There are wonderfully poetic images early on here that could easily have been made by a Lang or a Murnau: Charlie Chaplin, as the little tramp, pulling a large cart up a steep hillside, more mule than rickshaw driver. It's laden down with barrels, ladders and scaffolding, along with two passengers, and so naturally they fall prey to the power of gravity: they all go up and then back down again. More than once. And naturally there's a railroad track at the bottom complete with what must be the most frequently running train in Hollywood. These aren't slapstick in the slightest but they're comedic genius, possibly the first point in Chaplin's career where he gave us a glimpse of the timeless masterworks he would go on to create, and here unwittingly aided by the stark print with terrible contrast.
Up until now he'd been doing great stuff: pioneering the comedic arts, making the first feature length comedy, defining just what comedy was in the movies. Yet much of it really isn't that fun to watch today. Many of those numerous Keystone films from 1914 may have been riotous in their day but that day has long gone. Now they're tired. A year later Chaplin was at Essanay making films like this, and they're not tired any more, they're hilarious. While working through all this early work, this moment has seemed a long time coming, but after all this is still only 1915. Putting it into perspective, people like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd hadn't started to do anything either. Keaton didn't even make a film until 1917 and Lloyd had only just become Lonesome Luke, hardly his heyday.
Here Chaplin is working with decorators, or at least they're decorators and he's working, for the most part. You can almost describe half the script from that alone, but there's a lot more going on here. There's still the slapstick, here about as frenetically insane as I've seen, to be the obvious focus of attention, but there are other gags too that we have to pay attention to see: ones that run over longer periods of time or just take time to mature. This is definitely the peak of Chaplin's work up until this point and the start of the great work to come. It's also probably the first of his movies that is worth watching again and again.
Friday, 12 January 2007
By the Sea (1915)
There's a lot of wind at the sea side in 1915, it seems, so we're treated to a lot of flying hats that blow around like crazy to the accompaniment of a large amount of crazy high speed slapstick fun. This time it's all even faster paced than usual because half the frames seem to be missing. Maybe that's why my DVD copy runs less than ten minutes even though the running time is listed as either sixteen or twenty depending on where you look.
The cast are all interchangeable with all the other casts Chaplin worked with, though the only one I recognise is the omnipresent Edna Purviance. It's a wild ride but very little else, with almost no title cards and not much explanation of anything. The film is nothing more than a framework on which to hang fights and chases with whatever props come to hand. They may be fun fights and fun chases but that's all they are.
The cast are all interchangeable with all the other casts Chaplin worked with, though the only one I recognise is the omnipresent Edna Purviance. It's a wild ride but very little else, with almost no title cards and not much explanation of anything. The film is nothing more than a framework on which to hang fights and chases with whatever props come to hand. They may be fun fights and fun chases but that's all they are.
Thursday, 11 January 2007
The Man with Nine Lives (1940)
Frozen therapy is here apparently in the modern era of 1940. It roughly equates to the common modern cartoon version of cryogenics, where subjects aren't cured but put into suspended animation through being frozen until such time as a cure may have been discovered. However in this instance the suspended animation itself is the cure: merely freezing someone for five days is enough to stimulate the good tissue and kill off the diseased tissue. Or at least that's what the journalists think, though the doctor involved, Dr Tim Mason, freely points out that it's just a temporary thing.
He also points out that everything he's done has been inspired by a book, the work of a mysterious hermit of a scientist who disappeared ten years earlier and Mason can't trace. However all the misleading publicity leads Mason to get thrown into an involuntary sabbatical, so he and his nurse head on out to Silver Lake on the Canadian border to track down this recluse, Dr Kravaal, played naturally by Boris Karloff. Just as naturally Kravaal's island isn't quite as deserted as they might expect. Deep down under his mansion Kravaal is frozen solid in his refrigeration room, so they thaw him out and hear his story.
