Directors: Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat
Writers: Frank Launder and Ivor Herbert, from the story by Frank Launder and Sidney & Leslie Gilliat, inspired by the original drawings of Ronald Searle
Stars: Frankie Howerd and Dora Bryan


By the time I was born in 1971, the infamous St. Trinian’s boarding school for girls had been shuttered for half a decade, but it had already become enough of a British institution that the name, and what it represented, hadn’t gone away and, in fact, still hasn’t to this day. I saw this feature at some point during my childhood, probably on television, and parts of it were still lounging around in my memory, but it’s less a film now than it was. In 2017, a decade after the franchise was rebooted, to adopt modern terminology, it’s more of a time capsule than a movie, because the writers wrapped up the original series with a wallop by throwing everything but the kitchen sink into the script. In fact, this is more of a caper film, a spy picture and a chase flick than it ever is a school story, odd for a series that’s inspired by, named for and set in a school. In short, it highlighted that times had changed and it was surely the right moment for the girls to hang up their hockey sticks and call it a day. Well, at least for a while.

For those who don’t know St. Trinian’s, they began as a set of cartoons created by artist Ronald Searle and published in a magazine called Lilliput. The first was published in 1941, but after Searle had been called up for service and sent to Singapore. It was a polite cartoon without a hint of the brutality and delinquency that would soon come to characterise the school; that change was because of how Searle spent the Second World War. Officially listed as missing, he was confined to the Changi prison camp by the Japanese, then sent to work on the Siam-Burma railway, now famous as the setting for The Bridge on the River Kwai. He suffered from malaria, beri-beri, skin disease and ulcers, he shrank to eighty plus pounds and he was temporarily paralysed at one point by a pick-axe to the spine. Yet he continued to draw throughout this time, mostly documenting his war experiences in drawings that he hid under the mattresses of prisoners dying from cholera. He survived the war and so did three hundred of those drawings.

It’s impossible to imagine what Searle must have gone through but it’s easy to see how it must have shaped his cartoons. The next few St. Trinian’s cartoons were drawn during his captivity and they took a much more brutal aspect. They saw print after the war, five years after the first, and they quickly became famous. Many authors wrote stories set in girls’ schools, but they were always of well-behaved children doing something positive, like solving mysteries. Searle’s girls were murderous vixens who drank, smoked and caroused their way through school life, and their teachers were no different. By 1953, Searle had published five collections of these cartoons and done very well with them, so naturally the British film industry wanted to tap into that. In a way, they already had, with The Happiest Days of Your Life in 1950, officially based on a play by John Dighton but very much a proto-St. Trinian’s flick, not just because of the script but because of the producers, director and regular stars like Alastair Sim and Joyce Grenfell.

The series proper began in 1954 with The Belles of St. Trinian’s and progressed with 1957’s Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s and 1960’s The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s. This film was a late stab at a fourth entry in that trilogy, showing up six years late and changing the content considerably. Sim and Grenfell were both long gone, though other regulars like George Cole, Eric Barker and Richard Wattis were still in the cast. However, the leads were new: Dora Bryan as the new headmistress, Amber Spottiswood, and the comedic legend, Frankie Howerd, who would have been one hundred years old today. And here’s where the time capsule aspect of this film comes in. Howerd plays a crook by the name of Alfred Askett, who is masquerading as a high-class barber, Alphonse of Monte Carlo. He’s part of a gang who rob a Royal Mail train of £2.5m in a caper called Operation Windfall; their base is his barber shop, well equipped with spy gadgets so that the absent mastermind can communicate by television, barber’s chair and even shower head.
After all, it was 1966 and the world had changed. It had been a quarter of a century since the first St. Trinian’s cartoon, but James Bond was riding high with four films since 1962, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin had just made it into colour in 1965 and, maybe most important of all, a gang of fifteen men, led by Bruce Reynolds, known as Napoleon, had stolen £2.6m from a Royal Mail train in 1963. This was the Great Train Robbery, hardly the first use of that term given that Edwin S. Porter had made an influential film of that name in 1903, with its pioneering final shot of a robber shooting his gun directly at the audience, but the one of resonance to U.K. viewers. Great Train Robbers Buster Edwards and Ronnie Biggs later found themselves in pictures, under rather different circumstances: Edwards saw his life story adapted into a comedy drama called Buster, with Phil Collins playing the lead, and Biggs appeared in the Sex Pistols mockumentary, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, even singing a couple of songs with the band.

So, in 1966, it must have seemed like a fantastic idea to mix all of this together into a comedic romp that adds the St. Trinian’s girls to the stew, especially as they become the heroes pretty much throughout. Sure, we watch them misbehaving at points, usually at night when they should be asleep, but every misbehaving scene ends with a heroism scene, like turning the fire hoses that they’re conveniently keeping upstairs on burglars. This is fun, but it’s really not what St. Trinian’s was all about. That angle is mostly used up by the twenty minute mark, when the school moves into its new home at Hamingwell Grange, courtesy of the new Minister of Education, who’s in the headmistress’s pocket (and other things). The teachers are assembled from their holiday jobs: the deputy head is being released from prison, while the maths mistress is a card sharp, the art mistress is a stripper and the games mistress is a pro-wrestler. Once the maths teacher steals the fighting fund from a town meeting protesting their arrival, we’re set.
The primary story here is the caper, which is conducted in sixties spy-fi style by an absent ringleader talking in random gibberish, lines like: ‘Target past junction X9 at 02:25’, ‘Activate GP28’ and ‘Remove windfall to temporary base Ajax’. Echoing the real heist from three years earlier, they rob a Royal Mail train of £2.5m in sacks full of bills in small denominations and they get away clean, stowing the loot under the floorboards of a large estate that’s currently for sale: Hamingwell Grange. Of course, by the point that things have calmed down and they return to pick it up and transport it away, the grange has been sold and the St. Trinian’s girls have moved in. The robbers are promptly fought off with eggs, tomatoes and flour, not to mention darts, hockey sticks and those upstairs fire hoses. It sets up our story, with the robbers against the girls, but it soon escalates. On Parent’s Day, undercover civil servants investigating the school, the local police and Flash Harry join the robbers in searching the place for the loot.

What’s more, the writing team of directors Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, legendary names in British comedy, and the latter’s brother Leslie, with Ivor Herbert helping Launder turn their story into a screenplay, decided to take potshots at what often seems like every possible British institution. This doesn’t just make fun of boarding schools and bank robbers, it takes on the civil service, the police force, the weather, bad caterers, even morris dancers. It’s fair to say that British viewers will certainly get more out of this than those without a solid grounding in British culture. Some jokes are universal, but others will fly over the heads of anyone who didn’t go to school in the U.K. For instance, Alphonse takes his daughters to see Miss Spottiswood, with the aim of becoming spies within the school. They learned the three Rs, he tells the headmistress and she notes, ‘It’s always nice to have your Rs to fall back on.’ The three Rs are reading, writing and ’rithmetic, while Rs sounds rather like ‘arse’, the British version of ‘ass’.
The peak of the humour may be the performance of Dora Bryan as Amber Spottiswood, who proves she can stumble around with impeccable drunken style on high heels. Her face is incredibly expressive and her voice gains and loses airs, depending on who’s listening. While I’m watching for Frankie Howerd, she gets the better lines and the better scenes and, frankly, she does more with them. Sadly, Howerd contributes to the other end of the quality spectrum, which has to be the pair of blackface performances: an unknown actor portraying an Indian station manager and Alphonse joining him as part of an escape attempt, once he realises that the game is surely up. His Indian accent is truly awful and these scenes are cringeworthy. It’s hard to believe that this was deemed acceptable as late as 1966, but then The Black and White Minstrel Show, a variety show with all male performers in blackface, was still huge on British television, running as late as 1978, though a petition was launched against it in 1967.

Howerd does better in the scenes at Alphonse of Monte Carlo, because he’s in charge there. His henchmen are suitably varied but less interesting than he is, so he’s the one who gets to play with the gadgets littered about the place. The props budget apparently didn’t stretch particularly far, so these crooks mostly pretend that the regular equipment they’re acting around is enhanced with spy-fi extras. The automatic sterilizer acts as a messaging alert, the oversize sixties hairdryers serve as two way communicators and, in the most ridiculous example, the shower head acts as a radio receiver, at least until it becomes a shower head again, with comedic effect. These are fun scenes for Howerd, who often seems lost elsewhere because he’s not in charge and so feels rather like the week’s guest star, here to get a few choice moments and then sit back so the regulars can do their thing. He had far more opportunity in his next film, Carry On Doctor, in which he again played the lead in a series film full of regulars.
Howerd’s career was an unusual one because he continually fell in and out of fashion, one minute a tired hasbeen and the next a rediscovered genius. Barry Cryer appropriately described it as ‘a series of comebacks’ that lasted over six decades. He wanted to be a serious actor, but comedy seemed much more natural. His early years were spent on the stage and on radio, but he found his way to film in 1954 with a picture that was written for him, The Runaway Bus. Surely his best film was his next one, The Ladykillers, at Ealing, but he was in a minor role a long way down the credits. It was only here that he really started to build a film career, as he’d been far more successful on stage, especially with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which had finished a three year run in 1965, and on television, in a variety of variety shows and the pioneering satirical comedy, That Was the Week That Was. Of course, television would prove to be his biggest audience, especially with Up Pompeii in 1969.

That show had a long history. Originally a play on Comedy Playhouse in 1969, it promptly became a TV show, then a film with spin-offs both on the big and small screens. These feel very dated today, but they were perfect for Howerd’s particular style of comedy; his delivery felt entirely improvised, full of asides, backtracks and jabs at the audience, but was impeccably crafted. If you’ve ever seen a pantomime performed live on stage, that’s what Howerd could do better than anybody else. Up Pompeii cemented his fame, bolstered by two Carry On movies, Carry On Doctor and Carry On Up the Jungle, which were rarely far from British television screens, whether as the movies themselves or excerpted into clip compilations, and this St. Trinian’s picture. All these films are as British as it gets and he wrapped up his film career with two more perfect examples of that, The House in Nightmare Park and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. With such a British career, mostly risqué, it’s unsurprising that his fame didn’t travel well.
The same goes for St. Trinian’s itself (and the Carry On films and Up Pompeii). This was a ‘fourth in the trilogy’ sort of movie, a way to end a series of three films that had ended perfectly well already. The school returned in 1980 for a surprise entry in the series, The Wildcats of St. Trinian’s, which didn’t do well, probably because it chose to poke fun at the trades union movement, a fair target at the time but not a popular one with filmgoers; the writers really should have learned from Carry On at Your Convenience almost a decade earlier , which was a funny film but the first box office failure of the series after 21 previous hits. After that, the school was dormant until 2007 when a new generation of stars appeared in St. Trinian’s, a fresh reboot of the series with Rupert Everett taking the dual role previously played by Alastair Sim: in drag as the headmistress and out of it as her brother. Other major stars included Colin Firth as the Minister of Education and Russell Brand in the part George Cole plays here, of Flash Harry.

A second film, St. Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold, followed two years later with many of the same stars, sans Brand, and with Doctor Who star David Tennant added for good measure. It did reasonably well, though not as well as its predecessor, but garnered almost entirely negative reviews and the expected third in the new series, St. Trinian’s 3: Battle of the Sexes, confirmed as far back as 2009, still hasn’t been made. We can only assume that it won’t ever be made until such time as it is. Such is this series. St. Trinian’s is a cultural icon in the U.K. and it’s unlikely to ever truly close. It may be boarded up for a decade or two, but the girls will always find a way to pry those boards loose and run riot one more time, updated a little, of course, given that their debaucheries are not the trigger for public outrage that they used to be. If they can reboot Spider-Man every ten minutes, telling the same origin story, merely with a new lead actor and better CGI, they can reboot St. Trinian’s every ten years too.

Directors: Robert Hamer
Writer: Angus MacPhail, Robert Hamer and Henry Cornelius, based on the novel by Arthur La Bern
Stars: Googie Withers, Jack Warner and John McCallum


Any opportunity to watch an Ealing movie is a good opportunity and the hundredth birthday of one of that studio’s greatest stars, Googie Withers, is even better. There are plenty of other reasons too. Withers stars with her husband to be, John McCallum; their marriage in 1948 lasted until his death in 2010 and she outlived him by only a year. It also features a number of recognisable faces from the British post-war period: Jack Warner, Hermione Baddeley and Alfie Bass, to name just three (Sid James is uncredited as a bandleader, but I couldn’t find him even with frame advance). The superb cinematography is by the legendary Douglas Slocombe, as he was establishing his name at Ealing; he would go on to win three BAFTAs (from ten nods), be nominated for three Oscars and shoot three Indiana Jones pictures. And, if you still want more, it’s one of the most underrated gems from this era of British film, exploring the complexities and interconnections of one memorable Sunday in Bethnal Green.

I had a further personal reason to watch, namely that, if you take my family back only a few generations, we were bootmakers in the east end of London and many of the births, marriages and deaths that I’ve tracked were filed in Bethnal Green. I’m too young to remember this era myself, but my parents were kids at the time and, while both their families had moved a little further to the east by this point, I’m sure they would both recognise a lot of the reference points from their own childhoods. As the film’s trailer suggests, this was described as a ‘symphony of London’s East End’, long before Eastenders took that further into the world of soap opera, and it’s a fair description. It’s amazing to realise just how much is crammed into an hour and a half and it’s rare for a movie to feel this immersive. Most of us will leave it wondering where we might fit in this world: would we try to escape it by landing a good prospect or settle down to darts and Guinness at the Two Compasses? Hopefully we wouldn’t turn into the inept crooks.

We focus in particular on a couple of families, to soak up the atmosphere of their lives, and the most prominent is the Sandigates, a family of five living in cramped, though decent, conditions. George has two teenage daughters by a previous wife and a son by his new one, Rose, fifteen years his younger and a former barmaid at the Two Compasses. I don’t believe we’re ever told what George does for a living, but he’s a good, honest man, if hardly a prize catch; while we might see their two up two down as rather close to slum conditions, there were many living in much worse circumstances after the war. There are bombed out buildings in the area, war-time rationing is still in effect and there’s an Anderson shelter in the Sandigates’ back yard, but this is a London that’s looking very much forward now the war is over rather than back to the horrors of the Blitz. Some are more unscrupulous about how they can better themselves, of course, and one such family is the Hyams.

Solly Hyams, the patriarch of the clan is as Jewish as his name suggests, though his sons are considerably less so (even if they use words like ‘shiksas’ and ‘meshuggah’ in dialogue). Lou runs a local arcade and, from the depth of his pockets, more than that off the books. He’s trying to hire one of George’s daughters, Doris, for something posh up west and how dubious that job would be is open to question. Lou’s brother Morry, runs a local music shop, selling both records and musical instruments, and, as ‘the man with sax appeal’, is a featured attraction at local clubs. His eyes (and other things) are on George’s other daughter, Vi, who plays along with him as she wants an in to one of the various singing competitions in the area; she seems to ignore the existence of his wife and kid. That leaves little Alfie Sandigate, who must be about ten years old and works well to lead us into the main plot that splashes across these little personal stories like a headline on the front page of the News of the World. And talking of that...
Ten years earlier, Rose was head over heels for a man named Tommy Swann, as we see in a tough flashback scene. He plans to take her away from the East End, when he gets back from the north, and they’ll make a future together as man and wife. We watch her pack her bags to leave, only to be told that he’s been arrested for a smash and grab in Manchester. Robbery with violence means a long sentence, so she chooses to move on with her life without him. It’s no stretch (pun not intended) to see Alfie as Tommy’s son by Rose, with George the kind soul who proposed to keep her from becoming a single mother. But, however good George has been to her, the news that Tommy Swann has escaped from Dartmoor and is on the run sparks something inside her that’s lain dormant for a decade. When she discovers him hiding out in her Anderson, in dire need of food and shelter, she’s forced to take a good look at her past, present and future, with whatever decisions she makes likely to affect a lot more just than the two of them.

Googie Withers does a fantastic job here as the film’s lead, especially once she’s secreted Tommy upstairs in her own bed, keeping him safe until night falls and he can move on, perhaps to Cape Town, if he can catch the breaks. Nothing highlights just how small these houses were like an attempt to hide even one human being for a single day and Rose is continually kept on the hop keeping him concealed. After all, things are so cramped that Doris and Vi share a bed and George has to take his baths in the kitchen. John McCallum plays Tommy in the present with a brutal edge that wasn’t visible in his much more dapper flashback scenes; that’s fair, given that he clearly didn’t enjoy his time inside and states outright that he’d prefer to die before going back. The changes in him since Rose saw him last aren’t lost on her, but she’s so caught up in the turmoil of his reappearance that she’s unable to see them for what they really are. How much she gives him before he leaves is open to question, but she knows it’s more than she should.
Of course, there’s a lot more to this picture than Rose and Tommy. Everyone knows that this was his old stomping ground and it’s not long before both the police and the press are wandering around asking questions, of each other as much as anyone else about. Most prominent in this search are Jack Warner as Det. Sgt. Fothergill, a highly capable policeman whose treatment here shines an interesting light on the changes in policework over the last three quarters of a century, and Michael Howard as Slopey Collins, an apparently inept reporter who nonetheless eventually happens to be in the right place at the right time to get him onto the right track. Howard was best known as a comedian, but Warner was a perennial screen cop. Only three years later, he’d land a key role in The Blue Lamp as PC George Dixon; while he was shot dead soon into the film, he was brought back for the TV show, Dixon of Dock Green. He’d play this iconic role for 21 years, so memorably that his coffin was carried by real officers from Paddington Green.

Warner’s capable policework isn’t the focal point of this film, at least until we close in on the finalé and it becomes a chase, shot in impeccable style by Douglas Slocombe in scenes that deserve to be compared to those of The 39 Steps or The Third Man. He’s merely one of the most prominent of the supporting actors, fleshing out this neighbourhood as a backdrop to the drama unfolding within the two up two down of the Sandigates. There are so many other characters and so detailed a backdrop that we’re all likely to miss some of it. One tiny moment that stood out to me was when Lou walks into the Two Compasses; as he does so, he drops a coin into the collection tin of a blind trumpeter outside, who promptly says, ‘Thank you, Mr. Hyams.’ This is fantastic background, alongside the Salvation Army, who may or may not be those with banners advertising a march on Hyde Park, a doomsday prophet wearing a sandwich board and a collection of spivs and wide boys in the marketplace.
The actors filling these roles are a cross-section of British cinema at the time. The slightest exploration throws up careers of note. Doris’s boyfriend, Ted Edwards, for instance, is Nigel Stock, who played Dr. Watson to Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes in the sixties. Mrs. Spry, a landlady who doesn’t ask questions, is the fantastic Hermione Baddeley, such a versatile talent that she’s known best for the film noir, Brighton Rock, the TV show Maude and a string of comedies like Passport to Pimlico, The Belles of St. Trinians and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Her 2:32 appearance in Room at the Top is the shortest to ever be nominated for an Oscar. At the other end of the spectrum, Susan Shaw, who vamps a little here as Vi Sandigate, would find fame as Hestia, the leading lady in Fire Maidens from Outer Space, one of the worst movies ever made. Best of all for my money is Betty Ann Davies, as Sadie, the long-suffering wife of Morry Hyams; she gets a fantastic scene towards the end as she gifts her husband to Vi with some deeply acerbic advice.

Perhaps these supporting actors should be best highlighted by pointing out that most of their characters have something to hide, but none of them, except perhaps Lou Hyams, have poker faces worth a damn. Each of the actors are therefore tasked with acting their respective parts and the further parts they play while hiding what their parts have been getting up to, all while failing to see similar behaviour in their colleagues. The talent available in British cinema at the time was astounding and this film perhaps puts it to better use than most. Ironically, of course, its leads weren’t born in England: Withers was born in Karachi, which was British India in 1917 but Pakistan today; her stage name, meaning ‘dove’ or ‘pigeon’ in Punjabi was given to her by her Indian nanny; and McCallum was Australian through and through. At this point, it’s somehow unsurprising to find that Arthur La Bern, the author of the thoroughly English source novel, was born in London to French parents.
Withers and McCallum didn’t meet here, though they would be married less than a year later; they actually met on their previous picture together, The Loves of Joanna Godden, another Ealing film with many crossovers to this one. Both were co-written by Angus MacPhail, shot by Douglas Slocombe, produced by Michael Balcon, edited by Michael Truman and even directed by Robert Hamer, though only a little, as he stepped in, uncredited, to cover for Charles Frend during the latter’s illness. Ealing Studios may not have had a substantial crew by numbers, but they had some of the best in the business at the time and those names resonate across a lot of classic British films. This is far from the most famous title that any of these people worked on (even La Bern wrote a novel which was adapted into a more famous film, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square becoming Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy) but this stands with the best of them, happily as I chose it to celebrate the career of Googie Withers on her centennial.

Withers stumbled onto a film career, but it became a notable one. She was dancing in a West End stage production when she found work as an extra on The Girl in the Crowd, a 1935 film by Michael Powell. Arriving to discover that the actress cast in the third billed role had been dismissed, she was immediately asked to step into those shoes. She must have done well because she made another four pictures that year, staying busy until the war and keeping working through it. The biggest movie she worked on was The Lady Vanishes, one of Hitchcock’s very best British films, in 1938, but her best roles and her best pictures were to be found at Ealing, not just this one but Dead of Night, Pink String and Sealing Wax and The Loves of Joanna Godden. Those four films in three years led her to be listed as the eighth most popular British star in the country in 1948. Night and the City was still to come, with a great film noir role for her in Jules Dassin’s first British picture after being kicked out of the States by the Communist witch hunters.
However, she’d move to Australia with her husband in 1959 and spend more of her time on the stage, both there and around the world, than she would in films. She’d stay busy all her life, but her last four films were spaced over four decades, culminating with Shine in 1996, the multi-award winning Australian feature that brought Geoffrey Rush an Oscar. Her most prominent later role is surely the prison governess in Within These Walls, a British TV drama that was popular enough in Australia to inspire the creation of an iconic local show, Prisoner, known in the U.K. and U.S. as Prisoner: Cell Block H. In fact, Withers was offered the equivalent role in the latter show but declined; given its wild success, I wonder if she ever regretted that decision. I doubt it, because her screen career is character-based, even as a lead. She made over fifty films across six decades and was only uncredited twice; it’s a varied and great career that deserves a varied and great picture to epitomise it. It Always Rains on Sunday is precisely that.

Director: Roberto Rodriguez
Writers: Fernando Morales Ortiz and Adolfo Torres Portillo, from a story by Fernando Morales Ortiz and Adolfo Torres Portillo
Stars: María Gracia, Cesario Quezadas, Jose Elias Moreno, Manuel ‘Loco’ Valdes and El Enano ‘Santanon’


Once upon a time, so long ago that I can’t remember how long, I stumbled onto the surreal joy that is the filmography of K. Gordon Murray. He was an entrepreneur who borrowed a wild combination of children’s movies and horror features from Mexico, dubbed them poorly into English, gave them new, often more outrageous titles, and released them to the American market. I don’t know if I popped my Murray cherry on The Brainiac or The Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy, but I revelled in these pictures and was rather happy to discover, on moving to the American southwest, that many of them were easily available in dollar stores. However, I’m a strong believer in experiencing films in their original forms and it was only much later that I started to find some of these Mexican films sans the later Murray treatment. Sadly Mexican movies are rarely available in the U.S. with English subtitles, a poor situation that I really hope starts to change, but those that are tend to make a lot more sense than Murray’s bastardised versions.

This is one of Murray’s signature films, under the title of Tom Thumb and Little Red Riding Hood. The more recent DVD completes the original Mexican title, as Caperucita y Pulgarcito contra los monstruos has more than just our two childhood heroes, it has them facing off against the Monsters, the primary reason why this film is such a blast, in the very title. Let’s have fair advertising, please! If the Mormon family round the corner took their kids to see Tom Thumb and Little Red Riding Hood, they might reasonably think that they would have plumped for a safe family friendly movie, only to be progressively traumatised by the wild array of monsters sprawled across their screen. I would love to be a fly on the wall as they fought for their refunds. Would they be more upset about the Satan-worshipping Queen Witch that they stole from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or the paedophile who gets strung up to be used as a piñata? Maybe the monster who looks like Carrot Top if he was a fish man from Innsmouth.

The reason there are so many monsters is that we kick things off in the Kingdom of Evil. You have to admire the balls of the Queen Witch who runs the place. No doubt it was called something like Chihuahua when she took the throne, but she promptly renamed it to the Kingdom of Evil. Now that’s fair advertising, Mr. Murray! The Kingdom of Evil is, of course, where we can once again meet ‘all the storybook witches and monsters that we have met in fables’. Now, I have absolutely no idea which fables the scriptwriters, Fernando Morales Ortiz and Adolfo Torres Portillo, grew up reading, but I don’t recall the Brothers Grimm writing about vampires and Frankenstein’s monster. Maybe Child Snatcher would have fit in their work, as full as it was of dire warnings to children, and I could see Hurricane Dwarf working for them too, with his signature talent of blowing really hard. But what about Boogie Man, who looks like Sloth from The Goonies but with Groucho Marx’s moustache for eyebrows? Talk about traumatising for children!

Anyway, all these monsters have assembled in the castle of the Queen Witch for the trial of the Big Bad Wolf and the Ogre, charged with, well, being nice. El Lobo only had one job to do but he blew it; instead of eating Little Red Riding Hood, or Caperucita, as she’s known in Mexico, he befriended her instead. A similar fate befell the Ogre, who was supposed to devour Tom Thumb, or Pulgarcito in Spanish, but somehow switched to spinach, ice cream and popcorn instead; sadly, nobody clarifies if that’s one meal or three. Of course, such behaviour isn’t tolerated in the Kingdom of Evil so, after she asks how they plead, the jury pronounce them guilty and the sentence is given: death, when the full moon rises and the wicked owl chirps three times. Why she couldn’t have plumped for ‘the witching hour’, I have no idea. Oh, and she’ll turn those sickeningly pleasant children, as well as everyone else in their village, into ‘gross mice and ridiculous monkeys’. Just because she’s evil. That’s what evil witch queens are supposed to do, right?
Well, where there’s evil, there has to be good. Little Red Riding Hood is a real girl, though her dialogue feels dubbed except when she sings with an adult voice. Maybe it is hers; after three outings as Caperucito, María Gracia grew up and married José Domingo, Placido’s eldest son. And yes, this is a sequel, folks! It follows Little Red Riding Hood, or La caperucita roja, in 1960, and Little Red Riding Hood and Her Friends in 1961, though Caperucita y sus tres amigos could be translated as Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Amigos; now that would have been a film! Tom Thumb is a real boy too, though he’s initially shot using camera tricks to make him look only six inches tall; the scenes of him climbing up a table leg are excellently done. However, the effects budget clearly wasn’t going to let that continue, so he’s quickly rendered normal size by magic. He’s Cesáreo Quesadas, who first played Tom Thumb in Pulgarcito in 1958, making this a sequel to two series. So associated was he with the part, he later took Pulgarcito as an occasional stage name.

Clearly, this was cobbled together from various sources, as tended to be the case with Mexican films of this era, who had little care for copyright infringement. I’m still stunned by the Mexican Santa Claus, in which our space hero collaborates with Merlin, Vulcan and their international child labour factory to produce toys for everyone. Tom Thumb comes from English folklore and dates back to at least the 16th century. Little Red Riding Hood, taken from European fairy tales, predates him by six hundred years or so. The Queen Witch, however, is clearly pinched from Disney rather than the public domain stories they raided, just as Frankenstino is a steal from Universal as much as Mary Shelley’s novel. El Vampiro is just a generic vampire with goofy teeth, like the sort of action figure you’d pick up as a Chinese knock-off for a buck. I have no idea where the child sized El Zorrillo, aka Stinky the Skunk, comes from, but El Enano ‘Santanon’ is surely the best actor in the movie, even stuck in a furry suit for the whole thing.
There’s one more steal before we can get moving. With El Lobo and El Ogro locked up in the Queen’s dungeons, complete with iron balls chained to their legs, it falls to Stinky, the Wolf’s loyal little squire, to run for help. She (I assume she’s female) quickly locates our two heroes, though Red’s initial suggestion of, ‘Let’s visit the Queen Witch and ask her not to be so evil,’ is hardly called for. At this point, the Queen has already cast a spell, poured a concoction into the Singing River and made the weather hotter so everyone needs to drink. Given that this water is red not clear, the townsfolk clearly either all need glasses or deserve to be turned into mice and monkeys. Now we see where Red’s brains come from! Maybe if Mexico appointed Ambassador Red to ask Mr. Trump ‘not to be so evil,’ all talk of the wall would end. Anyway, Stinky suggests they visit the Morning Fairy, who’s like Glinda the Good but with a magic wand made of fireworks. So, in this Snow White vs. The Wizard of Oz tale, our heroes quest for the Queen’s magic filter.

