The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

Director Ida Lupino — an early woman filmmaker who got into directing because a director fell ill and she was on the set as an actor — crafts an impressive story here based on a real-life 1950 story.  Billy Cook murdered six people before taking two men as kidnap victims on a ride to Mexico, where he hoped to escape but was captured. The psychopathic hitchhiker in this film is named Emmett Myers, and portrayed by William Talman. His performance is the best thing about the film — he seems like resentment personified as he prods the two men along, and terrifically creepy as he sleeps with one damaged eye literally open and directed at the two men.

A lot of the shock value has been lost in more than fifty years, and the violence is too clean to be terribly believable, a bit like the violence in old Westerns where people can shoot guns out of each other’s hands.  I do wonder if it was considered a little tastless to produce the film three years after six people were killed, even with all the names changed. Thankfully, Lupino takes the time to make all the characters seem human, even Emmett Myers, though he’s clearly damaged beyond hope of repair.  There’s also an impressive scene where the car was apparently filmed by another one ahead of it with a camera on a trailer, so we’re able to follow it over bumps and down small hills. It’s enough to make you wish for more innovative moments, but Lupino has done extremely well, encouraging strong performances in an engaging film. The only disappointment is the somewhat abrupt ending.  Just how deep do the phychological scars go after spending days captured by Myers? We’re not quite sure, the men get a couple of lines and limp away into the tall shadows so often found in film noir.

Things to Come (1936)

Based on the H.G. Wells novel The Shape of Things to Come, and with a screenplay by Wells (though apparently not much involvement beyond that) this is an interesting, if remarkably dated film. Released in 1936, it portrays an England going to war around Christmas 1940 which was not far off, as it turned out, and it’s the first of three stages of a potential future the film presents. This first stage is remarkably anti-war, something I suspect wouldn’t have been allowed a few years later and into wartime. Characters make exasperated statements about the waste of it all, and in a long montage of barbed wire and bombs going off, the war is portrayed as lasting for decades and pummeling society back to the dark ages, so that people are reduced to living in rubble, trying to avoid disease, and pulling cars around with teams of horses. John Cabal (played by Toronto born Raymond Massey) is introduced, fights in the war and then disappears from the film for a while.

The second stage of the film has “social vitality” finally beginning to return around 1970, but society has become fragmented, and different warlords claim different parts of the country. The “Chief” of one particular region gets a visit from a grey-haired John Cabal in a nifty flying vehicle (and he wears a helmet the size of a small fridge) so Cabal can explain he’s part of a larger government restoring order and trade, and wiping out tinpot dictators and fragments of England that claim to be independent sovereign states. Of course, the tinpot dictator throws him in jail, and the second part of the film portrays the struggle to overcome the Chief, ultimately fairly easy once some giant warplanes are established, and knockout gas is used. It’s here that casting hurts the film quite a bit, because while Massey is okay if somewhat bland, the Chief is really a tremendous dork in a fur coat that wouldn’t be elected the head of a social club, never mind a chunk of England.

Another montage then takes us to 2036, a hundred years after the film was produced, and while I suspect this is meant to be a progressive montage to balance the war montage, it’s basically dislocated shots of people standing next to huge vats of goo, and massive drills reshaping the landscape (look at us, we can kick the crap out of mountains!) before finally the whole world is made up of clean, white cities with tremendous blank walls and everyone wears dresses. Er, great. I know filmmakers search for something different when portraying the future, but have a hard time understanding why it frequently needs to be either as clean as this, or as cluttered as Blade Runner (1980), except to say we seem to have trouble imagining the kind of compromise life usually becomes.

While the film is visually impressive, with some great model work for the time, the three segments are progressively blander, with the conflict in the final segment reduced to the descendant of John Cabal (again played by Massey) trying to protect his space program from a mob that appears to be motivated by some other prominent citizen, and the lamest speech ever (“We must stop this progress!”). All through the film, characters don’t speak as much as make pronouncements, making the film feel more like an essay brought to life than a drama.There’s only one moment in the first segment, when we see the body of a child in the rubble, that the film makes a powerful visual statement that isn’t someone telling us what to believe. And of course, enough time has gone by that we know none of these things are quite happening — we can only note the general lesson: that no matter what age it is, progress will be a struggle, and some people will fervently believe in doing absolutely the wrong thing.

