Terror in a Texas Town (1958)

Director: Joseph H Lewis
Writers: Ben L Perry, a front for Dalton Trumbo
Star: Sterling Hayden

This archetypal story is so familiar that what it reminds you of will vary depending on how old you are or which fresh take you happened to see first. For me, this is an early version of Nowhere to Run, with Jean-Claude van Damme and Rosanna Arquette. For others, it might be Road House or every other episode of The A-Team. Each generation has a dozen versions because it's a timeless story that cuts things down to the basics: good vs bad, right vs wrong, one man vs the establishment. Terror in a Texas Town is just one more take on that old chestnut about a town, the powerful man who owns it and the stubborn man who stands up to fight for what's right. Usually, only the names are different and here the town is Prairie City, TX, the affluent landowner is Ed McNeil and the Swedish whaler who takes him on is George Hansen, but there's an additional level to this take because what we see on screen also tells a story that resonates off screen too because the people making the film were fighting the system as much as any character in it.

The script was credited to Ben L Perry, who was acting as a front for the real writer, Dalton Trumbo, who few were aware had already won two Academy Awards. His first was for Roman Holiday in 1953, but he'd been fronted for there too, by Ian McLellan Hunter; his second was for The Brave One in 1956, which was credited to a pseudonym, Robert Rich, which he'd borrowed from the nephew of Frank King, the picture's producer. Of course, all of these shenanigans were to keep Trumbo, one of the very best in the business, working after he'd been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was named as a Communist sympathiser in The Hollywood Reporter in 1947, refused with nine others to testify in front of Congress and served eleven months in a federal penitentiary for being in contempt. These were known as the Hollywood Ten and they were promptly blacklisted from being able to work in the industry. Trumbo moved to Mexico with his similarly blacklisted wife and churned out scripts under fake names.

The reasons why filmmakers worked with blacklisted writers in such a roundabout way varied, but in this instance, director Joseph H Lewis didn't care because this was to be his last film. He'd shot forty features before this one in a variety of B movie genres: westerns, adventures and horror flicks, but perhaps most notably, films noir like My Name is Julia Ross and Deadly is the Female aka Gun Crazy. He'd continue on for another seven years shooting western shows on television, but he was done with theatrical features and so really didn't care where his script came from, just as long as it was good, and Trumbo had written Lewis's most noted film: Gun Crazy. This one is hardly original but it does everything it needs to do and Lewis was able to build well upon it. I was impressed with his work from the very outset, as it uses great camera movement and placement to have us watch Sterling Hayden walk down a dusty road towards a gunfighter, shot from behind that gunfighter's holster.

We don't watch it immediately, of course, because it's our finalé. Trumbo just sets up where we're going and then backtracks through highlights of a number of other scenes which we haven't seen yet until the opening credits end and we watch the burning of Brady's farm, barn and livestock. As you'll be stunned to realise, this was a deliberate act of arson aimed at clearing Brady off his land and the rest of the folk in town have been threatened too. Apparently Ed McNeil breezed into Prairie City and claimed to own it all, with land grants to back up his story, he says but we don't quite believe. The townsfolk, most of whom have lived there for years, are resisting his claims so he's been trying a variety of tactics to make these 'squatters' leave. He's paid a few off with money and now plans on scaring the rest into hitting the road. And, if the Brady fire doesn't do the job, he has a new card to play: Johnny Crale, an old school gunfighter doing an old school job, even in changing times. His era is ending but his bullets kill all the same.

And here's where we leap back to the Hollywood blacklist, because Dalton Trumbo wasn't the only man involved in this movie who was on it. Nedrick Young was an actor who had been branching out by writing scripts, such as Elvis Presley's Jailhouse Rock in 1957. His screenplay the following year for The Defiant Ones won him an Academy Award, though his original story, which was adapted by Harold Jacob Smith, was credited to Nathan E Douglas (note the initials), because Young had been blacklisted too. He plays Johnny Crale in this film like the industry he and Trumbo, as well as so many others, were suffering from. He's a bully, an intimidator and, if that doesn't work, an assassin. His ways are old ones that are out of place in the modern world but he can't retire even with a broken shooting hand. His girlfriend Polly tells him that he can't walk into a town and walk out again the way he used to, with state police and rangers and the like now at work, but he is what he is and he can't be anyone else.

For a blacklisted screenwriter about to win a Oscar, Young is a rather interesting actor and Lewis knows exactly how to capture him. We meet him in McNeil's plush suite above the local saloon, where the boss hires him over lobster, even if his right arm has been mangled and he's learned to shoot with his left. An acerbic conversation between the two includes McNeil's 'secretary', who often remains silently in shot as the camera moves around the room and between the speakers. McNeil is a cheerfully controlling swine who doesn't trust anybody, even with Sheriff Stoner in his pocket. As Johnny Crale, Young roils overtly, even if his physical movements are kept to a minimum; he's like Humphrey Bogart in a back brace. And Marilee Earle as that secretary, Mona Stacey, seethes silently at her invisible leash. The camera knows exactly where to go and it elevates the scene magnificently. The banter is summed up by a telling line: 'As long as there are people like you,' Crale tells McNeil, 'there'll be work for people like me.'

This isn't a Nedrick Young film, though, even if he's the villain’s villain. It isn’t a Sebastian Cabot picture either, even though he's the Boss Hogg of the piece. It's a Sterling Hayden movie and I’m watching for him, as he would have been a hundred years old on 26th March, my birthday. He’s George Hansen, the son of the example that McNeil has Crale set to the town after Brady’s fire doesn’t dissuade them from opposition to his landgrabbing schemes. Sven Hansen used to be a Swedish whaler and so did George, who arrives to help his dad run their farm, only to receive the news of his murder on the way into town, from no less a person than Johnny Crale. ‘Did you know him?’ Hansen asks the hired gun in his Swedish lilt. ‘Not very well,’ replies Crale. ‘Not for long.’ This is brutal stuff but it underlines who Crale is because this is what he does and it’s the one and only thing he truly understands. ‘How did he die?’ Hansen asks. ‘Somebody shot him,’ calmly replies the very man who did the deed.

And so George discovers the lay of the land, which is that he’s very likely to get screwed out of the farm he’s been sending money over for after every voyage because, well, justice. Sheriff Stoner is a dead end; ‘How can I get in trouble claiming what is mine?’ asks the whaler, finding that if he sets foot on his land, he’ll be promptly arrested for trespassing. McNeil tries to buy him out and, getting nowhere, tries threats but Hansen’s honesty, stubbornness and ability to crunch any new scenario down to a simple question is an experience he can’t handle. He has a line on everything except honesty and that flusters him. There’s no real suspense to how the film progresses. We know he’s going to go to the farm anyway. We know he’s going to meet José Mirada, his father’s friend who witnessed his killing but kept quiet in order to keep his pregnant wife out of harm’s way. We know he’s going to get beaten up and thrown out of town. We know he’ll return because we saw it in the opening scene, with him bringing a harpoon to a gunfight.

We know all of this because the story is ruthlessly predictable, but it’s elevated by some neat character development in scenes that echo the struggle of the Hollywood Ten and the other filmmakers who were blacklisted by the industry. Hansen tries to find others to stand with him and finds none, albeit for a few different reasons. Some are scared, more feel powerless, while others, like their leader, a deacon called Matt Holmes, want to fight legally. Trumbo and the others in the Hollywood Ten did the latter, believing, as Americans, that they had the right to freedom of speech and could belong to any political party they wanted, even if it was the Communist Party. They appealed to the Supreme Court but lost their fight, an unexpected loss that’s clearly echoed in how the script deals with Deacon Matt. He’s probably right, the one man doing things according to the book, but he’s ignored and his belief in the law derided. Instead, the film calls on an old fashioned hero with old fashioned guts whom the Hollywood Ten surely needed.

Sterling Hayden plays a good old fashioned hero with old fashioned guts. While we know what McNeil is after, he doesn’t for quite a while so his fight is entirely on moral grounds. ‘The truth,’ Hansen tells Polly, Crale’s long suffering girlfriend, in a blistering scene. ‘That is not so difficult to understand.’ If the writer and his compatriots believe that they’re George Hansen but were treated like Deacon Matt, Ed McNeil is the corrupt US government and the old fashioned bully, Johnny Crale, is HUAC personified, then it’s not difficult to read Polly as the American people at the time. ‘Why do you stay with a man like this?’ Hansen asks her, because she’s clearly not happy with her boyfriend who won’t listen to her, won’t do anything she asks and will continue to work his wicked ways until someone else takes him down. There’s a lot of pent-up frustration in her reply. She needs him, pure and simple, because she knows that she’s low and Crale is the only person who’s lower than her. How’s that for a bitter take on the Communist witchhunts?

