NOBODY'S GOING TO READ THIS, BUT ...
OCT. 26
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)
CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1964)
Both reviewed earlier this month.
Mervyn LeRoy had produced and directed parts of The Wizard of Oz. But the 8-year-old main character in his The Bad Seed, portrayed by 10-year-old Patty McCormack, is much more akin to the Wicked Witch than to Dorothy. Outwardly a little darling, Rhoda Penmark is in reality a grasping liar, and far worse.
The Bad Seed is an adaptation of a Maxwell Anderson play, itself based on a bestselling novel by William March.
LeRoy imported some members of the theatrical cast from Broadway to Burbank to make this movie. (“Legiters,” Variety calls them.) McCormack was one, and another was Nancy Kelly (in her final big-screen role), as Rhoda’s ineffectual mother.
The other credits read like a who’s who of future TV stars: e.g., Frances Bavier, Frank Cady, Shelley Fabares, Paul Fix, Eileen Heckart, William Hopper, Henry Jones (as an intellectually challenged custodian named Leroy – no kin to Mervyn), and that beloved, lonely Maytag repairman, Jesse White. Heckart and Jones were also among the theatrical transplants.
McCormack was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe.
In his autobiography, Mervyn LeRoy: Take One, the director bemoans how censors compelled him to ridiculously alter the original ending.
LeRoy’s notable screen credits are too numerous to mention, but among them are Little Caesar, Five Star Final (featuring Karloff), I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Gold Diggers of 1933, Oil for the Lamps of China, Three Men on a Horse, Johnny Eager, Any Number Can Play, Quo Vadis, Mister Roberts, and No Time for Sergeants.
“The Bad Seed (both novel and film) remains unique for its representation of evil. Evil is not only a child, but a little girl, and not only a little girl, but a little white girl, one who behaves perfectly – a darling child who plays the role of a little lady. This carefully carved shell of a little girl traps within it the horror of violence and murder.” – Chuck Jackson (2000)
“The Bad Seed goes a step further than criticizing consumerism for its confusion of greed and love and its mistaking of people for products. It shows that consumerism ultimately strips people of their humanity and turns them into products.” – T.S. Kord
Rhoda “uncannily resembles a Nazi child uncomfortably demonstrating capitalist society’s repressed affinities with fascism.” – Tony Williams
“Patty McCormack has that special cold beauty that makes her crimes all the more hideous.” – DVD & Video Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter
“Still a classic that demands and holds attention.” – Rex Reed
“A great love story – the greatest I ever made.” – Mervyn LeRoy, speaking of the relationship between the mother and daughter
DEAD RINGER (1964)
“A double dose of Davis” is how Leonard Maltin alliteratively puts it. In her dual role, Bette is a filthy-rich widow and her estranged twin, a struggling bar owner.
Karl Malden is a police detective; Peter Lawford is a gigolo.
Director Paul Henreid is, needless to say, better known as an actor; he was Bogart’s foil in Casablanca, and he deftly lit cigarettes for himself and Davis in Now, Voyager (both 1942). Davis and Henreid again costarred in the lesser-known Deception (1946).
His daughter, Monika, has a small role as a maid in Dead Ringer.
This crime story begins with a funeral and a birthday; it ends with warped justice.
André Previn composed what Variety called “the rich and macabre musical score.” And we get to hear Bette sing “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
Davis had portrayed twins in the 1946 drama A Stolen Life.
Dead Ringer, a Warner Bros. production, is a remake of a Mexican movie from that same year, La otra, starring Dolores Del Rio. In 1944, scenarist Rian James (cowriter of 1933’s 42nd Street) had tried in vain to get Warners to produce his story, so he sold it to a Mexican studio. This was the final feature for cinematographer Ernest Haller, who’d shared an Academy Award for Gone With the Wind. (See What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, below.)
Davis’s performance “galvanizes this uncommonly silly little film, but it is great fun to watch. It is creaky on … plot … but it has all the extra accoutrements the studio used to supply in her dramatic heyday.” ─ The New York Times
“The categories of twindom morph from good/bad to unhinged/slightly less unhinged.... Davis gleefully mugs so much … she’s practically daring the camera to throw a triplet into the mix.” — AVClub.com
Davis’s “acting, as always, isn’t really acting, it’s shameless showing-off. But just try to look away.” – Time magazine
“They ain’t done right by our Baby Jane in all her ungirdled neurotic glory.… A pedestrian script and a heavy-handed director come to the fore and we go on to mediocre melodrama and heavily contrived plotting.” – Judith Crist, the New York Herald Tribune
PSYCHO (1960)
Words fail me anew:
“You know, I have been in other films.” — Anthony Perkins
“What makes Psycho immortal, when so many films are already half-forgotten as we leave the theater, is that it connects directly with our fears: our fears that we might impulsively commit a crime, our fears of the police, our fears of becoming the victim of a madman, and, of course, our fears of disappointing our mothers.” — Roger Ebert
“There is scarcely a moment in Psycho when we aren’t feeling fear and trepidation over some morally discomfiting activity.” — Joseph W. Smith III
“Shot in chintzy black and white on a TV budget, Psycho marks the point where the contemporary movie era — the age of sensation over sentiment — began.” — The Entertainment Weekly Guide
Hitchcock “always had a keen eye for cinematic fashion and the prospect of profit, and he had noticed the recent emergence of cheap black-and-white films that made a habit of terrifying the public, among them The Fly, The Blob, Dementia [1955], Curse of the Undead and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. What if someone good, perhaps someone as good as Hitchcock, were to make one of these bargain-basement horrors? … [The shower scene] took seven days to shoot forty-five seconds of screen time. More than seventy camera setups were employed and seventy-eight pieces of film were somehow to be assembled.” — Peter Ackroyd in Alfred Hitchcock: A Brief Life [Editor’s note: The Brain That Wouldn’t Die was released two years after Psycho.]
“Psycho is a pot-pourri of Charley’s Aunt, Bluebeard, Sweeney Todd, Oedipus Rex with additional dialogue by Sigmund Freud, and The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case.... The murder is too erotic not to enjoy, but too grisly to enjoy; its ferocity and pornography are opposed. They force on the spectator a rapid, hysteric oscillation between outraged shock and enjoyment.” — Raymond Durgnat
“Nude-colored moleskin! Over the vital parts! Perfect! … [But] water had a tendency to melt the adhesive.” — Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller, by Janet Leigh with Christopher Nickens
“Its shock lies in the sheer domesticity of what it shows: not just the famous shower but the toilet in the same bathroom, apparently the first toilet ever seen in a Hollywood film.” — Michael Wood in the biography Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much [Editor’s note: King Vidor’s silent The Crowd (1928) has a scene with a toilet. And Wood obviously had never seen No Time for Sergeants (1958)]
“Even simple touches like … blood flowing down the drain — chocolate syrup was used because it shows up better on black and white film — were cleverly arranged to heighten the atmosphere.” — Fergus Mason
“It is death that presides over Psycho’s world; it is the film’s burden to bring death, at least to wish death, on those who behold it. Psycho prophesies our death, announces what we already know, that we are fated to die.” — William Rothman
“An apt inspiration for the Bates house may have been the playfully eerie Addams Family residence familiar from the celebrated Charles Addams cartoons in The New Yorker. A more direct influence was surely Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad.” — Stephen Rebello
“The shrieking strings of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho … score are atonal and discordant, although rhythmic like the stabbing of the knife.” — The Language of Film by Robert Edgar, John Marland, and Steven Rawle
“No one … BUT NO ONE … will be admitted to the theater after the start of each performance.” — ads for Psycho
“A lot of Psycho’s success has to do with your knowledge of movie conventions. It was a movie made for people who watch movies, particularly Hitchcock movies.” — screenwriter Joseph Stefano (who went on to codevelop the Outer Limits TV series)
“The entire exercise has merely been Hitchcock having fun at our expense. He has played games with our minds, shunted us through the maze, and manipulated us like putty. To fully enjoy Psycho, the viewer must accept this and be willing to laugh at himself.” — David J. Hogan
“The ironic thing about Psycho is that Hitchcock’s studio at the time, Paramount, had no faith in the project and didn’t want him to make it. The studio executives thought the novel it was based on was little more than pulp fiction, cheap and tawdry, not worthy of the elegant Hitchcock treatment – and in black and white!” – John McCarty
“I think the film is a reflection of a most unpleasant mind, a mean, sly, sadistic little mind…. All in all, a nasty little film.” – Dwight Macdonald, Esquire (1960)
“… the plot is full of holes…. Hitchcock [employs] his considerable skill ... to shock us past horror-entertainment into resentment.” – Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic magazine
“Hitchcock is not an entertainer, but a pander of vicarious perversion…. It is incumbent on us to inspect the real horrors of our time, but we don’t have to traffic with Hitchcock’s giggling obscenities.” – Robert Hatch, The Nation magazine
“With Psycho I think I managed to do what I like best in the world: controlling the audience.” — Hitchcock
OCT. 27
THE MONSTER (1925)
“Who knows if one will ever see the morning?”
Psychotronic Video Guide author Michael J. Weldon might just have something there when he writes, “Seeing just how far back horror clichés go is a good idea.”
As writer/editor Calvin T. Beck opined, “The big problem with The Monster was that early audiences were unprepared to fully understand a film parodying a genre that had scarcely started to exist!” Metaphorically speaking, the moviemakers were building the airplane while flying it. There were bound to be flaws.
This comedy-thriller is the weakest of the dozen or more Lon Chaney vehicles I’ve viewed. It generates few laughs, and Chaney is on camera far too little.
Johnny Arthur is Johnny Goodlittle, a general-store clerk and graduate of a mail-order detective school. He, the store owner’s daughter, and his rival for her affections stumble into the lair of mad doctor Ziska (Chaney).
The sequence, very late in the movie, that reveals Ziska’s fiendish plan presages Hammer Film’s Frankenstein Created Woman.
The plot in general brings to mind Poe’s System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1845), as well as Hollywood producer Richard Rowland’s 1920 statement: “The lunatics have taken charge of the asylum.”
Arthur (or his stunt double) makes a futile attempt at Chaplinesque acrobatics, though silent-film authority Harry H. Long hyperbolically deems the effort “worthy of Buster Keaton.”
The wan-looking actor went on to variously appear as Spanky’s father and Darla’s father in Little Rascals shorts.
Roland West directed. The Monster is based on a 1922 Broadway play by Crane Wilbur, the screenwriter of 1953’s House of Wax. (Director William Castle [1914-1977] reported that he wee-wee’d in his pants while watching the play.)
Walter James, the huge, oiled-up, blacked-up dude who portrays Ziska’s servant Caliban, was in the original Broadway cast and might have done Shakespeare proud as the monstrous, same-named character from The Tempest. James had played the Chief Eunuch in the “lost” 1916 fantasy A Daughter of the Gods, noted for its early nude scenes. The actor was later a foil for Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd.
Chaney “brings to it … all the force of personality which made him such a uniquely powerful screen presence.... With his silk dressing gown and long cigarette-holder, Ziska resembles a sort of fanged Noël Coward.” – Jonathan Rigby
“West manages the usual flurry of haunted-house tricks with flair and discretion.... James Whale might have remembered The Monster while filming Frankenstein (1931).” – Phil Hardy
“The Monster is nothing if not kinky. ” – Harry H. Long, who surmises that “Krafft-Ebing perversions” are bubbling around in Ziska’s head
“While a truly ridiculous film, The Monster is significant for formalizing certain mad science plot conventions.” – David J. Skal
“The starch seems to have been taken out of … The Monster by the inclusion of too much light comedy. The result is that, although this film possesses a degree of queer entertainment, it is neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring.” – The New York Times (1925)
“The comedy is neither funny nor original, and whatever suspense that might have been created fails to reach the apex needed to hold the interest of the audience.” – Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake
HAUNTED SPOOKS (1920)
Silent comedy king Harold Lloyd proves that suicide can be fun.
In this 25-minute short, codirected by Hal Roach (1892-1992), a Southern colonel has died and willed his plantation to his granddaughter (The Girl, played by Mildred Davis, the future Mrs. Lloyd) – provided that she and her husband reside in the mansion for a year. If not, her uncle will inherit. Her main problem: She isn’t married. But The Girl’s lawyer promises to find a husband for her.
The Boy (Lloyd), his heart broken by The Other Girl – “I’ve lost another one of the only girls I ever loved” – fails miserably at several attempts to kill himself, the last as an unsuccessful hit-and-run target for the lawyer’s car. The counsel then counsels him to meet and marry The Girl, and the newlyweds drive to the plantation.
Meanwhile, The Uncle and his female accomplice are plotting to gain the property by becoming fake ghosts and scaring off the couple. Before the Girl and Boy’s arrival during a nighttime thunderstorm, The Uncle tells one of the mansion’s black servants (former Negro Leagues pitcher Blue Washington), “… Every fourth year the ghastly grinning ghosts of the dead creep from their graves and roam these rooms.”
If you can get past the African American stereotypes in small segments of this two-reeler, you will find it very amusing.
One of the black actors was 6-year-old Ernest “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison.
Morrison’s gag near the conclusion of the film brings to mind the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787. The young fellow here proves without a doubt that he is three-fifths of a man.
In 1922, Morrison became an original member of Hal Roach Studios’ Our Gang troupe of kids (a.k.a. the Little Rascals). He also appeared in a number of comedies with Lloyd and with fellow silent clown “Snub” Pollard. Author Donald Bogle points out that Morrison “was one of the highest paid juveniles in early silents.”