Fear in the Night (1947)

A man wakes up from a nightmare that he murdered someone, only to discover blood on his hand, and a key in his pocket that wasn’t there before. Nearly twenty years before he played Leonard “Bones” McCoy in the original Star Trek, DeForest Kelley was in this low-budget, smash hit crime film I’m tempted to call film noir, except it probably isn’t quite dark enough. While I love older films, something in this style has become a cultural curiosity — men wear hats, they smoke, they slap each other around, and women basically just sigh passively at everything.

Playing Bones McCoy didn’t just define the rest of his career, it became the rest of his career, through no fault of his own.  Before that, Kelley was in an impressive range of films and TV pilots (some that never became a series), though the only things I’ve ever been able to actually see on DVD are this film, and Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) where he plays alongside Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.

By all accounts a quiet and pleasant man, Kelley happens to be the only Star Trek cast member who never wrote a memoir of any kind, though it’s probably the one I’d most want to read. As an actor, he has a fascinating face, though his range is  either limited or a bit saddled by awkwardness, depending on how you look at it. He isn’t a terrible actor, but he’s one of those actors that seems to only sometimes snap into the role and become completely natural.

Still, he’s the best actor in Fear in the Night, which is full of dialogue that was probably meant to sound original but instead sounds awkward. An old man says “Oh, that clock is a little slow, just like the horse I had yesterday,” and the future Bones McCoy (it’s so hard to disassociate him from that role) simply puts on his hat and walks away. The narration by Kelley says once or twice that it felt like his “brain was handcuffed,” which must be one of the most awkward images I’ve heard in a while, considering handcuffing a brain would actually be a bit of a challenge. Kelley is playing a twenty-four year old here, but is one of those actors that appears to have been born looking forty.

Regardless, it’s a tidy little film that wraps up after about 71 minutes, and a fascinating glimpse into the early career of an actor that would become a cultural icon.  I recall reading an interview with Kelley where he said after Star Trek he turned down various doctor roles to try and avoid typecasting, and then when nothing else was offered he took stuff that was worse than the roles he’d turned down, until finally the Star Trek films came along.  But if Trek was a blessing and a curse, Kelley dealt with it with his trademark gentlemanly behaviour, married to his wife Carolyn until his death in 1999.  It happened to be the month I turned thirty, and I recall drunkenly toasting him over and over at my celebration, on a patio with a bunch of friends. I’m sorry, DeForest. I meant to be classier about it, I really did.  But I was sincere in saying you’ll be missed, and the world needs more people like you, the less egocentric kind that know they’re just playing a part.

To watch McCoy and Spock try to get along when Kirk ain’t around, click here.

The Abominable Snowman (1957)

I’ve blogged about the great Peter Cushing recently in The Beast Must Die (1974) close the end of his film career, but recently went back to check out The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957) an early horror film for Cushing, and yet an underrated classic and a film that actually plays more like a thoughtful mystery.

Sure, there’s a body falling from a height that’s so obviously a dummy it isn’t funny. And sure, we’re talking about some actors climbing around sets and fake snow, but the studio work blends very well with some impressive location work, particularly as it’s all in black and white. Cushing co-stars with Forrest Tucker, and the two actors have roles that contrast quite nicely. Cushing is the utterly thoughtful naturalist and preservationist, and Tucker the showman who just wants to shoot a few and bring them home.  In other words, the two represent the best and worst sides of our nature. Wisely, the film waits, and then waits even longer to show us the face of a Snowman, while Cushing gets lines like this, looking at the body of one of them: “This isn’t the face of a savage thing… there’s gentleness.  Suppose they’re not just a pitiable remnant waiting to die out.  Waiting, yes… but waiting for us to go.”

Wait a sec, a fifties horror flick that suggests some of the low-key biodiversity out there might outlive us, and it’s only our egocentricity that allows us to think we’re more important?  I was impressed.  Sadly, the film is out of print on DVD, and as I’ve moaned before, there’s no Peter Cushing collection to speak of.  But try to track this one down, if you can, because it’s well worth it. I was able to see it through Zip.ca, in Canada.

Watch the flying dummy here.

