THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT (1975)

This fantasy adventure (which intelligent design advocates would boycott today) feels like a missing link between the 50's and 60's stop-motion work of Ray Harryhausen and the elaborate CGI worlds of Spielberg's JURASSIC PARK and Peter Jackson's KING KONG. The dinosaurs here seem to be mostly miniatures or full-size models, and while they're not as effective as the digital creations of today, they move in a more realistic fashion than the mythological creations of Harryhausen. The plot is taken from a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs and involves the discovery of an island where evolution has run rampant. Set during WWI, the film begins at sea in a dense fog with a German submarine sinking a British supply ship; a handful of survivors (including husky American Doug McClure and British scientist Susan Penhaligon) take refuge on top of the sub when it surfaces and wrest control from German officer John McEnery. They decide to head for a neutral coast but McEnery sabotages the compass and seesawing power games ensue, the upshot being that the sub winds up in uncharted waters. Lost and worried about dwindling fuel and food supplies, the motley group comes upon an island that McEnery assumes is the mythical continent of Caprona, inhabited by dinosaurs and cavemen at varying degrees of biological advancement, with more evolved creatures present as they head north. They kill and cook a plesiosaurus, manage to communicate with a relatively friendly caveman, and discover oil which they hope to use to get back to civilization, but external dangers and internal strife cause our group problems, leading to an exciting climax. The acting is decent, with McEnery and Anthony Ainley (as an untrustworthy German lieutenant) standouts. Penhaligon has a nothing role and can't do much with it. McClure plays the hero with stolid conviction. The effects and sets might not pass muster for today's viewers, but I found the film, the kind I associate with the long Thanksgiving weekends of my childhood, to be more fun than I expected. [TCM]

THE CRIMSON PIRATE (1952)
BLACKBEARD, THE PIRATE (1952)

By sheer coincidence, I saw these two archetypal pirate movies, made in the same year, on the same day. I had ordered CRIMSON PIRATE from Netflix after reading some very positive comments about it, and the day it came, BLACKBEARD popped up on Turner Classic Movies, so I thought they would make a nice pairing. Instead, viewing the two just strengthened my resolve to avoid pirate movies (I may be the only person in America who found PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN to be a total bore, though I will admit that Johnny Depp does a good Keith Richards). CRIMSON has some plusses, mostly rich Technicolor, the physique of its star Burt Lancaster, and a tongue-in-cheek tone, but I was a little weary of all the capital-F fun by the end. The plot has pirate Lancaster and his crew hijacking a ship belonging to a baron who is on his way to put down an island revolt led by El Libre, but when they find that the ship has more arms than riches, Lancaster works out a scheme in which the pirates will sell the arms to the rebels, then, for a fee, betray the rebels and El Libre to the baron. Once on the island, Lancaster falls in love with El Libre's daughter (Eva Bartok), faces up to his band of pirates who are tired of playing politics and just want to get back to plundering, and decides to double-cross the baron. The swashbuckling antics are well executed by the athletic star and his mute sidekick, Nick Cravat, who in real life had worked with Lancaster in the circus, and the opening scene, in which the pirates have splayed themselves across the ship pretending to be dead plague victims, is excellent. But the rest is just too much sound and fury to too little purpose. Torin Thatcher and Christopher Lee are standouts in the supporting cast. [DVD]

Oddly, Thatcher, whom I know best as the villain in the 60's fantasy JACK THE GIANT KILLER, is also in BLACKBEARD. This movie isn't as colorful and doesn't have as much "fun" action going on, but it has a stronger plot and a sense of real danger, with more actual death and dismemberment going on. Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver in a 1950 version of TREASURE ISLAND, is the title character, scourge of the shipping lanes, and much sought after by the former pirate Sir Henry Morgan (Thatcher) who has renounced pirating and vowed to capture Newton for the King. Meanwhile, Keith Andes is a doctor who believes that Thatcher hasn't really left his wicked ways behind and is out to get evidence against him. Andes winds up a prisoner of Newton's (and a useful one since he's a doctor), along with the lovely Linda Darnell, adopted daughter of Thatcher, who may have some hidden treasure with her. Indeed, she does, and Newton tries to spirit it away so as not to have to split it with his men. After some fierce fighting, Newton pulls off a deception by killing a look-alike to make it seem as if he's dead (with his head hanging in the public square), but he doesn't get the last laugh after all, with a grimly comic finale, particularly dark for a 50's film. Andes makes for a fairly dashing good guy (though not as studly as Lancaster), but Newton is always front and center and doesn't let a single scene get stolen from him. His performance is wildly over the top, and it seems as if he single-handedly created the "Arrrrrrggh..." stereotype which has been milked so often since--he starts practically every line of dialogue with that sound, and though it's fun in the beginning, it gets a bit tiring. Irene Ryan (later Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies) gets some mild laughs as Darnell's companion, and William Bendix is OK as Newton's sidekick. I believe I've had me fill of pirate movies for a while. [TCM]

THE DEVIL WITH HITLER (1942)

Technically, this Hal Roach comedy is classified as a short subject, though at 45 minutes, it's a only a few minutes shy of a B-movie second feature of the era, and it apparently played some theaters as the first half of a double bill. It has been charged over the years with being offensive, but I don't think it's any worse than TO BE OR NOT TO BE or THE PRODUCERS--though, obviously done on the cheap, it's not nearly as well made or creative as those films. The Board of Directors of Hell has decided that Hitler would make a better Devil than the Devil himself (Alan Mowbray), but the Devil asks for the chance to go to earth and trick Hitler (Bobby Watson) into committing one good deed, rendering him unfit for the job. The Devil appears on Earth as Hitler's valet and joins Mussolini (Joe Devlin) and a Japanese dignitary named Sukiyaki (George E. Stone) as they try to outwit, double-cross and even kill Hitler. The good deed that Satan tries to arrange comes by way of freeing a young couple (Douglas Fowley and Marjorie Woodworth) from a concentration camp sentence. There's lots of slapstick and prancing and ethnic slurs and witless humor, and perhaps the first instance of a Hitler character saying some version of the phrase, "Heil myself!" Mowbray is a very colorless Satan; Watson, who made a living in the 40's playing Hitler in comedies and drama, is OK; Devlin and Stone, both experienced character actors, fare the best here, though Stone's over-the-top Japanese portrayal hasn't aged well. Not really a very good movie, but interesting from a cultural and historical perspective. [TCM]

CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY (1939)

A historically important landmark as the first openly anti-Nazi Hollywood film; it was produced before the war when the Nazis were largely reviled in America, but the country was still officially neutral and Germany had not yet invaded Poland. Hollywood studios didn't want to risk losing the lucrative foreign markets so, though there had been movies with vaguely Middle European enemies, none had gone so far as to name the Nazis as villains. This film was based on a series of newspaper articles written by FBI man Leon Turrou which detailed the breaking of a Nazi spy ring in the U.S., and though it doesn't actually name real names, it does follow the real-life outlines of the case quite closely. The film was so controversial that Jack and Harry Warner were accused by Congress of warmongering. While it's certainly no stylistic masterpiece for the ages, it is a fast-moving spy movie for at least half of its length, and, while lacking much in the way of thrills or action, it is mostly compelling, interesting, and contains a handful of good performances.

The film begins in a documentary newsreel fashion by swiftly introducing us to most of the characters we'll be following for the next 100 minutes. In a Scottish village, we see Mrs. McLaughlin (Eily Malyon) receiving and resending mail for a Nazi spy ring. Next we visit a German-American social group meeting at which Dr. Kassel (Paul Lukas) is whipping up support for Germans who want to "save" America, who want to make America "our America." Lukas uses the overexcited style of Hitler in his speechifying, and is not above encouraging heavy-handed tactics to quash dissent, as we see in a scene in which Ward Bond gets roughed up after he speaks out at a meeting, saying "We don't want any --isms in this country except Americanism." Lukas is soon made head of American spy operations and told to wrap his fascist messages "in the American flag," and to incite race and class hatred. Next, on a German ocean liner on its way to America, we meet Schlager (George Sanders), his mistress Hilda (Dorothy Tree) and two Gestapo agents, who intimidate the captain of the ship into following Nazi orders. Finally, there's unemployed Kurt Schneider (Frances Lederer); his wife objects to his "sitting around and thinking" all day, but he's biding his time as a minor spy until his friend (Joe Sawyer) agrees to get him military information to pass on to his contact, Sanders. Lederer hopes to prove his worth to the Nazis and to make good money, but Sanders gives him chump change and little respect, so Lederer tries to go over Sanders' head and sends some spy info directly to Malyon in Scotland. Unfortunately, a clever mailman has alerted authorities to the wide array of foreign mail she receives and she's busted, which leads to the FBI being called in on the trail of the spy ring.

The energy flags a bit during the second half of the film, which focuses on Edward G. Robinson as the FBI man tracking down the ring members. Lederer is busted when he naively poses as the "Under-Secretary of State" in an attempt to smuggle passports, and Robinson uses some basic psychology to make the poor schmuck feel more important than he really is to get him to talk. Sanders escapes and Lukas, who is betrayed by his wife, talks to the feds and later gets on a ship for Germany, certain to face the music from his superiors. Lederer and some of his associates are put on trial, and the film ends anti-climactically with an odd little conversation in which Robinson and U.S. attorney Henry O'Neill express the surreal absurdity of their adventure. Though the documentary style of the film works against any real depth of characterization, the central trio of Lukas, Sanders, and Lederer are always quite watchable. Sanders, in particular, is striking; he has a modified Prussian buzz cut, and I'd swear that his nose or chin have been altered to give him an even more sinister look; his voice never drips with his usual patina of sarcasm and irony and he completely disappears into his role. German actress Lya Lys has a small role as Lukas' mistress, and John Ridgely, one of my favorite Warners supporting players, has a line or two as an Army hospital clerk. This runs on Turner Classic Movies quite a bit, but it would be nice to have this on a DVD, with a commentary track, given how much has been written about the film. [TCM]

REMBRANDT (1936)

