomimes. He performs magic tricks. He sports a wild range of outfits, from eighties pastel shades to circus ringleader. Everything’s about him.

Another reason why he stands out is because he’s in colour while his room is in black and white. No, that’s not a clever effect; the room and everything in it is simply painted black and white. It’s a neat way to highlight a drab childhood, even if the real reason was that the budget was somewhere south of not a heck of a lot. It also means that each of the dozen songs gives him a chance to escape into a new world, which grow inside his room using imaginative stage gimmickry and props. The big exception is the first one, which is easily the most dubious and not merely because it’s shot using primitive eighties technology; there are things that I have trouble explaining away, given that this production was clearly aimed at young children. I’m assuming, for a start, that Noah wasn’t really trying to hint that kids should own up to their homosexuality, then have incestuous sex with paedophile fathers, but it’s right there, next to bouncing on peanut butter sandwiches in space, which symbolism now seems more kinky in context.

So, let’s back up a step and see if any of you can suggest a better explanation. We begin when Mr. Tim (as the disembodied voice of his imagination calls him) arrives home and enters his black and white room with his giant black and white boom box. He listens to different stations, reacting with dance moves or air guitar, but retunes a lot as they’re all obsessed with his closet. Announcers tell him not to look in there, singers sing about its hidden dangers and he even tunes into KLST Kloset. He’s promptly sucked into that closet anyway but comes out of it as a spaceman, leaping off a moon and having a bath in space with an inflatable shark. He’s naked as a jaybird but daddy joins him in that bath anyway, dressed up as a sailor in a pink shirt and a porn moustache. Here’s verse two of Zoom, which this accompanies: ‘Me and my friends were in the bathtub havin’ fun tryin’ to get clean, when in walked my father; he dived in the water, took us for a ride on his submarine.’ Yes, please explain this without incest, paedophilia and gay group sex.

While it’s hard to explain that one away, the rest of the film settles down considerably. Mr. Tim’s imagination rings him on a stone dinosaur to set him a mission: to find the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo. Mr. Tim doesn’t want to know. He’s well aware that his imagination tends to get him into trouble, but he’s promptly talked into it for the fame and the fortune. The second song, If I Only Knew, the first one we see Noah actually sing, is a strange meta piece because it’s all about how he doesn’t have a clue what the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo is. No, we don’t have a clue either. If I understood the point of the movie, then it’s whatever Mr. Tim wants it to be. Like any six year old, Mr. Tim is upset that he doesn’t know what it is, gets distracted by monkeys and then decides that it’s going to be whatever he wants. That’s a pretty fair lesson to teach the little ones, much better, for instance, then suggesting that they can live in the trees and raise a family of monkeys. I don’t think biology works that way.

While I don’t usually pull out records for kids to listen to, the twelve tracks we hear from Noah are actually pretty decent. They’re varied in style, from the country folk of Sunshiney Mornin’ through the James Taylor-esque seventies soft rock of Friends with a Song to the Elvis Presley style rockabilly of Big Booger. That one’s about Mr. Tim getting picked on at school by a musclebound bully and the teacher never noticing; it leads into a self-explanatory sad little ballad called Tears on My Toes. Noah wisely avoids trying to be hip and leaping on the latest styles, using whatever works for each moment in this story. He doesn’t have the greatest voice in the world but he’s versatile enough to sound right with each of these styles, which is a good thing given that the success of this entire enterprise rests on him and it only exists to showcase the songs. I wouldn’t rewind a VHS tape of this to watch again and again but I can see why so many kids did. It’s like a compilation of different music that teams up to tell a single story.

The weirdest song has to be Musty Moldy Melvin. While Mr. Tim is the only human in evidence, he’s had a great time with puppets while singing a number of songs. He keeps a cat and a dog in his chest of drawers. During If I Was, a gorilla rips off his trousers and an elephant pulls him behind a tree. There’s an oddly undulating giraffe in his room during The Monkey Song, perhaps because it’s just the right height to look up his loincloth when he’s chilling with a monkey on top of the closet. But Musty Moldy Melvin features a host of weird creatures like the title character, who does the hoochie-koochie-koo, and Greasy Grimy Gertie who does the boogie boo. In fact, all the creepy little critters in the gurgly-gloppy-goo want to dance with him and they get their shot. He doesn’t seem remotely happy about it, but they were my faourite part of the movie. Sadly, my grandkids know how to whip and nae nae; I wish they’d do the boogie boo instead with these glorious nightmare creations that look like diseases on legs.

I can’t see Tim Noah doing the stanky legg, but he does seem to have found that magic spot where he can explain real world social issues, like social ostracism and environmental awareness in songs that are engaging to children. His album, Kaddywompas, appears to be a good example of this. I’m not sure how his feature, Daredreamer, works from that standpoint; from what I’ve read about it, it seems to revisit many of the themes he explored here and in a similar musical fashion, but with the inclusion of odd anomalies like a brief nude scene and a couple of swearwords that would bar this from appealing to the same audience. Surely, however, an adult audience would have a problem with Noah, who would have been 39 when Daredreamer was shot, portraying a high school student. We can't buy it here in In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo!? and he was a relative spring chicken at only 34! I will find that and check it out, but I can’t see it living up to this one, even the calmer last forty minutes after Zoom is done.

What shocks me most about this film isn’t the title and it isn’t even that first deviant song, it’s the fact that Noah managed to do so much with so little. The budget is so low that almost everyone else in the credits has the same last name. Tim Noah wrote the story with Creed Noah and Mary Noah (and director Barry Caillier); Creed Noah also produced (with Pat Royce), while Bill Noah and Zola Noah were both executive producers. Mary Noah also created the costumes. At this point, we have to wonder if set designer Rollin Thomas is merely a pseudonym, given that it’s his sole credit. While the film clearly belongs to Tim Noah, Rollin Thomas cannot be ignored for the craftsmanship that he put into these sets and the imagination with which he endowed them; if he’s real, I can only assume that he was massively experienced in stage work. And here I am praising this picture, even though I fully expected it to be a bad acid trip that would have been impossible to watch. To be honest, I’m half disappointed! But only half.

Director: Boris Petroff
Writer: Larry Lee, from a story by Jane Mann
Stars: J. Pat O'Malley, Jenny Maxwell, Valerie Allen, Buzz Martin, William Schallert, Nan Peterson, Peter Colt and Jack Searle

Classic exploitation flicks had a habit of overselling their cheap products but rarely do they come more oversold than this one. It’s a shocking picture, say the various posters, apparently all about child brides in the Ozarks in ‘flaming hillbilly color’. ‘Was she too old at 15?’ one poster asks, with scantily clad Jenny Maxwell front and centre a year after she didn’t land the lead role in Kubrick’s Lolita. ‘She was only 15 and itchin’ for a man,’ suggests another. Of course, such advertising can’t help but remind us of Child Bride, a 1938 film that has become legendary for all the wrong reasons. It aimed to combat the scourge of child marriage in the Ozarks by showing us an underage girl skinnydipping. Shirley Mills was twelve, while her body double, Bernice Stobaugh Ray, was thirteen. That embarrassment of a movie ran for years on the indie circuit, so perhaps the producers of this one had a deliberate eye on its audience, even though Shotgun Wedding doesn’t feature a single thing that would seem out of place on a TV sitcom of its era.

And that’s odd, because Larry Lee, who wrote the script from a story by the director’s wife, Jane Mann, appears to be a pseudonym for one Edward D. Wood, Jr. Now, Wood’s most famous movies were all released in the fifties, culminating with the legendary Plan 9 from Outer Space in 1959, but his career hadn’t yet descended to outright pornography as it would by the end of the sixties, both in books and films. However, I don’t recall anything from Wood’s pen that plays out quite so tamely and it’s surprisingly unsurprising to see Joe Blevins quote the artist Don Fellman, who said in Rudolph Grey’s biography of Wood, Nightmare of Ecstasy, that Wood had written a script for The Beverly Hillbillies which had been ‘rejected at the last minute’. This does feel like Wood distilled down all the component parts of the hicksploitation genre, rendered them family friendly for television and shoehorned them all into an hour. There are no boobs and no deaths and I could hear the nonexistent laugh track over the annoying crackle of my cheap copy.

I watched from a digital rip of a poor quality VHS tape because the film is steadfastly unvailable. Nobody has yet released it on DVD and I’m not convinced that anyone ever released a good quality print on VHS. For all that it feels like a TV sitcom, I’m not sure that it ever screened on television either. Yet, while it’s hardly high cinematic art, its obscurity seems unfair. Beyond the contribution of someone like Ed Wood with his sizeable cult fanbase, many others involved are also notable. The director was the Russian born Boris Petroff, whose career is often tied to Wood’s, as he made films like The Unearthly, with John Carradine, Allison Hayes and Tor Johnson; this was his very last feature. The surf music playing during the ‘wedding shindig’ is by Jerry Capehart, who wrote songs as important as Summertime Blues and C’mon Everybody with Eddie Cochran, whom he managed. It’s utterly out of place here and is clearly not being played on the two acoustic guitars and one banjo that we see, but it’s enjoyably catchy nonetheless.

