Shanks; The Magician

Two movies I have waited literally decades to see played on TCM last weekend, and the wait was worth it. While one was worth watching, though a tad disappointing, the other turned out to be on the strangest movies I’ve ever seen.

Shanks

The latter is “Shanks” (1974) the final directorial effort of William Castle. Truly one of the oddest and most unsettling films I’ve ever seen. It’s not for all tastes, but you can’t say it’s not unique. I found it fascinating.

Paramount distributed it back in the early 1970s, when they were living high off the hog on critical and commercial hits like “The Godfather” (1972) and “Chinatown” (1974). No way would any major studio release or distribute a film like “Shanks” today; they wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. The movie is virtually dialogue free, interspersed with intertitles like a silent movie introducing each act. There’s also a daring, almost avant garde musical score which would also never pass muster with today’s “let’s play it safe” studio mindset.

There’s only about 30 lines of dialogue in the film, not too surprising when the star is the famed mime Marcel Marceau. He has two roles, one of Malcolm Shanks, a puppeteer in a local carnival, and Old Walker, an eccentric inventor who invents a machine which can make inanimate objects move like a puppet. When Walker dies, Shanks takes the invention and uses it to animate corpses to make them move like real people – not realistically, but like puppets minus the strings.

Most of the movie is dialogue free, save for Shanks’ landlord relatives (who become test subjects for Shanks) and a budding romance between Shanks and a young local girl named Celia (Cindy Eilbacher). Celia looks to be all of about 13, which makes her relationship with the adult Shanks even more unsettling, and more than a little creepy..

The actors playing the corpses look to be professional mimes and their herky jerky movements are oddly beautiful and compelling. There is a violent third act, involving a motorcycle gang who home invades Shanks’ mansion while Shanks and Celia are having dinner. One anticipates Shanks using his animated corpses against the gang, and this occurs, though not in ways one expects. There is also an implied fate for Celia. I won’t spoil it, except to ask myself, “This got a PG rating?”

A huge plus is the aforementioned musical score by Alex North. North’s score earned an Oscar nomination for Best Score of 1974 and it is full of North’s trademarks: dissonant harmonies, haunting melodies, jazz elements and some Americana for the carnival scenes. Because so much of the film is silent, North’s score is responsible for carrying much of the action, and this it does brilliantly. So prominent is the music, that Paramount could have advertised it as a concert of Alex North’s music, and that wouldn’t be off the mark at all.

Never released on DVD, and I don’t think ever released on VHS, “Shanks” has been very hard to see since its debut. It was well worth watching.

The Magician

The other title was a silent horror film from 1926 called “The Magician.” I’ve been waiting to see this since the early 1970s, when I received as a birthday gift one of my first film books, “An Illustrated History of the Horror Film” by Carlos Clarens. The book contained several mouth watering stills from “The Magician”, including one of star Paul Wagener pouring from a laboratory beaker in a massive laboratory set, and a scene set in Hell with a young woman facing a bowing, near naked satyr while a leering Wagener looks on. What an impression those scenes made. Alas, the film was considered lost at the time.

A few years later I picked up at a local garage sale, a book called “The Ghouls” an anthology of short horror fiction and excerpts of novels that received cinematic treatment. (edited by Peter Haining, Stein and Day, 1971). The book contained an except from the novel “The Magician” by Somerset Maugham. Haining’s introduction to an excerpt from Maugham’s novel served to whet my appetite even further. Here’s what Haining had to say:

The history of the horror film is sadly dotted with examples of “lost” films – pictures which were made and then for some reason disappeared or were destroyed. Probably the most famous of these is The Magician, which was produced in 1926 by Rex Ingram, creator of such distinguished films as The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and Scaramouche.

The film of The Magician was based on the work of the same name by Somerset Maugham, which dealt in a thinly disguised fictional form with the activities of the notorious Black Magician Aleister Crowley, who performed ritual magic and animal sacrifice, indulged in drug taking and sex orgies and lived a life devoted to the premise of “evil for evil’s sake.” In Maugham’s story, Oliver Haddo – as Crowley is called – has “magical powers of extraordinary character” and frequently conducts “the blasphemous ceremonies of the Black Mass.” He is also said to be “attempting to create human beings” (shades of Frankenstein, no less).

Ingram had read the story shortly after its publication in 1908 and nurtured it in his mind for a film which he made in France in 1925-1926. So much of the plot rang true for Ingram (Crowley was still active at this time and often made newspaper headlines) that he was able to bring a vivid realism to the finished picture, introducing some fine episodes of Satanism and necromancy. However, these very elements caused the critics, almost to a man, to condemn the film as tasteless and vulgar. In a matter of a few years the three existing prints had disappeared and Ingram’s career was on the decline.

Reports of the picture which still exist (plus a pathetic handful of stills) indicate that the high point of the film was the mesmeric sequence in which Haddo introduces a young girl to the “delight” of devil worship through
hypnotism.

Three existing prints had disappeared? Aargh! I figured it was another lost silent film I would never see. The lost status, however, was premature, and in the age of home video, the title began popping up in catalogs. Copies were also for sale at horror conventions, but word was the quality was lacking. Despite my interest in early horror films, I took a pass on this title, as I didn’t want to see it in a poor quality copy.

Imagine my delight when TCM posted it on their schedule, with the news it would have a newly commissioned score by Robert Israel.

