Hitchin' Up with LINDA AND ABILENE

Libido-churning eroticism in the long-feared-lost LINDA AND ABILENE.

I finally caught up with H.G. Lewis's once-considered-lost LINDA AND ABILENE the other night, courtesy of Vinegar Syndrome's THE LOST FILMS OF HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS startlingly beautiful Blu-ray disc -- undoubtedly one of the releases of the year, regardless of the films' individual, er, merits.

Set in the Old West, and originally X-rated for its scenes of two adult orphaned siblings who get tired of moving hay from place to place, LINDA AND ABILENE would be considered a stylistic throwback had it been made at the same time as Edwin S. Porter's THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (1903). The plot is very simple: First Act) brother and sister resist each other; Second Act), brother and sister stop resisting each other; and Third Act) the brother attempts to restore sanctity to their home by directing his lust toward the saloon floozy Linda, and everyone loses.

Its highlights are anachronistic glimpses of Linda's silver toenail polish (not to mention her styrofoam-stiff boob job) and - my favorite - the jumbo-sized Band-Aid spied on Abilene's foot. The director did take care to remove it when the bottom of her foot was in closeup, and the mighty distracting gash across it makes us wish she'd worn her clodhoppers whilst preening nude in the shallowest "river" ever filmed.

From Morrissey With Love

Imagining what a Morrissey James Bond theme might sound like:

Oh Mr. World Domination you bore me
And I most sincerely wish that you'd go
And oh most sincerely just blow away and
Take all the boring evil you know away
Oh Mr. World Domination please go
Because we don't need your kind, don't you know
Nor the overbearing seeds of evil you sow
It's so boring to have to stop having fun
With John Osborne's kitchen sink realism
Because your solipsism's made me pick up a gun
So Mr. World Domination you can eat my Walther PPK
Lead, I promise, is deliciously good for you
And, as you die, perhaps you'll wonder how could have you
Been so full of you to act in such a flatulent way?
So Mr. World Domination, we've had quite enough
So you can bugger off
And I'll dance home, Mission Accomplished, I thank you.

Yes, I think it would probably go something like that.

The Name of Ligeia, or, I Think Too Much

 

It's been on my mind today that the name Ligeia may be mispronounced in Roger Corman's THE TOMB OF LIGEIA. The lightning bolt came from seeing in print the name of Walerian Borowczyk's wife (who played one of the Future People in Chris Marker's La Jetée) Ligia, pronounced (like Lydia) with the accent on the first syllable; this would seem to be the (or a) more contemporary spelling of the name. The spelling of a name may be modified over time but this isn't usually done unless its familiar, traditional pronunciation remains consistent. I love THE TOMB OF LIGEIA, and its "Lie-jee-ah" is a pronunciation I've grown up with and never questioned; I do wish this hadn't occurred to me. If I'm right, it's going to stand out in future viewings like "Don/Doña Medina" stands out in PIT AND THE PENDULUM.

Franco's Farewell Film

I had been saving it for the right night, but this evening I finally said goodbye to Jess Franco by watching his last movie, AL PEREIRA VS. THE ALLIGATOR LADIES. I have no idea how this film would look to a newcomer, but if you've seen them all or are well on your way, I don't see how anyone could deny that it's the most accomplished, enjoyable and surreal movie of Jess's final phase. It's beautifully shot, scored with freshly recorded music that spans back 50 years over countless movies, and it manages to comment on his entire career, the fantasies that have fueled a lifetime, the changing image of Lina, his long association with Antonio Mayans (pictured) and also the realities of growing older and facing death as the cackling temptations of life dance on. It is entertainment, essay and autopsy all in one, the one film of his video period that I can unhesitatingly call inspired. Who knows? It might be his 8½.

Longer, Redder Nights

I recently came into possession of a copy of Georges Franju's L'homme sans visage (1974), the original eight-part miniseries from which the feature version known as Nuits rouges (US: SHADOWMAN) was distilled. I am currently two hour-long episodes into it, only doing one per night. It has no subtitles, but the language of cinema is present throughout.

I've always heard that the feature version is the better one, tighter, better paced, etc. -- but from what I have seen so far, I doubt this. This version has all the breathing room the feature doesn't, and the best parts are almost always the slow scenes in which evil or magical deeds are made to seem mundane -- or vice versa. The opening night shot of a car's headlights as the vehicle slowly inches down a slope to idle under a bridge while two silhouetted figures dump a lifeless body in the river; bookcases opening to reveal secret passages; or a man in a red helmet and black leather jumpsuit thundering a motorcycle through subterranean tunnels hundreds of years old. This stuff goes straight into my veins; it's why I love movies.

I've heard this miniseries is under consideration for release in France as part of the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel's DVD issues of classic French fantasy television, but even if this does come to pass, it won't be subtitled. In the meantime, if the language barrier is no obstacle to you, consult your local torrent provider.

Once Upon A Time on a Lemon Farm

Tonight's viewing included "The Old Man Picked A Lemon" - Episode 29 of Season 2 of THE FUGITIVE, from 1965. It yielded something of interest.

