Three Films Make A Post: Satan Has Returned For Her!

The Devil’s Daughter (1973): I’m not usually in a mind to enjoy movies for their camp factor, but Jeannot Szwarc’s unofficial, “twenty-five years later” TV move sequel to Rosemary’s Baby has some moments in this regard that make it very, very difficult to stick to my guns there. I blame the combination of delicious scenery chewing by Shelley Winters and – of all people – Abe Vigoda as middle-aged Satanists with the glorious words of “Hail Diana, Princess of Darkness” and the very sensible looking orgy full of old people, as well as the hysterically melodramatic tone in which the tiniest little problems are presented. Also of note is an incredible final shot of Joseph Cotton as the Big Demon Daddy himself.

The Brasher Doubloon (1947): This John Brahm adaptation of a Philip Marlowe story by Chandler is not generally canonized as one of the great ones, but it is a rather delightful hard boiled detective tale, with the mandatory extremely convoluted plot and central mystery, and many a scene of our hero coping with the very peculiar people he encounters. Unlike in many other Chandler adaptations, there’s a certain sardonic humour to the film’s sense of the grotesque; it also features a romance – between Marlowe and a character played by Merle Davis – that permanently wavers between what we’d read as “problematic” today and something quite interesting and original. I could take or leave George Montgomery as Marlowe, but he certainly has his own idea of how the detective works; that it’s not always an idea I share isn’t his fault, and doesn’t negate his performance.

Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022): On one hand, I understand the general praise this Apple TV original wavering between comedy and coming of age drama has acquired. Writer/director/lead actor Cooper Raiff certainly knows what he’s doing in all three of his roles, presenting surprisingly complicated ideas in a very slick and entertaining way while also subverting some of the tropes of the romantic comedy (and his audience’s knowledge of them) in a controlled manner. Plus, Dakota Johnson again proves that she’s rather woefully underpraised by most critics.

On the other hand, I despair at a world where young filmmakers don’t make blistering paeans to Big Romantic Love anymore, but argue for bourgeois domestication as the one and only way to properly grow up; hell, I’m not happy with a world where young filmmakers believe properly growing up is a good thing. These kids really should leave that particular kind of nonsense to their elders.

The Lodger (1944)

London, 1888. Jack the Ripper is stalking the streets of Whitechapel, in a Production Code friendly change of pace murdering actresses and former actresses who for some reason haunt the Whitechapel streets like prostitutes (cough). Though, when the film says actress, it really seems to mean 1940’s risqué singer/dancer, so temporal confusion is bound to happen for any viewer.

The slightly come-down Bonting family takes on a lodger, one Mr Slade (Laird Cregar), who says he’s needing the rooms they rent him for living and pathological experiments. Slade is clearly a gentleman, even though he seems a bit lost and lonely. Yet he also has strange habits, coming and going at all hours of the night through the back entrance, burning various things one might think to be connected to the Ripper murders and generally acts creepy and more than just a bit crazy. Let’s not even start with his rants about the evil powers of female beauty.

Despite all of this, it takes quite some time until his hosts start to suspect him, which is particularly dangerous because their live-in niece Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon) is one of those actresses who don’t act but sing and dance, and most certainly fits the mould of female beauty Slade, who is most certainly not Jack the Ripper, no sir, gets so excited about.

This third adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger was directed by John Brahm, whose best – at least in my opinion – movies do tend to be thrillers in historical settings like this is. Brahm certainly knew how to attractively put much completely made up period detail into a film, the production putting Merle Oberon et al in fashion and environments that never try to actually realistically emulate the past but are very much a mid-1940s fantasy of the past. Particularly Kitty’s musical numbers have to be seen to be believed in this regard.

That’s not a criticism, mind you, for often, turning the past consciously into a fantasy of itself leads to more interesting results than any pretence of authenticity, which is often only a less honest kind of fantasy.

