by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Over the weekend Charles
and I watched a couple of movies from my backlog of off-the-air recordings I
made on DVD’s before the wretched conversion of my cable-TV service to
“all-digital” made that technically impossible. The films were items from
Turner Classic Movies in 2013 and were part of an unannounced tribute to
actress Patricia Medina, who was Mrs. Joseph Cotten but as far as I can recall
never actually made a film with him. The first was The Beast of Hollow
Mountain, a movie I’ve been
interested in seeing ever since I read about it in the book The Making of King
Kong — that’s the original King
Kong from 1933 rather than the
later versions (neither of which I’ve seen) nor the innumerable reboots,
sequelae and sequelae to the reboots. It was mentioned in the chapter on King
Kong’s special-effects head,
Willis H. O’Brien, who first conceived of bringing prehistoric creatures to
life on screen through the use of stop-motion animation. O’Brien’s technique
included first building an “armature,” a metal skeleton for the creature in
which neck, arms, legs and tails were fully articulated. Then the armature was
covered with a suitable material to look like the real animal — or at least our
best guesses, since all we have left of the dinosaurs are their bones, as to
what they actually looked like. The big step was having the model perform for
the camera by taking a single frame, then moving one or more of its parts
slightly, taking another frame, and then doing that over and over until what
resulted was a strip of film in which the model appeared to move.
The greatest
practitioners of this art form, which required a great deal of time, money and
patience (a stop-motion animation crew could take up an entire eight-our work
day to turn out a minute to a minute and a half of usable film), were O’Brien
and his friend and disciple Ray Harryhausen, who worked with O’Brien on the
1949 original version of Mighty Joe Young and became the leading stop-motion animator of the 1950’s and 1960’s,
creating sequences that are still stunning today even though stop-motion has
mostly been displaced by digital animation. O’Brien first showed off his
techniques in the 1919 short (about 15 minutes) film The Ghost of Slumber
Mountain, and in their book The
Making of King Kong authors
George Turner and Orville Goldner did a series of appendices describing the
previous films of the creative people involved in Kong. In their chapter on The Ghost of Slumber
Mountain they noted that in 1956
someone had produced a film called The Beast of Hollow Mountain and that O’Brien had provided its story (adapted
into a screenplay by Robert Hill with Jack DeWitt credited with additional
dialogue) but unfortunately had not been hired to do the effects work. In fact, as Turner and Goldner
noted, the two films had nothing in common except that both ended with
sequences of a normal human being chased by a flesh-eating dinosaur. The
Beast of Hollow Mountain was a
1956 co-production between Edward and William Nassour’s independent U.S.
company and the Mexican film studio Peliculas Rodríguez, which explains why the
film is set in Mexico, was shot there (in Cuernavaca in the Mexican state of
Morelos), and except for leads Guy Madison and Patricia Medina, has an
all-Mexican cast. Not surprisingly, the film was made simultaneously in English
and Spanish — a throwback to the early days of sound films, in which separate
crews would shoot different versions of the movie in different languages, using
the same stars if they were multilingual (Greta Garbo shot her first talkie, Anna
Christie, in both English and
German versions) but replacing most, if not all, of the cast. What’s most
fascinating about The Beast of Hollow Mountain is that for nearly an hour of its 79-minute
running time there’s not much of an indication that the titular beast is going
to turn out to be a living dinosaur.
It’s mostly a tale of American rancher
Jimmy Ryan (Guy Madison, who then was starring on U.S. TV in a Western series
called Wild Bill Hickock) and his
Mexican partner Felipe Sanchez (Carlos Rivas, whose presence puts the cast of The
Beast of Hollow Mountain one
degree of separation from the most recent Academy Awards telecast — the
telecast featured Rita Moreno, who played the slave girl from Burma in the 1956
film The King and I; Rivas
played her Burmese boyfriend who risked his life coming to Thailand to keep
seeing her and the two sang the duet “We Kiss in a Shadow,” though he may have
had a voice double) have bought a spread in Mexico. The local patrón, Don Pedro (Julio Villareal), is O.K. with the gringo and his Mexican partner running cattle in his
neighborhood, but another local rancher, Enrique Rios (Eduardo Noriega), isn’t.
