by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I ran a movie I’d recently recorded from TCM onto DVD: Riders to the Stars, a better-than-average space opera from 1954 in which the U.S. experiments with unmanned rockets are having problems because every time they fire a rocket into space, those pesky cosmic rays fatigue the metal and the rocket breaks apart in earth’s atmosphere and crumbles into dust when they recover it. They decide that meteors hold the secret to creating a shield that will prevent this from happening, and so they recruit a team of 12 candidates from whom to select four astronauts, each to pilot an individual rocket ship into space and capture a meteor so they can analyze it and figure out how meteors can fly through cosmic-ray belts without disintegrating. How they’re going to keep their manned rockets from disintegrating on return like the unmanned ones had done, and killing the astronauts inside, is never quite explained in the script by Wolf Man writer Curt Siodmak, with uncredited tweaks by producer Ivan Tors.
Despite that major lapse — and some unintentionally risible moments that suggest this film could have been good Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fodder — for the most part Riders to the Stars is a sober-minded, relatively understated film of real quality. It starts — after the opening scene in which the “black box” (actually it’s brown, but we get the idea) from the latest crashed rocket is recovered (by two Jeep drivers who speed over the dunes of the desert landing site heedless of the fact that they’re towing trailers with scientific equipment — often the trailers are off the ground and their precious equipment risks getting lost in the desert forever) and one of the scientists, Dr. Jane Flynn (Martha Hyer) — drawn as a wanna-be astronaut herself barred from space flight by the usual sexist prejudices of the 1950’s (I was always amused at how the U.S. made a big deal that they finally sent a woman into space in 1983 — 20 years after the Soviet Union had done so!) — figures out that the way to build a better rocket shield is to study how the meteors do it.
Given that this movie was being made at the height of the Cold War, the Tors-Siodmak script depicts the recruitment of the 12 astronauts as a cloak-and-dagger process in which the entire adult male population of the U.S. is sifted through high-tech computers (on punch cards — one of the joys of a movie like this is seeing how obsolete 1954’s idea of high-tech is!) until they end up with 12 candidates, including mathematics professor Richard Donald Stanton (William Lundigan, top-billed), who’s engaged to a model named Miss [Susan] Manners (Dawn Addams) who can’t decide whether or not to marry him (which turns out to be beside the point since, as just about any reasonably experienced moviegoer could guess, from the time he ends up at the space camp he starts falling in love with Dr. Flynn instead and it’s clear she’s a better match for him) and who also happens to be the son of Dr. Donald L. Stanton (Herbert Marshall), head of the space program. (The idea that William Lundigan could possibly have been the offspring of Herbert Marshall is one of the biggest suspensions of disbelief this movie requires.)
For a moment I imagined that the script would amp up the Cold War rhetoric and do an equivalent to the story of Jesus — why else would they recruit 12 males if it weren’t going to turn out that one of them would betray the program, which in this secular context would have meant turning out to be a Soviet spy? — but instead they whittle the pool down to four by subjecting the would-be astronauts (who until the very last moments don’t even know what they’re being recruited for!) to psychological tests like being kept waiting in an office for hours: the first candidate who starts complaining about this (and the fact that they’ve been locked in!) is washed out. The coolest parts of the movie, however, are the shots in the giant centrifuge, a part of the training of real-life astronauts as well; these scenes were filmed in and around the real centrifuge at USC (though the close-ups of William Lundigan contorting his face to make us believe he’s at 12G’s were obviously studio work in front of a process screen and he was acting rather than actually experiencing heavy gravity) and are quite well dramatized to show us the unnatural nature of the stresses put on the human body by escape velocity.
Once the training is finished this 81-minute movie is almost two-thirds over; the astronauts get their launch orders (with less than an hour’s notice!) and, much to my surprise, they’re each assigned a separate spaceship complete with a “meteor scoop” to grab a meteor and bring it back to earth. One of the astronauts, Walter J. Gordon (Robert Karnes), loses control, is sucked out of his spaceship and instantly becomes a skeleton (a mistake in the script: the vacuum of outer space would instantly kill not only the human being but also the microorganisms within the human body that cause it to decay after death, so a victim lost in space would remain physically preserved indefinitely), which causes another astronaut, Dr. Jerome Lockwood (Richard Carlson — who in addition to appearing in the movie is also credited as director, though associate producer Herbert Strock, who later made monster movies at American International, apparently also handled some of the direction) to freak out and unstrap himself from the seat of the spaceship (the makers of this movie decided to handle weightlessness by simply never having the astronauts get up, though this one disobeyed instructions and they shot him in slow motion to help create the illusion of weightlessness in space).
So it’s up to plucky Don Stanton to catch the meteor, bring it back to earth and land his spacecraft without enough retro-rockets to do it safely — the final 25 minutes or so of this movie are actually quite effective suspense filmmaking even though the “training” scenes that precede them are a bit on the dull side — and overall Riders to the Stars is a quite capable piece of filmmaking, not a world-beating movie (Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon would remain by far the best movie about space travel for decades, probably until 2001: A Space Odyssey) but certainly appealing despite glitches like a dubious central premise (one imdb.com commentator noted that, contrary to the assumption at the heart of the script, cosmic rays don’t fatigue metal; instead the big problem for which manned space rockets need shields is the heat of re-entry, and the material they ended up using was fiberglass and ceramic) and a color process offered by the “Color Corporation of California” that turned out to be SuperCineColor, our old friend from The Magic Carpet, which was unstable enough that the color went through some abrupt changes from reel to reel and, when it was working properly, offered credible skin tones, vivid blues and reds, and not much in the way of anything else.
Monday, August 4, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
Two 1950's "Hollywood" Cheapies from Texas
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I stayed up and watched a movie I’d just recorded from TCM’s “Underground” feature, The Killer Shrews, one of the films listed in Harry and Michael Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards and a pretty dismal film even by the meager standards of low-budget horror/sci-fi of the late 1950’s. This was one of the productions of the short-lived “Hollywood Studios,” which weren’t in Hollywood at all but in Texas, and was made to be shown on a double bill with a similarly themed film called The Giant Gila Monster (in which the title character was played by a normal-sized Gila monster — actually a Mexican beaded lizard — shot on miniature sets; it’s a film that’s found a place in political trivia because the young Robert Dornan supposedly played a teenager eaten by the monster in the opening scene).
Though it would have made excellent fodder for the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew (and indeed they did do an MST3K version in 1992), The Killer Shrews is pretty dreary watching au naturel. It takes place on a deserted island in the Caribbean and features a young, (presumably) hunky boat captain, saddled with the indigestible character name “Thorne Sherman” (and played by James Best, who later appeared with Jerry Lewis in the 1966 film Three on a Couch, who here seems undecided whether he wants to imitate James Dean, Rock Hudson or Elvis). Racing to get into a cove on the island before a hurricane hits the area in general and his boat in particular, Sherman lands and announces he has a cargo for Dr. Marlowe Craigis (Baruch Lumet, father of director Sidney Lumet — odd to think that someone associated with a brilliant film like Network has a familial connection with someone associated with a piece of cheese like The Killer Shrews! — and such a perfect oy vey Jewish type he’d have been good casting for the landlord if Rafter Romance had been remade in the 1960’s), only he doesn’t want to unload it until the storm passes because the weight of the cargo will help hold his boat in place during the hurricane.