Among Brahm’s other virtues is a fine ability to use the Hollywood-approved elements of expressionist films, so there are rather a lot of wonderful, moody shots of a foggy backlot London that is in turn filled with the shadows of policemen and the Ripper and those singing, dancing poor you hear so much about (see also, fantasy). This is actually a surprisingly effective contrast, because not portraying Whitechapel as the slum it was at once satisfied the needs of the production code but also turned the Ripper into even more of a threat, a predator in a place completely unprepared for such a thing.

Much less satisfying than Brahm’s work is the script by Barré Lyndon. Answering the age-old question if the audience of the past was really that slow, the film apparently already annoyed some critics of its own time by making everyone involved with Slade quite so slow on the uptake that it sometimes borders on the ridiculous. And even once the family, and a boring policeman played by George Sanders in a particularly bland month, are pretty sure their guest is indeed the killer, they still don’t act on it in any reasonable or useful fashion, deciding on nonsense like keeping Kitty, who is clearly in danger from him, out of the loop for no reason I could make out. Kitty herself seems to have no sense of self-preservation whatsoever, treating Slade even in full-on crazy rant mode (and Cregar’s a great, effective, eye-bulger and ranter) as if he were a nice, socially adapted guy. This would be even more frustrating if Oberon didn’t somehow manage to still project a degree of strength and intelligence into a character who has nothing like that whatsoever as she is written.


Still, despite these pretty hefty flaws, the game cast, the fantasy 1880s, and Brahm’s direction turn The Lodger into a surprisingly captivating movie, even if it is a somewhat frustrating one at times.

In short: The Undying Monster (1942)

aka The Hammond Mystery

In the English countryside. Oliver Hammond (John Howard), the family's maid, and a spaniel are attacked on a frosty full moon night by what can only have been an animal. The dog is killed, Oliver slightly hurt, and the maid so badly wounded she falls into a coma the family doctor Jeff Colbert (Bramwell Fletcher) does not expect her ever to recover from. Oliver's sister Helga (Heather Angel) is disturbed enough by the attack she's making a trip to London and Scotland Yard for help instead of just calling in the local police. Scientific detective Robert Curtis (James Ellison) and his partner, the rather less scientific Cornelia "Christy" Christopher (Heather Thatcher), clearly two specialists in the rather more curious sorts of crime, get on the case.

Once arrived at the Hammond mansion, it quickly becomes clear to the intrepid investigators that the crime at hand might just have something to do with the family curse which has supposedly caused death and destruction for the Hammond family through the ages. But everyone except Helga seems rather reticent to cooperate with the detectives, as if they'd hide some terrible secret.

I find this adaptation of Jessie Douglas Kerruish's novel rather more interesting than good and effective; in fact, I'm a bit disappointed I didn't actually enjoy watching The Undying Monster more than I actually did, for the film does some things which are rather uncommon and unexpected for its time. There's the clash between John Brahm’s moody gothic expressionist direction and art direction that is clearly brother to the spirit of the Universals, and a pair of detectives with a quite modern and scientific bent (let's look at this werewolf hair under the spectrometer!), the fact that said detectives really feel like an early attempt to take fantastic literature's occult detective - or at least a detective interested in the outré and improbable - into the world of the screen, an effort that would still take a few decades after this to actually lead anywhere. "Not leading anywhere" is the film's main problem I think, with a mystery plot that's so obvious a drunk monkey understands what's going on after the basic situation is set up, the whole science versus the supernatural angle first opened up pleasingly enough but then not really getting explored at all (with added bonus of a "natural explanation" scene that makes little sense after the audience has seen an actual werewolf transformation scene), and actors like John Howard and Heather Angel not being allowed to do much of anything.

Like many minor horror movies of its era, The Undying Monster is just a bit too slight to be really effective on an intellectual level, and seems to lack any courage to follow its own ideas where they lead, resulting in what at times seems more like a series of wasted opportunities than a complete movie.

