by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles and I got home — again in a driving rainstorm!
— we ended up watching another movie. Last night TCM was broadcasting a rather
interesting film called Maybe It’s Love,
based on a 1927 play by Maxwell Anderson (!) called Saturday’s
Children — this was when the work week was
5 ½ days instead of 5, with people making their dates on Saturday afternoons
and evenings. TCM’s guest host Donald Bogle (the African-American film
historian who’s filling in for Robert Osborne after having joined him as guest
host when the network did an “African-Americans in film” series) explained that
this was the first film Gloria Stuart did after she left Universal and signed
with Warner Bros. (in line with the confusion between the “Warner Bros.” and
“First National” corporate identities, the opening credits announce this film
as a Warner Bros. production while the closing credits claim it for First
National!). Bette Davis eventually prospered after making the same switch in
studio affiliations, but it didn’t help Stuart; from quality roles in Universal
films like The Kiss Before the Mirror, The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man (for director James Whale) and Air Mail (for John Ford, who would ultimately direct Stuart in
what’s probably her best film, The Prisoner of Shark Island, at 20th Century-Fox) she went to lead
roles in this nice but uninspired comedy and then as Dick Powell’s rich
girlfriend in Gold Diggers of 1935
(a great movie, but nobody watches it for Gloria Stuart; people watch it for
the two big Busby Berkeley numbers at the end, especially the proto-noir “Lullaby of Broadway”). First National had already
filmed Saturday’s Children under
Anderson’s title in 1929 with Gregory La Cava directing and Corinne Griffith
and Grant Withers as the leads; later Warners would make it a third time,
reverting to the Saturday’s Children
title, in 1940 with Vincent Sherman directing and Anne Shirley and John
Garfield in the leads.
This version was the directorial debut of William
McGann, a competent but hacky director who remained pretty much in the “B” salt
mines his entire career, from a script by Jerry Wald (future producer) and
Harry Sauber, and though it’s not a world-beater it’s a charming romantic
comedy with a quite nice plot line about love among the young and poor. Stuart
plays Bobby Halevy, who works as a secretary for an import-export company owned
by Adolph Mengle (Joseph Cawthorn), a malapropistic, thickly accented character
so reminiscent of producer Sam Goldwyn I couldn’t help but wonder if Cawthorn
was deliberately made up to look like him and given some of the caricatured
“Goldwynisms,” since he’s malapropistic throughout the film. Bobby is dating
Rims O’Neil (Ross Alexander), a tall, gangly clerk in the Mengle operation, but
he’s anxious because he doesn’t have enough money to support her and won’t
unless he can get Mengle to appoint him to run the company’s Havana office,
which will mean a raise and will force him to go alone for a bit, but when he
gets there he can raise the money from his increased salary and send for Bobby.
Meanwhile, the boss’s son, Adolph Jr. (Philip Reed), ends up at the office
because his dad wants to break him of his wastrel ways and teach him how to
work for a living, and instead of sending Bobby to Havana Sr. assigns him to be
Jr.’s keeper, making sure he doesn’t cruise the help or use the office
telephone to make dates with girls. Of course Jr. falls in love at first sight
with Bobby, who works as Sr.’s secretary, and in order to eliminate the
competition Jr. talks his dad into offering Bobby the Havana assignment after
all. Rims is ready to take it and even arrives at the ship, ready to sail, only
Bobby comes to see him off and, following some ill-advised advice from her
sister Florrie Sands (Ruth Donnelly) — it’s been established that Bobby lives with
her entire family, including her dad (Henry Travers, a year after he played her
father in The Invisible Man as
well), her mom (Helen Lowell), her brother-in-law (Frank McHugh at his most
annoying Frank McHughishness) and an aunt (Dorothy Dare) — Bobby gets Rims to
come back to her even though it means abandoning the boat and the Havana job
and getting married that very night.
The next day at the office Mengle, Sr. not
only says Rims isn’t getting the Havana job after all but he’s being fired, and
Rims gets another job but at less pay (which plays hell with Bobby’s attempts
to budget for them) until their financial problems and the continued inundation
of their apartment by Bobby’s relatives get to him. Rims buys a used car and
his brother-in-law takes over the driving, throws him out and crashes it. That
breaks up the relationship, and Bobby returns to her old job as Mengle, Sr.’s
secretary, while Rims returns to Mengle’s and begs for another shot at the
Havana job — more to get away from Bobby, whom he’s ready to divorce so Jr. can
have her, than anything else — only Jr., who seems to have seen The
Front Page, loans Rims his car so he can
make his ship on time, then reports it stolen, so Rims is arrested, he misses
the ship, but he and Bobby reconcile after she says the key to their happiness
is to behave as lovers rather than as married people. This isn’t exactly the
world’s freshest plot line, then or
now, but it’s charming and it succeeds precisely where a lot of modern movies
fail: it makes us like the characters
and want to see them prevail.
Though Rims’ rambunctious nature — he looks like
a go-getter who’s trying just a little too hard — and gangly, almost
uncoordinated body make it seem like he’d be a trial to live with (at times I
wished Warners would have given this role to their ace tap dancer, Hal LeRoy),
we like him, we like Bobby, and we want them to be together — and we want Bobby
to spurn the advances of the spoiled rich kid even though he’s drawn as a more
complex character than the second leads in most rom-coms of the period,
basically decent despite his wastrel ways, unwilling to go after Bobby by
overwhelming her with gifts Rims can’t match, and a good loser in the romance
game at the end even though sometimes the body language between Philip Reed and
the real-life Bisexual Ross Alexander makes one wonder why the poor guy doesn’t marry the rich guy instead! Maybe
It’s Love is one of those little movies the
studio system was so good at turning out that wasn’t going to be a world-beater
but was reliable entertainment,
and it had some charming (that word again!) supporting performances by J.
Farrell McDonald as a philosophical patrolman and the marvelous Maude Eburne as
the landlady of a boarding house Bobby moves into during her temporary breakup
from Rims towards the end.
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Whispering Whoopee (Hal Roach, 1930)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last Charles and I both got back so late — he from work and I from an Activist San Diego radio meeting — that instead of a feature-length film we ran a few shorts we’d just downloaded from archive.org. One was Whispering Whoopee, a 1930 Hal Roach comedy directed by James W. Horne and starring Charley Chase (his real name was Charley Parrott, and when he directed himself — which he did fairly often — he took his directorial credit as Parrott and his acting credit as Chase; his brother, James Parrott, was also a Roach director) as a property owner who’s trying to unload a parcel in Rockaway, New Jersey on the city government. Figuring that the best way to get the deal done is by exploiting the weaknesses of the flesh in the men he’s dealing with, he hires three professional vamps (even in the so-called “pre-Code” era the script by H. M. “Beanie” Walker and almost certainly the usual crew of Roach gag men couldn’t come right out and say they were prostitutes, but it’s pretty apparent) to seduce them into buying his property at a good price. The vamps, interestingly, are played by three Roach contractees who use their real names for their characters: Thelma Todd, Anita Garvin (quite striking and leggy even though she was better as the vengeful virago in the Laurel and Hardy short Blotto than the good-time girl she’s playing here) and Dolores Brinkman.
Only when Chase opens the door to admit the representatives from Rockaway, he finds that the city government is ahead of him: instead of the presumably reprobate men he was expecting he finds three straight-laced, sour-faced old men (Dell Henderson, Carl Stockdale and Tenen Holtz) — also, interestingly, using their real names for their characters — and he also has to deal with his landlord, Mr. Richmond (Edward Dillon), who warns him he’s already had too many neighbors complaining about his penchant for wild parties and this is his last warning: if he throws another one, he’ll be tossed out of the building. So he tries to keep his good-time girls quiet and demure — to the point of grabbing a throw-rug and draping it over Ms. Brinkman to make her costume just a wee bit more modest — only Ricketts (Eddie Dunn), his butler, who isn’t in on the change in plans and misunderstands Chase’s hand signals, spikes the drinks to be stronger, not weaker, than usual — and the alcohol does the trick and the men start responding to the advances of the women and the overall devil-may-care atmosphere of the party that develops. Eventually the principals start an all-out war with seltzer bottles that escalates into a typical Roach tit-for-tat slapstick scene until the men suddenly remember that what they came for was to sign the agreement to buy Chase’s property — which they do, with a fountain pen, only just then a few more blasts of seltzer hit the document and wash away the signatures. The End.
Whispering Whoopee is a routine two-reeler with one absolutely inspired and anarchic moment the Marx Brothers would have been proud of — Chase leads the three Rockawayans in a wild sing-along to the “Rockaway Booster Song” (I’m not making this up, you know!) — but aside from that it’s amusing but not scream-out-loud funny, and frankly Chase was better as a harried husband in the films he made that anticipated the formulae of 1950’s TV sitcoms (though John Bunny, a heavy-set middle-aged man who made a series of silent comedy shorts for Vitagraph between 1912 and 1915, when he died, was not only the first movie comedy star but also the true founder of the sitcom series — especially since, like such legendary later sitcom couples as George and Gracie, and Lucy and Desi, he and his wife actually played husband and wife on screen) than he is as the rambunctious, unscrupulous go-getter he plays here.
