I Bury the Living (1958)

Director: Albert Band
Writer: Louis Garfinkle
Stars: Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel and Peggy Maurer

Index: 2024 Centennials.

Robert Kraft is the new chairman of the Management Committee of the Immortal Hills cemetery in Milford so Andy McKee, who’s been its caretaker for as long as anyone can remember, shows him around. Bob Kraft is Richard Boone, well known on TV in 1958 for his role in Medic, which landed him a 1955 Emmy nomination, but was becoming a bigger star through roles in westerns like The Tall T, Ten Wanted Men and Man without a Star, along with a new TV show for 1957 called Have Gun – Will Travel, in which he played a gentleman wandering the West as a gun for hire to help people in need. McKee, an old Scot with a thick accent whose retirement is one of Kraft’s first priorities, is Theodore Bikel, then a thirty-four year old Austrian Jew. He was born in Vienna but moved to what was then Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), learning acting there and later in London, to which he moved at twenty-one to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He racked up many European nationalities in movies. A Scot was just one more.

The easiest way to see I Bury the Living is as an unassociated feature length episode of The Twilight Zone, so it doesn’t hurt that Boone bore a resemblance to Rod Serling. He had similar rugged good looks, a similarly serious attitude and, of course, a similar suit given that Bob is also the president of the Kraft department store. The Kraft family run the town of Milford and Bob’s Uncle George, who was chairman two years prior, explains to him how they maintain their level of prestige. Every man in the family “served on every community project, board and committee that was ever created. They served for free but they did it for business.” So, even though Bob is busy with the store, he’s now going to have to dedicate a few hours a week to the cemetery. Given that most of the feature is set at Immortal Hills and we never see the store, you can imagine how well that doesn’t go for him. There’s a reason for that and it is inherently tied to the big board on the far wall of the cemetery’s office that McKee talks him through on that first fateful visit.

Two for the Road (1967)

Director: Stanley Donen
Writer: Frederic Raphael
Stars: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney

I had never heard of Two for the Road before plucking it out of Stanley Donen’s filmography for this project, but I’m very happy that I did. It’s technically a British film, but the funding came from a Hollywood studio—20th Century Fox—and it was primarily shot in France, so it’s an international picture and that’s highly appropriate because it feels like an international film, a romantic comedy obviously influenced by the French New Wave. It was shot in 1966 and, while it certainly looks like it was shot in 1966, it also feels like it could have been made yesterday because it’s that timeless; and let’s be honest, how many films shot in 1966 can you say that about? It wasn’t much of a commercial success, making back $12m on a $5m budget, but it was highly regarded by the critics. More than one has described it as Donen’s best movie, even though he also directed Singin’ in the Rain; it’s often been described as having Audrey Hepburn’s greatest performance; and Henry Mancini has claimed that his theme is his personal favourite from his work.

Clearly I should take a look at it to remember Donen and his career, on what would have been his centennial; he came pretty close to celebrating it too, passing in 2019 at the age of 94. The lead actors are Hepburn and Albert Finney, the latter of which was fresh from the success of Tom Jones and the former very close to her initial retirement, with only Wait Until Dark following it until a much anticipated return a decade later in 1976’s Robin and Marian. The most important name, though, at least to this particular picture, is that of Frederic Raphael, who wrote the original screenplay. It’s not exactly autobiographical, but it was sparked by a road trip that he and his wife took through France, some of the script taken from things that they did but much of it taken from things that they didn’t do but could well have done in a parallel universe. He received an Oscar nomination for his work, the film’s only nomination as Hepburn was nominated for Wait Until Dark instead, but he lost to William Rose for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

The Baron of Arizona (1950)

Director: Samuel Fuller
Writer: Samuel Fuller
Stars: Vincent Price and Ellen Drew

Index: The First Thirty.

It took sixteen films for Vincent Price to get top billing, with Shock, and it took eleven more for him to get it again, with a low budget gem from cult director Sam Fuller. Like Bagdad, I’ve seen this one before. Unlike Bagdad, I’m happy to watch it again.

“To the state of Arizona!” is the toast as this film begins and that’s because it’s Valentine’s Day 1912 and we’re finally part of the union as the 48th and last continental state. John Griff is giving this toast and he follows up with “to a real lover of Arizona, my friend James Addison Reavis.” And everybody present is shocked.

They’re shocked because, while Reavis is the lead character here, he’s not the hero; he’s the villain. And we promptly go into flashback to a rainy night outside Phoenix forty years earlier to find out why.

