By Hank Reineke

I confess. Prior to this first-time viewing of Charles Marquis Warren’s supernatural drama Back from the Dead (Regal Pictures, 1957), I knew very little about the film. The movie was first released in summer of 1957 as one-half of a double-feature paired alongside Warren’s sci-fi pic The Unknown Terror. The pressbook promoting that original combo suggested the pair as the summer’s “2 Biggest Supershock Sensations! Super Monstrous! Super Human! Super Thrills!” Disappointingly, the promised thrills and excitement were creations only of super promotional ballyhoo.

As far as I can tell, this new Kino Lorber Blu-ray of Back from the Dead signals the film’s official debut on any home video format. My only, and very dim, memory of this film was a single, promising black-and-white still featuring a pair of Bergman-esque black-hooded figures standing cliff side near an ocean. I’m guessing I stumbled across that old photo in one of the monster movie magazines I passionately obsessed over back in the late 1960s/early 70s. So a time so long ago and far away, to say the least. I wish I could deem Back from the Dead a lost classic, perhaps minor in standing, but… Well, let’s just say while it might offer a semi-memorable moment or two – and, yes, while I’m certainly glad it’s been made available to us – it’s an eye-rubbing, draggy affair.

The scenario of Back from the Dead is based on Catherine Turney’s novel of 1952, The Other One, first published as a 248-page hardback by New York’s Henry Holt & Co. and later as a thirty-five cent Dell paperback. The blurb on the paperback’s cover promises a story of “Black Magic and a Modern Sorceress.” While the book might or might not deliver on its promise (I haven’t read it), Warren’s film simply does not. The film’s one-sheet poster asks “What was the Sinister Secret of this Unknown Creature who came… Back from the Dead?” Though the film does arguably answer the question posed by the poster, it does so without inventiveness nor vigor.

Prior to scribing of The Other One, Catherine Turney was a celebrated playwright. She was also an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter, a creator under contract at Warner Bros. The Other One, optioned by Robert Lippert’s Regal Pictures, received mixed critical reviews by upon its publication but most were generally favorable. One positive critique of praised Turney’s novel as: “Gothic witchery in which malevolent spirits, psychiatry and black magic compound into a hunk of emotional excitement that bids strongly for sustained reading into the small hours…” Other critics sourly found the book little more than tosh, one suggesting its “transmigrations of souls” scenario having produced “some, but not too much excitement.” In some manner of speaking, the latter comment more closely reflects my personal feelings towards the film version.

In the briefest of synopsis, Back from the Dead tells the story of Mandy Anthony (Peggie Castle), the new wife of Dick Anthony (Arthur Franz). Mandy, seemingly under a strange spell, slips into a comatose trance of sorts. She awakens from that state soon enough, but now identifies herself as “Felicia.” Though totally unaware of her husband’s prior marriage - to a woman named Felicia, of course, now dead - Mandy unexplainably refers to Dick by the private, pet nickname his former wife once bestowed upon him. Mandy’s sister Kate (Marsha Hunt) is understandably concerned of her sibling’s mental state. Kate will soon find herself in some danger through her determined investigations of her sister’s mysterious spiritual possession.

Hoping to sort things out, Kate enlists the assistance of some neighbors (Don Haggerty, Marianne Stewart) as well as the Bradleys’ (James Bell and Helen Wallace), the still-mourning parents of Felicia. She learns that Felicia – and others soon revealed - were members of a Devil-worshipping cult. She also learns should Felicia’s otherworldly grip on Mandy as host body begin to weaken, the Satanic cult has plans, if necessary, to imbue her soul into another innocent (Evelyn Scott).

It all sounds pretty exciting on paper, I guess. Turney was enlisted to adapt and translate her own novel for the screen, a promising start. Unfortunately, it’s here, I suppose, where the weak seams of the film’s adaptive storyline began to show. The filmmakers, by necessity, were tasked to simplify - and bleach out - aspects of her original story. In doing so, many aspects of the novel’s lasciviousness subplot elements and tangential, colorful characters were abandoned. To be honest, the producers really had no choice.

Motion picture censors would have most definitely had issues should the finished pic include the novel’s back-stories. These include an incestuous relationship between a seduced father and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Satanic Black Masses and sex orgies. Such scenarios would have certainly made for great exploitative fodder in the freewheeling1970s: in the mid-to-late ‘50s, it would have been castigated as lurid cinematic trash. The novel’s Devil worshipping protagonist was, of all things, a renegade priest. The ordained designation of the film’s central “villain” was likewise dropped as to not offend the “religious sensibilities” of the movie-going public.

To really understand this film – and its weaknesses - I suppose fans will be compelled to watch in tandem with either one of the two expert commentaries included with the set. Though I’m personally not a big fan of multiple audio commentaries, both offered here are informative if too-often overlapping in content. The first commentary is moderated by author-researcher Tom Weaver: he’s abetted with assistance from such knowledgeable friends as Dracula/Lugosi/Vampire film scholar Gary D. Rhodes and filmmaker Larry Blamire. A second commentary features film historian/journalist David Del Valle and Dana M. Reemes (the latter a biographer of the legendary 50s sci-fi director Jack Arnold). With the exception of Rhodes who, perhaps, over-estimates Back from the Dead as “a wonderful film,” there seems to be some consensus that the film version is a mostly frustrating misfire.

To their credit, both Weaver and Reemes have chosen to read through Turney’s original novel for contrast. There is quite a bit of discussion in regard to the many differences between the novel and the film. Reemes particularly digs deep in her analysis. Neither Weaver nor Reemes were introduced to the film upon its release in 1957. Weaver allows his first viewing was via a television broadcast in 1961. Reemes was first introduced to the film via a muddy bootleg VHS sourced from a 16mm television print. Del Valle too admits the film had long eluded him, and celebrates the film as a true rarity. Del Valle tends to cheerlead the film a bit early on in his commentary, but like the others soon recognizes its deficiencies as the movie progresses.

This is a rare strange case where I admit I enjoyed listening to the expert commentaries more than enjoying the film on its own merit. The commentaries share interesting, often contrasting, opinions on some several matters. There does seem to be a consensus on one point, however: that Warren was simply the wrong director to tackle the project. Warren entered the film business in 1948 as a writer of mostly westerns, later turning his attention to the direction of early television assignments. His first feature-film as director was the 1957 western Trooper Hook with Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck, a film certainly in his wheelhouse. His second and third directorial assignments were The Unknown Terror and Back from the Dead, the films shot as back-to-back quickies.

There’s agreement that Warren simply displayed little flair for styling an atmospheric horror film, especially one of a monster-less, supernatural nature. De Valle mused Warren’s “horror” films are mostly devoid of the ethereal, eerie atmosphere created in such stylish Val Lewton-RKO films as Cat People (1942), the devil-worshipping The Seventh Victim (1943) or in Universal’s celebrated The Black Cat (1934). Much to his credit, Weaver offers honestly from the onset that he’s generally not a fan of these old monochrome occult and black magic films. He’s especially not enthusiastic of those made in the wake of the 1956 publication of The Search for Bridey Murphy, the faddish best seller offering the story of a Colorado housewife who, under hypnosis, was presumed the reincarnate spirit of a nineteenth-century Irish woman from Cork.

In that “spirit,” Weaver believes the premise and execution of Back from the Dead is simply too “far out” to engender any real interest. Variety thought so too in their trade review of the pic 30 July 1957. They thought the film “laudable […] but only spasmodically successful.” That critic was certain the picture wouldn’t please matinee-goers as the film’s “horror aspects may prove to cerebral for the moppet trade.” Replace the word “cerebral” with the term “non-involving” and I’d agree entirely, with regret.

Though there were any number of “Bridey Murphy” styled film releases in 1957, the commentators rightfully point out that the film version of Back from the Dead consciously or unconsciously borrows elements from any number of earlier films. Among those plundered for ideas, intentionally or not, were Victor Halperin’s Supernatural (Paramount, 1933), Will Jason’s The Soul of a Monster (Columbia, 1944, slagged off by Weaver as “another lousy movie”), and Lewis Allen’s ghostly masterpiece The Uninvited (Paramount, 1944). There’s a suggestion that elements of Back from the Dead might have partly inspired Alfred’s Hitchcock’s Vertigo (Paramount, 1958). Weaver and Blamire suggests that actress Peggie Castle, as the spirit-afflicted Mandy in Back from the Dead, is virtually the proto-doppelganger of Kim Novak’s Judy Barton. Well, perhaps, but it’s a doubtful stretch. It’s also noted that the four-time married Castle, a former “cheesecake model,” suffered a tragic, alcoholic fate. Castle would die from cirrhosis of the liver, age 45.

Actress Marsha Hunt, who plays Mandy’s sister in the film, has an interesting backstory as well, though one of a survivor. Though she recollects to have appeared, in both credited and un-credited in some eighty-films since 1935, in June of 1950 offers to work abruptly stopped coming in. She found herself “graylisted” as a “patriotically suspect citizen” in the witch-hunting, anti-Communist bible Red Channels. A self-described “articulate liberal,” Hunt was never a member of the Communist Party nor even a particular supporter or participant in the movement. She simply found the McCarthy era witch hunts anti-American and anti-democratic.

As a result, Hunt was offered very few roles in the years 1950-1957, managing to eke out a nominal living by performing in low-wage traveling stock productions. She was to be cast as the mother of James Dean in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, but disappointingly had to turn down the role due to her stage commitments. She was happy to get the role in Back from the Dead, and expresses both professional and personal warmth with director Warren. Though she too acknowledged the film’s shortcomings, she long held to her belief that the project was “not a disgrace.”

One of the other aspects of the production that every commentator agrees upon is the completely unsuitable casting of actor Otto Reichow in the role of Maître Renault. He is, sadly, pretty stiff and boring in the role, a completely unremarkable practicing Satanist. Everyone onboard seems to have an opinion on who might have been able to pull off the role with a bit of exaggerated zest and menacing conviction: Weaver suggested John Carradine or Henry Daniell, Del Valle mulling Lionel Atwill, George Zucco or Martin Kosleck. Good choices all, though Atwill was already ten years dead and Zucco now retired from the biz in 1951 due to a stroke. (Carradine would have been my choice, if anyone is wondering).

Of the film’s primary male cast member, Tom Weaver deliciously skewers B-movie actor Arthur Franz (Sands of Iwo Jima, Invaders from Mars, Hellcats of the Navy) in an entertaining, if catty dismissal. To be fair, Weaver carries a bit of personal animosity for the actor (whom he refers to as “Arthur Frowns”). Seeking an interview with Franz when composing one of his interview books on sci-fi and horror actors of the 1950s, Weaver ignored the pleadings of both industry contacts and producer friends to simply forget about the arranging a one-on-one with the unfriendly, often belligerent Franz.

But Weaver persisted and upon finally making contact with the expectantly unpleasant Franz on the telephone, he actually managed to cajole and schedule a rare interview date with the actor. Except after weeks of researching the actor’s career, Franz disrespectfully hung-up the phone on the agreed upon interview date, refusing to share even a single anecdote. So Weaver’s memories of Franz are understandably grievous, to say the least. As for the roasting of poor Franz in the commentary… well, as the saying goes, payback’s a bitch.

Weaver’s commentary is threaded with audio excerpts from interviews he conducted with both Hunt and Harry Spalding, the latter a screenwriter often associated with Robert Lippert’s Regal Pictures. The interspersed commentary of Gary D. Rhodes is delivered in a scholarly, academic fashion. He muses at some length on the role of the American public’s awareness of Satan as portrayed in the press, in early films and in such popular music forms as blues and jazz. He concludes U.S. audiences were familiar with Satan if only, “in a brief, cursory fashion.”

Sixty-seven summers have passed since Back from the Dead first hit the silver screen. With the inclusion of The Unknown Terror on Kino’s new set Sci-Fi Chillers Collection (review forthcoming), fans can now re-live the certifiably mild thrills offered in Warren’s two-film foray into the wacky if nostalgic world of ‘50s double-feature matinees. However, I will offer a word of advice. These two movies might prove great fun to help pass the time of a rainy afternoon. However, should the sun be shining bright, by all means get outside and enjoy the day while you can. A double-feature of Back from the Dead and The Unknown Terror can most definitely wait

This Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu-ray issue of Back from the Dead is offered as a 4K scan from Paramount Pictures brand new HD master. It’s presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, in 1920 x 1080p in DTS monaural audio. The set includes the two aforementioned audio commentaries, three trailers (It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The Colossus of New York and the noir 99 River Street.) The disc also includes removable English subtitles and is jacketed in a mirroring cardboard slipcase. A welcome release for completists of supernatural cinema. Others may find the film lacking in “spirit.”

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By Hank Reineke

As a monster-movie loving kid growing up in the shadow of Manhattan, most of my Saturday night plans in the late 1960s and early 1970s were solidly set. That night was reserved for watching old horror and sci-fi flicks on New York City’s Chiller (WPIX-TV) or Creature Features (WNEW-TV). I don’t recall the latter program surviving past 1980 – and even then there had been an interruption of some six years in the scheduling of Creature Features. Though the program would return to the airwaves in 1979, the 8 PM broadcasts were now a thing of the past. The revived telecasts had moved to midnight and well into the early hours of Sunday morning. It hardly mattered, really. I no longer watched Creature Features with the same fervor of 1969 through 1973. I was age nineteen in 1979 and found other (if not necessarily better) things to do on Saturday nights.

This absence from Creature Features caused me to miss out on a number of obscure, aging films broadcast 1979-1980. Among this mix of occasional cinematic gems with near-misses was a mostly forgotten mystery programmer of 1944 titled The Man in Half Moon Street. I was particularly sorry to have missed this one: if my research is correct, I believe the film was broadcast only once – just shy of 2 A.M. - on March 29, 1980. Though one New York area newspaper listing dismissed the film as little more than a “Moody and marginally interesting tale of eternal youth through murder,” such lukewarm praise actually piqued my interest. This seemed my kind of movie. And for some forty-three years I’ve lamented having missing that broadcast.

It has been a tough film to get ahold of: though I’m guessing gray-market copies could have been found at conventions or through those “specialty” dealers of vintage VHS tapes from the ‘80s onward. But as far as I can tell (and, please, feel free correct me if you know better), The Man in Half Moon Street has never been officially available on any home video format: not Laser Disc, VHS, DVD or Blu Ray. Well, that is until now, as we near the eightieth year of the film’s original cinematic release. We have Australia’s Imprint Films to thank for finally issuing this superlative, region-free coded Blu-ray release.

As in the case of many Hollywood pictures of the day, The Man in Half Moon Street was not an original invention of the filmmakers: the scenario was actually based on the British stage drama of playwright Barré Lyndon. Lyndon’s play, published in 1939 by London’s Hamish Hamilton Publishing House, had first toured Bournemouth, Oxford, Manchester and Brighton on a two-week testing-sortie in February of ’39. The play would formally open at the New Theatre in London’s West End on 22 March 1939.

Lyndon’s main antagonist in the stage drama, chemist John Thackeray (Leslie Banks), is a ninety-year old man. One wouldn’t notice the dotage as Thackeray appears decades younger. This is due to the chemist having discovered that by combining radium and periodically replacing his aging super-renal glands with fresh specimens he can retain both youth and immortality. Of course the collection of fresh glands requires innocent others to lose their lives to Thackeray’s ghoulish harvesting.

Over a fifty-year period eight bank cashiers – those with access to large sums of money - have fallen prey to Thackeray’s criminal doings. Dissolving their bodies in acid baths, the chemist then steals the cash reserves his victims had been minding in their bank-telling guardianship. Thackeray requires the large sums so he can pay a confidant: in this case an ethically-challenged surgeon friend, to perform the necessary life-sustaining gland grafts. But Scotland Yard takes up the case just as the chemist readies to take the life of a targeted ninth victim for his evil ends.

Interestingly, playwright Lyndon would go on to write screenplays for Hollywood studios by the mid-1940s, including such moody mystery-noirs as John Brahm’s The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945). But in late January of 1940, it was announced that Don Hartman, a dependable scenarist for Paramount, was scheduled to begin work on adapting Lyndon’s stage play to the big screen. Hartman was, at present, in New York, trying to finish up his co-write (with Clifford Goldsmith) of The Further Adventures of Henry Aldrich.

That May of 1940, Paramount optimistically announced there would be no production delays on their twenty-five million dollar film schedule budget for the upcoming year. This declaration was made “despite war conditions in Europe which continue to threaten returns” in both national and international film markets. One of the films on the Paramount schedule was The Man in Half Moon Street. Early reports suggested that Basil Rathbone was to take on the leading role. The actor was available to assume the role of Thackeray as he had only recently completed work on Paramount’s A Date with Destiny (soon retitled The Mad Doctor).

Rathbone had played the villainous role in The Mad Doctor which, despite the intriguing title, was not a horror film, but a mystery crime-drama. The Los Angeles Citizen-News would report in June of 1940 that while Half Moon too was not of “bogeyman classification,” it on the “fantastic side” with its lurid sci-fi angle. In any case, the film project fell temporarily to the wayside, first due to scripting issues and afterward to the cranking out of patriotic films necessitated by America’s entry into WWII following the attack at Pearl Harbor.

But by early winter of 1943, the long dormant Half Moon project was showing signs of revival. On March 2, 1943 it was announced in the Hollywood trades that Lester Fuller, recently arrived in Los Angeles from New York, had been offered the director’s chair for The Man in Half Moon Street. In spring of 1943, Albert Dekker, a Hollywood “heavie” who recently scared audiences as Universal’s Dr. Cyclops (1940), was announced to assume the leading role.

But on June 15, 1943, Variety reported that Fuller was out of the Half Moon project. Ralph Murphy was now chosen to direct. Technically, the pair’s previously assigned directorial spots were merely traded-off. Murphy had initially been chosen to helm Paramount’s production of Marseilles, but former stage director Fuller was now tasked to assume responsibility on that particular film. Murphy was to move over to direct Fuller’s Half Moon project.

Murphy’s first assignment was a formidable one: he was “to order a complete rewrite job on the script.” There was also a report that such rewriting would likely require a recasting of principal characters. Though Swedish film star Nils Asther had been the latest actor announced to assume the film’s leading role, his participation in the project was now suggested as being “off” - for the time being, at least. The film’s producer Walter MacEwan wanted to weigh casting options “until further developments” in the scripting of Half Moon were resolved.

The re-writing of Half Moon would eventually fall to scenarists Charles Kenyon and Garrett Fort. The final screenplay credit would ultimately go to Kenyon alone who, like Fort, was a veteran of old Hollywood: their work in the industry could be traced to silent cinema’s earliest days. Fort’s resume for this sort of film was particularly impressive: he had written or co-written such totemic pre-code Golden Age Horrors for Universal as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936). But Fort’s credit on Half Moon only noted his role in adapting Lyndon’s play for the screen.

The final screenplay drafted would, peculiarly, expunge most of the ghoulish and murderous elements of Lyndon’s stage play – perhaps America’s real-life wartime experiences were horrific enough. There are no murders of bankers. The Thackeray character (renamed Dr. Julian Karell in the film) appears to be already a man of means, an accomplished portrait artist and scientist. He attends black-tie, high society, posh parties and conducts his experiments at an upscale London row house. The film curiously offers no scenes of on (or off) screen physical violence.

There are no gruesome acid baths in which the bodies of victims are disposed. The film’s lone “action” scene captures a moment when Karell “rescues” a despondent medical student (Morton Lowry) from a watery suicide attempt near the Thames Embankment. Most scenes of this dialogue-heavy script are set in parlors and sitting rooms – which, to be honest, really proves a drag on the film’s ninety-two minute running time. One begins to welcome even the briefest scenes when Karell ventures out into the shrouded night and pea-soup fog of the London Streets. Not that much happens during these interludes, but such moments provide a measure of moodiness to this otherwise slowly paced non-mystery.

Truth be told, The Man in Half Moon Street is no detective nor mystery film; we know almost from the beginning what’s going on. We learn the handsome and youthful Karell is actually more than one hundred years old in age. But through a century of experimentation – and with the assistance of the aging Dr. Kurt Van Bruecken, the “world’s greatest living surgeon and necrologist” (Reinhold Schünzel), Karell has managed to stay young through his drinking of a luminous serum and periodically undergoing fresh glandular transplants at ten year intervals.

There are problems ahead. Following a stroke, the shaky hands of the elderly Van Bruecken are no longer trustworthy to perform the necessary surgeries. Besides, Van Bruecken has undergone a change of heart: he fears that Karell is no longer working in the interest of science and humanity in staving off the aging process. He fears (rightfully) Karell is now consumed only by his burning desire for the lovely Eve Brandon (Helen Walker) and selfish self-interest in maintaining a “fraudulent youth.”

“No man can break the law of God,” Van Bruecken cautions, but Karell is confident if anyone can do it, he can. Even if that means farming the glands of the suicidal medical student he’s imprisoned upstairs. The other more pressing problem facing Karell is that his mysterious activities have finally brought him to the attention of an ethical surgeon (Paul Cavanagh), a cabal of fine art appraisers and Scotland Yard.

With Paramount now holding what they believed an acceptable – and mostly non-horrific - script in place, the casting of the film proceeded in earnest. In May of 1943 it was suggested that young actress Susan Hayward would play a “featured role” in Half Moon, though the report cautioned Paramount was still “having a time of it procuring someone to play the sinister male lead.” The earlier front-running names of Rathbone and Dekker were both out, and rumors of Alan Ladd’s casting were squelched when the actor chose instead to sign up for military service.

That same month producer MacEwan confirmed Nils Asther would in fact play the role of Dr. Julian Karell as earlier rumored. The trades suggested that it was Asther who, in fact, first suggested that Paramount pick up the rights to Lyndon’s play and cast him in the lead role. There was some mild press controversy regarding Asther’s casting. Some Hollywood gossips dismissed the actor as “Yesterday’s Star” (born in 1897, Asther had appeared in silent films with Greta Garbo). Though his character was scripted as someone thirty-five years of age, Asther was in reality 46 years old at the time of production. Still, there was an acknowledgement that the dashingly tall, slender, handsome (and rumored bi-sexual) actor “still has a big following.”

Though the actor was to star opposite the sultry Hayward, the role of Karell’s paramour Eve Brandon was ultimately given to Helen Walker. There would be some delay before she could join the production: the actress, currently on a wartime U.S.O. tour, was expected to report to the set near September’s end. Truthfully, Walker doesn’t have a lot to do in the film. She certainly photographs well as Karell’s doting and perhaps too protective and morally-blind girlfriend. Even though Karell’s work is secretive – so much so that it causes him to disappear for weeks or months at a time – Eve chooses to accept her lover’s “general mysteriousness” as a byproduct of his genius. I personally found Brandon less likable and sympathetic as the film progresses. When it’s finally revealed to her that Karell’s experimentations have brought harm to innocents, she’s so in love with him she dismisses his guilt, choosing instead to reflexively defend the “grandeur” of his ambitions.

If the main characters in this picture aren’t always likable, there’s still a lot to admire about the film. Miklos Rozsa’s moody musical score is certainly worthy of praise. Henry Sharp’s fog-bound “exterior” photography is similarly moody, but unfortunately not up on the screen much. In the final minutes of the film when Karell dramatically reverts to his actual age, long-time make-up man Wally Westmore – of Hollywood’s make-up family dynasty – does his best on the effects. But the camera cheats the audience of a full on-screen transformation ala Westmore’s make-up on Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) – which remains the “gold standard” of Golden Age horror transformations. Ralph Murphy’s direction is competent but workmanlike in execution. He creates very little visual tension until the film’s final scenes and, by then, it’s simply too late. Following the completion of Half Moon, Murphy was planning to move back to New York City to direct the Broadway stage production of Sleep It Off.

Of course World War II was still on-going, interrupting, ruining and/or ending the lives of countless innocents globally. In such an atmosphere Hollywood was not immune to war-time production delays and release date restrictions. Paramount alone had accumulated an unprecedented backlog of thirty-one completed films awaiting release in early summer of 1944. There was some confidence that the tide was turning in favor of the Allies, studios cooperating in the war effort by rolling out whatever patriotic war films they were sitting on. There was a consensus it was time to empty the vault of such films. It was believed that movie audiences would weary of war films following the cessation of fighting overseas.

There was, at long last, a belated screening of The Man in Half Moon Street held at a Hollywood tradeshow on October 16, 1944. Variety thought the script was a “compact and interesting,” the Kenyon/Fort scenario displaying a “few new twists from the formularized style of long-life mystery tales to keep interest at consistent level.” But the reviewer acknowledged, not unreasonably, that the film would best serve as “strong support” to a superior attraction. Other critics likewise suggested Half Moon was too weak to see top-billing on a double-attraction.

Indeed, The Man in Half Moon Street (already in U.S. regional release as early as December 1944 although the film’s copyright is listed as 1945 on the sleeve of the snap case) was featured as the undercard of a double-bill. (On his commentary, Tim Lucas reveals the film actually had its world-wide premiere in Australia in early November of 1944). On its U.S. run, the film was usually topped by director Fritz Lang’s cinematic take of novelist Graham Greene’s Nazi espionage tale Ministry of Fear. This double feature actually did reasonably well, the trades citing solid - if not necessarily boffo - returns as the package was rolled out across U.S. markets and into 1945. Newspaper columnists tended to give the Lang film the lion’s share of its critical attention, though both films were generally branded as little more than decent programmers of primary interest only to devotees of suspense and mystery films.

RETRO-ACTIVE: MEMORABLE ARTICLES FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES

By Hank Reineke

In September of 2021 I attended Manhattan’s Quad Cinema screening of Thomas Hamilton’s affectionate documentary Boris Karloff: the Man Behind the Monster. As a life-long fan of the actor - and the owner of dozens of books examining the actor’s career in film, stage and radio - this was the sort of career-spanning appraisal I was hoping to someday see. Then, only a few weeks following that theatrical screening, Cinema Retro was provided a stream of the doc for critical review. This enabled me to watch the film a second time, revisiting bits of commentary I had missed or recalled only hazily. At the time the stream was provided to Cinema Retro, it was still uncertain if Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster would be offered on physical media. That question was answered in October 2022 when the film became available as a two-disc combo Blu ray/DVD set from Voltage Films/Abramorama.

