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Clik here to view.On first impressions The Big Caper (1957) may look like just another grade B bank heist thriller but don’t be fooled. This 1957 independent pickup by United Artists is a genuine loose canon and highly peculiar within its own specialized genre. In the best heist thrillers (Rififi, The Asphalt Jungle), the robbery is usually ingeniously planned and executed but when it goes awry, it’s usually due to festering hatred among the instigators (Odds Against Tomorrow) or bad luck (Plunder Road). In The Big Caper, the glaring flaw is the organizer who appears to be a shrewd and cautious businessman until you see the wacko team he assembles for the job. And he might be the biggest nutcase in the lot. It’s not a comedy, but it should be, and you may very well find yourself laughing uncontrollably at times.  

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Clik here to view.The Big Caper is delirious fun but also has moments when it suggests it could have been a taut, edgy B-movie masterpiece in the style of Gun Crazy (1950) or The Big Combo (1955) if someone like Joseph H. Lewis had directed it. The 1955 source, a novel by the same title, was penned by Lionel White, the American crime novelist who also gave us 1956’s The Killing (from the novel Clean Break), 1965’s The Money Trap and the highly underrated The Night of the Following Day (from the novel The Snatch) in 1969.   Image may be NSFW.
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Produced by Howard Pine (Cult of the Cobra) and William C. Thomas (Run for Cover), The Big Caper was directed by Robert Stevens, who is best known for helming some of the most memorable TV episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Twilight Zone and Suspicion. This low-budget programmer was his feature film debut and it is wildly erratic in tone and direction, often sacrificing suspense for character development or overplaying dramatic situations at such a high pitch that it topples over into self-parody. Suspension of disbelief becomes impossible but you still can’t take your eyes off the screen. Twenty minutes into the film, it begins to self-destruct in spectacular ways yet it keeps lurching forward relentlessly like a runner in a race who suffered a heart attack a mile back but doesn’t know it yet. [Spoilers ahead]    Image may be NSFW.
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Luckily Stevens has a more than game cast and a great cinematographer – Lionel Lindon, whose long line of credits include such beautifully shot and lit features as The Blue Dahlia (1946), Alias Nick Beal (1949), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962). He was nominated for an Oscar three times and won for his work on Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Lindon shoots in a crisp black and white style for The Big Caper and designs some spooky shadowy sequences in the second half that take place in the boiler room of a high school.

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Elderly safecracker (Florenz Ames) and psychotic accomplice Corey Allen execute a heist in The Big Caper (1957).

All of this is enhanced by Albert Glasser’s pitch perfect score that mixes quasi-beatnik jazz with suspenseful music cues. Glasser, with more than 100 composer film credits, could do this stuff in his sleep and was most famous for his B-movie monster scores (The Neanderthal Man, The Cyclops, The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the Puppet People). Famous Monsters of Filmland used to sell Glasser’s horror soundtrack anthologies in the magazine’s back pages.  Image may be NSFW.
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The Big Caper starts promisingly enough with a terse, economic set-up that spells out the central premise – the planned robbery of a small town bank in San Felipe, California that handles the weekly payroll (totaling one million dollars) of nearby Camp Pendleton. Our three main characters are Frank Harper (Rory Calhoun), a small time hood who is looking for a big score, Flood (James Gregory), his shady employer and mentor, and Kay (Mary Costa), Flood’s mistress. We get the brief backstory on Flood; he brought Frank in off the streets as a troubled teenager and gave him work so there is a sense of obligation and loyalty there. And our first impressions of Flood fit the profile of a meticulous and intelligent criminal mastermind.

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Flood (James Gregory) and his mistress Kay (Mary Costa) are key players in a planned robbery in The Big Caper (1957).

At first, Flood even resists Frank’s bank heist scheme as too risky and dangerous and gives every impression of preferring jobs that avoid the use of guns or the possibility of physical violence. So much for first impressions.

The trio soon put Frank’s grand scheme into action. First, Frank and Kay agree to pose as a married couple with Frank buying the local gas station and a home in the suburbs. The idea is for the couple to blend into the community while they get familiar with the town, the daily patterns of life there and the bank’s operations. After four months in San Felipe, the couple are attending backyard barbecues, picnics and card games with the neighbors and the local cop even invites Frank on fishing trips.

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Frank (Rory Calhoun) and Kay (Mary Costa) pose as a married couple in suburbia in the heist thriller The Big Caper (1957).

This part of The Big Caper is fascinating with the two outsiders trying to pass themselves off as a normal, middle class couple (think of them as the last two human beings in a world of pod people, trying to fit in without being noticed – Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released the year before). As a result, the experience becomes transformative for them. Frank struggles with the arrangement at first but despite his tough, cynical demeanor, he adapts quickly to domesticity, even showing Kay how to make pancakes without burning them in one unlikely scene. Kay, for her part, has also grown disillusioned with her empty, pampered lifestyle as a kept woman and this experiment in faux marital bliss is giving her ideas.

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A publicity photo of Mary Costa and Rory Calhoun from The Big Caper (1957), directed by Robert Stevens

All of this comes pouring out after the couple spends an evening playing Scrabble with their neighbors. Kay reveals her yearning for the normalcy of marriage, children and a quiet life in a small town, saying “I hadn’t seen my sister in five years. Never met her husband or kids. They live in a lousy flat and have to keep the baby crib in the front room. She’s got a husband and kids. No diamond rings or mink coats but a family. I’m so jealous of her I could scream. I’m sick of the way I’ve been living.”  Frank’s firm response is “It’s too late to pull out now.”

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A publicity of Rory Calhoun from the crime drama, The Big Caper (1957), directed by Robert Stevens

One thing neither Frank or Kay counted on was their mutual attraction and, in one desperate moment, Kay grabs Frank and kisses him passionately before being rebuffed with “I don’t mix pleasure with business.” But Frank’s loyalty to Flood soon begins to erode as tensions mount between the threesome, aggravated by the arrival of Flood’s gang of “experts” in bank robbery. And this is when this potentially dynamic little caper picture becomes an entirely different movie.

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Robert H. Harris (center) is featured in this lobbycard from The Big Caper (1957).

Enter Zimmer (Robert H. Harris), the bomb maker, whose purpose is to distract the police with explosions while Dutch (Florenz Ames), an elderly safecracker who hasn’t worked in ten years, is the bank vault safecracker (Dutch appears to be modeled on Sam Jaffe’s dapper criminal genius in 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle).

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Florenz Ames was a character actor who appeared in several films and TV series during the 1950s.

Zimmer arrives at Frank’s house as a sweaty neurotic mess and stays that way the rest of the movie. Not only is he a barely functioning alcoholic with a gin obsession but he soon proves to be a dangerous pyromaniac as well. To say that Robert Harris’s performance is bouncing-off-the-walls looney is an understatement and every time he’s on screen he is more reminiscent of some eccentric character out of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) or Murder, He Says (1945).

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Roxanne Arlen, Paul Picerni (center) and Corey Allen are part of a gang plotting a robbery in The Big Caper (1957).

Then director Robert Stevens kicks the madness up a notch to level 11 with the introduction of Roy (Corey Allen), a psychotic platinum blonde muscleman whose sole purpose is to provide any brute strength needed for the job. In one of the movie’s craziest scenes, Roy, a self proclaimed health nut, attempts to entertain Kay in his swinging bachelor pad, deejaying discs on his turntable and serving her booze (“I don’t touch the stuff myself”), while she waits for Flood’s arrival. And when the big boss man finally shows up, his dark side starts to emerge in a dramatic way. He takes Roy aside in the bedroom, reprimanding him for his behavior.

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Roy (Corey Allen) cowers in fear as Flood (James Gregory) prepares to give him a beating in The Big Caper (1957).

In a scene charged with homoerotic overtones, Roy cringes on the bed in fear (or is it eager anticipation?) as Flood, towering over him, takes over his belt and begins to beat him while Kay waits apprehensively in the next room. In case we miss the mutual SM arrangement between Roy and Flood, a later scene underscores the perversity yet again when Flood says menacingly to Roy, “Before you turn in [for bed], I want to have a little talk with you.”

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Paul Picerni (second from right) starred in the popular TV series, The Untouchables.

Topping off the heist team is another loser – Harry (Paul Picerni, best known as Robert Stack’s partner on the TV series, The Untouchables), the lookout guy on the caper, who shows up with Doll (Roxanne Arlen), a loud-mouthed blonde vixen who already knows about the heist and demands to be cut in on the deal or she’ll blab to the cops.

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A publicity photo featuring James Gregory (left), Rory Calhoun and Mary Acosta in the crime thriller, The Big Caper (1957), directed by Robert Stevens

With all of these wild card characters chewing up the scenery, the execution of the actual bank heist is relatively low key and dull in comparison. There is a much more suspenseful sequence midway through The Big Caper where the neighbor Mr. Loxley (Patrick McVey), his son Bennie (Terry Kelman) and their dog Murphy make a surprise visit to Frank and Kay’s home. The dog senses the rest of the gang hiding upstairs and runs off to find them, barking his head off, with Bennie in hot pursuit. Kay manages to stop Benny before he discovers the unusual house guests and she rescues the dog in the nick of time; we see Flood and Roy getting ready to slit the dog’s throat with a knife. Yikes!  Image may be NSFW.
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Most of the real excitement though comes in seeing what the deranged Zimmer will do next. Earlier in the film, he goes on a gin bender and winds up burning down an old factory warehouse just for kicks. During the robbery, however, he goes off to the local high school, determined to blow it sky high as a diversion for the police. Frank and Fay, attending a neighbor’s cookout as an alibi, learn to their horror that the high school is not deserted as expected but is hosting a rehearsal for an upcoming student pageant. Frank rushes off to stop the madman before he can do any collateral damage but he has another nemesis on his trail – an enraged Flood whose suspicion of Frank and Fay’s relationship has been confirmed.   Image may be NSFW.
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The grand finale of The Big Caper should have been explosive but instead feels rushed and anticlimactic. It’s as if the director was on the sidelines with a stop watch, urging his cast to rush through their scenes because they have only seconds left to spare. Don’t expect any closure here or any epilogue explaining what happened to Dutch or Roy or Harry or even Flood who is almost beaten to death.   Image may be NSFW.
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There is no clear indication of what will happen to Frank and Kay either though Frank seems surprisingly upbeat as he calls the cops with the cool million close at hand. But if The Big Caper fails to completely satisfy on the level of a heist thriller, it more than makes up for it with its unfettered histrionics.

