It Came From the 1950s!
Also by Darryl Jones STUDYING POETRY (with Stephen Matterson) HORROR: A THEMATIC HISTORY IN FICTION AND FILM JANE AUSTEN REINTERPRETING EMMET: ESSAYS ON THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF ROBERT EMMET M. R. JAMES, COLLECTED GHOST STORIES (edited)
Also by Elizabeth McCarthy FEAR: ESSAYS ON THE MEANING AND EXPERIENCE OF FEAR (co-edited with Kate Hebblethwaite)
Also by Bernice M. Murphy THE SUBURBAN GOTHIC IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE SHIRLEY JACKSON: ESSAYS ON THE LITERARY LEGACY
It Came From the 1950s! Popular Culture, Popular Anxieties Edited by
Darryl Jones Elizabeth McCarthy and
Bernice M. Murphy
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Darryl Jones, Elizabeth McCarthy and Bernice M. Murphy 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–27221–7 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
DJ: For Margaret and Morgan, with love EMcC: For Paul Cronly BM: For my Godson Ieuan Murphy
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Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgements
x
About the Contributors
xi
Introduction
1
1 A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups David J. Skal 2 ‘It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!’ Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire Darryl Jones
17
33
3 Mutants and Monsters Kim Newman
55
4 ‘Don’t Dare See It Alone!’ The Fifties Hammer Invasion Wayne Kinsey
72
5 Genre, Special Effects and Authorship in the Critical Reception of Science Fiction Film and Television during the 1950s Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnston 6 Hammer’s Dracula Christopher Frayling
90 108
7 Fast Cars and Bullet Bras: The Image of the Female Juvenile Delinquent in 1950s America Elizabeth McCarthy
135
8 ‘A Search for the Father-Image’: Masculine Anxiety in Robert Bloch’s 1950s Fiction Kevin Corstorphine
158
9 ‘Reading her Difficult Riddle’: Shirley Jackson and Late 1950s’ Anthropology Dara Downey
176
vii
viii Contents
10 ‘At My Cooking I Feel It Looking’: Food, Domestic Fantasies and Consumer Anxiety in Sylvia Plath’s Writing Lorna Piatti-Farnell
198
11 ‘All that Zombies Allow’ Re-Imagining the Fifties in Far from Heaven and Fido Bernice M. Murphy
216
Bibliography
234
Filmography
244
Index
250
List of Illustrations
7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4
‘Booby trap/Syphillis and Gonorrhea’ ‘Chippers’. Women war workers of Marinship Corp., 1942 Sensational Exposés (April 1957) D for Delinquent, artist unknown (Ace D-270, 1958)
ix
140 143 145 148
Acknowledgements
This book began life in James Toner’s public house, Baggot Street, Dublin, in 2007 when the editors sat down to recover from a viewing of the rare Dublin-based giallo horror The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire, and between them cooked up a plan to run a conference on 1950s popular culture. This conference was held in Trinity College Dublin in May 2008, and the volume of essays you hold in your hands is its mutant offspring. We would like to thank all the participants in that conference, many of whom agreed to contribute to this book. Our thanks to Cyndy Hendershot, Jarlath Killeen, Stephen Matterson and Jenny McDonnell for their help with the original conference. Our thanks to the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, and particularly to the MPhil in Popular Literature, for their financial assistance in running the event. To Clive Bloom, for helping us to get the book into print, and to Christabel Scaife and Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave Macmillan for their patience and enthusiasm. Our thanks to the following hep cats and real gone kids, for their advice, encouragement and support: James Bell, John Exshaw, Tracy Fahey, Peter Hutchings, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Maria Parsons, Diane Sadler, Aspasia Stephanou, and to all our students on the MPhil in Popular Literature.
x
About the Contributors
Kevin Corstorphine is lecturer in English at the Scarborough campus of the University of Hull, having previously taught at Limerick and Dundee. He holds a PhD entitled ‘Space and Fear in Contemporary American Horror Fiction’ from the University of Dundee as well as an M.Litt in Romanticism from the University of St Andrews. His interests include the Gothic, American Literature, popular culture, film and theoretical approaches to space and place. He is also interested in the reception of science in literature, particularly evolution. He has published articles on H.P. Lovecraft, Oscar Wilde, Stephen King, and John Ajvide Lindqvist, among others. He is currently working on the weird tale, ecology and the Gothic, with particular reference to Ambrose Bierce. Dara Downey is an IRCHSS post-doctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and completed her PhD there in 2009. She has previously published essays on the work of Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Richard Matheson and Mark Z. Danielewski. As the book review editor for The Irish Journal of Gothic & Horror Studies she has produced numerous reviews on horror fiction, film and television. Her current research project is concerned with the nineteenth-century American women’s ghost story. Christopher Frayling was Rector of the Royal College of Art in London from 1996–2009, and Professor of Cultural History there as well as a former Chairman of the Arts Council England. He has published 16 books and numerous articles on visual culture, design and history, over the last 25 years including The Vampyre (1976) Spaghetti Westerns (1980); The Royal College of Art: 150 years of art and design (1987); Vampyres – Lord Byron to Count Dracula (1991); Nightmare – The birth of horror (1996); and Mad, Bad and Dangerous – the Scientist and the Cinema (2005) as well as many academic articles, review pieces and essays. He was knighted in 2000 for ‘services to art and design education’. Mark Jancovich is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of several books: Horror (1992); The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (1993); Rational xi
xii About the Contributors
Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (1996); and The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (with Lucy Faire and Sarah Stubbings, 2003). He is also the editor of several collections: Approaches to Popular Film (with Joanne Hollows, 1995); The Film Studies Reader (with Joanne Hollows and Peter Hutchings, 2000); Horror, The Film Reader (2001); Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans (with James Lyons, 2003); Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (with Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis, 2003); and Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (with Paul Grainge and Sharon Monteith, 2006. He was also the founder of Scope: An Online Journal of Film Studies; and is series editor (with Eric Schaefer) of the MUP book series, Inside Popular Film. He is currently writing a history of horror in the 1940s. Derek Johnston was awarded a PhD from the University of East Anglia based on his thesis ‘Genre, Taste and the BBC: The Origins of British Television Science Fiction’ in 2010. His publications include ‘Experimental Moments: R.U.R. and the Birth of British Television Science Fiction’ for the journal Science Fiction Film and Television; the entry on ‘When Worlds Collide’ for When Worlds Collide: The Critical Companion to Science Fiction Film Adaptations and ‘The BBC versus Science Fiction! The collision of transnational genre and national identity in British television in the early 1950s’ in Alien Nation: British Science Fiction Film and Television. Darryl Jones is Head of the School of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where he teaches nineteenth-century fiction and popular literature. He has written or edited seven books, most recently an edition of M.R. James’s Collected Ghost Stories for OUP. He has also written many articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular literature, film and culture. Wayne Kinsey is a consultant histopathologist in Norwich and lecturer at the University of East Anglia School of Medicine. He became a Hammer fan in 1971 at the impressionable age of 10 after watching a Friday night season of Hammer horror films and hasn’t been the same since. Since 1997 he has been writing the fanzine The House That Hammer Built and has written two successful books on the company, Hammer Films – the Bray Studios Years and Hammer Films – the Elstree Studios Years. The latter was recently nominated for best book of 2007 in the prestigious American Rondo horror film awards. He is currently working on two more books about Hammer. Hammer Films – a Life in Pictures is a pictorial book in collaboration with the BFI stills archive, expanding a
About the Contributors xiii
former BFI Southbank exhibition he contributed to showing that Hammer didn’t just make horror films, but had a much wider canvas working with a number of international acting and technical legends. This is to be followed by The Real Hammer Story, detailing the lives of the gifted technicians that made Hammer’s films the cult they are today. He also co-wrote the script for the supernatural thriller Messages (2007) starring Jeff Fahey, based on his original story. Elizabeth McCarthy teaches in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, where she was awarded a PhD in 2008. She has published essays on Romantic aesthetics and the serial killer, the vampire body and its mutilation, the politics of the guillotine in the French Revolution, World War I Propaganda and Post-World War I American Advertising, the ghost stories of Margaret Oliphant and conservative politics in Back to the Future. She has also co-edited the book Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear (2007) and is currently compiling and editing the book Jack the Ripper: Early Fictional Accounts of the Whitechapel Murderer. She is the co-founder and editor of the online journal The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (web address: http://irishgothichorrorjournal. homestead.com). Bernice M. Murphy is Lecturer in Popular Literature at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She has edited the collection Shirley Jackson: Essays on the Literary Legacy (2005) and written The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (2009). She is co-founder and editor of the online Irish Journal of Horror and Gothic Studies and has also published essays on Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Jonathan Carroll, Back to the Future and the recent decline of the American horror movie. She is currently working on a book about the relationship between horror and the wilderness in American popular culture. Kim Newman is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. His fiction includes The Night Mayor, the Anno Dracula novels, The Quorum, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne) and The Man from the Diogenes Club under his own name and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as Jack Yeovil. His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books (with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who. He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines (writing Empire’s popular Video Dungeon column), has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics, and scripted radio and television
xiv About the Contributors
documentaries. He has written and directed a tiny film called Missing Girl and written plays for BBC radio. His official web-site can be found at www.johnnyalucard.com. Lorna Piatti-Farnell is lecturer in Cultural and Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology. Her main research interests include cultural history, twentieth-century literature, film studies and advertising. Additional research interests include anime, manga and Gothic fiction. In her work, Lorna takes an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on issues of ethnicity, gender, national identity and cultural iconography. She specializes in food scholarship and has published on several aspects of culinary studies, including food and subjectivity, sugar and cultural politics, culinary history and memoirs. Lorna is currently completing a monograph entitled Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction, to be published in late 2011. Her next project, a monograph entitled Beef: A Global History, will be published in 2012. David J. Skal is an author and documentary film-maker who has extensively explored horror and science fiction in such books as The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror; Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, and Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture. With Nina Auerbach, he is co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and, with Elias Savada, author of Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning. He has guest lectured at dozens of colleges and universities across the United States, and has taught courses based on The Monster Show at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Victoria. His official web site is www.monstershow.net.
Introduction
The Age of Anxiety. This was the title of W.H. Auden’s Pulitzer Prizewinning long poem of 1947, in which four representative characters gather to talk, love and dream in a New York bar during World War II. Auden clearly caught a post-war mood, and the phrase ‘age of anxiety’ soon became proverbial, seeping into all levels of American culture over the next few years. The young composer Leonard Bernstein read The Age of Anxiety in the summer of 1947, and felt an ‘extreme personal identification of myself with the poem’, which signified for him ‘the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith’ in the modern world. His second symphony, composed in 1948–9, is his own record of his engagement with the poem’s themes and ideas; he called this symphony The Age of Anxiety.1 Subtitled ‘A Baroque Eclogue’, and written in an alliterative verse-form which he adapted from Anglo-Saxon poetry, Auden’s poem would generally be recognized as a characteristic high-cultural document, deploying a classic Modernist repertoire of allusions, images and registers to create a fragmented textual representation of the archetypal city of modernity, New York, the city to which Auden had moved in 1939. To a certain extent, The Age of Anxiety operates as a poetic response to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the greatest of all poetic documents of the modern city (though its use of dream and stream-of-consciousness interior monologue also demonstrate the extent of Auden’s engagement with the later work of Joyce). What Auden’s poem does is to inscribe in poetic form the superseding of London by New York as the global megalopolis, itself a symbol of the rapid decline of the British Empire across the interwar years, and its replacement by the US as a global–imperial superpower. It might not have been a surprise to find Leonard Bernstein, sophisticated New York intellectual that he was, wrestling with the implications 1
2
It Came from the 1950s!
of both The Age of Anxiety and the Age of Anxiety in the late 1940s. But the age of anxiety, as a structure of feeling, or what we might now call a cultural meme for the post-war years, operated across traditional aesthetic hierarchies and genre boundaries, and in doing so reached an enormous audience made up of highly disparate interpretive communities, affecting not only the metropolitan intellectual elite whom Auden might be thought of as addressing in his work (readers such as Bernstein), but also the rather different implied (and actual) readership of bestselling, mass-market fiction, those readers whom, according to some accounts, Modernism set out explicitly to exclude and alienate.2 And so it was that readers of William March’s potboiling classic, The Bad Seed (1954), would have encountered a scene near the beginning of the novel in which Christine Penmark, mother of the murderously precocious young sociopath Rhoda (who has just murdered a classmate because he won a school prize she coveted, and is the ‘Bad Seed’ of the novel’s title), overhears a conversation between two men in a park which comes conveniently close to expressing both her own increasingly uneasy state of mind and that of the United States itself during the 1950s: ‘I was reading the other day,’ said the taller of the two, ‘that the age we live in is an age of anxiety. You know what? I thought that was pretty good – a pretty fair judgement. I told Ruth about it when I got home, and she said, “You can say that again!” ’ ‘Every age that people live in is an age of anxiety,’ said the other man. ‘If anybody asks me, I’ll say the age we live in is an age of violence. It looks to me like violence is in everybody’s mind these days. It looks like we’re just going to keep on until there’s nothing left to ruin. If you stop and think about it, that scares you.’ ‘Well, maybe we live in an age of anxiety and violence.’ ‘Now, that sounds like it. Come to think about it, I guess that’s what our age is really like.’3 In a further series of acts of cultural transference, The Bad Seed was almost immediately transformed into a successful stage melodrama, which in turn became a minor masterpiece of trash cinema in 1956, at the hands of Mervyn LeRoy, a veteran Hollywood director with a background in vaudeville. While some might want to read the story we have just told as one of the sleazy exploitation of high art to low ends, or even an act of cultural vandalism, the editors and contributors of this volume tend to see things rather differently. Rather than the debasement of great art, we see this as
Introduction 3
a story in which W.H. Auden is one commentator among many, articulating a much more generalized sense of anxiety, and one which rapidly found its appropriate level, form and register in the sphere of popular culture. This volume of essays, then, is predicated on the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times, most particularly through their habitual deployment of forms of symbolic or metaphorical articulation, as a means of approaching their subjects obliquely. Unsurprisingly, cinema, the great popular aesthetic medium of the twentieth century, plays a definitive part in this argument. The two defining genres of 1950s cinema can themselves be seen as popular cultural responses to the age of anxiety: film noir, with its literalized shadow-world of troubling moral perplexities; and science fiction, which turned increasingly to paranoid fantasies of invasion and mutation. Both genres attempted to represent a world in which there were no certainties, and nothing was as it seemed. A series of questions suggest themselves. Why the 1950s? Why America? Why popular culture? And why this sense of anxiety? These are interrelated questions, and thus to a very large degree impossible to approach separately. Cumulatively, the essays in this volume provide a series of answers to these questions. The story of America’s cultural rise, which this Introduction and a number of our essays chart, is also, inextricably, the story of the end of the British Empire. In the decade after World War II, it had become apparent that Britain was finished as a global–imperial power – but not necessarily immediately as a cultural one. British popular cultural production in the 1950s has its own low-key fascination and integrity, and the first half of our book interweaves accounts of British and American pop culture, which we hope our volume places in a dialogic relationship, each commenting upon the other. It is no accident, therefore, that we chose to begin with W.H. Auden, a British émigré commenting on the American scene. Nevertheless, the burden of our story is that the 1950s was to be the first authentically American decade. The received idea of 1950s America is a comfortable one, with a nation basking in suburban security under the wise, grandfatherly presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, enjoying an unprecedented consumer boom brought on by post-war affluence. This affluence was itself a direct product of America’s new-found superpower status. It is our contention that the securing of the American imperium after 1945 manifested itself in two ways. One was hard power, the global (or, at least, western) military and political hegemony of the superpower, in which
4
It Came from the 1950s!
the ‘military-industrial complex’ – not, at that time, a catch-all focus for conspiracy-theorist paranoia, but a descriptive term for the peculiar nature and source of American power in the post-war settlement, and furthermore a term coined by (or at least attributed to) Eisenhower himself – oversaw all (or very many) aspects of American life. Indeed, Eisenhower can be seen to embody in his very career the indissociability of military and political power in post-war America, as he moved seamlessly from Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe (1943–45) to Chief of Staff of the US Army (1945–48), to Supreme Commander of NATO (1950–52), to President of the United States (1953–61). From 1948–50 he was President of Columbia University, New York, suggesting in symbolic terms that all spheres of American life, including its universities and its intellectuals, were open for incorporation into the military-industrial complex, gathered in under the protective wing of the B-52 bomber. But the story of 50s America and its place in the world is also one of soft power, of cultural imperialism enabled by the first genuinely global popular culture. The 1950s marked the beginnings of a distinctively contemporary popular culture, one in which television became the dominant medium for transmission, as it was to remain throughout the twentieth century. Television was the perfect cultural medium for this new, suburban, homeowning America, disseminating, embodying, reflecting, and creating its values. Twentieth-century popular culture is primarily an American phenomenon, and it is for this reason that the 1950s might be understood as the first distinctively ‘American’ decade; and, as Aldous Huxley – like Auden, a British intellectual transplanted to American soil – wrote prophetically as early as 1932 in Brave New World, ‘The future of America is the future of the world’ – though Huxley was certainly ambivalent about this future, as his account of a feral, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles in Ape and Essence (1949) shows. As well as television, the 50s also saw the widespread introduction or popularizing of many other characteristic features of American modernity: air travel; two-car families and a greatly expanded highway system for them to drive on; supermarkets and fast food; large-scale college education, initially as a product of the 1944 GI Bill, which provided free college education for servicemen returning from World War II; vast corporations, economic powerhouses of the new American Empire, and in their wake the emergence of a managerial class, the white-collar worker, or ‘organisation man’.4 With the economic boom came prosperity and security on a level never before experienced by so many people. As James Patterson has put it, it was ‘the biggest boom yet’ and the ‘mid 1950s
Introduction 5
seemed almost wonderful, especially in a material sense, to millions of upwardly mobile people.’5 This was not the only boom. 1950s popular culture created a generation, the first generation to have grown up immersed in popular culture within the home. This is the famously self-mythologizing ‘baby boom’ generation, products of a demographic phenomenon, a marked rise in American birth rates from approximately 1946–64, which was itself in part a (natural!) response to post-war affluence and security. Indeed, this period 1946–64, might be said to constitute a ‘long 1950s’: this is certainly how we as editors and contributors to the volume would want to define the historical parameters of our period. Unquestionably, the baby boomers were to set the American cultural agenda for the second half of the twentieth century. As with ‘age of anxiety’, the very term ‘baby boom’ was to become axiomatic, permeating American cultural discourse across the 1950s and beyond, and doing so in a variety of ways which were, again, often oblique. The term seems to have been coined, or at least popularized, by the columnist and economic commentator, Sylvia Post, in a New York Post article of 1951: ‘Take the 3,548,000 babies born in 1950. Bundle them into a batch, bounce them all over the bountiful land that is America. What do you get? Boom. The biggest, boomiest boom ever known in history.’6 Post’s self-consciously hip, flip, pop-cultural mimicry is itself a cultural product, an act of linguistic inflation entirely in keeping with its affluent, confident historical moment. It also, like a number of cultural endeavours of the 50s and early 60s, attempts to graft popcultural sensibilities onto older forms. The ‘New Journalism’ of Tom Wolfe and others (whose characteristic tone Post seems to be anticipating here) was such an endeavour, as of course was the Pop Art movement, whose practitioners attempted to assimilate the modern media of advertising, comic book art, and graphic design and reproduce them as refracted through the high-cultural formulations of fine art. Coming at the end of the baby boom period, Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (1964), the iconic document of the Pop Art movement, encapsulates many of the ideas we are discussing here and throughout this volume, most notably Cold War paranoia, American weapons-fetishism, and the interpenetration of traditional aesthetic hierarchies, to produce a work which is simultaneously satire, homage, critique, celebration, and translation. Lichtenstein, like Leonard Bernstein, was a New York intellectual curious about popular culture. In 1957, Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim translated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into the medium of the Broadway musical with West Side Story; Lichtenstein, who taught
6
It Came from the 1950s!
fine art at SUNY Oswego in upstate New York, and then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, adapted Whaam! from the Jerry Grandenetti cover for DC Comics’ All American Men of War # 89 (February 1962). In a manner which is again entirely characteristic of its age and its subject, the painting’s title, Whaam!, is a near-synonym for ‘Boom!’ Given this standard view of the 1950s as a period of great stability and affluence, readers might be justified in asking what precisely it was that America had to be anxious about. In part, the answer to this question is a Freudian one, and so we might want to understand popular cultural documents as arising out of the American unconscious; many of the essays in the book do precisely that. But the answer is also materialist and ideological; that is, it arises from historical concerns specific to the 1950s. As the literary historian Sacvan Bercovitch has observed: In a strange way, no quarter of the century has had to grapple with extremity, or its terrible aftermath, more than the seemingly tranquil decades after the Second World War, which some Americans still look back on as a Golden Age. Besides coming to terms with general carnage on an unheard of scale, and moving rapidly towards the reconstruction of Europe and Asia, the post war world had to assimilate the most shocking news of the war, perhaps of the century as a whole: the details of the holocaust and the effects of the nuclear bomb.7 Indeed, ‘rarely has a society experienced such rapid or dramatic changes as those which occurred in the US after 1945’.8 The war had proved a decisive catalyst for post-war growth.9 The gross national product soared by 250% between 1945 and 1960; millions of returning GIs prompted the rapid growth of suburbia and one of the most astounding migrations in history. Consequently, between 1948 and 1958, 11 million new suburban homes were established. An astonishing 83% of all population growth during the 1950s took place in the suburbs. By 1970, they would house more people than either cities or farms. Behind the dry statistics lay the inescapable reality of the situation: that the basic living pattern of American society was undergoing a revolution. The surface gloss of widespread prosperity and domestic bliss promoted by the official ideology was all too often contradicted by the facts beneath. From 1950 to 1953, the nation was engaged in the Korean War, a bitterly divisive conflict that would result in over four million casualties, and which almost culminated in the use of nuclear
Introduction 7
weapons.10 Despite the nation’s unprecedented prosperity, millions of its citizens – including most African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans – were still living with poverty and discrimination.11 Films, television, advertising and popular fiction all worked to bombard the nation’s women with positive images of themselves as homemakers, housewives, mothers; and yet millions of women felt frustrated and unfulfilled within these roles, particularly in the wake of World War II, which had, among other things, offered (or, more accurately, demanded) that women contribute to the war effort by becoming active and highly visible outside the home. In 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique provided a devastating analysis of the oppressive condition of the American housewife in the 1950s, and the modern Women’s Movement was born. Perhaps the most spectacular example of the psychologicallyimploding American woman of the 1950s was provided in the person of Sylvia Plath, and in this volume Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s essay demonstrates the extent to which Plath’s poetry is indebted to American consumer culture and the language of advertising. Plath wrote that she wanted to transform her own home into ‘an ad out of House and Garden’, complete with its ‘dream kitchen’, but in her poetry, these domestic ideals are transformed into phantasmagorical images for her own psychological breakdown. There is, we would contend, something representative about this process of transformation. The unconscious traumas of 50s American life were to an extent kept in check by the growth of biological psychiatry. The 1950s saw the introduction of numerous ‘wonder drugs’ with sedative properties, aimed directly at women undergoing a variety of emotional difficulties. Drugs like Meprobamate were increasingly widely prescribed; by 1956 it and other tranquillizers were taken by one in 20 Americans.12 By no means confined to the era’s housewives, this emotional anxiety and sense of crisis was also experienced by their white-collar husbands, who were expected to devote most of their time and energy to the wellbeing of ever more demanding and impersonal corporations (including, of course, pharmaceutical corporations) so that they would have enough money to buy those luxuries that society told its citizens they must have in order to be happy. Was it for this that they had fought the War? A culture of conspicuous consumption and built-in obsolescence, as part of a life lived under perpetual Cold War conditions, proved unbearably traumatic for many Americans. Expectations for an ever-increasing quality of life, measured in terms of material acquisition, became normalized in post-war America; but the disparity between idealized
8
It Came from the 1950s!
expectation and lived reality could seem insupportable. Increasingly, intellectuals such as David Reisman issued scathing critiques of the modern way of life that emphasized the psychological dangers which post-war American society allegedly posed its inhabitants. Similarly, critiques of suburbia by writers such as John Keats (The Crack in the Picture Window, 1956), and Richard and Katharine Gordon (The Split-Level Trap, 1961), claimed that the ‘conformist’, insular way of life encouraged in these new communities was also extremely detrimental to the mental wellbeing of their inhabitants. As James Patterson has pointed out, many of the key terms used in such critiques exposed these fears for the nation’s mental health – expressions such as ‘alienation’, ‘identity crisis’, ‘eclipse of community’, and, as we have seen, ‘age of anxiety’, entered public discourse.13 America was populated by the uprooted; the mass society obliterated individual identity; society itself, according to Riesman, was really a lonely crowd. The influential social commentator, Vance Packard, weighed in with a series of acutely sceptical analyses of modern America, The Hidden Persuaders (1957, on advertising), The Status Seekers (1959, on American social aggrandisement),The Waste Makers (1960, on built-in obsolescence), and The Pyramid Climbers (1964, on organization men and corporate hierarchies). If the cumulative effect of Packard’s works was to present a picture of post-war America as hollow, valueless and sick, then he was in good company, as this, too, was the conclusion of the great Harvard economist J.K. Galbraith in his most influential work, The Affluent Society (1958), which demonstrated the ways in which the values and aspirations of America were completely at odds with its actual social needs. One of the most vivid expressions of this post-war anxiety is Norman Mailer’s notorious essay ‘The White Negro’, in which he notes how ‘A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life’, the result of which is ‘a collective failure of nerve’. Commenting specifically upon the ‘psychic havoc’ caused by World War II and the knowledge it brought of the depths of man’s inhumanity and the indiscriminate and meaningless nature of mass death, be it by atomic war or concentration camp, Mailer concluded that the American ‘psyche was subjected to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well’.14 And if, as Barbara Ehrenreich has claimed, ‘warfare and aggressive masculinity have been . . . mutually reinforcing cultural enterprises’, then the apparent lack of agency that was concomitant with the modern warfare of World War II might well be seen as a point of crisis for masculinity.15 Or, as Mailer phrases it, being ‘deprived of cause and effect’, the aftermath of war had created a ‘crippled and perverted
Introduction 9
image of man’16 (291). Again, in a manner entirely in keeping with the era’s need for a rapprochement between avant-garde cultural analysis and the mass media, Mailer’s essay was reprinted in a collection entitled Advertisements for Myself (1959). Like so many other cultural analyses of this period, Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ is founded on anxieties which grew out of fears of nuclear holocaust. For this reason, we might think of the 50s, as many did during that decade, as an epistemic moment for modernity. For Mailer and others, being members of the first generation to have to live with the ever-present possibility of total global annihilation was potentially an unbearable psychological strain; to live under these conditions required a commensurately total renegotiation of the norms and conventions of social life and relations – all previous bets were off. The 50s, we have seen, witnessed an economic boom; it witnessed a baby boom. But it was nuclear warfare that unquestionably promised ‘the biggest, boomiest boom ever known in history’. What was a radical critique in the 1950s has by now become internalized, and so it has long been assumed, with considerable justification, that the dominant preoccupation of the 1950s was precisely with nuclear fears; and in part, at least, our volume reflects this. In fact, it could be argued that ‘The Bomb’ attains the status of an overarching metaphor or master-narrative for the era as a whole. On receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature on 10 December 1950, William Faulkner famously said: ‘our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: “When will I be blown up?” ’17 This identical sentiment is expressed over 30 years later by Stephen King, Pop Lit laureate of the baby-boom generation, in a well-known quote from his semi-autobiographical study of the horror genre Danse Macabre (1981): We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth and that any Iron Curtain outlaw who tried to draw down on us in that great saloon of international politics would discover who the fastest gun in the West was . . . but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any other nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium-90 in our milk from nuclear testing.18
10
It Came from the 1950s!
This dominant preoccupation accounts for the fact that many of our essays here are concerned with Science Fiction and Horror, as it was obviously through these genres that nuclear fears tended to find their most ready articulation. We are pleased to reprint here revised and expanded versions of classic essays by two of the foremost contemporary commentators on cinematic popular culture. David J. Skal, writing on the way in which American popular culture became saturated with ‘anxious images applied science and technology’, which ‘provided a safe outlet for diffuse fears about the scientific, technological and military juggernaut that was engulfing the world’. Kim Newman’s essay considers the ways in which these anxieties about nuclear warfare resulted in a series of memorable science-fiction monsters, both American and Japanese. Unable to look the Bomb in the eye at such close quarters, popular culture displaced its anxieties into these images of giant, irradiated monsters laying waste to cities. In their essay, Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnston invite us to revise what might have been easy assumptions about 50s genre films, arguing that it was the generic special effects, rather than the encoded ideological messages, which most preoccupied the original audiences of 50s sci-fi, and that, far from attempting an early version of today’s CGI verisimilitude, it was precisely the outlandishness and self-conscious artificiality of these often low-budget effects that gave them their force and appeal. However, as with all forms of majoritarian or dominant historiography, this assumption leaves out as much as it includes. Indeed, Faulkner notwithstanding, statistical analyses from the 1950s themselves tended to show that other, more directly tangible fears were as at least as prevalent: for instance, a poll taken in 1959 indicated that American citizens viewed juvenile crime as more worrisome than open-air atomic bomb testing.19 Youth culture had certainly made its impact on 1950s America. There were more teenagers than ever before, they had more money and were more aware of themselves as a semi-autonomous group within society. This, of course, had innumerable consequences for popular culture, as did the crime statistics of the period, which indicated a substantial rise in crimes committed by teenagers, commonly referred to as Juvenile Delinquents. The media panics which surrounded the issue of Juvenile Delinquency were wide ranging – and went far beyond the specifics of criminal behaviour, broaching every aspect of youth culture. Music (specifically Rock ’n’ Roll), films, TV and comics were all brought under scrutiny, not just in terms of their content and imagery, but also of the ways in which they were consumed by their teenage audience. As one commentator on the subject has suggested, such media panics,
Introduction 11
by reasserting the values of dominant adult groups, seek to defuse the threat posed by youth culture and thus to ‘re-establish a generational status quo’.20 However, what the theme of Juvenile Delinquency also reveals is the extent to which issues of race, class, gender and national identity, as well as generational conflict, contributed to rising public discourses of anxiety, particularly among dominant social groups, during the 1950s. Elizabeth McCarthy’s essay on ‘JD’ panics focuses specifically on one area of anxiety: the reckless, destabilizing energy of female sexuality, threatening to overwhelm the carefully-constructed family norm of 50s America. Time and again, pulp fictions and exploitation movies, at all points privileging packaging over content, presented lurid, salacious images of large-breasted, scantily-clad ‘thrill-seeking’ women in a manner meant simultaneously to arouse and to unsettle their consumers. Even those anxieties ostensibly entirely concerned with nuclear destruction often revealed subtler forms of unease. The Civil Defense movement of the 1950s encouraged all Americans to become Cold Warriors, emphasizing the fact that, for most citizens, the frontline of the battle against the communism was the home front. It was the individual responsibility of families to provide themselves with as much protection as they could against an impending nuclear strike; thus, it was their patriotic duty to turn their suburban homes into bomb shelters.21 As Kim Newman writes elsewhere, ‘the bomb shelter became an American institution . . . . A whole cowboy industry tried to persuade paranoid suburbanites of the fifties that shelters were as essential as a pool in the backyard, a finned car, and aluminium siding on the house’.22 The trope of the suburban home as a kind of fortress became increasingly prevalent across our long 1950s, revealing unexpected anxieties about the nature of community in the new suburbs, in small-town America, and in the big cities. Frequently, the threats explored in these shelter narratives come not from the Bomb itself, nor from invading communist forces, but from one’s very neighbours: come the apocalypse, it is against the unpatriotic unprepared that American citizens will need to arm themselves. This is the scenario animating a number of the classic works of genre fiction of the period, most notably Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), whose post-apocalyptic protagonist barricades himself into his home, as his former friends and neighbours, now infected with vampirism, try to force their way in. Shirley Jackson’s novel The Sundial (1958) has a wealthy New England family locking themselves away against Armageddon in their well-stocked shelter – and pointedly locking their lower-class neighbours out. Similarly, a number
12
It Came from the 1950s!
of episodes of Rod Serling’s landmark sci-fi TV series, The Twilight Zone, offered powerful critiques of mob culture and self-centredness: in ‘The Shelter’ (1961), an unfounded UFO scare exposes the egocentric nature of an otherwise idyllic neighbourhood; while in ‘The Monsters are Due on Maple Street’ (1959), a power failure and rumours of alien invasion again cause neighbour violently to turn against neighbour. Bernice Murphy’s essay revisits the suburban 1950s from a contemporary perspective, and in doing so examines the creative potentials of revisionism itself, as seen in Todd Haynes’ obsessively detailed homage to the lush melodramas of Douglas Sirk in Far from Heaven (2003) and Andrew Currie’s delirious 2006 ‘reimagining’ of 1950s suburbia in the comic zombie movie Fido. Both films are part of an ongoing series of works which look back to received notions of a halcyon 1950s of suburban stability, and exploit the anachronistic gap between contemporary sensibilities and nostalgic dreams for often highly creative ends. Serling, Jackson and Matheson, like very many of the classic genre writers of this time, were powerfully engaged with the implications of their historical moments, and two of the essays in this collection are studies of 50s genre greats. Dara Downey’s essay reads the work of Shirley Jackson in the light of the discoveries of 1950s anthropology, and places her work in the main stream of the American academic intellectual discourse of the time through analysing its repeated concerns with ritual and myth, purity and danger, all embodied in the classic generic trope of the Gothic house. Kevin Corstorphine looks at the short fiction of Robert Bloch, literary father of Norman Bates, which proves revelatory on the subject of 1950s masculinity, and causes us to rethink (once again) simplistic assumptions about the monolithic sexual politics of the pulp story: ‘Bloch’s writing of the 1950s,’ Corstorphine writes, ‘shows an attitude to women that subverts received notions of female submissiveness and male dominance.’ Given the geopolitical concerns of the 1950s, it is perhaps fitting that British culture should feature in our introduction – although not in the essays themselves – as a kind of coda. And yet it is fascinating to examine the ways in which the former global hegemon adjusted to its new-found role as subsidiary world power, or even perhaps as US client state. The Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Britain and France humiliatingly withdrew from using Israeli forces to launch a proxy war in Egypt after Eisenhower had refused to support the venture, is often seen as marking the definitive end of the British Empire. Again, these are concerns which find their popular cultural expressions. In this volume, Darryl Jones’s essay looks at the tensions and compromises involved in an Anglo-American
Introduction 13
co-production of 1957, Night of the Demon, one of the great post-war horror films, and a genuinely international venture, and examines the film’s clash of rationalist modernity and pre-modern metaphysics in the light of the clashing cultures of those involved, at all stages, in the making of the film. W.H. Auden, with whom we began our story, is in some ways an embodiment of the changing geopolitics of the post-war settlement. As noted, he moved to New York in 1939, and in 1946 he took up the US citizenship which he was to retain for the rest of his life; The Age of Anxiety might fairly be seen as Auden’s poetic response to becoming an American. For some, Auden became the archetype of what became known in the 1950s as the ‘integrated’ intellectual, reinforcing dominant cultural values.23 Auden may have felt that he was leaving a sinking ship, but for a number of British intellectuals this just made him a rat. In an influential 1960 essay, ‘Outside the Whale’ (its title adapted from ‘Inside the Whale’, George Orwell’s account of 1920s Modernism), the great socialist historian E.P. Thompson looked despairingly at an America characterized by ‘the roar of empty affluence and the constant solicitations of “organization man” ’, and pointed the finger squarely at the American Auden as the representative of ‘the “Natopolitan” intellectual of the fifties’.24 Stephen Spender, fellow member of the marxisant ‘Auden gang’ of the 1930s, became an avowed Cold Warrior in the 50s, as joint editor (with Irving Kristol) of Encounter, a periodical funded by the anti-Communist Congress for Cultural Freedom, a front organization for the CIA.25 Many of the issues and anxieties we have discussed in this introduction had their own peculiar, Vimto-flavoured British inflections. The end of rationing in 1954 marked the official demise of post-war austerity, and the beginnings of a home-grown consumer boom for which Prime Minister Harold Macmillan liked to take a good deal of the credit. The titles of two recent major histories of post-war Britain, Austerity Britain and Never Had It So Good (the last an election slogan associated with Macmillan) neatly encapsulate this transition.26 The catastrophic visions of the novels of John Wyndham, notably The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) are distinctive domestic versions of the Cold War anxieties which permeate so much post-war culture. More explicitly nuclear was the BBC docudrama The War Game (1965), depicting the aftermath of a nuclear strike on Britain, and considered so horrific that it was pulled from the schedules, and not shown on British television until 1985. Making a rather belated appearance in 1968, the poet and painter Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture
14
It Came from the 1950s!
was a self-conscious attempt to translate the sensibilities of Mailer’s ‘White Negro’ for a specifically British post-war audience and milieu, with home-grown Teddy Boys joining American beatniks and hipsters as the authentic voices of nuclear existentialism.27 It was the Gothic visions of Hammer Studios that were to prove the most distinctive British contribution to popular culture in the 1950s. The scholarly literature on Hammer is extensive, and deservedly so, as the studio’s films carved out a global identity over the late 1950s, with their highly distinctive mixture of contemporary sensibilities (sex and gore) and traditional virtues: a specifically British literary canon (the works of Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker and Conan Doyle, from which they never deviated for long), a superb repertory company of actors led by Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, and a production team of eccentrics, boffins, and steady chaps who could be relied upon to perform wonders on small budgets by recycling sets, costumes, stars and scripts as necessary. In a manner entirely characteristic of post-war Britain, Hammer were simultaneously cosy and radical – as their frequent battles with the censors testify. This volume includes two essays on Hammer. The first is by the studio’s foremost historian, Wayne Kinsey, whose essay offers an overview of the reception of Hammer in the 1950s, and particularly of its ongoing battles for creative autonomy against the British Board of Film Censors, a body who often seem determined to stamp out any whiff of originality or excitement in these films. Fortunately for Britain, and for cinema history, Hammer proved extraordinarily resilient and resourceful, and so tended to find ways around the censors. It is in part because of this achievement that the films are now held in such cultural esteem, and Christopher Frayling, doyen of British popular cultural studies, begins his essay on Hammer’s Dracula with an account of his own role as a cultural commentator and administrator in helping to secure for Hammer’s collection of props, make-up and costumes, from fake eyeballs to Kensington Gore, their rightful place as part of the British ‘national heritage’. In all of the books, films and images discussed in this volume, popular cultural narratives operate in complex and often duplicitous ways. As Theodor W. Adorno – like Auden and Huxley, another European intellectual transplanted into American soil – recognized in the essays later collected as The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (1990), the fruit of his meditations upon his new home, popular culture could operate conspiratorially to reinforce the power of vested interests – as a recursive medium, which does the thinking for its audience, and presents them with art which he notoriously likened to pre-digested baby food,
Introduction 15
popular culture was the perfect medium for securing and enforcing cultural-imperial hegemony. And yet, as we have seen, popular culture also became a means of expressing themes and concerns which openly contradicted the cosily consensual message being disseminated by the military-industrial complex of which it might be viewed as the cultural arm. This duality, we would argue, is at the very heart of popular culture and its appeal. It is voracious. It is promiscuous. It respects no boundaries. And . . . IT! came from the 1950s!
Notes 1. Leonard Bernstein, ‘Essay on The Age of Anxiety’ (1949). For an account of Bernstein’s composition of The Age of Anxiety, see Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein, (London, Faber and Faber, 1994.), p. 335. 2. For the classic account of Modernism’s exclusivist programme, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses; Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992). 3. William March, The Bad Seed (New York: Harper Collins, 1953; 1997), p. 30. 4. William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War Two (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 111–17. 5. James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 311. 6. Sylvia Post, ‘Babies Equal Boom’, New York Post, May 4, 1951. 7. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Cambridge History of American Literature (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 24. 8. Chafe, p. 111. 9. Ibid., p. 111. 10. Patterson, p. 339. 11. Ibid., p. 333. 12. Jonathan Michel, Prozac on the Couch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 72. 13. Patterson, p. 339. 14. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” in Advertisments for Myself, (London: Flamingo, 1961; 1994), p. 291. 15. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (London: Virago, 1998), p. 129. 16. Mailer, p. 291. 17. William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, Stockholm, 10 December 1950: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulknerspeech.html; accessed 24 January 2011. 18. Stephen King, Danse Macabre, (London, Warner 1981) p. 23. 19. James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 63. 20. John Springhall. Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998). 21. See Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
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22. Kim Newman, Millennium Movies: A Critical Guide to Contemporary Horror Films (Prospect, KY: Harmony, 1999) p. 66. 23. For ‘integrated’ intellectuals, see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 137–70. 24. E.P. Thompson, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Out of Apathy (London: New Left Books, 1960), pp. 177, 193. 25. Collini, p. 145. 26. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006). 27. Jeff Nuttall, Bomb Culture (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968).
1
A-Bombs, B-Pictures, and C-Cups1 David J. Skal
When the atomic bomb leveled Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, newspaper readers learned not only of the appalling devastation but also of the explosion’s unearthly beauty, a glowing hothouse blossom rising to the heavens. Witnesses to the test blast in the New Mexico desert on 18 July tried to describe the indescribable. Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, deputy to General Leslie R. Groves, head of the War Department’s atomic bomb project, combined the language of the theatre and literary criticism in his recollection of the event to the press: ‘The lighting effects beggar description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty that the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately.’2 From its first deployment, the atomic bomb began radiating metaphors about knowledge, sin, and science that gave startling new life to ancient ideas. ‘I am become Death, shatterer of worlds,’ said bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting the Upanishad after the first test detonation. H.G. Wells, who died in 1946, bitter and frustrated by a war that had dashed his utopian hopes, saw a real Judgment Day. ‘[T]he end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded,’ he wrote in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).3 Promethean presumption, the spoiling of Eden, Pandora’s box, the golem, Faust, and Frankenstein all absorbed new energy from the atomic blast and in the process gave popular culture of the post-war years a particular mythic intensity. Like the fatal, beautiful plants envisioned by Nathaniel Hawthorne in Dr Rappaccini’s garden, the blossoming of the atom had a resonant symbolism that folded modern science into ancient alchemy. 17
18
It Came from the 1950s!
Uranium was the new philosopher’s stone, a substance that promised almost mystical powers over the physical world and the processes of life. Public receptivity to a re-energized Frankenstein mythos didn’t come out of nowhere; the war years had seen an unprecedented number of mad scientists in Hollywood films, not only from the major studios but from independents as well. It is not surprising that the war effort was shadowed in popular entertainment by anxious images of applied science and technology. Without overtly challenging the patriotism of wartime audiences, mad science films provided a safe outlet for diffuse fears about the scientific, technological and military juggernaut that was engulfing the world. Dr Cyclops (1940) presented what remains one of the screen’s most chilling portraits of an obsessed scientific mind, a distillation of all the Depression decade’s suspicions about experts and intellectuals and runaway science. Dr Thirkell (Albert Dekker) is a classic scientific hermit, holed up in the Peruvian Andes, where he has found a way to use atomic radiation to miniaturize living things, in much the same way previously essayed in Tod Browning’s The Devil Doll (1936). Thirkell’s intellectual brilliance is matched only by his nearsightedness – literal as well as figurative. Completely self-absorbed, he cannot fathom his visitors’ objections to being used in his experiments or their outrage at being reduced to the size of figurines. All human values are beneath consideration. As iconography, Thirkell’s shaved head seems influenced by Peter Lorre’s similar bald pate in Mad Love (1935); it simultaneously draws attention to his braincase while rendering him creepily childlike. Thirkell is, after all, a monstrous baby, concerned only with his own interests and gratifications. Dr Cyclops was the brainchild of the producer-director team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack, the same pair responsible for another famous study of relative scale, King Kong (1933). Hollywood’s bogeymen laureates, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, became even more identified with mad science during the war than in their first decade as the screen’s leading purveyors of fear. Karloff, of course, had built an identification with the Frankenstein story (despite other, distinguished work as a character actor), and Lugosi had played a handful of mad doctors among his villainous characterizations of the 1930s. Now, both men occupied the laboratory the way the Nazis occupied France. All the Hollywood mad doctors of the war years operated in obsessive reclusion, paralleling the real-world secrecy surrounding the efforts of military research scientists. The public, of course, knew nothing of
A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 19
the Manhattan Project, but it did know, from a thousand reminders about loose lips and sunken ships, that there was much at stake in keeping science in the service of war hush-hush. Movieland madmen of the 1940s also conducted their experiments under conditions of strict secrecy; those who stumbled into their laboratories or learned their secrets were dealt with harshly. But it would have been strange for the public not to be curious about the secret activities of wartime scientists. Might there be a superweapon in the works that might defeat Hitler? But part of the message conveyed by Hollywood horror pictures was that it was better not to poke around laboratories, ask too many questions, or interfere with techno-scientific prerogatives generally. But for audiences, the closed laboratory would have the irresistible appeal of Bluebeard’s forbidden room. Enrico Fermi, a key member of the scientific team at Los Alamos that gave birth to the atomic bomb, pooh-poohed concerns among his colleagues that deployment of the new weapon might present ethical problems. In a quote that might have rolled easily off the tongues of Lionel Atwill or George Zucco, Fermi is reported to have said, ‘Don’t bother me with your conscientious scruples. After all, the thing’s superb physics.’4 He is also said to have wagered with co-workers all night over whether the bomb might ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. But after witnessing the test blast at Alamagordo, Fermi was so shaken he was unable to drive his car. Nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer later expressed his misgivings about participating in the development of the bomb, his oft-quoted 1956 observation that ‘we did the work of the devil’ being the most pointed. Following the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic device in 1949, Oppenheimer opposed the development of an even more powerful weapon, the hydrogen bomb, an invention championed by his far more hawkish counterpart, Edward Teller. President Harry Truman ordered the development of the H-bomb in 1950, and Oppenheimer was investigated as a possible Soviet agent. Nuclear jitters increased as the United States became embroiled in the Korean War, with talk of possible H-bomb deployment. Hollywood’s first post-Hiroshima monster of any consequence was, like one of Rappaccini’s creations, a vegetable. The Thing from Another World (1951) featured James Arness in his pre-Gunsmoke days as an eight-foot-tall space alien found frozen in Arctic ice. Despite the extraterrestrial pedigree, Arness’s make-up is clearly inspired by the tried-andtrue Frankenstein formula. And while not initially created by science, this jolly green golem is protected by a scientist who can’t pass up an experiment, regardless of the dangers (‘Knowledge,’ he says, ‘is more
20
It Came from the 1950s!
important than life’). The Thing from Another World also forges a link with Frankenstein in its evocative use of the North Pole as a setting; Mary Shelley had employed the same backdrop as a framing device in her novel, though it had not yet been featured in any film adaptation. The arrest, trial, and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing atomic secrets to Russia gripped the nation between 1950 and 1953, a period when invasion fantasies with atomic overtones began to proliferate in Hollywood films. The Promethean theme of unforgiveable fire-stealing pervaded the trial and its aftermath. Of course there was nothing proprietary about the principles of nuclear physics, and the Rosenbergs’ alleged contact with the ‘enemy’ took place during the war, when Russia was an American ally. As early as 1946 physicist E.U. Condon, writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, argued for a realistic attitude: ‘the laws of nature, some seem to think, are ours exclusively and that we can keep others from learning by locking up what we have learned in the laboratory. . . . Having created an air of suspicion and mistrust, there will be persons among us who think that other nations can know nothing except what is learned by espionage. . .. ’5 Thus the already fluid metaphor of nuclear energy became colored by an additional overlay of invasion or violation fantasy. Among the rash of movies released during the Rosenberg incarceration was Five (1951), a landmark, if talky, film about a quintet of nuclear holocaust survivors directed by Arch Oboler, best known for the scare tactics he developed for his legendary radio suspense series Lights Out. George Pal’s When Worlds Collide (1951) didn’t mention the atomic bomb, but its end-ofthe-world story would likely not have found as strong an audience in the absence of real apocalyptic fear. In Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), earth is issued a stern warning by the alien visitor Klaatu (Michael Rennie, after both Claude Rains and Spencer Tracy had proved unavailable), not to export its deadly nuclear capabilities into space, upon penalty of extinction by more evolved races that have successfully eliminated territorial aggression from their cultures. The film marked the first use of the eerie electronic theremin in a strange science context; previously it had been used by Alfred Hitchcock for surrealistic dream sequences in Spellbound (1945), and to underscore the alcoholic delirium of Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend (1947). Thereafter, the futuristic instrument, played without strings or keyboard by moving the hands through a magnetic field, was almost exclusively associated with the science fiction genre (its occasional use as back-up instrumentation by the Beach Boys notwithstanding).
A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 21
The advertisements for The Day the Earth Stood Still are notable for inaugurating the now time-honored tradition of women with nearly exposed breasts as indispensable mad-science iconography. Never mind that the décolletage displayed by the actress on the poster is nowhere to be found in the film itself; in the case of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Patricia Neal appears in the advertising art squirming in a tight red strapless dress while Gort, the towering robot, aims an extraterrestrial death ray over her shoulder, destroying the US Capitol. In the film she never wears anything but the most conservative attire. A second poster goes even further in altering her appearance: in an illustration based on an actual photograph of Neal being carried off by the robot, her real clothes are replaced by another low-cut dress (this one does have straps, but they’re falling off), and her hair is considerably lengthened, and bleached blonde to boot. A quick glance at almost any selection of fifties film posters reveals a steady equation between out-of-control science and overflowing brassieres. Breasts are promotionally prominent in graphics for Invaders from Mars (1953), Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), Forbidden Planet (1956), It Conquered the World (1956), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Beginning of the End (1957), Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957), and dozens of others. A perennial favorite is the anatomically improbable painting for Bride of the Monster (1955), in which the unconscious woman’s mammaries are so eager for attention that both have somehow migrated to the same side of her torso. On one level, the sci-fi films were simply reflecting the swelling Hollywood trends toward big-busted blondes in a decade of unprecedented abundance, where breasts took on a cornucopian significance. And, looking beyond the already entrenched exploitation of the female body in advertising, one can discern a more revealing gestalt. The archetype of the nourishing breast, combined with images of fantastic images of science and destruction in the fifties, yields a concise visual statement: the attraction and terror of the technological teat. The torrent of technological and science-driven socioeconomic change in the 1950s also spurred a desire for the return of protective moral and religious values seemingly swept away in the post-war tide of transformation. John L. Balderston, whose unproduced (but Hollywood-purchased) stage adaptation of Peggy Webling’s Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre had enabled Universal Pictures to launch mad science talkies in 1931, co-scripted a bizarre right-wing harangue called Red Planet Mars (1952), in which the apparent voice of God, radioing earth from Mars, causes a counter-revolution in Russia and stops a Nazi inventor from destroying the world with something called a
22
It Came from the 1950s!
hydrogen valve. ‘In an age of A-Bombs, B-Pictures, cold wars and science fiction,’ the New York Times observed, ‘such items as Red Planet Mars, which landed at the Criterion on Saturday, would seem to be inevitable.’6 Although an inexorable Frankenstein energy pervaded the science fiction films of the fifties, the original picture that had set mad science rolling in Hollywood now took a back seat to more up-to-date horrors. The old film itself, however, had a fascinating second life in litigation. Balderston sued Universal in 1951 over money owed for several sequels involving the monster. The suit itself turned on a B-movie question: Who brought the Frankenstein monster to life and who could control it? Balderston, suffering from heart disease and near the end of his life, desperately needed a transfusion of cash (he had already liquidated many treasured possessions, including a Shakespeare first folio). Despite the somewhat shaky basis of the suit – the studio had used almost nothing of the Balderston – Webling play in the original film, and save for a prologue involving Mary Shelley, had substantially rewritten the contract work Balderston had done for the 1935 sequel Bride of Frankenstein – Universal settled out of court, paying the screenwriter and Webling estate more than one hundred thousand dollars to acquire all future rights to ‘their’ monster. In 1957, Frankenstein’s director James Whale, inactive for many years and disabled by a series of strokes, committed suicide in his Pacific Palisades swimming pool. It was years before his oeuvre would receive any serious critical attention. The same year Frankenstein figured prominently in another California court case, in which actress Mae Clarke (Frankenstein’s fiancée, Elizabeth, in the film) filed a publicity-generating one-million-dollar suit against a Los Angeles television station and its female horror movie host, Ottola Nesmith. During the breaks in a broadcast of the Whale film on 1 October 1957, Nesmith identified herself as Clarke (‘You are going to see me tonight in Frankenstein, a film I made when I was young and pretty’). Clarke claimed that Nesmith had impersonated her as ‘an aged, demented, hasbeen actress, presumably poverty-stricken, slovenly attired, and arthritic of body.’ According to Clarke, ‘I saw my whole career destroyed, all I had done, all I had worked for, all my future earnings swept away in one-anda-half hours.’7 In the only recorded instance of a horror movie being screened in an American courtroom, Frankenstein was projected for a superior court jury on 16 July 1958, which found for the defense. Upon appeal, however, Clarke won the right to a new trial and settled out of court for a ‘substantial sum.’
A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 23
But aside from television and the courtroom, Frankenstein’s quaint Depression-era pyrotechnics amounted to a mere firecracker compared to the box-office bang of the Bomb in its increasingly outsized screen cataclysms in the fifties. In Columbia Pictures’ Invasion USA (1952), atomic bombs are used to attack New York, Washington, and Boulder Dam, but the story turns out to be a demonstration of mass hypnosis. Paramount’s War of the Worlds (1953), directed by George Pal, didn’t depict an actual atomic holocaust, but its images of alien death rays and mass conflagration had only one referent in the real world, and it was hotly radioactive. Weird science films proved to be just what the mad doctor ordered in an America embarking on a backlash binge against experts of all stripes. The 1952 presidential race between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson became a mass referendum on guts versus brains, men of action versus ivory tower intellectuals. Red Planet Mars, released two months before the Republican National Convention of 1952, confidently assumed the ascendancy of Eisenhower, featuring a fictional president with a strong physical resemblance to Ike, identifying him as a former general as well. Anti-intellectualism isn’t anything new in American culture, and reached back to the puritanical distrust of prideful knowledge. Richard Hofstadter, in his classic study, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, observes that Stevenson ‘became the victim of accumulated grievances against intellectuals and brain-trusters which had festered in the American right wing since 1933.’8 The McCarthy era further pushed an ‘atmosphere of fervent malice and humorless imbecility’9 in American affairs. The average citizen, writes Hofstadter, ‘cannot cease to need or be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor, the irresponsible brain-truster, or the mad scientist. . . . ’10 The Eisenhower–Stevenson conflict embedded itself firmly in the narrative formulas of 1950s science fiction films, the ones in which the military is called in to clean up the debris generated by starry-eyed scientist-intellectuals. The appeal of action over thoughtfulness was understandable in a public still heady over winning the war (the only American conflict since the Revolution to enjoy unqualified public support). But Hofstadter finds that the negative stereotype of intellectualism in the 1950s was only the most recent manifestation of a long tradition: ‘Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or
24
It Came from the 1950s!
abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or immigrants, the liquor interests of the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.’11 The human brain itself was presented in an evil light in Donovan’s Brain (1952). Dr Patrick Cory (Lew Ayres, in a marked departure from his benign Dr Kildare persona of the 1940s) keeps alive the brain of a ruthless industrialist whose body has perished in an air crash. Halfsubmerged in an aquarium-style tank, Donovan’s brain begins to throb and glow malevolently and in short order stages a telepathic leveraged takeover of Cory’s personality. Where, in his corporeal life, Donovan ever learned this neat out-of-body trick is never really explained, but soon Cory is continuing Donovan’s tax evasion schemes from beyond the grave and blackmailing his former business associates. Cory’s concerned wife (Nancy Davis, later First Lady Nancy Reagan) is concerned only to a point; her initial ethical concerns about her husband’s stealing a brain – she actually helps him cut it out – and putting it on life support in a laboratory just off the cozy living room are quickly quelled by her husband’s reassurances and brash scientific enthusiasm. Davis gives a truly weird performance, with a manner and vocal style that seem telegraphed from some other, very different picture. Intentional or not, the out-of-synch quality is somehow appropriate to a character who comes to accept a disembodied brain and its attendant apparatus as just another piece of home furnishing, post-war style. Brains, finally, are the problem in the film, just as they were in the same year’s presidential campaign. Cory’s overreaching intellectual curiosity merges with the misapplied brain-power of a vengeful megalomaniac, with disastrous results (all that thinking!). The future First Lady knows best: Just turn off your own higher brain functions, watch out for your husband’s interests, and everything will be fine. But sometimes other people’s brain functions needed to be turned off – permanently. Questions of their guilt aside, the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on 19 June 1953, amounted to a burning at the electrical stake of wizards who trafficked in forbidden, poisonous knowledge. The fallibility of modern technology was gruesomely underscored by the multiple applications of electricity needed to kill Ethel and the ‘ghastly plume’ of smoke that rose from her head to smudge the skylight of the Sing-Sing death house.12 Jean-Paul Sartre, the following day, published an excoriating attack on America in the pages of the Parisian daily Libération: ‘By killing the Rosenbergs you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch hunts,
A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 25
autos-da-fé sacrifices – we are here getting to the point: your country is sick with fear. . . .’13 The prosecution of the Rosenbergs served many purposes beyond pure justice, advanced numerous political careers, and provided useful scapegoats for America’s fear-sickness. The Soviet atomic threat, however, was hardly illusory, though its cracked reflection in popular entertainment of the time, abetted by the never-ending re-run loop of television, persists in memory longer than historical facts. As a result, our perception of the Red Scare is often colored by a surreal, campy hysteria that distorts the very real fears generated by the Cold War. One classic manifestation of nuclear fear – the association of atomic energy with giant, rampaging Hollywood monsters – began the very summer of the Rosenberg executions with Warner Bros’ The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), based, extremely loosely, on a Saturday Evening Post story by Ray Bradbury titled ‘The Fog Horn,’ in which a slumbering prehistoric beast is roused from the deep by a lighthouse horn that sounds like a monstrous, melancholy mating call. Bradbury’s story was strictly a mood piece and required considerable expansion, not to mention distortion, for the screen. In the film, the dinosaur is freed from an eons-old ice prison by atomic testing, although it is not in any sense an atomic mutation. The reawakened Beast goes on a rampage in lower Manhattan and is finally chased to Coney Island, to be spectacularly destroyed while trapped in the cage-like confines of a roller coaster. Around the time of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Warner was also developing a film based on an original story by screenwriter George Worthing Yates about giant ants running amok in the New York City subway system. Yates called his story ‘Them!’ He had posited nuclear radiation for the insects’ enormous size, rather like the highly publicized giant marigolds grown from irradiated seeds. From the standpoint of animal biology it was a dumb idea but a highly visual one. And thereby George Worthing Yates, previously known as the scriptwriter of such films as This Woman is Dangerous (1952) with Joan Crawford and Those Redheads from Seattle (1953) with Rhonda Fleming, set in motion one of the most imitated motion picture formulas of all time. Them! (1953) producer Ted Sherdeman had served as a staff officer to General Douglas MacArthur during World War II and had strong feelings about the use of nuclear weapons. Upon learning of the Hiroshima bombing, ‘I just went over to the curb and started to throw up,’ he said.14 When the story treatment for Them! crossed his desk, Sherdeman saw two pluses: ‘Everyone had seen ants and no one trusted the atom bomb, so I had Warner buy the story.’15
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It Came from the 1950s!
Unfortunately, screenwriter Yates, like many a mad scientist, overreached in his creation of mutant insects and turned in a script that deviated considerably from his original concept and was considered unfilmable because of budget considerations. Sherdeman took the script over and shaped the final version, which moved the ants from New York subway tunnels to Los Angeles storm sewers, and eliminated a final battle between the military and the monsters on an amusement pier (Warner story editors obviously recycled the concept in the roller coaster finale of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, released the previous year). Them! director Gordon Douglas recalled that the production team took the story very seriously. They ‘weren’t trying to make a comic strip or be cute about it. . . . We talked a great deal about the bombs these scientists were playing around with. . . .’16 Douglas was disappointed when further budget cuts made it necessary to film Them! in black and white rather than in 3-D and color, as had been planned. ‘I put green and red soap bubbles in their eyes,’ Douglas recalled of the 12-foot-long mechanical bugs. ‘The ants were purple, slimy things. Their bodies were wet down with Vaseline. They scared the bejeezus out of you.’17 In the end the film’s main titles were rendered in stand-alone color, an effect restored for DVD release. Them! was the first piece of popular entertainment to suggest, however wrong-headedly, that nuclear radiation might cause garden-variety insects, arachnids, or reptiles, to metamorphose into gigantic monsters threatening post-war peace and prosperity. The novelty and topicality of the subject drew large audiences and even half-respectful critical attention. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called the film ‘tense, absorbing, and surprising enough, somewhat convincing.’18 Time took the new style in monsters in its stride, finding in the faces of the giant ants ‘just that expression of chinless, bulge-eyed evil that Peter Lorre has been trying all these years to perfect.’19 The Japanese film Gojira (1954) didn’t receive an American release until 1956, with some added, Americanized footage featuring Raymond Burr. Known in the West as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, it came to epitomize the atomic mutation genre, the first in what was to become the longest-running monster series of all time. Rather than simply be caused by the bomb, Godzilla, in essence, was the bomb, the pop-culture byproduct of the only society that had directly felt the power of the atom unleashed. As if to begin a healing process, it was first necessary to name the trauma and put a face on it – even if the face was that of a fanciful prehistoric dragon somehow awakened by atomic testing. Godzilla may have helped Japan to come to terms with the awful reality of Hiroshima
A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 27
and Nagasaki through a process of desensitization; repeated over and over through the course of the film and its many sequels, the spectacle of a radioactive, fire-breathing horror destroying Japanese cities became easier and easier to take. In contrast with Godzilla’s later campy, even cuddly persona, the monster depicted in the original film is somber and frightening. The American film formulas were much more preoccupied with guilt, sin, and fear, focused on the anticipation of judgment, retribution, and irradiation. Images of post-war prosperity and domesticity were inevitably under siege; a key bit of iconography occurs in Earth vs. The Spider (1958) as a mammoth, marauding tarantula takes to Main Street for lunch. A looming crane shot from the spider’s point of view descends inexorably on a screaming woman, doomed because her skirt is caught in the door of a shiny new car. Americans have oversized messes to contend with in films like Tarantula (1958), The Monster That Challenged the World (1957), The Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), Beginning of the End (1957), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), War of the Colossal Beast (1958), and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), to name only a few. It might seem at first a stretch to compare giant radioactive bugs in the movies to dust balls in the home, but both were part of a continuum of contamination anxiety particular to the 1950s. In Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness, Suellen Hoy chronicles the culture of clean that had its roots in the nineteenth century but reached full expression in the years following World War II. ‘Considerations of health, which had been so important before World War II, ceased to be the primary reason for cleanliness after 1945. The contagious diseases that had plagued Americans for nearly all their history had virtually disappeared’20 Nonetheless, American felt dirty. In order to reassure themselves that they had truly joined the middle class, millions of the newly upwardly mobile turned to ritual cleansing. ‘Afraid of backsliding and afraid of offending, they became the main market for an endless supply of deodorants, mouthwashes, shavers, improved detergents, kitchen appliances, and bathroom fixtures.’21 Hoy doesn’t speculate about the fear, conscious or unconscious, of nuclear fallout and ideological contamination, but these issues were more than mere subtexts in a decade that introduced Senator Joseph McCarthy, fall-out shelters, and strontium 90. Cultural historian Thomas Hine, in his classic study of post-war America, Populuxe, suggests that the 1950s fetish for push buttons on household appliances was part of a mass cultural ritual to tame the nuclear threat. ‘The President of the United States was widely viewed
28
It Came from the 1950s!
as having a push button on or in his desk that would trigger atomic war as surely and inexorably as a housewife could activate her dishwasher.’22 In Bride of the Monster (1955), filmed under the title Bride of the Atom, schlock film-maker Edward D. Wood, Jr gave a decrepit Bela Lugosi his last speaking role as Dr Eric Vornoff, obsessed with creating an atomic superwoman, who wears an old-fashioned bridal gown for her up-to-date nuclear nuptials. Lugosi’s laboratory, perhaps significantly, is thrown together out of low-tech household items, including a fifties-style refrigerator, and, unintentionally underscoring the decade’s stomach-churning atomic angst, someone’s bottle of Pepto-Bismol, carelessly left in camera view. The atomic blast that ends the film (after Lugosi is devoured by an irradiated octopus) is absurdly contained, virtually domesticated. An observer, apparently within yards of the rising mushroom cloud, has no difficulty intoning the script’s judgmental coda: ‘He tampered in God’s domain.’ Images of atomic disaster worked their way into other kinds of films besides science fiction and horror. At the climax of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the villain, Albert Dekker (Dr Cyclops himself), describes the mysterious contents of a locked box to his moll in cryptic terms invoking Pandora, Lot’s wife, and the Medusa. It’s all too tempting. Deciding that what’s inside must be worth a fortune, the treacherous blonde (Gaby Rodgers), plugs Dekker, who, with his dying breath, begs her not to open the box. Of course she promptly does just that, releasing a glowing mass of atomic fire accompanied by a sound effect of obscene, devilish panting. While 1950s America was enthralled by modern, money-making variations on the Faust–Frankenstein story, other parts of the world had strikingly different reactions. In September 1955 South Africa’s interior minister, T.E. Douglas, banned Mary Shelley’s novel, calling it ‘indecent, objectionable and obscene.’23 Merely owning the book was grounds for a $2800 fine and five years in prison. In Australia, novelist Nevil Shute wrote an international best seller, On the Beach (1957), that trumped all the bug-eyed monster stories with its low-keyed narrative describing the end of all life on earth following a short, but devastating nuclear war. Shute presents a bleak, post-hydrogen bomb death-watch, as the inhabitants of Melbourne spend five months counting down the arrival of the radioactive cloud that has exterminated the rest of the human race. Written in stoic, Hemingwayesque prose, and with nary a mutant in sight, the book follows its characters to their inescapable annihilation; the result, according to the Atlantic, is a narrative with ‘a kind of cobra fascination.’24 Kirkus Reviews called it ‘an obsessive, nightmarish book,
A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 29
the more so because it is written on almost a deadpan level of narration, deliberately shorn of histrionics.’25 Catholic World had some specific complaints: ‘A young Australian woman in love with the American captain agree[s] that a “smutty love affair” is no way in which to face the world’s end. Good marks for that, of course. But On the Beach must set a record for suicides. I know of no other novel in which all the major characters, all, commit suicide. For this reason, despite the author’s skill and the book’s crusading earnestness, On the Beach definitely cannot be recommended to any reader.’26 Nonetheless, the book received considerable favorable word of mouth, and in 1959 it was reverently adapted to the screen by Stanley Kramer as Hollywood’s first ‘prestige’ nuclear nightmare. The all-star cast included Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins. Linus Pauling, soon to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, provided a blurb for the film, predicting that On the Beach would be remembered as ‘the movie that saved the world.’ This prompted critic Pauline Kael to take a snipe at both the film and director Kramer, whose greatest ability, she wrote, ‘may have been for eliciting fatuous endorsements from famous people.’27 Others took the film quite seriously; the Eisenhower administration, recently having issued a national policy urging all citizens to take responsibility for building and maintaining home fall-out shelters, responded dutifully to the Hollywood hoopla by issuing an internal document called ‘Possible Questions and Answers on the Film “On the Beach”.’ The film was chosen as best of the year by both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, despite Variety’s complaint that ‘there is no relief from depression. The spectator is left with the sick feeling that he’s had a preview of Armageddon, in which all the contestants lost.’28 In spite of all the boom and gloom, On the Beach grossed $5 300 000, making it the fifth-highest-earning film of the 1959–60 season, trailing only Ben Hur, Psycho, Operation Petticoat, and Suddenly, Last Summer.29 Another post-apocalyptic film of 1959, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, did not fare so well at the box office; its story of a lone trio of nuclear survivors (Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens, and Mel Ferrer) used a Rod Serlingesque premise to hammer home a liberal parable about race relations, one that failed to ignite audience interest. By the late 1950s, B-movie clichés were becoming sufficiently threadbare to reveal the floorboards beneath. Frankenstein 1970 (filmed in 1958) can be read as an almost transparent allegory of post-war Hollywood sci-fi horror: the latest Baron Frankenstein (Boris Karloff), tortured by Nazis, allows his castle to be used by an American film crew
30
It Came from the 1950s!
in exchange for the nuclear reactor he needs to revive his monster. The film studios, of course, had been doing exactly that for the better part of a decade: exploiting atomic energy to resurrect the Frankenstein formula on-screen. On the Beach marked a turning point in the representation of nuclear issues; whatever its deficiencies as a novel or film, Shute’s story managed to strip away the monster mask from what lay underneath: an old-fashioned skull. Once faced directly, the primal fear of death no longer required Hollywood euphemisms. Atomic mutation and radiation anxiety have now largely faded from the front burners of popular discourse. Radioactive monsters are now primarily the stuff of camp nostalgia, but Rappaccini’s poisoned garden still flourishes in new mutated forms. A key transitional film, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) lampooned paranoid notions of ideological contamination with General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) and his now-famous rants about ‘precious bodily fluids’ and their imminent contamination. A decade before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) alerted the world to the poisonous shadow of pesticides, one can detect a nascent environmentalism in pop culture’s fixation on polluted worlds that strike back at their polluters. These worlds were very much our own; beginning with Them!, a remarkable number of fifties monsters were nothing more than ordinary inhabitants of the backyard, poisoned by radiation and massively magnified into predatory horrors: ants, spiders, praying mantises, grasshoppers, and, in one case, even trees (1957’s From Hell It Came). Occasionally the standard big-bug formula was treated with unusual inspiration, as in The Fly (1958), the story of a French-Canadian scientist, André DeLambre (Al Hedison), whose experiments with matter teleportation scramble his atoms with those of a housefly. Part of the horror is obvious – the ickyness of a human-sized fly – but some of the shudders come from the implied question of humanity’s ultimate place in the ecosystem, where we are already entangled with a complex web of insects, microbes, and other ‘insignificant’ life forms, of which, science tells us, we may be just another passing example. A good deal of environmentalist debate has been shaped, at least to some extent, by mad science conceits: the evils of technology and technological thinking, science-created horrors (i.e., frightfully fouled ecosystems) that rise up to destroy their makers, and grandiose, Saturday-matinee talk about ‘destroying the planet’ and ‘saving the planet.’ It’s not surprising, therefore, that Hollywood environmentalists, inhabitants of a particularly megalomaniacal ecosystem dedicated to the
A-Bombs, B-Pictures & C-Cups 31
construction and destruction of imaginary worlds, are often especially adept at this kind of monstrously inflated rhetoric.
Notes 1. A previous version of this essay appeared in Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture by David J. Skal (W.W. Norton & Company, 1997). c 1997, 2011 by David Reprinted by permission of the author. Copyright 0002 J. Skal. All rights reserved. 2. Lewis Wood, ‘Steel Tower “Vaporized” in Trial of Mighty Bomb’, New York Times: 7 August 1945: 1. 3. H.G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (London: Heinemann, 1945), p. 1. 4. Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1958), p. 202. 5. E.U. Condon, ‘An Appeal to Reason’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: 1 March 1946: 6–7. 6. A.H. Weiler, ‘The Screen’, New York Times: 16 June 1952: 15. 7. ‘Mae Clarke Raps TV Portrayal,’ Los Angeles Examiner: 17 July 1958. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection. 8. Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 221. 9. Ibid.: 3. 10. Ibid.: 37. 11. Ibid. 12. Bob Considine, television reporter and witness to the Rosenberg executions, quoted in Alvin H. Goldstein, The Unquiet Death of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (New York and Westport: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1975). Unpaginated book. 13. Quoted by Walter and Miriam Schneir, Invitation to an Inquest (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 254. 14. Bob Groves, ‘ “Them!” Giant Ants That Spawned a Film Legacy,’ Los Angeles Times Calendar: 17 April 1988: 28. 15. Al Taylor, ‘Them!’ Fangoria, no. 5 (1979): 23. 16. Groves, op. cit.: 29. 17. Ibid. 18. Crowther, Bosley, ‘ “Them!” Warner Brothers Chiller at Paramount,’ New York Times: 17 June 1954. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection. 19. ‘Them!’ (review), Time: 19 July 1954. Unpaginated clipping. 20. Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 171–2. 21. Ibid. 22. Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 133. 23. ‘M.W. Shelley Book “Frankenstein” Banned,’ New York Times: 5 September 1955: 9. 24. ‘On the Beach’ (review), Atlantic: August 1957. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection. 25. ‘On the Beach’ (review), Kirkus Reviews: 1 July 1957. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection.
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26. ‘On the Beach’ (review), Catholic World: October 1957. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection. 27. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), p. 429. 28. ‘On the Beach’ (review), Variety: 2 December 1959. Unpaginated clipping, author’s collection. 29. Cobbert S. Steinberg, Film Facts (New York: Facts on File, 1980), p. 23.
2 ‘It’s in the Trees! It’s Coming!’ Night of the Demon and the Decline and Fall of the British Empire Darryl Jones
I In 1950, few Britons would have recognized the narrative of British imperial decline across the second half of the twentieth century, a narrative which, seen from our own perspective, seems to have taken on the status of historical inevitability. Indeed, much of the 1950s in Britain was characterized by a new-found climate of optimism. Rationing finally came to an end in 1954, and with it ended the period of what David Kynaston has recently termed ‘Austerity Britain’.1 In Britain as in America, the 1950s witnessed a consumer boom – by the mid-50s, Kynaston writes, Britain was, ‘if not quite yet a fully fledged consumerist society, at least a proto-consumerist one’2 – with the increased availability of both everyday necessities and luxury commodities accompanying a period of widespread employment, as the depression and dole queues of the previous generation disappeared over the horizon of the past, perhaps for good. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 had many commentators proclaiming the arrival of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’, a new golden age predicted by Winston Churchill when, on 11 February 1952, he paid tribute to the late King George VI in the House of Commons: ‘A fair and youthful figure, Princess, wife, and mother, is the heir to all our traditions and glories . . . and to all our perplexities and dangers never greater in peacetime than now. She is also heir to all our united strength and loyalty. She comes to the Throne at a time when a tormented mankind stands poised between world catastrophe and a golden age. That it should be a golden age of art and letters we can only hope – science and machinery have their other tales to tell – but 33
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It Came from the 1950s!
it is certain that if a true and lasting peace can be achieved . . . an immense and undreamed of prosperity with culture and leisure ever more widely spread can come . . . to the masses of the people.’3 Undoubtedly the greatest and most enthusiastic of all New Elizabethans was Nigel Molesworth, the Curse of St Custard’s, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s incorrigible schoolboy terror, whose subversive memoirs first appeared in Young Elizabethan, the educational magazine of the New Elizabethan movement (with A.L. Rowse as its historical advisor). In 1956, Molesworth opened Whizz for Atomms, the third volume of his adventures, with a chapter of advice on ‘How to be a Young Elizabethan’.4 It was to be an age of progress and modernism, of a Britain forged, as Harold Wilson would famously pronounce in 1963, in the ‘white heat’ of a scientific revolution.5 With this progressivism came the sense that Britain remained a globalimperial power. One of Wilson’s Prime Ministerial predecessors, Harold Macmillan, who came to office in 1957, owed a large part of his appeal to his ability to convey the impression that he was in fact a displaced Edwardian gentleman, a walking embodiment of Britain’s High Imperial past, exuding perpetual confidence in the continued existence of the British Empire: on a visit to Soviet Russia in 1959, he strolled around in plus-fours greeting Russians with a cheery exclamation of ‘Double-gin!’6 But, with hindsight, we now know that all was not, of course, well with the British Empire. The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 might be said to signal the beginning of imperial collapse, though there had been slow dwindlings for decades, and by the late 50s such was the proliferation of decolonization, particularly in Africa, that almost all competent observers recognized that the British Empire, as a geopolitical force, had all but disappeared. Since the 1940s there had been concerns and warnings about imperial overstretch, that Britain’s damaged postwar economy was simply unable to continue to meet the demands of maintaining the nation’s traditional global military presence. As early as 1945, no less a figure than John Maynard Keynes had warned the Treasury of the danger of a serious ‘over-playing of our hand’ were Britain to continue to ‘undertake liabilities all over the world’: We have got into the habit of maintaining large and expensive establishments all over the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa to cover communications and provide reserves for unnamed contingencies and to police vast areas from Tunis to Burma, and northwards from East Africa to Germany.7
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 35
Keynes’s warnings went largely unheeded, though Kynaston notes that, by the mid-50s, a recurring note of ‘declinism’ had begun to insinuate its way into the cultural discourse.8 This note was soon to become the dominant one. If there was a symbolic moment in this process, it was probably the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which waning imperial powers Britain and France attempted to use Israel to wage a proxy war against Egypt, a former British colony, in an attempt to reverse the nationalization of the Suez Canal, a trade route long vital to the British Empire. British public opinion was sharply divided, along a broad left – right wing axis: on Saturday 3 November, with a splendid sense of the popular-cultural rhetoric of the time (if nothing else), the front page of the populist right-wing Daily Sketch reported the bombing of Egyptian air-bases under the headline ‘RAF ROCK ’N ROLL ’EM ROUND THE CLOCK’.9 Two days earlier, the Sketch had warned, with perhaps unwitting prescience, ‘Suez means for us survival or ruin . . . [I]f Britain were now forced into an ignominious retreat by a frenzied faction at home, then indeed would our nation be eclipsed and our standing in the world lost for many years to come.’10 When President Eisenhower refused to lend US support to this venture, it promptly collapsed (partly for financial reasons, as Britain simply could not afford to continue military action without an American loan), leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, and a recognition that Britain was no longer an overwhelming force on the world stage, but rather a contingent power, or even for some a client state of the US.11 Writing home from Cambridge, where she was studying on a Fulbright scholarship and had recently met her future husband Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath got it right: ‘The attack is a disaster from every angle – moral, military, political . . . Britain is dead; the literary and critical sterility and amorality which I long to take Ted away from is permeating everything. God bless America.’12 By 1957, the New Elizabethan movement was well and truly over – Young Elizabethan magazine folded that year (though fortunately for civilization there was to be one more volume of Molesworth’s adventures, 1959’s Back in the Jug Agane), as did the nascent Elizabethan political party.13
II In 1957, Sabre Film Productions, under the distribution of Columbia Pictures, released Night of the Demon, a genre classic made by a very uneasy collection of Brits and Americans, with a French-American director, Jacques Tourneur, and notable contributions from a pair of Irishmen
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and a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Readers of this volume will by now be familiar with the hypothesis that popular cultural documents provide unique insights into the concerns, anxieties and desires of their times, most particularly through their habitual deployment of forms of symbolic or metaphorical articulation as a means of approaching their subject obliquely. While Night of the Demon has received some scholarly attention down the years, and has even been the subject of one full-scale monograph, Tony Earnshaw’s Beating the Devil: The Making of ‘The Night of the Demon’ (2005),14 its contextual significance as an Anglo-American co-production of 1957 has never, as far as I’m aware, been analysed. Night of the Demon is probably best described as an elaboration of the great Edwardian M.R. James’s classic ghost story ‘Casting the Runes’ (first published in 1911). In the film, Dr John Holden (played by Dana Andrews), an intransigently rationalist psychologist and cocksure embodiment of enlightened American modernity, travels to England, and from there back into pre-modernity, as he is given a comprehensive lesson in metaphysics by a home-counties Satanist, Julian Karswell (actually played by an Irishman, the Dublin actor Niall MacGinnis, a graduate of medicine at Trinity College), which forces him completely to change his world-view. The rational scepticism which Holden articulates with such total conviction throughout the film is, he comes to recognize at its close, nothing more than blinkered materialist dogma. The neo-Edwardian Harold Macmillan was fond of suggesting that Britain’s new role in the post-war world order could be as wise, aged, cultured Greece, offering sage advice to America’s vigorous, energetic, youthful Rome. Night of the Demon suggests that, at the very least, what is required is an Edwardian scholar-connoisseur’s appreciation of the appeal, force, and validity of the supernatural, and of the fact that it does exist and have a place in the modern world. In this, Holden is educated not only by Karswell, but by his scientific colleagues, the Irish Professor O’Brien (the Limerick-born Abbey Theatre actor Liam Redmond, a former student of medicine at UCD) and Dr K.T. Kumar of Bombay (Peter Elliott, not even remotely Indian), both representatives of decolonized former British Imperial territories, both well versed in the old ways. Professor O’Brien says, ‘I’m a scientist also, Dr Holden. I know the value of the cold light of reason, but I also know the deep shadows that light can cast. The shadows that can blind men to the truth.’ More simply, Dr Kumar says, when asked for his opinion on devils and demons, ‘Oh, I believe in them – absolutely.’ Jacques Tourneur himself was a genre specialist who claimed never to have turned down a script, telling Bertrand Tavernier in a 1971
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 37
interview, ‘In Hollywood, I accepted systematically all scripts that were offered to me, always, regardless of what the script was about.’15 Given this – and especially given his close working relationship in the 1940s with the great producer Val Lewton – it is difficult to know how much agency to afford Tourneur over his own work: in the Tavernier interview, he acknowledged that ‘I have only initiated a few films’, and singled out I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and the anti-racist western Stars in my Crown (1950) as personal projects. Nevertheless, the two extant booklength studies of Tourneur and his work, the volume of essays edited by Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen (1975) and the monograph by Chris Fujiwara (1998), both take a full-blooded auteuriste approach to their subject, inflected respectively with post-structuralist and formalist readings of the films themselves.16 To an extent, the attempt to understand Tourneur’s oeuvre as the unified product of a single artistic sensibility constitutes an act of reclamation, redressing the received view of Tourneur as a technician working most effectively under the guidance and creative control of Lewton, who tends to be credited with a near-total aesthetic influence over his films in a manner almost unique among Hollywood producers. While auteriste readings of Tourneur seem to me to be especially problematic in the case of Night of the Demon, given the complex and turbulent production context of that film (which I shall discuss later), it does nevertheless appear to be the case that there are recurring thematic concerns across many of Tourneur’s films, as well as a certain common tone, look, and mood. As Fujiwara notes, Tourneur was one of a number of European directors who began Hollywood careers in the 1930s and 1940s (others include Edgar G. Ulmer, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk and Andre De Toth). Reflecting and growing out of this sense of cultural and aesthetic displacement, ‘Night of the Demon is the central work in a group of Tourneur’s films about Americans in Europe.’17 Holden, an American among Europeans, seems intent on behaving as obnoxiously and high-handedly as he can, towards Karswell and the various occultists he meets, but also towards love-interest Joanna (Peggy Cummins), and his Old World colleagues, O’Brien and Kumar. As Fujiwara writes, ‘Holden has come [to Britain] on a mission to provoke and offend people’.18 More generally, some of Tourneur’s other key films dramatize a clash between rational, progressive American modernity and pre-modern supernaturalism: in Cat People (1942), ‘good plain Americano’ shipbuilder Oliver (Kent Smith) and his Serbian wife Irena, Old-European inhabitant of a world of fairy tales and ancestral curses; in I Walked With a Zombie (1943),
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Canadian nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) and the voodoo priests and zombies of the Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian. Night of the Demon, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie all to varying extents negotiate a delicate narrative relationship between the secular technomodernity of the New World and the metaphysics of the Old, and have been praised for the subtlety and sophistication of this achievement. In his own belief-system, however, Tourneur himself permitted no such ambiguities, telling Tavernier: I hate the expression ‘horror film’. For me, I make films about the supernatural because I believe in it. I believe in the power of the dead, witches. I even met a few when I was preparing Night of the Demon. I had a long conversation with the oldest witch in England about the spirit world, the power of cats. I also visit haunted houses. I happen to possess some powers myself. I sometimes get the feeling that I am about to meet a friend I haven’t seen in a long time. I scribble his name on a piece of paper. A few hours later the doorbell rings and it’s him. I show him the piece of paper on which, in front of witnesses, I wrote his name . . . I also know there are universes parallel to ours. I wrote a script on the subject, entitled Whispers in a Distant Corridor. It’s about the fight between on the one hand all the most sophisticated technical equipment, the most modern computers, etc., and on the other hand, the world of the dead which is trying to establish contact with ours. Their world is far more powerful than ours. One always hears of the problem of minorities, well, we, the living, are truly a minority compared to the dead . . . But it is really exasperating that supernatural forces are always represented as malevolent. Why this racism? If they exist and if they are malevolent, we would have been swept away a long time ago.19 This comment, I would argue, provides a suggestive interpretive gloss on the action of Night of the Demon. ‘The oldest witch in England’ to whom Tourneur refers in this interview was in fact a distinguished Professor of Egyptology and Anthropology at University College London, Margaret Murray, who seems to have acted as a de facto consultant for Night of the Demon.20 Murray also, according to her Dictionary of National Biography entry, did practise witchcraft, and was given to casting spells in order ‘to reverse academic appointments of which she disapproved’.21 To give the film a measure of scholarly credence, Murray was invited as a guest to the film’s press launch in the Dorchester Hotel, on 18 October 1956 (Tony
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 39
Earnshaw reproduces a remarkable photograph of the 93-year-old Professor Murray being kissed at the launch by a clearly-inebriated Dana Andrews).22 Murray wrote numerous influential anthropological studies of witchcraft, most notably The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931), both of which trace the relationship between modern witchcraft and pre-Christian religious rites and practices.23 It is to investigate Karswell’s own ‘devil-cult’ that Holden comes to England, but the presence of Murray’s work behind Karswell’s religion suggests both a more scholarly and a more sympathetic interpretation of Karswell than Holden’s blanket denial will allow. Karswell, who frequents the British Library and has himself ‘what is perhaps the finest library in the world on witchcraft and the black arts’, practises an anthropologically-based comparative religion, with its roots at Stonehenge, in aboriginal British belief-systems. Unquestionably, Satanism and the occult were a vivid presence in British popular culture in the 1950s, as they so often have been. Easily the most high-profile literary diabolist of the time was Dennis Wheatley, who very clearly understood the Devil as a figure for his times. For Wheatley, in fact, Satan was the ultimate Cold Warrior: very consistently, across a series of works from, for example, The Haunting of Toby Jugg (1948) through The Satanist (1960) and beyond, Wheatley understood Communism as a gigantic Satanic plot to control the world – Stalin himself was merely a tool or agent of the Devil. One of his bestknown novels of the 50s, The Ka of Gifford Hillary (1956), is essentially a neo-Victorian spiritualist novel, full of out-of-body experiences, astral journeys, and fears of premature burial, but it begins with a very long and hawkish account of British Cold War military policy: so long, in fact, that Wheatley’s narrator feels obliged to interrupt his own narrative with an italicized disclaimer; ‘any reader of this document who is uninterested in future strategy and our measures for countering the threat of Soviet invasion will lose nothing by omitting the next few thousand words and resuming this account on page 40’.24 Britain, Wheatley seems to be arguing, needs a nuclear deterrent in order to combat the Satanic forces of evil. His 1971 critical study, The Devil and All His Works, which acknowledges the influence of Margaret Murray on some of its ideas, makes very plain Wheatley’s belief that Satan, in fact, creates and controls secular modernity: We must also consider this new Age of Unbelief. Atheism goes hand in hand with Communism. During the past few decades, particularly in Russia and China, as the older generations die off there are ever
40
It Came from the 1950s!
fewer people who accept the beliefs of their forefathers. This applies to millions in the Western world and among the better-educated peoples of the Near East. . . . The decline in the faiths has led to major changes in outlook and conduct by many million people [sic] – to a repudiation by the young of the authority and (possible) wisdom of their elders, a seeking for some mental stimulant that will replace accepted religions, and a breaking down of prohibitions that, though the ages, have protected society for its own good. Whether unorthodox aid is deliberately sought, or atheism accepted, the removal of the old barriers against self-gratification has rendered a great part of the new generation vulnerable to temptations which, out of fear or with a hope of reward, they would otherwise resist. And nothing can change the laws which, at the time of the Creation, it was decreed should dominate the lives of human beings. So we all remain, and must continue to remain, subject to the Powers of Light and Darkness.25 According to Wheatley’s gloomy prognosis, only conservatism, socially and politically, and a return to the values of the British Empire, can save the world. While in his post-war works, from Toby Jugg (1948) onwards, Wheatley fingered Communism as the master-narrative for understanding the occult, his earlier works in the 1930s tend to interpret it in a colonial context, where threats to the British Empire come from its own disgruntled imperial Others. The Devil Rides Out (1934) opens with a gathering of Satanists presided over by the ipsissimus Mocata, whose manservant, the heroic Duc de Richleau explains, is ‘A Malagasy I should think. . . . A native of Madagascar. They are a curious people, half-Negro and half-Polynesian. This great brute stands about six foot eight, and the one glimpse I had of his eyes made me want to shoot him on sight. He’s a “bad black” if ever I saw one, and I’ve travelled, as you know, in my time.’26 Among the other colonial grotesques at the gathering are ‘a tall, fair fellow. His thin, flaxen hair brushed flatly back and whose queer, light eyes proclaimed him an Albino’; ‘a stout man dressed in a green plaid and ginger kilt, [who] was walking softly up and down with his hands clasped behind his back, muttering to himself inaudibly. His wild, flowing white hair and curious costume suggested an Irish bard’; ‘A grave faced Chinaman wearing the robes of a Mandarin, whose slit eyes betrayed a cold, merciless nature: a Eurasian with only one arm, the left, and a tall, thin woman with a scraggy throat and beetling
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 41
eyebrows which met across the bridge of her nose’; ‘A fat, oily Babu in a salmon-pink turban and gown’; and ‘a red-faced Teuton, who suffered the deformity of a hare lip.’ They are, thinks the Duc, ‘Altogether a most unprepossessing lot’.27 The Devil Rides Out was Wheatley’s first real foray into the genre of the Satanic thriller, which was to make his name and fortune until his death in 1977. At around the same time as the novel was published, Wheatley first met Rollo Ahmed, the West Indian occultist, yogi, convicted fraudster, and possible MI5 agent.28 After the success of The Devil Rides Out, Wheatley was asked to write a history of black magic but, lacking firsthand practical experience, suggested Ahmed for the job. His study, The Black Art, was duly published in 1936, with a glowing introduction by Wheatley himself, who cites Ahmed as his major source for The Devil Rides Out: Such praise as I have received in a most voluminous correspondence from all over the world as to the accuracy of the data in my book, The Devil Rides Out, is almost entirely due to my many long conversations with Mr. Rollo Ahmed. With unfailing patience he answered my innumerable questions, and in the most generous manner he placed his profound knowledge entirely at my disposal, in order that I might make my novel a little more than an ordinary fiction book.29 Rereading the Black Art while researching The Devil and All His Works, Wheatley was ‘again amazed at the extent of his knowledge’.30 After an extraordinarily lurid account of the Black Mass, Ahmed’s book closes with the assertion that black magic is an ongoing practice in modern society, and that secret societies of Satanists remain all around us. Satanic cults teach their initiates that ‘evil is only a relative term; that people have evolved, to see the beauty in so-called wickedness; that sin has no reality, and that the only way to a full life is to ignore ordinary standards of honesty, purity and kindliness, because the exercise of these qualities prevents people yielding to all their impulses and limits their material attainments.’ Soon, these initiates end up ‘wallowing in evil for its own sake’.31 Ahmed’s influence, mediated through Wheatley, is discernable in Rand Hobart’s Satanic creed in Night of the Demon. Asked, ‘What is the order of the true believer?’ Hobart (Brian Wilde) replies: ‘Those of us who believe that evil is good, and good evil. . . . Who blaspheme and desecrate. In the joy of sin will mankind that is lost find itself again.’
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Wheatley was also to make much of his acquaintance with Aleister Crowley, easily the most high-profile occultist of the twentieth century, to whom Wheatley was introduced in 1934 by the journalist and future Labour MP (and alleged occultist) Tom Driberg. Crowley gave Wheatley a copy of Magick in Theory and Practice, with a hand-customized titlepage: ‘This unique copy . . . Published for Dennis Wheatley only 1934 e.v. [era vulgaris]’.32 It is often claimed that Karswell is explicitly modelled on Crowley, though this seems very unlikely in the case of James’s original story: though Crowley was a student at Trinity College Cambridge in the 1890s, by which time James was a Fellow of next-door King’s, there is no evidence of their having met, nor that James knew anything at all of Crowley. James’s Karswell is barely described: ‘a stout, cleanshaven man’; ‘Nobody knew what he did with himself: his servants were a horrible set of people; he had invented a new religion for himself and practised no one could tell what appalling rites.’33 It does seem likely, however, that MacGinnis’s performance as Karswell – a portly, balding, middle-aged necromancer of impeccable manners – is inflected by an awareness of Crowley as refracted through Wheatley’s own work: he appears as the effete, ambiguous Mocata in The Devil Rides Out, ‘a potbellied, bald-headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp. He reminded me of a large, white slug.’34 MacGinnis’s Karswell is far more nuanced, sympathetic and interesting than either James’s blank original or Wheatley’s gross caricature.35 In the 1950s, Rollo Ahmed, disguised as ‘Mr. A’, participated in a series of sensational exposés of contemporary Satanic cults for the Sunday Pictorial: ‘It is the cult of many organized groups, they include people who are nationally and internationally famous.’36 At around the same time, ‘Fabian of the Yard’ (ex-superintendent Robert Fabian of the Metropolitan Police) published London After Dark, his own exposé of the capital’s seamier side, with, to quote the back-cover blurb, its ‘dope, prostitution, blackmail, low night-clubs, cosh boys and their molls, and all that goes with the murky side of London after dark’. This ‘murky side’ included ‘a private temple of Satanism!’ in Lancaster Gate, London W2: At one end of the long room is an altar, exactly as in a small church – except that the altar candles are black wax, and the crucifix is head downwards. Pentagrams and sigils . . . are on the low ceiling. On the left of this altar, is a black African idol – the ju-ju, obviously, of some heathen fertility rite. It is nearly five feet high, squat, repulsive, and obscenely
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 43
constructed. It is rubbed to a greasy polish by the ecstatic bare flesh of the worshippers.37 In June 1956, Reynold’s News and Sunday Citizen claimed to have acquired a Scotland Yard file on its investigations into contemporary black magic in London: ‘Peers on Yard Black Magic List’ ran the headline: The list reads like pages taken from Debrett! It includes two or three of the most famous names in the peerage and that of a former ambassador to the Court of St. James. It also names a number of wealthy people, including one with two country mansions and a luxurious West End flat.38 Responding to this sensation, from 3–24 June 1956 The Sunday Graphic ran a series of articles on black magic by ‘the man who knows more than anyone else about this strange, evil cult’, Dennis Wheatley himself. Wheatley had apparently been reading Fabian of the Yard: ‘Yet it is not only in Africa that such abominations are practised. A few years ago women were giving themselves up to hideous eroticism with a great carved ebony figure, during Satanic orgies held in a secret temple in Bayswater, London W2.’39 Clearly, there are in this narrative barelyconcealed anxieties about the activities of Britain’s new immigrant community, who, from the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948, carrying 492 Jamaican passengers, had become a recent (and, for some, a troubling) feature of 1950s English life.
III Night of the Demon’s opening scenes juxtapose its clash of modernity and the pre-modern through a clash of two architectural visions of Britain. The film opens with a spoken prologue over a shot of Stonehenge, which Holden will later visit after going to the Hobart farmhouse (the Hobarts are a family of rustic Satanists), and where he finds the originals of the runic symbols which Karswell has written on the parchment which summons the Demon. From there we move to the death of Professor Harrington, Holden’s English colleague, killed by the Demon Karswell summons. The next scenes show Holden’s transatlantic flight to England, where he first meets Joanna Harrington, and then the important scene where he lands at Heathrow. The building at which he arrives, the Europa Building (now Heathrow Terminal 2) is a hypermodern symbol of New Elizabethan England, a classic of post-war British
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modernist architecture, opened to great fanfare by Queen Elizabeth as recently as 1955.40 Indeed, Elizabeth’s early connections with Heathrow were profound, as she symbolically laid the first slab of concrete on the runway in the year of her coronation, 1953. One could, in fact, argue that Heathrow is the great symbolic municipal project of the New Elizabethan age. The Europa Building is part of a great movement of 1950s British modernist architecture, which was to give form to the nation’s post-war reconstruction: the Royal Festival Hall, designed by Leslie Martin, Robert Matthew and Peter Moro as the centrepiece for the 1951 ‘Tonic for the Nation’, the Festival of Britain, is probably the greatest single example of this movement for social and physical reconstruction. Architecture was, in fact, the representative medium of British post-war Modernism, and was animated by a distinct, progressivist social ideology. To borrow the title of Robert Elwall’s study of British architecture in the 1950s, it was to be the means of Building a Better Tomorrow.41 Night of the Demon’s trajectory is to take Holden, in his investigation of reason’s dark shadows, away from the gleaming techno-modernity of Heathrow, and towards the ancient darkness of the Hobart farmhouse and Stonehenge. With hindsight, one could argue that, once it leaves the gleaming Modernism of the Europa building – which is itself clearly liminal space, simultaneously nationalist and supra-national – Night of the Demon’s entire mise-en-scène betokens British declinism, reflecting a late-imperial world on the very cusp of irrevocable change. One of the film’s key scenes famously takes place in the British Library Reading Room, where Holden, looking for The True Discoveries of Witches and Demons, first encounters Karswell, who offers to lend Holden his own copy of the book, and while doing so slips him the parchment which he believes will seal his fate, Casting the Runes. While Christopher Frayling has written fascinatingly about the use and significance of the British Library Reading Room in Night of the Demon, and in cinema more generally, the fact remains that, within a generation, this extraordinarily resonant British cultural space was no more, having been replaced by Colin St John Wilson’s highly controversial new British Library on Euston Road.42 Many important scenes also take place in Holden’s London hotel, the Savoy, which was opened to great fanfare in 1889 as the city’s premier hotel, originally managed by César Ritz. Winston Churchill held his cabinet dinners at the Savoy. But by the early 50s, this great Victorian institution had itself become symbolic of the tensions under which the post-war British economy found itself, as a traditional British banking and business establishment began to come under threat from
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 45
a new, aggressive, American-inspired capitalist endeavour, the hostile takeover. As Kynaston writes: Over the autumn [of 1953] it had emerged that two of the financial world’s outsiders, Charles Clore and the property developer Harold Samuel, were between them seeking to engineer the takeover of the Savoy group of hotels, including Claridges and the Berkeley as well as the Savoy itself. This was a source of consternation to many leading City figures. Not only did they (like Churchill) greatly value the hospitality of these places, but the Clore/Samuel move was an ominous sign that the aggressive takeover bid was becoming a regular part of financial life, an assault in fact on keeping things in the club.43 The hostile takeover of the Savoy was thwarted at the last minute by the intervention of City financiers, much to the relief of Kim Cobbold, Governor of the Bank of England – but the writing was on the wall for such cherished British Imperial institutions. Night of the Demon closes with an extended railway scene, filmed around two Hertfordshire stations, Watford Junction (doubling in the film for Clapham Junction), where Holden gets on the 8.45 Southampton train, and nearby Bricket Wood, where Karswell meets his demise at 10 p.m., and where Holden, demonstrating that he has finally learned Karswell’s lesson in metaphysics, speaks the film’s last words to Joanna: ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know.’44 The film’s last shot is of a train going past, its billowing steam and screaming whistle a deliberate echo of the demon’s own accompanying effects.45 But the British railway system was by this time horrendously inefficient and cripplingly loss-making (losing over £100 million a year by the early 1960s). In 1963, the British Transport Commission, headed by Dr Richard Beeching, wielded its infamous axe, getting rid of 160 000 jobs, 5000 miles of track, and 2359 local stations during the 1960s.46 As Macmillan’s biographer Alistair Horne writes, this really did sound a death-knell for Britain: ‘It all meant a vast change in the quality of British life, with crumbling railway embankments shorn of rails and sleepers and overcrowded roads epitomising the disappearance of the heritage of the Industrial revolution that had made Britain great.’47 Bridging the two worlds, of secular modernity and a haunted British past, Night of the Demon famously takes Holden to a séance in the front parlour of the suburban Victorian home of the medium Mr Meek (Reginald Beckwith). It is surely this celebrated scene that Carlos Clarens, one of the film’s early admirers, had in mind when he
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commented that it ‘abounds in prosaic situations turning implacably into nightmares’,48 as following a rendition of ‘Cherry Ripe’ – ‘We must all sing! The spirits like it!’ Mrs Karswell says (‘Cherry Ripe’, written by Robert Herrick, is an English folk classic, and was used by John Buchan in Mr Standfast as a code, which only true-hearted British imperialists would understand)49 – Mr Meek’s spirit possession moves from comedy Indian Chief and Scotsman, through a little girl who has lost her doll, before the unmistakable voice of Professor Harrington cries in terror the films most famous lines: ‘It’s in the trees! It’s coming!’ (lines which Kate Bush sampled for the opening of the title track to her 1985 album, The Hounds of Love). Like the zombie Carrefour (Darby Jones) in I Walked with a Zombie, Mr Meek is that representative Tourneurian figure, the psychopomp, standing at the crossroads (carrefour) between two worlds, conductor of souls to the place of the dead. Meek’s séance takes us back to a major, and now largely disregarded, facet of Victorian and Edwardian British life: spiritualism and the occult. The arcana of occultism might seem literally outlandish to us now, as inhabitants, like John Holden himself, of a secular, materialist modernity characterized by, to use Max Weber’s famous term, Entzauberung (‘disenchantment’): in 1917 Weber wrote that ‘the fate of our times is characterized by rationalism and intellectualization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”’.50 But the total distinction that we tend to draw between matter and spirit – let alone the scepticism with which many of us treat the very existence of ‘spirit’ – may well have been meaningless to our contemporaries a century ago, who were drawn in very large numbers to the distinct but overlapping practices of spiritualism, psychical research, Theosophy, and occultism. One of the leading Theosophists, Annie Besant – Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s successor as head of the Theosophical Society – wrote in her book Why I Became a Theosophist (1891): ‘Spirit’ is a misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes in neither one nor the other. With him all living things act in and through a material basis, and ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ are not found dissociated. But he alleges that matter exists in states other than those at present known to science.51 As Janet Oppenheim has argued, spiritualist beliefs pervaded virtually all corners of Victorian life in Britain: in fact, spiritualism was the major Victorian response to the advances and discoveries of scientific
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 47
materialism, far more so than agnosticism or atheism. Far from being, as we might imagine, the province of a small number of fringe ideologues, cranks and zealots, or a retreat for the socially marginalized and politically disenfranchised (as it may be today), spiritualism and its scientific companion, psychical research, attracted some of the most prominent scientific, intellectual, cultural and political figures of the time, and thus should be placed ‘squarely amidst the cultural, intellectual and economic moods of the era’.52 Furthermore, spiritualism was an extraordinarily broad and flexible movement, able to accommodate all social classes and many varieties of belief, from Anglicanism to occultism. Indeed, far from being antithetical to our post-Weberian disenchanted world, the historian Alex Owen has suggested in her book The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern that occultism should be understood as a major, and seriously neglected, component of modernity.
IV If the séance at Mr Meek’s takes us back to a forgotten Victorian Britain, then it is tempting to read the Demon itself as the American Colossus, stomping all over the film’s carefully-constructed air of subtle restraint. For many viewers, the inclusion of the Demon constitutes the film’s fatal flaw, its sop to commercialism. This, too, accounts for the received version of the film’s genesis, troubled and compromised from the outset through having to make accommodations with the money-men. Certainly, the film’s English writer, Charles Bennett, felt that the integrity of the project had been destroyed by the vulgarity of the film’s American producer, Hal E. Chester, saying in an interview: ‘So . . . this guy, Hal Chester, messed up the screenplay quite a bit. It was so good, that screenplay, that it couldn’t be completely destroyed, only half destroyed. It’s still considered a good movie. ‘I think the job Jacques Tourneur did with what Hal Chester gave him was awfully good. Hal Chester, as far as I’m concerned, if he walked up my driveway right now, I’d shoot him dead.’53 Tourneur himself considered Night of the Demon ‘a vulgarisation of the truth’, and came to disavow responsibility for the finished film: ‘To me, Night of the Demon was two films. Three-fourths of the film to me was honest and in a pseudo-scientific way correct. It was science
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fiction psychology but it was almost honest. Then one-fourth of the film, which had to do with the delineation of that monster, belonged in another type of film which is the teenage horror film. Now we had carried on and made the whole film believable and logical and if we’d suggested that monster we’d have had a completely honest film, but to me it’s two things. The film was edited after I left.’54 The Demon itself was designed by the great Ken Adam (an émigré to Britain in 1934 from Nazi Germany, where he was born Klaus Hugo Adam to a Jewish family in Berlin), whose account of the process supports that of Bennett and Tourneur: I designed the monster, but under protest. I agreed completely with Tourneur. We both felt that it was completely wrong to show the monster because we felt the footprints – when you see steam coming from the imprints – were enough. But they insisted even though we were dead against it. Jacques Tourneur was a lovely man to work with except when he had this big battle with Hal E. Chester!55 I should note, however, that things are not necessarily that simple. It is not quite as straightforward as a case of Europeans versus Americans here – and not everyone remembers events in the same way. Assistant director Basil Keys maintained that the Demon was central to the film’s conception from the very beginning, and certainly not (as Tourneur had implied) inserted in post-production editing: ‘It was always in the script,’ he claimed.56 Chester was fond of taking credit not only for the finished film, but for the initial idea and script: Night of the Demon I got from the book, ‘Casting the Runes’. I travelled back and forth to California and I ran into Charlie Bennett, [who] used to be Hitchcock’s collaborator. Now I had already written, frankly, practically a whole script – a long treatment. I said ‘I tell ya what I’ll do, Charlie, I’ll give you first billing. Your name will be first. But I don’t have the patience to sit down and break it down into close-up, medium shot, long shot, all that.’ He said, ‘Sure, but I want a trip to Europe out of it.’ I said ‘Okay, ya got it.’ So that’s how his name got on the thing and the picture got made.57 To make matters even more complex, Tony Earnshaw, who knows more about the film’s genesis than anyone, maintains that the scenes with the Demon were not written by Chester at all (and certainly not by
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 49
Bennett), but were part of a script-doctoring job done by Cy Endfield, who may even have directed the footage of the Demon at the beginning and end of the film.58 For our purposes here, Endfield is a very interesting character, as he was certainly no friend to American imperialism. Endfield was exiled to Britain in 1951 after being blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was forced to earn a living as an anonymous script doctor or pseudonymous director (as variously Jonathan Roach, Hugh Raker and Charles De Lautour) until 1957, when as C. Raker Endfield he got the job of directing Hell Drivers, a fantastically rugged British thriller set around a two-fisted haulage firm, with one of the manliest casts ever assembled on celluloid (Stanley Baker, Sean Connery, Patrick McGoohan, Herbert Lom, Sid James, William Hartnell, Alfie Bass, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum – plus Peggy Cummins from Night of the Demon). Today, easily Endfield’s best-known work is also one of the great cinematic monuments to the British Empire, Zulu (1964), wherein Stanley Baker, Michael Caine, Jack Hawkins, Nigel Greene, Patrick Magee and a bunch of fighting Welsh choristers headed by Ivor Emmanuel restage the battle of Rourke’s Drift, in which, on 22–23 January 1879, the 150 soldiers of B Company of the 2nd Battalion of the 24th Regiment, the South Wales Borderers, fought off 4000 Zulu warriors, winning 11 Victoria Crosses in the process (the most ever awarded to a single regiment in a single battle). Even this film’s reputation as a high-Imperialist fantasy, or indeed as the British cinema’s valediction for the Empire, needs some nuancing. The film was very much a personal project for its star and producer, Stanley Baker, who understood the project quite clearly as bodying forth both his own Welsh patriotism, and his deep-rooted socialism. It is, after all, a film about the working-class subjects of internal colonialism (a Welsh regiment, comprised largely of Breconshire farmers) finding common cause with anti-colonial insurgents (the Zulus, who recognize and salute their heroism).59
V Much of the most influential theorizing of popular culture in the twentieth century has been animated by a hermeneutic of suspicion, or even disdain. Theodor Adorno’s analysis of the Culture Industry asserts that pop culture, an entirely deleterious force, serves as a hegemonic agent of capitalism, a means by which it exercises control over its consumers, through commodifying even its own dissent. The function of art, Adorno maintains, is to operate as a site of resistance to dominant
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capitalist ideologies; the modern consumer ‘is converted, along the line of least resistance, into the acquiescent purchaser’, incapable of critique, as the Culture Industry promotes only banality and passivity. Only the most austere, confrontational, avant-garde art allows us to escape the rapacious maw of the Culture Industry, by means of its very dissonance, asceticism, and difficulty. ‘All “light” and pleasant art has become illusory and mendacious’; any art which relies on an aesthetic of pleasure is always already compromised. Anyone who enjoys a work of art, Adorno believes, is a Philistine.60 Is there no possibility that popular culture can provide its own sites of resistance? Theorists of the British New Left, such as E.P. Thompson or Stuart Hall, attempting a reformulation of Marxist theory away from state-controlled ideology in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the revelations of the genocidal truth of Stalin’s regime, began from the 1960s to examine ways in which ‘bottom up’ cultural formations, for example, might constitute forms of genuinely radical ‘folk art’, operating outside (or beneath) the ideological control of the Culture Industry.61 I want to close by offering another, albeit related, possibility for the socially liberating power of popular culture, and one in keeping with my subject. Popular culture, I contend, is the medium through which we experience Sympathy for the Devil. Though, for all Cy Endfield’s radical politics, one would hardly want to make a case for Night of the Demon as a document of the New Left (if anything, it adumbrates a version of the same Victorian Imperial Toryism which informed M.R. James), it is worth stressing that it is produced from the same complex of historical forces that resulted in the New Left, and at the same time. As Satan’s biographer Peter Stanford suggests, the Devil is ‘a popular figure, not a dogmatic abstraction, and has come alive not in learned tomes or seminary debates, but in the lives of the faithful, terrifying, omnipresent and grotesque, evil incarnate.’62 In large part this is because, as the great historian of the Devil, Jeffrey Burton Russell, argues, the questions posed by theodicy, about the place and workings of evil in a creation supposedly governed by divine grace, are so difficult and painful as to prove essentially unanswerable, or answerable only by slippery evasions.63 Thus, mainstream, official, or institutionalized theology tends to avoid these questions. It has, in other words, ceded the territory of evil to popular culture: this is the domain of the Devil. There is a fine tradition, of course, of radical counter-readings of the Devil, as famously exemplified by the work of William Blake, for whom, of course, the ‘true poet’, as he observed in ‘The Marriage of
Night of the Demon & the British Empire 51
Heaven and Hell’, was necessarily ‘of the devil’s party’ – ‘For this history,’ Blake maintains, ‘has been adopted by both parties.’64 Blake was an important precursor-figure for the New Left: E.P. Thompson’s own last work was a landmark study of Blake’s intellectual formation, Witness Against the Beast.65 ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ draws to its apocalyptic climax with the ringing exclamation ‘Empire is no more!’66 For many, including Blake, the Devil has stood for the little man, the underdog, the revolutionary, the witness against empire. Standing at the end of one empire, the British, and facing into another, the American, Night of the Demon, in its concern with asserting the primacy of traditional beliefs and structures of feeling over a bull-headedly progressivist techno-modernity, bears, in its oblique, sinister way, such witness.
Notes 1. David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007). 2. David Kynaston, Family Britain 1951–57 (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 664. 3. Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940–2000 (London: Pan Macmillan, 2003), p. 211. 4. Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, Molesworth, ed. Philip Hensher (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 214–28. 5. For an analysis of the significance of this for British social and political history in the 1960s, see Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Abacus, 2006). 6. Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006), p. 236. 7. Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 433. 8. Kynaston, Family Britain, p. 616. 9. Ibid., p. 685. 10. Ibid., p. 682. 11. For accounts of Suez and the end of the British Empire, see, for example, Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, pp. 1–30; Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), pp. 484–500. 12. Kynaston, Family Britain, p. 683. 13. Weight, p. 317. 14. Tony Earnshaw, Beating the Devil: The Making of ‘The Night of the Demon’ (Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, 2005). 15. Jacques Tourneur, ‘Interview’ [with Bertrand Tavernier], in Claire Johnston and Paul Willemen, eds, Jacques Tourneur (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1975), p. 51. The Interview first appeared in Positif, 132 (November 1971). 16. Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 17. Ibid., p. 7. Other films in this category include Berlin Express (1948) and Circle of Danger (1951).
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18. Fujiwara, p. 244. In part, this unpleasantness is a consequence of Dana Andrews’s own alcoholism, which took its toll on the filming – as a number of commentators have noted, he is visibly drunk in a few scenes. 19. Tourneur, ‘Interview’, pp. 54–5. 20. Earnshaw, pp. 32–5. 21. ‘Murray, Margaret Alice (1863–1963)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online: http://www.oxforddnb.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/article/35169? docPos=4 (accessed 17 January 2011). This practice connects Murray to Margaret Johnston’s academic witch Flora Carr in Sidney Hayers’s Night of the Eagle (1962), based on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife. Night of the Eagle is often placed alongside Night of the Demon in accounts of horror cinema, and the two films are narratively very similar. 22. Earnshaw, p. 33. 23. See M.A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Margaret A. Murray, The God of the Witches (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 24. Dennis Wheatley, The Ka of Gifford Hillary (London: Hutchinson, 1956), p. 22. 25. Wheatley, The Devil and All his Works (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 11. 26. Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out (Ware: Wordsworth, 2007), p. 21. 27. Ibid., pp. 25–7. 28. For Ahmed’s relationship with Wheatley, see Phil Baker, The Devil is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2009), pp. 318–20. 29. Wheatley, ‘Introduction’ to Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art (1936; London: Senate, 1994), p. 8. 30. Wheatley, The Devil and All His Works, p. 270. 31. Ahmed, pp. 253, 259. 32. Baker, pp. 298–300. For Wheatley on Crowley, see The Devil and All His Works, pp. 273–6. 33. M.R. James, ‘Casting the Runes’, Casting the Runes and other ghost stories, ed. Michael Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 149, 137. 34. Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out, p. 20. 35. In 1967, Charles Gray gave a brilliant performance as Mocata, a middleaged ipsissimus of wealth, taste and breeding, again far outshining Wheatley’s original, in Terence Fisher’s Hammer version of The Devil Rides Out. 36. ‘Mr. A’s’ articles appeared on 28 October 1951 and 7 November 1954: see Gareth J. Medway, The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 143–9. 37. Robert Fabian, London After Dark: An Intimate Record of Night Life in London (London: Naldrett Press, 1954), pp. 75–6. The back-cover blurb is from the rather more lurid 1962 Panther paperback edition, credited to ‘Fabian of the Yard’. 38. Medway, The Lure of the Sinister, p. 152. 39. Baker, pp. 527–8. 40. The Europa Building was built for international traffic. The two other buildings of Heathrow’s Central Terminal Area were opened in 1956: the No. 2 Building Britannic (for domestic flights) and the Queen’s Building (for
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41.
42. 43. 44. 45.
46. 47. 48. 49.
50.
51. 52.
53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.
administration): see Philip Sherwood, Heathrow: 2000 Years of History (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 87–9. Robert Elwall, Building a Better Tomorrow: Architecture in Britain in the 1950s (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2000). For 1950s British architecture, see also William J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd edn (London and New York: Phaidon, 1996), pp. 929–45; Alan Powers, Britain: Modern Architectures in History (London: Reaktion, 2007). For the Festival of Britain, see Weight, pp. 191–206. See Christopher Frayling, ‘Introduction’, in Earnshaw, Beating the Devil, xx–xxiv. Kynaston, Family Britain, p. 351. Earnshaw, pp. 75–80, has a useful list of the film’s locations. This shot also echoes perhaps the most famous moment in any of Tourneur’s films, the scene in Cat People where Alice (Jane Randolph) believes she is being stalked by a panther; the scene comes to a dramatic climax with the appearance from nowhere of a bus with loudly-hissing air-brakes. This cinematic device, the shocking but bathetic climax to a scene of sustained tension, became known, in honour of the producer, as ‘Lewton’s Bus’. For these figures, see Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, p. 122. Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan 1957–86: Volume 2 of the Official Biography (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 252. Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films (New York: Da Capo, 1997), p. 144. Ronald Pearsall, one of the historians of Victorian supernaturalism, noted that séances developed a fixed code of practice across the second half of the nineteenth century, and would often begin with prayers or songs. The spirits were fond of popular songs, and on one occasion, Pearsall notes, a rendition of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ met with particular approval from the other world, with the spirits joining in; see Pearsall, The Table-Rappers: Victorians and the Occult (Gloucester: Sutton, 2004), p. 44. Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and eds H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford and New York: OUP, 1958), p. 155. For an analysis of Enzauberung specifically in the context of fin-desiècle and Edwardian spiritualism and occultism, see Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 10–16. Owen, p. 38. Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 4. Earnshaw, Beating the Devil, p. 26. Ibid, p. 26. Christopher Frayling, Ken Adam and the Art of Production Design (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 78. Earnshaw, p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., pp. 22–3. The very meticulous film scholar Sheldon Hall supports Earnshaw’s assertion that Endfield rewrote the screenplay of Night of the
54
59. 60. 61.
62. 63. 64. 65. 66.
It Came from the 1950s! Demon, though does not comment on whether or not he directed key scenes; see Hall, Zulu With Some Guts Behind It: The Making of the Epic Movie (Sheffield: Tomahawk, 2005), p. 82. See Hall, Zulu, for a lengthy and fascinating account of this film’s genesis and production, and of the various participants in its making. Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 32–3 and passim. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963). Stuart Hall has made a number of important interventions in this field: see, for example, Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (London: Hutchinson, 1964). Peter Stanford, The Devil: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1996), p. 93. See Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977). William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in The Complete Poems, ed. W.H. Stevenson (London and New York: Longman, 1989), p. 107. E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Blake, p. 124.
3
Mutants and Monsters1 Kim Newman
Sci-fi has always been fascinated with the Other, and critics of popular culture have been quick to point out that the Other is always other than itself, which is to say, the pods and blobs are ‘symbols’ standing in for something else. Ever since Susan Sontag pointed to the fact that the Other in 50s sci-fi was often linked to radiation, it has been customary to equate the Other with the Bomb. John and Jane Doe might think they’re being attacked by elephantine aphids run riot in their garden, but we know better. The hypothetical film informs us that a tactical nuclear weapon has been set off at the desert test site just ten miles away from the Doe residence; one step ahead, we realise that it is radiation that has caused the ravenous aphids to double in size every ten minutes, and jumping to conclusions, we decide that The Attack of the Giant Aphids is really about the arms race, and that John and Jane are down with a severe case of nuclear anxiety. But films like this are not primarily worried about the Bomb; they loved the Bomb, or at least the technology that made it possible. The Does may not be as dumb as we thought, and to understand what these films did worry about, all we have to do is look at what’s before our very eyes; it’s aphids after all, nature run amok.2
Science fiction films of the 50s, the period when nuke-awareness was at its height, are full of monsters. And the monsters tend to be radioactive. Peter Biskind, quoted above, tries to reduce the monster movies of the 50s to expressions of the oldest theme in the horror cannon, nature run amok, but monsters are rarely as simple as they at first 55
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seem. The Thing From Another World (1951), the first monster of the 50s, is a vegetable vampire from outer space who looks like Boris Karloff in a boiler suit. As played by James Arness, the Thing is Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, the Enemy Invader and Nature Run Amok in one catch-all package. The Bomb is never actually mentioned in the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby film, but there is a possibly significant moment when an explosive intended to free a flying saucer from the arctic ice proves much more destructive than the soldiers who set it off expect it to be. With its means of getting back to Another World blown to bits, the Thing might reasonably see itself as the victim of a pre-emptive first strike from the human race, and thus be rather more justified in killing everyone it runs into than the film suggests. The Thing From Another World ends famously with the American military/scientific (with the emphasis on the former) team triumphant over the ‘intellectual carrot’, and Scotty (Douglas Spencer), the wisecracking reporter, turning serious as he delivers the fade-out speech to the rest of the English-speaking world. ‘I bring you a warning . . . tell the world . . . tell this to everybody wherever they are . . . watch the skies! Keep watching the skies!’ Among other things, this prompts the audience to remember just what that good ol’ American base in the middle of the arctic is there for. It is part of the Distant Early Warning system, watching the skies with radar should the Soviets ever mount a bomber attack. The Russians are further implicated by the fact that the only sympathizer the Thing finds on this world is a cold, unemotional scientist with a beard and a fur hat. Nature may be running amok in The Thing, but the suggestion is that the rampant vegetation has friends in the Kremlin. The film may not be about the arms race, but the Cold War certainly forms a potent subtext for the s-f thrills of man against monster. The first real atomic monster movie is Samuel Newfield’s The Lost Continent (1951), a very cheap item from Lippert, the company that had produced Rocketship X-M (1950), the first real atomic Awful Warning movie. Its historic status aside, The Lost Continent is a minor film and the radioactive elements almost completely arbitrary. Major Cesar Romero leads an expedition to the South Seas in search of a downed, nuclearpowered rocket. It turns up on an island where dinosaurs have been ‘kept alive by uranium deposits’. The magic mineral has also pulled the experimental missile from the skies and can probably be blamed for the green tinting of all the lost continent scenes. Radiation is a funny thing, we are told in these films; it can do strange things. In fact, it can do anything convenient for the plot.
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This kind of radiation causes Douglas Fairbanks Jr’s duck to lay uranium eggs in Val Guest’s Mr Drake’s Duck (1951), makes Mickey Rooney glow in Leslie H. Martinson’s The Atomic Kid (1954), puts Peter Arne seven and a half seconds into the future in Ken Hughes’s Timeslip (1955), creates geniuses or zombies in John Gilling’s The Gamma People (1956), shrinks Grant Williams in Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1956), grows Glenn Langan in Bert I. Gordon’s The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), revives a murderous native as a walking tree in Dan Milner’s From Hell It Came (1957), makes Japanese gangsters sentient slime in Ishiro Honda’s Bijo to Ekitai Ningen (1958, The H-Man), turns Ron Randell to steel in Allan Dwan’s The Most Dangerous Man Alive (1961) and makes Tor Johnson into Coleman Francis’s The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961). In 1962, Stan Lee could get away with having Peter Parker, The Amazing Spider-Man, develop his superpowers after being bitten by a radioactive spider; and Marvel’s mutant group The Uncanny X-Men, who followed by a year, were originally ‘children of the atom’, the superfreak offspring of those exposed to radioactivity during the Manhattan Project. For all its scientific double-talk, The Lost Continent is as much of a throwback as its man-in-a-suit tyrannosaurus. It is an imitation of the greatest nature run amok film of all, King Kong (1933). In 1952, a re-released Kong earned four times as much as it had done during its original depression run. This success encouraged Warner Brothers to launch the atomic monster cycle, first by distributing the independently-made The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) then by producing Them! (1954). In Beast, a dinosaur frozen for millennia in the same ice that had held the Thing is thawed out by an arctic bomb test. As a result, the ‘rhedosaurus’ not only has the people-eating and building-smashing habits of King Kong but is also highly radioactive. Soldiers tracking it by spilled blood sicken and die of a nuke-related plague. In Them!, New Mexico bomb testing has caused successive generations of ants to get bigger – a rare instance (along with World Without End, 1956) of a script which seems to understand that genetic mutation means effects showing up in the offspring of the irradiated rather than assuming radiation has magical transformative properties. By the time the film starts, the insects are 20 feet long and need lebensraum. Like King Kong, the films find their monsters in isolated and under-populated regions, then brings them to a city for the finale. The Beast heads for its ancient breeding grounds in New York, the ants take their last stand in the Los Angeles storm drains. Of the films, Them!, despite its awkward puppet creatures, is by far the more successful. While Beast is content to ape the King Kong plot
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and fill in the non-monster scenes with aimless chatter, Them! effectively presents itself as a documentary-style thriller along the lines of The House on 92nd Street (1945), The Naked City (1948) or Panic in the Streets (1950). Well directed by Gordon Douglas, the film is strongly cast, nicely written, and, given the central absurdity of the giant ants, sensibly plotted. But what has it got to do with the Bomb? In Cinefantastique, Steve Rubin writes that the film’s ‘power lies in its ability to deliver a subtle but crucial message of the hazards of the nuclear age’.3 Ted Sherdeman, the film’s writer and original producer, saw Them! as an opportunity to deal with his own atomic anxieties. ‘I was a Lieutenant Colonel then,’ he said of the Hiroshima bombing, ‘and when I heard the news I just went over to the curb and started throwing up.’4 Dr Medford (Edmund Gwenn), the film’s humanist scientist, has a few grim lines about the Biblical prophecy that ‘the Beasts will rule the Earth’. There is also no question but that the bombs tested by Our Side are responsible for the menace, but in its endorsement of the official line Them! is hardly ambiguous. As soon as the New Mexico police discover the ants’ first victim was an FBI man on vacation, the Bureau is called in. Its plaster-of-Paris impressions of mysterious footprints and the presence of large amounts of formic acid in the corpse lead to the summoning of a pair of experts from the US Department of Agriculture. Cop James Whitmore, G-Man James Arness, elderly bug specialist Gwenn, and pretty bug specialist Joan Weldon are the heart of the team, but they can call upon the entire resources of the country’s law enforcement agencies, military might and scientific establishments. These are not quaking victims of atomic paranoia, but the level-headed nine-to-fivers who weighed up the consequences and decided to drop the Bomb in the first place. Like the semi-documentaries on which it is patterned, Them! is a hymn to the government. In the exciting finish, the military swing briskly into action in defence of the city and the monsters are convincingly taken out with superior firepower. Joe Public is ignored as the experts get on with their jobs. Before the battle, a Tannoy announces ‘your personal safety and the safety of the entire city will depend on your full co-operation with the military authorities’. Them! drops the touchy issue of the Bomb itself in order to reaffirm the worth of the society that made it possible, though it ends with Gwenn pondering the question of what further mutations might be thrown up by all the nuclear tests subsequent to the one that created the ants. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, however, displays a fearful circularity: the rhedosaurus is accidentally revived by the atom bomb,
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but it is also deliberately killed with an injected isotope. In a satisfying finale, Paul Christian and sharpshooter Lee Van Cleef face up to the Beast in the flaming ruins of Coney Island and shoot a radioactive device into the creature’s neck. Ray Harryhausen’s splendid special effects creation thrashes to its death with geiger counters still clicking. Gojira (1954), It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955) and Behemoth the Sea Monster (1959, The Giant Behemoth) also feature primordial monsters awakened by underwater bomb tests who are done away with thanks to the judicial application of a handy ultimate weapon. The message here is that science and the military can contain any monstrosity they might inadvertently unleash. The safety precautions work. After The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Them!, the Bomb and its side-effects became central to monster movies. Somehow, the atomic angle became bankable. The titles alone are testimony: Atom Man Versus Superman (1950), U-238 and the Witch Doctor (1953, a cut-down of the serial Jungle Drums of Africa), The Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), Atomic Rulers of the World (1956, originally Kotetsu No Kyojin), The H-Man, The Atomic Submarine (1959), Atom Age Vampire (1960, actually an Italian film Seddok, l’erede di Satana), The Atomic Brain (1963), The Fiend With the Atomic Brain (1972, Blood of Ghastly Horror). Man-Made Monster (1941) was re-released as The Atomic Monster, Bride of the Monster (1956) was originally Bride of the Atom, the British Timeslip became The Atomic Man in America and a feature-length version of the 1936 Flash Gordon serial was retitled Atomic Spaceship. Just as later films would put ‘sex’ or ‘blood’ in their titles, these movies capitalize on atomic buzz-words to lure in a nuke-conscious audience. Sometimes, the deception was deliberate: Kurt Neumann’s The Fly (1958), a film about a matter transmitter that deals in atoms but not atomics, was misleadingly advertised as ‘the first time Atomic Mutation on humans has been shown on screen’. The sublime terror that accompanies the epochal failure of society and individual men and women has not, especially in the case of the 1950s creature film, been represented in holy enough language. The characters in most of these efforts are flat caricatures who bathetically spout maudlin clichés, mouth scientific mumbo-jumbo, and scream hysterically for far too long in the direction of monstrously large reptiles. These gross efforts, pathetic claptrap, answer the most significant question of the 20th century with tacky special effects, papier-mâché sets, and idiotic plots. How can lumbering dinosaurs spewing atomic fire, giant carnivorous plants, and implacable mutant insects approach the fiery chaos that engulfed Japan? The force that
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killed too many in a hellish firestorm, the force that poisoned thousands more with pestilent radiation, the force powerful enough to etch the shadows of unknowing pedestrians into the cement is not a fit subject for cheap Hollywood productions. We needed a responsible contemporary of Bosch or Goya and not Samuel Z. Arkoff or Roger Corman to render, in proper proportions, our deadliest spectacle.5 Aside from occasional class acts like The Thing From Another World, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) or Jack Arnold’s remarkable series for Universal, s-f in the 50s was strictly a B genre. However, it would be an error to assume that the low-grade atomic paranoia movies constitute a coherent expression of a single point of view. Even among the quickest of the quickies, there exists a surprising spectrum of attitudes to the atomic society. These films fall roughly into two separate groups – those produced by the B units of major studios to support their own A features, and those made by independent producers for grindhouse and drivein double bills. In the former camp we have Columbia’s It Came From Beneath the Sea, Universal’s The Deadly Mantis (1957) and United Artists’ The Monster That Challenged The World (1957); while the latter is represented by the likes of Bert I. Gordon’s The Amazing Colossal Man and Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), both released through American International. On the whole, the major studios have better special effects and thus are more confident in staging scenes of mass devastation (though the Deadly Mantis’s attack on Washington is every bit as feeble and unconvincing as the Colossal Man’s rampage in Las Vegas). They can afford to rely on the fairly expansive formula of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Them!, building up to a battle between monster and military. Not uncoincidentally, the major studio films cited above were made with the co-operation of the Department of Defence; independent producers almost never received loans of men and materiel from the armed forces. The indies are forced to use claustrophobic settings, fewer characters and do without heavy artillery. Sometimes this means that the monsters have to be weedy enough to be killed off with a blowtorch (It Conquered the World, 1956) or hot rod headlights (Invasion of the Saucer Men, 1957), but occasionally budgetary restrictions lend a doomy feeling of helplessness to the struggle. At the major studios, quick-thinking military men of action are valued more than the muddle-headed men of science. In Robert Gordon’s It Came From Beneath the Sea, the love triangle is resolved when
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Dr Donald Curtis steps aside so that Navy man Kenneth Tobey can get Faith Domergue to give up the laboratory for the kitchen. Which shouldn’t be too hard, since all she does while the boys are discussing the giant octopus that threatens San Francisco is make coffee and look beautiful. Arnold Laven’s The Monster That Challenged the World is more interesting in its military/scientific polarity. Prehistoric eggs long dormant in an inland sea are hatched into giant mollusc creatures when nuclear waste is dumped. The fault is squarely with civilian eggheads (atomic power), but the victims who get fried and/or eaten are downto-earth Navy fliers. Lieutenant Commander Tim Holt romances base secretary Audrey Dalton, a widow whose little girl likes to play in the laboratory. A nascent scientist, the kid learns her lesson when her tampering with the thermostat awakens the last of the killer snails. Holt saves everyone, the equation between reckless science and childish blundering has been made, and we realize white-coats need uniforms to bail them out when they foul up. In It Came From Beneath the Sea, Tobey reprimands a hesitant comrade with ‘you’re not afraid of a little radiation are ya?’ The major studios were unable to exclude the atomic angle from their films, but tended to play it down. Only in the independently-produced, studio-released Beast From 20,000 Fathoms do we get to see the test that revives the monster; in Them! and It Came From Beneath the Sea the big bangs take place offscreen before the action. Nathan Juran’s The Deadly Mantis opens with 20 minutes of stock footage from air force shorts (Guardians All, One Plane – One Bomb, SFP308) and narration that informs us of the great job being done for the free world by SAC and the DEW line. The giant praying mantis isn’t woken by the Bomb, but by an erupting volcano. The military spot the big bug as it flies south and are ready for it by the time it reaches the States. The Deadly Mantis is a symbol for the Bomb all right, only the Bomb it symbolizes belongs to Someone Else. The independent films are less afraid to make allegations. In The Amazing Colossal Man, we see Colonel Glenn Langan disobey orders and rush into the site of a ‘plutonium bomb’ test in order to rescue the pilot of a crashed plane. Exposed to the blast, he has all his skin and body hair blasted off. Attack of the Crab Monsters concerns a scientific team sent to a Pacific Island to assess the effects of fall-out from H-Bomb tests on the flora and fauna. Both films deal with innocent victims of ill-advised tests and feature conscience-stricken Oppenheimer-type scientists trying to solve the problem in a test tube while the army is out blowing things up. The major studios present simple soldier heroes who act by the book and never question orders, but the independents are actively
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anti-military. ‘What sins could a man commit in a single life time that he should deserve this?’ asks the misanthropic, confused, doubting Colossal Man, flashing back to hand-to-hand dirtiness in Korea. The Amazing Colossal Man isn’t a very good film, but it fits the anxious/paranoid view of the 50s better than self-confident exercises like The Deadly Mantis. Gordon brought the Colossal Man back in War of the Colossal Beast (1958, The Terror Strikes) and starred another radioactive giant in The Cyclops (1957). Since he uses wonder drugs to make people and animals big in The Beginning of the End (1957), Village of the Giants (1965) and Food of the Gods (1976), shrunk people with light rays in Attack of the Puppet People (1958, Six Inches Tall) and never bothered to explain the gigantism of The Spider (1958, Earth Versus the Spider), he was obviously more interested in the effect than the cause. Attack of the Crab Monsters, despite its ludicrous villains, is a decent, chilling little film. Though the monsters look especially ridiculous in stills, they are slightly more effective in the film itself, which is dimly-lit enough to disguise the shortcomings of the giant crab outfits. Its military characters get killed early, leaving the problem to be solved by a group of multi-national scientists. One by one, they are murdered and decapitated, and the island crumbles until it is little more than an atoll. Whereas major studio monsters tend to be mindless destruction machines, the independents favour intelligent, even articulate, mutations. The Colossal Man rants endlessly about his personal problems; the Crab Monsters absorb the contents of the brains they eat, and get smarter with each kill. Like the monster in Corman’s The Day the World Ended (1956) and the invulnerable gangster in The Most Dangerous Man Alive, the Crab Monsters are functional mutations, more fit than man to survive a radiation-polluted environment. In this, films were following science fiction magazines, where, as Paul Brians points out in Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1984 (1987), ‘the most common side effect of radiation is not blindness, hemophilia or limblessness; it is the ability to read minds.’6 The majors were unwilling or unable to deal with their atomic monsters in anything but the most cut-and-dried, official-line-toeing terms. The doubts of The Amazing Colossal Man or the dreads of Attack of the Crab Monsters are nowhere to be found. Jack Arnold, a liberal whose films were made within the studio system, touches only tangentially on nuclear issues. However, Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), inspiration of course for The Amazing Colossal Man, is an atomic mutation movie. Grant Williams’s yacht drifts through a radioactive dust cloud and he begins to shrink. The origin of the cloud is barely
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considered and the film is concerned mainly with the physical and psychological plight of a man growing too small for his white-collar life. Screenwriter Richard Matheson, adapting his novel The Shrinking Man (1956), later worked with Roger Corman on his Edgar Allan Poe films; he ends his script with an echo of Corman’s benevolent mutation theme by having Williams enter a sub-atomic world of wonders and make peace with the universe. Arnold and Matheson have a more generous vision than Bert I. Gordon; the Amazing Colossal Man is gunned down on Boulder Dam, but the Incredible Shrinking Man finds transcendence in a microscopic landscape. Outside America, the concerns were subtly (sometimes not so subtly) different. Japan’s Toho Studios were so impressed with The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms that they assigned Ishiro Honda to direct an unofficial remake, Gojira. The film was a big hit in Japan, and got exported to the rest of the world as Godzilla, King of Monsters, with new scenes involving Raymond Burr as an American reporter spliced into the old footage. Gojira is a film from the nation that had the Bomb dropped on them, and it shows. We identify with King Kong and to some extent share his desire to trash New York, but the devastation of Tokyo in Gojira is agonising. The film opens in the burning ruins of the city, and flashes back to the lead-up story. Gojira is a rare monster movie to go into the nasty details of the catastrophe: hordes of injured refugees, thronging field hospitals, churches full of widows and orphans. The monster is not only completely unsympathetic, but also a far more explicit symbol for the Bomb than any of its American counterparts. The creature has fiery radioactive breath, and its spines glow ominously whenever it exterminates anything. Gojira is, at one remove, about the physical after-effects of the Bomb (a chilling little scene, not in the export version, has a doctor diagnose that a perky little girl with radiation poisoning is inescapably doomed), but it also tries to discuss the moral dilemma surrounding its use. Gojira is an enemy as unreasonable and implacable as any dictator, and conventional weapons are useless against it. The film’s hero, an embittered scientist, has invented an unlikely-sounding ultimate weapon, the Oxygen Destroyer. With the Oxygen Destroyer, Gojira could be defeated, but the scientist wants to suppress his invention for the good of humanity. In an American film, the tension would rise from the race-against-time development of the monster-destroying weapon, which would then be used speedily and with no qualms (cf: Earth vs the Flying Saucers, 1956). Much of the last third of Gojira is taken up with the scientist agonizing over the ethics of unleashing such a terrible force. In a typically
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Japanese heroic gesture, he finally deploys the Oxygen Destroyer against the monster, turning it instantly into a skeleton, then commits suicide so that his deadly knowledge will be lost forever. The film was a sensational success, in Japan and abroad, and led to the thriving and popular Kaiju Eiga genre of giant monster movies. Godzilla was swiftly brought back for Motoyoshi Oda’s Gojira no Gyakushu (1955, Gigantis the Fire Monster), a quickie sequel which introduced not the oxygen-destroyed skeleton in Tokyo Bay but a relative, who proceeded to stomp through a series of encounters with rival monsters until 1975, then vanished until Kohji Hashimoto’s Gojira (1984, Godzilla 1985) did resurrect the original beast and inaugurated its own cycle, which wound up in 1995 to make way for Roland Emmerich’s Americanized Godzilla (1998). Less impressive as an effects-created creature than Harryhausen’s rhedosaurus, Godzilla – a lumbering stuntman in a suit, dragging a tail across fabulously detailed miniature sets – became a far more lasting icon of the unleashed atom, though he gradually reformed under the influence of the children who formed the core of his adoring audience. The first Japanese monster movies were sombre, black and white efforts, with few of the wisecracks found in contemporary American films. However, the tone of the films soon changed. In Honda’s Rodan (1956), a pair of revived pterodactyls make sonic booms that are as destructive as A-Bomb blasts. But they don’t mean any harm and, when one is killed, the mate commits grief-stricken suicide by flying into a volcano. Rodan is sentimental in pretty-pretty colours, while Gojira is grim in black and white. In later Kaiju Eiga films, the scenes of mass destruction are visually appealing and almost cheerful. The most charmingly surreal of the run is Honda’s Mosura (1961, Mothra), which features a giant moth revived by nuclear testing in the Pacific and also caricatures America as the aggressive Republic of ‘Roliscia’, but features such fantastical devices as tiny twin singing princesses to give it a fairytale feel. In subsequent films, the monsters reformed and became sympathetic protectors of the Earth from alien invaders, befriending small children and paternally encouraging young love. Godzilla began a series of monster bouts with Honda’s Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (1962, King Kong vs. Godzilla) and Mosura tai Gojira (1964, Godzilla vs. the Thing), then began his rehabilitation by teaming with former enemy Mothra and Rodan against a triple-threat from outer space in Honda’s San Daikaiju Chikyu Sandai no Kessen (1964, Ghidrah the ThreeHeaded Monster). Mosura tai Gojira is the last of the original series to pay much attention to Godzilla’s nuclear origins – visiting the formerly paradisiacal island home of Mothra, a Japanese reporter (Akira Takarada)
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muses ‘it’s like the end of the world here . . . this island alone is good reason to end nuclear testing’ – and it has a streak of melancholy to go with its colourful and destructive battle scenes. Not coincidentally, it was also the last film to cast Godzilla as a bad guy; once the giant reptile was on our side, his radioactivity wore off or went unmentioned, and his firebreathing trick was just another attribute of his dragon-like hero status rather than a mark of mutation. In his increasingly silly, occasionally endearing way, Godzilla took on Ghidrah again (Honda’s Kaiju Daisenso/Monster Zero, 1965, and Kaiji Soshingeki/Destroy All Monsters, 1968), battled a giant lobster (Jun Fukuda’s Gojira, Ebirah, Mosura: Nankai no Dai Ketto/Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, 1966), learned parental responsibility (Fukuda’s Kaiju Shima no Kessen: Gojira No Musuku/Son of Godzilla, 1967), appeared in the Play It Again, Sam fantasies of a bullied child (Honda’s Gojira-MiniraGabara:Oru kaijû daishingeki 1969), tackled a creature who embodies pollution in a brief return to seriousness (Yoshimitsu Banno’s Gojira tai Hedorah/Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, 1971) and dealt with ridiculouslooking creatures (eg: Gigan, a fat metallic parrot with a buzzsaw in its stomach for breaking up wrestling holds) under the control of alien invaders (Fukuda’s Chikyu Kogeki Meirei: Gojira tai Gaigan/Godzilla vs. Gigan, 1972, Gojira tai Megaro/Godzilla vs. Megalon, 1973, and Gojira tai Mechagojira/Godzilla vs. the Cosmic Monster, 1974, and Honda’s Mekagojira no Gyakushu/Monsters From an Unknown Planet/Terror of Mechagodzilla, 1975). Godzilla’s change of heart was influenced by the success of a series from Toho’s great rival, Daiei Studios. Noriaki Yuasa’s Daikaiju Gamera (1965, Gammera the Invincible) introduced Gamera, a giant turtle who divides his time between rescuing children and tearing chunks out of more ferocious, malevolent monsters. There were Japanese monster movies which didn’t imitate the city-stomping Godzilla and Gamera films, often featuring bizarre human mutations created by scientific experiment or mishap. The stalwart Ishiro Honda alone was responsible for the human blob gangster of Bijo to Ekitai-Ningen (1958, The H-Man), the self-explanatory Gasu Ningen dai Ichigo (1960, The Human Vapor), and the shipwrecked yacht party who transform into colourful fungus creatures in Matango (1963, Matango – Fungus of Terror/Attack of the Mushroom People). In competition with these oddities were the teleporting electro-man of Jun Fukuda’s Denso Ningen (1960, The Secret of the Telegian) and Peter Dyneley as the man who splits into two monsters in George Breakston and Kenneth Crane’s US–Japanese The Split (1961, The Manster). However, the G-Force was irresistible and many
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imitators weighed into the fray, affording the spectacle of sumo wrestlers in uncomfortable suits grappling among decreasingly impressive miniature sets: Honda’s Uchi daikaiju Dogora (1965, Dagora, the Space Monster), Haruyasu Noguchi’s Daikyoju Gappa (1967, Gappa, the Triphibian Monster), Kazui Nihonmatsu’s Uchu daikaiju Guirara (1968, The X From Outer Space), Honda’s Gezora Ganime Kameba Kessen nankai no daikaiju (1970, Yog: Monster From Space). In the 50s, Britain was failing to come to terms with its increasing irrelevance to the global superpower confrontation. British atomic monster movies are therefore much more nervous than their American inspirations. Leslie Norman’s X the Unknown (1956) and Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend Without a Face (1958) seem to be pro-militarist movies along the lines of Them! but are far less self-confident. In X, the army confronts a ravenous radioactive blob from the bowels of the Earth in Scotland; while Fiend (set in a Home Counties version of Manitoba) exonerates a military atomic installation and blames the brain-eating monsters on a local mad scientist. The scripts are woodenly heroic, with stolid soldiers and dedicated military scientists handling problems bravely, but the visuals tell another story. X the Unknown opens with a bored army unit using geiger counters on a desolate beach, and an edgy, black and white gloom is cast over the entire film. Sympathetic characters (including children) are gruesomely eaten and the government men who face the crisis are high-handed time-servers. Fiend Without a Face undercuts its endorsement of the army with an amazingly graphic final shootout as the brain creatures are splattered to death. As in many British films of the time, the authorities are presented as remote and unsympathetic. Joseph Losey, who was to have made X the Unknown for Hammer, returned to the company with The Damned (aka These Are the Damned, 1961), the most vicious indictment imaginable of official policy in the face of the possibility of nuclear holocaust. In the late 50s, the atomic mutation cycle began to lose momentum. The majors dropped the genre first, then the independents began to cool off. Eugène Lourié, director of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, went to Britain to do yet another remake, Behemoth the Sea Monster. Two years later, he did the story again as Gorgo (1961) but cut the nuke angle completely. Meanwhile, Fred F. Sears’s The Werewolf (1956), Gene Fowler’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and Herbert L. Strock’s Blood of Dracula (1958, Blood Is My Heritage) combined radiation with more traditional movie monstrousness. During this cycle, even Baron Frankenstein (Boris Karloff) needed to employ an atomic pile, in Howard W. Koch’s Frankenstein 1970 (1958). In these films, mad scientists turn innocents
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into monsters in order to create a hardier human being able to survive in a tougher, post-holocaust world. Here, the soldier/scientist opposition is downplayed in favour of generation gap stories in which elderly scientists are intent on ruling the lives of happy-go-lucky teenagers who only want their inalienable right to drag-race, neck and listen to rock ‘n’ roll. After the first burst of mutant movies, when any self-respecting monster had to be radioactive, the sub-genre’s half-life dwindled. The task of keeping the form ticking was left to a trickle of mostly ridiculous and self-explanatory obscurities like Kenneth G. Crane’s Monster From Green Hell (1958) (giant wasps in Africa), Bernard L. Kowalski’s Attack of the Giant Leeches (1960, Demons of the Swamp), Robert Hutton’s The Slime People (1963) (more scaly than slimy), Del Tenney’s The Horror of Party Beach (1964) (underwater fish-human zombies), Lawrence Huntington’s The Vulture (1967) (Akim Tamiroff with wings and clawed feet), Harry Essex’s Octaman (1971) (yes, a man with an octopus for a head), Stephen Traxler’s Slithis (1978, Spawn of the Slithis), Douglas Camfield’s TV serial The Nightmare Man (1981) (a Soviet pilot fused with his crashed atomic warplane) and Greydon Clark’s The Uninvited (1987) (a cute cat escaped from a nuclear lab, who periodically transforms into a killer puppet). Beach blanket boppers in their bikinis and ball-huggers are being menaced by monsters that were created when drums of radioactive waste leaked. But not to worry; though a few girls get carved up, all comes right in the end in time for one last wiener roast before school starts again. These things happen only rarely because directors, writers and producers want them to happen; they happen on their own. The producers of The Horror of Party Beach, for example, were two Connecticut drive-in owners who saw a chance to turn a quick buck in the low-budget horror-movie name. The fact that they created a film which foresaw a problem that would become very real ten years down the road was only an accident . . . but an accident, like Three Mile Island, that perhaps had to happen sooner or later . . . The producers of The Horror of Party Beach never sat down, I’m sure (just as I’m sure the producers of The China Syndrome did), and said to each other: ‘Look – we’re going to warn the people of America about the dangers of nuclear reactors, and we will sugar coat the pill of this vital message with an entertaining story line.’ No, the line of discussion would have been more apt to go like this: Because our target audience is young, we’ll feature young people, and because our target audience is interested in sex, we’ll site it on a sun-and-surf type beach, which
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allows us to show all the flesh the censors will allow. And because our target audience like grue, we’ll give them gross monsters. But because any horror film has got to at least pay lip service to credibility, there had to be some reason for these monsters to suddenly come out of the ocean and start doing all these antisocial things. What the producers decided upon was nuclear waste, leaking from those dumped canisters. I’m sure it was one of the least important points in their preproduction discussions, and for that very reason it becomes very important.7
By the late 60s, the stragglers of the radioactive mutant film were confined to a few out-of-touch countries like South Korea (Kiduck Kim’s Dai Koesu Yongkari/Yongary, Monster From the Deep, 1967) and the Philippines (Gerardo De Leon’s Brides of Blood, 1968). In George A. Romero’s seminal horror film Night of the Living Dead (1968), the dead come back to life and start eating the living. We are reminded of the radioactive parasites that got the corpses walking in Edward L. Cahn’s Invisible Invaders (1958), but when the situation is ‘explained’ as the result of radiation from a crashed space probe, it’s supposed to be a joke. The film is an assault on our complacency and its events are so horrifying that the actual reason for the violence – obscured further in Romero’s follow-ups Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Day of the Dead (1984) – is simply irrelevant. All monster movies have subtexts; if Them! is about the Bomb, then Night of the Living Dead is about Vietnam. In the 70s, films such as George McCowan’s Frogs (1972) and Peter Sasdy’s Doomwatch (1972) are about pollution. In the 80s, there was a mini-trend of toxic waste monster movies (John Bud Cardos’s Mutant, 1984; Graham Baker’s Impulse, 1984; Michael Herz and Samuel Weil’s The Toxic Avenger, 1984), and Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D (1984) mixes toxic with nuclear waste and comes up with radioactive cannibal mutants wandering the New York sewers. Troma, following up their Toxic Avenger, got into the nuclear business with a run of ghastly wannabe comedies illustrating the dire consequences of storing radioactive waste in a high school: Class of Nuke ‘Em High (1986), Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Part 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown (1991), Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Part III: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid (1992). Troma’s anything-for-offence approach, which includes the rampages of Tromie the Giant Nuclear Squirrel, is curiously self-defeating: by straining to make the kind of cult kitsch the makers of The Horror of Party Beach came up with without effort, they create very thin, bad-tasting beer indeed, and the foregrounding of an anti-nuke sub-text only serves to make it utterly meaningless.