In the sixteen-page booklet that’s included in the set, director Hamilton advises both he and scripter Ronald MacCloskey originally envisioned their Karloff doc as a bold “4-hour, 2-part film or a 6 part miniseries.” They certainly had enough material to do so, with a reported 60+ hours of interviews involving no fewer than fifty-five subjects. And, that sixty hours of recorded interviews, of course, didn’t include the footage gleaned from Karloff’s fabled filmography.

While you’re not going to find some sixty-odd hours of extras on this release, the set does suggest that it offers an expanded director’s cut (titled on packaging - but not on the film itself - as Boris Karloff: The Rest of the Story). This is a bit curious. The version screened theatrically at the Quad ran 103 minutes – at least as per its billing at the cinema. The Rest of the Story disc runs one hour and forty-three minutes. Which, if my math skills haven’t failed, equals the same 103 minutes of running time.

Of course the new set does feature two additional bonus selections. The first, Meeting Boris Karloff, is, truthfully, not a terribly essential addition, but not uninteresting. It’s an offering of fourteen minutes of interview/commentary by three figures a bit tangential to Karloff’s legend. Of the trio, author and film historian Kevin Brownlow shares his reminisce of his November 1964 interview with Karloff. He recalls Karloff as an interesting interviewee – one who wasn’t remiss to take issue or correct erroneous information found in the press clippings Brownlow had collected. But he noted Karloff always challenged misinformation in a gentlemanly manner.

Andrew Pratt, described as a “great nephew” of the actor, then shyly recounts his one and only meeting with his great uncle. He credits that meeting as inspiration to pursue a career in film art direction – a career that would earn him a number of nominations and awards from the Academy, BAFTA, and the Art Directors Guild. The last subject interviewed was Anthony Bilbow, a television host of BBC-2’s Late Night Line-Up. His only real connection to Karloff was when the actor was a guest on the program, September of 1968. He recalls Karloff as a gentleman kind and warm, modest and self-effacing – but not in a “counterfeit” sort of way.

The final bonus feature of the set is a three-minute interview with the co-scriptwriter of Boris Karloff: the Man Behind the Monster, Ron MacCloskey. This New Jersey-based writer and comedian fell under Karloff’s spell at age seven, having caught Frankenstein on a late night TV telecast. A collector of Frankenstein memorabilia, MacCloskey’s interest in Karloff’s work proved lifelong and ultimately led to his teaming with director Thomas Hamilton to start shooting this documentary in 2018.

If the doc itself is truly an expanded version of the original, it doesn’t really change or radically alter anything presented in the theatrical cut. I’m more than willing to stand corrected if indeed, the doc is offered here in an expanded form. My frame-by-frame memories of those 2021 screenings are all a bit hazy now, so I can’t say with any certainty if extra footage/commentary was included. But, if you missed it the first time, I’ll tack on my original “streaming” review of October of 2021. I very much enjoyed the doc on its original run and my opinion of its merit has not changed at all. Read on, should you wish:

There’s a telling moment at the dénouement of Thomas Hamilton’s and Ron MacCloskey’s affectionate documentary Boris Karloff: The Man behind the Monster. Sara Karloff, the now eighty-two year old daughter of the beloved actor, opines that her father’s lasting cinematic legacy is due, in part, to the tenaciousness of his devoted fan base. It’s a demographic that we soon discover consists of a number of amazingly creative people: folks whose loyalty to and enthusiasm for Karloff’s work has not wavered over the decades. Sara’s contention is inarguably true. As this ninety-nine minute Voltage Films/Abramorama documentary unspools – crisply narrated by Paul Ryan and featuring commentary by preeminent Karloff scholar and “Biographical Consultant” Stephen Jacobs - we discover the actor’s admirer’s bridge several generations of fans and filmmakers.

The first generation to discover Karloff in the decades following his big splash as the Frankenstein monster in 1931, include directors Roger Corman and Peter Bogdanovich. Both men would have the opportunity and honor to work with the actor in his twilight years. The second generation of admirers were those introduced to Karloff via neighborhood cinema screenings or through television broadcasts of Shock Theater in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

These filmmakers, profoundly influenced by Karloff’s art, would go on to create a few cinematic gems of their own: John Landis, Joe Dante, and Guillermo Del Toro, to name a few. The latter gentleman is particularly effusive in his praise, describing Karloff’s performance as the vampiric Wurdalak in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath as a “tremendous” example of the great actor’s “physical presence, his majesty, his demonic power.”

If the documentary is chock-full of talented filmmakers offering tributes, the film is also supported by the erudite commentaries of film scholars David J. Skal (The Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror), Gregory W. Mank (Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: the Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration), Donald F. Glut (The Frankenstein Legend: a tribute to Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff), Sir Christopher Frayling (Frankenstein: the first Two Hundred Years), and critic Leonard Maltin.

There are also short tributes and reminisces by several actors – three now gone - who had worked with Karloff at some point in their career: Dick Miller (The Terror), Christopher Plummer (The Lark, Even the Weariest River), Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers), and Orson Bean (Arsenic and Old Lace). Karloff’s tells part of his own story through audio recordings made available to the filmmakers courtesy of the British cinema historian/author Kevin Brownlow (The Parades Gone By…) and the Pacifica Radio Archive.

It has long annoyed me that when one searches out the term “Boris Karloff” in the ever-expanding IMDB, the resulting prompt identifies the actor’s signature film as The Grinch that Stole Christmas (1966). My daughters would remind me that my personal agitation of this result is, by definition, a “first world” problem, one hardly worthy of condemnation. But as cinema’s preeminent boogeyman for four decades, seeing Karloff’s storied career reduced to a role featuring only his disembodied voice as the Grinch… Well, let’s just say that I still find it somewhat misleading and inappropriate.

Be that as it may, Hamilton’s film reminds Karloff himself might disagree with my wariness of the Grinch being bandied as the cinematic crown jewel of the actor’s legacy. Sara Karloff recalls receiving a phone call from her father immediately following his recording of the narration for that beloved Dr. Seuss vehicle. The actor we learn was profoundly happy with his work on the now-famous animated holiday classic, telling his daughter proudly, “I’ve done something which I think is pretty good.”

Karloff would pass away a couple of years following the first broadcast of The Grinch that Stole Christmas, but he worked to the very end of his days, appearing in a number of memorable – and a few less-than-memorable – films, several of which would see release in years following his passing. His last films were little more than cameo-length appearances shot on a Hollywood sound stage. It was director Jack Hill’s idea to take the Karloff footage from these shoots and blend the results into a series of Mexican horror films.

Karloff, rightly and proudly, would choose to refer to his spell-binding turn as the semi-autobiographical aging horror film actor Byron Orlok in Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) as his feature film swan song. Technically, it wasn’t. But the brief appearances in that post- Target series of Hollywood-Mexico co-production mash-ups were mostly an excuse for an old pro to continue to ply his trade and keep busy. But working oxygen-tank dependent and wheelchair bound on the Jack Hill-directed sequences, Karloff was prevented from doing much of anything with the already somewhat cut-and-paste material given to him.

Karloff, of course, was not the only “horror film” star of the genre’s celebrated Golden Age of the 1930s and 40s. Karloff, we learn, was actually not happy with the designation “horror movie”, much preferring his films to be termed as “thrillers” or “shock” pictures. His contemporary competitor as grand ghoul of the horror film - one whose own legacy would burn bright into the next century - was Bela Lugosi. Although Lugosi had too often played second-fiddle to Karloff in matters of employment and billing, the Hungarian’s post-mortem fame may have eclipsed his friend’s star over the last few decades.

For starters, Lugosi’s sad and lurid dependency on morphine and alcohol in his final years made him the subject of tabloid fodder, and gossip then – and now – still rules. Lugosi’s slow demise coupled with his appearances in several of Edward J. Wood’s revered cult films brought him a big degree of post-mortem fame. A brand new generation would discover the actor through Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning turn as Lugosi in Tim Burton’s semi-biographical drama Ed Wood.

To be fair, Lugosi’s string of mad performances in Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Glen or Glenda (1953) are, in many ways, were no less better or worse or more undistinguished than Karloff’s walk-ons in the creaky Jack Hill/Mexi-horror films of spring 1968. Though both sets of films are passably entertaining in their own uneven, cult-ish ways, both actor’s cinematic exits were ignoble ends to these two great men who famously made audiences shiver in 1931.

James Whale’s Frankenstein would ultimately transform Karloff into a full-fledged movie star, but it had been a long road to achieving such fame. The actor had been working on various Hollywood backlots since the silent era. In the course of his earliest silent film efforts – beginning with such titles as The Lightning Raider (1919) and His Majesty, the American (1919) – he worked as little more than an extra. His subsequent fame would cause a score of budding film historians to carefully survey battered old prints of Karloff’s earliest filmography in the often futile hope of catching a glimpse as he passed by the camera.

In truth, his decade-long career as a silent film actor was mostly non consequential. He would appear in approximately sixty or so silent films between 1919 and 1929. He would, on occasion, be gifted a role of some heft, most notably as that of “The Mesmerist” in The Bells (1926) opposite Lionel Barrymore, but he was most often cast in adventure-orientated serials as a heavy, or as a Hindu, Mexican or an Arab, a mystic or a general ne’er-do-well.

It was his casting as the sadistic “Galloway” in Howard Hawk’s sound prison drama The Criminal Code (1930) that brought him to the attention of Universal executives looking to cast a suitably cadaverous-appearing actor as the Frankenstein monster. Following Lugosi’s rejection of the part due to the absence of dialogue afforded, Bela’s pass on the role was fortuitous for Karloff. He was still hungry and looking for that big break. Although the role of the monster would forever typecast him, the actor remained forever grateful for having taking the role in Frankenstein, once describing the career door-opening creature as “the best friend I ever had.”

It’s not hard to see why Karloff’s portrayal of the monster remains the preeminent of the Universal series. He was, after all, the only actor to have been given the opportunity to actually act and emote, to bring a sense of pathos to the role. He was abetted, of course, by Jack Pierce’s iconic make-up which, rather than masking, cannily sculpted and made highlight of Karloff’s facial features and sunken cheeks. This gave the monster, according to one of the participants in the documentary, a “full expression range.” The trio of actors who would subsequently portray the monster in the Universal series simply weren’t given the opportunity to apply any emotive effect of their own. Even by Son of Frankenstein (1939), the third film in the series, the screenwriters had already reduced the monster into little more than a hulking, lumbering menace and henchman.

It is discouraging to learn that when Frankenstein had its gala premiere in the autumn of 1931, Karloff was not even invited to attend. He was already forty-four years of age when he assumed the role, a no-name celebrity and hardly a handsome matinee idol of any recognition. The unexpected phenomenal success of Frankenstein would change all that, and Universal was quick to capitalize on the actor’s sudden notoriety as Hollywood’s most beloved boogeyman. Karloff’s natural proclivity for taking on roles of menacing villainous characters with icy stares would allow his casting into a string of Golden Age horror classics – not only for Universal but for other studios as well, including memorable turn in MGM’s The Mask of Fu Manchu. The latter remains a great, entertaining film… if undeniably one of the most politically-incorrect lavish big studio productions of the 1930s.

When the market for horror films softened in the mid-1940s – thanks, in part, due to the horror genre’s continuing perceived transgressions of the Hays Code - Karloff easily transitioned to character roles, where, according to his daughter, her father’s natural “dark coloring,” permitted him to slip easily into “ethnic roles.” As one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, he was able to exercise his freelance status by working for, amongst others, RKO, Columbia, Monogram, and Warner Bros.

Another avenue of opportunity had presented itself around this same time. In 1941 Karloff was lured, against his better judgement according to this film, to take on the Broadway role of the villainous Jonathan Brewster in Joseph L. Kesselring’s stage play Arsenic and Old Lace. It was to his life-long disappointment that a clause in his theatrical stage contract prevented his returning to Hollywood – as did several fellow members of the original Broadway cast – to reprise the role for the much beloved Frank Capra film adaptation of 1944.

Though initially frightened to work in theatre before a live audience, the success of Arsenic emboldened Karloff to accept several other roles in such Broadway productions as The Lark (with Julie Harris), The Linden Tree, The Shop at Sly Corner, and even in a memorable turn as Captain Hook in a 1950 production of Peter Pan. Fortunately, we of a certain age who missed out still can get a small taste of what we missed since kinescopes survive from early Hallmark Hall of Fame broadcasts of the original production of The Lark and a 1961 re-staging of Arsenic and Old Lace.

Though Karloff’s work in radio is mostly ignored in this documentary, the film does take pains to point out that he was among the first movie stars of his generation to fully embrace television. Though he would often appear in serious televisions drams for such programs as Texaco Star Theater or Playhouse 90, he was not above spoofing his own curious fame as Hollywood’s grandest ghoul on any number of variety programs hosted by the likes of Red Skelton or Dinah Shore.

(Stefanie Powers and Robert Vaughn with Karloff in "The Mother Muffin Affair" on "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E." (Photo: Cinema Retro Archives)

In the 1960s, he would famously host (and occasionally act) in episodes of the television program Thriller, or appear in drag as “Mother Muffin” in an episode of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E – or with former U.N.C.L.E. agent Robert Vaughn in the spy-film The Venetian Affair (1966). Joe Dante also references the series of wonderful long-playing albums Karloff would record over the years, his unmistakable, lisping voice introducing children to a wonderful selection of folk tales, ghost stories, Washington Irving classics, and time-worn fables.

Boris Karloff: the Man behind the Monster reminds us that the actor (1887-1969) accomplished a lot in his eighty-one-years, a large percentage of which would encompass appearances on screen, on stage, on air, on record, and on television. To their credit, the filmmakers share what they can in the constraint of the film’ ninety-nine minute running time, and the film certainly succeeds as an excellent primer. Karloff wonks like myself might hold out hope that a multi-part, Ken Burns-style series might someday be put into the works, but I imagine that’s unlikely. One hundred and thirty four years have passed since Karloff’s birth. The fact that contemporary audiences remain completely entranced by his filmography in 2021 is testament enough to the worthiness of this loving tribute painting him as one of Hollywood’s greatest.

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By Fred Blosser

When asked to name a Pre-Code melodrama starring Charles Laughton as a sadistic megalomaniac in a tropical setting, most movie enthusiasts are likely to cite “The Island of Lost Souls.” As H.G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau, who turns animals into humans through appalling surgery in his “house of pain,” Laughton’s performance in the 1932 Paramount film remains a classic of horror cinema. “White Woman,” which followed from the same studio in 1933, isn’t nearly as well remembered or as outrageous. Still, it provided another delicious role for Laughton and offers wonderful insight into the tactics used by Hollywood in the Pre-Code era to exploit audiences’ demand for lurid escapism, while skirting the watchful eye of censors. The film, based on a stage play and directed by Stuart Walker, is available as a Blu-ray from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, from a new 2K master.

Laughton’s character, Horace H. Prin, is a predatory merchant who holds a monopoly on trade in the hinterlands of Malaya, then a British colony. In town he encounters Judith Denning (Carole Lombard), a young woman shunned by her fellow expatriates. Already the subject of salacious rumours, she learns that she’s about to be deported as an undesirable after going a step too far, performing torch songs in a “native cafe.” The stiff-necked governor is unmoved by Judith’s plea that she’s broke and has nowhere else to go. Judith attracts Prin’s attention and he offers her an escape to “something better” by accompanying him to his remote outpost. There, he promises, she’ll live in style.

Once she accepts his proposal, she realizes she’d have been better off taking her chances with deportation. Horace exploits the tribes with whom he trades, holds his employees in virtual slave labor, and once he has Judith in his control, he treats her with biting scorn. One of his clerks, David Von Elst (Kent Taylor), a disgraced military officer, falls in love with Judith, and she with him. Horace enjoys watching them squirm with no hope of escaping his domination. The two are trapped because the river is the only feasible way out of the jungle. Prin owns the only boats, and headhunting tribesmen lurk along the trail by land. When David is banished upriver to one of Horace’s warehouses, Judith’s troubles come to a head. A new employee arrives, Ballister (Charles Bickford), a roughneck who doesn’t bother to hide his intention to make time with Judith: “I’ve watched those sweet eyes of yours . . . and other things,” he tells her. “C’mon baby, what do you say?” Prin takes note but he’s more curious than anything else. How far will Ballister press his crude advances, given that he doesn’t fear Prin, Prin doesn’t fear him, and Judith treats both men with icy contempt?

In 2023, when it takes a lot to create a sex scandal worthy of attention, the backstory of “White Woman” appears more quaint than shocking. The cafe that draws the governor’s displeasure is about as raucous as your neighbourhood Applebee’s, its Chinese, East Indian, and dissolute European clientele apparently more interested in chatting among themselves than ogling the gorgeous blonde who plays the piano and sings on stage. Judith might as well be performing Billy Joel tunes at a piano bar in Iowa City. But this was about as far as the filmmakers could push the envelope in those days of restrictive erotic and racial conventions. A franker explanation for the fuss and bother—that the hapless Judith is actually a prostitute who hangs out at the cafe to solicit sex from men of color—would have been a non-starter even in the Pre-Code era.

Things liven up whenever Laughton appears as the chortling, smirking, and preening Prin, wearing a cheap tropical suit, a straw boater, Jheri curls, a bushy, bristly moustache, and an East End London accent. Prin is one of Laughton’s great grotesque characters, a monster shaped by a terrible start in life. “You ‘aven’t spent any part of your childhood in the slums, ‘ave you?” he asks Judith. “Well, I ‘ave.” Thanks to his early lessons in class prejudice, he luxuriates in his ability, via wealth and influence, to intimidate the “bloomin’ snobs” who run the colonial government. The same passive-aggressive rage fuels his treatment of Judith, whom he exploits, isolates, and emotionally abuses. Inferentially, she is a surrogate for all of the beautiful women who spurned him when he was young and poor. That she refuses to act the victim only intensifies his abuse. If critics haven’t explored this facet of the picture as a feminist statement years before modern feminism emerged, they should.

The Kino Lorber Blu-ray greatly improves on the movie’s previous home video release, a 2014 manufactured-on-demand DVD in the Universal Vault Series. As a special feature, the KL edition includes informative audio commentary by director and film professor Allan Arkush and film historian Daniel Kremer. It’s difficult to argue with their criticism of Stuart Walker’s static, unimaginative blocking of scenes, but in fairness, most movies adapted from stage productions in the early days of talkies suffered from the same shortcoming. Walker showed a little more flair in 1935’s “Werewolf of London.”

The Kino Lorber Studio Classics’ Blu-ray edition of “White Woman” can be ordered HERE from Amazon.

(Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)

By Hank Reineke

The Asphyx Will Rip You Apart… The Asphyx Will Invade Your Mind… The Asphyx Will Destroy Your Soul… If It Were In Your Power… Would You Sacrifice Your Wife… Your Children For Immortality?

The answers to the questions posed above by the advertising campaign for Peter Newbrook’s The Asphyx (1972) was a resounding “yes.” As the gifted but obsessed psychic-research scientist Hugo Cunningham, celebrated British actor Robert Stephens puts everyone in his family through the proverbial ringer by film’s end. Such single-minded research on his part is not accomplished without a measure of personal guilt, mind you. But as a curious man of science – and one obsessed with paranormal exploration - Cunningham pushes forward determinedly with increasingly morbid experimentations.

Such “experiments” include the exhuming of his dead son for some post-mortem testing, the photographing of a condemned man at a public hanging, a self-administered electrocution, putting his daughter’s head through a guillotine pillory and even willfully torturing a tubercular pauper. Hey, the last guy, a poorhouse resident, had only forty-eight hours to live anyway… so he was fair game.

Like Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, Cunningham is a man driven by obsession. Appearing before members of the Psychic Research Society, the scientist presents to colleagues a series of slides depicting a trio of unfortunates photographed at the precise moment of their deaths. Each photograph has a “smudge” present, a sort of phantasmagorical protoplasmic image hovering nearby. It’s Cunningham’s theory that the image is an Asphyx, a creature of Greek mythology. The Asphyx is a visual manifestation of one’s tortured “soul the moment it departs the body.” It’s the scientists’ belief that if one could pre-emptively isolate and imprison the Asphyx prior to expiration, that person might carry on as an immortal. This appears to be Cunningham’s endgame interest.

Though adopted son Giles (Robert Powell) is wary of his father’s dark experiments (“This isn’t science!” he warns), he begrudgingly becomes one-half of Cunningham’s research team – to disastrous results as one might expect. Since Cunningham, to his credit I guess, puts his own life on the line in pursuit of science and immortality, it seems only fair to him that members of the family do the same - and without complaint. Which certainly makes the case that, on some occasions, father doesn’t know best.

Cameras began rolling on the The Asphyx on Monday, February 7, 1972, at Surrey, England’s Shepperton Studios. Shooting wrapped a mere five weeks following first photography. The film was to be helmed by first time director Peter Newbrook, a former cameraman and cinematographer who boasted a filmography dating back to the early 1940s. The film certainly looks great, even if the pacing of Newbrook’s direction is somewhat suspect. The Academy Award-winning Cinematographer Freddie Young (B.S.C.) - of Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Battle of Britain and You Only Live Twice fame - would use the newish Todd-AO 35mm anamorphic system to great effect. In many respects, Newbrook’s The Asphyx is of similar construct to such British parlour-horror films being churned out by Hammer and Amicus in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

The question now was whether or not a Victorian-era set horror picture would make any money in 1972? The horror biz was already moving away from stately, moody gothic films to more exploitative blood-splattered fare. Nevertheless, upon the film’s completion, it was announced The Asphyx was to be distributed in the British market by Scotia-Barber. On week later, Variety reported that Martin Grasgreen, President of Paragon Pictures, had managed a deal with Glendale Film Productions (London) to handle distribution of The Asphyx in both the U.S. and Canada. In early winter of 1972, Paragon already had a number of exploitative horror-thrillers in release, including Blood Suckers, Blood Thirst and Death by Invitation.

In August of 1972 the Independent Film Journal announced that The Asphyx, described as a “science-fiction suspense thriller,” would be released the following month, the first of twenty-two films that Paragon had waiting in the queue. Box Office promised the film would be the recipient of “an extensive national advertising and promotion campaign,” with “key theater” roll-outs in Dallas, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.

Upon its September release, Variety noted The Asphyx was – welcomingly - bucking the recent trend of blood and gore horrors: Newbrook had intentionally delivered a more “cerebral” or “thinking man’s horror film.” Acknowledging the film was well cast and beautifully photographed, the trade review did rue that Brian Comport’s verbiage-laden screenplay was slow going and riddled with historical improbabilities. Other critics noted Robert Stephen’s mad scientist was one seemingly gifted with precognitive invention.

It was true. As The Asphyx is set in the year 1875, scientist Cunningham had somehow managed to prefigure such mechanical appliances as the first motion picture camera (not actually developed until 1888) and an electric chair (not developed into the early 1880s). To the credit of Box Office, the trade paper cautiously suggested that, “Selling the film as a monster movie would not be to its advantage: a more intelligent approach to sci-fi fans is indicated.” I imagine “less-intelligent” monster movie fans might have shifted restlessly in their seats back in ’72, awaiting even the mildest of jump-scares.

The Asphyx was the fourth and final of writer Brian Comport’s screenplays to be produced. His first screenwriting effort, Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (Cinerama Releasing Corp., 1970), was an out-and-out freaky and grisly exploitation film. Technically speaking, Girly wasn’t a completely original invention of Comport’s. The original story was loosely based on the stage play Happy Family (aka All Fall Down) by the novelist and BBC radio playwright Maisie Mosco. His second screen credit was a co-authorship with director Pete Walker on Man of Violence (later re-titled The Sex Racketeers). That film was a convoluted and overly talky international-gold smuggling-racketeer-caper-thriller with a pronounced sixties swagger.

In one of those local-lad-makes-good-type newspaper items, journalist Anthony Cardew of the Surrey Mirror and County Post, shared an hour with Comport, then basking in the success of his industry breakthrough with Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly. “I was offered a script which a producer wanted lived up,” the writer told Cardew. “He wanted a bit more action or something. I took the script apart and rewrote it completely. I added new characters, took some out and changed the thing entirely. I wrote it in note form, just suggesting the way I thought it should go.”

The producer was pleased with Comport’s revised scenario and formally commissioned him to draft a new screenplay, in the scripters own words, “from the beginning, according to my own ideas.” With the film in production, Comport was also approached by a representative from London’s Sphere books to turn his screenplay into a novelization, a six-week effort bringing in a bit of extra cash.

Many film critics found Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly – later retitled simply as Girly –aggressively unpleasant in its lurid, sexually suggestive subject matter - and decidedly distasteful in its depiction of depravity and violence. One critic would unflatteringly suggest Comport as a leading “candidate for sickest mind of the year award.” Another nonplussed reviewer thought the film as “Theater of the absurd… absurdly vicious.”

Scolding reviews aside, Comport’s star seemed to be on the rise. In October of 1970, only shortly following the release of Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly, production had already started on Robert Hartford-Davis’ thriller Beware My Brethren (Cinerama Releasing Corp., 1972) also from a Comport script. Things then cooled for an interim but, following a year or so of film-work drought, Comport was back with The Asphyx.

Though Comport’s script – adapted from a story provided by Christina and Laurence Beers – would appropriate more than a few elements from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Independent Film Journal interestingly suggested The Asphyx was of similar construct to William Castle’s B-movie classic The Tingler (1959): “There too a visible spirit of sorts popped up; but that one was of fear rather than death.” Though some wondered why a classically-trained actor of Robert Stephens’s caliber would agree to appear in a film clearly beneath his station, the former board-trotter of the Royal National Theatre thought The Asphyx “rather good.” He told journalist Neville Nisse of Staffordshire’s Evening Sentinel, “I really enjoyed making it because I liked the script and the people involved.”

