NEFERTITI, QUEEN OF THE NILE (1961)

Michael Curtiz's The Egyptian, taken from Mika Waltari's best-seller, is remembered as a box-office flop that almost immediately killed the career of Edmund Purdom, who took on the title role after Marlon Brando abruptly quit the production. After the massive success of The Ten Commandments (1956), however, producers perceived a persistent market for things Egyptian onscreen. Italian producer Ottavio Poggi saw something salvageable in The Egyptian's setting, the reign of proto-monotheist Akhenaten, and in Purdom, the Egyptian himself. The actor was already making films in Italy, and Poggi brought in two more American stars to make his project more marketable in the U.S. From our perspective his biggest get would be Vincent Price, who had just embarked on his run of Roger Corman Poe films for American-International and had a period pedigree thanks to his performance as "master builder or master butcher" Baka in The Ten Commandments. For the title role, the icon of ancient beauty thanks to the famous bust, Poggi landed Jeanne Crain, an Academy Award nominee who apparently had reached the end of the line in A pictures back in Hollywood. Fernando Cerchio, a writer-director who had come to specialize in period pictures and had written for Purdom in Herod the Great, took the helm for Poggi.

The results may surprise students of Egyptian history. Akhenaten, or Amenophis IV (Amadeo Nazzari) is a bit on the psychotic side, but overall seems a well-meaning fellow. Having just defeated a Chaldean army shortly before ascending to the throne, the prince is impressed by the monotheistic preaching of a captured Chaldean holy man (Carlo D'Angelo). On the homefront, his buddy Tumos (Purdom), a sculptor, has fallen in love with Tenet (Crain), a woman about whom he actually knows very little. He does know that it's dangerous to love her, since Tenet's dad doesn't approve. The old man sends goons to beat up Tumos, but he gets away to find sanctuary with Amenophis' army. The pharaoh-to-be promises to permit nothing to interfere with Tumos' romance with Tenet, but he himself knows little about the girl. He goes out of his way to be nice to Tumos as a rule because he has a nasty tendency of trying to kill his friend during the occasional psychotic break. Thankfully, Tumos tends to be a good sport about this.

Tenet turns out to be not merely the ward but the daughter of Benakon (Price), the high priest of Amon. Dad has been batting away suitors so that he can marry the girl off to the next Pharaoh, to improve his own connections in the royal household. He puts Tenet through a symbolic ritual sacrifice, "killing" her by shedding a single drop of blood so she can be "reborn" as Nefertiti. A marriage is quickly arranged, with poor Amenophis having no reason to know, thanks to the name switch, that he's broken his word to Tumos. The new pharaoh is preoccupied with theological speculation and his guilty conscience over all the men he's killed in war and appears to be impotent, marking this as an alternate reality in which King Tut will never exist.

Amenophis (he never changes his name to the more familiar one) thinks he's doing his pal a favor by commissioning him to carve the famous Nefertiti bust, but the sculptor only feels betrayed by both pharaoh, who didn't know better, and queen, who had no choice in the matter. He doesn't notice how Merith (Liana Orfei), the workshop's resident model, exotic dancer and archer, is pining for him. Merith is the sort of character the modern audience would want to see win out in the end, since she's a fighting heroine on top of being arguably more attractive than the legendary queen. Her archery comes in handy several times, including the film's obligatory -- The Egyptian had one, after all -- lion fight, which Tumos, being no Victor Mature, isn't going to win by himself.

Meanwhile, with Amenophis's encouragement, the Chaldean priest is building a monotheist cult, to the dismay of High Priest Benakon. Just to show that monotheists have no monopoly on intolerance, Benakon stirs up a riot during which the Chaldean and many of his followers are murdered. This backfires on the high priest when the angry pharaoh makes monotheism the national religion and bans all other cults. There's nothing left now but to stir up an army and overthrow Amenophis, regardless of the consequences to Benakon's daughter, the queen. Can a loyal army outside the capital save the day? Can Nefertiti get Amenophis to show some backbone and stand up to the rebels? I'll spoil that one: the answer is no, because our alternate-reality pharaoh has killed himself in a fit of war guilt. Well, can Tumos save the day? Again, the answer is no, because he's about to get himself stabbed to death by Benakon before Merith puts an arrow into the high priest to end the insurrection once and for all.

