Nightfall (1956)

James Vanning (Aldo Ray) has been on the run for some time now. The police is looking for him as their main suspect in the murder of a friend, while a duo of bank robbers (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) who actually killed the man – and nearly murdered Jim as well – believe he has run off with their ill-gotten gains. For reasons best known to himself, our protagonist doesn’t trust the police enough to tell them the story of what actually happened, though in noir, unspoken war trauma is always a good guess.

There’s also an insurance investigator (James Gregory) on his trail. Things begin to come to a head on a night Jim meet-cutes model Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft), and has an encounter with the robbers, as well as – unbeknownst to him – with the investigator.

For a film that’s generally seen as a noir, Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall does certain things rather differently. Sure, there’s a plot involving mistaken identities, gangsters, and a man on the run, but the femme isn’t fatale, the only on-screen authority figure is actually trustworthy, and our hero’s genuinely innocent – running away with the money like the robbers believe he did never seems to even have crossed his mind.

Instead of the shadows of the titular nightfall, the film’s tensest scenes take place in broadest daylight and comparatively wide open spaces – and it’s not even the desert but rather a lot of snow. All of which makes for a much nicer film than you usual find in the non-genre, the sort of film where love is a real and strengthening thing instead an object of dark obsession and method of manipulation, and where the protagonist is a very decent man whose only flaw is acting a bit stupid. Nihilism, this certainly ain’t.

Curiously enough, giving up on the darkness of the noir worldview doesn’t feel like a cop out for the film at all, but just as natural as the noir’s typical darkness comes to other films of the genre.

As Ray plays him, Jim is closer to Hitchcock’s traditional thriller protagonist, an everyman getting in over his head. Though most Hitchcock protagonists of this style do not project the sense of genuine vulnerability Ray displays here, wonderfully going against what his physique of bullneck and bulk would suggest. This is a 50s man not afraid to show his fears and genuine emotions to the woman he falls for, and consequently, Marie falling for him this quickly feels much less contrived than is typical for this sort of thing.

This compassionate eye for the softer side of the characters – see also the interactions between the insurance investigator and his wife – is not a thing you typically get in any movie seen as a noir, but for Nightfall, the feeling of watching basically decent, large-as-life people involved in a thriller plot seems central.

This being a Tourneur film, that thriller plot is realized with great care, economy and style, full of genuine tension. Nearly every scene is filled with the kind of detail that’s either telling about the characters or helps create the texture of the film’s world as an actual place.

In a way, all of this is very low key, but it’s also perfectly of a piece, and utterly convincing.

Past Misdeeds: The Power (1968)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only the most basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Professor Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) is the scientist in charge of a project researching pain to make NASA's astronauts more durable. During a meeting that is supposed to introduce their new government contact, Arthur Nordlund (Michael Rennie), to the team, notorious crackpot Professor Hallson (Arthur O'Connell) gets a wee bit hysterical about the results of some intelligence tests he made with the members of the group. It looks like one of the scientists has climbed some additional steps on the evolutionary letter, and has an improbable IQ as well as the obvious perks that go with something like that, like mind control and telekinetic powers (of course). The other scientists, including Tanner and his girlfriend Professor Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette), are more than just a little sceptical concerning their colleague's ideas, but when Hallson convinces everyone to concentrate on rotating a piece of paper with the power of their minds, and the thing actually begins to rotate, they are proven wrong. Looks like one of them really must be the homo superior.

That very same night, the mysterious mutant kills Hallson with his or her mental powers. The scientist only leaves behind a note with the name "Adam Hart" on it, a name his wife (Yvonne De Carlo) will later remember to have something to do with her husband's childhood. While he's at it, the guy who definitely isn't Professor X casts enough doubt on Tanner for the police to see the scientist as the main suspect for the Hallson's murder. Hart (to go with that name for him), seemingly having a rather unhealthy sense of humour, then proceeds to turn Tanner's very real academic credentials into fakes, which costs the Professor his job pretty quickly. Not satisfied with that, Hart then tries to kill Tanner (in what may very well be the film's weirdest scene) with the help of a carousel.

