TCM Oct 19 Oct 25 2025
CAHIERS DU HOWERY
Oct. 19-25, 2025
Turner Classic Movies has changed the start time for one of the motion pictures on the schedule I emailed at the beginning of the month: Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (The Ghost of Yotsuya) is now set for 4:30 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 20.
I’d also like to flag an engrossing mystery that was not mentioned on the schedule: So Long at the Fair (1950; 4 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 19). It’s not horror, but it was codirected by horror maven Terence Fisher for Gainsborough Pictures.
Time: 1889. Place: the Paris Exposition. British siblings Vicky (Jean Simmons) and Johnny are visiting. Johnny disappears, and Vicky frantically searches, while Parisians who have seen Johnny strangely claim they have not. Costarring Dirk Bogarde and Honor “Goldfinger” Blackman. The only weak point is the ending. (Hitchcock used the same “urban legend” that this plot employs in The Lady Vanishes and in a 1955 TV episode titled “Into Thin Air.”)
Fisher’s Hammer Film work will be showcased on Oct. 20, in an all-day marathon of the studio’s productions, which will include four of the director’s best.
Two now well-known filmmakers moved from the cutting room to the director’s chair thanks to the formidable producer Val Lewton. Earlier, Robert Wise had been assisted by Mark Robson in editing Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Andersons. Their two movies here – the second starring Boris Karloff – will be followed by a fine 2007 TCM documentary on Lewton:
OCT. 19
THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944)
“I come from great darkness and deep peace.”
The RKO motion picture studio ordered Val Lewton to make a sequel to his highly successful Cat People (1942; airing on TCM Oct. 30). But the only commonalities in this film are three characters from its predecessor.
It’s a child-in-peril movie, a well-done portrait of a lonely, introverted little girl with a vivid imagination (she’s the daughter of two of the characters left over from Cat People).
The child is the girl who cried wolf; the tales she tells are not believed by adults. And as in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the audience is left to decide whether the supernatural goings-on are real or imagined.
Robert Wise, who had been editing TCotCP, was appointed to his first credited directorial post after the original director was fired because of tardiness.
This picture’s title, and others, were foisted upon Lewton and company by RKO. The title, according to Wise’s biographer Richard C. Keenan, was a result of audience testing; moviegoers were given a Gallup multiple-choice questionnaire with a list of prospective titles and asked to pick the name of a film they were most likely to go see.
The young heroine is Ann Carter, whose other genre credits were I Married a Witch (as Veronica Lake’s daughter), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and The Boy With Green Hair.
Also in the cast is Sir Lancelot (Lancelot Pinard; b. 1902, d. 2001), a Trinidadian actor-singer who’s in Lewton’s The Ghost Ship and I Walked With a Zombie (which is ahead on TCM Oct. 30) as well.
Wise later helmed Lewton’s 1945 The Body Snatcher (TCM will feature this Boris Karloff vehicle on Oct. 21); The Day the Earth Stood Still; West Side Story; and The Sound of Music. (Best not to mention his Star Trek: The Motionless Picture.)
“Full of the poetry and danger of childhood.” – James Agee
“An atmosphere of gentle fantasy rather than horror.” – Howard Maxford
“As in all good fairy tales, poignancy and beauty walk hand in hand with fear.” – William K. Everson
“It has so much more dignity than the other Hollywood films around that it seems at this moment inordinately wholesome.” – Manny Farber
ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945)
No pun intended! Mainly set on a plague-ridden Greek island in 1912, during the First Balkan War, the Lewton-produced story presents Boris Karloff as a battle-hardened general, and the bugaboo here is an undead creature called a vorvolaka.
The film opens with the general, washing his hands as Pilate did, before compelling a derelict officer to commit suicide.
This thriller was inspired by paintings of the same title by 19th-century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin. (He did several similar versions, which also inspired a Rachmaninoff piece. Böcklin’s work – or facsimiles – can be seen in the opening credits and a matte shot.)
According to author Gregory William Mank, a copy of one of Böcklin’s paintings hung in the upstate New York cottage of Lewton’s aunt, actress Alla Nazimova, and fascinated him as a child.
Director Mark Robson supervised the producer’s Ghost Ship, Bedlam (headlined by Karloff, coming to TCM Oct. 28), and The Seventh Victim (Oct. 31). In the soap opera department, Robson helmed Peyton Place (1957) and Valley of the Dolls (1967).
The Isle cast features Alan Napier (“Alfred” on the Adam West Batman series) and Viennese stage actress Helene Thimig, widow of famed impresario Max Reinhardt. Prague-born Ernst Deutsch (“Ernst Dorian” here), who plays a doctor, had appeared in Der Golem (1920) and would appear in The Third Man (1949).
“Ads promised ‘201 blood-curdling scenes you’ll never tear out of your mind.’” —Michael Weldon
The movie “demonstrated, once again, Lewton’s obsession not only with death but also with the process of dying.” — John Brosnan
“The Lewton technique of suggesting terror through continual sustained mood, instead of the more direct and commercial jolting-shock approach, is especially overpowering in Isle.” – Calvin T. Beck
“Much of the film is shot at night and focuses on the still branches of trees and shrubs, stony pathways that lead past the crypt.... Karloff’s craggy and shadowy face echoes the island’s stark scenery.” – Cynthia Freeland
“A short, quiet picture with a thoroughly sympathetic and effective performance from the star.” – Mike Mayo in Hidden Horror: A Celebration of 101 Underrated and Overlooked Fright Flicks
“It is indeed unfortunate that Isle of the Dead is so dull for most of its length, as the finale ranks with the best moments of horror cinema.” — Dennis Fischer
“Tedious, overloaded, diffuse, and at moments arty, yet in many ways to be respected, up to its last half hour or so; then it becomes as brutally frightening and gratifying a horror movie as I can remember.” — James Agee in The Nation magazine
“More horrible [than] horrific and poor Boris Karloff, who must be pretty tired of this sort of monkey business by now, stumbles through the picture with a vacant, tired stare.” — Thomas M. Pryor in The New York Times
“If you make the screen dark enough, the mind’s eye will read anything into it they want! We’re great ones for dark patches. ... The horror addicts will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of.” — Val Lewton
VAL LEWTON: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS (2007)
This bio is excellent, as are all the other TCM documentaries I’ve seen. The producer/narrator is Martin Scorsese. The film traces the life of Lewton (1904-51) from his family’s immigration to the United States from Russia when he was a lad, to his vocation as an author of racy novels, to his phase as an MGM story editor –when he warned his boss, David O. Selznick, not to option Gone With the Wind – to his true calling as a low-budget-horror producer and uncredited screenwriter of nine unusual thrillers in the 1940s.
Scorsese points out that many of Lewton’s screen characters were “young women receiving quick, brutal educations in the ways of the world.” Among the interviewees are directors Jacques Tourneur and Robert Wise, who both got a leg up from Lewton. Appearing as well are Roger Corman (yet another B picture personage who gave a helping hand to quite a few young moviemakers) and Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure; Pulse). See more Lewton-produced works on Oct. 21, 28, and 30.
GASLIGHT (1944)
Reviewed earlier this month.
THE BIRDS (1963)
“It’s the end of the world.”
“Revolt of nature” horror, par excellence, from Hitchcock.
At a San Francisco pet shop, lawyer Mitch (Rod Taylor) and socialite Melanie (Tippi Hedren) meet by chance, deceive each other, and have a nasty confrontation all within the first few minutes of the movie. (Hitch’s cameo is there, too, and he has two Sealyham terriers in tow.) A natural-born prankster, Melanie trails Mitch up the coast to his family home in Bodega Bay, for the sole purpose of playing a practical joke on him. She meets Mitch’s jealous ex-girlfriend (Suzanne Pleshette), who’s a schoolteacher, and his jealous widowed mother (Jessica Tandy).
But these four, Mitch’s kid sister (Veronica Cartwright of Alien and The X-Files), and other locals find themselves in a peck of trouble, as birds inexplicably begin deadly attacks on human beings.
Hitchcock first spotted Hedren doing a TV commercial for a diet beverage called Sego and decided she was the one for this picture. (You may wonder if the director made a prognostic mental connection between Sego and “seagull,” one of his future birds of prey.)
Try as I might, I cannot determine whether Hedren’s character was named after her real-life daughter, Melanie Griffith (b. 1957).
In small but effective roles are Ruth McDevitt (of Kolchak: The Night Stalker), Richard “Mel Cooley” Deacon, Charles McGraw, and Doodles Weaver. You’ll catch glimpses of child star Suzanne Cupito, better known as Morgan Brittany.
The script was adapted by crime novelist Evan Hunter (a.k.a. Ed McBain). Hitchcock’s inspiration was a 1952 tale by Daphne du Maurier, writer of Jamaica Inn and Rebecca, which he’d already adapted for the screen.
Disney animator Ub Iwerks, cocreator of Mickey Mouse, supervised the postproduction job of blending avian and human footage.
There’s no musical soundtrack per se, only bird noises and atonal sounds produced by a Trautonium, an electronic instrument invented in 1929.
“It was not the first ‘disaster film’ or ‘catastrophe film,’ as has sometimes been suggested, but it did set out the paradigm for every successful one that followed.” – Hitchcock biographer Peter Ackroyd
“Since fantasy is a bubble without a real map and a real compass, the more a work’s realistic structure is strengthened the more shattering will be the impact of fantasy upon the real.” – Carlos Clarens
“It’s really about apocalypse, and the human race’s vanity in thinking that it deserves any better.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“The birds … are a concrete embodiment of the arbitrary and unpredictable, of whatever makes human life and human relationships precarious, a reminder of fragility and instability that cannot be ignored or evaded and, beyond that, of the possibility that life is meaningless and absurd.” – Robin Wood
“One of the most sensible film statements about human sexual affairs yet seen.” David J. Hogan in Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film
“This is perhaps [Hitchcock’s] most brutal film, and one of the cinema’s purest, horrifying portraits of apocalypse.” – VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever
“The only point of interest about The Birds is that it’s by Alfred Hitchcock, who once had a deserved reputation as a master technician. If the director’s name had been, say, Albert Hotchkiss, I should have noted ‘tedious and amateurish … perhaps the most spectacularly untalented newcomer since Allen Baron,’ and let it go at that.” – Dwight Macdonald, Esquire magazine (1963) [Allen Baron directed, cowrote, and starred in the low-budget but now highly regarded 1961 crime drama Blast of Silence. I don’t know who the heck “Albert Hotchkiss” was.]
“Beneath all this elaborate featherbedlam lies a Hitch-cock-and-bull story that’s essentially a fowl ball.... Dramatically, ‘The Birds’ is little more than a shocker-for-shock’s sake. It is a parody of Hitchcock by Hitchcock.” – Variety
My absolute favorite Hitchcock movie, Psycho, is ahead on TCM Oct. 26.
OCT. 20
THE LOST WORLD (1925)
The Mesozoic raison d’être for this flicker is Willis “King Kong” O’Brien’s stop-motion animation. As silent film historian Steve Joyce puts it, O’Brien “choreographed prehistoric beasties on screen like none had ever done before.”
In this adaptation of Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, a newspaper-sponsored expedition, led by professor Challenger, travels from England to the Amazon jungle, ostensibly to search for a missing scientist, but really to prove the professor’s claims that descendants of dinosaurs dwell on a plateau where the scientist was last seen. Challenger – described as “one of the greatest minds in London, with the temper of a gorilla” – has been publicly ridiculed, by media and peers alike, as a hoaxer. But he possesses the scientist’s notebook, with sketches of the prehistoric creatures.
The members of the exploratory party are Challenger; reporter Ed Malone (whom Challenger has previously tried to strangle); big game hunter Sir John Roxton; the missing man’s daughter, Paula White, who’s seen the giant beasts; skeptical professor Summerlee, a coleopterist (i.e., a beetle-maniac); and two servants, Austin and Zambo. After several months and some pretty good nature footage, the group reaches the plateau and its anachronistic monsters. Following numerous misadventures, reptilian royal rumbles, and the eruption of a volcano, they capture – with the aid of members of the Brazilian Geodetic Survey, who sweep in like the cavalry – a brontosaurus that has survived a fall from the plateau and bring it back to London, where it escapes and wreaks havoc.
Author Donald C. Willis calls this “a rough draft for King Kong.” The climactic sequence and others will remind Kong connoisseurs of O’Brien’s 1933 classic. The happy (for the dinosaur) ending of The Lost World prefigures 1961’s Gorgo. O’Brien also worked on the 1960 remake of The Lost World, starring Claude Rains as Challenger.
In the silent, there’s a love triangle subplot, which is underdeveloped, and which ends in a predictable but funny manner.
Future Oscar winner Wallace Beery is Challenger. His character is as irascible in this film as Beery was in real life. The actor abused wife Gloria Swanson, by her own account. On set, he hatefully harassed child stars Jackie Cooper and Mickey Rooney, by their own accounts. And in 1937, Beery, future James Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, and Broccoli’s mob-connected cousin were alleged to have fatally beaten former Three Stooges top banana Ted Healy in a fight at L.A.’s famed Trocadero nightclub.
The lead actress in the century-old silent is native Texan Bessie Love, whose cinematic career spanned nearly seven decades. She moved to England in 1935 and went on to bit roles in Children of the Damned (TCM, Oct. 26), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and (her final screen appearance) David Bowie’s The Hunger (1983).
Lewis Stone may be best known as Andy Hardy’s jurist father in the Mickey Rooney franchise (1937-46). He is a protagonist in Karloff’s Mask of Fu Manchu (1932).
A white actor, Jules Cowles, appears in blackface as a Conan Doyle character, faithful servant Zambo (“Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter!”).
Pro wrestler Bull Montana (Luigi Montagna) is a drooling ape-man adversary on the plateau.
Film historian William K. Everson demeaned director Harry O. Hoyt as “frankly a hack.” (The only other Hoyt directorial effort I’ve seen is his last, Jungle Bride [1933], which may be of some interest to fans of pre-Code naughtiness.) Nepotism alert: The director’s brother, Arthur Hoyt, plays professor Summerlee.
The scenarist was playwright Marion Fairfax, who wrote two scripts – one was dinosaur-less, Joyce says, “in case the animation didn’t pan out.” Her alternate screenplay’s plot involved an encounter with cannibals; you can catch a quick glimpse of one of these natives at about 32:00. (Cowles’s Zambo wears a never-explained sling on his right arm, due to a wound made by the now-lost natives.)
Among the movie crew’s 125 technicians and artisans was Mexican-born Marcel Delgado. When he was an art student working as a grocery clerk, Willis O’Brien hired him as his assistant on The Lost World. Delgado’s miniatures can be seen in King Kong, Son of Kong, The Wizard of Oz, and Raquel Welch’s Fantastic Voyage.
Another key helper was Ralph Hammeras, who later patented his painted glass matte technique. Glass mattes are used as a frugal miniature method to depict vast, elaborate screen backgrounds. Hammeras’s work enhanced O’Brien’s The Black Scorpion (TCM, Oct. 22), Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, and Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra.
If you’ve only viewed the earlier 68-minute version of this silent, then you haven’t really seen it yet. The restored 104-minute version, released in 2017, was pieced together from 11 different prints, some only uncovered in the last 35 years. (Silent film historian Robert K. Klepper says the original picture had a two-hour run time.) The restored version includes a brief prologue by Conan Doyle.
Before you scoff at the primitive animation as compared with today’s CG methods, consider the amount of sweat and craftsmanship involved in moving each intricate part of these rubber, metal-framed models by tiny fractions at 18 to 20 frames per second. And think of how backward CG may look to audiences100 years from now!
“The Lost World … is a good specimen of the picture that takes its own independent path and makes film history.” – Carl Sandburg, who wrote three reviews of the film in the Chicago Daily News in May and June 1925 [So the famed poet and Lincoln biographer wrote movie reviews! WHO KNEW?]
“Mechanically, The Lost World is marvelous; dramatically, not so hot.... [The love story] is stupid, inconclusive and dull.” – playwright/screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood, Life magazine (1925)
“Interesting because it proves that the camera is a liar.” – The New Yorker
TOKAIDO YOTSUYA KAIDAN (1959; a.k.a. The Ghost of Yotsuya)
At the risk of incongruously comparing an Asian work to European oeuvre, I will say this violent ghost story has a Shakespearean body count. Yotsuya is a village, one of the settings.
Director Nobuo Nakagawa’s The Ghost of Yotsuya is based on a kabuki play first staged in the 1820s; it has been adapted for the big screen many times since the silent era.