From 1940 to 1943 (and in stock footage in one ’44 farce), Morrison was “Scruno” in the East Side Kids series. Following Army service, Morrison in the mid-’40s turned down an offer to join the corollary of the East Side Kids, the Bowery Boys franchise, and he worked for many years as an inspector at a Compton, Calif., aircraft plant. Leo Gorcey, head honcho of the East Side Kids and Bowery Boys, said in an interview that Morrison was earning more in his aerospace job than Gorcey was as a “B” movie star.
(I feel certain that the use of the word “Spooks” in the 1920 short’s title was a cognizant choice, just as it was for an East Side Kids comedy Morrison made in 1941, Spooks Run Wild.)
“The film depicts the servants as quite gullible, spreading the tale [of ghosts, told by the villain,] … in malapropism-laden black voice, ‘An’ de whole graveyard turns upside down! Gassly, spooky ghosts come heah to room dese roams.’” – Robin R. Means Coleman in Horror Noire
STALKER (1979)
“‘Was it a meteorite or a visitation from outer space? Whatever it was, in our small country, there appeared a miracle — the Zone. We sent in troops. Not one returned. Then we surrounded the Zone with a security cordon. We did right . . . Although I’m not sure. I’m not sure.’ – from an interview with Nobel Prize winner Professor Wallace by an RAI correspondent”
In this Soviet-West German coproduction, the Stalker is a guide who illegally leads people into this desolate Zone of extraterrestrial origin, where the hopeless seek happiness. But when human beings are present, the Zone’s terrain goes into a constant state of flux. As if this weren’t bad enough, the Zone is saturated with ever-changing death traps.
At the center of the Zone is the Room, “a place where desires come true,” which Stalkers are forbidden to enter.
Before one such mission, the stone-faced Stalker leaves his vehemently disapproving spouse and their disabled little daughter (“Monkey”). He has been imprisoned a number of times for the illicit activity. “I’m imprisoned everywhere,” he tells the Wife. (In the Soviet Union, as various authors point out, the region of the gulags was known as “the Zone”; Chernobyl and other prohibited areas are also “zones,” so perhaps this tale was prophetic.)
The Stalker goes on to lead two men (under fire) into the Zone: the Writer, who is an archcynic, and the Professor, a materialistic physicist. (The Writer dubs their guide “Chingachgook.”)
A Variety reviewer distilled a large part of the plot: “Each [of the three] speaks of his own convictions along the way: the writer of inspiration, the scientist of reason, Stalker of faith.”
A voice-over by a woman (the Wife?) quotes Revelation 6:12b-17. The Stalker quotes Luke 24:13-18a. And a woman’s voice paraphrases verses from the Taoist Tao Te Ching. The Stalker believes in the Room. He is “one of God’s holy fools,” the Wife says.
Similar to The Wizard of Oz, the “real” world of Stalker has sepia hues (most of the time), while the Zone comes in colors.
Back in the 1990s, when I first viewed Stalker, one of the thoughts I had was that it would make a splendid stage play.
This isn’t to say it is not a fascinating motion picture. But since Stalker is very talky, and special effects are almost nonexistent, it could easily be adapted as a theatrical work.
As the Writer, speaking to an attractive young admirer before he enters the Zone, avers: “There’s no telepathy, no ghosts, no flying saucers.... Don’t hope for flying saucers. That would be too interesting.”
Stalker is non-sci-fi sci-fi, a refreshing alternative to Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, and other films of this genre released in the late 1970s.
Stalker certainly has a sufficient running time for a theater piece: 162 minutes. And, as mentioned, there is plenty of dialogue – full of irony, along with some wry humor, and punctuated by long silences amid lavishly photographed and extended takes. We hear verse written by Tarkovsky’s father, Arseny, a poet of note in Russia.
Periodically, the cinematography in Stalker focuses on what nowadays is called “ruin porn” and makes the ugly beautiful: ramshackle buildings, rusty junk, water despoiled by oil spills, and other pollution. (The location shooting was mainly done in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.)
None of the pyrotechnics that thrill current Broadway audiences would be needed for this prospective theatrical work. I visualize Stalker, the stage production, using primitive moving panoramas or perhaps more innovative rear projections. And a good sound system would be a must.
As stated above, I saw Stalker in the 1990s. Before viewing it a second time more recently, I could only remember a single scene, involving what looks at first like a miraculous healing – but it is not. (I recall audience members’ laughter.) At the conclusion, there’s another occurrence, involving the same character, that appears supernatural but within moments proves to be fully mundane. Or does it? The Rev. Colin Heber-Percy, a rural vicar and author, calls the segment “not much maybe.”
The film’s curtain is sublimely rung down with “Ode to Joy.”
Tarkovsky had a heart attack during the shoot. This was the last picture the director made in his native country before he renounced his Soviet citizenship because of the government’s suppression of his work. He lived in Italy, then West Berlin, then Paris, where he died of lung cancer at age 54 in 1986.
Stalker is adapted from the postapocalyptic novel Roadside Picnic (1972) by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The siblings were credited with the Stalker screenplay, but, they noted, Tarkovsky pretty much rewrote everything.
Stalker influenced the 2014 Jeff VanderMeer novel on which 2018’s Annihilation (with Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson) is based. And I wonder if Stalker might have given author Dan Simmons some ideas for his novel Hyperion (1989), a favorite of mine?
According to The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, Stalker has inspired “a series of first-person-shooter video games.”
“A zombie apocalypse without zombies.” – The New Yorker
“Far from being something from the world of tomorrow, this looks more like today, or rather the day before yesterday.” – film historian Maya Turovskaya
“Setting and camera work create an atmosphere that is suspenseful enough even without the excellent story it enhances.” – The Motion Picture Guide by Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross
Tarkovsky “is stating baldly, and for the most part unartistically, that authors and scientists have taken away hope. What or whose hope, exactly, is not clear.” – Donald C. Willis
“A dense, complex, often-contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness, the necessity for faith in an increasingly secular, rational world, and the ugly, unpleasant dreams and desires that reside in the hearts of men.” – Slant magazine
“The paradise that Jesus promises from the cross, [and] the claims for the Zone made by the Stalker, are available to us only through faith.” – Colin Heber-Percy
“At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last—and no one can concentrate on anything—for longer than about two seconds.” – Geoff Dyer in Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
“The film’s long silent stretches can be exhausting, akin not so much to watching paint dry, but to watching dry paint.” – Dennis Fischer [Editor’s note: The dry paint could be a Rembrandt.]
Responding to the USSR State Committee for Cinematography’s criticisms regarding the picture’s pace: “The film needs to be slower and duller at the start, so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theater have time to leave before the main action starts.” – Andrei Tarkovsky
Riddle me this: What do Peter Bogdanovich, Sandra Bullock, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern, Peter Fonda, Menahem Golan, Pam Grier, Dennis Hopper, Ron Howard, Gale Ann Hurd, Jack Nicholson, John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Talia Shire, and Sylvester Stallone all have in common? Answer: Each of these filmmakers got a big boost in his or her career from the late producer/director Roger Corman, who died in 2024 at age 98. And this is definitely just a partial list of celebrities who owed him a debt of gratitude. In 1981, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Corman had “provided more work for more talented young people than any other single producer in the last 30 years.”
Corman’s obit in The New York Times includes this quote from Scorsese: “[Corman] once said: ‘Martin, what you have to get is a very good first reel, because people want to know what’s going on. Then you need a very good last reel, because people want to hear how it all turns out. Everything else doesn’t really matter.’ Probably the best sense I have ever heard about the movies.”
Aside from Corman’s six Edgar Allan Poe adaptations (1960-64), which starred Vincent Price, the following comedy – later transformed into a musical stage play, which then became a 1986 feature – is probably the director’s best known:
THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)
Partly made on location in L.A.’s skid row! And shot in two days and one night; producer-director Roger Corman (1926-2024) broke his previous speed record.
This is the funniest (intentionally) of the 25 or so Corman-directed films I’ve seen. (I wouldn’t attempt to count the ones he produced.) The first quarter of the 72-minute opus offers machine gun-quick, near-absurdist humor that smacks of the Marx Brothers. Then things slow down a bit, as the plot progresses into accidental judgments and casual slaughters. [Spoiler Alert!]
Nebbish Seymour Krelboyne (Jonathan Haze), a flower shop employee, crosses a Venus flytrap with a butterwort and comes up with the phenomenal Audrey Jr. — which he has named after his gal pal and coworker, Audrey Fulquard (Jackie Joseph). She is one of several characters with rude puns in their names.
This inadvertent accomplishment gains him rock-star status. (In fact, his rock throwing is pivotal to the story.) Seymour even has groupies. But the hybrid turns out to be a man- and woman-eater and grows to “monstrositous” proportions (to use Audrey Sr.’s coinage).
The shop owner, malapropism-spouting Gravis Mushnick (Mel Welles), and one of his customers, Mrs. Siddie Shiva, speak with Yiddish accents, which are funny in and of themselves. (Even Audrey Jr. at times lapses into Yiddish syntax.)
Other oddball characters include Burson Fouch (Dick Miller), who’s on a strict diet of flowers (“a man eating plants,” says Corman’s 1990 memoir); police Detectives Joe Fink and Frank Stoolie (spoofing Dragnet); Seymour’s mother, Winifred (Myrtle Vail, former radio star and grandmother of screenwriter Charles B. Griffith; see Myrt and Marge [1933], featuring the Three Stooges), a hypochondriac who has an odd definition of health food (“It’s made from Chinese herbs and flavored with Epsom salts”); and Wilbur Force (Jack Nicholson), a masochistic patient of dentist Dr. Farb (whose surname is an anagram for …). [End of Spoiler Alert]
Nicholson, who is billed second from the bottom, has stated he improvised his lines in a scene surely meant as an homage to W.C. Fields and the Three Stooges. (Nicholson has remarked of Corman, “By mistake, he actually made a good picture every once in a while.”)
Corman’s unwieldily and hyperbolically titled memoir is How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. (Kind of reminds you of the full and marquee-challenged title of the director’s Viking Women, doesn’t it?)
In this tome, Griffith is quoted as saying that among the local attractions featured in Little Shop are “the world’s largest used-tire yard and the world’s largest used-toilet yard.” Scripter Griffith got the seed of the carnivorous-plant plot from a 1932 story, “Green Thoughts,” by British writer John Colllier, whose works have been adapted for The Twilight Zone, both of Hitchcock’s TV series, and other thriller shows.
The film had an aglet budget — just a tiny part of a shoestring: $27,500.
Frequent Corman collaborator Griffith provides the voice of Audrey Jr. and can be seen in two minor roles. Haze (1929-2024), Welles, and Miller (who turned down the lead role) were all Corman regulars. (In Europe, Welles, who held a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University, scripted the infamous Maneater of Hydra [1967] and directed the equally infamous Lady Frankenstein [1971].)
“Very inventive, resourceful and darn funny self-parody spoof.... Kinky, full of in-jokes, good lines, keen fun.” — Castle of Frankenstein magazine
“The film’s nighttime exteriors, shot on location in the slums of Los Angeles, are straight out of Nathanael West, and contribute to the aura of surreal hopelessness.” — David J. Hogan
“Alternately awful and inspired.” – Donald C. Willis
“The subtext of my films is a deliberate creation.” — Roger Corman
OCT. 28
“There is no Lon Chaney. I am the character I am creating. That is all.” — attributed
Sandwiched between two silent landmarks is a fine TCM documentary on “the Man of a Thousand Faces.” No zombies or werewolves here; Chaney’s characters are non-supernatural human beings with congenital defects.
THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME (1923)
The 1831 Victor Hugo novel was originally named Notre-Dame de Paris, but English-language editions today often have the movie title on their covers.
This film marked the turning point in Lon Chaney’s career; it was also one of the most expensive productions made by Universal Pictures in the 1920s.
One of the first shots is the full-scale replica of the Paris cathedral’s façade, which had cost the studio nearly $343,000.
As the intertitles tell us, the year is 1482, during the reign of Louis XI.
The house of worship was “a spiritual haven in a brutal age ... a sanctuary where the persecuted could find protection. The enduring monument of a mighty faith. It was in the broad cathedral square that the people met to celebrate the Festival of Fools, the one day of the year when the people, crushed by tyranny, gave themselves to unrestrained pleasure.” We then see two men in monkey suits physically molesting two women.
Quasimodo, the bell ringer, dwells in the cathedral: “To the townspeople he was an inhuman freak, a monstrous joke of Nature – and for their jeers he gave them bitter scorn and hate.”
He’s something of a Christ figure: One day, the populace celebrates him as the King of Fools; another day, with vicarious sadism, they thrill to watch him flogged for a crime for which he’s not responsible. (“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.” – Isaiah 53: 2b-3a)
Dom Claude is the good archdeacon and is kind toward Quasimodo; Jehan is Claude’s wicked brother, to whom Quasimodo is a “slave.”
Our hero, Phoebus, is the newly promoted captain of the guard. Love blossoms between him and Esmeralda, a beautiful Gypsy.
She was bought from the Roma as a child and raised by a 15th-century Lenin named Clopin, the King of Beggars. This would-be revolutionary declares, “Our day is coming – when we’ll bow our heads to no man!”
Esmeralda proves to be a savior for two of the characters. But, like Quasimodo, she is later falsely accused and tortured.
Aside from the spinal deformity, Quasimodo is deaf; blind in his right eye, which is covered by what the novel calls an “enormous wen”; and he has bad teeth. Author Mark Clark says the role “must have been especially inspirational for” Chaney, whose parents were both hearing-impaired.
The actor truly suffered for his art, but not as much as is generally believed. Film historian Harry H. Long says Chaney’s hump only weighed 20 pounds, not 70, as has often been reported (and the prosthesis was made of plaster, not rubber). Another myth surrounding Hunchback is that Chaney did all his own stunts.
