Child Bride (1938)

Director: Harry J Revier
Stars: Shirley Mills and Bob Bollinger

While many films reviewed in my upcoming book, Huh? An A-Z of Why Classic Bad American Films Were Made, were riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000, three have particular strong ties to that show. The folk who wrote it saw Monster a-Go Go as the worst picture ever made until they discovered Manos: The Hands of Fate, which promptly took over the title until the 20th anniversary celebration of the show at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con. With almost every major contributor to the show sharing a panel, they were asked if they'd ever passed on anything even worse. Their answer was 1938's Child Bride, which they described as 'Appalachian kiddie porn from the '30s'. They chose not to screen it, even though it wouldn't have been difficult to use a cut version that doesn't include the controversial skinny dipping scene. The film is in the public domain and almost every version available omits that scene, for obvious reasons. Only Alpha Video have it available uncut and while the MST3K description is a little unfair, it's definitely a disturbing film.

It's also a rather unique one in many ways because it doesn't fit well with the only obvious category of films that springs to mind. Back in the thirties, the studio system had control of both production and distribution and, as of 1934, their films were subject to the Production Code, which substantially restricted the content of the pictures they made. To include salacious subject matter in your movie, you had to make it independently and book it into theatres not owned by the studios. Many people enjoyed this creative freedom and made outrageous pictures, often drumming up custom as if they were carnival barkers and then skipping town after the show. While these folk weren't subject to the restrictions of the Production Code, they still had to stay on the right side of local censorship laws, which varied from town to town, so they tended to phrase their stories in educational terms, often with a speaker warning about the dangers of the topic at hand and selling pamphlets decrying it.

And so there were indie pictures about every social ill known to 1930s America: drug use, teenage pregnancy, abortion, prostitution... you name it. In every instance, these films spun melodramatic stories around these topics, occasionally illustrated with nudity, which ended up highlighting in no uncertain terms how dangerous it was not to be an upstanding moral citizen. Thus the films got by whatever local censorship was in place and audiences saw things that they couldn't possibly see in pictures from the major Hollywood studios. One notorious example is 1945's Mom and Dad, which was shot in six days for $63,000 but grossed over $80m, ranking it the third highest grossing film of the 1940s and still one of the most successful films ever made, based on return of investment, up there with The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. Inept in most regards, it had one magic ingredient to draw in the crowds: it included real footage of a baby being born. That's all it took.

Child Bride may appear to fit in that sort of company, especially as it was made by a fly by night producer whose cheques bounced and promises remained unfulfilled, but the more you analyse it the more it's an uneasy fit. Sure, it's a crusading picture, but its particular cause stands up today as valid, perhaps as it didn't need to rely on misinformation. Sure, it has an outrageous story, but it's a believable one for a change, because it plucked an outrageous story from the headlines and didn't need to embellish it. Most anomalous, though, is the fact that its lead actor remained proud of the film and her part in it until the day she died. Reactions like that are so rare with this sort of film that I can't cite another instance. Real actors, not that many real actors were involved in such films, tend to look back with raised eyebrows at such low points in their careers, or just avoid looking back at all. If they had careers, they tended to predate these pictures rather than follow them.

Yet Shirley Mills, who was only twelve at the time she shot Child Bride, remained proud of the film and work in it until her death in 2010. She had every opportunity to avoid remembering this, her feature film debut, but she played up to it and what she felt it had achieved. She was already established on stage, singing and dancing in vaudeville venues as 'Seattle's Shirley Temple' since she was a toddler. She also built a minor career, especially in the forties, as a supporting actress in Hollywood, including a slot as the young daughter of the Joads in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath. Before she retired from the screen at 26, she had made 27 films for directors as well regarded as Michael Curtiz, George Cukor and Alfred Hitchcock. Yet she highlighted Child Bride, saying that, 'I was proud to appear in that film,' and explaining on her website that it took a filmmaker working outside of the system to make a picture that educated the public on a very real issue.

That issue was child marriage, of course, but it hadn't sprung out of nowhere. It was inspired by a real wedding that took place on a dirt road in Hancock County, TN on 19th January, 1937 when Rev Walter Lamb, a Baptist preacher, married Charlie Johns and Eunice Winstead. They had a license, albeit one obtained with false information; Tennessee law prohibited issuing them to girls under twelve, so Johns claimed Winstead was eighteen. Nobody checked. In reality she was nine to his twenty-two. Lamb dismissed criticism on the basis that they'd have got another preacher to marry them if he'd said no. There was no undue influence as they really wanted to wed. It was a shock to Winstead's parents but they gave their approval on the basis that they'd been married under God and they didn't want to risk hellfire for their daughter. Winstead found the concern unfathomable. They remained married until Charlie died at 82 and she gave him nine children.

But the country took notice. After word got out, the story was covered by major newspapers, such as The New York Times, and major magazines, such as Life, who visited the couple in their cabin and published photos which brought home to the American public just how young Eunice Winstead was. Married for less than a month, they had sparked a national debate. It soon became apparent that child brides were far from uncommon, ten states allowing boys to marry at fourteen and girls at twelve, so with opposition building nationwide and states hastily updating their laws, it was all ripe for adaptation to the screen by an enterprising producer. So Frederick Falcon of Falcon Pictures rolled into rural Columbia, CA in 1938 to lease the recreation park for a year so he could shoot Child Bride on location with a few stars and a host of local talent and follow up with a new picture every six weeks. However, Falcon was really Raymond L Friedgen and Falcon Pictures didn't exist.

Naturally the locals, naive to the ways of huckster filmmakers, leapt on board, extending credit all around town and eagerly helping out in any way that they could, building sets and playing extras. Of course all they got out of it was an experience, because 'Frederick Falcon' rolled on out of town again at the end of the two week shoot, never to return, and paid all his bills with rubber cheques. It was an eye opener for Columbia, whose residents unwittingly paid in time, money and effort to be volunteers on a movie being shot in their town. Most of them probably never even saw the finished product, which gradually found its way onto the exploitation circuit under the inevitable collection of alternative titles like Child Brides of the Ozarks or Dust to Dust. At least, in this instance, the film was shot professionally enough and it did get finished. Many rural towns, especially in California, probably have similar stories to tell about films that never even got finished.

I wonder what those townsfolk who did get to see Child Bride thought about it, because it's a heavy handed morality tale, one that somehow stamps its approval on a range of inappropriate behaviour while consistently opposing the institution of child marriage. For instance, it's apparently fine to be an alcoholic wifebeating bootlegger or to kill someone in cold blood in front of already traumatised children, as long as you're against child marriage. Emotional blackmail is fine, thrusting cleavage is fine and giving up your kids to save your own neck is perfectly fine, just no child marriage. This sort of thing starts at the very beginning, as the Coltons, good guys because they read Child Marriage: A Crime, happily dress their twelve year old in a skimpy outfit conveniently ripped up the front to highlight that she doesn't wear underwear. Within the first two minutes, young Jennie sprawls in the pigpen mud and indulges in a water fight with her friend, Freddie Nulty. No exploitation here, right?

The story is instigated by Jennie's teacher, the only one in this fictional community of Thunderhead Mountain, so her class is attended by children of all ages. Miss Carol is a local girl made good, who claims to be a mountain girl even though she wears posh frills and make up and won't leave to be with her boyfriend, the assistant DA, until she's obliterated child marriage in the area. She stirs up enough resentment in the local men for them to robe up and kidnap her by torchlight to be tarred and feathered at somewhere called Spooky Hollow, but she's rescued by Ira Colton before we can see any more of her than her naked back. Colton is an equal opportunity bootlegger, his staff consisting of Angelo the dwarf, Happy the retard and Jake Bolby, the villain of the piece, who of course is one of the riled up torch carriers. Colton has already beaten him up for robbing Angelo, so he mounts a dastardly plan for murderous revenge that, not accidentally, ends up with him landing Jennie as a wife. He's seen her swim naked in the creek, you see, and he's completely smitten.

Now if seeing twelve year olds skinny dipping in the creek is enough to turn a hot blooded man into a murderous paedophile, then we're all in trouble because that's what we get for what feels like a two hour scene. Really it's a few minutes but they're long minutes indeed. The reasoning for it is so that Jennie can explain to Freddie that he can't go skinny dipping with her any more because Miss Carol says it's not OK. So he's stuck on the bank, wondering why he can only kiss her when they're both fully clothed, while she swims around naked. Clearly it's there to get child nudity past local censors, which is possibly the most exploitative thing any exploitation filmmaker can do. Shirley Mills, twelve at the time, really did strip down to the buff and doggy paddle around in the shallows on camera, but she couldn't swim, so the longer shots are of thirteen year old body double Bernice Stobaugh Ray, who looked different enough from Mills that her pubic hair had to be shaved for the scene.

By the time we get to the just as exploitative finalé, we're not sure who we're supposed to root for. Never mind character ambiguity, the good guys are clearly bad guys. Ira Colton, hero of the day on two separate occasions, bootlegs liquor for a living, drinks like a fish and beats his wife. Even Miss Carol, the saintly schoolma'am, conducts her crusade through emotional blackmail and gives up on it the moment she's confronted with a clear example. She wins out in the end, when her boyfriend persuades the governor to sign a law banning child marriage, but can't be bothered to save the girl from being ravaged in the matrimonial bed after being hitched under threat of blackmail. The hero who saves the day in her stead does so in a way that nobody should ever condone. None of this is ever addressed by the plot, so unlike the rest of the dubious educational exploitation pictures of the time, I can't see how they imagined this would get past local censors. In many instances it didn't.

