I saw Macabre just once, ages ago, and it played almost like a comedy for me due to the casting of Jim Backus as a two-fisted country lawman. Still, he won me over in the end and gave a surprisingly strong performance. I believe Macabre was Castle's first horror. The Tingler was fun. I have to say that ambiance was not a William Castle strong point. The Night Walker is a notable exception. Its modern and urban and yet it at times makes (probably mostly back lot,--but who knows?) L.A evocative, in its modest way anticipating Roman Polanski's use of the real New York City. Has that city ever looked so spooky as it did in The Night Walker. Around the same time a Castle-style horror, Lady In A Cage, made living even in a mansion in L.A. a nightmare,--and in broad daylight!
What were those modern Sixties horrors trying to tell us?
The Southern Gothics are in a class by themselves, I agree. They may well have at the time (the Civil War centennial period) played on the North/South differences, though Southern writers often use Gothic themes, the uncanny, feature grisly events, going back to the godfather of Southern literature, Edgar Allan Poe. Southerners themselves seem fond of such tales, as I was just reading last night on urban legends in America on a few sites, there was one that featured rural legends, and the South was mentioned as a region that abounded in them.
I think that Tennessee Williams' work was a factor in the rise of Southern Gothic horror in films, as indeed the 1959 adaptation of his Suddenly, Last Summer, is practically a horror movie. The ending frightened me more than all the golden age Universal horrors combined, excepting maybe The Mummy. If Robert Aldrich's first "hag horror", What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, channeled Sunset Blvd more than a little, his Hush, Hush...Sweet Charlotte seems a compendium of Tennessee Williams tropes going back to at least A Streetcar Named Desire.
A while back I was thinking about To Kill A Mockingbird, too, and how it actually in some ways plays like a horror. There are those lyrical scenes with the brother and sister playing, accompanied by Elmer Bernstein's lovely, jaunty score, but there's also the mysterious Boo Radley, the town's boogeyman; and then the rabid dog Atticus shoots. Add to the mix some "normal" characters played by actors with strange, offbeat or disturbing features (Crahan Denton, Richard Hale). Then there's the real boogeyman, Bob Ewell, brilliant portrayed by James Anderson, and you've got a whole lotta demons and people who look like demons swirling around.
Then, from a later period, there's that most unsettling and seldom seriously talked about Seventies classic, Deliverance, which manages to be horrifying with a minimum of Gothic trappings, mostly provided by the two actors who played the mountain men. It's a "Southern", and I've heard Southerners complain about its unflattering depictions of some of the inhabitants of their region, to which I can only respond "it's only a movie" and also, it was based on a novel written by a Southerner, so don't blame us Yankees for this one! Around the same time there was the cult classic The Legend Of Boggy Creek, which was written, directed, produced, filmed and acted by Southerners, in Arkansas, and it's a guilty pleasure of mine if ever there was one. It's a pip. The naturalistic, near documentary style of the film makes it highly effective. Apparently it's got a large following, rather the Thunder Road of it genre.
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Doghouse (447)
8 years ago
"What were those modern Sixties horrors trying to tell us?"
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If any messages are to be gleaned, I wonder if it would be of value to subdivide those Sixties horrors.
Whether urban, suburban or rural, your Psychos, Baby Janes, Sweet Charlottes, Night Walkers (I didn't think anyone but me remembered that one), Rosemary's Babies and the like are very much in the gothic/Grand Guignol tradition or mold, which had antecedents in Night Of the Hunter, Shadow Of A Doubt, Gaslight, Night Must Fall and others: unseen, isolated evil may lurk behind the most placid, benign or mundane of exteriors.
Lady In A Cage exists, I think, as part of a different subset that might be called "urban nightmare," perhaps kicked into high gear in the wake of JFK, but likely having its roots in the postwar disillusionment and cynicism of film noir, which observed that danger and evil lurk not only behind the facade of this individual setting or that, but around any corner and everywhere, which in turn had its own antecedent in the depression-era gangster film: all are at the mercy of the ills of modern society; anyone can become a victim at any time; no one is safe even in one's own home. Along the way, that had found its own prior expression in rural or suburban offshoots such as The Petrified Forest, He Ran All the Way, Suddenly, The Desperate Hours and, mining the emergent youth culture, Rebel Without A Cause and Blackboard Jungle, as well as in later exercises such as The Incident and In Cold Blood, all of which suggested that a new kind of chaos was an outgrowth of something systemic rather than pathological.
What was being offered, then, could have been in the nature of a "choose your brand" selection of horror: creepy, old time (if updated) "it could never happen to me" escapist thrills, or a sobering brand intended to induce paranoia and other more lingering visceral reactions.
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telegonus (736)
8 years ago
Doghouse: Paranoia does seem to be an underlying theme in many of those modern urban horrors that began to emerge after 1960. I thought of many of the films you mentioned before posting, and it's true: even The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without A Cause have those vibes. Those films positively "reek" of ambivalence, of ambiguity: a teacher committed to teaching troubled, impoverished urban youth/yet some of them beat him up, terrorize his wife with poison pen letters. A teen new to a school has his car's tires slashed by a gang/wants to join the gang, is nearly killed in the "initiation ritual"!
Some of that mood can be found in earlier films as well, such as Crossfire, The Window. Quickand, Dial 1119, Beware, My Lovely, Talk About A Stranger. Then there's the sci-fi paranoia of Invaders From Mars and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Where these films and films like them hit home is in their making the what ought to feel safe and cozy dangerous; familiar, comfortable places and people becoming, suddenly, terrifying; and mundane, daily rituals and behaviors interrupted, turned upside down and inside out, with the protagonist having to scramble for safety in an environment that once felt orderly and reassuring. A good example of this is the genteel and yet emotionally unsettling Loretta Young picture Cause For Alarm (1951), which actually has a cult following!
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
What were those modern Sixties horrors trying to tell us?"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If any messages are to be gleaned, I wonder if it would be of value to subdivide those Sixties horrors.
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Yes. It occurs to me that a combination of things -- the coming of TV, the falling apart of the Hays Code, the influence of uncensored Eurofilms, and a melange of "existing" horror tropes(Dracula, Godzilla, The Tingler, Roger Corman) -- made the 60's a rich time for all sorts of horror. And real life suddenly got scary too -- who can forget how 1966 gave us a knife killer(nurse killer Richard Speck) and a mad sniper(Texas Tower shooter Charles Whitman) in one fell "introduction to madness forever"?"
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Whether urban, suburban or rural, your Psychos, Baby Janes, Sweet Charlottes, Night Walkers (I didn't think anyone but me remembered that one), Rosemary's Babies and the like are very much in the gothic/Grand Guignol tradition or mold, which had antecedents in Night Of the Hunter, Shadow Of A Doubt, Gaslight, Night Must Fall and others: unseen, isolated evil may lurk behind the most placid, benign or mundane of exteriors.