The setting is a California lemon farm where David Janssen's Dr. Richard Kimble has found work supervising Mexican farm hands. When the beloved owner of the farm dies in a car accident, his wife Flo (Celeste Holm) is placed in temporary charge, but his errant and evil son Blaine (Ben Piazza, giving a fine performance) returns from his banishment -- he was sent away after being involved in a car wreck that claimed the life of the chief worker's daughter -- with the intention of selling the place out from under his stepmother. When Flo reveals recent codicils to the will, unknown to the son, which place her in majority ownership, Blaine hires a private investigator to research her and learns that used to work in Miami as a prostitute until eight years earlier, when the father, rich and prosperous, met her, got her phone number ("it was available"), hired her for a week of companionship and, before departing, asked her to marry him -- a story she relates to the sympathetic ear of Kimble. Blaine intends to expose her backstory unless she sells out to him for far less than her interests are worth... and, after much drama, things ultimately go the other way. The story ends with the farm's faithful Mexican workers assembling around Flo at the front porch of the family home, where she warmly invites them all inside for coffee.

If the story sounds familiar, it may be because the backstory and finale of this Jack Turley teleplay are nearly identical to Claudia Cardinale's backstory in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969) -- and her participation in that epic film's finale, when she is encouraged by Jason Robards' Cheyenne to take some water out to the workers who are building the train station on her land. I had seen this episode before but never made the connection till now.

THE FUGITIVE: My 50 Year Eureka

I'm now nearly halfway through my umpteenth viewing of THE FUGITIVE (the original, not the redo), courtesy of Paramount/CBS Television's MOST WANTED EDITION box set of the complete series. I have been watching this show for about 50 years, since it was first broadcast, but only now am I beginning to take notice of what may be its most important sociological subtext.

I am coming around to the view that what is most appealing about the show is not David Janssen (who gives what is still perhaps the most consistently believable performance of a continuous character in television), nor is it Kimble's plight at having to prove his innocence. It's not that at all... but rather that the show (inadvertently?) depicts an ultimate male fantasy of escape.

Think about it: Kimble breaks away from his domesticity in Stafford, Indiana (he didn't "kill" his wife), has numerous encounters and amorous adventures on the road, all while being doggedly pursued by a representative of the very law that tied him to that woman. William Conrad's opening narration ("... reprieved by fate when a train wreck FREED HIM en route to the death house ... FREED HIM to hide in lonely desperation, to change his identity, to toil at many jobs ... FREED HIM to search for a one-armed man he saw leave the scene of the crime ... FREED HIM to run before the relentless pursuit of the police lieutenant obsessed with his capture") keeps hammering those words "freed him" till they sound like serial temptations of the word "freedom." He blames a one-armed man - a metaphor you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to figure out. And at what sort of jobs does he toil? Construction worker, truck driver, road builder, bouncer - the sort of jobs that put hair on a man's chest.

The underlying point is surprisingly stark once you notice it. As dark and challenging as Kimble's fugitive existence may be, it FREES HIM. Once he's exonerated, it will mean a return to a regular existence, to a job and a home and a schedule, and clang clang go the jail guitar doors.

Revisiting Paul and Michelle

Because I am acquainting myself with the work of the late French actress Anicée Alvina in preparation to record an audio commentary for the BFI's forthcoming Blu-ray release of Alain Robbe-Grillet's SUCCESSIVE SLIDINGS OF PLEASURE, tonight I watched her two best-known American releases, FRIENDS (1971) and PAUL & MICHELLE (1974), both directed by Lewis Gilbert.

The first, best remembered due to its Elton John score, is about a couple of mature-before-their-time 15 year olds who run away from their unhappy homes, cohabitate, and end up having a child together. The sequel (made the same year as the Robbe-Grillet film, which is hard to believe - and the same year I got married, which is still harder to wrap my brain around) picks up their story three years further on, heaping some of life's difficulties on the reunited, but still-young couple. I last saw these movies when I was 17 and single, yet already a working critic; at the time, they seemed simplistic, soapy and wishy-washy to me, but seeing them again took me back with remarkable clarity to what it felt like to be a married teenager with a small apartment and a working wife. This detail alone made them feel unexpectedly moving at times.

Anicée and her co-star Sean Bury (one of the kids in Lindsay Anderson's IF... and Joseph Cotten's son in THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES) meet the challenge of their bilingual roles capably and it seemed to me that it could be argued that these movies -- to be frank, mostly forgotten now -- were the more innocent prototypes of Richard Linklater's BEFORE movies. This series might have continued, but the sequel flopped at the box office. Sean Bury has been retired from acting for some time, and Anicée died in 2006 at age 53, so we can only wonder if this couple ever met again or let each other go. To my surprise, the act of watching the two films again back-to-back made me feel an emotional investment in this young family's future so, regardless of the films' respective weaknesses, I can't exactly write them off as failures.

Neither film is presently available on DVD. FRIENDS is available via Amazon Instant; to see PAUL AND MICHELLE, you'll need to be more resourceful. 

