Howery's Review

OCT. 20 – 26

HAPPY 10/20 BIRTHDAY TO BELA LUGOSI (b. 1882), REX INGRAM (b. 1895), AND MICHAEL DUNN (b. 1934):::

OCT. 20

“I like looking at old Val Lewton films a lot. I just like the look of them; they’re so beautiful.” – Martin Scorsese

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TCM presents a triple feature of the least-known thrillers produced by Val Lewton (1904-51). But Lewton was much more than a producer. He always altered scripts a great deal, for the better.

In a 2007 TCM documentary on Lewton, the moviemaker is quoted as saying, “the Universal people spend a lot of money on their horror product. But not much on brains or imagination.” (TCM will screen this doc on Oct. 27.)

Carlos Clarens, who in 1967 published the book An Illustrated History of the

Horror Film, the first serious study of the genre, wrote, “Taken in their original

context, the films of Val Lewton stand out as chamber music against the seedy

bombast of the claw-and-fang epics of the day.” British journalist Robin Cross

said, “[Lewton’s] films have left a series of haunting images which once

experienced are never forgotten.”

By contrast, John Carpenter, speaking on a 2010 BBC program, memorably insulted Lewton’s legacy by calling him “overrated.” But the opinion of a spotty director like Carpenter is akin to and as scurrilous as Woody Allen’s statement to the Los Angeles Times that W.C. Fields maintained a funny persona but was “in

not very good films.” (Carpenter’s They Live – perhaps also overrated – will run on TCM Oct. 25.)

Russian-born Lewton’s thrillers, a string of nine low-budget successes from 1942 to 1946, saved RKO Pictures from bankruptcy in the wake of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane debacle. (Sets from Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons were frugally reused in Lewton’s first horror, Cat People, coming to TCM Oct. 27, followed by his I Walked With a Zombie and the Lewton documentary.)

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THE GHOST SHIP (1943)

“I see the white steel thirsting for blood, and the blood running to meet it.”

Neither a ghost story nor a horror story, this RKO thriller concerns the insane Will Stone (Richard Dix), captain of a cargo vessel, who claims “certain rights of risk” over his crew.

Third Officer Russell Wade signs aboard for his first post and finds himself entrapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

One heart-pounding sequence involves a gigantic runaway hook.

Viewers hear the thoughts of a mute sailor (craggy-faced Skelton Knaggs, also to be glimpsed in Lewton’s Isle of the Dead and Bedlam). He provides an ongoing (and lyrical) Greek chorus.

Lawrence Tierney (Reservoir Dogs, Prizzi’s Honor) had one of his earliest screen roles in The Ghost Ship, as a doomed sailor. Among cast member Russell Wade’s more than 80 motion pictures are Lewton’s The Leopard Man (stay tuned for this on Oct. 20) and The Body Snatcher, and the Karloff-Lugosi crime/sci-fi mishmash Black Friday, made by Universal.

Director and former Lewton film editor Mark Robson also supervised the producer’s Isle of the Dead (which follows), The Seventh Victim (his directorial debut; TCM, Oct. 30), and Bedlam. In the soap opera department, Robson helmed Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls.

The Ghost Ship scenarist was Donald Henderson Clarke, who, like Lewton, had spent a long career “writing sex shockers for drugstore book racks,” according to renowned movie critic Manny Farber. (Lewton’s most popular potboiler was titled No Bed of Her Own.)

“A nice little package of morbidity all wrapped around in gloom.” — Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (1943)

“One of the most accessible, consistently engaging, and dramatically sustained films of the entire Lewton series.” — Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career by Edmund G. Bansak

The Ghost Ship “might have been melodrama of the rawest, cheapest sort. Instead, director Mark Robson and writer Donald Henderson Clarke have managed an intelligent, psychological thriller in which the suspense builds up magnificently.” – the New York Post (1943)

“A study in the emotional paralysis of a certain type of workaday Fascist, offering a microcosmic view of the forces that, in 1943, were tearing the world apart. ‘Men are worthless cattle,’ explains Stone calmly, ‘and a few men are given authority to drive them.’” – Jonathan Rigby

“The plot outline is no better than a third-rate detective story; the characters rarely take on any body and the dramatic underlining of the story is negligible.” – the New York Herald Tribune (1943)

ISLE OF THE DEAD (1945)

No pun intended! Mainly set on a plague-ridden Greek island in 1912, during the First Balkan War, this 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.

The motion picture was inspired by paintings of the same title by 19^th-century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin. (He did several similar versions, which inspired a Rachmaninoff piece as well. 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.

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

THE LEOPARD MAN (1943)

I deem this the weakest of Lewton’s nine thrillers. Lewton’s good friend, Leopard Man director Jacques Tourneur, disliked the finished product. Nevertheless, it too has its moments (one of which involves a strategically placed pool of blood).

An escaped big cat turns out not to be the only trouble in a small New Mexico town.

The mononymous Margo (Lost Horizon), Jean Brooks, and Isabel Jewell (both in Lewton’s The Seventh Victim) costar.

Tourneur piloted 1957’s Curse of the Demon and Lewton’s Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie.

The Leopard Man is adapted from a novel, Black Alibi, by Cornell Woolrich, author of suspense tales including the one that formed the basis of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

The co-scripter, together with an uncredited Lewton, was Ardel Wray, who worked on I Walked With a Zombie and Isle of the Dead. Edward Dein provided “additional dialogue.” Dein directed the world’s first cowboy-vampire pic, Curse of the Undead (1959), and The Leech Woman (1960), a different twist on the stale African “jungle” theme.

“This film … seems to be one of Hollywood’s original gems – nothing impure in terms of cinema, nothing imitative about its style, and little that misses fire through a lack of craft.” – Manny Farber in The Nation magazine

“Directed with savage poeticism.” – Steven H. Scheuer

“A film for lovers of pools of darkness.” – Time Out Film Guide

“One of the best trapped-in-a-cemetery sequences ever.” – Michael Weldon

“Thinly plotted and often tedious, with superb sequences of horror sandwiched between long periods of wasted film. More an exercise in sadism than anything else, the film benefits like all of Lewton’s movies from its cinematography.” – Alan Frank

BLITHE SPIRIT (1945)

ELVIRA: I haven’t seen a movie for seven years.

CHARLES: Let me be the first to congratulate you.

British critic Kenneth Tynan said, “Theatrically speaking, it was Coward who took sophistication out of the refrigerator and put it on the hob.” (Ameringlish translation: hob = stove. )

In David Lean’s Technicolor adaptation of Noël Coward’s 1941 play, Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison), a mystery writer, is married to second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings). His first wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond, who was in the original West End cast), passed on, at a relatively young age, seven years earlier. (“She was convalescing from pneumonia, and one evening she began to laugh helplessly at one of the BBC musical programs and died of a heart attack.”)

Charles has invited spiritualist Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford, the future Miss Marple, who was also in the stage production) to their home to conduct a séance. He wants to study her for a planned novel and hopes she’s “a real professional charlatan.”

But he’s dismayed when the ghost of his first wife appears during the ritual, and she refuses to leave.