At heart, Child Bride was made for the most classic of all reasons: to make money. Friedgen was a crook who offset his costs by getting the town of Columbia to foot most of the bill. I have no idea if he followed that model on his further films, but it wouldn't surprise me. Director Harry Revier was at the end of his career and probably thankful for a last shot; he never directed again. They cut costs by having their respective ladies play prominent parts: Dorothy Carrol, who plays Jennie's mother, may or may not have been Revier's wife, and Diana Durrell, who plays Miss Carol, may or may not have been Friedgen's fiancée. It's within the bounds of possibility that they were merely mistresses. Only 2'11" Angelo Rossitto is recognisable today, credited as Don Barrett but playing a character with his own name, Angelo the dwarf. His career spanned seven decades, memorable in films like Freaks and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome and TV shows like HR Pufnstuf and Baretta.

What makes Child Bride unique amongst its peers is that, to hindsight, it seems to have achieved something. It didn't directly, as by the time it was ready for release in late 1938, the problem had already been taken care of, at least to the satisfaction of the offended public. States had brought in new laws to enforce minimum ages for marriage. While young girls continued to be married, as in some states wives didn't have to go to school, none would be quite so young as Winstead was and occasionally their husbands would be whisked off to jail. Yet the film, unlike every single one of its peers, finds itself to hindsight firmly on the side of justice. Until her death Shirley Mills continued to proclaim how proud she was to be part of a film that helped change the social fabric of her country, thus elevating it in the eyes of posterity. Really it was made for money, a con on a lesser level than The Creeping Terror. Over time it morphed into what it pretended to be, a crusader for justice.

Monster a-Go Go (1965)

Director: Bill Rebane
Stars: Phil Morton, June Travis and George Perry

Until they discovered Manos: The Hands of Fate, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 folk regarded Monster a-Go Go as the worst movie that they had ever riffed. It's certainly a bad film, with bad acting, bad dialogue and bad music, along with bad sound and bad lighting that makes it tough to keep up with what's actually going on, even with a clear narration laid over the top. What makes it so notably bad is that it's also boring, which is the death knell to a picture like this. While 'bad' can be forgiven or even enjoyed, 'boring' is a much harder obstacle to overcome. The only interesting thing about it is its history, because the man responsible for releasing it, Herschell Gordon Lewis, didn't care about it in the slightest. He merely needed a movie, any movie, to back one of his own at drive in theatres, because theatre owners couldn't withhold payment on the grounds that it was the other picture that made money when you owned both halves of the double bill.

The film he had was 1964's Moonshine Mountain, which cemented Lewis's stature as a pioneer of the hicksploitation genre by following on the heels of Two Thousand Maniacs! but with a focus on country music and comedy rather than gore. What he found to back it up was Terror at Half Day, a science fiction thriller in the Roger Corman vein, which had been in production between 1961 and 1963 but which was left languishing on the shelf of a film processing lab because the budget had evaporated. Lewis knew about Terror at Half Day as he'd been brought in as a cinematographer late on; maybe Bill Rebane, who was directing his first feature, hired him for his experience, the fact that he was cheap and because he'd worked for Lewis in 1959, doing part time sales in his commercial studio. When the lab told Lewis that the footage was available, he knew precisely what he could do with it, so he bought it, reedited it completely, added a narration and gave it a new title, Monster a-Go Go.

He was so proud of the results that he didn't even put his name on them. He's uncredited both as a director and the film's narrator, not to mention for the cinematography that he did even before he bought the footage. For everything else he did, he used pseudonyms: for his dialogue he's Sheldon Seymour, as a producer he added an S as a middle initial and for production design he's Seymour Sheldon. If the awful new title wasn't enough, his disdain for Terror at Half Day is made clear by the fact that he turned the serious, if probably still inept, thriller into a parody of itself, with what may well be the worst ending ever committed to celluloid, only Chained for Life even coming close on that front. Surprisingly, he also ditched a large amount of footage, thus minimising the presence of Henry Hite, the 7'6" vaudevillian who portrays the titular monster. I can understand much of what Lewis did and why, but I can't understand why he'd throw away what are probably the best bits.

While necessity drove Lewis's purchase of the Terror at Half Day footage, to a lesser degree it also drove the making of the original picture. Rebane had done very well for himself as a young man but had fallen on hard times and aimed this feature film to restore some of his success. He'd arrived in the US from Germany in 1952 as Ito von Rebane, a 14 year old Latvian kid fluent in four languages but not English; he learned by watching four movies a day for six months. After working his way up the ranks at WGN-TV in Chicago, he went back to Germany, where he did the same thing at Baltes Film, eventually directing shorts and presumably impressing Adalbert Baltes in the process. Baltes wasn't just a documentarian, producer and founder of the company, he had also designed a 360° projection system called Cinetarium that screened movies in a similar way to a planetarium. With exclusive US distribution rights to this system in his pocket, Rebane was a millionaire at 22.

Unfortunately, it didn't last. The companies he'd formed couldn't take the strain of patent disputes, legal fees and ongoing development. Picking himself up by his bootstraps, he returned to making films, starting out with a couple of successful AIP distributed musical shorts, Twist Craze and Dance Craze, hardly what you might expect given the sci-fi/horror films that he would become known for, but understandable when you realise that his idol was Donald O'Connor and his English immersion was through classic musicals and westerns. The connections he'd built during his Cinetarium days, the success of his shorts and a clear confidence in his own abilities led him to shoot Terror at Half Day, named for a small Illinois town north of Chicago. He failed as, in his words, 'going union killed the movie', but in hindsight, it was also a first step towards building a legitimate film industry in the midwest, something he's pushed consistently and successfully ever since. That's his real legacy.

What going union meant to this film was that the entire budget, all $50,000 of it, was used up by the end of the first week and by that point Rebane hadn't even shot a single scene with Henry Hite, the terror in Terror at Half Day. Interviews highlight that the union crew was very professional, and certainly the best footage is from that week's shoot, but also that they had no problem spending all the money without any concern as to whether the movie would get finished. Rebane's inexperience meant that he was out of budget and in a major hole with perhaps a quarter of the film shot. When he raised a little more financing, he'd learned his lesson so hired Lewis to finish the picture without a union bleeding him dry. These scenes are all notably inferior, especially with regards to lighting, but eventually the money ran out for good, leaving the movie unfinished until Lewis bought the footage and reworked it into his own picture for his own purposes.

What we see today in Monster a-Go Go is almost entirely footage from Terror at Half Day but it's clearly not the same film in any other way. The commonality ties to the core idea of an astronaut being launched into space but coming back fundamentally altered. Rebane's version is serious, the physical and mental change in astronaut Frank Douglas caused by radioactivity outside the Earth's atmosphere, meaning that the six foot tall man who went up returned as a ten foot tall radioactive monster, killing those he meets through proximity alone. The time was absolutely right. Rebane sought funding in 1960 and began production in the winter of 1961; in between those dates, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to reach orbit in April 1961, with Alan Shepard coming close a month later and John Glenn orbiting the Earth three times in February 1962. Studios naturally saw great subject matter, with films like 1959's First Man into Space even beating reality to the punch.

Rebane also had connections within Chicago, including Mayor Daley, who was interested in seeing film production return to the city for the first time since Essenay shot Chaplin one reelers there in 1915. Edison's strongarm tactics in patent enforcement had pushed the studios as far west as they could go, Hollywood emerging as somewhere they could make a stand and literally throw Edison's thugs out on their ear. We're used to seeing Chicago on film today, many of its landmarks obvious in movies like The Blues Brothers, Risky Business or The Untouchables, but it wasn't until 1959 and another Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, The Prime Time, that anyone returned to shoot there. That's why Daley and the City of Chicago happily closed down the busy intersection of Michigan Ave and Oak St for two hours around rush hour for a tense scene right under Wacker Dr that has the military catch the monster. This is groundbreaking stuff, but very little of it made it into Monster a-Go Go.

Nothing that Rebane aimed to follow that scene made it into the released version either. He wanted a different sort of ending to the usual. After the monster is caught, he wouldn't be destroyed in the way we've come to expect. Instead, he's taken alive and eventually cured through injections of an antidote serum. 'I wanted a happy ending,' said Rebane. 'I'm a happy ending guy.' Needless to say, that's not what he got. It's not known why Lewis changed everything in the way he did, but perhaps he saw the existing footage as a joke. There are certainly obvious flaws that put it on shaky ground immediately. Douglas's seven foot capsule clearly couldn't contain a ten foot monster. We're used to seeing such capsules land in the ocean to minimise impact but this one apparently touches down gently in an Illinois field without even generating a crater. Having the monster walk away from this crash is a precursor to the beginning of Crank: High Voltage and it's just as outrageous here.