The night before last Charles and I both got back so late — he from work and I from an Activist San Diego radio meeting — that instead of a feature-length film we ran a few shorts we’d just downloaded from archive.org. One was Whispering Whoopee, a 1930 Hal Roach comedy directed by James W. Horne and starring Charley Chase (his real name was Charley Parrott, and when he directed himself — which he did fairly often — he took his directorial credit as Parrott and his acting credit as Chase; his brother, James Parrott, was also a Roach director) as a property owner who’s trying to unload a parcel in Rockaway, New Jersey on the city government. Figuring that the best way to get the deal done is by exploiting the weaknesses of the flesh in the men he’s dealing with, he hires three professional vamps (even in the so-called “pre-Code” era the script by H. M. “Beanie” Walker and almost certainly the usual crew of Roach gag men couldn’t come right out and say they were prostitutes, but it’s pretty apparent) to seduce them into buying his property at a good price. The vamps, interestingly, are played by three Roach contractees who use their real names for their characters: Thelma Todd, Anita Garvin (quite striking and leggy even though she was better as the vengeful virago in the Laurel and Hardy short Blotto than the good-time girl she’s playing here) and Dolores Brinkman.
Only when Chase opens the door to admit the representatives from Rockaway, he finds that the city government is ahead of him: instead of the presumably reprobate men he was expecting he finds three straight-laced, sour-faced old men (Dell Henderson, Carl Stockdale and Tenen Holtz) — also, interestingly, using their real names for their characters — and he also has to deal with his landlord, Mr. Richmond (Edward Dillon), who warns him he’s already had too many neighbors complaining about his penchant for wild parties and this is his last warning: if he throws another one, he’ll be tossed out of the building. So he tries to keep his good-time girls quiet and demure — to the point of grabbing a throw-rug and draping it over Ms. Brinkman to make her costume just a wee bit more modest — only Ricketts (Eddie Dunn), his butler, who isn’t in on the change in plans and misunderstands Chase’s hand signals, spikes the drinks to be stronger, not weaker, than usual — and the alcohol does the trick and the men start responding to the advances of the women and the overall devil-may-care atmosphere of the party that develops. Eventually the principals start an all-out war with seltzer bottles that escalates into a typical Roach tit-for-tat slapstick scene until the men suddenly remember that what they came for was to sign the agreement to buy Chase’s property — which they do, with a fountain pen, only just then a few more blasts of seltzer hit the document and wash away the signatures. The End.
Whispering Whoopee is a routine two-reeler with one absolutely inspired and anarchic moment the Marx Brothers would have been proud of — Chase leads the three Rockawayans in a wild sing-along to the “Rockaway Booster Song” (I’m not making this up, you know!) — but aside from that it’s amusing but not scream-out-loud funny, and frankly Chase was better as a harried husband in the films he made that anticipated the formulae of 1950’s TV sitcoms (though John Bunny, a heavy-set middle-aged man who made a series of silent comedy shorts for Vitagraph between 1912 and 1915, when he died, was not only the first movie comedy star but also the true founder of the sitcom series — especially since, like such legendary later sitcom couples as George and Gracie, and Lucy and Desi, he and his wife actually played husband and wife on screen) than he is as the rambunctious, unscrupulous go-getter he plays here.
Hell Bent for Election (United Auto Workers, United Productions of America, 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After watching a spectacular dance sequence from the feature The Seven Little Foys — a 1955 biopic with Bob Hope as Eddie Foy, Sr. and, in this one clip, James Cagney reprising his role as George M. Cohan from Yankee Doodle Dandy and doing an incredible dance duet (Cagney said in his autobiography that his one regret about his career was that he hadn’t got to do more musicals, and here he dances up a storm and Hope keeps right up with him; it’s easy to forget that Hope began as a dancer as well as a comic, and he was good enough on his feet that his star-making role in the 1933 stage musical Roberta was played by Fred Astaire in the 1935 film version) — Charles and I ran a quite remarkable political commercial from 1944 called Hell Bent for Election, produced by the United Auto Workers (who then had a much longer and more complicated name — “United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers of America”) as what appears to have been an independent campaign for the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt for President and for the Democrats generally.
It’s a fascinating film for two reasons: first, it’s done in a beautiful state-of-the-art cartoon style — the director is Charles M. Jones, better known to cartoon buffs as Chuck Jones, who didn’t create the character of Bugs Bunny for Warner Bros. but did make many of the best cartoons with Bugs and the other characters in the Warners stable; the songs (including the Roosevelt campaign anthem “Gotta Get Out and Vote,” which I’ve heard elsewhere in a stunning broadcast recording by lifelong Democrat Judy Garland — who campaigned for Roosevelt in 1944 and Kennedy in 1960 and got savaged by the Right-wing journalists and columnists of her time!) are by Ballad for Americans and “The House I Live In” composer Earl Robinson with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg from The Wizard of Oz; and some of the people who later became stalwarts at the United Productions of America (U.P.A.) animation studio, including designer and storyboard artist John Hubley, were involved in the project. Actress Karen Morley was credited with “assistance,” and later quite a few people involved in this movie, including her, Harburg and Hubley, would be blacklisted. (That’s why Ira Gershwin, not Harburg, got to write the lyrics for Harold Arlen’s songs in the 1954 A Star Is Born.)
The cartoon’s premise is that there are two trains running and heading for Track 44, a state-of-the-art diesel streamliner with Franklin Roosevelt’s face and a sorry-looking toonerville trolley with the face of his Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. Only one train can take the track, and it’s up to union worker Joe (a tall, strapping blond with muscles to die for) to resist the attempts of a caricatured capitalist (who looks something like the little man on the Monopoly cards) to lull him to sleep so that Dewey’s train, not Roosevelt’s, gets on the track that will carry him to the White House. The situations and their staging rival anything Chuck Jones did for his commercial employers, and the other fascinating thing about this cartoon is to note just how little, at least on the Republican side, the arguments have changed. When the caricatured capitalist was cavorting on screen and a narrator was expressing his and the Republicans’ point of view — lower taxes, less regulation, dismantling the social safety net, and a freeze on workers’ wages while big business makes more money — the sentiments are those of any Tea Party meeting or Right-wing talk show today.
The sad part of watching this 1944 film in 2011 is how far the Democrats have fallen, from forthright advocacy of retirement security, unemployment compensation, education and health care for all, and responsible regulation of the business sector in the public interest to nibbling away at all those things and essentially accepting the Republican point of view that we have to coddle the business sector, deregulate it, give it tons of money via tax cuts and expect working people to pay for it, only doing all this not quite so quickly and brutally as the Republicans want to do it. Charles pointed out that if Obama and his people were to use the arguments in this film in his re-election campaign, he’d score an easy victory — but of course he won’t — and I wondered what the kids in the Occupy encampments would make of this film and the evidence in it that once upon a time one of the two major parties in the U.S. was publicly identified with an agenda so radical it’s considered totally beyond the pale of mainstream politics today.
After watching a spectacular dance sequence from the feature The Seven Little Foys — a 1955 biopic with Bob Hope as Eddie Foy, Sr. and, in this one clip, James Cagney reprising his role as George M. Cohan from Yankee Doodle Dandy and doing an incredible dance duet (Cagney said in his autobiography that his one regret about his career was that he hadn’t got to do more musicals, and here he dances up a storm and Hope keeps right up with him; it’s easy to forget that Hope began as a dancer as well as a comic, and he was good enough on his feet that his star-making role in the 1933 stage musical Roberta was played by Fred Astaire in the 1935 film version) — Charles and I ran a quite remarkable political commercial from 1944 called Hell Bent for Election, produced by the United Auto Workers (who then had a much longer and more complicated name — “United Automobile, Aircraft and Agricultural Implement Workers of America”) as what appears to have been an independent campaign for the re-election of Franklin D. Roosevelt for President and for the Democrats generally.
It’s a fascinating film for two reasons: first, it’s done in a beautiful state-of-the-art cartoon style — the director is Charles M. Jones, better known to cartoon buffs as Chuck Jones, who didn’t create the character of Bugs Bunny for Warner Bros. but did make many of the best cartoons with Bugs and the other characters in the Warners stable; the songs (including the Roosevelt campaign anthem “Gotta Get Out and Vote,” which I’ve heard elsewhere in a stunning broadcast recording by lifelong Democrat Judy Garland — who campaigned for Roosevelt in 1944 and Kennedy in 1960 and got savaged by the Right-wing journalists and columnists of her time!) are by Ballad for Americans and “The House I Live In” composer Earl Robinson with lyrics by E. Y. Harburg from The Wizard of Oz; and some of the people who later became stalwarts at the United Productions of America (U.P.A.) animation studio, including designer and storyboard artist John Hubley, were involved in the project. Actress Karen Morley was credited with “assistance,” and later quite a few people involved in this movie, including her, Harburg and Hubley, would be blacklisted. (That’s why Ira Gershwin, not Harburg, got to write the lyrics for Harold Arlen’s songs in the 1954 A Star Is Born.)
The cartoon’s premise is that there are two trains running and heading for Track 44, a state-of-the-art diesel streamliner with Franklin Roosevelt’s face and a sorry-looking toonerville trolley with the face of his Republican opponent, Thomas E. Dewey. Only one train can take the track, and it’s up to union worker Joe (a tall, strapping blond with muscles to die for) to resist the attempts of a caricatured capitalist (who looks something like the little man on the Monopoly cards) to lull him to sleep so that Dewey’s train, not Roosevelt’s, gets on the track that will carry him to the White House. The situations and their staging rival anything Chuck Jones did for his commercial employers, and the other fascinating thing about this cartoon is to note just how little, at least on the Republican side, the arguments have changed. When the caricatured capitalist was cavorting on screen and a narrator was expressing his and the Republicans’ point of view — lower taxes, less regulation, dismantling the social safety net, and a freeze on workers’ wages while big business makes more money — the sentiments are those of any Tea Party meeting or Right-wing talk show today.
