The Safecracker (1958)

Colley Dawson (Ray Milland), designing safes for rich people who use them to lock up treasures for nobody to see, has enough of the small life: fast cars, pretty women and touching said treasures loom large in his mind. So when an antiques dealer (Barry Jones) makes him an offer to put his talents to a safe-cracking use, Colley is easily convinced to start on a rather lucrative side-career.

To have use of his ill-gotten gains right here and now without alerting the police with a sudden influx of money, Colley starts on a double life, playing the daring safe-cracker and playboy under an assumed name on the weekends while keeping up his old life-style – including living with his elderly mum – on weekdays. Eventually, he gets caught when he ignores warning signs and directed warnings. He is sentenced to a ten year prison sentence.

However, in 1941, when World War II isn’t going terribly well for the British, Colley’s talents are in demand for a commando mission. The mission’s goal is to photograph secret documents kept in a safe in mansion in occupied Belgium that would disclose the whole of German spy operations in the UK. Particularly, doing this without the Nazis figuring out it happened would be quite a success for the British. Offered a full pardon on success, Colley agrees to take part in the mission, despite his decided lack of patriotism.

Ray Milland dabbled in directing from time to time, and clearly was a fan of directing himself. He’s still trying to hang on to his old charming, somewhat roguish image here in 1958, but at this stage in his career, “roguish” often turned out somewhat sleazy. Which isn’t a bad fit for Colley at all, though I was never quite sure Milland actually realized that was the impression he gave.

As a director, Milland isn’t terrible; he certainly isn’t great either. He has a tendency to use the least interesting shot in too many scenes, and doesn’t have a great hand for pacing either, leading to a lack of tension and a sluggishness not great in the sort of genres this is dabbling in.

The script doesn’t help there either. Structurally, this is a film of two halves from different genres, both of them not terrible successful. First, we have a heist movie that isn’t terribly interested in actually making the safe-cracking business exciting, focussed on a character who doesn’t change in any way once he’s turned from safe-maker to safe-cracker. Thus, the film is more going through the motions of a crime movie than actually being one. The second half does the same with war movie tropes. Again, there’s little tension; again, Colley isn’t changed by any of his experiences; again there’s an aimless, ambling quality to the way scenes are set-up. Not even the climactic raid appears to be all that tense.

Now, one could argue the decision to not have Colley experience any sort of inner redemptive arc as a somewhat interesting and uncommon decision, but since this leaves us with a character that goes through hardship and error completely without much of interest to an audience happening with him, I’d argue it’s an inherently boring decision as well. In the hands of more accomplished director and much more accomplished writers, one could of course do something with this reversal of expectations about how this sort of film is supposed to play out, but as it stands, this just makes a pretty lifeless film even more uninvolving.

Circle of Danger (1951)

Some years after the end of World War II. Having made enough money in the underwater salvaging business to afford it, Clay Douglas (Ray Milland) travels to the UK to figure out the truth of the mysterious circumstances that resulted in the death of his brother during the war. All Clay really knows is that his brother died on a joint commando raid with British forces, but he has a curious feeling that there’s more to the death than “just” the vagaries of war.

Now Clay has the funds to travel around Great Britain from Wales to Scotland to meet up with the survivors of the raid who also happened to survive the war. His doubts grow with the reticence the men show to speak of what happened to his brother; this certainly makes his investigation rather difficult.

Because a man needs a hobby, Clay has an early meet-cute with americanophile Elspeth Graham (Patricia Roc) who is as obviously smitten with him as he is with her. Turns out investigating a mystery and romancing a woman at the same time is something of a juggling act Clay isn’t terribly well cut out for.

Going by the bare plot description I did expect Circle of Danger to be a – perhaps Hitchockian, perhaps early 50s paranoid – thriller somewhat in the vein of perpetual house favourite Ministry of Fear (a film that of course also features Milland). In actuality, this is a very leisurely mystery that spends as much if not more time on Elspeth’s and Clay’s romance as it does on a very minorly realized mystery. Quite a bit of the film looks and feels a bit like a tourist board ad as well, with Milland strolling through very different parts of the UK in the studio and some beautifully shot locations director Jacques Tourneur shows from their prettiest sides.