I know nothing about the famed Dutch painter Rembrandt, played here by Charles Laughton, but a quick perusal of an encyclopedia entry tells me that this film is more fiction than fact. Nonetheless, this is a well-acted and nicely shot film, directed by Alexander Korda, who also directed Laughton in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII. The episodic film begins with Rembrandt, well known and respected, at the peak of his career and in the midst of working on a portrait of his wife, who is ailing (and whom we never see). As he delivers a long, adoring ode to his wife to his friends in a tavern, he is summoned to her deathbed. At the funeral meal, he continues the painting as though she's still posing. What follows is a series of narrative snapshots from the rest of his life. His long-awaited, gigantic, and expensive painting of the Civic Guard of Amsterdam ("Night Watch") is reviled by the Guard members for making them look undignified. His loyal housekeeper (Gertrude Lawrence) becomes his lover, but they cannot marry until his young son comes of age because of a clause in the will of his wife that would leave him bankrupt if he did. He has a beggar (Roger Livesey) pose for a portrait of the biblical Saul. Afraid he's going to lose his house to creditors, he goes back to live in his provincial hometown but feels like a misfit. On his return to Amsterdam, he is struck by the sight of a kitchen maid (Elsa Lanchester), paints her, and ultimately takes her as a lover, igniting Lawrence's wrath. Lanchester figures out a way for him to get around his creditors, who try to claim any new work of his for themselves, by setting up her own gallery of his work which he has given freely to her. By the end of the film, he is aged and alone except for a benefactor who gives him money for food (which he promptly spends on art supplies). The penultimate scene, with Laughton proclaiming, "All is vanity" to a table of carousing youths who have included him in their drinking, is Laughton at his best. The look of the film is painterly, with lots of bright light and vivid textures, apparently meant to conjure up Rembrandt's own technique with light. My favorite moment is Laughton, in a reverie, talking not entirely happily, about the burden of living "in a beautiful, blinding, swirling mist." The movie is also worth seeing for Gertrude Lawrence, the actress played by Julie Andrews in STAR! and parodied by Ann Sheridan in THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER, giving a rare screen performance. [DVD]

THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS (1938)

Mild romantic comedy which for me is more irritating than funny for two reasons: its fake feminist plot trappings and the performance of Robert Montgomery. He's a struggling shipbuilder married to a successful theatrical agent (Virginia Bruce). He snags a dream job that involves moving from New York City to New Bedford, and he assumes that his wife will give up her job and move with him. She, however, actually likes her job and wants to keep it, which leads to strife and separation. Her boss (Warren William) tries to help her and a battle of lawyers follows with some standard-issue trickery ensuing between the two sides. The sticking point winds up being a suggestion that she pay him alimony since she's making more money. When an ailing but beloved uncle (Harry Davenport) comes to visit, Montgomery agrees to spend the night to make the uncle think everything's fine, but Bruce's lawyer (Alan Dinehart) uses the occasion to snare him in a legal trap (sort of the opposite of the "Gay Divorcee" trap, using his presence at her place to imply that he's living with her and therefore not eligible to get alimony). I was disposed to like the film because Bruce is so appealing and her character clearly likes her career, but then things get resolved by biology: she finds out she's pregnant and decides to follow Montgomery away from the city to be a wife and mother. The moral of this tale can be encapsulated in one line of dialogue at the end: "Nature--that monkey wrench in the machinery of women's independence." Binnie Barnes and Lee Bowman do fine as friends who try to swoop in on Montgomery and Bruce. Montgomery is at his most doltish and irritating, but I do like Virginia Bruce, so I guess I'm glad to have seen this. [TCM]

THE WHISTLER (1944)

Nifty little B-thriller, the first in an 8-film series based on a popular radio show. Despite the title, this was not a superhero or detective series, but a suspense anthology (think Twilight Zone atmosphere but without the fantasy elements) which told crime stories with ironic twists. The title character was the narrator (think Rod Serling never showing his face) who would also sometimes comment on the action; once in a while we'd see him from a distance, strolling along and whistling mournfully. In this one, Richard Dix (who starred in most of the films, always playing different characters) is a man who, depressed over the apparent death of his wife at sea in a Japanese attack, hires someone to kill him. The middleman (George Lloyd) farms the job out to seasoned hitman J. Carroll Naish who begins staking out his prey. When Dix gets a telegram telling him that his wife is alive in a Japanese prison camp and is being shipped home soon, he's ecstatic and sets out to cancel the hit. Unfortunately, Lloyd was a cop killer who was himself killed by cops just after setting up Dix's hit. Dix thinks Lloyd's girl (Joan Woodbury) can help him stop the hitman, but she thinks that Dix set Lloyd up, so she's not much help, and in fact endangers his life by involving him in a log mountain road chase with police. When Dix drops out of sight to escape Naish, the newspapers say that he has amnesia and Dix's loyal secretary (the always wonderful Gloria Stuart) tries to find him. The hour-long film moves along nicely, though the climax, as in many B-films, is rushed and choppy and the production values are about average for a second-feature. [TCM]

WHITE CARGO (1942)

If you're only going to watch one "tropical melodrama" in your life, it should probably be THE LETTER, but if you decide to watch a second one, make it this one. I have a weakness for this kind of movie in which Americans, stuck in the Equatorial climes working at a rubber plantation (as in this film) or searching for riches or cruising on a ship, come to some kind of grief, usually involving romance or guns or both. This one, based on a 20's play, is a lot of fun; it's not quite campy, like the the Jon Hall/Maria Montez jungle films, because its humor is usually deliberate and the acting is restrained. Set in 1910 Africa, the film begins with Walter Pidgeon, the local magistrate, waiting to welcome the new plantation manager, young and energetic Richard Carlson, who is replacing Bramwell Fletcher, a burned out alcoholic. The cynical, tightly wound Pidgeon predicts that Carlson will soon wind up just like Fletcher, destroyed by "damp rot." (There is a running gag involving Pidgeon's violent reaction to Fletcher constantly saying "Blasted hot today," and later Carlson irritates him in the same way saying, "When I get acclimated...") Carlson is warned about the notorious exotic half-breed Tondelayo (Hedy Lamarr), but when she comes slinking into his shack, he goes slack-jawed with lust. Eventually, Carlson marries Lamarr (there appear to be virtually no other women in the area), but she soon gets restless and starts flirting with Pidgeon. When nothing comes of that, she sets about slowly poisoning Carlson. Some reviewers claim that there is a love triangle among the three leads, but I didn't see much evidence that Pidgeon actually wanted Lamarr, though he may be jealous that Carlson has a wife in their godforsaken corner of the world, and it seems clear that Lamarr has no real affection for either of the men, above and beyond any money and trinkets she can get. The film is rather stagy, with most of the action taking place in just a few interior rooms, but it all does feel effectively hot and grungy, especially with all the sweating flesh (mostly Carlson's). The role of Tondelayo is usually cited as the one that Lamarr is best known for, and she certainly looks striking with her dusky makeup (she's supposed to be half-Arabian, raised by African natives); it also helps that she is always shot in shadow or with a shadow across her face, making her look mysterious. Her acting talents, such as they were, don't get much of a workout. The youthful and sexy Carlson is fine, as is Frank Morgan as a well-meaning but frequently drunken doctor, Henry O'Neill as the local Reverend, and Reginald Owen as a skipper. Pidgeon is the weak link as far as I'm concerned; he is wooden and unappealing, and substitutes volume of voice for expression of emotion. But the movie is still great fun, though not for a second to be taken seriously. [TCM]

GIRL ON THE RUN (1958)

My partner and I have been having a lot of fun watching reruns of the 50's detective series "77 Sunset Strip" on the American Life cable network. The show follows the adventures of two private eyes, Stu Bailey (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) and Jeff Spencer (Roger Smith, quite the hottie, one year after he played Mame's nephew in AUNTIE MAME) who operate out of an L.A. office next to a nightclub called Dino's, which practically serves as their waiting room. The two are swinging bachelors who are always finding some innocent girl or femme fatale to flirt with. The show is probably better remembered these days for the character of Kookie (Edward Byrnes), the flip, hip young guy who was always combing his hair while he parked cars at Dino's, called everyone "Dad," and often helped out on cases. This film was apparently the 90-minute pilot for the show; according to online episode guides, it was aired as the first episode in October '58 and as far as I can tell, never received a theatrical release, but despite the presence of Zimbalist and Byrnes, it bears only a tangential relationship to the series that followed. Zimbalist gets involved in the case of a young singer (Erin O'Brien) who has fled Seattle after seeing the murder of a star witness in a major criminal case. She winds up in L.A. under an assumed name and Zimbalist tracks her down for a man (Shepperd Strudwick) who claims to be her boyfriend. He's not, however; he's the DA on the Seattle case who has a nasty secret or two of his own. Byrnes plays, not Kookie, but Kenneth Smiley, a cold-blooded killer who nevertheless has an amusing scene in which he remains behind in a theater long enough to finish watching a Daffy Duck cartoon. Also in the cast is Barton MacLane (one of the cops who made trouble for Bogart in THE MALTESE FALCON). It's a little slow getting started, and I missed Roger Smith, who never shows up, but there are some good fisticuffs and chases, and the show does set up the Zimbalist character as a scholar of Sanskrit, a plot detail that crops up during the run of the show a couple of times. It's also nice to see Byrnes get a chance to stretch a little beyond his insolent hipster persona. [TV]

TASK FORCE (1949)

Though made after WWII, this is the kind of movie that Hollywood pumped out in the years before America was officially engaged in the war: a quick history of a particular branch of the military or of a military breakthrough. Here, Gary Cooper serves as the focus for a story about the development of the aircraft carrier as a practical addition to the forces of the United States Navy. The film begins with Cooper retiring and then flashes back to 25 years earlier when pilots were just learning to land on the first carrier of its kind, the Langley. Some Navy brass and Congressmen are against developing a carrier fleet, and Commander Walter Brennan enlists Cooper to go to Washington to do some sweet talking; instead he gets into a spat with a powerful lawmaker (Stanley Ridges) when he speculates that Japan might have sinister intentions and a carrier fleet would be a perfect defense. We follow Cooper over the years as he gets demoted to a desk job, put back into a flying job, suffers through a crash, marries Jane Wyatt (widow of a fellow Navy pilot), and continues promoting aircraft carriers (and continues to antagonize Ridges). Of course, Cooper's predictions about a sea war with Japan come true and his career comes to its peak when he winds up on the Enterprise, the last carrier left in action. The bulk of the film is in black & white, with the last reel (about 20 minutes worth) in color, for no apparent reason. Cooper was entering what I think of as his "old man" phase and he's not particularly convincing as a young man. There's a decent supporting cast which includes Wayne Morris, Bruce Bennett, and John Ridgely as fellow pilots, and singer Julie London as Morris's gal. It's predictable (you just know that some tangential character is gonna die at Pearl Harbor so that "this time, it's personal") and a fair amount of newsreel footage is worked in toward the end. Not a bad movie, but at two hours, not one I'd care to sit through again. [TCM]