Purdom is weak and Crain is pretty much wooden, required almost literally to be nothing but a pretty face. Vincent Price does what he can with his villain role, but seems uncomfortable in his high-priest regalia. Liana Orfei nearly steals the picture but doesn't quite get enough screen time to pull off the heist. Cerchio has some of the same shortcomings as other peplum directors, particularly an inability to make mass battle scenes interesting, but he's better at staging and framing dramatic confrontations in the film's interiors. The production falls short on the exteriors, however, and overall you get the feeling that Poggi blew his wad on signing the Hollywood talent and had to cut corners elsewhere. Nefertiti is interesting as an eccentric take on the Akhenaten story and is worth a look for Vincent Price fans, but is probably too close to The Egyptian for its own good, or its audience's.

DVR Diary: THE MAD MAGICIAN (1954)

It took a while for Vincent Price to become a full-fledged horror man. He appeared in two Universal horror films from the classic cycle -- Tower of London and The Invisible Man Returns -- but didn't get identified with the genre until the 1950s. Andre de Toth's House of Wax was a milestone in 1953, making Price a real movie star for the first time. Publicity for his follow-up horror picture noted that he had suddenly begun receiving fan letters from children. Price reportedly speculated that House of Wax had made him nearly as popular as Roy Rogers or Lassie. Yet a hiatus, or reprieve, followed the release of John Brahm's black-and-white 3-D picture for Columbia. Price didn't make another horror picture until 1958's The Fly, after which came the deluge. So what happened? What was it about The Mad Magician, if anything, that stalled Price's transformation?

The late Mary Murphy's most famous cinematic utterance was the question, "What are you rebelling against?" Marlon Brando's answer in The Wild One was "Whadaya got?" Had Murphy's character in The Mad Magician asked the same question of her co-star, Price might have answered, "Exploitation by the man!" Price plays Don Gallico, a turn-of-the-century technical wizard who designs illusions and magic tricks for Ross Ormond, a theatrical producer whose star attraction is the magician Rinaldi the Great. Realizing that he's the real illusionist, Gallico gets the performing bug and decides to try his luck as a stage magician. Rather than let Rinaldi and Ormond benefit from his latest masterwork, an illusion of someone getting decapitated by a buzzsaw, Gallico shoots for stardom, mocking Rinaldi in the process with a note-perfect impersonation aided by an ingenious latex mask. What's interesting about this opening from the perspective of Price's career and reputation is how he doesn't play Gallico as an egomaniac but proves convincing as a nervous novice entertainer. Without his signature moustache, Price is still unmistakably himself but less like a trademark of himself, if you get my drift. In any event, Gallico's dream is dashed when Ormond sics lawyers on the theater with an injunction forbidding the use of illusions designed by his employee, all of which are Ormond's intellectual property by contract. Understandably, Gallico is one mad magician. At first he's just angry but when Ormond rubs it in a little too much our hero escalates from angry to homicidal crazy. A convenient bonfire celebrating a college football victory gives him an opportunity to dispose of the offending body, while Gallico's mask-making genius allows him to go incognito wearing Ormond's face, though he uses another name.