I don’t know the – usually great – Tourneur as a director of fare this light, but once I accepted that nothing about this affair is going to be tight, exciting, or tense, and clearly isn’t meant to be any of those things, I did start to enjoy myself with it.

After all, Milland is still in his charming leading man phase, and as always a joy to behold going through these particular motions, the romance is improbable enough to work, and Tourneur shoots even the least exciting criminal investigation with great style. As an added bonus, the suddenly very tight five minutes during the climax feature an incredible use of wide empty spaces for a suspense scene.

In short: The Sea Serpent (1985)

aka Hydra, the Sea Serpent

Original title: Serpiente de mar

The Sea Serpent concerns a giant sea serpent (surprise) created by an experimental H-bomb (cue five minutes or so of hilariously silly and contrived “coded” language between pilots and their home base, which does not look like a room in a military installation at all). A trio, sometimes quartet, of weirdos who witness various serpent attacks - a particularly grumpy looking Ray Milland, Timothy Bottoms, Taryn Power and Jared Martin as the on-again, off-again friend/enemy who believes Bottoms is responsible for the death of his brother only to join the fight once he finally sees the serpent as well.

If you’d tell me there were two Spanish genre directors called Amando de Ossorio, I’d absolutely want to believe you. It’s a more interesting explanation for the insanely varied quality of his work than the truth of luck, opportunity and what probably wasn’t a willingness to gilden any old crap.

Alas, this one was made by the lesser de Ossorio, so if you’re coming in expecting some moody sea serpent action, a bit – or a lot of – sleaze, and other more serious joys of a giant monster movie, you’ll be sorely disappointed. To be fair, given the quality of the sea serpent puppet, de Ossorio does his best with it, letting the adorable thing squish lighthouses or molest ships as often as he can afford it. Which, alas, isn’t all that often.

Thus much of the film has to be filled with the sort of cheap business you get up to when you have no budget for anything of visual interest and only a limited degree of imagination available. This starts with the much too long military code babble sequence and will continue through boring human interest – why the hell was the brother of Martin’s character not at least killed by the sea serpent instead of bad luck to make things at least a little less random and more dramatic? –, a conspiracy angle that makes little sense and is dropped whenever the film gets bored with it, and exciting sequences like Bottoms breaking Power out of a psychiatric clinic by putting her into a white coat and then simply wandering off with her until they encounter a guard who is beaten by some absurdly awkward flirting. An exciting giant monster movie, this is not.

Having said that, I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy my time with The Sea Serpent. There’s certainly something about the crappiness of the monster that’s more charming than annoying, and the superfluous business between the monster scenes is certainly neither clever nor relevant but also kind of fun if you’re in the mood for filler instead of a main course.

Past Misdeeds: The Uninvited (1944)

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  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.

While out in the country on vacation, music critic and composer Roderick Fitzgerald (Ray Milland) and his sister Pamela (Ruth Hussey) stumble over a house they immediately fall in love with as it reminds them very much of their childhood home. Pamela's more open about it, so she's the one to decide she and Rod will attempt to buy the house and leave their London life behind.

As luck will have it, Winward House, as it is called, is indeed for sale. Its owner, one Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), offers the siblings a surprisingly low price, even though his granddaughter Stella Meredith (Gail Russell), is quite set against selling the house at all.

As so many horror movie characters before and after them, Rod and Pam soon learn that a cheap new home can only mean one thing: said new home is haunted. Consequently, there are curious occurrences in the house. Its studio room where Stella's father once painted her mother, is colder and more damp than it should be and has a certain air of dread about it. Pets don't approve of the house's upper floor, and some nights, just before dawn, a woman's voice coming from nowhere can be heard crying.

On the positive side, after first misgivings, Roderick and Stella begin to fall in love. The Commander is dead set against this, but it's not so much the romance he seems to disapprove of, as the thought of Stella putting even a single foot into Winward House. Given what actually happens once Stella does step into the house, the Commander's fears aren't exactly unfounded.