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Agreed on all of those, but lets hand it to Hitchcock: he's the one who spent a week committing to film a murder of such then-shocking explicitness and screen time(the shower murder), followed up by a SECOND murder of near-equal brutality that....the horror mold was broken, then and there. Its funny about Psycho: all that great cinema, all those great lines, all that great acting...but its the two murders(including Herrmann's screeching strings) that REALLY made the history.
The "precedents" didn't go that far, and even many of the successors were not willing to go so far(or , they simply didn't have the days available to mount something as intricate as the shower scene.)
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Lady In A Cage exists, I think, as part of a different subset that might be called "urban nightmare," perhaps kicked into high gear in the wake of JFK, but likely having its roots in the postwar disillusionment and cynicism of film noir, which observed that danger and evil lurk not only behind the facade of this individual setting or that, but around any corner and everywhere,
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Home invasion remains a terrifying concept. I shudder picturing the Manson killers "just walking in" to both the Polanski/Tate rental house, and the LoBianco "regular people" house and then suddenly pulling out their knives and going to work. Can you IMAGINE the shock of the victims...the seconds of thinking these were "just visitors"(particularly in the Tate situation) and then...you realize they are butchers?
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
which in turn had its own antecedent in the depression-era gangster film: all are at the mercy of the ills of modern society; anyone can become a victim at any time; no one is safe even in one's own home.
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Another "realistic horror trope" is this: What if a "decent, law abiding citizen" ACCIDENTALLY crosses paths with a fellow human so beaten down and abused by life that they might as well be a mad dog. Often real life murder stories of random killings wills start with "It was fate that put Susie Smith on a collision course with a crazed escaped convict." Terrifying.
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Along the way, that had found its own prior expression in rural or suburban offshoots such as The Petrified Forest, He Ran All the Way, Suddenly, The Desperate Hours
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That's home invasion with the mix of hostage taking. The bad guys are going to "stay awhile" and hold the normal folks hostage...and kill interlopers. ALSO scary. (And always good when the cops/FBI or hostages turn the tables and kill their captors. Evil Sinatra dies crying like a little whining baby in Suddenly.)
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and, mining the emergent youth culture, Rebel Without A Cause and Blackboard Jungle, as well as in later exercises such as The Incident and In Cold Blood, all of which suggested that a new kind of chaos was an outgrowth of something systemic rather than pathological.
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These are the realities we preferred to ignore...
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What was being offered, then, could have been in the nature of a "choose your brand" selection of horror: creepy, old time (if updated) "it could never happen to me" escapist thrills, or a sobering brand intended to induce paranoia and other more lingering visceral reactions.
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Me, I like "it could never happen to me" escapist thrills:
North by Northwest
Charade
Wait Until Dark
Goldfinger
...with evenly matched opponents, hair-breadth escapes, and happy endings. I'm not a fan of "suspense" based on lingering hostage-taking or torture. In the Hitchocck canon, "Frenzy" is as far as I go. And that one single scene disturbed me and enraged me.
Psycho was, on balance, pretty grim -- the heroine dies horribly -- but it was so damn fun and atmospheric that it didn't matter.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
I saw Macabre just once, ages ago, and it played almost like a comedy for me due to the casting of Jim Backus as a two-fisted country lawman. Still, he won me over in the end and gave a surprisingly strong performance.
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Its been years since I've seen Macabre, but I recall believing Backus in his role. Its a forbear to John McIntire as Sheriff Chambers in this way: a man takes a job as "the law" in a small backwater, expects to have very little to do AS a lawman(what, bust drunks ala Andy of Mayberry?) and suddenly...because he IS the law..he has to confront horrific human depravity at its worst, and HE'S RESPONSIBLE to do something about it. All because he agreed to carry a badge.
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I believe Macabre was Castle's first horror.
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Yes, a great little cable TV documentary of some years ago demonstrated that Castle was a workhorse Columbia B director of Westerns when -- shades of Alfred Hitchcock! -- he saw Dialbolique and decided he should make a movie like THAT.
Castle made Macabre(about a race to find a toddler buried alive...with the rotted corpse of the toddler eventually viewed...except its a fake, the child is fine.) He added the gimmick of audience members being able to buy "death insurance" if the movie shocked them to death. He positioned nurses in the lobby. He got a big hit. (Starring, I might add, William Prince..who would be "The Bishop" for Hitchcock in Family Plot...the only actor directed by Hitchcock and Castle? Well, Vinnie Price did a Hitch TV episode directed by Hitch.)
Macabre begat The Tingler begat House on Haunted Hill begat 13 Ghosts. And then Psycho came out(in the same 1960 summer as 13 Ghosts) and Castle shifted to copycatting Psycho(Homicidal, Strait-Jacket). Though Castle DID do other types of movies after Psycho, too.
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The Tingler was fun. I have to say that ambiance was not a William Castle strong point.
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I think the ambiance was basic -- cheapo black and white. Though I tell you, some of the house interiors in House On Haunted Hill are about as good as the Bates Mansion, you ask me.
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The Night Walker is a notable exception. Its modern and urban and yet it at times makes (probably mostly back lot,--but who knows?) L.A evocative, in its modest way anticipating Roman Polanski's use of the real New York City.
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That may be the only Castle horror pic I haven't seen. I do know that "I Saw What You Did" is a two-fer: Joan Crawford is in it(but not for long) and in a great reversal, a naked man in a shower drags his clothed wife into the shower with him and stabs her to death. Its the Psycho shower scene done...inside out?
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Has that city ever looked so spooky as it did in The Night Walker. Around the same time a Castle-style horror, Lady In A Cage, made living even in a mansion in L.A. a nightmare,--and in broad daylight!
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As Sunset Boulevard and Baby Jane demonstrated, sunny LA gave itself over to many dusty, dim mansion and hotel interiors. Things age differently than on the cold, snowy, dirty East Coast. They rather ROT in the noonday sun.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
---
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What were those modern Sixties horrors trying to tell us?
Well answered for discussion by doghouse in another post. I shall join that one...
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The Southern Gothics are in a class by themselves, I agree. They may well have at the time (the Civil War centennial period) played on the North/South differences, though Southern writers often use Gothic themes, the uncanny, feature grisly events, going back to the godfather of Southern literature, Edgar Allan Poe. Southerners themselves seem fond of such tales, as I was just reading last night on urban legends in America on a few sites, there was one that featured rural legends, and the South was mentioned as a region that abounded in them.
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Must be SOME reason....I guess I just figure there is always some leftover CW animus...even today, as we know.
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I think that Tennessee Williams' work was a factor in the rise of Southern Gothic horror in films, as indeed the 1959 adaptation of his Suddenly, Last Summer, is practically a horror movie. The ending frightened me more than all the golden age Universal horrors combined, excepting maybe The Mummy.