The Man with Nine Lives has an intriguing story that is unfortunately notably leading, especially in the early stages. The cast make the most of it through sheer earnestness and deserve something a little less clumsy because the performances are pretty good. The leads keep everything going nicely until the arrival of Karloff twenty minutes in. Dr Mason is Roger Pryor, known as the poor man's Clark Gable. Jo Ann Sayers, playing his fiancee, Judy the nurse, has everything it takes to have become a decent B movie staple but this was the last of only twelve films she made, before she retired young to marry.
And then there's Karloff. He's a mad scientist, have no doubts about that, but he's far from the usual sort of mad scientist. He wasn't mad until he was driven so by the unwelcome attention of idiots in authority. He has a noble cause in mind, the cure for cancer no less, and he only experiments with subjects willing to take part, until circumstances and the actions of others decree otherwise. In many ways he's the real hero here and the bad guys are the sheriff, the DA, the coroner and a rich man's nephew greedy for inheritance. Kravaal wants to give his cure to the world, free of charge, but that greedy nephew destroys his formula because it's pointed out that he's legally dead and thus can no longer inherit. How's that for mitigating circumstances? One man destroys your cure for cancer and you have a gun in your pocket. No, this definitely isn't your run of the mill mad scientist movie!
He also points out that everything he's done has been inspired by a book, the work of a mysterious hermit of a scientist who disappeared ten years earlier and Mason can't trace. However all the misleading publicity leads Mason to get thrown into an involuntary sabbatical, so he and his nurse head on out to Silver Lake on the Canadian border to track down this recluse, Dr Kravaal, played naturally by Boris Karloff. Just as naturally Kravaal's island isn't quite as deserted as they might expect. Deep down under his mansion Kravaal is frozen solid in his refrigeration room, so they thaw him out and hear his story.
The Man with Nine Lives has an intriguing story that is unfortunately notably leading, especially in the early stages. The cast make the most of it through sheer earnestness and deserve something a little less clumsy because the performances are pretty good. The leads keep everything going nicely until the arrival of Karloff twenty minutes in. Dr Mason is Roger Pryor, known as the poor man's Clark Gable. Jo Ann Sayers, playing his fiancee, Judy the nurse, has everything it takes to have become a decent B movie staple but this was the last of only twelve films she made, before she retired young to marry.
And then there's Karloff. He's a mad scientist, have no doubts about that, but he's far from the usual sort of mad scientist. He wasn't mad until he was driven so by the unwelcome attention of idiots in authority. He has a noble cause in mind, the cure for cancer no less, and he only experiments with subjects willing to take part, until circumstances and the actions of others decree otherwise. In many ways he's the real hero here and the bad guys are the sheriff, the DA, the coroner and a rich man's nephew greedy for inheritance. Kravaal wants to give his cure to the world, free of charge, but that greedy nephew destroys his formula because it's pointed out that he's legally dead and thus can no longer inherit. How's that for mitigating circumstances? One man destroys your cure for cancer and you have a gun in your pocket. No, this definitely isn't your run of the mill mad scientist movie!
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1965)
We're in Egypt in 1900 and Arabs in black outfits are busy cutting a hand off a bound prisoner belonging to the Dalrymple expedition that has located the tomb of the ancient Egyptian prince Ra-Antef. The victim is Professor Dubois, who leaves a lovely daughter as well as a couple of colleagues, Sir Giles Dalrymple and John Bray. Inevitably there's the usual curse but at the instigation of American showman Alexander King they're soon out of Egypt and sailing back to England to put the prince on tour.
This is a Hammer horror and it's far too long since I've seen a good Hammer horror. However this isn't a great one, not a patch on the first ancient Egyptian mummy curse movie they put out, 1959's The Mummy. That film had the good fortune of starring both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and being directed by Terence Fisher. It's pretty hard to screw up a combination like that and it's one of the best of the early Hammers. As far as I can tell the only continuing cast member though is Michael Ripper, and he's a long way down the credits on both films.