The sad part of watching this 1944 film in 2011 is how far the Democrats have fallen, from forthright advocacy of retirement security, unemployment compensation, education and health care for all, and responsible regulation of the business sector in the public interest to nibbling away at all those things and essentially accepting the Republican point of view that we have to coddle the business sector, deregulate it, give it tons of money via tax cuts and expect working people to pay for it, only doing all this not quite so quickly and brutally as the Republicans want to do it. Charles pointed out that if Obama and his people were to use the arguments in this film in his re-election campaign, he’d score an easy victory — but of course he won’t — and I wondered what the kids in the Occupy encampments would make of this film and the evidence in it that once upon a time one of the two major parties in the U.S. was publicly identified with an agenda so radical it’s considered totally beyond the pale of mainstream politics today.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011
Gill-Man Sequence (Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us) (Universal-International, 1954-56)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2010, 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I ran The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature consecutively. I’m not sure why Jack Arnold has acquired something of a cult following among horror film fans — the two movies are well-directed enough (he did not direct the third in the series; John Sherwood did) but are done pretty much on autopilot, and Ricou Browning’s performance in the title role (unbilled!) is, likewise, a pretty straightforward piece of moving (one can’t really call it “acting”) in a story that is highly derivative of both Frankenstein and King Kong. In those movies, one felt a real sympathy for the monsters — in Frankenstein due to James Whale’s sensitive direction and Boris Karloff’s magnificently subtle performance, both of which rose above a pretty threadbare script — I still like to fantasize a Frankenstein movie in which Karloff could have played the Monster the way Mary Shelley wrote him, using that great voice to deliver Mary Shelley’s beautifully written speeches for her fully articulate version of the Monster:
This morning I ran The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature consecutively. I’m not sure why Jack Arnold has acquired something of a cult following among horror film fans — the two movies are well-directed enough (he did not direct the third in the series; John Sherwood did) but are done pretty much on autopilot, and Ricou Browning’s performance in the title role (unbilled!) is, likewise, a pretty straightforward piece of moving (one can’t really call it “acting”) in a story that is highly derivative of both Frankenstein and King Kong. In those movies, one felt a real sympathy for the monsters — in Frankenstein due to James Whale’s sensitive direction and Boris Karloff’s magnificently subtle performance, both of which rose above a pretty threadbare script — I still like to fantasize a Frankenstein movie in which Karloff could have played the Monster the way Mary Shelley wrote him, using that great voice to deliver Mary Shelley’s beautifully written speeches for her fully articulate version of the Monster:
“I
am malicious because I am miserable. Am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?
You, my creator, would tear me to pieces and triumph. Remember that, and tell
me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder
if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts and destroy my own
frame, the work of your own hands. Shall I respect man when he condemns me? Let
him live with me in the interchange of kindness; and, instead of injury, I
would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance.
“But
that cannot be. The human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union. Yet
mine shall not be the submission of abject slavery. I will revenge my injuries.
If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my
arch-enemy, because my creator, do I swear inextinguishable hatred. Have a
care. I will work at your destruction, not finish until I desolate your heart,
so that you shall curse the hour of your birth.”
— and in King
Kong the sympathy was
created by Willis O’Brien’s unique talent in giving Kong himself a
characterization similar to the one Karloff had acted. In Creature, the “Gill-Man” never managed to cross
over from monster to sympathetic being, at least partially because the writers
(in Creature, Harry
Essex and Arthur Ross, from a story by Maurice Zimm; in Revenge, Martin Berkeley) didn’t give the
Gill-Man any scenes that might have humanized his character. (No wonder Ricou
Browning, whose chief talent seemed to be aquatic rather than thespian, didn’t
get billing — though the part was so underwritten even Karloff in his prime
couldn’t have made the character come alive as a sympathetic figure!) About the
only thing they gave the Gill-Man to indicate his links to humanity was a
sexual itch for the leading ladies of both films (Julia Adams in Creature, Lori Nelson in Revenge — Nestor Païva, as the captain of the
Amazon boat, was the only actor who played in both) — and, while the actors
playing human beings in Creature
were at least competent
(and Richard Carlson in a bathing suit was quite attractive, with nice chest
hair and great nipples), the ones in Revenge were considerably less than that, leads
Nelson and John Agar (Golden Turkey Awards nominee for Worst Actor of All Time) delivering their lines
in the kind of monotone that bad actors lapse into when they don’t have a clue
about how to modulate their voices to create a character. — 11/6/94
•••••
On one of my
recent orders from the Columbia House DVD Club I had got the boxed set of
Universal’s three Gill-Man movies from the mid-1950’s — Creature from the
Black Lagoon (1954 — and
note the actual title credit does not include the definite article!), Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among
Us (1956). I had the
idea of screening the three movies on the remaining three days of October as
our Hallowe’en treat for the year (Charles and I previously did that with the
Universal boxed sets of the Frankenstein, Wolf-Man and Mummy series), and Creature
from the Black Lagoon
came off this time around pretty much as it always has — a quite competent if
not especially inspired horror thriller, obviously inspired by King Kong and its man-woman-monster love triangle
— with the caveat
that the last time Charles and I had seen it together, it had been on the big
screen at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts in the original 3-D. Seen in 3-D, aspects of Jack Arnold’s
direction that had always puzzled me — bits and pieces of how he’d staged the
action scenes — became clear, and the 3-D effects he threw into the movie,
notably Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning) aiming the harpoon gun and firing
it straight at the camera (apparently it was supposed to be a Gill-Man’s
point-of-view shot), seemed powerful instead of merely pointless.
Without the
3-D, Creature is
“flat” in more ways than one, a fun movie, good to look at (whatever your
gender or orientation, the sight of Richard Carlson, Richard Denning and Julia Adams in the scantiest swimsuits
Universal-International could dare with the Production Code still in effect has
an aesthetic thrill that would make Creature watchable even if it were a far worse
film than it is), well staged — at least the filmmakers don’t leave us in any
serious doubt that the monster exists (Val Lewton could get away with toying
with audience expectations and playing the is-it-or-isn’t-it-real game until
the final reel, but you’d have to be a filmmaker of his extraordinary taste and
skill for indirection and suspense to pull it off), cueing it with a shot of
its hand and a thundering three-note motif that shocks you to attention even if you’ve been nodding
off — and, given the limits of the genre, well acted. It’s just that the genuine pathos with which
the similar situation was staged in King Kong doesn’t happen here (though there’s the
marvelous scene in the film The Seven-Year Itch in which Marilyn Monroe’s character is
declaiming about how sorry she felt for the Gill-Man right after she and Tom
Ewell have seen the film together, and it’s at that moment that the rush of air from a
subway train below her blows through a grate and blows her dress above the
waist) and I’m not sure why not.
It may have to do with the expressionlessness of
the Gill-Man’s face — the head was a helmet mask that (unlike the one used in
the two later films in the series) does not allow the actors playing the
Gill-Man to see. And there were
two of them, as I learned to my surprise when obituaries for stuntman Ben
Chapman credited him with the role — I had always thought Ricou Browning had
played it, and later I found out they both had: Chapman on land and Browning (a
champion swimmer who could hold his breath for up to four minutes at a time —
director Arnold didn’t want him visibly exhaling under water because the
creature was supposed to breathe through gills, like a fish, and a life form
that got its oxygen from water instead of air wouldn’t have exhaled air
bubbles; alas, in the later two films this was ignored and the Gill-Man did breathe out air bubbles) in the water.
There are some quite nice touches in the script — notably that the Gill-Man
isn’t just another stupid monster: he’s got enough smarts to build the
underwater barricade that keeps the boat the (human) principals are on inside
the Black Lagoon until Carlson’s character does a dangerous dive to dislodge it
— but on the whole this is a competent, well-made but not masterly thriller
rather than a horror classic on the level of Frankenstein, The Mummy, The
Invisible Man, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Werewolf of London, Son of
Dracula and the other
truly great horror films Universal had made in the first 15 years or so of the
talkies. — 10/30/11
••••••••••
About the only thing they gave the Gill-Man to indicate his
links to humanity was a sexual itch for the leading ladies of both films (Julia
Adams in Creature, Lori Nelson in Revenge — Nestor Païva, as the captain of the Amazon boat,
was the only actor who played a human in both) — and, while the actors playing
human beings in Creature were at
least competent (and Richard
Carlson in a bathing suit was quite attractive, with nice chest hair and great
nipples), the ones in Revenge
were considerably less than that, leads Nelson and John Agar (Golden
Turkey Awards nominee for Worst Actor of
All Time) delivering their lines in the kind of monotone that bad actors lapse
into when they don’t have a clue about how to modulate their voices to create a
character. Ironically, the first 20 minutes of Revenge (before the Gill-Man is captured and moved from the
Amazon to Florida) were considerably better directed than Creature, with Arnold maintaining a tighter pace and creating
superior suspense effects, but the remaining hour of the film slowed to a
crawl, with large amounts of dull dialogue between Nelson, Agar and John
Bromfield (who both out-acted and out-hunked Agar, but — alas — got drowned by
the Gill-Man halfway through) before a final scene where the monster shows up
at a party (with an R&B band playing — what else, in a Universal movie —
“I’ll Remember April”) and creates absolutely no reaction at all until Lori
Nelson shows up and he kidnaps her.
Another annoyance of both movies is the political
incorrectness — the racism in Creature
(nobody cares about the mounting death toll until one of the scientists, played
by Whit Bissell, gets attacked and nearly killed by the Gill-Man, and Adams
laments the “loss of all that experience” if he dies — apparently the four
Brazilian bit-players who’d been killed earlier were considered expendable) and
the sexism in Revenge (there’s a long
scene between Agar and Nelson in which Nelson totally accepts the need for her
to abandon her scientific career in order to get married — even though the man
who’s romancing her is in the same field). It’s ironic that the blurb on the
video box, seeing a 1955 movie through 1993 eyes, says, “The tormented Creature
begins to emerge as a hauntingly beautiful alien, and a female researcher (Lori
Nelson) forms an uneasy emotional link with him, as her own doubts about career
vs. motherhood parallel the Creature’s feelings of alienation and confinement.