The plot takes its time in getting into the spirits of things, but they’re worth the wait. The reason for the delay is traditional Japanese story structure.
It’s a samurai tale of revenge for unspeakable acts. Men do the dirty work, while women — or at least the live ones — are pawns and objects of pathos.
In an unusual scene, a ghost appears simultaneously as two separate apparitions inside a room, one malevolent, grasping at a villain, and the other benevolent, ushering the female lead toward a long-hidden truth.
The grisly goings-on end with a pietà of sorts.
In Japanese, horror movies are kaiki eiga, but the Nakagawa picture is more narrowly defined as a kaidan eiga, or ghost movie.
Michael Crandol, in his 2021 book Ghost in the Well: The Hidden History of Horror Films in Japan, says Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is “widely regarded as the pinnacle of kaiki filmmaking.” The picture, he adds, is “generally regarded as the best of the more than thirty screen adaptations of the tale,” and it reflects Nakagawa’s “professed interest in story over spectacle.” The director’s use of “red and green filtered lighting” predates Roger Corman’s and Mario Bava’s similar techniques, Crandol says.
Nakagawa is renowned as well for his 1960 thriller, Jigoku (Hell).
“Nakagawa made this often-told story his own by focusing more on the psychology of the characters, particularly the ruthless, cruel, but somehow human, samurai hero and his fatally abused wife.” – Mark Schilling, author of Nudes! Guns! Ghosts! [The book title comes from the name of a 2012 retrospective of releases from former Japanese studio Shintoho, presented at D.C.’s National Museum of Asian Art and curated by Schilling.]
“Nakagawa fashions a suffocating series of social entrapments before events spiral into still-upsetting body horror and righteous supernatural violence.” – Walter Chaw
“It’s very ‘Japanese’ but filmed in a manner not unlike Hammer’s classic horror films from the same period.” – Stuart Galbraith IV
I want to acknowledge and thank my friend in Osaka, Mitsuyo (“Mitsy”), for her help with this review.
“I like all Hammer films.” – Martin Scorsese, quoted in Film Comment magazine in 1988.
You, too, might like all or at least some of the eight Hammer Film productions shown on this date; I dislike one, which I have not reviewed: The Devil’s Own. (The 1966 release is assuredly not to be confused with the 1997 Harrison Ford-Brad Pitt crime thriller of the same title.)
Star Joan Fontaine purchased the screen rights to the 1960 novel The Devil’s Own, by Norah Lofts, and proposed the movie to Hammer; it was her last big-screen appearance and is coming on TCM at 7:30 a.m. Eastern Oct. 20.
Four of the following motion pictures, including the first, were piloted by a director considered by many fans to have been Hammer’s greatest: Terence Fisher (1904-1980). And he was the company’s most prolific, with 29 of the studio’s productions to his credit.
Hammer – or, as some of us like to call it, Transylvania-Upon-Thames – went bankrupt and exited the feature film business in the 1970s but made a couple of TV series in the 1980s. The company was resurrected as a big-screen studio in the ’10s, releasing the remake Let Me In (2010, w. Chloë Grace Moretz), The Resident (2011, w. Hilary Swank), and The Woman in Black (2012, w. Daniel Radcliffe).
Six of the seven movies in the following Hammer critiques boast Christopher Lee (1922-2015) in their casts. Four of them star Peter Cushing.
Younger viewers may know Lee best as Count Dooku in the Star Wars universe and Saruman in the J.R.R. Tolkien-Peter Jackson universe. But for us old-timers, he will always be Dracula (bite) Mark 2.
Cushing (1913-1994) is forever Baron Frankenstein, Dr. Van Helsing, and Grand Moff Tarkin in 1977’s Star Wars (and, digitally speaking, in 2016’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story).
THE MUMMY (1959)
This is Hammer Film’s fair pastiche of elements from Universal’s The Mummy (1932), The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), and The Mummy Ghost (1944).
Various authors have regarded this four-pronged remake as something more: a clear allegory for a recent and major factor in the decline of Britain’s status as a global power: In 1956, Egypt’s President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been under British control since the occupation of 1882. In ’56, the U.K., Israel, and France invaded Egypt, attempting to regain control of the canal; but the three nations withdrew in 1957, after Eisenhower declined military aid and the U.N. stepped in. This marked a triumph for Egyptian nationalism.
In the film, archaeologist Peter Cushing is an avatar for the British Empire’s colonialist adventures (the character’s wife is French); the nominal villain, Mehemet Bey (George Pastell) – who sends the mummy Kharis on missions of vengeance against the desecrators of a sacred tomb – represents the Egyptian standpoint; and the mummy could be symbolic of the disintegration of the empire.
Christopher Lee is in the title role. Hammer’s principal screenwriter, Jimmy Sangster, served as scenarist. Mummy leading lady Yvonne Furneaux (1926-2024) later costarred in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and Polanski’s Repulsion.
The Mummy is “concerned with coming to terms with change, dwelling on the positives as well as the negatives of Britain’s imperial past and offering justification for it and condemnation of it in equal measure. It has a complex narrative (for which it has been criticized), fathering a number of contradictory discourses relating to science, religion, colonialism and retribution, and then ploughing a middle ground between them.” – Basil Glynn of Leeds Trinity University
“The Mummy engages with imperialism but finally retreats. Its Victorian setting distances its conflicts from the present era … permitting nostalgia for times when European colonialism held sway.” – Jasmine Day, Egyptologist and anthropologist
Director Terence “Fisher’s reworking … adds little thematically, save for a greater awareness of cultural relativity, but by making the titular creature the focus of the film, it is visually far richer.” – Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made, by Kim Newman and James Marriott
“Fisher’s surrealist use of colour … together with his unnerving sense of camera position and cutting, give the movie a genuinely macabre poetry never achieved in mummy films before or since.” – Phil Hardy (1986)
“Unlike Lon Chaney Jr.’s Universal portrayal, Lee’s Kharis is quick as well as deadly, rushing forward after crashing through a door, or nimbly climbing through a window after smashing the glass and bending the bars.” – Bryan Senn
“This disgusting English remake was done without my knowledge or consent, and it has been a terrible shock.” – Nina Wilcox Putnam (1888-1962), who wrote the story on which the 1932 Mummy was based, in a letter published in Time magazine
HORROR OF DRACULA (1958)
“I know somewhere nice and quiet where we can play.”
With a script by Hammer Film habitué Jimmy Sangster, and direction by Terence Fisher, this excellent thriller marked Christopher Lee’s first appearance as the king of vampires. Peter Cushing takes on his oft-repeated role as vampire hunter Van Helsing, and the cast includes Michael Gough (“Alfred” in the Batman pictures from 1989 to ’97), Carol Marsh (who held the title role in a 1949 live action/stop-motion-animation version of Alice in Wonderland), and Hammer perennial Charles Lloyd-Pack. (No relation; his surname was Lloyd-Pack, sometimes unhyphenated.)
But you will find little in common with Lugosi’s version – or with the Stoker novel. This film will have an encore screening on Oct. 30.
“Holy-moly!” – John Carpenter [quoted in the docuseries The Fearmakers Collection (2007)]
“The uncouth, uneducated, disgusting and vulgar style of Mr. Jimmy Sangster cannot quite obscure the remnants of a good horror story, though they do give one the gravest misgivings about treatment.” – a member of the British Board of Film Censors
“This film disgusts the mind and repels the senses. Dracula . . . is a handsome, sinister human being in a long black cloak with a sexual lust for the blood of the beautiful women who are his victims.” – Nina Hibbins, The Daily Worker (1958)
“[I] feel inclined to apologise to all decent Americans for sending them a work in such sickening bad taste.” – C.A. (Caroline Alice) Lejeune, The Observer (1958)
“There are boring horror films, and tasteless horror films. This new version of Dracula is a boring, tasteless horror film.” – Peter John Dyer of the British Film Institute (1958)
“In general, those sort of criticisms are highly exploitable.” – Michael Carreras, executive producer, Horror of Dracula
Fisher’s Dracula “is the 19th-century equivalent of James Bond – a man with all the qualities, powers and pleasures the petty bourgeoisie guiltily pines for, a lurid representation of the aristocracy.” – Phil Hardy
“Christopher Lee’s Count was fashioned as something of a cross between a brooding Lord Byron and a sulky James Dean – the perfect embodiment of 1950s sexuality.” – Ken Hanke
“‘It is a common fallacy that vampires can change into bats and wolves,’ announced a conceited Van Helsing … and to bury all the covert symbolism of the vampire, the new Dracula substituted a blatant, almost athletic display of sadism and necrophilia.” – Carlos Clarens
“Christopher Lee’s still-definitive portrayal of the Count – turning blood-sucking into an overtly sexual activity – is the crucial point at which Hammer found that sex and death in equal proportions – and particularly barely repressed sexuality in a Victorian setting – was the real winning formula.” – Sinclair McKay in his history of Hammer, titled A Thing of Unspeakable Horror [The book title comes from a tagline for The Brides of Dracula (1960)]
“The villain again becomes what he was always meant to be, the charming, intelligent and irresistible host who is on the point of turning the cosy Victorian world upside down by transforming women into ravening sexual animals.” – David Pirie
“Horror of Dracula liberated the horror movie, allowing it to become more sensual as well as more graphic.” – Dennis Fischer
“Horror of Dracula implies that the women of this world need Count Dracula to occupy the beds left vacant by easily fooled husbands and wandering fiancés.” – Gregory A. Waller
“Dracula was sexy, and he was seducing people, and he was basically going to bed with women ... and afterward, they just thought he was great.” — Joe Dante
“This is one of a handful of motion pictures which changed the face of horror films forever.” – Gary A. Smith
“Hammer had thrown down a gauntlet, ushering in a new age of visceral bluntness on-screen.” – David J. Skal
“Probably Hammer Films’ best shocker.” – Leonard Maltin
“Arguably the best of the Hammer horrors.” – Howard Maxford [Editor’s note: Hammer made more than 60 horrors between 1957 and 1976.]
“The Hammer Studio style at its best.” – Steven H. Scheuer
“The best vampire film ever made.” – Michael Weldon (1983)
“One of the five best horror movies of all time.” – John Carpenter (again – quoted in 1991)
“Nothing more nor less than a love story.” – Terence Fisher
Trivia time:
According to author Denis Meikle, composer James Bernard “was reported to have said that he was specifically asked to write ‘sex music’ for the film.”
In the marvelous documentary Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1994), Lee comments on Bernard’s soundtrack for Horror of Dracula: “This three-note, dropping-octave theme underscored the power of the title character.” Later in the doc, it is pointed out that Bernard, who composed for many Hammer motion pictures between the mid-’50s and mid-’70s, always based his melodies on the number of syllables in each movie’s title and their accents. In the U.K., this film was known simply as DRAC-u-la.
To put it another way, you can sing the words of the title to the tune of each of Bernard’s themes. Listen via YouTube to this piece, and to how he handled one of his final Hammer works, for Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell (1974):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c41qUVJ8fqk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9UtkZRNZF0
DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE (1968)
In this thinly plotted entry in Hammer’s Dracula cycle, Christopher Lee’s count puts the fear of God into a young atheist hero.
The grave from which he is risen is the whited sepulcher to which he was consigned at the conclusion of his last Hammer Film foray, Dracula – Prince of Darkness.
In the early 20th century, Dracula seeks revenge against a monsignor who has exorcised his castle. (Author Bruce Lanier Wright deems this character “a distinctly minor-league Van Helsing surrogate.”)
The chilling opening sequence features a Poe-esque church bell with knockers in lieu of a clapper. (Please forgive me!)
Rupert Davies, the monsignor, had and would have a number of non-Hammer thrillers under his belt: The Brides of Fu Manchu, The Conqueror Worm, The Crimson Cult, The Oblong Box, The Night Visitor, and 1974’s Frightmare.
Marion Mathie, who portrays the monsignor’s brother’s widow, was the second actress to play Hilda Rumpole on Rumpole of the Bailey.
Barry Andrews, who plays Paul, the freethinker, appears in the marvelous Blood on Satan’s Claw, from Hammer rival Tigon.
Veronica Carlson (1944-2022), the monsignor’s niece and Paul’s lover, is in Hammer’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (which TCM will present later on this date), the studio’s pitiful parody The Horror of Frankenstein, and the non-Hammer flicks Old Dracula (1974) and The Ghoul (1975).
Not easily forgotten are the DHRFtG shots of Carlson skipping along city parapets in a furtive trip to visit her boyfriend.
Character actor – I hate that term! – Michael Ripper, whom director Freddie Francis called “a kind of mascot for” Hammer, is Paul’s boss, a taverner.
Among the other colorful characters are an alcoholic priest and a mute altar boy. (Hmmm.)
Francis is more highly regarded as a cinematographer. In the latter role, he won Academy Awards for Sons and Lovers (1960) and Glory (1989). DHRFtG was the last of his five directorial efforts for Hammer.
The company’s Aida Young was, as author Denis Meikle says, “one of only a handful of women producers in the industry.”
The picture had the biggest box-office success of any in the Big D franchise and was one of Hammer’s greatest moneymakers overall up to that time; thus the studio, unfortunately, speeded up the vampire-king assembly line.
“Except for The Horror of Dracula, this is the strongest and best-looking entry in the series.” – Michael Weldon
“Heavy (handed) use of religious symbolism.... [Dracula] is reduced to a one-dimensional vampire suggesting tons of evil but unsupported by a strong plot.” – John Stanley
“Freddie Francis creates some admirable atmosphere and tension in the first half-hour, but ultimately reduces the film to an inconsequential splurge of arbitrary religious and sexual motifs.” – Time Out Film Guide
“The vampire sends a bat emissary to remove a crucifix hanging between his intended victim’s breasts, and the bat lingers, perhaps a bit distracted by all the scenery.” – David J. Skal
“The glow of repressed sensuality appropriate to Dracula’s Victorian victims and so expertly conveyed in [Terence] Fisher’s movies is totally lost by Francis.” – Phil Hardy
“The freshness and awe of Fisher’s approach was conspicuously absent.” – David Pirie
“A bloody bore.” – Judith Crist
“Script and acting are alike of the lowest order, whilst the use of colour filters during several key sequences is an unwarranted distraction.” – Howard Maxford
“It’s a jaded charade with even the technical credits – the pseudo-blood, the background scenery and the lensing and music – showing signs of lack of imagination.... If you are handling a stale idea you must either freshen it up or bury it.” – Variety
“Judging by this junky British film … he can descend again.” – The New York Times
“Christopher Lee as Dracula does his best to make our flesh creep but the result is simply tiresome. ‘Dear God,’ says one character. ‘When shall we be free of his evil?’ When indeed?” – the Daily Express
DRACULA A.D. 1972 💣 (aw, you know)
The prologue is set in 1872, with Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing chasing down his prey – though Cushing hadn’t battled Christopher Lee’s Dracula since 1958, and hadn’t portrayed this protagonist since 1960’s Brides of Dracula (sans Lee and Dracula). But the reunion/opening is distressingly similar to that of one of the cinematic antecedents, Hammer Film’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970).
We then fast-forward to the title year and a ritzy home where the obscure San Francisco rock-tet, Stoneground, has been hired to entertain at a private party. (Rod Stewart and the Faces were originally slated!)
Unwelcome neo-hippies – including Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), the granddaughter of Lorrimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), a lecturer, expert on the occult, and grandson of the 19th-century hero – have crashed the party. Among Jessica’s clique is one Johnny Alucard (Christopher Neame). The surname must have sounded just as silly to audiences when it was used as Lon Chaney Jr.’s title character’s alias in 1943’s Son of Dracula.
Later, Jessica and Johnny’s bunch meets at a coffee bar (cleverly named the Cavern), and Johnny suggests doing something “way, way out” – a Black Mass, to be held in an abandoned church. (Listen in the sequence for a musical nod to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”)
Our undead antagonist is resurrected by the ceremony and has the conventional objective of killing his enemy’s descendants.
Brace yourself for some miserable puns in the dialogue.
Beacham’s credits include Brando’s The Nightcomers, And Now the Screaming Starts, and the prime-time soap Dynasty.
Neame had appeared in Hammer’s Lust for a Vampire. He can be seen in Cornel Wilde’s postapocalyptic picture, No Blade of Grass; in the 007 adventure Licence to Kill; and the lost-found Doctor Who serial Shada.