FRIDAY THE 13TH - WHY?

I never understood what shot FRIDAY THE 13TH into the stratosphere. Back in 1980, I saw it opening day with a friend in a cattleplex with only one other person in attendance. There were some very talented people associated with the production (like Adrienne King, pictured, and Kevin Bacon, who is not), but even then, at the outset of their careers, though grateful for the work, they must have felt they were slumming; it was nothing the world had never seen before, done better. All of Tom Savini's superbly devised gore effects faded to white before you could appreciate what went into them -- imagine having to do that with all the funny stuff in a comedy!

I wrote a grumpy, sarcastic review for CINEFANTASTIQUE but the world paid no heed. The movie, though robbed of all its gunpowder by the MPAA, somehow wowed eager-to-be-scared youngsters with fake IDs and went on to become a hit, a franchise, a phenomenon. Some people have written books about it, others have made documentaries about it, like it somehow fried their brain and changed their lives. I'm glad they had some kind of seismic encounter with art, if that's as close as they got, but I sure wish someone with the goods (like George Romero) had caught half the breaks Sean Cunningham did. But he refused to work with the majors (like Paramount), knowing his white lightning would have to kneel and be homogenized.

Anyway, Happy Friday the 13th. If you're looking for a good movie to celebrate with, there is always the wickedly clever seed that inspired this leaden but fruitful franchise: Mario Bava's 1971 thriller BAY OF BLOOD -- now out on Kino Lorber Blu-ray and DVD, with my audio commentary and, for the first time in this country, the alternate Italian cut with different dialogue scenes.

Postscript: Script supervisor Martin Kitrosser (who now works with Quentin Tarantino) told me himself that the "original" FRIDAY THE 13TH was made in direct response to the Bava film; he even proposed dedicating the film to him but that idea was shot down by Sean Cunningham. The Bava film was not perceived at that time as esoteric or even Italian; it played under a variety of titles (like CARNAGE and TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE) under the stars in every other drive-in theater in the country, and it ran in first-run and in support of other grisly features for years and years. You probably could have found it playing somewhere just a few years before FRIDAY THE 13TH opened... but a few years is a lifetime's distance to those people attending indoor showings of FRIDAY THE 13TH when they were 12 or even 17 years old. Those people had likely not seen the Bava film, of course; what matters is that the filmmakers had. Clearly what happened is that some kind of generational leap took place, positioning a new generational wave and F13 at the same cultural Ground Zero; it was the first movie that a large number of young people saw that showed them more than they were used to seeing in terms of violence and sexual candor. Mind you, this was right on the cusp of home video being introduced into people's homes. Had FRIDAY THE 13TH been made a few years earlier and released to drive-ins by a minor distributor, it would have been indistinguishable from any number of other pictures. By the same token, had it opened later in the 1980s, by then, the young people who made it a hit would have seen so much more at home that they would have grown inured to its expurgated charms. However, because FRIDAY THE 13TH was released by a major distributor, because it got a wide release in indoor theaters, and perhaps too because its censorship left some things to fertile young imaginations, FRIDAY THE 13TH had an impact on a lot of impressionable minds. Which may indicate that, in any lucky juncture of the right thing at the right place and the right time, the thing can sit back and let the place and time do most of the heavy lifting.  

Streeting September 10: DEATH FORCE (1978)

Cirio H. Santiago's DEATH FORCE (aka VENGEANCE IS MINE), available on a double bill DVD with his VAMPIRE HOOKERS. I don't know what I expected, but I wasn't expecting an epic. 110 minutes -- a running time that aspires to respect rather than the usual double billing; Arkoff would have cut it off at the knees. But this is Santiago's spear hurled at the heavens; it's his answer to THE GODFATHER, THE DEER HUNTER, HELL IN THE PACIFIC, you name it -- and it toplines James Iglehart, the guy who played the unforgettable Randy Black in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, as well as Leon Isaac Kennedy and his then-wife Jayne Kennedy (who sings). Vic Diaz turns up briefly, so briefly he doesn't make the opening credits. It's not always greatness on a budget, but sometimes it is; everybody's dialled up to 10 and giving it their all. There's a young guy playing an old guy with lousy old-age makeup and Toshiro Mifune stoicism and, by the time he exits the story, by God, you half-believe he was Mifune. Low-budget filmmaking at its most insanely ambitious -- and, I have to say, better than what a lot of Santiago's peers in the drive-in trade could turn out when they were feeling their oats.

Something I Reviewed for VW... Which We'd Already Reviewed!

THE ROOM OF CHAINS
Les Amours Particulières
1970, Something Weird, 68m 52s, $10.00, DVD-R
By Tim Lucas

"The story you are about to see is true. It was taken from the composite files of the French Civil Police." So we are informed at the outset of this enjoyably sick French S&M melodrama, which plays very much like what might have happened had Jess Franco and producer Herman Cohen ever worked together. Produced by the French distribution company Inter Ecran, who had some involvement in Franco's DR. ORLOFF'S MONSTER (1964), this became the first Euro import distributed in the US by Group 1, a company whose fairly explicit trailers promised "total nudity and sexual activity" and featured fake man-on-the-street interviews with supposedly disgruntled/turned-on theater patrons.

