The Strange World of Planet X (1958)

Director: Gilbert Gunn
Stars: Forrest Tucker and Gaby André

I think my favourite hobby is listening to Robert Osborne introduce monster movies on TCM. It may be that he secretly loves the things but I don't think so. I think he feels embarrassed every time they come up, but he's a professional and he does his job well with just a hint of a smile at the realisation of what sort of material he's introducing. Then again this one begins as a pretty intelligent monster movie as such things go, made in the UK by Anglo-Scottish Pictures, sourced from a story by René Ray. Sure, the introduction is more than a little melodramatic ('Man goes forward into the unknown but how does the unknown react?'), but it settles down quickly into a thoughtful movie. It's actually hilarious to hear such rationality about science juxtaposed with a rampant sexism. 'A woman?' cries Dr Laird when he's told that his new computer operator is a member of the fairer sex. 'This is preposterous! This is highly skilled work!'

Laird is a scientist working in pure research who is eating up government money on the basis that his work may provide major benefits to the military. It has something to do with altering the molecular structure of metals through use of electro-magnetic energy. It uses a lot of power and it may well be interfering with the local TV signals. Brigadier Cartwright wants to shut the whole thing down, but after seeing a successful experiment and the more positive side effects only he knows about, he changes his mind. The force that Laird is wielding continues on when the power is cut and it proves able to make changes at a distance, offering possibilities of taking down enemy aircraft with some sort of beam. Of course there are other possible side effects too: weird weather and flying saucers, so many that the papers talk about an invasion from Planet X, hence the film's original title. I watched it under a fresh title of The Cosmic Monsters.

It's half an hour in that we find out where the film is going. Laird proves to be a mad scientist, a single minded genius who ignores the mere possibility of risks or side effects. 'I never consider anything which might interfere with my research,' he tells his assistant, Gil Graham. 'If I always stopped to calculate the risks there would be no research.' He wants to carry on regardless, even escalate his research. While Graham warns Laird, Smith warns Graham. He's a strange character who we first encounter in Briley Woods, near Laird's lab, strange not just because of his 'funny whiskers' but because he looks off into the distance when he's talking to people. He's come from a long way off, he says, where people ride giant dragonflies. He has a cool raygun too, so surely he's from the strange world of Planet X, whatever it's real name is. He can't talk to the police so he talks to Graham instead at the Crown and Mitre over a pint. Civilisation, you see.

The film is a bizarre combination of approaches. From one angle, it's a well thought out science fiction story, talky but engaging and defined. From another, it's a monster movie without a single capable effect at any point. Unfortunately the latter can't arrive without mangling the former, so scenes of civilised science and solid logic abruptly collapse into ludicrous ramblings at the blink of an eye. Similarly, the logical first half sees Michele Dupont, the Frenchwoman who is sent to be Laird's new computer operator, promptly turn rampant sexism on its head by demonstrating how intelligent and capable women can be, but the monster half turns her into a clichéd victim, a princess in need of rescue. That's how far the film devolves and it's painful to watch it happen. Imagine if halfway through The Day the Earth Stood Still, perhaps the most obvious comparison, a nuclear bomb floods Washington, DC with giant mutated insects. It wouldn't work there either.

Both on the good side and the bad side, it's the script that dominates. René Ray wrote the story as a six part TV series in 1956, and never wrote again, though she had a three decade career as an actress. For some reason she didn't adapt her own work, the screenplay being by Paul Ryder, who wrote a few other films in the surrounding years. I wonder how much of this script is Ryder's and how much Ray's. It's hard to know where to place the praise and the blame, but I presume that each deserves one but not the other. Behind the script, the effects stand out but not in any positive light. They're pretty dismal, shots of real insects combined with shots of actors in a poor attempt to suggest they're in the same scene. There are some capable framing shots but almost everything on the effects side is awful. Only one instance bears mention and that's a surprisingly gratuitous shot of a giant insect munching through the cheek of a corpse.

At least the giant insects are worthy of note, albeit an entirely negative one. It's hard to attempt to comment on the acting because it's so utterly routine. Alec Mango (yes, that's his real name) is a rare sort of mad scientist, one who avoids acting madly. Forrest Tucker is a strange choice for his assistant, the token American in the cast and the most famous name, beginning a year that would end with Auntie Mame, though he made four more movies in between. French actress Gaby André is a strange choice for a new assistant too, though I'm sure she's only there to act as a love interest as well as torment the chauvinists. She's badly dubbed at points. As the alien visitor, Martin Benson is the best of the bunch, but he can't generate any of the charisma that ought to be there. The most memorable actor is young Susan Redway, who plays Jane Hale, a precocious child with a perpetual grin and a surety that rivals Dr Laird's.

It's not that these actors are bad, because they're not, it's just that they can't seem to find a way to make themselves noticed with the material they're given. Not one of them shines and they all fade into the background so far that they almost get upstaged by the pint of bitter Smith doesn't recognise at the Crown and Mitre. In fact they're all so down to earth and routine that it's hard not to focus on the social aspect of the film and watch it as a slice of life from the fifties, not just the chauvinism but the pub culture, post-war lodging and the way young Jane spends almost all her screen time talking to strangers, just as her mother advised her not to. I'd like to remember the science fiction, but the lunacy it finds spoils it. This could have been a warning about climate change, far ahead of its time, speaking to man's destruction of our planet's protective layers, but it just uses it as an excuse for cosmic rays to mutate grasshoppers into monsters. Sigh.

Sirocco (1951)

Director: Curtis Bernhardt
Stars: Humphrey Bogart, Marta Toren and Lee J Cobb

I've successfully worked my way through most of Humphrey Bogart's career, not that hard a task as he's very well represented on TCM and on DVD. However I've found myself surprised to find that it isn't just his earliest films that are hard to find, from 1928 to 1931, before he was even a supporting star at Warner Brothers, but also his most recent. I've seen every film he made in the forties, for instance, and I'm only missing two from the thirties, at least from 1932 onwards. Yet I'm missing a full third of his output in the fifties, his last decade in film. At least Sirocco knocks it down to four to go. Made by Bogie's own production company, Santana Pictures, and distributed by Columbia, it's resonant because it's set during the Syrian fight for independence from the French. Emir Hassan tells English and American journalists that God and justice is on his side and we're supposed to be there too. Today, independent Syria still fights for freedom from itself.

Cinematically, Sirocco is immediately reminiscent of Casablanca, one of Bogie's biggest hits, if not the very biggest of them all. In that picture, he was a cynical American running a gambling house in Casablanca, at the western end of the Mediterranean during World War II. This time out, he's a cynical American running a gambling house in Damascus, at the eastern end of the Med, a couple of decades earlier in 1925. Instead of being caught up with a beautiful visitor played by Ingrid Bergman, he gets caught up with a beautiful visitor played by Marta Toren, promoted as the 'next Ingrid Bergman'. In many ways it sounds like the same film, but the difference between the two makes itself very aware as these two meet in a café: Sirocco has a much darker tone to it than Casablanca. We don't just see the likeable old jasmine seller plant a bomb underneath a table, we see the bloody aftermath too and it's far from pretty.