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Rory Calhoun makes a convincing small time hood in the crime drama, The Big Caper (1957).

The performances are all over the place though Roy Calhoun and Mary Costa help ground the film at times in a grittier, more realistic film noir universe. Calhoun is completely convincing as a dead end career criminal who begins to see the writing on the wall. Maybe his natural ease in the role comes from being an ex-con himself (he served time in San Quentin for various offenses before he was even 21 years old).

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Rory Calhoun was a 20th-Century-Fox contract player who was promoted as a promising leading man in such films as 1954’s River of No Return (pictured) with Marilyn Monroe.

No one would probably vouch for Calhoun as a great actor but he could be surprisingly effective when given decent material and certainly brought some much needed verve and attitude to his many genre films. At one time 20^th Century Fox was grooming him as a leading man in the fifties (With a Song in My Heart, How to Marry a Millionaire, River of No Return) but he was too rough around the edges for that kind of star build-up and worked much better in bad boy roles (A Bullet is Waiting, The Spoilers) like another slightly older actor of his generation, Robert Mitchum. Calhoun was also not afraid to have fun and even reveal a sly sense of humor when he found himself stuck in ridiculous costume epics such as Marco Polo (1962) or camp horror outings like Motel Hell (1980).

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A publicity photo of Mary Acosta in the 1957 crime thriller, The Big Caper (1957)

Mary Costa? She is quite the scintillating dish in The Big Caper and possesses some physical characteristics that remind me of Lola Albright. But she also generates real chemistry with Calhoun and strikes the right note of vulnerability, sexual longing and despair. Unfortunately Costa barely had a career at all and The Big Caper was her first starring role. Her biggest claim to fame is Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) in which she provided the voice for Princess Aurora. After that, she worked in television (mostly providing voice overs) and didn’t make another on-screen appearance until The Great Waltz in 1972.

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Corey Allen (left) and James Gregory play a bizarre S&M couple in The Big Caper (1957).

The rest of The Big Caper casting is like a face off between the world’s greatest scene stealers. James Gregory, a fine and charismatic character actor who is best remembered for his role as the commie political puppet in The Manchurian Candidate (1963), does the best he can with a character that grows more ridiculous as the film progresses. By the end he has been reduced to a sociopathic buffoon yet the movie never explains the hold he has over his gang or why they were in such awe of him. Neverthess, Gregory brings a touch of smooth villainy to the part and adds a touch of sadism and kinkiness to his scenes with Roy and inevitably Kay.

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Robert H. Harris plays a habitual pyromaniac in the heist melodrama, The Big Caper (1957)

Robert H. Harris and Corey Allen, on the other hand, go for broke in their scenes. Harris, a familiar face in countless TV shows and movies of the 50s and 60s (How to Make a Monster, The Invisible Boy), has a lot of fun with the pyromaniac aspect of his character, particularly in one scene where he strikes a match and gazes lustfully at it as if lost in sexual revelry.

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Corey Allen flexes his muscles for Mary Acosta in this lobbycard from The Big Caper (1957).

Corey Allen, who appeared two years earlier as James Dean’s chief rival and tormentor in Rebel Without a Cause, is almost unrecognizable here with his bronzed skin and albino hair but he looks like he’s having a blast acting the part of a complete lunatic; his post-midnight swim scene with the ill-fated Doll is a short but colorful example of gleeful excess.

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HUAC hearings circa 1951-1953

One last bit of trivia about the film: Martin Berkeley, the screenwriter who adapted the Lionel White novel for the screen, is infamous as the industry insider who named more than a 150 fellow writers, actors and directors in the 1951-52 HUAC hearings during the communist purge of the McCarthy era.Image may be NSFW.
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The Big Caper was released on DVD-R by MGM as part of their “Limited Edition Collection” in October 2011 (it includes no extras) and is the only way to view this offbeat crime thriller even if it isn’t presented in its original aspect ratio. The movie could certainly use a Blu-Ray upgrade but that probably isn’t going to happen.

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Mary Costa models a swim suit in this publicity photo from The Big Caper (1957).

*This is an updated and revised version of a post that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks (later re-titled Streamline), the official blog for Turner Classic Movies.

Other Websites of interest:

http://what-when-how.com/pulp-fiction-writers/white-lionel-pulp-fiction-writer/

http://www.hollywoodcultmovies.com/html/rory_calhoun_interview.html

https://www.dvdizzy.com/sleepingbeauty-interview.html

http://www.timem.com/starwebs/paulpicerni/gallery/framgall.htm

https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/54458/big-caper-the/

https://www.fandango.com/people/martin-berkeley-61466/biography

http://comptalk.fiu.edu/huac.htm”>http://comptalk.fiu.edu/huac.htm

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Road movies might seem like a home grown American film genre with such famous examples as Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) and Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) but there have also been plenty of influential representatives from abroad such as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) and Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road (1976). The latter film, in particular, takes a much more introspective and observational approach to character and narrative and such is the case with Vittorio De Seta’s little seen and almost forgotten 1969 feature, L’Invitata (aka The Uninvited). 

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Anne (Joanna Shimkus) tries to hide her shock at discovering her husband’s infidelity in The Uninvited (aka L’Invitata, 1969), co-starring Jacques Perrin (in background).

Set in a suburb outside of Paris, the movie opens as Anne (Joanne Shimkus) is awakened by her husband Laurent (Jacques Perrin), who has just returned from a business trip. He is affectionate and tender with his wife and then drops a bomb. He has brought someone home with him – Lorna (Lorna Heilbron), the daughter of a professor and an academic colleague. Anne can tell almost immediately that this mysterious, smiling visitor is much more than a casual work relationship.

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Laurent (Jacques Perrin) brings his lover (Lorna Heibron) home to meet his wife and gets an unexpected reaction in The Uninvited (aka L’Invitata, 1969), directed by Vittorio De Seta.

Maybe French women react differently than American women to this dilemma but Anne goes on auto-pilot and serves the two lovers dinner. In a private moment with Laurent, she expresses her confusion and pain but his admission of having an affair leads to an even more bewildering confession: “I thought if something like this had happened to me, I wouldn’t want to see you again. I thought it would be over between us. No, not at all. On the contrary, when I came in and saw you, suddenly I saw you as a woman, not like my wife. Do you understand? I could feel that I love you.”

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Anne (Joanna Shimkus) and Francois (Michel Piccoli) hit the road for sunnier weather in the melancholy road movie, The Uninvited (aka L’Invitata, 1969), directed by Vittorio De Seca.

Anne’s response is to flee the house and spend the night at an office building where she works as a graphic designer. In the morning, she is discovered sleeping on a couch by Francois (Michel Piccoli), an architect. Although they don’t know each other well, he can tell she is in some kind of distress and avoids making her uncomfortable with personal questions. Anne clearly has no plan of action but she admits she is on her way to the Cote d’Azur to see friends (she and Laurent had planned their vacation weeks ago). Francois offers to give her a ride since he is headed in that direction for a few business meetings followed by a rendezvous with his wife at their beach house. Anne accepts and the journey begins.

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The Uninvited presents a meditative, melancholy road trip where nothing earth-shaking or traumatic occurs. Yet the experience becomes a game changer for both passengers as their inner thoughts and emotions are revealed not so much through dialogue but via gestures, looks and interactions with other people along the way.

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Anne (Joanna Shimkus) and Francois (Michel Piccoli) are practically strangers who end up on an unexpected road trip in The Uninvited (aka L’Invitee, 1969).

On a visual level, the film mirrors the emotional transitions of both Anne and Francois as they travel from the cold north through desolate and industrial landscapes to the warm, sunny south. At the beginning of the trip Anne is in a state of shock, which eventually gives way to grief and finally to an understanding that she needs to throw off the shackles of her mind. Encounters with a gregarious village baker (Jacques Rispal) who is happy in his work and Francois’s artist/sculptor friend (Paul Barge) help Anne realize that self-knowledge can be a path to inner happiness. (Barge’s fantastic quarry rock creations look like relics from Pompeii or some other lost civilization).

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Anne (Joanna Shimkus) reflects on her situation while wandering the waterfront of Marseille in The Uninvited (aka L’Invitata, 1969).

In contrast to Anne, Francois is self-assured and protective, demonstrating both an almost paternal concern mixed with compassion for his troubled passenger. As their time together draws shorter, he begins to display deeper feelings for her and possibly even question his own marriage. But if you’re expecting the film to turn into a glossy romance like Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966), think again. The couple’s arrival at their destination plays out in an ironic twist where Anne becomes “the other woman” after sleeping with Francois and then meeting his wife (Clotilde Joano).

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An awkward tension occurs when Michele (Clotilde Joano, right) comes home and finds her husband (Michel Piccoli) with a stranger (Joanna Shimkus) in The Uninvited (aka L’Invitata, 1969).

The circular narrative structure of The Uninvited seems to suggest that all relationships are transitory, impermanent or illusory when it comes to marriage. Director De Seta never resorts to melodrama or sentimentality in his depiction of Anne and Francois. Instead he takes a more humanistic approach that is observational but also intimate and not detached. Other directors could have taken a much more plot driven, narrative approach and delivered a feminist revenge thriller or a romantic comedy or a soap opera but The Uninvited happily avoids easy classification in any genre. Interestingly enough, Francis Ford Coppola made a film the same year as De Seta’s film entitled The Rain People (1967) which shared some of the same thematic concerns, especially the premise of a married woman fleeing her husband in order to find herself. Unfortunately, Coppola’s film, which showed promise as a sensitive character study (with a great performance by Shirley Knight), morphed into an overwrought psychological drama with a climax bordering on the hysterical.