Now, I don’t know who wrote these subtitles but that one had me confused for a long while. After all, the Queen Witch kicked off a heatwave; maybe the Morning Fairy could use her magic filter to fix everyone’s AC. But no, eventually I realised that this is really a magic philtre, or potion. Similarly, the Big Bad Wolf’s ‘brought idea’ to get out of jail, which he brings up no less than thrice, is a ‘bright idea’ in real English. However, I never did figure out why Tom Thumb keeps seeing mops instead of monsters. That’s going to plague my sleep until I wake up, six weeks from now, with the proper translation on my tongue. It’s hardly fair, of course, of me to pick on the subtitles, when they were probably written half a century on by someone otherwise unrelated to the movie, but it’s certainly fair to pick on what’s in the picture. You know, like the clunky Martian robot which appears out of nowhere to attack Red while she’s stuck in a skeleton. Why Mexicans adored clunky robots in the sixties, I have no idea, but they were everywhere!
What stuns me most here is that this was supposed to be a children’s movie. Even if we ignore the whole monsters angle, which is a tough prospect given that Boogie Man is enough to scare the bejesus out of adults, let alone kids, it veers wildly between English pantomime and Japanese gameshow. I’ll throw out a couple of examples. That ‘brought idea’ of the Wolf’s is to pretend that he has Panfleta the millionaire flea in his hand and that suckers Boogie Man into opening the cell and idiotically allowing them to escape. That’s stupid on every level, but it’s quintessential pantomime and I could almost hear the kids in the audience willing El Lobo on! However, they’re later tied to a torture rack, ready to be sent into a pair of circular saws, when the Queen orders torment before death. That means tickling their bare feet with feathers, force feeding them far too much water and then tickling them again until they pee like racehorses. Through their mouths. Onto each other. And their torturers. Here, I heard a commentator in stitches.

Of course, it was 1962 so times were different. Many of the moments that could never happen today were apparently utterly fine back then. For instance, the Queen gradually sends all her monsters at the kids and eventually we get to Hurricane Dwarf. In fact, he catches both Tom and Red, but Stinky the Skunk promptly grabs a torch from its sconce and sets his nuts on fire; then they all pile on and pull out his chest hair. Or are they just tickling him? I didn’t want to guess. Earlier, of course, was Child Snatcher, who is just like the crazy paedophile you might expect, snatching up children in his large net and secreting them into a large sack that he keeps in a cave. Tom is caught, but Stinky literally bends over and sprays the poor pervert until he curls up in a foetal position; then they tie him up, haul him into a tree as if they’re going to lynch him and then beat him with sticks like he’s a piñata. Mexican kids are apparently twisted; I remembered others sleighjacking Santa Claus; no wonder those kids ended up with coal.
It’s worth mentioning here that the torch Stinky grabbed contained real fire, just like the Dragon of Avernus breathes real fire in dangerous quantities; I kept waiting for the set to catch fire or the costumes of the actors in it. At one point, this dragon shoots an impressive flame right at the head of the Big Bad Wolf, which is an actor in a fursuit. What did the insurance cost on this picture? Was there flame retardant material on Mexican shoots in 1962? How many stuntmen died of first degree burns? Inquiring minds want to know. The filmmakers did realise their priorities. The Dragon of Avernus is two guys in a cheap pantomime horse outfit with a cheap papier maché dragon mask that has a fully functional frickin’ flamethrower mounted inside it. Perhaps Tom Thumb was magically grown to adult size as Películas Rodríguez had blown their effects budget on a flamethrower. Did María Gracia stop playing Caperucita because she was supposed to be on fire throughout film four, Flaming Red Riding Hood vs. the Human Torch?

While it’s easy to rip this film apart, there are positive qualities. It crams a lot into its 81 minutes, rarely slowing down even when the characters decide to launch into musical numbers. Yes, this is a musical too, though without many songs or, indeed, anything in the soporific Disney vein. The sets are often decent, the Queen Witch’s castle looking like a castle should, and the twisted trees outside in the Kingdom of Evil are delightfully twisted. The props are even better, with the Queen’s fireplace, perhaps the mouth of Hell itself, absolutely gorgeous. It looks like a demon’s head with full length fangs and I want to buy it and build my own castle around it. None of the costumes are up to that quality, especially those of the supporting monsters who roam this Mexican island of lost souls, and the effects are mostly awful, but the lurid Eastmancolor does add a larger than life quality that the movie sorely needed. Nothing matches that fireplace though, even the dragon’s flamethrower.
The other aspect that surprised me is the quality of some of the actors. Nobody really acts well here, because it’s all larger than life lunacy but there are some great actors in the cast. Surely the best visible actor is Ofelia Guilmáin, Spanish by birth but who fled her home country after the rise to power of General Franco, so all her movies were Mexican. Naturally, she worked with other ex-pat Spanish filmmakers, like Luis Buñuel, which leads to the suitably surreal situation that this was the middle of her three pictures of 1962, in between The Exterminating Angel, one of the best films ever made, and The Brainiac, which would surely be one of the worst if it wasn’t so much lunatic fun. José Elías Moreno, who plays the Ogre, was a veteran character actor famous for his versatility and his macho men; it’s ironic that he’s best known today not for quality titles such as Black Wind, Mexico’s submission for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967, but trash like Santa Claus, in which he played the title role, or Night of the Bloody Apes.

Of course, if you’re reading this, you’re looking for trash; this is a Weird Wednesdays review, after all! Unlike many of the Mexican movies that K. Gordon Murray brought over the border, like The Brainiac, The Living Coffin and The Aztec Mummy trilogy, this doesn’t really benefit us if we go back to the original. Sure, we hear the high-pitched original voice of El Zorrillo rather than Murray’s own dub as Stinky the Skunk, but that’s not much of a gain. Perhaps we should seek out the originals of the horror flicks he dubbed, but stay with his versions of children’s films. After all, he became ‘the King of the Kiddie Matinee’ for good reason. What’s important is that we psychotronic cinema fans know who he is and experience the surreality of his work, but also that these weren’t really his films, that Mexico churned out bizarre children’s pictures; atmospheric, if batshit insane, horror movies; and, of course, luchador features featuring wrestlers like Santo whom Murray turned into Samson. These are gloriously weird worlds to explore!

Director: William Lustig
Writer: Larry Cohen
Stars: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Laurene Landon, Richard Roundtree, William Smith, Robert Z’Dar and Sheree North


No, this isn’t a politically charged drama about the current state of police violence, even if we have a prominent African American actor in the cast; Richard Roundtree actually plays the police commissioner. Our title character isn’t driven by race, he’s driven by revenge and that places this in an interesting category. It’s a horror movie, first and foremost, but it’s also a revenge flick; that my copy is on the other side of a DVD from The Exterminator isn’t just because James Glickenhaus executive produced this and directed that. And, of course, it’s a product of the late eighties, arguably picking up from RoboCop in 1987 and creating a hilariously surreal trend of mashing up every sub-genre imaginable with cop movies. Every year from this point on brought a fresh new example of Something New and Ridiculous Cop: Psycho Cop in 1989, Vampire Cop and Omega Cop in 1990, Karate Cop and Samurai Cop in 1991, Cyborg Cop in 1993, Scanner Cop in 1994, Gladiator Cop in 1995... and onwards. We’ll ignore Kindergarten Cop, of course, to keep sane.

This certainly looks like a cop movie to begin with, with Officer Cordell putting on his uniform with all its accoutrements in slo-mo as the opening credits roll. We’re in New York, the twin towers very much in evidence in the opening long shot, and Cordell is one of the city’s finest. The problem is that the public’s trust in the boys in blue is being rapidly eroded by a series of brutal murders at the hands of one of them. First up is Cassie Philips, who gets the better of a pair of muggers only to stumble into the wrong cop for help. He promptly lifts her off the ground by her throat and snaps her neck. ‘It was a cop, man,’ the muggers tell the authorities, ‘a big cop!’ And, while there are disbelievers, Frank McCrae, NYPD veteran in the requisite trenchcoat, believes those dumb kids. He doesn’t see how they could have done it and, as the killings continue, he reasons that it’s someone inside the department, not the commissioner’s wishful suggestion that it’s someone merely impersonating a cop in an attempt to discredit the force.

And so we’re off and running. There’s a lot wrong with this film, but the most unfortunate mistake was to cast so many character actors and give them so little to do. Tom Atkins does a capable job as Frank McCrae, but he’s clearly not stretched by anything he’s tasked to do here. Of course, he’s been playing cops since his debut in Frank Sinatra’s The Detective in 1968, so it was surely second nature for him by this point. Richard Roundtree, a decade and a half after Shaft, is also capable as Commissioner Pike but he could play this part in his sleep. Only William Smith as Captain Ripley is really notable, but that’s mostly because he’s more like Michael Rooker here than Michael Rooker would have been. Of course, Rooker had only begun his career two years earlier, while Smith’s goes back to The Ghost of Frankenstein in 1942 when he was a mere nine years old. This highlights how much the former must have paid attention to the work of the latter! Smith is still acting today and his filmography is a history of exploitation cinema.

Now, people don’t tend to think of Maniac Cop as a Tom Atkins movie, even though he’s the lead actor and the focal point for most of it; they think of it as a Bruce Campbell movie. This was early for the Big Chin, coming right after Evil Dead II and before Intruder, so he looks scarily young and he was only starting to realise how his powerful charisma could bolster his nascent acting skills into a magnetic combination. It’s quite obvious that Atkins, Roundtree and Smith could act circles round him without even trying, but his character, Patrolman Jack Forrest, is cheating on his wife with Laurene Landon, whose acting is so awful here that she’d make me look good. Landon is Theresa Mallory, another cop, and her part becomes more important (if less substantial) as the film runs on. I’ve enjoyed her work in guilty pleasures like Hundra and Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold, but she’s embarrassingly bad here and nobody benefits from that more than Campbell, who suddenly feels like Marlon Brando when acting opposite her.
It’s no spoiler to point out that Campbell isn’t the Maniac Cop of the title. I won’t spoil who is, even though it won’t surprise you in the slightest, but Forrest is in the movie to be set up to look like the killer. There have been three deaths thus far, each committed in a different way (the second was a young driver, a little the worse for wear, who’s slashed across the throat then hurled into the windscreen of his own car, while the third was an innocent man drowned in setting concrete), and everyone is suddenly scared of the boys in blue. Ellen Forrest is scared of her own husband, because he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night and never seems to stay home. He’s Campbell’s character, of course, and a strange woman even rings Ellen up to suggest that he’s the killer. ‘He went out again, didn’t he?’ So she follows him, not to work but to a motel, where she discovers his affair with Mallory, waves her gun around, wanders off, gets murdered by the Maniac Cop and is found in the very room in which she found her husband.

So into custody Forrest goes, where he seems to forget about his wife almost instantly. That’s just one awkward part of the script, written by exploitation legend, Larry Cohen. The next is how we’re supposed to expect Forrest to remain the primary suspect as the real murderer continues his spree, starting with Mallory, who’s out working vice in a horrendous wig. When the killer tries to murder her, McCrae shows up and the supernatural angle to the story shows up with him. A dozen bullets to the chest later, he’s gone, apparently into nowhere. He wasn’t breathing, she says. His hands were cold as ice, she says. Suddenly we don’t just have a Maniac Cop on our hands, we have a Zombie Cop, a Voorhees Cop or a Death Cop. Of course, this angle is mostly ignored from this point on, but it did help him to return for two sequels, the imaginatively titled Maniac Cop 2 in 1990 and then Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence in 1993. McCrae even figures out who the killer is but apparently fails to tell anyone, so Forrest stays behind bars.
Fortunately, here we get the best performance in the film, courtesy of Sheree North, sadly the least well known of the stars, who deserves the credit even if her character, Sally Noland, is quite frankly the only one with any opportunity for an actor. She was a notable character actor, even if her greatest claim to fame was being pushed by her studio as ‘the new Marilyn Monroe’. Her work should speak for itself, from major films like Charley Varrick, The Shootist and Telefon to memorable television roles like Lou Grant’s girlfriend and Kramer’s mum; she was nominated for two primetime Emmys. Here, she’s a cop who’s stuck indoors working a desk job because she wears a big brace on her mangled leg and walks with the aid of a cane. Her first, most subdued scene is fantastic and her more hysterical ones are superb too. She’s invested enough in the story to be believable when she shrieks in abject fear like a madwoman, unlike Landon who somehow forgets she’s a cop and turns into a random slasher movie victim to be.

It’s around this point that the grand mystery is unveiled, to nobody’s surprise, and we can shift from the cops trying to figure out whodunit to the cops attempting to stop whodunit from, well, doing it any more. For all that this is a horror movie, the New York backdrop is shot well enough to make this feel like a seventies throwback to pictures like Dirty Harry. It’s fair to suggest that Cohen took films like that and applied a little bit of realism, asking what would actually happen to a cop that tough and uncompromising and deciding that he’d be discarded by City Hall and sent to Sing Sing, where you can take over and imagine what happens next. If that could be a movie all on its own, this film is the sequel that acknowledges that it’s the late eighties and realises that everyone’s renting horror flicks with outrageous titles on VHS from the shelves of Blockbuster, so shifts firmly into that mode and throws in a new star with a big chin for good measure. Why it didn’t do better at the time, I have absolutely no idea.
Eventually, we get to why I’m reviewing it on 17th March. It’s St. Patrick’s Day today, the one day a year when every American is suddenly of Irish heritage. Nobody pinches the Maniac Cop for not wearing green, but everything does come down during the big St. Patrick’s Day parade through the streets of New York. Well, sort of. We veer away from it pretty quickly, but for a while it’s all kilts and bagpipes and reporter Sam Raimi talking up how dangerous it is this year. Apparently, bomb threats have been called in, among scores of threats against the police, but they’re going ahead anyway with the 50th anniversary parade. It would seem that nobody told Larry Cohen that this particular St. Patrick’s Day parade predates the signing of the Declaration of Independence by fourteen years! 1988’s parade would have been the 227th, a number unimaginable here in Arizona, a state so young that we’d just passed three quarters of a century. Maybe Cohen thought fifty years was more believable to us westerners.

There are so many possibilities for a movie shooting during a real parade, especially one of this size, but it doesn’t seem like Lustig got the permits, so he settles for having extras wave protest signs behind attendees at the real parade. I wonder if anyone realised what was actually happening at the time; did staff go out to have these real people sign waivers? Cohen doesn’t even throw in any ‘dying the river red’ jokes, mostly wasting the atmosphere while our heroes and villain chase off to the docks for their showdown. At least, while obviously scrimping on the budget, the production does show that it has some balls here. The chase scene feels like it’s older than 1988 because the vehicles are clearly moving really fast and the unknown stuntman who doubles for Campbell as he backflips off a flying paddywagon (well it is St. Patrick’s Day) into the river is really doing that. There isn’t any CGI and there aren’t any dummies. That’s old school filmmaking shot on 35mm to boot and we appreciate that immensely.
And, as we set up for the inevitable sequel, we think back and realise that as underwhelming as this script is, as little opportunity as it gives its stars and as stunningly awful as Laurene Landon is in the picture, there are a bunch of little details that made it seem OK anyway. Real stunts are just part of it. There’s real physical make-up work, especially on the face of Robert Z’Dar, a man whose chin doesn’t just trump Campbell’s but challenges American Dad’s. There’s real IT, the new-fangled computer gizmos the cops are struggling to figure out being greenscreen antiques talking to kludgy databases rather than the idiotic eternal zoom machines we get today. We have a real records room where cops go to pull out clippings from newspapers. There’s an electronic score from Jay Chattaway that doesn’t feel embarrassing almost thirty years on; instead it just feels appropriate. Even the poster works well, with a cheap but memorable tagline: ‘You have the right to remain silent... forever.’

Surprisingly, Maniac Cop didn’t do particularly well in 1988. It only made half its budget back at the box office, but gradually built a reputation as a cult film. Having so many cult names involved surely can’t have hurt: Campbell remains a huge cult star today, but many are also aware of Atkins, Landon, Roundtree, Smith and Z’Dar, not to mention writer Cohen and, to a degree, director Lustig. That only leaves Sheree North, of the top billed cast, and she deserves to be much better known than she is today. Sam Raimi isn’t hard to recognise, but the eagle-eyed will also notice George ‘Buck’ Flower in a tiny role, director William Lustig in a cameo and maybe even his uncle, the boxer Jake LaMotta, the Raging Bull, who plays a detective. I didn’t see him, but he’s there somewhere. It’s the names more than anything, but also the genre merging that has helped this live on. Just like its title character, it refuses to die and, beyond the two sequels, there’s still talk of a remake, which could actually be timely and appropriate. Watch this space.

Director: Jaguar Lim
Writer: Jaguar Lim
Stars: Jaguar Lim, Bobby Yip, Kieran, Hidy Yu, Henry Thia, Jaguar Lim, Jaguar Lim, Jaguar Lim, Jaguar Lim and Jaguar Lim


If you haven’t heard of the name Jaguar Lim before now, be warned: you’re going to be repeating it in your sleep after this review because the man is like a human meme. His Facebook page is a research rabbit hole from which I may never escape and, you know what? I’m OK with that. I have no idea what planet he’s from but he seems to spend his time in Malaysia, where he runs a nostalgic chain of candy shops of all things. It’s Country’s Tid-Bits & Candies Cottage, which apparently made him a large amount of money, and I mention it here because its name is the first thing we see in the movie after the ident of the production company, Jaguar Lim Films & Productions (M) SDN BHD, and the crediting of Jaguar Lim as producer on a dedicated screen. We get no less than fourteen such dedicated screens before the title card, detailing the key members of the cast and crew, and Jaguar Lim himself has, get this, ten of them, each with a different photo. No, I’m not kidding. Sorry, Tommy Wiseau, you’re clearly not egotistical enough.

He’s less a credit and more a drum beat. Producer: Jaguar Lim. Executive Producer: Jaguar Lim. Director: Jaguar Lim. Scriptwriter: Jaguar Lim. Starring Jaguar Lim. Then we take a brief break to introduce some other folk who appeared in the film, highlighting in the process how Jaguar Lim has connections. Credited with special appearances are Bobby Yip, a prolific Hong Kong actor who has worked for Wong Jing, Tsui Hark and Stephen Chow; and Kieran, a DJ on Hot FM in Bandar Utama, Malaysia. In shorter cameo roles are Hidy Yu, a model, actress and martial artist from Hong Kong; and Henry Thia, a comedian and actor from Singapore. Then it’s back to Jaguar Lim because he has no less than five cameo appearances too, three of them in drag. By the time we get to the end of the movie, we find ourselves in the forest with our hero, played by Jaguar Lim, watching his grandparents, both played by Jaguar Lim, fly away on a giant banana. Originally called Red Haired Priest, I’m unsure as to why this wasn’t simply renamed to Jaguar Lim.

You’ll be shocked, of course, to discover that we begin the film with, it’s that man again, Jaguar Lim, here the red haired priest of the original title and the lucky exorcist of the new one. Judging from his Facebook page, his hairstyles are creatures of legend, but he’s in a relatively routine red mohawk here as a Taoist priest named Hong Mao. This scene sums up the movie: it has other actors in it and their characters come to his, but he’s the one who drives the conversation, identifies the problem and then becomes the one and only solution. Here, he determines that there’s something wrong with their ancestor’s grave, though they never explain why they ever thought there was an issue, so he puts on his saffron robes and goes to work. It’s like he’s isn’t the star of the movie but the actual movie itself and these actors are just props like the paper money that they burn around the grave site, the spade he uses to dig up their grandfather and the white shirt he’s wearing that stays miraculously clean throughout.

And, sure enough, gramps hasn’t rotted and promptly leaps out of his grave to hop after them. Now, if that sounds strange to you, then let me blow your mind. While the subtitles refer to him as a zombie, he’s really what the Chinese call a jiangshi, a creature of the night usually translated as ‘hopping vampire’. Jiangshi are corpses who are so stiff that they can’t move their joints. Originally, they were reanimated by Taoist priests and taught to hop so that they could be led back home, especially those who died far away. Kept under control by sealing spells attached to their foreheads, they have a habit of running wild and attacking people whenever those spells come loose, hence the abundant sub-genre of hopping vampire movies in Asia, led by the amazing Mr. Vampire series. Like any creature of folklore, there are weapons to fight them: mirrors, sticky rice, ritually stained threads and, as we see here, the neat little trick of simply holding your breath. I believe every movie would be improved by a hopping vampire: like, say, Titanic.
Now, jiangshi are Asian monsters, so it’s not surprising to see one in an Asian monster movie. But, as they say, wait, there’s more! This particular jiangshi promptly finds himself battling what the subtitles call a dracula, apparently a generic term for a traditional western vampire. He’s dressed in the routine outfit: a frilly shirt, a velvet waistcoat and a cape, not to mention a pair of prominent fangs. Frankly, I’m all for an east vs. west vampire battle and would buy tickets to any feature that existed entirely to explore that concept, but this particular east vs. west battle is phrased entirely through eastern style and technique, like kung fu and wirework, suggesting that this dracula is just another monster to Jaguar Lim and he doesn’t really care too much about exploring the culture behind it. Maybe it’s only in the movie to set up the next scene, in which Hong Mao inadvertently knocks the dracula unconscious with a gigantic fart; he’s been eating spring onion and garlic snacks, thus allowing product placement and fart jokes all at once.

Even if they’re only here to be punchlines in cheap jokes, surely the best thing about this movie is its profusion of monsters and it isn’t going to quit now. Next up is Madeline, a pretty young lady claiming to be a university student doing forest research. It’s the next morning and Hong Mao, having sent everyone else home while he searches for his ancestor’s compass, is hardly going to say no to the company, especially when the saxophone music hits. Of course, this lucky exorcist isn’t quite that lucky; she’s some sort of monster who can disguise her true, repulsive form with its corpse face and its long pointed purple nails. I’m not sure what she actually is, maybe a rakshasa, an energy vampire or a form of hungry ghost; maybe a combination of all the above. Anyway, their inadvisable necking sessions are consistently interrupted by a child jiangshi with a kawaii grin and, really, if there’s anything any movie needs more than a hopping vampire, it’s a child hopping vampire in its mini-mandarin outfit. Like I said, Titanic.
While the plot appears secondary to the showcasing of this myriad of monsters, at least we have one at this point. Hong Mao runs from the child jiangshi and, when he realises what he’s running with, he runs from the rakshasa too. Given that Jaguar Lim seems to have been over-indulging somewhat on his candy store stock, he doesn’t run too well and it’s a good thing that another Taoist monk shows up to save him. This is Bai Yi, a character Bobby Yip plays with cheesy comedic relish, but he also provides some real story here, mostly in flashback. Apparently Hong Mao’s ancestor battled a teleporting witch half a millennium ago in a battle that is depicted rather like a bout of Mortal Kombat. They stamp their feet and the earth shakes; they wave their staffs in a threatening manner to spark some gratuitous After Effects action. Eventually the witch is defeated but he (yes, it’s male) curses his opponent’s entire line of descendants, promising their eradication. And that’s why the Hong Mao family moved from China to Malaysia.

At this point, I have to say I was enjoying the film. Sure, it’s stupid. Sure, the acting ranks from cheesily bad on down. Sure, Jaguar Lim feels like the inevitable retarded character in throwaway Hong Kong comedies who’s somehow landed a lead role in Malaysia. However, there isn’t a dull moment and the jokes, as bad as they mostly are, are delivered with a knowing wink. Unfortunately, it goes rapidly downhill from here, wrapping up this plot with a big battle scene just under halfway through the movie. It’s the fight refought for a new generation. Hong Mao, backed up by Bai Yi, who has three child jiangshi in reserve, and a bomoh or Malaysian shaman called Osman, with a trio of toyol in his corner, battles ‘the witch’s next generation’ with her bloated ghost assistant. Cue the poor fight choreography, After Effects abuse and cheesy dialogue as battle commences! Toyol, I should add, are Malay spirits, usually kept as thieves, saboteurs or mischief makers. Here, they appear as three painted kids in similarly painted underwear.
Now, if the movie had ended here, with the gorgeous Hidy Yu, one of the stars of 2013’s Kick Ass Girls, being defeated by our inept heroes teaming up properly for the first time, then it wouldn’t have been too bad; not good, I emphasise, but interesting to those who get a kick out of monster movies from other cultures. After all, just think about what’s in this last battle. We have two Taoist priests and a bomoh, set up in thoroughly different ways to wield their respective sorceries. We have not one but three hopping vampire children and three toyol, which I don’t believe I’ve ever seen in a movie before. We have surely the best effects scene in the picture, as an effectively ominous black cloud arrives and transforms into the witch’s huge ghost. Finally, we have a beautiful kick-ass witch from Hong Kong, dressed up in uncompromising black like any serious movie villain should. I just wish this scene had played out longer and with better writing. This paragraph is the sort of thing to give me wet dreams.

On the flipside, we have the second half of the movie. The first half sounds a lot better than it is, just because so much cool stuff is crammed into it, but the second half is so bad that I don’t believe my words could ever do it justice. Let’s just say that we kick it off by having Hong Mao urinate from a great height on three lovely ladies who are bathing, fully clothed, in a river by a waterfall and for them to discuss how salty and sweet the water suddenly tastes. It sparked memories for me of my brief voice acting career in Damon Foster’s Shaolin vs. Frankenstein, in which my Thug #2 character gets pissed on while hiding in some bushes; the best line I delivered was surely, ‘Mmm. Salty!’ Here, it degenerates further, because the only way he can get them to leave (he’s supposedly here to find the three child jiangshi who have suddenly grown up and vanished) is to threaten to fling poo at them. High cultural art this really isn’t. And, trust me, it only gets worse from here. Wait for the bathroom break and the armpit odour attack and...
Most of the rest of the movie consists of multiple appearances by Jaguar Lim as a variety of characters, of both genders and maybe some in between (‘You have made my hormone imbalance’ says Jaguar Lim to Jaguar Lim after she gives him the superpower of big boobs); puerile humour, both sexual and otherwise; and a succession of characters who confuse us because we’ve lost track of who anyone not played by Jaguar Lim actually is and why they’re even in the movie. The high point has to be the Sikh zombie, as I can’t remember seeing one of those in a movie either (there may have been some in The Dead 2, but the handheld camera meant I saw most of that in my peripheral vision to avoid motion sickness). The next high point is surely... well, I can’t think of one. It isn’t the infamous flying banana, the severing of an umbilical cord with a machete, the flashback to Jaguar Lim with jumper cables on his nipples, his transformation into an orangutan, the... and now I’m just tormenting myself.

I have to admire Jaguar Lim. He’s a chubby dude who runs a chain of candy stores, but he found the balls to make a feature film on his own terms. The fact that he didn’t have a clue what he was doing didn’t turn out as badly as it could have done; we can see and hear everything that we should, for a start, and that’s something that I can’t say for a lot of films shot here in the States. Because I assume that he financed this out of his own pocket, it has to be close to what he wanted to make, which is a valuable freedom that many filmmakers never find. I salute Jaguar Lim for those achievements, even as I have to highlight that this movie is bad in ways I hadn’t previously thought were possible. It’s a 90 minute vanity film that jumps the shark halfway through, then decides to do it again. And again. And again. It doesn’t just jump the shark, it jumps the frickin’ sharknado. The message is that anything’s possible but probably shouldn’t see the light of day. ‘Don't ask where i come from and where to go,’ says Jaguar Lim. ‘I, just a legend.’

Director: Samuel Fuller
Writer: Samuel Fuller
Stars: Constance Towers, Anthony Eisley, Michael Dante and Virginia Grey


One of the most consistently overlooked filmmakers in American movie history is Sam Fuller. I first learned about him on a British TV show called Moviedrome, presented by Alex Cox, the director of cult films like Repo Man and Sid and Nancy. Cox programmed two of Fuller’s films in a double bill: a western called Run of the Arrow and a war picture called Verboten! Both were low budget, although there were many actors that I recognised. What struck me then was what strikes me now whenever I see another Sam Fuller film, namely that he does a lot with a little and that lot includes things that we aren’t conditioned to expect from American movies. His most controversial pictures came later, like this one, as well as its predecessor, Shock Corridor, also starring Constance Towers, and White Dog, but he stretched taboos early and often in ways that don’t always seem controversial today. For instance, he often wrote films about marginalised characters, such as thieves or prostitutes, and films that featured multicultural casts.

I’d seen The Naked Kiss before and, when I started to look for a good choice to remember the career of Virginia Grey on what would have been her one hundredth birthday, it came quickly to mind. Any opportunity to watch a Sam Fuller picture is a good one and I was keen on taking a second run through this one to see what I’d missed a decade and change ago. One thing I discovered was that Grey isn’t in it anywhere near as much as I remembered her being, but the scenes that she does have are memorable and superbly performed with a great deal of power. She’s easily the best actor in the movie, even if she’s billed fourth after Towers in the lead and Anthony Eisley and Michael Dante in support. She plays a madam called Candy, who runs a cathouse called Candy à la Carte with a selection of Bon Bon Girls. How her part interacts with the film as a whole mirrors its moral progression and the film has no point unless it progresses morally and we notice that.