In the end, if Roderick and Pamela want to have a nice, spook-less home, help Stella grow independent of the shadows of a past she doesn't even remember, and get a bit of romance in trade, they'll have to delve into Winward House's and the girl's past, and thwart not only a supernatural menace but also a rather more worldly (yet thematically appropriate) threat.

Lewis Allen's The Uninvited is that most curious of things, a 40s horror movie made by a major studio that doesn't explain its ghosts away with some evil uncle in a gorilla costume. Apart from taking its supernatural menace seriously, the film also talks rather directly about some things films made under the iron rod of the production code did not usually dare talk about that way. It's as if the film were made by grown-ups with a grown-up audience in mind and just didn't feel the need to coddle anyone.

Not that The Uninvited sets itself so apart from the film mores of its time that it's afraid of a bit of deeply Hollywood-like sentimentality, especially since it is not only a horror movie but also a romance that transplants a handful of Gothic tropes into the contemporary 1940s, with a deft understanding of how to use them properly in this context. The characters here are after all modern people, so their reactions to the things going on should be modern too, however old-fashioned the tropes these dangers are based on are. In a really curious development, the merging of the gothically inclined romance and the ghost story elements works perfectly, with both sides of the genre equation strengthening each other, and nary a moment when the horror lover will gasp "oh no, they're romancing again" nor one for the romance lover to sigh "now with the ghosts again". This isn't a film of two genres grafted together like Frankenstein's Monster (or Bob, as I call him), but one that happens to belong to both and would make little sense - emotionally, thematically, or otherwise - if it restricted itself to just one of them.

While the script's (based on a novel by Dorothy Macardle I now really want to read, and not just to see how large the differences between original and adaptation are) fusion of ghost story and romance is very strong, a strong script alone does not always make a good movie. Hauntings can easily become ridiculous instead of haunting, and romances cloying instead of charming. Fortunately, Allen is quite capable of handling both sides of the film with equal verve. Allen is in general quite an interesting director. Once the mid-50s came around, he began a nearly absurdly fruitful career as a TV director, but among the films he made before that and - somehow - in between are some fine examples of filmmaking in various genres. It's this adaptability Allen makes great use of here, still very early in his career, showing a fine sense of how to develop a haunting mood through shadow and sparse light, and especially noise, as well as a knowledge of how to be romantic without turning kitsch.

Allen makes particularly good and subtle use of his actors to deepen the feeling of the house's haunting, with many a scene where Milland and Hussey are trying to joke away their fears (they are modern people living in the modern world, after all) yet their faces show how out of sorts they really are. It's always wonderful to witness the young dapper Milland in films of this age, when a guy who'd later turn into the perpetual old grump in front of the camera was allowed to bring the type of charming, slightly roguish characters to life that can become so annoying in the wrong hands but are really rather loveable when done right.


Thematically, this is of course a rather romantic (in various meanings of the word) film about a dapper young man who - with the help of his very competent sister who'll win herself her own grown-up romance in the process - has to rescue his lady from the shadows of the past, shadows that in this particular case haven't quite allowed her to grow up or to reach her full potential as a person, which in turn will probably help him with the same problem for himself. Despite the whole set-up not exactly providing Stella with much agency, the film also makes it clear that Roderick wants to help Stella not just because it's difficult to marry a dead woman but also to help her to actually grow up and reach that potential. We can argue about how progressive this can be when Rod is the one party of the relationship actually active here (though I'd really rather not), but we can hardly argue that a guy applying himself to help his romantic partner become a whole person instead of a pretty cipher isn't romantic in concept.

Past Misdeeds: The Dead Don't Die (1975)

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 without any re-writes or 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.

1934. On the night of Ralph Drake's (Jerry Douglas) execution on the electric chair for the murder of his wife during a break in a dance marathon, the supposed killer, who has no memory of what took place between him and his wife but is sure he would never have laid a hand on her, makes his brother Don (George Hamilton) promise to find out who is the true killer.