On screen are many recognisable faces, starting with J. Pat O’Malley, who’s given a rare leading role and lives up to it. He wasn’t a major film actor, being known more for the two hundred TV shows on which he appeared and for the voice work he did for Walt Disney in pictures like Alice in Wonderland, One Hundred and One Dalmations and The Jungle Book. However, he’s still fun to watch here as Buford Anchors, a self-proclaimed river rat who lives on a houseboat outside Mudcat Landing (population 47) with his two sons, Shub and Rafe; his daughter, Lucianne; and his girlfriend, Melanie, who’s of a similar age to his kids. He was doing her a favour at the time, helping her out as she was running from the authorities, having shot the strongman for whom she worked at a carnival back east, but he also seems to have genuinely fallen for her, however shrewish she becomes when he won’t let her know where he hid her $3,000. If there’s a plot here, rather than a string of scenes, it’s sparked by her announcement that she’s pregnant.

Melanie is played by Valerie Allen, one of a trio of gorgeous young ladies who brighten up this film. She’s also the least recognised of the three, even if she met Troy Donohue while filming Come Spy with Me and promptly became his third wife; like O’Malley, she’s a television actress who also made films. Playing Lucianne Anchors, Nan Peterson is a little more recognisable, at least to folk who saw The Hideous Sun Demon, the first of her four features; this was her last. She also appeared on a slew of TV shows, including four episodes of The Twilight Zone. Most recognisable of this bevy of beauties is Jenny Maxwell, the one featured on those outrageously misleading posters. She’s Honey Bee, the daughter of Buford’s neighbour, Silas, and the girl that Rafe has fallen hard for. They get a make out session on the river bank in one scene that reminds of From Here to Eternity, just without waves, though it’s surely a nod to her most famous role, in Blue Hawaii, in which she’s spanked on the beach by Elvis Presley.

Maxwell also got to sadly bring some of what happens here to her real life. The film is entitled Shotgun Wedding, perhaps because it contains both a shotgun and a wedding; we almost get a shotgun wedding during the finalé but that validation of the title is lost in less than a minute. Almost two decades later, Maxwell was actually shot dead, along with her husband, in what is usually seen as a botched robbery attempt. The film revolves around a marriage that features a major difference in ages; Valerie Allen was 27 at the time, while her screen husband, J. Pat O’Malley, was 59. When she died, Maxwell was 39 while her husband, Ervin M. ‘Tip’ Roeder, a criminal attorney, was 60. It’s fair to say that they just avoid failing the creepy test (half the man’s age and add seven), while the film’s fictional equivalent fails it utterly. Yes, the balding Buford and the mellifluous Melanie are too far adrift in age for their love match to be believed, but this is a hicksploitation movie so we should be surprised that they aren’t related to boot.

The closest this film gets to incest is the suggestion that Melanie’s baby might be Shub’s rather than his father’s, as he’s head over heels in love with her too. Then again, he’s the stereotypically strong but dumb hillbilly son, so we can’t even be sure he’s got her into the sack yet. What we get instead is a focus on the classic hicksploitation feud, which found its way into Appalachia with Celts immigrating to the States and is epitomised by the Hatfields and the McCoys. Every hicksploitation tale has to have a feud and this one has neighbour vs. neighbour, Buford vs. Silas, for no reason that we can fathom except that the latter is over-protective of his only daughter, Honey Bee. Writing this, I immediately hearken back to the lack of incest, because it’s not there in the movie. Sure, Honey Bee wears as little as possible at every point, to the degree that she even takes an outdoor shower at one point, but daddy’s upset about the idea that anyone might see his daughter so scantily clad rather than jealous of anyone who succeeds.

Most of the other standard hicksploitation elements included here show up in dialogue, which is occasionally clumsy but delivered well, at least by the adults and the young ladies; the young men are easily the weakest part of the movie. Former child actor Jackie Searl, who was the Dormouse in the star-studded 1933 version of Alice in Wonderland, at twelve years of age, is given some fantastic lines here: ‘Courtin’ and wooin’ brings dallyin’ and doin’,’ he snaps at Honey Bee. As his nemesis, O’Malley gets some too; when the preacher suggests that he take Melanie for better or worse, he quips that ‘Things can’t get much worse so I think I’d better.’ We’re given a great combo when Buford asks Melanie, ‘You gonna kiss me?’ and she replies, ‘You chewin’ tobacco?’ Melanie isn’t passed over for lines; when she tells Buford she’s going to have a baby, she spells it out, with three B’s. My favourite went to Lucianne, as she rushes into the wedding shindig to cry, ‘Pa! The preacher fell in the hog wallow!’ That’s hicksploitation in only eight words.

I’ve left out the preacher thus far, because he’s the other star of this show and deserves special mention. While the story revolves around J. Pat O’Malley as Buford Anchors and the visuals focus primarily on the three stunning young ladies in the cast, it’s fair to say that most of the success of the movie has to do with the subtle villainy of William Schallert as Preacher Parsons. Like O’Malley, he was prolific on television; he actually puts his co-star to shame, having appeared in almost three hundred shows over a strong six decade career, including a long run on The Patty Duke Show. Unlike O’Malley, he was also a notable film actor, racking up almost a hundred feature films and passing that threshold if we factor in TV movies. His first scene here ably highlights that he’s not the man of God he pretends to be, but we find out a lot more as the film runs on; he’s the only character who isn’t a cardboard cutout. This picture was surely never meant to be about the acting, but I got a real kick out of seeing O’Malley and Schallert play leads.

I’m not going to delve deeply into the plot because there really isn’t one. Rafe is in love with Honey Bee and she returns that love; his brother Shub is in love with Melanie, who’s clearly stringing him along. She’s stringing Buford along too, even though he’s not kidding about falling for her, because Melanie is in love with the three grand that he hid for her and she couldn’t care less about a one of them. Sister Lucianne is clearly fond of Preacher Parsons; the preacher likes all the pretty little things who keep smiling at him throughout and leaving him with not so subtle come ons like ‘I ain’t hard to find.’ Then again, that was Lucianne’s response to the preacher’s query, ‘Young lady, are you a milkmaid or an angel in disguise?’ This is more soap opera than plot and the feud has little to add. Sure, Buford rails at Silas and Silas rails at Buford, but we really don’t buy the escalation to shotgun wielding posse in the slightest. Hicksploitation needs more than fluttering eyelids, shotguns and Daisy dukes and this movie is the proof.

While I enjoyed The Beverly Hillbillies and The Dukes of Hazzard, hicksploitation was always meant to be a more adult genre and this feels lacking because it plays it so safe. Other prominent exploitation filmmakers of the day played in the genre and avoided such safety with abandon. Russ Meyer was one year away from Lorna and one more from Mudhoney, both of which make this seem like kindergarten viewing. Herschell Gordon Lewis was similarly a year away from both Moonshine Mountain and, my favourite of his, Two Thousand Maniacs!, the latter of which adds a further element to the sexual violence of Meyer’s films. Frankly, Shotgun Wedding isn’t as wild as something as studio safe as Swing Your Lady, Humphrey Bogart’s most embarrassing film, in which he’s a wrestling promoter touring the Ozarks with dim-witted talent who promptly falls in love with the hillbilly amazon he’s supposed to battle. And that one has authentic old time country music! Even The Beverly Hillbillies had Flatt and Scruggs!

Swing Your Lady was a movie set in the Ozarks but shot on the Warner Bros. lot in Hollywood. This one was at least shot on location out in the countryside but it’s hardly the right countryside. The Ozarks sprawl across Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, which is Osage country, but, for some reason, Boris Petroff Productions chose to shoot it in Apache Junction, Arizona. The town of Mudcat Landing, a sprawling metropolis for a population of 47, is really the original Apacheland movie ranch in Gold Canyon, not far from where the Arizona Renaissance Festival thrives today. It was built in 1959, capitalising on interest in the area after Paramount had shot the Clanton ranch scenes in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Gold Canyon two years earlier. It opened in 1960 and immediately saw success as a location for western TV shows and the odd movie, like Charro! and The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Most of the town burned in 1969, but it was rebuilt and remained in operation until it burned again in 2004. The last film shot there was Blind Justice in 1994.

The other location prominently used here was much harder to track down and I have to thank Charlie LeSeuer, Arizona’s western film historian, for being such a fount of knowledge. We start in Mudcat Landing and we go back there at points, but most of this is shot on and around the houseboat of Buford Anchors somewhere outside of town. There’s a bridge nearby, which looks rather like the Sheep Bridge which crosses the Verde river northeast of Carefree, but it isn’t that one. It’s actually a different Sheep Bridge, of a similar design but in a different place, which crossed the Salt River in the Usery Mountain Regional Park east of Mesa. There are few details online, but it seems that it was washed away in 1966. We do joke aboout Arizona knocking buildings down as they reach ten years of age, but Shotgun Wedding does appear to have been shot in a town that burned down and by a bridge that was washed away. Perhaps that’s appropriate for a movie that’s become rather forgotten, even if anyone really paid attention to it on release.

