All Through the Night (1942)

Director: Vincent Sherman
Writers: Leonard Spigelgass and Edwin Gilbert, from a story by Leonard Q. Ross and Leonard Spigelgass
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Conrad Veidt, Kaaren Verne, Jane Darwell, Frank McHugh, Peter Lorre, Judith Anderson, William Demarest, Jackie C. Gleason, Phil Silvers, Wally Ford, Barton MacLane and Edward Brophy

Index: 2018 Centennials.

The studio system was an evil creature in many ways but it did allow the studios to cultivate talent and put together casts like this film can boast. It’s a Warner Bros. picture, starring Humphrey Bogart at a key point in his career. It was in a Warner Bros. picture, The Petrified Forest, that he found his first success, but they weren’t sure how to capitalise on that so put him in some truly bizarre movies. For instance, when you think Humphrey Bogart, do you immediately conjure up ideas of hillbilly wrestling comedies and mad doctor horror movies? Well, just check out Swing Your Lady and The Return of Doctor X to see how badly he did in them. Of course, they figured it out eventually or you’d be asking me who he was right now. High Sierra made him a leading man, The Maltese Falcon made him a star and Casablanca made him a legend. That’s two films from 1941 and one from 1943; All Through the Night came right in the middle of those in 1942 and it’s a fascinating piece of work. It’s not as good as I remember it but it’s still a bundle of fun.

And just look at the names backing him up! His nemesis is played by Conrad Veidt, who had been a star in Germany, in important silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Man Who Laughs; he escaped the Nazis and become a star in the English language too, most notably opposite Bogart again in Casablanca. One of Veidt’s key men here is played by another escapee from the rise of the Nazis, Peter Lorre, an Austro-Hungarian who had started out in one of the greatest films ever made, Fritz Lang’s M, and made his way to Hollywood via England, where he starred in The Man Who Knew Too Much for Alfred Hitchcock, even though he couldn’t speak English; he learned his lines phonetically. By this point, he was a star in the States too, not only from eight Mr. Moto movies but also for Mad Love and The Maltese Falcon. Of course, he would be back for Casablanca as well, which makes this start to sound like a dry run, especially given that the subject matter revolves around regular folks and their interactions with the Nazis.

The Baby (1973)

Director: Ted Post
Writer: Abe Polsky
Stars: Anjanette Comer, Ruth Roman, Marianna Hill, Suzanne Zenor and David Manzy

Index: 2018 Centennials.

Ted Post, who would have been a hundred years old today, had a stellar career, gradually moving from the stage to television and eventually to film, where his fourteen features as director constitute a highly varied set of underrated gems. Choosing just one to remember him by is a difficult task indeed, as almost all of them would be perfect for this project, except perhaps the two in which he directed Clint Eastwood, Hang ’em High and Magnum Force, which are notably well known. The latter wasn’t his only sequel, as he also made Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but the rest are all standalones, often emphatically so. There’s The Legend of Tom Dooley, the old folk music standard turned into a film; The Harrad Experiment, a controversial comedy about sex in college; and Nightkill, a dark crime picture shot here in Phoenix. There’s Whiffs, a comedy about chemical warfare techniques being used to rob banks; 4 Faces, a compilation of four stories starring the same actor; and especially Go Tell the Spartans, a highly underrated Vietnam War picture.

I simply couldn’t resist The Baby though, which is as unlikely a feature as could be imagined for a director best known for hundreds of episodes of television westerns. Post was almost destined to find a career in the industry, having begun as an usher at the Pitkin Theater in Brooklyn, so caught up in what was on screen that some reports suggest that he would often forget to actually seat any of his customers. He tried acting, but it didn’t work out, so he shifted into directing plays, including a 1948 production of Dracula in Connecticut that starred Bela Lugosi. He kept this up during wartime, staging shows for the troops, but, by the fifties, he had found his way both into teaching, at the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, and television, where the bulk of his credits are to be found. He was nominated for a Primetime Emmy in 1955 for one episode of Waterfront, a crime show set in the LA harbour, and a DGA Award in the same year for a different episode of the same show. A year later, he’d get another nod for an episode of Medic.