NIGHTMARE (1964)

This Hammer thriller has elements of PSYCHO and DIABOLIQUE and works well enough for most of its length. The film has a great opening sequence of a young girl (Jennie Linden) being led through shadowy hallways by the voice of her mother, who traps her in an asylum cell. This turns out to be a recurring nightmare of Linden's, who years ago witnessed her insane mother stab her father to death. Her boarding school decides to send her home to her guardian (David Knight) for treatment to ease the dreams. Once there, however, she is haunted by a ghostly vision of a woman in white that no one else seems to see, and also by a tableau reminiscent of her father's death. When Knight's new wife arrives, she looks just like the creepy ghost, and Linden promptly stabs her to death and is sent off to an asylum, just as her dreams seemed to foretell. Of course, this is just the first half of the proceedings, and we soon learn that things and people aren't what they seem. When Linden escapes and heads for home, matters build to a fairly effective climax. Even if the plot does become predictable, it is fun to figure out who wants to help Linden and who wishes her harm. Chief among these folks is Brenda Bruce as a guardian from the boarding school, and Moira Redmond as Linden's companion and nurse. Linden has a few too many repetitious scenes of hysteria in the first half, though generally the acting is OK. The moody black and white cinematography is a plus. [DVD]

NIGHTMARE CASTLE (1965)

Routine Italian gothic thriller with the queen of 60's horror, Barbara Steele, in a dual role. This isn't exactly a bad movie, but it has nothing to make it stand out of the pack. Paul Muller is your average mad scientist married to your average dark-haired knockout (Steele), and engaging in your average arcane experiments involving reversing the human aging process. When he discovers that his wife is having an affair with the hired help (Rik Battaglia), he tortures them, kills them, and pulls out and preserves their hearts. He uses their blood to turn his aging assistant (Helga Line) young, and then, I think, takes her as his lover, but discovers that his wife's will leaves the castle to her nutty twin sister (also Steele, in a bad blonde wig). When she arrives, he seduces her and plans to drive her completely over the edge, but it turns out that the strange ghostly figures she reports seeing are actually the ghosts of the dead lovers. The acting is indifferent, the sets are cheap, and the atmosphere is so-so, but if you stick with it, the pace does pick up in the last half-hour and things build to a decent climax. Mostly for Barbara Steele fans. [DVD]

THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1972)

Another pairing of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (see THE CREEPING FLESH below), though in separate episodes of a horror anthology film. As a short-story lover (Ray Bradbury's collections were the first "adult" books I read), I like the idea of an anthology film, but in practice it doesn't come off all that well, with rare exceptions like the 1945 DEAD OF NIGHT, and this film is not one of the exceptions. The four tales all take place in a mysterious house which, despite the title, never comes close to dripping blood. The wraparound story involves a Scotland Yard inspector (John Bennett) looking into the disappearance of a horror film star (Jon Pertwee, best known as the 1970's Doctor Who) who had been living in the spooky old house. We then see the stories of three previous residents. The first tale features Denholm Elliot as a horror writer renting the house with his wife (Joanna Dunham); he's trying to finish a novel about a strangler but his efforts get derailed when the fictional killer seems to be coming to life and popping up all around the house. The secret here is easy to figure out, but it's still a fun story and the underrated Elliot is fun to watch. In the second tale, two old friends (Cushing and Joss Ackland) become obsessed with visiting a wax museum which has a model of Salome that resembles an old flame from their past. Lee stars in the next episode as a widower who hires a nanny to keep an eye on his young daughter, who may or may not be practicing voodoo. Finally, we go back to the frame story about an actor who buys a second-hand cloak to inspire him in his current role as a vampire; he finds out that clothes do make the man, or in this case, the vampire. Overall, about average for this kind of film--the screenplay by Robert Bloch is fine, but the production values could be better, and the direction by Peter Duffell is quite made-for-TVish. [DVD]

THE CREEPING FLESH (1973)

This Victorian horror/sf film which co-stars Hammer favorites Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee has a few too many subplots going for its own good, and its horrors are more subtle than some fans of the genre like, but it's worth watching for good performances and interesting (if not always successful) narrative threads. In a rather surreal opening, Cushing is painting horrific Dali-like portraits on the wall of his laboratory and telling a visitor that he has made the startling discovery that evil exists as a bacteria and he has it under his microscope. The main story then unfolds in flashback as Cushing returns to England from New Guinea with a skeleton of a primitive humanoid, and based on his readings in the local folklore, he believes it belongs to a race of creatures of pure evil. While washing off one of its hands, Cushing discovers that when water drips on it, its flesh re-composes, and he cuts off one of the fleshy fingers for further study. At the same time, he has to deal with dysfunctional family matters: his long-institutionalized wife has died (in an asylum run by Lee, his brother), and he is concerned that her illness will be passed down to his innocent daughter (Lorna Heilbron), who has just been told about her mother's secret illness. He makes a serum out of the cells of the skeleton that he thinks will serve as an antidote against evil and injects Heilbron with it. For one reason or another (the serum, or heredity, or the realization that such a huge secret had been kept from her), she snaps, runs away, and heads to town to act like a slattern. In a third plot line, Lee, who plans to steal the skeleton from his brother, has to deal with an escaped maniac, who winds up crossing paths with Heibron and setting up the climax of the film which ties all the plot threads together in a more or less satisfactory way, including a scene inspired by Val Lewton's THE BODY SNATCHER in which the skeleton winds up out in the rain and, of course, reconstituted and ready to find its missing finger. Cushing is really the star of this one and he acquits himself nicely with a nuanced portrayal of a man who thinks he's doing the right thing, for both his own flesh and blood, and for mankind, but who makes a monkey's breakfast out of everything (and, come to think of it, there actually is a monkey running around in the movie). Some critics take exception to the film's equating sex with evil (the sheltered daughter's slutty behavior is certainly seen as her first step toward total evil), but I saw the movie saying that the real problem was Cushing's well-intentioned sheltering. At any rate, the film's soup of repression, inherited insanity, sexual desire, and primal evil makes it difficult to assign meaning here, and indeed the movie is best viewed as an archetypal Cushing/Lee mad scientist movie. [DVD]

GOKE--BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL (1968)

Monster movie fan that I am, I had never heard of this Japanese import until I saw it on Turner Classic Movies' schedule last month. I figured, what the hell, and watched it expecting at best a sublimely bad movie, but instead it turned out to be a creepy and fairly compelling film, though in essence, it's just a long Twilight Zone episode. The film is set on a passenger jet where the mixed bag of travelers (psychiatrist, politician, arms dealer, space scientist, etc) are discussing the sad state of the world--wars, assassination, suicide terrorists--while the plane is flying through an increasingly apocalyptic-looking blood-red sky, and birds begin suicidally smashing themselves against the plane windows. Suddenly, even more hell breaks loose: just as the pilot gets a message that a bomb may be hidden on board, a man with a gun (Hideo Ko) storms the cabin, and a UFO zooms over the plane, sending it crashing to the ground. And all this happens before the credits! The survivors are left with little food or water, not knowing where they are. The gunman escapes, finds the glowing UFO, and in a trance, walks into it, to be confronted by a pulsing silver-blue blob. In one of the coolest effects ever, the man's face splits in two and the blob slithers in, taking control of him. Eventually, others get taken over in an old-fashioned vampirish fashion, tensions mount in the plane as the civilized surface of the passengers is worn down, and a creepy apocalyptic scene provides a satisfying ending. There is a strong anti-war theme running throughout the film, with newsreel footage of Hiroshima and Vietnam spliced in here and there during heated discussions. A young blond American woman takes pity on the split-faced guy because his face reminds her of the fatal wounds of her soldier-husband, who died in Vietnam. The politician gets on everyone's bad side, especially when it is revealed that the arms dealer has pimped his wife to him. According to Robert Osborne, this film inspired a scene in Quentin Tarentino's KILL BILL. Overall, a nice surprise, well worth searching out. It's on a Region 2 DVD, which may bode well for an American release someday. [TCM]

THE CURSE OF THE CRYING WOMAN (1963)

I lived in Tucson, Arizona for a few years in the mid-60's and our local Saturday night Chiller Theater would occasionally throw some Mexican horror films into the mix. I have vivid memories of only one of those, this atmospheric film which betrays a number of horror film thefts, influences or homages, depending on how generous the viewer is feeling toward the filmmakers. Off the top of my head, I count references, in plot or visuals, to Dracula, The Mummy, Phantom of the Opera, The Wolf Man, Fall of the House of Usher, Eyes Without a Face, and Black Sunday, and the film has the general feel of the American International B-movies of the era. All that makes the movie a nice thick Gothic soup, watered down a bit by a low budget and a sub-par English dubbing (though apparently there is a recent DVD release in Spanish with English subtitles). In a prologue, we see two men and a young woman riding in a coach through a foggy woods, stopped by a hideous wailing woman dressed in black with either jet-black blind eyes or empty eye sockets (I was never sure which). Her brutish companion unleashes some killer dogs and all three passengers are murdered. Cut to a nearby isolated hacienda, lived in by Selma (Rita Macedo) and her crippled manservant, the two killers from the previous scene, though the woman's eyes are now normal. Selma's niece Emily (Rosita Arenas) and her new husband Herbert (Abel Salazar, also the film's producer) arrive for a visit, summoned by Selma and brought by a coachman reluctant to approach what he calls the "Witch House."