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The rehabilitation of Gojira in films like Yoshimitsu Banno’s Gojira tai Hedora (1971, Godzilla Vs the Smog Monster) parallels the recession in nuclear anxiety during detente. However, Kohji Hashimoto’s Gojira (1984, Godzilla 1985), a remake-cum-revisionary-sequel, sets aside all the series since the original and tries to get serious again, indicting (in the Japanese version, at least) both the Soviets and the Americans as the Japanese government resists pressure to deploy nuclear weapons against the revived monster. This led to a revival of the Kaiju Eiga, re-introducing Ghidorah, Mothra and the rest of the gang, and refining Godzilla’s origin story. In Kazuki Omori’s Gojira vs. Kingu Ghidora (1991, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah), we learn that Godzilla was originally an ‘ordinary’ dinosaur, a prehistoric survival friendly to Japanese troops in the Pacific during WWII, and that it mutated into the familiar creature thanks to bomb tests. Time travellers from the future, out to forestall Japan’s economic dominance, try to tinker with the past and unmake the monster, but it seems that the post-1945 nuclear world will inevitably create the Godzilla it needs. The new series also included Kazuki Omori’s Gojira vs. Beorante (1989, Godzilla vs. Biollante), Takao Okawara’s Gojira vs. Mosura (1991, Godzilla vs. Mothra) and Gojira vs. Mekagojira (1993, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla) and Kenshou Yamashita’s Gojira vs. Supeesu Gojira (1994, Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla), then climaxed with the return of pleasing circularity by bringing back original heroine Momoko Kochi and the Oxygen Destroyer, incarnated as a monster in Takao Okawara’s Gojira vs. Desutoroia (Godzilla vs. Destroyer, 1995) and the supposedly final death of the original Godzilla. With Godzilla reaching the end of his second screen series in the mid90s, Daiei took the opportunity to get back in the kaiju eiga game by reviving their own monster, giving him a new origin myth and pitting him against the bird-creatures of Noriaki Yuasa’s Daikaiju kuchusen Gamera tai Gyaosu (1967, Gamera vs. Gaos) in Shusuke Kaneko’s Gamera Daikaiju Kuchu Kessen (1997, Gamera the Guardian of the Universe). Successful enough to relaunch the series, this back-to-basics Japanese monster movie is among the best of its genre. Kaneko takes the absurd epic with a refreshingly straight face, making some sequences actually moving or frightening as well as exciting on a smash-’em-up level. Gamera himself remains more than a tad ridiculous, especially when using jet exhausts to turn his shell into a species of flying saucer (we are told the monster is ‘not the product of evolution’, which explains a lot). The silly design of the original is modified but Gamera is still stuck with ridiculous aspects such as a set of impractical tusks, though the quality of the miniature work as cities are devastated and monsters tangle with each other is exemplary.
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In a familiar plot structure, the film opens with various omens and sightings, sends off experts to puzzle together the mystery while the monsters go from glimpsed attacks to all-out war, culminating in a big show-down between the good guy creature and the avian embodiment of flesh-eating evil. As in the 1990s Godzilla films, a young girl is psychically linked to Gamera, adding a rooting interest in that she sympathetically shares the wounds inflicted on him by the especially vicious Gyaos monsters. The script has a few adult touches – the ornithologist heroine learns of her mentor’s fate when she finds his glasses in a lump of Gyaos excrement – but goes out of its way not to throw in the pseudo-American razzamatazz of the resurgent Toho films. The heroes are models of Japanese virtue, dutiful and polite; the big moral quandary faced by the authorities is again whether Japan has the right to launch a military attack even in defence (and the army chooses to attack the wrong monster). We are even shown how monster attacks affect Tokyo’s public transport system and the value of the yen (it plummets). Though the film opens with a ship carrying plutonium waste encountering the Gyaos, these monsters are – like Mothra – more mystic in origin, and it turns out that Gamera, who is disguised as an island when we first meet him, was genetically-engineered by a lost civilization for the purpose of defending the world against any monsters that might come along of their own accord or be created by man’s hubris. Roland Emmerich’s American Godzilla (1998) amusingly replaces the anti-American bias of the Japanese films with an indictment of the perfidious French, whose Pacific tests have not awakened a dinosaur but mutated an iguana (as in Mark Jacobson’s odd literary novel Gojiro, 1991) into a streamlined, lantern-jawed beast which heads for New York in a de facto remake of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. The lazy comic edge of the Hollywood Godzilla obscures its reversal of the militarism of Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996): as much damage is caused to the city by the bungled application of US firepower as by the monster. At one point, heat-seeking missiles are fired at a cold-blooded beast. It is perhaps a symptom of the changes of anxiety about the nuclear threat that Godzilla even lets its ostensible villains off lightly. Jean Reno, the French covert operative in charge of covering up the fiasco, is heroic and sympathetic, while the army are clod-hopping rather than callous. This monster is just another big animal (nature run amok, again), suggesting a world more worried about nuclear tests because of their impact on the environment than because they might be a preliminary for war.
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Notes 1. This essay previously appeared in Millennium Movies (London: Titan, 1999). 2. Peter Biskind, Seeing Is Believing: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 127. 3. Steve Rubin, ‘Retrospect: Them!’, Cinefantastique 3, no. 4 (1974): pp. 23–7. 4. Biskind, see note 2. 5. Jonathan Lake Crane, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film (California: Sage Publications, 1994), p. 102. 6. Paul Brians, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1984 (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), p. 67. 7. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: Warner, 1981), p. 182.
4 ‘Don’t Dare See It Alone!’ The Fifties Hammer Invasion Wayne Kinsey
In 2009 the British Film Institute re-released an uncut version of Hammer’s original ‘X’ (16) rated 1958 production of Dracula as a certificate ‘12A’. The main cut that had been reinstated was of a staking which showed the stake entering a body, with the welling of blood: a scene that the UK Censor at the time deemed too graphic for an adult audience to see. Yet, the same scene survived in the American print for parental guided matinees. However, times are a changing. Today we become desensitized to horror through factual events graphically shown on prime time news programmes and the horror film has simply adjusted in order to stay one step ahead. As a pathologist, I have a duty to safeguard people from the horrors of the post mortem room; even medical students at the University of East Anglia have a counselling session on ‘how to deal with a dead body’ before they can see an autopsy. With that in mind, I remember questioning the responsibility of the makers of Saw IV (2007), who open their movie with a sexed-up, extremely graphic and life-like autopsy that revolted even me, who does the job regularly. And that was on DVD in the safety of my lounge, not watching it in the dark on an enormous screen. I often wonder what would happen if the audience of 1958 had to sit in front of that. I’m sure they would need the services of a pathologist the next day! Then again, if I were living in the fifties, maybe I would be saying the same about the new, all-colour, graphic and sexually-charged Hammer horror films that were just emerging, while defending the moral ground of the black and white Universal cycle of the thirties and forties. The point I’m trying to make here is that any essay on the impact of Hammer horror in the fifties must be taken in the context of the time period they were made. As we emerge from the noughties following 72
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these years of desensitization, it can be difficult now to appreciate the impact fifties’ horror classics made at the time they were released (at a time when this author was not even a twinkle in his parents’ eyes); particularly in light of the fact that children and young adults today see these films as very tame (hence their DVD releases as certificate ‘12’). So what evidence do we have 50 years on to remind ourselves of what was acceptable back in those halcyon days when TV was only just starting to appear in ordinary British homes? To the rescue comes our guardian angels of all things decent (yes, those latter day spoilsports) – the good old British Board of Film Censors (BBFC). Their deliberation will form the core of this essay’s exploration of the impact of Hammer horror in the 1950s. By the close of the 1940s, the sun was setting on Universal’s Gothic horror cycle and they were giving their monsters an undignified send off in the hands of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello – Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953); Frankenstein (1948); The Mummy (1955); The Invisible Man (1951) and The Killer, Boris Karloff (1949). Instead, horror and sci-fi had meshed into a cacophony of bug-eyed monsters and giant insects as the paranoia of the nuclear age took its toll. Enter Hammer films. Hammer began as the production arm of a family distribution company called Exclusive Films (run by the Carreras and Hinds families). The company chairman, James Carreras, was persuaded to hurl the company into film production in 1948 by Jack Goodlatte, managing director of the ABC cinema chain, as post-war Britain started flocking to the cinema again. Hammer started off by playing it safe with big screen adaptations of successful radio and TV shows, such as Dick Barton, PC 49, The Man in Black and the Lyons family. And this is how they came to produce their first real horror film in 1954, The Quatermass Xperiment. In 1953 Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. The sales of TVs went through the roof to watch the spectacle and the BBC (the sole TV station at that time) now had an appreciable audience to entertain. To bolster the summer schedule they turned to Manx writer Nigel Kneale and asked him to pen a 6-part serial for Saturday evenings. Initially called Bring Something Back, cashing in on the festering paranoia of space flight, Kneale took the name of his plagued rocket scientist from the telephone directory and The Quatermass Experiment was born. Britain’s first manned rocket returns to earth with one survivor who, infected by a drifting alien intelligence, slowly metamorphoses into a creature capable of sporing and taking over the planet. It was Doctor Who for grown-ups, except that where you previously hid from the Daleks behind the safety
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of your own sofa, now Quatermass was so scary you hid behind your neighbour’s sofa! Britain was gripped as each Saturday night the story unfolded – and the producers at Hammer also watched, wringing their hands with pound signs in their eyes. Hammer seized the moment and dropped the ‘E’ from Experiment in the title to emphasize the ‘X’ certificate. At an early stage, they realised the benefits in appeasing the BBFC and sent the script in for comment before production. Hammer would continue this during their horror cycle – not that they always took notice – but it gave them a chance to anticipate what scenes would later come under attack when they submitted the final film for certification. Even at this stage, milder than the colour shockers to come, the BBFC had their reservations: We have now read the screenplay of The Quatermass Experiment which was enclosed with your letter of the 27 August. I must warn you at this stage that, while we accept this story in principle for the ‘X’ category, we could not certificate, even in that category, a film treatment in which the horrific element was so exaggerated as to be nauseating and revolting to adult audiences. Nor can we pass uncut, even in the ‘X’ category, sequences in which physical agony and screams of pain or terror are unnecessarily exaggerated or prolonged.1 The next test for the film after surviving the censor’s scissors was of course the acceptance by the critics (who never warmed to horror films and could never accept them as worthy of serious attention). Director Val Guest (veteran writer of the Will Hay and Crazy Gang comedies) had done his job well and the critics’ comments were mixed. The New Statesman wrote, ‘Val Guest directed and A. Hinds produced. None of these – if I may put it so – are classed among our swells; but they have done their job well, and the result seems to be a better film than either The War of the Worlds or Them.’2 Meanwhile, Reynolds News lamented, ‘That TV pseudo-science shocker The Quatermass Xperiment has been filmed. And quitermess [sic] they’ve made of it, too.’3 Its success encouraged Hammer to make two further sci-fi shockers in early 1956. First was X the Unknown, an original tale about a mass of radioactive slime that escapes from a fissure on the Scottish moors to scour the countryside in search of radioactive calories. It was the first script by former Hammer production manager Jimmy Sangster and was again passed on to BBFC for comment. Their readers had a field day: I think the film company should be strongly cautioned on treatment: we cannot stop them making the film, but I think it will revolt many
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people – even The Quatermass Experiment did this, and it was mild compared with the present subject. The free use of the words ‘evil’ and ‘obscene’ is ominous. Well, no one can say the customers won’t have had their money’s worth by now. In fact, someone will almost certainly have been sick. We must have a great deal more restraint, and much more done by onlookers’ reactions instead of by shots of ‘pulsating obscenity’, hideous scars, hideous sightless faces, etc., etc. It is keeping on and on in the same vein that makes this script so outrageous. They must take it away and prune. Before they take it away, however, I think the President should read it. I have a stronger stomach than the average (for viewing purposes) and perhaps I ought to be reacting even more strongly. The readers’ comments were submitted to the BBFC secretary, Arthur Watkins, whose job it was to convey their misgivings in a somewhat more diplomatic manner to Hammer, We have now read the draft script of X the Unknown. While we have no basic objection to the story for the ‘X’ category, we consider that a great number of details will prove too nauseating even for that category and that much more restraint will be necessary in preparing the shooting script, which we should see. This applies particularly to shots of ‘the unknown’, which are too numerous and in many cases likely to be too revolting, and to the shots of its victims, alive and dead. Watkins went on to list problematic scenes, such as, ‘the final shots, in which his face runs into “horrible blodges of formless flesh” and the eyeball loosens in its socket, are quite prohibitive.’ Producer Tony Hinds replied with hollow reassurance, I have noted all your comments and will act accordingly. The ‘angry blisters’ on the boy’s body will be handled with care; the ‘burn scars’ on the Old Soldier will not be in any way horrific; the love-making will be played for comedy and will not be distasteful; and the shots of the ‘Unknown’ will be cut down to the minimum (I only wish I thought it could look half as exciting as the writer has described it!) With regard to the two horror sequences, Unwin being attacked by the ‘Unknown’ and the body of the soldier in the fissure, I think the only thing we can do is shoot them and then show them to you. The shot of the Security Guard engulfed in slime will simply be a shot of
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a man sprayed with chocolate blancmange and I do not think it will be upsetting. Hinds raised an important point here in that the written word was often far more horrific that anything Hammer could conjure up on screen. Next came Hammer’s interpretation of Kneale’s second Quatermass serial, Quatermass 2. This time Kneale himself worked on the first draft and director Val Guest was again brought in to refine it and direct it. The script, however, still caused consternation among the readers at the BBFC: What nonsense. Sillier than Quatermass I, or the other recent effusion from Hammer Films on the same lines. However, it is the sort of nonsense which aims at an ‘X’ certificate and is quite disgusting, if not frightening enough, to get it. I think I am right in saying that Quatermass II on television was preceded by the customary caution about children and nervous people; and the only part I saw (which involved engulfing people with slime) was quite sickening enough to be kept away from the very young or the moderately squeamish. For ‘X’, there should be the customary general caution that the sky is not the limit, either in sights or sounds. Strange as it may seem, Hammer’s sci-fi revolution still wasn’t the catalyst that led to their horror revival. That came through one of James Carreras’ contacts at the Variety Club, head of New York based Associated Artists Pictures, Eliot Hyman (Carreras had been Chief Barker of the Royal Variety Club in 1954/55). Two fledgling producers, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, had just produced their first film, a Rock ’n’ Roll ‘musical’ called Rock, Rock, Rock! (1956), and now presented Hyman with an adaptation of Frankenstein. Intrigued by the idea, Hyman was not going to risk such a project with a couple that had only one film to their name, and a Rock ’n’ Roll musical at that, but told them he knew a man in England who could pull it off and directed them to James Carreras at Hammer with the premise of a co-production deal. Hammer took the bait, but they were not impressed with Subotsky’s script, which drifted dangerously close to ideas developed by Universal in the 1931 version of Frankenstein, which may well have led to litigation problems. Subotsky was bought out and Hammer’s producer, Tony Hinds, placed the rewrite in the hands of Jimmy Sangster. The story has an interesting postscript: the two gentlemen who were deemed incapable of producing a horror picture went on to found Amicus
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Productions, who became Hammer’s main rival in horror films in the sixties and seventies, famed for their portmanteau style horror pictures. Sangster explains his approach to the script: I was a production manager at the time, so I knew about budgets and I did tailor it to a certain extent to Hammer’s financial restrictions. In every Frankenstein film there’s always peasants storming the castle at the end to burn it down. Tony said, ‘You can hear the peasants, you can see the torch light on the trees, but you can’t see the peasants. We can’t afford it.’ So you have to be a bit imaginative. I told that story at a French film festival and I didn’t get a titter. I asked my interpreter later what went wrong. ‘Oh, peasants,’ she said. ‘I thought you said pheasants!’4 Once more, Hammer sent a copy of Sangster’s script to the BBFC for comment. The response from the readers was predictable, This is infinitely more disgusting than the first script. In fact, really evil. A lip-smacking relish for mutilated corpses, repulsive dismembered hands and eyeballs removed from the head, alternates with gratuitous examples of sadism and lust. While the general outline of the story cannot be rejected for ‘X’, a great many details will have to be modified or eliminated. Other readers had equally strong views: This is certainly a monstrous script. It is ludicrously written, with a complete disrespect for history . . . None of the details of the creature’s birth and activities bears much resemblance to what I have read of him and the author has done his best to pile horror on horror in a way that, in my opinion, makes it unlikely that we should be able to pass such a film as this . . . It seems to me that a film that is even somewhat watered down from this script might give many adults a nightmare: people who go to a Frankenstein film expect horror but is a horror based on a family well-known legend and not this sort of stuff. Another added, This is a loathsome story and I regret that it should come from a British team. We have had some horrors from America, but none in
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my experience without some saving humour or light interlude. The writer of this script seems to think that the ‘X’ category is a depository for sewage. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) was a milestone movie. It was Britain’s first colour horror film and the first version of Frankenstein in colour. It was certainly more graphic than anything that had been seen before and the sexual elements were also heightened with buxom Hammer maidens in their plunging necklines. Colour was however the greatest draw; in black and white a bloodstained mouth would look no different from a chocolate smeared toddler’s mouth, but with the glory of Eastman color it was . . . blood – and gruesome at that! Hammer submitted a black and white cutting copy to the BBFC for certification, but the Censor board was quick to spot the irregularity. In a letter to Hammer, Arthur Watkins wrote: Although reference was made as far back as the 13 June last in a letter from Colonel Carreras, to the fact that the film would be in colour, no step was taken to remind us of this when a black and white print was submitted on 11 January, 1957. We are prepared to view intended colour films in a black and white version if we are approached and asked to do so. When we view such versions we bear in mind the fact that the completed film is to be in colour and frequently ask for certain reels to be resubmitted when colour has been added. . . . As regards The Curse of Frankenstein, it will certainly be necessary for us to see the whole film again in colour, in order to determine whether there is anything visually too unpleasant which we have overlooked at the black and white stage. There is one cut which I feel we shall have to ask you to make and you might as well do it now – and that is the shot in Reel 3 of Frankenstein wiping the blood off on his overall after severing the head. It is also the colour factor which has influenced our request, made above, for the shot of the head being dropped in the tank to be removed. Hammer naturally made as few cuts as they could get away with and the film was released in May 1957. Enter the film critics, who, as Christopher Frayling’s contribution to this volume also observes, were just as caustic as the BBFC readers. The Daily Telegraph commented, ‘When the screen gives us severed heads and hands, eyeballs dropped in a wine glass and magnified, and brains dished up on a plate like spaghetti, I can only suggest a new certificate – “S.O.” perhaps – for Sadists
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Only.’ Meanwhile, The Observer added, ‘Without hesitation I should rank The Curse of Frankenstein among the half dozen most repulsive films I have encountered in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.’5 However, the condemnation of the critics merely drove patrons into their cinemas and the film opened to phenomenal success both in UK and America. James Carreras wrote to Eliot Hyman who had co-financed the film and arranged distribution through Warner Brothers, ‘I enclose a new batch of figures which are quite fantastic. England is sweltering in a heat-wave and NOTHING is taking any money except The Curse of Frankenstein.’6 Indeed, on 29 July 1957, Today’s Cinema proclaimed, ‘The Curse of Frankenstein is now the sixth highest grosser in America – this picture can’t go wrong!’7 Exploitation seemed to be Hammer’s game, as they briefly sidestepped Gothic horror for a horror of another kind. The Camp on Blood Island (1957) was a brutal story of a Japanese prisoner of war camp, whose commandant, Yamamitsu, has already told the British Colonel, Lambert, that if Japan loses the war he will raze both the male and female camps to the ground and will kill every man, woman and child in them. When Lambert secretly learns the war is over, he has to keep the news from Yamamitsu at any cost by sabotaging his radio, with horrifying consequences. Hammer pulled no punches in showing the atrocities in a film that was bound to open old wounds only a decade after the end of the war. Initial plans for an ‘A’ certificate were soon cast aside when the new BBFC secretary, John Nicholls, wrote, As you probably know, Exclusive Films sent us a treatment of this subject in November last, when we expressed the opinion that the film could qualify for the ‘A’ category. However, the developed script emphasises the potentially ‘X’ elements in the story and, without guaranteeing the category in advance of seeing the film, we agree with you that this picture will probably be ‘X’. From that point of view, there is little in the present script which seems likely to give trouble, provided the treatment is reasonably discreet, but obviously treatment is even more than usually important when there are so many tense and harrowing moments in the story and when the possibility of brutal action is ever-present. Reynold’s News would single the finished product out as, ‘The most shameful and destructive picture of the year.’8
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However, Hammer was quick to follow the success of The Curse of Frankenstein with Dracula (1958). Again, Jimmy Sangster was asked to condense Bram Stoker’s novel, ‘The same rules applied as Frankenstein,’ he explains. ‘In the book Dracula travels to England by boat, on a stormy sea – at night. We couldn’t afford that. So, no sea voyage and no turning into a bat – both too expensive! But I always did that – even today when I’m writing a script – I always keep my eye on the budget.’9 Sangster once said that if he was asked to write an expensive scene, his pencil would break! The BBFC readers outdid themselves this time when his script was submitted, The uncouth, uneducated, disgusting and vulgar style of Mr Jimmy Sangster cannot quite obscure the remnants of a good horror story, though they do give one the gravest misgivings about treatment . . . The curse on the thing is Technicolor blood: why need vampires be messier feeders than anyone else? Hammer took little notice of their warnings and another gruesome shocker (by fifties’ standards) was canned, which did not impress the Board when the first cutting copy was sent in for certification: This is yet another version of Dracula, but with such a strong infusion of horror comic element injected into considerable parts of it as to make them acceptable conventions within the horror film genre. The version we saw had six scenes missing and was in black and white. The final version will be in colour and its addition, in our opinion will make certain scenes intolerable. The producers have ignored the script letter and, also, have deviated from the script. We consider that the president and other examiners should see this film. John Nicholls wrote to James Carreras: Further treatment is required to certain sequences to which we have already referred before we view the colour version for certification. In view of the accentuation of certain obvious features in the film by the addition of colour and full sound we are unable to promise an ‘X’ certificate until the completed version of the film has been viewed. The following cannot, in any case, be allowed: Reel 7. The whole episode of a stake being driven into Lucy, together with her screams, writhing and agonised face. The scene
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can retain only shots of Dr. Van Helsing taking up the stake and mallet, possibly one blow on the mallet as seen from outside the coffin, followed by him and Arthur looking at Lucy’s peaceful face. Reel 8. The whole episode of Dracula and Mina together whenever either of them shows sexual pleasure. There must, for instance, be no kissing or fondling. Reel 9. We have severe doubts about the disintegration of Dracula. In any case the shot of the disintegrating ankle between trouser and boot must go and any shots where flesh seems to disintegrate. If handled with care the middle distance shots of clothing and dust blowing away from them can be acceptable. We would advise the greatest caution about blood – on faces, necks and clothes and in, or immediately after, the blood transfusion scene. Caution is also required with regard to the music effects, especially ‘shock’ music, and sound in general. An outraged Carreras defended Hammer’s approach: Just a few general observations on ‘horror pictures’. These pictures get an ‘X’ certificate which immediately bars everybody under sixteen years of age from seeing them. The ‘X’ certificate also means that approximately 800 cinemas who call themselves family houses will not book the pictures. The horror audience is a very specialised one and many people who go to ‘X for sex’ pictures will not go to see a horror film. Naturally those who do go to see horror films expect to see something out of the ordinary, although quite often the horror mis-fires and they laugh at it. With the very poor state our industry is in it would be a terrible thing if the horror addicts go to see horror pictures and there is no horror in them, in other words, we will lose this audience. There has always been a horror audience since movies began and nobody has ever been the worse for it. Dracula is acknowledged the granddaddy of them all and as you know, has been made at least a dozen times. The specialised audience who will go to see Dracula will expect thrills but the cuts that you are asking us to make, in our opinion, are taking every thrill out of the picture, in fact, it is not as horrific as any of the past Dracula’s and we cannot believe that that is your intention. Interestingly, the BBFC would still be objecting to blood on vampire’s mouths when Hammer submitted the script for The Kiss of the Vampire
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in 1962, ‘Care will have to be taken with the shot of Ravna with a thin trickle of blood appearing at the corner of his mouth and staining the bed. This is rather nauseating stuff.’ Considering these comments in the light of hit TV shows such as True Blood (HBO, 2008–) one can certainly observe a radical change in attitudes. Back in 1958 the critics were fuming at Hammer’s latest offering. C.A. Lejune of the Observer warned, ‘ “Don’t dare see it alone!” is the adjuration printed in a black panel on the artistically blood-spattered synopsis of Dracula. For my own part, I wouldn’t care to see the film with anybody else, preferring not to expose a companion to what seems a singularly repulsive piece of nonsense.’ Meanwhile, Nina Hibbin in the Daily Worker complained, ‘I went to see Dracula prepared to enjoy a nervous giggle. I was even ready to poke gentle fun at it. I came away revolted and outraged. From the moment that Dracula appears, eyes bloodshot, fangs dripping with blood, until his final disintegration into a crumbling, putrescent pile of human dust, the film disgusts the mind and repels the senses.’10 The success of The Curse of Frankenstein also led to its anticipated sequel, The Revenge of Frankenstein. Jimmy Sangster comments, ‘I wanted something that would really revolt me, because if it revolts me it probably revolts everybody else, so I thought of cannibalism.’ Frankenstein transplants the brain of his crippled assistant into a new body, which, following a head injury leads the creature into a state of decay and a desire for human flesh. Good ammunition for the readers at the BBFC who noted that: The end of this story shows that the Old Firm have their tongues even further in their cheeks than usual. Nevertheless, a great deal of the script is much too gruesome and repulsive. Much as we should like to, I do not think we can very well refuse to allow any sequel to Frankenstein, but the makers will have to walk warily, in view of the reaction of many people to their first instalment. (Mary Shelley would turn in her grave if she could see her name on the title-page). There should be a very strong warning on treatment and on the avoidance of gruesome and repulsive details: and there is one thing, basic to the present story, which I do not think we can have – the cannibalism of the Monster. Before making his last film in England, The Judas Hole, Boris Karloff made a broadcast over the BBC and, with great emphasis, made the point that ‘horror’ should never be disgusting. The true elements of
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the real horror film are terror, suspense, action, the unknown, the macabre. The very introduction of the ‘mange business’ in this script introduces a strong and quite unnecessary element of disgust: and puts one out of sympathy with the project. p.73 is one of the most disgusting I have read for a long while, and the writer should be ashamed of himself. His main problem here is the cannibalism. Again, I have a feeling of revulsion and disgust, since aversion to cannibalism is one of the strongest inhibitions of ‘civilised’ man. Yet, with discretion, cannibalism is fair enough in a ‘horror’ film provided the emphasis is on terror. In this script, the treatment of cannibalism is disgusting, especially since it’s ‘artificial’ cannibalism and most particularly since it is associated with sex. Interestingly, the US Censor had a totally different outlook on the script. No mention was made of the cannibalistic elements, their comments instead bizarrely focusing on: Page 18. It will be unacceptable for the doctor to apply his ear to Vera’s breast. The dissolve should take place at the conclusion of Victor’s line ‘if you’d rather my dear . . . of course.’ Page 60. The concierge’s expression ‘My gawd’ is irreverent. Page 62. Han’s expression ‘God’ is unacceptable. Obviously, in America, cannibalism was more acceptable than profaning the Almighty. A common theme the BBFC was warning about was the mixture of sex and horror. Its readers had squirmed at Dracula’s relationship with his victims, who welcomed him as a lover. Now they were picking out more scenes in the Revenge script: We think that shots of Vera in her Victorian underclothes may well be all right. All we are concerned about is any danger of a horror film being too ‘sexy’: we often find that the juxtaposition of sex and horror gives rise to unfavourable criticism . . . Similarly, the nursing of male and female patients in the same ward has obvious sex implications, and we should prefer the ward to be a male ward only . . . Again, we do not mind Margaret appearing ‘defenceless’ and we are sure that the shots of her would not be indecent: all we want is that a monster should not appear to be lusting after her.
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Critics, as ever, were mixed in their responses to the film, but C.A. Lejune at the Observer was not amused, yet again: This the sequel to an earlier and almost as regrettable Frankenstein travesty made by the same company; and Peter Cushing, who can be an actor of parts when he so chooses, again demeans himself by playing the hero . . . The whole thing is to my taste a vulgar, stupid, nasty and intolerably tedious business. A crude sort of entertainment for a crude sort of audience. Films of this kind are the last refuge of unimaginative producers who have lost the art of communicating individually with human beings and have fallen back on the appeal to mass hysteria.11 However, the ‘crude’ audience clamoured for more and Hammer horror was born. Dracula was so successful it saved the then ailing Universal, who had financed the picture, from bankruptcy. As a result, the grateful company opened their vaults to Hammer and granted it rights to remake any of its back catalogue – an honour unprecedented for such a small independent British film company. Hammer chose The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera and The Invisible Man. Only the first two would be realized. Long remembered for horror films, Hammer’s non-horrors are often neglected and were sometimes rather better films. The studio’s 1959 output is a case in point. That year Hammer made eight films. Only three were straight horror; two more Terry Fisher colour classics, The Mummy and The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll and a monochrome shocker also by Fisher, The Stranglers of Bombay. These were supplemented by two comedies, a comic retelling of Jekyll and Hyde, entitled The Ugly Duckling (on the same lines as The Nutty Professor) and Watch it Sailor!; a war film, Yesterday’s Enemy; a gritty police drama, Hell is a City (both directed by Val Guest and starring Stanley Baker); and a tense message movie called Never Take Sweets from a Stranger. The last three were among some of Hammer’s best. In fact, Yesterday’s Enemy was nominated for BAFTAs in the categories of best picture, best actor (Baker) and best supporting actor (Gordon Jackson). All accolades were won on the night by Sapphire. Never Take Sweets from a Stranger is an extraordinary movie and still packs a punch when seen today, tackling as it does the particularly sensitive subject of child molestation. It was an adaptation of Roger Garis’s stage play, The Pony Cart. Actress Janina Faye, who was then only 11 years old, still has vivid recollections:
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The play of The Pony Cart was to be done as a one-off professional performance on a Sunday night at the Strand Theatre in London. In those days the licensing laws forbade children performing on stage or on television until they were 12 years old, although they could appear on film – don’t ask me why? Because it was only a Sunday night performance, the people engaging me thought they would be safe. Unfortunately, the then Lady Lewisham decided to object very strongly about a child appearing in a ‘sex play’ before the age of 12! She, of course, knew nothing about the context and message of the play before she raised such a fuss that made all the newspapers and even got me my own Giles cartoon in the Daily Express. The press reaction was quite remarkable, and my parents rightly decided to withdraw me from the production. I was devastated, as it would have been a very exciting experience for me, performing on a West End stage for the first time. I knew enough about ‘not talking to strange men’ to know the difference between this play and a play about sex!12 Fate decreed that Janina would reprise her role in Hammer’s film, although she still had to audition for the role. ‘As far as I am aware, it was coincidental that I then got the part in the film,’ she continues. ‘I was sent along with hundreds of others to audition for Cyril Frankel. We all auditioned several times at Hammer House in Wardour Street, before final casting was made. Prior to the release of the film, I was told I would get no billing outside the cinema as my casting in the play had attracted so much adverse publicity.’ It looked, for once, as if Hammer was playing down the sensationalism to produce a well-meaning message movie. With such sensitive subject matter, Hammer was again obliged to share its script with the BBFC. The reader noted: I hope that this is intended to be an ‘X’ film. I think that with its teeth drawn for ‘A’ it’s essential horror (which is the horror of the child and the bogey man, as old as the hills), would be so much reduced as to be pedestrian. It is the loneliness of the children in the wooded countryside, the dark water, and the silent pursuer which could give an audience the willies and to my mind this would be legitimate ‘X’ . . . It wasn’t, actually, attempted rape; it was something even worse to little girls, and it is a pity, I think, to mention rape. Then, in the trial scene, surely we would recoil from the idea of the child’s being threatened with a medical examination, even if it were sound legally . . . What this may achieve, of course, and this is why it
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irritates me, is the mischief of arousing in the mind of the spectator a misgiving about neighbourly old men. It would be a pity if every old man became a D.O.M. and a danger to little girls. Producer Tony Hinds responded: There was a court scene in the play, in which Olderberry won his case by so fragrant a miscarriage of justice that we dared not use it. In our version, the unpleasant trick that Olderberry and his Counsel use to win their case is to make the whole trial so distasteful that the Father insists that the trial be stopped, by dropping the charge. For this reason, it is important to us that the trial should become, momentarily, very distasteful, otherwise we have no scene. (I have discussed the playing of this scene with the Director, who is arranging his camera set-ups so that the child actress need not be present during the more outspoken parts of this sequence). Board secretary, John Trevelyan, was unyielding: I had quite forgotten that there was a court scene in the play and I certainly cannot remember how Olderberry Senior won his case, but we feel very strongly that the scene as at present scripted is most undesirable. The idea of a child being forced to have a medical examination to see whether or not she had been tampered with sexually is one that we would not be prepared to accept, and I must therefore ask you to find some other way in which you can reasonably get the father to drop the charge. I am sorry about this but we feel very strongly about it and feel that it is too distasteful even for the ‘X’ category. Hinds met with his writer to tone down the discussion of the medical examination, but Trevelyan was still concerned: We are still worried about this. We suggest that you might consider a reduction of the scene. You could have the line ‘Would you mind if we brought a doctor here to see you now?’ If this were immediately followed by Pete’s objection and the dissolve to the judge’s room where the judge can explain why he had invited all the parties concerned to meet. In the revised version we would, I think, be worried about the lines given to defence Counsel, such as ‘I think we have a right to know whether this child is as innocent as she seems . . . .’
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etc. As you will see from this we might accept the idea that a doctor should be brought in but we should definitely not want anything that would emphasise the reasons why this proposal was made. Hammer rewrote it again and this time it was accepted. The finished film got its ‘X’ certificate, but Hammer boss, James Carreras, was soon imploring Trevelyan to give it an ‘A’ certificate: The press show is tomorrow, but almost every Society interested in the welfare of children have seen the film, every leading crime reporter in Fleet Street saw the film last Friday and in almost every case they all said what a pity John Trevelyan did not give the picture an ‘A’ Certificate. In view of what has happened recently in Southampton and what is really happening every day, isn’t it possible for you to change your mind and give the picture an ‘A’ Certificate? It is because the dialogue is so clean and the action so inoffensive that I ask this and the fact that older children will never see the film seems to me a great pity. I wonder whether you could reconsider your decision. He sent Trevelyan a further message the next day: The Rev Arthur Morton of the NSPCC is enthralled by the film and wants to contact you and have a talk with you. At the Press show today it was sensational – Jympson Harman said that every child should see it and that it should be shown at children’s matinees as a warning. Thomas Wiseman said that it was sensational and mad to give it an ‘X’. The general feeling was that it should be left to the parent’s discretion as to whether a child should see it but most parents would appreciate it as a warning. The Daily Herald, see attached, voices the general opinion. In USA, France and Germany, Welfare Authorities have the same opinion and urge for all children to see it. However, Trevelyan stood firm: The British Board of Film Censors gave an ‘X’ certificate to the film Never Take Sweets from a Stranger. Subsequently certain professional film critics expressed the opinion that this film should be in the ‘A’ category so that it might be seen by children, at the discretion of their parents, with a view to conveying a warning to them that it was dangerous to talk to strangers. In view of these criticisms the Board
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decided to see the film again and review the question of category. After careful consideration it was decided that the film should remain in the “X” category’: The Board felt that the warning given in this film was important but that, in view of the way in which it was given, it was more suitable as a warning to parents than to children direct. It is believed that children tend to identify themselves with child characters on the screen, and this film two little girls are shown in a desperate situation and thoroughly frightened. Young children seeing the film might themselves be frightened and might not understand the exact nature of the danger. They would be aware that the old man was the source of the fear and some might even think that they should be afraid of old men. The theme of the story is an unpleasant one and the film is full of powerful tension. In the opinion of the Board, all these things made it desirable that the film should be in the ‘X’ category so that it could not be seen by young children. The cocktail of sex and horror would continue to plague Hammer into the sixties, along with its many imitators. As early as 1960, Tony Hinds objected to the BBFC when Hammer were asked to cut a scene from the script for The Curse of the Werewolf where a dumb beggar girl stabs a perverted Marquis in self defence when he attempts to rape her. Hinds’ defence was that he’d just seen a movie where a psychotic transvestite stabs a naked girl repeatedly in the shower! However, it was clear Mr Hinds was no Mr Hitchcock. Then, with the seventies, came the birth of sexploitation; the bar was lowered by the BBFC and the ‘X’ certificate now moved from 16 to 18 to allow the new films to be more graphic. John Trevelyan explains, ‘We believed that the new category would enable the Board to reduce the number of “X” films, and that raising the minimum age for the “X” category would give the Board more flexibility and would possibly make it rarely necessary to refuse or cut films for adult audiences.’13 Sex and horror were finally married with the BBFC’s consent, and Hammer immediately took the advantage and set to work on a trilogy of nude lesbian vampire films based on Sheriden Le Fanu’s novella, Carmilla; a far cry from the lustful look on the face of one of Dracula’s victims during the fifties that was then considered inappropriate for ‘adult’ audiences. The Hammer story continues today with Let Me In (2010) (a re-imagining of acclaimed Swedish vampire film Let the Right One in), The Resident (2010) (starring Oscar winner Hilary Swank and featuring
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a welcome return for old Hammeronian Sir Christopher Lee) and, in production, The Woman in Black starring Harry Potter’s Daniel Radcliffe. The revival will hopefully introduce a whole new audience to Hammer horror: sadly, most young people today would baulk at the back catalogue if they happened to encounter such seemingly ‘old-fashioned’ films on TV or DVD. Indeed, how tame the ‘shockers’ of times past seem over 50 years later – but as the critical commentary contained in this essay suggests, in their time such films were considered a genuine threat to public decency. ‘Don’t dare see it alone!’ screamed the tagline of the lurid poster for Hammer’s Dracula back in 1958. For cinema-goers during the 1950s the warning was a welcome indication that screen horror would never be the same again.
Notes 1. Documentation for this and all further BBFC comments at the British Board of Film Censors. 2. The Quatermass Xperiment review, New Statesman, 27 August 1955. 3. The Quatermass Xperiment review, Reynolds News, August 1955. 4. Jimmy Sangster, interview with the author, 1999. 5. Reviews of The Curse of Frankenstein by Campbell Dixon, Daily Telegraph, May 1957; C.A. Lejeune, Observer, 3 May 1957. 6. Documentation at British Film Institute Library. 7. Trade advertisement for The Curse of Frankenstein, Today’s Cinema, 29 July 1957. 8. Reynold’s News, 20 April 1958. 9. Sangster interview (1999). 10. C.A. Lejeune, Observer, 31 May 1958; Nina Hibbin, Daily Worker, 31 May 1958. 11. Lejeune, Observer, 31 August 1958. 12. The interview with Janina Faye from which these quotations are taken was conducted with the author (2001). 13. John Trevelyan, What the Censor Saw (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), pp. 60, 63.
5 Genre, Special Effects and Authorship in the Critical Reception of Science Fiction Film and Television during the 1950s Mark Jancovich and Derek Johnston
Accounts of science fiction in film and television in the 1950s often present it as dominated by the alien invasion narratives, in which monsters from outer space seek to subjugate or exterminate humanity. Furthermore, these alien invasion narratives are commonly presented as rather simplistic products of Cold War tensions in which the alien is merely a thin disguise for soviet aggression. As Andrew Tudor puts it: In the fifties . . . our way of life is threatened by alien forces which adversely affect the world around us. In this xenophobic universe we can do nothing but rely on the state, in the form of military, scientific and governmental elites . . . In this respect, then, fifties SF/horror movies teach us not so much ‘to stop worrying and love the bomb’ as ‘to keep worrying and love the state’, an admonition which accords perfectly with the nuclear-conscious Cold War culture of the period.1 In other words, the dominant image of 1950s science fiction film and television is reinforced by its easy fit with specific social and political contexts within the period. Furthermore, this image is also supported by the tendency to privilege specific films, such as The Thing from Another World (1951) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), which are often singled out due to their association with the auteur directors Howard Hawks and Don Siegel. However, neither of these films was a major industrial production nor particularly significant in terms of their performance at the box office. The New York 90
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Times does not even seem to have bothered to review Invasion of the Body Snatchers, although it did regard The Thing from Another World as one of the most enjoyable science fictions films of the period.2 Even in histories of British film and television, the critical focus on the Quatermass serials, and their subsequent film adaptations, seems to conform to this image of the period. However, there are a number of problems with this account of 1950s science fiction film and television. Most centrally the alien narrative was not a product of Cold War paranoia but had been a key element in the science fiction pulp fiction and comic books of the 1930s and 1940s (although its literary roots stretch back to ‘England Invaded’ narratives such as G.T. Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) and H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898).) Indeed, by the 1950s, the alien invasion narrative was considered such a cliché within science fiction literature that writers such as Ray Bradbury were even parodying the form in stories such as ‘The Concrete Mixer’.3 In other words, different media had very different understandings of science fiction as a genre and, in science fiction literature, the alien invader was not only regarded as old fashioned, but even actively rejected. Certainly, a number of key alien invasion stories were written within the period, including Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951), Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers (1955) and John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), but all of these novels clearly distinguished their alien invaders from the Bug-Eyed Monsters (or BEMs) of the 1930s and 1940s. Elsewhere prose science fiction covered a range of settings and themes but became strongly associated with the ‘ “Hard SF” fabulation’ of Arthur C. Clarke4 and the ‘weird under-the-skin oddness’ of Ray Bradbury.5 Conversely, the films and television programming of the period made little use of ‘Hard SF’ and while there was some interest in the work of Robert Heinlein, whose Rocket Ship Galileo (1947) provided the basis for Destination Moon (1950), it was Bradbury who came to signify the best of the science fiction literature to both the personnel who made films and television programmes, and the critics who evaluated them. For example, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) was claimed to be ‘from a story by one of the most imaginative science fiction writers, Ray Bradbury’,6 while the New York Times made special mention of the fact that It Came from Outer Space (1953) was an ‘adaptation of a story by Ray Bradbury, a top hand in the science fiction field’7 and Variety claimed that this ‘Ray Bradbury story proves to be good science-fiction.’8 Bradbury was even used as an marker of quality against which to evaluate other films, and while The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) was based
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on a novel by Richard Matheson, it was praised for being ‘as startlingly original as a vintage Ray Bradbury short story’.9 Conversely, The First Man into Space (1959) was claimed to have various merits but to be ‘far from achieving Ray Bradbury quality’.10 Of course, in the realm of science fiction literature, Bradbury has never been considered typical of the dominant trends in 1950s, and is often distinguished from the genre altogether on the grounds that he ‘has no use for science except as an allegorical device’, a position that results in the claim that he is a writer of ‘fantasy and horror rather than SF’.11 Perhaps the reason that he was often identified as central to science fiction literature within the realms of film and television production and criticism was that, although he was associated with the pulps in various ways, he was one of the key writers to have broken out of the subculture of science fiction fandom and had managed to publish within the ‘slicks’, the glossy, mainstream magazines exemplified by the Saturday Evening Post. If understandings of science fiction within literature were very different from those in film and television, it is also a mistake to assume that film and television were the same, and there is now a growing body of work that demonstrates that the genre works very differently in each medium.12 Generic categories in operation in one medium are not necessarily operative in another, and even when both media use the same generic term, this term may have a very different meaning in each medium. The key trends in science fiction television during the 1980s or 1990s, for example, look very different from the key trends within the films of these decades. Furthermore, as Roberta Pearson and Maire Messenger Davies point out, even in cases where film and television texts are part of the same franchise, the franchise may acquire a very different character in each medium. In their account of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94), for example, they illustrate that while the television series, and the films that followed it, share the same characters, the same universe and even purport to be temporally continuous, these texts are noticeably different in their concerns, their narrative organisation and even their understanding of character. Pearson and Messenger Davies see this as largely a result of differences between the two media, so that cinema is seen as a predominantly visual medium, in which science fiction is principally about spectacular special effects, while television is presumed to be a far less visual medium, in which science fiction is largely concerned with ideas, narrative complexity and the development of character arcs. Certainly, Pearson and
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Messenger Davies’ attention to the differences between science fiction film and science fiction television is vital, although these differences are probably not due to some inherent feature of each medium, but rather due to the differences between specific institutional contexts. Indeed, we seriously reject the frequent claims that the image is relatively unimportant within television,13 and would stress that from the earliest days of science fiction television special effects and spectacle have always been important.14 Furthermore, it is not simply that film and television are different from one another, but also that American science fiction films of the 1950s were fundamentally different from those made in Britain in the period, and that American science fiction television in the 1950s was very different from 1950s British television. Indeed, while American science fiction film is generally seen as far more creative than American science fiction television during most of the 1950s, with television initially dependent on materials culled from the film serials and comic books of the 1930s and 1940s, the case was very different in Britain, where it was television which was the dominant and creative form, with many of the key British science fiction films being attempts to exploit television successes as demonstrated by the Hammer film versions of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials. Furthermore, the differences between the television programmes and their film adaptations were recognized by reviewers at the time, with the Monthly Film Bulletin declaring that the film version of Quatermass II had been ‘arbitrarily cut’ from the television version so that it ‘has necessarily lost much of the quality of the original’.15 As should be clear, then, one needs to be careful of generic terms such as science fiction, which do not simply describe a coherent and unitary body of texts but rather a process of classification subject to intense debate and conflict. Indeed, while many American television programmes were routinely identified as science fiction from the very start of the 1950s, most of the programmes identified today as key examples of British science fiction television were not identified as such at the time. It was not until Mystery Story (1952) that there was any overt reference to a programme as science fiction, and even then the programme was not identified as science fiction in listings pages but rather on the letters page where viewers responded to the show after the event.16 Even a supposed science fiction classic such as The Quatermass Experiment was actually described as a ‘thriller’ by the BBC rather than science fiction, although the Monthly Film Bulletin referred to the film version as ‘closer to the horror film than most recent science fiction pictures’,17
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showing that there was a difference in the use of genre labelling between media. One reason that these British television shows were not identified as science fiction was due to the very different meanings of the term in the United States and Britain. At the time, science fiction was only beginning to be taken seriously as genre, and it was still largely associated with the pulps and the comic books. This was not a problem in the United States, where science fiction television was largely identified as a form of children’s entertainment, but it was a problem in Britain, where the programmes later identified as science fiction were usually presented as serious or at least adult dramas. Furthermore, negative responses to British television science fiction were often couched in relation to what were considered to be ‘childish’ or ‘sadistic’ comics, which could appeal ‘only to immature minds, to children and to young people, and to some adults who are perhaps not very intelligent’.18 The comics, and by association genre science fiction, were perceived as being part of a particularly American popular culture which threatened British native culture and therefore its national identity. However, during the early 1950s, the image of the genre started to change due to a series of factors. The golden age writers had already been struggling to present their writings as serious speculation on the social, economic and political effects of technological change, while others such as John Wyndham had been working to stress the literary credentials of science fiction by drawing attention to the stylistic qualities of their writing. Christopher Priest has even claimed that Wyndham’s popular success was due to the distance that he established from science fiction as a genre so that his novels can to be seen as ‘comedies of English manners’.19 However, following the critical and commercial success of Wyndham’s novel, The Day of the Triffids, in 1951, the mainstream press started to develop science fiction lists that would further validate the genre and distance it from an association with the pulps and comic books. As a result, it is not just that different media have different perceptions of a genre but that definitions may change across periods,20 and even conflict within periods.21 For example, Gernsback had invented the term ‘science fiction’ precisely to designate a particular type of fiction in which writers would ‘focus on the technological aspects of their stories or base their adventures on some scientific premise’,22 and so distinguish his pulp magazine, Amazing Stories, from other types of futuristic and fantasy fiction. Later generations of writers and editors would be highly critical of Gernsback’s contribution, but many continued to use
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‘science fiction’ as a term of precision. For example, the period in which John W. Campbell was editor of Amazing Stories is often seen as crucial to ‘the dawn of a new age in SF’ that would bring into being ‘the intelligent, adult genre that we know today’;23 and his influence is often attributed to the way in which he ‘strove to make his writers consider the full implications of their ideas and to question the motives of their protagonists’,24 a move that ‘led him to reject the Bug-Eyed Monsters’ of the pulps.25 However, if these uses of science fiction sought to privilege ‘intelligent, adult’ fiction over the supposedly childish concerns of the pulps magazines and the comics, by the 1950s, science fiction had become virtually synonymous with the pulps and comics for those making and reviewing film and television. Moreover, if these uses of the term ‘science fiction’ no longer required an attention to scientific plausibility, science fiction films and television were often seen as unscientific and even as anti-scientific, so much so that the term was also applied to a series of films that would rarely be identified as science fiction today. As a result, in its review of Project M7 (1953), the New York Times complained about ‘the wholly incredible and “unscientific” things [characters in the film] are permitted to do’,26 while it also described other films as ‘pseudo-scientific’.27 Taking a slight stronger tone, Variety even claimed of Captain Video that, from ‘a scientific standpoint, the script was generally balderdash’.28 As a result, some reviewers expressed a preference for the trend for semi-documentary films, and praised George Pal’s plans to follow up Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide with a move into ‘the realm of science-fact films’.29 Writing of these ‘semi-documentary’ or ‘science-fact films’, it was therefore claimed that Unidentified Flying Objects (1956) ‘quietly and effectively demonstrated’ that ‘truth can be more engrossing than fiction’,30 while On the Threshold of Space (1956) was claimed to be ‘proof that science-fact can be stranger and more interesting than science-fiction’.31 Of course, this position becomes more understandable when one considers that many reviewers by the mid-1950s had not only grown tired of the science fiction cycle but were also classifying a wide variety of fantasy films as ‘science fiction’. For example, Variety described The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) as a ‘Fairytale actioner with science-fiction and horror trimmings’,32 while the Monthly Film Bulletin identified Lost Continent (1951), a lost world picture featuring prehistoric creatures, as ‘a change from the more customary type of science fiction’.33 Nor was this simply a one-off and idiosyncratic description. The New York Times clearly identified Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) as a ‘science
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fiction’ story in which the heroes have ‘found another lost world and conquered it’,34 and it also noted the similarity between Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (1954, US release 1956) on the one hand, and King Kong (1933) on the other.35 The latter film was even rereleased in 1952 in an attempt to cash in on the science fiction monster cycle.36 Similarly, Rick Altman shows that, in 1954, Universal included the Mummy, the Wolf Man and Dracula in a list of ‘Hollywood’s prize science fiction monsters’ that it used to promote Creature from the Black Lagoon.37 This association of science fiction with the presence of mythological, prehistoric or extraterrestrial monsters also demonstrates the importance of special effects within the period, an importance that was equally relevant to television as film. For example, one of the first American science fiction shows of the decade was Captain Video (1949–55), which was described by the New York Times as ‘a triumph of carpentry and wiring rather than writing’.38 While this is clearly meant as a dismissal of the show’s supposedly juvenile content, the review also stresses that it is ‘in the use of settings, props and special effects that “Captain Video” derives its appeal’ and it is claimed that the show ‘boasts enough fancy gadgets to bewilder the adult and fascinate the youngster’. Similarly, Buck Rogers is claimed to be ‘endowed with a lot of expensive sets, technical mumbo-jumbo, scary incidents and atrocious acting, which probably will give it a banner Hooper rating with the small fry’.39 However, special effects were not simply associated with juvenile entertainment but were also believed to be capable of adding value to productions. As a result, while it was claimed that Out There ‘may prove to be the best of the lot’, when compared to the science fiction shows that had preceded it, the show was also claimed to be distinguished by its sets, which were described as ‘imaginative’.40 The New York Times even took the television industry to task in 1958 for its failure to develop science fiction shows after the Soviet launching of Sputnik. For the newspaper, this event should have made ‘ “sci-fi” programs . . . a natural for TV’: ‘If the cyclic history of TV means anything, TV-film producers should have begun preparing inter-galactic projects months ago’ but even Ray Bradbury was still ‘looking for someone to put [Report from Space] on the air after it is filmed’.41 Television’s failure to develop a ‘strong trend to space shows’ is described as ‘another case of TV’s lack of foresight’. Certainly, the New York Times acknowledged that shows would have to avoid ‘ “Buck Rogers” type of excursions to worlds inhabited by seven-headed gloops’, and feature the strong
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‘human stories’, if they are to appeal to adults and so secure ‘primetime evening audiences’. But it argued that the real problem facing television is that science fiction ‘must have the trappings of space and extra-terrestrial excitement’ and ‘the plain fact is, special effects are too expensive for the average TV budget’. However, this reference to special effects is not intended as an explanation for the failure of television but as a condemnation of it. As the article makes clear, the industry is ‘simply a season behind the times’ and that it cannot continue to get away with poor writing and cheap production values. Of course, as the reference to Captain Video demonstrates, special effects were sometimes seen as silly and superficial spectacles that simply disguised worthless trash, but it is also the case that, as is clear from the discussion of the New York Times’ condemnation of television’s failures in the aftermath of Sputnik, special effects were also seen as vital to science fiction. Even poor or silly special effects were not straightforwardly condemned but could even be used to present the film as humorously inept, as fun in spite of itself. As a result, while the New York Times claimed that the ‘trick effects’ in The Blob (1958) ‘look pretty phoney’, it also claimed that the ‘color is quite good’ so that ‘the blob rolls around in at least a dozen horrible-looking flavours, including raspberry’.42 Similarly, Queen of Outer Space (1958) was described by the Monthly Film Bulletin as ‘an amiable, if rather tame, burlesque of science fiction formulae’, which featured ‘stylised settings, costumes and effects . . . pleasantly shot in shiny space-color.’43 While this quote obviously finds the film’s visuals as amusingly ludicrous but fun, the New York Times was unreservedly positive in its assessment of the colour processes in Destination Moon, which are described as ‘rich’ and ‘luscious’, while the film as a whole is claimed to ‘make a lunar expedition [into] a most intriguing and picturesque event’. Indeed, its complaint about the film was that the ‘human reactions’ of the film’s characters ‘are nothing to the gadgeted ship, their miraculous observations – and those are all we advise you to go and see’.44 In other words, the film is supposed to be distinguished by its visual spectacle: ‘it’s awesome to watch the mechanics constructing that giant rocket’ and ‘exciting to climb aboard the ship with those four men . . . to wiggle and squirm with them in agony as their silver tube roars into space and to join in their general amazement at the various phenomena which occur’. Similarly, Forbidden Planet is described as ‘a wonderful trip into outer space’ that excels in its spectacle. Not only has it been ‘put on the screen in Eastman color and properly spacious CinemaScope’, it also features
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‘the gaudiest layout of gadgets this side of a Florida hotel’.45 In the process, the review not only draws attention to the spectacle of Robby the Robot, ‘a phenomenal mechanical man’, and Anne Francis, ‘the prettiest thing’ in outer space, but it positively stresses the film’s status as visual experience. For example, while Francis’s character is claimed to ‘intrigue and confound’ the spacemen in the film, who come to ‘see what’s what’, it is also stressed that the spacemen see plenty – and so, we promise will you . . . You’ll see the dry and ragged face of a worn-out planet, looking for all the (modern) world like some of those handsome illustrations in the slick-paper picture magazines. You’ll see the vast subterranean power-houses built by the super-human Krells who inhabited this far-off planet 2,000 centuries before earth-man was born. And you’ll see – or rather you won’t see – the fearful monster created by the Id, which (according to Dr Morbius) is the evil impulse of the subconscious mind. You won’t see him because he’s invisible, but when he gets caught in the electronic grid that the fellows put up around their flying saucer, you’ll get a vague idea of his giant proportions. And, brother, will you hear him roar. The film may be kitsch but every one involved has ‘had a barrel of fun with this film’, and produced something that is not only fun for the audience but visually engaging. In other words, science fiction special effects were seen as having the capacity to be genuinely creative and inventive and, in its review of The Island Earth, it is the ‘technical artists’ who are ‘the real stars of the picture’, and their ‘technical effects’ are claimed to be ‘so superlatively bizarre and beautiful that some serious shortcomings can be excused’ in other aspects of the film.46 Similarly, Ray Harryhausen acquired a considerable reputation for himself in the period. The New York Times, for example, singled out both Harryhausen and his collaborator, Willis Cook, for credit in its review of Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and these special effects artists are claimed to have ‘rigged an awesome apparition’ in their creation of the prehistoric monster of the title. Similarly, Variety gave Harryhausen ‘Special credit’ for the film’s ‘socko technical effects’ in which the ‘sight of the beast stalking through Gotham’s downtown streets is awesome’.47 In other words, special effects were seen as an area that could be genuinely creative and imaginative, and although the Monthly Film Bulletin complained that the creature ‘appears all too obviously a rather implausible model’, the positive reviews do not praise special effects for their
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realism but, on the contrary, for their capacity to create spectacular and off-beat fantasies. This position is in marked contrast to discussions of science fiction today where, as Telotte puts it, ‘it is precisely the tension between such seemingly magical effects and the desire to make those elements neatly “fit” into a reality illusion that is the core . . . appeal . . . of the entire science fiction genre’.48 In these accounts, special effects are understood as aspiring to the realism that the Monthly Film Bulletin finds lacking in Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. In other words, these effects attempt to fit so seamlessly into the world of the film that they pass unnoticed or disguise their trickery like a skilled magician so that performance of the illusion is blatant but the method of achieving it is hidden. So while science fiction films often proclaim their special effects as moments of cinematic exhibitionism, both in their promotion and in their mobilization within individual films, it is claimed that the appeal still depends on an illusion in which our vision is fooled by the visual evidence of that which we know is a fabrication. In this sense, science fiction special effects are seen as operating in much the same way as they do in historical epics. In other words, special effects are claimed to operate as part of the visual spectacle through which film industries, such as Hollywood, celebrate their own power and prestige. By appearing to reproduce the scale of bygone civilizations and major historical events, film industries confer an almost divine status upon themselves. As Moses declares, in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, after one of the most celebrated special effects sequences in the history of cinema in which the Red Sea has parted and then drowned Pharaoh’s armies: ‘Thou didst blow with Thy winds and the sea covered them. Who is like unto Thee Oh Lord? From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God!’ The difference, it is claimed, is that science fiction does not recreate the past but promises glimpses of the future, and this does not simply involve the spectacle of future societies and alien worlds, but also presents its special effects as being so advanced that they provide a glimpse into the future of film itself.49 In the process, such films present themselves as events in themselves, but such concerns have been read as both positive and negative. On the one hand, it has become commonplace today for academics, critics and even sections of the general public to complain that the spectacle of special effects now overwhelms plot and character,50 but others such as Telotte have argued that special effects also have the potential to foreground the very illusionist character of cinema. If special effects provide cinematic illusion as spectacle,
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they draw attention to themselves as illusions and to the workings of film as a whole. Telotte’s argument is both persuasive and attractive but, like other accounts, it presents illusionism as being the fundamental appeal of special effects. However, it is important to remember that the obsession with ‘state of the art’ special effects is actually relatively new, and that, as Schatz has pointed out, when New Hollywood film-makers such as Lucas and Spielberg initially turned to science fiction, they were actually appropriating a tradition of fairly low budget filmmaking.51 While special effects were certainly vital to the serials of the 1930s and 1940s, such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, these were hardly big budget productions that used ‘state of the arts’ effects, and could therefore hardly expect their special effects to attain an illusory realism. Even by the 1950s, most science fiction films were low budget productions, and even someone like George Pal, who was using state of the art special effects, was hardly working in the most economically powerful or technologically advanced sections of the industry. While his budgets may have been bigger than his competitors, he was certainly not making films that competed with spectacular historical epics such as The Ten Commandments. As a result, the function of the cheap, low-tech special effects of the 1950s would seem to be somewhat different to the financially intensive and technologically advanced special effects that distinguish contemporary blockbusters and, as a result, it is questionable how ‘illusionist’ 1950s special effects were supposed to be. Even the work of figures such as Ray Harryhausen seems to have been evaluated less according to some notion of ‘realism’ than according to one of creativity and imagination; i.e., it was less a question of whether special effects had the capacity to create an illusion of actuality than whether special effects displayed skill and invention. In this way, they were judged according to the values of fantasy rather than realism: they were judged on the basis of whether they were able to offer a vision of ‘a world that has not previously and indeed might never exist’.52 In other words, Sobchack may be right that the ‘major visual impulse of all SF film is to pictorialize the unfamiliar, the non-existent, the strange and totally alien’, but she may be wrong that it always seeks to do so ‘with a verisimilitude which is, at times, documentary in flavor and style’.53 Indeed, Harryhausen continues to be a cult figure today and is valued for his ‘wonderfully wobblesome’ special effects,54 a phrase that stresses that his strength lies not in the invisibility of his craft but, on the contrary, in the imprint of its creator. Not only does the Radio Times
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frequently refer to Harryhausen as a ‘genius’ in its announcements of forthcoming television showings of his films,55 but it is the presence of his ‘unique touches’ that make a film such as 20 Million Miles to Earth a ‘minor classic’.56 Rather than creating an illusion of reality, he is praised for his imagination, which produces monsters that are ‘memorable’57 and often possess a ‘well-defined personality’ that can, at times, ‘evoke sympathy for its bewildered plight.’58 In short, his monsters are not seen as being creatures of mere artifice but as inspired ‘creations’,59 which are ‘brought to fabulous life’ by their creator.60 In this way, the ‘stop-motion special effects put the flat characters and routine plot[s] in the shade’61 or rather ‘the actors and the plot once again end up playing second fiddle to the magnificent Dynamation sequences meticulously created by the godfather of special effects’.62 Not merely an element in the construction of these films, the special effects are seen as having precedence and, rather than the director or stars, it is Harryhausen who assumes the function of the author of these films and their main attraction. In Harryhausen’s films, it is the ‘stop motion magician’63 who makes the film ‘worth an excursion’.64 Science fiction was therefore seen as something that could certainly be childish and ridiculous but also as something that could be creative and profound, and while in some cases it was the special effects creators who were claimed to acquire the status of artists, in other cases, it was the writers and the directors. In the case of television, Nigel Kneale’s scripts for the Quatermass serials are regarded as some of the most important products of the decade and attracted phenomenal audiences and controversy,65 while Rod Serling’s scripts for The Twilight Zone (1959–64) consolidated and extended his reputation as a writer while simultaneously bestowing respectability on the genre. Prior to the series, Serling had a strong reputation as a writer of several highly regarded single plays, particularly Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956). Furthermore, these plays were famous for their controversial social commentary, and Serling himself was famous ‘for his public protests against what he described as “interference of non-artistic people in an artistic medium”.’66 His decision to co-produce the show was therefore seen as a significant move that even warranted a whole article in the New York Times, in which he claimed that the series would give him greater control over his scripts: ‘ “I’ll have a say in taste and policy,” he said. “I’ve never been in a position like that before. Nobody will be able to change lines by going to the executive producer because I’m the executive producer.” ’ However, the article also quotes him as saying that there ‘won’t be anything controversial in the new series’ and, although this might
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sound as though the move from the single plays to the science fiction series represented a retreat from social commentary, he was also claimed to have declared that he now believed that ‘you can get adult drama without controversy’. Indeed, as many critics have since noted, one of the strengths of The Twilight Zone’s fantasy format was that it enabled the show to handle materials that might have been too controversial outside the context of fantasy.67 As Serling himself said of his earlier work: ‘I was not permitted to have Senators discuss any current or pressing problem . . . In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots.’68 The show was therefore one of the first instances where science fiction television started to be taken seriously and the New York Times not only identified Serling as ‘one of television’s abler writers’ but also claimed that, in ‘the desultory field of filmed half-hour drama . . . Serling should not have trouble in making his mark. At least his series promises to be different.’69 In film, both Jack Arnold and Roger Corman acquired reputations as important directors. For example, Variety began to take note of Corman as a figure after describing Monster From the Ocean Floor (1954) as an ‘oddity’ on the grounds that it was supposed to be ‘a well done quickie’,70 and claiming that It Conquered the World (1956) was ‘a definite cut above the normal’, which ‘poses some remarkably adult questions amidst the derring-do’.71 Similarly, Teenage Caveman (1958) was claimed to be ‘somewhat surprisingly, a plea for international cooperation in terms of the dangers of radiation’ in which, despite its low budget, ‘the “message” is handled with a restraint and good taste’ that ‘gives substance to the production’.72 Of course, not all Corman productions received positive reviews but reviewers seem to have seen him as more than just a director of low budget exploitation, and to have developed a genuine investment in his development as a director with the Monthly Film Bulletin comparing Not of This Earth (1957) to Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and declaring that since the former is ‘such a marked improvement’ on the latter, ‘one hopes it is the more recent of the two films’.73 Similarly, Jack Arnold was also singled out as a director of significance. For example, Variety described It Came from Outer Space (1953) as a ‘strong’ film in which Arnold’s direction is distinguished by his handling of atmosphere. He not only ‘whips up an air of suspense’ but also achieves a ‘considerable atmosphere of reality’ for such a fantastic story.74 He is also praised for doing a ‘first rate job’ with Creature from the Black Lagoon, a film that was commended for ‘the eerie effects of its underwater footage’.75 Monthly Film Bulletin also praised ‘Jack Arnold’s characteristically blunt and melancholy style of direction’, which it
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considered to be ‘perfectly attuned to and in sympathy with’ the story of The Incredible Shrinking Man.76 However, as the decade unfolded, there was a sense that he did not realize his early promise. Monthly Film Bulletin claimed that Revenge of the Creature (1955) ‘adds little to the repertoire of movements and mannerisms [the Gill-Man] displayed in his first appearance’ and described the film as a ‘naïve and indifferently played shocker’.77 Nor was Variety much more positive, and it dismissed the film as ‘a routine shocker with obvious appeal for the crowd that goes for the horror pix’.78 As a result, by the time of Monster on Campus (1958), the Monthly Film Bulletin complained that the once ‘astringent director’ was ‘repeating himself ad nauseam’ and that the film marked ‘a further decline in Jack Arnold’s melancholy, and at one time thoughtful, talent’.79
Conclusion As we have seen, then, the contemporary critical preoccupation with the 1950s alien invasion narratives provides a very limited sense of the period’s science fiction film and television and rests on a questionable assumption that these narratives were the product of Cold War tensions. However, the genre not only developed in very different ways within different media, but the meaning of the term was, and continues to be, a highly contested one that had diametrically opposed meanings within different contexts. While some sought to distinguish science fiction from the pulp fiction and comic books of the 1930s and 1940s, others directly associated science fiction with these forms. Furthermore, the function of special effects was understood in ways that are very different from those common today. Certainly, in some cases special effects were seen as silly and childish but, in others, they were seen as genuinely inventive and creative, the products of special effects artists whose work was praised and admired. If, in the case of Harryhausen, the special effects artist was therefore seen as the true author of his films (or at least whatever was valuable within them), the period also saw the emergence of other authors (scriptwriters, producers and directors) whose reputations were not only constructed by distinguishing them from the genre more generally but which also worked, ironically, to legitimate the genre as it moved into the 1960s and 1970s.
Notes 1. Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Blackwells, 1989) p. 220. See also Peter Biskind, Seeing
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2.
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Is Believing: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Andrew Dowdy, Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (New York: Morrow, 1973); Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Bill Warren, Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1982). For histories of science fiction see Brian Ash, ed., The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: Harmony, 1977); Thomas R. Atkins, ed., Science Fiction Films (New York: Monarch, 1976); John Baxter, Science Fiction in the Cinema (New York: Paperback Library, 1970); John Brosnan, Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1978); John Brosnan, The Primal Screen: A History of Science Fiction Film (London: Orbit, 1991); Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality (Edinburgh: EUP, 2007); Edward Edleson, Visions of Tomorrow: Great Science Fiction from the Movies (New York: Doubleday, 1975); Alan Frank, The Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Handbook (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1983); Denis Gifford, Science Fiction Films (London: Studio Vista, 1971); Bill Harry, Heroes of the Spaceways (London: Omnibus, 1981); Phil Hardy, ed., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (London: Octopus, 1986); William Johnson, ed., Focus on Science Fiction Films (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972); Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder (Chicago: Advent, 1967); Frank Manchel, Great Science Fiction Films (New York: Franklin Watts, 1976); Douglas Menville, A Historical and Critical Survey of the Science Fiction Film (New York: Arno, 1975); Douglas Menville and R. Reginald, Things to Come: An Illustrated History of the Science Fiction Film (New York: New York Times Books, 1977); Peter Nichols, Fantastic Cinema (London: Ebury, 1984); Frederik Pohl and Frederik Pohl IV, Science Fiction_Studies in Film (New York: Ace, 1981); Jeff Rovin, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films (Secaucus: Citadel, 1975); Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1991); Philip Strick, The Movie Treasury of Science Fiction Movies (London: Gallery, 1976); J.P. Telotte, Science Fiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Gary K. Wolfe, The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State Univesity Press, 1979). Bosley Crowther, ‘THE SCREEN: TWO FILMS HAVE LOCAL PREMIERES; “The Thing,” an Eerie Scientific Number by Howard Hawks, Opens at the Criterion “Communist for F.B.I.” New Picture at Strand Theatre, Features Frank Lovejoy At the Criterion’, New York Times, 3 May, 1951, p. 34. Ray Bradbury, ‘The Concrete Mixer’, in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April, 1949 and republished in The Illustrated Man (first edition Doubleday, 1951). Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 215. Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, p. 218. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, August 1953, p. 131. A. W., ‘Look Out! The Space Boys are Loose Again’, in New York Times, 18 June, 1953, p. 38. Brog., ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, 27 May, 1953, p. 6. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, June, 1957, p. 83.
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10. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, March, 1959, p. 45. 11. George Mann, ed., The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (London: Robinson, 2001), p. 74. 12. See, for example, Glen Creeber, ed., The Television Genre Book (London: British Film Institute, 2001); Jane Feuer, ‘Genre study and Television’, in Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse, Reassembled (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 138–60; and Jason Mittel, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004). 13. For the classic account of this position, see John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema: Television: Video (London: Routledge, 1982). For challenges to Ellis’s claims, see John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 1995); and John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Furthermore, there is often a confusion between the supposed transparency of television’s visual style, and the supposed lack of television’s visual style. Writing of the supposed incompatibility between television and horror, Waller moves from a discussion of ‘the “invisible” style’ of the made-fortelevision films to a complaint about ‘the technical limitations that affect all telefilms’ so that the ‘relatively poor definition of the standard television image, for example, hampers, if not prohibits, telefilms from disclosing to the viewer a complex mosaic of vivid, mysteriously charged details’. Gregory A. Waller, ‘Made-for-Television Horror Films’, in Gregory A. Waller, ed., American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 147. 14. RUR is often cited as the first science fiction programme made by the BBC (1938) and reports of the programme drew attention to its use of superimposition of two camera images at the climatic moment of the programme to multiply the apparent number of robots represented on screen. This was then followed by The Time Machine (1949) in which special effects were used to convey the sense of movement through time: while two cameras mixed between live studio shots of the Time Traveller on his machine and scenery elements to establish the shift through time, a telecine sequence was also used which showed the dissolution of the Time Traveller’s laboratory to reveal the buildings of the future and the rapid passage of the sun, settling on the future landscape in the rain. 15. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1957, p. 75. 16. Anon., ‘Viewers Write to the “Radio Times” ’, Radio Times, 29 August 1952, p. 38. 17. Anon, Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1955, p. 150. 18. Michael Lewis, ‘Did You Hear That? Children’s Comics’, The Listener, 13 December 1951, p. 1007. 19. Christopher Priest, ‘British Science Fiction’ in Patrick Parrinder, ed., Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (London: Longman, 1979), p. 194. 20. See, for example, James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir and its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Stephen Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000). 21. Mark Jancovich, ‘A Real Shocker: Authenticity, Genre and the Struggle for Cultural Distinctions’, Continuum, 14: 1, April 2000, pp. 23–35. 22. Mann, p. 146.
106 It Came from the 1950s! 23. Mann, p. 98. 24. Mann, p. 98. 25. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Corgi, 1973), p. 258. 26. Bosley Crowther, ‘British Science-Fiction Thriller, “Project M.7,” and Italian Import, “The Lucky Five,” Bow Here’, New York Times, 27 November, 1953, p. 22. 27. Bosley Crowther, ‘20,000 Leagues in 128 Fantastic Minutes’, New York Times, 24 December, 1954, p. 7. 28. Anon., ‘Tele Followup Comment, Variety, 25 April, 1951, p. 36. 29. Thomas M. Pryor, ‘George Pal Plans New Film On Space’, New York Times, 21 May, 1952, p. 22. 30. A.H. Weiler, ‘Screen: “Saucer” Story – Quasi-Documentary on “Flying Objects” Bows’, New York_Times, 13 June, 1956, p. 46. 31. A.H. Weiler, ‘Screen: Supersonic Age Pioneers – ‘On the Threshold of Space’ Bows at Globe’, New York Times, 30 March, 1956, p. 10. 32. Hift., ‘7th Voyage of Sinbad’, Variety, 26 November, 1958, p. 6. 33. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1952, p. 36. 34. A.W., ‘At the Paramount’, New York Times, 1 May, 1954, p. 13. 35. A.W., ‘ “Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” Invades City’, New York Times, 25 June, 1953, p. 23; and Bosley Crowther, ‘Screen: Horror Import – “Godzilla” a Japanese Film, is at State’, New York Times, 28 April, 1956, p. 11. 36. Holl., ‘Film Review’, Variety, 17 June, 1953, p. 6. 37. Altman, Film/Genre, p. 78. 38. Jack Gould, ‘Television in Review’, New York Times, 20 November, 1949, p. X9. 39. Jack Gould, ‘Television in Review’, New York Times, 30 April, 1950, p. X11. 40. Jack Gould, ‘Television in Review’, New York Times, 4 November, 1951, p. 123. 41. Oscar Godbout, ‘TV Blast-Off: A Slow Start’, New York Times, 3 August, 1958, p. X9. 42. Howard Thompson, ‘ “Blob” Slithers into Mayfair’, New York Times, 7 November, 1958, p. 23. 43. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1959, p. 62. 44. Bosley Crowther, ‘ “Destination Moon,” George Pal Version of Rocket Voyage, New Film at Mayfair’, New York Times, 28 June, 1950, p. 32. 45. Bosley Crowther, ‘Screen: Wonderful Trip in Space – Forbidden Plant is Out of This World’, New York Times, 4 May, 1956, p. 21. 46. H.H.T., ‘ “This Island Earth” Explored From Space’, New York Times, 11 June, 1955, p. 8. 47. Anon., ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, June 17, 1953, p. 6. 48. Telotte, p. 25. 49. Ibid. 50. There is a strong suggestion of this position in Pearson and Messenger Davies’ account of the film version of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was discussed earlier. 51. Thomas Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood’, in Jim Collins et al., eds, Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 8–36. 52. Telotte, p. 28. 53. Sobchack, p. 88.
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54. AT, ‘Review of Clash of Titans’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008. 55. See, for example, AJ, ‘Review of Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008; AJ, ‘Review of Earth vs the Flying Saucers’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008. 56. AJ, ‘Review of 20 Million Miles to Earth’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008. 57. AT, ‘Review of Clash of Titans’; and DP, ‘Review of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008. 58. AJ, ‘Review of 20 Million Miles to Earth’. 59. Ibid. 60. AJ, ‘Review of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008. 61. JG, ‘Review of The Valley of the Gwangi’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008. 62. DP, ‘Review of The Golden Voyage of Sinbad’. 63. AJ, ‘Review of The First Men in the Moon’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008. 64. SG, ‘Review of Mysterious Island’, Radio Times, www.radiotimes.com, accessed 16 December 2008. 65. See Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fantastic Life of Nigel Kneale (London: Headpress, 2006). See also John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2003); and Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 66. John P. Shanley, ‘A Playwright at the Controls’, New York Times, 20 September, 1959, p. X19. 67. See for example Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight: The Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950–2002 (New York: Palgrave, 2003); and Jeff Sconce, ‘Science Fiction Programmes’ in Horace Newcomb, ed., Encyclopedia of Television (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997). 68. Quoted in Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). 69. Jack Gould, ‘Rod Serling Series’, The New York Times, October 3, 1959, p. 39. 70. Neal., ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, June 9, 1954, p. 6. 71. Kove., ‘Film Reviews’, Variety, September 12, 1956, p. 6. 72. Powe., ‘Film Reviews’ Variety, 17 September, 1958, p. 7. 73. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, June 1957, p. 89. 74. Anon., Variety, 27 May 1953, p. 6. 75. Anon., Variety, 10 February 1954, p. 6. 76. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, June, 1957, p. 83. 77. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1956, p.21. 78. Hift, Variety, 16 March 1955, p.6. 79. Anon., Monthly Film Bulletin, April, 1959, p. 61.
6 Hammer’s Dracula Christopher Frayling
Several years ago, I received a strange request from England’s Heritage Lottery Fund, the body which distributes ‘good cause’ lottery money to national heritage projects.1 Would I comment on an application for funding to house in a museum a large collection of artefacts associated with Hammer horror films – mainly ‘special effects makeup’, the Phil Leakey and Roy Ashton collections – from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s? There was a detailed inventory in the package that included some ‘dental appliances with a reservoir of blood, operated by the actor’s tongue’ from Dracula (1958), eye inserts, a ‘box of rubber noses and oriental eye pieces’, moulds for scars, plaster-cast heads of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, prostheses and make-up boxes including the ingredients of Kensington Gore (fake blood), plus assorted pen-and-pencil sketches, pilot-drawings, character designs, production photos, scrapbooks, press cuttings and documents. The main focus of the collection was on films from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) to The Reptile (1965). Did they, or did they not, deserve to be considered part of the national heritage? Were they ‘national’ or an offshore product of Hollywood? What was their ‘historical importance’? What was their cultural impact? And their effect on the post-war British film industry? Above all, were the collections – as an archive – worthy of support as significant examples of ‘the heritage’? As someone who had written and broadcast on both the Gothic novel and horror movies, I seemed in a good position to answer these questions. A follow-up telephone call explained that the Heritage Lottery advisers were in a quandary about how to react to this application. The application was dated December 1997. A decision had to be made by the end of January 1998, after which 108
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the collection would then be put onto the open market and probably be dispersed. I did not hesitate. Of course, I wrote in my report, the material culture of Hammer films deserved a place, preferably a prominent place, in a museum. Why not? Why the hesitation? Where significance and impact were concerned, the five film versions of the Frankenstein story made between 1956 and 1972 (with Peter Cushing as the arrogant aristocratic scientist), the six versions of Dracula made between 1957 and 1970 (with Christopher Lee as the grand saigneur), plus The Mummy (1959, with both of them) and The Devil Rides Out (1967, with Lee as the good guy, for once) if not some of the later Hammer films – represented for me a key moment in the history of British cinema. It was a moment when a small studio at Bray, just off the main Maidenhead – Windsor road, a gap in the market, a repertory company of directors, designers, musicians, technicians and actors, and a great deal of entrepreneurial flair, created a distinctive product, a distinctively stylish product, which even took the American market by storm and eventually won the Queen’s Award to Industry in 1968 (the only film company to be so honoured). At the time of The Curse of Frankenstein – Hammer’s breakthrough colour film in 1957 – some Madison Avenue financial backers expressed concern that ‘just how British [the actors] are by way of accent’ might hold back the film’s chances on the American market. Hammer replied reassuringly that ‘the British cast will be absolutely first class and will have no trace whatsoever of British accent’2 – which was very odd, since the very Britishness of the project turned out to be part of its appeal. Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe cycle, in some ways a spin-off from Hammer, was deliberately to contrast the barnstorming acting style of Vincent Price (school of the Barrymores in their prime) with the beach party delivery of the youngsters. Hammer’s repertory company belonged to a slightly more restrained British tradition: costume drama on stage – Peter Cushing learned about the importance of movement and unexpected gesture from watching Laurence Olivier at close quarters – and costume drama in film, which had been heralded by popular Gainsborough Studios historical romances and by post-war Charles Dickens adaptations. So although these films revisited the stories of Hollywood films made some 25 years before, they were undoubtedly British – if that was one of the concerns of the Lottery advisers – British, with an important Celtic flavour: Mary Shelley grew up partly in Scotland, Robert Louis Stevenson was born and bred there, Arthur Conan Doyle had his roots there and Bram Stoker was – according to which biography you read – ‘Anglo-Irish’, ‘Irish-Protestant’
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or ‘Anglo-Celt’. (My report was written before ‘the Irish Dracula’, the interpretation of the novel from various post-colonial perspectives, had become fashionable.) The stories were also in direct line of descent from the Gothic novels of the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries, and in the case of the vampires, from the public image of Lord Byron himself.3 There was a credential: a direct link with the House of Lords! In this sense, too, they were definitely a part of the national heritage. Just after the arrival of the novel – Eng. Lit.’s first eleven of robust and rational players, which had no doubt been studied by the Lottery advisers at school or university – had come this parallel form of irrational fiction. I remember citing a critic of the time on this: We began to reorder the natural world with seed drills and crop rotation, steam power and longitudinal navigation; we began to drink tea and approve of reticence in public manners; and then we came home in the evenings to wallow in, say, Vathek – 1786’s big hit, by the creepy William Beckford, with great gross-outs – ‘he awoke stung . . . by wormwood-colour flies, which emitted from their wings a suffocating stench’ – and necrophiliac tendencies: ‘My taste for dead bodies,’ says Vathek’s usually lingerie-clad mother, ‘and everything like mummy, is decided.’ It’s a line Barbara Shelley should have delivered in a Hammer film. . .4 This parallel form, this other, had been mocked in uneasy ways by members of the Eng. Lit. cricket eleven, partly because it had proved so very successful with the reading public. Bookending the first phase of the Gothic, Henry Fielding introduced book eight of Tom Jones (1749) with some jokes about the sorts of authors who resorted to horror and wonders to make their fictions interesting; then Jane Austen famously satirized the craze for Gothic fiction in Northanger Abbey, published posthumously a few months before Frankenstein at Christmas 1817 (though mainly written in the late 1790s, a time when 35% of all novels being issued in Britain were Gothics). This reaction was in the fulness of time to turn into a set of critical clichés – conditioned reflexes, almost – about horror fiction. It was – so the litany went – a form of fiction that was deliberately sensationalist; with heroes, heroines and villains who were merely puppets – acting out dramas which had little or no connection with the facts or morals of everyday life – in narratives which were disjointed and irrational; an ephemeral fad with formulaic connections (antiquated castles, mannerist landscapes, hidden secrets, hauntings,
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scowling aristocratic villains, put-upon maidens, eighteenth-century heroes and heroines projected back into historical environments) which only deserved to survive as a cult, at best a symptom of nasty consumerism at the end of the eighteenth century and since. Edmund Burke – who in his A Philosophical Enquiry into . . . the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) provided the admittedly sometimes spurious aesthetic credo for many Gothic novelists – wrote approvingly of ‘the terrible sublime’ as an antidote to mental lethargy and boredom. Horace Walpole, seven years later, agreed that ‘Terror, the author’s principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing.’ This was sensationalism for sensationalism’s sake, best read or viewed at night when the critical faculties were half-asleep. First-eleven novels could be read in daylight. So the authors of the original Gothic novels had not – until surprisingly recently – been admitted into literature’s first eleven by the academic community. They had been filed under ‘the popular novel’ instead, the sort of material Queenie Leavis – rather than her husband F.R. Leavis with his ‘great tradition’ – wrote about, in her studies of fiction and the reading public. Maybe this was another of the quandaries the advisers found themselves in. Was the post-1960s interest in the Gothic a lasting development? The late eighteenth-century debates about the ‘legitimate’ depiction of horror (best seen out of the corner of the eye) and the ‘illegitimate’ depiction of gore, had resurfaced in even starker terms when Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula were first released in 1957 and 1958. These debates too went right back to the era when Mrs Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho was thought to be a good example of ‘suggestion’ or ‘obscurity’ and M.G. Lewis’s The Monk was thought to be far too graphic for its own good. Another example of Hammer as heritage. Had the academic community moved substantively beyond these traditional concerns? Then there was the question of originality. One reason why Hammer films made such a splash at the time of their first release – strongly disliked by the critics and equally strongly liked by the public – was that there had in fact been surprisingly few British horror films made before the late 1950s; surprisingly, given the importance of the native literary tradition. Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi had made one or two in the 1930s (not their finest hours), but these did not perform well at the box office and they weren’t a patch on the actors’ Hollywood products. The Universal cycle of horror films made in Hollywood had been dominated by European talent including British director James Whale; British actors Colin Clive, Cedric Hardwicke, Boris Karloff, Charles Laughton, Claude Rains, Ernest Thesiger and British production designer Charles D.
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‘Danny’ Hall. But that had been in Hollywood, on the Universal backlot, when horror was associated with the old world – German expressionism, pre-modern superstition, sets left over from First World War dramas – when American stars thought playing the evil guys was bad for their image (they still do) and when the early talkies were kind to theatretrained British accents. An old-world genre in the new world of talkies. Between 1942 and 1945, the import to Britain of all ‘H’ certificate films was banned outright by the Central Office of Information and the British Board of Film Censors. The thinking was that there were horrors enough for the public to cope with in real life – a misunderstanding, incidentally, of how horror stories function. Who would risk being hit by a flying bomb while watching The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942), about an experimental breed of super-soldiers developed to do battle with the Nazis? Even after the Second World War, and the flood of Hollywood back numbers, a survey of the British film industry commissioned by the reconstruction Political and Economic Planning Group – which studied, by theme, 572 films screened in Britain between 1948 and 1950 – concluded that only 1.9% of the total fell into the ‘Supernatural’ category (meaning ‘beyond the known powers of the laws of nature’), compared with 26.9% in ‘Crime’ and 19.6% in ‘Love’ (including ‘courtship and married life’).5 The only categories below ‘Supernatural’ on the list were ‘Pathological’ (relating to mental or physical illness) and ‘Social Problems’. Another official survey of the narratives of all films released in Britain between 1955 and 1957 showed that ‘Horror’ represented just over 1% of the total in 1955, 2% in 1956 and just under 5% in 1957. ‘Love’ showed a steep decline in the same period, as did ‘Comedy’ and ‘Historical’.6 So when The Curse of Frankenstein opened on 2 May 1957 – soon moving to two Leicester Square cinemas simultaneously – it must have seemed, to misquote John Ruskin, like a pot of bright-red paint flung in the face of the film establishment, complete with resurrected dog and eyeballs preserved in jam jars. The garish palette, well-endowed servant girl/mistress, tuppence coloured gore, the apparent revelling in realistic details and the foregrounding of the up-to-now repressed – all these cast early Hammer horrors into the outer darkness. Most of the serious reviewers concluded that for such material to be justified, it needed either ‘poetry and art’ on the one hand, or comedic detachment on the other: the best of the Gothic novels – or the James Whale approach. Hammer seemed to have neither. C.A. Lejeune famously began her review in The Observer: ‘Without hesitation I should rank The Curse of Frankenstein among the half-dozen most repulsive films
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I have encountered, in the course of some 10,000 miles of film reviewing.’ To which Campbell Dixon in The Daily Telegraph added: ‘when the screen gives us severed heads and hands, eyeballs dropped in a wine glass and magnified, and brains dished up on a plate like spaghetti, I can only suggest a new certificate – “S.O.” perhaps, for Sadists Only.’ Dilys Powell, in The Sunday Times, concluded: ‘after its early promise of rich absurdity, [the film] drops into the merely disgusting’.7 ‘Repulsive’ and ‘disgusting’ were interesting words to have used in this context, because horror films – like their literary counterparts – had indeed often revelled in being transgressive; in challenging social taboos. There had been the Hollywood version of Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) in which Dr Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) tried to re-enact the literal truth of Darwin’s thesis about the descent of man with help from the over-sexed Erik the ape; or, another example, the British Censors cutting the sequence where Karloff’s creature plays with the little girl by the lakeside, in Frankenstein (1931), and throws her into the water thinking she will float like a flower – a cut that actually created the impression that the girl had been molested; or The Island of Lost Souls (1933), with its crazy surgical experiments fusing people and beasts and its hint of bestiality, which had been banned outright in Britain. One of the functions of the Gothic was, traditionally, to provide a set of metaphors, of grownup fairy-tales, with which to challenge mainstream morality and the tyranny of good taste. It has held up a haunted mirror – like the antique one in Ealing’s Dead of Night (1945), which reveals how repressed and artificial its bourgeois owners are – to the realist, true-to-life mainstream of English literature and cinema. At that point I rested my case. I had argued in my report that Hammer Films represented an important moment in British cinema history, were distinctively British, were descended from the Gothic novel of the eighteenth century and its neo-Gothic followers, had been critically neglected, were original and – like the Gothic novel – were in their own way transgressive. The extreme reactions of the serious newspaper critics revealed the impact they had made. One of the best early books about Hammer (1973) – and the films’ connections with Gothic literary themes: the fatal man, the beauty of the Medusa, Milton’s Satan – had been called A Heritage of Horror, by David Pirie.8 I hoped these arguments would enable the Lottery advisers to support the application. Hammer Films, like them or not, were indeed ‘historically important’, made a big ‘cultural impact’ and were significant examples of ‘the heritage’. In retrospect, my defence of Hammer-as-heritage now seems rather too broad-brush, too a-historical in the case it makes (‘The Gothic
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Novel’; ‘The Horror Film’, ‘Critical Clichés’, ‘Horror and Transgression’); not specific or precise enough in its delineation of what ‘the heritage’ and ‘the cultural impact’ might mean at any particular time. It has often been said that we get the horrors we deserve – and that what is considered ‘horrific’ by the consensus changes significantly over time, in tandem with wider social and cultural changes: the same certainly applies to notions of ‘the heritage’. In the 1950s, for example, big houses were known as ‘stately homes’; by the 1980s they had become ‘historic houses’, a less socially stratified phrase. And, to be precise, the Heritage Lottery application covered the whole of Hammer’s history at Bray up to 1966, and not just the early colour horror films of 1956–60 (from The Curse of Frankenstein to The Curse of the Werewolf, say) – with very little on the years at ABPC Elstree (1967–70) and MGM – EMI Elstree (1970–75): a ten-year slice of British film history, rather than the four-year slice on which I had concentrated. So I want in this essay to try and recapture, to pinpoint, the moment in May 1958 when Hammer’s Dracula was first released in Britain, by focusing its cultural impact more than was possible in the confines of my Heritage Lottery report.9 Just what was it that upset the critics so much, and that seemed – in the context of British cinema – so novel at the time? The critics had treated The Curse of Frankenstein as unusually ‘sick-making’ and ‘nauseating’ and had emphasized more than anything else the garish gore: the two novelties were, apparently, the colour and the emphasis on physical detail. This reaction completely baffled the American distributors, who reacted to The Curse as standard teenage drive-in fare. But when Dracula was released the following year, it was something else – beyond the fact that the film was the first Dracula to be shot in colour – that appalled the critics and even encouraged some of them to ask the Censor to intervene. A month after The Curse of Frankenstein went on general release in Britain – with record box-office figures already being reported – screenwriter Jimmy Sangster was commissioned to begin work on his adaptation of Dracula.10 It was in late June 1957: When I wrote The Curse, I hadn’t read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – but everyone knew the story of a man who makes a monster. I did read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, twice, and was rather overwhelmed by it actually – turning this 450 page novel into a 90 page script. But I completed my final draft in about a month. Sangster had been involved with Hammer as a company since the late 1940s, first as a third assistant, then first assistant, then production
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manager and then scriptwriter. He had worked with director Terence Fisher on ‘at least six of the pre-Gothic run-of-the-mill B-movies’ made by Hammer. So when he prepared his scripts, it was second nature to him to think about the exact cost of every word where budget and schedule were concerned. ‘We had no wolves, no gypsies, no Renfield, no boat, no Whitby – we couldn’t afford any of them. Every page was carefully costed.’ The film was budgeted at £81 412 (£750 for Sangster’s fee, £7788 for constructing the sets, £7810 for the artistes’ fees, £5000 for producer and director fees).11 The settings of Bram Stoker’s novel (Transylvania to Whitby to London to Transylvania) were reduced to Castle Dracula near Klausenberg, which is a coach-ride from Carlstadt, where the Holmwoods live, via a customs post at Ingolstadt. The main sets were the Castle (entrance hall, dining room recycled from the graveyard set, library/Gothic Room, Harker’s bedroom, crypt) and the Holmwood house (drawing room, cellar). The exterior of the Castle entrance, enhanced by a glass painting of turrets and Alpine peaks, was thought to be so impressive, and such good value for money, that it was soon to be recycled as Baskerville Hall (1958) and as an Indian village in The Stranglers of Bombay (1959). In this reduced physical space – with its basic contrast between ‘Castle’ and ‘Holmwood house’, desire and domesticity – Sangster turned Dracula into a fast-paced, non-stop 82-minute three-act adventure (arrival at the Castle/Lucy and Mina vampirized/the chase) with some comic relief (a dotty undertaker called Marx, a bumbling Customs official, a suspicious innkeeper) to ease the tension. Sangster now calls this kind of comic relief ‘the “pass the marmalade” line’ – after Peter Cushing’s memorably dry request to his betrothed at the breakfast table in The Curse of Frankenstein. It works in the same way as the ‘Porter at the gate’ scene after King Duncan’s murder in Macbeth. I showed Jimmy Sangster some of director Terence Fisher’s preparatory notes12 – which had recently been published, in facsimile – on how to transform the novel into filmable material:
p. 3 p. 4 p. 6
Insert (Tedious). ? Accents for Innkeeper and wife. Coach arrives Ext? Harker hears villagers’ dialogue as he goes through them. ? Foreign Language (Language Dictionary Dialogue). p. 7 Int. Coach? Accents. p. 10/11 Calèche and wolves episode.
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p. 12 p. 16 p. 22/23
Dracula? White moustache. Geography of House (Hall from Dining Room in relation to 1st entrance). No dialogue for 3 girls – Dancers (Mime only and whispers).
What happened, I wondered, to the Transylvanian insert, the calèche, the wolves, and how did the three silent dancing girls – the brides of Dracula – turn into Valerie Gaunt, in only her second film role, insisting: ‘A reason! You ask for a reason! Is it not reason enough that he keeps me locked up in this house, holds me against my will. . .’, just before trying to insert her upper canines into Jonathan Harker’s neck? Maybe we couldn’t afford three girls, though there were three in the novel. Or the coach and the wolves. No-one can remember whether we had a coach or not! Jonathan Harker ended up arriving on foot. I think I had a coach scene at the beginning, in my script. And Dracula certainly didn’t have a white moustache. This all reminds me of when I was later asked to write a pirate film for Hammer: “There’s just one thing,” they said. “We can’t afford a ship”! The solution to the ‘? Accents for Innkeeper and wife’/‘? Foreign Language’/‘Int. Coach? Accents’ problem was to set the film in a Home Counties Transylvania – peopled with eccentric British character actors such as bumbling Miles Malleson, mummerset-accented George Woodbridge and officious George Benson – and to present the Holmwood household as a haven of Victorian domesticity. The Universal Dracula – like its Frankenstein – had been set in a strange hybrid of the past and the present. Sangster’s Dracula was set roughly in the historical era the novel was written (May to December 1885 rather than 1891–97), and turned the story into a period piece – which was to have implications for its presentation of the Count as sexual threat. Where his ‘white moustache’ is concerned – and Bram Stoker’s celebrated description of Count Dracula as an aged military commander with massive eyebrows and a breath problem – the character was to be a younger, more brisk and sexually active figure, as well as a perfect host, from the early drafts onwards, although he was originally to wear a black hat. And his ability to change himself into a bat or wolf had gone, too. Jimmy Sangster redefined the rules of earlier vampire films – and of the novel – in the scene where Van Helsing listens to phonograph recordings of his research notes, and records some of his new discoveries:
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Established that victims consciously detest being dominated by vampirism but are unable to relinquish the practice – similar to addiction to drugs. Death results from loss of blood but unlike normal death no peace manifests itself, for they enter into the fearful state of the un-dead. Had Jimmy Sangster at that stage seen Nosferatu (1922), where the vampire Count is a folkloric creature with pointy ears, rodent teeth and a bald head, and where his contagion is likened to the plague? ‘No.’ Or Hollywood’s first Dracula (1931), where he was played in pre-Freudian style by Bela Lugosi as a hypnotic Hungarian in full evening dress, who comes across like a melodramatic demon king? ‘No.’ Really? ‘No.’ In fact, the protracted negotiations with Universal about who owned the film and performing rights to Bram Stoker’s Dracula – which had been going on since October 1956 – were still inconclusive when Sangster was putting together his draft scripts.13 This was not because Universal owned the remake rights to the novel, but to protect Hammer from accusations of copying the innovations from the 1931 version and its theatrical source (the Count’s cloak and Van Helsing’s kit of wooden stakes, for example). Eventually, a deal was struck which gave Universal worldwide distribution rights. Had Van Helsing’s new vampire rules also been dictated by budgetary considerations? One of my reasons was that [the transformation into a bat and a wolf] had never been done very well. I tried to ground the script to some extent in reality. I thought the idea of being able to change into a wolf or bat made the film seem more like a fairytale than it needed to be.14 Hence, the ‘addiction’ to drugs parallel, which made the dominance/dependence relationship between vampire and victim seem more real, more tangible, to a 1957 audience. As did the new-look Count, who had become a demon lover, a sexual predator. The scenes where these two came together involved Dracula’s seduction of Lucy (Carol Marsh) and Mina Holmwood (Melissa Stribling). In the film as released, these were among the most original contributions:15 LUCY’S Medium a blue She is
BEDROOM, later that same night. close-up, Lucy in a four-poster bed, in chiffon night-dress, her hair in plaits. agitated.
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CUT TO: The French windows in Lucy’s bedroom. One of them is open. CUT TO: Close-up, Lucy is more agitated. She feels the two scars on her neck. CUT TO: Close-up, swirling autumn leaves just outside the open window. CUT TO: Van Helsing’s study. He is looking at Harker’s diary while his voice is heard coming from the phonograph. . . CUT TO: Extreme close-up, Dracula’s face, with key light on his eyes, as he stands at the French windows. CUT TO: Lucy in bed. She is now very agitated. CUT TO: Leaves swirling. CUT TO: Long shot. In the foreground is Lucy in the four-poster bed. Over her, standing in the open window, is Dracula. He walks forward, coming round the foot of Lucy’s bed, finally reaching her. Pulling up his cape, Dracula conceals her from view. The black cape fills the screen. CUT TO: The next morning. Mina and Dr Seward come out of Lucy’s bedroom. . . ———————— VAN HELSING: You must get some garlic flowers, as many as you can, place them by the windows and the door, and by the bedside. They may be taken out during the day but under no circumstances are they to be removed at night, even if she implores you. I cannot impress upon you enough how important it is that you obey my instructions. Do exactly as I say and you may be able to save her. If you don’t she will die. I’ll be here in the morning.
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CUT TO: LUCY’S BEDROOM, that same night. She is now wearing a white night-dress. The room is full of garlic flowers, with vases of them on either side of her bed. In bed, Lucy is struggling to reach one of the vases of flowers. Eventually she succeeds in knocking it over. The maidservant Girda, in a dressing-gown, her hair plaited, enters the room to inquire after the noise. She is flustered. GIRDA: Heavens, child, what is it? LUCY: Girda, these flowers, I can’t stand them. GIRDA: They do smell strong, but Mrs Holmwood said. . . LUCY: Please Girda, they stifle me. GIRDA: Oh well, I’ll take them out. LUCY: And the windows, you’ll open the windows. GIRDA: Yes, miss, if that’s what you want. Girda opens the French windows and removes some of the garlic flowers. As she leaves she turns to Lucy. GIRDA: I’ll come back for the rest. Exit Girda. CUT TO: MEDIUM CLOSE-UP, leaves swirling outside the window. CUT TO: MEDIUM CLOSE-UP, Lucy in bed, her apprehension and excitement mounting. CUT TO: LONG SHOT, Dracula standing in the window. CUT TO: The full moon, as clouds pass across its face. CUT TO: Lucy in bed, a sheet pulled up over her face. Van Helsing stands near her, Mina and Arthur stand at the foot of the bed and Girda stands by the door. . . VAN HELSING: Mrs Holmwood, did you do as I told you? ARTHUR: She did. And you can see the result. ————————
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CUT TO: CLOSE-UP OF Mina standing in the doorway, inside the Holmwoods’ house. She has a fur collar pulled up around her neck, a green coat, and she has a warm twinkle in her eyes that has not been there before. She is looking vibrant and sensual. MINA: Good morning. ARTHUR: Mina, you gave me quite a fright. Where have you been at this hour of the morning? MINA: It was such a lovely day I got up early and went for a walk in the garden. I didn’t expect you back so soon. ARTHUR: I’m afraid I’ve got to go out again. MINA: Oh! When will you be back? ARTHUR: I can’t say for sure. Mina, you look very ill, are you all right? MINA: Arthur darling, don’t fuss, I feel perfectly well. Goodbye darling. ———————— CUT TO: . . .VAN HELSING: I know I ask a great deal of you but you mustn’t weaken now. We have it within our power to rid the world of this evil, and with God’s help we’ll succeed. CUT TO: EXTERIOR, GARDEN OF THE HOLMWOODS’ HOUSE. Arthur is standing, jiggling the crucifix in his hand. He looks up at the window of Mina’s bedroom. CUT TO: INTERIOR, MINA’S BEDROOM. Mina is sitting on the edge of her bed. CUT TO: ARTHUR IN THE GARDEN, KEEPING WATCH. A wolf howls. CUT TO: INTERIOR OF THE HOUSE. Dracula is standing in the hall. The camera is high, looking down. As Dracula ascends the stairs the camera tracks across the top of the stairs, finally bringing Dracula into close-up.
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CUT TO: MINA SITTING ON THE EDGE OF THE BED, apprehensive but eager. Dracula enters the room and approaches her. He plays his face close to hers and pushes her back onto the bed. There is a scream. CUT TO: CLOSE-UP OF AN OWL SCREAMING IN THE GARDEN. CUT TO: ARTHUR, STILL KEEPING WATCH. . . Did Jimmy Sangster recall writing these scenes? ‘The ones with Lucy, they were definitely me. The scene of Melissa Stribling at the door, smiling, that was mainly Terry Fisher. I just wrote “enter Melissa Stribling”. The scene of Melissa Stribling being visited by Dracula in her bedroom, that was partly me, partly Terry.’16 On 8 October 1957, the day before Terence Fisher was signed as the director of Dracula, the second draft of Jimmy Sangster’s screenplay was submitted to the recently appointed new secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, John Nicholls.17 Five days later, an internal Board memo sounded an ominous note – socially as well as morally: The uncouth, uneducated, disgusting and vulgar style of Mr Jimmy Sangster cannot quite obscure the remnants of a good horror story, though they do give one the gravest misgivings about treatment. . . The memo continued with serious worries about ‘Technicolor blood’, ‘shots of blood’ and ‘stake-work’, which were summarized by Nicholls in a letter to the Hammer people of 21 October. These worries mirrored the recent concerns of the newspaper critics about The Curse of Frankenstein. Sangster’s Dracula had introduced colour, fangs, red contact lenses, in-shot stakings – and décolletage – for the first time. At this stage, the Board’s reservations seemed to be almost entirely about the gore quotient, though there was a first warning about another issue as well: p. 10, 29, 45 etc. It is important that the women in the film should be decently clad, not seen in transparent night-dresses or with bared breasts, or in unduly suggestive garments. I would add that anything which cross-emphasises the sex aspect of the story is likely, in a horror subject of this kind, to involve cuts in the completed film.
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This was presumably put in to protect the BBFC’s back, in case subsequent drafts – or the film itself – went beyond the submitted words on the page. Jimmy Sangster had already crossed swords with the British Board, on X The Unknown (1956) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), but his final shooting script was dated 18 October – so while the Board was busy discussing his second draft, and having problems with it, Hammer was going ahead regardless. This was shortly to prove a source of irritation to the Board, and teach the Hammer executives a lesson about clearing up any misunderstandings well in advance of shooting expensive film stock. Filming began on 11 November 1957, partly on the new sound stage at Bray, and wrapped at the end of January 1958; on 5 February a black-and-white print of Dracula – minus six scenes and without ‘full sound’ – was winging its way to the BBFC. That same afternoon, an internal memo noted sniffily that ‘the producers have ignored the script letter and also have deviated from the script’. Just as they had feared, in the 21 October letter. By a week later, Hammer had belatedly agreed to make the cuts outlined by the BBFC at the script stage over three months before, and resubmitted a print on 12 February. This time, in addition to the graphic detail of the stakings and the disintegration of Dracula – the Board’s original concerns – a new sequence was added to the censors’ little list for the first time: Reel 8. The whole episode of Dracula and Mina together whenever either of them have sexual pleasure. There must, for instance, be no kissing or fondling. Plus ‘caution is also required with regard to the music effects, especially “shock” music. . .’ James Carreras, the head of the company, immediately fired back a letter to Nicholls with ‘Just a few general observations on “horror pictures”: The horror audience is a very specialised one and many people who go to ‘X for sex’ pictures will not go to see a horror film. . .. The specialised audience who will go to see Dracula will expect thrills but the cuts that you are asking us to make, in our opinion, are taking every thrill out of the picture, in fact, it is not as horrific as any of the past Draculas and we cannot believe that that is your intention. So the Board decided as a concession to screen the film again on 14 February, and this time one of the BBFC examiners noted:
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l 8. There is still a strong sex element in this scene. This is due to Mina’s anticipating expression in close-up and Dracula’s face (and expression) as it hovers over Mina’s before he applies himself to her neck. We are very doubtful whether this sex element can be removed . . . Cut the scene from immediately after Mina gets on the bed to shot of owl screaming. . . On 3 April, a colour print – complete with James Bernard’s thrashing, orgasmic music; high-volume variations on the three syllables of Dra-cu-la followed by rising scales – was submitted, incorporating further small cuts in the staking of Lucy and the disintegration of the Count. Having watched this print, the Board concluded that it was now prepared to pass everything except Reel 8, which ‘should be resubmitted’: shot of Dracula’s face approaching Mina as she lies on the bed, with her reaction, must go. There should be a cut from where he enters the room to the owl (and the sound of the screams) outside. . . Hammer’s good-humoured but firm response to this was to reiterate that they could not see how [Dracula’s] face looks more censorable in colour than it did in black and white: he is wearing no special makeup. There is no blood on his face, he is not wearing contact-lenses – in fact, the rather pink look he has makes him look, if anything, a little prettier than he did before! In the end, following a face-to-face meeting to resolve the deadlock on 14 April, the Board relented: Reel 8. While we consider that, in the approach of Dracula to Mina the sex-element is still too prevalent, in view of the apparent misunderstanding over this [the suggestion that if the scene did not look worse in colour than black and white, it would automatically be passed] and the technical difficulty of effecting further reductions, we are prepared to waive our objection to this scene. But a brief shot of the disintegrating face of Dracula, with ‘his hand pulling down’ had to go. On this basis, an ‘X’ certificate was duly issued a week later. The next Sangster-scripted Hammer horror, The Revenge of Frankenstein, would have an even rougher ride – with the BBFC making a point of being crystal clear about its reservations from the outset. When the Board had first read the script of Dracula, its main concern – as
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it had been with The Curse – was the explicitness of the gore. Then, when the BBFC viewed the black-and-white print of Dracula, the bedroom scene involving Dracula and Mina – together with ‘the sex aspect of the story’ – began more seriously to alarm them, and especially the look on the Count’s face and Mina’s reaction to it. The ‘sex-element is still too prevalent’. But Hammer managed to persuade the board, on a technicality, to leave the scene alone. Why had it taken so long for the censors to notice the full implications of this scene? Jimmy Sangster’s view on this is clear: It is because it wasn’t all in the script. [The BBFC memo of 5 February noted that the Hammer had ‘deviated from the script’.] It was a mixture of my script, Terry’s direction, James Bernard’s music and Bernard Robinson’s sets.18 Terence Fisher, who joined the team after Sangster’s first two drafts had been completed, always appreciated the way in which Sangster formatted his scripts: set the scene, present the dialogue, don’t be too prescriptive about staging. And it is clear that the staging and cutting of the Lucy and Mina scenes – together with the thrashing music – was what drew particular attention to the ‘sex aspect’. Fisher always maintained that this was what he brought to the project: ‘I think my greatest contribution to the Dracula myth was to bring out the underlying sexual element in the story. . .’19 Where the Lucy bedroom scenes were concerned, he recalled them as versions of the virginal bride waiting eagerly in her powder-blue night-dress for a nocturnal visitor: It’s almost ballet the way she opens the doors, goes back and lies down again, her eyes focused, waiting for him to appear. . . You know, it’s a distortion of the so-called ‘true love’, and this is the power of evil working from a distance. Dracula could cause himself to appear there right at the moment when he realised that any resistance to him she might have had was gone. And as for the controversial scenes involving Mina Holmwood, Terence Fisher saw these as being partly about the state of the Holmwoods’ marriage: Dracula preyed upon the sexual frustrations of his women victims. The [Arthur/Mina] marriage was one in which she was not sexually
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satisfied and that was the weakness as far as Dracula’s approach to her was concerned. When she arrived back after having been away all night [in the basement of the Friedrichstrasse undertaker’s parlour] she said it all in one close-up at the door. . . Fisher remembered advising Melissa Stribling to ‘imagine you have had one whale of a sexual night, the one of your whole sexual experience. Give me that in your face!’ And she certainly did. A confident, sexy, emancipated half-smile, rather than her usual wan detachment. All Arthur can say, in time-honoured fashion, is: ‘You look very ill, are you all right?’ So Terence Fisher’s direction, plus composer James Bernard’s music (brass and woodwind for the climaxes, strings for the lyrical bits), turned the potential on the page into something to frighten the censors. In the process, the director brought his own strong sense of good and evil – as well as of convention and transgression – to Hammer’s first Dracula. Lucy’s ‘true love’ is contrasted with ‘the power of evil’. (Remember that old-fashioned ‘Love’ films were going seriously out of fashion at the time.) The physical/sensual side of a marriage provides the demon with his opportunity. The audience is positioned as innocent bystanders, watching a morality play: all right, call it a vampire, call it the power of evil, call it the attraction of the power of evil – the important thing was the attraction of the power of evil. One of the greatest things that the power of evil has is to make its temptation tremendously attractive. There was a very strong sexual influence in Dracula, which is important, because two of his victims were women and they were . . . – apart from the superstition or legend of the power of the mind. You know what I’m trying to get at? It was human. It wasn’t impressionistic . . . it was an attempt to put it into realistic settings, of everybody’s personal experiences of what the power of evil is and how they can be controlled by it sexually, emotionally, any other way you can. If you go back to the Bible and the temptation of Jesus on the mountain. . . The temptation took the charismatic form of a new-look Count Dracula, with gentlemanly Christopher Frank Carandini Lee (he had signed on 29 October) in the title role – surprisingly, the first British actor ever to play the part. Frankenstein was British in Hollywood. So were the Mummy and Dr Moreau. But Dracula was either Eastern European or American (from the South). Lee’s career as an actor had, by his own
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admission, been ‘moving very slowly’ up to that point, despite having acted in over 40 films since his debut in 1947. He had come to specialize in portraying ‘The Other’ in assorted period adventure films – Spanish captains, Arab traders, a Montevidean in The Battle of the River Plate, the creature in The Curse of Frankenstein, and, most recently, the Marquis St Evrémonde in A Tale of Two Cities. ‘I’m the tallest actor in the country [60003 400030003 ],’ he said – in stark contrast with the vertically-challenged John Mills and Richard Todd and Richard Attenborough and most of the other stalwarts of British war/adventure films – ‘and am not entirely British in appearance’. Here was another solution to the ‘accent’ problem. He had proved himself a gifted mime, good at playing clipped or sinister aristocratic charm; and he could hiss and blaze convincingly when thwarted. These were essential talents because unlike Count Orlok in Nosferatu, he did not depend on grotesque make-up to be plausible; and unlike Bela Lugosi in Universal’s Dracula, he had no need of hypnotism to get his way with his victims. And he didn’t have to transmute into bats or wolves to enhance his charisma. All he had to do was to stand magisterially at a suburban window in a floor-length cloak, the lights on his eyes, and leave his victims – as well as the audience – to do the rest. Lee had only 13 lines in the film, all of them in the first two reels – which was admittedly 13 more than he’d had in The Curse of Frankenstein. But Dracula was to be his breakthrough movie. By Christmas 1958, a newspaper was featuring a cartoon about ‘Peter Cushion and Christopher Flea in Santa Claws’. Christopher Lee’s take on the story in many ways seems to have matched Terence Fisher’s: ‘a morality play with an admixture of pantomime, fairy story and melodrama . . . this is black, this is white; this is good, this is bad’. Where the character of the Count was concerned, Lee tried to emphasize his sadness, ‘a tragic quality – the curse of being immortal . . . the loneliness of evil’. This was to be emphasized more in subsequent Hammer Draculas. But in interviews he was reluctant to be drawn on the character’s sexual implications as demon lover, a new take on Beauty and the Beast: ‘There is a sexual element in vampirism, I suppose . . . I’ve never thought of fangs that way, quite honestly’.20 But Sangster and Fisher’s project, to bring out the underlying sexual element in the story, was what made Dracula scary again after all those years of retreads and parodies. Executive producer Michael Carreras grasped this immediately: ‘The greatest difference between our Dracula and anybody else’s was the sexual connotation. There was no real horror in it, the women were eager to be nipped by Dracula and I think that
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gave it a fresh look . . . [plus] they were the first Gothic horror films to be in colour.’21 After the black-and-white years, British film-makers had at last found a roundabout way of telling stories about sex. So this would be the unique selling proposition which would be emblazoned all over the British posters. ‘Every night he rises from his coffin-bed to silently seek the soft flesh, the warm blood he needs’. Complete with split infinitive. At the Gaumont, Haymarket, where the film opened on 22 May 1958, the word ‘DRACULA’ was lit up in huge neon letters, and beneath them: ‘The terrifying lover who died . . . yet lived!’ A gigantic Christopher Lee lunged towards Melissa Stribling’s neck – as on the posters – and by some mechanism managed to draw blood from the puncture-holes he had made in her neck, which flowed vertically down her hair22 : this, despite James Carreras’ assurance to the censors that this would not be an ‘X for sex’ picture in any way. His son Michael Carreras complained about the publicity issued for The Horror of Dracula (as it was called) by Universal’s marketing department in New York, which was ‘along the lines of the old Dracula pictures with Bela Lugosi’ – because it had completely missed the point: ‘Our Dracula is handsome and sexy . . . His victims are young, attractive women. The campaign in London is on horror sex lines and I would be grateful if you would re-examine.’ Out with the old bogeyman flapping his wings in evening dress, and in with Dracula sinking his fangs into Mina Holmwood’s neck. His wish was their command.23 By emphasizing ‘the underlying sexual element of the story’, Hammer’s Dracula was certainly to have a profound impact on the academic study of Stoker’s Dracula, as well as on the future of the vampire film. Before 1958, those commentators who wrote in any depth about Dracula – and there were very few of them – tended to place the book firmly in the context of Victorian neo-Gothic sensation literature.24 A kind of literary curiosity. Queenie Leavis in her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), her ‘outline of popular fiction’ in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, did not mention Dracula at all. Hall Caine yes, Bram Stoker no. Montague Summers, eccentric specialist in large antiquarian tomes about literary and folkloric vampires, with a bibliographical emphasis, acknowledged that ‘there is no sensational romance which in modern days has achieved so universal a reputation’, but complained that ‘Dracula is by no means briefly told’, that it contained ‘much careless writing’ and that it lost its way from ‘the rather tedious courtship of Lucy Westenra’ onwards. The reason for the novel’s immense popularity lay in the choice of subject-matter rather than its treatment. The scant two pages Summers devoted to Dracula – in a chapter on ‘The Vampire
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in Literature’ (1928) – consisted mainly of plot summary (he particularly liked the Transylvania section) and ended on misspellings of the names Hamilton Deane (‘Deans’) and Bela Lugosi (‘Lugoni’). Peter Penzoldt’s The Supernatural in Fiction (1952), based on an academic thesis, included Stoker’s Dracula in the bibliography but had only two brief things to say about the novel in the text: that Hollywood had ‘taken it over’ and that it was not in fact Bram Stoker ‘who introduced the vampire into English literature’. Devendra P. Varma, whose The Gothic Flame was first published the year before Hammer’s Dracula was released, noted that Stoker had created ‘the prince of vampires’ through bringing to perfection ‘each piece of crude and creaking machinery of Gothic romance’. And that was all he had to say about the novel. Varma found in Gothic novels ‘the same sinister overtones and the same solemn grandeur’ that twelfth-century cathedrals ‘evoked in medieval man’: Dracula was well beneath his intellectual threshold. Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony, first issued in 1933 and revised in 1951, sought ‘the erotic sensibility’ and ‘the pathology of Romanticism’ in a boisterously thematic approach to the literature of horror from De Sade to D’Annunzio – the Beauty of the Medusa, The Metamorphoses of Satan, The Shadow of De Sade, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Le Vice Anglais, themes later customized by David Pirie – but was much more concerned with the poetry and prose of the nineteenth-century romantics than with the more conventional neo-horrors of Bram Stoker. Dracula is not mentioned once, although Praz’s themes have all been applied to the novel – many times – since the 1970s. Summers was upset by Praz’s over-emphasis (in his view) on eroticism and called the book ‘disjointed gimcrack’. Other earlier studies of tales of terror – by Edith Birkhead (1921) and Michael Sadleir (1927) – were not interested in either eroticism or Dracula: their emphasis was on bibliography, and rescuing the early Gothic novels from critical condescension. Sigmund Freud’s biographer, Ernest Jones, devoted a chapter to vampires in his On the Nightmare (1931), but omitted to cite Dracula in support of his thesis about repressed incestuous desires and the psychology of the living: Stoker’s blood transfusion scene would in fact have helped his thesis considerably, but he focused instead on medieval folklore and German Romanticism.25 The one major exception to this neglect of Bram Stoker was another card-carrying Freudian critic, who wrote partly in response to Ernest Jones. In December 1959 (just after the release of Hammer’s Dracula, but in some ways harking back to an earlier tradition), Maurice Richardson published a half-serious, half-tongue-in-cheek, article about the psychoanalytical implications of ghost stories in general and Dracula in particular which he referred
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to as ‘a bisexual oral-and-genital sadomasochistic orgy’, a parable of Oedipal conflict (the Count as Big Daddy), totem and taboo, and the dilution of the sexual drive. The date of publication may be significant, as we’ll see. Today, the study of Dracula has changed utterly.26 The novel is at the centre of the extensive literature around ‘new Gothic criticism’. The approach now is to displace the basic function of the genre, which is to scare its readers in pleasurable ways, by solemnly deconstructing the words on the page into the ‘unsaid’ psychological or socio-political elements which may lie beneath them. Gothic novels have become texts, above all other forms of fiction, where ‘the repressed’ can return, where ‘the abject’ can be disguised, and where social anxieties can be buried – waiting for critics from today’s more liberated perspectives to dig them up. Since Foucault, it has become a critical cliché to set the category ‘Victorian’ against all that is ‘liberated’ and ‘modern’. And the key anxieties are to do with gender, sexuality and middle-class respectability in conflict with uncontrollable forces. Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall have concluded from this that it is as if literary criticism itself has become some kind of Gothic project creating its own melodramas through which to confront villains within the crumbling hierarchies of the academy.27 From defensiveness to defiance. As Matthew Sweet has observed: Dracula Studies first emerged as a serious discipline in the late 1960s and soon established the parameters of its interest. As Robert Mighall has argued in his book [A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction:] Mapping History’s Nightmares (1999), this kind of Freud-slaked, programmatically anti-Victorian criticism proposed that ‘the vampire is monstrous not because it is a supernatural being which threatens to suck the protagonists’ blood and damn their souls, but because at some “deeper level” it symbolises an erotic threat.’ So, Mighall contends, a book that contains no obvious allusions to sex – apart from one use of the word ‘voluptuous’ – has been used to prove how much energy the Victorians invested in their programme to police sex into silence.28 Sometimes, Mighall concludes in a paraphrase of Freud’s famous remark about a cigar, ‘sometimes a vampire is only a vampire’. The less the book actually mentions sex, the more it provides evidence for the repression of Victorian society. QED. ‘[This] serves less to illuminate a body of fiction than to congratulate itself, on behalf of modern progressive
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opinion, upon its liberation from the dungeons of Victorian sexual repression or social hierarchy.’ By setting the story in the drawing-rooms and bedrooms of the Victorian past, vintage autumn 1885, and by using the character of Count Dracula as a catalyst for revealing Victorian hypocrisy and outmoded forms of sexual morality, Jimmy Sangster and team transformed perceptions of Dracula. The scholars who first encountered the film and book in the 1960s have themselves now become the critical/academic consensus. As Sweet concludes, ‘Lee’s performance convinced a generation of scholars that Dracula was a book about sex, and not about vampires.’ Actually, the sub-discipline of ‘Dracula Studies’ emerged in a serious way not in the late 1960s but the early 1970s. The first sustained study of the novel’s sexual symbolism was written in 1972, of its psychology of dominance and dependence in the same year; of its menstrual subtext in 1978; my own analysis of the literary genesis of Dracula – which reprinted Jones’s chapter and parts of Richardson’s article for the first time – appeared in 1978; the first detailed study to examine the novel’s take on the ‘New Woman’ emerged in 1982; and its implications for gender studies were first fully explored in 1984. The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Dracula, with its introduction by A.N. Wilson calling it ‘a great story of the second-rate type’, completely ignoring the critical reappraisals since the early 1970s, was published in 1983. This approach had become well-nigh unthinkable, where serious scholarship was concerned, by the late 1980s. By then, the point of Bram Stoker’s original story had been inverted, with the Count becoming the liberator and his victims the forces of orthodoxy and repression. David Punter wrote of this turnaround among the academics: ‘The middle class is perfectly imaged in the form of the person sitting rigidly in the darkened chamber while monstrous forces press against the window.’29 Recognize the scene? It was the one Jimmy Sangster wrote. Subsequent literary and film versions of the vampire – the vampire as addict, the vampire as contagion, the vampire as last romantic, the vampire as embodiment of adolescent growing pains – have all fed off this insight. Van Helsing has become the bad guy, a fundamentalist spoilsport. But the precise cultural significance of the moment of Hammer’s Dracula in May 1958 is some way away from the subsequent rise of Gothic studies – coinciding with the growing interest in identity and sexual politics – from the early 1970s onwards. In fact, in some ways its significance is the opposite30 – because in Jimmy Sangster’s script and Terence Fisher’s direction, the precise context for ‘the sexual element’ in the story was a defence of family values and true love. We have seen how
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in Dracula the key conflict at the heart of the film is between Dracula and Arthur as the heads of two diametrically opposed households – the Castle and the family home – with Van Helsing as the priest/marriage guidance counsellor who helps to resolve the problems in Arthur’s marriage to Mina. Adultery is explicitly associated with letting the evil one in (‘everybody’s personal experience of what the power of evil is’, according to Terence Fisher). When the sexual act is not confined to marriage and the home (Mina is married; Lucy is engaged) it must be destroyed, if necessary with the help of a counsellor, a specialist in such things. Arthur cannot at first cope with the thought that the family itself may contain the seeds of Dracula’s power. He resents Van Helsing’s interference, thinks his wife must be unwell, and represses his and his wife’s libido and associates Dracula entirely with outside forces. Nothing to do with him and his marriage. But as Terence Fisher, again, put it: ‘Dracula preys on Mina’s vulnerabilities, her sexual frustration.’ Only when Arthur acknowledges – with Van Helsing’s professional guidance – that his wife is an adulteress (is being vampirized), that she has sensual needs that he is not satisfying, that he must in future face up to his own libido (and confront Dracula as the male head of a rival household), only then can the Count be defeated by the forces of good. Meanwhile, Dracula – who has lost his ‘bride’ (remember Valerie Gaunt?) thanks to Jonathan Harker – desperately seeks another partner in the form of first Lucy (he has seen her framed photo in Harker’s bedroom: ‘May I ask her name? . . . Charming’) and then, via Lucy, Mina Holmwood. Unlike in the novel, he appears to vampirize one partner or mate of the opposite sex at a time. The stripping-down of the story, in short, turns it into a fairy-tale about adultery. The women in the film – the bride of Dracula, Lucy and Mina – are receptacles to be possessed by either ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’. Van Helsing has no qualms at all about using them as bait to catch the Count. Dracula does vampirize Jonathan Harker, but that is treated as a revenge-killing rather than a seduction. The celebrated ending of the film shows Dracula in the Gothic Room of his castle being forced into the light by the power of the crucifix, and disintegrating in the sun’s rays; this is intercut with a shot of the crossed hands of Arthur and Mina. As her stigma – the burn-mark of the cross – fades, the camera remains on her hands for a few frames, making us aware of her wedding ring. Mina has been received back into the family, and to symbolize this Arthur kisses her hand. Meanwhile, ‘the only place [the Count] can make for now is home’, as Van Helsing has put it just before the final chase. There’s no place like home. I have seen it suggested that the final shot of the film reinforces this message. Dracula has
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been burned to dust, and all that is left of him is a pile of ashes and his ring (wedding ring?). Set into the marble floor beneath him, in the centre of the Gothic Room, is a circular zodiac design with inscriptions in Latin (on an outer ring) and ancient Greek (on an inner ring). The final shot shows the pile of ashes, the ring and a single Greek word. It has been suggested that the word is Eστ´ια, meaning ‘home or household or family hearth’. In Greek mythology, the virginal Hestia (Eστ´ια), ´ was the guardian of the domestic hearth fire, which was not allowed to go out unless it had been ritually extinguished, after which it was renewed in a ceremony of purification – just the right place for the undead to die. It is a nice idea – attributing much subtlety to production designer Bernard Robinson31 – but unfortunately the word is in fact Eστ´ιν, which simply means ‘it is’, part of an illegible phrase around the inner ring. The accent above the iota, in the film, is written the wrong way round. Nevertheless, there’s no place like home. Roll the credits. So in Terence Fisher’s words, it is ‘the ultimate victory of good over evil’. In May 1958, several years before the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, exactly two years before the first birth control pill was developed in the USA, the conclusion of Hammer’s Dracula is that permissiveness (as it was then called) is a serious threat to the stability of the family, which is in turn one of the strongest bulwarks of society. Yes, Terence Fisher’s Dracula pits inhibition against abandon, repression against desire, convention against the abject – all in the context of Hammer’s Eastmancolor version of Victorian domesticity around 1885 – but the film is not concluding from all this that liberation is or will be a social good. That thought was not available to mainstream film-makers in 1958. Subsequent, post-1970s, commentators on Dracula have projected the thought backwards because they want the film to be agreeing with them. They want today’s more liberated perspective to be there – even if ‘unsaid’ – so they can find it. Actually, and in some ways ironically, Hammer’s Dracula is far closer in spirit to Bram Stoker’s novel than to the post-1970s politics of liberation. George Orwell, had he lived, could have written a classic essay – along the lines of ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ or ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ – about the cultural significance of Hammer’s 1958 Dracula. Orwell was a keen observer of British cultural metaphors and what they revealed about underlying social attitudes: Dracula would have provided him with excellent material – which in turn would perhaps have helped the Heritage Lottery to treat Hammer films unproblematically as part of the national heritage. I’m delighted to say that my report helped to persuade them, that the decision was made in time, and that the archive now
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resides in the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford.
Notes 1. Application to the Heritage Lottery Fund, dated 19 December 1997, entitled ‘Acquisition of Collection of Artifacts Associated with Hammer Films’, plus appendices 1–9 with supplementary information. 2. David Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study (London: BFI, 1980): Part 2, items 8 and 9, 28 August 1956 and 3 September 1956. 3. The citations I gave were to my then-recent Nightmare: The Birth of Horror (London: BBC Books, 1996) and Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber, 1991), esp. pp. 107–44. 4. Vera Rule, ‘The Refreshing Grapes of Goth’, The Guardian, 5 August 1996: 10, previewing Nightmare: The Birth of Horror. 5. The findings of the surveys of 1948–50 and 1955–57 are reproduced in David Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study (London: British Film Institute, 1980), pp. 6–7 and part three document 43. 6. This is an expansion of ideas discussed in my Introduction to Martin Myrone and Christopher Frayling, eds, The Gothic Reader (London: Tate Gallery, 2006), pp. 12–20. 7. Newspaper reviews photographically reproduced in Pirie (op. cit.) part four document 46. 8. Revised in 2008 as David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror (London: Tauris, 2008). 9. This account of the genesis of Hammer’s Dracula (1958) owes much to Denis Meikle, A History of Horrors (Maryland: Scarecrow,1996), pp. 56–64; Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, The Hammer Story (London: Titan, 1997), pp. 30–3; David Pirie, A New Heritage of Horror pp. 95–112; Wayne Kinsey, Hammer Films: The Bray Studios Years (London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2002), pp. 91–113; David Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, pp. 51–62, and part six documents; and ed. Richard Klemensen, Hammer: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (Little Shoppe of Horrors number 4, Iowa, April 1978), pp. 23–118. 10. Interview with scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster, at the Royal College of Art, November 2007. 11. Production budget for Dracula from Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, part six documents 71 and 72. 12. Terence Fisher’s preparatory notes are reproduced in ed. Richard Klemensen, ‘Terence Fisher – Hammer’s master of Gothic Horror’, Little Shoppe of Horrors, Issue 19 (September 2007): 52–4. 13. See Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, part six document 68 dated 31 October 1956. 14. My interview with Jimmy Sangster; see also Meikle, op. cit., and Kinsey, op. cit. 15. Dialogue and stage directions are my transcriptions from the film itself. 16. Interview with Jimmy Sangster, November 2007. 17. The correspondence with the British Board of Film Censors is quoted in detail in Wayne Kinsey, op. cit., pp. 94–6 and 110–13.
134 It Came from the 1950s! 18. Interview with Jimmy Sangster, November 2007. 19. Terence Fisher’s quotes are from Kinsey, op. cit., pp. 100–1; Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, p. 56; Cinefantastique (vol. 4 no. 3), issue The Films of Terence Fisher, pp. 19–28; Little Shoppe of Horrors 19: 13–16, 36–51, 63–75; Fandom’s Film Gallery issue 1 (Belgium: Deurne, 1975); ed. Allen Eyles, Robert Adkinson and Nicholas Fry, The House of Horror (London: Lorrimer, 1973), pp. 12–15. 20. Christopher Lee’s quotes are from Pirie, Hammer: A Cinema Case-Study, p. 56; Eyles et al., The House of Horror, pp. 15–19; Kinsey, op. cit., p. 104; and Fandom’s Film Gallery issue 1. 21. Pirie, op. cit., p. 56. 22. Kinsey, op. cit., p. 126. 23. Matthew Sweet, ‘Flesh and Blood’, The Guardian Review, 27 October 2007: 14. 24. See Q.D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939); Montague Summers, The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (London: Kegan Paul, 1928), pp. 333–7; Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London: Peter Nevill, 1952), pp. 37–40; Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York: New York, Russell and Russell, 1966), pp. 160, 205; Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). 25. For the relevant extract from Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare, see Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber, 1991), pp. 398–417; and for the extract from Maurice Richardson’s essay see Christopher Frayling, op. cit., pp. 418–22. 26. On the new critical landscape surrounding Bram Stoker’s Dracula, see especially William Hughes, Bram Stoker: Dracula: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 27. See Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall, ‘Gothic Criticism’, in ed. David Punter, A Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) pp. 209–28 and co-ed. Christopher Frayling, The Gothic Reader introduction. 28. Matthew Sweet, op. cit. 29. Baldick and Mighall, op. cit., p. 225, citing David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (Longman, Harlow, vol. 2), pp. 201–2. 30. This reading of Hammer’s Dracula was originally inspired by discussions with Fern Presant – then a postgraduate student in the School of Film and Television – at the Royal College of Art in 1980. 31. On Bernard Robinson’s sets, see especially Kinsey, op. cit., pp. 98–100; and ed. Kinsey, The House That Hammer Built, issue 11, volume 2:3 (1999): 137–76.
7 Fast Cars and Bullet Bras: The Image of the Female Juvenile Delinquent in 1950s America Elizabeth McCarthy
Teenager Dori Graham is desperate to earn enough money to buy a dress for the local dance. That pretty much sums up the dramatic premise of the 1956 feature film Rock, Rock, Rock! But the film isn’t really about plot, it’s about music. It’s one of a series of similar productions featuring the pioneering disc jockey Alan Freed as himself. Other films in the series include Rock Around the Clock (1956), Mister Rock and Roll (1957) Don’t Knock the Rock (1957) and the ‘rock’-free title Go Johnny Go! (1959). In these films Freed played host to an illustrious cast of music groups and artists, including Bill Haley & His Comets, The Platters, Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, Little Richard, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Eddie Cochran, The Flamingos and Jackie Wilson. Long before the advent of the music video, the raison d’être of such films was to give their teenage audiences the opportunity to see their favourite artists in action. Rock, Rock, Rock! featured Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers performing their hit songs ‘Baby Baby’ and ‘I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent’. Used both in the title and in the chorus of the latter, it is evident just how widespread and recognizable the term ‘juvenile delinquent’ had become by the mid-50s. Far more significant, however, is the fact that Lymon’s irreverent presentation of the song quite blatantly shows the disparity between apparent message and actual performance. Brandishing a huge letter ‘T’ (for ‘Teenager’) on his sweater, with the Teenagers standing in a line behind him, similarly garbed, Lymon places his hands together in mock prayer and casting his eyes heavenward, sings: I’m not a juvenile delinquent No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no 135
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No-no-no, I’m not a juvenile delinquent Do the things that’s right And you’ll do nothing wrong Life will be so nice, you’ll be in paradise I know, because I’m not a juvenile delinquent1 Combining a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression with a mischievous smirk, Lymon’s faux angelic poses and the performance’s youthful exuberance betray the lie of its moral message, poking fun at oversimplified concepts of good and bad which surrounded debates about 1950s American youth.2 Yet, for many Americans of this period juvenile delinquency was no laughing matter. A poll taken by the Roper organization in 1959 indicated that American citizens viewed juvenile crime as more worrisome than open-air atomic bomb testing.3 Youth culture had certainly made its impact on 1950s America. There were more teenagers than ever before, they had more money and were more aware of themselves as a semi-autonomous group within society. Presumably, this is why Eric Sevareid, in a 1956 CBS radio broadcast, felt compelled to remark, ‘We feel bound to question whether the teenagers will take over the United States lock, stock, living room and garage’.4 In light of such commentary – with its near-apocalyptic vision of the rampant ascendancy of teen culture – is it any wonder that the close of the decade witnessed the unleashing of films like Teenagers from Outer Space? While the rise of youth culture in 1950s America had an incalculable influence on popular culture, it was also perceived as having a sizable effect on the crime statistics of the period, which rather dubiously indicated a substantial rise in crimes committed by teenagers.5 Yet, the media panics which surrounded the issue of juvenile delinquency went far beyond the specifics of criminal behaviour; they broached every aspect of youth culture. Music (specifically Rock ’n’ Roll), films, comics, television and fashion, were all brought under scrutiny, not just in terms of their content and imagery but also the way in which they were consumed by their teenage audience. Rock ’n’ Roll was a favourite scapegoat of the media. The multimillion-selling recording ‘Rock Around the Clock’, which debuted in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle,6 was soon to become synonymous with teen violence when riots were reported to have taken place in various locations after the screening of the film Rock Around the Clock, which featured Haley & His Comets performing their hit. Headlines, such as ‘Rock ‘n Roll Fight Hospitalizes Youth’, ‘Gas Ends Rock ‘n Roll
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Riot’ and ‘Rock ‘n Roll Stabbing’, make the connection between this new popular music and juvenile delinquency patently demonstrable. Most infamous of all, in terms of this new music’s vague yet threatening possibilities, was the media furore over Elvis Presley; with one source describing his live performances as ‘ “grunt and groin” antics’, ‘suggestive and vulgar, tinged with a kind of animalism’.7 In an article, from the New York Times, dated 28 March 1956, a quoted headline reads, ‘Rock-and-Roll Called ‘ “Communicable Disease”’. The individual quoted in the headline is Hartford Institute of Living psychiatrist, Dr Francis J. Braceland. Braceland diagnosed Rock ’n’ Roll as a ‘communicable disease, with music appealing to adolescent insecurity and driving teenagers to do outlandish things . . . It’s cannibalistic and tribalistic.’8 Robert M. Lindner, author of the 1944 study of delinquency Rebel Without a Cause9 (the title but not the content of which was used by Nicholas Ray for the seminal film of juvenile alienation, starring James Dean10 ), echoed Braceland’s diagnosis in a 1954 interview when he described the youth of America as ‘literally sick with an aberrant condition of mind formerly confined to a few distressed souls but now epidemic over the earth.’11 With excessive terms such as ‘cannibalistic’, ‘epidemic’ and ‘disease’ used to describe the contemporary delinquency problem, the media were more than willing to repeat and augment these ‘expert’ assessments in their representation of American youth culture. As John Springhall has suggested, the media panics and anxiety which gathered around the subject of juvenile delinquency sought to defuse the threat posed by youth culture and thus to ‘re-establish a generational status quo’ by reasserting the values of dominant adult groups.12 However, generational conflict is only one aspect of the discourses surrounding juvenile delinquency in the 50s. Issues of race, class, gender and national identity also contributed to rising public debates. Juvenile delinquency itself was certainly a matter of public concern in America long before the 1950s. However, it took on a new significance in the post-war period. Pre-war discourses on crime tended to associate juvenile delinquency with a wide range of socio-economic and environmental conditions, such as poverty, education, inadequate recreation, overcrowding and slum housing. This understanding of juvenile delinquency was represented in popular culture by films such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and Boys Town (1938), which treated delinquency as a social problem. During the post-war era this focus had shifted, now emphasizing the changes in family dynamics brought about by the war. Ironically, in many social commentators’ minds, post-war suburban affluence now supplanted pre-war urban depravation as the major
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contributing factor to the perceived rise in juvenile crime. In 1945, J. Edgar Hoover had predicted that post-war American society would suffer an onslaught of juvenile crime unless adequate measures were taken. In an article entitled, ‘There will be a Post-War Crime Wave Unless It’s Blocked by Direct Action Sparked by Some Old-fashioned Virtues’, he explains: There are many contributing causes of juvenile delinquency, such as the breakdown of the home as an institution, the general spirit of wartime abandon, the sharply increased spending power of inexperienced youth and the ‘war hero’ spirit of those not old enough to serve.13 The ‘breakdown of the home as an institution’, which Hoover refers to, is the result of the upheavals in family structure brought about by the war – with fathers conscripted into the military and mothers entering the workplace. Assuming that these circumstances will result in a less stable and controlled home environment, Hoover subsequently sees post-war affluence as a yet another contributing factor to this predicted crime wave because parental authority will be challenged further as teenagers’ sense of autonomy increases along with their financial independence. These shifts in family dynamics, along with an ever-increasing awareness of Freudian theory in the popular culture of the period, resulted in films like Rebel Without a Cause, which eschewed the ‘social problem’ focus of earlier narratives of juvenile delinquency in favour of an emphasis on the internal struggles of the individual, both within him/herself and within the family home. As the tagline of Rebel Without a Cause professes: ‘This is Jim Stark, teenager – from a ‘good’ family. Their families gave them everything – but a good example!’ While the nature of authority and autonomy for both adults and youths was central to debates on juvenile delinquency in this post-war period, attitudes towards gender and its social manifestation were never far behind.
The figure of the male juvenile delinquent, in particular, took on an extra import in relation to suburbia. As Leerom Medovoi points out, the post-war ‘bad boy’ ‘represented a youth spawned in the new suburbs, but refusing its domestication’.14 The themes of masculinity, liberty, and honour are key features in narratives of male juvenile delinquency and
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despite the rebellious image of the male delinquent in the 50s he can, to a certain extent at least, be seen as part of a long-running debate on American individualism, self-expression and self-fashioning. The female juvenile delinquent, however, does not facilitate this reading so easily. While sociological and criminological, as well as psychological, readings were regularly applied to the boy delinquent during the 50s, the problem of female juvenile delinquency was primarily the domain of psychoanalysts. The subject of sexuality and sexual behaviour underlay much of the psychological profiling of female delinquents. As such, it is not surprising to find that, during this period, the term ‘sex delinquent’ almost exclusively refers to females.15 Such means of interpreting and dealing with female juvenile delinquency are directly linked to changing attitudes towards sexuality and sexual activity brought about by World War II and what Hoover had vaguely referred to as ‘the general spirit of wartime abandon’. The image of the lawless female during the war was most vividly represented in the figure of the ‘good time girl’ or ‘pick up’ who actively sought sexual encounters with strangers; figuring this in terms of National Security – particularly in terms of the threat that VD posed to enlisted men – laws, and the propaganda campaigns which coincided with them, sought to deal with this threat by emphasizing the dangerous and criminal nature of female sexuality if left unchecked. Anti-syphilis and gonorrhea posters regularly depicted women leering at GIs, out on the town, with captions that combine military terminology with destructive female sexuality – ‘Juke Joint Sniper’ ‘Booby Trap’ (see Illustration 7.1) Many government agencies dealt with this threat in a very straightforward manner. One of the most prosaic, yet chilling, was America’s establishment of the Social Protection Division (SPD) of the Office of Community War Services; a wartime home front programme operating between 1941 and 1946. Its official mandate was to assist ‘communities affected by defense production and the war to provide community services’.16 Along with some forays into providing recreation for soldiers based near home, the health and welfare of the home front was its major concern. However, as Karen Anderson has noted, the SPD soon expanded its ‘health program into a purity campaign’ dedicated to the search for ‘incipient and confirmed sex delinquents’ who ‘not coincidentally happened always to be women’.17 As a result of America’s stepped-up wartime programme for venereal disease control on the home front (under the auspices of the SPD), the laws defining morals charges became increasingly broad and vague. Disorderly conduct became ‘endangering moral, safety or health’ and
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Illustration 7.1
‘Booby trap/Syphillis and Gonorrhea’
Source: Courtesy of the Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, p. 194.
vagrancy could include lewd, wanton or lascivious speech or behaviour. Some states introduced laws which made it illegal for ‘unescorted’ women to be served in a bar after eight o’clock in the evening; others imposed a curfew on girls below a certain age.18 Predictably, under these circumstances, FBI statistics indicated that, during the war years, the number of women charged with morals violations doubled; many of these were under 21 years of age, many under 19.19 In direct relation to the threat that female sexuality posed to the military, a 1943 report from the base surgeon of a large mid-western army airfield targeted young girls, in particular, as the primary cause of troops’
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high VD rates: ‘Good-time girls of high-school age are the army’s biggest problem today as a potential source of disease.’ The report concluded by noting, ‘While mothers are winning the war in the factories, their daughters are losing it on the streets.’20 The various responses to the behaviour of these young girls reveal the double standards at work in attitudes towards male and female sexual activity. The common interpretation that these girls are giving ‘free sex’21 to enlisted men is a clear indicator of how sexual desire is seen as a male prerogative, while female sexuality (female desire not even entering the equation) is a resource or commodity which can be saved up, sold or given away for free. Along with names such as ‘Victory Girls’ and ‘Wacky Khakis’, these girls were also commonly referred to as ‘patriotutes’, a combination of the words ‘patriot’ and ‘prostitute’. Such hybrid words point to a confusion over exactly how to understand and deal with such overt displays of female sexual desire.22 Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the conclusions of the 1942 Conference of the American Social Hygiene Association give a far more circumspect response to the issue, stating that it seemed that young girls practised ‘sexual delinquency of a non-commercial character . . . [as a means of seeking] adventure and sociability’.23 Whatever the motivational factors behind the actions of the ‘Victory Girls’ might be, their behaviour not only challenged gender ideology but also defied laws that curtailed their right to remain in public spaces.24
Like her wartime forerunner, the ‘good time girl’, the post-war ‘bad girl’ exhibits a predatory, indiscriminate and rapacious sexual appetite which is at odds with the concept of female sexuality as geared towards marriage, homemaking and family. The destructiveness of such undomesticated desire is summed up by Evelyn Millis Duvall in her 1950 guide for teenagers, Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers: Like every other source of power, it must be harnessed or it runs wild and becomes destructive. Electricity wired into your home will light your house, cook your meals, warm your feet, and perform all kinds of miracles. Left unleashed, as lightning, it can destroy everything you care about in one burning holocaust. So it is with sex.25 While properly ‘harnessed’ sexual desire is the equivalent of domestic comfort and bliss, sexual desire ‘left unleashed’ has the destructive potential of a ‘burning holocaust’. This threat to the sanctity of the
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home and the security of the Nation is exemplified by the figure of the socially and sexually promiscuous woman or girl, whose sexual lusts know no limits; traversing the boundaries of socio-cultural and political acceptability. With the rise of the pulp novel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, this new breed of sexual predator is, not surprisingly, associated with wartime scenarios, where ‘the general spirit of wartime abandon’ acts as a backdrop for tales of sexual desire which cross the boundaries of race, class and gender. Ernest L. Matthews, Jr’s Out of Bounds (1954) tells the story of wartime interracial sex between a German woman and black American GI. Its cover blurb reads, ‘He was a lonely GI and she a footloose fraulein.’ ‘Ursula was just a cheap blonde – but she brought him forbidden ecstasy!’26 Tereska Torres’ Women’s Barracks (1950), the first pulp to address a lesbian relationship explicitly, presents a fictionalized account of Torres’ experiences in the Free French Forces in London during the war. Subtitled ‘The frank autobiography of a French girl soldier’,27 the novel sold four million copies and, in 1952, was selected by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials as an example of how paperback books were promoting moral degeneracy. Other pulps of the era, dealing with potentially illicit themes, had avoided such bad publicity by being marketed as sociological and/or psychological studies. Hal Ellson’s Tomboy (1950), one of the first juvenile delinquency best sellers and ‘A shocking novel of teen-age gang life in the slums of Manhattan’ boasted an introduction by ‘noted psychiatrist Dr Fredric Wertham’, a figure we shall return to in due course. Wertham supported Ellson’s work, stating ‘There is a new fiction literature dealing with juvenile delinquency which should open the eyes of many.’28 He would prove considerably less enthusiastic about many other forms of teen-related fiction. Through the course of the 1950s pulp novels continued tapping into the themes of lesbianism and interracial sex, with, however, some significant shifts in focus. These later novels tended to place their tales of forbidden desire on American soil and outside of a wartime setting and, significantly, their central female protagonists were primarily young American girls, unlike the more mature, European protagonists of earlier pulps set during the wartime. J.C. Priest’s Private School (1959) is a typical example of the decade’s later pulp fiction forays into female sexual delinquency. It tells the story of a school for young girls, named The Briars, where lesbianism is an unofficial adjunct to the curriculum. Like many other pulps of this kind (particularly those focusing on the vices of the younger generation), Private School follows the lead of Ellson,
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disingenuously presenting its lurid tale as a gutsy exposé; an essential read for parents who want to know the facts about the youth of today, ‘Every parent should read this shocking novel of adolescent girls who first tolerated vice, then embraced it, then could not live without it.’29 While the figure of the war’s ‘good time girl’ may be found lurking beneath the surface of these tales of vice-ridden girls, there is, nevertheless, a very different image of wartime women which also finds its echoes in the ‘bad girl’ of 1950s popular culture; the female war worker (see Illustration 7.2). These wartime images of young women working in a team, efficient, determined, and physically robust, brandishing traditionally masculine tools and handling them with skill and competence are mirrored in visual representations of the aggressive girl gang found in juvenile delinquency films and pulp novels. These gangs are often similarly garbed in masculine attire, and are depicted as working in a team, wielding guns efficiently and willingly using physical force to achieve their criminal goals, which include, gas station hold ups, drug peddling, car theft and, in the case of the 1956 film, The Violent Years,
Illustration 7.2
‘Chippers’. Women war workers of Marinship Corp., 1942
Source: Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Maryland. Public Domain.