Michael Coles, who plays a Scotland Yard inspector who aids Lorrimer in both Dracula A.D. 1972 and its follow-up stinker, The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), had been side by side with Cushing earlier when the latter took the title role in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965).
Among Jessica and Johnny’s buds is African American singer-author Marsha Hunt, affecting an English accent (and not to be confused with Caucasian Hollywood actress Marsha Hunt [1917-2022]). The younger Hunt earned the distinction of having been in relationships with John Mayall, Marc Bolan of T. Rex, and Mick Jagger, by whom she has a daughter, Karis (not to be confused with Kharis – see The Mummy, above). Hunt may have been the inspiration for the Stones’ “Brown Sugar.”
Another of the mates is Caroline Munro (Hammer’s Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter; The Golden Voyage of Sinbad; Joan Collins’s The Devil Within Her; At the Earth’s Core [w. Cushing]; the 007 adventure The Spy Who Loved Me; and 1980’s Maniac).
Hippie “Greg” is Michael Kitchen, who held the title role in the 2002-2015 series Foyle’s War, and who was M16 chief of staff in two Pierce Brosnan James Bond adventures.
Director Alan Gibson, who was chiefly a TV guy, handled both this and Satanic Rites. He had piloted the indie production Goodbye Gemini (1970), a weird thriller starring Judy Geeson, Michael Redgrave, and Freddie Jones, involving twins, incestuous desires, and blackmail. Gibson had helmed Hammer’s Crescendo (1970), starring a beautiful Stefanie Powers and a wooden James Olson. It was the other half of a theatrical double feature with A.D. 1972.
Don Houghton scripted A.D. 1972, Satanic Rites, and Hammer’s final Dracula entry, the deplorable Hong Kong coproduction The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974), with Cushing but sans Lee.
Michael Vickers, a multi-instrumentalist with the original Manfred Mann, scored A.D. 1972. Author Jonathan Rigby bemoans Vickers’s “inappropriate wah-wah guitars and over-emphatic horns.”
“All I get to do is stand around on unhallowed ground, sweep down corridors and make the odd pounce or two. Nobody can write dialogue for Dracula.… I have one original Bram Stoker line, but that’s yelled out at a distance of a hundred years.” – Lee
“… Dracula and his activities get pushed into the background. Only Peter
Cushing, moving serenely and sincerely through the thicket of trite dialogue and overanxious performances, achieves moments of chilling convention.” – Cinema TV Today, former U.K. trade publication
“Reduces Hammer’s top two titans to the level of kitsch, comic-book nonsense.... However, Dracula A.D. 1972 is certainly an entertaining picture – but for all the wrong reasons.” – Jonathan Rigby
“Abysmal fang and cross flick without even the saving grace of humour. The worst of the Hammer Draculas, its would-be hip dialogue has to be heard to be believed.” – Howard Maxford
“A dismal example of the decline of the Hammer vampire output, with a confused and feeble script that fails effectively to locate the Count in the Swinging Chelsea of the seventies, wasting Lee and Cushing.” – Alan G. Frank
“No matter how naff it all is, there is tremendously good humour running throughout it.” – Sinclair McKay
“The film actually has a thesis concerning contrasting time periods: holy past versus unholy present…. The underlying message, that sometimes old values still need to be adhered to in an era of too much moral relativism, feels fresh too.” – John Kenneth Muir
THE DEVIL’S BRIDE (1968; U.K. title = The Devil Rides Out)
This perhaps overrated movie is based on a 1934 story by a friend of Christopher Lee’s, Dennis Wheatley (1897-1977). The villain of the piece, Mocata (Charles Gray), like so many other baddies, was inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley. (See The Black Cat, below.)
Lee battles to wrest two young friends from the grip of Satanists.
The role of the hero was a rarity for Lee. We remember Charles Gray from Rocky Horror and two 007s: You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever. Also in the cast is Brit-com mainstay Paul Eddington.
The director was Terence Fisher, and screenwriter was The Twilight Zone’s Richard Matheson. Cinefantastique magazine lauded composer James Bernard’s “dark and dismal” score.
As a number of authors note, the special effects are the weak spot.
“One of the few contemporary horror films that could match the style and craftsmanship of the old classics.” – William K. Everson
“Made on what by modern standards is still a comparatively tiny budget, it remains an excellent example of the kind of thing that can happen when melodrama is achieved so completely and so imaginatively that it ceases to be melodrama at all and becomes close to an allegorical vision.” – David Pirie (2008)
“May well be the finest Hammer movie of all, showcasing the studio’s classic strengths while avoiding the formula-bound tiredness that mars so much of its product. ... Wheatley himself considered it to be the best filmic adaptation of his work.” – Bruce Lanier Wright [Four other theatrical features were based on Wheatley’s novels, all before his death in 1977; two of those – The Lost Continent and To the Devil a Daughter – were produced by Hammer.]
“The cinematic equivalent of a fire-and-brimstone sermon.” – Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
“This film portrays a universe in which spiritual realities underlie all physical reality.... The rationalists who deny the existence of the supernatural only become unwitting allies of the power of evil. There is no scientific explanation of supernatural reality. It simply exists and its power can be felt.” – the Rev. Paul Leggett
“If my films reflect my own personal view in any way, it is in their showing of the ultimate victory of good over evil – in which I do believe.” –Terence Fisher
“While the special effects do not impress, the acting and sincere writing do.” – Dennis Fischer
“Dated demonic effects range from silly to surprisingly sinister, or both.” – The Rough Guide to Cult Movies
Trivia time: American distributors changed the title from The Devil Rides Out, fearing filmgoers would mistake it for Western.
FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED (1969)
“Had man not been given to invention and experiment, then tonight, sir, you would have eaten your dinner in a cave. You would have strewn the bones about the floor, and then wiped your fingers on a coat of animals. In fact, your lapels do look somewhat greasy.”
For my taste, this is the second-best among the seven pictures in Hammer Film’s Frankenstein franchise. (The second, and the best, was The Revenge of Frankenstein [1958] – like this, an effort from director Terence Fisher, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster, and star Peter Cushing.)
The characterizations in FMBD are more complex than those in your run-of-the-mill Frankenstein flick.
In his New York Times review, Vincent Canby called Cushing “Hammer’s Laurence Olivier.”
The doctor became progressively more evil as the 1957-74 series went on. As editor Phil Hardy’s horror encyclopedia observes, “he is now the monster.”
At the film’s outset, the sweet notes of a zither on a foggy city street belie the bloody violence that is imminent.
Dr. Frankenstein is wearing a bizarre disguise in this sequence, but his signature spats give his identity away to the audience.
He later blackmails his young landlady (Veronica Carlson, 1944-2022) and her fiancé, a doctor, into aiding him in his latest scheme, which centers on a mental institution. The fiancé is Simon Ward, in his first credited big-screen part, three years before his breakout role as Young Winston.
And where are the forces of justice and good here? The local police inspector (Thorley Walters) is only slightly less nasty than Frankenstein.
Freddie Jones, of The Elephant Man and 1984’s Dune, is the new monster. He gets a brain from George Pravda (who was in the 007 adventure Thunderball and the Jack Palance Dracula; the latter costarred Ward).
A key scene, involving a broken water pipe, is one of the most terrifying in any Hammer picture. And the exciting conclusion involves a conflagration worthy of Roger Corman, and a lady-or-the-tiger-style dilemma.
Listen attentively throughout to the extraordinary sound effects, which are perfectly meshed with the gory action.
There’s another disturbing scene, depicting a rape – though not graphically – which was forced upon director Fisher by distributor Warner-Pathé; the company wanted more sex injected into the plot. Fisher, Cushing, and Carlson were opposed. It “made us all very upset,” the actress told Filmfax magazine, adding that the sequence “spoiled the film.”
Yet this movie and 1958’s Horror of Dracula were the director’s personal favorites. Fisher’s first go at a Shelley adaptation was Hammer’s watershed Curse of Frankenstein (1957; to be aired Oct. 30).
Trivia time: FMBD marked the final teaming of Fisher, Cushing, producer Anthony Nelson Keys (who had served in the same role since The Curse of Frankenstein), composer James Bernard, and art director/production designer Bernard Robinson (1912-1970). The latter was responsible for the physical look of about 40 Hammer releases.
“Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed is one Frankenstein film in which there is no real hero or heroine – only characters burdened by varying degrees of culpability (not necessarily guilt) as a result of their day-to-day activities.” – We Belong Dead: Frankenstein on Film by Gary J. and Susan Svehla
“In Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, there were no heroes – only villains and victims. Even the pathetic … creature does ‘the right thing’ only for revenge.... The times were changing, and Hammer was changing with them.... The story caught the negativity of the Vietnam era, and wove in expertly the topicality of drug abuse.” – Hammer Films: An Exhaustive Filmography by Tom Johnson and Deborah Del Vecchio
“Fisher taps a rich vein of Romanticism here, making this the high point of a series that afterwards degenerated ….” – Time Out Film Guide
“This is director Terence Fisher’s most bleak and tragic vision of horror. It is also one of his greatest achievements and a high point in Hammer’s Frankenstein series.” – Gary A. Smith
“Fisher’s nastiest and most cynical film, its extremely gruesome atmosphere deriving not so much from the wince-making brain operations as from the callous and uncaring world in which it is set.” – Jonathan Rigby
“One of the most lush and sensual of the Hammer films.” – DVD & Video Guide by Mick Martin and Marsha Porter
Fisher created, “with Freddie Jones’s help, one of the most overtly sympathetic and moving Frankenstein monsters in the history of the cinema.” – David Pirie
“Many Cushing fans argue that the star’s finest Frankenstein performance came in Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed…. This time around, the mad Baron remains devoid of humor and completely unsympathetic.” – Mark Clark
Cushing “gets his effect by an authority which carries along the audience and which he could hardly strengthen even if playing Lear for an Oscar.” – Variety
“A subdued, slow-paced film that never reaches the intensity promised by its title.... Despite the numerous script flaws, Peter Cushing, the busiest man in horror in the 1970s, remains a marvel as Frankenstein.” – John Kenneth Muir
“I always approach Frankenstein as seriously as I would approach Hamlet. That’s the only way to approach any work.” – Peter Cushing
“There’s all the usual blood-gushing, scalpel-wielding, electrode-flashing and corpse-walking we expect.” – Brian Swift in Castle of Frankenstein magazine [Editor’s note: The writer is wrong about the electrode-flashing.]
“The series hit bottom with the threadbare Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed.... About the only positive thing that can be said … is that the gloves are off as concerns Frankenstein’s character.” – Ken Hanke
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed … proves it’s about time he was.” – Judith Crist
SCREAM OF FEAR (1961; U.K. title = Taste of Fear)
A fine mystery, set and filmed on the Riviera, starring Susan Strasberg and (in a small role, affecting a French accent) Christopher Lee, and directed by Seth Holt (who later helmed Hammer’s The Nanny, with Bette Davis in the title role). The screenwriter was Hammer stalwart Jimmy Sangster, for the first time taking on the secondary job of producer.
This was Sangster’s first and favorite of all the psychological thrillers he penned for Hammer. Superstar Lee considered this the best among his 28 Hammer appearances.
Strasberg’s Penny, a paraplegic, visits the mansion of her father, who’s supposed to be away on business. But she keeps seeing his dead body all over the place!
Michael Weldon’s Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film says, “You’ll never figure out the ending or anticipate some of the plot twists.” This is not quite true. Take two guesses at the ending, and the second one will be correct, at least in part. But, as with any good shocker, the additional twists are what make it worthwhile.
Some authors say this movie jumped on the Psycho bandwagon, but Scream of Fear was in development before the Hitchcock classic’s release. And it has far more in common with Gaslight and Diabolique; the latter was Sangster’s favorite motion picture.
Holt died at age 47 in 1971. The Hammer Story, by Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, says that Holt, an alcoholic, “suffered a fatal heart attack elicited by a bout of hiccups.”
Splendid B&W cinematography in Scream comes courtesy of Douglas Slocombe, who worked on the first three Indiana Jones flicks.
This film cut the first turf for Hammer’s series of psychological thrillers – Maniac (1963), Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964; TCM, Oct. 30), Die! Die! My Darling (1965; the only one not written by Sangster), Hysteria (1965), The Nanny (1965), Crescendo (1970), and Joan Collins’s Fear in the Night (1972). Scream of Fear is one of the two best, rivaled only by The Nanny.
And, yes, the song by the Misfits, which was covered by Metallica, is named after this flick.
“It remains a classic of its kind: one of the only films to take on Psycho on its own terms and come perilously close to toppling Hitchcock’s masterpiece from its perch of precision-engineered shock.” – Denis Meikle
“[The] scenario is a minor masterpiece of coiled suspense ─ taut and twisty, with finely embellished characters and spine-tingling set pieces.” ─ Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
“A couple of nasty surprises have been stirred into the routine ingredients of this unsavory little chiller con carne.” – Time magazine
“Contrived but excellently directed.... The script, as usual with Sangster, is a mechanical piece of suspense-mongering, which sacrifices logic and verisimilitude to achieve the mandatory number of shocks and ‘twists’ at the end.” ─ Phil Hardy
“Sangster proved that there was more to Hammer horror than many people had previously realised.” – Hammer’s Halls of Horror magazine
“I think Dad will make your flesh creep, as he did mine.” – Brendan Gill, The New Yorker
“The perfect film to show those people that always seem to figure out the ending after the first half hour.” ─ The Motion Picture Guide by Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross
“Short on graphic action, long on talk and … played with indifferent professional competence by a small cast.” ─ Bosley Crowther in The New York Times
“Audiences will either be scared out of their wits or bored, like the corpse, stiff.” – the Daily Express
“What thrills we’d been promised get dissipated by the nonsensical denouement.” – The Dispatch
Jimmy Sangster described his writing formula: “You merely put shock upon shock – and do it four times. Each shock is more terrifying than the preceding one. It’s bad audience psychology to have more. Of course, the real humdinger I keep for the climax.”
OCT. 21
A carload of Karloff and a fistful of Belas: Five of the eight pictures that the two horror superstars made together will run on this date. The only one I haven’t seen is You’ll Find Out (1940; 2 a.m. Eastern, Oct. 22), a musical and starring vehicle for Kay Kyser, who was among the most popular bandleaders of his era. In this 1940 comedy, Peter Lorre rounds out a trio of would-be murderers.
“Superstition, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.” — Lugosi as Dr. Vitus Werdegast
The Citizen Kane of pre-Code horror!
SPOILER ALERT! As I wrote in 2010, in a web-only sidebar on director Edgar G. Ulmer for dallasnews.com, this movie “marked the first teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The Black Cat has nothing to do with Poe — despite the title — but a great deal to do with necrophilia, devil worship, human sacrifice, quasi incest and (worst yet) ailurophobia. Oh, and Lugosi’s character flays Karloff’s alive. It’s all a censor’s nightmare!”
In the article, I failed to mention that this thriller defies a caution, in a precursor to the Motion Picture Production Code, against showing a “man and woman in bed together.” (It’s Karloff and screen wife Lucille Lund.) But the release of The Black Cat beat the start of strict enforcement of the code by two months.
British writer Ivan Butler observes, “[The film] introduces Satanic rites, but these are interrupted before they have made much progress, and the participants, in full evening dress, are clearly not going to let themselves go very far.”
A word of caution: Don’t expect too much in the way of logic from the plot. Just enjoy the ride.
Trivia time:
- Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig, an architect who is guilty of war crimes – among others – got his surname from German architect Hans Poelzig, who had worked with Ulmer on the set design for 1920’s Der Golem. But the character’s persona was inspired by occultist Aleister Crowley.
- Lugosi’s widow, Hope, said, “He hated cats.”
