The Beatles "Live" in Munich, Germany, June 24, 1966 (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, aired July 5, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I had originally planned to run Charles and I the final two episodes of Game of Thrones, but that morning I got a package containing an elaborate release of a live concert by the Beatles from Munich, Germany on June 24, 1966. The advertisement had ballyhooed that it was a limited release and made it sound like it contained the complete concert -- not only the Beatles’ set but all the opening acts as well -- but the accompanying DVD contained only a 47-minute cut-down of the show aired on German TV on July 5, 1966. Also it was in black-and-white -- there’s another concert from the Beatles’ last tour from the Budokan Arena in Tokyo that was filmed complete for Japanese TV and is the only footage of the Beatles performing a complete set in color (though, alas, it’s one of their weaker performances -- Ringo said later that by the end of the tours he was so bored he was drumming only on the afterbeats, not really driving the band, and in that film he looks like he’s about to fall asleep and fall off the riser containing him and his drum set). The Beatles were in much better form in this Munich concert even though they were pretty loose -- the entry on this concert on the “Beatles Bible” Web site, https://www.beatlesbible.com/1966/06/24/live-circus-krone-bau-munich-germany/, said it was one of the first concerts on their final tour and they hadn’t had much time to rehearse (they had just finished recording Revolver and no doubt didn’t relish having to go out and perform their golden oldies live while they had a ground-breaking recording in the can). The opening acts weren’t identified on the broadcast -- any announcements as to who they were were left out of the version that aired -- and it was only from the “Beatles Bible” page linked to above that I was able to nail down who they were.

The show began with three songs by Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, a band Brian Epstein was pushing strongly even though, with their clean-cut looks,short 1950’s-style haircuts and use of two saxophones in their lineup, they sound like cutting-edge white rock ‘n’ roll … from a decade earlier. They did three songs, “Ain’t Love Good, Ain’t Love Proud,” “You Can’t Love ‘Em All,” and a version of the classic blues “See, See, Rider” with some lyrical tweaks -- but compared to the great versions of this song (by Ma Rainey, who wrote it and had the young Louis Armstrong in her backup band; Ray Charles; and Mitch Ryder), this one’s pretty lame. Things picked up with the next band, The Rattles, who dressed “mod,” had Beatle haircuts and got five songs on the telecast, perhaps because they were the local German band (they actually sang in American-accented English but their announcements and between-songs patter were in German) added to the bill for the occasion, including “This Is the Love of My Life,” “Come on and Sing,” a cover of the Small Faces’ hit “Sha La La La Lee,” a reasonably good version of the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” (which by coincidence the Beatles had also covered, though only for an ostensibly “live” but actually lip-synched BBC-TV show called Around the Beatles) and a closing bit apparently called “Bye, Bye, Bye.” Things picked up even more with the next act, Peter and Gordon, even though they had to bring in an orchestra to back them and reproduce the big pop-rock sound of their records. “Peter” was Peter Asher, brother of Paul’s then-girlfriend, actress Jane Asher, and the first song they performed here was “Woman,” a rock ballad that Paul wrote for them under the pseudonym “Bernard Webb” to see if he could get a hit without his or the Beatles’ names attached to it. Paul realized he’d been “outed” when a fan at a Beatles concert held up a sign that read, “Long Live Bernard Webb.” They only got one other song on the telecast, an O.K. but surprisingly sloppy cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Let It Be Me.”

Then it was time for the Beatles, and the telecast only included six of their songs: Chuck Berry’s “Rock and Roll Music,” “Baby’s in Black,” “I Feel Fine,” “Yesterday,” “Nowhere Man,” and “I’m Down.” (The other songs on their set were “She’s a Woman,” “If I Needed Someone,” “Day Tripper,” “I Want to Be Your Man,” and “Paperback Writer.”) The most interesting song on the program was “Yesterday,” which Paul had recorded as middle-of-the-road pop -- just his voice and guitar backed by a string quartet -- but live they played it in a totally different arrangement, still a ballad but a rock ballad, with electric guitars and Ringo drumming with sticks instead of the wire brushes a jazz drummer would have used on a song like this. There are a few slips where the Beatles forgot the lyrics -- John screwed up “Rock and Roll Music” and Paul, who rarely goofed, couldn’t remember his own “I’m Down” (a somewhat disappointing performance because it’s disorganized and it was played on guitars throughout -- John didn’t double on electric organ the way he did on the record and when they played it on their final Ed Sullivan Show appearance on September 12, 1965) -- and a weird sound mix that seems to favor Ringo’s cymbals over everything else, but any document of Beatlemania is welcome. What’s more, one of the big surprises of this concert is the relative sedateness of the audience; there are still a few screaming teenage girls but not the continual banshee roar of the Beatles’ 1964 and 1965 concerts (which Paul later likened to trying to play rock ‘n’ roll in front of a Boeing 747 being readied for take-off), and though South German TV did surprisingly few audience shots the ones they did include featured a lot of men who were listening pretty impassively (did their girlfriends drag them there?).

St. Martin's Lane, a.k.a. Sidewalks of London (Pommer-Laughton, Mayflower, Renown, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Since the Beatles’ Munich show lasted only 47 minutes, I looked for something to fill in the next hour and a half and found it in St. Martin’s Lane, a 1938 British film issued in the U.S. as Sidewalks of London because the street name would have meant nothing to an American audience. It was produced by Erich Pommer, who had been the head of the German UFA studio during the Weimar Republic but, like a lot of creative Germans, had had to flee when the Nazis took over. (A lot of non-creative, non-celebrity Germans also tried to flee but had a much harder time getting into other countries; even the great director Fritz Lang had trouble with French customs -- which led him to include a bizarre sequence satirizing immigration officials in his 1933 French film Liliom.) Pommer fled to London and hooked up with a major star, Charles Laughton, to form an independent company called Mayflower Pictures (a German producer and a British star started a company and named it after a ship that took religious refugees from Britain to the U.S.!) and release through a British studio called Renown. St, Martin’s Lane deals with London’s buskers -- street entertainers who hang out in front of theatres and movie houses and do their acts for whatever change they can persuade their audiences to give them until the police tell them to move along.