Sherman and his Black assistant (and, it seems, only other crew member), ‘Rook’ Griswold (Judge Henry Dupree), land on the island and Sherman is immediately smitten with Craigis’s daughter Ann, played by Ingrid Goude, Swedish beauty and winner of the 1957 Miss Universe contest. (Just how this gorgeous Scandinavian Aryan type who would have been perfect for one of Goebbels’ propaganda newsreels was supposedly sired by the decidedly Jewish loins of Baruch Lumet is never explained in Jay Simms’ script, though there’s a hint when she lists some questions she’s surprised Sherman hasn’t asked and one of them is “about my accent” — I was expecting a line about how she was only Dr. Craigis’s adopted daughter but none materialized.)
Anyway, like a lot of other 1950’s horror films we get about a half-hour of boring exposition before this 65-minute movie finally gets to the nitty-gritty: it turns out that Dr. Craigis has hatched the interesting notion that the way to solve the world’s overpopulation problem is to shrink the average size of human beings to half of what it is at present so the world will be able to support more of them with the same amount of resources. To do this, he explains, he will have to figure out a way to counteract the usual rule that the rate of an organism’s metabolism increases as its size shrinks, and he’s using shrews as a research animal to figure out how to do this. Only — wouldn’t ya know it? — he’s made a serious miscalculation in his experiments and inadvertently bred a race of 100-pound shrews (“That’s the size of an average wolf!” Sherman exclaims) that, though they don’t hunt during the day, are rapidly denuding the island of all other species at night and forcing the members of Craigis’s team — Ann, Jerry Farrell (Ken Curtis), Dr. Radford Baines (Gordon McLendon) and their manservant Mario (Alfredo DeSoto), of whom Jay Simms never quite decided whether or not he could speak English (in some scenes he can, in others he can’t) — to lock themselves in their cabin at night.
Sherman points out that the cabin’s walls are made of plaster-covered adobe and therefore the shrews can dig right through them once they get wet, which they did in that hurricane, and this being a monster movie, one by one the lower-billed cast members end up as giant-shrew food. It turns out that a previous attempt by Dr. Craigis to kill the shrews by poisoning them has backfired big-time; not only did they assimilate the poison but their bodies learned how to manufacture it themselves, making the merest scratch from their fangs fatal and leading Dr. Baines to exclaim, “There’s an extremely high poison content in this shrew’s saliva!,” after he’s had a chance to analyze the shrew that killed Mario and which Sherman subsequently shot. It also turns out that Jerry was once Ann’s boyfriend and he’s having a series of jealous hissy-fits over her new attraction to Sherman (personally I thought Ken Curtis was hunkier than James Best!), and that these characters are going through their supplies of alcohol at such a rate one’s surprised William Powell and Myrna Loy don’t turn up to solve the mystery.
This being an incredibly tacky production (so cheap that its producers, Gordon McLendon and Ken Curtis, took roles in the film themselves to save the costs of hiring two more actors), it’s not surprising that the killer shrews themselves are played by a pack of mangy old dogs with ill-fitting saber-toothed masks (though I suspect some of the extreme close-ups of their faces appearing at holes in the walls were made by humans manipulating the “killer shrew” fangs), or that the climax revolves around an ultra-low-tech solution worked up by Sherman: he ties four old metal drums together and he, Ann and Craigis each get in one and use it as an improvised tank to walk to the shore of the island while the shrews hurl themselves futilely at their improvised armored vehicle.
Whatever meager terror the shrews provide is due almost entirely to the noise sound-effects man Milton Citron cooked up for them to make — sort of like the squeak of a mouse multiplied tenfold — and an ingenious shot devised by director Ray Kellogg, whose work through the rest of the film is pedestrian, to say the least (like Ed Wood, Kellogg pads out his movie with clips of stock footage used so often we start wanting to wave to them and say hello to our old friends), to emphasize the terror of the shrews by having them stick their fangs into the metal barrels through the eye slits Sherman cut into each one so the people using them could see. The general idea is that once they get into the water, the shrews won’t follow (since they can’t swim) and they can swim under the barrels, reach Sherman’s boat and escape, while the remaining shrews, having nothing else left to eat, will devour each other. At the end, like a good 1950’s heroine, Ann Craigis announces that she’s giving up her career as a zoologist to become Mrs. Thorne Sherman, who declares to his future father-in-law, “You know, I’m not going to worry about overpopulation just yet.”
•••••
I ran Charles one of the items on one of his recent “Digital Archive” download discs of Mystery Sciencen Theater 3000 because it contained a legendarily bad movie I’d long wanted to see: The Giant Gila Monster, second of two bizarre cheap horror/sci-fi films made in Cielo, Texas by producer Gordon McLendon — who called his company “Hollywood Pictures” even though they never got anywhere near the real Hollywood while making them. The other one was The Killer Shrews, set on a desert island where a mad scientist (played by Baruch Lumet, whose son Sidney went on to make great movies like Network) had the idea of shrinking people so the earth’s growing human population didn’t outstrip its resources (a plot premise later picked up by Kurt Vonnegut as the survival strategy pursued by China in his novel Slapstick, a comic masterpiece and probably Vonnegut’s most underrated book — the gimmick being that the miniaturized Chinese not only have become the size of germs but they act as germs when ingested into the body of a normal-sized human, causing disease and a quick but painful death), only his experiments produced a bunch of man-eating shrews played by dogs with awfully ill-fitting sabre-toothed masks to make them look properly “shrewish.”
The Giant Gila Monster is a movie of such total tackiness it makes The Killer Shrews look like a horror classic by comparison, but it has its own quirky charm. Incidentally I’ve heard for years that Congressmember Bob Dornan plays an acting role in this film but I’ve been unable to confirm that — he’s not listed for it on imdb.com and no other Web site identifies him with his role — even though he was publicly identified with it as early as his 1960’s days as a Right-wing radio talk show host before he got into politics (so much for the idea that you couldn’t do a Right-wing talk show under the Fairness Doctrine!). I was under the impression that he played the male half of the couple whose car overturns and crashes in the opening scene, but imdb.com lists this actor as one Grady Vaughn.
Anyway, The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews were both produced by Gordon McLendon, who owned a chain of country radio stations and was apparently a born-again Christian before born-again Christianity became cool. Unlike the similarly religious mogul wanna-bes who put up the money for Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space, McLendon decided to make a sci-fi horror film aimed at teenage audiences but also to sneak in “moral” messages into the movie, notably in “The Mushroom Song,” an unbelievably sappy limp-rock ballad written and sung by the film’s star, Don Sullivan: a setting of the Garden of Eden story as sap-rock. The script was written by Jay Simms from a story by Ray Kellogg, who also directed, and not surprisingly given that McLendon’s special-effects budget was probably a $50 gift certificate at Toys ’R’ Us (or whatever its equivalent was in 1950’s Texas) the title character was played by a normal-sized lizard walking around miniature sets. What’s more, according to one imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the reptile we see on screen isn’t even a gila monster, but a Mexican beaded lizard!
Needless to say, any thrill potential of this story is horrendously compromised by the filmmakers’ inability to show the [supposedly] giant [supposed] gila monster in the same frame as the people it’s [supposedly] killing — though at least the matchups between the model sets the lizard is working on and the full-sized ones that accommodate the human actors (if, to rip off Dwight MacDonald’s famous line about Haya Harareet in Ben-Hur, I may use that term for courtesy) are surprisingly well done by effects people Ralph Hammeras and Wee Risser (I’m not making these names up, you know!).