The Naked Kiss begins as we expect Sam Fuller movies to begin, namely with a bang. This is 1964 but we’re watching a woman beat up a man to a dramatic jazz score. She’s Kelly, who is dressed, or perhaps undressed, in a bra and skirt, high heels and a scarf. Oh, and a wig, as we discover when he pulls it off her to show a completely bald head. She takes $75 from his wallet, that she tells him is due to her, but leaves the rest of his substantial wad of cash. As she’s keen on telling him, she’s not robbing him blind. Then she fixes her wig and make-up in his mirror and leaves town, with him unconscious on the floor behind her. She’s a prostitute and he’s her pimp. We discover much later that his name is Farlunde and he holds a grudge. After he ripped her off, she got six of his girls to leave his stable, so he spiked her drink, cut off her hair and... well, we just saw the rest, as much as we can for a 1964 picture. It has to suffice that we’re told that the word was out in the underground to throw acid in her face.

And so we’re not set to see Kelly as our hero, when she arrives in a new town three years later. Towers really looks the part. She has a nice ass for one thing, but it’s much more than that. She’s smiling like she doesn’t know what happy is, but she’s seeking it. She’s also younger than she looks, as if she was was a beautiful girl once but times have been hard on her. Sometimes it seems that she’s winning her fight against her past and she looks good for it but, at other times, she’s older and her bone structure takes over from her skin, reminding of how she looks today in her twentieth year on General Hospital. How much is make-up and how much her, I have no idea, but it works. Her first day in Grantville is cleverly built, as she turns a trick for the local police chief without ever crossing a line to say that she’s doing it for the money. She’s selling Angel Foam, you see, a line of champagne at $10 a bottle. He recommends Candy’s, on the other side of the river in a different town. She’s ‘a personal friend of mine.... tell her I sent you.’
For some reason, however, Kelly doesn’t do that. While we’re never given a reason and she may not know one herself, she decides to quit. She rents a room from Josephine, a local seamstress, who doesn’t need a character reference from Kelly because she trusts her face. She finds work at the Grantville Orthopaedic Medical Center, which caters to all handicapped children, regardless of their circumstances. She even finds a romantic connection, with J. L. Grant, whose great-great-grandfather founded the town and who’s keen on keeping up the good work. He built the hospital where she works, for a start. If all this sounds too good to be true, I should point out two things. One is that it’s supposed to, shot mostly in soft focus, not enough to be a dream sequence but just right for an afternoon Movie of the Week. The other is that it actually is and Griff, the outwardly decent, cathouse-frequenting police chief, is a constant reminder that a town might look perfect on the outside but harbour horrendous secrets on the inside.

I’d love to be able to talk about the grand reveal, which is rather shocking for 1964, even though it’s handled in a magnificent way that shows nothing but tells everything. However, I don’t dare, because it’s one of the better hidden grand twists of American film. What I will say is that Kelly’s newfound success in Grantville falls apart completely in a single evening. One hour, she’s engaged to society’s most eligible bachelor with the respect of a whole town behind her as a marvel with the children; the next, she’s locked up in one of Griff’s cells, facing serious charges and serious questions from a man who knows her history better than anyone. This is fantastic from a dramatic standpoint, of course, but it’s also the point where we sit back and re-evaluate everything we’ve seen up until now. Why did Fuller show us what he did and in the way that he did? Why do people respond to this bombshell dropping the way that they do? The answers are like a textbook of how to build a character when that character is an entire town.
And that’s the point here. It’s like Fuller took the 1950s, turned them over and showed us their rancid underbelly, which is rather topical given how many politicians today seem to want to wind back the clock and take us back to that decade. And, perhaps most controversially, Fuller gives us an out, a heart and a conscience that show us the way forward, but he gives it to us in the form of a retired prostitute. Most brutal of all is the very last scene, in which Kelly walks through the people of Grantville to leave the town, presumably forever. I can imagine whole articles written about this scene, what it means and what’s going on inside the heads of everyone there. It’s a tough ending and many will want a different one, perhaps including me, but I think it’s the right one for the film. It throws a whole new question at us to ponder on, after giving us so many others throughout. Another of the characteristics of Sam Fuller’s movies is that every one I watch suddenly feels like it’s his best.

I’ve talked a lot here about Kelly because she’s the unlikely Christ figure at the heart of the movie, but there are other people here worthy of mention. For most of the film, I wouldn’t add her male co-stars to that list, but they really are well cast and do what they need to do. The key moment for Eisley as Captain Griff is the key moment for the film, when Kelly is locked up. He’s manoeuvered wildly throughout the film between wanting Kelly and wanting Kelly gone completely. He’s jealous not only of his personal friend, J. L. Grant, for landing her, but of her too for being a better person than he is. It’s when he’s forced to face that that he comes alive and we see the change. Michael Dante, always a smouldering shadow of a man, is similarly off, as the personification of the town, until we realise why and then everything comes into focus. Neither of them are at terms with who they are, unlike someone with as much vibrant character as Mac, the head nurse at the children’s hospital, whom Patsy Kelly plays with a real joie de vivre.
And then there’s Candy and her Bon Bon Girls. This is late in Virginia Grey’s career and she was literally born to it, arriving in this world in Edendale, the home of most major film studios at the time, including Keystone, where her father, Ray Grey, worked as an actor and director. No less a name than Gloria Swanson, also a Keystone alumnus, was one of her early babysitters. She even began her film career as a child, playing Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1927, though her early parts were generally uncredited because she’d focused on school. Perhaps inevitably, she returned to the film industry, signing with MGM, where she played many small roles in big films like Test Pilot and Idiot’s Delight, both of which starred a star with whom she’d have an on/off relationship for years, Clark Gable. After the tragic death of his third wife, Carole Lombard, in 1942, Gable and Grey were often seen in public together; it was a surprise to many when he married another in 1949. Grey’s friends say that this was why she never married, a rarity in Hollywood.

Arguably her career got most interesting after she left MGM in 1942, even if her most interesting work was often in B-movies like House of Horrors, Swamp Fire or Jungle Jim. in the fifties, she worked for producer Ross Hunter in soap operas such as All That Heaven Allows, The Restless Years and Back Street; that working relationship continued until Airport (her last feature), The Lives of Jenny Dolan and the mini-series of Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers, both on TV in the seventies. This is hardly her usual sort of role, but she’s resonant. She hires her Bon Bon Girls for looks rather than brains, but Candy herself is sharp and elegant. I was impressed by how she doesn’t attempt to hide her age but smiles because she knows she doesn’t need to. She’s caught off guard by Kelly at one point but ensures that she’s firmly composed as she wreaks her revenge in blistering style. She’s a hard as nails bitch who we know will do whatever it takes but she’s still able to find a believable softness, even if it’s just for show.
There are other interesting actors here too, with similarly long-running histories in Hollywood. Miss Josephine is played by Betty Bronson, two films away from the end of a career that began over forty years earlier in 1922. She made surprisingly few films for a silent movie star, but they included playing Mary in Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ and the title character in 1924’s Peter Pan, the movie that changed her life. She was chosen for that role personally by the author, J. M. Barrie, and her performance led to her being the first crush of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who became smitten. Perhaps at the other end of the spectrum is Hatrack, one of Candy’s Bon Bon Girls, so named because everyone wants to hang their fedora on her. She’s suitably sexy and she’s sultry beyond belief, but as dumb as a sackful of rocks. She’s Edy Williams and, six years later, she married Russ Meyer, having starred in his Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and The Seven Seconds. She’s still a regular at the Academy Awards today, renowned for her revealing outfits.

If Grey outshines the three actors billed ahead of her, she’s still an actor in a film that resonates mostly for its script. It’s shot with the same coarse style that most of the actors utilise in their work and it sounds good, even with a particularly soporific song at two separate moments in the film (and for very good reason), but it’s really all about Fuller’s script. It initially seems rather loose until the twist hits and everything turns, at which point we have to re-evaluate everything that went before. A second viewing is almost required here, not to make sense of the movie because it’s hardly obtuse but to understand just how deep this goes in its character assassination of small town America. Similarly, it can easily flow past us if we don’t pay enough attention, especially now, over half a century on, but, even after it’s gone, there’s something left in the air that won’t leave us alone and we realise just what Fuller did and how controversial this really was in 1964. Check it out, along with anything else you can find with Fuller’s name on it.

Director: Christoph Schlingensief
Writer: Christoph Schlingensief and Oskar Roehler
Stars: Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad, Joachim Tomaschewsky, Johnny Pfeiffer, Jones Muguse, Miklós Koniger and Thomas Chibwe


Index: Weird Wednesdays.

I’ve brought you some weird movies as part of my Weird Wednesdays project, but perhaps I’ll never be able to bring you another one weirder than this, a 1996 art film from German auteur Christoph Schlingensief, rather appropriately called United Trash. I am sure that the director had a serious purpose, namely to provide a socio-political commentary on the failure of the United Nations in Rwanda, but he chose to do it in an incredibly offhand manner. What he delivered was a sort of screwball comedy, in which no taboo is too low to exploit. It’s what you might get if Luis Buñuel took aim at western political and religious power structures and John Waters rewrote his script. If that sounds schizophrenic, it really is. The entire approach screams for analysis, as if there are deep and meaningful metaphors in every scene, but they’re all smothered in faeces and hurled at us by a chimp tripping on acid. The end result is somehow both aberrant and magnetic; we really don’t want to watch at all but we just can’t look away.

Let me introduce you to the key characters and you’ll get the idea. First up is Werner Brenner, a German general working for the United Nations somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa; we’re never told where, but the film was shot in Zimbabwe, so that’s as good a location as any. Brenner, played by Schlingensief regular Udo Kier, who I now see has been superbly described as the ‘Ron Jeremy of cult movies’ because he’s in so damn many of them, is clearly effete Prussian nobility which, to Schlingensief, translates to poor leader, flagrant queen and scat muncher. His wife, Martha, is Kitten Natividad, voluptuous vixen of many a Russ Meyer film, who’s racking up (pun not intended) quite the cult career of her own. She’s a former American hooker, whose debauched past (a twenty year stretch for exhibitionism) has been inexplicably replaced with a sexless present as a bored housefrau. She begins proceedings heavily pregnant and the baby shows up as black as the ace of spades, so that life change surely didn’t happen the way we’re told.

Well, either that or the child is the new messiah, by virtue of a case of immaculate conception; that’s how the local priest sees the situation. He’s Bishop Pierre, in the toothless form of actor Joachim Tomaschewsky. Pierre is German as well, but he’s been exiled to Africa for crimes that are never explained but which surely tie to his undying hatred for the Catholic church. It’s no stretch for us to believe that Lund, the bodybuilder boyfriend of General Brenner, has been kicked out of Europe too, because he’s as freaky a ‘dyed-in-the-wool pervert’ as I’ve seen on screen in a long while. There are scenes where Jonny Pfeifer sells his role so well that it can’t have helped his future career; the one where he’s discovered molesting an infant is truly abhorrent and I can only assume it was shot very carefully indeed. Then again, this film is not likely to be showing up on the resumés of anyone involved, unless they have become known primarily for sheer unadulterated weirdness and they want to milk that (pun very much not intended).

That leaves the unlikely narrator of the film, a baby who begins that narration an hour before he’s actually born. This is Peter Pan, who soon becomes Jesu Peter or Mohammed Peter or any other combination of similar names. He’s played by Thomas Chibwe, an actual African dwarf who spends the film with prosthetic make-up on his head to make it look like it features a constantly erupting vagina. Just in case you might want an explanation for that, it’s the product of a deranged plan. It might seem like a combination of accidents: Martha walks in on Lund molesting her baby, administers a marble test to check for penetration, then leaves it with him to unwisely stick up his nose. In hysterics because her son can’t breathe, she attempts to extract it with a knitting needle, only for her husband to trip on his way into the room and prompt the poor child to be scarred horribly for life. However, back here in the cheap seats, we suddenly realise why Bishop Pierre spent so much time ramming a needle through a voodoo doll’s head.
If you’re getting conditioned to my Weird Wednesdays picks and this doesn’t sound too wild, let me add that the doctor suggesting a five year recovery period for this budding messiah is a Hitler lookalike who moonlights as the local rocket expert, a ‘thorn in the flesh of Werner von Braun’. Kicked out of the west after the Challenger explosion, he’s experimenting with human engines, which apparently means local unfortunates drenched in whiskey. The goal of the local chief, a budding Idi Amin, is to ride a discarded V2 rocket all the way to Washington, DC, where he can blow up the U.S. President. Why, we have no idea, but that’s hardly the wildest suggestion in this picture. Clearly, this outrageous setup is that the west is utterly bankrupt morally and the people it sends to help less fortunate souls abroad are the least qualified people imaginable. And, what’s more, those less fortunate souls seem to be quite happy without the water well and crematorium that seem to be the UN’s crowning achievements in the locality.

We’re clearly asked to imagine what life would be like here without western influence. So let’s take away the bishop who’s leading them all horribly astray, remove the United Nations and their litany of horrendous examples and ditch the local chief, who, we are reliably informed, was educated in Munich. What’s left? A couple of musicians who sound far better with a guitar and a small drum kit than they should, and some happy folk. Of course, we can’t help but extrapolate that message to include this production too; I’d swear blind that most of the locals couldn’t understand a word said to them, whether in English or German, so they just smiled and laughed along in blissful ignorance. However, according to the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1996, the entire crew were arrested by the secret police ‘on suspicion of making a porn film’, and a number of sites report that the resulting picture prompted a brief cessation of diplomatic relations between Germany and Zimbabwe.
What’s oddest here is that this sounds like a particularly unhinged exploitation flick, but it really isn’t; it’s an art movie that aims to make a serious point using the cinematic language of exploitation flicks. Schlingensief, who wrote the script with Oskar Roehler, is able to keep things scooting along fast enough that we can’t get bored and variably enough to keep us believing that there’s worse yet to come. It doesn’t take the presence of Kitten Natividad, a lovely lady who looks bloated here (she looked fantastic when I met her years after this) to realise the Russ Meyer influence; we can’t fail to notice it in the editing. The score is lively and would have worked well in a Alejandro Jodorowsky movie; Tom Waits would surely give his seal of approval to all the Bohemian brass that’s in the soundtrack. The offensive material is in your face and taken from the John Waters textbook, but it’s given a more artistic edge than a camp one, so it also reminds on occasion of Pedro Almodóvar.

What it doesn’t have is the cohesion of any of those filmmakers. I got the strong impression that the budget was low and the time brief, so Schlingensief, who also shot the film, kept his camera rolling while his actors improvised in front of the human backdrops and pieced the semblance of a story together in post, with editor Andrea Schumacher. For instance, there are a couple of scenes of pageantry, which happen years apart in story time but appear to feature the exact same array of musicians and marchers. What it does have is an apparently never-ending supply of outrageous shots to burn themselves on our retinae and scar us for life. There’s actually a line of descriptive dialogue that suggests, ‘Like a maelstrom of wrong feelings, the images poured ecstatically.’ That line really sums up the movie to me far more than any of the much longer attempts at synopses that I’ve read. This film isn’t really the sum of its parts; it’s just a really long montage of them, something to play silently at a party and confuse your friends.
In fact, it’s incredibly hard to highlight examples because there are so many to choose from and there’s so much going on even in the background. For instance, we jump around in time like a narcoleptic: five years later, two hours later, four months later; most of these jumps are documented in paint on makeshift wooden signs that are literally carried past the camera by local extras. Some, however, can’t be ignored. One has Bishop Pierre proclaim Martha the mother of God by biting the head off a chicken and pouring the blood all over her; she immediately flashes back to her bathtub, from which she emerges naked to discover Lund whipping the bare ass of her husband, so cracks a bottle over his head in slow motion. The ever-flowery narration describes this: ‘like a gigantic orgasm, the wave of African folklore penetrated her in a growing helix of hatred and violence.’ Surely, this aims to mark the point in the film where Martha’s allegiances change, but we really don’t care. It’s just a barrage of mad imagery.

Perhaps I might get a little more out of United Trash if I understood the references. At one point, Martha goes to the hospital and is suddenly referred to as Effi Briest. I know that Effi Briest was a late Victorian novel that was adapted to film twice, most recently by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of Schlingensief’s key influences and the filmmaker from whom he borrowed a number of regular actors, including Udo Kier. However, none of that helps explain why Martha is suddenly referred to as Effi Briest. When I did get a reference, like what we discover in the White House right before chief Hassan el Haachi arrives in his V2 rocket, it didn’t seem too insightful. So the U.S. President is Jeff Koons II, who’s doing La Cicciolina II (or is it vice versa?) in bed in front of a camera crew. Is this a tie between European and American politics or a dig at Bill Clinton’s then-current scandals? It really doesn’t matter one way or the other. We’re too busy laughing at the cheap animation and wondering how much money Schlingensief saved on CGI.
At least I recognised those as references. Others seem like them but I may be digging too deep in a vain attempt to find meaning in a film that laughs at me for the attempt. For instance, after his five year recovery period, Jesu Peter finds himself released from an asylum and becoming incredibly popular. Is he really dressed up as Michael Jackson in a Hannibal Lector mask or is that just a wild coincidence? After the failed attempt on his life by his father on his prosthetic legs and the bazooka-equipped Lund, is the fantastic surreality we see the sort of release that wraps up a TV show, with a bizarre set of dancers: Jesu Peter, looking rather like a midget Mr. T after an albatross unloaded on his head; Kitten Natividad, the buck naked mother of God; a local in Bishop Pierre’s outfit and what looks like a mask from Scream; an inter-racial couple of German midgets; and the local anti-American chief, resplendent in his red, brown and gold muu muu? It sure felt like it to me, but there was probably no real intent behind it at all.

Perhaps the most telling moment is when Werner Brenner gets up on stage in front of the local militia, Africans one and all, with a full compliment of machine guns. Not only does Udo Kier put on blackface, he paints his entire body black and attempts some sort of improvised native dance naked but for a brief skirt of bananas. Lund is there too, clad in a truly awful blue Elvis-style jumpsuit, but we hardly even notice. What matters is that this scene doesn’t stand out from those around it (the previous scene involved the general masturbating a banana as an apparent warm-up) and that it works as the entire movie in microcosm (the whole film is a deliberate minstrel show, bludgeoning us with so much politically incorrect and morally abhorrent content that it slowly becomes passé and we accept it as the norm). No, I’m not quite that jaded a Weird Wednesdays viewer, but that’s surely much of the point of the film. Atrocity here, atrocity there; scandal here, scandal there. What are we ignoring in the world because we’re used to it?
I’d love to know more about the filming of United Trash, also known as The Slit, but there’s almost nothing online about it. I’d really like to know more about how this feature film affected the diplomatic relationship between two different countries, the one which produced it and the one where it was shot; again, there’s little online beyond some repeated paragraphs probably sourced from an official press release. What I did find online was a strong connection between Schlingensief and Africa. He’d been travelling to that continent since 1993, initially to Namibia, where he would later stage at least one opera by Wagner and shoot a documentary, The African Twin Towers; then Zimbabwe, where he shot this picture; and later Burkina Faso, where he started to build an Opera Village. His earlier pictures often centered around a thematic search for the real Germany, like A Hundred Years of Adolf Hitler or The German Chainsaw Massacre; rather bizarrely, he seems to have found it in Africa. I’m still trying to figure out what I found in this film.

Director: Daniel Haller
Writer: Charles B. Griffith
Stars: John Cassevetes, Beverly Adams, Mimsy Farmer and Maurice McEndree


The landscape of American film changed in the late sixties in many ways and not only because American life changed too. Many of the things that the industry was used to and could safely rely on just weren’t the case any longer: the studios didn’t own theatres any more, television was eating heavily into ticket sales and the Production Code, which governed film ‘decency’, was increasingly being ignored. Society was in upheaval, with the civil rights movement and the counterculture, not to mention anti-Vietnam War protests. The studio heads, realising that their pictures were becoming increasingly irrelevant, eventually gave in, admitted that they were now completely out of touch and began to give large sums of money to whoever might possibly be in touch. This led to the New Hollywood of the early seventies, with the most fascinating set of movies seen in America since the pre-code era back in the early thirties. The studios didn’t get their mojo back until Jaws in 1975, arguably the first modern blockbuster.

If the big studios were akin to cruise liners, so couldn’t turn round quickly, indie filmmakers were speedboats and they could turn on a dime. Companies such as American International Pictures (A.I.P.) and filmmakers like Roger Corman, who shot many movies for them to distribute, could leap on every fad and have topical features in drive-ins in no time. To see where New Hollywood got their ideas (not to mention most of their key people), check out the indie films of the sixties. Biker flicks were just one sub-genre of exploitation but they were an important one in the late sixties and early seventies as people wanted to ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’. Many were carbon copies of their predecessors but others took the opportunity to explore themes that the studios weren’t willing to touch yet. Motorpsycho, from Russ Meyer, muses on PTSD; the first Billy Jack film, The Born Losers, adds prejudice against Native Americans; and, of course, Easy Rider became the definition of ‘a generation lost in space’ in 1969.

This film is relatively loose and out of control, perhaps appropriately given the subject matter, but it explores an existential crisis, with our biker heroes attempting to escape the society that oppresses them to Hole-in-the-Wall, the legendary sanctuary of Butch Cassidy, that to them becomes an impossible dream. For all that the film romanticises the outlaw biker, clearly our hero, who only wants to live and let live outside the control of the Man, it also minimises him. As we start, Cody’s motorcycle club of two hundred has already dwindled down to twenty-six; by the time the key moment arrives, during the finalé, it decreases to one. Nobody else cares any more; they’re having too much fun indulging in stereotypical anti-social delinquent biker behaviour. In other words, we should approve of the outlaw biker and his wild west sense of honour and justice, but most of his riding buddies are just thugs and lowlifes whose degeneracies really do warrant the full attention of the law. It’s an interesting mixed message for 1967.

I’m watching because Devil’s Angels was mostly shot in Arizona, but that isn’t Arizona as we begin, not least because we don’t have a Pacific Ocean (until the big one hits the San Andreas). The aircraft boneyard scene may have been shot at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, but there just isn’t enough to make sure of that identification. Certainly the scenes that follow have been identified as San Pedro, CA, where Corman shot The Wild Angels a year earlier: Cabrillo Beach, Point Fermin and Gaffey Street. It seems like all the time the Skulls Motorcycle Club spends in California is focused on leaving, though. There’s nothing there any more, especially after Gage crashes his bike into a broken down car on the way to the clubhouse, leaving a man dead at the scene and a cop witness to his hit and run. Cody has his club tear down Gage’s recognisable bike into parts, pack up their inevitable collection of beer, pot and Nazi memorabilia, and peel out of there. He wants to find Hole-in-the-Wall, where they can all live in peace.
These early scenes aren’t much. It isn’t just that most of it is ruthlessly stereotypical, adding nothing to the bunch of biker movies which preceded it, not least The Wild Angels, which Corman directed (he only produced this). That picture featured a fantastic cast, including Nancy Sinatra, Diane Ladd and Michael J. Pollard, and also introduced such quintessential biker movie stars to the genre as Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern. The only star here is John Cassavetes, right before The Dirty Dozen and Rosemary’s Baby, at a time he tried to raise as much money as he could from acting to finance the even more indie films he wanted to direct. After him, the most recognisable actor has to be either Buck Kartalian, who played the Mel Brooks lookalike Khan in Gymkata, or Leo Gordon, a big and definitive tough guy who I recently reviewed in Night of the Grizzly. Here it’s Kartalian who plays a biker, while Gordon moves away from the dark side to play a small town sheriff, still tough but one of the good guys for a change.

What’s worst though, is that everything seems ruthlessly improvised. That approach can work wonders and, certainly, some of the most famous moments in film history were actually improvised, but all the hippie dippie dialogue here seems like the product of a copious quantity of marijuana. Surely at least some of the actors were stoned when they delivered it; perhaps even Chuck Griffith was stoned when he wrote the script. The only coherent things in this whole section are the decisions to leave the state and break out Skulls member Funky from the Lenning City Jail before they do. The latter is a good thing because Funky is a real character but most of his fellow Skulls are non-entities. When one can be distinguished from another, like with Robot, it’s because he hasn’t got a pair of brain cells to rub together and he’s used only for cheap comedic effect. Funky’s girl is a joy too, but the film does a lousy job at telling us names, so I can only assume that she’s Karen, played by Mitzi Hoag. This is early for her but later photos match up.
Is there any real structure here yet? No. And there won’t be any for quite a while. Cody and Lynn lead the way out of California, in a rather hopeful attempt to reach Hole-in-the-Wall, especially given that they don’t know where it is. If they did, they wouldn’t be driving southeast into Arizona but northeast to Wyoming, given that it’s in the Big Horn Mountains of Johnson County; the cabin at which the Hole in the Wall Gang met the Wild Bunch is preserved at the Old Trail Town museum in Cody, WY. But no, these folk don’t ask directions and just keep on riding as if fate will surely lead them to their promised land. Of course, mild things happen to spark them off on the way and they respond in rather less mild fashion. They play havoc at a grocery store, after fleecing it of beer and gas, in part because the owner obviously doesn’t want them there. When a camper knocks over one of their bikes, they pursue it, then tear it to pieces and set fire to it. It belongs to the most nonchalant couple ever: ‘Next year, we’ll get a boat,’ he tells her.

It takes almost half an hour for the film to get where it needed to go, which is Brookville in the movie and Patagonia, AZ in reality. It’s your typical small town and they arrive during the 27th annual town picnic, which means a fairground, a beauty contest and a host of other things that bored bikers are quite happy to mess with. Initially, they just sit down in the bleachers to watch the girls in bikinis up on stage. However, as soon as sides are set up by the officials panicking about what these interlopers might do to the town, we’re thrown onto the side of the bikers in an odd way: Royce, the town’s mayor, awards first prize in the beauty contest to gormless Clara Hays over the cute new girl in town, Marianne Fielding, and we join the bikers in vocal disagreement. Marianne is an important character in the movie to come as she hangs around the bikes long enough to get picked up by another annoyingly unidentified character whom I presume is Roy, played by Kipp Whitman. younger brother of Stuart Whitman.
And with Sheriff Henderson letting the Skulls stay on the beach where he can keep an eye on them, with them promptly getting hammered on stolen Coors and with Roy about to ride sweet young Marianne over to the party, you can imagine exactly what is going to happen next. Well, the picture wants you to imagine that so it can play with your prejudice against these knights of the open road, when we’re really just attuned to what we’re going to see in biker movies from A.I.P., so we find ourselves remaining on the side of the bikers. Oddly, we’re also on the side of Sheriff Henderson, because he’s a tough but honest cop who can see the big picture and play the best hand he’s dealt. He’s not going to conjure up any false charges and he’s not going to stand for them when the moronic mayor does exactly that. We almost feel sorry for the poor sheriff, stuck between a rock and a hard place that are coming together fast. Leo Gordon’s stubbornly honest performance is one of the best in the movie.

The problem is that, even if we’re surely never going to find ourselves on Mayor Royce’s side and we aren’t given a chance to get to know the people of Brookville, we can’t really pledge our allegiance to the bikers either. Cody is a complex soul, the only one of the bunch, but even he’s a wildcard. What drove a wedge between me and the Skulls started with their penchant for crap beer and escalated through their bizarre habit of not actually drinking it. So much Coors is wasted here by spraying it at other folk, pouring it over other folk or just throwing it at other folk that I began to wonder if Smokey and the Bandit was a sequel to this film, made to restock the west with Coors after the Skulls abused the entire previous stock of two states; then I remembered that they hauled it east over the Mississippi, where it couldn’t be sold legally because of its lack of preservatives. Given that these bikers behave quite well compared to previous examples of the genre, not least The Wild Angels, the film can easily be seen as underwhelming.
I often wonder, as I review these dry heat obscurities that were shot predominantly in Arizona, how locals felt about these movies being shot in their towns. That goes double for ones shot in the smaller towns dotted around the state, and double again when the subject matter is as potentially controversial as this. I wonder if the good townsfolk of Patagonia, an hour south of Tucson, knew that Corman had apparently cast real Hell’s Angels a year earlier in The Wild Angels and that that film descends into blasphemy and rape. This isn’t technically related, but it certainly plays with the same theme and in many ways could be seen as a milder remake. With most of the film set in and around Brookville, we see a lot of Patagonia, though some scenes were apparently shot in nearby small towns like Sonoita and Amado. I can’t identify those in the film, partly because the most obvious locations for material such as this weren’t built at the time, like the Longhorn Grill in Amado with its giant longhorn skull entrance, which dates to the 1970s.