Laughton plays veteran busker Charles Staggers, who chases a woman (Vivien Leigh) who steals sixpence from the hat he’s literally passed after his recitation and then picks the pocket of prominent songwriter Harley Prentiss (Rex Harrison, whose presence definitely marks this as an all-star movie) and grabs his cigarette case after Prentiss has stood them to coffee at an outdoor stand. Charles chases the girl into a deserted mansion that’s up for rent, confronts her and tries to grab the cigarette case from her so he can turn both her and it into the police for a reward, but in the meantime he gets to see her dance (albeit in a half-lit long-shot that made me suspect Leigh had a dance double) and realizes she’d be a major asset to his act. He ends up moving her into his room -- to the predictable distaste of the older couple who run the place (though of course I couldn’t resist a joke about the real Laughton being Gay -- “Vivien, you have nothing to worry about from him!”) -- and she, Charles and two of Charles’ friends, Arthur Smith (Gus McNaughton) and a songwriter named Gentry (Tyrone Guthrie) form a foursome who sing and dance Gentry’s new song, “Wear a Straw Hat in the Rain.”

But the act breaks up almost as soon as it starts when Harley Prentiss returns to the action, thanks Charles for returning his cigarette case, keeps the police from arresting them and offers “Liberty” -- the name Leigh’s character uses -- a tryout for a professional “indoor” show. Liberty gets the job and director Tim Whelan illustrates her rise to stardom through a montage of theatre programs in which she gets higher billing in each show, until she’s ready for a starring vehicle alongside the established male star she was trying to cadge an autograph from in the opening sequence. The show is called A Straw Hat in the Rain and features a big production number based on Gentry’s song, which Prentiss has ripped off and passed off as his own -- and I had thought the plot resolution would involve Charles hearing the number, recognizing the song and getting Gentry to sue for plagiarism. Instead it takes a darker, Sister Carrie-esque turn in which Charles hangs out outside the theatre where Liberty is starring and tries to get her attention -- only he punches out a cop who’s trying to get him to move on and ends up with a four-month prison sentence. Meanwhile Liberty has been having an affair with Prentiss, but it’s hinted that she’s also dating the star of her show and she gets an offer from Hollywood to make films in the U.S. -- and Prentiss tells her he won’t marry her because he knows she’s just using him to advance her career the way she used Charles.

St. Martin’s Lane is an engaging mixture of plot tropes -- the first half reminded me of the 1932 Jessie Matthews vehicle The Good Companions (though that was about buskers in the British countryside, not in London) and the second half evoked comparisons to A Star Is Born from both Charles and I (especially when Charles responds to Liberty’s leaving him by becoming an alcoholic) -- directed by Tim Whelan (who, like the star, was British but had careers on both sides of the Atlantic) from a script by Clemence Dane (though imdb,com credits Laughton, Pommer, Whelan and American playwright Bartlett Cormack with contributions) and isn’t a great film but is a quite charming one. It even features Carroll Gibbons and His Orchestra with a performer I’d actually seen live -- U.S. harmonica player Larry Adler, whom my late partner John and I saw at a free waterfront concert by the San Diego “Pops” Orchestra in 1989 paying tribute to big-band swing. In the 1930’s Adler successfully lobbied the American Federation of Musicians to admit him and declare that the harmonica was a real instrument and not just a toy; on this 1938 tour he not only made this movie in England but stopped over in Paris and did a recording session with Django Reinhardt; and in the early 1950’s he was blacklisted in the U.S. for Left-wing politics, moved to Europe and made a comeback playing on the soundtrack of fellow blacklistee Jules Dassin’s French crime thriller Rififi.

Behind the Door (Thomas H. Ince Productions, Artcraft, Paramount, 1919)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched an intriguing movie on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” that I’d never heard of before: Behind the Door, a 1919 production by Thomas H. Ince, released through Paramount on their high-end “Artcraft” label. Ince is one of the more forgotten figures in silent-film industry even though it was he, more than anyone else, who invented the studio system. He actually built the studio complex that later became the headquarters of MGM for many years (and is now owned by Sony) and, though he directed several pictures personally (notably Civilization, an ill-timed 1916 anti-war epic that was compared to D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance and was likewise a box-office flop), he was mainly known as a producer and studio head. In 1915 he, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett merged their companies to form the short-lived Triangle Studios, but by 1919 Triangle was moribund and Ince, who’d pioneered the studio system, with this production also pioneered the sort of arrangement that would succeed it: an independent producer teaming up with a major studio and recruiting a writer, director and cast to offer the project to a studio that would finance and release it.

Behind the Door was released in early 1919, just after World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before World War II) ended, and it stars former stage actor Hobart Bosworth as Oscar Krug, who runs a taxidermy store in a small Massachusetts town. (The idea that in 1919 there was enough of a demand for stuffed animals a taxidermy business could maintain a store on a small-town main street is itself an interesting sign of how much the culture has shifted.) The film actually begins in 1925 -- six years after it was made, a rare example of a film set in the near future that isn’t science fiction -- in which Krug returns to his taxidermy shop, long since closed, abandoned and regularly vandalized by street kids. Then the film flashes back to 1917, when Krug’s reasonably successful career and his attempt to marry Alice Morse (Jane Novak), daughter of the town’s richest man, Matthew Morse (J. P. Lockney) -- which her dad naturally opposes -- are both derailed by the U.S. declaration of war against Germany. A group of townspeople gather around Krug’s shop, intent on either beating him up or outright lynching him for having a German name and ancestry and daring him to enlist in the war against his ancestral homeland. Krug protests that he was part of Admiral George Dewey’s fleet in Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War, and so when he does enlist he’s steered not to the Army but to the Navy.

