UNTAMED YOUTH (1957)

Near a small town in Texas, young sisters Penny (Mamie Van Doren) and Jane (Lori Nelson), who are hitchhiking their way to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming famous singers, are caught skinny-dipping in a river by Sheriff Mitch and arrested, for that and for being vagrants. Cecilia, the local judge, offers them and other juvenile offenders the opportunity to pick cotton for a month at a local farm run by Russ Tropp. They’re paid for their work and they get to rock and roll in the evening in their barracks, with songs provided by Penny and by a guitarist named Bong (the rock singer Eddie Cochran). We soon discover that the judge is secretly married to Tropp, hence this arrangement, and during a labor shortage, he gets away with having cheap juvenile workers (cheaper even than migrants), making the kids work hours in the hot sun, giving them shabby living conditions, and not conducting required medical checks. We also see that Tropp has a live-in mistress, Lilibet, but when she displeases him, he boots her out to pick cotton. When the judge’s son Bob arrives home from his Army service, Tropp gives him a job, and soon Bob is flirting with Jane and, at the instigation of Penny and Lilibet, digging into Tropp's dastardly ways. Bob discovers that Tropp has been feeding the kids dog food on occasion, and one day, a sickly girl named Baby faints in the sun. Bob, ignoring Tropp's orders, takes her to the hospital where she dies and it's discovered that she was five months pregnant. Tropp offers to get Penny an audition at a local TV station, but he wants sexual favors in return which Penny won't deliver. Eventually Jane and Bob both tell the judge what's going on. Will she do the right thing and put an end to Tropp's misdeeds or will lust blind her to the situation?

In the realm of sexy teenage melodramas of the 1950s, this is OK. Mamie plays Mamie here and that's not all bad. She's got skimpy clothes, attitude in spades, and her songs are not unpleasant—one has a verse that goes, "You’re as slimy as a salamander." In another, she sings, "I get the jiggles / Everything wiggles!" Lori Nelson, as the more innocent sister, sort of fades into the background but manages to pep up when called upon to in the last third of the film. Eddie Cochran, who had a top 10 hit, "Summertime Blues" (a song most of us know now from the The Who's cover in the 70s), was killed in a car crash in 1960. His one song, "Cottonpicker," is fun, done as a mini-production number out in the fields. The very busy Lurene Tuttle (with almost 200 acting credits on IMDB, including playing the sheriff's wife in Psycho) is adequate as Judge Cecilia, though the way she ignores the goings-on in her courtroom when her son comes bouncing in is very unprofessional (and maybe indicates some mother-son issues?). Though it's hard to take your eyes off of Mamie, I was pleasantly distracted by the two darned good-looking male leads. John Russell (Tropp) has an intense and sexy gaze, making Cecila's interest understandable despite his sleazy behavior. Don Burnett (Bob) is young and handsome and charismatic but didn't have a long career—I know him from DAMON AND PYTHIAS. His character is a little slow on the uptake but is properly heroic in the end. The score by the prolific Les Baxter is appropriately loud and sexy. Jered Barclay is amusing as an aloof beatnik; in one scene, a dancing girl brushes her head against his hand and he's careful to wipe his hand on his shirt afterward. I liked this movie, but I can only recommend it to Mamie fans, or fans of 50s teenage camp, or, ya know, fans of handsome B-movie actors. At top right, Russell and Van Doren; at left, Burnett and Nelson. [YouTube]

THE INDIAN TOMB (1921)

Prince Ayan, the Majarajah of Eschnapur in India, unearths and awakens the buried yogi Ramigami, who is in a deliberate trance-like state of near death, to do his bidding. He wants to commission a British architect, Herbert Rowland, to build a magnificent tomb, "the tomb of a great love," he says, to compare with the Taj Mahal. Ramagami can transport himself across time and space in an instant, and so appears in Herbert's living room and convinces him to travel to India to take on the project. Herbert leaves a letter telling his fiancée Irene where he's gone, but some time later, the disembodied hand of the yogi appears in the room and takes the letter. Still, Irene manages to piece together where he's gone and goes after him. In Eschnapur, the prince is courtly but a bit mysterious, and we soon get some backstory that Herbert doesn't learn until later: the Princess Savitri is not yet dead. Ayan caught her having an affair with a British officer and has imprisoned her and plans on using the tomb to bury her alive, even as his soldiers are out hunting for her lover, MacAllen. Irene arrives but worried her presence will distract Herbert, Ayan doesn't let them meet. Other complications arise—Ramigami, though forced to help the prince, warns him that nothing good will come of his revenge plans; Savitri's loyal servant Mirrjha gets involved asking Herbert for help; the prince is impressed by Irene's selfless love for Herbert and seems to be attracted to her; MacAllen hides in a hut which soldiers set on fire, but manages to escape; Herbert wanders into the Pit of Penitents, actually a prison for lepers, and contracts leprosy himself. At this point, we’re only halfway through the four-hour movie and, though the pace does slow considerably, there is still plenty of action left before the climax, a chase which ends on a rope bridge over a deep gorge.