It’s those parallels to real life American politics that render this a blistering western morality tale, but it’s done really well even outside that. No, I don’t buy Hayden’s inconsistent Swedish accent, though he is a lot better at it than I would have expected, had I realised he was going to attempt such a thing. He’s the tall, strong, principled hero that the story calls for right down to a tee, just as Ned Young is superbly cast as the hired gun. ‘They all came here to see blood,’ he sneers and we can’t help but hate him with every fibre of our being, even if we don’t know what he represents. Sebastian Cabot is spot on as McNeil and I thoroughly enjoyed Carol Kelly’s deep self-hatred as Molly. The rest of the cast provide capable support, even if actors like Victor Millan perhaps overdo the simplicity, but it’s the combination of script, direction and camerawork that really sells this picture which, because of its undertones, transforms the new lands of possibility into a trap of corruption and deceit. It sits well with The Ox-Bow Incident and High Noon.

I have to come back to the camerawork of Ray Rennahan, the director of photography. He was massively experienced, having pioneered colour in Hollywood as far back as sequences in the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments. He had two Oscars under his belt, for Gone with the Wind and Blood and Sand, but it could easily be argued that he should have won more. There are a string of amazing shots in this film that are worthy of being highlighted but, to avoid spoilers, I’ll only mention a couple. One is that opening shot where we’re positioned behind Johnny Crale’s holster to watch Hansen approach from the bad guy’s perspective. Another accompanies the murder of Sven Hansen. Mirada was there with his son, Pepe, but, with Crale riding towards the farm, Hansen has them stay in the barn to keep them safe and Rennahan’s camera follows them right in to watch the whole thing unfold through the window. Terror in a Texas Town is a forgotten gem, made by a bevy of Oscar winners, and Rennahan is prominent among them.

Of course, I’m watching this to celebrate the centennial of Sterling Hayden’s birth and he does fine work here too, even if he never won an Academy Award of his own; the closest he got was a nomination for a BAFTA as Best Foreign Actor for Dr Strangelove. He was well cast here, with the exception of that accent, as he had been promoted by Paramount as ‘the beautiful blond Viking god’. At 6’5” he certainly towered over most of his co-stars and that helped him here. He was well established at this point, with films like The Asphalt Jungle, Johnny Guitar and The Killing behind him, though he hated acting, accepting roles to finance his sailing habit, and he despised the industry. As Lt John Hamilton, he served in the OSS in World War II, supplying Yugoslavian Communist partisans with what they needed to fight Nazis. His admiration for them led to a brief membership in the Communist Party; unlike Trumbo, though, he co-operated with HUAC and named names. He regretted that deeply and perhaps it prompted him to accept this role.

His life really didn’t help his career, beyond not actually wanting to act unless it paid for his sailing. What he cared about most was the sea, having discovered it at sixteen, dropping out of school and working on a schooner. He fished the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and worked as a mate or fireman on a variety of vessels in a similar variety of places, sailing around the world more than once. At only 22, he captained a square rigger from Gloucester, MA to Tahiti. No wonder his autobiography in 1962 was entitled Wanderer rather than some reference to one of his many memorable characters. His co-operation with HUAC meant that he was never blacklisted, but problematic custody battles with a wife he married three times and an awkward tax situation meant that he lived outside the US because he’d have been arrested on his return; he missed out on roles like Quint in Jaws because of that. Whether he liked it or not, most know his name as an actor, though, and this underrated film is worthy of mention alongside his many classics.

Angel Baby (1961)

Director: Paul Wendkos
Writers: Orin Borsten, Paul Mason and Samuel Roeca, from the novel Jenny Angel by Elsie Oakes Barber
Stars: George Hamilton, Mercedes McCambridge, Joan Blondell, Henry Jones, Burt Reynolds, Roger Clark and Miss Salomé Jens

Sometimes reading up on a movie before watching it, even just synopses at IMDb that ought to be free of spoilers, can be rather misleading. Angel Baby kept me on the hop, because it does a lot more than what I was expecting and it does it in different ways to how it intends. For a start, there’s an opening text which recommends (rather late, I should add) that ‘you consider carefully this picture’s suitability for viewing by impressionable children.’ That suggests a salacious exploitation picture, albeit not too salacious as this is 1961, especially as IMDb plays up a clash between a woman ‘who believes she has been chosen by God’ and a ‘greedy promoter and his shrewish wife’. Well, you can safely ignore all that. This isn’t exploitative in the slightest, playing out instead as a melodrama with serious underlying themes. There is a clash, but not of the sort you might expect from that synopsis. Also, while we do have both a greedy promoter and a shrewish wife, they’re not married to each other and they feature in separate plot strands. Whew.

So, how to begin fixing that so you can watch without getting confused? Well, let’s kick off with the young lady who’s the title character. She begins the picture as Jenny Brooks, who has been mute since the age of eight, after her father hit her. Her devout mother, who’s poured all her money into medical treatments to no avail, brings her to a travelling evangelical preacher, Brother Paul Strand, in the hopes that she can be healed in a revival tent. Jenny is happy fooling around with bad boy Hoke Adams outside but Ma drags her in and, to her own amazement, Brother Paul manages to stir her into speech. It’s a miracle, ladies and gentleman, a miracle! And so when the show packs up to get back on the road, Jenny is there to go along for the ride and dedicate her life to serving the Lord. Now, if you’re imagining Brother Paul Strand as that ‘greedy promoter’, you’d be leading yourself astray. He’s a good man, spreading the gospel by whooping and hollering in summer revival meetings all across the deepsouth.

He’s also played by a young George Hamilton, so it’s no surprise to find young Jenny falling hard for him, especially as they’re of much closer ages than his wife, Sister Sarah, who’s the gatekeeper for their show. And, for all the exuberant praising of the Lord’s name, this is at heart a much more down to earth story, a good old fashioned love triangle which merely has Jesus hovering behind each of the three corners like a little angel on these folks’ shoulders, or perhaps a little devil because, of course, we’re not going to leap headlong into a happy ending. Hamilton wanted a happy ending of his own, deciding after four prior films to make ‘better, more serious movies’ mostly to impress his girlfriend’s family. I’m not sure how that story ended up, but he’s decent here as a holy roller with passion and verve, if not as a fighting man. The actor who debuted as Hoke Adams later commented that ‘George Hamilton beat me up in this film. Does that tell you something?’ That’s Burt Reynolds, a sexy muscled beast even if he hadn’t grown into himself yet.

Reynolds is surprisingly impressive for a supporting role in his first outing, but for all the testosterone on display in his scenes, this isn’t about the guys; it’s about the girls. It was named for a woman, based on a book by a woman, Jenny Angel by Elsie Oakes Barber and it stars three women, each of whom is far more interesting than their male colleagues. Jenny is played by ‘Miss Salomé Jens’, who lands an ‘introducing’ credit, because her future should clearly start here with a serious lead rather than her two previous titles, Showdown at Ulcer Gulch, a comedy short made by Chico Marx’s Disney animator son-in-law, and Terror from the Year 5000, a cheap sci-fi flick from Robert J Gurney Jr. She’s well cast here, pretty but plain, with the ability to look lost one minute and then let her eyes come alight and steal the show the next. It’s the exact combination that she needs to play Jenny and she does it well. She’d go on to a lot of TV work, like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but surprisingly few films of note.

She’s the lead, so we watch more of her than anyone else, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off her two female co-stars whenever they’re on screen. One is Joan Blondell, a vivacious thirties actress who progressed to more serious roles as she got older and larger. She’s Mollie Hays here, Brother Paul’s pianist who’s a little too fond of the juice. ‘Whiskey undid me,’ she tells Jenny, and it’s what surely prompts her drunken vision of something floating around the girl which she interprets as being an angel; and that’s how Jenny Brooks becomes Angel Baby. As won’t be surprising to anyone who’s enjoyed Blondell’s earlier movies, she’s the one with all the character here. Jenny is more notable for what she represents, but Mollie is more notable for who’s giving her life. She works well with Henry Jones, who plays her husband Ben, and she steals her fair share of scenes, whether drunk or sober. She also drives many of the key direction changes and stays on top of everything. She was more vibrant early in her career, but more interesting as time went on.

And that leaves Mercedes McCambridge as Sister Sarah Strand. As she would have been a hundred years old on 17th March and her screen husband here is currently a dashing hit on reality TV, we can safely say that there was an age difference and not in the usual direction for classic Hollywood. She had 23 years on George Hamilton, who, making his fifth feature, was younger than the debuting Burt Reynolds, who has a full three years on him. McCambridge was also by far the biggest star in the picture, having won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her own screen debut in 1949, as Best Supporting Actress for All the King’s Men. She’s known for classic Hollywood roles in Johnny Guitar, Giant and Suddenly, Last Summer, not to mention an uncredited spot in Touch of Evil, whose auteur, Orson Welles, called her ‘the world's greatest living radio actress’. Yet her filmography is wildly versatile, as highlighted by her ending the sixties with The Counterfeit Killer, Women’s Penitentiary XII and Marquis de Sade’s Justine.