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Yes. You know, a critic's quote for Repulsion in a 1965 print ad, went like this: "Repulsion makes Psycho look like a Sunday school picnic." I read THAT in 1965, as a kid.
But in my archive research on the 1960 release of Psycho, I found THIS critic's quote in a 1960 print ad for Psycho: "Psycho makes Suddenly Last Summer look like a Sunday school picnic."
So , Sunday School picnics must have been all the comparative rage back in the 60's. And its amazing to think of Psycho as being "compared to an earlier film" rather than considered as the landmark it supposedly was.
Suddenly Last Summer never goes for the "bloody blast in the face" tactics of Psycho, but I do recall its insane asylum scenes, the fact that Kate Hepburn wants to have Liz Taylor lobotomized, and above all, the flashback to a bunch of little boys evidently CANNIBALIZING someone(not shown, but certainly implied.)
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If Robert Aldrich's first "hag horror", What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, channeled Sunset Blvd more than a little, his Hush, Hush...Sweet Charlotte seems a compendium of Tennessee Williams tropes going back to at least A Streetcar Named Desire.
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It seems so, doesn't it. I found an interview with Aldrich where he said he regretted making Baby Jane and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte so close together -- "I didn't want to become a middle-aged Hitchcock," he said. But the two scripts turned up around the same time. They were in the air. Charlotte is DISTINCTLY different from Baby Jane, certainly in its Southern Goth roots, but also in its Psycho-esque ultra-violence.
Of course, after Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Aldrich did two macho man movies in a row: Flight of the Phoenix and The Dirty Dozen.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
A while back I was thinking about To Kill A Mockingbird, too, and how it actually in some ways plays like a horror.
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Its a great film...one of the surprises to come out of Universal-International in the sixties, being of real quality (recall that the studio went back to being Universal with The Birds.)Horror is definitely an element, and yet here is a movie that certainly made me cry my eyes out. In at least three places -- and one of them is fairly early on (when the two kids discuss the late mother in the house while Atticus sits alone on the porch swing he MUST have shared with that woman.) The other two: Boo revealed behind the door and the final scene and remembered words of the picture. Truly a tearjerkier.
And yet:
there's also the mysterious Boo Radley, the town's boogeyman; and then the rabid dog Atticus shoots. Add to the mix some "normal" characters played by actors with strange, offbeat or disturbing features (Crahan Denton, Richard Hale). Then there's the real boogeyman, Bob Ewell, brilliant portrayed by James Anderson, and you've got a whole lotta demons and people who look like demons swirling around.
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Creepy, all the way around. My parents took me to see that at the drive-in on release; I was quite young, and while I could "relate" to the children in it, I was continually knocked for a loop by the scares in the picture, "hitting the floor" of the car in the back continually, especially at the end(frankly, Boo Radley behind the door scared me, too -- that's where the Boogie Man appears in nightmares.)
The abject bigotry and menace of Bob Ewell sticks with you forever(particuarly when he spits on Atticus' face.) I didn't even KNOW the movie was about a rape trial til I saw it when I was much older...and THAT creeped me out, too, once the truth was known.
Still, a great movie...family, loss, tears, terror, nostalgia, and inspiration. All in one great package. And Gregory Peck's greatest performance(in a role turned down by Rock Hudson, who had also turned down Ben-Hur, and thus cleared the way for TWO Best Actor performances.)
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
Then, from a later period, there's that most unsettling and seldom seriously talked about Seventies classic,
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..and there's a reason for that, isn't there?
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Deliverance, which manages to be horrifying with a minimum of Gothic trappings, mostly provided by the two actors who played the mountain men.
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Its from the same year as Hitchcock's (less popular, less famous) Frenzy and both films gave the word "horror" a new kind of defintiion. The horror in both films is "realistic"(no haunted houses, no dark nights) and sexual -- rape is on the menu, but the inhumanity of the rapists is disturbing in new ways. (As a plug, I'll note that I have an old OP called "Deliverance and Frenzy and 1972" on the restored Frenzy board, and I compare the two there.)
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It's a "Southern", and I've heard Southerners complain about its unflattering depictions of some of the inhabitants of their region, to which I can only respond "it's only a movie" and also, it was based on a novel written by a Southerner, so don't blame us Yankees for this one!
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Yes, southerner James Dickey wrote the novel, and one does wonder from whence he got his inspiration.
That said, the seventies, with the new-fangled "R" and "X" ratings, were a time of "testing every taboo in the book." Rape was one of them, and MALE rape was the province of Deliverance. (As incest was the province of Chinatown.)
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Around the same time there was the cult classic The Legend Of Boggy Creek, which was written, directed, produced, filmed and acted by Southerners, in Arkansas, and it's a guilty pleasure of mine if ever there was one. It's a pip. The naturalistic, near documentary style of the film makes it highly effective. Apparently it's got a large following, rather the Thunder Road of it genre.
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I know of Boggy Creek, but I never saw it. I'm reminded that the 70s was the last time we had good, "raw" indiefilms, which could be made anywhere, looked cheap, but often had "cachet."Somehwere around the 80's, film technology had improved to the point where cheap movies never LOOKED cheap anymore. In the 70's...they did. And were still GOOD.
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telegonus (736)
8 years ago
William Castle had a journeyman career at Columbia for about a dozen years prior to turning to making horrors. There's little in his earlier film to suggest that his career would move in this direction. Like fellow New Yorker Irwin Allen, Castle was a showman first. The main difference being that Castle possessed a flair for making movies, while Allen strikes me as more producer than director; a packager of ideas, of high concept sci-fi and fantasy geared at more or less the same audience as Walt Disney's live action films.
I don't think that Castle paid close attention to production values even when his movie were proving highly profitable. The Columbia-Allied Artist back lots were not among the better ones in Hollywood, and that hurt just the look of his films. He showed more flair in casting. House On Haunted Hill has one of the most eclectic casts in any movie of its kind I can think of. Vincent Price seems at home in that big old house but not so much Richard Long, Carol Ohmart, Julie (Robert's sister) Mitchum, Alan Marshal or Elisha Cook, Jr., though Cook never really looked comfortable in any setting. Is it me or does that early drive up the hill to that big ugly house feel almost like something out of an Ed Wood picture? To my way of looking at it there's a similar "cluelessness" early in the film, as if no one knew what to do or how to act. In time the movie rallies but for a short period it seemed to be drifting downhill as if in a mudslide.