Death Collector (1988)

Director: Tom Garrett
Writer: John J. McLaughlin
Stars: Daniel Chapman, Ruth Collins, Loren Blackwell, Karen Rizzo and Philip Nutman

I didn’t know about the 1988 film Death Collector until last year, but I’m a big fan of genre hopping and this one is a post apocalyptic western with wild credits. The first half dozen characters include ‘Molested Woman’ and ‘Hood with Whip’, before progressing all the way to ‘Fearless Turbo Sluts’. Splatterpunks John Skipp and Craig Spector play, no surprise here, ‘Splatter Punk 1 and 2’. I got a kick out of the assistant editor and sound editor being credited as a pair, given that the former was Donald Johnson and the latter John Donaldson. Keep watching, though, and you’ll reach Francisca Vanderweerdt. Thirty years ago today, she showed up on set to do make up and hairstyling. Then, as she wrote on Facebook last year, ‘The assistant director came over and introduced himself. When I shook his hand, the loudest voice I have ever heard said, ‘This is the man you’ll spend the rest of your life with.’’ That was Brian Pulido, the Evil Ernie to her Lady Death and they married in 1991. Congratulations on thirty years together, folks!

Back then, this was called Tin Star Void and I wonder what writer John J. McLaughlin wanted it to be. It’s really a western at heart, but it seems more like a post-apocalyptic action flick, nothing like the pictures that would make his name, many years later. This was his debut as a scriptwriter and it was clearly going to spend its days being rented from Blockbuster, the sort of tape with ‘cult movie’ written all over it. McLaughlin only wrote one more film in the entire twentieth century but eventually hit the big time in the 2010s. Yes, the scriptwriter of Death Collector, as definitive a straight to video title as anything starring Rutger Hauer or Dolph Lundgren, went on to be a big shot, writing or co-writing Black Swan, Hitchcock and Parker within only four years. That ambition is perhaps why Death Collector, for all its many faults, still feels interesting and, in its low budget way, stylish. It’s not as wacky as Six-String Samurai, made a decade later, but it does bear some similarities in approach and would play well to the same audience.

The Girl Hunters (1963)

Director: Roy Rowland
Writer: Mickey Spillane, Roy Rowland and Robert Fellows
Stars: Mickey Spillane, Shirley Eaton, Scott Peters, Guy Kingsley Poynter, James Dyernforth, Charles Farrell, Kim Tracy, Hy Gardner and Lloyd Nolan

Index: 2018 Centennials.

It’s a rare literary detective who didn’t make it to the cinema screen both early and often. The Guinness Book of Records lists Sherlock Holmes as the ‘most portrayed movie character’of them all, with his first appearance on film arriving as early as 1900, so early that author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hadn’t even written The Hound of the Baskervilles yet. This was Sherlock Holmes Baffled, a thirty second piece that was exhibited in Mutoscope machines in arcades. Most of the longest running film series in the western world feature a detective, such as Charlie Chan, who has now appeared in over fifty movies, or the Lone Wolf, who’s racked up half as many. While I grew up in the UK in the eighties, watching Jeremy Brett play Sherlock Holmes and Joan Hickson play Miss Marple on television, both still arguably the most authentic versions of those characters, my go to detective was Mike Hammer. I adored Stacy Keach’s performance on Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and devoured the original novels. In rural Yorkshire, this was akin to exotica.

Keach was far from the first actor to play Mike Hammer, though the hardboiled detective first saw life in print, back in 1947 in the novel I, the Jury. Spillane published five sequels in the three years between 1950 and 1952 and, naturally, the media paid attention. Ted DeCorsia was the first actor to take on the role, on radio in 1952’s That Hammer Guy, but Biff Elliot played him on film the next year in I, the Jury, in 3-D no less. Ralph Meeker took over in 1955 for Robert Aldrich’s fantastic Kiss Me Deadly. Robert Bray was next in line, in 1957’s My Gun is Quick, before the character moved to TV, with Darren McGavin portraying the title role in 78 episodes of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. What came next, though, was something unique. I don’t know if The Girl Hunters, an indie production in the UK, marks the only time in which the author of a beloved character played it himself, but I can’t come up with another one. ‘Mickey Spillane is Mike Hammer’ proclaim the opening credits, while the closing ones add ‘Mike Hammer is Mickey Spillane’.

