Strangers on a Train (1951)

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: Farley Granger, Ruth Roman and Robert Walker

I'm climbing the stairway to Cinematic Heaven in 2010 to post five reviews a week of films from the IMDb Top 250 List, supposedly the greatest motion pictures of all time. Are they really? Find out here.

I started my travels through the IMDb Top 250 in 2004 with only a sad four films directed by Alfred Hitchcock under my belt. By this point I was up to eighteen, from The Lodger in 1926 to Marnie in 1964, and the more of them I watched the more obvious it became that Hitchcock was fascinated by the concept of the perfect murder. It's an inviting concept for a writer because it isn't a self contained thing, it isn't as simple as just committing the act. Murder is easy, but getting away with murder is not. You have to make sure that you leave no evidence that might lead back to you, you have to cover your tracks, you have to erase any connections between you and the victim. You have to think of everything. It's far from uncommon for crime writers to obsess over this and it's often reflected in their fiction.

The purest form is the classic locked room mystery where a murder is committed behind a door that is locked from the inside with no murderer present, but it's far from the only form and Patricia Highsmith may have invented a new one here, where all trace of a motive is removed by having unconnected strangers trade murders. Highsmith is one of the legends of the crime genre in literature but Strangers on a Train was her first novel and she had so little influence at this point in time that Hitchcock quickly acquired the rights to adapt it for a mere $7,500, keeping his name out of the negotiations to avoid a natural inflation of the price. He kept a literary connection with his choice of screenwriters though, first approaching Dashiell Hammett and then hiring Raymond Chandler to adapt the script. In the end the bulk of the work was done by Czenzi Ormonde, Ben Hecht's assistant.

And we're not disappointed. Robert Walker's character is the main source of theories here and he's as magnetic as Hitchcock. He's Bruno Anthony, a man with expensive shoes and a personalised tie who does precisely nothing except things he's never done before. 'Have you ever driven a car blindfolded at 150mph?' he says. 'I have.' He can do all this because he has a rich father who provides his income, but for some reason that rich father wants him to work for a living instead. That just doesn't sit well with Bruno so he spends his time thinking up ways to kill him off, thus ensuring his own unencumbered fortune and freedom. 'I'm sick and tired of bowing and scraping to the king!' he pronounces to his flaky mother, but of course he never does anything about it. He thinks up ways to blow up the White House too, which makes his mother laugh but it doesn't cause the President any lost sleep.

Then one day he's travelling by train when things magically click into place, perhaps by design. Sitting opposite him is Guy Haines, a famous tennis player whose name is all over the papers, and he falls into conversation with him as naturally as if that's all he ever does. Anthony reads a lot, not having anything better to do with his time, so he knows that Haines is waiting for a divorce from his wife Miriam, so that he can marry his new love, Anne Morton, the daughter of a United States senator. What Anthony doesn't know is that the divorce isn't going to happen because Miriam Haines has changed her mind, even though she's pregnant with another man's child, but that would have just spurred him on all the more. 'I certainly admire people who do things,' says Anthony and he has some very particular things in mind.

Motive is what trips most murderers up, he feels, so he suggests a way in which both of them can get what they want most without ever having to worry about such a thing. It's a simple but effective concept: they should merely swap their murders. After all, if he kills Guy's wife for him, nobody would suspect a thing. There's nothing to connect the two of them, as they don't know each other, hadn't even met before today and even that was just a chance meeting that nobody would remember. There's even less to connect him to Miriam Haines, who he's never met and who lives in Metcalf, a town he may never have been to. And in return for freeing this stranger up to marry the woman he loves, this stranger could return the favour and bump off his father. 'Criss cross!' as he keeps saying.

What makes this conversation work so well is that these two actors play against each other to perfection. Walker portrays Anthony as a softly spoken but cleverly calculating stalker, and that very quietness makes him even more scary. He's amoral enough to see murder as a game, just another on the list of things he hasn't done yet. Farley Granger, whose character also saw murder as a game in Hitchcock's Rope, is a decent man here who acts as a superb foil for Walker, as steady and methodical as his tennis play, though Anthony has a talent for nudging him off his game just a little. He's polite enough to humour the man but because Anthony is such a quietly spoken fruitloop, he merely seems half fascinating and half disturbing, and even when he leaves the train he doesn't think any more of it. He just goes about his business, at least until he finds Anthony waiting outside his house with the broken glasses of his freshly killed wife, who he's strangled to death at an amusement park.

It's the constant tension between the two of them that makes the film, as the nightmare slowly but surely descends upon Haines. Anthony really has him from moment one on the train, but it would be a toss of the coin how it would turn out if he'd called the maniac's bluff at the point he brings his theoretical little game into reality. Sure, it would be an awkward situation at any time to attempt to explain but the longer it runs the more awkward it gets and the worse it would look if he went to the police and told the truth. The whole piece is a cleverly structured nightmare of ever decreasing circles and both of the lead actors are more than up to the task. I enjoyed Farley Granger's performance here far more than his attempt at the other side of the argument in Rope three years earlier, and I don't think I've enjoyed Robert Walker anywhere better than here, this being the most memorable role he ever had.

Most of the film is told in the form of mirrored pairs and Haines and Anthony are only the most obvious, Anthony being the dark side that Haines doesn't usually have much difficulty suppressing. The entire story could be seen as a psychological battle between the different halves of a single schizophrenic lead, but Hitch would leave his overt schizo work for other pictures and Anthony is very real. The doubles appear as puns and cinematic devices, so that we often only see the flipside of something. There's only one murder in the entire film and we don't see that directly, we watch it mirrored in the twin lenses of Miriam's glasses. Even Hitchcock's traditional cameo could be seen as another instance of the pair concept, given that he's climbing onto a train with a double bass. They could almost be mistaken for twins.

Anthony latches onto Haines so relentlessly that he's almost as much of a perpetual and growing annoyance as Mr Hyde was to Dr Jekyll, always escalating and threatening to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down just through idiotic confidence. How much can Haines ignore? Sure, he can hang up the phone when Anthony rings him at home. He can even hang up when he rings him at the senator's house, with the whole family watching. But Anthony sends him a letter, he bumps into him in public while he's out walking through Washington with Anne, he sends him a plan to his father's house with the key taped to it. Here's the point at which Haines had opportunity to expose the truth, with evidence! Most memorably, when everyone's heads are bobbing left and right to follow the tennis game at his club, there's Anthony staring straight ahead at him like the angel of death.

Suddenly he's everywhere, standing on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial as Haines walks past, even turning up to a party at the senator's house, talking to an elderly guest about murder techniques and how best to succeed at the dastardly deed. Here are more doubles, as he demonstrates to this bemused old lady how he can strangle her, while he watches Anne Morton's sister Barbara standing behind her and sees Miriam Haines all over again. Not only is there this double but Mrs Cunningham, whose throat his hands are wrapped around, is the double of his mother. No wonder Hitchcock told François Truffaut, 'Isn't it a fascinating design? One could study it forever.' While Strangers on a Train works as a taut and entertaining thriller, it almost invites a mathematical analysis, marking down the times and the events and watching for patterns. No, I didn't, but I wouldn't be surprised to find someone did.

Even without diving into pattern recognition, there's plenty to see and I'm not just talking about the stunt where the old man crawls under the merry-go-round, which was real. Hitch claimed that it was the most dangerous stunt ever performed under his direction, and he would never allow such a thing again. I'm talking about the supporting cast, who probably get less to do than in any other Hitchcock film but are interesting to watch nonetheless. Best of all is Barbara Morton, Anne's younger sister. She's a spunky kid, played by a bright-eyed Patricia Hitchcock, the director's daughter who had also appeared for him in Stage Fright and would again in Psycho. She provides a blissful counter to the tension with the innocence of a child, saying out loud whatever wicked thoughts that may come to mind. 'I still think it would be wonderful to have a man love you so much he'd kill for you,' she tells Anne, just as the suggestion is floated that maybe he had.

Her father is Leo G Carroll, a Hitchcock regular. Time was I knew him only as Alexander Waverly in The Man from UNCLE, but while I've now seen him in many classic Hollywood films, it may just be his long running association with Hitch that springs to mind first, especially when Walker looks a little like Napoleon Solo here from certain angles. Carroll appeared first in Rebecca, then went on to five further collaborations with the master, this being the last but one with only North By Northwest still to come. Anthony's parents are Jonathan Hale and Marion Lorne, Hale being Insp Henry Fernack, the Saint's nemesis on the side of the law in the George Sanders movies of the thirties and forties, and Lorne being the bumbling Aunt Clara on Bewitched.

The other character who steals our attention at least a little is Miriam Haines, played to great effect by Kasey Rogers, though she was still going by Laura Elliott at this point. Bizarrely, as she's probably best known as the second Louise Tate on Bewitched, she doesn't share any screen time at all here with Marion Lorne. Miriam is cute but loathsome, unashamedly rotten, willing to blackmail her husband while she's pregnant with another man's child. It's appropriate that she be murdered on the other side of the Tunnel of Love, having acquired not one but two chaperones to the amusement park, yet another pair for this film. She isn't a patch on her replacement in the affections of her husband but she's still far more interesting to watch. Ruth Roman is capable as Anne Morton but she's a reasonably bland character who isn't much more than a good catch.