Here we have Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard (not Ron Howard), Fred Clark, Jack Gwillim and Dickie Owen as the mummy which is inevitably brought back to stumbing life to attack everyone else. The film also introduces Jeanne Roland and her pleasing cleavage as the young Annette Dubois in her debut film, before going on to such lofty heights as being James Bond's masseuse in You Only Live Twice. Everyone is perfectly decent but nobody really shines, with the possible exception of Clark who blusters joyously as the American showman, inventing Turkish Delight and rambling on about his friend Phineas Barnum. The rest of it is pretty predictable but there's nothing too bad about any of it, merely nothing that compares with the great material that Hammer tended to put out.
This is a Hammer horror and it's far too long since I've seen a good Hammer horror. However this isn't a great one, not a patch on the first ancient Egyptian mummy curse movie they put out, 1959's The Mummy. That film had the good fortune of starring both Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and being directed by Terence Fisher. It's pretty hard to screw up a combination like that and it's one of the best of the early Hammers. As far as I can tell the only continuing cast member though is Michael Ripper, and he's a long way down the credits on both films.
Here we have Terence Morgan, Ronald Howard (not Ron Howard), Fred Clark, Jack Gwillim and Dickie Owen as the mummy which is inevitably brought back to stumbing life to attack everyone else. The film also introduces Jeanne Roland and her pleasing cleavage as the young Annette Dubois in her debut film, before going on to such lofty heights as being James Bond's masseuse in You Only Live Twice. Everyone is perfectly decent but nobody really shines, with the possible exception of Clark who blusters joyously as the American showman, inventing Turkish Delight and rambling on about his friend Phineas Barnum. The rest of it is pretty predictable but there's nothing too bad about any of it, merely nothing that compares with the great material that Hammer tended to put out.
The Tramp (1915)
Some lowlife from a trio of lowlifes steals Charlie Chaplin's lunch and Edna Purviance's money. When his friend comes back for more, the little tramp is there to help her out by kicking some lowlife ass. In return he gets invited home to her farm for free food and work and all the rest of it. Quite why anyone would be stupid enough to give Chaplin a hayfork is completely beyond me, but these folks then proceed to allow him to use it on them in all the ways you'd expect.
This is an interesting film for a number of reasons. I recognise a lot of the gags from the last couple of Essanay shorts he made, and they haven't really progressed any further, but there's a lot more here. This is the first of Chaplin's short comedies to really be a complete feature film condensed into a mere twenty minutes. We start with Chaplin walking down the road towards us and we end with him walking down the road away from us. It's neatly bookended and it progresses with intent throughout. It's completely obvious that Chaplin was really beginning to master the talents that he would demonstrate so amply as the years progressed.
Edna Purviance was the main woman in Chaplin's life at this point so naturally she has a prominent part. Future director Lloyd Bacon gets a double role in this one as one of the thieves and Edna's fiancee. At least he manages to avoid the sharp end of the little tramp's hayfork.
This is an interesting film for a number of reasons. I recognise a lot of the gags from the last couple of Essanay shorts he made, and they haven't really progressed any further, but there's a lot more here. This is the first of Chaplin's short comedies to really be a complete feature film condensed into a mere twenty minutes. We start with Chaplin walking down the road towards us and we end with him walking down the road away from us. It's neatly bookended and it progresses with intent throughout. It's completely obvious that Chaplin was really beginning to master the talents that he would demonstrate so amply as the years progressed.
Edna Purviance was the main woman in Chaplin's life at this point so naturally she has a prominent part. Future director Lloyd Bacon gets a double role in this one as one of the thieves and Edna's fiancee. At least he manages to avoid the sharp end of the little tramp's hayfork.
Caught in the Rain (1914)
According to my 57 film Charlie Chaplin box set from Brentwood Home Video, this one's called In the Park and it fits in with his Essanay period in 1915. Indeed Chaplin made a film called In the Park in that very timeframe, but this ons isn't it. In this case In the Park is the reissue title of a film made a year earlier called Caught in the Rain. Now In the Park is not a great title, given that only the first couple of the twelve minute running time are actually spent in a park, but it's no worse than Caught in the Rain as that only happens in one scene for even less time. Go figure.