“One of the masterpieces of the genre.” — Phil Hardy
“Stands out as a landmark in the genre — many buffs have even dubbed it the best of Universal’s ‘golden horror films’ of the thirties — with Lugosi in one of his several finest roles.” — Calvin T. Beck
“The most cultured horror film … yet witnessed.” – The San Francisco Examiner
A “clash of two eyebrow-squinting nuts.” – Variety
“The most perverse of all the Universal horror classics.” – Gregory Mank
“The earliest mainstream template for splatter cinema.” – Gary J. Svehla
“The Black Cat is a totally unique film. There has never been another quite like it, either in mood or in execution.... While there does appear to be an occasional lapse in continuity, and the motivations of the characters at times seem hazy …, these incongruities actually add to the perverse appeal of the picture and enhance its dark, otherworldly texture.” — Bryan Senn
“Perhaps the most outré horror film of its period. Ulmer’s fondness for quasi-expressionism and heightened melodrama turn the film into a perversely clever comic strip.” — David J. Hogan
“Boldly thumbing its nose at convention, the film is a veritable catalogue of human corruption.” — Universal Horrors by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas
“Satanism never really gets to look like this much fun again for a few decades.” – Pre-Code.com
“There is not much Poe in this, and in spite of a splendidly sinister performance by Karloff and a surprisingly moving one from Lugosi the final result is a rather scrappy and ineffectual film.” — Ivan Butler
“Ulmer was faithful to the letter of Poe.” – Bill Krohn in Film Comment magazine (1983)
“The scenes of torture may thrill morbidly inclined picture-goers but the rational picture-goers will, no doubt, be filled with disgust.” — Harrison’s Reports, a former movie trade journal
“Universal’s top grossing release for 1934 was ‘From Caligari to Hitler’ in one lurid package.” – J. Hoberman in The Village Voice (1998), referring to Siegfried Kracauer’s 1947 book tracing the history of nationalism in German cinema
“The Black Cat is only a couple of whiskers away from the movie loony bin, inhabited by those cuckoo films that we admiringly call ‘the worst films ever made.’… [But the movie] is so entertaining that everyone overlooks its many awful moments.… It had thematic relevance. Ulmer infused his story with a postwar anguish that was peculiar to Europeans, because they continued to live on the soil where their loved ones were buried in mass graves.” – Danny Peary
SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939)
“This is place of dead. We’re all dead here.” – Bela Lugosi as Ygor
Karloff portrays the Monster for the last time. (Not counting an amusing October 1962 episode of Route 66. This installment, with the Macbethian title “Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing,” also guest-starred Lon Chaney Jr. and Peter Lorre.)
Boris had objected strongly to having the Creature speak in The Bride of Frankenstein, and here he again utters only growls, grunts, and well-placed screams (actually one scream, heard twice – dubbed the second time).
The actor’s pantomime dexterity is superlative: Observe, for example, the doctor’s first encounter with the reanimated Monster, and how the Creature wipes that smile onto Dr. F.’s face.
Basil Rathbone, as the title character, spouts medical technobabble with the best of them.
Lionel Atwill is police Inspector Krogh, he of the artificial arm that’s spoofed in Young Frankenstein.
The monster’s BFF, Ygor (Bela Lugosi, in what author Carlos Clarens calls “his last solid role”), is an old man with a horn. His backstory is that he survived a hanging with only a minor injury: a broken neck. Ygor plays baleful tunes as the Monster goes out to do his pal’s dirty work.
Four-year-old Donnie Dunagan’s saccharine performance as the grandson of Frankenstein is as risible as it is irritating.
The movie’s sets are a throwback to the glory days of German Expressionism.
The director/producer/script doctor was Rowland V. Lee, who guided Karloff and Rathbone in the same year’s Tower of London, featuring Vincent Price.
Scenarist Wyllis Cooper created the horror radio series Lights Out and Quiet, Please.
Cinematographer George Robinson made 17 Universal horrors between 1930 and 1955, including four Abbott and Costello send-ups, and he worked on other A&C comedies and on the duo’s TV show. (You can see more of his artistry later on this date in The Invisible Ray.)
“God, he was cute.” – Lugosi, speaking of his alter-Ygor to a New York Post reporter in 1939
“The last in Universal’s Frankenstein series to make much sense.” – Michael Weldon
“At 10 reels [it’s] much too long to sustain feelings of terror or genuine excitement.... Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating film, and, if only on the level of its art direction, sets, lighting, and overall visual elegance, must certainly rank as the second best film in the series [after Bride of Frankenstein].” — William K. Everson
“Slow the film may be, but it has a kind of architectural solidity that matches the dreamlike labyrinthine massiveness of the sets … and builds to a stunning climax.” — Phil Hardy
If Son of Frankenstein “isn’t the silliest picture ever made, it’s a sequel to the silliest picture ever made, which is even sillier.... But its silliness is deliberate — a very shrewd silliness, perpetrated by a good director in the best traditions of cinematic horror.” — The New York Times (1939)
THE BODY SNATCHER (1945)
Celebrated director Robert Wise piloted this thriller (one of his personal favorites), set in Edinburgh in 1831, and based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story about grave robbers who sell corpses to physicians for anatomical research. It marked the first teaming of Karloff and distinguished horror producer Val Lewton, and the final teaming of Karloff and Bela Lugosi, though the latter’s role is shamefully small. There’s extraordinary repartee between resurrectionist Karloff and a medical professor (Henry Daniell). BK’s cabman Gray has a threatening hold over Dr. MacFarlane, because of a dark secret in the professor’s past.
Val Lewton produced and cowrote this drama; you can view more of Lewton’s work on Oct. 28 and 30.
Trivia time: The exterior sets are recycled from Charles Laughton’s 1939 Hunchback of Notre Dame.
“A shocker with an edifying background in fact … Dracula, in all his gory, was never arrayed like this.” – John McManus, New York PM Reviews (1945)
Lewton’s The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead demonstrate “some of the most sensitive movie intelligence in Hollywood” – James Agee, who in The Nation magazine named these two pictures among the best of 1945
“Arguably the best of the Lewton horrors.” – Howard Maxford
“Like all Val Lewton productions, The Body Snatcher shows a humane sincerity and a devotion to good cinema unfortunately rather rare in U.S. movies.” – Time magazine (1945)
“Not so much about bodies as it is about souls – about one man’s imperfect soul agonized by another’s wholly evil one.” – Gregory William Mank
Lewton’s “philosophy, in addition to scaring the wits out of people, was that he had a responsibility to the millions who saw our pictures. He aimed at more than mere exploitable crook shows, and wanted their impact to result from legitimate psychological conflicts. Lewton’s pictures were cheaply made, but not cheap.” – Robert Wise
“Daniell seemed typed as an upright cadaver, rarely moving his body, his sickening speeches of epicene superiority oozing from a stiff, mask-like face.” – Ronald L. Smith [writing of the actor’s performances in general]
“Some of Karloff’s best lines as Gray seem, strangely enough, to come straight from the Stevenson original. (Karloff only makes them sound as if they had been written expressly for him.)” – Donald C. Willis
OCT. 22
THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936)
“Every science fact accepted today once burned as a fantastic fire in the mind of someone called mad. Who are we on this youngest of planets to say that the INVISIBLE RAY is impossible to science?” – Foreword
Boris Karloff. Bela Lugosi (as the hero!). A projector that travels through space and time. An African expedition to locate a prehistoric meteor consisting of an element a thousand times more powerful than radium (Karloff). “Astrochemistry, controlled by radial forces from the sun” (Lugosi). And a loving mom!
As you might have guessed already, this unsung landmark has one of the most byzantine plots you’re likely to see in 1930s horror/sci-fi from Universal Pictures or anywhere else.
At his lab in the Carpathian Mountains, scientist Rukh (Karloff) demonstrates his spatiotemporal device, which pinpoints the whereabouts of “Radium X.” Then he, wife Diana (Frances Drake), and physician Benet (Lugosi) partner with a titled English family for the lengthy stay in Africa to find the precious substance – which, we soon learn, can be used for healing or for destruction.
(An on-screen magazine article about the expedition is datelined “Bornu, Nigeria.” But they can’t fool me: Rukh’s contraption definitely showed the billions-of-years-ago meteor landing in Angola. Some sources credit bit player Etta McDaniel [Hattie’s older sister] as “Zulu woman,” which would set the action even farther south.)
Alas, when Rukh finds the element in a fiery pit, he is inflicted with a poisoning that makes him glow in the dark, gives him the touch of death, and eventually drives him insane. He alienates and loses Diana, accuses the other key figures in the expedition of stealing his discovery, and – after everybody relocates to Paris – seeks revenge. (There’s a hint of Dr. Phibes.)
Cultural historian David J. Skall calls this “the first film to exploit the public interest and anxiety in the alchemical, Faustian aspects of radioactivity.” Author Sir Christopher Frayling says it all reads “like a parodic version of the life of Marie Curie.”
One sequence describes a myth found as well in Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, the Cushing-Lee-Savalas gem Horror Express, and Will Smith’s Wild Wild West: “optography,” the notion that the eye holds the last image viewed before a person’s death.
Those with photographic memories will recognize sets recycled from the 1936 serial Flash Gordon, as well as stock footage of electronic gadgetry from Karloff’s 1931 Frankenstein.
A church that is central to the plot is actually the façade for Universal’s 1923 Hunchback of Notre Dame (TCM, Oct. 28).
Frances Drake can again be seen in Mad Love on Oct. 25.
The “other man” is Frank Lawton, who played the title character as an adult in 1935’s David Copperfield. He was Maureen O’Sullivan’s fiancé, Toto (lucky dog!), in The Devil-Doll (1936).
Also in the Dickensian adaptation’s cast (as Miss Murdstone) was Violet Kemble-Cooper, who nobly portrays Rukh’s mother. This Broadway performer was the scion of a British theatrical family.
Rukh’s African bearers, according to the New York Herald Tribune review, are “a group of sparsely clad gentlemen with a Harlem accent who pass for African tribesmen.”
Among these are Daniel L. Hynes (the male lead in King Vidor’s 1929 musical Hallelujah) and Dudley Dickerson (a Three Stooges regular).
F/X maven John P. Fulton takes viewers on a round trip to “the nebula in Andromeda.” He labored over six Hitchcocks; many of Universal’s horrors, including all of its invisi-franchise except for the 1951 Abbott and Costello farce; 1931’s Dracula (TCM, Oct. 31); 1934’s The Black Cat (the first Karloff-Lugosi team-up); and Bride of Frankenstein (Oct. 31). He parted the Red Sea in 1956’s The Ten Commandments.
Director Lambert Hillyer helmed the first Batman serial (1943), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), and a whole passel of “B” Westerns (about 25 for William S. Hart alone).
Scenarist John Colton worked on Werewolf of London (1935) and Lillian Gish’s Old West thriller, The Wind (1928).
Composer Franz Waxman (The Bride of Frankenstein) did the score.
This photoplay was originally called The Death Ray. I would guess the title was changed in an attempt to cash in on the box-office success of The Invisible Man. (Other proposed titles were Ghoul of Piccadilly and The Shining Spectre.) There are a number of plot similarities to the 1933 classic – particularly the themes of madness and revenge – but the ray is by no means invisible.
The picture is “the first modern effort whose theme and plot motivations fixed the pattern for dozens of science-fiction films of the post-World War II era.” – Richard Bojarski [Karloff himself was stuck with the same basic plot idea in five later movies through 1940 alone!]
“It is one of the earliest ‘speculative fiction’ films, probably the first B grade science fiction film, and as such it set a pattern for scores of later science-on-the-loose pictures. Yet, it is a kind of story that is becoming increasingly rare in today’s cinema; it is true science fiction. It extended the technology of its day and placed a man into a situation where that technology becomes a force against which he must fight…. We lose something, I think, when fiction doesn’t challenge us to think: ‘what if ….’” – Richard J. Schmidt, Films in Review (1986)
“Anticipating by at least fourteen years popular science-fiction-horror themes which have been recurring ever since 1950, it grows in stature next to others in the genre as the years go by.” – Calvin T. Beck
“A tight and visually inventive sf thriller with an interesting visual surface, glossy and metallic…. The Invisible Ray presages the sf films of the next decade. Pale, grey, relying more on detail than suggestion for its effects, it set the mood for a whole genre of quasi-scientific fantasies.” – John Baxter
It’s the “combination of laboratory possibility with film studio extravagance that makes the picture – finely staged and powerfully portrayed as it is – of considerable appeal to the masses.” – The Cinema, a former British trade publication
“It isn’t blood-curdling to the point achieved in some Hollywoodian efforts, but it is different and fairly entertaining…. [Karloff] and Lugosi stand away out in an otherwise average cast.” – Variety
“What follows [the intro] is so palpably nonsensical that one suspects that the grave foreword and the impressive opening, with its gleaming astronomical instruments, were such a subterfuge for taxing the property departments of the film studios, and whisking Messrs. Karloff and Lugosi into the heat of melodrama involving a new way for Karloff to annihilate.” – the New York Herald Tribune
KAIJU! Gesundheit!
But Japanese kaiju films are nothing to sneeze at! The term is a compound of the words for unnatural and beast, and it’s applied to giant-monster thrillers like Godzilla (or Gojira).
The first reviewed below is a fun Godzilla sequel; followed by two movies directed by the original Godzilla man, Ishirô Honda; followed by two 1950s pictures in which the artistry of the original King Kong animator, Willis H. O’Brien (1886-1962), can be enjoyed. The first of those two is a U.S. release, and the second a U.S.-U.K. coproduction. The U.S.-U.K. film and the one succeeding it were directed by Russian-by-birth, French-by-preference Eugène Lourié. Then, finally, at long last, we get to 1954’s Gojira. And next, it’s back to Hollywood and some regular-size monsters – or maybe not quite. Some of the actors portraying the Invaders From Mars topped seven feet in height, as detailed below. Now that I’ve gotten you totally confused …
EBIRAH, HORROR OF THE DEEP (1966; a.k.a. Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster)
I’ve caught every one of the Godzilla movies released between 1954 and 1975 – 15 in all – and none of the more than 20 made after ’75. This is my second favorite, next to the original Gojira.
To search for his brother, missing for some while after his fishing boat was scuttled in a South Seas storm, young Ryôta hijacks a well-stocked yacht, and simultaneously hijacks two new friends, and a surprise guest. (The latter’s “special skill comes in handy” later in the plot.)
The foursome are in turn marooned on an island. And the perpetrator of their shipwreck ain’t strictly kosher: It’s a giant lobster monster, Ebirah, who destroys vessels attempting to get on or off the island. (The name derives from the Japanese word ebi, meaning shrimp or prawn.)
Also on the isle is Red Bamboo, an army of bad guys who are clandestinely developing nukes. Author Steve Ryfle calls this organization “an apparent stand-in for the People’s Republic of China and its nuclear proliferation.”
Red Bamboo thugs have enslaved natives of Mothra’s nearby home, Infant Island – including the mandatory beautiful heroine, Daiya. The captives are forced to manufacture a juice – not the red radiation antidote of the 1961 Mothra plot, but an Ebirah repellant, a yellow liquid that, when coated on the malefactors’ ships, allows them to float safely past the monster’s treacherous claws.
As if all this weren’t enough, Godzilla just happens to be hibernating in a cave on the island, and our heroes jury-rig a Frankensteinian device to awaken him, hoping they can escape while he diverts the secret army’s attention.
Soon it’s Scylla versus ’Zilla. Lacking a crab cracker to use as a weapon, Godzilla must engage in claw-to-claw combat with Ebirah. The Monster King’s death-ray breath nearly makes a thermidor of Ebirah, who emits the mythical lobster scream.
In a nod to King Kong, the G-dude saves Daiya from a giant bird of prey. (He then taps his nose in satisfaction.)
Mothra appears to be even more of a late sleeper than Godzilla. On Infant Island, it is not until the movie is nearly over that she’s at last aroused from ceremonial slumber to fly to the rescue.
The filmmakers are clearly beholden to Jules Verne.
Some aspects of EHotD are improvements over previous J-monster shows. The miniatures are better. The often humorous dialogue is crisper. And the musical score (by Kurosawa composer Masaru Sato) is superior. One highlight is Big G.’s rock and roll battle against the villains’ jet squadron.
And it’s comforting to know G. has retained his immunity to high-tension wires.
Yes, some things never change. You can still very plainly see the Mothra marionette’s strings.
Akihiko Hirata, the eye-patched antihero of 1954’s Gojira, is the Red Bamboo captain.
Kumi Mizuno, who plays Daiya, is in War of the Gargantuas, coming up next. She appeared in five pictures directed by Ishirô Honda, and held small roles in 2002’s Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla (which only came to U.S. theaters in 2022) and 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars. Some will remember the actress from Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (“Name three presidents.”)
The Okada twins replace the Itô twins in the roles of the tiny, Mothra-worshipping fairy priestesses. Yuko and Yoko Okada went by the stage name Pair Bambi. (More like Pair Tinker Bell!)
Director Jun Fukuda made his Godzilla debut here. He went on to helm four more of the Big Green Guy’s movies.
If Godzilla is your cup of sencha, then this flick should appeal to you.