As for the leads, Farley Granger was on the up and up at this point, most of his career still ahead of him, Rope and the Nicholas Ray film noir They Live By Night the best films he'd landed thus far. He'd go on to an interesting and varied career, though hardly a conventional one, given that about a third of his films would be Italian, mostly giallos and spaghetti westerns. Walker however only had a single film left to go, My Son John in 1952, before an untimely death at 33 from an allergic reaction to a sedative, probably tied to the fact that he'd been drinking before it was prescribed to him. He'd married Phyllis Isley in 1939, who would go on to fame as Jennifer Jones, but she left him in 1943 for his boss, David Selznick and he never recovered. 'My personal life has been completely wrecked by David Selznick's obsession for my wife,' he once said. 'What can you do to fight such a powerful man?' Well there was always criss cross...

Female (1933)

Director: Michael Curtiz
Star: Ruth Chatterton

You can tell how old this film is because it's set at an American car manufacturer. Sales are slipping at the Drake Motor Car Company so it's still topical, but the business is run by a woman so it has to be a precode. She's tough too. Some guy rattles on and she shuts him up unceremoniously. 'You've all got statistic poisoning,' she tells them. 'Your business is to sell cars.' And that's it. End of meeting. She's Alison Drake, the daughter of the previous CEO or whatever they called them in 1928 when he died, leaving her the only one with enough of a clue to take over. Since then she's grown cold and cynical by her own admission. Now she deliberately treats men the way men treat women. Harriet Brown, an old schoolfriend, remembers her as a romantic soul. She's on her second husband and third kid. Alison Drake only has a car company. A husband? 'I'd rather have a canary,' she says.

She's happy having George P Cooper for the night, the new guy on the board played by Johnny Mack Brown. He's only been with the company for sixteen days and he's been trying to meet with her for most of that time, but now he's caught her eye she invites him over to her house for dinner. They have a great time, once she persuades him that she doesn't want to talk business in the slightest and slings a cushion suggestively onto the floor to make her point very clear, but next day when he sends her flowers she summons him into her office and tells him in no uncertain terms that the only thing that she cares about there is business. He gets a bonus while Briggs, the last guy, gets a transfer to Montreal for telling her that he loves her.

Sexual harrassment worked both ways back in the precode era and this is definitely the sort of women's picture that couldn't even be floated a year later. Drake is the antithesis of the all American wife and mother that would soon be epitomised by Myrna Loy. If we were in any doubt as to what she would think about such a character, she gifts us with a blitz of very precode lines. 'A woman in love is a pathetic spectacle,' she comments. She tells a married colleague, 'You wouldn't have these problems if you were a fallen woman.' When she finally gets the one man she wants and he proposes, she turns him down because she wants to carry on a fling instead. 'Marriage isn't for me, for us,' she tells him. 'After all, we can be so happy as we are. Don't let's spoil everything.'

This man is Jim Thorne, in the form of George Brent, the real life husband at the time of Ruth Chatterton, who plays Alison Drake. This was the fourth of their four films together in only two years. They had married in between The Rich are Always with Us and The Crash, both released in 1932, but their big hit was 1933's Lilly Turner and this was the inevitable cash in on the successful pairing. She's very much the lead character, as the title would suggest and hers is the only name above that title, but he's the man who conquers her. He's an engineer, who has invented the automatic transmission or whatever gadget she needs for her new car, and so she steals him away from the competition for a two year contract. 'Unethical my foot. What's that got to do with business?'

Of course she doesn't know what Thorne looks like, so when she skips out on a party at her own house because she's fed up with all the unearned compliments, naturally he's who she tries to pick up at a shooting gallery. He isn't having any of it though. 'I don't take pickups home,' he tells her. Of course she takes him home, after he finally discovers that the girl who seems to be everywhere he is is really the boss, but he isn't having any of it there either. He's immune to her vodka, because he's worked in Russia where they brush their teeth with it. He keeps talking business even when faced with the most outrageous hints to quit and sweep her off her feet instead. Even when she does her cushion trick, sprawling invitingly for him, he turns her down flat. He's not going to do the boss just because she wants him to.

And so he becomes everything she wants. After all, the other men are all 'flattering, conniving, kowtowing,' and she's fed up with the lot of them. She even gives up on one conquest after he emotes that she's like a goddess, basically because she just can't face popping his cherry and dealing with the emotion at work afterwards. The only man she's safe with is Pettigrew, who is effectively her right hand man at Drake Motor. Initially I thought that was because he was gay, because after she notably looks her prospective conquests up and down, he notably does the same thing, but he does seem to have a thing for Miss Frothingham too though so perhaps he's just bisexual. He admires his boss immensely but when he tells a colleague, 'She's the only real woman I've ever met,' it isn't to get into her pants.

George Brent knew how to handle women. After all he survived a tumultuous two year relationship with Bette Davis, though he didn't become one of her four husbands. Davis, who had supported Brent and Chatterton in The Rich are Always with Us, waited a whole five days after they married to marry her first husband, Harmon Nelson. Tell me that was coincidence. Marriage is what really sets the fireworks going in this film. After Drake finally hooks Thorne by playing the needy card at a company picnic at which he's the only invitee, life is fine for a while, but he's an honest old fashioned man and so naturally proposes, only for her to burst his bubble. 'I suppose you think you're too superior for marriage and love and children,' he tells her, 'the things that women were born for.' Yes, he actually said that, to his own wife, no less.

The script by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola, suggested by a story by Donald Henderson Clarke, is as fast paced as you could imagine for a film that runs only a whisker over an hour and it's as outrageously quotable as any precode I've seen. You can tell that just from the gems I've referenced here, but trust me, there are many more. Yet the dynamics of human relationships are rather broadly painted, and that's an understatement. Chatterton runs the gamut from queen of all she can see to needy and incapable little girl and she's far more successful at the former than the latter. 'If you weren't so pathetic, you'd be funny!' Thorne tells Drake at one point, but he should have brought that one out a few scenes earlier. He doesn't just bring her to her knees, he turns her into a useless puddle of goo. To be fair she comes out of it, unlike some other films of the time, and the picture is female run through and through up until Thorne conquers her, but as always, it should have ended a couple of lines before it does.

Shanks (1974)

Director: William Castle
Star: Marcel Marceau

William Castle did a lot in his years in the movie industry: the early entries in crime series, the mid period B movies in most genres and, of course, the classic horror days where he seemed to invent a new gimmick every time out. He began as an actor on Broadway at the meagre age of fifteen, apparently passing himself off as Sam Goldwyn's nephew, then worked through a range of different jobs before leaving for Hollywood at 23. He worked through the jobs there too, racking up a few uncredited acting performances in late thirties pictures, was the dialogue director for a couple of films including Penny Serenade and had started writing pictures too before he began directing in 1943. Even then he found time to shoot second unit direction for Orson Welles on The Lady from Shanghai and produce Rosemary's Baby.

Every career has an end, however long and fascinating it was, and Castle's was here. He'd retired in 1968 after Project X but came back this one last time for Shanks in 1974, his swansong as a producer and director. It's a rather quirky picture, 'a grim fairy tale' as the subtitle would have it, perhaps comparable to Edward Scissorhands, but played out more as a ballet or performance art piece than as horror story or social comment. It's so different I'd suggest that the concept spoke to Castle personally, though I really should apologise for that pun because the stars of the film are Marcel Marceau and Marcel Marceau, although one of them does speak. In fact he speaks quite a bit more he did in Silent Movie, for instance, a Mel Brooks film in which, rather ironically, he had the only speaking part.

His speaking part here is Old Walker, who begins the film watching a deaf mute puppeteer called Malcolm Shanks, who sits high up on a ladder making his puppets dance far below him to please the assembled throng of children. Guess which Marceau's non-speaking part is! Well anything beyond that is open to question because we're never quite sure if it's supposed to be a story for us or a story for that gaggle of children. I lean towards the latter, making the bulk of the film a sort of live action puppet performance, in fact doubly so because while the whole thing is a sort of puppet show in itself, merely one played by people, many of those people also become puppets. And now I'm just confusing you, I'm sure. I should add that as Shanks is the lead character and he can't speak, we're introduced to the story through title cards as if this was a silent film, though he's the only one without a voice.

Yes, this is pretty strange stuff, but I should really back up a step. Whether it's a story within a story or just the story itself, here's what we get. Malcolm Shanks, the deaf mute, lives with the Bartons, his shrew of a stepsister and her drunk of a husband, making him something of a Cinderella figure. Fairy tale nods abound here. They live on welfare even though Barton always seems to have another bottle to hand, but Malcolm gets an opportunity to earn five hundred bucks by going to work for Old Walker, a rich but strange old man who lives in a huge and spacious mansion that I'd certainly buy for a dollar. It has everything, including a huge iron gate, a library and a laboratory. What more could I want?

Well the situation Malcolm finds himself in is as strange as Walker himself, with his purple rinse. Walker talks him through a few experiments, all of which lead to one macabre and inevitable conclusion. First he wires up a frog to electrodes to make it move. Then he animates a chicken by remote control. No wires this time, just metal pins placed into key locations on the body and controlled by what look suspiciously like the controllers for my old Grandstand game system. The next experiment is going to be on a human being because Walker has Malcolm place those pins into a map of the human body, an anatomical wall chart that remains conveniently there when he turns up the next day to find the old man dead in his laboratory. So the third experiment is going to be Old Walker himself.