Whatever the reasons Lewis had for changing the tone of the picture, he did it with a vengeance and he shattered any continuity the original film had in the process. He didn't actually add much new footage, just a few linking shots to support the rewritten story and an attack scene with the monster, as Henry Hite was still available. Continuity ought to have been easy to preserve, as he worked with the original cameraman, Bill Johnson, too but it apparently wasn't deemed important, as Lewis's new ending underlines. I should emphasise that not everything Lewis did was detrimental. Most viewers remember the shot of the spaceman striding across the cosmos over the opening credits, and that was a Lewis contribution. The catchy theme tune by The Other Three that accompanies it was his too. Mostly though, he mangled, and most of his mangling was through ditching existing footage rather than adding new, although the new attack scene is bizarrely incompetent.

To be fair, I should also add that the bad continuity began in Terror at Half Day. Rebane only had his lead actor, Peter Thompson, for that first week that ate up his budget. So, once he raised more money, he simply replaced Thompson's character, Dr Manning, with Dr Brent, with no explanation beyond a line of dialogue to suggest he handed over the reins. Presumably this is also why George Perry's character, Dr Logan, is killed off early in the film, but the actor promptly returns to play his brother. Perry was a beautician who dearly wanted to be an actor; he ponied up financing in return for a major part and ended up with two. At least shooting sequentially, something else Rebane did through inexperience, helped these transitions. It may be inept storytelling but it doesn't break the story. Lewis's most unforgivable contribution to the film does, in such a blatant and unapologetic way that it perhaps singlehandedly caused the elevation of the picture to cult status.

After the Wacker Dr scene, the biggest looking scene in the picture which Lewis cut significantly, the authorities chase the monster into the sewers. We're shown Henry Hite walking underground and, in a more traditional ending to the one Rebane wanted, Lewis planned to have him encased in concrete by pouring it into the tunnels from above. What he actually did beggars belief and I should quote verbatim: 'As if a switch had been turned, as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called Douglas to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness!' Yeah, the ending is that the monster never existed. Everything thus far has revolved around a non-existent monster that held the entire city of Chicago in a panic for absolutely no reason.

But wait, there's more, as they say. Dr Logan passes Col Steve Connors a telegram and Lewis dives even further into the abyss of idiocy. 'With the telegram, one cloud lifts, and another descends,' he tells us. 'Astronaut Frank Douglas, rescued, alive, well and of normal size, some eight thousand miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule! Then who, or what, has landed here? Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled? Case in point: the line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin! You have witnessed the line being shaved even thinner! But is the menace with us? Or is the monster gone?' It's hard to imagine a more incoherent or belittling end. At least Robot Monster was honest! This is just Lewis raising his middle finger to drive in audiences, highlighting that he has their money and there's nothing they can do about it. It gave him his double bill and his percentage. Screw the rest.

Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961)

Director: Roger Corman
Stars: Antony Carbone, Betsy Jones-Moreland and Edward Wain

Sometimes it seems like legendary exploitation film director Roger Corman wrote the book on how to save money while making a film. He didn't invent every idea he used, but he put them to better use than anyone else. His autobiography is titled How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime and, while that isn't strictly true, his unparalleled win/loss record is due partly to his ability to make big films with little money, meaning that he could compete with much more expensive pictures with a fraction of their overhead. Trained as an engineer, he thought logically and occasionally went a step too far, like when he optimised lighting setups on Oklahoma Woman by splitting up shots based on which direction the characters were facing and shooting everything facing one way before setting up afresh and shooting everything facing the other. It made logical sense and sped up production but the actors got confused and he discarded the idea in the future.

Other ideas were as logically sound but much more successful. After Allison Hayes broke her arm while shooting Gunslinger, he shot close ups of her looking in every direction while waiting for the car to take her to hospital. He shot other scenes with a body double later to edit in. Even on Five Guns West, the first film he directed himself, he avoided costly and complex scenes in an elegant way, by having a soldier look through binoculars at a band of stock footage Indians on horseback, then explaining that, 'The Indians are over here. Let's head over there.' He shot Atlas against the plentiful Greek ruins for background colour and had a character explain that two centuries of civil war had destroyed everything. For the same film, he donated to the Greek Army Charity Fund to gain five hundred soldiers to overwhelm Thenis in panoramic style. Only fifty arrived so he filmed close ups instead and changed dialogue to reflect a small trained force defeating a large rabble.

Most successfully, he found ways to use or reuse what was already around him to do something cheaply or for free. The burning cane fields in Thunder Over Hawaii were a regular stalk burnoff that he scheduled around, costing him nothing. When he had to burn down the mansion in House of Usher, he found developers about to demolish a nearby barn and paid them fifty bucks to burn it instead while his cameras rolled. When The Raven wrapped a full two days ahead of schedule, he made the best use of his cast, his crew and his magnificent gothic sets that he could: he had them shoot another movie, The Terror. He didn't even have a complete script so he couldn't film the whole thing, but he shot what he could and had assistant directors complete it later. Perhaps his most famous film, The Little Shop of Horrors, was shot on a standing set that another film had left empty, in two days and one night, with three more for rehearsals.

In low budget pictures at the time, the most expensive thing around often wasn't the star or the set, it was the location. A film could elevate itself above its competition simply by sporting exotic locations, but of course it cost money to get to them. So when he was hired in 1956 to direct She Gods of Shark Reef, a South Pacific picture, by a lawyer who wanted to produce, it made a lot of sense for American International to hire him to direct another movie, Thunder Over Hawaii, back to back with it, halving many costs for both companies and gaining AIP an exotic location in the process. Corman took that to heart. When he went to the Black Hills of South Dakota to shoot Ski Troop Attack, his brother Gene came along for the ride to produce Beast from Haunted Cave at the same time and share the costs. His most productive back to back shoot, though, was in 1959 when he travelled to Puerto Rico and shot not two but three pictures back to back.

Originally Corman was slated to produce a war picture called Battle of Blood Island, driven by tax incentives to 'manufacture' in Puerto Rico, but he scheduled in a second, Last Woman on Earth, to maximise the use of San Juan, the Caribe Hilton hotel and the beach house he'd rented. The writer on the latter was Robert Towne, just starting out in 1959 but soon to become Hollywood's most reliable script doctor and later one of its most respected writers, landing a much deserved Oscar for 1974's Chinatown in a very tough year. Then and now, Towne's biggest problem has always been the slow speed at which he writes, not a huge deal when you're an Oscar winner working for a major studio but a showstopper when you're working on a Corman picture. He hadn't finished before the cast and crew shipped out; Corman's solution was to bring him along too, paying his way by not only finishing the script but also playing the third character in a cast of three.

Battle of Blood Island and Last Woman on Earth were both two week shoots that went smoothly. In fact they went so smoothly and morale was so high that a week into the latter, Corman phoned home and asked Charles Griffith to write a third picture, a comedy horror in the vein of the pair of highly successful quickies they'd shot in 1958, A Bucket of Blood and The Little Shop of Horrors. Griffith was experienced writing for Corman and he was as fast as Towne was slow, so faced with writing an entire feature in a single week for a cast that was already on site, he recycled his script for Thunder Over Hawaii to become Creature from the Haunted Sea. It had the same leads as Last Woman on Earth, Antony Carbone and Betsy Jones-Moreland, with Towne thrown in to boot. Not meeting Corman's deadline for Last Woman on Earth therefore got him stuck with two acting roles, both of which he completed under the pseudonym of Edward Wain.

The other reason a third picture was viable was because Corman's assistant, Kinta Zabel, flew in with money left over from another movie Corman was financing back home. The Wild Ride came about when Harvey Berman, who taught high school drama and ran a film class, suggested that he could shoot a juvenile delinquent film with his students for a tiny budget. Corman agreed but looked over the first day's footage and found it amateurish, so he sent his art director and a pair of his stock actors, including Jack Nicholson. He gave Zabel a $30k cheque to cover all costs and asked him to bring whatever remained to San Juan. Enough was left for five days of production. Griffith's script arrived on the last Thursday of the Last Woman on Earth shoot; Corman rewrote parts of it that night. They photocopied it on the Friday and gave it to the cast, Zabel locked in locations on the Saturday, they planned shots on Sunday and began shooting on the Monday.

What resulted was a bad movie but a fun one. It doesn't have the unlikely substance of A Bucket of Blood or The Little Shop of Horrors, but it unfolds well for the most part and doesn't get boring. The story revolves around a strongbox full of gold stolen from the Cuban treasury as Castro took over. Surviving Batista officials spirited it away but, needing a way to get it out of Cuba, unwisely decided to trust an American gangster called Renzo Capetto. They'll give him a quarter of it and use the rest for their counter-revolution, but you won't be surprised to find that Capetto promptly conjures up a plan to keep all of it. He and his henchmen will slowly bump off the Cubans at sea, while blaming their disappearances on a sea monster. They use a plunger to leave sucker tracks and a rake to leave claw marks. The catch is that there really is a sea monster and it kills Cubans as fast as they can in exactly the same way, leading to some fun confusion.