Soon they are both driven to break free of their respective ‘prisons,’ with
exciting results.” Had the makers of Revenge actually made the movie the video blurb-writer describes (a sort of cross between The
Day the Earth Stood Still and Rebel
Without a Cause), it would have “held up”
as a considerably more interesting work than the one we actually have. Still, Revenge
is historically interesting for its early
depiction of a pre-Disneyland theme park (Marineland in Florida) and as the
first film of Clint Eastwood (he plays a lunk-headed research assistant who
loses a lab rat — and would have been virtually unrecognizable if the blurb
hadn’t helpfully identified him and his mini-bit part). — 11/6/94
•••••
I decided to screen the Mystery
Science Theatre 3000 version of the 1955
film Revenge of the Creature,
Universal’s first of two sequelae to The Creature from the Black Lagoon — virtually no one realizes that the monster in that film
is actually called the “Gill-Man” because he’s humanoid but has gills and
therefore breathes water instead of air — and, at least according to a “trivia”
post on imdb.com, the only sequel to a 3-D movie that was itself in 3-D. One
reason I wanted to see this just now was that after having just seen Clint
Eastwood’s first credited screen role
in the 1956 film The First Traveling Saleslady (with Ginger Rogers and Carol Channing — which makes it
count as at least a sort of “doubles” movie, since Channing created the role of
Dolly Levi in the stage musical Hello, Dolly! and Rogers was one of her mid-run replacements) I was
curious to re-see Eastwood’s first movie role ever. He plays a dorky lab
technician who loses one of the four white rats entrusted to his care, worries
that a cat ate it and then realizes he had it in his pocket all along. “He’ll never amount to anything in movies,” the MST3K crew couldn’t resist joking after Eastwood’s brief scene
came on.
Revenge of the Creature begins
in the Amazon, where the first Creature from the Black Lagoon was set — Nestor Païva, the boat captain, was the only
actor who carried over from the cast of the original Creature movie to this one (unless you count Ricou Browning, the
champion swimmer who played the Gill-Man in his underwater scenes — when I saw
the obituary for stunt man Ben Chapman I was startled to find him credited with
playing the Gill-Man in Creature from the Black Lagoon since I’d always thought Browning had played him, and it
turned out they both did: Chapman played him on land and Browning played him
underwater — and in Revenge Browning
repeated his phase of the Gill-Man role but stunt man Tom Hennesy replaced
Chapman for the land-based scenes) — and it shows the Gill-Man getting captured
and brought back to the U.S. for exhibition at Florida’s Marineland, the first
aquatic theme park (which did a good business — enough so that it spawned a
West Coast version, Marineland of the Pacific — until it was eclipsed by Sea
World), though they call it something else in the film. The people in charge of
nursing the Gill-Man back to health after all the bullets that got fired at it
both in the first film and this one are oceanographers Prof. Clete Ferguson
(John Agar) and Helen Dobson (Lori Nelson), who being that they’re first- and
second-billed and of different genders naturally fall in love with each other,
albeit quite diffidently (and the MST3K crew
couldn’t help but kid the virtual torpor of their love scenes).
The Gill-Man
naturally gets tired of being put on display as a freak — though he seems
almost as put out by the monotony of his diet (just those fresh fish that get
handed to dolphins at aquatic theme parks as rewards for successfully
completing a trick) — and of course he escapes, pulling out the chains that are
supposed to be holding him in place in the grand manner of amorous movie
monsters from Frankenstein’s creation to King Kong, and he ambles around
Florida more or less stalking Lori Nelson and also crashing parties (there’s a
neat scene in which a rather limp jazz band featuring tenor sax and trombone
plays “I’ll Remember April,” a song that had already featured prominently in at
least two better Universal movies: the 1942 Abbott and Costello vehicle Ride
’Em, Cowboy, in which it was introduced;
and the 1944 film noir Phantom
Lady) and various joints until he’s
finally plugged, more or less for good, though there was a third Gill-Man
movie, The Creature Walks Among Us — in
which the scientists in that one give the Gill-Man a trachaeotomy that saves
his life but converts him from a water-breather to an air-breather; at the end
of that one the Gill-Man, acting on
instinct, walks down a beach and back into the water — either we were supposed
to think that, no longer being able to breathe underwater, he would drown and
that would be the end of him; or the screenwriters just screwed up.
Revenge
of the Creature isn’t a bad movie — though
it’s not especially good, either; John Agar and Lori Nelson don’t have any
charisma at all, either jointly or severally — they’re hardly in the same league,
either as actors or as personalities, as Richard Carlson and Julia Adams from
the first film in the series — and the Gill-Man’s antics, including his sort-of
crush on Nelson’s character (anemically reprised from the first film, which
itself was an anemic reprise of King Kong
in that department), have the sort of been-there, done-that air about them that
infects all too many movie sequels. Still, it’s better than the sort of fare MST3K usually ridiculed — good enough that we can watch it as
entertainment but not so good that we’d
resent seeing it made fun of — though the other Universal-International movies
they gave the “treatment” to, including The Mole People, The Deadly Mantis and especially The Leech Woman, were more appropriate targets (both for them and for the
San Diego-area early-1980’s precursor, Schlock Theatre, in which the snarky comments on the film were run under
the action as subtitles rather than spoken over the dialogue). The best line
from the MST3K group in Revenge of
the Creature: when the Gill-Man emerges
from the Universal-International studio tank one of the crew said, “Man, Esther
Williams aged really badly!” — 4/26/10
•••••
Our film was Revenge of the Creature, the second in the three-film “Gill-Man” sequence
that started with the 1954 classic Creature from the Black Lagoon (note the absence of a definite article in that
title) and ended in 1956 with The Creature Walks Among Us, the only one not directed by Jack Arnold (John Sherwood replaced him)
and the only one not originally shot in 3-D. Revenge of the Creature is the middle movie in the sequence and this time
around, much to my surprise, I liked it better than its predecessor even though
(unlike with the first Creature)
I haven’t had the advantage of having seen it in 3-D, in which some of Arnold’s
perplexing directorial decisions became a good deal more comprehensible. It’s
true Revenge doesn’t have as good
a cast as the original — from Richard Carlson, Richard Denning and Julia Adams
(all professionally competent if not especially great actors) we head down to
John Agar, John Bromfield (though the spectacularly good-looking swimmer of
Esther Williams’ vehicle Easy to Love is certainly a hot piece of eye candy and adds to the aesthetic appeal
of this film!) and Lori Nelson — but frankly it’s got a more interesting plot,
mainly because it moves the Gill-Man from his Amazonian environment (according
to imdb.com, the Black Lagoon itself was actually “played” by Big Bear Lake!)
into the modern-day urban world of Miami Beach, Florida — just as King
Kong, as good as the first three-fourths of
it is, gets even better once the monster reaches New York City and interacts
with modern-day urban civilization and its people. Revenge of the
Creature begins with another expedition
into the upper tributaries of the Amazon to capture the Gill-Man and see if
he’s still alive — and if he is, to take him to a marine theme park in Florida
and put him on exhibit. (This plot line became unexpectedly timely with the
recent announcement by PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,
that they are suing Sea World for holding killer whales and dolphins as slaves
in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment; one could readily imagine a
modern-day moviemaker taking that one on and inserting a subplot in which an
attorney argues that a humanoid monster like the Gill-Man or Frankenstein’s
creation is a “person” within the Constitutional definition and therefore can’t
be exhibited or summarily executed.)
They sail there in a boat called the Rita
II — presumably the original Rita, the one sailed by the principals in the original Creature
from the Black Lagoon, was damaged beyond
repair by the events of that film, though Nestor Païva is still the captain
(and he and Ricou Browning, who played the underwater incarnation of the
Creature, are the only on-screen performers who carried over from the first
film to this one; Tom Hennessy replaced Ben Chapman as the on-land Gill-Man and
also doubled as one of the Marineland divers who tried to handle him) — and there
are arguments between Joe Hayes (John Bromfield) and some of the crew members
on just how far to risk their lives for whatever it is the rich person behind
the expedition is paying them. Eventually they do entrap the Gill-Man and bring him to the theme park
(the sequences were shot at the real-life Marineland, which pioneered the
concept of a theme park featuring marine mammals but was eventually put out of
business by the bigger, splashier Sea World), where they put him on display (the entrance features a life-size
cut-out of him that seemingly anticipates the Universal Studios tour as well as
the 1993 movie Jurassic Park,
also about an eccentric multimillionaire’s scheme to exhibit prehistoric
creatures to the public that goes hideously wrong) with a steel chain fastening
him to the floor of the aquarium so he can’t get away. Scientist Clete Ferguson
(John Agar, looking as uncomfortable as he always did playing a man of learning
— he was a close friend of John Wayne, got cast in a lot of the Duke’s movies,
and tried to copy Wayne’s mannerisms whether they made sense for the part he
was playing or not) comes to Marineland, or whatever they’re calling it, to
research the Gill-Man, and he’s saddled with a science-student assistant, Helen
Dobson (Lori Nelson), whom he hates at first sight and, by the hoariest of
classic movie conventions, ultimately falls in love with — and, of course, the
Gill-Man falls in love with her too.