The Asphyx performed reasonably well at the box office – not boffo perhaps, but reasonably well. So much so that in January of 1973, Paragon announced they were going to enter into a co-production deal with Glendale for two additional features. Paragon would, of course, retain all U.S. distribution rights, but would now also share in a generous slice of a film’s international profit. When U.S. box office receipts measurably dipped following the film’s initial run, The Asphyx was often paired on the secondary market with other indie horrors: Night of the Living Dead, Son of Blob and Blood Suckers among them.

(Variety trade advertisement)

In Australia, The Asphyx was given the more compelling title Spirit of the Dead, the adverts teasing an audience confrontation with “The Horror That Lurks Halfway Between Heaven and Hell!” The campaign posters for Spirit of the Dead featured accompanying artwork promising a more ghoulish monster than the film would deliver. The Asphyx would also enjoy a sustained life in the United Kingdom. Exploitatively re-titled The Horror of Death on its re-release, the film would play in cinemas throughout the 1970s. It was often incongruously paired on multi-bills with such chop-socky fare as Kung Fu Virgins and The Angry Dragon.

This 2023 Kino Lorber Studio Classics edition of The Asphyx replaces the Kino/Redemption Films co-issue of 2012. The only really new “Special Features” offered is the commentary track provided by film historians Kim Newman and Stephen Jones and six trailers promoting other Kino Product. This new edition is also packaged in a protective slipcase that mimics the artwork of the case insert. Both the 86 minute U.K. theatrical cut and 99 minute U.S. expanded cut are made available to view. But, as the package warns, the “reconstruction of the extended version blends HD footage mastered from the 35mm negative with SD footage mastered from the U.S. release print.” The changes in visual quality are very significant as forewarned.

For the record, I watched the extended version. Though the inclusion of an additional thirteen minutes is welcome, these extra fragments are of no great interest. In fact, it’s possible the added running time further slows down a film already in desperate need of judicious editing. Newbrook’s direction is competent, but Comport’s screenplay is weighed down by too many sermons: the film’s main characters continually perseverate on the moral misguiding’s of Cunningham’s tampering with spiritual and life-and-death issues. Such hand-wringing tires after a while. Having said all this, The Asphyx is an interesting film, if far from a forgotten classic. While aficionados of British horror should certainly add the title to their watch list, it might be best to screen the film with muted expectation.

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By Hank Reineke

Village of the Damned is the cinematic moniker of John Wyndham’s far less exploitative titled 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos. Wyndham’s writing specialty was science-fiction: he graduated from contributing short stories to such colorful genre magazines as Wonder Stories and Amazing Stories to publishing full-fledged novels. Though his stories were occasionally adapted for such television dramas as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, his cinematic credits were relatively few. Village of the Damned is perhaps his best remembered movie tie-in, but a 1951 novel was also filmed and subsequently released as Day of the Triffids (Allied Artists, 1962).

Village of the Damned was originally conceived to film in Hollywood, and American writer Stirling Silliphant was tapped to compose the screenplay for the movie – which was to be, more or less, a faithful adaptation of Wyndham’s novel. Though Silliphant had accrued a few film credits, he was primarily regarded as a television writer, having contributed a score of 1950s teleplays to a variety of programs ranging from The Mickey Mouse Club to Perry Mason to Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Wolf Rilla, a German-born novelist but long-time a resident of London, was tapped to direct Village of the Damned. Rilla’s background too was mostly in television production, having written or directed a score of TV comedies and dramas over the span of a dozen years. Rilla was approached to direct Village when studio accountants deemed it far more economical to film in England rather than Hollywood. Rilla thought Silliphant’s scenario was workable. But he also thought the Yank’s grasp of contemporary British customs and vernacular was lacking. So Rilla and the film’s British producer Ronald Kinnoch (the latter writing under the pseudonym of “George Barclay”) reworked the original script to better authenticate and Anglicize.

The rewrite was successful in that regard. The atmosphere surrounding Village of the Damned is nothing less than stiff-lipped British in tone. In 2022 looking back, one could easily mistake Village as a Hammer Film Production (ala the Quatermass series).  Several prominent cast members of Village, including Barbara Shelley and Michael Gwynn, would be familiar to Hammer Films devotees, their faces having graced screens in such productions as The Camp on Blood Island, The Revenge of Frankenstein, Quatermass and the Pit, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, Rasputin, the Mad Monk, Scars of Dracula and The Gorgon. The venerable British actor George Sanders, the former star of The Saint film series, is fittingly at the center of the mystery. And there’s plenty of mystery about…

The tiny, sleepy hamlet of Midwich is the “village” referenced in the film’s title.  Nothing much ever happened in Midwich until, for an odd four-hour interval, time not only stops but is seemingly lost. The townspeople, for reasons unknown, all fall into unconsciousness.  Initially there doesn’t appear there was any significant fall-out from this strange time-warping aberration, but several months later every village woman of childbearing age - married, courting or celibate - finds themselves pregnant.  This collective simultaneously give birth to children unusual in both manner and appearance. The children, whom some suspect are the product of some strange “impulse from the universe,” are uniformly uber-intelligent, gifted beyond their years. While polite to their parents and other adults, the children also strangely distant, unusually formal and unemotional in manner.

The children are also endowed with several peculiar special gifts – not the least of which is the ability to read the minds of the adults. This ability has unnerved those members of the community who are forced to interact with these mysterious youngsters.  It’s soon revealed these children are, as suspected, the offspring of alien beings. They have been imbedded in the village to study the minds and culture of their earth-bound galactic neighbors. For what purpose? Well, no one is sure, but the worst is feared.  Once the British military gets involved their intelligence agents report the residents of Midwich are not alone.  Reports are coming in of similar alien birth-takeovers amongst rural Eskimo populations as well as countries sitting behind the Iron Curtain. 

Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) and his wife Anthea (Barbara Shelley) are the parents of one such “special” child, David (Martin Stephens). David seems to be the spokesman of the children. He also is not shy in demonstrating the bad habit of telepathically coercing those he perceives as enemies to take their own lives.  The situation worsens when the school-age alien brood make the decision to abandon Midwich to imbed more widely among the populace.  The town elders and military realize they can’t allow these aliens, semi- contained in Midwich, to spread further afield.  But how does one plot against those with the ability to read every thought that crosses the minds of those wishing them destruction?

It’s a neat premise and Village of the Damned was a surprising hit for MGM, the B-film’s appeal amongst cinemagoers and critics alike having caught the studio off guard. When studio brass realized they had a commercial steamroller on their hands, the publicity department was free to go full throttle. MGM began to take out full page ads in the trades, boasting that “Village of the Damned Saturation Openings” were rollin-up “Sensational Grosses!” This wasn’t mere ballyhoo, it was the truth. So it wasn’t terribly surprising when MGM announced a follow-up feature was already in consideration.

Anton Leader was chosen to direct this sequel Children of the Damned. Similar to Rilla, Leader was best known for his directorial work on television, not in motion pictures. In fact, following a successful career in the 1940s as a producer of radio dramas, Leader had worked almost exclusively on the small screen. He would subsequently helm an episode or two of practically every iconic television series of the 1950s and 1960s. Leader had left the U.S. for Europe in February 1962, hoping to set up his own production company on the continent. This dream was deferred when Leader was asked to direct Children of the Damned and given a nifty $400,000 budget to do so.

Having worked almost exclusively in the penny-pinching television industry, Leader gladly accepted. He would tell a journalist from Variety that it had been good to get away from TV since a big screen filmmaker was “more respectfully regraded” and given more time and latitude to do a “respectable job.” The problem was Leader envisioned Children of the Damned as an “art picture.” The brass at MGM Britain was less interested in making a profit, not a point. They wanted Children of the Damned be a coattail-riding horror film, which wasn’t the film as delivered.

Variety recorded Leader’s chagrin when the director was first made aware of the “advertising campaign mapped out by MGM […] lurid billing as an exploitation special.” Indeed, the poster art played up only a ghastly sensationalism: “They Come To Conquer the World… So young, so innocent, so utterly deadly!” A second ad mat was no more constrained (nor honest) in its carnival-barking: “Beware the Eyes that Paralyze! All-New Suspense Shocker… even more Eerie and Unearthly than Village of the Damned!”

In truth there’s very little eeriness and only a bit of suspense in the film. Children isn’t a bad film, but it is a curious follow-up, one that wildly detours from the premise of the original. There’s only a smattering of sci-fi elements. The “children” number only six in this sequel and their provenance is multi-national. The children are, again, borne by unwed women “never touched.” All six are brilliant, each possessing “intellect beyond belief.” It’s this reason that makes them of great scientific interest to Dr. Tom Llewellyn (Ian Hendry), a psychologist and Dr. David Neville (Alan Bader), a geneticist. They suggest a UNESCO program should be commissioned to study the children.

The problem is that the children do not wish to be studied. They escape from their respective embassies to gather inside the bowels of an old church. There was no need for them to proactively discuss this decision amongst each other – or, at least, not in the usual oral method. Since they communicate with one another through telepathy, they already share a communal knowledge base. They have no separate nor distinct personalities and mostly, if not exclusively, communicate their wishes to be left alone through an intermediary they control through hypnotism.

A sector of both the scientific establishment and military believe it would be best to “destroy” the children, believing them to be the spearhead of an invasion of aliens. But the army discovers the children are well-equipped to defend themselves against any aggressive action. Unlike the Village children, this new group of moppets choose only to use their telepathic energies towards their own defense. They’re not interested in causing harm to anyone, even as the bowels beneath their church sanctuary are wired with explosives.

Children is, without doubt, a different animal than Village. John Briley, the U.S. born screenwriter would contribute an original screenplay for the sequel, one only loosely based on the premise of the Wyndham novel. Though early in his career, Briley was no hack merely trying to get along by writing B-pictures. In 1983, as the writer of Ghandi, Briley was awarded an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

But the folks going to the cinema to catch Children of the Damned wanted a horror film, and no doubt felt cheated upon exiting. This film was more of a preachy “co-existence not no-existence” exercise. Most reviews of the film were critical of the movie’s high-minded and obvious aspiration as being experienced as a “message film.” One critic thought the concocted scenario was simply too precious. The filmmakers were attempting to endow the film “with moral significance […] heavy-handed, unnecessary and too pretentious an aim for so relatively modest a production venture.”

Although Children of the Damned was Leader’s last feature film of significance, the British trades were reporting the novelist/director had already reworked Christopher Monig’s 1956 mystery novel The Burned Man into a screen treatment, pitching the idea of bringing it to the screen to Hammer’s James Carreras.  That project would not happen, for better or worse, and Leader soon returned to TV directing. Children of the Damned is more of a curio today, but Village of the Damned has enjoyed lasting notoriety, even having been remade by Horror-film maestro John Carpenter in 1995. But while Carpenter’s film easily bests any of the antiquated optical effects of the 1960 version, Rilla’s original remains the more iconic.

Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned are made available as BD-ROMS through the Warner Archive Collection. Village is presented in 1080p High Definition 16 x 9 1:78.1 and in DTS HD Master Audio Mono. Children has been made available in 1080p High Definition 16 x 9 1:85.1 and in DTS HD Master Audio Mono. Both films are relativity sparse with extras, though both offer each film’s theatrical trailer and removable English subs. The only true “special features” is Steve Haberman’s commentary track on Village and screenwriter John Briley’s commentary on Children.

Click here to order "Village of the Damned" Blu-ray from Amazon

Click here to order "Children of the Damned" Blu-ray from Amazon

BY HANK REINEKE

A March 1945 notice in the Los Angeles Times reported that following his return to Hollywood from a USO camp tour, Boris Karloff was to begin work on a RKO Radio production titled Chamber of Horrors. The film was to be produced by Val Lewton, the producer who had already brought to the screen such psychological-horrors as Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Curse of the Cat People (1944). Karloff had already appeared in a pair of Lewton’s horror-melodramas for RKO, The Body Snatcher (1945) and Isle of the Dead (1945). The actor had been enjoying his freelance status of late. Recent castings in a series of mad scientist films (1940-1942) for Columbia solidified Karloff’s reputation as cinema’s preeminent boogeyman - even in roles sans grotesque makeup appliances. So the engagement of the actor for Chamber of Horrors was properly trumpeted in a 1945 Variety notice as something of a given: “Karloff Goes Mad – Again.”

By August of 1945 the pre-production title of Chamber of Horrors was abandoned, the film tentatively re-slated as A Tale of Bedlam. It’s not entirely clear why the earlier title was dropped. One can speculate that RKO wished to differentiate their new film from the 1940 British Edgar Wallace thriller of the same name. But this second title too was soon shortened, the resulting film eventually released simply as Bedlam.

The origin of the film’s scenario was certainly original, one inspired by a painting of the sixteenth century British artist William Hogarth. In the years 1733-1734, Hogarth would brush a series of eight plates depicting the plight of a doomed character’s commitment to London’s notorious St. Mary’s of Bethlehem Asylum. The most famous of these portraits was Plate #8, titled “The Rake’s Progress,” a snapshot depicting madness on the ward’s floor. If Lewton’s films are best recalled for their psychological-horror element, the scenario of Bedlam illustrates the sorry fate of those irreversibly afflicted. Particularly the lurid, inhumane conditions to which they’re subjected following internment.

In the case of Bedlam, Lewton (under the nom de plume of “Carlos Keith”) and director Mark Robson would craft a provocative, class-conscious screenplay. Though the film is a historical-melodrama in construction, the picture was marketed as a thinly disguised Boris Karloff horror vehicle. Robson was a favorite collaborator of Lewton’s. He helmed Karloff’s previous film for RKO Radio, Isle of the Dead, as well as two earlier Lewton productions, The Seventh Victim (1943) and Ghost Ship (1943). The latter title, in fact, appears here as one half of the double-feature Blu ray made available here through the Warner Archive.

The budget for Bedlam was kept reasonably low since the filmmakers were able to make use of an existing set at RKO-Pathe’s studio in Culver City. Eagle-eyed admirers of the classic Ingrid Bergman-Bring Crosby movie The Bells of St. Mary (1945) will notice that film’s convent school setting has been repurposed for the darker explorations of Bedlam. The existing set’s availability allowed the production and costume designers on Bedlam some economic freedom to properly – and lavishly - dress the costumes and settings. The film has a very elegant, high-budget feel despite it’s small bankroll, and Robson does an admirable job of contrasting the privileged world of London’s elite against the poor souls who suffer the dank, dark asylum chamber of St. Mary’s.

The film takes place in the year 1761, an era cynically described here as “The Age of Reason.” Karloff’s unpleasant character, Master Sims, serves as the particularly cold and malevolent Apothecary General of the asylum. He’s a man without morals, interested only in satisfying his own selfish desires and lining his pocket. To this end, Sims continually toadies and fawns to those of regal or high political import, such as the corpulent and equally repulsive Lord Mortimer (Billy House). To gain favor with those of high position, Sims coldheartedly showcases “performances” of interned “loonies” for amusement and monies.

Things start going bad for Sims when he’s challenged by Nell Bowen (Anna Lee), a mistress of Mortimer’s whose earlier haughtiness and indifference has softened by the grotesque showcases. Rightfully seeing Bowen as a threat to both his position and pocketbook, Karloff does what he can to break the woman’s spirit. He cynically and falsely charges her with derangement, leading to a commitment to the ward at St. Mary’s. Her only hope in breaking free – and continuing her fight for the well-being and humane care for fellow inmates interred in this “bestial world” – is through the interventions of a pacifist Quaker (Richard Fraser) and a sympathetic, anti-Tory Whig politician Wilkes (Leland Hodgson). But the malevolent Sims will do all he can to silence and destroy the determined woman to prevent that from ever happening.

The film’s monochrome cinematography looks great, Director of Photography Nicholas Musuraca atmospherically capturing and juxtaposing the elegant lifestyles of the rich and powerful against the sorrowful living conditions of the mental and emotionally disturbed inmates of the asylum. Such attention to detail is particularly impressive when considering the production of Bedlam was shot quickly, photography wrapping by the end of September 1945.

The Hollywood trades would report shortly afterward that Karloff was scheduled to appear in yet a third film for the team of Lewton and Robson, Blackbeard, presumably a swashbuckling pirate epic. RKO executive producer Jack Gross was to supervise this new production, one scheduled to commence filming in spring of 1946. That film would, sadly, not see the light of day. Lewton’s relationship with Gross was reportedly an unfriendly one, and the box-office for Bedlam wasn’t what the studio had wished it to be. The revenue shortfall was partly attributed to troublesome distribution issues.

Such issues aside, it was also true that public interest in horror films had diminished. Such changes in taste had allowed Karloff to - briefly – be free of playing roles that exploited his reputation as cinema’s man of menace. This respite, however, wouldn’t last long. The gentlemanly, lisping actor was soon back to playing villains, mad scientists, and mysterious Swamis before decade’s end - even terrorizing Bud Abbott and Lou Costello as an acrobatic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Lewton would go on to produce four subsequent films following Bedlam, but the filmmaker would pass on in March of 1951, a somewhat uncelebrated figure in Hollywood. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that film scholars would reassess his contributions to cinema, anointing several of his earliest 1940’s efforts as classics of the horror genre. Robson’s career would continue unabated for decades, scoring big successes with such films as Von Ryan’s Express (1965) and Earthquake (1974).

Though this Blu ray’s second film lacks a star player of Boris Karloff’s caliber, Robson’s The Ghost Ship is certainly worth a watch. Despite its titillating supernatural title, this film too is not a horror-vehicle. Tom Merriam (Russell Wade), a newly hired third mate to Captain Will Stone (Richard Dix), suspects the cargo freighter’s commander is not only mentally disturbed, but possibly homicidal. The problem is no one on the crew or at the shipping company seems to agree with him. This despite mounting evidence of the Captain’s increasingly suspicious actions and demonstrably bizarre behavior. In some respects, The Ghost Ship is similar to Bedlam as it suggests one remain wary of being too trustful of those holding positions of power and prestige. Though a sixty-nine minute B-film, The Ghost Ship is a pretty effective effort, some even preferring it to Bedlam as it’s a bit more suspenseful in construction.

This Warner Archive Collection Region-Free Blu ray edition of Bedlam and The Ghost Ship is presented here in 1080p High Definition 16x9 1.37.1 and DTS-HD Master Mono Audio. While the set includes the trailers of both films, the only other special feature offered is an informative and entertaining commentary courtesy of film historian Tom Weaver in support of Bedlam. Those of us who already invested in Warner’s nine-film DVD set The Val Lewton Horror Collection (2005) might not choose to upgrade for this Blu two-fer, but fans of Karloff and Lewton will be amply rewarded should they do so. This set not only features upgraded transfers with great balance, but also Weaver’s usual comprehensive supporting commentary, absent from the original DVD release.

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BY HANK REINEKE

There’s a telling moment at the dénouement of Thomas Hamilton’s and Ron MacCloskey’s affectionate documentary Boris Karloff: The Man behind the Monster. Sara Karloff, the now eighty-two year old daughter of the beloved actor, opines that her father’s lasting cinematic legacy is due, in part, to the tenaciousness of his devoted fan base. It’s a demographic that we soon discover consists of a number of amazingly creative people: folks whose loyalty to and enthusiasm for Karloff’s work has not wavered over the decades. Sara’s contention is inarguably true. As this ninety-nine minute Voltage Films/Abramorama documentary (presented by Shout! Studios) unspools – crisply narrated by Paul Ryan and featuring commentary by preeminent Karloff scholar and “Biographical Consultant” Stephen Jacobs - we discover the actor’s admirer’s bridge several generations of fans and filmmakers.

The first generation to discover Karloff in the decades following his big splash as the Frankenstein monster in 1931, include directors Roger Corman and Peter Bogdanovich. Both men would have the opportunity and honor to work with the actor in his twilight years. The second generation of admirers were those introduced to Karloff via neighborhood cinema screenings or through television broadcasts of Shock Theater in the late 1950s/early 1960s.

These filmmakers, profoundly influenced by Karloff’s art, would go on to create a few cinematic gems of their own: John Landis, Joe Dante, and Guillermo Del Toro, to name a few. The latter gentleman is particularly effusive in his praise, describing Karloff’s performance as the vampiric Wurdalak in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath as a “tremendous” example of the great actor’s “physical presence, his majesty, his demonic power.”

If the documentary is chock-full of talented filmmakers offering tributes, the film is also supported by the erudite commentaries of film scholars David J. Skal (The Monster Show: a Cultural History of Horror), Gregory W. Mank (Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: the Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration), Donald F. Glut (The Frankenstein Legend: a tribute to Mary Shelley and Boris Karloff), Sir Christopher Frayling (Frankenstein: the first Two Hundred Years), and critic Leonard Maltin.

There are also short tributes and reminisces by several actors – three now gone - who had worked with Karloff at some point in their career: Dick Miller (The Terror), Christopher Plummer (The Lark, Even the Weariest River), Ian Ogilvy (The Sorcerers), and Orson Bean (Arsenic and Old Lace). Karloff’s tells part of his own story through audio recordings made available to the filmmakers courtesy of the British cinema historian/author Kevin Brownlow (The Parades Gone By…) and the Pacifica Radio Archive.

It has long annoyed me that when one searches out the term “Boris Karloff” in the ever-expanding IMDB, the resulting prompt identifies the actor’s signature film as The Grinch that Stole Christmas (1966). My daughters would remind me that my personal agitation of this result is, by definition, a “first world” problem, one hardly worthy of condemnation. But as cinema’s preeminent boogeyman for four decades, seeing Karloff’s storied career reduced to a role featuring only his disembodied voice as the Grinch… Well, let’s just say that I still find it somewhat misleading and inappropriate.

Be that as it may, Hamilton’s film reminds Karloff himself might disagree with my wariness of the Grinch being bandied as the cinematic crown jewel of the actor’s legacy. Sara Karloff recalls receiving a phone call from her father immediately following his recording of the narration for that beloved Dr. Seuss vehicle. The actor we learn was profoundly happy with his work on the now-famous animated holiday classic, telling his daughter proudly, “I’ve done something which I think is pretty good.”

Karloff would pass away a couple of years following the first broadcast of The Grinch that Stole Christmas, but he worked to the very end of his days, appearing in a number of memorable – and a few less-than-memorable – films, several of which would see release in years following his passing. His last films were little more than cameo-length appearances shot on a Hollywood sound stage. It was director Jack Hill’s idea to take the Karloff footage from these shoots and blend the results into a series of Mexican horror films. Karloff, rightly and proudly, would choose to refer to his spell-binding turn as the semi-autobiographical aging horror film actor Byron Orlok in Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) as his feature film swan song. Technically, it wasn’t. But the brief appearances in that post- Target series of Hollywood-Mexico co-production mash-ups were mostly an excuse for an old pro to continue to ply his trade and keep busy. But working oxygen-tank dependent and wheelchair bound on the Jack Hill-directed sequences, Karloff was prevented from doing much of anything with the already somewhat cut-and-paste material given to him.

Karloff, of course, was not the only “horror film” star of the genre’s celebrated Golden Age of the 1930s and 40s. Karloff, we learn, was actually not happy with the designation “horror movie”, much preferring his films to be termed as “thrillers.” His contemporary competitor as grand ghoul of the horror film - one whose own legacy would burn bright into the next century - was Bela Lugosi. Although Lugosi had too often played second-fiddle to Karloff in matters of employment and billing, the Hungarian’s post-mortem fame may have eclipsed his friend’s over the last several decades.

For starters, Lugosi’s sad and lurid dependency on morphine and alcohol in his final years made him the subject of tabloid fodder, and gossip then – and now – still rules. Lugosi’s slow demise coupled with his appearances in several of Edward J. Wood’s revered cult films brought him a big degree of post-mortem fame. A brand new generation would discover the actor through Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning turn as Lugosi in Tim Burton’s semi-biographical drama Ed Wood.

To be fair, Lugosi’s string of mad performances in Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957), Bride of the Monster (1955), and Glen or Glenda (1953) are, in many ways, were no less better or worse or more undistinguished than Karloff’s walk-ons in the creaky Jack Hill/Mexi-horror films of spring 1968. Though both sets of films are passably entertaining in their own uneven, cult-ish ways, both actor’s cinematic exits were ignoble ends to these two great men who famously made audiences shiver in 1931.

James Whale’s Frankenstein would ultimately transform Karloff into a full-fledged movie star, but it had been a long road to achieving such fame. The actor had been working on various Hollywood backlots since the silent era. In the course of his earliest silent film efforts – beginning with such titles as The Lightning Raider (1919) and His Majesty, the American (1919) – he worked as little more than an extra. His subsequent fame would cause a score of budding film historians to carefully survey battered old prints of Karloff’s earliest filmography in the often futile hope of catching a glimpse as he passed by the camera.

In truth, his decade-long career as a silent film actor was mostly non consequential. He would appear in approximately sixty or so silent films between 1919 and 1929. He would, on occasion, be gifted a role of some heft, most notably as that of “The Mesmerist” in The Bells (1926) opposite Lionel Barrymore, but he was most often cast in adventure-orientated serials as a heavy, or as a Hindu, Mexican or an Arab, a mystic or a general ne’er-do-well.

It was his casting as the sadistic “Galloway” in Howard Hawk’s sound prison drama The Criminal Code (1930) that brought him to the attention of Universal executives looking to cast a suitably cadaverous-appearing actor as the Frankenstein monster. Following Lugosi’s rejection of the part due to the absence of dialogue afforded, Bela’s pass on the role was fortuitous for Karloff. He was still hungry and looking for that big break. Although the role of the monster would forever typecast him, the actor remained forever grateful for having taking the role in Frankenstein, once describing the career door-opening creature as “the best friend I ever had.”