Initially, Don - who is in the Navy and not a detective anyhow - has nothing to go on in his investigation. A visit with Moss (Ray Milland), the dancehall promoter responsible for the dance marathon Ralph and his wife took part in, does not bring to light anything the sailor doesn't already know.

And that could be that already, making for a very short film, but strange things begin to happen all around Don. It starts when a mysterious woman (Linda Cristal) - later to be named Vera LaValle - tries to warn Don off the case completely, for a certain "he" knows what the sailor's up to and will do something terrible to him if he persists. Before he can question Vera further, Don sees his dead brother walking around outside the restaurant the scene's taking place in, and follows the dead man into a shop whose owner Perdido (Reggie Nalder) is not a fan of people just barging in on him. In the following scuffle, Don accidentally kills Perdido, or at least thinks he does, before the shop owner's assistant (Yvette Vickers) does her best to bash his head in.

When Don awakes, he finds himself in the tender care of Vera. The woman spouts more cryptic warnings, but at least she now gives the mysterious "him" a proper name - Varrick - and very reluctantly puts Don on his trail. That trail, not completely to the audience’s surprise, leads directly into a funeral parlour. Alas, there seems to be no Varrick at hand there. However, there's the body of a certain Mister Perdido laid out. Our hero is confused enough by everything that has happened to him to feel the need to take a good look at the dead man. Little does Don expect the corpse to speak to him with someone else's voice and try to strangle him.

After escaping the zombie, Don decides to go to the police with his rather wild story, because that's what you do when people you killed attack you. The patient cop on duty even agrees to accompany Don to Perdido's shop to clear things up. It's just that Perdido seems to be pretty much alive, and makes Don's story out to be an alcohol fuelled fantasy.

Obviously, Don can't count on the help of the police anymore, yet he can't bring himself to give up and ship out until he has discovered an explanation for what the hell is going on around him.

The excellently titled The Dead Don't Die belongs to the last interesting phase of director Curtis Harrington's career, before he became just another guy churning out episodes for any old TV show people paid him for, and that (very funny) film about the possessed dog.

The Dead is a TV production too, it can, however, count itself among the small yet potent group of US TV horror movies from the 70s that are just as individual and peculiar as anything made for the big screen. Unexpectedly for a TV movie in general, yet not all that surprising if you've seen some of the other TV movies directed by Harrington, the film has the feel of something more personal and individual than what you'll usually see produced for the small screen, and fits nicely into the cinematic body of work of its director.

As is typical of his films, Harrington fuses diametrically opposite elements into a whole that's dream-like and artificial. On one hand, the The Dead Don't Die is pervaded by a sense for and an interest in period detail that just screams - at least as much as the film's budget and short production time allow - "realism". Its visual style, on the other hand, is clearly influenced by the conscious artificiality of the film noir (and what, after all, is more noir than a story about a guy looking for the man who framed his brother for murder, a mysterious woman with a heavy accent, and a series of strange encounters?), the lush melodrama of Douglas Sirk (though with other social interests than Sirk had), and the hidden complexity of Val Lewton's RKO productions. In a sense, Harrington is about as retro a director as I could imagine (see also the near obsessive casting of old guard Hollywood actors in minor roles here and everywhere else in his career), but he's not interested in merely reproducing the past. Rather, Harrington is taking (his favourite) elements of the past to shape something new and very much his own. Which, again, isn't something you'd expect to find in a TV movie, where routine usually comes – has to come - before individual artistic expression.

As a whole, The Dead feels like a film noir's themes had stumbled into an RKO horror movie that for its part has found itself inexplicably entwined with the visual and emotional world of the melodrama.

Robert Bloch's (who you might know as the author of the novel Hitchcock's Psycho is based on, but who began his career as a pulp writer in the Lovecraft circle, wrote large amounts of SF, horror and mystery, and also worked quite a bit for TV too) script is an appropriately strange one, too, full of small but interesting diversions and peculiar little flourishes that just might let the members of The Dead Don't Die's audience put on the same utterly confused facial expression George Hamilton wears for much of the film's running time.