Right there you may notice the plot getting more convoluted than it ought to be. It gets more so when the former Mrs. Gallico, who is also the estranged Mrs. Ormond (Eva Gabor) turns up hunting for her current husband. Her appeal to the press catches the attention of the mystery-writing wife of the boarding-house owner who now recognizes her tenant as "Ormond." Mrs. O knows better; having been intimate with both Ormond and Gallico, she sees through the disguise -- so she has to die. Now our mad magician's decision to wear Ormond's face makes sense, since Ormond is now accused of his wife's murder. Rinaldi is skeptical, however, assuming for reasons of his own that a fugitive Ormond would have sought him out. He's more suspicious about Gallico designing new illusions that he feels are rightfully his. He spies on Gallico demonstrating his latest device, a crematorium illusion, but ends up getting a personal demonstration. So we end up with what had been hinted at early: the "Great Rinaldi" will debut the crematorium trick, if the mystery writer, the once-loyal assistant (Murphy) or her boyfriend the police detective don't track down Gallico first....

The Mad Magician is only 72 minutes long but manages to meander for much of that time while Price wastes time wearing masks or make-up for his impersonations. It's as if House of Wax producer Bryan Foy wanted to make Price a modern Lon Chaney of many faces. As mentioned, Price is quite good when he doesn't have to impersonate other people, and has one really good mad scene while killing Ormond, daring his tormentor to laugh at him now. But the film's eccentric or merely pointless digressions -- among the latter is a bit of business in which Price and Murphy accidentally switch bags, the former's containing Ormond's head -- dissipate the intensity of the star turn. Director John Brahm was Twentieth Century-Fox's horror specialist in the 1940s; if past his prime here, he still manages to give the picture an appropriate period atmosphere. The picture may sabotage itself in some ways, but is that enough to explain Price's five-year exile from horror? I suspect not. It's more likely that Price became identified with a kind of period horror film that was rendered obsolete by the sudden advent of sci-fi inflected horrors like Them!, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, and so on. While Price may be most revered by horror fans for the period horrors Roger Corman later adapted from Edgar Allan Poe, he had already reestablished himself as a horror man by then thanks to the modern-dress horrors he made for William Castle, as well as The Fly. Something else may have happened. Note how House of Wax had reportedly captivated small children. That film, and maybe Mad Magician as well, may have planted a seed in impressionable minds that germinated while Price went back to more conventional character acting. Once those captivated kiddies became old enough to go to drive-ins, Price was set for life.

DVR Diary: THE JACKALS (1967)

A dead man wrote The Jackals, and it shows. Robert D. Webb's film is the story of a gang of bandits who flee across a stretch of desert to escape a posse after a bank holdup. Barely making it through the parched landscape, they end up in a ghost town, where they encounter a tough young woman who lives alone with her grizzled grandfather. The gunmen guess that the only reason the pair stays on is gold. Everyone else thought the vein had been played out -- hence the ghost town -- but grandpa knows better. The gang wants the gold, but the gang leader grows a conscience. Finally, the gang divides against itself as the repentant leader faces off against his dandyish rival with lives and a fortune at stake.

Perhaps this rings a bell. Imagine a black and white desert and Gregory Peck and Richard Widmark leading the gang across. Imagine Anne Baxter as the tomboy decking Peck with a punch but later falling in love with him. That's William Wellman's Yellow Sky (1948), one of that decade's best westerns. Lamar Trotti adapted a story by gangster specialist W. R. Burnett to grim, gritty effect. Trotti died in 1952, but Twentieth Century-Fox resurrected him when the opportunity arose to remake Yellow Sky. The dead man shared script credit with Harold Medford, whose job it was to translate place names and monetary units into terms fit for the story's new setting, the wastes of South Africa. Medford and Webb did a similar translation of Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street the same year, calling it The Cape Town Affair. I haven't seen that, and now I better not, given how godforsaken The Jackals is. The direction is uninspired. The music almost invariably finds the wrong tone. The actors, with one exception, may as well be an amateur production of Yellow Sky. Jackals replaces Gregory Peck with Robert Gunner, best known (if known at all) as one of the other astronauts in the original Planet of the Apes. It replaces Richard Widmark with Bob Courtney, a British actor with a grand total of 12 screen credits, which is more than Gunner has. It replaces Anne Baxter with Diana Ivarson, best known (if known at all) for appearing in two episodes of the Batman TV show. They stink. Billed above them all is the actor playing our grizzled grandpa, a role played in Yellow Sky by veteran character actor James Barton. This part they needed a star for, and they brought in Vincent Price. He stinks. Whatever his virtues, grizzled is a type Price could not do. He camps it up like he thinks himself the comedy relief. Not one line he speaks rings true. I hope whatever painting he bought with his paycheck was a fake.