This silent movie, directed by Joe May from a screenplay by Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou (based on a novel she wrote the year before), is the first of three German films based on this material. All three movies are roughly four hours long and were presented in their original runs as two separate films, released a month or so apart. I haven’t seen the 1938 version, but Fritz Lang’s 1959 remake deviates from the core material in several ways, primarily by making the architect the princess's lover. The silent version gives the Ramigami character supernatural powers, putting the movie fully into the fantasy genre. This isn't as much fun as the Lang film, but it is spectacularly made with huge sets, elaborate costumes, romance, hissable villainy, and, allowing for the silent era acting, good performances. Three leading men take the honors. Conrad Veidt (Major Strasser in Casablanca), at top right, is utterly compelling as the prince, coming off as a good and civilized man twisted by jealousy. Bernhard Goetzke is just as good as Ramigami, an interesting character who doesn't get as much screen time as Veidt but is almost as memorable. Paul Richter, later to play the heroic Seigfrid in Lang's epic film Die Nibelungen, pictured at left, gets short shrift as MacAllen, but has a couple of good scenes. I’m shallow enough to wish that Herbert and Irene had been played by younger prettier people. Olaf Fonss and Mia May are OK as Herbert and Irene; both engage in silent movie overacting, but both are energetic enough in action scenes. Lya De Putti (namechecked by Sally Bowles in Cabaret) is sexy as the doomed servant, and Erna Morena has little to do as the princess.

Among the interesting setpieces: two scenes set in a tiger pit, one of which features tigers munching on a dead body; a dance that ends in death by snake bite; the creepy leper pit featuring a man hanging upside down and another one buried to his neck in the dirt floor—the lepers are called penitents so I assume that their disease is thought to caused by sinfulness. The large sets are effective, and the costumes are occasionally dazzling, especially one with a very elaborate headdress worn by Veidt. At four hours, both halves could have been trimmed but still, I quite enjoyed both this and the Lang version. The Blu-ray from Kino has a largely ineffective minimalist score, seemingly composed of blocks of music dropped into sequences without much regard to appropriateness, but the print looks good. Just before I watched this, I read the novel, newly translated into English just a few years ago. Given the long movies made from it, it's fairly short, basically providing seed material for the filmmakers, and the ending is ridiculous, like Von Harbou hit a deadline and stopped. I don’t recommend the book but I do highly recommend both the 1921 and the 1959 films. [Blu-ray]

THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR / THE INDIAN TOMB (1959)

Originally released as separate films, these two Fritz Lang works are actually one long narrative which has been unofficially referred to as Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic. Put together, it feels like a 3-1/2 hour serial, which is meant as a compliment. German architect Harald Berger has come to the Indian kingdom of Eschnapur at the behest of Maharajah Chandra to build schools and hospitals and make improvements to his palace. En route, Berger saves a servant girl from harassment and is thanked by her mistress, the lovely dancing girl Seetha, who is headed to the palace to become a temple dancer for Chandra. The next day, Berger saves Seetha from an attacking tiger and the two form a bond which grows into a romance. Her origins are supposedly “obscure and shadowy,” but when she recognizes an old Irish folk song that Berger sings, she realizes that she is indeed half-European on her father's side. The situation at the palace is fraught. Chandra’s wife died and he has sent for Seetha as a possible replacement, angering the dead maharani’s brother, Padhu. Meanwhile, Chandra’s brother Ramigani has been plotting to overthrow Chandra and gets Padhu on his side, hoping the people will rebel if Chandra picks a commoner to be his bride. We meet Asagara, an Indian engineer who is assigned to assist Berger and who will, as sides in the conflict develop, be torn between loyalty to Chandra and being a friend to Berger. Irene, Berger’s sister, and her engineer husband Walter are on their way to assist Berger. After performing a remarkably sexy temple dance, Chandra puts Seetha up in the palace and asks for her hand. She claims to feel like a bird in a gilded cage, like the real one in her room, but the civilized Chandra insists he has no wish to force her into a quick decision, saying “haste is a European vice.” Padhu kidnaps Seetha and plans to rape her, but Chandra saves her. Now both Chandra and Berger have been her rescuers and she feels beholden to both. After escaping a tiger in an arena, Berger and Seetha go on the run with Chandra’s men racing after them. A final title card says, “For the miraculous rescue of the lovers, see the sequel.”