TCM host Jacqueline Stewart (a statuesque Black woman with hair either very short or severely pulled back, who seems to have been hired mainly because TCM wants to get across the idea that classic movie buffs come in all colors and genders) said the film might have done better at the box office if it had been released while the war was still going on. But I suspect it wouldn’t have had much of a chance before the war given its out-front critique of the insane level of anti-German jingoism that got ratcheted up in 1917 and led to such absurdities as the venerable conductor of the Boston Symphony, Karl Muck, being interned for eight months as an enemy alien. (He left the U.S. after his release and not surprisingly never came here again, though he continued to live and work in Europe until his death in 1930.) The film was directed by a person with whom I have a personal connection: Irvin Willat, a filmmaker who specialized in stories about the sea; my connection to him is I went to high school with his grand-nephew Carl Willat, a cartoonist with my high-school paper with a wicked imagination and great sense of humor. Willat directed the second feature in two-strip Technicolor, Wanderer of the Wasteland (1924), but I’d never actually seen a film of his until last night -- and he’s not a particularly interesting or creative director but he stages the action effectively and the film picks up considerably once Krug actually goes out to sea on a ship called the Perth.

We learn it’s supposed to sail escorted by a British destroyer but we never find out what kind of ship the Perth is or how it figures in the war effort. Not that it matters much, because it’s only six days out to sea when it’s sunk by a German U-boat whose captain is listed only as “Submarine Commander” on the official credits but as “Lt. Brandt” on imdb.com. He’s played by the young Wallace Beery, already easily recognizable as the character actor (usually, but not always, a villain) who stayed at MGM for decades, and though part of me wished for Erich von Stroheim in this role Beery acquitted himself well enough in a film whose acting was quite variable. Bosworth tried to tone down his stage-bred gestores for film but didn’t always succeed, and J. P. Lockney’s performance is almost a caricature of silent-film acting at its hammy worst. The gimmick is that Krug married Alice on the eve of his departure on the Perth, her dad threw her out of his home, and with nowhere else to go she stowed away on the Perth -- only when the ship is sunk Brandt’s U-boat encounters the lifeboat in which Krug and Alice are floating aimlessly at sea (“without sail or oar,” the title tells us) and takes her aboard but leaves him on the sea to die.

He’s eventually picked up (we don’t say by whom or how, but almost certainly by a U.S. or allied vessel) and he ends up the captain of another ship, which sinks the U-98 and takes Brandt and several other crew members on board as prisoners. There’s a chilling scene in which Krug takes personal charge of Brandt, reveals himself as a fellow German (we know this because a title reads “Deutschland Uber Alles”), gets the guy drunk and gets him to talk about “mermaids” he’s found at sea -- really stranded women he could kidnap and take aboard as sex slaves for himself and his crew. Willat’s direction, relatively unadventurous in the early scenes (there are almost no moving-camera shots or the kind of quick intercutting Griffith pioneered), suddenly becomes chilling as we see flashbacks showing exactly what happened to Alice aboard the U-98: she became Lt. Brandt’s sex slaves and then, when he was finished with her, he threw her to his crew who descended on her like locusts on a cornfield. When she died from these ministrations, they simply dumped her at sea by firing her body through one of the torpedo tubes.

Flash-forward back to the ship where Krug is holding Brandt as a prisoner and has insisted on taking personal charge of him; other crew members, including Krug’s first mate and friend McTavish (James Gordon), hear odd noises from Krug’s cabin but ignore them. We got an intimation of what Krug intends to do with Brandt when we see him break out his old taxidermy tool kit and extract a scalpel, and eventually Krug invites McTavish and a fellow crew member to look “behind the door” where he’s strung up Brandt and .. Willat politely averts his camera but we read a couple of titles in which Krug says, “I promised to skin him alive … but he died before I could finish.” The ending takes place in 1925 and shows Krug inside his old and long-abandoned taxidermy shop, where his dead wife reappears as a ghostly image; as Krug dies his own ghostly image emerges from his body and he and Alice are reunited in death like 19th century opera characters.

Behind the Door was based on what was billed as a “spectacular story” by Gouverneur Morris -- who actually gets his name in bigger letters than the director’s (a Writers’ Guild of America member’s wet dream!) -- though the actual script was by Luther Reed (who later became a director and specialized in World War I movies) -- and Behind the Door emerges as a quite capable film even though it’s hardly one of the deathless greats of the silent era. It’s also one of those films in which no one print survived complete: it had to be pieced together from an incomplete (and, in spots, badly nitrate-burned) print from the Library of Congress, a complete but heavily abridged version released in Russia and discovered in a film archive there, along with a few scenes that had to be filled in with stills and an elaborate color-tinting scheme reproduced from Willat’s surviving cutting continuity for the film. The opening features a spectacular effect that combines tinting and toning to show a bright red sunrise over a blue-tinted background until the entire screen fills with red representing the dawn; many silent films were quite elaborately tinted, and it shows that many silent-era filmmakers regarded the absence of color as a limitation they were eager to work around as much as possible -- while 1930’s and 1940’s filmmakers often liked the starkness of black-and-white and were not thrilled by color even when photographic color processes became available.