However, there are two obvious landmarks to identify Brookville as Patagonia, even though neither is there any more. The first is the Stradling Museum of the Horse Inc., located directly opposite the fairground, from which we see it often, including from the top of the ferris wheel. It was founded by Anne Stradling in 1960 to celebrate the horse throughout history; she and her husband also ran a ranch and a motel in town but, realising that none of these were sustainable, she eventually donated her collection, appraised at $10m, to the Hubbard Museum in Ruidoso, NM, in 1986. The other is the Big Steer, a bar that is featured prominently, both inside and out. This closed in 2001 and was remembered shortly afterwards by Paul ‘Sonny’ Showalter, a Patagonia Marshal’s deputy for 27 years, as ‘a fighting bar’. I wonder if it was a fighting bar in 1967 when the Skulls invaded or if that reputation came later. It’s sadly amusing to realise that we see it fictionally here as it apparently really was.
The Arizona countryside is a good reason to watch Devil’s Angels, but it’s not the only one, even if this is a relatively minor entry in the biker cinema of the era. There are some long shots where bikers ride right through the river to get to the beach and they look perfect: moving paintings of peace and tranquility raped by the engines of the new visitors. Richard Moore’s cinematography is an odd mixture of glorious long shots and less impressive close ups. He was a major name, having co-founded Panavision in 1953 only to leave it nine years later because he didn’t want to be stuck behind a desk. As cheesy as much of the clearly improvised dialogue gets, there are some good lines to elevate the material. ‘Toujours l’amour. Tonight, for sure,’ made me grin and the movie could be summed up by Cody’s girl, Lynn, when she suggests that ‘There’s no place that’s got good things that doesn’t have cops.’ I enjoyed the campfire ghost story too, about a ‘motorsickle cop’ and the vengeful ghost of a Skull.

The most memorable moments aren’t always the ones that should stand out, though. I got stuck on the fact that Coors in 1967 was apparently bought in soup-style cans on cardboard trays. Times have certainly changed. The music underlines that too, with a lot of pschedelic pop and surf music that doesn’t seem to fit today with hard rockin’ bikers in leathers. The theme tune is by Jerry and the Portraits, a band who don’t seem to have recorded anything else, while the rest of the score is by the Arrows, the backing band of Davie Allan, who specialised in soundtracks and recorded many for Corman’s biker flicks; his most successful song, Blues Theme, from The Wild Angels, was one of the first that Eddie van Halen learned to play. Some of the quirkier moments revolve around one of the Skull ladies, whose name I missed, if it was ever announced. She really wants to get pregnant but hasn’t decided yet on who the father should be; she eventually figures it out on a ouija board on the beach, while everyone else is partying.
The crew all did better work elsewhere. Corman only produced, which presumably meant making sure the film wrapped on time and within budget so he could feed it up to A.I.P. Director Daniel Haller was Corman’s art director of choice for years; he shot most of his Poe pictures, for a start, and handled the production design as well. This was only his second film as a director, following Die, Monster, Die! in 1965, a vague adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space. He’d return to bikers again with The Wild Racers and to Lovecraft with The Dunwich Horror, but he spent most of his directorial career working for television, finishing up in 1988 with Road Lord, an episode of The Highwayman shot here in Arizona. Writer Charles B. ‘Chuck’ Griffith was another Corman regular; most of his filmography is for Corman movies, dating back to Gunslinger in 1956. He was responsible for perhaps the most famous three pictures that Corman ever made: A Bucket of Blood in 1959, The Little Shop of Horrors a year later and Death Race 2000 in 1975.

I can’t quite say that for all the cast though. John Cassavetes certainly did better work elsewhere and not just on screen; his three Oscar nominations were as an actor, a scriptwriter and a director respectively. He’s easily the best actor in the film as Cody but it’s hardly his best role. Cody’s girl, Lynn, is played by Beverly Adams, best known either for her role in How to Stuff a Wild Bikini or for marrying her hairdresser on Torture Garden, the film she made after this; that hairdresser was Vidal Sassoon. Honestly, I was more impressed by Mimsy Farmer, who makes Marianne a believable picture of almost innocence. Farmer had a highly unusual career, mostly in Italy; giallos like Four Flies on Grey Velvet and The Perfume of the Lady in Black; Lucio Fulci’s The Black Cat; and the war movie Code Name: Wild Geese. I liked Mitzi Hoag too, as Funky’s girl, Karen, but I never quite bought into her being part of this scene. She’s quirky, so fits with Funky, but just too nice to be associated with the Skulls. You could take her home to meet the parents.
Buck Kartalian is fantastic as Funky. I needed to get past his Mel Brooks impression in Gymkata and this was a great way to do it. His career is an odd mixture of legendary failures like Myra Breckinridge, Octaman, Gymkata and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and big successes like Cool Hand Luke, Planet of the Apes, The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Rock; the sheer versatility needed to play in that list is on show here. Never mind Cassavetes as the lynchpin of the film, as solid as he is when he’s not apparently stoned out of his brain, it’s Kartalian and Leo Gordon who shine brightest here. And that’s odd because Devil’s Angels, like all the biker flicks of the era, was inherently about youth and its potential for societal change, but Kartalian and Gordon are the oldest actors in the lead cast; born in 1922, they were seven years older than Cassavetes and a decade or two older than anyone else. Maybe that’s the biggest problem; the best things are the ones that don’t count and the things it needed didn’t show up. Like good examples of the new generation.

Directors: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten
Writers: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra and Peter Litten
Stars: Caroline Munro and Simon Scuddamore


April Fools’ Day has been associated with pranks since The Canterbury Tales in 1392, so it’s another thing we can blame on Geoffrey Chaucer, if not the Romans, who had a festival called Hilaria about a week later. Of course, there’s an April Fool’s Day horror movie, released in 1986 and well worth watching, but I felt that it was a little too obvious for my Horror Movie Calendar project. Instead, I chose another April Fool’s Day that was released in 1986 but was renamed to Slaughter High to avoid confusion (or a lawsuit from the lawyers of Paramount, a studio with deep pockets). To highlight the magnificent power of irony, this version was clearly shot first, given that its lead actor, Simon Scuddamore, committed suicide in November 1984, right after the film wrapped. It’s very possible that the April Fool’s Day everybody knows wasn’t even started until after that date. Further irony lies in these two slasher movies, a thoroughly American genre, were shot in Canada and the UK respectively. Then again, it did all begin in Italy with A Bay of Blood...

This isn’t a particularly notable slasher, but then the genre isn’t known for its notable films; it’s known for its memorable maniacs and its imaginative deaths. Slaughter High is perhaps the dumbest classic slasher I’ve ever seen, but it has a memorable maniac and it has a few highly imaginative deaths, so it’s built up a minor cult following over the decades. I could even see the film growing in esteem after repeated viewings because, while it aims to be a slasher, it’s perhaps unintentionally also an early and solid example of the urban legend horror movie. It gets at least 100% better if we decide to imagine that this isn’t a real movie with a story we’re intended to believe and decide instead that it’s a YouTube video about an urban legend that makes no sense but people are talking about anyway. After all, in this modern world of alternative facts and perception equalling truth, what’s to say that isn’t what it is. If we believe it, then it’s true, right? What if we want to believe it, because it would be better that way? Does that work?

Initially, it isn’t as stupid as it is outrageous, because the particular prank that kicks it off is really brutal. We’re at Doddsville High, founded in 1857 and looking rather cool from the outside. I’d buy that building for a dollar! We arrive in time for a chemistry nerd called Marty Rantzen to have the time of his life, or at least so he thinks. After all, Carol Manning is holding his hand and dragging him to the girls’ locker room to make his day. Given that Carol Manning is played by a 35 year old Caroline Munro, a Bond girl who looks utterly stunning, we can perhaps understand why he can’t believe his luck. Of course, it’s all an April Fools joke and when he springs buck naked from the shower, it’s to discover an entire film crew of students shooting him on video, hosing him down with a fire extinguisher and prodding him with a javelin. By the time the janitor sends in the coach, they’ve electrocuted Marty on the towel rack, dunked him head first into the toilet and flushed it. It’s hardly his day but, trust me, it’s about to get a lot worse.

The coach puts everyone, except Marty, of course, into detention in the gym, but he has very little control. Two of the number go to Marty before detention to ‘apologise’ by giving him some extra-special dope to smoke. Why Marty would trust these numbwits, I have no idea, but he does and that means that he has to run out of the chem lab mid-experiment to puke his guts up. He returns to his bubbling beakers after team captain Skippy Pollack has sabotaged them, having temporarily escaped detention to make the already horrendous situation even worse. Next thing we know, the lab catches fire and a very large bottle inappropriately stored on a rickety shelf above Marty’s head topples into the inferno and splashes nitric acid all over his face. They all run to watch poor Marty stuck in a burning lab, horribly disfigured and fighting for his life. They watch in horror, but not in guilt. If it wasn’t 1986, I swear they’d be taking selfies against the burning background. What a bunch of prizes they are!
So, you can see the ‘outrageous’; here’s the ‘stupid’. It’s a rare actor here who’s under thirty and not one of this cast is believably in high school. If they retook their senior year half a dozen times, I still wouldn’t buy into these actors in these roles. So, when we leap forward an undetermined amount of years (I think someone mentions five late on) and none of them look like they’ve aged a day, the credibility of the picture is on shaky ground before it even gets moving. And it continues to stretch our belief throughout, like it was made by Willy Wonka and it says ‘unbreakable’ on the tin. All these miscreants find their way back to Doddsville High to enjoy their class reunion, but cutey Carol is the only one who actually dresses up for the occasion. Then again, they fail to notice a great deal: like they’re the only ones there, the school is now derelict and, of all things, the sun goes down. How many people wait outside an empty building drinking beer for a class reunion that is clearly not going to happen? Well, these ten, that’s who.

The actors are mostly forgettable, there mostly as a challenge to us to figure out which ones are under thirty, and the names don’t get thrown around well enough for us to associate most of them. Beyond Skip being the leader of the pack and Carol the bait, we really have to cross-reference who dies in which way with the name associated with that death on Wikipedia; that works fine now but it wasn’t so easy in movie theatres in 1986. Well, Stella’s easy to identify because she’s the bubbly blonde, while Frank and Joe are only distinguishable because the former drives a pickup truck and the latter shows up on a motorbike. Once they’re inside, we lose track again. Oh, and yes, they do find a way inside. Eventually. By breaking in. These morons still think there’s a class reunion waiting for them inside. What’s perhaps most ridiculous is that there is, complete with a banner and beer and a reasonably capable spread. And they tuck in as if no flags have just gone up at all. Suddenly, every cabin in the woods movie seems utterly realistic.
So far, the biggest problem the movie has is that Biff from Back to the Future isn’t here to rap on everyone’s head, shouting ‘McFly!’ and the next biggest problem is Everything Else. Fortunately we’re about to start on the imaginative death scenes, prompted by an astute comment by Skip when they all suddenly remember Marty Rantzen: ‘We turned him from a nice little guy,’ he recalls, ‘into a crazed lunatic.’ Now, that line is delivered and received with so much gravitas that I was honestly surprised that it wasn’t backed by a laugh track. Someone really should overdub this movie with wah wah wah noises, because it could make it blisteringly funny in all the wrong ways. Anyway, Marty, I mean, the killer (like there is ever the slightest doubt that the killer is someone other than the dude that they humiliated, burned and disfigured for a prank five years earlier) starts in on his revenge. First up is Digby, who shouldn’t have been on the list as he’s just the janitor. He’s lifted up by the strength of the insane and impaled on a coat hook.

But then we get Ted. Ted Harrison goes out in fantastic fashion! He picks up a PBR and shotguns it, a term I had to look up because, being English, I’m blissfully unaware of fratboy rituals that I haven’t seen in movies. It means that he punctures the can close to its base, then puts his mouth to the hole, pulls the tab and chugs it down in a flash. Ted is apparently very good at shotgunning, but is sadly unaware that the killer had replaced the beer with some sort of acid that doesn’t destroy beer cans but makes quick work of his stomach. His nether regions promptly turn inside out and he collapses dead on the floor. We’re almost at the halfway mark and we’re one down, nine to go! Finally, Slaughter High has potential to be something other than stupid. In fact, it finally dawns on our myriad morons that maybe something’s up and they should run away really fast. Sadly for them, Marty has the brain that none of them have so he’s locked all the doors and electrocuted all the windows. I cheered hard for Marty. Go, villain, go!
Half of me doesn’t want to talk about the death scenes here because they comprise most of the good things about this movie, but I find that I have to submit to the other half which wants to rave about them. We know, of course, that there are rules that you must follow if you want to survive a horror movie and clearly Stella hasn’t read them. She’s with Joe nowadays but she decides to make out with Frank instead, while her man is off somewhere trying to save their lives. They find a room, strip down and get their freak on. Just as Stella’s about to reach an electrifying climax, she grasps the metal frame of the bed and, well, let’s just suggest that her orgasm was a little more electrifying than she expected. Unbeknownst to her, Joe wouldn’t have minded her infidelity on grounds of being dead at the time. While he’s underneath a tractor, repairing it for an escape attempt, the killer hands him a wrench, then switches the vehicle on and drops it on him. Too slow, Joe! What a bloody mess he becomes.

To be fair, there are other good things here, just not many of them. I actually started a list of the things that win in Slaughter High. Most obvious is stupidity, which is so engrained in the fabric of the film that it’s almost the lead character. The single most stupid thing I have ever seen in the history of the movies is Nancy’s suggestion that the revenge-crazed lunatic that has already mangled seven out of the ten pranksters on his personal hitlist will adhere to the rules of April Fools’ Day and stop at noon. Carol’s ass is the star of the last half an hour, because we watch it running away from the camera in high heels for most of it (at least I thought so). It’s worth a full ninety minutes, and unless there’s a truly stunning coincidence, one of the three writer/directors thought so too, given that he married her in 1990. That’s George Dugdale and he’s a lucky man indeed. Carol’s flouncy white outfit is a winner as well, because it has magic dirt-repelling capabilities. If only she had marketed it instead of going to a class reunion of death.
The score by Harry Manfredini, justly famed for his soundtrack for Friday the 13th, is a high point too. It’s an odd electronic affair, a surprising success for something that couldn’t ever be dated to any other decade than the eighties. The main theme is really eight notes that squelch, which shouldn’t ever work, but I’ve found myself humming them all day. You’ll notice here that I haven’t said anything about the acting in these paragraphs about the positives, but there is one aspect that I’ll call out. Skip Pollack is played by Carmine Iannaccone, in his screen debut, and young Carmine was never going to win an Oscar. However, I’m actually surprised at the brevity of his career because he has a dramatic flair that would have been perfect for straight to video genre flicks. He’s a real drama queen, shining in overdone moments where he poses like he’s delivering Shakespearean magic instead of just swearing at Marty to come out and show himself. I have no idea if this was deliberate but I loved it and it could have taken him a long way.

He’s far from the only actor here to fail to go a long way. Most of the cast made either nothing else or almost nothing. Gary Martin is a rare exception, as he’s built a substantial career out of his voice, starting in 1994 with The Neverending Story III. He’s a busy man, not something I’d have expected from his performance as Joe. Frank, his lust rival here, also went onto a substantial career, Billy Hartman racking up over five hundred episodes of Emmerdale Farm as Terry Woods. Of course, nobody listening to the American accents can really believe that these actors live in Los Angeles with stars next door. They’re mostly, if not entirely, Brits trying to sound like Americans because, hey, who would watch a British slasher? They slip up rather often, but it’s fair to say that they do a better job than most of the Americans who attempt to sound like Brits. Maybe producer Dick Randall submitted this to the major studios as an all American movie, waited for them to fall for it, then echoed the locker room pranksters by screaming, ‘April Fool!’
Perhaps film fans would have recognised it as England more from the architecture than the accents, because Doddsville High fails to ring true as American in the slightest. The outside is actually a small part of Holloway Sanatorium, a 'hospital for the insane of the middle class', built in Surrey in the Franco-Gothic style and financed by Thomas Holloway, whose fortune was ironically made by selling quack medicine, cure-alls that did nothing medically but were advertised with finesse. As Holloway was still operational in the mid-seventies, we never go inside. The interiors were shot within St. Marylebone Grammar School in Westminster, whose alumni include notables as varied as Jerome K. Jerome, Adam Ant and Len Deighton. That suggests that the level of education was high, so the writers of this picture couldn’t possibly have gone there as nobody educated could ever have conjured up the ending. It’s a twist in search of a point in a film in search of a reason and it makes less sense than anything previous. April Fool, indeed.

Director: William Castle
Writer: Robert Bloch
Stars: Robert Taylor, Barbara Stanwyck and Judith Meredith


Drop the name of Robert Bloch, who would have been one hundred years old today, in polite company and the likelihood is that you’ll hear the very same word back from everyone around you: ‘psycho’. He wrote the novel of that name in 1959 and it became famous when Alfred Hitchcock adapted it onto film a year later. Bloch wrote two sequels, called Psycho II and Psycho House, though they’re unrelated to any of the subsequent film or TV sequels, prequels and remakes. However, Bloch was nothing like a one trick pony. He was a contributor to Weird Tales magazine, one of the youngest members of H. P. Lovecraft’s literary circle, and his early short stories are great takes on his mentor’s cosmic horror themes. After Lovecraft’s death, he diversified his writing to include a range of horror, science fiction and thrillers. His novels are of consistent quality but include gems like Night-World, American Gothic and Night of the Ripper, the latter two fictionalising real people, the serial killers H. H. Holmes and Jack the Ripper respectively.

Given the success of Psycho, we might expect that film studios would have leapt at the chance to adapt his other work, especially as his bibliography was expansive by that point. However, most of his work on film was as a scriptwriter rather than a source author. Unsurprisingly, many of his scripts were for genre anthology shows like Thriller and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, with his name on ten episodes of each, but he also wrote three episodes of Star Trek, among many others. His screenplays for films included no less than five features for Amicus, the ‘other’ classic U.K. horror studio, including Torture Garden, The House That Dripped Blood and Asylum; an odd couple, The Cat Creature and The Dead Don’t Die for director Curtis Harrington; and, perhaps most interesting, a pair of features for legendary exploitation filmmaker William Castle, both in 1964. The first was Strait-Jacket, which sees Joan Crawford murder a cheating Lee Majors with an axe, and the second is this unjustly neglected gem starring Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck.

This was late in Castle’s career and he was riding high at the time as the king of the gimmick. All his most famous films date to the five year period prior to this, including House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts and Mr. Sardonicus. However, he’d been directing since 1953 with Strait-Jacket his 50th movie and The Night Walker his 51st; he only had six left to come, with a six year gap between Project X in 1968 and his final picture, the fascinating Shanks in 1974. I’ve enjoyed a wide range of his work, but there’s just something special in his horror films and pairing him up with another legend like Robert Bloch was never going to disappoint. These two films make for a fascinating double bill, each of them taking a classic Hollywood actress and having her dance with insanity. The pair play out differently but there are commonalities between them that run deeper than just the involvement of this pair of genre luminaries. I can only dream about where that partnership could have taken them, had they worked together longer.

The worst thing about this movie is the beginning, for two reasons. One is the meandering introductory monologue, which feels like it runs a lot longer than the two and half minutes I just timed. ‘What are dreams?’ asks Paul Frees in a playful voice. And you know that voice, I know it, whether it be from one of hundreds of films, TV shows, cartoons, commercials or radio shows, even as the Ghost Host of Disney’s Haunted Mansion attractions. Reportedly, he was earning fifty grand a year in the early seventies just for providing a voice to the Pillsbury Doughboy. He’s great and the surreal visuals that interpret him are great, but I wish they’d been cut much shorter. The other reason is the theme tune, presumably by Vic Mizzy, which drove me nuts for a couple of hours until I figured out what he’d pinched it from. It’s Food, Glorious Food from Oliver!, which didn’t reach the big screen until 1968 but premiered in the West End four years before this. Maybe Mizzy went to see it on Broadway in 1963.
The best thing about the movie is the rest, especially the freaky dreamlike tone that pervades it which begins with the first scene: a man with sightless eyes walks into his wife’s bedroom, to find her asleep but muttering about someone else. ‘Hold me tight,’ she mutters. ‘I love you.’ He’s Howard Trent, a rich man who’s jealous of a man who apparently doesn’t exist. He’s played by Hayden Rorke, who was in his early fifties and younger than he looks here. He was an experienced actor, this being the last but one of his fifty features, but it would be another year before he’d find his most recognisable and abiding role, that of Dr. Alfred Bellows in I Dream of Jeannie. His wife is Irene Trent, who likes the idea of a perennial dream visitor about as much as her husband does. She’s played by Barbara Stanwyck, taking a role that would gone to Joan Crawford had she not signed on to Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (and then left it again). This was Stanwyck’s last feature, though she’d soon become a busy television actress with The Big Valley.

Howard Trent torments himself mercilessly. He records his wife while she sleeps so he can listen to her subconscious infidelity on a nightly basis; it’s the same dream, night after night. He invites Barry Morland, his attorney, over to ask his advice and practically accuses him of being ‘the other man’. He can’t sleep, knowing that she’s dreaming of this mystery man, even though his insomnia has the side effect of proving that he doesn’t ever show up. And his torment is contagious, because it torments Irene in turn. After that awkward meeting with Howard, Morland asks Irene who the man is. She has no idea, but she tries it on with Barry just to see what it feels like to be unfaithful. ‘Do you want to kiss me, darling?’ she suggests, seductively, but it goes nowhere because neither of them want it to. It’s a weird quandary, one that ends with a fantastic argument with the aid of some great shots down the stairs. ‘My lover is only a dream, but he’s more of a man than you!’ she screams at her husband, he hits her and she runs out of the house.
Next thing we know, the house is on fire and a mysterious explosion upstairs apparently claims the body of Howard Trent. It isn’t found, but he’s assumed dead, given that everything’s melted within the blast radius of his laboratory. A fireproof door saves the rest of the house and Irene has to adapt to life on her own. She finds it difficult, because her dreams still plague her, especially as she hears her husband’s cane tapping its way about and sees his horribly burned features glowing in magnificent black and white. But hey, at least it’s a new dream, right? Well, she doesn’t want that one either so she moves out and into an apartment behind a beauty salon she owns. Of course, it doesn’t help because, if it did, we wouldn’t have a movie, but the mystery deepens when her dream man actually shows up in the form of Lloyd Bochner, at the other end of his screen career to her. He has a great voice and it’s not surprising to find that he eventually found his way into the wonderful world of voice acting.

Largely free from the light-hearted fun that peppered many of Castle’s macabre classics, The Night Walker is both a mystery and a horror story. Both angles are unsurprisingly Hitchcockian, as Irene Trent wonders if she’s going mad, often unsure if she’s awake or asleep; this is explored wonderfully by the Dream not just showing up in her apartment but taking her first to a hotel and then to a chapel, where they’re to be married. The mystery enters Vertigo territory when she elicits the help of Barry Morland, who is now her attorney, to drive her around trying to find the places she visited in her dream. The oddest thing is that they find them, though, of course, they’re empty and feed the idea that she’s mad. The horror stems not only from the mad mystery but from an array of details that surround it, not least that everyone in the wedding chapel, including the priest who conducts their service, appears to be a waxwork dummy. I absolutely adored the ever-spinning chandelier of candles too; that was neatly freaky.
The lead actor is Robert Taylor, playing Barry. After all, Rorke and Bochner come and go periodically in Irene’s dreams; Barry is tasked with dealing with everything when she’s awake, which naturally gets increasingly complicated. Taylor was a decent actor who worked for a major studio but his career never found the spark it needed to make him one of the greats, even though MGM had him on contract for 24 years and started billing him as ‘The New King’ after Clark Gable left in 1953. He seems very old here, though not through make-up like Hayden Rorke; it’s probably the three packs of cigarettes a day he smoked throughout his life; only four years later, he’d be diagnosed with the lung cancer that ultimately claimed his life. When I think of Taylor, I think of a young man, like he was in A Yank at Oxford in 1938 around the peak of his career (he’d made it up to third in box office appeal in 1937). The Giussani sisters based the look of their comic book character Diabolik on him, the one John Phillip Law played in 1968.

While watching, what grabbed me were the twists and turns of Bloch’s script, as brought to visual life by Castle and his DP, Harold E. Stine, who would later be Oscar-nominated for The Poseidon Adventure; this was late for black and white photography, but it’s an accomplished horror take on film noir shadows. Only once it was over did I realise that one other factor that I enjoyed immensely was the age of the lead actors. Taylor was 53 when The Night Walker was released and he looked older; Rorke was a year older and played older still. At 57, Stanwyck was three years older again, though she looks younger here than her younger co-stars. It won’t surprise you to know that the average age of the stars of a horror movie is not usually as high as the mid-fifties; I’d be shocked to find it as high as the mid-thirties myself because horror movies are a teenager’s game. Sure, this was made during the odd boom of the hagsploitation picture, thanks to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962, but this goes far beyond that sub-genre.
In fact, it could be argued that Robert Bloch was deliberately subverting the hagsploitation genre, after exploiting it earlier in the year with Strait-Jacket. He was always one to see things in different lights, hence his playful use of language in collections like Tales in a Jugular Vein and Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow; and his frequent use of real historical figures in fictional settings. Maybe he felt he had done the hagsploitation thing with Strait-Jacket and didn’t want to repeat himself, but was willing to subvert it by creating an odd variation on the theme which plays with the expectations of the audience and keeps us guessing until the end. I can’t talk too much about the finalé, because there are a few twists here that I should absolutely not spoil, but I will say that there’s a wonderful instance of a character removing a disguise. It isn’t just who’s in the disguise and whom the disguise is of, but in how it’s done and, above all, how it’s undone. It’s one of those memorable moments from classic horror cinema that should be in all the clips.

While I’m watching for Robert Bloch, in order to celebrate his centennial, and it’s a highly underrated and overlooked example of his film work, the screen belongs to Barbara Stanwyck. Well, and Harold E. Stine, but Stine’s film career would continue on while Stanwyck’s wouldn’t. He shot three more pictures for William Castle, for a start: The Busy Body, The Spirit is Willing and Project X. It seems more appropriate to highlight Stanwyck here because she didn’t make another picture, concentrating on television for the last couple of decades of her screen career, finishing up on The Colbys in 1986. This is so late in her career that it had been a dozen years since she’d divorced her second husband who was, coincidentally, Robert Taylor, and they were married for thirteen years. The former couple appearing together again was one of the draws of the movie in 1964, but it wasn’t enough to make it a success. Now over half a century old, it’s mostly forgotten, but it deserves reevaluation as a notably freaky horror thriller with twists.

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writers: Charles Gaines and Bob Rafelson, from the novel by Charles Gaines
Stars: Jeff Bridges, Sally Field and Arnold Schwarzenegger


I’m a child of the eighties, which means I grew up with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I saw every one of his eighties movies soon after release and that continued on into the nineties until I gave up and tried to avoid things like Jingle All the Way. However, I find that I never consciously went back to the seventies, which surprises me. I’d seen Hercules in New York, because it’s one of those so bad it’s good movies that I can’t resist, and I’d seen The Long Goodbye, in which he isn’t even credited, but I hadn’t seen The Villain until this project last year, watching for Kirk Douglas’s centennial, and I hadn’t seen Stay Hungry until now, watching for R. G. Armstrong’s. I wonder if I’ll find myself reviewing Scavenger Hunt next year, watching for someone else’s! In fact, the entire Stay Hungry cast looks like my childhood: Jeff Bridges from Starman, Sally Field from Smokey and the Bandit, Robert Englund from V (and, later, A Nightmare on Elm Street), Roger E. Mosley from Magnum, P.I. and Scatman Crothers from, well, Hong Kong Phooey (yeah, and The Shining).

What I found from this long overdue catchup was that my idea of what this movie was and what it actually is only just intersected and the maybe ten per cent that did includes duh facts like it’s a feature film and Arnie is a bodybuilder. I think my expectations of Stay Hungry were more like the reality of Pumping Iron, shot months later but not released until 1977, though they do play together well. That’s a docudrama narrated by Charles Gaines and based on his photo-essay about the 1975 Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia competitions, with the Austrian Oak winning the latter. This is a comedy drama adapted by Gaines from his original novel and the title refers only in part to Arnie who, as Joe Santo, a bodybuilder preparing for Mr. Universe, is the one to speak it aloud. He says it to a rather young Jeff Bridges, playing the lead role of Craig Blake, because he’s the one who needs the advice. I’ve seen Bridges a lot younger than this, in The Last Picture Show, Fat City and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, but I guess I’ve got used to him being old.

When we first meet him, in the pastoral and peaceful countryside behind the mansion he recently inherited, Blake doesn’t have a clue who he really is, deep in his heart. He has some ideas, but they’re not his. Now that his parents are dead, in a plane crash, the family has expectations of him, to join the steel business that brought them their wealth and status. He’s just not ready, so he gets involved in an inadvisable real estate deal instead. Jabo and his stereotypically entitled slimebags plan to build a new skyscraper in Birmingham, AL, and they’re buying up all the properties within a whole city block to make that possible. Blake’s part is to talk or pressure the owner of the Olympic Spa into selling to him but, even to us, he’s clearly as uncomfortable with Jabo as he is settling down in the family business for a long, boring career. He wanders off anyway, down to the Olympic, unaware that it will become the catalyst that sees him define who he is and what he plans to do with the rest of his life.