You can see the serial story beats in the above summary. and I didn’t even mention the fakir rope trick act which ends with the death of Seetha’s servant girl. TIGER is paced quickly, but the second film slows things down a bit. The action largely shifts to Irene and Walter who arrive in Eschnapur and slowly suspect that Chandra’s story of Berger being off on a hunting trip is hiding something sinister. Chandra tells Walter he is to oversee the construction of a magnificent tomb for his dead love, which turns out not to be the late maharani but Seetha who will be entombed alive. Ramigani and Padhu collaborate on fomenting an uprising, with the high priest Yama brought in on the plans, though he may be a wild card. Berger spends much of the second film out of commission and Irene becomes a focus of the story. It isn’t really a spoiler to note that in the end, Berger and Seetha wind up together, but Chandra, who has been presented as somewhat sympathetic throughout, gets his own unexpected and rather moving redemption. 

Many devout Fritz Lang fans dismiss this film as empty campy spectacle without the interesting visuals and themes that are present in his more well-known films. Other fans interpret the story as being about ethnic identity, tradition, and colonialism. However, taken on its own terms, this is a very entertaining adventure. It’s quite colorful and the interior sets are spectacular; most of the exteriors were shot on location in Udaipur in India. The most talked-about scenes are two dances by Seetha (Debra Paget); the one in THE INDIAN TOMB, which involves a dangerous snake, is incredibly sexy with Paget practically naked, and in both, we can see the male viewers becoming uncomfortably aroused. Paget, probably known more for her looks than her acting, is quite good and basically carries the movie. She upstages Paul Hubschmid (aka Paul Christian) who is fine as the hero, if not as physically commanding as a typical action hero of the era. Walther Reyer is very good as Chandra at expressing his inner conflict—he likes Berger and respects him for saving Seetha from the tiger, but he’s also a royal ruler and is used to getting his way. The special effects involving the tigers and the snake are cheap and artificial but we suspend our disbelief. The original 1921 silent version, co-written by Lang but not directed by him, is on deck for watching next and is apparently more faithful to the novel written by Lang’s wife at the time, Thea von Harbou, which is on my bedstand. Highly recommended, but avoid the American version, Journey to the Lost City, which cuts the two films down to 90 minutes and, of course, is dubbed. Pictured top right are Paget and Hubschmid; at left is Paget dancing. [Blu-ray]

ZERO FOR CONDUCT (1933)

We see two boys, Colin and Caussat, on a train heading back to boarding school. They're high-spirited, playing little pranks on people, but at school, they are tamped down by administrators. The two boys bond with another student, Bruel, to become ringleaders in a movement of, if not outright disobedience, then slight disruption of the rituals and rules of the school. Tabard, a younger boy, develops a special relationship with Bruel; that relationship is frowned upon by some teachers, though the science teacher himself shows an interest in Tabard. The new class monitor, Huguet, becomes friendly with the boys as a kind of Pied Piper figure, occasionally amusing them with his Charlie Chaplin imitation and taking them into town on Sundays. Small acts of rebellion grow: the boys turn over a bed with a teacher sleeping in it; twice, Tabard tells a teacher he’s "full of shit"; a food fight breaks out over the constant diet of cooked beans. Finally, an innocent but anarchic pillow fight breaks out one night (pictured), played out partly in slow motion with pillow feathers filling the air, and the next day, during the celebration of Commemoration Day, with several dignitaries present, the four boys barricade themselves in the attic, raise a skull and crossbones flag, and throw trash from the roof.