Trivia time: One of the dubbing voices in the English-language version was Barney Miller’s Hal Linden. He performed similar duties in another “G-rated” production, Destroy All Monsters (ahead on this date).
“A welcome change of pace and style.... Fukuda brought an action director’s sense of pace, versus Honda’s more scientific community/documentary-influenced style.... It’s so good you could literally remove the monsters and still have a pretty solid, entertaining picture.” – Stuart Galbraith IV
“The film has its humorous moments as Godzilla … reveals himself … adept at football [soccer] as he and Ebirah play with an enormous rock at the start of their fight.” – Phil Hardy
Of Masaru Sato’s score: “There are Dick Dale-like surf-rock themes …, a piece that sounds like Carl Stalling’s frenetic music for Warner Bros. cartoons …, and a wonderful vocal piece for the Infant Island fairies.” – Steve Ryfle
THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (1966)
This Ishirô Honda production is pretty bad, but it has notable advocates, including Tim Burton, Nicolas Cage, John Carpenter, Guillermo del Toro, Brad Pitt, and Quentin Tarantino.
When del Toro was growing up, he was enthralled by Japanese giant monsters. His two favorite films were Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965) and its nominal sequel, The War of the Gargantuas. “They have a lot of pathos, and they made me weep,” he said in an interview.
Speaking as one who has seen the ’65 Frankenstein knockoff, I can’t say that viewing it would be of any help to audience members’ comprehension of TWotG. For one thing, dialogue references connecting the two movies were cut from the U.S. version of Gargantuas.
The plot here involves two ogreish, giant humanoids on the loose: the good brown one, Sanda, and the bad green one, Gaira. (The latter is carnivorous.) Scientist Russ “Riff” Tamblyn knows that both are accidental clones of Furankenshutain and tracks them down.
One memorable sequence involves a nightclub singer, portrayed by Kipp Hamilton – at the time the sister-in-law of Carol Burnett and the girlfriend of Gargantuas executive producer Henry G. Saperstein. Avid fans of Devo, who covered her song, may recognize “The Words Get Stuck in My Throat” – and we wish they had.
In the English-dubbed version, Tamblyn improvised many of his lines. The West Side Story star was later cast in Satan’s Sadists and Dracula vs. Frankenstein, both directed by his friend, schlockmeister Al Adamson.
Kenji Sahara (b. 1932), who plays Tamblyn’s assistant, can again be seen immediately following this gem in Destroy All Monsters. To date, he’s made 25 monster movies, including Frankenstein Conquers the World. He was in the original Godzilla and 11 of its variants.
Scenarist Takeshi Kimura penned a dozen other Toho studio monster shows, including Destroy All Monsters and Frankenstein Conquers the World.
Best TWotG line (from Tamblyn’s Dr. Stewart): “I tried calling … everybody, except the SPCA.”
As Rabelais wrote, “Laughter makes men human.”
“The ultimate Japanese monster movie.” – John Carpenter
“War does offer one standout element that lifts it above so many of its juvenile compatriots (and harkens back to the original Godzilla itself) – its focus on the horrific loss-of-human-life element so often glossed over in the more puerile kaiju eiga specimens…. Strong stuff for an ostensibly juvenile-targeted fantasy flick.” – Bryan Senn
“In Sanda and Gaira, one can read the opposing impulses of the Japanese identity after World War II, from an intrinsic peacefulness, geared only to self-defense and protection. To a more violent and aggressive stance…. The two opposing ideals must be reconciled in order for the country to survive.” – Jason Barr
“This is a strange one.” – VideoHound’s Golden Movie Retriever
Trivia time: Tarantino says he modeled the Kill Bill: Vol. 2 fight between Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah after a Sanda vs. Gaira tussle (which is swordless, of course).
DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968)
Boomer-generation genre fans – among them Rick Baker, Tim Burton, Joe Dante, Guillermo del Toro, Peter Jackson, Stephen King, John Landis, Steven Spielberg, and Billy Bob Thornton – fondly recall Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, whose editor was Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008; no period).
This Ishirô Honda motion picture is an example of a Famous Film of Monsterland.
The year is 1999 (“I was dreaming when I wrote this”), and Godzilla and all the other kaiju of the world have been confined by force fields to Monsterland, among the Ogasawara Islands, where they are fed, cared for, and studied by scientists who live in an underground base.
When the base suddenly becomes incommunicado, the U.N. sends a group of astronauts – in a ship apparently designed by artist Umberto Boccioni – to the island to investigate.
The monsters reappear, just as suddenly, around the globe, each ravaging a different large city.
But not Tokyo! Be patient – they get around to it.
Turns out that the all-female aliens – yep, some more of those – from the planet Kilaak are at the bottom of this. In the manner of 1953’s Invaders From Mars, they control the minds of the Monsterland scientists and kaiju by means of transmitters implanted in their heads.
Toho studios went whole hog with this, the company’s 20th monster movie (depending on how you count). There are a total of 10 monsters – or 11 – once again, depending on how you count.
But some of these recycled monsters had not even been in earlier Godzillas. For example, as author David Kalat points out, Manda, the critter who destroys London, was in a 1963 Honda film called Atragon, which involves the lost continent of Mu and the land-sea-air supership of the title.
Destroy was intended to be the final Godzilla movie (hoo-HA!). It was remade in 2004 as the 50th-anniversary production Godzilla: Final Wars, which authors Robert Hood and Robin Pen call “Destroy All Monsters in a Matrix of Independence Day pub brawls.”
“As art, it isn’t much. For fans of big monsters smashing model buildings and fighting each other, it is the ultimate.” – The Motion Picture Guide by Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross
The “battle royal, with the Japanese puppeteers working overtime, is a grunting, crushing, squealing and fire-breathing sight – and as amusing as it is clever.” – Howard Thompson in The New York Times
The monsters “live in slightly crotchety coexistence with each other, like retirees in a managed-care facility.” – Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times
“More Toho monsters than there are in heaven.” – Leonard Maltin
“By this time, [the monsters] have degenerated into vaudeville characters. The effects are perfunctory, all effort having been concentrated on the finale.” – Phil Hardy
“Mostly dull, often impossible to follow, but climactic scene with all the gang vs. Ghidrah in an orgy of stomping, biting and fighting dirty, is good for some easy laughs.” – Castle of Frankenstein magazine [The name of the three-headed dragon cast member was later rendered Ghidorah.]
Again, I acknowledge and thank my friend in Osaka, Mitsuyo (“Mitsy”), for her help with these reviews.
THE BLACK SCORPION 💣 (1957)
In Hollywood, imitation is the sincerest form of making a buck. After the phenomenal success of Them! (1954), there followed a string of inferior giant arthropod movies.
In this particular one, Mexico City-based geologists Richard Denning and Carlos Rivas jeep their way to a rural region to examine the effects of a massive volcanic eruption; there they meet cattle rancher Mara Corday (1930-2025).
Everyone is shocked to find that the eruption has spewed out giant prehistoric scorpions (with a taste for beef).
What sets the film apart is the stop-motion-effects work by Willis O’Brien and Pete Peterson; the latter did the bulk of the animation work. (Aside from the scorpions, a couple of other critters were intended to appear in 1933’s Kong but weren’t used.) O’Brien and Peterson also teamed for Mighty Joe Young and The Giant Behemoth. (The latter will be screened next.)
As author Paul M. Jensen says, “In some shots that combine a scorpion with live action, the creature is seen as a giant silhouette, which suggests that the process work that would have matted the model into that space was never completed.”
Another flaw: The drooling models of the monsters’ “faces,” used in close-ups, don’t match the articulated model bodies and look more like underground comics artist Bill Griffith’s Mr. Toad than like actual scorpions’ heads. George Pal collaborator Wah Chang designed these faces.
Denning appears in The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Creature With the Atom Brain, The Day the World Ended, Target Earth, and Twice-Told Tales. Corday, a 1958 Playboy Playmate, is in the casts of Tarantula (1955), The Giant Claw (1957), and four Clint Eastwood movies (not counting Tarantula, in which young Eastwood had a bit as a jet pilot who napalms the giant arachnid).
Director Edward Ludwig had done three John Wayne pictures.
Scripter David Duncan’s magnum opus is 1960’s The Time Machine, and he worked on The Monster That Challenged the World, Monster on the Campus, The Leech Woman, and Fantastic Voyage.
(Rivas and at least five other Mexican actors from Black Scorpion had earlier appeared in The Beast of Hollow Mountain [1956], another U.S.-Mexican coproduction, cowritten by O’Brien but not featuring his effects.)
Trivia time: “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.” The narrator here, Bob Johnson, is best known as the voice on the myriad reel-to-reel recordings in the prologues to television’s Mission: Impossible (1966-1973).
“Extravagant hocus pocus, unfolded in Mexico, covering ding-dong battle between geologists and giant scorpions. Yarn full-blooded, players eager, camera work clever, and highlights eerie.” ─ Kinematograph Weekly (1958)
“Comes up with some memorable monsters, but puts them down in an otherwise competent but indifferent script.” – Donald C. Willis
“This is considerably more lively than most of the recent examples of eccentric cinema zoology.” ─ the Monthly Film Bulletin, a former British Film Institute publication
“Creaky oversized bugs [are] out to rule the world, starting in Mexico City. They lose – but nobody watching wins.” – Judith Crist
THE GIANT BEHEMOTH (1959; U.K. title = Behemoth the Sea Monster)
Immediately and proudly, this proclaims itself as a Nuclear Scare movie by following the opening credits with a succession of shots of atomic bomb explosions.
Are these clips from a “duck and cover” film, designed to instruct paranoid 1950s schoolchildren on what steps to take in the event of a nuclear attack?
No! This is American marine biologist Steve Karnes (Gene Evans) in London, showing the bomb blasts on a 50-inch screen and warning an international group of scientists about the threat of radiation and “a biological chain reaction” from all the nuke tests.
Later, Karnes cancels his flight home when he gets word about a Cornish fisherman who has inexplicably died of radiation burns, as well as news of thousands of dead fish washing up on beaches in the region. He and professor Bickford (André Morell), head of the Atomic Energy Commission, travel to Cornwall to investigate.
As more death and destruction ensues, it turns out that the cause of the trouble is highly unexpected – and 200 feet long. As if its size weren’t enough: The Palaeosaurus produces electric pulses, like an eel; the monster is saturated with radioactivity from nuclear waste; and its body can thus emit deadly radioactive rays through those electrical charges. (This is surely inspired by Godzilla’s similar mutation.)
The primary question: How to destroy it without scattering radioactive particles?
The solution, which I won’t reveal, amounts to fighting fire with fire.
I will say that, at the conclusion, the behemoth has a taste for a submarine sandwich.
Disappointingly, we have to wait for the main event – the stop-motion animation – until the last 20 minutes of an 80-minute movie. The earlier appearances of TGB are merely a wire-operated head and neck, which Willis O’Brien helped to make.
According to author Mark F. Berry’s Dinosaur Filmography, Pete Peterson (who had multiple sclerosis) did all the animation, while O’Brien “constructed the behemoth stop-motion puppet [and] designed and set up matte shots.”
The budget was tight. When the animation does arrive, it’s not up to the standards of O’Brien’s 1953 Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (coming up next) – much less King Kong. O’Brien and Peterson had only a few weeks to labor, so in the picture “much of their work is used again and again, either reversed, enlarged, or simply repeated,” says author Dennis Fischer.
The shots of fleeing, panicked citizens and deserted streets have a greater impact. Viewers will detect more nods to 1954’s Gojira, as well as a tip of the hat, near the end, to 1925’s The Lost World.
This is an Allied Artists release, but André Morell was a Hammer Film fixture, appearing in the latter studio’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Shadow of the Cat, Plague of the Zombies, The Mummy’s Shroud, She, and The Vengeance of She. His genre appearances for other production companies include Terence Fisher’s So Long at the Fair (which TCM screened on Oct. 19), Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, Bryan Forbes’s The Wrong Box, and Richard Fleischer’s 10 Rillington Place.
In Behemoth, Jack MacGowran (1918-1973) is a museum paleontologist who – like all such scientists in all such sci-fi flicks – is eager to gain extensive and hitherto impossible knowledge from studying the sea monster, dead or alive. Irishman MacGowran was in the casts of Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Hammer’s Night Creatures, How I Won the War (w. John Lennon and Michael Crawford), Polanski’s Fearless Vampire Killers, the George Harrison-scored Wonderwall, and The Exorcist (his last screen role). MacGowran’s New York Times obit notes that he was “a renowned interpreter of the works of Samuel Beckett and Sean O’Casey.”
Ukrainian-born director-F/X man Eugène Lourié, who had been art designer for Jean Renoir and other great French auteurs, was attempting with this movie and with his U.K.-made Gorgo (1961) to duplicate the premise and the financial success of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Lourié also directed The Colossus of New York (1958), about a huge android with Ross Martin’s brain. (He was slated to helm The Black Scorpion but had a conflict with the producers.)
“Eugene Lourie’s non-pretentious script is pleasingly low keyed, the dialogue is intelligent and economical and Mr. Lourie’s direction is rapidly enough paced to bring out a satisfactory suspense…. In the absence of Job’s specifications on ‘behemoth,’ they seem to have stuck the heavy head and carnivorous dental equipment of the blood-thirsty old Tyrannosaurus Rex onto the long, relatively thin neck and clumsy, horizontally balanced body of dull, sluggish grass and waterlily-eating Brontosaurus or, perhaps Diplodocus.” – the Los Angeles Times
“Underfed monster, undercast melodramatics.” – Halliwell’s Film Guide
As mentioned above, O’Brien did stop-motion animation for 1933’s King Kong. He performed the same duties for the hastily made sequel, Son of Kong, released the same year. Eleven weeks before the follow-up’s Christmastime premiere, he suffered an unimaginable tragedy. On Oct. 6, his wife, from whom he’d separated, shot and killed their two young sons, the elder of whom was blind, and attempted to kill herself. She died in a hospital prison ward in November 1934.
Willis O’Brien died at age 76 in 1962. Hours before his death, he had been working on animated setups for director Stanley Kramer’s star-studded comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (remember the very long firetruck ladder?).
FOR FURTHER VIEWING: A 10-minute compilation of funny O’Brien shorts, which were distributed by Thomas Edison’s studio between 1915 and 1917:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbLkqGjOCk
THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953)
“This is such a strange feeling. I feel I’m leaving a world of untold tomorrows for a world of countless yesterdays.” – professor Thurgood Elson (Cecil Kellaway), as he descends in a bathysphere in search of the beast
This giant-dinosaur film, along with Kong, provided templates for Godzilla (which will follow) and an untold number of other pictures. Awakened by a secret nuclear bomb test in Greenland’s Baffin Bay, the prehistoric (and fictitious) “Rhedosaurus” swims toward its home in the waters near New York City, leaving a swath of destruction in its wake.
No one believes nuclear physicist Tom Nesbitt (Paul Hubschmid) and other witnesses who have seen the creature. But Lee Hunter (Paula Raymond), assistant to famed and skeptical paleontologist Elson, has faith in professor Nesbitt, and romance blossoms quicker than you can say “Mesozoic.”
As the creature ravages the Big Apple, the U.S. military attempts to destroy it but finds that the beast presents a new and unexpected danger.
The conflagrant conclusion, perhaps inspired by the Cagney classic White Heat, takes place at Coney Island. (Hot dog!)
Certainly this is among the better sci-fi movies of the 1950s, but Ray Harryhausen’s animation seems less energetic than both his later work and the stop-motion magic of his mentor, Willis O’Brien, on King Kong. The script is based on a story by Harryhausen’s old friend Ray Bradbury.
Kellaway’s performance is a standout.
Beast’s cast reads like a blue book of genre specialists (you know the faces, if not the names): James Best (The Brain Machine; Death Mask; Forbidden Planet; The Killer Shrews – and never mind The Dukes of Hazzard), King Donovan (Invasion of the Body Snatchers; The Magnetic Monster), Roy Engel (The Black Castle; The Colossus of New York; The Day the Earth Stood Still; 1950’s The Flying Saucer; Indestructible Man; It Came From Beneath the Sea; Killers From Space; The Mad Magician; The Magnetic Monster; The Man From Planet X; Night of the Hunter; Not of This Earth; Zombies of the Stratosphere; and more), Frank Ferguson (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein; House of Wax; Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte), Michael Fox (Conquest of Space; The Dunwich Horror; Gog; The Lost Planet; The Magnetic Monster [again!]; Riders to the Stars; War of the Satellites; What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?; Young Frankenstein), Kenneth Tobey (Ben; Gremlins; Gremlins 2; Honey, I Blew Up the Kid; The Howling; Innerspace; It Came From Beneath the Sea; Strange Invaders; The Thing From Another World; 1957’s The Vampire), Lee Van Cleef (Escape From New York; It Conquered the World), Donald Woods (Dimension 5; 13 Ghosts). The distinctive voice of future producer/talk-show host Merv Griffin (costar of 1954’s Phantom of the Rue Morgue) can be heard as a radio announcer. (Listen carefully for his veiled reference to marijuana.)