The Last Page (1952)

Director: Terence Fisher
Writer: Frederick Knott, from a play by James Hadley Chase
Stars: George Brent, Marguerite Chapman and Diana Dors

Index: 2018 Centennials.

One hundred years ago today, Marguerite Chapman was born. 22 years later, she started a film career that only lasted for a decade and change but kept her busy indeed. From 1940 to 1943 alone, she appeared in twenty B-movies of varied genre and quality, that prompted Jerry Mason of the Los Angeles Times to suggest, ‘I saw none of them, and you probably didn’t either.’ I have indeed seen some of these, as they weren’t only routine wartime programmers, like Navy Blues or You’re in the Army Now, in which she appeared as a member of the Navy Blues Sextet. I saw her in detective series, like Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum or One Dangerous Night, one of the Warren William Lone Wolf pictures. Some of these certainly seem to exist as little more than opportunities for her to rise to the A list, having impressed people in the highly-regarded 1942 serial, Spy Smasher. Unfortunately, they seem to be rather hard to track down nowadays. I looked for films like Parachute Nurse and the later One Way to Love, but they’re nowhere to be found.

Her easily available movies are generally later ones in which she played a supporting role, like The Seven Year Itch, although she did actually make it to the A list by being cast as the female lead in Destroyer, alongside Edward G. Robinson and Glenn Ford. I prefer to find the interesting films lurking behind those major titles in a filmography, but hers are surprisingly elusive and, when they can be found, they’re not that appropriate. I did watch Spy Smasher, thinking it was about time I included a serial in this project, but as enjoyable as she is as the lead’s fiancée, she’s hardly in it. Similarly, Flight to Mars, a 1951 sci-fi romp in which her character, Alita, is named as an overt homage, might have worked, but she’s only in the second half; maybe I’ll revisit it later this year for her co-star, Cameron Mitchell. I remembered that she ended her film career with a leading role, in The Amazing Transparent Man, but that was hardly a great movie. So which picture should I choose to remember her, one that I can actually find to watch?

Home of the Brave (1949)

Director: Mark Robson
Writer: Carl Foreman, based on the play by Arthur Laurents
Stars: Jeff Corey, James Edwards and Lloyd Bridges

Index: 2018 Centennials.

Watching the news lately, it sometimes seems like we’ve hardly progressed at all in the world of race relations. Movies like this are shocking realisations of how far we’ve really come and how quickly because they chart the passage of time. A couple of years ago, I took a look at how outrageously racist Hollywood was back in its classic era, while celebrating the career of Willie Best, a massively talented African American actor who began his career as Sleep n’ Eat and was given next to nothing to do for decades; well, except act lazy, eat watermelon and roll dice. I chose The Ghost Breakers to remember him, given that he was close to being half a comedic double act with Bob Hope in it, but he still had to deal with spook jokes and dialogue like, ‘You look like a blackout in a blackout.’ It was 1940, after all, only a year after Hattie McDaniel had become the first African American winner of an Academy Award for her performance in Gone with the Wind. Less well remembered is the fact that she was also the first African American nominee.

While that was a major step, it has to also be remembered that Georgia’s segregationist laws meant that she was barred from even attending the film’s premiere in Atlanta; Hollywood and America had a long way to go. It seems appropriate to mention here that Sidney Poitier was only thirteen at the time, because we tend to see him nowadays as the true beginning of progress, but that’s not entirely fair. He made his mark early in his career in No Way Out, playing a doctor who treats a pair of racist brothers, but that was in 1950; it was his second film and the first for which he received a credit. Yet a year earlier, another African American actor made his mark in a role that would have been perfect for Poitier; his name was James Edwards and he would have been a hundred years old today. What’s more, he does a fantastic job in a complex role and, in doing so, set the stage for Poitier and the big changes that we would see over the next couple of decades, if often through Poitier’s far more prominent performances.