The bulk of the plot is boring and the action seems to center around the coffee shop where the kids hang out (an obligatory setting in a teen movie of the day) and the garage where the film’s protagonist, Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan), runs his towing and repair service and, with the connivance of Jeff (Fred Graham), the local sheriff, steals parts from the wrecks to improve his own hot rod. He’s also got a girlfriend with a very thick Latina accent but he seems a good deal more interested in both the car and the sheriff than in her, and he lives with his mom and his sister, who (as we learn in a jarringly inserted scene about two-thirds of the way through) is sucking all the money he makes because she has some sort of crippling disease and she continually needs braces and other medical equipment. (Thinking it must have been polio and recalling Sister Kenny, I joked, “Where is Rosalind Russell when we need her?” “Miles away from this movie!” Charles fired back.) The garage setting has the unlived-in feel of similar garages in Gay porn films, and quite frankly despite his deficiencies as an actor (he is the best performer in the cast, though that’s not saying much) and a singer (his nerdy little voice wasn’t going to keep Elvis awake nights worrying about the competition), Don Sullivan is actually rather handsome in a tall, gangly way and one can readily imagine him as a Gay-porn performer, especially since even in the baggy pants common in the 1950’s he’s still flashing a pretty impressive basket.
Anyway, the giant gila monster who’s really a normal-sized Mexican beaded lizard wrecks a (model) train (he crosses a gully under a bridge, thereby weakening it and making it impossible for the bridge to support the train’s weight — had the monster, or this film’s writers, seen Buster Keaton’s The General?). I joked at this point, “No animals were harmed in the making of this movie. However, the director’s five-year-old son was severely traumatized when dad sacrificed his electric train set for this sequence.” Thereafter, the sheriff and all the assorted rustics who seem to make up the entire population of this area (aside from the teenagers) finally take the monster’s threat seriously, though it’s up to our hero Chase Winstead to kill the bloody thing. He does this by turning his car into a mobile bomb, loading it with four cans of nitroglycerine and ramming the monster with it, bailing out himself just in time to avoid being consumed by the flames himself à la V for Vendetta.
A number of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fan Web sites have called this the worst movie they ever parodied (which they did rather well, especially when Joel Hodgson and his robot cast members riffed on the incredibly repetitive lyrics of Sullivan’s song, “My Baby, She Rocks”: “My baby she swings, and sings/and swings whenever I bring her things/she swings, and sings/and swings for little diamond rings”), which I doubt (if pressed I’d name Space Ghost and The Giant Spider Invasion as the worst MST3K targets of all time, with Jack Frost probably up there as well); they actually did pretty well by it, especially in their interstital skits based on it (the sight of Joel Hodgson trying to play the rustic town drunk from the movie is especially treasurable).
I stayed up and watched a movie I’d just recorded from TCM’s “Underground” feature, The Killer Shrews, one of the films listed in Harry and Michael Medved’s The Golden Turkey Awards and a pretty dismal film even by the meager standards of low-budget horror/sci-fi of the late 1950’s. This was one of the productions of the short-lived “Hollywood Studios,” which weren’t in Hollywood at all but in Texas, and was made to be shown on a double bill with a similarly themed film called The Giant Gila Monster (in which the title character was played by a normal-sized Gila monster — actually a Mexican beaded lizard — shot on miniature sets; it’s a film that’s found a place in political trivia because the young Robert Dornan supposedly played a teenager eaten by the monster in the opening scene).
Though it would have made excellent fodder for the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew (and indeed they did do an MST3K version in 1992), The Killer Shrews is pretty dreary watching au naturel. It takes place on a deserted island in the Caribbean and features a young, (presumably) hunky boat captain, saddled with the indigestible character name “Thorne Sherman” (and played by James Best, who later appeared with Jerry Lewis in the 1966 film Three on a Couch, who here seems undecided whether he wants to imitate James Dean, Rock Hudson or Elvis). Racing to get into a cove on the island before a hurricane hits the area in general and his boat in particular, Sherman lands and announces he has a cargo for Dr. Marlowe Craigis (Baruch Lumet, father of director Sidney Lumet — odd to think that someone associated with a brilliant film like Network has a familial connection with someone associated with a piece of cheese like The Killer Shrews! — and such a perfect oy vey Jewish type he’d have been good casting for the landlord if Rafter Romance had been remade in the 1960’s), only he doesn’t want to unload it until the storm passes because the weight of the cargo will help hold his boat in place during the hurricane.
Sherman and his Black assistant (and, it seems, only other crew member), ‘Rook’ Griswold (Judge Henry Dupree), land on the island and Sherman is immediately smitten with Craigis’s daughter Ann, played by Ingrid Goude, Swedish beauty and winner of the 1957 Miss Universe contest. (Just how this gorgeous Scandinavian Aryan type who would have been perfect for one of Goebbels’ propaganda newsreels was supposedly sired by the decidedly Jewish loins of Baruch Lumet is never explained in Jay Simms’ script, though there’s a hint when she lists some questions she’s surprised Sherman hasn’t asked and one of them is “about my accent” — I was expecting a line about how she was only Dr. Craigis’s adopted daughter but none materialized.)
Anyway, like a lot of other 1950’s horror films we get about a half-hour of boring exposition before this 65-minute movie finally gets to the nitty-gritty: it turns out that Dr. Craigis has hatched the interesting notion that the way to solve the world’s overpopulation problem is to shrink the average size of human beings to half of what it is at present so the world will be able to support more of them with the same amount of resources. To do this, he explains, he will have to figure out a way to counteract the usual rule that the rate of an organism’s metabolism increases as its size shrinks, and he’s using shrews as a research animal to figure out how to do this. Only — wouldn’t ya know it? — he’s made a serious miscalculation in his experiments and inadvertently bred a race of 100-pound shrews (“That’s the size of an average wolf!” Sherman exclaims) that, though they don’t hunt during the day, are rapidly denuding the island of all other species at night and forcing the members of Craigis’s team — Ann, Jerry Farrell (Ken Curtis), Dr. Radford Baines (Gordon McLendon) and their manservant Mario (Alfredo DeSoto), of whom Jay Simms never quite decided whether or not he could speak English (in some scenes he can, in others he can’t) — to lock themselves in their cabin at night.
Sherman points out that the cabin’s walls are made of plaster-covered adobe and therefore the shrews can dig right through them once they get wet, which they did in that hurricane, and this being a monster movie, one by one the lower-billed cast members end up as giant-shrew food. It turns out that a previous attempt by Dr. Craigis to kill the shrews by poisoning them has backfired big-time; not only did they assimilate the poison but their bodies learned how to manufacture it themselves, making the merest scratch from their fangs fatal and leading Dr. Baines to exclaim, “There’s an extremely high poison content in this shrew’s saliva!,” after he’s had a chance to analyze the shrew that killed Mario and which Sherman subsequently shot. It also turns out that Jerry was once Ann’s boyfriend and he’s having a series of jealous hissy-fits over her new attraction to Sherman (personally I thought Ken Curtis was hunkier than James Best!), and that these characters are going through their supplies of alcohol at such a rate one’s surprised William Powell and Myrna Loy don’t turn up to solve the mystery.