It seems to me that The Night Walker is the best of the Castle horrors. Here too the casting is very good. Lloyd Bochner was the right man for the job in his key supporting role. Neither Robert Taylor nor Barbara Stanwyck were at the peak of their powers but they were old pros and served the material well. One thing I like a lot about the movie is that while it's rather a whodunit (or a who's gonna do it) it keeps the viewer on edge, and the nearly baroque plotting throws me off guard as I'm nearly always surprised by the time the movie is over. I can't help but wonder if the film is Castle's "Thriller tribute" as Homicidal was his homage to (and imitation of) Psycho. It plays rather like an extended crime episode of the series, and its horror moments are reminiscent of Thriller as well. Its exploitation vibe and a certain lack of classiness, of style, hold it down, but then these were always Castle "issues", but it does work nicely.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
William Castle had a journeyman career at Columbia for about a dozen years prior to turning to making horrors. There's little in his earlier film to suggest that his career would move in this direction.
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One thing "way back," I think, was his affiliation with The Whistler series. I can't recall if that was radio only, or if films were made as well. That one little thing may have left horror in the back of his mind as an avenue to explore.
But honestly, the fifties were pretty repressed and dull in Hollywood movie subject matters. Horror of the Frankenstein/Dracula-like mode had been replaced with the big bug/giant monster stuff. I like to point out that while Godzilla from Japan was the famous monster, he was preceded by about two years by an American giant lizard, "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms," animated by Ray Harryhausen and attacking NYC. That was a very profitable Warners pick-up with Warners followed up with "Them!" --a giant ant picture. "The Beast" and "Them" rather drove all of these movies(with King Kong as a long-ago forbear.)
Universal in the fifties also got The Creature from the Black Lagoon out there, joining his 30's forbears as a new type.
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William Castle had no license to make "monster movies" at Columbia and whereever, but it seems that "Diabolique" struck a different chord, as it would in Hitchocck: the "regular human being" as the source of horror.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
Like fellow New Yorker Irwin Allen, Castle was a showman first. The main difference being that Castle possessed a flair for making movies, while Allen strikes me as more producer than director; a packager of ideas, of high concept sci-fi and fantasy geared at more or less the same audience as Walt Disney's live action films.
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Yes. What's interesting about Allen is that while he peaked in the 70's as "the master of disaster" with The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, he had had the formula in place over a decade earlier with the "lesser all-star casts" of "The Big Circus," and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea." Those movies lined up folks like Victor Mature, Rhonda Flemiing, and Vincent Price as Allen would eventually line up Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden and Faye Dunaway.
And in between those movies, Allen took over TV with "Lost in Space" and his TV version of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Interesting to me: "The Towering Inferno" is THE disaster movie, to me, with THE most truly all-star of casts(McQueen and Newman to start, then everybody else.) But after Towering Inferno, its like the Irwin Allen hit machine broke down and collapsed. Inferno had a good script, but the stuff that followed it was dreck -- The Swarm, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, When Time Ran Out. Most mysterious to me. Its as if Allen knew he was a fraud, and it caught up with him after "Inferno" brought him his greatest fame.
William Castle never really got the A-listers that Allen would get, except that one time he got to produce(but not direct) a novel he had bought called "Rosemary's Baby."
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
I don't think that Castle paid close attention to production values even when his movie were proving highly profitable.
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From Macabre on, he seems to have made them just spooky enough to properly "turn on the promotional gimmicks." Shall we recount them?
Macabre: "Death insurance."
House on Haunted Hill: A skeleton floats across the theater ceiling.
The Tingler: SOME seats are wired to tingle the customer.
13 Ghosts: Tinted glasses to see the ghosts.
Homicidal: A "fear break" to leave the theater and get a refund...if you stand in "Coward's Corner."
Mr. Sardonicus: Audience votes for villain to die or live.
Strait-Jacket: Cardboard axes.
I Saw What You Did: SOME seats are equipped with seat belts to handle scenes of terror.
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The Columbia-Allied Artist back lots were not among the better ones in Hollywood, and that hurt just the look of his films.
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And...he just didn't care. He had calculated that his biggest audiences for these films were in the male pre-teen bracket. He had rather predicted today's big audience, yes? (Which, "adult" or not, is also the audience that flocked to "Psycho" for mulitple showings, and was disappointed by The Birds.)
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He showed more flair in casting. House On Haunted Hill has one of the most eclectic casts in any movie of its kind I can think of. Vincent Price seems at home in that big old house but not so much Richard Long, Carol Ohmart, Julie (Robert's sister) Mitchum, Alan Marshal or Elisha Cook, Jr., though Cook never really looked comfortable in any setting.
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Interesting points -- though Cook's spooked-out, often drunk, and eerie character really sticks out in that movie. He gets the final line about the ghosts(who are very scary as groaning, laughing sound effects:): "They are coming for me now...and then they will come for YOU."
And Miss Ohmart sure knew how to SCREAM.
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Is it me or does that early drive up the hill to that big ugly house feel almost like something out of an Ed Wood picture? To my way of looking at it there's a similar "cluelessness" early in the film, as if no one knew what to do or how to act.
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I posit this largely to the script, which has the characters suddenly change in personality, or elect to do stupid things, or forget what has already happened, etc. By contrast, Joseph Stefano's screenplay for Psycho is a model of logic, construction and character. I suppose Hitch was "shooting fish in a barrel" versus Castle's screenplay, but still...it mattered.
In time the movie rallies but for a short period it seemed to be drifting downhill as if in a mudslide.
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Well, its really for kids, I guess.
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telegonus (736)
8 years ago
The Whistler was an excellent radio series that began on the west coast only, then went viral, which is to say national, and ran for about a dozen years. There was, I believe, a TV version as well, but due to the odd narrated structure of the radio episodes I can't imagine them visualized. The Columbia B movie series ran for a few years, featured veteran star Richard Dix, playing different characters, and was apparently quite good. I've never seen one, however. The radio show is an acquired taste, and one I acquired, though I have to be in the right mood for it.
Aside from a couple of one offs William Castle's directorial career away from The Whistlers was conventional. He apparently got on well enough with studio chief Harry Cohn, and he remained with Columbia for a long time. Like so many old time movie directors Castle had the air of the con man or carny about him. That seemed to come with the territory back in the studio days, going back really to the start of the movies themselves, which were rather like freak shows-peep shows early on. Entertaining, and yet somehow uncanny. Many silent era directors had that "odd air" about him, from Americans like D.W. Griffith and Tod Browning to Europeans like Erich Von Stroheim.
I don't follow movies much these days, though it seems to me that with the coming of the Movie Brats in the Seventies, and all that's followed, that many if not most of those who survived, men like Spielberg and Lucas, were rather straight, sober citizen types, with a sincerity that would surely have baffled their predecessors, most of whom contented themselves with making movies as entertainment, with the occasional "special" film to show that his heart is in the right place. George Stevens was a transitional figure, beginning as a studio guy, he branched out after the war, made a name for himself as a serious artist with films like A Place In The Sun, Shane and Giant, finally overreaching, as was/is so often the case in Hollywood, with The Greatest Story Ever Told.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
It seems to me that The Night Walker is the best of the Castle horrors.