The various plotlines, perhaps due to the vagaries of the dubbing, were sometimes difficult for me to follow, but here's what I was able to glean: 1) Selma is the descendant of a witch, killed hundreds of years ago by a lance through the heart; she keeps the witch's skeleton in the basement; 2) According to legend, on the eve of Emily's 23rd birthday, the long silent bells in the hacienda tower will toll and Emily will be able to resurrect the dead witch; 3) Selma's husband has fallen under the family curse which turns all the males into wolfish beasts, and he's imprisoned upstairs. Emily is told that Herbert will suffer the same fate; 4) Selma periodically transforms into the black-eyed witch figure and kills, needing human blood to thrive. Even if the plot remained disconnected, the individual sequences are all well staged, with shadows and shrieking and a good Gothic air to the proceedings, though the hacienda sets are a bit spare. A backstory flashback scene, which uses brief clips from earlier Salazar films presented in negative, is quite effective, conjuring up similar flashback scenes from the Universal Mummy series. One shot of Selma walking through a giant cobweb is cribbed directly from the Lugosi DRACULA. The music veers between effective and overdone, and the acting is no better than the genre calls for. Worthwhile viewing. [VHS]

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1956)
aka THE CREEPING UNKNOWN or THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT

This is the first of a series of SF films featuring the character of Prof. Quatermass, the head of a secret group of British scientists who are conducting experiments in outer space. The film opens with a young rural couple whose outdoor make-out session is interrupted by a huge crash-landing missile. Quatermass (Brian Donlevy, playing him as an mean and arrogant man who is used to getting his way) and his group arrive on the scene and we find out that they have sent up the rocket with three men on board without any kind of official approval. Only one of the men survives; the other two appear to have been reduced to small blobs of jelly. The survivor (Richard Wordsworth), who never speaks, experiences some weird skin and bone changes, is cold to the touch, and doesn't seem to be able to react to people. His wife smuggles him out of the hospital without realizing that he has essentially been taken over by an alien life force, and is able to drain the life out of plants, animals, and people. He escapes and winds up on the loose as he transforms into a gigantic jelly blob. The climax takes place in Westminster Abbey where the blob is perched, like a faceless Jabba the Hutt, on some scaffolding not far from where a TV news crew is broadcasting a special on the Abbey. I suspect that this film was a bit ahead of its time, with its theme of alien organisms infecting and changing human beings (the influential INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS came out the same year). Its dank, bare bones, black-and-white look keeps the film admirably low-key. Quatermass is unlikable and unsympathetic, which was most likely intended by the filmmakers (at one point, he says, "There's no room for personal feelings in science") though Donlevy's gruff, one-note performance certainly adds to that. Jack Warner plays a mostly sympathetic police inspector, Margia Dean is the astronaut's wife, 10-year-old Jane Asher appears as a young girl menaced by the alien, and Gordon Jackson (later the beloved butler Hudson on "Upstairs, Downstairs") has a small role in the climax as a BBC-TV producer. I liked the tension between the restraints of society and the law, and the unbridled impulses of the scientists, and I also liked the ending, in which, despite the "meddling in God's domain" message of the narrative, Quatermass vows to keep exploring the great unknown. [TCM]

CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961)

Despite this movie's title and the pedigree of its production company (Hammer Films), this is just barely a horror movie. It's more a Gothic Freudian Dickens tale with a wolfman instead of a pickpocket at its center. A long opening sequence focuses first on a beggar (Richard Wordsworth) who arrives in a Spanish town during a holiday which has been called to mark the wedding feast of the Marquis's daughter. The Marquis at first appears inclined to be generous, but soon the beggar is thrown into jail and left for years to rot, totally forgotten. The story then shifts to the jailer's mute daughter (Yvonne Romain) who winds up in his cell and is raped by the beggar, who has become completely deranged. She goes off to live in the woods, but dies while giving birth on Christmas Day, which is considered a cursed day for childbirth. The boy grows up into a werewolf, but the love and compassion of his guardians stop his evil transformations. However, as an adult (Oliver Reed), he discovers that feelings of lust trigger his lycanthropy. He falls in love with Christina (Catherine Feller) and the two have an affair, despite her betrothal to someone else, but when things don’t go his way, Reed's transformations cause trouble for all. The film is slow-going, especially if you're only watching it for blood and horror; most of the werewolfery is saved for the last 10 minutes of the film. Reed is excellent--I agree with one IMDb reviewer who says that Reed may be the best actor ever to play a werewolf--and the makeup is quite good. The rest of the acting and the general production values are about par for a Hammer film. Overall, an interesting variation on the usual Hollywood werewolf story, but not totally successful. [DVD]

CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (1961)

A Roger Corman quickie, and as such, sorta fun. Given the title and posters, one might expect this to be a traditional low-budget monster movie, but actually it's a comedy with a monster roaming in and out of the proceedings (mostly out until the last 10 minutes). It clearly had a sub-B picture budget and the dialogue is all dubbed in (a pet peeve of mine), but surprisingly, this was fun to watch once--I don't know that I would want to sit through the whole thing again. Several online critics have noted that the movie plays out like a spy movie spoof, although it was made at the very beginning of the spy movie boom, and the movie is best appreciated in that spirit. Secret agent XK 150 (Robert Towne) narrates this misadventure concerning a gangster (Antony Carbone) who is hired to help take a big chunk of stolen gold out of Cuba in the aftermath of Castro's revolution. On board Carbone's boat is a small crew, the group of thieves, Agent XK 150, and a sexpot femme fatale (Betsy Jones-Moreland). Carbone gets the bright idea to keep the gold for himself by killing off the Cubans one at a time and claiming that a sea monster is to blame. Little does he know that a real sea monster is following the boat, leading to a climax in which the real monster kills just about everyone except the secret agent. The monster is ludicrously bad, like a swimmer covered with a big carpet, with ping-pong balls stuck on for eyes, and it's clear that we're not meant to take any of the menace seriously. The single funniest scene is when the sexpot croons a lounge song, which just happens to be called, "The Creature from the Haunted Sea," and she keeps singing it even while a group of would-be pirates are slaughtered right behind her. I also loved the narration that introduces the crew: we're told that Carbone once tried to nominate Mussolini for president on the Republican ticket, that Jones-Moreland was caught pushing heroin at Boy's Town, and that young Happy Jack (Robert Bean) got his facial tic from watching too many Bogart movies. My favorite character is Pete Peterson Jr. (Beach Dickerson), the son of a vaudeville-era bird mimic, who communicates mostly via animal noises; it's a one-joke bit that remains funny throughout. There are many good one-liners, such as the agent (who emphasizes to us that XK 150 is not his real name) telling us that "it was dusk--I could tell because the sun was going down," or one character telling us that he found his new girlfriend in Puerto Rico "living in a sort of sorority house by the docks." Though the special effects are mostly ineffective, shots of the monster underwater attacking some swimmers look like they may have influenced Spielberg in JAWS. The Robert Towne who plays the agent is the same Robert Towne who wrote some of Corman's films and later went on to write CHINATOWN and SHAMPOO. Good for a few laughs, but not for chills or thrills. [DVD]

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957)

This classic 50's science fiction film seems, on the surface, to be another traditional warning about meddling in God's domain, though ultimately the film's message is both more cosmic and more personal than that, with an interesting spiritual tone toward the end. Typical 50's couple Scott and Louise Carey (Grant Williams and Randy Stuart) are lying about in their swimsuits, vacationing on their boat, in an almost flirtatious mood; when Stuart goes down to get some more beer, the boat goes through a large cloud of mist that leaves glitter on Williams' chest (I'm resisting a 70's disco joke here). They don't give the incident much thought, but a few months later, Williams complains that the dry cleaner gave him the wrong clothes because they're too big; later he notices that his wife no longer has to stand on tiptoes to kiss him, and after a trip to the doctor, he realizes that he's slowly shrinking. Modern medicine is helpless--they call his condition "anti-cancer" but don't know how to reverse it--and after news of his condition leaks out, he's viewed as a freak by a nosy public (there's an interlude in which he finds work at a carnival). The doctors try a serum on him which seems to stop the shrinking for a time, but soon even that quits working. Of course, his condition wrecks havoc with his relationship with his wife, who still vows to stick with him. Soon he's reduced to living in a doll house and when their pet cat attacks him, he winds up trapped in the basement. He's so small that he can't get his wife's attention and she assumes he's been killed by the cat. The last section of the film takes place entirely in the basement as he scavenges for food, tries to work around a mousetrap, and finally does battle with a spider. Not all the "big sets" special effects to make Williams look small work, but the action scenes are still surprisingly effective. In the quiet and haunting ending, he stands looking outside into the night sky, no longer hungry, no longer afraid, and, in a Samuel Beckett mood, speculates about going on in the face of the infinitesimal and the infinite. It's interesting that the cause of the shrinking, which is loosely tied to radioactivity and insecticides, isn't dealt with more, especially given the number of 50's SF movies that focused on atom-age fears. The movie clearly had a B-budget, and most of that money went to the special effects, so the sets are threadbare and the acting is modest at best. The blandly handsome, almost hunky Williams isn't the best actor (he wasn't even that good in the detective show "Hawaiian Eye" which seems to have been the peak of his career), but his detached demeanor works in the context of the movie. William Schallert (Patty Duke's TV dad) and Raymond Bailey (Mr. Drysdale on "The Beverly Hillbillies") play doctors. Hey, Universal, why isn't this classic out on DVD with commentary? [TCM]

THE HEAD (1959)

I ran across this budget DVD with a trashy, lurid cover at the library and chose it for a "low expectations" viewing night, but the movie turned out to be better than its title and cover would indicate, and much more interesting than the more well-known B-movie THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE (made the same year as this movie but not released until '62). That one was rightfully skewered on MST3K, but this German film, despite having a few low-budget rough edges, isn't a bad movie at all. Prof. Abel (well-regarded French character actor Michel Simon) lives in an odd house, not quite art deco, but reminiscent of other sinister mad doctor houses (specifically from THE BLACK CAT and EYES WITOUT A FACE), surrounded by an ominous Grimm Brothers forest. Attended by Dr. Burke (Kurt Muller-Graf) and a strapping, somewhat slow-witted assistant named Burt (Helmut Schmid), Abel has been working on Serum X, a formula to keep dead tissue alive, and he's used it successfully on a dog's head. Irene, a young and lovely but hunchbacked nurse (Karen Kernke) visits often and seems to have a thing for Dr. Burke. The creepy Dr. Ood (Horst Frank) arrives one night, having applied to be an assistant to Abel, who is sick and is planning on having his doctors perform a heart transplant on him, but Ood has more grandiose ambitions, wanting to perfect Serum X for his own purposes. When Burke catches on to Ood's plans, Ood kills him, decapitates Abel, and keeps his head alive, resting in a tub of the serum, with wires attached all over the place. Ood's ultimate plan is to cut off Irene's head and attach it to the voluptuous body of Lilly (Christiane Maybach), a stripper at the Tam-Tam Club, on whom, years ago, Ood performed plastic surgery to help her beat a murder rap. The operation goes well and at first, all Irene knows is that her hunched back has been cured, but soon she suspects that something isn't quite right, and when she discovers that she has Lilly's purse, she winds up at the Tam-Tam Club where the stripper's boyfriend recognizes a beauty mark on Irene's back as belonging to Lilly. A somewhat rushed climax follows, resulting in death and destruction back at the Abel house.