The characters are cut from the same cloth. Bogie is Harry Smith, as hard boiled and cynical as Rick Blaine. The rebels, to whom he runs guns, think he's an oddity, an American in Syria without morals or political convictions. 'I've had them,' he says. 'I had a belly full of them. I left them in the States with my first wife.' Toren is Violette, a mysterious foreign lady with a history, to whom he immediately forges a romantic connection. 'You have so much to learn,' she tells him and the banter works. She's already taken though, by Col Feroud, the Capt Renault of this film, who is at once the villain of the picture, as the head of military intelligence for the occupying French, and the anti-hero, because he's apparently a calm, fair and honourable man. The more obvious bad guy is his superior officer, Gen LaSalle, who doesn't see his enemy as human and proclaims the execution of five Arabs for each dead French soldier, until Feroud politely returns him to sanity.

Feroud is Lee J Cobb, who is a quiet but powerful presence in the film, in between his two Oscar nominations for On the Waterfront and The Brothers Karamazov. He keeps calm everywhere and under the greatest pressure, except when it comes to Violette, who has a habit of driving him nuts. It doesn't help when she leaves him, of course, and it really doesn't help when she throws out the name of Harry Smith, the man who helped her at the café. Toren is good at being both independent and dependent at the same time, but her career didn't take off in Hollywood. This may have been her biggest film, though she made higher rated ones. After a few European films, she went home to Sweden in 1957 and died of a cerebral haemmorrhage at the slight age of thirty. Already long established, Everett Sloane plays Gen LaSalle, though after dominating the early scenes, he disappears for a long while. His bitterness is welcome when it returns.

The tone is dark throughout, Harry Smith being a lot less in control of his destiny here than Rick Blaine ever was. Sirocco could even be seen as a vague prequel to Casablanca, not just because of the timeframes involved, but because the experiences Smith goes through are easily the sort of experiences that could have shaped Blaine. The only catch to that theory is that Bogart made Sirocco in 1951, a decade after Casablanca, and the years between only etched the weight of the world further into his iconic face. There's little romance to counter the pressure, the lighter sides coming from lesser characters. Zero Mostel and Nick Dennis are only a slight reminder of Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, but they offer much the same touch. Mostel is delightfully obtuse as Balukjiaan, an Arab trader. 'Look at me, I'm an honest businessman,' he protests. Dennis is part Andrew Sachs and part Mischa Auer, dancing around even when he isn't dancing.

While the Casablanca comparisons are obvious and early, Sirocco doesn't fare too well. It does keep us involved and it grows late after indications that it wouldn't. Perhaps two thirds of the way in, as we start to believe that the characters are set in stone, change begins and it unfolds OK, the last fifteen minutes giving Bogart and Cobb in particular some good scenes. There are some neat lines, Cobb getting the humanitarian ones and Bogart the cynical ones. 'What do you care whose gun it is,' he tells one man, 'as long as it isn't aimed at you?' Mostly though it runs on without impressing too much, an excellent example of how even poor material in the hands of those involved can be worth watching. No, it isn't Casablanca, but few films are. It isn't even a great entry in Bogie's distinguished filmography, but it's still worth a look to see how he tried to continually darken his characters yet retain some semblance of sympathy.

Hell Below (1933)

Director: Jack Conway
Stars: Robert Montgomery, Walter Huston, Madge Evans, Jimmy Durante, Eugene Pallette and Robert Young

Of all the classic films I've watched lately, Hell Below would appear to be the most unashamedly schizophrenic. Produced in collaboration with the US Navy and dedicated to the men who serve in its submarines, it's at once a war movie, a romance, a drama, an action picture, a comedy and even, most surprisingly for 1933, an effects film. Mostly based around Taranto in Italy, an allied naval base in the Mediterranean, in 1918, we discover a barrage of rear projection and a wealth of model shots the moment we get there. When an enemy air raid attacks the town, we're treated to some strange but somehow intriguing effects to accompany the damage to buildings, somewhat like tar oozing down the camera to signify light loss. As this is a precode, there's little hesitation in showing us people killed or wounded and the blood effects are notably ahead of their time, bullets making suitably bloody wounds and survivors having missing limbs.

Given how much the film scoots around, it's hard to decide what to focus on. The tone keeps on changing, and while that may be appropriate for wartime it's difficult for the viewer to keep up with the intentions of the filmmakers. Perhaps they're trying to tell us that while war is hell, and we should never forget that, it has its light moments too, even if we have to search for them, ever conscious that the dark side is always waiting to reassert itself when we least want it to. Certainly there's never a dull moment and the tension is capably held, however much the rear projection work reminds us how real this isn't. As befits a precode, it doesn't attempt to sugar coat a nasty reality, if anything relishing in throwing some really tough choices at its characters and lingering on the decisions they make. It reinforces that while there's often a right answer, it still may not be a good one. Choose well or choose badly, there are still ramifications.

Playing the lead, Lt Thomas Knowlton, is Robert Montgomery, who shows how he got credited above someone as talented as Walter Huston when he changes tone on the back of a dime. He has to do this often and he does it admirably. He's a hero and a villain all at once, a rogue and a sincere romantic lead, a selfish fool and a generous saviour. The best example of this comes at a street carnival, to which he whisks his commander's daughter, blatantly aiming to seduce this married woman. Caught halfway up a ferris wheel when an air raid arrives, he springs to action and saves the day. Once he has her to safety, they return to the frivolity of life until we realise that they're now at his place and the kiss he steals is very real. It must be difficult for an actor to transform from light hearted to serious to light hearted to serious without losing depth, but Montgomery manages it magnificently here and he rides a rollercoaster of an ethical story arc.

Huston is Lt Cmdr T J 'Deadpan' Toler, an experienced commander who takes over Knowlton's sub as the film begins and they arrive back in Taranto for long awaited leave. Huston is unfairly neglected today, his son John's notable work as a director being far more remembered. Yet the elder Huston was a real star back in the day, one of the few who managed to combine the role of character actor and leading man successfully. While his acting career ran until 1950, a little past his Oscar winning supporting turn in his son's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it was during the precode era that he shone brightest in my eyes. 1932's American Madness and The Beast of the City are two of the most underrated precode dramas in my eyes, and Kongo ranks behind only Freaks as the most gloriously outre film classic Hollywood ever made. He began 1933 with yet another precode gem, Gabriel Over the White House, and then followed up with this.

The conflict between Toler and Knowlton is an interesting one. It runs consistently throughout the story, but our perception of it changes over time. Initially Knowlton is the human face and Toler is the by the book stickler for detail, but gradually we see that our judgement was unfair. Toler is human too, but with enough experience to be able to see the big picture and frame his decisions accordingly. Knowlton has nowhere near the experience so his human decisionmaking is flawed and dangerous. Watch the death scene of Seaman Jenks once and you won't forget just how flawed. Of course, that makes Knowlton a character to watch and Toler one to respect. Once we learn enough to get past first impressions, we'd want to serve under Toler but go out on the town with Knowlton. What's so surprising about this conflict is that it never descends to the level of good guy/bad guy, remaining admirably and steadfastly in shades of grey.