I'm sure you can imagine the sort of sea monster built with this sort of notice. Stuck designing it was Beach Dickerson, who like everyone in Corman's company ended up doing whatever needed to be done at the time. Primarily an actor, throughout a four decade career he also produced and directed, but he'd laugh to find that IMDb lists his most famous work as 'Costume Department, Creature from the Haunted Sea'. There to handle sound for Last Woman on Earth, he handled that role for this film too, played one of Capetto's henchmen and was tasked to build the monster, even though his experience with monsters was scuttling around in a crab suit in Attack of the Crab Monsters. He turned five helmets from Battle of Blood Island into one large head with tennis balls for eyes and table tennis balls for pupils. He stuck moss and brillo pads onto a wetsuit with black oilcloth to look slimy and pipecleaners for claws. It's utterly ridiculous but in a fun way.

After all, there's no way anyone could take this movie seriously; the introductions we're given to Capetto's gang hammer that home. He's 'the most trusted man ever to be deported from Sicily', whose pseudonyms range from Zeppo Staccato to Shirley L'Amour. He was 'rejected by the Navy, Marines and SS'. Anthony Carbone riffs on Humphrey Bogart and he's fun to watch. Betsy Jones-Moreland treats his moll, Mary-Belle Monahan, to an outrageous southern drawl. She wiped out a police chief convention at the Hollywood Bowl with a tommy gun and dealt heroin at Boys Town. Her brother, Happy Jack, developed a muscle spasm from watching too many Bogie movies. This part was written for Corman but in such a way that he couldn't play it. He cast Bobby Bean, who had been in The Wild Ride and flew to San Juan just in case there was something for him to do. As Pete Peterson Jr, Dickerson is like the fourth Stooge, a half retarded animal imitator.

Handling the introductions is Robert Towne, who showed in Last Woman on Earth that for a writer he wasn't a bad actor, but you wouldn't believe it from this evidence. He wildly overplays his role as Sparks Moran, an inept American spy known as XK150. His part was bulked up in 1963 when Corman had Monte Hellman shoot additional scenes in Santa Monica to pad the film out to a TV friendly 74 minutes. The opening scenes with Hellman's wife as fellow spy XK120 are surreal and hilarious, even though he's reminiscent of Nicolas Cage trying to look surreptitious. He kisses her goodbye suavely then trips over the staircase; the acting is terrible but the timing is awesome and they play it all delightfully straight. Griffith's script is flawed in the extreme but it has a lot of wit. Later in the film, Moran woos Mary-Belle outrageously, with no success. Jones-Moreland has great fun rejecting both him and the Cuban general, Tostada, with delightfully snarky rejoinders.

Looking back in an interview with Tom Weaver, she suggested that the movie 'started out to be a takeoff on everything Roger had ever done before. It was to be a comedy, a laugh a minute. Then all of a sudden, somewhere in the middle of it, that got lost and it got to be serious!' The second act is certainly lacking, but the third hints at slapstick as characters fall for other characters in a daisy chain of unwanted advances. Happy Jack wants Carmelita, discovered at a sorority house; Carmelita wants Sparks; Sparks wants Mary-Belle and Mary-Belle wants and has Renzo Capetto. Of course, the monster wants everybody. The poster asks us to 'not give away the answer to the secret' but it's that the monster wins, in Corman's favourite of all his endings, which he dictated over the phone to Griffith. With most of the cast dead, it survives, sitting on the strongbox at the bottom of the sea in a brief shot that has led to this film being called Corman's most personal.

In his autobiography, Corman states that 'the craziness of the shoot showed in the finished film,' and I'd heartily agree. The serious pulp story Griffith wrote for Thunder Over Hawaii and rewrote for Beast from Haunted Cave doesn't stand up in the slightest as a parody of those films, but the energy is palpable. The leads were making their second of two films back to back, while some of the crew were making their third in five weeks, but nobody shows signs of flagging. The movie is held together with little more than goofy energy but that's precisely what they aimed for, spicing up many shots with delicious narration and dialogue heavy ones by adding movement. One has characters throwing a coconut around a palm grove while they talk like it's an American football. Tommy Wiseau must have been paying attention, though clearly not to Corman's money saving ideas. 'Nobody was making movies like these,' said Corman, but that's because only he could.

Cuban Rebel Girls (1959)

Director: Barry Mahon
Stars: Beverly Aadland, John MacKay, Jackie Jackler and Marie Edmund

The last line of Errol Flynn's infamous memoirs, My Wicked, Wicked Ways, reads, 'The second half-century looms up, but I don't feel the night coming on.' He dictated that in late 1958, at the age of 49, while living in Jamaica with his girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, as she turned sixteen, but the night came on quicker than he thought, as he died of a heart attack in Vancouver only a year later. It's unlikely that it was a surprise to anyone else, as a lifetime of hard living and harder drinking had turned him from the swashbuckling icon of Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk into a bloated parody. He hadn't been healthy for years, rejected for service in 1942 as 4-F for an enlarged heart, chronic back pain, malaria, tuberculosis and a set of venereal diseases. His liver began to fail in 1952, as he contracted hepatitis. Heavy smoking had caused Buerger's disease, thrombosis of veins and arteries. His second half-century lasted less than four months.

It's not unusual for Hollywood stars to deteriorate, slowly or quickly, and die before their time, but usually they fade away. In Flynn's case, what makes it unusual is he did the opposite. 1959 might even count as his most fascinating year, even had he not died towards the end of it. He survived a bout of food poisoning earlier in the year, after eating a mixture of uncooked hamburger meat and raw egg yolks. He was plagued by the IRS, who eroded his finances so far that he was heading for bankruptcy, though his lifestyle continued as if he was still one of Hollywood's highest paid actors. His third wife, Pat Wymore, was finally divorcing him, which made his teenage girlfriend happy, as she was eager to become his fourth. Even his career was notable again, his three 1957 and 1958 films, The Sun Also Rises, Too Much, Too Soon and The Roots of Heaven, praised for some of the best acting in his career. Yet his final two, shot in 1959, were perhaps his worst.

Conversely, they're also two of his most interesting, as he found himself in the right place at the right time to meet a variety of personal needs. The place was Cuba, which he knew well, having long enjoyed the hedonistic lifestyle made possible by Fulgencia Batista's openness for wealthy tourists. The time was just before Batista, Cuba's president and dictator, was overthrown by the guerrilla revolution led by Fidel Castro and his 26th of July Movement. Revolutions had long been a magnet to the idealistic Flynn, who once wrote, 'Ever since boyhood I have been drawn, perhaps romantically, to the ideas of causes, crusades.' He joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and condemned Gen Franco in Madrid, as he aimed 'to follow in Hemingway's footsteps' as a wartime correspondent. With a new Cuban cause, he took to the hills to report it for the New York Journal-American, a Hearst publication. He wrote at least two features.

Clearly just as important to Flynn as this serious reportage was the need to repair his finances, so he took the opportunity not only to write about the revolution but to film it too, making two rather different pictures that went on to have rather different histories. The one that nobody knew about for the longest time was Cuban Story or The Truth About Fidel Castro Revolution, as it saw a world premiére in Moscow before disappearing for four decades, finally being rediscovered and screened in New York in 2001. A supposed documentary, it's closer to propaganda, clearly taking the side of the rebels, with whom Flynn and film producer Victor Pahlen, felt kinship. Pahlen, a Russian born American, met and befriended Flynn in Havana in 1956. They both knew and loved Cuba under its dictator, but were well aware of problems that Castro claimed he would solve, after seizing power, like restoring elections and press freedom.

As propaganda, Cuban Story is a mess, a paeon to an ideology that didn't exist, awkwardly pro-Castro but not pro-Communist. The rebels fighting Batista were comprised of different factions with different agendas, including anti-communists; even after taking control, Castro came to the States to deny he was communist. In 1965 he became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, but Flynn saw that writing on the wall in 1959. 'It is one thing to start a revolution, another to win it and still another to make it stick,' he said, 'and as far as this writer is concerned it ain’t sticking,' adding that 'the police state in Cuba is not very different from that of its predecessors.' What Cuban Story really has is amazing footage, chronicling the changes in Cuba from the very beginnings of the revolution to after its success. When it finally resurfaced, even the head of the Cuban National Archive told Pahlen's daughter that he had never seen it before.

As it wasn't all shot in 1959, clearly Pahlen was responsible for the footage, or at least most of it, with Flynn peripheral in the grand scheme of things. Maybe he helped get Pahlen and his camera into some of these places, but he doesn't appear on screen much at all. He's there at the outset, apparently ad libbing an introduction whilst under the influence, locating Cuba on a globe that he literally tosses throws away to bounce audibly off screen. He's there early on playing cards with Aadland at the Casino de Capri in Havana, partly owned by George Raft. For a shot of Flynn with Castro though, we have to settle for a photograph. While Flynn clearly gives the introduction, it just as clearly isn't him providing the narration, though the film claims that it's 'reported by Errol Flynn' and it's told in the first person as if it was. It has been suggested that it's Pahlen himself, who has the writing credit, though the accent is British with a Scots tinge, rather than Russian.