Robert D. Webb directed at least one halfway-decent movie in his career, the 1956 Robert Ryan western The Proud Ones. Others more familiar with his work may cite other films worth remembering. The Jackals was his last feature film, not counting a 1968 documentary, and it's clear that he was played out by the time he ended up in South Africa. He brings nothing to this picture; he either copies Wellman's shots or comes up with far less effective shots of his own, and he has no control over Price. His direction is as uninspired as the idea of remaking Yellow Sky in another country. Maybe my high regard for the original handicaps Jackals in my eyes, but I'd like to think that someone who's never seen or heard of the Wellman film would also recognize the Webb for the inert crap it is. It's hard to see any historical interest or curiosity value that would justify anyone else wasting their time with it, however, so take my word on this one.

Wendigo Meets THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964)

Friends, I come before you to discuss the vampire; a minority element if ever there was one, and there was one....Really, now, search your soul, lovey -- is the vampire so bad? All he does is drink blood. Why, then, this unkind prejudice, this thoughtless bias? Why cannot the vampire live where he chooses? Why must he seek out hiding places where none can find him out? Why do you wish him destroyed? Ah, see, you have turned the poor, guileless innocent into a hunted animal. He has no means of support, no measures for proper education, he has not the voting franchise. No wonder he is compelled to seek out a predatory nocturnal existence.

Robert Neville grunted a surly grunt. Sure, sure, he thought, but would you let your sister marry one?

Richard Matheson's I Am Legend is a product of its time -- it was published in 1954 -- that has been perpetually reinterpreted ever since. It has been adapted for film three times -- add a fraction if you count the short film that Jean-Luc Godard claims to have based on the novel. It's a curious thing, though, that in our age of pop vampires the most recent movie version of the story, the one that uses the original title, took pains to make Robert Neville's enemies something other than vampires, or nothing we recognize readily as vampires. Did it lose something by doing without the creatures' aversion to garlic, crosses and mirrors? How important is vampirism to the story?

My friend Wendigo reminds me that Matheson's novel makes a lot of its hero's struggle to comprehend a mass outbreak of old-school vampirism. Neville teaches himself science in order to formulate a theory of vampirism's origins in bacteria, and part of its amusement comes from Neville's struggle to make it all make sense. When I read it, I thought it might be a transparent account of Matheson's own struggle to conceive a science-fiction vampire. To make the infected humans something other than traditional supernatural creatures sacrifices that psychological struggle to make sense (or science) out of the stuff of superstition. You sympathize with Neville's struggle in the book even while you question whether science can comprehend it all.

At the same time, Matheson's vampires, which are fairly well represented in Sidney Salkow's film (co-directed by Ubaldo Ragona), aren't parading around in opera capes and gesturing hypnotically at one another. Wendigo notes that George Romero has cited the novel as a major influence on Night of the Living Dead, and Salkow's film looks like it had to be a visual influence. These are pale, slow, staggering, somewhat spastic vampires, no match for a man one-on-one but strong in numbers. They may not be dead, but they're all messed up. We're as far away from Hammer as we are from Universal. Wendigo thinks this may be the first movie to imagine a world overrun (if not ruled) by vampires, though it lacks the exotic or erotic imagination of later variations on the theme. But if Matheson's or Salkow's vampires don't remind you of Lugosi or Lee, Wendigo says that their shabby appearance and uncouth manners fit many a folkloric profile of the vampire.

Walk slowly, and carry a big stick: Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as The Last Man on Earth's neighbor-turned nemesis Ben Cortman.