Dr. Strangelove; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Hawk Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday Turner Classic Movies did what was advertised as their Hallowe’en marathon of horror movies, but they did some films that don’t really qualify as “horror” generically because they had to fit them into their usual Saturday series, “The Essentials” and “Noir Alley.” The “Essential” was Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The film began as a serious speculative novel called Red Alert by a writer variously referred to as Peter George (in the credits of the movie) and Peter Bryant (in my copy of the book), in which a psychotic U.S. general orders an unauthorized nuclear attack on the Soviet Union which threatens to trigger the Russians’ dreaded “Doomsday Device” by which the Russians will automatically set off nuclear weapons that will make the surface of the earth totally uninhabitable to humans for the next 200 years or so. (I haven’t read the book in years and I don’t have a copy of it anymore, but that’s the general idea.) Later another, more famous writer named Eugene Burdick -- whose most famous book was The Ugly American, about a U.S. agent who gets involved with and unwittingly destabilizes the fictitious Asian country of “Sarkhan” (which was obviously Viet Nam) -- wrote a book on the same premise called Fail-Safe, and Bryant/George sued Burdick for plagiarism. Both books were purchased for movies, with Stanley Kubrick buying Red Alert and, as TCM co-hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Brad Bird explained, Kubrick originally hired George to write the script and intended to film the novel as a serious warning story come scritto.

Then Kubrick started reading the literature by various pundits on how to survive and win a nuclear war -- and he came to the conclusion that the whole idea was ridiculous. One of the books that particularly unnerved him was a short one I’ve actually read by so-called “futurist” Herman Kahn called Thinking the “Unthinkable,” which was the source of the whole idea of a “Doomsday Device.” (Herman Kahn was actually the model for the character of Dr. Strangelove, though other names -- including Henry Kissinger and nuclear physicist Dr. Edward Teller -- have been suggested.) Kubrick ultimately decided that the whole idea of “winning” a nuclear war was so ridiculous that the only possible way to make a movie about it was to make it a satirical comedy. So he brought in Terry Southern as a writer and gave the people and places campy spoof names: the bomb wing set to attack Russia and start World War III is based out of “Burpleson Air Force Base” (full of signs depicting the U.S. Strategic Air Command’s motto, “Peace Is Our Profession,” which is so loony-tunes to begin with Kubrick and Southern didn’t have to tweak it any to make it a satire of itself!) and the psycho general who orders the attack is “Jack D. Ripper” (Sterling Hayden, whose usual overwrought acting style is just right for the part -- this, The Killing -- his previous film for Kubrick -- John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar are his best films). Ripper’s assistant is Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), a British Royal Air Force officer on loan to the U.S. Air Force.

The overall Strategic Air Command head is General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) and the hapless, ineffectual President of the U.S. is Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). The commander of the B-52 that flies into Russia to drop the bomb that will set off the “Doomsday Device” is Major Kong (Slim Pickens) and the field office in charge of the U.S. Army unit that launches an invasion of Burpleson to get General Ripper on the phone to the President is “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn). Add to that a Suviet leader named “Premier Dmitri Kissoff,” whom we never see; the Russians are represented by their ambassador, Alexei de Sadesky (Peter Bull in a marvelous comic performance that got overshadowed by the more illustrious names in the cast) and Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers) himself, the U.S.’s top advisor on nuclear strategy and a former Nazi whom the U.S. essentially requisitoned from Germany after World War II. Dr. Strangelove uses a wheelchair and his wartime injuries apparently included the loss of his hand, since he has a black-gloved prosthesis on his right arm that he can barely control -- a running gag is his difficulty in using it to lift his cigarette to his mouth (this is 1964, so virtually all the dramatis personae smoke) -- I suspect this gimmick was borrowed from Lionel Atwill’s artificial hand in Son of Frankenstein.

You’ll notice I’ve listed Peter Sellers in three different roles -- he was actually supposed to play Major Kong as well but he had a severe heart attack right after filming all the sequences except those taking place inside the B-52 (which also feature a young and virtually unrecognizable James Earl Jones as the plane’s bombardier) -- and TCM’s co-host, Brad Bird (a director who’s mostly done animated films but has several live-action credits as well, including the most recent Mission: Impossible movie), recalled that he was once given an assignment by his drama teacher to get up at 2 a.m. to watch a TV showing of Dr. Strangelove to study Peter Sellers’ tour de force in creating three totally different characterizations in three different nationalities (British -- his own -- American and German). Ironically, five years previously Sellers had played even more roles in The Mouse That Roared, also a spoof of the Cold War and the nuclear threat and also a movie which ends in a series of nuclear explosions that spells doom for the human race (though in The Mouse That Roared that’s only a fantasy sequence), but the difference between The Mouse That Roared and Dr. Strangelove is the difference between talent and genius.

Dr. Strangelove strikes me as the real follow-up to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933) -- also a film about leaders whose egos push them and their countries into a catastrophic war -- and a movie that makes its anti-war points in the language of comedy and at once makes us laugh and cry over the horror of it all. One thing about Dr. Strangelove is the extent to which the obsessions of its characters are bound up with sex. General Ripper is almost never shown without a cigar sticking out of his mouth (and this is one movie in which a cigar is not just a cigar -- and remember that a stiff, unsmoked cigar in his mouth was one of Groucho Marx’s trademarks as well). General Turgidson is summoned to the War Room at the White House while he’s in bed with a young trophy mistress identified only as his secretary and referred to as “Miss Foreign Policy.” Ripper explains to Mandrake that he got the idea to start World War III on his own authority when he had trouble maintaining and erection during “the physical act of love,” and he insists that though he appreciates women “I do deny them my essence” (which I presume to mean he pulled out before ejaculating). Major Kong goes through the contents of the survival kits the bomber crew have been provided with in case they’re shot down or crash on Russian soil, notes that they include condoms, and says, “A fellow could have a good time in Vegas with all this stuff.”