The German title of this film is "Die Nackte und der Satan," which translates as "The Nude and the Devil," and indeed the print I saw shows much evidence of censoring snips. We see Lilly start her strip tease, but then there's an abrupt cut to another scene. Later, when Ood plies Lilly with liquor to get her into his lab, she starts writhing, fully clothed, on a couch, then after a jagged cut, she is seen passed out in just her underwear. I assume both scenes had some nudity or near-nudity removed for American audiences, and it would be nice to see a clean and restored version of the movie. It's not a timeless classic, but for God's sake, if Criterion can do a special edition disc of the B-flick FIEND WITHOUT A FACE, it wouldn't hurt for some company to at least dig around for a complete cut of this film. The sets, not quite expressionistic, are quite atmospheric, and even the bare-bones strip club has a weird, "Blue Velvet"-ish feel. The movie's biggest strength is Horst Frank, who looks and acts appropriately strange without going over the top. As far as I know, the only version of this available in the states is from Alpha Video, and though the print is far from perfect, the dubbing is surprisingly good and I was pleased to discover this little gem in any condition. [DVD]

THE MONSTER MAKER (1944)

Poverty Row thriller with a unique twist, though one that some find to be tasteless. Ralph Morgan is a concert pianist and Wanda McKay is his daughter. At a concert, creepy scientist J. Carroll Naish sees McKay, who resembles his dead wife Lenore (a Poe-ish touch), and becomes fixated on the idea that McKay is her reincarnation. Naish pesters the girl, who already has a fellow (Terry Frost). Morgan threatens to go to the police if Naish keeps it up, so Naish knocks Morgan out and injects him with the virus which causes acromegaly, a disorder that causes hideous deformity of the head, hands, and feet and will leave Morgan looking like a cousin of the Elephant Man. His hands are affected first and, since he is unable to play the piano, he cancels all of his bookings and retreats to his study. Morgan's doctor knows the name of a good endocrinologist, who of course turns out to be Naish, who is working on a cure and willing to let Morgan be his guinea pig if Morgan will "give" him McKay. There is a mildly complicated backstory involving Naish's dead wife, who killed herself when he gave her the same disease to punish her for leaving him, but that's not crucial to the climactic action, which involves guns, an ape, and Naish's loyal assistant (Tala Birell) who is eventually moved to help Morgan in his fight against Naish. Morgan's makeup is good for a sub-B film, though other production values are poor. Morgan and Naish are good, and the movie is short, which is a plus here. Glenn Strange, who later played the Frankenstein monster and spent years on Gunsmoke as the bartender, plays Naish's muscle thug. [DVD]

THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH (1964)

When I was a prepubescent horror movie fan, I not only sought out monster flicks but also any literature about monster flicks--at the age of 8, I had a subscription to "Famous Monsters of Filmland" and bought "Castle of Frankenstein" on the newsstands whenever I could find it. I was also a big comic book buff, and occasionally these two interests met, as in a series of photo-comic books based on horror films. The only two of these artifacts I remember vividly were for THE MOLE PEOPLE and THE HORROR OF PARTY BEACH. I saw the first film when I was a teenager, but never got a chance to see the second until sometime in the 90's when I saw a cut print of it bludgeoned to death on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Now, thanks to Dark Sky Films, I own an incredibly pristine copy of the film forever on DVD. Is it really worth having forever? No, since it's basically a Frankie & Annette beach movie as if made by Ed Wood. But having had the chance to see this film which inspired lots of chills in me as a child is, to quote the MasterCard ads, priceless.

The film opens with a garbage boat dumping radioactive waste in the ocean. The canisters leak onto skeletons (Why are they there? Who knows?) which in no time flat transform into chintzy looking "Black Lagoon"-type creatures which come trolling along the beach and nearby community looking for young nubile women to slash up. The main characters are introduced at a beach party (duh!) where hunky John Scott is breaking up with slutty Marilyn Clarke, who wants more out of life than clean-cut, whitebread Scott. The movie flirts with "West Side Story" territory when Clarke starts dancing with sexy, swarthy biker Agustin Mayor and a rumble breaks out. Scott finds solace with the equally whitebread Alice Lyon (who looks closer to 40 than 20, though to be fair, Scott is also considerably older than the Party Beach regulars) and Clarke goes for a swim, only to become the first victim of the monsters. The rest of the movie is a series of vignettes of young women getting killed by the shambling creatures, alternating with vignettes of Scott working with Lyon's scientist father (Allen Laurel) at finding a way to stop the bloodshed. Laurel's maid (Eulabelle Moore), who insists that a voodoo curse is the problem, accidentally discovers that sodium is lethal to the monsters, leading to an incoherently staged finale as Scott and the cops try to destroy the beasts just as they're about to do in Lyon. The black and white film is surprisingly gory, especially in an early sequence where the monsters shred a bunch of girls at a slumber party, but unimaginative camerawork, awkward direction, and shoddy post-dubbing drain the last half of the film of any real energy. A band called the Del-Aires provides occasional rock & roll songs, unmemorable except for "The Zombie Stomp." Online critic Bradley Harding of Monsters at Play defends the film as a "send-up" of the American International beach films, but I don't think it was intended as a parody, and if it was, it's not nearly smart or funny enough to be successful on that level. Still, the movie is enjoyable in its sub-B-level way, and I can imagine watching it again when I'm in a nostalgic mood for the trappings of my childhood. [DVD]

ONE MILLION B.C. (1940)

The granddaddy of caveman movies, and perhaps the uncle of dinosaur movies, since KING KONG came first. The film begins in the present time with a small band of mountaineers (including Tyrone Power and Carole Landis) seeking shelter in a cave during a storm. Already in the cave is a strange old man (Conrad Nagel) who proceeds to tell his captive audience a story of early humans, gleaned from ancient paintings on the cave walls. Once the flashback starts, there's a bit of narration by Nagel to set the scene, but after that there's no more dialogue (except some caveman grunts) and we never return to the frame story. Since Nagel encourages his listeners to identify with his tale, we see Power and Landis as the two chief protagonists. The main narrative is a kind of primitive "Romeo and Juliet" concerning a romance between members of two different caveman tribes: Power from the brutal Rock People and Landis from the more passive Shell People. Power kills a boar and gets into a clash with his group's leader (Lon Chaney Jr., almost unrecognizable to me at first in a beard and wild hairdo). He winds up kicked out of the clan and, injured and drifting down a river, is discovered by Landis who nurtures him back to health and, as a romance develops, also becomes a civilizing influence. The two have run-ins with dinosaurs, mostly real alligators and armadillos and photographically blown-up lizards with fins stuck on their backs. Eventually, a volcano erupts, sending thick flows of lava down to swallow up animals and people alike, but Power and Landis survive and wind up like Adam and Eve figures. The special effects are OK for the time (stop-motion animation may have been beyond the movie's budget) and some of the scenes have wound up in later caveman movies. The volcano sequence remains particularly impressive. Some have made animal cruelty charges against the film, especially in regards to a violent and bloody tussle between two lizards, but to me the fight looks mostly faked or enhanced by off-screen means. Produced and directed by Hal Roach, also known for the Topper movies and Laurel & Hardy comedies. John Hubbard, who appeared the same year in TURNABOUT with Landis (a fantasy/comedy I'll review next month), is the only supporting player I recognized. I'm happy to have finally seen this, but I'd recommend it only to genre buffs. Others might prefer the 1960's remake with Raquel Welch which I assume has better effects. [TCM]

BARON BLOOD (1972)

I like Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY and think it deserves its reputation as one of the most influential horror movies of the 1960's, but I'm not sure that Bava deserves his rep as a genius director. BARON BLOOD is the sixth Bava film I've seen and though each film does have some bright spots, usually in the area of visual style, acting and narrative are not his strong points and overall I haven't been terribly impressed with his output. In this one, handsome young Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora) arrives in Austria to search out information on his ancestor, the infamous Baron Otto Von Kleist, a kind of Vlad the Impaler figure from the distant past who had a full-fledged torture chamber set up in the basement of his castle. As it happens, the castle is undergoing restoration for possible use as a luxury hotel and Peter strikes up a friendship with sexy architect Eva (Elke Sommer). They hear rumors of ghosts and curses, and together, in a half-prankish, half-serious way, they read out an ancient incantation designed to bring the Baron back to life. They don't realize that their magic works and the Baron returns as a slouching, gory-faced, Phantom of the Opera-type killer who stalks the castle grounds. He later manages to disguise himself as a distinguished older gentleman in a wheelchair (Joseph Cotton) and is determined to reclaim his land. Peter and Eva figure things out and contact a medium (Rada Rassimov) in an attempt to send him back to oblivion. There is blood and death and, of course, since there's a nice torture chamber around, some scenes of torture before the undead Baron is taken care of. Cotton looks and sounds quite frail, although he wasn't yet 70, and would in fact live another 22 years (and make around 30 more movie and TV appearances before his death). Cantafora and Sommer are both easy on the eyes and act as well as they need to. Well known Italian actor Massimo Girotti (OSSESSIONE, LAST TANGO IN PARIS) is wasted in the role of Peter's uncle. There's an odd scene, in which the Baron kills someone in front of a huge Coke machine, which feels like awkward product placement. The castle sets are impressive, and a nighttime chase through interestingly-lit fog comes off quite well, but overall a slow-moving, disappointing affair. [DVD]

BRIDE OF THE GORILLA (1951)

