Dark Intruder (1965)

Director: Harvey Hart
Writer: Barré Lyndon
Stars: Leslie Nielsen, Mark Richman, Judi Meredith, Gilbert Green, Charles Bolender and Werner Klemperer

Index: Centennials.

This is surely not the best film I’ve seen this year but I had more fun with it than with any film in decades. It’s so far up my alley, it seems like it should be illegal. I wanted to climb into the sets and play with the props and live in its world, without the threat of being eviscerated by an ancient Sumerian demon, naturally.

Yet it’s almost forgotten today, only trawled out on odd occasions like right now for Leslie Nielsen’s centennial. It was originally made by Shamley Productions as the proposed pilot for a new TV show. They had already had success with Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Suspicion and the feature Psycho. The Alfred Hitchcock Hour was on its final season, so they tried The Black Cloak.

As those other shows were anthologies, that may suggest that this would have been too. In another universe though, it might have been a period occult detective show and I would have have tuned in for it religiously. After watching this, I wanted to dive into the rest of the series and cursed the universe that it wasn’t real.

And of course it wasn’t! It was deemed too much for American television in 1965 and was re-edited by Universal, at whose studio it had been shot, for release as a feature. It appeared as the first half of a drive in double bill with the William Castle movie, I Saw What You Did.

Occult detectives were born in the Victorian era in literature, with regular characters going back to Carnacki the Ghost Finder, starting in 1910. On screen, however, this may well count as the beginning, soon followed by Hammer’s black magic films—The Devil Rides Out was 1968—and early seventies TV movies like Ritual of Evil and The Night Stalker that gave us Dr. David Sorell and reporter Carl Kolchak.

Here, the occult detective is Brett Kingsford, an occult expert and seventh son of a seventh son who lives in 1890 San Francisco. He owns a richly furnished mansion, courtesy of a couple of set decorators who outdid themselves, Julia Heron and John McCarthy. He has an orrery, a cocky mandrake plant and an esoteric library. He even has a little person as a servant, Nikola seeming as much a friend and confidant.

What he doesn’t have are answers to a cruel and vicious crimewave that’s front page news on the Globe. Someone or something has killed four, apparently with claws, then left a bizarre ivory statue behind at each crime scene. As we soon find when the Commissioner calls him in to consult, they’re similar but not identical. On each, some sort of creature gradually emerges further from the back of the carved skulls with each successive statue.

The experts are baffled but Kingsford thinks of the Crimson Desert, Azathoth and Dagon, all parts of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. However, a visit to an “obscure acquaintance”, an old and wizened Chinese gentleman with a long wispy moustache and beard and longer fingernails, is more knowledgeable. It’s a Sumerian god, pre-Babylonian, the essence of sublime evil. He has a clear idea of the killer’s intentions too: seven killings, one for each of the seven spokes of a demon’s wheel. So, three more to come.

As much as I adored this movie, it’s not hard to find fault, perhaps most obviously here as a running time of a breath under an hour means that this Chinese elder is visit one rather than visit eight. Kingsford apparently specialises in obscure acquaintances but there just isn’t time enough to explore that. He has to find answers immediately so that we can move on.

It also means that this crime is closer to him than perhaps it should be. We don’t meet that many characters but they’re all involved, even if they don’t know it yet. A primary cast of six is enough to cover it, even with three of those being him, his servant and the Commissioner.

The others are Robert Vandenburg, a friend and antiques dealer; Evelyn Lang, his vibrant fiancée; and Professor Malaki, a “mantologist, psychometrist, seer”. Credited lower but close to their importance is Robert’s family doctor, Dr. Kevin Burdett. That’s all we need, it seems.

Really, we need much more but I adored the film anyway. Sure, Judi Meredith has nothing to do as Evelyn and Peter Richman is overdone as frequently as he isn’t, but Nielsen is a solid balance, countering dark material with a light flippancy and Vandenberg’s distraction with a strong focus. I wanted more of this character.

And, however short this is, it always seems immersive, to the degree that what seems like every shot is a worthy screenshot. I liked the twists of the script by Barré Lyndon, who also wrote The Lodger and Hangover Square, but still more the set decoration and cinematography, the latter by John F. Warren, a decade after his Oscar nomination for The Country Girl.

And it all promised so much! However, like so many pioneers, we weren’t ready for it.

It isn’t perhaps what we expect from Leslie Nielsen, but he had many screen careers and most predate Airplane! He was Canadian, born in Saskatchewan to a Danish father and Welsh mother; his elder brother Erik was a politician who became Deputy Prime Minister. However, it was a half-uncle, Jean Hersholt, best known for Greed, who prompted his decision to act.

After training as an aerial gunner at the end of the Second World War and a brief stint as a DJ in Calgary, he obtained a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. In 1950 he debuted on TV, appearing in countless live plays; in 1952 he added Broadway with Seagulls over Sorrento; and, in 1956, he reached the big screen, in the musical The Vagabond King, even though it was his third movie to be released.

His best known early film was his second, an important sci-fi feature, Forbidden Planet, but a string of others followed, including Tammy and the Bachelor, opposite Debbie Reynolds. He was far from happy with his roles, though, so went largely back to television, appearing on no end of shows of every genre, and commercials.

There were some good and prominent roles in his dramatic career, the most obvious being the captain in The Poseidon Adventure, but half his films before Airplane! were TV movies. That was a pivot, as he was suddenly “the Olivier of spoofs”, to quote Roger Ebert.

Even with Prom Night and Creepshow, he was in a different light; Police Squad and The Naked Gun were inevitable. Mining that vein led from Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Spy Hard down to the likes of Superhero Movie and Stan Helsing, but he owned the entire genre.

After an incredibly busy career on stage and screen, he died in 2010 at eighty-four.