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Robert Duvall and Shirley Knight star in Francis Ford Coppola’s road movie, The Rain People (1969).

It also has to be said that The Uninvited succeeds so well in its balance of the realistic and the poetic is due to the cinematography by Luciano Tovoli. The visual depiction of Anne and Francois as two lonely souls traveling in a bubble (their car) through space and time is eloquently expressed through exterior shots looking inside the car from the windshield. Other times they are glimpsed inside the vehicle from the back seat point-of-view. This approach makes the road trip experience feel like it is happening in real time, especially for the viewer.

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A scene from the enigmatic climax of The Uninvited (aka L’Invitata, 1969) starring Joanna Shimkus.

Last but not least, the ensemble cast is pitch perfect with Joanna Shimkus doing an admirable job of conveying an array of emotions and moods with minimum dialogue. Shimkus, who was born in Nova Scotia, began her career as a fashion model in Paris and made her film debut in Jean Aurel’s De L’amour (1964, aka All About Loving). She is particularly memorable in three films for director Robert Enrico – The Last Adventure (1967), Zita (1968) and Ho! (1968) and for her performance in The Virgin and the Gypsy (1970), opposite Franco Nero in an adaptation of the D.H. Lawrence novella.

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A typical glamor shot of fashion model/actress Joanna Shimkus circa the late ’60s.

During her peak working years as an actress (1964-1972), Shimkus didn’t make many movies but her ethereal beauty and mercurial screen presence should have brought her more acting opportunities. Maybe it did and she simply chose to concentrate on being a wife and mother instead. In case you don’t know, Shimkus is married to Sidney Poitier. They met during the making of The Lost Man (1969) but didn’t marry until 1976. They raised two children together and are still married.  Image may be NSFW.
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The Uninvited was De Seta’s third feature film and quite a departure from the film that first brought him international fame, Bandits of Orgosolo (1961), an austere, documentary-like account of a Sardinian shepherd using non-professional actors. That film won four prizes at the Venice Film Festival including Best Film and Best First Work. Prior to Bandits of Orgosolo, De Seta had specialized in short form documentaries and after The Uninvited he returned to that format making several documentaries for Italian television.

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A young Vittorio De Seta during the 1960s.

Unfortunately De Seta rarely returned to fictional narratives again and perhaps the failure of The Uninvited to generate much public or critical interest was responsible. Whatever the reason, the film is ripe for rediscovery along with Bandits of Orgosolo and his second dramatic feature, Un Uomo a Meta (1966), also starring Jacques Perrin. Currently none of De Seta’s work is available in the U.S. on DVD and Blu-Ray from an authorized distributor and unless the Criterion Collection or a similar company steps forward to change that situation, an analog release seems doubtful. Strangely enough, you can currently view the entire movie on YouTube (it could disappear at any time) and I was able to get hold of a decent DVD-R of The Uninvited from European Trash Cinema so happy hunting.

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Michel Piccoli and Joanna Shimkus star in Vittorio De Seca’s The Uninvited (aka L’Invitata, 1969).

Other weblinks of interest:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/dec/11/vittorio-de-seta

https://irenebrination.typepad.com/irenebrination_notes_on_a/2010/02/berlin-film-festivals-homage-to-vittorio-de-seta.html

https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/joanna-shimkus-44385.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2-vIIPD4D8

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Imagine a tunnel under the Atlantic that connected the United States with Europe and provided a high speed form of transportation between the two points. It’s certainly not an unrealistic expectation for the near future when you consider that the undersea rail known as the Channel Tunnel (aka the Chunnel) that currently connects Folkestone, Kent in England to Coquelles, France has been in operation since 1994. But that remarkable feat of engineering is only 50.5 km. compared to the 5,000 km. that would be the more likely distance of an undersea rail that connected New York City with London. Still, proposed plans for under-the-sea travel connectors between countries separated by water continue to surface in news reports and may happen in the near future. What’s most remarkable is the fact that Transatlantic Tunnel (aka The Tunnel), a 1935 British film, envisioned the same thing and some of that movie’s futuristic art direction and design is not that far removed from some of the models you can view on the interest today (just do a search for undersea rail systems).      

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Set in some distant future beyond 1940, Transatlantic Tunnel is a fascinating, rarely screened science fiction fantasy that is a remake of both the German silent, Der Tunnel (1915), and a 1933 French version starring Jean Gabin entitled Le Tunnel, directed by Curtis Bernhardt. I’ve not seen those versions but the 1935 Gaumont British release that stars Richard Dix is a curious blend of utopian fantasy, soap opera, tragedy and disaster movie, all rolled into one.   Image may be NSFW.
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The film’s mixture of British and American actors and the central plot of physically forging a connection between the U.S. and Great Britain is also evocative of a time when the two nations were much more demonstrative about a League of Nations-like brotherhood. George Arliss, that renowned star of the British stage and screen, even makes a cameo appearance as England’s prime minister (a character obviously modeled on his Oscar-winning role as Disraeli), proclaiming that the tunnel will be “an artery through which will course the life-blood of our two nations, flowing into the hearts of Anglo-American relations.” Supporting this idealistic venture 100 percent is the President of the United States, played by Walter Huston (also in a cameo role).  Image may be NSFW.
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[Spoiler Alert] The real drama and interest is generated by the central premise in which Richard Dix’s engineer hero, Richard McAllan, solicits international financing for his dream project and after getting the green light, risks his life and the lives of thousands of men, to accomplish the daunting task which takes a heavy toll on most of those who commit themselves to it. McAllan, however, is the type of driven, single-minded visionary that could truly be accused of “tunnel vision.” He puts his job before everything else in his life, including his wife, son, lifelong friends and even his own personal safety. As a result, his marriage falls apart and his wife Ruth (Madge Evans) loses her eyesight while volunteering as a nurse in the tunnel’s medical facilities; workers exposed to deadly gases in the tunnel transmit their toxic effect like a virus.

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Richard McAllan (Richard Dix) addresses his tunnel workers on a TV monitor in the 1935 sci-fi drama, Transatlantic Tunnel, directed by Maurice Elvey.

Even worse, McAllan’s son Geoffrey (Jimmy Hanley), who is like a stranger to McAllan after spending most of his young life in boarding schools, becomes a casualty the first day he volunteers to help his father on the job. He is trapped and suffocated with hundreds of others in a horrible drilling accident involving an underwater volcano. The grim events continue with a bitter falling out between McAllan and his best friend and co-worker Robbie (Leslie Banks) over McAllan’s wife.

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Richard McAllan (Richard Dix, center) has a disagreement with his friend Frederick Robbins (Leslie Banks) while socialite Varlia Lloyd (Helen Vinson) looks on in Transatlantic Tunnel (1935).

On top of this, Varlia (Helen Vinson), the beautiful, wealthy daughter of the project’s main millionaire investor (C. Aubrey Smith), is trying to steal McAllan away from his blind wife while some of the treacherous investors double cross each other for sole ownership; one even kills his business partner with a poisoned cigarette.

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Helen Vinson plays “the other woman” in Richard Dix’s busy life in the sci-fi drama Transatlantic Tunnel (1935).

Sure, it’s excessive and occasionally laughable in the way it stacks the deck with one melodramatic incident after another. Admittedly, the soap opera aspects tend to stall the suspense and excitement built up in the spectacular tunnel segments. Yet, despite occasional pacing problems, Transatlantic Tunnel is surprisingly visionary at times.

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An example of the futuristic set design in the 1935 sci-fi drama, Transatlantic Tunnel, directed by Maurice Elvey.

The opening sequence of the film is particularly striking with the camera pulling back from the conductor of a live orchestra to reveal that the musicians are not performing in a theater but in the living room of a millionaire’s mansion. Then we see the bored faces of the gathered guests – selected crown heads of international industry. One leans over to his wife and says, “Will this tune ever end?” “It’s Beethoven,” she replies, pausing one beat and then, “He’s dead.” “Good!” is his response. With a simple click of a switch the orchestra is soon hidden from view and silenced by the millionaire host who turns his attention to the matter at hand, a plea for money for a project that will benefit mankind.

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An upper class gathering discuss investment opportunities in new technology in the sci-fi drama Transatlantic Tunnel (1935), directed by Maurice Elvey.

Of course, this crowd is only interested in profit margins and the film’s depiction of these potential investors is quite telling. They have no interest in culture – that was apparent in their bored response to a Beethoven symphony. And they have no shame in expressing their nihilistic worldview or class-conscious contempt for anyone not in their inner circle. One jaded guest comments snidely to Varlia on the visiting American’s project and personal character – “They’re such dull things – tunnels. Don’t try to analyze him my dear. He’s a kind of human mole. It’s all right if he’s underground but blast if he comes up in daylight! Besides, look at his clothes.”  Image may be NSFW.
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While McAllan’s proposal is at first rejected, the businessmen are eventually talked into investing by their host who appeals to their simple greed. The munitions millionaire says with supreme confidence, “When your tunnel is built, all the other countries of the world will come to me for guns to blow it up.” We could just as well be witnessing a private meeting of Halliburton executives discussing how they are going to get even richer off the Iraq War.   Image may be NSFW.
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Some of the futuristic design on display in Transatlantic Tunnel will bring a smile to your face such as the tunnel rail cars which look like something out of The Jetsons. But some of it looks forward to genuine technological advances such as the ‘televisor’ – a combination video screen/phone – or the ‘enunciator’ – an early form of wireless loudspeaker. And the large wall size TV monitors installed in people’s homes where you can enjoy face to face communication with the other party pre-date Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 as well as other technologies developed in recent years.

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By 1935 standards, the set design for Transatlantic Tunnel looks remarkably prescient for its era.