I'm not a great admirer of Hamilton, but his sleepwalker-ish body language here and his eternal wide-eyed look of surprise are just what the film and his role need of him. His character is, after all, walking through scenes and encounters as unreal and surreal as anything a man might dream up, never sure what's real and what's not, finding himself completely out of his depth.


Which all adds up to one of the best voodoo zombie movies of the 70s.

On ExploderButton: The Uninvited (1944)

Ghosts and romances are things that should go together like rapier fights and people wearing ridiculous wigs, but usually, if your romance contains a ghost, or your ghost enters the realm of romance, horrible things are bound to happen.

Unless, of course, your film is Lewis Allen's The Uninvited where all manner of things are done exceedingly well and even the most cynical cult movie fan says yes to romance. Read everything I think about the film in this week's appearance on ExploderButton.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,romance,reviews,other places,lewis allen,ray milland,ruth hussey,gail russell

In short: Frogs (1972)

Rich people are really disgusting. So thinks the animal population on the swamp island belonging to the rich Crockett family, and one fine 4th of July (well, actually, they begin the day before), they finally do something to clean the place up. Led by what oh so meaningful shots of adorable animals croaking suggest must be their frog generals (who, like all generals, don't dirty their hands themselves), the animals slowly kill off servants and family, mostly by betting on the natural horror film human tendency to fall down for no good reason, stumble into puddles full of leeches, or - in what might be the film's funniest scene - to step towards the smoking poison instead of away from it.

Accidental family guest Pickett Smith (a name that can only belong to a pre-facial-hair Sam Elliott, or a fence company) tries his best - it isn't much - to keep the family alive, but that's not easy with a family patriarch (Ray Milland really needing the money) who won't have his beautiful 4th of July/birthday be ruined by mere trifles like a few corpses.

In the realm of nature strikes back movies, there are mere films about nature striking back, and then there's the unfairly named - seeing as all other animals are doing all the work and the frogs just croak, unless they are controlling their peers by telepathy, an idea I wouldn't put past the writers - Frogs. Frogs, probably to nobody's surprise, is as bad as its plot suggests, and therefore awesome.

To understand the quality of the movie, just imagine the most boring members of the cast of a soap opera of your choice - let's say Dallas - transplanted to Florida where they are attacked by lots of adorable animals director George McCowan never manages to let look threatening for even a second. Which must be some kind of achievement in a film that does feature an alligator attack. Of course, it is quite difficult to imagine how the poor animals could look threatening in a film that insists on letting them kill off their victims in predominantly indirect ways that really rather suggest the true cause of the film's humans deaths isn't so much killer animals as a proclivity to drink too much alcohol and inborn stupidity.

Needless to say, an alcoholised viewer will find much to be entertained by here, starting with the film's effortlessly ridiculous attempts at doing Southern Melodrama (I imagine the filmmakers seeing themselves not as producing a horror movie Dallas but rather a cross of a horror film and a Tennessee Williams play), continuing through the utter absurdity of many of the deaths (obvious favourite: the glass house with the poison-bottle-throwing lizards, though there's something to be said for however it is Milland is supposed to die), and ending on little flourishes of random weirdness that must come quite natural to a film that dances to an electronic Les Baxter soundtrack that might have been composed by letting frogs jump all over a synthesizer.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,george mccowan,ray milland,sam elliott,joan van ark

Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937)

International man of adventure Hugh "Bulldog" (not that anyone ever calls him that) Drummond (Ray Milland) has barely returned to his native England to morally support his half-wit - so he's fifty percent cleverer than in the Colman-Drummonds - friend Algy (Reginald Denny) who is just about to give birth to a child (or was that Algy's wife?), when he stumbles into another adventure.