Written and directed by Gérard Trembasiewicz (who made only one more theatrical feature, 1974's BLOODY SUN with Chris Mitchum and Claudine Auger), the film stars Jacques Bernard as antiques dealer Georges Garais who, though married to business partner Florence (Evelyne Ker), enjoys a secret relationship with handsome young employee Marc. With emphatic homosexual collusion, if not actual activity, the two men dress in ceremonial robes to eavesdrop on the ritual whippings of various naked, chained, female abductees acquired by a lumbering subhuman gardener in Georges' employ. (Among the kidnapped is Nathalie Nort, last seen participating in an S&M stage act in Franco's SUCCUBUS.) When Marc questions what his mentor is making him do and calls their ritualistic night life crazy, Georges suavely reasons "Yes, Marc, it is crazy. But everybody's crazy─why should we pretend we're not? It's our awareness that makes us completely free."

This anarchistic spirit doesn't quite carry over to Trembasiewicz's directorial approach, which, in contrast to the subject matter, is almost gentlemanly, admiring the female form but depriving the film of any menace or urgency by refusing to depict any persuasive suffering. Indeed, though we hear whipping, we never actually see it, which becomes all the more disappointing when we later discover there's an authentic reason for that. When we're finally left holding all the cards in this poker game, Georges stands out as one of the most hapless and fatuous sickies in cinema history.

However, the film─even in this transfer from a beat-up 35mm print that clearly paid its drive-in dues─is very pretty to look at, thanks to DP Maurice Fellous (ROAD TO SALINA, FACELESS) with lustrous hot pink-to-purple lighting that recalls Rollin's THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES, and the gothic proto-prog score by Guy Skornik (only two cues, one -- which you can hear here -- repeated ad hallucinatorum) shows a pointed Keith Emerson influence. If you watch it, you'll have fun. Available from www.somethingweird.com, who shave off a penny for the $9.99 download.

Harold Lloyd, Master of Suspense

I first saw this famous photo of Harold Lloyd, from his most popular comedy SAFETY LAST! (1923), when I was a child and it connected me instantly and consciously to imagery I had experienced only in dreams. As time marched on, the still image acquired brief bursts of motion, when footage from the rarely screened antique was co-opted into commercials or comedy programming like FRACTURED FLICKERS. I got around to seeing the superb 1989 documentary HAROLD LLOYD: THE THIRD GENIUS (narrated by Lindsay Anderson) and Lloyd's own restaging of his most dizzying career highlight in Preston Sturges' THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK (1947) long before my first actual viewing of SAFETY LAST! itself -- which finally took place last night, courtesy of Criterion's often breathtaking new Blu-ray disc, which sports a brand-new 2K digital restoration. It not only makes the actors' pancake makeup nearly palpable, but the powerful sharpness of the image brings us all the more into the presence of its terrors and the sheer cleverness of its meticulous execution. The bigger your home screen, the more you will feel in the pit of your stomach the awful threat of gravity.

Seeing the film at last brought something unexpectedly elemental into focus for me -- not about silent comedy but about what came after. I haven't done any reading about Harold Lloyd, so I have no way of knowing if what I'm about to say is original thinking, but it's original to me and I'm fascinated by it. Lloyd made a few of these so-called "thrill" pictures (as they are called in the THIRD GENIUS documentary, included as a gratifying extra on this disc) and I suspect the reason why motion picture comedy regards him as "the third genius" (after Chaplin and Keaton) is that he was more importantly one of the principal architects of the thriller and, in my opinion at least, the greatest of all influences on the work of Alfred Hitchcock.

This "department store stunt" sequence pictured above essentially takes the archetypal slip on the banana peel to its most terrifying extremes, and it makes us laugh the way rollercoasters make us laugh, by bringing us face-to-eyeteeth with the colossal maw of Death and allowing us to survive that encounter with grace, style and humor. The Hitchcock element looms large in this very photograph: it resonates with the British Museum sequence of BLACKMAIL, the Statue of Liberty sequence of SABOTEUR, with Scottie's fall in REAR WINDOW, with the Mt. Rushmore sequence of NORTH BY NORTHWEST, and perhaps most resonantly with VERTIGO. The scene is most challenging in its depiction of a single man attempting to conquer one of collective Man's most towering achievements, and most terrifying in its exposure of the individual to the forces of the world around him. At one point, as Lloyd ascends the face of the building and comes to a ledge, he comes under attack by a group of pigeons in a moment every bit as traumatic as Tippi Hedren's assault in THE BIRDS. The Hitchcock connection must have been noticed by composer Carl Davis who, in his 1989 score, accompanies Lloyd's desperate attempts to swat them away with stabbing strings that recall Bernard Herrmann's shower music for PSYCHO. It is commonly labelled a classic comedy sketch, but it is much more importantly one of the screen's most elaborate suspense set pieces and a masterpiece of sustained anxiety.