So far, so good. Bridges is a good lead, as always, but his character is lost so he needs people of substance to help him find his way forward. That’s certainly not Joe Spinell, who plays Jabo, because if I’ve learned anything from the movies, it’s that any character played by Joe Spinell is someone from whom you should never take direction. It’ll have to be the people he meets at the Olympia and they all come out of the woodwork the moment he walks in. First up is Sally Field, also looking younger here than I know her because this is effectively the beginning of her career, even if she was in two films in the sixties. She’s Mary Kate Farnsworth and she’s the cute little welcoming face of the gym, presumably a receptionist and secretary. Blake feels an immediate attraction and she soon becomes his girl, however oddly she fits in his world of country clubs and high society. Field always did play well as the free spirit or the fish out of water, comfortable at being uncomfortable, and here she gets to play both of them at once.
The bundle of energy who gives Blake a tour of the Olympia is Franklin, in the surprising form of Robert Englund. He’s loose here, utterly unlike anyone else I’ve seen him play, though he did play a lot of rednecks early on before he found his niche. He was calm and passive in V as Willie the gentle alien and, of course, evil and controlling as Freddy Krueger, but this is something else again. I have to say that he’s the least impactful of the lead actors but that’s the character’s fault rather than his. He’s a joy to watch every time he gets screen time, not least because we know that something unexpected is likely to happen, whether it’s a brawl or a cool pool shot. Among other tasks, he’s Joe Santo’s grease man, which means he oils him up before competitions. And Joe is in training for the Mr. Universe competition, which means a lot of working out. We see surprisingly little of that and what there is has Arnie dressed in strange costumes, like a sort of Mexican Batman outfit that successfully hides his physique.

That’s the weirdest thing about this film, but it all makes sense when you realise the timing. While bodybuilding was a thoroughly established sport in the mid-seventies, with Schwarzenegger retiring in 1975 after his sixth consecutive win as Mr. Olympia, not long after shooting this picture. It’s odd to consider today, but Joe Q. Public had absolutely no idea who he was when Stay Hungry hit theatres, so he had to be kept covered up until competition time, near the end of the picture, when he could be unveiled and, along with a collection of the best of the best, shock everyone, as indeed they do, running around the streets of Birmingham in a hilarious finalé. With Stay Hungry and Pumping Iron, Charles Gaines let the world in on the secret, making Arnie and Lou Ferrigno, among others, household names. Incidentally, Gaines made another major contribution to pop culture by inventing paintball. He and Bob Gurnsey came up with it and he and eleven others played the first game, in New Hampshire in 1981.
Now, with Sally Field cute as a button, Robert Englund bouncing around like a rubber ball and Arnie working out in the strangest costumes, you might think we’re set, but the place belongs to Thor Erickson and he’s played by our birthday boy, R. G. Armstrong, in an unusual but highly memorable performance. He was a versatile actor, who was acclaimed for playing Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway in 1955, but the roles he was given on screen, whether working in film or on television, tended to be in westerns. He found his way into almost every TV western that I’ve heard of, plus a few others: Have Gun - Will Travel, The Rifleman, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Maverick, Wagon Train, Rawhide, Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The High Chaparral, you name it, even Walker, Texas Ranger! On film, he became a regular for Sam Peckinpah, often as an off-kilter preacher in pictures like Ride the High Country, Major Dundee and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. He may not have been the star, but he was a highly memorable mainstay of the genre.

That’s not to say that westerns were all he made. His first picture, Garden of Eden in 1954, was a nudie cutie and he’d run the gamut of exploitation sub-genres in the seventies, including Angels Die Hard, Boss Nigger and Dixie Dynamite, not to forget Race with the Devil. Later films were as varied as Reds, Children of the Corn and Predator, but I wonder if he ever had another role with quite as wild an opportunity as Thor Erickson provides him here. He’s a businessman, running a gym that’s surviving, if not particularly successful; he’s a trainer, with real hopes of Joe Santo bringing back the Mr. Olympia title; and he’s a big dude, which we notice when we see that even Arnie has to look up at him. However, he has a dark side that goes far beyond the inferiority complex that prompts him to wear a horrendous wig: he spends much of his time drunk; he has a hole in his office floor that allows him to peep on the ladies karate class getting changed; and he goes utterly off his rocker on an amyl nitrate binge late in the film.
It’s a fantastic part for someone willing to go to those places for the sake of art and it pays off for him. I won’t spoil the scenes late in the movie when he turns into a dangerous madman, but I will say that they go much further than I ever expected and the fight scene is blistering, not as much for the choreography but because it looks utterly believable; my eyes were wide wondering if the actors got hurt for real during shooting. I’d have been impressed even if he wasn’t almost sixty at the time, but then he was still a busy actor after he turned eighty. His final appearance was as the lead in a 2001 horror movie called The Waking or Keeper of Souls, whose ratings suggest was not a good way to go out. He continued to act on stage off-Broadway, retiring in 2005 because cataracts had made him almost blind. He still found time for a few years in retirement before he died in 2012 at the ripe old age of 95, less than a month after his oldest collaborator, Andy Griffith, with whom he’d acted in university in the Carolina Playmakers.

Even the most reliable actor can be brought down by a bad script or a bad director, but Gaines gave them plenty of opportunity to find quirky ways for their characters to shine and Bob Rafelson kept things under control while seeming improvisationally loose. The cast honestly seemed to enjoy themselves, a highly appropriate aspect given that we’re supposed to buy into our leading rich boy being seduced by the family aspect of the gym and the life that they lead. We see as much of Mary Kate, Franklin and even Joe outside the Olympia as inside it, each of them forging memorable scenes for themselves that surprised. I wasn’t expecting to see a bare butt shot from Sally Field, an enjoyable game of pool from Robert Englund or Arnold Schwarzenegger sawing on a fiddle and playing it hot in a bluegrass band, of all things. At one point, Mary Kate sees a painting through an office window, Blake goes in to steal it and they give it to a passer by; it’s of sunflowers, but she thought it was a lion. It’s only one of many feelgood scenes.
Of course, with Joe Spinell hovering in the shadows, a host of entitled rich kids without manners (including Ed Begley, Jr.) pushing Blake even further away from his upbringing and that blistering descent into drug-fuelled debauchery by Erickson, we know that not everything is going to end up sweetness and light. There are also aspects that seem odd. I get why Blake brings Santo and his bluegrass playing buddies to play at a high class party but everything about it feels wrong, including why he thought it was such a bright idea to begin with. Some recognisable faces are given far too little to do: Helena Kallianiotes should have had more chance at action as Anita, the Olympia’s karate teacher Joanna Cassidy seemed wasted as a society girl who briefly hooks up with Joe and Scatman Crothers’s role as the Blakes’ butler of many decades felt too clichéd for the film and his talents both. I was also shocked at how thin Sally Field was; I know my boobs are bigger, but I believed I could lift her up with one arm here and I don’t work out.

Appropriately, given that he would have been a hundred years old today and I’m watching for him, it may be fair to say that this film fades out with R. G. Armstrong’s part. Arnie gets to unveil his amazing physique on stage and battle poses with Ken Waller, a long-standing rival of the era, to the theme from Exodus; and Armstrong goes off the deep end back at the gym, doing all sorts of things I’m not going to spoil in the run-up to his big fight with Blake. And then... well, the rest is enjoyable but notably lesser. The bodybuilders launching a chase scene through the streets, only to be waylaid by the general public and distracted into posing for them, is glorious fun but it’s a distraction for us too, while the plot threads are wrapped up in the safest of all Hollywood endings. I’m not unhappy that we went there, but the one could have been less like a music video without music and the other could have contained at least a little salt to go with the sugar. Maybe that would have helped us stay hungry too.

Director: Marc Allégret
Writers: Audrey Lindop and Cecil McGivern, from the novel by Joseph Shearing, with additional dialogue by Hugh Mills
Stars: Stewart Granger and Valerie Hobson


Index: 2017 Centennials.

If there was any doubt as to what genre this picture falls under, it vanishes with the title card. A primitive painting of an isolated and foreboding mansion against a sky so dark and tortured that it seems like a tsunami ready to wash over the house. A carefully italicised font that looks like handwriting, coloured the orange of faded blood. A title that at once introduces the leading lady and subtly hints at dark emotions; ‘fury’ meaning destructive rage and ‘blanche’ meaning to turn white, often through abject fear or shock. Yes, these are quintessential components of the gothic and this is a powerful one that perhaps stands up today because of its heady atmosphere of doom. There have been better movies made in this genre, Hitchcock’s Rebecca being merely the obvious choice and Dragonwyck and The Uninvited following in its footsteps, but few contain anything close to the ache for catastrophe the doomed lovers of Blanche Fury exude like sweat. This doomed romance has an unusual emphasis on the first word not the second.

After the title card, we see a skeletal tree and hear the wind, even though the painted clouds aren’t moving. We follow a pair of urgent riders as they exhort their horses through the woods and up the manicured paths of Clare Hall. Oh yes, I’d buy that place for a dollar! It’s a gorgeous, if rather brutal box of a mansion, the external shots being of Wootton Lodge, in Staffordshire, which dates back to 1611; it’s currently owned by the family of Joseph Cyril Bamford, who founded the company named for his initials, now the third largest manufacturer of construction equipment in the world. The internal shots are just as striking, though these were sets back at Pinewood Studios with high ceilings, ornate doorways and a plethora of paintings. As you might expect, there’s also a young lady in bed, clearly ill and those riders are the doctors doing what they can for her. She’s very weak, they say, as we shift into abstract visuals and echoed dialogue as she dies.

The character is Blanche Fury and the actress is Valerie Hobson, who would have been a hundred years old today. This movie was made for her, as what she later described as ‘a sort of ‘loving gift’’ by her husband, the producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, to firm her up in the minds of audiences once again as a leading lady. She’d been a notable actress in the thirties, with a fantastic year at Universal in 1935, where she played major roles in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Bride of Frankenstein (as the wife of Dr. Frankenstein, who is not, you will recall, the title character) and Werewolf of London, the first Hollywood werewolf movie. As the thirties became the forties, she was the leading lady in two early Powell and Pressburger movies: The Spy in Black and Contraband, both opposite Conrad Veidt. However, she took most of the war years off to give birth to their first son, Simon, born with Down Syndrome, and her successful return in David Lean’s Great Expectations was among a star-studded ensemble cast.

Blanche Fury was her next film and, while her co-star, Stewart Granger, is technically billed first, gothics are almost always stories about women and this is no exception: she’s the lead and Granger plays her love interest, rather than the other way around. This film, following Great Expectations and to be soon followed by the blackest black comedy ever made, Kind Hearts and Coronets, meant that she was firmly back at the top. However, she and Havelock-Allan divorced in 1952, one last prolific year for her as she retired a couple later, after marrying John Profumo, the well-connected MP for Stratford-on-Avon. Almost a decade later, at the heart of the Cold War, the Profumo Affair brought down not only his career but the Conservative government of the day. Even though he had indulged in an affair with Christine Keeler, a model less than half his age, Hobson stood by him and they dedicated the entire rest of their lives to charity, Profumo initially cleaning toilets at Toynbee Hall, an East End charity that aimed to combat poverty.
Of course, it’s Hobson who indulges in an affair here, through her character, initially named Blanche Fuller. After the death of her parents, she works her way through a number of thankless jobs as companions to invalids, until she receives an unexpected letter from her uncle, offering employment at Clare Hall, as companion and governess to her young niece, Lavinia. This is the ancestral home of the Fury family, dating back centuries. However, when Allan (or Adam, depending on which version you read) Fury died without legal issue, his estate went to his wife’s family, the Fullers, who promptly adopted the Fury name. Now it’s run by Simon Fury, Blanche’s uncle, who will soon gift it to his son, Laurence, whom Blanche marries for ‘position and security’. The catch, you won’t be surprised to find, is that she doesn’t love him, even if he isn’t quite as ‘weak and insipid’ as Wikipedia might suggest. She loves Philip Thorn instead, officially the estate’s steward but really the illegitimate son of Allan (or Adam) Fury.

This is a glorious way to build suspense. Simon Fury employs Thorn because he’s very good at his job, but he inexplicably fails to acknowledge that the reason he’s very good at his job is, in large part, because he cares deeply for the history of the Fury family and their estate. He burns with resentment for the Fullers, whom he sees as interlopers squatting on his rightful inheritance. As the son of Allan (or Adam) Fury, everything around him should be his and he’s hired an attorney, Samuel Calamy, to track down legal documents to prove that his father married his mother, an Italian lady, decades earlier. Ironically, Stewart Granger, who is appropriately arrogant and brooding here, really was of Italian heritage; his middle name, Leblanche, was taken from the Italian opera singer, Luigi Lablache, his great-great-grandfather, who taught the future Queen Victoria to sing. Incidentally, the names around that are not what you expect; born James Stewart, he adopted Stewart Granger on becoming an actor to avoid confusion.
Gothics have a tendency of dabbling in the supernatural, often as a precursor to madness, and this one drops a few hints. Thorn recounts to Blanche the story of Alaric Fury, who adopted a barbary ape on his way to the First Crusade. When he died in battle, the ape refused to let anyone near his body. Legend says that the ape still protects the family, encapsulated in the subtle motto: ‘Beware Fury’s Ape’. That’s nothing to do with reality, suggests Blanche, to which Thorn ominously replies, ‘We shall see.’ These are just hints, though, as the real supporting players in the coming story are a band of gypsies, who enter into an escalating war: they steal a couple of Fury horses, Thorn and Blanche steal them back and things get worse from then on, with a barn set on fire during the party after Blanche and Laurence’s wedding. Soon after, with Blanche and Thorn bemoaning their respective fates, a throwaway line that, ‘I wish they’d die’ leads them both to realise possibilities. The question is whether they’ll do it together.

The affair here isn’t too effective at romance, but it’s fantastic for being destructive. Granger doesn’t smoulder like a walk on the wild side but he does carry the bitter and twisted really well and Hobson picks up some of that. They feel doomed from the outset, not least because there are really two love triangles going on here simultaneously. While we think we’re watching Laurence and Blanche and Thorn, we’re really watching Blanche, Thorn and Clare Hall. For all that he’s an arrogant prick, who only gets more arrogant as he starts to orchestrate things his way, he does care about more than himself; he cares about his family’s history and aches to be a legitimate part of that, running the estate not because he’s paid to do so but because it’s his. ‘You presume too much and too often,’ Simon Fury tells him and he’s right, but he actually becomes more believably aristocratic as he starts to believe he might just get what he wants. When he tells Blanche, ‘I’m the only real Fury here’, he’s being arrogant but he isn’t lying.
While Granger is spectacularly good at playing a servant who refuses to know his place, we can’t forget that Hobson has a similar role. She’s not of quite so important stock, but she begins the film living below her station and she knows it, having to keep quiet as invalid employers like Mrs. Winterbourne lay into her for £16 a year. There’s an unusual shot in a corridor here that highlights how claustrophobic her life has become; to our 21st century eyes, it looks like it was shot on an iPhone. The cinematographer was Guy Green, who had just won an Oscar for shooting Great Expectations, highlighting just how small the world can be. Two actresses played Estella in that film: the adult Estella was Valerie Hobson, whose character here falls in love with Stewart Granger’s, while the younger was Jean Simmons, who married him for real (in Tucson) only two years after this; he was 37, she only 19. We might fairly rage at how Hollywood always pairs older actors with younger actresses, but sometimes it led to reality following suit.

I appreciated Hobson’s role here, though her character is quite literally not able to let her hair down more often than a couple of scenes. The first time that happens is arguably her best scene, as Laurence walks upstairs to ask her down to play host to some of his friends. She refuses, which stuns him into an eloquently misogynistic speech about how wives must obey their husbands and we never buy a word of it. I had some sympathy for poor Laurence, but this scene was a powerful one for Hobson and she owns it absolutely. I should point out that Laurence is played superbly by Michael Gough, in an emphatically different role to the one he played in Horrors of the Black Museum, which I reviewed for his own centennial only five months ago. This is generally listed as his debut, though Anna Karenina premiered a month earlier, and he does a great job of appearing weak but sympathetic. Certainly a product of his time and upbringing, he’s just trying to do his best by his family and I liked him more than I did the leads.
A few other actors deserve brief mention too. Walter Fitzgerald endows Simon Fury with a Robert Hardy sort of feel. He was well known for that sort of haughty but honest demeanour long before Hardy made it his own; the latter only made one feature while the former was working in film. This was at the peak of Fitzgerald’s career, with this and The Fallen Idol in 1948 leading to arguably his best role, as Squire Trelawney in the Disney version of Treasure Island, two years later. Sybille Binder impressed me too, if less for what she did as what she didn’t do. She plays Louisa, who arrived at Clare Hall from Italy forty years earlier, with her mistress (and Thorn’s mother); now she becomes Blanche’s maid. She’s at once a little overdone and utterly part of the scenery. She looms out of the backgrounds like she was painted into them and her habit of moving very little actually works, for a change, because of that. Maurice Denham is also solid as a very honest family friend, Maj. Fraser, who investigates the inevitable deaths.

And yes, there are deaths, two of them to be exact, and they’re inspired by a true case of murder exactly a century earlier, which is rather appropriate, given the circumstances of my reviewing this film. These were the murders at Stanfield Hall, in Norwich, a father and son killed by a tenant-farmer who had fallen on hard times and designed a scheme to defraud them of both their lives and their property, with a governess his unwitting accomplice. He killed under disguise, but was recognised, arrested and found guilty of murder; the kicker was that his mistress refused to provide him the alibi he had set up. He defended himself in court, to little effect, and was hanged. This true case was adapted by Joseph Shearing, who specialised in mysteries inspired by true crime cases, though Shearing was actually a pseudonym. The author was Mrs. Gabrielle Long, who was best known as Marjorie Bowen, prolific author of gothic romances and other works. This screen adaptation gives no credit to that source novel.
Oddly, those involved don’t see this film in the greatest light. Granger called it ‘a silly story, too grim and melodramatic’, but then he has famously said that he enjoyed precious few of his own films, going only as far as to call this one, ‘a wonderful looking film.’ Producer Havelock-Allan has said that he aimed to make a costumed melodrama like those with which Gainsborough Pictures had so much success in the mid-forties, but ‘a serious one with a better story’. His mistake, or so he suggests, was to make a ‘hard’ film rather than a ‘soft’ one. ‘There was a real hatred in it as well as love, and the public didn’t want it.’ Today, I’d argue that this is the reason why the film works so well. We’re never in doubt as to where Thorn’s true affections lie and it’s not with any human being; his name is as appropriate to his character as Blanche’s new surname, because hell hath no fury and all that. At the time, this was a welcome back for Valerie Hobson, but it stands up today as a strong memorial to her talents.

Director: Roy Rowland
Writers: Dr. Seuss and Allan Scott, from a story by Dr. Seuss
Stars: Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy


Index: 2017 Centennials.

I’d seen The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T before, but it’s by far the most interesting movie starring Hans Conried, so I knew I had to choose it for his centennial. What I hadn’t realised until a fresh viewing is that this bears some similarity to another cult feature released in 1953, namely Robot Monster. That film unfolds as the fever dream of a young boy, who imagines the entire world destroyed by an alien who appears as a gorilla in a diving helmet, who rules the planet from his cave which is otherwise occupied only by a bubble machine. The remaining survivors are Johnny’s family and a couple of archeologists, so he pairs them off with his mum and sister. When I reviewed Robot Monster, I highlighted how weird it was that a young boy would be dreaming about such perverted ideas as replacing his father, killing one sister and having the other kidnapped by an alien ape with a bondage fetish. This film helps me to realise that it’s just a imaginative boy dealing with his hopes and fears in a dream sequence.

Because that’s exactly what The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is, or at least without the perverted angle. Little Johnny is now Little Bart or, to use his full name, Bartholomew Collins, who we can only assume does not grow up to appear on Dark Shadows. He recently lost his father, to death rather than divorce because this is 1953, and he’s practicing as hard as he can on the piano to take part in a recital in a month’s time. Well, not really. He doesn’t like playing the piano at all and he’s only practicing for two reasons: one is that his mother, Heloise, whom he likes a lot, wants him to; and the other is because his piano teacher doesn’t acknowledge the existence of other instruments. He hates the autocratic Dr. Terwilliker with a passion and imagines him to be a racketeer. As Bart can’t be a blink over ten years old, this is all a lot of pressure for him, so when he falls asleep at the keys, his feature length dream sequence directly addresses his hopes and fears: how he can find a new dad and how he can cope with the recital.

While this is clearly much better than Robot Monster, which is often described as one of the worst films ever made, it’s not without its share of problems. Had a certain person not been heavily involved, it’s relatively safe to suggest that few would still remember it today. The presence of that certain person, however, changes things absolutely, and it’s difficult to imagine this picture without him. He’s Theodor Geisel, better known to one and all as Dr. Seuss, and he came up with the concept for the film, wrote the story and, with Allan Scott, turned that into a script. What’s more, he clearly designed many of the costumes and sets and he wrote the songs too. In fact, there were many more songs than made it into the final picture; 24 were filmed and 11 were cut. The songs are readily available today on a 3 CD set, but the excised footage is believed lost. It’s fair to say that without Seuss, this picture either wouldn’t exist at all or it wouldn’t exist in a form that anyone would care about today.

There are some other names of note. The director was Roy Rowland, who had made a number of short films in the thirties before progressing up to features in 1943. His films prior to this are varied, with the most notable probably the Edward G. Robinson film, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes. Whatever takes Rowland didn’t shoot, Stanley Kramer did, though his only credit was as a producer; his directorial career didn’t official begin until 1955 but his string of important films started almost immediately after that. While the real leads are Tommy Rettig as Bart Collins and Hans Conried as his ‘only enemy’, Dr. Terwilliker, the acknowledged leads are Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy, a married couple who rarely appeared apart, whether that be on stage, film, radio or television, where they had their own shows and frequently guested on others; they were two guest hosts of The Tonight Show in the run-up to Johnny Carson taking over in 1962. Rettig would become famous for his three years as the human co-star on Lassie.
Hans Conried, as recognisable a face as his was and as talented a lead as this film demonstrates, took a long time to find his place in Hollywood. Initially a radio actor, his first film roles were in the late thirties, in films as important as It’s a Wonderful World and The Great Dictator, but he was rarely credited and his characters rarely had names; for some reason, he played a lot of desk clerks. They kept him busy, at least, until 1953 when a set of seven memorable parts suddenly came his way all at once. A fantastic voice actor, he gave voice to both George Darling and Captain Hook in the Disney adaptation of Peter Pan; he played a major supporting role in The Affairs of Dobie Gillis as Prof. Amos Pomfritt; and the lead in Siren of Bagdad as a travelling magician, among a few others. Yet it was this film, looking back, that he described as ‘the film that might have changed my life’. Playing the title role in something so utterly memorable after a decade of bit parts and nothing roles, we can understand why.

But, as solid as Rettig and Conried are as Bart Collins and his nemesis, Dr. Terwilliker, it’s Dr. Seuss who dominates this film with a real sense of style, whether visual, in dialogue or just through the surreality of the story. Everything we see reminds us of classic Dr. Seuss children’s books, but it’s worth pointing out that this predates most of them and all the most famous ones; Horton Hears a Who! saw print in 1954, The Cat in the Hat and How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1957 and Green Eggs and Ham in 1960. In fact, while he had published ten children’s books prior to 1953, he was primarily known as an illustrator at this point, drawing political cartoons, advertising campaigns and comic strips. During the war, he wrote the Private Snafu cartoons and a pair of propaganda pieces, Your Job in Germany and Our Job in Japan, which grew into 1948’s Design for Death, an exploration of Japanese culture, narrated by Conried, which won an Academy Award. So did Gerald McBoing-Boing in 1950, which had been based on his original story.
After the success of that short, Geisel threw himself into this project, submitting to Columbia in 1951 an insanely long 1,200 page script with a host of dark themes that were clearly the product of his experiences during World War II. He relocated from La Jolla to Los Angeles to be closer to the production, so that he could be more directly involved with it. That worked well, given what we see on the screen, but there was a lot going on behind the scenes: there were many delays, the budget was slashed and the script was eviscerated. In his dream, Bart plays a crazy piano that stretches off as far as the eye can see, curving away into the distance within a large room; Dr. Terwilliker’s goal is to have five hundred boys playing it all at once, their ten fingers each comprising the five thousand of the title. Budget restraints meant that only 150 were hired for that scene, but one bad hot dog meant one kid got sick and a vomit chain reaction ensued onto the keys. Geisel later joked that critics later responded ‘in much the same manner.’

This piano keyboard which, like most of Seuss’s illustrations, entirely avoids straight lines isn’t even the first quintessential Seuss visual. The film began with Bart navigating a landscape of spheres; he’s wearing a Happy Fingers beany, with its hand sticking out of the top and the men who chase him have multi-coloured nets. Surfaces at the Terwilliker Institute, however, large, are painted a single colour, while guards alternate blue and yellow. There are signs by doors that read IN or OUT and by ladders that read UP or DOWN, each accompanied by exactly the pointing hand that we expect. One such ladder rises impossibly high but goes exactly nowhere but up. Staircases rise or fall through holes in the floor, some ending in slides, and there are vents and pipes all over the place. While all of these are instantly recognisable as designs of Dr. Seuss, there are influences apparent, such as Salvador Dali and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the fact that those rhyme adding an extra level of synchronicity.
Through these sets, we follow Bart Collins as he tries to one-up his nemesis, Dr. Terwilliker. He’s figured out that his teacher is an egomaniac megalomaniac, whose institute is surrounded by an electrified fence and whose stairway walls carry video screens for propaganda broadcasts like ‘Practice Makes Perfect’. He soon discovers that this villain has kidnapped his mother, hypnotised her and made her his Official Number Two. He’s even ‘graciously condescended’ to be her new husband, so Bart refuses to hide out in his ‘nice comfy cell’. He can outwit the inept guards easily enough, but he needs help to rescue his mother and the only man who can help him is the plumber, August Zabladowski, if only he can convince him what’s going on around him. With Terwilliker able to hypnotise people and willing to play the gracious host, while shovelling bundles of cash into his safe, that’s a hard task but Bart is a determined soul and, if we’ve learned anything from Dr. Seuss books, it’s that we should never underestimate a child.

Not only does Tommy Rettig do a great job as Bart Collins, he must have earned the trust of his colleagues. At one point, he needs to climb the headboard of Dr. Terwilliker’s bed in order to steal the key to his safe. The catch is that Dr. Terwilliker is asleep at the time and Hans Conried gamely lets him slip and slam his foot into the pillow right next to his head. It’s worth mentioning that the key is secreted behind a ticking metronome and the theft of it is only made possible by Bart’s sense of rhythm keeping the sounds going while stopping that metronome. Suddenly, we see him coming to terms with his piano practice. Another direct tie to that is the scene that unfolds in a dungeon, where players of other instruments are confined. Echoing Dr. Terwilliker’s earlier words, it’s ‘for scratchy violins, screechy piccolos, nauseating trumpets etc. etc.’ The six minute musical number which follows, with its host of imaginative instruments and fantastic choreography, is perhaps the best scene in the movie, surreal but utterly enticing.
And yes, this is a musical. This particular scene unfolds without lyrics but the other songs are as playful with Seuss’s comedic lyrics as this is without them. Some are relatively straightforward, like Terwilliker Academy, with verses like ‘Terwilliker, we sing to thee; our cruel black hearts we bring to thee for crime and slimy villainy. Terwilliker Academy!’ Others, however, are so flamboyant for 1953 that the visuals couldn’t remotely live up to the wild words. There’s the Doe-Me-Doe Duds, which accompanies Dr. Terwilliker’s dressing for the big recital. It’s like a drag queen wish list, so just imagine Hans Conried dressed like this: ‘I want my pink brocaded bodice with the floofy fuzzy ruffs and my gorgeous bright blue bloomers with the monkey feather cuffs.’ I have to say, though, his hat is utterly fabulous, darling. No wonder this had problems at the time; this was two decades before blaxploitation allowed pimp stylin’ on the big screen. And what pimp would wear a ‘polka-dotted dickie with the crinoline fringe’?