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the gang rape of a young man; as the newspaper headline in the film proclaims, ‘Young Man Robbed – Criminally Attacked by Four Girls!’. Combining teensploitation with sexploitation, films such as Girl Gang (1954) declare their no-holds-barred authenticity by recourse to reallife headlines, ‘Daring exposé of teenage orgies! – Torn from today’s headlines!’. This delinquent girl gang theme was equally prevalent in pulp novels, in a dizzying array of titles, like Albert L. Quandt’s ZipGun Angels (1952) (later titled Boy-Crazy), Wenzell Brown’s Gang Girl (1954), Joe Weiss’s Girl Gang (1957), Don Elliott’s Gang Girl (1959), Harry Whittington’s Halfway to Hell (1959) and Joseph Hilton’s Angels in the Gutter (1955); the last lamentably observing of its young protagonists, ‘They roamed in gangs, these lost girls, women at fifteen – too old at twenty.’30 Not to be outdone by fiction and film’s inroads into sensational stories ‘torn’ from real-life, true crime magazines capitalized on the seductive seditious image of the girl gang, with articles alerting their readers to ‘Montana’s Girl Gang-Leader’, ‘California’s Queen of the TeenAge Terror Mob’ and ‘She-Wolves in Blue Jeans – The Shocking Story of Girl-Gang Terror’ (see Illustration 7.3).31 This image of the 1950s ‘bad girl’ as part of a gang differentiates her ‘bad girl’ status from that of the femme fatales in film noir, who never operate in gangs. The figure of the 50s ‘bad girl’ is also different from the femme fatale in that her acts emphasize thrill-seeking and lawlessness for its own sake. Often young enough to still live at home, her motivations are not primarily financial but, rather, rebellious. It seems the recklessness of crime is itself an attraction for her; and this recklessness is often figured in terms of sexual excitement.32 In media representations, phrases like ‘thrill crazy’ and ‘out for kicks’ are frequently appended to her exploits. The promotional lines from the following pulp novels are typical examples of this association between female teenage delinquency and thrill-seeking: ‘The shocking story of a young girl who hunted for thrills’, Boy Chaser (1955); ‘Some girls will do anything for kicks’, Rock ‘n Roll Gal (1957); ‘They prowl the fringe of the underworld out for kicks’, Bad Girls (1958).33 Predictably, the taglines of juvenile delinquency films make similar associations: ‘A girl delinquent . . . a jet propelled gang . . . out for fast kicks’, Juvenile Jungle (1958); ‘Trying to crowd a lifetime of thrills into one night . . . every night’, Girls Town (1959). It is essential to note that the advertising and promotion of juvenile delinquency films and pulp novels is often far more provocative than their actual narratives. But, by focusing on how these tales of juvenile delinquency are marketed, I am deliberately emphasizing presentation
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Illustration 7.3
Sensational Exposés (April 1957)
Source: Skye Publishing Co., 270 Park Ave., New York, NY, 60 W 46th St, New York, NY, and Louisville, KY. Public Domain.
over narrative and this is precisely how so-called exploitation fiction and film works. American International Pictures’ method of operation is a perfect example of this process. Although best known for their later horror film cycles, one of AIP’s earlier film cycles targeted the youth market with tales of juvenile delinquency in films such as Hot Rod Girl; often the titles, images and taglines for these films would come before a script or plot outline, and scripts were not infrequently given less attention than advertising. From 1956 to 1957, AIP produced no less than 11 juvenile delinquency films of various kinds, many with an emphasis on the girl delinquent; Hot Rod Girl (1956); Girls in Prison
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(1956); Shake, Rattle & Rock! (1956); Runaway Daughters (1956); Dragstrip Girl (1957); Rock All Night (1957); I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); Reform School Girl (1957); Motorcycle Gang (1957); Sorority Girl (1957); I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). Capitalizing on the quick production rate of their films, AIP would often distribute more than one film at a time to cinemas, accompanied by promotional material advertising the films in double and triple bills. The double-bill poster for Dragstrip Girl and Rock All Night is a montage which included the original posters for the films along with the following words blazing around them, ‘Slap-Happy, Speed-Crazy Youth!’, ‘Never such Thrills!’, ‘You’ll want to see it again and again!’, ‘2 Rock! Sock Bop! Hits’, ‘Reckless. . . Daring. . . Devil Don’t Care Speedsters out for every kind of thrill!’, ‘See!’. In promotional material such as this, film viewing itself is being associated with thrill-seeking, excess and reckless abandon. This connection between movie viewing and thrill-seeking has a particular significance in the 1950s, with the rise of the drive-in cinemas. Despite some promoters’ attempts to present the drive-in as a venue for all the family, it developed into a popular site for teenagers in particular. So, while older and younger generations stayed at home and watched television, teenagers flocked to drive-ins, which, unlike indoor cinemas, held their own against the new technology.34 Within the semi-private confines of an automobile, drive-ins were a site for sexual encounter.35 Punning on the automotive nature of the drive-in, certain areas, normally at the back, were commonly referred to as ‘passion pits’. Aware of the dating rituals of their teenage audiences, and conscious of the fact that young courting couples may not want to go home too early, many drive-in theater managers provided fast food outlets for their young patrons and ran double, triple and quadruple bills; showing teen-orientated films, with crime, horror, science fiction, Rock ’n’ Roll and hot rod themes.
Few things captured the excitement of youth, sex, speed and independence in 1950s America better than the automobile and particularly the hotrod car. Not surprisingly, the thrill-hungry girl delinquent of popular culture loved fast cars. This love of danger and speed is most famously represented in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), when Judy (Natalie Wood) starts the chickey-run race and is quite clearly surging with excitement. The late 1950s produced a spate of hotrod films with the image of the ‘thrill crazy’ and fast-living female juvenile delinquent rarely in the driving seat but frequently occupying centre stage in the film’s promotion,
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as the following taglines show: ‘Scorching story of the slick chicks who fire up the big wheels!’ Hot Rod Rumble (1957); ‘Car crazy. . . Speed crazy. . . Boy crazy!’ Dragstrip Girl (1957); ‘She’s hell on wheels. . . fired up for any thrills!’ Hot Car Girl (1958); ‘The Scorching, Reckless JOY RIDES of Wild Girls of the Road!’ Young and Wild (1958).36 The poster art for hot rod films is similarly geared towards an emphasis on the female delinquent; her huge figure, in a tough and seductive pose, engulfing the majority of the image and dwarfing the other action, whether that action is speeding hot rods, romantic clinches or punch-ups. In these promotional materials the language and imagery of female sexuality and auto-mobility collapses together. The tagline for the 1957 film The Devil’s Hairpin is particularly blatant in this regard: ‘Fast, streamlined and low down – that’s the way the King liked his women and his cars.’ This image of the female body as hard, fast, streamlined and dangerous was not only evident in cinematic representation of the 50s juvenile delinquent, it was also manifest in the fashions of the era, most notably in the highly-structured, conically-pointed bullet bra, also known as a torpedo bra, which created a silhouette that was a definitive part of late 40s and 50s culture. With a shape reminiscent of a bullet, torpedo or airplane nose, the bullet bra silhouette is a unique example of the Cold War era’s far-reaching influence on American culture.37 Of course, the name torpedo or bullet bra is indicative of military terminology and as we have seen, both during and after the war, representations of female sexuality were frequently aligned with mechanical technology, be it in the form of ‘booby’ traps or hotrods. In this regard it is worth noting that World War II, itself, had a direct impact on women’s fashion and clothing. Dress codes in factories, which included trousers and shorter hair were soon fashion choices and, as we have seen, became a part of popular culture’s image of the tough gang girl. While Veronica Lake sheared her trademark peek-a-boo hair in support of women factory workers who had to do the same, companies like Lockheed informed their workers that bras must be worn because of good taste, anatomical support, and in order to boost morale. By the mid-50s virtually every female star sported bullet bras, from Mamie Van Doren to Agnes Moorehead. The bullet bra made its unique presence known most dramatically when worn with a tight sweater. Commonly referred to as the ‘sweater girl’ look, this was often paired with tight fitting skirts or, in the case of younger women, with jeans. This latter look is particularly synonymous with the image of the girl delinquent. The character of Britches (Yvonne Doughty), in the 1953 film, The Wild One, is a noteworthy cinematic
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Illustration 7.4 D for Delinquent, artist unknown (Ace D-270, 1958)
example but similarly garbed young women can be found on the covers of myriads of pulp novels, men’s magazines and true-crime publications (see Illustration 7.4). The bullet-braed ‘bad girl’ also appeared in comic books such as Crimes by Women and, despite its emphasis on the ‘Old West’, Women Outlaws.38 Of course, sometimes the bullet-braed female could be on the side of good, especially in science fiction comics, such as Startling Stories and Planet Stories,39 where the front-cover heroines sport ray guns, goldfish bowl headgear and impossibly angular frontal support crafted from space-age material.
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Because such comics were aimed at the younger generation it is not surprising to find that some viewed the suggestive imagery and content of these publications as a dangerous influence on that impressionable audience. In 1948, Dr Frederic Wertham began his crusade against the harmful effects of comics when he participated in a symposium entitled ‘The Psychopathology of Comic Books’. Later the same year, in an interview for a Collier’s article, with the attention-grabbing title ‘Horror in the Nursery’, he accused comics of being ‘sexually aggressive in an abnormal way’.40 Wertham launched his full-out attack in his 1954 publication, Seduction of the Innocent, pointing to comics as a major cause of juvenile crime. Linking delinquency to crime and horror comics in particular, his most vehement arguments targeted the sex angle of these publications. In a chapter entitled ‘I Want to be a Sex Maniac’, he disapprovingly noted that, ‘One of the stock mental aphrodisiacs in comic books is to draw girls’ breasts in such a way that they are sexually exciting. Whenever possible they protrude and obtrude.’41 As further evidence of the connection between female anatomy and automobile styling, Wertham noted how children call these ‘headlights’ comics.42 As if these feminine obtrusions were not enough, Wertham also claimed that prohibitive parts of female anatomy could be detected in the bark patterns of trees and the folds of characters’ clothes. Wonder Woman meets with Wertham’s particular ire. Quoting The Psychiatric Quarterly, he explains how she portrays an ‘extremely sadistic hatred of all males in a framework which is plainly Lesbian’ and, extrapolating from this in his own words, he concludes, ‘For boys, Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls she is a morbid ideal.’43 In a slightly more lucid moment, Wertham noted the influence of comic book culture on other media, including films and television. Interestingly, he chooses what he refers to as a ‘perverse, sexually sadistic scene’44 from a female juvenile delinquency film poster as an example of this collusion between comic books and other media. The poster, in question, is for the film Problem Girls (1953), which features a scantily-clad girl hitched up by a cord bound around her wrists while being subjected to a hosing down by an older female authority figure. Wertham’s insights into the comic book as a blueprint for delinquency found another public forum when he was called as an expert witness at the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. The subcommittee’s aim was a ‘full and complete study of juvenile delinquency in the United States’ and, in particular, ‘an inquiry into the possible relationship [between] juvenile delinquency . . . and the media of mass
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communication’.45 At the conclusion of the comic books session, the subcommittee put forward a set of guidelines which led to the formation of the Comics Code Authority and ultimately to a radical alteration in comic book publication in the following decades. The subcommittee’s guidelines stipulated that ‘If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity.’46 It also asserted that ‘The letters of the word “crime” on comic magazines shall never be appreciably greater than the other words contained in the title.’47 Much like the word ‘crime’, no physical components of a woman’s body were permitted to be represented as appreciably larger than any other; ‘Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.’48 Undoubtedly, this is a reference to women’s breasts, hips and bottoms. Ironically, under the subcommittee’s guidelines, 1950s Hollywood actresses such as Jayne Mansfield may well have qualified as prohibited material. Curiously, neither the subcommittee nor Wertham gave a great deal of attention to the hugely popular genre of comics specifically aimed at girl readers. Both mention romance and love confession comics only in passing. In Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham had, yet again, expressed his concern over the subject of breasts, this time in relation to the advertising contained within the pages of romance comics. In the chapter entitled ‘Bumps and Bulges’, he notes: [T]here are full-course lessons in hypochondriasis. In a comic book with stories of love’s frustrations there is a full-page advertisement . . . with sets of photographs: ‘Before’ and ‘After’. The ‘Before’ look like average girls; the ‘After’ have noticeably protruding breasts. Accompanying these pictures are three sets of diagrams, each purporting to show profiles of women’s bust lines. Any girl, of course, especially after she has been alarmed by the text, can identify herself with at least one of these diagrams and brood about the corresponding information: ‘SELF-CONSCIOUS ABOUT YOUR FLAT-LOOKING BUSTLINE?’49 Despite both Wertham and the subcommittee’s relative lack of attention to the genre, by emphasizing the trials, tribulations and dangers of female desire outside of the confines of homemaking or a contented married life, the images and storylines in girls’ romance and true confessions comics, such as Teen-Age Romances, Young Love and Teen-Age Temptations,50 come considerably closer to the image of female delinquency propagated in other mass media. Perhaps the little that is said about these girls’ comics in the subcommittee’s guidelines says
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everything that is needed in terms of the underlying attitudes about the root cause of female juvenile delinquency in this era: ‘The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage.’51
The most immediate casualty of the changes brought about by the subcommittee’s findings was the horror comic. Attacking the very core of the horror comic’s being, the subcommittee proposed that ‘No comic magazine shall use the word “horror” or “terror” in its title’ and that vampires, werewolves, ghouls and zombies could not be portrayed. While horror comics struggled under these restrictions in the latter half of the 1950s, horror films were, conversely, experiencing an upsurge in popularity and a new breed of horror emerged during the mid-50s which combined classic horror film motifs with science fiction and, along with atomically-mutated ants and big-brained invaders from the red planet, there came a motley assortment of angst-ridden teen monsters, most notably in the films I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). In their own way, these films are hybrid forms, combining the themes of earlier juvenile delinquency films with horror. Michael Landon, in the dual role of teenager and teenage werewolf is a violent and maladjusted youth at odds with his teenage peers. As the monster in I was a Teenage Frankenstein, Gary Conway is a confused assemblage of teenagers; part reckless joy-rider, part high-school football star, along with a few other parts, all of which are berated by his domineering creator/father. In their monstrous forms both blatantly represent the hormonal terrors which affronted teenagers, namely hair where there was no hair before and a terrible case of acne. Their ability to arouse nothing but loathing and disgust in the female sex compounds the image of these monsters as frustrated and confused teenage boys. Despite these parallels between the teen horror film and juvenile delinquency films there were significant differences. For many, especially those with a vested interest in promoting horror films, teen horror offered a harmless alternative to the juvenile delinquency film. As AIP producer Sam Arkoff pronounced in 1958, their ‘monsters do not smoke, drink or lust’52 – a far cry, indeed, from Karloff’s cigar-smoking, aleswilling, mate-chasing monster in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Also in 1958, Herman Cohen, the producer of numerous teen horror films, remarked, ‘Teenagers who see those tough Juvenile Delinquency films
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can go out and buy a bicycle chain but no one can go out and make a monster.’53 Another notable difference between the more ‘realistic’ juvenile delinquency films and these later teen horrors was the comparative lack of convincing female teen angst in the latter, and a dearth of memorable or visually arresting images of female juvenile delinquency. Few people can, for example, recall the female monster protagonists of Daughter of Dr Jekyll (1957) or Frankenstein’s Daughter (1959). One simple and partial explanation for this rather disappointing turn of events is the possibility that audiences didn’t want to see attractive young actresses disfigured behind monster make-up. The female juvenile delinquent as a high-school hellcat or a hotrod she-wolf may be ‘bad’ but she always looks ‘good’. Two horror movies at the close of the decade with at least marginally more memorable female monster protagonists are Wasp Woman (1959) and The Leech Woman (1960). Interestingly, both protagonists are older women whose monstrous transformations are brought about by the ingestion of a youth formula, which releases the violent delinquent in both – albeit in semi-invertebrate form. Susan Cabot hopes to revive her failing beauty business as well as her own youth by injecting herself with jelly taken from queen wasps but as she grows younger by day she becomes ‘a lusting queen wasp by night’. Coleen Gray is an old woman who withstands the neglect and cruelty of her younger husband by hitting the bottle. She soon swaps alcohol for a compound that restores her lost youth when consumed with the pineal gland fluid of freshly dead males and she, accordingly, becomes the murderous Leech Woman. Alcoholism, marital dissatisfaction, romantic rejection, and a sense of failure are the keystones of one of the 50s most powerful images of female delinquency. In Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) is an alcoholic, recently released from a sanatorium, who suffers all the indignities a woman can at the hands of her lowlife husband, Harry. Driving recklessly along the road one night, Nancy almost crashes into a spaceship and a giant alien tries to paw her. Assuming Nancy is drunk or deranged, the sheriff and townspeople dismiss her claims. When she tells her husband about her encounter, he happily assumes that this signals his wife’s ultimate breakdown and permanent return to the sanatorium, which will enable him and his mistress to spend Nancy’s 50 million dollar inheritance (it seems the dimensions of Nancy Archer’s gigantism and her bank balance may be interrelated). However, Nancy’s story is proven true when she meets the alien a second time and suffers from some kind of radiation which causes her to grow to an enormous size. She rises out of bed and tears out of her mansion
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roof. ‘I know where my husband is!’ she exclaims in a booming voice, heading toward town, ‘He’s with that woman! I’ll find him.’ Nancy then begins a systematic rampage through her local town, wrecking the car of the sheriff, who didn’t take her alien sighting seriously, and ripping the rooves off buildings in an effort to find her unfaithful husband and his mistress. She finds them in a bar and, having killed off her rival, Nancy carries her husband away in her hand, à la Kong/Fay Wray. The sheriff fires a riot gun at an electrical transformer just as Nancy passes it. This electrocutes her as well as her husband. Like all good exploitation art, the film’s promotional material promised more than the narrative delivered. And it is the iconic poster, by Reynold Brown, which invades popular consciousness rather than the film itself. Skimpily clad, straddling a highway, wrecking cars like they were toys and causing havoc, Nancy is undoubtedly a ‘bad girl’, a big bad girl. And the film’s tagline leaves us in no doubt that all of her physical attributes have undergone gigantic growth: ‘See a female colossus – her mountainous torso, skyscraper limbs, giant desires!’ While Nancy is no juvenile, she may certainly be classed as a female delinquent. Reminiscent of the imposing presence of the young female delinquent in the promotional material of hotrod films, Nancy’s giant figure engulfs Reynold Brown’s poster, dwarfing everything else. Mirroring the exploits of the female juvenile delinquent, Nancy drinks excessively, drives recklessly, trashes a police car and commits colossal acts of vandalism on her local area. Also, like the female juvenile delinquent, Nancy’s body grows, and with that growth she discovers a never-before-imagined power, which she uses to wreak vengeance on her neglectful spouse and on a community that has systematically dismissed her as ‘poor mixed-up Mrs. Archer’. With the relative demise of the female juvenile delinquent in the popular culture of the 1960s and the rise of sexploitation, with its twisted takes on themes as divergent as Nazism and the ‘free love’ movement, the recalcitrant figure of Nancy, and her wasp and leech counterparts, reveal, if only briefly, that the threat posed by disaffected womanhood was not confined to the image of the ‘Car Crazy. . . Speed Crazy. . . Boy Crazy’ girl; it also included the misused, unappreciated and dissatisfied woman.
Notes 1. Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers, 1957–02 [Gee: #1026]. 2. It is of little wonder that Lymon performed the song with such irony. In an interview with Ebony magazine in 1967, he noted how far ‘I’m Not a Juvenile
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3. 4. 5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Delinquent’ was from being autobiographical: ‘You know I never was a child [. . .]. In the neighborhood were I lived, there was no time to be a child. [. . .] When I was 10, I made a good living hustling prostitutes for the white men who would come up to Harlem looking for Negro girls. [. . .] I had been smoking marijuana when I was in grade school. But, I didn’t start using the real stuff [heroin] until I got into show business.’ Ebony, Vol. 22, No. 3 (January 1967): 43. A year after this interview, Lymon died of a heroin overdose at age 25, in the same apartment in which he had grown up. J. Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 63. Quoted in Ibid., p. 13. Despite the fact that by 1945 J. Edgar Hoover was claiming that ‘17-yearold boys and 18-year old girls have committed more crimes than any other age groups’, statistics on juvenile crime throughout the war period and well into the 1950s are indeed dubious. The means of collecting accurate statistical data on actual crime was less than reliable, especially in light of the fact that crime statistics can be affected by changes in what is considered a crime, as well as changes in police practice and reporting. In the absence of accurate data, sporadic and sensational accounts of juvenile crime and, in particular, J. Edgar Hoover’s own seriously biased and emotionally-charged reports on the social changes brought about by the war affected public perceptions of the juvenile delinquency problem. See J. Edgar Hoover’s ‘There will be a Post-War Crime Wave Unless –’, The Rotarian, Vol. 66, No. 4 (April 1945): 12–14; ‘Why Law Fails to Stop Teenage Crime’, U.S. News & World Report (14 January 1955): 64–75; and Max F. Baer, ‘The National Juvenile Delinquency Picture’, Personnel & Guidance Journal, 38 (December 1959): 278–9. The film was based on Evan Hunter’s bestselling novel The Blackboard Jungle (1954). The subject of both the novel and film was juvenile delinquency in a New York inner-city school. ‘Gas Ends Rock ‘n Roll Riot’, New York Times (4 November 1956); ‘Rock ‘n Roll Fight Hospitalizes Youth’, New York Times (15 April 1957); ‘Rock ‘n Roll Stabbing’, New York Times (5 May 1958); Ben Gross, New York Daily News (8 June 1956). Francis J. Braceland, quoted in ‘Rock-and-Roll Called “Communicable Disease”’, New York Times (28 March 1956). Referring to Rock ’n’ Roll as ‘cannibalistic and tribalistic’, Braceland is undoubtedly tapping into fears about Rock ’n’ Roll’s influence, as an ostensibly black American music form, on white American youth. The full title of Linder’s book is Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (1944). Linder’s book is the story of a violent and criminal psychopathic youth, named Harold, who uncovers the underlying causes of his aberrant behaviour with the help of a doctor who subjects him to a series of psychoanalytic hypnosis sessions. Linder was by no means shy of sensationalism or fear-mongering when it came to describing the state of society: ‘Psychopathy is more widely spread today than ever before in the history of our civilization . . . it is assuming more and more the proportions of a plague . . . it is today ravishing the world with far greater ill-effects than the most malignant of organic diseases.’ Rebel Without A Cause (London: Research Books Limited, 1945), pp. 15–16.
Fast Cars & Bullet Bras – The Female JD 155 10. In 1954, while the film Rebel Without a Cause was in pre-production, Nicholas Ray was interested in meeting Linder in order to compare his views on delinquency with his own. At this stage Linder knew that Ray and the studio had rejected the content of his book and retained the title alone. He completely disagreed with Ray’s idea for a naturalistic treatment of the subject, insisting that his psychoanalytical approach was the only way to go about presenting the delinquency problem on screen. Fortunately, Ray utterly rejected this approach. See Douglas L. Rathgeb, The Making of Rebel Without a Cause (Jefferson: McFarland, 2004), pp. 32–7. 11. Robert M. Lindner, quoted in Ronald J. Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties (New York: Dembner Books, 1986), p. 270. See also, Cyndy Hendershot, I was a Cold War Monster: Horror Films, Eroticism, and the Cold War Imagination (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 2001), p. 114. 12. John Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap, 1830–1996 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 1999), p. 7. 13. J. Edgar Hoover, op.cit.: 14. One could argue that Hoover’s predictions about a rise in juvenile crime are a self-fulfilling prophecy as he was instrumental in collating these statistics and presenting them to the American public. 14. Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 42. 15. See Rachel Devlin, ‘Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945–1965’, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities (Winter, 1997). 16. Records of the Office of Community War Services [OCWS] (Record Group 215), 1940–48. http://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/ 215.html#215.3.3, accessed 15 September 2010. 17. Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (London: Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 104. 18. Ibid. p. 96; 103–4. 19. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 339. 20. Quoted in John Costello, Love Sex and War: Changing Values, 1939–45 (London: William Collins, 1985), p. 282. 21. Goldstein, p. 339. 22. This implicit understanding of female desire as confused and/or deviant is by no means confined to contemporary commentators. It is reasserted in more recent critics’ attitudes also. In his 2003 publication, War and Gender, Goldstein refers to these girls as giving ‘free sex’ to soldiers (Goldstein, p. 339); while John Costello, in his 1983 study, entitled Love Sex and War: Changing Values, 1939–45, interprets these girls’ sexual activity in terms which, despite the subtitle of his book, perfectly reflect the ‘values’ of many wartime commentators: ‘[S]tirred by a misguided adolescent patriotism . . . the ‘patriotutes’ as they were dubbed in the American press often dispensed their favours for a Coca-Cola, a meal, or the price of a movie.’ While the sexual activity of so-called ‘Victory Girls’ is thus interpreted as a combination of a confused sense of patriotism and a willingness to exchange sexual ‘favours’ for small fiscal rewards, the ‘young servicemen’ who have sex with these girls are interpreted as ‘naturally not averse to accepting the sexual invitations they were offered.’ (pp. 279–81).
156 It Came from the 1950s! 23. Goldstein, p. 339. 24. See Marilyn E. Hegarty, Victory Girls, Khaki-Wackies, and Patriotutes: The Regulation of Female Sexuality during World War II (New York; London: New York University Press, 2008). Narratives highlighting the dangerous threat women posed to military men continued well after the war. One true crime publication from 1952 announced ‘The Nation’s Number 1 Shame – The Dames Who Prey on G.I. Joe!’, ‘Millions of dollars are spent to teach G.I. Joe how to handle himself in combat, but he receives no training in how to defend himself against another kind of enemy.’ Police Detective, June 1952. 25. Evelyn Millis Duvall, Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers (New York: Association Press, 1950), p. 67. 26. Ernest L. Matthews, Jr, Out of Bounds (New York: Universal Books, 1954), cover blurb. 27. Tereska Torres, Women’s Barracks (New York: Gold Medal Books 1950), cover blurb. 28. Fredric Wertham, Introduction to Hal Ellson’s Tomboy (Michigan: Scribner, 1950), p. v. 29. J.C. Priest, Private School (New York: Universal Publishing & Distributing Corporation, 1959), cover blurb. 30. Albert L. Quandt, Zip-Gun Angels (New York: Original Novels, 1952); Wenzell Brown, Gang Girl (New York: Avon Books, 1954); Joe Weiss, Girl Gang (New York: Beacon Books, 1957); Don Elliott, Gang Girl (New York: Nightstand Book, 1959); Harry Whittington, Halfway to Hell (New York: Avon Books, 1959); Joseph Hilton, Angels In The Gutter (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Gold Medal Books, 1955), cover blurb. 31. Police Reporter Year, 1956; Confidential Detective (June 1956); Sensational Exposé (April 1957). 32. A character like Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in Gun Crazy (aka Deadly is the Female, 1950) may be seen as an exception to this. However, while she may be classed as a femme fatale who displays a thrill-seeking attitude towards crime, this is intimately connected to her position as a member of a romantic criminal couple whose crime spree acts as an expression of their sexual desire for one another. 33. Leo Margulies, Bad Girls (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1958); Kate Nickerson, Boy Chaser (Carnival Books, 1955); Ernie Weatherall, Rock ’n Roll Gal (New York: Beacon Books, 1957), cover blurbs. 34. Kerry Segrave, Drive-In Theaters: A History from their Inception in 1933 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2006) p. 10. 35. See Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 36. The subject of hot rods was by no means limited to the cinema screen. For example, Henry Gregor Felsen wrote numerous, highly popular, hot rod novels, such as Jungle Highway (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1942); Hot Rod (E.P. Dutton & Company, 1950); Street Rod (New York: Random House, 1953); Crash Club (New York: Random House, 1958); Boy Gets Car (aka Road Rocket) (New York: Random House, 1960); Here is Your Hobby: Car Customizing (G.P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1965); A Teen-Ager’s First Car (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1966). 37. Interestingly, these airplanes themselves often displayed nose art of pin-ups.
Fast Cars & Bullet Bras – The Female JD 157 38. Crimes by Women, Fox Feature Syndicate #1–15 (1948–50); Women Outlaws, Fox Feature Syndicate #1–8 (1948–49). As one Blog comment notes, ‘Yes, bra technology was much more advanced than I realized in the old west.’ Tom, Fantasy Ink, http://fantasy-ink.blogspot.com/2009/10/women-outlaws.html, accessed on 7 October 2010. 39. Startling Stories, Standard Magazines #1–99 (1939–55), Planet Stories, Fiction House #1–71 (1939–55). 40. Wertham, interviewed by Judith Crist, ‘Horror in the Nursery’, Collier’s 27 March 1948: 22–3, 95–7. See also Mike Benton, The Comic Book in America (Dallas, Tex.: Taylor Publishing, 1989), p. 45. 41. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York, Toronto: Rinehart & Company, Inc. 1953, 1954), p. 178. See also Maurice Horn, Sex in the Comics (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), p. 134. 42. Wertham, op.cit., p. 179. 43. Ibid., p. 194. 44. Ibid., p. 370. 45. Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency. Interim Report of the Committee on the judiciary pursuant to S. Res. 89 and S. Res. 190 (83d Cong. 1st Sess.) – (83d Cong. 2d Sess.) A Part of the Investigation of Juvenile Delinquency in the United States. US Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Juvenile Delinquency. 1955–6. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 77–90720. Introduction. 46. Ibid. Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America, Inc., adopted October 26, 1954: 36–7. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Wertham, op. cit., p. 201. While the Subcommittee on Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency did not take as much interest in breast adverts as Wertham had, they did note, in reference to advertising in comic books, ‘Numerous pseudomedical advertisements in comic books and love magazines are aimed at the teen-ager’s desire to glorify his personal appearance or to improve his physique through easy measures: a tablet to put on weight; a tablet or chewing gum to take off weight; hair and scalp formula; skin cleanser or treatment for pimples; an electrically operated “spot reducer”; a course in exercises to develop muscles.’ Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency. Interim Report. 1955–6. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 77-90720. 50. Teen-Age Romances, St John #1–45 (1949–55); Young Love, Crestwood/Prize #1–73 (1949–56); Teen-Age Temptations, St John #1–9 (1952–54). 51. Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency. Interim Report. 1955–6. Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 77–90720. 52. ‘Wald Slams Exploitation Films, Told “Peyton Place” Pretty Lurid,’ Variety, 29 October 1958: 7. Quoted in Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), p. 129. 53. Herman Cohen, quoted in Thomas Doherty, op. cit., p. 115.
8 ‘A Search for the Father-Image’: Masculine Anxiety in Robert Bloch’s 1950s Fiction Kevin Corstorphine
Robert Bloch’s writing of the 1950s shows an attitude to women that subverts received notions of female submissiveness and male dominance, and does so within the confines of the pulp fiction magazine: a form of literature that is often perceived to be at best adolescent fantasy and at worst misogynist exploitation. Bloch does not always avoid the outrageous sensationalism of his contemporaries, but uses his own tastes, developed as a young reader devouring Lovecraft and Poe, to convey a unique view of the world. This perspective is shaped by and yet resistant to 1950s norms of masculinity and conformity. Bloch’s own anxieties are revealed in startling ways, yet are overshadowed by a knowing and ironic sensibility, particularly in relation to these two writers, who take on the metaphorical aspect of father figures. Here I intend to focus on several short stories of the 1950s, viewing this decade as a transitional period, in Bloch’s work, between his earlier fantasy stories written in the shadow of Lovecraft and his later psychological crime fiction, overshadowed, of course by a novel that appears in 1959: Psycho. Psycho, as is well known, deals with a disturbed killer by the name of Norman Bates. Although male by physical sex, Norman has been unable to individuate his personality from that of his mother. This manifests itself in a radical physical way. Norman’s mother and her lover died when he was a teenager (poisoned, we later discover, by Norman himself). Norman then wrote out a suicide note in her handwriting, and as Sam Loomis informs us at the end of the novel, changed in the process: Apparently, now that it was all over, he couldn’t stand the loss of his mother. He wanted her back. As he wrote the note in her handwriting, addressed to himself, he literally changed his mind. And Norman, or part of him, became his mother.1 158
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He then dug up her corpse, preserved it, and brought it back into the house. All this is unbeknown to Mary Crane, who has made a spontaneous decision to steal a rich businessman’s cheque from her office and elope with her boyfriend Sam. On the way to meet Sam, she stops for the night at the motel run by Norman and chats briefly to him. In a fit of jealous rage, ‘Mother’ bursts in on Mary while she takes a shower and decapitates her. The rest of the novel consists of Sam Loomis, Mary’s sister Lila, and a private detective named Arbogast attempting to work out what happened to Mary and the money. Eventually they are led back to Norman and discover the awful truth. Psycho was popularized, and is most often discussed in popular and academic discourse, in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film version. Replicating Bloch’s plot, it has been viewed2 as exemplifying the fallen woman Eve/whore archetype in its brutal punishment of Mary (renamed Marion), who has attempted to transgress the boundaries of patriarchy by absconding with money that belongs to her patronizing employer and his business associate. From the other perspective, ‘Mother’ seems to be an overt representation of the monstrous feminine; a repressive, emasculating force that controls Norman’s actions, despite her physical absence. Bloch’s novel resists such straightforward readings, however, in its complex interplay of gender roles. The novel begins by putting Norman in the role of victim, describing the fright he gets from rain hitting the window, when he fears that someone is tapping on the pane. Our sympathetic identification with Norman, however, is soon subverted by Bloch’s unsettling description of his mental state. Norman is mentally stunted and completely under the control of his mother’s influence. This immediately brings to mind Freud, but a direct reference to the Oedipus complex by the third-person narrator deftly signals the importance of psychoanalysis while simultaneously deflecting the possibility of a straightforward Oedipal reading. While Norman sits reading, we are apparently presented with an argument between himself and his mother, which is later revealed to be a deranged monologue. ‘Mother’ criticizes Norman’s choice of reading, comparing his anthropological book to the psychology he apparently tried to explain to her in the past: ‘Psychology isn’t filthy, Mother!’ ‘Psychology, he calls it! A lot you know about psychology! I’ll never forget that time you talked so dirty to me, never. To think that a son could come to his own mother and say such things!’
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‘But I was only trying to explain something. It’s what they call the Oedipus situation, and I thought if both of us could just look at the problem reasonably and try to understand it, maybe things would change for the better.’ ‘Change, boy? Nothing’s going to change. You can read all the books in the world and you’ll still be the same.’ (pp. 6–7) This is clearly an authorial confession that the Oedipal narrative is going to be used as a plot device, but it also precludes Freudian criticism by making obvious what would normally be hidden from view. We are also given an indication of the theme of arrested development that will saturate the remainder of the novel. Themes of failure and betrayal are endemic to Psycho. Crucial to this is the idea of Norman’s masculinity. He has failed to develop properly as an adult male. Just as the voice of his mother informs, he will never change, Mary Crane is shocked by his confession that he has never been out with a woman. In an awkward conversation with Norman, Mary gives him advice contrary to his mother’s demands: ‘Mr Bates, you’ll pardon me for saying this but how long do you intend to go on this way? You’re a grown man. You certainly must realize that you can’t be expected to act like a little boy all the rest of your life. I don’t mean to be rude, but –’ (p. 26) Norman is under pressure from two contrary directions: he is labouring under the expectations of his mother all the while aware that wider society expects something different of him. He can fulfil neither of these roles in a satisfactory way and suffers from constant guilt over real and imagined failures. Psychoanalytic theories of trauma and guilt, however, do not hold sufficient explanatory power over this narrative in the light of Bloch’s extremely self-aware use of their implications. Although feminist concerns have informed discussion of the film’s scopophiliac tendencies, Psycho is less often considered in terms of the novel’s construction of masculinity. Norman is himself a victim of societal gender roles. Through his failure to individuate and take control over his own life, he becomes not so much a human subject as a creature of his environment, driven by forces unrelated to rationality or social norms. Norman loses his father, but how this comes about and the effect it has is bound up with his confused notion of his own masculinity. His father is a shadowy and somewhat ambiguous figure. At one
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point we hear that Norman’s mother, Norma, was a widow by the time she opened the motel (p. 108). It seems likely, however, that either her husband died after leaving her or she merely claimed that he was dead. Norman is harassed by his mother’s voice talking about ‘Your-father-who-ran-off-and-deserted-me’ (p. 78), and Sam Loomis informs Lila that, ‘Mrs. Bates hated men ever since her husband deserted her and the baby, and this is one of the reasons she treated Norman the way she did, according to Dr. Steiner’ (p. 146). Norman’s simultaneous resentment of his mother and over-protectiveness towards her must stem at least partly from their abandonment by his father. If Psycho is set, as it appears to be, in the 1950s, then Norman’s father must have left before the war. Susan Faludi argues in Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man (1999) that men have been failed by confining gender roles which, unlike women, they have felt no need to escape from. Among many factors, this is due to an overwhelming message from society that they are in control, when in fact a changing world has left them in a limbo from which it is difficult to see a way out. Unlike the feminist movement, the cause of men lacks a clear opponent or goal, leaving many men resentful of feminism, immigration and any number of issues that are not their real enemy. Faludi recounts how, ‘In the generation before the war, millions of fathers failed to support their families, became itinerant laborers, hoboes, winos. But that was the fault of the Great Depression, not of its men.’3 This would account for Norman’s father in the time-scale just cited. Yet Faludi’s argument relating to post-war men is particularly relevant for Norman: The post-World War II era was the moment of America’s great bounty and ascendance, when the nation and thus its fathers were said to own the world. Never, or so their sons were told, did fathers have so much to pass on as at the peak of the American Century. And conversely, never was there such a burden on the sons to learn how to run a world they would inherit. Yet the fathers, with all the force of fresh victory and moral virtue behind them, seemingly unfettered in their paternal power and authority, failed to pass the mantle, the knowledge, all that power and authority, on to their sons.4 An anxiety surrounding this time of transition for the American male suffuses Psycho. Norman’s failure is in becoming a man, as his failure to enter the adult world of sex and relationships goes to show. Likewise, his mother constantly chides him about being a baby, and even discourages
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him from looking in the mirror, presumably in case he realizes he has grown up: Mother was right. It was nasty to stare at yourself, all naked and unprotected; to peek at the blubbery fat, the short hairless arms, the big belly, and underneath it – When you did, you wished that you were somebody else. Somebody who was tall and lean and handsome. (p. 75) Norman, however, has missed his chance to become a man, choosing instead to live in the past. As always, his inner life is reflected in his lived surroundings: the Bates Motel hardly gets any business thanks to a new bypass that has been built. It is progress that betrays Norman. As Mark Jancovich has pointed out, ‘Mrs Bates is not part of a wholesale attack on the changing gender roles,’ and that in Bloch’s writing in general, ‘the killer is often seen as a product of modernity, rather than maternity’.5 This is a theme that is specifically built up throughout Bloch’s short fiction in the 1950s. A reading of these stories reveals some startling explorations of gender and creativity. ‘The Thinking Cap’ (1953) anticipates Bloch’s most successful heir, Stephen King, by constructing a nightmarish narrative around an author struggling with writer’s block. We are introduced to Barnaby Codd as he desperately stumbles around his rented room looking for tinned beans, too poor even to sustain an alcohol habit. His fortunes change when his past reputation leads to an increasingly rare dinner party invite, where he meets an enchanting green-eyed woman and somehow succeeds in being invited home by her. His sense of masculine confidence, however, has been shattered by years of failure: ‘Codd had difficulty in comprehending her invitation. It was just too good to be true.’6 Indeed, when he gets to her apartment he does not take the negotiations as far as sex, but manages only a depressed, rambling outpouring of emotion. Cleo Fane, as she calls herself, takes on the authoritative role as she introduces Codd to an absurd helmet designed to channel creativity. When he questions whether this might be a joke, she immediately withdraws the offer, emotionally manipulating him into begging for her to reinstate it. The wretched Codd gets his wish and is soon a bestselling author once more, inspired by his fantastic visions of alien planets and psychotic killers (material too suspiciously similar to Bloch’s own output to claim full authorial distance). Here, the male author figure is portrayed as a slave and his muse a taunting
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figure of authority. Ordered not to remove the helmet, he eventually does, at the urging of his (male) psychiatrist. This power dynamic is noteworthy: during the first meeting Codd asks Fane if she is ‘a lady psychiatrist’.7 The patronizing note of mistrust inherent in this is not apparent when, in desperation once more, he makes an appointment with the aptly-named Doctor Fine. The archaic word ‘Fane’ describes a temple or church. If we accept this symbolic interpretation then a binary opposition emerges between Codd’s irrational worship of the feminine figure and the calm reassurance offered by the masculine order (Fine). Certainly this is supported by his visions of Fane while wearing the helmet, where she appears as a green-skinned goddess riding a giant dog. Her precise nature is never revealed, but Codd, convinced she is delusional and has hypnotized him into sharing her fantasies, indulges in some psychoanalysis of his own by theorizing that she has a fixation on the sorceress Circe of Greek mythology. As is often the case in weird fiction, the hypothesis of the narrator turns out to be the most likely truth, as when he removes the helmet he is transformed into one of her beasts, doomed to serve as her steed on an alien planet. Shades of Lovecraft are visible here, in the story’s suggestion that ancient gods are, and have always been, aliens. Witches too, in Bloch’s conception, as can be seen in ‘Broomstick Ride’ (1957), where astronauts on a strange planet discover an alien race; in fact a splinter group of Satan-worshipping humans who had discovered atomic-powered propulsion at some point in the past and left Earth in order to escape persecution. Although provocatively speculative in suggesting the strange possibilities inherent in science and history, this story is told with a wry sense of humour and its more outrageous elements reflect the expectations of its readership (here Super-Science Fiction) as well as Bloch’s own tastes. Nonetheless, there is a notable consistency in the way he returns to the same themes and builds a coherent vision of his fantasy universe. In the 1950s this is a world, to return to Jancovich’s argument, that is steeped in the concerns of his day, here atomic power, alien worlds, and contemporary unifying theories emerging from structural approaches to anthropology and myth. All of this is ready material for Bloch’s storytelling. His essay ‘Poe and Lovecraft’ (1972) reveals his attitude towards these past masters and more than a little about his own practice. Regarding their perceived lack of engagement with the real world he points out that, ‘Both Poe and Lovecraft were acute observers of the scientific and pseudo-scientific developments of their respective days, and both men utilized the latest theories and discoveries in their writing.’8 Note here the easy companionship of scientific and
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pseudo-scientific: both, of course, are equally valid sources of inspiration for fantasy fiction, certainly with Bloch. Going further, he criticizes the misconception that they were ignorant of contemporary writing merely by virtue of their own being so startlingly different: Both men, as professional writers, were well and widely-read in the contemporary work of their day: Poe as a working critic, demonstrates his knowledge in his nonfictional efforts and Lovecraft, in his correspondence, proves himself no stranger to Proust, Joyce, Spengler and Freud.9 Bloch’s assertion here that the fantasy or horror writer is not necessarily ignorant of either developments in the contemporary world or in literature is reflected in his own work. All authors are exposed to the same world, but process this into fiction in very different ways. ‘Thinking Cap’ can be seen as a kind of satire on the question commonly asked of all writers: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ His use of Circe reflects a keen interest in mythology and the ways in which ideas are transmitted through human culture. Man in this story is not a generative force, but a conduit through which something greater, here the feminine, flows. A writer should not, perhaps, be so arrogant as to claim the power of creation for his own. These ideas of feminine creativity, generative power and the unavoidable connection to childbirth can be seen in ‘The Goddess of Wisdom’ (1954); a rather odd anticipation of Ridley Scott’s Alien, in that an alien female uses men as a vehicle through which to reproduce. The narrator, looking for anonymous sex after six months of space travel, encounters an incredibly beautiful woman who, in a misogynist’s dream come true, does not speak. She had been found with no memories in the cockpit of a ship beside the headless corpse of the narrator’s friend Harley, which fails to warn off the impassioned astronaut. They engage in a kind of telepathic sex, which is far from safe10 and ends with a reverse impregnation: The seed grew in Harley’s brain, where it had been planted to grow, and his head burst out there in space, and in a week it was all over and Minerva was born. My Minerva. In a week, now, she’ll reproduce again. But this time it’s feeding and growing in my brain. It absorbs the bony parts of the skull and the skin expands incredibly. It drinks the blood and eats the soft gray
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nourishment and waxes fat in godliness as it sups on the wisdom of men.11 It transpires that she is part of an ancient alien race that uses this method of reproduction to travel across the gulf of space. As Bloch puts it: The seeds travel from world to world, from universe to universe, and man is the carrier and the host. And in ancient times, a man who could make such a journey would be a god. His offspring would be a god or goddess. It must have happened on Olympus, when Minerva was born. Yes, that’s the way it was. I remember the legend of the goddess of wisdom now, the legend of Minerva. Minerva, who sprang fullblown from the head of Jupiter.12 Throughout this short story, the narrator’s thought processes are constantly disrupted by this feminine presence. In Julia Kristeva’s terms, she is the abject, that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order’.13 Abjection, as she writes, ‘is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it’.14 Bloch’s portrayal of the monstrous feminine though, is closer to the reclaimed sexual imagery of postfeminism than the abject monsters of literary history, and indeed much contemporary fiction in the 1950s. It is tempting to associate this alien woman with the Gothic trope of the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth, which represents male fear of the castrating woman in psychoanalytic feminist criticism. The narrator even questions his pimp about this: ‘What’s the catch here, Ottar? Is she dangerous, does she bite?’15 Yet he does not get close to either her vagina or her teeth. This interpretation is not necessarily indicative of female empowerment, as she is the monstrous other rather than the heroine. Although she claims to be a goddess this does not prevent her being demonized (after all the biblical Eve can be interpreted as an archetypal Goddess of Wisdom). Yet the narrator is supremely ambivalent about what has happened to him, perhaps even grateful to have encountered her. He has been entirely manipulated by this alien version of the noir femme fatale. Bloch also returns to this perversely attractive combination of beauty and cruelty in ‘String of Pearls’ (1956), where a regal Indian woman turns the tables on two con-artists by having them strangled and their skulls added to the very necklace they were trying to steal.
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Throwing gender boundaries and attempts to pin down Bloch’s own politics into confusion, he offers us precisely the opposite situation in ‘I Like Blondes’, a story originally published in Playboy in 1956. Here, an ageing Lothario tricks a naïve young girl back to his apartment by pretending to be innocent and plying her with booze. The atmosphere of menace exuded throughout the story is well justified. It transpires that he is an alien being, and it is not just earth-girl love he is after: ‘I like blondes. They can laugh at me all they please – I’ll take a blonde any time. As I say, it’s a matter of taste. And blondes are simply delicious.’16 A structuralist reading, of course, would reveal that this performs the same function as a hundred fairy-tales: a cautionary warning to young girls on the cusp of adult sexuality. This, however, is far from Playboy’s intended audience. There is a tempting correlation of plot with readership here, the narrator’s literal consumption of women reflecting the reader’s symbolic consumption of the female image. In the era of the femme fatale on the big screen, however, and the men’s magazine market maintaining a certain level of sophistication and indeed literary aspirations, it risks oversimplification to view this as titillation. ‘I Like Blondes’ clearly has more than a streak of satire about it. Far from being a suave operator, this alien seducer is portrayed by Bloch as a somewhat pathetic figure: Perhaps I was a bit obvious and overdressed for the occasion. Perhaps I shouldn’t have winked, either. But that’s a matter of opinion . . . isn’t it? I have mine. Other people have theirs. And if the tall girl with pageboy cut chose to give me a dirty look and murmur, ‘Disgusting old man,’ that was her affair. I’m used to such reaction and it didn’t bother me a bit.17 He doesn’t understand music and is disturbed by the ‘vulgar sexual connotation’ of dancing. His own peculiar brand of misogyny marks him out as a sexual misfit. Even though he has paid to be in a ‘dime-a-dance’ hall, he has nothing but contempt for the women who work there: Those girls, those hostesses! Where did they get their dresses – the crimson Day-Glow gowns, the orange and cerise abominations, the low-cut black atrocities, the fuchsia horrors? And who did their hair – poodle cuts and pony tops and tight ringlets and loose maenad swirls? The garish, slashing, red-and-white makeup, the dangling,
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bangling cheap jewelry gave the impression of pink ribbons tied to the horns of a prize heifer.18 Here it is the man who is demonized. A woman-hating, sexually maladjusted freak, he turns out not even to be human, and far from the ideal Playboy reader. In the first issue Hugh Hefner noted that the ideal reader enjoys, ‘inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex’.19 The narrator of ‘I Like Blondes’ has much more in common with Bloch’s portrayal of Norman Bates in Psycho than Anthony Perkins’ performance in Hitchcock’s screen version. Perkins is outwardly charming, but hides a damaged portion of his psyche that his despicable mother is entirely responsible for. Bates in the novel is a fat, middle-aged, bespectacled alcoholic who fantasizes over making musical instruments from flayed human skin. It is his own guilt over the murder of his mother, as much as the way he has been brought up, that compels him to further killings. Bloch’s portrayal of Bates and the narrator of ‘I Like Blondes’ as misfits and fantasists betrays an authorial urge to construct a vision of normality based on reason, and move away from the overbearing influence of two of the most psychologically-disturbed literary father-figures one could hope for: Poe and Lovecraft. Bloch’s distancing of himself from the text frequently leads to a sardonic tone and even the inclusion of Gothic in-jokes. In ‘I Like Blondes’ the alien goes by the name of Beers while on earth. It transpires though, that he is wearing a borrowed human body collected by his friend, Ril. Describing Ril, he says: He’s one of my friends. He collects, too. We all collect, you know. It’s our hobby. We come to Earth and collect . . . Ril has a rather curious hobby, in a way. He collects nothing but Bs. You should see his trophy room! He has a Bronson, three Bakers, and a Beers – that’s the body I’m using now. Its name was Ambrose Beers, I believe. He picked it up in Mexico a long time ago.20 This is a clear reference to Ambrose Bierce, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913. Bierce is one of the authors singled out for discussion by Lovecraft in his essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (1927). He praises much of Bierce’s work, but does not shy away from criticism, pointing out, ‘a certain touch of naiveté, prosaic angularity, or earlyAmerican provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later horror-masters’.21 Given the timescale, these later masters must
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no doubt include Lovecraft himself, who is generous in his acknowledgement of past authors but nonetheless adopts a certain sense of a teleological progression towards the more cosmic perspective of himself and his contemporaries. This sense of progression is inherent in Bloch’s staking out of his own literary territory. His reference to Bierce here, a seemingly minor point, is actually very telling. Presented here are the themes of collecting, consumption, and wearing the body of an older author as a disguise: the very motifs that characterize his own progression from reader to author of fantasy fiction by way of imitation. As S.T. Joshi points out, ‘Bloch has never made any secret of his literary and personal debt to H.P. Lovecraft’,22 but at the same time his 1950s output shows a concerted effort to move away from the fantasy-orientated themes of earlier work when he was writing for Weird Tales, such as ‘Mannikins of Horror’ (1944), ‘The Beasts of Barsac’ (1944), and under pseudonyms, somewhat crass efforts like ‘Death is an Elephant’ (1939) towards a more mature and self-possessed style, though one that remains bound to Lovecraft’s themes for some time, straining as it does to transform them and shed the dead weight of the past. Bloch’s Lovecraftian story ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ (1950) begins the decade by incorporating Lovecraft as a character, and even making reference to his death in 1937, something that Joshi finds in ‘questionable taste’.23 In poor taste it may be, but this is not only 13 years later, but also in keeping with the sense of humour shared by Lovecraft and Bloch, demonstrated by their playful ‘killing’ of each other started by Bloch in ‘The Shambler from the Stars’ (1935), where an unnamed New England horror writer is destroyed by his Faustian thirst for forbidden knowledge. Lovecraft responded with ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (1936), where a similar fate befalls a thinly-veiled character called Robert Blake. Bloch’s finale to this peculiar trilogy, ‘The Shadow from the Steeple,’ follows Edmund Fiske (Tarleton Fiske, incidentally, was one of Bloch’s many pseudonyms), a friend of Blake’s, as he investigates the disappearance. Fiske writes to Lovecraft for help and advice as he does so, as did the young Bloch, who corresponded with Lovecraft for five years. The investigation leads ultimately to Doctor Ambrose Dexter, a character mentioned in Lovecraft’s story, although his first name is Bloch’s addition. Dexter has been possessed by the ancient god Nyarlathotep, which is using the nuclear scientist to further its nefarious plans. The unusual name of Ambrose, with its connotations of immortality, would of course be revisited with Ambrose Beers in ‘I Like Blondes’, bringing both elder authors into the realm of the fictional, indeed granting them an afterlife on the page. Bloch utilizes a lightness of touch, however, and there is a possible pun here on ‘ambidextrous’, with Dexter gaining power from
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both his human and immortal aspects, a force to be reckoned with on ‘either side’. If ‘The Shadow from the Steeple’ can be interpreted as a young writer working through some kind of Oedipal issues with his literary ‘father’, then ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’ (1951) complicates things further. Bloch began his career with literary imitations of Lovecraft, but this pastiche of the ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is much more self-conscious in its borrowing. Passages from Poe’s original are lifted verbatim and woven into the tale. Here, the narrator’s mysterious friend, the Usherfigure, is himself obsessed with Poe. Not only does he have a collection of all Poe’s first editions, but apparently unpublished work as well, which even includes ‘The Further Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym’. By the time we discover that he has the ultimate collector’s item, Poe’s exhumed corpse, in the basement, it becomes increasingly obvious that he has resurrected the body by some means. It is Poe himself, rather than Usher’s sister, who comes shambling towards his captor to lock him in a deadly embrace. Not only does Bloch change Poe’s original to an allmale scenario, but it is a highly destructive one. Whereas Poe’s ‘Usher’ can be read as a satire on the decadence of European aristocracy, Bloch’s re-imagining portrays obsessive collecting and male hero-worship as a moral and creative dead end. The allusions to incest in Poe take on a different shade here. Usher’s relationship with Madeline is explicitly incestuous; the family line putting forth, ‘no enduring branch’.24 The narrator’s relationship to Poe, then, takes on connotations of literary incest. The arboreal metaphor can perhaps be stretched to comment on the apprentice’s anxiety surrounding the need to ‘branch out’, or indeed for the apple to fall further from the tree. Poe dies for the second time in the story, but takes the collector with him, allowing no escape from this odd Oedipal cycle, where Poe serves as both revered mother and overbearing father. As with ‘I Like Blondes’, collecting behaviour is central, something that psychiatrists tend to associate with men.25 Certainly, ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’ maintains the wine-swilling manly drawing-room atmosphere of the original. The narrator is compelled to visit the mansion purely because he finds the implausibly named Launcelot Canning (the name is actually from ‘Usher’s’ interpolated poetic romance, ‘The Mad Tryst of Launcelot Canning’) to be an intriguing individual. He does not, however, share his obsessions: I confess that his invitation as such did not enthrall me, for I hold no brief for the literary hero-worshipper or the scholarly collector as a type. I own to more than a passing interest in the tales of Poe, but
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my interest does not extend to the point of ferreting out the exact date upon which Mr. Poe first decided to raise a mustache, nor would I be unduly intrigued by the opportunity to examine several hairs preserved from that hirsute appendage.26 Bloch’s parody of the collector shows his sense of humour, but in the context of the story, the dangers of obsession are made clear as Poe brings about the death of his admirer. Like Madeline in ‘Usher’, he does this with an embrace: There without the doors there did stand a lofty and enshrouded figure; a figure all too familiar, with pallid features, high, domed forehead, mustache set above a mouth. My glimpse lasted but an instant, an instant during which the man – the corpse – the apparition – the hallucination, call it what you will – moved forward into the chamber and clasped Canning to his breast in an unspeakable embrace. Together, the two figures tottered toward the flames, which now rose to blot out vision forever more.27 No doubt Freud would read this compulsive return to the moustache as phallic symbolism, but even without going that far, the figure of Poe is here, very much, an elder statesman. From a writer’s point of view, the message is clear: literary father figures can be stifling in their overbearing influence. Bloch, in a 1973 essay, claims that ‘Poe and Lovecraft are our two American geniuses of fantasy, comparable each to the other, but incomparably superior to all the rest who follow in their wake.’28 His comparison of the lives of the two writers would almost suggest that they had sprung Minerva-like, fully-formed from the New England soil. He says: Both Poe and Lovecraft were New England born. Both were, to all intents and purposes, fatherless at an early age. Both developed a lifelong affinity for poetry and the elements of a classical education. Both utilized archaisms in their writing styles and affected personal eccentricities which in time became consciously cultivated.29 Bloch is not blind to the faults of the two writers, pointing out that ‘their outlook was, to a marked degree, provincial; even parochial,’30 but then again, who is not critical of their parents? Despite their flaws, Bloch
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views these men as unique individuals who did not let their milieu dictate what they wrote. The problem is that of writing tales of the fantastic while retaining a personal voice, stepping out of the overshadowing legacy of these literary father figures. Bloch’s work is haunted by their ghosts in the same way that Psycho is haunted by the very lack of a father figure. Mrs Bates refers to Norman’s father purely in hyphenated terms: ‘Your-father-who-ran-off-and-deserted-me’ (p. 76). Poe retains this sense of mystery to the narrator of ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’, who can barely describe him: ‘the man – the corpse – the apparition – the hallucination, call it what you will.’ The revenant corpse takes on a perversely feminine role, almost breast-feeding the collector. Poe’s Madeline bears her brother to the floor a corpse, whereas Bloch has Poe cling to Canning in ‘an unspeakable embrace’ as the flames consume them both. Like the soulless tales churned out by the re-animated corpse, over-identification with a writer destroys creativity. There is a need, perhaps, for the kind of feminine creative energy embodied in the Minerva creature of ‘The Goddess of Wisdom’. Poe’s role here is not a feminine one but a grotesque parody exposing the lack of the feminine. From this perspective it is crucial that Psycho’s ‘Mother’ is not a true revenant female but rather a male projection of the extremes of the feminine grotesque. Mark Jancovich, discussing Bloch’s novels, offers a warning against reducing his fiction to an emphasis on this feminine grotesque, arguing that Bloch does not compulsively return to a demonization of women: Psycho’s use of the mother is . . . only one cause among many. Psycho’s concern with the crisis of identity may use the figure of the mother, but it does not simply emerge out of anxieties about ‘momism’ or the matriarchal family. While the killer in The Scarf is compelled by attitudes towards sex which are associated with his relationship to his mother, the killer in The Kidnapper is motivated by his relationship to his father.31 Indeed, the shifting identities and ironic reversals, common to many of Bloch’s short stories, reveal an outlook that sidesteps the totalizing discourse of Freudian narratives and offers a much more existential view of human agency. In the anti-communist and conformist America of the 1950s, Bloch presents characters who explicitly do not fit in. To compensate for this they use the strategy of acting out patterns of behaviour based on dominant ideas of masculinity.
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Bloch’s 1956 story, ‘A Good Imagination’, published in Suspect magazine, brings issues of masculinity to the fore when the narrator discovers his wife has been sleeping with George, the handyman. He describes George in terms that could not more obviously project fears about his own inadequate masculine identity: He had to stoop a bit in the basement because he was so tall. Tall and heavyset, with the thick neck and broad shoulders that are the common endowment of outdoor men, movie stars, and adult male gorillas . . . But then, perhaps some women like apes. Perhaps they have a secret craving for hairy bodies and crushing weight and panting animalism. Louise always told me she hated that sort of thing. She respected me because I was gentle and understanding and controlled myself. At least, that’s what she said.32 The narrator tricks George into walling Louise inside the basement (a classic Poe motif), suffocating her, then takes great joy in telling him about it (this turns out to be a trick as well). What is interesting here is the way in which he overcomes this brutish masculine figure. First of all there is a ludicrously phallic revolver: His eyes began to bulge. I watched his hand curl around the mouth of the beer bottle. And I brought the muzzle of the Colt up so he could see it . . . I inched the revolver up higher, and he flinched back . . . I saw his muscles flex, his neck tighten.33 Secondly, the narrator uses Poe as a touchstone for how he should proceed. After George runs off, mad with grief and guilt, he reaches for a conveniently placed book: ‘I picked up my copy of Poe, and not by accident. I wanted to see if his treatment of the situation was as melodramatic as mine had been.’34 Here is the essence of Bloch’s authorial anxiety: the burden of influence. In part, then, these stories are responding to the very notion of writing Gothic fantasy in the 1950s, post-Poe and Lovecraft, both authors who were being simultaneously reprinted in the same pulp magazines as Bloch. As a response, he experiments with models of masculinity, from hard-boiled characters who would not be out of place in a Raymond Chandler or Dashiel Hammet novel, to nerdish literary types who use their superior knowledge to prevail. Most of these character types, though, break down and crumble in the face of narrative pressures. As a pulp writer, Bloch is equally shifting masks in order to present
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a model of masculinity that panders to the readership of whatever magazine he happens to be writing for. All these portrayals, however, have a strong vein of satire that disrupts these identities even as they are constructed. Norman Bates’s father, even in his ghostly absence, dictates the direction of Psycho. It is noteworthy that the narrator of ‘The Man Who Collected Poe’, the most reasonable and well-balanced figure in these short stories, avoids the fate of his obsessive friend, smothered by a literary forefather, but still describes events, hauntingly, in a voice that is not entirely his own. A fitting postscript to Bloch’s 1950s output is his 1960 short story ‘The Funnel of God’: a psychedelic curiosity concerning a young white South African boy who embarks on an existential journey following an encounter with a shamanic figure known as ‘The Black Skelm’. Harvey Wolf’s mother has died in childbirth and his father has moved away on business, leaving Harvey in the care of his foreman and servants. Disregarding all warnings to avoid the Black Skelm’s cave, Harvey is impelled to meet him, and having listened to the old man’s talk of the Zulu empire a hundred years past and much philosophizing about the rise and fall of civilizations, he is designated a fellow ‘seeker’ and seals this pact by drinking fresh cattle blood from a human skull. After a brief meeting with his father Harvey travels to America and becomes increasingly disillusioned with every aspect of the social order, from racial segregation to public holidays. Strikingly, he rails against ‘the artificial social values which emotionally warped young people into “manliness” or “femininity” ’.35 Troubled by his inability to settle for illusion over truth, Harvey seeks out a psychiatrist, who points the finger of blame squarely at the figure of the absent father: ‘his self-styled search for Truth was merely a search for the Father-Image, denied him in childhood’.36 Harvey becomes every bit as discombobulated at the methodology of 1960s psychiatry as Esther Greenwood would be three years later in Plath’s The Bell Jar when his psychiatrist makes a series of image interpretations more akin to myth-making than science. Taking as his premise the significance of his patient’s second name ‘Wolf,’ he proceeds to dissect Harvey’s obsession with the film The Wolf Man: What had Harvey thought when the Wolf Man was beaten to death with a cane by his father in the movie? Did Claude Rains, as the father, remind Harvey of his own parent? Did he perceive the phallic symbolism of the silver cane used as an instrument of punishment? And so on, blah, blah, blah – until Harvey Wolf got up from the couch and walked out again.37
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This slavishly Freudian analysis frustrates Harvey with its limitations; an interesting point given Psycho’s straightforward cause-and-effect presentation of mental health, where Norman’s problems seem ultimately to stem from an over-attachment to his mother in childhood. This is in fact a fitting development that illustrates Bloch’s innovation in using the narrative of psychology to construct plot: something that would be imitated time and time again throughout the coming decades. Although the stories discussed here offer insight into the motivations and concerns of Bloch and his time, it is important to note that in Bloch we have a writer who is self-reflexively aware of his own anxieties and those of his readers. Like Harvey Wolf, his perspective tends to the cosmic rather than the specific, but is tempered by a discipline that enables creativity within boundaries; a spectral return, perhaps, of the murdered superego.
Notes 1. Robert Bloch, Psycho (London: Bloomsbury, 1998), p. 148. Further references to this edition are given in the text. 2. Most pertinently in Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI, 1992). 3. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), p. 597. Further references to this edition are given in the text. 4. Ibid., p. 597. 5. Mark Jancovich, American Horror from 1951 to the Present (Staffordshire: Keele University Press, 1994), p. 246. 6. Robert Bloch, ‘The Thinking Cap’, Final Reckonings: The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch, Volume One (New York: Citadel Twilight, 1990), pp. 171–94 (175). 7. Ibid., p. 176. 8. Robert Bloch, ‘Poe and Lovecraft’, Ambrosia, Volume 2 (August 1973), reproduced at Alan Gullette’s Web Page, , accessed 03/02/08. Bradbury, Ray, ‘The Concrete Mixer’, in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April, 1949 and republished in The Illustrated Man (first edition Doubleday, 1951). Brendon, Piers, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007). Brians, Paul, Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction 1895–1984 (Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 1987). 234
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236 Bibliography Curtis, William J.R., Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Phaidon, 1996). Crane, Jonathan Lake, Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the Horror Film (California: Sage Publications, 1994). Creeber, Glen, ed., The Television Genre Book (London: British Film Institute, 2001). Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London & New York: Routledge, 1993). Crist, Judith, ‘Horror in the Nursery’, Collier’s (27 March 1948). Derleth, A., H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2: Dagon and Other Tales (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Devlin, Rachel, ‘Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945–1965’, Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities (Winter, 1997). Dika, Vera, ‘The Stalker Film, 1978–81’, in American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. by Gregory A. Waller (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Docherty, Brian, American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, ed. by Brian Docherty (London: Palgrave, 1990). Doherty, Thomas, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark, 1996). Dowdy, Andrew, Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (New York: Morrow, 1973). Duvall, Evelyn Millis, Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers (New York: Association Press, 1950). Earnshaw, Tony, Beating the Devil: The Making of ‘Night of the Demon’ (Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, 2005). Edleson, Edward, Visions of Tomorrow: Great Science Fiction from the Movies (New York: Doubleday, 1975). Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (London: Virago, 1998). Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W.R. Trask, (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovick, 1959). Elliott, Don, Gang Girl (New York: Nightstand Books, 1959). Ellis, Tom, Visible Fictions: Cinema: Television: Video (London: Routledge, 1982). Ellson, Hal, Tomboy (Michigan: Scribner, 1950). Elwall, Robert, Building a Better Tomorrow: Architecture in Britain in the 1950s (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2000). Engelhardt, Tom, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). Eyles, Allen, Robert Adkinson and Nicholas Fry (eds), The House of Horror (London: Lorrimer, 1973). Fabian, Robert, London After Dark: An Intimate Record of Night Life in London (London: Naldrett Press, 1954). Faludi, Susan, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999). Feuer, Jane, ‘Genre study and Television’, in Robert C. Allen, ed., Channels of Discourse, Reassembled (London: Routledge, 1992).
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Filmography
Abbot and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Charles Lamont, 1953) Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (Charles Lamont, 1951) Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) All that Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (Bert I. Gordon, 1957) American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) Angels with Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938) Attack of the Crab Monsters (Roger Corman, 1957) Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Nathan Juran, 1958) Attack of the Giant Leeches (aka Demons of the Swamp, Bernard L. Kowalski, 1960) Attack of the Puppet People (aka Six Inches Tall, Bert I. Gordon, 1958) Atom Age Vampire (originally Seddok, l’erede di Satana, Anton Giulio Majano, 1960) The Atomic Brain (Joseph V. Mascelli, 1963) Atom Man Versus Superman (Spencer Gordon Bennet, 1950) The Atomic Kid (Leslie H. Martinson, 1954) Atomic Rulers of the World (originally Kôtetsu No Kyojin, Koreyoshi Akasaka, Teruo Ishii & Akira Mitsuwa, 1959, US release, 1964) The Atomic Submarine (Spencer Gordon Bennet, 1959) Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985) The Battle of the River Plate (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1956) Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugene Lorie, 1953) The Beast of Yucca Flats (Coleman Francis, 1961) Beginning of the End (Bert I. Gordon, 1957) Behemoth the Sea Monster (aka The Giant Behemoth, Douglas Hickox & Eugène Lourié, 1959) Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, 1948) Bijo to Ekitai Ningen (aka The H-Man, Ishirô Honda, 1958) Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) The Blob (Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958) Blood of Dracula (aka Blood Is My Heritage, Herbert L. Strock, 1958) Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) The Boogie Man Will Get You (Lew Landers, 1942) Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) Boys Town (Norman Taurog, 1938) The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935) Bride of the Monster (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1955) Brides of Blood (Gerardo De Leon, 1968) Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) The Camp on Blood Island (Val Guest, 1957) Chikyû kogeki meirei: Gojira tai Gaigan (aka Godzilla vs. Gigan, Jun Fukuda, 1972) C.H.U.D. (Douglas Cheek, 1984) 244
Filmography
245
Circle of Danger (Jacques Tourneur, 1951) Class of Nuke ‘Em High (Richard W. Haines, Michael Herz, Lloyd Kaufman, 1986) Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown (Eric Louzil, Donald G. Jackson, 1991) Class of Nuke ‘Em High, Part 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid (Eric Louzil, 1992) Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) The Creature with the Atom Brain (Edward L. Cahn, 1955) The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) The Curse of the Werewolf (Terence Fisher, 1961) The Cyclops (Bert I. Gordon, 1957) Dai Koesu Yongkari (aka Yongary, Monster From the Deep, Kiduck Kim, 1967) Daikaijû Gamera (aka, Gammera the Invincible, Noriaki Yuasa, 1965) Daikaiju kuchusen Gamera tai Gyaosu (aka Gamera vs. Gaos, Noriaki Yuasa, 1967) Daikyojû Gappa (aka Gappa, the Triphibian Monster, Haruyasu Noguch, 1967) The Damned (Joseph Losey, 1961) Daughter of Dr Jekyll (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1957) Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1987) Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004) Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985) The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951) The Day the World Ended (Roger Corman, 1956) The Devil’s Hairpin (Cornel Wilde, 1957) Diary of the Dead (George A. Romero, 2007) Denso Ningen (aka The Secret of the Telegian, Jun Fukuda, 1960) Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden & Robert Hamer, 1945) The Deadly Mantis (Nathan Juran, 1957) Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950) The Devil Doll (Tod Browning, 1936) The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1967) Donovan’s Brain (Felix E. Feist, 1952) Don’t Knock the Rock (Fred F. Sears, 1957) Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958) Dragstrip Girl (Edward L. Cahn, 1957) Dr. Cyclops (Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1940) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) Earth Vs the Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears, 1956) Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2003) Fido (Andrew Currie, 2006) The Fiend With the Atomic Brain (aka Blood of Ghastly Horror, Al Adamson, 1972) Fiend Without a Face (Arthur Crabtree, 1958) First Man into Space (Robert Day, 1959) Five (Arch Oboler, 1951) The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958) Food of the Gods (Bert I. Gordon, 1976) Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1957)
246 Filmography Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) Frankenstein 1970 (Howard W. Koch, 1958) Frankenstein’s Daughter (Richard E. Cunha, 1958) From Hell It Came (Dan Milner, 1957) Gamera Daikaiju Kuchu Kessen (aka Gamera the Guardian of the Universe, Shusuke Kaneko, 1997) The Gamma People (John Gilling, 1956) Gasu Ningen dai Ichigo (aka The Human Vapor, Ishirô Honda, 1960) Gezora, Ganime, Kameba: Kessen! Nankai no daikaijû (aka Yog: Monster From Space, Ishirô Honda, 1970) Girl Gang (Robert C. Dertano, 1954) Girls in Prison (Edward L. Cahn, 1956) Girls Town (Charles F. Haas, 1959) Go Johnny Go! (Paul Landres, 1959) Godzilla (Roland Emmerich, 1998) Gojira (Ishirô Honda, 1954) Gojira (aka Godzilla 1985, Kohji Hashimoto 1984) Gojira, Ebirâ, Mosura: Nankai no Dai Ketto (aka Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, Jun Fukuda, 1966) Gojira-Minira-Gabara: Oru kaijû daishingeki (aka Godzilla’s Revenge, Ishirô Honda, 1969) Gojira no Gyakushû (aka Gigantis the Fire Monster, Motoyoshi Oda, 1955) Gojira tai Hedorâ (aka Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, Yoshimitsu Banno, 1971) Gojira tai Mechagojira (aka Godzilla vs. Cosmic Monster, Jun Fukuda, 1974) Gojira tai Megaro (aka Godzilla vs. Megalon, Jun Fukuda, 1973) Gojira vs. Beorante (aka Godzilla vs. Biollante, Kazuki Omori, 1989) Gojira vs. Desutoroia (aka Godzilla vs. Destroyer, Takao Okawara, 1995) Gojira vs. Kingu Ghidora (aka Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, Kazuki Omori, 1991) Gojira vs. Mekagojira (aka Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Takao Okawara, 1993) Gojira vs. Mosura (aka Godzilla vs. Mothra, Takao Okawara, 1991) Gojira vs. Supeesu Gojira (aka Godzilla vs. Space Godzilla, Kenshou Yamashita, 1994) Gorgo (Eugène Lourié, 1961) Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) Grease (Randal Kleiser, 1978) Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) Hell Drivers (Cy Endfield, 1957) Hell is a City (Val Guest, 1960) Horror of Party Beach (Del Tenney, 1964) Hot Car Girl (Bernard L. Kowalski, 1958) Hot Rod Girl (Leslie H. Martinson, 1958) Hot Rod Rumble (Leslie H. Martinson, 1957) Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink, 2010) The Hound of the Baskervilles (Terence Fisher, 1959) The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) The House on 92nd Street (Henry Hathaway, 1945) Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) Invaders from Mars (William Cameron Menzies, 1953)
Filmography
247
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) Invasion of the Saucer-Men (Edward L. Cahn, 1957) Invasion USA (Alfred E. Green, 1952) Invisible Invaders (Edward L. Cahn, 1958) Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1933) It Came From Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, 1955) It Came from Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) It Conquered the World (Roger Corman, 1956) The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957) I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) I Was a Teenage Werewolf (Gene Fowler Jr., 1957) I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (Herbert L. Strock, 1957) Juvenile Jungle (William Witney, 1958) Kaijû Daisensô (aka Monster Zero, Ishirô Honda, 1965) Kaijû Sôshingeki (aka Destroy All Monsters, Ishirô Honda, 1968) Kaijûtô no kessen: Gojira no musuko (aka Son of Godzilla, Jun Fukuda, 1967) King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (aka King Kong vs. Godzilla, Ishirô Honda, 1962) Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943) L.A. Zombie (Bruce LaBruce, 2010) The Leech Woman (Edward Dein, 1960) Let the Right One In (Thomas Alfredson, 2008) Lost Continent (Sam Newfield, 1951) The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1947) Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954) Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) Man-Made Monster (aka The Atomic Monster, George Waggner, 1941) Matango (aka Matango – Fungus of Terror/Attack of the Mushroom People, Ishirô Honda, 1963) Mekagojira no Gyakushu (aka Monsters From an Unknown Planet/Terror of Mechagodzilla, Ishirô Honda, 1975) Mister Rock and Roll (Charles S. Dubin, 1957) Monster From Green Hell (Kenneth G. Crane, 1958) Monster From the Ocean Floor (Wyott Ordung, 1954) Monster on Campus (Jack Arnold, 1958) The Monster That Challenged the World (Arnold Laven, 1957) The Most Dangerous Man Alive (Allan Dwan, 1961) Mosura (aka Mothra, Ishirô Honda, 1961) Mosura tai Gojira (aka Godzilla vs. the Thing, Ishirô Honda, 1964) Motorcycle Gang (Edward L. Cahn, 1957) Mr Drake’s Duck (Val Guest, 1951) The Mummy (Terence Fisher, 1959) Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932) The Naked City (Jules Dassin, 1948) Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (Cyril Frankel, 1960) Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) Night of the Eagle (Sidney Hayers, 1962)
248 Filmography Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (F.W. Murnau, 1922) Not of This Earth (Roger Corman, 1957) Octaman (Harry Essex, 1971) Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957) On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959) On the Threshold of Space (Robert D. Webb, 1956) Operation Petticoat (Blake Edwards, 1959) Panic in the Streets (Elia Kazan, 1950) Parents (Bob Balaban, 1989) Peggy Sue Got Married (Francis Ford Coppola, 1986) Pleasantville (Gary Ross, 1998) Problem Girls (Ewald André Dupont, 1953) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) Psycho (Gus Van Sant, 1998) The Quatermass Xperiment (Val Guest, 1955) Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004). Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985) Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) Red Planet Mars (Harry Horner, 1952) Reform School Girl (Edward Bernds, 1957) The Resident (Antii Jokkinen, 2011) The Reptile (John Gilling, 1965) The Revenge of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1958) Revenge of the Creature (Jack Arnold, 1955) Revolutionary Road (Sam Mendes, 2008) Rock All Night (Roger Corman, 1957) Rock Around the Clock (Fred S. Sears, 1956) Rock Rock Rock! (Will Price, 1956) Rocketship X-M (Kurt Neumann, 1950) Rodan (aka Sora no daikaijû Radon, Ishirô Honda, 1956) Runaway Daughters (Edward L. Cahn, 1956) Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995) San Daikaijû Chikyû Sandai no Kessen (aka Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster, Ishirô Honda, 1964) Saw IV (Darren Lynn Bousman, 2007) Shake, Rattle & Rock! (Edward L. Cahn, 1956) Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004) Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010). The Slime People (Robert Hutton, 1963) Slithis (aka Spawn of the Slithis, Stephen Traxler, 1978) Sorority Girl (Roger Corman, 1957) Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) The Spider (aka Earth Versus the Spider, Bert I. Gordon, 1958) The Split (aka The Manster, George Breakston & Kenneth Crane, 1961) Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986) The Stranglers of Bombay (Terence Fisher, 1959) Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959) A Tale of Two Cities (Ralph Thomas, 1958)
Filmography Tarantula (Jack Arnold, 1958) Teenage Caveman (Roger Corman, 1958) Teenagers from Outer Space (Tom Graeff, 1959) The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951) Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1953) This Island Earth (Joseph Newman, 1955) This Woman is Dangerous (Felix E. Feist, 1952) Those Redheads from Seattle (Lewis R. Foster, 1953) Timeslip (Ken Hughes, 1955) The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (Terence Fisher, 1960) Uchu daikaijû Dogora (aka Dagora, the Space Monster, Ishirô Honda, 1965) Uchû daikaijû Girara (aka The X From Outer Space, Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968) The Ugly Duckling (Lance Comfort, 1957) The Uninvited (Greydon Clark, 1987) Unidentified Flying Objects (Winston Jones, 1956) Village of the Giants (Bert I. Gordon, 1965) The Violent Years (William Morgan, 1956) The Vulture (Lawrence Huntington, 1967) Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005) War of the Colossal Beast (Bert I. Gordon, 1958) War of the Worlds (Byron Haskin, 1953) Watch it, Sailor! (Wolf Rilla, 1960) Wasp Woman (Roger Corman, 1959) The Werewolf (Fred F. Sears, 1956) When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Mate, 1951) The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953) Written on the Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956) The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941) The Woman in Black (James Watkins, 2011) The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959) World Without End (Edward Bernds, 1956) X The Unknown (Leslie Norman, 1956) Yesterday’s Enemy (Val Guest, 1959) Young and Wild (William Witney, 1958) Zulu (Cy Endfield, 1964) 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Nathan Juran, 1958)
249
Index
20 Million Miles to Earth 101 28 Days Later 217 Abbott, Bud 73 Abbott and Costello meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 73 Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein 73 Abbott and Costello meet the Invisible Man 73 Abbott and Costello meet the Killer, Boris Karloff 73 Abbott and Costello meet the Mummy 73 Adam, Ken 48 Adams, Carol 210 Addams Family, The 225 Adorno, Theodor 14, 49–50, 60 Advertisements for Myself 8 Affluent Society, The 8 ‘Aftermath’ 207 Age of Anxiety, The 1–2, 13 Ahmed, Rollo 41–2, 43, 52 Aldrich, Robert 28 Alien 164 All American Men of War 6 All that Heaven Allows 222–4 Altman, Rick 96 Amazing Colossal Man, The 27, 57, 60–2 Amazing Stories 94–5 American Graffiti 219 American International Pictures (AIP) 151 Amicus Productions 76–7 Anderson, Karen 139 Anderson, Paul Thomas 222 Andrews, Dana 36, 39 Angels with Dirty Faces 137 Angels in the Gutter 144 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life 23 Ape and Essence 4
‘Applicant, The’ 205 Arkoff, Samuel Z. 60, 151 Armed Vision, The 178 Arne, Peter 57 Arness, James 19, 55, 58 Arnold, Jack 57, 60, 62–3,102–3 ‘Art of Donald McGill, The’ 132 Ashton, Roy 108 Associated Artists Pictures 76 Astaire, Fred 29 Atom Man Versus Superman 59 Atomic Brain, The 59 Atomic Kid, The 57 Atomic Spaceship 59 Atomic Submarine, The 59 Attack of the 50 Foot Woman 27, 152 Attack of the Crab Monsters 21, 27, 60–2, 102 Attack of the Giant Leeches 67 Attack of the Puppet People 62 Attenborough, Richard 126 Auden, W.H. 1, 3–4, 13–15 Austerity Britain 13 Avila, Eric 230 Ayres, Lew 24 BAFTA Awards 84 ‘Baby Baby’ 135 Bachelard, Gaston 182, 184–6, 190–1, 193 Back in the Jug Agane 35 Back to the Future 218–19 Bad Girls 144 Bad Seed, The (novel) 2 Bad Seed, The (film) 2, 15 Badalamenti, Angelo 219 Baker, Dylan 226 Baker, Graham 68 Baker, LaVern 135 Baker, Stanley 49, 84 Balaban, Bob 219–20 Balderston, John L. 21–2 250
Index Baldick, Chris 129 Bano, Yoshimitsu, Gojira tai Hedora (aka Godzilla Versus the Smog Monster) 65, 69 Bass, Alfie 49 Battle of Dorking, The 91 Battle of the River Plate, The 126 Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The 25–6, 57–9, 63, 66, 70, 91, 96, 98–9 Beast of Yucca Flats, The 57 ‘Beasts of Barsac, The’ 168 Beating the Devil: The Making of Night of the Demon 36 Beatles, The 132 Beckwith, Reginald 45 Beginning of the End 21, 27, 62 Behemoth the Sea Monster 59, 66 Belafonte, Harry 29 Bell Jar, The 173, 198, 202, 204 Ben Hur 29 Benedict, Ruth 176, 193 Benjamin, Walter 201, 212 Bennett, Charles 47–8 Benson, George 116 Bercovitch, Sacvan 6, 15 Berlin Express 51 Bernard, James 123–5 Bernstein, Leonard 1–2, 5, 15 Berry, Chuck 135 Besant, Annie 46 Best in Show 232 n. 7 Bewitched 225 Bierce, Ambrose 167–8 Bijo to Ekitai- Ninjen (aka The H-Man) 57, 65 Birkhead, Edith 128 ‘Birthday Present, A’ 205 Biskind, Peter 55, 71 Black Art, The 41 ‘Blackberrying’ 207 Blackboard Jungle, The 136 Blake, William 50–1, 60 Blob, The 97 Bloch, Robert 12, 158–75 Blood of Dracula 66 Blue Velvet 220 Boas, Franz 176, 193 Body Snatchers, The 91 Bomb Culture 14
251
Bont, Jan de 188 Boogie Man Will Get You 112 Born on the Fourth of July 218 Boy-Crazy 144 Boy Chaser 144 Boyle, Danny 217 Boys Town 137 Boys’ Weeklies 132 Braceland, Francis J. 137 Bradbury, Ray 25, 91–2, 96 Brave New World 4 Brians, Paul 62 Bride of Frankenstein 22, 151 Bride of the Atom 28 Bride of the Monster 21, 28, 59 Brides of Blood 68 British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) 73–89, 121–4 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 82, 93 British Film Institute 72 ‘Broomstick Ride’ 163 Brown, Reynold 153 Browning, Tod 18 Bryant, Marsha 202, 205, 212 Buchan, John 46 Buck Rogers 96, 100 Building a Better Tomorrow 44, 52 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 20 Bundtzen, Lynda K. 202 Burke, Edmund 111 Burr, Raymond 26, 63 Bush, George W. 229 Byars, Jackie 217 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 110 C.H.U.D. 68 CBS 136 Cabot, Susan 152 Cahn, Edward L. 68 Caine, Hall 127 Caine, Michael 49 Camfield, Douglas 67 Campbell, John W. 95 Campbell, Joseph 178 Camp on Blood Island 79 Capote 232 n. 7 Captain Video 95–7 Caputi, Mary 216
252 Index Cardos, John Bud 68 Carey, Jon 15 Carmilla 88, 208 Carnal Appetites 212 Carreras, James 73, 76, 78, 80–1, 87, 122, 127 Carreras, Michael 126–7 Carson, Rachel 30 Carter, Angela 210 ‘Casting the Runes’ 36 Cat People 37–8 Chandler, Raymond 172 Chase, Richard 179 Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness 27 Cheek, Douglas 68 Chesney, G.T. 91 Chester, Hal E. 47 Chikyu Kogeki 65 China Syndrome, The 67 Christian, Paul 59 Churchill, Winston 33, 44–5 Chysalids, The 13 Cinefantastique 58 Circle of Danger 51 Civitello, Linda 199 Clarens, Carlos 45–6 Clarke, Arthur C. 91 Clarke, Mae 22, 31 Clarkson, Patricia 224 Class of Nuke ’Em High 68 Class of Nuke ’Em High Part Three 68 Class of Nuke ’Em High Part Two 68 Clive, Colin 111 Close Encounters of the Third Kind 232 n. 7 Cobbold, Kim 45 Cochran, Eddie 135 Cohen, Herman 151 Collier’s 149 Comics Code Authority 150 ‘Concrete Mixer, The’ 91 Condon, E.U. 21, 31 Conjure Wife 180 Connery, Sean 49 Connolly, Billy 228 Conway, Gary 151 Cook, Willis 98 Cooper, Merian C. 18
Coppola, Francis Ford 219 Corman, Roger 60, 63,102, 109 Corstorphine, Kevin 12 Costello, Lou 73 Coward, Rosalind 203–4, 208, 209 Crack in the Picture Window, The 8 Crane, Kenneth G. 67 Crawford, Joan 25 Crazy Gang, The 74 Creature from the Black Lagoon, The 95, 96, 102 Creature with the Atomic Brain, The 59 Crimes by Women 148 Crowley, Aleister 42 Crowther, Bosley 26 Culture Industry, The 14 Cummins, Peggy 37, 49 Currie, Andrew 12, 217, 221, 225, 229–30 Curse of Frankenstein 76–9, 80, 108, 109, 111–15, 121, 122, 124, 126 Curse of the Werewolf 88, 114 Curtis, Donald 61 Cushing, Peter 14, 84, 108, 109, 115 ‘Cut’ 206 Cyclops, The 62 Czerny, Henry 228 D For Delinquent 148 ‘Daddy’ 207 Daikaiju Gamera (aka Gamera the Invisible) 65 Daikyoju Gappa (aka Gappa, The Triphibian Monster) 66 Daily Express 85 Daily Herald 87 Daily Sketch 35 Daily Telegraph 78, 113 Daily Worker 82 Dalton, Audrey 61 Damned, The (aka These are the Damned) 66 Danse Macabre 9, 71 Daughter of Dr Jekyll 152 Davies, Máire Messenger 92–3 Davis, Nancy 24 Dawn of the Dead (2004) 217 Dawn of the Dead 68
Index Day of the Dead 68 Day of the Triffids, The 13, 94 Day the Earth Stood Still, The 20–1, 60, 62 DeMille, Cecil B. 99 De Toth, Andre 37 Deadly Mantis, The 60–2 Dead of Night 113 Dean, James 137 Deane, Hamilton 128 ‘Death & Co’ 209 ‘Death in an Elephant’ 168 Dee, Frances 38 Dekker, Albert 18, 28 Denso Ningen (aka The Secret of the Teligan) 65 Destination Moon 91, 95, 97 Devil Doll, The 18 Devil Rides Out, The 40–1,109 Devil and All His Works, The 29, 41 Devil’s Hairpin, The 146 DiCaprio, Leonardo 218 Diary of the Dead 228 Dick Barton, Special Agent 73 Dickens, Charles 109 Dixon, Campbell 113 Doctor Who 73 Domergue, Faith 61 Donovan’s Brain 24 Don’t Knock the Rock 135 Doomwatch 68 Doughty, Yvonne 147 Douglas, Gordon 26, 58 Douglas, Mary 183–4, 191, 192 Douglas, T.E. 28 Downey, Dara 12 Doyle, Arthur Conan 109 Dr Cyclops 18 Dr Strangelove 30 Dracula (1931) 116, 117, 126, 127 Dracula (1958) 14, 72, 80–2, 89, 108–33 Dracula (novel) 127–30 Dragstrip Girl 146–7 Driberg, Tom 42 Duvall, Evelyn Millis 141 Dwan, Allan 57 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 128
253
Ealing Studios 113 Earnshaw, Tony 36, 39, 48–9, 51 Earth Vs. The Spider 27 Earth versus the Flying Saucers 63 Eden, Sir Anthony 35 Ehrenreich, Barbara 8, 15 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 23, 29, 34–5 Eliade, Mircea 182–4, 190, 191 Eliot, Peter 36 Eliot, T.S. 1, 78 Elizabeth II 33, 44, 73 Elliott, Don 144 Ellson, Hal 142 Elwall, Robert 44, 52 Emmanuel, Ivor 49 Emmerich, Roland 64, 70 Encounter 13 Endfield, Cy 49–50 Engels, Friedrich 207 Essex, Harry 67 Exclusive Films 73, 79 Fabian, Robert 42 Facts of Life and Love for Teenagers 141 Fairbanks, Douglas 57 Fakuda, Jun 65 Falcon, Richard 217, 224 ‘Fall of the House of Usher, The’ 169, 185 Faludi, Susan 161 Family Guy 232 n. 6 Far from Heaven 12, 216–24, 226–32 Faulkner, William 9–11 Faye, Janina 84–5 Feminine Mystique, The 7 Fermi, Enrico 19 Ferrer, Mel 29 ‘Fever 103’ 205 Fiction and the Reading Public 127 Fiddes, Nick 210 Fido 12, 216–31 Fiedler, Leslie 176 Fielding, Henry 110 Fiend Without a Face 66 Fiend with the Atomic Brain, The 59 Finney, Jack 91 First Man into Space, The 92 Fisher, Terence 84, 115, 121, 124–6, 130–2
254 Index Five 20 Flamingos, The 135 Flash Gordon 100 Floyd, Janet 200 Fly, The 30, 59 Focal Encyclopaedia of Photography 203 Food of the Gods 21, 60, 62, Forbidden Planet, The 97–8 Forrest Gump 218 Foster, Laurel 200 Foucault, Michel 129 Fowler, Gene 66 Francis, Anne 98 Francis, Coleman 57 Frankel, Cyril 85 Frankenstein (1931) 22–3, 76, 113, 116 Frankenstein (novel) 19–20, 22, 28, 110 Frankenstein 1970 29, 66 Frankenstein: An Adventure in the Macabre 21 Frankenstein’s Daughter 152 Frayling, Christopher 14, 44, 52, 78 Frazer, James George 178 Freed, Alan 135 Freud, Sigmund 128–9,159, 164, 170, 209 Friedan, Betty 7 Frogs 68 From Hell It Came 30, 57 Frye, Northrop 176 Fujiwara, Chris 37, 51 ‘Funnel of God, The’ 173–4 Fussell, Betty 206 Gainsborough Studios 109 Galbraith, J.K. 8 Gamera Daikaju Kuchu Kessen (aka Godzilla and the Guardians of the Universe, 1997) 69 Gamera Versus Gaos 69 Gamma People, The 57 Gang Girl 144 Gardner, Ava 29 Garis, Roger 84 Gasu Ninjendai (aka The Human Monster) 65
Gaunt, Valerie 115, 131 Geary, Robert F. 181 Geertz, Clifford 193 Gernsback, Hugo 94 Gezora Ganime Kameba: Kessen! Nankai no daikaijû (aka Yog: Monster From Space) 66 Giles (cartoonist) 85 Gilling, John 57 Girl Gang (film) 144 Girl Gang (novel) 144 Girls Town 144 Girls in Prison 145 ‘Glutton, The’ 206–7, 209, 211 Go Johnny Go! 135 ‘Goatsucker’ 207 ‘Goddess of Wisdom, The’ 164–5, 171 Godzilla (1954) 96 Godzilla (1995) 63, 70 Godzilla, King of the Monsters 26 Gojira (1985) 63 Gojira (aka Godzilla) 26, 59, 63–5 Gojira, Ebrira, Mosura: Nankai No Dai Ketto (aka Eibira, Horror of the Deep) 65 Gojira-Minra-Gabara: Oru Kaiju Daishingeki 65 Gojira No Gyakushu (aka Gigantis the Fire Monster) 64 Gojira Versus Kingu Ghidora 68 Gojira Vs Mosura (aka Godzilla Versus Mothra, 1991) 67 Gojira tai Mechangojn (aka Godzilla versus the Cosmic Monster) 65 Gojira tai Megero (aka Godzilla versus Megalon) 65 Golden Bough, The 178 Good Housekeeping 177 ‘Good Imagination, A’ 172 Goodfellas 218 Goodlatte, Jack 73 Gordon, Bert I. 57, 60, 63 Gordon, Richard and Katharine 8 Gordon, Robert 60, 62 Gordon, Stuart 233 n. 25 Gorgo 66 Gosford Park 232 n. 7 Gothic Flame, The 128
Index Grandenetti, Jerry 6 Grant, Cary 233 n. 26 Gray, Coleen 152 Grease 219 Greene, Nigel 49 Guest, Val 57, 74, 76, 84 Gunsmoke 19 Gwenn, Edmund 58 Haley, Bill 135–6 Halfway to Hell 144 Hall, Charles D. (‘Danny’) 111–12 Hall, Sheldon 53–54 Hall, Stuart 50 Halliday, Jon 223 Halper, Thomas 220 Hammer Studios 72–89, 108–33 Hammet, Dashiel 172 Happy Days 219 Hardwicke, Cedric 111 Harman, Jympson 87 Harryhausen, Ray 59, 64, 98, 100–1, 103 Hartnell, William 49 Hashimoto, Kohji 64 Hattenhauer, Darryl 177 ‘Haunter of the Dark, The’ 168 Haunting, The 188 Haunting of Hill House, The 180, 182–90, 192–3 Haunting of Toby Jugg, The 39 Hawkins, Screamin’ Jay 135 Hawks, Howard 56, 90 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 17 Hay, Will 74 Hayden, Sterling 30 Hayes, Allison 152 Haynes, Todd 12, 217–18, 221–4, 227, 229–31 Haysbert, Dennis 223 Hedison, A. l30 Hedren, Tippi 233 n. 26 Hefner, Hugh 167 Heinlein, Robert A. 91 Hell Drivers 49 Hell is a City 84 Heritage of Horror 113 Herrick, Robert 46 Herz, Michael 68
255
Hibbin, Nina 82 Hidden Persuaders, The 8 Hilton, Joseph 144 Hinds, Anthony 74, 75–6, 86, 88 Hine, Thomas 31 Hitchcock, Alfred 20, 88, 159, 167, 231 Hitler, Adolf 19 Hofstadter, Richard 23, 31 Holmes Smith, Christopher 199 Holt, Tim 61 Honda, Ishiro 57, 63–6 Hoover, J. Edgar 137–9 Horne, Alistair 45 ‘Horror in the Nursery’ 149 Horror of Party Beach, The 67–8 Hot Car Girl 147 Hot Rod Girl 144 Hot Rod Rumble 147 Hot Tub Machine 232 n. 6 Hours, The 222 House and Garden 198 House on 92nd Street, The 58 Hoy, Suellen 27, 31 Hudson, Rock 222–3 Hughes, Ted 35, 208 Huntington, Lawrence 67 Hutton, Robert 67 Huxley, Aldous 4, 14 Hyman, Eliot 76 Hyman, Stanley Edgar 176–9, 194 I Am Legend 11–12 I Dream of Jeanie 225 ‘I Like Blondes’ 166–9 ‘I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent’ 135–6 I Walked With A Zombie 37–8 I Was a Teenage Frankenstein 146, 151 I Was a Teenage Werewolf 66, 146, 151 Imitation of Life 222–4, 226 Impulse 68 Incredible Shrinking Man, The 57, 62–3, 91, 103 Independence Day 70 Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis 211 Invaders from Mars 21
256 Index Invasion USA 23 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) 60, 90 Invasion of the Saucer Men 21, 60 Invisible Invaders 68 Invisible Man (Hammer Studios) 84 Island of Lost Souls, The 113 It Came From Beneath the Sea 59–61 It Came from Outer Space 91, 102 It Conquered the World 21, 102 Jackson, Gordon 11–12, 49, 84 Jackson, Rosemary 182 Jackson, Shirley 176–97, 206 Jacobson, Mark 70 James, M.R. 36, 50 James, Sid 49 Jameson, Fredric 220 Jancovich, Mark 10,162–3, 171 Johnson, Tor 57 Johnston, Claire 37 Johnston, Derek 10 Jones, Darby 46 Jones, Darryl 12 Jones, Ernest 128–9 Joshi, S.T. 168 Journal (Plath) 202 Joyce, James 164 Judas Hole, The 82 Jungle Drums of Africa 59 Juran, Nathan 61 Juvenile Jungle 144 Kael, Pauline 31 Kafka, Franz 179 Kaiji Shima No Kessen: Gojira No Musuku (aka Son of Godzilla) 65 Kaiju Daisenso (aka Monster Zero) 65 Kaiju Soshingeki (aka Destroy All Monsters) 65 Kaneko, Shusuke 69 Ka of Gifford Hillary, The 39 Karloff, Boris 18, 29, 56, 66, 73, 82, 111, 113, 151 Keats, John 8 Kelly, Grace 231 Kennedy, David 199 Keys, Basil 48 ‘Kidnapper, The’ 171
Kim, Kiduck 67 King, Stephen 9, 15, 71,162, 219 King Kong (1933) 18, 57, 96 Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (aka King King Versus Godzilla) 64 Kinsey, Wayne 14 Kiss Me Deadly 28 Kiss of the Vampire, The 81 Kluckhohn, Clyde 193–4 Kneale, Nigel 73, 76, 93, 101 Koch, Howard 66 Kotetsu No Kyojn (aka Atomic Rulers of the World) 59 Kowalksi, Bernard L. 67 Kraken Wakes, The 91 Kramer, Stanley 29 Kristeva, Julia 165 Kristol, Irving 13 Kubrick, Stanley 30 Kynaston, David 16, 33–4, 45, 51 L.A. Zombie 233 n. 25 LaBruce, Bruce 233 n. 25 Ladies’ Day 202–4 Ladies’ Home Journal 201–2 ‘Lady Lazarus’ 209 Lake, Veronica 147 Landon, Michael 151 Lang, Fritz 37 Langer, Susanne E. 193 Lasch, Christopher 203 Lassie Come Home 225 Lauer, Arnold 61 Laughton, Charles 111 Le Fanu, Sheridan 88, 208 Le Roy, Mervyn 2 Leakey, Phil 108 Leavis, F.R. 111 Leavis, Q.D. 111, 127 Lee, Christopher 14, 89, 108, 109, 125–7, 130 Leech Woman, The 152 Lefebvre, Henri 191 Leiber, Fritz 180 Lejeune, C.A. 82, 84, 112 ‘Lesbos’ 205 Let Me In 88 Let the Right One In 88 Lewis, Matthew 111
Index Lewis, Peter 201 Lewisham, Lady 85 Lewton, Val 37 Lichtenstein, Roy 5 Life Among the Savages 180 Life with the Lyons 73 Lights Out 20 Lindner, Robert M. 137 Little Richard 135 Lom, Herbert 49 London After Dark 42 ‘Lord of the Castle’ 180 Lorre, Peter 18, 26 Losey, Joseph 66 Lost Continent, The 20, 56, 95 ‘Lottery, The’ 178, 180 Lourie, Eugene 66 Lovecraft, H.P. 158, 163, 167–8, 172 Lucas, George 100 Lugosi, Bela 18, 28, 111, 113, 117, 126–8 Lymon, Frankie 135–6 Lynch, David 219–20 MGM 114 Macbeth 115 Macmillan, Harold 13, 34, 45 Mad Love 18 Mad Men 231 Mademoiselle 202 Magee, Patrick 49 Magick in Theory and Practice 42 Magnificent Obsession 222 Magnolia 222 Maguire, Tobey 220 Mailer, Norman 8, 9, 14 Malinowski, Bronislaw 193 Malleson, Miles 116 Man-Made-Monster 59 ‘Man Who Collected Poe, The’ 169–71, 173 Man in Black, The 73 ‘Mannikins of Horror’ 168 Mansfield, Jayne 150 March, William 1 Markey, Janice 202, 204, 206 Marsh, Carol 117 Martin, Leslie 44 Martinson, Leslie H. 57
257
Marx, Karl 207 Matango (aka Fungus of Terror, Attack of the Mushroom People) 65 Matheson, Richard 11, 63, 92 Matthew, Robert 44 Matthews Jr., Ernest L. 142 Maynard Keynes, John 34 McArthur, Douglas 25 McCallum, David 49 McCarthy, Elizabeth 11 McCarthy, Joseph 23, 27 McDonalds 199, 212 McGinnis, Niall 36, 42 McGoohan, Patrick 49 McLachlan, Kyle 220 Mead, Margaret 176, 193 Medovoi, Leerom 138 Meka Gojira No Gyakushu (aka Monster from an Unknown Planet) 65 Melville, Herman 177, 179 Midwich Cuckoos, The 13, 91 Mighall, Robert 129 Milland, Ray 20 Millennium Movies 70 Mills, John 126 Mind at the End of Its Tether 17 Mister Ed 225 Mister Rock and Roll 135 Moby Dick 177 Monk, The 111 Monster From Green Hell 67 Monster From the Ocean Floor 21, 102 Monster on Campus 103 ‘Monsters are Due on Maple Street, The’ 12 Monster that Challenged the World, The 27, 60–1 Monthly Film Bulletin 93, 95, 97–9, 102–3 Moore, Julianne 222 Moorehead, Agnes 147, 224 Morgan, Marabel 211 Morton, Rev Arthur 87 Moss, Carrie Anne 226 Most Dangerous Man Alive, The 57, 62 Mosura (aka Mothra) 64 Mosura tai Gojira (aka Godzilla Versus the Thing) 64 Motorcycle Gang 146
258 Index Mr Drake’s Duck 57 Mulvey, Laura 217 Mummy, The (1959) 84, 109 Munsters, The 225 Murders in the Rue Morgue 113 Murphy, Bernice M. 12, 192 Murray, Margaret 38–9, 52 Mutant 68 Muzzio, Douglas 220 My Favorite Martian 225 My Mother the Car 225 Mysteries of Udolpho, The 111 Mystery Story 93
Omori, Kazuki 69 On the Beach 28–9, 31–2 On the Nightmare 128 On the Threshold of Space 95 Operation Petticoat 29 Oppenheim, Janet 46, 52 Oppenheimer, Judy 180 Oppenheimer, Robert J. 17, 19, 61 Orwell, George 13, 132 ‘Ouija’ 207 Out There 96 Out of Bounds 142 Owen, Alex 47
Naked City, The 58 Neal, Patricia 21 Nesmith, Ottolo 22 Never Had it So Good 13 Never Take Sweets from a Stranger 84–6 New Statesman, The 73 New York Times, The 91, 95–8, 101–2, 137 New Yorker, The 177–8 Newfield, Samuel 56 Newman, Kim 10–11 Nicholls, John 79, 80–1, 121–2 Nietzsche, Friedrich 167 Nightmare Man, The 67 Night of the Demon 13, 33–54,180 Night of the Living Dead 68, 226, 228 Nihonmatsu, Kazui, Uchu daikaiji Girara (aka The X From Outer Space) 66 Noguchi, Haruyasu 66 Norman, Leslie 66 Northanger Abbey 110 North by Northwest 233 n. 26 Nosferatu 117, 126 Not of this Earth 102 Nueman, Kurt 59 Nuttall, Jeff 13 Nutty Professor, The 84 Nyby, Christian 56
PC 49 73 Packard, Vance 8, 200 Pal, George 20, 23, 95, 100 Panic in the Streets 58 Parents 219–20 Patterson, James 4–5, 15 Pauling, Linus 29 Pearson, Roberta 92–3 Peck, Gregory 29 Peggy Sue Got Married 218–19 Penzoldt, Peter 128 Perkins, Anthony 29, 167 Perloff, Marjorie 205 Phantom of the Opera, The (1962) 84 Philosophical Enquiry, A 111 Picasso, Pablo 167 Pirie, David 113, 128 Place of Enchantment, The 47 Planet Stories 148 Plath, Sylvia 7, 35, 173, 177, 198–215 Platters, The 135 Playboy 166 Pleasantville 220–21 Poe, Edgar Allan 109, 158, 163, 164, 169–72, 176, 180, 185 ‘Poe and Lovecraft’ 163–4, 170 ‘Poem for a Birthday’ 209 Poetics of Space, The 182, 184–6 Pony Cart, The 84–5 Post, Sylvia 5, 15 Potter, David 200 Powell, Dilys 113 Praz, Mario 128 Preminger, Otto 11
Oboler, Arch 20 Observer 79, 82, 84, 112 Octaman 67 Okowara, Takao 68 Old Yeller 223 Olivier, Laurence 109
Index Presley, Elvis 137 Price, Vincent 109 Priest, Christopher 94 Priest, J.C. 142 ‘Princess, The’ 210, 211 Private School 142 Problem Girls 149 Probyn, Elspeth 212 Project M7 95 Proust, Marcel 164 Psychiatric Quarterly, The 149 Psycho 29, 158–62, 167, 171, 173, 174 Puppet Masters, The 91 Purity and Danger 183–4 ‘Pursuit’ 210 Pyramid Climbers, The 8 Quaid, Dennis 223 Quandt, Albert L. 144 Quatermass II 76, 93 Quatermass Xperiment, The Queen of Outer Space 97
73–5, 93
‘Rabbit Catcher, The’ 209 Radcliffe, Ann 111 Radcliffe, Daniel 89 Radio Times, The 100 Rains, Claude 111 Raising Demons 180 Randell, Ron 57 Ray, K’Sun 226 Ray, Nicholas 137 Ray 218 Re-Animator 233 n. 25 Reagan, Ronald 216 Rebel Without a Cause (book) 137 Rebel Without a Cause (film) 137–8, 146 Red Planet Mars 21–3 Redmond, Liam 36 Reform School Girl 146 Reiner, Rob 219 Reisman, David 8 Rennie, Michael 20 Reno, Jean 70 Renoir, Jean 37 Report from Space 96 Reptile, The 108
259
Requiem for a Heavyweight 101 Resident, The 88 Revenge of Frankenstein 82–3, 123 Revenge of the Creature 103 Revolutionary Road 218 Reynold’s News 74, 79 Richardson, Maurice 128–9 Robinson, Bernard 124, 132 Robinson, Edwin Arlington 176 Rock, Rock, Rock! 76, 135 Rock All Night 146 Rock Around the Clock (film) 135–6 ‘Rock Around the Clock’ (song) 136 Rocketship Galileo 91 Rocketship X-M 56 Rock’n’Roll Gal 144 Rodan 64 Rodgers, Gaby 28 Romantic Agony, The 128 Romero, Caesar 56 Romero, George A. 68, 225, 228 Rooney, Mickey 57 Rosenberg, Ethel and Julius 20, 24, 25 Rosenberg, Max 76 Rubin, Steve 58 Runaway Daughters 146 Ruskin, John 112 Sacred and the Profane, The 182, 183 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de 128, 210 Sadeian Woman, The 210 Sadleir, Michael 128 Safe 222 San Daik Aiju Chikyi Sandai No Kessen (aka Ghidra the Three-Headed Monster) 64 Sandbrook, Dominic 16, 51 Sangster, Jimmy 74, 77, 80, 82, 114–17, 121, 123–4, 126, 130 Sapphire 84 Sartre, John Paul 24 Sasdy, Peter 68 Saturday Evening Post 92, 180 Saw IV 72 ‘Scarf, The’ 171 Schatz, Thomas 100 Scott, Ridley 164
260 Index Searle, Ronald 33, 51 Sears, Fred F. 66 Seddok, L’Erede di Santana, (aka Atom Age Vampire) 59 Seeing is Believing 71 Sensational Exposés 145 Serling, Rod 12, 29, 101–2 Sevareid, Eric 136 Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, The 95 ‘Shadow from the Steeple, The’ 168–9 Shake, Rattle & Roll! 146 ‘Shambler from the Stars, The’ 168 Shaun of the Dead 225 Shederman, Ted 58 Shelley, Mary 20, 22, 28, 82, 109 ‘Shelter, The’ 12 Sherdeman, Ted 25 Shoedsack, Ernest, B. 18 Shrinking Man, The 63 Shute, Nevil 28 Shutter Island 218 Siegel, Don 90 Silent Spring, The 30 Sirk, Douglas 12, 37, 217, 218, 221, 222–25, 228 Skal, David J. 10 Slime People, The 67 Slithis 67 Smith, Kent 37 Snyder, Zack 217 Sobchak, Vivian 100 Sondheim, Stephen 5 Sontag, Susan 55 Sorority Girl 146 Spellbound 20 Spencer, Douglas 56 Spender, Stephen 13 Spengler, Oswald 164 Spider, The (aka Earth Versus the Spider) 62 Spielberg, Steven 100 Split, The (aka The Manster) 65 Split Level Trap, The 8 Springhall, John 137 Stack, Robert 223 Stalin, Joseph 39, 50 Stand by Me 219 Standford, Peter 50, 60
Star Trek: The Next Generation 92 Stars in My Crown 36 Startling Stories 148 Status Seekers, The 8 Steinberg, Michael 201 Stevens, Inger 29 Stevenson, Adlai 23 Stevenson, Robert Louis 109 Stoker, Bram 80, 109, 115, 127–8, 130, 132 Stranglers of Bombay, The 84, 115 Stribling, Melissa 117, 121, 125, 127 ‘String of Pearls’ 165 Strock, Herbert L. 66 Subotsky, Milton 76 Suddenly, Last Summer 29 ‘Suicide off Egg Rock’ 211 Summers, Montague 127 Sunday Times, The 113 Sundial, The 11 Super-Science Fiction 163 ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ 167 Supernatural in Fiction, The 128 Suspect 172 Sutcliffe, Denham 177 Swank, Hilary 88 Sweet, Matthew 129–30 Takadara, Akira 64 Tale of Two Cities, A 126 Tamiroff, Akim 67 Tangled Bank, The 178 Tarantula 27 Teen-Age Romances 150 Teen-Age Temptations 150 Teenage Caveman 102 Teenagers from Outer Space 136 Teller, Edward 19 Telotte, J.P. 99–100 Ten Commandments, The (1956) 99, 100 Tenney, Del 67 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 210 The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit 233 n. 27 Them! 25–6, 30, 57–9, 66, 68, 74 Thesiger, Ernest 111 Thing From Another World, The 19–20, 55, 60, 90
Index ‘Thinking Cap, The’ 162–4 This Island Earth 98 This Woman is Dangerous 25 Thomas, Keith 212 Thompson, E.P. 13, 15, 25, 50–1 Those Red Heads From Seattle 25 Timeslip (aka The Atomic Man) 57, 59 Tobey, Kenneth 61 Today’s Cinema 89 Todd, Richard 126 Tom Jones 110 Tomboy 142 Torres, Tereska 142 Total Joy 211 ‘Tour, The’ 205–6 Tourneur, Jacques 35–8, 47–8, 51,180 Toxic Avenger, The 68 Traxler, Stephen 67 Trevelyan, John 86–8 True Blood 82 Truman, Harry 19 Tudor, Andrew 90 Twain, Mark 176 Twilight Zone, The 12, 101–2 Two Faces of Dr Jekyll, The 84 ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’ 210–11 U-238 and the Witch Doctor 59 Uchi Daikiju Dogura (aka Dagura the Space Monster) 66 Ugly Duckling, The 84 Ulmer, Edgar G. 37 Unidentified Flying Objects 95 Uninvited, The 67 Universal Studios 72, 73, 116–17, 126, 127 Van Cleef, Lee 59 Van Doren, Mamie 147 Van Ghent, Dorothy 176, 178 Variety 95, 98, 102–3 Varma, Devendra P. 128 ‘Very Strange House Next Door, The’ (aka ‘Strangers in Town’) 180 Village of the Giants 62 Violent Years, The 143 Vulture, The 67
261
Wagner-Martin, Linda 201 Walk the Line 218 Walpole, Horace 111 War Game, The 13 War of the Colossal Beast 27, 61 War of the Worlds, The (1953) 23, 74 War of the Worlds, The (novel) 91 Wasp Woman 152 ‘Waste Land, The’ 1, 178 Wastemakers, The 8 Watch It, Sailor! 84 Watkins, Arthur 75, 78 We Have Always Lived in the Castle 178, 182, 189–94 Weber, Max 46–7, 52 Webling, Peggy 21 Weil, Sam 68 Weird Tales 168 Weiss, Joe 144 Weldon, Joan 58 Wells, H.G. 17, 31, 91 Werewolf, The 66 Wertham, Fredric 142, 149–50 West Side Story 5 Whaam! 5–6 Whale, James 22, 111–12 Wheatley, Dennis 39–43, 45, 52 When Worlds Collide 20, 95 Whispers in a Distant Corridor 38 ‘White Negro, The’ 8–9 Whitmore, James 58 Whittington, Harry 144 Whizz for Atomms 34 Wilbur, Richard 176, 180 Wild One, The 147 Wilde, Brian 41 Wilder, Billy 37 Willans, Geoffrey 33, 51 Willemen, Paul 37 Williams, Geoffrey 33, 51 Williams, Grant 57 Willis, Sharon 223 Wilson, A.N. 130 Wilson, Colin St. John 44 Wilson, Harold 34 Wilson, Jackie 135 Wilson, Sloane 233 n. 27 Wise, Robert 20, 188 Wiseman, Thomas 87
262 Index Witherspoon, Reese 220 Witness against the Beast 51 Wolf Man, The 173 Wolfe, Tom 5 Woman in Black, The 9 Women Outlaws 148 Women’s Barracks 142 Wonder Woman 149 Wood, Ed 28 Wood, Natalie 146 Woodbridge, George 116 World, The Flesh and the Devil, The World Without End 57 Worthing Yates, George 25–6 Wray, Fay 153 Written on the Wind 222–3
Wyman, Jane 222 Wyndham, John 13, 91, 94 X the Unknown
29
66, 74–5, 122
Yasua, Noriaka 69 Yeats, Richard 218 Yeats, W.B. 198 Yesterday’s Enemy 84 Yongary, Monster From the Deep 67 Young Elizabethan 33, 35 Young Love 150 Young and Wild 146 Zip-Gun Angels 144 Zulu 49

Allied Artists Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films
ALSO
BY MICHAEL R. PITTS AND FROM MCFARLAND
Columbia Pictures Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, 1928 –1982 (2010) Western Film Series of the Sound Era (2009) Poverty Row Studios, 1929 –1940: An Illustrated History of 55 Independent Film Companies, with a Filmography for Each (1997; paperback 2005) Charles Bronson: The 95 Films and the 156 Television Appearances (1999; paperback 2003) Horror Film Stars, 3d ed. (2002) Western Movies: A TV and Video Guide to 4200 Genre Films (1986; paperback 1997) Hollywood and American History: A Filmography of Over 250 Motion Pictures Depicting U.S. History (1984)
Allied Artists Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films MICHAEL R. PITTS
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARY
OF
CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Pitts, Michael R. Allied Artists horror, science fiction and fantasy films / Michael R. Pitts. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-6046-5 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Allied Artists Pictures Corporation — Catalogs. 2. Motion pictures — United States — Catalogs. 3. Horror films — United States — Catalogs. 4. Science fiction films — United States — Catalogs. 5. Fantasy films — United States — Catalogs. I. Title. PN1999.A4P58 2011 791.430973 — dc22 2011006773 BRITISH LIBRARY
CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
© 2011 Michael R. Pitts. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Poster art from the 1959 film The Giant Behemoth, originally titled Behemoth, the Sea Monster (Allied Artists/Photofest) Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com
For my grandson, Jacob Michael Cruz
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Table of Contents Preface
1
FEATURE FILMS
3
TELEVISION FEATURES REISSUES
181
227
Theatrical Films in Chronological Order 233 Bibliography Index
vii
235 237
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Preface When Screen Gems released its “Shock!” and “Son of Shock!” packages of old Universal and Columbia horror films to television in the late 1950s, it opened a floodgate of popularity for horror, science fiction and fantasy films that has yet to abate. Living in Central Indiana, I was able to see these wonderful movies on WISH-TV, Channel 8, when they were presented by the hugely popular horror host, Selwin. From 1958 to 1961 the classic movie monsters were seen each Friday night until Selwin began showing Tarzan and Bomba movies on an afternoon show called Selwin on Saturday. In the spring of 1962 he was back on late Fridays wearing a silver spacesuit purchased from the Captain Company and presenting a new flock of scary movies, this time from Allied Artists. It was evident these more modern fright fest offerings were of a different (lesser) breed than the monster movies of yore, but they had a lure of their own. Many a baby boomer got hooked on horror movies watching these Allied releases and after nearly a half century they retain a place in the hearts of genre followers. From 1952 to 1978 Allied Artists Pictures Corporation released over 80 feature films in the horror, science fiction and fantasy film categories. Like most of the studios’ product, they were mainly average outings but there were some top-notch productions like House on Haunted Hill, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Macabre, The Maze, Not of This Earth and World Without End. At the other end of the spectrum, the company was responsible for the release of movies like The Bride and the Beast, The Disembodied, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, From Hell It Came and Mission Mars. Somewhere in the middle come such favorites as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, The Atomic Submarine, The Bat, Black Zoo, Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, The Giant Behemoth, Queen of Outer Space and The Strangler. For traditionalists there is John Carradine in The Cosmic Man, Lon Chaney in Indestructible Man and The Cyclops and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein 1970 and The Sorcerers. One of the studio’s most popular series was “The Bowery Boys” and several of their entries involved horror, sci-fi or fantasy. Allied also imported the genre features Blood and Black Lace, Caltiki the Immortal Monster, Crow Hollow, Island of the Doomed, The Magic Weaver and Moonwolf. There were even some sex horror imports, including Blood Rose and Eugenie. Allied Artists’ history goes back to the silent days when W. Ray Johnston started Rayart Productions in 1924; it became Syndicate Film Exchange in 1928. With the coming of sound there were a few releases under the banners Continental Talking Pictures and Raytone, and then in 1931 the company became Monogram Pictures. In 1935 Johnston and Trem Carr, who was in charge of production, merged Monogram with several other studios (Mascot, Majestic, Liberty) and Consolidated Film Industries to form Republic Pictures Corporation. In 1937 Johnston re-started Monogram and the company returned to motion picture production. Among its product was some horror movies, including some with Bela Lugosi in the 1940s. In 1946 Johnston became chairman of the studio’s board and general sales manager Steve Broidy succeeded him as Monogram’s president. Since Monogram was associated with 1
2
Preface
program pictures, Broidy formed Allied Artists Productions in 1946 to make prestige productions. By 1953, Allied Artists Pictures Corporation completely phased out Monogram. For the next 13 years Allied Artists continued to make and/or distribute a variety of films, including the big-budget items Friendly Persuasion (1956), Love in the Afternoon (1957), The Big Circus (1959) and 55 Days at Peking (1963). Two of the studio’s biggest moneymakers were producer-director William Castle’s initial “gimmick” productions Macabre (1958) and House on Haunted Hill (1959). In 1965 Broidy left Allied Artists and was succeeded by Claude A. Giroux. The company went into television and quit making films in 1966. Two years later, Emanuel L. Wolf took over the company and for the next several years Allied mainly released imports before resuming film production with the big-budget affairs Cabaret (1972), Papillon (1973), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and The Betsy (1978). With dwindling revenue, Allied Artists joined Kalvex, Inc./PSP, Inc., to form Allied Artists Industries in 1976 but declared bankruptcy three years later. In 1980 Lorimar Productions purchased the company’s film library; Time Warner bought Lorimar in 1988. Today most of the Allied Artists film library is under the control of Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. Allied was one of the first to go into TV distribution with its Interstate Television Corporation, a subsidiary that released most of the old Monogram product to television stations. As Allied Artists Television Corporation, the studio had nearly 400 feature films available to television stations in 14 different packages, plus an additional 135 Monogram westerns in five more packages, in the mid–1970s. Twenty-two of these movies, although released theatrically by other companies, are discussed in this volume since it was Allied that made them available to the small screen. In one case, Hand of Power, this proved to be the movie’s first U.S. showing. Also included in the text is Allied’s 1963 double-bill reissue of the Jack H. Harris productions The Blob and Dinosaurus! In the summer of 1978, the studio formed Allied Artists Video Corporation, a subsidiary that planned to release some 500 titles on video. Thus Allied became the first major studio distributor to tap the VCR market. It released over 100 titles in both the Beta and VHS formats before being shuttered by Lorimar in the fall of 1980. This volume takes a look at the genre films of Allied Artists between 1952 and 1978, along with the already noted TV releases and the two 1963 reissues. I have tried to give balanced coverage of these films, including both personal and critics’ comments as well as detailed plot synopsis, casts and credits. Films are in black and white unless otherwise noted. I have a special fondness for the Allied product, especially those from the 1950s into the mid–1960s, and I hope this work will encourage others to take a look at these entertaining movies. Thanks to the video market, most of them are available for viewing. Some sources list Queen of Spades, a 1948 British film, as a 1950 Allied release but it was issued under the Monogram banner in the U.S. Another alleged Allied release is the 1976 West German production Superbug, but it was issued stateside by Scorpio International and Central Park Films. Included in the TV section is the 1962 film This Is Not a Test which at least one source claims to be an Allied release but its only theatrical showings seem to have been through Modern Films. I would like to thank Len D. Martin, Gary Kramer, Ray White and James Robert Parish for their help with this book. While Allied Artists was not in the top echelon, the studio kept up a steady program of popular low-budget movies and many of their horror, science fiction and fantasy films have more than stood the test of time. Most important, they continue to entertain. I hope you enjoy reading about them.
Feature Films The Atomic Man (1956; 78 minutes) Producer: Alec C. Snowden. Director: Ken Hughes. Screenplay: Charles Eric Maine, from his novel The Isotope Man. Photography: A.T. Dinsdale. Editor: Geoffrey Muller. Music Director: Richard Taylor. Art Director: George Haslam. Sound: Ronald Abbott. Production Manager: Jim O’Connolly. Makeup: Jack Craig. Wardrobe: June Kirby. Continuity: Marjorie Owens. Assistant Directors: Denis Johnson and Ted Sturgis. CAST: Gene Nelson (Mike Delaney), Faith Domergue ( Jill Rabowski), Donald Gray (Robert Maitland), Joseph Tomelty (Detective Inspector Cleary), Leonard Williams (Detective Sergeant Haines), Barry MacKay (Inspector Hammond), Peter Arne (Dr. Stephen Grant Rayner/Jarvis), Martin Wyldeck (Dr. Preston), Mary Jones (Sister Brown), Philip Dale (Dr. Peters), Carl Jaffe (Dr. Marks), Patricia Driscoll, Phillipa Hiatt (X-Ray Assistants), Gordon Bell (Assistant Surgeon), Ian Cooper (Anesthetist), Vanda Godsell (Stenographer), Launce Maraschal (Editor Alcott), Charles Hawtrey (Office Boy), Vic Perry (Emmanuel Vasquo), Paul Hardmuth (Dr. Bressler), Dervis Ward (Allegan), Anthony Woodruffe (Nuclear Physicist), Brian O’Higgins (Barman Pat).
When an unconscious man is pulled from the Thames River near Duggan’s Wharf in London and sent to a hospital, his photograph is familiar to science writer Mike Delaney (Gene Nelson). With his girlfriend, news photographer Jill Rabowski (Faith Domergue), Mike comes to believe the man is Dr. Stephen Rayner (Peter Arne) of the Brandt Nuclear Research Institute. A world-renowned physicist, Rayner is known as the Isotope Man because of his work with atomic energy. Mike and Jill go to the hospital where the man is pronounced dead following an operation to remove a bullet from his back. The operation was performed by Dr. Preston (Martin Wyldeck). After a shot of adrenalin, the patient revives. Mike shows his picture to the doctor and Inspector Cleary ( Joseph Tomelty) and both agree there is a resemblance to the scientist. A check at the institute by Sergeant Haines (Leonard Williams) proves that Rayner is there. At the hospital, Jill takes a picture of the revived man. The next day Mike goes to visit his old friend Robert Maitland (Donald Gray), Brandt’s director. He also meets Rayner, who shows no interest in the photograph of the man in the hospital and mentions that he is working on a project that could have worldwide effects. Mike’s editor (Launce Maraschal) orders him to quit the Rayner case and stick to scientific writing. After noticing that all the photos of the revived man have the same foggy glow, Mike goes back to see Maitland, who says the effect might be caused by static electricity. Since the man in the hospital complains of headaches and has a high fever, Dr. Preston orders an x-ray be taken but there is a malfunction due to radioactivity in the room. Mike and Preston talk to the revived man but he only rambles and mentions “Vasquo” and UTC. Mike and Jill go to Rayner’s residence where she takes his photograph. As they leave, Mike is intrigued to see a hat with the initials EV which came from Buenos Aires. Rayner, whose real name is Jarvis, meets with Dr. 3
4
Feature Films
Bressler (Paul Hardmuth), the plastic surgeon who made him look like Rayner. Jarvis tells his employer, Argentine businessman Emmanuel Vasquo (Vic Perry), that a test of the new formula will result in an explosion that will destroy the institute and its inhabitants. Jill reveals that the man pretending to be Rayner is a fake because the photo she took of him has no glow. Mike is fired by his editor for working on the Rayner case and not the assignment given to him. Mike gets permission from Dr. Preston to question the man in the hospital but his responses make no sense until Jill transcribes them to show that he answers questions before they are asked. Preston tells them that the man’s heart stopped for seven or eight seconds before he was revived. They learn the wounded man had been abducted by Vasquo’s operatives. Mike deduces that Rayner developed a formula for synthetic tungsten and Vasquo wants it destroyed since his company, United Tungsten Corporation (or UTC), controls two-thirds of the world’s supply of that mineral. Jarvis goes to the institute and plants a plutonium bomb in the nuclear reactor but is distressed to learn that the scheduled test will be delayed several hours. That night someone shoots at Mike in front of his apartment building. When Jill goes there the next morning, she finds him with Inspector Haines, who is questioning him about the attack. Delaney goes with Haines to see Inspector Cleary and there he meets Dr. Marks (Carl Jaffe), a psychoanalyst who says that when Rayner’s heart stopped, his brain continued to function and when revived his consciousness was 7.5 seconds ahead of his physical self. He theorizes that this happened due to the scientist’s long involvement with radioactivity. Jill borrows an ice pick from a barman (Brian O’Higgins) and breaks into the Argentine’s UTC office. Vasquo learns from an informant (Vanda Godsell) at the hospital that Rayner has been given an antidote that has brought him back to real time and that he recalls his kidnapping. Vasquo orders Bressler to kill Rayner but the surgeon cannot make himself commit the crime. Bressler leaves behind a syringe filled with poison. Mike, Cleary and Dr. Marks go to see Rayner and when they pass Bressler in the hall, Marks recognizes him. Mike finds out that Bressler tried to get rid of Rayner and tells Cleary. A police dragnet is launched for Vasquo and the fake Rayner as the plastic surgeon is brought in on a stretcher after having committed suicide by jumping in front of a car. Jill calls Mike to tell him she found photographs of Rayner in Vasquo’s office but the crook and his henchman (Dervis Ward) show up. Arriving at the Argentine’s office, Mike finds it empty but answers the telephone and is told to go to Duggan’s Wharf, where a boat is waiting. There he discovers Jill is a prisoner at a warehouse. During a shootout, Vasquo is accidentally killed by his henchman, who is then shot by Delaney. Jill informs Mike that Vasquo planned to blow up the institute and they take Jarvis to the site just in time to have Maitland halt the test. Cleary shows them the plutonium bomb found there by his men. Mike and Jill decide to carry out their own experiments in romance. The sci-fi element of The Atomic Man deals with Rayner’s mind jumping 7.5 seconds into the future following the stoppage of his heart for that length of time. Outside of the sequence of his answering questions before they are asked and the use of a tape recorder to match his answers with previously asked queries, the feature is basically an anemic espionage thriller, slow-moving and methodical. Produced in England at Merton Park Studios, it was issued in that country in 1955 by Anglo-Amalgamated Film Distributors as Timeslip with a 93-minute running time. When Allied Artists released it in the U.S. as The Atomic Man in March 1956, it was cut by thirteen minutes. In some stateside venues it was double-billed with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (q.v.). David Quinlan reported in British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928 –1959 (1984), “For [the] unlikely plot to succeed, [the] film has to be fast and exciting: it is.” Donald C.
The Atomic Submarine
5
Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972) opined, “No story to go with the intriguing central gimmick.” Ed Naha agreed in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975) when he wrote, “[T]his production presents an interesting premise that doesn’t get a full plot treatment.” VideoHound’s Sci-Fi Experience (1997) noted, “Preposterous but intriguing idea is wasted in this dull, talky British feature.” The same year The Atomic Man debuted in its homeland as Timeslip, Faith Domergue also starred in It Came from Beneath the Sea, Cult of the Cobra and This Island Earth. Her later genre efforts were Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965), Legacy of Blood and The House of Seven Corpses (both 1972). Best known as a movie dancer, top-billed Gene Nelson turned to directing and helmed Hand of Death (1962). Director Ken Hughes also directed The Brain Machine (1954), a segment of Casino Royale (1967), the fantasy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the slasher thriller Night School (1981). The feature’s production manager, Jim O’Connolly, went on to write the well-liked sci-fier The Night Caller (1965), released stateside as Blood Beast from Outer Space; he directed the topnotch Joan Crawford thriller Berserk! (1967) and the entertaining The Valley of Gwangi (1968), as well as serving as producerdirector on Horror on Snape Island (1971), also known as Tower of Evil and Beyond the Fog.
The Atomic Submarine (1959; 72 minutes) Producers: Alex Gordon and Henry Schrage. Associate Producer–Screenplay: Orville H. Hampton. Producer Associates: Irving Block and Jack Rabin. Director: Spencer G. Bennet. Photography: Gilbert Warrenton. Editor: William Austin. Music: Alexander Laszlo. Art Directors: Don Ament and Daniel Haller. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Harry Reif. Production Manager: Edward Morey, Jr. Makeup: Emile Lavigne. Special Effects: Irving Block, Louis DeWitt and Jack Rabin. Wardrobe: Norah Sharpe and Roger J. Weinberg. Assistant Director: Clark Paylow. CAST: Arthur Franz (Lieutenant Commander Richard “Reef ” Holloway), Dick Foran (Commander Dan Wendover), Brett Halsey (Dr. Carl Neilson, Jr.), Tom Conway (Sir Ian Hunt), Paul Dubov (Lieutenant David Milburn), Bob Steele (Chief Petty Officer “Griff ” Griffin), Victor Varconi (Dr. Clifford Kent), Joi Lansing ( Julie), Selmer Jackson (Commander Terhune), Jack Mulhall (Secretary of Defense Justin Murdock), Jean Moorhead (Helen Milburn), Richard Tyler (Carney), Sid Melton (Chester Tuttle), Ken Becker (Powell), Frank Watkins (Watkins), Everett Creach (Seaman), Edmund Cobb, Frank Lackteen (Strollers), John Hillard (Alien Voice), Pat Michaels (Narrator).
Nostalgia fans like the films of producer Alex Gordon, if for no other reason than he stocked his movies with old-time players. After working as one of
Dick Foran, Arthur Franz and Paul Dubov in The Atomic Submarine (1959)
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the founding producers of American International Pictures, Gordon came to Allied Artists with The Atomic Submarine, which the studio released late in 1959. True to form, it was loaded with veteran players: Dick Foran, Tom Conway, Bob Steele, Victor Varconi, Jack Mulhall, Selmer Jackson, Edmund Cobb and Frank Lackteen. In fact, the familiar faces were the highlight of this science fiction effort that offered Electro-Sonic music, grainy stock footage and rather unconvincing miniatures. The alien creature in the feature is an H.P. Lovecraft–like monstrosity, a dark squid-type creature with tentacles and a huge eye. The production moves at a fairly steady clip and, while obviously made on a low budget, it probably did not disappoint viewers upon its initial release. The depths of the Arctic Circle corridor are closed by the military after ships and submarines are blown up by an unknown force. After the atomic submarine Sturgeon is destroyed, a meeting is called at the Pentagon by Bureau of Arctic Defense head Admiral Terhune (Selmer Jackson). There he introduces Dan Wendover (Foran), commander of the atomic submarine Tiger Shark, to Secretary of Defense Justin Murdock (Mulhall), Nobel Prize–winning scientist Sir Ian Hunt (Conway) and his colleague Dr. Clifford Kent (Varconi). Wendover is told that his sub will be equipped with ultra-modern tracking devices, warheads and the Lung Fish, a diving bell. His mission is to find and stop whatever is destroying the seagoing craft. Lieutenant Commander Richard “Reef ” Holloway (Franz), Wendover’s executive officer, is on shore leave making love to beautiful blonde Julie (Lansing) but is interrupted by a telegram telling him to immediately report for duty. At the Bremerton Navy Yard he finds Chief Petty Officer “Griff ” Griffin (Steele) screening the men who are returning to the vessel. On board he is upset to find that he is bunking with Dr. Carl Neilson, Jr. (Brett Halsey), the son of his mentor. He dislikes the young scientist, who developed the Lung Fish with his father, because Carl’s pacifistic views caused the elder Neilson to resign his Navy commission and concentrate on scientific work. Also on board the submarine are Hunt, Kent and two frogmen, Carney (Richard Tyler) and Powell (Ken Becker). The submarine heads under the North Pole. Carl gets a telegram saying his father has sufficiently recovered from a heart attack to join the mission but the young man refuses to sacrifice his dad’s health and announces he will carry on in his place, much to Reef ’s chagrin. As the two men are arguing, the craft is hit by a freak electrical storm and a strange craft is seen speeding away. Hunt draws a picture of the mystery vessel and Kent announces that it looks similar to a photograph he has of a flying saucer. Since the alien ship was topped with a light that looked like an eye, Hunt begins referring to it as the Cyclops. As reports come in of further attacks on U.S. vessels, Hunt theorizes that the craft operates on a magnetic field and it has to return to the North Pole to be re-energized. Wendover conceives a plan to have the Tiger Shark wait at a point where the saucer may next strike and then attack it with nuclear warheads. With the submarine on silent running, the men wait for the UFO to appear. When it does, the commander orders the warheads fired. One warhead misses the Arthur Franz in The Atomic Submarine (1959)
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craft and the other is stopped by a jelly-like substance emitted by the flying saucer. Over Carl’s objections, Wendover orders the sub to ram the UFO. In doing so, it pierces and becomes locked into the craft. Both the flying saucer and the sub then sink to a depth of 1,200 feet. Reef suggests the Lung Fish be used to transport him, Lieutenant Milburn (Paul Dubov) and the frogmen to the craft; once inside they might be able to dislodge the sub with blowtorches. Carl pilots the four men to the UFO. Reef, Milburn and the frogmen enter the alien ship through a portal and find that it contains oxygen. As they work to free the submarine, it is noted that radiation levels are rising. Hunt theorizes that the spaceship is returning to “life” and moving toward the Pole. Reef hears a voice calling to him and he and Milburn follow it. Frogman Powell is burned to death by a ray, and in trying to get back to the diving bell Carney is crushed by the closing door of the portal. Reef is told to come alone to an opening and there he sees a giant one-eyed monster with tentacles that communicates with him through thought waves. The alien says it is exploring various worlds for possible habitation. When Milburn tries to shoot the being, it kills him with a death ray. Reef is told that he will return with the alien, along with other specimens, for study. Reef shoots out the monster’s eye and runs back to the diving bell. He tells Wendover to pull the Tiger Shark out of the saucer and he and Carl return to the submarine in the Lung Fish. As the flying saucer speeds back to the North Pole, Reef warns that the world is doomed if the alien is allowed to escape. Their one hope lies in converting the last warhead into a guided missile. After it is readied, the crew waits until the UFO breaks through the ice and rises into the sky. Wendover orders Griff to fire the missile and it destroys the flying saucer. Back at the navy yard, Reef and Carl agree they can work together to stop the aliens if they ever return. Filmed by Gorham Productions in the summer of 1959, The Atomic Submarine has had mixed reviews. Steven H. Scheuer in Movies on TV 1975 –76 Edition (1974) said it “leaves one cold.” In The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope (2000), Joe Kane wrote, “Aside from its nostalgia value, the pic generates genuine suspense….” Ed Naha in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975) noted, “A favorite of TV viewers, this delightfully inept film is fascinating fun to behold…. Brings back fond memories of those great Saturday afternoon matinees.” Writing on more of a highbrow level, Welch Everman in Cult Science Fiction Films (1995) saw a deeper meaning to the production when he referred to it as “another threat-of-invasion movie from the fifties, a period during which Americans expected a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union any day. Movies such as this one spoke directly to our nation’s most pressing fears.” In regards to the plot’s hawkish attitude toward alien invaders, he said that the feature demonstrates “there is no question that atomic submarines and nuclear weapons are good things, and the ending of the film tells us that, as long as science and the military can resolve their differences and work together, everything will be ok — an idea that got harder and harder to swallow as the 1960s wore on.”
Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957; 63 minutes) Producer-Director: Roger Corman. Associate Producer–Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith. Photography: Floyd Crosby. Editor: Charles Gross. Music: Ronald Stein. Makeup: Curly Batson. Assistant Directors: Maurice Vaccarino and Lindsley Parsons, Jr. CAST: Richard Garland (Dale Drewer), Pamela Duncan (Martha Hunter), Russell Johnson (Hank Chapman), Leslie Bradley (Dr. Karl Weigand), Mel Welles ( Jules Deveroux), Richard H. Cutting (Dr. James Carson), Beach Dickerson (Ron Fellows), Tony Miller ( Jack Sommers), Ed Nelson (Ensign Quinlan), Maitland Stuart (Mac), Charles B. Griffith (Tate), Robin Riley, Doug Roberts.
The setting is a small Pacific Ocean atoll that had been the site of fallout from an
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H-bomb test. Navy Ensign Quinlan (Ed Nelson) brings a scientific team to the locale to study the effects of radiation and also try and find their missing predecessors led by Dr. McLean. The head of the group is Dr. Karl Weigand (Leslie Bradley), a nuclear physicist, and joining him are biologists Dale Drewer (Richard Garland) and Martha Hunter (Pamela Duncan); electronics expert Hank Chapman (Russell Johnson); geologist James Carson (Richard H. Cutting ); French botanist Jules Deveroux (Mel Welles); and two Navy demolition men, Ron Fellows (Beach Dickerson) and Jack Sommers (Tony Miller). Deveroux notices the lack of insect noises and jokingly says they may soon hear the voices of the ghosts of McLean and his crew. A seaman falls from a boat while unloading supplies and while he is underwater his head is severed from his body. While getting settled in the house on the atoll, the group is subjected to an earthquake followed by an avalanche. Later they watch as Quinlan’s seaplane takes off ; it explodes and Quinlan and his men are killed. In the laboratory in the house, Hank is unable to make radio contact with the mainland due to a powerful storm. Weigand reads from a journal left by McLean which ends abruptly with a description of finding a portion of a giant worm. After another earthquake, Martha does some underwater exploring and is joined by Dale. When they return to land, Weigand and Carson take them to a deep pit which has just been formed. During the night, Martha hears a voice claiming to be McLean. When she investiPoster for Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957)
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gates she is joined by Carson and the two go to the pit. Carson climbs down just as another tremor is felt and he falls while Martha passes out. The remaining men find the young woman and hear Carson calling to them from the bottom of the pit saying he has a broken leg. As Dale takes Martha back to the house, the rest of the group go through a series of tunnels in hopes of locating Carson. Back at the house, Dale and Martha hear a strange noise and when Dale goes into the lab he is attacked by a large claw. When the other men cannot find Carson, they return to the lab to see it wrecked, food taken and their radio destroyed. Going back to continue to search for Carson, the group is beset by another tremor and Deveroux’s right hand is severed by a falling rock. As Martha tends to Deveroux at the house, Fellows and Sommers play cards in their tent and are attacked by an unseen (by the audience) monster. That night the voices of the two seamen call to Deveroux and he goes to the edge of the pit where he is killed by the claw. Awakened by the botanist’s screams, the others soon hear him talking to them only to find his room is deserted. The next night, Deveroux calls out to the team and asks them to join him in the caves. Weigand, Dale and Hank go there only to be attacked by a giant crab. Bullets and hand grenades fail to stop the creature but it is killed when a huge stone falls on it. Weigand severs one of the beast’s claws. As the trio is about to leave, they are attacked by a second huge crab which Dale delays with a grenade. After examining the severed claw, Weigand concludes that the giants have been created by radiation poisoning; after devouring the brains of their victims, they take on their intelligence and are able to project thoughts in the dead men’s voices. He also states the remaining giant crab is slowly sinking parts of the island by emitting an arc of heat. Martha examines a photo of the surviving crab and it says it is about to give birth. Hank uses electricity to disintegrate the severed claw and Weigand orders him to set up a ray that they will use to kill the second crab. After Hank and Martha place electrical devices in the cave in order to kill the creature, they are chased by the monster but escape by swimming underwater. More landslides take place and the island continues to get smaller. Hank successfully rebuilds a new radio and Martha tells him that she and Dale are going to be married. Weigand and Dale, exploring what is left of the island, see an oil spill and take separate paths trying to find its origin. The physicist goes into the cave where he is stunned by setting off the ray and is devoured by the monster. Seeing his demise, Dale, Martha and Hank go back to the lab. Deveroux’s voice tells them they will soon be absorbed and the giant crabs will continue to attack humans. As a huge earthquake nearly demolishes the atoll, the three survivors make it to a rock jutting into the ocean, where the radio tower still stands. When they fail to stop the beast with their remaining hand grenades, Hank rushes the creature and is injured. As Dale and Martha try to fight off the giant crab, Hank climbs the radio tower and brings it down on the monster with both of them being electrocuted. Made on a $70,000 budget late in 1956 as Attack of the Giant Crabs, the feature was the first made by producer-director Roger Corman that used market research to give a film its title. Allied Artists released it on a double bill with Not of This Earth (q.v.) in February 1957 and the combo went on to gross over one million dollars at the box office. Actor Ed Nelson, along with fellow performer Beach Dickerson and key grip Chuck Hanawalt, operated the crab monster that was made of Styrofoam and was moved by one of the men sequestered in the hollowed-out area behind its face. Running slightly over one hour, Attack of the Crab Monsters moved at a fast clip as most of the cast are devoured by the mutated creatures. The Hollywood Reporter called it “average” and noted that the film “suffers from a
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limited budget.” According to Variety, “It isn’t believable, but it’s fun….” Mark Thomas McGee in Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts (1988) noted, “There are moments when Crab Monsters takes on the characteristics of an old fashioned ghost story when the voices of the victims call to their friends.” In Sleaze Creatures (1995), D. Earl Worth compared the feature to another Corman production: “In many respects, Attack of the Crab Monsters was a carry over from Day the World Ended. Both began with heady anticipation of nuclear spectacle. Aftermaths of the explosions were commented on by similar celestial voices. The characters lived in isolated but comfortable homes. Most sections of their environments looked normal but felt strange. In various ways, the mutants were travesties of people.” Parts of the film’s score appears on the compact disc Not of This Earth! The Film Music of Ronald Stein (Varese Sarabande VSD-5634), released in 1995. The CD has scores from seven of Stein’s films including Not of This Earth and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) [q.v.].
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958; 65 minutes) Producer: Bernard Woolner. Executive Producer–Photography: Jacques Marquette. Director: Nathan Hertz [Juran]. Screenplay: Mark Hanna. Editor: Edward Mann. Music: Ronald Stein. Sound: Philip Mitchell. Makeup: Carlie Taylor. Props: Richard Rubin. Assistant Director: Ken Walters. CAST: Allison Hayes (Nancy Archer), William Hudson (Harry Archer), Yvette Vickers (Honey Parker), Roy Gordon (Dr. Cushing), George Douglas (Sheriff Dubbitt), Ken Terrell ( Jess Stout), Otto Waldis (Dr. Heinrich Von Loeb), Eileen Stevens (Nurse), Michael Ross (Bartender Tony/Giant Alien), Frank Chase (Deputy Sheriff Charlie), Thomas E. Jackson (Prospector), Dale Tate (TV Newsman).
One of the true joys of 1950s bad science fiction is Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, a film so beloved by genre fans that it was remade in 1993 as a TV movie with Daryl Hannah. The update went in for a tongue-in-cheek approach and was nowhere near as entertaining as the original that played it straight, making it the far more amusing of the two. The 1958 version does have its share of comedy, mainly supplied by a bumbling deputy sheriff (Frank Chase), and the sorry-looking giant hand belonging to the title character and a space alien. Filmed as The Astounding Giant Woman, the Allied Artists release also sported shoddy special effects, especially in the long shots of the alien and giant woman. Much of the time the two titans are transparent. Best of all, the movie features two sexy leading ladies, Allison Hayes and Yvette Vickers, and both make the most of their scenes; the former Yvette Vickers and William Hudson in Attack of the 50 Foot as a drunk, neurotic heiress who is losing her husband to Woman (1958)
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William Hudson and Allison Hayes in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
the latter. Vickers gives a classic portrayal of a cheap slut — the same type of character she played to perfection in another “attack” movie, Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). Director Nathan Juran helmed Attack of the 50 Foot Woman using only his given and middle names, Nathan Hertz, apparently hoping to avoid association with such a cheap outing. (He did the same with 1958’s The Brain from Planet Arous [q.v.], a Howco International release that Allied Artists included in a 1970s TV package.) Scripter Mark Hanna also wrote Not of This Earth [q.v.], The Undead, The Amazing Colossal Man (all 1957) and Terror from the Year 5000 (1958). A television reporter (Dale Tate) relates sightings of a huge glowing sphere being seen in the skies near the Bering Sea, Egypt, South Africa and New Zealand, and he predicts the orb will soon be over Southern California. Beautiful Nancy Archer (Hayes), heiress to the $50 million Fowler fortune, is driving through the desert on her way home after arguing with her husband Harry (William Hudson) over his attentions to redhead Honey Parker (Vickers) while they were dining at Tony’s Bar. She is stopped by a large glowing object in the roadway. A bald giant (Mike Ross) emerges and tries to take the priceless Star of India diamond she is wearing. Back at the bar, Harry romances Honey who wants him to leave Nancy. He tells her he cannot afford to desert his rich wife. The distraught Nancy runs into town and demands to see Harry. Sheriff Dubbitt (George Douglas) tells his deputy Charlie (Chase) to fetch Harry, but Harry bribes the lawman to say he has gone home. Nearly hysterical, Nancy tells the skeptical law enforcers about her experience on the highway, and they go with her to search for the alien but only find her abandoned car. Later that night, Nancy calls Harry a gigolo and a miserable parasite but confesses she still loves him. Harry
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tells her to get some rest and gives her sleeping pills and then returns to the bar to see Honey. There he informs his young mistress he will try to get his wife returned to the sanitarium where she once was committed for emotional problems. In doing so he will be able to get control of her estate. To convince Honey of his intentions, he shows her the Star of India diamond. Harry calls in Nancy’s physician Dr. Cushing (Roy Gordon); Harry is disappointed when the medical man refuses to re-commit Nancy. Nancy again confronts Harry about his relationship with Honey and accuses him of wanting to put her back in the sanitarium. While watching television she hears a news report about her supposedly seeing a flying saucer and in anger she smashes the TV screen. She then tells Harry he will go with her into the desert to search for the UFO; she takes along a pistol belonging to her loyal butler, Jess (Ken Terrell), who does not like Harry. After driving most of the day, Nancy sees the flying saucer at twilight. When they approach the orb, the giant comes out. Harry shoots at it and drives away, leaving the screaming Nancy behind. Harry goes back home and starts to pack. When Jess wants to know what happened to Nancy, the two men fight and Harry hits Jess with a bottle. Harry goes to Honey’s hotel room and orders her to quickly pack so they can get out of town. Charlie stops the two lovers and takes them to the sheriff ’s office and the next morning they learn that Nancy has been found unconscious on the roof of her pool house. Suffering from burns and scratches around the neck, she is treated by Dr. Cushing and a nurse (Eileen Stevens). After Honey hears Cushing tell the nurse to be careful not to give Nancy an overdose of her medication, she convinces Harry to get rid of his wife by that method. That night Harry sneaks into Nancy’s bedroom to kill her but the nurse follows him and when she turns on the light she becomes hysterical because Nancy has greatly increased in size. A specialist, Dr. Von Loeb (Otto Waldis), is brought in by Cushing and the two men have the unconscious Nancy chained and give her huge amounts of morphine. The sheriff and his deputy find large footprints on the estate. Dubbitt and Jess follow the tracks into the desert and come upon the UFO. They enter the craft and find a room in which precious gems, including Nancy’s diamond, are apparently used to power the craft. The giant chases them out and destroys their car but returns to the orb when Dubbitt uses hand grenades. The spaceship takes off and the two men start to walk back to town. Nancy wakes up and calls for her husband. Harry refuses to allow her any other medical treatment although Von Loeb wants to operate on her in hopes of reversing the growth process. The two doctors use an elephant syringe to give Nancy more drugs but she comes to and breaks through the roof and sets out to find Harry. Cushing, Von Loeb and the nurse drive back to town and along the way pick up the sheriff and Jess as Nancy frightens an old prospector (Thomas E. Jackson). She destroys the hotel where Honey rooms and then tears the roof of the bar where Harry and Honey have been drinking. Harry shoots at Nancy. A huge beam falls on the table under which Honey is hiding, crushing her. Nancy picks up Harry and begins walking away as the sheriff fires at her with a shotgun. The giant woman walks into some power lines and Dubbitt shoots at them, causing an explosion that electrocutes Nancy, who falls to the ground, holding her dead husband. Dennis Fischer wrote in Science Fiction Film Directors, 1895 –1998 (2000), “Despite its shoddy effects such as its see-through double exposed space giant, or maybe because of them, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman retains its appeal due to a sly sense of humor, the pulchritudinous appeal of its star Allison Hayes, and some fine supporting performances.” In Science Fiction (1984), Phil Hardy noted, “The corniness of Hanna’s screenplay and Juran’s plodding direction…. The special effects are dire….” Bill Warren in Keep Watching the Skies! The 21st Century Edition (2009) said, “Some people consider this to be one of the
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great inadvertent comedies of the 1950s…. The film’s own screwy logic is relentless, there are several scenes which couldn’t have been more outrageous if they had been designed to be, and the special effects are jaw-droppingly awful.” Portions of Ronald Stein’s score are included in the compact disc Not of This Earth!: The Film Music of Ronald Stein (Varese Sarabande VSD-5634), issued in 1995.