The footage in Cuban Story is valuable to historians of Cuba: Batista in his palace, rebels dead in the streets after the failed attack on the Moncada Barracks, Castro preparing for exile in Mexico, demonstrations, rebels hiding in the hills, Che Guevara liberating Santa Clara, former president Carlos Prío, Castro's first speech in Havana with a dove alighting on his shoulder, destruction of Batista landmarks, trials of officials, even a firing squad. The other film Flynn shot at this point is also Cuban but valuable far more to historians of Errol Flynn himself. It's Cuban Rebel Girls, which purports to be a dramatised documentary of rebel life with his girlfriend, Beverly Aadland, as the star. She was a budding actress and underage showgirl in Las Vegas when he met and seduced her on the set of the Gene Kelly movie, Marjorie Morningstar, in 1958. She was fifteen at the time, though she looked much older. He may or may not have believed she was eighteen.

Why Flynn made Cuban Rebel Girls is open to debate, possibly because it was for many different reasons all at once. He knew and loved Cuba and was caught up in the revolution unfolding there. He wanted to meet and report on those behind it, perhaps seeing Castro as a hero of the people. Being out of the country also meant that he was out of reach of the IRS, at least temporarily. He'd already spent the advance for his autobiography, which he hadn't delivered yet, as well as much of what he'd borrowed from backers for a film he planned to make but perhaps didn't even exist outside his sales pitches. As some of these backers may well have been 'less than reputable', it's hardly a stretch to see him connect the dots and decide that shooting a cheap quickie in Cuba would be the best thing all around. It would deliver the film he'd promised, neatly serving as a tax write-off in the process, unfold in exciting fashion amidst a real revolution and make his girlfriend a star.

While that sounds like a winner on paper, Cuban Rebel Girls is a loser on almost every front. How much money he had left to finance it is open to question, but it obviously wasn't a lot, given who he put to work on it. The only major name was his own and he didn't have to pay himself, so he's prominent, writing the script and providing narration, for real this time. He's obvious early on as 'The American Correspondent', flying into Havana where he's shuffled from contact to contact to get him closer to the rebels, then vanishing from sight for long periods at a time, resurfacing in the hills where he visibly struggles in the terrain. To direct, he hired Barry Mahon, a fighter pilot and POW camp escapee whose experience in movies was restricted to co-producing a couple of Flynn's indie pictures in the early fifties. More importantly, he had been Flynn's personal pilot for years and had more recently become his manager. Success was clearly in his interest too.

And of course there's Beverly Aadland. Her mother Florence was a dancer who had lost her leg in a car accident, so lived vicariously through her daughter. Beverly was posing for adverts at six months, eventually becoming the Ivory Soap baby. Dance classes followed as soon as she could walk and she was doing bit parts in movies at three. Some reports suggest she was doing a good sight more than just acting, as she'd bloomed quickly to a 34-18-34 figure at the age of twelve and was allegedly willing to use it for a hundred bucks. Flynn's exploits with the ladies were not far removed from those of the characters he played, leading to the phrase, 'in like Flynn'. He also clearly liked the young stuff, though when he was brought to trial in 1943 by two underage girls for statutory rape, he was cleared of all charges. However, reading what she's written between the lines, it may well have been Aadland who seduced him rather than the other way around.

The catch is that however much experience Aadland had on stage and film, this one makes it very obvious that she wasn't a good actress. Amidst all the true and supposedly true material conjured up for Flynn's script, there's a hokey fictional subplot to provide her with a part and the film with a dynamic title. She's Beverly Woods, an American girl whose boyfriend is Cuban and fighting in the hills with Castro. Her friend is Jacqueline Dominguez, Cuban herself, and about to mount an arms run to the rebels, so she goes along for the ride. Flynn immediately plays them up. 'Some people can put idealism ahead of their own personal losses,' he tells us, as they fly to Miami with $50k in their handbags, drive to Key West and hire shifty looking Capt Alvarez to sail them to Cuba. Some of this is interesting. Boxes are gradually sneaked into the hold and regular fishing trips disguise the odd run across the Straits of Florida under the eyes of the coastguard. Mostly it's ham fisted.

The action is poorly staged and poorly written: one bunch of inept rebels literally walk outside to be arrested when the polizia arrive, except for Maria who climbs out of the window and escapes slowly over the rooftops. The direction is what you'd expect from a man new to the director's seat and whose career would lead him to the heights of International Smorgas-Broad, Fanny Hill Meets the Red Baron and Prostitutes Protective Society. Worst of all, the acting is poor to begin with and gets worse, especially from Aadland, who doesn't seem to realise what tone is appropriate in a rebel camp. Life is jolly, it seems: natives sing songs, the girls take baths in inlets and they all talk about military equipment. 'Sounds like fun,' says Beverly. 'Maybe I'll get to shoot somebody.' She pouts a lot, she blinks a lot and she always sticks her breasts out to pose while she talks. Most of her dialogue is about getting to see her Johnny. She clearly doesn't care about the revolution.

Her performance makes the poor drama even more tortuous. There are slight hints at suspense, strategy and action, but mostly there's only Beverly and Johnny mooning over each other. 'Now I'm a rebel girl, I think I'll think about war too,' she proclaims. She's like a transplant from a teen drama to a war movie, like The Steel Helmet with Hannah Montana. Of course, the only common ground between The Steel Helmet and Cuban Rebel Girls is that they both have three word titles and they both contain shooting. The continuity is terrible, making it easy to lose track of who and what and why. Everyone's a terrible shot too, making this somewhat like Imperial stormtroopers battling Imperial stormtroopers except that occasionally people die. Flynn reappears on occasion to say something chipper while looking like Walt Disney. Beverly gets radio duty on a radio that never talks back to her; she talks, frogs croak and birds tweet and it's otherwise silent and surreal.

One scene literally stops so Beverly can sew up a hole in Flynn's trousers because he scraped his knee on the way up to the camp. Bizarrely, it's the most believable scene in the film, the truest to reality in this supposed dramatisation of real revolution life. With Flynn in bad shape, he needed a lot of care and Aadland tirelessly gave him that, nursing him through recurring bouts of malaria. It was Aadland who found him unconscious in Vancouver, attempted mouth to mouth rescuscitation and called for medical assistance. Flynn had suggested to Stanley Kubrick, casting for Lolita, that he and Aadland play the roles on film that they were living at the time as a surprising but devoted couple. That didn't happen. Neither did her inheritance, as the will which Flynn wrote before going to meet Castro that left her a third of his estate in Jamaica was declared invalid. In the end, what she got was the leading role in her lover's last film. It was a quickie in every way.

The Conqueror (1956)

Director: Howard Hughes
Stars: Jack Beutel, Thomas Mitchell, Jane Russell and Walter Huston

Howard Hughes had a knack for making money so strong that it could almost be called a Midas touch, but occasionally even he lost it. The Conqueror was a rare financial flop for him, though it did tie Rebel without a Cause for the 11th place in box office rentals in 1956, earning $4.5m. The catch is that it cost $6m to make and, apparently feeling guilty over some of the decisions made during production that may have cost the lives of many of his cast and crew, he shelled out $12m more to buy back every print of the film. After initial release, nobody saw The Conqueror except Howard Hughes himself until 1974, when he allowed it to be broadcast on television. Reportedly he watched it a lot, screening it and either Jet Pilot or Ice Station Zebra continuously during later reclusive years, in which he may well have suffered from allodynia, pain from being touched, so distracted himself by stripping naked and watching movies continually.

Virtually everything associated with The Conqueror was unmitigated disaster, but most disastrous was the choice to shoot on location in the Escalante Desert near St George, UT, downwind from the Nevada Test Site where the government had conducted Operation Upshot-Knothole in 1953, only a year earlier. There were other problems too: Susan Hayward's black panther attacked her, Pedro Armendáriz's horse threw him, breaking his jaw, a flash flood nearly wiped out production and sweltering 120° heat made the fur costumes unbearable. Yet these fade into insignificance compared to the the acutely radioactive sand of Snow Canyon, into which clouds of fallout from eleven above ground nuclear tests in Nevada had funnelled, exposing the filmmakers for thirteen full weeks. You might think that this situation couldn't have been made any worse, but Hughes shipped sixty tons of this radioactive Utah dirt back to Hollywood to give retakes authenticity.

It's often been stated that Hughes simply accepted the government's assurances to the locals in St George that there was no danger to public health and that later on he felt 'guilty as Hell' that he had risked the lives of his cast and crew for a movie. However, Charles Higham's biography of Hughes highlights that this isn't fair. He was running RKO Pictures in 1953, as it produced Split Second that focused on the dangers of radiation in Nevada. It was actor Dick Powell's directorial debut, which he followed up with this. Hughes contracted to the government and the military, so uneasy with their ongoing testing that he delayed building any factories in Nevada. He was also notoriously germophobic, using tissues when picking up objects and requiring others to remove dust from their clothes. Tellingly, he never went to St George, which perhaps he only chose for being a Mormon town; he had long hired only Mormon aides to be sure they didn't drink.

The production numbered 220 cast and crew on location. By 1981, 91 of them had contracted a form of cancer and 46 were already dead of the disease, including many of the key players: John Wayne, Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead all died of cancer in the seventies, director Dick Powell in 1963 and Pedro Armendáriz the same year, by shooting himself in the heart to bypass suffering from terminal cancer. Half the residents of St George had contracted the disease by this time, and eventually, over half the cast and crew would too. While it has never conclusively been proved that the tests were a factor in these deaths and many victims smoked heavily, including the Duke, who survived lung cancer in 1964 before succumbing to stomach cancer in 1979, it's still likely, given a statistical anomaly of instances over three times higher than would usually be expected and wide variance in these instances, not restricted to lung cancer in the slightest.