The Bigamist (1953)

Director: Ida Lupino
Writer: Collier Young, from an original story by Larry Marcus and Lou Schor
Stars: Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn and Edmond O’Brien

Index: 2018 Centennials.

To suggest that Ida Lupino was one of a kind is a spectacular understatement. She did a great deal at a time when the system didn’t think she should be able to do anything, except stand in front of the camera and look cute. To celebrate her career on what would have been her one hundredth birthday, I selected a feature on which she wore a number of hats. She was a co-star, alongside Joan Fontaine and Edmond O’Brien, which was odd for reasons I’ll get into later. She also directed. And she ran, with her husband, the independent production company, The Filmakers, which self-financed it. And she did all this in 1953, which sits at the heart of the era when women had two jobs to do, one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom. Then again, she had done what wasn’t expected from the beginning of her career, taking the role in 1932’s Her First Affaire that her mother wanted. The Bigamist is one of the issue films in which The Filmakers specialised and it has great resonance to her own life at the time.

As with many issue films, it’s not about the what but the why. For instance, we know who the bigamist of the title is, because he’s identified on the very second title card. It explains that the picture stars Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn ‘and Edmond O’Brien as the Bigamist’. Given those names, it’s pretty clear which two women he’ll marry and, sure enough, we open the movie with him and Fontaine trying to adopt a child. He’s Harry Graham and she’s his wife Eve, who’s eager to adopt, because she has a medical issue, we presume, that prevents her from having a child naturally. They’re working with the thorough Mr. Jordan, who immediately flags up Harry’s reluctance to sign the form authorising him to check into ‘every detail’ of their private lives. Now, I wonder why that could be! Well, we watch Mr. Jordan, superbly played by Edmund Gwenn, follow the trail to Harrison Graham’s house in Los Angeles, where he lives with his other wife, Phyllis, in the lovely form of Ida Lupino, and their baby boy, Danny.

The Glass Web (1953)

Director: Jack Arnold
Writers: Robert Blees and Leonard Lee, from the novel, Spin the Glass Web, by Max Simon Ehrlich
Stars: Edward G. Robinson, John Forsythe, Kathleen Hughes and Marcia Henderson

Index: 2018 Centennials.

Kathleen Freeman was a busy girl in 1953. She began it with The Magnetic Monster, which was my last centennial review and, after seven other movies, ended it with The Glass Web, which is my new one. I’m not watching for her this time out though, because her centennial isn’t due until next year; I’m watching for John Forsythe. My American better half knows him well as Blake Carrington on Dynasty and as the disembodied voice of Charlie on Charlie’s Angels, but I know him from movies, from Destination Tokyo in 1943 to Scrooged in 1988, via such fundamentally different films as Kitten with a Whip, Marooned and The Trouble with Harry. It was as Blake Carrington that he’s best remembered, of course, largely for being the role that landed him six consecutive Golden Globe nods (he won two) and his three consecutive Primetime Emmy nominations (he didn’t win any). However, the latter were far from his first flirtation with the Emmys; he had been previously nominated three decades earlier in 1953, as Best Actor.

And it’s 1953 to which I’m going to turn back time, to a drama/thriller from the ever-reliable director, Jack Arnold, he of Creature of the Black Lagoon, High School Confidential! and The Mouse That Roared fame, to name but three of his admirably varied movies. This one’s based on a novel, Spin the Glass Web, by Max Simon Ehrlich, published the previous year. I know some of Ehrlich’s later books, but his best known novel was The Reincarnation of Peter Proud in 1973, also quickly filmed. Ehrlich is important here as he didn’t just write books; he wrote for newspapers, the stage, for radio and, most importantly, for television, scripting episodes of Suspense, The Defenders and Star Trek, among others. We discover why that’s pertinent one scene into the movie. A young lady is driven up to an open mineshaft in the desert. When she isn’t impressed, her companion shoots her dead, carries her over to the shaft and dumps her body unceremoniously in. And then we pan back to discover that they’re actors on the set of a television show.