This 45-minute film, directed by Jean Vigo, is less a coherent narrative (though there is a developing throughline) than a series of impressionistic vignettes, some realistic, some less so. One can easily see how this influenced Lindsay Anderson’s IF, a much later film about boarding school revolutionaries, although this film's anti-authoritarian tone remains light compared with the later film's sex and violence. The endings of both movies feature authoritarian celebration disrupted by students, though in IF, there is a vision of bloodshed rather than pillow feathers and trash. In 1933, the threat of anarchic behavior by children was enough to get the film banned in France, though today this movie seems almost sweet and wholesome. Though this is a sound film, the dialogue is fairly sparse and not terribly important to the story, with the exception of Tabard's scatological outbursts. Though the teachers and the headmaster, a cranky bearded dwarf, are presented as rigid and oppressive, they mostly aren't seen as cruel so much as petty and ineffective. The most startling scene is not one of rebellion: at one point, a teacher catches a boy drawing a mocking picture of him which comes briefly to animated life. In its own way, the ending is almost as surreal as the ending of IF, and I was left wondering if indeed the entire last few minutes are real or just in the boys’ imaginations. Jean Daste (Huguet) played the lead in Vigo’s L’ATALANTE, the only feature length film that Vigo made in his short lifetime. French title: ZERO DE CONDUITE. [Criterion Channel]

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACEMONSTER (1965)

In a spaceship, Nadir, a bald alien who looks a bit like Dr. Evil with Spock ears, assists the Princess, buxom and glittery, in her plan to kidnap women from Earth to repopulate their dying planet (both pictured at left). They shoot an Earth missile out of the sky, but at Cape Kennedy, NASA goes ahead with plans to send an astronaut, alone, to Mars, despite the missile failure and despite receiving signals from space that may or may not be from intelligent beings. The astronaut, Frank Saunders, is not known to the public, and during a press conference, he suddenly freezes up and has to be taken from the room. We then discover that Frank is a cyborg, a robotic being created with body parts, being sent on this mission to minimize harm to humans. In a lab, doctors peel back his hair to adjust the wiring in his head, and he's ready to blast off. But the aliens shoot the rocket down over Puerto Rico and Frank manages to parachute to safety. The alien ship lands and one the aliens tries to kill Frank but only succeeds in damaging him, leaving him with half of his face exposed as metal and wire. He wanders around the island on a fairly harmless rampage, referred to by one of the earth scientists as "an astro-robot without a control system." The scientists go to Puerto Rico and two of them, Adam and Karen, spend a few minutes idly tooling around on a moped, accompanied by a pleasant mildly jazzy love song. They eventually find Frank hiding in a cave and Adam manages to fix his wiring just enough so he'll follow instructions. In the meantime, the aliens attend a pool party and kidnap all the women (and later, Karen) and get them on their spaceship. Frank gets to the ship, frees the women, and battles the aliens and their secret weapon, the title spacemonster, named Mull. The ship is destroyed along with Frank, and the credits roll with Adam and Karen tooling around San Juan on the moped again, apparently having fallen in love.

Where to start? First, I have to say that I didn't really like this movie but I kinda loved it, or maybe vice versa. That title (the posters turn "Spacemonster" into "Space Monster," but it's one word in the opening credits) conjures up low B-movie delights, and there are several. The monster's body is covered with cheap looking carpeting passing as fur. The makeup on Frank's face in the last half (at right) is pretty good, and in the first half, he is handsome in a mannequin-looking way, appropriate for a cyborg. The first few minutes of the movie seem to promise a high camp delight: Nadir looks like Mike Myers' Dr. Evil, talks in a lightly mincing fashion, and stares at people as though he is bit psycho. (The actor, Lou Cutell, did a lot of TV and is maybe best known as the proctologist in the Seinfeld "Assman" episode.) The princess looks like Liz Taylor as Cleopatra dressed in shiny red plastic, even though the movie is in black & white. (The actor, Marilyn Hanold, was a chorus girl and Playboy playmate.) But the movie cannot live up to its opening and the campiness soon turns into Z-movie schlock: cheap sets, bad acting, inept editing, tons of stock footage, padding shots of Cape Canaveral and San Juan, and not enough background actors—at an important press conference announcing the Mars mission, there are only four reporters. The only actor of note is James Karen (Adam) who does the best he can as a fairly unheroic hero; he went on to a long career as a character actor in movies and TV, and like Cutell, he made a Seinfeld appearance. Nancy Marshall, as Karen, isn't bad. Robert Reilly gets Frank's artificial look down pat, but after the first twenty minutes, is mostly just a wandering lug who fails at conjuring up the Frankenstein monster. He did not have a long career in acting.