Jimmy risks his own life to save Don Pedro’s drunken servant Pancho (Pascual
García Peña, who judging from his performance here probably got calls from
Mexican casting directors who were asked for a Thomas Mitchell type) from a
runaway horse. In doing this he attracts the attention of Don Pedro’s daughter
Sarita (Patricia Medina), who’s engaged to Rios but doesn’t like him — she’s
willing to marry him at his father’s behest to unite the two family fortunes,
but the moment she sees Jimmy she falls head over heels for the American. Jimmy
humiliates Rios in a street brawl and that makes Rios even more determined to
drive Jimmy off his land and out of Mexico. While all this is going on cattle
are mysteriously disappearing from both Jimmy’s and Rios’s herds — Pancho and
his son Panchito (Mario Navarro), a typically obnoxious movie kid of the
1950’s, are convinced that inside Hollow Mountain, separated from the rest of
the country by an impassable swamp, lives some sort of beast that’s eating the
missing cattle, but of course Jimmy and Rios each accuse the other of rustling.
Jimmy is broke: his financial survival is dependent on his getting his latest
herd to market, and Rios plants two workers on his staff and tells them to
stampede the cattle so Jimmy will lose his herd, his income will fall through
and he’ll be forced to leave town.
Pancho ventures into the swamp country to find
out what’s happening to the cattle, only he doesn’t get far because a giant
shadow of something or other approaches him and he screams. Eventually his sombrero (looking surprisingly clean for someone who lived
as rough a life as Pancho did and, at least in the scenes we see, almost never
took it off) is found in the swamp. Cut off from credit by Rios’ influence,
Jimmy starts the big cattle drive that’s supposed to redeem his fortunes, only
the stampede happens earlier than Rios and his undercover men intended it to,
and soon enough we find out why: the Beast of Hollow Mountain, a generic
upright-walking killer dinosaur along the lines of Allosaurus (the Jurassic Era precursor to Tyrannosaurus
rex; the difference is that Allosaurus could still walk on all fours when it wanted to
whereas the T. Rex’s front limbs had
degenerated to the point where they were virtually useless), is chasing away
the cattle from both herds
because apparently raw cattle are its favorite existing food source. The first
hour of The Beast of Hollow Mountain is a pretty generic Western, not bad but not particularly interesting
either, and it’s not at all clear when this film is supposedly taking place — it could be virtually any time
from the 1870’s to the 1956 present when it was made. Once the dino-action
starts it becomes a virtually non-stop chase scene in which the humans try to
drive the dinosaur into the quicksand-filled swamp because out in the middle of
Nowhere, Mexico, without access to high-tech weapons or the planes from which King
Kong’s makers, Merian Cooper and
Ernest B. Schoedsack, brought down the big ape (literally — they were both
accomplished pilots and they took over the stunt-flying task when one of them
joked to the other, “We really ought to kill the S.O.B. ourselves”), that’s the
only way they can knock the thing off. Many of the cast and crew members went
on to work on The Black Scorpion, a 1957 production and another U.S.-Mexican co-venture — though that
one did involve O’Brien bringing
the giant black scorpion to life with stop-motion animation.
Though O’Brien
didn’t get to work on The Beast of Hollow Mountain despite providing the “idea” for the film (that’s
how he’s credited, simply with an “idea” rather than a full-fledged story
credit), the animation is quite convincing. The credits ballyhooed the film as
being in the new “Nassour Regiscope” process of “Animation in Depth,” but like
“Dynamation” (the title Ray Harryhausen’s employers slapped on some of his
later films to make them sound like they were being shot in a revolutionary new
process) this is simply stop-motion animation presented for the first time in
CinemaScope and color. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, three
techniques were used in the final film: the traditional stop-motion animation with
articulated models described above, so-called “replacement animation” (in which
a scene is brought to life by constructing several different models, each one
virtually identical except for the part that’s supposed to move, and one model
is replaced by the next in sequence as the scene is shot frame-by-frame) and,
for the close-ups of the monster walking, a human stunt person wearing
full-sized dino-boots to get the shots directors Edward Nassour and Ismail
Rodríguez wanted of the monster’s feet traipsing through the muddy swampland
separating Hollow Mountain from the rest of Mexico. Eventually it ends the way
you expect it to, with the Beast of Hollow Mountain drowned in quicksand, Jimmy
and Sarita together, the ranch saved and Rios publicly humiliated. Apparently
there’s a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of this film, which might be fun to see, but au naturel The Beast of Hollow Mountain isn’t a bad movie but isn’t an especially good one
either; it’s nice to see all that Mexican scenery in color (thank you,
cinematographer Jorge Stahl, Jr.) and the human activities going on in front of
it aren’t bad, while the dinosaur is animated as well as one could expect from
a film that O’Brien or Harryhausen didn’t do the effects work on; it’s just a monster climax, sort of Zorro
Meets Godzilla, grafted onto a not
especially interesting tale of Mexican land-grabbing.