Somehow, Tanner manages to survive the mutant's attack. The events have made it quite clear to him that he can't expect help from anyone, and that he certainly can't trust his colleagues anymore, for one of them must be his hidden enemy. So the scientist sets upon the only course still open to him: trying to find Hart's trace in Hallson's hometown. Obviously, dangers to life and sanity, and Aldo Ray await him.

Byron Haskin's George Pal-produced The Power is a surprisingly peculiar tale that uses its SF thriller plot to create a film that unites elements of the pre-70s conspiracy thriller with scenes of a gleefully bizarre nature, and a generally pessimistic view of human nature, resulting in something halfway between Alfred Hitchcock and an acid trip.

Casting George Hamilton of all people as a scientist of some renown may sound more bizarre than clever, but his special brand of absent-minded vacuity works here as well as it would later do in Curtis Harrington's The Dead Don't Die, presenting the character as someone in whose shoes most every viewer would be able to feel comfortable, even if said viewer is less pretty and well-groomed. As we all know, this sort of thriller works well with an everyman character for audience identification in the lead role, and if Hitchcock could cast Cary Grant accordingly, Haskins could do the same with George Hamilton.

Haskin's direction is interesting, but also a bit all over the place. The Power's main draft is the Hitchcockian thriller - some scenes seem to directly and deliberately echo The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest, especially, and a many of the film's techniques for creating suspense are taken directly from Hitchcock's playbook - yet Haskin also has a tendency to include moments of broadest-stroke satire that always threaten to turn into melodramatic horror, and scenes that are mock-surrealist enough to belong into an Italian film from the 70s (see especially Hart's fun fair attempt at killing our hero or the very strange final confrontation between hero and villain). However, there are also moments of truly disquieting nuance to be found here, like the moment when Yvonne De Carlo's "funny"-drunk and oversexed middle-aged woman begins to show the cracks that Hart's powers have left in her mind, or the emotionless, matter-of-fact way Aldo Ray's character discusses that he's been on the lookout for people asking for Hart so that he can kill them for these last ten years. These moments also go a long way to demonstrate how important a good supporting cast is to a) make a film better and b) help someone with a limited acting range like Hamilton look good. These performances and what they stand for are also where the film's rather pessimistic and paranoid stance regarding human nature can be seen most clearly. In The Power's world, every character has mental breaking points and cracks that make it easy for them to be dominated by someone like Hart; everyone is corruptible and nobody is save from harm from the people surrounding him. This is not a position the film ever states outright, yet it is hidden in plain sight in every scene right until the end when a big question mark half-heartedly pretends to be a happy ending.

Less good than the supporting cast are the film's special effects, or rather, their execution is more ropey than you'd expect from a film made in 1968. Unfortunately, the effects in the film's grand finale are its weakest, with some very cartoony animation, a rotating skeleton and George Hamilton's floating head standing in for a mental duel that would have worked better if the actors had just stared at each other while Miklós Rózsa's dramatic music played. In The Power's case, we call them "special" effects for a reason.


Fortunately, a handful of badly executed special effects in conceptually interesting scenes is not enough to drag down a film as interesting and peculiar as The Power is. As a matter of fact, this is exactly the sort of imperfection that makes a film even more itself by revealing a humanity you don't usually encounter in things that are perfect.

In short: The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960)

It’s 1901, and the cause of Irish independence needs money. So what better plan could there be than to break into the nigh impregnable Bank of England and steal the King’s gold bullion? Because a bunch of people with dubious Irish accents won’t be able to plan this sort of heist on their own, the cause’s upper echelons import US-Irish criminal mastermind Charles Norgate (Aldo Ray).

Norgate does need a bit of time to come up with a good plan, but does some fine preparation work breaking into a museum, befriending alcoholic sewer experts as well as Monty Fitch (Peter O’Toole) the upper-class sportsman type Captain of the part (insert correct military jargon here) of the Royal Guards responsible for protecting the Bank. He also finds time for the important business of romancing widow and boss of the cause’s spy operations Iris Muldoon (Elizabeth Sellars). Once the plan’s ready, there certainly won’t be anything that could go wrong, right?