So the Frankenstein connection, monster or doctor, is rudimentary—Adam does take ownership credit for creating Frank, and Frank stumbles around threateningly a couple of times and does kill someone—and the Spacemonster, before the climatic fight, is just glimpsed. That final fight is a bad movie classic moment—Frank and Mull punch each other, wrestle a bit, and otherwise are seen in blurry closeups doing what we're not sure. The background score consists mostly of average-sounding AM pop music. The pool scene has couples clustered around the end of a pool, with close-ups of unappealing asses shaking to the music. Most critics assume the alien planet to be Mars, but it's not identified in the movie. In the credits, the Princess is named Marcuzan but she's never called that in the film. So what did I like about this? Well, I loved Nadir and the Princess in their camp moments, and I actually liked Frank, both as an emotionless fake astronaut and in his later monster face makeup. The closing credits roll over Adam and Karen riding through San Juan and they look happy to be doing so, which made me happy. This was director Robert Gaffney's only feature-length film. There are reports that the movie was originally intended to be a sci-fi spoof, maybe in a Plan 9 way (and it does feel like a 1950s movie dug up in the 1960s) but except for the scenes in the spaceship, it's not. Still, by God, I had fun watching this and might just watch it again sometime. [YouTube]

BLIND CORNER (1964)

aka MAN IN THE DARK

British Paul Gregory is a pianist who has gone blind and, turning away from ambitions to write a concerto, becomes a successful composer of pop tunes—we hear a couple of them performed by singer Ronnie Carroll, and Paul is invited to the recording sessions to do some fine tuning. His wife Anne, though on the surface a devoted helpmate, is having an affair with Ricky, a struggling artist. Anne talks Paul into commissioning Ricky to paint her portrait, which allows her to spend large chunks of time canoodling with Ricky. She would like to divorce Paul, feeling only pity now for her husband, but she's used to a moneyed lifestyle which she would lose. Mike, Paul's friend and agent who is no friend of Anne's, reluctantly tells Paul that he saw Anne and Ricky looking awfully cozy together at a restaurant, wanting Paul to hear it from him before he hears it as gossip. Paul investigates, making plans to divorce and disinherit her, while Anne decides that maybe it's time to get rid of Paul in a different way: murder. As Paul is known as a heavy drinker, she tries to talk the reluctant Ricky into getting Paul drunk and pushing him off their balcony. Joan, Paul's secretary, who is a little in love with him, helps Paul investigate and, from a hiding place in the apartment, sees Anne and Ricky kiss in front of Paul. One night, Ricky finally agrees to kill Paul and heads to his apartment, but a major plot twist puts all arrangements in doubt.

Generally this is a by-the-numbers B-thriller with a nifty twist that makes it memorable. Most of it takes place in just two or three settings (Paul's small but nicely appointed place, Ricky's shabbier place, a recording studio) but that's not a liability here. I like that Paul is not portrayed as a saint; he's a little cranky at times but not enough to make him unsympathetic. He's well played by William Sylvester, an American actor who became something of a jack-of-all-trades type in British B-films. He's handsome and stoic and plays blind well. Barbara Shelley is nicely low-key as the adulterous schemer, and the handsome Alexander Davion (Ted Casablanca in Valley of the Dolls) is similarly low-key as the reluctant pawn in Anne's game. The small cast is capably rounded out by Mark Eden as Mike and Elizabeth Shepherd as Joan. Ronnie Carroll was an Irish singer who had a few Top 40 hits in the U.K.; his songs are bland and pointless and he has nothing to do with the plot. There is a short scene in the apartment at night that uses a gimmick that was better utilized a couple years later in Wait Until Dark. Directed competently by Lance Comfort who made a string of eleven B-films between 1960 and 1965. Overall, this was another nice discovery courtesy the YouTube algorithm, probably brought to my attention because I'd seen a couple other William Sylvester movies recently. Pictured are Shepherd and Sylvester. [YouTube]

BLACK GRAVEL (1961)