I think this was an attempt at making a Val Lewton-type of psychological thriller, but sadly, a low budget and the presence in a supporting role of an actor (Tom Conway) who had appeared in several of Lewton's minor masterpieces are clearly not guarantees that an interesting film will result. Conway and the exotic setting bring to mind I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, but this movie loses in any kind of comparison to that more interesting and atmospheric film. At Van Gelder Manor in the middle a jungle plantation, passions run high, so we are told, because of a love triangle between the plantation owner (Paul Cavanagh), his young wife (Barbara Payton), and the main overseer (Raymond Burr, looking about as young and thin as he ever would). The two men wind up in a fist fight and Cavanagh is bitten by a deadly snake which kills him. An old native woman (Gisela Werbisek) finds the body and puts a curse on the killer, saying "The jungle will hunt him until he's dead." In what could have been an interesting idea (albeit a cop from Lewton's CAT PEOPLE), it turns out that it's not the jungle hunting him down so much as himself; Burr, after marrying the widow, begins to think that he's transforming into a gorilla. He's drawn into the jungle at night, to do what, we're never sure, and the only time we see him in gorilla form is when we're looking through his eyes, or when he's looking in a reflective surface. After long segments of Burr stumbling deliriously around a cheap jungle set, alternating with obvious stock footage from other jungle movies, Burr gets justice at the hands of police commissioner Lon Chaney (yes, Chaney's the good guy!). This winds up being a psychological thriller being sold to viewers as a monster movie, and everyone will be disappointed. Sadly, it's not quite bad enough to be a "so bad it's good" treat, though the Mystery Science Theater 3000 guys might have been able to make it watchable. [DVD]

HORROR CASTLE (1963)

[Spoilers follow!] The original title of this Italian horror film is THE VIRGIN OF NUREMBERG. That's a more interesting title, but either way, the film itself is a mediocre product, which is a bit frustrating because the plot has potential. The opening sequence is well done: a woman (Roseanna Podesta) wakes up during a thunderstorm, finds her husband gone, and while looking for him, hears faraway moaning. She investigates and finds a room filled with torture chamber paraphernalia, including an imposing iron maiden (The "Virgin" of the Italian title) with blood dripping from it. When she opens it, she finds a dead woman, her empty eye sockets oozing gore. After the credits, we find out that Podesta has just come to live in a German castle with her new husband (George Riviere); the basement of the castle is a torture chamber museum, and there are rumors that a mad torturer from 300 years ago, known as "The Punisher," still haunts the place. For the next hour, we get a lot of tedious scenes of Podesta wandering around the atmospheric halls and grounds of the castle, dodging a few sinister-seeming folks: the scarred museum assistant Erich (Christopher Lee), the creepy housekeeper, a tourist who is apparently a police officer, and a masked figure who may or may not be just a display mannequin that keeps getting moved around. After another out-of-the-blue murder and a scene of torture involving a rat starting to gnaw through a woman's face, we discover that the real killer is no ghost but Riviere's father (Mirko Valentin), a Nazi who was part of the failed scheme to kill Hitler. He was caught and tortured mercilessly--his face now looks like a skinned skull, and he bears a passing resemblance to Ralph Finnes as Voldemort in last year's Harry Potter movie--and he has himself become a mad torturer. The finale is OK, but doesn't quite make the earlier 70 minutes worth sitting through. Because everyone is rather poorly dubbed, even the English-speaking Lee, it's difficult to judge the acting. The musical score is weak throughout; sometimes it's got a weird jazzy/noir feel which is out of sync with the film's tone, and other times it's wildly overdone shock music, which seems intended to make up for the film's overall lack of shocks. [TCM]

YOU'LL FIND OUT (1940)

Today I begin my annual month of horror movie reviews with the last of my Kay Kyser films. Some critics lambaste this movie, which features Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Peter Lorre, as a missed opportunity, and it's true that none of the three are used to their full spooky potential. But once you accept that, and quit wishing the movie was something other than what it is, I think you'll find it a fine comedy-thriller, atmospheric enough for Halloween viewing. Kyser and his band are playing a 21st birthday party gig for an heiress (Helen Parrish) who is also the girlfriend of Kyser's manager (Dennis O'Keefe). The site of the party is a mansion which just happens to be on a small island connected to the mainland only by a small bridge, and once the band and guests arrive, the bridge collapses in the middle of a nasty storm, leaving all stranded for the night. Parrish's slightly loony aunt (Alma Kruger) has arranged to hold a seance with her favorite medium (a turbaned Lugosi) in order to contact her dead husband, and Parrish has arranged to have famed skeptic Lorre there to expose Lugosi's trickery. Also present is Karloff, a respected judge and the family's legal advisor. The seance is played well for both creepiness and hilarity, and it soon becomes clear that someone is trying to kill Parrish, probably for her inheritance. Lugosi is the obvious villain, but are there others in cahoots with him? Kyser, O'Keefe, and Kyser's resident funny man Ish Kabibble trip over themselves trying to solve the mystery. There are secret panels, a falling chandelier, electric shock machines, and a dog whose tail glows in the dark, among other "old dark house" hijinks. One odd but effective gimmick is an electronic voice-distortion device called the Sonovox which produces an unearthly effect and is used both in the climax and the closing musical number. Speaking of music, the songs this time around are all fairly catchy, especially "Like the Fella Once Said," which is made up of bad puns, and "The Bad Humor Man." My favorite Kyser movie; I hope Warner puts out a DVD set of his, though I won't be holding my breath. [TCM]

SWING FEVER (1943)

After making several comedies for RKO, such as AROUND THE WORLD, band leader Kay Kyser went up in the movie world for this one, made at MGM, but unfortunately, it's not quite as funny as his previous films (and despite its title, it has little to do with swing). This is the only one of Kyser's vehicles in which he doesn't play himself, although his character, a musician named Lowell Blackford, isn't terribly far removed from the familiar Kyser persona. When we first see Blackford, he's trying to sell his ambitious "symphonetta" to New Swing Music Publishers. Although swing singer Marilyn Maxwell takes a liking to him, he doesn't have much luck selling his music until Maxwell's boyfriend, boxing promoter William Gargan, discovers that Kyser has the "evil eye," a way of squinching his eye at someone that causes the person to lose consciousness. Gargan plots to have Kyser use his talent to ensure that his loser client (Nat Pendleton) wins an important match. Maxwell rearranges Kyser's tone poem in swing time and he becomes a big success (backed, of course, by the Kyser band). Kyser falls for her (and eventually she for him) and he agrees to use his evil eye, but a variety of complications ensue, winding up with Kyser trying to escape from kidnappers so he can get to the arena in time to work his magic. There are many songs here, but aside from a bluesy, artily-shot number by Lena Horne, none of the music is memorable--though there is a fun cameo early on with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. Pendleton, a former wrestler, has an amusing scene with former boxer Max Rosenbloom and there seems to be great comic potential there, but it's not followed up on. Maxwell and Gargan make a nice couple, and Pamela Blake has a brief but memorable moment as Lois, the secretary. Ish Kabibble gets in a funny rhyme, which he also uses in at least one other Kyser movie: "Mary has a little lamb; she also has a bear. Everybody's seen her lamb, but no one's seen her bear." [TCM]

AROUND THE WORLD (1943)

This is perhaps the most interesting of the movies which starred band leader Kay Kyser (see my review of MY FAVORITE SPY) mostly because it sticks closely to the world of showbiz and feels like it could have been a documentary of a real wartime tour by a dance band of the era, except for the Nazi spy subplot. The film follows the band on a worldwide tour to entertain Allied troops; they begin in Australia and have stopovers in India, China, Egypt, and Liberia. Much of the film consists of songs and comedic bits performed onstage by the band and guest celebrities Joan Davis and Mischa Auer, playing themselves. Davis is amusing, but the dour-looking Auer, a decent comic actor in films such as MY MAN GODFREY and YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU, seems uncomfortable doing stand-up type routines. Between the band's appearances in front of soldiers, a couple of threadbare plots unfold. One centers on a young actress, Marcy McGuire, playing what I assume is a fictionalized version of herself, who stows away with the band when they leave Australia. She eventually gets to perform onstage, her highlight being a cute patter song, "The Moke from Shomokin" (which she sings looking a bit bug-eyed), but soon tragedy strikes her family and she has to learn the lesson that, in her chosen profession, the show must go on. The other plot has Kyser and Auer getting involved with an exotic Countess (Joan Valerie), not realizing that she's a spy who's trying to pass on secret plans hidden in a flashy ring. There is a particularly cute song, "Roodle-ee-doo," which consists of a string of then-current slang phrases, and an "inspiring" song, "Great News Is in the Making," which is sung at the end of each of their shows. Robert Armstrong plays the general who has to break bad news to McGuire, and Kyser regular Ish Kibble does his usual corny jokes. [TCM]

MY FAVORITE SPY (1942)

Bandleader Kay Kyser was quite popular in the 1940's, largely due to his radio show "Kay Kyser's Kollege of Musical Knowledge" which featured music, comedy, and music trivia quizzes. His band featured singers Harry Babbitt and Ginny Simms, and the chief comic relief, aside from Kyser himself, was cornet player Ish Kabibble (his real name was the just as unlikely Merwyn Bogue) who came off as a mellow dimwit--his stage name is apparently based on a Yiddish expression that has been translated as, "What, me worry?" Kyser and the band made a number of comedies in the 40's, mostly playing themselves. Though none of them come anywhere the heights of the Marx Brothers or Crosby and Hope, they are all entertaining, and to my mind, some of them are as good as and even better than the average Abbott and Costello movie. I've already reviewed THAT'S RIGHT YOU'RE WRONG and I've caught up with most of the rest of them recently and will write them up this week. In this one, Kyser, playing himself, gets a draft notice on his wedding day. It turns out to have been a case of mistaken identity, but he's enlisted by the government to do some spy work because the Orchid Club, where he and his band are playing, may be a hotbed of espionage. His partner in spying, blonde looker Jane Wyman, makes Kyser's new wife (Ellen Drew) jealous, but he can't tell his wife or his band what's going on, leading to lots of comic misunderstandings. Robert Armstrong (Carl Denham in the original KING KONG), the owner of the club, is the Nazi spy, and in an nifty twist, he's getting messages out to his fellow Nazis through Morse code worked into the musical arrangements of the songs. Things drag a bit in the middle, but the ending, with everyone racing around an abandoned theater, is fun. There are only a couple of songs, but Ish Kabibble gets to do some of his deadpan shtick, and familiar supporting cast faces include Una O'Connor, William Demerest, and Helen Westley. (Talk show host Mike Douglas was a singer with the band, but doesn't have a featured role in any of the movies.) Generally good fun. [TCM]

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY (1965)

As widescreen 60's historical epics go, this is about average: there is some beautiful cinematography and the sets are impressive, but the drama can't quite live up to all those trappings. In fact, in some ways, this material might have worked better as a two-person play since, even though there appear to be thousands of extras milling about, essentially there are only two important speaking roles, the great sculptor and painter Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) and his patron Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison). The movie, like the recent CAPOTE, doesn't try to encapsulate Michelangelo's entire life but instead covers one crucial period of time: his work on the Sistine Chapel from 1508 to 1513. Julius, known as the Warrior Pope, is at war with France trying to recover the Papal States under the banner of the Vatican, and the film includes a couple of lackluster battle sequences, but mostly we see Julius warring with Michelangelo over the painting of the Chapel. Michelangelo sees himself as a sculptor rather than a painter, and when the film opens, he has been spending years on a series of statues for the future tomb of the Pope and resents it when Julius pulls him away to work on the chapel ceiling. Once Michelangelo does throw himself into the painting, he has conflicts with Julius about time, cost, and style, specifically the scandalous nudity of some of his figures. The cardinals find the nudes to be obscene, but the artist's response is, "God created man with pride--it was left to the priests to create shame." Whenever Michelangelo seems ready to give up, the Pope goads him into continuing, and later when Julius is on what all assume to be his deathbed, about to succumb to battle injuries, the artist goads him back to health.