The most striking set design though is the actual tunnel set with its massive high ceilings and endless rail retreating into the distance. The huge radium drill is equally spectacular and so are the disaster sequences with masses of workers fleeing through fiery, smoke filled chambers and McAllan in his deep sea diver-like protective gear rushing to the rescue (Allegedly some of the special effects shots from the German and French versions of The Tunnel were rumored to have been reused in this film).  Image may be NSFW.
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Which reminds me…there is some unavoidable and hilariously phallic exchanges in the film such as McAllan’s excited live broadcast to the public: “Down here, far below the Atlantic bed, strewn with the wrecks of centuries, men are working day and night from both sides of the Atlantic. They are driving their shafts nearer and nearer to one another. And one day far below the raging storms of the ocean they’ll meet and the greatest engineering dream the world has ever known will become an accomplished fact.”

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Underground workers in the sci-fi drama Transatlantic Tunnel put their lives on the line and sometimes pay the cost.

There’s also a funny homoerotic male shower sequence that rivals the female one in Gold Diggers of 1933 with half-naked men splashing each other with water and telling jokes against a frosted glass background where we see the silhouettes of other men bathers.   Image may be NSFW.
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If there is a lesson to be learned from Transatlantic Tunnel it is that ambitious projects that serve mankind like the Tunnel demand a sacrifice that men like Richard McAllan are willing to make. What’s more important, devoting your life to a humanitarian project or being a successful father and husband? Is it possible to do both? Not likely. When McAllan is asked at the end of the film if he would do it all again knowing the heavy price he would pay, he says yes because, “I believe my work will bring peace to the world.” Men like McAllan are essential in the progress of the human race – but good luck to their wives and children!

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Raymond Massey stars in the 1936 sci-fi film Things to Come, based on a novel by H.G. Wells.

When one considers other British science fiction films from the same era, Transatlantic Tunnel easily stands out as one of the best. It was released the year before two H.G. Wells film adaptations, Things to Come (based on the H.G. Wells novel The Shape of Things to Come) and The Man Who Could Work Miracles, and holds up much better than either of those films, despite the stunning art direction of the former and enjoyable whimsy of the latter.   Image may be NSFW.
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Maurice Elvey, director of Transatlantic Tunnel, had previously helmed another film entitled High Treason (1929) in which a tunnel linking England to Europe was a subplot. It was Gaumont’s first official “talkie” but was also released as a silent. Elvey would go on to direct The Clairvoyant aka The Evil Mind (1935) starring Claude Rains, but most of his films were not in the fantasy genre.  Image may be NSFW.
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Transatlantic Tunnel was previously available on VHS and is available on DVD in various editions but the quality will be variable since the film is in public domain. A poor quality copy of it can also be streamed on YouTube. If the original film elements could be located for a restoration, a Blu-Ray would certainly be more than welcome but the chances of this happening seem slim to none.  Image may be NSFW.
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*This is an updated and revised version of a post that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks (later renamed Streamline), the official blog for Turner Classic Movies.

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Sandhogs in the New York-New Jersey area attend a special screening of Transatlantic Tunnel (1935).

Other websites of interest:

https://immortalephemera.com/52708/richard-dix-biography/

https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=69&doc_id=1286366#

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2016/04/29/the-case-for-transatlantic-undersea-trains/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/world-s-longest-undersea-rail-tunnel-hits-first-obstacle

http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/449112/index.html

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/93824/Transatlantic-Tunnel/articles.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFjJUcfyKqs

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“According to the ancient Romans, the Hour of the Wolf means the time between night and dawn, just before the light comes, and people believed it to be the time when demons had a heightened power and vitality, the hour when most people died and most children were born, and when nightmares came to one.”

Setting the stage for what will follow with this ominous introduction, Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 feature Hour of the Wolf (Swedish title: Vargtimmen) is probably the closest the director has ever come to making a horror film, one that crosses over into the realm of the supernatural.

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Liv Ullman recounts the strange details of her husband’s disappearance in the creepy psychological drama, Hour of the Wolf (1968), directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Hour of the Wolf unfolds with the intriguing framing device of having Alma Borg (Liv Ullmann), the wife of painter Johan Borg (Max von Sydow), recount to an unseen interviewer, the strange disappearance of her husband and what lead up to it, the film’s main narrative unfolds from Johan’s point of view as Alma reads his diary.

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Johan (Max von Sydow) is the tormented protagonist of Ingmar Bergman’s macabre Hour of the Wolf (1968).

Living in seclusion on the coast of a desolate island, Johan and his pregnant wife begin to experience overwhelming feelings of dread and apprehension triggered by Johan’s recurring nightmares and a fear of the dark. Even his wife begins to see apparitions which may or may not exist.

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One of the disturbing apparitions featured in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).

When one of them, an elderly woman, encourages Alma to read her husband’s diary that he keeps hidden under the bed, she learns of a previous mistress, Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin), who once again enters his life when his socially prominent neighbors invite her to visit them. This unsettling development along with a series of strange incidents, haunting visions and creative frustrations drive Johan to the brink of madness, while his wife tries but is unable to relieve his tormented state of mind.

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A host of malevolent faces haunt the psyche of Johan (Max von Sydow) in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).

Much closer in tone to his bleak psychological dramas of the early sixties (Through a Glass Darkly [1961], The Silence [1963]), Hour of the Wolf was the first film in a trilogy that starred Max von Sydow as the director’s alter ego; the other two films are Shame (1968) and The Passion of Anna (1969).

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Liv Ullman (background, left) and Max von Sydow endure dark times in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).

Through the painter Johan Borg, Bergman is able to address his own feelings of anxiety and isolation as an artist as well as his tenuous relationship with society. At one point, Johan even confesses, “I call myself an artist for lack of a better name. In my creative work is nothing implicit, except compulsion. Through no fault of mine I’ve been pointed out as something extraordinary, a calf with five legs, a monster.”

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In one of the more disturbing sequences in Hour of the Wolf (1968), a half-naked boy attacks Johan (Max von Sydow) after stalking him in a provocative way.

In the end, Hour of the Wolf is a gothic and disturbing meditation that is often impenetrable in its meaning though a good deal of the film works solely on the power of its imagery – a man who suddenly walks up the wall and onto the ceiling, an old crone who removes her eyes, places them in water glasses and then tears off her face, a young, half-naked boy who attacks Johan while he is fishing and is beaten to death and tossed in the sea where his corpse hovers like a ghost just beneath the surface.

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A scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (168) starring Max von Sydow (in background).

Bird references are also abundant throughout the film, from the beaklike, predatory features of the sinister Arkivarie Lindhorst (Georg Rydeberg) to a wind-whipped line of laundry that sounds like wings flapping in the breeze.

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“Hour of the Wolf”
Liv Ullmann, director Ingmar Bergman
1968 Svensk Filmindustri

Bergman admitted that the Tod Browning version of Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi was a major influence on the film. Even the behavior and appearance of Johan’s neighbors in the castle seem straight out of Bram Stoker’s novel; the way they flock around the painter hungrily at a dinner party suggests vampires moving in for the kill.  Image may be NSFW.
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Another inspiration was Mozart’s opera, The Magic Flute (which Bergman would later adapt for Swedish television in 1975 followed by a theatrical release). In one sequence, dinner guests assemble to watch a puppet theatre presentation of a musical selection from The Magic Flute, except that the performer isn’t a puppet at all but a miniature person. Hour of the Wolf is full of disorienting, slight-of-hand magician tricks like this and often seems more grounded in the world of nightmares than reality.

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One of the many macabre images in the Ingmar Bergman psychological horror film, Hour of the Wolf (1968).

Bergman initially planned to make Hour of the Wolf several years earlier but had abandoned the screenplay (entitled The Cannibals at that time) when he became ill with pneumonia and put it aside. He later returned to it in 1966 when he was living on his island retreat of Faro. “The demons would come to me and wake me up, and they would stand there and talk to me,” Bergman said.

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Erland Josephson (left) and Max von Sydow star in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).

The film was partly shot on location at Hovs Hallar, a rocky, coastal area in southwest Sweden, which Bergman had used previously for the opening scene of The Seventh Seal (1957). Liv Ullmann, who was living openly with Bergman at the time, gave birth to his daughter Linn during the shooting of Hour of the Wolf. Though they never married, the couple would collaborate on a total of ten films together, including Face to Face [Swedish title: Ansikte mot ansikte, 1976) which earned Ullmann an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

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Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman play a tormented married couple living on an isolated island in Hour of the Wolf (1968).

One of the strongest attributes of Hour of the Wolf is Sven Nykvist’s striking black and white cinematography, although the veteran cameraman faced several creative challenges throughout the narrative such as the dinner party conversation scene where the camera swirls around the table, pausing on each person momentarily before flying like a bird to the next one.

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Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968) is one of the director’s more disturbing dramas; it is actually more like a horror film.

Max von Sydow recalled this scene, saying “Bergman wanted to have the whole dinner table conversation – all in one take. His idea was to give the actors something near to the kind of continuity in performance that you get in the live theatre. Sven Nykvist…was seated in front of us, and the table at which we sat was partly surrounding him. I remember Nykvist’s total precision in his panning technique…because when you pan from one face to another as fast as he had to do, it’s very difficult to stop each pan at a moment when you have an ideal composition on each person.”

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A man appears to walk up the side of a wall in a supernatural moment during Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).

While many critics found Hour of the Wolf to be one of Bergman’s lesser works, the film had its champions. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote “…if we allow the images to slip past the gates of logic and enter the deeper levels of our mind, and if we accept Bergman’s horror story instead of questioning it, Hour of the Wolf works magnificently. So delicate is the wire it walks, however, that the least hostility from the audience can push it across into melodrama. But it isn’t that. If you go to see it, see it on Bergman’s terms.”

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Ingrid Thulin, an actress who has appeared in many Ingmar Bergman films, has a cameo role in Hour of the Wolf (1968).