But the actor did do his own makeups, for which he was renowned as “the Man of a Thousand Faces.” His August 1930 obit in The New York Times reads, “As Quasimodo in ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ he constructed high cheek bones and remodelled his face with plastic gum. Over one eye he applied a shell, which he covered with flesh-colored material. In this grotesque portrayal he wore a straitjacket to twist his frame. It became so painful that it had to be removed periodically to relieve him.” The “harness,” as some have called it, kept him from standing up straight. Silent-film maven Robert K. Klepper writes that the facial makeup included mortician’s wax. In creating his makeup, Long points out, Chaney studied drawings of Quasimodo rendered by author Hugo himself.
Pause for a moment to consider the advantages the silents had over talkies: The intertitles of Hunchback total fewer than 2,100 words. (I arrived at this figure by duping an online script into a Word file.) Without concerns for spoken words or sound effects, moviemakers could concentrate on visual aspects, such as fine cinematography and skillful editing. A story’s deeper meaning is related through pantomime, symbolic mise-en-scène, and other visuals.
For instance, viewers understand Phoebus’s heartfelt shift in his designs toward Esmeralda simply by seeing him lift part of her wayward blouse to cover her bare shoulder.
And can’t the silents’ exaggerated facial expressions, which may now seem silly to us, be deemed as having a greater vitality?
Esmeralda is portrayed by Patsy Ruth Miller; Long calls her character “a flapper with a tambourine.”
Brandon Hurst is Jehan. According to IMDb, the English actor made 15 other genre pictures – from John Barrymore’s 1920 Jekyll/Hyde (in which he played the good doctor’s sweetheart’s dad) to House of Frankenstein (1944). Cinematic history repeats itself (sort of): Catch Hurst’s act as Briggs, the butler of a physician friend of Spencer Tracy’s 1941 Jekyll, later on Oct. 28; and Hurst is a cemetery gatekeeper in director Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man (1943; Oct. 30).
Nigel De Brulier – like Hurst, a British stage performer – is the archdeacon. De Brulier can be seen in Hal Roach’s One Million B.C. (1940) and as the wizard Shazam in one of the greatest serials, Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941).
Chaney had wanted Erich von Stroheim to direct (can you imagine?); Universal’s whiz kid mogul Irving Thalberg announced that frequent Chaney collabo Tod Browning (future director of Dracula) would helm Hunchback; but the big boss, Carl Laemmle, decreed Wallace Worsley would pilot this blockbuster. Worsley had sat in the director’s chair for both a better Chaney melodrama, The Penalty (1920), and a “lost” film of Chaney’s, A Blind Bargain (1922). But costar Miller said Chaney directed as much as Worsley did. Chaney edited his own scenes, too. (Worsley’s son, William Jr., was production manager for Spielberg’s E.T.)
Co-screenwriter Edward T. Lowe Jr. worked on The Vampire Bat (1933), House of Frankenstein (1944), and House of Dracula (1945).
One of the Hunchback assistant directors was William Wyler, future Oscar winner for Ben-Hur.
The 1923 film premiered at a run time of more than two hours; only 98 minutes are extant.
“In The Hunchback of Notre Dame may be seen what is surely Lon Chaney’s masterpiece…. Yet the production falls short of being a masterpiece; somehow, with the exception of the hunchback, the characters and the masses of people and their action don’t have the funny, crazy, ragged, massive, lovable human stuff that goes with the novel of Victor Hugo.” – Carl Sandburg of the Chicago Daily News
“Chaney could express with his whole body in a few gestures what pages of dialogue couldn’t.” – Burt Lancaster
Chaney’s performance “totally dims the rest of the picture, which is full of second-rate Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille-anry, which dates rather quickly. But not this performance of Chaney’s.” – Orson Welles on the PBS series The Silent Years (1971)
“The enormous sets and Chaney’s performance are one thing, but the unimaginative handling and the length, especially to modern audiences, are another. Not quite the classic some would have it be, but with interesting moments for those who can stay the course.” – Howard Maxford
“Is it is or is it ain’t a horror film?… In comparison to the epic scope of the films with which it was intended to compete, it lacks visual distinction.… Third-rate melodrama is, alas, the stuff of which this Hunchback is made.… None of the actors in Hunchback manages more than a one-note performance.…” – Harry H. Long
“This picture is a legitimate example of movie elephantiasis…. All this [expense] would have been futile … if the story had not furnished it with backbone and if Lou [[sic!]] Chaney had not provided a singularly fine performance in the title role.” – Time magazine (1923)
“The Hunchback of Notre Dame is misery all of the time, nothing but misery, tiresome, loathsome misery that doesn’t make you feel any the better for it.” – Variety
.
LON CHANEY: A THOUSAND FACES (2000)
Early on, this TCM documentary touches upon one crucial fact about the silent-movie superstar: As mentioned, Chaney’s parents were hearing-impaired, which helped him to hone his skills as a consummate pantomimist. The bio’s other highlights include Lon Chaney Jr.’s account of how he was stillborn and his father saved his life (“I was born black and dead”); interviews with fans who’d viewed Chaney père’s works in the ’20s (among these are sci-fi master Ray Bradbury and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine editor Forrest J Ackerman [no period]); with moviemakers Jackie “Uncle Fester” Coogan (who was Oliver Twist to Chaney’s Fagin), Loretta Young (who turned 15 while working on Chaney’s Laugh, Clown, Laugh [1928]; she was the female lead), et al.; and with Sara Karloff, who relates invaluable advice that Chaney gave her father.
The narrator is Kenneth Branagh. The director was noted British documentarian Kevin Brownlow; the executive producer was Hugh Hefner.
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)
“It’s impossible to believe there are a majority of picturegoers who prefer this revolting sort of a tale on the screen.” — Variety (1925)
“Quite possibly the most popular film to come out of the silent era.” — Robert K. Klepper
“In a way, The Phantom of the Opera is the perfect silent film, for it allowed Chaney to exercise the full range of his pantomimic skills.” — David J. Hogan
“No one has topped Chaney’s ability to make the phantom seem both monstrous and yet somehow human.” — Edward Edelson (1974)
“Chaney charted new terrain and established signposts that would guide performers for decades.” — Mark Clark
“When I was an 8-year old I saw Lon Chaney in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA — and gazed upon the face of naked fear.” – Robert Bloch, author of the novel Psycho
“Universal’s new production seeks for the chilling thrill, the scene that scares you, which is yet so new, so fascinating that your pleasure surpasses your scare.” – Carl Sandburg
“Homage to classical Greek legend of Orpheus and E.A. Poe’s fiction (primarily ‘Masque of the Red Death’) is vividly evident.” – Castle of Frankenstein magazine
“It’s a mediocre film at best and hardly a glowing example of the art of silent filmmaking ... . [Chaney’s] performance, one of his best, is extraordinary in that he positively dominates the film even though he doesn’t appear — except as a shadow on the wall — until halfway through.” — Harry H. Long
“Not a great film if you are concerned with art and subtlety, depth and message … But in its fevered melodrama and images of cadaverous romance, it finds a kind of show-biz majesty.” — Roger Ebert
Concerning the sequence in which the monster’s face is revealed: “No other shock introduction or a sudden unmasking of a movie monster … has ever quite duplicated the skill and excitement of this memorable scene.” — William K. Everson (1974)
“The acting, though undistinguished, is appropriate to the general tub-thumper quality of the story. In other words, it is of the variety that is usually known as ‘ham.’” – playwright Robert E. Sherwood, writing in Life magazine
“In adapting the novel, Universal was somewhat clumsy; the first half of the movie is uneventful, and there are too many extraneous characters throughout.” – Roy Kinnard
The Parisian villain is described by a character who has caught a glimpse of him: “His eyes are ghastly pits in which there is no light — like holes in a grinning skull.... His face is like leprous parchment — yellow skin stretched drum-tight over protruding bones.” But in the very next scene, the Phantom is said to have “the voice of an angel.”
The nominal director was New Zealand-born Rupert Julian (né Thomas Percival Hayes). But author John T. Soister labels Julian a “journeyman” and says Chaney himself shot at least half the footage.
As film historian William K. Everson and other authors point out, the movie was edited, re-edited, and re-re-edited, partly to satisfy the whims of Universal’s front office. The “Ultimate Edition” two-disc set, released by Image Entertainment in 2003, includes the original 1925 version, a 1929 version with color sequences, and still-photo reconstructions of three other versions, one (from 1930) with added fragments of dubbed voices and of sound effects.
The Dallas Morning News review in 1925 says this silent’s most famous shot elicited a “universal gasp” among the audience. Nowadays, of course, you wouldn’t get a universal gasp even if Chaney’s head exploded in 3D IMAX and splattered his brains all over the screen.
The world needs more hit musicals based on the classic Universal monsters. In 2018, I saw another possible archetype, King Kong: The Musical, a “woke” variation on the landmark RKO picture. How about a stage adaptation of The Creature From the Black Lagoon?
Trivia time: Gibson Gowland, the star of Erich von Stroheim’s epic Greed (1924), is the vengeful leader of the mob at Phantom’s conclusion.
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1941)
Reviewed earlier this month.
The following two films were produced and cowritten by Val Lewton. See more of Lewton’s work on the eve of the Eve of Allhallows, i.e., Oct. 30.
ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945)
Reviewed earlier this month.
BEDLAM (1946)
Inspired by the art of William Hogarth, this last of Lewton’s nine legendary horrors casts Boris Karloff as the crooked, sadistic apothecary general of the infamous London asylum in the 1760s. Of the inmates, he says: “They’re animals. Some are dogs. These I beat. Some are pigs. Those I let wallow in their own filth. Some are tigers. These I cage. And [touching the chin of a catatonic young woman] some, like this one, are doves.”
Author Tom Weaver suggests that Bedlam may be the first horror movie to feature a feminist heroine. Anna Lee portrays an actress who falls afoul of Karloff’s Master Sims.
English-born Lee named Bedlam the second-favorite of her more than 60 films, after How Green Was My Valley. She had appeared opposite Karloff in the British-made sci-fi thriller The Man Who Lived Again (1936) and is neighbor to siblings Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962; coming to TCM on Oct. 30).
One scene in Bedlam prefigures an iconic shot in Goldfinger. As author Jonathan Rigby points out, a later sequence evokes elements of three tales by a great American author of the 19th century.
Among the Bedlam inmates: Ellen (The Waltons) Corby, who had been promoted to actress from her position as script supervisor; Robert (Hideous Sun Demon) Clarke; Ian Wolfe (1896-1992; he was Mr. Atoz in the Star Trek episode “All Our Yesterdays”; he appeared earlier on Trek in “Bread and Circuses”); and Jason Robards Sr., also in the cast of Lewton’s Isle of the Dead.
Trivia time: In this low-budgeter, the velvet outfit worn by Lee is Scarlett O’Hara’s green “curtain” dress from Gone With the Wind.
“There has never been a film like Bedlam, a horror film that is at once a reminder of the ignorance from which the human race suffers … and a heartfelt, humanistic work of art.” — The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural
“An elaborate improvisation, but not an improvement, on one of Hogarth’s engravings.” — James Agee
“As in all Lewton films, the melodrama is used also for more serious purposes.... But sincere, artful and scary as the best of Bedlam is, its horror and high-mindedness don’t always blend smoothly.” – Time magazine
MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935)
Reviewed earlier this month.
OCT. 30
THE SWARM (1978)
“How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour?”
- Isaac Watts
Think of 20 of your favorite Hollywood films (and maybe include a couple of European productions, too) among those released from the 1930s through the 1970s. Are you thinking? I’ll wait…
I can guarantee that as many as a dozen of the actors in the pictures on your list are part of the cast of The Swarm.
Set in Texas and featuring our hero, the entomologist, this flick is a hot mess, clearly made with a budget equal to the GDP of some developing nations, and with that superstar-studded ensemble. What a waste!
Author Nik Havert does not overexaggerate when he writes, “The majority of the cast is dead halfway through the film.”
Remember the African killer bee scares of the 1970s, and the 1980s, and the 1990s? In The Swarm, the little buzzers are known in shorthand as “the Africans,” which The New York Times’ Janet Maslin calls “a very unfortunate bit of phrasing.”
Regarding the film’s inferior F/X, Maslin describes the swarms as looking “like clouds of nutmeg or, sometimes, like peculiarly chunky smog.”
The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) by Harry and Michael Medved nominates The Swarm in its category “The Worst Credit Line of All time,” to wit: “The African killer bee should not be confused with the hard-working, industrious American honey bee, which provides us with honey and pollinates our flowers.” The Swarm wins in another of the book’s categories: “The Most Badly Bumbled Bee Movie of All Time.”
Some of the dialogue tends toward the excruciatingly technical. Worst yet, the conclusion of The Swarm may remind viewers of real-life disasters like the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in 2010.
I don’t wish to sully the names of the stars by mentioning them, but there is a quote below from one cast member that I couldn’t resist. Please consult the Internet Movie Database to find the rest of the players. Their presence almost makes it worth suffering through this stinker. Almost.
If you do watch, carefully observe the tone and demeanor of the renowned performers. You’ll ascertain that they aren’t taking what they’re doing seriously. Perhaps the same is true of screenwriter Stirling Silliphant (Oscar winner for 1967’s In the Heat of the Night), who based his script on a 1974 novel by Arthur Herzog.
Director Irwin Allen, “the Master of Disaster,” is not so masterful this time around. The Swarm was his first commercial failure.
The “expanded edition” of the film (heaven help us!) is 156 minutes long, 40 minutes more than the original.