Important sources:
Joe Blevins - Shotgun Wedding at Dead 2 Rights.

Key locations in the film on Google Maps.

Director: Boaz Davidson
Writer: Marc Behm from a story by Boaz Davidson
Stars: Barbi Benton, Chip Lucia, Jon Van Ness, Den Surles, Gay Austin, John Warner Williams and Lanny Duncan

With My Bloody Valentine being far too obvious a Valentine’s Day pick for my Horror Movie Calendar, I searched around and found this feature, which begins on Valentine’s Day and which is flavoured by it throughout. It was shot as X-Ray but released as Hospital Massacre, a much more salacious title. While the original isn’t exactly a name to reach out and grab us by the wallet, the new one unfortunately pigeonholes the movie into the slasher genre, which almost everybody seems to believe this is. I thought so too for maybe half the running time, but I gradually discarded that idea because the film makes precisely no sense as a slasher. Now, it is well within the bounds of possibility that director Boaz Davidson, who also wrote the original story which Marc Behm adapted into a screenplay, is completely inept and had no conception of how utterly ridiculous this really is. I don’t buy that and have a theory that allows everything we see to make complete sense. So settle down, kids, and let me explain.

Initially, it does follow the slasher template, right down to the flashback prologue that takes place in 1961. We’re at Susan Jeremy’s house and she’s inside playing with a friend called David and a train set. Another boy leaves a Valentine’s card at her front door, knocks to get her attention, then runs back to the window to watch her open it. Unfortunately for him, it doesn’t go so well. ‘From Harold?’ David cries. ‘Oh my God!’ Susan adds. He screws it up and discards it as they laugh. So, during the brief time she leaves the room to cut a couple of slices of cake, Harold apparently sneaks in through the window, lifts David up high and impales him on a hatstand which stubbornly refuses to tip over, even with a ten year old corpse throwing it off balance. Little Susan screams and we leap forward nineteen years to 1980. Susan is all grown up now and looking rather professional in her red business suit. She has a daughter called Eva and a bitter ex-husband named Tom, but she’s off to hospital with her new beau, Jack, to get some test results.

So far, so good for a slasher movie, though we aren’t given any additional information here to help us along. We don’t know what the police thought about David’s gruesome demise, because we never see any. We don’t know that Harold was arrested and locked away in a psych ward like Michael Myers. We don’t know if he continued to obsess over Susan. We don’t really know much at all, just that Susan grew up and has to get some test results. And here’s where I’m going to depart from conventional wisdom and call a different tune. I don’t believe that Susan and Tom are divorced and I don’t believe that Jack exists. I do believe that it’s Tom who will drop his wife off at the hospital, before taking Eva home. I do believe that Susan is going to stress out about how scary her test results are going to be. And I do believe that she worries herself so much that her mind descends into a Kafka-esque nightmare of weird intensity that dredges up the suppressed trauma of David’s death. Keep that in mind and this will make a lot more sense.

The little disconnections from reality begin as they arrive at the hospital. Jack stops in the no parking zone and because Susan says that it’ll only take a couple of minutes, he stays there. He suddenly realises, totally out of the blue, that this was the hospital where some maniac ran amok the previous year. ‘Oh please!’ replies Susan. And into the hospital she goes to ask for Dr. Jacobs’ office, the doctor she’s been seeing for a few years now. The man with a mop drums his fingers in a notably creepy fashion, leering at Susan. Inside the elevator is a fresh corpse, propped against the wall, bleeding on her pristine white shoes. Ah no, it’s a sleepy man and a burger. He wishes her a Happy Valentine’s Day as he leaves. A trio of workers in gas masks and short sleeved shirts are supposedly fumigating the ninth floor, but they’re just hanging around the elevator to tell her she’s gone a stop too far. Then someone pulls a switch and stops the elevator. Just a few minutes, remember? Time never flows at the standard rate in our dreams.

While Susan is stuck in the lift, Dr. Jacobs is called up to the ninth floor for no apparent reason and with no apparent destination. It has to be said that she looks very young and very nervous, but perhaps that’s because there’s nobody to be found anywhere on the ninth floor; even the fumigators have disappeared. And we, up here in the cheap seats, can’t fail to pose a barrage of questions. For a start, I get that Jacobs walks up the stairs because the elevator isn’t responsive but, when she steps out of the stairwell and into a dark and hazy floor that’s clearly not being used, why doesn’t she assume this is a prank and walk right back down again? Does this junior hospital doctor have nothing better to do with her time than wander around a disused hospital floor in the dark wondering why she’s there? Why does she walk tentatively into a random room and then close the door behind her? Why does she pull back a sheet to expose a corpse? And why does she wander over to a locker to get stabbed to death by the maniac in scrubs?

None of this makes sense. It would make sense if she was a college student trying to grab the last few items for the scavenger hunt that might get her into a sorority in a slasher movie, but it makes no sense in this context. The only other way that it makes sense is if it’s the product of Susan’s nightmare. This sort of thing goes on and on. That creepy janitor from earlier discovers Dr. Jacobs hanging upside down in a locker, for no believable reason at all. When he tells the doctor hovering outside, he runs away and the janitor chases him into a room, somehow loses him in there and then stands around waiting for the maniacal killer to materialise out of nowhere and thrust his face into a conveniently nearby sink full of acid. Does anything here make sense at all? I should add that Susan’s fiancé, Jack, is still parked in the no parking zone right in front of the hospital. Nobody has told him to move. Nobody has given him a ticket. He doesn’t wonder why Susan’s taking so long. And it’s so quiet that he even falls asleep.

The only thing that makes sense is that, amidst the creepy doctors, creepy nurses and creepy patients of this hospital, Susan finds one helpful soul to try to lever her out of the bureaucratic nightmare in which she’s found herself mired. And his name is Harry. It isn’t remotely possible that anyone can fail to figure out the killer in this movie; it’s no more difficult to guess who will murder his way through the credits in a new Friday the 13th picture. Yet, the introduction of friendly intern Harry doesn’t stop everyone else in this hospital from acting creepy. In one notorious scene, Dr. Dan Saxon submits Susan, who he has strip down to her panties, to an utterly awkward physical examination. In slow motion. We saw her X-rays too, though they looked more like a gorgon than an actual human body part, and they weren’t of her feet. Or her throat. Or her thighs. Dr. Beam isn’t any better and Nurses Dora and Kitty are there to enforce not to nurse. And these are just the employees! Just wait until you meet the patients!

There has to come a point where enough is enough. If we stubbornly persist in reading this as a straightforward slasher, it’s going to really suck. Sure, the score is impressive, full of choral weirdness and orchestral strains, courtesy of composer Arlon Ober, who had conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but the rest fails any test you throw at it. The quality of the acting ranges from capable on down. The cinematography is nothing to write home about. The editing seems off, with a few shots stubbornly refusing to end. The deaths are reasonably plentiful, at least, and the effects decent; one in particular took me by surprise, which is a strong compliment. But the script makes less and less sense as time goes by and the levels of surreality keep on increasing. Nobody seems willing to tell Susan what’s wrong with her, but they dump her into a ward anyway with three old women who rant and rave like a lunatic Greek chorus. I honestly wondered if she had found her way into a mental hospital by mistake.

Beyond the score, there are only two things that work. One is the performance of Barbi Benton as Susan Jeremy, which I must say is surprising because she was never the greatest actor in the world, as decorative as she is in films like Deathstalker. While she was more versatile than most expect, with a string of repeat TV roles and a brief career as a country singer (Brass Buckles reached #5 on the country chart in 1975), she was still primarily known in 1981 for her modelling career that had led her to the Playboy mansion. She met Hugh Hefner at the age of eighteen and he asked her out; when she replied that she’d never dated anyone over 24 before, the 42 year old mogul quipped, ‘That’s all right, neither have I.’ They lived together for seven years, during which time she graced the cover of Playboy three times and ‘photo-essays’ inside twice more. Even though it didn’t seem likely, she does everything here that she needs to do and she successfully sells the nightmare that she finds herself trapped in.

The other success is that nightmare. Halfway through, I stopped watching this as a slasher. I ceased waiting for the next kill to see how ingenious it would be. I quit throwing my hands up in disdain at how ridiculous each scene continued to be. I gave up bitching internally about how empty this hospital is, even when nurses whom we’ve never seen before are suddenly murdered in wild and wacky ways, like the one where the killer walks down a typically dark hallway with a sheet held out in front of him and his mobile light source. Instead I settled back and let the surreality wash over me. Watching this as a stress-driven, PTSD-fuelled nightmare doesn’t merely make sense; it also ups the creepy factor substantially. After she wakes up in the ward to find a horrific gift by her bedside, she runs off and opens the first door she finds, exposing three people in full body casts, flailing around like lunatics. That image is fleeting and utterly irrelevant to the story, but it’s glorious and it’ll stay with me.