Coward suggested to Lean that he direct Blithe Spirit but admonished him to “just photograph” the play. The film is a trimmed-down version, retaining much of the risqué humor. (Oh, Capt. Bracegirdle!) The theatrical script’s odd “hell” and “damn” have been snipped out, along with at least one instance of the B-word.

U.S. censors must have frowned upon the sequence in which Hammond alluringly lies supine on a bed for quite a length of time.

Some scenes originally set in the Condomine home are changed to exteriors, so as to be car-bound rather than stage-bound.

Coward’s plot has a nice twist, but, apparently at British censors’ behest, Lean altered the play’s ending.

Lean’s direction can’t match his better-known masterpieces, but the picture is well-acted and very amusing. It garnered an Academy Award for special effects. Lean and Coward codirected In Which We Serve, and the playwright starred in and scripted that 1942 war movie. Lean helmed adaptations of Coward’s The Happy Breed (1944) and Brief Encounter (1945).

“My dear, you’ve just f***ed up the best thing I ever wrote.” – Coward to Lean, after the latter screened his adaptation of Blithe Spirit for the former

“The ghost, who faintly suggests a bidet out of repair, is very entertaining. Whenever Margaret Rutherford is on screen, as the medium who starts and tries to control the trouble, the picture is wonderfully funny.” – James Agee

“Rutherford has the shortest, unheartiest (funniest) laugh on record. Harrison, as usual, is just adequate.” – Donald C. Willis

“Blithe Spirit is David Lean’s best comedy, and the best supernatural farce ever committed to film, so its relative obscurity among horror film fans remains a bit puzzling.” – Dennis Fischer (1991)

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EDITH SCOB OF EYES WITHOUT A FACE WAS BORN ON 10/21/1937; CARRIE FISHER WAS BORN ON 10/21/1956; KEN WATANABE WAS BORN ON 10/21/1959:::

OCT. 21

THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG (1927)

This was Hitchcock’s third feature, his first thriller, his first big success – and his first cameo appearances (dorsal view, on a newsroom set, at about 4:50, and in the mob scene near the end).

But it’s not very good.

The plot is based on a novel in turn based on the Jack the Ripper slayings. In the silent, seven murders of young blonde women have been committed, and a well-to-do man (Ivor Novello, the No. 1 male star in Britain) who fits the killer’s vague description shows up at the door of a rooming house, seeking accommodations. He soon falls in love with the landlords’ daughter, Daisy, a fair-haired fashion model, much to the chagrin of a previous suitor, police detective Joe.

Is he the serial killer? We fret when he casually picks up a knife or a hearth poker.

But the pacing of the story is draggy and seems padded, and much of the acting, even measured by silent standards, isn’t great. As expected, Hitchcock’s cinematography has flair: infinite-looking stairwells, and a brief worm’s-eye view through a transparent floor into the suspect’s rooms (a window into his sole, one might say).

The climax is reminiscent of the end of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925; TCM, Oct. 28).

The studio, Gainsborough, forced Hitchcock to add the love story to his adaptation of a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes (sister of Hilaire Belloc) and to alter the book’s ending.

Four later theatrical features have been adapted from the novel: in 1932 (also starring Novello), 1944, 1953, and 2009. I’ve seen the 1944 and 1953 versions. My preference is the latter, titled Man in the Attic and starring Jack “the Ripper” Palance and Frances “Aint Bee” Bavier. (The British director of the ’32 remake, Maurice Elvey, piloted Transatlantic Tunnel, a 1935 sci-fi movie to be screened Oct. 25.)

Hitchcock had labored in Germany from 1924 to 1926. Aside from the widely reported influence of German expressionism on The Lodger, author Tom Ryall detects the impacts of French surrealism and dadaism, Soviet editing styles, D.W. Griffith, and documentary techniques.

Trivia time: The silent inspired a song of the same title on the “deluxe edition” of Judas Priest’s 2024 album, Invincible Shield.

“Most, indeed, of [Hitchcock’s] later films’ ingredients are here; the ingenious visual touches, the acute and sometimes caustic observation, the imaginative, economical style, the long build-up of suspense, the climactic violence. In all these THE LODGER pointed forward to its director’s great future.” – Lindsay Anderson [director of This Sporting Life; If ….; and O Lucky Man!]

Hitchcock’s “concern with the uncertain line between guilt and innocence, his confident dismissal of the minutiae of the plot, the disturbing intrusions of fetishistic sexuality, are as apparent here as they are in Psycho.” – Time Out Film Guide

“The film’s theme is panic as a social network …” – Raymond Durgnat

“Hitchcock treats the most conspicuous conventions of detective fiction with playfulness … and manipulates openly and systematically his audience’s expectations.” – Lesley Brill

“Almost a masterpiece, spoiled by the weak acting of the two principals.” – the New York Herald Tribune (1927)

“Bogey-bogey murder and mystery stuff, laid on with a shovel as in the days of ancient hokum, but its tedium is relieved by some excellent camera work.” – The New York Sun (1927)

“The Lodger is a jolting mess of a film, but one that remains electrifying. … This is a kind of cinema that has been refined out of existence, not least by Hitchcock himself.” – The Guardian (2012)

“One of Hitchcock’s best comedies, unfortunately unintended as such. ‘The Lodger’ is just too, too ‘tormented’ to be taken seriously. … Visually, generally undistinguished.” – Donald C. Willis

SYLVIA AND THE PHANTOM (1946; Sylvie et le fantôme)

This French comedy is a cross between Laura and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, with a tincture of Topper.

Our ghost here is the most famous of French movie comedians (next to Jerry Lewis, that is): Jacques Tati, in his feature debut. And the role befits his later style of funny business, since it is a nonspeaking part.

All the action of this contemporary story takes place in or near a castle belonging to the baron. His daughter, Sylvie, is celebrating her 16^th birthday. All her young life, she’s been enamored of the figure in an old painting: Alain de Francigny (Tati), known as “the White Hunter,” who died in a pistol duel over her grandmother. Sylvie believes he haunts the castle.

On the eve of her natal anniversary, her cash-strapped father sells the painting, in which the soul of the ghost dwells. But Alain escapes the portrait – along with his ghost dog, Pyramus, a spaniel – before the picture is taken away, and he remains in the chateau.

As an unusual and consolatory gift, the baron plans for his daughter to meet the ghost. He hires a gray-haired actor to play the part. The baron wanted one imposteur but, through happenstance, winds up with three – actually four!

The visual effects aren’t quite as refined as those of the Hollywood ghost stories of the era – but then, the Tinseltown films weren’t made in a country that had been occupied by Nazis.

Tati is barely recognizable without his pipe and bucket hat, and in white Dickensian garb. The costumes were designed by no less a cultural icon than Christian Dior!

I heartily recommend any of the comedies Tati directed and starred in: Jour de fête (1949), Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Mon oncle (1958) ...

Sylvie et le fantôme was piloted by Claude Autant-Lara, himself an artist. A diabolical production of his, “Le diable au corps'” (“Devil in the Flesh” [1947]), caused a big scandal with its account of an affair between an adult woman and a high schooler. Tati was also in this cast.