“The surprise comedy hit of the season.” – Janet Maslin in The New York Times
“A twelve-million-dollar picture that manages to look like a buck-ninety-eight.” – Stephen King
“At 156 minutes, there is an awful lot of The Swarm to laugh at…. The film is so serious, so lacking in humor, that the actors’ gloom ’n’ doom pronouncements only come out as funny.” – John Kenneth Muir
“It sometimes seems that the character actors may outnumber the bees.” – Time magazine
“In recent years, [The Swarm] has developed a certain cult notoriety, akin to that of Plan 9 From Outer Space.” – Phil Hardy (1985)
“Ecological disaster movies like The Swarm are part of an American heritage of nature vs. civilization stories [that generally] warn us that, in the face of the natural world, our civilization is a very fragile thing indeed.... But, in the end, the movie says that with a little human ingenuity, we can still defeat nature. Today, when the ecological disaster movies of the seventies could very well come true, this seems like a very irresponsible and dangerous message.” – Welch Everman (1995)
“Shooting our first scenes with the bees, we noticed little black dots appearing on our clothes. The bees were shitting on us. Sadly, they weren’t the only ones. When the film was released the audience and critics did the same.” – Michael Caine, in his autobiography Blowing the Bloody Doors Off
“You’ve never seen an automobile accident, have you, that didn’t attract an immediate audience? … You take some gigantic feat of derring-do and connect it with what I call the super automobile accident; that’s my basic theory, and it’s worked well.” – Irwin Allen, speaking to Robert Lindsey of The New York Times on the set of The Swarm
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962)
“You weren’t ugly then. I made you that way.”
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are siblings Jane and Blanche Hudson, former actresses living in an old L.A. mansion.
Alcoholic, unbalanced Jane – pathologically envious because Blanche’s long-ago success as an adult star had overshadowed hers as a girl – torments her terrified, paraplegic older sister.
In one chilling scene, Jane regresses to childhood and does a song and dance she’d performed in vaudeville, as her job-starved pianist (Victor Buono) looks on in disgust.
Strangely, the film morphs into a beach-party movie – with a touch of Sunset Boulevard.
British actress Anna Lee (Bedlam, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) is the next-door neighbor. Barbara Merrill, the real-life daughter of Davis and Gary Merrill, plays Lee’s daughter.
Calvin Thomas Beck, in his book Scream Queens, describes Davis in her semi-grotesque makeup: “She looked like a combination of a scrofulous, overripe Shirley Temple and Marcel Marceau gone sour.” Actually, Davis created the makeup: “I used a chalk-white base, lots of eye shadow – very black – a cupid’s-bow mouth, a beauty mark on my cheek, and a bleached blond wig with Mary Pickford curls,” she wrote in her autobiography This ’n That.
Robert Aldrich directed WEHtBJ?, a box-office smash, and helmed Kiss Me Deadly; Davis’s Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte; and The Dirty Dozen.
Baby Jane cinematographer Ernest Haller (who’d shared an Academy Award for Gone With the Wind) had worked with both Crawford and Davis several times. He was lensman for Lionel Atwill’s Murders in the Zoo. He shot the second Star Trek pilot episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and did a day’s (uncredited) labor on one other Trek installment, “Requiem for Methuselah.”
Aldrich regular Frank DeVol composed the tense WEHtBJ? score.
This picture pioneered the trend of starring older actresses in horror films, a vogue lasting through the mid-’70s.
The movie is adapted from a novel by Henry Farrell, who cowrote the screenplay for Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte and scripted director Curtis Harrington’s What’s the Matter With Helen? (The latter thriller, released in ’71, followed the trend, casting two veteran actresses: Shelley Winters and Agnes Moorehead.)
Author David J. Skal says, “Like cinematic versions of Elizabeth Bathory …, Hollywood’s new horror queens hoped to rejuvenate their careers by similarly bathing in blood.”
The commercial tagline for WEHtBJ? was, “Sister, sister, oh so fair, why is there blood all over your hair?”
“If it sometimes looks like a poisonous senior citizen show with over-the-top spoiled ham, just try to look away.... As in the best Hitchcock movies, suspense, rather than actual mayhem, drives the film.” – The Movie Guide, edited by James Monaco
“A grand horror movie for adults, made remarkable by the no-holds-barred performances of old-pros Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in their Guignol perfection. Miss Davis triumphs on two levels, capping her insane villainies with a lyrical pathos that is unforgettable.” – Judith Crist
“Bette in all her tragic horror again creates a villain with the proportion of a monster, a character perfectly tragic and evil, a performance perfectly beautiful. Joan Crawford is perfect.” – Cinema magazine (1962)
“At some point during [Jane’s] descent into madness, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? stops becoming a ‘camp classic,’ which is how it’s often described, and starts becoming the real thing, a psychological horror story.” – Roger Ebert
“This film is about waste. About the expense of spirit and the waste of shame.” – Leonard Wolf
“Producer-director Aldrich has fashioned here a film of subdued menace and intense power. Watching it, you feel as if you were facing a deadly and beautiful snake: horrified, but unable to tear your eyes away, hopelessly fascinated.” – Castle of Frankenstein magazine
“Baby Jane and its later imitators tap into something primal – not simply fear of an aging hag wielding a hammer (or a cleaver or an ax), but fear of aging itself, the chilling truth of our own mortality.” – Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
Davis “looks like a prototype for Cesar Romero’s Joker from the Batman television series.” – Mark Clark [Pedantic editor’s note: Actually, the prototype for Bob Kane’s Joker was Conrad Veidt’s character, Gwynplaine, in the Victor Hugo-based The Man Who Laughs (1928).]
“When Davis viewed the completed film for the first time at the Cannes Film Festival with Robert Aldrich at her side, she broke down in tears and asked him, ‘Do I really look that awful?’” – Peter McNally
“Nobody – at least nobody in their right mind – could reasonably claim that What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a consistently well-directed film.” – Monthly Film Bulletin, a former British Film Institute periodical
“Mr. Farrell’s press agent, Mitch Douglas, said Davis and Crawford had been enticed into the movie by the book and the chance to co-star. He said each actress used exactly the same words about the other: ‘I’ll wipe the floor with her.’” – from novelist Henry Farrell’s 2006 obituary in The New York Times
Trivia time: Has the two actresses’ real-life rivalry been exaggerated? Crawford biographers and other authors say she had wanted to work with Davis for years, asked Aldrich to find a suitable vehicle in which to unite the two, and personally asked Bette to costar. Stories of the women’s supposed antagonism were merely good publicity. Crawford was unhappy when Davis received an Oscar nomination and she did not, and Crawford reportedly campaigned against a Davis win. The same year, Anne Bancroft garnered the Best Actress honor for The Miracle Worker, and Crawford arranged to accept the award at the ceremony on the absent Bancroft’s behalf.
I recall butting into a conversation about Freaks at my college during one autumn in the 1970s. A schoolmate, working behind a library counter, was angrily complaining to another that the campus film series should not include Freaks. She had not seen it but called it exploitative and demeaning to very special people like many of the actors in the movie. Before this upcoming screening, I had not seen it either – I’d only read about it – but I interjected that its purpose was to depict these circus performers as just plain folks.
“Then why are they showing it on Halloween!” she snapped.
Speaking generally of the director, writer Ed Crouse has said: “[Tod] Browning gets right into one’s nervous system.”
But Freaks, now a cult favorite, was a financial flop in its day. As David J. Skal and Elias Savada point out in Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre, the director’s career never recovered.
It is a circus tale of a littler man (played by German-born Harry Earles) who marries a bigger woman (Russian-born Olga Baclanova) who’s got an ulterior motive. (Author Gregory William Mank calls Baclanova “a Garbo on steroids.”)
Adding to the plot’s strangeness, Earles’s real-life sister Daisy (a fellow future Munchkin) plays the spurned woman who is truly in love with him. (MGM’s autocratic studio head Louis B. Mayer hated and disowned Freaks; some have suggested he saw Earles’s irascible, cigar-smoking Hans as a caricature of himself.)
Baclanova, a high-wire artist in Freaks, is a duchess/seductress in The Man Who Laughs (1928), a Victor Hugo-based picture wherein lies the inspiration for Batman’s Joker. The male lead in Freaks is British-born Wallace Ford, as Phroso the clown. He appeared in The Mummy’s Hand, The Mummy’s Tomb, Lugosi’s The Ape Man, and James Stewart’s Harvey. The ’32 film’s seal trainer, Venus, is Leila Hyams, costar of The Island of Lost Souls. Another of the carnies is Edward Brophy. In Mad Love, he’s a condemned killer who faces the guillotine with a smile.
Among other cast members is little person Angelo Rossitto (1908-1991), whose acting career lasted from 1927 to 1987. Over those years, he shared the screen with John Barrymore (who introduced Rossitto to cinematic work), Lon Chaney, Warner “Charlie Chan” Oland, Laurel & Hardy, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Johnny Weissmuller, Bette Davis, Glenn Ford, Vincent Price, Jonathan Pryce, and Mel Gibson. (Remember Master Blaster in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?)
“Browning made the mistake of using real freaks in this film. We may only feel really comfortable with horror as long as we can see the zipper running up the monster’s back, when we understand that we are not playing for keepsies.... Even some of MGM’s tame exhibitors flatly refused to show it.” – Stephen King
“… Browning was far ahead of his time in thinking about ‘body horror’ – the instinctive, abdominal repulsion that the sight of physical abnormality triggers, the shock and shame that physical difference brings out in both the beholder and the beheld.” – Brad Weismann
“Still sick, twisted, perverse and profoundly human. Pickled in a jar of bile, it contains Browning’s view of the world at its purest.” – Guillermo del Toro
“For pure sensationalism, Freaks tops any picture yet produced.” – Louella Parsons (1932)
“So loathsome that I am nauseated thinking about it.” – a letter published in Harrison’s Reports, a motion-picture trade journal (1932)
“Outrageous onslaught upon the feelings, the senses, the brains and the stomachs of the audience.” – The Hollywood Reporter (1932)
“In Freaks, the movies make their great step toward national censorship.... If they get it, they will have no one to blame but themselves.” – The Kansas City Star (1932)
“Freaks is by far the most daringly executed plot we have ever seen on the screen.... Frankenstein is a bed-time story by comparison.” – Motion Picture, a former fan magazine
“Tod Browning can retire in peace, satisfied that he has directed the ultimate in horrors.” – the Boston Herald
“There’s a story that when the screenwriter brought the script to [MGM production chief] Irving Thalberg and he read it, he kind of dropped his head into his hands and said, ‘Well, I asked for something horrible, and I guess I got it.’” – David J. Skal
“The prewar era’s most chilling look at the abuses of sexuality.” – David J. Hogan
“Browning has turned the popular convention of horror topsy-turvy. It is the ordinary, the apparently normal, the beautiful which horrify – the monstrous and distorted which compel our respect, our sympathy, ultimately our affection.” – Ivan Butler
“Despite the strong horrific punch of the finale, Freaks stands more as a touching and occasionally artfully humorous plea for understanding, for the need to treat those different from ourselves with dignity and respect.” – Dennis Fischer
“A lurid but wholly original saga of sexual manipulation and revenge.” – Mark Gatiss
Freaks “can also be seen as a subversive attack on [Browning’s] employers, the huge Hollywood production company and glamour factory Metro Goldwin [sic] Mayer (MGM), which was best known for its large-scale cinematic worship of conventional beauty.” – Stockholm University professor Torkild Thanem
“Freaks is as courageous as it is exemplary.” – Reynold Humphries
“Freaks possesses a unique, raw power which sets it apart from (and lifts it above) most of its Golden Age contemporaries.” – Bryan Senn
“The film features some stilted performances and is slow, and crudely moralistic until the wedding feast.” – Cult Movies by Danny Peary
“Freaks has attained a kind of immortality as an example of what happens when a great director makes a monumental error of judgment. He leaves behind a film that squirms with the vitality of incoherence.” – Leonard Wolf
Trivia time: For those of you who have watched or will watch Freaks and wonder about the one, unintelligible line spoken by Prince Randian (and for those who don’t turn on the subtitles), what this armless, legless man says is, “Hey, can you do anything with your eyebrows?”
HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
Reviewed earlier this month.
THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1957)
Reviewed earlier this month.
“I like looking at old Val Lewton films a lot. I just like the look of them; they’re so beautiful.” – Martin Scorsese
Producer Val Lewton (1904-51) is revered by many contemporary filmmakers. But Lewton was much more than a producer. He always altered scripts a great deal, for
the better.
Carlos Clarens, who in 1967 published the book An Illustrated History of the
Horror Film, the first serious study of the genre, wrote, “Taken in their original
context, the films of Val Lewton stand out as chamber music against the seedy
bombast of the claw-and-fang epics of the day.” British journalist Robin Cross
said, “[Lewton’s] films have left a series of haunting images which once
experienced are never forgotten.”
By contrast, John Carpenter, speaking on a 2010 BBC program, memorably insulted Lewton’s memory by calling him “overrated.” But the opinion of a spotty director like Carpenter is akin to and as scurrilous as Woody Allen’s statement to the Los Angeles Times that W.C. Fields maintained a funny persona but was “in
not very good films.”
Russian-born Lewton’s thrillers, a string of low-budget successes from 1942 to 1946, saved RKO Pictures from bankruptcy in the wake of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane/Magnificent Andersons debacle.
The following three Lewton productions were directed by Frenchman Jacques Tourneur, shown in reverse order of their release. After those, you can enjoy Tourneur’s 1958 Curse of the Demon. In the wee hours of Halloween will come Lewton’s The Seventh Victim, directed by Mark Robson. (Another odd scheduling choice by TCM: Three Tourneur films, followed by one directed by Freddie Francis, followed by another Tourneur. Maybe the TCM host will explain this configuration?)
THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)
I deem this the weakest of Lewton’s nine thrillers. Director Tourneur disliked it. Nevertheless, it, too, has its moments (one of which involves a strategically placed pool of blood).
An escaped big cat turns out not to be the only trouble in a small New Mexico town.
The mononymous Margo (1937’s Lost Horizon), Jean Brooks, and Isabel Jewell (both in The Seventh Victim) costar.
The Leopard Man is adapted from a novel, Black Alibi, by Cornell Woolrich, author of suspense tales including the one that formed the basis of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
The co-scripter, together with an uncredited Lewton, was Ardel Wray; she worked on I Walked With a Zombie (coming up next) and Isle of the Dead as well. Edward Dein provided “additional dialogue.” Dein directed the world’s first cowboy-vampire flick, Curse of the Undead (1959), and The Leech Woman (1960), a different twist on the stale African “jungle” theme.
“This film … seems to be one of Hollywood’s original gems – nothing impure in terms of cinema, nothing imitative about its style, and little that misses fire through a lack of craft.” – Manny Farber in The Nation magazine
“Directed with savage poeticism.” – Steven H. Scheuer
“A film for lovers of pools of darkness.” – Time Out Film Guide
“One of the best trapped-in-a-cemetery sequences ever.” – Michael Weldon
“Thinly plotted and often tedious, with superb sequences of horror sandwiched between long periods of wasted film. More an exercise in sadism than anything else, the film benefits like all of Lewton’s movies from its cinematography.” – Alan Frank
I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)
This tale of Caribbean voodoo and a dysfunctional white family is very loosely based on Jane Eyre. A nurse (Frances Dee) travels from Ottawa to the West Indies to care for a catatonic woman (Christine Gordon).
Tom Conway is the sick woman’s brother-in-law. (He’s in The Seventh Victim, coming to TCM on Halloween.)
The screenwriter on the RKO production was Curt Siodmak, who worked on The Wolf Man and other fine (and some not-so-fine) scripts for Universal.
Author Peter Dendle describes the black zombie character, Carrefour, as “an embodiment of the will of the natives and of the land itself, a will expressing disapproval of the moral trespasses of the decadent colonialists.”
Of one scene featuring actor/calypso performer Sir Lancelot (1902-2001), British-born critic Robin Wood wrote in 1972: “There can’t be many Hollywood movies of the early Forties in which a colored character is permitted to make sly, malicious fun of whites who are neither comic nor villainous – with the film’s at least partial endorsement – and get away with it.”
Trivia time: Lancelot put a reworking of a song he sings here on record under the title “Scandal in the Family.” It was also known as “Shame and Scandal (in the Family)” and “Ah Woe Is Me” and has been covered by Odetta, the Kingston Trio, Peter Tosh and the Wailers, the Stylistics, Helen Humes, and many other artists.
“A dull, disgusting exaggeration of an unhealthy, abnormal concept of life.” — Thomas M. Pryor in The New York Times (1943)
“This movie helped rescue the genre from a clichéd world where monsters roared, heroines screamed and heroes rescued.” — The Rough Guide to Cult Movies
“… a hauntingly, nightmarishly beautiful tone poem of voodoo drums, dark moonlight and somnambulistic ladies in floating white, brought to perfection by [Jacques] Tourneur’s direction … wonderfully evocative transposition of Jane Eyre (loosely speaking) to the West Indies … [hovers] visually in precarious balance between darkness and light … a small masterpiece.” — Phil Hardy
“Without a doubt the most haunting and poetic of voodoo films (and perhaps of horror films in general as well).” – Bryan Senn (1998)
“One of the most poetic and mournful horror films ever made.... The film has rightfully been proclaimed a minor masterpiece.” — Dennis Fischer
“A deeply moving, beautifully filmed and thematically satisfying love story with the implications of a Greek tragedy.... The love story is the frame for a richly moving film that includes understated comments on the relationship between blacks and whites.” — Leonard Wolf
“One of the finest of all American horror films … It is built on an elaborate set of apparently clear-cut structural oppositions: Canada-West Indies, white-black, light-darkness, life-death, science-black magic, Christianity-Voodoo, conscious-unconscious, etc. — and it proceeds systematically to blur all of them.” — Robin Wood
Dee and Gordon’s “nocturnal walk through the cane fields, while the approaching drums drown out the rustling of the wind, constitutes the core of the film as well as one of the high-water marks of screen terror.” — Carlos Clarens
“Avoiding motivation and rational explanation, ambiguity and sexual tension reign in Zombie, not in the least through the suggestion of a link between Western anxieties and folk superstition.” — Ernest Mathijs
“Concerned predominantly with horror and insanity caused by repressed female sexuality in the family.” — Jon Towlson
“An atmospheric and intelligent vision unparalleled in zombie film.... The natives are presented with an appreciation and sensitivity refreshingly at odds with Hollywood standards of the day.” — Peter Dendle (2001)
“[Val Lewton’s motion pictures] were subtle in their style and presentation, depending upon psychological aspects of horror, suggested by atmospheric photography and clever editing rather than the more blatant shocks of conventional horror films.” — John Brosnan
“Like all of Lewton’s films, this one gets more frightening the less it shows.” —The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“Our formula is simple. A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fadeout.” — Val Lewton
CAT PEOPLE (1942)
Reviewed earlier this month
NIGHTMARE (1964)
The working title was Here’s the Knife, Dear – Now Use It.
This mystery is the fourth of Hammer Film’s eight psychological thrillers. Like the first, Scream of Fear, it follows the Gaslight pattern, with several interesting twists, but it’s not as well-done as the 1961 mystery.
Seventeen-year-old Janet Freeman (Jennie Linden) is tormented by dreams linked to a horrendous crime that occurred in her home on her 11th birthday.
But the retribution for a related, contemporaneous crime – which takes up the latter half of the film – is implausible, impractical, and downright illegal! Still, it makes for a pretty good story.
Director Freddie Francis and scenarist Jimmy Sangster “discovered” Jennie Linden performing with a small repertory company in Worthing. She went on to costar in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965), Ken Russell’s D.H. Lawrence-based Women in Love (1969), and David Niven’s dud comedy Old Dracula (1974).
Brenda Bruce, who plays Janet’s sympathetic teacher, is the first victim of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960).
Moira Redmond, in the role of Janet’s new nurse, is in I, Claudius; A Shot in the Dark (1964); Terry-Thomas’s fair comedy-mystery Kill or Cure; and the fine detective story Jigsaw (both 1962)
Australian Clytie Jessop, who portrayed a ghost in The Innocents (1961), has a similar role here. She made but one other movie, Francis’s anthology Torture Garden (1967), with Burgess Meredith, Jack Palance, and Peter Cushing, in which she plays a living wax figure of the goddess Atropos.
“One long scream.” – The Daily Mail
“‘Nightmare’ has several of the ingredients of a successful thriller cocktail, but these have not been shaken with enough guile to click satisfactorily.” – Variety
“What we have here is half a wonderful film, and while the film’s second half is not bad, it lacks the originality and emotional involvement provided during the first half.” – Midnight Marquee magazine
“A one-way ticket to Dullsville.” – Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
“It tends to strangle itself on its repetitious scare gimmicks.” – the New York Herald Tribune
In a 2003 biography, Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career, author Edmund G. Bansak states, “Burn, Witch, Burn [a.k.a. Night of the Eagle] is the perfect companion piece to Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon, and their parallels go much further than their similar sounding British titles….” Someone at TCM’s programming department must have read this book about the famed horror producer and paired the two movies. These next two motion pictures do have similar plots; in each, a skeptical social scientist becomes a believer … the hard way.
CURSE OF THE DEMON (1957; U.K. title = Night of the Demon)
“Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.”
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Dr. Julian Karswell is a perfect British gentleman. Loves his mother. Good with children. Occasionally conjures up a fierce cyclone to intimidate his enemies. Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), we discover, is a master of the black arts and leader of a Satanist cult.
His main nemesis is a visiting American psychologist (Dana Andrews) who declares, “I’m not a superstitious sucker like about 90 percent of humanity.”
This motion picture is loosely based on a 1911 short story, Casting the Runes, by Britain’s M.R. James.
According to author John McCarty, director Jacques Tourneur “for research purposes … interviewed several of England’s most famous witches about the spirit world.” (The McCarty book from which the quote comes is named after Tourneur’s 1958 The Fearmakers, a Red Scare thriller also starring Dana Andrews.)
Curse of the Demon is the subject of a myth among horror aficionados: Tourneur claimed he wanted to leave the monster unseen, but he was forced by the producer to show the demon on-screen. However, author/documentarian Tony Earnshaw has discovered that the demon was in the script early on. The design of the creature is based on old woodcuts. Fans have been debating its efficacy for decades.
Some deem this tangible devil one of the film’s few flaws. Another weak point (not to give away too much) is undoubtedly the scene of the tussle between Andrews’s Dr. Holden and “Grimalkin,” where the actor seems to be playing with a large plush toy.
Tourneur gave us The Comedy of Terrors (Karloff, Lorre, Price, Rathbone – and Joe E. Brown!) and the classic Robert Mitchum noir Out of the Past.
Welsh-born costar Peggy Cummins, who plays the niece of one of Karswell’s victims, was a pistol-packin’, Bonnie Parker-esque villain in the acclaimed noir Gun Crazy (1950).
MacGinnis appeared in Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts (as Zeus), Hammer Film’s Viking Queen, and Freddie Francis’s omnibus Torture Garden.
Charles Lloyd-Pack (no relation) has a bit part as a chemist.
Screenwriter Charles Bennett had a hand in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (both versions), The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, Sabotage, Blackmail, and Secret Agent, as well as several DeMille scripts.
Brooklyn-born Hal E. Chester was executive producer and a cowriter. As a youth, this former actor had appeared in the interconnected Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, and East Side Kids franchises. Blacklisted Cy Endfield, who directed 1961’s Mysterious Island, was an uncredited co-scripter.
“One of the most intelligent, literate, and nightmarish horror films of the 1950s.” – Bryan Senn
“Repays repeated viewings with a number of subtle and richly textured scenes that are, in their quiet way, as perfect as any in the movies.” — Bruce Lanier Wright
“Except for a shot where the demon looks like King Kong in drag, riding an invisible bicycle, I think the demon is terrific.... It’s the scariest monster in film history.” — Danny Peary (1983)
“A highly effective black magic thriller packed with atmosphere.” — David Pirie
“Tourneur’s horror classic is both redemptive and evangelical … a compelling critique of modernity and the demons it has awakened.” – A Christian Response to Horror Cinema (2015) by Peter Fraser (who quotes 2 Thessalonians 2:3-8 with reference to the allegory of the film’s villain)
“In the hands of Jacques Tourneur, the use of understatement as the most effective method of sending chills up an audience’s collective spine reached a sort of apotheosis.” — John McCarty (whose straight-to-video 2007 docuseries The Fearmakers Collection, based on his book, includes a segment on Tourneur)
“Jacques Tourneur … knew that real horror is a fragile, glass-boned thing.... Night of the Demon abounds in prosaic situations turning implacably into nightmares.” — Carlos Clarens
“Screenwriter Charles Bennett was one of Alfred Hitchcock’s ablest collaborators, and this may in fact be the finest Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never made.” — The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“Got hair as black as night
Got a skirt that’s, ooo, so tight
Tellin’ you I got an itch –
She’s my witch.” – Kip Tyler
BURN, WITCH, BURN (1962; U.K. title = Night of the Eagle)
This U.K. production proves the old maxim: Behind every great man, there’s a great voodoo charm.
Norman Taylor (Peter Wyngarde), a sociology professor who teaches classes on superstition, seems a shoo-in to be appointed department chair. But he discovers that his wife, Tansy (American Janet Blair) – using some methods she learned during a stay in Jamaica – holds the secret to his success. When he promptly puts an end to this, he almost instantaneously begins a bizarre downward spiral from rising star to fallen idol. And then there’s that living statue.
Feminists and others may cringe at the supreme sacrifice Tansy is willing to make for her husband.
Wyngarde was a ghost in the Henry James-based The Innocents (1961) and an alien gestapo chief in the comic strip-based Flash Gordon (1980). Another college wife is Margaret Johnston, later in the serial-killer drama The Psychopath (1966), which should be better known. Anthony Nicholls, who portrays a rival professor, was a neighbor in the creepy-child thriller Our Mother’s House (1967) and was spymaster to a trio of superhero super-secret agents in the TV series The Champions (1968-9). His college wife (“a middle-aged Medusa”) is played by Kathleen Byron, who had roles in three Powell-Pressburger classics: the girlfriend of a wounded veteran in The Small Back Room, a homicidal nun in Black Narcissus, and an angel in Stairway to Heaven. She was a vampire’s aunt in one of the better latter-day Hammer Film horrors, Twins of Evil (1971).
If TCM runs the U.S. version (distributed by American International Pictures) of Burn, Witch, Burn, it will be introduced in total darkness by voice actor Paul “Boris Badunov” Frees, who adjures “all evil spirits” from the theater. As another promotional ploy, American theatergoers were given packets of salt and an accompanying protective incantation.
Twilight Zone pros Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont cowrote the BWB script. Their plot entails some genuinely toe-curling scares and a nice twist ending.
Composer William Alwyn’s pulsating score drives the action.
Director Sidney Hayers made Circus of Horrors (1960) and a favorite Canadian “Western,” The Trap (1966), starring Oliver Reed and Rita Tushingham.
Hayers and two of the producers, Albert Fennell and Julian Wintle, collaborated on Patrick Macnee’s spy show The Avengers.
BWB is based on the 1943 novel Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber Jr., previously made as Weird Woman (1944), one of six thrillers in Lon Chaney Jr.’s Inner Sanctum series (1943-45). The story was adapted yet again as Witches’ Brew (1980), a comedy starring Teri Garr, Richard Benjamin, and Lana Turner (in her final feature).