And we wonder why Hans Conried was the star of this show! Mary Healy is entirely capable as Heloise Collins but she’s playing an everyday suburban mother in the fifties, which means that every minute away from cooking dinner or vacuuming the carpet is a wasted minute; she’s simply not allowed to do much. Her real life husband and potential new screen husband, Peter Lind Hayes, is downbeat but decent as August Zabladowski. He gets some good potential stepfather scenes, especially the one with the imaginary fishing trip. He also skates pretty well, a skill needed for a battle scene with a pair of twins with long joining beards, given that the Heasley brothers were taught ice skating by Sonja Henie. These are the most obvious hint that Bart’s dream ties to his reality, for there are photos of his uncles on the top of the piano with long beards. Compared to Healy and Hayes, Conried is able to strut in a series of amazing outfits, pose outrageously and pronounce disintegrations at dawn. Who were those leads again?
It’s a shame that this wasn’t a commercial success, because I’d have dearly loved for the face of musicals to change. I liked the sort of musicals that thirties Hollywood put out, with the surreality of Busby Berkeley and the class of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I never found much joy in the interpretative style of Gene Kelly, though, the genius of Singin’ in the Rain excepted, and most fifties or sixties musicals bored me to tears. This film, for all its flaws in pace and consistency, made me wonder what it would be like if they had choreography and set decoration, not to mention lyrics, by Dr. Seuss. I’m already imagining what he could do to The King and I and An American in Paris might actually be tolerable with him spicing it all up. But the failure of this film meant that what Seuss had in store for the future of cinema was restricted to others adapting his books, with varying degrees of success. It also meant that an actor of the calibre of Hans Conried never got to play something this wild and wonderful again, at least not in live action film.

Of course, his career didn’t stop, he just moved on to where the money was, which was for him increasingly in voice work. With a role as successful as Captain Hook behind him, he was in demand and many know him best today as Snidely Whiplash in the Dudley Do-Right of the Mountains segments of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. He also contributed voice work to The Phantom Tollbooth, Woody Woodpecker and Hoppity Hooper. His film roles continued in titles as varied as the sci-fi drive-in picture, The Monster That Challenged the World; the Jerry Lewis comedy, Rock-a-Bye Baby; and the live action Disney movie, The Cat from Outer Space. He also guested on a slew of TV shows, including 21 appearances as Uncle Tonoose in Make Room for Daddy. He remained active until the day before his death in 1982, meaning that a few appearances were therefore posthumous. He had a fantastic career, but I wonder how it would have been different had The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T succeeded in 1953.

Director: Russell Mulcahy
Writers: Brad Mirman and Christopher Lambert, from a story by Brad Mirman
Stars: Christopher Lambert, Robert Joy, Barbara Tyson, Rick Fox and Leland Orser


Index: Horror Movie Calendar.

In our modern consumerist culture, it’s easy to see the holiday of Easter like Bill Hicks described it: ‘commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus by telling our children a giant bunny rabbit left chocolate eggs in the night.’ However, to Christians, it’s one of the cornerstones of the liturgical year, the end of one season and the beginning of another, and it’s serious stuff indeed. It follows the season of Lent, during the six weeks of which many Christians prepare for Easter by fasting or giving up something to symbolise sacrifice. Lent ends with Holy Week, which is rich with key events: Palm Sunday marks the triumphal entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem, Maundy Thursday remembers the Last Supper and Good Friday commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus. This all ends with Easter Sunday, which begins Eastertide with a great celebration, because it’s when Jesus rose from the dead after three days in the tomb. After Jesus’s birth, marked at Christmas, his resurrection is the most important event in the Christian year.

In fact, it’s so important that people have been arguing about it for millennia: what theological significance it bears, its tie to the Jewish holiday of Passover and even the date on which it should be celebrated. Controversies over when the correct date should be date back to the second century and trawl in the First Council of Nicaea and the Synod of Whitby. Things only got worse when the western world shifted from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and they’re not even squared away yet. As recently as 1997, the World Council of Churches proposed reform, suggesting that Easter should be celebrated on the ‘first Sunday following the first astronomical full moon following the astronomical vernal equinox, as determined from the meridian of Jerusalem.’ Had that been adopted, it would have taken effect in 2001, a rare year in which the Western and Orthodox dates for Easter coincided. The fact is that it wasn’t adopted and people will continue to argue about it for the foreseeable future.

Given this history, it’s almost surprising that we haven’t seen a whole bunch of religious horror movies revolving around Easter; after all, death, resurrection and immortality are popular subjects for both lunatics and Hollywood screenwriters. Well, here’s an interesting such attempt, made by some interesting people who seem to work well together. The story was conjured up by Brad Mirman, who wrote and directed the memorable comedy Crime Spree in 2003. He’s known more as a writer than a director, with a string of screenplays to his name of films that starred Christopher Lambert: Knight Moves, Gideon and Highlander III: The Sorcerer for starters; Lambert co-wrote this one with him and stars in it himself. The director is Russell Mulcahy, who had made him famous with the original Highlander and infamous with its inept sequel, Highlander II: The Quickening (which Mirman will be ecstatic to say he had nothing to do with). It’s fair to say that this isn’t as original as the former but is a good shot at redemption for the latter.

Lambert is a cop, John Prudhomme by name, who moved from New Orleans to Chicago after the accidental death of his son. He’s apparently a decent detective but he’s not well liked, presumably because he still hasn’t come to terms with his loss. It affects his relationships with his wife, Sara, and his colleagues on the force and it affects us too, because Lambert is notably stiff in the early scenes and we wonder if we’ll have to watch such awkward acting throughout the film. Well, we don’t, because a tough case does the job of getting him emotionally invested and that awkwardness fades with our proximity to the killer, epitomised by how the detective’s reactions change to the constant jokes of his partner, Andy Hollinsworth. Initially, he fails to even acknowledge them but he eventually joins in and, as bad as his jokes are, they’re what he needs to belong. The very ending of the picture, after the case is solved, is emotionally manipulative but it’s OK for a change because Lambert has built up to it for ninety minutes.
This case is why I’m reviewing Resurrection on Easter Sunday. Someone is killing people in Chicago and they’re taking body parts from the corpses. I don’t mean hair clippings as souvenirs, I mean large body parts: Peter Belcoeur’s right arm, Matthew Leeson’s left and James Ordway’s head. In return for taking things so substantial, the killer leaves behind Roman numerals carved into their skin and not small ones either; think CXIX or MMCDXXVII. It takes three deaths for Prudhomme to figure out the key to the case. Each victim is 33 years old, the age of Jesus when he was crucified. Each is murdered on a Friday, the day on which that happened. Each has both the name and occupation of one of his apostles. The numbers are bible references, each chapter and verse covering the return of Jesus. Clearly this imaginative serial killer is re-constituting the body of Christ and there are three more weeks until Easter Sunday, when the Christian church recognises his resurrection. One message, painted in lamb’s blood, reads, ‘He’s coming.’

This is a fantastic setup for a dark thriller, especially as the obvious comparison, even from the early scenes, is to David Fincher’s Se7en, the pinnacle of dark thrillers. Needless to say, this can’t match it, but it comes a lot closer than most. It’s missing the brutal ironies, the attention to detail and the nested twists (though it does have one excellent twist that I didn’t see coming until almost the moment it was revealed and one neat irony whose depth mirrored the film’s). What it does have is a strong sense of pace, an admirable feel and some clever red herrings. It also has some powerful visual set pieces, including the killer’s body part montage and the final showdown between cop and killer, with an impressive third party to that clash who adds a great deal of tension to a scene that was already tense. Gareth Wilson, who was a set dresser for films as varied as Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Quest for Fire, is credited for set decoration but the whole art department deserves praise.
The closest the visuals get to Se7en are when we discover the third victim. He’s somewhere beneath Chinatown, in a location that appears to be built out of narrow corridors, naked women and rats. The cops’ journey through the former is a claustrophobic one and a sense of real danger accompanies them. When Joe Mantell advised Jack Nicholson to, ‘Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,’ it was up there on the surface with plenty of space around them. Here, Christopher Lambert and Leland Orser, who is highly believable as his partner, descend into a creepy netherworld, increasingly far from safety, in which nobody was witness to a man beheaded, drained of blood and posed for effect, not to mention the killer’s escape, presumably through those very same narrow corridors, with the victim’s head. In at least one way, this is more realistic than the more stylised set-pieces of Se7en, because everything we see is in muted colours, a Chicago constructed from rain, terror and the colour grey, with only hints at more.

The one aspect I wanted to see the film explore at much more depth is the religious aspect which is, after all, the entire point. As soon as Prudhomme realises what the numbers mean on the flesh of the Numbers Killer’s victims, we’re in religious territory. As the inevitable FBI profiler suggests, this murderer doesn’t see what he does as murder; he’s simply making sacrifices to God. His habit of taking body parts only when their owners can feel what he’s doing deliberately echoes the suffering of Jesus on the cross. There’s more than one meaning to the word ‘passion’ but it’s never highlighted here, even when a key character is set up to walk in similar sandals in a neat little trap. Instead, the only time that the police force ever decides to seeks religious expertise is when Prudhomme goes to see Father Rousell, his former pastor who’s offered help to combat his grief, to find out who the ‘boanerges’ are that the killer references in a fax to the cops.
I found this problematic because this is 1999, so the internet existed and was relatively easily available to look up anything that a dictionary couldn’t provide the answers to. I remember it well and it wasn’t what it is now, but it would have been fine to obtain an answer to a simple question like that. What it wouldn’t have done is provided deeper insight into the why behind the case, an explanation of what the killer was attempting to do and why he was doing it in that particular way. Those the questions that the detective should have taken to the priest for answers, but none of that happens at all. This particular police department is rather insular when it comes to research, its cops only grudgingly talking to the FBI profiler who shows up to offer his services, and the biggest gap is the religious one. The scene with Fr. Rousell works because it provides a lead to the next target, a rare instance of the filmmakers not trusting the telegraphing of religious points. Those without religious background may miss the rest.

Given the actor who plays Fr. Rousell, I was hoping that the character would have played a larger part in proceedings as our guide into the religious aspects of the case. He’s David Cronenberg, the acclaimed writer/director who proved himself as an actor back in 1990 in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. Some posters, such as those from France, where Resurrection was exhibited theatrically (it was a straight to DVD title in the States), list Cronenberg prominently above the title, alongside Lambert and Orser, suggesting that he has a huge part to play, but it’s really little more than a cameo. He gets two scenes, one to further the plot and one to help bolster Prudhomme’s character. He deserved more than that and so did the script. The same could be easily applied to Barbara Tyson, as Prudhomme’s wife, Sara, and Peter MacNeill as his boss, Capt. Jack Whippley; both are really only in the movie to add depth to his character and help to firm up his story arc as we move forward through the case.
Cronenberg aside, I appreciated the fact that I didn’t recognise any of the supporting cast. Some are familiar, as they’re character actors notching up another entry in their sizeable filmographies, but I couldn’t identify them and that works really well when the characters they’re playing are cops. In particular, Leland Orser, who seems highly recognisable, has appeared in a whole slew of movies from which I failed to recognise him. He’s in all three Taken movies, as well as genre pictures like The Bone Collector, Alien: Resurrection and Piranha, as well as blockbusters like Independence Day, Saving Private Ryan and Daredevil. Ironically, he was also in Se7en, playing ‘Crazed Man in Massage Parlor’. Robert Joy, who plays Greg Wingate, the FBI profiler, was a CSI: New York regular, which utterly slipped my mind. His fifty features include titles as varied as Ragtime, Waterworld and Harriet the Spy. Both are just what their roles required, being highly talented actors who don’t have star power enough to overwhelm their characters.

Even Christopher Lambert, whose diction is as recognisable as his face, manages to immerse himself far enough into this picture that we start to forget that he’s a star. For all that Se7en does what it does better than Resurrection, we’re never able to forget that we’re watching Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey. Even when we dip into the supporting characters, the same often applies. Barbara Tyson is more believable as Sara Prudhomme than Gwyneth Paltrow was as Tracy Mills, not because she’s better but because we don’t recognise her. The same goes for Peter MacNeill and R. Lee Ermey; the latter is inherently recognisable but the former isn’t. Ironically, that may be partly why Resurrection flew under the radar in 1999, four years after Se7en shocked us all. It’s inherently less recognisable and less memorable. However, it has much worthy of praise and deserves not to vanish into the black hole of capable movies that people overlooked. This Easter it deserves a resurrection.

Director: Norman Foster
Writers: Philip MacDonald and Norman Foster, based on the character created by John P. Marquand
Stars: Peter Lorre, Joseph Schildkraut, Lionel Atwill, Virginia Field, john King and Iva Stewart

The Great Villain Blogathon is in its fourth year, appropriately hosted by Silver Screenings, Shadows & Satin and Speakeasy, given that all those S’s sound rather like a hiss. It has covered villains from silent era Lon Chaney to modern day Pixar with all the usual suspects in between, so I chose a slightly different approach for my entry into year four: a rapid-paced black and white film which paints San Francisco rather like Ben Kenobi’s famous description of Mos Eisley. It’s a ‘wretched hive of scum and villainy’ in which an assassin hovers outside every window, a ne’erdowell skulks in every shadow and the script racks up so many candidates for the role of master thief that we end up sitting back and letting Mr. Moto solve this one for us. This isn’t a film with a single villain, nor even a pair, but three distinct bands of them. Most dangerous among them is Metaxa, a legendary jewel thief believed to be dead. Mr. Moto is not so sure, so he’s taking a fake vacation under the firm expectation that our MacGuffin will draw him out.

That MacGuffin is the crown of Balkis, the Queen of Sheba, which is of such importance that there’s a radio journalist reporting on its excavation live from the back of a truck parked under the ‘pitiless Arabian sun’. It’s utterly priceless, of course, and is promptly whisked out of the country on its vulnerable journey to San Francisco’s Fremont Museum. You won’t be surprised to find that ‘the young and brilliant archaeologist, Howard Stevens’ is a Hollywood leading man take on the real archaeologist, Howard Carter, who, in 1922, discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun and, through the effusive prose of journalist H. V. Morton, kickstarted Egyptomania across the western hemisphere. Actor John King gives off a self-effacing Jimmy Stewart sort of vibe as Stevens, a rare character to not rank on the Metaxa possibility chart, so he tends to fade into the background when the villainy commences in earnest. He’s a mild fish out of water here but he found his feet within a year as ‘Dusty’ King in a series of westerns that wrapped up his career.

Mr. Moto is right there when Stevens hauls out the crown, masquerading as a Viennese professor called Heinrich von Something or Other. He wears a believable beard but the dulcet tones of Peter Lorre are rather hard to disguise, even when not pretending a Japanese accent. He was much better at Viennese, given that he was born in an Austro-Hungarian town called Rózsahegy that has since become a Slovakian town called Ružomberok. He also began his stage career in Vienna, before finding creative outlet in an array of sinister characters in movies, starting with the child murderer, Hans Beckert, in Fritz Lang’s German masterpiece M, but continuing on in England and Hollywood in early films like The Man Who Knew Too Much and Mad Love. Moto is not often a typical hero but he’s certainly not a villain and he gave Lorre a good opportunity to highlight his versatility. However, after eight films, he wanted out as he found the character had become childish and restricting, though we never see his frustration on screen.

Lorre didn’t have to worry, because the way the world was changing rendered the series obsolete anyway. For those not familiar with him, Mr. Moto was a character brought to the screen from the world of books. John P. Marquand, a young American author with a few literary novels behind him, spent the thirties alternating more of those, including the Pulitzer-winning The Late George Apley, with short stories for the slicks, especially the Saturday Evening Post. It was this magazine which serialised No Hero in 1935, a novel which saw book form as Your Turn, Mr. Moto, the first in a new series. The Post had been seeking a new Asian hero since the death of Earl Derr Biggers, the man behind the Charlie Chan novels, in 1933. At that point the Orient was an exotic and fascinating place, with Japan an ‘inscrutable’ nation, to dabble in a much-overused cliché. However, only a few years later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the western world had a different viewpoint and an Asian hero was the last thing on anyone’s minds.
Four Mr. Moto novels had been published before Pearl Harbor and a fifth, already serialised in Collier’s Weekly, was waiting for its book publication. Apparently, these are different from the ensuing film series, not least because Moto wasn’t the protagonist but an oft-encountered character by a selection of more traditional American heroes, albeit usually ex-pat ones seeking something in the East. Moto himself was more a ruthless spy than a genial policeman, into which role he was soon transformed by Hollywood, working either for Interpol or a fictionalised take on it. While Asia generally was still exotic, this was an era of Imperial Japanese expansion, epitomised by their invasion of Chinese Manchuria in 1931, which they occupied until the end of World War II, and an increasing awareness of this eventually put paid to these stories. The attack on Pearl Harbor prompted Marquand to mothball his character for good, though he did return to him in 1956. The eight films came and went in between books three and five.

Lorre was surprisingly good in these films, given that he was playing in what’s known as yellowface, when a Caucasian actor plays an Asian character. Some examples are truly appalling, such as Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and some just beggar belief, like Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed. Much rarer are the instances when the actor, regardless of whether they should have been given the role, actually does it justice: Lon Chaney as Mr. Wu, Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto and Boris Karloff as Fu Manchu are perhaps the only classic examples I can come up with. Lorre was short, only 5’ 3½”, and he had rounded features, so it didn’t take much to change his screen race. What’s most important is that he occupies Moto’s skin with respect, combining a polite tone of voice with impressive posture and modest approach. He’s clearly not only intelligent but the most intelligent man in any room in which we see him, but he doesn’t use that to belittle anyone. Combining these aspects makes him inherently trustworthy.
That’s a particularly good thing in this picture, because there don’t appear to be many trustworthy characters in San Francisco. In fact, we don’t even have to get there to know that. Soon into the cruise over, Moto’s disguise as a Japanese tourist called Shimako is rumbled by an exuberant idiot from Scotland Yard by the name of Archie Featherstone and, in that very moment, villains crawl out of the woodwork and wire home with the news. We soon learn who some of those villains are, but we aren’t let in on Metaxa’s secret identity; that’s left for the finalé, which is capable in every way but the one that wreaks havoc in the Fremont Museum, the hero and villain’s battle destroying a painful number of exhibits. This is certainly action-packed for a mystery picture, the editing of Norman Colbert, a veteran of two earlier Mr. Moto movies, being notably sharp. I saw the cruise to San Francisco as the coiling of a spring, which is let loose as soon as they arrive and the crown is loaded into a fantastic armoured truck manned by fake cops.

While viewers could easily argue about the best aspects of this picture, few would disagree about the worst, namely Featherstone, a tiresome caricature of a bumbling buffoon, a sort of proto-Clouseau without any of his redeeming qualities. He spends the movie stumbling into scenes that were doing just fine without him, immediately making them worse, then stumbling into situations that would have unfolded much better without his presence. For instance, that clever heist at the docks is a great idea, but having this annoyance in human form give chase by grabbing a ride with an uncredited Willie Best really isn’t. I like Best, as awful as many of the parts he was given were, but here he’s just an unwitting sidekick to Featherstone, who promptly traipses right into Chinatown and accidentally saves the day. That gets his face on the front page of the papers, while we bemoan the fact that the villains failed to shoot him dead in a back alley. He deserved that for the utterly unnecessary blackface scene alone.
Whenever Featherstone isn’t on screen, we’re being introduced to a variety of shady characters played by a variety of actors often known for playing shady characters. First up is David Perez, a Chinatown jeweller played by Morgan Wallace, an actor whose SAG membership number is 3. He’s a crook only because he believes it’s safe, in the game to cut down jewels removed from the crown of Balkis for resale, but he’s unwilling to put his neck on the line when Mr. Moto is in the picture. He’s working with Joe Rubla, an overt gangster type, who’s more than willing to rub Moto out. While his toughness is tempered by awkwardly dated dialogue like, ‘You think a little Japanese dick is going to scare me?’, regular serial actor Anthony Warde (he was Killer Kane to Buster Crabbe’s Buck Rogers) plays him with all the necessary bravado. This pair, along with the usual minions, constitute the first villainous band but there are many others whose honesty is also clearly in doubt. Perhaps they’re villains but perhaps they’re only red herrings.

Next up is Eleanore Kirke, in the form of the lovely Virginia Field, making her third appearance in the Mr. Moto series, each time playing a different character. She initially appears to be Stevens’s girlfriend, travelling home with him to San Francisco, but that’s not the case; his girlfriend is really Susan French, secretary to Prof. Roger Hildebrand of the Fremont Museum, who will be taking over control of the crown, so three guesses as to what she’s really up to and the first two don’t count! Hildebrand is automatically sinister because he’s played by Lionel Atwill, a prolific horror actor and one of the most prominent second tier icons after the big names at Universal. He was so good at playing sinister that he comes off that way even when he’s not playing a sinister character and we can’t be too sure about him here. Also suspicious is his chess partner, Hendrik Manderson, a cantankerous old gentleman who partially financed the Stevens expedition; he’s played by Oscar-winning character actor Joseph Schildkraut.
But wait, as they say, there’s more! Manderson has a Chinese assistant by the name of Wong, who is actually played by a Chinese actor, born Ho Chee Chung but credited, as always, as Honorable Wu. His big scene takes place at a Chinese restaurant called the Laughing Buddha, in which all the apparent staff are also ethnically appropriate. Ironically, all the Chinese actors listed at IMDb are named Wong except for one playing the character of Wong. The most prominent is Victor Wong, who plays the owner here but is surely most remembered for being Charlie the cook in the original King Kong. There’s also Victor Varconi portraying Paul Borodoff, an investigator from the Pacific Insurance Corporation who shows up out of the blue, automatically a suspicious move. At this point, we start to wonder about the rest of the characters, like Susan French, played by Iva Stewart in the biggest role of her career, and the cops and the security guards and, well, all those unidentifiable assassins taking potshots at Mr. Moto!

And, of course, with all this going on, the Fremont Museum spends about five minutes after receiving the crown of Balkis to have it out on display in a special room with special security measures, which are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. I kid you not, Hildebrand attempts to demonstrate the alarm to a collected throng of notables and journalists but, after it fails to sound, he carries on regardless as if such a catastrophic failure of crucial systems couldn’t possibly constitute a concern! This inept take on security doesn’t help the film, especially as the only person the guards ever catch is Archie Featherstone, with his habit of trying the most ill advised actions in the most ill advised ways. G. P. Huntley plays him as he was surely expected to, but he’s a sad try at comic relief. Featherstone comes across as a series regular but this was the only film he was in. If it was ever intended for him to continue on into further pictures, I’m unabashedly happy that the series ended here, just to stop that from happening.
Featherstone is the Jar Jar Binks of the Mr. Moto series. Every time he’s on screen, the quality of the film plummets, just as every time he leaves the screen, the quality of the film increases. For the eighth movie in a series about to end, this is a heck of a lot of fun whenever Featherstone is gone. The technical aspects are strong, especially visually, with Colbert’s sharp editing backing up some striking cinematography from the four-time Oscar nominee Charles Clarke. Mostly though, everyone seems to be having a blast, even down to the minor support roles, like that of Benny the bellhop, to whom Moto teaches a single judo move which has immediate application within a minute or two. Oddly, it’s Lorre who appears to have most fun, even though he was disguising an increasing disdain for the character. He delivers with style, especially for an actor for whom English was a second language. One memorable moment has Moto find a phone cord cut and comment drily, ‘Someone deprived this instrument of all utiity.’

Running only 65 minutes, this 20th Century Fox production has everything you could possibly want in a tale of intrigue. If only it didn’t also have Archie Featherstone and a few cheap devices to keep things moving along. Beyond its own merits, though, it’s an excellent example of the American fascination with the Japanese psyche at the time and of the practice of yellowface, especially given that the lead Japanese character is played by a white Austro-Hungarian, even though a number of capable Asian actors play much less important parts deep into the uncredited credits. I find yellowface fascinating, especially as it’s not looked upon with routine disdain the way blackface is, but I find even more fascinating America’s relationship with Japan, from Commodore Perry opening up the country in 1854 after centuries of self-imposed isolation and possibility sparking in the minds of far too many all the way up to thoroughly racist wartime propaganda cartoons like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips in 1944.
It feels weird in our 21st century internet world to realise how little Japanese culture was understood, how slowly news travelled and how much of the world was hidden to the eyes of most of its population. After Perry, Japan transformed itself in merely half a century into a powerful modernised nation. Americans could well have been distracted during the early thirties by things like the Great Depression but, emerging from that in the late thirties and forties, they wanted to look outward and Hollywood was happy to provide their particularly exotic take on the country and its culture. In many ways, this is the quintessential take because it’s a yellowface lead interacting with an occidental story, all film noir intrigue and B movie detection, but with moments of real actors of Asian descent playing characters of their own race in appropriate settings, like the Laughing Buddha. Forgetting Featherstone, it’s a whole bundle of villainy, wrapped up with intrigue and topped off with Peter Lorre. Happy Great Villain Blogathon, folks!

Director: George Seaton
Writers: George Seaton and Valentine Davies
Stars: Dan Dailey and Celeste Holm, from the stage play by Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, in turn based on the memoir by Rosemary Taylor


Hey look, it’s Tucson! And this isn’t one of my Dry Heat Obscurities reviews, because Tucson here is merely a setting not a location; the film was shot instead in a variety of towns in Nevada with frontier names like Carson City, Silver City or Virginia City. Another more appropriate location was Gardnerville, named for John M. Gardner, on whose land it was founded. Apparently he sold seven acres in 1879 to Lawrence Gilman, who had bought a house ten miles away and wanted to move it, possibly because it was haunted by a ghost highwayman. So the Kent House in Genoa became the Gardnerville Hotel in Gardnerville and the town was born. This is appropriate because this comedy really revolves around a struggle to define accomplishment and it suggests that its leading male character, James C. Hefferan, accomplished much because he gave his name to pretty much everything in Tucson, even if it rarely brought a decent income. The rest has to do with how his family survives this lack of money, which boils down to his wife, Emily.

That’s Emily Hefferan, in the lovely form of Celeste Holm, who owns this film. Dan Dailey isn’t bad as Jim and this came only a year after his Oscar-nomination for When My Baby Smiles at Me, but he’s an odd cross between Jimmy Stewart and Danny Kaye and he’s a lot more of a supporting character, flitting in and out of the story as needed, rather than driving it forward. He certainly drives the town of Tucson forward but not our story. Holm drives that from her standpoint as the grounding of the family, the film and what may well be the entire community as a sort of collective surrogate mother. Holm would have been a hundred years old today and she came pretty close, succumbing to a heart attack in 2012 at the age of 95. Her career wasn’t as prolific as some, but it ran long, the gap between Three Little Girls in Blue in 1946 and College Debts in 2015 being almost seven decades. In fact, many fans remember her for the TV show Promised Land, which ran from 1996 to 1999 as a spin-off from Touched by an Angel. She was 79 as that began.

If any of those fans watch Chicken Every Sunday, they’ll be surprised because it was made half a century earlier with Holm mostly in aging make-up. It begins with an old Emily strutting angrily down the street to see Charles L. Blaine, Attorney at Law. She wants a divorce, surprising enough to the lawyer, who has known her husband since he was a kid, that she has to walk down the hall to tell her story to the new lawyer in town whose name, Robert Hart, is being stencilled on the door while she talks. What she tells him is our story too, unfolding as a long flashback to show us what brought things to this sorry end. Hart’s questions echo ours as he’s as new to Tucson as we are. For a start, why would Emily want a divorce on the grounds of ‘non-support’ when her husband’s name appears to be on every business in town, from the hotel to the dairy? Sure, it’s on everything, she replies. ‘That’s just the trouble.’ This riddle is a fantastic way to kick off a feature film, even if its answer becomes obvious relatively quickly.

The flashback starts with Jim and Emily’s wedding. He’s the vice president of the bank but he has to borrow money from a friend to pay the minister. Emily calls him on that as they drive home, because he had $2,000 a week before, not a small sum for what is presumably the 1910s. He explains that he lost $500 on a real estate deal in Flagstaff, used $1,100 to finance the new brewery and gave the last $400 to their neighbour, Gonzales, as he was going to lose his ranch. Emily’s head is simultaneously up in the clouds, happy that she’s married a man with such abundant faith in the goodness of mankind, and firmly grounded, as she had a feeling that they’d start out without a quarter, so took in a couple of boarders without letting Jim know. So they spend their honeymoon with another pair of honeymooners in their house, but at least the $70 a month the Lawsons are paying ensure that the Hefferans have somewhere to live now that they’re married. And so we continue for an hour and a half.
I should add here that this is a true story, or as close as passed for one in the Hollywood of 1949. It began as a memoir, written by Rosemary Taylor, called Chicken Every Sunday: My Life with Mother’s Boarders. She was born Rosemary Drachman here in Phoenix in 1899, but her family moved to Tucson five years later, 27 years after it incorporated, and the Hefferans are the Drachmans, Mose and Ethel. A quick Google search shows me the Drachman Institute and a Drachman Montessori school in Tucson, among others, but I know the connection already as the hotel at which we usually stay when visiting Tucson is on Drachman St. Taylor’s book was adapted to the stage in 1944 by the Epstein twins, Julius and Philip, writers of little pictures like Casablanca and Arsenic and Old Lace and their solid sense of humour is maybe best highlighted by a response they gave on a House Un-American Activities Commission questionnaire. Asked if they had ever belonged to a subversive organisation, they replied, ‘Yes. Warner Brothers.’