The Bat (1959; 80 minutes) Producer: C.J. Tevlin. Director-Screenplay-Story: Crane Wilbur. From the play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood. Photography: Joseph Biroc. Editor: William Austin. Music: Louis Forbes. Song: Alvino Rey. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Rudy Butler. Production Manager: Edward Morey, Jr. Makeup: Kiva Hoffman. Wardrobe: Norah Sharpe and Roger J. Weinberg. Continuity: Virginia Mazzuca. Props: Ted Mossman. Assistant Director: Clifford Broughton. CAST: Vincent Price (Dr. Malcolm Wells), Agnes Moorehead (Cornelia Van Gorder), Gavin Gordon (Lieutenant Andy Anderson), John Sutton (Warner), Lenita Lane (Lizzie Allen), Elaine Edwards (Dale Bailey), Darla Hood ( Judy Hollander), John Bryant (Mark Fleming), Harvey Stephens ( John Fleming), Mike Steele (Victor “Vic” Bailey), Riza Royce ( Jane Patterson), Robert B. Williams (Detective Davenport), William Janssen (Bank Clerk), Virginia Linden (Bank Customer), John Lomma (Voice of the Bat).
One of the chestnuts of the 20th century stage, The Bat had its basis in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novel The Circular Staircase, published in 1908. Under that title it was filmed by Selig Pictures in 1915 by director Edward J. Le Saint, starring Guy Oliver, Edith Johnson, Stella Razetto, Eugenie Besserer and Bertram Grassby. Five year later Rinehart and Avery
Agnes Moorehead and Lenita Lane in The Bat (1959)
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Agnes Moorehead, Lenita Lane and Vincent Price in The Bat (1959)
Hopwood collaborated on a stage version, The Bat, which debuted at Broadway’s Morosco Theatre on August 23, 1920, and had a run of 867 performances. The cast included Effie Ellser, Edward Ellis, Anne Morrison and May Vokes. Two years later it was staged in London and in its cast were Claude Rains, Arthur Wontner (a future screen Sherlock Holmes), and Eva Moore; it ran for over 300 performances. Mary Pickford produced the first screen adaptation of The Bat (United Artists, 1926) featuring her younger brother Jack Pickford along with Jewel Carmen, Louise Fazenda, Emily Fitzroy, Robert McKim, Sojin, Eddie Gribbon and Tullio Carminati. It was adapted to the screen and directed by Roland West, who also did the same chores for the first sound version of the vehicle, The Bat Whispers, which was produced by Art Cinema Corporation and issued by United Artists in late November 1930. Chester Morris, Una Merkel, William Bakewell, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Richard Tucker, Grayce Hampton and Maude Eburne headed the cast. May Vokes repeated the role of Lizzie in the 1937 Broadway revival of The Bat which also featured Minnette Barrett, Herman Lieb, Linda Lee Hill and Robert Ober. The production had a brief run on Broadway early in 1953 with Lucille Watson, ZaSu Pitts and Shepperd Strudwick. At the end of that year it was presented on the syndicated Broadway Television Theatre program, starring Estelle Winwood, Alice Pearce and Jay Jostyn. In March 1960, “The Bat” was an episode of NBCTV’s Dow Hour of Great Mysteries and its cast included Helen Hayes, Jason Robards, Shepperd Strudwick, Bethel Leslie and Margaret Hamilton. Eight months before the NBC-TV program, Allied Artists released a screen version of
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Gavin Gordon, Lenita Lane (in background), Vincent Price, Agnes Moorehead, Riza Royce and Elaine Edwards in The Bat (1959)
The Bat with the advertising pitch, “When the Bat flies, someone dies.” Silent screen star Crane Wilbur adapted the Rinehart-Hopwood play and also directed the film for Liberty Pictures. He previously wrote House of Wax (1953) and The Mad Magician (1954), both vehicles for Vincent Price, who headlined this third version of The Bat in the expanded role of Dr. Malcolm Wells. Despite top billing, Price had less screen time than co-star Agnes Moorehead, who dominates the proceedings as mystery writer Cornelia Van Gorder. Some publicity was generated for the movie by including Darla Hood, once the little darling of the “Our Gang” comedies, in what would be her final film. Gavin Gordon, as Lieutenant Anderson, and John Sutton, playing Warner the butler, were featured although the film would have benefited if they had swapped roles. Variety called the production “sluggish.” In Theatre: Stage to Screen to Television (1981), William Torbert Leonard noted it had “overactive performances and a lack of definition both in characterization and incident, and one is left caring as little about the victims as about the identity of [the Bat].” Filmed in the spring of 1959, the production is definitely the least of the three screen versions of the highly successful mystery play but it is not without merit and overall is a well-made and fairly entertaining horror-mystery. Of particular interest is the underplayed friction between the characters of Dr. Wells, Lieutenant Anderson and Warner the butler. Best-selling mystery writer Cornelia Van Gorder (Moorehead), along with rough-hewn Lizzie Allen (Lenita Lane), her companion, lease a remote mansion called the Oaks so she
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can concentrate on writing a new novel. Once they are settled, Lizzie complains that the servants want to leave because a series of murders were committed in the area by a hideous cloaked maniac known as “The Bat.” She also claims there are rumors the madman has released rabid bats in the locale. Going to the local bank, the two women meet Vic Bailey (Mike Steele), the vice-president, and his pretty bride Dale (Elaine Edwards). Vic says he is surprised that his boss, bank president John Fleming (Harvey Stephens), who built the Oaks, had rented it and she informs him the transaction was handled by insurance man Mark Fleming ( John Bryant), John’s nephew. Cornelia and Lizzie are also introduced to Police Lieutenant Andy Anderson (Gordon). After they leave, Vic and Dale tell the law officer that the bank has been robbed of over one million dollars in bonds and securities. Anderson wants to call in the bank president but he is out of town on a hunting trip with the local doctor, Malcolm Wells (Price). At their remote cabin, John Fleming informs the physician that he embezzled the money from the bank and offers him one-half of it if he will stage a false death for him by killing their guide Sam. When Wells hesitates, Fleming threatens him. Fleming’s attention is diverted when he notices the woods are on fire, and Wells shoots him. Several days pass and Cornelia and Lizzie read in the newspaper that Vic Bailey is in jail accused of embezzlement. The novelist refuses to believe he is guilty. All of their servants except chauffeur Warner (Sutton) quit and Cornelia promotes him to butler. That night a terrible thunderstorm erupts and as Cornelia is about to latch the front door Lizzie screams as a clawed hand reaches for her boss. The hand disappears. A figure in black breaks into the house and releases a bat through a bedroom transom. It bites Lizzie before Cornelia traps it in a closet. Cornelia calls Wells, whom Anderson spies experimenting on a bat in his home laboratory. After Wells leaves, the policeman searches the lab as the doctor goes to the Oaks and examines Lizzie. He takes the bat with him for an examination but tells the women he thinks it is not rabid. As the physician leaves the house, Anderson shows up and tells the women the culprit is the Bat and that he will have the place watched. Worried about the savings he had in the bank, Anderson goes to see Mark and tells him he feels Vic is innocent and that John Fleming (whose body has been brought home and buried) robbed the institution and hid the money at the Oaks. Mark informs him that Judy Hollander (Hood), his uncle’s secretary, plans to testify for Brady at his trial. Judy and Dale are invited by Cornelia to stay at the Oaks. Also living in the house is Jane Patterson (Riza Royce), the new cook. Cornelia confides to the women she thinks John Fleming embezzled the bank’s money which is hidden in the house and the Bat is trying to find its location. She has Dale telephone Mark to inquire if he has the plans for the edifice and he says he thinks they may be there and he will come search for them. After dinner, Cornelia announces she will write a mystery novel about the missing money and the Bat and she asks Dale to be her secretary. Mark secretly enters the house and locates a small closet behind a clock. There he finds the plans but he is attacked by the Bat and killed. When the women hear the clock striking, something it has not done before, they investigate and find the murdered Mark hanging in the closet. The police and Wells are called. When the physician shows up, Anderson questions him but is told it was his night off. Later the butler follows the police lieutenant when he roams around the grounds. During the night, the dark figure cuts the telephone lines and goes to the third floor and begins removing part of a wall. The noise awakens Judy and Dale who investigate. The Bat kills Judy on the stairway as he makes his escape. Anderson shows up and Mrs. Patterson tells him that Warner is absent. The unkempt butler arrives and says he was struck on the head while trailing the policeman around the estate. Since Cornelia hit the escaping Bat with a poker on the side of the head, Anderson
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accuses Warner of being the madman. The doctor suddenly returns to the Oaks, claiming he was in a car accident, and Anderson also suspects him of the crimes. Detective Davenport (Robert B. Williams) is assigned to guard the house but during the night he is drugged. Cornelia goes back to the third floor and finds a secret room, containing a locked safe, behind a fireplace. She gets locked in the room while the Bat surprises Wells in his laboratory and kills him. Lizzie revives Davenport and the two locate Cornelia who is about to suffocate in the closed room. When they see the garage is ablaze, Cornelia realizes that the Bat set the fire to get them out of the house. The trio waits for the killer. The Bat shows up and tries to open the safe where the stolen money is hidden; as he is about to murder the two women, he is shot in the back by Warner who unmasks the madman. Cornelia has the stolen money returned to the bank. Vic Bailey is freed and Cornelia finishes her latest thriller about the Bat.
Beast from Haunted Cave (1959; 72 minutes) Producer: Gene Corman. Associate Producer: Charles Hanawalt. Director: Monte Hellman. Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith. Photography: Andrew Costikyan. Editor: Anthony Carras. Music: Alexander Laszlo. Sound: Charles Brown. Production Coordinator: Beach Dickerson. Technical Advisors: Ed Keene and Birdie Arnold. CAST: Michael Forest (Gil Jackson), Sheila [Noonan] Carol (Gypsy Boulet), Frank Wolff (Alexander “Alex” Ward), Wally Campo (Byron Smith), Richard Sinatra (Marty Jones), Linne Ahlstrand (Natalie), Christopher [Chris] Robinson (Creature/Bartender), Kay Jennings ( Jill Jackson), Imelda (Small Dove).
At a remote lodge in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Alex Ward (Frank Wolff ) takes ski lessons from instructor Gil Jackson (Michael Forest), who also runs a bait shop with his sister Jill (Kay Jennings). Alex has come to the area with his heavy drinking girlfriend Gypsy (Sheila Carol) and two cohorts, taciturn Marty (Richard Sinatra) and goofy Byron (Wally Campo), to rob the local bank. Alex hires Gil to take the group on a two-day skiing trip to his cabin in the forest and he orders Marty to plant dynamite in a mine. He plans to use the explosion as a cover when they rob the bank. That evening Gypsy drinks too much and makes a pass at Gil. Marty talks barmaid Natalie (Linne Ahlstrand) into going with him to the mine. There he sets the explosives to go off at nine the next morning and he also sees fragments of what appears to be a giant egg. As he begins to make love to Natalie, a tall, web-covered monster (Chris Robinson) attacks the girl. Marty returns to the hotel-bar and tells Alex what happened but his boss thinks he is crazy. To get Gil out of town, Alex has Gypsy meet him at the ski lift as Alex, Marty and Byron hear the mine explosion and then break into the bank, where each of them takes two gold bars. The trio heads to the trailhead where they meet with Gil and Gypsy and head cross-country to Gil’s cabin, where Alex plans to rendezvous with a pilot who will fly the robbers to Canada. That night they stop along the trail to sleep and Marty says he thinks they are being followed. While standing guard he hears strange noises and, going to investigate, he finds Natalie in a cocoon in a tree. Marty becomes distraught but refuses to talk. The next day, Gil spots unknown animal prints in the snow. Arriving at the cabin, the skiers meet Gil’s housekeeper Little Dove (Imelda), whom Byron thinks wants to scalp him. Rather than returning to the lodge, Alex suggests they stay the night at the cabin. Over the radio they hear about the bank robbery and the explosion that killed one of the miners. The news of the man’s death causes Gypsy to drink more and she kisses Gil who is then forced to fight Alex and Marty but is stopped at gunpoint by Byron. Alex slaps Gypsy who later meets outside with Gil and tells him she stays with Alex because he saved her from an unsavory past. The monster shows up outside
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the cabin and attacks Marty but he scares it away. The next morning, while Gil chops wood, he is told by Gypsy that Alex plans to murder him. When Gil tells her he will ski back to town and get the law, she asks to go with him. Marty locates a cave that he thinks houses the monster. Alex confides to Byron he plans to kill Gil and Small Dove (even though Byron has grown fond of the Indian woman), and that he wants to get rid of Marty who is no longer trustworthy due to his maniacal desire to kill the mystical beast. When Alex later inquires about Gil’s whereabouts, Gypsy tells him he has gone deer hunting. When she goes outside, she is followed by Byron who sees her depart on skis. The monster attacks Byron, who throws a torch at it. The fleeing creature carries off Small Dove. Gil waits for Gypsy on the trail and the two begin skiing back to the lodge. Marty tells Alex about seeing the egg shell in the mine and theorizes that the monster hatched out of it. Byron sneaks out of the cabin in search of Small Dove. Going to the cave, he finds Natalie and the Indian woman encased in webs along a wall. As he is about to free them, the monster attacks him. Gil and Gypsy arrive at the cave to get out of a coming blizzard. Leaving Gypsy at the entrance, Gil explores the cavern and sees Byron, Natalie and Small Dove in their cocoons as the beast tries to kill him. Gil shoots at the creature and Gypsy arrives and begins throwing rocks at it. Gil yells to Gypsy to run away. As she does so, she meets Alex and Marty, who have come armed with weapons and flare guns, and she tells Alex that Gil is inside the cavern, unarmed. The monster kills Alex and fatally wounds Marty who, before dying, shoots one of the flare guns, setting the beast on fire and destroying it. Gil and Gypsy embrace and escape from the cave of horror. Cult director Monte Hellman made his debut with Beast from Haunted Cave, which was filmed on location in Deadwood, South Dakota, by the Filmgroup, a company owned by the Corman brothers, Roger and Gene. Seeking new locales, the producers decided on South Dakota since it was a non-union state; the money they saved by not dealing with unions was used to make a second feature. Gene and Hellman filmed Beast for two weeks and then Roger produced and directed Ski Troop Attack in the following fourteen days. Charles B. Griffith wrote both scripts and Michael Forest, Frank Wolff, Wally Campo, Richard Sinatra and Sheila Carol appeared in both. Roger was the uncredited executive producer on Beast. He and Gene asked Paul Blaisdell to create the title monster but when he wanted too much money they assigned the task to Chris Robinson, who not only appeared as the creature but also had a small role as the bartender at the ski resort town’s bar-hotel. He made the beast out of plywood covered by chicken wire to which he attached putty and angel and crepe hair. Robinson later starred in the horror film Stanley (1972). The Beast has often been described as a spider-like creature but it has a more ghostly appearance, sort of a tall emaciated corpse covered with webs. For the most part the Beast is only seen fleetingly, thus heightening the fright value of the creature. The film itself is a somber affair, its main locales being the bar-hotel, the remote cabin and the cave. Even in the outdoor scenes there is no sunlight, the shooting apparently taking place under overcast conditions. The characters differ drastically: Gil, the hero, is almost intolerably dull, while the sadistic Alex is a thug, girl-shy Marty is psychotic and his pal Byron is almost brain dead. The most interesting of the lot is Gypsy, a drunken hooker, nicely enacted by Carol, who reforms at the finale and wins the hero’s love. As Sheila Noonan, Carol appeared the same year in producer-director Jerry Warren’s vapid The Incredible Petrified World. Richard Sinatra, who played Marty, was the son of bandleader Ray Sinatra, the first cousin and musical mentor of Frank Sinatra. While trying to romance Gil’s sister Jill, Marty’s character reverts to hip talk, and throughout the feature the characters of Alex and Gypsy refer to
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each other as “Charles.” When the film was scheduled for TV release it proved to be a bit short and director Hellman filmed a couple of additional minutes with his wife Jaclyn doubling in the role of Jill Jackson. Although cheaply made and given only quick playoff (and, like most of the Filmgroup product, not even copyrighted), Beast from Haunted Cave leaves a somewhat positive impression with the viewer, something not always accomplished by late 1950s sci-fi–horror efforts. In fact, its main assets may very well be its impoverished look, unusual locations, a set of diverse characters and a genuinely scary monster. It got quick theatrical playoff by Allied Artists, on a double bill with Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman (q.v.), in the late summer and fall of 1959.
Beyond Love and Evil (1971; 89 minutes; Color) Producer: Roland de Nesle. Director: Jacques Scandelari. Screenplay: Jean-Pierre Deloux, Jacques Scandelari and Jean Stuart. Story: Jean Stuart, from the novel La Philosophie dans le Boudoir (The Philosophy of the Boudoir) by Marquis de Sade. Photography: Jean-Marc Ripert. Editor: Roger Ikhlef. Music: Jean-Claude Pelletier. Production Design: Michel Lablais. Sets: Quassar. Makeup: Jean d’Estree. Special Effects: Kalinowksy. Costumes: Jean Bouquet. Assistant Directors: Jose Pinheiro and Jean Stuart. CAST: Souchka (Xenia), Lucas de Chabanieux (Zenoff ), Fred Saint-James (Yaid), Marc Coutant (Young Man), Sabry (Sabrina), Serge Halsdorf (Varlac), Michel Lablais (Ladies’ Man), Milarka Nervi (Pisces), Doris Thon (Panther Woman), Nadia Kempf (Lolita), Ursuel Pauly (25Year-Old Woman), Nicole Huc (Fleeing Woman), Jean-Christophe Vouvet (The Grand Minister).
Just how much the grip of censorship had weakened by the early 1970s is exemplified by Allied Artists releasing this dubbed French import to theaters, despite its heavy doses of nudity and near XXX sexual shenanigans. Made by Comptori Francais du Film Production in 1969, it was shown in its homeland as La Philosophie dans le Boudoir (The Philosophy of the Boudoir) and had its plot origins in the 1795 novel by the Marquis de Sade. Its alternate French titles were Decameron Francese and De Sade 76. U.S. outings were trimmed by three minutes. For horror fans the plot includes a torture dungeon in an old chateau inhabited by a huge ape man called Varlac (Serge Halsdorf ), who delights in ravishing nubile young women. After a skeleton on a cross is set on fire, a young man, Zenoff (Lucas de Chabanieux), travels at night to the chateau of Xenia (Souchka), the woman he loves. He is unaware she belongs to a sex cult led by Yald (Fred Saint-James), whom she intends to marry. The two announce their wedding plans at a dinner party at which the guests engage in body painting. Yald tells the group they can have sex with his bride but only after he has consummated their marriage. Zenoff is quite upset and doubts that the betrothed are truly in love. When a young woman (Nicole Huc) is accused of breaking the cult’s rules, she is thrown out of the castle, given a head start and then pursued through the woods. As she is about to escape through a fence, she suddenly stops and lets herself be captured. For the evening’s entertainment, Yald releases Varlac (Halsdorf ), an ape-like man, who pursues the runaway and rapes her in his cell as the cultists watch and then engage in a orgy. The next day, another young woman (Doris Thon) is sent into the woods and hunted by the cultists who capture and beat her. Zenoff tries to get Xenia to run away with him but ends up having sex with her. Later the cultists watch as Xenia and Yald consummate their marriage. Zenoff is shocked by the proceedings. He and Yald agree to a contest in which the winner gets Xenia if she can be picked out of all the women wearing masks. Yald wins but during their second game with knives he is stabbed by Zenoff. Xenia becomes the cult leader. Following another orgy,
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she has the young man engage in the flogging of a girl and then he goes with Xenia to her bedroom. There she has one of the cultists beat him before Xenia throws Zenoff out of the chateau, despite his begging her to let him stay. The previous year Allied Artists released another European production based on DeSade’s novel Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion (q.v.).
Black Zoo (1963; 88 minutes; Color) Producer: Herman Cohen. Director: Robert Gordon. Story-Screenplay: Aben Kandel. Photography: Floyd Crosby. Editor: Michael Luciano. Music: Paul Dunlap. Song: Robert Marucci and Russell Faith. Art Director: William Glasgow. Sound: John Bury, Jr. Makeup: Philip Scheer. Production Manager: Edward Morey, Jr. Special Effects: Pat Dinga. Wardrobe: Jack Masters. Optical Effects: Howard Anderson Co. Assistant Director: William McGarry. CAST: Michael Gough (Michael Conrad), Jeanne Cooper (Edna Conrad), Rod Lauren (Carl Conrad), Virginia Grey ( Jenny Brooks), Jerome Cowan ( Jerry Stengel), Elisha Cook, Jr. ( Joe), Marianna Hill (Audrey), Oren Curtis (Radu), Eilene Janssen, Eric Stone (Newlyweds), Dani Lynn, Susan Slavin (Art Students), Edward Platt (Detective Rivers), Douglas Henderson (Lieutenant Mel Duggan), Jerry Douglas (Perkins), Claudia Brack (Carl’s Mother), Daniel Kurlick (Carl as a Child), Byron Morrow (Coroner), Michael St. Angel (Officer Donovan), Joseph Mell (Frank Cramer), Warrene Ott (Mary Hogan), George Barrows (Victor the Gorilla), Herman Cohen (Guided Tour Member).
Twenty-seven years before the formation of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Black Zoo contained a similar organization, the True Believers. This group, however, believed in the migration of animal souls and one of its members, zoo owner Michael Conrad (Michael Gough), used his “pets” to get rid of those who got in his way. In The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), Phil Hardy wrote, “Ineptly scripted, ploddingly directed, wildly overacted by Gough … it has nowhere near the same charge as the very similar Murders in the Zoo (1933). But [Floyd] Crosby’s camerawork is excellent, and no film that has the wit to include a scene in which Gough ushers a lion, tiger, a black panther and a cougar into his sitting-room, installs them on couches and easy chairs, and solemnly indulges them with a lullaby on the organ, can be all bad.” Released by Allied Artists in May 1963 and also called Horrors of the Black Zoo, the feature was the last of three horror outings Gough headlined for producer-writer Herman Cohen, preceded by Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and Konga (1961). The actor went on to appear in two Cohen horror films with Joan Crawford, Berserk (1967) and Trog (1970). Among Gough’s other genre efforts are Horror of Dracula (1958), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), They Came from Beyond Space (1967), Crucible of Horror (1970), Horror Hospital (1973), Satan’s Slave (1976), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and The Haunting of Helen Walker (1985). He is probably best remembered as butler Alfred Pennyworth in Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992) and Batman Forever (1995). Herman Cohen (1925–2002) produced and often co-wrote a number of other genre efforts, including Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), Target Earth (1954) [q.v.], I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Blood of Dracula (all 1957), The Headless Ghost (1959), A Study in Terror (1965), Craze (1974) and Watch Me When I Kill (1977). The director of Black Zoo, Robert Gordon, also helmed It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). The same year he co-starred in Black Zoo, Rod Lauren appeared in Terrified and The Crawling Hand. Virginia Grey was also in Cohen’s Target Earth, House of Horrors (1946), Who Killed Doc Robin? Unknown Island and Jungle Jim (all 1948). Jerome Cowan’s genre credits include Fog Island, The Crime Doctor’s Courage and The Jungle Captive (all 1945), Night in Paradise
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Rod Lauren, Jeanne Cooper and Michael Gough in Black Zoo (1963)
and Flight to Nowhere (both 1946), Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), Have Rocket, Will Travel (1959), Visit to a Small Planet (1960) and The Gnome-Mobile (1967). In the Westwood section of Los Angeles, a young woman (Warrene Ott) is mauled to death by a tiger while walking home. The next day Michael Gordon (Gough), the owner of Conrad’s Animal Kingdom, shows off his prize animals, including a tiger, lion, black leopard, cougar and Victor (George Barrows), a huge gorilla, to a tour group. The audience is also treated to a chimp show given by Gordon’s wife Edna ( Jeanne Cooper). Verbose developer Jerry Stengel (Cowan) comes to see Gordon and offers to buy his land for a housing project he wants to build but the zookeeper refuses to sell and orders the obnoxious businessman off his property. Gordon chews out mute animal keeper Carl (Rod Lauren) for not keeping the animal cages clean and then orders him to bring the big cats to his study where he plays the organ and lectures them about greedy men who want their land and how he will always protect them. The next day Stengel returns and promises to zone off the area as a residential district, close the zoo, have Conrad’s license revoked and the animals condemned. Gordon then agrees to the deal. That night Carl drives him to the developer’s home but before signing the contract, Conrad lets in King, a lion, who kills Stengel. The day after the developer’s death is reported, Gordon is contacted by the police to see if any of his animals have escaped. Three pretty art students (Marianna Hill, Dani Lynn, Susan Slavin) get the owner’s permission to sketch his animals. One of them, Audrey (Hill), is attracted to Carl and they start to become friends. That evening, Edna’s drinking upsets Gordon and they argue over Carl because she wants the young man to be sent to a special school where he will get an education. Gordon slaps his wife but then apologizes. While
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feeding Baron, a tiger, zookeeper Joe (Elisha Cook, Jr.) torments the animal and it claws him. Joe shoots the big cat. When Gordon finds out, he beats the worker until Edna begs him to stop. Sending his wife back to their house, Gordon and Carl throw Joe into the lion’s cage where he mauled to death. Under cover of night, the Gordons and Carl bury Baron in an old cemetery. Gordon attends a meeting of the True Believers, an animal lovers’ cult, where he is consoled and given a tiger cub. The group performs a ceremony that passes the soul of Baron into the body of the young cat. Edna’s former agent and friend, Jenny Brooks (Grey), convinces her to accept an offer to star with her chimp act in the Madison Circus for a year. When Gordon finds out about the agreement, he and Carl take Victor to the agent’s garage and when she returns home it kills her. During a police investigation, the coroner (Byron Morrow) informs Lieutenant Duggan (Douglas Henderson) that the woman was done in by a tremendous blow to the head that was not administered by a human. Police Chief Rivers (Edward Platt) refuses to believe the death was caused by an animal until a laboratory technician ( Jerry Douglas) confirms that hair found in Jenny’s hand was not human. Edna becomes upset when she learns of her friend’s death. After Gordon leaves to attend a meeting of the True Believers, Edna hears on the radio that Jenny was murdered by an animal and she comes to realize that her husband is behind the killing. After forcing Carl to reveal that he drove Gordon to Jenny’s house the night before, she tells the young man they will leave that night and he can become her assistant in the chimp act. As they are about to depart during a thunderstorm, Gordon returns and Edna accuses him of causing Jenny’s death. As Gordon begins to beat his wife, she begs Carl to help her and he says the young man is his son. Carl remembers that as a child (Daniel Kurlick) he witnessed his father murder his mother (Claudia Brack) and the shock caused him to lose his voice. When Gordon orders Carl to open the lion’s cage so he can dispose of Edna, the young man rebels and the two men fight in the rain. Gordon calls for the big cats to help him as Carl strangles his father. Black Zoo is highlighted by the reverent burial of the tiger in a spooky cemetery while its ravaged slayer is unceremoniously disposed of off-camera, and the chimp act sequence when one of the participants is urged to smoke a cigarette. The year of the film’s release, Charlton Publications, who did Horror Monsters and Mad Monsters magazines, issued a comic book made up of photographs from the film. Titled Horror Monsters Presents Black Zoo, it was billed as “A Picture by Picture Chiller Mag.”
Blood and Black Lace (1965; 84 minutes; Color) Producers: Massimo Patrizi and Alfredo Mirabile. Director: Mario Bava. Screenplay: Marcello Fondato. Story: Giuseppe Barilla, Mario Bava and Marcello Fondato. Photography: Ubaldo Terzano. Editor: Mario Serandrei. Sound: Vittorio Trentino. Sets: Arrigo Breschi. Production Managers: Benito Caripi, Armando Govoni and Franco Grifeo. Makeup: Emilio Trani. Assistant Directors: Priscilla Contardi and Cristina Grieco. CAST: Cameron Mitchell (Max Martan), Eva Bartok (Countess Christina Como), Thomas Reiner (Inspector Sylvester), Arianna Gorini (Nicole), Dante De Paolo (Frank Sacalo), Mary Arden (Peggy), Franco Ressel (Marquis Richard Morell), Claude Dantes (Tao-Li), Luciano Pigozzi (Cesare Losarre), Lea Kruger (Greta), Massimo Righi (Marco), Francesca Ungaro (Isabella), Giuliano Raffaeli (Zanchin), Harriet White Medin (Clarise), Mara Carmosino, Heidi Stroh, Nadia Anty (Models), Enzo Cerusico (Service Station Attendant).
During a storm, model Isabella (Francesca Ungaro) meets with drug addict Frank Sacalo (Dante De Paolo) and promises to get him a fix. After leaving Christina’s, the highclass fashion salon where she works, the young woman is stalked by a masked figure in black
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who kills her and drags her body to a secluded area. As Countess Christina Como (Eva Bartok), the owner of the establishment, closes for the night, she threatens to fire Isabella for being absent during the evening, and later finds her corpse in a clothes closet. Inspector Sylvester (Thomas Reiner) talks with Christina and co-owner Max Martan (Cameron Mitchell), who tells him to contact the dead woman’s roommates Nicole (Arianna Gorini), Peggy (Mary Arden) and Greta (Lea Kruger), models for the salon. Dress designer Cesar Losarre (Luciano Pigozzi) informs Sylvester that Isabella’s lover was antique dealer Sacolo. The inspector calls on Sacolo and says cocaine was found in Isabella’s home. During a showing at the salon, Nicole finds a diary that belonged to the murdered model. She tells Christina that she will turn it over to the police the next day. She then telephones Frank who asks her to come to his shop. When she does, the masked maniac torments her before killing her with a metal hand with knife-like fingers. When the murderer fails to find the diary in her purse, he drives off in her car. Peggy and Marco (Massimo Righi) meet at her home where they are greeted by housekeeper Clarise (Harriet White Medin). After she leaves, Marco tells Peggy he loves her. Peggy gets a telephone call from Reiner informing her that her car, which Nicole had borrowed, has been found abandoned. The officer says he is coming to see her and Marco leaves. Peggy reads part of the diary and then burns it in a fireplace. When she answers the door, the hooded fiend drags her back into the apartment. After he beats her, she informs him that she burned the diary. When he hears the police arriving he knocks her out and carries her away. Sacolo comes to the villa Christina shares with Marquis Richard Morrell (Franco Ressel) and tells them he found Nicole’s murdered body in his shop. He suggests they each give the other an alibi. When Morell refuses, Frank reminds him he signed IOUs to Isabella for several thousand dollars he could not repay. Bound and gagged, Peggy is kept in a dank cellar by the killer. As he beats and tortures her she rips off his mask, and he drives her face into a hot stove. Reiner questions Frank about Nicole’s murder and accuses him of being a drug addict. At police headquarters, the inspector asks Clarise to identify any of the suspects she saw driving Peggy’s car, and Marco accuses Cesare of being the murderer. Marco suffers an epileptic fit and is taken to the hospital. Reiner informs Max, Frank, Cesare and the marquis they are all suspects in the killings and has them placed under arrest. That night at the salon, Greta is afraid to go home alone but she is sent away by Christina who drives to the chateau where she discovers the body of Peggy in the trunk of her car and drags it inside. Someone Advertisement for the Allied Artists double bill of Blood moves the corpse and tries to and Black Lace and Young Dillinger (1964)
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smother Christina, who survives to call the police. Reiner is forced to release the five suspects. Model Tao-Li (Claude Dantes) comes to Max and tells him she plans to fly to Paris the next day. After she leaves, he uses a secret passage behind a bookcase to go into the cellar where Peggy was held hostage. Christina shows up and tells him she killed Greta in the house the models rented. He informs her that the police think the murderer is a sex maniac. Lovers Max and Christina blame Isabella for all their troubles since she blackmailed them over the suspicious car accident that killed the countess’ husband. Max tells Christina they must place the blame on someone else for the police. She drowns Tao-Li in her bathtub and then slits the dead woman’s wrist to make it look like suicide. As Christina attempts to flee from the murder scene, she climbs along a balcony but slips and falls off a ledge. At the salon, Max opens a strongbox filled with jewels but is confronted by the badly injured Christina. She tells him she realizes he only wanted her wealth. When he embraces and kisses her, she shoots him. Christina calls the police and then dies holding her lover. In 1960 Allied Artists released the Italian production Caltiki the Immortal Monster (q.v.), photographed by Mario Bava, who was also the feature’s uncredited co-director. Following the success of Bava’s first official directorial assignment, Black Sunday (1960), which American International Pictures released in the U.S., Allied went on to issue Bava’s Blood and Black Lace in the spring of 1965. Its pre-release title was Fashion House of Death and in a few locales it got distribution by Woolner Bros. A co-production of France, Italy and Monaco, the film was released in Italy in 1964 as Sei Donne per l’Assassino (Six Women for the Killer) at 88 minutes, four minutes more than its stateside showings. The film was dubbed by Allied Artists with Paul Frees supplying most of the male voices, including that of top-billed Cameron Mitchell. Its thin story of a stocking mask–wearing maniac in black murdering various women in gruesome ways was typically enhanced by Bava (some sources claim that he was also the film’s co-photographer), with terrific visuals that included mostly night and inside locales, rain-swept terrain and dark shadows. John Stanley’s Creature Feature Movie Guide Strikes Again (1994) noted, “Bava uses primary colors to psychological effect, creating the paradox of a beautiful-looking movie about death.” Castle of Frankenstein #8 (1966) said the film was a “[m]inor Italian-made chiller … Mostly whodunit fare, but director Mario Bava adds horrific overtones.” James O’Neill in Terror on Tape (1994) felt that “Bava’s neon-colored atmosphere paved the way for the lush cosmopolitan thrillers of Dario Argento and has violence, which, though not overly gory, is still pretty strong stuff…. Only the poor dubbing detracts from the overall effect.” Video Hound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics (1996) reported, “The story is violent and suspenseful, and Bava brings to it his trademark atmospheric cinematography, careful use of color, and perverse manipulation of characters.” In Spaghetti Nightmare (1996), Luca M. Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta called Blood and Black Lace the “[f ]oundation stone of the Italian thriller.”
Blood Rose (1970; 91 minutes; Color) Producer: Edgar Oppenheimer. Director: Claude Mulot. Screenplay: Claude Mulot, Edgar Oppenheimer and Jean Larriaga. Photography: Roger Fellous. Editor: Monique Kirsanoff. Music: Jean-Pierre Dorsay. Production Manager: George Dyerman. Unit Director: Hubert Bausmann. Makeup: Nicole Felix. Special Effects: Guy Delecluse. Assistant Director: Jean Larriaga. CAST: Philippe Lemaire (Frederic Lansac), Anny Duperey (Anne Lansac), Howard Vernon (Dr. Romer), Elisabeth Teissier (Moira), Olivia Robin (Barbara), Michelle Perello (Agnes), Valerie Boisgel (Catherine), J.P. Honore (Paul Bertin), Gerard Huart (Wilfried), Jacques Seiler (Inspector Dorte), Michel Charrel, Veronique Verlhac (Gallery Clients), Roberto (Igor), Johnny Cacao (Olaf ).
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Starting with Les Yeux Sans Visage (The Eyes Without a Face), a 1959 French release issued in the U.S. three years later as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, there were a number of feature films about mad scientists trying to restore disfigured young women’s scarred faces with skin grafts. Others in the canon include Spain’s Gritos in la Noche (Cries in the Night) (1962), released stateside in 1965 as The Awful Dr. Orloff, the British production Corruption (1967) and the 1970 film La Rose Ecorchee (The Burnt Rose) from France. Allied Artists issued the latter that October in the U.S. as Blood Rose; it got an R rating. It was billed as “The First Sex-Horror Film Ever Made” although that claim probably goes to director Jess Franco’s 1967 production Succubus. Franco directed The Awful Dr. Orloff starring Howard Vernon in the title role and the actor was also in Succubus as well as having special billing in Blood Rose. La Rose Ecorchee ran 95 minutes when it was shown in France but its Allied Artists stateside version was minus four minutes of lesbian scenes. In Italy it was shown as Tre Gocce di Sangre per una Rosa (Three Drops of Blood for a Rose). When it was issued in Great Britain in June 1970 by S.F. Distributors at 88 minutes, it was titled Ravaged and was assigned a Certificate X. It had limited release in West Germany as Die Geschaendete Rose. At a remote chateau, Frederic Lansac (Philippe Lemaire) and his friend and business partner Wilfried (Gerard Huart) await a doctor’s verdict on the condition of Frederic’s wife Anne (Anny Duperey), who has been badly burned in a fire. Frederic, a famous portrait painter as well as a botanist and beauty salon owner, recalls how he rejected the advances of his former girlfriend Moira (Elisabeth Teissier) after hiring beautiful Anne as his new model. He falls in love with Anne, who has inspired his best paintings, and takes her to his old country castle where she tells him she wants to live. They are tended by two dwarfs, Igor (Roberto) and Olaf ( Johnny Cacao), who have been at the chateau since Frederic was a boy. To celebrate their marriage, Anne gives an outdoor costume party. When Moira arrives, the two women have words and Anne backs into a bonfire with her dress catching fire. As a result, Anne can never walk again, her eyesight is somewhat blurred and her face is terribly disfigured. She insists her death be announced and lives at the chateau hidden away from the world. The institute Frederic operates with Wilfried hires Dr. Romer (Vernon) to work on a formula extracted from a poisonous plant. Since Frederic can no longer paint because of what happened to his wife, Wilfried, who has to go away for a time, suggests he take over running the institute. Agnes (Michelle Perello) is hired to take care of Anne as Frederic brings home one of the deadly plants to study. Anne becomes jealous of Agnes. After the blonde nurse becomes Frederic’s lover, Anne induces her to touch the plant, causing the nurse to die. Anne informs her husband she caused the girl’s death because she was too beautiful. That night Frederic and the dwarfs bury the victim. At the institute, Frederic overhears Romer talking about performing facial surgery at his home and that night he follows him there and confronts his employee. Romer admits he lost his medical license after the failure of a skin graft technique he developed and that he was sent to prison. After being freed, he was forced to change the facial features of criminals and took the institute job to put that in his past. Frederic takes Romer to examine Anne but he says it is hopeless since he would need a living woman’s face to replace hers and the donor would die in the process. Anne dreams that her beauty is restored but she is haunted by the visage of Agnes’ resurrected corpse. Frederic opens a letter from Agnes’s sister Barbara (Olivia Robin) telling her that she and Paul ( J.P. Honore) plan to marry. After a number of young women are judged, Frederic orders Romer to take Catherine (Valerie Boisgel) to the chateau for the skin graft surgery. At the chateau, the two dwarfs sexually assault and kill Catherine, causing the now
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mad Anne to beat them. Pretending to be a writer researching an article on old chateaus, Barbara arrives and is asked to stay the night by Frederic after a terrible storm erupts. Finding a photograph of herself with Agnes, the young woman explores the castle and sees Catherine’s corpse. Frederic realizes Barbara’s true identity and has her put in a dungeon. When Igor tries to molest her, Barbara knocks him out with a water pitcher and runs away but is recaptured by Frederic. Police Inspector Dorte ( Jacques Seiler) confronts Romer after a gangster with a changed face is found murdered. The doctor denies any knowledge of the event. After he gets a call from Frederic ordering him to come to the chateau to perform the skin graft, he sneaks out of his apartment building and eludes the watchful policeman. Barbara begs Romer, who feels the graft will not be successful, to let her go. Romer hangs himself. Anne wakes up to find him dead and blames Frederic and the dwarfs for her being unable to have a new face. The dwarfs drag her into the hall and kick Anne to death. As Frederic tries to cut Barbara free, Igor attacks him. The two fight with Frederic being badly wounded. Barbara kills Igor with a scalpel. She tries to help Frederic but Paul arrives and she makes him drive her away from the chateau. The dying Frederic phones the police and tells them he killed his wife and a servant and that two women are buried on the chateau grounds. As Olaf mourns Igor’s death, Frederic tries to finish his portrait of Anne. Blood Rose contains quite a bit female nudity and its leisurely paced story is enhanced by surreal atmosphere and a dream-like staging technique. A great asset is the huge old chateau where most of the action takes place. Donald C. Willis wrote in Horror and Science Fiction Films (1972), “Lush music, weird little atmospheric bits, and senseless bursts of brutality, all of which adds up to nothing but a small bore.” In Film Review 1971–1972 (1971), F. Maurice Speed dubbed the film a “chiller-diller.” Michael J. Weldon noted in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983), “This strange, atmospheric production is more warped than usual, thanks to two dwarf servants who wear animal skins, are sexually active, and generally get underfoot.” When the feature was issued on video in Germany as Horrormaske (The Mask of Horror), Video Watchdog #12 ( July-August 1992) said, “The film is an early example of the combination of horror and nudity, typical for the work of French filmmakers in the ’70s.”
Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons (1960; 92 minutes) Producer: Roy Parkinson. Director: W. Lee Wilder. Screenplay: Myles Wilder. Photography: Stephen Dade. Editor: Tom Simpson. Music: Albert Elms. Songs: Albert Elms and Josephine Caryll. Sound: George Adams. Makeup: George Partleton. CAST: George Sanders (Henri Desire Landru), Corinne Calvet (Odette), Jean Kent ( Julienne Guillin), Patricia Roc (Vivienne Dureaux), Greta Gynt ( Jeanette), Maxine Audley (Cynthia), Ingrid Hafner (Giselle), Selma Vaz Dias (Madame Boyer), Peter Illing (Lefevre), George Coulouris (Lacoste), Sheldon Lawrence (Pepi), Paul Whitsun-Jones (Station Master), Keith Pyott (Estate Agent), George Melford (Concierge), Robert Rietty (Bank Clerk), Mark Singleton (Advertising Clerk), Milo Sperber (Librarian), C. Denier Warren (Neighbor), Harold Berens ( Jeweler), Ian Fleming (Attorney), Dino Galvani (Hardware Store Proprietor), John Gabriel (Barber).
In 1901, French film pioneer George Melies made the short Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard) based on a story by Charles Perrault about a man who marries and murders women for their money. Bluebeard became a term synonymous with bigamist killers and was the nickname of Henri Desire Landru (1869–1922), the famous French serial killer. John Carradine played the title role in Bluebeard, a 1944 PRC production directed by Edgar G. Ulmer; three years later Charles Chaplin wrote, directed, composed the music and starred in United Artists Monsieur Verdoux, a comedy melodrama based on a story by Orson Welles about the Landru
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Spanish lobby card for Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons (1960), picturing George Sanders and Patricia Roc
case. In 1963 Charles Denner had the title role in the French production Landru, released as Bluebeard by Embassy Pictures in the United States. Richard Burton starred in the 1972 release Bluebeard, directed by Edward Dmytryk. Sandwiched between the Chaplin film and the 1963 French production was Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons, which Allied Artists issued in the spring of 1960. Filmed in France and at England’s Elstree Studios, Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons was directed by W. Lee Wilder and written by his son, Myles Wilder. The elder Wilder was the brother of Billy Wilder. W. Lee and Myles Wilder had earlier collaborated on Phantom from Space (1953), Killers from Space, The Snow Creature (both 1954), Fright (q.v.) and Manfish (both 1956) before the son began working exclusively in television. W. Lee Wilder went on the make The Man Without a Body (1957), Caxambu (1967) and The Omegans (1968); his best film was his directorial debut, the taut film noir melodrama The Glass Alibi (1946), which he remade in 1955 as a shallow imitation called The Big Bluff. He also produced The Great Flamarion, a 1945 Republic release. The title role of Landru in Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons was played by suave George Sanders, who was also no stranger to horror, sci-fi and fantasy films. Among his many genre credits are The Man Who Could Work Miracles and Things to Come (both 1936), Rebecca and The House of the Seven Gables (both 1940), The Lodger (1944), Hangover Square, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (all 1945), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
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(1947), From the Earth to the Moon (1958), Village of the Damned (1960),The Jungle Book (1967; voice only), The Body Stealers (1969) [q.v.], Future Women (1970), Endless Night (1971), and Doomwatch and Psychomania (both 1972). The brother of actor Tom Conway, Sanders (who was once married to Zsa Zsa Gabor and was later her brother-in-law) committed suicide in Spain in 1972 at age 66. Paris antique furniture store owner Henri Landru (Sanders) becomes infatuated with cabaret singer Odette (Corinne Calvet) and she takes him to her apartment thinking he is rich. The young woman’s lover, Pepi (Sheldon Lawrence), calls her and she informs Landru that her mother needs five thousand francs for an operation. After giving her two thousand francs and promising the rest, Landru stays the night with Odette but the next day she will have nothing to do with him when he cannot come up with the rest of the money. Wanting to win back Odette, Landru agrees to help Vivienne Dureaux (Patricia Roc) sell some furniture. He is introduced to her sister Giselle (Ingrid Hafner). Vivienne is attracted to Landru who is unable to sell the furniture to another dealer, Lacoste (George Coulouris). When he finds out that the woman has sold the furniture, Landru, who has told her he is a retired army colonel, tries to persuade her to let him invest the proceeds. When she refuses, he pushes her off a bridge and steals her money, ring and keys. Going to her apartment, Landru sells the dead woman’s possessions and gives the money to Odette, who takes him back. Changing his name and shaving his beard, Landru answers a newspaper advertisement placed by Julienne Guillin ( Jean Kent). He tells her he is a diplomat and takes her for a weekend at a remote villa he rented near the village of Gambais in Austria. There he proposes marriage and she accepts, giving him access to her bank account and apartment. Landru murders Julienne and cuts up her body, burning it in the villa’s large game roasting stove. After getting the murdered woman’s funds, Landru asks Odette to marry him but she refuses. He continues to obtain money by romancing a quartet of rich widows whom he murders for their savings. His next victim, Jeanette (Greta Gynt), is murdered in Paris and her body is buried in two suitcases at a building site after which he pretends to be her husband and raids her bank deposit box. While at the bank he meets Madame Boyer (Selma Vaz Dias) and finds out that her husband deserted her two years before and left for Africa. Landru pretends to know her husband and claims he is owed a gambling debt. He fleeces the woman out of the money and takes it to Odette but overhears her and Pepi deride him. Later Landru asks Odette to join him at the Austrian villa and tries to poison her. When the singer realizes her benefactor is trying to kill her, she mocks him and his habit of recording all purchases, including the weapons he used to murder his victims. Landru beats Odette to death and burns her remains. Giselle, who has located the man who bought her sister’s furniture and through him gets Landru’s name, tells the police what she has learned and goes to Gambais. Landru is about to leave the village when the station master (Paul Whitsun-Jones) informs him of Giselle’s arrival. He goes back to the villa where he finds her searching the place. He tries to kill her but is interrupted by the police and runs into the forest where he is captured after being attacked by Julienne’s cat Max, who he let run wild after her murder. Landru is tried and convicted of his many offenses and is guillotined. Eugene Archer wrote in the New York Times, “Under W. Lee Wilder’s melodramatic direction, the suave matrimonial criminal is neither a figure of dark comedy nor an anarchistic symbol of the post-war devaluation of human life. He is merely a not-too-bright ‘con man’ who stumbles into his murderous career…. George Sanders half-heartedly tries to inject an occasional note of jocularity … but he soon surrenders to occupational fatigue.” Variety also found fault with Sanders who the reviewer said “is completely bogged down by
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his material.” Regarding the overall production, the British Monthly Film Bulletin complained, “Period, background and mood all fluctuate maddeningly.” Co-star Corinne Calvet gave a deft performance as the seductive, two-timing Odette.
The Body Stealers (1969; 89 minutes; Color) Producer: Tony Tenser. Director: Gerry Levy. Screenplay: Michael St. Clair. Photography: John Coquillon. Editor: Howard Lanning. Music: Reg Tilsley. Art Director: Wilfred Arnold. Sound: Hugh Strain. Production Manager-Assistant Director: John Workman. Special Effects: Tom Wadden. Wardrobe: Frank Vinall. CAST: George Sanders (General Armstrong), Maurice Evans (Dr. Matthews/Marthos), Patrick Allen (Bob Megan), Hilary Dwyer (Dr. Julie Slade), Lorna Wilde (Lorna), Neil Connery ( Jim Radford), Robert Flemyng (Wing Commander W.C. Baldwin), Allan Cuthbertson (Hindesmith), Carl Rigg (Pilot Officer Briggs), Sally Faulkner ( Joanna), Michael Culver (Lieutenant Bailes), Shelagh Fraser (Mrs. Thatcher), Steve Kirby (Driver), Leslie Schofield (Gate Guard), Max Latimer (Guard Sergeant), Ralph Carrigan (Military Policeman), Johnny Wade (Orderly), Edward Kelsey, Dennis Chinnery (Control Officers), Michael Warren (Harry), Arnold Peters (Mr. Smith), Clifford Earl (Laboratory Sergeant), Larry Dann ( Jeep Driver), Michael Goldie (Dispatch Driver), Wanda Moore (Blonde Secretary), Jan Miller (Sally), Derek Pollitt (Dr. Davies), Carol Hawkins (Paula), Colin Rix (Control Sergeant), Michael Graham, Brian Harrison (Pilots).
Made at Shepperton Studios in England by Tigon Pictures and Sagittarius Productions, The Body Stealers was issued in the U.S. in the spring of 1969 by Allied Artists. It received an R rating due to brief nudity. In its homeland it was called Thin Air; some stateside release prints carried the title The Invasion of the Body Stealers, apparently an attempt to confuse the public into thinking the feature was akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) [q.v.]. Despite a top-notch cast and more than passable production values, the feature is a drawn-out affair. Films and Filming declared, “[D]espite the efforts of Patrick Allen, George Sanders and, in particular, Hilary Dwyer, disbelief is not suspended for one moment of the film’s seemingly lengthy ninety minutes.” Top-billed Sanders also headlined Sagittarius’ The Candy Man the same year. NATO representatives General Armstrong (Sanders), Lieutenant Bailes (Michael Culver) and parachute designer Jim Radford (Neil Connery) observe a test flight in which a trio of pilots try out Radford’s new suits. During the demonstration, the men disappear into a red cloud and only the parachutes reach the ground. At an air show, three skydivers also disappear in a red cloud and the next day it is revealed that a total of eleven men went missing while using parachutes. Jim suggests to Armstrong that his friend Bob Megan (Patrick Allen), a veteran skydiver, be hired to investigate since bureaucrat Hindesmith (Allan Cuthbertson) demands immediate results. Bob agrees to do the job for $25,000. That night, while walking along a beach, he meets beautiful Lorna (Lorna Wilde), who runs away when he tries to make love to her. The next day Bob meets with the area’s space research laboratory director, Dr. Matthews (Maurice Evans), and is attracted to his lovely assistant, Dr. Julie Slade (Hilary Dwyer). As he looks at the recovered parachutes and checks the reports, Dr. Matthews suggests to Bob that he not keep his queries earthbound and have an open mind. Armstrong and Megan request that Hindesmith halt all military maneuvers since the missing men had space conditioning. The general is informed that one of the men has been found but he is dying. He and Bob rush to the research lab where Dr. Matthews says that the man has died, but not from injury, disease or exposure. Armstrong telephones Hindesmith who agrees to the grounding order. That night Bob again meets Lorna on the beach and they have sex. Later, when the young woman sees Jim taking
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pictures of her, she runs away and Bob follows but loses her. Back at his hotel, Bob gets a call from Julie that is abruptly cut off. He drives to the lab where he finds her recovering from being knocked out. She informs him she was hit from behind; the parachutes are missing. Julie also says that test results show the dead man was changed as his organic cells were so altered he was no longer human and he was also radioactive. Dr. Matthews theorizes that the man was changed for another environment or atmosphere. When General Armstrong reveals that Lieutenant Bailes has been found murdered, Bob calls Jim at the hotel and asks him to bring a link hook he found at the airfield to the lab; it proves to be radioactive. Hindesmith is told by Armstrong that Bob will make a parachute jump wearing a radiation-proof suit. Jim shows Armstrong the photos he took the night before of Bob and a young woman but only his friend is visible in the pictures. Just before the jump, Bob is visited by Lorna who begs him not to go through with it. He makes a date with her for that night. At the airfield, Jim spots Lorna; when she sees him she runs away. He follows her into a wooded area where he is murdered. During the jump, Bob is engulfed in a red cloud and disappears but soon reappears and pulls his parachute cord, landing unconscious. He is taken to the lab where he revives and hears Armstrong say that Jim has been killed. Finding out that a scarf he got from Lorna is radioactive, Bob sends Julie to find Dr. Matthews as he heads for his date. Julie drives to her boss’ home and there she finds his body and faints. As Bob meets Lorna at the beach, Armstrong learns that Dr. Matthews took control of the parachutes and decides to investigate. Bob returns Lorna’s scarf and demands to know where she came from, causing her to run away. He follows her to Matthews’ house where he finds the scientist’s dead body and Julie unconscious. He is held at gunpoint by what appears to be Matthews’ double but the being turns out to be Marthos (Maurice Evans), an alien from the planet Mygon. He informs Bob that he took the scientist’s form upon arrival on Earth seeking men to help repopulate his plague-decimated planet. He says the fliers were chosen because they could adapt to a new atmosphere. Lorna begs Marthos not to kill Bob and Julie. When the two try to escape, he starts to shoot at them but is stunned by Lorna’s space gun. Bob tells her that if she lets the captives go, he will try to organize volunteers to help repopulate her planet. As they walk outside and say goodbye, a huge spaceship materializes and Lorna vanishes. The airmen revive and Armstrong arrives at Matthews’ house. Hindesmith tells the general that the incident “officially” never occurred as Bob and Julie fly away in his private plane. The producer of The Body Stealers, Tony Tenser, did more than a dozen horror and science fiction films, including The Black Torment (1964), The Projected Man (1966), The Sorcerers (1968) [q.v.], The Blood Beast Terror, Witchfinder General (Conqueror Worm) and Curse of the Crimson Altar (The Crimson Cult) (all 1968), Zeta One and The Haunted House of Horror (Horror House) (both 1969), The Beast in the Cellar (1970), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Doomwatch (1972), also with George Sanders, The Creeping Flesh (1973) and Frightmare (1974).
The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters (1954; 65 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Edward Bernds. Screenplay: Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds. Photography: Harry Neumann. Music Director: Marlin Skiles. Editor: William Austin. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Sets: Joseph Kish. Makeup: Edward Polo. Wardrobe: Bert Henrikson. Special Effects: Augie Lohman. Continuity: John L. Banse. Assistant Director: Edward Morey, Jr. CAST: Leo Gorcey (Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney), Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones), Bernard Gorcey (Louie Dumbrowski), Lloyd Corrigan (Anton Gravesend), Ellen Corby
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(Amelia Gravesend), John Dehner (Dr. Derek Gravesend), Laura Mason (Francine Gravesend), Paul Wexler (Grissom), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck), Bennie Bartlett (Butch), Rudy Lee (Herbie Wilkins), Norman Bishop (Gorog the Robot), Paul Bryar (Officer Martin), Jack Diamond (Skippy Biano), Pat Flaherty (Officer O’Meara), Steve Calvert (Cosmos the Gorilla).
Between 1946 and 1952, Monogram Pictures released twenty-eight “Bowery Boys” features, the series being a derivative of earlier juvenile pairings like “Dead End Kids,” “Little Tough Guys” and “East Side Kids.” Allied Artists became the releasing company for the series in 1953 and until 1958 churned out another twenty “Bowery Boys” adventures. Several of the comedies had the boys involved with the supernatural. Huntz Hall played the nonetoo-bright Sach Jones in all the films while Leo Gorcey headlined as smart-talking, Englishlanguage mangling Slip Mahoney until 1956 when he was replaced in the final seven outings by Stanley Clements, playing Stanislaus “Duke” Coveleskie. James Robert Parish wrote in The Great Movie Series (1971), “The Bowery Boys have had enormous popularity both in theatrical release and in constant television syndication … (they) have always had an indefinable appeal, stemming from the lower comic sense of slapstick and corny punning dialogue which fills their pictures.” In an interview with Ted Okuda in Filmfax #9 (February-March 1988), the director and co-writer of The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters, Edward Bernds, said the feature was the biggest moneymaker of the series, adding that all of the “Bowery Boys” movies turned a profit. “Something about the juxtaposition of the Bowery Boys and a bunch of monsters appealed to audiences,” he said. Bernds also noted that the feature used material from Dopey Dicks (1950), a two-reel Three Stooges short he directed for Columbia. Released in June 1954, the comedy horror programmer begins at Louie Dumbrowski’s (Bernard Gorcey) sweet shop in New York’s Lower East Side where street urchins break one of his windows with a baseball. Since the boys have no place to play baseball, Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey) and Sach Jones (Hall), two denizens of Louie’s place, decide to lease a local vacant lot next to the Acme Warehouse as a playground. A family named Gravesend owns the property so Slip and Sach drive to their spooky mansion to propose a business deal. There they find the family members and their household to be something out of the ordinary, being made up of siblings Anton (Lloyd Corrigan) and Dr. Derek Gravesend ( John Dehner), their sister Amelia (Ellen Corby) and beautiful niece Francine (Laura Mason). All the family members take an intense interest in Slip and Sach. The brothers show the boys their labs where Derek runs a test on Sach’s brain and finds it is perfect for a gorilla’s head. Slip and Sach are invited to spend the night so the family lawyer can attend to the details of the rental agreement the next day. When the boys cannot sleep, Slip goes for a snack but it is nearly consumed by Amelia’s giant carnivorous plant, Igapanthus. Anton uses a microphone to control his robot Gorog (Norman Bishop), accidentally ordering it to kill Sach. The metal man breaks into Sach’s bedroom but the brothers hear the noise and Anton recalls the robot. When Slip returns with more food, Sach thinks he is the giant and knocks him out. Anton concocts a formula that is supposed to transform anyone into a beautiful being but when he gets the family’s sinister butler, Grissom (Paul Wexler), to drink it he briefly turns into a monster. Derek decides to transplant Sach’s brain into the head of his gorilla Cosmos (Steve Calvert). When Slip and Sach do not return to the sweet shop, Louie and their pals Chuck (David Condon) and Butch (Bennie Bartlett) go looking for them. At dawn, Slip and Sach are held at bay by gun-carrying Derek who tells them they are about to be used for the sibling’s experiments to create a new, peaceful race of beings. Just as the brothers are about to commence their experiments on Slip and Sach, Grissom informs them
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that they have visitors. Derek tells Louie, Chuck and Butch that their friends left the night before. Slip saws through the wall of the closet in which he and Sach have been locked and the two find themselves in the gorilla’s cage. When Louie, Chuck and Butch hear their cries, they too are locked away, although Amelia and Francine want them for their own purposes. Grissom ties Slip to Anton’s operating table while Derek straps Sach to the one in his laboratory. Cosmos breaks out of the closet, knocks out Anton and frees Slip, who takes the microphone and activates Gorog, who fights with the gorilla. Slip tries to get away but runs into Amelia, who attempts to feed him to her plant. Francine frees Sach but Derek tries to stop her as he gets away from them only to be chased by both Gorog and Cosmos. Slip tries to find Sach while Anton orders Grissom to get him a head. The plant nearly eats Sach, who is saved by the butler, who then takes him to the brothers. Louis manages to get free of his bonds but runs into Cosmos who is chased off by Gorog. Anton calls the robot back to the lab. Slip finds Louie and they free Chuck and Butch, who have been frozen. Derek locks Cosmos in his cage and Anton places Gorog in the closet and the brothers continue to fight over who will have Sach’s head. Slip has Louie call the police as Sach throws him the microphone through a transom and Slip orders Gorog to break out of the closet and attack the brothers. Anton cuts off the robot’s power source and the brothers and Grissom prepare to operate on Sach, who accidentally drinks the elixir concocted by Anton and turns into a hideous monster. He beats up the siblings and the butler and then attacks his pals before returning to normal. Slip gets the groggy Derek to sign the lease on the lot. Back home, the boys find more of Louie’s windows have been broken, this time by the batting of the Bowery Tigers’ new star, Gorog. Phil Hardy wrote in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), “Not very amusing, but with [Huntz] Hall turned into a sort of werewolf, there isn’t really leisure to be bored.” In Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975), Ed Naha opined, “This one can mercifully termed ‘unique.’” David Hayes and Brent Walker said in The Films of the Bowery Boys (1984), “The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters has a funny script and the best supporting cast in the series’ history. It is replete with puns, horror house clichés and talent.” Variety noted that the film “goes overboard on the malapropisms which generally give zest to the series…. [It] is on the weak side, not up to the usual standard, with appeal even for followers of the series apt to be limited.”
Bowery to Bagdad (1955; 64 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Edward Bernds. Story-Screenplay: Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: John C. Fuller. Music Director: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Sets: Joseph Kish. Makeup: Edward Polo. Special Effects: Augie Lohman. Wardrobe: Bert Henrikson. Continuity: John L. Banse. Assistant Director: Edward Morey, Jr. CAST: Leo Gorcey (Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney), Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones), Bernard Gorcey (Louie Dumbrowski), Joan Shawlee (Velma), Eric Blore (The Genie), Jean Willes (Claire Culpepper), Robert Bice (Duke Dolan), Richard [Dick] Wessel (Gus), Michael Ross (Tiny), Rayford Barnes (Canarsie), Rick Vallin (Selim), Paul Marion (Abdul), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck), Bennie Bartlett (Butch), Charles Lung (Caliph Hamud), Leon Burbank (Guard).
Centuries pass after Aladdin’s magic lamp is stolen. Selim (Rick Vallin) and Abdul (Paul Marion) arrive in New York City under orders from the caliph (Charles Lung) of Bagdad to locate it. Finding the lamp in a thrift shop, Sach Jones (Huntz Hall) buys it as a gift for sweet shop owner Louie Dumbrowski’s (Bernard Gorcey) birthday. His overbearing pal Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey) makes fun of Sach for buying junk as hoodlums Tiny (Michael Ross) and Canarsie (Rayford Barnes) try to strong arm Louie into selling his lease to their
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boss, gangster Duke Dolan (Robert Bice). Sach accidentally rubs the lamp and a genie (Eric Blore), the slave of the lamp, appears and grants his wish for six malted milk shakes. Tiny sees what happened and reports to Duke whose underling Gus (Dick Wessel) urges him to obtain the magic lamp after reading a similar story in The Arabian Nights. The two Arabs fight over the lamp but drop it and run away when the boys interrupt them. Slip throws the lamp in the trash since he does not believe Sach’s story about the genie. Slip later rubs the lamp and when the genie appears he and Sach fight over him until they agree to own the lamp jointly. Slip tells the genie to only take orders from him and Sach together and the boys ask for a million dollars which they get in gold bars. Slip and Sach argue over the money and Sach accidentally wishes away the gold and the lamp. Tiny and Canarsie take the lamp at gunpoint but are followed by Selim and Abdul. After Duke gets the lamp, his moll Velma ( Joan Shawlee) rubs it. When the genie appears, he says he cannot grant them any wishes; they try to beat him up and he disappears. Duke tells Velma to go to Louie’s place and bring the boys back to his penthouse at the Winthrop Towers. She pretends to be Southern Belle Cindy Lou Calhoun and vamps Sach, but Slip will not let him go with her unless he too has a date, so Velma gets Claire Culpepper ( Jean Willes), Canarsie’s girlfriend, to pretend to be her cousin. At the penthouse, Claire flirts with Slip while Velma lures Sach to Duke who orders him to make the genie do his bidding. Slip manages to make a getaway as the genie informs Duke he can only take orders jointly from Sach and his pal. Selim and Abdul put Slip in a pantry as the genie tells Sach to get away from Velma by pretending to make love to her. Slip and Sach’s pals Chuck (David Condon), Butch (Bennie Bartlett) and Louie arrive at the penthouse looking for them. Gus and Canarsie get Slip out of the pantry as Louie finds the lamp with Selim pretending to be the genie. Tiny and Canarsie knock out the Arabs, and the genie sends Selim and Abdul back to Bagdad. Louie tells Chuck and Butch to go for the police and ends up in the pantry where he gets drunk with the genie. Fed up with constantly being hit on the head, Duke tells his men to shoot Slip and Sach as they try to escape on a window ledge so he can be the genie’s master. Sach rubs the lamp and the genie grants their wish to be taken home but they end up in Bagdad, his home, where they are attended to by beautiful harem girls. The caliph orders Slip and Sach decapitated and they agree to free the genie in order to return to the Bowery. They find themselves back on the window ledge and about to be shot by the gangsters when Chuck and Butch show up with the police, who arrest Duke and his gang. Back at the sweet shop, the genie reappears and grants Slip and Sach one final wish. When Slip tries to monopolize the opportunity, Sach asks for the courage to punch out his pal. This accomplished, Sach escapes before Slip revives. The film’s director and co-writer, Edward Bernds, told Ted Okuda in Filmfax #9 (February-March 1988) that Bowery to Bagdad was his favorite of the eight “Bowery Boys” features he helmed. He also noted that the movie was influenced by Three Arabian Nuts (1951), a Three Stooges short he directed for Columbia Pictures. Overall, the feature is only an average series entry, albeit a fast-paced fantasy comedy highlighted by Eric Blore’s amusing portrayal of the jovial genie. The funniest scene came in the sweet shop when bungling Sach gives Slip a cup of paint instead of coffee and Slip throws a piece of pie at him in retaliation and hits vamping Velma.
The Bride and the Beast (1958; 78 minutes) Producer-Director-Story: Adrian Weiss. Screenplay: Edward D. Wood, Jr. Photography: Roland Price. Editor: George M. Merrick. Music: Les Baxter. Production Design: Edward Shiells.
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Sets: Harry Reif. Makeup: Harry Thomas. Special Effects: George Endler. Production Supervisor: Louis Weiss. Assistant Directors: Harry L. Fraser and Harry S. Webb. CAST: Charlotte Austin (Laura Carson Fuller), Lance Fuller (Dan Fuller), Johnny Roth (Taro), William Justice (Dr. Carl Reiner), Gil Frye (Captain Cameron), Jeanne Gerson (Marka), Steve Calvert (Spanky the Gorilla), Slick Slavin (Messenger), Jean Ann Lewis [Eve Brent] (Stewardess), Shogwah Singh (Native), Bobby Small (Gorilla).
Filmed early in 1957 as Queen of the Gorillas, this pedestrian jungle melodrama was released theatrically in February 1958 by Allied Artists. Since the 1980s it has come into favor with schlock cinema fans because it was written by Edward D. Wood, Jr. Outside of the heroine wearing an angora sweater and her surname Fuller (the same as leading man Lance Fuller and also that of Wood’s long-time girlfriend Dolores Fuller), the script shows little of the loony plotting and stilted dialogue associated with Wood, the producer-director-writer of such cinema fare as Bride of the Monster (1955), Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958) and The Sinister Urge (1961). Laced with lots of jungle stock footage (much of it from Universal’s Man Eater of Kumaon [1948]), The Bride and the Beast is basically a plodding, uninteresting affair outside its having the beautiful heroine brush off her stoic husband in favor of cohabitating with a gorilla. The film was a family affair production-wise with Adrian Weiss producing and directing, as well as writing the story on which Wood’s script was based; Louis Weiss serving as production supervisor and Samuel Weiss the assistant editor. Louis Weiss produced Wood’s initial directorial effort Glen or Glenda? (1953). The assistant directors for the feature were Hollywood Poverty Row oldtimers Harry L. Fraser, a veteran writer-director, and Harry S. Webb, the one-time operator of such studios as Biltmore, Metropolitan and Reliable Pictures. Big game hunter Dan Fuller (Lance Fuller) and his new bride Laura (Charlotte Austin) arrive at his home during a thunderstorm. Caged in the basement is Dan’s pet gorilla Spanky (Steve Calvert), Poster for The Bride and the Beast (1958)
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who fascinates Laura since she grew up with a pet monkey. When she gets too close to Spanky’s cage, he grabs her wrist and caresses her hair and angora sweater, but she talks him into letting her go. When she leaves, the gorilla goes berserk and tears up his cage. Laura dreams of the beast and then, unable to sleep, she gets up as Spanky breaks out of his cage and comes into her bedroom. The gorilla again caresses Laura and tears her nightgown as Dan wakes up and kills him with a pistol. Laura tells Dan she was unafraid of the creature and felt a kinship with him. Going back to sleep, Laura has a recurring dream of living in a jungle; when she sees her reflection in a pool of water, she wakes up screaming since she saw a gorilla’s face. Dan goes to town the next day and brings back Dr. Carl Reiner (William Justine). Reiner, who has known Laura for many years, suggests trying regression deep sleep therapy to bring an end to her nightmares. He places her under a hypnotic spell and takes her back in time with Laura remembering a previous life as a gorilla. Dan is unconvinced but Dr. Reiner suggests to him the newlyweds postpone their upcoming trip to Africa. They ignore his advice and along with houseboy Taro ( Johnny Roth) fly to Africa, take a cattle boat to a port town and then go by truck into the jungle. Captain Cameron (Gil Frye), the local game warden, checks Dan’s papers and gives him permission to capture animals for his employer, a stateside zoo. Laura loves being in the jungle as her husband and his native workers snare a leopard, zebra, rhino and giraffe. Cameron consults with Dan since two killer Indian tigers are loose in the area after being set free by a shipwreck; he asks Dan’s help in finding them. The hunt takes the Fullers and their party into gorilla country where one of the tigers killed a native. When camp cook Marka ( Jeanne Gerson) is attacked and mauled by one of the beasts, Dan wounds it but the tiger escapes. The other tiger falls into a pit dug by Dan’s bearers and he waits for its mate to return. Laura finds that her husband is gone and goes searching for him. The tiger attacks Dan but runs away when he shoots at it. The big cat then chases Laura, causing her to fall off a precipice and be knocked out. As the tiger is about to pounce on his wife, Dan comes to her defense and is badly scratched when he kills the beast with a knife. Dan asks Taro to go for a doctor. As Dan tends to his own wounds, Laura comes to and leaves her tent and is carried off by a gorilla who knocks down her husband when he tries to intervene. Dan follows his wife and the gorilla to a cave where he kills one of the beasts but is left unconscious when he fights his wife’s abductor. Laura then willing leaves with the gorilla. Back home, Fuller tells Dr. Reiner he did everything he could to find his wife, and the medical man says he believes Laura went back to where she came from. Outside of beautiful Charlotte Austin, the daughter of crooner Gene Austin, The Bride and the Beast has little to recommend it, even for the most rabid of bad movie lovers. The same year she was in Frankenstein —1970 (q.v.) after having previously appeared in Gorilla at Large (1954) and The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957). Leading man Lance Fuller was also in This Island Earth (1955), The She-Creature (1956) and Voodoo Woman (1957). The title beast was played by Steve Calvert who wore the gorilla outfit, which he bought from Ray “Crash” Corrigan in the early 1950s, in numerous films and TV programs.
Caltiki the Immortal Monster (1960; 76 minutes) Producers: Bruno Vallati and Samuel Schneider. Directors: Robert Hamton [Riccardo Freda] and (uncredited Mario Bava). Screenplay: Philip Just [Filippo Sanjust]. Photography: John Foam [Mario Bava]. Editor: Salvatore Billitteri. Music: Robert Nicholas [Roberto Nicolosi] and Roman Vlad. Sound: Lee Kresel and Maurice Rosenblum. Special Effects: Mario Foam [Mario Bava]. Choreographer: P. Gozlino. CAST: John Merivale (Dr. John Fielding), Didi Sullivan [Dide Perego] (Ellen Fielding), Ger-
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ald Haerter [Gerard Herter] (Max Gunther), Daniela Rocca (Linda Gunther), Giacomo RossiStuart (Laboratory Assistant), Daniele Vargas (Bob), Victor [Vittorio] Andre (Professor Rodriguez), Arturo Dominici (Nieto), Black Bernard [Nerio Bernardi] (Police Chief ), Gay Pearl (Dancer), Deirdre Sullivan ( Jenny Fielding), Tom Felleghy (Astronomer).
Made in Italy as Caltiki — I Monstro Immortale (Caltiki — The Immortal Monster), this combination horror–sci-fi outing was set in Mexico and its credits claimed it was “Based on an Ancient Mexican Legend.” Released in the U.S. in the summer of 1960 by Allied Artists as Caltiki the Immortal Monster and also called Caltiki the Undying Monster, it was a staple of mid–1960s television, where it got its reputation as an out-of-the-ordinary scare production with visuals a notch above most imports of its ilk. The dubbed U.S. version was produced by Titra Sound Corporation. Later it was learned that the director, Robert Hamton, usually spelled Hampton, was really Riccardo Freda, who abandoned the project, with cameraman John Foam finishing the production. It was revealed that Foam was Mario Bava, later the cult director of such genre fare as Black Sunday (1960), Evil Eye (1962), Black Sabbath (1963), Blood and Black Lace [q.v.] and Planet of the Vampires (both 1965), Kill Baby Kill (1966), Danger: Diabolik (1967), Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1969), Baron Blood (1972) and Shock (1976). The film is highlighted by Bava’s photography with much of the production done in dark or semi-lit locals with very few outdoor scenes. The title monster is a blob-like creature capable of rending itself to multiply. It is said to have been made of cow entrails. At the site of the abandoned Mayan city of Tekal, 300 miles south of Mexico City, Nieto (Arturo Dominici) runs screaming “Caltiki” into an archaeological expedition camp. Leaving his wife Ellen (Didi Sullivan) to look after the hysterical man, Dr. John Fielding ( John Merivale) and co-workers Max Gunther (Gerald Haerter) and Bob (Daniele Vargas)
Didi Sullivan and John Merivale in Caltiki the Immortal Monster (1960)
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go to the cave where Nieto and another expedition member, Almer, were exploring. They find an opening in the cave wall caused by the recent eruption of a nearby volcano and they descend a flight of stone stairs taking them to an underground temple with a lake and a statue of the goddess Caltiki. Their Geiger counter picks up radiation near the lake and John suggests they explore its bottom; they go back to camp for diving equipment. That night John and Ellen argue over the expedition as the local Indians dance to ward off evil spirits. Max tells Ellen he is attracted to her but she rejects his advances. The Indians halt their dance when they see Bob filming the ceremony. John and Ellen make up the next morning and he tells her to return to Mexico City with Linda (Daniela Rocca), Max’s beautiful half-breed wife. At the temple, Bob dives into the lake and finds the bottom strewn with skeletons and lots of gold ornaments, some of which he brings back to the surface. Over John’s objections, Bob goes back into the lake and, while picking up more treasure, he is attacked. When John and Max bring him up, they see his face has been dissolved. A giant blob-like creature rises from the water and chases them out of the cavern. Max goes back to get the treasure and the thing takes hold of his arm; John chops off part of its flesh as the two men escape. John drives their truck into the mouth of the cave, causing an explosion that destroys the monster. Back in Mexico City, Professor Rodriguez (Victor Andre) informs John that an unknown substance from the creature ate away the flesh, and the poison from the organism will soon enter Max’s bloodstream and go to his brain. Max overhears the two men. John tries to figure out what caused the abnormal development that destroys any living thing with which it comes in contact. Wanting to help Max, John decides to use radioactivity on a section of the creature. Cutting it in half, he uses beta-tron rays, causing the thing to activate, grow and multiply. Max becomes deranged and tells Linda he plans to get revenge against John and Ellen; that night he kills a nurse and escapes from the hospital. Linda becomes upset because Max wants Ellen. Linda gets a telephone call asking them to come to the hospital. There they find the nurse has been murdered and Max is missing. The police begin searching for Max as Rodriguez and John discuss the Mayan prophecy that a comet will give the goddess Caltiki ultimate power over the world. After Rodriguez leaves, John receives a telephone message saying the alien flesh has started to grow and multiply and he orders it destroyed by fire. After he leaves for the laboratory, Max breaks into the house and cuts the telephone wires. Rodriguez consults an astronomer (Tom Felleghy) who informs him a comet last seen on Earth in 607 A . D., the year of the mysterious Mayan evacuation of Tekal, is due in the heavens. The doctor realizes that all specimens of the creature must be destroyed but he is unable to reach John by A nurse (actress unidentified) is attacked by a man (Gerard Haerter) telephone. Driving back to in Caltiki the Immortal Monster (1960).
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John’s house, the doctor’s car careens off a cliff and crashes. Later the doctor’s assistant (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) tells John about the comet and he requests the military bring flame throwers to his house to destroy the last sample of the monster. Linda takes Max food as the part of the creature in the laboratory begins to grow and breaks out of its glass container. Max tries to attack Ellen; when Linda attempts to stop him, she shoots her. Hearing noises in the laboratory and thinking it is John, Max opens the door and is devoured by the monster. Ellen runs upstairs and, taking her little daughter Jenny (Dierdre Sullivan), she tries to escape from the house by a balcony but the creature has multiplied to the point they cannot get to the ground. Speeding toward home, John is picked up by the police and put in a cell but manages to escape as the lawmen pursue him. As John arrives home, he is followed by the police and the military. He orders them to set off the flame throwers which consume some of the blobs. Ellen and Jenny are trapped in a bedroom. John climbs a ladder to get them but the blob nearly knocks it over before the trio fall back to the ground on the ladder and escape the monster. The soldiers then release the full force of the flame throwers, completely destroying Caltiki. Despite the movie’s popularity, especially with Baby Boomers, reviews of Caltiki the Immortal Monster have been a mixed bag. Luca M. Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta in Spaghetti Nightmares (1996) called it a “[v]ery inventive and enjoyable ‘fanta-horror’ films, excellently made and with an skillful use of black and white photography.” In Terror on Tape (1994), James O’Neill said it was a “[p]assable spin-off of The Blob and The Creeping Unknown … Visually imaginative … but this otherwise routine, with silly special effects.” Danny Peary in Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986) declared, “Undeniably silly, but still it’s one of my favorite low-budget horror films…. Film contains one genuinely spooky sequence in which a diver explores a deep, uncharted mountain pool and finds out too late that he’s not alone. It will remind some of the scene in Alien in which John Hurt comes across the alien hatchery.” In Science Fiction (1984), Phil Hardy said, “A minor outing, this was one of the earliest Italian films to be aimed at the American market…. Though the acting is routine and the script leaden, Bava injects a few stylish flourishes.” Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972) felt it was “[r]ather tame after an eerie beginning.” Golden Era released the feature in Great Britain in 1961 as The Immortal Monster. The same year, the French company Star-Cine Cosmos published a photo novel of the film entitled Le Monstre Immortel (The Immortal Monster). Arturo Dominici, who had the small role of Nieto, the next year portrayed the resurrected Javuto in Bava’s classic gothic horror thriller Black Sunday. Vittorio Andre, who portrayed Dr. Rodriguez in the production, also supervised its voice dubbing for the English language version released by Allied Artists.
Communion (1976; 108 minutes; Color) Producer: Richard K. Rosenberg. Director: Alfred Sole. Screenplay: Rosemary Ritvo and Alfred Sole. Photography: John Friberg. Editor: Edward Sailer. Music: Stephen Lawrence. Sound: Mark Salwasser. Production Design: John Lawless. Sets: Stephen Finon. Makeup: Anne Paul and Karen Sole. Production Manager: Rosemary Rivto. Wardrobe: Lenora Guarini. Costumes: Michelle Cohen. Assistant Director: Adrienne Hamalian. CAST: Linda Miller (Catherine “Kay” Spages), Mildred Clinton (Mrs. Tredoni), Paula Sheppard (Alice Spages), Niles McMaster (Dominick “Dom” Spages), Jane Lowry (Annie DeLorenze), Rudolph Willrich (Father Tom), Michael Hardstark (Detective Mike Spina), Alphonso DeNoble (Mr. Alphonso), Gary Allen ( James “Jim” DeLorenze), Brooke Shields (Karen Spages), Louisa
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Spanish lobby card for Communion (1976)
Horton (Dr. Whitman), Tom Signorelli (Detective Ray Brennan), Lillian Roth (Pathologist), Patrick Gorman (Father Pat), Kathy Rich (Angela DeLorenze), Ted Tinling (Detective Cranston), Mary Boylan (Mother Superior), Peter Bosche (Monsignor), Joseph Rossi (Father Joe), Marco Quazzo (Robert “Bob” DeLorenze), Dick Boccelli (Hotel Clerk), Ronald Willoughby (Funeral Home Director), Sally Anne Golden (Policewoman), Lucy Hale (Church Soloist), Libby Fennelly (Nun), Maurice Yonowsky, Beth Carlton (Children’s Shelter Attendants), Drew Roman (Policeman), Antonino Rocca, Michael Weil (Funeral Home Attendants), Dr. Leslie Feigen (Doctor).
Filmed in Patterson, New Jersey, by Harristown Funding, Communion was issued to theaters in November 1976 by Allied Artists. The R-rated production drew little box office response and quickly faded but was reissued by Allied in 1978 as Alice, Sweet Alice due to the presence of Brooke Shields, who made her debut in the film. That year she had caused a sensation as a child prostitute in Pretty Baby and the studio took advantage of her newfound popularity to try and breathe life into Communion. The ploy was not very successful. In 1981 Citadel Films tried again, releasing the production for a third time theatrically (this time as Holy Terror), with ten minutes shorn from its running time. Overlong, slowly paced and Catholic-baiting, Communion lost what little punch it had by revealing the identity of the killer too soon. It constantly shows holy images contrasted with acts of violence, the best staged being the stabbing of the aunt on a staircase, the action being right out of a playbook by Alfred Hitchcock or William Castle. The cast also includes Lillian Roth in her penultimate film role and a fleeting bit by wrestling great Antonino “Argentine” Rocca. Catherine Spages (Linda Miller), a divorcee with two young daughters, Alice (Paula Sheppard) and Karen (Shields), goes to the rectory of St. Michael’s Catholic Church where
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nine-year-old Karen is soon to receive first communion. Karen is a favorite of the priest, Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich), who gives her a crucifix that belonged to his mother. Jealous of her sister and the priest’s affinity for her, Alice dons a shiny, grinning face mask and deliberately scares the rectory housekeeper, Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton), and is chastised by her mother. Taking her younger sister’s doll, Alice later lures her to an abandoned warehouse where she frightens Karen with the mask and pushes her into a storage room. Letting her out, Alice warns Karen not to tell their mother or she will get rid of the doll. Back at their apartment building, Alice has a confrontation with the landlord, Mr. Alphonso (Alphonso DeNoble), a huge, bald, unkempt man she calls Fatso. At the communion ceremony, Catherine’s sister Annie DeLorenze ( Jane Lowry) sends her overweight daughter Angela (Kathy Rich) to find the absent Alice as Karen checks on a noise in a nearby room and is strangled from behind with a large candle by someone dressed in the fright mask and a bright yellow school raincoat. Karen is placed in a chest, the crucifix is ripped from her neck and her body is set on fire. Alice shows up wearing a bridal dress and carrying a school raincoat and attempts to receive communion when a nun (Libby Fennelly) screams after finding Karen’s body. Catherine learns of her daughter’s murder and is consoled by the priest and her sister as Alice hides Karen’s communion veil. Police detectives Spina (Michael Hardstark), Brennan (Tom Signorelli) and Cranston (Ted Tinling) investigate as Dominick “Dom” Spages (Niles McMaster), Catherine’s ex-husband and the girls’ father, arrives for the funeral. Afterward, Annie announces she plans to stay with Catherine in her time of grief, and a belligerent Alice is told she will have to return to school. Alice hates her aunt and the two argue; Annie thinks her niece deliberately dropped a glass of milk and implicates her in the crime, saying she had Karen’s veil in her pocket. Dominick goes to see Brennan who wants to talk with Alice but he refuses after Cranston tries to implicate her in the killing. Cranston informs Brennan that school officials wanted Alice to see a psychiatrist. When Alice gives Mr. Alphonso the rent check, she deliberately crumples it; he tries to grope her and she retaliates by strangling his beloved cat. Going to the basement of the apartment building, Alice wears the mask and feeds cockroaches she keeps in a jar. As Annie leaves the building, a figure in mask and raincoat stabs her several times in the feet and legs. After she is taken to the hospital, Dominick finds Alice in the basement and she tells him that Karen attacked Annie. Dominick and Father Tom go to the hospital to see Annie. Cranston arrives to question her but she only wants her milquetoast husband Jim (Gary Allen). She tells him her assailant was Alice but Catherine calls her a liar and questions where her daughter Angela was at the time of Karen’s murder. After failing a lie detector test and telling the police that Karen attacked Annie, Alice is placed in a children’s shelter where Dr. Whitman (Louisa Horton) informs her parents that the young girl needs psychological help. Back home, Dominick tells Catherine he thinks Angela may have murdered Karen but she disagrees. The two start to make love when his wife calls. Catherine tells her ex-husband to stop playing detective and go home but he vows to find his daughter’s killer. Later he gets a telephone call from Angela who says she has Karen’s crucifix and he agrees to meet her at a waterfall near an abandoned warehouse. Seeing someone he thinks is Angela, he follows her into the building and is stabbed in the left shoulder and then knocked out with a brick and bound with rope. As he is about to be pushed out a third floor window, Dominick finds out his assailant is Mrs. Tredoni. Almost caught when returning to the church, the housekeeper hides in a confessional where she tells Father Tom she has sinned for being impatient with the parish’s now addled monsignor (Peter Bosche). When Dominick does not return, Catherine goes to the rectory to see Father Tom. Mrs. Tredoni offers her
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coffee and says her own little girl died on the day of her first communion and that little children have to pay for the sins of their parents. Father Tom returns and tells Catherine about Dominick being found murdered. At the autopsy, the pathologist (Roth) finds a crucifix lodged in his throat. As a result, Catherine and Father Tom go to the children’s shelter and bring Alice home but she is not informed of her father’s murder. The next day Alice places a jar filled with cockroaches on the huge stomach of the sleeping Mr. Alphonso. After she and her mother leave for mass, Mrs. Tredoni, dressed in the mask and yellow raincoat, shows up to kill them. Mr. Alphonso wakes up screaming when he finds the insects crawling over him and runs into the hallway where she sees Mrs. Tredoni. Thinking she is Alice, he grabs her and the woman stabs him to death and runs from the apartment building. She is followed by Spina, who has been trailing her. Before the church service begins, Father Tom tells Spina he will turn Mrs. Tredoni over to the police when she attempts to get communion. Rushing to the altar, Mrs. Tredoni is denied communion by the priest and she stabs him in the neck. In front of the horrified congregation, Mrs. Tredoni hugs Father Tom as Alice leaves the church in a dazed state, carrying the killer’s shopping bag and bloody knife. Communion is populated by unlikable characters, some of them eccentric, like the grotesque landlord and the shrewish aunt. Surprisingly, the title character, Alice, has almost no redeeming qualities. She is a nasty, self-centered brat whose mental state is certainly questionable. Phil Hardy, in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986) tries to analyze the heroine’s actions by saving she is “[m]enaced on the one hand by a Church in its dotage urging submission on pain of hellfire, and on the other by a corrupt society assuming eagerness to participate in its secret vices” so she “almost inevitably takes over where her predecessor left off.” No doubt due to Brooke Shields’ involvement in the production, Communion received considerable coverage for a not very good slasher feature, with both adherents and foes. The Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide (1989) termed it “a wonderfully perverse low-budget Bad Seed–type tale…. The best Catholic-themed verite ever lensed in New Jersey….” Video Hound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics (1996) said the feature is a “shocking, suspenseful horror thriller, full of bizarre images and sudden violence.” Mike Mayo went even further in Videohound’s Horror Show (1998), calling it a “complex indictment of Catholicism” and adding, “The film’s influence on various slasher films of following decades, particularly the Italians, is obvious. Despite a modest budget, it’s aged better than many more expensive productions of the same era. The ending’s terrific.” In Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), Danny Peary opined, “Cult horror film is guaranteed to keep you tense. The attack scenes are not for the faint-hearted…. Picture is full of off beat touches and characters. Well made, but beware.” Far more on the mark was Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films II (1982) when he wrote, “A gallery of psychological grotesques in a very loud, crude slash-and-stab horror thriller. Gross and unpleasant.”
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962; 85 minutes) Producer-Director: Albert Zugsmith. Screenplay: Robert Hill, from the novel Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey. Photography: Joseph F. Biroc. Editors: Roy V. Livingston and Robert S. Eisen. Art Director: Eugene Lourie. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Joseph Kish. Production Manager: Lonnie D’Orsa. Costumes: Norah Sharpe and Roger J. Weinberg. Makeup: Bill Turner. Continuity: Eylla Jacobs. Assistant Director: Lindsley Parsons, Jr. CAST: Vincent Price (Gilbert “Gil” De Quincey), Lindo Ho (Ruby Low/Ling Tang), Philip Ahn (Ching Foon), Richard Loo (George Wah/Old Man), June Kim (Lotus), Yvonne Moray (Child), Alicia Lu (Ping Toy), John Mamo (Auctioneer), Arthur Wong (Kwai Tong), Jo Anne Miya,
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Terence De Marney, Vincent Price and Arthur Wong in Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962)
Geri Hoo, Keiko [Nishimura] (Dancing Girls), Carol Russell (Slave Girl), Terence de Marney (Opium Den Customer), Vincent Barbi (Captain), Caroline Kido (Lo Tsen), Gerald Jann (Fat Chinaman), Vivianne Manku (Catatonic Girl), Miel Saan (Look Gow), Victor Sen Yung (Wing Young), Ralph Ahn (Wah Chan), Richard Fong (Bidder), Roy Jenson, Charles Horvath (Boat Crewmen), Angelo Rossitto (Newspaper Seller), David Chow (Opium Eater).
In the fall of 1958 Allied Artists announced it was going to film the 1821 work Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey and it would be made in color in Japan by producer-director William Castle. Nothing came of the project but it was revived two years later by producer-director Albert Zugsmith Photoplay Associates with Vincent Price starring as a descendant of De Quincey and the action set in San Francisco in 1902. Released in the summer of 1962, the feature was shown in the United Kingdom as Evils of Chinatown and was reissued as Secrets of a Soul and Souls for Sale. Zugsmith, who had produced The Tarnished Angels (1957), Touch of Evil (1958) and Imitation of Life (1959), also wrote, produced and directed Sex Kittens Go to College (1960) [q.v.] and Dondi (1961) for Allied. In 1966 he directed another drug-themed feature, Movie Star American Style, or, LSD I Hate You for his Famous Players company. A shipment of Chinese women arrives on the California coast but one of the captives, 17-year-old Lotus ( June Kim), manages to escape. George Wah (Richard Loo) is injured
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fighting her captors. Adventurer Gilbert “Gil” De Quincey (Price) arrives in San Francisco and visits the antique shop of Ching Foon (Philip Ahn). A Tong war takes place over the murder of Wah, the editor of the Chinatown Gazette. Foon sends Gil to Ruby Low (Linda Ho), who is mourning the death of Wah although he was her enemy, with his exposés of the selling of imported slave girls to Tong members. Ruby is the mistress of elderly Ling Tang, the head of the slavery operation. After getting caught in the middle of a Tong fight, Gil breaks into the newspaper office and hears Foon talking with Lotus. Gil later questions Lotus, who tells him she was abducted from her homeland and brought to San Francisco to be sold into sexual slavery. When attackers break into the room, Gil spirits Lotus into an elevator that leads them to the sewers. As they try to escape they are attacked by four men, and the girl is carried away by them. Gil follows but is knocked out. When he comes to, he is confronted by several men wearing masks, one of whom is Foon who, like De Quincey, has the tattoo of Ling Tang. Breaking free of his bonds, Gil enters a cellar where he finds Ping Toy (Alicia Lu), diminutive Child (Yvonne Moray) and a dying girl (Vivianne Manku) in cages. Child, who is really a small adult and once the consort of Ling Tang, tells him they are being starved instead of killed outright so their ghosts will not haunt their former owners. Gil sets them free and they lead him to another room where he jumps onto a hanging cage that carries him to a balcony where he finds a passage that leads to an opium den. There he smokes an opium pipe and has terrible visions and weird dreams of attackers and monsters. Awaking, De Quincey jumps out of a window and goes into a building where he hears someone crying for help. Pursued by men with weapons, he falls from a balcony and wakes up when Ruby Low throws water on him. They are in her apartment where she reveals a secret room containing the vast treasure of Ling Tang which she plans to use to rule a province in China. They kiss and she knocks him out. Gil is placed in a cage in a room next to the area where the slave auction is being held. He also finds Child and Ping Toy have been recaptured. As young women are forced to dance for Tong members who bid for them with opium, Gil manages to get out of his cage and sets Child and Ping Toy free. He leads them to Ruby Low’s apartment where they find firecrackers; he shows them how to empty gunpowder out of the fireworks and spread it throughout the building. When one of the girls proves to be bald, the Tong buyers squabble, and Ling Tang appears to arbitrate the matter. Lotus is made to dance and is purchased by an old man (Loo) for fifteen head of opium. After being given a signal by Gil, Ping Toy lights the gunpowder as the old man is revealed to be George Wah, whose death was staged so he could infiltrate the Tongs. Pandemonium erupts as the girls try to escape. Gil joins Wah in fighting their captors. Gil, Wah, Lotus, Ping Toy and Child run out of the burning building but are pursued by the Tong members. They escape through a manhole but Gil is knocked out and Child is killed. Falling into the sewer, Gil is attacked by the masked Ling Tang who turns out to be Ruby Low. He pulls her into the rapidly flowing water and they drown together. Confessions of an Opium Eater is a confusing affair that hints that the character of Gilbert De Quincey, a descendant of Thomas De Quincey, may have some prior knowledge of the slave trade and came to San Francisco to aid Wah and his men in the Tong war — but this is not delineated in the script. The film is padded with drawn-out sequences of the captured girls dancing at the slave auction. Its only real horrific parts came at the beginning with a couple of scenes of a rotting corpse on a beach and De Quincey’s later confused dream after smoking opium. The latter was mainly made up of clips from such American International features as Invasion of the Saucer Men and Voodoo Woman (both 1957) and Earth vs the Spider (1958).
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Vincent Price is miscast in the leading role, a part better suited to any number of action stars. The feature was not popular with critics with the Monthly Film Bulletin referring to it as a “crude piece of claptrap.” James Robert Parish and Steven Whitney in Vincent Price Unmasked (1974) called the film “a tattered, exploitation presentation,” adding, “Price’s exaggerated performance and his nonheroic demeanor were hardly an intrinsic asset to this warped–low budget offering.” Michael Weldon in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983) referred to it as an “[i]ncredible, trashy drug adventure” and noted, “In the late ’60s this Albert Zugsmith epic was a favorite of drugged patrons at midnight shows.” About the only highlight in this mundane adventure feature is the work of midget Yvonne Moray as Child. Her lively and ingratiating work helped provide some amusement in an otherwise drab affair. Moray’s film career dated back to the mid–1930s; the actress, who was sometimes called a little Garbo, also appeared in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
The Cosmic Man (1959; 73 minutes) Producer: Robert A. Terry. Associate Producer: Harry Marsh. Director: Herbert Greene. Story-Screenplay: Arthur C. Pierce. Photography: John F. Warren. Editors: Richard C. Currier and Helene Turner. Music: Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter. Musical Director: Lou Kosloff. Sound: Philip Mitchell. Production Supervisor: Lester D. Guthrie. Special Effects: Charles Duncan. Assistant Director: Richard Del Ruth. CAST: John Carradine (The Cosmic Man/The Stranger), Bruce Bennett (Dr. Karl Sorenson),
Paul Langton and Bruce Bennett in The Cosmic Man (1959)
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Angela Greene (Katherine “Kathy” Grant), Paul Langton (Colonel Mathews), Scotty Morrow (Ken Grant), Lyn Osborn (Sergeant Gray), Walter Maslow (Dr. “Rich” Richie), Herbert Lytton (General Knowland), Ken Clayton (Major), Alan Wells (Sergeant), Harry Fleer (Park Ranger Bill), John Erman (Corporal), Dwight Brooks (Radar Operator), Hal Torey (Dr. Steinholtz).
Forest rangers report a UFO has landed in Stone Canyon and General Knowland (Herbert Lytton) of Air Force Intelligence orders Colonel Mathews (Paul Langton) to investigate. He also consults with astrophysicist Dr. Karl Sorenson (Bruce Bennett), who agrees to go the site. Mathews arrives at Stone Canyon with Sergeant Gray (Lyn Osborn) and they are taken to the UFO by a park ranger (Harry Fleer) and find Karl testing the area for radioactivity. The craft is a large egg-shaped sphere hovering above the ground. While the scientist theorizes the object is some type of probe, the colonel feels it might be hostile and notes that finding out how it works could give the country space supremacy. Kathy Grant (Angela Greene) and her son Ken (Scotty Morrow), who cannot walk, drive to the area to check out the local gossip about a flying saucer landing in the area, since Ken wants to be an astronomer. Kathy owns Grant’s Lodge and the colonel makes a deal with her to use the facility to house his men. While she and Ken get acquainted with Karl, Mathews radios the general and questions Karl’s loyalty. Knowland says the scientist, who Mathews believes is anti-military, is a major general in the reserves and one of those responsible for the atomic bomb. At his laboratory at Pacific Technical University’s Science Department, Karl describes the object to his assistant, Dr. Richie (Walter Maslow), who resents the international barriers that prevent them from discussing the matter with other scientists. Richie also expresses his frustration at not being able to successfully complete a photon chamber diagram. A sergeant (Alan Wells) makes sure the landing site is well guarded and goes to the lodge where he has the feeling of an unseen presence, not realizing a light from the craft followed him. At the lodge, Mathews shares a drink with Kathy who tells him her husband was a Korean MIA and that Ken has only six months to a year to live. When the colonel leaves the room to take a telephone call from the general, Kathy is frightened by a man in black who quickly disappears. That night the town is disturbed by the presence of the black-caped shade. The next day, Richie informs Karl that all their tapes have been demagnetized and someone has made the proper corrections to the photon chamber diagram. This convinces Karl that the area is being visited by an alien. He later learns that the colonel plans to move the UFO to the local military post for inspection. When Karl leaves to go to the landing site, a stranger ( John Carradine) wearing a hat, long coat and thick glasses requests a room that will provide him with privacy. At Stone Canyon, the Air Force men are unable to move the sphere with a net attached to a truck nor can it be breached with a torch. Karl determines that the object can turn light into energy and use it to emit powerful sonic blasts. This causes Mathews to demand the object be taken apart. After he arrives at the lodge, the general agrees after Karl suggests the landing site may have been chosen because it is near plants working with ion propulsion and radiation. As Mathews announces that Dr. Steinholtz (Hal Torey) is due to arrive from Washington D.C. to look into the matter, the lights go out and a powerful voice informs those present that he is an alien who has come to Earth to gain knowledge for the inhabitants of other planets; he also praises the work of Karl and his colleagues. As the alien starts to leave the room, Mathews fires at him but to no avail. Ken tells Karl about the strange man staying at the hotel and the general issues an order for the alien’s capture. When Karl objects, he is placed under protective custody and told by Mathews that various weaponry plants have suffered sabotage. Karl finds out that Steinholtz plans to place a magnetic field around the UFO to stop the alien from returning to the craft. During the night,
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Kathy awakens to find the stranger playing chess with her son. The man later enters the boy’s room, telling him not to be afraid. The next morning Kathy finds out that Ken is missing. Karl and the sergeant, his guard, drive to the landing site over a little-used mountain path, followed by Kathy and Richie. After they arrive at the sphere, the stranger shows up carrying a sleeping Ken and puts him on the ground. He tells the military men to shut down the magnetic field so he can return to the craft since his mission is completed. The apparatus is stopped but Steinholz wants to study the alien and turns it back on, causing the Cosmic Man to collapse. Karl then turns it off as Ken wakes up and walks to his mother. A light from the craft disintegrates the space man as Ken bids him farewell. Karl announces that the alien will someday return. The only production of Futura Pictures, The Cosmic Man was filmed early in 1958 and purchased by Allied Artists as a companion feature for House on Haunted Hill (q.v.), with theatrical issuance in February 1959. In the United Kingdom it was released by Associated British-Pathé. Despite budget limitations, it is a fairly well-made and well-acted production that is too talky and action-less. The UFO looks like a huge suspended egg and the title character, mostly shown in a negative image, is not frightening and has little screen time, despite being portrayed by top-billed John Carradine. No doubt audiences expecting a monster and a few scares were sadly disappointed. Although the sci-fier has a heartwarming ending with the paraplegic boy being cured by the Cosmic Man, the feature simply lacks the thrills its title promised. It does provide a hint of romance with Kathy being attracted to both the cerebral Karl and visceral Mathews. Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972) judged it “Poor” and Castle of Frankenstein #8 (1966) called it “[r]outine grade-B science-fiction.” Ed Naha wrote in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975), “Childish romp with good intentions and fairly nice results if you don’t take it too seriously…. John Carradine as the interplanetary peacemaker brings the film much more dignity than it warrants.” In Science Fiction (1984), Phil Hardy noted, “One of a series of films of the fifties infected with the general fear of nuclear war, this engaging, low-budget oddity, like Robert Wise’s far more assured The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), explores the idea of a benevolent alien trying to set Earth to rights…. The film’s optimistic ending has a certain naïve power.”
Crashing Las Vegas (1956; 62 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Jean Yarbrough. Story-Screenplay: Jack Townley. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: George White. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Joe Edmondson. Sets: Victor Ganelin. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Makeup: Frank McCoy. Special Effects: Ray Mercer. Wardrobe: Bert Henrikson. Production Assistant: Rex Bailey. Continuity: Richard Chaffee. Assistant Director: Edward Morey, Jr. CAST: Leo Gorcey (Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney), Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones), Mary Castle (Carol LaRue), Don Haggerty (Tony Murlock), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck), Terry Frost (Sergeant Kelly), Jimmy Murphy (Myron), Mort Mills (Oggy), Jack Rice (Wiley), Nicky Blair (Sam), Doris Kemper (Kate Kelly), Don Marlowe, Dick Foote (Policemen), Jack Grinnage (Bellboy), Robert Hopkins (Quiz Show Host), John Bleifer ( Joe Crumb, Man in Seat 62), Emil Sitka (Man in Seat 87), Frank J. Scannell (Croupier), Joey Ray (Floor Manager/Dream Judge), Jack Chefe, Cosmo Sardo (Waiters), Frank Hagney (Guard), Speer Martin (Elevator Operator), Jimmy Brandt (Usher), Minerva Urecal (Woman), Alfred Tonkel (Man).
After starring as Slip Mahoney in 41 “Bowery Boys” programmers, Leo Gorcey called it quits with Crashing Las Vegas, released to theaters in the spring of 1956. The reason Gorcey gave for leaving was the death of his father Bernard Gorcey, who played the part of sweet
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shop owner Louie Dumbrowski for a decade. Other sources claim Leo was terminated because of excessive drinking; in some scenes in Crashing Las Vegas he does appear inebriated. Filmed in Las Vegas, the production has a tacky look with little of the glitter of the gambling capitol rubbing off on the tired proceedings. Huntz Hall as Sach dominates the action but his character is less appealing than usual, making the outing a chore to watch. In The Films of the Bowery Boys (1982), David Hayes and Brent Walker opined, “Crashing Las Vegas tries to spoof television game shows and gambling systems. It succeeds at doing the first, but the Las Vegas footage is comprised of just standard ‘B’ film plottage.” Variety declared, “Crashing Las Vegas may not be the best in this long series of ‘Bowery Boys’ films, but has plenty of laughs…. This is Hall’s film all the way, and Leo Gorcey is just shadow dressing.” The film’s minor link to sci-fi and fantasy deals with Sach’s getting an electric shock that enables him to pick winning numbers. Although they have no money, Slip Mahoney (Gorcey) and Sach Jones (Hall) vow to help their landlady Mrs. Kelly (Doris Kemper) when she cannot meet her mortgage payment. Sach accidentally gets shocked by an electric outlet and then goes with Slip, Chuck (David Condon) and Myron ( Jimmy Murphy) to a TV quiz program with the four hoping to hit the jackpot for Mrs. Kelly. Slip manages to predict the winning number in a wheel of fortune spin, getting a month’s vacation in Las Vegas. When Slip, Chuck and Myron complain, the show makes it a week for four in the glitter capitol. After getting settled in their hotel, Sach wins a big stake at another wheel of fortune game but loses it by leaving the table. Accepting a loan from Mahoney, Sach piles up another win and gets noticed by beautiful blonde gold digger Carol LaRue (Mary Castle) and her partners, Oggy (Mort Mills) and Sam (Nicky Blair). The crooks think Sach has a system and Carol plays up to him, even letting Sach believe he saved her life when she pretends to drown in the hotel swimming pool. Carol tells Sach she wants to win enough money to pay for an operation for her mother and he takes her money and promptly loses it at roulette. Carol walks out on Sach who admits to Slip that with her around he cannot think of numbers — and then proceeds to shut down the roulette wheel when he wins with his predictions. The three crooks enlists the aid of their pal Tony Murlock (Don Haggerty) and set out to fleece Sach of his gambling winnings. After Carol calls to apologize to Sach, he informs Slip they have enough money to rescue Mrs. Kelly but Slip wants him to continue gambling to pay for their retirement. After a newspaper story about Sach’s luck is published, none of the gambling houses will let them play. That night Sach goes off with Carol. His pals think he has been abducted and call the police. Carol takes Sach to her apartment house and he is tricked into thinking her room is on the twenty-first floor although they never leave the ground floor. When Carol gets too friendly with Sach, Tony, who claims to be her husband, shows up and the two men get into a shoving match with Tony going out a window. As Oggy pretends to call the law, saying Sach murdered Tony, Sach rushes out of the apartment and ends up in a police car where he hears a radio call looking for him. Not realizing that it deals with his pals saying he was kidnapped, Sach thinks he is a wanted man and runs back to the hotel and takes refuge in a closet. After hearing Slip, Chuck and Myron talk about a murder, Slip passes out and dreams that he and his friends have been sentenced to the electric chair. The boys hear his cries and get him out of the closet. When Sach tells him about Tony’s death, Slip realizes his pal has been framed to get his money and decides to get him a lawyer. After he leaves, Carol and Oggy show up and demand to know Sach’s gambling system. Sach tells them he does not have a system but gives them his suitcase filled with the money he won and they depart. When Slip returns, Sach informs him what happened and is told there has
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been no murder. The boys goes to Carol’s apartment and search the place as Tony, Oggy and Sam arrive with the suitcase and they all get into a fistfight. Sach and the crooks end up being knocked out. When Sach comes to, he switches on a fan that blows the money out a window. Unplugging the fan, Sach gets a shock that cancels out his powers of predicting correct numbers. The dejected boys go back to their hotel but get a telephone call from Mrs. Kelly, who has followed them to Las Vegas. They set out to find her room, but Sach guesses the wrong number and is throttled by Slip. Huntz Hall was promoted to top billing in the “Bowery Boys” series following Leo Gorcey’s departure and Stanley Clements was brought in as his replacement, playing the character Stanislaus “Duke” Coveleskie. Seven more series outings were released from 1956 to 1958, including Hold That Hypnotist, Spook Chasers and Up in Smoke (all 1957) [qq.v.].
Crow Hollow (1952; 69 minutes) Producer: William H. Williams. Director: Michael McCarthy. Screenplay: Vivian Milroy, from the novel by Dorothy Eden. Photography: Robert Lapresle. Editor: Eric Hodges. Art Director: George Haslam. Sound: Sidney Rider. Production Manager: Adrian Worker. Production Supervisor: Leslie Sinclair. Makeup: Jack Craig. Wardrobe: Elsie Curtis. Continuity: Betty Harley. Assistant Director: Kenneth Rick. CAST: Donald Houston (Dr. Robert “Bob” Amour), Natascha Parry (Ann Amour), Pat [Patricia] Owens (Willow), Esma Cannon (Aunt Judith), Nora Nicholson (Aunt Opal), Susan Richmond (Aunt Hester), R. Meadows White (Dexter), Melissa Stribling (Diana Wilson), Penelope Munday (Cass), Ewen Solon (Sergeant Jenkins), Denis Web (Police Inspector York), Georgie Herschel (Nurse Baxter), Gordon Bell (Alec), Janet Barrow (Mrs. Wilson), Norman Claridge (Hospital Doctor), Doris Yorke (Hospital Nurse).
In London, beautiful Ann Amour (Natascha Parry) awakens her roommate Cass (Penelope Munday) to tell her that she is going to marry Dr. Robert Amour (Donald Houston), whom she has known for only a week. At their wedding reception, he informs their friends that he and Ann plan to live at his family’s house at remote Crow Hollow. Before leaving, the newlyweds visit Mrs. Wilson ( Janet Barrow), a terminal case and an old family friend of the groom. She tells Ann that her new husband is an orphan and becomes agitated at the mention of his three aunts who live at Crow Hollow and begs the young woman not to go there. When they arrive at Crow Hollow, Bob introduces Ann to his maiden aunts, Judith (Esma Cannon), a naturalist who collects rare insects; Hester (Susan Richmond), who makes soup for invalids; and Opal (Nora Nicholson), who is greatly attached to their maid-companion, Willow (Patricia Owens). The newlyweds are given the room where the aunts’ mother died forty years before. The next morning Ann meets the beautiful Willow, who brings her breakfast, but they immediately mistrust each other. Ann inspects the grounds and looks at Judith’s insect collection but is frightened when she sees a large poisonous spider that has just arrived from Australia. She also meets the gardener, Dexter (R. Meadows White), who warns her not to be dominated by the three old women. After becoming upset when she finds Willow trying on her clothes, Ann drives into town with Hester and has lunch with her husband, telling him that life for her at Crow Hollow is a useless existence and she wants them to have their own home. He tries to cheer her up by saying they will attend a local dance but on the day of the festivities, when Willow is doing her hair, the poisonous spider falls on Ann’s shoulder and is killed by Bob. Judith questions how the spider got out of its box; Ann contends it was not an accident. At the dance, Robert introduces her to Diana Wilson (Melissa Stribling), the daughter of the dying woman she met in London. Ann asks Diana why her mother warned her not to come to Crow Hollow and
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she is told that Mrs. Wilson trained Willow and was unhappy when the aunts bribed the young woman to work for them. When Ann again asks to leave, Robert tells her he promised his grandfather that his aunts would always have a home at Crow Hollow. Dexter informs Ann that the aunts were not happy when Robert married a stranger and they had felt the same way when his father, their half-brother, married the doctor’s late mother Marguerite, who died 25 years before under vague circumstances. Ann visits Marguerite’s grave at the local churchyard but a storm ensues and she comes down with chills and a fever. When Ann begins to recover, Hester brings her soup; when the young woman eats it she becomes deathly ill and tells Bob she was poisoned. She recovers as Judith searches for a large deadly toadstool that Dexter found for her but she only locates a bottle of strychnine, which Hester uses to poison rabbits raiding her garden, and gives it to Willow. After a 20-year absence, crows return to the property as Ann packs and informs Willow that she is going away for a time. Getting a ride to the train station, she begins to feel weak and runs into Diana and goes to her house. There Diana informs Ann that her mother felt the aunts wanted Robert to marry Willow. Diana takes Ann back to Crow Hollow where she finds Willow has been stabbed while sitting at Ann’s dressing table. Ann tells Bob that she was the intended victim. She is questioned by Police Inspector York (Denis Webb) and finds out from him and Sergeant Jenkins (Ewen Solon) that the murdered girl had been adopted, her father being a gardener for Mrs. Wilson two decades before; her unknown mother may have come from a prominent family. Realizing that she is the main suspect, Ann tells the police she had left a hat on her bed before she departed and that Willow had probably tried it on; since she was stabbed from the back, the murderer mistook the maid for Ann. The inspector agrees this might be the case and he leaves a policeman at Crow Hollow and asks Diana to stay for a few days. That night Bob is called out on a case and he takes Ann to Diana’s room and both women realize they did not hear the telephone ring. Ann runs to Bob, who is in the kitchen with Opal, who offers both of them coffee. They refuse to drink the brew, realizing it might be poisoned. Opal admits that Willow was her daughter and that she tried to kill Ann with Judith’s spider and Hester’s soup. She killed her own daughter thinking she was Ann. As the newlyweds leave to call the police, the woman drinks the coffee she planned to use to poison them. Robert tells Ann he will apply for the position of a house surgeon in Middlesex but she wants to remain at Crow Hollow. Allied Artists released the British import Crow Hollow in the U.S. in 1952 following Eros Pictures debuting it in its homeland that August. Made by Bruton Film Producers at Merton Park Studios, it was called La Isla de la Muerte (The Island of the Dead) in Spain. Based on Dorothy Eden’s 1950 novel, it is a compact and moderately entertaining psychological horror film highlighted by beautiful Natascha Parry as the heroine in harm’s way. It is best remembered for providing Melissa Stribling’s film debut; she later portrayed Mina in Horror of Dracula (1958). Patricia Owens, who played the lovely Willow, was the wife of the scientist in The Fly (1958). Top-billed Donald Houston was also in Maniac (1963), A Study in Terror (1965), Tales That Witness Madness (1973) and Clash of the Titans (1981), and a regular on the 1973 British sci-fi TV series Moonbase 3. In British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928 –1959 (1984), David Quinlan called it a “[g]loomy yarn, poorly made, performed without conviction. Best thing’s the title.”
Curse of the Voodoo (1965; 73 minutes) Producer: Richard Gordon. Executive Producer: Kenneth Rive. Director: Lindsay Shonteff. Screenplay: Tony O’Grady [Brian Clemens] and Leigh Vance. Photography: Gerald Gibbs. Editor:
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Barry Vince. Music: Brian Fahey. Art Director: Tony Inglis. Sound: Jock May. Production Executive: Fred Slark. Makeup: Gerry Fletcher. Wardrobe: Mary Gibson. Assistant Director: Bill Snaith. CAST: Bryant Halliday (Michael “Mike” Stacey), Dennis Price (Major Lomas), Lisa Daniely ( Janet Stacey), Ronald Leigh-Hunt (Doctor), Mary Kerridge ( Janet’s Mother), John Wittey (Police Inspector), Jean Lodge (Beva Lomas), Danny Daniels (Simbaza Chief ), Dennis Alaba Peters (Saidi), Tony Thawnton (Mr. Radlett), Michael Nightingale (Second Hunter), Nigel Feyisetan (London Simbazan), Louis Mahoney (African Expert), Valli Newby (Pickup), Andy Meyers (Tommy Stacey), Jimmy Feldgate (Barman), Bobby Breen Quintet (Night Club Musicians), Beryl Cunningham (Dancer).
British film producer Richard Gordon made a number of popular genre efforts, including Fiend Without a Face and The Haunted Strangler (both 1958), First Man into Space (1959), The Projected Man and Island of Terror (both 1966), Tower of Evil (1971), Horror Hospital (1973) and Inseminoid (Horror Planet) (1981). Curse of the Voodoo, however, is not a high water mark in his career, since it is a boring, slow-moving and cheaply made production with an unlikable lead character. It also has a number of drawn-out sequences, such as a silly night club dance and the “hero” being stalked by vengeful natives. Filmed at Shepperton Studios in England, the film was released in that country in 1965 as Curse of Simba, running 61 minutes. Allied Artists issued it on the bottom half of a double bill the same year in the U.S. with Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (q.v.) which probably made cinema customers want their money back. It also had some stateside showings as Voodoo Blood Bath. The Bobby Breen Quintet, which provided music in a night club sequence, was a black band. During a safari in Simbaza country in Africa, Radlett (Tony Thawnton) wounds a lion but does not kill it. Simba is a lion god to the natives and the penalty is death for anyone who kills one of the beasts. Big game hunter Mike Stacey (Bryant Halliday) goes into the brush with bearer Saidi (Dennis Alaba Peters) and finishes off the wounded lion. Later, in camp, the Simbaza chief (Danny Daniels) throws a sword in front of Stacey, placing him under a black magic curse. The leader of the safari, Major Lomas (Dennis Price), orders everyone, including Mike, who was injured by the lion, to return home. On the trip back, Saidi tries to stab Mike but is stopped by Lomas and runs away. In Johannesburg, Mike learns that his wife Janet (Lisa Daniely) has taken their small son Tommy (Andy Meyers) and returned to live with her mother (Mary Kerridge) in England. Mike takes the advice of Lomas’ wife ( Jean Lodge) and follows Janet back to England where he meets her at his mother-in-law’s country home and gives his son a stuffed lion. Mike makes a date with Janet for that evening so they can discuss a reconciliation but when she does not show up he goes home with a young woman (Valli Newby) he picks up in a bar. During the night he dreams that Saidi has been captured by the natives and when he is tortured, Mike feels the pain. He leaves the woman and walks through a wooded area where he thinks he hears a lion roar and then goes to see a doctor (Ronald Leigh-Hunt) who treats his re-opened wound. He returns to the woman who tells him he had a bad nightmare before he awoke. When he mentions hearing a lion nearby, she says a zoo is only a few blocks away. When Janet comes to see him, Mike asks her to return to Africa with him but she refuses. When he thinks he sees a Simbaza native (Nigel Feyisetan) he follows the man but loses him on a bus. That night Mike shoots at the native when he tries to break into his room. The police investigate and an inspector ( John Wittey) takes his gun. When he is walking in the country, Mike sees two Simbaza natives coming at him with spears and he runs from them and wakes up to the doctor giving him a shot. The medical man says Mike’s arm is infected and not healing properly. Janet, who has come to help her husband, asks about his hallucinations; the doctor thinks they may be due to his excessive drinking. Mike tells Janet the Simbazas
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are after him. After three days the doctor says his condition is worsening and the trouble is in his mind. Mike awakes and sees the native at his window and hears his son call for help. Janet goes to see an expert (Louis Mahoney) in African lore who tells her that anyone who kills a lion may be put under a curse by the Simbaza tribe and the only way to break the spell is to return to Africa and kill the man who placed him under a curse. After she tells him what the expert said, the weak Mike announces he plans to go back to Africa and asks her to contact Lomas to make the arrangements. In Africa, Mike tells Lomas to stay with Janet as he drives a Jeep into Simbaza country where Saidi is still being tortured. He rescues his bearer and pursues the chief on foot but runs out of ammunition. Feeling weak, Mike goes back to his Jeep and uses it to run down the chief. Relieved of the curse, Mike sets out with Saidi to return to Janet. The same year he produced Curse of the Voodoo, Richard Gordon made Devil Doll, which also starred Bryant Halliday and was directed by Lindsay Shonteff.
The Cyclops (1957; 66 minutes) Producer-Director-Screenplay-Special Effects: Bert I. Gordon. Associate Producer-Production Manager: Henry Schrage. Assistant Producer: Flora M. Gordon. Photography: Ira Morgan. Editor: Carlo Lodato. Music: Albert Glasser. Sound Effects: Douglas Stewart. Makeup: Carlie Taylor and Jack H. Young. Assistant Directors: Harry O. Jones [Harry L. Fraser] and Ray Taylor, Jr. CAST: James Craig (Russ Bradford), Gloria Talbott (Susan Winter), Lon Chaney, Jr. (Marty Melville), Tom Drake (Lee Brand), Duncan [Dean] Parkin (The Cyclops — Bruce Barton), Vicente Padula (Governor), Marlene Kloss (Newsstand Girl), Manuel Lopez (Police Officer), Paul Frees (Voice Effects).
Lon Chaney, James Craig and Gloria Talbott in The Cyclops (1957)
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Producer, director, writer and special effects artist Bert I. Gordon is best known for his sci-fi productions with giants: humans, animals and insects. Thus he has been nicknamed “Mr. BIG,” relating his initials to his screen reputation. After making TV commercials and editing TV movies, Gordon’s first directing effort was the wretched King Dinosaur (1955); next he made The Cyclops, the first of several films featuring human giants. The Cyclops was made in 1955 and was sold to RKO Radio which planned to release it on a double bill with the British import X —The Unknown (1956), but the studio went out of business and Gordon’s film went to Allied Artists and was issued with Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (q.v.) in July 1957. Both features starred Gloria Talbott. In Guayjorm, Mexico, Susan Winter (Talbott) meets with the local governor (Vicente Padula) in an attempt to obtain a permit to fly inland in search of her fiancé Bruce Barton, who disappeared during a solo plane flight three years before. The official does not trust her traveling companions, bacteriologist Russ Bradford ( James Craig), who was a close friend of Bruce and now is in love with Susan; uranium hunter Marty Melville (Lon Chaney, Jr.), and pilot Lee Brand (Tom Drake), and denies her request. He also demands one of the men remain in town while a police officer flies home with them. The next day Marty knocks out the officer (Manuel Lopez) and the four take off for the interior despite being warned of downdrafts. Marty’s uranium detector picks up signs of the mineral but he panics when the flight gets bumpy and knocks out Brand, causing the craft to nosedive. Susan manages to wake Lee, who lands the plane in the area where Bruce’s craft may have crashed. Upon landing, Marty realizes the area is rich in uranium and wants to return immediately to Guayjorm to file a claim which will make him millions. The others refuse to leave until they find out what happened to Bruce. Looking over the area, Russ spies a dinosaur-size lizard but it quickly disappears before the others can see it. Susan and Russ search for Bruce’s plane and he tells her he loves her and is tired of contending with a dead man for her affections. They hear a loud noise and see a giant hawk devour a rodent as big as a dog. They return to the plane, which Lee and Marty have turned around for takeoff, and Susan asks Russ to take possession of its keys. The four then set out to search the area and see a fight between a giant iguana and a lizard. Marty insists they return home and Russ agrees but first he takes a skin sample from the mortally wounded iguana. At their camp he determines that its cells are multiplying at a fantastic rate. He theorizes that the creatures were originally normal size but radioactivity caused them to mutate and become giants. Russ warns the same thing can happen to humans. While the men sleep, Susan searches for her fiancé’s plane and, seeing Gloria Talbott is astounded to see The Cyclops (1957).
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something towering over her, she screams. The others locate her in a cave which also contains airplane parts. As Russ tries to calm her, a 25-foot-tall giant (Duncan Parkin) with a disfigured face and one eye blocks the cave entrance with a huge rock. Russ theorizes that the Cyclops’ is due to radiation and he hopes to be able to communicate with him although all the creature does is emit loud roars. As the group sleeps, Marty takes Russ’ gun. The creature returns and Russ suggests that Susan try to talk to it. As she is doing so, Marty shoots at the giant, who kills him, picks up the young woman and sets her on the boulder. She screams when she sees a gigantic snake which the Cyclops eventually subdues. Russ and Lee climb out of the cave and the trio set out for their landing site. As they stop to rest, Russ convinces Susan that the giant is Bruce. The trio creep past the sleeping Cyclops and get back to the plane. The craft will not start. When they see the Cyclops approaching, the three run into the hills. Afraid the creature will wreck the plane, Russ lures him away. Climbing into some rocks, he ties dry grass onto the end of a long stake, sets it on fire and throws it into the giant’s eye, causing him to collapse. Susan, Russ and Lee get back in the plane which Lee gets started. Just as they take off, the giant returns but the plane flies over him and out of the area. As they head home, Susan looks down to see the man she once loved dead on the ground. Filmed at Griffith Park and Bronson Caves, The Cyclops has been criticized for tacky special effects and an arid plot. For Baby Boomers watching it for the first time on TV in the 1960s, it was more than passably good entertainment, with a hideous monster, giant wildlife and an over-the-top performance by genre star Lon Chaney, Jr., who earlier had the title role in Allied’s Indestructible Man (1956) [q.v.]. The film was no critical success, although it fared well at the box office. Regarding the title monster, the Monthly Film Bulletin opined, “The Cyclops, revoltingly ugly and emitting horrible noises, does not survive searching close-ups, but despite this limitation he makes an unusually grim addition to the gallery of screen monsters.” Castle of Frankenstein #8 (1966) called it a “[d]ismal low-grade adventure…. Inept special fx by Bert I. Gordon.” Dennis Fischer wrote in Science Fiction Film Directors, 1895 –1998 (2000), “The effects consist of bad superimpositions and awkwardly staged split screen shots. The plot is rambling and practically non-existent, with only Albert Glasser’s score and some hamming from the usually drunk Chaney maintaining any interest whatsoever.” In Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972), Donald C. Willis termed the feature “[c]lumsy and boring.” Steven H. Scheuer’s Movies on TV, 1975 –76 Edition (1974) concurred, calling it a “[h]umdrum thriller.”
Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957; 70 minutes) Producer-Screenplay: Jack Pollexfen. Associate Producer: Ilse Lahn. Director: Edgar G. Ulmer. Photography: John F. Warren. Editor: Holbrook N. Todd. Music Supervisor: Melvyn Lenard. Art Director: Theobold Holsopple. Sound: Fred Kessler. Sets: Mowbray Berkeley. Production Manager: Joseph Boyle. Makeup: Lou Philippi. Wardrobe: Robert Martien. Special Effects: Louis DeWitt and Jack Rabin. CAST: John Agar (George Hastings), Gloria Talbott ( Janet Smith), Arthur Shields (Dr. Lomas), John Dierkes ( Jacob), Mollie McCard (Maggie), Martha Wentworth (Mrs. Merchant), Marjorie Stapp (Undressing Woman), Rita Greene (Lucy), Marel Page (Lucy’s Beau).
Producer-writer Jack Pollexfen and director Edgar G. Ulmer first worked together on The Man from Planet X in 1950. In 1954 Pollexfen produced and directed Indestructible Man (q.v.) for Allied Artists and two years later he and Ulmer re-teamed for Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, the writer’s second foray into the adventures of offspring of the Robert Louis Stevenson
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characters (he co-wrote 1951’s The Son of Dr. Jekyll). The movie not only had Miss Jekyll, nee Janet Smith, nicely enacted by the beautiful Gloria Talbott, but it also featured a werewolf. In fact, the script had the Hyde character, Jekyll’s horrid alter ego, turning into a lycanthrope before being dispatched with a stake through the heart. The script blurred the folklore of vampires and werewolves and in one scene hero John Agar reads a book about lyncathropy which gives the hairy, murderous beast the blood-drinking traits of a vampire. The feature was made by Film Ventures Productions and issued theatrically in July 1957 on a double-bill with The Cyclops (q.v.), also headlining Talbott. On a foggy night, Janet Smith (Talbott) and her fiancé George Hastings (Agar) arrive at the English country manor of Dr. Lomas (Arthur Shields). The next day is her twentyfirst birthday. She is greeted by Mrs. Merchant (Martha Wentworth), the housekeeper, and also meets taciturn Jacob ( John Dierkes), the groundskeeper, and Maggie (Mollie McCard), a maid. Maggie expresses fear of the rising moon and says she will not sleep in the manor house; Mrs. Merchant tells Janet the villagers are superstitious. Lomas informs Janet that the house and grounds are hers and she will inherit the estate and a sizable fortune, although her late father’s will states that he can live in the house for the rest of his life. The doctor says the young woman was never told of her wealth in order to thwart suitors who might only want her for her money. He also announces that he will have more to tell her the next day. Morning finds Janet and George exploring the house and coming upon a secret room filled with scientific paraphernalia. Lomas finds them there and says the room was used by Janet’s father as his laboratory. The doctor asks to talk to Janet alone. Later, the distraught woman informs George that she cannot marry him and asks him to leave the estate. He demands an explanation and she asks Lomas to tell him the truth. The doctor takes them to the family tomb and shows them the grave of Dr. Henry Jekyll, Janet’s father. Lomas says that he and Jekyll were medical students together and Henry did great scientific work but a strange experiment caused him to withdraw from the world. Jekyll’s theory, Lomas said, was that all men are part good and part evil and he tried to develop drugs to separate them and used himself as a guinea pig, inadvertently turning himself into a murderous fiend. The villagers hunted down the evil Mr. Hyde and drove a stake through his heart — but now they believe he still prowls as a werewolf when there is a full moon. George rebuffs the notion that what her father did will affect Janet and demands they leave the next day to get married. In order to help Janet sleep, Lomas uses hypnosis. As the fearful Maggie walks home under a full moon, Janet dreams that she chases Maggie and kills her. When Janet wakes up screaming, she is comforted by George. Lomas gives her a sedative but she finds blood on her hands and gown, mud on her shoes and sees a hideous visage when she looks in a mirror. The next morning Jacob carries in the body of Maggie, whose throat has been horribly torn. He refers to Janet as Miss Jekyll and later tells Mrs. Merchant the villagers will take care of the young woman like they did her father by driving a stake through her heart. Before going to sleep that night, Janet is given a strong sedative by the doctor as George makes sure that her bedroom windows are tightly sealed. Still she dreams of running through the woods, attacking and murdering a young woman (Rita Greene) who has left her lover (Marel Page) after a spat. She again wakes with blood on her hands and clothes. George explains that the blood came from her cutting herself during the dream. Jacob soon arrives with the news that another girl has been found murdered and says Janet is a werewolf. Lomas fires Jacob; Mrs. Merchant gives her notice. Leaving George to look after Janet, the doctor goes into town for new servants and the young woman begs her fiancé to kill her. Later, when Janet cannot be found, George and Lomas search the grounds and locate her
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in the family burial vault. Nearby is Jacob fashioning a stake; Lomas orders him off the property. Janet learns from the doctor that she cannot leave the area because she is scheduled to testify at a coroner’s inquest regarding the two murders. That night Janet is again given a sedative and Lomas says he will sit with her. After she is asleep, he puts her under hypnosis and has her follow him through a secret passage to the vault. George wakes up and trails them and in the tomb he overhears Lomas tell the hypnotized Janet to hang herself. He then sees the doctor turn into a werewolf. George and Lomas fight, and George is knocked out. The werewolf goes to the village where he spies a young woman (Marjorie Stapp) undressing and attacks her; her screams alert the villagers. They follow the wolfman back to the tomb where he is wounded by Jacob. George wakes up in time to save Janet from hanging herself and tells her Lomas is a murderer who wants her money for himself. Seeing the werewolf return, he tells her to pretend to be asleep. As the beast starts to caress the girl, George jumps him and they fight. The villagers swarm in the crypt and Jacob plunges a stake into the werewolf ’s heart, killing him. The film opens and closes with shots of a man in werewolf makeup; at the end of the picture, the monster suggests to the audience he may return. His lyncanthrope makeup was pretty perfunctory, albeit with fangs. Ulmer has developed a cult following although one is hard pressed to see much reason for it in Daughter of Dr. Jekyll. Actor Brian Aherne, in his book A Dreadful Man (1979), talked about working on Ulmer’s final production, The Cavern (1965). He called him “a rather florid, temperamental character who had much experience and some talent but so far not much success.” Ulmer’s other genre outings include The Black Cat (1934), Bluebeard (1944), The Amazing Transparent Man and Beyond the Time Barrier (both 1960) and Journey Beneath the Desert (1961). In Classic Movie Monsters (1978), Donald F. Glut said Daughter of Dr. Jekyll was “incredibly low budgeted…. Allied Artists’ dubious contribution to the mythos[, it] was directed without style by Edgar G. Ulmer, and was the most unorthodox treatment of the Stevenson theme yet.” He also noted that the feature was padded for its TV release and “some of the frames were double-printed to stretch out the action, while Janet’s nightmare sequence was augmented by stock footage from Allied Artists’ Frankenstein 1970, made in 1958. Strangely, the Frankenstein Monster of the one film became the Mr. Hyde of the other.”
The Day of the Triffids (1962; 94 minutes; Color) Producer: George Pitcher. Executive Producer: Philip Yordan. Directors: Steve Sekely and (uncredited) Freddie Francis. Screenplay: Philip Yordan (for uncredited Bernard Gordon), from the novel by John Wyndham. Photography: Ted Moore. Editor: Spencer Reeve. Music: Ron Goodwin and Johnny Douglas. Art Director: Cedric Dawe. Sound: Bert Ross and Maurice Askew. Production Manager: George Fowler. Special Effects Photography: Wally Veevers. Wardrobe: Bridget Sellers. Continuity: Pamela Davies. Assistant Director: Douglas Hermes. CAST: Howard Keel (Bill Masen), Nicole Maurey (Christine Durrant), Janette Scott (Karen Goodwin), Kieron Moore (Tom Goodwin), Mervyn Johns (Mr. Coker), Janina Faye (Susan), Ewan Roberts (Dr. Soames), Alison Leggatt (Miss Coker), Geoffrey Matthews (Luis de la Vega), Gilgi Hauser (Teresa de la Vega), John Tate (SS Midland Captain), Carol Ann Ford (Bettina), Arthur Gross (Flight Radioman), Collette Wilde (Nurse Jamieson), Ian Watson (Royal Botanic Gardens Night Watchman), Victor Brooks (Poiret), Katya Douglas (Mary), Gary Hope (Pilot), Thomas Gallagher (Heavyset Man), Sidney Vivian (Blind Ticket Agent), John Simpson (Blind Man).
Based on John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, The Day of the Triffids was put together by Philip Yordan, who took screenplay credit for blacklisted Bernard Gordon. Onetime Hollywood
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Lobby card for The Day of the Triffids (1963)
musical star Howard Keel headlined the production but was not happy with the final product as noted by a career article on him by Michael B. Druxman in Films in Review (November 1970) in which he commented, “[T]he screenplay had no story-line and I wrote a lot of my own dialogue. The picture was under-financed and the special effects were very poor. When I left England I told the producer he didn’t have a finished film, that he hadn’t shot enough footage. I was right. A year later they shot the lighthouse sequences, with Kieron Moore and Janette Scott, which were needed to tie the story together.” The additional material was directed by Freddie Francis over a five-week period and interpolated into the footage done by director Steve Sekely. Its working titles were Invasion of the Triffids and Revolt of the Triffids. On a night when the world is bombarded by meteors, at the Royal Botanic Gardens a night watchman (Ian Wilson) is devoured by a huge “walking” plant. Bill Masen (Keel), an American seaman, is resting in a nearby English hospital where he underwent eye surgery ten days before. He begs Dr. Soames (Ewan Roberts) to remove his bandages a day early so he can see the meteor show but the physician refuses. When Bill wakes up the next morning, he is unable to rouse anyone. Taking off the bandages, he finds out his sight is normal but the hospital is a wreck and deserted except for Soames, who is blind due to the glare of the meteors. The doctor commits suicide by jumping from a window. At a remote lighthouse, Tom Goodwin (Moore) and his wife Karen (Scott) are carrying out marine biology work. Tom is a heavy drinker and their marriage is on the rocks. When their supply boat does not arrive, they hear on the radio that the meteor shower has blinded most people, and that a new plant that can uproot itself and move around has a fatal sting. Bill leaves
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the hospital and walks through a mostly deserted London. At a train station he rescues a sighted young girl, Susan ( Janina Faye), from the crowd after a wreck. She tells him she ran away from school and had hidden in the train’s luggage van and did not see the meteors. As they walk through the city they see a dog killed by a huge plant. After going to Bill’s ship they take a deserted car. Getting stuck along the road they search for rocks to put under the wheels for traction. Seeing a giant plant coming toward them, the two barely escape. The next day they arrive at a dock area where they hear a mayday from a ship and see an aircraft crash. Bill and Susan take a speedboat and head to France because they heard a meeting of sighted survivors was to take place in Paris. At the lighthouse, Karen sees a large plant growing; when it tries to attack her and her husband, Tom manages to destroy it. Arriving in Paris, Bill and Susan find the meeting has been cancelled. On the road out of the city they meet sighted Christine Durrant (Nicole Maurey) who takes them to her chateau where Mr. Coker (Mervyn Johns) and his sister (Alison Leggatt) are caring for her blind neighbors. Susan makes friends with a blind young woman, Bettina (Carol Ann Ford). At the lighthouse, Tom and Karen examine the plant in an attempt to determine its makeup; while they rest, it breaks out of the building. Bill decides to find help and he and Coker go for supplies. They see a number of the carnivorous plants growing; Coker calls them Triffids, since their scientific name is Triffidus Celestus, and says they were brought to Earth by the meteors and propagate by emitting millions of spores. The two men see a light plane crash and go to the site but are surrounded by Triffids. As they try to escape, Coker is killed. When Bill returns to the chateau he finds it has been taken over by a band of drunken escaped prisoners. He manages to rescue Susan and Christine but the encroaching Triffids kill Bettina and break into the chateau. Bill, Christine and Susan take the prison van to Toulon, which is in flames, and decide to travel to the U.S. naval base near Cadiz in Spain. Finding a circus truck, they drive it to a villa where they find a couple, the de la Vegas (Geoffrey Matthews, Gilgi Hauser), who are expecting their first child. As Bill places electric wiring around the house, Christine helps the blind woman deliver a baby boy. Hundreds of Triffids converge on the villa and the electric current holds them off as Bill uses fire to burn the vanguard of the invaders. Susan suggests that sound attracts the plants so Bill shuts down the generator, proving her to be correct. To lure the Triffids away from the villa, Bill drives the circus truck and plays music. As the Triffids follow him, Christine and Susan drive away with the trio planning to meet at Alaconte, where a naval rescue is planned. Later Bill abandons the circus truck and after an overland trek he is rescued by a lifeboat and reunited with Christine and Susan. At the light house, the Triffids invade the building, forcing Tom and Karen to climb to its top. In a final desperate act, Tom sprays the invaders with sea water and they dissolve. Despite its production problems, The Day of the Triffids turned out to be a fairly entertaining sci-fi effort with an especially strong performance by Howard Keel as the seaman, along with Janette Scott and Kieron Moore in the claustrophobic lighthouse sequences. Janina Faye was also very good as the orphan; she had earlier been impressive as the little girl who accused a local stalwart of being a child molester in Hammer Films’ Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1961). The different sequences directed by Steve Sekely and Freddie Francis mesh well together and the title monsters are quite scary, being tall, mobile, repulsive plants with a taste for human flesh. Variety opined, “Although riddled with script inconsistencies and irregularities, it is a more-than-adequate film of its genre.” The New York Times felt the movie was “pretty good, considering the modest budget.” Video Watchdog ( Jan.-Feb. 1991) said it was a “semi-suc-
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cessful filming of John Wyndham’s classic novel.” In The Science Fictionary (1980), Ed Naha stated, “The special effects nearly steal the show in this colorful adaptation of John Wyndham’s excellent novel of the same name. Much of the book’s tension has been lost in the cinematic narrative, but what remains is riveting.” Apparently footage was cut from the film before its U.S. theatrical release. Castle of Frankenstein #3 (1963) has a two-page spread on the production showing a Triffid aboard an airplane, panicking the passengers and attacking the crew. In 1964 the French publication Star-Cine Cosmos issued a photo story magazine of the film entitled Les Monstres Verts (The Green Monsters). The Day of the Triffids was remade twice, first in 1981 by BBC-TV and again in 2009 as a television mini-series.
Deborah (1974; 110 minutes; Color) Producer: Paolo Prestano. Director: Marcello Andrei. Screenplay: Marcello Andrei, Piero Regnoli and Giuseppe Pulieri. Story: Giuseppe Puilieri. Photography: Claudio Racca. Editor: Gianni Oppedisano. Music: Alberto Verrecchia. Sound: Roberto Albertini. Makeup: Lamberto Martini. Production Design–Sets: Elena Ricci Poccetto. Production Manager: Diego Spataro. Assistant Director: Alfredo Varelli. CAST: Bradford Dillman (Professor Michael Lagrange), Marina Malfatti (Deborah “Debbie” Lagrange), Gig Young (Herman Ofenbauer), Delia Boccardo (Mira Wener), Micaela Esdra (Elena), Lucretia Love (Mrs. Ofenbauer), Gigi Casellato (Psychiatrist), Vittorio Mangano (Dr. M. Vajda), Adriano Amidel Migliano (Albert Wener), Mario Garriba (Hospital Doctor).
Attending a carnival with her husband, Professor Michael Lagrange (Bradford Dillman), Deborah (Marina Malfatti) witnesses a trapeze performer fall, something the young woman predicts in her own mind just before it happens. At home Deborah pays more attention to her German shepherd dog Igor than to her husband. When she goes to see Michael at the university research center where he works, she overhears him talk about her to his pretty assistant Elena (Micaela Esdra). When Michael tries to celebrate their anniversary and wants to make love to his wife, Deborah rejects him and he tells her they cannot go on this way. He says she is upset because she cannot become pregnant, something she wants very much. After her doctor (Vittorio Mangano) tells Deborah she cannot have children, she and Michael attend a party given by their friend, parapsychologist Herman Ofenbauer (Gig Young), and his wife (Lucretia Love). Herman conducts an experiment in which he has Deborah pick a book and show it to the other guests. He then sends them to another room and tells them to use their thought processes to tell him its title. While Herman is blindfolded, Deborah sees wine glasses start to tingle and is nearly blinded by a bright yellow light before the glasses shatter; she faints. As Michael is taking her home, they witness a car accident in which a young woman, Mira Wener (Delia Boccardo), is thrown from the vehicle. At home Igor becomes hostile to Deborah. That night she dreams of the crash and the woman and becomes ill. Michael tells Herman about the accident and is told that Deborah is a very powerful medium and that kinetic energy flowing from her caused the glasses to break. Michael says his wife is obsessed with having a baby. After Michael and Deborah read the news reports of the auto accident, Herman takes Deborah to a children’s home where she plays with the little ones. Herman tells Michael he and Deborah should adopt a child. As Michael and Deborah dance that night, she informs him she is pregnant. Her doctor later tells him she has a false pregnancy, but it may be dangerous to tell her the truth. As she begins wearing maternity clothes, Deborah meets Mira who says she has been told her baby has died but she does not believe it. The two women become friends and Deborah does a sculpture of her. Going to a zoo, Deborah sees an image of Mira and hears loud, piercing
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animal sounds. When her friend arrives, she leaves quickly when she sees Michael. Herman informs Michael that since he pretends to accept Deborah’s pregnancy, it has heightened her isolation because she does not believe he is telling her the truth. He also tells Michael to go away with his wife. When he tries to make love to her that night, Deborah rejects Michael, saying sex is bad for the child. He informs her she is not pregnant and that she is a lunatic but that he wants to help her. Michael goes to a bar where he is found by Elena, who is in love with him; she tells him he only cares for himself. When Michael returns home he finds his wife in a frantic state, smashing her artwork. Failing to calm her down, he calls in a doctor and blames Herman for her condition. Michael has Deborah placed in a clinic where she has dreams of him having an affair with Elena. Deborah tells Michael she needs for him to believe she is pregnant and asks to be taken home. When Deborah escapes from the clinic, the psychiatrist (Gigi Casellato) calls the police. Michael returns home and finds Igor dead and the house ransacked. Desperate, Michael asks to see Albert Wener (Adriano Amidel Migliano), who survived the car crash, and when he goes to his house he finds a pool party going on. He tells Wener he thinks Deborah is with his wife Mira but the man informs him that Mira died shortly after the wreck. Deborah is inside the Wener home where she finds Mira in a dark room. Mira claims Deborah stole the baby from her after the crash and it belongs to her. When Mira dissolves away, Deborah, who is suffering birth pangs, tries to drive to a hospital but ends up wrecking her car. While waiting with Herman and Elena for information about his wife, Michael gets a telephone call saying she has been taken to a hospital. When the trio arrive there, Michael is informed by the doctor (Mario Garriba) that Deborah has died but they were able to save the baby. Allied Artists released this Italian import in the U.S.; it was made by Paola Film as Un Fiocco Nero per Deborah (A Black Ribbon for Deborah). Its only stateside box office pull came from Hollywood stars Bradford Dillman and Gig Young, who were not dubbed as was the rest of the cast, and that proved to be very slight. Young appears wan and dissipated. When it was shown in Great Britain on video in 1984 it was re-titled The Torment and was cut by nine minutes. Luca M. Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta in Spaghetti Nightmares (1996) termed it a “[m]ediocre copy of Rosemary’s Baby.” For the most part, Deborah is a pointless excursion into psychological horror and is padded with long, drawn-out sequences involving dreams, dancing and hallucinations.
Destination 60,000 (1957; 65 minutes) Producers: Philip N. Krasne and Jack J. Gross. Director-Screenplay: George Waggner. Photography: Hal McAlpin. Editor: Kenneth G. Crane. Music: Albert Glasser. Art Director: Nicolai Remisoff. Sound: Herman Lewis. Sets: Arthur Friedrich. Costumes: Byron Munson. Assistant Directors: Hal Klein and Ira Stewart. CAST: Preston Foster (Colonel Ed Buckley), Pat Conway ( Jeff Connors), Jeff Donnell (Ruth Buckley), Coleen Gray (Mary Ellen), Bobby Clark (Skip Buckley), Denver Pyle (Mickey Hill), Russell Thorson (Dan Maddox), Anne Barton (Grace Hill).
Destination 60,000 is a film with a science fiction plot that has long been outdated. In fact, even before its release, it was already passé story-wise. The feature’s highpoint of an aircraft reaching 60,000 feet happened in real life more than two weeks before Allied Artists released the film to theatres in May 1957. On April 26, the Jupiter rocket was launched at Cape Canaveral. The flight was to test the design version of the craft’s airframe and rocket engine and lasted 93 seconds, reaching a 60,000 foot altitude. Although terminated, the flight was considered partially successful. On the other hand, Concorde was the first
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commercial jet to reach the 60,000 feet altitude on March 2, 1969, a dozen years after Destination 60,000. Pilot Jeff Connors (Pat Conway) wants to test-fly The Dream, an experimental craft designed and constructed by Colonel Ed Buckley (Preston Foster) and Dan Maddox (Russell Thorson), the owners of Buckley Aircraft Corporation. During World War II, Jeff saved Ed’s life and he is a close friend of his wife Ruth ( Jeff Donnell) and the godfather of their son Skip (Bobby Clark). He is also attracted to the company’s secretary, Mary Ellen (Coleen Gray). After passing a physical examination, Jeff studies with another pilot, Mickey Hill (Denver Pyle), to get back into the regimen of flying jet planes. Hill volunteers to test a new fuel by flying to an altitude of 60,000 feet but since his wife Grace (Anne Barton) is going to have a baby, Ed asks Jeff to carry out the assignment. During the flight, Jeff follows orders and turns off the plane’s rockets for ten seconds and then tries starting them again but the latter function fails and Ed radios him to eject from the craft. Jeff tries to fly The Dream back to the airfield but it blows up and he is ejected, making a safe landing when his automatic parachute opens. Ed speculates that gases may have accumulated when the rockets were switched off. Jeff cannot remember if he tried to turn on the ignition switch a second time before blacking out. Since he did not carry out orders, Jeff is put on a thirtyday suspension by Ed but he resigns. Ed and Maddox design a new aircraft and when it is completed, Hill is assigned to fly it to the 60,000 foot altitude. Again the rockets fail to restart and the pilot blacks out as the plane dives to the ground. Hill’s arm accidentally bumps the seat ejector switch but he is badly hurt upon landing. After talking with Mickey and Grace in the hospital, Jeff realizes that Hill will heal and he makes up with Ed, completes his suspension and starts seeing Mary Ellen again. Maddox concludes that the two planes crashed because of ignition switch failures and he and Ed begin work on a third model but have trouble getting financial support from lending institutions. Although it might be dangerous, Ed decides to conduct a power dive before a second ignition with the new aircraft. The recovered Hill, who has just become the father of a baby boy, wants to fly the mission. Hill’s doctor nixes the idea and Jeff, who has become engaged to Mary Ellen, wants to carry out the assignment but Ed declares he will complete the mission. Jeff asks his friend to think of his wife and son but he refuses to listen so Jeff gets permission to trail him in a second craft. Ed flies the new model to 60,000 feet and is able to re-ignite the rockets but passes out. Jeff has Mary Ellen send a radio message to Ed’s plane with code words they used during the war. Ed regains consciousness and is able to safely land the new Dream. Only a passable programmer with a paltry sci-fi angle, Destination 60,000 was the final big-screen outing for director George Waggner, who in the early to mid–1940s made some of Universal Pictures’ classic horror films. He directed Man Made Monster, Horror Island and The Wolf Man (all 1941) and The Climax (1944). He was also the producer of The Wolf Man and The Climax and served in the same capacity for Invisible Agent and The Ghost of Frankenstein (both 1942), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Phantom of the Opera (both 1943).
Dig That Uranium (1955; 61 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Edward Bernds. Screenplay: Elwood Ullman and Bert Lawrence. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: William Austin. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Joseph Kish. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Special Effects: Ray Mercer. Wardrobe: Bert Henrikson. Continuity: Richard Chaffee. Assistant Director: Austen Jewell. CAST: Leo Gorcey (Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney/Lone Disarranger #1), Huntz Hall
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(Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones/Lone Disarranger #2), Bernard Gorcey (Louie Dumbrowski/Bartender), Mary Beth Hughes ( Jeanette/Saloon Girl), Raymond Hatton (Hank “Mac” McKenzie), Harry Lauter (Ron Haskell), Myron Healey ( Joe Hody/Pecos Pete), Richard Powers (Frank Loomis/Idaho Ike), Paul Fierro (Indian), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck/Saloon Customer), Bennie Bartlett (Butch/Saloon Customer), Francis McDonald (Indian Chief ), Frank Jenks (Mechanic Olaf ), Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer (Shifty Robertson), Don C. Harvey (Tex).