To be more precise, he first stumbles over a pretty girl (Heather Angel who'd go on to reprise her role in later Drummond movies with John Howard) - later to be revealed as Bulldog's future long-suffering fiancé Phyllis Clavering - playing dead by the side of the road. Phyllis will proceed to steal Drummond's car while he is distracted by the obligatory dead body. Of course, as Drummond fastly surmises with his own, manic yet ironic romanticism, Phyllis is stealing cars for a good reason and is in fact in need of a knight in shining armour. Phyllis, Drummond and the audience will learn soon enough, is held against her will by the mandatory bearded villain (Porter Hall) out to steal her inheritance.

It'll take a series of kidnappings, re-kidnappings, run-ins with Drummond's suffering police acquaintance Inspector/Colonel/Commissioner Nielson (Guy Standing) and much sneaking about a mansion to improve her situation.

It's quite useless to attempt to build a continuity from the various Bulldog Drummond movies, made sometimes in the US and sometimes in the UK, though I do tend to pretend the John Howard movies are taking place in something of a chronological order. Well, at least we can say that the US movie Bulldog Drummond Escapes reveals how Drummond got his fiancé, and must therefore happen before any of the US Howard movies, even though it seems to have been made - the Internet's not much help when you're trying to find out which of the three or four Drummond movies made in 1937 came out first - after the first Howard appearance and just leave it at that. We can also be happy that this Drummond version again does not partake in its source's borderline fascism and racism; it's much too good-natured for that.

This is the only time Ray Milland took on the Drummond mantle, which really is a bit of a shame, for Milland is surprisingly (one doesn't exactly think "dapper charm" when one thinks of Milland, after all) great as the two-fisted frantic romantic. The actor clearly has fun with the character's manic edge, going through much of the film eyes a-glow and excited by ADVENTURE. That sort of excitement is quite infectious and helps the willing viewer get over the fact that much of the film's adventure for budgetary reasons really only consists of people running or sneaking through a mansion. That's perfectly alright, however, for the film - sprightly directed by John P. Hogan (hopefully not the SF writer, climate change denier and oh-so-heroic defender of Holocaust deniers) - manages to be a whole lot of fun, having a light touch with its genre clichés that says (you obviously must imagine an American pretending to be British here) "It's just a jolly bit of fun, old chap". Which is absolutely true.

In a surprising turn of events, Bulldog Drummond Escapes wins over the few sceptical parts of my heart that can't be convinced by things like "fun" and "humour" by featuring a female lead in Heather Angel who - besides actually having chemistry with Milland - is not completely useless. In fact, it's not at all difficult to imagine that Phyllis would come out alright even if Drummond were not there to help her out in his own, peculiar manner. I'd suggest remake-loving Hollywood to take a look at the Drummond franchise and turn it into a female-led series of adventure comedies, but then I fear they'd be even less inclined to do that than they were in 1937.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,adventure,mystery,pulp,john p. hogan,ray milland,heather angel,reviews

In short: Ministry of Fear (1944)

England, 1944. Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is released from the asylum he spent the last two years of his life in for the mercy-killing of his fatally ill wife into the bomb-scourged countryside. On his way to London, Stephen visits a charity country fair and wins himself a cake under slightly complicated and bizarre circumstances that involve a fortune teller and attempts to renege on the promised cake (I wouldn't be surprised if GLaDOS had seen the movie, really). Next thing Stephen knows is a fake blind man is stealing his cake, only to be hit by a German bomb.

Stephen can't let the strange occurrences he experienced rest, so, once he has arrived in London, he begins a series of enquiries that will lead him onto the trail of a Nazi spy ring. Stephen will visit a drunk private detective, take part in a séance that will leave him under the suspicion of being a killer, and stumble into the arms of an Austrian émigré (Marjorie Reynolds) who may either be the woman he's going to marry or a Nazi spy herself.

I know this is still something of a sacrilegious idea in certain circles, but I've always preferred Fritz Lang's Hollywood movies to those he made in his first German phase. I think it has something to do with the friction between a fiercely intellectually independent like Lang and the strictness of the Hollywood system, or rather the sparks that can result when a director has to fight for every self-indulgence (see for example also Seijun Suzuki).