Bagdad (1949)

Director: Charles Lamont
Writer: Robert Hardy Andrews, based on a story by Tamara Hovey
Stars: Maureen O’Hara, Paul Christian and Vincent Price

Index: The First Thirty.

OK, so this wasn’t as bad as I remembered it from a previous viewing in 2007, but it’s not a good film by any standards and it has to rank alongside Brigham Young and Up in Central Park as the worst of Vincent Price’s First Thirty.

Of course, he’s easily the best thing about it, though he really didn’t need his right eye to be glued shut to make him seem sinister and corrupt as Pasha Ali Nadim. He also narrates the film, because, of all the stars in Hollywood at the time, he was surely the one best suited to pronounce Scheherezade correctly.

The biggest problem with the film is that it isn’t the Arabian Nights fantasy that it might be mistaken for. It’s a generic story of intrigue in an exotic locale, Bagdad, the largest city in the world during the Islamic Golden Age, and here somewhere where “all unbelievable things are possible”, apparently including the overt rear projection. It might have worked as an indie distraction on a B-movie budget and in black and white, but it doesn’t have the substance to work as a Technicolor blockbuster.

The Bribe (1949)

Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Writer: Marguerite Roberts, based on the short story by Frederick Nebel
Stars: Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price and John Hodiak

Index: The First Thirty.

Here’s another Vincent Price movie that I’d never even heard of, though it turns out that I have seen parts of it, in Steve Martin’s comedy nod to film noir, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. He takes his name of Rigby from this film and the whole Friends and Enemies of Carlotta angle is taken from its location, Carlotta being a town on the Central American island of Los Trancos.

Of course, this is the original and it wants to be taken seriously, a little too much if Rigby’s got anything to say about it. That’s Rigby the American cop, in the form of Robert Taylor, who’s sent to Carlotta to find out who’s behind a war surplus racket.

Apparently someone’s buying lots of scrap, but someone’s including good airplane motors in the shipments, which are then shipped out of the country, where they’re conditioned and sold. That’s millions of dollars in profit, none of it taxed, and if there’s anything that’s more un-American than taking money from Uncle Sam, I don’t know what it is.

There are only two suspects, so Rigby looks at them first when he gets to Carlotta in the guise of a fisherman. Apparently, nobody goes to Carlotta except to fish. Or to steal airplane engines, of course. They’re a married couple, Tugwell and Elizabeth Hintten. Tug flew down with the airline, but lost his job so now tends bar at Pedro’s and drinks himself into a stupor on his day off. Liz sings there and well too, but we only get a couple of songs. Tug is played by John Hodiak, Liz by Ava Gardner.

The Three Musketeers (1948)

Director: George Sidney
Writer: Robert Ardrey, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas
Stars: Lana Turner, Gene Kelly, June Allyson, Van Heflin, Angela Lansbury, Frank Morgan, Vincent Price, Keenan Wynn and John Sutton

Index: The First Thirty.

For a beloved family classic, there’s an awful lot wrong with this famous take on The Three Musketeers, now only the seventh result for the famous title on IMDb, but the fifteenth made at that time. However, it won me over again in the end, as it does each time. I’m embarrassed early on but it leaves me smiling by the end.

The Three Musketeers this time out—Athos, Porthos and Aramis, as always—are played by Van Heflin, Gig Young and Robert Coote, who make for a jolly lot of honourable scoundrels, Heflin in particular bringing substance to his role and not only in the sense of alcohol.

The new fish, D’Artagnan, who trawls them into a rash of adventures, is Gene Kelly, utterly sure that he’s in a musical even though writer Robert Ardrey and director George Sidney had no such ambition. He overdoes everything as a living cartoon and I never bought his comedy, but the balance and energy he has as a dancer does lend itself to magnificent swordfights.

On his first day in Paris, he manages to find his way into a duel with all three of the above musketeers on the very same day, but the first turns into a rout of Richelieu’s men, who show up to arrest them. Given a string of ambitious leaps, I wondered if he was aiming at Douglas Fairbanks Sr. more than Errol Flynn, but then I realised that his ability to turn anything into a prop meant that he was aiming at Jackie Chan, merely thirty-five years too early.

Rogues' Regiment (1948)

Director: Robert Florey
Writer: Robert Buckner, based on a story by Robert Buckner and Robert Florey
Stars: Dick Powell, Marta Toren, Vincent Price and Stephen McNally

Index: The First Thirty.

Back to regularly scheduled programming, Price’s next film proper after Up in Central Park is a picture that tries to be every different film genre all at once. It doesn’t work, which might explain why this is criminally underseen and unavailable outside the grey market, but it is a particularly fascinating attempt.