It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958)

In 1958, it must have been hard to imagine life in the fifties wouldn’t go on forever, because the small crew returning from Mars (in the distant year 1973) has several woman on board just to serve pie and coffee. The ship is returning with a prisoner — a man suspected of killing the rest of his crew when a first ship crash-landed on Mars, but in fact a fearsome monster from the planet is on board, and his innocence is proven when it begins picking off members of this new crew.

Director Ridley Scott once described Alien (the first film in the Sigourney Weaver series) as a well done B-movie, and he’s right. Both films are monster movies, or a haunted house in space, with the major difference that Scott was a more skilled director with a decent budget, and better actors (or, if not better actors, at least actors that don’t have to deliver clunky dialogue that make it difficult to believe it’s the distant year 1973). Still, it’s also fair to say Alien (1979) borrows heavily from its predecessor, and It! is entertaining enough, despite the low budget, the early reveal of the monster and the fact that it’s a guy in a big rubber suit. In fact, Alien even borrows the kitchen scenes with the crew sitting around talking, though the actors in Alien get reel-feeling dialogue like “Can I finish my coffee first?  Thanks, it’s the only good thing on this ship.”

Together, the two films are a perfect example of the difference more time and money can make.

Tarzan of the Apes (1932)

The original Edgar Rice Burroughs novel by the same title (1914) must be among the worst novels I’ve ever read — a wandering plot, blatant statements about British superiority (after all, drop an infant from the British empire into the jungle and naturally they take charge, right?) and a lack of any real attention to detail.  At one point Tarzan has an arm nearly completely torn off, but despite being away from any real medical attention he just… gets better.  For all that, Burroughs at least explains his origins from parents marooned after a mutiny, and has Tarzan evolving in the book, learning French and then English before finally returning to England to pursue Jane Porter. 

I was curious about the 1932 film with champion swimmer Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, undoubtedly the most famous man in the role, the one who starred in a dozen films, and the creator of the famous Weissmuller yell, sometimes rumoured to be a sound effect created using a yodeler.

But first, the film gives us Jane Porter and family and friends, commenting that Africa is an “awful hole,” arranging for their servants to be whipped and plunging through the jungle to shoot whatever animals they see.  To call the film dated is something of an understatement.  Needless to say, they encounter Tarzan (who sports medium-length, well styled hair), there are some impressive scenes of a stuntman swinging around, and other stuntmen choking lions while pretending to stab them.  Somehow his buddy Cheetah can communicate complicated instructions to elephants, who are always ready to kick some butt for old Tarzan. Tarzan also seems to be able to communicate a lot with that scream of his, and rides elephants and hippos like they’re cabs in New York.  Jane screams a lot, except when she wants to blow the head off a hippo, and the film finally doesn’t offer the slightest explanation as to what Tarzan is doing there, or who he is.

Despite good production values for 1932 it’s all pretty laughable, and yet as I write this in 2008 I can’t say I live in an enlightened twenty-first century.  We’re seriously lacking conservation efforts, and as both Canadians and Americans head into elections, we can’t seem to decide in favour of more progressive governments, despite a desperate need to address climate change and many other issues.  Ah, Tarzan — you’re a quaint reminder of just how stupid we stilll are.

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

Basil Rathbone had played a lot of magnetic villains in the thirties, but in 1939 he was suddenly, immediately and for all time one of the great actors to play Sherlock Holmes in a couple of lavish productions with Fox studios: Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  If you’ve never seen them, these are lavish, terrific productions, with an increasingly bumbling Watson the only drawback (say what you want about him not being as smart as Holmes, he wasn’t a complete idiot, either). Unfortunately, despite the success of these films, the studio decided times were changing (the Second World War had started, of course) and audiences wouldn’t be into historicals.   

Universal studios took over, and in Voice of Terror (1942) Sherlock gets an update, a slightly bizarre wind-blown haircut that looks sharp enough to cut your hand, and he fights the Nazis.  The film isn’t terrible, but… it isn’t great either.  It’s an awful lot of talk, a certain amount of action happening offstage, and our old friend stock footage makes a few appearances.  There’s also just something fundamentally wrong about the whole thing,  really.  If Holmes must be brought into the forties, he should at least be in stories that resemble Conan Doyle, not globe trotting like some kind of nerdy Bond. Universal made three Holmes vs. Nazi films before audiences began to say hey, give us some wind and maybe a mansion or two in the English countryside, that’s all we really wanted you meddling, dipstick studio executives. Universal began to get it right in later films, though in the twelve films made with Universal (yes, that’s a total of fourteen films cranked out with Rathbone) the update to the forties remained, largely for budget reasons. Personally, I think it’s unfortunate he didn’t do more historicals, an updated Holmes isn’t the same.  But if you squint hard enough through Holmes getting on a plane or quoting Churchill, the later films are certainly enjoyable too.