Initially Knowlton has a sidekick, Lt Brick Walters, played by Robert Young and until I saw them share scene after scene I hadn't realised how much Roberts Montgomery and Young look alike. They bounce off each other capably too. On their first night of leave, both are ordered to a dance tasked with entertaining the wives of the high brass and both fall for Joan Standish, in the lovely form of Madge Evans. Knowlton wins out and prompts the romantic subplot of this film, if you can use that term when she's married to a serviceman injured in the line of duty who can't walk. The romance is as much a prop to build the character of Lt Knowlton as an actual romance, but it's there and Evans does a fair job. More watchable are the double act of Eugene Pallette and Jimmy Durante (yes, you read that right), one which is joyous from its first appearance and only becomes more so with time, all the way to a fight with a kangaroo (yes, you read that right too).

Durante is Ptomaine, the ship's cook, who's studying mail order to be a dentist, while Pallette is MacDougal, the chief torpedo man, who enjoys nothing more than a good fight. They are utterly and refreshingly down to earth, hilarious without having to crack jokes, exactly the sort of men who would make the claustrophobic life on a sub an experience to remember. Both are worthy, more character based and realistic than either of them usually played. I have no idea how much of the boxing match Durante has with the kangaroo was actually shot with him, but it certainly looks like most of it was. Sure, there are cuts and clever angles, but it still seems real. The only downside to this double act is how they keep getting caught up in the stereotypes, which are everywhere here and as bad as the accents. Yet there are counters. For every buck toothed Brit sergeant played by an Irishman, there's a solid example of honourable British stiff upper lip.

It's this inconsistency that stands out most. This film is very good at getting us to invest interest in a scene only to steal it away from under us. As Knowlton romances Joan, off he's called to the boat. As he's about to get information out of the captain, we're thrust into a battle. And on we go: one minute booming guns, the next chirping birds; one minute we're at an illegal fight, the next a convalescent home. There's frequently romance and heartache in the very same scenes. This inconsistency of tone makes the film very choppy and that's backed up by some abrasive cuts between scenes. That may be less the fault of the film and more its preservation, but there is a considerable difference of opinion in how long the picture even runs. Contemporary reviews reported variance between 78 and 155 minutes, which is a pretty serious difference. The version I watched was 101 minutes long. I wonder what was chopped out.

What this leaves is a film that deserves vast amounts of praise in its details but less as a picture. The detail work holds up remarkably well and feels very right. We're drawn to the conflict, which is always believable and never polarised: there are no good guys and bad guys here, merely real guys making good or bad decisions under the stress of war. The Germans speak German and are only the obvious enemy, the real enemy being within bad decisions. The casting is clever, down to the convalescent home scene being populated by actors with missing limbs. There's attention to historical detail: when the story calls for the scuttling of a World War I destroyer, they actually scuttle a World War I destroyer, the USS Moody, which was being decommissioned at the time. Even the use of the ship's cat is subtle and appropriate. And yet as a whole, it doesn't hold up as well as it's hard to even see this as one film. It's half a dozen pictures all at once, maybe more.

Fast and Loose (1939)

Director: Edwin L Marin
Stars: Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell

Even in Hollywood's so-called greatest year, they were still getting up to the same shenanigans they do today. Fast and Loose features William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles yet again, as they did many times after the success of The Thin Man in 1934. No, wait a minute, that's not true. Contrary to every expectation we have from the moment the film begins, with a note to the milkman asking for him to 'please leave one quart of aspirin tablets', Fast and Loose is an unashamed knock-off, the middle of three movies featuring Joel and Garda Sloane, who are Nick and Nora in everything but name. Sure, the cast is missing a wirehaired terrier and for this couple incessant partying mean that they have trouble making ends meet, but that's why they have to work for a living. Joel Sloane is a rare book dealer with a sideline in helping insurance companies investigate the theft of such things. In such ways are knock-offs born.

While the first of the three Joel and Garda films, the previous year's Fast Company, had Melvyn Douglas and Florence Rice in the lead roles, this second instalment saw Robert Montgomery and Rosalind Russell take over. The stellar supporting cast from the first film isn't quite as stellar this time out, but it does include Reginald Owen, Etienne Girardot and Ian Wolfe, though surprisingly none of them seem to really get their teeth into their roles. It's rare for any of them to disappoint and they're all watchable here but they should have been better and I couldn't help but wonder why. Perhaps Edwin L Marin shot it as fast and loose as the title suggests. What's most surprising is that Montgomery and Russell breeze along well with the material, but were promptly replaced for the third film, Fast and Furious, made the same year, by Franchot Tone and Ann Sothern. When MGM can't keep the same leads over three films in two years, something is wrong.

Fortunately in 1939 even a film with problems is pretty palatable. The writer was Harry Kurnitz, a former journalist who, under the pseudonym of Marco Page, wrote the script for Fast Company and the source novel it was adapted from. He also wrote original screenplays for both the follow ups and obviously impressed someone because he was soon moved up to the series he knocked off. He wrote the screenplay for the fourth instalment in that series, Shadow of the Thin Man, one of the best sequels ever written, and co-wrote the story for the fifth, The Thin Man Goes Home. Kurnitz certainly understands what made Nick and Nora great, though he plays with the formula just a little and he's more blatant with Joel and Garda than he would be with Nick and Nora. His story here is roughshod in places but it speeds along nicely with an appropriate combination of complexities and plentiful helpings of clues, action and humorous dialogue.

Beyond Joel Sloane, who has convenient connections to almost everyone in the story, it revolves around a scrap of a William Shakespeare manuscript. It's owned by Nick Torrent, a rich collector who has found himself in financial trouble, for mysterious reasons. Another collector, the absent minded Christopher Oates, wants to buy the manuscript and he wants Sloane to handle the sale. When Sloane tries to find a way into the Torrent household, he finds that Dave Hilliard, Torrent's insurer, wants him in too. He hands him a first edition of Paradise Lost, apparently lost or stolen from Torrent's library but mysteriously without a claim. Already inside both Torrent's house and confidence is Phil Sergeant, something akin to Sloane's protégé, though mysteriously unhelpful. The mysteries add up, as do the corpses, though the most mysterious may be how the role of Torrent's son, the rich living Gerald, was given to someone with the name of Tom Collins.

Detailing much more of the story would spoil it, as this mystery isn't just about whodunit. There are a whole host of red herrings, so many that Harry Kurnitz was presumably experimenting with the things. Compared to your average TV show nowadays, in which my wife can invariably tell you whodunit within five minutes of the opening credits, Kurnitz piles twists on top of mysteries on top of complexities, but manages to keep a relatively slick story. We aren't confused at any point, though the armchair detectives in us are certainly kept busy. My wish was simply that the first red herring, Mr Wilkes, would have had more of a part. He's played by Ian Wolfe, a name not well remembered today, but who owned a face that every classic film fan would recognise, as he played many short but memorable parts from 1934 to 1990. I've enjoyed his work from as early as 1935's Mad Love and as late as 1990's Dick Tracy, his last film. He gets very little to do here.