Well, we apparently need a little reinforcement first, so Malcolm goes goes home to play with his puppets, who look just like the characters in our story, but finds that his hosts are hardly pleased at his presence. 'Lazy silent freak!' cries Barton. 'Why aren't you at work?' asks Mrs Barton. 'Get back to work,' she demands while her husband stomps on his Walker puppet until it's as dead as its model. Life is tough when you're not just Cinderella, but you're deaf and dumb to boot. But hey, you can still have a ball because you can go back to Old Walker's mansion and stay there, animating his corpse like a remote control puppet. Yes, that's where this film is going and it has more than a little macabre fun in doing so.

We can't forget the other characters, of course. With no more money coming in, Barton heads over to the mansion to demand it and Malcolm, in self defence, uses his remote control chicken to peck him to death, then animates him too. He even walks him home, but when his wife rushes out of the house to find out what he's doing in the middle of the road, she's run over by a car and he can animate her as well. Now we have a whole bunch of puppets for Malcolm to play with and of course that's what he does. He takes them shopping, he takes them on a picnic, he has a blast. Just think how Cinderella would have felt if she was freed from all her drudgery and she could play with her ugly stepsisters like they were dolls? This works well because Philippe Clay and Tsilla Chelton, both experienced French actors, demonstrate something of a talent for mime themselves as Mr and Mrs Barton respectively.

Every fairy tale has to have a little girl for the story to happen to and here she's called Celia. Actress Cindy Eilbacher was sixteen at the time but she looks a few years younger, which makes it rather sinister to watch her hang around with Marcel Marceau, especially when she seems to have a crush on him. He looked younger than his age too but given that he was over fifty that's still a lot older than her. Nothing happens between them though, everything remaining as innocent as it would be in a Hans Christian Andersen story, even though she ends up having her birthday party alone at Old Walker's mansion with Malcolm and the animated corpses of the Bartons, who act as servants and entertainment both. At least he's buried Old Walker by this point, because the old gentleman must have been starting to reek.

Just as we reach the pinnacle of this bizarre ballet, when Mrs Barton unwittingly cuts off her own finger while slicing the cake and Malcolm retrieves it and pops it into his breast pocket, Evil enters the story. Yeah, none of this is remotely evil, apparently, because Malcolm and Celia are our heroes. The bad guys comprise a biker gang who barge in with the corpse of one of their number to lay on the birthday table because he's just crashed outside the mansion. Good things happen, bad things happen and very bad things happen, but we get to see Marcel Marceau reanimate himself via remote control and climb out of his grave and that's worth the price of admission all on its own.

While William Castle directed and made a cameo appearance as a grocer, this is utterly Marceau's show, or perhaps his sheau. He's bizarrely watchable as the deaf mute puppeteer of the title and even more watchable as the old man who he turns into a quirky puppet corpse. The script was by Ranald Graham, his first film as a writer, but I wonder how much input Marceau had. Fairy tales are natural material for mimes, though he was famous for running through all of human life from birth to death in a few silent minutes. He did all the choreography himself and he must surely have taught Clay and Chelton too, who were presumably able students. In fact I preferred both of them in this film in animated corpse form.

By comparison, the biker gang get next to nothing to do except fight the puppet corpses, but they're comprised of an interesting set of actors. The only female biker, Mata Hari, is Helena Kallianiotes, a belly dancer who became Jack Nicholson's property manager. The rapist murderer of the gang (OK, they got to do some things, but offscreen) is Goliath, played by Biff Manard, who looks rather strange here in his sleeveless shirt and leather collar given that I know him best as the homeless baseball player Hap Ashby in the Trancers movies. Einstein is bug eyed Don Calfa, the hitman from Weekend at Bernie's, though he had already acted for Scorsese, Spielberg and Robert Downey Sr, among others. Napoleon is played by Joey Bishop's son Larry, who made a lot of biker movies around this time. That leaves Phil 'Kamikaze' Adams as Beethoven and he was a stuntman who played a lot of odd bit parts in movies. I presume Genghis Khan is the corpse, which leaves Mondo very little to do indeed.

The other notable name is Alex North, who composed the music and contributed to the film in a more solid way by fathering its producer, Steven North. It's a quirky score, as befits a quirky movie and it was nominated for an Oscar, making his twelfth of fifteen nominations. He never won though so the Academy just gave up and gave him an honorary award instead in 1986. I found the music a little intrusive early on, but perhaps my brain was still transitioning to the particular Twilight Zone that it needed to be in to get what was going on. As time ran on it seemed more and more appropriate. Some of it was sourced from the score he had composed for 2001: A Space Odyssey at the studio's request but which Stanley Kubrick didn't use, given that he had planned to use classical pieces all along. Other themes were reused in The Shoes of the Fishermen and Dragonslayer.

Overall I honestly can't say whether Shanks was successful or not. Different from anything else I've seen and very different from anything else I've seen with William Castle's name on it, it's certainly a memorable piece and I'll want to come back to it again for a second viewing. Did it feel like a piece of genius? Not really. Was I enthralled, disturbed and entertained, as I should be when viewing a 'grim fairy tale'? Well, yes, I was. I'm sure it's not going to disappear from my mind any time soon and that's usually a pretty good sign. As the closing remark to a notable career, it's a bizarre but worthy footnote. Maybe the film itself was the gimmick for a change and Castle had the last laugh. He died three years later at the age of 63, but perhaps his animated corpse is still having a great time today.

The Mind Reader (1933)

Director: Roy Del Ruth
Star: Warren William

Oh, how I've waited for this one! Every time I see a Warren William precode I wonder if anyone else should ever have been allowed to play a charlatan, a con man or an unscrupulous businessman. For four magical years he played all these things and there was a light on the screen that burned so brightly it was irresistible. Films like Skyscraper Souls, The Match King and Employees' Entrance show his blistering power but they're far from the only ones. He was still great once the Production Code clipped his wings but he was never quite the same. Imposing the Code on Warren William is like declawing a wildcat. I'm not missing many of his precodes now but this is the missing one I've burned for the most. William as the Great Chandra, professional fraudster and mind reader: how could I resist such a picture?

He hasn't become Chandra when the film starts. In fact he has so many personalities that we can't even be sure which is the real one, but I'm sure it's none of the ones we see. Later we find out his real surname is Chandler but we never find out what his first name is, his friends merely calling him Chan. By the railroad tracks in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, he's Dr Norman Le Blanc, the Painless Dentist. On the corner of First and Beal in Nashville, he's Dr Zukor selling his Wonder Hair Tonic, the miracle preparation of the age. In Emporia, Kansas, he's exhibiting the champion flagpole sitter of the world, of all things. His sidekick Frank Franklin, in the always welcome form of Allen Jenkins, has apparently been up there for 22 days, which probably really means half an hour, but they're not making any money.

They need a new racket and they find it, inspired by a successful competitor, Swami Mrajah, the Marvel of the Age. As the Great Chandra, the name taken from the front of a box of cookies, he starts raking in the dough, pun not intended. It's all crooked of course, with Frank and his other cohort Sam to back him up, designed not just to earn money but also to set up private readings later at a buck a pop. He even gets letters from women asking him questions, for another one dollar fee. It's hardly surprising its successful, given that it's Warren William, Allen Jenkins and Clarence Muse running this scam, but there's one more major character to come. Constance Cummings joins the crew in Kokomo, Indiana but she's not in on any of it and it takes her a while to really learn what's going on under her nose.

She plays Sylvia Reynolds, a paying customer in the Kokomo audience who wants to know if she's going to stay in town and get married or move to Chicago to look for work. 'A very great change is coming into your life,' he tells her, and for once he's right. She's a rather lovely young lady and once he realises who she is, he's smitten. Never one to fail to take opportunity by the teeth, he helps her out again after the show when her aunt loses her purse. He knows where it is because it's stuck under Frank's jacket but he sets up an elaborate plot to get it back and impresses her even more. When they leave town, she comes along with them as his secretary. It doesn't take long for him to propose. 'So love her! Why marry her?' asks Frank in one of many great precode lines.

It's in Danville that she discovers that the engagement ring he gave her was stolen by Frank back in Frankfort, a fringe benefit from a scam to let their scam go ahead. There are layers here, trust me. Frankfort has an ordnance against fortune telling and the chief of police is a smart cookie who's taken down charlatans before. So Chandler calls it a demonstration of science and persuades the journalists massed outside his train by starting and stopping his pulse at will. The chief of police has worked out his gimmick and broken it but Chandra reverses the move and ends up getting invited to dinner by the chief for a private reading. Warren William was never anyone to do anything by halves.