It’s not hard to see why Karloff’s portrayal of the monster remains the preeminent of the Universal series. He was, after all, the only actor to have been given the opportunity to actually act and emote, to bring a sense of pathos to the role. He was abetted, of course, by Jack Pierce’s iconic make-up which, rather than masking, cannily sculpted and made highlight of Karloff’s facial features and sunken cheeks. This gave the monster, according to one of the participants in the documentary, a “full expression range.” The trio of actors who would subsequently portray the monster in the Universal series simply weren’t given the opportunity to apply any emotive effect of their own. Even by Son of Frankenstein (1939), the third film in the series, the screenwriters had already reduced the monster into little more than a hulking, lumbering menace and henchman.

It is discouraging to learn that when Frankenstein had its gala premiere in the autumn of 1931, Karloff was not even invited to attend. He was already forty-four years of age when he assumed the role, a no-name celebrity and hardly a handsome matinee idol of any recognition. The unexpected phenomenal success of Frankenstein would change all that, and Universal was quick to capitalize on the actor’s sudden notoriety as Hollywood’s most beloved boogeyman. Karloff’s natural proclivity for taking on roles of menacing villainous characters with icy stares would allow his casting into a string of Golden Age horror classics – not only for Universal but for other studios as well, including memorable turn in MGM’s The Mask of Fu Manchu. The latter remains a great, entertaining film… if undeniably one of the most politically-incorrect lavish big studio productions of the 1930s.

When the market for horror films softened in the mid-1940s – thanks, in part, due to the horror genre’s continuing perceived transgressions of the Hays Code - Karloff easily transitioned to character roles, where, according to his daughter, her father’s natural “dark coloring,” permitted him to slip easily into “ethnic roles.” As one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, he was able to exercise his freelance status by working for, amongst others, RKO, Columbia, Monogram, and Warner Bros.

Another avenue of opportunity had presented itself around this same time. In 1941 Karloff was lured, against his better judgement according to this film, to take on the Broadway role of the villainous Jonathan Brewster in Joseph L. Kesselring’s stage play Arsenic and Old Lace. It was to his life-long disappointment that a clause in his theatrical stage contract prevented his returning to Hollywood – as did several fellow members of the original Broadway cast – to reprise the role for the much beloved Frank Capra film adaptation of 1944.

Though initially frightened to work in theatre before a live audience, the success of Arsenic emboldened Karloff to accept several other roles in such Broadway productions as The Lark (with Julie Harris), The Linden Tree, The Shop at Sly Corner, and even in a memorable turn as Captain Hook in a 1950 production of Peter Pan. Fortunately, we of a certain age who missed out still can get a small taste of what we missed since kinescopes survive from early Hallmark Hall of Fame broadcasts of the original production of The Lark and a 1961 re-staging of Arsenic and Old Lace.

Though Karloff’s work in radio is mostly ignored in this documentary, the film does take pains to point out that he was among the first movie stars of his generation to fully embrace television. Though he would often appear in serious television dramas for such programs as Texaco Star Theater or Playhouse 90, he was not above spoofing his own curious fame as Hollywood’s grandest ghoul on any number of variety programs hosted by the likes of Red Skelton or Dinah Shore.

In the 1960s, he would famously host (and occasionally act) in episodes of the television program Thriller, or appear in drag as “Mother Muffin” in an episode of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E – or with former U.N.C.L.E. agent Robert Vaughn in the spy-film The Venetian Affair (1966). Joe Dante also references the series of wonderful long-playing albums Karloff would record over the years, his unmistakable, lisping voice introducing children to a wonderful selection of folk tales, ghost stories, Washington Irving classics, and time-worn fables.

Karloff's late career guest star appearance in "The Girl from U.N.C.L.E." as Mother Muffin, opposite Stefanie Powers and Robert Vaughn.

Boris Karloff: the Man behind the Monster reminds us that the actor (1887-1969) accomplished a lot in his eighty-one-years, a large percentage of which would encompass appearances on screen, on stage, on air, on record, and on television. To their credit, the filmmakers share what they can in the constraint of the film’ ninety-nine minute running time, and the film certainly succeeds as an excellent primer. Karloff wonks like myself might hold out hope that a multi-part, Ken Burns-style series might someday be put into the works, but I imagine that’s unlikely. One hundred and thirty four years have passed since Karloff’s birth. The fact that contemporary audiences remain completely entranced by his filmography in 2021 is testament enough to the worthiness of this loving tribute painting him as one of Hollywood’s greatest.

For details about how to view the film, click here.

"WHEN SHERMAN MET FRANKENSTEIN" 

BY MARK CERULLI

To celebrate the release of producer Sam Sherman’s memoir, When Dracula Met Frankenstein (Murania Press) Cinema Retro presents this exclusive interview with the man himself. In our two-hour conversation, the filmmaker demonstrated a virtual photographic memory when discussing his remarkable 60 plus year career. Our interview was a time capsule of the drive-in era where creative marketing, distribution and production exemplified the true spirit of independent filmmaking.

Sam Sherman grew up a horror and western film fan. The first horror film Sam ever saw was Universal’s classic monster comedy, Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) which captivated his imagination at a very young age. Following his dream, he attended City College of New York to study filmmaking. Like most CR readers, he was also an avid collector – in his case, horror stills, which one imagines were almost given away in the 1950s. Those black and white photos, picked up in the small memorabilia stores that used to dot Manhattan, led to a career – “In 1958, I wrote to Famous Monsters and to my surprise, got a call back from Jim Warren and asked if they’d be interested in renting my stills,” Sherman recalled.

“I produced ads for Captain Company (FM’s merchandising division) and I also acquired product for them.” (As one who spent a lot of hard-earned teenage cash on Captain Co products - including a Dr. No movie poster for all of $4.99 - that was a part of Sam’s long career I could instantly relate to.)

While ghostwriting articles for FM and working on other Warren publications like Spacemen, Screen Thrills Illustrated and Wildest Westerns, Sherman frequently found his enthusiasm for horror looked down upon by Help! magazine art director, Terry Gilliam. Years later, Gilliam took an obvious jab (and inspiration) from Sherman’s climactic battle of the monsters in Dracula vs Frankenstein (1971) with his own comedic dismemberment scene in Monty Python & The Holy Grail (1975). “I made it a point never to see anything he’s done,” Sam adds.

In the 1950s and 60s, New York was the center of the film universe and Sherman found himself making the rounds of small distributors trying to find films to license for his own fledgling company, Signature Films. Sam later got in with an independent film company called Hemisphere Pictures which specialized in movies shot in the Philippines, including the Blood Island horror cult classics directed by Eddie Romero. Sherman honed his exploitation skills by creating the theatrical, television, radio and print ad campaigns which established Hemisphere as The House of Horror with unforgettable gimmicks and marketing promotions like “The Oath of Green Blood” for the first audience participation film, The Mad Doctor of Blood Island (1969).

Sam’s book is full of photos from that era – from snapshots of early visits to LA, to on-set stills and “ballyhoo” photos of theater displays, lurid posters and marquees. One image that jumps out is of a young Sam standing behind the iconic Boris Karloff on A.I.P.’s The Raven set. “Forry Ackerman (Famous Monsters’ longtime editor) took me to the last day of shooting and we spent the whole day with Peter Lorre and Vincent Price, which was wonderful. I had a nice chat with Karloff. He finished up for the day and (director) Roger Corman took him away to do The Terror, which was non-union, somewhere else.” Talk about maximizing your star!

In 1968, Sherman and several partners – including longtime friend, filmmaker Al Adamson, formed Independent-International Pictures Corp. (a riff off the very successful American International Pictures). “Al just wanted to make movies, he left it to me to figure out how to market them and make money,” Sam recalls.

Their first production for the new company was a raw biker film, Satan’s Sadists starring Russ Tamblyn of West Side Story fame and directed by Adamson. The film tapped into the national shockwaves reverberating from biker gang violence as well as LA’s horrific Manson murders. The female lead was a statuesque California blonde, Regina Carrol, who became Adamson’s girlfriend, later his wife and star of his films. Wanting to give her a little extra exposure, Sherman labeled her “The Freak-Out Girl”. As the film contained nudity, the then-new movie ratings board wanted to slap an X on Satan’s Sadists. Sam went to the mat to contest it, even advising the theatre circuits to rate the film themselves based on regional tastes vs the Motion Picture Board’s inconsistent classifications for independent films.

Sam’s book is full of similar throw out the rulebook tales – like licensing an odd Filipino caveman film named Tagani which was shot in black & white. To modernize it, Adamson shot some new scenes with veteran horror star John Carradine but the film still didn’t look right, so Sam suggested using various tints (“Like they did in silent movies”). He wrote MORE new scenes (including computer sex!), added an eye-catching title - Horror of the Blood Monsters and they now had a releasable film!

At Independent-International, Sam and Al shrugged off the industry’s notoriously unforgiving deadlines: “We released an imported German picture called Women for Sale which had been a big hit and I said ‘We can’t find anything like it to follow up with, so let’s make a picture like this’, it’ll be called Girls for Rent…” Sam hired an industry friend to write it, months went by without a script. “We’re getting closer to the key summer playdates, and we were really in a jam” Sam recalled. “I got another writer and we knocked the picture out fast, doing the campaign fast, ordered prints and got it into release by the end of the summer. Sixty days, I couldn’t believe we could do it but we did and it was a pretty good film!”

Of course, there’s a chapter on Independent-International’s biggest picture – Dracula vs Frankenstein, which actually started out as Blood Freaks (aka Blood Seekers). “The script was not much of anything but I was working on it… we wanted a name actor so Al went to agent Jerry Rosen who said ‘You can have Lon Chaney, Jr. and J. Carrol Naish for a week for $6K.’” They booked them sight unseen – and when they reported for work, both were in ill health. “Naish had a bad eye and Chaney had throat cancer. (Dracula vs Frankenstein would be his final horror film.) “Ya gotta meet the people,” Sam adds knowingly. Diminutive Angelo Rossitto rounded out the cast as the carnival barker Grazbo. The resulting film was so bad, backers recommended it just be shelved. Sam lives by the motto “Waste not, want not” and since he was an editor himself, he went to work watching the film repeatedly until he found a line of dialogue he could use to expand the storyline to include the last surviving Frankenstein… and the monster. “And once I thought that I said, ‘Let’s bring in Dracula for good measure.’” Scraping together $50K for reshoots they hired a tall, dark-haired record store employee, Rafael Engel (named “Zandor Vorkov” by Forry) to play the Count and 7’4” accountant, John Bloom, to play the monster. “I left it to Al to make the picture, but as the president of Independent International, I made the final decisions,” Sam adds. Sam also tapped Famous Monsters’ Forry Ackerman who not only acted in the film, but also secured the electrical equipment and props of special effects wizard Kenneth Strickfaden for the production. Strickfaden’s crackling electrical contraptions were originally used in Universal’s Frankenstein film 40 years earlier. Against the odds, Dracula vs Frankenstein was a monster hit! Ahead of his time, Sam even released the film on TV AND in theaters/drive-ins “day-and-date” at the same time. “Nobody cared”, Sam says, chuckling, “I did what I wanted to do.”

Naturally, Sam devotes a chapter to his creative partner and “the brother I never had”, Al Adamson, who was tragically murdered by a contractor renovating his desert house in 1995. Incredibly Sam still had a connection with him because one night after Al had been declared “missing”, Sam silently asked his friend to give him a sign of where he was… the word “Cement” popped into his mind. He communicated that to police and sure enough, when they investigated, Al’s body was discovered underneath a cement floor. The contractor was apprehended in Florida and is now serving decades in prison but the pain of Sam’s loss is palpable. He still keeps Adamson’s name alive with drive-in screenings and special DVD and Blu-ray releases of their work.

Behind the scenes on "Dracula Vs. Frankenstein": (L to R): John Bloom,  Sam Sherman, Zandor Vorkov, Al Adamson.

Now 81, Sam feels the time is ripe for his story to be told. His oversize book is full of industry lore and life lessons. “I hope readers get that if they want to be in the picture business, they can… and people who aren’t filmmakers but want to know the history of Al and myself, the whole story is there – how we did it, why we did it and what really happened.” Summing up, Sam says, “We did what we had to do.”

CLICK HERE TO ORDER BOOK FROM AMAZON

BY HANK REINEKE

Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X is a more technically extravagant version of the original stage production of playwrights Howard Warren Comstock and Allen C. Miller. The play was first tested at the Fox Theater in Great Neck, Long Island, for a single night’s performance on January 10, 1931. It was immediately followed by a brief run at Brandt’s Carlton Theatre in Jamaica, Queens, where newspaper adverts suggested theatergoers “Bring Your Shock Absorber” along. The production then moved to Brandt’s Boulevard Theatre in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, for several performances, only to be followed by a week-long preview and fine-tuning at Brandt’s Flatbush Theater in Brooklyn beginning January 26.

The three-act “mystery melodrama” would finally make its Broadway debut at the Hudson Theater, off W. 44^th Street, on February 9, 1931. The stage play featured actor Howard Lang in the role of the sinister Dr. Xavier, but the mystery wouldn’t enjoy a terribly long run on the Great White Way. The Hudson would eventually shutter the doors on the production in mid-April 1931.

It’s no coincidence that four Brandt-owned theatres were successively engaged to showcase the early previews of Doctor X. The play had been intentionally co-produced for the stage by the theatre owners William and Harry Brandt. Billboard would note in December of 1930 that the two brothers had chosen to enter the field of theatrical production as a potential remedy to offset the “slack business conditions on the subway circuit.”

The early reviews of the Brandt’s showcase were mainly positive, especially when considering the decidedly grim fare offered. The critic from Brooklyn’s Times-Union thought Doctor X a “swell show.” The paper reported that the gruesome goings-on of Jackson Height’s preview had not only caused a woman in the balcony to scream in fright but that other patrons nervously called “for the lights to be turned on” midway through the program. Whether such outbursts of fright were genuine or simply publicity ballyhoo stunts may never be known. But likely more of the latter than the former.

Not everyone was impressed. Brooklyn’s Standard-Union newspaper took a contrarian view of the stage show’s ability to curdle the blood of attendees. In the paper’s review of February 10, 1931, their critic would grieve that Doctor X was a mostly undistinguished effort, “Freighted with all the dismal baggage of those lamentable pastimes known as mystery thrillers.” “Even though the authors, no pikers, have arranged almost an endless procession of synthetic horrors,” the review mercilessly continued, “spectators are no longer hoodwinked by such drowsy tidbits. No longer can an actor with an anaemic makeup or panels that slide open terrify theatergoers into submission.”

Nonetheless, and though the play opened to mixed reviews, some of the New York dailies were impressed. There were enough good notices to allow the Brandt’s to run advertisements suggesting Doctor X as “New York’s Only Mystery Hit: Electrifies Press and Public Alike!” The critic of the New York Herald Tribune thought it a grand affair, trumpeting, “’Doctor X’ holds the best claim for some time to the grand heritage of such creepy works as ‘The Bat,’ ‘The Cat and the Canary’ and ‘The Spider.’” These references to past and successful mystery-melodramas of the stage were not only interesting but prescient: all three of these theatrical properties were subsequently licensed by Hollywood studios to be brought to neighborhood movie screens. Such transitioning of properties from Broadway to Hollywood was, as referenced by the above review, not unusual.

Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s The Bat had made its Broadway debut at the Morosco Theatre on August 22, 1921. That play would be belatedly adapted for the screen as a vehicle for Vincent Price in 1959. John Willard’s The Cat and the Canary would debut on the boards of the Majestic Theatre on June 14, 1937, and enjoy no fewer than three film treatments: there was Paul Leni’s celebrated silent film version of 1927, a popular Bob Hope mystery-comedy of 1939, and a late-arriving 1978 British production featuring Honor Blackman, Michael Callan and Edward Fox. Fulton Oursler and Lowell Brentano’s The Spider would make two appearances on Broadway with an initial staging at Chanin’s 46^th Street Theater in March of 1927 and, again, at the Century Theater in February of 1928. That play would be brought to the big screen twice, first in 1931 as a straightforward murder mystery, then reconfigured in 1945 as a film noir-style mystery picture.

Interestingly, Lionel Atwill was working on a different Broadway stage at the same time Doctor X was concurrently running at the Hudson. Atwill was working one block north at Broadway’s Morosco Theatre, the featured player in Lee Shubert’s production of The Silent Witness (opening date 3/23/31). The Silent Witness too was quickly picked up by Fox and following that show’s Broadway run, Atwill traveled out to Hollywood to star in the play’s film version, co-directed by Marcel Varnel and R.L. Hough. Though there were reports that Lionel Atwill was to return to the New York stage directly following that film’s wrap, in early March 1932 newssheets reported that Warner Bros. had asked him to remain in Hollywood for a spell. He had been offered the title role in their recently optioned property Doctor X.

In succeeding weeks, more details would emerge of the forthcoming production. On March 17 there were reports that Michael Curtiz had been signed to direct Doctor X and that silent film star Mae Busch (“absent from pictures some years”) was also offered a small role. On March 19, the Hollywood Reporter would relate that actor Tommy Dugan had signed on for two new Warner Bros. pictures, the first being Doctor X. On March 20, it was reported that popular ingénue Fay Wray was brought on to the picture, with shooting scheduled to “begin this week.” Warner Bros/First National’s Technicolor film production of Doctor X would wrap – very quickly, considering the elaborate sets designed and constructed - in early May of 1932. The film’s projected release was set for late July.

There’s a lot to like about this film. With the release of Doctor X, Warner Bros. was most likely hoping to siphon off some of the public interest and box office that Universal was enjoying with such macabre fare as Dracula and Frankenstein. Though the studio fell short of producing an iconic film, they nevertheless produced a pretty decent B-picture that offered a modicum of thrills and chills. One of the true highlight’s of the film version of Doctor X, is the art deco “mad scientist” laboratory sets of designer Anton Grot. The sets were so elaborate and grand that the New York Herald Tribune would run a fifteen paragraph long - and impressively detailed - tribute on Grot and his designs. That article, “Built-in Menace Hangs Over All in Anton Grot’s House of Doom”), includes an unusual for the period in-depth interview with the designer. The article also notes that no fewer than “192 sketches and blueprints” of imaginative and elaborate design had been drafted in preparation for shooting.

BY HANK REINEKE

On Disc two of the Warner Archive’s new and essential Blu-ray release of The Curse of Frankenstein - the first Hammer horror classic - Richard Klemensen, publisher of Little Shoppe of Horrors magazine, offers a succinct examination of the nuts and bolts of the film’s production history. The Klemensen segment is only one of several generous and informative featurettes included on the set. In the course of The Resurrection Men: Hammer, Frankenstein and the Rebirth of the Horror Film, the publisher explains that Hammer was a small, struggling indie studio that had churned out B pictures and modest second features since its 1934 inception. The studio’s fortune – and existence - was threatened in the early 1950s when television upended the British film industry. Ironically, it was during this same period that Hammer would lens one of their most significant big screen splashes: a sci-fi property adapted from British TV titled The Quatermass Xperiment.

That film would signal the studio’s first successful entry in the theatrical sci-fi/horror genre: even though the picture was a far cry from the Gothic horrors to which the studio would soon be most associated. The public’s interest in Gothic horror had waned in the late 1940s, as enthusiasm for Universal’s famed cycle of Dracula and Frankenstein and Mummy films had peaked and passed. The movie-going public with a penchant for the mysterious had since turned their attentions to flying saucers and alien visitors, of giant radioactive insects, of Ray Harryhausen’s celebrated animated monster-mutations.

So it was an odd time for Hammer to invest money in restages of such literary monsters as Shelley’s Frankenstein Monster and Stoker’s Count Dracula. The initial script for the first of Hammer’s Frankenstein cycle films would come to company producers via two gentleman who would eventually become competitors: Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg, the two principal founders of Amicus Productions. Hammer execs would ultimately reject that script and scenario, but the idea of producing of a Frankenstein film was not dismissed. The studio’s interest in reviving the franchise was ultimately left to screenwriter Jimmy Sangster.

Hammer’s decision to resurrect the monster was not met with enthusiasm by Universal Pictures. As the creators of the original series of Frankenstein films (1931-1948), the studio was very protective of their interests. They would do their best to make certain that no Universal-conceived elements would be co-opted by this British up-start. But as Mary Shelley’s property had long been in the rights-free Public Domain, Universal could not claim copyright to any characters that appeared in the original novel of 1818.

In truth, Hammer had no intention to overlap with the celebrated Universal film series. For starters, there would be no iconic armies of torch and pitchfork toting angry villagers chasing the monster. This wasn’t an artistic choice or due to any executive decision to not shadow Universal’s tropes too closely. The modest budget they set aside for the production of The Curse of Frankenstein simply wouldn’t allow for the employment of that many extras. The use of Jack Pierce’s iconic flat-top Frankenstein monster make-up, replete with neck bolts and callow cheeks was also taboo. Hammer’s make-up wizard Phil Leakey would conjure up an admittedly less iconic - but certainly far more gruesome – set of make-up for Frankenstein’s creation, all boils and melted flesh and cloudy eyes.

Gruesome and bloody would be the order of the day. As the first Frankenstein film to be shot in color, the filmmakers were able to take advantage of relaxed contemporary standards of what was deemed acceptable to show on screen. The resulting film was certainly far more graphic than previously seen, dressed as it was with ample amounts of blood-letting and gory visuals. That’s not to say the censors were happy with the film’s content when submitted for review. The film would receive an “X’ rating in Great Britain. This wasn’t only due to the graphic content and violence as presented, but also due to Hammer’s introducing an element of lurid sexuality and provocative peeks of Hazel Court’s ample cleavage.

Hammer would also wisely make Shelley’s Baron Victor Frankenstein the series central character. Actually, it was the Baron’s lack of character that would make him the series’ central villain. Peter Cushing’s Frankenstein remained as obsessed as ever in his desire to create new life from dead tissue. This ambition was a hallmark of all his mad scientist predecessors at Universal: Colin Clive, Lionel Atwill, Patrick Knowles, Onslow Stevens and even Boris Karloff himself. But Cushing’s Frankenstein was more ambitious in his creating of new monsters. The actor’s Dr. Frankenstein was the monster, producing a series of woeful, tortured creatures in the course of his experimentations.

The Curse of Frankenstein would bring together several members of the production crew whose work would soon become synonymous with Hammer’s brand of horror. Director Terence Fisher was a dependable figure to helm the project. He had creating serviceable thrillers for the studio’s producers since 1951. Despite working with penny-pinching budgets, Production Designer Bernard Robinson was able to create a sense of luxurious, visual ambiance with his opulent set decorations. This was no small feat as most of the films he would design for Hammer were shot within the cramped confines of Bray House on the Thames.

Then there was Jack Asher, whose moody lighting was never short of brilliant. His work became even more nuanced and image-invoking when the success of Curse at the box office convinced the studio to loosen the purse strings… a bit. This decision allowed the studio to invest in bigger budgets and to unleash their creative energies on other horror film properties once the sole domain of Universal. Between 1957 and 1974, Hammer would give us no fewer than seven Frankenstein films, nine Dracula movies, four Mummy pictures and even a one-shot Spaniard Werewolf epic. This in addition, of course, to an impressive number of original monsters and adherents of Satan they would conjure on their own.

I’m preaching to the choir here. If you are a fan of vintage horror movies, you are already acquainted with this classic. Warner’s Blu ray edition of The Curse of Frankenstein provides film fans with beautiful transfers of this 1957 horror classic with the choice of enjoying it in 1.85:1, 1.66:1, and 1.37:1 Open-Matte versions, all restored and remastered from 4K scans. The set also offers a generous amount of supplemental materials providing dedicated fans with backstories on its production. Asher’s contributions are featured in the set’s featurette Torrents of Light: The Art of Jack Asher, with cinematographer David J. Miller (A.S.C.) bringing to the fore the elements that made Asher’s photography so distinctive and compelling. Miller describes Asher as a “perfectionist” and the preeminent “architectural lighting director,” and makes a convincing case of such an honor.

Though the phrase “painting with light” has become an overused stock-phrase to describe the art of cinematography, Miller suggests that Asher’s work is particularly deserving of such accolade. He describes the atmospheric visual imagery as captured by Asher as “an oil painting come to life.” Miller also suggests, not unreasonably, that Asher not only set the template for Hammer’s visual style, but that his work had clearly influenced the styles of cinematographers in Italy and France, the great Mario Bava being the most notable. He also suggests that Asher had freedom to creatively contribute to the “Hammer style” as he had previously worked extensively with Fisher and Production Designer Robinson. Such familiarity and trust with the core creative team was an essential component to the film’s visual flair.

Another figure whose work for Hammer is now considered essential to the Hammer brand was that of composer James Bernard. The composer’s dramatic, string-soaked arrangements would serve as a perfect complement to the often wild melodrama unfolding on screen. Bernard’s contribution to the Hammer legacy is examined in detail in yet another featurette Diabolus in Musica: James Bernard and the Sound of Hammer Horror, moderated by composer Christopher Drake.

Most famously, The Curse of Frankenstein would first pair two names that eventually would forever remain associative with the Hammer Film legacy: actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Cushing was a well-known figure to television audiences in Britain when he accepted the role of Victor Frankenstein in Curse. The actor’s feature film work prior to his work with Hammer was less celebrated, though never short of brilliant. In 1956 Christopher Lee wasn’t yet a film star of any magnitude, at least not a household name. He had been a difficult actor to cast due to his height. He dwarfed the lead actors he worked alongside, which no doubt rankled his better-known male co-stars and caused frustrating framing issues to cinematographers. In his casting of the creature in Curse, his height would finally work to his advantage. But ultimately he was cast not due to his towering presence alone. He also impressed with his abilities to communicate effectively as a mime.

“CLINICAL EXPLOITATION”

By Raymond Benson

There have always been what have been termed in the motion picture industry “exploitation films,” even back in the silent days. The late 1930s and much of the 1940s, however, saw a deluge of cheap, not-even-“B” pictures made, usually independently of Hollywood and marketed in guerilla fashion as “educational” adult fare. You know the type. Reefer Madness. Child Bride. Marihuana.