Co-scripter Lou Morheim’s career path led him to write for and coproduce The Outer Limits; co-scripter Fred Freiberger followed a similar trajectory and coproduced the series Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, and Space: 1999.
Cinematographer John L. Russell worked on Welles’s Macbeth; Hitchcock’s Psycho; both of Hitch’s TV series; Boris Karloff’s Thriller series; Ulmer’s The Man From Planet X; Tobor the Great; Indestructible Man (with Lon Chaney Jr.); and other genre productions.
According to editor Phil Hardy’s science-fiction encyclopedia, Beast cost less than $200,000 and grossed more than $5 million, “which set the financial precedent for the run of monster pictures to follow.”
“Suspenseful, solidly constructed, and tons of fun to watch.” – Chris Barsanti
“The script is competent-of-kind, neither too silly nor too absorbing, and neither the monster nor the people have much personality.” – Donald C. Willis
“Morheim and Freiberger’s script is stilted and the film suffers from long periods of inaction but Lourié’s direction is surprisingly atmospheric and he makes his low budget look much more expensive by adroit use of lighting and shadow.” – Phil Hardy
“The film is let down by a sketchy script full of the solemn philosophising later to become an sf film commonplace, and by some unintentional humour.... The film is only really at its best when Lourié and … Harryhausen are allowed full charge.” – John Baxter
“Archetypal fifties monster flick let down by inferior trick work and cardboard characters. No King Kong, that’s for sure.” – Howard Maxford
“The boys in Hollywood seem to have surrendered to the idea that there is just no limit to foolishness, and have introduced an unlikely lizard that, by means of special-effects photography, has the proportions of King Kong, if none of his abysmal fascination.” – The New Yorker (1953)
GOJIRA (1954; a.k.a. GODZILLA)
“For those watching at home, this is no play or movie. This is real, the story of the century.” – a reporter character’s line from the original Godzilla, coincidentally echoing a newsman’s line from 1954’s Them!
What do you get when you cross a gorilla with a whale?
The bad riddle actually refers the etymology behind the name Gojira, a portmanteau of the Japanese words for gorilla (gorira) and whale (kujira).
At the risk of accusing the famed Toho studio of cinematic plagiarism, I will say that the original film about our 400-foot-tall friend was the company’s attempt to duplicate the monstrous box-office success of both a 1952 rerelease of King Kong (1933) to theaters (in a double feature with 1943’s The Leopard Man, of all things) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. In a few respects, Godzilla is a copycat of these earlier Hollywood pictures.
KONG KOPYING: a mention of olden times when young women on a Japanese island were sacrificed to Godzilla; like Kong, G. wrecks a model train.
BEAST BORROWING: Both the 1953 film’s “Rhedosaurus” and G. are awakened by nuclear blasts, and both proceed to sink ships (more on this later). As in Beast (and in 1950’s The Thing From Another World, et al.), a scientist, anticipating what great knowledge might be learned from the monster, does not want it destroyed. The Jules Vernian undersea conclusion of Gojira is very similar to a middle segment of Beast. Both dinos tackle high-voltage wires – among the most effective sequences of either film. (But in lieu of animation, in Godzilla we have a man in a suit.)
G.’s sinking of vessels early in the 1954 movie alludes to a real-life tragedy, which occurred eight months before Godzilla’s release. A Japanese tuna trawler sailed into an area near Bikini Atoll, just as the United States was secretly testing the first “deliverable” hydrogen bomb there; the vessel’s crewmen were sickened by radioactive material, and one died.
The sane scientist of the first Godzilla picture, Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), is working on a fear-inspiring secret project, too. As British author Mark Bould points out, the project is an example of cinematic “bad science” but is a good analogy for nuclear destruction.
Eventually, Serizawa comes to learn the truth of the saying: If you tell somebody else a secret, then it’s not a secret anymore.
He is involved in a love-triangle subplot, ultimately settled in a Dickensian manner.
Kurosawists like myself will recognize Takashi Shimura (who portrays paleontologist Dr. Yamane) from The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ikiru (meaning To Live), and other films by that most renowned of Japanese directors. Shimura here portrays the requisite “guy who explains stuff,” with a requisite beautiful daughter (who is another side of the love triangle).
Hirata appeared in six other giant-monster flicks helmed by Godzilla director Ishirô Honda.
In fact, Honda served as assistant director on four of Akira Kurosawa’s last five works, and Honda’s association with his friend and fellow auteur dated back to 1949. Author Stuart Galbraith IV notes that this pair’s nicknames for each other, based on the etymologies of Ishirô and Kurosawa, were “the Japanese equivalents of Porky [Honda] and Blacky [Kurosawa].”
Gojira’s man-in-a-monster costume idea, far more economical and less time-consuming than the stop-motion animation in Kong or Beast, has been dubbed “suitmation.” But the Godzilla who makes the first appearance is a hand puppet!
The actors inside the latex suit were Haruo Nakajima, who’s on screen most of the time, and Katsumi Tezuka. Nakajima, a stuntman and trained martial artist, jumped into a Godzilla suit in a dozen motion pictures between 1954 and 1972, and he essayed the roles of Rodan, Mothra, and other giant monsters. (Costume-less Nakajima and Tezuka can briefly be glimpsed in a scene in a newspaper office.)
David Kalat, author of the exhaustive A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series, says Nakajima passed out a number of times during filming in the hot, weighty G-suit. A cup of his sweat, so it was said, came out of the outfit each time he removed it. He lost 20 pounds during the shoot.
The fine score was composed by Akira Ifukube. He created the monster’s roar, which opens the movie, by rubbing the loosened strings of a double bass with a rosin-covered leather glove, slowing the tape of this down, and adding an echo.
Following the 2011 disaster surrounding the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant in Ōkuma, a member of an antinuclear group of Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivors stated, “The bureaucracy, industry and the media were able to shut our eyes to the danger of nuclear power. We let them fool us, even in this country that was the victim of the atomic bomb.”
In its small way, Gojira was an early warning to Japan not to be thus fooled.
“Believe it or not, we naively hoped that the end of Godzilla was going to coincide with the end of nuclear testing.” – Ishirô Honda
“Godzilla is the son of the atomic bomb. He is the nightmare created out of the darkness of the human soul. He is the sacred beast of the apocalypse.” – producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, who had the original idea of Godzilla and created the franchise, and who produced six Kurosawa works
The film may “be read as a form of cultural therapy, allowing the defeated Japanese to work through the trauma of the wartime bombings in the scenes of panic or destruction and … giving them a chance to reimagine and rewire their devastating defeat.” – Susan Napier
“Within the world of Gojira, the contamination of modernity ultimately comes from outside, and from the United States, situating Japan as a passive, perhaps even heroic, victim of the cold war and perhaps World War II as well.” – Mark Anderson
“Godzilla grafted atomic trauma onto the King Kong formula and launched one of the biggest ritual displays of naive metaphor the world has ever seen.” – David J. Skal (1952-2024)
“The most peculiar thing about Godzilla as a metaphor for the bomb is the creature’s simultaneous status as a legendary beast of Japanese islanders’ mythology: surely a more precise representation of the disaster that befell the country at the end of the Second World War would be an agent of destruction from far away, unheard of even in legend, not this native, almost familiar monster. Is Godzilla, then, also on some subterranean level a metaphor for Japan’s former imperial ambitions, which finally unleashed the retaliatory fury that leveled its cities?” – Terrence Rafferty in The New York Times (2004)
“The effects work by master Eiji Tsuburaya, honed from years of doing propagandistic war films, takes great pains to ground the fantastic and absurd in dark and familiar locales.... Godzilla has become a concept more than anything else – an idea that can morph to fit the changes, anxieties, concerns or just plain entertainment wants of the times.” – Miguel David Rodriguez
INVADERS FROM MARS (1953)
“Gee whiz!”
Though told from the point of view of a child, this William Cameron Menzies movie is about as hard as cinematic hard science fiction got in its era.
It was a dark and stormy night … odd, faraway noises prompt budding astronomer David (Jimmy Hunt) – the young son of a designer/engineer (Leif Erickson) who is working on a secret government project – to peer from his bedroom window. Out of the clear black sky, a flying saucer lands in nearby sandpits and (cost-consciously) disappears.
Before we know it, the Martians aboard the vessel have mentally enslaved David’s father and mother (Hillary Brooke), by means of “surgery we’ve never known possible,” as humans later discover.
The parents suddenly turn ugly, part of what author Martin Rubin calls the plot’s “dark reversal of Ozzie-and-Harriet domesticity.”
At first, governed by typical “boy who cried wolf” prejudices, other adults don’t believe David’s account of what has happened. His alien-controlled mother tells authorities he’s been “reading those trashy science-fiction magazines.”
The extraterrestrials have burrowed under the sandpits and hatched a plot of death and destruction, sabotage and thievery, to wreck the secret U.S. project (an atomic space rocket), which – à la The Day the Earth Stood Still – they deem a threat. Their scheme results in the demise by cerebral hemorrhage of one young human (shades of Larry Cohen’s 1960s TV series The Invaders).
After a local doctor (Helena Carter – no “Bonham”) and astronomer (Arthur Franz) are convinced of the truth and come to David’s aid, characters theorize about how creatures could live in the inhospitable environment of Mars, and how their “infrared” and “radioactive” weapons function.
(As is standard in these movies, Carter’s clothing gets ripped during the action. Hollywood fabrics are SO flimsy!)
To uncover where the aliens are ensconced, the military quickly rigs a “variable oscillator” – which we might dub a METAL detector (Martian ExtraTerrestrial Alien Life-form).
The Martian “mutants,” clad in green velour outfits with visible zippers (or seams) up the back, are perhaps distant cousins of the Clay People in 1938’s Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars. Among these beings are 7-foot-4 Lock Martin, who’d portrayed the robot Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still; 7-foot-7 pro wrestler Max Palmer (a future evangelist, who dubbed himself “Goliath for Christ”); and 7-foot-4 Ed Wolff, who took Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, the Lugosi serial The Phantom Creeps, Eugène Lourié’s The Colossus of New York, and Edward Bernds’s Return of the Fly to new heights.
Controlling the mutants is the Martian leader. One of the enslaved humans describes him: “He is mankind developed to its ultimate intelligence.” Actually, the tentacled green head inside a large crystal sphere belongs to Mexican-born little person Luce Potter. She wears a round latex helmet to indicate a big brain. The distance shots of the character inside the sphere, borne by mutants, were done with a sculptured likeness.
The subtext of most 1950s sci-fi pictures is branded with the “Red Scare” label, and this is no exception. The U.S. military is shown in a positive light. “As the Caissons Go Rolling Along” plays on the soundtrack, accompanying footage of convoys of combat vehicles.
One of the military members is Milburn Stone (Gunsmoke’s Doc Adams).
Arthur Franz can be seen (and unseen) in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, as well as in Monster on the Campus and The Atomic Submarine.
Look fast for: Barbara Billingsley (of Leave It to Beaver and Airplane!) as Franz’s secretary, and Richard Deacon (of The Dick Van Dyke Show and Leave It to Beaver), in his screen debut, as an MP.
Austere-looking Morris Ankrum is the Army colonel commanding the anti-Martian troops. His genre credits include Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, The Giant Claw, Kronos, How to Make a Monster, Giant From the Unknown, The Most Dangerous Man Alive, and Roger Corman’s X: The Man With the X-ray Eyes.
A scientist marked for death by the aliens is Robert Shayne (Inspector Henderson on The Adventures of Superman, 1952-58).
This was one of the few features helmed by noted art director Menzies. Among his expressionist designs here are a Caligari-esque footpath and seemingly mile-long building hallways, in contrast to the “phosphorescent,” bubbled walls of the aliens’ lair. (According to author Dennis Fischer, “The bubble-marked walls which dissolve under the Martian heat ray were actually constructed out of condoms.”)
Other highlights of Menzies’s stints in the director’s chair are Lugosi’s Chandu the Magician and the H.G. Wells-penned Things to Come.
As an acclaimed art director, he served on John Barrymore’s silent Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1933’s star-studded Alice in Wonderland, Gone With the Wind, Around the World in 80 Days, and both the 1924 and 1940 renditions of The Thief of Bagdad. He won the first Academy Award for art direction, bestowed for two late-’20s silents: The Dove and Barrymore’s Tempest.
Taking Menzies’s usual role as art director for Invaders was Boris Leven, whose designs for West Side Story garnered an Oscar.
Cinematographer John F. Seitz was behind the cameras for Rex Ingram’s The Magician, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, and When Worlds Collide.
Invaders was among the few sci-fi movies of the period to be made in color. Martin Scorsese has counted Invaders as one of his six favorite SF films, citing its use of light and color. However, the picture was made with the bargain-basement, two-color Cinecolor process, which was subject to fading over time. Thankfully, a beautifully restored version was released in 2023.
For segments of his eerie score, Paris-born composer Raoul Kraushaar used the slightly distorted voices of 16 singers. He wrote music for The Abbott and Costello Show and many other series, as well as for Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
Republic Pictures, widely regarded as the greatest maker of movie serials, produced Invaders From Mars.
In 1986, director Tobe Hooper released an inferior remake.
“Nightmarish, in its way, and ground-zero for many later fantasies of alien abduction.” – Chris Barsanti
“An absolutely terrifying experience and one of the few fantasy works this author does not recommend for younger viewers. [Uses] the frightening images and sounds that populate a nightmare….” – Gary Gerani in Monster Fantasy magazine (1975)
“One of the most unusual films of the fifties.... The menacing alien adults not only emphasize the isolation of the child’s world but also the reds-under-the-bed paranoia of the fifties.” – Phil Hardy
“Because everything is seen from David’s point of view, the film is like Kafka for kids.” – Michael J. Weldon
“Through its asexuality, [the Martian leader] references postwar anxieties that radiation contamination will result in the loss of sexual difference.” – Cyndy Hendershot in Paranoia, the Bomb, and 1950s Science Fiction Films
“Only the fastidious will hold the acting and the logic of the script against the movie.” – Donald C. Willis
The “last twenty minutes is something of a field day for science fiction enthusiasts.” – the Monthly Film Bulletin, a former British Film Institute periodical
OCT. 24
THE FURY (1978)
In the dictionary, under the word “anonymous,” it might say: “Kirk Douglas assuming an alias in a black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.”
And how did our hero wind up here?
In the first act of this gory tale, former secret agent Peter (Douglas) and teen son Robin are having fun at an Israeli beach, when boatloads of men disguised as Arabs attack with machine guns. (The film plays upon any anti-Arab bigotry among its audience members.) Robin, who is gifted with incredible telekinetic powers, is taken by “a government agency you never heard of,” which wants to experiment on him and turn his abilities into a weapon.
“It’s a frightening power these people have,” Peter later remarks. “They can make almost anybody disappear at any time.” (Sounds like today’s ICE.)
Peter spends most of the rest of the story undercover, hunted by a government death squad as he searches for his son. A lead brings him to Chicago, where he enlists the help of another teen, Gillian, whose dangerous psychic powers are the equal of Robin’s.
Newsweek called The Fury’s conclusion “Jacobean.” In this movie, ESP stands for “excess sanguinary projection.” A good thriller, with De Palma’s typical dashes of dark humor. But it should have been longer; the plot needs some filling out.
Costars include Andrew Stevens (Massacre at Central High), Amy Irving (in her second big-screen effort, following Carrie), Carrie Snodgress (who, while raising the son she had with Neil Young, hadn’t made a feature film in eight years), Charles Durning (De Palma’s Sisters; When a Stranger Calls), Fiona Lewis (The Fearless Vampire Killers; Dr. Phibes Rises Again; Jack Palance’s Dracula; Innerspace), and my lantsman John Cassavetes (we grew up in the same Long Island town, Port Washington; he got there first). The latter can be seen again in Rosemary’s Baby (TCM, Oct. 25). Newcomer Daryl Hannah is one of Irving’s schoolmates. Dennis Franz is a helpful police officer. De Palma recidivist William Finley is yet another psychic.