The Magnetic Monster (1953)

Director: Curt Siodmak
Writers: Curt Siodmak and Ivan Tors
Stars: Richard Carlson, King Donovan and Jean Byron

Index: 2018 Centennials.

Back in the fifties, the planet Earth was threatened by a new monster each time a new sci-fi B-movie hit the drive-ins. Some of the most iconic monsters we might conjure up today are sourced from that era, from Rodan to the Blob, from the Thing from Another World to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, from the Mole People to the Brain Eaters. Many of these were completely ridiculous, whether they be the gorilla in a diving helmet in Robot Monster, the giant flying turkey in The Giant Claw, or even the budget-saving creatures we couldn’t see in Invisible Invaders. Sometimes, however, they struck a nerve so well that they grew into the bedrock of pop culture: characters like Gort, the invulnerable robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still, Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet or Godzilla, who’s appearing in his thirtysomething feature this year. Of course, those last three challenge our idea of what a monster is and perhaps are all the more memorable for that. They can be good, bad or, in the case of Godzilla, maybe chaotic neutral.

All of these monsters, of course, were outward representations of the fear that was consuming the world in the wake of the use of atomic weapons to end World War II in 1945, the beginning of the Cold War in 1947 and the start of the nuclear arms race in 1949. We began estimating how close we were to mutually assured destruction in 1947, when the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board introduced the Doomsday Clock. According to them, the closest we’ve been is two minutes to midnight, which has been the case twice: in 2018, because of Trump and his bigger red button, and in 1953, after the US and the Soviet Union tested thermonuclear devices for the first time. That realisation is truly scary, because our collective reaction to this is wildly different. In 1953, we were building fallout shelters and practicing duck and cover routines. In 2018, we’re delegitimising science and trying to stop our teens from eating Tide Pods. I really don’t know which is worse.

The Lineup (1958)

Director: Don Siegel
Writer: Stirling Silliphant
Stars: Eli Wallach, Robert Keith and Warner Anderson

Index: 2018 Centennials.

It would be difficult to make films without actors, but the people behind the screen are just as important. My centennial reviews in 2016 began with a director, Masaki Kobayashi, and the first notable centennial of 2018 is of a writer, Stirling Silliphant. It would be easy to pluck out famous titles from his career because it’s hardly lacking them. The most obvious would be 1968’s In the Heat of the Night, which won him an Oscar and the first of two back-to-back Golden Globes; the second was for Charly, his adaptation of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. He was often nominated for awards: The Slender Thread and The Towering Inferno also received Golden Globe nods, Telefon was nominated for an Edgar and Village of the Damned was up for a Hugo, not just once but twice. However, each of those worthy screenplays was an adaptation of someone else’s material: usually novels but, in the case of The Slender Thread, an article in Life magazine. His script for The Towering Inferno was based on two entirely unrelated novels, blurred together.

So Silliphant was very good at adapting existing works into new ones, but that wasn’t all that he did. Hilariously, given that he had a consistently strong career, full of quality films, I first wrote about him in my review of perhaps the worst feature ever made. No, he didn’t write Manos: The Hands of Fate, but he did directly prompt its creation by betting an El Paso fertiliser salesman, Harold P. Warren, that he couldn’t make and exhibit a feature film. Warren did and so Silliphant lost that bet, but the results were not good, to say the least. Even the execrable contributions to film of Robert Silliphant, Stirling’s brother, were better than that and he was the writer behind The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? Oh, and he wrote the story that became The Creeping Terror too. I wonder what it must have been like over at the Silliphants at Thanksgiving, with Stirling talking about his award nominations and Robert talking about what he’d just done for Ray Dennis Steckler.