Another perennial scene stealer is Etienne Girardot, perhaps best known to most as Dr Doremus, the coroner in a trio of Philo Vance movies in the mid-thirties. He's the absent-minded, perhaps senile, Christopher Oates, so really should have stolen every scene he's in with his fondness for sayings but inability to remember the last word of any of them. However like Wolfe, he can't get his teeth into the part for some reason and so becomes mildly amusing background. The Torrent family are background, as are their butler and business manager. Even Lucky Nolan, a local hood who runs a gambling palace and has his hooks into the Torrent household, is background, only Joan Marsh managing to elevate herself as Nolan's moll, Bobby Neville. At the ripe old age of 26, she wasn't too far off retirement, with over fifty films behind her and only seven more to go. She may have had the smallest feet in Hollywood, but she's pretty notable here.

For the most part it's difficult to focus much on anything except the intricacies of the plot and the charisma of the two leads. Robert Montgomery is a real go getter as Joel Sloane, more active than William Powell ever was as Nick Charles, but with just as dry a sense of humour. He drives much of this story, as much by his actions as by his character's connections to so many of the others. Rosalind Russell is a little more active than Myrna Loy's Nora Charles too. Though she tries and mostly succeeds in preserving Loy's unflappable calm, she does get a scream queen moment here that feels more than a little out of place. There's also a jealousy that goes beyond Nora's laconic wit and suggests at a little more than perhaps it should. Regardless of the quality of this pair of knock-off characters though, they're eminently watchable. No, they're not Nick and Nora, but they're watchable nonetheless and I should find the bookends to the trilogy.

Madhouse (1974)

Director: Jim Clark
Stars: Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Robert Quarry

Given that today would have been Vincent Price's one hundredth birthday, a Vincentennial as it were, I felt it appropriate to celebrate his life and career by watching a Price picture that I hadn't seen before. It took some searching but I located this one, a co-production between Amicus in the UK and AIP in the States. It's far from his best film but it has much to offer, not least the trio of legends in leading roles: Price, Peter Cushing and Robert Quarry. A couple more back them up, as Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff make surprise guest appearances, given that they'd both been dead for years: Rathbone died in 1967 and Karloff in 1969. They appear through the magic of cinema, rather like Bela Lugosi did in Plan 9 from Outer Space, but at least Ed Wood used new footage to the screen, Rathbone and Karloff reappear in clips from older AIP films. Five of those are reused here, a quick fact that helps to underline how recycled much of Madhouse is.

The plot is highly recycled. It was originally sourced from a novel called Devilday by Angus Hall, but apparently it bears little resemblance to it. It bears more of a resemblance to one of Vincent Price's previous films, Theater of Blood, made only the previous year and which lies much closer to the peak of his output. The only real difference is the attempt to build suspense by hiding the villain until the end of the film. Theater of Blood featured Price as a stage actor called Edward Lionheart who, after years of bad reviews, fakes his own death and returns to murder his critics. Madhouse features Price as Paul Toombes, a film actor, who is driven mad by the murder of his wife to be, even though he may have done the deed himself. A dozen years later, he travels to London to rekindle his career on television by appearing once more as his famous character, Dr Death, who promptly begins a killing spree in real life as Toombes arrives.

You might expect the dozen year gap between the first murder and the rest of the story to be spent in the madhouse of the title and you'd be right. However that skips by in a single scene and that's it for that. I did wonder, as the suspense built, if the title had a better meaning, that perhaps Toombes was in the madhouse all along and everything we see unfolds only in the mind of a lunatic, but I was giving the film too much credit. It doesn't. It's played straight as a hybrid of horror and suspense, that sort of pre-slasher movie that relishes in its cool death scenes but keeps a sense of mystery about the why of it all. The mystery element worked well here, at least in that clues kept getting dropped for me to fail to identify until the killer was unmasked. Frankly I preferred Theater of Blood and The Abominable Dr Phibes, both of which ignored the mystery element completely and concentrated on style and ingenuity.

Madhouse does have some style but it takes a while to appear, most of it not arriving until the finalé. Strangely, it doesn't have much to do with Price, instead tying to a supporting character played by Adrienne Corri, perhaps best known as Mrs Alexander, the housewife victim in the Singin' in the Rain scene in A Clockwork Orange. During the introductory scene, she's venomous Faye Carstairs, an actress who had appeared in one of Toombes's films and who is not happy in the slightest as he announces his engagement to Ellen Mason at a New Year showing of his fifth Dr Death movie. Twelve years later in London, she's Mrs Herbert Flay, wife to Peter Cushing's character. Life hasn't treated her well: she's now a bleached white and mostly bald lunatic in a wig who skulks around the cellar at night with her babies, all spiders. While most of the cast get routine characters, hers allows many possibilities and she certainly runs with them.

In comparison, her husband is one of those routine characters. Just as Price plays a character rather like we imagine Price himself, a cultured and polite man who merely happens to make outrageous horror movies, Cushing's role doesn't surprise either. He's also cultured and polite and has a gorgeous house on the banks of the Thames. He's also a horror actor, though at the outset he's a writer, as acting hadn't played out for him at that point. Robert Quarry is at least a little more sleazy, starting out as a man who makes adult films for art houses, and who has the distinct bad taste to point out after Toombes announces his engagement to Ellen Mason that she had once been one of his stars. Later in London he's a producer for Rainbow Television, out of the adult business but still sleazy. Quarry fans might be interested to find that he gets to dress up for a costumed ball as his most famous role, Count Yorga. Blink and you'll miss it though.

While all three of these legends do capable work, none of them really able to do otherwise, it's the women who prove most watchable. Adrienne Corri gets to run wild with her role, often with spiders crawling over her body. Clean cut Natasha Pyne, fresh from seven seasons of the classic TV sitcom Father Dear Father, plus the less successful big screen adaptation, is a sheer delight as a PR lady for Rainbow who looks after Toombes. It's not a great role, but she shines in it as a capable professional woman who happens to be gorgeous to boot. Ironically for someone not known for horror movies, she debuted on film in a Hammer picture, a swashbuckler called The Devil-Ship Pirates, with Christopher Lee but not Peter Cushing. Linda Hayden, on the other hand, is known mostly for her horror movies, having built up to this one with notable roles in Taste the Blood of Dracula and The Blood on Satan's Claw. She's very prominent as the first London victim.

The screenplay is the biggest problem, though I don't know how much budget constraints might have contributed. It's so far removed from the source novel that Angus Hall can't attract praise or criticism. Those responsible are Ken Levison and Greg Morrison, neither of whom had a heck of a lot of experience. Levison was a script editor for television whose prior screen work was restricted to a three year period that ended in 1966, eight years before this film was made. He apparently came out of retirement to write this, only to promptly retire again. Morrison never did anything else on screen. It's not that their work is bad here, it's just that it's derivative in many ways and could have been so much better. To give credit where credit's due, there are some really clever touches, such as a mirror scene in Flay's house that suggests multiple personalities, but it isn't followed up on. That's a common complaint here.