When Sach Jones’ (Huntz Hall) old pal Shifty Robertson (Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer) arrives in town he takes him to Louie Dumbrowski’s (Bernard Gorcey) sweet shop to see their buddies Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey), Chuck (David Condon) and Butch (Bennie Bartlett). Shifty brags about owning a uranium mine that has made him rich. When he offers to sell the deed to Louie, Slip talks the old man into buying it. Shifty then makes a quick escape from the Bowery. The group drives their old jalopy to Panther Pass, Nevada, and are shot at by Joe Hody (Myron Healey) and Frank Loomis (Richard Powers), henchmen of hotel owner Ron Haskell (Harry Lauter), who does not want anyone prospecting in the area. While the boys eat at a restaurant, waitress Jeanette (Mary Beth Hughes) hears Sach brag about their uranium mine and she informs Haskell. When Sach accidentally upsets Loomis’ drink, the henchman forces him to consume powerful “Old Vesuvius,” causing a fight to ensue. Haskell stops the brawl and offers the boys rooms since he wants to find the location of their uranium strike. Jeanette learns from Sach that Louie has the deed to the mine. Haskell gets Louie into a card game along with Hody and Loomis. They plan to fleece him and force him to give up the deed, but the more they try to cheat the more he wins. After getting their car repaired, with the mechanic (Frank Jenks) installing a new reverse gear, the boys drive to Bearclaw Canyon to find their Little Daisy mine. When Slip and Sach argue over the latter’s use of a Geiger counter, the two henchmen watch them from a distance through binoculars and think they have found uranium. They two leave to tell their boss as the boys meet old-time prospector Hank “Mac” McKenzie (Raymond Hatton) who says the Little Daisy is a played-out silver mine. When the discouraged New Yorkers return to their hotel, a rock with an attached note telling them to stay out of the area in thrown through their window. That night McKenzie tells them a story about old-time outlaw Pecos Pete. As he talks, Sach goes to sleep and dreams that he and Slip are Rangers who stop Pete (Healey) and his pal Idaho (Powers) from bothering a saloon girl (Hughes) and wrecking Louie’s (Bernard Gorcey) saloon. During a showdown, Sach shoots Idaho and Slip eliminates Pecos Pete. Sach wakes up and the boys agree to continue their prospecting the next day. After Hody and Loomis tell him the Little Daisy mine has no uranium, Haskell and his men observe Sach and McKenzie find the ore and attack them. The old prospector makes a getaway on his mule Josephine while Sach is knocked over a cliff. Hank gets to the boys’ camp and tells them what happened to Sach and they take their jalopy and try to locate him. Finding Sach on a ledge, they bring him up with a rope but Haskell and his men arrive and promise to shoot them. Much to Slip’s chagrin, Sach suggests to the hotel owner that driving them over a cliff in their own car would be easier. Haskell tells Sach to drive the boy’s jalopy and he and his men follow him in another car. Sach uses the new powerful reverse gear on the jalopy to outsmart the crooks whose car careens over a cliff. The wreck uncovers uranium at their mine but an Indian chief (Francis McDonald) and his tribe show up, claiming ownership since the area is on their reservation. When the chief offers Slip flowers, he refuses but Sach accepts and the gift proves to be lovely maiden Spring Wildflowers. The fortieth of forty-eight “Bowery Boys” adventures, Dig That Uranium was filmed as Operation Uranium and was released to theaters in late December 1955. It was the final
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series film for both Bernard Gorcey, who was killed in an automobile accident, and Bennie Bartlett. The comedy western fits into the realm of film fantasy due to its dream sequence which David Hayes and Brent Walker in The Films of the Bowery Boys (1984) called “one of the best in the series.” Variety termed it “filler fare” but added that Gorcey and Hall “cavort again in the same manner which seemingly has pleased followers of this series for years, pair having long ago mastered their respective roles.” The feature’s location shooting was done at the Iverson Ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Western film stalwarts Richard Powers, Harry Lauter and Myron Healey add authenticity to the proceedings as does Mary Beth Hughes as their cohort.
The Disembodied (1957; 68 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Walter Grauman. Screenplay: Jack Townley. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: William Austin. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Sets: Joseph Kish. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Continuity: Richard Michaels. Assistant Director: Austen Jewell. CAST: Paul Burke (Tom Maxwell), Allison Hayes (Tonda Metz), John Wengraf (Dr. Karl Metz), Eugenia Paul (Lara), Joel Marston (Norman “Norm” Adams), Robert Christopher ( Joe Lawson), Norman Frederic [Dean Fredericks] (Suba), A.E. Okonu (Voodoo Drummer), Paul Thompson (Gogi), Otis Greene (Kabar), Samadu Jackson (Witch Doctor), Gloria Jean Reynolds, Donna Jean Jones (Dancers), Cecil Penrice, Julius Chabata, Alex Koffi Ametowo (Musicians).
Filmed as Voodoo Girl and Voodoo Queen, The Disembodied was released in the late summer of 1957 on a dual bill with another jungle horror thriller, From Hell It Came (q.v.). Since the latter deals with a vengeful, walking tree, it is hard to believe it could be the better of the two offerings but The Disembodied, thanks to its vapidity and overall stagebound cheapness, takes second place to its theatrical mate. Phil Hardy in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986) called it a “silly jungle saga” echoing Ed Naha’s earlier evaluation in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975): “Silly tale of voodoo and jealousy…. A real snore fest.” Even more critical was Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films (1972) who termed the programmer “[c]rude, unpleasant. Grade Triple-Z.” In the African jungle, beautiful Tonda Metz (Allison Hayes) tries to kill her husband, Dr. Karl Metz ( John Wengraf ), by strangling his effigy, a voodoo doll, but a servant, Suba (Norman Frederic), comes to his rescue. Suba informs his employer that the jungle drums announce the coming of three white men, one of them injured, and Metz tells him to dissuade them. When he fires at the intruders, Tonda stops Suba and meets moviemakers Tom Maxwell (Paul Burke) and Norm Adams ( Joel Marston), who are carrying their nearly dead partner, Joe Lawson (Robert Christopher), on a stretcher because he was attacked by a lion. Dr. Metz agrees to treat him but tells the other men they must sleep in a nearby hut and not in his house. The two men find a vulture feather in the hut and their bearer, Gogi (Paul Thompson), calls it black magic and burns it. Tonda meets Suba and they kiss but are seen by his wife Lara (Eugenia Paul). Placing charms on Joe, Tonda dances at a voodoo ceremony. Awakened by the drums, Tom and Norm watch the dance with Gogi, who says the white woman is a voodoo queen and warns them that the act of seeing the dancing is punishable by death. The three men return to the hut. Tonda stabs a voodoo doll, causing Joe to react in pain. The next day Tom and Norm find Joe completely healed but in a state of shock. Dr. Metz refuses to say how his patient was cured so quickly. Suba’s dead body is brought to the house and Lara accuses the medical man of killing her husband. Finding Suba’s heart has been removed, Tom, Norm and Gogi go to the ceremonial site, find blood on an altar and conclude this was where the servant was murdered. Norm and Gogi go back for their
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disabled Jeep. Tonda shows up and Tom tells her he saw the ceremony but she denies having been at the place before although she says it seems familiar. Tom later joins Tonda and her husband for coffee and Metz informs him he is a doctor of psychology. Since he did research on voodoo in Haiti, Tom asks Dr. Metz about the subject. After Tonda leaves, her husband tells Tom not to become too curious about voodoo. Tom and Dr. Metz observe a native ceremony of mourning for Suba as Joe rises from his bed and joins the ritual, taking a knife and then going into the jungle. That night Tonda comes to Tom’s hut and tells him she is afraid of her husband because he has a strange influence on her and the natives. They kiss. Joe attacks Tom with the knife but Tom knocks him out and carries him into the hut. When Tom cannot revive Joe, he confronts Dr. Metz but is disarmed by his houseboy, Kabar (Otis Greene). Metz asks his wife if she has fallen in love with Tom. Lara goes to Joe, knowing he possesses her husband’s soul. Metz tells Kabar to return Tom’s gun and they learn that Joe has disappeared from the hut. The doctor urges Tom to leave the area as quickly as possible or remain at his own peril. Norm and Gogi return with the Jeep and Tom tells them they will leave the next morning. That night Metz accuses his wife of having been with Tom. Finding out that the visitors are leaving the next day, Tonda goes to Tom and tells him she fears her husband and he says he will take her with him. When the woman tries to convince Tom to kill Metz, he refuses, slaps her and tells her to return to her husband. The next morning Tom and Norm find their guns are missing and Gogi has been murdered. After they bury him, the two men go to the house in search of guns. Tonda holds them at bay with a pistol which Tom takes away from her as her husband returns with Kabar. Metz asks Tom if he plans to leave with his wife and Tom informs him he does not love her. The doctor gives Tom his prize rifle and asks to go back to Kendar with the two men, leaving Tonda behind permanently. The angry woman stabs her husband and later uses a voodoo doll to eliminate Kabar, who was a witness to the stabbing, since she plans to blame Tom and Norm for her husband’s death. To fool Tonda, Tom sets up Kabar’s body in the Jeep, making it look like he is alive, and he also stops the woman from trying to smother her unconscious mate. Seeing Norm and Kabar going in the Jeep to Kendar for a doctor, Tonda thinks her voodoo magic has failed so she has the natives capture Tom and plans to use him to save her husband so she will not hang. During the voodoo ceremony, Joe tries to kill Tom with a knife but Lara stabs Tonda, breaking her spell. Joe then frees Tom as the natives flee. When Dr. Metz begins to recover, Tom, Norm and Joe return to Kendar. The Disembodied was produced by Ben Schwalb, using the same crew that made most of his “Bowery Boys” programmers for Allied Artists. The film’s main asset was sexy Allison Hayes as the evil Tonda; the actress headlined Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and The Hypnotic Eye (1959) [qq.v.]. She was also in The Undead, The Unearthly and Zombies of Mora Tau (all 1957) and The Crawling Hand (1963), as well as the TV episode “Deep Freeze” (1956), in which she was an alien invader. Norman Frederic, who played Suba, later starred in The Phantom Planet (1961), while Robert Christopher, who was Joe, had the ignominious misfortune of being in Jerry Warren’s infamous Frankenstein Island (1981). John Wengraf seemed somewhat physically feeble in the role of Dr. Metz, a part better suited for Tom Conway or Paul Cavanagh; he appeared in several genre TV outings as well as the features Paris Playboys [q.v.] and Gog (both 1954), The Return of Dracula (1958) and 12 to the Moon (1960). The Disembodied marked Walter Grauman’s directorial debut and he went on to helm Lady in a Cage (1964) and several genre TV movies like Daughter of the Mind (1969), Crowhaven Farm (1970) and The Golden Gate Murders (1979).
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Eugenie (1970; 91 minutes; Color) Producer-Screenplay: Peter Welbeck [Harry Alan Towers]. Director: Jess Franco. From the novel by the Marquis de Sade. Photography: Manuel Merino. Music: Bruno Nicolai. CAST: Marie Liljedahl (Eugenie), Maria Rohm (Madame Marianne Saint Ange), Jack Taylor (Mirvel), Christopher Lee (Dolmance), Paul Muller (Monsieur Mistival), Nino Korda (Roches), Herbert Fux (Hardin), Kaplan [Anney Kablan] (Augustin), Ingrid Swenson [Maria Luisa Ponte] (Madame Mistival), Uta Dahlberg (Therese), Colette Giacobine (Colette), Kathy Lagarde (Maid), Jess Franco (Ritual Participant).
Both Allied Artists and Distinction Films released Eugenie in the United States although the latter company used a longer title, Eugenie… The Story of Her Journey into Perversion. In Great Britain it was issued by Video-International as Philosophy in the Boudoir, a general translation of the title of the 1795 Marquis de Sade novel on which it was based. In France it was shown as Les Brulantes (The Scorchers) and in West Germany it was called Die Jungfrau und die Peitsche (The Young Woman and the Whip). In 1971 Allied distributed a French production based on the same work, Beyond Love and Evil (q.v.). Both features received X ratings and did poorly at the box office. Howard Thompson in the New York Times called Eugenie an “atrociously written, directed and performed waste of perfectly good raw film.” Castle of Frankenstein #16 (1971) noted, “Jess Franco strikes again with this inept, pretentious and mostly out of focus sex fantasy…. Pseudo-arty romanticism gets repulsive at times with amateur photography no help. Recommended only to drooling masochists and fans of Miss Liljedahl’s body.” In The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983), Michael J. Weldon referred to it as an “inept sex sickie…. An X-rated relic, which would probably get an R now.” “Twenty years down the pike, Eugenie still packs a punch,” reported Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs in Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Movies 1956 –1984 (1994). A satanic cult, lead by Dolmance (Christopher Lee), adheres to the writings of the Marquis de Sade and conducts a ceremony that culminates in the murder of a naked girl. Beautiful teenager Eugenie (Marie Liljedahl), who is constantly being suppressed by her domineering mother (Ingrid Swenson), is unaware her father (Paul Muller) has designs on her friend Marianne (Maria Rohm), who is really Madame Saint Ange. Marianne has sex with him in return for his daughter spending the weekend on her island where she and her stepbrother, Mirvel ( Jack Taylor), with whom she is involved in an incestuous relationship, plan to sexually exploit the teenager. She is brought to the island by Augustin (Kaplan), the island gardener and boatman. Once she arrives, the women sunbathe and Marianne initiates Eugenie in lesbian sex. During dinner she and Mirvel drug the girl. As Mirvel carries Eugenie to bed, Kaplan, also Marianne’s lover, objects to the way the girl is being abused but she reminds him he had nothing before she rescued him from poverty and gave him his position. Mirvel tells his stepsister he loves Eugenie and he does want to see her sacrificed. Marianne and Mirvel have sex and both of them make love to Eugenie while Therese (Uta Dahlberg), their lovely deaf and dumb servant, watches. The young girl awakes and tells her friend she had a dream so strange it seemed real. After dinner, the trio agree to play a game and Marianne suggests charades. Mirvel gives Eugene a drugged cigarette as a group of libertines, led by Dolmance, arrive dressed in 18th-century costumes and physically abuse the young woman. The following morning the frightened Eugenie tells Marianne about the torture but her friend says it was another dream since she has no marks of physical abuse. After a pleasant day that includes a group sing and boating, Eugenie sleeps as Mirvel enters Therese’s room, strangles her with a chain, stabs her and hangs her body from the ceiling. Eugene awakens and finds her favorite doll with its head cut off. Roaming the house, she discovers Therese’s body. Mirvel confronts the girl and tells her that Marianne is not only
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his stepsister but also his mistress. When he tries to rape her, Eugenie stabs Mirvel as Marianne watches. After Eugenie locates Marianne, her friend tells her she is glad Mirvel is dead. The cultists return as Marianne orders them to torture and kill Eugenie but Dolmance decides to sacrifice her instead. Eugenie joins the group in beating Marianne and then stabs her benefactor. Dolmance tells Eugenie that Marianne hated her for winning Mirvel’s love and that she will be found with their corpses and condemned as a murderess. A naked Eugenie runs along the beach and finds a graveyard as a rescue boat arrives. Later she is invited by Marianne to partake in a weekend jaunt on her private island. Christopher Lee apparently did not realize he was filming scenes for a sex movie when he replaced George Sanders in the role of Dolmance, working for only two days on the project. In the editing process, he is made to appear as part of the erotic activities, the director of Eugenie’s undoing. Swedish actress Marie Liljedahl, who is quite convincing as the innocent teen turned into a sex slave and killer, earlier headlined the erotic dramas Inga (1968) and Ann and Eve (1970), and would also appear in Dorian Gray (1970) and The Seduction of Inga (1971). Maria Rohm, who played Madame Saint Ange, was married to the film’s producer-writer Harry Alan Towers, who used the nom de screen Peter Walbeck. Cast members Jack Taylor and Paul Muller often worked with director Jess Franco. The film was made in four weeks at Mercia in Spain and interiors done at the Alcazar Studio in Barcelona. Franco had an affinity for the works of the Marquis de Sade; he had made Justine (1968) and would later film a second Eugenie in 1970 with Soledad Miranda, billed as Susan Korda, in the title role (it was never finished due to her death in a traffic accident). Franco went on to film Plaisir a Trio (Pleasure for Three) (1974), Sinfonia Erotica (Erotic Symphony) and Erotismo (Eugenie, Historia de un Perversion) [Eugenie, History of a Perversion] (both 1980), Gemidos de Placer (Cries of Pleasure) (1983) and Helter Skelter (2000), all based on de Sade’s writings. Video Watchdog #2 (1990) reported that some of composer Bruno Nicolai’s score for Eugenie appeared earlier in Paul Naschy’s first starring horror movie La Marca del Hombre Lobo (The Mark of the Wolfman), a 1967 release issued in the U.S. by Independent International as Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror in 1970.
Face of Fire (1959; 79 minutes) Producers-Screenplay: Albert Band and Louis Garfinkle. Associate Producer: Gustaf Unger. Director: Albert Band. From the story “The Monster” by Stephen Crane. Photography–Art Director: Edward Vorkapich. Editor: Ingemar Ejve. Supervising Editor: Frank Sullivan. Music: Erik Nordgren. Sound: Per-Olof Pettersson. Sets: Rolf Boman. Production Manager: Gustav Roger. Makeup: Borje Lundh. Wardrobe: Britta Sylwander. Production Coordinator: Albert Jaeger. Assistant Director: Carl-Henry Cagarp. CAST: Cameron Mitchell (Dr. Ned Trescott), James Whitmore (Monk Johnson), Bettye Ackerman (Grace Trescott), Royal Dano ( Jake Winter), Miko Oscard ( Jimmie Trescott), Robert F. Simon ( Judge Hagenthorpe), Richard Erdman (Al Williams), Howard Smith (Sheriff Nolan), Lois Maxwell (Ethel Winter), Jill Donohue (Bella Kovac), Hjordis Petterson (Mrs. Kovac), Charles Fawcett (Dr. John Moser), Doreen Denning (Frightened Girl), Harold Kasket, Althea Orr, Vernon Young (Townspeople).
Set in 19th century rural America with Hollywood stars, Face of Fire was filmed in Stockholm, Sweden, as Face of the Fire and The Monster, and was produced by Allied Artists in association with Svensk Filmindustries and Mardi Gras Productions. It was based on the 1898 Stephen Crane short story “The Monster.” When Allied Artists released it in the U.S. in August 1959, sometimes in tandem with The Bat (q.v.), it was played as a horror movie
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although it is more of a melodrama. During the filming of its house-burning sequence, the fire got out of hand and nearly destroyed the Svenska Films studio. It was publicized that star Cameron Mitchell’s eyebrows were burned off during the conflagration. While Ed Naha in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975) felt it was “[w]ell done,” Face of Fire garnered little attention at the time of its release. It was very popular in Sweden. It’s become one of the more obscure genre releases of the late 1950s. It marked the feature film debut of Bettye Ackerman, who later became popular on the ABC-TV series Ben Casey (1961–66), in which she appeared with her husband Sam Jaffe, who played Dr. Zorba, with Vincent Edwards in the title role. In a small rural community at the end of the 19th century, Monk Johnson ( James Whitmore) works as a handyman and groom for Dr. Ned Trescott (Mitchell) and his wife Grace (Ackerman). He is especially close to their young son Jimmie (Miko Oscard), whom he nicknames Pollywog. The well-groomed Monk calls on Bella Kovac ( Jill Donohue) and asks her to marry him and gets approval from her widowed mother (Hjordis Petterson). On his way home, Monk hears a fire bell and joins the rest of the community in following it to Trescott’s home, which is ablaze. The doctor and his wife try to go into the house to save their son and are restrained by their neighbors but Monk goes inside and, finding the boy, wraps him in a blanket. Seeking a way out of the flames, Monk carries Jimmie to Trescott’s basement lab but he falls on the steps and is knocked out. Chemicals blow up due to the heat and splash on Monk’s face, horribly burning him. Trescott manages to get into the house and save Jimmie and then goes back with others to bring out Monk. Trescott and his wife stay with their friend Judge Hagenthorpe (Robert F. Simon). Dr. Moser (Charles Fawcett) says Monk’s face has been damaged beyond recognition. Trescott has his wife and son stay with his in-laws as their home is rebuilt and he tries to help Monk, whose mind has been affected by the tragedy. When Trescott and other doctors are unable to aid Monk, Judge Hagenthorpe thinks the man may want to die, but Trescott will not hear of it and has Monk wear a black hood. When the new house is completed, the burned man is brought to live again with the Trescotts but all the townspeople who once liked Monk now refuse to associate with him, including Bella. When the sight of him frightens a young girl (Doreen Denning), she runs into the street and is hit by a horse and wagon. The locals chase Monk out of town. Farmer Jake Winter (Royal Dano) shows up armed at Trescott’s house and wants to have Monk placed in an asylum. In order to look out for Monk, the doctor joins Winter and his followers at a local game preserve where Monk is thought to be hiding. When a dead body with a mangled face is found near railroad tracks, the people think Monk has been killed and decide to have a memorial for him. Jimmie, whose speech has been impaired by the ordeal, runs to tell his father he has seen a faceless man. Dr. Trescott and Judge Hagenthorpe find Monk and bring him home. Again the townspeople turn against Monk and one day while he is sitting in the backyard of the Trescott property the local children dare each other to get close to him. When the fire bell rings, Monk recoils at the sound but recognizes Jimmie and calls him Pollywog. The boy takes his friend by the hand and they go into the house, giving the Trescotts the strength they need to keep Monk with them. About the only horrific aspect of Face of Fire was the very scary makeup of Monk’s horribly burned face done by Borje Lundh. The same year the film was released, associate producer Gustaf Unger also made the science fiction feature Terror in the Midnight Sun, which did not see U.S. release until 1962 when Jerry Warren issued a butchered version of it called Invasion of the Animal People.
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Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965; 76 minutes) Producer: Robert McCarty. Executive Producer: Alan V. Iselin. Associate Producer: Stanley P. Darer. Director: Robert Gaffney. Screenplay: George Garrett, R.H.W. Dillard and John Rodenbeck. Photography: Saul Midwell. Editor: Lawrence C. Keating. Music: Rose Gaffney. Sound: Maurice Rosenblum. Sets: Charles Bailey. Costumes: Anna Hill Johnstone. Makeup: John D. Alese. Production Manager-Assistant Director: Ben Berk. CAST: Marilyn Hanold (Princess Marcuzan), Jim [James] Karen (Dr. Adam Steele), Nancy Marshall (Karen Grant), David Kerman (General Bowers), Lou Cutell (Dr. Nadir), Robert Reilly (Colonel Frank Saunders), Bruce Glover (Alien Soldier), Robert Fields (Reporter), Robert Alan Browne (Alien Crewman), Susan Stephens (Blonde Captive).
For those who swallow the Kool-aid that Plan 9 from Outer Space (1958) is the worst film of all-time, a look at Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster should alleviate such thoughts. At that, the latter production is still a rung above fare like The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) and The Creeping Terror (1964). With exterior shooting in Puerto Rico and interiors done in Seneca, New York, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster was originally called Operation San Juan and Frankenstein Meets the Space Men and was released in Great Britain as Duel of the Space Monsters. Produced by Futurama Entertainment Corporation and Vernon-Seneca Films, it was billed as being filmed in “Futurama.” Its soundtrack included songs by the Distant Cousins, singing “To Have and Hold,” and the Poets performing “That’s the Way It’s Got to Be.” It is chock full of grainy NASA and military stock footage. Anthony Petkovich noted in his career study of Bruce Glover, who played one of the space aliens, in Psychotronic Video #20 (1995), “The prop control panel was from Fail-Safe and the spaceship was the roof of a hot dog stand. The weapons were Wham-O toy air pistols…. A soundtrack 45 (by Bob Crewe of Four Seasons fame) was released.” Aboard an alien spaceship, Princess Marcuzan (Marilyn Hanold) orders her cohort Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell) to destroy a just-launched NASA probe. Dr. Adam Steele ( James Karen) and his lovely assistant Karen Grant (Nancy Marshall) have developed an astro-robot they call Frank (Robert Reilly). With General Bowers (David Kerman) they take the mechanical man to the NASA Space Center where he is introduced to the press as Colonel Frank Saunders, an astronaut who will fly solo on the first Mars mission. As he is answering questions, Frank’s face freezes and Adam and Karen whisk him off to the laboratory where Steele determines that an electrode in his head malfunctioned due to humidity. The general questions them on what might happen to the Mars mission if something goes wrong with the robot’s “brain.” The next day the Mars probe, with Frank aboard, is launched. Nadir tells the princess it is a weapon sent to attack their ship and she orders it destroyed. Saunders parachutes to safety. When the princess learns of this, she tells Nadir to eliminate the astronaut. After Frank sets down safely in Puerto Rico and begins looking for help, the alien ship lands and he is spotted by a space soldier who shoots at him with a ray gun. The ray destroys the left side of Frank’s face and head and short-circuits his memory functions causing him to throttle the attacker and run away. When his comrades take him back to the ship, the injured alien is given over to Moll, a huge monstrous creature, by the vengeful princess and Nadir. That night Frank stops a car and strangles a man but is driven off by the hysterics of his young female companion. The princess begins phase two of their mission on Earth by telling her crewmen their home planet is unfit for habitation due to a recent atomic war and they need good breeding stock to repopulate it. She orders them to kidnap Earth women for that purpose. In their laboratory, Adam and Karen try to pick up signals from Frank, who comes upon a native and murders him with his own machete. General Bowers gets word that the empty Mars capsule has been found in Puerto Rico and there has been violence
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in the area caused by a man in a spacesuit. Adam, Karen and Bowers fly to the island. The aliens abduct a beautiful blonde woman (Susan Stephens) and incinerate her male companion with a ray gun. Adam and Karen make plans to find Frank but Bowers says the military will capture him. The two lovers, Adam and Karen, take off on a motor bike and leave San Juan and head into the countryside. The signal they have been following leads them to a cave where they find Frank. While Adam remains behind to repair the robot, Karen goes back for help. The aliens raid a pool party and carry off eight pretty girls. On their way back to the spaceship they also abduct Karen. Taken to the princess and Nadir, Karen refuses to talk and she is placed in a cage next to Moll. General Bowers orders troop deployment as Adam repairs Frank and leads him out of the cave. After finding Karen’s abandoned motor bike, the two follow her signal and locate the alien craft. Adam tells Frank to watch the ship as he takes the bike and rides for help. The aliens capture Frank and take him to the ship and leave him unconscious on a table next to Karen’s cell. She calls to him and he wakes up. Bowers orders a rocket barrage on the UFO. Nadir tells the princess they must leave immediately in case the Earthlings should attack them with atomic weapons. Frank grabs a ray gun and gets the drop on the aliens. The captive women are set free and they flee from the craft. Upon the urging of Adam, Bowers stops the attack when he finds out that Karen is a prisoner of the invaders. One of the aliens opens Moll’s cage and, after Karen is out of the ship, the robot fights with the monster. Karen is picked up on the road by Bowers and his crew and she is reunited with Adam. The princess orders Nadir to ignite their ship’s rockets but as he does so, Frank uses the ray gun to blast the control panel and the UFO explodes. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster was unleashed on theaters in September 1965 as the top half of a double bill with the leaden Curse of the Voodoo (q.v.). The script was originally written as a comedy by three University of Virginia graduate students; one of them, George Garrett, wrote an amusing and informative essay on the film that was included as a booklet with the DVD (Dark Sky Films, 2006). Besides relating how the script came about, Garrett provides information on the near loony circumstances surrounding its filming and distribution as well as tidbits like how it was called Mars Attacks Puerto Rico in Latin America. Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster does offer quite a contrast between the beautiful and the grotesque. The bitchy space queen, Princess Marcuzan (Hanold), and Karen (Marshall), the scientist’s assistant, are both lovely as are the bevy of abducted girls, especially a blonde bikini wearer (Stephens). Hanold was one of the Venusian vampire women in the Three Stooges short Space Ship Sappy (Columbia, 1957). In contrast, the hideous blasted face of Frank (short for Frankenstein?) was nicely designed by John D. Alese. The monster Moll is a fearsome creature: ugly and tall with shaggy hair, huge eyes, fangs and a pointed head with horns. Moll is constantly in motion and always on the attack with his huge swinging arms and clawed hands. Far more on the comedic side is the sadistic Dr. Nadir (Cutell), a short, pudgy troll with large pointed ears, bug eyes and an egg-shaped bald head. His mannerisms and speech were decidedly effeminate in contrast to the cold, calculating princess. As one would expect, Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster did not garner much in the way of plaudits. Donald F. Glut in The Frankenstein Legend (1973) thought it was “a travesty of the name of Frankenstein,” and C.J. Henderson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (2001) noted, “There is no true Frankenstein monster in this picture. There is no Dr. Frankenstein. There is no reason to watch.” Michael J. Weldon in The Psychotronic
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Encyclopedia of Film (1983) said, “Don’t miss. It’s the worst…. Lots of rock music, stock footage, and laughs.” Video Hound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics (1996) concurred: “A classic grade-Z epic…. It’s cheap and stupid, and the makeup and costumes are wonderfully way-out. A must see.”
Frankenstein 1970 (1958; 83 minutes) Producer: Aubrey Schenck. Director: Howard W. Koch. Screenplay: Richard Landau and George Worthington Yates. Story: Aubrey Schenck and Charles A. Moses. Photography: Carl E. Guthrie. Editor: John A. Bushelman. Music: Paul Dunlap. Sound: Francis E. Stahl. Production Design: Jack T. Collis. Sets: Jerry Welch. Makeup: George Bau. Assistant Director: George Vieira. CAST: Boris Karloff (Baron Victor von Frankenstein), Tom Duggan (Mike Shaw), Jana Lund (Carolyn Hayes), Donald “Red” Barry (Douglas Row), Charlotte Austin ( Judy Stevens Row), Norbert Schiller (Shuter), Rudolph Anders (Wilhelm Gottfried), Irwin Berke (Inspector Raab), John Dennis (Morgan Haley), Frank Roehn (Cab Driver), Joe Piloski (Station Master), Otto Reichow (Reactor Expert), Mike Lane (Hans), Jack Kenny (Assistant Cameraman).
Boris Karloff signed a three-picture contract with the production team of Aubrey Schenck and Howard W. Koch in 1957 and that year he headlined their mundane horror effort Voodoo Island, released by United Artists. Next the producers landed a deal with Allied Artists to make Frankenstein 1970, filmed as Frankenstein 1960, giving Karloff in the role of a descendant of the scientist who created the monster. Filmed on the Warner Bros. lot in CinemaScope, the feature was nicely done production-wise but its overall horror content was mediocre following a terrific opening sequence. Professional wrestler Mike Lane, who was billed in the ring as Big Mike Lane, portrays the monster, both at the beginning as a movie actor and later covered with bandages as the creature revived by Frankenstein. Best noted as the tragic boxer in The Harder They Fall (1956), Lane later played a kindly Frankenstein Monster, called Frank N. Stein, in the television series The Monster Squad (NBC-TV, 1976–77). The third film Karloff was to do with Schenck-Koch, King of the Monsters, was never filmed. A young blonde woman ( Jana Lund) runs screaming through a foggy night, pursued by a hulking monster (Lane) with clawed hands. He chases her into a lake and begins strangling her when a voice yells “cut” and TV director Douglas Row (Donald Barry) stops the scene. The soaked actress, Carolyn Hayes, tells publicity man Mike Shaw (Tom Duggan) she deserves plenty of copy for her suffering. The television people are filming at the ancient castle of Baron Victor von Frankenstein (Karloff ) commemorating the 230th anniversary of his ancestor, Richard von Frankenstein, creating his murderous monster. The scientist, who is bent and scarred from World War II torture, has agreed to let his friend Wilhelm Gottfried (Rudolph Anders) lease the castle to the TV crew in order to get money to buy an atomic reactor unit that he, Frankenstein, needs for his experiments. Wilhelm questions him about spending so much money and tells him all of his art treasures have been sold. Frankenstein says he needs the reactor for electricity for the castle and that he only has his work since his captors let him keep his surgeon hands so he could perform the unholy operations they demanded. Frankenstein films an introduction to the television program in the burial vault of his castle, explaining that his ancestor spent seventeen years creating a living man only to find out it was a monster, and how he removed its vital organs and buried it deep in the bowels of the structure for all time. Carolyn becomes uneasy over the fact that Frankenstein pays special attention to her and she also has to ward off the advances of Row, who employs his jealous fourth ex-wife, Judy (Charlotte Austin), as the script girl. Carolyn is quite fond of Frankenstein’s family retainer, the loyal Shuter (Norbert
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Schiller), and gives him a scarf and a kiss, much to the scientist’s chagrin. After the atomic reactor is delivered, Frankenstein works in his hidden laboratory where he has installed listening devices so he can hear what is going on in other parts of the castle. Frankenstein has dug up the body of the monster and plans to re-animate it by replacing its vital organs and using the reactor to return the creature to life — and eventually having his own brain placed in its head to continue the family line. While closing up the castle for the night, Shuter sees a light in the vault and finds the secret entrance to the laboratory. Frankenstein kills his loyal butler and puts his heart and brain in the monster. When Carolyn inquires about Shuter the next day, Frankenstein tells her he has gone to visit relatives. As Frankenstein goes to place Shuter’s eyes in the creature, he drops them on the floor and ruins them. That night a drunken Shaw tries to seduce Judy but she locks him out of her room. The monster abducts and accidentally kills Judy as Frankenstein laments that her eyes cannot be used for the creature since he wanted Shaw’s orbs. Row tells his cameraman, Morgan Haley ( John Dennis), to make some tests with Carolyn in the vault and while they are there the monster nearly grabs the young woman. When she leaves, the creature murders Haley whose blood does not match that of the monster as Frankenstein had hoped. With Judy, Haley and Shuter missing, Row calls in Police Inspector Raab (Irwin Berke) but Frankenstein gives him logical explanations for their leaving. Gottfried asks Frankenstein to disclose the nature of his experiments and he is taken to the laboratory where he meets the monster who murders him so his eyes can be used to make him see. Row and Shaw search the vault and the director finds Haley’s viewfinder and goes back to see Raab, telling Shaw to take care of Carolyn. Frankenstein hypnotizes Shaw and tells him to have the actress come downstairs at a certain time. When she does, she is carried to the vault by the monster. Row convinces the inspector to return to the castle with him and when they cannot find Carolyn, Shaw joins them in searching for her. As Frankenstein calls to the monster to bring the actress to the laboratory, the young woman regains consciousness and realizes that Shuter the butler is part of her abductor and tells him to take her back upstairs. The three men hear her calling for help and descend into the vault as the monster confronts Frankenstein and begins destroying the laboratory. The scientist turns on the atomic reactor and its steam kills both him and the creature. After the laboratory is cleared of radiation, Row, Mike and Rabb remove bandages from the head of the monster and the visage of a pre-war Victor von Frankenstein is revealed. As noted, the best part of Frankenstein 1970 comes at the beginning with the girl being chased through the fog by the monster. This eerie and scary sequence is particularly well staged and sets the tone for what could have been a top-notch horror film but the rest of the script is a letdown with Karloff ’s over-the-top performance as Victor von Frankenstein providing very little compensation. The best acting work in the film is done by Donald Barry, best remembered as cowboy star Don “Red” Barry. He dominates every scene in which he appears as the abrasive, self-centered, bombastic and lecherous director. He is ably helped by two beautiful actresses, Jana Lund and Charlotte Austin. Austin starred in The Bride and the Beast (q.v.) the same year for Allied Artists. Variety called the film a “[w]ell-made entry in the horror class…. Camera work is fluid and perceptive [and sets] are a major asset to believability.” The British Kinematograph Weekly noted, “It follows the pattern of previous Frankenstein films…. [T]he introduction of the television unit gives the shenanigans zip…. Cast iron star and title thriller.” Donald F. Glut in The Frankenstein Legend (1973) called it “a shoddy production,” adding, “There was hardly anything futuristic about the film even when seen in 1958. With the exception
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of the atomic reactor, the story could have been set earlier in time.” Regarding the star he said, “Karloff himself seemed to express a contempt for the role he was playing … and in one of the only instances of his career, overacted.” Frankenstein 1970 was often dual billed with Queen of Outer Space (q.v.) when released by Allied in July 1958. Part of its opening chase scene was later incorporated into the TV version of Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957) [q.v.] to beef up the running time.
Fright (1956; 68 minutes) Producer-Director: W. Lee Wilder. Screenplay: Myles Wilder. Photography: J. Burgi Contner. Editor: L. Robert Harris. Music: Lew Davies. Sound: Walter Wood. Makeup: Josephine Cianelli. Wardrobe: Bernard Shaw. CAST: Nancy Malone (Ann Summers), Eric Fleming (Dr. Jim Hamilton), Dean L. Almquist (Cullen), Frank Marth (George Morley), Humphrey Davies (Dr. Charles Gore), Elizabeth Watts (Lady Olive Fitzmaurice), Walter Klavun (Warden), Amelia Conley (Miss Ames), Tom Reynolds (City Editor Bill), Robert Gardett (Managing Editor), Norman MacKaye (Inspector Blackburn), Ned Glass (Taxi Driver), Don Douglas (Lieutenant White), Sid Raymond (Taxi Driver), Philip Kenealy (Policeman), Chris Bohn (TV Announcer), Norman Burton (Thompkins), Alney Alba (Butler Philip), Mae Clarke (Woman in Restaurant), Jimmy Little (Bartender Joe).
After eluding the New York City police by hiding in a bakery truck, double murderer George Morley (Frank Marth) ends up cornered on the Queens Borough Bridge. When Inspector Blackburn (Norman MacKaye) is unable to talk him down, passing Park Avenue psychiatrist Dr. Jim Hamilton (Eric Fleming) asks permission to try. Believing Morley is obsessive with a highly suggestible mentality, Jim uses the sound of his voice and the bridge lights to put the murderer in a trance, thus permitting the police officers to take him into custody. Among the many spectators is Ann Summers (Nancy Malone). The next day the newspapers are filled with stories about Jim who is called the “Park Avenue Svengali” although he tells the press he used simple suggestion technique on Morley who he feels is an unrepentant killer. As he gets into his car to leave work, the psychiatrist finds he has a passenger, Ann, who says she too may have a criminal mind. Although he denies her request to become his patient, Jim becomes intrigued with the woman after finding she left a German-language book in his car. His friend, history professor Charles Gore (Humphrey Davies), suggests that Jim may be attracted to her; Jim says he was married once and that was enough. Ann calls his office and asks for an appointment and Jim consents but when he meets with her she does not remember the novel and says she speaks no German although she gets notes in that language. She also relates she is a constant traveler and has never married or been in love. Jim goes to the local jail to complete his report on Morley, as requested by Blackburn, and he puts the killer under hypnosis. At his next session with Ann, he hypnotizes her and she starts to talk in German but is told by Jim to use English. She says she is eighteen years old and is with her lover Rudy at his Viennese hunting lodge — and that they both must die. When she comes to, Anne says she has never been in Vienna. She consents to meet the psychiatrist for dinner that night; she does not show up but does send Jim a message written in German (it simply says she will not keep the dinner date). At their next appointment, Anne tells Jim she does remember sending the note and that she often has memory loss. Under hypnosis the woman announces she is Baroness Maria Vetsera, whom Anne is trying to kill, and she is living in January 1889. Late that night Jim meets with Gore who informs him of the Mayerling affair, in which a married Austrian prince, Archduke Rudolf von Hapsburg, the son of Emperor Franz Joseph I, killed Maria Vetsera at their love nest, his hunting lodge Mayerling. When the doctor puts the woman under
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hypnosis again, she, as Maria, tells him about dying with Rudolf at Mayerling. The next day Jim and Ann have a date in the park and he tells her he is falling in love with her. At the same time, a newsman named Cullen (Dean L. Almquist) comes to the psychiatrist’s office and, while waiting for him to return, steps on a foot button that turns on a tape recorder containing Ann’s Mayerling story. The reporter takes it to his managing editor (Robert Gardett) and city editor (Tom Reynolds) and they agree to run it despite the probability of a libel suit. When Jim sees the story he demands a retraction. Ann, who feels she has been betrayed, phones the psychiatrist and tells him she never wants to see him again. Determined to win her back, Jim goes to her Sutton Place home and meets with her old family friend, Lady Olive Fitzmorris (Elizabeth Watts). At first the old lady is hostile, but when he tells her he wants to help Ann she informs him about the young woman’s past, including the fact that her widowed father had an affair with Ann’s Austrian nurse. Jim comes to believe that Ann got her Mayerling story from the nurse as well as a smattering of German and a subconscious guilt complex because of the affair. Ann is considered missing, and police Lieutenant White (Don Douglas) informs Jim that a note in German has been received accusing the psychiatrist of murdering her. In the doctor’s office, White finds Ann’s purse containing signed travelers checks worth $2,000 and a handkerchief with blood on it. Although he is not arrested, Jim is followed by the law. When he has lunch with Gore, he tells him he has fallen in love with Ann. When asked about Morley, Jim says he is asocial and that he, Jim, has a few more tests to run before the man is sent to the electric chair. Since Gore thinks Ann as Maria is trying to find her lover, Jim comes up with a plan to substitute him with Morley. He gets Cullen to write a story saying the reincarnation of Archduke Rudolf has been found. That night Ann shows up at Jim’s apartment. With the warden’s (Walter Klavun) permission, Jim hypnotizes Morley into thinking he is Rudolf and then takes Ann to see him. Having left a gun loaded with blanks in the room, Jim puts Ann under hypnosis and as he, Cullen and the warden watch, Morley re-enacts the shooting of his lady love. Jim brings Morley out of his trance and then reawakens Ann, who is now free of Maria and can look forward to the future with her psychiatrist. Reincarnation became a vogue in Hollywood after the release of The Search for Bridey Murphy, a novel by Morey Bernstein. A film version with Louis Hayward, Teresa Wright, Nancy Gates and Kenneth Tobey was beaten to theaters by three months when Allied Artists issued Fright. Filmed mostly on location in New York City, Fright not only deals with a past life experience, it also interpolates hypnosis, history and split personality into its plotline. The result is a tepid, tacky, poorly acted melodrama done partially in a semi-documentary style. Wilder produced and directed Fright and it was penned by his son, Myles Wilder. Filmed as Cast No Shadow, it was later reissued by Exploitation Films as Spell of the Hypnotist. In Movies on TV 1975 –76 Edition (1974), Steven H. Scheuer termed it a “[m]eandering psycho-drama.” Second-billed Eric Fleming, who played the stolid psychiatrist, also appeared in Conquest of Space (1955), Queen of Outer Space (1958) [q.v.] and Curse of the Undead (1959). He is best remembered as trail boss Gil Favor in the CBS-TV series Rawhide.
Fright (1971; 87 minutes; Color) Producers: Harry Fine and Michael Style. Director: Peter Collinson. Screenplay: Tudor Gates. Photography: Ian Wilson. Editor: Raymond Poulton. Music: Harry Robinson. Song: Bob Barrett, sung by Nanette. Sound: Spencer Reeves. Sets: Peter Young. Production Design: Disley Jones.
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Production Manager: Tom Sachs. Makeup: George Blackler. Costumes: Jean Fairlie. Continuity: Joy Mercer. CAST: Susan George (Amanda), Honor Blackman (Helen Helston), Ian Bannen (Brian Helston), John Gregson (Dr. Derek Cordell), George Cole ( Jim Lloyd), Dennis Waterman (Chris), Tara Collinson (Tara Helston), Maurice Kaufmann (Inspector), Roger Lloyd-Pack (Constable), Michael Brennan (Sergeant).
The precursor of babysitter-in-peril thrillers like Halloween (1978) and When a Stranger Calls (1979), Fright was made at Shepperton Studios in London by Fantale Films in cooperation with British Lion. It got a Certificate X when released in its homeland but was PG when Allied Artists issued it stateside in late May 1971. This was the second time the studio handled a feature with that title, the first being a 1956 W. Lee Wilder feature (q.v.). The British production was also called Night Legs and Wake Up in Fright and was re-issued in the U.S. as I’m Alone and I’m Scared. Susan George, who is quite fetching in a light blue top and mini-skirt, holds the film together with her well-modulated portrayal of the harried babysitter but the film itself seems like a lot of puzzle pieces that barely fit. The British accents are sometimes so heavy as to be almost unintelligible. One amusing scene has the teenager trying to calm her jitters by watching The Plague of the Zombies (1966) on television. Blonde college student Amanda (George) gets off a bus at night and walks on a deserted road to the home of a couple who call themselves the Lloyds. She is met by Helen (Honor Blackman), who seems nervous, and is introduced to her husband Jim (George Cole) and their three-year-old son Tara (Tara Collinson), for whom Amanda is to babysit while they go out to celebrate at a fancy restaurant. Helen berates Jim for letting Spooky, their cat, in the child’s bed and Helen becomes unnerved when he jokes that their old house may have an occasional ghost or poltergeist. Anxious about going out, Helen says she does not often leave her little boy and gives the babysitter the telephone number of the restaurant. After they leave, a man watches Amanda as she makes tea. After she puts the boy back to bed, someone taps on a window and the doorbell rings. It is Chris (Dennis Waterman), one of her school chums, who has followed her to the Lloyd house. Helen and Jim arrive at the restaurant to celebrate a divorce and are joined by her psychiatrist, Dr. Derek Cordell ( John Gregson). After Amanda lets Chris in the house, he makes sexual advances which she rejects. He tries to scare her with the plot of a horror movie he saw but denies watching her through the window. He also informs her that Helen is not Jim’s wife and that her real husband tried to kill her and is now in a mental institution. At the restaurant, Helen asks Derek if her husband could be traumatized by the divorce and he answers in the affirmative. As Amanda and Chris make out, Helen calls to check on her son. Following the phone call, the sexually frustrated Amanda throws Chris out of the house. As he watches Amanda, who is near a second floor window, Chris is attacked and beaten unconscious by a stranger. Amanda turns on the television and watches a horror movie as Helen tells Jim and Derek she thinks something is wrong at home. When the doorbell rings again, the babysitter thinks it’s Chris but she sees a strange man at the window and calls the restaurant. Just as Helen is about to take her call, the phone line is cut. Derek calls the Lloyd house but gets no answer. A neighbor (Ian Bannen) brings in Chris, begins massaging his heart and announces the young man has died. Helen and Jim speed home in their car and go off the road with the vehicle getting stuck in mud. The neighbor tries to comfort the now hysterical Amanda as Derek goes to the police and tells them to get to the Lloyd home. As a report is being filled out, a call comes in to the police station that a woman has been murdered near a bus stop. The neighbor, who is really Brian Helston, Helen’s estranged husband and
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Tara’s father, begins calling the young woman “Helen” and she starts to become suspicious of him. After he begins kissing her, Amanda submits to him sexually. As Brian sleeps, Amanda takes Tara and tries to escape. Chris revives as Brian takes his son by the hand and tells the babysitter not to leave. Picking up a heavy statue, Chris tries to hit Brian but is knocked down and beaten senseless. When the police arrive and call to Brian to give himself up, he locks Amanda and his son in the house. As Helen and Jim show up, Brian breaks a mirror and threatens Amanda with a shard of glass. Derek talks to Brian over the police loudspeaker and asks to meet with him but the madman refuses. The psychiatrist tells the police not to provoke Brian who threatens to slit the throats of his captives. Brian says he wants to talk to Helen. Amanda torments him with harangues about his wife not wanting him. The madman again thinks the babysitter is his wife, who comes to the house with a hidden gas canister. Brian welcomes Helen but locks the door, breaking his promise to release Amanda and Tara. Helen drops the canister and when it goes off, Amanda comes up behind Brian and cuts him with the glass before running out of the house. The bleeding Brian grabs the boy and holds the glass to his throat but Helen talks him into giving up their son. As she backs away, holding the little boy, Amanda shoots Brian. In The Essential Monster Movie Guide (1999), Stephen Jones called Fright an “[u]npleasant slasher film…. The team of screenwriter Tudor Gates and producers Harry Fine and Michael Style fail to recreate the look of their Hammer productions (The Vampire Lovers [1970], etc.) and a cast of fine British character actors look justifiably embarrassed.” Phil Hardy in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986) said it was an “openly exploitative film….
Lobby card for Fright (1971)
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[it] manages to mobilize both mental illness and the notion of woman as automatic victim, sexual and otherwise, for the generation of shock and suspense, while suggesting some sympathy for the male maniac. … [Peter] Collinson’s direction is full of inserted close-ups and over-familiar shots of a telephone looming in the foreground…. [Tudor] Gates’s awkward script and the demand for instant shocks leave the solid cast little room for [maneuver].” “Laughably transparent ‘maximum suspense’ calculations,” is how Donald C. Willis summed up the proceedings in Horror and Science Fiction Films II (1982). For a film with such a plethora of talent, both behind and in front of the camera, Fright turned out to be a mundane thriller, partially saved, as already noted, by the presence of beautiful Susan George. She was also in The Sorcerers (1967) [q.v.], Dracula (1970), Die Screaming, Marianne and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (both 1973), Computercide, The House Where Evil Dwells and Venom (all 1982). Honor Blackman was in such genre efforts as Daughter of Darkness (1947), Breakaway (1955), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Goldfinger (1964), in which she had her most famous role as Pussy Galore, To the Devil a Daughter (1976) and The Cat and the Canary (1978). Ian Bannen appeared in Doomwatch (1972), From Beyond the Grave (1973), The Watcher in the Woods (1980) and a 1981 TV adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. George Cole was featured in A Christmas Carol (1951), The Anatomist (1961), Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh) (1964), The Vampire Lovers (1970) and The Blue Bird (1976). Tara Collinson, who played the three-yearold with the same given name, was the son of the film’s director, Peter Collinson, who also helmed Straight on Till Morning (1972), Ten Little Indians and The Spiral Staircase (both 1976). Screenwriter Tudor Gates also penned Barbarella (1967), The Vampire Lovers (1970), Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1972), the last three for Fright’s producers, Harry Fine and Michael Style.
From Hell It Came (1957; 72 minutes) Associate Producers: Richard Bernstein and Byron Roberts. Director: Dan Milner. Screenplay: Richard Bernstein. Story: Richard Bernstein and Jack Milner. Photography: Brydon Baker. Editor: Jack Milner. Music: Darrell Calker. Art Director: Rudi Feld. Sound: Frank Webster, Sr. Sets: Morris Hoffman. Costumes: Frank Delmar. Makeup: Harry Thomas. Production Supervisor: Byron Roberts. Special Effects: James H. Donnelly. Assistant Director: John Greenwald. CAST: Tod Andrews (Dr. Bill Arnold), Tina Carver (Dr. Terry Mason), Linda Watkins (Mae Kilgore), John McNamara (Professor Clark), Gregg Palmer (Kimo), Robert Swan (Witch Doctor Tano), Baynes Barron (Chief Maranka), Suzanne Ridgeway (Kory), Mark Sheeler (Eddie), Lee Rhodes (Norgu), Grace Mathews (Orchid), Tani Marsh (Naomi), Chester Hayes (Maku/The Tabanga), Lenmana Guerin (Dori).
Natives on Kalai, a small island in the Pacific Ocean, conduct a ceremony in which Kimo (Gregg Palmer) is condemned to die because the tribe’s witch doctor, Tano (Robert Swan), said he caused the death of his own father, their former chief, by associating with the American scientists conducting experiments there. Kimo claims his father died from the black plague and begs his wife Kory (Suzanne Ridgeway) to tell the tribe the medicine the white men gave his father did not kill him. She wants to become the bride of the new chief, Maranka (Baynes Barron), and rebuffs her husband who promises to come back from Hell and puts a curse on Tano, Maranka and Kory. Kimo is stabbed in the heart with a dagger. The killing is witnessed by trading post owner Mae Kilgore (Linda Watkins), a Cockney widow. At the scientific compound, Dr. Bill Arnold (Tod Andrews) complains to plant expert Professor Clark ( John McNamara) about the island’s malaria, jungle rot, insects, heat and the ignorance of the natives. Clark tells Bill he misses his girlfriend, Dr. Terry
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Mason (Tina Carver), who rejected his marriage proposal to work on the island of Baku. The two men discuss their study of radioactivity on the island; it was brought there by a typhoon after an atomic blast 1,700 miles away. Clark says there is no more radioactivity on the atoll than in a typical dental x-ray. The natives blame local deaths on atomic fallout although both men agree it is caused by plague. Mae is attacked by a native whom Bill, Clark and their assistant Eddie (Mark Sheeler) scare away. After being revived, Mae tells the Americans she saw the natives murder Kimo. Clark decides to ask Washington D.C. for more help and on the next helicopter flight Terry is brought to assist them. Bill is overjoyed to see Terry but he tells her the island is dangerous and he wants her to return to Baku. She says she must obey orders and remain. Mae gets a pretty local outcast, Orchid (Grace Mathews), to be Terry’s servant. Kory confronts Maranka because he has rejected her for another woman, Naomi (Tani Marsh), who brings him poison for darts he plans to use to kill the Americans. Native Norgu (Lee Rhodes) takes his wife Dori (Lenmana Guerin) to the compound to be checked for minor burns and he tells the scientists that Tano poisoned Kimo’s father. When Bill and Terry go for a walk in the jungle, he announces he wants them to get married but she prefers to continue her career. Terry notices something odd in the native cemetery and when they investigate they find a tree growing from Kimo’s grave. They have Clark look at the site and he speculates that since Kimo was buried standing up in a coffin made from a tree trunk, the roots have somehow come from it. When Norgu returns with Dori the next day, he says the natives believe that Kimo has come back as a Tabanga, a vengeful human tree. He tells of a native chief who was murdered and returned as a Tabanga to get revenge on his killers. Orchid arrives and says the Tabanga has a dagger sticking out of it and a green liquid is dripping from its bark. Bill, Clark and Terry test the Tabanga and find it has a pulse and is radioactive. Clark sends their findings to Washington and is ordered to take the thing to the laboratory and examine it more closely. When Tano and the chief hear of the Tabanga, they make plans to use it to kill Norgu and the Americans. Maranka also wants Kory dead. She hears them talking and goes to the compound, tells the Americans the natives plan to kill them and asks for help. The scientists dig up the Tabanga, which is now taller than a human, and take it to their laboratory where it begins to die. In an effort to save it, Terry injects the tree with an experimental serum which takes at least eight hours to take effect. The next morning the team finds the lab has been destroyed along with their radio, cutting off communications with the outside world, and the Tabanga is gone. While Bill thinks the tree may have come back to life, Clark says the natives took it and destroyed their property. When Kory sees Naomi bathing in a lagoon, she tries to kill her. As the two women fight, the Tabanga shows up and carries off Kory, dropping her in quicksand. The Tabanga comes into the village and crushes the chief against a tree and throws his body into a ravine. Tano lures the Tabanga to a pit his men have dug and when the walking tree falls into it they throw in torches and depart, convinced the monster has burned. During the night the scorched Tabanga comes out of the pit and murders Tano. Mae arrives at the compound with news that the monster is again on the loose and she joins Bill, Terry, Clark and Eddie in looking for the creature. Terry stops to get some rocks out of her shoe and is captured by the monster. The others hear her screams and see the walking tree carry the young woman to the edge of the quicksand. Bill and Eddie shoot at the Tabanga and one of the bullets pushes the dagger into its heart, causing the monster to fall back into the quicksand and disappear. Maku (Chester Hayes) and some of the other natives ask the Americans to stay and help their people. As Bill and Terry kiss, Mae asks Clark if he is married.
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From Hell It Came was a Milner Bros. Production; the siblings previously made The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955). Allied Artists issued it on a dual bill with The Disembodied (q.v.) in the late summer of 1957. The Tabanga, which looked somewhat like a mobile grandfather’s clock with arms and eyes, was based on designs by Paul Blaisdell. In his biography Paul Blaisdell: Monster Maker (1997), Randy Palmer wrote, “The Tabanga monster was effective, although it was shown a little too often to seem properly intimidating. Still, it looked like what it was supposed to look like: an ambulatory tree sporting the famous ‘Blaisdell scowl.’” The Tabanga costume was constructed at Don Post Studios and later showed up as a prop in a warehouse scene in the melodrama Arson for Hire, which Allied Artists released as the lower half of a double bill with The Giant Behemoth (q.v.) in March 1959. In Sleaze Creatures (1995), D. Earl Worth said From Hell It Came was “decently photographed, energetically scored, weird with a cracked sense of conviction and, in its title monster, had a Blaisdell beast the Billiken company should have made a model of.” “Very, very bad,” is how Donald C. Willis described the feature in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972). Top-billed Tod Andrews used the name Michael Ames when he earlier appeared in the Warner Bros. sci-fi comedy The Body Disappears (1941) and two Bela Lugosi Monogram thrillers, Voodoo Man and Return of the Ape Man (both 1944). Leading lady Tina Carver was a victim of The Man Who Turned to Stone (1957). From Hell It Came gave “Introducing” billing to Linda Watkins, but the actress’ career of more than four decades also included a leading role in the 1932 mystery Charlie Chan’s Chance.
The Ghost of Crossbones Hollow (1952; 56 minutes) Producer: Wesley Barry. Executive Producer: William F. Broidy. Director: Frank McDonald. Screenplay: Maurice Tombragel. Photography: William Sickner. Editor: Ace Herman. Music: Lee Zahler. Art Director: Dave Milton. Sound: John Carter. Sets: Vin Taylor. Makeup: Charles Huber. Set Continuity: Eleanor Donahoe. Assistant Director: William Beaudine, Jr. CAST: Guy Madison (Marshal Wild Bill Hickok), Andy Devine (Deputy Marshal Jingles P. Jones). “The Tax Collecting Story”: Gordon Jones (Curly Wolf ), Sam Flint ( Judge), Marjorie Bennett (Widow), Mike Ragan [Holly Bane] (Gus), Ray Bennett (Sheriff ), Joe Greene (Rancher), James Guifoyle (Old Rancher), Billy Bletcher (Waiter). “Ghost Town Story”: Russell Simpson (Sam Overman/Stanton), John Doucette (Stopes), Bart Davidson (Manager).
The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok was telecast from 1951 to 1958 for 113 half-hour episodes starring Guy Madison in the title role and Andy Devine as his sidekick Jingles P. Jones. The series was so popular that between 1952 and 1955 sixteen feature films were released theatrically, each made up of two segments of the TV show. One of these, The Ghost of Crossbones Canyon, came to theaters in November 1952 on the cusp of Monogram being absorbed into Allied Artists. Thus the film played in various locales under the auspices of both with its 1953 showings coming from Allied. “Ghost Town Story” had a pseudosupernatural plot, giving the feature its title. It was first telecast June 17, 1951. Stopes ( John Doucette) and his gang hold up the Central City Express Office and knock out Deputy Marshal Jingles P. Jones (Devine). Marshal Wild Bill Hickok (Madison) and Jingles track the outlaws for two days before coming to Crossbones City, a ghost town near the Mexican border. Jingles claims the place is haunted by the ghost of outlaw Stanton, whose gang used the town as its headquarters. They are surprised by the appearance of prospector Sam Overman (Russell Simpson), who tells them that there are spirits in the old town. That night the two lawmen ride into Crossbones City and Sam tries to scare them
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away. They decide to sleep in a hotel. As Jingles stands guard, he is frightened by various noises caused by the old man. Bill tells Jingles to get some sleep as he does guard duty. The next morning Bill sees Sam go into the saloon and follows him. There the old man meets with Stopes and his men as they count the loot from the express office holdup. Sam orders the gang to capture the lawmen as Jingles wakes up and sees Hickok go into the saloon. Stopes gets the drop on the marshal and they fight while Jingles shoots one of the outlaws and holds the other at gunpoint. Sam stops the fight and informs the lawmen he is really Stanton and had faked his death. As Sam is about to shoot Bill and Jingles, he has a falling-out with Stopes over the robbery proceeds and the lawmen go for cover. The disGuy Madison, the star of The Ghost of Crossbones Canyon (1952) traught Sam falls over a bal- and Phantom Trails (1955), feature films culled from the telecony railing and is killed as vision series The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok (1951–58). Stopes tries to escape and has a shootout with Jingles. Bill comes around behind Stopes and subdues him. The outlaw confesses that Sam used the ghost story to scare people away from his hideout. Some of the advertising for the film called it The Ghost of Crossbone Canyon. In 1955 Allied Artists released Phantom Trails (q.v.), another theatrical feature made up of episodes of The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok television series.
The Giant Behemoth (1959; 80 minutes) Producers: David Diamond and Edward (Ted) Lloyd. Director–Production Design: Eugene Lourie. Screenplay: Eugene Lourie and Daniel James. Story: Robert Abel and Allen Adler. Photography: Desmond Davis and Ken Hodges. Editor: Lee Doig. Music: Edwin Ashley. Art Director: Harry White. Sound: Sid Wiles. Production Manager: Jacques de Lane Lea. Makeup: Jimmy Evans. Special Effects: Willis H. O’Brien, Irving Block, Louis DeWitt, Jack Rabin and Pete Peterson. Assistant Director: Kim Mills. CAST: Gene Evans (Steve Karnes), André Morell (Professor James Bickford), John Turner ( John), Leigh Madison ( Jeanie Trevethan), Jack McGowran (Dr. Sampson), Maurice Kaufman (Mini-Submarine Commander), Henri Vidon (Tom Trevethan), Leonard Sachs (Scientist), Lloyd Lamble (Admiral Summers), Howard Lang (Naval Commander), Neil Hallett (Helicopter Pilot), Patrick Jordan, Georgina Ward (Photo Lab Assistants), Arthur Gomez (Quayside Fisherman), Max
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Lobby card for Behemoth the Sea Monster, the British title of The Giant Behemoth (1959)
Faulkner (PLA Radio Operator), Andre Maranne (French Radio Officer), Derren Nesbitt (Radio Officer), Neal Arden (TV Newsman), David McAvoy (Street Broadcaster).
At a meeting of the Atomic Energy Commission in London, American marine biologist Steve Karnes (Gene Evans) warns that the careless disposal of radioactive material will become a threat to the planet. He is scoffed at by several members, but gains the partial support of Professor James Bickford (André Morell), a British physicist. In Cornwall, fisherman Tom Trevethan (Henri Vidon) is hit by a blinding, burning light. His daughter Jeanie (Leigh Madison) later walks to the village pub in search of her dad; another fisherman, John ( John Turner), joins her to look for him and they find Tom, his face badly burned, in a dying condition. He tells them something came out of the sea and calls it Behemoth. Following the fisherman’s funeral, Jeanie and John walk along the beach and see scores of dead fish. When the young man spies a pulsing white substance between some rocks, he touches it and his hand is burned. Steve is about to leave London as he hears a TV news report that fishing has come to a complete standstill in Cornwall and there have been reports of a sea monster. He visits Bickford who supplies the details of Trevethan’s death and the two go to the site. They find the dead fish have been taken out by the tides or destroyed by the locals. One fisherman describes seeing a light under the water. John takes them to see the village doctor who examined the body of the dead fisherman and he also shows them his burned hand. Steve is surprised not to find radiation contamination on the beach. At the lab, Steve notes that one of the fish has a white spot inside it that glows and is radioactive.
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Although the specimen came from a beach nowhere near the tragedy, Steve goes to Plymouth for further exploration and hires a boat, the Molly T. He eventually spots a huge object rise out of the sea but it moves too quickly to be chased. When a steamship is wrecked on a nearby beach, Steve and Bickford examine it and find no survivors with the craft badly damaged and containing high levels of radiation. Going back to London, the two men inform Royal Navy Admiral Summers (Lloyd Lamble) that they believe a marine animal of tremendous size and strength attacked the ship. Steve also says the white substance found in the radioactive fish was from the stomach lining of a marine creature. As Summers sends out an order to alert naval forces around the world about the monster, the Behemoth attacks a remote farm and incinerates a farmer and his son. Looking at photos taken at the scene of the attack, Steve and Bickford see a huge footprint. They meet with Dr. Sampson ( Jack MacGowran), a noted paleontologist, who declares it belongs to a plesiosaurus, a type of dinosaur with the properties of an electric eel. He theorizes that the creature is returning to the shallows that gave it birth and asks to join the two men in trying to find the beast. When Steve tells him the dinosaur is radioactive, Sampson sadly notes it will have to be destroyed. Steve and Bickford meet again with the admiral and recommend that the Thames River be blocked off and London evacuated. Sampson and a helicopter crew try to find the Behemoth but when the pilot (Neil Hallett) drops too near the water, the creature rises up and its radiation incinerates the craft. The monster then emerges from the Thames and overturns a ferry, killing nearly all its passengers. The military plans to blow it up but Steve warns that the radioactive pieces could cause massive health problems. He says that the creature is burning itself up and that shooting pure radium into it will safely bring about its immediate demise. As a warhead is being loaded with the radium, the Behemoth returns to London and goes on a spree of destruction throughout the city, destroying buildings and power lines and starting large fires. After the Behemoth falls through London Bridge and back into the river, Steve and a commander (Maurice Kaufman) take a mini-submarine armed with the warhead and go after the creature. The craft begins leaking after being hit by the monster, but the commander is able to fire the warhead which hits and destroys the Behemoth. When Steve returns to the dock to meet Bickford, they hear a radio report about masses of dead fish being found on the shores of the United States from Maine to Florida. Filmed in England as a co-production of Allied Artists and Eros Films as The Behemoth, the movie was released in Great Britain by Eros as Behemoth the Sea Monster with an X Certificate. In its day it was a fairly popular monster outing with its reputation being further enhanced by the fact that legendary stop-motion animator Willis H. O’Brien worked on the project. His classics in the field of special effects include The Lost World (1925), King Kong and The Son of Kong (both 1933), Mighty Joe Young (1949) and The Black Scorpion (1957). The Giant Behemoth, however, was not one of his career highlights. While the title monster was fairly realistic, the production was plagued by the use of obvious miniatures. Fortunately the plot leading up to the scenes with the monster is interesting. The film was not helped by the taciturn hero played by Gene Evans. Jack MacGowran overplayed the part of the seedy paleontologist. André Morell, as always, is sound as the British physicist. The Giant Behemoth was directed and designed by Eugene Lourie and is similar in plot and execution to his earlier The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). In Science Fiction Film Directors, 1895 –1998 (2000), Dennis Fischer noted that the film “benefit[s] from superior performances by its leads, Gene Evans and André Morell…. Lourie shot the film on location documentary style, which adds a feeling of realism to the proceedings…. Lourie’s direction is both atmospheric and inventive, but the inadequate budget prevents The Giant Behemoth
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from eclipsing The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” Among the director’s other genre credits are The Colossus of New York (1958), Gorgo (1961) and second unit work on Crack in the World (1965). He was art director for two other Allied releases, Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962) and Shock Corridor (1963) [qq.v.].
The Golden Idol (1954; 71 minutes) Producer-Director-Story-Screenplay: Ford Beebe. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: John Fuller. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: Dave Milton. Sound: Charles Cooper. Sets: Robert Priestley. Production Supervisor: Allen K. Wood. Makeup: Norman Pringle. Special Effects: Ray Mercer. Assistant Director: Edward Morey, Jr. CAST: Johnny Sheffield (Bomba), Anne Kimbell (Karen Marsh), Paul Guilfoyle (Prince Ali Ben Mamoud), Leonard Mudie (Commissioner Andy Barnes), Smoki Whitfield (Eli), Rick Vallin (Abdullah), Lane Bradford ( Joe Hawkins), Roy Glenn (Gomo), James Adamson (Ezekial), William Tannen (Sergeant Reed), Don C. Harvey (Officer Graves), Bill Walker (Nadji), Robert Bice (Guard), Nakimba (Chimp).
Following his appearance as Boy, the adopted son of Tarzan and Jane, in eight “Tarzan” films (from Tarzan Finds a Son! in 1939 through Tarzan and the Huntress in 1947), Johnny Sheffield took on the role of Bomba, the Jungle Boy, in a dozen features released between 1949 and 1955. The Monogram series entries The Lost Volcano (1950) and The Hidden City (1953) dealt with lost civilizations and The Golden Idol, issued by Allied Artists early in 1954, revolved around a priceless native idol. The character originated in a popular series of books published by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Between 1926 and 1938 twenty novels about Bomba by Roy Rockwood (a pseudonym) were published, the first ten with South American settings and the rest in Africa. Thanks to the popularity of the Bomba films, the initial ten volumes were reissued by Grosset and Dunlap and later by Clover Books. Bomba (Sheffield) retrieves the Lost Idol of Watusi from the emir, Prince Ali Ben Mamoud (Paul Guilfoyle), who stole it from a Tanganyikan witch doctor. The emir pays dishonest hunter Joe Hawkins (Lane Bradford) to get the priceless treasure back for him because he wants to collect a huge reward for it from the British government. Since Commissioner Andy Barnes (Leonard Mudie) is set to arrive to get the idol, Mamoud tells Hawkins to abduct Bomba and torture the young man in order to find its whereabouts. As Mamoud, Hawkins and Gomo (Roy Glenn), a tracker, set out to find Bomba, the jungle boy sees Barnes traveling in a motorboat and beckons him to shore. With the commissioner and his underlings Eli (Smoki Whitfield) and Ezekiel ( James Adamson) is archaeologist Karen Marsh (Anne Kimball) who wants the Idol of the Watusi for a museum. Karen thinks she will get the idol from Mamoud but Bomba informs her he has it and will give it to her for the reward which he will distribute among the tribe of the witch doctor murdered by the emir. Mamoud and Hawkins see Bomba talking to Karen and the commissioner so Hawkins decides to pretend to be a big game hunter in order to join their party and let the jungle boy lead him to the idol. A lion tries to kill Karen but she is saved by Bomba. Hawkins comes to their camp and finds out that the young man is going for the idol. When he leaves, Bomba is captured by the emir’s henchmen and soon finds out that Hawkins is in cahoots with Mamoud. When he is threatened with torture, Bomba tells his captors that if they kill him, they will never find the idol. Hawkins returns to camp with the emir’s men and captures Barnes and his party. When Mamoud shows up with Bomba, he threatens to torture Karen. Bomba then agrees to return the idol by the end of the next day and he leaves but is guarded by two of the emir’s henchmen (Bill Walker, Robert Bice). During the night, Bomba’s pet chimp Nakimba knocks out guard Gomo with a rock and unties Eli, who
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Roy Glenn, Leonard Mudie, Paul Guilfoyle, Rick Vallin, and Anne Kimball in The Golden Idol (1954)
releases Karen and Barnes, and they run into the jungle. Gomo revives and tells Mamoud and Hawkins, who set out after the escapees. Bomba has knocked out his guards and is using jungle drums to send a message for help to district policemen Sergeant Reed (William Tannen) and Officer Graves (Don C. Harvey). When morning comes, Bomba arrives at the Pangola Basin where he has hidden the golden idol underwater. After he dives for it, the commissioner, Eli and Karen show up but they are followed by Mamoud and Hawkins. Bomba brings up the idol and gives it to Karen. As she and the commissioner leave with it, he swims to overturn Mamoud’s boat. Bomba and Hawkins fight in the water while the emir is killed by a huge serpent. The policemen arrive and place Gomo and the other henchmen under arrest as Bomba gives them a badly beaten Hawkins. Filmed at Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch in Newhall, California, as Bomba and the Golden Idol, the film was the tenth entry in the series. The Motion Picture Exhibitor said, it “should
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find the usual clientele awaiting it. The story is interesting and the cast, direction, and production are also in the usual category.” The feature was produced, directed and written by Ford Beebe whose career went back to the silent days. During the sound era he helmed a plethora of genre serials as well as producing and directing Night Monster (1942) and The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) and producing Son of Dracula (1943), all for Universal. When the Bomba series ended in 1955, Sheffield teamed with his producer-directoractor father, Reginald Sheffield, in the TV pilot Bantu, the Zebra Boy. When it failed to sell, he retired from acting and pursued a successful career in real estate. In 1967 DC Comics published seven issues of the Bomba, Jungle Boy comic book. In 2010, veteran jungle-movie tree climber Sheffield died after a fall from a ladder.
Hands of a Stranger (1962; 85 minutes) Producers: Newton Arnold and Michael du Pont. Director-Screenplay: Newton Arnold. From the novel Les Mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac) by Maurice Renard. Photography: Henry Cronjager. Editor: Bert Honey. Music: Richard LaSalle. Song: John Mosher. Art Director: Ted Holsopple. Sound: Victor B. Appel and Glen Glenn Co. Production Manager: Vernon Keays. Sets: John Sturtevant. Makeup: Charles Gemora. Technical Advisor: Dr. Richard Gans. Assistant Director: Jack C. May. CAST: Paul Lukather (Dr. Gil Harding), Joan Harvey (Dina Paris), James Stapleton (Vernon Paris), Irish McCalla (Holly), Barry Gordon (Skeet Wilder), Ted Otis (Dr. Ross Compton), Michael Rye (George Britton), Larry Haddon (Lieutenant Syms), Elaine Martone (Eileen Hunter), George Sawaya (Tony Wilder), Michael du Pont (Dr. Ken Fry), Sally Kellerman (Sue), David Kramer (Carnival Barker), Carl Carlsson ( Juggler), The Red Norvo Quintette [Red Norvo, Red Wootten, Jimmy Wyble, Jerry Dodgion, John Markham].
Paul Lukather, James Stapleton, Joan Harvey and Michael Rye in Hands of a Stranger (1962)
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Maurice Renard’s novel Les Mains d’Orlac (The Hands of Orlac) was first filmed in Austria in 1924 as Orlacs Haende (The Hands of Orlac), directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt as the pianist whose new transplanted hands turn him into a murderer. The first sound version of the book came in 1935 with MGM’s Mad Love starring Peter Lorre, Frances Drake and Colin Clive, with the emphasis on the crazed Dr. Gogol, portrayed by Lorre. In 1959 the British production The Hands of Orlac was done by Britannia–British Lion starring Mel Ferrer as Stephen Orlac with Christopher Lee as the evil magician Neron. It was shown in the U.S. in 1964 as Hands of a Strangler. Two years before that, Allied Artists released a screen version of Renard’s work, Hands of a Stranger, in April 1962. While walking down a street, a man is shot and robbed and left for dead, his powerful hands clinging to a lamp post. He is taken by ambulance to a hospital where Dr. Gil Harding (Paul Lukather), the chief of surgery, tries in vain to save his life. The doctor is questioned by Police Lieutenant Syms (Larry Haddon) in an attempt to find some clue to the murdered man’s identity. That night, pianist Vernon Paris ( James Stapleton) gives a triumphant concert before a capacity crowd and afterward is greeted by his sister Dina ( Joan Harvey), his girlfriend Ellen Hunter (Elaine Martone) and his manager George Britton (Michael Rye). He sends the trio on to a party and later takes a cab driven by Tony Wilder (George Sawaya) who tells Paris that his young son also plays the piano. When Wilder attempts to show Vernon a picture of the boy, he loses control of the vehicle, causing a head-on crash. At the hospital, Harding gets Britton’s permission to replace Vernon’s hands, which have been destroyed in the accident, with those of the murdered man, although the manager says the pianist would be better off dead. Harding and his associates, Dr. Ross Compton (Ted Otis), Dr. Ken Fry (Michael du Pont) and nurse Holly (Irish McCalla), perform the first-time procedure of grafting a dead man’s hands onto a living body. After the operation, Harding tells a distraught Dina that surgically everything went as planned and she calls him a crazed monster. After he shows her the pianist’s mangled hands, she demands to know whose hands were grafted onto her brother. Syms asks the surgeon what happened to the murdered man’s hands and the doctor requests two months to carry out an experiment. When Paris comes to, he demands to know what happened to his hands. Dina assures her brother he will again play the piano. After x-rays show that Vernon’s body has accepted the new hands, Harding and his associates remove the bandages and the pianist realizes they are not his hands. The doctor informs his patient he has been given two normal hands and it is up to him to accept them or give up. When he tries to play the piano, Vernon can only remember his former triumphs. He goes to see Eileen, who has prepared a candlelight dinner for another man, and the two argue. She backs into the table and her dress catches fire as Paris refrains from helping her. After Syms informs Harding that the fingerprints of the murdered man have not revealed his identity, Dina tells the doctor that Vernon has become depressed over Eileen’s death. Paris goes to the home of the cab driver, Tony Wilder, and is met by his ten-year-old son Skeet (Barry Gordon), who says his father will be back soon. The boy notices the stranger’s interest in his piano and invites him to play. When he cannot, the boy makes a caustic comment that throws Vernon into a rage and he shoves the boy with his powerful hands, causing him to fall and hit his head. The blind Wilder returns home with his seeing eye dog and calls for his son, not realizing the boy is dead. Dina has dinner with Harding and talks about life with her brother and asks him about the origins of Vernon’s new hands. The next day Harding examines the pianist’s hands and tells him that full dexterity will return, especially with exercise. That night Vernon goes with his sister and the doctor to a carnival but when he cannot hit targets at a carnival booth he assaults
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the barker (David Kramer). After Dina tells her brother she has fallen in love with Harding, he goes to see Fry, who is with his girlfriend Sue (Sally Kellerman), and he murders them. When Syms shows Harding the bodies of Fry and Sue, and also tells him about the Wilder boy, he theorizes that the surgeon gave Vernon new hands and the pianist is taking revenge on those involved in his tragedy. At his apartment, Vernon tells his sister he will play for her but he wants her to listen from another room. After Compton assures his colleague they must continue his work, Harding goes to see Dina and they find the music they are hearing is from a recording. At the same time, Vernon murders Compton and takes his body to the theater where he had his greatest triumph. Harding and Dina drive to the empty concert hall and confront Vernon who shows them Compton’s corpse. Vernon demonstrates that he cannot play the piano and grabs Dina as Harding tells him his body accepted the new hands but his mind did not. The pianist tries to strangle Harding and during the struggle he is shot and killed by Syms. Hands of a Stranger is a low-budget, talky melodrama which emphasizes the use of hands in everyday activities. Filmed as The Answer by Glenwood-Neve Productions, it apparently was cut before its theatrical release since the Red Norvo Quinette gets special billing but is only heard briefly on a phonograph record playing the song “How’s Your Mother.” When it was released in Great Britain in August 1962 by Warner-Pathé it ran 73 minutes, twelve minutes shy of its stateside running time. The acting is uniformly good, especially Paul Lukather as the dedicated surgeon and Joan Harvey as the tragic pianist’s loving sister. Lukather also starred in Dinosaurus! (1960) [q.v.] but is probably best remembered for starring in the daytime serial Bright Promise (NBC-TV, 1969–72). The film’s director-scripter, Newton Arnold, also helmed Blood Thirst (1971) and was assistant director for Blade Runner (1982). The makeup was done by Charles Gemora, best known for appearing in his custom-made gorilla outfit in many horror films including Seven Footprints to Satan (1929), Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), and The Monster and the Girl (1941). Gemora died in 1961, making Hands of a Stranger one of his last films. Production manager Vernon Keays co-directed the serial The Mysterious Mr. M (1946). Perhaps the most memorable scene in the film occurred at the carnival, when the pianist suddenly looks in a distorted mirror and sees his hands, which appear to be monstrous talons. Castle of Frankenstein #3 (1963) called Hands of a Stranger “[g]ood, but not outstanding,” and Steven H. Scheuer’s Movies on TV 1975 –76 Edition (1974) proclaimed, “Wildly implausible — some good moments.” Phil Hardy in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986) termed it “worthy but dull” while John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (1994) thought it an “[i]nteresting variation” on Renard’s work, adding, “Writer-director Newton Arnold creates good characters and dialogue but there are times when he goes off the Freudian end.” In Horror and Science Films: A Checklist (1972), Donald C. Willis stated, “None of the Hands of Orlac adaptations is better than mediocre, and this may be the worst.”
Hell’s Five Hours (1958; 73 minutes) Producer-Director-Screenplay: Jack L. Copeland. Associate Producer–Editor: Walter A. Hannemann. Photography: Ernest Haller. Music: Nicholas Carras. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Jim Mobley and Harold E. McGhan. Sets: Herman Schoenbrun. Production Manager-Assistant Director: Stanley Goldsmith. Costumes: Bert Henrikson. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Special Effects: Milton Rice. CAST: Stephen McNally (Mike Brand), Coleen Gray (Nancy Brand), Vic Morrow (Burt Nash), Maurice Manson (Dr. Howard Culver), Robert Foulk ( Jack Fife), Dan Sheridan (Ken
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Archer), Will J. White (Al Parker), Robert Christopher (Bill), Charles J. Conrad (George Knight), Ray Ferrell (Eric Brand), Richard Warren (Mack), Artie Lewis (Reporter), James Parnell (Pete), Joe Devlin (Cook), John Mitchum (Roadblock Officer), Bru Danger (Squad Car Policeman), Joey Ray, Robert Colbert, John Damler, Louis Hart, Jim Cathey, Bill Gallant (Policemen), Norman Nazarr, Leo Needham (Photographers), Tony Lockridge (Helper), Bill Hughes, Frank Hagney (Guards), Ann Staunton (Customer), Cappy Carey, Hart Wayne (Evacuees), Ed Richard (Man).
Allied Artists’ Port of Hell (1954) [q.v.] and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) from United Artists fit nicely into the film noir category but both touched on sci-fi as they edged into the realm of nuclear apocalypse. Another Allied feature, Hell’s Five Hours, produced by the Muriel Corporation and issued on a double bill with Macabre (q.v.) in April 1958, is more insular in that it deals with a psychopathic terrorist who sets himself up as a human bomb in order to take out a military-industrial manufacturer of rocket fuel as his means of revenge for perceived ill treatment at the hands of the system. The feature was produced, directed and written by Jack L. Copeland, a maker of documentaries, and it was his only theatrical outing. The exteriors were shot at a steam plant in the San Fernando Valley and its initial reel contains no dialogue. The New York Times reported, “The first ten minutes of Hell’s Five Hours move swiftly. It’s a simple — sometimes too simple — clockwatching chore thereafter.” Mike Brand (Stephen McNally), the manager of the Exiter Fuel Corporation which makes rocket fuel for the government, is told there has been a robbery resulting in the shooting of a security guard and a tank set on fire and that dynamite has been stolen. As he meets with the local police and FBI men, he receives a telephone call from a man who says he will blow up the plant. An order is issued to evacuate everyone within three miles of the complex and Mike mandates that the gasoline at the site be pumped to another location one hundred miles away, a process taking five hours to complete. Mike calls his wife Nancy (Coleen Gray) and tells her to take their young son Eric (Ray Ferrell) to his mother’s home in a nearby city. Jack Fife (Robert Foulk), a plant foreman, informs his boss that he fired worker Burt Nash (Vic Morrow) earlier in the day for smoking and the man promised retaliation. As the gas is being pumped, Nash hovers around the area with Poster for Hell’s Five Hours (1958) dynamite cinched to his body; he
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later telephones Mike with another promise to blow up the complex. The police notify Mike that Nash has a history of suicidal talk and they believe his being fired caused him to seek revenge. They arrange for psychiatrist Dr. Howard Culver (Maurice Manson) to assess Nash’s actions, not knowing the psychopath has gone to Mike’s home where he makes Nancy call her husband demanding to go inside the plant. After Nancy drives Nash and Eric to the plant, the police do not try to capture the suspect as the three enter one of the buildings. The FBI men find evidence in Nash’s abode of his constructing a device to set off a bomb by employing liquid mercury. As Culver tells the police not to make any sudden moves toward the suspect, Mike meets with him in the plant. When Eric tries to get away, a policeman comes to his aid, saving the boy but getting shot by Nash. Burt tells Mike that Fife beat him up, compounding all the other mistreatment he has received over the years. As Nash forces Nancy to get into one of the tankers, Mike and the police learn from Fife that Nash told the truth about being beaten. Nancy tries to humor her captor while the psychiatrist says he believes Nash is not suicidal and suggests he may be open to an offer of money. After Mike says he will give Nash $5,000, the man agrees to consider it but informs Nancy it will never happen since he has committed two murders. While Mike and the police wait for a bank vault to open so they can get the money, Nash moves Nancy deeper into the plant, shows her how his bomb trigger works and tells her he wants her to leave with him. When one of the steam lines buckles, the explosion frightens Fife and he runs into Nash, who shoots him. Nash takes Nancy to a rooftop, unaware they are being followed by Mike. The police inform Nash they have the promised money but he becomes agitated by the sound of a siren announcing that the gas transfer has been completed. Nancy attempts to escape and Nash shoots at her. Mike fights with him and when they hit the ground the bomb does not go off. Moving back to a rail, Nash wires the trigger but falls and is blown up.
Hold That Hypnotist (1957; 61 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Austen Jewell. Screenplay: Dan Pepper. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: George White. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: Dave Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Joseph Kish. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Wardrobe: Bert Henrikson. Continuity: Richard M. Chaffee. Assistant Director: Edward Morey, Jr. CAST: Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones/Algy Winkle/Marc Antony), Stanley Clements (Stanislaus “Duke” Coveleskie/Bartender), Jane Nigh (Cleo Daniels/Inn Girl), Robert Foulk (Dr. Simon Noble), James Flavin ( Jake Morgan), Queenie Smith (Kate Kelly), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck/Inn Customer), Jimmy Murphy (Myron/Inn Customer), Murray Alper (Gail), Dick Elliott (Hotel Clerk), Mel Welles (Blackbeard), Edward Stepner (Bruno), Frank Orth (Beedle), Mary Treen (Maid), Irving Mitchell (Agnew), Lee Roberts, Robert Bice, Bob Roark (Reporters), John Close (Sergeant Benton), George Barrows (Pirate).
Kate Kelly (Queenie Smith) is the landlady of the Bowery Boys: Sach Jones (Huntz Hall), Duke Coveleskie (Stanley Clements), Chuck (David Condon) and Myron ( Jimmy Murphy). When she becomes interested in reincarnation, she decides to pay Dr. Simon Noble (Robert Foulk), a best-selling author, to hypnotize her so she can be regressed into former lives. The boys want to prove the man is a fake. As Noble and Jake Morgan ( James Flavin), his partner, host a press conference, the Bowery Boys show up and Duke demands to be hypnotized. When this fails, Sach is put into a trance after staring at an earring worn by Noble’s feather-headed secretary, Cleo Daniels ( Jane Nigh). He is taken back to the 17th century as Algy Winkle, a tax collector in Charleston, South Carolina. There he tells the pirate Blackbeard (Mel Welles) to pay his taxes and is suckered into a game in which he ends up with a map showing the whereabouts of a treasure hidden by the buccaneer. Sach
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comes back to the present before he can relate the location of the treasure. Going to the library, the boys learn about Winkle and find out he was killed in a storm at sea on his way to get the riches. Duke offers Noble and Morgan part of the loot if the doctor will hypnotize Sach again so he can reveal its location. Noble realizes he cannot put Sach in a trance without Cleo’s earring but he and Morgan got rid of her because she knew the regression subject of his book was paid to talk about phony previous lives. The boys find Cleo modeling swimsuits in Jersey City but she too demands a cut of the treasure before she will cooperate. Noble hypnotizes Sach again but this time he goes back to ancient Rome where he is Marc Antony. Coming forward, Algy Winkle says the treasure is in a cave at Hudson’s Cove and the two crooks tell Sach to hold off his pals at gunpoint as they go to find the grotto. Cleo brings Sach around by kissing him and the Bowery Boys drive to the cave. In their jalopy, Sach finds a magazine with the story of Blackbeard and they realize this is where he got the idea of the hidden treasure. Sach runs into a cave to get away from his upset pals and finds a case full of jewelry. When the two crooks try to steal it, the Bowery Boys overpower them and head home where they celebrate with Cleo and Mrs. Kelly. Police Sergeant Benson ( John Close) shows up to tell them they found the proceeds of a jewel robbery but Sach is placated when Cleo kisses him. The year before Hold That Hypnotist was released by Allied Artists, the studio issued a more melodramatic outing dealing with hypnotic regression Fright (q.v.). Made as Out of This World and Roving Eyes, Hold That Hypnotist came to theaters in March 1957 and was the forty-fourth of forty-eight “Bowery Boys” films. The whimsical plot satirized the then current fad of delving into previous lives by hypnosis, popularized by Dr. Morey Bernstein’s book The Search for Bridey Murphy, which Paramount filmed under that title in 1956. The Bowery Boys outing, however, is all levity and gives top-billed Huntz Hall a chance to enact three roles. Not only does he play the goofy series character Sach, but he also is tax collector Algy Winkle and Rome’s Marc Antony. Austen Jewell, who had served as assistant director on several of the series’ previous entries, made his directorial debut in Hold That Hypnotist and it proved to be one of better outings in the Bowery Boys’ post–Leo Gorcey films with Stanley Clements.
House on Haunted Hill (1959; 75 minutes) Producer-Director: William Castle. Associate Producer–Screenplay: Robb White. Photography: Carl E. Guthrie. Editor: Roy Livingston. Music: Von Dexter. Song: Richard Kayne and Richard Loring. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Morris Hoffman. Production Manager: Edward Morey, Jr. Makeup: Jack Dusick. Special Effects: Herman Townsley. Continuity: Virginia Mazzuca. Assistant Director: Jack R. Berne. CAST: Vincent Price (Frederick Loren), Carol Ohmart (Annabelle Loren), Richard Long (Lance Schroeder), Alan Marshal (Dr. David Trent), Carolyn Craig (Nora Manning), Elisha Cook, Jr. (Watson Pritchard), Julie Mitchum (Ruth Bridgers), Leona Anderson (Mrs. Slydes), Howard Hoffman ( Jonas Slydes).
For his second “gimmick” horror film, following the success of Macabre (1958) [q.v.], producer-director William Castle made House on Haunted Hill that featured “Emergo.” To further chill an already frightened audience, this gimmick had a prop skeleton swinging through theaters on wires at the same moment that its counterpart emerged from an acid vat on screen. Produced for $150,000, the horror thriller grossed over four million dollars. The feature also solidified Vincent Price as a star of scary movies, the actor having previously done The Invisible Man Returns (1940), Shock (1946), House of Wax (1953), The Mad Magician (1954), The Fly (1958), et al. Castle and Price would re-team for The Tingler the same year
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at Columbia Pictures. The premise of House on Haunted Hill (a group of people locked in a spooky old house for a night) was reminiscent of the 1930 novel (by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning) and play (by Owen Davis) The Invisible Host which Columbia filmed in 1934 as The Ninth Guest and later partially remade as The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) and The Missing Juror (1944). Variety said, “Haunted Hill is expertly put together. There is some good humor in the dialog which not only pays off well against the ghostly elements, but provides a release for laughter so it does not explode in the suspense sequences. The characters are interesting and not outlandish, so there is some basis of reality. Director William Castle keeps things moving at a healthy clip.” The Los Angeles Examiner reported, “If you want the living daylights scared out of you, go visit House on Haunted Hill,” and the Motion Picture Herald called it “[a] very commercial piece of nerve-wracking horror entertainment.” Phil Hardy wrote in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), “Efficient, considerably boosted by [Vincent] Price’s sinisterly genial performance, and quite enjoyable in its old-fashioned horror-comedy way…. [It] has a plot which seems like one of his [Castle’s] own promotional gimmicks.” “Ghostly gimmickry abounds…. Hokey but entertaining murder mystery,” is how Ed Naha described House on Haunted Hill in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975). Harrison’s Reports noted, “There long has been an absence of ghost stories from the screen and this one should be welcomed by exhibitors who can use such fare because it is a very good picture of its kind.” In Hollywood’s typical fashion of not leaving well enough alone, the film was redone in 1999 as a horrorcomedy that Leonard Maltin’s 2004 Movie and Video Guide (2003) termed “[a] dreary remake…. Heavy-handed, and no fun at all.” Opening to the sounds of groans, chains rattling and Poster for House on Haunted Hill (1959)
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screams, House on Haunted Hill has Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook, Jr.), the owner of the century-old mansion, saying he only spent one night there and the next day he was almost dead. Pritchard has rented the house to rich Frederick Loren (Price) who claims his fourth wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart) wants to give a haunted house party. Loren is paying each of the invited guests $10,000 if they can spend a night in the abode and he arranges for them to arrive in funeral cars. Those invited all need the money. They are Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), a test pilot; Dr. David Trent (Alan Marshal), who is doing a study on hysteria; typist Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), who works for one of Loren’s companies and is the sole support of her family; newspaper columnist Ruth Bridgers ( Julie Mitchum), who wants to do a feature on ghosts but needs the money to pay off gambling debts; and the alcoholic Pritchard. After they show up, Lance saves Nora from being killed when a chandelier falls near her. Frederick informs Annabelle that their guests have arrived but she tells him she does not want to attend the party and they argue with him accusing her of trying to poison him for his money. Pritchard tells the others there have been seven murders in the house, including that of his brother who was killed by his wife (who also did in her sister at the same time). He said their heads were never found and the ghosts in the place will come for all of them soon. Frederick appears before the invited guests and informs them they will be locked in at midnight with no electricity or telephones. He asks Pritchard to give the others a tour of the house. In one room, dark drops fall from the ceiling onto Ruth’s hand with Pritchard announcing she has been marked by the ghosts. In the cellar he tells how a man murdered his wife over jealousy and he shows them the acid pit into which her body was thrown. When the others leave, Lance and Nora remain. After Lance disappears into another room, Nora sees a white-haired crone in a floor-length black outfit. Lance is later found in the room with a head wound, claiming someone knocked him out. Lance and Nora go back to the basement where she again sees the old woman float across the room but becomes incensed when the test pilot does not believe her story. Going upstairs, Nora meets Annabelle, who tells her that Frederick is planning something. She also informs Nora that she is afraid of her husband due to his jealousy and that he would kill her if he could. In her room, Nora opens a traveling case and finds the bloody, severed head of a woman and runs screaming into the hallway where she is grabbed by a man who tells her to get out of the house before she is killed. Finding the others in the living room, the hysterical Nora announces she wants to leave but calms down when she sees the caretakers (Leona Anderson, Howard Hoffman) whom she recognizes as the old woman and the man who warned her. She still demands to leave but the elderly couple quickly depart and everyone is locked inside the house. Annabelle makes an appearance and Frederick gives the guests toy caskets, each containing a revolver, but Pritchard warns they are no good against the dead, only the living. Nora takes the others to her room but finds her traveling case empty and refuses a sedative offered to her by Trent. Going to see Nora in her room, Lance finds it deserted but does locate the fake head in a closet and confronts Pritchard with it. As they argue they hear a scream and they find a woman hanging from a rope in the hallway. Trent takes her down and carries her to a bedroom. Lance fears that it is Nora but it turns out to be Annabelle. Nora grabs Lance in the hallway and informs him she thinks Frederick tried to choke her. Lance gives her his gun and tells her to lock herself in her room. In the living room, Frederick asks Trent if his wife committed suicide or was murdered while Lance declares that one of them is a killer and suggests they all stay in their rooms until morning. Going back to Nora, Lance says he thinks Frederick murdered his wife and he plans to try and get help. Lance finds a secret panel as a thunderstorm breaks loose and Nora sees a rope
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climb into the house snake-like through her window where stands the specter of Annabelle. The young woman runs from the room and sees Annabelle’s body again hanging in the hallway. Hearing Nora’s screams, Trent goes to Frederick’s room and the two men agree to search the house with Frederick taking the downstairs. Trent goes to Annabelle’s room and tells her their plan is working: The hysterical Nora will soon kill Frederick and then they will have his fortune. Trying to find Lance, Nora goes to the basement. When Frederick shows up she shoots him and runs upstairs. Trent emerges from the darkness and begins moving the body, intending to drop it into the acid vat, as the lights go out. Annabelle comes to the basement and sees a skeleton rise from the acid as Frederick’s voice admonishes her for killing him. Backing away from the skeleton, Annabelle falls into the vat and is consumed as Frederick emerges holding a puppeteering mechanism that controls the actions of the skeleton. With the help of Pritchard and Ruth, Nora locates Lance in a secret passage and the quartet go to the basement where Frederick tells them it will be up to the law to decide if he is guilty or innocent in the deaths of his wife and her lover. Pritchard announces that the ghosts have taken nine people and will soon be coming for him and you.
The Human Duplicators (1965; 80 minutes; Color) Producers: Hugo Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce. Executive Producer: Lawrence H. Woolner. Director: Hugo Grimaldi. Screenplay: Arthur C. Pierce. Photography: Monroe P. Askins. Editor: Donald Wolfe. Music Director: Gordon Zahler. Art Director: Paul Sylos. Sound: Robert Reeve and Jean G. Valentino. Sets: Raymond Boltz, Jr. Production Manager-Assistant Director: Jesse Coralles. Makeup: Bob Mark. Special Effects: Roger George. Special Effects Makeup: John Chambers. Wardrobe: Carol Brooks and Mickey Meyers. CAST: George Nader (Glenn Martin), Barbara Nichols (Gale Wilson), George Macready (Professor Vaughn Dornheimer), Dolores Faith (Lisa Dornheimer), Hugh Beaumont (Austin Welles), Richard Arlen (Lieutenant Shaw), Richard Kiel (Dr. Kolos), Tommy Leonetti (Android Spy), Lonnie Sattin (Dr. Lin Yung), John Indrisano (Thor), Margot Teele, Alean “Bambi” Hamilton (Laboratory Assistants), Ted Durant (The Galaxy Master), Mel Ruick (Dr. Munson), Larry Barton (Android), Andrew Johnson (Guard), Bill Hampton, Walter Maslow, Richard Schuyler, John Dasten, Lori Lyons, Benito Prezia.
Released in March 1965 as the top half of a double bill with Mutiny in Outer Space (q.v.), The Human Duplicators is more interesting for its cast and settings than its convoluted plot. Cheaply made by Woolner Bros. and distributed by Allied Artists, the production was top-billed George Nader’s last Hollywood outing; in the interim he went to Europe and headlined a series of popular Jerry Cotton spy melodramas. Here Nader appears jaded and a bit long in the tooth to be playing an action-romantic leading man. Even more off beat is the casting of shrill-voiced, hard-boiled blonde Barbara Nichols as his lady love and agent partner. In the scene where Nader’s android tries to kill Nichols, her piercing screams are so loud they could burst glass. Outside of the two leads, the rest of the cast is quite good, especially George Macready as the kindly scientist and his evil android counterpart, Hugh Beaumont as Nader’s boss, veteran film star Richard Arlen as a police lieutenant, and beautiful Dolores Faith as the scientist’s blind niece. Faith also starred in Mutiny in Outer Space. Although he is not billed in the film’s advertising, Richard Kiel has a large role as the invading alien, Dr. Kolos. After he gained fame in as the gigantic Jaws in the James Bond outings The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979), The Human Duplicators was issued on video in the mid–1980s as Jaws of the Alien. Given “introducing” billing, but little to do, in the sci-fier are pop singer and composer Tommy Leonetti and Lonnie Sattin, sister of the equally exotic Tura Satana. Much of the film’s action takes place in a huge old
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Hollywood mansion that looks like something out of Sunset Blvd. (1950) with Paul Sylos’ art direction and set decoration by Raymond Boltz, Jr., giving the proceedings a much richer look than most of its ilk. Unfortunately the spaceship shown at the start of the movie looks like a Christmas tree decoration and the interior of Kolos’ craft is short on futurist gadgetry. Giant alien Kolos (Kiel) is assigned by his superiors, led by the Galaxy Master (Ted Durant), to establish a colony on Earth in order to expand their domination. Kolos is told that if he fails, he will be destroyed. Kolos is tele-transported to the mansion of eccentric scientist Professor Vaughn Dornheimer (Macready) who is working to create a perfect android in hopes of bettering human life. The alien meets the scientist’s blind niece Lisa (Faith), whom Dornheimer hopes to some day give the power of sight, and he tells the old man he can assist him in his experiments by being able to create an android in a few days. Kolos places Dornheimer and his two female assistants (Margot Teele, Alean “Bambi” Hamilton) under his spell and soon replaces them with lookalike androids. Dr. Munson (Mel Ruick), a colleague of Dornheimer’s, robs the Space Research Corporation’s laboratory and bullets do not faze him as he escapes. National Intelligence Agency master spy Glenn Martin (Nader) is called into the case and consults with Police Lieutenant Shaw (Arlen) and later they find Munson’s body near the Dornheimer estate. Glenn reports to his boss, Austin Welles (Beaumont), and is told by another agent, Gale Wilson (Nichols), that Munson died from electrocution. She also says that Munson and two other scientists who died after committing robberies of highly classified materials were friends of Dornheimer. Glenn decides to talk with the scientist and, claiming to be a writer for View magazine, he goes to the estate where he meets Lisa, who warns him not to remain there. Dornheimer informs Glenn that he wants to rectify physical and mental illnesses and give Lisa sight. When the scientist leaves briefly to consult with Dr. Kolos, Glenn rummages through his papers and finds a photograph of physicist Dr. Lin Yung (Lonnie Sattin) but is spied upon by Dornheimer’s butler Thor ( John Indrisano), who is also an android. When Glenn and Gale go to dinner that night, they are trailed by another android (Tommy Leonetti). After reading some of the professor’s books on cybernetics, Glenn tells his girlfriend he has to get into Dornheimer’s laboratory. The next day he locates a cave that leads him to a room filled with dummies, several face masks (including that of Munson), and coffins containing duplicates of members of the scientist’s staff. Locating the laboratory, Glenn observes Dornheimer creating an android of Dr. Yung by draining off her life forces into a synthetic body. Lisa tells Glenn to leave because her uncle is locked in a cell and the Dornheimer he sees is really an android created by Kolos. Glenn is captured by the alien and duplicated. Welles gets a telephone call saying another robbery has been committed and the suspect is Dr. Yung. Glenn’s android goes to see Welles and says he wants to go to Washington, D.C., to further investigate the case, but Gale senses something strange about her boyfriend. At the estate, Lisa overhears Kolos telling the Galaxy Master about the creation of Glenn’s android and is told to duplicate her because humans cannot be trusted. Dornheimer’s android then confronts Kolos about Lisa but the alien, who has fallen in love with the blind girl, tells him that if he interferes he will be destroyed. Lisa visits Glenn in a cell that also houses her uncle, who needs medical attention. Gale follows Glenn’s android to an electronics warehouse where she finds him committing a robbery. The Glenn android tries to kill her; Gale is rescued by Welles and his men who corner the android, whose arm breaks off after being caught between two closing doors. The android manages to drive away. At the mansion, Kolos informs Lisa that his superiors will destroy him if he does not carry out his orders. The
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Hugh Beaumont (left) and George Nader and Barbara Nichols (on stairs) in The Human Duplicators (1965). Actors on the floor are unidentified.
androids, led by Dornheimer’s duplicate, turn on Kolos. Lisa is also captured after she makes a return visit to Glenn’s cell, bringing him a coin he dropped. Glenn opens the coin and uses its concealed coils to saw through the bars on his cell as the professor tells him the androids can be disabled by using an electrical beam aimed at their brains. Going to the laboratory, Glenn finds Kolos chained to a wall and the androids about to duplicate Lisa. He uses the electronic beam on the androids while Kolos breaks free and begins fighting them. Dornheimer’s android is confronted by Glenn’s android. When the scientist’s android tells Glenn’s double to kill the secret agent, the one-armed mechanical man says he will only take orders from Kolos. The two androids fight and destroy each other. Kolos rescues Lisa and takes her upstairs as Gale arrives with Welles and his men. The alien tells them he must leave knowing he will be destroyed but he says he no longer cares since he has learned that he too is an android. Kolos gives Lisa her eyesight before returning to his spaceship. Co-financed by the Italian company Independenti Regionali, The Human Duplicators was released in that country as Agente Spaziale K1 (Space Agent K1) and in France as Les Creatures de Kolos (The Creatures of Kolos). Its director, Hugo Grimaldi, earlier handled the U.S. version of the second “Godzilla” feature, Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959), and he also helmed and produced Duplicators’ co-feature, Mutiny in Outer Space (q.v.).
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The Human Vapor (1964; 81 minutes) Producers: Edward L. Alperson and Stanley D. Meyer. Executive Producer: Tomoyuki Tanaka. Director: Ishiro Honda. Screenplay: Takeshi Kimura. Photography: Hajime Koizumi. Editors: Kenneth Wannberg and Kazuji Taira. Music: Kunio Miyauchi. Production Design: Kiyoshi Shimizu. Sound: Masao Fujiyoshi. Production Executive: Sanezumi Fujimoto. Production Manager: Yasuaki Sakamoto. Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya. Assistant Director: Koji Kajita. CAST: Keiko Sata (Kyoko), Tatsuya Mihashi (Detective Okamoto), Kaoru Yachigusa (Fujichiyo Kasuga), Yoshio Tsuchiya (Mizuno), Fuyuki Murakami (Dr. Sano), Bokuzen Hidari ( Jiya), Takamaru Sasaki (Police Chief ), Tatsuo Matsumura (Editor Ikeda), Ko Mishima (Detective Fujita), Hisaya Ito (Police Scientist), Yoshifumi Tajima (Sergeant), Yoshio Kosugi (Detective), Minosuke Yamada (Official), Kozo Nomura, Tetsu Nakamura (Reporters), Ren Yamamoto (Nomura), Sensho Matsumoto (Dance Teacher), Toki Shiozawa (Dance Teacher’s Wife), Kamayuki Tsubono (Officer Ozaki), Yashushima Tsutsumi (Bank Manager), Wataru Omae, Hideo Shibuya (Rowdy Theater Patrons), Akio Kusama, Yutaka Olca (Policemen), Yukihiko Gondo, Shoichi Hirose (Murdered Guards), Takuzo Kumara (Kajimoto), Mitsuo Matsumoto (Crime Lab Assistant), Junpel Netsuke (Bystander), Haruo Nakajima (Vapor Man), James Hong (Voice of Mizuno).
Brenco Pictures distributed The Human Vapor in the United States in the spring of 1964 although some of its play dates in the southwest were under the auspices of Allied Artists. This sci-fi outing was made by the Toho Company in Japan as Gasu Ningen Dai Ichigo (The First Gas Man) and released there in 1960. Ten minutes were sliced from the original for its stateside showings. The Human Vapor was similar in plot to another 1960 Toho release, Denso Ningen, which was shown on U.S. TV as Secret of the Telegian. Both films had the same producer (Tomoyuki Tanaka) and special effects director (Eiji Tsuburaya). Yoshio Tsuchiya, who had the title role in The Human Vapor, played a police detective in Secret of the Telegian. The Human Vapor was directed by Ishiro Honda, who is most famous for his “Godzilla” and other monster movies for Toho. In 1958 he directed Bijo to Ekitai Ningen, shown stateside as The H-Man; dealing with the theme of human transformation in the milieu of the gangster film, it was one of Honda’s most entertaining sci-fiers. The Human Vapor is “not as visually impressive as the previous movie, probably because invisibility and gaseous substances are not notably photogenic material” (Phil Hardy, The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies [1986]). Instead of involving the underworld, this outing was basically a love story that interpolated traditional Japanese dance into its plotline with the heroes being a policeman and a female reporter. The title character is not often seen in vaporous form, and when he is the Vapor Man he’s hardly frightening. Overall, The Human Vapor is a lesser Toho production and one that usually gets lost in the shuffle with the company’s other science fiction efforts. Mizuno (Tsuchiya) meets with newspaper editor Ikeda (Tatsuo Matsumura) and some reporters and tells them he is the Vapor Man who has been terrorizing Tokyo. He says he was working as a librarian when he was visited by the eminent scientist Dr. Sano (Fuyuki Murakami) of the Japanese Space Association. Mizuno, once a top test pilot, was grounded due to illness and Sano offers him a chance to fly in space. He goes to the scientist’s laboratory where he signs a contract and is given a shot before being placed in a chamber where he sleeps for ten days. During that time he is turned into vapor by the scientist’s rays. When he returns to normal, Mizuno realizes he has been transformed into something terrifying. Instead of the superman he intended, Sano has created a Vapor Man. After the scientist admits that Mizuno was not his first experiment but the only one that lived, the librarian kills him. Mizuno knows he is a freak but that he also has superhuman power and can
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The title character in The Human Vapor (1964), given regional release by Allied Artists.
vaporize at any time. He decides to rob a bank to get the money needed by the woman he loves, noted dancer Fujichiyo Kasuga (Kaoru Yachigusa), so she can dance again after being in a sanitarium. During the robbery, Mizuno kills a policeman and steals a bank car, leading the police on a chase around Tokyo, before wrecking the vehicle near Fujichiyo’s home. The police go to the house and are told by the dancer’s attendant, the elderly Jiya (Bokuzen Hidari), that they cannot see his mistress. Detective Ikamoto (Tatsuya Mihashi) tells his girlfriend, reporter Kyoko (Keiko Sata), that the hunted man disappeared. Mizuno robs another bank. A guard is later found dead behind a locked vault door and an autopsy reveals he died from some kind of gas. Ikamoto asks Kyoko to check on the background of the dancer, who has not worked in a long time. Both of them go to see Fujichiyo but Kyoko gets there first and is told by the dancer that she plans on giving a recital. When the suspect leaves in an expensive car, the detective and the reporter follow her to the public library where Mizuno gives her a book of traditional dance prints. Fujichiyo goes to her dancing instructor (Sensho Matsumoto) and attempts to pay him for lessons but he refuses the money, saying she needs to rest before she resumes dancing. When Ikamoto finds out from Kyoko that it costs thirty million yen to stage a dance recital, he vows to find out who is giving the dancer the money she needs to perform. Mizuno calls the newspaper and announces he plans to rob the Kyoto bank the next day. The police set a trap for him only to bring in Nomura (Ren Yamamoto), who robbed another bank at the same time and claims to be the man they want. When some of the stolen money is found among the pay-
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ment for Fujichiyo’s dancer posters, Okamoto and his men go to her house where she is rehearsing and locate more stolen loot. The dancer is taken into custody. Fujichiyo tells the police the money was given to her so she could dance again but she refuses to reveal the source and is put in jail. Going to the newspaper office, Mizuno announces that he robbed the bank. When Okamoto shows up, he agrees to go back to one of the vaults to prove how it was done. During the demonstration, Mizuno vaporizes and kills two men and demands that his girlfriend be released from jail or more people will die. As the newspapers proclaim that Tokyo is at the mercy of the Vapor Man, Mizuno returns to the police and confronts Okamoto who asks him if Fujichiyo knows about him. The policeman shoots Mizuno who vaporizes, proclaiming that his lady love will be released from jail and will dance again. He goes to her cell and sets all the prisoners free, but the dancer refuses to go as the escapees riot. Kyoko suggests to Ikeda that the newspaper give a forum for Mizuno to tell his story. Later, when he does so, the police break into the newsroom and try to kill him but he vaporizes and rises into the air. The chief of police (Takamaru Sasaki) asks Fujichiyo to help eliminate Mizuno for the good of humanity. After she is released from jail, the dancer is told by her teacher that the musicians will not play for her. Mizuno informs Fujichiyo that he has rented a theater for her recital and asks her to fulfill her destiny because he loves her and that her glory will he his. Kyoko talks to the dancer and tells her many people will be killed if she carries out her plans to perform and asks her to cancel the recital. Fujichiyo replies that she will give her performance for Mizuno, the man she loves. That night she dances, accompanied by Jiya, with only Mizuno in the audience. Unbeknownst to him, the police plan to fill the hall with gas and blow it up in an attempt to kill the Vapor Man. The crowd outside the theater gets out of hand and breaks into the hall and becomes rowdy with Mizuno ordering them to leave. When he is manhandled by some ruffians, Mizuno vaporizes and the crowd stampedes. The detective and Kyoko try to get the dancer and her accompanist to leave but they refuse. When the crowd is gone, Fujichiyo resumes her dance for Mizuno. When the performance is over, the two dance as the police set off the detonator to blow up the hall only to find it has been sabotaged by the Vapor Man. As she embraces her lover, Fujichiyo ignites a lighter which blows up the theater. The crowd watches as the Vapor Man drags the dancer out of the hall but she dies, leaving him to wander through eternity alone.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1957; 110 minutes; Color) Producers: Robert Hakim and Raymond Hakim. Director: Jean Delannoy. Screenplay: Jean Laurence and Jacques Prevert, from the novel by Victor Hugo. Photography: Michel Kelber. Editor: Henri Taverna. Music: Lavagnino. Music Director: Jacques Metehen. Production Design: Rene Renoux. Sound: Jacques Carriere. Sets: Maurice Barnathan. Costumes: Georges Benda. Production Manager: Ludmilla Goulian. Unit Manager: Paul Laffargue. Makeup: Bonnemaison and Klein. Special Effects: Gerard Cogan. Choreographer: Leonide Massine. Assistant Director: Pierre Tyberghein. CAST: Gina Lollobrigida (Esmeralda), Anthony Quinn (Quasimodo), Jean Danet (Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers), Alain Cuny (Claude Frollo), Robert Hirsch (Pierre Gringoire), Danielle Dumont (Fleur de Lys), Philippe Clay (Clopin Troulliefou), Maurice Sarfati ( Jehan Frollo), Jean Tissier (King Louis XI), Valentine Tessier (Aloyse de Gondelaurier), Jacques Dufilho (Guillaume Rousseau), Roger Blin (Mathias Hungadi), Marianne Oswald (La Faloudel), Roland Bailly (Hangman), Pieral (Dwarf ), Camille Guerini (President), Damia (Beggar Woman), Robert Lombard ( Jacques Coppenole), Albert Remy ( Jupiter), Hubert Lapparent (Guillaume de Harancourt), Boris Vian (Cardinal), Georges Douking (Hoodlum), Paul Bonifas (Lecornu), Madeleine Barbules (Madame Outarde), Albert Michel (Night Watchman), Daniel Emilfork (Andre le Rouge), Ger-
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maine Delbat (Parishioner), Jean Martin (Pickpocket), Jean Thielment, Doudou Babet (Beggars), Frank Maurice (Executioner Andre), Paul Bisciglia (Man at Feast of Fools), Dominique Marcas (Woman at Court of Miracles), Nadine Tallier (Girl at Court of Miracles), Pierre Fresnay (Narrator).
Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame has been filmed several times, the most noted being the 1923 Universal production starring Lon Chaney and RKO’s 1939 version with Charles Laughton. More faithful to the original work was Allied Artists’ 1957 release The Hunchback of Notre-Dame which was made by Paris Films in France in the spring of 1956 and released in that country as Notre-Dame de Paris, the original title of Hugo’s book. It was made as The Hunchback of Paris because RKO owned the rights to the original title; just before the film’s stateside release in November 1957, RKO decided to permit Allied to use it. The U.S. release, at 110 minutes, was five minutes shorter than the French version. The actual Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was used for the filming, giving it an authentic look. The mass poverty and sordid conditions of the populace was somewhat glossed over. Besides the film’s colorful production values, its main asset is the cast. Gina Lollobrigida is a very beautiful and believable Esmeralda. Anthony Quinn brings out the humanity of the deformed Quasimodo, although in deference to both Chaney and Laughton, his hunchback is not particularly physically repulsive, only a bit misshapen. Alain Cuny is particularly good as the alchemist-priest who is outwardly cold but burns with lust for Esmeralda. Jean Tissier gives a wonderfully underplayed performance as the cunning King Louis XI. While Jean Danet, as Phoebus, and Robert Hirsch, as Pierre, are only adequate, Valentine Tessier is quite good as the king’s attorney as is Maurice Sarfati as the priest’s libertine brother. In 1482 Paris, poet-author Pierre Gringoire (Hirsch) watches as an unruly audience makes a mockery of his morality play, The Quest for Beauty. At the behest of Clopin Trouillefou (Philippe Clay), the king of beggars, the crowd goes to the Feast of Fools as Pierre attempts to get solace from priest Claude Frollo (Alain Cuny). Gypsy girl Esmeralda (Lollobrigida) dances at the feast and draws the attention of Frollo, who lusts for the beautiful maiden. Calling the feast a blasphemy, the priest has Quasimodo (Quinn), the nearly deaf and deformed bell ringer at the Notre Dame Cathedral, break up the crowd and destroy their altar. Esmeralda and the others go to the crowning of the King of Fools and, after several candidates are rejected, she calls attention to Quasimodo and he is declared the winner. He is paraded through the streets wearing a robe and crown until Frollo disperses the participants and tells his servant to bring him the gypsy girl. Quasimodo carries out his orders but Esmeralda’s screams bring soldiers led by Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers (Danet), and the hunchback is arrested. Phoebus takes Esmeralda to a nearby inn where he plans to have sex with her but she holds him off with a knife and laughingly runs away. The broke Pierre wanders through Paris in search of a place to sleep and ends up in the Court of Miracles, the kingdom of thieves and beggars, where he is sentenced to be lynched in retaliation for King Louis XI (Tissier) having ordered the hanging of a thief the previous week. Just as he is about to die, Pierre is saved by Esmeralda, who agrees to marry him. He goes with the gypsy to her home where he finds out his only husbandly duty will be to be the groom for her female goat Charlie. He tells him she is in love with Phoebus. The next day the king and his attorney, Gondelaurier (Tessier), go incognito to see Frollo, who is also an alchemist trying to make gold which the monarch needs for his treasury. Quasimodo is tethered in the cathedral courtyard and whipped for abducting Esmeralda. When he begs for water, the crowd mocks him but the gypsy girl shows mercy and complies with his
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wishes. During her street act, Esmeralda has the goat spell out Phoebus’ name, and the jealous Frollo calls her a witch. Phoebus comes to see his betrothed, Fleur de Lys (Danielle Dumont), whose home is near the courtyard, and she demands he clear the area since she is jealous of Esmeralda. He carries out her orders but makes a date to meet the gypsy girl that night. Frollo gets wind of the rendezvous and goes to the inn where he tells a tipsy Phoebus to leave Esmeralda alone because she belongs to someone else and is a witch. Ignoring the priest, Phoebus goes to an upstairs room and finds Esmeralda waiting. To prove she wants him, the girl throws her knife out a window. Frollo picks up the knife, stabbing Phoebus in the back. The gypsy is placed on trial and the inn’s owner (Marianne Oswald) and her dwarf companion (Pieral) tell of seeing a man in black at the scene. Their testimony is ignored and the girl is tortured into confessing that she stabbed her lover. Sentenced to hang, Esmeralda is taken to the front of the cathedral to receive the blessing of the monks before being put to death. Quasimodo carries her inside where she receives sanctuary since Notre Dame is a house of refuge. Upon awakening, the girl screams at the sight of the hunchback who tells her he is sorry for being so ugly. He gives her a whistle, which he can hear, to call him. Frollo finds her wandering one of the cathedral’s parapets and tries to rape her after she recalls he was the man in black who stabbed Phoebus. She uses the whistle to bring Quasimodo, who comes to her defense. As Frollo departs, the hunchback tells her it was the priest who ordered him to kidnap her. The girl again screams the next morning when the hunchback awakens her and he runs into the bell tower for solace. The gypsy follows and apologizes. She sings and dances for the hunchback and he gives her a concert of the bells with the sound so deafening she has to run below, although she is glad to see Quasimodo so happy. Later he gives her flowers and wishes she would stay with him forever in the cathedral. She spies Phoebus riding below and calls to him but the captain ignores her. The gypsy tells the hunchback to bring Phoebus to her so she can tell him she does not love him any more but the captain rides away to see his fiancée. To protect her feelings, Quasimodo brings Esmeralda flowers he claims are from Phoebus but she knows better. Fearful there will be a revolt of the peasants if the gypsy girl is taken from the cathedral, King Louis and his attorney go to see scholar Rousseau ( Jacques Dufilho), who has been imprisoned in a cage for fourteen years, to get his opinion on the monarch’s power to break the rule of sanctuary. The learned man advises there is a precedent for such an action. The next day, Frollo tries to get Quasimodo to leave the cathedral but he refuses and bars the doors. Lead by Trouillefou, an army of thieves and beggars storms Notre Dame to release Esmeralda. Quasimodo throws down heavy stones to deter them. When Esmeralda sees the crowd, she begs the hunchback to desist but he pours a cauldron of boiling wax out of the church’s gargoyles’ mouths and onto the invaders. As the rabble are about to batter down the cathedral door, the king’s foot soldiers and archers arrive. An archer, Frollo’s brother (Sarfati), climbs a ladder onto a parapet but Quasimodo throws the man into the street below. The door is knocked down and as Esmeralda is carried out, the king’s soldiers attack the crowd and she is killed by an arrow. Following the carnage, Quasimodo sees the gypsy’s body being dragged away for hanging and throws Frollo from the parapet. The hunchback later finds Esmeralda’s body in a burial vault and lies down beside her. Years later their two skeleton are found entwined. In The Films of Anthony Quinn (1975), Alvin H. Marrill stated, “Quinn played his Quasimodo as a more pitiful and less monstrous figure than did [Chaney and Laughton], while maintaining the actor’s privilege of donning bizarre makeup — a twenty-five-pound hump on his back, orthopedic braces to twist his body, false nose and teeth, five-pound
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lead weights in his shoes, and other ‘monster’ accouterments. It was Quinn’s vigorous performance, together with Gina Lollobrigida’s alluring Esmeralda, which provided the production with whatever merits it had. … “The intertwined stories of Esmeralda and Quasimodo are muddled under [Jean] Delannoy’s static direction, reduced to a series of mass scenes and slow-moving vignettes…. Much of the rich atmosphere so vividly described in the Hugo tale … provides the spectacle filmed at the expense of plot in this French-made recapitulation of the classic.” In a similar evaluation, the New York Times said, “The intertwined stories of Esmeralda, the strange, wild gypsy girl, and the deformed bell-ringer of the title, are oddly disjoined affairs that only fitfully come half-alive through a series of mass scenes and static vignettes. The cathedral and the citizens of high and low degree of fifteenthcentury Paris loom higher than the muddled intrigue and romance of this ponderous adventure. The producers, director and scenarists seem to have been more intent on providing spectacle than a sharply etched story line.” Variety reported, “[A]lthough beautifully photographed and extravagantly produced, [it] is ponderous, often dull and far over length.” The reviewer felt Lollobrigida “appears to be somewhat miscast” but thought Quinn “gives a well-etched impression of the difficult role. His makeup is not as extreme as either of the two previous characterizations.”
The Hypnotic Eye (1960; 79 minutes) Producer: Charles B. Bloch. Executive Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: George Blair. Screenplay: Gitta Woodfield and William Read Woodfield. Photography: Archie Dalzell. Editor: William Austin. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: Dave Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Frank Wade. Production Manager: Edward Morey, Jr. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Special Effects: Milt Olsen. Wardrobe: Roger J. Weinberg. Hypnosis Technical Advisor: Gil Boyne. Continuity: Virginia Barth. Assistant Director: Ray Gosnell, Jr. CAST: Jacques Bergerac (The Great Desmond), Marcia Henderson (Marcia Blaine), Merry Anders (Dodie Wilson), Allison Hayes ( Justine), Joe Patridge (Detective Sergeant Steve Kennedy), Fred Demara (Doctor), Lawrence Lipton (Poet), Eric “Big Daddy” Nord (Bongo Player), Guy Prescott (Dr. Philip Hecht), James Lydon (Emergency Doctor), Carol Thurston (Doris Scott), Phyllis Cole (Mrs. McNear), Holly Harris (Mrs. Stevens), Mary Foran ( June Mayes), Eva Lynd (Miss Thompson), Evan MacNeil (Victim).
A young woman (Eva Lynd) tries to wash her hair over a lit gas burner and dies. Detective Sergeant Steve Kennedy ( Joe Patridge) tells the attending physician ( James Lydon) she is the eleventh beautiful girl who has mutilated herself with one woman using a straight razor thinking it was a lipstick brush, another drinking lye and a third cutting her face with a fan’s blades because she thought it was a vibrator. Kennedy consults his friend, psychiatrist Dr. Philip Hecht (Guy Prescott), and they agree to meet to discuss the cases. That evening Kennedy accompanies his girlfriend, Marcia Blaine (Marcia Henderson), and secretary Dodie Wilson (Merry Anders) to see Desmond ( Jacques Bergerac), a hypnotist, at the Hayes Theatre. During the show, Desmond convinces a man he cannot open his eyes, has another believe he is in the desert, a third man feeling he is alone on a cold night and the fourth that he is a dog. He then asks for three female volunteers and his assistant, Justine (Allison Hayes), nods to him to select Dodie. He places her under hypnosis and convinces her she has turned to stone and then is light as a feather and finally he has her floating in air. Before bringing her back to consciousness, Desmond whispers in her ear. While leaving the theater, Dodie passes a poster of the hypnotist, prompting her to tell Kennedy and Marcia she has to go home right away. Dodie pretends to take a cab but doubles back to the theater. That night she washes her faces with sulfuric acid and is badly burned. When Kennedy and
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Marcia go to the hospital to see her, Dodie says she has no recollection of why she used the acid. Marcia later suggests that Dodie having been hypnotized may be involved. When the policeman gets a call about someone jumping off a bridge, Marcia insists on going back to the theater where she plans to be hypnotized by Desmond. At Justine’s urging, he chooses Marcia who avoids being hypnotized when he flashes a blinking eye light, concealed in his left hand, at her. Later she tells Kennedy and Hecht about the light, how she pretended to be hypnotized and thinks Desmond may be involved in the mutilations. She also says Desmond told her to meet him at the theater at midnight. The three go to the theater and Marcia meets Desmond in his dressing room, and he uses the hypnotic eye to put her under his spell. They go to a café where they hear a beatnik poet (Lawrence Lipton) accompanied by a bongo drummer (Eric “Big Daddy” Nord). Kennedy and Hecht follow Desmond and Marsha back to her apartment where the two are interrupted by Justine while they kiss. As Desmond leaves, he asks Justine how many more will there be and she replies it will happen as long as there are pretty faces like Marcia’s. Justine orders Marcia into a boiling hot shower but is interrupted by Kennedy’s arrival. Justine tells him she is an old school roommate of Marcia’s and is staying with her for a few days. Justine hides when Marcia greets Kennedy, who questions her about Desmond and his possible connection to Dodie’s disfigurement. Justine overhears the conversation and runs away. Hecht agrees that Marcia was put under Desmond’s spell and Kennedy asks him to help question the other victims to see if they had been hypnotized and knew Desmond or Justine. Both the facially scarred Mrs. McNear (Phyllis Cole) and the blind Doris Scott (Carol Thurston) say no to the queries but Kennedy finds one of the balloons Desmond uses in his act in Doris’ purse. Since they know Dodie was hypnotized, they talk to her but she too denies such an event. When Hecht asks her doctor’s (Fred Demara) permission to hypnotize her, he says not for at least a week but he informs the psychiatrist that Dodie repeated the name Justine when she was brought to the hospital. Kennedy and Hecht go to Marcia’s apartment in hopes of putting her under hypnosis so she can recall what happened when she was with Desmond in the theater, but they find she is not there. They theorize she has gone back to see the hypnotist and go to the theater where they find her in the audience. When Justine sees Kennedy, she tells Desmond to stop him and the hypnotist uses the flashing light but the detective pulls a gun on him. Justine leads Marcia back stage and onto a high catwalk. Kennedy goes after them as Hecht holds Desmond at gun point and tries to talk Justine into surrendering. When Hecht tells her she is beautiful and has much to live for, she laughs at him and pulls off a skin-tight mask, revealing a terribly scarred face. Desmond knocks the gun out of Hecht’s hand and tries to strangle him but is shot by Kennedy. When Justine sees her lover lying dead on the stage floor, she jumps off the catwalk and dies beside him. Marcia nearly falls but comes out of hypnosis and is saved by Kennedy. Hecht tells the audience that hypnosis can be dangerous and to only submit to it when carried out by a doctor. Made as The Screaming Sleep and filmed in “Hypnovision,” The Hypnotic Eye was released theatrically in February 1960. Ben Schwalb, who produced the studio’s “Bowery Boys” outings, served as executive producer for this Bloch-Woodfield Production that used “HypnoMagic.” This gimmick had magician the Great Desmond (Bergerac) pretending to place the audience under hypnosis by ordering them to participate in a number of acts, including blowing up and lifting balloons given out during the performance. Unfortunately this audience participation near the film’s finale greatly slowed the pace of the picture. In an attempt to appeal to the beatnik audience, the film featured poet Lawrence Lipton reciting his self-composed “Confessions of a Movie Addict or Holy Barbarian Blues.” Lipton,
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who billed himself as King of the Beatniks, appeared at a coffee house and was accompanied by bongo drummer Eric “Big Daddy” Nord. The shooting for this sequence was done at Los Angeles’ The Gas House, which was owned by Nord. The two performers were given special billing as was Fred Demara, whose life story as master of pretending to be something he was not in various professions was filmed in 1961 as The Great Imposter starring Tony Curtis as Demara. Jacques Bergerac is adequate as Desmond, the magician, in a role better suited for Bela Lugosi two decades before. Joe Patridge has the bulk of the footage as the police detective hero but he is rather bland in comparison to the film’s three lovely leading ladies, Marcia Henderson, Merry Anders and Allison Hayes. While the latter’s part was not large, she dominated her scenes as the vengeful Justine. Unfortunately the overall film was not very horrifying, or even entertaining. Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972) found it “[s]omething less than hypnotic” while Ed Naha in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975) declared, “Must be seen at a kiddie matinee for full effect.” Regarding the audience hypnosis trick, he opined, “Even if you don’t go into a trance, you get to stomp your feet and wrestle with a Hypnotic Eye balloon. The balloon is almost worth watching the movie for.” Almost a decade after its initial outing, Allied re-issued the feature as The Torturer! Master of “The Hypnotic Eye” with the come-on this time dubbed “Touch-O-Vision.”
Indestructible Man (1956; 70 minutes) Producer-Director: Jack Pollexfen. Screenplay: Vy Russell and Sue Bradford. Photography: John Russell, Jr. Editor: Fred Feitshans, Jr. Music: Albert Glasser. Art Director: Ted Holsopple. Production Manager: Chris Beute.
Lon Chaney in Indestructible Man (1956)
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CAST: Lon Chaney (Charles “Butcher’ Benton), Marian Carr (Eva Martin), Casey Adams [Max Showalter] (Police Lieutenant Dick Chasen), Ross Elliott (Paul Lowe), Stuart Randall (Police Captain J.L. Lauder), Kenneth Terrell ( Joe Marcelli), Marjorie Stapp (Hysterical Woman), Rita Greene (Carny’s Girl), Robert Shayne (Professor Bradshaw), Roy Engel (Police Sergeant), Peggy Maley (Francine), Madge Cleveland (Bar Lush), Marvin Ellis (Squeamy Ellis), Joe Flynn (Laboratory Assistant), Eddie Marr (Carny), Dorothy Ford (Tall Dancer).
One of the great pleasures for Baby Boomers watching horror and science fiction movies on television in the early 1960s, Indestructible Man is one of those films beloved by fans but shunned by critics. Michael J. Weldon in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983) hit the nail on the head when he termed it “great junk … classic trash.” More typical is Ed Naha in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975) who said, “Dreadful gangster story is heightened in sheer futility by a ludicrous ‘you are there’ type narration…” while Stephen Jones in The Essential Monster Movie Guide (2000) termed it “low-budget madness” and John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (1994) dubbed the film “[b]ottom-ofthe-barrel pulper…. So poorly scripted and directed it’s bad enough to be entertaining.” Even Richard Bojarski, a devotee of the feature’s star Lon Chaney, wrote that it “bears a slight resemblance in plotting to the earlier Man Made Monster [1941] but has little else to recommend it” in his article “Son of Chaney” in Castle of Frankenstein #7 (1963). Indestructible Man is remindful of Man Made Monster, the Universal production that launched Chaney as the studio’s top horror star of the 1940s, but lacks its finesse and solid production values. The 1956 release has a semi-documentary feel about it along with a film noir façade that appears to be Dragnet-influenced, as well as interpolating footage from the 1948 production He Walked by Night. Filmed at Jerry Fairbanks Studios late in 1954, the feature also includes quite a bit of footage of downtown Los Angeles with some scenes in the Bradbury Building and around Angels’ Flight, the Bunker Hill district cable railway. Chaney, in mostly a mute performance, dominates the proceedings as the revenge-bent “Butcher” Benton and tight close-ups of his face are seen in several scenes. Toward the end of his career, Chaney played a scientist who revives a corpse, the plot ploy of Indestructible Man, in the “Spark of Life” segment of the atrocious Dr. Terror’s Gallery of Horror (1967). Some sources claim the 1956 film is a loose remake of the Boris Karloff starrer The Walking Dead (1936), while its finale sequences in the Los Angeles sewers ape The Third Man (1949). Police Lieutenant Dick Chasen (Casey Adams) relates the happenings from the previous seventy-two hours, beginning with the Los Angeles Police Department closing the case of a $600,000 armored car payroll committed robbery by Charles “Butcher” Benton (Chaney). On the eve of his execution, Benton is visited by his lawyer, Paul Lowe (Ross Elliott), who wants to know where he hid the stolen loot. Although he is about to die, Benton vows to kill Lowe and his cohorts, Joe Marcelli (Kenneth Terrell) and Squeamy Ellis (Marvin Ellis), who testified against him. (Lowe set up the heist and Marcelli and Ellis took part in it.) Chasen goes to see Benton’s friend, stripper Eva Martin (Marian Carr), hoping she can lead him to the stolen payroll. She claims to know nothing about the matter. After he leaves, Eva is visited by Lowe, who also wants to find out if she knows where the money is hidden. While she performs her act, Lowe finds a letter from Benton in her dressing room. It contains a map of the city sewer system showing the place where he concealed the payroll. Lowe takes the map and replaces it with a fifty dollar bill. News of Benton’s San Quentin execution is broadcast and later his body is procured from the morgue by a laboratory assistant ( Joe Flynn) who takes it to his employer, Professor Bradshaw (Robert Shayne), who is working on a cancer cure. The biochemist sends nearly 30,000 volts of electricity into the corpse to see the effects on cell structure, and to his surprise Benton returns to life. The experiment
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has left Benton mute and superhuman, with a maniacal desire to get revenge on the three men who betrayed him. Benton kills Bradshaw and the assistant and begins walking toward Los Angeles. Along the way he meets a carnival barker (Eddie Marr) and his young girlfriend (Rita Greene) and lifts the man’s car so he can fix a flat tire. Benton kills the man and takes the car and later murders two policemen who try to stop him at a roadblock. Chasen takes Eva to a drive-in for dinner and she explains she was never romantically involved with Benton, although she felt sorry for him after he was jilted by her roommate. Chasen is assigned by his boss, Captain Lauder (Stuart Randall), to find the mad killer who cannot be stopped by bullets. Once in Los Angeles, Benton sees Eva at the Follies and finds out that Lowe has taken the map he left for her. When he departs, the stripper tries to inform Chasen that Benton is still alive. Unable to reach him, she tells Squeamy. Benton hunts down Marcelli and kills him and then goes to Lowe’s office but finds it deserted. Squeamy comes to see Lowe and runs into Benton who tosses him to his death from the building’s fifth floor. Eva goes to the police with her story but Chasen and Lauder do not believe her until they learn of Bradshaw’s murder and how his assistant bribed a morgue attendant in order to obtain Benton’s body. The two policemen then interrogate a young woman (Marjorie Stapp) who describes how her boyfriend’s spine was broken by a tall man with superhuman strength. Upon their return to the police station, Chase and Lauder are confronted by Lowe who demands protective custody. When they refuse he strikes a desk sergeant (Roy Engel) and is put in jail. Chasen conceives a plan to make the lawyer admit he was behind the payroll robbery: He and Lauder pretend to drop the charges against Lowe; fearing for his life, the attorney admits his part in the stickup and gives the policemen the map revealing the hiding place of the stolen money. Lawmen begin a thorough search of the city’s sewers with plans to stop Benton by using flame throwers. Benton finds the loot but is surrounded by the police and his face is badly burned by the fiery weapons. He manages to escape to a power station and as the police follow him he mounts a huge machine and sets it in motion. It crashes into an electrical unit and Benton is burned to death. With the payroll retrieved and the case definitely closed, Chasen asks Eva to marry him. In Keep Watching the Skies! The 21st Century Edition (2009), Bill Warren states that several scenes shot for Indestructible Man do not appear in the final product. Among them is Butcher breaking into the city jail and murdering Lowe. It does seem strange that the attorney, who was the cause of all the mayhem, does not get his comeuppance and is allowed to live. Apparently another subplot had the killer abducting Eva and taking her to Bronson Caverns where she is saved by Chasen who uses tear gas on the Butcher. The young woman is sent to a hospital after suffering a injury during the fray; in the released version she does mention being hospitalized. This, however, could be attributed to her having been confronted by an ex-beau who has returned from the dead and sets about murdering most of her underworld acquaintances, and anyone else who gets in his way! Allied Artists released Indestructible Man in March 1956, usually as the lower half of a double bill with World Without End (q.v.).
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956; 81 minutes) Producer: Walter Wanger. Director: Don Siegel. Screenplay: Daniel Mainwaring, from the magazine story and novel by Jack Finney. Photography: Ellsworth Fredericks. Editor: Robert S. Eisen. Music: Carmen Dragon. Production Design: Edward Haworth. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Joseph Kish. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Special Effects: Milt Rice. Assistant Directors: William Beaudine, Jr. and Richard Maybery.
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Lobby card for Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
CAST: Kevin McCarthy (Dr. Miles Bennell), Dana Wynter (Becky Driscoll), Larry Gates (Dr. Dan Kaufman), King Donovan ( Jack Bilicec), Carolyn Jones (Teddy Bilicec), Jean Willes (Sally Winters), Ralph Dumke (Chief Nick Grivett), Virginia Christine (Wilma Lentz), Tom Fadden (Ira Lentz), Kenneth Patterson (Stanley Driscoll), Guy Way (Officer Sam Janzek), Eileen Stevens (Anne Grimaldi), Beatrice Maude (Mrs. Grimaldi), Jean Andren (Eleda Lentz), Bobby Clark ( Jimmy Grimaldi), Everett Glass (Dr. Ed Pursey), Dabbs Greer (Mac Lomax), Pat O’Malley (Baggage Carrier), Guy Rennie (Club Proprietor), Marie Selland (Martha Lomax), Sam Peckinpah (Meter Reader Charlie), Harry Vejar (Mr. Grimaldi), Whit Bissell (Dr. Hill), Richard Deacon (Dr. Harvey Bassett), Robert Osterloh (Ambulance Attendant), Frank Hagney (Night Watchman).
The best of Allied Artists’ science fiction releases, and one of the finest films issued by the studio, Invasion of the Body Snatchers remains one of the true cinema classics of its genre. Perhaps Bill Warren summed it up best in Keep Watching the Skies! The 21st Century Edition (2009): “The picture is so well directed and imaginatively conceived it overrides objections to details.” Based on the 1954 Collier’s magazine serial “The Body Snatchers,” the film was released in February 1956 doubled-bill with The Atomic Man (q.v.). Made on a $300,000 budget with a nineteen-day shooting schedule and produced by Walter Wanger Pictures, it was lensed early in 1955. Allied executives apparently felt the ending of the picture was too grim and sought to soften it with a semi-happy, or at least hopeful ending. Variety opined, “This tense, off beat piece of science-fiction is occasionally difficult to follow due to the strangeness of its scientific premise. Action nevertheless is increasingly exciting [and] characterizations and situations are sharp. Don Siegel’s taut direction is fast-paced generally,
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Larry Gates, Kenneth Patterson, King Donovan and Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
although in his efforts to spark the climax he permits [Kevin] McCarthy to overact in several sequences.” The Hollywood Reporter said it “contains a great deal of solid emotion and suspense.” Dr. Miles Bennell (McCarthy) is brought to a hospital where Dr. Harvey Bassett (Richard Deacon) calls in psychiatrist Dr. Hill (Whit Bissell) to examine him. After being found trying to halt traffic on the freeway, Miles is raving about giant pods taking over people’s minds and souls. Hill agrees to listen to his story and Miles relates how he was called back to the small California town of Santa Mira from a medical convention by his nurse Sally Winters ( Jean Willes), due to a sudden influx of patients. Driving to his office with Sally, the doctor almost runs over a young boy, Jimmy Grimaldi (Bobby Clark), whose grandmother (Beatrice Maude) says will not go to school. Noticing that the Grimaldis have closed their profitable roadside vegetable business, the doctor and his nurse proceed to his office where he finds only a handful of patients with the usual complaints. As Miles is about go to lunch, his former sweetheart, Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), whom he has not seen in five years, arrives. She says her cousin Wilma Lentz (Virginia Christine) claims that her uncle Ira Lentz (Tom Fadden) is an imposter and not the man who raised her. He agrees to see Wilma and, leaving with Becky, the doctor learns she is no longer living in England and has just come back from Reno after getting a divorce. On the street they meet an old classmate, police officer Sam Janzek (Guy Way), who was one of the people who cancelled
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out on seeing the doctor. That afternoon Jimmy is brought by his grandmother to Miles in a near hysterical state claiming his mother is an imposter. Miles later goes to the Lentz home where he finds Ira mowing the lawn. He talks with Wilma who can give no definite reason for her feelings about her uncle other than he has no emotions, just a pretense of sensitivity. Miles tells Wilma he wants her to see his friend, Dr. Dan Kaufman (Larry Gates), a psychologist, and she asks him to make an appointment for her. Miles takes Becky to dinner and, arriving at a swanky club they meet Kaufman and the town’s oldest practitioner, Dr. Ed Pursey (Everett Glass), who both mention the strange phenomenon, which they term a form of mass hypnosis. The restaurant is nearly empty, the owner (Guy Rennie) saying business has fallen off drastically in the last two weeks. Just as they are about to have cocktails, Miles gets an urgent call from writer Jack Belicec (King Donovan). When Miles and Becky arrive at the Belicec home, they find Jack and his wife Teddy (Carolyn Jones) in an agitated state and they are shown what appears to be a corpse lying on a pool table. The body has waxen features and no fingerprints and Teddy notices that it resembles Jack. Before taking Becky home, Miles tells the couple to stay up and watch the body and, if nothing happens by morning, to call the police. At the Driscoll house, Miles and Becky arrive to find her father (Kenneth Patterson) emerging from the cellar where he says he has been working. As Jack sleeps, Teddy sees the body’s eyes open and becomes hysterical when she spies a cut on the palm of its right hand, the same place Jack cut his hand when he accidentally broke a liquor bottle earlier in the evening. The Belicecs drive to Miles’ house, and he gets Kaufman out of bed with the story. When Jack mentions Becky, Miles quickly drives to her house and breaks in through a basement window. There he discovers a developing body resembling Becky and he runs upstairs and carries the sleeping woman back to his house. After Becky wakes up and Kaufman arrives, the men go back to the Driscoll house but find nothing in the basement. Becky’s father shows up with a shotgun, after having called the police, and soon Chief Nick Grivett (Ralph Dumke) arrives and says that a corpse matching the one at the Belicec home is in the morgue after having been found on a burning haystack. Kaufman convinces Miles that his mind was playing tricks on him in the darkened basement and that he did not see Becky’s double there. On the way to his office the next morning, Miles runs into Wilma in front of her antique shop and she tells him she woke up without the mistrust of her uncle. That day Jimmy and his grandmother return with the boy now completely calm and the doctor begins to wonder why people’s symptoms vanish so suddenly. In his greenhouse, Miles hears popping noises and sees four large pods opening up, spewing liquid and bubbles. He calls to guests Becky, Jack and Teddy and they watch as the pods begin to evolve into human bodies, one for each of them. Miles speculates these new bodies take over the minds of a person as they sleep, thus the recent epidemic of people being called imposters. Becky remembers her father has been acting differently. Miles tries to call both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the state governor but the telephone operator claims that all the lines are in use. After using a pitchfork on the pods, Miles tells Jack to take the women and go for help but not to call the police since he thinks they too have been changed. Becky refuses to leave Miles. When Miles and Becky stop for gas, the attendant (Dabbs Greer) puts two pods in the trunk of his car. Miles later becomes suspicious and stops the vehicle, finds the pods and sets them on fire. The two drive to Sally’s home but when Miles looks through a window he sees her with the Lentz family and Becky’s father, who is carrying a pod intended for the nurse’s little daughter. They go to Miles’ office while the police continue to search for them. Miles and Becky take pills to keep them awake and he tells her they cannot close their eyes and sleep or they will be transformed.
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When morning arrives they watch the sheriff distribute pods in the town square, the things having been brought in trucks from area farms. As they are trying to figure out their next move, Kaufman, Jack and the police chief break into the office and Mr. Grimaldi (Harry Vejar) brings in two pods for Miles and Becky’s transformation. Kaufman explains to them that seeds drifting through space took root in nearby farm fields and as pods they have the power to take on the physical characteristics of any living thing and absorb its mind and memories. He says this makes for a perfect world without disease or troubles. When Miles asks him if this also rules out love, Kaufman replies there is no room for feelings as Miles notes that their only instinct is to survive. Locked in his office as Jack and Kaufman sit in the waiting room watching the pods develop, Miles fills syringes with a strong sedative and manages to give the shots to the two men as Becky does the same to the police chief. Deciding their only hope is to get to the nearest highway, Miles and Becky walk calmly through the streets but when she sees a dog nearly run over by a truck the woman cries out, alerting Janzek, who finds his drugged comrades. The lawman and the citizens run after Miles and Becky who make their way into a mining tunnel where they hide in a shaft and avoid detection. Later they hear music playing and, admonishing Becky not to doze off, Miles goes to find its origin only to realize it is coming from the radio of a truck loaded with pods. He returns to the tunnel and finds Becky nearly asleep and tries to carry her away but they fall down. Miles kisses Becky and realizes she has been transformed. She begins hollering to the others to get him as the doctor runs to the highway where he is horrified to see a truck filled with pods. When he has finished talking to the doctors at the hospital, Bassett declares him a mental case but just then a traffic accident victim is brought in and the ambulance attendant (Robert Osterloh) is talking about seeing strange-looking pods. This is overheard by Hill who orders the local law enforcers and the FBI be notified. Miles is relieved as he fights to stay awake. Over the years, much has been made of the plot intonations of Invasion of the Body Snatcher. Theories about its underlying motivations, ranging from it being a denunciation of United States Cold War policies, a repudiation of the House of Representatives and the Senate’s attempt to ferret out Communists in government and the private sector and its being a proponent of isolationism. On the other hand, there are those who have felt it is a jarring overview of autocratic mind control as exemplified by the rulers behind the Iron Curtain. In this context the film would be an offshoot of George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984, which Columbia released as a movie the same year Invasion of the Body Snatchers opened. The mind-numbing, euphoric consequences of being transformed could also have its origins in the Soma drug prominent in Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley. As noted, the film was based on a magazine story that was novelized in 1955 and its author, Jack Finney, always maintained it had no deep meanings and was designed as “popular entertainment.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers was shot in SuperScope as The Body Snatchers and They Came from Another World. It was filmed in several of the towns surrounding Los Angeles, including Chatsworth, Glendale, Hollywood, Los Feliz, Sierra Madre and Woodlands Hills, along with Bronson Canyon (the location of the mineshaft) and the Hollywood Freeway, where Kevin McCarthy’s gave his now famous warning, “They’re here already! You’re next!.” King Donovan, who plays Jack Belicec, told me in an April 1974 interview that Invasion of the Body Snatchers was one of his favorites among the many movies he made, including The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Magnetic Monster (both 1953) and Riders to the Stars (1954). He worked on the production for twelve days and referred to it as a “minor classic” although he claimed “it was not made as it should have been made.” He noted that some
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fifteen to twenty pages of the script were cut before it went into production. Donovan said this was done by the movie’s producers and he called the action “a good example of creative persons being put down by money.” He said he enjoyed working with the rest of the cast and he felt Siegel was a fine director. According to Donovan, Siegel had a grueling task, having to work all day filming with long evenings spent looking at rushes and planning the next day’s shooting. Invasion of the Body Snatchers spawned several vastly inferior remakes. Using the same title, a big-budget 1978 production starred Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams; its only highlight was McCarthy doing a cameo repeating his maniac freeway sequence. It was also more graphic than the original in detailing the development of the pods. United Artists released this second version that also had Siegel doing a bit as a cab driver. In 1994 Warner Bros. did a third outing, Body Snatchers, with Meg Tilly and Gabrille Anwar, set at a military compound. A fourth version, with the microorganisms instead of pods, came out in 2007 as The Invasion. In 1988 Republic Pictures Home Video issued a colorized VHS tape version of the 1956 film. Surprisingly, the fairly muted colors do not take away from the overall effect of the original.
Island of the Doomed (1967; 86 minutes; Color) Producer: George Ferrer. Director: Mel Welles. Screenplay: E.V. Theumer. Story: E.V. Theumer and Ira Meltcher [Mel Welles]. Photography: Cecilio Paniagua. Editor: Antonio Canovas. Music: A. Garcia Abril and Jose Munoz Molleda. Art Director: Francisco Canet. Production Manager: Enrique Sagaseta. Makeup: Juana Culell. Assistant Directors: Juan Ignasio Galvan, Fanny Wesling and Joseph Galliar. CAST: Cameron Mitchell (Baron von Weser), Elisa Montes (Beth Christianson), George [Jorge] Martin (David Moss), Kay [Kai] Fischer (Cora Robinson), Ralph Naukoff [Rolf von Nauckhoff ] ( Jim Robinson), Hermann Nehlsen (Professor Jules Demerest), Matilde Sampedro (Myrtle Callihan), Ricardo Valle (Alfredo), Mike Brendel (Baldi/Accident Victim).