There is a woman, a Medici countess (Diane Cilento), who loves Michelangelo and nurses him back to health after he reaches total exhaustion while working on the ceiling, but he is unwilling to take energy away from his art to put into a relationship. In fact, although the movie ignores long-standing theories that Michangelo had love affairs with men, the film does treat Michelangelo, Julius, and the countess almost as a love triangle. It's worth noting that the movie is at least twice removed from history, as it is based on a novel by Irving Stone, and the countess is apparently a totally fictional character. There isn't much humor, except for a kind of running gag involving Michelangelo accidentally dropping things from the scaffolding onto the priests during mass. The only other actors with much dialogue are Harry Andrews as a papal architect and supervisor of the chapel painting, and Thomas Milian as Raphael, an artist whom the Pope considers using at one point to replace Michelangelo. The cinematography is quite good, and a scene in which Michelangelo is inspired by a view of clouds from a mountaintop to shape his God and Adam comes off nicely, although it could easily have been dreadful kitsch. The reconstructions of the in-progress ceiling are impressive, but the shot near the end of the completed art made me a little dizzy. Heston is at the peak of his looks, though Harrison nearly acts him right off the screen. [FMC]

A STUDY IN SCARLET (1933)

I don't know if it's really fair to review a movie during which I fell asleep, not once but twice, but here goes. I'm a odd Sherlock Holmes fan: I've probably only read four or five of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, but I'm a big fan of the Rathbone movies and I enjoy reading the Holmes pastiches and tributes written by other writers. Though this film's title is also the title of the first published Sherlock Holmes story, the movie's plot has nothing to do with it. Given that, the story isn't a bad one, but if you've ever read or seen an adaptation of Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians," you'll know what to expect. Reginald Owen, a fine supporting actor of the 30's and 40's, perhaps best known as Scrooge in the 1938 CHRISTMAS CAROL, does a nice job as Holmes, who is called upon by a widow (Doris Lloyd) whose husband's inheritance is going not to her, but to a small "secret" group called the Scarlet Ring, whose members split up the inheritance money of the others--an arrangement called a tontine, also used as a plot device in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Wrong Box." When other members of the group begin dying mysteriously, Holmes suspects that one member is getting greedy and tries to track him or her down. Warburton Gamble makes a particularly colorless Watson, though Alan Mowbray as Lastrade and Alan Dinehart as the chief suspect are both good, and Anna May Wong has a small but important role. The movie has a cheap Poverty-Row look, but delivers some atmosphere toward the end. My falling asleep had more to do with me than with the movie, although it's not exactly a nail-biter. [DVD]

ALWAYS A BRIDE (1940)

This appears to be George Reeves' 21st century cultural moment: Ben Affleck plays him in a current big-budget film (Hollywoodland) and seasons of the Superman TV show are being released on DVD. I got the season one boxed set for my birthday and, coincidentally as we're making our way through the shows, TCM aired this little-seen B-film which features Reeves in one of his few leading roles. Contrary to what you might think from his Superman persona, he's charming and frothy and does as good a job at romantic second-feature lead as any other B-leading man of the time. Though the movie itself (a small town romantic triangle) isn't that good, it's because of the writing, not because of Reeves. The real problem with the short film is that it feels like two different movies, or more to the point, like the pilot of a so-so TV show, followed by an early episode. In the first half, Rosemary Lane is engaged to the colorless but socially connected John Eldredge, but she obviously prefers the handsomer, hunkier George Reeves, even though he's a glib tongued flatterer for whom a career is not a high priority. His rich uncle (Oscar O'Shea) is tired of supporting him and Lane's folks are in Eldredge's corner, but still Reeves manages to win Lane's hand, partly by fast talking Eldredge out of the very idea of marriage. In the second half, Reeves is still out of a job and O'Shea refuses to foot any more of their bills; Reeves goes to the mayor hoping for an appointive position, but the mayor and his cronies, thinking Reeves is a simpleton, agree to pay his bills if he'll run against the mayor in the forthcoming election, providing what they hope will be an easy win for the mayor. Instead, Reeves decides to take politics seriously and launches a real run, using his rhetorical gifts to run on a platform of "Here's why you shouldn't vote for me." The outcome is predictable. Reeves is quite good, the only real reason to see the movie. He's funny and completely believable as a fast talking but well intentioned bumpkin who isn't really a bumpkin. Lane is so-so, running at fairly low energy, and the plotting and dialogue could be stronger--the last five minutes or so are particularly weak. But I'm glad to have seen this other side of George Reeves, and I'd definitely recommend this to Reeves fans. Heaven knows where they got the title from. [TCM]

WENT THE DAY WELL? (1942)

A very entertaining "what if" story which was undoubtedly produced as wartime propaganda to prepare the British people in case of German invasion, which was much feared at the time. The film, set in the cozy village of Bramley End, begins with an "Our Town" feel, as a narrator talks directly to the camera and relates the events of the wartime story from a vantage point several years after the war, claiming that government had kept the story under wraps on purpose. We are introduced to the villagers as they go about their lives, with preparations for a weekend wedding taking up most everyone's time. When a group of Army engineers comes rolling into town for maneuvers and requisitions temporary housing, the villagers are only too happy to accommodate them, and the vicar offers up the church for the bulk of the men. We find out that the men are actually Germans preparing for to receive a parachute invasion; in a long sequence which is not quite Hitchcockian but still quite tense, we wait for the Germans to slip up or for a nosy villager to stumble onto the truth. When their cover is blown, the Nazis round up most of the villagers in the church, letting a few back to their homes, accompanied by soldiers, so the illusion of everyday life can be sustained in case outsiders might breeze into town. The rest of the film follows the resourceful men and women of Bramley End as they attempt to get word to the outside world and fight back against their occupiers. 

The most remarkable thing about the film is the sudden violence that crops up, and the fact that none of the characters (even the children) is exempt from the possibility of injury or death. An old woman who has been something like comic relief suddenly attacks a soldier with an axe and kills him, and just as suddenly, another soldier enters, sees the dead body, and shoots the woman dead. The violence is not gory, but it is sudden, frequent, and fairly graphic for its time, though all the more effective for not being rendered in close-up in Dolby 5.1 surround sound. This is mostly an ensemble piece, with the only standout (in terms of narrative focus) being Leslie Banks (the crazy hunter in THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME) as a distinguished village squire who is actually a collaborationist. Other familiar faces in the cast include C.V. France as the aged vicar, Basil Sydney as the Nazi in command, David Farrar (the hunk who gets the nuns hot and bothered in BLACK NARCISSUS) as another Nazi, and Mervyn Jones (Bob Cratchit in the Alastair Sim CHRISTMAS CAROL) and Elizabeth Allan (leading lady in MARK OF THE VAMPIRE) as villagers. The film is more artful than much propaganda of the time and remains well worth watching for its low-key documentary-like style, its tension, and its portrayal of everyday people in extraordinary circumstances. [DVD]

BEHIND OFFICE DOORS (1931)

Fairly lame pre-Code office romance melodrama, worth catching only for Mary Astor. She plays a secretary at a paper company who is secretly holding a torch for traveling salesman Robert Ames. She helps further his career by feeding him tips, and when the big boss retires, Astor not only talks a banker into selling the company to the employees, she also gets a big raise for Ames. Six months later, Ames is president, but we see that Astor, as his secretary, is really the driving force behind the company, though certainly underappreciated by the rather slimy Ames, who is either willfully unaware of her romantic interest or just doesn't care. In the meantime, Astor has been pursued by wealthy but married Ricardo Cortez; they meet cute playing Blindman's Bluff and Truth or Dare at a party and, though he says he's separated, she still avoids getting in too deep. Ames has a trampy mistress (Edna Murphy) whom he hires as a secretary, even though she's incompetent, but eventually he gets engaged to the ritzy Catherine Dale Owen, leaving both Astor and Murphy behind. In the rather frustrating but predictable finale, Astor winds up with Ames, though he still doesn't really seem to appreciate her. Astor is fine, as is Cortez who gives his playboy character a sheen of genuine charm which helps make him a bit more sympathetic than the average "rich guy who loses the girl" in movies of the era. The real problem with the movie is leading man Ames, who when he filmed this was just about a year away from an untimely death at the age of 42 from alcoholism. It is difficult to see anything redeeming about his character--he's not handsome, he's not charming, and he really never fully appreciates Astor--and I was rooting for Cortez to win out. [TCM]

SHAFT (1971)