For most of the film, the plot is capable but unimaginative. Towards the end of the film, it gets really slack, relying on some outrageous conveniences that pile up unashamedly for an entire sequence. It begins with Toombes escaping from certain death without any explanation, only to stumble out of the room into a TV interview with him, mere seconds off cue, even though he and we had totally forgotten it was scheduled. Michael Parkinson cameos as himself, though the brief scene suggests that he doesn't actually interview people, he just shows extended snippets from their movies instead. The only realistic plot element during this part of the story is an OJ Simpson glove sequence, decades before that particular murder ever happened. Fortunately the inanity ends and we get a satisfactory triptych of finales: a flamboyant one, an explanatory one and a gloriously outrageous one, outrageous in all the right ways.

Don't watch this for quality, watch it for the people involved, especially Adrienne Corri, who may never have done more magnetic work, however wasted her part was. She showed an aptitude for the genre here that was never capitalised on. A steady working actress throughout the fifties and sixties, both in film and on television, she made few horror movies. Her first may have been Corridors of Blood in 1958, with both Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee, unless you count 1954's Devil Girl from Mars, and she'd make odd forays over the years, but she demonstrates here that she had everything needed to be a memorable horror lead, not a scream queen but a lead. She made three further films, none of them horror, and a host of TV episodes before retiring from the screen in 1992. That's a shame. Vincent Price, the real lead here, had more horror movies to go, of course, but none for AIP. This was his last picture for them after a long and memorable run.

Kitten with a Whip (1964)

Director: Douglas Heyes
Stars: Ann-Margret and John Forsythe

There simply isn't anything a movie can do to live up to a title like Kitten with a Whip, unless it actually starred Kitten Natividad and was directed by Russ Meyer. This one came from Universal in 1964 so no, it's not particularly exotic, being shot in black and white to boot. However it does star Ann-Margret as hell raising Jody Dvorak, who begins the film in a nightgown being chased by armed men with dogs. We don't know she's hell raising to begin with, as we're not given context to work from, but we're happy when she finds an apparently empty house and cuddles up in bed with a teddy bear. We still have sympathy when up and coming politician David Stratton comes home and discovers her. Jody has wild hair and in the light we see that the nightgown is torn. She even shows Stratton the long scratches on her back and runs through a wild yarn to explain it all. Only her wild attitude gives us pause to think there's something else behind her story.

We find out the details when Stratton goes to lunch the next day, because it's plastered all over the news. Apparently she broke out of juvenile hall, after stabbing the matron and attempting to burn the place down. Here's where we discover how dumb Stratton is and how much trouble he's got himself into. He didn't call the cops. He bought her clothes from a store, pretending they're for his wife. He gives her some money to start over. He's even about to tell a colleague about what happened until he sees her on the TV. Given that he's a politician played by John Forsythe, you might expect him to be a little brighter than this but no, he's a kind hearted fool. Jody knows exactly how to deal with him. He threatens he'll call the cops but she stops him in seconds. If he goes through with it, she'll cry rape. 'I'll get my claws into you,' she tells him, and promptly does, literally ripping his shirt and scratching his chest to make a point.

Now we know what we're looking at: a suspense thriller that's ahead of its time in a number of ways. I was expecting some sort of gang story, perhaps with Ann-Margret as a female Brando, but this is nothing like that. As it unfolds we see two possible directions. It could be a hostage drama, merely one that has a cute and bubbly female villain using blackmail as a weapon rather than a tough guy with a gun. It could also be a psychological piece, where Jody isn't just trouble but mentally unbalanced, maybe schizophrenic, what the matron calls 'an unpredictable girl'. What we get is something of both but more too, an attempt to look at the modern generation in a new way. Whether it succeeds or not is open to question but it certainly has an intriguing try in an unconventional setting. Much of this side of the picture arrives when Jody invites friends over to Stratton's place: Buck, Ron and Midge, who are as different from each other as they from Jody.

Jody is a damage case, half victim, half villain, and turning from one to the other on a dime. Ann-Margret is magnetic to watch, though she can't remotely pass for 17. She was 23 at the time and looked great but she had a maturity to her that both helped and hindered here. We don't buy her age but we buy her streetwise act, as much as she sometimes tries too hard. Midge is the hanger on, only part of the group because she has wheels. Actress Diane Sayer isn't bad looking but Ron plays with her and Buck abuses her. She lets it happen because it means that she belongs, but she's still scared. Buck is the thug, though a polite one. He's quick to violence and isn't afraid of following through. Skip Ward reminds of a young Lee Marvin. That leaves Ron, who is bizarrely some sort of amateur philosopher, a guru full of advice for everyone. He's fascinating to watch, proclaiming that he feels no pain, attempting to put mind over matter, controlling everything.

The ride that these characters take David Stratton on is a strange one, completely different from all my expectations. There's a lot here from The Desperate Hours, but while John Forsythe looks nothing like his older self here and more like a less iconic Humphrey Bogart, he has the Fredric March role not the Bogart one. There's some Touch of Evil too, in the cross border setting, jazz music and sleazy, unpredictable atmosphere. I wasn't surprised to find that some of the music was lifted from Henry Mancini's score for that film, though I was surprised to find that the motel scene in Tijuana towards the end of the picture was shot on the Bates Motel set from Psycho. I can't place the other film I felt here, perhaps because it's less about the details and more about the longing. While Jody is a tortured character, I felt there was a longing for normality in a kind of Myrna Loy, perfect wife type way. How much was sincere is open to question.

Kitten with a Whip is ranked among 'The Hundred Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made' in The Official Razzie Movie Guide, and it was lampooned by the folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000. I vaguely remember reading about it back in the eighties and getting the impression that it was a camp teen drama, which it patently isn't. While I don't believe the film succeeds in everything it attempts, and in some instances it doesn't come close, it does at least succeed in standing on its own. It has elements taken from other films, but it brings them together in a new framework. I'm sure that this is going to become a guilty pleasure, which makes me regret leaving it on my DVR so long. I'm most fascinated to find out whether a couple more viewings will make me drop the 'guilty' part of that. I'd like to track down the source novel too, written by Wade Miller. What I don't want to find is the purported remake, with Lindsay Lohan in the Ann-Margret role.

The Big Timer (1932)

Director: Eddie Buzzell
Stars: Ben Lyon and Constance Cummings

Cooky Bradford thinks he's a fighter. He's mostly there for the genuine boxers to spar with and his real job is dishing out hamburgers behind the counter of a lunch wagon. He's personable and boastful and a little dense, but he has all the right lines. 'I'll murder him!' is his catchphrase, consistently delivered as a throwaway thing. Pop Baldwin, who runs the local gym, thinks he's a palooka, but Pop's daughter Honey thinks he's going to make it big. Of course she's head over heels in love with him, so that really doesn't count; but before we know it, Pop gets hit by a car, she takes over the place and he's the only fighter who stays in her camp. Honey may be blinded by love but she isn't stupid. She teaches him a few tricks, puts him in the ring and he does good, but that prompts them to try to break into the New York fight racket and that doesn't work out too well. After all, he has a dame for a manager.