In Cold War-era West Germany, the town of Sohren is home to an American Air Force base. The presence of the Americans in restaurants and bars and whorehouses has helped boost the town’s economy, and now as the base expands, the construction business is also growing. Robert drives a gravel truck and participates in a scheme to steal shipments of gravel from the base into the black market. In the opening scene, we see a driver accidentally run over a dog, and Robert dumps the dog's body in the gravel—though nothing would have brought the dog back, it's still a fairly brutal scene, and there will be a callback to this scene later. Robert discovers that the wife of a newly arrived American officer is his ex-mistress Inge, and that the dog was hers. In the past, Robert told Inge that love is "a fairy tale told to keep us stupid," but now he's interested in starting things up again, especially as Inge is unsettled in her marriage—her husband cares more about his career than their relationship. Lying about the possibility of the dog still being alive, Robert leads her on and gets her involved in his life. Robert's American airman friend Bill is romancing a local girl, Anni, with the two planning on going away together to Canada. One night, Bill and Elli are having a midnight makeout session in the woods, and Robert and Inge accidentally run over them. Robert pitches their bodies in some of the gravel being used for extending runways on the base. Soon, Robert is tangled up in two investigations, one looking for the black market gravel and one looking into the whereabouts of Bill and Elli. Eventually, it is assumed that the couple have defected to East Germany, but when the Americans decide to run some tests on the new gravel beds to detect any defective spots, Robert realizes that this will certainly uncover the bodies, and he might wind up implicated. Tragedy follows.

This is a strong and bleak German film noir with a well developed plot, interesting characters, and an excellent lead performance by the gruffly handsome Helmut Wildt as Robert (pictured). Despite the character's poor choices, we generally sympathize with him even as we may not exactly like him. Ingmar Zeisberg is fine as Inge, and the supporting cast is OK, though the German actor Hans Cossy isn't terribly convincing as the American major married to Inge. If you want to, you can dig into the various situations here and read into them commentary on Germany trying to build a new nation without fully dealing with their Nazi past, but on just a surface level, the plot is resonant enough. A controversial scene in which an older German man (and still a Nazi at heart) calls out the Jewish owner of a nightclub was misunderstood by German censors and was cut from the original release print. The very bleak ending was also softened, but neither move helped the film at the German box office. The current print I saw on TCM (also available on Blu-ray) is the original uncensored version. I highly recommend this to fans of noir, melodrama, international cinema, and just plain good movies. German title: Schwarzer Kies. [TCM]

THE BEACH GIRLS AND THE MONSTER (1965)

Marine scientist Otto Lindsay lives in a beach house on a small cliff overlooking a surf beach. His son Richard used to help him in his work with marine mutations but Richard is tired of a life of all work and no play so decides he's going to play as much as he can, with his girlfriend Janey and the surfing gang that gathers on the beach every day. He also resents his young and trampy stepmother, Vicky. The house is full of resentment. Otto resents his son's search for freedom and fun. He is also beginning to resent Vicky who is spending more time out of the house socializing (with other men, as we find out and as Otto suspects). Vicky resents Otto's single-minded zeal for his work. Everybody seems a little resentful toward Otto's assistant Mark who has been living in Otto's house since he got a permanent limp from a car accident caused by Richard. All this is laid out in the first half of the movie but the film begins with the promise of its title quickly fulfilled. Several bikini-clad beach girls are dancing to a song called "Dance, Baby, Dance" (co-written by Frank Sinatra Jr.!). One of them, Bunny, pulls a prank on her boyfriend Tom by sprinkling sand on his hot dog (literally) and running away. Hiding near a cave, she is attacked by a monster, pop-eyed and covered with seaweed, and clawed to death. The police take a cast of strange footprints found in the sand to Otto and he thinks they look like they belong to a giant mutated South American fantigua fish. 

We then witness some of the psychodramas detailed above play out. Otto lashes out at his son's friends, referring to them as "loafers and tramps." Mark's hobby is clay sculpture, mostly of bosomy females. Mark thinks a bust he made of the late Bunny as a naked mermaid would be an appropriate gift for Bunny's parents and somewhat bizarrely, Richard agrees. Vicky poses for Mark's latest sculpture but rebuffs his romantic intentions, saying "Did you think I’d make love to a cripple?" Richard shows Mark a few minutes of surfing footage (to pad out the film to a little over an hour). Vicky rather brazenly heads out on a date with a man named Paul. The kids, apparently done mourning Bunny, have a midnight beach party dancing to their own guitars and bongos, singing a song called "Monster in the Surf," accompanied by a lion puppet named Kingsley. I am not making any of this up. Later that night, the monster strikes again, killing Tom, with the kids blaming Mark because he finds the body on the beach. Vicky gets home from her date and the monster claws her to death. Then Mark, sort of on the run from the cops, finds a huge rubber monster mask in the house.