Ministry of Fear has always been one of my favourite films by Lang. This will probably not come as much of a surprise to regular readers of this blog (hi, Mum!), for Ministry of Fear contains many of the elements known to get me excited. First and foremost, there's a feeling of the bizarre (and sometimes the whimsical) lying at its heart, as if it were perfectly reasonable for a Nazi spy ring to hide McGuffins away in cakes and stage fake séances to cover their tracks and scare interlopers away; if you need realism instead of the peculiar yet coherent logic of certain types of mental illnesses or dreams in your plots, you'll probably despair of Lang's film quite soon.

Ray Milland's Reynolds is obviously the perfect foil for a plot of this kind, because he's more than just a little unsure of his own position in life and reality, and at first clearly can't decide if he's gotten so out of step with life in the world that quotidian reality looks strange to him, or if quotidian reality itself has gotten out of step. Lang's matter-of-fact depiction of wartime England as a place where it's as normal as waiting at a bus stop to keep to blackout rules and calmly go to the next bomb shelter once the bomb warnings sound emphasises this feeling of a world that's become strange even further. Once the outside world has reached a point like it did during World War II, Lang's film seems to say, there's just no telling what's real and what a paranoid fantasy. There might never have been that much of a difference anyway.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,fritz lang,ray milland,marjorie reynolds,thriller

On WTF: The Dead Don't Die (1975) & A Small Announcement

Curtis Harrington had a hell of a strange career. Starting out as a peculiar and artful B-movie auteur, he somehow found his way to the feeding troughs of television where he first made just as peculiar and artful TV movies, and then went to waste directing routine TV shows in a routine fashion.

The Dead Don't Die is one of these artful and peculiar TV movies, though, and comes highly recommended to anyone with a place in her heart for Val Lewton's RKO productions, film noir and Douglas Sirk. Today being Friday, there's more about the film in my write-up on WTF-Film.

And because Monday's my birthday, and ancient evils party for strange aeons, this is the last you'll read from me until Wednesday.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,reviews,horror,curtis harrington,george hamilton,linda cristal,ray milland,zombies,other places

Black Noon (1971)

The Old West. Reverend John Keyes (Roy Thinnes) and his wife Lorna (Lynn Loring) are crossing the desert on their way to the good reverend's new place of employment. Alas, John is a preacher and not a ranger, and consequently the couple soon enough loses their way.

They'd probably die of thirst, if not for the sudden fortunate appearance of Caleb Hobbs (Ray Milland), his mute daughter Deliverance (Yvette Mimieux) and their factotum Joseph (Hank Worden). They rescue the preacher couple and bring them into the town Caleb's mayor of, picturesque - if slightly un-frontier-like looking - San Melas (see what they did there?). John recovers from his near-death experience speedily, but Lorna seems to have been hit a bit harder by dehydration and exhaustion, so the couple will have to stay in town for a bit before they can continue on their journey.

Their hosts sure don't mind. It's been quite a while since a preacher has been in town, and the populace is just all too glad to have the chance to get some holy vibes. When he's not staring at Deliverance in a way quite unfitting for a married preacher, John obliges his hosts' wishes of doing some preaching for them with a vengeance. Why, look, his first smug sermon even manages to heal a lame boy! And while he's being heroic, he also puts himself against the lone gunman (Henry Silva) who has been terrorizing the town.

Now, given his good qualities, the townsfolk would really like John to stay for a bit longer, perhaps as their new preacher. John is tempted to oblige that wish, but Lorna has a bad feeling about that, as she has about the whole place.

She's quite right, too. Not everything in the oh-so-subtly named town is quite right. Why does John have strange nightmares and even daytime hallucinations of a bleeding man since he has come to town? Why does Lorna get worse instead of better the longer she is staying in town? Might it have something to do with the witchcraft Deliverance practices in her free time? Or is it all part of a Satanist conspiracy? One thing is sure, John's moral compass is pointing in more awfully un-priestly directions the longer he stays.