In a similar vein, Renata Adler of the New York Times commented, “…it is unthinkable for anyone seriously interested in movies not to see it.” The film went on to win the Best Director award from the National Society of Film Critics and the Best Actress Award for Ullmann from the National Board of Review.

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A typically grim image from Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).

As for the film’s meaning, Bergman probably expressed it best when he offered up this opinion: “I think it’s terribly important that art exposes humiliation, that art shows how human beings humiliate each other, because humiliation is one of the most dreadful companions of humanity, and our whole social system is based to an enormous extent on humiliation…the laws, the carrying out of sentences…the kind of school education…I experienced…the religion we officially profess ourselves adherents of.”

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MGM DVD cover of Hour of the Wolf

Hour of the Wolf was first released by MGM Video as part of a 5-film Ingmar Bergman DVD boxed set in April 2004 that was accompanied by extra features along with the titles Persona, Shame, The Passion of Anna and The Serpent’s Egg. In January 2006 MGM released Hour of the Wolf as a single DVD with extras that included interviews with Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson and a commentary by Bergman biographer Marc Gervais. The film made its appearance on Blu-Ray in November 2018 thanks to The Criterion Collection which included it in Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, a 39-film boxed set with more than thirty hours of supplemental features. It is not available separately at this time but if you’re a Bergman fan, this is the best and most comprehensive collection of his films ever released on home video and the price is reasonable considering the quality of the transfers.  Image may be NSFW.
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* This is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other websites of interest:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5987-hour-of-the-wolf-and-from-the-life-of-the-marionettes-the-strength-of-surrender

https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/hour-wolf

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/hour-of-the-wolf-1968

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Clik here to view.Often cited as one of the worst major studio movies ever made, The Oscar (1966) lives up to its infamous reputation but unlike many films which get tagged as “the world’s worst” and are usually tedious and only intermittently hilarious in small doses such as The Conqueror [1956] or The Swarm [1978], this one is consistently entertaining for its flamboyantly excessive performances, sordid situations and bitchy, mean-spirited dialogue that paints Hollywood as a place where you sell your soul and become an easily disposable product. 

It is certainly not the first film expose of the movie industry – What Price Hollywood? (1932), A Star Is Born [both the 1937 & 1954 versions] and The Bad and the Beautiful [1952] have all done a better job at skewering the business with wit and style. But The Oscar is unique for receiving the endorsement from the Academy of Arts and Sciences to use its trademark image and awards ceremony in the film (the Academy even gets a special citation in the opening credits). The fact that they actually approved the use of their icon and establishment in such a sleazy melodrama boggles the mind and would never happen today when the Academy is so much more controlling of their brand and sensitive to how it is represented.  Image may be NSFW.
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Based on a popular novel by Richard Sale, the narrative opens at the Oscar ceremonies as Hymie Kelly (Tony Bennett), a former friend of Best Actor contender Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd), relates the entire story in flashback of how Fane finally arrived at the prestigious ceremony and what he did to get there. Think of it as a skid row version of All About Eve (1950).

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Stephen Boyd plays a feral, reptilian bottom-feeder in the anti-Hollywood trash classic, The Oscar (1966),directed by Russell Rouse.

Fane is one of the most repulsive and loathsome individuals ever created for the screen and Stephen Boyd brings him to vulgar life in what is either his worst performance or a brilliant one which takes all of the worst personality traits of a studio-created superstar and turns them into a hyperactive cartoon caricature of monstrous proportions. “Tearing through the movie like the Tasmanian Devil,” Michael Sauter wrote in The Worst Movies of All Time; Or What Were They Thinking?, Boyd “snarls, sneers, makes sudden menacing gestures, snarls some more, sneers some more, and makes the chords in his neck stick out.” It is one of the most physical performances you’ll ever see with facial tics, exaggerated hand gestures and robotic body movements becoming the clay which Boyd uses to sculpt his masterpiece.

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Joseph Cotten (left) is one of many famous Hollywood actors who appear in The Oscar (1966) starring Stephen Boyd as a driven, ruthless actor.

Fane’s rise to fame makes the pulp novels of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann look tame by comparison. We first see him promoting his girlfriend Laurel (Jill St. John) as a stripper in low-rent bars and gin joints in small towns while Hymie collects the cash. Fane quickly moves on from this parasitic relationship after arriving in New York City where his luck improves upon meeting Kay Bergdahl (Elke Sommer), a fashion designer for a ritzy department store. Frankie avidly pursues her and then drops her like a hot potato once he is introduced to Sophie Cantaro (Eleanor Parker), a Hollywood talent scout, at a play rehearsal. In record time, Frankie becomes Sophie’s new discovery, relocates to Los Angeles and quickly begins his ascent to stardom, double-crossing, backstabbing and intimidating everyone who crosses his path. Fane’s lust for fame is so twisted that he even secretly feeds scandalous details about his own past to newspaper reporters, raising the suspicion that one of his fellow Oscar contenders did it to sway the voters. Along for the ride every step of the way is Hymie, his childhood friend turned personal assistant but his real purpose seems to be a human doormat for Frankie.

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Stephen Boyd (left) gives his personal assistant Tony Bennett some unpleasant orders in The Oscar (1966).

Cast in the role of Hymie, his first – and last – feature film as a dramatic actor, Tony Bennett was pursued for the part by producer Clarence Greene and director Russell Rouse, two longtime fans of the singer. When they saw him make a television guest appearance on The Andy Williams Show, they both “were struck by an extraordinary warmth and sensitivity which came over on the television screen.” That convinced Greene and Rouse that Bennett had star potential and he was given a screen test, which led to his legendary bad performance in The Oscar.

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Egomaniac star Stephen Boyd (left) reads the trade papers while his browbeaten assistant (Tony Bennett) waits for his commands in The Oscar (1966).

The real mystery is why Greene and Rouse would cast Bennett as Hymie if they were struck by his “extraordinary warmth.” Hymie is a complete cipher, the real mystery at the core of the film. While the screenplay (written by Greene, Rouse and Harlan Ellison) establishes the fact that Frankie and Hymie bonded at an early age over impoverished circumstances and dysfunctional families, there is no explanation for Hymie’s unswerving loyalty to Frankie as he witnesses the terrible things he does to others, not to mention his own abusive treatment by the man. Whether intentional or not, Hymie comes across as a born masochist and his lack of self esteem encourages total degradation and humiliation by the sadistic Fane. It’s the perfect master-slave relationship and Hymie ends up looking just as creepy and repulsive as his egomaniac friend.

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Hymie Kelly (Tony Bennett) reflects back on the events that led to this infamous night at the Academy Awards in The Oscar (1966).

Bennett plays Hymie with an annoying earnestness that alternates between whining and trite moralizing. His entire body posture appears hunched over and cringing most of the film as if he’s waiting to be kicked like a dog. His big dramatic scene, where he finally tells Frankie off while acknowledging his own self-loathing, results in one of the funnier exit scenes in movies. Bennett, on the verge of a tearful breakdown, pivots away from Frankie and we see him bolt for the door in a sequence that accents his physical awkwardness in the role. It’s as if he’s learning to run for the first time and isn’t quite sure his legs are working properly.

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Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd, center) and Hymie Kelly (Tony Bennett) cower at the threats of a small town sheriff (Broderick Crawford) in The Oscar (1966).

The final embarrassment was probably being singled out as “The Worst Performance by a Popular Singer” in The Golden Turkey Awards by Harry and Michael Medved. So Maybe it’s a good thing Bennett didn’t pursue other dramatic roles after The Oscar because it might have prevented him from recording some of the records that have made him a living legend today. He’s a two-time Emmy award winner, a recipient of the 2005 Kennedy Center honors, was inducted into the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame in 1997 and has won 20 Grammy awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Fading actress Sophie Cantaro (Eleanor Powell) rages at the ambitious actor who has just discarded her in The Oscar (1966).

Among the other cast members in The Oscar, Eleanor Parker was singled out the most by critics as giving the best performance as the aging talent scout who is told by one associate, “You’re 42. There are many good minutes for you.” At this stage in her career, Parker was past the leading lady phase by Hollywood standards and was now specializing in supporting character roles such as Stuart Whitman’s alcoholic shrew of a wife in An American Dream (1966) and a wealthy eccentric targeted for murder in Eye of the Cat (1969).

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Milton Berle and Eleanor Parker play victims of the egocentric actor Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) in The Oscar (1966).

In The Oscar, Parker seizes on the melodramatic nature of her role and tosses off the unintentional camp dialogue with a theatrical flair, especially in one ugly post-coital moment with Fane: “Look at me when you talk to me! I’m not some kind of garbage pail you can slam the lid on and walk away,” to which Fane replies, “I’m going, old lady.” According to Doug McClelland in his biography, Eleanor Parker: Woman of a Thousand Faces, the actress has a special fondness for The Oscar because it was during a publicity tour for the movie that she met her fourth and final husband, Raymond N. Hirsch (He died in 2001, Parker died in 2013).

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Elke Sommer (far left), Stephen Boyd, Edie Adams and Ernest Borgnine (second from right) are featured in the camp classic, The Oscar (1966).

Besides Ms. Parker, there are other supporting roles to savor in The Oscar such as Ernest Borgnine as a loud, obnoxious private eye and his tacky, deceptively shrewd ex-wife (Edie Adams), who proves she’s a smarter Hollywood player than Fane. Peter Lawford also pops up in a minor role as a former famous actor now reduced to working as a headwaiter in a restaurant. His presence is a disturbing reminder to Fane of the ephemeral nature of stardom and, in some ways, mirrored Lawford’s own fall from grace in Hollywood. By the time of the film, Lawford had been excluded from the “Rat Pack” by Frank Sinatra after a falling-out and his leading man movie status had transitioned into supporting roles and cameo appearances in TV series like I Spy and The Wild, Wild West.

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Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd, right) and his agent Kappy Kapstetter (Milton Berle) have a poolside confrontation in The Oscar (1966).