There's a common thread running through this film about this sort of society perception, but not only as regards women. It's a precode picture, an era which was known for its preponderence of strong female lead characters and Honey Baldwin fits on the saintly side of that. She's a strong woman, one who is willing to play in a man's world, and it's plain that she's an important part of whatever success Cooky is ever going to have. His corner man, Catfish, memorably tells her that, 'he needs you like Gandhi needs his safety pin,' which is underlined when he unbelievably fails to remember his own birthday. Many scenes grow out of a disbelief that Cooky could have a dame for a manager, but the sexism isn't one sided here. At a job agency, a lady tells Honey that being a cook is no sort of job for a man. Class comes in for a few jibes too, the guests at a boxing event for charity complaining that the host lets the fighters stay to eat with them.

Really it's not a boxing movie, as much as there's some of the standard progression. Sure, Cooky lives the hard life, finally gets his break and moves on up, only to let it go to his head and cause him to start making all the wrong decisions. In fact, as much as Ben Lyon is an endearing lead, full of boyish charm and contradiction, that charm wears thin. When Thelma Todd arrives in the picture as Kay Mitchell, the society girl who hosts those charity events, pretty obviously because she has a thing about slumming with the rough and tumble guys who win, we find ourselves not caring about Cooky any more. We can root for him as an outsider, but when our sympathy goes our interest goes with it. On the other hand, the lovely Constance Cummings as Honey isn't just a strong female lead but a cute and devoted lady too. No, she's not believable as the boxing equivalent of Ida Lupino, the sole woman in a man's business, but she's decent nonetheless.

Cummings was a capable lead, though she never found herself at home in Hollywood. Samuel Goldwyn discovered her on Broadway but she had a tough time finding the right films. Though her 35 pictures ran from 1931 to 1963, over half of them were released in her first four years in the business. When she made The Big Timer she had six movies behind her, half of which saw her credited above Boris Karloff, one released after his huge break in Frankenstein. None were major pictures though and there would be no big hits to come either, at least until she moved to England and appeared in comedies like Blithe Spirit and The Battle of the Sexes. This is what makes her a discovery, a face you find while filling in gaps in the filmographies of others. Worthy pictures to seek out include Frank Capra's American Madness, the Warren William precode The Mind Reader and the highly underrated Washington Merry-Go-Round with Lee Tracy.

The problem with this film is that there isn't enough substance to her part to make her more than just the best thing abut it. In fact it misses all the many opportunities it has just as surely as if it was written by Cooky Bradford rather than Robert Riskin, who had two years to wait before making his name on and winning a well deserved Oscar for It Happened One Night. He'd already worked for Frank Capra, adapting The Miracle Woman well, but that working relationship would go on to much better things, like Lady for a Day, Mr Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe. In a strong filmography this is one of his lower points. If he had been serious about the sexist and classist hints he kept dropping, he should have made the film about Honey Baldwin not Cooky Bradford. While she's the glue both to the film's story and to Cooky's, this should have been an influential proto-feminist opportunity for her to stamp her authority over the plot and his career.

I don't know what Riskin had aimed at, but it doesn't feel like he'd aimed at anything. It's a love story, though not a particularly heartfelt one and we rarely feel that there's any real substance to it. The surprise party scene is about as tender as it gets and that just allows Cummings a shot at dignified heartbreak. It's a boxing picture but there's not much time spent in the ring; what there is fails the authenticity test, not least because it's sped up for effect. Mostly it's a simple drama of human nature, with a couple starting low, moving up in the world, falling apart and eventually finding a way to begin again. Mathematically it may be textbook, but emotionally it leaves us dry. Cummings does what she can with the material and Lyon is decent. Thelma Todd doesn't get enough to do and the best known other name, Nat Pendleton, doesn't arrive until the end in an uncredited bit part. Given they're the only reason to watch, that doesn't leave much.

This is the Night (1932)

Director: Frank Tuttle
Stars: Lily Damita, Charlie Ruggles, Roland Young, Cary Grant and Thelma Todd

Every actor has to make their debut on screen somewhere and Archibald Leach made his here, also debuting his new stage name of Cary Grant. Playing an Olympic Javelin thrower, Stephen Mathewson, he's as confident as if he'd had a dozen hits behind him already. He's not quite the Cary Grant he would become: more like a statue of the work in progress, suitably chiselled but not quite right yet. He's young, of course, and heavily made up, but most obviously he's so full of energy that he almost bursts out off the screen, so much so that it isn't much of a stretch to believe that Grant, a trained acrobat, could have been an Olympic athlete himself. However this is a precode and his character only exists to befuddle his wife's attempts to be with her lover, a lover played by Roland Young, the most gloriously understated actor in classic Hollywood. That means that Grant would have dominated the film physically even if he'd played it subtle.

Stephen Mathewson isn't stupid. It doesn't take long for him to see through the comedy of errors that constitutes the initial storyline, which fails to unfold in a remotely believable manner. Claire, his wife, is having an affair with Gerald Gray, and they plan to travel to Venice together on the train. Unfortunately for them, their friend Bunny West gives the tickets to Stephen by mistake. Forced into a clumsy fabrication to cover it all up, Bunny invents a wife for Gerald, which position Gerald promptly has to audition for. A hungry French actress calling herself Chou-Chou lands the part and all the inevitable hijinx ensue. In fact, 'inevitable' is a good word to use, because the dialogue is consistently cheesy, full of puns, obvious situation comedy and occasional forays into song, as if it was based on a vaudeville performance instead of a play. It's certainly stagebound, even outdoors in Venice, but it feels much more like a collection of routines than a story.

There are laughs to be had, even some strong ones on occasion, and I giggled through much of it, but it isn't remotely a subtle piece. The closest it ever reaches is Stephen's understanding of the reality of the situation without letting on, while the rest of it is painted in very broad strokes indeed. What this means is that the main reason it all works isn't because of the story or even the dialogue, but because of the people who bring it to life. The cast is magical, mostly because they know how blatant the whole thing is and play along with its idiocies while staying joyously dry and serious. Lesser actors would have broken it horribly, but here Paramount were especially blessed with the double act of Roland Young and Charlie Ruggles, who fit the roles they're given, of Gerald Gray and Bunny West respectively, so well that the material doesn't matter. I found myself laughing at every cliché. Sober, they're hilarious. Drunk, they're even better.

That's pretty much it for the male side of the cast, which is completed by Irving Bacon, one of the most prolific bit part character actors in Hollywood history, who racked up almost 500 credits like this one. He's Gray's manservant and he gets a running gag that involves him continually but accidentally stripping off Claire's dress. Let's hear it one more time for the precodes! Claire is played by Thelma Todd, who is sufficiently bitchy for us to wonder how she managed to land one man, let alone two, platinum blonde hair notwithstanding. She does a fine job in the part but the script means that she's inherently not the female lead that we spend most of our time watching. She's the chase, Chou-Chou is the catch. Chou-Chou is also played by the delightful Lili Damita, who is remembered more for who she married than who she played on film, but nonetheless lit up a number of films with her presence. She's even better here than she was in The Match King.