Anyway, it's not bad for one of Chaplin's 1914 movies, but it's hardly a great one. He's apparently a little drunk and so decides to try it on with Alice Davenport who has been temporarily left alone on a park bench by her husband Mack Swain. Swain of course is the inevitable large guy with facial hair and he gets more than a little upset when he realises what's going on. Then it's quickly out of the park and into the same hotel I just watched Chaplin wander around drunk in in A Night Out. In fact most of the gags are the same too, with lots of falling down stairs and getting caught in the wrong bedrooms.
Not bad, but it's all been done before, and obviously this wasn't the last time it was done either, even by Chaplin himself. There's even a short Keystone Kops type routine at the end.
Anyway, it's not bad for one of Chaplin's 1914 movies, but it's hardly a great one. He's apparently a little drunk and so decides to try it on with Alice Davenport who has been temporarily left alone on a park bench by her husband Mack Swain. Swain of course is the inevitable large guy with facial hair and he gets more than a little upset when he realises what's going on. Then it's quickly out of the park and into the same hotel I just watched Chaplin wander around drunk in in A Night Out. In fact most of the gags are the same too, with lots of falling down stairs and getting caught in the wrong bedrooms.
Not bad, but it's all been done before, and obviously this wasn't the last time it was done either, even by Chaplin himself. There's even a short Keystone Kops type routine at the end.
Wednesday, 10 January 2007
The Ninth Gate (1999)
You really can't go wrong when starting off a film with a suicide by hanging, especially when the dead man is surrounded by a gorgeous library filled with antique books. It's a Roman Polanski movie, based on the novel El Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, the best selling Spanish journalist turned writer. He's quoted as saying that Polanski's film isn't bad but it isn't his novel. It stars Johnny Depp, meaning that it's one a Depp that I haven't managed to see yet, and there aren't too many of those left.
Depp is Dean Corso, an unscrupulous book dealer with a reputation, who is not unwilling to buy a rare Don Quixote for a steal from a couple who don't have a clue, when the man who does is right there in the room but unable to comment after having a stroke. Boris Balkan, a wealthy collector of books on the devil, invites him to work for him. There are three copies of an antique volume called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows still in existence, a book containing riddles that when decoded lead to a ritual to raise the devil. Balkan believes that only one is genuine he doesn't know if it's his own copy or one of the other two. So he hires Corso to find a way to compare the three and find out which one is the real one.
The investigation leads him down strange paths. He starts seeing things that aren't there, his home is ransacked and beautiful women start throwing themselves at him. Naturally it all revolves around the book, and when those beautiful women can't find it they start trying to kill him instead, and manage that with the dealer he trusts to stash the book for him. Even piles of scaffolding seem to be trying to kill him, when nobody else is around. And throughout he keeps bumping into a nameless young lady who can vanish without explanation.
This is not an action film and it's far from an effects film either, though there are some very subtle effects shots that are as notable for their brevity as their effectiveness. José López Rodero does a magnificent job in a couple of double roles, for instance, even though he's not even an actor, but a production manager. I also love the colour of the film, which is usually beautifully faded to brown, and makes me want to see Chinatown again in widescreen this time round. The performances are subtle but very powerful indeed. Depp is far more restrained than usual and deliberately lets himself be outshone by a number of female characters with smaller parts in the film: a dynamic and sexual Lena Olin; an enigmatic Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski's real wife who has featured in a few of his movies; and Barbara Jefford as an elderly baroness with a colourful past. Frank Langella is also a remarkably and refreshingly unvillainous villain. Above all, I have a feeling that this is a film that grows with each viewing. I'm looking forward to next time through.