Of course, her most famous role is surely providing the voice to the demon that possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist, making her role as a preacher’s wife here a neat contrast. There’s further contrast between the Strands too: Brother Paul is a New Testament kind of guy, healing the sick and believing in positivity; Sister Sarah, though, is Old Testament to the core, preaching hellfire and damnation with the fallen angel never far from her tongue. Her monologues are productions, perfect for a seasoned radio actress able to wrap her considerable talent around lines like those following their first contretemps over Jenny. ‘Oh, the devil has you in his grip,’ she mutters to him. ‘I know how swiftly Satan moves to coil his evil web around the heart.’ She escalates. ‘Why doesn’t God rain fire and brimstone down upon these women?’ she asks. ‘Show him the raging fires of Hell that burn in this woman’s eyes. Show him the Damned. Show him the fallen angels writhing in torment.’ Finally she gets to the point. ‘You must exorcise this devil, Paul.’

And so Angel Baby hits the road, with Mollie and Ben in tow to help run a new revival show: Jenny Angel, Miracle Girl, Preacher of the Ages. It’s here that we meet that ‘greedy promoter’ from the synopsis, albeit one who isn’t as outrageous as that suggests. He’s Sam Wilcox, a successful pharmacist and apparently a devout man, who witnesses Jenny in action as she persuades a murderer into a confession, then protects him from the mob until the police can take him. He proposes to manage and finance her with the spiritual line, ‘Are you cutting me in, Miss Angel?’ He’s no crook, he simply understands how money works and he sees her as just another product. Well, at least until temptation comes knocking and commandments are ready to be broken. There is a story here, after all, and Roger Clark gets to contribute plenty to its growth until the Strands inevitably rejoin it and we can move towards the finalés, one that follows Sister Sarah’s beliefs and one that follows Brother Paul’s. The very end could have gone a few ways but it works well.

From what I can tell, not having read Elsie Oakes Barber’s 1954 novel, this doesn’t follow it with any real zeal. For a start, it’s about Giannina Angelina who leaves a Boston slum for a mission, to be named Jenny Angel and marry Kendall Wyatt, before setting out as an evangelist. The Strands and the Hays appear to be the product of the scriptwriters; while Sam is in the novel, he seems to be rather different here; and a further subplot not in the film would appear to be the most important in the book. So this is a very loose adaptation and I wonder what it really aimed to accomplish. It appears to be pro-religion, pro-evangelist and even pro-faith healer, but it sets up awkward questions for the faithful in 1961. How did Sister Sarah pluck the 23 years younger Paul out of a choir to marry her and yet remain chaste? Are we supposed to see their different approaches to faith as equally valid or make a judgement call and call one false? And what of a love triangle between preachers? Marriage as purgatory doesn’t seem particularly biblical.

I’d suggest that the film sits uncomfortably between the passionate dramas of the fifties and the social exploration of the sixties. It’s late for the former and early for the latter, so it tries to do both and doesn’t quite succeed at either. It’s often compared to Elmer Gantry, an earlier novel by Sinclair Lewis which was adapted to the screen in 1960, a year before this film, with Burt Lancaster and Jean Simmons. Given the many differences between Angel Baby and Jenny Angel, it’s no stretch to see Elmer Gantry as frequent a source as the credited one. It does well though, with its strong performances and confident camerawork, courtesy of Emmy-winning Jack Marta and double Oscar-winning Haskell Wexler, who died last December. The story remains the weakest link, because it doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It’s engaging but predictable. It’s traditional but modern. It’s ambitious but careful. There are too many incompatible goals for it to truly stand out but it does remain an interesting member of the crowd. Can I get an amen?

The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967)

Director: Roman Polanski
Stars: Jack MacGowran, Sharon Tate and Alfie Bass

Dance of the Vampires, the original British title of what soon became known instead in the United States as The Fearless Vampire Killers, either with or without the subtitle of Pardon Me, But Your Teeth are in My Neck, is a rather strange picture. The original title might suggest a European vampire tale in the style of Jean Rollin with abundant nudity. The new one clearly plays up the comedic angle and the subtitle hints at Carry On levels of farce. It’s most often described as a comedy horror film or a horror comedy, as if the order of those words suggests a priority, but it’s really none of the above. Yes, it’s humorous, but it’s very much in an old fashioned style of humour that isn’t going to have you laughing out loud or rolling on the floor. Yes, it’s about vampires, but there’s very little plot and what there is plays so archetypally that the easiest description is as cliché. It stuns me that few people seem to describe the film as what it really is, a fairy tale, especially as it’s truer to that ancient form than anything Tim Burton has conjured up.

It’s especially odd to me because, to my mind, this fails as a straight comedy or a straight horror movie, but succeeds magnificently as a fairy tale. Watch it the wrong way and you’re going to think something is missing. Everything here is fairy tale in its truest sense: a story full of folklore, myth and hand-me-down knowledge, all phrased as a cautionary tale. You can see Roman Polanski, director and co-writer, start in on this immediately, with the arrival of Professor Abronsius and his assistant, Alfred, in the snowy wastes of Transylvania. It’s easy to see the Brothers Grimm in the opening shot of their sleigh beset by wild dogs, which Alfred beats away with an umbrella while his master sits motionless because, as we soon discover, he’s been frozen stiff. It’s obvious when they arrive at an inn that everyone has their own remedy for his condition, whether that be hot beer and cinnamon or just putting his feet into a hot bath. Some disagree; one wants to rub snow on his nose, while another says to leave it alone.

And, of course, it’s impossible to miss how they all clam up when Abronsius recovers and asks about the garlic hanging from the walls and the ceiling. No wonder he comes alive at this point, because it’s his life work finally showing some promise. He’s been travelling around central Europe trying to find evidence of vampires, but to no avail. This quest has already lost him a chair at the University of Königsberg and it’ll lead to him losing a lot more. Without providing spoilers, there’s a Lovecraftian message in play here, an old faithful that seeking knowledge for its own sake is an inherently dangerous act which will surely lead to bad things, usually insanity; the ending to this movie endows that message with a delicious irony. The Professor has been very much on that path for decades, though he’s taken nothing but wrong turns until now, collecting vast amounts of knowledge but no practical experience. Finally, his persistence has paid off and, as he eagerly tells Alfred, ‘We are nearing our goal.’

Before they reach it, though, there’s more ritual and folklore, always introduced lightheartedly. We watch Alfred place heated bulbs onto his master’s back in the old Chinese technique of cupping. The innkeeper, Yoine Shagall, has a daughter, who likes taking baths; her father spanks her because of it. ‘No baths!’ he repeats like a mantra and even sneaks through the bedroom of our intrepid heroes at night to board up the bathroom door with a hammer, then tiptoes right back out again. The next day, the inn’s maid hides under Alfred’s table when a hunchback with club feet and buck teeth walks in and a patron spits on the floor after he leaves. Everything has rules in a fairy tale because that’s what it’s for: follow the rules and you’ll be safe, but break the rules and outrageously awful things will happen to you. Amidst all this, it’s easy to read hidden meaning into everything. Suddenly, the snowman that Alfred builds in front of the inn seems like a guardian for Sarah Shagall, who watches him from an upstairs window.

Not that it works, of course, because people are good at breaking rules. Sarah keeps on sneaking baths and her father neglects to hang copious amounts of garlic in the bathroom, so leaving the way open for the local vampire lord to breeze in through the window in the roof. In a wonderful little touch, Sarah first notices the danger she’s in when she realises that it’s snowing inside the bathroom. This sequence is an archetypal one, over quickly but with every component needed: a naked girl and a caped vampire, neck biting action, discovery too late, voiceless terror and pursuit in vain. It’s well shot too, with a memorable shot of the Professor breaking into the bathroom to discover an empty bath with blood stained bubbles. While I’m watching for Ferdy Mayne, who plays Count von Krolock, the vampire who took Sarah and who lives in the inevitable castle on the hill, it’s worth mentioning cinematographer Douglas Slocombe here, who died last month at the ripe old age of 103.

Slocombe was a legendary British cinematographer, having shot many of the great Ealing comedies like The Man in the White Suit, The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets, the latter of which had that amazing shot which assembled eight different characters, all played by Alec Guinness. Today, he’s surely best known for shooting the Indiana Jones trilogy, the first of which landed him his third Academy Award nomination. He never won an Oscar, even though his work on Raiders of the Lost Ark could easily be regarded as a textbook on cinematography. By that point, though, he’d already won three BAFTAs out of nine nominations, his wins for films as diverse as The Servant, The Great Gatsby and Julia. The British Society of Cinematographers honoured him with five awards, the other two being for The Lion in Winter and Jesus Christ Superstar, and, in 1995, with a Lifetime Achievement Award. I’d highlight other titles of his too, such as Circus of Horrors, The Italian Job and Rollerball.

Ferdy Mayne was even more prolific, though he rarely played lead roles in his half century in film. He made over 130 pictures and appeared in innumerable television shows, but surprisingly few capitalised on his European heritage. A German Jew, his family had the foresight to send him to England in 1932 to keep him safe from the Nazis and he became an informant for MI5 during World War II. After a couple of brief early appearances, one in a sleigh shot from behind and the other while he seizes Sarah, he gets a glorious introduction inside his castle that highlights both the serious and frivolous nature of the picture. Perhaps inevitably for 1967, he plays the count like a sort of cross between Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, the two most recognisable vampires at the time. He aims more at emulating Lee, but his 6’1” frame was the same as Lugosi’s and his voice shifts during the film from the deep resonance of the former into the accented enticements of the latter.