“Conjure Wife and its [first two] cinematic iterations use witchcraft as a metaphor for female empowerment….” — Meghan Purvis, in The Politics of Horror
“Structured with [the writers’] incredible symmetry and tightness…. Hayers too shoots the whole thing with an almost Wellesian flourish, extracting the maximum effect from every scene…. A kind of strange amalgamation of Rosemary’s Baby and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — David Pirie
“Builds to shattering suspense [and a] genuinely frightening climax.” — Leonard Maltin
“Simply as a suspense yarn, blending lurid conjecture and brisk reality, growing chillier by the minute, and finally whipping up and ice-cold crescendo of fright, the result is admirable.” – Howard Thompson, The New York Times
“A subtle study of one more way in which men fear the powers of women.” – Leonard Wolf
“A basically chilling occult movie is spoiled by a too-verbose and over-melodramatic script.” – Alan Frank
“Goes to show what can happen in a community that fails to pay its teachers a living wage.” – Time magazine
I mentioned strange scheduling above. It would also seem to have made more sense for the programmers to bunch The Seventh Victim with the other three Val Lewton-produced films above. But it’s worth the wait.
OCT. 31 
“I’ve been quiet, oh, ever so quiet. I hardly move, yet it keeps coming all the time, closer and closer. I rest and rest, and yet I am dying.” – Elizabeth Russell as Mimi
Satanists in Greenwich Village!
This picture was cowritten by the celebrated Lewton; his write-hand man, DeWitt Bodeen; and Charles O’Neal (Ryan’s father).
It marked the directorial debut of film editor Mark Robson (who later supervised Lewton’s The Ghost Ship, Isle of the Dead, and Bedlam) and the screen-acting debut of Kim Hunter (Zira in the original Planet of the Apes franchise) as Mary Gibson. Hugh Beaumont plays the romantic interest, lawyer Gregory Ward; Beaumont later portrayed another Ward – Ward Cleaver, the Beaver’s dad.
One scene apparently inspired the most famous sequence in Hitchcock’s Psycho. (Lewton had worked as a story editor on Hitch’s Rebecca. The two men knew each other; the Hitchcocks and the Lewtons dined together on a number of occasions.) Another scene was copied by Carol Reed in The Third Man. Italy’s premier horror director, Dario Argento, has declared himself a fan of Lewton, and it is easy to see the connection between The Seventh Victim and Argento’s Suspiria.
Author Greg Mank says at least five of the female characters in The Seventh Victim are inferred to be lesbians. Mank and other writers wonder if the influence of Lewton’s aunt, the silent-era star Alla Nazimova, might be somehow linked to this element in the scripts of both his Seventh Victim and Cat People. Val Lewton Jr. believed that his father based the Seventh Victim’s title character (played by Jean Brooks, at the time wife of future Oscar-winning screenwriter Richard) on Nazimova.
“Lewton’s masterpiece may well be The Seventh Victim…. Rarely has a film succeeded so well in capturing the nocturnal menace of a large city, the terror underneath the everyday, the suggestion of hidden evil.” – Carlos Clarens
“Innocent Mary’s quest for her own sinister mirror image, embodied by her missing sister, is a chthonic journey through a bleak New York plangent with despair, a Gotham populated by the damned.” – Nikolas Schreck
“The film has a haunting, lyrical, overwhelming sense of melancholy and despair to it – death is looked upon as a sweet release from the oppression of a cold, meaningless existence…. Without a doubt the bleakest ending to any film ever made in Hollywood.” – The Movie Guide, edited by James Monaco
“Unusually eloquent in its vision of life as a meaningless, pitiful process of consumption.” – Joel E. Siegel
“The Seventh Victim isn’t quite well directed enough to be called a masterpiece. But almost.” – Phil Hardy
“Maybe it isn’t essential that a plain horror picture make sense but at least the patron is entitled to know what the heck is going on.... We have no more notion what The Seventh Victim … is about than if we had watched the same picture run backward and upside down.” – Bosley Crowther in The New York Times
TOBY DAMMIT (1968)
This is the third and best segment of the Poe portmanteau Histoires extraordinaires (Spirits of the Dead), loosely adapted from three E.A.P. short stories. The episode – released on disc separately from the other two in 2020 – stars Terence Stamp (1938-2025) as an alcoholic Shakespearean actor visiting Rome to play Christ in a Vatican-sponsored Western. “Blasphemy, almost…,” a priest/producer tells Toby through an interpreter, adding that the film is to be “a cross between the work of Carl Dreyer† and Pasolini, with a touch of John Ford.”
The demonic little blonde girl in this story was reportedly inspired by the wraith in Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby … Kill (1966; the original title is Operazione paura, or Operation Fear).
There is very little of Poe in the movie; the contemporized 1968 iteration trades feet for Ferrari.
Biographer Chris Wiegand points out, “As a youth [Fellini] wanted to look like the brooding author…. He would later confess that he didn’t read Poe’s original story until after the film was completed.”
To this day, thousands of directors and F/X experts worldwide must be attempting to figure out how Fellini – love him or hate him – achieved images like the ones here without the aid of CGI. For example, as Toby is chauffeured from the Rome airport along hazy streets, one moment we see a truckload of beef carcasses, and the next moment the camera pans to a large store whose interior is entirely made of a thousand different light fixtures and lamps.
This was the first of six Fellini pictures scripted or co-scripted by Bernardino Zapponi, who admitted, “By the time we finished, nothing was left [of Poe] except for the title and the ending.” In the giallo realm, Zapponi cowrote Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975).
Criterion released a digital restoration of Toby Dammit in 2020, as part of a boxed set called Essential Fellini.
Two egregious errors mar the opening credits (which, I assume, haven’t been repaired). They read, “liberally adapted from Edgar A. POE’s novel, ‘Don’t wager your head to the Devil.’” First, it’s a short story, not a novel. Second, the title is “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” Perhaps the title as given on-screen is a translation from the Italian title that no one bothered to double-check?
The other two segments of Spirits of the Dead are Metzengerstein, directed by Roger Vadim (and starring Jane and Peter Fonda), and William Wilson, directed by Louis Malle (w. Alain Delon and Brigitte Bardot).
_____
† You can view Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) at 7 a.m. on Nov. 1.
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Toby is “a tortured aesthete whose ideals – represented, perhaps, by the apparent youth and purity of the girl – have long since been corrupted by immersion in an empty world of wealth and pleasure. Religion, art, love, are all subsumed to commerce….” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made, by Kim Newman and James Marriott
The film reflects “the growing influence of dreams and psychoanalysis upon Fellini, most particularly the theories of Jung. Fellini’s interest in dream imagery would continue for the rest of his career.” – Peter Bondanella
“This … is the monochrome jet-set satire of Fellini’s La dolce vita curdled into the hues of a sickly, psychedelic nightmare…. The film represents a perfect fusion of Fellini’s trademark grotesquerie with Poe’s own.” – Jonathan Rigby
“Have you seen Fellini’s sketch in Spirits of the Dead? It’s fantastic, truly wonderful. This is what I like about cinema: one thing grabs your attention, then a second, and suddenly magic is in the making.” – Roman Polanski, speaking to interviewers (1969)
“The idea of having three interesting European directors each adapt a Poe short story to the screen is great, but the results are mixed. ‘Toby Dammit’ … by Fellini is brilliant. Even if you’re not a Fellini fan and think his films are overlong nonsense, his segment is great.” – Michael Weldon
Re: Spirits of the Dead: “One of those club sandwich movies much-loved by European movie-makers and audiences and not, as a rule, highly regarded here.... It is … worth biting all the way through, for on the bottom is a thick, salty slice of Federico Fellini’s best grade of prosciutto – elegant ham.” – Richard Schickel in Life magazine
MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)
Pre-Code in all its glory! For example, MotWM has references to drug addiction that could not be so explicit after the Hays office tightened censorship in 1934. The word “junkie,” proscribed under the Production Code, is used several times; a woman dies of an overdose of the opium derivative laudanum.
And actress Glenda Farrell, as a reporter, tosses off the best zingers (complete with clang associations): “[He] thinks a hangover is a Jewish holiday.” “He can look like a gorilla and have the manners of an Igorote, but he’s got to have dough – plenty of dough.” “You can go to some nice, warm place. And I don’t mean California.”
Comic standby Frank McHugh is her editor.
Disabled sculptor and museum owner Lionel Atwill adores Fay Wray and wants to put her on a pedestal (permanently).
As critic James Monaco points out, this was “one of the first horror films to be set in the everyday reality of modern-day New York and not in a mystical foreign land.”
The plot requires a stretch of logic, since the chief villain practically throws himself into the electric chair by broadcasting his scheme to other characters.
The expressionist-influenced movie was directed by Budapest-born Michael Curtiz – who later gave the world The Adventures of Robin Hood, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and Casablanca – and was made in early two-color Technicolor (shades of blue-green and red-orange).
Armenian American Arthur Edmund Carewe’s performance is exceptional. The actor is the undercover cop in Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, a relative of the deceased in Paul Leni’s silent The Cat and the Canary, and a murder suspect in Curtiz’s Doctor X.
Gavin Gordon, who portrayed the trilling Lord Byron in the prologue to The Bride of Frankenstein (1935; running later on Halloween), costars in MotWM. In the 1933 picture, actor Edwin Maxwell takes a fall worthy of James Cagney’s in The Public Enemy two years earlier.
Observe how the mise-en-scène in the opening sequence makes it appear that the man, as well as the building, is on fire. Art director Anton Grot worked on Doctor X and Warner Bros.’ 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The script was based on an unpublished story – or play; sources vary – by Charles S. Belden, later a screenwriter for Charlie Chan at the Opera (starring Karloff) and three other Chan mysteries.
The movie was remade two decades later, in 3D, as House of Wax, starring Vincent Price (and to be screened later on this date).
“Never achieves anything but a wax-like imitation of horror.” – The New York Evening Post (1933)
“Still an interesting and often impressive film; a relative classic, if not a consummate one.” – William K. Everson
“There’s a slightly cruel, almost fascist streak throughout, especially in the police’s handling of things, and the shocks are a little sparse by present standards. But it holds up amazingly well, and its pale, shimmering images linger in the mind.” – Time Out
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931)
This adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson, starring Fredric March, is textbook pre-Code.
Author Thomas Doherty describes the scene after Jekyll meets Ivy (Miriam Hopkins), a Soho music hall performer: “In her room, on her bed, she lifts her dress and bares her thigh. Jekyll watches as she bends over, exposes her bosom, and pulls off her garters and stockings. The next shot finds her under the covers with nothing on but a come-hither look. She kisses the good doctor but a comrade interrupts her as-yet social intercourse. ‘Come back,’ she whispers. Walking the street again, Jekyll cannot shake the memory of her leg, swaying temptingly on the bed…”
Author/TV production manager Richard J. Anobile wrote in 1975, “This is probably the most famous scene in the film and despite its age still exudes a sensuality lost today despite our preoccupation with screen sex.”
In Stevenson’s novella, the narrator tells Jekyll, “if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend [Hyde].” The movie’s seamless and still awe-inspiring transformation of man to monster was made possible by means of an innovation of cinematographer Karl Struss that entailed graduated red and green filters in front of the lens, along with carefully applied red makeup and dimming red lights. (Struss photographed five Tarzan flicks, Island of Lost Souls, The Fly, and other horrors.)
March netted an Academy Award. The Oscar-nominated Jekyll script was written by poet-composer Samuel Hoffenstein and journeyman Percy Heath.
Director Rouben Mamoulian piloted Garbo’s Queen Christina and Tyrone Power’s The Mark of Zorro.
“Mamoulian’s version stoutly defends the healthy normality of sex.... Still by far the best film of the story.” – Phil Hardy (1986)
“March’s Jekyll and Hyde was the first characterization in the genre to overtly meld eroticism and menace, opening the door for a horde of sexually repressed madmen.” – Mark Clark
“[Makes] Frankenstein seem genteel by comparison.” – Raymond Valinoti Jr.
“Mamoulian’s film has all the chiaroscuro elegance of Victorian engravings.” – Carlos Clarens
“The well-known story is inevitably, but not outrageously, embellished, the atmosphere of time and place is caught sufficiently well not to jolt our suspension of disbelief.” – Ivan Butler
“Hyde arouses the liberal audience’s worst fears about class consciousness. Rather than allowing Jekyll to experience a new sense of community and social awareness, Hyde forces Jekyll to perform criminal, even primitive, acts already associated with proletarian culture.” – Annalee Newitz
“Mamoulian’s physical and visual pacing seems a trifle too rapid; pans and other camera movements are sometimes so swift that one feels like a tourist in an art museum, being rushed around by the guide from one exhibit to another.” – William K. Everson in Castle of Frankenstein magazine
“As a prototype for Hyde, I didn’t take a monster, but our common ancestor, the Neanderthal man. Mr. Hyde is not a monster but a primeval man – closest to the Earth, the soil.” – Rouben Mamoulian
Another “mystery of the wax museum”: Why is TCM not screening the remake House of Wax right after the 1933 original, rather than sticking 1931’s Jekyll/Hyde between the two?
HOUSE OF WAX (1953)
“The end will come quickly, my love. There is a pain beyond pain, an agony so intense it shocks the mind into instant beauty. We will find immortality together.”
As Victoria Price writes in a biography of her father, Vincent, this movie marked his “first role in a pure example of the horror genre.”
The 3D, stereophonic remake of Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) trades the original’s contemporary New York setting for a late-19th-century one. Price (as injured artist Jarrod) joins costars Phyllis Kirk (Nora Charles on the 1957-59 TV series The Thin Man), Carolyn “Morticia” Jones, and Charles Bronson. The latter plays Price’s mute lackey, aptly named Igor. (In the 1933 original, Lionel Atwill’s antagonist was surnamed Igor.)