Depp is Dean Corso, an unscrupulous book dealer with a reputation, who is not unwilling to buy a rare Don Quixote for a steal from a couple who don't have a clue, when the man who does is right there in the room but unable to comment after having a stroke. Boris Balkan, a wealthy collector of books on the devil, invites him to work for him. There are three copies of an antique volume called The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows still in existence, a book containing riddles that when decoded lead to a ritual to raise the devil. Balkan believes that only one is genuine he doesn't know if it's his own copy or one of the other two. So he hires Corso to find a way to compare the three and find out which one is the real one.
The investigation leads him down strange paths. He starts seeing things that aren't there, his home is ransacked and beautiful women start throwing themselves at him. Naturally it all revolves around the book, and when those beautiful women can't find it they start trying to kill him instead, and manage that with the dealer he trusts to stash the book for him. Even piles of scaffolding seem to be trying to kill him, when nobody else is around. And throughout he keeps bumping into a nameless young lady who can vanish without explanation.
This is not an action film and it's far from an effects film either, though there are some very subtle effects shots that are as notable for their brevity as their effectiveness. José López Rodero does a magnificent job in a couple of double roles, for instance, even though he's not even an actor, but a production manager. I also love the colour of the film, which is usually beautifully faded to brown, and makes me want to see Chinatown again in widescreen this time round. The performances are subtle but very powerful indeed. Depp is far more restrained than usual and deliberately lets himself be outshone by a number of female characters with smaller parts in the film: a dynamic and sexual Lena Olin; an enigmatic Emmanuelle Seigner, Polanski's real wife who has featured in a few of his movies; and Barbara Jefford as an elderly baroness with a colourful past. Frank Langella is also a remarkably and refreshingly unvillainous villain. Above all, I have a feeling that this is a film that grows with each viewing. I'm looking forward to next time through.
13 Ghosts (1960)
Young birthday boy Buck Zorba wishes that he lived in a house with furniture that nobody could take away, because his father Cyrus is a scientist so forgetful that he never remembers to pay the bills. Before they can blink, Cyrus's long dead uncle turns out to be just dead. It happened last week and right in town and he's left his sprawling mansion to his nephew, apparently along with the ghosts that he has collected from around the world. Naturally in they move and immediately decide to play with the ouija board which points out that there are thirteen of them and they want to kill them!
I don't recognise anyone except Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West herself, who may just be that here too. Certainly Buck thinks so! Then again what writer Robb White and producer/director William Castle, the gimmick maestro of the era, wanted us to look at are the ghosts. This film was original made using a gimmick called Illusion-O, vaguely similar to the 3D process but in which the colours work differently: one colour intensifies the ghosts and the other makes them fade. They look pretty cool, if very dated. This was 1960, after all.
The story is very 1960 too, exactly the sort of thing I'd expect from something like a Three Investigators novel or pulp adventure story: it's fun and consistently entertaining, though there's not a huge amount of substance; and it's far from a horror movie, at least how people expected horror movies to be by the time they got around to doing a remake. The rest of the family are the sort of wholesome Americans we saw in Lost in Space, wanting to move out because of the activities of their ghosts yet hardly seeming phased by any of it. Definitely another intriguing William Castle movie though, of many.
I don't recognise anyone except Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West herself, who may just be that here too. Certainly Buck thinks so! Then again what writer Robb White and producer/director William Castle, the gimmick maestro of the era, wanted us to look at are the ghosts. This film was original made using a gimmick called Illusion-O, vaguely similar to the 3D process but in which the colours work differently: one colour intensifies the ghosts and the other makes them fade. They look pretty cool, if very dated. This was 1960, after all.
The story is very 1960 too, exactly the sort of thing I'd expect from something like a Three Investigators novel or pulp adventure story: it's fun and consistently entertaining, though there's not a huge amount of substance; and it's far from a horror movie, at least how people expected horror movies to be by the time they got around to doing a remake. The rest of the family are the sort of wholesome Americans we saw in Lost in Space, wanting to move out because of the activities of their ghosts yet hardly seeming phased by any of it. Definitely another intriguing William Castle movie though, of many.