Actor Jon Hall, B-lead in a number of exotic adventure movies of the 1940s, stars in this as Otto and also directs. Critics tend to lump this cheapie in with THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH from the year before, and there are certainly similarities, but this film, despite many weaknesses in writing and acting, is a notch better. If nothing else, the score, a mix of surf music and slinky jazz, and written by Sinatra Jr., is pretty good—"Dance, Baby, Dance" is still in my head as I write this. The monster looks exactly like a big phony rubber outfit, but as we discover, it's supposed to. The beach boys and girls are peppy and attractive. The two young leads, Arnold Lessing as Richard and Elaine DuPont as Janey (both pictured at  right), are good, balancing out a bit the somewhat tired performance of Hall and the occasional overacting of Sue Casey as Vicky (who went on to a surprisingly lengthy career which included a small role in 1999's American Beauty). Mark is played adequately if a bit uncomfortably by Walker Edmiston, who had a career as a voice artist and children's TV show host. Another draft of the screenplay wouldn't have hurt. The character of Mark, who at various times comes off as suspicious, sweetly innocent, and a little pervy, could have used some fleshing out. Otto, who is not important to the plot until he is, is a big zero. The motivations of the killer are left unexplored. Vicky is really the most developed character because the young frustrated trampy wife is such a cliche. It's amateurishly filmed but taken for what it is, a Jon Hall vanity project (I assume since he starred, directed and did the cinematography), it's empty-headed fun. Pictuerd top left are Lessing and Edmiston. [YouTube]

THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1935 serial)

Gene Autry is a singing cowboy radio star who performs a daily show at 2:00 at his Radio Ranch, a family vacation resort. He and his band the Radio Riders play songs and perform short western dramas (which, even though the show is broadcast over the radio, they act out as though they could be seen by an audience). Autry's contract stipulates that he must broadcast every day or forfeit the show, in which case he would lose the ranch. A kids' fan club, called the Junior Thunder Riders, led by teenagers Frankie and Betsy, have meetings in a barn and adopt a slogan, "To the rescue!" which they cry out when they jump on their horses. Their name comes from a mythical group of horse riders who might still exist. Autry finds a small figure of a robed rider which is said to be an artifact of "antediluvian Americana" which may be evidence of the myth. Professor Beetson and his men arrive looking for the fabled lost city of Mu which is said to contain fabulous riches. Aware of Autry's contract, and wanting to empty out the ranch so his men can dig for Mu, Beetson kills Baxter, Autry's ranch partner, and frames Autry who goes on the run. Helped by Frankie and Betsy, Autry still manages to do his 2:00 broadcast each day from hiding. As it happens, Mu lies far beneath the Radio Ranch's land, is called Murania by its residents (forced underground thousands of years ago by glaciers) who are ruled by a strict queen, and its riches are huge deposits of radium which the Muranians have used to create wondrous inventions, including boxy (and rather clumsy) robots to perform manual chores. Queen Tika despises the world above and wants to keep Murania hidden at all costs—we see that the Muranians on horseback are the original Thunder Riders of myth, and they still ride when Murania is threatened. Autry is now sought by three parties: the professor and his men, the police, and Queen Tika who worries that the popularity of Radio Ranch will lead to her land being exposed. 

The year before the first Flash Gordon serial came this forerunner, an amalgam of adventure, western, fantasy and sci-fi. Oddly, once it gets going, it works. Gene Autry (pictured above left) plays himself, a real-life singing cowboy radio star who would eventually appear in dozens of B-westerns and record many hit songs, including the holiday tunes "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Here Comes Santa Claus." In this, one of his earliest films, acting is not his strongest talent, but I was surprised how appealing he is: he's not bad looking, his persona is one of a likable everyday sort of fellow, and once the fisticuffs get going, he acquits himself nicely (probably with the help of a stunt double), though there are noticeably fewer fistfights here than in the average serial. His delivery occasionally verges on amateurish, with frequent over-enunciating of words and some pacing problems, but some of the other actors have the same problems, especially Dorothy Christy as Queen Tika. She artificially overacts like crazy but is effective once in a while. By far, the strongest actor here is Frankie Darro (as Frankie). Seventeen when he made this film, he was a very busy child actor, having appeared in over twenty movies before his appearance here. He’s handsome, can be both cocky and personable, and is a fine actor. It's said that his small stature (5 foot 3) was an impediment to leading man roles, and he was often cast as a jockey. His co-star, Betsy King Ross (Betsy), pictured with Darro at right, is not nearly as good, but to be fair, she only made three movies; she was better known as a horse riding champion and that talent is put to good use here. I enjoyed the antics of Smiley Burnette and Peter Potter (billed as William Moore) as Oscar and Pete, comic relief band members who wind up joining Autry and the kids in their adventures. 