It can't last, of course, but Sylvia manages to persuade him to get onto the straight and narrow, at least for a while. He wanders door to door attempting to sell brushes in New York City but you know that's not for him, so when Frank drives past and proposes a whole new spin on their old racket, he's naturally up for it. 'Love. Marriage. Honesty,' sneers Frank. 'Now there's a combination guaranteed to get anybody into the poorhouse!' Did I mention I love precodes? Frank is now a chauffeur for Mrs Wilson Douglas Austin, a rich lady who lives for mediums and mind readers and he's being paid by both husband and wife already to keep quiet about their affairs. So enter Dr Andrew Munro, who promptly starts making news. 'Seven Park Avenue homes exploded since the first of the year,' says the paper. 'Isn't that terrible?' asks Sylvia when she reads about it and if you've seen one Warren William film you can already see his reaction.

To be honest William isn't quite as dynamic as I expected he would be here. He's certainly cast perfectly and he gets some great scenes, especially when he skips town and ends up as the drunk old Dr Divoni, finding a semblance of a conscience in the Goat's Nest bar in Juarez, lambasting the audience for being stupid enough to ask him questions, trust him to know things, watch him laugh at them. It's hardly the safest place to throw his crystal ball at the crowd but he's a little too drunk to care. Every time Sylvia finds something out he has a new excuse for her to persuade her back into line, even when Mayo Methot turns up in a short but powerful role as Jenny, a woman who sent him one of those dollar questions. He ruined her life and she takes a dive down the elevator shaft outside his room just to reinforce her point.

Yet when he's in character as the Great Chandra he tones down the charm and fragments his sentences. I think he's aiming at a suitably mystical tone but really we just want the sort of deep confident tones that only Warren William can bring to a con and they're not there. We have to wait until he's back out of character to see what he can really do. Constance Cummings is fair as Sylvia but Mayo Methot steals her thunder with that one brief scene and Natalie Moorhead is better too as Mrs Wilson Douglas Austin, though she doesn't have the part she could have had. Clarence Muse is excellent as Sam, but Allen Jenkins really steals pretty much everyone's thunder as Frank, with many of the best lines of the film and a more substantial part than he often got. He even gets the last word: 'It sure is tough to be going away just as beer's coming back,' he tells Chan. I love precodes.

It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)

Director: Robert Gordon
Stars: Kenneth Tobey and Faith Domergue

Man's greatest weapon of the seas is the atom powered submarine, we're told as this film begins and that's pretty great, all things considered, at least for anything except a movie called It Came from Beneath the Sea. 'The mind of man had thought of everything,' points out the narrator, 'except that that was beyond his comprehension.' And as the credits roll, reminiscent of Star Wars except they're scrolling out of the sea instead of the stars, we watch the waves roil and wonder what It is going to be. Well, we have to wait a little while before we can find out. This atomic sub gets chased across the Pacific by something that does a pretty good job of holding them stuck against their will for a little while before they finally manage to break free. Cmdr Pete Mathews brings the sub back into dry dock with something stuck in its pipes.

Given that this is 1955 you know that means one of two things: something that's going to suck royally or something animated by Ray Harryhausen. Fortunately it's the latter, a giant radioactive octopus, but this not being CSI: Miami they have to run thirteen days of tests to work out precisely what it is first. People laugh about scifi movies of the fifties so it's always surprising to find realistic science in them that puts our modern CGI fuelled shows to shame. It can be found here in the form of two serious scientists: Dr John Carter is the inventor of analytical biology and Prof Lesley Joyce is the premier expert on marine biology still living. Of course one of these characters has to be a lovely young lady and it's the latter. Prof Joyce is played by Faith Domergue, the same year she made This Island Earth, while Dr Carter is Donald Curtis, a year before Earth vs the Flying Saucers.

Compared to them, Cmdr Pete Matthews, played by Kenneth Tobey from The Thing from Another World and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, is just an arrogant little prick. He basically pressgangs our scientists into service, putting them to work for days at a time without much sleep. He walks past a No Smoking sign in the lab with a cigarette between his lips, while cornering the lovely professor with a set of chat up lines while she's too tired to resist. Or so he thinks! He underestimates her throughout the film, while Dr Carter is a little more understanding, even responding to the Commander's sexist assumptions that girls are just girls. 'There's a whole new breed who feel they're just as smart, just as courageous as men,' Carter tells him. 'And they are.' He even tries to give him a wake up call. 'They don't like to be overprotected, they don't like to have their initiative taken away from them.' Mathews doesn't have a clue.

He gets a couple of macho moments where he saves someone under risk to his own safety, but that's about it, and to be fair Carter gets the same. Carter and Joyce are the ones who really run this show. They work out what the monster is, they work out where it is and they work out how they can do something about it. Joyce even works out where it came from: the good old military test scenario. It comes from the Mindanao Deep, she suggests, spurred into unusual action by hydrogen bomb tests off the Marshall Islands. Now it's radioactive and many of the fish that provide its food have built in geiger counters that mean that they now stay away in droves, leading the giant octopus to find different food elsewhere. You know, like us.

Storywise it's a slow piece but kept interesting because of the love triangle at the heart of much of the dialogue that doesn't pertain specifically to the monster. Both Cmdr Mathews and Dr Carter are interested in lovely young Prof Joyce, even though she looks rather manly on occasion. No, it isn't Sylvester Stallone in drag. The film even leaves us on an ambiguous note when it comes to these three, though I'm guessing writers George Worthing Yates and Hal Smith were about to cop out and let our proto-feminist scientist forego equity and respect for blind machismo. We can't help but get caught up in the story and I'm sure everyone who didn't play on an American football pitch when they were in high school would be rooting for Dr Carter. I'm sure I'm not the only geek out there, folks.

Yates was the experienced writer, on a high after Them! a year earlier and with a number of notable genre films to come, including Earth vs the Flying Saucers, Attack of the Puppet People and War of the Colossal Beast. I guess we can let him off for King Kong vs Godzilla, because he only wrote the source story. Smith had written a few films, this being his last, but he was better known as an actor, for his voice work and for being Otis the drunk on The Andy Griffith Show. They do leave us with a few questions though, that stand out half a century later, especially to do with radiation. Most especially, is blowing up a giant radioactive octopus in San Francisco Bay really such a great idea, especially when the heroes are in the water not that far away at the time? I didn't see anyone suggesting decontamination here at any point whatsoever.

Given that this is a monster movie, I have to end up talking about the monster. It's a fun critter, suitably monstrous, which gets plenty of opportunity to wrap its tentacles around all sorts of stuff, not just atomic subs but tramp steamers too and even the Golden Gate Bridge. Iconic architecture is even more important in monster movies than it is in Hitchcock thrillers, after all. The only thing missing is a memorable sound effect but then there wasn't much of a budget to work with and I'm guessing that octopi don't tend to make a heck of a lot of noise, no roars or screams or weird ululations. We just have to make do with long tentacles slapping down onto unsuspecting San Franciscans.

Producers Sam Katzman and Charles Schneer only had $150,000 to work with, which meant that Ray Harryhausen could only afford to give his octopus six legs, dubbing it a hextapus. He does a pretty good job of keeping part of it in the water at all times so we hardly notice but it does look a little too much like a flexible starfish at points. Certainly it's great work for $26,000 for his stop motion work. What could you buy with that today? Two frames of some eight foot blue critter in a forest? Schneer and Harryhausen knew how to spend their money, this being their first of many films together. They'd follow up with Earth vs the Flying Saucers and 20 Million Miles to Earth before hitting a much more substantial budget for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The rest is history.

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Director: Eugène Lourié
Stars: Paul Christian, Paula Raymond, Cecil Kellaway and Kenneth Tobey

It must be the contrariness in me but I just love Robert Osborne having to introduce films like this on TCM where he has to talk about 'horrible disgusting terrorising mutant monsters'. It's one of the joys in my life. Frankly though this is one of those scifi films in the middle of the ranks, nothing to be ashamed of in the slightest. For all its tiny budget it's more than a few leagues ahead of the real Z grade movies that relished exploitative titles like this, but it's still behind the serious classics of the science fiction genre. Most notably it began the modern monster movie phenomenon and introduced to the mainstream movie industry a man by the name of Ray Harryhausen, the inheritor of the stop motion throne of Willis O'Brien.

Our trigger for action is the rather generically titled Operation Experiment way up in the Arctic Circle, but maybe generic is the point. We get the idea of it's all about by watching Prof Tom Nesbitt and Col Jack Evans and the rest of their military scientific team put on their goggles and wait at the rendezvous point for the plane that's headed two hundred miles north to explode something huge and atomic nearby. It's capably shot, with a glorious mushroom cloud, billowing fire and huge ice floes tilting and collapsing, though this is quite likely stock footage patched together with talent. The explosion shakes up plenty, as I'm sure you'll be stunned to discover, and it brings something strange onto the radar screen, though it soon disappears again as if it had never been.

It doesn't take long for us to find out what it is, but given that the movie is called The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms they really don't have a heck of a lot of opportunity to play by the classic monster movie rulebook and only give us hints. It does kowtow to that once, as the creature lumbers off behind a crag of ice to be hidden by an incoming blizzard, but thirty seconds later we see it full on, a hundred million year old dinosaur wandering around the Arctic, prompting George Ritchie, one of the scientists, to fall off an ice ledge in fright and end up buried by an avalanche. Prof Nesbitt sees it too, while trying to save Ritchie, but that just gets him flown home to be checked into the Hartley Hospital so they can look him over. 'Psychiatric interrogation re traumatic hallucinations' says the card. In other words, they think he's nuts.