There are other images that will stay with me too. At one point, Susan has to wait in Dr. Saxon’s office for a while and eventually her eyes wander to the pictures of wounds framed and hanging on his walls; I couldn’t help but remember how Will Graham told Dr. Hannibal Lecktor how he knew he was the killer he sought. There’s a patient with the same name as me, who looks rather like an intoxicated Quentin Tarantino; he crops up at points throughout the movie and always adds a little edge. A number of notable scenes involve privacy screens, almost like a fetish, and one in particular stands out for its nightmarish quality, the killer inviting Jack to ‘come closer’ to see what is presumably his fiancée collapsed in a wheelchair behind a privacy screen, all through a set of creepy whispers. As I write this, I feel I should set a reminder six months out for me to re-read this review and see which images leap right back to front and centre and which have faded over time. At this point, I’m interested to see how that comes out.

And so, this was utterly not what I expected. Yes, it’s a great movie for Valentine’s Day, with a snubbed young psychopath maybe re-discovering his crush a couple of decades later and murdering his way towards her; if he can’t win her metaphorical heart, he will just have settle for the physical thing, right? But it isn’t a slasher movie, it’s a trip into the subconscious of a young lady with trauma in her past and stress in her present about the possibility of bad news in her future. It’s a consistently wild nightmare of a movie, weird and wonderful and worthy of comparison to films like Possession rather than films like Halloween. Barbi Benton is the lead the film needs and the sight of her half naked is always welcome. The filmography of Boaz Davidson may not be particularly impressive in any way other than picture count, but this deserves to be remembered along with The Last American Virgin and the Israeli movies like Mishpahat Tzan’ani that provide his best IMDb ratings. It’s just not a slasher movie, folks.

Director: Paul Stanley
Writer: Guerdon Trueblood
Stars: Vince Edwards, William Shatner and Richard Basehart

This review is part of the Movie of the Week Blogathon hosted by Classic Film and TV Café.

I’ve taken part in a few blogathons in my time, but they’ve generally revolved around people, usually actors. However, this one is a little more interesting, courtesy of Rick Armstrong at Classic Film & TV Café, who has set up a Movie of the Week Blogathon with the goal of celebrating TV movies, made between the mid-sixties and the late-eighties. He aims for this to be an annual event, so I will put a list together for next year of some more TV movies I’ve been meaning to catch up with. This year, however, I was always going to go with Sole Survivor, which was first broadcast on CBS on 9th January, 1970. I first read about this film when researching William Shatner, a man whose early movie career is utterly fascinating, with an amazingly varied selection of interesting material up until he turned into a caricature of himself in, arguably, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Many, though far from all, of those films were made for TV and this is a great example of television a lot deeper than Captain Kirk, T. J. Hooker and Denny Crane.

We don’t meet Shatner for a while. Instead we’re introduced slowly and subtly to a scene while the opening credits roll, through a combination of visuals, sound and music. We’re in the desert, which we later find out is in Libya, looking at the wreck of a bomber, a B-25 Mitchell which is strafed with bullet holes. There’s a pitcher painted on the hull, throwing a baseball with a broken swastika on it, above the name of the plane. As we realise we’re looking at the corpse of the Home Run, the desert wind gives way to strains of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, played plaintively on the harmonica. Then we hear a progression of machine gun fire, radio chatter and jazz music, as if the Home Run itself is waking up and remembering what happened to it. Sure enough, the next thing we see is a human being, one of five who are using the plane as shelter. They’re all in uniform, surely the men who flew the old bird and it’s clear that they haven’t left this remote site in the last seventeen years, not least because they haven’t aged. Yes, they’re all ghosts.

Well, given that the movie is called Sole Survivor, we initially wonder which one of them is alive and which four are only alive in his memories, but it doesn’t take long to figure out to whom the title is truly referring. That revelation arrives as a result of a couple of Brits sighting the well-preserved wreckage from above. The sixth and only missing member of the crew is Russ Hamner, who is far from a ghost and far from Libya. He parachuted out, survived the rest of World War II and worked his way up the ranks to become Brig. Gen. Hamner; he’s about to be informed of the long overdue discovery of his old bird by a pair of officers who are working for the Inspector General’s office. The Home Run is three hundred miles south of Benghazi, which means seven hundred from where he reported it lost off the coast of Sicily. ‘All we have are you and the plane,’ is a very telling comment and, sure enough, Hamner flies on with them to the Libyan desert to investigate the wreck and try to figure out what happened to it and its remaining crew.

Now, this introduction may sound rather familiar to you, but why may depend on how old you are. Military historians, who will be avid viewers of this feature, may well realise that the Home Run is based on a real bomber, a B-24 Liberator called the Lady Be Good, which was lost after a bombing raid on Naples in 1943 but re-discovered in the Libyan desert by a BP exploration team in 1958; the crew had overflown their air base in a sandstorm and, because of a navigation system limitation, continued on the precise opposite course to what they needed until they ran out of fuel. Television fans from the generation before mine may remember an episode of The Twilight Zone called King Nine Will Not Return, which began that show’s second season in 1960 with Rod Serling introducing in person for the first time. This was fiction based on the Lady Be Good, the bodies of whose crew had coincidentally been found only a couple of weeks before the episode aired; a grave marker in the episode deliberately carries the date the Lady Be Good was lost.

Sole Survivor came along a decade later, but there are successors to this story as well as predecessors. A British horror writer, James Herbert, wrote a novel in 1976 called The Survivor, which introduced a supernatural angle to his work. This particular novel began with the horrific crash of a 747 passenger jet which took the lives of everyone on board except for one, then followed him, the co-pilot, who is utterly and mysteriously unhurt. This book was filmed under the same name, in Australia in 1981, with Robert Powell in the title role, and that combination stayed with me long enough to spoil the legendary twist of The Sixth Sense. I recall realising, two thirds of the way through that movie, that I’d taken its twist for granted from the outset. Looking back, after seeing this, I can see a direct line of influence from Serling to Shyamalan, via Guerdon Trueblood, who wrote this original screenplay, and Herbert. Coincidentally, Silver Screenings chose to cover Trueblood’s other 1970 TV movie, The Love War, for this very blogathon.

There’s a lot to like in this movie, which is at turns brutal, suspenseful and touching. The latter first shows up with the trucks that bring people to the wreck for the first time in seventeen years. Capt. MacDonald, played by Patrick Wayne, lines all his men up for inspection and he smartly salutes the investigator who walks towards them. Maj. Michael Devlin, in the form of the leading man, Vince Edwards, even touches his cap, as if in response, but it’s just an instinctive action as he says of the plane, ‘I wish it could talk.’ This is the point where it’s finally confirmed to our five young airmen that they’re truly dead; as they adjust to something they’ve considered already, they hang around to see what will happen. Initially, they don’t even recognise their former colleague. ‘Don’t look much like him,’ one states. ‘It’s him... and it isn’t,’ suggests another. ‘If it is him, he lived,’ underlines a third. A chilling scene follows as Hamner climbs back into his old seat to remember and the ghosts of the five men he survived crowd around to watch.

We watch too and, while the flashback outlines where we’re going to end up, we have no idea at this point how we’re going to get there. The leads are Edwards and Shatner, who are doing the same job but with a very different level of intensity. The latter is the man in charge, Lt. Col. Josef Gronke, but he doesn’t want to rock the boat, two years away from retirement; he’s not going to ‘lock horns’ with a brigadier general. The former has no such qualms, for personal reasons which we’ll soon discover; he’s a driven man who sees the truth as more important than a colleague’s career. Even at this point, a third of the way into the picture, there isn’t a clear direction. Is this a straightforward investigation case, only with ghosts? Is it a Tell-Tale Heart style guilt trip for the general? Given that the crash was seventeen years ago and Gronke has served for eighteen, is there a hidden past that’s going to be trawled out? Is he simply playing good cop to Devlin’s bad cop? I appreciated the possibilities that Trueblood left open for us.

The film benefits from them as much as it does the eventual twist, which I didn’t see coming. The sheer brutality of it is tempered somewhat by a scene unfolding a few miles away, but the actual ending is left open for us. The sadistic among us will take it in one direction, with the ramifications truly horrifying, but the hopeful of our number will see a very satisfactory conclusion. I must add that this is far from a cop-out; it’s a very clever ending indeed. Trueblood’s filmography is hardly stuffed with masterpieces, as the writer of The Savage Bees and Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, as the director of The Candy Snatchers or even as an actor, a role which he only filled once, in Meatcleaver Massacre; when your most seen movie is Jaws 3-D, you’re not going to be remembered well. That’s a real shame, because this picture is well written through and through, with some sharp dialogue, some clever plot progression and some neat character development, not to mention some worthy little touches here and there to add depth.