Price’s nemesis is Roy Roberts (later the cruise ship captain on The Gale Storm Show). The director was André de Toth.
Scripter Crane Wilbur also wrote The Mad Magician and directed and adapted 1959’s The Bat, both starring Price. The Bat, which I’ve never seen, will follow.
“Till now, we have had only mental and emotional contact with you, the audience. Now we have physical contact. Not only can we reach out and touch you, but we will be able to reach your nerve centers through your eyes – give your stomach butterflies, make you recoil, set your ticker pumping!” – de Toth, speaking of 3D in an interview with the Los Angeles Times during the making of House of Wax
“Put into question is the disputed margin between pornography and artistic representation.” – Parker Tyler in The New Republic magazine (1953)
“Contemporary critics criticized the film for its eroticized violence, but such dismissals encouraged a curious public to make the film a major success.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made, by Kim Newman and James Marriott
“As the barker describes Jarrod’s wax museum, House of Wax is full of ‘thrills, chills, and laughter.’ Plus sex.” – Danny Peary
“One of the most feminist of horror films, with Phyllis Kirk as the strong female hero who struggles against male condescension.” – Dennis Fischer
“Quite lively in places. Its success helped to make Vincent Price synonymous with the horror genre.” – Howard Maxford
“The critical consensus was that this was 3-D’s finest hour.” – Jerry Vermilye
“A synthetic spine-chiller.” – the (New York) Daily News
“Its capacity to scare anyone but the hopelessly credulous is open to serious question, and its capacity to interest without scaring is even more negligible. Consequently, for adults its bag of technical tricks remains just that.” – Moira Walsh, America magazine
“Artistically, … it is just a waxen replica” of the 1933 picture. – David J. Hogan
“House of Wax has, I think, set the movies back about forty-nine years. It could have set them back further if there had been anything earlier to set them back to.” – John McCarten in The New Yorker
Phyllis Kirk “was as flat-chested as a marble table-top when I interviewed her. Then on the first day of shooting she appeared with some Mae West-ish bulges. I asked her to shed the kapok. Indignantly she persisted it was all real. I asked Wardrobe to give me a stick pin.... During subsequent rehearsal I stuck the pin in the bulge. She never noticed it.... I explained to her and the cast and crew, she had talent, and no kapok was needed to augment it.” – de Toth again, interviewed in Fangoria magazine [Balanced coverage: Kirk denied that this incident ever happened, except for the “she had talent” part.]
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Trivia time: Hungarian-born de Toth had lost his left eye in an accident as a youth and wore an eye patch. So the director of the premier 3D motion picture of the ’50s had no depth perception and could not see in three dimensions. “Beethoven couldn’t hear music either, could he?” de Toth told Time magazine.
Bonus video: Follow the link below to a newsreel of the L.A. premiere, accompanied by an excerpt from the rousing musical score. How many celebrities, movie moguls, and future presidents and first ladies can you ID in this 2:14 vid? I’ll give you a head start: The 7-foot-plus dude is Lock Martin, whom we loved as Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still and as one of the title characters in Invaders From Mars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wORRPbl10ow
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In May, NBCUniversal opened Epic Universe theme park in Orlando, a segment of which is the classic-monster-themed Dark Universe. But who needs to go to Florida to view high-tech animated monsters when you can see the real deal right in the comfort of your own home? Here’s a marathon of five of Universal Pictures’ early classics, starting and ending with movies directed by James Whale:
THE INVISIBLE MAN (1933)
“We’ll begin with a reign of terror. A few murders here and there. Murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction.”
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“Power, I said! Power to walk into the gold vaults of the nations, into the secrets of kings, into the Holy of Holies; power to make multitudes run squealing in terror at the touch of my little invisible finger. Even the moon’s frightened of me, frightened to death! The whole world’s frightened to death.”
Based, needless to say, on H.G. Wells, but also partly based on Philip Wylie’s The Murderer Invisible. Claude Rains and Gloria “Titanic” Stuart star. (London-born Rains got the part after Karloff turned it down; it was his first Hollywood role.)
Look fast for Walter Brennan, John Carradine, and Dwight Frye.
Screenplay writer R.C. Sherriff worked on Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (coming up later on this unholy-day) and The Old Dark House; Dracula’s Daughter; and The Dam Busters (1955), a U.K. World War II drama whose climactic aerial scenes inspired Star Wars.
(Preston Sturges, later a famed directorial king of comedy at Paramount Pictures, had written a wild script for The Invisible Man that involved the Russian Revolution. His draft was rejected, and Universal fired Sturges. One door closes, another opens ...)
“[A] very English film full of Whale’s idiosyncratic humour.” — John Brosnan
“Strong in plot and atmosphere, masterly in trick photography … powerful fantasy … [with] offbeat humour.” — Peter John Dyer
“This eerie tale evidently afforded a Roman holiday for the camera aces.” —Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times (1933)
“Not only is the show a technical tour de force, The Invisible Man also contains some of the best dialogue ever written for a fantastic film.... There are flashes of the offbeat humor so dear to Whale.” — Carlos Clarens
“Arguably the best H.G. Wells adaptation on film.” — John Brunas
“Surprisingly, the film’s pacing is lethargic and the plot spends too much time on upset citizenry and snoopy police stalking the wilderness for their invisible man. The film’s tone is goofy, quaint and comical when the film needs to be suspenseful, spooky and dark.” – Midnight Marquee magazine
DRACULA (1931)
“I never drink … wine.” ‡
Stage-bound cinematography. Check. Antiquated acting styles. Check. Plot that loses steam after the first quarter of a mere 75-minute running time. Check.
Fully deserving of classic status. Mos def.
The director was Tod Browning, who earlier had worked with Lon Chaney and later helmed Freaks. A contemporary newspaper reporter called Browning “the Edgar Allan Poe of the cinema.”
The cinematographer was Karl Freund, who had labored on F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and later became director of photography for I Love Lucy. By some accounts, Freund deserves most of the credit for any virtues Dracula may have. (A rare Freund stint in the director’s chair, Karloff’s The Mummy, succeeds Dracula.)
Bela Lugosi, the voice that launched a thousand impressionists, remains the king of the vampires in the minds of many. He had performed the role on Broadway, and the movie is based on the 1920s theatrical play. Dwight Frye (Renfield), with his patented insane laugh, and Edward Van Sloan (Van Helsing), a performer who had shared the New York stage with Lugosi, are the other main attractions. David “Who Remembers Him Now?” David Manners is Harker; he was the juvenile lead in Karloff’s The Mummy; in the first Boris-Bela vehicle, The Black Cat; and in 1932’s The Death Kiss, which is footnoted in horror history for a cast that includes Lugosi and Van Sloan.
“With Dracula, American cinema stumbled upon a way to depict life on the absolute edge, one step from the abyss. The horror genre became a means of addressing ultimate moral concerns and subjects: heaven, hell, redemption, damnation, good, evil — and also blackness, emptiness, a malevolent universe, the existential void.” — Mick LaSalle
“Browning was not stupid. He knew that Dracula was about eroticism and sex elements that always spelled big box office. He also saw the opportunity to portray these elements in a story that was atypical of the American horror cinema up to that time, for in most such films, the supernatural ingredients were typically used as a bogus mask for some mystery or comedy plot and were explained away at the conclusion. The monsters were never ‘the real thing.’” — John McCarty
“For all its weakness, the film had, and still retains, a certain gothic grandeur altogether missing – in fact not even attempted – in later versions.” – Ivan Butler, an English playwright and actor who as a teen in the 1920s portrayed protagonist Lord Godalming in touring stage productions of Dracula
“The film is all mood and menace, with a seductive Lugosi etching an unforgettable antihero. Creaky and overly theatrical by today’s standards, the film nevertheless remains a motion-picture milestone.” — The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“The script collapses at the end, unlike the book, because of the arbitrary ‘B’ picture length. The acting, too, is ‘B’ picture standard; only Edward Van Sloan’s Dutch professor stands up to Lugosi with any power.” — Peter John Dyer of the British Film Institute, writing in Castle of Frankenstein magazine
“When I was playing Dracula on the stage, my audiences were women. Women.... In order to establish a subtle sex intimacy. Contact.… [Women c]ame – and they knew an ecstasy dragged from the depths of unspeakable things. Came – and then came back again. And again.” – Bela Lugosi, quoted in Motion Picture Magazine (1931) [Bela biographer Arthur Lennig adds: “One wonders, of course, how many of the foregoing effusions were produced by the female interviewer’s imagination.”]
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‡As The Village Voice’s William Paul noted, “(the three dots are hardly sufficient to describe the length of the pause here).”
THE MUMMY (1932)
“Don’t kill me! I’m a priestess of Isis. Save me from that mummy! It’s dead! Save me!” – Zita Johann to Noble Johnson
In 1932, revivified Boris Karloff seeks his reincarnated lover of 3,700 years ago. Object: mummification.
His character, Imhotep, is named after an ancient architect and high priest.
This is one of the few films directed by future Oscar-winning cinematographer Karl Freund.
Edward Van Sloan, who’s in the casts of Universal’s Frankenstein (which follows), Dracula (as mentioned), and Dracula’s Daughter, portrays an Egyptologist in this outing.
The Mummy’s plot has often been compared to the 1931 Dracula’s. In Films in Review magazine, Richard J. Schmidt wrote that The Mummy “has enough in common with Dracula to qualify as a remake.” John L. Balderston had Americanized the London stage play on which Lugosi’s Dracula was based, and he totally revised an earlier script for The Mummy. (Balderston collaborated as well on the decade’s classics Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein [a later Halloween treat on TCM], and Mad Love, and on 1944’s Gaslight.)
In Karloff’s first scene, he was reportedly wrapped in 150 yards of linen. Makeup ace Jack Pierce, who created the looks of all Universal’s iconic monsters from the early ’30s through the mid-’40s, was proudest of his work on Karloff here.
“Eschewing the lurid and the blatantly sensational, the picture modulates its chill elements with exquisite refinement.” – Universal Horrors by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas
“Karl Freund’s direction provides an evil, enchanted vision for The Mummy – as if we are looking at the film through the eyes of a King Cobra.” – Gregory William Mank
“Egypt in this film is not just a land of remote and incomprehensible history but also a present-day source of overwhelming and mysterious exoticism and eroticism, making it a perfect site for [the heroine] to succumb and transgress: such yielding to temptation proving an essential ingredient of classic horror of the 1930s.” – Basil Glynn in The Mummy on Screen
“Poetic horror and truly one of the greatest, most original fantasy films of all time.” – Bryan Senn
“The closest that Hollywood ever came to creating a poem out of horror.” – William K. Everson
“Karloff wraps himself up in the part … No tricks, just a true cinematic treat.” –Rex Reed
“Dull and ponderous, distinguished chiefly by the exemplary discretion of Karloff’s performance.” – Phil Hardy
Trivia time: British actor Bramwell Fletcher (Svengali; The Undying Monster), who plays assistant archaeologist Ralph Norton, was married to Helen Chandler – who had the female lead role (Mina) in Lugosi’s Dracula – from 1935 to 1940. In The Mummy, Norton sees the living corpse, goes mad, and utters the immortal line: “He went for a little walk! You should have seen his face!” (It’s all in the delivery.)
FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
Reviewed earlier this month.
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935)
“We belong dead.”
Director James Whale’s follow-up to his Frankenstein (1931) is an example of the sequel outstripping the original. And Boris Karloff talks in this one!
At the movie’s outset, a little retcon shows us that the monster didn’t really perish in the 1931 picture, as everyone thought. He’s up and at ’em again, and looking for love, with the aid of a reluctant Baron Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, reprising his role) and the eager, Uber-weird Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger). Author David Gillota, in his Dead Funny: The Humor of American Horror, finds a wealth of double entendres in the two men’s conversation about Pretorius’s homunculi.
The bona fide bride of Frankenstein, Baroness Elizabeth F., is portrayed by 17-year-old Valerie Hobson of Northern Ireland. In 1935, she also appeared in Universal’s Werewolf of London.
Franz Waxman’s stirring score was recycled in Universal serials and elsewhere.
“This is a pompous, badly acted film, full of absurd anachronisms and inconsistencies. It owes its one moment of excitement … to the strange electric beauty of Miss Elsa Lanchester.” — Graham Greene (1935)
“Some movies age; others ripen. Seen today, Whale’s masterpiece is more surprising than when it was made, because today’s audiences are more alert to its buried hints of homosexuality, necrophilia and sacrilege.” — Roger Ebert
“The grim parallel with the life of Christ is not accidental; much of the film’s cleverness lies in Whale’s impudent religious symbolism.” — David J. Hogan
“Probably … the best of the entire manmade monster genre from any period.” — William K. Everson (1974)
“The brilliant screenplay is as vibrant with language as it is with action.” — Leonard Wolf
“One of the silver screen’s most fondly regarded horror movies, this splendid sequel to Frankenstein offers an excellent blend of black humour and thrills, and shows all concerned in top form.” — Howard Maxford
“Whale apparently decided to make Bride of Frankenstein Universal’s most ghoulish horror film, also its funniest and psychologically most endearing.” – Ethan Mordden
“Whale manages to elicit both terror and pathos by means of a camp rendition of the ceremonies of birth and marriage.” — Alberto Manguel
“A baroque exercise in the fantastic that periodically succeeds in parodying itself.” — Carlos Clarens
“Whale manages to walk a tightrope between poetic intensity and parody that finally succeeds magnificently.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made, by Kim Newman and James Marriott
“While this is a major genre film, it is by no means the classic it is claimed to be. By infusing the movie with his own quirky sense of humour, Whale undermines the horror to its detriment.” — Alan G. Frank
Trivia time: Elsa Lanchester’s Bride’s finger-wave bouffant (with highlights) was inspired by the Nefertiti Bust. The actress explained how the effect was done: “They placed a cage on my head and combed my own hair over this cage.” Stephen King wrote that she looked “like a latter-day Studio 54 disco queen.” Lanchester’s hisssssss near the end was inspired by a startled swan she once spotted in Regent’s Park.