This being an incredibly tacky production (so cheap that its producers, Gordon McLendon and Ken Curtis, took roles in the film themselves to save the costs of hiring two more actors), it’s not surprising that the killer shrews themselves are played by a pack of mangy old dogs with ill-fitting saber-toothed masks (though I suspect some of the extreme close-ups of their faces appearing at holes in the walls were made by humans manipulating the “killer shrew” fangs), or that the climax revolves around an ultra-low-tech solution worked up by Sherman: he ties four old metal drums together and he, Ann and Craigis each get in one and use it as an improvised tank to walk to the shore of the island while the shrews hurl themselves futilely at their improvised armored vehicle.
Whatever meager terror the shrews provide is due almost entirely to the noise sound-effects man Milton Citron cooked up for them to make — sort of like the squeak of a mouse multiplied tenfold — and an ingenious shot devised by director Ray Kellogg, whose work through the rest of the film is pedestrian, to say the least (like Ed Wood, Kellogg pads out his movie with clips of stock footage used so often we start wanting to wave to them and say hello to our old friends), to emphasize the terror of the shrews by having them stick their fangs into the metal barrels through the eye slits Sherman cut into each one so the people using them could see. The general idea is that once they get into the water, the shrews won’t follow (since they can’t swim) and they can swim under the barrels, reach Sherman’s boat and escape, while the remaining shrews, having nothing else left to eat, will devour each other. At the end, like a good 1950’s heroine, Ann Craigis announces that she’s giving up her career as a zoologist to become Mrs. Thorne Sherman, who declares to his future father-in-law, “You know, I’m not going to worry about overpopulation just yet.”
•••••
I ran Charles one of the items on one of his recent “Digital Archive” download discs of Mystery Sciencen Theater 3000 because it contained a legendarily bad movie I’d long wanted to see: The Giant Gila Monster, second of two bizarre cheap horror/sci-fi films made in Cielo, Texas by producer Gordon McLendon — who called his company “Hollywood Pictures” even though they never got anywhere near the real Hollywood while making them. The other one was The Killer Shrews, set on a desert island where a mad scientist (played by Baruch Lumet, whose son Sidney went on to make great movies like Network) had the idea of shrinking people so the earth’s growing human population didn’t outstrip its resources (a plot premise later picked up by Kurt Vonnegut as the survival strategy pursued by China in his novel Slapstick, a comic masterpiece and probably Vonnegut’s most underrated book — the gimmick being that the miniaturized Chinese not only have become the size of germs but they act as germs when ingested into the body of a normal-sized human, causing disease and a quick but painful death), only his experiments produced a bunch of man-eating shrews played by dogs with awfully ill-fitting sabre-toothed masks to make them look properly “shrewish.”
The Giant Gila Monster is a movie of such total tackiness it makes The Killer Shrews look like a horror classic by comparison, but it has its own quirky charm. Incidentally I’ve heard for years that Congressmember Bob Dornan plays an acting role in this film but I’ve been unable to confirm that — he’s not listed for it on imdb.com and no other Web site identifies him with his role — even though he was publicly identified with it as early as his 1960’s days as a Right-wing radio talk show host before he got into politics (so much for the idea that you couldn’t do a Right-wing talk show under the Fairness Doctrine!). I was under the impression that he played the male half of the couple whose car overturns and crashes in the opening scene, but imdb.com lists this actor as one Grady Vaughn.
Anyway, The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews were both produced by Gordon McLendon, who owned a chain of country radio stations and was apparently a born-again Christian before born-again Christianity became cool. Unlike the similarly religious mogul wanna-bes who put up the money for Ed Wood’s Plan Nine from Outer Space, McLendon decided to make a sci-fi horror film aimed at teenage audiences but also to sneak in “moral” messages into the movie, notably in “The Mushroom Song,” an unbelievably sappy limp-rock ballad written and sung by the film’s star, Don Sullivan: a setting of the Garden of Eden story as sap-rock. The script was written by Jay Simms from a story by Ray Kellogg, who also directed, and not surprisingly given that McLendon’s special-effects budget was probably a $50 gift certificate at Toys ’R’ Us (or whatever its equivalent was in 1950’s Texas) the title character was played by a normal-sized lizard walking around miniature sets. What’s more, according to one imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the reptile we see on screen isn’t even a gila monster, but a Mexican beaded lizard!
Needless to say, any thrill potential of this story is horrendously compromised by the filmmakers’ inability to show the [supposedly] giant [supposed] gila monster in the same frame as the people it’s [supposedly] killing — though at least the matchups between the model sets the lizard is working on and the full-sized ones that accommodate the human actors (if, to rip off Dwight MacDonald’s famous line about Haya Harareet in Ben-Hur, I may use that term for courtesy) are surprisingly well done by effects people Ralph Hammeras and Wee Risser (I’m not making these names up, you know!).
The bulk of the plot is boring and the action seems to center around the coffee shop where the kids hang out (an obligatory setting in a teen movie of the day) and the garage where the film’s protagonist, Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan), runs his towing and repair service and, with the connivance of Jeff (Fred Graham), the local sheriff, steals parts from the wrecks to improve his own hot rod. He’s also got a girlfriend with a very thick Latina accent but he seems a good deal more interested in both the car and the sheriff than in her, and he lives with his mom and his sister, who (as we learn in a jarringly inserted scene about two-thirds of the way through) is sucking all the money he makes because she has some sort of crippling disease and she continually needs braces and other medical equipment. (Thinking it must have been polio and recalling Sister Kenny, I joked, “Where is Rosalind Russell when we need her?” “Miles away from this movie!” Charles fired back.) The garage setting has the unlived-in feel of similar garages in Gay porn films, and quite frankly despite his deficiencies as an actor (he is the best performer in the cast, though that’s not saying much) and a singer (his nerdy little voice wasn’t going to keep Elvis awake nights worrying about the competition), Don Sullivan is actually rather handsome in a tall, gangly way and one can readily imagine him as a Gay-porn performer, especially since even in the baggy pants common in the 1950’s he’s still flashing a pretty impressive basket.
Anyway, the giant gila monster who’s really a normal-sized Mexican beaded lizard wrecks a (model) train (he crosses a gully under a bridge, thereby weakening it and making it impossible for the bridge to support the train’s weight — had the monster, or this film’s writers, seen Buster Keaton’s The General?). I joked at this point, “No animals were harmed in the making of this movie. However, the director’s five-year-old son was severely traumatized when dad sacrificed his electric train set for this sequence.” Thereafter, the sheriff and all the assorted rustics who seem to make up the entire population of this area (aside from the teenagers) finally take the monster’s threat seriously, though it’s up to our hero Chase Winstead to kill the bloody thing. He does this by turning his car into a mobile bomb, loading it with four cans of nitroglycerine and ramming the monster with it, bailing out himself just in time to avoid being consumed by the flames himself à la V for Vendetta.
A number of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 fan Web sites have called this the worst movie they ever parodied (which they did rather well, especially when Joel Hodgson and his robot cast members riffed on the incredibly repetitive lyrics of Sullivan’s song, “My Baby, She Rocks”: “My baby she swings, and sings/and swings whenever I bring her things/she swings, and sings/and swings for little diamond rings”), which I doubt (if pressed I’d name Space Ghost and The Giant Spider Invasion as the worst MST3K targets of all time, with Jack Frost probably up there as well); they actually did pretty well by it, especially in their interstital skits based on it (the sight of Joel Hodgson trying to play the rustic town drunk from the movie is especially treasurable).