It was Warner Brothers who bought the movie rights to the Epsteins’ play and had them write the script, but they then sold it on to 20th Century Fox, who had it rewritten. Each rewrite surely shifted the story a little further away from the truth, which was a debatable thing even in Taylor’s original memoir; a note from the author in the studio file suggests that she invented a good part of it. That really doesn’t matter, because it’s a good foundation on which to build a comedy and the best reason to watch is surely not the story but Celeste Holm’s performance in it. Those watching because Ruthie, Emily’s youngest daughter in this picture, is played by Natalie Wood, will be sorely disappointed because she’s hardly in it, even if she got to celebrate her tenth birthday on set. The daughter with screen time is the eldest, Rosemary, played by Colleen Townsend, who is the same lovestruck young lady that we’ve seen a hundred times in a hundred different Hollywood movies of the era.
That’s odd, given that Rosemary Hefferan is presumably the fictional representation of the original author. You might think that, if she was going to make this stuff up, she’d make her own character more interesting, but the Hollywood version apparently felt that beautiful was enough, Townsend looking so attractive that we can easily understand why the boy whom she adores, Geoffrey Lawson, who adores her back, finds it hard to get more than a single word out whenever he tries to talk to her. Fortunately, Emily is on the case. ‘A girl’s got to be that forward if a man’s going to be that backward,’ she explains, in one of many memorable lines she’s given throughout the movie. She teaches Geoffrey to dance and gives him the confidence to step in, even as Rosemary finds herself pursued by Harold Crandall, a society robot from an important Boston family. Emily doesn’t trust anyone who bows from the waist and Rosemary doesn’t like him either, but she’ll end up with him anyway unless Geoffrey finds some balls.

What’s notable here isn’t that Geoffrey is played by Alan Young, a capable British actor perhaps best known today as the voice of Scrooge McDuck in a variety of films, cartoons and videogames, even though his six decades worth of features include the classic version of The Time Machine; it’s that Alan Young was a mere two years younger than Celeste Holm, believably playing the mother of his love interest. This happens a lot here, partly because Holm and Dailey have to play their characters as newlyweds, then age as their children age, and partly because we skip forward in time quickly. What we’re shown in between Rosemary’s birth, when she steals the mayor’s thunder while dedicating the Hefferan Hospital, and Rosemary’s graduation from high school, at which Jim is served legal papers (that’s it for the Hefferan Hotel), is a progression of other ventures which succeed after he leaves them or is forced out financially. They’re here to highlight Emily’s promise to add a new room every time he makes another investment.
The age gaps get ridiculous when we start in on the George Kirby angle, which dominates the second half of the picture, ratchets up the pace and shifts proceedings over to broad farce. Kirby is a big man in construction, a perfect investor for Jim’s new copper mine venture if only he lived in Tucson (or even Arizona) and had a clue who James C. Hefferan was. Well, into Emily’s boarding house comes Rita Kirby, George’s wife, escaping his clutches and his horrendous toupee. Veda Ann Borg is great fun as Rita, with a laid back voice, voluptuous looks and back street hooker manners, the first of a number of characters introduced late in the movie who steal the show from Jim and try to steal it from Emily too. Rita is obviously a young trophy wife, but Borg was two years older than Holm. With Borg playing younger than her real age and the younger Holm playing older than her real age, we find ourselves often reliant on the quality of the make-up by the thoroughly experienced Ben Nye. He does a reasonable job of it.

Borg does steal the film for a while, but then vanishes, just as we wonder if she’s working a scam. Later, it’s Connie Gilchrist, only fourteen years older than Borg but playing her much older mother, a drunken ex-vaudevillian called Millie Moon, who steals the show so emphatically that we wonder why she was written in such a way. Gilchrist does a great job but anyone in this role would have stolen their scenes from all the other calm, decent and upstanding members of the household, even the reliable Porter Hall playing within his usual pompous type as bank president Sam Howell, one film before Betty Grable would shoot him repeatedly in the posterior in The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend. The other prominent actor in the cast is William Frawley, just two years away from his most famous role of Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy. He blusters appropriately as George Kirby but inevitably takes a back seat to the ladies in his life, who have all the character that his character doesn’t. That toupee can only take him so far.
Chicken Every Sunday ought to be much better than it is. It’s an enjoyable classic comedy, if not a movie to return to, but not for the reasons we might expect. The director, George Seaton, was riding high after Miracle on 34th Street in 1947, a success which won him the Oscar as a writer he didn’t win four years earlier for The Song of Bernadette; he’d win a second for The Country Girl in 1954. Yet, it doesn’t feel like he had much of a vision for this film at all as a director. He also wrote the screenplay with Valentine Davies, with whom he had written Miracle on 34th Street, but the whole thing feels constrained. It feels like the characters don’t really want to be funny and that they are comes more from the actors than the script. More than once, I felt that Dan Dailey was about to break into song and, while I wish that many classic musicals would just quit with the singing and dancing to give the story a chance, I found a rare example of the opposite here; adding some musical numbers might have given this the life it needed.

The major cast were notable too, if a notch down from those originally sought. Dan Dailey’s Oscar nod was only a year behind him and he was a reliable leading man, if more in musicals than dramatic roles, but he wasn’t of the level of Henry Fonda, the original choice for Jim Hefferan. Celeste Holm had already won her Oscar (and a Golden Globe), for Gentleman’s Agreement in 1948 and she’d be nominated again in both 1950 and 1951, making this an odd year out; however, her role was aimed at Maureen O’Hara. Colleen Townsend was an up and coming starlet after The Walls of Jericho in 1948, but Jeanne Crain was first choice for Rosemary Hefferan. Really, it succeeds best from a feminist standpoint, as long as we ignore the idiotic Hollywood ending that was perhaps inevitable during the Production Code era. Jim Hefferan is a good man and he’s well intentioned, but his only good decision was Emily. Even though he tells her, ‘Honey, I love you, but you don’t have a head for business,’ she really does and she succeeds where he fails.
And that’s why this is a good choice to celebrate the career of Celeste Holm, even though she made many better movies. She came to this from Gentleman’s Agreement, Road House (no, not that one) and The Snake Pit, and she’d soon go on to Champagne for Caesar, All About Eve and High Society. This doesn’t stand well in their company on any criteria except her performance. Even if Dan Dailey has top billing, this is her film and she’s by far the best reason to watch it, even if the role of a patient wife didn’t quite fit reality; at 32, Holm was already halfway through her third marriage and she’d marry twice more after that. For all her great roles on screen, she began on stage, originating the role of Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, and she emphatically went back to it, even with her fame at its peak in the early fifties and even if her 24 films include at least one from every decade from the 1940s to the 2010s. I could have chosen quite a few of those, but Emily Hefferan is a worthy and dominant character and she’s a great way to remember Celeste Holm.

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Writer: Michael Wilson, from the book by L. C. Moyzisch
Stars: James Mason, Danielle Darrieux and Michael Rennie


Index: 2017 Centennials.

At what point, I wonder, do spoilers come into play when covering a film based on historical fact? Well, my mindset these days was forged by a theatrical viewing of Public Enemies, at which I was shocked at the audible shock of one audience member when Johnny Depp’s character was killed. Yes, that’s public enemy number one John Dillinger, who was shot and killed by special agents in 1934. If American audience members can be blissfully unaware of such a historic American event, are they likely to know much about, say, espionage in Turkey during World War II? Probably not, so I’ll be careful here, though I have to highlight that this film, while based on a memoir, isn’t remotely as true as the ballsy opening scene might suggest. Rather than merely plaster the usual ‘this is a true story’ onto the screen, we’re also placed inside the House of Commons, as an MP asks if the book, Operation Cicero, is factual. The reply? ‘It must be regretfully admitted that, in substance, the story to which the honourable member refers is a true one.’

In a nutshell, this story involved a man selling a substantial amount of British secrets to the Nazis for cash. In reality, his name was Elyesa Bazna, a Turkish man of Albanian descent, who worked as valet to Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, the British Ambassador to Turkey. The latter had a habit of taking secret documents home, in a dispatch box, and Bazna’s locksmithing skills allowed him to open this and photograph them. In late 1943, he contacted L. C. Moyzisch at the German Embassy in Ankara, and sold him a first batch of pictures. Given the codename of Cicero, he continued to do this for some months. Eventually the British discovered the leak and investigated, even mounting a sting operation that failed. However, the pressure was mounting and Cicero decided that it was time to quit. He stopped selling information in February 1944 and left the embassy in April. What’s wild is that the Nazis failed to act on any of this important information, not trusting it, and the British failed to catch Bazna.

In this screen adaptation, written by Michael Wilson, who had won an Oscar a year earlier for co-writing A Place in the Sun, much is kept factual but much is either changed or completely made up. The general result is to take a spy story, steeped in testosterone and greed, and craft from it an elegant tale of espionage, with a stirring Bernard Herrmann score. Generally, the Germans are real, starting with Moyzisch, who wrote Operation Cicero as a memoir of the affair. During World War II, his official position in Ankara, the capital of neutral Turkey, was a ‘commercial attaché’, though it was a cover for his real job as head of the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS and a sister organisation to the Gestapo. That doesn’t gel with this take on the character, delivered by an Austrian actor called Oskar Karlweis, who plays him as a nervous type seemingly incapable of doing what we know he did. This was only his second English language film, his strong career twenty years earlier ended by Nazi occupation. He’s great but he’s not real.

With Moyzisch oddly weak, we clearly need another Nazi to help this story remain believable. It turns out to be Franz von Papen, another real historical figure and a huge one. A favourite of Paul von Hindenburg, the German president during the later years of the Weimar Republic, he served as Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and Vice-Chancellor under Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1934. The Night of the Long Knives, which purged Hitler’s chief political opponents left Papen alive, though he left the government and was sidelined into lesser ambassadorial appointments. At the time of this story, he served as German Ambassador to Turkey. Frankly, I adored the performance of John Wengraf, another Austrian actor forced to flee his homeland after the rise of the Nazis only to be tasked in Hollywood with playing characters he despised the most, such as Nazis. Wengraf plays Papen as the subtle and incisive brain of the German Embassy in Ankara though, in reality, he was an autocratic noble with catastrophic decision making skills.
If the Nazis are mostly fictionalised versions of real people, massaged into the new story, the British are a step further away from reality. Papen’s opposite number, the British Ambassador to Ankara, is Sir Frederic Taylor, surely much easier to pronounce than Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. In the hands of Walter Hampden, he’s a decent chap, perhaps a little trusting but far from inept. Everything about dispatch boxes is excised, thus polarising him into the good guy and his valet into the bad guy. That valet has a new name too, Ulysses Diello, and he’s brought to magnificent life by James Mason, who endows him with a suave, eloquent and ultra-confident persona. Mason is fantastic here, though Diello resembles the real Bazna in no way, shape or form. He dominates poor Moyzisch at their first meeting and continues to dominate everyone at every meeting. He’s so smooth that he almost has us buy into him being the hero he is in his own mind, until we step back and think about who he really is, a cruel, greedy sociopath.

Mason does so much here that I’m sure there are little details that I missed and will pick up on a second viewing. He has a subtle way of showing his arrogance when dealing with those he sees as inferior minds, such as his habit of not looking at people when the crux of the conversation is over, focusing instead on more important tasks like carefully putting on his gloves, re-shaping his hat or counting the money he’s raking in from the Nazis. I’ve never seen someone put on gloves so frequently in a movie! There are other moments too, like when he waits in Moyzisch’s office for him to develop the first reels of film. He looks up at the usual large portrait of the Führer but in such a way that it seems more like he’s looking down on him. Yet, when working as a valet, he demonstrates all the deference that is expected from his betters, playing the part of, as he ably describes it at one point ‘the best gentleman’s gentleman’. There are worlds of difference here between getting someone a drink and asking them to get you one.
His Achilles’ heel is Countess Anna Staviska, a pivotal character here who is placed in between the two sides as both a motive and an opportunity. This character is entirely fictional and her entire subplot is entirely fictional too, surely with the goal of including a female presence to a story that would be otherwise be notably without one. I believe that the only other female character given dialogue is an unnamed cleaning lady who has two lines in an otherwise silent but critical performance late in the film. Therefore it’s down to Danielle Darrieux to represent the entire female gender, something she does with effortless style. ‘More than anyone I’ve ever known,’ Sir Frederic tells Diello, ‘she symbolised the world in which she lived and which she thought would never end, a world of infinite beauty, luxury and indulgence.’ Diello knows this well, having served as valet to her late husband. Clearly, he’s in love both with her and what she represents. She’s a dream to him, but one which now may be accessible.

There’s a world of depth in the relationship between Diello and the Countess. They play many different roles at different points in the story: man and woman, master and servant, noble and peasant, victim and saviour, traitor and accomplice, hope and salvation. These roles change over time, even within single sentences, and the interplay is fascinating to watch, especially given the incisive dialogue and the textbook delivery of Mason and Darrieux. Even though this is complete departure from historical fact, it’s also an incredibly good way to represent what espionage and counter-espionage really are. Regardless of any emotional investment, each character uses the other and they both know that from the outset. Every word therefore becomes a move in a chess game, with all the power plays, sacrifices and endgames the analogy implies, except that the board and its pieces are visible only in the minds of those playing the game. What can you trust? What can’t you trust? Are you visualising the board correctly?
Anna is the reason why I’m reviewing 5 Fingers today, because she’s played by the elegant Danielle Darrieux, a French actress who celebrated her one hundredth birthday today, 1st May, the first of my subjects this year to reach her centennial. Her career is one of the longest on record, the distance in time between her first feature, Le bal, in 1931 at the slight age of thirteen, and, at present, her most recent, Pièce montée, in 2010, being almost eighty years! If we count a short documentary, Tournons ensemble, Mademoiselle Darrieux, then that increases to an incredible eighty-five! Who knows, maybe she’ll make another film in her second century. Most of her pictures were made in her native France, including Mauvaise graine, the directorial debut of Billy Wilder; two awesome films for Max Ophüls, La Ronde and Madame de...; and the multi-award winning modern François Ozon movie, 8 femmes. However, she did make a few pictures abroad too, from 1938’s The Rage of Paris, opposite Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., to 1956’s Alexander the Great.

She’s devastating here from her very first scene, at a reception held by a Turkish minister for the diplomatic corps. With the rest of the attendees suffering through an opera singer mangling Wagner, she sits in a side room eating and Franz von Papen pops in to compliment her. She maintains her poise, even as her acerbic dialogue betrays her current stature, far below where it used to be. Her husband, the Count, has passed away, leaving her a widow. Her estates and possessions in Poland, confiscated by the Nazis, are now occupied by Hermann Göring, whom she loathes. She only eats nowadays when she’s invited to a dinner, such as this one. Her delivery is superb. Papen asks why she left Warsaw. ‘Bombs were falling,’ she replies. ‘I felt I was in the way.’ What about her friends? ‘I have no friends and those who want to be, frankly, cannot afford it.’ As Moyzisch stares at her, after summoning Papen, she comments, ‘Herr Moyzisch, please do not look at me as if you had a source of income other than your salary.’
It isn’t merely Countess Staviska’s dialogue that is exquisite and it’s hardly surprising to discover that Michael Wilson won both a Golden Globe and an Edgar for his script. He was nominated for an Oscar too, which would have made two in a row, but he lost to Charles Schnee for The Bad and the Beautiful. He would win a second Oscar, for 1958’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, but as he and Carl Foreman, his co-writer, were blacklisted by Hollywood at the time, they didn’t actually receive their awards until 1984. Officially, the award was given to Pierre Boulle, who had written the source novel, even though he spoke no English. This ridiculous state of affairs was routine in the fifties. Dalton Trumbo won twice, for Roman Holiday and The Brave One, even though he was blacklisted; a front took one award, a pseudonym the other. Nedrick Young, also blacklisted, also won twice, for co-writing The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind, each time through a pseudonym. Of course, none of them could attend the ceremony.

There are so many great lines that it’s tough to pick favourites. Anna rumbles an undercover Nazi with a left-handed compliment: ‘How charmingly you Swiss click your heels. An old Swiss custom?’ She may get the most, but others aren’t left out. ‘The source of your money has never concerned you any more than the source of your electric light,’ Diello suggests to her. ‘They only become worrisome when they were shut off.’ Papen often eloquently skewers his Nazi superiors, describing them as ‘half-witted paranoid gangsters’ or ‘a government of juvenile delinquents.’ The Japanese ambassador calls him ‘the only unpredictable German I’ve ever met.’ A British agent describes Istanbul: ‘This city was created by Allah primarily for the concealment of spies.’ Many lines go to a character I haven’t mentioned yet, Colin Travers, who’s sent from London to Ankara to investigate the possibility that a German spy exists within the British Embassy. At one point he mentions that ‘Counter-espionage is the highest form of gossip.’
Perhaps my favourite is when Travers, in the recognisable combination of jovial exterior and utterly serious interior that sums up Michael Rennie, lays politely into Diello. ‘You’re the most cold-blooded thief, traitor and criminal I’ve seen in a lifetime of looking at human trash,’ he tells him. ‘What a pity,’ Diello replies. ‘I rather hoped I’d look like a gentleman.’ That’s a great line and a better response, but it also ably sums up their characters. In reality, Elyesa Bazna sold secrets for the basest of motives: money. Diello, his fictional counterpart, is far more complex and so much of what he does boils down to the fact that he loves the Countess, who is of a different class and moving between classes is nigh on impossible. He yearns to be her social equal and that bandying for position is highlighted by who can ask whom to make the drinks at any particular point in time. Diello serves gentlemen as a valet, but his ego is large enough to position himself above them, even as their status makes that unthinkable. Mason enjoys this depth.

It’s a shame that 5 Fingers isn’t well known today. Perhaps part of that is the odd title, which is never mentioned anywhere within the film. The memoir upon which it was based was more prosaically named Operation Cicero, but someone saw a reason to change it and I wonder why. The closest explanation we have is exhibited on the movie’s poster, on which each finger on the silhouette of a hand is labelled; these five fingers reveal ‘lust’, ‘greed’, ‘passion’, ‘desire’ and ‘sin’. That’s pretty loose, as explanations go, but it’ll serve, I guess. Perhaps the centennial of Danielle Darrieux, who acted for many great French directors, from Maurice Tourneur to François Ozon via Max Ophüls, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Demy (for whom she was the only actress to sing her own songs), will focus some attention back onto it. After all, she only made a few pictures outside France and this could well be the best of them. It certainly deserves much more attention than any of the others.
I’ve seen far too few of her French films, but those that I have are fantastic. I particularly enjoyed a pair of features for Ophüls: La Ronde, with Anton Walbrook and an opening shot which is a legendary feat of ambitious choreography, and The Earrings of Madame de..., with Charles Boyer. She also appeared in a third, in one of the three stories on the theme of pleasure in, well, Le plaisir. Even though I’m hardly a fan of musicals, I thoroughly enjoyed Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, so should check out another of his most famous films, The Young Girls of Rochefort, with Darrieux in support of Catherine Deneuve and George Chakiris. Others I feel I should track down include a British film, The Greengage Summer, a mystery surrounding the French Resistance entitled Marie-Octobre and the film that launched her stardom, a period piece called Mayerling, again opposite Charles Boyer. More recently, one film that’s racked up awards is 8 Women by François Ozon. French film is a rabbit hole and Darrieux can be found everywhere in it.

Director: Paul Ragsdale
Writer: Paul Ragsdale
Stars: Anthony Iava To’omata, Angelica de Alba, Joshua Palafox, Tiawny Ferreira, Christopher Beatty, Lindsay Amaral, Kyle Duval, Tommy Fourre, Ryan Holley, Robert Holloway, Steven Pettit Jr., Pete Magazinovic, Delawna McKinney, Don Gonzalez and Spencer Reza


Index: Horror Movie Calendar.

Not all holidays are English language, even if half the people getting drunk on Cinco de Mayo have never spent a day in Mexico in their lives and whose command of the Spanish language doesn’t extend past ‘uno mas’ and ‘por favor’. This feature, made because director Paul Ragsdale wanted to shoot a slasher movie, looked at holidays on the calendar and saw that there was a glaring gap on the 5th May just waiting for a Mexican horror feature, can’t hide its tiny budget but it does manage to do far more than I expected it might, especially as it progresses from a cheap beginning to a surprisingly poetic ending. It also veered quickly away from paths that I expected it to follow: while it did start out as a slasher, and it follows some rules from that genre, it feels far more seventies than eighties with a social awareness angle that feels completely out of place in a world epitomised by Freddy and Jason. It’s also predominantly in English, though with a heavy Hispanic focus and a little Spanish dotted here and there for flavour.

I have to say that the beginning is pretty awful, though I must also acknowledge that part of that is by design. Ragsdale decided to present Cinco de Mayo as the first half of a double bill showing on cable TV in a recurring segment called All Nite Long. This is truly embarrassing to my generation but only because it’s so accurate. Eden Trevino does a great job of parodying Rhonda Shear from the Friday edition of USA Up All Night, though in acknowledging that she clearly out-eighties her inspiration, I was shocked to find that Shear didn’t take over the show from Caroline Schlitt until 1991, making this a seventies film in an eighties segment sourced from a nineties show. The rest of the awful is less easy to explain away. Everyone in the cast makes it into the opening credits, in a font bad enough for L to look like I and actors to look like typos. Tlawny Ferrelra? Maybe not. Then, when the movie proper starts, with a brief prologue from a year earlier, it’s really dark and it’s difficult to see what’s going on. Not a good beginning.

It could easily be argued that it keeps improving from that low point, though I’m not sure at what precise point I stopped laughing and started digging the movie. It may well have been the conversation between a set of students about the fact that their Chicano History teacher, Prof. Humberto Valdez, has just been fired. On the surface, it seems entirely as dumb as you might expect from a bunch of college kids but, behind the stupidity, it’s thoughtful, incisive and well written. Before this point, which starts around the eighteen minute mark, my notes were mostly about poor lighting, poor acting and worse camerawork. After it, they focused more on good ideas, good dialogue and interesting angles for the script. The lighting never improves, but the acting does and the white bigots, in particular, are thoroughly believable. Ironically, one of the more prominent, Valdez’s neighbour, Ted, is played by Kyle Duval, who Ragsdale previously cast as a character in love with a young Hispanic lady in a short film called The Mexican Connexion.

The slasher side of the story seems relatively simple: Valdez gets fired, so he goes on a killing spree. However, there’s a lot more to it and, in many ways, Valdez and the film are the same thing. As a character, he seems to exist only to impart his message, namely that Mexican culture extends a lot further than his students think. When asking them about Cinco de Mayo, Cory gets particularly enthusiastic but it’s because of ‘all the drinking, all the car racing, all the fights, getting shanked, chicks sitting on hoods and shit.’ Magdalena asks him later if he really thinks that gangs and prison are an important part of Mexican culture. He replies, honestly, ‘Isn’t it?’ So what their teacher, colloquially referred to as El Maestro, fails to get over in his class, does start to resonate with his students and with us. As Valdez’s message is really the message of the picture, we start to think about some of his topics, such as: ‘What is Cinco de Mayo and what does it mean?’ Well, it probably isn’t what you think, even if you think deeper than Cory.
For a start, Cinco de Mayo doesn’t commemorate Mexican independence. That was achieved on 28th September, 1821, at the end of eleven years and eleven days of war with Spain. However, Mexican Independence Day, the most important national holiday in Mexico, remembers the beginning of that period rather than the end, so is celebrated on 16th September. This is to remember the Cry of Dolores, when Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a Roman Catholic priest, urged his people to revolt and they did exactly that. Just as Mexican Independence Day is about the spirit of independence, as epitomised in the Cry of Dolores, Cinco de Mayo is far more important as a symbol than an actual event. It celebrates the victory in 1862 that the Mexican Army, against overwhelming odds, won against France at the Battle of Puebla. The Mexicans numbered 4,000 poorly equipped men, while the French, with twice as many men and much better equipment, hadn’t lost in half a century. The Mexicans won anyway and that energized their people.

What’s really odd is that most of Mexico doesn’t actually celebrate Cinco de Mayo. While it used to be a national holiday, it is not any more, celebrated only in the states of Puebla, where the battle was fought, and Veracruz, its neighbour. It would appear that this Mexican battle is honoured more in the U.S., where California has celebrated it continuously since 1863. Then again, North American history often gets tangled together without any regard for current political boundaries. The Mexican commander, for instance, was General Ignacio Zaragoza, who was born in a little Mexican village by the name of Bahía del Espíritu Santo, which is now the town of Goliad, Texas, its name an anagram of Hidalgo, that priest who gave the Cry of Dolores, with the silent H omitted. The man who asked Padre Hidalgo to speak up was José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, who declared an independent Texas in 1813, wrote its constitution and served as its first president. It only lasted a few weeks, but still. Sam Houston didn’t show up until 1836.
Of course, that’s all a century or two ago. Cinco de Mayo was released during the tenure of the 44th President of the United States, though I’m watching during that of the 45th and it seems rather timely; frankly, this movie could easily be prescribed as catharsis during the Trump administration. Valdez is a Hispanic man, a big one too, and his actions, at least the initial ones he takes before his bloody rampage, are inspired by racial intolerance against Latinos. That extra-dark scene at the beginning unfolded one year prior, when two white men shot dead a young Hispanic man on the way home from a party, before dumping him by the Greaser Tree. Nothing racist there, right? Well, this town is populated by people like that. ‘I’m an American citizen,’ Valdez tells Ted as a conversation turns round on him. ‘Liberal mumbo jumbo,’ Ted replies. Rick, whose girl lusts after their greasy labourer, plans to mark Cinco de Mayo by driving his truck, flying his flag and blaring real music. None of that mariachi crap, he has Nickelback!

It’s hard not to side with the killer when he’s killing bigots and he has some interesting approaches too. Of course, he takes down Dean Liberstein, who fired him with prejudice. Initially we assume the dean is hanging from a noose because he’s being lynched, but no! Valdez has a baseball bat and he’s going to treat him like a piñata. Frankly, Ragsdale should have left it there but, possibly inspired by Welcome Home, Brother Charles, he adds a half-baked conspiracy theory to explain why a mild-mannered professor will suddenly explode with ‘Aztec blood lust’. It’s not a worthy angle, but it does allow school counsellor, Dr. Harry Love, to explain to the town sheriff that millions of other Americans are suffering from Aztec blood lust. I can see the daytime talk shows now. Ring this number if you too have Aztec blood lust! Don’t be shy; millions of others suffer from the same condition. Now, over to Dr. Oz, who’s figured out a product to cure it. Oh, and here’s a young mother whose child was vaccinated and now has Aztec blood lust!
I jest, of course, but the conspiracy theory angle is wildly overplayed, while the rest of the picture is, if anything, downplayed. I’d initially felt Spencer Reza and especially Pete Magazinovic were out of place as the dean and the counsellor, but once I saw what they were setting up, I understand why they overdid it so much. Fortunately, that’s a minor aspect, perhaps serving primarily to explain why this picture seeks equal treatment for Mexicans by allowing them to be serial killers just like us white guys. To really understand this, we have to pay attention to what Prof. Valdez reads during the film, a book mysteriously in Dr. Love’s office too, as if it really wants us to pay attention to it. It’s Joaquin Murieta, by John Rollin Ridge, an 1854 dime novel whose original title, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta, The Celebrated California Bandit, hints at his stature as a sort of Mexican Robin Hood. Johnston McCulley may well have used this book, and Murieta’s nephew, as inspiration for Don Diego de la Vega, better known as Zorro.

Murieta was real, but what’s known of him is so anecdotal that half it is probably made up and the other half is a construct of a few different people. The general theme is that he was a Mexican miner, working a rich claim in California during the Gold Rush, who suffered repeated indignities in quick succession: Anglos drove him from his mine, raped his wife, lynched his half-brother and, if that wasn’t enough, horse-whipped him for good measure. No wonder he became a bandit. No wonder, also, that the revenge that he quickly obtained and the brigandry that followed built his name as a folk hero. Clearly, Valdez, who mentions in the movie that Murieta’s gang hid out in the vicinity, sees him that way and it’s not surprising that he takes Murieta’s identity during the finalé. I must add here also that when the California State Rangers were created to hunt him (and four other Joaquins), they were led by a man named Capt. Harry Love, the name given here to the school counsellor who sparks the whole thing.
So, there’s much to praise here, even in a film with so much to decry. I liked the All Nite Long idea, with Stacy Monroe introducing Cinco de Mayo by posing in spandex against neon backdrops and acting all giddy. What I didn’t like was the trailer she shows us for the film supposedly playing next. That’s Dance Til You Die, which pits dancers against zombies and might seem like a good idea but really turns out not to be. Beyond not playing like a trailer in the slightest, it’s even more low budget than Cinco de Mayo and, even though I get a kick out of low budget schlock, I’ll certainly be switching off All Nite Long at 1am right before Dance Til You Die comes on. I have to call out the music for a similar mix of positive and negative. There’s some great stuff here, including some really cool John Carpenter-esque eighties synth from a Mexican musician named Vestron Vulture, but there’s no overarching theme to it all. It’s just cool bits here and other cool bits there, with some less cool bits in between. There’s no flow.