John Guillerman’s The Day They Robbed the Bank of England is a surprisingly entertaining film despite a rather dubious script that doesn’t bother to flesh its characters out properly and includes a painfully awkwardly realized romance. This good impression is particularly surprising in a film that additionally has to try and pretend Aldo Ray is any kind of mastermind as well as really rather attractive, both things even I can’t bring myself to suspend my disbelief for.

Characterisation beyond presenting someone as a slightly whimsical comic relief figure isn’t the script’s forte. In fact, the only character here with an actual, interesting arc is O’Toole’s Fitch. As the actor plays him, he’s a man hiding his disgust at himself for being really not more than a tin soldier without anything going for him except his upbringing and his uniform under much alcohol and bluster who finds a chance to prove himself and grows through it. I’m not even sure how much of this is thanks to the script – whose other characters you could sum up with names like Whiny O’Malley without being unfair – and how much to O’Toole; I very much suspect the latter, O’Toole making much out of the tiniest hints of an inner life the script provides.

The plot tends to digress into the wrong directions too – the romance between Norgate and Muldoon and Whiny’s jealousy really doesn’t add anything to the film, and the last act turn-around of the Cause against the robbery doesn’t do much but add a distraction to what was until that point a half hour of very tightly directed heist suspense with the film cutting between Norgate and his buddies digging (well, and Whiny whining) and avoiding discovery, and Fitch slowly realizing what’s going on right below his feet.

Apart from O’Toole, it is Guillermin’s often clever – and always good-looking – direction that turns this one from just a badly written film without much to say or do into an interesting little heist movie. The director grabs every opportunity to create little moments of suspense and our old paradoxical buddy, mild excitement, that very aptly distract from the various failings of script and casting; though even he doesn’t manage to convince me to think of Aldo Ray’s love life with anything but a shudder.

On WTF: The Power (1968)

George Hamilton versus the Übermensch in the excellently paranoid SF thriller The Power by Byron Haskin! Hitchcock, psychedelics and the disquieting collide!

See me stay this excited in my column on WTF-Film!

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,sf,thriller,byron haskin,george hamilton,suzanne pleshette,michael rennie,aldo ray,other places

Psychic Killer (1975)

Arnold Masters (Jim Hutton) is a rather unlucky fellow. He's been put into a mental institution for killing the doctor who didn't want to operate on his sick mother because they were too poor, a crime he says he didn't commit, and is now in the process of truly losing his mind. That his mother died of her illness surely doesn't help matters.

He develops a friendship with another inmate who really did kill someone (charmingly enough his own daughter, for being a prostitute), but who likes train spotting and feeling self-righteous. Arnold's new friend seems to be in the magic business, somehow manages to kill his daughter's pimp from inside the institution and then commits suicide. He leaves everything he owns to Arnold. Among his possessions is a peculiar amulet that induces a death-like state in Arnold, which nearly gets him autopsied. Arnold's lucky, though, and wakes up alive again before he can be opened up. Shortly thereafter, someone (who knows who) confesses to the murder Arnold always insisted he didn't commit, opening the way for Arnold's return to freedom.

Arnold returns to his mother's house and spends most of his time sitting in a chair, using the powers of the magic amulet for revenge. The amulet gives him the ability to leave his body behind and kill the people he holds responsible for his mother's demise and his own incarceration in various nasty telekinetic ways.

The investigating cop, Lieutenant Morgan (Paul Burke) and his partner Aldo Ray are fastly homing in on Arnold as their main suspect, but can't prove anything. Only when Morgan gets in touch with Arnold's former psychiatrist Doctor Scott (Julie Adams) and she later contacts a parapsychologist friend of hers (Nehemiah Persoff), the case begins to become clearer to him.

Psychic Killer is a very peculiar film. One third TV horror movie-like snoozefest, one third weird comedy and one third the skewed and strange kind of horror typical of local independent productions of its time, watching the film is a rather schizophrenic experience.

Ray Danton's direction is often rather static and rambling, and it is therefore not much of a surprise that this is the director's last feature film before he began a long and not particularly interesting career in episodic TV. Going by filmographic details, I'd blame everything interesting about the film on Greydon Clark, one of the film's script writers (and one of its murder victims in a frightening non-acting turn), who'd later write and direct Satan's Cheerleaders and Wacko, among less noteworthy films.