Dough and Dynamite (1914)
I'm not surprised that Dough and Dynamite is one of the last Keystone films made by Charlie Chaplin. The quality of them improved notably throughout 1914 from the early shorts directed by people like Henry Lehrman or George Nichols to the later ones directed by Chaplin himself. The worst are the ones in the middle directed by Mack Sennett or by Chaplin along with Mabel Normand, who was often the real star in them, as evidenced by titles like Mabel's Busy Day or Mabel's Married Life.
This one is longer than most that came before it and while it didn't keep me laughing all the way through, it certainly kept a chuckle rolling. Then again it would be difficult to fail entirely with prominent signs advertising French tarts on view. Chaplin is a working man here and seemingly someone of at least a little importance at the bakery as he gets to order around someone who looks a lot like Ben Turpin, but apparently is Chester Conklin. It's hard to tell these people sometimes beneath all that outrageous fake facial hair!
The pair of them are waiters who end up as bakers because the real bakers all go on strike. Given that they get up to enough trouble as waiters with customers who include Charley Chase, it's not surprising how much more they get up to as bakers. Both Chaplin and Conklin get beaten up with bread products in about every way conceivable and probably a few more besides, and the strikers end up getting a stick of dynamite into the bakery to blow it up. All of these scenes are as great examples of slapstick timing as you'd expect, but they're not constructed as well as you'd remember.
This one is longer than most that came before it and while it didn't keep me laughing all the way through, it certainly kept a chuckle rolling. Then again it would be difficult to fail entirely with prominent signs advertising French tarts on view. Chaplin is a working man here and seemingly someone of at least a little importance at the bakery as he gets to order around someone who looks a lot like Ben Turpin, but apparently is Chester Conklin. It's hard to tell these people sometimes beneath all that outrageous fake facial hair!
The pair of them are waiters who end up as bakers because the real bakers all go on strike. Given that they get up to enough trouble as waiters with customers who include Charley Chase, it's not surprising how much more they get up to as bakers. Both Chaplin and Conklin get beaten up with bread products in about every way conceivable and probably a few more besides, and the strikers end up getting a stick of dynamite into the bakery to blow it up. All of these scenes are as great examples of slapstick timing as you'd expect, but they're not constructed as well as you'd remember.
Tuesday, 9 January 2007
Die, Monster, Die! (1965)
The swirling colours that accompany the title credits bode well, as does the outrageous title with its exclamation mark and the cool font used for the credits. However whenever a film takes pains to introduce us to an actress who I've never heard of, over forty years after her introduction, that really doesn't bode well at all. Who is Suzan Farmer? Well she did a couple of Hammer horrors but otherwise it looks like she's most famous for being married to Ian McShane. Anyway, this is loosely based on Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space, because hey, if loose adaptations of Poe stories worked for American International then surely Lovecraft's would too.
American Stephen Reinhart arrives in Arkham, which has somehow found itself transplanted to England, but none of the locals want anything to do with him when he says that he's trying to find the Witley place. He gets there on foot, to see it fog shrouded and guarded by traps, locked gates and Boris Karloff who doesn't want to see any visitors, let alone any that come to see his daughter. Karloff is Nahum Witley, wheelchair bound and supposedly following in the footsteps of his dead father. His wife Letitia is scared of light and so hides behind the canopy of her bed. She's happy to see Reinhart, because she wants him to take her daughter away from Arkham.
For all the colour and lavish gothic sets, this would work pretty well as an hour long radio play. Simply keep the superb and well enunciated banter between Karloff and Freda Jackson, and get rid of the quiet scenes where Reinhart wanders around the creaking mansion. The sound effects would work wonderfully on radio. Only some of the more astute visuals like the charred shape of a corpse burned into a carpet or the glowing green glasshouse, full of giant plants, lend themselves better to film. Yet they, and even the 'zoo in hell' could be translated. Then again, why not just make The Colour Out of Space properly instead of turning it into something substantially different? Even the names were mostly changed to protect the innocent, let alone the plot and the motivations.