The real standout performance in The Oscar though is Milton Berle, delivering a surprisingly sincere, low-key dramatic performance as Fane’s much put-upon and unappreciated agent, Kappy Kapstetter. He gets the last laugh though and dismisses Fane with this poolside putdown: “Have you ever seen a moth smashed against a window….leaves the dust of its wings. You’re like that Frankie. You leave a powder of dirt everywhere you touch.”

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Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) and Kay Bergdahl (Elke Sommer) during happier times in their relationship in The Oscar (1966).

Most of the dialogue in The Oscar, in fact, is so quotable and beyond cliche that it’s an embarrassment of riches. Take, for example, this exchange between Fane and Kay at their first meeting at a Greenwich Village party:

Kay: “I’m not the kind of woman who uses sex as a release or even as a weapon.”
Frankie: “You always talk like that?
Kay: “I try.”
Frankie: “Do me a favor, will ya and try dropping it with me. I’m not that smart. You free thinkers confuse me.”

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A publicity photo of Elke Sommer and Stephen Boyd from The Oscar (1966).

Often the screenplay will reference real movie stars to give the proceedings a sense of legitimacy such as this conversation between Fane and his agent:
Fane: What about that spy thing at Warners?
Kappy: “They signed Dean Martin.”
Fane: “Dean Martin. That part was right for me!”
Kappy: “Look, I’m not trying to hurt you. I’m just trying to wipe away the fog between you and reality.”

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Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (center) makes a cameo appearance as herself in The Oscar (1966).

1966, of course, was the year that Dean Martin starred in The Silencers, the first of a series of Matt Helm spy comedies but The Oscar is full on insider references and in-jokes. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper appears as herself in the film and so does costume designer Edith Head. At the finale, set at the Academy Awards, Bob Hope appears as the master of ceremonies, just like he was in real life for many years, and Merle Oberon presents the Best Actor Oscar. Among the other contenders mentioned we see Frank Sinatra, with daughter Nancy by his side, and mentions of Richard Burton for “Grapes in Winter” and Burt Lancaster for “The Spanish Armada,” both fictitious films.

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Cheryl Barker (Jean Hale) is just as vicious and egocentric as her date Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) in The Oscar (1966).

Author Paul Roen noted in his review of The Oscar in High Camp Volume 2, “…the thoroughness with which the book’s abundant gay references have been systematically excluded from the screenplay…in the book he [Fane] was an athletic model, nude photographs of whom appeared on a pack of gay pornographic playing cards…Adding insult to injury, the script perversely and persistently underlines its own heterosexuality. At times this becomes downright obsessive, as when, for example, a group of TV executives discuss Frankie’s potential as the star of a weekly series: “I don’t think we need to worry about Fane being a man.” “He looks like a real man.” “Hell, he’s a man, all right!”

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Jill St. John has a brief but memorable supporting role in The Oscar (1966), co-starring Stephen Boyd.

When The Oscar opened theatrically, it was savaged by most critics. TIME: “Even at its awful best, this mindless epic will hardly win anything but booby prizes…The probable Oscar winners: Least Believable Performance by a Supporting Actor: to Singer Tony Bennett, who plays the star’s stooge as though someone had half-persuaded him that a crooner can burst into tears as easily as he bursts into song. Least Performance by an Actor: Stephen Boyd, who literally wrings his hands in moments of crisis. His portrait of a snaky, sniveling contender at the Oscar countdown should be shown exclusively in theatres that have doctors and nurses stationed in the lobby to attend viewers who laugh themselves sick.”

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Stephen Boyd (left) in full Tasmanian Devil-mode in The Oscar (1966).

The New York Times called it “Another distressing example of Hollywood fouling its nest – professionally, commercially and especially artistically…Obviously the community doesn’t need enemies so long as it has itself.” And The N.Y. Herald Tribune chimed in with “Heels may get to Hollywood but once there, rest assured, they do not win Oscars. This is the comforting message of The Oscar, a film that should ideally be viewed with your head under a hair drier – in or out of a beauty parlor. Otherwise you run the risk of hearing clearly some of the raunchiest dialogue ever to emanate from big screen – with plot and characters to match.”

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Stephen Boyd and Eleanor Parker star in the camp melodrama, The Oscar (1966).

The final irony is that despite The Oscar‘s poor critical reception it did actually receive two Academy Award nominations – one for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and one for Best Costume Design by Edith Head – though neither won in its category.

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Science fiction author and screenwriter Harlan Ellison

Co-screenwriter Harlan Ellison had written several screenplays for TV series like Burke’s Law and The Outer Limits prior to tackling the scenario for The Oscar. It would prove to be his only screenwriting experience for a feature film. Ellison would later describe seeing The Oscar at a Hollywood premiere with an audience: “I practically wept. I saw this film for which I had worked for a year, and people are laughing in the theater and they’re laughing at dramatic moments. And I’m sinking lower and lower and lower in my seat. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I said, ‘This is the end of my feature film career.'”

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Frankie Fane (Stephen Boyd) receives a shock at the Academy Awards ceremony in The Oscar (1966).

At one time The Oscar had been available on VHS but the film has never received an official DVD release. The only way to see it was on rare occasions on TV such as Turner Classic Movies which first broadcast it in November 2008. The good news is that KL Studio Classics plans to release the film on Blu-Ray from a brand new 4K master sometime in 2020!

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Talent scout Eleanor Parker, studio head Joseph Cotten (center) and Hollywood agent Milton Berle discuss a potential star’s screen test in The Oscar (1966).

Other websites of interest:

https://www.salon.com/2010/03/06/the_oscar/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/29/harlan-ellison-obituary

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/harlan-ellison-dead-volatile-legend-science-fiction-was-84-1062923

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What the heck is Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One? Is it a documentary or is it fiction? Maybe it’s a pretentious mess masquerading as art or possibly the most unique experimental film of the late sixties. We’re talking about William Greaves’s rarely seen 1968 work which was released on DVD in December 2006 by the Criterion Collection, thanks to the efforts of filmmakers Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi who were so impressed with this one-of-a-kind collaboration that they helped Greaves’s produce his long-in-the-works sequel to it – Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2 1/2 – in 2005 (and which is also included on the Criterion disc).  

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Director William Greaves in Central Park filming Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1968) with two of his actors.

Until recently you would have had trouble finding a film buff who was familiar with William Greaves or his contributions to the cinema and only a few would have heard of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One simply because outside of a few select screenings in 1968 it was never distributed theatrically nor made available for the non-theatrical market (museums, universities or film societies). Yet Greaves is probably the least heralded African-American filmmaker of the 20^th century despite a long and impressive list of documentaries, beginning with his work for the National Film Board of Canada in the early fifties on up to his executive producer stint on PBS’s Black Journal.

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Among his more notable films are Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, Emergency Ward, Ali: The Fighter, and Ralph Bunce: An American Odyssey which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2001. Greaves’s last completed work as a director was Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 ½. He died in August 2014.

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William Greaves (left) appeared in the 1949 drama Souls of Sin, directed by Powell Lindsay.

Even before he became a filmmaker he was an actor on the stage and later in independent films made specifically for black audiences such as Sepia Cinderella, Miracle in Harlem, and Souls of Sin. Alfred L. Werker’s Lost Boundaries, a 1949 true-life drama based on a black family that passed for white in New Hampshire, is probably his best known film role as an actor and co-stars Mel Ferrer and Carleton Carpenter. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, however, is an anomaly in his career and a fascinating one.

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William Greaves (center) listens to his actors rehearse for a set in the 1968 experimental film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

According to Greaves, he was given money by a producer who was impressed with his work and told to make anything he wanted. The result was a complete departure from his documentary work while still incorporating aspects of it including some stunning cinema verite moments before it became a fixture in the work of the Maysles Brothers (Salesman [1969]).

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A bickering married couple played by different actors in several variations of the same scene is just one of the offbeat aspects of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1968), directed by William Greaves.

But what is it all about? Well, on the surface, it’s about a film crew shooting a fiction film about a bickering couple at a crisis point in their relationship. The anger and resentment between the two stems from a frustrated sexual relationship and real or imagined betrayals. The dialogue between them is harsh and ugly; it’s also banal at the most basic soap opera level, like a hack version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

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The loose cinema verite nature of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1968) is evident in this sequence where a New York cop questions a film crew member about their movie.

It soon becomes apparent though that Greaves is well aware of the inferior nature of the script and is possibly using it to provoke his actors and crew to react to it in some way that will actually improve the work. Unbeknownst to Greaves during the filming, the crew were meeting secretly without him and recording their bitch sessions where they argued over the direction of the film and their responsibility for it – several of them were afraid Greaves had no clear idea of what he was doing and felt they needed to intervene.

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William Greaves (second from right) observes his actors while a light meter reading is taken in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1968).

This, of course, was exactly what Greaves had hoped would happen and he was delighted when the crew presented him with this clandestine footage at the end of the shoot. He later admitted that Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One probably wouldn’t have worked without it.

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Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker play one version of an unhappily married couple airing their complaints in Central Park in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1968), directed by William Greaves.

But that’s just one aspect of the film. There is also the fact that three different pairs of actors appear as Alice and Freddie, one of whom is an interracial couple (played by Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker) whose story is continued 35 years later with the same actors in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2 1/2. There is also a “musical” version of the same scenario – this is typical of Greaves’s anything-goes experimental technique – in which a young Susan Anspach (Five Easy Pieces, Montenegro) appears, singing Alice’s dialogue.

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A young Susan Anspach plays a dissatisfied married woman who sings her complains in a variation of a scenario featuring different actors playing the same couple in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1968).

The fine line between the “acting” scenes and the crew reacting to each other and the director – all of it shot in New York’s Central Park – is further blurred by yet another type of performance – the unplanned appearance of a homeless alcoholic in the park who wanders into the rehearsal, providing the perfect final curtain for Greaves’ project.