Maj. Devlin is the emphatical focus and Vince Edwards ably has him drive the story forward with passion which remains even after its origin has been explained. Shatner is second billed, but the character flaws of Lt. Col. Gronke bolster the other actors on screen more than they allow him opportunities. What he gets is great dialogue, as most of the best lines are given to Shatner. ‘The Libyan desert is no place to make waves,’ Gronke tells Devlin, one of a number of his lines that made me smile. The real supporting slot is that of Brig. Gen. Hamner and Richard Basehart is the actor given the most opportunity to emote, whether drunk or sober, which he is more than happy to explore. The presence of the five ghost airmen prevent the script from descending into a battle between Devlin and Hamner; they serve as a very effective Greek chorus. Even if it takes some time for us to gather up their names (they’re collectively Mac, Tony, Brandy, Gant and Elmo), we’re right there with them as what become seen as the victims of this tragedy.

What’s more, they grow too! They’re far from cardboard cutouts hanging around the wreck of the Home Run waiting for someone to notice them. They’re also more than just props to move the script along, adding little details where necessary to set up the next discovery. They provide a very human face to tragedy, providing us with a bridge to the past and reminding us of how things have changed. Until these investigators drive up in trucks, they aren’t even aware that the war is over, let alone that they didn’t survive it. At one point, dispatches arrive for the general by helicopter, something none of them have ever seen, though some remember hearing about such an invention. ‘I wonder if this is the only progress the human race has made in seventeen years,’ one of them philosophises. When the investigators listen to a baseball game on the radio, the ghosts listen and Elmo comments, ‘I don’t know how they worked it, but Brooklyn is now in Los Angeles.’ The littlest thing is huge when you’ve been lost for seventeen years.

While it was William Shatner who drew me to this film, it’s the brooding Vince Edwards who leaves it foremost in my mind. Also of note are Patrick Wayne, credited as Pat, and Lou Antonio; the former plays Mac, the Home Run’s captain, with respect and abiding courage, while the latter plays the odd man out of the five ghosts, a characteristic that lends his character some real substance. It’s unfair to overlook Richard Basehart either, especially if we’ve seen prior films as varied as He Walked by Night, Fixed Bayonets! and La Strada. He also played Ivan, the middle of The Brothers Karamazov, in MGM’s 1958 take on the novel; his younger brother, Alexi, was played by William Shatner, not the sort of actor you expect to show up in a Dostoevsky adaptation. Then again, he’s not the sort of actor you expect to play, a year after the end of Star Trek, a colonel so weak in character that he tightrope walks his way through a military career. He plays him well though, in yet another memorable, fascinating but sadly unknown movie from his early career.

Thank you, Rick Armstrong and Classic Film & TV Café for prompting me to get round to this one.

Director: Oscar Boetticher
Writers: Malvin Wald and Eugene Ling, based on a story by Malvin Wald
Stars: Lucille Bremer and Richard Carlson

You couldn’t tell it from this film, but Lucille Bremer was a dancer, a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall at the age of sixteen and the one ‘most likely to succeed’, according to her peers. It can’t surprise that she attempted a film career, but she failed her screen test at Warner Bros. and knew it, once she insisted on going back to view it. She went back to dancing, at clubs like the Copacabana and the Club Versailles in New York and, only later, got her second shot at Hollywood, after Arthur Freed saw her dancing and had her audition for Louis B. Mayer. This time it went well and a brief career in MGM musicals ensued. A supporting role as Judy Garland’s sister in Meet Me in St. Louis led to the lead in Vincente Minnelli’s Yolanda and the Thief, opposite a star of the calibre of Fred Astaire. Unfortunately, the picture failed for many reasons and she never got another musical lead. She danced with Astaire once more in Ziegfeld Follies and also appeared in Till the Clouds Roll By, the biopic of Jerome Kern. Her musical career had lasted three years.

Mayer considered that she also had potential for dramatic roles but she was never pushed for them. Her last MGM picture was in support of Lionel Barrymore and James Craig in the final Dr. Gillespie movie, Dark Delusion; then they loaned her out to a poverty row company, Eagle-Lion Films. Her final three films were shot for them in 1948: Adventures of Casanova, Ruthless and this picture, which is short and sweet but deserves more attention than it tends to receive. It runs a mere 61 minutes, but packs rather a lot in; had it been made as an A-movie rather than a B-movie, it could easily have filled a further half hour with character development. It isn’t too surprising that, eventually, someone came back to the ideas here and made another feature along similar lines, though Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor, made fifteen years later in 1963, attempts a lot more and succeeds at it too. If we compare the two, the later film wins every time, but that doesn’t mean that this one doesn’t achieve the goals that it’s set.

We know it’s a film noir immediately, because director Budd Boetticher has one lady walk out of the shadows, followed by another who has been tailing her. This was early enough in his career that he was still being credited as Oscar Boetticher, though the Jr. he started out with had been dropped a couple of years prior. Boetticher, of course, became known for his westerns, but that’s one of the few genres that Behind Locked Doors isn’t; it’s a drama, a romance and a thriller, all shot in a film noir style by cinematographer Guy Roe. It’s the second of those ladies who’s played by Lucille Bremer; she’s Kathy Lawrence, a reporter for the Tribune, and she’s tailing Madge Bennett because she’s convinced she’ll lead her to Judge Finlay Drake. Well, ex-judge Finlay Drake, that is, who’s on the lam with $10,000 offered for any information leading to his arrest. We’re never told what he did to deserve such attention, but every cop in the state is looking for him and Lawrence thinks she’s found him.

We know it’s a B-movie because the running time doesn’t include much for introductions, so we’re treated to a succession of signs to tell us where we are and, often, who we’re about to meet. First up for Lawrence is a private investigator called Ross Stewart. We aren’t privy to why she picked him, but his throwaway comment about her being his first client may not be a joke; the letterer has just finished painting his name on his door when she arrives to see him. Everything adds up, she tells Stewart. She followed Madge to the La Siesta sanitarium; she’s the judge’s girlfriend who’s supposed to be out of town. The place is run by Dr. Clifford Porter, a former state medical officer and friend of Drake’s. Even her gut tells her that it’s true and I’ve seen enough journalist movies from the thirties and forties to know that we should always trust the reporter’s gut. The only catch is that she can’t prove anything. She has to get someone inside to confirm with his own eyes that the judge is there. Hence Ross Stewart, P.I.

This is an interesting set-up and it’s put together well, even if the lack of budget is clearly on show. Bremer is a confident actress, a surprising thing for someone whose contract was up after this picture and knew she wouldn’t renew it. She reminds of Bette Davis from the side, something not lost on MGM who had her read from Dark Victory during her audition because they saw that too; from the front, she’s more like Myrna Loy, except that she moves more than her facial muscles. Had I not known she was a dancer, I bet I’d never have guessed it from this picture; even though I did know she was a dancer, I’m more than happy with her non-dancing work and would happily have kept watching her next bunch of dramatic pictures. As Ross Stewart, however, Richard Carlson does try too hard, especially early on when the P.I. is trying to impress his client, and he ends up making her look even better than she does on her own. Fortunately he gets better as the film runs on, especially as he’s really the lead, even if she got top billing.

The complexities of Shock Corridor aren’t apparent here, but there’s still plenty going on in La Siesta when Stewart, masquerading as Kathy’s manic depressive husband, Harry Horton, gets himself committed on the recommendation of the state psychiatrist. The downside is that almost everyone inside is a one-dimensional character, there for a single purpose. The upside is that they’re each played well and, in three instances, by uncredited actors who film fans will recognise. There’s Kathleen Freeman, maybe still best known as the Penguin in The Blues Brothers, here playing a nurse. There’s prolific child actor Dickie Moore who, at the ripe old age of 22, was closing in on the end of a long screen career; he’d started at a mere eighteen months and stayed busy throughout. And, most prominent of the three, is Tor Johnson, in a non-speaking but still substantial role as the Champ, locked in a sparse cell at La Siesta with only a chair for company and tormented by an attendant, who fakes bell sounds to make him jump up and fight.

Die hards will know many more, of course, including the man who impressed me most in this film, the only one with a part crafted out of more than cardboard. He’s Ralf Harolde, playing very much against type as a man named Fred Hopps. We’re never told what Hopps is, but I’m presuming that he’s the one human employee on the La Siesta staff rather than a patient put to more trusting use than his peers. This is a long way from the gangsters I’m used to seeing him play, especially in the thirties, and he impresses. He’s very proper here, somewhat like a shrunken version of Boris Karloff outside his horror roles, especially with his close cropped hair and bow tie. That helps him stand out as the ‘good’ on the staff, as compared to the ‘bad’ of his boss, Dr. Porter, and the ‘ugly’ of his most obvious colleague, Larson, the psychopathic senior attendant, whose round glasses lend him a Gestapo feel that seems highly appropriate given his sadism. Prolific character actor Douglas Fowley isn’t stretched as Larson but does his job well anyway.

If the actors are reliable and the crew back them up with decent if routine editing, score and cinematography, it’s really the script that stands out for most attention. The story is by Malvin Wald, who adapted it with Eugene Ling. This was early in his career but it came right after The Naked City, for which he had served in the same roles, adapting his own story there with Albert Maltz. He does a textbook job here of setting things up well and wrapping them up well too. Every character is in the movie for a good reason and everything happens for a good reason as well. Even as we close in on the finalé and wonder which of a few options he’s going to go with, we aren’t surprised at all by how it plays out. Again, with an extra half hour, I’m sure he could have added complexity to the characters and allowed them to develop, but he doesn’t have that luxury and, frankly, I’m impressed by how much he crammed in with a mere hour to play with. The catch is that I can’t say too much or I’ll venture rapidly into spoiler territory!