Credited as Lily Damita here, she went by many names and many spellings, as befits an exotic and continental wild beauty. Off screen she was known as Dynamita or Tiger Lil and she was an able foil to notorious hellraising second husband Errol Flynn, her first husband being legendary director Michael Curtiz and her third a dairy rancher from Iowa. She demonstrates her fluency in multiple languages as Chou-Chou, but mostly demonstrates a smouldering presence that draws the men to her like moths to a flame. She's magnetic, impossible to ignore, and Thelma Todd's more conventional beauty can't compete, just as Claire can't compete with Chou-Chou. Damita didn't make many films, 34 in 16 years, over half of which were made in Europe: in Germany, the UK or her native France. Her highest rated picture is the French language version of Ernst Lubitsch's One Hour with You, with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald.

Nothing I've commented on thus far is remotely surprising. It's perhaps more ludicrous than we might expect as well as being more admirably enacted by the stellar cast, but that's nothing to shock us. Yet the film does have one real surprise that manifests itself even as the credits begin: it has a very notable sense of style that is far from the norm in this sort of romantic comedy. The credits unfold over an orchestra and when the story begins, the camera sweeps with panache as if this was Roland West adapting The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The angles are imaginative and it's all choreographed around the music, including the sound effects, making the feel somewhat like an ambitious production number, merely without any singing or dancing. We're outside so the film is tinted dark blue, which adds to the effect. That continues throughout the film, with indoors being standard black and white but outdoors being a lush dark blue.

There are points where this feel ventures even more into production number territory, such as the train boarding scene, but the feel is more important than any actual singing. When voices are added, the effect is cheesy and occasionally badly timed, but when they remain absent and we just watch choreography, it's fascinating. I don't know who was responsible, but interesting names in the crew surely contributed. Victor Milner, a nine times Oscar nominee and a winner for 1934's Cleopatra, was the cinematographer. Lucien Ballard, later renowned as Sam Peckinpah's cinematographer, was one of his assistant camera operators. More intriguingly Jean Negulesco was the technical director, very early in a notable career. I wonder if the expressionistic look of these scenes came from him, his talents as a painter and his experience as a stage decorator. Whoever was responsible, they elevated the picture beyond expectations.

The Blue Angel (1930)

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Star: Emil Jannings

Sound arrived in Hollywood early, Al Jolson telling us that we ain't heard nothin' yet as far back as 1927, but it took a little longer in the rest of the world where silent films continued to be produced even past the mid thirties. In Germany, which mastered much of the visual style that would later define classic Hollywood, Fritz Lang did truly amazing things with sound in his 1931 masterpiece, M, but the first major German sound film came a year earlier, with Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. It stars Emil Jannings, an important stage actor who made his way to film as early as 1914 and featured heavily in F W Murnau's films of the twenties, including Faust, The Last Laugh and Tartuffe. With other major roles in films like Varieté, Waxworks and Othello behind him, it could hardly have been surprising when he was awarded the very first Oscar in 1929, ahead of the ceremony, as Best Actor for The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command.

Yet Jannings is little known today, not least because he went back to his native Germany when Hollywood converted to sound and his thick accent killed his career there, only to actively make Nazi propaganda pictures for Josef Goebbels, but that's not the only reason that when people seek out The Blue Angel, they're not coming for Emil Jannings. His co-star, whose name didn't appear above the credits, gave perhaps her most iconic and memorable role here, though she would go on to give many more over the decades to come. She's Marlene Dietrich, as cabaret singer Lola Lola, and they're still spoofing that performance today. After this film, for which she shot both English and German versions, she would be whisked away to Hollywood to appear opposite Gary Cooper in Morocco. The rest is history. However good Jannings is as portly college professor Dr Immanuel Rath, and he is very good indeed, she's the main reason people watch today.

To highlight how important she is here, we see her first, albeit in the form of a poster, but then we're whisked away to Dr Rath's classroom for some subtle humour as he attempts to teach a student to pronounce the word 'the'. He also discovers that many of his class sneak off at night to visit the Blue Angel, a club where women sing and dance in scanty attire, and where naughty postcards are readily available of the popular talent. Naturally Dr Rath takes it upon himself to investigate and complain to Lola Lola that she's corrupting his students. Dietrich is younger here than I've ever seen her, a little plumper too and certainly higher pitched with her initial singing voice. She's more than a match for him though, as won't come as a surprise to anyone, even before they've seen how much of a fuddy duddy bachelor Rath is. He doesn't stand a chance and she steals the film from under Jannings with wicked smiles, careful poses and exotic charm.

He isn't the same again, now as unsure of his carefully cloistered world as Lola is sure of her wild one. When he goes back the next night to return the pair of knickers his students had sneaked into his pocket and apologise for his unseemly conduct, she plays with him with a sly grin. He's putty in her hands. How Jannings kept such a straight face I have no idea. How I han't realised how hilarious this film is I have no idea. I always thought it was a musical drama. There's plenty of drama while we laugh and smile though, Rath even sending Lola into stunned silence when he springs to life to defend her in her dressing room. This film began slowly in a college classroom ruled by a staid professor who looks older than Jannings's 46 years and we wonder what we're about to watch. How can this story reconcile with what we expect from Dietrich? Yet the next we realise, it springs into life so effectively that we hardly keep up for grinning in admiration.

There's a lot of technique in play here. Being such a fan of M, I couldn't help but notice the use of sound, which is often used in similar ways, though not so integrally to the plot. There is music and there are songs, not just as entertainment, but to set the scene and underline the tone. At the Blue Angel, the raucous music often starts and stops with the opening and closing of doors. The place is a triumph of set decoration, unlike any club I've seen on film, with textures that are palpable. The atmosphere seeps off the screen, not just the debauched nature of the place but the lackadaisical way they change the sets on the tiny stage and cycle through performers. The troupe is a travelling one but they begin and end at the Blue Angel and they fit there as if they never left. The troupe's manager and conjurer looks like the Penguin and there's an awesomely sad clown who wanders around as if sleepwalking. He's always in frame, joyously doing nothing.

Of course Dietrich has much to do with that atmosphere. She's the focal point of the show, but she adds so many little touches that make it feel like she'd been doing this forever. She pauses between verses to chug down a glass of beer and rearranges her knickers in the doorway. She's as textured as the place that hosts her. It's the real beginning of the Marlene Dietrich we'd watch over the decades: the woman of two contrasting halves, the delightful lady and the whore who could outdrink and outswear any of us. She's a joy to watch, even when she isn't singing Falling in Love Again, but by the end of the film Jannings amazingly steals the picture back from her, as Rath descends into the grotesque, far enough to truly shock us. In the end, the story really is about him: the difference between the Rath we see at the beginning and the Rath we see at the end is the result of a traumatic story that fills us with as much sadness as joy.