In the 40s, especially in the wake of World War II, the Baby Boomer phenomenon was just beginning, and there was a need for sexual hygiene education for young people—at least, that’s what the makers of these tawdry movies told the public. There most certainly was a necessity for Sex Ed in schools—and some legitimate companies stepped up to the plate to create “clinical” material shown to gender-segregated classrooms dealing with the facts of life, menstruation, and venereal disease. I can remember being in fifth or sixth grade in the early 1960s… all the girls were ushered out of class for an hour for a special screening of some cryptic film that all the boys were curious about, but of course had no idea what it could possibly be. Whenever we asked any of the girls what they had seen, we were met with an emphatic, “I’m not telling you!” This just made the event even more of a mystery.

In the 1940s, a producer who was really nothing more than a snake oil salesman—but a very successful one—named Kroger Babb specialized in making, at the time, sexually frank and sometimes explicit but so-called educational films that were really nothing more than exploitative and an attempt to attract an audience with prurient inquisitiveness. Mom and Dad, first seen in 1945, might be the most successful of any of these pictures. In fact, it was one of the biggest box office hits of the entire decade and beyond, as it was exhibited up until the 1970s.

Babb and his team would come to town, rent a theater for a week or two, and distribute promotional materials and place ads in local papers that hawked the film’s “moral” and educational aspects, and that it was something every young adult must see (no children allowed). There was, of course, push back from churches, public officials, and the law. In some territories the film was banned (the New York State Supreme Court finally allowed it to be shown in their state after years of being unseen). All this served to boost audience interest! And if there wasn’t much of a protest, then Babb intentionally created and distributed his own fake outrage in flyers and such to drum up the enthusiasm!

Screenings also featured a lecture during intermission by a “medical specialist” named Elliot Forbes—who was really a hired actor. This interlude also served as a chance to sell sexual hygiene literature produced as tie-ins to the film. Interestingly, in African American communities, the Elliot Forbes role was taken by none other than Olympic star Jesse Owens (who was most likely handsomely paid).

BY BRIAN GREENE

Think of Linda Blair acting in the 1970s, and the ’73 horror classic The Exorcist will likely be the first film that comes to your mind. But while there’s ample reason for that movie to stand out as it does, Blair put on an equally memorable performance – albeit in a completely different type of movie – in 1974’s made-for-TV feature Born Innocent. In that release, which has the feel of an especially harsh ABC Afterschool Special, Blair plays an average, highly likable teenage kid who becomes estranged from her worthless parents and winds up in a rough juvenile detention facility, following some runaway attempts. Born Innocent can be lumped in with the “babes behind bars” exploitation subcategory of films, but there’s nothing campy about the TV movie. It’s downbeat, super realistic, and devastatingly sad.

Around five months after Born Innocent originally aired on NBC, the network showed Blair in a similar type of story, with their broadcast of Sarah T.-Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic, in February of ’75. Shout! Factory has just introduced a new Blu-ray version of the film. Blair, who turned 16 a few weeks before the movie reached households, plays the troubled title character, Sarah Travis. Sarah is a lot like Blair’s character Chris Parker from Born Innocent. She’s a normal, relatable, well-intentioned teenage girl going through some rough times. Sarah’s parents divorced a few years before the outset of the story, when her materialistically ambitious mother got tired of her artistically inclined husband’s (played by Larry Hagman) unreliable ways. The mother (Verna Bloom plays her) remarried a more stable, financially healthy man (William Daniels), and the family - which includes Sarah’s older, married sister – moves from San Francisco to an upscale neighborhood in Southern California.

There are some factors that differentiate Sarah Travis’s life predicaments from Chris Parker’s. While Chris is (was, before being sent to the reform school) being raised by a physically abusive father and an emotionally absent mother, Sarah’s three parents are actually trying to be good to her. Her artsy dad doesn’t have the wherewithal to be a provider to her, and he often leaves her disappointed by not being available enough to her; but at least he loves her and sometimes has fun with her. And while Sarah’s mom is a feminist’s nightmare whose answer to every life problem is “I’ll let my husband decide what to do about that,” she means well in attempting to create a stable home environment for her daughter. Ditto Sarah’s stepfather, who tries his best to connect with the girl and see to her needs, without attempting to completely overtake the role of father in her life. Also, Sarah has a love interest – a bright, sensitive guy who is played by Mark Hamill, a couple years before Hamill’s breakthrough role in Star Wars.

But Sarah’s life is challenging for her, even if it’s not as seemingly hopeless as Chris Parker’s situation. She misses her real dad and feels alienated by how focused her mother is on social status, and how completely her mom defers to her new husband in all matters. She’s had to change high schools, and faces the same social pressures and anxiety any 15-year old would experience in having to make that adjustment at such a psychologically volatile time in life. And while the guy she likes enjoys her company and cares about her, he’s not ready to get emotionally involved with her, the way she would like. All of this leads Sarah to continually turn to alcohol, to “help me feel good.” What starts as an occasional sneaky nip during a stressful moment, becomes a debilitating habit.

The story of Sarah T. was written by the TV writing/producing husband and wife team of Richard and Esther Shapiro, who are best known as the creators of Dynasty and its spin-off series The Colbys. A novel based on the film, which shares its title and plot elements, was written by author Robin S. Wagner and published as a Doubleday paperback original a month after the movie aired on television. The book is not something anyone needs to read if they’ve seen the film, and is most memorable for its lurid cover image, that shows Sarah’s downcast face superimposed over the contents of a pint of whiskey. The Sarah T. film was directed by Richard Donner, whose other directorial efforts from the decade include The Omen (’76) and Superman (’78).

BY FRED BLOSSER

Mario Bava’s Gli invasori or The Invaders (1961) was imported to U.S. theaters in 1963 by American International Pictures in a dubbed print as Erik the Conqueror -- not to be confused now with Terry Jones’ 1989 farce, Erik the Viking. It was the sort of genre movie that would have played on a weekend double-bill at the Kayton, the second-run theater in my home town. There, it would have been paired either with another Italian peplum or sword-and-sandal epic, with a Hammer Films horror show, or with an Audie Murphy western. The Kayton’s 1960s double features were eclectic, to say the least. In that buttoned-down Cold War era, the peplums satisfied international box-office demand for movies about brawny bare-chested heroes, curvaceous scantily-clad women, and exotic settings that Hollywood productions like Quo Vadis (1951), Ben-Hur (1959), and Cleopatra (1964) were slow to satisfy because they were so expensive and time-consuming to produce. The model for Erik the Conqueror was Richard Fleischer’s very popular 1958 epic The Vikings, produced by and starring Kirk Douglas. The influence must have been obvious at the time even to undiscriminating audiences who watched the dubbed import at the Kayton and its counterparts in other small towns. But The Vikings required an investment of $5 million in 1950s dollars from Douglas’ Bryna Productions and its partners to pay for A-list Hollywood talent and on-location filming in Norway. Bava wrapped Erik the Conqueror for a fraction of that cost using existing studio interiors, exteriors on the Italian coast, a modest cast, and ingenious camera tricks that obviated the need for hiring thousands of extras for crowd scenes and constructing new sets.

American International’s 1963 movie poster played the film for exploitative value. “He lived only for the flesh and the sword!” the tag line proclaimed. The British poster under the title The Invaders similarly advertised, “He lusted for war and women.” Both ads suggested more sex and skin than the script, costuming, and actors actually delivered. Like The Vikings, Erik the Conqueror centers on two antagonists who don’t realize at the outset that they’re brothers. Dispatched by English King Lotar (Franco Ressel) to negotiate peace with the Viking chief Harald, the treacherous Sir Rutford (Andrea Checchi) instead attacks Harald’s village, massacres Harald and most of his people, and engineers Lotar’s murder. Harald’s young sons are separated in the chaos. Eron is rescued and carried to Norway, while Erik is adopted by the now-widowed English queen, Alice. Twenty years later, colluding with Rutford, Eron (Cameron Mitchell) leads an invasion of England and sinks an English warship commanded by Erik, now the Duke of Helford. Kidnapping Queen Alice, Eron installs Rutford as his regent. In the meantime, Erik (George Ardisson) is shipwrecked among the Vikings. In a romantic misunderstanding, Erik mistakes Eron’s bride, the Vestal Virgin Daya (Ellen Kessler), for his own sweetheart, Daya’s twin sister Rama (Alice Kessler). The Vestal Virgins are an anachronism in the Medieval setting, but the conceit gave the producers a chance to include dancing girls in diaphanous gowns to pique the attention of male viewers. Once the misunderstanding with Rama is squared away, Erik rescues the queen and proceeds to a showdown with Eron and the turncoat Rutford.

Arrow Video in the U.K. has released a new, 2K restored print of Erik the Conqueror from the original 35 mm camera negative in a Blu-ray and DVD combo package. The new release provides a renewed opportunity to reassess Bava’s movie in a sharp, letterboxed 2.35:1 Dyaliscope image, with critical context provided by supplementary materials. Rescued from the drab, pan-and-scan format to which it was doomed in old TV and VHS editions, and enhanced even beyond Anchor Bay’s worthy 2007 DVD edition, it emerges as an acceptable B-movie with respectable costuming and action scenes. The production values are notably better than those of most peplums and easily comparable to those of Hollywood’s second-tier Technicolor epics of the 1950s, if not to the overall finesse of higher-profile releases like The Vikings and Jack Cardiff’s lively, underrated Norse epic from 1964, The Long Ships. Plot, dialogue, and characterizations are rudimentary, but then, so are those in the joyless, overstuffed, multi-million-dollar costume epics of recent vintage. At that, some of the sillier lines in Bava’s movie can be avoided by turning on the Blu-ray’s Italian voice track and English subtitles instead of the English-language dub with its alternately wooden and childish voices. The simple-minded dialogue in Gladiator (2003), Robin Hood (2010), and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) is pretty much inescapable short of turning the volume completely off.

BY HANK REINEKE

Among devotees of horror and mystery-adventure films, director Jesús “Jess” Franco remains a divisive character.  His earliest, more traditionally constructed films - say The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962) and The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966) - are usually held in some level of regard amongst traditionalists, while more adventuresome moviegoers wax rhapsodic over his later perplexing, exploitative and occasionally pornographic art film exercises. Franco’s The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968) and The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969) are more conventional exemplars of traditional movie-making, not as challenging to audiences as some of his more experimental post 1972 work. Both films are now available on a double-feature special edition Blu-ray from Blue Underground.

The five Fu Manchu films produced by Harry Alan Towers from 1965 through 1970 are occasionally referenced – and perhaps dismissed - as weak James Bond pastiches, but such description is misleading and unsatisfying. The Fu Manchu films as conceived by Towers and Co. are akin to cinematic comic strips for adults – the two final strips admittedly marketed to a more leering segment of mature audiences. Jess Franco was something of a Johnny-Come-Lately to the series, perhaps a budget-minded choice of director. The first two films (The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) and The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966) were helmed by Australian Don Sharp, the series’ third entry, The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1968) directed by Brit Jeremy Summers. For what would prove to be the final two entries of the franchise, the producers went to the continent to seek out an alternate director.

Jess Franco admitted to being surprised at having been asked to direct the series’ fourth and fifth entries. In many respects the eccentric Spaniard was worthy of Tower’s consideration as he shared the producer’s lifelong enchantment with the comic-strip sensibilities of such popular dime store caliber-novelists as Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace. But while he manages to bring some sense of old world British Empire derring-do to the screen, his two Fu Manchu films - with their attendant misfires and lurid nude sequences – stand apart from the first three films in the series and remain resolutely Franco in construction.

How so? Well, the bevy of beautiful, half-naked women hanging sorrowfully in bondage chains is a continually present and reoccurring Jess Franco fantasy. Christopher Lee’s co-star, Tsai Chin, recalls the distinguished British actor’s discomfort parading in his Fu Manchu wardrobe past a gaggle of chained, half-naked actresses. The epitome of gentlemanly British behavior, Lee was visibly distressed by such staging. In Chin’s estimation, while the cultured and mannered Lee was most determinedly a renaissance man, he was certainly “not a womanizer.”

Chin, the Chinese-born British actress then best known internationally for her small role as agent “Ling” in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, would have had some insight in this matter. She returns in The Blood of Fu Manchu for her fourth outing as Lin Tang, the sadistic, malevolent daughter of the mad villain. As in the series’ previous entries, Chin portrays Tang as completely dispassionate, commanding her minions to torture and humiliate innocents and enemies alike with merciless Oriental fervor.

In an interview with Tsai Chin years on and included here as a bonus feature, the informed actress admits to having had to repeatedly “search her conscience” to justify her participation in the Fu Manchu franchise. She was progressive enough to recognize that the Sax Rohmer novels were unapologetically racist in their construction. Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series, the first novel having been published in 1912, were written as blowback in the decade following the long simmering anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anti-Christian, and decidedly anti-British Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901. But Chin was also keenly aware of racism in the modern film industry; there were, simply, few opportunities for “ethnic” actors to get work of anytime, so she soldiered on with the series despite her misgivings.

In truth, the actress was sadly given very little do. Chin believed, very accurately, that the character of Lin Tang - as written by one “Peter Welbeck” - was completely one dimensional. The actress was born a year following MGM’s own esteemed Boris Karloff/Myrna Loy vehicle, The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). In this pre-code film, the sultry Loy brashly teased Lin Tang as a seductress and nymphomaniac. It’s extremely baffling why – in the swinging sixties and with such nudity and bondage envelope-pushers as Franco and Towers steering the enterprise – Chin’s Lin Tang was so wasted, cast as little more than a remorseless, cruel bitch.

Christopher Lee wouldn’t suffer any moral quandaries as a Caucasian playing an Asian villain with exaggerated epicanthic folds – the responsibility of an actor, after all, is to effectively pretend and make an audience believe that he or she is someone they are not. Regardless, the lanky Lee would admit disappointment with the series as a whole. It was his opinion that, as had Hammer’s popular Dracula series, the Fu Manchu franchise ran out of steam very quickly, that the earliest film had been the finest and that the enterprise should have wrapped immediately following. It’s there, however, that the similarities end. Lee’s exasperation with the producing team at Hammer is well documented, but the actor - very interestingly - seemed to carry little animus for Harry Alan Towers.

BY HANK REINEKE

With a screenplay penned by an otherwise obscure advertising copywriter named Ceri Jones (adapted from an original story by director Gary Sherman), the premise of Death Line is rather simple. Late night travelers on London’s famed underground tubes have been disappearing with alarming regularity from the Russell Square Tube Station. Two young, unmarried collegians, Alex Campbell (David Ladd) and Patricia Wilson (Sharon Gurney), unwittingly get themselves entangled into the mystery when they find an unconscious, well-dressed fop lying comatose on the lower steps of the station. They alert a wary and hesitant policeman to investigate, but the slumped body – whose wallet had earlier identified the body as Sir James Manfred, O.B.E. - is suddenly nowhere to be found.

We soon learn that Manfred (James Cossins) is merely the latest delicacy in the supper plans of a gruesome character billed only as “The Man.” Even putting his cannibalistic appetite aside, “The Man” (Hugh Armstrong) still cuts a pretty morbid figure. Filthy, ragged, and with skin tone that’s both beyond the pale and ravaged with festering sores (think of the iconic and disheveled – but still healthier appearing - figure that graces the cover of Jethro Tull’s seminal Aqualung LP), this mostly mute subterranean has – somewhat reluctantly - become the last surviving offspring of a band of tunnel dwellers.

There’s a back story here, of course. It seems that during the construction of the South London tube in 1892, there was an unfortunate cave-in that entombed a team of construction workers. The company contracted to build that particular section of this nineteenth century subway went immediately into bankruptcy, coldheartedly making no attempt to rescue those (apparently) mixed-sex workers trapped in the dank and rat infested arc-shaped tunnels.

This was unfortunate as some of those abandoned not only managed to survive, but to reproduce and flourish (more or less) by eating the flesh of their less fortunate comrades. It’s never adequately explained why in the eighty years between the tunnel collapse of 1892 and the film’s current date of 1972, the youngest and last surviving of the mining offspring has lost all of their language skills aside from a grunting, guttural mimic of the rail line’s oft-repeated conductor’s phrase “Mind the Doors.” Likewise, it’s never explained why – while searching out potential future meals on the underground platforms - the “trapped” tunnelers simply didn’t walk up the stairwells and out into the sunshine. Of course, if they had, there would be no drama. Certainly romancing University students Campbell and Wilson wouldn’t have been begrudgingly dragged into the on-going police investigation – much in the manner of Fred and Daphne from the old Scooby Doo cartoon series. To some degree it hardly matters. They’re window dressing. British actor Donald Pleasence is the true star of this vehicle, bringing more than a dollop of churlish intensity to his blue collar character, Inspector Calhoun. Pleasence is a decidedly old-school policeman, a cantankerous, prudish sort who continually badgers his secretary for cups of tea. He also relishes belittling and sneering at young Campbell and his generation’s immoral lifestyles, live-in girlfriends, and hippie mindset. He’s particularly disdainful of privileged middle-class kids dabbling in the political protest movements of the day.

To be fair, Calhoun shows little regard for the more well-heeled citizens of Britain either, tossing more than a few cynical barbs at the newly deceased snob James Manfred, O.B.E. He also possesses an almost pathological antipathy toward M.I.5. He views the organization not as an ally but more as a smug, self-important competitor in his street level fight against crime.

Though horror film icon Christopher Lee gets a feature billing in Death Line, his role is relatively small and the single scene he does appear in does little to move the narrative forward. Producer Paul Maslansky had previously worked with Lee on a number of films (including the very atmospheric and spooky black and white chiller Castle of the Living Dead). It was through Maslansky that Lee was cast as Pleasence’s smirking antagonist, the condescending and derby-topped Stratton-Villiers of M.I.5.

Though the two actors would only share a single scene together – oddly, the pair would only share the briefest of moments seen together on the big screen – Maslansky recalled Lee gladly accepting the small role if only to work with Pleasence, an actor he much admired. The young American actor, David Ladd, was also duly impressed by Pleasence, describing him as the consummate “actor’s actor.” He found working alongside him somewhat “intimidating.” Ladd is the younger brother of Oscar-winning producer Alan Ladd, Jr., and was certainly no leading man in Britain. He had previously worked mostly in the U.S. as a child actor. Though Ladd’s role of Alex Campbell was originally purposed for a British actor, the producers thought having an American in the part might make the film an easier sell in the States.

BY TIM GREAVES

Dario Argento – whose directorial career has now spanned almost 50 years, positioning him as a genuine icon of terror cinema – is probably best associated with his clutch of intoxicatingly imaginative chillers, each of them ornamented with brutal (and increasingly graphic) murder scenarios, stylishly lurid lighting schemes and wildly inventive camerawork.

Throughout the second half of the 1960s Argento had found a degree of success in writing stories and screenplays for movies; he most famously worked alongside Sergio Leone for 1968's Once Upon a Time in the West. But it was taught 1970 thriller The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (o.t. L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo) that marked his debut in the director’s chair and set him on the path to becoming the Godfather of the giallo.

Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante), an American writer currently residing in Rome, walks past a brightly lit art gallery late one night and sees inside a shadowy figure, clad in black, stabbing a woman. Attempting to intervene, Dalmas manages to get himself trapped in the entrance between two sets of locked sliding doors, unable to prevent the assailant from fleeing and helpless to assist the woman left bleeding to death on the floor. Fortunately, aid arrives and the woman – Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi), wife of the gallery's owner – survives. It transpires that Monica was the almost-victim in a series of attacks that have left several beautiful women dead. Dalmas becomes obsessed with the case, replaying what he saw over and over in his head, convinced that he's missing a vital clue to solving the mystery. But in getting involved he inadvertently sets himself up as a target for the killer.

Argento not only directed but also wrote The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (basing it thematically on a 1949 pulp novel, “The Screaming Mimi”, by Frederic Brown). He would go on to make better movies but for a debut feature this really is an exemplary piece of film-making, bearing many of the embryonic flourishes – clearly influenced by the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Mario Bava – that would later become his trademark; specifically the faceless, black-gloved killer whose nefarious activities are often shot POV and, on a more cerebral level, the misperception of a witnessed moment, with characters struggling to retrieve a clue buried in their subconscious, the significance of which failed to register upon them when initially glimpsed. These recurrent themes would play out to varying degrees of success in many of Argento's later films, most significantly Four Flies on Grey Velvet (o.t. 4 mosche di velluto grigio, 1971), Cat o'Nine Tails (o.t. Il gatto a nove code, 1971), Deep Red (o.t. Profondo rosso, 1975, considered by many to be the greatest of all the Italian gialli), Tenebrae (o.t. Tenebre, 1982), Phenomena (1985), Opera (1987), Trauma (1993), The Stendhal Syndrome (o.t. La sindrome di Stendhal, 1996), Sleepless (o.t. Non ho sonno, 2001), The Card Player (o.t. Il cartaio, 2004), Do You Like Hitchcock? (o.t. Ti piace Hitchcock, 2005) and Giallo (2009).

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage itself is a masterpiece of sustained suspense. The escalating tension during a scene in which the hero's girlfriend (Suzy Kendall) is menaced by the killer – who uses a large kitchen knife to methodically chip away at the lock on her apartment door – is as perfect an example as one could wish for as to why Argento is often referenced as the Italian Hitchcock. The violence – notably an out-of-shot vaginal stabbing – was transgressive for its day, and in spite of the fact that far more shocking atrocities have been unflinchingly splashed across the screen in the decades since, several moments in Argento's fledgling offering still pack quite a visceral punch. 

By Hank Reineke

The Vampire Bat (1933) was a staple of TV late-night movie programming well into the 1980s. Too often the running time of this maltreated film was irreverently trimmed or stretched to accommodate commercial breaks or better fit into a predetermined time slot. With black-and-white films almost completely banished from the schedules of local television affiliates by 1987, TV Guide disrespectfully dismissed The Vampire Bat as a “Dated, slow-motion chiller.” That’s an unfair appraisal. But with the MTV generation in the ascendant and Fangoria gleefully splashing the lurid and blood-red exploits of such slice-and-dice horror icons as Michael Meyers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger on its covers, it’s somewhat understandable why the other-worldly atmospherics of The Vampire Bat were perceived as little more than a celluloid curio – an antiquated footnote in the annals of classic horror.

The Vampire Bat is hardly original. The film was, no doubt, conceived as an exploitative hybrid of Universal’s Dracula and Frankenstein twin blockbusters of 1931. (Though not a Universal production, several scenes of The Vampire Bat were purportedly shot on that studio’s back lot). Though this Pre-Code film starts as a mostly routine mystery sprinkled with doses of suggested vampirism, there’s also a mad doctor who secretly labors in mad devotion to “lift the veil” separating God from man. The doctor has artificially created living, pulsating tissue requiring human blood for sustenance. Sadly, low rent Majestic Pictures wasn’t able to engage the services of Universal’s Kenneth Strickfadden. So the mad doctor’s bare-bones laboratory features none of the splendid electrical gimmickry or flashing circuits that monster kids love so well.

Though director Frank R. Strayer might not have achieved auteur status, he was no mere craftsman. He had been involved (most often in a directorial capacity) in well over one hundred film projects dating back to the silent era. His greatest notoriety was likely being the principal helmsman of the wildly popular Blondie series for Columbia in the late 1930s/early 1940s. Though no gloomy visionary as Universal’s James Whale, Strayer could nonetheless effectively conjure similarly eerie, ethereal atmospheres to the low-budget mystery and horror film productions he was assigned. The scenario and screenplay for The Vampire Bat was scribed by Edward T. Lowe. Lowe too was a true pioneer of the Hollywood film industry. He had also worked in the silents, hanging on long enough to contribute scripts to such popular mystery franchises of the 1940s as the Bulldog Drummond, Charlie Chan, and Sherlock Holmes series.

For a modestly-budgeted production without major studio backing, it must be said the cast of The Vampire Bat is exceptional. For all intent and purposes, this is essentially an “actor’s film,” as Strayer – curiously - offers little on-screen moments of murderous mayhem. Our hero is the affable Melvyn Douglas, a future two-time Academy winner whose career would endure for more than a half-century. In Ninotchka (1939), Douglas would famously sway screen siren Greta Garbo from the schemes of such Soviet puppet masters as Bela Lugosi. Leading lady Fay Wray, who would earn her bona fides as the big screen’s preeminent “Scream Queen” of the 1930s with a five film run in 1932-1933 (Doctor X, The Most Dangerous Game, The Vampire Bat, Mystery of the Wax Museum and, of course, King Kong), finds herself again the target of a mad doctor’s evil machinations. Sadly, the comely actress isn’t given much to do in The Vampire Bat except have a teasing flirtation with the dashing Douglas and await her inevitable final reel rescue from the mad fiend.

BY FRED BLOSSER

Angela Gray (Emma Watson), a young woman living with her father and grandmother in rural Minnesota, accuses her father of sexually molesting her.  The father, John (David Dencik), is brought in by the police for questioning. A reformed alcoholic and widower, John claims to have no memory of abusing his daughter, but he is reluctant to deny the accusation because, he says confusedly, “It must be true. Angela would never lie.” The department brings in psychologist Dr. Kenneth Raines (David Thewlis) to consult on the case, and Raines suggests that he hypnotize John to see if he can unlock the repressed memory. Under hypnotic regression, John “remembers” being in Angela’s bedroom, witnessing a sexual assault on his daughter, and photographing it, but he says the rapist was actually one of the department’s own officers and a family acquaintance, George Nesbitt (Aaron Ashmore). The senior investigator assigned to the case, Det. Bruce Kenner (Ethan Hawke), is quick to believe the accusations. Convincing his commanding officer to detain both Gray and Nesbitt, he goes full tilt to find evidence.

Supported by Reverend Beaumont (Lothaire Bluteau), the pastor of the fundamentalist church that she and her family attended, Angela begins to level increasingly bizarre charges. She alleges that her grandmother Rose (Dale Dickey) was also involved in the abuse as a member of a robed, hooded satanic cult that holds secret orgies and sacrifices infants. “They’re everywhere,” she tells Kenner, and suggests that the car crash that killed her mother four years before was no accident. As evidence of her story, she fearfully shows the detective an inverted cross branded on her stomach. “Now they’ll kill you too,” she warns. For Kenner, her charges are given additional weight by a barrage of TV media reports about a covert nationwide network of Satan worshippers.