You can write much of the rest of the plot yourself, merely plugging in the particular details at hand. This time out the hero convinces a young lady called Lee Hunter, the assistant to Prof Thurgood Elson of the Dept of Paleontology. He's the world's foremost expert on the Mesozoic age which is a good job because the monster turns out to be a rhedosaurus who dates back to precisely that era. We know that because Nesbitt identifies it from a sketch and so does Jacob Bowman, the helmsman of a ketch called Fortune that was attacked by the monster somewhere off the Grand Banks. It's working its way down the Arctic current, possibly to its old stomping grounds, the submerged canyons of New York, the only place the relics of the rhedosaurus have ever been found. Guess what the ending is going to involve, I dare you.

Well, let's back up a step. Sure, this is a pretty routine and predictable creature feature and we've all seen the story many times before, but this film is something of an original. Producer Hal Chester sparked the idea from two events in 1952: the theatrical re-release of King Kong, the success of which proved that there was a market for monster movies, and the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb as part of Operation Ivy. Connecting the two seems obvious today but this was the first film to do it and it took another year before anyone really took it a step further. Released in June 1953 it was followed a year later by The Creature from the Black Lagoon in March and Them! in June. Then in November came the granddaddy of them all, Gojira, the original Godzilla movie, though this wouldn't see American release until 1956.

There are other influences obvious too. Prof Elson is played by Cecil Kellaway, a delightful South African actor whose voice and appearance prompted many roles as clergymen or professors, especially as he grew older. Watching this film for the first time in many years, he couldn't help but remind me of John Hammond, the part Richard Attenborough played in Jurassic Park, especially when he takes the boat out to the submerged canyons to look for the creature, wondering what it would be like to take the thing alive. I could easily see him in a sequel blithely adding to a conversation, 'Oh, we have a rhedosaurus.' It seems strange to compare these two films, given the vastly different style of their effects but both were pioneers, one in modern CGI and the other in stop motion animation. Proponents of both approaches could easily use these two films for their arguments but as much as there was certainly magic in Jurassic Park I'd still go with the old stop motion approach to monster movies any time.

The script came out of Hal Chester's original ideas but he didn't write it. In fact six writers contributed, including science fiction author Ray Bradbury who was visiting his friend Ray Harryhausen on the set. Reading the script, then titled Monster from the Sea, he suggested that some scenes were very reminiscent of a story he'd written a few years earlier for the Saturday Evening Post called The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, such as the memorable one where the dinosaur climbs out of the sea to destroy a lighthouse on the coast of Maine. The very next day the studio bought the film rights for him and the picture changed its name to match his story. However, perhaps distancing himself from his pulp roots, he renamed his story to The Fog Horn for future reprints.

The cast are capable, real actors playing real parts rather than what would soon become faded stars playing faded parts. Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid plays Prof Nesbitt, under his stage name of Paul Christian. He was a star in German language movies at the time but had rarely appeared in English film, though to highlight his linguistic talents he has a scene here in French. His first English film was Bagdad in 1949, a terrible film but one with great dialogue, especially between Hubschmid and Vincent Price, who appeared behind him in the credits. Kellaway was a hugely experienced actor with credits dating back to 1933, including prominent roles in Wuthering Heights, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Harvey. Kenneth Tobey, who plays Col Jack Evans, was riding high in science fiction after leading the cast in The Thing from Another World two years earlier. He'd be back for It Came from Beneath the Sea in 1955.

Other actors were just starting out but would go on to forge names for themselves. Lee Van Cleef gets a very early role here as a sniper, though he only gets a couple of lines and not much screen time. James Best gets even less and I didn't even recognise him as the chubby radar man at the beginning of the film. People like Donald Woods, Steve Brodie and King Donovan are recognisable faces too. The biggest star though has to be the monster, brought to life through the effects magic of Ray Harryhausen, here working in a major motion picture for the first time, after a number of self made short films for children. This really set his career in motion and he'd soon return for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts and on to Clash of the Titans in 1981.

Harryhausen's rhedosaurus is great fun to watch and it's obvious that he'd learned his craft well, hardly surprising as he'd worshipped Willis O'Brien, the stop motion animator behind The Lost World and King Kong, for years. He'd even worked with him on Mighty Joe Young. While the rhedosauraus was fictional and differs from true dinosaurs in many ways, its motion is thoroughly believable, especially when thrashing its tail or munching on New York City cops. There are many iconic scenes that would prove hugely influential, not least the destruction of the lighthouse, the finale among the rollercoasters of Coney Island and perhaps best of all, the scene where the rhedosaurus comes up against high voltage electric wires. These are awesomely lit, with the sparks lighting up the monster then throwing it back into darkness. Compared to what Harryhausen does with his stop motion rhedosaurus, the real life octopus versus shark fight is just boring. No wonder this started a whole new trend in pictures.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

Director: Preston Sturges
Star: Eddie Bracken

In 1944 Preston Sturges was on such a roll it's hard to come up with its equal anywhere else. I haven't yet seen his 1940 debut, The Great McGinty, but I've seen his next five films and there isn't a dud among them. Most writers or directors would happily kill for one title like Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story or Miracle of Morgan's Creek, but Sturges wrote and directed all five in five years, and then followed up with this one. With a mere twelve films to his name as a director he was hardly prolific, taking a while to move up first from being a writer to a writer/director but once he got there his track record is beyond belief: all but one of those twelve came within the single decade of the forties. OK, he had regulars like Raymond Walburn, William Demarest and Franklin Pangborn and those names would never have hurt any filmmaker but these films don't let up even when they're not on screen.

Demarest is Sgt Julius Heppelfinger, a marine sergeant with more experience than can comfortably be imagined, with ribbons across his chest and with every reason to be called a hero. However he isn't the hero of the title because this isn't a patriotic war film, it's a Preston Sturges comedy, which means that we're about to watch another American sacred cow take a tumble, this time the concept of heroism. When he and five fellow marines with only 15c between them walk into a bar and order a single beer, they run across the real title character, Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, because he's the depressed guy at the end of the bar who buys them all a round. He's a marine too, or at least he was, and it's the fact that he isn't any more that's why he's depressed and why we have a story.

You see his dad was a marine, a winner of the Congressional medal of honour who was killed in action the day he was born, so all he's ever wanted to do was be a marine too. Everything in his life merely led to the moment when he became a marine, to walk in the footsteps of his hero father, but life has a habit of kicking us in the nuts when we least expect it and so when it finally happened, it lasted for a mere month. They discharged him on medical grounds due to chronic hayfever. He's so in shock that he hasn't even gone home in a whole year because he has no idea what to tell his mother. He's more like a mouse than a marine, trying to work out what he's going to do next by climbing into a bottle, especially when the singer in The Dog Watch starts on Home to the Arms of Mother.

His unwanted salvation comes through Heppelfinger and his men, especially when Heppelfinger realises that Truesmith's dad was his sergeant in the last war and he was there when he died. A private called Bugsy, who has no mother and really wishes he did have, finds out where he's from and promptly rings Mrs Truesmith, easing the impact by telling her that her boy is a Guadalcanal veteran on a medical discharge and he's coming home. It's just one little lie to help the boy out, before dragging him to the phone, but you know how slippery a slope that is. After Woodrow flusters around trying to be modest and deny everything without calling the man a liar, the Sarge jumps in and makes it even worse.

Next thing you know all seven of them are on the train to Oakridge with one of the Sarge's medals pinned to his chest, the plan being to sneak him home to mother and be done with it. The catch is that these marines did their job a little too well. The Oakridge station is packed with well wishers, four bands, the mayor, a reception committee, a key to the city, the works. OK, part of it is that there's an election for mayor going on but that's only part of it. Just imagine all the other things that could go wrong to help dig this whole a little deeper and they'll be here too along with a few more than you haven't thought of yet. When Heppelfinger and his marines see four bands through the train window they decide that one medal isn't enough and give him the whole bunch. It just goes on, layer after layer.

Did I mention that his girl Libby has become engaged to someone else since he left, someone who couldn't get into the forces himself because he had chronic hayfever? And that he'd asked her to do so by mail because he was too ashamed to come home to her? Schultz's Market starts delivering free food to help out. The local priest burns their mortgage in church because the townsfolk have bought it out in tribute to the 'Home of Heroes'. The reception committee announces a little monument to be paid for by public subscription, one called Like Father Like Son that has him shaking hands with his dad. They even want him to stand for mayor, 'an honest man who will tell the truth about what it's all about.' Doc Bissell has everything except popularity, so he's his party's way to topple the incumbent mayor, Everett J Noble. Oh, and that guy Libby is engaged to? Noble's son. She's Evvy Noble's secretary too.

Woodrow Truesmith is played by Eddie Bracken, who was also the hero of the previous Preston Sturges movie, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. He's exactly the right actor for the part, utterly honest but utterly naive, saying precisely the wrong thing at precisely the right time but in such a way that everyone around him thinks it's precisely the right thing. It's clever writing but Bracken nails the everyman vibe and he's as believable as could be. 'Everybody's been so kind,' says Mrs Truesmith while Woodrow, more and more nervous with every moment, tries to hide. He's no coward but he's steamrolled throughout and he flusters around trying to find a way out only to find himself deeper in that hole with every passing moment. 'So much can happen in a day!' he says, and he isn't exaggerating.