Filmed in Spain as La Isla de la Muerte (The Island of the Dead), this Spanish–West German co-production was made by Orbita Film, Madrid, and Tefi Film, Munich. In West Germany it was released as Das Geheimnis der Todesinel and was edited by Siegfried Kramer, with a running time three minutes less than its original 88 minutes. When Allied Artists issued it in the U.S. as Island of the Doomed in November 1967 it ran 86 minutes. In Great Britain it was called Blood Suckers and in France Le Baron Vampire (The Vampire Baron). It was later shown on U.S. television as Maneater of Hydra. Tour guide Alfredo (Ricardo Valle) persuades six people to go with him on a two-day jaunt to a small Italian island owned by reclusive Baron von Weser (Cameron Mitchell). They are architect David Moss (George Martin), beautiful Beth Christianson (Elisa Montes), businessman Jim Robinson (Ralph Haukoff ) and his much younger wife Cora (Kay Fischer), matronly Myrtle Callihan (Matilde Sampedro), and University of Michigan botanist Professor Jules Demerest (Hermann Nehlsen). Upon reaching the island by ferry, the visitors drive to the villa. Along the way Cora flirts with Alfredo, who tells them all the inhabitants except the baron and his servants left the island due to a vampire scare. A man (Mike Brendel) with a scarred face jumps in front of the car and is killed. Weser arrives and says the man is his cook and that he was suffering from an incurable disease that drove him mad. Weser shows the group his botanical gardens with imported orchids and then takes them to his villa where he gives them rooms for the night. Robinson argues with his wife over her attentions to the driver and at dinner Weser informs his guests that their food is made
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up vegetables grown on the island. Myrtle comments that the cucumbers taste like meat. She is frightened when she sees the butler, Baldi (Brendel), the mute twin brother of the dead man. Cora drinks too much and Weser takes her to the kitchen for coffee. Upon returning, Weber warns Robinson not to touch a porcupine plant which he says can cause temporary paralysis. While Weser shows his guests some of his specimens, including a meateating plant he developed by combining a Cross a Century plant with a Venus Flytrap, Alfredo is murdered in his car. As the Robinsons and Myrtle retire for the night and Weser confers with fellow botanist Demerest, David and Beth go outside for air and he warns her to lock her doors and windows. During the night, the restless Cora seeks out Alfredo but finds Weser feeding his plants and tries to seduce him but is thwarted. Cora returns to her room and, finding her husband gone, goes to bed and is attacked and murdered. The next morning Weser, David, Beth and Myrtle meet Robinson who has come back to the villa after some early morning fishing. Going to his room, Robinson finds his dead wife with a large puncture mark on her face. At the same time, Myrtle goes to the car, sees Alfredo and collapses. The woman accuses Demerest of the killings since she saw him lurking in the hallway the night before. After David questions Weser about the murders, the baron phones for the police but finds the line is dead and indicates that the ferry will not be back until the next afternoon. Robinson speculates that the killings were done by vampire bats since blood was drained from the victims. David suggests they leave the island and he and Weser go to ready a boat but find it has been sabotaged. Beth and Myrtle explore the woods, with the older woman taking pictures and telling the younger one they will not get off the island alive. This causes Beth to panic and she runs away, eventually falling into the grave Baldi is digging for his brother. He brings the unconscious woman to David as Demerest takes a rabbit from its cage and watches as it is devoured by a huge tree. When Demerest confronts Weser with the anomaly, he regretfully kills the botanist with a knife embedded in a statue of the Indian goddess Kali. He has Baldi remove the body. David finds the phone line cut and observes the servant carrying the corpse. When Weser arrives on the scene, David accuses Baldi of being the killer. The servant knocks down both men and escapes on a bicycle and they follow him in the car. He ends up in an abandoned chapel next to the island’s cemetery where he climbs on the roof and tries to kill his pursuers by hurling boulders at them. The wall on which Baldi is standing collapses and he is buried in the rubble. As a thunderstorm approaches, Myrtle goes outside to take pictures and is attacked and killed by a large bloodsucking tree. Weser and Robinson take Baldi’s body to the island’s mausoleum and return to the villa where the wind blows open a window. When Beth closes it, she sees Myrtle’s body in the courtyard and goes there only to be attacked by the tree. Robinson hears her screams as a branch of the tree breaks through the bedroom window and tries to kill him. He runs downstairs saying the tree is the killer as David hears Beth’s cries and takes an axe and frees her. As Weser and Robinson fight, the latter is paralyzed by the porcupine plant. Weser kills him with another axe and goes out to stop David from destroying his creation. As the two men fight, Weser accidentally cuts the tree with his weapon and it devours him. One of the truly ludicrous moments in horror film history has to be the finale scene in Island of the Doomed when mad scientist Weser tells the vampire tree that he loves it and wants to give it his blood and die with it. The tree itself is a shaggy thing with its petals unfolding to reveal erotic looking stamen that disgorge red liquid and penetrate flesh to draw off a victim’s blood. It is remindful of the scene with the two sex object monsters fighting in Battle Beyond the Sun (1963).
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While Island of the Doomed did quite well at the box office, it was hardly a favorite with critics. In The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), Phil Hardy dubbed it a “cheap shocker” adding, “The direction is token and the movie’s only watchable scene is the latterday Eve’s reunion with the tree in the baron’s obscene garden of Eden followed by the surreal image of the profusely bleeding tree.” John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (1994) called it “crudely photographed and acted… [It] plays almost like a stereotyped whodunit, yet has a compulsion in the way the decadent characters behave, setting themselves up for the slurping green creepers and wriggling branches.” Movies on TV 1975 –76 Edition (1974), edited by Steven H. Scheuer, gave the film its lowest rating, adding, “Clichés! Forgettable foreign-made entry.” The film’s director, Mel Welles, had to use the name Ernst von Theumer, one of Island of the Doomed’s producers, since it was a co-production, but his name appeared on prints seen outside Europe. He also directed Lady Frankenstein (1971), which von Theumer produced. Welles is best known as an actor in Roger Corman films like The Undead (1957), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) [q.v.] and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) [q.v.]. He also acted in Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955), The 27th Day (1957), She Beast (Revenge of the Blood Beast) (1965) and Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype (1980), and provided the voice of ESS in Wolfen (1981).
Jalopy (1953; 62 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: William Beaudine. Story-Screenplay: Tim Ryan and Jack Crutcher. Additional Dialogue: Bert Lawrence. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: William Austin. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Charles Cooper. Sets: Robert Priestley. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Special Effects: Ray Mercer. Continuity: Ilona Vas. Assistant Director: Austen Jewell. CAST: Leo Gorcey (Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney), Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones), Bernard Gorcey (Louie Dumbrowski), Robert Lowery (Skid Wilson), Leon Belasco (Professor Bosgood Elrod), Richard Benedict (Tony Lango), Jane Easton (Bobbie Lane), Murray Alper (Red Barker), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck), Bennie Bartlett (Butch), Tom Hanlon (Race Announcer), Mona Knox (Dream Girl), Bob Rose, Carey Loftin, George Dockstader, Louis Tomei, George Barrows, Dude Criswell, Fred Lamont, Dick Crockett, Teddy Mangean, Pete Kellett, Bud Wolfe (Drivers), Conrad Brooks (Party Guest).
The twenty-eighth film in the long running “Bowery Boys” series, Jalopy was the initial entry under the Allied Artists banner and it was also the first to be produced by Ben Schwalb, who remained with the series until 1957. Regarding his influence on the productions, David Hayes and Brent Walker wrote in The Films of the Bowery Boys (1984), “The gangster characters are now played for buffoons, and so are the boys. Schwalb elected to instill into the series a purer form of comedy, as he felt that a policy of piling laughs upon laughs would create comedies that were made as they were supposed to be made. It was a smart move on his part to transform the Bowery Boys into buffoons, as they were obviously getting older, and audiences might tire of grown men who appeared to be retreating into adolescence.” Jalopy’s slight sci-fi angle dealt with the creation of a superspeed formula that also seems to materialize dream girls. Variety dubbed it “an above-average programmer,” adding, “[Leo] Gorcey and [Huntz] Hall romp through the roles they’ve long mastered…. Ben Schwalb, in producing, has stuck to the proven formula for the series to turn film into success. William Beaudine’s direction wisely accents the laugh potential….” Jalopy racer Skid Wilson (Robert Lowery) has been making a killing at the track with his car driven by Tony Lango (Richard Benedict) and serviced by mechanic Red Baker
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(Murray Alper). When he finds out that a new entry, “Mahoney’s Meteor,” owned by Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey) and his pals Sach Jones (Huntz Hall), Chuck (David Condon) and Butch (Bennie Bartlett), has entered the next race, he tells his girlfriend Bobbie Lane ( Jane Easton) to get details. Slip test drives the jalopy but the noise it makes drives away customers from Louie Dumbrowski’s (Bernard Gorcey) sweet shop as the car overheats at a standstill. They placate Louie by promising to take part of their race purse to pay off his rent since they are using the back room his shop for Professor Elrod Bosgood (Leon Belasco) to work on a new fuel formula. Sach mixes up a concoction that explodes when he drops it. After the smoke clears, Bobbie shows up and he thinks he created her. The young woman makes a play for Slip so he gives her a pass to the races but the next day his car is passed by all the others and he ends up running into a wall. Sach tries to aid Slip by running on the track but he instead causes a series of wrecks. The angry drivers unite to pursue Slip and Sach, who jump over a wall and run away. Back at the sweet shop, the angry Slip tells Sach to wax the floor while he tries to get more money out of Louie for the next race. Sach puts the formula he invented in Louie’s rented waxer and it flies out a window, shoots up in the air and crashes back to the street. Slip decides to use the formula in his jalopy and it circles the track in eleven seconds. Skid and his cohorts try to find out the secret of Slip’s success, and Sach mentions putting something in the gas tank. Sach and the professor stir up a batch of the formula and when Sach drops some of it on the floor, Bobbie returns inviting the gang to a pre-race party at Skid’s apartment. Once the boys get to the festivities, Lango and Barker search for the formula but fail to find it, so Skid tries to force the gang and Louie to reveal its whereabouts. Sach throws some of the formula on the floor and he and his pals escape and go back to the sweet shop where they are accosted by Skid, Lango and Barker. During the melee, Louie calls for the cops. The thieves return after the law departs, and find out the new batch is no good. They leave in disgust as Sach realizes that he forgot to put seltzer water in the formula. At race time Skid feels he has nothing to fear from Slip and he is proved correct when the Meteor barely makes it around the track at the start of the big $1,500 race. Sach shows up with a new batch of the formula, runs onto the track and puts it in the jalopy’s tank. Slip’s car flies around the track in reverse with Sach clinging to its side. Slip wins the race, and a disappointed Skid tells Bobbie to return the fur coat he bought her. During a post-race celebration at Louie’s place, Sach again throws some of the formula on the floor and a beautiful girl materializes (Mona Knox) and goes off with Slip. He tries again but this time a girl wearing horn-rimmed glasses arrives for Elrod. Sach follows Slip as Louie decides to try his luck with the formula but ends up in tears when it fails to produce his dream girl.
Jennifer (1953; 73 minutes) Producer: Berman Swartz. Director: Joel Newton. Story: Virginia Myers. Photography: James Wong Howe. Editor: Everett Douglas. Music: Ernest Gold. Song: Matt Dennis and Earl Brent. Sound: Jean L. Speak. Sets: George Sawley. Production Manager: Lonnie D’Orsa. Makeup: Dan Greenway. Wardrobe: Ruth Matthews. Continuity: John Franco. Assistant Director: Austin Jewell. CAST: Ida Lupino (Agnes Langley), Howard Duff ( Jim Hollis), Robert Nichols (Orin Slade), Mary Shipp (Lorna Gale), Ned Glass (Grocery Clerk), Kitty McHugh (Mrs. Canaway), Russ Conway (Gardener), Lorna Thayer (Molly), Matt Dennis (Singer).
Ida Lupino and Howard Duff were married from 1951 to 1968. They first appeared together on film in 1949’s Woman in Hiding and after their marriage they teamed for Jennifer, followed by Private Hell 36 (1954), Women’s Prison (1955) and While the City Sleeps (1956). They also co-starred in the CBS-TV comedy series Mr. Adams and Eve (1957–58). Jennifer
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borders on horror with its spooky old house location and noir atmosphere, along with a ghostly shadow seen at the beginning and end of the film. Jennifer is perhaps the least known of the couple’s films; it is highlighted by off beat camerawork, often involving dark shadows, but it is laden with long, drawn-out scenes containing almost no action. Allied Artists released it in the fall of 1953. Leonard Maltin’s 2004 Movie and Video Guide (2003) termed it a “[t]urgid programmer.” In Spanish-language countries it was called La Sombra (The Shadow). Secretary Agnes Langley (Lupino) is hired for $150 a month by Lorna Gale (Mary Shipp) to live at her family’s sumptuous estate near the small California town of Montecito. The previous caretaker, Jennifer Brown, Lorna’s cousin, left without giving notice. Lorna tells her friend, local businessman Jim Hollis (Duff ), to keep an eye on Agnes since she is alone in the old house. Agnes finds Jennifer’s diary and starts to read it and becomes unnerved by strange sounds in the dark mansion. Jim decides to introduce himself to Agnes by personally delivering an order she made to his grocery store. After she tells him about hearing strange noises, he searches the grounds but finds nothing out of the ordinary. He tells her he thinks Jennifer got lonely and did not like living in the country. Jim also offers to let Agnes stay at his inn but she declines. When Agnes goes to Jim’s store to get more supplies, she overhears gossip regarding Jennifer from the clerks (Ned Glass, Lorna Thayer) and a customer (Kitty McHugh). Back at the house, she continues to read the diary and finds a broken record Jennifer abandoned called “Vortex.” An employee of Jim’s, 19-year-old Orin Slade (Robert Nichols), arrives to repair the water heater and tells Agnes that Jennifer worked for a local attorney named Sampson, who killed himself after the young woman allegedly
Spanish lobby card for Jennifer (1953) picturing Howard Duff and Ida Lupino
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took important documents from him. He theorizes that something violent happened to Jennifer. When Jim asks Agnes to dinner, she declines the invitation and drives to a Santa Barbara music store to listen to the record that Jennifer apparently broke. Agnes later finds a bank book with numerous deposits and a $70,000 balance. When she shows it to Jim, he opines that the young woman may have been involved in blackmail although there are no withdrawals from the account. Agnes comes to the conclusion that Jennifer died in the house. She and Jim search a passageway that leads below the cellar but find only a storage area. Jim gets Agnes to talk about her past and she admits she was dumped by her fiancé for another woman. Jim again asks Agnes to stay at his inn but she refuses although accepting his invitation to a dance there that evening. After he tells Orin not to talk to Agnes about Jennifer, Jim receives a telephone call from Lorna who says she needs to see him the next day. During the dance, Orin rummages through his boss’ desk and locates the bank book that might belong to Jennifer. After the dance, Jim and Agnes kiss and set a date for the next night. When he is delayed, she looks through some of Jennifer’s things and finds a note hidden in a ball of twine stating that the young woman was afraid and planned to hide in the furnace room. Orin shows up and tells Agnes about finding the bank book and that he thinks Jim was involved with Jennifer. He says Jim and Lorna are talking at the inn and he believes they know the truth about Jennifer’s disappearance. Agnes goes to the furnace room and sees a woman’s face in a pool of water and tries to get away from Jim when he arrives. Jim catches up with her in the garden and she accuses him of murdering Jennifer. According to Jim, Lorna informed him that Jennifer died after having been placed in a sanitarium because the Gale’s could not face insanity in the family. The nearly hysterical Agnes tells Jim she saw Jennifer’s body in the basement and he takes her back there and shows her that the face she saw in the water was her own reflection. Realizing that her imagination was the cause of her fears, Agnes looks forward to the future with Jim. As they walk away hand in hand, the dark shadow of a woman slithers unto the front steps of the mansion. Jennifer introduced the popular standard “Angel Eyes,” written by Matt Dennis and Earl Brent; Dennis sings the song in the film. It was also recorded by others, including Herb Jeffries, Nat (King) Cole, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.
Jungle Gents (1954; 63 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Edward Bernds. Screenplay: Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: Sam Fields. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Sets: Joseph Kish. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Makeup: Edward Polo. Wardrobe: Bert Henrikson. Special Effects: Augie Lohman. Continuity: John L. Banse. Assistant Director: Austen Jewell. CAST: Leo Gorcey (Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney), Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones), Bernard Gorcey (Louie Dumbrowski), Laurette Luez (Anatta), Patrick O’Rourke (Alf Grimshaw), Rudolph Anders (Dr. Goebel), Harry Cording (Dan Shanks), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck), Bennie Bartlett (Butch), Emory Parnell (Captain Daly), Woody Strode (Malaka), Joel Fluellen (Rangori), Murray Alper (Fats Lomax), John Harmon (Harmes), Roy Glenn (Chief Omotowa), Emil Sitka (Crewman Painter), Pat Flaherty (Officer Cady), Jett Norman [Clint Walker] ( Jungle Man), Ned Glass (Laboratory Technician), Eric Snowden (Trader Holmes).
After taking a new antibiotic for a head cold, Sach Jones (Huntz Hall) has a heightened sense of smell and aids the police by literally sniffing out stolen diamonds in Louie Dumbrowski’s (Bernard Gorcey) sweet shop, secreted there by Fats Lomax (Murray Alper). Officer Cady (Pat Flaherty) arrests Sach along with Fats. At the police station Captain Daly (Emory Parnell) tries to make Sach confess that he lied about smelling the diamonds. A laboratory
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technician (Ned Glass) convinces the chief that the antibiotic gave Sach a sharper sense of smell and he is freed. Alf Grimshaw (Patrick O’Rourke), the grateful owner of the gems, tells Sach and his pals Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey), Chuck (David Condon) and Butch (Bennie Bartlett) that they can make a fortune searching for a cache of missing diamonds in Africa using Sach’s new gift. The Bowery Boys, along with Louie and Alf, sail to Africa, and after traveling inland on the River King, they confer with Holmes (Eric Snowden), a trader who is in partnership with Grimshaw. Suffering from jungle fever, Holmes informs them another partner had found diamonds but was murdered before he could reveal the location. The partners had earlier agreed that the gems were hidden in some remote grottos and Holmes gives Sach a map to the area as the ailing man’s attendant, Dr. Goebel (Rudolph Anders), arrives to check on him. Holmes tells Sach to guard the map with his life. As Slip, Sach, Louie, Chuck, Butch and Grimshaw head into the jungle, they are followed by Goebel and his cohort Dan Shanks (Harry Cording), who want the diamonds for themselves. Sach accidentally uses the map to start a fire in order to ward off lions. During the night, one of the beasts enters Slip and Sach’s tent and they run through the jungle and get caught in a trap. After they are rescued, Sach leads the party on a wild goose chase over the African veldt, with Goebel and Shanks trailing them. At last Sach admits burning the map and Slip finds out he used a girdle advertisement as his pretend chart. Sach says he will kill himself but when his gun misfires the others make him take up the rear of their safari. When a lion tries to attack Sach, he is saved by beautiful jungle girl Anatta (Laurette Luez), who kills the lion and takes a shine to Sach but flees when his friends return. The local natives think Sach killed the lion and declare he is a great white hunter. Goebel and Shanks talk Chief Omotowa (Roy Glenn) of the Nadoros tribe into having his men eliminate all the newcomers except Sach. The safari members are captured by the hostile tribe and are told by Goebel that Sach will help him find diamonds while the rest have their heads shrunk. Slip and the others cause Sach to get a head cold so that he cannot sniff out the precious gems. When he finds out Sach has a cold, Goebel takes him to masked witch doctor Rangori ( Joel Fluellen) for a cure. Anatta returns and disables the shaman and Sach puts on his mask and attire and sets his pals free. Now that Sach is over his cold, Slip asks Alf to have Anatta take them to the Nalabarani, caves allegedly containing the tomb of an ancient king and his headless ghost, to find the diamonds. When Slip and Sach run into each other in the caves, the latter’s nose is injured and he again loses his sense of smell. Pursued by the specter, Sach accidentally stumbles on the diamonds but Goebel and Shanks get the drop on him and his pals. The ghost, who is really Holmes, shows up and the crooks shoot at him. The boys subdue the baddies. Holmes declares that Goebel and Shanks eliminated his partner. Later, as the boys get ready to go back home, they say farewell to Alf and Holmes. Sach plans to stay in Africa with his newfound love Anatta but quickly changes his mind when her boyfriend, a tall jungle man (Clint Walker), arrives on the scene. Jungle Gents was the twenty-fifth “Bowery Boys” outing. The film starts out with plenty of humor and does well until the location switch from the Bowery to Africa slows down the affair, with plenty of jungle, animal and native stock footage. It becomes rather plodding from that point until the amusing finale. The second part of the film is also shackled with the plot ploy of Sach contemplating suicide, hardly a good idea considering the juvenile nature of the series’ audience. On the plus side, there is beautiful Life magazine pin-up Laurette Luez as the jungle girl and a young Clint Walker (billed as Jett Norman) as her Tarzan-like boyfriend. Luez earlier appeared in Prehistoric Women (1950) and Siren of Bagdad (1952). Jungle Gents is a minor “Bowery Boys” effort. Variety complained, “Not much of a
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plot and stock footage doesn’t help matters any, neither the narration from Gorcey. Screenplay by Elwood Ullman and director Edward Bernds is below-par for both.”
Macabre (1958; 71 minutes) Producer-Director: William Castle. Screenplay: Robb White, from the novel The Marble Forest by Theo Durrant. Photography: Carl E. Guthrie. Editor: John F. Schreyer. Music: Les Baxter. Art Directors: John T. Collis and Robert Kinoshita. Sound: George J. Eppich, Frank Webster and Clem Portman. Makeup: Jack Dusick. Special Effects: Irving Block, Louis De Witt and Jack Rabin. Wardrobe: Irene Caine and Bert Henrikson. Assistant Director: Paul Wurtzel. CAST: William Prince (Dr. Rod Barrett), Christine White (Nancy Wetherby), Jim Backus (Sheriff Jim Tyloe), Jacqueline Scott (Polly Baron), Susan Morrow (Sylvia Stevenson), Dorothy Morris (Alice Wetherby Barrett), Philip Tonge ( Jode Wetherby), Jonathan Kidd (Ed Quigley), Ellen Corby (Miss Kushins), Howard Hoffman (Hummel), Linda Guderman (Marge Barrett), Voltaire Perkins (Minister).
After directing films for fifteen years, William Castle financed his first independent production, Macabre, with the assistance of screenwriter Robb White, who adapted the film from the 1951 novel The Marble Forest by “Theo Durrant” (a pseudonym for a dozen mystery writers who collaborated on the enterprise). Castle allegedly mortgaged his home in order to pay his part of the nearly $90,000 production that was filmed at the Ziv Studios in Hollywood. Although this was Castle’s first horror film he had directed films with genre
Spanish lobby card for Macabre (1958) picturing Jacqueline Scott and Philip Tonge
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overtones such as The Whistler, Mark of the Whistler and When Strangers Marry (Betrayed) (all 1944), Voice of the Whistler and The Crime Doctor’s Warning (both 1945) and Just Before Dawn (1946). To bolster Macabre’s box office potential, Castle came up with the gimmick of taking out a $1,000 insurance policy on each theater patron, collectable if they died of fright while watching the movie. Allied Artists released the production in time for Halloween in 1958 and it was a big success with some sources claiming it had a total gross in excess of five million dollars. It launched Castle’s career as a horror film director as well as one of the cinema’s premier showmen and paved the way for his next blockbuster for Allied, 1959’s House on Haunted Hill (q.v.). Filmed in nine days, Macabre is a tense thriller that has some spooky cemetery scenes that include a couple hiding in a grave, a hand coming from behind a tombstone and a repulsive corpse. The production opens with a narrator telling audience members to watch out for each other and to contact the management if anyone becomes uncontrollably frightened. At the finale the same voice asks patrons not to reveal the ending. During the proceedings, the film often cuts to a clock showing viewers the progression of the plot. Overall, the film fills its scare quota. Top-billed William Prince makes a most unappealing leading man while Jim Backus nicely plays against type as a vengeful lawman. The picture’s four leading ladies, Christine White, Jacqueline Scott, Susan Morrow and Dorothy Morris, are all very good, with White especially fine in the difficult part of a blind free spirit. Ellen Corby makes the most of her brief scenes as the caring nanny, while Philip Tonge nicely captures the character of an old man who appears to be holding on to life by a thread. Jonathan Kidd does a good job as a harried undertaker. The film’s credits are not shown until the end; there are cartoon caricatures of Castle and White riding in a car followed by hearses giving the names of the cast members killed in the proceedings as “The Dead” with the survivors listed as “The Living,” leading to the production credits. Castle of Frankenstein #17 (1971) called the film an “uneven mixture of straight suspense and black humor spoof…. Basically rather unpleasant, not as much fun as later Castle epics.” Undertaker Ed Quigley (Kidd) informs Jim Tyloe (Backus), the sheriff of the small town of Thornton, that a child’s coffin has been stolen from his mortuary. The lawman chides him for his gambling debts and intimates he may be trying to collect on insurance. To avoid the subject, Ed questions Tyloe about rich Jode Wetherby (Tonge) having the funeral of his daughter Nancy (White) scheduled for midnight. Jim sees Dr. Rod Barrett (Prince) coming to his office and blames him for Nancy’s death as well as that of her sister Alice (Morris), the physician’s late wife. He also asks about the doctor’s three-year-old daughter Marge (Linda Guderman) and advises the medical man to get out of town. Upset about being blamed for the deaths of his wife and sister-in-law, Rod is consoled by his nurse Polly Baron (Scott), who is in love with him. She says the locals think he was with divorcee Sylvia Stevenson (Morrow) when his wife went into labor and tells him he should leave town with Marge and take her with them. Rod suggests he and Polly take Marge for a picnic in the park since he has no patients but when they go to his home they cannot find the little girl. Her nanny, Miss Kushins (Corby), says the child was brought home by Sylvia and was playing with her teddy bear when last seen. Believing his daughter is with Sylvia, Rod goes to her home but the child is not there. Sylvia questions him about Marge not liking her and expresses jealousy over his relationship with Polly. The nurse answers a phone call and upon hearing the what the caller says, she faints. Rod arrives home to see Miss Kushins tending to Polly, who tells him the man on the phone said to tell Rod that the little girl is in a coffin and has five hours to live. The nanny wants to call the sheriff but Rod
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stops her, saying the lawman hates him and will not help. He also tells her not to go to his father-in-law, Wetherby, because the news might be fatal as he has a bad heart. When the doctor and his nurse find the child’s Teddy bear on his front porch, it is covered with clay and Rod suggests to Polly that Marge may be buried in the town’s cemetery. As they go there, Miss Kushins walks to Wetherby’s home and tells him what is happening. In the graveyard, Rod and Polly check several recently dug plots but find nothing. When they come across Nancy’s open grave, Rod decides to dig deeper for the child. As he and Polly are shoveling out dirt, they hear a noise and hide as someone covers the opening with a tarp. It turns out to be Mr. Hummel (Howard Hoffman), the caretaker; someone hits him and knocks him out. As the doctor is tending to the caretaker, a hand reaches from behind a tombstone and grabs Polly. It turns out to be Wetherby, who said he hit Hummel because he thought the man kidnapped the little girl. The old man then relates (via flashbacks) how his blind daughter returned to town where she meets Jim, an old friend. They make love and he asks her to marry him but she refuses since he loves her sister Alice, who married Rod. Nancy finds out she is pregnant and asks her brother-in-law for an abortion saying she does not want to be a wife or mother. Rod refuses her request and she dies shortly thereafter. The doctor informs his father-in-law that he killed Hummel and tells Polly to take him home. Rod later calls Polly and suggests that Marge may be at the funeral home; she and Wetherby join him there. They search the caskets but find them empty and are confronted by Ed, whom Rod accuses of abducting his daughter. The undertaker denies the charge as Jim arrives. The men take Nancy’s coffin to a hearse. Rod and Polly return to the cemetery where she blames him for the tragedy because of his relationship with Sylvia. The nurse remembers (in flashbacks) how Rod’s wife Alice, ordered to bed for the duration of her pregnancy, came to his office when he was with Sylvia. That night, while Rod was at Sylvia’s home, Alice went into labor and Polly could not locate Rod. When the doctor goes back to his office, he finds Jim waiting for him with the announcement of his daughter’s birth and the death of Alice. The lawman beats Rod and promises further revenge. Polly slaps Rod when he accuses her of the kidnapping. Their argument is interrupted by the sheriff; Polly tells him about Marge’s disappearance. The trio find one mausoleum unlocked and when Polly goes inside looking for the little girl, she sees Hummel’s bloodied corpse. Nancy’s funeral takes place during a thunderstorm. After the service, Rod, Jim and Ed begin filling in her grave when the doctor’s shovel hits a metal object. It turns out to be a child’s coffin. When he opens it, he finds a mutilated corpse. Wetherby sees the body, suffers a fatal heart attack and nearly falls into his daughter’s grave. Rod is shot by Ed, who throws money at him and confesses to joining the doctor in a plot to kill Wetherby so he could pay off his gambling debts. He tells Jim that Rod wanted the old man’s millions and fabricated the kidnapping and had him (Ed) make the grotesque dummy to scare Wetherby to death. Rod could have saved Nancy’s life but she stood in the way of his getting the money. Before going to the hospital, Rod asks to go to his office where he plays a tape recording to Polly of the call he faked about Marge being kidnapped. After he dies, the nurse locates the little girl asleep in her father’s office.
The Magic Weaver (1965; 77 minutes; Color) Producer-Director: Alexander Row [Aleksandr Rou]. Screenplay: Eugene Schwartz [Yevgeni Shvarts]. Photography: David Suren [Dmitri Surensky]. Music: Andrew Wolkon [Andrei Volkonsky]. Conductor: A. Roitman. Songs: A. Kolinsky and V. Lifshiz. Production Design: Yevgeni Galej. Special Effects: L. Askimov. Designers: Arseni Klopotovsky and V. Nititchenko.
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CAST: Michael [Mikhail] Kuznetsov (The Old Soldier), Nina Kishkon [Nelli Myshkova] (Mariya), Vito Pereva [Vitya Perevalov] (Ivan), Anatoil Kubatsky (Water Wizard), Georgi Millyar (Prime Minister Croak), Olya Khadhapuridze (Alyonushka), Vera Altayskaya (Ttushka-Nepogodunska), S. Trotsky (Altyn Altynych), Aleksandr Khvyla (Mudrets-Molchanik).
An Old Soldier (Michael Kuznetsov) leaves the service and with his drum walks through a forest. After sharing his lunch with talking squirrels, he meets two bear cubs who inform him that their grandfather has been caught in a trap. He frees the older bear who tells him that a fiend has taken over the forest and turned it into a horrible place. As he walks along, he sees a small boy, Ivan (Vito Pereva), who says he is looking for his mother, Mariya (Nina Kishkon), who has been carried off by the evil Water Wizard (Anatoil Kubatsky), because she is the world’s finest weaver. He also informs the Old Soldier that his father was lost in a blizzard years before and the drummer offers to help the boy find his mother. The giant Water Wizard materializes, causing the Old Soldier to bang his drum in a call for his comrades. The Wizard becomes normal size and begs the man to quit banging the drum as he cannot stand loud noise. The boys tells the Wizard he wants his mother and, although the evil one denies having her, he promises to take them to his palace and give the Old Soldier a slave for his drum. After traveling down a long stone stairway into the underwater kingdom, they enter the Wizard’s coral palace where they see various aquatic monsters. The drummer is offered a frog man, Prime Minister Croak (Georgi Millyar), for a slave but he refuses. As the mother begs for her son in a prison cell, she is put under a spell by a transparent woman (Vera Altayskaya) who tells her freedom and slavery are one. The Water Wizard displays to the Old Soldier and Ivan the wonders of his palace along with various servants, including a silent walrus, a giant lobster and his humanrooster guardian, three mathematicians, several trained dancing and singing pirates, and miniature mermaids. When the Old Soldier refuses these wonPoster for The Magic Weaver (1965), the U.S. release of the Soviet film Marya-Iskusnitsa (Maria, the Wonderful Weaver) ders, he and the boy are taken to a guest room filled with food. (1959).
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The drummer suspects it is poisoned and he and Ivan dine on the child’s provisions. When Croak reports to the Wizard that the guests did not eat the tainted food, the evil one commands his court to think of a way to get rid of the unwanted visitors. Upon the advice of the walrus, the king consults with an underground deity, and when he returns he orders rich gifts for the strangers. He also calls for his little granddaughter, Alyonushka (Olya Khadhapuridze), who distrusts the Wizard, and he informs her that a dangerous swamp cousin and his nephew have come to take away her friend Mariya. She demands to meet the newcomers and he takes her to their chamber but uses magic to distort their images, making them look evil. The Wizard tells her to hide the weaver and say six magic charms over her for protection. After she leaves, he orders Croak to follow the little girl; once she has said the charms, he is to push her into boiling water. As the Wizard takes the Old Soldier and Ivan to this treasures and tells them to take what they want, Alyonushka leads Mariya into a remote water cavern. After she recites the charms, the weaver turns into six transparent likenesses of herself. When Croak tries to push the little girl into the boiling water, he slips and falls in himself. The six beings arrive at the court and the Wizard orders Ivan to identity his mother or she will be his forever. He also takes the drum from the Old Soldier. On the third try, the boy sees his mother but the Wizard refuses to keep his part of the bargain. Alyonushka comes to the defense of the strangers and leads them out of the court as the Old Soldier orders a magic harp to play, making the Wizard and his minions dance. The Old Soldier, Ivan, Mariya and Alyonushka escape from the palace. Eventually the pirates are able to subdue the harp and go after them. The Old Soldier is caught in their net but escapes and beats up the pirates as Croak follows the escapees into the forest. After an encounter with the grandfather bear, Croak reverts to being a frog but the transparent woman brings torrential rain. Back at her home, Mariya cannot come out of the spell placed on her. When Ivan goes to the well for water, the Wizard rises out of it and tries to abduct the boy. Her son’s screams rouse the mother and she runs to save him, joined by the Old Soldier and Alyonushka. The weather clears and the transparent woman becomes a bird that is eaten by a cat. On dry land the Water Wizard turns into a mud puddle. Mariya and the Old Soldier find they are attracted to each other as they all plan a feast of celebration for the entire world. Released stateside in a dubbed version by Allied Artists in late September 1965, The Magic Weaver was made in the Soviet Union at Maxim Gorky Studios as Marya-Iskusnitsa (Maria, the Wonderful Weaver) and issued there in 1959. Bellucci Productions prepared the English-language version and its running time is nearly twenty minutes less than the original. Based on Russian folk tales, the production is a lavish one, with colorful undersea sets and characters. Most of the film’s songs were cut for the American version and what remained were rarely dubbed in English. Although the feature teems with fantasy elements, there is very little overtly horrific about it; even the evil Water Wizard is hardly frightening. In some of the publicity for the film, the villain is dubbed His Royal Wetness, Whirlpool III. Allied issued advertising material for the fantasy, which gives some background on its making. It states, “The Magic Weaver was filmed in Russia using many of the Soviet Union’s top stars. Unusual because it does not resort to animation to achieve its magical effects, it is doubly surprising coming from the USSR, which for the last 30 years has been making mostly propaganda films. Much of the credit can be given to Director [Alexander] Row, who convinced the Soviet officials to let him make pictures based on the old legends. According to Row, children, and adults too, are in danger of losing touch with these wonderful old stories, merely because most filmmakers find them too difficult to produce. Willing to
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make a special effort, he has created a new and exciting kind of picture, combining reality and fantasy in a way that few will be able to resist.” The Magic Wizard was produced and directed by Row, the Americanized name for Soviet helmsman Aleksandr Rou, who made fantasy films for 35 years, including Po Shchuchjemu Velenyu [As If By Magic] (1938), Morozko [Jack Frost] (1965) and Zolotye Roga [Golden Horns] (1972), as well as the dramas May Night and Stars of the Ukraine (both 1953). According to Video Watchdog #9 ( Jan-Feb. 1992), Rou “was the most beloved of all Russian film fantasists, an essentially juvenile filmmaker whose popularity eclipsed even that of the more ambitious Aleksandr Ptushko.”
The Maze (1953; 80 minutes) Producer: Richard Heermance. Executive Producer: Walter Mirisch. Director–Production Designer: William Cameron Menzies. Screenplay: Daniel B. Ullman, from the novel by Maurice Sandoz. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: John Fuller. Music: Marlin Skiles. Sound: Charles Cooper. Sets: Robert Priestley. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Special Effects: Augie Lohman. Technical Advisor: Maurice Davidson. Continuity: Ilona Vas. Assistant Director: Austen Jewell. CAST: Richard Carlson (Sir Gerald MacTeam), Veronica Hurst (Kitty Murray), Katherine Emery (Edith Murray), Michael Pate (William), John Dodsworth (Dr. Bert Dilling), Hillary Brooke (Peggy Lord), Stanley Fraser (Robert), Lillian Bond (Margaret Dilling), Owen McGiveney (Gardener Simon), Robin Hughes (Richard Robar), Clyde Cook (Cab Driver), The Phelans (Dancers), Jack Chefe (Waiter), Bess Flowers, Harold Miller, Bert Stevens (Night Club Patrons).
At the remote Castle Craven in Scotland, servants William (Michael Pate) and Robert (Stanley Fraser) find their master, Sir Samuel MacTeam, has died so they notify his heir, Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson). The ensuing events are then told (in flashbacks) by Edith Murray (Katherine Emery), whose niece Kitty (Veronica Hurst) is engaged to marry Gerald. The three are on vacation in Cannes with Kitty’s former suitor Richard Robar (Robin Hughes). Gerald tells them his Uncle Samuel is a recluse who will not be attending his and Kitty’s nuptials in two weeks. As Kitty and Richard dance, Gerald relates to Edith that it has been fifteen years since he was at Castle Craven where his uncle locked him in his room at night and forbade him to go into a large maze on the grounds. He also says that the castle is without modern conveniences including telephone, electricity and central heating. Gerald is next in line to inherit the castle and Edith worries because none of the baronets lived long after getting the title. Gerald gets an express letter and he informs Kitty and her aunt that he has been called to Castle Craven but he wants to wait until after the wedding. Kitty tells him to go now. Weeks pass before the two women read that Sir Samuel has died and Gerald is the new baronet. Kitty relates to Edith that all her cables to the castle have been received but none answered and her aunt tells the young woman to forget Gerald. Edith receives a letter from Gerald telling her he cannot leave Castle Craven and that he is releasing Kitty from their marriage bargain. A line in the letter is heavily crossed out and Kitty erases the mark over to find the words “unless there is a death.” Feeling that he needs her, Kitty asks her aunt to accompany her to Scotland so she can find out what is the matter. The two arrive at the castle on a foggy night and their cab driver (Clyde Cook) departs hastily. William informs them that Sir Gerald cannot be disturbed but Kitty says they are tired of standing in the fog and goes inside. Gerald, who looks twenty years older, angrily informs the women they must leave immediately but they insist on staying the night. They are taken to adjoining rooms with walled-up windows and Kitty comments on the rubber covering in the hallway and stairs. When the women are locked in their rooms, they complain
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to no avail. During the night, Kitty is awakened by a dragging sound in the hallway and sees a light move past the bottom of her door. She locates a door to a bat-infested passage that leads to a lookout tower over the maze and again she hears the dragging sound. When she finds that Edith is suffering from a cold, Kitty tells Gerald they will stay until her aunt is well. Kitty notices strange webbed prints on the hall floor which Robert quickly wipes away. Feeling that Gerald is not well, Kitty tells him she wants to help but he refuses to see a doctor. Kitty writes a letter to their mutual friends, Dr. Bert Dilling ( John Dodsworth) and his wife Margaret (Lillian Bond), and invites them to the castle, along with Richard and Peggy Lord (Hillary Brooke). Kitty finds the gate to the maze open and she ventures inside where she finds the same strange prints but Gerald makes her go back to the castle. That night Edith hides before her bedroom door is locked and goes into a tower room where she spies something large and black that emits a loud croak before scampering away. She screams and faints. Gerald carries her back to her room, telling her she is a victim of her imagination. Kitty is awakened by the dragging sound in the hall and the light passing by the door. When morning comes, Gerald tells the women to leave and as they are about to do so the quartet of friends Kitty invited show up at the castle. After he reluctantly gives them rooms, Gerald voices his displeasure with Kitty for inviting the four but she tells him she only wants to help him; he tells her that the only way she can help is to leave. As they have drinks that evening, Gerald’s demeanor improves until he hears a loud noise from upstairs and he and the servants lock the guests in the dining room. Bert tells the others that he plans to have Gerald taken into custody for observation and he fears the man might be dangerous. When Gerald returns, he tells the group they must be locked in their rooms for the night. The doctor later informs his wife that the men of the MacTeam line suffer from a congenital illness that causes them to die at an early age; the last wife of one of them died after only a few days in the castle, two hundred years ago. He says the family line has been carried on through nephews. Kitty and Edith go back to the tower room where they find seaweed, a bowl of tomatoes and a book on human monstrosities. A loud noise causes them to run back to their rooms and not long after Gerald and the servants soon come down the hall leading something shrouded by a sheet. Kitty and Edith follow them to the maze but eventually get separated. Edith faints after seeing a large, screaming frog. The thing jumps past Kitty and goes into the castle where William and Robert help it to the tower room. Gerald finds Edith and Kitty and takes them back to the castle and all three look up in time to see the thing jump out of the tower window and crash to the pavement below. The servants tell Sir Gerald they tried to calm the creature but it was agitated and afraid after being seen by the two women. As Kitty and Edith are about to leave the next day, William summons them to the dining room where Gerald has convened the others. He explains that the creature they saw was Sir Roger Philip MacTeam, who was born in 1750 and lived in an amphibious state for over two hundred years. He says his ancestor had developed mentally but not physically and his death resulted from his being too proud and too weak to reveal his existence to the outside world. Gerald asks Kitty to forgive him. Narrator Edith reports that the two are now married and living at modernized Castle Craven. Filmed in Hollywood in 3-D, The Maze was issued theatrically in the summer of 1953 (it was Allied Artists’ only feature in that format). It was directed and designed by William Cameron Menzies, who had a number of genre credits in both fields. He was art director for The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and The Bat (1926) in the silent days and had the same chore on Alice in Wonderland (1933). He directed The Spider (1931) and Chandu the Magician (1932), both starring Edmund Lowe, and he was both director and art director of Things
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to Come (1936) and The Whip Hand (1951). He produced the 1940 version of Thief of Bagdad. His penultimate genre effort was a sci-fi thriller, Invaders from Mars (1953), which featured Hillary Brooke, who has only a minor role in The Maze, his last directorial outing. Topbilled Richard Carlson was also a genre veteran with numerous credits, including The Ghost Breakers and Beyond Tomorrow (both 1940), Hold That Ghost (1941), The Magnetic Monster and It Came from Outer Space (both 1953), The Creature from the Black Lagoon and the Carlson-directed Riders to the Stars (both 1954), Tormented (1960) [q.v.], The Power (1968) and The Valley of Gwangi (1968). Michael Pate, who played the silver-haired servant William, made several other horror films like The Strange Door (1951), The Black Castle (1952), Curse of the Undead (1959), and Tower of London (1962). More than two decades before she portrayed the doctor’s wife in The Maze, Lillian Bond co-starred in another horror thriller, The Old Dark House (1932). Variety noted, “Allied Artists makes its bid in the 3-D market with an exploitation horror feature that can be ballyhooed for sturdy grosses…. It’s an old-fashioned thriller that starts slow and builds methodically to a climax that should have chill seekers screeching. William Cameron Menzies designed and directed the melodrama in an upbeat manner that keeps attention going with the subject, even though the plot is implausible and the script inclined towards talkiness. A feeling of expectancy is sustained through to the climax, a horror sequence that virtually puts a hideous, frog-like monstrosity into the laps of the audience.” “A highly original, flawed piece,” is how Phil Hardy described The Maze in Science Fiction (1984). He added, “Shot in 3-D (and replete with numerous extraneous ‘pelt and burn’ effects), this is a very strange, grotesquely fascinating, piece competently directed by Menzies and full of suspense, yet almost ruined by a small budget.” Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972) felt it “looks suspiciously like a dull, run-of-the-mill horror movie.” In Science Fiction Film Directors, 1895 –1998 (2000), Dennis Fischer called it “outrageously oddball.” Regarding the not particularly frightening amphibious monster, he said, “Naturally, Menzies’ effectiveness is undermined by an unconvincing frog costume, sodden if unusual (to say the least) story, and pathetic explanation for this strange condition…. Still, Menzies is able to muster up some sympathy over this peculiar plight, though most of his genius seems to have been devoted to creating an interesting look to the castle and maze on a minuscule budget.” Castle of Frankenstein #17 (1971) opined, “Weird, occasionally near-excellent 3-D sleeper set in old Scottish castle with terrible secret. Moody quality is result of expert production design…. Very atmospheric, even scary, until the end, which proffers what is probably the most incredible, albeit unusual, denouements in horror — or any other genre of film. Don’t tell!” In 1982 The Maze was reissued by StereoVision International as Creature of the Maze and advertised as being in “StereoVision 3-D.”
Mission Mars (1968; 89 minutes; Color) Producer: Everett Rosenthal. Executive Producers: Lawrence Appelbaum and Morton Falick. Director: Nick Webster. Screenplay: Mike St. Clair. Story: Aubrey Wisberg. Photography: Cliff Poland. Editor: Paul Jordon. Supervising Editor: Michael Calamas. Music: Berge Kalajian and Gus Pardalis. Song: Gus and Sturg Pardalis; sung by Forum Quorum. Sound: Jack Barry and Sanford Rackow. Production Designer: Hank Aldrich. Makeup: Clay Lambert. Special Photographic Effects: Haberstroh Studios. Costumes: Grover Cole. Assistant Directors: Don Moody and Sal Scoppa, Jr. CAST: Darren McGavin (Colonel Mike Blaiswick), Nick Adams (Nick Grant), George De
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Vries (Duncan), Heather Hewitt (Edith Blaiswick), Shirley Parker (Alice Grant), Michael DeBeausset (Cliff Lawson), Bill Kelly (Soviet Cosmonaut), Chuck Zink (Radio Operator Chuck), Ralph Miller (Simpson), Art Barker (Dr. Everett), Monroe Myers (Lawson’s Aide Laird), Jay W. Jensen (Space Center Employee).
Filmed in Miami, Florida, by Sagittarius Productions and Red Ram Productions as Red Planet Mars, Mission Mars saw theatrical release in February 1968, just before 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had a much bigger budget and plot substance. The Allied Artists release was not much more than a patchwork of NASA technical and stock footage sewn into a sci-fi story about astronauts leaving their women on Earth to fly to Mars and encounter a hostile alien life form. Along the way they run into the traditional meteor shower. In the finale, an American and a Russian unite to make a triumphant voyage home. Tacky production values and trite special effects did not help matters, with the lead performers being hamstrung by a mundane script. Phil Hardy in Science Fiction (1984) called it “absurd, yet appealing” while John Stanley’s Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide (1988) best summed it up by saying, “Laughable kiddie stuff with Darren McGavin and Nick Adams as hysterically incompetent astronauts…. Their ship looks like an inverted Campbell Soup can, the alien life form (called a Polarite) resembles Gumby and an E.T. sphere is a golf ball magnified. Incompetently directed…. So abort it!” Edith Blaiswick (Heather Hewitt) wakes up screaming from a dream in which her astronaut husband Mike (McGavin) is killed when a rocket explodes. He consoles her and they go for an early morning swim. Astronaut Nick Grant (Adams) similarly assures his wife Alice (Shirley Parker) and says the upcoming mission will be his last; she is skeptical. The two astronauts, along with navigator Duncan (George De Vries), take their final physicals and are briefed by NASA’s chief of operations Cliff Lawson (Michael DeBeausset) about their eighteen-month round trip journey to Mars. The trio blast off and after orbit is achieved they switch the ship over to manual control. The booster rockets are jettisoned and the craft connects with its supply ship and they begin the 35 million mile flight to the Red Planet. Lawson meets with Edith and Alice and informs them all is going well on their husbands’ voyage. The astronauts spy the bodies of two Soviet cosmonauts floating in space, apparently victims of a failed mission a few months earlier. After the ship survives a meteor storm, they close in on Mars and descend to the planet. They land successfully and the three men suit up and set out to explore. As they search for the supply ship, the men leave balloon markers along the way. Nick comes across the body of a frozen Soviet cosmonaut and takes him back to the ship. Mike and Duncan are bombarded by a blinding light from a metallic, robot-like thing which they destroy with a ray gun. Back on board the ship, the two astronauts inform Earth of the attack and Lawson dubs the thing a Polarite. He tells them NASA is scrapping the mission because the Polarites are possibly being used by a hostile alien host. As they talk, a huge round sphere appears near the ship and they lose contact with Earth. When Mike tries to blast off, nothing happens and he says some force is stopping them. He orders Nick and Duncan to check out the sphere. When they do so, it opens, blinding Duncan and dragging him inside. The two survivors try to get the booster unit from the supply ship and use it to increase the rocket’s power so it can return home. Mike notices that the Polarite is immobile when in a shadow so he goes for the power unit. As Mike returns to the ship, the Polarite revives and Nick puts it out of commission with his ray gun. The booster unit is installed but communications are again cut off as a second attempt to blast off fails. When Mike goes to the sphere and tries to communicate with it, the object repeats his words and tries to pull him inside, but he makes it back to the rocket. The Rus-
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Darren McGavin and Nick Adams in Mission Mars (1968)
sian, now revived, informs Mike and Nick that if a disk inside the sphere is destroyed, they will be able to leave Mars. Against Mike’s orders, Nick goes to the sphere and fires at it but is engulfed in a burning light. He is pulled into the object and causes it to explode. Mike and the Russian blast off and begin their return voyage to Earth as Nick’s sacrifice is related to Lawson. Edith, who is with Lawson, informs her husband that he is to be a father. Although they both had successful film careers, Darren McGavin and Nick Adams were best known as television stars. McGavin headlined Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (Syndicated, 1957–59), Riverboat (NBC-TV, 1959–61) and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (ABCTV, 1974–75). Adams’ greatest fame came as Johnny Yuma in ABC-TV’s The Rebel from 1959 to 1961 and he also starred in Saints and Sinners (NBC-TV, 1962–63). He was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar in Twilight of Honor in 1963. Two years later Allied Artists headlined him in Young Dillinger but its puny box office returns failed to give the studio a much needed financial boost. Adams’ career quickly descended to the point where he starred in a trio of Japan’s Toho Studios outings, Frankenstein Conquers the World, Invasion of the Astro-Monster (Monster Zero) (both 1966) and The Killing Bottle (1967). Mission Mars is sometimes mistakenly called Murder in the Fourth Dimension which was an Italian film that was to co-star Aldo Ray and Nick Adams but never went into production.
Moonwolf (1966; 74 minutes) Producers: Wolf Brauner and Martin Nosseck. Directors: George Freedland [Georges Friedland] and Martin Nosseck. Screenplay: George Freedland [Georges Friedland] and Johannes
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Hendrich. Photography: Herbert Korner and Antun Markic. Editor: Rudolph Cusumano [Ralph Cushman]. Music: Henri Price and Albert Sendry. Art Directors: Max A. Bienek and Aaree Koivisto. Sound: Erwin Schanzle and Kurt Vilja. Sound Effects Supervisor: Jack Cornall. Unit Managers: Bolko Marcard and Tuukka Soitso. Assistant Director: Jochen Wiedermann. CAST: Carl Moehner (Dr. Peter Holmes), Ann Savo (Ara), Helmut Schmidt ( Johann), Paul Dahlke (Ara’s Father), Richard Häussler (Professor Albert Robert), Ingrid Lutz (Ilona), Horst Jentzen ( Jimmy), Ake Lindman, J. Kovacs (Lumberjacks), Inken Deter (Pilot), Paavo Jannes (Doctor), Wolf (Himself ).
Martin Nosseck Productions copyrighted Moonwolf in 1964 but Allied did not release it theatrically in the U.S. until the spring of 1966. It is a dubbed version of the 1959 West German film Und Immer Ruft Das Herz, also called Zuruck aus dem Weltall, that ran 14 minutes longer than the stateside release. Made by CCC Productions in Berlin with location shooting in Lapland, its sci-fi angle deals with a dog sent into space in order to test the effects of weightlessness. Moonwolf, which contained quite a bit of space launch footage, is mainly a boy and a girl and a dog love plot sewn into the fabric of a travelogue. Phil Hardy in Science Fiction (1984) noted, “A story no doubt partly inspired by the Sputnik II flight with the dog Laika (1957). The plot is similar to that of countless Disney features….” Movies on TV 1969 –70 Edition, edited by Steven H. Scheuer, called it a “[m]ildly interesting tale” but listed it as an Italian production set in Alaska. At the International Space Conference in Geneva, Professor Albert Robert (Richard Haussler) gives a report on a possible Moon landing but expresses doubts about man being able to cope with weightlessness in outer space. He goes to see his friend, Dr. Peter Holmes (Carl Moehner), a zoologist and veterinarian who has promised to let the space program use his dog Wolf to test endurance in space. Peter balks at his promise when he learns the animal will have tiny electronic probes placed in his brain and body. Peter recounts to Robert how some years before, as a college senior working on a thesis in zoology, he was in the north country of Lapland where he saw a mother wolf killed by a wildcat as she tried to protect her young. A violent summer storm arose and the next day he saw a young wolf pup foraging for food before falling into a river. Returning to the present, Robert informs Peter that the space probe Moonwolf is scheduled to take place in four weeks and the doctor reluctantly agrees to train Wolf for the flight. A month later the rocket takes off. After contact with it is lost twice, Robert projects it will return to Earth in Lapland. The two men fly to the locale and along the way Peter resumes his story about how Wolf came to be his pet. Two years before he had returned to Lapland at the time of a reindeer roundup. After going further north he saw a wolf-dog that led him to a young woman, Ara (Ann Savo), who had fallen into a snow pit. He took her to a cabin where she told Peter she was chasing snowbirds and fell and that Wolf is her dog. Ara said she pulled him out of a stream when he was a pup and Peter realized it was the same animal he thought drowned two years before. The woman’s fiancé, lumberjack Johann (Helmut Schmidt), came for her and Peter returned with them to her father’s (Paul Dahlke) home which also housed the area’s weather station. That night during a fierce blizzard, Ara became delirious and Peter used the station’s radio to request that penicillin be dropped by parachute in order to save her. Disregarding Peter’s warning that he cannot survive the storm, Johann headed out on skis to bring back a doctor for Ara. When her father found out about Peter calling for help, he radioed the flight to bypass the station due to the terrible storm although it may cost his daughter her life. Peter tended to Ara and the next morning the parachute landed and he and Wolf picked up the medicine which Peter gave to Ara. Wolf got his paw caught in a trap and some Laplanders, who thought it was a dangerous wolf, started to shoot him but he was saved by
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Peter. After Ara recovered, she asked Peter to accompany her to a festival in a nearby village, making Johann jealous. When they returned home, Ara informed Peter that she loved him and not her fiancé, but he said he must go and she told him to take Wolf with him so he would remember her. He chained up the dog and left but was confronted by Johann and the two men fought. Wolf broke his chains, leapt through a window and stopped Johann from stabbing Peter. As they are about to land in Lapland, Peter informs Robert the reason he did not want to risk Wolf ’s life was because of Ara. The capsule containing the dog ejects and lands near Ara’s father’s weather station, a forest area that cannot be reached by helicopter. Peter goes there on skis and meets Ara again. She tells Johann to use his sled and go with Peter to find Wolf. As they trudge through deep snows, the two men are surrounded by hungry wolves. The sled overturns and Johann hits his head on a rock as Peter holds off the animals with a rifle. Johann dies from his injury. The next morning, Peter locates the capsule and frees Wolf, and they return to Ara. Credited with co-writing the music score for the U.S. version of Moonwolf is Albert Sendry, longtime conductor for singer Tony Martin.
Mutiny in Outer Space (1965; 82 minutes) Producers-Story: Hugo Grimaldi and Arthur C. Pierce. Executive Producers: Bernard Woolner, Lawrence Woolner and David Woolner. Screenplay: Arthur C. Pierce. Photography: Archie Dalzell. Editor: George White. Music Supervisor–Sound Effects Supervisor: Gordon Zahler. Production Designer: Paul Sylos. Sound: John Doye, Jr. Sound Effects: Josef von Stroheim. Sets: Raymond Boltz, Jr. Production Supervisor: Jack Voglin. Makeup: Ted Coodley. Special Effects: Roger George. Assistant Director: Flip Cook. CAST: William Leslie (Major Gordon Towers), Dolores Faith (Faith Montaine), Pamela Curran (Lieutenant Connie Engstrom), Richard Garland (Colonel Frank Cromwell), Harold Lloyd, Jr. (Sergeant Andrews), Glenn Langan (General Knowland), James Dobson (Dr. Hoffman), Ron Stokes (Sergeant Sloan), Robert Palmer (Major Olsen), Francine York (Captain Stevens), Gabriel Curtiz (Dr. Stoddard), Carl Crow (Captain Don Webber), H. Kay Stephens (Sergeant Engstrom), Robert Nash (Colonel Howard), Joel Smith (General).
Space Station X-7 is in the path of an out-of-orbit thirty-year-old communications satellite. To avoid a collision, X-7 commander Frank Cromwell (Richard Garland) orders an evasive maneuver. Cromwell is informed that a spaceship (carrying geological specimens found in a lunar ice cave) is about to blast off from Luna Base II on the Moon and will dock with X-7 in a few hours. Major Gordon Towers (William Leslie) and Captain Don Webber (Carl Crow) are bringing the cargo; Towers tells his co-pilot he is looking forward to the layover so he can see his girlfriend, civilian biochemist Faith Montaine (Dolores Faith), who has been assigned to X-7. During the flight, Don complains about an irritation on his right leg. On the station, communications officer Lieutenant Connie Engstrom (Pamela Curran) informs Cromwell of their impending arrival while the ship’s physician, Dr. Hoffman ( James Dobson), says the commander needs to get more rest. Connie, who is in love with Cromwell, thinks the commander is headed for a mental collapse and needs to be transferred. Gordon and Don float from their craft to the space station where they undergo cleansing before greeting the crew. As they are being shown to their quarters, Don passes out and is taken to the infirmary where he registers a high temperature. Tests run by Faith show that his body has been invaded by some type of spores that appear to be a fungus. She immediately goes to check the Moon samples to see if they are the source of the fungus. The ship is clipped by a meteor that damages the laboratory, upsetting the crate holding the geological specimens. Gordon and Faith are called to the infirmary by Hoffman who
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informs them that Don has died from fungus infection and that all their lives are in jeopardy. Cromwell demands to see the dead man, who is covered by the fungus, and sends information to Earth command that he died from space weightlessness complications, despite Gordon’s objections. General Knowland (Glenn Langan), the chief of the satellite program, is given the coded message from Cromwell by his assistant, Captain Stevens (Francine York). It also states that Gordon’s behavior is not in the best interest of the space agency. Connie later informs Cromwell that the general wants clarification on his message, especially in regards to Gordon. When Gordon tells Connie the commander is a sick man, she says she will not be a part of any conspiracy against him. Faith and Hoffman find the lab a mess following the meteor hit with some of the lunar specimens ruined. She goes to work studying the remaining samples, not realizing the fungus has multiplied and started to spread around the lab. Gordon prepares a report about Cromwell to send to General Knowland. When he calls Faith, he gets no answer. He and Hoffman run to the lab where they find her surrounded by the expanding fungus. Gordon grabs hold of a pipe near the ceiling and gets to Faith and has her climb on his back and is able to get her to safety. Hoffman speculates that the fungus thrives on light so Gordon orders computer operator Sergeant Andrews (Harold Lloyd, Jr.) to seal the lab and cut off its electric power. When Gordon informs Cromwell about the fungus, he refuses to act. After Gordon objects he is ordered arrested along with Faith and Hoffman, who back Gordon. Cromwell orders Connie to send Knowland a full account of the mutiny, including Gordon’s threatening him with a gun. Realizing the commander is not lucid, she sends a tape recording of their conversation. After receiving the recording, the general consults with Dr. Stoddard (Gabriel Curtiz) and sends orders to Major Olsen (Robert Palmer) on X-7 to release the prisoners and relieve Cromwell of his command. He also orders all craft to stay away from the space station due to the growing fungus. Cromwell eludes Gordon, Faith and Sergeant Sloan (Ron Stokes) as they search the craft for him. Andrews reports that the commander has sabotaged the ship’s communications system. While Andrews fixes the radio, Hoffman alerts Faith that he has been infected by the fungus and she takes him to the infirmary. Gordon radios Knowland not to send a supply ship to the station because of the growing fungus that destroys all living cells on contact. The general quarantines X-7 and initiates a plan to destroy it if it shows signs of falling to Earth. After Faith confirms that Hoffman is infected, he tells her the fungus thrives on heat, not light, and asks to be placed in a refrigeration chamber to destroy the microorganisms. Cromwell shows up in the control room with a vat of acid and holds the crew at bay as he activates the ship’s gravitational control, causing the airlock to the lab to open with the fungus starting to spread to the outside of the craft. Gordon and the others manage to subdue Cromwell and place him in restraints. The fungus also spreads inside the station. With food running out, Gordon orders the crew to put on survival suits so he can lower the temperature in the craft to zero in hopes of destroying the invaders. He goes to the control room, killing the fungus there with a spray, and shuts down the heating system. Knowland gets a message from the X-7 crew that they are running out of oxygen and the fungus on the outside of the ship must be destroyed. His assistant, Colonel Howard (Robert Nash), suggests cutting off the sun’s heat to the craft and the general orders a rocket to take off and spray an ice crystal cloud around the space station. When this occurs, the fungus is eradicated and Gordon is able to restart the ship’s heating system. With the crew saved, Knowland announces that a relief ship will reach them in three hours. Gordon hugs Faith. Mutiny in Outer Space was made by Hugo Grimaldi Productions and Woolner Bros. Pictures and released on a double bill with the same outfits’ The Human Duplicators (q.v.)
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by Allied Artists in March 1965. The film’s working titles were Invasion from the Moon, Space Station X and Space Station X-14. It is a surprisingly entertaining and fast-paced affair with many plot elements and highlighted by a fine cast. It is padded with some NASA stock footage. One amusing aspect of the plot has the fungus holler (sounding like a creaking door) when destroyed. Low-key lighting and a claustrophobic setting add much to the lowbudget film’s overall suspense. It also manages to predict finding ice on the Moon. Cast-wise, stoic hero William Leslie is the weakest link; he earlier had the same effect on The Night the World Exploded (1957). Just the opposite is beautiful and talented Dolores Faith, whose too-short film career also includes the genre efforts The Phantom Planet (1961) and House of the Black Death (1965), as well as Mutiny’s co-feature, The Human Duplicators. Richard Garland was in The Undead (1957), Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) [q.v.] and Panic in Year Zero! (1962), while Harold Lloyd, Jr., appeared in Frankenstein’s Daughter (1958). Had Mutiny in Outer Space been made a decade before, Glenn Langan would have been perfect for the leading role; here he is well cast as General Knowland. He had the title role in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and was also in The Return of Doctor X (1939), Hangover Square (1945) and The Andromeda Strain (1971). Cast in the small role of the general’s associate, pretty Francine York had the misfortune of being the leading lady in Space Monster (1965) and Curse of the Swamp Creature (1967), two films American International Pictures made for television.
Nightmare Castle (1966; 80 minutes) Producer-Director: Allen Grunewald [Mario Caiano]. Screenplay: Mario Caiano and Fabio De Agostini. Photography: Enzo Barboni. Editor: Renato Cinquini. Music: Ennio Morricone. Production Designer–Sets: Massimo Tavazzi. Sound: Bernardino Fronzetti. Production Manager: Pietro Nofri. Makeup: Duilio Giustini. Costumes: Mario Giorsi. Assistant Director: Angelo Sangermano. CAST: Barbara Steele (Muriel Hampton Arrowsmith/Jenny Hampton Arrowsmith), Paul [Muller] Miller (Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith), Helga Line (Solange), Lawrence Clift (Dr. Dereck Joyce), Rik Battaglia (David), John MacDouglas [Giuseppe Addobbati] ( Jonathan).
During the 1960s, Barbara Steele established herself as one of the most popular players in horror films and has since had a cult following. Although she appeared in many mainstream features like Federico Fellini’s 8∂ (1963) and Der Juge Torless (The Young Torless) (1966), her reputation remains in macabre cinema. She later branched out into the production side of movies with the ABC-TV telefilms The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988). One of her best genre outings is the Italian production Amanti d’Oltretomba (Love Beyond the Tomb), released in that country in 1965 and in the U.S. in the summer of 1966 by Allied Artists as Nightmare Castle, running 80 minutes. It originally ran 104 minutes; when it was issued in Great Britain as both The Faceless Monster and Night of the Doomed it clocked in at 100 minutes. The footage missing from the stateside showings is mostly extended scenes and the lesser running time does not hurt the flow of the film or its horror impact. Nightmare Castle gives Steele dual roles, that of half-sisters, one brunette and the other blonde. At Hampton Castle, heiress Muriel Hampton Arrowsmith (Steele) taunts her scientist husband, Dr. Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller), about his experiments involving frogs and electricity. He says he is going to a medical conference in Edinburgh and as she gives him a kiss they are observed by their aged housekeeper, Solange (Helga Line). As Stephen leaves, he entrusts his wife’s safety to his gardener David (Rik Battaglia). Muriel and David later run to the greenhouse where they make love but are caught by Stephen, who hits
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Rik Battaglia and Barbara Steele in Nightmare Castle (1966)
David with a cane. He chains his wife and her lover and promises to make them suffer before they die. Muriel informs him that she has made a new will, leaving all her money and property to her half-sister Jenny (Steele). Stephen offers to let the two go free in exchange for the will, but David tells Muriel not to give it to him because he will kill them anyway. Solange scolds Stephen and tells him he will have to let the pair live but he replies that since Jenny is in an asylum, he will get control of the estate. Taking the lovers to his bedroom, Stephen drops acid on Muriel before throwing David over her and electrocuting them. He drains Muriel’s blood, places the lovers’ hearts in a container below a statue and burns their bodies. He puts their ashes in an urn in which he grows a fleshy plant. Later, after Stephen has used Muriel’s blood to restore Solange’s beauty, he returns to Hampton Castle with a new bride, Jenny. Solange demands to know why he married the young woman and he tells her that Jenny’s sanity hangs by a thread and he plans to use drugs to put her back in an asylum so he can get her money. On her wedding night, Jenny awakes to hear a pulsing sound and sees blood pouring from the plant. As the room spins, she dreams of David helping her out of a crypt. When they go to the greenhouse to have sex, a faceless man strikes the gardener. She wakes up calling David’s name and trying to choke her husband. The next night, Stephen and Solange hear Jenny scream and they find her in the castle’s vault with blood on her hands. She tells them she is not mad and begs not to be sent back to the asylum. Stephen informs his wife that he plans to write to her physician, Dr. Dereck Joyce (Lawrence Clift), and ask him to come to the castle to tend to her. When he arrives, Jenny
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tells Dereck about her dream and begins laughing when her husband mentions his experiments. She takes the doctor to the greenhouse where they find an earring she claims to remember losing there in her dream. Solange tells Dereck that Jenny has a habit of hiding things and then forgetting their location and she secretly places the earring’s mate in the young woman jewelry box. When Dereck asks to examine the box, the earring is found there, and Jenny begins to doubt her sanity. At dinner that evening, Solange cuts her hand and Stephen takes her to his laboratory where he gives her an injection of Muriel’s blood. Jenny hears a voice telling her to go to the lab as Dereck inspects the vault and finds Muriel’s tomb empty. Jenny comes into the lab and slashes Stephen’s face with a scalpel. After Dereck takes her back to her bedroom, Solange tells her lover that the young woman had Muriel’s face. Muriel takes over Jenny’s mind, causing her to try and seduce Dereck, but a window blows open and the young woman comes to her senses. In the greenhouse, Jenny asks Dereck why Muriel torments her and she begs him not to leave her. He says they must get away from the castle. The physician informs Stephen that the castle has ghosts and he wants to get Jenny away before they destroy her mind. Stephen attaches an electric wire to the bathtub next to Dereck’s room and when he hears someone enter he turns on the power, but ends up electrocuting a servant ( John MacDouglas). When Jenny tells her husband she is leaving with Dereck, he accuses the physician of trying to seduce her. Stephen tells his wife he loves her and promises to take her on a long trip the next day. Dereck agrees to leave but tells Jenny he will always try to help her. Solange becomes very cold and informs Stephen she needs Jenny’s blood. Dereck finds the young wife having a dream: She speaks to him as Muriel and says her heart is below a statue and that Stephen killed her. The physician pretends to leave the castle as a storm arises and Jenny begins to pack. She goes to see Stephen, who carries her to the laboratory where he tells his wife he will free her from nightmares forever and gives her chloroform. He begins the two-hour process of putting Jenny’s blood into Solange’s veins and goes to prepare for the next day’s trip with his lover. Dereck returns to the castle, opening a hiding place under the statue and finding the hearts of Muriel and David. When he pulls out a dagger and separates them, their spirits become visible. Stephen knocks Dereck out with a candle holder and then sees his first wife. As David’s bloody corpse removes the needle from Solange’s arm, Muriel promises Stephen eternal ecstasy and takes him to his bedroom where she straps him in the chair and sets him on fire. As Solange turns into a skeleton, Dereck recovers and carries Jenny into the living room, but they are trapped there by the ghosts of Muriel and David. When Dereck throws their hearts into the fireplace, the spirits disappear. Jenny and Dereck flee Hampton Castle by running outside into the storm. Steele’s horror film career was launched in 1960 when she starred in Mario Bava’s La Maschera del Demonio (The Mask of the Demon) which was released in the U.S. as Black Sunday. She followed it with Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock (1962), The Ghost (1963), Castle of Blood [q.v.] and The Long Hair of Death (both 1964), Terror Creatures from the Grave (1965), An Angel for Satan and She Beast (both 1966) and Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), shown stateside as The Crimson Cult. The actress went on to appear in The Space Watch Murders (1975), Shivers (They Came from Within) (1975), Piranha (1978), The Silent Scream (1980) and the TV film Dark Shadows (1990) and its 1991 spin-off TV series. Co-stars Paul Muller (billed in the U.S. version as Paul Miller) and Helga Line also had extensive genre careers. Muller was in Mystery of the Black Jungle and Black Devils of Kali (both 1954), I Vampiri (1956), released in the U.S. as The Devil’s Commandment;
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Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete (1960), Kali Jug, Goddess of Vengeance (1963), Malenka (Fangs of the Living Dead) and Venus in Furs (both 1969), Eugenie [q.v.] and Count Dracula (both 1970), Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Lady Frankenstein (1971), A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973), a second version of Eugenie (1974) and Bloody Psycho (1989). Line appeared in The Blancheville Monster (1963), Mission Bloody Mary (1965), Exorcism’s Daughter (1971), Horror Express (1972), The Mummy’s Revenge, The Dracula Saga, The Vampire’s Night Org y, Santo contra Dr. Muerte (Santo vs. Dr. Death) and Horror Rises from the Tomb (all 1973), When the Screaming Stops (The Lorelei’s Grasp) (1974), Killing of the Dolls (1975), Curse of the Black Cat (1977), Stigma (1980) and The Devil’s Breath (1993). Rik Battaglia, who played the ill-fated David, was best known for European Westerns and adventure films but he was also in Minotaur, the Wild Beast of Crete (1960), Sandokan the Great (1963), The Treasure of the Aztecs and Pyramid of the Sun God (both 1965), Mysterious Island (1973) and Ten Little Indians (1974). Nightmare Castle’s director, Mario Caiano, helmed nearly 50 features, including Vampire in Venice (1988). Phil Hardy in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986) was critical of Nightmare Castle: “Less a horror film than a well intentioned, but bad, love poem addressed to Steele, this picture’s complicated plot is simply strung together to allow us to see her being lustful, tortured, disfigured, sleeping, walking, fainting, loving, afraid, and so on…. [It is] completely structured around her presence…. The film seems frozen in its fetishistic contemplation of Steele, an impression underlined by Ennio Morricone’s repetitive score.” More on the mark was James O’Neill in Terror on Tape (1994): “Robust Steele vehicle…. Barbara excels in a typical dual role, while the pale gray photography and Ennio Morricone’s richly romantic music create a marvelous mood.” The Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide (1989) noted, “This Italo horror has truly eerie photography and the sepulchral beauty of Barbara Steele…” while Luca M. Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta in Spaghetti Nightmares (1996) called it an “[e]legantly executed story of love after death.” Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972) opined, “Notable mainly for Morricone’s wildly romantic renditions of ‘Sweet Genevieve.’ (He uses the melody much as Victor Young used it in The Sun Shines Bright [1953]. Coincidence?).” While some sources claim Steele did not dub her voice in the English-language versions of her horror movies, Video Watchdog #7 (September-October 1991) states, “In her dual role in [Nightmare Castle], Barbara Steele dubs the voice of Jenny Hampton, but not Muriel.”
Not of This Earth (1957; 69 minutes) Producer-Director: Roger Corman. Screenplay: Charles Griffith and Mark Hanna. Photography: John Mescall. Editor: Charles Gross, Jr. Music: Ronald Stein. Sound: Philip Mitchell. Production Manager-Assistant Director: Lou Place. Makeup: Curly Batson. Special Effects: Paul Blaisdell. Titles: Paul Julian. CAST: Paul Birch (Paul Johnson), Beverly Garland (Nadine Storey), Morgan Jones (Officer Harry Sherbourne), William Roerick (Dr. F.W. Rochelle), Jonathan Haze ( Jerry “Pittsburgh” Perrin), Dick Miller ( Joe Piper), Anne Carroll (Alien Woman), Pat Flynn (Officer Simmons), Barbara Bohrer (Waitress), Roy Engel (Police Sergeant Walton), Tamar Cooper ( Joanne Oxford), Harold Fong (Chinese Victim), Gail Ganley, Ralph Reed (Teenagers), Hank Mann (Drunk), Tom Graeff (Parking Attendant), Jan Boleslavsky (Alien Contact), Lyle Latell (Second Paul Johnson).
One of the best low-budget science fiction films of the 1950s, Not of This Earth was produced and directed by Roger Corman and double-billed with his Attack of the Crab Monsters (q.v.) early in 1957. Although cheaply, and somewhat carelessly made (a microphone
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Lobby card for Not of This Earth (1957) picturing Beverly Garland and Paul Birch
is visible in a scene where the nurse serves her policeman boyfriend coffee), the film is good entertainment in its mixture of horror, science fiction and underplayed comedy. Paul Birch dominates the proceedings as the alien vampire who eschews fangs in favor of blood transfusions, and Beverly Garland is just as good as his self-reliant nurse. Jonathan Haze is amusing as the alien’s seedy houseboy and Dick Miller contributes a memorable cameo as a vacuum cleaner salesman who fast talks his way into oblivion. Made for under $100,000 by Corman’s Los Altos Productions, Not of This Earth brought in over one million dollars at the box office. Two teenagers (Gail Ganley, Ralph Reed) make out in a car parked on a suburban street and when the girl says goodnight and walks home she meets a mysterious man who uses his eyes to kill her and then draws off her blood. The man is an alien from the wartorn planet Davanna who has come to Earth in search of blood for his people. He takes on the guise of Earthman Paul Johnson (Birch) but always wears dark glasses to conceal he has no pupils. He uses the power of his own eyes to destroy those of his victims and burn out their brains but he cannot tolerate loud noise. He goes to a hospital for a blood transfusion and meets nurse Nadine Storey (Garland) and gets an appointment with Dr. Rochelle (William Roerick) who refuses to give him help without first finding out his blood type. Johnson places the doctor under his spell and orders him never to discuss his case. After receiving the transfusion, Johnson offers Nadine $200 a week to live at this home and tend to his daily need of new blood. She agrees to do so as the doctor confirms his patient is dying from the destruction of the cellular structures of his blood. When Johnson’s houseboy
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and chauffeur, Jeremy Perrin (Haze), spies his boss putting containers of blood in a refrigerator, the alien threatens to eliminate him if he does not mind his own business. Arriving at Johnson’s rented house, Nadine meets Jeremy who makes overtures to her, which she rejects. Johnson shows her to her room and then locks her in but Nadine objects. He tells her that no person sleeps in insecure quarters where he comes from but when Nadine asks him about his origins, the foreign-accented Johnson does not reply. That night the alien uses a teleporter to communicate with his contact ( Jan Boleslavsky) on Davanna, who details his assignments on Earth. Since Johnson has already taken human form, he is next to increase the amount of blood teleported to Davanna and send a sub-human specimen. If these phases are successful he is then to conquer the Earth, and if they are not he is to obliterate the planet before he dies. The next morning Nadine questions Jeremy about his job with Johnson and he tells her he is being paid $300 a week, mainly to drive his boss various places and keep everyone out of the basement. Johnson answers the door for a vacuum cleaner salesman (Dick Miller) who wants to demonstrate his product. The alien allows the man to go to his basement to use his product to unplug a pipe and while there he burns out the man’s brain, drains his blood and puts his body in the furnace. When Johnson notices a trio of winos in a park, he orders his servant to invite them to his house that night for dinner. Nadine decides to explore the basement and finds empty flasks but accidentally leaves her bathing cap behind. Dr. Rochelle shows up with her boyfriend, police motor patrolman Harry Sherbourne (Morgan Jones). When Johnson and Jeremy get back home, Harry recognizes the chauffeur as Pittsburgh Perrin, an ex-convict. That night Jeremy brings the three derelicts who are promptly done away with by the alien, who teleports their blood to his planet. The local police find a thirteenth victim with her eyes and brain burned out and Sergeant Walton (Roy Engel) worries about vampire killer headlines. While walking that night, the alien meets a Chinaman (Harold Fong) who he puts under a spell and takes back home. He is transported to Davanna via the teleporter. The next day Jeremy tells Nadine about the winos and the Chinaman and she takes a sample of liquid from a glass Johnson drank from for analysis. Rochelle informs her it is a compound made up of every known vitamin, the perfect food. In town, the alien meets a woman (Anne Carroll) who has come from Davanna. She informs him the war there is finished, all the blood on the planet is gone, and his contact has been murdered. The woman also tells Johnson they will not be able to return home. Since she is badly in need of blood, he breaks into Rochelle’s hospital office and gives her a transfusion, not knowing it is the blood of a rabid dog. Johnson tells the woman to go to a hotel but after he leaves she becomes nauseous and goes back to the hospital where she collapses. Johnson tries to abduct a parking lot attendant (Tom Graeff ) but when someone honks a horn the young man manages to escape. The alien hunts him down and kills him. Rochelle gets a call to come to the hospital to tend to the dying woman and Harry goes with him. After finding the woman has died, the two men sees she has no pupils and was wearing dark glasses like Johnson. Harry calls Nadine and tells her to get out of the Johnson house since he thinks her boss may not be human, but she decides to stay and look for evidence. She and Jeremy find the teleporter, and Jeremy sees a skull in the furnace and throws it at Johnson. Johnson fries Jeremy’s brain and then attempts to kill Nadine, but is put off by her screams and she runs away. The alien materializes a bat-like creature that he sends to kill Rochelle. Johnson is able to catch up with Nadine and place her under his telepathic control. Johnson kills motorcycle cop officer Simmons (Pat Flynn) with his eyes and tries to do the same to Harry but he loses control of his car, wrecks it and is consumed when it explodes. The entranced Nadine, who has walked to the house, is about to teleport herself
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to Davanna when the alien’s death breaks his spell over her. Nadine and Harry later stand at Johnson’s tombstone which reads “Here Lies a Man Who Is Not of This Earth.” They do not see another alien coming toward them. Many consider Not of This Earth to be one of Roger Corman’s more noteworthy early films. Variety touted it as a “[g]ood science fiction thriller” while the British Monthly Film Bulletin stated, “This grisly little tale, falling into a division between horror and science fiction, introduces one or two relatively original variations on the macabre.” In a detailed article on the film in Castle of Frankenstein #23 (1974), Abbie Herrick wrote, “The dialogue is snappy and realistic…. Every element blends in effectively to progress the film to its culmination…. The film is exciting in its Einensteinian ending … terrifying in that its evil is ‘something’ that could pass as one of us, and universal in its anti-war message.” Randy Palmer in Paul Blaisdell: Monster Maker (1997) stated, “It was made with the same brevity as most of his other productions, but the … screenplay contained enough off-the-wall elements to make it seem fresh and exciting.” Paul Blaisdell created the briefly seen bat-like monster and the teleporter. The former was a silly looking thing that resembled a flying lamp shade with an insect-like creature atop it. The scene where the thing drops on Dr. Rochelle’s head and apparently sucks out his brain is scary, especially when blood begins oozing out from under the creature. To show the pupil-less eyes of the alien, Birch wore white contact lenses that proved to quite painful if left in too long. Near the end of filming he got frustrated with production delays and refused to finish the picture. Veteran actor Lyle Latell, who had the physical build of Birch, was called in to complete the movie. Parts of the music score for the film are included in the compact disc Not of This Earth!: The Film Music of Ronald Stein (Varese Sarabande VSD-5634), released in 1995. Roger Corman later produced three remakes. The first (1988) starred Traci Lords and Arthur Roberts and was directed by Jim Wynorski. While not as good as the original, it was a worthy follow-up. As a sign of the times, Beverly Garland’s bathing suit scene from the original was replaced by Lord’s nude shower. Terence H. Winkless directed the third version, a 1995 teleflick starring Michael York, Elizabeth Bardondes and Mason Adams. In 1998 the property was done again as Star Portal, starring Athena Massey as a female alien and Steven Bauer as the doctor; it was directed by Jon Purdy.
Oh! Those Most Secret Agents! (1965; 83 minutes; Color) Executive Producer: Antonio Colantuoni. Director: Lucio Fulci. Screenplay: Vittorio Vighi, Mario Guerra, Amedeo Sollazzo, Lucio Fulci and Vittorio Metz. Photography: Bitto [Adalberto] Albertini. Editor: Ornella Micheli. Music: Piero Umiliani. Sound: Franco Groppioni. Sets–Special Effects: Sergio Canevari. Production Managers: Albino Morandini and Orlando Orsini. Makeup: Telemaco Tilli. Assistant Directors: Nino Zanchin and Giorgio Galizia. CAST: Franco Franchi (Franco), Ciccio Ingrassia (Ciccio), Ingrid Schoeller, Aroldo Tieri (Married Couple), Carla Calo, Nino Terzo, Enzo Andronico (Soviet Agents), Annie Gorassini (Maid), Poldo Bendandi (Soviet Chief ), Nando Angelini, Piero Morgia (American Agents), Puccio Ceccarelli (Chinese Torturer), Alessandro Tedeschi (Soviet Assassin), Seyna Seyn (Chinese Agent), Nicola di Gioia (Goat Torturer), John Bartha (Electronic Treatment Doctor).
The Italian comedy team of Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia began working together in the 1950s; during the 1960s and 1970s they starred in over one hundred feature films, mainly satirizing popular movie genres. Despite their hefty cinematic output, the duo’s movies rarely made it stateside and those that did were mostly incomprehensible to viewers thanks to the team’s silly “comedy” antics that did not translate well this side of the
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Atlantic. Their only film to get wide distribution in the U.S. was War, Italian Style (1967) and that was due to having Buster Keaton, Martha Hyer and Fred Clark in its cast. Produced by Mega Film in Italy as 002 Agenti Segretissimi (The 002 Secret Agents), Oh! Those Most Secret Agents! poked fun at the popular James Bond craze but it failed to attract an audience when Allied Artists released it in late March 1965, a year after its Italian premiere. Later in 1965 Sherpix Pictures reissued the feature as 00-2 Most Secret Agents. The film’s original running time of 90 minutes was cut by seven minutes for U.S. bookings. At a Mediterranean resort filled with beautiful girls, vagabonds Franco (Franchi) and Ciccio (Ingrasia) read a newspaper advertisement that convinces them to rob what they think is a vacant palatial villa. They are unaware that the ad was placed by an espionage ring working for a voyeuristic robot wanting patsies for an experiment. The two bunglers are captured by the spies and a microchip containing a supposedly bogus formula for a powerful new secret weapon is implanted in Franco’s tooth. The spies hope to use the duo to fool agents from other countries while they work to perfect the real formula, which they put in Franco’s head by mistake. Operatives from the United States, the Soviet Union and Red China converge on Franco and Ciccio in hopes of getting the microchip while the two chase scantily clad young women on the beach. When the spies realize that Franco has the real formula, they try to communicate with him and Ciccio by sending messages written on women’s panties but the duo prefer the wearers. Mostly through ignorance and accidents, Franco and Ciccio manage to avoid being captured until the Americans finally pull all their teeth and obtain the formula. No longer of use to the secret agents of the world, the vagrants return to their lives of petty thievery. While Oh! Those Most Secret Agents! contains a modicum of spy film ingredients, like futuristic gadgetry and semi-naked girls, plus a subplot of a jealous husband (Aroldo Tieri) suspecting Franco and Ciccio of compromising his beautiful wife (Ingrid Schoeller), it mainly concentrates on the woes of Franco in trying to get rid of the unwanted tooth and the boys’ avoidance of being captured by foreign operatives. Matt Blake and David Deal in The Eurospy Guide (2004) stated, “If the mere prospect of a Franco and Ciccio film doesn’t break you out in a cold sweat … [this] is a neatly made, hugely enjoyable film. It’s not, perhaps, as well constructed as some of their other vehicles … but it certainly speeds along at a rate of knots and has a few good gags. There’s plenty of mileage made of general clichés….” For the majority of viewers, Paul Mavis summed it up best in The Espionage Filmography (2001) when he commented, “Unwatchable.” Oh! Those Most Secret Agents! was directed by Lucio Fulci who helmed Franco and Ciccio the next year in the sci-fi spoof 002 Operazione Luna (002 Operation Moon), which had no stateside showings. Fulci, later dubbed the “Godfather of Gore,” is best remembered for such stomach-turning horrors as Zombie (1979), The Beyond (Seven Doors to Death), The Gates of Hell, The House By the Cemetery and The Black Cat (all 1981) and Zombie 3 (1988).
Paris Playboys (1954; 62 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: William Beaudine. Screenplay: Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: John C. Fuller. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Charles Cooper. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Sets: Robert Priestley. Wardrobe: Smoke Kring. Special Effects: Ray Mercer. Continuity: John Franco. Assistant Director: Edward Morey, Jr. CAST: Leo Gorcey (Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney), Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones/Professor Maurice Gaston Le Beau), Bernard Gorcey (Louie Dumbrowski), Veola Vonn
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(Mimi Du Bois), Steven Geray (Dr. Gaspard), John Wengraf (Vidal), Marianna [Mari] Lynn (Celeste Gambon), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck), Bennie Bartlett (Butch), Fritz Feld (Maitre d’ Marcel), Gordon Clark ( Jacques Gambon), Alphonse Martell (Butler Pierre), Robin Hughes, Roy Gordon (Henchmen).
Sach Jones (Huntz Hall) is a look-a-like for noted French physicist Professor Maurice Gaston Le Beau (Hall); when the scientist goes missing, he is reported to be a denizen of Louie Dumbrowski’s (Bernard Gorcey) sweet shop in the Bowery. Le Beau’s rocket fuel is coveted by foreign powers and he has been the target of several assassination attempts. Members of the Scientific Section of the United Nations’ Intelligence Agency seek out Le Beau at Louie’s place only to meet the simple-minded Sach. After they show Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey) pictures of the scientist, they come up with the idea of having Sach impersonate Le Beau, hoping his kidnappers will set him free. Leaving their pals Chuck (David Condon) and Butch (Bennie Bartlett) behind, Slip, Sach and Louie fly to Paris with the scientists. Slip tells Sach that Le Beau, who has been reported by the media as being an amnesiac, has a beautiful fiancée, Mimi Du Bois (Veola Vonn). When Mimi learns that Le Beau has been found, she consults with his physician, Dr. Gaspard (Steven Geray), who tells her he can be cured of his amnesia. The doctor is secretly working with Vidal ( John Wengraf ), an underworld figure representing spies who are after the rocket fuel formula. In Paris, Sach, despite his usual loony antics, is able to convince both Mimi and Dr. Gaspard that he is Le Beau but when it is suggested by the doctor that he renew his research, the young woman says he must have his memory restored. Mimi informs Sach they will be married the next week and go on a prolonged honeymoon. When secret agents try to murder Sach, he decides to go back to the Bowery but Slip tells him they must stay in Paris and uphold the honor of their country. Le Beau, who is incognito on a tropical isle and has been romancing several young women, sees a picture of Sach with Mimi in a newspaper, becomes jealous and goes home. Once in Paris, Le Beau finds Louie in his house and tells him to get out. When Sach asks Louie why he is packing, the old man becomes bewildered at his friend’s quixotic behavior. Le Beau then proposes to Mimi as Slip becomes confused over what he thinks is Sach’s strange actions but he soon realizes what has happened when the two look-a-likes come face to face. Le Beau goes after Sach with a sword, ends up fighting with Slip and is then secreted in a closet. Vidal, Dr. Gaspard and their henchmen (Robin Hughes, Roy Gordon) demand that Sach, who they now think is the real Le Beau, prove that the rocket fuel formula works and he puts together a recipe that he pours into a miniature missile. Le Beau is set free by Mimi but the henchmen bring them to the lab as the small rocket zooms around the room. It crashes and the explosion knocks out the spies, who are taken into custody. For his heroism, Sach is awarded the Legion of Honor by French officials while the disappointed Le Beau is comforted by Mimi. The thirty-third “Bowery Boys” production, Paris Playboys has only a faint sci-fi angle, the development of a futuristic rocket fuel. Made as Paris Bombshells, it is a below-average entry. Variety stated, “The laughs don’t come frequently nor with ease in the script…. Main springboards, per usual, are the malaprops of Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall’s crazy antics….” The Hollywood Reporter labeled it “typical Bowery Boys filmfare, wild and noisy slapstick.” David Hayes and Brent Walker in The Films of the Bowery Boys (1984) called it “a labored non-comedy. Shot on a set that looks like the one used for Loose in London [1953], and resembling that picture in some other ways, it is no more than a dull procession of misunderstandings.” The authors note that a scene where Sach is nearly murdered while reading in bed is a reworking of a similar one in Loose in London.
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Phantom Trails (1955; 52 minutes) Producer: William F. Broidy. Photography: John J. Martin. Editor: Carl L. Pierson. Music: Lee Zahler. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Frank Webster. Sets: Mowbray Berkeley and Vin Taylor. Production Supervisor: A.R. Milton. Makeup: Charles Huber. Special Effects: Ray Mercer. Assistant Director: William Beaudine, Jr. CAST: Guy Madison (Marshal Wild Bill Hickok), Andy Devine (Deputy Marshal Jingles P. Jones). Episodes: “Ghost Rider”: Director: Wesley Barry. Screenplay: Bill Raynor. CAST: Paul Bryar (Ed Grannis), Steve Pendleton (Gurt Lesley), Hank Patterson ( Jess Morgan), William Vedder (Pops Garroway), Ethan Laidlaw (Ben Lesley). “A Close Shave for the Marshal”: Director: Frank McDonald. Screenplay: Maurice Tombragel. CAST: Steve Brodie (Matt), Byron Foulger (Henry Hopper), Harry Harvey, Sr. (Sheriff ), Robert Filmer (Banker Wade), Burt Wenland ( Jake).
Like the earlier The Ghost of Crossbones Canyon (1952) [q.v.], Phantom Trails was made up of two episodes of the popular The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok television series that ran from 1951 to 1958 for a total of 118 episodes. Its popularity spawned a 217-episode radio show of the same title, also starring Guy Madison and Andy Devine, that was broadcast from 1951 to 1954. The TV entries “Ghost Rider” (originally telecast in 1952) and “A Close Shave for the Marshal” made up Phantom Trails. While the latter had nothing to do with the supernatural, “Ghost Rider” told of U.S. Marshal Wild Bill Hickok (Madison) having his deputy, Jingles P. Jones (Devine), dress like a ghost and ride through Banshee City’s cemetery in order for them to capture an outlaw gang plaguing area ranchers. Allied Artists released this pastiche to theaters in May 1955 without advertising that it was made up of television shows.
Port of Hell (1954; 80 minutes) Producer: William F. Broidy. Associate Producer: A. Robert Nunes. Director: Harold D. Schuster. Screenplay: Gil Doud, Tom Hubbard and Fred Eggers. Story: D.D. Beauchamp and Gil Doud. Photography: John J. Martin. Editor: Ace Herman. Music Director: Edward J. Kay. Art Director: George Troast. Sound: Al Overton. Production Supervisor: A.R. Milton. Makeup: Philip Scheer. Special Effects: Ray Mercer. Continuity: Joyce Webb. Assistant Director: William Beaudine, Jr. CAST: Dane Clark (Gibson “Gib” Pardee), Wayne Morris (Stanley Povich), Carole Mathews ( Julie Povich), Marshall Thompson (Marshall “Marsh” Walker), Marjorie Lord (Kay Walker), Otto Waldis (Captain Snyder), Harold Peary (Leo), Tom Hubbard (Nick), Gene Roth (Enemy Ship Captain), Victor Sen Yung (Enemy Radio Operator), Jim Alexander (Chief Parker), Charles E. Fredericks ( John Reynolds), Dee Ann Johnston (Walker Child).
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is considered the landmark feature film to deal with an atomic weapon brought into the country for the purpose of detonating a nuclear holocaust, but it was preceded by Port of Hell, which Allied Artists put in theaters late in 1954. Four years later, the studio’s release Hell’s Five Hours (q.v.) covered some of the same ground although it was more narrow in that it involved the possible destruction of a government defense facility. Made as Dynamite Anchorage, Port of Hell was dubbed an “exciting, suspenseful drama” by Film Daily. Variety declared it “a notch above average supporting fare.” On the other hand, the New York Times thought it was a “mild, shipshod little drama” but liked the work of Dane Clark: “It has a good, forthright performance by [Clark] and some picturesque glimpses of an active waterfront, both of which are wasted…. [I]t’s admirable to find Mr. Clark trouping instead of merely ambling.” Former Navy commander Gib Pardee (Clark) takes over the position of Los Angeles harbor port warden and, strictly adhering to rules, he arrests Stanley Povich (Wayne Morris),
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Lobby card for Port of Hell (1954) picturing Carole Mathews, Wayne Morris and Dane Clark
a tugboat operator, for smoking in an off-limits locale. Later Povich’s sister Julie (Carole Mathews) chews Gib out for his actions and warns him that his stiff-necked attitude could lead to his demise. That evening Kay Walker (Marjorie Lord) shows up to take her wheelchair-bound husband Marsh (Marshall Thompson) to their anniversary dinner at the White Swan Café. Gib declines an invitation although he and Marsh, who is his harbor assistant, were in the Navy together. He tells them he is a loner without friends. Gib and Parker ( Jim Alexander), the harbor police chief, check the area and find fishing boat moorings are packed; since this presents a fire hazard, Gib says he plans to put new rules in place. While Marsh and his wife are having dinner, he learns that ship captain Snyder (Otto Waldis) has been sending coded messages. The freighter Beneva is supposed to have a cargo of Mexican firecrackers but is really concealing an atomic bomb. Nearby is an enemy ship set to detonate the bomb in 24 hours in a plan dubbed “Operation Thunderbolt,” which is designed to wipe out Los Angeles. When Gib’s orders about the moorings are put into effect, several fishing boat owners become upset; Leo (Harold Peary) refuses to obey them and is jailed. Gib also has problems with a security guard who has not been keeping track of trucks carrying cargo as they arrive and leave the docks and he gets into a fight with one of the truckers, Nick (Tom Hubbard). Snyder receives a message from the captain (Gene Roth) and radio operator (Victor Sen Yung) of the detonator ship saying that Operation Thunderbolt is on schedule. Gib and Julie are attracted to each other but Stan warns his sister
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Lobby card for Port of Hell (1954) picturing Otto Waldis, Dane Clark and Marshall Thompson
to stay away from the port warden. When Marsh is radioed that the Beneva and its cargo of firecrackers is nearing Los Angeles, he tells Gib who boards the freighter along with Chief Parker as it anchors outside the harbor. When Snyder tells Gib the ship was last at a port with cholera and there may be rats on board, the port warden implements new regulations and tells the captain he and his crew must remain on board the vessel for 24 hours. The port warden later finds Snyder on shore in violation of his ship’s quarantine. The agitated Snyder is arrested after he confesses about the atomic bomb and its planned detonation. Gib decides to try and tow the Beneva out to sea. Marsh wants to call in the authorities but Gib fears this will cause mass panic and he goes to seek Stan’s help but finds he is not at home. Gib does see Julie and he tells her he loves her. When Gib finds Stan in a café, he gets hit but when he explains about the bomb, the tugboat owner agrees to help and enlists Nick and Leo as his crew. It will take about ten hours to get the freighter safely out of the range of the city. Gib, Marsh and the three tug boaters go to the now deserted Beneva and Gib gets on board as Marsh, Stan and his crew begin to tow the ship out to sea. When they get thirty miles from the harbor, Stan tells Nick and Leo to drop the tow lines. Picking up Gib, they head back to Los Angeles harbor. The atomic bomb is detonated but causes no damage and the government announces the explosion was only a test. Julie is waiting for Gib when he returns to port.
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Private Eyes (1953; 64 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Edward Bernds. Screenplay: Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds. Photography: Carl Guthrie. Editor: John C. Fuller. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Charles Cooper. Sets: Clarence Steensen. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Wardrobe: Smoke Kring. Makeup: Norman Pringle. Continuity: Ted Schilz. Assistant Director: Austen Jewell. CAST: Leo Gorcey (Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney), Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones), Bernard Gorcey (Louie Dumbrowski), Joyce Holden (Myra Hagen), Robert Osterloh (Professor Damon), William Phillips (Soapy), Rudy Lee (Herbie), William Forrest ( John Graham), Chick Chandler (Eddie), David [Gorcey] Condon (Chuck), Bennie Bartlett (Butch), Lou Lubin (Oskar), Tim Ryan (Policeman Andy), Peter Mamakos (Chico), Edith Leslie (Nurse Aggie), Myron Healey (Karl), Gil Perkins (Al), Emil Sitka (Wheelchair Patient), Steve Stevens (Boy), Carl Saxe (Attendant).
Bowery denizens Slip Mahoney (Leo Gorcey) and Sach Jones (Huntz Hall) are in charge of a youth athletic club at the back of Louie Dumbrowski’s (Bernard Gorcey) sweet shop; Louie complains the noise is keeping customers away. Young Herbie (Rudy Lee) clips Sach on the chin during a sparring match and the latter finds he is now a mind reader. When Eddie (Chick Chandler) offers to sell Slip his Eagle Eye Detective Agency for $400, the profit-minded Slip buys it for $200 borrowed from Louie, figuring Sach’s new powers (Slip says Sach is “wired for mental telegraphy”) will bring in business. Once the boys are in business, beautiful blonde Myra Hagen ( Joyce Holden) shows up wanting protection from an assassin. Giving Slip a manila envelope containing the names of those she suspects if she is murdered, the young woman flees and leaves behind a fur coat. Sach, who wears a deerstalker and sports a pipe, puts the envelope in the office safe and, needing a place to hide its combination, he also puts that inside and locks the door. Myra is abducted by an armed man, Chico (Peter Mamakos). Officer Andy (Tim Ryan) inspects the fur coat and identifies it as part of a heist. Professor Damon (Robert Osterloh) operates a sanitarium as a front for a theft ring that steals fur coats nationwide and alters them for re-sale. Myra worked for Damon but wants out of the racket and tells him about the letter she left with the detectives. Slip and Sach receive a visit from Apex Insurance Company investigator John Graham (William Forrest) who is looking into the stolen fur coat racket. He offers the boys a $10,000 reward to help catch the gang and he also wants Myra’s letter. As Slip, Chuck (David Condon) and Butch (Bennie Bartlett) look for Myra, Sach decides to use a shotgun to open the safe and when that fails he makes a bomb out of gunpowder. He blows the safe apart but the blast knocks him out and he loses his mind-reading abilities. Damon forces Myra to telephone the detectives and ask for the return of her envelope. When two of the professor’s henchmen, Chico and Soapy (William Phillips), show up to get it, the missive cannot be found. Herbie, who has been brought in to hit Sach again so he will regain his powers, is abducted by the thugs and taken to the sanitarium. Slip calls Graham, the head of the fur theft gang, and tells him Herbie has been kidnapped. Damon later phones Slip and tells him the boy will be returned when he gets the letter. Karl (Myron Healey), one of Damon’s men, loves Myra and warns her that his boss plans to do away with her and the boy. She finds Herbie, who calls Slip and Sach and tells them what is happening. Slip locates the envelope and, disguised as the noted Viennese Dr. Hockenlopper, goes to the sanitarium with Sach, who pretends to be his wealthy patient, Mrs. Abernathy. Slip and Sach look for Herbie with the latter encountering Graham. Telling Graham who he really is, Sach hands him the envelope so he can get the promised reward. Graham sends his henchmen after the detectives. Slip locates Myra and Herbie but the boy slugs Sach, thinking he is one of the
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crooks. The punch brings back Sach’s mind-reading abilities. When Graham promises to help Slip, Sach, Myra and Herbie escape, Sach reads his mind. Graham holds them at gunpoint but is stopped by Karl. Slip takes the envelope and is chased by the thugs. He lures them into the water therapy bath area where Herbie knocks them out with a barbell and they fall into the vat. After receiving their reward, Slip and Sach open the Bowery Boys’ Club, with Karl as the athletic director. During the ceremonies, in which Myra serves as hostess, the kids start a food fight with Slip, Sach and Louie getting pies in the face. Private Eyes, the thirty-third “Bowery Boys” entry, was released at the end of 1953. Made as Bowery Bloodhounds, it was one of several that used a genre hook to exploit otherwise low-grade comedy. In this case it was Sach’s ability to read minds. Variety noted, “There are some funny moments in pic…. Gorcey with his malaprops and Hall’s craziness make film enjoyable.” David Hayes and Brent Walker wrote in The Films of the Bowery Boys (1984), “Private Eyes is the fastest-paced entry in the Bowery Boys series and one of the funniest. Transcending its meager budget, the film is consistently brisk and does not let up for a moment, allowing Gorcey and Hall to romp freely. Much of the credit must be given to director Edward Bernds, who lets the boys perform without too much plot interference.” The authors noted that one scene in the film involving a man (Emil Sitka) in a wheelchair was reworked from the 1946 Three Stooges short Monkey Businessmen, also directed by Bernds. A major asset to the film was beautiful leading lady Joyce Holden.
Queen of Outer Space (1958; 80 minutes; Color) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: Edward Bernds. Screenplay: Charles Beaumont. Story: Ben Hecht. Photography: William P. Whitley. Editor: William Austin. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: Dave Milton. Sound: Charles G. Schelling and Joe Lapis. Sets: Joseph Kish. Production Manager: Edward Morey, Jr. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Special Effects: Milt Rice and Jack Cosgrove. Wardrobe: Irene Caine, Sid Mintz, Sophia Scott Stutz, Thomas Pierce and Neva Bourne. Assistant to Producer: Lester A. Sansom. Assistant Director: William Beaudine, Jr. CAST: Zsa Zsa Gabor (Talleah), Eric Fleming (Captain Neal Patterson), Dave Willock (Lieutenant Mike Cruze), Laurie Mitchell (Queen Yllana), Lisa Davis (Motiya), Paul Birch (Professor Konrad), Patrick Waltz (Lieutenant Larry Taylor), Barbara Darrow (Kaeel), Marilyn Buferd (Odeena), Guy Prescott (Colonel Ramsey), Joi Lansing (Blonde Girlfriend), Mary Ford, Marya Stevens, Laura Mason, Lynn Cartwright, Kathy Marlowe, Coleen Drake, Tania Velia, Norma Young, Marjorie Durant (Venusians), Gerry Gaylor, Brandy Bryan (Venusian Guards), June McCall, Ruth Lewis (Amazons).
Queen of Outer Space was made by Ben Schwalb, the producer of the “Bowery Boys” series, and directed by Edward Bernds, who often worked on the same programmers. It was written by Charles Beaumont from a story, “Queen of the Universe,” by Ben Hecht; that was also the film’s working title. Filmed in CinemaScope with color by De Luxe, the production was released in the fall of 1958, sometimes co-featured with Frankenstein 1970 (q.v.). A cheap, light-hearted space romp, it was noteworthy at the time because its credits did not roll until nearly fifteen minutes had elapsed. Reused from Bernds’ World Without End (1956) were sets, special effects and a tatty-looking giant spider. Some of the costumes in Queen of Outer Space came from MGM’s Forbidden Planet (1956). Although the script is written as a spoof, Bernds directed it as a straightforward space melodrama, which is surprising considering his lengthy background in comedy writing and directing. The film’s chief asset, as well as box office pull, is Zsa Zsa Gabor, who handles her role with finesse and is stunning as a Venusian scientist with perfect hair and wearing a series of lovely gowns designed by Thomas Pierce. While considered far more of a personality
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than an actress, Gabor had several legitimate film credits including Moulin Rouge (1952), The Story of Three Loves and Lili (both 1953), Death of a Scoundrel (1956), in which she appeared with her third husband George Sanders and his brother Tom Conway; Touch of Evil (1958), Picture Mommy Dead (1966), Every Girl Should Have One (1979), and Johann Strauss — Der Konig ohne Krone (1986). Although the film is filled with pretty Venusian maidens, the rest of the cast is bland when compared to glamour queen Zsa Zsa. Eric Fleming, who earlier starred in Allied’s Fright (1956) [q.v.], is a stilted hero and Dave Willock and Patrick Waltz are blah as his wisecracking sidekicks. Only Paul Birch manages to instill some dignity in the role of a seasoned scientist, and it is his character who ends up with a bevy of beauties at the film’s finale; Birch starred in Allied’s Not of This Earth (1957) [q.v.]. The title role in the film is played by Laurie Mitchell as the radiation-scarred Queen Yllana. Concealed behind a mask in most scenes, she can do little with the role other than act bitchy. In 1985, astronauts Captain Neil Patterson (Fleming), Lieutenant Mike Cruze (Willock) and Lieutenant Larry Turner (Waltz) are assigned by Colonel Ramsey (Guy Prescott) to take scientist Professor Konrad (Birch) to a way station in space. As they get close to it, the four men see a series of beams shoot through space and one of them obliterates the space port. When the beams start coming at their rocket, Patterson orders a maneuvering technique but they end up traveling at such a terrific speed that all the men pass out. When they awake, the ship is in a snow-covered area thanks to its automatic landing controls. They decide to explore the planet after finding it has an Earth-like atmosphere. Once they get below the snow line and into a jungle-like area, Konrad announces he believes they have landed on Venus. The only sound they hear is an electronic signal. The next day they are captured by six beautiful women in short skirts and high heels who take them to a palace. There they meet the masked Queen Yllana (Mitchell) who tells them the Earth has been monitored for years and she believes they have come to Venus to make war. Motiya (Lisa Davis), one of the lovely Venusians, reports to her boss, scientist Talleah (Gabor), about the men’s arrival and she vows to see them. Mike and Larry note the absence of men on Venus. The prisoners are sent to a cell as Yllana declares they will be put to death. Konrad tells the others he believes the Venusians destroyed the space station. Talleah brings them food and says she is the leader of a group of rebels fed up with the queen’s cruelty. She tells them that several years before, Venus nearly lost a war with the planet Mordo and that Yllana led a women’s revolt against the men who started the conflict. Only the males who were needed survived, and they are housed on Tyrus, a prison colony. As Talleah hides, the queen returns and offers to meet with Neil. After she leaves, his friends declare that Yllana is attracted to the captain and suggest he use romance to change her mind about them. In Yllana’s quarters, the woman continues her tirade against the astronauts, saying their space outpost was to be used to attack Venus. After she confesses to being lonely, Neil tries to get her to take off the mask she wears but she refuses. When he pulls it off, her he finds her face is horribly disfigured and she tells him it was caused from the radiation that resulted because of the war the men of Venus started. She orders Neil back to confinement. Later he and his comrades are taken to Talleah’s laboratory where she says the queen has ordered the destruction of Earth with a beta-disintegrator ray. When guards come looking for the men, Talleah, Motiya and Kaeel (Barbara Darrow) lead them through a secret door and out of the palace. They hide in the jungle but are hunted by the guards. The group takes refuge in a cave. Larry is attacked by a giant spider but Neil kills it. As they wait in the cave the captain finds he is falling for Talleah, while Mike becomes attracted to Kaeel and Larry to
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Motiya. Realizing they cannot survive without provisions, Konrad suggests that Talleah and the other women pretend to take them prisoners so they can try and destroy the ray machine, which is housed deep in the jungle. At the palace, Talleah and her aides turn on the queen. Neil removes Yllana’s mask and gives it to the scientist so she can pretend to be the monarch and stop the attack on Earth. The queen finds a ray gun and calls in her guards who capture the astronauts and Talleah. As Yllana makes the captives watch, she begins the procedure to aim the nuclear energy projector at Earth but it malfunctions and explodes. Talleah gives a signal to Motiya and her allies to storm the palace. Yllana is incinerated by her own weapon and her guards are overpowered. Talleah is made the new queen of Venus. After several weeks the astronauts’ ship is repaired and the women tell them goodbye. Just before they depart, the men receive a message from Colonel Ramsey telling them to stay on Venus until a relief expedition arrives, although it may take up to one year. The three astronauts prepare for romance with their beautiful Venusian lovers. Even Dr. Konrad finds himself surrounded by a flock of admiring beauties. As to be expected, Queen of Outer Space was not taken seriously by either viewers or critics. Castle of Frankenstein #24 (1974) noted, “Seems to have been intended as a spoof, but it’s funny in exactly the opposite way….” In Horror and Science Fictions Films: A Checklist (1972), Donald C. Willis felt the film was “Drab s-f ” and Welch Everman in Cult Science Fiction Films (1995) opined, “If you are really a student of bad cinema, you really couldn’t ask for much more in a sci-fi film.” A “Standout ‘Best Worst’ movie” is how Time Out Film Guide, 9th Edition 2001 (2000) termed it, adding, “The Place may be Venus, but the Time looks more like cocktail hour than the future; everyone’s wearing vintage Swanky Modes and ice-staking skirts. There’s also a fine display of ’50s sublimated sexuality in Poster for Queen of Outer Space (1958)
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the endless kissing scenes….” Most critics took potshots at the tacky special effects and sets, the most ludicrous being the cardboard beta-disintegrator which looks like it was designed for a junior high school play. Queen of Outer Space was turned into photoplay magazines in Brazil and France several years after its theatrical release. In 1963 Cosmos Aventuras published it in Brazil as A Raggia de Venus (The Queen of Venus) and the next year Star-Cine Cosmos did the same in France where it was titled La Reine de Venus (The Queen of Venus).
Sabu and the Magic Ring (1957; 61 minutes; Color) Producer: Maurice Duke. Director: George Blair. Screenplay: Samuel Roeca, Benedict Freedman and John Fenton Murray. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: William Austin. Music: Harry Sukman. Art Director: Dave Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Sets: Hal Gossman. Makeup: John Holden. Special Effects: Augie Lohman. Costumes: Eileen Younger. Continuity: James West. Assistant Director: Grayson Rogers. CAST: Sabu (Himself ), Daria Massey (Zumila), William Marshall (Ubal), Peter Mamakos (Mazufar), Vladimir Sokoloff (Old Fakir), John Doucette (Kimal), Robert Shafto (Caliph of Samukan), Bernard Rich (Ali), Robin Morse (Yunan), George Khoury (Phransigar), Cyril Delevanti (Abdul), Kenneth Terrell (Guard), John Lomma (Soldier).
Sabu (1924–63) was discovered by documentary film legend Robert Flaherty in India, where he (Sabu) was the stable boy for a maharajah. He starred in Flaherty’s British production Elephant Boy in 1937 and came to Hollywood where he appeared in The Jungle Book and Arabian Nights (both 1942), Cobra Woman (1944), Song of India (1949), Savage Drums (1951) and Jaguar (1956). He returned to England to make Black Narcissus and The End of the River (both 1958). Sabu and the Magic Ring, which ironically cast its star as a stable boy, was originally filmed as two episodes for a proposed television series that did not sell. Allied Artists issued it in November 1957. The Arabian Nights–themed fantasy was released on the lower half of a twin bill and then became kiddie matinee fare before going full circle, ending up on television in the late 1960s. Although shown theatrically in color, its TV prints were black and white. Sabu’s final films were Rampage (1963) and A Tiger Walks (1964). In the kingdom of Samukan, Sabu happily tends the caliph’s (Robert Shaffto) elephants until he is charged with stealing a priceless diamond. He tries to find the gem but ends up with a ring that he wants to give to his lady love, fruit seller Zumila (Daria Massey). They take it to storyteller Abdul (Cyril Delevanti) who recites a tale of King Solomon, who finds a silver ring and rubs it with a genie materializing and giving him his every wish. Sabu rubs his ring and Ubal (William Marshall), a giant genie, emerges and performs several chores at his new master’s behest. The diamond had been stolen by stable master Kimal ( John Doucette) for prime minister Mazufar (Peter Mamakos), who sells it to get money to get rid of the caliph and take his place. The prime minister attempts to steal the magic ring from Sabu but is thwarted by the genie. Sabu is whipped by the prime minister’s henchmen but he will not reveal where he hid the ring. Yunan (Robin Morse), a magician banished from his kingdom for practicing the black arts, offers to help the prime minister obtain it. Sabu is set free and goes to Zumila but she is abducted and put under a spell by Mazufar and Yunan. Having hidden the magic ring on his best elephant, Sabu tries to find it without success. Ubal appears and gives the ring to his master. When the genie locates Zumila, he is frozen by Yunan. Sabu finds the ring cannot help him rescue the girl. Mazufar and Yunan have a falling out over the ring. The imprisoned genie frees himself and helps Sabu rescue Zumila. Ubal sends Yunan to the South Pole. The lovers find out that Mazufar is slowly
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poisoning the caliph. A goose swallows the magic ring; after Sabu picks it out of a flock of geese, he and Zumila take refuge in a grotto at the behest of an old fakir (Vladimir Sokoloff ). Mazufar learns from the caliph that he plans to unite Samukan with Damascus when he dies and will hold a feast for its ruler, Prince Achmed. The prime minister hires Phransigar (George Khoury) and his men to murder the prince. The old fakir tries to keep Sabu and Zumila in the grotto so he can collect a reward posted for them. After laying an egg, the goose runs away but the egg falls from a ledge and lands on the young man’s head and breaks, revealing the magic ring. After Sabu and Ubal successfully battle forty thieves, the old fakir gets his reward. Zumila orders the genie to set her and Sabu free. The genie makes his master a prince who rides an elephant to the caliph’s palace, causing the prime minister to believe he is Achmed. Mazufar finds out he has been made a fool when the assassin returns to say he killed the prince but by now the genie has cured the caliph of food poisoning. Mazufar and his henchmen kidnap the caliph but he is saved by Sabu who uses a magic carpet given to him by the genie. Sabu, Ubal and Ali (Bernard Rich), another stable boy, fight Mazufar’s men until Zumila tells the genie to end all hostilities. Giving the magic ring to the genie so he can find eternal rest, Sabu and Zumila return to their former happy existence. Steven H. Scheuer’s Movies on TV 1969 –70 Edition (1969) called Sabu and the Magic Ring an “OK fantasy for the kiddies; it’s played for laughs, but could have used more.” Leonard Maltin’s 2004 Movie and Video Guide (2003) says it is “[l]ow-budget backlot Arabian Nights nonsense….”
Sex Kittens Go to College (1960; 94 minutes) Producer-Director-Story: Albert Zugsmith. Associate Producers: Robert Hill and Martin Milner. Screenplay: Robert Hill. Photography: Ellis W. Carter. Editor: William Austin. Music: Dean Elliott. Songs: Conway Twitty. Sets: John Sturtevant. Sound: Robert Post and Charles Schelling. Production Manager-Assistant Director: Ralph Black. Makeup: Monte Westmore. Special Effects: Augie Lohman. Wardrobe: Claire Cramer and Rudy Harrington. Dialogue Director: Jackie Coogan. Continuity: Frank Kowalski. CAST: Mamie Van Doren (Dr. Mathilda Gabrielle West), Tuesday Weld ( Jody), Mijanou Bardot (Suzanne de la Cour), Mickey Shaughnessy (Boomie), Louis Nye (Dr. Ernst Zorch), Pamela Mason (Dr. Myrtle Carter), Martin Milner (George Barton), Conway Twitty (Himself ), Jackie Coogan (Admiral “Wildcat” MacPherson), John Carradine (Dr. Harvey Watts), Vampira [Maila Nurmi] (Etta Toodle), Norman “Woo Woo” Grabowski (Himself ), Irwin Berke (Professor Towers), Allan Drake (Legs Raffertino), Jody Fair (Bartender), Arline Hunter (Nurse), Buni Bacon (Hostess), Babe London (Amanda Cadwallader), Charles Chaplin, Jr. (Fire Chief ), John Van Dreelen (Bullets), Barbara Pepper (Woman in Torn Dress), Harold Lloyd, Jr., Jack Carr (Policemen), Jose Gonzalez Gonzalez (Mexican Bookie), Noel de Souza (Arab Bookie), Cherrio Meredith (Miss Everleigh), Beverly Englander (Shoeshine Girl), Buddy Douglas (Midget), Edwin Randolph (Railroad Conductor), Chim the Chimpanzee (Abraham Q. Voltaire).
Filmed as Sexpot Goes to College, Teacher vs. Sexpot and Teacher Was a Sexpot, this socalled comedy from Photoplay Associates, Inc. (Albert Zugsmith Productions), has a slim sci-fi connection in that it features a talking robot called Thinko and star Mamie Van Doren’s character registers an IQ of 298, 40 points above genius. The robot was actually Elektro, which was made by Westinghouse and first displayed in 1939; for the film its appearance was somewhat altered. When Sex Kittens Go to College was released to TV it was called Beauty and the Robot. Under any name it is a clunker. The New York Herald Tribune called it “[p]uerile and precious…. It is a very sorry venture into slapstick that never manages to get within halooing distance of merit.” The Hollywood
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Reporter felt it was a “harmless little farce…. There isn’t really any plot, just [a] series of blackout gags and situations.” Movies on TV 1969 –70 Edition (1969), edited by Steven H. Scheuer, stated, “Computer that picked the plot for this one has a screw loose somewhere; ghastly attempt at farce has nothing.” C.J. Henderson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (2001) noted, “The title tells one all there is to know.” The main asset of Sex Kittens Goes to College is an admixture of talent headed by gorgeous blonde Mamie Van Doren, who handles her thankless role of a genius ex-stripper college professor with exuberance. She gets to look and act sexy and rattle off all kinds of intellectual jargon, and also sings the song “Baby” and does a lengthy, sexy dance alongside Jackie Coogan, John Carradine, Irwin Berke and Louis Nye. Conway Twitty back ups Mamie musically on her vocal and he also sings the title song “Sexpot Goes to College” as well as “Miss Mamie.” Tuesday Weld has her usual coy co-ed part and Brigitte Bardot’s little sister, Mijanou, plays a love-crazed journalism major; while very beautiful, she has no screen presence. Martin Milner, who was also an associate producer, is the stiff leading man, while Mickey Shaughnessy and Allan Drake mug their way through comic gangster roles. Jackie Coogan, also the film’s dialogue director, imitates W.C. Fields in the part of a philandering benefactor, and Carradine and Berke ham it up as professors hot for Van Doren. Pamela Mason appears far too old to be playing Milner’s girlfriend. Norman “Woo Woo” Grabowski tries to be amusing, but fails on all fronts. Wasted in passing bits are Vampira, Jody Fair, Arline Hunter, Babe London, Barbara Pepper, Charles Chaplin, Jr., Harold Lloyd, Jr., and Jose Gonzalez Gonzalez. Only Chim the Chimpanzee and Thinko manage to escape unscathed. At Collins College, a computer dubbed Sequential Auxiliary Modulator, or Thinko, spews out information on the new head of the science department, Dr. Mathilda West (Van Doren), for its inventor Dr. Ernst Zorch (Nye) and his bookish brunette assistant Etta Toodle (Vampira). It not only reveals she has an IQ of 298 and holds thirteen degrees, but it gives her perfect measurements and reveals that she is very beautiful and sexy. Zorch runs to the train station to tell Dr. Myrtle Carter (Mason) that the newcomer is not what the school expected as she waits for Mathilda’s arrival with her boyfriend, George Barton (Milner), the school’s head of public relations, and an all-girl band. A member of the band is blonde Jody (Weld) who is smitten with dimwitted “Woo Woo” Grabowski (himself ), president of the student body and captain of the football team, who is to give a welcoming speech. After the train stops, the group mistake a dowdy brassiere salesperson (Babe London) for the new professor but finally meet beautiful Mathilda, who is so stunning she causes Grabowski to faint. Also getting off the train are Chicago hoodlums Legs Raffertino (Allan Drake) and Boomie (Shaughnessy), who are looking for Sam Thinko, a bookie who has been winning all bets and bankrupting their boss. Legs attracts French exchange student Suzanne (Bardot) who is writing a book on American men as lovers and she tells them to go to the college to find Thinko. Suzanne warns Jody to beware of Mathilda because of her effect on Grabowski, so on her way to class the coed breaks her bra strap and gets the footballer to give her his fraternity pin to hold it together. Myrtle is jealous of the beautiful Mathilda and to disrupt her first lecture on applied psychology, she releases Abraham Q. Voltaire, a chimp, who is mistakenly introduced by the addled Zorch. Mathilda wins over the students by shooting off two pistols to demonstrate the psychology of fear and then talks with Grabowski about his dread of the opposite sex only to find he is attracted to her. Professors Watts (Carradine) and Towers (Berke) invite Mathilda for barbequed ribs at a club called the Passion Pit that evening. Dressed as college students, the gangsters go to Zorch’s
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Martin Milner, Louis Nye and Mamie Van Doren in Sex Kittens Go to College (1960)
lab to find Sam Thinko and, believing the professor is the bettor who has been causing all their troubles, they knock him out and leave him hanging on a clothes hook. When Mathilda watches football practice, Grabowski faints. George tells her to stay away from the field due to her effect on the players. He also warns her that Watts and Towers are married men before going to Zorch’s lab where he gets a phone call from “Wildcat” MacPherson (Coogan), an admiral in the Nevada navy and the school’s wealthy benefactor. “Wildcat” announces he is coming to the Passion Pit that night. Legs and Boomie spy Mathilda getting ready for her date and the latter recognizes her as Tassles Monclair, “The Tallahassee Tassle Tosser,” a noted striptease dancer. As she is leaving to go to dinner with the two professors, Mathilda is confronted by Jody who says she is a menace for taking away Grabowski’s affections. As Mathilda is dining with Watts and Towers, the jealous Myrtle shows up and gets Suzanne, who moonlights as the club photographer, to change clothes with her so she can take pictures of the new professor with “Wildcat” and George. Legs and Boomie also show up. As Suzanne romances Legs, Boomie and Myrtle get tangled when the strap of her camera becomes entwined around the gangster and his violin case which houses a sub-machine gun. Zorch informs George that Thinko has not only given him the names of the last 75 winners of the Kentucky Derby, but also has predicted the next three winners. The two men meet “Wildcat” and at the club he thinks Mathilda is Watts’ wife. George gets a call from Etta
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who tells him Thinko has dug up the fact that Mathilda worked as a stripper. When he asks the new professor about it, she demands to know why her past should affect her ability to teach. After singing a song and dancing, Mathilda hypnotizes “Wildcat,” Watts, Towers and Zorch into doing a wild dance with her. When it is finished, she drops a drum on George’s head and pours water in it. The still entangled Boomie and Myrtle cause a panic when she accidentally sets off his sub-machine gun. The police show up and arrest “Wildcat” for public misconduct. George goes to the science lab and finds Mathilda, who says she is sorry for the way she treated him, and the two begin to realize they are in love. The gangsters shows up and Legs accuses Mathilda of running the bookie racket and offers her $100,000 to quit. Recalling that he fed Thinko gambling statistics, Zorch is unable to explain how the robot placed the bets. Just as Thinko names more winners, bookies from around the world show up in the lab and a melee takes place. Sleepwalking Grabowski arrives and tampers with Thinko, who begins to go haywire. Mathilda and George use fire extinguishers to run off the crowd so the robot will not be destroyed. When he comes to, Grabowski realizes he has been placing the bets predicted by Thinko in his sleep. After she makes sure the robot will be all right, Mathilda decides to give up teaching and return to being a striptease dancer. The next day, a trim and blonde Myrtle dumps George in favor of “Wildcat,” who has asked her to marry him, and Grabowski, using the $100,000 offered by the gangsters, drives away with Jody in a new convertible. George borrows a fire engine and, with Zorch steering, speeds to the train station to find Mathilda before she can leave town. At the station, George proposes but Mathilda says he must accept her for herself and he agrees. Suzanne informs Legs that she must give him up in order to research and write her book, and a now blonde and sexy Etta consoles Zorch, who had also fallen for Mathilda. An alternate version of Sex Kittens Go to College, running ten minutes longer than the one shown to the general public, was made for exhibition in art and “adult only” theatres. It added a sequence near the end in which the ailing Thinko dreams of watching four strippers do their acts. The quartet appear topless with only minimal attire for their performances. About the same time Sex Kittens Go to College was issued by Allied Artists in August 1960, Universal released College Confidential, also produced and directed by Albert Zugsmith. Its cast included several of Sex Kittens’ players, including Van Doren, Shaughnessy, Grabowski, Mason, Arline Hunter and Conway Twitty.
Shinbone Alley (1971; 86 minutes; Color) Producer: Preston M. Fleet. Executive Producer–Director: John David Wilson. Associate Producer: David Detiege. Screenplay-Lyrics: Joe Darion. Story Continuity: John David Wilson, David Detiege, Dick Kinney and Marty Murphy, from the play by Mel Brooks and Joe Darion and the “Archy and Mehitabel” stories by Don Marquis. Photography: Wally Bullock, Gene Borghi and Ted Bemiller. Editor: Warner Leighton. Music: George Kleinsinger. Sound: James L. Alcholtz. Production Design: John David Wilson, David Detiege, James Bernardi, Cornelius Cole, Sam Cornell, Jules Engel and Gary Lund. Production Coordinator: Christine Decker. Animators: Frank Andrina, Bob Bemille, Bob Bransford, Brad Case, Rudy Cataldi, Selby Daley, Fred Grable, Frank Gonzales, Jil Hiltz, Barrie Nelson, Frank Onaitis, Amby Paliwoda, Spencer Peel, Gil Rugg, John Sparey, Ken Southworth, Russ Von Neida and George Waiss. VOICE CAST: Carol Channing (Mehitabel), Eddie Bracken (Archy), Alan Reed (Big Bill), John Carradine (Tyrone T. Tattersall), Byron Kane (Narrator), Hal Smith (Freddie the Rat/Prissy Cat), Joan Gerber (Penelope the Fat Cat/Ladybugs of the Evening), Ken Sanson (Rosie the Cat), Sal Delano (Beatnik Spider), The Jackie Ward Singers.
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Don Marquis created the characters of Archy, the lovesick cockroach, and Mehitabel, the promiscuous feline fatale, in his “Sun Dial” column in the New York Sun in 1916. In 1954 Columbia Records did a long-playing album based on the characters, “Archy and Mehitabel” (ML/OL-4963), with music and lyrics by George Kleinsinger, who also conducted, and Joe Darion, with Carol Channing providing the voice of Mehitabel, Eddie Bracken as Archy and David Wayne as the narrator. Mel Brooks and Darion wrote a play based on the LP and as Shinbone Alley it opened on Broadway in the spring of 1957 with Bracken repeating the role of Archy, Eartha Kitt as Mehitabel and Erik Rhodes as bombastic theatrical producer Tyrone T. Tattersall. The supporting cast included George S. Irving and Ross Martin. Tom Poston and Chita Rivera were the standbys for the lead players. The production lasted for only 49 performances. Bracken was Archie for the third time in the May 16, 1960, Play of the Week TV telecast “Archy and Mehitabel.” This version was based on Marquis’ book The Life and Times of Archy and Mehitabel and in it Tammy Grimes was Mehitabel and Jules Munshin was Tattersall. Bracken, Kitt and Grimes appeared on the 1960 record album “Shinbone Alley” (Sound of Broadway 300/1), with music from both the 1957 Broadway show and the 1960 TV production. Channing and Bracken were back as the voices of Archy and Mehitabel in the animated screen version Shinbone Alley, produced by Fine Arts Film in 1969 but not issued theatrically by Allied Artists until the spring of 1971. After he commits suicide, depressed poet Archy (Bracken) is reincarnated as a cockroach and has to live among the denizens of shabby Shinbone Alley. He decides to become the greatest cockroach poet of the ages and jumps on the keys of his old typewriter at the newspaper where he once worked but soon comes to realize he is only a humble insect. He falls in love with exotic dancer Mehitabel (Channing) but is soon out of her life when an old boyfriend, gangster cat Big Bill (Alan Reed), returns to town with two pals. Archy tries to convince Mehitabel to get a job as a housecat but she says she loves Bill. When the cockroach objects, Bill flicks him away. Archy buries his disappointment by writing about philosophy, politics, ethics, nature studies and adventures in song. When Bill rejects Mehitabel again, Archy goes to see her at her home in a trash can. When he preaches to her about her morals, the cat becomes angry and Archy decides to try and commit suicide again but fails. Mehitabel takes up with theatrical impresario Tyrone T. Tattersall ( John Carradine). After three days, Tattersall becomes frustrated in trying to make an actress of the no-talent cat, and the final straw comes when she bowdlerizes Shakespeare and they split after a bitter fight. Bill and Archy watch the fray. The tomcat later tells Mehitabel he liked her acting and she takes him back with her to Shinbone Alley. The angry Archy plunges into a work that is an indictment of mankind. He plans to organize all the insects of the world against humans until he finds out that Bill has again ditched Mehitabel after denying he is the father of her five kittens. During a storm, she is tempted to let her offspring drown but saves them at Archy’s behest. With winter coming on, Mehitabel takes Archy’s advice and becomes a high society housecat but quickly becomes bored with her new owners and always chasing after her mischievous kittens. When Archy comes to visit, Mehitabel says he cannot stay because people hate cockroaches. He gets drunk and dreams of pretty ladybugs of the evening who steal his love poems about Mehitabel. When he comes to, he challenges Bill to a fight. Archy then admits he ruined Mehitabel, and Bill realizes the cockroach loves the cat. As he wanders through a snowstorm, Archy hears Mehitabel singing and he follows her to Shinbone Alley where he says he loves her for what she is, his best friend. Archy then sees his bylined story in the newspaper.
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Shinbone Alley is an overlong and not particularly entertaining animated fantasy that is too mature for children and too juvenile for adults. In The Family Guide to Movies on Video (1988), Henry Herx and Tony Zaza called it “[disappointing] … [T]he result simply lacks the elemental zest and witty irony of the Marquis original.” In Theatre: Stage to Screen to Television (1981), William Torbert Leonard noted, “The cartoon feature had little of the Disney studio’s expertise and, being poorly distributed, passed quickly into oblivion.” Leonard Maltin’s 2004 Movie and Video Guide (2003) declared, “Genuinely odd…. Episodic, to say the least, with some witty and tuneful moments, and great vocal performances by Bracken and Channing. Not really for kids.” John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (1994) thought it was a “[d]elightful cartoon…. Quaint and entertaining.” The film version of Shinbone Alley contained more than a dozen songs, the highlight being Carradine and Channing’s rousing rendition of “Ah, the Theatre, the Theatre.” Carradine and Alan Reed add zest to the proceedings as the voices of the ham actor and hoodlum tomcat Big Bill.
Shock Corridor (1963; 100 minutes) Producer-Director-Screenplay: Samuel Fuller. Executive Producer: Leon Fromkess and Sam Firks. Photography: Stanley Cortez and (uncredited) Samuel Fuller. Editor: Jerome Thoms. Music: Paul Dunlap. Music Supervisor–Sound Effects Supervisor: Gordon Zahler. Art Director: Eugene Lourie. Sets: Charles Thompson. Costumes: Einar H. Bourman. Makeup: Dan Greenway. Production Manager: Rudolph Flothow. Special Effects: Charles Duncan and Linwood G. Dunn. Choreographer: Jon Gregory. Assistant Director: Floyd Joyer. CAST: Peter Breck ( Johnny Barrett), Constance Towers (Cathy), Gene Evans (Dr. Boden), James Best (“Jeb” Stuart), Hari Rhodes (Trent), Larry Tucker (Pagliacci), Paul Dubov (Dr. J.L. Menkin), Chuck Roberson (Wilkes), Neyle Morrow (Psycho), John Matthews (Dr. L.G. Cristo), Bill Zuckert (“Swanee” Swanson), John Craig (Lloyd), Philip Ahn (Dr. Fong), Frank Gerstle (Police Lieutenant Kane), Rachel Roman (Singing Nympho), Linda Randolph (Therapy Dance Teacher), Wally Campo (Inmate with Hand Over Right Eye), Marie Devereux, Barbara Perry, Marlene Manners, Lucille Curtis, Jeanette Dana, Karen Conrad, Allison Daniell, Ray Baxter, Linda Barrett, Harry Fleer (Inmates), Chuck Hicks (Attendant).
Filmed as Straitjacket and given the pre-release title Long Corridor, Shock Corridor was released in the fall of 1963. The black-and-white feature contained color hallucination sequences that were interpolated into the plot by producer-director-writer Samuel Fuller, who filmed them for his previous projects House of Bamboo (1955) and the uncompleted Tigrero, lensed in the Matto Grosso area of Brazil. Made in ten days without exteriors, Shock Corridor was considered somewhat controversial and it was denied a release in the United Kingdom, where it did not debut until 1990. The film is a psychological horror affair that provides a chilling look at the terrors of a mental hospital ward, its denizens and the mental deterioration it causes the movie’s chief protagonist. Overlong and talky, it is held together by Peter Breck’s performance as the grasping newsman who loses his sanity over greed for a Pulitzer Prize. Sexy Constance Towers is just as memorable as his caring, but long-suffering, stripper girlfriend. Gene Evans, James Best and Hari Rhodes are quite good as the mental patient witnesses to a murder who are mostly delusional with short periods of lucidity. Chuck Roberson is impressive as the hospital’s seemingly humane but firm attendant. Wanting to win a Pulitzer Prize, news reporter Johnny Barrett (Breck) devises a plan with his Daily Globe managing editor, “Swanee” Swanson (Bill Zuckert), to solve the murder
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of Sloane, an inmate at the State Mental Hospital. He tries to enlist the aid of his exotic dancer lover Cathy (Towers) in a scheme that will place him in the facility so he can talk to the three men who witnessed the crime. ( Johnny wants her to pretend to be his sister and file a complaint stating he has incestuous desires toward her.) A reluctant Cathy goes to the police, and Lieutenant Kane (Frank Gerstle) has Johnny arrested as she files a formal complaint saying he is insane. Johnny is questioned by Dr. Menkin (Paul Dubov), whom he attacks; this pretense of violence lands him in the mental facility where he is met by attendants Wilkes (Roberson) and surly Lloyd ( John Craig). He becomes acquainted with inmate Pagliacci (Larry Tucker), a rotund opera fancier who murdered his wife, and he ingratiates himself with one of the murder witnesses, Stuart (Best), who believes he is Civil War general Jeb Stuart. Johnny meets with psychiatrist Dr. Cristo ( John Matthews), who asks him if he hears voices, and he is later given hydrotherapy. Johnny is brutally attacked by a group of nymphomaniacs before being rescued by the attendants. When he again talks to Stuart, the young man recalls being in Korea and going over to the Communist side but eventually changing his mind; after being part of a prisoner exchange, he was given a dishonorable discharge. After saying he was rejected by his family and friends in Arkansas, he tells Johnny he did not see the face of the killer but he did see his white hands. On visiting day, Johnny informs Cathy of Stuart’s story. She goes to Swanson and tells him to get Johnny out of the hospital because the experience is making him sick. Johnny meets the second crime witness, Trent (Rhodes), a black man who suffered a mental collapse from the hostility he met as the first person of his race to enroll in a Southern college. He now is a flaming racist who leads the other inmates in trying to kill another black man; as a result of the melee, he and Johnny end up in straightjackets. During moments of sanity, Trent informs Johnny that the killer was an attendant but he will not reveal the name. The next visiting day, Johnny tells Cathy he is getting close to learning the killer’s identity but when she kisses him he becomes upset, thinking she is his sister. Johnny is given shock treatments and now has trouble talking. He becomes acquainted with the third crime witness, Dr. Boden (Evans), a renowned physicist who went insane working on nuclear fission. With the mind of a six year old he draws a picture of Johnny. Boden is eventually reveals that the killer was Wilkens, whom Sloane had accused of taking sexual advantage of female patients. Johnny attacks Boden over the drawing and later tells Cristo he knows who killed Sloane, but he keeps getting the identity mixed up with others. After he hallucinates about being caught in a torrent of rain in the hospital corridor and being struck by lightning, Johnny recalls the name of the killer. When Cristo refuses to believe him, Johnny goes to the hydrotherapy unit to confront Wilkes. The two men have a violent fight with Johnny forcing the attendant to admit his guilt. Johnny then informs Cristo he is a plant and asks permission to call Swanson so he can write his story. Months later, after Johnny wins the Pulitzer Prize, Cathy talks with Cristo, who informs her the man she loves is not a catatonic schizophrenic. When she embraces Johnny he does not respond. A.H. Weiler wrote in the New York Times that the movie “certainly succeeds in shocking, if not particularly convincing…. Mr. Fuller’s melodrama does describe — without probably too deeply into complex psyches — schizophrenia, dementia praecox, nymphomania and other aspects of alternating worlds of fantasy and reality in which the patients live…. [The film is] vividly shocking, if not a scientist’s dream.” Variety felt that “the film is dominated by sex and shock superficialities…. The dialog is unreal and pretentious, and the direction is heavyhanded, often mistaking sordidness for realism. The performers labor valiantly, but in vain.” Danny Peary opined in Guide for the Film Fanatic (1986), “More than any other
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film, Sam Fuller’s cult favorite treads a fine line between art and trash. The dialogue is stilted, yet every few minutes one of the characters says something more honest and brave and moving than we are used to in American cinema. The film thrives on sensationalism; all the sexual content seems solely intended to make the picture lurid. Beneath the sleaze is a mature, sad-eyed view of America, where people are encouraged to strive beyond their capacities for accomplishment and to do their country proud even if they can’t accept responsibility or fame…. Shadowy cinematography by Stanley Cortez, who photographed midgets at the end of the corridor set so that it would appear to be longer than it was.” Fuller’s Shock Corridor screenplay was novelized by Michael Avallone and published by Belmont Books in 1963 to coincide with the film’s release. It was reissued by Texas Bookman in 1990, the same year it was first published in Great Britain (along with the film’s first issuance there) by Xanadu Books as part of its “Blue Murder” series.
The Sorcerers (1967; 87 minutes; Color) Producers: Tony Tenser and Patrick Curtis. Executive Producer: Arnold L. Miller. Director: Michael Reeves. Screenplay: Michael Reeves and Tom Baker, from the novel by John Burke. Photography: Stanley A. Long. Editors: Susan Michie and David Woodward. Music: Paul Ferris. Songs Sung by Toni Daily with Lee Grant and the Capitols. Art Director: Tony Curtis. Makeup: Geoff Rodway. Continuity: Doreen Soan. Assistant Director: Keith Wilkinson.
Lobby card for The Sorcerers (1967)
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CAST: Boris Karloff (Professor Marcus Monserrat), Ian Ogilvy (Mike Roscoe), Elizabeth Ercy (Nicole), Victor Henry (Alan), Dani Sheridan (Laura Ladd), Catherine Lacey (Estelle Monserrat), Susan George (Audrey Woods), Alf Joint (Ron), Meier Teenier (Snack Bar Owner), Gerald Campion (China Shop Customer), Ivor Dean (Inspector Matalon), Peter Fraser (Detective), Martin Terry (Tobacco Shop Owner), Bill Barnsley (Fur Store Constable), Maureen Booth (Disco Girl), Arnold L. Miller (Taxi Driver), Toni Daly (Singing Voice of Laura Ladd).
Director Michael Reeves (1944–1969) completed a trio of horror movies before his death from a drug overdose but he displayed such promise he has become a cult figure to genre fans. At age 20 he was hired to be assistant director on Il Castello dei Morti Vivi (Castle of the Living Dead) (1964) and ended up shooting some footage used in its final release. As a result he helmed the Italian-Yugoslav production La Sorella di Santana (The Sister of Satan) (1965), released in the U.S. as She Beast and in Great Britain as Revenge of the Blood Beast. This low-budget but well received outing starred Barbara Steele, with Ian Ogilvy in the supporting cast. Due to its success, Reeves was assigned to direct The Sorcerers, headlining Boris Karloff with Ogilvy co-starred. Tony Tenser co-produced The Sorcerers and his Tigon Productions next hired Reeves to do Witchfinder General (1968), released in the U.S. by American International Pictures as Conqueror Worm; it starred Vincent Price and Ogilvy. This well-made 17th century witch hunt drama proved to be Reeves’ final cinema outing. The Sorcerers was filmed on location in London and at West London Studios, giving the production a gritty look, especially in its street and disco scenes. The latter feature the Paul Ferris songs “Sweet Nothin’” and “Your Love,” sung by Toni Daly with accompaniment by Lee Grant and the Capitols. Daly dubbed the singing voice of Dani Sheridan, who portrays a tragic disco slut singer. Top-billed Boris Karloff, who appears rather feeble, was the film’s box office bait and he played the role of a practitioner of medical hypnosis in fine fashion but it is Catherine Lacey who takes the acting honors as his wife, a woman who descends into madness as her powers to control a young subject increase. Ogilvy nicely handles the part of the guinea pig, with good support from beautiful Elizabeth Ercy as his French girlfriend and Victor Henry as his pal. A young, brunette Susan George has a small but memorable role as one of the victims of a mental telepathy experiment that goes badly awry. Professor Marcus Monserrat (Karloff ) has spent most of his adult life trying to perfect a machine that will transfer thoughts, assisted by his loyal wife Estelle (Lacey). Barely making a living from his practice of medical hypnosis, Monserrat finally perfects his invention and sets out to find a young person to be the first experimental subject. At a disco, Mike Roscoe (Ogilvy) becomes bored with his girlfriend Nicole (Ercy) and leaves her to his friend, mechanic Alan (Henry), and ends up in a diner where he meets Monserrat, who offers him ultimate excitement. Going with the inventor to his small flat, Mike is placed in a chair with electrodes attached to his head. As Monserrat operates his invention, the young man experiences mind alteration and comes under control of the old couple who can rule him telepathically. Telling Mike he will remember nothing of their encounter, the Monserrats send him away to see if they can control him at a distance. Going back to the disco, Mike picks up Nicole and the two sneak into a hotel where they enjoy its swimming pool with Monserrat and Estelle experiencing the same physical sensations as the young couple. Finding the activity tiring, the scientist and his wife relax their concentration. Monserrat tells his wife he wants to get financing for the invention and put it to good use. Estelle complains that after thirty years of poverty due to medical science scoffing at his ideas, the two of them deserve to use the young man to bring themselves pleasures they have missed. The
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next day Estelle sees a coat at a fur store and her husband agrees to help her use Mike to get it. That night Mike is telepathically told by the Monserrats to get the coat. During the robbery he is almost caught by a constable (Bill Barnsley) and in escaping he cuts his hand. Both Monserrat and Estelle now have identical cuts on their hands as she tells him she enjoyed the danger and they now can do things without fear of the consequences. Nicole calls Alan and asks him to take her out; they go to the disco. Later that night Mike shows up at Nicole’s flat and tells her he cannot remember what he did that evening and they end up in bed. Estelle wants to experience speed so she and Monserrat command Mike to steal Alan’s motorcycle and take Nicole on a wild ride in the country. When they return, Alan reprimands Mike for taking his bike and scaring Nicole. Upon Estelle’s command, Mike beats up Alan and hits his boss (Alf Joint) with a tire iron. Although Estelle is jubilant over the fight, her husband says he will no longer help her. She announces that her will is stronger than his. When Monserrat threatens to bring Mike back to his senses, Estelle knocks him down and destroys the mind machine so he cannot carry out his threat. Nicole tells Alan she wants nothing more to do with Mike, who goes to see an old girlfriend, Audrey (Susan George). Estelle makes Mike stab Audrey to death with a pair of scissors. Monserrat tells the crazed Estelle he will stop her but she laughs at him. Nicole and Alan spot Mike at the disco where he picks up singer Laura Ladd (Sheridan) and takes her away. She follows him to an alley where he strangles her upon Estelle’s command. The next day Alan shows Nicole newspaper stories about the two murdered young women. Since they saw Mike with the singer, Alan wants to call the police but Nicole insists they go to his flat, which they find empty. At his business, a china shop called the Glory Hole, Mike refuses to talk to them. When Alan accuses him of the murders, Estelle orders Mike to kill him. The two fight as Nicole goes for the police. A taxi driver (Arnold L. Miller) recalls seeing the murdered singer with a young man and goes to the police, who after visiting Mike’s flat are on the way to his shop. As Inspector Matalon (Ivor Dean) and his men approach the china shop, Mike stabs Alan in the arm and steals a car. Alan joins Nicole in the police car and they chase Mike as Monserrat and Estelle vie to mentally control him. After a lengthy car chase, Monserrat gets the upper hand and causes Mike to crash the car, which explodes and catches fire. Monserrat and Estelle’s bodies are charred as they die with him. Variety called The Sorcerers “[a] straightforward thriller slanted to ‘horror’ addicts…. Eastman Color lensing by Stanley Logan makes good use of several London locations…. Karloff handles his role with noble professionalism….” When Allied Artists issued the movie in the U.S. in November 1967 it had running times of between 82 and 87 minutes while its British releases ran between 79 and 85 minutes. When it was issued in the latter country in May 1967 by LMG, it was given an X Certificate and Kinematograph Weekly commented, “The plot is quite ingenious and obviously well suited to the particular talents of Boris Karloff, but the really exciting part of the acceptably incredible story takes a long time working up.” David Pirie wrote in A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946 – 1972 (1974), “In some ways The Sorcerers is the ultimate portrayal of the tabloid society and it is only a pity the young people in it, including Mike and his girlfriend, are not strong enough to provide much more than a token presence against the old couple. For this and other reasons, the film certainly stops short of being a masterpiece. However, Reeves succeeded marvelously well in communicating the essential components of this theme and the result is constructed like a series of Chinese boxes, which open into one another.” When Allied Artists released The Sorcerers on video in the late 1970s, all the violence was cut out.
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Spook Chasers (1957; 62 minutes) Producer: Ben Schwalb. Director: George Blair. Screenplay: Elwood Ullman. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: Neil Brunnenkant. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler and Charles Schelling. Sets: Robert J. Mills. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Wardrobe: Bert Henrikson. Special Effects: Augie Lohman. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Continuity: Richard Michaels. Assistant Director: Austen Jewell. CAST: Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones), Stanley Clements (Stanislaus “Duke” Coveleskie), Darlene Fields (Dolly Owens), David Gorcey (Chuck), Jimmy Murphy (Myron), Eddie LeRoy (Blinky), Percy Helton (Mike Clancy), Peter Mamakos (Snap Sizzolo), Ben Welden (Ziggie), Robert Shayne (Lieutenant Harris), Bill Henry (Harry Shelby), Pierre Watkin (Dr. Moss), Robert Christopher (Ernie), Bill Cassidy (Photographer), Anne Fleming, Audrey Conti (Beautiful Escorts).
The Bowery Boys’ final escapade with the supernatural, Spook Chasers was issued in June 1957. The fourth from the last film in the series, it is a fast-paced, cheap-looking affair that uses a bevy of retread spook bits, some of them dating from the silent days. Although passable for its ilk, it sorely needed Bela Lugosi and Bernard Gorcey, both of whom had gone to their rewards by the time the film was made. An amusing plot ploy had the chief gangster, Snap Sizzolo (Peter Mamakos), giving orders to his underlings by constantly snapping his fingers. Regarding its early summer playdates, Variety noted it “might have done well at the box office if released later in the year, say October.” The owner of Clancy’s Café in the Bowery, Mike Clancy (Percy Helton), is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, due to overwork and having to deal with local freeloaders Sach (Huntz Hall), Duke (Stanley Clements), Chuck (David Gorcey), Myron ( Jimmy Murphy) and nearsighted Blinky (Eddie LeRoy). Mike’s physician, Dr. Moss (Pierre Watkin), pays him a visit and orders rest and lots of fresh air. Two of his customers, slick realtor Harry Shelby (Bill Henry) and his beautiful secretary-girlfriend Dolly (Darlene Fields), overhear the conversation and offer to sell Mike a palatial place in the country called Cedarcrest, near the village of Thornton. They convince him to make a down payment on the house but they do not tell him it last belonged to murdered gangster Wee Willie Dolan, whose ghost is supposed to haunt the place. Arriving at the abode with the boys in their old jalopy, Mike finds his purchase to be falling apart. While his cohorts offer to help him fix it up, he phones Shelby demanding his money back only to be informed by Dolly that he is in Florida. The boys set out to repair the house and its contents; Sach tries to fix a faucet and crosses some electric wires, causing considerable damage. Duke takes after him and Sach falls on a tea wagon that runs into a wall, dislodging a sack of paper money. Duke convinces Mike to use some of the money to pay off the house so they will be free to search it. The boys go to Shelby’s office with the money and he pretends to have just returned from Florida. He accepts the payment, saying he will send Mike the deed to the property. Shelby is visited by gangster Snap Sizzolo (Mamakos) and his thugs, Ziggie (Ben Welden) and Ernie (Robert Christopher). When Snap sees the cash Mike gave Shelby, he thinks it may be part of the robbery loot Dolan hid in the house and he orders the realtor to buy the place back. When Mike declines Shelby’s offer, he is told the house may contain ghosts and to watch out for his health. This causes Duke to suspect that the realtor may know about the money they found. Shelby tells Dolly to use her charms on Sach to find out what he knows regarding the loot. She invites Sach to her apartment, gets him drunk on champagne and feigns an interest in him, and he admits finding the money. Mike and the boys arrive back at Cedarcrest during a thunderstorm and find there is no electricity. They pair up in three different rooms for the night. Chuck and Myron are tied up by two ghosts while Blinky’s bed
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disappears with him in it, causing a frightened Sach to seek out Duke and Mike. They see what they think is Blinky in the bed but it is one of the ghosts, with a hairy arm, that later causes Sach to go running out of the room. Snap and his thugs show up looking for the money. Sach runs into a revolving wall, which has bags of money on its other side. Blinky finds Sach and they return to their room and see one of the beds occupied. They hit the sleeper, who turns out to be Duke. Duke goes back in his own room with Mike and the two see a gloved hand with a trumpet and a skull. Mike runs into Sach’s room and is chased by a ghost who then goes after Sach but is knocked out by Blinky. Sach runs back into the living room’s revolving wall, knocks down more money and is heard by the gangsters. The hoodlums try to get the money from Sach and in the struggle Snap’s gun fires, bringing Duke, Mike and Blinky. A melee ensues with the boys battling the thugs. The two ghosts show up and hold off both sides at gunpoint. Police Lieutenant Harris (Robert Shayne) and his men, who had been trailing Snap, arrive and arrest the gangsters and unmask the ghosts, who turn out to be Shelby and Dolly.