Today, we don't look back at The Conqueror and see radioactive fallout, we look back at one of the most insane casting choices Hollywood ever made. There had been others, not least a trio of roles for Katharine Hepburn, whose impeccable Bryn Mawr accent inexplicably voiced backwoods girl Trigger Hicks in Spitfire, Mary, Queen of Scots in Mary of Scotland and, worst of all, Chinese peasant girl Jade Tan in Dragon Seed. Yet John Wayne is perhaps the most iconic American film star of all time, forever associated with rugged, hardworking, heroic types. Here he's tasked with playing Temujin, later known as Genghis Khan, which is as utterly ludicrous as it sounds. In later years he stated that the moral of the film was 'not to make an ass of yourself trying to play parts you're not suited for.' It's the most ridiculous part he ever played, eclipsing his brief performance as Longinus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, speaking, 'Truly, this man was the son of God.'

The reason the Duke took the part to begin with is the stuff of legend. Studio releases suggest he demanded the part, having seen the script lying around somewhere. According to the Medveds' book, The Hollywood Hall of Shame, this took place in the office of Dick Powell, who had already been assigned to shoot Wayne's third and last RKO picture. They were discussing script choices, when Powell was called away for a few minutes. On his return, he found Wayne engrossed in the script for The Conqueror and insisting that the part be his. Powell attempted to dissuade him in vain, later explaining, 'Who am I to turn down John Wayne?' Some reports suggest that Powell intended to discard the script, others that he already had and the Duke had retrieved it from the bin. Perhaps he seriously felt it was a good choice for him to stretch his acting muscles, or maybe he just wanted to make a movie, perennial RKO delays affecting his work for other studios.

To me, it's an iconic story that explains well how such an awful script could make it to production. A leading man since 1930, Wayne was arguably at the peak of his powers in the 1950s. Recent successes like Fort Apache, Red River and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon under his belt, he kicked off the decade with Rio Grande for his favourite director, John Ford. His best non-western, The Quiet Man, came in 1952, and one of his personal favourites, Hondo, in 1953. His most acclaimed film, The Searchers, was released in 1956, so that year saw both his best and worst movies. No wonder Wayne would become the industry's biggest star, topping Quigley's list of all time money makers. It's no stretch to see that a simple 'yes' from him might be enough to turn a discarded screenplay into a six million dollar picture and an emphatic one might guarantee it. Certainly, he was serious about the rôle once it was his, going on a crash diet that included Dexedrine four times a day.

While John Wayne's 'yes' to play Genghis Khan appears to have been a personal choice, the 'yes' from his leading lady took a lot more persuasion. Howard Hughes saw Susan Hayward as perfect for the part of Bortai, the fiery Tartar princess taken forcibly by Temujin but who gives herself to him willingly in the end. After all, she wasn't just a talented actress, Oscar nominated in 1947 for her role in Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman, she was also a fiery character in real life, something Hughes knew well as he was having an affair with her at the time. He constructed this film around her as much as around John Wayne, however much she hated it. He literally wouldn't take 'no' for an answer, even offering Darryl F Zanuck, who owned her contract, a million dollars under the table to release her for this film. Zanuck threatened to suspend her and her rising divorce costs forced her to accept. Still, she hated the script, the costumes, the heat, everything about the film.

It's easy to see why. It's unintentionally hilarious from moment one, looking utterly like a western in every way except for the props and costumes. It opens with Temujin, with slanted eyes, a hint at a moustache and a falcon on his arm, riding down with his men to discover why Chief Targutai is crossing his land and discovering Bortai, the chief's haughty third wife to be. 'I feel this Tartar woman is for me,' he tells his Mexican sidekick. 'My blood says take her!' Take her he does, in a raid that sparks war between Mongols, Tartars, Merkits, Karkaits and whatever other races show up in the form of local Navajo indians who didn't even wear make up to hide their ethnic origins. Bizarrely, much care was made to construct twelfth century villages from ancient drawings, but nothing else looks remotely authentic. Even the desert, described in the opening text as 'harsh and arid' is remarkably green, the Escalante a poor casting choice for the Gobi.

Admittedly, some actors fare better than others. The ever-reliable Agnes Moorehead is capable as Hunlun, Temujin's mother, her only failure the fact that she speaks in English like everyone else. Lee van Cleef is prominent in the background, always doing something without ever doing much. If anyone's needed to fetch a fur, deliver a present or just ride a horse out of frame, it's him, but he gets maybe one word in the entire film. Relying on his looks, which served him well for many ethnicities, works fine. The great Wang Khan's shaman is played by John Hoyt, a western staple, especially on television, but he goes all out, like Basil Rathbone playing Fu Manchu, and in doing so finds a slot in the long line of surprising white actors who aren't entirely terrible in yellowface make up, such as Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff. These are rare exceptions, as most cast members fail to treat this as anything but just another western, which in most regards it is.

It's often said that Kurosawa's films, which he freely acknowledged had roots in John Ford's, were Japanese westerns or easterns, if you will. At least he adapted Ford's techniques to fit essentially Japanese settings, populating them with samurai and historical authenticity. The Conqueror ought to feel like such an eastern but it doesn't. It feels irrevocably like a western, somewhat like a play put on during a down moment on a cattle drive. If Buffy the Vampire Slayer can go musical, then the cast of Red River could stage a biopic of Genghis Khan just for fun, right? Hey, I could be the great conqueror, says the Duke. My frequent Mexican co-star could play my brother and the red haired Irish lass over there could be my bride. Maybe in an alternate universe where the Nazis won the war and occupied the US, the cast of a Paramount western are thrown into a POW camp and bide their time with frivolities like this. Think the play in Grand Illusion turned on its head.

It looks like a western in eastern clothes, guns swapped for swords, stetsons swapped for ornate eastern headgear, horses swapped for, well, horses. If props and costumes were swapped back, only the dancing girls in Wang Khan's palace would feel out of place in a western. The woman of Samarkand doesn't dance like a saloon girl in her outfit of Christmas tinsel, protected from the Breen Office by a flesh coloured bodysuit underneath. It sounds like a western too, Victor Young's score much better than what he gave Hughes for The Outlaw, but just as inappropriate, without even of a hint of eastern flavour. The language Oscar Millard puts into the characters' mouths is Elizabethan. Kurosawa adapted Shakespeare to the east; he adapted the east to Shakespeare. 'While I have fingers to grasp a sword, and eyes to see your cowardly faces, your treacherous heads will not be safe on your shoulders,' pronounces the Duke, 'for I am Temujin, the Conqueror.'

It's all about as authentic as Carry On... Up the Khyber, but without tapping into any underlying truth. Like The Outlaw, its only success lay in being sumptuous to the eyes, the cinematography from Joseph LaShelle, an Oscar winner for Laura, being accomplished. None of this mattered to Howard Hughes, of course, whose many action packed but nonsensical pictures suggest that he's the classic equivalent of Michael Bay. Maybe he didn't screen it over and over for decades out of guilt. Perhaps, as Higham suggests, he identified with the conqueror, having dated most of the leading ladies of the golden age, not least his own fiery princess, Susan Hayward, who he could forcibly take over and over again by simply rescreening the movie. In a way he already had, by forcing her to say 'yes' to the part. The Conqueror would have been horrible in any form, but its legendary badness is due to John Wayne. The 'yes' that he volunteered was its death blow.

The Outlaw (1943)

Director: Howard Hughes
Stars: Jack Beutel, Thomas Mitchell, Jane Russell and Walter Huston

Bad movies aren't always made by people without enough money to make good movies. They can also be made by people with more money than they know what to do with, like Howard Hughes. In 1941, Hughes was well established in the movie industry, having inherited the family fortune at 18 and taken his millions to Hollywood a year later to produce films. He found quick success, with his second picture, Two Arabian Knights, a hit with the public and the critics, winning Lewis Milestone the Oscar for Best Director (Comedy) of 1927-8. An experienced flier who would set a number of world speed records later in the thirties, Hughes spent almost four million dollars on his 1930 aviation epic, Hell's Angels, which saw his first credit as director, although he had uncredited assistance from Edmund Goulding and a debuting James Whale. His second would be The Outlaw, thirteen years later, which would prove just as controversial, if for different reasons.

With Hell's Angels, the controversies were many. For a start, there was Jean Harlow, eighteen year old platinum blonde bombshell. She'd been working solidly in uncredited roles since 1928, but this launched her to stardom, after the advent of sound overtook the film's long production and Greta Nissen, the Norwegian leading lady, was no longer viable when her role became a speaking one. Production delays also prompted a law suit, as Hughes feared that Darryl F Zanuck's The Dawn Patrol would steal his film's thunder before he could finish it and sued to stop its release. On a darker note, Hughes crashed a plane while shooting a scene his stunt coordinator refused to allow his men, World War I pilots all, to do. He got away with facial surgery, but four other members of the crew, three pilots and one mechanic, lost their lives during production accidents. With The Outlaw, there was only one controversy, spun deliberately for publicity: Jane Russell's bust.