“Graceful but extremely slight fantasy. … The film is such a delicate pastry that you can hardly remember eating it.” – Pauline Kael

“An excruciatingly coy and whimsical little pastry… . contains some of the most asinine dialogue since Balaam’s pet opened his mouth.” – The New York Times (1950) [See Numbers 22:26-31]

“Long on story and surprisingly short on the Gallic film makers’ usually keen insight into character…. It unfortunately neglects the basic ingredients of the fairy tale; its characters must be real, no matter how fey their circumstances.” – the New York Herald Tribune

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HAPPY 10/23 BIRTHDAY TO EMILIA CLARKE, MICHAEL CRICHTON, ANG LEE, AND ANNA PALK:::

OCT. 23

This night’s Bela gala begins with two of Lugosi’s lesser efforts, from his Monogram Pictures phase:

THE CORPSE VANISHES M(1942)

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were up.”

“Up! I’ve been up all night with dead people!”

This movie bears no relation whatsoever to Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938).

The title of this 1942 opus should more accurately be plural: The Corpses Vanish. But I would have called it – with apologies to Julia Roberts – The

Done-Away^(-With) Brides. However, those titles would also constitute false advertising, as we’ll see. (In Britain, the picture was renamed The Case of the Missing Brides, which is more to the point.)

Around town, five brides have mysteriously been left (dead) at the altar, or rather five altars. By one nefarious means or another, their bodies have been corpse-napped before autopsies can be performed. And who should be at the bottom of the scheme but Bela Lugosi, as the heartless Dr. Lorenz.

The victims are actually in a (more censor-friendly) cataleptic state, and Lorenz is extracting the ladies’ precious bodily fluids in order to rejuvenate his aging, infirm wife (ex-model Elizabeth Russell, a Val Lewton superstar whose high cheekbones pierce my very soul; Hollywood trade papers dubbed her “the Houri of Horror”).

This married couple have an extremely odd sleeping arrangement.

Lorenz is aided and abetted by his servant (Minerva Urecal) and her two unusual and antithetically sized sons, Angel and Toby.

Angel (portrayed by former heavyweight pugilist Frank Moran, who, according to the Internet Movie Database, stood 6-foot-1) is intellectually challenged and is a hair fetishist.

I suspect that Toby is a knee fetishist. Actor Angelo Rossitto (1908-91) was 2-foot-11. He also appears in the Bela flicks Spooks Run Wild (an East Side Kids comedy) and Scared to Death.

(I wonder if the names of the two sibling characters were switched in an earlier script draft? After all, Rossitto had played a hillbilly with the unlikely given name of Angelo in the execrable exploitation movie Child Bride [1938].)

The heroine is Luana Walters, as a plucky journalist. (“Working on a newspaper, one becomes cynical and suspicious.”)

Her photographer/partner is comic Vince Barnett (1902-1977), who appears in Bowery at Midnight, coming up next. Barnett was a cast member in Bela’s The Death Kiss, Howard Hawks’s Scarface, Red Planet Mars, and Vincent Price’s Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. He was a master of “put-on” jokes, and his 1977 obituary in The New York Times said he pranked Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Antarctic explorer Roald Amundsen.

Minerva Urecal is a name to conjure with. But the actor playing the hero of this piece has a name debatably even more memorable, one that destined him to appear here: Tristram Coffin, who was a regular in movie serials.

The Corpse Vanishes elevates overacting to a new level of respectability. Viewers will get the impression that the performers are in on the joke.

Director Wallace Fox managed Bowery at Midnight and six East Side Kids comedies; he was mainly a wrangler of “B” Westerns.

Trivia time: Monogram Pictures’ quickie producer Sam Katzman, for whom Lugosi did this and eight other Bs between 1936 and 1944, has a cameo as “Man in Newspaper Office.”

“The best of the [Lugosi Monogram] series in terms of horror, and quite a grim little number. … It is an absurd farrago, and claiming that it produces the best horror of the series is a suggestion made in comparative terms only.” – William K. Everson

“For all the wrong reasons, it may in some ways be the best film Lugosi made for Monogram. … One of Poverty Row’s most entertaining horror films of the ’40s.” – Tom Weaver [who sees this as the precursor to Lugosi’s collaborations with Edward D. Wood Jr.]

“[Director Wallace] Fox attacks the material with such seriousness that it works better than it has a right to. … For a 1940s product, The Corpse Vanishes is a remarkably ‘sick’ movie, especially in its stress on necrophilic motifs.” – Ken Hanke

“A gruesome offering aimed at out-horroring all horror pictures.” – Motion Picture Herald (1942)

BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT  (1942)

“Ask Frankie some questions. ... Ask if it gives him pleasure to take human life.”

In this horror-adjacent flick, Bela is the kindly owner of a mission for the needy of the title’s Manhattan neighborhood. No, but wait a minute … Bela is really a double-dealing jewel robber and murderer. No, but wait another minute … Bela is a professor of criminal psychology and a loving (?) husband.

This film, like Karloff’s The Walking Dead (1936) and the Karloff-Lugosi team-up Black Friday (1940), is a hybrid of crime and horror – and vastly inferior to those two movies.

Lugosi’s role(s) will remind viewers of his U.K.-made The Human Monster (1939), in which he uses a home for the blind as a “blind” (in the argot of one of the Bowery characters) for criminal activity. The Lugosi personae likewise have something in common with Lon Chaney’s in The Blackbird (1926).

In his book Poverty Row Horrors, Tom Weaver writes, “Lugosi was almost never a great actor, but he was also almost never an uninteresting one.”

Except for a brief foretaste, the solid horror element doesn’t make its incongruous arrival until (literally) one minute before the end. Trust me: It’s not worth the wait. Considering the conclusion, which a Los Angeles Times critic called “the last word in absurdity,” I think this opus should have been titled Corpse Groom. And you may ask yourself: Why isn’t this dude an incarcerated murderer and/or the subject of a massive scientific study?

Among the familiar faces in the cast are Tom Neal (star of the uber-noir Detour); Dave O’Brien (seen on TCM earlier this month in Lugosi’s Spooks Run Wild and the Devil Bat; not seen in Reefer Madness); John Archer (King of the Zombies, Destination Moon, Kurt Neumann’s She Devil; he was the daddy, with Marjorie “The Danny Thomas Show” Lord, of Anne Archer); Bernard Gorcey (Leo’s father); Pat Costello (Lou’s brother); and, as an alcoholic mad doctor-cum-janitor, Lew Kelly (of the Three Stooges’ Spook Louder and a couple of hundred other films).

Wanda McKay is a mission volunteer and Archer’s fiancée. She costarred in Lugosi’s Voodoo Man and in The Monster Maker, with J. Carrol Naish. McKay was the widow of “Georgia on My Mind” composer Hoagy Carmichael.