That’s not to say that his performance is merely a combination of influences. He adds details to the role, not just the grey hair that neither Lee nor Lugosi would countenance. Most obviously, he adds a timeless patience that’s different to what either previous star brought to the role. Lugosi endowed Count Dracula with the politeness inherent in a noble upbringing, but Mayne adds ennui to that. He’s lived a lot of lives and has settled into a routine that bores him and the arrival of the Professor, whose works he’s read, is a welcome distraction from what could well be centuries of repetition. He seizes this opportunity with what Abronsius describes, in a neatly clever double conversation, as ‘the mechanical need to fight against the torpor of hibernation’. He’s talking about a bat, but his entire spiel applies to von Krolock as well. Among the Count’s more blatant lines, like ‘I’m a nightbird. I am not much good in the daytime,’ it’s easy to miss clever details like Abronsius’s monologue, but they’re still there nonetheless.

Along with Slocombe and Mayne, the other big winners at this point are Krzysztof Komeda for his choral score and the team who built a gothic castle to the specifications of convention but without skimping on scale. It’s a delight in every way, a huge stone construction packed full of vast four poster beds, drooping candles and antique furnishings, whether on the floor or the walls, and a dusting of cobwebs decorates the abundant wooden panels. The geometry is dreamlike, the combination of presumably unconnected sets and Slocombe’s floating camera raising an appropriate disconnection as we try to figure out what leads where. Abronsius and Alfred get to explore more during the day than perhaps they’d like but needs must. When Koukol, the hunchback servant, in the suitably bulky form of Terry Downes, a middleweight champion of the world, blocks the door to the crypt, our intrepid duo take to the snow-covered roofs to find a way in. The professor gets stuck in the window and Alfred goes the long way around to free him.

Again, this is the sort of thing that we read about in fairy tales. There’s so much of this, more overtly with the progression of the film, that it’s hard to read it any other way, but then perhaps some don’t have any background in that sort of literature, imbibing their fairy tales at the bar of Disney rather than the library of Anderson and Grimm. There are some glorious scenes that run on fairy tale logic towards the end. One has Alfred being chased around a colonnade by the Count’s effeminate son, Herbert, only for the vampire to stop and Alfred to run all the way round and end up right next to his pursuer. Another has the pair talk to Sarah in snippets during the grand vampire ball that provided the film’s original title, as if none of the vampires with their enhanced hearing could hear them. Best of all is their escape from the dance, with a bevy of vampires following them in procession towards a mirror, in which a mere three figures are visible: Abronsius, Alfred and Sarah, the girl they’re attempting to rescue.

I’ve seen this film before and enjoyed it, but watching late one night while I was sleepy, I missed much of the detail and found it surprisingly slow. Watching afresh in the morning, it was back to the speed that I’m used to and I caught the little details that I liked so much in previous viewings. My favourite is surely still the moment when Yoine Shagall, now a vampire, climbs into the bedroom of the serving wench he’s been sneaking around with; she holds up a crucifix and he, being Jewish, laughs at her and points out that she has the wrong cross. I love the use of colour, especially during the ball, which is full of faded vampires in faded outfits. When Sharon Tate is revealed, dressed in a bright red costume, she stands out fantastically. I’d call out Jack MacGowran as Professor Abronsius, the massively experienced Irish actor who overdoes everything gloriously, but it’s Koukol who sledges down a hill in a coffin and Alfred who’s pursued by a gay vampire. The latter is played by Polanski himself, refusing a credit until the very end.

At the end of the day though, it’s Sharon Tate who shines brightest. This wasn’t her first lead role, but I’m much more fond of her work here than anywhere else. To my mind, she was perfectly cast, even though Polanski was set on Jill St John. Tate is so desirable that it’s believable that Count von Krolock wants her and Polanski got her, the two marrying a year later. Their marriage lasted just over a year and a half until Tate, along with their baby which was almost due, was murdered by the Manson Family at their house in Los Angeles. She left behind only nine films and a few TV appearances, including a run on The Beverly Hillbillies. Sadly, she’s remembered mostly for her murder, but we can see her talent grow through three major films: Eye of the Devil, The Fearless Vampire Killers and Valley of the Dolls. Polanski would go from strength to strength, of course, and Mayne would continue to be prolific, even playing Count Dracula in a German TV show called Teta. He would have been a hundred years old today, on 11th March.

Bwana Devil (1952)

Director: Arch Oboler
Stars: Robert Stack, Barbara Britton and Nigel Bruce

Time was that I knew the name of Sidney W Pink from the astoundingly awful 1961 monster movie known as Reptilicus, which he produced, directed and contributed the original story that Ib Melchior adapted into a screenplay. As epitaphs go, being the man behind Reptilicus is really not a good one. It’s much better to be remembered as the pioneer of 3D movies, having kickstarted the 3D craze of the early 1950s with this film, which he produced. It was his first major credit, having only been an uncredited assistant production manager before this, on Lost Horizon fifteen years earlier, but it launched his career. After this, he’d move on to write, produce and direct I Was a Burlesque Queen, then follow up with The Angry Red Planet, which applied a reddening effect during film processing to simulate the Martian environment, a technique which he named CineMagic. His last credit was in 1970, as the producer of The Man from ORGY, four years after he had ‘discovered’ Dustin Hoffman off-Broadway and cast him as the lead in Madigan’s Millions.

He would have been a hundred years old on 6th March and that’s enough reason for me to take a look at Bwana Devil in his memory. It wasn’t the first 3D movie, that honour going to The Power of Love, released as far back as 1922, when Sid Pink was only six years old, utilising a process invented by a Harry K Fairall. It was previewed in Los Angeles, then booked to play in Newark, NJ, but it didn’t make much of an impact and, only a year later, the film had been renamed to The Forbidden Lover and released flat. Today, it’s a lost film. Bwana Devil, on the other hand, was a phenomenal success which sparked a brief revolution in filmmaking, a two year period which the 3-D Film Archive calls ‘the golden age of stereoscopic cinema’. It began with the premiere of Bwana Devil on 26th November, 1952 and ended with Universal’s Revenge of the Creature, which premiered on 23rd March, 1955. This ‘golden age’ includes fifty English language 3D features, 48 of which were filmed between January and October of 1953.

Sadly, Bwana Devil is worth watching more for its importance to history than for any inherent quality, but it’s still an interesting feature. In fact, the story that it fictionalises is interesting on its own merits, which perhaps explains why it’s been told and retold. Bwana Devil, with Robert Stack playing Bob Hayward, was sourced from the same historical events as The Ghost and the Darkness in 1996, with Val Kilmer as John Henry Patterson, and 2007’s Prey, with Peter Weller as Tom Newman. Lt Col John Henry Patterson was the real historical figure, who in 1898 led a British project to construct a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. Over nine months, two male lions terrorised the site, killing scores of locals and Indian workers and eating at least thirty of them. Patterson eventually killed both and published a book called The Man-Eaters of Tsavo in 1907. He kept the skins and used them for a quarter of a century as floor rugs before selling them to the Chicago Field Museum in 1924. They’re still there on display today.

This fictional adaptation changes Patterson into Bob Hayward, who is only in Kenya because his father-in-law is running the entire project from back in London. He gets to be the man on the ground and he clearly hates it. In fact, he arrives in the picture in memorable fashion: drunk driving a train from Mombasa into camp with the mail and a new cook. He remains drunk too, as if the liquor will somehow spirit him home to Blighty where he wouldn’t have to deal with the heat, the Hindu workers or the cool cucumber in a pith helmet, Maj Parkhurst, who commands the camp. ‘I’ve had enough of you,’ he slurs at the major, ‘and my father-in-law’s railway. I want to go home.’ Even when he hears about a lion that’s spooking the camp, he just heads out with a gun to chase it off. He can’t find it but fires off a bunch of shots anyway and expects that it’ll do the job. No such luck, of course. Fortunately, after the first victim is discovered, the new cook killed not by ‘those Masai devils’ but by a lion, he sobers up and becomes the lead the film deserves.

Thus far, we’ve had an intriguing opening credits sequence, in which the names stand out superbly from the background, even if the African chanting just repeats over and over on a loop. We’ve had very bright footage for 1952, because the picture was shot in Ansco Color; it was much cheaper than Technicolor but apparently holds up well, the copy I watched looking notably brighter than some of the faded Technicolor films that I’ve seen. We’ve seen a elephant filmed in completely different colour, as if Arch Oboler had no clue that viewers might see through such transparent shenanigans. We’ve met Nigel Bruce as the camp’s medic, Dr Angus McLean from Balloch, who is as Scottish as that suggests. And we’ve had a whole lot of nothingness. What’s oddest here is that nothing happens for quite a while. It’s all shot capably enough, if without much imagination, but the wild monkeys steal most early scenes until the film remembers what it’s supposed to be doing, kills someone off and focuses us back on the supposed man-eating lion.