There are a lot of intriguing scenes in which
the two are trying to condition the Gill-Man to obey commands by sticking him
with a cattle prod when he doesn’t do what they tell him to do, as well as
others in which either or both of our ichthyologist lovebirds stroll the
hallways of the public viewing area at night, during one of which Lori Nelson’s
character expresses sorrow for the Gill-Man’s loneliness (the one scene in
either of the first two Gill-Man movies that even tries for the pathos of the James Whale Frankensteins) — and in the end, not surprisingly given how
closely the screenwriters for this one (William Alland, the producer, wrote the
story and Martin Berkeley wrote the script) were following the classic
templates not only from the original Creature (scripted by Harry Essex and Arthur A. Ross from a
story by Maurice Zimm based on an “idea” by Alland, who according to imdb.com
heard a story of a supposedly haunted lagoon in Mexico from cinematographer
Gabriel Figueroa when they were both working on Orson Welles’ ill-fated project
It’s All True) but from King
Kong and quite a few other monster movies
as well, it’s the Gill-Man’s case of the hots for Helen that gives him the
adrenaline rush needed to tear the chain loose from its mooring and escape. (Anyone who had seen King Kong would have known that would happen.)
In the middle
of all this, the plot comes to a dead stop so we can see the Marineland
“educated porpoise,” Flippy (not Flipper, Flippy!), do his act. Once the Gill-Man escapes he gets his
titular “revenge,” and like some later movie monsters he seems to do a lot of
hanging out at lovers’ lanes and parties — and the good guys keep letting the
Gill-Man kidnap Helen again and again; he seems to zero in on her no matter how
often she’s rescued. There are some neatly chilling scenes showcasing the
monster’s indifference to the lives around him — in one, finding a line of
parked cars blocking his access to the beach, he simply turns one of them over;
in another, two young men who previously have been arguing over whether or not
they should stay in college see Helen’s form sprawled out on the side of the
coast road, make the mistake of getting out to help her, and end up the latest
victims of the insanely jealous Gill-Man. Ultimately the monster is cornered on
the beach and pumped full of bullets — though as with the first Creature movie, he somehow manages to survive that treatment
long enough to set up a sequel.
Though not as strongly cast as the first, and
with far fewer shots of cast members of either gender in scanty (or as scanty
as a 1955 movie could get away with) swimwear, Revenge of the
Creature seems to me to be an advance on
the first film and hardly worthy of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 “treatment,” which it got in the show’s latter stages
once they’d got the approval of Universal to take on a few of their 1950’s
less-than-classics (movies like The Mole People, The Deadly Mantis — featuring William Hopper, the guy who played Paul
Drake on Perry Mason, as an
entomologist figuring out ways to combat a giant-sized praying mantis — and the
awesomely awful The Leech Woman
were far more appropriate MST3K
“targets” from the Universal-International archives). It’s also worth noting
that Revenge of the Creature
features the very first film appearance by Clint Eastwood — in one scene,
playing a comic-relief doofus lab assistant who thinks a cat has eaten one of
the four lab rats he was supposed to be taking care of, only it turns out the
rat was in his lab-coat pocket all along — one of the most embarrassing debuts
ever by someone who went on to a major career, though it’s interesting to note
that this film’s producer and story writer, William Alland, who played the
reporter Thompson in Citizen Kane,
is the one degree of separation between two of the industry most legendary
actor-directors, Orson Welles and Clint Eastwood! — 10/31/11
••••••••••
Charles and I got together at about 6:45 last night and we
joined John P. in a screening of one of the videos I just bought, The
Creature Walks Among Us. This is the third
and last of Universal’s “Gill-Man” movies of the 1950’s, with a completely
different cast from either of the first two, and considerably better than the
second in the series (Revenge of the Creature) in its plot (story and screenplay by Arthur Ross)
and acting (reuniting Jeff Morrow and Rex Reason from the science-fiction film This
Island Earth the year before, and also
featuring Gregg Palmer and the obligatory blonde bombshell, played by Leigh
Snowden in an Esther Williams-like performance, especially when she does a nice
water ballet while supposedly suffering from “rapture of the deep” 200 feet
under in the Florida Everglades). Unfortunately, Jack Arnold yielded the
directorship to John Sherwood this time out, and the film doesn’t have the same
kind of atmosphere and suspense Arnold brought to the two previous entries in
the series. The Creature Walks Among Us is one of those frustrating films that could have been a lot better than it was. Its premise —
that, in order to save the Gill-Man’s life after its gills are damaged in a
fire (after it pours gasoline on itself, apparently thinking it’s water), a
trachaeotomy is performed on it and it therefore acquires the capacity to
breathe air directly, while losing its natural ability to breathe through water
— is easily the strongest of any of the films in the series, and with
sufficiently sensitive direction and acting in the role, the movie could have
been a classic tale of the “outsider,” a creature earning sympathy for being
out of place on land or water
(much the way director James Whale and star Boris Karloff evoked so marvelously
sympathetic a portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster in the 1931 classic Frankenstein).
But whoever is in the Gill-Man’s suit this time (the
reference books say it’s Ricou Browning in all three films, but the Gill-Man
looks considerably heavier-set and clunkier once it’s converted into a land
creature — indeed, I’d hazard the guess that it was Tor Johnson in the suit
post-op) is no Boris Karloff, and Sherwood is no James Whale, either. With the
Gill-Man having little to do in the latter stages of this film but hole up in
an electrified pen on the estate of mad-doctor Morrow — and cast long,
lingering glances at Morrow’s private lagoon, the closest he could come to his
ancestral oceans — the film’s focus shifts to its human characters (a mistake)
and the sordid romantic intrigue between Morrow, Snowden (his wife), Palmer
(who tries to rape her twice — ironically, she’s saved by the Gill-Man both
times) and Reason (who ends up with her at the end, after Morrow and Palmer
conveniently die). The ending is moving, though: the Gill-Man walks across a
ridge and stares at the sea, about to walk in and head “home,” not knowing what
we know: that he no longer can breathe
water, and therefore he will drown … Charles joked later that the Gill-Man was
actually a Lesbian Gill-Woman (“Did you see a dick on her?” he asked — “Maybe
it retracted, like a dog’s,” I replied, to which he said, “No dog — or any
other animal — retracts its balls”),
homosexually attracted to human women. — 4/23/95
•••••
Charles and I closed out our
Hallowe’en celebration by watching the third and last film in the Gill-Man
sequence, The Creature Walks Among Us,
which on balance is probably the weakest of the three entries but is also of
odd interest as a genre-bender.
Directed by John Sherwood (replacing Jack Arnold, who helmed the first two;
Sherwood was mostly a second-unit director, and his only other directorial
credits were Raw Edge and The
Monolith Monsters, the latter being a quite
trippy sci-fi/horror movie in which the monsters were animate rocks) from a
script by Arthur A. Ross, The Creature Walks Among Us is essentially the Gill-Man character grafted onto
the plot of the contemporaneous Universal-International masterpiece Written
on the Wind (both films were released in
December 1956). Jeff Morrow plays Dr. William Barton, essentially the Robert
Stack character from Wind, a
ferociously possessive husband and also a fantastically rich scientist who
conceives of the idea of going to the Everglades, recovering the Gill-Man and,
if he is alive, using him as a guinea pig in his experiments on jump-starting
human evolution. Leigh Snowden, essentially a Marilyn Monroe wanna-be (complete
with eye-searing blonde hair and a breathy voice, though she doesn’t play as
dumb as Marilyn often did and her breastworks are quite a bit less impressive)
plays his long-suffering wife Marcia (essentially the Lauren Bacall character
from Wind), while Rex Reason
(reunited with Morrow from the cast of This Island Earth the year before) is the hot, hairy-chested (itself
something of a novelty in the movies of the 1950’s because previously actors
hadn’t been allowed to show chest hair; either they had none naturally or they
shaved it), Hudsonesque hunk Dr. Thomas Morgan, who attracts Marcia’s
affections and her husband’s jealousies.
Given that the title of one recent
best-seller was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this mash-up of a romantic melodrama and a
sci-fi/horror film doesn’t seem quite so weird now as it did in 1956, when this
movie confused audiences and wrote finis to the Gill-Man cycle. It’s got some good atmospheric scenes of the
creature being hunted down in the Florida swamps — the little-regarded Sherwood
seems the equal of the legendary Arnold in building suspense and chiaroscuro atmosphere — as the ill-assorted crew Dr. Barton has
accumulated sets sail in his yacht (at first I was puzzled that a boat
operating in Florida would have San Francisco listed on its stern as its
homeport, but later it turns out that the boat is an oceangoing yacht and the
principals take it and the Gill-Man to Sausalito, in Marin County just north of
San Francisco, where Dr. Barton has his palatial home — which might actually be
the same set as the Hadley family’s residence in Written on the Wind) and uses a sophisticated sonar device to trace the
Gill-Man, only when they actually find him, he overpowers them and smashes
their electric lantern, so they light gasoline-filled torches and end up
setting the Gill-Man on fire.
When next we see him he’s swathed in bandages
aboard Dr. Barton’s yacht and they’re trying to figure out how to get him to
breathe, since his gills were so badly damaged in the fire that they’re
irreparable — and Dr. Barton hits on the bright idea of converting him into an
air-breather, since he discovers (rather contrary to the premise of the first
two films) that he has lungs as well as gills, he’s just never used the lungs
before. So they give the monster a tracheotomy and Dr. Barton announces that
he’s successfully jump-started evolution and turned a freshwater creature into
a land-based animal. The rest of the movie shows the Gill-Man — no longer so
appropriately named — considerably more heavy-set than we’ve seen him before
(for some reason, though Ricou Browning played the aquatic version of the
Gill-Man in all three films, the actors playing him on land changed — Ben
Chapman in Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tom Hennessy in Revenge of the Creature and Don Megowan here) and dressed in clothes (making
him considerably less scary), and the movie jumps around from the monster
sequences to the soap-opera bits which, quite frankly, seem more interesting.