Well, imagine the irony: that's among the few "Castle horrors" I have not seen. Though I saw its trailer, which was quite scary, really. And now, I shall try to see the film.(On You Tube, no doubt.)
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Here too the casting is very good. Lloyd Bochner was the right man for the job in his key supporting role.
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Lloyd Bochner was smooth, suave, handsome and a bit stolid. More a TV actor, but good. His son, Hart Bochner, was one of those "too handsome" young men who ended up playing snobbish Frat Jocks and, most memorably, the smarmy young stockbroker who tries to make a deal and gets killed in "Die Hard"(1988)
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Neither Robert Taylor nor Barbara Stanwyck were at the peak of their powers but they were old pros and served the material well.
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Were they not married at one time? And here, again, we see the horror genre saving some old-time Hollywood careers in the sixties.
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One thing I like a lot about the movie is that while it's rather a whodunit (or a who's gonna do it) it keeps the viewer on edge, and the nearly baroque plotting throws me off guard as I'm nearly always surprised by the time the movie is over.
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I'll take that recommendation. Castle must have had a better screenwriter this time!
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I can't help but wonder if the film is Castle's "Thriller tribute" as Homicidal was his homage to (and imitation of) Psycho. It plays rather like an extended crime episode of the series, and its horror moments are reminiscent of Thriller as well. Its exploitation vibe and a certain lack of classiness, of style, hold it down, but then these were always Castle "issues", but it does work nicely.
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Your expertise on Thriller serves you well, here.
William Castle's b/w brand of pre-teen horror didn't surive the sixties. As John Waters said, once Night of the Living Dead hit, horror couldn't be so innocent anymore.
I recall Castle using Sid Caesar for two "comedy mysteries," in color, in the mid-sixties. One I did not see: The Spirit is Willing(with Vera "Psycho" Miles doing her usual workhorse thing). One I did see: "The Busy Body," with Robert Ryan playing a mob boss and Richard Pryor playing a cop, and some "Trouble With Harry" business about a corpse. Also the kiss of death: a Vic Mizzy score for the comedy.
"Rosemary's Baby" made William Castle rich. He bought the book and was desperate to direct it, but Paramount head Robert Evans made a hard-edged offer: Produce only, and we will make you rich -- but we will STOP you from directing. Polanski famously got the job. Castle famously got a "prestige credit."
There were some stop-and-go attempts at horror movie making by Castle in the seventies(including one with Marcel Marceau!) but his era was long over. I personally saw Castle host his trailers at the 1977 FILMEX film exposition in LA. Spring of 77. He smoked a cigar and sat in his trademark high director's chair and told us of his next movie "An Address of Extinction." But he died only weeks later. I'm glad I saw him.
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telegonus (736)
8 years ago
Good news, EC: The Night Walker's screenplay was written by none other than...Robert Bloch! Vic Mizzy wrote the score but it's done straight, or as straight as a Vic Mizzy score can be, and highly effective.
I saw one of the Sid Caesar Castles, The Spirit Is Willing, on,--or is it in?,--of all places--a double bill in which the main feature was Bonnie & Clyde. Yup. Summer of '67. I and a friend and his father went. People tend to forget that for all its violence, that was a FUN movie.
The Busy Body is one I've seen in bits and pieces. Isn't Arlene Golonka in it? I think it was her. Such an unsexy name for such a hot babe. As to Rosemary's Baby it proved if nothing else that in his heyday as a young hotshot producer Robert Evans was da bomb.
It's sort of a pity that William Castle died just as he was becoming a grand old man for younger movie buffs. My sense is that his career as a director was over; and less due to age than the kind of film-maker Castle was. At least the movie Matinee, made many years after Castle's death captured the showman spirit of the man pretty well, and was an enjoyable movie. As movies about Hollywood people go, I much prefer it to My Favorite Year.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
Good news, EC: The Night Walker's screenplay was written by none other than...Robert Bloch!
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Good for him...he was only paid $9000 for the rights to his novel Psycho(when Advise and Consent drew $250,000!) but Hitchcock's movie sure got him a lot more movie work.
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Vic Mizzy wrote the score but it's done straight, or as straight as a Vic Mizzy score can be, and highly effective.
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I probably shouldn't have "dinged" Vic Mizzy(re The Busy Body.) Surely his sitcom music was among the most notable of the sixties...and his "Ghost and Mr. Chicken" score is literally jazzy AND spooky. He did the famous Addams Family finger-snap(now heard at NBA basketball games) ....maybe its just that his name was "Vic Mizzy." Its a a funny name.
I didn't realize he was capable of a serious score but...why not?
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I saw one of the Sid Caesar Castles, The Spirit Is Willing, on,--or is it in?,--of all places--a double bill in which the main feature was Bonnie & Clyde. Yup. Summer of '67. I and a friend and his father went. People tend to forget that for all its violence, that was a FUN movie.
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Bonnie and Clyde? Well, yeah...all that Beverly Hills banjo music to the car chases and all, I guess.
I see Psycho, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch as a "trilogy of landmark violent pictures" that ran the course of the sixties. Each film took a familiar genre -- the thriller, the gangster picture, the Western -- and cranked up the blood and made history by ALSO being well written , well acted, and Entirely Cinema. Nobody forgot those movies who saw them.
The Spirit is Willing on a double bill with B and C, is just this side of the craziest double bill I've ever heard of. My mother and her friend saw it in 1964: Cleopatra and The Birds! I mean, that's like six hours of movie!
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The Busy Body is one I've seen in bits and pieces. Isn't Arlene Golonka in it? I think it was her. Such an unsexy name for such a hot babe.
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Yes. I remember her well. Whatta name. I think she's a burlesque dancer in The Busy Body; Caesar's love interest in the gangster comedy.
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As to Rosemary's Baby it proved if nothing else that in his heyday as a young hotshot producer Robert Evans was da bomb.
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Evans and his henchman Peter Bart took a near-broke, underperforming studio and delivered these hits: Rosemary's Baby, The Odd Couple, True Grit, Love Story, The Godfather. It was historic. They also gave us Paint Your Wagon, Darling Lili, and On a Clear Day during that period, but who noticed.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
It's sort of a pity that William Castle died just as he was becoming a grand old man for younger movie buffs.
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Yes. When I saw him at FILMEX in 1977, it was a full house. It was actually about a two-hour show of great trailers in movie history(including some Hitchcocks like Psycho and The Birds.) The final two trailers were for new movies "coming soon": Black Sunday and Star Wars. Black Sunday had the far more exciting trailer.
Then the screen went dark, Castle came out, sat in his high chair and lit up a cigar and we looked at HIS trailers. Cheers and applause.
Given that Castle didn't live much longer, I'm glad he got that "send off."
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My sense is that his career as a director was over; and less due to age than the kind of film-maker Castle was.