As befits the top billed name, Lucille Bremer does do more than just send Stewart into harm’s way for a fifty per cent share in the reward money. She comes to visit him periodically, to check in on his progress and perhaps fall a little more for him too. Of all the subplots going on, the one given least attention is the romance between Lawrence and Stewart, which is so run of the mill that it could have been copied and pasted from any other script floating around Hollywood that year. Bremer returns for the finalé too, playing a strong part in how everything wraps up. At the end of the day, while Stewart is the one who put himself in danger, she’s the one who orchestrates the whole thing, rather an odd statement to make about a 1948 B-movie but a welcome one nonetheless. I don’t want to give it too much credit, because it could be the lack of budget manifesting itself. After all, she’s a journalist without a newspaper, as far as we can tell; we never see any evidence of it. Maybe she’s just the romantic lead and the reporter in one.

That lack of budget is everywhere, but Boetticher and Roe do their best to hide it. I wouldn’t expect a sanitarium to be decorated in the latest styles, for instance, but La Siesta is bare bones through and through and gets barer when we sneak up the stairs to see the locked ward where Tor Johnson waits patiently for props that never arrive. Ostensibly, Dr. Porter has his patients work to give them something therapeutic to do, but really it helps cut down the need for extras. The state psychiatrist tells the fake couple of Kathy and Harold that private sanatoriums are busy affairs, but this one seems to have a patient population of half a dozen, plus a few extras dotted around the common room to make it seem like it’s worth their while to switch the lights on. I’d say half a dozen speaking roles, but both the Champ and the kid are apparently unable to speak, so we only hear four of them, which number does include the undercover investigator. Now, I’m wondering how they failed to twig to his subterfuge from his arrival!

I enjoyed Behind Locked Doors, though Wald’s script deserved more depth, which would only have come from more running time and more budget, neither of which were going to happen at Eagle-Lion. Budd Boetticher went on to more prominent things, as in a way did Wald, who co-wrote Venus in Furs with Jess Franco. On the acting front, most of the cast were thinking about retirement, including Lucille Bremer. Only Richard Carlson really went on to notable roles after this, at least in the sci-fi world, where he was the lead in the overlooked The Magnetic Monster and It Came from Outer Space, not to mention the far from overlooked Creature from the Black Lagoon. Most of his colleagues here were just getting old, but Bremer had other reasons to retire. During the shooting of Adventures of Casanova in Mexico, earlier in 1948, she met a man named Abelardo Luis Rodríguez, the son of a former president of the same name. By the time this picture reached theatres, they were married and she felt no need to fight for her MGM contract.

They moved to Baja California, where they founded a 10,000 acre resort called Rancho Las Cruces, which started a tourism boom fed by the Hollywood stars that Lucille knew and the Mexican notables that Rod knew. Other actors, such as Desi Arnaz and Bing Crosby, who were both business partners of the Rodríguez family, would follow suit and build houses in Las Cruces. The marriage lasted fifteen busy years and accounted for four children but, after the divorce, Bremer moved to La Jolla, CA where she owned a clothing boutique for children. That far down the coast from Hollywood, where everyone is in the movie industry, whether they actually do anything or not, I wonder how many knew her in those later years as a former actress. While few actresses got to lead an MGM musical with Fred Astaire, hers turned out to be one of the forgotten ones and her screen career soon followed. This last role proved that she still had plenty of potential, but life intervened and we’ll never know what she could have done with it.

Director: David Miller
Writers: Richard L. Breen and Phoebe & Henry Ephron, from the novel by Leo Rosten
Stars: Gregory Peck, Tony Curtis, Angie Dickinson and Bobby Darin

This week’s Dry Heat Obscurity wasn’t entirely shot in Arizona. In fact, from what I can gather, most of it was shot on the Universal lot back in Universal City, CA. However, every time we step outside, we find ourselves on the Libby Army Airfield, which is part of Fort Huachuca, a U.S. Army installation at the northern end of the Huachuca mountains, fifteen miles north of the Mexican border. It’s part of the Arizona town of Sierra Vista today, though it wasn’t when this picture was shot, as they didn’t annex the post until 1971. We fly over Fort Huachuca behind the opening credits to land at Libby. Now, the Libby Army Airfield is also the Sierra Vista Municipal Airport, but this script calls it the Colfax Army Air Field, which is a fictional name. However, if we track the story back to its origins, we’ll find that it’s really pretending to be the Yuma Army Airfield, still in Arizona but located three hundred miles west, where it shares its facilities with the Yuma International Airport as a combined civilian/military operation. Are you confused yet?

Well, let me back up to the real Second World War and hopefully things will become clear. Ralph R. Greenson, best known today as a psychoanalyst to the stars, was then a captain in the Army Medical Corps, stationed at the Yuma Army Airfield, where he worked with patients suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D. He was an early professional to associate P.T.S.D. with the experiences of soldiers during wartime, so his work became well known and highly regarded. In 1961, a personal friend called Leo Rosten, a professional humorist and retired scriptwriter, fictionalised the doctor’s wartime stories into a novel, transforming Capt. Greenson, M.D. into Capt. Newman, M.D. Hollywood quickly came knocking to adapt this success onto the big screen, even though the doctor’s accomplishments were becoming eclipsed at the time by his professional association with celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe; a number of conspiracy theories have him involved in covering up the circumstances of her death in 1962.

Then again, those celebrities may have helped the film to happen. Another of his patients was Tony Curtis, who shares top billing here with Gregory Peck, who, as Capt. Josiah J. Newman, M.D., is quite obviously the lead. Both Greenson and Rosten were Jewish; the latter was already well known for his writings about Yiddish characters but would become famous for The Joys of Yiddish, a vast encyclopaedia of Jewish language and humour. While Peck plays Newman with no obvious ethnic bent, Curtis has no such qualms and portrays Cpl. Jackson ‘Jake’ Leibowitz, an orderly who Newman hijacks into service on his ward, as quintessentially Jewish; he may well have been playing not only a part but an actual homage to his psychotherapist and the friend who wrote about him. His opening scene, as Newman captures his services, is priceless; he’s so pessimistic that he appears more like a patient. ‘We haven’t lost an orderly yet,’ suggests Newman. ‘Don’t spoil your record, Captain,’ he replies. Gin later? ‘Who plans that far ahead?’

While Leibowitz soon finds his feet and becomes a valued assistant on Ward 7, he eventually turns into minor comic relief; his best and biggest scenes are the least important ones in the picture, surely there only to break up the more dramatic episodes of life in a psychiatric ward; in many ways, he turns into the scrounger Curtis played in Operation Petticoat. Fortunately, Peck is able to ground himself much better and Capt. Newman is a fantastic character, defined as much by his failures as by his successes. To the credit of the source novelist and the trio of scriptwriters, Phoebe and Henry Ephron (Nora’s parents) and Richard L. Breen, he comes across as thoroughly believable. Much of that is because he’s introduced very well, first through his interactions with Col. Pyser, who’s in charge of Colfax, and then through his interactions with patients on his rounds. We watch and learn through a visiting statistician, Lt. Belden ‘Barney’ Alderson, played by Dick Sargent. Newman laughs at the character’s first name; Peck’s was actually Eldred.

These early scenes are blistering. The light hearted music that opened the film set the tone and there’s humour throughout these scenes, but there’s serious drama too and much insight. The first patient, Arthur Werbel, wants to be discharged so he can go back to the war to protect his brother. Alderson is sympathetic, until Newman explains that Arthur doesn’t have a brother. The captain has a different tone and a different technique for each and every patient. He knows them all deeply and he knows how he needs to respond to get them to progress to the point where he can safely discharge them. Bobby, for instance, has lost the ability to speak, so Newman’s friendly and tells him that it’ll come. Carrozzo is a character, diagnosing his doctor, so Newman is patient. However, an unnamed bully causes a riot in the ward, so Newman bullies him right back, making it very clear that he’s in charge. Alderson leaves the ward with a healthy respect of what this offbeat shrink is doing and what his patients are going through. So do we.

The problem is that the film doesn’t really know what it wants to be, possibly because it was ahead of its time. It starts by deluging us with the chaos of a psychiatric ward and lets us take some time to find our feet; we meet a lot of characters and begin a number of subplots to which we’ll return throughout the picture. However, the film gradually becomes episodic in nature, as we focus on one case to the exclusion of the rest; as that one is resolved, a new one comes along to replace it. Today, this would be a TV show, with single episode stories within an overriding season arc and with individual growth for regulars, but this was before M*A*S*H, let alone Hill Street Blues. As tends to be the case with episodes, some are stronger than others. One involves the introduction of 14 Italian P.O.W.s to Colfax, not mental cases but enemies, and Ward 7 is the only one with locks. Their Christmas stage rendition of Hava Nagila, a traditional Native American song according to Leibowitz, is funny but insubstantial. It’s a skit, a memory, a moment.