But the vampires themselves are less important to the overall mood of the story than Neville's attempt to understand or resist them. Wendigo sees a generation-gap subtext in it, with Neville as a flustered suburban parent who can't figure out those kids today, whose values are no longer his. The core story isn't so much about the extinction of mankind, as Salkow's title implies, but the obsolescence of a certain kind of man who may not like what's come to replace him but really doesn't have the power or the right to stop them. You can also read anxiety about Communist ascendancy into it; the era's paranoia was partly founded on the fear that Communism was going to win. As the excerpt above shows, you can also read some racial anxiety into it as well. I Am Legend was written at a time when many people saw the world changing out of control and couldn't see themselves in the future. The Last Man On Earth was filmed around that same time, but seems to miss the point a lot.

Above, Franca Bettoia as Ruth holds Vincent Price at bay. Below, the next generation of vampires makes its presence known.

According to Wendigo, Matheson was set to adapt his own novel under the impression that an A-list cast would work alongside Vincent Price in a big-budget movie, but bailed when he discovered the limitations of the production. Matheson shares screenplay credit under the pseudonym of Logan Swanson, but the finished product loses a lot of Neville's character. For starters, in one of those infuriatingly arbitrary decisions, Neville's name is changed to Robert Morgan. Second, this film makes him a scientist from the beginning struggling to find a cure for the pandemic, so we don't get those great (though maybe uncinematic) scenes when he teaches himself science. Third, Neville's alcoholism is underplayed. In the novel he frequently drinks himself into a stupor to drown out the yelling outside his door or forget his sorrows. In Last Man there's one scene when Morgan grabs a bottle of booze, but tosses it aside to go to sleep.

Maybe Matheson's co-writers thought a drunk who didn't know much about science was unworthy of Vincent Price. I have to say that when I read the novel, I heard Charlton Heston's voice in my head whenever Neville ranted or raved, even though it's been decades since I last saw The Omega Man. The Neville of the novel has that sardonic, cynical, self-pitying attitude that Heston could convey, but I don't think that was beyond Price's powers. Wendigo feels that Price was further undercut by the writers' heavy reliance on voiceover narration early in the film. That narration announces too early what the film will be about, and it denies Price the chance to reveal his character through his actions and his acting. He's better when he can show a range of emotion, laughing then crying while watching home movies, pathetically trying to reassure a dying dog, and desperately trying to keep the young woman he finds outside from running away from him. The main thing I miss from his performance is the rage that so often rises to the surface in the novel. Wendigo feels confident that Price could have pulled it off, but we'll never know.

No exploding vampires here: in this picture they stay where you staked them.

In an obvious sense, Last Man is more a vampire-hunter movie than a vampire film, though an especially bleak one compared to Hammer's Van Helsing vehicle Brides of Dracula. Vampire hunting for Neville/Morgan isn't a cool or glamorous calling, and there's little point to his stakings apart from payback. In that sense, The Last Man on Earth has had a greater influence on horror films outside the vampire sub-genre, particularly the "survival horror" category founded by Night of the Living Dead. Salkow's film has more historic than aesthetic significance. The script wastes too many of the novel's opportunities, from smothering the opening with voiceovers to dealing all too briefly with the hero's adoption of the dog. Like all the movie adaptations of I Am Legend, this film misses the point of Matheson's ending, the passing of a man who knows his time is past. Wendigo doesn't think it a waste of time, and he recommends it to anyone who wants to know what vampires looked like to most people in the distant past. He thinks Matheson fans should give it a look, if only because it'll give them a better appreciation of what Matheson accomplished and how movies have fallen short of it. Vincent Price's fans should enjoy this without reservation since it's the nearest thing to a one-man show he pulled off in a feature film. But the definitive film version of I Am Legend remains to be made.

"Can a zombie woman hunger for love?" That's the question asked by this trailer, uploaded to YouTube by fraserw2