Eventually it all builds to the expected climax: the Creature runs wild on the
grounds of Dr. Barton’s Sausalito manse and dispatches the not-so-good doctor so the nice Dr. Morgan and the
nice Mrs. Barton can get together — and there’s a haunting final scene in which
the monster stands on the Sausalito beach, gazing longingly at the water as the
film fades out. The ending is powerfully ambiguous enough that it deserves a
better movie — does the monster intend to walk in the water? Has it forgotten
it no longer can breathe under water? Does it remember it can no longer breathe under water and does it
realize it’s now no longer at home in either the land or water worlds? It’s an
interesting ending to a cycle which, though hardly in the same league with the
classic Universal series horrors from the 1930’s and 1940’s, has its points of
interest and is certainly worth seeing, especially if the first two Creature movies once again become available in 3-D. — 11/1/11
A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ended up watching bits and pieces of the Turner Classic Movies horror-film marathon for Hallowe’en, including a documentary narrated and written by Stephen King, whose observations on the history of horror in cinema frankly annoyed me and clarified why I don’t like that much of his work. He said he thought the original Frankenstein was weakened by the carefully wrought sympathy we were made to feel for the monster — I think that’s one of the strongest points of the film, and if King had ever bothered to read Mary Shelley’s novel he would find that the original creator of the story pushed the sympathy-for-the-monster bit even farther than James Whale, John L. Balderston and the other people involved in making the first (and by far the best) two Universal Frankenstein movies did. King said he like the Hammer Frankenstein films better than the Universal ones precisely because they made the monster an unmotivated instrument of destruction and didn’t bother to build sympathy for it — and they showed a clip from the first Hammer Frankenstein, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), in which, barred from using the original Jack Pierce monster makeup because Universal had copyrighted the design, they made up Christopher Lee as the monster to look like Marcel Marceau had been in a really bad accident.
I ran out of room on my blank DVD a few minutes before this ended — just in time to miss King’s admission that maybe building up a little sympathy for the monster wasn’t such a bad idea (I’d figured the show would come up a few minutes short of a full hour, but it didn’t) — and I was particularly interested in King’s depiction of the films based on his own work, of which he liked Carrie, Cujo (he said the star, Dee Wallace Stone from E.T., should have got an Oscar nomination!) and The Dead Zone, and hated The Shining — but then almost no writer who worked with Stanley Kubrick escaped unscathed (though Vladimir Nabokov’s and Terry Southern’s opinions of working with him remained unrecorded, Arthur C. Clarke and Frederick Raphaël, who wrote the script for Kubrick’s swan song Eyes Wide Shut, had even less affection for what Kubrick did to their material than King did). King explained that in The Shining he wanted the father character to be a rock of stability and the son to be the monster, but Kubrick and Jack Nicholson (who in the lead was really flashing back to his earliest days making cheap, tacky horror films for American International in the early 1960’s before Easy Rider made him a star) gave the part a flaring, over-the-top interpretation that made the father the monster — and King said that in the end of his book the hotel burned down, while at the end of the film it froze over, a metaphor for the way Kubrick took what he intended as a “warm” story and turned it “cold.”
Throughout the film King emphasized that he likes big, blatant horror sequences and interpretations over anything subtle (though he did have nice things to say about Val Lewton and in particular about the scene from Cat People in which Jane Randolph is menaced in the swimming pool by a monster we never see except as a shadow on the wall — made, director Jacques Tourneur later said, by his fist!) — it’s why he prefers Christopher Lee over Bela Lugosi as Dracula (he said Lugosi looked like a headwaiter in a tuxedo) — and he said the whole idea of a horror film is to give you that “aha!” moment when you’re scared out of your wits and you jump out of your seat. King also said that that’s one of the reason horror films don’t hold up on repeat viewings, and that people who do watch a horror film again and again do so to relive the memory of being scared the first time.
The full title of this production was A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King, and it was worth watching once but interesting more for its insights into King’s own strategies as a writer than for anything interesting (or not so interesting) he had to say about the films; ironically, TCM was also showing an interview they did with Gloria Stuart about her experiences working with James Whale, particularly on the film The Invisible Man, in which she said far more about what made the early-1930’s Universal horror films (and horror films in general) great than King had in an entire hour — though I still found it amusing that a British-born director with a normally meticulous eye for detail made such a glaring goof as we see in the Iping pub scene of The Invisible Man: the pub has an American-style dartboard instead of the more elaborate British-style dartboard. (“Maybe James Whale had never even seen a dartboard!” Charles joked.) Incidentally, the Stephen King documentary has a mistake almost as glaring: he says Creature from the Black Lagoon was the first horror film in 3-D — and later on there’s a clip from House of Wax, made a year earlier (1953) and the actual first horror film in 3-D.
Charles and I ended up watching bits and pieces of the Turner Classic Movies horror-film marathon for Hallowe’en, including a documentary narrated and written by Stephen King, whose observations on the history of horror in cinema frankly annoyed me and clarified why I don’t like that much of his work. He said he thought the original Frankenstein was weakened by the carefully wrought sympathy we were made to feel for the monster — I think that’s one of the strongest points of the film, and if King had ever bothered to read Mary Shelley’s novel he would find that the original creator of the story pushed the sympathy-for-the-monster bit even farther than James Whale, John L. Balderston and the other people involved in making the first (and by far the best) two Universal Frankenstein movies did. King said he like the Hammer Frankenstein films better than the Universal ones precisely because they made the monster an unmotivated instrument of destruction and didn’t bother to build sympathy for it — and they showed a clip from the first Hammer Frankenstein, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), in which, barred from using the original Jack Pierce monster makeup because Universal had copyrighted the design, they made up Christopher Lee as the monster to look like Marcel Marceau had been in a really bad accident.
I ran out of room on my blank DVD a few minutes before this ended — just in time to miss King’s admission that maybe building up a little sympathy for the monster wasn’t such a bad idea (I’d figured the show would come up a few minutes short of a full hour, but it didn’t) — and I was particularly interested in King’s depiction of the films based on his own work, of which he liked Carrie, Cujo (he said the star, Dee Wallace Stone from E.T., should have got an Oscar nomination!) and The Dead Zone, and hated The Shining — but then almost no writer who worked with Stanley Kubrick escaped unscathed (though Vladimir Nabokov’s and Terry Southern’s opinions of working with him remained unrecorded, Arthur C. Clarke and Frederick Raphaël, who wrote the script for Kubrick’s swan song Eyes Wide Shut, had even less affection for what Kubrick did to their material than King did). King explained that in The Shining he wanted the father character to be a rock of stability and the son to be the monster, but Kubrick and Jack Nicholson (who in the lead was really flashing back to his earliest days making cheap, tacky horror films for American International in the early 1960’s before Easy Rider made him a star) gave the part a flaring, over-the-top interpretation that made the father the monster — and King said that in the end of his book the hotel burned down, while at the end of the film it froze over, a metaphor for the way Kubrick took what he intended as a “warm” story and turned it “cold.”
Throughout the film King emphasized that he likes big, blatant horror sequences and interpretations over anything subtle (though he did have nice things to say about Val Lewton and in particular about the scene from Cat People in which Jane Randolph is menaced in the swimming pool by a monster we never see except as a shadow on the wall — made, director Jacques Tourneur later said, by his fist!) — it’s why he prefers Christopher Lee over Bela Lugosi as Dracula (he said Lugosi looked like a headwaiter in a tuxedo) — and he said the whole idea of a horror film is to give you that “aha!” moment when you’re scared out of your wits and you jump out of your seat. King also said that that’s one of the reason horror films don’t hold up on repeat viewings, and that people who do watch a horror film again and again do so to relive the memory of being scared the first time.
The full title of this production was A Night at the Movies: The Horrors of Stephen King, and it was worth watching once but interesting more for its insights into King’s own strategies as a writer than for anything interesting (or not so interesting) he had to say about the films; ironically, TCM was also showing an interview they did with Gloria Stuart about her experiences working with James Whale, particularly on the film The Invisible Man, in which she said far more about what made the early-1930’s Universal horror films (and horror films in general) great than King had in an entire hour — though I still found it amusing that a British-born director with a normally meticulous eye for detail made such a glaring goof as we see in the Iping pub scene of The Invisible Man: the pub has an American-style dartboard instead of the more elaborate British-style dartboard. (“Maybe James Whale had never even seen a dartboard!” Charles joked.) Incidentally, the Stephen King documentary has a mistake almost as glaring: he says Creature from the Black Lagoon was the first horror film in 3-D — and later on there’s a clip from House of Wax, made a year earlier (1953) and the actual first horror film in 3-D.
The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (Hammer, 1964)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
During the afternoon Charles and I watched two highly contrasting films from the TCM horror marathon for Hallowe’en. One was The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), the second Hammer Mummy movie, five years after the first one (which was a remake not of the 1932 Universal Mummy with Boris Karloff and Zita Johann, but the 1940 “reboot” The Mummy’s Hand) and a thoroughly silly film that never got the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment but certainly should have. It was an auteur work from Hammer studio head Michael Carreras, who not only produced but also directed and (under the pseudonym “Henry Younger” — a pun on the name “John Elder,” used by fellow Hammer producer Anthony Hinds as a pen-name for his scripts) wrote it. It’s a farrago of mummy nonsense whose central premise is that Pharoah Rameses VIII had twin sons, who according to the imdb.com cast list were called Ra and Re (though what I heard — or at least thought I heard — on the soundtrack for the latter’s name was “B,” like the letter or the insect), and like the similar royal twins in Alexandre Dumas père’s story Twenty Years After a.k.a. The Iron Mask, from which Carreras a.k.a. “Younger” almost certainly pinched the concept, one of them was good, one of them was bad, and the bad one exiled the good one to the nomadic tribes of the Sahara, where they recognized his goodness and made him king until the bad guy’s assassins caught up with him and killed him.