“Not since his portrayal of Dracula has Bela Lugosi appeared in finer fettle than in Bowery at Midnight. Don’t go to see it unless you’ve had your vitamin pills.” – the Brooklyn Eagle (1942)

“The action and story move neatly, with an assortment of interesting characters – quaint mission derelicts, puzzled policemen, a hero and heroine, and many more.” – Calvin Thomas Beck

“Too much happens for it to make any sense, but it is the dialogue – some of which Bela rises to with magnificent aplomb – that gives it a few classic moments.” – William K. Everson

“Mild but atmospheric.” – Leonard Maltin

“Lugosi is up against one of the silliest scripts in his long horror career. To make matters worse, the work of the supporting cast would make even the rankest amateur blush.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer (1942)

“The pointlessly convoluted plot … seems an end in itself, as if the mere convolutions were an achievement.” – Donald C. Willis

“An especially dreary example of Poverty Row horror.” – Halliwell’s Film, Video & DVD Guide

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HAPPY 10/24 BIRTHDAY TO BOB KANE, COCREATOR OF BATMAN; AL FELDSTEIN, ARTIST/WRITER/EDITOR OF MAD MAGAZINE; AND WENDY NEUSS, PRODUCER OF STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION AND STAR TREK: VOYAGER:::

OCT. 24

THE NIGHT DIGGER (1971)

This unjustly overlooked British thriller was written for Patricia Neal by her husband, Roald Dahl, who loosely based the script on a novel, Nest in a Falling Tree, by New Zealander Joy Cowley. Like the real-life Neal, the book’s main character is a stroke survivor.

In the screen adaptation, mature and single Maura Prince (Neal), a speech therapist, and her blind, domineering adoptive mother, Edith (Pamela Brown), live a Grey Gardens-esque existence in Edith’s run-down mansion in the English countryside.

A young, mysterious interloper, Billy (Nicholas Clay), rides his Honda into their lives and is promptly hired as a live-in handyman.

Dahl injects his bizarro screenplay with dark humor. Examples are the conversations about sex-reassignment surgery. And who else has ever described vile serial crimes with such jocularity?

The ending is quite a shocker. Perhaps a certain character develops a tiny spark of conscience, and thinks: I’ve had a taste of happiness and a normal life. What I was doing before must stop. This is how I will stop it.

Dahl must have had hell to pay for the dialogue lines in which Billy guesses that Maura is 50 or 55 years old. Neal was 45 at the time of the film’s release. (By the way, Pamela Brown was only nine years older than her on-screen daughter, Neal.)

Bernard Hermann’s typically excellent score incorporates Billy’s harmonica.

Director Alastair Reid was mainly a TV man.

Both Neal and Dahl were displeased with the end result, which was a box-office flop.

“It’s pornographic.” – Patricia Neal

“Strictly for those with a taste for the perverse.” – The New York Daily News

“A lethargic although artfully photographed mess.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“Intriguing psycho melodrama has nice black comic touches and is extremely well acted, but lacks focus and doesn’t add up to the sum of its parts.” – Clive Davies

“Players give excellent portrayals, but the picture is lacking in both setting and direction.” – The Motion Picture Guide by Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross

“The script signally fails to renew the formulaic material, and histrionic acting, especially by Brown, is used to make up for the story’s lack of inventiveness.” – Phil Hardy

“Roald Dahl’s screenplay has more inconsistent motivation, more clichés and less wit than one might expect from this estimable British miniaturist. But the major fault lies with director Alastair Reid, who lingers unduly over most of his material, and lets the climaxes flash by with insufficient intensity.” – Variety

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The Eve of All Hallows is also (more or less) the eve of Election Day, and it was surely a conscious choice at TCM to present four horror films in a row with powerful sociopolitical messages:

THE BROOD (1979)

“This creature has never really been born. At least, not the way

human beings are born.”

“Jesus!”

David Cronenberg. If the mere mention of this director’s name elicits feelings of repugnance, please skip ahead to the next review. If not, well, there’s no accounting for taste.

Whatever else anyone thinks of Cronenberg, he can always be relied on to do something different.

In this work by the Canadian master of “body horror,” members of a highly dysfunctional family are being killed.

The murders are apparently committed by a relative of the perpetrator in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (or of the one in Alfred Sole’s Alice, Sweet Alice).

But, seriously …

One member of the ill-fated family, Nola (Samantha Eggar), is residing at a psychiatric clinic run by Dr. Raglan (Oliver Reed), a famed proponent of “psychoplasmics therapy,” which deals with physiological manifestations of a person’s inner emotions, and which involves transference and intense role-playing.

Nola and her estranged husband, Frank (Art Hindle), have a 5-year-old daughter, Candy (Cindy Hinds, from whom the little girl in Poltergeist must have gotten hairstyling tips). The parents share visitation rights. But Frank comes to believe that Nola is physically abusing Candy.

More slaughters ensue.

Your average director, if doing a scene involving a child or a group of children and entailing graphic violence or other inappropriate subject matter, might film the kids in one take and, say, a slaying or some undue dialogue in a separate take, without the youngsters present, and then deftly edit the two together.

Not our Davy! A group of little ones was in the thick of things when two of the grisly murders were shot. In the second, masquerading children – specifically, eight girl gymnasts – do the deed.

The director’s fans will recognize a recidivist actor: Robert A. Silverman, who appeared in eXistenz, Naked Lunch, Rabid, and Scanners. Hindle was in Black Christmas (1974); the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Porky’s; Porky’s II; and Offspring (2009). Veteran performer Felix Silla, of the TV series The Addams Family (1964-66) and Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (1979-81), is on hand, too. Glimpse him again in Demon Seed, which follows.

One of the makeup men, Jack H. Young (1910-92), worked on The Wizard of Oz, the late director Bert I. Gordon’s The Cyclops and War of the Colossal Beast, and on Apocalypse Now.

I last saw Cronenberg the actor as Federation official Kovich on Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24).

Trivia time: You’ll know it when you see it: What is perhaps the most shocking and infamous sequence was Eggar’s idea, not Cronenberg’s, the actress has stated. In Birth Pains, a 2015 documentary on the making of The Brood, she says she got the idea from her “seven or eight” pet dogs. For the overall scene, prosthetics were made of condoms of “varying sizes,” filled with “I don’t even want to know what it was,” the actress says. A Cinefantastique article adds that “a section of weather balloon … studio blood and spaghetti” were parts of the practical effects. In a number of countries, cuts were ordered to this segment for theatrical release.