Filmed in Canada but supposedly situated in a grim, gray American Midwest locale that looks like a backdrop from one of H.P. Lovecraft’s gothic horror stories, writer-director Alejandro Amenábar’s “Regression” (2015) is presented as a mystery story with horror overtones: Is Angela telling the truth? Where are the photographs that would substantiate her story and John’s hypnotically “retrieved” memory? If devil-worshippers lurk among the everyday townspeople of Hoyer, Minn., who are they?

Viewers under 30 may be just as confounded as Hawke’s driven, ultra-caffeinated investigator. Others who are old enough to have watched tabloid TV in the mid-1980s will catch on faster, especially since Amenábar tips his hand at the outset by informing us that the story takes place in 1990. During the 1980s, in a series of sleazy TV shows presented as fact, Geraldo Rivera, Sally Jessy Raphael, and others fostered the scary notion that devil worshippers formed an incestuous, murderous underground movement in many American towns and cities. The specious stories were founded on lurid “memoirs” of people who claimed to be the victims of satanists, cases of alleged “ritual” child abuse prosecuted by overzealous authorities on the basis of shoddy investigative techniques (notably, hypnotic regression), the rantings of deluded or unscrupulous TV preachers, and leftover memories of the 1969 Manson murders. If they weren’t true believers already, many middle-class viewers were convinced when they tuned in to “The Devil Worshippers,” a segment of ABC’s prime-time “20/20” show in May 1985, and heard host Hugh Downs proclaim: “There’s no question that something is going on out there.” If the normally unflappable Hugh Downs was worried, they should be too. Besides, tens of thousands of parents were already fretting that their kids were being seduced to the Dark Side by satanic symbolism in Black Sabbath rock videos.

The panic eventually subsided in the early 1990s as the salacious stories were discredited and clearer thinking finally prevailed. In the meantime, the tabloid hacks had lost interest and moved on to other worthy endeavors, like cracking Al Capone’s money vault. But the damage had already been done to the careers and reputations of many innocent people who had been slandered as rapists and degenerates.

Although Amenábar’s movie is handsomely (if gloomily) mounted and well-acted, there isn’t much of a mystery to Angela’s story if you remember those relatively recent historical events. Consequently, by the time Kenner figures out that he’s being gamed by a mentally disturbed young woman, TV hype, and his own overheated imagination, you’ve already there waiting for him to catch up. I thought that Amenábar would put a twist in the story that Angela’s coven of backwoods satanists actually existed, and Det. Kenner would wind up like the unfortunate characters in John Moxey’s “City of the Dead” (1960), José Ramón Larraz’s “Black Candles” (1982), and of course “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968). But no, Kenner confronts Angela and the film ends with a written epilogue about the real-life ‘80s satanist scare. No ambiguous final shot of bystanders secretly wearing inverted crosses and giving Kenner sinister glances after he walks away. Still, Amenábar reminds us that it doesn’t take much to prey on people’s fears and phobias. We may not worry today whether Joe and Ethel next door have a satanic altar in their basement, but that’s only because 24/7 cable shows, network news, and internet gossip have given us more immediate things to fear and revile. Never mind that most are as spurious as Hugh Downs’ devil worshippers.

The 2016 Anchor Bay DVD of “Regression”  is crisp and sharp.  Hawke, Watson, and Amenábar discuss the film in four short features added as supplements.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

BY HANK REINEKE

Though I’m generally not wishy-washy in my assessment of… well, practically anything, I admit to holding a decidedly middle-ground opinion on the work of Jesus “Jess” Franco.  There are some films by this controversial Spanish director that inspire me to become more intimate with his work.  Conversely, there are others that actually discourage me from seeking out additional titles. His films, particularly those from 1972-1973 following, have proven to be polarizing to cineastes. Though he attracted notice in the early 1960s with such more or less traditionally-mannered horror films as The Awful Dr. Orloff and The Diabolical Dr. Z (both shot in atmospheric black and white and both quite entertaining), Franco was a restless, creative soul eager to push the envelope.

By the mid-70s Franco had attained a reputation as a competent and bankable director of exploitation features. Even his detractors – and there are many – cannot argue that the director had an ability to bring a film to market both quickly and under-budget. Beginning in the early-1970s, he would controversially begin to introduce elements of soft-core pornography within the framework of otherwise more conventional horror or historical-period films. Some find these films artful and intriguing; others see them as sadistic, lurid celebrations of sexual violence. These controversial films would often be seen as pandering to an audience that four-time Franco collaborator Christopher Lee would later deride as the “raincoat crowd.” Whether you found Franco’s films as artful unabashed celebrations of the female form or as unrelentingly sordid cinema that’s unapologetically misogynistic in construction… Well, this would all depend on your own moral compass.

Blue Underground has just released two of Franco’s earliest, most notorious – and, to be fair, occasionally artful – films on Blu-ray. Both films originate from the era that historians perceive as the controversial director’s transitional period: Eugenie… the story of her journey into perversion (1970) and Justine (1969). Both films were inspired by the works of the notorious eighteenth century French novelist the Marquis de Sade, an author for whom Franco clearly shares an affinity.

Jesus Franco’s Eugenie… the story of her journey into perversion (1970) is tangentially based on de Sade’s notorious 1795 novel La philosophie dans le boudoir (“Philosophy in the Bedroom”). Franco describes de Sade as “an extraordinary writer” in one supplement, and offers Eugenie as “the story of a poor girl who drowns in a hemorrage of sin in the discovery of love.” If this is truly Franco’s perception, his interpretation is a bit at odds with de Sade’s own conception of the title character. In de Sade’s novel, Eugenie is a young girl already unredeemingly infused with decadent and depraved impulses. In Franco’s film, the young girl is portrayed as a victimized ingénue, an innocent misued and brutalized by elders and authority figures for their own lurid pleasures. In de Sade’s novel Eugenie is a willing participant in acts of near-unspeakable debauchery. In his own version of the wicked novel, Franco almost entirely removes this component from the scenario, portraying the young girl as an unfortunate hostage to predators who manipulate her through a combination of mind control and drugs.

Though his name is offered on publicity materials as one of the film’s two stars (the other being the gorgeous Swedish actress Marie Liljedahl), Christopher Lee recalls Eugenie as the only motion picture in his career that he was moved to ask his name being struck from advertising. The distinguished British actor has long told a tale that, a mere six months following his work on the film, a friend tipped him off that the final cut of Eugenie was not playing in the usual cinemas in and around London.  Quickly following up on his friend’s observation, Lee was reportedly horrified upon discovery the film had been relegated to the sordid “blue” cinemas of Compton Street in the city’s Soho district. He was especially troubled by a scene where a completely nude woman, surrounded by a gaggle of Sadists, was strapped to a table in the background of one of his shots. In the early 1980s, Lee dismissively told Robert W. Pohle Jr. and Douglas C. Hart, authors of The Films of Christopher Lee (Scarecrow Press, 1983), “that I was entirely ignorant of what was going to take place behind my back after I had finished the comparatively innocuous scenes I appeared in.”

In the eighteen-minute and informative supplement Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco (also included on this Blue Underground release) film historian Stephen Thrower suggests that Lee might have been somewhat disingenuous with his claim of being unaware of the debauch scene playing out behind him.  As Lee was a self-acknowledged worldly and literate man of the arts, the author suggests that it would be highly unlikely that the actor would have not been at least partly familiar with the writings of de Sade. Surely this cultured English gentleman would be well aware of what sort of film this was to be?  Having suggested this, Thrower nonetheless admits willingness to accept Lee’s victim-hood at face value; he acknowledges neither Franco nor producer Harry Alan Towers were the type to suffer moral ambiguities in the countenance of such deception.

In any event, and regardless of his excised headline billing, Lee is hardly a main player in the production. The actor recalls the “bits and pieces” in which he was involved were shot on a Barcelona sound-stage in all of two days. In his single primary scene, the actor was even made to supply his own wardrobe: a red velvet smoking jacket he had appropriated following the shooting of the East German-French-Italian co-production Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962). What is certain is that Lee would not work with the director again. Though belated release dates on the continent and in the U.S. might suggest otherwise, Lee collaborated on four films with Jesus Franco from late 1968 through mid-1969. Along with Eugenie, there were The Castle of Fu Manchu (1970), The Bloody Judge (1970), and Count Dracula (1972).

If Lee harbored any lasting hard feelings for Franco’s perceived betrayal of his trust, it apparently wasn’t long-lasting.  In one supplement Lee magnanimously describes the Spaniard as “a much better director than he’s given credit for.” He suggests the filmmaker was handicapped not by any lack of talent in his craft, but by tight schedules (most of Franco’s films were given three to four weeks of photography at a maximum) and shoestring budgets. If this is Lee’s genuine appraisal of Franco’s talents, it’s not one shared by the director himself. The filmmaker is surprisingly dismissive of his own work, only acknowledging with dispassion, “of all my films [Eugenie is] the one I hate the least.”

Though not a neat break from his past oeuvre, historians of continental film are of the mind that Eugenie was more-or-less a transitional movie for Franco, a pivotal catalyst for the director’s turn from more traditional movie-making forms to a more seamy and steamy catalog of cult-films. In the final analysis, Eugenie was a difficult film to market in 1970 as it had a cinematic foothold in two disparate worlds. U.S. distributor, Jerry Gross, didn’t even want the final product as he found the film too artsy and tame and wanted to see more flesh on-screen. Franco would defend the finished film as “erotic but not pornographic.” Depending on where one draws the line between art and pornography, I suppose this is a somewhat truthful self-assessment on Franco’s part. It took no fewer than three attempts to market the film in Germany due to censorship issues, and in the U.K. there was no general release.

Though no less exploitative than Eugenie, Franco’s Justine is actually a visually softer and more lavish production. It’s a moody costume-drama set in the time of de Sade’s world, a time replete with castles, and lush gardens, and baroque music. The film is also mounted in a more traditional format, the many sordid indignities suffered by the title character recounted in an unrelenting episodic style. Like Eugenie, Justine (the beautiful Romina Power, the eighteen-year old daughter of screen-legend Tyrone Power) is degraded in equal measure by religious figures, criminals, noblemen, and low caste boarding house tenants. Also as in Eugenie, the young girl is savaged with moral disregrad by both predatory men and women. The film voyeuristically drifts from episode to episode as Justine endures a series of humiliations. The film is unrelentingly grim, and the filmmaker’s almost casual depictions of sexual violence rarely pauses a moment so one can catch a breath.

By Hank Reineke

There are, at a minimum, three important lessons gleaned from the outrageous 1970 sci-fi thriller The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. The first and most obvious lesson is that the adage “two heads are better than one” is simply not necessarily true. The second is that mad scientists, the most bitter and misunderstood members of the medical profession, tend to a more liberal interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath they’re sworn to. The last and perhaps most important lesson: if you and your best gal find yourself necking in an automobile on a remote lover’s lane, it might be best to spoon under a good-old fashioned hardtop. Convertibles are too easily shredded by two-headed maniacs.

Let’s be frank. Anthony M. Lanza’s The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant is one weird movie. It’s not without merit, but it’s surely a film that invites parody and guffaws over a Coke and tub of hot popcorn. This, I imagine, is the reason Kino Lorber has offered the choice of a genuine “RiffTrax” audio commentary as an optional supplement. In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t listen through the mocking supplement in total. Truth be told, while I enjoy a cheap laugh or a well chosen barb as much as anyone, I’ve never been a big fan of the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” or “RiffTrax” phenomenon. It’s not that I don’t find such commentaries humorous or even, on occasion, insightful… at least when enjoyed in the privacy of one’s own home. But one can’t ignore that such burlesque has inspired several generations of idiots to ruin public theatrical screenings with lame attempts at imitation.

Though a genuine 1970s drive-in theater-exploitation-horror movie in nearly every regard, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant differs from most as it offers not a single spooky nighttime scene. This might be the only horror film that I know of that takes place entirely in broad daylight. Co-screenwriter James Gordon White conceived the film “as a tongue-in-cheek take off on Frankenstein,” but I suppose that can be said of practically any horror/sci-fi film featuring a body on an operating gurney. In some ways the film, reportedly shot on a budget of $350,000 and a money-spinner for A.I.P. within six months of release, is an oddity even among that studio’s deep-catalog of low-budget horrors. Writer White sees the film as a classic “B” production, while star-player Bruce Dern has infamously dismissed it as a “Z” picture.

It must be said that nearly everything about the film is schizophrenic, and this extends to the movie’s soundtrack. There’s an early dash of background instrumentation that offers a Seventies ghetto-soul vibe. But this then contemporary musical element seems somewhat out of place when juxtaposed against the film’s entirely tranquil Californian countryside setting. Odder still is the film’s main title song, “Incredible,” a pleasant but out-of-sync bossa nova vocal number sung by the otherwise obscure singer Bobbie Boyle. Both interludes start the film off on a weird, discordant note.

Screenwriter White (The Glory Stompers. The Mini-Skirt Mob) admits that while writing the non-union scenario for American-International, he had visualized horror-film maestro Vincent Price in the role of the crazed Dr. Roger Girard: the part, for whatever reason, went to a young, lithe Bruce Dern instead. A great actor by any standard, Dern turns in an uncharacteristically aloof and workmanlike performance in The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant. In his memoir Things I’ve Said but Probably Shouldn’t Have, Dern admits he wasn’t at all thrilled about the role, but the offer of $3,500 for ten days work was enough for him and his fiancé to get married on so he signed up. Regardless of the star’s dubious commitment to the project, director Anthony M. Lanza keeps the film moving along at a good clip, and it must be said the movie suffers no moments of padding.

The film certainly wastes no time in getting one involved. We’re instantly transported to a suburban home where a ghastly act of violence is in progress. With several bloodied bodies littering the floor, a crazy-eyed psychopath – one with an unfortunate propensity for sexual violence - is in the process of lasciviously terrifying a young girl. Thankfully, she’s saved from a lurid fate at the last minute when the police arrive and subdue the madman. Though a prudent judge commits the murderous rapist, Manuel Cass, (played with wild, eye-rolling fervor by Albert Cole) to a mental institution “until sanity is restored,” there’s little chance of that happening anytime soon. It’s not long after his confinement that Cass murders an attendant and drives off into the countryside in a sporty 1961 Dodge Comet.

The scene shifts to a seemingly more tranquil environment. Though wife Linda is adamant that her husband is a “fine surgeon” who could very well enjoy a thriving “marvelous practice” if only he… well, put his head to it, Dr. Roger Girard (Bruce Dern) seems pretty determined to remain less than respectable. Dr. Girard is a man obsessed: he’s single-minded in his determination to transplant a second head on a human subject. He’s also pretty confident in his ability to accomplish such a task. He’s already succeeded in this endeavor - as any number of twin-headed caged animals and serpents kept in his home laboratory can attest. For what purpose, you might ask? Well, the doctor’s preoccupation in this matter is never adequately explained. He’s obviously self-interested in creating an unassailable reputation as one of the scientific greats, but as for the moral complexities of his twin-head experimentations… well, “future generations” can sort it all out. The doctor’s suspicious, cagey elder mentor-assistant Max (Berry Kroeger) mutters something early on about his protégé being the only one who can restore his damaged hands “and the body needed to go with them,” so there’s some surgical motive there as well. Dr. Girard, at least at first, doesn’t come off quite as crazy as Max, but he too is something of a nut case, quick to impart bitter, disparaging missives on the small-minded dullards he once worked beside at the local hospital.

Not counting the paying audience, the true victims of The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant are Pat Priest’s beleaguered Linda Girard and John Bloom’s Danny. As the not-so-good doctor’s luscious wife, any on-screen appearance of Priest, the lovely and curvaceous former Marilyn Munster, is welcomed. Sadly, without the kindly Uncle Herman or Grandpa to watch over and afford her a measure of familial protection, Priest’s lonely afternoon of poolside sun-bathing is interrupted when she’s spied upon, kidnapped and near-sexually assaulted by the psychopathic escapee. Her preoccupied husband didn’t hear her screams as he was, as usual, puttering away with bad intent in his hacienda-home laboratory. As awful as Cass manhandles Priest during the kidnapping, it must be said that the treatment she receives from her own husband is barely better. In the course of the film Dr. Girard (all in the interest of scientific secrecy, of course) locks his wife in his laboratory, gags her mouth, ties her to a bed, performs a needle injection against her consent, feeds her tranquilizers, and imprisons her inside a large steel cage… and this is not to mention the not inconsequential emotional abuse she’s made to endure. But the doctor promises his wife a nice vacation (“anywhere you want”) after he finishes up his experiments, so all is good.

BY FRED BLOSSER

French gangster movies about mobs, molls, and ingenious but ill-fated heists enjoyed a big vogue in Europe in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially after the success of Jules Dassin’s stylish “Du Rififi chez Les Hommes” in 1955.  Opening here a year later in an edited, subtitled print as “Rififi,” Dassin’s picture drew a small but appreciative audience of critics and foreign-film fans, and became a perennial favorite in American art houses, repertory theaters, and film schools.    

This was a rare example of a “policier,” as French audiences called them, gaining any critical and commercial notice on these shores even remotely comparable to their popularity abroad.  Although the genre owed a clear debt to classic American crime films, it fell victim here, like nearly every other cinema import from abroad, to a homegrown bias against dubbed or subtitled foreign films in that more insular era of American popular culture. The vast demographic of moviegoers in small-town America tended to be wary of movies that they had to read as well as watch, or those in which stilted dialogue came out of unfamiliar actors’ mouths in interchangeable voices that didn’t match the movements of their lips. If you were a crime-movie enthusiast, you already had plenty of domestic product to choose from, anyway, thanks to a wave of violent, “fact-based” programmers like “The Bonnie Parker Story” (1958) and “Al Capone” (1959) that U.S. studios released in the wake of high ratings for TV’s “The Untouchables.”

The policiers that crossed the Atlantic, if they made it at all, were likely to be relegated to marginal, second-run theaters, alongside nudies and exploitation pictures. Newspaper ads and posters played up the sexier, grittier aspects of the films as lurid entertainment “for adults only.” For example, the blurbs on the posters for “Doulos, the Finger Man,” a subtitled 1964 edit of Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Le Doulos” (1963), proclaimed: “Raw, Savage, Shocking” -- “So ruthless, untamed women would do anything for him . . . and did!”  In these days of graphic internet porn, what may have been “shocking” 50 years ago now looks quaintly tame. Actual nude scenes in the original European prints, which were modest to begin with by today’s standards, were trimmed out of the American versions in deference to anti-obscenity laws. The sensual content that remained would hardly cause a stir in today’s climate, but it was provocative for its era, when married couples on TV had to be shown sleeping in modest PJs in twin beds, if they were shown in the bedroom at all.

The advertising strategy of implied sex turned a quick buck for distributors who had little chance of seeing the policiers accepted by mainstream ticket-buyers. However, the films’ reputation suffered in the larger court of public opinion. Middlebrow critics snubbed them as sordid trash, almost beneath their notice. The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther, for example, dismissed the Melville film as “talkative and tiresome,” and seemed personally offended by the “mean and disagreeable” title character portrayed by Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Things have changed greatly since then. Younger generations of critics, less bothered by disagreeable characters than Crowther was, have revisited the policiers and found them worthy of serious discussion. Thanks to DVD, Blu-ray, streaming video, and cable movie networks, a wider audience in middle America has a chance to see the films in their original form, and they’re more likely to be receptive to foreign productions than their grandparents in the Ike era. Several policiers, including “Le Doulos” and nearly all of Melville’s other pictures, are available in restored DVD and Blu-ray editions with classy packaging. However, other policiers of arguably equal merit remain missing in action on U.S. home video, even on the collector’s market, notably Alex Joffé’s 1959 production, “Du Rififi Chez Les Femmes” (1959).

As the title suggests, Joffé’s film shares a bloodline with Jules Dassin’s better known classic. Both were based on novels by French crime writer Auguste Le Breton, who claimed that “rififi” was criminal slang that he had picked up from real underworld acquaintances in the hangouts of Montmartre and Pigalle, meaning something like “melee” or “rumble.” Le Breton co-authored the script for the Joffé movie.

Some critics have questioned whether Le Breton was telling the truth about his gangland connections, and suspect that he coined the term “rififi” himself. Dassin said he was disturbed by racist implications in the word, since Le Breton asserted that it referred to the violent characteristics of Parisian gangs made up of North African immigrants from the Rif area of Morocco. Accordingly, in the film version of “Du Rififi chez Les Hommes,” Dassin downplayed the ethnicity of his characters. Sort of a Mickey Spillane of France, Le Breton became a popular celebrity after the success of “Du Rififi chez Les Hommes” and made a lot of money writing about hoods and tough guys. Many of his novels were branded with “rififi” in their titles, but aside from certain shared themes and plot elements, the books were unrelated to each other.

In “Du Rififi Chez Les Femmes” (in my rough English translation, “The Girls Mix It Up”), underworld entrepreneur Vicky de Berlin (Nadja Tiller) owns a popular floating nightclub, the “Ration K,” on the Senne River in Brussels. Characteristically for Le Breton’s criminal figures, Vicky’s surname isn’t necessarily her real family name, just a nickname referring to the city where she came from. (In “Du Rififi chez Les Hommes,” the ringleader of the story’s audacious jewel robbery, played by Jean Servais in the movie, was Tony Le Stéphanois: “Stéphanois” being a colloquialism for someone from the French town of Saint Etienne.) Vicky’s troubled past as a displaced Berliner is suggested by a photograph of her father on the desk in her private office, a German officer wearing the Iron Cross. The name of her club implies that she might have made her first money dealing surplus or stolen U.S. Army rations on the black market after World War II.

BY TIM GREAVES

Not to be mistaken for the cannibal monstrosity from Umberto Lenzi with which it shares its title, Eaten Alive is a 1976 tale of terror set in the Louisiana swamps and was directed by Tobe Hooper in the wake of his phenomenal success with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre two years earlier. From the outset Eaten Alive shares its predecessor's mien of ill ease (though not to such stomach-tightening effect), but little of its wicked humour. Indeed it's an all-round far crueller film and positively bubbles over with bloodshed.

Producer Mardi Rustam – who also wrote the story with colleague Alvin L Fast, TCSM's Kim Henkel then adapting it for the screen – was aiming to ride the tidal wave of Jaws' success; what the results lacked in quality (certainly if Rustam felt truly inspired by Spielberg’s film) was voraciously compensated for with lashings of cheap thrills and squalid chills.

The story kicks off with a very fresh-faced Robert Englund attempting to abuse 'the new girl' in a grimy brothel. Immediately deciding that prostitution isn't for her, the young lass packs her bags and sets off on foot into the night. But it's very much a case of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ when she stumbles across the remote Starlight Hotel and its creepy proprietor Judd (Neville Brand); after attempting to assault her, he prongs her to death on the tines of a pitchfork and feeds her corpse to the huge crocodile he keeps in an enclosure in the back yard. It’s a brutal and extremely graphic sequence but one via which Hooper adeptly alerts the audience that he's upped the ante to deliver something rather more visceral then he did with TCSM (which for all its notoriety is a largely bloodless affair, functioning primarily on a psychological level). The rest of the movie’s runtime pivots on Judd serving up hotel guests as crocodile chow for no discernible reason beyond the fact he's mad as...well, as a box of baby crocs.

Given the unbridled success of Hooper's earlier film, it's no surprise that Eaten Alive is often given short shrift and indeed it is inferior, mainly due to sluggish pacing and the fact it was shot in its entirety on a soundstage; although the hotel exteriors –wreathed in swirling mist and bathed in a quease-inducing red glow – have an appealingly stylised look, it's also painfully obvious one is looking at a studio-bound set, replete with the tell-tale hollow sound resulting when interiors feebly posture as exteriors. However, if you can look past this handicap, and claustrophobic dread coupled with sleaze by the bucketful float your boat, then there's plenty on offer here to keep you entertained.

The cast alone is worth tuning in for. Complementing Brand's frenetic turn as the maniac hotel manager there are fun appearances from legends Mel Ferrer (whose career had certainly seen better days) and Addams Family icon Carolyn Jones (almost unrecognisable as the decrepit Madam of a brothel). Also on hand are Stuart Whitman as a local sheriff oblivious to the carnage being perpetrated on his patch and TCSM's leading lady Marilyn Burns, who fortuitously discards her frightful wig early on but still ends up bound and gagged by our resident psychopath... the poor girl didn't have a lot of luck in Hooper's films, did she? There's also a bizarre turn from William Finley as a disgustingly sweaty guest with a penchant for barking like a dog, giving Brand strong competition in the most deranged character stakes.

Alternatively lurking under titles such as Horror Hotel, Starlight Slaughter and Legend of the Bayou, when Eaten Alive was issued in the UK on VHS in the early 80s under the moniker Death Trap it immediately drew unfortunate attention that earned it a place among the infamous 'video nasties' and it was withdrawn from circulation. Previous DVD releases have reportedly been pretty much substandard across the board (although I haven't seen any of them to be able to comment fairly). But one thing's for sure: Arrow's new uncut Blu-ray/DVD combination package is anything but substandard, in fact it's absolutely terrific, doing Robert Caramico's stylish cinematography more fitting a service than one could have ever imagined possible. 

As if such a superior, uncut presentation of the film alone doesn't make this one a worthwhile purchase, Arrow has bundled in an impressive collection of sweeteners. There are new interviews with Tobe Hooper (who also appears in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it introduction tagged onto the start of the movie), supporting actress Janus Blythe and make-up artist Craig Reardon, as well as older ones with Hooper, Robert Englund and Marilyn Burns. Mardi Rustam provides an informative commentary and there's also a 20-something minute featurette that delves into the life of the Texas bar owner upon who the film is loosely based, as well as a healthy selection of trailers, radio and TV spots, plus a gallery of poster art and lurid lobby cards. A final gem appears in the form of a gallery of original 'comment cards', collected from attendees at a preview screening of the film back in 1976, with the incentive for filling them out being a reward for the best 'new title' suggestion. Most of the remarks are pretty uncharitable, with an amusing standout being the one on which the viewer sarcastically requests to be informed of any subsequent title change so that he/she doesn't inadvertently go to see it again!