Col. “Bat” Guano sees Mandrake’s British uniform and immediately decides he’s a “prevert” -- and when Mandrake finally persuades Guano to let him call the President because he’s deduced the stop-code that will abort Ripper’s attack orders, as Mandrake enters a phone booth to make the call Guano says, “If you try any preversions in there I’ll blow your head off!” Even the opening sequence, in which stock footage of bombers undergoing air-to-air refueling is shown under the opening credits while the soundtrack gives us a lounge-music version of the old romantic ballad “Try a Little Tenderness,” emphasizes the film’s connections between military violence and sexuality. (Interestingly, these same stock clips were used in another 1964 film, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, so they appeared in one of the worst movies of all time as well as one of the greatest!) Since Dr. Strangelove was made at the tail end of the Production Code the sexual innuendi couldn’t be as explicit as they could have a decade or so later, but they’re strong enough to get the point across and I think they’re funnier for being subtle.

Dr. Strangelove is odd viewing right now during the Trump administration, if only because right now what we’d have to worry about in this situation isn’t a rogue general but a bonkers President ordering an unnecessary, unjustified and catastrophic nuclear attack -- though, like Duck Soup, Dr. Strangelove is a timeless political satire about how wars get started by the fragile egos of national leaders and their willingness to authorize absolutely insane policies (in one scene the Russian ambassador says they went ahead with their Doomsday Device when they learned that the U.S. was planning something similar -- he thunders, “Our source was the New York Times!” -- and President Muffley is told he authorized the feasibility study but can’t remember doing so because a President signs so many papers a day he can’t recall the contents of each one) with virtually no thought because national leaders are encased in intellectual bubbles in which there’s no one around to tell them how stupid these ideas are. Some Presidents, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, have at least tried to correct for this sort of groupthink by recruiting advisors who would give them different points of view -- but Donald Trump, with his bottomless appetite for flattery and his demands for “loyalty” not to the interests of the U.S., but the person of Donald Trump, has rigorously rid his administration of anyone who could possibly tell him when he’s being a moron (a term a number of his advisors, including some now-former Cabinet members, have actually used about him) or an asshole.

Dr. Strangelove isn’t a “horror” film in the sense in which the term is usually used, but it is literally horrific in that it ends with the destruction of most of humanity, aside from a few survivors who will live underground in mineshafts until the earth’s surface is habitable again -- and there’s a line about how the choices for who gets one of the limited slots in the mineshafts will have to include members of the established political and military elites .. thereby ensuring that the same horriffic attitudes and philosophies that precipitated the disaster will be reproduced in whatever section of humanity survives it. The magnificent closing -- with stock shots of nuclear explosions heard over a soundtrack of Vera Lynn’s World War II-era record “We’ll Meet Again (Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When)” -- just puts a capstone on a great and, regrettably, timeless movie. And this time around I was also struck by the similarity between the beautiful tracking shots of the bomber traveling over the winter wasteland of eastern Russia and the traveling shots of similar country, albeit photographically altered (the Hebrides in Scotland) in the Star-Gate sequence at the end of Kubrick’s next film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (my current choice as the greatest movie of all time) -- a visual motif Kubrick went back to again in the opening scenes of Jack Nicholson driving to the mountain resort in what’s otherwise one of Kubrick’s worst movies, The Shining. And it’s fascinating that in an era where the terms “hawks” and “doves” were used to express people’s overall attitudes towards war, with “hawks” favoring war and “doves” favoring peace, it’s ironic that the director of three of the greatest anti-war movies ever made -- Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket -- called his production company “Hawk”!

Them! (Warner Bros., 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Dr. Strangelove Turner Classic Movies followed up their Hallowe’en programming with something far more typical of “horror” fare: Them!, a 1954 production from Warner Bros. and David Weisbart (who would produce Rebel Without a Cause a year later) starring James Whitmore and James Arness as law-enforcement officers (Whitmore as New Mexico cop Sgt. Ben Peterson and Arness, a year before his debut as Marshal Matt Dillon in the long-running Gunsmoke, as government agent Robert Graham) who find themselves leading a campaign to exterminate a race of giant ants that resulted when normal-sized ants mutated from the atomic radiation created by the first nuclear explosion, the “Trinity” atomic-bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945. The ants run from nine to 12 feet long and have the same sexual division of labor as real ants (or insects generally): their colonies are led by queen ants, most of the labor is done by female worker ants, and the males, called “drones,” are there only to fuck the female once and then die.

All this is explained to us by the scientist character Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn, who’d played a super-scientist before in the 1936 Warners horror film The Walking Dead, in which he revives Boris Karloff who’s been executed for a crime he didn’t commit, only Karloff becomes a revenge machine bent on killing all the people who framed him; most of us, though, remember him as Santa Claus in the original 1947 Miracle on 34th Street, and it’s a little weird to hear Santa Claus deliver lectures on entomology), who brings along his daughter, Patricia Medford (Joan Weldon), as his assistant. There’s the usual “this is no job for a woman” crap she has to deal with as she insists on entering the cave where the giant ants are living -- she explains that her dad isn’t physically strong enough to do it and she’s the only other person there with the scientific expertise needed to figure out what’s going on -- but there’s no hint of a romantic or sexual interest between her and any of the men.

Though Them! wasn’t the first of the giant-monster-loosed-on-the-world-by-nuclear-radiation movies, it’s one of the better ones; it may have had a low production budget but it at least had a major-studio infrastructure instead of the catch-as-catch-can production values of American International and the other small companies that made these sorts of things. It also had competent acting -- even though all the actors playing law-enforcement officials seem to have graduated from the Jack Webb School of Underplaying a Cop -- and an unusually well-constructed script by George Worthing Yates, Russell Hughes and Ted Sherderman that set the template for a lot of later “bugs” movies. There’s a long, relatively slow exposition and effective suspense direction by Gordon Douglas before the movie first starts to show us the giant ants on the rampage, after which (like the original King Kong) it becomes more or less a succession of action set-pieces culminating in a confrontation in a sewer still under construction under what’s left of the Los Angeles River. There’s also real pathos in the character of a mother, Mrs. Lodge (Mary Ann Hokanson), whose husband was killed by the giant ants as he had taken their two sons out to play in the dry, paved-over riverbed and who’s broken-hearted not only by his loss but anxiety over the fate of her kids (who, predictably, turn up alive and are rescued -- though barely -- by the people who’ve descended into the sewer to kill the ants).