The usual Sturges names are as great as they always were. William Demarest is Sgt Heppelfinger, who constantly has to explain why what they're doing now is morally OK. They're not telling lies, they're telling the truth just with the names changed to protect military secrets. They should have burned his mother's mortgage anyway when his father died. There are six heroes there already, they're just throwing in another one for good luck. Franklin Pangborn is the chairman of the welcome committee who is confounded by nobody doing a thing he wants, even when he blows his whistle. Raymond Walburn is the mayor, Everett D Noble, as blustery and florid as he ever was. Harry Hayden and Jimmy Conlin are up there with them and Esther Howard is a joy as Noble's wife, who nonetheless seems to be Woodrow's biggest fan.

Preston Sturges is the real star though, Oscar nominated for this script but competing with himself, for The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. He had a knack of writing fast paced scripts packed with joyous dialogue where almost every line is a gag in itself, a setup for a new gag or reinforcement for an old one. The jokes are so layered that by the time you stop laughing at one you find yourself laughing at three more. Yet behind it all is a serious point, a moral story with depth and meaning, that only makes the comedy darker if we choose to pay attention. Blind hero worship is dangerous, as we discover in the end, and just as Woodrow digs his own hole, so does almost everyone else in the film. He's honest with them throughout, they just refuse to hear what he's telling them.

Sturges's real talent was to attack quintessentially American ideas and rip them asunder in ways that make us laugh, while never being anything less than patriotic in the process. Whether it be instant riches, glamour, millionaires, stardom or as here, heroes, he deflated them all while restoring the original humanity behind it. Woodrow Truesmith is not the hero he's made out to be but circumstances prove that he's a hero nonetheless. There are hints here dotted throughout the dialogue about buying war bonds, working at night if you have to, trusting in the marines. Yet the messages are never hammered home, they're dangled for us to take if we want to. More than anything the film suggests that we should think, about what we believe and why we believe. That's a heck of a lesson to throw into a wartime comedy.

Frankenstein (1931)

Director: James Whale
Stars: Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff

As any child could tell you, Frankenstein is one of the great horror classics, a story that has been told and retold more times than can easily be counted, but nonetheless Universal in 1931 felt the need to add a preface in the style of Ed Wood or William Castle. 'It deals with the two great mysteries of creation, life and death,' says Edward Van Sloan, preparing us for the horror that is to come. There's plenty of it, beginning with wailing women at a funeral and the mad scientist of the title telling a hunchback to keep out of sight behind a tomb until the gravedigger has filled in the grave, so that they can uncover it again. 'He's just resting,' says Henry Frankenstein of the corpse, 'waiting for a new life to come.'

Colin Clive is a great Henry Frankenstein, the son of the Baron here, who spends most of the time in his white surgeon's gown and manic features. Dwight Frye shines almost as brightly as Fritz the hunchback, a beast of a man who only needs circumstance to prompt him to demonstrate just how base his nature really is. He's Frankenstein's assistant, one who is more than willing to stoop as low as his master in emptying graves, this body being merely one of many because Herr Frankenstein is collecting parts for his creation from many corpses. The last thing he needs is a brain, a quality brain not a useless one like that belonging to the hanged man they pass on the way home.

If we didn't have any hints that things were going to eventually go wrong, it's hammered home here. Fritz picks up the brain from the Goldstadt Medical College, where Dr Waldman lectures on the differences between a normal brain and an abnormal criminal brain. He even has them in well labelled jars in case we weren't paying attention. Unfortunately Fritz drops the normal brain so takes the abnormal one instead, the one with a history 'of brutality, of violence, of murder.' Who would notice the difference? Oh, if he had only known! Naturally he doesn't tell his master, who completes his creation and waits for nature to be in place for his grand experiment. Sure enough it soon arrives. 'This storm will be magnificent,' he tells Fritz, 'all the electrical secrets of Heaven and this time we're ready.'

Having watched the 1926 version of The Magician within the week, it's obvious how much the abandoned old watchtower near Goldstadt that he's using as his laboratory owes its design to the previous film. It's one of the huge and ominous sets used for this film, some of which were recycled from The Cat and the Canary four years earlier. They look great, both indoors and outside in the countryside and the mountains, but the painted backgrounds sometimes have folds in them that are impossible not to notice even on a big screen TV let alone a theatre screen. Most eyes were probably concentrating on the monster though, especially given how well he's been hidden for the longest time.

After the wild success of Universal's Dracula earlier the same year, audiences were anxious to see who would play the character of Frankenstein's Monster and even the opening credits list the actor responsible as merely a question mark. Henry Frankenstein teases us a few times by pulling back the sheet that covers his creature only to show that the head is bandaged or by asking his guests to look at it but not showing us at the same time. No advance pictures had been made available and many assumed that they would see Bela Lugosi in the role. He had made a twenty minute test reel on the Dracula sets though the footage is considered lost, but he turned down the part because it was not a speaking role and possibly because the depth of the character at the time was not apparent. The script had changed by the time it got to Boris Karloff, as had the director, Robert Florey making way for James Whale.

In the end film, the creature actually has more innocent humanity than most of the leads. Henry Frankenstein told his fiancée Elizabeth about his experiments only on the day they got engaged, and having wandered off to his abandoned watchtower took four months to write to her, explaining that, 'My work must come first, even before you.' His former professor, Dr Waldman, is at once in awe of Henry's skills and in fear of his sanity. He explains to Elizabeth that his work in the fields of chemical galvanism and electrobiology far outstrips what they've done at the university but believes that his quest to destroy and recreate life has been advanced to the point of abject danger. It's quaint to hear a scientist suggest that the natural progression of research is dangerous insanity, but such were the times.

Of course these give us some of the best scenes, Colin Clive being perfect for the role and James Whale thankfully sticking to his choice rather than pursuing the studio's idea of using Leslie Howard. 'Crazy am I?' he asks his uninvited guests who turn up on the night of his grand experiment, Elizabeth, their friend Victor Moritz and Dr Waldman. 'You'll see whether I'm crazy or not,' he says, looking rather crazy, and invites them in to see his experiment. He raises the body up to the heavens, into that magnificent storm, then brings it back down to watch its hands move. 'It's alive!' he memorably repeats in a gibbering mantra. 'Now I know what it feels like to be God!' This is a truly magical scene that was promptly mangled because of concerns over its blasphemous content, especially after the film was reissued during the era of the Production Code. Thankfully we have the full film to relish today, but this line wasn't fully restored until 1999.

It's far from the only great scene because we're promptly treated to a few. 'Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous?' Frankenstein asks Dr Waldman, who has now seen the reality of his experiments. 'Where should we be if no one tried to find out what lies beyond? Have you never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud and what changes the darkness into light?' There's so much depth in these discussions that has resonated down the years into so many other science fiction stories and films. Where is the boundary beyond which we should not go? We're still arguing that one today over stem cells, which in their own way accomplish much of what Frankenstein aimed at. Waldman's response is simple: 'You have created a monster and it will destroy you.'

It's over half an hour before we see that monster and it's only a 70 minute film. He stumbles backwards into the room, only to turn and display Boris Karloff in the memorable make up created by Jack Pierce. This creature is very unlike the character in the original Mary Shelley novel (though this is really based more on the later play by Peggy Webling), ironically the only real similarity being the fact that it was yellow in colour, something we can't see given that it's a black and white film. All those images with the flat head and the electrodes in the neck that you know well stem from Pierce's make up design for this film. The creature can't speak, he leans at ungainly angles weighed down by heavy boots and he's simply awe inspiring. Yet even through the thick make up it's Karloff's eyes that are the real gems, eyes that tell who the creature really is, longing for the light and pleading when it's gone.

Abnormal brain or not, it's Fritz that brings out the monster, who begins to rage only when Fritz rushes in to the room with a huge torch. Sure enough the vicious little hunchback soon takes delight in tormenting the creature, with fire and a whip. It isn't surprising to find that horrific screams emanating from the cellar turn out to be a dying Fritz that the creature has strung up, hanged by his own whip, the first victim for Frankenstein's Monster. Who knows how many have followed, in this film, in what has become nine Universal sequels beginning with 1935's Bride of Frankenstein, the seven entries in the Hammer series that started with The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 and many others.

Even today the most memorable may well be little Maria, who the creature discovers here by a lake after her father leaves to check his traps. Just like the seven year old actress who played her, Marilyn Harris, she isn't scared of the monster at all and simply wants to play with him. 'See how mine floats,' she says as she throws a flower into the lake. Once he's out of flowers, he picks her up and throws her in too, thinking that she'll float as well. The whole scene is amazingly innocent but remains one of the most controversial scenes in all of cinema. Both Karloff and Harris are wonderful and this cements the misunderstood nature of the character, building its depth superbly. Karloff isn't actually in this film too much, the early Universal horror holding true to the principle of only showing the monster when they had to, but he's magnetic throughout.