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tomorrow We Live (PRC, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles an interesting if quite bizarre movie I’d recorded recently to DVD from TCM: Tomorrow We Live, a 1942 PRC “B” with distinguished credentials both in front of and behind the camera. The producer was Seymour Nebenzal, who’d made some of the greatest films of the later years of the Weimar Republic in Germany (Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera and Siren of Atlantis, Lang’s M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) and then had had to flee the Nazis. The director was Edgar G. Ulmer, one of the most consistently interesting of the PRC directors (a former assistant to F. W. Murnau who’d lost his chance at a major studio gig at Universal when he fell in love with Shirley Castle, his script girl on his one Universal movie, The Black Cat, not realizing that studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. was interested in her too; Laemmle fired him as soon as The Black Cat was finished, but apparently the two lovebirds stayed together since the script girl on Tomorrow We Live was named Shirley Ulmer!), and the stars were Ricardo Cortez — spiraling down from major-studio stardom (he’d begun his career in the silent era as Paramount’s attempt at a replacement for Rudolph Valentino, and had done fairly well in the early 1930’s) — and Jean Parker, who’d never quite made it in the majors but did some fairly interesting movies at PRC (notably Ulmer’s Bluebeard and Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House).
Alas, they were all hamstrung by a truly weird script by Bart Lytton that seemed to be an attempt to combine rustic “rural” melodrama, soap opera and gangster movie. Julie Bronson (Jean Parker) returns home to Butte, Montana (established by stock shots of an appalling darkness that look like PRC may have cribbed them from some of John Ford’s silent Westerns) without finishing her last year of teachers’ college, and moves back in with her father, William “Pop” Bronson (Emmett Lynn). She’s got a boyfriend, Lt. Bob Lord (William Marshall), a serviceman stationed at a nearby base and getting ready to ship out to combat, but Julie meets and finds herself dangerously attracted to Alexander Caesar Martin (Ricardo Cortez), gangster, black marketer and owner of the town’s nightclub, “The Dunes.” Martin is referred to throughout as “The Ghost,” so nicknamed because he survived two attempts on his life from rival gangsters, and he’s blackmailed Julie’s father into helping him with his black market activities (he’s got a large inventory of tires stashed in a shed on the Bronson farm) because it turns out “Pop” himself had a criminal past and was an escaped convict. Martin has to deal with another gang that wants to muscle in and take over the Dunes and the black-market business — their confrontations in Martin’s office at the Dunes are the most dully photographed parts of the movie, staged as master shots with the camera seemingly miles away — and at the end the rival gang kills Martin and torches the Dunes, Lt. Lord ships out and he and Julie make arrangements to meet in San Francisco and marry there just before his unit goes off to war.
Content-wise it’s a pretty trivial movie — a far cry from the rich story material Ulmer got to work with in Bluebeard, Out of the Night/Strange Illusion and Detour — and Ulmer, aside from some inexplicable lapses (like those shots of Martin and the rival gangsters in the office, which might as well have been played in a theatre!), directs it like a film noir, with dark, shadowy visuals and artful compositions that seem more beside the point than usual. Tomorrow We Live is a good example of how a German director could take a piece of classic Americana and make something extraordinarily dark and brooding out of it (Ulmer’s noir sensibility even shone through in a couple of places in Jive Junction, his teen musical!), though the script and directorial style clash rather than reinforcing each other and a lot of Ulmer’s visual virtuosity (including a pretty normal love scene between Lt. Lord and Julie in which Julie’s hair blows up from her scalp and photographs almost stark-white in the backlighting!) seems pretty much beside the point.
I ran Charles an interesting if quite bizarre movie I’d recorded recently to DVD from TCM: Tomorrow We Live, a 1942 PRC “B” with distinguished credentials both in front of and behind the camera. The producer was Seymour Nebenzal, who’d made some of the greatest films of the later years of the Weimar Republic in Germany (Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera and Siren of Atlantis, Lang’s M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) and then had had to flee the Nazis. The director was Edgar G. Ulmer, one of the most consistently interesting of the PRC directors (a former assistant to F. W. Murnau who’d lost his chance at a major studio gig at Universal when he fell in love with Shirley Castle, his script girl on his one Universal movie, The Black Cat, not realizing that studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. was interested in her too; Laemmle fired him as soon as The Black Cat was finished, but apparently the two lovebirds stayed together since the script girl on Tomorrow We Live was named Shirley Ulmer!), and the stars were Ricardo Cortez — spiraling down from major-studio stardom (he’d begun his career in the silent era as Paramount’s attempt at a replacement for Rudolph Valentino, and had done fairly well in the early 1930’s) — and Jean Parker, who’d never quite made it in the majors but did some fairly interesting movies at PRC (notably Ulmer’s Bluebeard and Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House).
Alas, they were all hamstrung by a truly weird script by Bart Lytton that seemed to be an attempt to combine rustic “rural” melodrama, soap opera and gangster movie. Julie Bronson (Jean Parker) returns home to Butte, Montana (established by stock shots of an appalling darkness that look like PRC may have cribbed them from some of John Ford’s silent Westerns) without finishing her last year of teachers’ college, and moves back in with her father, William “Pop” Bronson (Emmett Lynn). She’s got a boyfriend, Lt. Bob Lord (William Marshall), a serviceman stationed at a nearby base and getting ready to ship out to combat, but Julie meets and finds herself dangerously attracted to Alexander Caesar Martin (Ricardo Cortez), gangster, black marketer and owner of the town’s nightclub, “The Dunes.” Martin is referred to throughout as “The Ghost,” so nicknamed because he survived two attempts on his life from rival gangsters, and he’s blackmailed Julie’s father into helping him with his black market activities (he’s got a large inventory of tires stashed in a shed on the Bronson farm) because it turns out “Pop” himself had a criminal past and was an escaped convict. Martin has to deal with another gang that wants to muscle in and take over the Dunes and the black-market business — their confrontations in Martin’s office at the Dunes are the most dully photographed parts of the movie, staged as master shots with the camera seemingly miles away — and at the end the rival gang kills Martin and torches the Dunes, Lt. Lord ships out and he and Julie make arrangements to meet in San Francisco and marry there just before his unit goes off to war.
Content-wise it’s a pretty trivial movie — a far cry from the rich story material Ulmer got to work with in Bluebeard, Out of the Night/Strange Illusion and Detour — and Ulmer, aside from some inexplicable lapses (like those shots of Martin and the rival gangsters in the office, which might as well have been played in a theatre!), directs it like a film noir, with dark, shadowy visuals and artful compositions that seem more beside the point than usual. Tomorrow We Live is a good example of how a German director could take a piece of classic Americana and make something extraordinarily dark and brooding out of it (Ulmer’s noir sensibility even shone through in a couple of places in Jive Junction, his teen musical!), though the script and directorial style clash rather than reinforcing each other and a lot of Ulmer’s visual virtuosity (including a pretty normal love scene between Lt. Lord and Julie in which Julie’s hair blows up from her scalp and photographs almost stark-white in the backlighting!) seems pretty much beside the point.
Earth vs. the Spider (American International, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I dredged up one of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 discs and reached for a disc that I thought contained the film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, a dumb movie but one with a certain degree of appeal (especially from Ray Harryhausen’s effects work, notably the final scene in which an alien flying saucer crashes into the White House as it is shot down), but no-o-o-o-o, the movie actually was Earth vs. the Spider, a 1958 non-epic from producer-director Bert I. Gordon at American International.