The Mad Magician (1954)

After having spent the last few years of his working life making props for other people's stage shows in the employment of the rather nasty Mister Ormond (Donald Randolph), Don Gallico (Vincent Price) is finally beginning to make his life's dream of a career as a stage magician come true. He's got a charming assistant in Karen Lee (Mary Murphy), a gimmick imitating famous other magicians built on his ability to make life-like masks, and a thrilling new trick called "The Lady and the Buzzsaw", so nothing can go wrong.

Unfortunately, Don isn't much of a businessman and doesn't realized that whatever he creates while still in the employ of Ormond - say a sensational new trick - belongs to Ormond. Ormond, being the nice chap he is, waits with telling this to Don until right before the saw is supposed to buzz.

After that fiasco, Don continues to work for Ormond until they get into an argument that goes into a few more of the very peculiar problems between the two men, like the fact that Ormond stole Don's wife (Eva Gabor) years ago and is now unhappily married to her. One might ask why Don is still working for the guy, but that would mean putting much more thought into the film than the people making it did.

Anyway, two men are having a row, there's a convenient buzzsaw nearby, so of course Don uses it to kill Ormond. And of course this won't be the magician's only murder. He does, after all, have a tendency to do rather silly things like lose Ormond's head, and walks around masked as the people he has killed, making himself much more problems this way as he would have if his victims just disappeared. Still, it takes the combined intellects of Karen, her cop boyfriend (Patrick O'Neal) and the mystery writer Mrs Prentiss (Lenita Lane) - into whose pension he has moved in in his Ormond disguise for no good reason at all - to catch Don.

If you have seen Vincent Price in 1953's much superior House of Wax, you can imagine what kind of thoughts must have led to the creation of The Mad Magician. These movies would of course be the inspirations for a long row of films about mild-mannered artiste types losing their minds and getting bloodthirsty to which beloved hero of the house Vincent Price lent his remarkable talents.

Alas, The Mad Magician is neither a House of Wax nor an Abominable Doctor Phibes. Old workhorse John Brahm's direction is just a bit too pedestrian, with nary a flourish of creativity on display. Brahm doesn't even attempt to built the Gothic mood of dread and doom the film would require to work, and instead goes for a style that probably could have worked for a script that was more of an actual mystery instead of the random conglomeration of nonsense the one for the film turns out to be.

Not much in that script makes any sense at all. Gallico's masquerading as his dead victims isn't even explained as an attempt to distract from their being dead, and most of the plotting and characterisation just come over as lazy (even in the context of a cheap early 50s horror film), quite as if writer Crane Wilbur had had to deliver three set pieces and didn't care at all about putting any thought into connecting them.

Given how shoddy and underdeveloped much of the writing feels, I still have to give Wilbur and Brahm credit for the amount of agency and competence the female characters - or at least Karen and Mrs. Prentiss, Claire being the usual femme fatale - are allowed to have. It is, after all, they who solve the murders and even safe cop boyfriend's life during the final punch-out, something that just wasn't done in US movies of the 50s. Men in the film are either morally corrupt, mad, or utterly ineffectual. I vaguely remember the gender roles in the also Wilbur-written The Bat (also with Price as the bad guy) to have been similar, which could make Wilbur's work as a director and writer something worthy of further exploration for me.

Then there is Vincent. Price is in his element in a role like this and does his typical ultra-nuanced over-acting, even if the script doesn't give him as much to work with here as one would wish for. He builds up his character's softer side as much as possible and makes him as sympathetic as he is able to, and then goes into his (few) mad outbreaks with true relish, like a kettle that finally blows. It is even a bit creepy (in a feel that decidedly lacks in creepiness in every other aspect) to watch how Gallico's confidence grows with every murder he commits, as if growing strength of character and growing moral abhorrence were intrinsically entwined in his case. That idea doesn't seem so much to be part of the script as something Price develops alone through his performance. It's quite a thing to watch.

Alas, to get at the core of Price's performance, the surprising female characters, or the handful of moments of acceptable silliness, one has to slog through many a pedestrian sequence. It was still worth it for me, but less patient viewer's mileage will vary.

 

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