Black Noon is a very neat little TV movie directed by long-time TV director Bernard L. Kowalski, and written by TV western specialist Andrew J. Fenady. As I have mentioned before, I'm very fond of films attempting to mix the western and the horror film, and finding a rather obscure example of a film mixing the Satanist conspiracy sub-genre and the western is the sort of thing that makes my day.

Even better for that day is that Black Noon has merits beyond its mere existence. Nobody will ever call a US TV movie from the 70s stylish or visually exciting, but Kowalski is the sort of professional director who can make the visual straightforwardness the TV format demands from him work to his film's favour; and if the situation demands it, like in the dream sequences, Kowalski is even able to use cheap old dream sequence standards in an effective way Roger Corman would have approved of. If nothing else Kowalski brings a tightness to the visuals as well as the pacing that fits the at its core very simple story well.

Fenady's script really has its moments too, never showing the silent and inescapable corruption/seduction of the priest and his beliefs with too grand a gesture. In the end, Black Noon's tone seems to imply, what we witness is terrible (and frankly a bit unfair) in its consequences, but in the end nothing unusual in the history of humanity; pithy corruption's just a normal, daily occurrence. Good old honest 70s bleakness didn't even stop from infecting TV movies, it seems.

But even when it's not about the basic weakness of people, the Black Noon's script does its best too avoid becoming overtly melodramatic. Of course there are louder scenes, but these scenes are actual emotional turning points the film worked up to while hinting at their underlying emotional complexities. This hinting at the film's themes does work so well not only because of Fenady's writing, but also because Black Noon's ensemble cast is rather great. Everyone (well, except for Henry Silva's porn moustache, but what can you do?) seems out to treat a set-up that could be played as a carnival side-show with earnestness and concentration, strengthening the human side of the story in favour of the film's potential for camp.

 

 

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In short: The Masks of Death (1984)

An elderly Sherlock Holmes (Peter Cushing) returns from his beekeeping duties to help his old associate Inspector MacDonald (Gordon Jackson) - the only policeman he doesn't outright despise, though he still treats him like a rather stupid child - unravel the mysterious case of three seemingly causeless deaths. The only visible marks on the bodies of the victims are expressions of abject fear on their faces.

While Holmes and Watson (John Mills) are somewhat stumped by the case, the Home Secretary (an embarrassingly drunk Ray Milland) urges the detectives to take on the "more important" case of the disappearance of a high ranking German personality from a locked room, which puts the Secretary's secret efforts for a peace treaty with the Germans into peril.

Annoyed as he is, Holmes still follows the call of the motherland and uncovers a conspiracy with possibly dreadful consequences. There is also a the return of Irene Adler (Anne Baxter) to awaken the old woman-hater's curiosity.

 

This short British TV movie reunites Cushing (in his last leading role) and John Mills in roles that weren't exactly new to them to nice effect.

Neither the script by Anthony Hinds nor Roy Ward Bakers very pedestrian direction are anything to write home about, but the two lead actors don't seem to mind. Cushing and Mills (whose Watson is not of the dreaded "bumbling idiot" variant) have a beautiful rapport as old friends who are too much in love with classic British stiffness to be all that emotional, yet whose small gestures and friendly bickering betray their closeness all the same.

Especially Cushing provides some telling acting details that seem to come much more from him than from the script (that just ignores how being old must feel to someone like Holmes) and give a glimpse into Holmes as someone who doesn't take to age well - it hasn't made him any milder and now even provides him with ample opportunity to turn his irritation onto his own growing slowness.

I need hardly mention that the idea of an old Holmes played by Cushing (whose calm professionalism I'd take about egomaniac horror icon Christopher Lee any day) at the end of his career brings with itself a certain melancholy even when the script doesn't do a lot with the concept.

The Masks of Death is the actors' film anyway. Besides the quite wonderful Cushing and Mills, Anne Baxter and Anton Diffring are also doing a lot to let one forget the film's slightness, making it a worthy final bow (and yes, I am ignoring Biggles here, even I have standards) for Cushing.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,in short,mystery,sherlock holmes,peter cushing,roy ward baker,john mills,ray milland,anton diffring,anne baxter