By Todd Garbarini

Michele Soavi’s Stage Fright (1987) is one of the most entertaining Italian giallo films ever made that is not directed by Dario Argento. This stunning directorial debut by the man who was frequently Mr. Argento's second unit director on previous films only gets better with age and easily lends itself to repeat viewings despite being somewhat marred by a disappointing ending. The film is beautifully lit and photographed and is a slasher film that one can call truly lurid in its execution, but at times it is also very funny. It boasts a premise that is formulaic to be sure, but its very simplicity works in its favor. Plus, the idea of being trapped inside a building with no possible way out is one that anyone can find frightening. Stage Fright calls to mind Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1986) which follows a similar plot (folks who band together to ward off an intruder and cannot find an exit) and the mammoth Metropol Theatre. In fact, Mr. Soavi played the metal-faced punk in Demons who handed out the invitations. He’s also the young cop in the police car outside the theater in Stage Fright, redubbed dialog and all. The film has the usual charms one has come to expect of the Italian horror cinema of years gone by: quirky character banter, quotable lines, off-the-wall camera moves, and a phenomenal musical score, here done by Simon Boswell and Stefano Mainetti.

Filmed in April and May of 1986 right after Russia’s Chernobyl nuclear disaster (one of the characters in the film even writes out a check dated April 26, 1986 – the very day of the Reactor 4 meltdown), Stage Fright’s opening credits play over some strange sound effects, slow footsteps, a door opening, someone forcing a mop into water, a cat meowing and screeching, etc. The film then opens on a shot of Lucifer, the stage manager’s black cat who happens to be running through a stage play that is in rehearsal. His appearance cannot go unnoticed. Before the dawn arrives, more bad luck than one can shake a stick at will befall the entire cast of this production. Lucifer seems to be the harbinger of bad luck for the entire group. David Brandon, the photographer in Photo of Gioia (1987), stars as Peter Collins, the director of this theater troupe of amateurs rehearsing for the play that is opening much sooner than he lets on. Described by one of the young women as an intellectual musical, “The Night Owl” is the story about a murdered prostitute who comes back from the dead and rapes her own killer. Nice, huh? Peter tries to get his cast together and in synch with the music but they’re all over the place. Unbeknownst to him and the others, Alicia the leading lady (Barbara Cupisti) and Betty the wardrobe mistress (Ulrike Schwerk) sneak out in the hopes of finding treatment for Alicia’s twisted ankle. Naturally, they go to a mental institution because psychiatrists are doctors, too, aren’t they? Naturally, it’s pouring. Naturally, the institution houses Irving Wallace, an actor who went crazy and killed 16 people. And naturally, Wallace manages to escape and find refuge in Betty’s car that very night! Amazingly, Mr. Soavi makes no effort to conceal Wallace’s face from the audience; we know what he looks like, and he is frightening.  After the police interrogate everyone, Peter decides to use this horrible incident to his advantage. Unfortunately, the real killer is hiding in the theater that they cannot exit.

Reliable Giovanni Lombardo Radice, aka John Morghen, plays Brett, the perpetual theatrical prankster with the effeminate voice. He meets his death brutally as well through a case of mistaken identity.

The ending is truly bothersome, because it throws in the usual tongue-in-cheek horror movie ending staple that became so prevalent in the genre’s lesser offerings.

Don’t let this one disappointment stop you from seeing Stage Fright. What the ending lacks in the way of logic is more than made up for in mood, music, sound effects, and the constant drone of thunder from outside the theater. All of these elements mix to make Stage Fright a terrific slasher film. 

The new Blu-ray from Blue Underground is a revelation and worth the upgrade, not just for the beautiful image, but also for the wealth of extras that the disc has to offer. This is the first time that this film has been available in the United States with any extras to speak of:

Theatre of Delirium – Interview with Director Michele Soavi (approx. 19 minutes). I must admit that this is first time I have actually seen a sit-down discussion with Mr. Soavi (pronounced mic-KELL-ay so-AHV-ay), a director who showed tremendous promise with this first feature. His subsequent offerings have been hit or miss and he now seems to work solely in the realm of Italian television productions.

Head of The Company – Interview with Star David Brandon (approx. 12 minutes). This is an interview with one of my favorite actors in the film. Mr. Brandon played Peter the stage manager, whose dictatorial style is what holds the group of amateurs together as they are dispensed with one by one Ten Little Indians-style.

Blood on The Stage Floor – Interview with Star Giovanni Lombardo Radice (approx. 14 minutes). This actor is better known internationally as John Morghen and has appeared in a wealth of brutal horror films for Ruggero Deodato and Lucio Fulci. Here he speaks of his experience making the film, and his annoyance with one of the actors who was not a trained performer.

The Sound Of Aquarius – Interview with Composer Simon Boswell (approx. 18 minutes). This piece shines a light on the film’s score, which is one of my favorite scores and was once released on the Lucertola label in a limited pressing of 1200 copies and how Simon Boswell the composer came to score the film. The score is terrific.

The Owl Murders – Interview with Make-Up Effects Artist Pietro Tenoglio (approx. 11 minutes) is interesting in that Mr. Tenoglio has nearly 60 credits to his name as a make-up artist, yet he is not as well-known as Sergio Stivaletti who contributed effects to many other contemporary giallo films, such as Demons (1986) and Opera (1987). I am glad that he is given his due here.

The requisite theatrical trailer and poster/still gallery rounds out the extras.

Owning this on Blu-ray is a must for fans of this film. The dark, sub-par transfer from the Eighties has been upgraded to a gorgeous and colorful palette which makes me yearn for the now bygone days of Italian horror cinema.

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By Hank Reineke

The Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is an absolute gem.

This was my first visit to the triplex located at 136 Metropolitan Avenue. The cinema is only a couple of blocks stroll from the Bedford Avenue L subway station and sits mere minutes from Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As the movie I hoped to catch Thursday night was a special “one night only, one showing only” screening to begin at 9:30 P.M., I hesitated before buying my advance ticket and traveling into the city. I live in central New Jersey; far from where Manhattan’s southern end and Brooklyn meet. I’m 53 years old now and a workday late night out is getting ever more difficult to recover from. But, in the end, I simply couldn’t pass on this opportunity to catch the Nitehawk Cinema’s wonderfully wrought presentation of the fourteenth James Bond film “A View to a Kill”  that was released in 1985. Though 007 film retrospectives aren’t necessarily rare to repertory theater programming, too often fans are offered only such early Sean Connery-era classics as “Dr. No” and “Goldfinger” as exemplars. Here was a rare chance to re-experience - in glorious 35mm and nearly three decades after its original release - Roger Moore’s rarely theatrically re-screened sign-off as James Bond.

It was the right decision. The Nitehawk is a bountiful oasis for moviegoers and film enthusiasts. The walls of the lobby are adorned with both foreign and domestic movie posters and a lengthy plexi-glass wall display of vintage old-school “big box” and clamshell case VHS tapes circa the late 1970s and early 1980s. The cinema itself offers the usual – and sometimes the more unusual - highbrow art-house films, but there’s also great enthusiasm among programmers for pure popcorn movies: the weird, the exploitative, and the guiltiest of celluloid pleasures. Offering a fully stocked bar complete with an impressive array of draft and bottled beers and other alcoholic (and non-alcoholic) refreshments, a great selection of hot comfort foods, and the most delicious hot buttered popcorn I’ve enjoyed in some time (served in a deep stainless steel bowl), the movie-going experience at the Nitehawk is an absolute delight. The terraced seating and plush seats and aisles with ample leg room and courteous attendants are a refreshing bonus. Best of all, the fans who gathered to watch Roger Moore stroll and fire one final time into the trademark gun barrel were simply my kind of moviegoers. There was no one chatting away on cell phones or sending glowing texts about nothing while the feature was in progress.

The Bond film, which played out before a sold-out and appreciative audience, was part of the cinema’s on-going series “The Deuce.” Upcoming screenings in the series include “Fight for Your Life” (1977) and “Wolfen” (1981). “The Deuce,” for the uninitiated, was an affectionate pop-cartographic nickname for the nostalgically remembered stretch of aging movie palaces that once populated the area of 42^nd Street between 6^th and 8^th Avenues. By the early 1970s, this great neighborhood and glorious entertainment strip became the playground of prostitutes and drug addicts. The once magnificent theaters were relegated to playing before houses half-filled with adventurous teenagers, junkies, the homeless and mental cases.

To some degree, “A View to a Kill” was an odd choice for inclusion in the series. Any James Bond, even one of the series less remarkable ones as this one, was, by no means, atypical of the usual 42^nd Street movie fare of the time. The Times Square theaters more usually offered 24/7 programming of the cheapest Kung-Fu films from Hong Kong, the sleaziest and most lurid of low-budget horrors, and the world renowned pornographic all-nighters. To paraphrase one of the film’s presenters this evening, “Some people have described 42^nd street as the place where movies went to die. We think of 42^nd street as the only place where many of these movies could have lived.”

In their opening presentation to the film, organizers of the screening spun a somewhat dubious tale of “A View to a Kill” having played as the top-bill of a double-feature program at the notorious Selwyn Theater. The Selwyn, once one of the brightest fixtures on the strip had, in its final years, fallen prey to disrepair and neglect. It eventually morphed unpleasantly into a legendary dank and ghoulish Grind-house with sordid clientele. I can’t say for certain whether or not this classy James Bond film actually played a fleapit like the late-stage Selwyn, but if true it would have mostly certainly been on a subsequent run. My own clippings book reveal that upon its initial U.S. issue on May 24, 1985, this particular 007 opus had opened two blocks north of the Selwyn at the more elegant Loews Astor on W. 44^th Street.

Though Moore’s final outing as James Bond is, arguably, the least successful of his tenure, it remains a very entertaining programmer throughout. The 35mm print screened was in fine condition, the color palette still mostly bright but with just enough black scratches to remind you that you were enjoying a real film as originally presented. Though few James Bond zealots would allow their true feelings to show, Bond snow “surfing” through a phalanx of Russian assassins as the cover version of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” played on the soundtrack brought about a murmur of amused giggles and cheers. Time and history have allowed Moore’s lighter-turn as Bond to enjoy a welcome reevaluation. It was somehow liberating for the devoted 007 fan, for two hours time at least, to put aside the grim and solemn tone of the recent Craig Bonds and actually have some fun and smile during a James Bond movie again.

By Mark Cerulli

Robert McGinnis…

For fans of movies of the 1960s and ’70s, his name ranks up there with the stars who made the major studio films of that era. Even though he didn’t actually “make” movies, his work most definitely did. Best known as the artist behind the “classic” James Bond posters, McGinnis worked for almost every publisher and major magazine for decades, putting his distinctive stamp on a huge, well, body of work, which is fully (and gloriously) represented in The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, a lush 176-page hardback now on sale from Titan Books. Since McGinnis is one of the most influential and iconic movie poster artists of the 20^th Century, Cinema Retro was pleased to see him honored in this way.

The book starts with McGinnis’s journeyman beginnings in the 1950s Cincinnati and New York advertising scenes, where he toiled away on product ads like so many other young, hungry illustrators. Most would flourish for a time, then fade into obscurity, but a chance encounter in NYC with artist Mitchell Hooks (of Dr. No movie poster fame) led to paperback cover assignments that firmly put McGinnis on the map. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, most book covers were illustrated, and the cover directly impacted sales. The more lurid or intriguing the art, the better the sales, and McGinnis’s racy (for those days) cover art quickly brought him attention from publishers.

In 1961 McGinnis painted his first movie art – Breakfast At Tiffany’s – and that launched him into the illustration stratosphere for the rest of the decade. He painted the key art for Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Casino Royale (1967 spoof), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever, Live and Let Die, Man With the Golden Gun, and the book cover art on Moonraker, helping guide the Bond series through major transformations as different actors took on the lead role. McGinnis’s specialty was the human form – he painted the heroic images of Bond and, of course, the sultry Bond Girls. The late Frank C. McCarthy handled certain explosions and action art on some of the early Bond titles. The result was marketing nirvana, dramatic, precedent-setting artwork that helped make Bond the hottest movie property around.

McGinnis’ work was everywhere – from huge billboards to newspaper ads, and, of course, on paperbacks in every commuter’s briefcase. Curiously, his favorite art from his movie work is for The Odd Couple one-sheet, where he perfectly captured the essence of neat-freak Felix and super-slob Oscar. Other Hollywood works like Barbarella and Cotton Comes to Harlem are also beautifully reproduced in the book, some with his original sketches, so the reader can see the work evolve.

Each phase of McGinnis’s long career is chronicled by writer Art Scott, who worked with the artist on this definitive book. As you might expect, each chapter is profusely illustrated with gorgeous full-color art – from hardboiled detective book covers to bucolic landscapes for magazines like Reader’s Digest and Good Housekeeping, even vivid historical scenes for National Geographic are here. McGinnis also illustrated for a number of men’s magazines like True and Cavalier, and his provocative nudes left little to the imagination, but they also serve as even more proof of his astonishing skill. These long-legged “McGinnis Women” looked like they could get up and walk off the page – something I’m sure most Cavalier readers wished they would! The artist himself chimes in throughout the book, offering up inside stories from his long career. Thankfully, his creative output isn’t slowing down – just look at page 95 where his stunning cover art for the 2011 limited edition of Stephen King’s Joyland is reproduced. That cover features a pale, yet alluring “McGinnis Woman” in a bikini and holding a rifle. What could be more perfect?

The Art of Robert E. McGinnis is one of those “must haves,” a book any movie or fine art fan will want to pick up to look through again and again. It perfectly captures McGinnis’s impressive work, curves, gun barrels and all. With a list price of just $34.95, it’s a bargain when compared with the prices McGinnis original art now fetches at auction. 

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By Fred Blosser

Except maybe for Michael Caine and Ernest Borgnine, has any other actor ever starred in more movies, ranging more widely from classic (“A Star Is Born,” “North by Northwest,” “Lolita”) to cult (“The Pumpkin Eater,” “Cross of Iron”), to the campy and B-level titles that partially rounded out the final two decades of his career (“Bad Man’s River,” “Mandingo”), than James Mason (1909-1984)?

Two releases from the Warner Archive Collection showcase Mason’s versatility in mid-career films that could hardly be farther apart in theme and subject matter.

“The Decks Ran Red” (1958) was one of Mason’s two collaborations with producer/director Andrew L. Stone in the late ‘50s. Ed Rummill (Mason), a hardworking and ambitious first officer on a luxury liner, is offered the command of the S.S. Berwind, a merchant ship, after the previous captain unexpectedly dies. “You might be smart to pass this up,” one of his superiors cautions, noting that the Berwind has a restless crew and a troubled history. Rummill eagerly jumps at the opportunity for advancement anyway. Presently, flying to the remote New Zealand port where the Berwind is docked, his enthusiasm is dampened on first sight of the ship: “As dirty, as miserable, as rusted-up an old tub as I’d ever seen.”

But dirt and rust are the least of his worries. Crewman Scott (Broderick Crawford), abetted by his crony Martin (Stuart Whitman), begins to stir up mutiny even before the Berwind leaves port. Scott’s plan is this: after they put out to sea, he’ll nudge the mutineers into killing Rummill and the other officers. Then he and Martin in turn will murder their fellow crewmen. Once they dispose of the bodies, the two conspirators will partially scuttle the ship and bring it in as an abandoned derelict, collecting a reward for recovering the vessel: one million dollars, half the value of the Berwind and its cargo. Further creating strife, a beautiful woman comes aboard for the voyage (Dorothy Dandridge), the wife of the new ship’s cook. Scott gleefully figures that the presence of the “well-stacked doll” will ratchet tensions even higher.

Stone’s direction is so efficient and the sleek Mason and rumpled Crawford are so well contrasted as the main antagonists that you’re tempted to overlook lapses in logic and continuity as the movie proceeds. The ship’s routine appears so orderly and the crew so sedate that the mutiny angle never really comes together. Stone seems to recognize about halfway through that the narrative is about to stall, and so Scott abruptly abandons the mutiny scheme, breaks out his stash of firearms, corners the officers on the bridge, and with Martin’s help begins to pick off the other crewmen. Rummill begins as a character on a human scale, competent but fallible, but by the end of the movie, he’s swimming across a choppy ocean and scaling the side of the ship like an action hero for a final confrontation with Scott. Similarly, Dandridge’s character, Mahia, never quite seems to come into focus either; calculatedly seductive one minute, scared and helpless the next. An early scene suggests that she will pose a sexual challenge to the happily married Rummill, as Mason muses in voiceover, “It never entered my mind that the woman would be so sensuous and so exotically beautiful.” But Rummill keeps hands off, regarding her as more a nuisance on the already troubled ship than an object of desire.

Perhaps the movie is best enjoyed as the cinematic equivalent of 1950s men’s pulps like “Male” and “Saga,” which marketed lurid tales of modern-day piracy, danger at sea, and exotic sex as true stories. Mason’s voiceover narrative even has the same overheated prose style: “There was a ship named the S.S. Berwind. This is the story of that ship . . . A story which actually happened . . . A story of the most infamous, diabolically cunning crime in the annals of maritime history.” The name “Ed Rummill” is suspiciously similar to “Erwin Rommel,” Mason’s famous role in “The Desert Fox” (1951); maybe Stone and Mason were having a little fun with the audience.

In Sidney Lumet’s “The Sea Gull” (1968), an ensemble cast enacts Chekhov’s tragedy of frustrated lives and misguided love in a circle of well-to-do landowners, actors, and aspiring artists in late 19th Century Russia. Mason shares roughly equal screen time with Simone Signoret, Vanessa Redgrave, David Warner, Harry Andrews, Alfred Lynch, Denholm Elliott, and Kathleen Widdoes, but in a sense he’s first among equals. He has top billing as Trigorin, a popular but second-rate novelist. He’s the subject of the first close-up in the film in a brief, wordless scene added by Lumet and screenwriter Moura Budberg that doesn’t appear in the original play. And the role of Trigorin is a pivotal one, whose actions lead to calamity for two of the other characters in the final act.

It’s laudable to see any attempt to bring classic literature to the screen, especially these days, when the average person in the street, if asked to identify Chekhov, probably would answer, “Isn’t he that guy from ‘Star Trek’?” I give Lumet and his cast high marks for ambition, even if they never quite surmount the challenge of translating Chekhov’s complex, allusive work to the visual, kinetic medium of film.

Two basic problems, one relating to casting and the other to performance, beset the movie. While Warner and Redgrave are fine actors, they’re too old at 27 and 31, respectively, to play Chekhov’s Konstantin and Nina. I knew lots of kids like Chekhov’s Konstantin in my college literature and drama courses, bright but immature 20-year-olds with mother fixations. At 27, Warner seems like a case of arrested development. Likewise, it’s affecting when Chekhov’s 17- or 18-year-old Nina attaches herself to the older Trigorin, and you realize, even if she doesn’t, that her infatuation will not end well; Redgrave looks like a woman in her twenties who should know better. Mason doesn’t present the same disconnect between appearance and behavior, but he brings a misplaced sense of gravity to the role of the faintly absurd Trigorin. The disreputable Mason of “The Wicked Lady” (1945) and “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1952) would better have served the role.

The Warner Archive Collection editions are bare-bones DVDs without chapter stops, subtitles, or significant extras. “The Decks Ran Red” includes the theatrical trailer. The black-and-white transfer is acceptable, and there’s a startling visual in the title credit, where “Red” in “The Decks Ran Red” stands out in bleeding crimson against the monochromic background. They do the same thing now in “Sin City” with computers; how did they do it in 1958? The transfer of “The Sea Gull” is somewhat soft, muting the Technicolor cinematography, but not objectionable. There are no extra features.

Order The Decks Ran Red here.

Order The Sea Gull here.

By Lee Pfeiffer

Look, I'm not one of these high-brow guys who knock all of the programming on cable TV. About the only shows I ever have time to watch are guilty pleasures like Hoarders and Storage Wars plus various National Geographic programs that center on helpless humans being devoured by wild animals. Most of the time I'm working on my computer, so the only programs that run consistently are political shows that don't require me to sit in front of a screen. In fact, with all the heated debates on these programs, they provide plenty of wild animal-like behavior in and of themselves. What I do find really offensive is when a cable network decides to use a legendary movie as the basis of a low-grade TV concept. For example, A&E has just announced that it is developing a series titled Bates Motel that will explore the early years of Psycho's legendary cinematic killer Norman Bates, as well as his Oedipus-like relationship with his mother. Is this really what classic movie lovers have been clamoring for? Obviously not.  How many people even remember that there was a TV movie sequel to Psycho back in 1987? So this new project is a rip-off of a rip-off.  However, A&E is gambling that there are plenty of undiscriminating viewers out there who probably never even saw the original film and will think this concept is a hoot. Murder and implied incest? Irresistable! And now Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece can be improved upon with the inclusion of numerous dumb-ass commercials, color cinematography and answers to the mysteries surrounding Bates' background that were so annoyingly mysterious that they might have inspired you to use your own imagination. Click here for the lurid details.

(Cheap plug: For Cinema Retro's in-depth tribute to the original Psycho, see issue #18)

Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man

By Mark Mawston

With Halloween fast approaching I thought I might recommend some films that seem to have found themselves, bar one or two, languishing in DVD dungeons like forgotten prisoners.

There are many recognized classics of the genre from The Omen and The Exorcist to The Haunting, as well as the Universal classics such as Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy but some of what I humbly call classics seldom, if ever, get a chance to shine. To try and set this straight before the witching hour strikes, I like to recommend a few films, 13 to be precise, that you may have missed or could perhaps re visit during this spookiest time of year.

13) Night Of The Eagle:

This superb British Witchcraft tale (known under the more lurid title Burn Witch Burn in the U.S.) is a minor monsterpiece. Starring Jason King himself Peter Wyngard it shows the consequences of marrying a witch in a way that Darren and Samantha never had to deal with on Bewitched. Taking its subject matter very seriously, this is a superbly acted little film with a, quite literally, killer climax. A Stone Cold Classic you could say.

12) Night Of The Demon.

This genre classic would make a superb “Night” time double bill with its predecessor in this list. Based on the short story Casting Of The Runes by M.R. James (and known as Curse Of The Demon In The States) this is a terrifying film whose dark atmosphere is backed up by superb and believable performances and a classic storyline. Dana Andrews was never better but the star of the show is Niall MacGinnis as Dr. Julian Karswell who can switch from children’s entertainer to demon conjurer quicker than the extinguishing of a flickering candle flame. The chase through the forest by the unseen demon is a masterpiece of subtly which is disregarded in the climax for the full on view of the film’s title creature. Many say this spoils the Val Lewtonesque feel of the film but I rather like it.

11) The Devil Rides Out:

Quite simply one of the best Hammer films ever made, with Christopher Lee acting against type, very successfully, as the hero rather than the monster. Based on the novel by Dennis Wheatly and brought to the screen by the superb Richard Matheson, this is Hammer firing on all four cylinders and has some of the most memorable set pieces of the studio’s superb output. Future Blofeld Charles Gray is excellent as Macata. One of Terence Fishers best, a director who was to Hammer what Terence Young was to the Bond films.

10) The Wicker Man:

One of the key films to watch over the period is Robin Hardy’s cult classic about a cult. Is it a musical? Is it a horror film? Is it really a classic? Well it’s a simple yes to all of them. When I talked to producer Michael Deeley about this he still seemed a bit bemused about this film’s well documented past and pointed out that the only way it could be released at the time was for it to be trimmed and released as a double bill. Many films have had that happen over the years (Ray Harryhausen’s Valley Of Gwangi coupled with Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle (a.k.a Naked Under Leather ) but few films who’s trims ended up as motorway landfill have such a following. The ending is still up there with that of Planet of the Apes for those who have yet to see it. Unlike The Sixth Sense, I had no idea of the “twist” until the shocking climax. It remains a unique cinematic experience. The soundtrack by Paul Giovanni is as unforgettable as the naked dance of Britt Ekland’s character Willow in the film.

By Harvey F. Chartrand

MICHAEL MORIARTY, who starred in such classic films as Who’ll Stop the Rain and Pale Rider, exiled himself to Canada in 1995, following a nasty confrontation with U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in a Washington, D.C. hotel room. Moriarty was invited along with network television executives and producers to hear Reno’s views on censorship of TV violence. Law and Order, one of the least violent shows on television, was cited as a major offender. Incensed by Reno's campaign to “forcibly end violence on television and trample on rights of free expression as guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution,” Moriarty quit the series and left the U.S. in protest. He has been a landed immigrant in Canada ever since. Why the fateful encounter with Reno led to a radical (and seemingly overnight) transformation of Moriarty’s political views from soft liberal to hard-core conservative remains unexplained to this day. The onetime Manhattan über-liberal’s sudden shift to “gun-toting” arch-conservatism proved to be too much to fathom for his socialite wife Anne Hamilton Martin, and their seemingly ideal marriage ended after almost 20 years.

Moriarty was an up-and-comer in the early seventies. In 1973, he drew lavish praise for his back-to-back performances as a baseball player who befriends a dying teammate in Bang the Drum Slowly and as a cold-blooded Marine Duty Officer in The Last Detail. That same year, Moriarty starred in a TV-movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie with Katharine Hepburn. Moriarty's role as the Gentleman Caller won him an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor of the Year. Moriarty then nabbed the 1974 Tony Award in the Best Actor category for his role as a young London homosexual with a blistering razor-sharp tongue in Find Your Way Home, beating out heavyweight competitors Zero Mostel, George C. Scott, Jason Robards and Nicol Williamson.