One of the triad of seminal 70's "blaxploitation" films (which, oddly enough, all begin with the letter "S"), the other two being SUPERFLY and SWEET SWEETBACK'S BADASSSSS SONG. Of the three, SHAFT comes the closest to having a traditional Hollywood narrative, with a good-guy hero (not an unorthodox anti-hero as in the other two films) and a fairly straightforward private-eye plotline. In fact, what surprised me most about this film was how similar it was to an old-fashioned Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe movie, set in New York City rather than California. John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) is the black private investigator who manages to work with "the man" (the white cops) and still keep his street cred with friends, clients, and informers. Bumpy, a powerful Harlem gangster (Moses Gunn) strongarms Shaft into trying to find his kidnapped daughter, the one who's going to go to college and get a better life. At first, Bumpy claims the culprit must be Ben Buford (Christopher St. John), the leader of a black radical group, but when Shaft contacts him, a bunch of Buford's men get slaughtered and Buford joins up with Shaft to go after the real villains, some Mafia hoods new to town who want to muscle in on Bumpy's trade. Shaft, who feels he's been used by Bumpy, is reluctant to continue, but a cop friend of Shaft's (Charles Cioffi) is afraid that the gang activity could be mistaken for a "race" war, so Shaft follows the case to its bloody climax. A long and excessively violent sequence at the beginning involving a man falling to his death from Shaft's office window makes little narrative sense, and the final battle, which involves lots of men and guns and a high powered water hose, is ludicrous, but both scenes work in that 70's "ultraviolence" way. The film was obviously shot on a B-movie budget, but most of it seems to have been done on the streets of NYC and it makes for an interesting window into that specific time and place. The opening, with Shaft strutting through Times Square, shows him pass 7 or 8 movie marquees, with films ranging from big Hollywood hits of the day to more squalid action thrillers to porn; it seems to be self-conscious announcement that this movie will fit right in with the grand Times Square tradition. Shaft gets to tell off Whitey a few times (and bed and dump a trampy white girl whom a flamingly gay bartender fixes him up with) and throw attitude everywhere, and Roundtree is very good as an updated Chandleresque "private dick who's a sex machine with all the chicks"--did you really think I'd write this review without quoting a line from that fabulous theme song by Isaac Hayes? Despite all the violence (and the two short sex scenes), what really got my blood racing was when the opening riff of the theme song kicks in at the very end. Not as raw and subversive as SUPERFLY, but more fun. [TCM]

ROAD TO PARADISE (1930)

[Spoiler included!!] Very odd early talkie with Loretta Young in a dual role, and not one but two (or even three) wildly implausible plot twists--major suspension of disbelief is needed to make it through this one. In the first few minutes of the film, we meet a non-traditional little family composed of two small-time crooks (the dapper George Barraud and the sickly Raymond Hatton) and Mary, the young woman (Loretta Young) whom they raised. Weird Plot Twist One: We find out that she's an honest-to-God mind reader and not just a trick entertainer; if she concentrates hard enough, she can actually read people's minds. You'd think that with a talent like that, she'd be in great demand, but she's out of work (due to a harassing boss) and agrees to pull a jewelry heist with her "fathers." Weird Plot Twist Two: while the three are having dinner at a Chinese restaurant frequented by underworld figures, a group of idle rich "slummers" comes waltzing in, and one of the group (Margaret, also played by Young) is a dead ringer for Mary. Our family targets them for the robbery, but things don't go smoothly and Margaret is shot, falling into a mini-coma. While the two guys run, Mary stays with Margaret and swaps clothes and identities with her. Thanks to Mary's ability to read the mind of the unconscious Margaret, the cops fall for her ruse, as do the maid, the butler, and even Margaret's boyfriend (Jack Mulhall). The next morning, when the real Margaret awakens, the jig seems to be up, but in Plot Twist Three (contrived and predictable, but not necessarily weird), the women discover that they are long-separated twin sisters. Turner Classic Movies got the running time wrong (as has been happening too often lately) so my DVR cut off the last 3 or 4 minutes, but a happy ending was clearly in store for all (except perhaps for Mary's fathers). Young is lovely and quite good in the two roles; the special effect used to have the two Youngs interact seems not to be split screen, but rear projection, and it is indeed effective, especially in the restaurant scene in which Mary is right behind Margaret, listening to her conversation. [TCM]

FOOTLIGHT PARADE (1933)

The release of a 6-disc Busby Berkeley DVD set has provided a good excuse for me to revisit some of these fun movies which helped to define the classic Hollywood musical genre. Though Berkeley did direct some films, his most famous ones, including most of the films in the set, are ones for which he did only choreography and direction of musical segments, but these films are remembered today almost solely due to his contributions. Most of these 30's films involve a traditional show biz plot, usually following the travails of a group of people struggling against odds to put on a show. The cast of characters almost always involves a beleaguered director, cost-cutting producers, a charming young leading man, and a chorus girl who gets a big break at a starring role. Here, James Cagney is the director whose shady producers (one of whom is Guy Kibbee) tell him they don't want to back a new Broadway show because movies are killing the stage musical. Cagney's response is to start a whole new business creating live traveling "prologue" shows, essentially free-standing production numbers, to accompany hit movies. Just as he gets his business off the ground, he runs into trouble when a rival company starts copying his show ideas. Suspecting there's a spy in the woodwork (and there is), Cagney locks his cast and crew in the theater while they finish rehearsing three new prologues. The film climaxes with the three numbers, all Busby Berkeley spectaculars. Dick Powell, as usual, is the juvenile lead and Ruby Keeler, as usual, is the chorus girl/breakout star (though her personality is so drab and her talent so average that I have a hard time buying her sudden stardom). Joan Blondell, usually a brassy second-string dancer in the chorus, plays Cagney's secretary and love interest, though she has to battle a couple of rivals (Blondell's trampy roommate Claire Dodd and greedy ex-wife Renee Whitney) along the way. The overstuffed plot also involves the producers cheating Cagney out of money and a backstage censor (Hugh Herbert) who tries to clean up a number involving dancing cats in heat. Also in the cast is Frank McHugh as a choreographer and Ruth Donnelley as Kibbee's conniving wife. Of the three main numbers, "By a Waterfall" is the most spectacular, a kind of forerunner of the Esther Williams aquashow numbers of the 40's; "Honeymoon Hotel" is the sexy one, with lots of married men using the name Smith spending the night with their mistresses; "Shanghai Lil," which features Cagney, is a narrative number of the kind done to perfection years later by Gene Kelly. The dance numbers defy description; just see them. My favorite line: Blondell to Dodd: "As long as they have sidewalks, you'll have a job!" [DVD]

GIDGET (1959)

I am not a big fan of beach movies, despite the potential for studying undraped male pulchritude. Usually, when people talk about such films, they are referencing the series done in the mid-60's by American International, starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, but I think that many of the widespread beach movie cliches actually came from this film, which was the inspiration for two later movies and two TV series. Sandra Dee plays Frances, a high school girl who finds herself and her hormones running a little behind her boy-crazy pals. While they are looking forward to a summer of flirting with college-age boys, Dee, a little gawkier and less developed than her friends, doesn't understand what the fuss is about. Instead of flirting, she winds up hanging out on the beach with some surf bums who adopt her as a mascot. The leader of the gang is known as the Big Kanuha (Cliff Robertson), a Korean War vetern who has decided to drop out of society and follow the sun. Dee, nicknamed Gidget for "girl midget," admires him but soon falls in love with the handsome, younger Moondoggie (James Darren), son of a rich father, who wants to follow in the Kahuna's footsteps. However, she always seems to get on Moondoggie's nerves, so when the big summer-ending luau rolls around, she sets in action a silly screwball-comedy plan to make Moondoggie jealous by going after Kahuna. Naturally, things don't quite go as planned, lessons are learned by everyone, including Kahuna (who, just a few years before the hippie movment, goes the opposite route and drops back into the rat race), and Gidget and Moondoggie wind up together (at least temporarily) at the end. There is some surprisingly blunt sex talk, or what passed for such in a late-50's movie made for teenagers, but Gidget remains, despite her best efforts, "pure as the driven snow." Dee is likeable, and the surf bum gang (including Joby Baker, Doug McClure, and future Billy Jack actor Tom Laughlin) start out as an interesting bunch, but their characters aren't allowed to develop and they get pushed into the background by the final third. Arthur O'Connell as Dee's dad seems a little too old for the part (he was 50 but looks older). Mary LaRoche is fine as the mother, though she was better a few years later as Ann-Margaret's mom in BYE BYE BIRDIE (and her best role might be as Telly Savalas's passive, cringing wife in the creepy Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" with the murderous Talking Tina doll). The beach location shooting is nice, although most of the stars do their surfing in front of a rear-projection screen. It's not a musical, but at one point, just as he's getting snuggly with Dee, Darren breaks out unexpectedly in song. I saw this letterboxed on Turner Classic, and I hear the Columbia DVD, which is pan-and-scanned, is practically unwatchable. [TCM]

HOUSE ON TELEGRAPH HILL (1951)

A decent Gothic-type melodrama with a topical twist (the lead character is a post-war refugee from Belsen); Fox Video is marketing this on DVD in their "film noir" line, but it's really not--a little more than shadows and the occasional city street scene is needed to make a noir--and I think die-hard noir fans will be disappointed. It's much more like REBECCA or GASLIGHT than DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Valentina Cortese is a Polish widow who has been thrown into a concentration camp. She befriends a woman named Karin who clearly does not have the resources for survival that Cortese does; despite Cortese's best efforts, Karin dies. Cortese, knowing that the dead woman had shipped her son off to live with wealthy relatives in San Francisco, impulsively takes her identity papers and, when the camp is liberated just a few days later, she passes herself off to the American solider in charge of repatriation (William Lundigan) as Karin. She finds out that the rich aunt is dead and, knowing that the son was just a baby when he was sent away and wouldn't recognize her, she decides to head to the States and make a home with the child. The issue of her motives is a little murky; after the kind of suffering she went through, and knowing she had no home or family left in Europe, it's hard to fault her for wanting a better life, but she is still guilty of working her way into money and motherhood under false pretenses. A more interesting movie might have examined this moral quandary a bit, but that doesn't happen here. At any rate, Cortese gets to the U.S. and meets up with the child's guardian (Richard Basehart), a distant relative of the dead aunt. They hit it off and by the time they get to the West Coast, they're married. The child takes to her and she to him, but the housekeeper (Fay Baker) is standoffish and a little creepy, and soon we suspect that there is more to Basehart than meets the eye. Coincidentally, Lundigan shows up again, as a lawyer friend of Basehart's, and when Cortese suspects that Basehart and Baker are in league against her, she turns to him for help, not knowing that Basehart has told Lundigan that she's going nuts. There is a suspicious car accident, a near-fatality in a mysterious playhouse, and some possibly poisoned drinks on a tray (a la Hitchcock's SUSPICION) before all is resolved. Basehart, who I only really know from his starring role in the 60's TV show "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," is quite good at maintaining moral ambiguity (is he good or is he bad?) for most of the movie, better than Cary Grant was in SUSPICION--though I suspect that was more the fault of the script than the actor. Baker, who went on to do mostly supporting TV parts, is also very good, nicely understated in the Mrs. Danvers-like role. Though shot mostly in a studio, there is some nice location footage of San Francisco. I can't recommend this as a film noir, but for a Friday night Gothic thriller, it will fit the bill. [DVD]