Before seeing SAFETY LAST!, I always looked to Germany for the antecedents of Hitchcock's cinema: Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, the expressionists. That has always been the common wisdom. But no... The real Hitchcock -- the American Hitchcock, if you will -- is far more vividly foreseen here in Lloyd's white-knucked grip on the hands of that clockface. It's also there in the closing shot, a disarmingly and charmingly contrived shot of our now-carefree hero walking blithely through a sticky tar spill that pulls him out of his shoes and then his socks, in the way Lloyd seems to say, "When you can't be terrifying, be elegant."

In fact, everything I know about the thriller can be glimpsed here, even when Lloyd's feet are soundly placed on terra firma. His character, The Boy, signs Lloyd's own name on the dotted line, so the identification of actor and director is complete. He moves to the Big City, leaving his trusting girl behind with promises of inevitable success, which lead to deceptions by mail as his metropolitan ship fails to come in, aside from a menial job as a salesman at a fabrics counter in a department store. He lies to his lady love, painting himself into corners that require more lies, and he fetishizes her memory into the gift of a pendant, incomplete as he cannot yet afford a chain for it. When he finally gets the chain, which he can afford only by forgoing a week of meals, Lloyd turns the screws of every last dime of the price tag by showing the components of a window displayed fifty-cent meal disappearing into thin air, piece by piece. (As another master of the thriller, Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage, wrote in his own memorable "Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot": "Is the hero getting it in the neck?") Even then, he must have the chain delivered with a handwritten explanation that the "Tiffany" chain is being forwarded by the downmarket Jewish merchant's shop where he actually acquired it on sale. The only way to obliterate the lies accumulated through the hero's best intentions is to force him into a place of mortal peril, fully exposed to the elements, to a jury of his peers, and to a gasping audience. Lloyd compels "Lloyd"'s pretended ascent to success with a literal ascent to success, prodded upwards floor by floor by the perpetual threat of arrest.

Another aspect of the Hitchcockian thriller found here is in Lloyd's sense of America and Americana, the disparity between the wholesome American dream and money-driven Big City reality. It's not hard to see a parallel between this film's Harold and Mildred (Mildred Davis) and, say, Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) and his niece Charlie (Teresa Wright) in SHADOW OF A DOUBT; in both cases, a citified cynic finds himself representing a myth of worldly success and adventure to the untravelled small town souls who are least inclined to sit in judgment of him. Harold isn't a murderer of widows in his most brazen reality, but he does turn the crime of an acquaintance into a sanctioned publicity stunt for profit. Many Hitchcock heroes are men who are not who they seem to be: John Robie in TO CATCH A THIEF, Manny Balestrero in THE WRONG MAN, Norman Bates in PSYCHO. 
 
Of course it was from Lang and Hitchcock, not to mention the Edgar Wallace krimis, that the James Bond films also arose. Lloyd's gasp-inducing stunt work, however augmented it may have been with forced perspective trickery, just as surely played a role in predicating those "audacity of Bond" pre-credit sequences which have been thrilling audiences since the heart-stopping ski jump that opened THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and established these as a series must in 1977.  

To see SAFETY LAST! -- a film now approaching its 100th anniversary -- is to see at least 50 other classic movies, unreeling at high speed through your senses in a free-falling rush of recognition. It is to recognize a living tissue sample which shares precious arteries with films playing in theaters today. When one considers that its achievement followed the Lumière Brothers' first documentary uses of their cinematograph by less than thirty years, it puts the supposed technological advances of cinema's last thirty years into comparatively tepid perspective.

Spinning Off From The Love-Go-Round

DAISY CHAIN is a bizarre sex comedy anthology with a tangled history, which, truth be told, is a big part of its fascination. It was produced in Germany where it was released in 1965 as Das Liebeskarussell ("The Love-Go-Round"), clearly from its title intended as a contemporary variation of Max Ophuls' La Ronde (1950). It was given an English export title (WHO WANTS TO SLEEP?), so an English version of its original cut was likely prepared; however, it ended up falling into the hands of producer Joe Juliano, who worked with screenwriter Ed Marcus to give the film's four stories a framework. They ended up hiring actor Steve Eckart to portray (get this) Dr. Royce Druthers, a psychologist specializing in sexual matters, who sits in Paris cafés and flirts with a very German-looking receptionist in nurse garb, preening over his own insights about the battle of the sexes whilst pissing away patient confidentiality. I'm not sure when (the IMDb says 1980, which can't be right), but DAISY CHAIN was distributed in the USA by Intercontinental Films Inc. with a new animated title sequence and theme song (by Juliano) attached. The film's direction is credited to Ralph Olsen and Ralph Thiel, though the original segments were in fact divided amongst GRIMM'S FAIRY TALES FOR ADULTS director Rolf Thiele (who did the "Sybil" and "Angela" segments), Axel von Ambesser ("Lolita") and Alfred Weidenmann ("Dorothea"). Everything about this movie -- the animated titles, the segmented construction, the structural debt to a classic art film -- evokes the memory of Mario Bava's similarly interesting, similarly shaky FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT (1969).