It’s your typical small-town high-schoolers (played by actors in their late 20’s and early 30’s, by the way, though the MST3K crew didn’t ridicule this as much as they had in Ring of Terror) battling giant monster movie — virtually all of Bert I. Gordon’s movies feature something or someone who’s been artificially enlarged in size and has become menacing — and aside from Sally Fraser (Peter Graves’ wife in It Conquered the World, a movie that actually looks good by comparison with Earth vs. the Spider!), none of the cast members (Ed Kemmer, June Kenney, Eugene Persson, Gene Roth, Hal Torey, June Jocelyn, Mickey Finn et al.) were people I’d ever herd of before — and as a giant-spider movie this one is better than The Giant Spider Invasion but nowhere near as good as Tarantula (and, indeed, the spider featured here is a tarantula, leading to someone posting a “goof” comment on imdb.com to the effect that spider’s webs are an important part of the story but tarantulas don’t spin webs).
It was pretty typical tacky 1950’s sci-fi, complete with model shots of a giant spider that looked like someone made it with pipe cleaners (besides producing, directing and co-writing — with The Mole People author László Görög and George Worthing Yates — Bert I. Gordon also took credit for the special effects, with one Flora M. Gordon listed as his assistant, and naturally the MST3K crew couldn’t resist making fun of the all-in-the-family nature of the credits: “Honey, pass me that plastic head, please”) and some all-too-obvious cuts between live-action footage and models of the same sets. About the only point of distinction this movie had was that Gordon took a crew to Carlsbad Caverns and filmed it as the home of his giant spider — which was cool, though it would have looked nicer in color — but for the most part this one was just one big bore even the MST3K crew couldn’t make entertaining, and if anything they seemed more inspired by the weird short with which they prefaced it — an educational film about effective public speaking hosted by a real-life speech professor who looked, acted and sounded all too much like the voice coach famously caricatured in Singin’ in the Rain — which they did a much better job of ridiculing.
I dredged up one of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 discs and reached for a disc that I thought contained the film Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, a dumb movie but one with a certain degree of appeal (especially from Ray Harryhausen’s effects work, notably the final scene in which an alien flying saucer crashes into the White House as it is shot down), but no-o-o-o-o, the movie actually was Earth vs. the Spider, a 1958 non-epic from producer-director Bert I. Gordon at American International.
It’s your typical small-town high-schoolers (played by actors in their late 20’s and early 30’s, by the way, though the MST3K crew didn’t ridicule this as much as they had in Ring of Terror) battling giant monster movie — virtually all of Bert I. Gordon’s movies feature something or someone who’s been artificially enlarged in size and has become menacing — and aside from Sally Fraser (Peter Graves’ wife in It Conquered the World, a movie that actually looks good by comparison with Earth vs. the Spider!), none of the cast members (Ed Kemmer, June Kenney, Eugene Persson, Gene Roth, Hal Torey, June Jocelyn, Mickey Finn et al.) were people I’d ever herd of before — and as a giant-spider movie this one is better than The Giant Spider Invasion but nowhere near as good as Tarantula (and, indeed, the spider featured here is a tarantula, leading to someone posting a “goof” comment on imdb.com to the effect that spider’s webs are an important part of the story but tarantulas don’t spin webs).
It was pretty typical tacky 1950’s sci-fi, complete with model shots of a giant spider that looked like someone made it with pipe cleaners (besides producing, directing and co-writing — with The Mole People author László Görög and George Worthing Yates — Bert I. Gordon also took credit for the special effects, with one Flora M. Gordon listed as his assistant, and naturally the MST3K crew couldn’t resist making fun of the all-in-the-family nature of the credits: “Honey, pass me that plastic head, please”) and some all-too-obvious cuts between live-action footage and models of the same sets. About the only point of distinction this movie had was that Gordon took a crew to Carlsbad Caverns and filmed it as the home of his giant spider — which was cool, though it would have looked nicer in color — but for the most part this one was just one big bore even the MST3K crew couldn’t make entertaining, and if anything they seemed more inspired by the weird short with which they prefaced it — an educational film about effective public speaking hosted by a real-life speech professor who looked, acted and sounded all too much like the voice coach famously caricatured in Singin’ in the Rain — which they did a much better job of ridiculing.
Friday, July 25, 2008
It Conquered the World (American International, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we ended up watching was It Conquered the World, a fascinating (in all the wrong ways!) Roger Corman “B” from American International in 1956 that was basically a blatant ripoff of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still: iconoclastic scientist Dr. Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef, better known as the bald, rat-faced villain in Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti Westerns but here sporting hair, a moustache, decent modern clothes and a disinclination to support things like nuclear weapons and space launches) makes radio contact with an alien from Venus (the planet Venus? Yes, indeed!) and offers guidance to it while it hijacks an experimental satellite and rides it down to Earth. Once here, it puts in place a plan to (dare I say it?) conquer the world by sending out bat-like probes that bite people on the backs of their necks and turn them into zombies under his control. As a demonstration of his power, he also stops all sources of human energy — electricity and automotive travel in particular — and since he only has eight of the probes, he husbands them and uses them on the leading politicians and military men of the small Colorado town where all this is taking place.
Among his targets are Anderson’s colleague, Dr. Paul Nelson (Peter Graves, top-billed), and Nelson’s wife Joan (Sally Fraser), whom the alien succeeds in taking over — whereupon, since the process appears to be irreversible, Paul is forced to shoot her. Produced and directed by Corman from a script by Lou Rusoff, It Conquered the World came out five months and 10 days after the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and sought to take the Body Snatchers metaphor and use it for Right-wing propaganda (as John Carpenter’s 1983 They Live took it over and used it for liberal-Left propaganda in the age of Ronald Reagan, who’s “outed” as an alien in the theatrical and DVD versions of Carpenter’s film, though not in the TV version); just as the House Un-American Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and the minions of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade were telling us that Communists pursued their dastardly plots by recruiting our political, military and scientific leaders and subverting them, so does the Venusian alien in this film; there’s one truly chilling scene in which the local general (who’s been taken over) confronts the editor of the town paper (who hasn’t), gives him his marching orders as to what to print under the New Order, and shoots the editor dead when the editor invokes freedom of the press to defy him.
Alas, any quality It Conquered the World might have had is completely undone by the ridiculousness of the monster; one of Paul Blaisdell’s makeups for American International (and a design he reused again and again, just adding bits and pieces of cloth and wire to change the monster’s appearance so it would look like a “new” menace in each film), it resembles a giant ambulatory cucumber, sliced in half vertically and stood up on the severed end, to which someone tried to play Mr. Potato Head and stick toothpick arms in place (though according to the trivia section on imdb.com the actual costume — still in the hands of Blaisdell’s assistant, Bob Burns — is beet-red, not green as I’d assumed). Apparently it originally had a round, dome-shaped head, but when this version (with Blaisdell himself inside wearing and working the costume) was tested, not only was it unfrightening but Beverly Garland, the actress playing Tom Anderson’s wife (who’s supposed to confront the monster in a scene that attempts high drama and achieves high camp), towered over it.