It does get better, mostly because Hayward grows substantially as a character and because Robert Stack is up to the challenge, even if he occasionally appears to be wondering as much about what he’s doing in Kenya as his character. Ramsay Hill, who plays Maj Parkhurst, vanishes from the picture in rather a cheap fashion, his off screen death in Mombasa by scorpion bite being merely reported by the Commissioner. It means that Hayward is now in charge and he’d better sober up. The Commissioner comes from the grand old tradition of stiff upper lip English gentlemen, throwing out glorious dialogue which alternates between blissful ignorance of the seriousness of the situation and wild overconfidence about what he can do about it. He decides, of course, that he’ll just trap and kill the lion, because, well, the Indian coolies are ignorant savages or some such. ‘Great sport this, eh?’ he tells Hayward. ‘It’ll be a trophy by morning.’ Of course, it doesn’t go quite how he expects. He bags a hyena instead.

If much of this adaptation plays into cliché, not to mention melodrama, there are positive aspects beyond just the historical reasons to watch. Unlike most Hollywood productions, many of the Indians are actually played by Indians, with the film’s technical advisor, Bhogwan Singh, leading them. What’s more, the two lions are actually played by lions, albeit rather polite ones who seem to want to play more than to rend a man asunder. These lions do interact with the cast, unlike the many elephants, hippos and ostriches that Oboler shot separately, but there’s most definitely a plushie stunt double thrown at actors at points. It’s jarring to be shown Stack climbing into a kayak and paddling into a river, taking pot shots at hippos that look like stock footage, falling in and swimming out and appearing miraculously dry on the river bank to find the commissioner dead at the paws of one of the rather playful lions (if you ignore the screams), who couldn’t be more laid back without being horizontal. Believability is not one of this film’s strong points.

The best scene with a lion, however, is notably suspenseful, as Hayward decides to hire a set of wannabe warriors from the Masai to hunt down the lions. Apparently, they have a rite of passage that conveniently involves a boy not becoming a man until he’s killed a lion while armed with nothing but a spear. Just as a majority of the Indians are apparently played by Indians, so the Masai appear to be played by Masai. The movie does proudly announce at the outset that it was ‘photographed and recorded in the Belgian Congo, Kenya, Uganda and California.’ Just how much was shot in the latter, I don’t know, but it looks much more authentic than most Hollywood jaunts into the dark continent. These Masai surround one of the lions and close in the circle, surrounding it with shields and spears. The lion runs around in ever decreasing circles until making its escape out of the trap, leaving one dead in its wake. While attack scenes are mostly poor, this scene was powerfully done. It looks believably dangerous and that’s what this picture needed.

Of course, I watched Bwana Devil in 2D, but there are scenes that quite literally leap out as obvious shots for the 3D audience. Sadly, the one that Pink and writer/director Arch Oboler want us to remember isn’t a memorable one. Perhaps the native hurling a spear at the audience would have sold to folk in 3D glasses but it’s nothing but underwhelming without them. Even worse is the kissing scene, which tasks Stack and Barbara Britton with leaning romantically toward the camera with lips pursed in anticipation. After all, the film’s tagline was, ‘A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms!’ I haven’t mentioned Britton until now as she’s shoehorned into the script with no subtlety, just to provide a love interest where there doesn’t need to be one. She’s Alice Hayward, Bob’s wife, and she shows up late in inappropriate clothing for the climate for dumb scenes like bathing a native boy then walking him over to where the men are digging a ditch. Little Mukosi actually has more reason to be in the film than she does, as he sparks plot points. She doesn’t.

Of course, we don’t watch Bwana Devil today to see Barbara Britton. To be fair, we don’t really watch it to see Robert Stack either, but at least he has opportunities and he does grow his character substantially as the film runs on. He’s the only actor willing to attempt to highlight how long the Tsavo lions terrorised the real life equivalent of Hayward’s camp; he does so by losing himself in the quest to kill them. It’s not hard to see them as personifying the entire continent for him, an albatross around his neck that he’s unable to lose and which is driving him mad. He has to kill these lions, not only because it will end the suffering of his men but because it will end his own suffering through an assignment that he hates. It’s no surprise to find that once he finally does so (and that really can’t be seen as a spoiler), the picture has no remaining purpose and wraps up in what must be less than ten seconds. It’s literally a blink and you’ll miss it finalé, one of the quickest I’ve ever seen in film.

While I’d argue that the location shooting, the inclusion of natives and actors of appropriate ethnicities is a draw, with Robert Stack’s performance a secondary reason to watch and the presence of Nigel Bruce an extra incentive, the main reason anyone watches Bwana Devil today is its historical importance to film. It was the first colour 3D feature and the gimmick succeeded in drawing audiences back into theatres from their television sets. Everyone else threw 3D films into production, though it took five months for them to reach screens. First up in April 1953 were Man in the Dark, a film noir from Columbia, and the picture that most people think of as the first 3D movie, House of Wax from Warner Brothers, with stereophonic sound and Vincent Price establishing himself as a horror lead. Bwana Devil beat them notably to the punch with its technique called Natural Vision, designed by Milton and Julian Gunzburg. Oboler and Pink were making a film called The Lions of Gulu, but scrapped ten days of footage and started over with Natural Vision.

It’s hardly surprising that critics hated it, though it isn’t as bad as many have made out. It’s dull for much too long and takes a long while to really get started. It has docile monsters and pointless subplots. It has plot convenience issues up the wazoo and the 3D bits are cheesy and embarrassing to modern eyes. It’s hard to understand what it meant to audiences in 1952 but they adored it and continued to enjoy 3D for a brief couple of years before the craze wore thin. Maybe they really thrilled to the spear being thrown at them through the camera just as audiences had reacted to Train Pulling into a Station, the 1895 Lumière Brothers short which has become legend. It’s notable that the Lumières, even at the tail end of the 19th century, were trying to create films in 3D. In fact, Louis Lumière reshot that very film with a stereoscopic film camera and screened it to the French Academy of Science in 1935. In many ways, Bwana Devil was history repeating itself yet creating something new in the process.

Death Car on the Freeway (1979)

Director: Hal Needham
Stars: Shelley Hack, Frank Gorshin, Peter Graves, Harriet Nelson, Barbara Rush, Dinah Shore, Abe Vigoda, Alfie Wise and George Hamilton

The fourth centennial for me to celebrate in 2016 is that of Dinah Shore, who was a leap year baby, born in Tennessee on 29th February, 1916. She died at 77 in 1994, but technically she only saw 19 birthdays, so she was forever young. Like Jackie Gleason, her name was a major one across multiple media and it’s arguable whether she was better known for music, radio or television. As a vocalist, she was the highest charting female in the 1940s; one of her songs, Buttons and Bows, sat at number one for ten weeks; and Blues in the Night was only her first of nine million sellers. On radio, she starred in seven different series of her own and guested on many others. She had appeared on television as far back as 1937 but gained her own show in 1951 and racked up a string of successes that led to eight Emmies and a Golden Globe. Her film career never took off, ending with Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick in 1952, but she did make more for television, including this odd melding of genres from CBS in 1979.

Its reputation, surely emphasised by its title, is as a thriller, a late TV movie rip-off of Steven Spielberg’s masterful Duel, which was almost eight years old when this was first broadcast. While there are certainly moments of tension on the California freeways, the most suspenseful scene takes place off the road and the film plays out more as a journalist drama than a thriller, albeit one set in television news rather than newspapers. There are points where the picture seems to be attempting serious dramatic points, a long way beyond what might be expected for a TV movie, but none of them are really explored, so it ends up far less substantial than it clearly thinks it is. Shelley Hack’s performance doesn’t help, as this was early in her career and, while she looks cute and lights up well when she smiles, she’s understated and rather careful with her dialogue. She does have her moments, but the new Charlie’s Angel was unable to give Janette Claussen the gravitas she needed to really make the difference that she so aches to make.

When the story begins, she’s an up and coming news anchor at KXLA, but she’s still new to the business and very green. In fact, she seems a little too green for someone hired out of college by an experienced newsman, Ray Jeffries, who mentored her and married her. They’ve been divorced for a few months, but he’s still after her, both romantically and professionally. She’s polite and plays along, but she needed out from under his reputation, wanting to establish herself on air rather than just as his writer. She manages it too, discovering a possible link between two separate cases of apparent road rage, investigating them and building the story as it grows. Jeffries brings her flowers on the night that her ratings exceed his for the first time, but he’s too much of a male chauvinist pig to mean it. While Hack isn’t emotional enough, her character does get plenty of emotion out of her ex, played unsympathetically by a suitably smarmy George Hamilton. I may not have been entirely on her side, but I certainly wasn’t on his!

