by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a really peculiar movie I’d just
downloaded from archive.org: The Devil’s Sleep, a bizarre 1949 production from George Weiss’s spectacularly misnamed
Screen Classics Production company. Weiss specialized in exploitation films and
pretty clearly was depending on getting his product into non-traditional movie
venues where he didn’t have to abide by the Production Code, since this film
deals specifically with prescription drug abuse (offhand I can’t think of an
earlier movie that centers around prescription drug abuse, though there were
quite a few about marijuana and illegal hard drugs) and contains one remarkable
scene in which a woman is shown getting into a steam bath at a health spa and
the camera angle (the cinematographer was William C. Thompson, former Dwain
Esper and future Ed Wood collaborator) distinctly shows far more of her breasts
than would have been allowed at a major studio in 1949. The Devil’s
Sleep is also intriguing for the
exploitation nature of the casting: the central role of Judge Rosalind
Ballantine (another area in which George Weiss pioneered where the majors
feared to tread: I can’t offhand think of an earlier movie in which one of the
characters was a female judge!), tough-minded crusader against juvenile delinquency
and drug abuse, is played by Lita Grey Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin’s second wife,
who’d had her 15 minutes of fame over two decades earlier during their
scandalous divorce action. (The whole thing was such a bad memory for Chaplin
that when he wrote his autobiography in 1965 he glossed over it in just two
sentences, saying that he didn’t want to embarrass the two sons he and Lita had
had by rehashing the scandal involving their breakup.)
The film also features
George Eiferman, Mr. America of 1948, sucking off his 15 minutes by casting him as himself and making him
an innocent dupe who’s hired to work at the health spa run by gangster Humberto
Scalli (Timothy Farrell), not realizing that the “health spa” is just a front
for making prescription drugs available illegally to abusers. Eiferman is a
nice-looking hunk of man-meat at a time when men could win bodybuilding
contests without making their bodies look like relief maps of the Himalayas
(though his naïveté about drug abuse plays oddly in this era of almost
universal steroid use among bodybuilders), but we get to see all too little of
him — he’s only in two scenes, wearing a full business suit in one and a body
shirt in the other, and the sequence we were hoping for (as two jaded old Gay
men, anyway!) of him showing off his Mr. America bod in trunks or a posing
strap never materialized. Aside from that The Devil’s Sleep is a slovenly, ill-acted movie in which police
detective sergeant Dave Kerrigan (William Thomason) teams up with Judge
Ballantine to fight juvenile delinquency and bust the ring that’s selling drugs
to kids, and there’s a preposterous series of relationship coincidences in
which Kerrigan’s girlfriend Jerri (Laura Travers) is the sister of Bob Winter
(Jim Tyde), who’s been drawn into drug abuse by Scalli’s lieutenant Hal Holmes
(Stan Freed, whom we do get to
see in swim trunks and who’s the hottest-looking man in the movie!) even though
his girlfriend Margie (Tracie Lynn) is Judge Ballantine’s daughter. The idea is
that Holmes will lure this dubious couple to Scalli’s big house so they can
swim in the pool — and so one of Scalli’s henchmen can get a photo of Margie
skinny-dipping, which he can then use to blackmail Judge Ballantine into laying
off the gang.
The Devil’s Sleep
is one of those annoying movies that actually had the germ of a good story but
got sabotaged by the execution: the slovenly direction by W. Merle Connell
(through long stretches of the film it seems like he’s never heard of the
closeup), the monotone acting of most of the principals (one imdb.com reviewer
calls Timothy Farrell “the legendary anti-actor,” but he’s actually one of the
most convincing people in the cast!), the dreary stock music (which sounds like
it was recorded in the early 1930’s; there’s a nice pop-jazz instrumental heard
while the kids are being corrupted at the pool party but other than that one
wonders throughout the movie why George Weiss couldn’t or wouldn’t get any more
recent stock music cues!) and the
bizarrely painted opening credit card, which also looks like it came from an early-1930’s instead of a
late-1940’s movie. One oddity is that Timothy Farrell would go on to play
Humberto Scalli in at least two other movies, the 1951 Racket Girls (an even worse movie than this one, in which the
action revolves around a cache of footage of hefty women wrestling each other
for sport — given the number of buxom babes that appear in this film as well,
as the clients of Scalli’s health spa, one wonders if Weiss had a “thing” for
big women!) and 1953’s Dance Hall Racket (a bad movie that’s become legendary not only as Phil Tucker’s
directorial debut but for the appearance of future comedy legend Lenny Bruce,
in an embarrassingly bad performance that offers no hint of his later career
trajectory). When Charles and I watched the Mystery Science Theatre
3000 version of Racket Girls I noted that two years later, in 1953, Weiss would
give Ed Wood his first chance to direct, resulting in Glen or Glenda? — and as hard as it may be to believe, Weiss’s
association with Wood was actually a definite step up for him as a producer!