At four hours (12 chapters), this doesn't feel overly long, only getting repetitious in the last few chapters. The adventures take place in varied settings: at the ranch, in the surrounding desert, and in the underground land of Murania, effectively produced mostly with the use of miniatures and matte shots (see left). A form of television is used throughout as a way for Queen Tika to keep track of the outer world in general and Gene Autry in particular, though it's never explained where her dozens of cameras are located. Among the cliffhangers are a literal cliffhanger, a downed plane, and radium ray guns. Though Autry and the Junior Thunder Riders are the central heroes, our sympathies for other characters shift on occasion. The queen is over-the-top evil and wants to have Autry killed until she changes her mind (not due to romantic feelings but out of practicality). Her assistant Lord Argo is secretly fomenting a revolution, and is responsible for saving Autry from the Chamber of Death, but later becomes dangerous to all. (Autry's resurrection is an interesting scene; apparently he actually dies, and when the Reviving Machine brings him back, he spends several seconds babbling nonsensically in the Language of the Dead.) The boxy robots are unintentionally amusing until Oscar and Pete disguise themselves as robots and engage in some slapsticky humor. It’s pretty fun to see the Junior Thunder Riders yell their slogan in unison and take off for a rescue. There are a few songs, including a novelty number about the animals on Noah's Ark. The plotpoint about having to broadcast every day is downright silly, but does provide an occasional deadline that forces Autry to race against the clock. The print on the Alpha DVD I watched is not in great shape, but I have not heard of the existence of a restored print yet. Somewhat primitive but recommended for serials fans. [DVD]

THE CURSE OF BELPHEGOR (1967)

A dance troupe is rehearsing a new ballet work inspired by worship of the legendary demon Belphegor, with the stage dominated by a large golden statue of the demon. Unsettling things begin happening. First, a set decorator standing on a ladder is spooked by the sight of a figure dressed like Belphegor and falls off the ladder to his death. Next, people on stage hear weird music coming from the statue followed by a voice predicting a series of deaths: the two theater owners, Garnier and Hubert; the writer Olivier; and the director Fred. Other characters we meet include the star, an old comic relief stage manager, and Garnier’s ward Roger. The troupe carries on and the opening goes off well, but late that night, Garnier is stabbed to death on the stage by the demonic figure, someone wearing a Belphegor mask with gold-painted hands. The cops investigate but the predicted deaths continue. Roger, who falls under suspicion because he stands to inherit the theater, gets involved with a female reporter named Claude and the two wind up at a sprawling but abandoned farmhouse where they are tortured by supersonic sound waves and held by the Belphegor figure who plans to burn them to death with a flamethrower torture device before he kills the star onstage at the climax of the ballet. I'm fairly certain that the above summary is accurate, but there is more to it than that, and I had problems following the narrative. Things get a bit convoluted with some secondary plotpoints I was unsure about: one of the characters is gay (I'm not even sure which one, maybe Fred) and has a male lover he calls Kitty, and another character is caught stealing documents, possibly in a blackmail attempt. 

The main problem: the print of the movie I saw on YouTube, supplied by Culture Tube, is in French with an English dub done by AI, and the dubbing is awful. The mouth movements are rarely matched, but that is the least of the problems. All the voices, even the older people, sound like those of bored twenty-somethings and the dialogue is frequently rushed and blurred, causing me to miss a fair amount of the story. I suppose it's better than having no English at all (the subtitles supplied were in French) but I hope this doesn’t become a trend. Because of this, I can't really judge the acting. Maurice Sarfati (Fred, pictured above right) and Noelle Noblecourt (Claude) are attractive and energetic but for the most part I can't reliably match cast names to characters. One that I could, Paul Guers as Fred, reminded me of Kier Dullea. The Belphegor figures, both the human and the statue, are effective. The somewhat unsatisfying ending seems to promise a sequel that never came. The name Belphegor was used in a famous French novel and silent serial from the 1920s but this has no relation to that. I might watch this again if a properly dubbed or subtitled version becomes available. [YouTube]