The news story is the thriller angle and we’re thrown into it immediately after the opening credits. Becky Lyons is driving to Van Nuys to be the first victim on an episode of Barnaby Jones. Instead she becomes the second victim of a driver with apparent anger issues. After cutting in front of a blue van to make her exit, its driver wipes down his steering wheel, pulls on gloves and puts on a bluegrass eight track tape to accompany his quest to run her off the road. He blocks her exit, attempts to bounce her into a collision and, eventually, shoves her little yellow Honda hard enough to leave it hanging over the guard rail of a bridge. Jan’s co-workers are cynical, one highlighting that the girl was in showbiz and probably wouldn’t ever get a better chance at fame than her on air interview at the scene, but Jan connects the incident to an earlier news report her ex had covered of a tennis pro, Dinah Shore’s character, who had experienced almost exactly the same thing. The cops don’t buy it yet but we’re now chasing the Freeway Fiddler.

If this was trying to be Duel, it fails pretty miserably. Spielberg had Dennis Weaver terrorised for over an hour, unable to get away from a mysterious truck that’s set on killing him, but Death Car on the Freeway replaces this tight approach with a set of much looser ones. That grimy and characterful Peterbilt 281, a model chosen by Spielberg because its needlenose front resembled a face, was replaced by an everyday Dodge van. The hellish suggestion that perhaps it was the truck rather than its driver that wanted to kill is ignored entirely here. The suspense of one driver being pursued along an increasingly claustrophobic freeway is defused here by having the killer rack up a collection of victims in separate vignettes. Shelley Hack isn’t even one of them, not getting to duel with the Dodge until the finalé. And, of course, we keep on cutting away from the freeway action to watch her cover the case, which is more important to the film because of what it means to her than for what it actually is.

It’s surprising to discover that Death Car on the Freeway hasn’t been released on DVD yet, given that its impressive cast list alone would endear it to many fans. For now, we have to settle for VHS rips or a YouTube upload. I had to try a few copies, the best of which was still far from pristine, the blue van being more like black and the ‘one car on green’ light being more blue. The opening credits list a set of ‘cameo stars’, some of whom get a lot more screen time than a cameo would ever provide. George Hamilton is the ‘and’ at the end of that list, suggesting that he’s really playing support for Hack, whose show this clearly is, but there are seven others in the list and only two really count as cameo appearances. Those are Abe Vigoda, who gets one ephemeral scene in a hospital bed to establish his cute nurse before she becomes a victim, and Harriet Hilliard, the Harriet of The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, who plays a blind landlady in a late but important scene as Jan closes in on the Freeway Fiddler. Those are cameos.

Jan’s co-workers at KXLA are all parts. She anchors with Alfie Wise, a regular in Hal Needham movies who bolsters her capably as Ace Durham, a name which sounds a lot more dynamic than he is; the older and more established female anchor is Rosemary, played with knowing cynicism by the underrated Barbara Rush; and her boss is Ralph Chandler, in the form of Frank Gorshin, who gets a little more to do here as a supportive authority figure than he did in my last centennial review, Skidoo. Peter Graves, right before he would return to fame in Airplane!, plays the only cop we really see in what could easily be described as a serial killer story, Lt Haller. Sure, there are a couple of cars giving chase with sirens blaring late in the film but he’s the only cop who has a face and the chance to speak. It’s hardly a challenging role and he could do this in his sleep but he does his job and doesn’t phone it in. That leaves Dinah Shore, who was clearly enjoying her time actually acting again outside the variety format she was known for.

Before the victims start to become mere statistics, we get to know three of them just a little. As tennis pro Lynn Bernheimer, Shore was the first victim of the Freeway Fiddler, back when he hadn’t quite mastered a suitable killing technique, so she’s also the first survivor. Jan interviews her, of course, but she gets other scenes later when the reporter has further questions or, in one instance, quite possibly because she was still on set looking chipper and Needham just shot some more footage. The other two early victims were up and comers, but they became names later. Becky Lyons, whose near death experience opens the film, is Morgan Brittany, a Hollywood moniker so glitzy that it’s hardly surprising that she ended up on Dallas. Jane Guston, the nurse whose cuteness pleasantly tormented Abe Vigoda, is Tara Buckman, who got her most memorable role in another Hal Needham film, as Adrienne Barbeau’s navigator in The Cannonball Run. Well, either that or for her murder at the hands of Santa Claus in Silent Night, Deadly Night.

As much fun as it is to watch all these famous names and faces, the story can’t get by on star power but it tried and failed to do that throughout. Part of it is the fact that nobody except Hack and Hamilton get a real chance to endow their characters with depth. Part of it is the unimaginative cinematography which is restricted to in car, next to car and helicopter. Outside terror on the freeway scenes, it’s simple back and forth stuff that hardly inspires. Much of it is the fact that it keeps setting up more powerful directions, but refuses to commit to them: the angle where Jan’s take on macho car advertising prompts pressure on her network from Detroit, the feminist angle that sees her phrase these crimes as being anti-women and the angle that plays up the psychological profile of the killer as being dominated by his mother and having a strong need to be hurt or killed for being a bad boy. Instead we get seventies clichés like freeway ramps under construction and cars that explode at the slightest touch.

The best scenes to my mind come late in the film, when Jan finally discovers the confidence that her ex-husband is set on chipping away from her and decides to follow up on what might be the most ill-advised lead that I’ve seen in a thriller. Sure, the Freeway Fiddler is targetting attractive women and she’s set him up to hate her with a passion, but when she receives an evasive phone call from a car club on the wrong side of the sticks, why wouldn’t she just head on down to see the Street Phantoms without taking anyone along or even letting anyone know that she’s going? What, as they say, could possibly go wrong? Well, it turns out that the folk at the car club and the collection of bikers next door are very good at making her uncomfortable while still helping her out in a neatly abstract way. Both Robert F Lyons and Sid Haig shine here, in small parts dwarfed by those star cameos. Roger Aaron Brown is decent too, even hindered by a very poor make-up job, his horrific scar looking like someone just threw a ball of plasticine at him.

The worst are more uninspired than they are actually bad. For a film that advertises in its title a death car on the freeway, the scenes which place the death van into action could have been improved in a hundred ways. The stunts are well handled, but I’ve seen California drivers and don’t remotely buy their utter lack of response to attempted vehicular homicide here. It would also have been good to not recognise certain cars across multiple scenes. I liked the idea of Jan taking a defensive driving class, from former stuntman and director of this film, Hal Needham himself, but it makes no sense. Cars weren’t that cheap in 1979! I don’t buy that a little money down will cover the damage they cause and I doubt that dangerous driving can extend past the school to involve an 80mph chase down rural roads with Needham’s hot pursuit in a suspiciously recognisable Dodge van. There’s no way any insurance company would cover this school! But hey, this was the seventies. A better script and a better villain and this could have been something.

Skidoo (1968)

Director: Otto Preminger
Stars: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, Fred Clark, Michael Constantine, Frank Gorshin, John Phillip Law, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, George Raft, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney and Groucho Marx

When I started my centennial project, half of the point was to celebrate the contributions to film of people who were born a hundred years ago; the other was to be able to watch and review interesting films. They don’t get much more interesting than this one, a 1968 feature from Paramount Pictures and director Otto Preminger, a massively important director in the fifties for taboo-busting films like The Moon is Blue, The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder; he also made earlier classics, like Laura. Skidoo can be interpreted as a late entry in that taboo-busting output, but I don’t buy it. It’s just a chaotic LSD movie that might well have been written on the drug it uses as a plot device. The scriptwriter was Doran William Cannon, who also wrote another odd feature, Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud; he had assistance here from Rob Reiner, at this point just a bit part actor and writer for the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, who claims that Preminger fired and rehired him every day. I wish I knew what they thought they were doing.

To me, it works best as a trainwreck, a movie that we just can’t look away from, even as we wonder what could possibly have happened to create such a mess. Groucho Marx, appearing in his last film as a crime lord called God, described both his performance and the film as ‘God-awful!’ I wouldn’t go quite that far, but he has a point. The film has certainly become a guilty pleasure for some fans of offbeat cinema, but mostly it’s regarded poorly by fans and critics alike. Those who choose to watch the film are less likely to be doing so for the picture itself and more for its incredible cast of stars who, like Preminger, were most prominent a decade earlier. Jonathan Rosenbaum describes them as ‘a legion of Fifties TV corpses’, with the film itself an ‘endlessly fascinating aberration’. I share that opinion because I found that I was unable to look away from the screen, even though I was clearly watching a disaster unfold and I had no stake in the cast of legends because I didn’t grow up knowing who most of them were.

The first one we meet is Jackie Gleason, the star of the film, who would have been one hundred years old on 26th February. He’s one of the few actors here that I did grow up watching, albeit for Smokey and the Bandit movies rather than for The Jackie Gleason Show or The Honeymooners. I knew him as a film actor rather than a television actor, let alone a recording artist. Let’s not forget that each of his first ten albums sold a million copies and his first, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for the most weeks spent in the Billboard top ten with an amazing 153. He began the sixties on a high note, deservedly nominated for an Academy Award for playing Minnesota Fats in The Hustler; he lost out to George Chakiris in West Side Story. Sadly, ended it on a lesser note, returning to the big screen after five years away for three poorly received comedies: Skidoo, How to Commit Marriage and Don’t Drink the Water. This is clearly the worst of them and, frankly, the idea of watching Minnesota Fats go on an acid trip is still freaking me out, man.