Charles and I watched this on a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 download and the MST3K crew mostly made fun of Graves’ future career (especially his gig hosting Arts & Entertainment’s Biography series) and his family relationship with James Arness (Graves was actually Arness’s younger brother, something I hadn’t known before),who at the time had a respectable gig starring in the TV series Gunsmoke while Graves had to make a living making movies like this and the even worse The Beginning of the End (which staged an invasion of Chicago by giant grasshoppers by having real grasshoppers walk over a still photo of the Chicago skyline, often of course stepping on the parts of the photo that were meant to represent sky!). Rusoff did give Graves an unbelievably pretentious curtain speech expressing the film’s Libertarian (sort of) politics: “Man is a feeling creature, and because of it the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. When men seek such perfection they find only death, fire, loss, disillusionment and the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to our misery but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved. There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from Man himself” — and quite naturally the MST3K crew had a lot of fun ridiculing that!
The film we ended up watching was It Conquered the World, a fascinating (in all the wrong ways!) Roger Corman “B” from American International in 1956 that was basically a blatant ripoff of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Day the Earth Stood Still: iconoclastic scientist Dr. Tom Anderson (Lee Van Cleef, better known as the bald, rat-faced villain in Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti Westerns but here sporting hair, a moustache, decent modern clothes and a disinclination to support things like nuclear weapons and space launches) makes radio contact with an alien from Venus (the planet Venus? Yes, indeed!) and offers guidance to it while it hijacks an experimental satellite and rides it down to Earth. Once here, it puts in place a plan to (dare I say it?) conquer the world by sending out bat-like probes that bite people on the backs of their necks and turn them into zombies under his control. As a demonstration of his power, he also stops all sources of human energy — electricity and automotive travel in particular — and since he only has eight of the probes, he husbands them and uses them on the leading politicians and military men of the small Colorado town where all this is taking place.
Among his targets are Anderson’s colleague, Dr. Paul Nelson (Peter Graves, top-billed), and Nelson’s wife Joan (Sally Fraser), whom the alien succeeds in taking over — whereupon, since the process appears to be irreversible, Paul is forced to shoot her. Produced and directed by Corman from a script by Lou Rusoff, It Conquered the World came out five months and 10 days after the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and sought to take the Body Snatchers metaphor and use it for Right-wing propaganda (as John Carpenter’s 1983 They Live took it over and used it for liberal-Left propaganda in the age of Ronald Reagan, who’s “outed” as an alien in the theatrical and DVD versions of Carpenter’s film, though not in the TV version); just as the House Un-American Activities Committee, Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover and the minions of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade were telling us that Communists pursued their dastardly plots by recruiting our political, military and scientific leaders and subverting them, so does the Venusian alien in this film; there’s one truly chilling scene in which the local general (who’s been taken over) confronts the editor of the town paper (who hasn’t), gives him his marching orders as to what to print under the New Order, and shoots the editor dead when the editor invokes freedom of the press to defy him.
Alas, any quality It Conquered the World might have had is completely undone by the ridiculousness of the monster; one of Paul Blaisdell’s makeups for American International (and a design he reused again and again, just adding bits and pieces of cloth and wire to change the monster’s appearance so it would look like a “new” menace in each film), it resembles a giant ambulatory cucumber, sliced in half vertically and stood up on the severed end, to which someone tried to play Mr. Potato Head and stick toothpick arms in place (though according to the trivia section on imdb.com the actual costume — still in the hands of Blaisdell’s assistant, Bob Burns — is beet-red, not green as I’d assumed). Apparently it originally had a round, dome-shaped head, but when this version (with Blaisdell himself inside wearing and working the costume) was tested, not only was it unfrightening but Beverly Garland, the actress playing Tom Anderson’s wife (who’s supposed to confront the monster in a scene that attempts high drama and achieves high camp), towered over it.
Charles and I watched this on a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 download and the MST3K crew mostly made fun of Graves’ future career (especially his gig hosting Arts & Entertainment’s Biography series) and his family relationship with James Arness (Graves was actually Arness’s younger brother, something I hadn’t known before),who at the time had a respectable gig starring in the TV series Gunsmoke while Graves had to make a living making movies like this and the even worse The Beginning of the End (which staged an invasion of Chicago by giant grasshoppers by having real grasshoppers walk over a still photo of the Chicago skyline, often of course stepping on the parts of the photo that were meant to represent sky!). Rusoff did give Graves an unbelievably pretentious curtain speech expressing the film’s Libertarian (sort of) politics: “Man is a feeling creature, and because of it the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. When men seek such perfection they find only death, fire, loss, disillusionment and the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to our misery but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved. There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from Man himself” — and quite naturally the MST3K crew had a lot of fun ridiculing that!
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Harem Girl (Columbia, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I managed to squeeze in a movie, one of the Columbia “B”’s from faraway places I’d recorded on DVD earlier in the week, and it proved to be surprisingly good: Harem Girl, a vehicle for wisecracking blonde comedienne Joan Davis, directed by Edward Bernds (a former sound recorder who’d made his directorial debut with the Three Stooges’ short Micro Phonies in 1945 — and it showed) and written by him and Elwood Ullman (another Stooges veteran). Davis plays Susie Perkins, a woman from Cedar Rapids who suddenly chucks her job and fulfills her dream of emigrating to the Middle East in hopes of finding one of those hot sheiks that didn’t exist outside of Rudolph Valentino movies.
By screenwriters’ fiat, her traveling companion is Shareen (Peggie Castle), princess of a fictitious and unnamed Arab country (most of the stock footage we see representing it is from Egypt, including a beautiful overhead shot of one of the pyramids, though judging from the court intrigue and the presence of oil it appears that the filmmakers were thinking of Iraq), only while she’s been gone the government has been seized by the usurper Jamal (Donald Randolph), who alternates between wanting to have Shareen killed and have her married off to Ameen (Peter Bracco), the Bey of Amar — though Bracco’s performance is so queeny I joked he’d better have been called the Gay of Amar. The gimmick is that Shareen’s now-deceased father had the idea of banning all citizens of his country from owning guns, thinking that would prevent a civil war — but instead Jamal and his gang just got guns from outside and the rest of the people were sitting ducks. Majeed (Paul Marion), Shareen’s boyfriend, wants to lead a revolution but knows he doesn’t stand a chance without firearms, so Susie hits on the idea of going undercover in the palace to find out the location of Jamal’s arms stash so the rebels can steal the guns and use them to take over.
This is one of those comedies in which the plot is just a pretext, but Bernds and Ullman do a great job of maintaining the tension between the old-fashioned Arabian Nights costume-picture tropes and the contemporary setting (including the MacGuffin of an old scroll that indicates the location of an oil field that will make everyone in this country fabulously wealthy — some things never change!), and Davis (in her last feature film, though after this movie she’d spend three years on TV in a series she starred in and produced called, natch, I Married Joan) is a riot throughout, nervy and wise-cracking but also adept at doing physical comedy (the scene in which her bed falls in on her is especially delightful), as if someone cross-bred Joan Blondell and Charlotte Greenwood. The anti-racist crowd would probably make a grim feast of all the racist Arab stereotypes in this movie (and, curiously, religion isn’t mentioned at all — at least most of the Middle Eastern period pieces had phrases in the dialogue like “By the beard of the Prophet!” that at least acknowledged the existence of Islam), but overall Harem Girl holds up as a very funny movie, one that aimed low but hit its target squarely and offered a lot of joy doing it.