Nick Adams, who played Stephen Reinhart, died three years later through an accidental drug overdose. Then again he's one of the names associated with the Rebel without a Cause curse, one of four prominent amd mysterious deaths at a young age, the other three being James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. He had a short but important career, notable in its decline through his becoming deemed unhireable. After starting out his career in major films like Rebel without a Cause, Mister Roberts and Sweet Smell of Success, he ended up in a downward spiral into genre filmmaking, where he made this one in between Frankenstein Conquers the World and Invasion of the Astro-Monsters.
He's solid here though Patrick Magee, in a lesser part as a doctor, holds his own against the volatile Oscar nominee. Karloff and Freda Jackson are excellent and I wish there were only more of them to enjoy, even though Karloff looks like an old Omar Sharif. And the hitherto unremembered Suzan Farmer is decent in a very decent way. I don't remember her in the Hammer horrors but I wonder if she ever played anyone with indecent depth, as she gives the impression that she could only play the squeaky clean good girl who believes understatements like 'I think something terrible is going to happen', not long after seeing her mother melt in front of her.
The terrible thing that really did happen was that the effects, along with the acting and the script, were excellent for the first half but dropped off noticeably in the second. Half of it's great fun, the other half is run of the mill blah.
American Stephen Reinhart arrives in Arkham, which has somehow found itself transplanted to England, but none of the locals want anything to do with him when he says that he's trying to find the Witley place. He gets there on foot, to see it fog shrouded and guarded by traps, locked gates and Boris Karloff who doesn't want to see any visitors, let alone any that come to see his daughter. Karloff is Nahum Witley, wheelchair bound and supposedly following in the footsteps of his dead father. His wife Letitia is scared of light and so hides behind the canopy of her bed. She's happy to see Reinhart, because she wants him to take her daughter away from Arkham.
For all the colour and lavish gothic sets, this would work pretty well as an hour long radio play. Simply keep the superb and well enunciated banter between Karloff and Freda Jackson, and get rid of the quiet scenes where Reinhart wanders around the creaking mansion. The sound effects would work wonderfully on radio. Only some of the more astute visuals like the charred shape of a corpse burned into a carpet or the glowing green glasshouse, full of giant plants, lend themselves better to film. Yet they, and even the 'zoo in hell' could be translated. Then again, why not just make The Colour Out of Space properly instead of turning it into something substantially different? Even the names were mostly changed to protect the innocent, let alone the plot and the motivations.
Nick Adams, who played Stephen Reinhart, died three years later through an accidental drug overdose. Then again he's one of the names associated with the Rebel without a Cause curse, one of four prominent amd mysterious deaths at a young age, the other three being James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. He had a short but important career, notable in its decline through his becoming deemed unhireable. After starting out his career in major films like Rebel without a Cause, Mister Roberts and Sweet Smell of Success, he ended up in a downward spiral into genre filmmaking, where he made this one in between Frankenstein Conquers the World and Invasion of the Astro-Monsters.
He's solid here though Patrick Magee, in a lesser part as a doctor, holds his own against the volatile Oscar nominee. Karloff and Freda Jackson are excellent and I wish there were only more of them to enjoy, even though Karloff looks like an old Omar Sharif. And the hitherto unremembered Suzan Farmer is decent in a very decent way. I don't remember her in the Hammer horrors but I wonder if she ever played anyone with indecent depth, as she gives the impression that she could only play the squeaky clean good girl who believes understatements like 'I think something terrible is going to happen', not long after seeing her mother melt in front of her.
The terrible thing that really did happen was that the effects, along with the acting and the script, were excellent for the first half but dropped off noticeably in the second. Half of it's great fun, the other half is run of the mill blah.
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