Really, what you get out of this film is going to depend on what you’re looking for. Low budget movie mavens aren’t likely to care about the poor lighting and camerawork; at least the sound is good and that’s more important. Film fans generally will find a lot of things to complain about, but they may enjoy the surprising cultural depth for what appears to be a simple slasher movie. Slasher fans may want more kills than they get and they may find the finalé underwhelming, but the second half of the film does contain some fun death scenes. White supremacists need not apply; they’re likely to buy up copies and burn them in public, which would at least put some money in the pockets of Paul Ragsdale for future projects. The audience I’m not sure about is the likely one; I’d suggest that Hispanic Americans will enjoy this over cerveza but they may not care about the focus on their culture that the film wants to push. If they’re the kids who walk out of El Maestro’s class because they don’t care, that may be their response here too.

Director: Ralph Thomas
Writer: Patrick Campbell, with additional dialogue by Jan Read and Gerard Bryant
Stars: Carol Marsh and David Tomlinson


Index: 2017 Centennials.

It’s amazing what the passage of time can do to simple words. Nowadays, we might think of 'Helter Skelter' as a Beatles song or as the racial war prophesied by Charles Manson after obsessing over it. Some might think of the manga by Kyoko Okazaki or the live action film it spawned. Some may look much further backwards: Christina Rossetti’s poem, Goblin Market, published in 1862, over a century before The White Album, includes the phrase, ‘helter skelter, hurry skurry’; Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, wrote a poem called Helter Skelter in 1731; and Thomas Nashe beat him by a century and a half by employing the phrase in his Four Letters Confuted, back in 1592. Apparently, it’s an Old English phrase dating back to the middle of the twelfth century, so we should feel no qualms about reappropriating it from the likes of Charles Manson. Sadly, however, when confronted with the phrase, few will think of this surreal comedy, produced by Gainsborough Pictures in 1949.

Of course, words are not the only things to change over time. They change much slower than fame and that’s never more obvious than when looking at comedians. I was born in England and lived there until I was 33, but this film, only a couple of decades older than I am, is like a glimpse into a different century, rather appropriate given that some of these comedians do exactly that at one point in the movie. It’s a Who’s Who of British comedy of the time, with names that I recognise, such as Terry-Thomas and Jimmy Edwards, prominent in the opening credits and a whole slew of others popping in briefly. Reading through the film’s IMDb page, I realise that I even missed a couple, presumably because I blinked, and others never appear on screen. For instance, the script was by Patrick Campbell, the third Baron Glenavy, an Irish humorist who later served as a long-running team captain on Call My Bluff, opposite Frank Muir, one of the few comedians of his day who apparently didn’t appear in this movie.

There is a story, though it’s little more than a theme on which the many guests are ready, willing and mostly able to riff. In other words, this is really a variety show featuring a variety of performances, vaguely strung together to provide a semblance of a plot. Nominally, it’s about poor Susan Graham, a rich and beautiful heiress who’s celebrating her 19th birthday in such a way that we’ll buy into her life not being as remotely enjoyable as that description suggested. She has two guardians until she inherits at 21 but they’re mostly interested in setting her up with their respective nephews, whom she despises with a passion. What’s more, a trip to the Magnolia Club (with both nephews in tow as unwanted dates) results in her laughing so hard at a featured performance by Lamouret and his famous duck, that she contracts the hiccoughs. The rest of the film involves a set of wild and wacky attempts to cure her of this ailment, none of which work, resulting in a rather unusual leading role for actress Carol Marsh.

Lamouret is surely the odd man out in this line-up, as he was French rather than English, but he’s a fascinating artist to kick off the featured performances. He’s Robert Lamouret and his ventriloquist dummy duck, wearing a sailor suit, was named Dudule, even if he’s so close to the duck we’re imagining that the opening credits include ‘with acknowledgements to Donald Duck’ after his name. Presumably, Lamouret came to some sort of arrangement with Walt Disney because, seven years later, the act even showed up for an appearance on The Mickey Mouse Club. What’s also odd is that this is maybe the only ventriloquist act I’ve ever seen that includes no real ventriloquism. Certainly Dudule doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t even make a lot of quacking noises, mostly interacting with his master through comedy gags rather than ventriloquism. Whatever this act should really be described as, it is funny and more so than a good proportion of the others which follow. Comedy has changed over time, but so have our senses of humour.
It’s surprising to me that Ralph Thomas, making his second film in the director’s chair after a romantic comedy called Once Upon a Dream, didn’t want to direct comedy, given that he would go on to prove that he was so good at it. His biggest hit was Doctor in the House, which topped the box office in 1954 and became the most profitable film in the history of the Rank Organisation. It started a trend, whereby Rank would greenlight the sorts of movies Thomas wanted to make in return for another instalment in that series, which eventually ran to seven features, along with television and radio shows. What doesn’t surprise me in the slightest is that the film Thomas cited as an inspiration was Hellzapoppin!, which Thomas ‘enormously admired’. This is more restrained in its boundary breaking but it’s just as madcap and the comparison is a fair one. Incidentally, Ralph’s brother, Gerald, directed the Carry On series, whose producer, Peter Rogers, was married to Betty Box, Ralph’s most frequent and important collaborator.

In keeping with that Hellzapoppin! inspiration, the filmmakers throw everything they have at the wall to see what would stick. The results are wildly varied in both style and quality, but the overall effect is to introduce us to so many talents that we can’t keep up, while displaying comedic ideas old and new. When Susan acquires the hiccoughs, she goes to the bar to get a glass of water, which only briefly works before prompting a worse bout, which briefly pulls the film reel off its sprockets. That sort of manipulation was new with Hellzapoppin!, though this scene leads into an actual pie fight, something that dates back to the early days of slapstick, the film also sped up in homage to that over-ratcheted silent era. It’s worth mentioning here that Richard Hearne, the film’s narrator and the story’s instigator, plays a variation here on his regular character, Mr. Pastry, called Prof. Pastry. His origins are in a stage show, Big Boy, from 1936 but he was sourced very much from silent era slapstick comedy.
Unless I blinked, Prof. Pastry is only named in the end credits, because the 1949 audience was fully expected to recognise him. His shenanigans are presumably, therefore, entirely in character, including his gatecrashing of the pie fight in a suit of armour and an action that changes the whole course of the movie. You see, Susan’s love interest is someone I haven’t mentioned yet. He’s a radio star called Nick Martin, whose daily adventures in Nick Martin, Special Investigator, a nod to Dick Barton, Special Agent, are a hit with a wide audience, including Susan’s French maid, Giselle. Susan hates the character and soon comes to hate the man behind it too, as he hinders her path into the Magnolia Club, by having the temerity to sign autographs for a bevy of beauties lying in wait for him, then wants his usual table, at which she and her unwanted beaux have been seated. But when he pops up at the same country pub, Prof. Pastry, in the guise of a supernatural cupid in Bacchanalian garb, shoots them both with love’s arrows for instant romance!

And, for all that Richard Hearne may or may not have been the first ‘television star’, I’m watching Helter Skelter for Nick Martin, or at least for the actor who portrays him, David Tomlinson, as he would have been a hundred years old today, 7th May. Tomlinson’s career began on the stage and grew through a set of ripping yarns shot during the early years of the Second World War and again immediately after, films like ‘Pimpernel’ Smith, School for Secrets and I See a Dark Stranger. In between, he served as a flight instructor in the R.A.F. Helter Skelter came as his roles were diversifying; a fantasy romance in which he featured in 1948, Miranda, is reprised here with a cameo by its leading lady, Glynis Johns, as a mermaid called Miranda Trewella. This was easily the busiest time of his career, with seven films released in 1948 and six in 1949; many were romantic comedies, although he’d also play one of the three P.O.W.s escaping from Stalag Luft III in 1950 in The Wooden Horse, a fictionalised version of a true wartime story.
Of course, while he continued on in films as varied as Calling Bulldog Drummond, Tom Jones and The Liquidator, he’s easily best known today for the major roles he played in a trio of live action Disney features, each made late in his career. Mary Poppins came first in 1964, released when he was 47 years old. He plays George Banks, the disciplinarian banker who hires the magical nanny to handle his children; it can be argued that he’s the real lead character as the film happens to him and he gets the real story arc. Four years later, he’d play the villain in The Love Bug, Peter Thorndyke, perhaps the only actor in the cast to hold his own against Herbie, the lovable Volkswagen Beetle. Finally, in 1971, he’d play Emelius Browne, the con man who is shocked to discover that the nonsense he’s hawking through his Correspondence College of Witchcraft actually works in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Beyond being some of the most enjoyable Disney movies ever made, these are particularly great roles for an actor of his calibre.

Tomlinson retired in 1979, after shooting The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, also the last role of his friend, Peter Sellers, but many actors here in Helter Skelter continued on, often to much greater things. For instance, one of Hearne’s television collaborators has two roles here that showcase his mastery of comic voices. He plays the head waiter at the Magnolia Club and, in a flashback scene, King Charles II. He’s Jon Pertwee, whose comedy career peaked with his eighteen years on The Navy Lark on radio, but who’s best known today for playing the third Doctor in Doctor Who. Some of the best comedy in the film comes in this flashback, as a maid sits back in a haunted house and dreams that she was Amber, a lady sought after by both King Charles and Oliver Cromwell, as well as a lord named Bruce Carlton. The latter asks what she’s wearing. ‘Just a little thing I threw on,’ she replies. ‘You almost missed,’ he quips. Charles II comments, after climbing in through her window, ‘I wined her. I dined her. Now I can’t find her!’
How did we get to a haunted house, you might ask? Well, after a variety of other solutions fail, a doctor suggests Susan visit one to shock the hiccoughs away. He’s Dr. Jekyll, which leads to a brief and pointless shot of Jekyll turning into Hyde, except that we find it funny to see Wilfrid Hyde-White as Mr. Hyde, not just because of his name but as he’s always so utterly composed whatever the circumstances. Of course, the prescription is just a way to shift the action on from one scenario to the next so a new comedian can strut his stuff. Next up is the office of a mad psychiatrist, Dr. James Edwards, yet another character named for its actor, comedian Jimmy Edwards; the most famous example is Prof. James Edwards, M.A., the headmaster in the sitcom, Whack-O! These scenes are perhaps the least funny in the picture, partly because Edwards falls flat but mostly because Harry Secombe of The Goons has never been more annoying than as Alf, his lunatic assistant. At least they prompt the screening of a silent film, which is much better.

This is Would You Believe It?, a 1929 film by Walter Forde, which was made silent but was later released with music and sounds that are apparent here. We see about five minutes of this film, which was originally much longer: IMDb says 56 minutes, Wikipedia 57 and other sources as high as 71. On the basis of these five minutes, it’s a frenetic battle between a young inventor, who has made designs for a new and improved tank, and the foreign agents who want to steal it, and I’m eager to see the rest. Of all things, what really grabbed me was the way the suitcase containing his designs falls down a spiral staircase! I have to add that the inclusion of this brief silent short mangles what little consistency Helter Skelter had managed to find, but does continue the showcasing of wild and diverse comedic talent in the film. While I laughed out loud at points, it’s a true variety performance in that there are others when we can safely take a bathroom break or adjourn to the bar for another pint without missing anything worthy.
Perhaps the funniest section comes courtesy of Terry-Thomas, a favourite of mine from films as varied as Carlton-Browne of the F.O., The Abominable Dr. Phibes and The Naked Truth, not to mention Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Seeking Nick Martin at the BBC, Susan accidentally follows Terry-Thomas, who performs a version of his famous Technical Hitch sketch, as a DJ who has to cover for broken records on live radio by singing them himself. What’s amazing is that this works as well for viewers as listeners, as his facial contortions while attempting Paul Robeson are hilarious. Sadly, we don’t get his version of Yma Sumac, normally part of his routine, as that must really have stretched his vocal range! He had done this sketch for six years, but the rest of this section may well have influenced his TV show, How Do You View?, which soon became the first comedy series on British TV. Broadcast live, it often saw him wandering through control rooms and other places at the BBC Studios, just as Susan finds herself doing here.

It’s here at the BBC that the ‘rest of cast’ section of the IMDb credits start to shine, with a host of uncredited names and faces who ring memorable, many of them captured performing their acts or presenting their shows. There’s Richard Wattis, Valentine Dyall, Michael Medwin... each of them highly recognisable at the time. There’s even Carry On regular Kenneth Griffith working with Nick Martin on his show. Even a fourteen year old BBC page boy turns out to be Johnny Briggs, whose three decades on Coronation Street as Mike Baldwin would cement his fame much later in life. Some names only show up during a brief montage of stock footage clips, such as Dennis Price, playing Lord Byron, presumably taken from The Bad Lord Byron, made earlier in 1949. I must have blinked and missed Maj. Bright and Capt. Early, another pairing of Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne spawned from their similar double act in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. They continued in similar, usually cricket-loving roles, in otherwise unrelated films.
As you can imagine from this review, which leaves a whole heck of a lot out, there’s a vast amount going on in this movie, which is, amazingly, only 81 minutes long. And I haven’t even delved into David Tomlinson’s character yet. Well, just like with Mary Poppins, it’s his character who gets a story arc. Carol Marsh is fair as Susan Graham, in at least two meanings of the word, but she’s hardly a leading character, more a walking hiccough. It’s Nick Martin who grows throughout the film, not only from the brash radio star to the modest lover but in many other ways too. While he’s the eponymous star of Nick Martin, Special Investigator, it’s his mother who writes the scripts and he’s totally under her hilarious thumb until he decides to buck her orders for once. What’s more, the biggest drama of the film comes from him refusing to go on air one day until the missing Susan can be found. This sparks nationwide panic and that romp through the BBC’s vaults for footage to deliberately misinterpret for comedic value.

Tomlinson died peacefully in 2000 at the age of 83, but he’s the best reason to watch this as a story. Of course, if you do watch it for its story, you’re going to be sadly disappointed because there really isn’t much of one. The real value in watching this film is for its time capsule glance at the world of British humour in 1949. Where else are you going to see so many famous comedians in a single feature, many of them exhibiting their best material in capably edited scenes? It’s worth mentioning that the talent on show here were household names at the time, but their material is often lost. For instance, Jimmy Edwards is best known for Whack-O!, which ran for sixty episodes over eight seasons, the last of which was first broadcast during my lifetime. Yet almost the entire run is lost, with only six episodes known to remain today. As problematic as Helter Skelter is as a feature film, it’s a gold mine of material which does a fantastic job of showcasing a true variety of British stage and screen comedians, often otherwise gone for good.

Director: Jacques Tourneur
Writer: Ardel Wray, based on the novel, Black Alibi, by Cornell Woolrich, with additional dialogue by Edward Dein
Stars: Dennis O’Keefe, Margo and Jean Brooks


Index: 2017 Centennials.

Putting my mere four names to shame, María Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estela Bolado Castilla y O'Donnell was born in Mexico City one hundred years ago today, though she shrank that name down about as far as possible for her screen career. However, as Margo, she didn’t make as many movies as she should have done, as she was blacklisted just as her star was rising. Even her more famous second husband, Eddie Albert, was caught up in that debacle too, and only found abiding fame after his service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. That’s a shame, because Margo showed great potential even as a child. At a mere nine years of age, she performed in nightclubs as a specialty dancer for Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra; that bandleader would marry her aunt, Carmen Castillo, when Margo was twelve. At seventeen, she was plucked off the dancefloor to play Claude Rains’s ex-lover in Crime without Passion. It ensured a screen career, which built steadily until her blacklisting, after which her roles became few and far between.

Even with only fourteen feature films to her name, I had a choice for this project. She was well regarded in Winterset in 1936, in a role which she’d originated on stage, in both instances playing the screen girlfriend of Burgess Meredith. She was also notable in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon a year later, as the beautiful young lady who ages and dies rapidly after leaving Shangri-La. However, I went with this one as it’s a personal favourite of mine, even among the works of producer Val Lewton, whose fourteen pictures at RKO during the forties included nine horror movies which revolutionised the genre. At a time when Universal were the only real player in the genre left and their work after The Wolf Man had become a string of sequels, Lewton’s films really filled the gap, with a set of quality pictures that were written well, with deep thematic substance; shot well, with incredible use of light and shadows, as befitted the beginnings of the film noir era; and directed well, by a string of names who would go on to serious fame.

The Leopard Man is the third of these nine films, the last to be directed by Jacques Tourneur, the son of pioneering French director Maurice Tourneur, after Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. Tourneur’s success with Cat People, which made $4m from a $150,000 budget, launched him onto RKO’s ‘A’-list, and his most praised picture, the film noir, Out of the Past in 1947, was shot with Nicholas Musuraca, his cinematographer on Cat People. His only later horror movie was Night of the Demon, one of the greatest British genre films of all time. After these, Mark Robson, the editor of those three films, ascended into the director’s chair for The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship; he’d also direct the last two, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam. Robson’s first five movies as a director were for Lewton, but he’d go on to direct seven actors in Oscar-nominated performances and gain two nods himself. Prior to this, he’d worked with Orson Welles; his first work was as an uncredited assistant editor on Citizen Kane and his first credit was for Journey into Fear.

The other two, The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher, were directed by Robert Wise, another editor who was promoted to director when Gunther von Fritsch proved unable to complete the former film to schedule; Wise finished it and directed the latter solo. These, and a non-horror movie for Lewton, were his first directorial credits, though he’d go on to win four Oscars over a long and versatile career, for producing and directing West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Arguably, he should have won his first back in 1942 for editing Citizen Kane; he’d been Mark Robson’s boss on that movie. He also edited The Magnificent Ambersons, for which he also shot a few additional sequences; he must have felt at home when directing The Curse of the Cat People, as it re-used some of that film’s sets. His later horror films are notable too: The Haunting in 1963 and Audrey Rose in 1977. Lewton was surely the mastermind behind the best horror of the forties but, as you can tell, he hired exceedingly well too and these films were fantastic team efforts.
Usually it’s Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Bedlam that tend to get praised over and over, but the other six stand up very well in their company and deserve as much praise. I chose The Leopard Man partly because I feel that it’s especially worthy, but also for being the way I always remember Margo, with her clacking castanets a memorable soundtrack throughout much of the picture. In fact, they’re the first things we hear, even before we see anything, because they accompany the score behind the opening credits. Then, as the film begins, they continue in a deceptively simple opening shot. She’s a dancer, Clo-Clo by name, and she practices in her room to the annoyance of the ladies next door. The camera moves towards Clo-Clo’s room, somewhat voyeuristically watches her framed in the open doorway, then pans to the other room, where we see Kiki Walker bang on their shared wall in annoyance before slamming her door in our face. This is exquisite cinematography by Robert de Grasse, especially for a low budget picture.

We’re in an unnamed town in New Mexico, where we only see crowds in the unnamed café at which most of our characters work. Then again, that’s because of a scene that unfolds only five minutes into the movie, sparked by an unnamed gentleman who turns out to be the nominal lead. We’ll later discover that he’s Jerry Manning, Kiki’s publicity agent, manager and boyfriend, perhaps in that order. His latest scheme to garner her attention is to have her walk into the café, during Clo-Clo’s number, of course, with an impressive partner: a black leopard on a leash (played by Dynamite, who was also the panther in Cat People). Beyond constituting a memorable entrance, we can’t help thinking, with our sarcastic 21st century mindsets, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ Well, Clo-Clo one-ups Kiki by rushing the poor creature with a clicking castanet crescendo and off it scampers to hide in the dark streets of the town, which promptly scares everyone into their homes, especially after the deaths begin.
Every time I watch The Leopard Man, I feel that it’s a movie far ahead of its time, but Scott Preston, exploring the film in Cineaction magazine, ably highlights that much of the praise for this belongs equally (or more) with Cornell Woolrich, who wrote the source novel, Black Alibi, only a year earlier. Woolrich was a huge deal, one of the great pulp crime writers of the era and one of the most frequently adapted to screen but he’s annoyingly out of print today; his work isn’t old enough to have entered the public domain while ‘estate issues’ have prevented newer editions. This was only the third adaptation of his work onto film, but his name would often be seen on screens in the forties: Black Angel, Night Has a Thousand Eyes and two Whistler films for a start. His biggest picture, though, is surely Rear Window, the Hitchcock film from 1954, which was based on his short story, It Had to Be Murder. And, it seems, it was Woolrich’s Black Alibi that really did some of the things first that I expected The Leopard Man to be credited with.

For one, this is a slasher movie, made in 1943, long before the films usually cited as most influential on that subgenre: Psycho and Peeping Tom, both released in 1960, and A Bay of Blood in 1971. Once the black leopard is free, we’re ready for the victims to add up and, sure enough, they do, in the form of the lovely young ladies we expect. First up is Teresa Delgado, a local girl sent out by her mother to get cornmeal from the store. She doesn’t want to leave the house but she goes anyway. She really doesn’t want to walk across the arroyo and under the railroad tracks to the other store because the first one is closed, but she does it anyway. There’s a fantastic shot as she returns, scared and slow, through the dark tunnel under the tracks, wondering if the leopard is in there with her. What happens there is known as the ‘Lewton Bus’, after a similar release of tension in Cat People, though here it’s a train. The leopard is on the other side; she screams and makes it home, but her blood flows under the door before mama can open it.
For another, it’s a serial killer story because we gradually realise, along with Jerry Manning, that the progression of deaths may be the work not of the missing leopard but a human being. It’s fair to say that horror, mystery and crime were often lumped together back in the thirties and forties, resulting in routine crossover, but this treats the killer in a very different way to the norm. He’s no crime lord, comic book villain or evil genius; he’s just a man, driven by impulses that he can’t control and doesn’t understand. The only real antecedent in this is Fritz Lang’s M, which was surely a huge influence on Lewton, Tourneur and scriptwriter Ardel Wray, not only for this compassionate exploration of an insane man but for its use of sound. Clo-Clo’s castanets don’t carry the weight of the whistling in M, but they’re a recurrent theme that adds depth to the fantastic visuals. The catch, of course, is that the movie is short, the cast is small and it’s hardly difficult to figure out who that serial killer is.

Without spoiling that ‘revelation’, I can suggest that this is worth watching once to see it unfold, then again to see how it was built. There’s a wealth of depth in how the actor in question plays his part, far beyond the leads. Dennis O’Keefe is a more simple leading man who struggles to justify his top billing, even though he was a capable actor and this was one of his most remembered movies, made at the time when he was just starting to really establish himself after a decade of bit parts. Jean Brooks is a far more obvious lead as Kiki, especially as she appears to be our focus from the beginning. Lewton would also cast her in The Seventh Victim and his awful juvenile delinquent movie, Youth Runs Wild. Oddly, it’s Margo’s name on the poster after O’Keefe’s, even though she isn’t the lead. However, Clo-Clo is also far more notable than Jerry Manning and more memorable than Kiki. In fact, she’s the most abiding character in the entire movie, the one we remember after it’s all done, not least because of those clicking castanets!
What’s more, the film’s theme of doomed fortune revolves around her. While Kiki shares her room with a dreaming cigarette girl, Clo-Clo shares hers with a fortune teller named Maria, played by the ever-acerbic Isabel Jewell, as memorable as ever. Whenever Maria has Clo-Clo select a card from her deck, it’s the Ace of Spades, representing Death. Whenever she deals the cards, the same thing happens, even if she tries to hide it every time by dealing afresh. Clo-Clo is a tough girl, so naturally she laughs it off, but the sheer repetition can’t fail to affect her. The fact that she encounters every victim of the Leopard Man and is the only character in the story to do so, is another harbinger of doom. So is the story told by Maria’s cards, that she’ll meet a rich man who will give her money and then she’ll die. All this haunts her and when this prophecy of the cards begins to come true, it haunts her all the more. It’s a great way to build up Clo-Clo’s character and the picture, but neither Jerry nor Kiki have anything remotely similar.

Margo is fantastic here, an exotic diva who clearly warrants the acclaim that she clearly believes is due to her. She dances like she never walks and she walks like she owns the streets beneath her feet. Kiki’s sets are after Clo-Clo’s, suggesting that she’s the bigger draw, and she does have a publicity man following her around, but we never see her perform and, even though Jean Brooks is nice on the eyes, she has a girl next door sort of beauty rather than that of a glamorous star. To me, this is one of those films where my concentration automatically finds its focus on the supporting characters, who are far more interesting than the leads. O’Keefe and Brooks do their jobs capably, but it’s Margo and Isabel Jewell who shine for me here. I last saw Jewell in Babies for Sale, a thoroughly different movie in which she was just as acerbic and stole just as many scenes. Being a Val Lewton picture though, who we see on screen isn’t as important as how we see them and that’s because of the crew as much as the cast.
I often find myself calling out a particular crew member for praise, but with this film and any of Lewton’s horror movies, it’s really the result of a set of highly talented professionals working together. Tourneur was a visionary director who would create some of the techniques that made film noir what it was. Robson and Wise were both accomplished editors who were finding their place at the time; Lewton gave them their first stints in the director’s chair and their careers flourished. The director of photography here was Robert de Grasse, an experienced cinematographer with one Oscar nomination already to his name, for Vivacious Lady, a 1938 romcom starring Ginger Rogers. Everyone talks about Teresa Delgado’s blood under the door, but I actually prefer the scenes that precede it. They just feature a girl and the wind, but they’re haunting and the way Tourneur and de Grasse build tension through use of a dark tunnel, a dripping sound and what might be a pair of leopard eyes is absolutely textbook stuff.

What leapt out at me this time through was the lighting, which is impeccable throughout. The camera moves especially well and a nod has to be given to the choreography that allows it to include so much as it does so. Had the budget been more substantial than a mere $150,000 (by comparison, the highest grossing film of the year, For Whom the Bell Tolls, cost $3m), and the film longer, then scenes during the finalé might have been even more special. They’re set in and around a procession of locals, dressed in tall black masks and black cloaks, in memory of a local massacre of Indians in the seventeenth century by conquistadores. Whenever people proclaim the superiority of colour and modern technical marvels, I always point them to Hollywood in the forties, as film noir was mastering just how much could be done with light and shadow in glorious black and white, then Germany in the twenties, where a great deal of the techniques of film noir were forged.
The Val Lewton horror movies, however, show just what could be done when a talented director and a talented cinematographer, usually known as the director of photography back then, worked hand in hand with talented art directors and set decorators. The former were responsible for the entire art department, what are now known as production designers; they unified the vision of a film. The latter populate the film with everything that we see, outside of the props that the actors use. As much as the golden age of Hollywood usually references the thirties and Hollywood’s golden year was 1939, I’ve gradually come to realise that the forties were a step up. Film noir is surely the most artistic movement in American film and it offered so much in the way of possibility to those talents who wanted to do something more than had been done before. That bled into other films of the time and the horror movies of Val Lewton are the most obvious such pictures I can think of.

Of course, there are reasons why The Leopard Man doesn’t slip off the tongue right after Cat People. It’s too short to have anywhere near the space it needs to do its story justice and the theme isn’t as tightly woven in as it could be. There are some odd choices of casting, though they’re far less notable than many such choices made in the classic Hollywood era. The owner of the leopard, who lends it to Jerry, is Charlie How-Come, a Native American played by Abner Biberman, as Native American an actor as such a name suggests. He did have exotic features that prompted his casting as every race under the sun and he was certainly talented, but we don’t buy him as Native American here. Ironically, he ended up running Universal’s casting department! Consuelo Contreras, the second victim, should be a lovely Latino girl, but she’s played by Tuulikki Paananen, credited as Tula Parma, who was Finnish. She does a surprisingly good job but, again, we don’t buy her as Mexican in the slightest.
Every time I watch or re-watch a film for my centennial project, I feel compelled to explore further. Usually, that centres around the person I’m remembering, but Margo had less of a career than many of my subjects to explore. Here, there are so many names whose careers I want to leap into with abandon. I’ve sought out the films of Jacques Tourneur for years, but I have more to find. I keep seeing Isabel Jewell cropping up in all sorts of movies and she impresses me every time. I’ve followed Mark Robson’s career as a director but should focus on his films as an editor too. I really ought to track down the novels of Cornell Woolrich, in addition to the films that grew out of them. Most of all, though, as happens every time I pull a Val Lewton off the shelf, I want to dive back into the whole set of nine horror movies. They’re old fashioned exercises in tell not show and they don’t revolve around the icons of the Universal horrors, but they’re arguably the closest the classic horror movie ever got to art. Thanks, Margo!

Bibliography:
The Strange Pleasure of The Leopard Man: Gender, Genre and Authorship in a Val Lewton Thriller by Scott Preston