“The Brood has something pretty terrible to tell us about the state of family life today and about the fears [of] North American males.” — The (London) Observer

“Cronenberg’s darkly despairing view of family life gives The Brood a raw emotional power that stamps it as a major achievement.” — Jonathan Rigby

“A brilliantly visceral example of physical metaphor. A film which takes the pent-up rage of its characters and turns it into something you can see, something weirdly real.” – Mark Kermode

“An effective indictment of pop and fad psychology, which, according to the film, is not only dangerous but also fails to deal with real problems.” — Welch Everman

The Brood has a “silky smooth and continuo plotline, with a regard for logic and motivation rare if not extinct in most of [Cronenberg’s] horror-dispensing rivals.” — Nigel Andrews

“The monumental daftness of its plot defeats all possible suspension of disbelief.” — David Castell

“A repellent but resonant horror film that might have been that rarity — a modern-day horror classic — if some of the script’s loopholes had been filled in.” — Steven H. Scheuer

“An el sleazo exploitation film, camouflaged by the presence of several well-known stars but guaranteed to nauseate you all the same. That’s after it bores you first. … It’s disgusting in ways that are not entertaining; as opposed, for example, to the great disgusting moments in ‘Alien’ or ‘Dawn of the Dead’ (1979).” — Roger Ebert

“Often Cronenberg is offensive — too often he is downright vulgar; he seems to be getting kicks trying to disgust us. (He’s like a kid who puts a green pea in his nose at dinner.)” — Danny Peary

“It’s a big, wide wonderful world we live in!” — Leonard Maltin

“My version of Kramer vs. Kramer.” — David Cronenberg [who made The Brood amid a bitter divorce and child custody battle]

DEMON SEED (1977)

“Death is a gentleman, too. He makes good losers of us all.”

This disturbing drama will resonate with contemporary audiences, especially women, for a number of reasons.

It’s the story of Susan and Alex Harris (Julie Christie, Dennis Weaver), an unhappily married couple who are separating. Susan is a child psychologist. Alex is a scientist. Alex is moving out of their computer-automated house (which is replete with voyeuristic security cameras).

On the job at a company called ICON, Alex leads a team that, with funding from the Defense Department, has developed Proteus IV, the ultimate supercomputer, made with organic components and intended to absorb all human knowledge.

But, like Skynet in the Terminator series, Proteus – named for the shape-shifter of Greek myth – is self-aware, and it has ideas of its own.

A “nightmare” referred to in Demon Seed seems to have clawed its way toward reality in today’s American society: Our computers have become tools of mind (and vote) manipulation through “psychographic” techniques. Voters have been victimized by fake robocalls with deceptive messages.

Examples of “deepfakes” can also be seen in Demon Seed; this term has been defined in The New York Times as “an ultrarealistic fake video made with artificial intelligence software.”

People have now turned into cyborgs – i.e., living organisms with machine parts, which are known as smartphones.

Demon Seed reflects other more atrocious topics in today’s news, but, at the risk of trivializing the subjects, I will say that mentioning these would give away too much of the plot.

This film will bring to mind 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as another, more demonic genre classic from the same year, 1968. Demon Seed is such a powerful tale that viewers will forgive the loose ends.

The visual effects might have aimed at matching those of noted video artists like Nam June Paik and Ed Emshwiller, who were in their heyday in the ’70s.

But the most impactful special effect is surely Proteus’ gigantic and brutal polyhedral arm.

Robert Vaughn is the uncredited voice of Proteus IV.

Director Donald Cammell codirected and scripted Mick Jagger’s Performance (1970), whose other head man was Nicolas Roeg. Demon Seed is based on a novel by Dean R. Koontz.

Among the performers on the electronic soundtrack are keyboardist Ian Underwood of the Mothers of Invention and jazz guitarist Lee Ritenour.

Critic Vincent Canby wrote that two actors who take part in the movie’s twist ending “look like brass-dipped Mickey Rooneys.” (One of these two heavily costumed players is Felix Silla, whom we know as Cousin Itt, Twiki, and a hang gliding Ewok.)

“Demon Seed takes horror imagery one step beyond the H.A.L. 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey.” – John Kenneth Muir

“Intelligent futuristic thriller, provocatively written, stylishly directed, and well acted, especially by Christie … . As riveting as it is bizarre.” – Leonard Maltin

“Gadget-happy American moviemaking at its most ponderously silly. … Donald Cammell … directed ‘Demon Seed’ with more apparent interest in the machinery of the movie than in its sense.” – Vincent Canby in The New York Times

“Has a sophisticated, frequently brilliant script that makes both Proteus and Susan seem to be sympathetic victims of their time and place. … The film’s major weakness is the scriptwriters’ too easy identification of their major characters with the Holy Trinity.” – Leonard Wolf

“Some religious viewers may consider it the ultimate in blasphemy, others may cynically shrug it off as weird technological hypothesis.” – Variety

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HAPPY 10/25 BIRTHDAY TO MIA WASIKOWSKA:::

OCT. 25

At last! TCM is screening a picture costarring my celebrity look-alike, Keith David (not to be confused with actor David Keith):

THEY LIVE (1988)

“We’re their Third World!”

In writer/director John Carpenter’s anti-Reagan, anti-Bush, anti-yuppie, anti-consumerism allegory, released near the tail end of the “Decade of Greed,” an average Joe comes to realize many of the people around him aren’t really people at all.

Canadian-born pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper (1954-2015) is Nada, a transient who finds work at an urban construction site. (Critic David Edelstein of the New York Post opined that the character’s “name is a fair verdict on Piper’s acting skills.”) There Nada meets the cynical Frank (Keith David), a fellow laborer.

Nada eventually stumbles upon special eyeglasses, which reveal that subliminal subterfuge, transmitted by means of a television signal, is being used to subjugate human beings. Hidden Orwellian propaganda messages are ubiquitous on billboards and in magazines: “Obey,” “Marry and Reproduce,” “No Independent Thought.” Facing pages in one periodical read, “Watch TV” | “No Imagination.” Voices from traffic lights drone, “Sleep, sleep, sleep...” Currency bills actually say, “This Is Your God.”

(Author Jonathan Lethem says some believe the “Hoffman lenses” helping Nada to uncover this plot – and simultaneously making the wearer “high” – are named after Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD. Lethem mentions antiwar activist Abbie Hoffman as a possible inspiration, too.)

Earlier, Nada had spied upon a resistance movement based in a church. Its members have hacked into the TV brainwashing to deliver truths such as, “Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent.”

Scenes at Justiceville, a doomed camp for homeless people where Nada and Frank get a free meal (and which is adjacent to the church), will bring to viewers’ minds the June Supreme Court decision giving cities greater authority to remove the unhoused who are sleeping outdoors.

Piper displays his wrestling ring “skills” in an overlong, five-minute fight sequence between Nada and Frank, about two-thirds of the way through. From there on, the thoughtful plot goes downhill, turning into a mere slaughter-fest until the conclusion.

Perhaps Piper was using this film, a buddy movie in which his buddy is black, to show that his racist wrestling persona was all just an act?

Keith David, of course, earlier appeared in Carpenter’s reboot of Howard Hawks’s The Thing. The steadily employed actor’s other genre credits include the Robert A. Heinlein-based The Puppet Masters; Armageddon; Pitch Black; The Chronicles of Riddick; and Coraline.

Meg Foster, whose eyes are a blue million miles, is the female lead. Raymond St. Jacques is a blind street preacher who is part of the resistance. (His character and Justiceville are reminiscent of Soylent Green.) Carpenter regular George “Buck” Flower is a drifter.

Another frequent Carpenter collaborator, Alan Howarth, co-composed music with the director. As a sound effects man, Howarth worked on the first six Star Trek features, as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, Gremlins, and Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man.

They Live is adapted from a 1963 short story called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson. Carpenter wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym “Frank Armitage.”