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Director William Greaves (left) returns to New York’s Central Park for a sequel to his 1968 avant-garde experiment Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

The true meaning of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One  remains a subject of debate but whether Greaves was just having a private joke at the expense of his crew and the audience I tend to agree with his own public statement about the film: “It is a free fall in space. We simply don’t know where we will land with this creative undertaking. It is a study of the creative process in action. Also, the film is Jazz! It is improvisation. It is an exploration into the future of cinema art.”

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Director Bill Greaves (right) on set near Strawberry Fields in Central Park with Steve Buscemi for the film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take 2 1/2 (2005). Photo by Susan Stava.

For me, it was an exhilarating experiment that made me realize how rarely filmmakers push the boundaries of the medium anymore. Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi were certainly excited by it and so was the audience that saw a rare screening of it at Sundance in 2001. If you’re looking for something decidedly different from the typical formulaic product from Hollywood, this just might rock your boat.

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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and the 2005 sequel, Take 2 ½ are still available as a single DVD disc from The Criterion Collection. It is quite possible that Criterion will release the films on blu-ray at some point in the future.

* This is a revised and updated version of a blog that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks (later renamed Streamline), the official blog for Turner Classic Movies.

Other websites of interest:

http://www.williamgreaves.com/biography.htm

https://hyperallergic.com/427776/william-greaves-symbiopsychotaxiplasm-take-one

http://bathrobeblog.blogspot.com/2014/08/william-greaves-pioneer-of-modern-black.html

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3001-man-with-a-plan-william-greaves-in-symbiopsychotaxiplasm-take-one

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/daring-original-overlooked-symbiopsychotaxiplasm-take-one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9_rgiYBIwc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlFGf6FVKOw

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Clik here to view.Not all film preservationists are focused on saving and restoring lost classics of silent and early cinema like Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) or overlooked noir indies from Hollywood’s golden era such as Richard Fleischer’s Trapped (1949). Mondo Macabro, which has been around since 2003 or so, is dedicated to introducing movie lovers to fringe cinema from around the world – obscure genre films that run the gamut from horror to sexploitation to art house oddities from countries as far flung as Japan, Latvia and South Africa. Among some of their offbeat releases are Lady Terminator (1989), a cheesy Indonesian rip-off of James Cameron’s The Terminator, The Living Corpse (1967), a vampire thriller from Pakistan, and Strip Tease (1963), a melancholy French drama starring Nico (of The Velvet Underground) with music by Serge Gainsbourg and Alain Goraguer. The company’s most recent release on Blu-Ray, The Killer of Dolls (El asesino de manecas, 1975), is easily one of their most peculiar and transgressive acquisitions to date. 

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Director Miguel Madrid aka Michael Skaife makes a cameo appearance as a destroyer of dolls in the introduction to El Asesino de Munecas (The Killer of Dolls, 1975).

The director, Miguel Madrid (credited as Michael Skaife on the film), only made three films and is virtually unknown outside of his native country Spain. Horror fanatics might be familiar with his 1971 debut feature, Necrophagus, which was released in the U.S. as Graveyard of Horror and is generally reviled by genre fans as a listless, poorly edited mess about the living dead.  Image may be NSFW.
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The star of The Killer of Dolls, David Rocha (real name Jose Luis Moreno) is also relatively unknown although he has enjoyed some cult success in Spain with supporting roles in four films by Paul Naschy (aka Jacinto Molina) including The Traveler (El Caminante, 1979), and Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

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A masked serial killer is on the loose in a city park in the Spanish psychological thriller, The Killer of Dolls (1975).

Thanks to Mondo Macabro, Rocha and Madrid, who died in 1996, may finally achieve some kind of cinema immortality for The Killer of Dolls, which should attract a cult following for its sheer weirdness and obsessive tone. To be sure, there are plenty of flaws. It was such a low-budget production that no retakes were allowed resulting in uneven performances and awkward continuity. Some of the camerawork is shaky with an over reliance on the zoom lens and certain visual motifs like doll heads, mannequins and plastic body parts become needlessly repetitive. Yet, in a strange way, these defects also contribute to the film’s off-kilter nature which achieves something approaching a delirious dream state.

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Images of mannequins and dolls permeate the dream like imagery of The Killer of Dolls, a 1975 psychological thriller from Spain.

[Spoiler alert] Even though The Killer of Dolls was promoted as a horror film in the style and manner of Italian giallos of the period like Hatchet for a Honeymoon and The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, it is neither a straightforward slasher film or even a mystery thriller since the killer’s identity is revealed early in the film. Think of it more as a psychological case study with large portions of it told through from the point of view of a seriously deranged individual.

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David Rocha plays a twisted former medical student who can’t tell reality from his hallucinations in The Killer of Dolls (1975).

Paul (David Rocha), the protagonist, is a medical student who was recently expelled from school because he becomes faint at the sight of blood. He is soon put to work by his father, the gardener of a large estate owned by the Countess Olivia (Helga Line). When Paul’s parents go on vacation, the young man starts to have a complete mental breakdown and soon the police are investigating a string of murdered women.  Image may be NSFW.
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Paul is a major head case whose madness is revealed through his hatred of dolls, which he not only collects but also enjoys tearing apart, burning or dissecting on an autopsy table in the privacy of his room. Sexual identity confusion is also a major problem in his interactions with others, particularly women. All of it stems from early childhood when his sister died and his mother began treating Paul as a daughter. The psychological fallout from this accounts for Paul’s frequent hallucinations where people appear as mannequins. Even worse, he has developed an alter ego in the form of his dead sister who appears to Paul in mirrors and compels him to murder.

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A woman abandoned by her date in the park falls victim to a masked assailant in The Killer of Dolls (1975), directed by Miguel Madrid aka Michael Skaife.

How does one begin to play such a tormented character? David Rocha throws himself into the role with such a rabid intensity that it occasionally topples over into unintentional comedy but there is no denying his effectiveness at gender shifting from his feminine side to macho aggressor.

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Los ojos azules de la muñeca rota aka Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (1974)

What is particularly atypical for this type of film is the lack of female nudity although the misogynistic tone is unfortunately hard to ignore and was typical of so many Spanish horror films and thrillers during the seventies such as The Blood Splattered Bride, Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (aka Los Ojas Azules de la Muneca Rota) and It Happened at Nightmare Inn. In a rare example of reverse exploitation, it is the male killer who is fetishized as a sex object, appearing in various scenes of undress, especially shower scenes where he fondles himself with orgiastic abandon. His overt narcissism is constantly on display whether he is sexually taunting the Countess or parading around in underwear or skin-tight clothes with shirts open to the waist.

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Paul (David Rocha in mask) prepares to operate on a naive neighborhood kid who thinks he playing “hospital” in The Killer of Dolls (1975).

The other big disconnect for some viewers may be the fact that no one seems to notice Paul’s completely unstable behavior. The Countess continues to lust after him even after he berates her for propositioning him and then attacks a garden table with a pruning blade in reaction. Audrey (Inma de Santis), the Countess’s virginal daughter, is also infatuated with Paul and doesn’t seem concerned about his obsession with dolls and mannequins. There is also Robert, a young boy of nine or ten who becomes an unlikely playmate of Paul in the movie’s most disturbing subplot. Robert comes close to being murdered twice (both attempts are interrupted by visitors) but he thinks Paul is just playing with him.

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Audrey (Inma de Santis) and Paul (David Rocha) fantasize about bridal gowns in the Spanish psycho thriller, The Killer of Dolls (1975).

The Killer of Dolls stands out as an oddball example of a film that blurs the line between exploitation and art film without comfortably settling into either category. It is worth seeing for Rocha’s over-the-top performance alone which is either so-bad-it’s-good or a valid interpretation of schizophrenic disorder. If the film had been hugely successful during its original release, it would probably have stereotyped Rocha as crazies for the rest of his film career in the same way that Psycho‘s Raymond Bates became Anthony Perkins’ best remembered role.

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David Rocha aka Jose Luis Moreno stars as the tormented protagonist of The Killer of Dolls, 1975.

Among the other intriguing attributes of The Killer of Dolls are the many surreal dream sequences and hallucinations which exploit the creepiest aspects of Paul’s hang-ups (the opening credit sequence set in a mannequin factory is stunning). Fans of the legendary architect Antonio Gaudi will also enjoy the film’s fantastic setting in Barcelona’s Park Guell, which serves as the Countess’s estate (The other Spanish locations include Sitges and Castelldefels).

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Inma de Santis (left) and Helga Line play daughter and mother in the Spanish psycho thriller, The Killer of Dolls (1975), directed by Michael Skaife aka Miguel Madrid.

The Killer of Dolls also provides a juicy role for Helga Line as the sex-starved Countess. The German actress became a popular fixture in European genre films but is probably best known for such popular Spanish imports as Horror Express, The Vampire’s Night Orgy and When the Screaming Stops (aka The Loreley’s Grasp).

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A publicity shot of Inma de Santis and David Rocha during the making of The Killer of Dolls (1975) in Spain.

Inma de Santis is also well cast as the innocent, adoring Audrey, who represents an impossibly idealized romantic partner for Paul. Unfortunately, de Santis died in a car accident at age 30, cutting short a promising career in Spanish cinema. Among her more famous roles in the genre are Eloy de la Iglesia’s Forbidden Love Game (1975), opposite John Moulder-Brown, and Devil’s Exorcist (El juego del Diablo, 1975).  Image may be NSFW.
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Last for not least the music score by Alfonso Santisteban effectively reflects the musical influences of the seventies starting with an opening theme that sounds inspired by Shaft and other Blaxploitation soundtrack albums. There is also an amusing and unexpected musical interlude which predates the music videos of the eighties and features a folk rock band performing at a deserted amphitheater while two female dancers do “The Robot.” Remember that dance?

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Paul (David Rocha) admires a recent trophy from his stalking session in a local park in the 1975 Spanish thriller, The Killer of Dolls (1975).