From Here to Eternity (1953)

Back when the world was black and white, the war reached a place called Pearl Harbour.  But first, you see some men and women.  Frank Sinatra is small and tough and Burt Lancaster is big and tough and Montgomery Clift is sensitive and tough.  Women walk by and the men say things like “Woo woo!”  Men also say things like “Anybody does any killin’ around here, I’ll do it.”  Men get drunk.  Women watch them.  Both men and women talk, and everyone has a little piece of pain.  The women and men kiss, and there are violins, sometimes lots of violins.  Sometimes men and women get along.  Sometimes they don’t.  One man and one woman go to a beach where there are waves and lots of violins and they pose in front of each other like tense deer.  They are happy at the beach and then they are sad at the beach.  

Some men are cruel and some men are pretty darn OK and just play the harmonica or whatever.  And, it’s a pretty darn sad world when the cruel ones get ahead.  In the final ten minutes or so the enemy invades, and even our best stock footage doesn’t stop them.  Burt Lancaster stands around with a machine-gun on his hip like it’s a giant, well… you know.   And me?  I just felt I’d spent my evening watching an overrated film, because I knew the part already about the cruel ones getting ahead sometimes, and I thought the violins were a bit much.  But Frank was good.  Good job, Frank.

Gojira (1954) and Godzilla (1956)

Produced around ten years after the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and introducing a monster dislodged and empowered by nuclear testing, it isn’t hard to guess at the subtext in the original Japanese film Gojira (1954). What’s surprising is that the original isn’t just about a guy in a suit stepping on models of tanks, it attempts a message, and emotional impact. As the monster destroys the city, a woman huddles in flames and rubble, trying to shelter her three children, saying “Not long now, soon we’ll be reunited with father… not long now.” Surprised? I was too. 

North Americans have mostly known Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956) which is the same film recut with less emphasis on a tragic scientist, inserting scenes with Raymond Burr as a reporter who always seems to be in the right place, chomping on a pipe, shot so that it appears he was at the back of the room saying things like “My Japanese is a little rusty!” so that someone translates. On occasion, he also talks to the back of a head, meant to be one of the Japanese actors. In short, the English version reduces the film to something closer to a simple monster movie. 

Both films are included here, along with commentary by experts (not people involved in the making of them), trailers and a few interesting featurettes on things like the making of the costume.

The Wrong Man (1956)

This isn’t a particularly well recognized Hitchcock, but it’s one of my favourites for being a simple story, perfectly told.Henry Fonda is excellent as a straightforward and good man mistakenly assumed to be someone who’s held up a number of different stores. Though a somewhat slow and bleak film, the pace works well, allowing every step of the way to feel believable and it’s well acted, so we really care for the characters, and feel the strain on the suffering family. It doesn’t have any of the the overly memorable set pieces Hitchcock is famous for, but an outstanding film nonetheless, a portrait of the kind of silent suffering the average person down the street or your neighbour might be enduring.

The DVD includes a short documentary with a good analysis of the film.

The Mummy (1940)

Reviewed from “The Legacy Collection,” DVD release. 

After Frankenstein made him a star, the studio looked for another vehicle for Boris Karloff, and The Mummy was it. The first Mummy film (1932) has the magnetic Karloff, who doesn’t actually spend much time in the severe Mummy bandage makeup, but somehow sort of regenerates into almost human form, probably for the sake of his own comfort after what he went through on Frankenstein. He’s still a magnificent villain and an excellent actor, opposite a striking female lead in a film with good production values that puts the cartoonish remake decades later to shame.

The sequel films (four more flims in the series) don’t have Karloff, and I found them average at best, with irritating comic relief sidekicks, perky dogs that lead the hero to the Mummy, no real explanation for how the Mummy survives destruction each time, and recycled plots. I suppose they’re interesting to watch once, to see how the series degraded.

Worth buying, however, for the original film and extras, a decent documentary (though much of the information is related second hand, by film historians), and the trailers and commentary.