Though only two giant-monster movies ever achieved real greatness -- the original 1933 King Kong and the original 1954 Japanese film Gojira (not the version we got two years later as Godzilla, with virtually all the non-monster dramatic content cut out and replaced by new and cheaply-shot footage featuring Raymond Burr; Gojira, which we in the U.S. didn’t get to see until 2004, is a masterpiece that intensely expresses Japan’s nationwide post-traumatic stress disorder at being the first country ever on the receiving end of a nuclear attack) -- Them! is quite good entertainment, able to make us suspend disbelief despite its scientifically ridiculous premise (no creature on earth with an outside skeleton can be longer than 18 inches or so because if they got any bigger than that, earth’s gravity would pull their internal organs off the outside skeleton -- and the largest exoskeletal creatures, lobsters and crabs, solve that problem by living most of their lives under water, where their buoyancy partly counteracts the effect of gravity) and refreshing in that unlike in other contemporary monster movies, the scientist agrees with the military that the creature needs to be killed instead of pleading with the authorities to keep it alive for research and/or to try to communicate with it (as happened in James Arness’s other science-fiction horror classic, The Thing, from 1951).

TCM host Ben Mankiewicz warned us that the special effects wouldn’t be as good as they’d be in a version of this premise made today, post-CGI, and he made the surprising claim that instead of using miniature models and stop-motion photography to represent the giant ants, they built two full-sized models, one complete and one partial, and needed up to 20 people off-set to work them. The effects are quite convincing, though that may be one of the reasons this film is in black-and-white (albeit with one splash of color -- the title is blood-red against a black-and-white backdrop): because these kinds of effects, especially the composite shots needed to have the monsters interact on screen with human beings, were considerably easier in 1954 to do in black-and-white than in color.

The Seventh Victim (RKO, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Them! TCM showed a film that crossed genre lines, at once horror and film noir, Val Lewton’s 1943 vest-pocket masterpiece The Seventh Victim, a film I’ve long had an affection for even though I can also see room for improvement in it and I’d love to see a modern remake. In 1942 Val Lewton, a former journalist and pulp writer who had been hired as David O. Selznick’s West Coast story editor (he also had an East Coast story editor, Kay Brown, and in a weird bit of revenge-taking because Selznick had bought Gone With the Wind on Brown’s recommendation after Lewton had told him to pass on it, Selznick had Lewton stand outside the theatre’s restrooms and count how many people used them during Gone With the Wind’s preview screening, information Selznick wanted because he was having an argument with his distributor, MGM, over whether to have an intermission in the film and he wanted to document that so many people would need to use the bathroom during the film that an intermission would be necessary), was picked by Charles Koerner, newly appointed studio head at RKO, to head a new horror unit that would make “B” films. Lewton was given three restrictions -- his films couldn’t cost more than $150,000 to make, they couldn’t run longer than 75 minutes, and the titles would be given to him by RKO’s marketing department based on what they thought they could sell to the horror audience -- but within those limits he could do pretty much whatever he wanted.

Lewton decided that with that little money he couldn’t do the kinds of out-front monster extravangae Universal made, so he wouldn’t try; instead he would use shadows and creative sound editing to scare audiences without having to show much of anything. One of the things that made Lewton’s movies so good was that he inherited virtually the entire staff Orson Welles had assembled to make his early-1940’s masterpieces, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, which had both been financial baths for the studio. Koerner had been brought in to replace George Schaefer, the studio head who’d signed Welles, and he immediately announced that from then on RKO films would feature “Showmanship Instead of Genius.” Koerner hired Lew Ostrow, who had previously produced the Hardy Family series at MGM, and Ostrow in turn hired Lewton. “When Orson was, so to speak, ‘evicted’ from RKO -- he was given a few hours to move out --most of the people who had been associated with him were punished, because of our love for him, because of our hopes for him,” The Seventh Victim director Mark Robson recalled. Fortunately, most of the people demoted to the “B” unit as punishment for having worked with Welles -- including Robson and Robert Wise, who had co-edited Citizen Kane -- were grabbed by Lewton, who as someone who had decided to make his films unusually creative sonically naturally could use people who had trained with a master of radio drama like Welles.

Both Robson and Wise made their debuts as directors on Lewton projects, Robson on The Seventh Victim and Wise on The Body Snatcher (Lewton’s first period piece and his first film with established horror stars Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; when Lewton was told RKO had signed Karloff and was assigning him to his unit, Lewton protested because Karloff represented exactly the kind of in-your-face horror Lewton was trying to avoid … until he and Karloff actually met and Karloff told Lewton how much he loved his films and looked forward to the chance to work with him), and both went on to quite long and productive careers. Lewton’s first film as producer was Cat People, and originally it disappointed RKO executives who had expected a film about a were-cat to feature a woman with fangs, claws and fur like Lon Chaney, Jr. in Universal’s The Wolf-Man -- until it got released and grossed $4 million, thereby making up most of RKO’s losses on Orson Welles. That and the next two films Lewton produced, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man, were directed by Jacques Tourneur, son of another director who’d been hired from France to work in Hollywood, Maurice Tourneur; Tourneur fils hadn’t established a reputation from under the shadow of Tourneur pere until the success of Cat People. After the three films he and Lewton made together, the studio decided to pull them apart and they offered Lewton higher budgets -- only to renege when they found Lewton wanted to give Mark Robson his first directorial job on his next production.