I managed to squeeze in a movie, one of the Columbia “B”’s from faraway places I’d recorded on DVD earlier in the week, and it proved to be surprisingly good: Harem Girl, a vehicle for wisecracking blonde comedienne Joan Davis, directed by Edward Bernds (a former sound recorder who’d made his directorial debut with the Three Stooges’ short Micro Phonies in 1945 — and it showed) and written by him and Elwood Ullman (another Stooges veteran). Davis plays Susie Perkins, a woman from Cedar Rapids who suddenly chucks her job and fulfills her dream of emigrating to the Middle East in hopes of finding one of those hot sheiks that didn’t exist outside of Rudolph Valentino movies.
By screenwriters’ fiat, her traveling companion is Shareen (Peggie Castle), princess of a fictitious and unnamed Arab country (most of the stock footage we see representing it is from Egypt, including a beautiful overhead shot of one of the pyramids, though judging from the court intrigue and the presence of oil it appears that the filmmakers were thinking of Iraq), only while she’s been gone the government has been seized by the usurper Jamal (Donald Randolph), who alternates between wanting to have Shareen killed and have her married off to Ameen (Peter Bracco), the Bey of Amar — though Bracco’s performance is so queeny I joked he’d better have been called the Gay of Amar. The gimmick is that Shareen’s now-deceased father had the idea of banning all citizens of his country from owning guns, thinking that would prevent a civil war — but instead Jamal and his gang just got guns from outside and the rest of the people were sitting ducks. Majeed (Paul Marion), Shareen’s boyfriend, wants to lead a revolution but knows he doesn’t stand a chance without firearms, so Susie hits on the idea of going undercover in the palace to find out the location of Jamal’s arms stash so the rebels can steal the guns and use them to take over.
This is one of those comedies in which the plot is just a pretext, but Bernds and Ullman do a great job of maintaining the tension between the old-fashioned Arabian Nights costume-picture tropes and the contemporary setting (including the MacGuffin of an old scroll that indicates the location of an oil field that will make everyone in this country fabulously wealthy — some things never change!), and Davis (in her last feature film, though after this movie she’d spend three years on TV in a series she starred in and produced called, natch, I Married Joan) is a riot throughout, nervy and wise-cracking but also adept at doing physical comedy (the scene in which her bed falls in on her is especially delightful), as if someone cross-bred Joan Blondell and Charlotte Greenwood. The anti-racist crowd would probably make a grim feast of all the racist Arab stereotypes in this movie (and, curiously, religion isn’t mentioned at all — at least most of the Middle Eastern period pieces had phrases in the dialogue like “By the beard of the Prophet!” that at least acknowledged the existence of Islam), but overall Harem Girl holds up as a very funny movie, one that aimed low but hit its target squarely and offered a lot of joy doing it.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Thank You, Mr. Moto (20th Century-Fox, 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Thank You, Mr. Moto is a 1937 20th Century-Fox production and the second film in the series starring Peter Lorre as Kentaro Moto, Japanese — detective? Secret-service agent? Spy? The writing never makes it quite clear which — created by John P. Marquand, a respectable writer of novels of manners “slumming” in the detective genre and apparently recruited to do so by a publisher that wanted more stories like the Charlie Chan novels now that Chan’s creator, Earl Derr Biggers, had died in 1933. The first film in the series, Think Fast, Mr. Moto, had also been based directly on a Marquand novel, but this was one detective-movie series that actually seemed to improve when they got away from the original character’s stories as sources and started cooking up their own.
It’s a lumbering tale in which the MacGuffin is a series of seven hand-painted scrolls that, when laid next to each other, become a map leading to the tomb of Genghis Khan and the location of the fabulous treasure that was buried with him. One of the scrolls was loaned by its owner, Princess Chung (the actress playing her isn’t listed either in the on-screen credits or in the American Film Institute Catalog but I suspect she was the real-life Mrs. Peter Lorre, Celia Lovsky, who 30 years later would play almost exactly this sort of dragon-lady character as Mr. Spock’s mother in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek series), to a museum, and then stolen, and various baddies including Eric Koerger (Sidney Blackmer), Madame Tchernov (Nedda Harrigan, later Mrs. Joshua Logan) and a few others, are out to steal them and get the treasure.
Moto is also on the trail of the treasure, working for mysterious employers whom we presume are on the side of good, and he holds out the hope of financial compensation to the princess and her son (Philip Ahn, whose quiet dignity steals the movie out from under the rest of the principals, as usual), which they resist because they don’t want the tomb of the great conqueror to be despoiled and looted the way those of the Egyptian pharaohs were. Lorre doesn’t really look Asian but that rat-like voice is certainly believable as Japanese (as it was as German, Greek or all the other exotic nationalities he played), and this film has a lot more action than the Chan movies — though Lorre was clearly doubled in a lot of the fight scenes, at least Moto got to practice jiu-jitsu and subdue his enemies with physical force as well as cunning — but the film ultimately collapses under the creaky weight of Marquand’s plot as adapted by Willis Cooper and director Foster, with too many subplots and barely explained murders (including that of Madame Tchernov’s husband, played by the great character actor Sig Ruman surprisingly “straight,” which kicks off the movie) to be especially mysterious or thrilling.
Thank You, Mr. Moto is a 1937 20th Century-Fox production and the second film in the series starring Peter Lorre as Kentaro Moto, Japanese — detective? Secret-service agent? Spy? The writing never makes it quite clear which — created by John P. Marquand, a respectable writer of novels of manners “slumming” in the detective genre and apparently recruited to do so by a publisher that wanted more stories like the Charlie Chan novels now that Chan’s creator, Earl Derr Biggers, had died in 1933. The first film in the series, Think Fast, Mr. Moto, had also been based directly on a Marquand novel, but this was one detective-movie series that actually seemed to improve when they got away from the original character’s stories as sources and started cooking up their own.
It’s a lumbering tale in which the MacGuffin is a series of seven hand-painted scrolls that, when laid next to each other, become a map leading to the tomb of Genghis Khan and the location of the fabulous treasure that was buried with him. One of the scrolls was loaned by its owner, Princess Chung (the actress playing her isn’t listed either in the on-screen credits or in the American Film Institute Catalog but I suspect she was the real-life Mrs. Peter Lorre, Celia Lovsky, who 30 years later would play almost exactly this sort of dragon-lady character as Mr. Spock’s mother in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek series), to a museum, and then stolen, and various baddies including Eric Koerger (Sidney Blackmer), Madame Tchernov (Nedda Harrigan, later Mrs. Joshua Logan) and a few others, are out to steal them and get the treasure.
Moto is also on the trail of the treasure, working for mysterious employers whom we presume are on the side of good, and he holds out the hope of financial compensation to the princess and her son (Philip Ahn, whose quiet dignity steals the movie out from under the rest of the principals, as usual), which they resist because they don’t want the tomb of the great conqueror to be despoiled and looted the way those of the Egyptian pharaohs were. Lorre doesn’t really look Asian but that rat-like voice is certainly believable as Japanese (as it was as German, Greek or all the other exotic nationalities he played), and this film has a lot more action than the Chan movies — though Lorre was clearly doubled in a lot of the fight scenes, at least Moto got to practice jiu-jitsu and subdue his enemies with physical force as well as cunning — but the film ultimately collapses under the creaky weight of Marquand’s plot as adapted by Willis Cooper and director Foster, with too many subplots and barely explained murders (including that of Madame Tchernov’s husband, played by the great character actor Sig Ruman surprisingly “straight,” which kicks off the movie) to be especially mysterious or thrilling.
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