He’s ‘Tough’ Tony Banks. No, not the keyboardist from Genesis, this Banks is a renowned hitman who had enough clout to successfully retire and remain so for seventeen years but not quite enough to avoid God pulling him right back in the moment he thinks Tough Tony is the right man for a particular job. We can’t quite buy him as a tough guy here, because he spends an apparently endless opening scene struggling with his wife, Flo, played by Carol Channing, over which TV channel they should watch. I enjoyed the odd set of clips and commercials far more than the so-called comedy, which is how I caught that one channel is broadcasting a bunch of gangsters appearing before a senate committee. ‘Eggs’ Benedict appears in a swathe of bandages that hide 23 bullet holes; he explains that, ‘I was cleaning my gun and it went off.’ It would seem that Tony can’t get away from the life he’s left behind. Hechy and Angie show up out of the past and surely the ’37 Rolls outside can only be the Puerto Rican mob.

Well, it isn’t, but it begins the onslaught of famous faces. The Rolls contains a hippie called Stash, played by a very different John Phillip Law to the one I know from Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik, both released the same year as Skidoo; he’s here to bring Tony’s daughter Darlene home because she’s defected to the counterculture. He can’t grasp the world of her parents: ‘Violence is the sign language of the inarticulate’, he says. Hechy and Angie are a father and son pair of gangsters in the wild combination of Cesar Romero and Frankie Avalon. Romero was an established and versatile actor, but at this point easily best known as the Joker on Batman; we’ll meet two of his fellow villains here too and should note that a third, Mr Freeze, was played by this fim’s director, Otto Preminger. Avalon was coming to the end of his run of Frankie and Annette beach movies. They’re here on a mission from God: to summon him to take care of a job, surely tied to the news on the TV, that George ‘Blue Chips’ Packard, Tough Tony’s best friend, is missing.

So far, the film has been interesting. Gleason seems eager to be flustered as Tough Tony, Channing has a wide collection of the worst outfits I’ve ever seen and we’re starting to see a flood of recognisable names and faces. Yet the film was supposed to have been sparked by Preminger’s fascination with his son Erik’s life as a hippie dropout in Greenwich Village; when a sample of writing by Doran William Cannon showed up on his desk, featuring hippies tripping out on LSD, he leapt at the chance to film just that sample. This film never really focuses on that and, when the trips begin, they’re not being taken by the counterculture characters who steal all the early scenes. I needed to avert my eyes from Flo’s wardrobe choices and the topless chicks getting bodypainted were easy targets. Law is consistently entertaining and there’s a cool, if overdone, section in wild split screen that recounts a flashback in the style of an old silent movie, right down to the outrageous facial hair. But the film’s about to lose focus.

I was never quite sure if it was supposed to satirise the old guard playing old guard characters or the new folk playing new characters. Maybe it was supposed to do both, exploring the obsolescence of gangsters (a year before Mario Puzo published The Godfather and four before Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation did insane box office) and highlighting how ridiculous modern life had become, whether through the hippies or a reliance on the ‘Age of Electronics’ that Avalon demonstrates through his remote controlled bachelor pad that would make Quagmire jealous. The problem is that none of this fits at all well together, with the eventual collision of subplots feeling like precisely that: a collision caused by nobody having the faintest clue where they’re going. Late in the film, Harry Nilsson and Fred Clark play a pair of tower guards, laced with LSD, who look out over their domain and disbelieve everything they see. I felt like that just watching the movie and wonder how many actors shared that feeling while making it.

And there are plenty of them. The one who gets away with his reputation most intact is probably Mickey Rooney, playing Packard, whose nickname of ‘Blue Chips’ is explained by the ticker tape machine to help him manage his stock portfolio from his private prison cell in Alcatraz. He’s turning states evidence in an attempt to take down God, who believes that Tough Tony is the only man who can get to him, given that Packard is his best friend and his daughter’s godfather, with those seventeen years of retirement as icing on the cake. So into Alcatraz goes Banks. He’s bunked with an old con, soon to be Emmy-winning Michael Constantine as Leech, and new guy Austin Pendleton as a draught dodger called Fred the Professor, who turns out to be the spark behind the only thing that this film really achieves. It was never really going to be about Packard challenging God or Tony taking down Packard or Flo taking in a hippie collective. It was always going to come down to the LSD the Professor smuggled into Alcatraz as envelope glue.

We find this out when Tony finds it out, namely right after he’s licked one of those envelopes to contain a letter to Flo. ‘I’m on a trip!’ he mutters and the Professor guides him through it. If there’s any structure to this film at all, I think that it’s here that we find it and I can see three directions. The first has Tony strung out on acid, which is an excuse for Preminger to call in his 1968 effects team to conjure up a wild journey. Tony’s cellmates shrink and talk to him from purple pyramids; numbers proliferate, punctuated in dots; a screw flies around the room with God’s head on it, cigar and all; and Rooney does a musical number in a striped convict suit. Does it mean anything? No, but it looks suitably out there for mainstream Hollywood in 1968. The second was hinted at by the earlier flashback scene crafted as a silent movie reel. This is a stereotypical Keystone farce comedy, with a bunch of gags that sound funny in isolation thrown together and mixed with improvisation until everything turns into a chase. It’s just feature length and in colour.

The last is the one that might resonate as the point of the picture. While Tony initially resisted the call of God, capitulating only when his friend, Harry, played by Arnold Stang, is murdered as a warning, he goes on to do everything that God asks up to this point. After he comes down from the acid trip, though, that’s all over. He’s not going to ‘kiss’ (ie kill) Packard any more and he’s not going to rot in Alcatraz either. He’s going to put a plan together to get out of there and take care of God. This is Otto Preminger, through his scriptwriters, telling us that acid is better than therapy and it’ll help us focus our lives to discover what’s really happening, man. Does he need half a movie to build up to that? Not in the slightest. Does he need the other half to bring it all home? He can’t be bothered. All I believe he had in mind for this picture was an effects-ridden acid trip, a subsequent reinvention and a madcap rush to the end credits. We lost the opening ones when Tony changed the channel, but the end ones are sung, in entirety, by Harry Nilsson.

And so we focus on the stars, most of whom are dosed with LSD when Tony’s escape plan gets going. I’d argue that Burgess Meredith, the Penguin in the Batman TV show, was born to play someone unwittingly dosed with acid. He’s the Warden of Alcatraz, showing up with Senator Peter Lawford, formerly of the Rat Pack, who probably owned a bachelor pad in real life like the one Frankie Avalon has here. LSD finds his ambition. ‘There are only three great Americans,' he memorably orates, ‘Washington. Lincoln. And me!’ Frank Gorshin, the Riddler in Batman, is the Man here, God’s right hand inside Alcatraz. Richard Kiel, just as easy to recognise as ever, is a dim-witted prisoner called Beany who gets a memorable scene on acid where he grabs every prisoner in turn to see which is Loretta. Slim Pickens sings Home on the Range as a switchboard operator so high that he puts God through to Packard to explain the hit on him. None have a lot of screen time, but they’re more entertaining than the odd scenes back at Tony’s with Flo and Darlene and the hippie contingent. Only Geronimo’s wild translation of a cryptic message is worthwhile there.

Meanwhile, on God’s yacht, which had been loaned to Preminger for the shoot by John Wayne, the faces keep on coming. Groucho Marx, wrapping up a legendary career at 77 years of age, is so awful here that we feel that he’s unable to play himself. Preminger wanted him to be his old self but he just isn’t up to it. He’s more like a caricature played by another comedian, but not so well that I could figure out which. He isn’t as fast and he isn’t as funny as we remember. Madcap comedians shouldn’t age. The only part that he really nails from God’s character is his confusion, as he’s firmly at the top of the Tree, the hierarchy of the protection racket, but is so wanted that he can’t even leave his boat. He’s stuck playing bumper pool with a giraffe of a supermodel and hurling orders at his captain. The former is Luna, the first black model to appear on the cover of Vogue and the latter is George Raft, almost unrecognisable from his heyday as a real mob-connected actor playing believable gangsters in thirties Warner Brothers pictures.

The underlying impression of the film is that everything’s wrong. What are all these fifties legends doing in a 1968 movie about acid? Why is Jackie Gleason tripping? Was Carol Channing high as a kite when she shot her scenes and was her character likewise when she bought her wardrobe? How come Groucho Marx can’t even play himself? What are the villains from Adam West’s Batman all doing inside Alcatraz? Who in the film hasn’t slept with Flo? Who’s Darlene’s father, really? And did the scriptwriter really lose track of writing that subplot? Where did Stash land himself a ’37 Rolls and if possessions are like, yesterday, man, can he sign the title over to me? Why does the most striking female presence in the film have less boobs than I do? Why do the Green Bay Packers play naked? And who thought it would be a great idea for Harry Nilsson to sing the end credits, right down to such unmelodic sections as ‘Copyright MCMLXVII by Sigma Productions, Incorporated’? Well, the answer to all these has to be LSD. It’s the only answer, it seems.