The Seventh Victim was an original story by Charles “Blackie” O’Neal (father of Ryan O’Neal and grandfather of Tatum O’Neal) and Cat People writer DeWitt Bodeen, and it begins in a convent school (actually a recycling of the set of Amberson Manor from The Magnificent Ambersons, complete with the stained-glass panels representing faith, hope and charity Welles and his art director, Mark-Lee Kirk, had meticulously reproduced from the description of them in Booth Tarkington’s novel), in which student Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter, in her first film -- she gets an “Introducing” credit) is summoned by the headmistress and told that her sister Jacqueline (Jean Brooks, then-wife of writer and future director Richard Brooks), who’d raised Mary since the death of their parents, hasn’t been heard from or paid the school’s tuition in eight months. The headmistress (who has the ironic name “Miss Lowood” -- “Lowood” was the name of the boarding school where Jane Eyre grew up in Charlotte Bronte’s novel) agrees to loan Mary some money with which to go to New York and see if she can trace her sister. Miss Lowood also says that if things don’t work out for her in the big city she can always come back and they’ll hire her as a teacher -- whereupon she’s accosted by Miss Gilchrist, another member of the school’s staff, who warns her not to come back to the school because then she’ll never leave again and never have the kind of life she could have experienced outside its walls.

Mary duly arrives in New York and finds herself surrounded with various “types,” including the middle-aged couple (Chef Milani and Marguerita Sylva) who own the Italian restaurant where Jacqueline was a regular and the beauty products company, La Sagesse, which Jacqueline founded and built into a success. Only now the company is being run by Esther Redi (Mary Newton), a sinister heavy-set middle-aged woman. Mary is shocked when she learns that her sister sold Redi the business -- and is even more shocked when she finds that Jacqeline didn’t sell the business but gave it to her outright. Redi also changed the company’s logo to feature a parallelogram with a slash in the middle -- symbol of a Satanic cult called the Palladists that was founded in the Middle Ages and has been revived in contemporary New York. An opportunistic private detective named Irving August offers to help Mary find Jacqueline for $50; the two break into La Sagesse after hours and narrowly miss the watchman, only when August goes into a secret room he’s mysteriously stabbed and killed by an assailant we never see. Mary also meets the men in her sister’s life -- psychiatrist Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway, reviving his character from Cat People -- and thereby establishing this story as taking place before Cat People because in that film Judd was killed by the cat-woman after he made a pass at her); Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), whom at first Mary assumes Jacqueline was merely dating but later is shocked to find was actually married to her; and Jason Hoag (Erford Gage), who 10 years earlier published a book of poetry that was hailed as a masterpiece but since then has been blocked and hasn’t written anything.

Mary finally meets Jacqueline -- whose long, sculpted black hair practically becomes a character itself -- but Jacqueline is a death-obsessed space case who’s rented a room in the building that houses the Italian restaurant in which she’s hung a noose she intends to use when she’s finally got tired of living. She’s also run afoul of the Palladists, whom she joined as a thrill-seeker and then earned her wrath when she tried to leave. They locked her into a room in the basement of La Sagesse -- the one Irving August tried to enter -- and she was the one who killed him because in her disoriented state she was sure he was there to kill her. The final scene packs the biggest wallop of the whole movie; Jacqueline escapes both the Palladists and the well-meaning good guys who are totally unaware of what they’re up against and walks through the city streets, encountering various New York characters -- including a troupe of actors she runs into while they’re on intermission but still in costume, one of whom makes a crude pass at her -- and she finally makes it back to the room above the restaurant. She runs into her next-door neighbor, a woman who used to be a “regular” on the club scene until she got tuberculosis, who dresses in one of her old lame outfits for one last night on the town before she croaks. She goes into the room she’s rented and hung the noose -- in yet another touch of Lewtonesque irony the room number is 7, ordinarily a symbol of good luck -- and she closes the door and we hear her voice as a voice-over recite the epigram from one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets we saw in a title just after the opening credits: “I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday.” It was so Val Lewton to construct an entire film leading up to the heroine’s suicide and then not show it to us!

Indeed, the ending confused the original audiences and, according to TCM commentator Harry Muller, made The Seventh Victim the first Lewton production to lose money -- though, given how “B” movies were sold to theatres on a flat-fee basis instead of a percentage,as long as Lewton kept it on budget it’s hard to imagine how it could have lost money even if audiences didn’t like it. But while American audiences may not have taken to it, The Seventh Victim became a cult film in Britain, as Robson found out when the British producers John and Roy Boulting visited him after World War II. “They used to bicycle a print of The Seventh Victim around London,” Robson recalled, “among them Carol Reed and Cavalcanti and people like that, thinking it an advanced and weird form of filmmaking.” The Seventh Victim has some clunky moments -- among them Tom Conway’s character trying to embarrass the Satanists at their meeting by reciting the Lord’s Prayer -- and Kim Hunter’s performance is promising but hardly up to her later standards, but overall it’s still a quite remarkable movie and one thing I particularly like about it is it has no supernatural elements: the Palladists are just a cult and we’re not expected to believe they’re in touch either with a real Satan or some eldritch Lovecraftian creature they’re worshiping as such.