As the opening credits roll, it’s obviously a French Foreign Legion movie, which is backed up by those very words showing up under the title on the movie’s poster. And it is, but not in the usual way. This is a far cry from Beau Geste.

For a start, the very next scenes involve the burning of the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun outside their bunker in Berlin in 1945. It might seem historical to us but it was notably topical for 1948, being only three years on. It’s only two years after the Nuremberg Trials, our next stop, to watch in archive footage, the fate of the leading Nazis to survive the war. One, however, also sentenced to death, isn’t there.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Directors: Charles Barton and Walter Lantz
Writers: Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo and John Grant
Stars: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange and Lenore Aubert

Index: The First Thirty.

While it took Vincent Price sixteen films to land top billing, achieving it with Shock, and he was very much a supporting actor throughout the rest of his First Thirty, his profile was such that his name made it onto every single poster for every single feature he was in from Service de Luxe to Up in Central Park. That remarkable streak, comprising his first twenty-one films, is ended here, as he’s given less to do in this one than in any other thus far and possibly in his entire career.

That’s because he’s basically just a sight gag in the last minute of the film, delivering a pair of lines and some maniacal laughter to serve as the final punchline to the original Universal comedy horror flick. Let me set the scene.

Abbott and Costello have survived the film, thinking back on what they just went through. While Lou saw everything, his partner didn’t, consistently so for comedic effect, and so he’s adamant to get that across now they’re safe.

“The next time that I tell you that I saw something when I saw it, you believe me that I saw it,” Lou spits out in his infamously thick Brooklyn accent.

Bud is dismissive. “Oh relax. Now that we’ve seen the last of Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Monster, there’s nobody to frighten us any more.”

Up in Central Park (1948)

Director: William A. Seiter
Writer: Karl Tunberg, based on the musical by Herbert Fields, Dorothy Fields and Sigmund Romberg
Stars: Deanna Durbin, Dick Haymes and Vincent Price

Index: The First Thirty.

Four words are needed to set you up for Up in Central Park and not all of them are obvious from the poster. Sure, it’s a romantic musical, as you’d expect. It’s also a comedy, or at least it’s supposed to be, and that’s there too. The fourth word needed, though, is “politics”.

You see, this is a fictional story set against the backdrop of a very real political era, that of the dominance of Tammany Hall in 1870s New York. Vincent Price is notorious William Tweed, whom everyone calls “Bill” or “Boss”, depending on whether they’re in his favour or not. And, just in case a word like “notorious” wasn’t enough, here’s a little history lesson.

Back when the Republicans were liberal and the Democrats were conservative, there was a Democrat named William Tweed, who owned New York, not literally, as he was merely third in the ranks of landowners, but through his influence and control. He sat on the boards of railroads, banks, utilities, mines, newspapers, even the Brooklyn Bridge Company. He was a state senator in New York and a congressman in Washington. He orchestrated elections and controlled finances, to the degree that, by the time he was convicted of corruption and sent to jail for life, he had extracted the equivalent of $5 billion in today’s money from the city.

Moss Rose (1947)

Director: Gregory Ratoff
Writers: Jules Furthman and Tom Reed, adapted by Niven Busch from the novel by Joseph Shearing
Stars: Peggy Cummins, Victor Mature and Ethel Barrymore

Index: The First Thirty.

It would be easy to find fault with Moss Rose, a gothic film noir murder mystery drama of a movie, but it feels relentlessly unusual and I’d be lying if I said that it’s not going to stay with me. I have a feeling I’m going to remember it a lot longer and a lot more fondly than Vincent Price’s previous couple of movies, even if he isn’t actually in it much. It kept me guessing all the way, partly about whodunit but mostly about where the heck it would travel next. It’s thoroughly unpredictable.

Breaking his trend of playing four villainous roles in a row, Price is a police inspector here in a Victorian London straight out of Jack the Ripper, with cobbled Coin St., near Waterloo Bridge, drenched in fog. It starts suspensefully with young chorus girl Belle Adair going home from work and wondering who’s hiding in the shadows watching her. Of course, we can see that it’s Victor Mature, who we don’t expect to play a 19th century stalker.

If that’s our first surprise, our second is that Belle is not our victim; that’s a friend, fellow chorus girl and neighbour, Daisy Arrow, who’s flustered already the moment we first meet her. As Belle goes on a date with Georgie that night, the pair of them hear Mature’s voice as he rides off with Daisy. Next day, she brushes past him on the stairs to her apartment. She’s coming in and Mature’s rushing out in a hurry because Daisy’s dead in her room, having been drugged and then smothered.