Rick Baker did the special makeup effects, and John Williams did the score.
Trivia time: In a scene with bikinied Irving and Melody Thomas Scott walking along a beach, you’ll spot swimming-trunked Jim Belushi briefly in the background at left. This was his first film.
Art (unknowingly) imitates life: For more than two decades beginning in 1972, the CIA and other U.S. government and military branches ran a project, called Stargate, that investigated psychokinesis and ESP and was initiated in the belief that the Soviets had a similar program. Ultimately, the U.S. program, which cost a total $20 million, was declared a failure. The project was revealed to the public in 1995. (This earlier project bears no relation – except in a mutual waste of money – to the current Stargate Project, the international infrastructure venture involving OpenAI, Oracle, and other companies.)
De Palma imitates De Palma: Scenarist John Farris based the script on his own 1976 novel. Viewers will compare The Fury’s plot to De Palma’s Carrie, but the book was released in January of ’76, and Carrie came out the following November. (Stephen King’s novel was published in 1974.) Parts – and I do mean parts – of The Fury are comparable to Cronenberg’s 1981 Scanners (TCM, Oct. 25), and the 1978 flick certainly influenced the Canadian director.
Speaking of influences, one might think, based on the derring-do in one early sequence, that Peter is imitating Superman (or perhaps, since his son is “Robin,” …?). But the Christopher Reeve rendition of the Man of Steel premiered later in 1978.
“The issues DePalma raises about power, individualism and personal responsibility in mass society are real ones and he does not treat them frivolously.” – The Observer
“De Palma’s staging amounts to a movie-long chase that is witty, crisp and suspenseful.” – Richard Schickel, Time magazine
“‘The Fury’ is a furiously paced, thoroughly gripping psychological thriller…. John Farris’s script … becomes increasingly ludicrous, but ‘The Fury’ remains a handsomely crafted, unusually tantalizing movie.” – Kathleen Carroll, the (New York) Daily News
“A perceptive critic once observed that Brian De Palma belongs to the submarine-sandwich school of filmmaking – tossing in a little of this, a little of that, a little of anything that might make the product spicier and bulkier…. De Palma has a brashly exciting visual sense that rarely runs dry.” – David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor
“Destruction for its own sake seems to be The Fury’s raison d’être…. Whatever their shortcomings, De Palma’s films are not easily forgotten.” – Robert Asahina of The New Leader, a former political and cultural magazine
“How could I give up gore? What would all my blood-soaked fans do?” – Brian De Palma [spoken on a publicity tour for The Fury]
“The spilling of blood in The Fury comes close to being hard-core pornography for the medium in a way that supposedly real sex is not. For a project so lurid, the acting is surprisingly thoughtful and solid.” – Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice
“I wouldn’t recommend the film as a benefit attraction for the Hemophilia Foundation, or for those made queasy by the sight of blood, or for the serious-minded…. [De Palma] flatters young people by suggesting that they have some power they can’t control, a ‘gift’ that adults don’t have but desperately want.” – Molly Haskell, New York magazine
De Palma “has such a grip on technique in The Fury that you get the sense of a director who cares about little else; there’s a frightening total purity in his fixation on the humor of horror. It makes the film seem very peaceful, even as one’s knees are shaking…. The visual poetry of The Fury is so strong that its narrative and verbal inadequacies do not matter. No Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many ‘classic’ sequences.” – Pauline Kael
“Fine popular entertainment…. De Palma, like Alfred Hitchcock, is a superb technician, sure and subtle in such matters as camera placement and editing.” – Richard Schickel, Time magazine
“It is not a stretch to view this film as De Palma’s North by Northwest…. De Palma’s gift is not his attention to story details, but his understanding how to fit pieces together…. He has severed style from substance, and the world can either take it or leave it.” – John Kenneth Muir
“‘The Fury’ is a movie so monumentally silly that it practically has to be seen to be disbelieved…. [De Palma] has become a stylist with no concern for substance. Actors are as much pawns for De Palma as they are for Hitchcock, but he hasn’t the skill to edit their work into a performance.” – Jerry Oster
“De Palma tries to follow in Hitchcock’s footsteps and trips over his own derivativeness.” – Steven H. Scheuer
“Some of the critics I most respect have saluted The Fury as an artistic triumph, the birth of a classic, better then Hitchcock, irresistible in technique and impact…. But the movie still seems to me a piece of balderdash, and fourth-class balderdash at that…. Even in its own idiotic terms, The Fury makes no sense whatever.” – Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Saturday Review
“There’s an awful lot of blood in the movie and a lot of flesh, but there’s little flesh and blood. ‘The Fury’ is the work of a brilliant, droll, sadistic puppeteer.” – David Ansen, Newsweek
“The John Farris screenplay, though based on a published novel, has the air of something that hasn’t been thought clearly through…. When a screenplay is so bad, there truly isn't much that actors can do except behave themselves, which is more or less what happens.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times
The Fury “is not fun trash. It’s dumb garbage…. [Producer Frank Yablans] may well have been attempting to depict the possible abuse of gifted children in our society or hint at the potential horrors behind reports of Russian and Chinese research in parapsychology. Actually, all that is abused here is the reputation of some good actors and the intelligence of the moviegoer…. The film is rated R – for rubbish.” – Judith Crist, the New York Post
“Stylish trash…. The ultimate litmus test for those who prefer form over content.” – Leonard Maltin
“Apart from a few throwaway references to government agencies and psychic phenomena, there is never, anywhere, a coherent exposition of what all the running and jumping is about. The more one analyzes the picture, the less substantive its story becomes.” – Variety
“Happily [the government] agents, though more diabolical than the C.I.A., are no less inept…. Apart from its Grand Guignol effects, ‘The Fury’ has little of consequence…. It could have been made by any Hollywood journeyman.” – Howard Kissel, Women’s Wear Daily
“The Fury signifies nothing…. The only reality the characters in this movie have is that contributed by the actors…. It isn’t even scary because it has only the dimension of a cartoon and you don’t get close enough to a cartoon to feel scared.” – the Ottawa Journal
“This movie marks the start of the degeneration of [De Palma’s] storytelling abilities … watchable, but dumb and pretentious.” – Richard Meyers
“Fourth-rate Carrie and sixth-rate Obsession.” – Films in Review [Obsession is De Palma’s 1976 Vertigo wannabe.)
“Quite simply one of the worst movies of all time…. You will realize to your own fury that none of it makes even the slightest bit of sense….” – Rex Reed, the (New York) Daily News
OCT. 25
THE TINGLER (1959)
“Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic. But scream! Scream for your lives! The tingler is loose in this theater, and if you don’t scream, it may kill you! Scream! Scream!”
Vincent Price on LSD!
The Tingler is the EC comic of ’50s horror cinema. The 2006 British book Horror! The Definitive Companion to the Most Terrifying Movies Ever Made states: “this stands as the single strangest premise ever put forward by an American horror film.”
How’s this for a conceit? Coroner/scientist Warren Chapin (Price) is studying the source of fear. This is the reason he experiments with acid in one sequence. But the really bad trip comes after he discovers that a parasitic, centipede-like critter, dubbed the tingler, can latch on to human spinal columns, is empowered and given form by fear, and can cause death by cracking the backbone. Only the host’s screams can nullify the tingler.
At one point, Chapin makes an unwilling test subject of his nasty, cheating wife, Isabel. (Isabel: “There’s a word for you.” Warren: “There are several for you.”)
Director William Castle was guilty of some of the most bizarre promotional gimmicks in cinematic history. For example, something he dubbed “Percepto”: Certain seats in theaters screening The Tingler were rigged with what Variety referred to as “war surplus vibrating motors.” According to memorabilia collector Bob Burns, who helped install these motors at a San Antonio theater while he was employed by a local TV station, the small devices had been used inside military plane wings to shake the ice off them.
The gadgets were turned on during a sequence in which the tingler (venturing into Blob territory) terrorizes a movie house. Audience participation gone wild! (Some enterprising youths brought screwdrivers into cinemas and stole the motors.) “In the final count,” Castle said, “I think we must have buzzed 20,000,000 behinds.”
Price called Castle a “nutty fellow.” (And can’t you just hear the actor saying these words in his mellifluous voice?)
Ex-child star Darryl Hickman (1931-2024) is the film’s juvenile. Months after The Tingler’s release, he wed castmate Pamela Lincoln (1937-2019), who portrays his fiancée and Isabel’s kid sister.
The Tingler riffs on the French classic Diabolique and on silent cinema. (Diabolique inspired director Castle to get into this horror thing.) The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural sees The Tingler as a forerunner to Cronenberg’s They Came From Within and Ridley Scott’s Alien.
“Vincent Price is a scientist who doesn’t know the meaning of fear. He’s not brave, he just doesn’t know the mean— Anyway, he’s experimenting to find out what makes people scared. (Besides horror pictures.)” – Castle of Frankenstein magazine (1962)
“The Tingler has survived as a first-rate and quite congenial scary film.... [The monster] looks as if it were designed by a first-year special effects student who was not doing very well.” – Leonard Wolf
“The multiplying absurdities of The Tingler are not only essential to its entertainment value but also make one wonder what [screenwriter Robb] White and Castle were ‘on’ when they concocted it.” – Jonathan Rigby
“More screams per frame than any other horror pic on record. (For max effect, play at top volume; your neighbors will never forget you.)” – Joe Kane, a.k.a. The Phantom of the Movies®
“As I sat there experiencing the miracle of Percepto, I realized there could be such a thing as Art in the cinema.” – John Waters
SCANNERS (1981)
As most viewers are aware, writer/director David Cronenberg’s movie is a real mind blower.‡
The name of one of the main characters, Dr. Ruth (Patrick McGoohan), surely alludes to Dr. Ruth Westheimer (1928-2024), whose program Sexually Speaking premiered on a New York radio station in 1980. Yet among the Cronenberg films up to the time, Scanners has the least to do with sex.
This Ruth, a “psychopharmacist,” has our protagonist, Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) – a homeless person – drugged and kidnapped at a mall.
(As most viewers will guess at this early juncture, Ruth is not who he seems.)
Vale is unknowingly possessed of tremendous psychic abilities, Ruth informs him: “You’re a scanner, which you don’t realize. And that has been the source of all your agony. But I will show you now that it can be a source of great power.” The agony comes from having to hear everything everyone around him is thinking. The great power entails turning other human beings into his puppets.
The doctor works for a private weapons and security systems company called ConSec, and he privately enlists Vale to infiltrate what he calls a “scanner underground,” led by Revok (Michael Ironside), who’s “in an insane crusade to destroy the society that created him.” Any scanner who refuses to join Revok is killed. Vale agrees to the assignment, and during his mission he meets a scanner yogini, Kim Obrist (Jennifer O’Neill), who reluctantly aids him in his quest.
This plot takes some ideas from De Palma’s The Fury. There’s also a little of Hitchcock’s The Birds. Author John Kenneth Muir opines, “Scanners suggests, in some fashion, the screenplays for The X-Men (2000) and X-2 (2003),” with Revok as Magneto and Vale as Professor Xavier.
The ending of Scanners makes me glad I’m an only child.
McGoohan – who was born in Astoria, Queens, a few miles from my abode – is renowned for the cult series he created, The Prisoner (1967-68).
Stephen Lack was in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers.
I saw Michael Ironside as a guest speaker at a science-fiction convention in July. He seems just as dour in person as many of his characters are. His genre films include Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Terminator: Salvation, and X-Men: First Class.
Jennifer O’Neill starred in The Reincarnation of Peter Proud and was perhaps typecast in The Psychic, one of director Lucio Fulci’s better gialli. O’Neill, former fashion model and current born-again Christian, put the “chic” in psychic.
One of the makeup artists was Dick Smith, who worked on The Exorcist and won an Oscar for Amadeus.
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‡ Ian Conrich, who wrote The Modern Fantastic: The Films of David Cronenberg, would say an intro like this “suggests a lack of originality amongst writers, a particular overuse of news-speak that often works by puns and association for the expression of an opinion, and, finally, a one-dimensional approach to Cronenberg.” So, sue me!
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“Regretfully forecasting a world in which media commentator Bill O’Reilly can threaten call-in listeners with frightening-sounding visits from a gestapo called Fox Security, a private ‘security’ force in thrall to Rupert Murdoch’s corporation, there’s Scanners’ depiction of ConSec, a secretive corporation running its own aggressive agenda without, apparently, oversight from the government.” – John Kenneth Muir (2012)
“The writer/director is as involved with social affects as he is with special effects: he supplements his terror with philosophy.” – Carrie Rickey, The Village Voice
“One could write a master’s thesis about, say, the relationship between existentialist Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of ‘Otherness’ and Scanners…. Despite low production values and some poor acting, Scanners delivers the goods on multiple levels and remains one of the best films by one of the genre’s most accomplished auteurs.” – Joseph Maddrey
“Relatively conventional by Cronenberg standards – though wildly imaginative by normal ones.” – The Movie Guide, edited by James Monaco
Scanners breaks “through a barrier of credibility which has meant that the poor taste of much of the special effects and make-up has at last been used in a story of some imagination…. It is not a pleasant film, nor is it particularly worthy, but it has a likeable determination to tell a story well at a rattling pace, a skill which few enough film-makers can demonstrate.” – Nicholas Wapshott, The Times of London
“What is going on is rarely clear and never plausible. Cronenberg can compose a nice scene; he has yet to learn how to tell a coherent story.” – Philip French, The Observer
“A lame-brained science fiction movie…. ‘Scanners’ does nothing but dull the mind.” – Kathleen Carroll, the (New York) Daily News
“Stomp your hands, clap your feet!” – Quiet Riot
One or both of those pairs of anatomical extremities, which most of us naively take for granted, are thematic subjects of the following three TCM offerings:
THE HAND 💣 (1981)
I have just two words for Oliver Stone’s second feature film as director: It stinks.
MAD LOVE (1935)
“Each man kills the thing he loves.”
Peter Lorre – who author Anne Sharp says had a “haunting tadpole face” – runs circles around the other actors and proves he was the best nutcase in the business. And he’s completely bald in this, his first U.S. role, which makes him even scarier. His character waxes poetic, quoting Wilde (see citation above) and both Brownings.
Mad Love is set in Paris, and the central characters are a trio of renowned figures: Dr. Gogol (Lorre), a surgeon who heals children without charge, but who is completely insane; Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), a Grand Guignol actress who is the object of theatergoer Gogol’s obsession; and Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive), her husband, an English concert pianist.
Mad Love is a variation on the 1920 novel The Hands of Orlac, by Maurice Renard. The tale was adapted for the screen in 1924 by director Robert “Caligari” Wiene, under that title (and costarring Conrad Veidt, the Caligari somnambulist), and again in 1960 (with a cast including Mel Ferrer and Christopher Lee).
The storylines of all the adaptations concern hands with minds of their own, or vice versa.
Clive twice portrayed Dr. Frankenstein, but in Mad Love, it is he who receives the spare parts. Another plot thread of Mad Love may bring to mind the fetishistic tendencies of Jeffrey Dahmer.
The shot of a snarling Lorre wearing shades, fedora, metal gauntlets, and a steel-and-leather neck brace is one of the most outré and enduring images in all of 1930s horror. (Explaining these accoutrements would give too much away.)
Ted Healy, an ex-vaudevillian now best known as the Three Stooges’ erstwhile top banana, contributes so-called comic relief as an American reporter named Reagan. Keye Luke has a pleasantly non-stereotypical role as Gogol’s assistant surgeon. The following year, Drake played Karloff’s wife in The Invisible Ray, costarring Lugosi.
This was the final directorial effort of Oscar-winning cinematographer Karl Freund, who had piloted Karloff’s The Mummy and went on to become director of photography for I Love Lucy. (Listen for an allusion to a famous line from The Mummy, spoken by Gogol’s drunken maid.)
The cinematographer was Gregg Toland, who later worked on Citizen Kane. In her essay “Raising Kane,” critic Pauline Kael noted visual similarities between the two motion pictures and theorized that Toland “passed on Freund’s technique to Welles.”
The opening credits of Mad Love are punchy, to say the least.