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Yes. He couldn't get the mojo going in the 70's; horror had changed. He made one called "Bug!" and the Marceau film. The movie he told us about -- "An Address of Extinction" -- was to be about a psycho haunting a large apartment building, perhaps based on the Dakota in Rosemary's Baby. It was never made.
But nobody can ever take the 1958-1964 run away from him -- the gimmicks, the young crowds, the personal appearances, and even(in bits and pieces) the scares in the movies themselves(how those ghosts laughed maniacally and screamed in House on Haunted Hill and 13 Ghosts WAS scary.) And Time named Homicidal one of the Ten Best Movies of 1961...preferring it to Psycho as a matter of "pace."(Boy were they wrong on that one. Well, maybe right on pace, but Homicidal isn't close to Psycho in quality.)
And of course, rather weirdly, Castle got to "run with Hitchcock" once Hitchcock joined the Castle universe with Psycho. The two men posed for a photo together once, and Castle did a joke photo of a cake in the shape of Hitchcock's head about to be cut by him with a butcher knife. I suppose Hitchocck was bugged by the comparisons, but Psycho DID use the Castle playbook for success ("NO ONE will enter the theater after Psycho begins!")
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At least the movie Matinee, made many years after Castle's death captured the showman spirit of the man pretty well, and was an enjoyable movie.
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It really was, directed by Spielberg protege Joe Dante, who really knew the Castle history. John Goodman played Castle under another name, but WE knew who he was supposed to be. I liked that the story placed Castle in Key West Florida as the real life horrors of the Cuban Missile Crisis hit...he could barely compete.
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As movies about Hollywood people go, I much prefer it to My Favorite Year.
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Well, Matinee is early sixties; My Favorite Year is early fifties. I like 'em both, and I LOVE O'Toole in MFY. I remember this exchange between O'Toole's Errol Flynn like movie star and Jewish Mother Lainie Kazan:
O'Toole: I have a daughter. I haven't seen her in two years.
Kazan: Two years?!...SHAME on you.
O'Toole:(Abashed). Yes. Shame..on...me.
How O'Toole read the words "Shame on me"...Oscar worthy. He almost won one.
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telegonus (736)
8 years ago
Briefly: with all that was going on in the news, from student protests, inner city riots, the Panthers, SDS, in addition to such violent films as The Dirty Dozen, Bonnie & Clyde, The Wild Bunch, even the more mainstream Untouchables-like St. Valentine's Day Massacre, who needed horror, the traditional Gothic kind, on the big screen or the little one? The evening news trumped all that, and with real people!
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
Briefly: with all that was going on in the news, from student protests, inner city riots, the Panthers, SDS, in addition to such violent films as The Dirty Dozen, Bonnie & Clyde, The Wild Bunch, even the more mainstream Untouchables-like St. Valentine's Day Massacre, who needed horror, the traditional Gothic kind, on the big screen or the little one?
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Yes, its probably another reason William Castle went out of style.
I've always been intrigued by the Twin Psychopathic Horrors of the Summer of 1966:
Richard Speck's knife murders of a group of student nurses in their shared Chicago apartment.
Charles Whitman's mass shooting from the Tower at Texas University.
Hitchcock's Psycho had perhaps suggested that maniacs like Speck and Whitman WOULD be arriving soon -- it took six years. Indeed, Speck and Whitman helped knock Psycho out of its September 1966 CBS debut(the stabbing murder of Senator candidate Charles Percy's daughter that week was the last straw.)
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I doubt that Alfred Hitchcock could realize that the release of his (then)ultra violent shocker Psycho in 1960 would presage an entire decade of violence, from JFK's assassination in 1963 to the Manson murders of 1969. Madness seemed to be in the air..perhaps an offshoot of a hugely growing population. The movies and real life were now in competition for gore.
THAT said, there had certainly been atrocities and gore in WWII, but American movies and domestic American culture didn't seem to be interested in reflecting that violent reality.
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telegonus (736)
8 years ago
That was a dark time, with those freak murders. I believe Whitman, as it turned out, had a brain tumor,--is that possible, for a tumor to turn someone into a mass killer?--while Richard Speck was a swine who lived too long, got a "sweetheart" prison sentence, and he somehow managed to engage in some gender bending along the way. I think of Speck whenever I watch An Unlocked Window, and wonder whether he saw that Hitch hour, and if it "inspired" him. The pathology was already but maybe the show gave him a method.
It was around that time that Gothic and in general period horrors went out of fashion. You're right. Hammer films continued but in the U.S. the market didn't so much dry up as film-makers went in different directions to make horror. Between then, Castle, Hitchcock and Robert Aldrich "showed the way". On the small screen the Gothic style inspired maybe the strangest soap opera ever, Dark Shadows, and was a hip show for kids to watch after school. There was some good contemporary horror in TV movies of the 1966-74 period, and some of it was a mix of Goth and modern.
As a little historical aside/coda: one thing all these events, movies, TV shows and trends have in common is that they're all post-JFK. If the president hadn't been shot and killed in Dallas late in 1963 I doubt that any of this would have happened. Literal cause and effect? No. More like a sea change in American culture in the wake of a national trauma.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
That was a dark time, with those freak murders. I believe Whitman, as it turned out, had a brain tumor,--is that possible, for a tumor to turn someone into a mass killer?--
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Evidently, so. One of the issues about real-life mad killers is that often it is simply a matter of brain damage -- if the brain mechanisms are removed that control rage, lust, murderous impulses...guilt, conscience...the human being is one step closer to being an animal(but animals generally kill to EAT, not in sadistic pleasure.)
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while Richard Speck was a swine who lived too long, got a "sweetheart" prison sentence, and he somehow managed to engage in some gender bending along the way.
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Yes, he was rather a case for the death penalty , if one is so inclined(with the proven worst, I am.) He lived a long and , for him, not bad life.
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I think of Speck whenever I watch An Unlocked Window, and wonder whether he saw that Hitch hour, and if it "inspired" him. The pathology was already but maybe the show gave him a method.
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Yikes! The nurse thing.
I am sure we had our mass killers in other centuries but it seemed to take until the 60s to get the thing going in the US. All sorts of influences created these human monsters, including, perhaps, the copycat influences that Psycho and its progency instilled. We'll never really know, but there's no going back. Our movies are ultraviolent. Some people are ultraviolent.
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It was around that time that Gothic and in general period horrors went out of fashion. You're right.
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I expect there just wasn't a market for Ye Olde Atmospheric horror. Its funny, Psycho was there in 1960, but it took until about 1970 to get the full gore on. With Bonnie and Clyde, and the exhilarating Wild Bunch as midwives.
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Hammer films continued but in the U.S. the market didn't so much dry up as film-makers went in different directions to make horror.
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Even Hammer, as I recall. Though their Dracula/Frankenstein movies of the 70s just added more sex and violence, I think.
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Between then, Castle, Hitchcock and Robert Aldrich "showed the way".