Spy in the Sky! (1958; 75 minutes) Producer-Director: W. Lee Wilder. Screenplay: Myles Wilder, from the novel Counterspy Express by A.S. Fleischman. Photography: Jimmy Harvey. Editors: Lien d’Oliveyra and Loet Roozekrans. Music: Hugo de Groot, performed by The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. Art Director: Nico Van Baarle. Sound: Wim Huender. Production Supervisor: Bobby Rosenbloom. Costumes: Max Heymans. Makeup: Fa. Michels. Assistant Directors: Piet Van Mook and Joseph Van Weeren. CAST: Steve Brodie (Vic Cabot), Andrea Domburg (Alexandrine Duvivier), George Coulouris (Colonel Benedict), Sandra Francis (Eva Brandisi), Herbert Curiel (Pepi Vidor), Bob De Lange (Sidney Jardine), Hans Tiemeyer (Dr. Fritz Keller), W.R. Melchers (Ridolfo), Leon Dorian (Max Maxwell), Harold Holsten (Pawn Shop Clerk), Antonie Zoet ( Jeorgi), Monica Witkowna (Gypsy Singer), E.F. Beavis, Alex Zweers, Robert H. MacDowell (Radio Newscasters), Dity Oorthuis (Fritzi), Albert E. Gollin (Consul Representative Martin), Roland Wagter, Jr. (Soldier), R. Borello (Milkman), H.J. Hagemeyer (Policeman), Johann Schmitz (Headwaiter), J.K. Krees (Croupier).
The Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957. Not only did it spur a U.S. initiative to duplicate the feat, it also was the beginning of Hollywood movies dealing with the space race. Allied Artists had War of the Satellites (q.v.) in theaters in May 1958, and followed it two months later with Spy in the Sky!, made by W. Lee Wilder Productions and Domino Pictures Corporation. Filmed at Cinestone Studios in Amsterdam, it was scripted by Wilder’s son Myles from the 1954 novel Counterspy Express by A.S. Fleischman. Spy in the Sky! contains only a tinge of sci-fi in its storyline of a satellite sending coded information to the Soviets, a portent of the near future. The film’s trailer, however, declared it dealt with a Secret code “that could start a space war” and its poster highlighted “Secret Agents of the Satellite Era!” Basically the film is an anemic spy thriller with a decided tacky look. Location shooting in The Netherlands gives it some visual interest, although most of its scenes are either interiors or at night. The Wilders previously did Fright (1956) [q.v.] for Allied and would go on to make the bigger budgeted Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons (1959) [q.v.] for the company. Nations around the world are made aware that the Soviet satellite Sputnik is sending coded signals. Dr. Fritz Keller (Hans Tiemeyer), a German scientist captured by the Russians and made to work on their space program, escapes, disguised as farmer Hans Krauss. He carries with him the secret code used to decipher the satellite’s signals. Arriving in Vienna, Keller pawns a guitar and its case and sends the ticket to the American consulate. He is rec-
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Spanish lobby card for Spy in the Sky! (1958) picturing Herbert Curiel and Hans Tiemeyer
ognized by gambler Pepi Vidor (Herbert Curiel) who pulls a gun on the scientist and kidnaps him, planning to use Keller for ransom. Vic Cabot (Steve Brodie), an American agent, arrives in Vienna and at the airport he is approached by a mysterious woman who wants him to take a package through customs for her; he refuses. That night Vic meets another agent, Max Maxwell (Leon Dorian), in an alley and is told he is to locate Keller. Max suggests that Vic meet Pepi, who has been trying to date his girlfriend, singer Eve Brandisi (Sandra Francis). As they are talking, a car drives by and Max is shot and killed. Vic goes to Club Caprice, where Eve sings, and is told it is her night off, but he meets the owner, Colonel Benedict (George Coulouris), who wears a neck brace. As they converse, the woman Vic saw at the airport arrives but leaves quickly. Benedict tells Vic that Eve lives at the Park Apartments and he goes there and reveals Max’s murder to her. When Vic spots Benedict and his henchman Jeorgi (Antonie Zoet), he and Eve leave by the back entrance and he takes her to his hotel. She tells Vic that Pepi can usually be found gambling at a casino in the town of Belton and they agree to go there the next day. While Eve sleeps the next morning, Vic goes out and is met by Sidney Jardine (Bob De Lange), who claims Max worked for him and that he will give him Keller if the money is right. Vic declines the offer and runs into Benedict, who later informs Jardine that he is treading on dangerous ground. Back at the hotel, Vic finds Eve is gone so he goes to the U.S. consulate where government man Martin (Albert E. Gollin) gives him the pawn ticket. Vic tries to redeem the item, an old guitar and its case, but finds it has been sold to a man with a neck brace. He returns to Club Caprice, searches Benedict’s office and finds the instrument but is nearly caught by
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the arrival of the mysterious woman. Back at his hotel, Vic has the guitar sent to the consulate and returns to his room and finds Eve. At his remote farmhouse, Pepi tells his girlfriend Fritzi (Dity Oorthuis) he plans to make Keller talk. The scientist is kept in the attic and has not eaten for six days. When Pepi cannot break the old man’s silence, he beats him. Fritzi screams at him to leave Keller alone. Not finding Pepi at the casino, Vic and Eve return to the hotel. The gambler sees them, telephones Vic and sets up a meeting to trade for the scientist. Benedict overhears Pepi’s conversation with the American. As Vic and Eve drive to meet with Pepi, Vic stops at a service station and calls Benedict, finding out he is not at the club. Driving on, they are stopped by a motorcycle cop (H.J. Hagemeyer) and then by a drawbridge before finding Pepi, who has been murdered in his car. Soon Vic and Eve see Benedict in his vehicle along with Jeorgi and another henchman, Ridolfo (W.R. Melchers), who is fixing a flat tire. Leaving Eve in their car and telling her to go for the police, Vic sneaks up behind Ridolfo, slugs him and takes his place in the back seat of Benedict’s car as Jeorgi drives on. Vic conceals his face with the lapel of his coat and finds he is sitting next to the mysterious woman. He keeps her quiet at gunpoint. When they stop to get directions to Casa Milano, the house where Keller is supposed to be held, she translates when talking to an Italian milkman (R. Borello). Upon arrival at the house, Vic walks up to it with the woman and Jeorgi, whom he knocks out. Once inside, the woman identifies herself as Duvivier (Andrea Domburg), a counterspy who pretends to be Benedict’s confidant, but has been investigating him until assigned to find Keller. Vic fires his gun, causing Benedict to come to the house as he and Duvivier take the car and go to Pepi’s abode to find Keller. Vic tells Fritzi about Pepi’s murder but they are too late to rescue Keller, who has hanged himself. In the scientist’s shoe Vic finds a scrap of paper containing the numbers 1344. Returning to Belton, Vic has Duvivier drop him off and he goes to his hotel where he locates Eve. They board a train for Vienna but Jardine shows up and Vic learns that he and Eve are in cahoots in trying to get the code. Taking Vic’s gun, Jardine promises him a split in the profits but the agent manages to get the weapon and holds the conspirators for the police. Duvivier meets Vic at the train when it arrives in Vienna and as they drive away in Benedict’s car he gets the drop on them. He makes Duvivier drive him to the club but once in his office Vic gets the best of him and he is arrested. Going to the American consulate, Vic works with Martin to decipher the code that Keller had hidden on one of the strings of his guitar. When the code is finally broken, Vic and Duvivier realize they are in love. Regarding Spy in the Sky!, Variety complained, “[It] is the kind of story that will confirm European pessimism about the capabilities of American agents to best their Russian opposites. [Steve] Brodie is represented as a chuckle-headed bungler and incompetent…. The continuity is confusing and finally annoying.” The British Monthly Film Bulletin concurred, “This story is full of complications which scarcely compensate for the lengths which the basically simple plot is stretched.”
The Strangler (1964; 89 minutes) Producers: Samuel Bischoff and David Diamond. Director: Burt Topper. Screenplay: Bill S. Ballinger. Photography: Jacques Marquette. Editor: Robert S. Eisen. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Directors: Eugene Lourie and Hal Pereira. Sound: Hugo Grenzbach. Production Manager: Edward Morey, Jr. Sets: Sam Comer and James W. Payne. Makeup: Wally Westmore. Assistant Director: Clark Paylow. CAST: Victor Buono (Leo Kroll), David McLean (Lieutenant Frank Benson), Diane Sayer (Barbara Wells), Davey Davison (Tally Raymond), Baynes Barron (Sergeant Mack Clyde), Ellen
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Victor Buono, Diane Sayer and Davey Davison in The Strangler (1964)
Corby (Mrs. Kroll), Michael Ryan (Detective Mel Posner), Russ Bender (Dr. Clarence Sanford), Jeanne Bates (Clara Thomas), Wally Campo (Eggerton), Mimi Dillard (Thelma), Byron Morrow (Dr. Morton), John Yates (Intern), James Sikking (Sketch Artist), Robert Cranford ( Jack Rosten), Selette Cole (Helen Lawson), Victor Masi (Carnival Attendant).
In his official screen debut as effete pianist Edwin Flag in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Victor Buono received an Academy Award nomination. The hefty actor’s work in that horror melodrama launched his successful screen career and he followed it with his first starring role in The Strangler, released in the spring of 1964. It was based on thencurrent serial killings that traumatized the city of Boston, where the film debuted; the case was officially brought to the screen in The Boston Strangler (1968) starring Tony Curtis. Although a low-budget programmer from producer Samuel Bischoff, The Strangler was well directed by Burt Topper and dominated by Buono as the deceptive woman hater who takes out his mother domination frustrations by murdering comely young women. In homage to Baby Jane, a doll broken by the killer after he murders a nurse closely resembles the one featured in that movie. Davey Davison and Diane Sayer manage to corral some attention as two young carnival workers who become involved with the demented killer and Ellen Corby is good as his self-centered, bossy mother. Buono later portrayed another serial killer in the Italian macabre comedy Il Strangolatore di Vienna (The Strangler of Vienna) (1972), issued in the U.S. as The Mad Butcher in 1974. As nurse Helen Lawson (Selette Cole) undresses, she is watched by Leo Kroll (Buono), a thirty-year-old, 300-pound hospital laboratory technician, who strangles her and leaves behind a small doll. Police Lieutenant Frank Benson (David McLean) and Sergeant Mack
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Spanish lobby card for The Strangler (1964)
Clyde (Baynes Barron) arrive to investigate after the murder is reported by the victim’s fiancé, Jack Rosten (Robert Cranford), who discovered the body. Since this is the eighth strangling in a row, the homicide division detectives question all the employees of the hospital where Helen worked, including Leo, who says he knows nothing of the crime. Leo’s invalid mother (Ellen Corby), a patient at Park Sanatorium, calls to see if he is going to visit her but he says he is tired and instead goes to the Odeon Fun Palace where he plans to give an engagement ring to Tally Raymond (Davey Davison), who operates the carnival’s toss-a-ring game where he wins the dolls he leaves with his victims. He drums up the courage to see Tally but she is with a relief girl, Barbara Wells (Diane Sayer), so he wins the game, gets a doll and leaves. Leo takes flowers to his mother but she berates him for not visiting her for two nights and tells him she nearly died of heart trouble the night before but she was saved by her nurse, Clara Thomas ( Jeanne Bates). That night Leo goes to Clara’s apartment and strangles her for saving his hated mother’s life. Benson and Clyde investigate the homicide and question people at the sanatorium. Psychiatrist Dr. Sanford (Russ Bender) tells Benson the last killing did not match the pattern of the previous ones. Benson goes to Leo’s house and asks him to come to police headquarters to answer some questions and there Leo demands a lie detector test. Eggerton (Wally Campo), who conducts the test, tells Benson that Leo shows no evidence of lying and he is released. Sanford theorizes that the killer is a schizophrenic who can lie around a test and has a deep hatred of women. At the sanatorium, Leo is told by an intern ( John Yates) that his mother’s heart condition is so
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delicate she has not been told of Clara’s murder. Mrs. Kroll is upset because Leo has not seen her for another two nights and she accuses him of having a girlfriend and warns him against women, saying they will ruin his life. She tells him no girl would want him because he is fat, not rich nor good-looking, and that no one but her has ever liked him. When she says she misses Clara, Leo informs her the nurse has been murdered, and his mother has a heart attack. When Leo gets home he receives a telephone calling saying she has died and he celebrates by smashing her photographs. Clyde goes to the Fun Palace and questions Barbara. Leo sees them and, after the detective leaves, he asks her what the lawman wanted; she tells him he asked about dolls. When Barbara goes home that night, Leo watches her undress, breaks into her apartment and strangles her, leaving behind a doll she gave him. Benson learns of the killing and, when Clyde tells him he interviewed the latest victim, they agree to stake out the toss-a-ring booth. That night Leo goes back to the booth and presents Tally with the engagement ring. When he tells her he loves her and wants to get married, she rejects him. Leo becomes angry and agrees to Tally’s request to leave, but he promises to see her again. Clyde arrives and talks to the young woman who tells him about Leo and the dolls he wins. She goes with him to police headquarters, giving a sketch artist ( James Sikking) a description that turns out to be a likeness of Leo. Benson orders Clyde and Detective Posner (Michael Ryan) to arrest Leo but he is not home. Clyde finds a drawer full of dolls and informs his boss. Tally refuses to be a decoy to catch the killer and demands to go home so she can pack and leave town. Clyde goes with Tally to her apartment and plants a radio microphone. He and Benson remain outside the apartment building in hopes of catching Leo. As Tally packs, she covers up the microphone; hearing no sound the worried policemen run into the building. Leo comes out of a closet and begins strangling the young woman. The detectives break down the door and shoot Leo, who falls out of a six-story window onto the pavement below. He dies with a doll lying beside him. Variety wrote, “Dramatically skillful direction by Burt Topper and a firm level of histrionic performances help The Strangler over some rough spots and keep the picture from succumbing to inconsistencies of character and contrivances of story scattered through the picture…. Bueno for Buono, a convincing menace all the way. There’s always a place on the screen for a fat man who can act, and Buono has the avoirdupois field virtually to himself.” The Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide (1989) said Buono “is quite impressive” and James O’Neill in Terror on Tape (1994) agreed: “Buono is ideally cast…. [T]his suffers from an abrupt ending … but is worth seeing for Vic’s intense acting in one of his few starring roles.” Time Out Film Guide, 9th Edition 2001 (2000) noted, “Victor Buono brought a certain class to this compelling tawdry exploiter….”
Target Earth (1954; 75 minutes) Producer: Herman Cohen. Director-Editor: Sherman A. Rose. Screenplay: Bill [William] Raynor, Wyott Ordung and James H. Nicholson, from the story “Deadly City” by Ivor Jorgensen [Paul W. Fairman]. Photography: Guy Roe. Music: Paul Dunlap. Production Designer: James W. Sullivan. Sets: Morris Hoffman. Production Manager: Clarence Eurist. Sound: Earl Synder. Makeup: Stanley Orr. Special Effects: Dave Koehler. Special Optical Effects: Howard Anderson Company. Wardrobe: Robert Olivas. Assistant Director: Jack Murphy. CAST: Richard Denning (Frank Brooks), Kathleen Crowley (Nora King), Virginia Grey (Vicki Harris), Richard Reeves ( Jim Wilson), Robert Roark (Davis), Mort Marshall (Charles Otis), Arthur Space (Lieutenant General Wood), Whit Bissell (Scientist Tom), Jim Drake (Lieutenant), Steve Pendleton (Colonel), House Peters, Jr. (Technician), Herman Cohen (Lab Technician Barton), Jeffrey Sayre (Army Staff Officer), Steve Calvert (Robot).
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Target Earth was filmed in the summer of 1954 at Kling Studios by Abtcon Pictures in collaboration with Allied Artists, which released it in November of that year. It was based on the story “Deadly City” by Paul W. Fairman, writing under the pseudonym Ivor Jorgensen, published in the March 1953 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction. The hero of the film, in theorizing that the invading aliens came from Venus, admits to being a reader of science fiction magazines. For the most part, Target Earth is a pretty entertaining sci-fi production whose use of sound waves to thwart alien invaders predates Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) by two years. Its chief deficits are an obviously low budget, lots of military stock footage and an “army” of invaders made up of exactly one robot who looks like a walking pile of tin cans. James H. Nicholson, who would soon form American Releasing Corporation, which evolved into American International Pictures, worked on the script, as did Wyott Ordung, who the same year directed producer Roger Corman’s first genre outing, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954). Waking up after trying to commit suicide with sleeping pills, Nora King (Kathleen Crowley) fails to find anyone in her apartment house. She walks outside and goes for many blocks until she comes upon the body of a dead woman and is frightened when a man (Richard Denning ) walks up behind her. She runs from him and he pursues her, eventually cornering her in a dead end alley. The man slaps Nora to calm her down and tells her he is not going to harm her. He says his name is Frank Poster for Target Earth (1953)
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Brooks and that he woke up at noon after having been mugged and robbed the night before. The two cannot figure why a city of 500,000 people is deserted but Frank suggests some type of evacuation has taken place. After hearing music, they go to a restaurant where they meet Jim Wilson (Richard Reeves) and his long-time girlfriend Vicki Harris (Virginia Grey), who are enjoying free food and drink. They tell Frank and Nora they missed the evacuation because they were celebrating Jim’s winning the daily double. After having dinner, the quartet leave the restaurant and find a car with a dead man inside. When Frank and Jim try to start the vehicle, they find it is disabled. A stranger, Charles Otis (Mort Marshall), appears and says that all the cars he has seen will not run and that he came from an area where houses and stores were wrecked and dozens of people killed. After they see a giant shadow, Frank suggests they take refuge in Hotel Bateman, where they find a newspaper detailing the evacuation caused by unidentified invaders. Afraid to stay at the hotel, Charles runs into the street and is confronted by a large robot that kills him with a ray emanating from its head. At a military command center, Lieutenant General Wood (Arthur Space) is informed that the 387th Airborne Division has been wiped out by the invaders, whom he speculates may be from Venus. He says the robots in the city are probably a vanguard for a much larger invasion force and orders two dozen bombers to attack the enemy but they too are destroyed. The four people in the hotel witness the massacre. Nora tells Frank about her suicide attempt and how six months before her husband Jerry was killed in an automobile accident. At the time of the wreck she was driving and they were arguing. She also says she now wants to live and they realize they are attracted to each other. As Wood orders atomic weapons and missiles prepared to destroy the city, he learns that an inactive robot has been located and taken to a laboratory for study. Tom (Whit Bissell), the head scientist, tells Wood the robot is made of surgical steel and guided by electro-magnetic impulses and it is apparently invincible. That night, Nora is awakened by someone trying to break into her bedroom. It turns out to be gun-toting Davis (Robert Roark), who holds them all hostage for the rest of the night. The next morning he tells Nora he wants her to go with him in a escape route through the city sewers. She slaps him when he kisses her. He takes Frank, Nora, Jim and Vicki to the hotel lobby where Vicki recognizes him as the killer of a woman on Skid Row. He admits to the crime as well as killing a guard during the evacuation and tells the group he plans to use them as decoys so he can escape the robots. When Vicki tells him he does not have the courage to pull the trigger, he shoots her and wounds Frank. Jim fights with Davis and strangles him just as a robot breaks into the hotel. The three survivors run for the roof, followed by the mechanical invader. When Jim tries to climb a ladder, he is killed by the robot’s ray. It takes aim at Frank and Nora but collapses when a military convoy arrives with a high-frequency sound transmitter. Joining the military men, Frank and Nora are informed that the robot’s cathode ray tubes were destroyed by the high-pitched sound. Our planet will be safe from the alien invaders. Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972) called Target Earth “[m]ediocre at best” and Phil Hardy reported in Science Fiction (1984), “The robots are disappointing, poorly designed and lumbering, but the initial scenes of the characters alone in the deserted city are surprisingly compelling.” C.J. Henderson opined in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (2001), “Target Earth is an unfortunate movie. It opens impressively enough for a black-and-white ’50s sci-fi film. The credits and music are strong, and the plot has a nicely moody kickoff. The story starts off wonderfully dark and cynical, striking the right mood for a perfect sci-fi/noir motion picture, but after about 20 minutes, the film falls apart. The dialogue grows more and more inept. The story loses all its drive,
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wandering in circles to kill time.” The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope (2000) declared, “[A] mixed bag, it boasts its share of low-budget pluses…. [Producer Herman] Cohen and crew make their obvious lack of funds work to their atmospheric advantage, creating a mood of overwhelming gloom and doom by plunging us into a big city stripped of its noise, clutter, and very pulse.” In Keep Watching the Skies! The 21st Century Edition (2009), Bill Warren termed it “a tidy, efficient film that overcomes its budget and the awkwardly designed robots.” Top-billed Richard Denning was one of the quintessential monster fighters of the 1950s. After starring in Unknown Island in 1948 he headlined Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), Day the World Ended (1956) and The Black Scorpion (1957). He was married to 1940s horror favorite Evelyn Ankers.
Tormented (1960; 75 minutes) Producers: Bert I. Gordon and Joe Steinberg. Director-Story: Bert I. Gordon. Screenplay: George Worthing Yates. Photography: Ernest Laszlo. Editor: John Bushelman. Music: Albert Glasser. Additional Jazz Sequences: Calvin Jackson. Song: Lewis Melzer and Albert Glasser; sung by Margie Rayburn. Art Director: Gabriel Scognamillo. Sound: John Kean. Sets: Gene Redd. Makeup: Bill Cooley. Wardrobe: Marge Corso. Special Effects: Herman Townsley. Special Visual Effects: Bert I. Gordon and Flora M. Gordon. Assistant Directors: Joe Boyle and Bill Forsyth. CAST: Richard Carlson (Tom Stewart), Susan Gordon (Sandy Hubbard), Lugene Sanders (Meg Hubbard), Judi Reding (Vi Mason), Joe Turkel (Nick Lewis), Lillian Adams (Mrs. Ellis), Gene Roth (Mr. Nelson), Vera Marsh (Mrs. Hubbard), Harry Fleer (Frank Hubbard), Merritt Stone (Minister), George Stanley (Photographer), Dick Walsh (Doctor), Leslie Thomas (Guest).
After six years of making films dealing mainly with giant insects and monsters, producer-director Bert I. Gordon turned to a ghost story with Tormented, scripted by George Worthing Yates, who also wrote Earth vs the Spider, Attack of the Puppet People and War of the Colossal Beast (all 1958) for him. In addition, Yates did the story for Them! (1953) and the scripts for It Came from Beneath the Sea and Conquest of Space (both 1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), The Flame Barrier, Frankenstein 1970 and Space Master X-7 (all 1958). Relying more on emoting than tacky special effects, Tormented (released in the fall of 1960) is a fairly scary spook show that moves along quickly, easily carrying out its duty as a double bill item, usually paired with Caltiki the Immortal Monster (q.v.). While he is best known for his cinema outings dealing with giantism, Gordon’s greatest contribution to the entertainment field was his daughter Susan, who debuted in his Attack of the Puppet People and appeared in his The Boy and the Pirates (1960). A sweet, unassuming child, Susan took all the acting honors in Tormented. She went on to appear in her father’s second supernatural melodrama, Picture Mommy Dead (1966). Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson) has rented a beach house on an island where his young fiancée Meg Hubbard (Lugene Sanders) lives with her wealthy parents (Vera Marsh, Harry Fleer) and eight-year-old sister Sandy (Susan Gordon). Tom and Meg are to be married in two weeks and he is then to give a piano jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. He is visited by his old girlfriend, singer Vi Mason ( Judi Reding), who demands he give up Meg and return to her. They meet at an old lighthouse and when Tom refuses to knuckle under, Vi threatens to blackmail him with letters he wrote to her. The two climb to the top of the lighthouse and as they argue, Vi leans against a railing that gives way and she falls, barely hanging onto the rail. She begs Tom to help her but he watches as she falls to her death in the sea. The following morning Tom goes to the beach in search of Vi’s body and sees it floating near the shore. He carries the corpse and places it on the sand only to have it turn into a mass
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of seaweed. Sandy, who is very attached to Tom, arrives and finds Vi’s watch, which the pianist later throws into the sea. As he broods in the lighthouse over Vi’s death, Meg arrives and tries to cheer him up. Tom begs her to marry him immediately so they can get off the island. When she refuses, they leave as a shadow envelops the place and they smell perfume. Walking along the beach with Meg, Tom spies a third set of footprints in the sand but before he can show them to her the waves wipe them away. As Tom works at his beach house, Vi’s record of the song “Tormented” begins playing on the phonograph. He takes it off the turntable but a few minutes later it plays again and he smashes the recording. When Mrs. Ellis (Lillian Adams), a blind real estate agent, brings Tom flowers, he inquires if she believes in ghosts. She tells him about a family named Samuels who rented a house from her. Their young son and his dog went missing and after that tenants would not remain in the house due a scratching sound at the door, along with coldness and seaweed in the boy’s room. Tom dreams of Vi that night. When he wakes up, he goes to the lighthouse where he calls to her and says that he will no longer pay attention to her and that he will marry Meg. The next day Sandy comes to see Tom and she tells him that Meg wants to reconcile with him. She asks to see her sister’s engagement ring but when Tom takes it out of the box it disappears — and he then sees it on Meg’s crawling hand. Telling Sandy to leave, Tom implores Vi to not torment him. He runs to the beach where she sees Meg and they embrace. They go back to her house where the young woman is horrified to see her wedding dress covered in seaweed. Sandy later tells Mrs. Ellis about Tom going to the lighthouse and the blind woman goes there and confronts Vi’s ghost and almost falls off the railing but stops herself in time and calls the spirit a fiend. Meg’s father returns from a business trip to attend her wedding but expresses displeasure with her marrying a jazz musician. Sandy goes to the lighthouse to see Tom and finds a medallion belonging to Vi. Boat operator Nick Lewis ( Joe Turkel) goes to Tom’s beach house wanting him to pay the five dollar cost of the return boat ticket Vi promised him. To get rid of the intruder, Tom gives him the money. At a beachfront café, Nick overhears the proprietor (Gene Roth) talking with Mrs. Ellis about Tom and Meg’s upcoming wedding. Later he goes to their wedding rehearsal and tells Tom he wants to see him again. That evening at a pre-wedding party, a picture of Tom and Meg is taken but when Tom sees it, Vi’s face is also visible. The next morning Vi’s head appears at Tom’s house and says she plans to tell the world he killed her. He wraps it in a towel and takes it outside where it rolls down a flight of wooden steps. Nick picks up the bundle, which turns out to be a bunch of wilted flowers. He tells Tom he wants $5,000 to keep quiet about Vi, since he has possession of the medallion found by Sandy. Tom agrees to talk with him at the lighthouse. When they get there Vi’s ghost urges him to kill the blackmailer, which he does with a lead pipe. Sandy comes down the lighthouse stairs, having witnessed the murder. During the wedding, the minister (Merritt Stone) asks if anyone knows any reason for the marriage not to take place and just as Sandy is about to speak up, a chilling breeze blows through the church, wilting all the flowers. When her bridal bouquet also wilts, Meg screams and runs from the church. The defeated Tom goes to the lighthouse and informs Vi’s ghost that he will leave the island without getting married. The Hubbards realize that Sandy has not returned home, unaware that she has gone to the lighthouse to find out why Tom killed the boat man. Knowing he has to silence the little girl, Tom takes her to the top of the building. As he starts to push her through the railing, Vi’s ghost lunges at him and he plunges to his death in the water. When the Hubbards and other residents go to the beach, Vi’s body is brought to the shore, followed by that of Tom. Vi’s arm falls over Tom in an embrace, revealing the wedding ring on her left hand.
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Tormented did not see British release until 1964; thirteen minutes were trimmed from the proceedings in that territory. There the Monthly Film Bulletin declared it a “[f ]aintly idiotic ghost story redeemed by a few of its hallucinatory effects … mainly routine.” Donald C. Willis commented in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972), “Though one of Gordon’s better pictures, it’s still no great shakes.” “[Richard] Carlson and [Judi] Reding are good in this more ‘adult’ than usual Gordon flick, which mixes creepy atmosphere with blatant special effects,” wrote James O’Neill in Terror on Tape (1994). Joe Kane in The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope (2000) opined, “Gordon’s ghost story relies on cheap FX and a moody lighthouse setting to nudge it along but stacks up as agreeably tacky ’50s fun.” Charles Kilgore wrote in Ecco the World of Bizarre Video #14 (1990), “To be sure, Tormented bears the mark of a Bert I. Gordon production. It suffers from laughably bad special effects (courtesy of Bert and wife Flora), occasionally painful stabs at acting from a seemingly bewildered cast, and Gordon’s nonchalant shrug towards establishing story credibility. What makes Tormented memorable is Gordon’s subversive reworkings of ghost story conventions and his cheap shock tactics — which occasionally backfire — to relate its seamy account of a scorned floozy whose ghost returns from the grave to claim her killer…. [A]lthough Gordon’s skill at directing motion pictures has been justifiably lambasted by critics, Tormented —along with his best work — reveals the touch of a director who understood how to entertain audiences by coyly toying with their expectations.”
Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977; 144 minutes; Color) Producer: Merv Adelson. Executive Producer: Helmut Jedele. Director: Robert Aldrich. Screenplay: Ronald M. Cohen and Edward Huebsch, from the novel Viper Three by Walter Wager. Photography: Robert Hauser. Editors: Michael Luciano, William Martin and Maury Winetrobe. Music: Jerry Goldsmith. Title Song Sung by Billy Preston. Art Director: Werner Achmann. Sound: James Willis, Gordon Daniel, Gordon Davidson and Gilbert Marchant. Production Designer: Rolf Zehelbauer. Production Manager: Harry Sherman. Production Supervisor: Harry Sokal. Special Effects: Henry Millar and Willi Neuner. Makeup: Georg Jauss and Hans-Peter Knoepfle. Costumes: Tom Dawson. Assistant Directors: Rolf M. Degener and Wolfgang Glattes. CAST: Burt Lancaster (General Lawrence Dell), Richard Widmark (General Martin MacKenzie), Roscoe Lee Browne (Professor James Forrest), Joseph Cotten (Secretary of State Arthur Renfrew), Melvyn Douglas (Secretary of Defense Zachariah Guthrie), Charles Durning (President David T. Stevens), Richard Jaeckel (Captain Sanford Towne), William Marshall (Attorney General William Klinger), Gerald S. O’Loughlin (Brigadier General Michael O’Rourke), Paul Winfield (Willis Powell), Burt Young (Augie Garvas), Charles Aidman (Bernstein), Leif Erickson (CIA Director Ralph Whittaker), Charles McGraw (Air Force General Peter Crane), Morgan Paull (First Lieutenant Louis Cannellis), Simon Scott (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Phil Spencer), William Smith (Hoxey), Bill Walker (Willard), David Baxt (Sergeant Willard), Glenn Beck (Lieutenant), Ed Bishop (Major Jack Fox), Phil Brown (Rev. Cartwright), Gary Cockrell (Captain Jackson), Don Fellows (General Stonesifer), Weston Gavin (Lieutenant Wilson), Garrick Hagon (Driver Alfie), Elizabeth Halliday (General Stonesifer’s Secretary), David Healy (Major Winters), Thomasine Heiner (Nurse Edith), Bill Hootkins (Sergeant Fitzpatrick), Ray Jewers (Sergeant Domino), Ron Lee (Sergeant Rappaport), Robert Sherman (Major LeBeau), John Ratzenberger (Sergeant Kopecki), Robert MacLeod (State Trooper Chambers), Lionel Murton (Colonel Horne), Robert O’Neil (Briefing Officer), Shane Rimmer (Colonel Alexander B. Franklin), Pamela Roland (Sergeant Kelly), Mark Russell (Airman Mendez), Rich Steber (Captain Roger F. Kincaid), Drew W. Wesche (Lieutenant Witkin), Kent O. Doering (Barker), Allan Moore, M. Phil Senini, Rich Demarest (Sharpshooters).
Set in the near future, Twilight’s Last Gleaming was filmed in West Germany by Gerie Productions as Silo III and Viper Three. Slow-paced and overlong, it was one of the last
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films made by director Robert Aldrich, who had done the earlier genre outings Kiss Me Deadly (1955), another movie dealing with atomic weapons, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964). The film’s protagonists’ desire to have the U.S. government come clean on the real reasons for the Vietnam War were nullified since the release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and various other sources had basically revealed this long before the film came to theaters in February 1977. Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times, “[T]he film has the appearance of a rather classy television show…. Mr. Aldrich obtains a good deal of suspense from idiotic material, though his use of the split-screen doesn’t double suspense as often as it cuts it in half.” Variety termed it an “intricate, intriguing and intelligent drama.” Marc Sigoloff said in The Films of the Seventies (1984), “Well-done thriller…. [It] may be a message movie, but its never overly preachy or boring….” Joe Kane in The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope (2000) termed it a “farfetched but watchable pulp thriller.” In Movie Guide for Puzzled Parents (1984), Lynn Minton warned, “The moviemakers exploit the current cynicism about our military and intelligence establishments by telling us — chillingly — how the joint chief would answer. There’s raw language and some shooting and killing, but it’s the movie’s message that would upset many children, and I’d want to be around to talk about it with them. Not for under 14 or 15.” On November 16, 1981, Professor James Forrest (Roscoe Lee Browne) comes to the president of the United States, David T. Stevens (Charles Durning), to plead for the life of his daughter’s lover, a man who murdered a foreign potentate. Stevens refuses his request. Former Air Force General Lawrence Dell (Burt Lancaster) breaks out of a Montana prison with three other death row inmates, Willis Powell (Paul Winfield), Augie Garvas (Burt Young) and Hoxey (William Smith). They waylay a military Jeep with Hoxey killing the driver. The four men gain entrance to an Air Force security base as Hoxey shoots a guard before he is killed by Dell. Getting control of the base’s missile launch control center, they secure it and knock out Captain Towne (Richard Jaeckel) and First Lieutenant Cannellis (Morgan Paull). Now controlling nine Titan missiles equipped with atomic warheads, Dell informs Duty Control that Silo 3 is in hostile hands and asks to speak with General MacKenzie (Richard Widmark). He tells his old adversary he has full launch control of the missiles but MacKenzie thinks he is bluffing. Dell tries to get Towne, an old friend, to give him the combination to the safe housing the keys needed to launch the missiles, saying he wants to expose the government’s true intentions. When Towne refuses, Garvas uses a ruse to make Cannellis think he has put out one of his commander’s eyes and will do the same with the other if he does not get the information. Cannellis gives him the combination, which is imprinted on his dog tags. MacKenzie orders the situation labeled top secret and contacts the president, who is meeting with Secretary of Defense Guthrie (Melvyn Douglas), who has been bickering with Secretary of State Arthur Renfrew ( Joseph Cotten). MacKenzie informs the president about the situation, saying the warheads are probably aimed at the Soviet Union, but he feels Dell does not have the capacity to launch them. Bypassing the National Security Council, Stevens calls a meeting with Renfrew, Guthrie, Attorney General William Klinger (William Marshall), Air Force General Pete Crane (Charles McGraw), CIA Director Ralph Whittaker (Leif Erickson) and Phil Spencer (Simon Scott), chairman of the Joint Chiefs, along with a presidential attaché, Brigadier General O’Rourke (Gerald S. O’Loughlin). Scott informs the group that Dell was demobilized after five years in a Viet Cong prison camp and came home to find his wife had left him. Renfrew claims Dell was revolutionized by the enemy and it is brought out he was sent to death row in Montana on a murder charge. Stevens calls Dell who tells him he and his partners want ten million
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Burt Lancaster, Paul Winfield and Charles Durning in Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977)
dollars in cash and transportation out of the country to a safe haven. He also demands the president be his hostage and that he disclose to the American people the true reasons for the Vietnam War. Stevens asks for time to consider the proposals and he and Dell agree on 90 minutes. MacKenzie sets up a camp outside camera range of the base and waits for presidential authority to launch Operation Gold, a small nuclear device that will take out the intruders. Guthrie suggests Stevens call Dell a second time and he is offered twenty million dollars, a full pardon and safe transit. Much to the chagrin of Powell and Garvas, Dell
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refuses the offer, demanding the president expose the Vietnam War documents. Stevens orders MacKenzie to carry out Operation Gold but when Dell sees tanks approaching the base he calls the general and demands the attack be stopped. Clandestinely a chopper delivers infantrymen and the bomb to the site. As they are setting up the device, an alarm is set off and Dell keys one of the missiles to launch. Towne and Cannellis manage to get free and attack the invaders. Cannellis shoots Garvas before he is killed by Powell. Towne is knocked out and tied up as MacKenzie asks the president for permission to set off the nuclear bomb but is told to hold back. Dell halts the missile launch. The president and his advisors go over the government’s Vietnam policy which called for limited wars in order to avoid an nuclear conflict. Guthrie tells the upset Stevens that an open government is needed but most of the others disagree. Klinger suggests such action might take place slowly over a period of years. All the advisors agree that the president should go to Montana to meet with Dell so that protective measures can be taken after Dell and his cohorts evacuate Silo 3. Stevens angrily refuses but, after consulting O’Rourke, he changes his mind, admitting he is scared. Stevens tells Guthrie that if he is killed, the new president must release the secret documents after two weeks. As Air Force One flies to Montana, Dell learns that MacKenzie is in command near the silo. When he calls him, the general says the president is about to land. Powell suggests to Dell that the chief executive may be a double and they all will be killed before the documents are exposed. Dell wants to launch the missiles but Powell refuses to help him. After getting word that Air Force One has landed, Dell and Powell watch the president enter the silo. He takes the elevator to the control center; the three men leave the compound and head for the plane but as they near it they are shot by sharpshooters. Before dying, Stevens tells Guthrie to keep his word. While lacking in plot plausibility, Twilight’s Last Gleaming is a delight for fans of veteran Hollywood actors as its cast is filled with famous names, all of whom give wellmodulated performances. Burt Lancaster is quite good as the chief protagonist, wavering between self-sacrificing patriotism and obvious mental imbalance. Paul Winfield and Burt Young handle their roles as hardened criminals in good fashion and William Smith is outstanding in his cameo as the trigger-happy Hoxey. Joseph Cotten, Melvyn Douglas, William Marshall, Gerald S. O’Loughlin, Leif Erickson, Charles McGraw and Simon Scott give in-depth performances as presidential advisors and Richard Jaeckel and Morgan Paull are very believable as the defenders of the missile silo. Richard Widmark is excellent as the commanding general, and Charles Durning’s character is one of textured personality nuances. The casting of Durning, however, does not appear to be historical since few heavyset men have held the presidency, the last being William Howard Taft who was elected in 1908. Twilight’s Last Gleaming was also called Nuclear Countdown. For Swedish showings it was cut to 123 minutes and in France it was trimmed to 91 minutes.
Up in Smoke (1957; 64 minutes) Producer: Richard Heermance. Director: William Beaudine. Screenplay: Jack Townley. Story: Elwood Ullman and Bert Lawrence. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: William Austin. Music: Marlin Skiles. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Frank McKenzie. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Sets: Joseph Kish. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Wardrobe: Sid Mintz. Continuity: Frank Remsden. Assistant Director: Jesse Corallo, Jr. CAST: Huntz Hall (Horace Debussy “Sach” Jones), Stanley Clements (Stanislaus “Duke” Coveleskie), David Gorcey (Chuck), Eddie LeRoy (Blinky), Dick Elliott (Mike Clancy), Judy Bamber (Mabel), Byron Foulger (Mr. Bub), Ralph Sanford (Sam), Ric Roman (Tony), Joe Devlin
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(Al), James Flavin (Policeman), Earle Hodgins (Friendly Frank), John Mitchum (Desk Sergeant), Jack Mulhall (Police Clerk), Fritz Feld (Dr. Bluzak), Wilbur Mack (Druggist), Benny Rubin (Bernie).
After Bowery Boys Sach (Huntz Hall), Duke (Stanley Clements), Chuck (David Gorcey) and Blinky (Eddie LeRoy) and café owner Mike Clancy (Dick Elliott) collect $90 to help pay the medical expenses of a polio victim, Sach is given a ride to the bank to deposit the funds by Sam (Ralph Sanford), who takes him to a bookie joint run by Tony (Ric Roman) and Al ( Joe Devlin). The two crooks cheat Sach out of the money. When he gets back to the café he is belittled by Duke for being so stupid. Sach informs Blinky that he wants to get even with the crooks even if it means selling his soul to the Devil. Mr. Bub (Byron Foulger) appears and informs Sach that he will give him horse race winners for the next seven days in return for his soul. Sach goes along with the deal but, after being given the name of the first day’s winner, he finds out the bookies will not take his bet because he has no money. He dreams up a scheme to sell the boys’ old jalopy, unaware that Duke has already done so. After being paid ten cents for the jalopy by a dishonest salesman (Earle Hodgins), Sach is arrested for car theft and put in jail where Mr. Bub shows up and gives him the next winner. Tony and Al become suspicious when the horse Sach picks wins again. After the boys bail him out of jail, Sach gets the third day tip from the Devil disguised as an organ grinder’s monkey. When Mike and the others see him talking to the monkey, they send Sach to Dr. Bluzak (Fritz Feld), a psychiatrist, who becomes so discombobulated trying to psychoanalyze Sach he ends up on the couch asking for the names of horse race winners. Borrowing $20 from Mike, Sach goes back to the bookies and bets on the Devil’s latest tip, causing Tony and Al to do the same. Just before the race, Sach is persuaded to change his mind and the horse he bets on loses. The bookies have Tony’s girlfriend Mabel ( Judy Bamber) become a waitress at Mike’s in order to discover Sach’s system for making bets. On the seventh day, Mr. Bub gives Sach $100 and tells him to go to the race track where he will be given the name of the horse that will win the big race. Going to the race track with Mike and Mabel, Sach is followed by the bookies and Sam. In the guise of a soda peddler, Mr. Bub gives Sach the name of the winning horse and he bets the money. Chuck shows up saying that a charity is going to pay the polio victim’s expenses so Sach tries to break his deal with Mr. Bub. Mabel tells Tony to bet on the same horse as Sach. Realizing the Devil will get his soul if the horse wins, Sach convinces Mike to waylay its jockey and he takes his place. Even with Sach in the saddle, the horse wins and Mr. Bub comes for his soul only to learn the horse has been disqualified because he was ridden by the wrong jockey. When the boys go back to Clancy’s Café, Sach sees Mr. Bub working as the new busboy. He tells Sach he can get reinstated if he finds new clients. Sach sends him to Tony and Al, who lost all their funds on the race. Richard Heermance, who produced The Maze and World Without End (qq.v.), took over from Ben Schwalb as the producer for the final two “Bowery Boys” productions, Up in Smoke and In the Money (1958). Released late in 1957, Up in Smoke is a cheap affair highlighted by an amusing performances by Byron Fougler as the Devil and Earle Hodgins as slick used car salesman Friendly Frank. Otherwise the laughs are few. Variety stated, “Director William Beaudine might have been nodding a little on this one.” David Hayes and Brent Walker wrote in The Films of the Bowery Boys (1984), “Repetition characterizes Up in Smoke. The film cuts from the lunchroom to the bookmaking office, and back, rarely breaks the pattern…. New producer Richard Heermance kept sets sparse, and writers Elwood Ullman and Bert Lawrence simply updated the old 16th century story of Faust.”
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War of the Satellites (1958; 66 minutes) Producers: Roger Corman, Jack Rabin and Irving Block. Director: Roger Corman. Screenplay: Lawrence Louis Goldman. Story: Jack Rabin and Irving Block. Photography: Floyd Crosby. Editor: Irene Morra. Music: Walter Greene. Art Director: Daniel Haller. Sound: Philip Mitchell. Production Manager: Lionel C. Place. Sets: Harry Reif. Makeup: Stanley Orr. Special Effects: Louis DeWitt, Irving Block and Jack Rabin. Assistant Director: Jack Bohrer. CAST: Dick Miller (Dave Boyer), Susan Cabot (Sybil Carrington), Richard Devon (Dr. Pol Van Ponder), Eric Sinclair (Dr. Howard Lazar), Michael Fox ( Jason Ibn Akad), Robert Shayne (Ambassador Hodgekiss), Jerry Barclay ( John Compo), John Brinkley, Tony Miller (Control Room Officers), Bruno VeSota (LeMoine), Jay Sayer ( Jack), Mitzi McCall (Mitzi), Roy Gordon (United Nations President), Roger Corman (Ground Control Officer), Beach Dickerson (Armed Crewman/Voice of Reporter), James Knight (Second Crewman).
Eight months after the Soviets launched the first space satellite, Sputnik, in October 1957, Allied Artists released War of the Satellites on a double-bill with Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (q.v.). Filmed in eight days in cramped settings, the sci-fi outing attempted to cash in on the space craze and even included a brief Life magazine blurb in its advertising since that periodical had made mention of it in an article on current science fiction movies. The film’s chief asset is its cast, with an especially good performance by Richard Devon in three roles, the scientist behind the satellite program and his two alien clones. Susan Cabot does not have a role befitting her talents as the scientist’s assistant; she is also harshly lit in several scenes. Even producer-director Roger Corman shows up as the ground control officer. A major highlight of the picture is Walter Greene’s bombastic music score that gives the film the feel of an old-time serial. War of the Satellites is based on a story by special effects artists Irving Block and Jack Rabin, who also co-produced it with Corman. Their effects, done with Louis DeWitt, are among the tackier aspects of the production. A satellite manned by volunteers attempts to succeed where nine predecessors failed by penetrating an energy barrier that halts further space travel and destroys the vessels. Among the United Nations representatives watching the voyage are U.S. Ambassador Hodgekiss (Robert Shayne) and foreign emissaries Ibn Akad (Michael Fox) and LeMoine (Bruno VeSota), along with Dr. Pol Van Ponder (Devon), the head of Project Sigma. Akad complains of the half-billion dollars lost in the previous futile flights and LeMoine predicts that this one will also fail. The satellite makes contact with the barrier and explodes. Akid calls for an end to the project. Two necking teenagers ( Jay Sayer, Mitzi McCall) find a small missile that fell from the sky and take it the authorities. At the United Nations, Sybil Carrington (Cabot), Van Ponder’s assistant, reads a message written in Latin found on the missile. It says it is from a civilization called the Spiral Nebula Ghana and it will stop low level humans from exploring space. In response Hodgekiss says no one has the right to keep people from space travel and urges the body to continue with Project Sigma. Van Ponder informs newsmen that the missive is a hoax but confides to Sybil and staff engineer Dave Boyer (Dick Miller) that the missile is harder than anything ever devised by humans and that he does not know where it came from. The next Sigma launch is planned and Hodgekiss asks Van Ponder to a UN forum to answer questions about the preparations. On his way there, the scientist is blinded by a bright light; his car crashes down an embankment. While Akad denounces the latest launch plans, Hodgekiss is told that Van Ponder has been killed. Moments later, the scientist arrives and is given an ovation. After the meeting, Van Ponder tells the ambassador a police officer was mistaken about his being killed and asks to use his office to go over some plans. When Hodgekiss leaves, Van Ponder separates into a second being, aliens having taken the form of the dead scientist. Van Ponder communicates with
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the aliens about his plans to thwart the space mission. Dave arrives and asks that Sybil not be included in the launch crew but his request is denied. Sybil alerts them to news of the world being blanketed in a holocaust of fires, floods and volcanic explosions which many connect with the alien message. Van Ponder phones Hodgekiss to say that Sigma should be halted and he tells Dave and Sybil the aliens are apparently so powerful they look upon humans as we look upon bacteria. He prepares a message that he asks Dave to read at the UN but instead the engineer says mankind cannot survive by abject surrender and Sigma must proceed at all costs. The members agree with him unanimously and vote to continue the project. When Dave is working with Van Ponder some time later, he notices the scientist has exactly the same growths on each arm. After taking down the license number on the scientist’s car, Dave decides to look at his wrecked vehicle. As Van Ponder is talking with John Compo ( Jerry Barclay), the project’s astronomical engineer, he accidentally incinerates his right hand on a burner. When Compo goes for help, the alien revitalizes it by rubbing it with his left hand. When Compo returns with Dr. Howard Lazar (Eric Sinclair), the two men find Van Ponder in perfect health and Compo is told he has been working under too much pressure. Compo says Van Ponder is not human. Dave goes to a junkyard and finds the scientist’s wrecked car which is so badly mangled that he realizes no one could have survived the crash. Dave calls Sybil and she tells him that Van Ponder has moved up the latest launch time. The scientist is not happy when Dr. Lazar clears Compo to be part of the crew with him and Sybil on Rocket One, with Dave following on the second rocket. Just before blast-off, Dave witnesses Van Ponder duplicate himself. Three rockets are successfully launched and after their components break apart they merge to become the Sigma satellite. Following the launch, the scientist confronts Compo and tells him the truth about being an alien and offers to make him one but the engineer refuses and is murdered. When Sybil comes into the room, Van Ponder announces that Compo died due to launch acceleration and then informs the crew of the death and his plans to blast through the Sigma barrier and destroy it. Dave tries to make Sybil believe Van Ponder is not human but she scoffs at him so he accuses the scientist of killing Compo. After the funeral for Compo, Dave asks Dr. Lazar about Compo’s health which the doctor says was perfect. Dave tells the doctor that Van Ponder murdered Compo and then shows him the scientist’s fingerprints which prove he isn’t human. Lazar tells Van Ponder he must check his heart and, after the alien leaves to observe the formation of a distant cloud mass, he gives himself a heart to fool the medical man. Now partly human, the scientist realizes he loves Sybil and makes a date to talk to her about their future together. Going back to the doctor, Van Ponder murders Lazar as Sybil informs Dave about the scientist’s strange behavior toward her. Dave tells her to stay with Lazar, not realizing the doctor has been killed. Van Ponder orders Dave’s arrest for the deaths of Compo and the doctor and he is taken into custody by two crewmen (Beach Dickerson, James Knight). When Van Ponder disposes of Lazar’s body, he is observed by Sybil who runs from him into the Solar Energy Room. He follows her and tells her he needs her because he is now human. As the satellite nears the barrier, the control room officers ( John Brinkley, Tony Miller) call to Van Ponder for instructions and he orders them to head for it. The scientist then clones himself. One of the aliens goes to the control area while the other remains and tries to molest Sybil. Dave knocks out his guards and, taking a gun, finds one of the aliens and wounds him. Then the two engage in a struggle with Dave killing the alien. When Van Ponder dies, the other alien with Sybil collapses and both life forms disappear. Dave orders the control room officers to use solar energy to get through the barrier. As the UN representatives watch, the Sigma
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satellite blasts its way through the barrier and Dave announces that the whole universe is now a new frontier. “A confusing space action melo” is how Variety termed War of the Satellites, adding, “A lesser entry for the exploitation market…. Over-talkative script … characters are so unreal they are mere walk-throughs….” The Hollywood Reporter felt it was “[t]opical” while the British Monthly Film Bulletin commented, “Reasonably diverting science fantasy, unduly cluttered with international problems and the inevitably brainy female in the space ship. The production is generally makeshift, but the trick effects work, the atmosphere is occasionally eerie.” Phil Hardy stated in Science Fiction (1984), “The signs of swift making are all too evident, especially in the over-talkative script and the mismatch between the special effects … and the action…. The result is a conventional film, in which the aliens clearly represent the Russians….” In Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972), Donald C. Willis claimed it is “[o]ne of Corman’s worst.” While the film’s title may have suggested a battle in outer space, it apparently referred to the Sigma Project’s efforts to break through the alien barrier.
The Wasp Woman (1959; 63 minutes) Producer-Director: Roger Corman. Screenplay: Leo Gordon. Story: Kinta Zertuche. Photography: Harry Neumann. Editor: Carlo Lodato. Music: Fred Katz. Art Director: Daniel Haller. Sound: Philip Mitchell. Production Manager: Jack Bohrer. Makeup: Grant R. Keat. CAST: Susan Cabot ( Janice Starlin), Fred [Anthony] Eisley (Bill Lane), Barboura Morris (Mary Dennison), William Roerick (Arthur “Coop” Cooper), Michael Mark (Eric Zinthrop), Frank Gerstle (Private Investigator Les Hellman), Bruno VeSota (Night Watchman), Roy Gordon (Paul Thompson), Carolyn Hughes ( Jean Carson), Lynn Cartwright (Maureen Reardon), Frank Wolff (Delivery Man), Lani Mars (Nurse Warren), Philip Barry ( Jerry), Roger Corman (Hospital Doctor), Gene Corman (Board Member).
The first production of Gene and Roger Corman’s Filmgroup, The Wasp Woman was filmed in five days and released on a double-bill with the brothers’ Beast from Haunted Cave (q.v.) by Allied Artists in November 1959. It was Susan Cabot’s final film; she worked for Roger Corman previously in Sorority Girl, Carnival Rock (both 1957), The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, Machine-Gun Kelly and War of the Satellites (q.v.) [all 1958]. As the title character she wore a black insect head mask and black hairy gloves. The monster is seen mostly in dark scenes and is more repulsive than scary. The film has a cheap, hurried look although Cabot and the rest of the cast give exemplary performances, making it a bit more interesting than it otherwise might have been. There is even some comedy repartee between goldbricking, busty secretaries (Carolyn Hughes, Lynn Cartwright) with Beast from Haunted Cave star Frank Wolff showing up in a bit as a delivery man. Variety termed it an “[u]nexciting but exploitable horror film…. [It] looks polished but it’s pretty slow and not very frightening.” The British Monthly Film Bulletin called it “[r]outine stuff ” while Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Films: A Checklist (1972) stated, “Terrible. The attempts at suspense are pretty silly, though a few scenes in a cosmetics firm have an air of credibility about them, and Susan Cabot is good. One of Roger’s worst.” Revenue at cosmetics firm Janice Starling Enterprises has dropped over fourteen percent and during a board meeting, Bill Lane (Fred [Anthony] Eisley) tells Janice (Cabot) and the other members that the problem is the new face representing the company’s products. Janice has been used for advertising for sixteen years but it was felt she was growing too old for the job. Janice talks with chemist Arthur “Coop” Cooper (William Roerick) about the
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possible use of enzyme extracts but he warns her against the idea. Eric Zinthrop (Michael Mark) makes an appointment with Janice and in her company’s laboratory he injects guinea pigs with a youth formula he has invented from royal jelly derived from queen wasps. The aged, sickly animals are made young by the formula and she hires him to make a compound that will be safe for humans and orders him to use her for the experiments. Janice announces to the board that she has hired Zinthrop and lays out her plans to revolutionize the company as a result of his experiments. Lane informs his girlfriend, Mary Dennison (Barboura Morris), who is also Janice’s private secretary, that he thinks Zinthrop is a confidence man, and Coop agrees. Both men tell Mary to keep them informed on Janice and Zinthrop’s activities. After working on the formula for some time, Zinthrop shows Janice a cat he has caused to revert to a kitten and she takes the first injection of the youth enzyme. Three weeks pass and while Janice is impatient she looks five years younger. Mary locates Zinthrop’s letter to Janice about the wasp enzyme and shows it to Bill and Coop, who plans to check on the man’s past. One night Janice goes to the laboratory and injects herself with the formula and a few days later she comes to work looking younger; Mary tells her she appears to be in her early twenties. Janice then informs the board that her company will market Zinthrop’s formula under the banner “Return to Youth with Janice Starlin.” One morning Zinthrop goes to the lab and is attacked by the cat, which has returned to its normal size and gone mad. He kills the animal and disposes of it and then leaves. The disappointed Zinthrop walks in front of a car. Coop finds the man’s notebook and realizes the origins of his formula. When Zinthrop does not return, Janice hires a private detective, Hellman (Frank Gerstle), and the man’s assistant Jerry (Philip Barry) locates him at Central Emergency Hospital as an amnesia case. Poster for The Wasp Woman (1960)
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Coop returns to the lab to test Zinthrop’s formula and is attacked by Janice, who has turned into a wasp woman. After she kills him and drinks his blood, Janice returns to normal and realizes that the formula which she has been injecting is nearly gone. She has Zinthrop transferred to her office and cared for by a nurse (Lani Mars). That night a watchman (Bruno VeSota) hears noises in the lab and when he enters, Zinthrop and the nurse hear a loud scream. Trying to locate Coop, Bill and Mary go to the lab where they find Zinthrop’s notebook and Coop’s pipe. Bill tells Mary he thinks Coop and the night watchman are dead. Suffering from severe headaches, Janice tries to get Zinthrop to concoct more of the formula. When the nurse enters the room, Janice turns back into the monster and kills her. Bill and Mary talk with Zinthrop, who tries to tell them about the attack but he becomes violent. When Mary tries to convince Janice to call the police, her boss again becomes a wasp woman and attacks her. Bill and Zinthrop hear Mary’s screams and Bill runs upstairs to the lab where he sees Mary’s body being dragged away. The Wasp Woman attacks him. When Zinthrop shows up, she tries to kill him. Bill holds the monster off with a chair as Zinthrop douses the creatures with carbolic acid. Using the chair, Bill pushes the Wasp Woman out of a window and she falls over forty floors to her death. Zinthrop dies from the exertion as Bill finds Mary is all right. The Wasp Woman was written for the screen by actor Leo Gordon, based on a story by Kinta Zertuche, the wife of the film’s art director, Daniel Haller. TV prints include several extra minutes of footage filmed by director Jack Hill. The scenes shot by Hill give the reason for Zinthrop contacting the Starlin company. Michael Mark reprises the Zinthrop character, who works for the Honey Fresh company as a chemist. He is fired by executive Howard Renfro (Karl Schanzer) for not turning in a report on royal jelly from bees and instead working with wasps. The scenes also feature Aron Kincaid as beekeeper Howard. Although the sequence is merely padding, it does fit in well with the rest of the movie. In 1995, director Jim Wynorski remade The Wasp Woman for Roger Corman’s New Horizon Pictures, with Jennifer Rubin in the title role. The Wasp Woman proved to be the first of several genre outings for Anthony Eisley, who changed his name from Fred after the movie was made. He went on to appear in Lightning Bolt (q.v.) and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (both 1966), Journey to the Center of Time and The Mighty Gorga (both 1967), The Witchmaker (1969), Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971), The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackal (made in 1971 but not released on video until 1985), Monstroid (1978), Deep Space (1987) and Evil Spirits (1991).
Who? (1975; 93 minutes; Color) Producer: Barry Levinson. Co-Producer: Kurt Berthold. Director: Jack Gold. Screenplay: John Gould [Jack Gold], from the novel by Algis Budrys. Photography: Petrus Schlomp. Editor: Norman Wanstall. Music: John Cameron. Art Director: Peter Scharff. Sound: Mike Le Mare, Colin Miller and Hayo von Zuendt. Costumes: Ille Sievers. Production Manager: Frank Winterstein. Unit Manager: Peter Bergens. Special Makeup: Colin Arthur. Special Effects: Richard Richtsfeld. Continuity: Sandra Piffrader. Stunt Coordinator: Remy Julienne. Assistant Director: Siegfried Rothemund. CAST: Elliott Gould (Sean Rogers), Trevor Howard (Colonel Azarin), Joseph Bova (Dr. Lucas Martino), Ed Grover (FBI Agent Finchley), John Lehne (FBI Agent Haller), James Noble (General Deptford), Lyndon Book (Dr. Barrister), Michael Lombard (Dr. Jacob Besser), Kaym Tomborg (Edith Hayes), Joy Garrett (Barbara), John Stewart (Frank Heywood), Bruce Boa (Miller), Fred Vincent (Douglas), Alexander Allerson (Dr. Korthu), Ivan Desny (General Sturmer), Dan Sazarino (Uncle Lucas), Craig McConnell (Tonino), Herb Andress, Del Negro, Frank Schuller (FBI Agents).
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A tepid and confusing mixture of sci-fi and spy film genres, Who? was filmed in 1973 but did not see release in the U.S. until August 1975. Made in West Germany and Miami, Florida, by Hemisphere Productions and Lion International, the picture had numerous alternate titles. In Italy it was called Who? I’uomo dei due Volte and in West Germany it was entitled Das Phantom mit der Stahl Maske (The Man with the Steel Mask). In England it was shown as Man Without a Face; another U.S. title was Prisoner of the Skull. It was released on video as The Man with the Steel Mask and Roboman. While its advertising promised a metal man, “The Kill Machine with the Megaton Mind,” Who? proved to be a limp Cold War melodrama that shows the similarities between Soviet brainwashing and U.S. debriefing. Its plot is hard to follow since the script calls for constant jumping from the present to the title character’s stay in the U.S.S.R. and back again. Joseph Bova, a former children’s TV host, manages to make a sympathetic being out of the man with a metal face but most of the cast appears confused by the proceedings. Kaym Tomborg offers a nicely etched portrayal of the woman who once loved the metal man. There is even a car chase sequence staged by Remy Julienne that looks like something out of a Charles Bronson thriller. Dr. Lucas Mariano (Bova), the supervisor of the top secret government Neptune Project in Florida, is badly injured in a car accident near the Iron Curtain while attending a conference. Following the fiery explosion, he is rescued by the Soviets and kept by them for six months. Upon his release he is met by FBI agents Sean Rogers (Elliott Gould), Finchley (Ed Grover) and Haller ( John Lehne), who are taken aback when he appears wearing a gray steel face helmet and a mechanical left arm. Rogers is in charge of debriefing Lucas, who says he was interrogated by Soviet Colonel Azarin (Trevor Howard), and not General Sturmer (Ivan Desny), as Rogers expected. He is locked in a room as the skeptical Rogers tells other agents he does not know who Lucas is or what he is but he does know who sent him. Rogers suspects the Soviets have either sent a double or have rigged Lucas to send back information to them once he returns to the Neptune project. In flashback, Azarin talks with Dr. Korthu (Alexander Allerson), who says Lucas is so badly mangled he will have to be recreated as a partially artificial man. The U.S. medical experts tell Rogers the man they examined is human and some of him used to be Lucas Mariano. Rogers questions Lucas and asks him why the Soviets let him return and he replies that he told them nothing about Neptune. Lucas’ colleague, Dr. Besser (Michael Lombard), comes to see him but Rogers will not let the two converse about their work. Both Rogers in the present and Azarin in the past question Lucas about his life, including working at this Uncle Lucas’ (Dan Sazarino) restaurant and his romances with Edith (Tomborg), who loved him, and promiscuous Barbara ( Joy Garrett). Rogers checks on Lucas’ college friend Frank Heywood ( John Stewart), who is deceased, and how he came to work for Neptune and then left to work in Tokyo as a consultant. After ten days of interrogation, Rogers tells Lucas he can go home but as they get to their plane, two assassins try to kill the scientist. After Rogers chases the hit men, their vehicle overturns and explodes. When Haller tells Rogers the Soviets tried to kill Lucas, Rogers says Azarin wants them to believe they have the real scientist so he can go back to work on Neptune. In Miami, Lucas walks the streets and is stared at by everyone. He goes to see Edith and they reminisce about their time together but after he leaves, Rogers calls her and tells her to continue to work with him. When Lucas seems confused he is approached by Finchley, who has been shadowing him, and accidentally lets him know he was overheard talking with Edith. Lucas runs away and Finchley follows him only to be hit and killed by a car. At the beach, Lucas tells Rogers he wants to go back to his late parents’ farm but the agent says if he is cleared he can go back to work. At Neptune, Besser informs Rogers that
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the project needs Lucas and that Hayward had been insecure with his work there. In flashback, when Lucas fails to cooperate with the Soviets, Azarin asks Dr. Korthu to make him another metal man and they enlist Hayward who agrees so they can find out about Neptune. As Lucas works the family farm, Rogers shows up and asks him to return to the project. In flashback, Hayward dies from post-operative shock and Azarin is forced to send Lucas home. In the present, Lucas decides to stay on the farm where he is happy. Variety said the film, adapted from Algis Budrys’s 1958 novel, “is an action-espionage thriller examining, from a science fiction perspective, the nature of identity…. Joe Bova gives a beautiful, underplayed performance as diminutive US scientist Martino.” Phil Hardy in Science Fiction (1984) called Who? “a modest offering…. [Jack] Gold directs as though unimpressed by his own script, spending too much time on chases rather than concentrating on the impassive Bova who gives the film’s best performance as the listless cyborg.” C.J. Henderson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (2001) termed it a “competent work, but that’s about all.”
World Without End (1956; 80 minutes; Color) Producer: Richard Heermance. Director-Screenplay-Story: Edward Bernds. Photography: Ellsworth Fredericks. Editor: Eda Warren. Music: Leith Stevens. Art Director: David Milton. Sound: Ralph Butler. Production Manager: Allen K. Wood. Sets: Joseph Kish. Set Sketches: Alberto Vargas. Makeup: Emile LaVigne. Special Effects: Irving Block, Jack Rabin and Milt Rice. Continuity: Kathleen Fagan. Assistant Director: Don Torpin. CAST: Hugh Marlowe (Dr. John Borden), Nancy Gates (Garnet), Nelson Leigh (Dr. Eldon Galbraithe), Rod Taylor (Herb Ellis), Shawn Smith [Shirley Patterson] (Elaine), Lisa Montell (Deena), Christopher Dark (Hank Jaffe), Booth Colman (Mories), Everett Glass (Timmek), Stanley Fraser (Elda), William Vedder ( James), Paul Brinegar (Vida), Rankin Mansfield (Beryl), Mickey Simpson (Naga), David Alpert (Major), Herb Vigran, Don Kennedy, John Close, Walter Conrad (Reporters), Bill Forman (Radio Announcer), Strother Martin (Nihka), John Bleifer ( Jule), Keith Richards (Human Captive), Mimi Gibson ( Jenny Jaffe), Hugh Corcoran (Master Jaffe), Nancy Howard (Mrs. Jaffe), Michael Garth (Military Officer), John Hiestand (Television Newsman). Not only is World Without End the first film of the 1950s to deal with time travel, it is one of the finest sci-fi films of the decade and one the best in the genre from Allied Artists. Filmed in CinemaScope and Technicolor, it was released in March 1956 on a double bill with Indestructible Man (q.v.). Except for a rather puny rocketship (via footage from Monogram’s Flight to Mars [1951]) and two tatty giant spiders, the film was visually satisfying, thanks to well-chosen exterior locations and Joseph Kish’s sets as well as art direction by David Milton. The set sketches for the production were drawn by noted artist Alberto Vargas. Leith Stevens’ musical score adds much to the futuristic feel of the proceedings; he earlier composed the music for Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951) and The War of the Worlds (1953). Emile LaVigne’s makeup for the subhumans is very well done, although most of the mutants are seen only in background and medium shots. One exception is the one-eyed Naga (Mickey Simpson), the leader of the pack, a very fine presentation of the human race degenerated by atomic war. The acting in the movie is above par for sci-fi efforts with Hugh Marlowe heading the cast and giving a superb performance as a scientist who must adapt to life six centuries in the future. After working in radio and stage, Marlowe began making movies in the mid– 1930s and by the time he starred in World Without End he had been in prestige items like
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Christopher Dark, Rod Taylor, Hugh Marlowe, Nelson Leigh and Keith Richards in World Without End (1956)
Twelve O’Clock High, Night and the City and All About Eve (all 1950), The Day the Earth Stood Still and Rawhide (both 1951), Monkey Business (1952) and Garden of Evil (1954). The same year he did World Without End he also headlined the equally fine sci-fi effort Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. He would go on to appear in Elmer Gantry (1960), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964); his other genre effort was Castle of Evil (1966). Marlowe and leading lady Nancy Gates make a good romantic team. The film also includes two other lovelies, Shawn Smith and Lisa Montell. Smith, who used the name Shirley Patterson when making “B” westerns in the 1940s with Bill Elliott, Tex Ritter, Charles Starrett, Johnny Mack Brown, Russell Hayden and Eddie Dean, went on to appear in The Land Unknown (1957) and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Nelson Leigh, who portrayed the leader of the space expedition in World Without End, was the screen’s first Jor-El in the 1948 serial Superman; he also appeared in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955). Rod Taylor, the film’s radioman, starred in one of the screen’s best sci-fi features, The Time Machine (1960). The main drawback to World Without End, filmed as Flight to the Future, is Edward Bernds’ somewhat plodding direction. Starting out in the sound department at Columbia Pictures, Bernds went on to write and direct Three Stooges shorts for the studio before taking over directing the “Blondie” series in the late 1940s. Leaving Columbia in 1952, he
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went to Allied Artists where he worked with the Bowery Boys on Private Eyes (1953), The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters and Jungle Gents (both 1954) and Bowery to Bagdad (1955) [qq.v.] before making World Without End, his best feature film. He also wrote the screenplay from his supposedly original story although the film is obviously influenced by H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine. Bernds went on to make Queen of Outer Space (q.v.) for Allied in 1958 and it not only borrowed part of World Without End’s storyline, it used some of its footage and one of the spiders. Bernds also directed Space Master X-7 (1958), Return of the Fly (1959), Valley of the Dragons (1961), The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and The Three Stooges in Orbit (both 1962). The military, newsmen and the family (Nancy Howard, Mimi Gibson, Hugh Corcoran) of astronaut Hank Jaffe (Christopher Dark) await word of the fate of the first space reconnaissance mission to Mars in 1957. Radio control has been lost between mission control and spaceship XRM. The astronauts have reached Mars and completed two orbits of the planet and are about to return home. Dr. Eldon Galbraithe (Leigh) is the leader of the expedition and its other members are scientist Dr. John Borden (Marlowe) and communications officer Herb Ellis (Taylor). As they head back, the ship is caught in a turbulent red cloud and begins accelerating at a fantastic speed with the crew being unable to reverse its rockets. The men black out and eventually the ship crashlands in a mountainous area covered with snow. When the crew awakes, they find they are unharmed on a planet with Earth-like gravity and oxygen although it contains some minor radiation. Having no radio contact with Earth and unable to repair the craft, the men take food, water and weapons and walk several miles until they get below the snow line and arrive in a green valley. Hank finds a cave where the men are attacked by two giant spiders, one of which they manage to kill. Getting back outside, they make camp for the night but are attacked by human-like mutants, one of which they kill. The creature has only one Cyclopean eye. The next day the astronauts come upon a cemetery with the latest date on the headstones reading 2188. This causes Dr. Galbraithe to speculate that their rocket traveled faster than the speed of light and they are on Earth in the distant future. While John and Herb accept the verdict, Hank is upset because he realizes his wife and two children have been dead for centuries. Guessing they are in either Colorado or New Mexico, the men press onward. Dr. Galbraithe tells Hank that John’s wife and children died in a plane crash on the way to join him in Hawaii. John is attacked by the mutants and the others come to his rescue. They find refuge in a cave where they discover a metal door. When it lifts, they enter a lighted hallway where a voice tells them to leave behind their paraphernalia and enter a large room. There they are greeted by an old man, Timmek (Everett Glass), who introduces them to his council, including a younger member, Mories (Booth Colman). Timmek informs them that he and his people are the descendants of survivors of a devastating atomic war that took place five centuries before. They live underground where power plants and laboratories supply all their needs since radiation destroyed most of the surface world, leaving a race of deformed mutants. Mories informs the astronauts that his people are peaceful and need no weapons. The men meet Timmek’s beautiful daughter Garnet (Gates) and she and John find they are attracted to each other, much to the chagrin of Mories who feels Garnet belongs to him. Another young woman, Elaine (Smith), is attracted to Herb, as is servant girl Deena (Montell). Garnet tells John that Deena came from the surface and not all those living above ground are mutants, although those not killed in infancy are enslaved by them. Since Garnet has said that her people will not engage in warfare, John tells Hank he feels Timmek and his men will not help them repair their ship so they can explore the planet in hopes of finding
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other pockets of civilization. After touring the underground world, the astronauts note the vitality of the women but the anemic quality of the men and the sparsity of small children. When the astronauts make a proposal to the council to set up an outpost on the surface in order to repair their ship, it is tabled for consideration although Mories accuses the newcomers of wanting to use their weapons to seize control and start a new war. Hank tells the others that he has learned the colony is dwindling in size. That evening Garnet shows John an old tunnel that leads to a hillside where they sit in the moonlight. Mories listens in on the astronauts planning to make their own weapons to fight the mutants and also learns that their guns are being kept by James (William Vedder) in his apartment. He goes there to confiscate the weapons and when James finds him, Mories hits him with a gun butt and kills him. He then stashes the weapons under a bed in the astronaut’s quarters, not realizing he has been seen by Deena, who is jealous of Elaine for kissing Herb. Garnet tries to convince Timmek to let the men have the material they need, saying she loves John, but they are interrupted by the news of James’ murder. The astronauts are captured and the guns found. The council members order them exiled above ground with their guns and supplies. When Deena tries to talk to Timmek, she is beaten by Mories. Timmek and his men find the young woman who tells them it was Mories who hid the guns and an order is issued for his capture. Mories runs out of the compound into the upper world where he is surrounded and bludgeoned to death by the mutants. Timmek and the council give the astronauts permission to fashion new weapons and they fabricate a rocket launcher to fight the savages. Deena finds out that Hank is in love with her. She tells John they only need to kill the mutant leader, Naga (Simpson), to free the normal ones being held captive. Going above ground, the four men use the bazooka to kill a number of the mutants, who take refuge in a cave. One of the normal slaves (Keith Richards) begs for mercy, and John tells Hank to take him back to Deena for questioning. She returns with Hank, saying Naga will order her people killed. Hank goes to check out the cave area but is wounded by Naga with a spear. John has Deena call to Naga, offering to fight him in one-to-one combat. Although the others protest, John says he can defeat Naga, who has no depth perception because of having only one eye. The savage runs out of the cave and attacks John but after a short skirmish, John manages to kill him. Deena tells the other mutants that John is now their leader and they retreat. Months later, a colony has been established on the surface, integrating the people from the underground with the normal ones once held as slaves. As John finds love with Garnet, Hank with Deena, and Herb with Elaine, the astronauts set out to rebuild the human race. While viewers generally deem World Without End a cut above most Allied Artists sci-fi offerings, reviews of the film vary. Ed Naha in Horrors: From Screen to Scream (1975) dubbed it a “[s]ophomoric attempt at Wellsian moralizing.” Steven H. Scheuer in Movies on TV 1969 – 70 (1969) said, “An interesting premise makes this sci-fi tale a bit more absorbing than some comparable films.” In Science Fiction (1984), Phil Hardy complained, “Ironically the money spent on the film’s special effects only serves to highlight the weak melodramatics of Bernds’ script and the stodginess of his direction.” John Stanley’s Creature Feature Movie Guide Strikes Again (1994) termed it an “[e]ntertaining grade-B actioner…. Nothing new, but fast moving with its many fights, monsters, etc.” Dennis Fischer in Science Fiction Film Directors, 1895 – 1998 (2000) stated, “World Without End plays the hoariest of science fiction cliches to the hilt, and while it is never invigorating, it never becomes completely boring either.”
Television Features In the mid–1970s, Allied Artists Television, a subsidiary of Allied Artists Pictures Corporation, released several packages of motion pictures for television distribution. These packages included not only Monogram and Allied Artists theatrical films but also motion pictures made by other companies. Of the latter, twenty-two feature films dealing with horror, science fiction and fantasy were included in some of these packages and they are discussed here. Some of the movies were re-titled for television.
Atlas (The Filmgroup, 1961; 79 minutes; Color) Producer-Director: Roger Corman. Associate Producer-Screenplay-Production Manager: Charles B. Griffith. Photography: Basil Maros. Editor: Michael Luciano. Music: Ronald Stein. Sound: Allen Hershey. Costumes: Barbaro Comeau. Assistant Director: Henry Yatron. CAST: Michael Forest (Atlas), Frank Wolff (Praximedes), Barboura Morris (Candia), Walter Maslow (Garnis), Christos Exarchos (Indros), Andreas Flippides (King Talectos), Miranda Kounelaki (Ariana), Sascha Dario (Dancer), Theodoros Dimitriou (General Gallus), William Jolley (Seronikosian Rebel), Robert Hudson (Socrates), Jean Moore (Handmaiden), Dick Miller, Charles B. Griffith (Thenisian Soldiers), Roger Corman (Seronikosian Senator), James Carleton, Keith Whitley, Charles Stirling (Soldiers).
Producer-director Roger Corman’s company, The Filmgroup, released Atlas in the spring of 1961. It was filmed the previous year in Greece. Corman originally announced it would be a big-budget road show production but when local financing fizzled it was done in ten days for $70,000. Sword-and-sandal epics were the rage at the time thanks to the Hercules films with Steve Reeves and their Continental offshoots. Atlas proved to be a tacky, puny effort despite some nice on-location shooting at actual Greek ruins and color filming in Vitsascope. Unable to corral more than a handful of extras as soldiers, Corman filmed the tepid battle scenes in close-ups with Filmgroup regular Dick Miller and the film’s writer, Charles B. Griffith, having bits as participants. Special billing is given to Sascha Dario, the prima ballerina of the Greek National Opera. Michael Forest is a listless Atlas although Frank Wolff has a field day chewing up scenery as the wicked warlord Praximedes; the two actors previously starred in Corman’s Beast from Haunted Cave (1960) [q.v.]. Another Filmgroup member, Barboura Morris, was the leading lady, displaying more legs than energy. Located in the northern mountains of Greece, the city of Thenis is under siege by Praximedes (Wolff ) of Seronikos, a self-proclaimed tyrant. At a meeting between Thenis’ King Talectos (Andreas Flippides) and Praximedes, it is proposed that the drawn-out fight be decided with a match to the death between Talectos’s son Indros (Christos Exarchos) and a warrior of Praximedes’ choice. Agreeing to the proposal, Praximedes travels to the Olympic Games in Athens with his mistress Candia (Morris) and advisor Garnis (Walter 181
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Maslow). There they see Atlas (Forest) defeat another wrestler and become the hero of the games. Praximedes asks Atlas to fight Indros for him. After falling under the spell of Candia, the mighty man agrees, although he refuses to kill his opponent if he wins. On the way back to Thenis, Praximedes and his soldiers are attacked by rebels whom he orders his men to massacre. In Thenis, Atlas engages in combat with Indros and defeats him but refuses Praximedes’ command to kill the man. Keeping his word, King Talectos turns Thenis over to Praximedes and his men. During a banquet, Candia is slapped by her lover; she asks Atlas to take her with him when he leaves the city. Secretly, Praximedes has some of his men dress as Thenisian soldiers and massacre more than 800 citizens. Atlas and Candia observe the slaughter. King Talectos is arrested and charged by Praximedes with instigating the massacre. Praximedes’ general, Gallus (Theodoros Dimitriou), is made the judge at Talectos’ trial, with Garnis as his defender and Praximedes as the prosecutor. The king is found guilty and ordered executed with an axe. Praximedes lets a disgusted Atlas leave the city as Indros’ lover, Ariana (Miranda Kounelaki), helps Candia get out of Thenis. Garnis lusts for the beautiful blonde Ariana but she refuses his offer of help. Candia and Atlas meet outside the city, but when Praximedes finds his mistress is missing he follows them and they are captured by his soldiers. Riding back to Thenis, the band is attacked by Indros, who escaped the slaughter, and his rebels. Atlas and Candia are freed as Praximedes rides back to the city. There he informs Garnis to guard Ariana who he wants to use as a hostage. Garnis tells the young woman her life is in danger and for her to go to Athens where he will meet her. When Garnis informs Praximedes that Ariana is missing, the tyrant accuses him of treachery and stabs him to death. Ariana goes to Indros as Atlas conceives a plan to sneak most of the rebels into Thenis through a secret passage since Praximedes will lead his men to ambush them. The rebels take the city as its few defenders surrender. When Praximedes finds he has been tricked, he takes his army back to Thenis where it is are defeated by the rebels. In hand-to-hand combat with Atlas, Praximedes is killed. With peace restored to Thenis, Atlas and Candia ride off to Egypt. The year 1961 saw the release of more than a dozen sword-and-sandal costume dramas and while none of them can be considered epics, Atlas was certainly the runt of the litter. The British Monthly Film Bulletin complained, “Not one of the best Cormans…. Both script and acting leave much to be desired…. [I]t’s all a bit too heavy and plodding.” Joe Kane in The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope (2000) claimed, “[Charles B.] Griffith’s script and [Barboura] Morris’ appealing presence help save the day” while VideoHound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics (1996) states, “The script adds wit, style, and even some political commentary to the sword and sandal shenanigans, while avoiding all the more expensive clichés.” Video Watchdog #4 (1991) dubbed the film “amusingly undernourished” and noticed that Jack Nicholson may have played one of the battle scene warriors: “[H]is shield’s in the way, but that smile is unmistakable.” Allied Artists Television included Atlas in its “Science-Fiction Features” package.
The Brain from Planet Arous (Howco International, 1957; 71 minutes) Producer-Photography: Jacques Marquette. Associate Producer: Dale Tate. Director: Nathan Hertz [Juran]. Screenplay: Ray Buffum. Editor: Irving Schoenberg. Music: Walter Greene. Sound: Philip Mitchell. Makeup: Jack Pierce. Technical Advisor: J.L. Cassingham. Assistant Director: Bert Chervin. CAST: John Agar (Steve March), Joyce Meadows (Sally Fallon), Robert Fuller (Dan Murphy), Thomas B. Henry ( John Fallon), Ken Terrell (Colonel), Henry Travis (Colonel Frogley), E. Leslie Thomas (General Brown), Tim Graham (Sheriff Wally Paine), Bill Giorgio (Soviet Observer), Dale
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Joyce Meadows and Thomas B. Henry in The Brain from Planet Arous (Howco International, 1957)
Tate (Professor Dale Tate/Voices of Gor and Vol), Kenner G. Kemp, Gil Perkins (Military Men), George (Dog).
Cinematographer Jacques Marquette made a brief foray into the production side of filming in the late 1950s when he produced and photographed The Brain from Planet Arous. With most of the same crew from that film, he also took over as director for Teenage Monster, which Howco International put out on a double-bill with Brain. The next year he was executive producer and did the camerawork on Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (q.v.) and in 1961 he had the same chores with Flight of the Lost Balloon (q.v.). He also photographed Creature from the Haunted Sea (q.v.) and The Strangler (1964) [qq.v.]. Billed as Nathan Hertz, Nathan Juran directed both Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and The Brain from Planet Arous. Considering the content of both sci-fiers, it is no wonder he used a non de plume. Dale Tate, the associate producer of Brain, supplied the voices of aliens Gor and Vol so the title should have been The Brains from Planet Arous, although only one model was used for both aliens. Outside of the use of the caverns in Bronson Canyon, the film is pictorially arid although it packs a lot of activity into its brief running time. It was released to TV in Allied Artists Television’s “Science-Fiction Features” package. A mysterious object crashes into Mystery Mountain and a short time later scientists Steve March ( John Agar) and Dan Murphy (Robert Fuller), who are experimenting with nuclear fission in the desert, notice high radioactivity with the source thirty miles away. The two men have lunch with Steve’s fiancée Sally Fallon ( Joyce Meadows) and her father John (Thomas B. Henry) and then go by Jeep to the origin of the disturbance. They find a huge cave recently blasted out of a mountain and when they enter it they notice that the radioactivity comes and goes. The men see a huge floating brain with two eyes coming at
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them and when they fire at the thing, it emits a ray that knocks out Steve and kills Dan. The thing then takes possession of Steve’s body. A week later, Fallon calls his worried daughter to see if Steve and Dan have returned and a short time later Steve shows up saying Dan has gone to Las Vegas. When Steve gets too rough with Sally, her dog George attacks him. He leaves after Sally tells Steve he needs to see a doctor. When he returns to his laboratory after experiencing severe head pain, the alien arises from Steve’s brain and tells him that it is Gor from the distant planet Arous. The thing says it will use Steve’s body as a dwelling place and that it finds Sally to be very exciting. The next day Sally and her father go to Mystery Mountain and find the cave containing Dan’s dead body. They are met by a giant brain named Vol who tells them that it too is from Arous and that it has come to Earth to capture the outlaw Gor. It says Gor is controlling Steve and it says it will meet them at their home the next day to map out a strategy to capture the criminal alien. Steve arranges with Colonel Frogley (Henry Travis) to be an observer at an atomic energy test at Indian Springs and Gor promises Steve that it will demonstrate something that will use the power of pure intellect, letting it rule the planet. Vol informs Sally and her father that Gor is insane for power and asks their permission to use George as a host so it can keep a close watch on the criminal. Ordering Steve to see Sally, Gor uses its powers to destroy an airplane, killing 38 people. As they take George along, Sally tells Steve that he seems different and he says he plans to introduce an important discovery at the atomic test, a power that will make him the most feared man on Earth. When Steve again tries to seduce Sally, she pushes him away and he apologizes, saying he got carried away. Hearing about the airplane crash, they go to the site where Frogley shows Steve a burned corpse and says the destruction was caused by some unearthly power. Back home, Sally informs her father that she thinks Gor’s possession of Steve caused the tragedy. Vol tells them that Gor must leave the host body each day to get oxygen and that it can be destroyed by being struck at a spot called the Fissure of Orlando, on the top of the brain. Sheriff Paine (Tim Graham) talks to Steve about Dan’s death and when he threatens to arrest him, Steve tells him he killed Dan and caused the plane crash and then murders the lawman. At a meeting of the military and various scientists, General Brown (E. Leslie Thomas) announces that the Earth has been invaded but the atomic test will be held. Steve tells them of this powers and demonstrates by destroying the test site and another airplane. When Frogley tries to shoot him, he is slain. Steve demands to meet with world leaders that night and intends to give them a demonstration that will cause as much excitement as the bombing of Hiroshima. Exhausted, Steve later confides to Sally that after they are married they will be rich and live in Washington, D.C. Meeting with representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, China and India, Steve says he wants these nations’ resources so he can build an interplanetary fleet of rockets to return to Arous and become the master of the universe. He also says he will take over the United Nations building and meet with them again in two days. With Vol’s aid, Sally finds a diagram of the brain and points out the Fissure of Orlando and leaves it in Steve’s laboratory. When he returns, she hides as Gor leaves Steve’s body and Steve sees the picture. Sally backs into the sheriff ’s body and screams and Gor attacks her but Steve comes at the alien with an axe and kills it. Vol leaves for Arous as Steve returns to normal and kisses Sally, who tries to tell him how Vol helped her. John Agar does as well as possible in the lead role, considering he is playing a man whose body is taken over by a horny alien who not only wants to rule the universe but is hot for his woman. Joyce Meadows as the feminine interest appears worried most of the
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time and Thomas B. Henry seems mostly uninterested as her father. The title monster is neither intimidating or frightening. Surprisingly, Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972) called it “the usual.” While the film is not good, or even mediocre, it is hardly usual. C.J. Henderson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (2001) wrote, “It sounds awful, but it’s actually fun to watch if for no other reason than Agar’s performance. Trashy, but not that trashy.” Regarding the brains, Dennis Fischer commented in Science Fiction Film Directors, 1895 –1998 (2000), “[They] were simply balloons with lit up interiors manipulated on piano wires with a pair of eyes on the front lobes, but they do make memorable menaces, especially with Dale Tate’s sinister readings for Gor.”
Castle of Terror (Woolner Bros., 1964; 84 minutes) Producers: Frank Belty [Leo Lax] and Walter Sarch [Mario Vicario]. Director: Anthony M. Dawson [Antonio Margheriti]. Screenplay: Jean Girmaud [Giovanni Grimaldi] and Gordon Wilson, Jr. [Sergio Corbucci]. Photography: Richard Kramer [Riccardo Pallottini]. Editor: Othel Langhel [Otello Colangeli]. Music: Ritz [Riz] Ortolani. Art Director: Walter Scott [Ottavio Scotti]. Special Effects: E. Catalucci. Makeup: Sonny Arden. Wardrobe: Rose Lynne. Assistant Director: Roger Drake [Ruggero Deodato]. CAST: Barbara Steele (Elisabeth Blackwood), Georges Reviere (Alan Foster), Margarete Robsahm ( Julia), Henry Kruger [Arturo Dominici] (Dr. Carmus), Montgomery Glenn [Silvano Tranquilli] (Edgar Allan Poe), Sylvia Sorrente (Elsi), Raoul H. Newman [Umberto Raho] (Sir Thomas Blackwood), Phil Karson [Giovanni Cianfriglia/Ken Wood] (Herbert), John Peters (William Blackwood), Merry Powers (Cynthia Blackwood), Ben Steffen [Benito Stefanelli] (Groom], Salvo Randone (Tavern Keeper), Johnny Walters (Driver).
Allegedly based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, Castle of Terror was shown theatrically in the United States in the summer of 1964 by Woolner Bros. as Castle of Blood. Allied Artists released it to TV in its “Cavalcade of the ’60’s — Group V” and “Science-Fiction Features” packages. A French-Italian co-production, it was made in Italy as Danza Macabre (Macabre Dance) by Vulsinia Film–Jolly Film–Ulysse Productions–Leo Lax Films. In its homeland it was also called La Lunga Notte del Terrore (The Long Night of Terror) and Terrore (Terror), while its alternate English titles include Coffin of Horror, Coffin of Terror and Tombs of Horror as well as Dimensions in Death, Edgar Allan Poe’s Castle of Blood and Edgar Allan Poe’s Castle of Terror. Under any title, it is a scary horror thriller, nicely paced and moody, with all of its scenes taking place at night except for the brief finale. Beautiful Barbara Steele highlights the proceedings as the specter heroine and Georges Reviere nicely handles the role of the protagonist who must spend a night in a supposedly haunted castle to win a bet. The actors manage to keep the characters believable and the gothic feel of the old castle in which most of the film takes place adds greatly to the atmosphere of endless terror. In 1840s London, Times journalist Alan Foster (Reviere) arrives at a tavern to meet visiting author Edgar Allan Poe (Montgomery Glenn) on All Souls’ Night. The dissipated Poe is reciting one of his tales of the living dead to Sir Thomas Blackwood (Raoul H. Newman). Alan scoffs when the author claims his works are not fiction. Sir Thomas bets Alan ten pounds he cannot spend the night in the old castle on a cliff near Providence, where honeymooners disappeared after going there on their wedding night. Sir Thomas and Poe drive Alan to the castle, agreeing to meet him there at dawn. Entering the dark abode, Alan is soon frightened by his own reflection in a mirror and later hears music, briefly seeing couples dance. He is soon met by a beautiful woman, Elisabeth Blackwood (Steele), who says she lives alone in the castle, and that each year Sir Thomas sends someone to visit her.
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Barbara Steele and Georges Reviere in Castle of Blood (Woolner Bros., 1964)
She asks him to stay in order to spite Sir Thomas and takes Alan to a bedroom where they are joined by Julia (Margarete Robsahm), whose beauty the man earlier admired when he saw her portrait. In the hallway, Elisabeth informs Julia that Alan belongs to her and that he must never learn the truth about the castle. Elisabeth also says she loves Alan and accuses Julia of being jealous. Returning to Alan’s room, Elisabeth learns he is very attracted to her and they kiss, not knowing they are being spied on by Julia. In bed, Alan rests his head on Elisabeth’s breast but cannot hear her heart beat. She says it has not beat for ten years because she is dead. A shirtless man (Phil Karson) runs into the room and stabs Elisabeth and runs away as Alan shoots at him. Returning to the bedroom, Alan finds Elisabeth is gone. Hunting for her, he meets Dr. Carmus (Henry Kruger), a famous scientist the writer thought was deceased. Carmus says he saw what happened but was unable to intervene. The doctor also relates to Alan he can prove that humans can exist after death. He also claims that the castle’s dead will soon relive their last five minutes of life. At midnight, Alan and Carmus see the dead dancing. Elisabeth tells the shirtless man, the castle’s gardener Herbert, to go away although he reminds her she said she loved him more than her husband William ( John Peters). After the guests, including William’s brother Sir Thomas and his wife Cynthia (Merry Powers), leave, Elisabeth and William make love. Herbert breaks into their bedroom and strangles William. He then tries to kill Elisabeth but is struck and killed by Julia, who then tries to seduce Elisabeth; she stabs her to death. Alan searches for Carmus and demands to be let out of the castle. Alan watches as Carmus enters the castle’s crypt and opens a stone coffin with the decayed corpse inside returning to life and becoming mist. Herbert murders Carmus, who tells Alan that is how he met his destiny. Two newlyweds
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(Sylvia Sorrente, Ben Steffen) arrive at the castle to spend their wedding night and they too are murdered by Herbert. As Julia and Carmus tell Alan that it is his turn to die, he runs to the crypt where Elisabeth says the ghosts need his blood so they can return to life next year. She leads him through a passage to the outside but tells him she cannot go with him. Alan drags Elisabeth into the night only to see her decompose beside her tombstone. Running from the other spirits, Alan is impaled on the castle’s iron gate. At dawn Sir Thomas and Poe return and find Alan dead with the castle’s owner taking ten pounds from the dead man’s purse. The voices of Elisabeth and Alan tell each other they are together forever. Castle of Terror’s director, Antonio Margheriti (billed as Anthony M. Dawson) had a lengthy genre career, including Assignment Outer Space (1960), Battle of the Worlds (1961), Horror Castle (1963), The Long Hair of Death (1964), also with Steele; Wild, Wild Planet (1965), Lightning Bolt (q.v.) and The War of the Planets (both 1966), Mr. Superinvincible (1970), Seven Deaths in a Cat’s Eye (1973), Whisky and Ghosts (1976), Killer Fish (1979), Cannibal Apocalypse (1980), The Hunters of the Golden Cobra (1982), Ark of the Sun God (1983), Yor, the Hunter from the Future (1983), Treasure Island in Outer Space (1987) and Alien from the Deep (1989). In 1971 Margheriti remade Castle of Terror as Web of the Spider, starring Anthony Franciosa, Michele Mercier and Klaus Kinski (as Edgar Allan Poe). Billed as Gordon Wilson, Jr., director Sergio Corbucci receives co-writing credit for Castle of Terror. In an interview with Carlo Piazza in Cine Zine Zone (May 1989) he claims he directed more than half of the film before turning it over to Margheriti so that he, Corbucci, could work on another assignment. The film’s assistant director, Ruggero Deodato, billed as Roger Drake, went on to direct such gore features as Jungle Holocaust (The Last Survivor) (1976) and Cannibal Holocaust (1978). In The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), Phil Hardy noted, “Margheriti’s direction is wonderfully atmospheric, with long, meandering sequence shots and perfectly executed gothic imagery.” The Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide (1989) said Castle of Terror has an “earnestly creepy flair…. [Steele is] sepulchrally seductive…. [I]t’s a good bet for Italo Gothic horror fans.” James O’Neill in Terror on Tape (1994) thought it an “[a]bove-average Steele vehicle…. Barbara is shown to good advantage as the dreamy Elisabeth….” According to VideoHound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics (1996), “Cult favorite Steele enhances this atmospheric chiller” while Luca M. Palmerini and Gaetano Mistretta in Spaghetti Nightmares (1996) declared it to be a “classic of its kind.” Castle of Terror was issued on video in France around 1990 as Danse Macabre (Macabre Dance) running 87 minutes, four minutes longer than the U.S. version. Video Watchdog #7 (1991) said this “uncovered version contains Barbara’s lesbian kiss with Margarete Robsahm, and a brief disrobing scene of newlywed Sylvia Sorrente.”
Creature from the Haunted Sea (The Filmgroup, 1961; 74 minutes) Producer-Director: Roger Corman. Associate Producer: Charles Hanawalt. Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith. Photography: Jacques Marquette. Editor: Angela Scellars. Music: Fred Katz. Production Manager: Jack Bohrer. Sound: Roberto Velasquez. Makeup: Brooke Wilkerson. Monster Costume Design: Beach Dickerson. CAST: Antony Carbone (Renzo Capeto), Betsy Jones-Moreland (Mary Belle Monahan), Edward Wain [Robert Towne] (Sparks Moran/Agent XK150/Narrator), Edmund Rivera Alvarez (General Tostada), Robert Bean (Happy Jack Monahan/The Creature), Sonia Noemi Gonzalez (Mango Perez), Beach Dickerson (Pete Peterson, Jr.), Esther Sandoval (Carmelita Rodriguez), Terry Nevin (Colonel), Blanquita Romero (Rosina Perez), Elsio Lopez, Tanner Hunt, Armando Rowra
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(Rebel Soldiers), Jaclyn Hellman (Agent XK120 in TV version), Richard Sinatra (Man Waiting To Use Pay Phone), Kay Jennings (Bar Spy).
Following the overthrow of the Batista regime in Cuba by Fidel Castro, General Tostada (Edmund Rivera Alvarez), his colonel (Terry Nevin) and a group of soldiers rob the country’s treasury and make a deal with expatriate American Mafioso Renzo Capeto (Antony Carbone) to smuggle the gold out of the island country on his yacht. After escaping from government soldiers, the craft heads out to sea with Capeto’s mistress, gun moll Mary Belle Monahan (Betsy Jones-Moreland), her morose younger brother Happy Jack (Robert Bean), the gangster’s dim-witted but loyal associate Pete Peterson, Jr. (Beach Dickerson), who does animal imitations, and crew member Sparks Moran (Robert Towne), really U.S. government spy, Agent XK150. Renzo wants to get rid of half the Cuban contingent so he decides to use the legend of a local sea monster to cover up his eliminating the soldiers. He has Pete use a toilet plunger to make “footprints” so that it will appear as though a sea creature boarded the craft when they kill one of the soldiers, although they do not realize the real Creature (Bean) killed a second one. The general believes it was the Creature and Renzo suggests they change course to Puerto Rico. The incompetent Moran wires his superiors that the yacht is headed for Bali. As Mary Belle sings a song about the Creature from the Haunted Sea, Renzo and Pete kill the members of a Cuban military boat. Moran tells Mary Belle he wants her and she is repulsed. Renzo outlines a plan to Pete in which he will wreck the yacht on some rocks, take the gold by boat to the island but upset it, causing the treasure to sink to the bottom of the sea. He says they will return later to get the strongbox, sending Happy Jack to San Juan for supplies. The two carry out the plan and the yacht’s passengers reach the island. As the others built thatch huts, Pete explores the jungle and meets a hefty middle-aged woman, Rosina Perez (Blanquita Romero), who also does animal calls, and they immediately fall in love. Pete takes Rosina back to camp. Happy Jack shows up with the boat and brings with him Carmelita Rodriguez (Esther Sandoval), a waterfront hooker he professes to love. To his dismay, Renzo learns from the general that his soldiers are actually frogmen and are ready to dive for the strongbox. Moran meets Carmelita and they fall for each other. During the dive, Renzo, Pete and Happy Jack kill several of the Cubans and blame the sea monster. After Carmelita tells Happy Jack she loves Moran, who still wants Mary Belle, Rosina takes Happy Jack into the jungle and introduces him to her beautiful daughter Mango (Sonia Noemi Gonzalez) and he is immediately smitten. When Rosina’s husband objects to her playing around, he is knocked out by Pete who allies with Happy Jack in getting rid of the rest of their crew in order to stay on the island and marry Rosina and Mango. During the next dive, Renzo finds the strongbox and hides it under a wreck. After he leaves, it is retrieved by the Creature. After the monster carries off Mango, Happy Jack accuses Renzo of killing her, and Mary Belle agrees with her brother. Wanting to get rid of the rest of the Cubans, Renzo and his men dive the next day with spear guns. When the general finds the gold, he is killed by the gangster and Pete. After finding the remains of Mango’s sarong, Happy Jack is attacked and killed by the sea monster. On the yacht, Mary Belle blames Renzo for her brother’s death. The monster boards the craft and abducts Mary Belle and returns to attack the rest of the passengers as Moran and Carmelita escape in a lifeboat. Renzo manages to get to shore but the monster follows and kills him. As they look forward to the future together, Moran informs Carmelita that it was the Creature from the Haunted Sea who got the gold. Producer-director Roger Corman produced Battle of Blood Island (1960) in Puerto Rico and followed it with Last Woman on Earth (1960) [q.v.], which he also directed. Using the
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latter film’s cinematographer ( Jacques Marquette) and three lead players (Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland, Edward Wain [Robert Towne]), he quickly shot a third feature, Creature from the Haunted Sea, a horror comedy reworking of Charles B. Griffith’s script for Beast from Haunted Cave (1959) [q.v.], itself refashioned by Griffith from Corman’s Naked Paradise (Thunder Over Hawaii) (1956). The Filmgroup, a small company operated by Corman and his brother Gene Corman, released Creature from the Haunted Sea in June 1961, usually combined with The Devil’s Partner. Creature from the Haunted Sea is one of those films viewers either love or hate; there appears to be no middle ground. It looks, and is, cheap. Its forced humor, some of it funny, and oddball characters give the film what little entertainment value it possesses. No one is really likable, except the beautiful Mango, who ends up being a meal for the title creature. The cast seems to be having fun with the affair and the acting is uniformly good. Robert Bean, who started out as the boom operator, took over the role of Happy Jack when Roger Corman vacated it; Bean also played the title monster. Beach Dickerson, who was the peabrained animal imitator Pete Peterson, Jr., designed the creature. It is one of the tackiest monsters ever put on film. Creature from the Haunted Sea, which ran theatrically at 63 minutes, was too short for a 90-minute TV time slot, so 11 minutes of new additional footage was shot and interpolated, most of it directed by Monte Hellman. These scenes include a nearly six-minute segment prior to the credits where Agent XK150 (Towne) escapes from two assassins and meets his beautiful counterpart, Agent XK120 ( Jaclyn Hellman, the director’s wife) in a Santo Domingo bar. In another new sequence, he phones her in Havana from a pay phone on a desolate beach to report that the case is about to break wide open. Creature was included in Allied Artists Television’s “Science-Fiction Features.”
Crypt of the Living Dead (Atlas Films, 1973; 85 minutes; Color) Producer: Lou Shaw. Executive Producer: Wolf Schmidt. Director: Ray Danton and (uncredited) Julio Salvador. Screenplay: Ricardo Ferrer, Lou Shaw and Julio Salvador. Story: Ricardo Ferrer and Lois Gibson. Photography: Juan Gelpi. Editor: David Rawlins. Music: Phillip Lambro. Art Director: Juan Alberto. Production Manager: Antonio Espinosa. Unit Manager: Ali Taygun. Sound Effects: Marv Kerner. Makeup: Mariano Garcia Rey. Special Effects: A. Molina. Assistant Director: Gil Carretero. CAST: Andrew Prine (Chris Bolton), Mark Damon (Peter), Teresa Gimpera (Queen Hannah), Patty Sheppard (Mary), Ihsan Genik (Wild Man), Mariano [Garcia] Rey (Professor Bolton), Frank [Brana] Branya (Abdul Hamid), Edward Walsh (Ali), John Alderman (First Fisherman), Jack LaRue, Jr. (Adnan), Jem Osmanoglu (Boy), Shera Osman (Zora), Daniel Martin ( John).
The Spanish production Crypt of the Living Dead has a puzzling history. Filmed in Turkey, it was made as La Tumba de la Isla Maldita (The Tomb of the Cursed Island), directed by Julio Salvador, who collaborated on the script with Ricardo Ferrer, from a story by Ferrer and Lois Gibson. Its original running time was 99 minutes. When the production was acquired for U.S. release, actor Ray Danton, who had helmed Robert Quarry’s Deathmaster (1972), directed new scenes from script additions by the film’s producer, Lou Shaw. Quite a bit of the original footage was removed and the movie, now called Hannah, Queen of the Vampires, ran 85 minutes. Atlas Films released it in the U.S. in the fall of 1973; it was rated PG. Allied Artists included it in its TV packages “The Golden Seventies — Group VII” and “Science-Fiction Features” a few years later as Crypt of the Living Dead. It was filmed in Metrocolor but some prints are black and white. The TV version was later issued on video as Vampire Woman, Vampire Women and Young Hannah, Queen of the Vampires.
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Under any title it is very atmospheric with effective sinister locales but it is hampered by many overly dark scenes and a sometimes muffled soundtrack. In an ancient church on a Turkish island, Professor Bolton (Mariano Rey) is searching for the tomb of Hannah (Teresa Gimpera), the wife of French King Louis VII, who had her buried alive there in 1269 for practicing vampirism. Finding Hannah’s coffin, Bolton is strangled by Peter (Mark Damon) and shoved under the vault by his cohort, Wild Man (Ihsan Genik), who uses a hammer to knock loose the vault’s foundation which comes crashing down on the dead man. Chris Bolton (Andrew Prine), the professor’s engineer son, comes to the island to bury his father and is ignored by the local fishermen. Peter takes him to the church and shows him the place where his father lies. Peter is writing a novel about Hannah and how she came to be buried there on a return trip from the Crusades with her royal husband. Chris, who also meets Peter’s schoolteacher sister Mary (Patty Sheppard), says he wants to move the tomb to remove and bury his father’s body. During the night, Chris sees Wild Man and chases him. Mary later informs the engineer that the professor was researching the legend of Hannah. Rigging a hoist, Chris breaks the seal on the marble tomb in order to move it in two sections. The reluctant locals finally agree to pull the hoist ropes as the skies turn black and a storm erupts. Chris peers into the tomb and finds Hannah perfectly preserved. As Chris later talks to Peter about the corpse, Hannah returns to life, rises from the tomb as a mist and turns into a wolf that kills the dog of blind sailor Abdul Hamid (Frank Brana) for its blood. Hamid warns the locals that the vampire has returned, and that in two days she will have full strength unless her tomb is resealed. Chris goes back to the tomb as the Wild Man carries off Mary. Hearing her screams, he pursues the two and saves the young woman, using his knife to put out one of her abductor’s eyes. As they sit by a bonfire on the beach, Mary informs Chris that there have been rumors of a devil cult on the island. They spend the night together; they are awakened the next morning by Hamid, who brings them wolf bane, telling them to spread it around Hannah’s tomb to keep her inside. Peter secrely watches as Chris and his sister have sex. Later, Chris informs Peter that he wants to take Mary away from the island. Jubilant over Mary having found happiness, Chris says she came to the island to look after him due to his addiction to drugs and helped him put his life back together. Hamid has a young man, Adnan ( Jack LaRue, Jr.), prepare a stake to drive into the vampire’s heart but as he makes a crucifix he is murdered by the Wild Man. After Hamid’s body is found in the tomb, Chris wants to reseal it but the others refuse to help him. Going back to the tomb alone, Chris removes the garlic, sees that Hannah has disappeared and goes to warn the villagers. The vampire attacks Adnan’s father, Ali (Edward Walsh), as Chris hunts for Mary. She has gone to the tomb where she finds her brother conducting a ceremony in homage to Hannah. When he is attacked by the Wild Man, Chris uses a stake to kill him. Mary promises to stay with her brother if he will only leave the island. Peter tells her he killed Professor Bolton and plans to do the same with Chris. Hannah starts to attack a young girl (Shera Osman) but is spotted by the villagers and turns into a wolf. Tying up Mary, Peter prays to Hannah for eternal life while Ali, now a vampire, begs Chris to kill him with a stake through the heart. After doing so, Chris tries to stop Peter from sacrificing Mary to the vampire. As the two men fight, Peter falls on Chris’ knife and the sight of his blood causes Hannah to attack him. Giving Mary the wolf bane for protection, Chris returns to the tomb as the villagers surround Hannah with crosses. She turns into mist as one of the men drives a stake into Peter, killing him. When Chris calls to Hannah, she attacks him in the form of a wolf. Mary uses the wolf bane to make her stop. Chris sets the vampire on fire with a lantern and her badly burned form
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is surrounded by the villagers. As she tries to fend them off, Chris drives a stake through her heart. Later he buries his father and leaves the island with Mary as the young girl, now fanged, attacks a playmate ( Jem Osmanoglu). Phil Hardy noted in The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), “Scenes of graphic violence punctuate the movie and culminate in the images of [Teresa] Gimpera set alight with an oil lamp and staked with the camera chronicling in detail the disintegration of her body and face into an unsightly mess. Script and dialogue are both rudimentary….” In Terror on Tape (1994), James O’Neill thought it a “low-cost vampire tale,” adding, “[P]oor Hannah, sporting a paste tiara making her look like the hometown beauty queen, is given short shrift indeed, spending most of her time in her tomb before being set on fire and staked. Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.” [I]n The Essential Monster Movie Guide (2000), Stephen Jones wrote, “Atmospheric night sequences and unusual Turkish locations make this an interesting vampire thriller.” Crypt of the Living Dead was made by a number of people who were genre veterans. Besides Deathmaster, Ray Danton also directed Psychic Killer (1976) while top-billed Andrew Prine was in Simon, King of the Witches (1971), Terror Circus (Barn of the Naked Dead) (1973), The Town That Dreaded Sundown and Grizzly (both 1976), The Evil (1978) and Amityville II: The Possession (1982). Mark Damon was in House of Usher (1962), Beauty and the Beast (1963), Black Sabbath (1964), The Young, the Evil and the Savage (1968) and The Devil’s Wedding Night (1973). Beautiful Teresa Gimpera appeared in the horror outings Count Dracula and Aoom (both 1970), The Devil’s Lover and Night of the Devils (both 1971), Spirit of the Beehive (1973) and The People Who Own the Dark (1975). Equally gorgeous Patty Sheppard was in The Man Who Came from Ummo (Assignment Terror/Dracula vs. Frankenstein) and La Noche de Walpurgis (Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman) (both 1970) and Witches’ Mountain (1972). Mariano Garcia Rey, who played the role of Professor Bolton, was also Crypt of the Living Dead’s makeup artist. Daniel Martin, the star of several spaghetti Westerns, had a bit part as one of the villagers; his role may have been much larger in the original Spanish version of the film.
Dark Venture (First National Film Distributing, 1956; 84 minutes; Color) Producer-Director-Screenplay-Editor: John Trevlac [Calvert]. Photography: Sven Persson. Music: Louis Palange, George Brown and Leonid Rabb. Sound: Doug Geerdts. Sets: Koos Botha. Production Manager: Jack Hall. Costumes: Hilda Combs. Special Effects: Ted Allan. Makeup: Ray Madison. Continuity: Madrian Calvert. Assistant Director: Lindsley Parsons, Jr. CAST: John Calvert ( John Kenyon), Ann Cornell (Pamela Cameron), John Carradine (Gideon), Charles Haydon (Dr. Cameron), Stuart Mitchell (MacIntyre), Paul Gordon (Cuthbert Matumba-Baobab), Bruce Meredith Smith (Harley Barlow), Jimmy the Chimp (Himself ), Swazi Tribesmen (Themselves).
Produced by Expedition Epics Film Corporation and filmed in Panorama-Scope, Dark Venture is an obscure jungle melodrama that touches on the supernatural with its plot involving a sacred elephant burial ground and a phantom-like figure (played by horror film great John Carradine) who guards it. The movie is the work of John Calvert, who not only starred in it with his wife Ann Cornell, but also produced, directed, wrote the script and edited it under the name John Trevlac, his surname spelled backward. Calvert, a native of Trenton, Indiana, came to fame in the 1930s as a professional magician, the Great Calvert, and began working in films in the next decade. Cinematically, he is best known for essaying the role of Michael Waring, “The Falcon,” in a trio of Film Classics releases, Devil’s Cargo and Appointment with Murder (both 1948) and Search for
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Danger (1949), the latter with Cornell, who also co-starred with her husband in Gold Fever (1952). Filmed in 1955 in the East African areas of Kenya and Mozambique, Dark Venture includes the song “The Jungle” by Leonid Rabb and George Brown. It was issued to TV by Allied Artists in the mid–1970s in its “Cavalcade of the ’60s — Group III” package. John Kenyon (Calvert) comes to Africa in search of a reputed elephant burial ground rich in ivory. After searching for six months he meets Harley Barlow (Bruce Meredith Smith), a poacher, who ill treats his tracker Baobab. Barlow incites a local tribe to eliminate Kenyon by saying he killed the chief ’s sacred cow. Kenyon is warned by Baobab and the two men use dynamite, disguised as magic, to scare off the natives. The tracker leads Kenyon to a herd of old elephants, not realizing they are being trailed by Barlow, who kills several of the animals. When Kenyon tries to stop him, Barlow threatens to shoot him. Kenyon is forced to kill him to protect himself. The wounded Kenyon is taken to a remote village where Dr. Cameron (Charles Haydon), a Canadian whose licensed has been revoked by the British, lives; he is away but his daughter Pamela (Cornell) tends to Kenyon’s injuries. As he recovers, Kenyon falls in love with the young woman. Her father, near death, asks Kenyon to take Pamela out of Africa. While exploring the local grasslands, Kenyon meets a mysterious man, Gideon (Carradine), who guards a series of caves. Gideon becomes hostile when Kenyon asks about them. Back in the village, Kenyon saves a child from a crocodile but has a falling-out with Dr. Cameron, who later throws himself to the reptiles. After an attempt is made on his life because of the doctor’s death, Kenyon returns to the village and takes Pamela away before the angry tribe destroys it to get rid of evil spirits. When Pamela accuses Kenyon of being responsible for her father’s death, he tells her of their pact about taking her out of the jungle. The next day the young woman is stalked by a lion that is killed by Kenyon. When Baobab locates elephant tracks, Pamela convinces Kenyon to follow them. They are nearly killed in an animal stampede instigated by Gideon. Marauding elephants decimate the area, destroying Baobab’s village and killing his wife and children. Kenyon manages to shoot three of the elephants and badly wounds a fourth when it attacks Pamela. Hoping the dying beast will lead them to the elephant graveyard, Kenyon, Pamela and Baobab follow it, not knowing that the burial grounds are guarded by Gideon. Pamela slips and nearly falls off a ledge but is rescued by Kenyon as Gideon tries to push a boulder onto them. The tremor from the crashing boulder causes Gideon to tumble to his death as molten lava shoots out of a crater created by the jolt. Kenyon and Pamela manage to make it to safety. In 1985, John Calvert fashioned a new alternate version of Dark Venture called Beyond the Sahara, in which he and Ann Cornell recreated their roles as John Kenyon and Pamela Calvert. Here Kenyon relates his African adventures to a newsman named Clayton, with the film’s story being told in flashback. Twelve years later Calvert added new opening and closing sequences to Dark Venture with Cornell again appearing in new footage; this time it was called The Great Expedition to the Elephant’s Graveyard. This version includes a brief appearance by David Carradine discussing his father John Carradine’s role in the original footage. In 2004 it debuted at the Williamsburg Film Festival and was introduced by Calvert, who continued to do his magic act well into his nineties.
Death Curse of Tartu (Thunderbird International Pictures, 1967; 84 minutes; Color) Producers: Joseph Fink and Juan Hidalgo-Gato. Director-Screenplay: William Grefe. Photography-Editor: Julio C. Chavez. Music: Al Jacobs. Songs: Al Greene and Al Jacobs. Sets: Tom
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Spanish lobby card for Death Curse of Tartu (Thunderbird International, 1966) picturing Maurice Stewart and Gary Holtz
Casey. Sound: Armando Fernandez. Makeup: Marie Del Russo. Assistant Director: Earl Wainwright. CAST: Fred Pinero (Ed Tison), Babette Sherrill ( Julie Tison), Bill [William] Marcus (Billy), Mayra Gomez (Cindy), Sherman Hayes ( Johnny), Gary Holtz (Tommy), Maurice Stewart ( Joann), Fred Weed (Sam Gunter), Doug Hobart (Tartu), Brad F. Grinter (Explorer).
Deep in the Florida Everglades, an explorer (Brad F. Grinter) locates the hidden entrance to a cave but after he enters its stone door closes, trapping him inside. He is killed by a mysterious figure who takes the parchment he was carrying. Hunter Sam Gunter (Fred Weed) and his Indian guide Billy (Bill Marcus) travel by canoe through the swamp and land near an ancient native burial ground. Billy does not want to go any further, for despite being educated, he believes in evil spirits and the legends of his people. Gunter tells Billy to bring back Ed Tison (Fred Pinero) and his party in air boats. Going through the marshes, Gunter finds a skull. Making camp, Gunter digs up a large rock with writing on it. The long-dead Indian Tartu (Doug Hobart) returns to life, becomes a snake and kills the explorer. Ed and his wife Julie (Babette Sherrill) arrive at Billy’s wildlife haven with four archaeology students, Cindy (Mayra Gomez), Johnny (Sherman Hayes), Tommy (Gary Holtz) and Joann (Maurice Stewart), who are going on a field trip to the burial grounds. Billy tells the Tisons that the area is haunted and that four hundred years ago the witch doctor Tartu had the power to turn into wild beasts; when he died, he promised to return to take revenge on anyone who desecrated his burial place. Disregarding Billy’s warnings, the six people take two air boats into the Everglades, locate the spot where Gunter landed and find the skull. After making camp, they come upon the tablet and Ed translates it, telling his wife it contains Tartu’s prophecy. Tommy and Joann go swimming in the swamp and are devoured
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by a shark, a creature that does not live in fresh water. Hearing jungle drums, the others break camp and prepare to leave but Johnny brings word that their air boats have been sunk. Ed says the only explanation is Tartu’s curse. He sends Johnny for help but the young man is stalked and killed by a deadly snake. Cindy dreams that Johnny has been killed. Ed says they must find Tartu’s burial place and destroy him. As they search, the three hear chanting coming from under the ground and Julie finds the opening to the cave. When they see Gunter’s body, Cindy runs away and Ed and Julie find themselves locked inside. Cindy is chased by an alligator and runs back to the cave but cannot get in and takes refuge by clinging to a tree limb. Ed uses gunpowder to jar loose the cave’s stone door but by the time they get to Cindy she has fallen from the tree. The young student dies after the alligator bites off her left arm. Ed and Julie return to the cave but cannot move the stone lid on the coffin. As they talk, the mummified Tartu rises from his grave and turns into a warrior who attacks them. Julie runs away as Ed and Tartu fight. After knocking out Ed, the witch doctor goes after the woman. Ed revives and follows them carrying an axe. Tartu pushes Julie into quicksand but Ed jumps him and the two men struggle as Julie slowly sinks into the mire. Ed manages to shove Tartu into the quicksand and pull out Julie. Tartu disappears, fulfilling his prophecy that only nature can destroy him. Death Curse of Tartu was released theatrically early in 1967 by Thunderbird International Pictures on a double-bill with Sting of Death; both films were directed by William Grefe. Produced by Falcon International Pictures and filmed on location in Florida’s Everglades National Park, Tartu is a fairly entertaining independent horror outing that would have benefited from a shorter running time. Too much of the movie is taken up with slowmoving scenes and long, drawn-out chase sequences. It is quite scenic with good photography by Julio C. Chavez, who also edited the production. Marie Del Russo’s makeup for the half-decayed corpse of Tartu is well done. One amusing scene has four college students dancing to rock ’n’ roll tunes while the camera lingers lovingly on the two scantily clad coeds’ posteriors. James O’Neill in Terror on Tape (1994) thought it “[m]inor but imaginative…. Poor acting, but bleak locations and effective makeup make it a passable time-killer.” VideoHound’s Cult Flicks and Trash Pics (1996) termed it “a low-budget flick so bad it’s funny,” and Stephen Jones opined in The Essential Monster Movie Guide (2000), “Writerdirector Grefe pads out the slim storyline with interminable treks through the undergrowth, accompanied by an irritating music score and numerous screams.” Allied Artists released Death Curse of Tartu to television in its “Science Fiction Features” package. In 1990 the home video company American Video issued the movie in France, where it never had a theatrical release, as Cobra Woman and credited its direction to Jess Franco. Brad F. Grinter, who had a bit part as the murdered explorer at the beginning of the film, went on to co-produce and direct Veronica Lake in Flesh Feast (1970), also filmed in Florida. A later feature dealing with vengeful Indian spirits is The Dark Power (1985) starring Lash LaRue.
Flight of the Lost Balloon (American International, 1961; 91 minutes; Color) Producer: Bernard Woolner. Executive Producer–Photography: Jacques Marquette. Associate Producer-Director-Screenplay-Story: Nathan Juran. Editor: Rex Lipton. Title Song Sung by Marcella Wright. Sound: Tom Ashton. Sound Editors: Bill and Terry MacDonald. Makeup: Charles Gemora. Properties: Richard Rubin. Miniatures: Projects Unlimited. Assistant Directors: Howard Alston and Jack Bohrer.
Advertisement for Flight of the Lost Balloon (Woolner Bros., 1960)
CAST: Mala Powers (Ellen Burton), Marshall Thompson (Dr. Joseph Farady), James Lanphier (The Hindu), Douglas Kennedy (Sir Hubert Warrington), Robert W. Gillette (Sir Adam Burton), Felippe Birriel (Golan), A.J. Valentine (Giles), Blanquita Romero (The Malkia), Jackie Danois (Native Dancer).
Flight of the Lost Balloon was a W-M-J Production, a collaboration between producer Bernard Woolner, executive producer and cinematographer Jacques Marquette and associate
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producer–director–writer Nathan Juran. Filmed in Eastman Color and SpectraScope in Puerto Rico, the film had brief release by Woolner Bros. before being distributed nationally by American International Pictures. A promotional gimmick involved handing out motion sickness pills to patrons as they bought tickets to see the film. Mainly an adventure outing, Flight of the Lost Balloon does have some genre elements, including the search for Cleopatra’s mummy and her lost treasure; a tall, grotesque henchman, two vicious gorillas and an attack by a flock of giant condors. Allied Artists Television included it in its “Science-Fiction Features” package. In 1878, the London Geographical Society finances a balloon expedition to Lake Victoria in Africa to rescue one of its members, Sir Hubert Warrington (Douglas Kennedy), who is being held prisoner in an old castle. Word of Sir Hubert’s plight is brought by the Hindu ( James Lanphier), who will accompany the rescue leader, Sir Adam Burton (Robert W. Gillette) and navigator Dr. Joseph Farady (Marshall Thompson), on the flight. The expedition moves to its starting point in Niger where the natives are unfriendly because they believe the men are going to the Moon, which they worship. As Joe is preparing the craft for ascent, Sir Adam’s beautiful daughter Ellen (Mala Powers) comes aboard to wish him well in freeing Sir Hubert, her fiancé. She is followed by the Hindu, who gives orders to the natives to let go of the ropes. The balloon rises, leaving Sir Adam behind. With a storm coming up and no hope of a safe landing, Joe informs Ellen that they will have to travel across Africa with the Hindu. When they land in the Congo jungle to replenish their water supply, the trio is surrounded by cannibals. The Hindu tells the locals they are gods from the Moon who have come to honor their village and they are asked to attend to the tribe’s queen (Blanquita Romero), who is ill. Joe determines she is only drunk and, after reviving her with smelling salts, the trio watch a native celebration and then sneak back to the balloon. When the locals see the Moon rise, they realize they have been duped and follow the strangers who escape and fly to Lake Victoria. After the Hindu says Sir Hubert is on a nearby island, the balloon is attacked by a flock of giant condors. In order for the craft to be able to descend, Joe jumps overboard as Ellen and the Hindu land on the island. Ellen is escorted to the Hindu’s castle while he tells his gaunt, mute henchman Golan (Felippe Birriel) to take his men and find and kill Joe. They locate the navigator when he swims to shore but he manages to elude them. The Hindu informs Ellen that Egyptian queen Cleopatra visited the headwaters of the Nile River during her reign and he also warns her not to wander around the castle because of its many dangers. Joe locates Ellen and tells her that Golan has been trying to kill him. The Hindu informs the chained Sir Hubert (who, despite torture, has refused to tell him the location of Cleopatra’s treasure) that Ellen is on the island. Sir Hubert scoffs at the Hindu’s plan to torture the young woman to make him talk, saying he only romanced her to get the financial support of her father in searching for the treasure. In an underground cavern, Joe and Ellen find two chained gorillas. The Hindu informs Ellen that Cleopatra, after the death of Marc Antony, buried her nation’s treasure on the island before killing herself. He spent thirteen years looking for it only to have Sir Hubert make the discovery; he tells Ellen that until the explorer reveals the treasure’s location, he will torture her. Joe overhears the conversation and, after the Hindu and Ellen leave, he sets Sir Hubert free and they plot their escape. The next day the Hindu brings Ellen back to the torture chamber to put her on the rack but first he demonstrates it on a native. As Golan begins to torture Ellen, Joe gets his attention and Sir Hubert knocks the giant out with a maul. Joe frees Ellen and tells her to scream to make the Hindu think she is being tortured. Joe, Ellen and Sir Hubert make their way to the underground cavern
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where they lock themselves in a cage and set the gorillas free. When Golan revives, he goes after the trio but ends up being killed by the beasts. Sir Hubert and Ellen run for the balloon as Joe stays behind as a decoy. The young woman prepares the craft for takeoff while Sir Hubert goes to the grotto where the treasure is hidden and brings back chests filled with jewels. He goes back again and Ellen follows him, realizing he would have let her die so he could keep the secret of the treasure. As Sir Hubert tries to open the coffin containing Cleopatra’s mummy, several heavy chests fall on him, crushing the explorer among the treasure he sought. Joe returns to the balloon, followed by the Hindu and his minions. He and Ellen board the craft but are forced to throw over most of the treasure chests in order to ascend. The Hindu manages to climb the rope to the balloon’s basket but Joe throws a box at him and he falls into the lake. Realizing they cannot get over the mountains to land in Zanzibar, Joe and Ellen throw off the remainder of the treasure, although she keeps one large jewel for a wedding band. A fast-moving, entertaining romp, Flight of the Lost Balloon is minor compared to some of director Nathan Juran’s other efforts, including The Deadly Mantis and 20 Million Miles to Earth (both 1957), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jack the Giant Killer (1962) and First Men in the Moon (1964). As Nathan Hertz he helmed Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and The Brain from Planet Arous (both 1958) [qq.v.]. The former film was also produced by Bernard Woolner; Juran worked on both features with co-producer and cinematographer Jacques Marquette. Top-billed Mala Powers appeared in The Unknown Terror (1957), The Colossus of New York (1958) and Doomsday Machine (1972), while co-star Marshall Thompson had a number of genre credits: Cult of the Cobra (1955), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Fiend Without a Face (1958), First Man into Space (1959), Around the World Under the Sea (1966) and The Formula (1980), as well as the TV series World of Giants (Syndicated, 1961). James Lanphier, who gave the film’s best performance as the erudite and sinister Hindu, was also in The Deadly Mantis (1957).
Gun Riders (Independent-International Pictures, 1969; 81 minutes; Color) Producer-Director: Al Adamson. Associate Producers: Robert Dix and John “Bud” Cardos. Story-Screenplay: Robert Dix. Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond. Editors: William Faris and Pete Perry. Sound: Robert Dietz. Production Manager: John “Bud” Cardos. Unit Manager: Rick Jackson. Wardrobe: Leona Grosz. Sound Effects: Jim Farris. Titles: Bob Lebar. Script Supervisor: Ray Doyle. Production Advisor: Fred Saletri. Music Editor: Ed Norton. CAST: Robert Dix (Ben Thompson), Scott Brady ( Jim Wade), Jim Davis (Clay Bates), John Carradine (Preacher Boone Hawkins), Paula Raymond (Kansas Kelly), John “Bud” Cardos ( Joe Lightfoot/Satago), Gene Raymond (Voice of Death), Tara Ashton (Althea Richards), Kent Osborne (Dave Miller), Vicki Volante (Nora Miller), Denver Dixon [Victor Adamson] (Rawhide), Ray Young (Horace Higgins), Julie Edwards (Lavinia), Fred Meyers (Driver), Maria Polo (Little Fawn), Jill Moelfel (Vi), Keith Murphy, Ray Goldrup, Tom Goldrup (Yaquis), Al Adamson (Yaqui with Knife).
Gun Riders was the title Allied Artists Television gave Five Bloody Graves when it was syndicated in its TV package “The Golden Sixties — Group VI.” The film was toned down (deleting excessive violence and nudity) for the small screen; eight minutes of footage was cut from its original running time of 89. Filmed at Capitol Reef, Utah, as Lonely Man and Five Bloody Days to Tombstone, the film was made by Dix International Pictures in 1968 and was one of the first movies to be distributed by Independent-International Pictures, which released it theatrically late in 1969. Like most I-I product it played mainly to smaller venues and drive-ins. A very violent western, its horror content had Death (voice of Gene Raymond)
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Tara Ashton, Julie Edwards and John Carradine in Five Bloody Graves (Independent-International, 1969)
narrating the affair. Populated by a fine cast, Five Bloody Graves was photographed by future Academy Award winner Vilmos Zsigmond and its outstanding feature is beautiful desert locales. Robert Dix, son of actor Richard Dix, co-produced and wrote the film in addition to playing the lead, a gunman known as the Messenger of Death, based on a real character. Tara Ashton, who was one of the saloon girls in the movie, later married Dix. In the Old West, Death (Raymond) rides alongside his messenger, Ben Thompson (Dix), who wants to kill Satago ( John “Bud” Cardos), who murdered his wife Mary on their wedding night. Satago is the leader of the Yaquis, renegade Apaches, out to rid the area of whites, and his half-brother Joe Lightfoot (Cardos), who is riding with his squaw Little Fawn (Maria Polo), informs Ben that the Indians have been getting weapons from gunrunners. When a Yaqui (Al Adamson) attacks Ben’s old flame Nora Miller (Vicki Volante), he fights and kills the renegade. Nora’s husband Dave (Kent Osborne) returns from Tucson and orders Ben off his land. Dave is warned to leave since the area is crawling with Yaquis. When Dave goes to check his traps, the Indians attack their home and kill Nora. He returns in time to try and fight them off but Satago kills him, burns their cabin and scalps Nora. Gun riders Clay Bates ( Jim Davis) and Horace Wiggins (Ray Young) trade guns for gold with Satago and are given two days to get out of the territory or be fed to the ants. Ben finds Joe, who has been ambushed; after Ben removes an arrow from his shoulder, they ride on in search of Satago, who has captured Little Fawn and staked her to the ground. Clay and Horace come upon the young woman and Clay rapes and shoots her with Horace taking a pendant from her neck. Ben and Joe find Little Fawn’s body and Joe vows vengeance on
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her killer. A wagon overturns and its passengers fight off their Yaqui attackers. The travelers are gambler Jim Wade (Scott Brady) and saloon girl Lavinia ( Julie Edwards), whom he won in a poker game; loquacious preacher Boone Hawkins ( John Carradine), madam Kansas Kelly (Paula Raymond), saloon girl Althea (Ashton), old cowboy Rawhide (Denver Dixon) and a driver (Fred Meyers). As the Indians retreat, Ben and Joe ride to help the travelers and Jim informs them they were run out of Tucson and are headed for Tombstone. Lavinia becomes jealous of Althea’s attentions to Jim and the two fight. After they are separated, Boone watches Althea change clothes before he is surprised by Ben. When a Yaqui tries to kill Althea, Ben shoots him. She tells Ben her man got gold fever and left her. That night Ben and Joe sneak into the Yaqui camp and kill several of the braves, although Satago gets away. The next day Clay and Horace find the group traveling across the plains and join them. Clay spies Lavinia bathing in the river and tries to entice her with the pendant, which is seen by Joe. When Lavinia screams, Jim comes to her rescue and knocks out Clay, but the young woman is killed by an arrow. Boone preaches a sermon over Lavinia when they bury her and the group continues its journey. Horace suggests to a drunken Clay that they take the others’ rifles and sell them to Satago to save their own skins. When he tries to do so, Horace is shot by Boone. Joe goes after Clay for killing Little Fawn. After catching the gun rider, he stakes him out to be eaten by ants. Satago shoots Joe but before he dies he knifes Clay. When Joe does not return, Jim informs Ben they have to move on. Boone is shot with an arrow, Kelly is stabbed and Jim is killed. With all of their party gone, Ben and Althea try to escape but she is killed by a Yaqui arrow. After he kills her attackers, Ben fights with Satago. When they fall into the river, the current carries off the half-breed, drowning him. Burying the members of the wagon party, Ben rides away. Gun Riders was directed by Al Adamson, whose father Victor Adamson (billed as Denver Dixon) plays one of the wagon defenders; after a few scenes he disappears, apparently done in by the Yaquis. Al also produced and directed the Independent-International releases Man with the Synthetic Brain (Blood of Ghastly Horror) and Vampire Men of the Lost Planet (Horror of the Blood Monsters) [qq.v.] (both 1969), that were issued to TV by Allied Artists. Phil Hardy in The Western (1984) stated, “Despite its violence and sexual excesses, this is a surprisingly traditional Western…. The film is cheaply, but imaginatively made.”
The Hand of Power (Constantin Film/Rialto, 1968; 83 minutes; Color) Producer: Horst Wendlandt. Director: Alfred Vohrer. Screenplay: Ladislas Fodor, from the novel by Edgar Wallace. Photography: Karl Lob. Editor: Jutta Hering. Music: Peter Thomas. Production Designers: Walter Kutz and Wilhelm Vorwerg. Sound: Gerhard Muller. Production Manager: Fritz Klotsch. Costumes: Irms Pauli. Makeup: Charlotte Kersten and Will Nixdorf. Assistant Director: Eva Ebner. CAST: Joachim Fuchsberger (Inspector Higgins), Siw Mattson (Peggy Ward), Wolfgang Kieling (Sir Cecil Rand), Pinkas Braun (The Stranger), Hubert von Meyerinck (Sir Arthur), Claude Farell (Sister Adela), Peter Mosbacher (Ramiro/Sir Oliver Ramsey), Siegfried Rauch (Dr. Brand), Otto Stern (Mr. Merryl), Renate Grosser (Mrs. Potter), Hans Krull (Vicar Potter), Lil Lindfors (Sabrina), Ilse Page (Miss Finley), Edith Schneider (Professor Bound), Wolfgang Spier (Mr. Bannister), Ewa Stromberg (Librarian), Jimmy Powell (Casper), Thomas Danneberg (Captain Winscott), Max Wittmann (Elderly Laboratory Attendant), Dietrich Behne (The Zombie), Eva Ebner (Secretary), Michael Miller (Mechanic), Al Pereira (Mourner), Alfred Vohrer (Voice of the Laughing Corpse).
Allied Artists Television released The Hand of Power to the small screen as part of its “The Golden Sixties — Group VI” and “Science-Fiction Features” packages. This was the
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first time the movie had showings in the United States since it was never released here theatrically. Circa 1990 it was brought back to TV syndication by Independent-International Pictures as The Zombie Walks. The production was a West German Krimi (a mystery-horror outing) based on the works of British thriller writer Edgar Wallace, said to be the most filmed of all fiction authors. During the 1960s and early 1970s the Krimis were the biggest moneymaking movies in West Germany and they were also popular worldwide. In the U.S. they mostly were shown on television. Produced by CCC-Rialto Film as Im Banne des Unheimlichen (In the Thrall of the Sinister One), the film was based on Wallace’s 1927 novel The Hand of Power although its action-filled, fast-moving, complicated storyline had little resemblance to the literary work. Wallace’s voice (probably via recordings he made for English Columbia in the late 1920s) is heard at the beginning and end of the movie. The Laughing Corpse, the phantom who uses poison from a scorpion ring to eliminate his victims, sports a black costume with a skull face and skeleton hands. Much of the action takes place in a spooky castle, a dark old church and its environs and a dismal hospital. The horror mood is also enhanced by foggy, windswept terrain presented mainly in night sequences. During a funeral service at the church in Crowfield for Sir Oliver Ramsey, who was killed in a plane crash, a demonic laugh is heard, and the deceased’s half-brother, Sir Cecil Rand (Wolfgang Kieling), claims it is his sibling who has come back to haunt him. Reporter Peggy Ward (Siw Mattson) of the London Star learns that Rand has inherited most of the dead man’s estate which is also sought by the local vicar, Potter (Hans Krull), for his church, and Dr. Brand (Siegfried Rauch), for the hospital he operates with Sister Adela (Claude Farell), who took care of Sir Oliver when he was injured many years before. In a nearby tavern, half-caste stonemason Ramiro (Peter Mosbacher) claims that Sir Oliver has returned from the grave as a zombie. At New Scotland Yard, Inspector Higgins ( Joachim Fuchsberger) finds secretary Miss Finley (Ilse Page) upset because he broke a dinner date with her. Later, his boss Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck) who has taken over from the equally incompetent Sir John, consults with him regarding the “Case of the Laughing Corpse.” At the family castle, Rand sees a skeleton face at a window and is told by his lawyer Merryl (Otto Stern) that his sibling is dead; his scorpion ring has not been found. On the way home, the lawyer is forced off the road and accosted by a figure in black wearing a skull mask and skeleton hands. Peggy finds his body and calls Higgins, who is dining with Miss Finley. Merryl died of shock. Potter says that Rand saw his dead brother and was found unconscious in the cemetery. Dr. Brand tends to Rand while Sister Adela brings Ramiro and relates seeing a shadow in the graveyard. Higgins questions Rand who claims his brother killed the lawyer. In her dressing room, singer Sabrina (Lil Lindfors) opens an envelope containing £10,000, not knowing she is being spied on by Rand. The hooded figure shows up and kills the young woman with poison from a scorpion ring. When the phantom leaves, Rand takes back the money but is forced to share it with his blackmailing chauffeur Casper ( Jimmy Powell). While London newspapers claim that the two murders were committed by a zombie, Higgins gets a report saying both victims died from a poison that caused heart failure without leaving any traces. He goes to the library to get a book on the subject only to find out from the librarian (Ewa Stromberg) that the only copy was checked out by Peggy. When he goes to her apartment, the inspector hears the reporter screaming and breaks in and sees she has been attacked by the phantom, who steals the book and escapes. Finding out the work was written by scientist Professor Bound (Edith Schneider), Higgins goes to her laboratory and is told that the only volume, a proof copy, was just sent to her by Mr. Bannister
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(Wolfgang Spier), the undertaker who buried Sir Oscar. The zombie kills Bannister whose corpse is found by his friend, Dr. Brand. The vicar informs his wife (Renate Grosser) that they will get the bulk of Sir Oscar’s estate if Rand dies within one year. When Higgins confronts Rand, he says Sister Adela dropped him for Sir Oscar because he would inherit most of the family money and she responds that Sir Oscar left England eighteen years before because of his brother. Higgins sees the skeleton face at the window and goes after it but is knocked out and brought in by Casper and revived by Peggy. In Sabrina’s dressing room, Higgins finds a picture of Captain Woodridge, the pilot of the plane that crashed killing Sir Oscar, and learns he was engaged to the singer, who then worked as a stewardess, Miss Winslow. He also finds a record of the Laughing Corpse’s laugh and has it played at the vicar’s next sermon, causing Rand to collapse; at Dr. Brand’s hospital, he is attended by Sister Adela. When he is strapped to a table for x-rays, Rand is frightened by the appearance of the phantom as Dr. Brand is murdered. Higgins arrives with Sir Arthur, and Rand tells them he is afraid of Sister Adela who is named in Sir Oscar’s will. The inspector and Sir Arthur break into the hospital’s record room to look at Sir Oscar’s medical reports only to beaten to them by Peggy. Casper is murdered and Rand is the main suspect as Higgins tries to locate Ramiro to help him open Sir Oscar’s grave. He finds the stonemason deathly ill. Sister Adela takes him to the hospital where he dies. Higgins finds Sir Oscar’s coffin has been moved and the vicar claims it was done by Ramiro. When Rand escapes from the hospital, Sir Arthur informs Higgins that the man is insane. Higgins goes to the mortuary where he hears the organ being played and finds out it is Peggy who says she was brought there after being kidnapped by a man who stole Sir Oscar’s medical records from her. The two find Rand in the burial vault raging hysterically that his brother wants to kill him. They take him back to the castle where he is placed under special police guard. Sir Arthur is knocked out by the phantom. When he is revived, Sir Arthur and Higgins question Rand, who states he gave Sabrina money because she told him she was pregnant. Sister Adela informs the policemen that Rand did not want her to marry Sir Oscar since their children would have inherited the family fortune and not him. Hearing a noise in the attic, Higgins investigates and is confronted by a man who identifies himself as Captain Winscott (Thomas Danneberg), a friend of the dead pilot. He is also working for Dr. Bound, the pilot’s sister. Peggy identifies him as the man who kidnapped her and took Sir Oscar’s medical records. The phantom uses the scorpion ring to murder Rand. When the others hear his cries, they chase the killer onto the castle grounds where he steals a police car. Higgins and the others follow him to the vicarage in another vehicle and there they confront Potter. The phantom gets the drop on them and calls Adela to his side. He has her hold them at gunpoint as he opens a valve that emits poison gas. As a fire starts, Higgins chases the phantom and unmasks him as Ramiro. The inspector shuts off the gas as Sister Adela attempts to save Ramiro with an antidote for an inflection from which he suffers, but fails. She admits that Ramiro was really Sir Oscar who was out to eliminate all those who tried to kill him. She then takes her own life. Between 1961 and 1968 Alfred Vohrer directed fourteen Edgar Wallace Krimis and in The Hand of Power he also provided the voice of the Laughing Corpse. Joachim Fuchsberger portrayed Inspector Higgins in two earlier Wallace thrillers helmed by Vohrer, Der Hexer (The Hexer) (1964), shown on TV as The Mysterious Magician, and Der Monch mit der Peitsche (The Monk with the Whip) (1967), released to television and on disc as College Girl Murders. Ilse Page also played Miss Finley in the latter movie as she did in a total of five Krimis.
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In The Video Watchdog Book (1992), Tim Lucas termed The Hand of Power an “entertaining film … is noteworthy for several reasons,” including director Vohrer and cinematographer Karl Lob “working deliberately against their usual stylistic grain, delivering a film shot in subdued earthtones to compliment its central, monochromatic (and wonderful!) villain.” Portions of the soundtrack of The Hand of Power are included on the compact disc Peter Thomas — Film Musik: Die Original Musik aus den Edgar Wallace und Jerry Cotton Filmen (Polydor 517 096-2), although it does not have the song “Feel My Heartbeat” sung in the film by Lil Lindfors.
Last Woman on Earth (The Filmgroup, 1960; 71 minutes; Color) Producer-Director: Roger Corman. Associate Producer: Charles Hanawalt. Screenplay: Robert Towne. Photography: Jacques Marquette. Editor: Anthony Carras. Music: Ronald Stein. Sound: Beach Dickerson. Production Manager-Assistant Director: Jack Bohrer. Properties: Stanley Watson. CAST: Betsy Jones-Moreland (Evelyn Gern), Antony Carbone (Harold Gern), Edward Wain [Robert Towne] (Martin Joyce).
A variation of Arch Oboler’s post-nuclear holocaust drama Five (1951), Last Woman on Earth is so sparse in budget and plot it could have been called Three. Released theatrically on a dual bill with The Little Shop of Horrors (q.v.), this dour affair no doubt disappointed its audience by being filled with seemingly endless talk. It was filmed in color and VitaScope in Puerto Rico, following producer Roger Corman’s winding up Battle of Blood Island (1960). Corman spent so little money on the second film that he was able to follow it with Creature from Haunted Sea (1960) [q.v.] with the same trio of leading players, Betsy Jones-Moreland, Antony Carbone and Edward Wain, a pseudonym for the writer of Last Woman on Earth, Robert Towne. Allegedly Towne had not finished the script when shooting began so Corman brought him to Puerto Rico and had him play the tertiary role in the film while he also completed the screenplay. Towne went on to script The Tomb of Ligeia (1965) for Corman, Chinatown (1974), for which he won an Academy Award, The Yakuza (1975), Shampoo and Marathon Man (both 1976). He also directed Personal Best (1982) and Tequila Sunrise (1984). As an actor he is badly miscast in Last Woman on Earth, coming off as a nerd. He projected the same kind of manner in Creature from the Haunted Sea but it fit better in that comedy. The underwater wreck shown in Last Woman on Earth also appears in Creature from the Haunted Sea. Indicted in a million dollar housing scandal, wealthy businessman Harold Gern (Carbone) is staying in Puerto Rico with his wife Evelyn ( Jones-Moreland). During a cockfight his lawyer, Martin Joyce (Towne), shows up to confer with him. After Harold gambles and tries to pick up two women in a bar, he tells Martin to get their legal papers from his hotel room. The lawyer runs into a tipsy Evelyn who becomes coy and dangerously walks on a banister railing before telling Martin that her marriage is a sham. In the bar, Evelyn wants Harold to be more affectionate but he leaves her for his dates, saying they will go fishing the next day. Taking Martin with them, the Gerns go scuba diving. When a manta ray gets too close, Evelyn fires at it with a spear gun and slightly wounds the lawyer. When they surface, the trio find they cannot breathe and continue to use their oxygen tanks. On board Harold’s yacht they find Manuel, the skipper, dead. When the boat will not start and they cannot get a radio signal, they take a small boat and row to shore. As they trek through the jungle toward town, their oxygen supply runs out; taking off their masks, they find the air is thin but breathable. In the city they find corpses in the streets. Taking a car, they drive
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to the Caribe Hotel, where they had been staying. As they drink at the bar, Harold asks Martin what happened and the lawyer says the world found a bigger and better bomb, or it was an act of God. Unable to stay in the same locale with dead bodies, the three drive to the end of the island to a home owned by Harold’s business partner. The next day they find they have enough supplies to survive for a long time but both Evelyn and Martin are morose and cynical about their situation, while Harold wants to devise a survival plan. When Harold spies an insect, he realizes they cannot stay on the island due to the pestilence its kind will bring and suggests they take the yacht and go north to colder terrain. While Harold teaches the others to fish and navigate a boat, he notices that his wife and Martin are becoming more affectionate. Both Evelyn and Martin resent Harold’s controlling their lives. The lawyer finds a dead young girl on the beach and the two men verbally spar over Evelyn. When Harold goes fishing, Martin invites Evelyn to go with him to the beach where they kiss and go back to the house and have sex. Harold returns home to find his wife embracing Martin. The next day the two men go fishing, and Martin informs Harold that he will not take orders from him. They fight, fall out of the boat and get to shore where Harold hits Martin near the right eye with a rock. Martin says Harold wants to exile him and the businessman says he and Evelyn are going to leave the island without him. Evelyn finds out about Harold’s ultimatum and objects. When he refuses to reverse his decision, she asks Martin to take her with him. He agrees to drive with her to the yacht and the two take the car, along with the keys to a van, the only other vehicle. As they drive away, Harold says he will not go after them but later hotwires the van. Martin’s eye bothers him to the point he wrecks the car. Evelyn and Martin cut through a forest and when they get to town she asks him if they can have a baby but he says the world is finished. Leaving Evelyn in a church, Martin goes to find Harold. The two men meet on a pier where Harold hits Martin in the head with a rifle butt. The two continue to fight but the exertion takes its toll on Martin and he begins to lose his sight. He returns to the church, followed by Harold, and dies. Harold tells Evelyn he killed Martin and says he wants to go home. He holds out his hand to her and asks his wife to help him. Variety found Last Woman on Earth to be a “[s]lim lower-berth melodrama…. Corman’s direction is generally lackluster.” The British Monthly Film Bulletin thought it “frankly dull, burdened with pretentious dialogue.” Phil Hardy in Science Fiction (1984) found deeper meaning in the scanty production: “A fascinating minimalist film…. [D]espite its tacky surface, [it] has the vision of the best of Science Fiction writing, a rare occurrence in American Science Fiction films of the period.” Although it was filmed in color, most prints of Last Woman on Earth are in black and white. Some sources claim director Monte Hellman added footage to make the film fit a ninety minute TV time slot but this appears to be one film that made it to the small screen without any additional scenes incorporated into it. Allied Artists Television included it in its “Science-Fiction Pictures” package.
Lightning Bolt (Woolner Bros., 1966; 94 minutes; Color) Producers: Alfonso Balcazar, Giuseppe De Blasio and Cleto Fontini. Director: Anthony M. Dawson [Antonio Margheriti]. Story-Screenplay: Alfred [Alfonso] Balcazar. Photography: Riccardo Pallottini. Editor: Juan Oliver. Music: Riz Ortolani. Art Director: Antonio Visone. Sets: Juan Alberto Solar. Sound: Alesandro Sarandrea. Production Manager: Luigi Millozza. Production Supervisor: Dino Mercuri. General Manager: Francisco Balcazar. Costumes: Paolo Moschi. Makeup: Romolo de Martino. Assistant Directors: Luis Martin and Nino Fruscella.