Flash forward to 1900, and a group of Egyptologists — Adam Beauchamp (Terence Morgan), John Bray (Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard’s son and Sherlock Holmes on a short-lived 1950’s TV series), Sir Giles Dalrymple (Jack Gwillim) and Annette Dubois (Jeanne Roland, an oddly gamine-like actress for a Hammer leading lady, more Shirley MacLaine than Marilyn Monroe as a body type and saddled with one of the worst-ever attempts at a French accent — she got an “introducing” credit and it’s not surprising that after this performance almost no one ever heard of her again) — searching for the tomb of Ra and ultimately finding it, though not before Annette’s father (Bernard Rebel) falls victim to a gang of local thugs in the opening scene: they behead him and chop off his left hand in a sequence so ridiculously phony it reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (though in the Python film the very phoniness was the point of the joke).
Needless to say, there’s supposed to be a curse on the mummy’s tomb (hence the title), and the curse goes into high gear when the financial sponsor of the expedition, Alexander King (Fred Clark — and yes, from the moment I saw his name in the credits I wonder how on earth he would fit into a Hammer film), decides to tour the mummy and the priceless art treasures discovered along with it as a carnival attraction and make scads of money off it. Needless to say, the mummy himself (itself?) comes back to life and parades around — in a singularly awful, masklike mummy makeup that covers the mouth of the unfortunate actor (Dickie Owen) who has to play the part — and there’s also a nice bit of critique of cultural imperialism in the expedition’s dealings with their contact in the Egyptian government, Hashmi Bey (George Pastell), though quite frankly the 1932 Mummy had more to say about cultural imperialism in one line (in which Boris Karloff, playing the wizened old Egyptian Ardath Bey who’s really the revivified mummy Imhotep in disguise, laments, “We Egyptians are not permitted to dig up our ancient dead. That privilege is reserved for foreign museums”) than this film has in 81 minutes.
Indeed, when Carreras a.k.a. “Younger” inserted into his script a blue-green medallion with an inscription from the Middle Old Kingdom (considerably earlier in Egyptian history than the mummy character) that supposedly can be use to raise the dead, I only wished he’d used it to raise John L. Balderston, writer of the 1932 Mummy (who died in 1954), so he could have got a good script out of him! It turns out that Adam Beauchamp is really the revivified Re, or B, or whatever Ra’s evil twin brother’s name was, and that’s supposed to be the big climax of a film that isn’t terribly frightening (the Hammer movies were considerably dangerously edgy in their gore levels back then, but after the Hallowe’en, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Saw series, they’re practically kindergarten films by comparison!) but works — like a lot of the Hammers these days — as sheer camp.
During the afternoon Charles and I watched two highly contrasting films from the TCM horror marathon for Hallowe’en. One was The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), the second Hammer Mummy movie, five years after the first one (which was a remake not of the 1932 Universal Mummy with Boris Karloff and Zita Johann, but the 1940 “reboot” The Mummy’s Hand) and a thoroughly silly film that never got the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 treatment but certainly should have. It was an auteur work from Hammer studio head Michael Carreras, who not only produced but also directed and (under the pseudonym “Henry Younger” — a pun on the name “John Elder,” used by fellow Hammer producer Anthony Hinds as a pen-name for his scripts) wrote it. It’s a farrago of mummy nonsense whose central premise is that Pharoah Rameses VIII had twin sons, who according to the imdb.com cast list were called Ra and Re (though what I heard — or at least thought I heard — on the soundtrack for the latter’s name was “B,” like the letter or the insect), and like the similar royal twins in Alexandre Dumas père’s story Twenty Years After a.k.a. The Iron Mask, from which Carreras a.k.a. “Younger” almost certainly pinched the concept, one of them was good, one of them was bad, and the bad one exiled the good one to the nomadic tribes of the Sahara, where they recognized his goodness and made him king until the bad guy’s assassins caught up with him and killed him.
Flash forward to 1900, and a group of Egyptologists — Adam Beauchamp (Terence Morgan), John Bray (Ronald Howard, Leslie Howard’s son and Sherlock Holmes on a short-lived 1950’s TV series), Sir Giles Dalrymple (Jack Gwillim) and Annette Dubois (Jeanne Roland, an oddly gamine-like actress for a Hammer leading lady, more Shirley MacLaine than Marilyn Monroe as a body type and saddled with one of the worst-ever attempts at a French accent — she got an “introducing” credit and it’s not surprising that after this performance almost no one ever heard of her again) — searching for the tomb of Ra and ultimately finding it, though not before Annette’s father (Bernard Rebel) falls victim to a gang of local thugs in the opening scene: they behead him and chop off his left hand in a sequence so ridiculously phony it reminded me of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (though in the Python film the very phoniness was the point of the joke).
Needless to say, there’s supposed to be a curse on the mummy’s tomb (hence the title), and the curse goes into high gear when the financial sponsor of the expedition, Alexander King (Fred Clark — and yes, from the moment I saw his name in the credits I wonder how on earth he would fit into a Hammer film), decides to tour the mummy and the priceless art treasures discovered along with it as a carnival attraction and make scads of money off it. Needless to say, the mummy himself (itself?) comes back to life and parades around — in a singularly awful, masklike mummy makeup that covers the mouth of the unfortunate actor (Dickie Owen) who has to play the part — and there’s also a nice bit of critique of cultural imperialism in the expedition’s dealings with their contact in the Egyptian government, Hashmi Bey (George Pastell), though quite frankly the 1932 Mummy had more to say about cultural imperialism in one line (in which Boris Karloff, playing the wizened old Egyptian Ardath Bey who’s really the revivified mummy Imhotep in disguise, laments, “We Egyptians are not permitted to dig up our ancient dead. That privilege is reserved for foreign museums”) than this film has in 81 minutes.
Indeed, when Carreras a.k.a. “Younger” inserted into his script a blue-green medallion with an inscription from the Middle Old Kingdom (considerably earlier in Egyptian history than the mummy character) that supposedly can be use to raise the dead, I only wished he’d used it to raise John L. Balderston, writer of the 1932 Mummy (who died in 1954), so he could have got a good script out of him! It turns out that Adam Beauchamp is really the revivified Re, or B, or whatever Ra’s evil twin brother’s name was, and that’s supposed to be the big climax of a film that isn’t terribly frightening (the Hammer movies were considerably dangerously edgy in their gore levels back then, but after the Hallowe’en, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Saw series, they’re practically kindergarten films by comparison!) but works — like a lot of the Hammers these days — as sheer camp.
Village of the Damned (British MGM, 1960)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Fortunately, just after the piece of cheese that was The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (the last in a sequence of eight Hammers TCM showed in sequence on Hallowe’en, including their takes on the Frankenstein and Dracula characters as well as their mummy films) TCM showed a masterpiece: Village of the Damned, a 1960 film from Britain based on a novel by John Wyndham called The Midwich Cuckoos, a great title, though one that would not have gone over well with the horror audience either in the U.K. or the U.S. — in this country audiences seeing a marquee reading “George Sanders in The Midwich Cuckoos” would probably have assumed it was a film about ornithology and cast Sanders as a dotty birdwatcher. Instead, Sanders plays professor Gordon Zellaby (a tongue-twisting name but only a minor blot on a great movie); he and his wife Anthea (Barbara Sellaby) have been childless — by chance, not by choice — for years when all of a sudden a mysterious force causes all the inhabitants of Midwich to lose consciousness simultaneously. A similar gimmick has been used for laughs in several films, including Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, but though there are comic elements in this one (a technologically backward older couple who still have a wind-up 78 phonograph and use a non-electric iron get immobilized while she’s in the middle of listening to a record and ironing her best dress; the iron burns through the dress, of course, while the record sticks in one groove and keeps playing it over and over until it runs down) the scene is carefully not played for laughs: among the victims are a bus driver (and all his passengers) whose bus runs into a tree (fortunately without causing injuries), and a farmer who’s driving his tractor when whatever it is hits and ends up plowing in circles until he too is stopped when his vehicle hits a tree.
The authorities are alerted because at the precise moment all of Midwich was immobilized Zellaby was on the phone to his brother-in-law, Alan Bernard (Michael Gwynn), and Alan is concerned enough to go to Midwich to investigate — whereupon he sees a motorcycle cop drive towards the town, pass through the invisible line and fall off his bike when he too falls victim to whatever it is. The immobilization only lasts for a few hours, after which everyone comes to — but in a few months it develops that every woman in town who’s capable of bearing a child suddenly finds herself pregnant. The Zellabys, who’ve been hoping for such an event, are pleased as punch — but some of the others, especially a woman whose husband had been at sea for over a year, a 17-year-old (and her parents) and a middle-aged virgin, are less than thrilled, especially with the townspeople (and the sailor, who happens to arrive home just as the wife gets the “good” news) leaping to the obvious conclusions.