Jannings was the star, but he was a star already. Dietrich was nobody when she was cast, taking the role given to Brigitte Helm, of Metropolis fame, when that actress ceased to be available; but she left it a star and she never looked back. In historical context, she created a template for the liberated professional woman that must have been a major influence on the depiction of women in the precode era of Hollywood and beyond, not only in the power that woman can have but the way in which she chooses to wield it. She's the catalyst for Dr Rath's fall in the story, Rath seeing her as an ideal woman but discovering that fantasy doesn't translate to reality. She's the reason why the film was often heavily recut too, many censors unable to deal with Lola's raw sensuality. The Nazis banned it as soon as they took power but Hitler viewed it often in his private cinema. There's much to read into that, not only that Rath could be a metaphor for interwar Germany.

Heinrich Mann wrote the source novel and the Nazis banned everything with his name on it, yet it wasn't a deliberate attack on them. Originally published in 1905 as Professor Unrat, it was an attack on the bourgeoise German education system of the time, exposing the double standards of its lead character. In German, the word 'rat' means 'advice', but Rath's students satirise him as 'Prof Unrat', or 'Prof Garbage'. This adaptation removes some of the moral depth of the novel but focuses it as what director Joseph von Sternberg called 'the downfall of an enamoured man.' The more you think about it, the more it really does focus simply on the changes one man brings on himself through a succession of reactions. Marlene Dietrich is a delightful distraction, a really important one, but in the end that's all she is. This may have launched her international career in a massive way but the picture remains as the credits suggest: an Emil Jannings film.

Dead Ringer (1964)

Director: Paul Henreid
Stars: Bette Davis, Karl Malden and Peter Lawford

If there's anything better than a film starring Bette Davis, it surely has to be a film starring Bette Davis and Bette Davis. This one has her playing twins, as she had done in A Stolen Life in 1946, but this was 1964 and times had changed. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was only a couple of years earlier and this was advertised as 'for Baby Jane people'. To emphasise the tone of the piece, it begins at a funeral, that of Frank DeLorca, a key figure to both of the characters Bette Davis plays. He was a rich colonel from an important family. Edith Phillips was a WAC he met in wartime who fell in love with him. Margaret DeLorca is her sister, who stole him away from her on the pretext of being pregnant with his child. Edith hasn't forgotten, though it's been ten years since they've seen each other. Time has treated them very differently. Maggie is rich and flaunts her wealth to her sister, who runs a cocktail lounge called Edie's Bar but is a soft touch.

The technical work done to enable Bette Davis to play opposite herself is pretty solid, only a hint of texture now and again betraying the trickery. What Davis does with the roles is fascinating, as she overdoes both parts initially, deliberately so as both are twisted characters, hurling polite barbs at each other from behind fake faces. It's when Edie storms out that the subtleties begin. It's when she discovers from Maggie's chauffeur on the way home that the DeLorcas never had a child that the story follows suit, especially once her landlord gives her a month's notice as she's three months behind on the rent for the bar. So this soft touch gets serious. She gets her sister to her room above her bar, she shoots her dead and she takes on her life. They are twins after all. Swapping clothes and hairstyles is easy. The rest is just picking up the necessary details without anyone noticing. If anyone could make it work, it would be Bette Davis, right?

Well, it isn't quite that simple. While Edie has kept up with her sister's public life in the papers, there are secrets that have never been printed, down to an affair that the press wasn't privy to. There are people she hasn't met, background she doesn't know, habits she wasn't aware of. Her sister led a privileged life, in a mansion with many rooms and many servants, none of which she knows. Edie smokes but Maggie doesn't. There's even Duke, the family dog who hated Maggie but gets on with Edie fine. Naturally we expect to spend the rest of the film waiting for it all to fall horribly apart, though we have at least a modicum of sympathy for Edie. We don't approve of her actions, of course, but we do want to see her redeem herself by coming clean. What Bette Davis brings to this role though that lesser actresses couldn't have done is that the longer Edie plays Maggie, the more Maggie subsumes her and the more she loses that sympathy.

While we watch Bette Davis dominate throughout, as is hardly surprising for a film that stars her in not just one but two leading roles, there's a notable supporting cast to back her up and they are surprisingly prominent as the story runs on. Most obviously there's Karl Malden, as a down to earth cop called Sgt Jim Hobbson, one who saw Edie earn her first buck and wanted to marry her, even though she may not have fully realised it. He doesn't see the details as quickly as the other major name, Peter Lawford, who is Maggie's bit on the side, perhaps because he doesn't want to. The interest both these characters have in the sisters keeps the story dynamic and fascinating, not to mention full of cruel irony with at least one twist that I didn't see coming. Malden has the bigger part and he works it well. Lawford has less to do but he does it capably, surely bringing plenty of less savoury Rat Pack realism to bear on his character's sleaziness.

I was happy to see Estelle Winwood as Dona Anna, Frank's highly religious mother. She's superb but she has been in every part I've seen her play. I came in at the very end of her career, as the aged nurse to Elsa Lanchester in Neil Simon's Murder By Death, and every odd picture I find here and there adds to my appreciation of her talent. While Winwood is subtle here, Jean Hagen is an enthusiastic society friend of Maggie's called Dede Marshall who breezes into her mansion as if she owned the place and everyone in it and breezes back out again. This was Hagen's last role, after a short but memorable set of nineteen films in the fifteen years since Adam's Rib in 1949. By coincidence, Winwood only made nineteen films too but it took her three times as long, her screen career running from 1931 to 1976. Hagen was a versatile talent, who left behind pictures as varied as The Asphalt Jungle, Singin' in the Rain and The Shaggy Dog. She's a brief riot here.

One face I didn't know that stood out as worthy of note is that of Cyril Delevanti, who acquits himself well as Henry, the DeLorca's butler. It turns out that I've seen him a lot, in uncredited bit parts in old Universal horrors as well as much later pictures like Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Soylent Green, but here is where I'm likely to picture him whenever I see him again. It's certainly a good cast but there's another actor to mention who serves a surprising role: Paul Henreid, who had served as a capable leading man to Bette Davis on more than one occasion but especially in one of her greatest pictures, 1942's Now, Voyager. Here he doesn't appear on screen because he's the film's director, something he took to after speaking out against McCarthyism, something which got him promptly blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Unable to act, he directed B movies and TV episodes. This was his most prominent film as a director.

It's a surprising piece in a number of ways. Based on a short story by Rian James, it was adapted into a script as early as 1944 but was shelved by Warner Brothers. It saw life first in Spanish as a 1946 Mexican film called La Otra, the story's original title, with Dolores del Rio playing the lead twins in the same year that Davis played twins in A Stolen Life. Whatever the reason Warners left it untouched for so long, Davis wanted the parts when Dead Ringer was put together a couple of decades later and she turned down roles in other films to get them, including 4 for Texas with two more prominent Rat Pack members, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Whatever its history, it feels like it was advertised, a dark sixties thriller made in the wake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I'm sure it would have played very differently in the mid forties, the era of film noir. Given the clever twists, I'm intrigued as to how La Otra treated the same material that far back.