As I said, parts of Psychic Killer are the usual, brownish-grey supernatural thriller hokum often seen in 70s TV, but there are a lot of very bizarre scenes that make up for it. Especially the murders and the situations surrounding them are fluctuating between silly and utterly insane. It's the details that make them so. The first murder, for example, starts off with a psychiatrist doing a bit of adultery with a decidedly younger female patient to whom he - while groping her breasts - explains that she is just living out her oedipal fantasies with him, before Arnold's spirit rudely interrupts with a killing. Or take the second murder - a nurse teases an immobile, dying patient with her dubious female charms, then decides to take a shower, does a more frightening than sexy striptease, only to finally get cooked by the shower for her transgressions.

It's not exactly tasteful, and filmed and acted in a way that makes me unsure if anybody beyond the writers was in on it being meant to be a joke; if in fact it was. Moments like these abound (watch out for the hobby opera singer death crush), and they are what make Psychic Killer quite a blast to watch.

What these moments, or the sprinkling of supposedly "funny" scenes that just aren't, don't produce is a very coherent film, or one that is able to frighten or scare a viewer. If Psychic Killer is horrific, than more through the peculiarly transgressive way in which it doesn't seem to be knowing what sort of film it wants to be when it grows up.

The actors are all over the place. Hutton plays Arnold serious and dramatic, while Burke starts out like a cop JJ Jameson, but dials it down the longer the film continues. Some of the comedic relief actors are just puzzling.

My personal explanation for the strange but glorious mess on display throughout the film is that Psychic Killer was initially written as a pure black comedy, but was turned into something of a straighter thriller by someone (director? producer? caterer?) who didn't get the joke, or just didn't want to get it. It's confusing, to be sure, but I like to be confused by the films I watch. It is usually much more entertaining than being bored by them.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,comedy,aldo ray

In short: Haunted (1976?/1979?/1982?)

In the 1860s, the Native American sorceress Abanaki (Ann Michelle) is killed for no good reason in the traditional way all frontier communities dealt with their witches, namely by being tied naked to horse and left in the desert. Abanaki of course curses her killers and their descendants.

About a hundred years later, the small Western town where all this happened has turned into a ghost town. Only two young men, their psychosomatically blind and depressed mother (Virginia Mayo) and their uncle (Aldo Ray), who is madly in love with mum, still live there, and Patrick, the older brother, is not planning on staying much longer. Tomorrow, he'll pack up his mum and get her into a sanatorium, and he and his brother aren't going to stay in town after that.

A woman named Jennifer Baines (Ann Michelle) gets stuck in the ghost town. Is she Abanaki reincarnated come to take vengeance? People discuss reincarnation. A pay phone is installed in the graveyard next to the ghost town. People talk melodramatically. Virginia Mayo out-melodramatizes everyone else. Patrick has sex with Jennifer, leading to more melodramatic and kitchen philosophical talk and some fine analysis of gayness. Aldo Ray goes mad! (He has probably heard the film's music). Dark secrets are sort of unveiled. There are pay-phone calls from beyond. Ballads play. Aldo Ray burns.

Haunted is yet another of the mighty peculiar films the great years of American local independent filmmaking have brought us.

I must admit that I have not much of a clue what director/writer Michael A. DeGaetano intended to do here. Is it an homage to classic Hollywood melodrama that accidentally got mixed up with a horror film? A parody? An early example of post-modern filmmaking? An arthouse film about memory that is betrayed by the incompetence of its actors? I certainly don't know, and I am also less than sure that DeGaetano knew what he was doing.

I find Haunted quite a bit more difficult to like than many of its brethren in spirit, in part probably because the classic era of the Hollywood melodrama is not as evocative for me as it seems to be for DeGaetano. On the other hand, however, I find it equally difficult to agree with the handful of reviews of the film which call it things like "a pile of crap". Haunted is just much too careful, confusing and confused to run under the trash label. The film also completely lacks in the hack and slash mundanity that is often used to hide a lack in imagination in horror films.