Was the wait worth it? For the most part yes, though this is not a lost masterpiece. The film only runs about 76 minutes and it moves along pretty fast. Israel’s score uses familiar classical music, some which were also heard in “The Black Cat” (1934) and the Hades sequence is scored with “A Night on Bald Mountain.”

Oliver Haddo (Wagener) is obsessed with creating life. He finds a forbidden book with the successful formula for same, and said formula requires the blood of a maiden, preferably with blonde hair, fair skin and blue eyes. Pretty Margaret Dauncey (Alice Terry, wife of director Rex Ingram) fits the bill admirably. Haddo does hypnotize her and shows her visions of Hell in a short dream sequence. Tinted red, this is a pretty impressive sequence and Haddo looks like he’s wearing horns as the watches the hellish frivolity.

Haddo hypnotizes her to be his wife and takes her to his castle outside Monte Carlo, an elongated vertical structure which resembles the castle in James Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935). I won’t be giving anything but Haddo’s castle even explodes the same way it does in the Whale movie. Haddo even has a dwarf-like assistant. Some speculate that Whale must have been familiar with Ingram’s film as some of the laboratory scenes in Whale’s two Frankenstein movies echo those in “The Magician.”

Wagener is best known for playing the title role in “The Golem” (1920), and his oddly proportioned visage is a perfect fit for horror films.

In his introduction to the film, TCM host Robert Osborne says everyone assumed Maugham based Haddo on Crowley and Crowley thought the same thing. Crowley penned a letter to Vanity Fair Magazine decrying this notion, saying he should not be considered the Haddo character. How bizarre is that? Can you imagine an avowed Satanist today penning a letter to a magazine like Vanity Fair? Why, traditionalists would likely wail at the decline of morality. Back then, Jazz Age audiences were probably thrilled by it all.

Eye of the Needle

“Eye of the Needle” (1981) is a crackerjack thriller starring Donald Sutherland as Henry Faber, aka The Needle, a top German spy during World War II who discovers the Allies’ D-Day invasion plans and attempts to transmit the information back to Berlin. On the run from the authorities, he attempts to cross the English Channel by boat during a storm. His boat is wrecked and he washes ashore the isolated Storm Island, where he is taken in by the lonely and vulnerable Lucy (Kate Nelligan), who lives on a sheep farm with her crippled, embittered, often drunk husband David (Christopher Cazenove) and their young son.

Lucy soon falls in love with Henry, but doesn’t know his real identity. The Needle and Lucy begin a love affair, before she realizes he is not who he appears to be and The Needle is willing to do anything, or kill anyone, to achieve his mission of letting his superiors know where and when D-Day will occur. “The war has come down to the two of us,” Faber tells her during the climax.

I remember how excited I was when “Eye of the Needle” came out. Like millions of others I had read, and enjoyed, the best selling novel by Ken Follett, one of those books that was impossible to put down. I’m a sucker for World War II movies, as well as thrillers set in isolated areas, where help cannot be reached by picking up the phone and calling the local police station down the street.

But most important, it boasted a new score by the great Miklos Rozsa, my favorite composer. I was giddy at the idea of hearing a new Rozsa score, as he was in the twilight of his career and new scores were few, though he had scored a triumphant trifecta in 1979 with scores to Billy Wilder’s “Fedora”, Jonathan Demme’s “The Last Embrace” and the time travel romance/thriller “Time After Time” which has one of the greatest end titles of all time. Hearing it makes you glad to be alive.

I remember seeing “Eye of the Needle” during a summer afternoon matinee at the River Oaks Theater in Calumet City. I was taking summer classes at the local community college and after morning classes would often throw my books in the trunk of my car and drive to the River Oaks to catch a flick.

I was not disappointed, as “Eye of the Needle” is a terrific thriller, with a fine sense of time and place. Wartime England is well portrayed as a land of rations, overcrowded trains and military personnel hurrying to and fro. Sutherland superbly portrays The Needle, a man with ice water in his veins who, with his stiletto, dispatches anyone who remotely suspects him of not being who he says he is. It’s a wonderful performance.

The Rozsa score does not disappoint, though it could have been better dubbed. Apparently, large chunks of it were thrown out in post-production, which is a shame because there are large portions of the film that go unscored and the film tends to drag a bit. The end credits, however, do allow Rozsa to develop his rapturous love theme to near operatic heights with a nifty little coda that never feels to bring a smile to my face. I remember a good number of the mostly elderly audience members staying in their seats to hear the music. It did my heart good, but such is the power of Rozsa.

That summer I also saw, at the same theater, “Dragonslayer” with its difficult but ultimately rewarding Alex North score. I remember thinking how fortunate I was to hear the latest works of two master composers. I may not have been able to hear them in their heyday, but considered myself very lucky to hear their later scores in the theaters. Unlike athletes past their prime, at the end of their film careers Rozsa and North were still at the top of their game.

That summer of 1981 was a remarkable one, one of the best I can remember, both for the movies and their scores. There was also Ray Harryhausen’s last film, the Greek mythology fantasy “Clash of the Titans”, a now forgotten film called “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, one of the best 007 movies ever “For Your Eyes Only”, one of the few John Carpenter films I like “Escape from New York”, and “Victory” the rousing World War II soccer movie with Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and Pele, with a gloriously loud Bill Conti score that more than lives up to the film’s title.

Would that we would have another summer like that one.

Rating for “Eye of the Needle”: Three stars