This movie stars Curd Jurgens and Nadja Tiller ("Sybil"), Gert Fröbe and Catherine Deneuve ("Angela"), Anita Ekberg and Peter Alexander ("Lolita" -- which has nothing to do with the Nabokov novel), and Johanna von Koczian and Peter Alexander ("Dorothea") -- making this one of the rare films to star two James Bond villains (Fröbe and Jurgens). It also features Letitia Roman in a small role, so small it's hard to imagine she had played the lead in Mario Bava's THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH just two years before. This film was made the same year she made Russ Meyer's FANNY HILL, also in Germany. All the stories shared with us by Dr. Druthers are less about sex than about the fact and dread of infidelity. "Sybil" is about a woman who uses a female passerby to save her reputation when her husband nearly catches her in bed with a celebrated symphony conductor; "Angela" is about the young wife of an older man who feigns sleepwalking to meet her lovers; "Lolita" is about a model whose plumbing problems while preparing to take a bath attracts a male neighbor in pajamas and a difficult scenario to explain to her sugar daddy; and "Dorothea" is the old hide-under-the-bed story as a married woman's tryst is disrupted by her husband's premature homecoming.

The movie would be much easier to dismiss as trash if not for the "Angela" segment. Fröbe is wonderful, injecting some real pathos into a comic role, and Catherine Deneuve -- filmed just before or after REPULSION -- is radiant with a knowing, sly quality I've never seen her tap in any other performance. The segment also contains one of those images whose wonderment makes the whole thing worth sitting through: After one of Angela's lovers eludes discovery by jumping from a window onto a pile of pillows, sending goose feathers everywhere, Fröbe follows his beloved Angela as she "sleepwalks" in her white nightgown along a rooftop back to their room, goose down everywhere against the night sky like the flakes in a snow globe.

I watched the Televista DVD, which is fairly poor quality -- nothing at all so lovely as the image I've Googled to illustrate this report. I understand Das Liebeskarussell is available on DVD in Germany at a shorter running time. This suggests to me that the import doesn't contain any of the Dr. Royce Druthers nonsense and thus might hold up better as entertainment and time capsule; however, I'm not sure whether an English track is provided. On the trivial side of things, I noticed one of Jean Rollin's famous Castel twins -- Marie-Pierre or Catherine -- sitting behind Dr. Druthers at the Paris café and walking through one other scene as an extra. Her hair is black, as it was in 1970's THE NUDE VAMPIRE... and 1969-70 sounds about right, considering the LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE influence seen in the comedy vignette blackouts that Druthers uses to pepper his sagacity.    

Chad and Jeremy in Gotham City

The second season of BATMAN can be heavy sledding, but it does offer that wonderful diptych "The Cat's Meow"/"The Bat's Kow-tow" with Julie Newmar as Catwoman (her formerly silken delivery now channeling kooky Paula Prentiss half the time); Chad and Jeremy (whose voices Catwoman steals and holds for ransom; Jeremy Clyde looks uncannily like a long-haired Peter Cushing), Don Ho (obligatory Bat-climb cameo); Joe Flynn as a dance instructor, Steve Allen as TV announcer Allan Stevens and an unbilled Christina Ferrare (MARY MARY BLOODY MARY) as a squealing Chad and Jeremy fan. Catwoman, disguised as Miss Klutz, gives Dick Grayson dancing lessons until a sneeze -- caused by a vase of dogwood -- unmasks her. Neil Hamilton's Commissioner Gordon has his pompous prattle stolen by Catwoman's voice snatching device as well, but he gets it back in time for his closing line to Madge Blake, "Mrs. Cooper, you took the words right out of my mouth." All this and Robin persistently ruining Batman's opportunities for illicit romance with Catwoman (whose appeal he's still too young to understand), it's perfect, absolutely perfect.

A Return Trip to Hell House

Pamela Franklin as Florence Tanner in THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE.

Last night, thinking about the recently deceased Richard Matheson, I decided to watch John Hough's THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973) for the first time in many, many years. The only film produced by former AIP magnate James H. Nicholson after his split with Samuel Z. Arkoff, it was based on Matheson's novel HELL HOUSE, which I haven't read but is reputed to be much stronger and harsher than the PG film adaptation. Something tells me I may have reviewed it on laserdisc for VIDEO WATCHDOG back in our first decade, but my last lasting memory of seeing the film was at a preview screening in 1973. Despite a disappointing finale, there was much about the film that impressed me then, not least of all Alan Hume's almost ogreishly beautiful and odd cinematography, which makes the outside of Hell House look like Xanadu while the interiors could pass for the contents of Charles Foster Kane's snow globe after it broke and spilled all the confetti out.