And that's really what The Outlaw is about. Ignore all the many suggestions to the contrary, this entire film exists so that Howard Hughes could show as much of Jane Russell's bust as possible. Sure, the screenplay was by massively experienced writer Jules Furthman, who had been Oscar nominated for his screenplay for the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty. Sure, there were also uncredited contributions by versatile producer/director Howard Hawks and his long term writing collaborator, Ben Hecht, who had met while working on 1932's Scarface for Hughes and ended up working together on nine films, including Twentieth Century, His Girl Friday and The Thing from Another World. Jean-Luc Godard called Hawks 'the greatest American artist'; Richard Corliss called Hecht 'the Hollywood screenwriter.' Hecht won the first Oscar for best original screenplay and ended up with two from six nominations. These aren't minor names.

Neither are those they wrote about, the story revolving around wild west legends Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday, perennial Hollywood subjects in the forties, after odd earlier portrayals: Edith Storey played the title role in Billy the Kid in 1911, with Garrett and Holliday both originated on screen in 1937, Robert Homans playing the former in Jim Hanvey, Detective and Harvey Clark the latter in Law for Tombstone. Billy the Kid was especially popular, Bob Steele playing him six times in 1940 and 1941 and Buster Crabbe thirteen between 1941 and 1943. The actors giving them life here are even more prestigious. Garrett is played by Thomas Mitchell, whose Oscar was for 1939's Stagecoach, but could equally have been for any of four other classics he made that year. Holliday is Walter Huston, who didn't win until The Treasure of the Sierre Madre in 1949 but had already landed three nominations. Only Jack Buetel was new to the screen as Billy the Kid.

Well, Buetel and Jane Russell, both of whom became stuck under Hughes's thumb for seven years. The Outlaw was originally shot in 1941, but spent two years in limbo because of how prominent Russell's breasts were in the film. While Hughes initially bowed to the requirements of those who administered the Production Code and cut half a minute of footage, his distributor, 20th Century Fox, cancelled their agreement. In response, Hughes orchestrated a counterintuitive campaign to build public outrage about his unreleased film, fuelling the fires beneath a controversy about his 'lewd picture' until the demands for it to be banned generated enough publicity to reach screens in 1943. However it only lasted a week before its violations of the Production Code prompted its removal. When it finally saw wide release in 1946, Buetel and Russell had been stuck promoting for six years, locked into contracts for Hughes that disallowed them from making other movies.

Looking back from today, it's almost unfathomable how this happened. Russell doesn't get naked in the film; she doesn't even get topless. This was Production Code era Hollywood and that simply wasn't allowed, whatever imaginative publicity Hughes might have generated. She merely shows a decent amount of cleavage, but that was shocking enough. A great review at IMDb talks about how a fourteen or fifteen year old youth sneaked in to see it on original release. His friends were eager to know how fast Billy the Kid was, who shot who and how. 'All I wanted to do was describe Jane Russell,' he said. It's a telling anecdote, but it's not merely a reflection on Russell's charms, which gave their names to pairs of mountains across the globe and prompted Bob Hope to joke that 'culture is the ability to describe Jane Russell without moving your hands.' It's also a nod to how there's nothing else here to see. The time honoured stories are told at their most ridiculous.

For a while, you might think that the story is all about Doc Holliday's strawberry roan, which has been stolen. It's 'about thirteen hands high and cute as a bug's ear,' as he describes him and he catches up with him in Lincoln, NM, where it arrived in the hands of Billy the Kid, who swears he bought him fair and square. Given that Doc's old friend, Pat Garrett, is working as the sheriff of Lincoln County, we get to meet all three of them quickly in perhaps the best scene of the movie. They're shot well, hardly surprising as the cinematography is by Gregg Toland, at the peak of his career after Wuthering Heights, The Long Voyage Home and Citizen Kane. Unfortunately, he's the only one impressing. Huston isn't bad in his awful chequered trousers but he gets progressively worse as the film runs on. This is already the worst I've ever seen Mitchell, usually such a reliable actor, and he gets worse too. Buetel never gets the chance to impress, but this is his best scene.

Worst of all is the script. Already it's clumsy and occasionally cringeworthy, but it gets far worse than any of the actors. From this pivotal scene, it plays out like a love triangle, but one between three men. Garrett describes Holliday as his best friend and he reacts to the growing friendship between Doc and the Kid with what can only be regarded as jealousy. Each scene heightens the homoerotic undercurrents until they reach ludicrous level and then continue on regardless. That strawberry roan and the schemes and counterschemes to win him feel like a metaphor for their friendships. Just in case we might take any of this seriously, the score underlines that this is all a cartoon, complete with wah wah wah noises for every disappointment. Bizarrely the music is by Victor Young, a composer who was also at the top of his game. He never won an Oscar in his life, but landed 22 nominations, sometimes four of them in the same year, like 1940 and 1941.

In another film, Doc's strawberry roan would be the MacGuffin of the piece. Certainly owning him is the primary motivation throughout for both Doc and the Kid, which means that it becomes one important factor for Pat Garrett too, yet we don't care about him in the slightest. What makes the film so surreal is that all this continues unabated even when Rio McDonald shows up no less than eighteen minutes in. This is a rather unique film because it has a pair of different MacGuffins, one for the characters and one for the audience. Even as these legends tussle over Red the roan, the viewers are wondering when Jane Russell is going to show up. After all, it's her on the posters, her on the publicity stills and her that Howard Hughes had been pushing at the public for years, in a shirt that looks like it's held up only by the power of art but would fall off if she breathed. Hughes had even designed a brass bra for her, to push up those breasts and highlight that cleavage.

Well, we don't see her until the eighteen minute mark and then not enough to know she's female, let alone Jane Russell. She's just someone trying to kill Billy the Kid one night in a dark barn. Two minutes later they tussle in the hay, but even when she's revealed, she's fully clothed, shirt right up to her neck. After she tries and fails to kill the Kid for the last time, in revenge for the death of her brother a town or two back, it's hinted that he rapes her there in the hay. 'Hold still, lady,' he tells her, 'or you won't have much dress left.' That's it for Rio McDonald though for quite a while. We have more homoerotic love triangle stuff to struggle through, Doc taking the Kid's side when Garrett tries to stop him leaving the scene of a deadly shootout. That spurs a sequel, Doc taking down Pat's gun and Billy two of his deputies. With a through and through to the side though, he's in bad shape and Doc takes him straight to Rio's house. Rio, it seems, is his girl.

Now, we have to pause for reevaluation here, because this is the point the script finally gives up the ghost. Rio attempted to revenge her brother by killing Billy the Kid on her own, even though she's sleeping with one of the most legendary gunslingers in the west. She didn't ask Doc to take care of it for her, she tried it herself, failed and got raped in the process, but Billy's unconscious body in her bed is all she needs to realise that she's in love with him. She does wield a knife in a threatening manner, but decides to just use it to cut his clothes off, so she can nurse him back to health, even climbing into bed with him to keep him warm. Doc's gone for a month, but when he returns, he discovers that his new friend has taken his girl as well as his horse. The Kid graciously offers him one of the two, while Rio stands there dumbstruck, and he has the bad taste to argue with him when he picks the horse. He doesn't even kiss her goodbye.

It's a strange thing when every bit of publicity material revolves around Jane Russell's twin assets but the story itself really doesn't care about them in the slightest. They're the only reason she's in the film, as her acting talent is hardly notable here and her perpetual sneer is often painful to see. Maybe it's a pout, but it's hardly sexy, even if it smoulders. I wondered if the wind had changed on her. It turns out to be her Blue Steel: it's disdain, defiance, disappointment, every emotion from D to D. So she's here to show off as much cleavage as the Production Code would allow. For a while, her dresses get more and more revealing until a full 45 minutes in, she leans over the Kid's body and both he and we get a great view. From then on, the 1946 audiences dreamt of a fast forward button to see how much more she'd show and how soon. Her best scene has her tied up outside with leather straps soaked so they'll shrink. The world lusted. Doc and the Kid didn't notice.

The Outlaw is a stunning failure in almost all regards. The performances are embarrassments to the talents of the actors. The story is such a stinker that Hawks and Hecht must have been truly thankful to have been uncredited. The music is the most inappropriate score I've ever heard in a Hollywood picture. Only Gregg Toland's cinematography emerges unscathed, and even there it suffers from some awful rear projection shots. Russell didn't even wear the cantilevered bra that Hughes had carefully engineered with structural steel, instead secretly modifying her own a little and pretending. The film would have been a great candidate for the Razzies, had they existed at the time. Yet The Outlaw was also a box office hit that launched Russell's career as a global sex symbol and built her 38D-24-36 figure into the latest sensation. The publicity worked in ways the film itself couldn't dream of. Sometimes all you need is sex, and it doesn't have to be in the film.