“Extravagant, bizarre and very fast-paced, Mad Love is almost a parody of the typical horror film of the period.” – John Brosnan
“Stark horror melodrama with interesting visuals and a persuasive star performance.” – Howard Maxford
“At heart ‘Mad Love’ is not much more than a super-Karloff melodrama.... But Mr. Lorre, with his gift for supplementing a remarkable physical appearance with his acute perception of the mechanics of insanity, cuts deeply into the darkness of the morbid brain.” – The New York Times
“Freund uses the camera like a brush, painting shadows and light upon a celluloid canvass to create mood and meaning in every frame. Nothing in this picture is flat, there are always layers upon layers of dark and light.” – Bryan Senn
“I believe the low-spoken villain who is absolutely blasé about what he does, who works out a murder like a mathematical problem, for instance, is a much more terrifying fellow than the human fellow who commits a murder in a fit of anger.” – Peter Lorre
THE UNKNOWN (1927)
Some motion pictures are firmly entrenched in the silent era. They could not have been made at any later time. Tod Browning’s The Unknown is one such film. The antagonist (Lon Chaney) is a circus performer called Alonzo the Armless Wonder. Joan Crawford costars as the circus owner’s daughter, who has a weird phobia.
Alonzo is a knife thrower, but the actual foot maneuvers are done by an armless man, Paul Desmuke.
Co-scripter Waldemar Young worked on Charles Laughton’s Island of Lost Souls.
Chaney’s feature films, particularly the “monster” flicks, bring to mind the Turner Classic Movies documentary Universal Horror (1998), which postulates a peculiar influence World War I had on subsequent cinema. Because of medical advances by this time, wounded troops who would have died of similar injuries in earlier conflicts were merely maimed and disfigured. This is reflected, the documentary suggests, in the grotesque movie makeup created after the war. (Perhaps analogously, contemporary master makeup man Tom Savini has used as inspiration the harrowing visions he witnessed as a combat photographer in Vietnam.)
I’ve only watched about five minutes’ worth of the TV series American Horror Story, but it was enough to tell that it alluded to The Unknown.
“The case of Mr. Tod Browning is rapidly approaching the pathological. After a series of minor horrors that featured such comparatively respectable creations as murderous midgets … all sinister and deadly in a murky atmosphere of blackness and unholy doom, the director presents us now with a melodrama that might have been made from a scenario dashed off by the Messrs. Leopold and Loeb.” – the New York Herald Tribune [A murderous midget is in The Unholy Three (1925), which was remade in 1930.]
“A very disturbing, sick film.” – Peter John Dyer of the British Film Institute
“Wild and frequently repulsive.” – The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer
“Widely regarded as Lon Chaney’s weirdest and most bizarre film…. Just as bizarre and strange as any film that could be released today.” – Robert K. Klepper (1999)
“There are enough kinks, quirks, and generally unwholesome elements in this outing for a dozen films.” – Ken Hanke
“Fans of Lon Chaney often mention that The Unknown is the perfect film to show to friends who think that silent movies are all Mary Pickford and the Little Tramp; the uninitiated are usually amazed to discover that the Age of Innocence had such a dark and perverse underside.” – Henry Nicolella in American Silent Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Feature Films, 1913-1929
“One of the most resplendently morbid films ever made.... The tormented tale is worthy of the Theatre of the Absurd, but staged with an intensity and emotional directness that lift it into areas of amour fou and wholly justify the Grand Guignol ending.... Unusual … in the depth and darkness of its undertones of sexual phobia.” – Phil Hardy
“In the midst of the 1920s’ New Morality, with young Americans emancipating themselves in every direction while enthusiastically absorbing second-hand accounts of Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, Browning’s kinky scenarios of unrequited love and physical dismemberment must have seemed like dire warnings from a more grim-faced and atavist age.” – Jonathan Rigby
Browning “has a fine pictorial eye and succeeds in intriguing our visual sense without making any appeal to our brains.” – The Film Spectator, a former Hollywood-based magazine
THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951)
A sci-fi flick from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, the dynamic duo of British art-house cinema? Well, this fantasy, a Technicolor feast for the eyes based on Offenbach’s 1881 opera, did make it into editor Phil Hardy’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (a.k.a. The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, a.k.a. The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction). And the first tale does have a robot — or rather a life-size mechanical doll — and other automatons.
The opera is based on the short story “Olympia” (1814) and two others by E.T.A. Hoffmann.
“Olympia,” the doll, is portrayed by Moira Shearer, who, like several other actors here, plays more than one role. These tales are stories of love and tragedy. (One of the characters is even named Schlemil.)
“Ballet and opera (and, by extension, cinema itself) become magic spaces, where anti-naturalistic designs, trick photography and the eradication of any sense of realism turn the screen into a new, imaginative space.” — Andrew Moor
“Drifting pieces of sad, sickly cellophane [suggest] gaiety’s futility.” — Raymond Durgnat
“Powell and Pressburger’s purest, most immaculate work…. The film is inventive, authoritative and passionate.” – The Guardian (2015)
“This film version of the opera is, in toto, a vastly wearying show. And that is because it sates the senses without striking any real dramatic fire.” – Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
“Over-ambitious attempt to create a film told entirely with music and dance.... Despite the talent involved, it eventually suffocates on its own opulence.” – Howard Maxford
Trivia time: Future Hammer Film director and Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Francis was camera operator for TToH.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945)
Reviewed earlier this month.
DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)
Words fail me:
“It begins with an image of two superplanes in intercourse-sustenance and ends with a climax of [mushroom] clouds.” – George W. Linden [Trivia time: The music behind the opening credits is an instrumental version of “Try a Little Tenderness,” arranged by [Mr.] Laurie Johnson, composer of the theme song of Patrick Macnee’s The Avengers; Johnson died in 2024 at age 96.“Try a Little Tenderness” was first recorded by Britain’s Ray Noble in 1932 and immortalized in 1966 by Otis Redding.]
“With the help of Terry Southern, [Stanley Kubrick] constructed, I think, the most perfectly written comic screenplay of the postwar cinema.” – Alexander Walker, speaking in the 2000 documentary Inside: Dr. Strangelove
“Arguably the best political satire of the century, a film that pulled the rug out from under the cold war by arguing that if a ‘nuclear deterrent’ destroys all life on earth it is hard to say exactly what it has deterred.” – Roger Ebert
“Undoubtedly the most significant American film of the past twenty-five years.... Beyond the flashing needles and knives Kubrick wields against sacred cows, there is a gripping suspense thriller here, sharply unfolded, tightly told, neatly cut from climax to climax.... The ultimate black comedy of our time.” – Judith Crist (1974)
“The first film to prescribe laughter as the antidote to what was then mankind’s foremost fear: imminent destruction when the Big One dropped.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“One might have thought that a comedy about nuclear weapons in the hands of trigger-happy idiots released less than two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, two months after the Kennedy assassination, and at the height of the Cold War would fall flat, but one would be underestimating Kubrick’s genius as a filmmaker.” – Jennifer Eiss
“To design the film, Kubrick had chosen the relatively untried German-born Ken Adam, who had just won his reputation with the sets of Dr. No.... [co-scripter] Southern brought to the film a uniquely sixties black humour, redolent of stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, cartoonist Jules Feiffer and New York’s satirical magazines.... George C. Scott’s [Gen.] Buck Turgidson was a caricature of the cigar-chomping, war-loving head of the Strategic Air Command in the fifties, General Curtis LeMay.” – Kubrick biographer John Baxter [Editor’s notes: LeMay was George Wallace’s running mate in the 1968 presidential election; Ken Adam served as production designer for a total of seven James Bond films.]
“This was arguably [Peter] Sellers’ finest hour on screen, with his bravura multi-personality performance, playing [R.A.F. Group Capt.] Mandrake and also the insidiously bland mandarin President Merkin Muffley, and, most egregiously of all, the ex-Nazi scientist inspired by the V-2 rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.” – The Guardian (2019)
“In calling [Sellers’s president] Merkin Muffley (literally, the female pubic area with a false hair piece), Kubrick … labels the president as a female, using epithets that betray the same fear and contempt for femininity as the characters whom he intends as targets of his satire.” – William Fried
“Muffley is a parody of Adlai Stevenson, a bland intellectual nominally in command of a gang of military madmen.” – Mr. Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers, by Ed Sikov
“Kubrick’s darkly comic vision exposes the absurdity of middle-aged wet dreams about sexuality and postnuclear survivability. We have entrusted our fates to junior grade Hugh Hefners who play with guns and bombs.” – David J. Hogan
“Notable as the last film in which Kubrick told a recognizable joke.” – Chris Barsanti
“Stanley was a control freak of the highest order and ran his set more like a dictator than a director. He treated actors as if they were technical elements in his design, not as creative professionals like himself.” – James Earl Jones, who made his big-screen debut as Bombardier Lt. Lothar Zogg [Editor’s note: “Lothar” was a comic-strip character, the African valet/bodyguard of Mandrake the Magician.]
“‘When Johnny Comes Marching Home’ … which dated back to the American Civil War, now carries a hidden layer of meaning when played over scenes of a giant nuclear bomber racing to fulfill its mission: Johnny won’t come marching home from this battle, and nor will anyone else.” – George Case
“The wildly evocative image at the conclusion … of Slim Pickens riding the ‘Bomb’ downward through the sky, as if he were trying to tame a raging bull, points out, perhaps in the most perverse way, the irony of a society living in fear of the very weapon it sees as its salvation from fear.” – Jon R. Stone
Dr. Strangelove was “scripted to conclude with a huge, Three Stooges-style pie fight in the War Room, which was actually filmed, but cut before the film’s release because Kubrick thought such obvious slapstick would move the film into the realm of pure farce, and blunt its satiric edge.” – Wheeler Winston Dixon
“The more you watch this, the more you get.” – The Rough Guide to Cult Movies
“This brilliant black comedy … seems better with each passing year.” – Leonard Maltin
“… Often [Kubrick’s] jokes are on the childish level of risqué skits in a cheap burlesque show.… he mixes bright satirical wit with slapstick, pointless wisecracks about sex, and phallic symbols that even a beginning psychology student would consider puerile…. While a few of the critics are now calling Stanley Kubrick a ‘boy genius,’ I’m wondering if the emphasis shouldn’t be more on ‘boy’ and less on ‘genius.’” – Philip T. Hartung, Commonweal (1964)
“… twirpish twiddle …” – Films in Review (1964)
CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)
We see young Mary Henry emerge from a muddy river, after a car accident that has killed two women friends. But when she heads from Kansas to Utah to take a job as a church organist, spectral visions and other weird happenings plague her. She believes a derelict amusement park may hold the key to these strange occurrences.
“A film masterpiece, if in a minor key.” – Leonard Wolf
“Herk Harvey [a maker of industrial and educational films] was consciously influenced by the likes of Bergman and Cocteau.... What makes the highfalutin touches work is their sheer awkwardness – the discordant notes they strike are eerier than any slickly executed flourishes would be. Watching this movie, you’re laughing at the corniness of it all one minute, frightened out of your wits the next.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made
“The out-of-sync sound, unconventional editing choices, and weird pacing create an oppressively unsettling ambiance that will leave viewers feeling anxious from beginning to end…. Harvey drew inspiration from European directors like Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau….” – Christopher J. Olson
“Insufferably portentous, the script harks back to those expressionistic dramas which solemnly debated this life and the next with heavy-breathing dialogue.” – Phil Hardy
“If Carnival of Souls has an underlying theme, it seems to be that emotional separation from other people is tantamount to separation from life itself.” – Sixties Shockers by Mark Clark and Bryan Senn
“It’s an exercise in weirdness.” – director Herk Harvey
ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968)
Words fail me again:
“Oh, shut up with your ‘Oh, Gods,’ or we’ll kill you, milk or no milk!” – Patsy Kelly as witch Laura-Louise
“[Novelist] Ira Levin has come up with a plot so effectively original that it is deserving more of a patent than a copyright…. The beauty of the [movie] plot is that it virtually conceals its real subject…. Two universal fears run through ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ the fear of pregnancy, particularly as it consumes personality, and the fear of a deformed offspring with all the attendant moral and emotional complications…. An almost flawless entertainment.” – Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice
“Truly frightening because so much of it is so plausible, ROSEMARY’S BABY is one of the finest examples of modern horror, a milestone in the evolution of the genre…. The fears and anxiety that Rosemary experiences initially seem like an understandable response for a neurasthenic young woman to have when an ‘alien’ being is growing within her….. Supernatural metaphors … make pregnancy a rich and strong condition.” – The Movie Guide, edited by James Monaco
Guy and Rosemary “become Joseph and Mary in a new Satanic order inversely paralleling the Christian Messiah’s birth.” – Tony Williams
“‘Rosemary’s Baby’ reached theaters on the eve of the women’s liberation movement. Today, it reads like a cautionary reminder of why one was needed in the first place.” – Karen Durbin, The New York Times (2003)
“Polanski’s film shows the demonic nature of capitalism. Capital is accumulated through betrayal and murder…. While other movies inflect the idea of supernatural evil with the suggestion that modern business methods emanate from Hell, only Rosemary’s Baby elaborates a worldview in which evil is the quiet, unsensational medium that modern people breathe.” – Gary Indiana, The Village Voice
“The successful mounting of the atmosphere of evil in this film is due to the restraint with which the creative team has laid on the horrors. Most of the sinister things that happen would be quite ordinary in other circumstances.” – Kine Weekly, a former British trade paper
“Polanski’s genius for horror is, unlike Hitchcock’s, sly, sneaky, subversive…. Polanski flirts with absurdity, with stories so incredible in their sickness that they ought to be ridiculous, and makes them vilely convincing. I really do advise any pregnant woman, however rational or sophisticated, not to go near Rosemary’s Baby.” – The Observer
“The temptation must have been strong to strew the film with red herrings, and looking back on it there may have been a few. But in general the style is marked by exciting economy. No shot seems superfluous, no conversation irrelevant, no creepiness for creepiness’s sake…. Hokum? Perhaps, but very high class hokum. The best in its kind for years.” – The Daily Telegraph
“It is a horror film, not very scary…. [The film] doesn’t quite work on any of its dark or powerful terms…. You can see the movie, and like it, without risking terrors or nightmares.” – Renata Adler, The New York Times
“The humor of the film, especially the wit of the ending, makes the film worth considering…. The actors are at their best in realizing the humor in the book….” – Film Quarterly
Witch Ruth Gordon “[tramples] over the English language (‘preganant’ and ‘culumsy’ are the remains of two of her victims).” – Ramsey Campbell, a contributor to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (In any case, Gordon took home an Academy Award for best supporting actress.)
The character “Rosemary stands as one of the best-realized, most three-dimensional portraits in horror movie history.” – Mark Clark
“Miss Farrow’s special magic is her fragility. She reminds one of a fawn in captivity.” – Kathleen Carroll, the (New York) Daily News
Of the Satanic rape sequence: “Mia, Ruth Gordon and Patsy Kelly finally wore, in Patsy’s words, ‘what you might call flesh-colored muumuus.’” – Look magazine
“Why on earth does a major filmmaker feel seduced by a dumb piece of boo-in-the-night like this story? … The film is elegantly designed by [production designer] Richard Sylbert and cinematically well executed in every way, but it adds up to a rather trivial and slaphappy piece of work.” – Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker
“Unfortunately, as I made the film and I don’t believe in God or in the Devil.… I’m doubly incapable of being frightened by my own creation, and that really bothers me.” – Roman Polanski, speaking in 1969 to interviewers (one of whom thought witch Sidney Blackmer sounded like Mr. Magoo)
“Perhaps here (as certainly in his version of Macbeth) there’s an echo of Polanski’s knowledge of the Nazi era.” – Ramsey Campbell
“He has his father’s eyes.” – Roman to Rosemary
‡
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‡ Dialogue excerpt from Addams Family Values (1993):
Gomez (regarding baby Pubert): He has my father’s eyes.
Morticia: Gomez, take those out of his mouth!
Trivia time:
⏺That’s an anonymous Mia Farrow la-la-la-ing her way through the theme behind the opening and end credits: “Lullaby From Rosemary’s Baby,” which hit #111 on Billboard’s pop chart.
⏺Beginning at about 1:37, you’ll hear the voice of an uncredited Tony Curtis, as a bewitched actor.
⏺Producer William Castle can be seen in a cameo outside a phone booth at 1:46.
⏺The exterior of the Bramford, the ancient apartment building where Rosemary, Guy, et al. live, is really the Dakota, home to many celebrities past and present, and where John and Yoko resided from 1973. For years, Mia Farrow and her sizable family resided in a building next to the Dakota. On the morning of Dec. 8, 1980, Farrow walked by Mark David Chapman, or so he said.