We seem far closer to the world of They Live now than we were 36 years ago. The picture was released four days before the 1988 election. Canny programmers at TCM are running it 11 days before a critical general election.

Trivia time:

⏺On one of the many boob tube screens scattered around They Live is a clip from The Monolith Monsters, which was, as author Robert Cumbow puts it in his book on Carpenter’s works, “one of a multitude of Fifties films on the theme of invaders threatening the complacent American lifestyle.” The unique aliens in this 1957 flick are inorganic, ever-growing and expanding towers of crystal.

⏺You might miss this if you don’t know it’s coming, but Carpenter even takes a subtle jab at his recurrent critics Siskel and Ebert.

“Carpenter gazes at homelessness, unemployment, poverty, racial prejudice and violence as a result of two things: the Reagan era of voodoo economics in which the wealth never really trickled down beyond the most financially successful ‘upper’ echelon of American society; and the emergence of television as a corporate-owned avenue through which they sell, sell, sell.” – John Kenneth Muir

“Carpenter shows us the underclass that was ignored and victimized by the ‘Reagan revolution,’ a rare occurrence in modern-day films with their emphasis on glamorous and powerful characters.” – Dennis Fischer

“That the aliens pass for human and live among us, as our wives and husbands, is a particularly trenchant comment about the thorough inhumanity of American capitalism.” – Barry Keith Grant

“The sci-fi invasion pictures of the Cold War were full of not-so-veiled metaphors for Communist takeover. In the ’80s, Carpenter clearly sees the American way of life in much greater peril from the Right, especially from bankers, businessmen and their hired politicians.” – David Edelstein

“Daffily mixes up the paranoia of the Red Scare monster movies of the ’50s, with a different kind of nightmare: the radical’s belief that everything is tightly controlled by a small, malicious ruling elite.” – the Los Angeles Times

“A consummate, oddly exciting vision of Orwellian thought control filtered through old movies and the pages of Fortune magazine.” – Cinefantastique

“They Live is a junkheap, but its scrappy and inventive, and it casts a spell…. They Live is a delirious anthem for paranoid, left-wing street loons.” – the New York Post

“The ultimate goal of They Live as a work of satire [is for us to acknowledge] that such a fantastic idea of hypnosis and control is credible only because commercial culture is designed to function in exactly that way.” – Slant Magazine

“So eighties it hurts.” – Jennifer Eiss

“A particular highlight is the prolonged back-alley fight scene, … which progresses from a simple movie slugfest into a hilarious parody of professional wrestling and knuckle-headed stubbornness, but also manages to make an effective political point about the underclass being too busy beating each other up to start a revolution.” – Phil Hardy

“John Carpenter’s last seriously vital film….” – Chris Barsanti

“John Carpenter trots out the heavy artillery of sociological context and political implication, but you don’t have to get deep down to realize he hasn’t a clue what to do with it, or the talent to bring it to life…. [He’s] trying to dig deep with a toy shovel.” – The Washington Post

“The first thing you have to realize about it is, They Live is a documentary. It’s not fiction. It is real. And it’s gone on ever since I made the movie. In fact, it’s probably more They Live-ish today than ever…. [A] lot of what we see going on is kind of some of the things I was yelling and screaming about in the old days.” – John Carpenter, interviewed by Nick Schager for The Daily Beast (2018)

THE HIDDEN (1987)

A presidential candidate’s body is possessed by a murderous alien monster. (Ah, well, things could be worse.)

Resembling a slug with tentacles – or, as the website SFGate more poetically puts it, “a dolphin that’s been run over by a train” – the creature has the ability to migrate from one human body to another (through the mouths, of course). This would make it analogous to the demon in Denzel Washington’s Fallen (1998), though not quite as agile.

On its trail are the mysterious FBI agent Gallagher (Kyle MacLachlan, pre-Twin Peaks) and police Detective Beck (Michael Nouri). But why do so many quotidian items seem unfamiliar to Gallagher?

The agent describes the alien parasite to Beck as a considerably conspicuous consumer: “He sees something he wants, he steals it. Something gets in his way, he kills it.”

The creature is fond of loud rock music (but not country), firearms, and Ferraris (though, in a pinch, it settles for a ’77 Cadillac DeVille). Gallagher favors a 1980 Porsche.

But, from the standpoint of plot logic, the alien’s final grasp for power seems pretty futile at a late point in the story.

And exactly who is the resurrected character at the end? It seems that only a little girl knows the answer.

Watch/listen for nods to Dune, Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss, Forbidden Planet, and the influential giant-ant movie Them!

One of the possessed is Claudia Christian of Babylon 5.

Among the rest of the cast are Clu Gulager, scream queen Lin Shaye, and Danny Trejo (blink and you’ll miss the latter).

Director Jack Sholder’s other genre credits include Alone in the Dark and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2. Scripter Jim Kouf (alias “Bob Hunt”) worked on The Boogens, Rush Hour, and National Treasure.

“A sleeper that talks like a thriller and walks like a thriller, but has more brains than the average thriller. It also has a sense of humor, and some subtle acting by MacLachlan.” – Roger Ebert

“MacLachlan is a little strange at the best of times, but here he’s so far out he practically isn’t in the movie.” – Melanie Pitts, The Village Voice

“Powered by a driving rock score, this is by turns sleek, reckless, and smoothly effective, like a Ferrari with a psycho killer at the wheel.” – Time Out Film Guide

“It’s not so much the action that makes the film memorable, but rather the portrayal of an alien being who wants what he wants when he wants it and then takes it without regard for law, morality, life or limb. In the gilded age of Gordon Gekko and Ivan Boesky, we recognize such characteristics in the human equation too.” – John Kenneth Muir

“An excellent, extremely violent sci-fi thriller that joins The Terminator and Aliens as the best of the slick action-sci-fi movies of the ’80s. … Kyle MacLachlan’s FBI agent is a dry run for Dale Cooper on Twin Peaks, but in this one he has a reason for being weird.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made

“If there’s such a thing as punk soulfulness, then this movie has it…. Nothing about the movie, which has its own special brand of deadpan funkiness, ever feels stale or forced.” – The Washington Post

“The Hidden wants to have its Alien and E.T., too, although the alien-pursuing-alien plot is closer to Brain From Planet Arous … . The movie is probably at its best when presenting the body-hopping alien as a semi-satiric cross between the Indestructible Man and the Ultimate Consumer.” – Donald C. Willis

“A well-constructed thriller brought down by an utterly conventional sci-fi ending.” – Variety

“Overly derivative 1980s Terminator/Robocop sci-fi action material about indestructible beings in human shape, but decent sense of humor, high-velocity action, and credible performances later earned a substantial cult following.” – Chris Barsanti

THE SHOUT (1978)

A what-the-heck-is-going-on? pre-credits sequence is followed by more of the same, until the conclusion, when the incidents of the first sequence are (at least partly) explained.

This is a contemporized adaptation of a 1929 short story by Robert Graves. Could the author of the “I, Claudius” historic novels have had The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari in mind? Like the 1920 silent, both his story and the film begin and end at a mental hospital.