The mystery pregnancies result in the birth of 12 blond, blue-eyed children who as they grow through infancy to school age turn out to have extraordinary mental powers, including the ability to read the minds of normal humans and to bond their own brains into what today would be called a hive-mind — the script by Wolf Rilla (who also directed), Sterling Silliphant and Ronald Kinnoch (who also produced, but in the Val Lewton tradition he took his writing credit as “George Barclay”) actually compares them to ant and bee hives — that gives them super-intelligence. It also makes them threatening as all hell — on two separate occasions they respond to real or perceived threats from normal humans by focusing their mental powers (represented by a glint in their eyes that, according to imdb.com, was created by matting a negative image of their irises over the positive one on film) and forcing them to commit suicide. One man is led to drive his car into a wall and another, the brother of the original victim, goes after them with a shotgun and is taken over so he shoots himself with it instead — and, in line with the less-is-more theory of horror Val Lewton pioneered (and Stephen King debunked) that the less we see of something, the scarier it is, we don’t actually see the man blast his own head off, much less the resulting blood and gore.
That’s the difference Boris Karloff once outlined between terror and horror (by his definition, the films he made would constitute “terror” while the splatter movies of today would be “horror”); the point of the sequence is not to gross us out by seeing the guy’s brains explode, but to intimidate us by confronting us with the sheer power of the mystery children and the threat they pose to anyone who’s unfortunate enough to get on their bad side. George Sanders was a bit old for his role — he aged well physically but the growing disinterest in acting, and in life itself, that would lead him to commit suicide for real in 1970 (and leave behind a note explaining that the reason why was that everything now bored him) is very much a part of his characterization and, in fact, is absolutely right for the part, as is the fact that he looks decrepit and utterly unheroic even in a story that forces him to a sacrificial gesture at the end (spoiler alert — using his own mental power literally to turn his mind into a brick wall, he sneaks a suitcase containing a bomb into the building where he’s supposed to be teaching the children, and blows up both them and himself).
Village of the Damned, like the Lewton films and damned few others in the history of terror on screen, is a movie that scares precisely because of its understatement, its refusal to give us more information about what’s going on beyond the bare minimum needed to follow the story (we never learn what power was behind creating the super-children in the wombs of human females, nor what its agenda was, nor why it had to be preceded by immobilizing all the people in the town), yet it’s a tale not only chilling in its basic conception but evocative of questions about whether the ends justify the means — as when Zellaby receives word that a similar incident in a village in Russia ended abruptly when the Soviet government ordered their army to level the town, killing super-children and innocent villagers alike, and we’re left to wonder whether faced with a menace like this, the totalitarian solution, however brutal and inhuman, may be the only way to deal with it.
According to imdb.com, Village of the Damned was originally planned as an MGM Hollywood production with Ronald Colman as Zellaby, but the controversial nature of the story — particularly the rash of virgin births, which predictably drove the Roman Catholics still in charge of the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency nuts — forced MGM to transfer the production to their British subsidiary, and while that was going on Ronald Colman died. What makes it even more ironic was that George Sanders ended up “replacing” Ronald Colman in more ways than one; not only did he end up making a film originally intended for Colman, he married Colman’s widow, Benita Hume.
The children — led by Martin Stephens, who plays David Zellaby (at one point Sanders’ character acidly notes, “He’s my wife’s son; I can’t be at all sure that he’s mine”) and would play another haunted child one year later in The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw — wore blond wigs with extra-high skulls to give the impression that their cranial development was larger than normal people’s, and though the script doesn’t mention this I couldn’t help but think that one aspect of the movie that had special resonance for a British audience just 15 years after the end of World War II was the way they looked like the Nazi ideal, the blond, blue-eyed Aryan supermen of the future who were supposed to take the place of the Untermenschen once the Nazis helped things along by exterminating us.
Fortunately, just after the piece of cheese that was The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (the last in a sequence of eight Hammers TCM showed in sequence on Hallowe’en, including their takes on the Frankenstein and Dracula characters as well as their mummy films) TCM showed a masterpiece: Village of the Damned, a 1960 film from Britain based on a novel by John Wyndham called The Midwich Cuckoos, a great title, though one that would not have gone over well with the horror audience either in the U.K. or the U.S. — in this country audiences seeing a marquee reading “George Sanders in The Midwich Cuckoos” would probably have assumed it was a film about ornithology and cast Sanders as a dotty birdwatcher. Instead, Sanders plays professor Gordon Zellaby (a tongue-twisting name but only a minor blot on a great movie); he and his wife Anthea (Barbara Sellaby) have been childless — by chance, not by choice — for years when all of a sudden a mysterious force causes all the inhabitants of Midwich to lose consciousness simultaneously. A similar gimmick has been used for laughs in several films, including Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, but though there are comic elements in this one (a technologically backward older couple who still have a wind-up 78 phonograph and use a non-electric iron get immobilized while she’s in the middle of listening to a record and ironing her best dress; the iron burns through the dress, of course, while the record sticks in one groove and keeps playing it over and over until it runs down) the scene is carefully not played for laughs: among the victims are a bus driver (and all his passengers) whose bus runs into a tree (fortunately without causing injuries), and a farmer who’s driving his tractor when whatever it is hits and ends up plowing in circles until he too is stopped when his vehicle hits a tree.
The authorities are alerted because at the precise moment all of Midwich was immobilized Zellaby was on the phone to his brother-in-law, Alan Bernard (Michael Gwynn), and Alan is concerned enough to go to Midwich to investigate — whereupon he sees a motorcycle cop drive towards the town, pass through the invisible line and fall off his bike when he too falls victim to whatever it is. The immobilization only lasts for a few hours, after which everyone comes to — but in a few months it develops that every woman in town who’s capable of bearing a child suddenly finds herself pregnant. The Zellabys, who’ve been hoping for such an event, are pleased as punch — but some of the others, especially a woman whose husband had been at sea for over a year, a 17-year-old (and her parents) and a middle-aged virgin, are less than thrilled, especially with the townspeople (and the sailor, who happens to arrive home just as the wife gets the “good” news) leaping to the obvious conclusions.
The mystery pregnancies result in the birth of 12 blond, blue-eyed children who as they grow through infancy to school age turn out to have extraordinary mental powers, including the ability to read the minds of normal humans and to bond their own brains into what today would be called a hive-mind — the script by Wolf Rilla (who also directed), Sterling Silliphant and Ronald Kinnoch (who also produced, but in the Val Lewton tradition he took his writing credit as “George Barclay”) actually compares them to ant and bee hives — that gives them super-intelligence. It also makes them threatening as all hell — on two separate occasions they respond to real or perceived threats from normal humans by focusing their mental powers (represented by a glint in their eyes that, according to imdb.com, was created by matting a negative image of their irises over the positive one on film) and forcing them to commit suicide. One man is led to drive his car into a wall and another, the brother of the original victim, goes after them with a shotgun and is taken over so he shoots himself with it instead — and, in line with the less-is-more theory of horror Val Lewton pioneered (and Stephen King debunked) that the less we see of something, the scarier it is, we don’t actually see the man blast his own head off, much less the resulting blood and gore.
That’s the difference Boris Karloff once outlined between terror and horror (by his definition, the films he made would constitute “terror” while the splatter movies of today would be “horror”); the point of the sequence is not to gross us out by seeing the guy’s brains explode, but to intimidate us by confronting us with the sheer power of the mystery children and the threat they pose to anyone who’s unfortunate enough to get on their bad side. George Sanders was a bit old for his role — he aged well physically but the growing disinterest in acting, and in life itself, that would lead him to commit suicide for real in 1970 (and leave behind a note explaining that the reason why was that everything now bored him) is very much a part of his characterization and, in fact, is absolutely right for the part, as is the fact that he looks decrepit and utterly unheroic even in a story that forces him to a sacrificial gesture at the end (spoiler alert — using his own mental power literally to turn his mind into a brick wall, he sneaks a suitcase containing a bomb into the building where he’s supposed to be teaching the children, and blows up both them and himself).
Village of the Damned, like the Lewton films and damned few others in the history of terror on screen, is a movie that scares precisely because of its understatement, its refusal to give us more information about what’s going on beyond the bare minimum needed to follow the story (we never learn what power was behind creating the super-children in the wombs of human females, nor what its agenda was, nor why it had to be preceded by immobilizing all the people in the town), yet it’s a tale not only chilling in its basic conception but evocative of questions about whether the ends justify the means — as when Zellaby receives word that a similar incident in a village in Russia ended abruptly when the Soviet government ordered their army to level the town, killing super-children and innocent villagers alike, and we’re left to wonder whether faced with a menace like this, the totalitarian solution, however brutal and inhuman, may be the only way to deal with it.
According to imdb.com, Village of the Damned was originally planned as an MGM Hollywood production with Ronald Colman as Zellaby, but the controversial nature of the story — particularly the rash of virgin births, which predictably drove the Roman Catholics still in charge of the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency nuts — forced MGM to transfer the production to their British subsidiary, and while that was going on Ronald Colman died. What makes it even more ironic was that George Sanders ended up “replacing” Ronald Colman in more ways than one; not only did he end up making a film originally intended for Colman, he married Colman’s widow, Benita Hume.
The children — led by Martin Stephens, who plays David Zellaby (at one point Sanders’ character acidly notes, “He’s my wife’s son; I can’t be at all sure that he’s mine”) and would play another haunted child one year later in The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw — wore blond wigs with extra-high skulls to give the impression that their cranial development was larger than normal people’s, and though the script doesn’t mention this I couldn’t help but think that one aspect of the movie that had special resonance for a British audience just 15 years after the end of World War II was the way they looked like the Nazi ideal, the blond, blue-eyed Aryan supermen of the future who were supposed to take the place of the Untermenschen once the Nazis helped things along by exterminating us.
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