The meaty episodes are elsewhere, starting with Bobby Darin, who was deservedly Oscar nominated for his role as a gunner, Cpl. Jim Tompkins, who refuses to confront the episode in his past that torments him, a common scenario for P.T.S.D. sufferers. I won’t spoil this but will say that Darin gives an incredible performance here, so believably haunted by his past that actors in horror films should learn from his pain. His greatest scene comes when he’s ready to be given flak juice, or sodium pentathol, which turns out to be an amazingly versatile drug; in fact, it’s put to two uses here simultaneously, neither of which is as a truth serum. Jim wants it because it’s a powerful general anaesthetic; he has insomnia and can’t sleep unless he’s drunk himself into a stupor. Newman is keen to administer it as a psychiatric aid because it also facilitates the recall of repressed memories. Peck sits back and lets Darin blister, then quietly looks out of the window and expresses his own pain through subtle nuance. Both men do this scene proud.

I’ve always regarded Darin as a songwriter and musician, given that he wrote and recorded a number of million sellers in his time, many of which are well known today, like Splish Splash and Dream Lover. Somehow, however, I’ve never really acknowledged him as a superb actor too, even having seen him play an antisocial Nazi sympathiser in Pressure Point, earning a Golden Globe nod over his co-star, Sidney Poitier; he lost to his co-star here, Gregory Peck, for To Kill a Mockingbird. He only made fourteen pictures, but they’re a diverse bunch with highly unlikely roles for a teen idol. Apparently he was up to the challenge; he’s so great here that it’s notable how many others in the cast fail to match him. The couple of actors who do best are Eddie Albert and Robert Duvall, both coincidentally best known at the time for other pictures starring Gregory Peck; Albert for Roman Holiday a decade earlier, which brought him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and Duvall for his previous picture, To Kill a Mockingbird.

In many ways, Duvall plays a similar character here to Boo Radley there: it’s a small but important role of a young man suffering from mental damage who’s very quiet throughout but explodes into violence at a key moment. Capt. Paul Winston proves to be a challenge for Newman because his usual approaches aren’t working; he can’t break through to the man inside the shell, knowing only that the key lies in the thirteen months he spent in a cellar in occupied France. Duvall does well here, early in his career, but it’s a subtle performance that asks politely for our attention while most of the rest of the cast are given overt performances which rudely steal it. Albert’s is certainly one, as the mind of Col. Norval Bliss has split into two: the troubled Mr. Past and the intelligent but carefree Mr. Future, who steals a number of scenes from other great character actors. Albert is rightly known for his comedy roles, but he was a powerful man in serious dramatic parts too and his performance in this film underlines that yet again.

If it sounds like a testosterone fuelled picture, you’re not too far wrong, but there is eye candy in the film and that eye candy gets some opportunity too. Most obviously, there’s Angie Dickinson as Lt. Francie Corum, a nurse from Ward 3 who manages to get one over on Newman in her first scene. The obvious romantic subplot fizzles, when she realises that he’s courting her for her talents as a nurse rather than a beautiful young lady, but never quite goes out and would clearly get somewhere in that theoretical TV series version. It’s actually refreshing that it doesn’t within the two hour running time, given that Peck was 47 and Dickinson only 31, not a large gap for Hollywood screen romances. She willingly transfers over after witnessing Newman loudly dealing with Bliss. ‘Oh, I wasn’t shouting at him,’ the doctor tells her. ‘I was shouting at his symptoms.’ Incidentally, the name was surely sourced from the real medical facility at Fort Huachaca: the Raymond W. Bliss Army Medical Center.

One Angie Dickinson in an Army Base full of young soldiers would be a recipe for disaster, so we do have a number of other female characters. Bethel Leslie gets a highly unusual role as Mrs. Helene Winston, Capt. Paul’s wife, who Newman requests visit as a last resort. She’s utterly not what he expects and she walks a fascinating tightrope between upper class strength and really not having a clue. Jane Withers is also often on screen, as Lt. Grace Blodgett, the matron of Ward 7. She was a child actor, who began her film career at six in 1932 and had all but retired by the time she reached twenty, with over forty movies behind her; even though she’s still alive today, this proved to be her final screen role at the ripe old age of 37. Instead, she began a decade as Josephine, the Lady Plumber in TV commercials for Comet cleanser. As a film actor, her one trip out of retirement was to complete the role of Laverne in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996, after the original voice actor, Mary Wickes, died; she also reprised the role in the sequel.

With all this talent on show, it’s somehow surprising that Captain Newman, M.D. flopped. I think the main reason was that it was a little out of time. In many ways, it’s ahead of its time, presaging those deep dive television shows that took off after Hill Street Blues and are all the rage today. However, it’s dated too, feeling a lot more than nine years older than M*A*S*H. While the title character gains depth through acknowledging the irony that he’s getting soldiers well just so they can be sent back into harm’s way, this has little of the pessimism, not to mention nudity and strong language, that would show up with the counterculture’s response to the Vietnam War; it seems utterly surreal to find that that had already been raging for eight years at this point. Rosten’s source novel was released in 1961, the same year as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which turned out to be a much better pointer to the future; no-one quotes this movie today, or its source novel, even though I’m very tempted to personally adopt, ‘Is Mr. Future mad?’

Perhaps most tellingly, I’m not watching for Peck or Darin, Dickinson or Withers, Duvall or Arnold. I’m watching right now for the Libby Army Airfield, hardly the component part that Universal felt film critics might focus on half a century later. Fort Huachuca is a fascinating place, not least because it keeps re-inventing itself. Initially founded to fight Geronimo and his Chiricahua Apaches, it became the base for the Buffalo soldiers for a couple of decades until 1933. It took on a new focus on electronic warfare as long ago as 1954 and is now home to the US Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command. There are two museums on site, which are open to the public for free, though civilian visitors are required to pass a criminal background check before being allowed through the gate. Just remember, it has been said that ‘it’s the only fort in the Continental United States where you can be AWOL for three days and they can still see you leaving.’ I wonder if I’ll be able to get a modern day photo to match the location in the film.

Director: Bill Condon
Writers: Rand Ravich and Mark Kruger, from a story by Clive Barker
Stars: Tony Todd, Kelly Rowan, William O’Leary, Bill Nunn, Matt Clark, David Gianopoulos, Fay Hauser, Joshua Gibran Mayweather, Michael Culkin, Timothy Carhart and Veronica Cartwright

Cheesy title or not, the original Candyman was one of the underrated horror gems of the nineties. I’ve seen it a couple of times but watched it again before reviewing this, its first of two sequels, on Mardi Gras, the day on which the finalé of Farewell to the Flesh is set. It surprised me again for a whole slew of reasons. Some were little ones, like Virginia Madsen being credited above Tony Todd, the monster of the franchise; the brief presence of Ted Raimi, brother of Sam; or the fact that the score was by a major composer, Philip Glass. Others were more important, such as the way in which it’s really an African American horror film that speaks without stereotype. Four of the six leads are actors of colour, though the focus is on a white woman; that leaves only one white male, who’s by far the weakest of that half dozen, being a college professor cheating on his wife with a bimbo student. Xander Berkeley played him well, but this isn’t about Prof. Lyle; it’s about racial inequality and how things haven’t changed much in a century or so.

This sequel isn’t remotely up to its predecessor, but it’s better than many have given it credit for; unfortunately, when it’s bad, it’s really bad and that lack of consistency really doesn’t help. A great example of this comes during the prologue, right before the title card, as the Candyman shows up in the bathroom of a New Orleans bar. Before I explain this, let me explain who Candyman is. He’s Daniel Robitaille, the son of a slave who grew up in polite society after the American Civil War because his father innovated a shoe production technique that proved highly profitable. Daniel became a renowned portrait artist, but made the mistake of falling for, and fathering a child with, a white woman. Being 1890, his lover’s father promptly led a lynch mob that severed his painting hand and replaced it with a hook, then smeared him with honey to attract bees to sting him to death. For reasons left unexplained until this sequel, his soul can be summoned by speaking the name Candyman into a mirror five times, whereupon Bad Things happen.

That background does more than neatly set up an urban legend in African American cloth. It illustrates an act of cruelty so utterly horrific that it underpins a horror franchise, but in a way that echoes down the decades. The lynch mob isn’t merely killing Daniel, it’s enforcing to him that he’s less of a human being than they are. Sure, he can live among white folk and he can even paint them, but he’s not one of them, because he’s black, and that inequality is mirrored in what we see in the contemporary scenes. So, as we begin the sequel, we expect Candyman to show up mysteriously when somebody unwisely summons him and we expect that he’ll gut that idiot with his hook hand. What we don’t expect is the red herring we get right before he appears out of thin air: the lights start to flicker, our victim looks around and then we watch, shot from behind, a black man standing up in one of the stalls. Yes, the sequel to arguably the most racially aware modern horror movie is setting up a scare by suggesting that all black men look alike.