In the framing narrative, Alan Bates, Tim Curry (in the role of “Robert Graves”), Jim Broadbent (in his first credited role), Robert Stephens (ex of the late Maggie Smith), and John Hurt take part in a cricket match, played by medical professionals, patients, and villagers and held in a cow pasture (which has the usual hazards) outside the institution.

Patient Crossley (Bates) and visitor Graves are scorers; during the game, the former tells the latter the rest of the tale in flashback.

The plot concerns wanderer Crossley, who insinuates himself into the bucolic north Devonshire home of Anthony (Hurt), a John Cage-like composer, church organist, and apparent fan of painter Francis Bacon, and his wife, Rachel (Susannah York – she of the pop-up-headlight eyes). Like the couple in 1971’s The Velvet Vampire, Anthony and Rachel share the same dream.

Crossley claims he has learned a secret from an Aboriginal shaman: a shout that will kill all living creatures within earshot. Musician Anthony is eager to hear this shout, despite the danger. (The electronically manipulated voice is director Jerzy Skolimowski’s.)

Crossley’s recounting of his 18 years among the Indigenous Australians is at times deeply disturbing. Among the less appalling examples, he says an Aboriginal man can steal an object belonging to a woman he has his eyes on, and turn the thing into a charm that makes him irresistible to her.

The devious Crossley has evil designs, but Anthony has a few tricks of his own.

Cinematographer Mike Molloy beautifully photographs the dunes and other West Country landscapes.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times called The Shout’s soundtrack “piercingly loud.” Keyboardist Tony Banks and bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford of Genesis composed the score. They collaborated with synth-pop record producer Rupert Hine (who helped to craft some of Tina Turner’s songs).

Polish-born Skolimowski’s other weird but engrossing motion pictures include Deep End (1970), whose theme is adolescent sexual obsession, and Moonlighting (1982), an allegory about migrant worker exploitation, which stars Jeremy Irons.

“The intellectual’s Exorcist.” – the Monthly Film Bulletin, a former British Film Institute periodical

“Here is one of those superior English films that, when we encounter them, make us glad there is an England.” – Leonard Wolf

“The narrative spirals within a double-flashback structure, using dreamlike condensation and displacement of meaning, reversing cause and effect, keeping multiple readings in perfect balance and evoking a sharp but leisurely paced LSD state in the viewer.” – Amy Taubin, The Soho Weekly News

“Fascinatingly, it is the boundaries between truth and falsehood that merge, rather than those between madness and [sanity]. … A triumph … with an impressively streamlined screenplay and faultless performances.” – Time Out Film Guide

“THE SHOUT has a certain compelling element that both mystifies and involves the viewer, its unusual story told with equal amounts of obscurity and skill. It has no tidy explanations, leaving the audience as baffled at the end as they were at the start.” – The Movie Guide, edited by James Monaco

“‘The Shout’ is an elegant looking movie, nicely performed, but because it leaves one knowing less than one did at the beginning, it is easily forgettable. Except for the sound.” – Canby

“Poorly acted, incoherent and unendurably loud.” – Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)

“An intellectual carrot! The mind boggles!”

No, the above line isn’t from the 1960s series Lost in Space. It’s from the original Thing, in which scientists, service members, and a reporter at the North Pole discover a recently crashed spaceship and its vegetable-man, hemovore alien (6-foot-7 James Arness, pre-Gunsmoke).

One scientist (Robert Cornthwaite, also in 1953’s War of the Worlds) insists the E.T. be studied, not harmed. The other scientists include Paul Frees, the future voice of Boris Badunov.

The credited director is Christian Nyby, an editor, but The Thing was actually directed by its producer, Howard Hawks, a master who gave us the original Scarface, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep, and other classics. Thing costar Kenneth Tobey said Nyby directed one scene. (Tobey was interviewed for Tom Weaver’s book Attack of the Monster Movie Makers.)

Many observers have pointed out that John Carpenter’s 1982 remake is more faithful to the novella that inspired both films: Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr., longtime editor of Astounding Science-Fiction magazine. But the novella is an exercise in logic rather than an exercise in gore.

Ben Hecht made uncredited contributions to the script, and William Faulkner had a hand in the screenplay as well.

Dimitri Tiomkin’s fine score for the 1950 picture smoothly jumps from martial to Martian.

In the words of the journalist character: “Keep watching the skies!”

“The best science fiction film ever made.” – Michael Crichton

“The furthest beachhead ever established by Germanic horror on the body politic of American technology.” – John Baxter

“A major influence on the work of John Frankenheimer, Ridley Scott, Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter, The Thing From Another World singlehandedly ushered in the era of serious science fiction … . As the first ‘flying saucer’ picture by a respected A-level producer, it legitimized the fledgling, often-derided genre of sci-fi cinema.” – Sloan De Forest

“The real … horror of the situation is not the roaring, bloodthirsty creature itself but the fact that an intellect superior to that of man’s would be even deadlier.” – Carlos Clarens

“Filled with an atmosphere of genuine suspense which at times builds to almost intolerable levels.” – John Brosnan

“A paranoia film. It intends not merely to scare you with shock confrontations and terror scenes, but to send you home with acute xenophobia.” – Science Fiction Studies in Film by Frederik Pohl and Frederik Pohl IV

“A wonderfully paranoid, heart-stopping horror film masquerading as science fiction.” – The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

“Howard Hawks … left his imprint throughout, not least in the movie’s sly erotic humor.” – The New Yorker (2019)

“The climax cooks. [Hawks’s] directorial influence comes through in the feeling of camaraderie among the group that extends to the lone woman.” – The Entertainment Weekly Guide to the Greatest Movies Ever Made

“The dead men of science have become so subhuman in their basic understanding, so stupid and infectiously so, that they are the perfect food for the intellectual, carnivorous carrot, the Thing in the story. … [Sci-fi/horror] films suggest that scientific materialism is a moral transgression that leads to barbarism and genocide, the very cause of the horror, not the solution.” – Peter Fraser in A Christian Response to Horror Cinema

“Pseudo-scientific thriller, extremely well produced. In fact, so much so that the more extravagant sequences manage to squeeze some sense of conviction into their basic improbabilities. … One of the biggest gaffes in the production is that the ‘thing’ looks like a cross between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, neither of whom, I would say, could be mistaken for a vegetable.” – Picturegoer magazine

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The casts of the following two features both include Walter Huston (father of director/actor John, grandfather of Anjelica). In the first, he briefly portrays the U.S. president. In the second, he portrays the devil. Coincidence? I think not!

TRANSATLANTIC TUNNEL (1935; U.K. title = The Tunnel)

I rarely watch a movie for a particular star. In this film, the stars are the antique special effects – miniatures and mattes. The only pity is there aren’t more of them.

Otherwise, this sci-fi curio is marred by preachy, dated, melodramatic dialogue.