However, Moriarty’s bid for big-screen stardom was a complete failure. In 1975, he was cast as a rookie detective who unwittingly kills an undercover policewoman in the Serpico-like drama Report to the Commissioner. The film (now hailed as a masterpiece) was shredded by the critics, especially the influential Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, who dismissed Moriarty’s acting as unbridled hysteria. Roger Ebert described Moriarty’s performance as manic: “During whole stretches of the movie, (the rookie detective) seems to be in the grip of incomprehensible tensions and fears, and Moriarty makes these so obvious we wonder why he isn’t sent in for observation. Underplaying, providing just the slightest suggestion of inner terrors, would have made the performance more convincing.”

By necessity, Moriarty made the switch to television, appearing in series like The Equalizer with Edward Woodward and starring as a German SS officer in the landmark television miniseries Holocaust, which won him another Emmy. Moriarty was also unforgettable as an aggressive professional hockey player in The Deadliest Season, one of the greatest TV-movies about hockey ever made.

Through the 1980s, Moriarty started turning up in increasingly lurid fare such as Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent, The Stuff, It's Alive 3: Island of the Alive and A Return to Salem's Lot. In 1986, Moriarty starred in the fantasy science-fiction movie Troll, playing the role of Harry Potter, Sr.! In the decades since, these films have all become cult classics. Moriarty is especially proud of his involvement in The Hanoi Hilton, a harrowing true story about the ordeal of American prisoners of war in North Vietnam’s most infamous prison during the Vietnam War.

Yet the role that Moriarty is still best remembered for is that of Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone in the first four seasons of Law and Order (1990-1994). Stone is an essentially humorless man of unflinching rectitude who believes in maximum enforcement of the law, but is open to plea bargaining if conditions warrant.

“In early 1994, I quit Law and Order and announced my departure in the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety,” Moriarty told Cinema Retro. “My employers, the mainstream press and even Wikipedia like to say that it was (executive producer) Dick Wolf who fired me and not the other way ‘round. People say: ‘Oh, well, no one fires Dick Wolf!’ Well, I did. At any rate, I had become an American dissident. I left for Canada not too long after that.”

After shedding his sleek Ben Stone persona, Moriarty moved to Toronto (and later Halifax and Vancouver) and became a radically different person – some described his behaviour as crazy or bipolar. At age 52, after a lifetime of discipline and abstemiousness, Moriarty began drinking and smoking heavily. The years of hard living were evident in the thickening of his features and a noticeable weight gain. His smooth-as-velvet voice became raspy from the constant intake of nicotine. The onetime exemplar of virtue on television even got into a few scrapes with the law. He was thrown into a Halifax drunk tank in 1997. In November 2000, Moriarty was arrested for assault after slapping his former girlfriend and manager Margaret Brychka during a drunken argument in a Vancouver bar. The charges were later dismissed in court.

The dark years passed and, through rigid adherence to the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and his abiding faith in the Roman Catholic Church, Moriarty was able to lay his demons to rest. He says he has been clean and sober since 2003.

“Canada’s AA fraternity and their infinite faith in the power of God have brought me to a calm and utterly sober joy in life I had never thought possible,” Moriarty said.

Until 2006, Moriarty continued his acting career from his home base in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, where he lives with his lady friend Irene Mettler. Since relocating to Canada, the former star of Law and Order appeared in a steady stream of movies and TV shows, notably the hard-edged police drama Major Crime, Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal, Emily of New Moon, Crime of the Century, Courage Under Fire, Children of the Dust (with Sidney Poitier), The Arrow, Earthquake in New York, James Dean (Moriarty won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie as Dean’s father), Taken (in the UFO TV mini-series premiere episode directed by Tobe Hooper) and director Larry Cohen’s Pick Me Up episode of Masters of Horror.

Now 70, Moriarty is semi-retired from acting, mainly due to health concerns following open-heart surgery and the lingering effects of serious injuries sustained during a savage beating at a Maple Ridge tavern in 2002. Moriarty’s last completed film to date is the still unreleased The Yellow Wallpaper, in which he plays a mysterious realtor. Lensed in Georgia in 2006, The Yellow Wallpaper is loosely based on the famous horror story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

By Raymond Benson

By Raymond Benson

Director Samuel Fuller is a controversial figure in American cinema history. Audiences either love him or hate him, and there is usually no in-between. Incorporating a style that is often over-the-top, no matter what the genre or story might be, Fuller’s films are very much in your face. Outspoken, opinionated, and an auteur who wasn’t afraid to stand on a soapbox and shout to the masses what he felt was injustice, bigotry, or hypocrisy, Fuller belongs in the camp of directors who attempted social change but never achieved popular success doing it. Today he is revered as a cult figure by such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and Tim Robbins (all who appear in the documentary, The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, a bonus feature on the Shock Corridor DVD). One can certainly see Fuller’s influences on the films of Scorsese and Tarantino. Scorsese admits “stealing” a sequence from an early Fuller war film, The Steel Helmet, and using it in Raging Bull.

The Criterion Collection has remastered and restored in high definition two of Fuller’s gems from the sixties—Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964) for DVD and Blu Ray. Anyone unfamiliar with the director’s work will do no better than to dive in to these powerful, dynamic dramas—or shall I say… melodramas. And that they are. In both pictures, the acting is heightened, the dialogue borders on the corny (some sequences are unintentionally funny today), and the subject matter is lurid. How these films were released in a time when the Production Code was still in effect is a mystery (they were issued “for mature audiences only,” several years before the ratings in America came about).

By Doug Gerbino

The Warner Archive Collection released six rare Lon Chaney, Sr. films on October 26 -- five silents and one talkie (his one and only talkie). The films are He Who Gets Slapped (1924); The Monster and The Unholy Three (both 1925); Mr. Wu and Mockery (both 1927); and The Unholy 3 (1930), the sound remake of the 1925 film with a numerical title and a different ending. Lon Chaney, Sr. was a fascinating actor. It's a shame that he is pigeon-holed as a horror star. This is due to the over-availability of two of his most famous films: Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and Phantom of the Opera (1925/29). The fact that these two films are public domain has made them the most widely available of his movies. Within recent years, Warner Home Video has been releasing some of Chaney's MGM films. In 2003, Warner Home Video and TCM released The Lon Chaney Collection, which contained three films: The Aces of Hearts, Laugh, Clown, Laugh and The Unknown. Great stuff, but it left you wanting more.

Now WHV, through its Warner Archive Collection has just released six Chaney rarities on a burn-to-order basis. These films, while not digitally remastered, look fine considering their age -- as fine as when TCM shows them on their network. In chronological order we start with 1924's He Who Gets Slappe, which co-stars Norma Shearer and John Gilbert and holds the distinction of being the very first film completely made and released by the newly formed studio, MGM. Chaney plays a mad doctor in the "comedy" film, The Monster where he wears surprisingly little make-up (and looks surprisingly like Boris Karloff, one of his successors in the horror genre of the following decade). The 1925 silent version of The Unholy Three is a classic directed by Tod Browning, with whom Chaney had a most productive, if strangely symbiotic relationship. His co-stars are Mae Busch (before she became "ever popular" playing opposite Laurel & Hardy) and Victor McLaglen. Chaney plays two Asian characters in Mr. Wu a lurid tale of paternal revenge. Ironically, we do have Anna Mae Wong in the cast, but Chaney's daughter is played by Renee Adoree! Mockery is set during the Russian revolution of 1918. Chaney plays a Russian peasant who risks his life to help a Russian Countess (Barbara Bedford) escape to safety. She repays Chaney by making him a servant in her household. Here, she forgets who he is, while remembering that she loves Ricardo Cortez and carrying on with him while Chaney suffers (which no one did better than Lon Chaney, Sr. during the silent era).

Lastly we come to The Unholy 3, the 1930 talkie remake of the 1925 silent The Unholy Three (notice the title change). At MGM, two stars held out in making their talkie debuts. One was Greta Garbo, and the other was Lon Chaney, Sr. MGM was a little worried about Garbo and her accent. They had nothing to worry about with Chaney and this frustrating film proves it -- frustrating in that we get a glimpse of what might have been when hearing his wonderful voice. Chaney died seven weeks after the film was released, thus making it the only talkie he ever did. Chaney -- the man of a thousand voices as well as a thousand faces...ah, well. How eerily ironic at the film's end to see a friend give Chaney a carton of cigarettes, now knowing that he died of throat cancer at the age of 47 less than two months later.

As of this writing, these films are being offered on the Warner Home Video website on a mail-order basis under the Warner Archives Collection. Warner Archives'' DVDs are only for sale in the United States; you can get all six films for $71.82, but they are limiting the package to one per customer. I guess WHV has noticed all the folks who had been ordering up a storm and reselling internationally on eBay and Amazon.com. When you got a good thing people want it, and if you like the films of one of the greatest cinema actors of the 1920s, you will want these Lon Chaneyfilms. Get your "one-per-customer" package today.

Click here to visit the Warner Archives web site

RETRO ACTIVE: THE BEST FROM CINEMA RETRO'S ARCHIVE

P.B. HURST, AUTHOR OF THE NEW BOOK THE MOST SAVAGE FILM: SOLDIER BLUE, CINEMATIC VIOLENCE AND THE HORRORS OF WAR (McFarland) LOOKS BACK AT WHAT IS PERHAPS THE MOST CONTROVERSIAL WESTERN OF ALL TIME.

A good number of critics in 1970 believed that Soldier Blue had set a new mark in cinematic violence, as a result of its graphic scenes of Cheyenne women and children being slaughtered, and had thus lived up – or down – to its U.S. poster boast that it was “The Most Savage Film in History.”

A massive hit in Great Britain and much of the rest of the world, Soldier Blue was, in the words of its maverick director, Ralph Nelson, “not a popular success” in the United States. This probably had less to do with the picture’s groundbreaking violence, and more to do with the fact that it was the U.S. Cavalry who were breaking new ground. For Nelson’s portrayal of the boys in blue as blood crazed maniacs, who blow children’s brains out and behead women, shattered for ever one of America’s most enduring movie myths – that of the cavalry as good guys riding to the rescue – and rendered Soldier Blue one of the most radical films in the history of American cinema. The film’s failure in its homeland might also have had something to do with the perception in some quarters – prompted by production company publicity material – that it was a deliberate Vietnam allegory.

I was unaware of most of this in 1971 when, as a nervous fifteen-year-old English schoolboy, I read about the film’s horrors in newspapers, and heard lurid accounts of the cutting off of breasts from my classmates, who had illegally seen the film at a cinema that wasn’t too bothered about the age of the patrons (all of whom should have been at least eighteen to view what was then an X certificate film).

I had managed to survive several Hammer horrors – Scars of Dracula, Lust for a Vampire and Countess Dracula spring readily to mind – at the very same cinema when I was underage. But having been scared witless by the mutilation scene in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, when that gripping movie had played on TV several months earlier, I wisely realised that any of the various cuts inflicted on the Indians by the cavalry in Soldier Blue represented a mutilation too far in terms of my well being. So I waited for the picture to turn up on television (as it takes considerably more guts to walk out of a packed cinema than to hide behind the sofa!). Waited and waited as it turned out.

I eventually viewed the picture, which stars Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss and Donald Pleasence, when ITV transmitted it in 1980. However, there was a small problem: the notorious massacre sequence, which is the picture’s reason for being, had been removed virtually in its entirety (seemingly more cuts had been inflicted on the film than had been perpetrated on the American Indians!), as it was deemed too horrific for television. (It took another twenty-two years for the film to be shown on British terrestrial television in something resembling its theatrical release form!) So I still hadn’t viewed the notorious scenes that had sparked, in conjunction with films such as The Devils, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, the screen violence inferno that engulfed Britain in the 1970s.

Bangkok police are now uncertain whether actor David Carradine's death was due to suicide. Like most media outlets, Cinema Retro reported the early police conclusion that he took his own life, as Carradine was found hanging in a hotel closet with a nylon rope around his neck. We also reported that his friends and colleagues on the film he was about to shoot in Thailand were skeptical that he had any suicidal tendencies. However, the new theory offered by police adds a lurid and sensationalistic aspect to the case. Given the uncertain facts about the case, we would prefer not to directly report on these allegations unless they are proven to be fact, out of respect to Mr. Carradine.  If you want to read how the mainstream media is covering these new theories, click here.

Cinema Retro columnist David Savage continues his coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival with a report on a surprise appearance by Dennis Hopper at a screening of one of his earliest films.

The newly restored 35mm print of Night Tide (1961), USA

Last year saw the passing of Curtis Harrington (1926-2007), the director of a slew of delicious psycho-thrillers from the '60s and '70s, including Who Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and What's the Matter with Helen? (1971), both with Shelly Winters, as well as the critical favorite The Killing Kind (1973) with John Savage. So it was a fitting tribute to the director that Tribeca Film Festival screened two newly restored prints of Harrington's at Pace University last Sunday, April 29^th -- his 1948 experimental short, Picnic, and his rarely seen, first feature film, Night Tide (1961) with Dennis Hopper. Both prints were fresh out of the Academy Film Archive labs in Los Angeles. Adding to the insider-thrill of the occasion was a surprise visit by Hopper himself, who drove in from Queens where he was on location shooting a new movie. Hopper said he hadn't seen the film -- his first, full-length starring role -- in several years, so it was interesting to watch the 25-year-old actor on the screen, then steal furtive glances over at him in his seat watching himself, some 47 years earlier.

Night Tide tells the tale of a young sailor, Johnny Drake (Hopper) on leave in the then-derelict area of Venice, California, who becomes smitten with a mysterious, dark-haired girl, Mora (Linda Lawson) who portrays a mermaid in a carnival sideshow on the pier. They meet in a beatnik grotto-bar complete with jazz combo and snapping, turtlenecked patrons, and from there embark on an enigmatic, moody love affair that spells trouble from the get-go. Her handler and sideshow boss, Captain Murdock (Gavin Muir), warns Johnny that her previous boyfriends were both found drowned, and hints broadly that the fishtail she wears in the sideshow may not be a put-on. Other troubling signs include her serving fish for breakfast, and on one date, she succumbs to the incantatory rhythms of a beach bongo-duo and draws a crowd as she writhes expressionistically to their performance. Johnny won't listen to locals who also try to warn him off the mysterious Mona, until it's nearly too late.

Highly atmospheric and evocative of Los Angeles' beatnik art scene in the late '50s-early '60s (of which Hopper was a member), Night Tide is a odd delight, full of eccentric bit players, stilted dialogue and the lurid backdrop of a seedy amusement pier. It also sets the tone for Harrington's later pictures, most of which are campy thrillers involving a mentally fragile woman in a setting of decayed glamour, in the same genre as Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).

But digging a bit deeper, it hints at Harrington's involvement in the occult. Harrington, according to Dennis Hopper, was a friend of notorious occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger, with whom he went to school and collaborated on Anger's and his own first experimental films -- many of which deal in mythical and pagan topics. Their mutual friend was an artist in the L.A. art scene of the time known simply as 'Cameron,' and who plays the role of The Water Witch in Night Tide. In the film (credited as Marjorie Cameron) she appears elusively as a witchy woman in black, usually accompanied on the soundtrack by ringing bells. Her appearance throughout Night Tide is never explained, but it casts doubt on the true provenance of the character of Mona, and whether they are mother and daughter, or something more sinister. Interestingly, Marjorie Cameron was married to Jack Parsons, a pioneering genius in rocketry and occult enthusiast, and together they were friends of L. Ron Hubbard and other science fiction writers. According to a short bio on the Internet Movie Database, in 1946 she, Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard undertook the famous "Babylon Working," a complex ritual spell attempting to create a "magical child." In the early '50s she lived in a house in Pasadena reputed to be a hive of occult and sexually transgressive behavior. In 1954 she appeared in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (along with Harrington) and was a friend of Satanist Aleister Crowley, Dennis Hopper and actor Dean Stockwell. How well Hopper knew Cameron was unclear by his comments, but it was intriguing information, providing a glimpse into his early days as an actor in L.A. and the cast of characters that populated art galleries, living rooms and underground film sets of the time.

Hopper went on to comment that Night Tide was "one of the first independent films," made for $28,000 and listed on Time Magazine's 10 Best Films of that year, although it was never released in theatres, owing to a dispute with labor unions. "Making independent films back then was nearly impossible," he told the audience from the stage. "It was virtually unheard of to work outside the studio system." Harrington, Hopper revealed, was Twentieth Century Fox head Jerry Wald's assistant and got his start in movies the old fashioned way – by serving as a gofer and working his way up from there. Still flinty and ornery as hell at 72, Hopper makes a compelling case for career longevity and still does not suffer fools easily, as evidenced by his sarcastic answers to many questions posed from audience members. When he mentioned his authorship of Easy Rider (1969), vigorously disputed by Terry Southern and others, I was going to raise my hand. Then I thought, hmm…better not go there. This dark man of indie cinema just turned a shade more sinister.

To watch the original trailer of Night Tide, cut and paste this URL into your browser: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2275213593/

-David Savage

Never let it be said that Cinema Retro readers are not appreciative of the human anatomy. We've received a number of letters griping that we've been negligent in presenting our Gratuitously Sexy Photos of the Week. We plead guilty, but only because there has been such an abundance of other stories. Nevertheless, we herewith resume the feature that has earned us high marks not only from straight guys but also from our female readers and gay guys who appreciate the fact that we never fail to include some vintage male cheesecake shots to satiate their lurid desires as well.

Having barely survived the horrors of Germany in the final days of WWII, young Elke Sommer never dreamed she would become one of the major starlets of the 1960s. Elke has recently given Cinema Retro interviews about her films from this period. Look for the first in issue #10 in which she recalls making Deadlier Than the Male.

Long and hard- that's how you can describe Dick Chamberlain's surfboard in the 1960s flick Joy in the Morning. Chamberlain, like Rock Hudson and so many other gay Hollywood hunks of the era, had to stay in the closet in order to maintain their lucrative careers as the "boys next door". Chamberlain set the record straight, so to speak, in his autobiography from the 1990s in which he opened up about the trials and tribulations of hiding his sexuality for so many years.

Cinema Retro Editor-in-Chief LEE PFEIFFER takes a look at the new DVD edition of director William Friedkin's most controversial film.

When I was a kid way back in 1969, my friend's mother took her two young sons to the movies in an attempt to see Midnight Cowboy. When the person inside the box-office pointed out the X rating and refused to sell her tickets for her kids, the mom blurted out, "Why not? My boys love westerns!" One can only hope that equally well-meaning but naive moms don't put Warner Home Entertainment's new special DVD edition of director William Friedkin's Cruising in their kid's Christmas stockings because they think it will call to mind episodes of the old Love Boat series. The film caused a firestorm while it was still in production and was no less controversial upon its release in 1980. Unless you literally came to the city on the back of a hay wagon, you're probably aware that Cruising is not a promotional film for the Royal Caribbean line. Rather, it is a grim and often shocking story about a series of gruesome murders that takes place in New York City's infamous gay leather bars. The film is ostensibly a standard crime melodrama. Al Pacino is a young cop who enthusiastically accepts a top secret assignment from his boss (Paul Sorvino) to drop out of society and go undercover in the bar scene in order to solve the murders. Pacino initially views the mission as a way to fast track his way to the rank of detective. However, he soons finds himself haunted by the old axiom, "Be careful what you wish for - you just may get it."

Pacino as police officer Steve Burns: going all the way.

In speaking to William Friedkin recently, I candidly told him that when I saw the film upon its initial release I found it loathsome. Yet, upon viewing it again on DVD, I was mesmerized by the subtleties of the script and the entire style of the movie. Friedkin speculated that perhaps I had simply matured along with my ability to judge the complexities of films such as this. That seems a fair guess, but I would argue that certain films can almost never be appreciated with one viewing. They are designed to be seen repeatedly because, if properly made, the viewer can discover new aspects that continue to enrich the experience. Cruising is one such film. Friedkin told me his main influence for the movie was Antonioni's 1966 film, Blow Up - for some a pretentious bore and for others (including myself) a thoroughly unique cinematic experience that improves with every viewing. Even Friedkin doesn't argue that Cruising succeeds on the same level as Blow Up - but if you can bare the gut wrenching experience of watching it more than once, you might find he has succeeded in crafting a fascinating film that - like the movie that inspired it - leaves the viewer to use their imagination to answer the many open-ended plot elements that remain at the story's conclusion. Like any such work, each viewer might have an entirely different take on what they have seen.

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Thursday 3:00 p.m.  For the Spaghetti Western posse, the day started with a press conference for the official launch of Spaghetti Western: The Secret History of Italian Cinema 4, overseen by Festival chairman, Davide Croff, and the co-curators, Marco Giusti and Manlio Gomarasca. The guest line-up was comprised of Franco Nero, Sergio Donati, and Tonino Valerii, with American director Eli Roth, and New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, also on hand. After Manlio had described the Spaghetti Western as, “the Italian genre which most contributed to change in worldwide cinema,” Nero spoke with passion about the Western and its continuing importance: “No male actor in the world doesn’t want to play in Westerns. Westerns were often A-movies in America, but B-movies in Italy. But these B-movies paid for all the auteur films. When I travelled to Japan and South America, in the hotel registers, they would just write “Django” . . . So I say it is a mistake not to make Westerns today, look at the worldwide sales of DVDs... To make Westerns in the Seventies’ style is a good idea. Westerns are something mythical, legendary.”

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He recalled the great Sergio Corbucci, calling him, “an under-appreciated director in the true sense of the word, like Tonino Valerii. They really are sound directors who get the best out of a story.” He then told his anecdote about Corbucci’s legendary sense of fun, in which, during the filming of the title scene of Django, Corbucci told Nero to walk past the camera, pulling his iconic coffin, and to keep going until they had enough footage and Corbucci shouted “Cut”. Nero duly obliged, trudging on and on through the mud, the coffin getting heavier and heavier, wondering when on earth Corbucci would be satisfied. Eventually, having had enough, he stopped and looked back. There was no one in sight; Corbucci had told the crew to pack up and leave as soon as Nero was out of earshot. . . . Corbucci, he added, ‘would arrive on the set and ask, “How many are we going to kill today? Ten? Twenty?” . . . I really miss him.’

Valerii, after giving a quick account of how he came to make his first film, Taste for Killing, in 1966, mainly talked about the making of A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die, and his comments would be best read in conjunction with the report on that film.

Image Entertainment is promising (threatening?) to release a 3 DVD special "Imperial Edition" of the notorious 1979 film Caligula,an epic that was to good taste what Liberace was to understatement. The film was bankrolled by Penthouse Magazine mogul Bob Guccione and became infamous for having lured established stars such as Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud onboard to film their scenes - without telling them that hardcore footage would be -er, inserted- after the fact. Some of the cast at least feigned being outraged over this ploy while McDowell and Mirren have obviously had a change of heart - both are contributing to what should be a fascinating audio commentary track for the new edition.

The new DVD also features:

• Hours of documentaries
• Never before seen footage
• Alternate version
• Hi def transfer

Even Mussolini didn't have it this good!

This will be the unrated version with hardcore sequences intact. (A watered down version was released as an "R" rated film, but seeing Caligula without the sex is like seeing The Wild Bunch without the guns.) The film was an ambitious attempt to make a hardcore film a virtual epic and have it taken seriously by critics. The scheme didn't work, however. Not only did critics scorn the raw sex play but they also complained about the scenes of lurid torture. Indeed, the film does graphically showcase scenes in which Rome's mad emporer indulges in his penchant for mass slaughter. Hey, everybody's got to have a hobby, right? There were also endless sequences of orgies, sado-masochism, and assorted perversions - you know, the kind of stuff Congressmen ususally get caught up in. The film is never less than fascinating if you can stomach the unpleasantness. It does boast some impressive sets - and yes, we're actually referring to the production design! To label it a porn film is probably unjust because it does have loftier aspirations than a grind house film. Whether it succeeds or not depends on whether the viewer can tolerate the kinky sexual antics of Caligula. They may be more stomach-turning than erotic, but I personally live by the old addage, "The worst sex I ever had was like the worst pizza I ever had - terrific!"

The Caligula special edition will be out in late October - just in time for the holidays, especially if you like getting your stockings stuffed. - Lee Pfeiffer

TO ORDER THIS DVD DISCOUNTED FROM AMAZON CLICK HERE

Malcolm McDowell as Caligula- It's good to be emperor!

We once received a letter from a subscriber who said that while Cinema Retro is his favorite film magazine, the content was best suited for a magazine titled Cinema Hetero. We confess to being guilty of over-emphasizing stories that tend to favor middle-aged, straight white guys because...er...our magazine is put together by two middle aged, straight white guys. However, our new web site has liberated us to expand our horizons and be more inclusive with our content. Let's face it...straight guys see hints of lesbianism in everything including the Ginger and Maryann scenes from Gilligan's Island. Are these just absurd fantasies or are there really intentional, latent homoerotic images in some of our most cherished films and TV series?

Journalist Diana Blackwell examines this scenario as it pertains to one of the most beloved war films of all time, the 1964 epic Zulu which recounted the legendary stand by a small number of British soldiers against an overwhelming number of Zulu warriors. In England, this is the equal of the American's Alamo - only with a happy ending. In this analysis, Ms. Blackwell examines latent homoerotic images in the film. Is this simply a case of a female perceiving homoerotic fantasies that don't reflect the intended content of a film or has she uncovered some hidden messages in oft-viewed classic adventure story? You can judge for yourself - but we think this article will tempt you to view Zulu again just to examine her thoroughly-researched conclusions. At the very least, Ms. Blackwell's article about Zulu gives an all new perspective to "keeping the British end up."

Introduction

Zulu has always seemed like a sexy movie to me despite its lack of love scenes or romantic subplots. The sexiness has little to do with Zulu’s few scenes of women: the bare-breasted Zulu girls aren’t onscreen for very long, while the missionary’s daughter, Miss Witt, is buttoned-up in every way. ¹ No, Zulu is sexy because of its men and the subtly homoerotic quality of their interactions.

Ultra rare poster style