I Walked With a Zombie (RKO, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Seventh Victim TCM reached back two films in the Lewtonian canon and showed I Walked with a Zombie, which director Jacques Tourneur described as “a horrible title for a very good film -- the best film I’ve ever done in my life.” It began as a magazine article by Inez Wallace that was simply a travel piece about going to Haiti, but RKO studio head Charles Koerner saw box-office gold in that thar title and bought the rights to it even though the piece was basically unfilmable. Lewton, Tourneur and writers Curt Siodmak (a surprising name to see on the credits of a Lewton film since he had written The Wolf-Man and many of the other Universal horrors Lewton was setting himself up against) and Ardel Wray decided to make it a knockoff of Jane Eyre relocated to the West Indies. (Ironically, when Jean Rhys wrote her 1966 prequel to Jane Eyre, The Wide Sargasso Sea, she set it in the West Indies and made Antoinette Rochester, the mad wife, a half-Black Creole.) The opening scene takes place in winter in Canada -- we can see that because snow is falling outside the office where nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is being interviewed for a new job -- and she agrees to take it but is somewhat taken aback when she learns it’s going to be nursing the mentally ill wife of a plantation owner in the West Indies. (Well, at least it’ll get her away from all that snow.) She meets the man who, as yet unbeknownst to her, is going to be her employer, Paul Holland (Tom Conway), when she’s approaching the island on a sailing ship (itself a marvelous symbol of her heading to a job with people obsessed with their pasts) and he tells her all the ugliness and cruelty behind the superficial beauty of the place.

It turns out the Hollands have been running a sugar plantation on this island for at least two centuries and they originally made their fortune on slave labor. It’s amazing enough that a Hollywood movie made just three years after Gone With the Wind tells us up-front that slavery was evil and there was nothing noble or romantic about it -- no wonder Val Lewton didn’t want David Selznick to make Gone With the Wind! -- but the racial politics of I Walked With a Zombie get even farther ahead of their time than that. As she works into her job Betsy encounters not only Paul but his half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison, top-billed -- and for someone who looked like an empty suit in the Busby Berkeley musical The Gang’s All Here it’s a surprise to see him give a rich performance as a complex character under Lewton’s and Tourneur’s auspices!) and their mother (Edith Barrett). Paul explains that “Mrs. Rand” (her only identification in the character list) first married his planter dad and then, after the senior Holland died, married the local missionary and had Wesley -- who’s grown up to be a self-hating drunk. From various sources, including a calypso song written for the film and sung by a performer named “Sir Lancelot” (and later recorded in the late 1950’s by the great African-American woman folksinger Odetta) called “Shame and Scandal,” Betsy learns that Wesley tried to hit on Paul’s wife Jessica (Christine Gordon), and the night he tried her to run away with him was the night she went crazy.

Torn between her own growing love for Paul and her belief that restoring Jessica to sanity will make him happy, Betsy first tries the services of a Western doctor, Dr. Maxwell (James Bell), on the island and then,when his “insulin shock” treatment fails (the idea was to use insulin to induce a coma and then shock her back into consciousness and hopefully into sanity). Then, on the advice of her servant Alma (Theresa Harris), she goes to the voodoo hougan to see if their magic will work where Western medicine has failed. The titular walk with a zombie takes place among tall, slender, strikingly lit sugar cane and features Betsy taking Jessica to the voodoo camp, led by the tall Black guide Carrefour (Darby Jones), who when we first see him is standing so still we think he’s a statue and only later, when he moves, do we realize he’s a living person. Though the voodoo ceremony depicted in I Walked with a Zombie is probably not that authentic, it’s done with a lot more sensitivity, taste and cultural respect than Hollywood’s norm for depicting non-Abrahamic religions at the time. The voodoo congregation is composed of serious people who hold down jobs (albeit as servants) elsewhere on the island and are not the sorts of primitive Black savages that earlier films like Roy William Neill’s Black Moon (1934) did. (When Charles and I saw Black Moon I said it was probably the most openly racist movie Hollywood had made since The Birth of a Nation -- and that’s not just 21st century hindsight either: in 1934 the Motion Picture Herald warned owners of theatres with large Black clienteles not to show it.)

One of the things I most admire about Lewton is his extraordinary sensitivity towards people of color -- I remember how shocked I was when I saw Sir Lancelot appear in a 1943 Dick Powell musical at Paramount called Happy-Go-Lucky and saw him cast as the typical stupid shuffling servant stereotype, a far cry from the way Lewton used him here and again in The Curse of the Cat People (where he’s a servant but one who’s emotionally part of the family and is treated with dignity and honor) -- which perhaps came from his own childhood and his feelings of isolation. I Walked with a Zombie is one of Lewton’s best, J. Roy Hunt’s cinematography is the sort of luscious, rich, high-contrast black-and-white that makes you wonder why anyone thought the movies ever needed color; the dazzling shots he and Tourneur come up with make this film one painterly scene after another; Lewton’s use of sound (both Roy Webb’s musical score and the voodoo drums and other sounds of the hougan ritual) is superb as always, and though the plot really doesn’t make much sense (we learn that Mrs. Rand has actually taken a leadership position in the hougan, at first merely to use voodoo to get the local Black population to boil their water and take other basic sanitation measures, but later we find that she actually was the one who “zombie-ized” Jessica Holland to keep her and Wesley Rand from fleeing the island together, and at the end Wesley and Jessica do a Star Is Born-style walk into the ocean -- jarringly obviously Malibu -- so the wastrel and the white zombie both die and Paul and Betsy are free to get together), the movie has been such a visual feast -- and the characters so richly brought to life, especially by Conway and Ellison --it doesn’t matter.

I Walked with a Zombie is first-rate filmmaking by any measure, and an example of the artistry with which horror films used to be made before audience tastes coarsened and today the horror audience just wants blood, gore and carnage -- forget artistry and imagination. I remember when I saw Wes Craven’s Scream I quite enjoyed the first hour and a half of the movie -- I found myself wishing Craven could have lived in the 1940’s and had Lewton as his producer -- and then in the last half-hour Craven, all too aware of what his audiences expected and wanted, brought the knives out figuratively and literally and splashed the screen in the rivers of blood modern-day horror fans want.