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One begat the next. Castle was there first, but not with good scripts. Hitchcock found what was great in the Bloch -- an old Victorian mansion AND a shabby new motel for atmosphere-- and made sure that the horror was very, very real: a woman who stabs you hard and fast and lots of times.
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On the small screen the Gothic style inspired maybe the strangest soap opera ever, Dark Shadows, and was a hip show for kids to watch after school.
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Yes, I watched it with a certain interest...it wasn't my mom's soap, that was for sure.
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There was some good contemporary horror in TV movies of the 1966-74 period, and some of it was a mix of Goth and modern.
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Horror struggling to find its new tone. And then the big ones hit: The Exorcist and Jaws. So major and yet really not repeatable.
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As a little historical aside/coda: one thing all these events, movies, TV shows and trends have in common is that they're all post-JFK. If the president hadn't been shot and killed in Dallas late in 1963 I doubt that any of this would have happened.
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I pause for thought. Yes, suddenly the American world WAS torn apart. It was a brutal murder, followed by another brutal murder of the murderer (rather as Arbogast followed Marion, a double shock.) It remains shocking to think that a man selected to be President by millions could be rendered inoperative by one crazed loner (or even a small group, Mr. Stone...)
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Literal cause and effect? No. More like a sea change in American culture in the wake of a national trauma.
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Well, soon the psychos were coming out of the woodwork. More assassins. Whitman. Speck. Manson. And plenty after that. The Bob Rusk-like Ted Bundy, for one.
And then our host of shooters of the 21st Century.
The one in the movie theater still hits me where I live...
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telegonus (736)
8 years ago
The anarchy did seem to commence early to middle Sixties, and it hasn't stopped. Essentially nearly every presidential election since then has featured a candidate who in one way or another promises to "stop the madness", whether it was Nixon, via "law and order", Carter, "through prayer", Reagan, with his supply side economics, Clinton with charm, Dubya,--well, he was a mistake--Obama, the Second Coming, Trump, with his "Make America great" promise.
There have been lulls, as with Reagan and Clinton, briefly with Obama, thus far not at all with Trump. We do seem to be falling apart as a nation, and even the movies probably don't reflect what's happening any longer; as the audience is too fragmented, demographers have taken over, with MBA's no less. This is, as one local journalist described last week,--and I wholeheartedly agree with her--the real reason why Bill O'Reilly was canned by Fox. His ratings were great but his viewership was mostly white Boomer (and older) males and the network wanted to broaden its appeal to younger viewers more likely to spend money.
What has any of this to do with Psycho? Well, artists have a way of understanding what's going on in the world, and, as per Mr. Shelley, are the true "legislators" (i.e. they see what's happening more clearly than anyone else, can predict or guess pretty well what the future will bring), thus a movie from 1960 made by creative people with their noses to the grindstone, can capture, indeed create, on screen, a mood that has not yet happened nationally, is only a movie in its year of release, even as it's a highly profitable one, and yet "anticipates", loosely speaking, I admit, the future, right down to the LGTB murderer of the "normal" (relatively speaking) woman, makes it an endlessly fascinating work of art worthy of study and reflection.
(I hope I didn't get too OT here...)
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telegonus (736)
8 years ago
Correction: Percy Shelley's words, in his A Defence Of Poetry, were that poets were the unacknwoledged legislators of the world, for which I substituted, knowingly, artists. I just want too set this straight before someone jumps in to correct me.
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Doghouse (447)
8 years ago
Can't help but reflect, ec, on how these references dovetail into what we were discussing a few days back about the "it can't happen to me" frights vs those of the "urban nightmare" sort; this time, however, in relation not to varying dramatic themes but to real life.
The atrocities of WWII - and even Vietnam, for that matter - were "over there." And if there was a real-life parallel to gothic, Psycho-style jeopardy here at home, it was simply one of being unfortunate enough to venture into the wrong place...one where unanticipated danger waited. But Speck, Whitman and Manson's so-called family demonstrated that horror could come after you, visiting itself upon you anytime, anywhere.
Small wonder, perhaps, that following JFK and other assassinations, social unrest surrounding civil rights and anti-war protests along with those maniacs who went forth and committed their horrors upon society at large rather than upon only someone unlucky enough to blunder into their webs, a "cinema of paranoia" developed in the '70s, manifesting itself in everything from smaller, overlooked films like Joe or Little Murders, multiple explorations by Alan Pakula, thrillers like Straw Dogs and even bitter comedies like The Out-Of-Towners and The Prisoner Of Second Avenue, to Taxi Driver.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
Can't help but reflect, ec, on how these references dovetail into what we were discussing a few days back about the "it can't happen to me" frights vs those of the "urban nightmare" sort; this time, however, in relation not to varying dramatic themes but to real life.
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Yes. You know, one time I lived in a city being plagued by a serial killer and...I felt it. At night. I remember thinking "this is no fun for real." Hitchcock fan and all.
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The atrocities of WWII - and even Vietnam, for that matter - were "over there."
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Absolutely. And generally only visited upon men -- rather unsporting when you think about it. No women, no children. Well, in the crossfire THEY got it.
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And if there was a real-life parallel to gothic, Psycho-style jeopardy here at home, it was simply one of being unfortunate enough to venture into the wrong place...one where unanticipated danger waited. But Speck, Whitman and Manson's so-called family demonstrated that horror could come after you, visiting itself upon you anytime, anywhere.
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Flip sides of the horror coin. Psycho taught us not to stop at strange motels. But those other guys were "home invaders" or "random shooters."
Today, I work near some buildings which have public, posted signs directing the reader on how to elude the "random building shooter." I like the last line: "Stand and fight only if there is no where to run or hide."
And of course, 9/11 delivered the terror on all cylinders: pick a way to die...none was good (in the planes of death, in fire, plummeting to your death, crushed under fallen concrete and steel...)
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Small wonder, perhaps, that following JFK and other assassinations, social unrest surrounding civil rights and anti-war protests along with those maniacs who went forth and committed their horrors upon society at large rather than upon only someone unlucky enough to blunder into their webs, a "cinema of paranoia" developed in the '70s, manifesting itself in everything from smaller, overlooked films like Joe or Little Murders, multiple explorations by Alan Pakula, thrillers like Straw Dogs and even bitter comedies like The Out-Of-Towners and The Prisoner Of Second Avenue, to Taxi Driver.
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You might say we're running a pretty grim thread here, but those movies WERE made, and often found audiences.
And this: The Out of Towners(Lemmon/Sandy Dennis version.) It was sold as a "comedy" but I saw it, start to finish, as a horror movie. Stuck in the sky in a holding pattern over the airport. Mugged. Lost luggage. Booked hotel room. It kept up Jack Lemmon's losing streak between Felix Unger and his Oscar-winning schmuck in Save the Tiger. Talk about a sacrificial career!