Polk County Pot Plane (1977)

Director: Jim West
Stars: Don Watson, Bobby Watson, Big Jim, Paul Weiner, 'Sandy' St Armour, Edward Smith, Bob Deyton, Debbi Washington and N67038 (DC-4)

We've all had good ideas for movies, just like we've all had good ideas for band names, but most of us have never shot a movie or formed a band. Georgia State Representative James I West is the exception, because a good idea for a movie literally landed in his metaphorical back yard and he made it happen. In August 1975, someone flew a Douglas DC-4 into Polk County under cover of night and landed on the top of Treat Mountain. Designed for runways over 3,000 feet, it stopped in only 500 on a landing strip cleared by bulldozers mere hours before and lit up with strips of 100 watt light bulbs. It had clipped pine trees on the way in and needles were still stuck in the prop. It was carrying 3,260 pounds of marijuana and 75 pounds of hashish, which were mostly recovered by authorities from a rental truck a few miles away. Many were arrested but most were released, including the plane's owner, Robert Eby, as nobody could prove he was flying it at the time.

While it was a talking point all over Georgia, Jim West saw a good idea for a movie. Fortunately for us, he did everything right in turning it from the former into the latter. The federal authorities had seized the plane as evidence but couldn't figure out what to do with it, as it clearly couldn't just fly out again. Eventually they auctioned it off to the highest bidder on the courthouse steps. Ahead of the auction, West bought the 300 acres surrounding the plane, fenced it off and set armed guards to stop potential buyers from inspecting it. Once he won the plane, he hired a crew to expand the runway to 3,500 feet and flew it out himself using JATO bottles for added lift. With the set and the biggest prop in hand, he formed a production company, Westco Productions, wrote a screenplay and set to persuading everyone he knew to take part, as cast, crew or both. Previous experience was not required and clearly didn't exist for the most part.

What's most amazing to me, beyond the background to this story itself, is how far West managed to get. His dedication must have been absolute and his word trusted implicitly. His neighbour was a house mover, so he promptly hired him to play a house mover who sets up one of the biggest stunts in the film. Howard Smith and Bob Deyton play the Clayton County police chief and sheriff purely because that's what they were. When Oosh and Doosh, the lead characters, are lifted off the roof of the Clayton County Jail by helicopter, they really are lifted off the roof of the Clayton County Jail by helicopter. What's more, like everyone else in the film, they perform their own stunts, as presumably West just didn't know any stuntmen. These are not minor stunts and we can't forget that these folk aren't even actors, let alone stuntmen. For the more dangerous stunts, they were liquored up with 'liquid courage' first. As far as I know, nobody was hurt.

Of course, West himself was as experienced as a filmmaker as anyone else involved, which is to say not at all. This was the only film he made and it shows. While he's only credited as producer and director, it has been said that anywhere there's a Jim or a James in the credits, it's really him, from Jim Clarke the writer to Jim Young the camera operator. I don't know if that's really true or not, but it's certain at least that he's Jim Whozitt as Big Jim Elliott, the pilot who flies in the DC-4 for its initial landing at the beginning of the film. He does a capable job, very naturalistic as you might expect, but believable, and it sets the pace for the acting throughout, which is similarly shorn of any real acting in favour of authentic southern accents and conversational tone. This is actually much appreciated, one of the charms of the film, along with the relentless stuntwork and chase scenes. The film's biggest success is that nothing in it pretends to be anything it isn't.

If it wasn't clear beforehand, it becomes absolutely clear during the first chase scene that there's no effects work going on here at all, not just no CGI but no effects at all. When we see Oosh and Doosh driving their camper van full of pot at high speed, they're doing just that. When we watch them nudging cop cars off the road, that's what they're doing. When their camper van nicks the blade of a bulldozer on the back of a truck going the other way and half the top gets ripped off, that's precisely what happened. It feels rather surreal that we're watching a fictional story that's leading up to a reenactment of a true event, but in doing so we're watching something very real indeed. The only reasons this doesn't play out like an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos are that they kept getting away with these stunts and because editor Angelo Ross was one of the few professionals on the crew. His other editing job in 1977 was Smokey and the Bandit.

There is a plot unfolding, but that's one of the weaker parts of the affair. Oosh and Doosh work for Joe King and they're good boys the boss doesn't want to lose. They're dumb enough to get all four of their crew caught and locked up in the Clayton County Jail, but they're bright enough to talk the sheriff into allowing them all to work on the roof the very next morning with their regular clothes underneath their jail outfits. They promptly escape by helicopter, with Oosh and Doosh hanging onto the landing skids for the duration of the ride, presumably without harnesses or safety nets or anything except that 'liquid courage'. They get back to King's place to find that he's been deposed offscreen by Sandy, who shoots the helicopter pilot and puts Oosh and Doosh right back to work, this time picking up a new load from the DC-4 in an eighteen wheeler, which is promptly chased by state troopers. These cops are apparently really quick, both to find crooks and to let them go.

What follows contains a little bit of story, a little bit of humour and a little bit of violence. There's no acting talent or character building to speak of. Mostly it contains a lot of vehicles. It's a ninety minute feature but a full third of that is taken up with car chases and associated stuntwork. This would be reasonably impressive in any film, both in quantity and quality, but it's eye opening in this film because of the lack of stuntmen. Remember, if we see it, they did it for real. When a cop car crushes itself under the back of the truck, that's what it did. When another drives right under the truck and loses its top, that's what happened. And when the eighteen wheeler speeds right through a prefab house parked in the middle of the road, that's absolutely what happened. How much of the budget went on 'liquid courage' I have no idea, but most of it was surely spent on vehicles. Every time I watch I forget to count how many get trashed, but it's a lot.

This is exciting but then these are the exciting scenes. The catch is that surrounding them are other scenes of vehicles that aren't exciting in the slightest. While a third of the film is taken up with chase scenes and stunts, another third of it, if not more, is taken up by vehicles not being chased and nothing else happening that requires 'liquid courage'. We see cars driving down the road, trucks driving down the road, armoured vehicles driving down the road. We watch loading and unloading, we even watch parked vehicles waiting for someone to show up. We see cop cars waiting for something to happen. We see bulldozers at work. We watch vehicles following other vehicles, pushing other vehicles, nudging them in new directions. We're shown shots from the helicopter and the DC-4 and aerial shots of the helicopter and the DC-4. Sometimes it feels like the action was choreographed by a six year old boy playing with his hot wheels.

In some ways it's refreshing that this isn't just another seventies action flick, even just another seventies hicksploitation flick. Because nobody knew what they were doing, the film doesn't feel like anything else and that's always a good thing, even if the end result is fundamentally flawed. The building blocks may be clearly phrased like the memories of films or TV shows, but generally they're put together in whole new designs that apparently just seemed like they made sense at the time. Whole swathes of this film are completely dialogue free, occasionally accompanied by old timey music that helps set the scene as silent slapstick comedy. It's a heist movie when Oosh and Doosh rob an armoured car to pay back Sandy for the losses and damages they've incurred. It's a chase movie in its heart and in truth it's a snapshot of the seventies south, Georgia accents all the way, jeans so tight you can see the testicles and hairstyles right out of Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Eventually all this preliminary padding gets us to the point of the film, dramatised of course. Big Jim wants to bring in the biggest shipment ever seen and, despite their track record, wants Oosh and Doosh to be his ground crew. He's going to fly in ten million dollars worth of pot and cocaine from Colombia and he'll give them a quarter of a million each to make it work. He needs a 2,500 foot runway carved off the top of Treat Mountain in Polk County and five two ton trucks to carry away the drugs. And he needs it in three days. Nobody does their job right, the ground crew not clearing as much as they should and even Big Jim arriving a couple of hours ahead of schedule, but that just means that we watch the plane fly in, clipping trees as it did in reality, wondering how Jim West managed to get away with everything he put in this film without a single stuntman on the payroll. The picture's motto is clearly, 'Just do it!' and that's what they did.

Presumably the aerial shots we see during the finalé were the first filmed, of the real plane in the real location before Jim West bought the land. They could even be news footage taken after the event, just as the radio announcements by real Atlanta DJ Van Q Temple may well be recordings from the time. Yet, as tends to be the case with this unique film, reality morphs into fiction that is in its own way, new reality. When Jerry Burnam and his bulldozer crew clear land for Big Jim to fly onto Treat Mountain in the story, it's really Jerry Burnam and his bulldozer crew clearing land for Jim West to fly off the mountain with his new purchase and so make the rest of the film possible. When he flies back in, he's reenacting the real event in the real plane in the real location. We're impressed with his skill as a pilot, assuming he's actually flying the plane, but we're even more impressed with the unknown pilot who did it first, at night and with much less runway.

The more I see Polk County Pot Plane, later reissued as In Hot Pursuit, the more I love it. While it's not a good movie, clearly an amateur affair through and through, Jim West was bright enough to know every one of his limitations before he even began and he worked around them throughout. He knew he was working with amateur actors because they were friends, family and presumably whoever said, 'Sure, I'll be in your movie, Jim,' so he wrote scenes that didn't require acting. He knew he didn't have stuntmen so he persuaded his cast with a politician's silver tongue to go for it and do amazing things. The result is so intrinsically honest that it's surreal. We're conditioned to know that films are fake, but this one isn't. It's as honest as they come, not because West wanted it that way but because he didn't know how to do it differently. He saw an opportunity, grabbed it and didn't let go until he had what he wanted. Maybe that 'liquid courage' was really for him.