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.