There are flaws here. The camerawork is a little shaky on occasion, especially when moving through the town. The folds in the great backgrounds to the sets get more noticeable as the film runs on because we end up in the mountains against a background of sky. Everything is Germanic, from the costumes to the dances, let alone the names, but for some reason Frederick Kerr plays Baron Frankenstein like an Englishman. What he does here isn't far removed from what Nigel Bruce did as Dr Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes. The influence of The Magician is obvious, when you watch the two together, but only in some of the sets.

Yet this remains one of the most iconic and imitated films of all time. Mary Shelley's novel is timeless but this is a very free adaptation and brings its own elements to the mythos. The make up is new here as are the performances by people as notable as Dwight Frye and Colin Clive, let alone Boris Karloff who finally found stardom in Hollywood at the age of 44 after twelve years in supporting roles in silents, serials and early sound films. After solid work in the silents, It's ironic that his greatest success came in a sound film in which he didn't speak. From here he didn't look back, making over 150 films of varying quality but in which he is rarely anything but the best thing in them.

Miss Pinkerton (1932)

Director: Lloyd Bacon
Stars: Joan Blondell and George Brent

I wasn't initially sure what to expect from Miss Pinkerton but it's a precode starring Joan Blondell so that's all the reason I really need to watch. The opening credits identify that it's based on a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart though, so the tone becomes obvious. If you didn't know that she wrote creaky old house mysteries, you'd have worked it out from the use of atmopheric shadows as we're introduced to the setup. Old house mysteries are where murder mysteries and horror films blurred together, Rinehart's best known novel being The Bat, and sure enough this one begins with a murder at the old Mitchell home at 10th and Sylvian. Young Herbert Wynn is dead, shot through the head.

Inspector Patten is investigating, in the friendly form of George Brent, but he's an inexperienced detective, this being his first case. Wynn's body was set up to appear like a suicide but the family are naturally trying to pass it off as a sad accident while he was cleaning his gun. Patten knows it's neither as there are no powder burns and moreover, he would seem to be an unlikely candidate for taking his own life. 'He couldn't kill himself, not the kind he was,' says Hugo the butler. Aunt Juliet puts it in more definite words. 'He was a coward,' she says, straight out. With a fresh $100,000 life insurance policy on the table and odd people continually turning up to claim their part in the story, the motives for murder are plentiful.

What he can be sure of most is that everyone in the Mitchell house looks suspicious, so he acquires some surreptious help in the form of Georgia Adams, a nurse at the Polyclinic Hospital. After all Wynn's aged Aunt Juliet found the body and has been confined to bed with shock. A nurse to care for her can be there all day and all night and see things that a detective might not, and Nurse Adams is more than willing to help out because the routine of hospital life is driving her nuts. 'Mind a change?' she tells her matron. 'Lady, if you only knew!' Naturally Joan Blondell plays Nurse Adams and she looks as fetching in her uniform as you might expect. Patton dubs her the Miss Pinkerton of the title.

The old house mystery followed a reasonably strict formula and this one is no exception, adhering to all the conventions. Women are attacked but however it's done they get the opportunity to scream long and loud. Lights go out at inopportune moments to conceal nefarious activity that usually involves escaping through windows or locked doors. Shadows play a big part in proceedings and there have to be at least a couple of scenes where they show us menacingly clutching hands. Revelations are made as the story progresses of secret marriages, secret passages, in fact anything that has been kept secret. Most important of all, characters have to pronounce impending doom. 'Something might happen,' says Aunt Juliet here, 'something terrible.'

Every character sneaks around looking suspicious, including any that aren't. The detective's task is always harder in an old house mystery because they can't just watch for telltale signs of guilt because everyone looks so continually guilty that they all must be guilty of something, even if it isn't murder. Guilt is guilt in an old house mystery, whether the character is guilty of murder or sneaking an extra bowl of cornflakes in the morning. Here Mary the maid is uncommonly close to Aunt Juliet, Hugo the butler can't stand up straight and really knows how to skulk and even Dr Stuart looks uncommonly sinister. Actors like John Wray, C Henry Gordon and Blanch Friderici are far from well known names but they all look familiar. Holmes Herbert is more recognisable as the Mitchell lawyer, Arthur Glenn. Elizabeth Patterson impresses as Aunt Juliet.

All in all this one's a routine affair, fun to watch but without much substance. It doesn't do anything that any other old house mystery doesn't do, with the single exception of the presence of Joan Blondell. She can usually be counted on to elevate anything at least a notch but she struggles here. The whole thing needed a little something extra to really engage, there really being no solid detective work being done by anyone. Nurse Adams gets to provide some of the glue but she isn't anywhere near as fun as many of the unlikely female detectives of the era and she really doesn't have much passion for it, being relegated to being a pleasant diversion. For his part Insp Patten merely arrests everyone apparently on the basis that he'll get it right in the end. It's worth watching if you're a fan of someone here but not for much more.

The Brainiac (1962)

Director: Chano Urueta
Stars: Abel Salazar, Ariadne Welter, David Silva and Germán Robles

I'm driving the highway to Cinematic Hell in 2010 for the awesome folks at Cinema Head Cheese to post a review a week of the very worst films of all time. These are so bad that they make Uwe Boll look good.

One of the most annoying things about living in west Phoenix with its large Hispanic population is discovering that the cheap and plentiful supply of bizarre Mexican films in stores around the valley never come with subtitles. It's like being a child in a world of candy but being forbidden to eat anything. One day I'm going to need to learn Spanish just to be able to understand what's going on in bad Mexican wrestling and horror movies. So to me, K Gordon Murray is a godsend. He was a American film producer, often known as 'the King of the Kiddie Matinee' and what he did was to take these Mexican films, give them outrageous new titles and dub them into English so we single language speakers can understand them.

Unfortunately for him but fortunately for us, the IRS seized his back catalogue because of tax issues he was going through but before he could contest the situation in court he died of a heart attack, leaving them in the public domain. I think I picked up my copy of The Brainiac at a dollar store somewhere, hardly a worthy price for such a delightful piece of Hispanic insanity. Murray, as his nickname suggests, mostly went for children's fairy tales, including many adaptations of the works of the Brothers Grimm and a series of Little Red Riding Hood movies. Yet even these are often strange gems, such as the notorious Santa Claus, possibly his biggest success, given that this Santa is an alien who battles a demon sent by Lucifer while visiting Earth on his mechanical reindeer. How can you go wrong with that?

This one is far from a fairy tale, being a low budget horror movie originally titled The Baron of Terror and released in 1962. It's a tale of legend, about a cruel sorcerer called Baron Vitelius d'Estera who has run afoul of the Spanish Inquisition. They're a rather ineffectual Spanish Inquisition though, one who have apparently not heard of fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, as we find out in the early scenes. 'We the grand inquistors,' begin the Grand Inquisitors, promptly yammering on about a charge of heresy against the Baron in some secret chamber before finally picking up a scroll to start actually reading. Spanish must be a really economical language and there's no way the rapid fire English dubbing can cover it all in time, but thankfully we don't have to worry about lip synching because they're all wearing hoods.

This is New Spain in 1661 and the Holy Inquisition doesn't like things like sorcery, conjuring or necromancy, as you might expect. They don't like people telling the future through use of corpses either, even though that sounds rather intriguing. What's more the Baron even seduces married women! And maidens! Yes, those are two separate charges, seducing maidens being apparently more wildly inappropriate than married women. Perhaps they're underage. And so these inquisitors sentence him to be subjected to torment, as far as is justified. Yes, these guys are all about ruthless torture, but only as far as is justified, presumably stopping after two eyes or ten fingers or something.

Naturally he'll be proved guilty if such torture results in his being maimed or his blood being drawn. I'd suggest that if his blood wasn't drawn during torture they really need a lot more practice, but Baron Vitelius is apparently a rather powerful man, so much so that he laughs with disdain at their tortures. He welcomes their torment, in fact he eggs them on because he thoroughly enjoys it, but all we see is his startlingly unharmed body relaxing in this mediaeval torture chamber like it was a tiki bar and he was Dean Martin waiting for a drink. No wonder the hooded inquisitors are pissed off, so much so that when a mysterious Portuguese man turns up to speak in the Baron's defence, they ask him to be honest and then give him two hundred lashes for disagreeing with them. Pretty tough, huh? Nobody expects... etc etc.

Anyway, Baron Vitelius makes the chains that bind him vanish into thin air to reappear instead on the legs on his inquisitors, not because he wants to escape but just through some quirky sense of humour or something. Those wacky mediaeval sorcerers! So rather than using his vast powers to kill them all and escape, he decides to let them dress him in the clothes of shame, which strangely makes him look like the Pope, and then burn him alive in a field. Perhaps, as a student of astronomy, he knew that his earthly demise would coincide with someone holding up to the screen a badly drawn comet so that he could hitch a magical ride three hundred years into the future. And that's what he does, after pledging to return and wipe the bloodlines of his four tormentors from the face of the Earth.

That means swinging 1961 where a young couple of comet following astronomers are kicking up their heels but decide to wander off to visit Prof Millán at the observatory on the very night that the Baron's comet is due to return. Sometimes bad writing just thrives on coincidence, like the fact that their professor doesn't even tell them about it until they get there. He has a stack of old books that talk about the Baron's comet in detail. 'Comet seen,' they say, which means that it'll be visible at 2.36am precisely. In other words, about now. He tells us that time, by the way, I didn't just make it up, but even with such accuracy he keeps it all secret until 2.35am. Nonetheless, it isn't there. 'It's not possible,' the Professor says when Ronnie Miranda can't find it in a full ten seconds. 'I think something's gone wrong.' With the cosmos. Yeah!