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CAST: Anthony Eisley (Lieutenant Harry Sennett), Wandisa [Guida] Leigh (Kary), Diana Lorys (Captain Pat Flanagan), Ursula Parker [Luisa Rivelli] (Sylvia), Folco Lulli (Rehte), Paco Sanz (Dr. Rooney), Barta Barry (Flacccus), Tito Garcia (Fidel), Jose Maria Caffarel (Archie White), Luciana Petri (Sea Plane Hostess), Goffredo Unger (Wilkes), Rene Montalban, Oreste Palella.
Woolner Bros. released Lightning Bolt in the U.S. in 1966 with Allied Artists including it in its “Cavalcade of the 60’s — Group V” and “Science-Fiction Features” TV packages a decade later. A Spanish-Italian co-production from Seven Films–B.G.A.–Balcazar, it was originally called Operazione Goldman (Operation Goldman) in Italy, where it ran 96 minutes, with a four-minute-longer running time in Spain. Its U.S. prints clocked in at 94 minutes. Made at the height of the James Bond craze, the film is a tongue-in-cheek action spoof of the spy genre with the smooth hero (Anthony Eisley) surrounded by a bevy of beautiful woman as he fights a supervillain (Folco Lulli) out to control the world. Both the hero and the bad guy have red hair and Eisley drives an orange Jaguar. Variety noted, “Unfoldment of the film’s incredible plot premise is professional and rapid, if still standard and uninspired spy fare…. [Eisley] makes a more than adequate hero….” Matt Burke and David Deal in The Eurospy Guide (2004) wrote, “This is one cheesy movie…. The special effects are as to be expected — not very special…. Though the movie has a few charms, they are outweighed by too much silliness, a weak villain, and the sense that the time spent watching it is worth more than the budget spent to make it.” Following the sabotage of six Cape Kennedy Moon rockets, the Federal Security Investigation Commission has nuclear scientist Dr. Rooney (Paco Sanz) investigate but he turns up missing after diving into a lagoon with his assistant Wilkes (Goffredo Unger), following the discovery of a ray station. Captain Patricia “Pat” Flanagan (Diana Lorys) is named chief of Operation Lightning Bolt (the recovery of Dr. Rooney), and she enlists the aid of Lieutenant Harry Sennett (Eisley), who masquerades as a playboy and buys a seaplane complete with a sexy hostess (Luciana Petri). At his rented house near Hotel Florida, a spa for spies, Harry finds Pat in the shower and washes her back. They observe Archie White ( Jose Maria Caffarel) searching the place but his young blonde wife Sylvia (Ursula Parker) shows up, shoots him and drives away. The injured man escapes. Harry and Pat go to his place and along they way see a number of silos belonging to a local brewery. A radio signal leads them into one of the silos where they get locked in and deluged by water. Harry stops the rising water by plugging an air hole but a panel is opened, he is carried outside and then returns to rescue Pat. He sends Pat for security as he goes back home and finds Sylvia, who holds him at bay with an acid-shooting pistol. Pat shoots Sylvia and the silos explode. Harry decides to check out Dr. Rooney’s apartment and sees a beautiful woman, Kary (Wandisa Leigh), leaving the place, which has been ransacked. Harry finds a secret room filled with recording equipment and listens to a tape the scientist made before he went to check out the lagoon. When Pat informs Harry that the latest rocket launch has been moved up and is scheduled to take place in the next few minutes, he rushes to the site in his Jaguar and is followed by Kary. He is too late and gets caught in the fiery debris of the exploding rocket but makes it to the shore where he is stopped by the military police. Harry knocks out the MPs, takes their Jeep and follows a Rehte Beer Company truck he saw near the launch site. He fights with the driver and takes the truck into the company’s warehouse where he runs into White, whom he disables with a gas-filled fountain pen. White is electrocuted when he tries to kill Harry with a wrench but hits a high voltage pipe. Harry tries to escape in the Jeep but is captured. Kary has him put in a capsule that is dropped into the sea and sent to an underwater city. When he awakes, Harry meets Dr. Rooney who shows him a laser he was forced to develop for Rehte (Lulli). He also sees the madman’s
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hibernation chamber where Rehte freezes people who are no longer of use to him. Taking Harry to Rehte, Kary tells him her father is in one of the chambers and will be killed unless she does the tyrant’s bidding. Rehte informs Harry that his underground city is mostly automated and that he plans to launch a lava cannon to the Moon and with the laser he will be able to destroy any city on Earth and rule the planet. Harry tells Rehte he is insane. The agent is ordered to the hibernation chamber as the madman tells Dr. Rooney to have positive results with the laser in forty-eight hours. Kary informs Dr. Rooney that Harry is their only hope and she helps the agent to escape but is captured and taken to Rehte, who kills her father and then her with one of his rays. Dr. Rooney shuts down the city’s generator as Harry eludes the guards and causes an explosion that triggers a deluge of lava. All the prisoners in the hibernation chambers die. Rehte plans to launch his rocket manually. Dr. Rooney orders Harry to stop Rehte and the two men climb to the top of a catwalk and fight with Rehte falling to the floor and engulfed in the lava. Harry and Dr. Rooney take refuge in the rocket cannon that launches them to the surface of the water as the subterranean city is destroyed. His seaplane (carrying Pat) picks up Harry and the scientist, and Harry and Pat retire to one of its bedrooms. An inside joke in the dubbed U.S. version of the film has one of the Senators investigating the rocket explosions called Woolner, the name of the movie’s releasing company.
Lisa and the Devil (Peppercorn-Wormser, 1975; 91 minutes; Color) Producer: Alfred [Alfredo] Leone. Director: Mickey Lion [Mario Bava] and (uncredited) Alfred Leone. Screenplay: Alberto Cittini and Alfred Leone. Photography: Cecillio Paniagua. Editor: Carlo Reall. Music: Carlo Savina; Rodrigo’s “Concerto d’Aranjuez.” Conducted by Paul Muriat. Art Director: Nedo Azzini. Sets: Rafael Ferri. Production Manager: Faustino Ocaria. Makeup: Franco Freda. Special Effects: Franco Tocci. Assistant Director: Lamberto Bava. CAST: Telly Savalas (Leandro), Elke Sommer (Lisa Reiner), Silva [Sylva] Koscina (Sophia Lehar), Robert Alda (Father Michael), Alida Valli (The Countess), Alessio Orano (Max), Gabriele Tinti (Chauffeur George), Kathy Leone (Tour Companion), Eduardo Fajardo (Frank Lehar), Carmen Silva (Anna), Franz von Treuberg (Shopkeeper), Espartaco Santoni (Carlo), Andres Esterhazy (Tourist).
Filmed in Italy as Lisa e il Diavolo (Lisa and the Devil) by director Mario Bava in 1972, this surreal horror film failed to please its producer, Alfredo Leone, after it did not get picked up by a U.S. distributor. He had Bava shoot new footage in order to have it appeal to fans of The Exorcist (1973), and when it was released stateside in 1975 as The House of Exorcism it made little sense plot-wise. Filmed in Technicolor by Leone International Films, The House of Exorcism added new footage of Robert Alda as a priest who tries to rid Elke Sommer’s character of its demonic inhabitant and juxtaposed scenes from the original film with the new footage to make a farrago with some striking and horrifying scenes sewn together with others that are starkly mediocre and filled with foul language. When Allied Artists Television included it in the TV package “The Golden Seventies -Group VII,” it reverted to the title Lisa and the Devil but it lost several minutes of theatrical footage containing nudity, bad language and violence. It was not until the early 1980s that Bava’s original 116-minute version of the movie was released. Two young women, Lisa Reiner (Sommer) and a new friend (Kathy Leone), are members of a tour group in the Italian city of Toledo. They view a fresco in which the Devil carries off the dead. Lisa wanders away from the group and finds a curio shop whose proprietor (Franz von Treuberg) is talking to a man, Leandro (Telly Savalas), who looks like the Devil in the fresco. On the street, Lisa has a fit and is aided by Father Michael (Alda),
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a priest, and is taken to a hospital by ambulance. She wakes up in the street and sees Leandro carrying a dummy; and he points her to the square containing the fresco. She meets a man, Carlo (Espartaco Santoni), who calls her Elena; when she pushes him away, he falls down a flight of stone steps and she runs away. In the hospital Lisa becomes violent and speaks in a masculine voice, ordering the priest to go away. She tells him she is not Lisa but then asks for his help. That night Lisa gets a ride in a car with Frank Lehar (Eduardo Fajardo) and his much younger wife Sophia (Sylva Koscina). The car overheats, forcing George (Gabriele Tinti), the chauffeur, to stop in front of an decaying villa where she sees Leandro, the butler. The place belongs to the blind countess (Alida Valli) who wants the people to leave but her son Max (Alessio Orano) begs her to let them stay and she relents. At the hospital the doctors find nothing physically wrong with Lisa and tell Father Michael that her problems are psychiatric but he suspects something supernatural. George and Sophia make love. The doctors inform the priest that Lisa has a split personality. She breaks her bonds, causes a light fixture to explode and goes berserk. The countess meets her guests at dinner. Father Michael prays for Lisa but she throws up on him. He demands to know who she is and her reply is “Elena.” Max asks Lisa to stay at the villa when the others depart; the countess says it is too late because she is the likeness of Carlo’s lover. Lisa informs Father Michael that she took Carlo from his wife, the countess, because her husband Max was impotent. The Lehars find George murdered in their car, his throat slashed. When Frank tries to make Sophia leave, she runs over him with the auto as Leandro watches. Lisa sees someone staring at her through a window and runs outside, pursued by the man, who turns out to be Carlo. In the villa, Lisa watches Leandro break a corpse’s ankles to make it fit in a coffin, and Carlo calls her Poster for The House of Exorcism (Peppercorn-Warmser, 1976), which Allied Artists released to television under its original title, Elena as she faints. Father Michael sees visions of his dead Lisa and the Devil.
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lover Anna (Carmen Silva), who was killed in a car crash, and she reveals her naked body and begs him to have sex with her before turning into Lisa, who taunts the priest. Carlo is bludgeoned to death. Sophia sees the killing and runs into the villa where she is murdered by Max. Father Michael demands to know the whereabouts of Lisa’s soul. Lisa awakens to find Leandro measuring her. He informs her that Carlo is dead and she finds the countess hovering over Sophia’s bloody corpse. Running to Max, Lisa is told they will run away together and start a new life, adding that his mother is jealous beyond reason. He also tells Lisa she is more beautiful than Elena, who deceived him. Max shows Lisa a bed containing Elena’s decayed corpse and he uses chloroform on the young woman and undresses her. Max tries to have sex with Lisa but is impotent. Later he tells his mother that Elena ran away with her husband and that he avenged her and himself at the same time by killing his lover. He also says he killed George and Sophia because they were going to take Lisa away. The countess tells her son he can only be saved if Lisa disappears and he kills her. Going to the dining room, Max sees all the dead ones sitting at the table. when his mother’s corpse comes toward him, he backs out of a window and falls to his death. The countess’ corpse is being pushed by Leandro. Father Michael demands to know where the events took place as Lisa spews toads from her mouth. In the city, Lisa walks toward the square with the fresco while the shopkeeper complains to Leandro that she got away. Father Michael goes to the vacant villa and fights with Satan, who attacks him with snakes. The priest orders the Devil and his accursed souls back to Hell and exorcises the villa. Richard Meyers wrote in For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films (1983), “Now this one is a hoot. Savalas makes all sorts of casual demonic speeches to the innocent Sommer while sucking on a lollipop, exactly as his television character Kojak had done…. It is all extremely absurd, but very funny.” In The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), Phil Hardy opined that the U.S. release’s new scenes “not only destroy the rhythm of Bava’s picture but no doubt also remove the most poetic sequences since they wouldn’t contribute to the action.” Regarding the original footage, Hardy notes, “The overwhelmingly morbid sense of necrophilia exuded by the movie, with Bava’s camera lovingly caressing draperies and corpses, is punctuated by flamboyantly eerie exterior night scenes in which the director’s morbid romanticism achieves intensely beautiful effects.” Perhaps the contrast between the two versions of the movie is best described in Video Watchdog #2 (1990), deriding producer Alfredo Leone’s “transforming Mario Bava’s twilight masterpiece Lisa and the Devil into the execrable pea soup paen, House of Exorcism.” The role of Lisa’s tour friend is well played by Kathy Leone, the daughter of producer Alfredo Leone, who took over the direction from Bava for some of the new scenes added to Lisa and the Devil to become The House of Exorcism.
The Little Shop of Horrors (The Filmgroup, 1960; 71 minutes) Producer-Director: Roger Corman. Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith. Photography: Arch Dalzell. Editor: Marshall Neilan, Jr. Music: Fred Katz. Art Director: Daniel Haller. Sound: Phillip Mitchell. Properties: Carl Brainard. Assistant Director: Richard Dixon. CAST: Jonathan Haze (Seymour Krelboin), Jackie Joseph (Audrey Fulquard), Mel Welles (Gravis Mushnik), Dick Miller (Burson Fouch), Myrtle Vail (Winifred Krelboin), Tammy Windsor, Toby Michaels (High School Girls), Leola Wendorff (Mrs. Siddie Shiva), Lynn Storey (Hortense Feuchtwanger), Wally Campo (Detective Sergeant Joe Fink), Jack Warford (Detective Frank Stoolie), Merri Welles (Leonora Clyde), John Shaner (Dr. Phoebus Farb), Jack Nicholson (Wilbur Force), Dodie Drake (Waitress), Jack Griffin (Drunk), Robert Cogan (Hobo), Charles B. Griffith (Drunk Patient/Burglar/Voice of Audrey, Jr.).
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Jonathan Haze and Audrey, Jr., in The Little Shop of Horrors (The Filmgroup, 1961)
Allied Artists Television released The Little Shop of Horrors to the small screen as part of its “Science-Fiction Features” package. Made as The Passionate People Eater on a budget of less than $30,000 in three days, the film is a minor classic in the field of horrific comedy. Although Roger Corman receives solo producer and director credit on the production, some sources claim scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith and co-star Mel Welles directed some of the footage. The Little Shop of Horrors developed such a cult following over the years that it spawned the 1982 award-winning musical of the same title by composers Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. In 1986 the musical came to the big screen starring Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Vincent Gardenia, Steve Martin and Bill Murray with direction by Frank Oz. An animated cartoon series, Little Shop, was telecast by Fox Kids Network in 1991. Detective Sergeant Joe Fink (Wally Campo) relates how a homicide on L.A.’s Skid Row turned into the most horrifying period of his career. Gravis Mushnik (Welles) runs a florist shop in a downtrodden area of the city along with bumbling employee Seymour Krelboin ( Jonathan Haze), who he pays ten dollars a week. A new customer, Burson Fouch (Dick Miller), orders carnations to eat and puts the cost on his tab. After Seymour messes up still another order, Mushnik wants to fire him but another employee, Audrey Fulquard ( Jackie Joseph), defends him, not knowing Seymour is smitten with her. Seymour offers to give Mushnik a new plant he has grown from seeds obtained from a Japanese gardener and Fouch points out that small shops with exotic plants do better business. Mushnik sends Seymour to his apartment to get the plant, which he has named Audrey Jr. Upon his arrival,
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the young man delights his mother Winifred Krelboin (Myrtle Vail), a hypochondriac, with a tonic that is 98 percent alcohol. Taking Audrey Jr. back to the flower shop, Seymour finds his boss is not impressed but he is given ten days to turn it into an acceptable display. Sitting up with the sickly plant, Seymour notices it has opened up and when he goes to get it water he accidentally cuts his finger on a thorn and finds out Audrey Jr. is nourished by blood. The next day the plant has doubled in size and brought in a large crowd, causing Mushnik to give Seymour a two dollar raise and make plans to adopt him. Two Cocamonga High School students (Tammy Windsor, Toby Michaels) want the plant for their school’s float in the Rose Bowl Parade and Mushnik is overjoyed when they agree to consider a $2,000 flower purchase. Audrey Jr. begins wilting. Seymour promises to make the plant healthy again. That night it talks and demands to be fed. Not knowing what to do, the young man walks through Skid Row and over to the railroad yards where he throws a rock at a bottle and accidentally knocks out a drunk ( Jack Griffin), who falls on the tracks and is decapitated by a train. Seymour takes the body back to the flower shop and, when the plant demands food, he gives it the drunk’s body parts. Mushnik sees Seymour feeding Audrey Jr. and vows to inform the law. The next morning the plant is huge and the shop is swarming with customers so Mushnik holds his tongue. A dentist, Dr. Farb ( John Shaner), is angry with Seymour for messing up one of his flower orders and tries to take out more than one tooth. The two get into a fight and Seymour mortally wounds Farb with a dental instrument but is unable to remove the body because of the intrusion of pain-loving undertaker Wilbur Force ( Jack Nicholson). Pretending to be the dentist, Seymour yanks out several of Wilbur’s teeth. Seymour gives Audrey Jr. Dr. Farb’s body and later informs his boss that the plant is through eating because it has been fed three times, the most required of a cross between a Venus Fly Trap and a butterwort. Due to the two disappearances on Skid Row, Fink and his partner, Detective Frank Stoolie ( Jack Warford) interrogate a nervous Mushnik but learn nothing. Hortense Feuchtwanger (Lynn Storey) of the Society of Silent Flower Observers of Southern California shows up at the shop and says she will give Seymour a trophy for Audrey Jr. when it blooms in two days. As Mushnik sits with the plant that night and refuses its demand for food, Seymour takes Audrey to his home for a dinner prepared by his mother, made up of health foods and medications. When the two young people talk about getting married, the old sot chastises Seymour for not getting her an iron lung first. A burglar (Charles B. Griffith) breaks into the flower shop and demands money from Mushnik, who tells him it is hidden inside Audrey Jr. The crook goes to retrieve the money and is devoured by the plant. The next night Seymour and Audrey have a picnic in the flower shop but when the plant calls out to be fed, the young woman thinks it is Seymour talking, becomes disgusted with him and leaves. The dejected Seymour roams Skid Row where he is enticed by a hooker (Merri Welles) whom he accidentally kills and then feeds to Audrey Jr. The special ceremony for the plant’s blooming takes place at sunset the next day and is attended by Mushnik, Audrey, Mrs. Krelboin, Hortense and the two policemen. Just as Seymour arrives, the blooms open showing the faces of the murder victims. The young man runs out of the shop, chased by the detectives and Mushnik. He leads them through a junkyard filled with hundreds of semi-truck tires and bathroom appliances before hiding in a commode. Seymour goes back to the shop where Audrey Jr. demands to be fed. He picks up a knife and dives into the plant, promising to kill it. When Mushnik, the detectives, Audrey and Mrs. Krelboin return, the last bloom opens, revealing Seymour’s face. Variety reported that the film was a “serviceable parody of a typical screen horror
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number…. Little Shop of Horrors is kind of one big sick joke, but it’s essentially harmless and good natured…. The acting is pleasantly preposterous.” The Motion Picture Herald called it “[h]orrifically funny,” adding, “The deft production-directional touches of the resourceful redoubtable Roger Corman are very much present….” The British Monthly Film Bulletin termed it “the best full-length horror comedy ever made in two days.” Mark Thomas McGee reported in Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts (1988), “Over the years, Little Shop of Horrors has developed a cult following and is probably better and more fondly remembered than any of Roger’s more prestigious productions. It was one of two American films to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival the years of its release…. No picture ever gave Roger a better return.” While Corman may get most of the praise for turning out such an amusing film on so little money in such a short time, the actors also deserve much credit. Jonathan Haze is topnotch as the half-witted, well-meaning Seymour, and Jackie Joseph is able to bring off the difficult role of his addled love interest. The film’s best performance is that of Mel Welles as the harried Gravis Mushnik and he is almost matched by Myrtle Vail as Seymour’s batty, health-conscious mother. (Vail, who was scripter Charles B. Griffith’s grandmother, for many years starred on the radio serial “Myrt and Marge.”) Dick Miller adds a nice touch as the flower eater and Wally Campo and Jack Warford nicely carry off their Joe Friday– Frank Smith imitation of “Dragnet.” Jack Nicholson makes the most of his outrageous part as the masochistic dental patient.
Lost Women (Howco International, 1953; 69 minutes) Producers: G. William Perkins and Melvin Gordon. Directors: Herbert Tevos and Ron Ormond. Screenplay: Herbert Tevos. Photography: Karl Struss and Gilbert Warrenton. Editors: Hugh Winn and Ray H. Lockert. Supervising Editor: W. Donn Hayes. Music: Hoyt Curtin. Sound: Harry Smith. Sets: Theodore Offenbecker. Makeup: Paul Stanhope and Harry Ross. Special Effects: Ray Mercer. Properties: Oscar Lau and Ernest Johnson. Dialogue Supervisor: Orville H. Hampton. Dialogue Director: Herb A. Lightmann. Script Supervisor: Sam Freedle. Assistant Director: Theodore Joos. CAST: Jackie Coogan (Dr. Arana), Richard Travis (Dan Mulcahey), Allan Nixon (Dr. Tucker), Mary Hill (Doreen Culverson), Robert Knapp (Grant Phillips), Chris-Pin Martin (Pepe), Harmon Stevens (Dr. Leland J. Masterson), Nico Lek ( Jan van Croft), Samuel Wu (Wu), John Martin (Frank), Tandra Quinn (Tarantella), George Barrows (George), Dean Riesner (Henchman), Kelly Drake, Candy Collins, Doris Lee Price, Mona McKinnon, Sherry Moreland, Ginger Sherry, Chris Randall, Diane Fortier, Karna Greene, June Benbow, Doris Hart (Spider Women), Katina Vea [Katherine Victor] (Spider Woman Guide), Dolores Fuller (Blonde Spider Woman in Woods), Margia Dean (Brunette Spider Woman in Woods), Fred Kelsey (Cantina Bartender), Angelo Rossitto (Dwarf ), John George (Mute Assistant), Julian Rivero, Suzanne Ridgeway, Jack Low (Cantina Customers), Lyle Talbot (Narrator).
Herbert Tevos wrote and directed footage for a film called Lost Women of Zarpa and Tarantula for Joy M. Houck and J. Francis White, Jr., the owners of Howco International Pictures. When Houck and White deemed the production too short and incoherent for release, they called in Ron Ormond to finish the film. Ormond had previously directed westerns starring Lash LaRue for the two producers’ Western Adventure company and he helmed new footage written by Orville H. Hampton, who got screen credit as dialogue supervisor for the finished product, Mesa of Lost Women, which Howco issued theatrically in the summer of 1953. The film was shown in Great Britain as Lost Women, the title used by Allied Artists Television when it was included in its “The Golden Sixties — Group VI” and “ScienceFiction Features” packages. Under any title, it is an insipid mess, although it contains lots
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Spanish lobby card for Mesa of Lost Women (Howco International, 1953). Contrary to the advertising, Jack Holt does not appear in the film.
of eye candy via the sexy spider women that included Ed Wood actresses Dolores Fuller and Mona McKinnon, and Jerry Warren’s perennial leading lady, Katherine Victor. Hoyt Curtin’s constantly annoying flamenco music soundtrack was later used in Wood’s Jail Bait (1954) with Fuller, McKinnon and Lyle Talbot, the narrator of Mesa of Lost Women. In Mexico’s Muerto Desert, surveyor Frank ( John Martin) and his sidekick Pepe (ChrisPin Martin) find Grant Phillips (Robert Knapp) and Doreen Culverson (Paula Hill) near death from dehydration. They take them to the Amer-Exico Field Hospital, where they are treated by Dr. Tucker (Allan Nixon). Grant comes to and begins raving about super-sized deadly bugs and begs camp foreman Dan Mulcahey (Richard Travis) to use oil to burn off the top of Zarpa Mesa. Grant tells the story of how, a year before, the renowned scientist Dr. Leland J. Masterson (Harmon Stevens) traveled to Zarpa Mesa to meet Dr. Arana ( Jackie Coogan) to discuss scientific theory. Masterson is led to Arana’s hidden cave laboratory by a mysterious woman (Katherine Victor); Arana informs Masterson that he has been able to control the interior pituitary gland’s growth hormone and in working with spiders has created beings with the properties of both species. He laments that his main success has been with females while his experiments with males have only resulted in creating dwarfs. Arana shows Masterson the beautiful Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), who he says can grow new limbs and will lives for centuries, along with a giant spider. The horrified Mas-
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terson tells Arana he is evil and that he and his creations must be destroyed. As Masterson tries to escape, he is given a shot by Tarantella that makes him lose consciousness. After being confined in a mental ward for a year, Masterson escapes and is trailed for two days by his nurse, George (George Barrows). Masterson winds up in a cantina in a small Mexican town where Doreen is stranded with her wealthy older fiancé Jan von Croft (Nico Lek) as their pilot, Grant, tries to repair Jan’s plane so the couple can fly to Mexico City to be married. Masterson, whose mind has snapped, sits with Doreen and Jan and as George joins them they watch Tarantella dance. Jan is unaware that his servant Wu (Samuel Wu) has been mesmerized by the spider woman. Masterson shoots Tarantella and then forces the others to go with him to Jan’s plane; after they leave, the dancer revives. Although the plane is not totally repaired, Masterson tells Grant to fly them out of the town as the police approach. Flying over the Muerto Desert, an engine fails and Grant is forced to make a landing on Zarpa Mesa. After Grant fires a flare, Wu makes a fire and George decides to explore. He is attacked and killed by a giant spider. During the night, Doreen hears a rustling noise and starts talking to Grant, who makes her admit she is marrying Jan for his money. Doreen is frightened when she sees the spider women and dwarfs watching them. Wu goes to Arana and informs him that he has brought Masterson back to the mesa; as he leaves, he is killed by the spider women. Jan is killed by the giant spider. The other members of the party are captured by Arana’s creatures and taken to his underground laboratory where he gives Masterson a serum that restores his sanity. The scientist again refuses to aid Arana in his mad schemes. When Tarantella tries to kill Masterson, she is restrained by Doreen as Grant subdues Arana. Masterson mixes together volatile chemicals and orders Doreen and Grant to run from the laboratory as he causes a conflagration that destroys Arana and his creations. Except for Pepe, all the listeners at the hospital doubt Grant’s story, even though it is confirmed by a revived Doreen. Dan refuses Grant’s request to set fire to Zarpa Mesa where one of the spider women keeps watch. Needless to say, Lost Women garnered little praise. Variety called it “for laughs only” while John Stanley’s Creature Features Movie Guide Strikes Again (1994) dubbed it “[t]urgidly written-directed-acted sci-fi thriller…. So incompetent you won’t believe your eyes.” Phil Hardy said in Science Fiction (1984), “The special effects are grim.” In The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983), Michael J. Weldon declared it “[g]reat grade-Z nonsense” while The Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide (1989) thought it “[u]ndeservedly underrated classic dreck….” James O’Neill in Terror on Tape (1994) termed it “[o]ne of the very worst…. [T]he two guys who helmed this mess make Ed Wood look like John Ford.” Co-director Ron Ormond went on to make exploitation films, including westerns, country music and religious movies. Among them were the genre efforts The Exotic Ones (The Monster and the Stripper) (1968) and The Grim Reaper (1976).
The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (The Filmgroup, 1962; 79 minutes; Color) Producer: Joseph Moss [Art Diamond]. Associate Producer: Jack Woods. Director: Alfred Posco [Aleksandr Ptushko]. Screenplay: Karl Isar [Konstantin Isayev]. Photography: Frank Provor [Fyodor Provorov]. Editor: George Stein. Music: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Music Director: Grigori Gamburg. Song: John Smich, sung by Gino Marsili. Choreography: Sergei Koren. Art Directors: Edward Kuman and Eva Disel. Sound: Victor [Viktor] Zorin. Costumes: O. Kruchinina. Makeup: Jose Malar. Special Effects: Sidney Mulin [Sergei Mukhin]. CAST: Edward Stolar [Sergei Stolyarov] (Sinbad), Anna Larion [Alla Larionova] (Luberia), Ellen Mysova [Yelena Myshkova] (Princess Morgiana), Maurice Troyan [Mikhail Troyanovsky] (Trifon), Norman Malish [Nadir Malishevsky] (Tanus), Robert Surow [B. Surovtsev] (Hadabad),
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William Leon [Yuri Leonidov] (Cassim), Laurence Astan [M. Astangov] (Prince Lal Bahari Day), Irving Perev [Ivan Pereverzev] (Abdalla], Eugene Krikol [Nikolai Kryuchkov] (Old Merchant), Stanley Martinson [Sovol Martinson] (Money Lender), Nord [Lev] Fenin (Viking Leader), Arnold Kaylor [Stepan Kayukov] (King Neptune), Olivia Viklandt (Queen Neptuna), Lucille Vertisya [Lidiya Vertinskaya] (The Phoenix), Julian Burton (Voices of Sinbad and King Neptune), Luana Anders (Voice of Princess Morgiana), Francis Ford Coppola (Voice of Cassim).
The Filmgroup, headed by producer-director Roger Corman, purchased the Englishlanguage rights to the 1953 Soviet film Sadko, directed by Aleksandr Ptushko, based on the 1867 symphonic poem by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Corman assigned Francis Ford Coppola and James Landis the task of turning the movie into a dual bill release item and they changed the musical fantasy into a Sinbad film thanks to the continuing success of Columbia Pictures’ The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The new dubbed version deleted ten minutes of running time, added a title song, and was released theatrically in March 1962 as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad. Allied Artists Television brought it to the small screen in its “Science-Fiction Features” grouping. Sadko was first released in the United States in 1953 by Artkino Films, the company that seven years later sold it to Corman. That year it received the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion award and was widely screened throughout the world. Issued in its homeland in 1952, Sadko was the final film of Soviet director Aleksandr Ptushko, who died that year. Known for his direction and special effects, Ptushko imbued the feature with his trademark sumptuous production values that included exotic and impressive sets, well-staged battle scenes, a fascinating underwater world and the Phoenix, a bird woman who entices men to sleep forever. As to be expected from a Soviet production, politics involving class struggle dominates the first third of the movie. While Corman’s U.S. reworking glosses over the political overtones and excises music that would have slowed down a feature destined for kiddie matinees, The Magic Voyage of Sinbad retains the topnotch fantasy elements like Sinbad’s magic harp, the water nymph who changes goldfish into bullion, a tiny living White Horse chess piece, the Phoenix and her mysterious lair and the aquatic world of Neptune with a dancing octopus and a lobster-drawn chariot. After completing his famous seven voyages, legendary sailor Sinbad (Edward Stolar) returns to the coastal city of Covosan. Having given all his treasure to the poor of other lands, he comes home with only his magic harp. He is disappointed to find the city run down with all the wealth in the hands of greedy merchants. Sinbad meets a beautiful working girl, Luberia (Anna Larion), who gives him water. Trying to rally the citizens to bring the city back to its former glory, Sinbad tells them of the bird of happiness and vows he will build boats and sail around the world to bring it back to Covosan. At a feast given by a wealthy old merchant (Eugene Krikol), Sinbad is derided when he asks the rich to use their money to build a fleet of ships; he vows to construct the boats himself. A young boy, Hadabad (Robert Surow), asks to come along on the voyage and Sinbad agrees. That night the sailor plays his harp at the water’s edge and is kissed by Princess Morgiana (Ellen Mysova), the daughter of King Neptune (Arnold Kaylor), who agrees to help him by providing golden fishes. Sinbad summons the townspeople and makes a bet with the merchants that he will get the golden fishes or they can have his head. He is joined in his efforts by strongman Cassim (William Leon), who outwrestles a bear, and old wise man Trifon (Maurice Troyan). Sinbad makes two unsuccessful attempts to bring up the golden fishes in his net but on the third try the princess keeps her promise and he obtains his prize. The impressed merchants agree to open their warehouses and a celebration takes place. At the end of the day Sinbad
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Edward Stolar and Ellen Mysova in The Magic Voyage of Sinbad (The Filmgroup, 1962), a reworking of the Soviet film Sadko (1952).
realizes he has given the city’s wealth to the poor and that he has no money to build his fleet. Luberia tells Sinbad that her mother forbids their being together. Princess Morgiana again comes to his rescue and turns the golden fishes into gold coins, giving Sinbad the funds he needs to construct three ships. Bidding goodbye to Luberia, Sinbad sets sail with his men to find the bird of happiness. They sail north and land on a desolate coast where they are attacked by Viking warriors. Sinbad and his men win the battle and take the Viking leader’s (Nord Fenin) white stallion as a prize. They sail to the exotic cities of Abadu, Banagalor and Nashapur but are unable to find the bird of happiness. Sinbad next leads his men to India where Trifon learns that a maharajah (Laurence Astan) has a phoenix of happiness kept in a tall tower surrounded by seven walls. When the ruler arrives on an elephant, he is insulted when Sinbad, riding the white stallion, will not bow to him. The monarch wants the horse and Sinbad suggests they play a game of chess with the prize being either the stallion or the Phoenix. Outsmarting the maharajah, Sinbad wins the game and enters a hidden staircase with Trifon, Hadabad and Cassim. They arrive in an ornamental tower where they find the Phoenix (Lucille Vertisya) perched. The evil bird begins singing a siren song that puts Trifon, Hadabad and Cassim to sleep but Sinbad uses his harp to resist her; awakening his friends, they go back into the palace. The maharajah orders his army to
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attack the strangers as they try to return to their ships but Sinbad uses the Phoenix to put the soldiers and their elephants to sleep. Sailing on to Egypt, Sinbad realizes he cannot find the bird of happiness and decides to return to Covosan and Luberia. The ships are hit by a great storm because no homage was paid to King Neptune. Sinbad decides to give up his life to save his crew: He dives to the bottom of the sea and finds the coral gates to Neptune’s palace where he serenades the king and his argumentative wife, Queen Neptuna (Olivia Viklandt). Claiming he must return to land to replace his broken harp strings, Sinbad tries to leave the kingdom but Neptune orders him to marry one of his seven beautiful daughters. He chooses Morgiana, although he tells her he really loves Luberia. She provides him with a seahorse so he can escape. Sinbad is followed by the king, who drives a chariot pulled by a giant lobster. Sinbad outraces Neptune and gets back to Covosan where he is reunited with Luberia. When the three vessels return unharmed, Sinbad tells the people happiness is not a bird and that it has always been in Covosan. Tim Lucas in Video Watchdog #9 (1992), provides an insightful summary: “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad may be a foolish translation of a wonderful film, but it is too feeble a disguise to fully desecrate Ptushko’s original production. Ptuschko’s most splendid scenes … all remain essentially intact. The Magic Voyage of Sinbad cannot help but be a remarkable viewing experience … in spite of itself.” Michael J. Weldon in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983) noted, “No Sinbad here…. It’s really pretty impressive…. The only real low point is a silly-looking octopus.” In Movies on TV 1975 –76 (1974), Steven H. Scheuer said, “No magic here. Hokum swashbuckling adventure.”
Man with the Synthetic Brain (Independent-International, 1972; 86 minutes; Color) Producer-Director: Al Adamson. Executive Producers: Charles McMullen and Zoe Phillips. Associate Producers: Samuel M. Sherman and J.P. Spohn. Screenplay: Dick Poston and Chris Martino. Story: Al Adamson and Samuel M. Sherman. Photography: Louis Horvath and William [Vilmos] Zsigmond. Editor: Samuel M. Sherman (uncredited). Music: Jimmie Roosa and Don McGinnis. Sound: Robert Dietz. Makeup: Lee James. Production Manager: J.P. Spohn. Titles: Bob Le Bar. Script Supervisor: Sandy Portelli. CAST: John Carradine (Dr. Howard Van Ard), Kent Taylor (Dr. Elton Corey), Tommy Kirk (Police Lieutenant Cross), Regina Carrol (Susan Van Ard), Roy Morton ( Joe Corey), Arne Warda (Sergeant Grimaldi), Tacey Robbins (Linda Clarke), Richard Smedley (Acro), Kirk Duncan (David Jordan Clarke), Tanya Maree (Vicky), Barney Gelfan (Detective Pete), John Aimond (Nick), Lyle Felice (Vito), Joey Benson (Police Lieutenant Ward), John Talbert (Curtiss), K.K. Riddle (Nancy Clarke), Al Adamson (Murdered Gang Member), Robert Dietz (Policeman), J.P. Spohn (Head in Box).
Allied Artists Television released Man with the Synthetic Brain to the small screen in its “The Golden Sixties — Group VI” and “Science-Fiction Features” packages in the mid– 1970s. At the same time it was still getting theatrical showings under its 1972 Independent-International Pictures release title, Blood of Ghastly Horror. The feature’s history dates back to 1963 when Victor Adamson Productions made the tawdry jewel heist thriller Two Tickets to Terror in Hollywood and Lake Tahoe. Adamson, better known as Denver Dixon, produced this cheap effort and his son Al Adamson made his directorial debut with it (and also played one of the robbers). Also called Echo of Terror, it was released to theaters in 1965 as Psycho A-Go-Go with added songs by the Vandells. In 1967, new footage with John Carradine was interpolated, giving the movie a science fiction subplot, and it was shown as Fiend with the Electronic Brain by Hemisphere Pictures. In the early 1970s, more scenes were
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Roy Morton and John Carradine in Man with the Synthetic Brain, the TV title of Blood of Ghastly Horror (Independent-International, 1971).
spliced in with Kent Taylor, Tommy Kirk and Regina Carrol; Independent-International released it as Blood of Ghastly Horror. The final result is one of the worst films ever patched together. It is incredibly dull and lacks the redeeming quality of being fun to watch. Much of the latter-day footage is lensed in tight facial close-ups, barely matching the older material. A disfigured fiend, Acro (Richard Smedley), goes on a killing spree, murdering a hooker and her doper customer, a female pedestrian and two cops. Lieutenant Cross (Kirk) is put in charge of the case and he receives a box in the mail containing a severed head and a note signed by Joe Corey (Roy Morton). Cross relates to his associate, Sergeant Grimaldi (Arne Warda), Corey’s history of being a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who was treated by brain surgeon Dr. Howard Van Ard ( John Carradine). Van Ard is visited by Police Lieutenant Ward ( Joey Benson) and says Corey died during an operation two years before. Benson notes the dead man’s fingerprints were found at the scene of a jewel robbery. Corey takes part in the heist but his briefcase containing the gems ends up in the back of a pickup truck owned by David Clarke (Kirk Duncan). The sadist Corey murders one of his cohorts (Al Adamson) as Clarke drives home where his little daughter, Nancy (K.K. Riddle), finds the jewels. Corey goes to an office building, kills a secretary, gets Clarke’s address and invades the man’s home with three other gang members, Vito (Lyle Felice), Curtiss ( John Talbert) and Nick ( John Aimond). When Clarke denies knowing about the diamonds, Corey beats him and is sent by Vito to find the man’s wife Linda (Tacey Robbins), who sings at a club. Ward goes back to see Van Ard, who tells him he has been experimenting on the rehabilitation of damaged brain cells and has built an artificial brain component which he put in Corey’s head, causing him to become a psychopathic homicidal maniac. Corey goes to the bar where
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Linda sings and picks up a hooker who tells him the woman and her daughter took a bus to Lake Tahoe where they are to meet her husband. Corey strangles the young woman and then goes to Van Ard’s office, straps him to some equipment and fills him full of electricity. Cross informs Grimaldi that everyone involved in the Corey case is dead except himself. The lieutenant receives a visit from blonde Susan Van Ard (Carrol), the late neurosurgeon’s daughter, who tells him she fells she is being contacted telepathically. After she leaves, Cross informs Grimaldi that Corey once said his missing father, Dr. Elton Corey (Taylor), was involved in voodoo experiments. At his laboratory, Dr. Corey keeps his zombie slave Acro in a cage and vows to avenge the death of his son. He telephones Susan, saying he once worked with her father and he has some papers for her. Susan sends word about the call to Cross, who is out of the office. As Dr. Corey and Acro go to meet Susan, Detective Pete (Barney Gelfan), who took Susan’s message, drives to the meeting place. As Dr. Corey carries off Susan, Acro attacks Pete, who writes part of a license plate number in his own blood before dying. Cross and Grimaldi see Pete’s note from Susan and go to the area where they find Pete’s body and the partial number. At his laboratory, Dr. Corey informs Susan that he plans to turn her into his slave and that he blames her father for making his son an electronic freak. He also relates how his son followed Linda Clarke and her daughter to Lake Tahoe with he and Curtiss taking them into the desert where he demands the jewels. When Linda says she knows nothing about the robbery, she and her daughter are taken to a motel where Corey tries to rape Linda but is stopped by Curtiss. The two men fight and Corey shoots Curtiss. Linda and Nancy take his car and drive away. Corey steals a another car and follows them as the police are alerted to their whereabouts. Clarke and Ward also follow. Linda stops her car in snow country and she and her daughter try to elude Corey on foot as they are trailed by her husband and Ward. Corey corners Linda and Nancy but he is shot by Ward and plunges off a cliff. Corey finds the jewels in Nancy’s doll. Dr. Corey starts to give Susan an injection when Grimaldi arrives; he is murdered by the dying Acro. The madman turns Susan into a hideous crone and says she will serve him. Acro breaks out of his cell and kills Dr. Corey before collapsing. Susan takes an antidote that returns her to normal as Cross arrives on the scene. In Schlock-O-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson (1998), David Konow said, “Blood of Ghastly Horror is the perfect example of Al [Adamson] and Sam’s [Samuel M. Sherman] diehard mentality to do whatever it takes to complete a movie…. With so many films of this era promising so much in their ads yet delivering so little, at least Blood of Ghastly Horror delivered. As Sam says, ‘It John Carradine in The Man with the Synthetic Brain, which had blood, it was ghastly and was derived from Fiend with the Electronic Brain (Hemisphere, it was horrible.’” 1968).
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Mermaids of Tiburon (The Filmgroup, 1962; 76 minutes; Color) Producer-Director-Screenplay-Underwater Photography: John Lamb. Associate Producer: Ron Graham. Photography: Brydon Baker and Hal McAlpin. Editor: Bert Honey. Music: Richard LaSalle. Music Editor: Lloyd Young. Sound: Del Harris. CAST: George Rowe (Dr. Samuel Jackson), Diane Webber (Mermaid Queen), Timothy Carey (Milo Sangster), Jose Gonzalez-Gonzalez (Pepe Gallardo), John Mylong (Ernst Steinhauer), Gil Baretto (Baquero), Vicki Cantenwine, Nani Morrissey, Judy Edwards, Jean Carroll, Diana Cook, Karen Goodman, Nancy Burns (Mermaids).
While working at his job at Marineland, Dr. Samuel Jackson (George Rowe), a marine biologist, is approached by pearl expert Ernst Steinhauer ( John Mylong) with a business proposition. Steinhauer wants Jackson to go with him to Tiburon Island to dive for large pearls. Jackson agrees to join the expedition and flies to Mexico to meet Steinhauer, who is missing. Jackson charters a boat and sails to Tiburon as does adventurer Milo Sangster (Timothy Carey), who has hired a craft owned by Pepe ( Jose Gonzalez-Gonzalez). Jackson arrives at Tiburon which he notes is untouched since the beginning of time. After going ashore, he finds sea otters, a species thought to be extinct. Sangster informs Pepe that they are going to Tiburon to dive for pearls and makes him a gift of one of them. Finding Tiburon to be an amazing marine sanctuary, Jackson spies a strange sea creature that turns out to be a mermaid (Diane Webber). Following her underwater, he finds several others like her
Spanish lobby card for The Mermaids of Tiburon (The Filmgroup, 1962)
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and determines that they are water-breathing mammals. Sangster and Pepe locate the island as Jackson picks a bouquet of water flowers which the mermaid readily accepts. She leads him into a grotto where he sees many more mermaids who flee from him, but some return due to curiosity. The mermaids take him to a bed of giant oysters and one of them leads a killer shark away from Jackson. Sangster throws dynamite into the water in an effort to kill Jackson, who manages to recover and return to shore. Sangster and Pepe search for the pearls as Jackson boards their boat and finds evidence that Sangster robbed and murdered Steinhauer. Sangster returns and the two men fight. When Pepe tries to stop Sangster from shooting Jackson, he is pushed into the sea and devoured by the shark. A fire is started by Sangster’s flare gun and the dynamite explodes, destroying the craft. Sangster escapes in a rowboat and returns to the oyster bed; Jackson goes after him. After taking two of the huge oyster shells to shore, Sangster sees the mermaids, follows them and ends up in a grotto where he is caught between boulders and dies. Jackson decides to return home as the mermaids disappear; he promises to someday go back to Tiburon Island. Basically an undersea photo essay in the Gulf of California, Mermaids of Tiburon had a piddling adventure plot highlighted by producer-director-writer John Lamb’s outstanding underwater photography. The subplot of mermaids gives the film a fantasy theme. Issued theatrically in June 1962 by the Filmgroup, it was produced by Pacifica Productions. The original version was included by Allied Artists Television in its movie package “ScienceFiction Pictures.” Lamb removed most of the mermaid footage and re-shot it with topless women, including Gaby Martone, and the film was shown in adult and art theatres as The Aqua Sex and The Virgin Aqua Sex in 1964. In 1985 Lamb again re-edited the feature and it was issued as the nude version of The Mermaids of Tiburon. “Foolish undersea adventure concerning ‘unclassified’ fish women” is how Michael J. Weldon wrote in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983). R.G. Young in The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film (2000) said it was a “[s]tandard semi-fantasy.” Steven H. Scheuer in Movies on TV 1969 –70 (1968) thought it “[p]retty fishy, despite good camera work.” Donald C. Willis in Horror and Science Fictions: A Checklist (1972) called it “[d]ull.” Mermaids of Tiburon footage appeared in the “Mermaid” episode of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” (ABC-TV, 1964–68) and the 1968 Mexican film La Mujer Murcielago (The Batwoman).
Satanik (Interfilm/Hispamex, 1968; 84 minutes; Color) Producer: Romano Mussolin. Director: Piero Vivarelli. Story-Screenplay: Eduardo Manzanos Brochero, from the comic strip by Magnus [Roberto Raviola] and Max Bunker [Luciano Secchi]. Photography: Silvano Ippoliti. Editor: Gianmaria Messeri. Music: Manuel Parada. Art Directors: Cubero and Galicia. Sound: Romano Pamplona and Alessandro Sarandrae. General Production Manager: Giancarlo Marchetti. Production Manager: Mario Barboni. Production Secretary: Mario Villani. Sets: Cimino. Wardrobe: Berniece Sapanaro. Makeup: Gianni Ornadi. Assistant Director: Giuseppe Avati. CAST: Magda Konopka (Dr. Marnie Bannister), Julio Pena (Inspector Trent), Umi [Umberto] Raho (George Van Donan), Luigi Montini (Dodo La Roche), Armando Calvo (Inspector Gonzalez), Mimma Ippoliti (Stella Dexter), Isarco Ravaioli (Commissaire La Duc), Nerio Bernardi (Professor Graves), Joe Atlanta (Albert), Antonio Pica (Louis La Roche), Piero Vivarelli (Max), Gaetano Quartararo (Sergeant Ortega), Mirella Pamphilli (Dancer), Gustavo Simone (Frank), Giancarlo Prete (Pedro), Pedro Fenollar ( Janitor), Luis de Tejada (Gang Member).
Also called Satanic, this Italian-Spanish co-production’s major asset is its presentation of star Magda Konopka’s body, mainly in exotic costumes. Otherwise it is a listless, mundane
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effort offset somewhat by some scenic Swiss scenery. The star’s monster makeup is tacky and no explanation is given for her facial deformity although its temporary remedy fills her with bloodlust. Outside of Konopka’s striptease in a black Diabolik-like suit, Satanik has little claim to fame, except for being based on the popular comic strip of the same name, published by Corno of Milan, and must rate as one of Europe’s lesser excursions into the horror-sci-fi film field. With its brief nude scenes snipped out, the film was included by Allied Artists Television in its “The Golden Sixties — Group VI” and “Science-Fiction Features” packages. On a stormy night in Madrid, facially grotesque Dr. Marnie Bannister (Konopka) goes to see her associate, Professor Graves (Nerio Bernardi), a world-famous biochemist who has been working on a cell regeneration serum. He has had success with animals but notices a ferocity in their behavior after the injections. Marnie wants him to experiment on her but he refuses and she kills him. She mixes his formula with a crystal and drinks the concoction, becoming a very beautiful woman. She takes the dead man’s money and medical papers and leaves. Local police inspector Gonzalez (Armando Calvo) calls in Scotland Yard Inspector Trent ( Julio Pena) to work with him on the case, since Marnie, who has disappeared, is a British citizen. At a hotel bar, Marnie meets diamond dealer George Van Donan (Umi Raho) and she goes back with him to his apartment where he buys her clothes as she takes them off. She extracts information from him about gambler Louis La Roche (Antonio Pica) and gives it to the police. Louis has transferred a large amount of money to a Geneva bank in the name of his mistress, Stella Dexter (Mimma Ippoliti). The police raid Louis’ club and he and his men, excepting Albert ( Joe Atlanta), are killed in the shootout. When Marnie meets Van Donan that night, she turns into a hag and kills him before going back to the laboratory, murdering the guard (Pedro Fenollar) and restoring her youth with the serum. The police find that Van Donan has been murdered and trace his car to the laboratory. After Marine lets them in, she kills Sergeant Ortega (Gaetano Quartararo) and takes the vehicle but is pursed by Trent and Gonzalez. She manages to elude them and goes to Stella’s apartment, drowns the young woman in her bath tub and assumes her identity. Landing in Geneva, she is taken to Louis’ brother, night club owner Dodo La Roche (Luigi Montini), who never met Stella. Trent traces the dead Stella’s airline ticket to Geneva and goes there, joining forces with Commissaire La Duc (Isarco Ravaioli). The two policemen go to Dodo’s club and watch Marnie perform a striptease. Albert arrives and tells Dodo that Stella double-crossed his brother. After her dance is finished, Marnie sees the two lawmen and flees with Dodo and Albert also after her. She takes a boat, the Major Davel, to escape to France, but Trent and La Duc and the gangsters also board the craft. Dodo and Albert confront Marnie but Albert says he is not Stella. The policemen get the drop on them and a shootout ensues. The gangsters are killed and Trent receives a leg wound. Marnie escapes to shore and is followed by La Duc, who lets her go because she has reverted to a hag. Having lost the crystals on the boat, Marnie steals a car from a garage, not knowing its brakes are faulty. She speeds along a curving road and drives over an embankment. The car catches fire and Marnie is killed but in death her beauty is restored. In The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies (1986), Phil Hardy summarized the film as “a routine potboiler derived from gangster clichés, science fiction and horror movies with the odd musical number thrown [in] and totally lacking in style.” James O’Neill in Terror on Tape (1994) called it “[f ]amiliar-looking…. Visually interesting but dramatically hollow.” “Yet another variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s [Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde]” is how Stephen Jones described it in The Essential Monster Movie Guide (2000).
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Terror in the Haunted House (Howco International, 1961; 80 minutes) Producer: William S. Edwards. Executive Producer: Robert Corrigan. Associate Producer: Michael Miller. Assistant Producer: Taggart Cassey. Director: Harold Daniels. Screenplay: Robert C. Dennis. Photography: Frederick E. West. Editor: Tholen Gladden. Music: Darrell Calker. Art Director: A. Leslie Thomas. Sound: Alfred J. Overton. Sets: Tom Oliphant. Production ManagerAssistant Director: Lester D. Guthrie. Makeup: Harry Thomas. Wardrobe: Joyce Rogers. Properties: Al Hurley. CAST: Gerald Mohr (Philip Justin Tierney), Cathy O’Donnell (Sheila Wayne Justin), Bill Ching (Mark Snell), John Qualen ( Jonah Snell), Barry Bernard (Dr. Victor Forel).
Terror in the Haunted House premiered under that title in 1962 (it was made in 1958) but soon became My World Dies Screaming. When Allied Artists Television included it in its “Science-Fiction Features” grouping, shorn of five minutes running time, it reverted back to its original title. Theatrically the feature advertised itself as the first movie to be made in “Psycho Rama,” using subliminal communications techniques. This gimmick no doubt came about thanks to producer-director William Castle’s successful stratagem in features like Macabre (1958), House on Haunted Hill (1959) [qq.v.], The Tingler (1959), 13 Ghosts (1960) and Homicidal (1961). When shown in theaters, the movie had a prologue and epilogue with star Gerald Mohr discussing and demonstrating the techniques of subliminal imagery that had quick exposures of skulls and snakes; he orders the audience to scream. When the movie came to TV, these shots were replaced by animation. Terror in the Haunted House has some genuine scares but overall it is a mediocre production saddled with bland characters and dingy, oppressive settings. In Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist (1972), Donald C. Willis called it “[t]horoughly routine mystery-horror.” Sheila Justin (Cathy O’Donnell) tells Lausanne, Switzerland, psychiatrist Dr. Forel (Barry Bernard) about her recurring dream of being in a silent, malignant, deserted mansion, a place of unspeakable horror. She sees the name Tierney on a mailbox and enters the house, goes up a flight of stairs and opens the door to an attic where she knows death in its most hideous form is waiting for her. The doctor is unable to unravel the source of her nightmare as she recalls a mundane life spent mostly in a sanitarium recovering from insipid tuberculosis. He notes that her dream has resumed in the past six weeks since her whirlwind courtship and marriage to fellow American Philip Justin (Mohr). Sheila and Philip fly to the United States and on the plane he informs her that he has no family. The couple drive to Florida where Philip wants his wife to have a two-week rest but when they reach the remote house he has rented, she becomes upset when it looks like the one in her dream. Sheila has reservations about going into the house and when they do so they are met with hostility by the caretaker, Jonah ( John Qualen), and his snarling white dog, Jacob. He tells them the owners of the place left seventeen years ago and he is taking care of it as he awaits their return. When Sheila sees that the inside of the house is also like her nightmare, she begs to leave and Philip agrees but their car will not start since some wires have been pulled and the distributor cap is gone. Jonah tells the young woman that the owners of the house are named Tierney and she has a vague recollection of playing there as a child with a boy who carved their initials on a palm tree. The caretaker says the neighbors called the house’s owners “the mad Tierneys.” He disappears when Philip returns. Sheila asks her husband if he brought along a gun and he assures her he did. During the night she hears a scream and wakes up to find Philip gone and then sees an inhuman face at the window. Sheila runs downstairs, opens the door to the cellar and is confronted by Jacob. She goes back to her bedroom where she is comforted by Philip. Philip informs
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Sheila that he thinks Jonah is trying to scare them away and goes to have a talk with the old man. Finding the gun in her husband’s suitcase, Sheila also sees the distributor cap. Going down the hall, she opens the door to the attic and faints; Philip carries her back to bed. The next day Sheila tells Philip she did not have a nightmare and asks him why he brought her to the house; he says he wants to rid her of the bad dream. Not finding the distributor cap, Sheila explores the yard and locates the tree with the carved initials. While her husband goes for a walk, Mark Snell (Bill Ching) drives up and informs Sheila that he owns the house and tells her to leave. She says her husband rented it but he declares it is not safe to live in and he does not want the cost of liability if anyone should get hurt. Philip returns and it is obvious the two men are acquainted as Mark decides to stay for a few days although he again warns Sheila to leave. Mark later informs her that she lived in the house before and that her husband’s real name is Tierney. When she asks him about what Mark told her, Philip says they both lived in the house as children and she realizes he was the older boy she loved as a little girl. He also says she was never ill but was sent to a Swiss sanitarium at age seven after suffering a nervous collapse. When she peruses the Tierney family bible, Sheila learns that Philip’s father, Samuel, his brother Lawrence and their father Matthew all died on the same day, April 11, 1939. When she questions Jonah about the family, he tells her that Matthew saw signs of insanity in his sons and killed them with an axe before dying himself. He also informs her that Philip, who was away at the time of the slaughter, is tainted with insanity and for her to go away before it is too late. As Sheila walks down the hall, Jonah warns her of a falling chandelier that nearly kills her. Thinking Philip tried to kill her, Sheila locks herself in the their bedroom; when Mark brings her dinner, he informs her he and Philip are cousins and he is the son of Matthew’s daughter Lydia, who died giving birth to him. He says he was raised by his grandfather who felt he had escaped the Tierney curse and that is why he was not murdered. When Sheila hears a scream that night, she opens the bedroom door and sees Jonah falling to his death over the banister. Mark says the old man’s neck is broken. Philip drives for the police but comes back and places Jonah’s body in the cellar. Mark tells Sheila to lock herself in the bedroom with the gun while he goes to a neighbor’s house to call the police. Philip breaks into the room and tells his wife to shoot him but she refuses, saying she wants to help him. He makes her go to the attic, where she faints. When she comes to, Sheila recalls being in the room the night of the murders and says Jonah was the killer. Philip informs her that Jonah was married to Lydia and was Mark’s father and he murdered the Tierneys so that his son could have the family plantation, money and estate. He also says the old man may have come to regret what he did and, in saving Sheila from the falling chandelier, he caused his son to murder him to keep him quiet. Mark returns and confronts Philip and tries to kill him with an axe. The two men fight, and Mark falls on the weapon and dies. Philip tells Sheila her nightmare is over as they leave the house where no one else will ever live again. Gerald Mohr appeared in several genre outings like Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939), Jungle Girl and The Monster and the Girl (both 1941), The Catman of Paris (1946), Invasion U.S.A. and Son of Ali Baba (both 1952) and The Angry Red Planet (1960). Cathy O’Donnell, who was billed here as Kathy O’Donnell, was in The Spiritualist (The Amazing Mr. X) (1948), while Bill Ching was in Scared Stiff (1953). Director Harold Daniels also helmed Port Sinister (1953) and House of the Black Death (Blood of the Man Devil) (1965).
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This Is Not a Test (Modern Films, 1962; 72 minutes) Producers: Fredric Gadette and Murray De’Atley. Executive Producers: James Grandin and Art Schmoyer. Director: Fredric Gadette. Screenplay: Peter Aberheim, Betty Lasky and Fredric Gadette. Photography: Brick Marquard. Editor: Hal Dennis. Music: Greig McRitchie. Production Manager: Gordon Gadette. CAST: Seamon Glass (Deputy Sheriff Dan Colter), Thayer Roberts ( Jake Saunders), Aubrey Martin ( Juney Saunders), Mary Morlas (Cheryl Hudson), Mike Green ( Joe Baragi), Alan Austin (Al Weston), Carol Kent (Karen Barnes), Norman Winston (Sam Barnes), Ron Starr (Clint Delaney), Don Spruance (Peter Crandall), James George, Jr., Norm Bishop, Ralph Manza, Jay Della, William Flaherty, Phil Donati, Doyle Cooper (Looters).
While on night patrol, Deputy Sheriff Dan Colter (Seamon Glass) receives orders to set up an emergency roadblock on a mountain road. He first pulls over elderly Jake Saunders (Thayer Roberts) and his pretty granddaughter Juney (Aubrey Martin), who are carrying crates filled with chickens in their old truck. Colter is nearly run down by tipsy Cheryl Hudson (Mary Morlas), who is with her gambler boyfriend Joe Baragi (Mike Green), who has just won $175,000. The deputy also stops trucker Al Weston (Alan Austin), a driver for Discount World, who has picked up hitchhiker Clint Delaney (Ron Starr). As Dan gives Cheryl a speeding ticket, his car radio alerts him to a worsening situation. A married couple, Sam (Norman Winston) and Karen Barnes (Carol Kent), drive up with their little poodle, Timothy. When Dan and Al go to check on the hitchhiker, the young man runs away and the deputy recognizes him as an escaped killer. The police radio announces a yellow alert for an impending air raid. When the others try to use their car radios, Jake tells them there is no regular radio reception in the area due to the mountains. When a condition red and martial law is announced, the trucker says the group is caught between a military base and missile silos. Joe announces he is going to a local bar so Dan knocks him out and handcuffs him to the bumper of his car. Some of the people begin to panic; Dan announces they will work together to unload the truck so it can be used as a bomb shelter in case of an attack. Juney is afraid of being locked up in the truck and runs away, followed by her grandfather. She finds the killer but he lets her go as motorcycle rider Peter Crandall (Don Spruance) shows up and helps unload the truck. Dan sets Joe free when he agrees to help with the work. Al flirts with Karen and gives her merchandise from his truck’s cargo. Dan destroys all the liquor on the truck. When Clint tries to steal food, the deputy shoots at him but the killer gets away. Al agrees to stand lookout as orders come from the police radio to shoot all looters. When Sam sees Karen and Al making love, he walks away. Clint decides to move the truck further up the road and orders Sam to get his wife and Al. When he confronts them, Sam backs down and the trio return to the others as Karen deserts her husband for Al. After Al drives the truck away and the rest go with Dan, Clint returns for his suitcase and goes berserk when he cannot get any of the cars to start. When the police radio reports that missiles have been launched, Jake, Juney and Peter break away and Sam shoots himself. As Dan, Cheryl, Joe, Al and Karen stay in the truck, Jake tells his granddaughter and Peter to take refuge in an old mine shaft while he plans to climb to a mountaintop and watch the bomb blast. Dan kills Karen’s dog in order to conserve oxygen. A distraught Karen opens the truck door and is confronted by a group of looters as the police radio announces a missile strike is three minutes away. The looters overpower Dan, takes his keys, steal his car and take Karen with them. Al locks Dan out of the truck. As Clint shows up, the deputy begs to be let in and the blast hits. Made in the early 1960s at the apex of fears of a nuclear attack from the Soviets, This Is Not a Test is a cheaply made but competently presented look at the reactions of a group
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of people caught in pre-holocaust frenzy. It takes place in a few hours at night on a lonely mountain road. While top-billed Seamon Glass is stoic as the lawman, the rest of the cast handles their parts well and the plot holds viewer interest, although it looks more like a lengthy television episode than a theatrical feature. Made by GPA Productions, it apparently had some big screen showings from Modern Films although The Film Buff ’s Checklist of Motion Pictures (1912 –1979) (1979), edited by D. Richard Baer, claims it was an Allied Artists release. This is unlikely although Allied Artists Television did put it in its small screen packages “Cavalcade of the ’60’s — Group III” and “Science-Fiction Features.” Reviews of the movie tend to be contemporary since it has been included in releases like Mill Creek Entertainment’s 50 Movie Pack “Nightmare Worlds.” Joe Kane in The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope (2000) called it a “truly bizarre desert-set cheapie,” adding, “The ending’s a minor classic.” VideoHound’s Sci-Fi Experience (1997) declared, “The effectiveness of the film’s social commentary is hindered by its small budget,” while C.J. Henderson in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (2001) complained, “Those who expect humankind to end this way will be bored; those who think people are too smart to end this way will be offended and bored.” Bill Warren in Keep Watching the Skies! The 21st Century Edition (2010) noted, “It’s a modest film with modest goals, but some of those are attained.”
Vampire Men of the Lost Planet (Independent-International, 1970; 85 minutes; Color) Producer-Director: Al Adamson. Executive Producers: Charles McMullen and Zoe Phillips. Associate Producer-Supervising Editor: Ewing Brown. Screenplay: Sue McNair. Photography: William Zsigmund [Vilmos Zsigmond], William G. Troiano and (uncredited) Gary Graver. Editor: Peter Perry. Music: Mike Velarde. Sound: Bob Dietz and Jerry Hansen. Makeup: Jean Hewitt. Special Effects: David L. Hewitt. Effects Editor: Fred Badiyan. Production Consultant: Samuel M. Sherman. Script Supervisor: Joyce King. Second Unit Director: George Joseph. CAST: John Carradine (Dr. Rynning ), Robert Dix (Colonel Manning ), Vicki Volante (Valerie), Joey Benson (Willy), Jenifer Bishop (Lian Malian), Bruce Powers (Commander Steve Bryce), Fred Meyers (Captain Bob Scott), Britt Semand (Linda), Brother Theodore [Theodore Gottlieb] (Narrator), Al Adamson, John “Bud” Cardos, Gary Graver, Gus Peters, Irv Saunders (Vampires), John Andrews (Vampire Victim), Sean Graver (Young Boy).
This Tal Production was first released theatrically early in 1970 by Independent-International Pictures as Horror of the Blood Monsters. It was still playing under that name in movie houses when Allied Artists Television included it in its “The Golden Seventies — Group VII” and “Science-Fiction Features” packages as Vampire Men of the Lost Planet later in the decade. In some locales it was released as Space Mission to the Lost Planet. Its working titles included Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet, Creatures of the Red Planet and Horror Creatures of the Prehistoric Planet. It was shown in Italy as 7 Per L’Infiniti Contro I Mostri Spaziali (7 for Infinity Against the Space Monster). Advertised with color effects in Spectrum X, “A New Dimension in Terror,” the movie was made up of footage from a 1965 blackand-white Philippines horror film Tagani, directed by Rolf Bayer, with new color footage added for U.S. release by producer-director Al Adamson. In this new release, the Filipino footage was tinted in various hues. The rocket ship used in the new scenes is obviously a cheap toy. The fight scenes from Tagani are realistic and brutal. The film also contains monster footage from One Million B.C. (1940) and Unknown Island (1948). In the near future, a series of vampire attacks spark a space probe to a remote galaxy where the virus was thought to originate millions of years ago. Noted scientist Dr. Rynning ( John Carradine) is the head of the expedition to the galaxy in the ship XB-13 along with
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Britt Semand, Bruce Powers and John Carradine in Horror of the Blood Monsters (IndependentInternational, 1970)
Commander Steve Bryce (Bruce Powers), Captain Bob Scott (Fred Meyers), astronaut Willy ( Joey Benson) and laboratory assistant Linda (Britt Semand). Ground control, lead by Colonel Manning (Robert Dix) and Valerie (Vicki Volante), coordinate the ship’s takeoff but later contact is lost with the vessel. When he is finally able to communicate, Rynning says the ship was involved in a collision and the crew is shaken but all right. With the XB-13’s power system damaged, Rynning declares they will have to land on a nearby planet to make repairs. Steve informs Linda that he thinks they are on a suicide mission. After several days, a planet is spotted and the craft safely lands. The orb is identical to Earth except for a red haze. Rynning has suffered a minor coronary and stays aboard the ship while the others explore the planet and see dinosaurs, mammoths, snake men and a battle between two gigantic lizards. As the explorers pick up samples of rock, flora and fauna, they view two rival tribes doing battle and save a young woman ( Jenifer Bishop) from tribesmen with fangs. Placing a communicator device behind the right ear of the girl, the explorers are able to talk to her and find out her name is Lian Malian. She tells them she is a member of the Tagani tribe who are peaceful cave dwellers at odds with the bloodthirsty Tubetons. Back at Earth’s Ground Control, Manning and Valerie have sex using electrodes. Lian Malian relates how she killed two Tubeton tribe members who were vampirizing a young boy. On Earth, Manning informs Valerie that the XB-13 is lost on an uncharted planet that houses chromatic radiation and then the two again make love electronically. The Tagani hole up in a cave and a young brave is sent to bring back more warriors to fight the Tubeton vampires; Lian Malian sneaks out to go with him. As the explorers follow her back to the cave, they see the Taganis attacked by lobster men but the tribesmen manage to get to shore. The war-
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riors go to a mountain cave to get fire water to keep their eternal flame alive and there they are attacked by bat demons which they kill. As the warriors go to help the rest of her people, Lian Malian leads the Earth people to the mountain cave and Steve realizes the fire water is actually petroleum. He sends Bob back to the ship for cans so they can use the oil to get their rocket re-launched. Along the way he sees three dinosaurs. After the cans are filled, Steve and Linda take them back to the ship as Willy and Bob return Lian Malian to her people. On the way to the rocket, Steve finds a metal container and Rynning orders him to bring it back with him. After avoiding a huge lizard, Steve and Linda make it back to the ship as the two tribes fight. After a brutal battle, the Tagani win. While Willy, who has fallen in love with Lian Malian, goes to say goodbye to the girl, Bob is killed by a surviving Tubeton warrior, who is shot by Willy. Steve and Linda return to the spot where they found the metal container for rock samples but after analyzing the artifact, Rynning orders the astronauts to return to the ship. Willy collapses. Lian Malian finds Steve and Linda and tells them Bob is dead. Steve carries Willy back to the ship where Rynning informs the crew they have entered a poisonous atmosphere that contains the deadly vampire virus. Saying it was caused by the careless use of nuclear weapons, the scientist announces that the virus cannot live on Earth and orders a takeoff. As Lian Malian, who loved Willy, watches from a distance, the ship begins its return flight. A “paste-up science-fiction atrocity” is how Michael J. Weldon accurately described Horror of the Blood Monsters in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983), adding, “Ten points for the title.” While supposedly a straight science fiction affair, the movie has “many funny moments” according to David Konow in Schlock-O-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson (1998). He notes, “The women of the vampire tribe are cave babes with the bottoms of their loin-cloths cut like miniskirts. But the best scene in Horror offers a sex machine.” The writer is probably referring to the character played by Jenifer Bishop when he talks about the feminine outfits. When first introduced in the movie she is called Malian but later on is identified as Lian. Apparently Bishop was hired to match scenes with the Filipino actress in Tagani who played that part and the two women look enough alike to give some cohesion to their diverse scenes.
Reissues In 1963 Allied Artists acquired the theatrical rights to The Blob (Paramount, 1958) and Dinosaurus! (Universal-International, 1960), both produced by Jack H. Harris and directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. Released as a double bill, the movies proved to be very successful, no doubt in part due to the fact that Steve McQueen, the star of The Blob, had become an international box office draw.
The Blob (Paramount, 1958; 82 minutes; Color) Producer: Jack H. Harris. Associate Producer: Russell Doughten. Director: Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. Screenplay: Kate Phillips [Kay Linaker] and Theodore Simonson, from an idea by Irvine H. Millgate. Photography: Thomas Spalding. Editor: Alfred Hillman. Music: Ralph Carmichael. Song: Burt Bacharach and Mack David. Art Directors: William Jersey and Karl Karlson. Sound: Gottfried Buss and Robert Clement. Makeup: Vin Kehoe. Special Effects: Barton Sloane. Continuity: Travis Hillmann. Assistant Director: Bert Smith. CAST: Steve McQueen (Steve Andrews), Aneta Corsaut ( Jane Martin), Earl Rowe (Lieutenant Dave), Olin Howlin (Old Timer), Stephen Chase (Dr. T. Hallen), John Benson (Sergeant Jim Bert), George Karas (Officer Ritchie), Lee Payton (Nurse Kate), Elbert Smith (Henry Martin), Hugh Graham (Mr. Andrews), Vince Barbi (Diner Owner George), Audrey Metcalf (Elizabeth Martin), Jasper Deeter (Elderly Fireman), Tom Ogden (Fire Chief Phil), Elinor Hammer (Mrs. Porter), Pamela Curran (Kissing Teenager), Ralph Roseman (Mechanic), Charlie Overdorff (Marty), David Metcalf (Drunk), George Gerbereck (Bartender), Julie Cousins (Waitress Sally), Kieth Almoney (Danny Martin), Eugene Sabel (Projectionist), Robert Fields (Tony Gressette), James Bonnet (Mooch Miller), Anthony Franke (Al), Josh Randolph, Molly Ann Bourne, Diane Tabben (Teenagers), Howard Fishlove, Jack H. Harris, Theodore Simonson (Theater Patrons).
Considered one of the classic low-budget sci-fi features of the 1950s, The Blob was filmed at Valley Forge Film Studios in Pennsylvania under the auspices of local film distributor Jack H. Harris’ Tonylyn Productions. Budgeted at $147,000, Harris sold the film to Paramount and it grossed more than ten times its cost at the box office. The rights to the movie reverted back to Harris in the early 1960s and he leased it to Allied Artists who kept it in cinemas for the rest of the decade. Made mostly of silicone, the title monster was not frightening and (except for one vague scene when it apparently assimilates a doctor) its ability to absorb humans is only stated and not shown. What is impressive about The Blob is that it is so well made considering its non–Hollywood origins and that its interesting plot moves swiftly, nicely supported by its cast. The film also reflects the restless youth syndrome of the period, exemplified by Steve (billed as Steven) McQueen in his first starring role. The only drawback is that the “teenagers,” including McQueen, appear a bit too old for their parts. So successful was The Blob that its title became a part of the nation’s culture, an umbrella term for low-budget movie monsters. The film’s title song, composed by Burt Bacharach and Mack David, was recorded by the Five Blobs for Columbia Records (41250) 227
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Aneta Corsaut, Stephen Chase, Olin Howlin and Steve McQueen in The Blob (Paramount, 1958), reissued theatrically in 1963 by Allied Artists.
and appeared on the pop music charts for two months in the fall of 1958. The recording can be heard during the film’s credits. In 1971 Harris produced a comedy sequel to The Blob, Beware! The Blob, which had video release as Son of Blob. Thirty years after the first film, The Blob was remade in 1988 by director–co-writer Chuck Russell; the result was graphic but vapid. As teenager Steve Andrews (McQueen) tries to get to first base with Jane Martin (Aneta Corsaut) while they are parked in his jalopy, they see what looks like a shooting star. It lands nearby and they try to locate it. A rustic recluse (Olin Howlin) finds a crater-covered ball-shaped object in a small pit near his shack and when he pokes it with a stick the shell cracks and a glob-like substance attaches itself to his hand. The teenagers find the old man and take him to Dr. Hallen (Stephen Chase) who is about to leave for Johnsonville for a medical conference. Unable to determine what plagues the oldtimer, the doctor asks Steve and Jane to go back to Old North Road where they found the man and look for clues. As Steve and Jane are about to leave, they are met by teens Tony (Robert Fields), Mooch ( James Bonnet) and Al (Anthony Franke). The trio challenge Steve to a race. He accepts, but his antics are spotted by policeman Lieutenant Dave (Earl Rowe) and he is lectured. The doctor calls in his nurse, Kate (Lee Payton), saying he may have to amputate the old man’s arm since the substance continues to spread. At the pit, Steve and Jane and the three teen boys
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locate the meteor’s shell and at the old man’s shack they find his small dog which Jane takes with her. Kate shows up to assist Dr. Hallen but when she goes to take the old man’s pulse rate she finds he is gone and she is attacked and absorbed by the ever-growing blob. The doctor shoots at the thing, to no effect. He locks himself in his study and tries to call for help. Steve and Jane return to the doctor’s house and looking in through a window Steve sees the physician assimilated by the monster. The two teens go to the police station but the story is derided by Sergeant Bert ( John Benson). Steve and Jane’s parents are called; while Steve’s father (Hugh Graham) stands up for his son, Jane’s father, Henry Martin (Elbert Smith), the local high school principal, forbids Steve to see his daughter again. The teenagers agree to meet later. While slipping out of her house, Jane is confronted by her little brother Danny (Kieth Almoney) whom she tells to go back to bed. Steve and Jane go to the local movie theater’s midnight spook show and get the other teens to help them locate the blob, which has devoured a mechanic (Ralph Roseman) and drinkers at a bar. Steve and Jane see the dog outside his father’s grocery store but when Steve discovers the door is unlocked they go inside and are accosted by the monster. They take refuge in a meat locker; the monster slides in under the door but quickly retreats. Telling the other teens what happened, Steve orders them to wake up the town with car horns and sirens. When a crowd gathers in the center of town, Steve implores Dave to listen to him while Bert searches the Andrews store and finds it empty. As Dave tries to break up the mob, the blob attacks the patrons in the movie house and they run screaming into the street. As the blob approaches, Danny shoots at it with his cap pistol. Jane grabs him and goes with Steve into the Downingtown Diner. With the owner (Vince Barbi) and a waitress ( Julie Cousins), they take refuge in the basement as the monster envelopes the place. Dave attempts to destroy the blob by having Bert shoot down an electric line that lands on it but to no effect. The power line causes the diner to catch on fire and the owner tries to put out the fire with an extinguisher which causes the blob to retreat. Steve realizes the thing can be stopped with cold and calls to Dave to use fire extinguishers. Martin leads the teens to the high school where they collect 22 extinguishers and take them downtown and use them to subdue the blob. As Steve, Jane and Danny get out of the diner, Dave contacts the government. A plane flies the frozen monster to the Arctic, the film ending with a question mark. Variety said The Blob “will tax the imagination of adult patrons,” adding, “Neither the acting nor direction is particularly creditable…. Star performers … are the camerawork of Thomas Spalding and Barton Sloane’s special effects. Production values otherwise are geared to economy.” Joe Kane in The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope (2000) declared that it “shapes up as the quintessential late–50s monster movie. The gaudy color, lightly self-mocking tone, and memorable title creature likewise add to the fun…. The Blob remains a must for the uninitiated and a musty delight for the rest.” In Films of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1988), Baird Searles said The Blob “epitomizes the low-budget, high-grossing film that combined adolescents and aliens and singlehandedly convinced producers that there was no need to pour money into big productions when the same public would turn out for cheaper ones.” Many consider the Blob’s invasion of the movie theater spook show the highlight of the movie. Scenes from the 1953 horror outing Daughter of Horror (Dementia) are shown. In one quick sequence the teens can be seen standing before a movie poster for The Vampire and the Robot with Bela Lugosi. This is a re-title of the British feature Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (1952), which was also released as Vampire Over London. It also got stateside showings in 1964 as My Son, the Vampire.
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Dinosaurus! (Universal-International, 1960; 85 minutes; Color) Producers: Jack H. Harris and Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. Director: Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. Screenplay: Dean E. Weisburd and Jean Yeaworth, from an idea by Jack H. Harris. Photography: Stanley Cortez. Editor: John A. Bushelman. Music: Ronald Stein. Art Director: Jack Senter. Sound: Jack Cornall and Jack Wheeler. Sets: Herman Schoenbrun. Makeup: Don Cash. Wardrobe : Bill Edwards. Underwater Sequences: Paul Stader. Special Photographic Effects: Tim Baar, Gene Warren and Wah Chang. Script Supervisor: Sam Freedle. Assistant to Producer: S. Robert Zanger. Assistant Director: Herbert Mendelson. CAST: Ward Ramsey (Bart Thompson), Paul Lukather (Chuck), Kristina Hanson (Betty Piper), Alan Roberts ( Julio), Fred Engelberg (Mike Hacker), Wayne Treadway (Dumpy), Luci Blain (Chica), Howard Dayton (Mousey), Jack Younger ( Jasper), James Logan (T.J. O’Leary), Wilhelm Samuel (Lou), Gregg Martell (The Neanderthal Man), Jack H. Harris (Tourist).
Poster for Dinosaurus! (Universal-International, 1960), re-released by Allied Artists in 1963.
“Movie junk” is how the New York Times termed Dinosaurus!, not realizing the film’s intended audience or its genre appeal. Following the success of The Blob (1958) (q.v.) and 4D Man (1959), producer Jack H. Harris reteamed with director Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., to make this sci-fi effort for their Fairview Productions; it was issued in the summer of 1960 by Universal-International. Filmed near St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, the film greatly benefited from Stanley Cortez’s cinematography and a likable cast that included Ward Ramsey, Paul Lukather and lovely Kristina Hanson. Gregg Martell adds much to the film as a caveman and he has some amusing sequences involving culture shock such as his trying to eat fake fruit, seeing his reflection in a mirror and trying on a dress. He even gets a chance to throw a pie at the villain. For the youngsters and teens, the
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film’s main draw is its two dinosaurs whose models were constructed by uncredited Marcel Delgado, whose films included The Lost World (1925), King Kong and The Son of Kong (both 1933), Mighty Joe Young (1949), The War of the Worlds (1953) and Jack the Giant Killer (1962). The photographic effects for these creatures are mostly mediocre. American contractor Bart Thompson (Ramsey), his foreman, Chuck (Lukather) and bulldozer operator Dumpy (Wayne Treadway) are building a port at a Caribbean island which will bring commerce to the area. Island manager Mike Hacker (Fred Engelberg) keeps the natives from working on the project since he will not see any profit from it. He is also the cruel guardian of young Julio (Alan Roberts), who has ingratiated himself with Bart and Chuck. When some underwater explosives fail to detonate and Bart’s girlfriend Betty Piper (Hanson) dives into the water, Bart goes after her. The young woman swims face to face with a prehistoric creature and faints with Bart bringing her to safety. Bart has two frozen dinosaurs brought on shore and hires T.J. O’Leary ( James Logan), an alcoholic, to watch them during the night until paleontologists can arrive to examine them. Hacker finds the body of a caveman (Martell) on the shore and stashes it nearby with plans to sell for exhibition. He goes to the local café, which is run by pretty Chica (Luci Blain), and roughs up Julio for not doing his chores, causing the boy to run into the jungle. Hacker tells Chica he will have her put in jail unless she becomes his girlfriend. After she leaves, Hacker hires Mousey (Howard Dayton) and Jasper ( Jack Younger) to help him take the body of the prehistoric man away the next day. A storm hits the island and lightning strikes the two dinosaurs, reviving them and the caveman. O’Leary is killed by the T-Rex. Chuck suggests that a safe haven for the people of the island might be an old abandoned fortress and he sets out to build a moat around it as the citizens are evacuated there. The caveman goes to Betty’s house and frightens away her mother as Julio watches the T-Rex destroy a Jeep and its occupants. The boy goes to the Piper home and is confronted by the caveman but the two become friends. When Hacker and his cohorts show up, the caveman and Julio manage to get away. Betty sees Julio and the caveman riding on the neck of the Brontosaurus. When the T-Rex comes after the other dinosaur, Bart, Betty and Dumpy try to save Julio who jumps off his ride (as does the caveman). Betty is captured by the T-Rex but the caveman drives an axe into the beast’s foot and then carries the young woman to the safety of a mine shaft. The T-Rex attacks and mortally wounds the Brontosaurus as Betty fends off the caveman’s mild romantic overtures and tries to cook him some food. When Julio is attacked by the T-Rex, the caveman carries him into the mine shaft. Hacker uses a rope to get into the mine and holds Betty, Julio and the caveman at bay with a pistol and shoots the prehistoric man in the arm when he tries to defend his new friends. The T-Rex attacks the mine shaft as Bart and Dumpy try to hold it at bay by tossing homemade bombs. Just as Hacker plans to feed Julio to the T-Rex, Bart manages to throw a bomb into its mouth, causing the beast to dislodge timbers in the shaft. The frightened Hacker tries to escape and is killed by falling rocks and timber. The caveman holds up some of the timbers so Betty and Julio can get away but is crushed under them before Bart can bring him to safety. Bart, Betty, Dumpy and Julio drive to the fort which Chuck has prepared for an attack from the monster. The dying Brontosaurus falls into quicksand. When the T-Rex arrives, the moat is set on fire but there is only enough fuel to burn for five minutes. Bart gets into one of the bulldozers and does battle with the creature, eventually pushing it into the sea. Dinosaurus!, like The Blob, ends with a question mark, but in this case no sequel followed.
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Theatrical Films in Chronological Order • 1952 •
Hold That Hypnotist (March) Destination 60,000 (May) Spook Chasers ( June) The Cyclops ( July) Daughter of Dr. Jekyll ( July) The Disembodied (August) From Hell It Came (August) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (November) Sabu and the Magic Ring (November) Up in Smoke (December)
The Ghost of Crossbones Canyon (November) Crow Hollow
• 1953 • Jalopy (February) The Maze ( July) Jennifer (October) Private Eyes (December)
• 1954 •
• 1958 •
The Golden Idol ( January) Paris Playboys (March) The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters ( June) Jungle Gents (September) Target Earth (November) Port of Hell (December)
The Bride and the Beast (February) Macabre (March) Hell’s Five Hours (April) Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (May) War of the Satellites (May) Frankenstein 1970 ( July) Spy in the Sky! ( July) Queen of Outer Space (September)
• 1955 • Bowery to Bagdad ( January) Phantom Trails (May) Dig That Uranium (December)
• 1959 •
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (February) The Atomic Man (March) Indestructible Man (March) World Without End (March) Crashing Las Vegas (April) Fright ( June)
The Cosmic Man (February) House on Haunted Hill (February) The Giant Behemoth (March) Face of Fire (August) The Bat (September) Beast from Haunted Cave (October) The Wasp Woman (October) The Atomic Submarine (December)
• 1957 •
• 1960 •
Attack of the Crab Monsters (February) Not of This Earth (February)
The Hypnotic Eye (February) Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons (April)
• 1956 •
233
234
Theatrical Films in Chronological Order
Sex Kittens Go to College (August) Caltiki the Immortal Monster (September) Tormented (September)
• 1967 •
• 1962 •
• 1968 •
Hands of a Stranger (April) Confessions of an Opium Eater ( June) The Day of the Triffids ( July)
Mission Mars (February)
• 1963 • Black Zoo (May) Shock Corridor (September)
• 1964 • The Strangler (April) The Human Vapor (May)
• 1965 • The Human Duplicators (March) Mutiny in Outer Space (March) Oh! Those Most Secret Agents! (March) Blood and Black Lace (April) Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (September) Curse of the Voodoo (September) The Magic Weaver (September)
Island of the Doomed (November) The Sorcerers (November)
• 1969 • The Body Stealers (April)
• 1970 • Eugenie (August) Blood Rose (September)
• 1971 • Beyond Love and Evil (March) Shinbone Alley (April) Fright (May)
• 1974 • Deborah
• 1975 • Who? (August)
• 1976 • Communion (November)
• 1966 • Moonwolf (May) Nightmare Castle ( July)
• 1977 • Twilight’s Last Gleaming (February)
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Alvarez, Max Joseph. Index to Motion Pictures Reviewed by Variety, 1907–1980. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982. Blake, Matt, and David Deal. The Eurospy Guide. Baltimore: Luminary Press, 2004. Bleiler, David, ed. TLA Video and DVD Guide 2004. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Bojarski, Richard. The Films of Bela Lugosi. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1980. _____, and Kenneth Beale. The Films of Boris Karloff. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974. Brooks, Tim, and Earle Marsh. The Complete Directory of Prime Time National TV Shows from 1946 to the Present. New York: Ballantine, 1988. Everman, Welch. Cult Horror Films. New York: Carol, 1995. _____. Cult Science Fiction Films. New York: Carol, 1995. Fischer, David. Science Fiction Film Directors 1895 – 1998. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000. Frank, Alan. The Films of Roger Corman. London: BT Batsford, 1998. _____. Horror Movies. London: Octopus, 1974. Gifford, Denis. Karloff: The Man, the Monster, the Movies. New York: Curtis, 1973. Glut, Donald F. Classic Movie Monsters. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978. _____. The Dracula Book. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975. _____. The Frankenstein Legend. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1973. Hardy, Phil. The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. _____. Science Fiction. New York: William Morrow, 1984. Hayes, David, and Brent Walker. The Films of the Bowery Boys. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1984. Henderson, C.J. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies. New York: Checkmark, 2001. Herx, Henry, and Tony Zaza. The Family Guide to Movies on Video. New York: Crossroad, 1988. Hickerson, Jay. The New, Revised Ultimate History of Network Radio Programming and Guide to All Cir-
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Spaghetti Nightmares. Key West: Fantasma Books, 1996. Parish, James Robert. Ghosts and Angels in Hollywood Films. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1994. _____. The Great Movie Series. Cranbury, NJ: A.S. Barnes, 1971. _____, and Michael R. Pitts. The Great Science Fiction Pictures. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977. _____, and _____. The Great Science Fiction Pictures II. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990. Peary, Danny. Guide for the Film Fanatic. New York: Fireside, 1986. The Phantom’s Ultimate Video Guide. New York: Dell, 1989. Pirie, David. A Heritage of Horror: The English Gothic Cinema 1946 –1972. New York: Avon, 1973. Pitts, Michael R. Radio Soundtracks: A Reference Guide, 2nd Ed. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1986. _____. Western Film Series of the Sound Era. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Pym, John, ed. Time Out Film Guide 9th Ed. London: Penguin, 2000. Quinlan, David. British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928 –1959. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1985. _____. Quinlan’s Film Directors. London: BT Batsford, 1999. _____. Quinlan’s Film Stars, 5th Ed. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2000. Roat, Richard. Hollywood’s Made-to-Order-Punks: The Complete History of the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys. Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2010. Ross, Jonathan. The Incredibly Strange Film Book. London: Simon & Schuster, 1995. The Scarecrow Movie Guide. Seattle: Sasquath Books, 2004. Searles, Baird. Films of Science Fiction and Fantasy. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988.
Scheuer, Steven H., ed. Movies on TV 1969–70. New York: Bantam, 1969. _____. Movies on TV 1975 –76. New York: Bantam, 1974. _____. TV Movie Almanac and Ratings 1958 & 1959. New York: Bantam, 1958. Senn, Bryan. Drums O’ Terror: Voodoo in the Cinema. Baltimore, MD: Luminary Press, 1998. Stanley, John. John Stanley’s Creature Feature Movie Guide Strikes Again. Pacifica, CA: Creatures at Large Press, 1994. Strick, Philip. Science Fiction Movies. London: Octopus, 1976. Tohill, Cathal, and Pete Tombs. Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Movies. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994. TV Feature Film Sourcebook. 2 vols. New York: Broadcast Information Bureau, 1978. VideoHound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics. Detroit: Invisible Ink Press, 1996. VideoHound’s Sci-Fi Experience: Your Quantum Guide to the Video Universe. Detroit: Invisible Ink Press, 1997. VideoHound’s Vampires on Video. Detroit: Invisible Ink Press, 1997. Warren, Bill. Keep Watching the Skies! The 21st Century Edition. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Weldon, Michael J. The Psychotronic Film Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996. _____, with Charles Beasley, Bob Martin and Akira Fitton. The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. New York: Ballantine, 1983. Williams, Lucy Chase. The Complete Films of Vincent Price. New York: Citadel/Carol, 1995. Willis, Donald C. Horror and Science Fiction Films: A Checklist. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1972. _____. Horror and Science Fiction Films II. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982. Worth, D. Earl. Sleaze Creatures. Key West: Fantasma Books, 1995. Young, R.G. The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Films. New York: Applause, 2000.
Periodicals Billboard (Los Angeles, CA) Castle of Frankenstein (Bergen, NJ) Cine Zine Zone (St. Maur, France) Ecco (Washington, DC) Filmfax (Evanston, IL) Horror Monsters (Derby, CT)
Little Shoppe of Horrors (Waterloo, IA) Mad Monsters (Derby, CT) Psychotronic Video (Chincoteague, VA) Screen Facts (Kew Gardens, NY) Variety (New York, NY) Video Watchdog (Cincinnati, OH)
Websites American Film Institute (www.afi.com) Creepy Classics (www.creepyclassics.com) Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com)
Newspaper Archive (www.newspaperarchive.com) YouTube (www.youtube.com)
Index Abtcon Pictures 162 Ackerman, Bettye 66 Adams, Brooke 108 Adams, Casey 102 Adams, Lillian 165 Adams, Mason 134 Adams, Nick 123, 124 Adamson, Al 215, 216, 217, 224, 226 Adamson, James 81 Adamson, Victor see Dixon, Denver Addobbati, Giuseppe see MacDouglas, John The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok 77, 78, 137 Agar, John 183, 184 Aherne, Brian 85 Ahlstrand, Linne 17 Ahn, Philip 43 Aimond, John 216 Albert Zugsmith Productions 145 Alcazar Studios 65 Alda, Robert 205 Aldrich, Robert 167 Alese, John D. 68 Alexander, Jim 138 Alice, Sweet Alice see Communion Allen, Patrick 29 Allerson, Alexander 176 Allied Artists Industries 2 Allied Artists Pictures Corporation 2 Allied Artists Productions 2 Allied Artists Television 181, 182, 183, 195, 197, 199, 203, 205, 208, 210, 213, 215, 219, 224 Allied Artists Video Corporation 2 Almoney, Kieth 229 Almquist, Dean L. 72 Alper, Murray 111, 113 Altayskaya, Vera 118 Alvarez, Edmund Rivera 188 Amanti d’oltretomba (Lovers Beyond the Tomb) see Nightmare Castle American International Pictures 6, 24, 43, 162 American Releasing Corporation 162 Ames, Michael see Andrews, Tod Anders, Merry 99, 101 Anders, Rudolph 69, 114 Anderson, Leona 90 Andre, Victor (Vittorio) 37, 38 Andrews, Tod 75, 77 Angel Eyes 113 Anglo-Amalgamated Films 4
Ankers, Evelyn 164 Anwar, Gabrielle 108 The Aqua Sex see Mermaids of Tiburon Arden, Mary 23 Argento, Dario 24 Arlen, Richard 91, 92 Arnold, Newton 85 Arson for Hire 77 Art Cinema Corporation 14 Artkino Films 213 Ashman, Howard 208 Ashton, Tara 198, 199 Associated British-Pathe 46 Astan, Laurence 214 The Astounding Giant Woman see Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) Atlanta, Joe 220 Atlas 181–82 The Atomic Man 3–5, 104, 233 The Atomic Submarine 1, 5–7, 233 Attack of the 50 Crab Monsters 7–10, 131, 233 Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) 1, 10–13, 171, 183, 273, 233 Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1993) 10 Attack of the Spider Women see Lost Women Austin, Alan 223 Austin, Charlotte 34, 35, 69, 70 Austin, Gene 25 Avallone, Michael 152 Bacharach, Burt 227 Backus, Jim 116 Bakewell, William 14 Bamber, Judy 170 Bannen, Ian 73, 75 Barbi, Vince 229 Barclay, Jerry 172 Bardones, Elizabeth 134 Bardot, Brigitte 146 Bardot, Mijanou 146 Barnes, Rayford 32 Barrett, Minnie 16 Barron, Baynes 75, 160 Barrow, Janet 48 Barrows, George 212 Barry, Don “Red” see Barry, Donald Barry, Donald 69, 70 Barry, Philip 174
237
Bartlett, Bennie 31, 33, 61, 62, 111, 114, 136, 140 Bartok, Eva 23 Barton, Anne 60 The Bat (1926) 15 The Bat (1959) 1, 13–17, 65, 233 The Bat Whispers 15 Bates, Jeanne 160 Battaglia, Rik 128, 129, 131 Bauer, Steven 134 Bava, Mario 24, 36, 38, 205, 207 Bayer, Rolf 224 Bean, Robert 188, 189 Beast from Haunted Cave 17–19, 173, 181, 189, 233 Beaudine, William 110, 170 Beaumont, Charles 141 Beaumont, Hugh 91, 92, 93 Beauty and the Robot see Sex Kittens Go to College Becker, Ken 6 Beebe, Ford 83 Behemoth the Sea Monster see The Giant Behemoth Belasco, Leon 111 Bellucci Productions 119 Belmont Books 152 Bender, Russ 160 Benedict, Richard 110 Bennett, Bruce 44, 45 Benson, Joey 216, 225 Benson, John 229 Bergerac, Jacques 99, 100, 101 Berke, Irwin 70, 146 Bernard, Barry 221 Bernardi, Nerio 220 Bernds, Edward 31, 32, 115, 141, 178–79, 180 Bernstein, Morey 72, 88 Besserer, Eugenie 13 Best, James 150, 151 The Betsy 2 Beware! The Blob 228 Beyond Love and Evil 19, 64, 234 Beyond the Sahara see Dark Venture Bice, Robert 33, 181 The Big Circus 2 Birch, Paul 132, 134, 142 Birriel, Felippe 196 Bishoff, Samuel 159 Bishop, Ed 31 Bishop, Jenifer 225, 226 Bissell, Whit 163
238 A Black Ribbon for Deborah see Deborah Black Sunday (1960) 24, 36, 38 Black Zoo 1, 20–22, 234 Blackman, Honor 73, 75 Blain, Luci 231 Blair, Nicky 47 Blaisdell, Paul 27, 134 Blake, Matt 135, 204 The Blob (1958) 2, 227–29, 231 The Blob (1988) 228 Bloch-Woodfield Productions 100 Block, Irving 171 Blood and Black Lace 1, 22–24, 36, 234 Blood of Ghastly Horror see Man with the Synthetic Brain Blood Rose 1, 24–26, 234 Blore, Eric 33 Bluebeard (1944) 26 Bluebeard (1963) see Landru Bluebeard (1972) 27 Bluebeard’s Ten Honeymoons 26–29, 156, 233 Bobby Breen Quintet 50 Boccardo, Delia 58 Body Snatchers 108 The Body Stealers 29–30, 234 Boisgel, Valerie 25 Bojarski, Richard 102 Boleslavsky, Jan 133 Bomba 1, 81–83 Bomba and the Golden Idol see The Golden Idol Bond, Lillian 121, 122 Bonnet, James 228 Borello, R. 158 Bosche, Peter 40 Bova, Joseph 176, 177 The Bowery Boys 1, 31, 33, 46, 48, 61, 63, 88, 110, 114, 136, 140, 155, 170 The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters 30–32, 179, 233 Bowery to Bagdad 32–33, 179, 233 Brack, Claudia 22 Bracken, Eddie 149 Bradford, Lane 81 Bradley, Leslie 8 Brady, Scott 199 The Brain from Planet Arous 11, 182– 85 Brana, Frank 190 Branco Pictures 94 Brendel, Mike 108, 109 Brent, Earl 113 The Bride and the Beast 1, 33–35, 70, 233 Brinkley, John 172 Bristow, Gwen 89 Britannia-British Lion 84 Broadway Television Theatre 14 Brodie, Steve 157, 158 Broidy, Steve 1, 2 Bronson, Charles 176 Brooke, Hillary 121, 122 Brooks, Mel 149 Brown, George 192 Brown, Johnny Mack 178
Index Browne, Roscoe Lee 167 Bruton Film Producers 49 Bryant, John 16 Budry, Algis 177 Buono, Victor 159, 161 Burke, Paul 62 Burton, Richard 27 Cabaret 2 Cabot, Susan 171, 173 Cacao, Johnny 25 Caffarel, Jose Maria 204 Caiano, Mario 131 Caltiki — I monstro immortale see Caltiki The Immortal Monster Caltiki The Immortal Monster 1, 24, 35, 38, 164, 234 Caltiki The Undying Monster see Caltiki The Immortal Monster Calvert, John 191, 192 Calvert, Steve 31, 34, 35 Calvet, Corinne 28, 29 Calvo, Armando 220 Campo, Wally 17, 18, 160, 208, 210 Canby, Vincent 167 Cannon, Esma 48 Carbone, Antony 188, 189, 202 Cardos, John “Bud” 198 Carey, Timothy 218 Carlson, Richard 120, 122, 164, 166 Carmen, Jewel 14 Carminati, Tullio 14 Carol, Sheila 17, 18 Carr, Marian 102 Carr, Trem 1 Carradine, David 192 Carradine, John 1, 26, 45, 46, 146, 149, 150, 191, 192, 198, 199, 215, 216, 217, 224, 225 Carrol, Regina 216, 217 Carroll, Anne 133 Cartwright, Lynn 173 Carver, Tina 76, 77 Castellato, Gigi 59 Castle, Mary 47 Castle, William 2, 39, 43, 88, 89, 115–16, 221 Castle of Blood see Castle of Terror Castle of Terror 185–87 Cavanagh, Paul 63 CCC Productions 125 Central Park Films 2 Chandler, Chick 140 Chaney, Lon, Jr. 1, 51, 52, 53, 101, 102 Chaney, Lon, Sr. 97, 98 Channing, Carol 149, 150 Chaplin, Charles 26 Chaplin, Charles, Jr. 146 Charlton Publications 22 Chase, Frank 10, 11 Chase, Steven 228 Chavez, Julio C. 194 Ching, Bill 222 Christine, Virginia 105 Christopher, Robert 62, 63, 155 The Circular Staircase 13 Citadel Films 39 Clark, Bobby 60, 105 Clark, Dane 137, 138, 139
Clark, Fred 135 Clay, Phillipe 97 Clements, Stanley 31, 48, 87, 88, 155, 170 Clift, Lawrence 129 Clinton, Mildred 40 Clive, Colin 84 Close, John 18 Cobb, Edmund 6 Cohen, Herman 20, 164 Cole, George 73, 75 Cole, Nat (King) 113 Cole, Phyllis 100 Cole, Selette 159 College Confidential 148 Collinson, Peter 75 Collinson, Tara 73, 75 Colman, Booth 179 Columbia Pictures Corporation 31, 32, 33, 89, 213 Columbia Records 227 Communion 38–41, 234 Condon, David 31, 33, 47, 61, 87, 111, 114, 136, 140; see also Gorcey, David Confessions of an Opium Eater 41–44, 81, 234 Connery, Neil 29 Consolidated Film Industries 1 Continental Talking Pictures 1 Conway, Pat 60 Conway, Tom 6, 28, 63 Coogan, Jackie 146, 147, 211 Cook, Clyde 120 Cook, Elisha, Jr. 22, 90 Cooper, Jeanne 21 Copeland, Jack L. 86 Coppola, Francis Ford 213 Corby, Ellen 31, 116, 159, 160 Corcoran, Hugh 179 Cording, Harry 114 Corman, Gene 18, 173, 189 Corman, Roger 9, 18, 19, 110, 131, 132, 134, 162, 171, 173, 175, 181, 182, 188, 189, 202, 203, 208, 210, 213 Cornell, Ann 191, 192 Corrigan, Lloyd 31 Corrigan, Ray “Crash” 35 Corsaut, Aneta 228 Cortez, Stanley 230 The Cosmic Man 1, 44–46, 233 Cosmos Aventuras 144 Cotten, Joseph 167, 169 Coulouris, Joseph 28, 157 Cousins, Julie 229 Cowan, Jerome 20, 21 Craig, Carolyn 90 Craig, James 51, 52 Craig, John 151 Crane, Stephen 65 Cranford, Robert 160 Crashing Las Vegas 46–48, 233 Crawford, Joan 5 Creature from the Haunted Sea 183, 187–89, 202 Creature of the Maze see The Maze Creatures of the Red Planet see Vampire Men of the Lost Planet
Index Crosby, Floyd 20 Crow, Carl 126 Crow Hollow 1, 48–49, 233 Crowley, Kathleen 162 Crypt of the Living Dead 189–91 Culver, Michael 39 Cuny, Alain 97 Curiel, Herbert 157 Curran, Pamela 126 Curse of Simba see Curse of the Voodoo Curse of the Voodoo 49–51, 68, 234 Curtis, Tony 101, 159 Curtiz, Gabriel 127 Cutell, Lou 67, 68 Cuthbertson, Allan 29 Cutting, Richard H. 8 The Cyclops 51–53, 54, 233 Dahlberg, Uta 64 Dahlke, Paul 125 Daly, Toni 153 Damon, Mark 190, 191 Danet, Jean 97 Daniels, Danny 50 Daniely, Lisa 50 Danneberg, Thomas 201 Dano, Royal 66 Danse Macabre see Castle of Terror Danton, Ray 189, 191 La danza macabre see Castle of Terror Dario, Sascha 181 Darion, Joe 149 Dark, Christopher 178, 179 The Dark Power 194 Dark Venture 191–92 Darrow, Barbara 142 Daughter of Dr. Jekyll 1, 52, 53–55, 71, 233 Daughter of Horror 229 David, Hal 227 Davies, Humphrey 71 Davis, Jim 198 Davis, Lisa 142 Davis, Owen 84 Davison, Davey 159, 160 Dawson, Anthony M. see Margheriti, Antonio The Day of the Triffids (1963) 55–58, 234 The Day of the Triffids (1981) 58 The Day of the Triffids (2009) 58 Dayton, Howard 231 Deacon, Richard 105 Deal, David 135, 204 Dean, Eddie 178 Dean, Ivor 154 Death Curse of Tartu 192–94 De Beausset, Michael 123 Deborah 58–59, 234 Dehner, John 31 De Lange, Bob 157 Delannoy, Jean 99 Delevanti, Cyril 144 Delgado, Marcel 231 Del Russo, Marie 194 Demara, Fred 100, 101 De Marney, Terence 42
Dementia see Daughter of Horror Denmer, Charles 27 Denning, Doreen 66 Denning, Richard 162, 164 Dennis, John 70 Dennis, Matt 113 DeNoble, Alphonso 40 Deodato, Ruggero 187 De Paolo, Dante 22 De Quincy, Thomas 43, 43 Desny, Ivan 176 Destination 60,000 59–60, 233 Devine, Andy 77, 78, 137 Devlin, Joe 170 Devon, Richard 171 De Vries, George 123 De Witt, Louis 171 Dickerson, Beach (Beech) 9, 172, 188, 189 Dierkes, John 54 Dig That Uranium 60–62, 233 Dillman, Bradford 58, 59 Dimitriou, Theodoros 182 Dinosaurus! 2, 85, 227, 229–31 The Disembodied 1, 62–63, 77, 233 The Distant Cousins 67 Distinction Films 64 Dix, Richard 199 Dix, Robert 198, 199, 225 Dix International Pictures 197 Dixon, Denver 199, 215 Dmytryk, Edward 27 Dobson, James 126 Dodsworth, John 121 Domberg, Andrea 158 Domergue, Faith 3, 5 Dominici, Arturo 36, 38 Domino Pictures Corporation 156 Don Post Studios 77 Donahue, Jill 166 Donnell, Jeff 60 Donovan, King 105, 106, 107–08 Dorian, Leon 157 Doucette, John 77 Douglas, Don 72 Douglas, George 11 Douglas, Jerry 22 Douglas, Melvyn 167, 169 Dow Hour of Great Mysteries 14 Drake, Allan 146 Drake, Frances 84 Drake, Tom 52 Druxman, Michael B. 56 Dubov, Paul 5, 7, 151 Duel of the Space Monsters see Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster Duff, Howard 111, 112 Dufilho, Jacques 98 Duggan, Tom 69 Dumke, Ralph 106 Dumont, Daniella 98 Duncan, Kirk 216 Duncan, Pamela 8 Duperey, Anny 25 du Pont, Michael 84 Durant, Ted 92 Durant, Theo 115 Durning, Charles 167, 168, 169 Dwyer, Hilary 29
239 Easton, Jane 111 Eburne, Maude 14 Echo of Terror see Man with the Synthetic Brain Eden, Dorothy 49 Edwards, Elaine 15, 16 Edwards, Julie 198, 199 Edwards, Vincent 66 Eisley, Anthony 173, 175, 204 Eisley, Fred see Eisley, Anthony Elliott, Bill 178 Elliott, Dick 170 Elliott, Ross 102 Ellis, Edward 14 Ellis, Marvin 102 Ellser, Effie 14 Elstree Studios 27 Emery, Katherine 120 Engel, Roy 103, 133 Engleberg, Fred 231 Ercy, Elizabeth 153 Erickson, Leif 167, 169 Eros Films 80 Eugenie 1, 20, 64–65, 234 Evans, Gene 78, 79, 150, 151 Evans, Maurice 29, 30 Everman, Welch 7, 143 Evils of Chinatown see Confessions of an Opium Eater Exarchos, Christos 181 Expedition Epics Film Corporation 191 Exploitation Films 72 Face of Fire 65–66, 233 The Faceless Monster see Nightmare Castle Fadden, Tom 105 Fair, Jody 148 Fairman, Paul W. 162 Fairview Productions 230 Faith, Dolores 91, 92, 126, 128 Fajardo, Eduardo 204 Fantale Films 73 Farell, Claude 200 Fawcett, Charles 66 Faye, Janina 57 Fazenda, Louise 14 Feld, Fritz 170 Felice, Lyle 216 Felleghy, Tom 37 Fenin, Mort 214 Fennelly, Libby 40 Fenollar, Pedro 220 Ferrell, Ray 86 Ferrer, Mel 84 Ferrer, Ricardo 189 Ferris, Peter 153 Feyisetan, Nigel 50 Fields, Darlene 155 Fields, Robert 228 Fields, W.C. 146 Fiend with the Electronic Brain see Man with the Synthetic Brain 55 Days at Peking 2 Film Ventures Productions 54 The Filmgroup 18, 173, 187, 213, 219 Fine, Michael 74 Fine Arts Films 149
240 Finney, Jack 107 Un fiocco nero per Deborah (A Black Ribbon for Deborah) see Deborah Fischer, Dennis 12, 53, 122, 180 Fisher, Kay (Kai) 108 Fitzgerald, Ella 113 Fitzroy, Emily 14 The Five Blobs 227 Five Bloody Graves see Gun Riders Flaherty, Pat 113 Flaherty, Robert 194 Fleer, Harry 45, 164 Fleischman, A.S. 156 Fleming, Eric 71, 72, 142 Flesh Feast 194 Flight of the Lost Balloon 183, 194–97 Flight to Mars 177 Flippides, Andreas 181 Fluellen, Joel 114 Flynn, Joe 102 Flynn, Pat 133 Foam, John see Bava, Mario Fong, Harold 133 Foran, Dick 5, 6 Ford, Carol Ann 57 Ford, John 212 Forest, Michael 17, 18, 181 Forrest, William 140 Foster, Preston 60 Foulger, Byron 170 Foulk, Robert 86, 87 Fox, Michael 171 Franchi, Franco 134, 135 Franciosa, Anthony 187 Francis, Freddie 56, 57 Francis, Sandra 157 Franco, Jess 25, 64, 65, 194 Franke, Anthony 228 Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster 1, 50, 67–69, 234 Frankenstein 1970 1, 35, 55, 69–71, 141, 233 Franz, Arthur 5, 6 Fraser, Harry L. 34 Fraser, Stanley 120 Freda, Riccardo 36 Frederic, Norman 62, 63 Fredericks, Dean see Frederic, Norman Frees, Paul 29 Friendly Persuasion (1956) 2 Fright (1956) 27, 71–72, 73, 88, 156, 233 Fright (1971) 72–75, 234 From Hell It Came 1, 62, 75–77, 233 Frye, Gil 35 Fuchsberger, Joachim 200, 201 Fulci, Lucio 135 Fuller, Dolores 34, 211 Fuller, Lance 34, 35 Fuller, Robert 183 Fuller, Samuel 150, 151, 152 Futura Pictures 46 Futurama 67 Futurama Entertainment Corporation 67 Gabor, Zsa Zsa 28, 141–42 Ganley, Gail 132
Index Gardenia, Vincent 208 Gardett, Robert 27 Garland, Beverly 132, 134 Garland, Richard 8, 126 Garrett, George 68 Garrett, Joy 176 Garriba, Mario 59 Gas Ningen Dai Ichigo (The First Gas Human) see The Human Vapor Gates, Larry 105, 106 Gates, Nancy 72, 178, 179 Gates, Tudor 74, 75 Gelfan, Barney 217 Gemora, Charles 85 Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch 82 Geni, Ihsan 190 George, Susan 73, 75, 153, 154 Geray, Steven 136 Gerie Productions 166 Gerson, Jeanne 35 Gerstle, Frank 151, 174 The Ghost of Crossbones Canyon 77– 78, 137, 233 The Giant Behemoth 1, 77, 78–81, 233 Gibson, Lois 189 Gibson, Mimi 179 Gillette, Robert W. 197 Gimpera, Teresa 190, 191 Giroux, Charles A. 1 Glass, Everett 106, 179 Glass, Ned 112, 114 Glass, Seamon 223, 224 Glasser, Albert 53 Glenn, Montgomery 185 Glenn, Roy 81, 82, 114 Glenwood-Neve Productions 85 Glover, Bruce 67 Glut, Donald F. 55, 68, 70 Godsell, Vanda 4 Gold, Jack ( John) 177 Golden Era 38 The Golden Idol 81–83, 233 Gollin, Albert E. 157 Gomez, Mayra 193 Gonzales, Sonia Noemi 188 Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Jose 146, 218 Gorcey, Bernard 31, 32, 46, 61, 62, 111, 113, 136, 140, 155 Gorcey, David 155, 170; see also Condon, David Gorcey, Leo 31, 32, 46, 47, 48, 61, 62, 88, 110, 111, 114, 136, 140, 141 Gordon, Alex 5 Gordon, Barry 84 Gordon, Bernard 55 Gordon, Bert I. 52, 53, 164, 166 Gordon, Flora 166 Gordon, Gavin 15, 16 Gordon, Leo 175 Gordon, Richard 50, 51 Gordon, Robert 20 Gordon, Roy 12, 136 Gordon, Susan 164 Gorham Productions 7 Gorini, Arianna 23 Gough, Michael 20, 21 Gould, Elliott 176 GPA Productions 224
Grabowski, Norman “Woo Woo” 146, 148 Graeff, Tom 133 Graham, Hugh 229 Graham, Tim 184 Grant, Lee and The Capitols 153 Grassby, Bertram 13 Grauman, Walter 63 Gray, Coleen 60, 86 Gray, Donald 3 The Great Expedition to the Elephant Graveyard see Dark Venture Green, Mike 223 Greene, Angela 45 Greene, Ellen 208 Greene, Otis 63 Greene, Rita 54, 103 Greer, Dabbs 106 Grefe, William 194 Gregson, John 73 Grey, Virginia 20, 21, 163 Gribbon, Eddie 14 Griffin, Jack 209 Griffith, Charles B. 181, 182, 189, 208, 209, 210 Grimaldi, Hugo 93, 127 Grimes, Tammy 149 Grinter, Brad F. 193, 194 Grover, Ed 176 Guderman, Linda 116 Guerin, Lenmana 76 Guifoyle, Paul 81, 82 Gun Riders 197–99 Gynt, Greta 28 Haddon, Larry 84 Haerter, Gerard 36, 37 Hafner, Ingrid 28 Hagemeyer, H.J. 158 Haggerty, Don 47 Hall, Huntz 31, 32, 47, 48, 61, 62, 87, 88, 110, 111, 113, 136, 155, 170 Haller, Daniel 175 Hallett, Neil 80 Halliday, Bryant 50, 51 Halsdorf, Serge 19 Halsey, Brett 6 Hamilton, Alean “Bambi” 92 Hamilton, Margaret 14 Hammer Films 57, 74 Hampton, Grace 4 Hampton, Orville H. 210 Hampton, Robert see Freda, Riccardo Hamton, Robert see Freda, Riccardo Hanawalt, Chuck 9 The Hand of Power 2, 199–202 Hands of a Stranger 83–85, 234 The Hands of a Strangler see The Hands of Orlac The Hands of Orlac 84, 85 Hanna, Mark 11 Hannah, Daryl 10 Hannah, Queen of the Vampires see Crypt of the Living Dead Hanold, Marilyn 67, 68 Hanson, Kristina 230, 231 Hardmuth, Paul 4
Index Hardstark, Michael 40 Hardy, Phil 12, 20, 32, 38, 41, 46, 62, 74, 85, 89, 93, 110, 122, 123, 125, 131, 163, 173, 177, 180, 187, 191, 199, 203, 207, 212, 220 Harris, Jack H. 227, 230 Harvey, Don C. 82 Harvey, Joan 83, 84, 85 Hatton, Raymond 61 Haukoff, Ralph 108 Hauser, Gilgi 57 Haussler, Richard 125 Hayden, Russell 178 Haydon, Charles 192 Hayes, Allison 10–12, 62, 63, 99, 101 Hayes, Chester 76 Hayes, David 32, 47, 62, 110, 136, 141, 170 Hayes, Helen 14 Hayes, Sherman 193 Hayward, Louis 72 Haze, Jonathan 132, 133, 208, 210 He Walked by Night 102 Healey, Myron 61, 62, 140 Hecht, Ben 141 Heermance, Richard 170 Hellman, Jaclyn 19, 189 Hellman, Monte 18, 19, 189, 203 Hell’s Five Hours 85–87, 137, 233 Helton, Percy 155 Hemisphere Pictures 215 Henderson, C.J. 68, 146, 163, 177, 224 Henderson, Douglas 22 Henderson, Marcia 99, 101 Henry, Bill 155 Henry, Thomas B. 183, 185 Henry, Victor 153 Herrick, Abbie 135 Hertz, Nathan see Juran, Nathan Herx, Henry 150 Hewitt, Heather 123 Hidarki, Bokuzen 95 Hill, Jack 175 Hill, Linda Lee 14 Hill, Marianna 21 Hill, Mary 211 Hirsch, Robert 97 Hitchcock, Alfred 39 Ho, Linda 43 Hobart, Doug 193 Hodgins, Earle 170 Hoffman, Howard 90, 117 Hold That Hypnotist 48, 87–88, 233 Holden, Joyce 140, 141 Holt, Jack 211 Holtz, Gary 193 Holy Terror see Communion Honda, Ishiro 94 Honore, J.P. 25 Hood, Darla 15, 16 Hopwood, Avery 13–14 Horror Monsters Presents Black Zoo 22 Horror of the Blood Monsters see Vampire Men of the Lost Planet Horrors of the Black Zoo see Black Zoo Horton, Louisa 40
Houck, Joy M. 210 The House of Exorcism see Lisa and the Devil House on Haunted Hill (1959) 1, 2, 46, 88–91, 116, 221, 233 House on Haunted Hill (1999) 89 Houston, Donald 48, 49 Howard, Nancy 179 Howard, Trevor 176 Howco International Pictures 183, 210 Howlin (Howland), Olin 228 Huart, Gerard 25 Hubbard, Tom 138 Huc, Nicole 19 Hudson, William 10, 11 Hughes, Carolyn 173 Hughes, Ken 5 Hughes, Mary Beth 61, 62 Hughes, Robin 120, 136 Hugo, Victor 97 Hugo Grimaldi Productions 127 The Human Duplicators 91–93, 127, 234 The Human Vapor 94–96, 234 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) 97 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) 97 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1957) 96–99, 233 Hunter, Arline 146, 148 Hurst, Veronica 120 Huxley, Aldous 107 Hyer, Martha 136 HypnoMagic 100 The Hypnotic Eye 99–101, 233 I’m Alone and I’m Scared see Fright (1971) Im banne des Unheimlichen (In the Thrall of the Sinister One) see The Hand of Power Imelda 17 The Immortal Monster see Caltiki The Immortal Monster Independent-International Pictures 197, 215, 216, 224 Independenti Regionali 93 Indestructible Man 53, 101–03, 177, 233 Indrisano, John 92 Ingrassia, Ceccio 134, 135 Interstate Television Corporation 2 Invasion 108 Invasion of the Body Stealers see The Body Stealers Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) 1, 4, 29, 103–08, 233 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) 108 Ippoliti, Mimma 220 Irving, George S. 149 La isla de la muerte (The Island of the Dead) see Island of the Doomed Island of the Doomed 1, 108–10, 234 The Isotope Man see The Atomic Man Iverson Ranch 62
241 Jackson, Selmer 6 Jackson, Thomas E. 12 Jaeckel, Richard 167, 168 Jaffe, Carl 4 Jaffe, Sam 66 Jalopy 110–11, 233 Jaws of the Alien see The Human Duplicators Jeffries, Herb 113 Jenks, Frank 61 Jennifer (1953) 111–13, 233 Jerry Fairbanks Studios 102 Jewell, Austen 88 Johns, Mervyn 57 Johnson, Edith 13 Johnson, Russell 8 Johnston, W. Ray 1 Joint, Alf 154 Jones, Carolyn 106 Jones, Morgan 133 Jones, Stephen 74, 102, 191, 194, 220 Jones-Moreland, Betsy 188, 189, 202 Joseph, Jackie 208, 210 Jostyn, Jay 14 Julienne, Remy 176 Jungle Gents 113–15, 179, 233 Juran, Nathan 183, 196, 197 Justice, William 35 Kalvex, Inc./PSP, Inc. 2 Kane, Joe 7, 167, 182, 224, 229 Kaplan 64 Karen, James 67 Karloff, Boris 1, 69–71, 102, 153, 154 Karson, Phil 186 Kaufmann, Maurice 80 Kaylor, Arnold 213 Keaton, Buster 135 Keays, Vernon 85 Keel, Howard 56, 57 Keene, Tom see Powers, Richard Kellerman, Sally 85 Kemper, Doris 47 Kennedy, Douglas 196 Kent, Carol 223 Kent, Jean 28 Kerman, David 67 Kerridge, Mary 50 Khadhapuridze, Olya 119 Khoury, George 145 Kidd, Jonathan 116 Kiel, Richard 91, 92 Kieling, Wolfgang 200 Kilgore, Charles 166 Kim, June 42 Kimbell, Anne 81, 82 Kincaid, Aron 175 Kinski, Klaus 189 Kirk, Tommy 216 Kish, Joseph 177 Kishkon, Nina 118 Kiss Me Deadly 86, 137 Kitt, Eartha 149 Klavun, Walter 72 Kleinsinger, George 149 Kling Studios 162 Knapp, Robert 211 Knight, James 172 Knox, Mona 111
242 Koch, Howard W. 69 Konopka, Magda 219, 220 Konow, David 217, 226 Korda, Susan see Miranda, Soledad Koscina, Sylva (Silva) 206 Kounelaki, Miranda 182 Kramer, David 85 Kramer, Siegfried 108 Krikol, Eugene 213 Kruger, Henry see Dominic, Arturo Kruger, Lea 23 Krull, Hans 200 Kubatsky, Anatoli 118 Kupcinet, Karyn see Windsor, Tammy Kurlick, Daniel 22 Kuznetsov, Michael (Mikhail) 118 Lacey, Catherine 153 Lackteen, Frank 6 Lake, Veronica 194 Lamb, John 219 Lamble, Lloyd 80 Lancaster, Burt 167, 168, 169 Landis, James 213 Landru 27 Landru, Henri Desire 26 Lane, Lenita 13–15 Lane, Mike 69 Langan, Glenn 127, 128 Langton, Paul 44, 45 Lanphier, James 196, 197 Lansing, Joi 6 Larion, Anna 213 LaRue, Jack, Jr. 190 LaRue, Lash 194, 210 Last Woman on Earth 188, 202–03 Latell, Lyle 134 Laughton, Charles 97, 98 Lauren, Rod 20, 21 Lauter, Harry 61, 62 La Vigne, Emile 177 Lawrence, Bert 170 Lawrence, Sheldon 28 Lee, Christopher 64, 65, 84 Lee, Rudy 140 Leggatt, Alison 57 Lehne, John 176 Leigh, Nelson 178, 179 Leigh, Wandisa 204 Leigh-Hunt, Ronald 50 Lek, Nico 212 Lemaire, Phillippe 25 Leon, William 213 Leonard, William Torbert 15, 150 Leone, Alfredo 205, 207 Leone, Kathy 205, 207 Leonetti, Tommy 91, 92 Le Roy, Eddie 155, 170 Le Saint, Edward J. 13 Leslie, Bethel 14 Leslie, William 126, 128 Liberty Pictures 1 Lieb, Herbert 14 Lightning Bolt 203–05 Liljedahl, Marie 64, 65 Lindfors, Lil 200, 202 Line, Helga 128, 130, 131 Lipton, Lawrence 100, 101
Index Lisa and the Devil 205–07 The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) 202, 207–10 The Little Shop of Horrors (1986) 208 Lloyd, Harold, Jr. 127, 128, 146 Lob, Karl 202 Lodge, Jean 50 Logan, James 231 Lollobrigida, Gina 97, 99 Lombard, Michael 176 London, Babe 146 Long, Richard 90 Loo, Richard 42 Lopez, Manuel 52 Lord, Marjorie 138 Lords, Traci 134 Lorimar Productions 2 Lorre, Peter 84 Lorys, Diana 204 Lost Women 210–12 Lost Women of Zarpa see Lost Women Lourie, Eugene 80–81 Love, Lucretia 58 Love in the Afternoon 2 Lowe, Edmund 121 Lowery, Robert (Bob) 110 Lowry, Jane 40 Lu, Alicia 43 Lucas, Tim 202, 215 Luez, Laurette 114 Lugosi, Bela 1, 77, 101, 155, 229 Lukather, Paul 83, 84, 85, 230, 231 Lulli, Folco 204 Lund, Jana 69, 70 Lundh, Borje 66 Lung, Charles 32 Lupino, Ida 111, 112 Lydon, James 99 Lynd, Eva 99 Lynn, DanI 21 Lytton, Herbert 45 Macabre 1, 2, 86, 115–17, 221, 233 MacDouglas, John 130 MacGowran, Jack 80 MacKaye, Norman 71 Macready, George 91, 92 Mad Love 84 Madison, Guy 77, 78, 137 Madison, Leigh 79 The Magic Voyage of Sinbad 212–15 The Magic Weaver 1, 117–20, 234 Mahoney, Louis 51 Majestic Pictures 1 Malfatti, Marina 58 Malone, Nancy 71 Maltin, Leonard 89, 145, 150 Mamakos, Peter 140, 144, 155 Man Eater of Hydra see Island of the Doomed The Man Who Would Be King 2 Man with the Steel Mask see Who? Man with the Synthetic Brain 199, 215–17 Mangano, Vittorio 58 Manku, Vivianne 13 Manning, Bruce 89 Manson, Maurice 87 Maraschal, Launce 3
Marcus, Bill 193 Margheriti, Antonio 187 Marion, Paul 32 Mark, Michael 174, 175 Marlowe, Hugh 177, 178, 179 Marquette, Jacques 183, 189, 196, 197 Marquis, Don 159 Marr, Eddie 103 Marrill, Alvin J. 98 Mars, Lani 175 Marsh, Vera 164 Marshal, Alan 90 Marshall, Mort 163 Marshall, Nancy 67, 68 Marshall, William 144, 167, 169 Marston, John 62 Martell, Gregg 230, 231 Marth, Frank 71 Martin, Audrey 223 Martin, Chris-Pin 211 Martin, Daniel 191 Martin, George 108 Martin, John 211 Martin, Ross 149 Martin, Steve 208 Martin, Tony 126 Martin Nosseck Productions 125 Martone, Elaine 84 Martone, Gaby 219 Marya-Iskusnitsa (Maria, The Wonderful Weaver) see The Magic Weaver Mascot Pictures 1 Maslow, Walter 45, 181–82 Mason, Laura 31 Mason, Pamela 146, 148 Massey, Athena 134 Massey, Daria 144 Matsumoto, Sensho 95 Matsumura, Minosuke 94 Mathews, Carole 138 Mathews, Grace 76 Matthews, Geoffrey 57 Matthews, John 151 Mattson, Siw 200 Maude, Beatrice 105 Maurey, Nicole 57 Mavis, Paul 135 Maxim Gorky Studios 119 Mayo, Mike 41 The Maze 1, 120–22, 170, 233 McCall, Mitzi 171 McCalla, Irish 84 McCard, Mollie 54 McCarthy, Kevin 105, 107, 108 McDonald, Francis 61 McGavin, Darren 123, 124 McGee, Mark Thomas 10, 210 McGraw, Charles 167, 169 McHugh, Kitty 112 McKim, Robert 114 McKinnon, Mona 211 McLean, David 159 McMaster, Niles 40 McNally, Stephen 86 McNamara, John 75 McQueen, Steve (Steven) 227, 228 Meadows, Joyce 183, 184
Index Medin, Harriet White 23 Melchers, W.R. 158 Melies, Georges 26 Menken, Alan 208 Menzies, William Cameron 121–22 Mercier, Michele 187 Merivale, John 36 Merkel, Una 14 Mermaids of Tiburon 218–19 Merton Park Studios 4, 49 Mesa of Lost Women see Lost Women Meyers, Andy 50 Meyers, Fred 199, 225 Meyers, Richard 207 Michaels, Toby 209 Migliano, Adriano Amidei 59 Miller, Arnold L. 154 Miller, Dick 132, 133, 171, 181, 208, 210 Miller, Linda 39 Miller, Tony 8, 172 Mills, Mort 47 Millyar, Georgi 118 Milner, Martin (Marty) 146, 147 Milner Bros. 77 Milton, David 177 Minton, Lynn 167 Miranda, Soledad 65 Mission Mars 1, 122–24, 234 Mistretta, Gaetano 24, 38, 59, 131, 187 Mitchell, Cameron 23, 24, 66, 108 Mitchell, Laurie 142 Mitchum, Julie 90 Modern Films 2, 224 Moehner, Carl 125 Mohr, Gerald 221, 222 Monogram Pictures 1, 2, 31 Monsieur Verdoux 26 The Monster (1959) see Face of Fire Montell, Lisa 178, 179 Montes, Elisa 108 Montini, Luigi 220 Moonwolf 1, 124–26, 234 Moore, Eva 14 Moore, Kieron 56, 57 Moorehead, Agnes 13–15 Moranis, Rick 208 Moray, Yvonne 43, 44 Morell, Andre 79, 80 Morlas, Mary 223 Morricone, Ennio 131 Morris, Barboura 174, 181, 182 Morris, Chester 14 Morris, Dorothy 116 Morris, Wayne 137, 138 Morrison, Ann 14 Morrow, Byron 22 Morrow, Scotty 45 Morrow, Susan 116 Morrow, Vic 86 Morse, Robin 144 Morton, Roy 216 Mosbacher, Peter 200 Mother Riley Meets the Vampire 229 Mudie, Leonard 81, 82 Mulhall, Jack 6 Muller, Paul 64, 65, 128, 129–30 Munday, Penelope 48
Munshin, Jules 149 Murakami, Fuyuki 94 Muriel Corporation 86 Murphy, Jimmy 47, 87, 155 Murray, Bill 208 Mutiny in Outer Space 91, 93, 126– 28, 234 My Son, the Vampire 229 My World Dies Screaming see Terror in the Haunted House Mylong, John 218 Mysova, Ellen 213, 214 Nader, George 91, 92, 93 Naha, Ed 5, 7, 32, 46, 62, 66, 89, 101, 102, 180 Naschy, Paul 65 Nash, Robert 127 Nehlsen, Hermann 108 Nelson, Ed 8, 9 Nelson, Gene 35 New Horizon Pictures 175 Newby, Valli 50 Newman, Raoul H. 185 Nicholson, Jack 182, 209, 210 Nicholson, James H. 162 Nicholson, Nora 48 Nicolai, Bruno 65 Nigh, Jane 87 Night Legs see Fright (1971) Night of the Doomed see Nightmare Castle Nightmare Castle 128–31, 234 The Ninth Guest 89 Nixon, Allan 211 Noonan, Sheila see Carol, Sheila Nord, Eric “Big Daddy” 100, 101 Norman, Jett see Walker, Clint Norvo, Red 85 Not of This Earth (1957) 1, 9, 10, 11, 131–34, 233 Not of This Earth (1988) 134 Not of This Earth (1995) 134 Not of This Earth (1998) 134 Not of This Earth: The Film Music of Ronald Stein 10, 13, 134 Notre-Dame de Paris see The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1959) Nurmi, Maila see Vampira Nye, Louis 146, 147 002 Agenti Segretissimi see Oh! Those Most Secret Agents! Ober, Robert 14 Oboler, Arch 202 O’Brien, Willis 80 O’Connolly, Jim 5 O’Donnell, Cathy (Kathy) 221, 222 Ogilvy, Ian 153 Oh! Those Most Secret Agents! 134–35, 234 O’Higgins, Brian 4 Ohmart, Carol 90 Okuda, Ted 31, 33 Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire 229 Oliver, Guy 12 O’Loughlin, Gerald S. 167, 169 One Million B.C. 226
243 O’Neill, James 24, 38, 131, 161, 166, 187, 191, 194, 212, 220 Oorthuis, Dity 158 Operazione Goldman (Operation Goldman) see Lightning Bolt Orano, Allesio 206 Ordung, Wyott 162 Orlacs Haende (The Hands of Orlac) 84 Ormond, Ron 210, 212 O’Rourke, Patrick 114 Orwell, George 107 Osborn, Lyn 45 Osborne, Kent 198 Oscard, Miko 66 Osman, Shera 190 Osterloh, Robert 107, 140 Oswald, Marianne 98 Otis, Ted 84 Ott, Warrene 21 Owens, Pat (Patricia) 48, 49 Oz, Frank 208 Pacifica Productions 219 Padula, Vicente 52 Page, Ilse 200, 201 Page, Manuel 54 Palmer, Gregg 75 Palmer, Randy 77, 134 Palmer, Robert 127 Palmerini, Luca M. 24, 38, 59, 131, 187 Paolo Film 59 Papillon 2 Paramount Pictures 227 Parish, James Robert 31, 44 Paris Playboys 135–36, 233 Parker, Shirley 123 Parker, Ursula 204 Parkin, Duncan (Dean) 53 Parnell, Emory 113 Parry, Natasha 48, 49 Pate, Michael 120 Patridge, Joe 99, 101 Patterson, Kenneth 105, 106 Patterson, Shirley see Smith, Shawn Paul, Eugenie 62 Paull, Morgan 167 Payton, Lee 228 Pearce, Alice 14 Peary, Danny 38, 41, 151 Peary, Harold 138 Pena, Julio 220 Pepper, Barbara 146 Perello, Michelle 25 Pereva, Vito 118 Perrault, Charles 26 Perri, Luciana 204 Perry, Vic 4 Peters, Dennis Alaba 50 Peters, John 186 Petkovich, Anthony 67 Phantom Trails 78, 137, 233 Phillips, William (Bill) 140 La Philosophie dans le boudoir see Beyond Love and Evil Philosophy in the Boudoir see Eugenie Photoplay Associates, Inc. 145 Pica, Antonio 220
244 Pickford, Jack 14 Pickford, Mary 14 Pieral 98 Pierce, Thomas 141 Pigozzi, Lucinao 23 Pinero, Fred 193 Pirie, David 154 Pitts, ZaSu 14 The Plague of the Zombies 73 Platt, Edward 72 Poe, Edgar Allan 185 The Poets 67 Pollexfen, Jack 53–54 Polo, Maria 198 Port of Hell 86, 137–39, 233 Poston, Tom 149 Powell, Jimmy 200 Powers, Bruce 225 Powers, Mala 197, 198 Powers, Merry 186 Powers, Richard 61, 62 Prescott, Guy 99 Price, Dennis 50 Price, Vincent 14, 15, 42, 43, 88, 89, 90, 153 Prince, William 116 Prine, Andrew 190, 191 Private Eyes 140–41, 233 Psycho-A-Go-Go see Man with the Synthetic Brain Psycho Rama 221 Ptushko, Aleksandr 120, 213, 215 Purdy, Jon 134 Pyle, Denver 60 Qualen, John 221 Quarry, Robert 189 Quartaro, Gaetano 220 Queen of Outer Space 1, 71, 72, 141– 44, 179, 233 Queen of Spades 2 Queen of the Gorillas see Bride and the Beast Quinlan, David 4, 49 Quinn, Anthony 97, 98, 99 Quinn, Tandra 211 Rabb, Leonid 192 Rabin, Jack 171 Raho, Umi (Umberto) 220 Rains, Claude 14 Ramsey, Ward 230, 231 Randall, Stuart 103 Rauch, Siegfried 200 Ravaged see Blood Rose Ravaioli, Isarco 220 Ray, Aldo 124 Rayart Productions 1 Raymond, Gene 198, 199 Raymond, Paula 199 Raytone Pictures 1 Razetto, Stella 12 The Red Norvo Quintette 85 Red Ram Productions 123 Reding, Judi 164, 166 Reed, Alan 149, 150 Reed, Ralph 132 Reeves, Michael 153 Reeves, Richard 163
Index Reeves, Steve 181 Reilly, Robert 67 Reiner, Thomas 23 Renard, Maurice 84 Rennie, Guy 106 Republic Pictures Corporation 1 Republic Pictures Home Video 108 Ressel, Franco 23 Reviere, Georges 185, 186 Rey, Mariano Garcia 190, 191 Reynolds, Tom 72 Rhodes, Erik 149 Rhodes, Hari 150, 151 Rich, Bernard 145 Rich, Kathy 40 Richards, Keith 178, 180 Richmond, Susan 48 Riddle, K.K. 216 Ridgeway, Suzanne 75 Righi, Massimo 23 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikoli 213 Rinehart, Mary Roberts 13 Ritter, Tex 178 Rivera, Chita 149 RKO Radio Pictures 52, 97 Roark, Robert 163 Robbins, Tacey 216 Roberson, Chuck 150, 151 Roberto 25 Roberts, Alan 231 Roberts, Arthur 134 Roberts, Ewan 56 Roberts, Thayer 223 Robin, Olivia 25 Robinson, Christopher (Chris) 17, 18 Roboman see Who? Robsahm, Margarete 186, 187 Roc, Patricia 27, 28 Rocca, Antonino 39 Rocca, Daniela 37 Roerick, William 132, 173 Rohm, Maria 64, 65 Roman, Ric 170 Romero, Blanquita 188, 196 La Rose écorchée (The Burnt Rose) see Blood Rose Roseman, Ralph 229 Ross, Mike (Michael) 11, 32 Rossi-Stuart, Giacomo 38 Roth, Gene 138, 165 Roth, Johnny 35 Roth, Lillian 39, 41 Rou, Aleksandr 119, 120 Row, Alexander see Aleksandr Rou Rowe, Earl 228 Rowe, George 218 Royce, Riza 15, 16 Rubin, Jennifer 175 Ruick, Mel 92 Russell, Chuck 228 Ryan, Michael 161 Ryan, Tim 140 Rye, Michael 83, 84 Sabu 144 Sabu and the Magic Ring 144–45, 233 Sadko see The Magic Voyage of Sinbad Sagittarius Productions 29, 123
Saint-James, Fred 19 Salvador, Julio 189 Sampredo, Matilda 108 Sanders, George 27, 28, 29, 30, 65 Sanders, Lugene 164 Sandoval, Esther 188 Sanford, Ralph 170 Santoni, Espartaco 206 Sanz, Paco 204 Sasaki, Takamaru 96 Sata, Keiko 95 Satana, Tura 91 Satanic see Satanik Satanik 219–20 Sattin, Lonnie 91, 92 Savalas, Telly 205, 207 Savo, Ann 125 Sawaya, George 84 Sayer, Diane 159, 160 Sayer, Jay 171 Sazarino, Dan 176 Schanzer, Karl 175 Scheuer, Steven H. 7, 53, 72, 85, 110, 125, 144, 146, 180, 215, 219 Schiller, Norbert 69–70 Schmidt, Helmut 125 Schneider, Edith 200 Schoeller, Ingrid 135 Schwalb, Ben 63, 100, 110, 141, 170 Scorpio International 2 Scott, Jacqueline 115, 116 Scott, Janette 56, 57 Scott, Simon 167, 169 The Screaming Sleep see The Hypnotic Eye The Search for Bridey Murphy 72, 88 Searles, Baird 229 Secret of the Telegian 94 Secrets of a Soul see Confessions of an Opium Eater Sei donne per l’assassino (Six Women for the Assassin) see Blood and Black Lace Seiler, Jacques 26 Sekeley, Steve 56, 57 Selig Pictures 13 Selwin 1 Selwin on Saturday 1 Semand, Britt 225 Sendry, Albert 126 Sen Yung, Victor 138 The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 213 Sex Kittens Go to College 42, 145–48, 234 Shafo, Robert 144 Shaner, John 209 Shaughnessy, Mickey 146, 148 Shayne, Robert 102, 155, 171 Sheeler, Mark 76 Sheffield, Johnny 81, 83 Sheffield, Reginald 83 Sheppard, Patty 190, 191 Sheppard, Paula 39 Shepperton Studios 29, 73 Sheridan, DanI 163 Sherman, Samuel M. 217 Sherpix Pictures 135 Sherrill, Babette 193 Shields, Arthur 54
Index Shields, Brooke 39, 40, 41 Shinbone Alley 148–50, 234 Shipp, Mary 112 “Shock!” 1 Shock Corridor 81, 150–52, 234 Shonteff, Lindsay 51 Showalter, Max see Adams, Casey Siegel, Don 104, 108 Signorelli, Tom 40 Sigoloff, Marc 167 Sikking, James 161 Silva, Carmen 207 Simon, Robert F. 66 Simpson, Mickey 177, 180 Simpson, Russell 77 Sinatra, Frank 113 Sinatra, Richard 17, 18 Sinclair, Eric 172 Sitka, Emil 141 Ski Troop Attack 18 Slavin, Susan 21 Sloane, Barton 229 Smedley, Richard 216 Smith, Bruce Meredith 192 Smith, Queenie 87 Smith, Shawn 178, 179 Smith, William 167, 169 Snowden, Eric 114 Sojin 14 Sokoloff, Vladimir 145 Solon, Ewen 48 Sommer, Elke 205 Son of Blob see Beware! The Blob Son of Dr. Jekyll 54 “Son of Shock!” 1 The Sorcerers 1, 152–54, 234 Sorrente, Sylvia 187 Souchka 19 Souls for Sale see Confessions of an Opium Eater Space, Arthur 163 Space Mission to the Lost Planet see Vampire Men of the Lost Planet Spalding, Thomas 229 Speed, F. Maurice 26 Spell of the Hypnotist see Fright (1956) Spier, Wolfgang 201 Spook Chasers 48, 155–56, 233 Spruance, Don 223 Spy in the Sky! 156–58, 233 Stanley 18 Stanley, John 24, 85, 102, 110, 123, 180, 212 Stapleton, James 83, 84 Stapp, Marjorie 55, 103 Star-Cine Cosmos 38, 58, 194 Star Portal 134 Starr, Ron (Ronald) 223 Starrett, Charles 178 Steele, Barbara 128, 129, 130, 131, 153, 185, 186, 187 Steele, Bob 6 Steele, Mike 16 Steffen, Ben 187 Stein, Ronald 10, 13, 134 Stephens, Harvey 16 Stephens, Susan 68 Stern, Otto 200 Stevens, Eileen 12
Stevens, Harmon 211 Stevens, Leith 177 Stevenson, Robert Louis 52, 55, 220 Stewart, John 176 Stewart, Maurice 193 Sting of Death 194 Stoker, Ron 127 Stolar, Edward 213, 214 Stone, Merritt 165 Storey, Lynn 209 The Strangler 1, 158–61, 234 Stribling, Melissa 48, 49 Strudwick, Shepperd 14 Style, Michael 74 Sullivan, Deirdre 38 Sullivan, Didi 36 Superbug 2 Surow, Robert 213 Sutherland, Donald 108 Sutton, John 15, 16 Svensk Filmindustries 65 Swan, Robert 75 Swenson, Ingrid 64 Switzer, Carl “Alfalfa” 61 Syndicate Film Exchange 1 Taft, William Howard 169 Tagani 224, 226 Tal Production 224 Talbert, John 216 Talbot, Lyle 211 Talbott, Gloria 51, 52, 54 Tanaka, Tomoyuki 94 Tannen, William 82 Target Earth 161–64, 233 Tate, Dale 11, 183, 185 Taylor, Jack 64, 65 Taylor, Kent 216, 217 Taylor, Rod 178, 179 Teele, Margot 92 Teissier, Elisabeth 25 Tenser, Tony 30, 153 Terrell, Ken (Kenneth) 12, 102 Terror in the Haunted House 221–22 Tessier, Valentine 97 Tevos, Herbert 210 Thawnton, Tony 50 Thayer, Lorna 112 Thin Air see The Body Stealers This Is Not a Test 2, 223–24 Thomas, E. Leslie 184 Thomas, Peter 202 Thompson, Howard 64 Thompson, Marshall 138, 139, 197, 198 Thompson, Paul 62 Thon, Doris 19 The Three Stooges 31, 32, 68, 141 Thurston, Carol 100 Tiemeyer, Hans 156, 157 Tieri, Aroldo 135 Tigon Pictures 29, 153 Tilly, Meg 108 Time Warner 2 Timeslip see The Atomic Man Tinling, Ted 40 Tinti, Gabriele 206 Tissier, Jean 97 Titra Sound Corporation 36
245 Tobey, Kenneth 72 Tohill, Cathal 64 Toho Company 94 Tomborg, Kaym 176 Tombs, Pete 64 Tomelty, Joseph 3 Tonge, Philip 115, 116 Tonlyn Productions 227 Topper, Burt 159, 161 Torey, Hal 45 The Torment (1974) see Deborah Tormented 164–66, 234 The Torturer! Master of “The Hypnotic Eye” see The Hypnotic Eye Towers, Constance 150, 151 Towers, Harry Alan 65 Towne, Robert 188, 189, 202 Travis, Henry 184 Travis, Richard 211 Treadway, Wayne 231 Trevlac, John see Calvert, John Troyan, Maurice 213 Tsuburaya, Eiji 94 Tsuchiya, Yoshio 94 Tucker, Larry 151 Tucker, Richard 14 La tumba de la isla maldita (The Tomb of the Cursed Island) see Crypt of the Living Dead Turkel, Joe 165 Turner, John 79 Twilight’s Last Gleaming 166–69, 234 Twitty, Conway 146, 148 Two Tickets to Terror see Man with the Synthetic Brain Tyler, Richard 6 Ullman, Elwood 115, 170 Ulmer, Edgar G. 26, 53, 55 ...Und immer ruft das Herz see Moonwolf Ungaro, Francesca 22 Unger, Goffredo 204 Unger, Gustaf 66 United Artists 14, 86 Universal-International Pictures 230 Unknown Island 226 Up in Smoke 48, 169–70, 233 Vail, Myrtle 209, 210 Valle, Ricardo 108 Valley Forge Film Studios 227 Valli, Alida 206 Vallin, Rick 32, 82 Vampira 146 Vampire Men of the Lost Planet 199, 224–26 Vampire Over London 229 Van Doren, Mamie 145, 146, 147, 148 Varconi, Victor 6 Vargas, Alberto 177 Vargas, Daniele 36 Vaz Dias, Selma 28 Vea, Katina see Victor, Katherine Vedder, William 180 Veidt, Conrad 84 Vejar, Harry 107 The Vendells 215 Vernon, Howard 25
246 Vernon-Seneca Films 67 Vertisya, Lucille 214 Ve Sota, Bruno 171, 175 Vickers, Yvette 10, 11 Victor, Katherine 211 Victor Adamson Productions 215 Video-International 64 Vidon, Henri 79 Viklandt, Olivia 215 The Virgin Aqua Sex see Mermaids of Tiburon Vohrer, Alfred 201, 202 Vokes, May 14 Volanti, Vicki 198, 225 von Meyerinck, Hubert 200 Vonn, Veola 136 von Seyffertitz, Gustav 14 von Theumer, Ernst 110 von Treuberg, Franz 205 Voodoo Blood Bath see Curse of the Voodoo W. Lee Wilder Productions 156 Waggner, George 60 Wain, Edward see Towne, Robert Wake in Fright see Fright (1971) Waldis, Otto 12, 138, 139 Walker, Bill 81 Walker, Brent 32, 47, 62, 110, 136, 141, 170 Walker, Clint 114 Wallace, Edgar 200, 201, 202 Walsh, Edward 190 Walter Wanger Pictures 104 Waltz, Patrick 142 War of the Satellites 156, 171–73, 233 Ward, Dervis 4 Warford, Jack 209, 210 Warner Bros. 69, 77 Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. 2 Warren, Bill 12, 102, 104, 164, 224 Warren, Jerry 18, 63, 66, 211 The Wasp Woman (1960) 19, 173–75, 233 The Wasp Woman (1995) 175 Waterman, Dennis 73 Watkins, Linda 75, 77 Watson, Lucille 14 Watts, Elizabeth 72 Way, Guy 105
Index Wayne, David 149 Web of the Spider 187 Webb, Denis 48 Webb, Harry S. 34 Webber, Diane 218 Weed, Frank 193 Weiler, A.H. 151 Weiss, Adrian 34 Weiss, Louis 34 Weiss, Samuel 34 Weld, Tuesday 146 Welden, Ben 155 Weldon, Michael J. 26, 64, 68, 102, 211, 215, 219, 226 Welles, Mel 8, 87, 110, 208, 210 Welles, Meri 209 Welles, Orson 26 Wells, H.G. 179 Wengraf, John 62, 63, 136 Wentworth, Martha 54 Wessell, Dick 33 West, Roland 14 West London Studios 153 Wexler, Paul 31 White, Christine 116 White, J. Francis 210 White, R. Meadows 48 White, Robb 115 Whitfield, Smoki 81 Whitney, Steven 44 Whitsun-Jones, Paul 28 Who? 175–77, 234 Widmark, Richard 167, 169 Wiene, Robert 84 Wilbur, Crane 15 Wilde, Lorna 29 Wilder, Billy 27 Wilder, Myles 27, 72, 156 Wilder, W. Lee 27, 28, 72, 73, 156 Willes, Jean 33, 105 Williams, Leonard 3 Williams, Robert B. 17 Willis, Donald C. 4–5, 26, 38, 41, 46, 53, 62, 75, 77, 85, 101, 122, 131, 143, 163, 166, 219, 221 Willock, Dave 142 Willrich, Rudolph 40 Wilson, Ian 56 Windsor, Tammy 209 Winfield, Paul 167, 168, 169
Winkless, Terence H. 134 Winston, Norman 223 Winwood, Estelle 14 Wise, Robert 46 Wittey, John 50 W-M-J Productions 195 Wolf, Emanuel L. 1 Wolff, Frank 17, 18, 173, 181 Wong, Arthur 42 Wontner, Arthur 14 Wood, Edward D., Jr. 34, 211, 212 Wood, Ken see Karson, Phil Woolner, Bernard 195, 197 Woolner Bros. 91, 127, 185, 196, 204 World Without End 1, 102, 141, 170, 177–80, 233 Worth, D. Earl 10, 77 Wright, Teresa 22 Wu, Samuel 212 Wyndham, John 55, 58 Wynorski, Jim 134, 175 Wynter, Dana 105 Xanadu Books 152 Yachigusa, Kaoru 95 Yamamoto, Ren 95 Yates, George Worthing 164 Yates, John 160 Yeaworth, Irvin S., Jr. 230 Yordan, Philip 55 York, Francine 127, 128 York, Michael 134 Young, Burt 167, 169 Young, Gig 58, 59 Young, Ray 198 Young, R.G. 219 Young, Victor 131 Young Dillinger 23, 124 Younger, Jack 231 Zaza, Tony 150 Zertuche, Kinta 175 ZIV Studios 115 Zoet, Antonie 157 The Zombie Walks see The Hand of Power Zuckert, William (Bill) 150
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