Maybe the scriptwriters, Rand Ravich and Mark Kruger, who worked from a story by Candyman’s creator, Clive Barker, thought it might be acceptable because this first victim is the most annoying white dude from the first movie. Dr. Phillip Purcell, an arrogant expert on urban legends, provided a voice of reason when Helen Lyle, a graduate student researching the Candyman, opines that he’s real. However, Michael Culkin played him as a man who knows that he knows more than everyone around him, like a Stephen Fry shorn of his humility. We can believe Fry reciting Candyman’s name into a mirror five times just to prove he doesn’t exist, but we wouldn’t want to punch him in the face and rip off his rat-tail, which we surely want to do to Purcell. He’s the only character to return here because he provides a natural bridge between the films. We’re three years on and he’s touring in support of a book on the Candyman; the presentation he gives at his book signing is a solid primer that brings new viewers quickly up to speed.

His appearance here also links us directly to Ethan Tarrant, who initially appears to be a deranged fan, a believer in the Candyman who prophesies that Purcell will be murdered next, but who quickly becomes far more. You see, New Orleans is Daniel Robitaille’s home turf, even if he mysteriously ended his days in Chicago, and the Candyman’s previous victim was Tarrant’s father, Coleman, another believer who had gone to Purcell for help. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see where we’re going here, especially if I tell you how posh the Tarrants are. The name is pronounced with an emphasis on the second syllable, Coleman was an attorney with credible aspirations of serving on the Supreme Court and his widow’s name is something as mundane as Octavia. The family even brought up their children in the ancestral mansion, a former plantation called Esplanade; they’re high society in the Big Easy, even if little Annie Tarrant works as an art teacher at St. Vincent’s, where most of her young students are coloured and poor.

And here I have to wonder if something I couldn’t help but notice was deliberate or not, as it seems important. The obvious goal is to set up Annie, a product of generations of privilege, as socially colourblind, caring deeply about all her students, whatever their heritage. This, of course, connects her with Robitaille, who dared to love a woman of a different colour. The catch is that the script doesn’t seem to follow suit. Annie’s principal is African American and clearly a good man too, but what’s his name? We’re not told. The white cop who believes Ethan is the Candyman killer is Det. Ray Levesque, but who’s that African American lady working with him? The credits tells us she’s Pam Carver, but the film doesn’t. I assumed she’s his superior officer, but we’re not told that either. When Matthew, one of Annie’s students, vanishes, she tracks down his father; the credits tell us he’s Rev. Ellis, but people only call him ‘the Reverend’. Is this subconscious racism or a clever device to lessen characters of colour by denying them names?

I may be way off base, but it feels to me like the scriptwriters watched the first picture, failed to understand what it was about and assumed that its success was due to the many African American characters appealing to a new audience for horror films, so wrote the sequel with that in mind. In other words, it looks consistent but doesn’t play that way because it’s really just a slasher with the monster from Candyman. Even if that’s true, as I believe it is, there’s enough of substance that bleeds through from the first film to the second to make it a worthwhile view anyway. Some of the best things about Farewell to the Flesh revolve around the mythology of the Candyman and the rest tie either to Kelly Rowan, who plays Annie Tarrant with a power that echoes Virginia Madsen in the first film, and the city of New Orleans, which is rarely a poor location for a movie but one which here provides strong contrasts of carefree carnival and poverty-struck projects, two worlds that never seem to touch.

Rowan isn’t a busy film actress; her prior feature to this was, ironically, Hook four years earlier, in which she played Peter’s mother. She’s far better known for her television work, with substantial runs in Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years, Perception and The O.C., the latter of which won her a PRISM award for her authentic depiction of a recovering alcoholic. She’s very good here too, even though Annie isn’t remotely as meaningful a character as Helen Lyle, her equivalent in the first movie. She grounds the character magnificently and, if Tony Todd gives the film its soul, Rowan provides its heart. Of course, that leaves the city of New Orleans to portray its guts, an appropriate role for a city which felt to me like a living being when I visited it last. That’s almost two decades ago now but I can still taste the air and feel the vibrancy of the place. Walking down streets in the French Quarter, it felt like people were born in the streets, lived out their lives and eventually died right there where they began. That’s an appropriate location for this picture!

As the film begins, we’re three days away from Lent, which means two days from Mardi Gras, the climax of the carnival period in the Crescent City, which will have been building for two weeks. It’s also the climax to our movie, appropriately enough, given the religious and historical significance of the date. Lent is a period when many Christians remember the forty days which Jesus spent fasting in the desert through fasting themselves or through other forms of self-denial like giving up something they enjoy. Given that people didn’t historically have the technology to preserve proscribed food until the end of Lent, they ate it instead by Shrove Tuesday, which I knew in Protestant England as Pancake Day but natives of Catholic Louisiana know in French as Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday. It seems almost obvious to use such a day, in which the whole city is indulging its appetites during the lurid atmosphere of a vast carnival, as the backdrop to the killing spree of a supernatural murderer.

Sadly, the story isn’t as integrated into the carnival as deeply as we might hope, so it serves more as a background than a location. Fortunately, that background is explored in interesting ways, such as the provision of a carnival DJ, the King Fish, broadcasting on WBOV, to guide us through both the season and the feature. Sometimes he’s talking about the carnival, sometimes the Candyman and sometimes both at once, such as when he explains the film’s subtitle: ‘carnival’ is Latin for ‘farewell to the flesh’, another nod to the fasting of Lent, in which many give up meat, but also a nod to the deaths at the Candyman’s hook and his own plans, as we discover on Mardi Gras. He’s an endearing presence, courtesy of the smooth Cajun tones of Russell Buchanan, a singer and actor who’s found a new career as a political blogger with a sense of humour. ‘Yes, the movie was met with mixed reviews,’ he says of his big flop, Rhinestone, ‘Some critics thought it was bad and some thought it was worse. But, dammit, I was funny!’

And I got a lot deeper here than I intended for a film that surely aims to be a slasher. Whatever reason the scriptwriters conjured up to explain the success of Candyman, they weren’t so obtuse to realise that many watched it for its death scenes. There are more of those here and they’re agreeably bloody; the King Fish surely echoes the audience when he introduces another song with, ‘This goes out to the man with the hook!’ My favourite kill, beyond the satisfaction of watching Dr. Purcell get his at the beginning, was when the insertion of the Candyman’s hook through an entire body prompts a spurt of blood onto the face and into the mouth of Annie Tarrant. It’s icky but stylish. That’s the same scene where Annie scratches the killer’s face in anger and bees come out. That effect still impresses me, even though the bees in the flashback scene to Daniel Robitaille’s lynching are beyond awful. Bizarrely, a few of the death scenes underwhelm, such as the one given to the best known actor in the movie, Veronica Cartwright.

And, no, that’s hardly a spoiler! Cartwright plays Octavia Tarrant, haughty mother to Annie and Ethan, so the odds on her demise were so low from the very outset that bookies wouldn’t have taken any bets. If you think that’s a spoiler, you should avoid reviews forthwith! Anyway, she’s decent in a relatively insubstantial role because she sneaks in the sort of nuance that only good character actors can find; I wonder if Kelly Rowan paid attention because she does the same thing. The only other actor to manage a similar accomplishment is Matt Clark as a black market dealer called Honore Thibideaux, as Cajun as that name suggests even though he’s not even a Southerner, hailing from Washington, D.C. These character actors were sidelined far too much in this film, in favour of more screen time for Tony Todd; the picture suffers for that surface approach and would have been more successful had it shown less and explained more through the talents of supporting actors like Cartwright and Clark.

For those inquisitive about this franchise, check out Candyman first. Once you realise how underrated that film is and how it really doesn’t need any further explanation, you can make a choice as to whether to follow up with this or not. If you do that and enjoy it anyway, then there’s a third in the series that you’ll want to finish up with. It’s Candyman: Day of the Dead, released straight to DVD in 1999 and, as you might expect, it exploits a holiday too, beginning on the eve of Día de Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead. It features Tony Todd, of course, because it wouldn’t be easy to replace his tall, imposing frame and calm demeanour, but it adds the Playboy centerfold and Baywatch regular, Donna D’Errico, and appears to take the racial angle in a Hispanic direction which doesn’t appear to make any sense on the face of it. I’ll check it out anyway, just to see, but its reputation isn’t even as good as this film, let alone the original Candyman. Daniel Robitaille hasn’t resurfaced in the 21st century yet and that’s probably a good thing.

Carry On... Up the Khyber (1968)

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend (1949)

Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

Sting of Death (1965)

Love Happy (1949)

Life Blood (2009)

Nothing Lasts Forever (1984)

Marquis (1989)

The Blue Veil (1951)

Edge of Eternity (1959)

Black Friday (1940)

The Baron Against the Demons (2006)

Emperor of the North Pole (1973)

In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wazzie Woodle Woo!? (1985)

Shotgun Wedding (1963)

Hospital Massacre (1981)

Sole Survivor (1970)

Behind Locked Doors (1948)

Captain Newman, M.D. (1963)

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995)