Still, Haunted is more a mystery than a film, a riddle instead of a coherent narrative - if you want to call it a narrative at all. As such, it's the sort of movie many a viewer will find boring or just plain annoying. With this one, I honestly can't blame anyone not being interested in. I'll probably have to watch it another dozen times or so before I know what I truly make of it.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,in short,melodrama,aldo ray

Bog (1978/1983)

Somewhere in the provincial wilds of Wisconsin there's a nameless, boggy lake. Under its surface dwells the most amazing of creatures - a beautiful (your ideas of beauty may vary) swamp monster. The monster - let's call it Elroy - spends most of his time sleeping, when he's not injecting the local swamp hag (Gloria DeHaven) with his blood to make her his willing sex slave (well, as far as a PG rating allows, which isn't all that far). Elroy, who failed at evolution, can only procreate with the help of a female human, you see.

One sunny day, a backwoods fisher wakes the poor dear through his misuse of dynamite, making for a pissed off monster and a dead fisherman. As luck will have it, no sooner is the man dead (and his blood sucked, in case you were wondering), than two bitchily married couples arrive at Elroy's home for a fishing weekend.

All the bitching, drinking and noisy berating of partners seems to piss Elroy off even more (I'd say he's not feministically inclined). It doesn't take long until the women fishers are also sucked dry, while their husbands suddenly feel the barbaric urge to buy really big guns and shoot themselves a monster. These two yahoos shouldn't be too much of a problem for a real monster like El, but the local police under Sheriff Rydholm (Aldo Ray, who else?) is a completely different story.

With the scientific help of (and I quote) "local sawbones" Dr. Wednesday (Marshall Thompson - good Lord, is there a retirement home for aging B-Movie heroes around!?) and Ginny Glenn (Gloria DeHaven, in a double role without any discernible reason), a scientist from the conveniently situated local marine research lab, we soon learn all there is to learn about the monster, namely that it's a relation of Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, just with cancer cells instead of the vegetable part, a proboscis for sucking blood and other stuff (some part of it is made of tungsten???) that doesn't make any sense.

After some (useless) fun with explosives, a middle-aged love interlude and a few more deaths, our scientific scientists finally develop a method to catch the monster. They build a Blood Scent Generator (TM, I suppose) to lure poor Elroy out and mistreat him with fire extinguishers until he drops down unconscious. Alas, not every old movie hand will survive this little escapade!

Having caught the true hero of the film with still nearly twenty minutes of runtime to fill, what better way to do this than by flying in ichthyologist John Warner (Leo Gordon!) - just to sprout a little more "scientific" nonsense.

If you paid attention you might have noticed that a) the monster is still alive and b) Elroy hasn't abducted a female cast member yet. I think you can draw your own conclusions about what will happen next.

After the mainstream and the producers of B grade schlock had deserted the traditional American cheap monster movie with a guy in an even cheaper monster suit sub-sub-genre, it was time for the heroic efforts of local filmmakers to fill in the hole AIP left in our hearts. Often, this lead to films with merits even more dubious than the merits of the worst of early Roger Corman, but from time to time it gifted us (slimy, stinking) pearls like Bog. Now I'm not saying Bog is a good movie (although I kinda do, because I kinda think so). It's just an absolutely perfect specimen of its kind (at least as perfect as Elroy).

Bog's awesomeosity, let me count your ways:

1. Terrible cheesy theme song, that has nothing to do with the film? Check.
2. A monster suit so ugly you'll see more frightening things on Halloween (even in Germany)? Check.
3. "Science" that even I know is oh-so-wrong? (Also, science that lets a bunch of dead scientist rotate in their graves so heartily that the Earth's roation itself is changing?) Check.
4. Dialogue so phony you can't help but admire the actors for not giggling? Check.
5. "Acting"? Check.
6. Plotting written with two "d" and making no damn sense at all? Check.
7. More local colour than you can shake a (swampy, slimy) stick at? Also, offensive backwoods people clichés and sudden appearance of not racistically written black person? Double check!

If you need more reasons to not walk, but run, to the nearest den of iniquity that sells films like this, I'm not just not able to help you anymore, I'm frankly not willing!

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,aldo ray,marshall thompson,reviews