NOV. 1
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)
Words fail me one last time:
“We know we’re going to die, right? So we’re the living dead.” – George A. Romero (1940-2017)
“No horror movie seemed to take on racism with as much visceral force, until … ‘Get Out.’ And Mr. Romero’s movie is even bleaker.” – Jason Zinoman in The New York Times (2017)
“I hinted [in a Critics’ Pick video] that the Jones character’s death could be read as a prophecy of Barack Obama’s presidency: a calm and competent African-American saves the white people from their own rashness and stupidity (as well as from zombies) and is destroyed. Now, of course, the prophecy seems all the more chilling. The casual, unapologetic and ultimately self-destructive violence of white supremacy is the true and enduring horror of American life.” – A.O. Scott in The New York Times (2017)
“The real subject of the film … is obviously not the undead, but racism.” – Cahiers du Cinéma
“If future generations want to get some sense of what the traumatic sixties – and particularly 1968 – were like, they need look no further than” Night of the Living Dead. – John McCarty
“The documentary-style footage of rural death squads executing these undead communes that the director slices into the fiction here effectively conveys the pervasive impact of verité violence for an American generation watching Vietnam and race-riot footage unwind on a nightly basis at the time of the film’s release.” – Xavier Mendik in the book 100 Cult Films
“The picture is cinema’s ultimate expression of the cynicism and hopelessness that deadened our hearts and minds in the Vietnam era. Values stand for nothing. Bravery, self-sacrifice, even love and motherhood are steamrollered.... The beast is in us all.” – David J. Hogan
“Romero’s N of TLD asset … is that his ghoulish terrors personify the oppression and persecution normally felt by all except by the most insensitive.... The first time that the genre’s had a black man for a hero!” – Calvin T. Beck, editor/publisher of Castle of Frankenstein magazine
“I convinced George that the black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way.” – Duane Jones, African American star
“The real horror of Night of the Living Dead is that there is nothing we can do that will make any difference at all.” – poet R.H.W. Dillard
“The tension is relentless: there are no romantic sub-plots or humourous interludes, only a growing sense of helplessness and claustrophobia.” – Peter Dendle
“The film’s power lies in the way the basic plot … is carried through to its conclusion with ruthless logic and subtle irony, on the way deflating every cliché it throws up.” – Phil Hardy
“There are no ‘explanations,’ just as there are no ‘solutions.’… Instead, Romero concentrates on action and atmosphere, graphically delineating what horror can actually mean, and here it means your worst fears, the most terrifying and insane events imaginable …” – Mark Spainhower
“You hear your mouth trying to laugh and scream at the same time, and that is Romero’s remarkable achievement.” – Stephen King
“The grainy film stock feels as old as death itself.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“One of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made – and when you leave the theater you may wish you could forget the whole horrible experience.... The film’s grainy, banal seriousness works for it, gives it a crude realism.” – Pauline Kael
“Crude, derivative, and one of the best horror films ever produced.” – The Village Voice
“Zombies are the real lower-class citizens of the monster world, and that’s why I like them.” – Romero
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SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER VIEWING:
⏺Birth of the Living Dead (2013) – This documentary on the making of the cult classic of course deals with America’s political milieu in 1967-68 – the Vietnam War, racial unrest. We learn that one of Romero’s first moviemaking jobs was directing short films for Pittsburgh-based Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He made commercials for local beer brands, too. Duane Jones’s NotLD role as Ben is compared with the oeuvre of Sidney Poitier and with blaxploitation flicks. Interviewees include Walking Dead producer Gale Anne Hurd and critics Elvis Mitchell and Jason Zinoman. We hear from elementary school students in the Bronx who are in a class called Literacy Through Film.
⏺Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated (2009) – More than 100 artists from around the globe reimagine B&W scenes from the 1968 classic, laid over the 96-minute soundtrack of the original. The art ranges from the realistic to the abstract to the bizarre: limited animation, clay animation, collage, video game CG (both new and antique styles), hand puppets, Rotoscoping (and other artistic fiddling with clips from Romero’s feature), Legos, dolls of the Barbie and Ken ilk, and some critters that appear to be reconstructed Mogwai toys. Producer/director Mike Schneider has said he was striving for the feel of an art museum.
CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)
Reviewed earlier this month.
HOUSE (1977; a.k.a. Hausu)
“It’s unscientific, unexplainable, unnatural, unreasonable. It doesn’t make sense.”
I’ve seen more than 200 Japanese motion pictures. (Yes, I counted.) ††
Director Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s House is definitely among the top five on the weirdness scale. Jay McRoy, a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Japanese Horror Films, says Ôbayashi (1938-2020) got ideas from his adolescent daughter, who “contributed several flights of fancy as well as a few of her deepest fears.”
In part, this reads like a children’s movie, with its use of animation and all manner of camera tricks, its jaunty score, and its fluffy Persian cat named Blanche.
Gorgeous, an adolescent who perpetually applies makeup, is indignant that her widowed father (a composer who scores Italian gialli thrillers) intends to remarry. In rebellion, she leaves home, bound for the abode of her aunt (the deceased mother’s sibling), whom she hasn’t seen in 10 years. Gorgeous invites six school friends ─ Fantasy, Kung Fu, Mac (Makku, as in McDonald’s; she’s the eater of the bunch), Melody, Prof (the one with the eyeglasses), and Sweet ─ to join her.
This fairy tale does Hansel and Gretel one better. Here, the house itself devours the children, avoiding the middleman ─ or middlewitch.
“[House is] a rigorously consistent oedipal drama … an uncanny mixture of comedy and horror, of gags and beautifully photographed spectral imagery and demonstrates how crude and pathologically ‘male’ Western fantasies [such as 1976’s Carrie] about girls’ sexual maturation can be.” ─ Phil Hardy
“The tension in the film is between the dry, sexual graveyard that the aunt inhabits and the nascent sexuality of [Gorgeous] and her friends.... One of the most original horror films of the 1970s.” ─ Mondo Macabro: Weird & Wonderful Cinema Around the World by Pete Tombs
“Obayashi’s debut feature has been described as resembling Beetlejuice (1988), as directed by Dario Argento. It could also be Suspiria remade by the Monkees or an episode of Rentaghost directed by Takashi Miike.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made, by Kim Newman and James Marriott
“You, my friend, lover that you are of the obscure, the grotesque, the inscrutable, and the just flat-out funky and awe-inspiringly eccentric, have never, ever seen anything like House (aka Hausu).” – Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle
†† I’ve made an ongoing alphabetical list of every Japanese feature that I can recall watching, which I continually update. The final tally reaches across all fictional genres: historical drama, samurai, contemporary drama, comedy, anime, horror, science fiction, giant monster, normal-size monster.
Trivia time: Ôbayashi’s day job was making TV commercials. Here’s a cologne ad he did in 1976, featuring Charles Bronson and character actor Percy Helton (of Kiss Me Deadly and over 200 other films):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmQTmFizuFY
I want to acknowledge and thank my friend in Osaka, Mitsuyo (“Mitsy”), for her help with this review.
VAMPYR (1932)
This motion picture was made by one of the greatest directors of all time, Danish-born Carl Theodor Dreyer, who gave the world The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath, the silent comedy The Parson’s Widow, and (my own favorite) Ordet.
The script is based on the oft-filmed Carmilla and other stories by Sheridan le Fanu.
When I saw Vampyr for the first time, at a campus theater on a Halloween night during my college days, many people walked out on it. It’s a picture that requires patience. As author David Rudkin points out, the sound and other technical aspects are of poor quality, and the acting by a mostly amateur cast is weak. (The main character is played by the film’s backer, a wealthy baron, under a pseudonym.)
Viewers will get a sense of déjà vu from at least one sequence, involving what might be called a corpse’s-eye view, which has been imitated many times.
“No one denies that Vampyr is a problematic film. For some, it is ‘difficult’: difficult to follow, or to like, or to accept as the work of a master.... The truth is, the film as we currently have it is in a wretched state.” — David Rudkin
“This profoundly beautiful film does not yield its sombre splendors easily or soon. A hasty viewer can fine him- or herself exasperated or baffled or confused by its slow pace or by such primitive matters as who is doing what to whom — and why.... Dreyer has found the filmic means to show how thin is the barrier between the nightmare that we dream and the one we live.” — Leonard Wolf
The scenes “have depth and a simplicity of style which is seldom achieved in the hurried world of the film studio.... But, for all that, it was a peculiarly irritating picture.” – The New York Times (1932)
“Created as it was before the vampire genre developed a more familiar catalog of characters and icons, Vampyr does not conform to the standard expectations of a vampire film.... With its dream-in-dream tone, striking graphics, and disconcerting subjective camera, Vampyr goes beyond fantasy into a world where the fantastic imagines the real.” — The Vampire Film From Nosferatu to True Blood by Alain Silver and James Ursini
“Uniquely beautiful and disturbing.... The entire film is riddled with disjunctive editing, impossible point-of-view shots and seemingly incoherent events…, which make it impossible for the viewer to settle on any particular ‘view’ with any certainty.” — Phil Hardy
“For those coming afresh to Vampyr, the surprises lie in how different it is from its bloodsucking celluloid cousins. Dreyer’s hypnotic visuals hold viewers in their sway from the opening titles to the mesmerizing final frame.” – Charles M. Kline in Hidden Horror: A Celebration of 101 Underrated and Overlooked Fright Flicks
“Even with digital sound, widescreen color, and computer-generated effects, few, if any, filmmakers have approached the intensity of Dreyer’s Vampyr.” – Kingdom of Shadows, a 1998 documentary narrated by Rod Steiger
“The most modern of older fright films, [Vampyr,] with its prowling camera and indistinct connection to reality, is firmly in touch with the mysterious and inexplicable. The theme, as in all of Dreyer’s films, is suffering.” — The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“The entire film is built on atmosphere and on an almost unbreathable sense of evil.” — Carlos Clarens
“As close as you get to a poem on film.” — Guillermo del Toro
“Herman Melville in Moby Dick speaks of the horror of whiteness. Whiteness is one of the results of loss of blood, and Dreyer makes full use of it in his film on the bloodsucking vampire. White buildings, white mist…. Vampyr is a pale film.” — Ivan Butler
THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)
“An intellectual carrot! The mind boggles!”
No, the above line isn’t from the 1960s series Lost in Space. It’s from the original Thing, in which scientists, service members, and a reporter at the North Pole discover a recently crashed spaceship and its vegetable-man, hemovore alien (6-foot-7 James Arness, pre-Gunsmoke).
The scientists include Paul Frees, the future voice of Boris Badunov.
The credited director is Christian Nyby, an editor, but The Thing was actually directed by its producer, Howard Hawks, a master who gave us the original Scarface, Bringing Up Baby (TCM, 8 p.m. Eastern on this date), His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, and other classics. Thing costar Kenneth Tobey said Nyby directed one scene. (Tobey was interviewed for Tom Weaver’s book Attack of the Monster Movie Makers.)
Many observers have pointed out that John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is more faithful to the novella that inspired both films: Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr., longtime editor of Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. But the novella is an exercise in logic rather than an exercise in gore.
Ben Hecht made uncredited contributions to the script, and William Faulkner had a hand in the screenplay as well.
Dimitri Tiomkin’s fine score for the 1950 picture smoothly jumps from martial to Martian.
In the words of the journalist character: “Keep watching the skies!”
“The best science fiction film ever made.” – Michael Crichton
“The furthest beachhead ever established by Germanic horror on the body politic of American technology.” – John Baxter
“A major influence on the work of John Frankenheimer, Ridley Scott, Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter, The Thing From Another World singlehandedly ushered in the era of serious science fiction.... As the first ‘flying saucer’ picture by a respected A-level producer, it legitimized the fledgling, often-derided genre of sci-fi cinema.” – Sloan De Forest
“The real … horror of the situation is not the roaring, bloodthirsty creature itself but the fact that an intellect superior to that of man’s would be even deadlier.” – Carlos Clarens
“Filled with an atmosphere of genuine suspense which at times builds to almost intolerable levels.” – John Brosnan
“A paranoia film. It intends not merely to scare you with shock confrontations and terror scenes, but to send you home with acute xenophobia.” – Science Fiction Studies in Film by Frederik Pohl and Frederik Pohl IV
“A wonderfully paranoid, heart-stopping horror film masquerading as science fiction.” – The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural
“Howard Hawks … left his imprint throughout, not least in the movie’s sly erotic humor.” – The New Yorker (2019)
“The climax cooks. [Hawks’s] directorial influence comes through in the feeling of camaraderie among the group that extends to the lone woman.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“Pseudo-scientific thriller, extremely well produced. In fact, so much so that the more extravagant sequences manage to squeeze some sense of conviction into their basic improbabilities.... One of the biggest gaffes in the production is that the ‘thing’ looks like a cross between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, neither of whom, I would say, could be mistaken for a vegetable.” – Picturegoer magazine (1951)
“Simply stated, we have the sci-fied image of both Dracula (the veggie creature lives on human blood) and Frankenstein (its lumbering, silhouetted image resembling Karloff’s classic creation) coming to Earth via flying saucer, crashing into Arctic ice.” – Midnight Marquee magazine (2011)