Gymkata (1985)

Director: Robert Clouse
Stars: Kurt Thomas, Tetchie Agbayani, Richard Norton and Edward Bell

Ah yes, gymnastics action! We start with a very ominous score, string heavy and reminiscent at points of the Jaws theme, but once we get more than just names, we get Kurt Thomas doing a routine on the high bar intercut with shots of horses running. There are nine of the latter, carrying Richard Norton and a cool bunch of ninjas in pursuit of one man on foot. We’ll find out later that this is Col Cabot, who is taking part in the Game, a cross between an endurance test, an obstacle course and a hunt. Any outsider who enters the imaginary country of Parmistan must attempt the Game. If they fail, they die. If they prove successful (and nobody has in 900 years), they get not only to live but for the Khan of Parmistan to grant them one wish. That ought to mean that Parmistan is closed down tighter than North Korea, but somehow we’re to believe that the Khan’s right hand man, the warrior who shoots Col Cabot, is Australian. Oh, and he’s in league with the Russians. Consistency really isn’t this film’s strong suit.

Neither is establishing itself with credibility. Kurt Thomas, the man we saw on the high bar and are about to see on the parallel bars, was a real gymnast and a notably successful one: a Nissen Award winner, the first gymnast to win the James E Sullivan Award for the best amateur athlete in the US and a gold medal winner at two different World Championships who is very likely to have won Olympic gold too had the US not boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980. In other words, he’s really good at what he does. However, what he does is gymnastics and that doesn’t help his credibility in this action film. Now, my grandfather was a gymnast who specialised in the rings, a discipline which requires massive strength and agility; he also served as a major in the Raiding Support Regiment, a special forces precursor to the SAS. So I know how tough gymnastics can be, but popular culture doesn’t. Popular culture says that male gymnasts are wimpy gay wusses. It doesn’t help that Thomas, who was 29 at the time, looked like he was half that.

So when Jonathan Cabot, the gymnast that this gymnast plays, is recruited into the Special Intelligence Agency to enter Parmistan, play the Game, win it and then, for his wish, ask for the country to install an early warning satellite monitoring station just in case the Commies let their nuclear birds loose, we’re a little confused. This kid doesn’t look old enough to drink, he has precisely zero training as an agent and the US wants him to travel to the Hindu Kush to do something that nobody’s managed to do for twice as long as his country has even existed. Yeah, we can buy into that, right? Well, no, even when he finds out that his father was an SIA agent who tried the exact same thing but failed. Yes, Col Cabot was Jonathan Cabot’s dad, so the magical power of movie revenge will apparently ensure his son’s success. I haven’t read Dan Tyler Moore’s 1957 novel, The Terrible Game, on which Charles Robert Carner based his script, but it surely can’t be as ridiculous as this. And we’re only ten minutes in.

Now, to be fair, the SIA are willing to let him train for two months to prepare with Tadashi Yamashita and Sonny Barnes, but the point is for him to invent an entirely new martial art, an odd mixture of karate and gymnastics, which I’m not sure anyone actually gets round to naming ‘gymkata’ but clearly provides the film’s title. From the inevitable training montages, it apparently involves running, punching and walking up a spiral staircase on your hands. Oh, and producing both back and forward standing somersaults with a half twist. Suddenly, merely knowing the difference between a punch and a kick isn’t enough for us to commentate on martial arts fights! I’m trying to figure out what a Thomas salto is and whether I just saw one. Oh, and the other character we meet at this point is the SIA’s own expert on the Game: Rubali, the stereotypically beautiful and deadly princess of Parmistan. Whose mother was Indonesian. I guess insiders get out of the country a lot, even though the journey can only be taken by pack mule and kayak.

Anyway, training is completed and off go Cabot and Princess Rubali to Parmistan, via a salt mine on the Caspian Sea to be supplied with cool gadgets because firearms aren’t allowed within Parmistan. If you’re to cheat, you might as well obey the rules while you do so, right? And these guys hunt human beings for sport but they don’t like guns? Weird. Fortunately, there’s a great deal to keep us occupied in the town of Karabal. There’s Col John Mackle, a sort of low budget M, who dishes out low budget gadgets. There are a host of traitors in their midst who promptly kill off all the good guys and kidnap Princess Rubali. There’s a terrorist training centre, led by a man with the worst movie accent I’ve ever heard; he looks like a midget Christopher Lee but he sounds like Tommy Wiseau. There’s a big dude with a big scar across his face and a bigger axe in his hands, who thinks chopping a fire extinguisher is a bright idea. There’s even a chase through the streets of whatever Yugoslavian city is substituting for Karabal, with only one car.

And, setting the scene for the rest of the film, wherever Cabot goes, his path is packed full of gymnastics equipment to leap onto so he can demonstrate his brand new martial art in a live environment. If you’re being chased round a alley corner, just leap into the air and there will be a high bar stretching across the way for you to use in a gymnastics routine that involves kicking people very hard indeed. I don’t believe we’re supposed to notice that it’s ready chalked for maximum grip. I can forgive this sort of thing a little, because Jackie Chan made a career out of it, but it shouldn’t be this blatant and it shouldn’t be prepared for the opportunity. Just wait for the Village of the Damned, whose town square contains a pommel horse ready for kick-ass gymnastics action! To be fair, I’m exaggerating a little here, as Cabot gets to do a lot of action scenes in places that don’t have gymnastics equipment, but I’d love to know how the filmmakers ever thought they’d get by with that pommel horse of death!

Thus far, this has been relentlessly generic stuff, the only original element being the gymnastics, which is the most ridiculous of all. There’s generic martial arts training, generic gunplay and generic cold war spy twists perpetrated by generic cold war spies in raincoats, but there’s nothing that really rips off anything in particular. That’s about to change. Now, I’ve seen worse than this, but it’s threadbare, strung together and rendered laughable by the dynamic score, which would be great if everything else could live up to it. Once we get to Parmistan, we start in on the overt ripping off of films that we know. It’s about to turn into Enter the Dragon, a rather more successful feature directed by Robert Clouse. Then it’ll turn back to The Most Dangerous Game, which it hinted at early on. Finally it’ll turn into something rather akin to Bedlam crossed with Westworld, where everyone in an entire town is trying to kill Cabot but they all happen to be completely insane. How did this get pitched to MGM and why did they greenlight it?

We also get the truly bizarre experience that is the Khan of Parmistan, who surely realised how ridiculous his role was and so played it up for laughs. He’s Buck Kartalian from Detroit, MI, the star of films like Cool Hand Luke, Planet of the Apes and Myra Breckenridge. Well, the star of Please Don’t Eat My Mother! aka Sexpot Swingers, but he did play lesser roles in those bigger pictures, often memorably, as Julius was in Planet of the Apes. Here, he comes across like Mel Brooks with his vast moustache and deadpan lines like ‘Anyone trying to avoid an obstacle will be instantly killed!’ He’s just outlining the Game here to a set of competitors: a three mile run to a swamp, a two hundred foot rope climb, half a mile more to the gorge, then into the river, on to the high forest, then the Village of the Damned and a five mile run through the swamp to get back to the city. ‘It’s not all at great risk,’ he suggests with bright eyes before donning his Russian fur hat and wandering off with a grin to play king for his people.

Contrary to popular opinion, there are positive aspects to this film. I liked the Yugoslavian locations, even if I didn’t like the constant depiction of the locals as inbred halfwits without teeth. Some of what we see in the Village of the Damned is neatly freaky, including a madman who has a face built onto the back of his head so that he can masquerade as a statue and attack when you turn your back. There’s a brief glimpse of a local sport in which ninjas on horseback try to enclose each other in nets. The fights aren’t bad at all and this is an action movie with plenty of action. But the martial arts side is clearly set up to be Enter the Dragon, with Kurt Thomas as Bruce Lee and Richard Norton as Bolo Yeung. Neither has a chance. Norton was responsible for the fight choreography, which is better than his acting, but this was early on for him; he’d fought Chuck Norris in The Octagon and played one of the title characters in Force: Five, but Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung and Cynthia Rothrock were all firmly in his future.

Of course, there’s plenty that’s completely awful, starting with the whole idea behind the film. Parmistan is a joke and its Khan is beyond a joke. The Princess could have been used substantially but she’s wasted in a routine romantic subplot. The rest of the plot is idiotic and overblown, apparently trying to outdo its early inanities with worse ones later on. If the Game wasn’t ridiculous enough to begin with, it’s rendered worse by the constant cheating and rulebreaking. Thorg is a ridiculous villain shoehorned into the second half of the film, Bob Schott looking like a drunk Matt Hardy. The wedding angle is stupid, as is the ending and the grand reveal that comes soon before it. The locations are good but the camerawork isn’t and the acting is a disgrace. Perhaps I can forgive Kurt Thomas, as he wasn’t an actor, but nobody else. And why does he stop and turn around every two steps when being chased, even halfway up a rope that’s on fire? That got old quicker than Norton’s embarrassing ponytail. So yeah, it’s almost as awful as you’ve read.