The movie, as a whole, no longer works for me, but it retains a firm grip on its historical value. First and foremost, we have no better time capsule of what the mainstream horror genre was prior to the release of THE EXORCIST, which would shake the world at the end of the same year. There are some impressive premonitions of William Friedkin's film here: we get rattling tables instead of beds, loud sounds, people speaking profane words in demonic voices, evil spirits infesting a bed, images of young flesh torn by diabolic unseen hands, the sense of a girl's innocence imperilled. That innocence is projected by British actress Pamela Franklin, who had already relocated to America by this time but returned to England for this, her final British film; indeed, it would be her penultimate motion picture, followed by Bert I. Gordon's THE FOOD OF THE GODS (1976). She continued to work in American television until 1981, when she retired into private life to raise a family. Franklin was inspired casting for this film because her role here as mental medium Florence Tanner complements her debut performance as the similarly named Flora in Jack Clayton's THE INNOCENTS (1961). Both Flora and Florence are goaded by unseen presences stronger than themselves to points where their innocence is overcome, even soiled, by evil. Florence is an adult, of course, but Clive Revill's Dr. Barrett makes some reference to her as being "almost a child" (Franklin was 22 or 23 at the time of filming) and there is also something about the way she presents herself that seems priestly, not quite of this world because she's too sensitive to it and very likely untouched by men.

The film's four principals -- the others are Revill, Roddy McDowall and Gayle Hunnicutt -- all give fine performances, but Franklin alone succeeds in giving her role both as much as was written and more than was written. McDowall's physical medium Benjamin Fischer seems too self-controlled to be the man left emotionally shattered by his last visit to Hell House; Revill's Barrett is antagonistic in a way that seems natural rather than supernaturally influenced; and we don't get to know Hunnicutt's Ann Barrett well enough in her natural state before the supernatural begins to interfere with her. Florence Tanner is also the first of the characters to die -- this is no spoiler, since the DVD uses her corpse as its cover illustration -- and, once she goes, there is really not much left to the film except its disappointing parts.

John Hough received a lot of attention for his direction of this and Hammer's TWINS OF EVIL, but I really think what many people applauded as good direction in those days was good cinematography. Both films certainly look splendid, TWINS being photographed by Ken Russell's great cameraman Dick Bush. In terms of literal direction, LEGEND is a story too briskly told; it feels much too tightly cut, which cuts off the air it needed to breathe and to brood. Every change of scene signals a new date and time code at the bottom of the screen, which most viewers, I'm sure, tune out after awhile -- but it lends itself anyway to underlining every new event as important when it isn't always.

Richard Matheson also scripted this film and chose not to credit it to his pseudonym Logan Swanson, so he must have been sufficiently pleased with the outcome of working within the production's perimeters. In some ways, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE signalled the end of the British horror cinema, at least the end of its Golden Age. (THE WICKER MAN, another contender, came out later but seems almost sui generis.) Granted, there was still some cheap tinsel to come in the wake of THE EXORCIST (THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, THE DEVIL WITHIN HER, TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, etc), but LEGEND, for all its unevenness, shows us what what great about British horror at its best; it presents us with the handiwork of some of the finest actors, technicians and locations that flourished in Britain from the late '50s through the early '70s. It's elegant and earnest, yet doomed by its own refined reticence to belong to another time when it had the right story and team to spearhead a new one.

5 Thoughts About TORN CURTAIN

1. This is not one of Hitchcock's best movies -- it suffers from an overly wholesome John Addison score, unconvincing process photography that's made even more pronounced on Blu-ray, and gauzy, star-filtered cinematography for stars who are much too young to have real need of it -- but it does contain some of his most memorable supporting characters. I mean the leather-jacketed, gum-chewing Hermann Gromek (Wolfgang Kieling), the careworn farmer's wife (Carolyn Conwell), the heartbreaking Countess Kuchinska (Lila Kedrova), and Professor Gustav Lindt (Ludwig Donath), one of the most persuasive scientists I've seen in any movie.

2. When Gromek prepares to make a call, moments before the savage attempt on his life, I hear a small amount of voice-over repair on Kieling's voice that I believe was performed by Paul Frees. And exact minute-and-second count may follow. I can't prove it, but I can hear it.

3. As a fan of Italian director Antonio Margheriti, I get a tremendous kick out of the moment when Dr. Michael Armstrong -- the astrophysicist played by Paul Newman -- defects to East Berlin and is quizzed by their officials about America's Gamma 5 project.

4. I never noticed him in this movie before, but that's the WEREWOLF IN A GIRL'S DORMITORY (Curt Lowens) who plays the road block official as our heroes are making their escape by bus. Lo and behold, his uncredited performance is noted on the IMDb.

5. I like to believe that, following their escape, Drs. Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) did indeed marry and had a child together. He grew up to be Dr. Paul Armstrong (Larry Blamire) of the LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA films, following in his parents' footsteps as a scientist.