Fortunately Ronnie's fiancée Maria isn't as much of a complete idiot. 'How beautiful it is,' she says, as it turns into a firework, flashing sparks off the screen. It turns into much more than that too, descending in the form of a chunk of rock slowly to the ground, to then magically turn into a weirdly growling werewolf monster with the inevitable accompanying swirl of mist. I'm sure you want an explanation here but I'm a little hard pressed to come up with one. It can only seem that the Baron is powerful enough to survive being burned alive, hitch a ride on a comet, thrive for three hundred years without air or food and get back to the precise spot he left at the precise time he promised, yet just forget to stay human in the process. To do that he needs to suck brains.

So he finds a convenient victim seemingly waiting for him, so he can rape his brain by sticking a long forked tongue into the back of his head to slurp out his brains. If this wasn't a black and white film, we just know he'd be wearing a red shirt. Then he finds a drunk bar girl for dessert. 'You're sweet,' she says, because he's the only other person in the bar. 'I'm afraid,' she adds, probably because he just stands there looking at her, but she buys him a drink anyway and plants a kiss on his lips. Presumably she's looking for something more animalistic than just conversation, the little slut, but that's what she gets, because he promptly turns into the weird furball with a pulsating head, a pair of lobster claws and a huge forked tongue. You'd think that a huge forked tongue might be dream material but it wasn't to be. He just sucks out her brain.

You know that there has to be a little more to things than this and sure enough the Baron isn't just some brain slurping version of Jason Voorhees. He's suave and sophisticated, at least when he hasn't been kissed by a young lady, and he has a weird hypnotic technique that involves him doing precisely nothing while someone flashes a light on and off in front of his eyes. In the form of veteran Mexican actor Abel Salazar he's also something of a dish and women just throw themselves at him. One asks him for a match in the street, presumably some sort of Mexican prostitute code, and starts sucking on his face, so he returns the favour by sucking on her brains. It's like he's living in an all you can eat buffet and the food keeps screaming, 'Pick me!'

Beyond the magical powers he possesses, which I should add include the ability to turn invisible at will, he also has the benefit that Federico Curiel and Adolfo López Portillo, who wrote the script, haven't a clue how to write anything except conveniences and plot holes. Nobody has a clue who the Baron is because he hasn't been around for three hundred years but somehow they know his reputation as a gentleman. Bodies start turning up with the brains sucked out at precisely the same time he did but the cops don't connect the two. 'It probably was some maniac who thought he was cracking a safe!' says one of them. The Baron can also invite all his targets to the castle he promptly acquires and look them over, then bump them off one family at a time without anyone noticing the coincidence.

This party seems to be there entirely so we can see who the descendants are, inquisitor faces superimposed over those of their descendants even though they're played by precisely the same actors. To be fair two are now women but the names already gave it away. So Luis Meneses looks precisely the same as his ancestor Baltasar de Meneses, because they're both René Cardona; and Prof Indalecio Pantoja looks precisely the same as Sebastian Pantoja, because they're both Mexican horror legend Germán Robles. Ana Luisa Vivar doesn't look at all like Erlindo a Vivar because she's a girl but they superimpose her ancestor's face anyway just so we can't confuse her for anyone else.

That leaves Victoria Contreras, descendant of Alvaro Contreras, and here's where the Baron gets caught up in a quandary. She must die because he's pledged to purge the bloodlines of the inquisitors who put him to death, but she's engaged to Ronald Miranda, who you will be dumbstruck in surprise to find is the descendant of that Portuguese witness, Marcos Miranda, who took a hundred lashes for the Baron back in 1661. What's a poor revenge crazed, brain sucking monster to do? Well naturally he just has to ignore such a problem until he's disposed of everyone else first and added to his secret stash of brains that he keeps in a jar in a locked cabinet and sups from whenever nobody's looking. That's 'his medicine,' you know, because he 'once had a very strange disease.' I so need to use that line next time someone offers me a drink. 'It so happens liquor does me damage. I once had a very strange disease.' Then I can flash a light in my eyes and suck out their brains.

He has so much fun disposing of his victims too. Prof Pantoja has a daughter, Maria Pantoja, a smouldering beauty with a father who gets scarily bug eyed when the Baron hypnotises him into paralysis. He only gets more bug eyed as he seduces his daughter in front of him just to prove he can and then sucks both their brains out. Then it's Luis Meneses and his wife and the same goes here. He seduces the wife then sucks out her brains even though he attacks her from the front. His tongue is longer than that of Gene Simmons but apparently just as versatile. Ana Luisa Vivar doesn't get to be seduced in front of her boyfriend because she faints clear away and that boyfriend is already doing a handstand in the bathtub with his head underwater. Apparently in the magical world of Baron Vitelius, even corpses don't obey the laws of gravity.

This is amazing stuff and there's so much here to love. I haven't even mentioned the cops yet, of which there are two because that's apparently the entire local police force, one detective inspector and a sidekick detective for comic relief. Oh, and there's a coroner too. Perhaps there are only two cops because they have so little budget that they have to take odd jobs like policing the Baron's party of carefully selected guests in case jewel thieves turn up. The rest of the budget obviously went on their sixties Mexican ghostbuster costumes, which come out of nowhere and stun us into disbelief. Who you gonna call?

The detective inspector is David Silva, who is bald headed and big enough to be a wrestler. Naturally they dub him with a soft voice, laid back and dreamy. 'I wish they'd find some way to control the subjects a man studies,' he says because the coroner believes the killer knows about anatomy. 'A maniac with a lot of knowledge is a threat.' He should move to Texas. His sidekick Danny is played by Federico Curiel who looks like a bad American businessman but through dubbing sounds more like Ted Raimi. 'Right, chief?' he says a lot, because he's never sure of anything. 'Make sure you tag the bones well,' he tells a cleanup crew at one point, 'because if you miss one I might get mixed up.' He's a scream, and I wish he would.

What's so magical about this film is that it's so cool but any time you attempt to analyse it the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards because it's glued together with distraction. For instance our young heroes, Ronnie Miranda and Veronica Contreras, are budding young astronomers who leave a party to go see the Baron's comet even though they have no idea it's there. Yet later on, they decide to ignore the perplexing conundrum of science tied to this comet apparently disappearing into thin air to go to a different party, even dragging the Professor along for a lark. At one point the Baron visits the museum that stands where the Inquisitors' crematorium used to be purely so that we know what it is when the cops decide to go hang out there later, because hey, maybe the serial killer who's been sucking out brains all over town might be tied in to the Spanish Inquisition or something. Like, huh?

As an introduction to bad Mexican horror, you simply can't go wrong with The Brainiac. It has everything you could possibly want except zombies. The monster is memorably freakish, with its snapping lobster claws and that huge flopping forked tongue that is frequently taunting and deliciously pornographic. It's like the filmmakers weren't sure at all what they wanted to create so decided to combine a vampire, a werewolf and a sea monster all together, with plenty of hobgoblin to boot. Perhaps their confusion ties to the fact that there's precisely no reason for there to even be a monster in the first place, just a sorcerer bent on centuried vengeance. Abel Salazar certainly isn't too cool to play less hairy monsters, given that he was Dr Enrique Saldivar in a couple of vampire movies a few years earlier, The Vampire and The Vampire's Coffin.

Many of the actors here have pedigrees in horror, though Salazar came to it late in his eclectic career. After sixty or so dramas, adventures and romances, he found a niche with The Vampire and promptly followed up with The Man and the Monster, The Living Head and The Curse of the Crying Woman, all made for Cinematográfica ABSA, which also made The Brainiac. Germán Robles is the most famous genre actor, playing two generations of Pantojas here, both inquisitor and eventual victim. He debuted in those two Abel Salazar vampire movies and is still making films today, including a string of movies as an aristocratic vampire called Nostradamus, the Jess Franco/Soledad Miranda movie She Killed in Ecstasy and Albert Zugsmith films like The Chinese Room and The Phantom Gunslinger.

I so have to find a Germán Robles movie called Neutron Battles the Karate Assassins because a film with a title like that deserves to be reviewed for Cinema Head Cheese. Watch this space. Perhaps I'll get diverted into other films by director Chano Urueta though. He made over a hundred movies from 1928 to 1974, many of which seem to involve outrageous genre material. The earliest seems to be The Sign of Death in 1939, which is about a wizard trying to invoke the ancient Aztec god Quetzalcoatl by sacrificing a quartet of virgins. And Gone with the Wind won the Best Picture that year? I wonder why.

Urueta's most flamboyant titles come later in his career, not just with The Witch's Mirror, The Brainiac and The Living Head but with a string of movies about luchador heroes like Blue Demon beginning in 1965. If only I could find one of these with subtitles, perhaps Blue Demon Versus the Satanic Power, Blue Demon Versus the Infernal Brains or The Wrestling Women Versus the Mafia. Maybe I'll just have to go back to good old K Gordon Murray who took El Santo movies and dubbed them into Samson movies for an American audience. Now, which dollar store has those?