Thank God he finally got to play a macho hero airline pilot in the otherwise banal "Airport 77."
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Doghouse (447)
8 years ago
Today, I work near some buildings which have public, posted signs directing the reader on how to elude the "random building shooter." I like the last line: "Stand and fight only if there is no where to run or hide."[/quote]Wow! Isn't that...hmmm...I can't even come up with the right word! Raises all sorts of questions about the neighborhood, the buildings themselves, the particular atmosphere of the period in which they were posted; I can honestly say I've never seen the like.
[quote]The Out of Towners(Lemmon/Sandy Dennis version.) It was sold as a "comedy" but I saw it, start to finish, as a horror movie. Stuck in the sky in a holding pattern over the airport. Mugged. Lost luggage. Booked hotel room. It kept up Jack Lemmon's losing streak between Felix Unger and his Oscar-winning schmuck in Save the Tiger.[/quote]Great citation. In a way, it bridges the two constructs: it certainly qualifies as "urban nightmare" on the one hand, but on the other, it embodies the "it can't happen to me" kind of horror. Maybe any one of them at a given time, but not the entire series of miseries that befalls this one hapless couple in a city of eight million over the course of a day and a night.
So much of comedy is predicated on the misfortunes of others. We all remember Alan Alda's pompous producer in Crimes and Misdemeanors[/b][/i] ([i]"Comedy is tragedy plus time"[/i]), but I think Mel Brooks got closer to nailing it:
[i]"Tragedy is: I cut my little finger. It could get infected...could be very serious...this is very important to me. Comedy is: you fall into a manhole and die. What do [b]I[/b] care?"[/i]
[quote]Thank God he finally got to play a macho hero airline pilot in the otherwise banal "Airport 77."
Probably the first Paycheck Project Lemmon had taken on (after which he took two years off). Looking very '70s-dapper in an uncharacteristic mustache, and giving maximum conviction to lines like, [i]"I know you're scared, we're all scared, but we can't let them see that!"[/i] I remember catching it second-run at a neighborhood theater on a double bill with [b][i]Voyage Of the Damned. Either a strange coincidence, or some booker had a sly sense of humor: two films depicting passengers aboard mass conveyance stranded mid-ocean, and two Lee Grant "mad" scenes in one evening.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
Today, I work near some buildings which have public, posted signs directing the reader on how to elude the "random building shooter." I like the last line: "Stand and fight only if there is no where to run or hide."
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Wow! Isn't that...hmmm...I can't even come up with the right word! Raises all sorts of questions about the neighborhood, the buildings themselves, the particular atmosphere of the period in which they were posted; I can honestly say I've never seen the like.
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Well, I left out a key point that should explain things: these are GOVERNMENT buildings, with lots of government workers in them. I'm not one of them, but I visit on business from time to time, and those signs are up in the lobbies and on each floor.
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The Out of Towners(Lemmon/Sandy Dennis version.) It was sold as a "comedy" but I saw it, start to finish, as a horror movie. Stuck in the sky in a holding pattern over the airport. Mugged. Lost luggage. Booked hotel room. It kept up Jack Lemmon's losing streak between Felix Unger and his Oscar-winning schmuck in Save the Tiger.
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Great citation. In a way, it bridges the two constructs: it certainly qualifies as "urban nightmare" on the one hand, but on the other, it embodies the "it can't happen to me" kind of horror. Maybe any one of them at a given time, but not the entire series of miseries that befalls this one hapless couple in a city of eight million over the course of a day and a night.
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The idea that "one thing happens after another" always made The Out of Towners feel like "way too easy" of a script for Neil Simon to write -- he started getting lazy pretty fast. But the weird thing was that Simon's "comedy" construct(one horrible thing after another) turned to pure, realistic horror to me. Our couple doesn't get killed, but everything else happens to them. And casting tic-ridden flibbergibbet Sandy Dennis as Lemmons' wife was too perfect a match: it was like two hours with sweaty, anxiety-ridden mice. Not fun. (I never saw the remake with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, but they had to be funnier.)
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So much of comedy is predicated on the misfortunes of others. We all remember Alan Alda's pompous producer in Crimes and Misdemeanors[/i] ([i]"Comedy is tragedy plus time"), but I think Mel Brooks got closer to nailing it:
"Tragedy is: I cut my little finger. It could get infected...could be very serious...this is very important to me. Comedy is: you fall into a manhole and die. What do I care?"
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Ha. Hitchcock used the manhole cover idea in one of his remarks: A man falls into a manhole in a comedy, you just see him fall out of the shot. Ha ha. But if you have the camera looking into the hole to show the man bleeding and screaming in agony...drama.
I suppose this is the key to slapstick in general. We know that Bugs Bunny cartoons were funnier the more violent they got -- Inspector Clouseau comedies, too.
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ecarle (14979)
8 years ago
Thank God he finally got to play a macho hero airline pilot in the otherwise banal "Airport 77."
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Probably the first Paycheck Project Lemmon had taken on (after which he took two years off).
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It was during this time that Lemmon became more of a stage actor, and did plays on TV. Somebody called him "The American Olivier." All I know is that he made far too many movies where he was the shell-shocked nebbishy loser. He played such neurotics ANGRY..there was a little macho to him, but he wasn't much of a movie star.
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Looking very '70s-dapper in an uncharacteristic mustache,
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Yes...I recall thinking: "He was always fairly handsome and now he's distinguished."
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and giving maximum conviction to lines like, "I know you're scared, we're all scared, but we can't let them see that!"[/i]
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Ha. Yeah..not much to work with. But he was competant and cool, he had a pretty girlfriend, and he unleashed some fury on the crooks in the plane who turned out to be responsible for sinking it underwater by accident.
Trivia: Alfred Hitchcock himself was brought in to consult on the underwater entrapment stuff in Airport 77, given his experiences with Foreign Correspondent and Lifeboat; he was on the Universal lot and did it as a favor to Lew Wasserman.)
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I remember catching it second-run at a neighborhood theater on a double bill with [i]Voyage Of the Damned. Either a strange coincidence, or some booker had a sly sense of humor: two films depicting passengers aboard mass conveyance stranded mid-ocean, and two Lee Grant "mad" scenes in one evening.
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Oh, those big cast 70's movies. Lee Grant had a great decade. I found her much more sexy in her middle age than as a young actress, but she usually trashed her great new look playing wackos.
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One more thing about Airport 77: James Stewart played a small movie-long cameo and I think Lemmon and he had one shot together -- not a scene, just the two in the same shot. And I flashed back to "Bell Book and Candle" of 1958 and how the two men had been different stars, and younger stars..with Stewart about to cede romantic leads to Lemmon.
PS. How The Out of Towners ends: on their return flight to Ohio from NYC, Lemmon and Dennis find that their plane is being hijacked to Cuba. "Realistic horror."
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