Set in the not-too-distant future, the story opens during a party/private concert at which wealthy Briton Lloyd (C. Aubrey Smith) persuades his guests, “the crowned heads of industry,” to invest in a project to build a tunnel between the U.K. and the United States. Engineer McAllan (Richard Dix) and his old friend Robbins (Leslie Banks) will be in charge. (You can pretty much foretell from the interactions of men and women in this first scene the direction in which the romantic subplots will head.)

The tunnel plan wins the funding, but both the dig and McAllan’s family suffer one tragedy after another. The project’s lofty goal, as Lloyd puts it, is to bring about “world peace through the union of the English-speaking peoples.”

Alas, like Robbins’s undersea digging invention, the “radium drill,” this film does bore here and there.

The time frame spans a number of years, with McAllan’s son growing from a small boy to a youth in his late teens.

U.S. President Walter Huston and U.K. Prime Minister George Arliss speechify back to back in two sequences.

One way you can tell this isn’t an American picture is that a filthy-rich villain is never seen to pay for a heinous crime, which would have been required under Hollywood’s Production Code.

Transatlantic Tunnel is based on a 1913 novel by Germany’s Bernhard Kellermann and had been adapted for the screen in 1915 and 1933. Curtis Bernhardt, later of Hollywood, directed versions in German and in French, released in ’33.

The 1935 director was the prolific Maurice Elvey, who’d remade Hitchcock’s silent The Lodger in 1932. Cinematographer Günther Krampf (who’d lensed the Conrad Veidt’s Poe-inspired Der Student von Prag [1926] and Karloff’s The Ghoul [1933]) and art director Ernő Metzner (who’d worked with Lubitsch, Pabst, and Wiene) had both emigrated from Germany.

Scenarist Curt Siodmak brags in his amusing autobiography, Wolf Man’s Maker, that his sci-fi ideas for this movie foresaw big-screen TV as well as the sort of machinery used to dig the Channel Tunnel. He forgets that Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and other earlier pictures feature similar futuristic tech.

Siodmak, Bernhardt, and Metzner all fled the Nazi regime. Siodmak resided in England before moving to the United States.

He penned 1941’s The Wolf Man – creating many of the myths of lycanthropy that fans falsely assume are centuries old. Siodmak wrote the novel Donovan’s Brain, adapted as a much-imitated 1953 movie.

Any science-fiction-film fan who is inquisitive about how it was done in England in the mid-’30s should catch Transatlantic Tunnel.

“The Tunnel preaches an inevitable gospel of scientific progress as an altar upon which the fates of individuals must unfortunately but inevitably be sacrificed.” – Barry Keith Grant

“An imaginative drama in the best Jules Verne tradition, ‘Transatlantic Tunnel’ forges on through the years with such desperate courage that it enlists the spectator as an ally in the great enterprise.” – The New York Times

“The special effects lend reality to the effort, showing how air locks shut down critical sections of the tunnel during a disaster, how people are trapped inside forever, and other troubles faced during construction.” – The Motion Picture Guide by Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross

“The increasing importance of air travel made the story’s basic premise antiquated, if not downright Victorian. … What’s never made clear is how any of this would lead to peace, although there is a reference to sinister Eastern forces in alliance against the English-speaking peoples.” – Down From the Attic: Rare Thrillers of the Silent Era Through the 1950s by John T. Soister and Henry Nicolella

“Bogs down in two-dimensional character conflicts.” – Leonard Maltin

HAPPY 10/26 BIRTHDAY TO CARY ELWES AND SETH MACFARLANE:::

OCT. 26

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER (1941; a.k.a. All That Money Can Buy; a.k.a. A Certain Mr. Scratch; a.k.a. Daniel and the Devil; a.k.a. Flesh and Gold; a.k.a. Here Is a Man) ^†

“When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck … . It’s true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner.” – Mr. Scratch

Place: New Hampshire. Time: the 1840s. An era before U.S. politics became the amiable, benign, and guileless entity it is today.

The motion picture is adapted from Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story, which he in turn derived from a Washington Irving tale. Benét cowrote the script.

The plot transplants the Faust legend to rural New England, where struggling farmer Jabez Stone (James Craig) sells his soul to Mr. Scratch (Walter Huston) in return for seven years of wealth and prosperity.

Money changes everything. Jabez transforms from Mr. Nice Guy into a bane to his family and his agrarian neighbors.

Mr. Scratch sends hell’s Belle (French-born Simone Simon of Cat People and The Curse of the Cat People) to tempt Jabez away from his wife. Belle and other condemned souls in the story come from “over the mountain.” (Mont Blanc?)

Scratch offers Jabez an extension of the seven-year pact, with a proposition that is perhaps a perverted analogy to God’s test of Abraham in Genesis Ch. 22.

Ultimately, Jabez enlists much-admired Massachusetts senator and lawyer Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) to argue his case against the devil in an attempt to win back Stone’s soul.

Huston sets the screen on fire in his Oscar-nominated role of Mr. Scratch. British critic Ivan Butler wrote, “Huston’s is a country legend-type devil who, as light relief from purchasing souls for money or desire, causes the occasional ruinous storm, steals food, curdles milk ….”

And the Faust of Goethe or F.W. Murnau never had a defense attorney like Arnold’s Webster.

Director William Dieterle’s background in German expressionism is evident.

A hellish party scene in the middle of the movie is as close as a legitimate Hollywood picture of the ’40s could come to depicting an orgy. Professor Tony Williams of Southern Illinois University says the sequence resembles “a Walpurgisnacht gathering.”

Jane Darwell is Jabez’s mother. Jeff Corey is a local farmer. Canadian John Qualen, minus his usual faux Scandinavian accent, is Miser Stevens, a “loan shark” and previous client of Mr. Scratch.

Future director Robert Wise was film editor.

Bernard Herrmann’s Academy Award-winning score seems at times overbearing.

The 1992 restored version of TD&DW added 22 minutes of footage that had been cut for a 1952 reissue; though the visual and audio quality of the reclaimed scenes is uneven, these previously missing sequences are important to continuity.

In conclusion, I say: Stephen Vincent Benét-dictus qui venit in nomine Domini.

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^† One reason for the plethora of titles: The studio, RKO, wanted to avoid confusion with another of its ’41 releases, The Devil and Miss Jones. Some sources say the studio or the censors weren’t keen on the word “Devil” in the title; but, if we consider the name of the other production, this doesn’t make sense. A Certain Mr. Scratch was one working title. Daniel and the Devil was used for the mid-1950s theatrical reissue.

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“Walter Huston leaves a lingering impression as Scratch, whose credibly sinister persona is leavened by cutting wit. This is a Mephisto who enjoys his job.” – Nikolas Schreck

An “adaptation of astute political perception of twentieth-century America in the midst of crisis; the Depression and imminent world war are manifest in the words and deeds of Benét’s screen characters.” – Robert Singer in Literature/Film Quarterly

“Dieterle and cinematographer Joseph H. August … imbue the proceedings with a lush visual style that’s equal parts eerie and whimsical, with a striking play of shadows and light that, along with some brilliant practical effects, takes the film into the liminal space between reality and fantasy.” – Slant Magazine (2024)

“Basically a European Expressionist film masquerading as a major American studio release.” – Lee Pfeiffer