Warming To MEDIUM COOL

Robert Forster in MEDIUM COOL, 1969

I've always been only mildly enthusiastic about Haskell Wexler's seminal MEDIUM COOL, mostly because of the way it begins and ends, but Criterion's new Blu-ray knocked it into sharper focus for me. Influenced by the political Sixties cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and Norman Mailer's then-hot-off-the-presses "nonfiction novel" THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, it features Robert Forster (JACKIE BROWN) as a Chicago TV news cameraman who becomes increasingly aware of how the US government and Big Business were using the media to distract and control an increasingly demonstrative public at the height of the Vietnam war, and who essentially finds his humanity in a relationship with an Appalachian woman (Verna Bloom) and her son (Harold Blankenship) at the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The actors are shown interacting with history on the convention floor and outside in Lincoln Park where hundreds of peaceful demonstrators were beaten back by police, armored vehicles and jeeps outfitted with barbed wire bumpers. Seen today, MEDIUM COOL resonates like an old bulletin that still carries surprising heat; it manages to be both firmly rooted in its time and awfully aware of what's just around the corner. It not only foresees Kent State but the ending of EASY RIDER, which followed it into theaters only one month later.

Criterion has given it a spectacular, razor-sharp presentation, with two illuminating commentaries and a host of supplements -- including two lengthy excerpts from two documentaries by editor Paul Cronin, one about the making of MEDIUM COOL and the other a heartbreaking 15m from a work-in-progress about the film's affecting young Appalachian actor Harold Blankenship. The soundtrack, credited to Mike Bloomfield (whose group The Electric Flag had previously scored Roger Corman's THE TRIP) and featuring Paul Butterfield, was tampered with on previous home video incarnations but is intact here. It includes some scattered early Frank Zappa/Mothers of Invention  tracks, including slightly different acetates (you can hear the crackles) of two songs from the then-as-yet-unreleased WE'RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MONEY, whose lyrical content shows that Wexler was not the only artist aware that the Summer of Love was on a collision course with reality.

MANEATER OF HYDRA: Finally Wide-ra

I first saw Mel Welles' botanical shocker MANEATER OF HYDRA (aka known as ISLAND OF THE DOOMED, LA ISLA DE LA MUERTE and LE BARON VAMPIRE) back in 1970 on Cincinnati's SCREAM-IN with the Cool Ghoul. I was transfixed. This movie had everything: Cameron Mitchell, Eurocult atmosphere, sexy Kay Fischer and blood-sucking plants with obscenely drippy tendrils! It also features a supporting role by Ricardo Valle, who played Morpho in THE AWFUL DR ORLOF. During the grand finale, a storm broke out and, as torrents of rain fell on Mitchell's dying plants, the whole screen looked awash in blood. But even then I could tell the picture was cropped to hell and back. People died only half-onscreen. People talked to other people you couldn't see. The end credits were so squeezed I couldn't tell what happened to Cameron Mitchell.

I knew Mel Welles in the last years of his life and we spoke more than once about our shared hopes that a widescreen copy would someday surface on DVD. He wanted to see it again. It didn't happen in his lifetime and it still hasn't happened... but I just found the next best thing on YouTube: a widescreen French-language copy in six installments! Not ideal quality, but it's more watchable than anything we've had before!

Click here for Part 1 of 6. Links to subsequent chapters should appear in YouTube's right-hand column.

Awful News About the German ORLOF

Over the past year, the German company Edition Tonfilm has issued a couple of wonderfully worthy Jess Franco titles, namely MIDNIGHT PARTY (as HEISSE BERUHRUNGHEN) and the first Franco Blu-ray, CELESTINE - AN ALL ROUND MAID (as CELESTINE - MADCHEN FUR INTIME STUNDEN). Unfortunately their latest release of Franco's THE AWFUL DR ORLOF (as SCHREIE DURCH DIE NACHT) marks the first disappointment in an otherwise exciting, and therefore promising, list.

The appeal of this single-disc offering is that it is the first to include both the Spanish and French versions of the film. The Spanish version (never released here in the States) is 11m longer than the French version we know, and it consists almost entirely of extended dialogue scenes between the police, the crime witnesses and their suspects that adds to the weirdly comic tone of the picture. Even though the extra footage doesn't help the film, it would be nice to have... especially in that it includes the surgery scene as Franco clearly intended it to be seen, without the sexing-up added to the French version. Alas, the Spanish version is presented by Tonfilm with the English dubbing track on all the footage shared with the French version, along with German subtitles, with the Spanish audio kicking in only when the footage exclusive to the Spanish version appears... and again, that footage is subtitled only in German. So the English-speaking viewer is cut off from the experience of seeing this version when it counts most, and it also compromises the integrity of the Spanish version for German viewers. The 1.33:1 image is cropped differently, more tightly, than the bonus 1.66:1 French version, which is non-anamorphic and, again, offers the film only in English with German subtitles, detracting from its authenticity as the French version. What is worse, the French version is incomplete, including only one of the nude inserts shot for the film. It lacks the crucial insert of Morpho ripping away the bodice of Diana Lorys' heart-embossed dress and grabbing the breasts of her stand-in.

I'm presently scripting an audio commentary for Redemption's upcoming Blu-ray release of THE AWFUL DR ORLOF. I wish I could tell you that it was going to right all these wrongs, but unfortunately it won't include the Spanish version, which I would love to see properly released here someday. On the other hand, it will present the French version complete and looking more lustrous than it has ever looked before, and I'm giving the commentary my best effort.