When you look at The Killer of Dolls in the context of when it was made, it is rather extraordinary that it even exists. It was released in early 1975 while General Franco was still alive (he died in November 1975) and Spanish cinema was still at the mercy of an all-powerful board of government censors. It is more than a little surprising that so much taboo material – an androgynous protagonist, male nudity, gore, interracial sex (The Countess goes to bed with her black servant Rene) and the threat of child abuse – managed to survive the cut. In an extra feature on the Blu-Ray of The Killer of Dolls, we discover that the censors were more concerned with how Spain and the setting might be perceived by audiences outside the country. As a result, the director was ordered to give the cast, including himself, non-Spanish names and change the setting to France (in name only).

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A serial killer spies on a couple making love but sees the woman as a mannequin in the 1975 Spanish psycho thriller, The Killer of Dolls.

The Blu-Ray of The Killer of Dolls is recommended for connoisseurs of bizarre cinema and includes several extra features of interest: two audio commentaries, one by Kat Ellinger of Daughters of Darkness Podcast fame and one by Euro-cult expert Robert Monell & film historian Rod Barnett. It also includes an interview with actor David Rocha and an interview with Dr. Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, author of Spanish Horror Film.

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The opening credit sequence of The Killer of Dolls (1975) is set in a mannequin factory.

Other websites of interest:

https://366weirdmovies.com/capsule-the-killer-of-dolls-1975/

https://www.bmovienewsvault.com/2019/10/the-killer-of-dolls-and-woman-chasing.html

https://www.wallofcelebrities.com/celebrities/helga-line/biography.html

https://www.vulture.com/article/spanish-horror-movies-you-should-watch.html

https://elpais.com/elpais/2013/12/30/inenglish/1388413211_320751.html

https://player.fm/series/daughters-of-darkness-podcast-with-kat-ellinger-and-samm-deighan-1447458

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itronay3V94

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The Spanish DVD cover for The Killer of Dolls (1975)

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Clik here to view.Films about hobos have always been predominantly about male characters, with few exceptions such as Veronica Lake donning a male hobo disguise and tagging along with Hollywood producer-turned-drifter Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels [1941]. So, it’s particularly unexpected and refreshing to see a Depression era based film like Girls of the Road (1940), in which almost all of the central characters are women, playing runaways, vagrants and other homeless cases, fending for themselves on the margins of society. 

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Clik here to view.At the time it was made Columbia was rivaling Warner Bros.’s output in the early thirties with a slew of social issue/exploitation programmers such as Glamour for Sale [1940], Convicted Woman [1940] and Men Without Souls [1940]. While it certainly wasn’t perceived as anything distinctive or different from the other low-budget genre films being spit off the assembly line, Girls of the Road looks much more interesting today and is a cut above the standard Columbia B-movie.

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Cast members from 1940’s Girls of the Road featuring Lola Lane (center) pose for a publicity photo.

Part of the reason is the film’s offbeat subject manner – how many films about girl hobos can you name? – but it’s also the tug-o-war between the exploitation elements and genuine social critique that make it a fascinating oddity. Then there’s the casting starting with the criminally undervalued Ann Dvorak and including such spunky character actresses as Helen Mack (The Son of Kong [1933]), Lola Lane (oldest sister of actresses Rosemary and Priscilla Lane), Ann Doran (Rebel Without a Cause [1955]), Mary Field (Song of the South [1946]) and Grace Lenard. The token male actors include small roles for Bruce Bennett (Mildred Pierce [1945]) as a police officer and Don Beddoe (The Face Behind the Mask [1941]) as an unsympathetic sheriff.

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Cesca Camonte (Ann Dvorak) is threatened by her gangster brother Tony (Paul Muni) in Scarface (1932), directed by Howard Hawks & Richard Rosson.

Ann Dvorak, whose talent was mostly wasted during her Warner Bros. days as a contract player, would occasionally win a role that demonstrated what a fine actress she could be – The Crowd Roars [1932], Scarface [1932],  Three on a Match [1932], Heat Lightning [1934], Dr. Socrates [1935]. By the time she made Girls of the Road, she was deeply entrenched in a B movie career, most of it undistinguished, and she probably didn’t relish making this one either. Yet, it was clearly a star role for her (despite the movie’s poverty row budget) and she makes the most of it as Kay Warren, the privileged daughter of a governor, who becomes emotionally invested in the plight of homeless women and runaways during the Depression.

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Helen Mack (left) and Ann Dvorak star in the B-movie quickie about female hobos – Girls of the Road (1940), directed by Nick Grinde.

The film throws us quickly into the premise with a quick montage of dramatizations depicting the dangers of life on the road, ending with one unfortunate earning a newspaper headline as the victim of the “Hobo Girl Strangler.” But that’s another movie. Image may be NSFW.
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Determined to do something about the rapidly escalating situation after her father refuses to take action (based on a report), Kay decides to leave home but leaves behind this note: “Dad, the girls in the report aren’t figures and facts. They’re people like me. I’m going to meet and try to find out about them. Maybe there is some way to help them. Please don’t try to make me come back until I’m ready.” Then she hits the road, disguised as a vagrant on the run with a fake backstory. Almost immediately she gets picked up a masher and gets out of his car in a rainstorm. She then hooks up with a fellow hitchhiker, Mickey (Helen Mack), and they make their way to a girl hobo camp which is soon busted by the cops.  Image may be NSFW.
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After a brief jail stint with the obligatory food fight and riot scene, the female transients are taken to the train depot and herded onto boxcars headed for the state border where they will be processed by the local authorities. A change of plans occurs, however, when one of the girl hobos causes the sheriff to fall off the moving train and afraid of reprisals, the entire group flees the train, scattering in all directions.

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Ann Dvorak (left) and Helen Mack experience a female hobo jungle first hand in Girls of the Road (1940).

The second half of Girls of the Road follows Kay and Mickey’s brief stay at a motor court where they offer refuge to Jerry (Ann Doran), a former jailmate who soon robs them and betrays them to the cops. Kay and Mickey manage to avoid capture, thanks to a sympathetic truck driver, and make their way to a rural hobo camp run by Ellie (Lola Lane), a tough, confrontational type who clearly has it in for her latest arrivals after hostile earlier impressions. More hardships and trouble occur before a tragedy brings them all together in a moment of female bonding. Then a swarm of cops close in and it’s back to the authorities for an unexpected – and idealized – happy ending.   Image may be NSFW.
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You can tell from the above synopsis that Girls of the Road, directed by Nick Grinde, takes a formulaic approach to the social problem of hobo girls, introducing melodrama, chase sequences and tawdry situations every few minutes to keep the sixty-one minute movie hurling along. There are also absurd contrivances such as the introduction of a young innocent who spent her last money on her wedding dress instead of a train ticket to join her future husband. So there she is amid a pack of homeless, predatory females, clinging to her neatly wrapped wedding dress and hoping to hitchhike or boxcar-hop her way to the wedding in time.

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Female vagrants take shelter from the authorities in Girls of the Road (1940), directed by Nick Grinde.

It also has to be said that being a typical B-unit production from White Hollywood, there is no representation by Black, Mexican, Native American or any other ethnic group on display but you can almost sense them just beyond the camera range, living an existence even worse than the one shown.

Despite these obvious flaws, there are plenty of powerful and moving scenes in this unpretentious minor leaguer that successfully evoke the era in spirit, either through the dialogue and situations or in purely visual terms.

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Hobos in a boxcar view female runaways passing along the rail in Girls of the Road (1940).

One of the most evocative moments in the film occurs when the hobo girls are taken to the train depot where the sheriff intends to transport them to the state line. As their train pulls in with boxcar after boxcar filled with other hobos like them, mostly men, the camera cuts back and forth between both groups as they eye each other. No words or dialogue are needed as we see the faces before us and for a brief moment I forgot I was watching actors instead of real people.

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Lola Lane (center) and her homeless pals acknowledge a passing boxcar full of hobos in Girls of the Road (1940).

Helen Mack and Lola Lane, in particular, bring real grit and a believable cynicism to characters who have seen their share of hard knocks. Dvorak, in contrast, has the more difficult role of trying to fit in with this hardened bunch and not really succeeding in fooling anyone – either her fellow hobos or the viewer. For one thing her polished manner, obvious education and stylish clothes are a dead giveaway that she’s not the real McCoy but she’s eventually accepted nonetheless with few questions asked. The reason her idealized and implausible character works is because Dvorak exudes such a warm and luminous presence here with those big, soulful eyes of hers and that unique face which can look beautiful one minute and haggard and haunted the next.

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Ann Doran plays a traitorous vagrant in the B-movie social drama, Girls of the Road (1940), directed by Nick Grinde.

There are other things I love about Girls of the Road such as the idyllic hobo jungle in the countryside complete with a lake, abandoned farmhouse and bucolic surroundings with no men in sight. In fact, many of the women partner up as couples though any suggestion of lesbian behavior is never overt, except in the eye of the beholder perhaps. And even though this all-female encampment is never as idealized as the shantytown in Frank Borzage’s Depression era romance, A Man’s Castle (1933) – the women are constantly bickering and fighting – it does offer a respite from the road or the railyard or some industrial urban setting.

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Spencer Tracy (left) and Loretta Young star in the Depression-era romance set in an idealized shantytown in A Man’s Romance (1933), directed by Frank Borzage.

I also like the tough, sarcastic non-stop bantering between the hobo girls as they constantly jockey for position or advantage amongst themselves. Partly it’s a survival tactic, partly a reflection of their experience “out there.”  Yet, unlike Warner Bros. Depression era dramas like Heroes for Sale [1933] or Wild Boys of the Road, Girls of the Road isn’t as relentlessly grim and Dvorak gets off lightly without having to learn about life on the road in a manner than would scar her forever. There is even unexpected humor here and there and one surprising moment when the seemingly heartless Ellie breaks out in song with a spiritual – “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” – in response to the death of a fellow drifter. In the end, Girls of the Road offers hope at the end of the tunnel with an FDR New Deal wet dream climax but it’s the journey there that often reflects glimpses of the real world.

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Homeless female vagrants experience the dangers of Depression era America in Girls of the Road (1940).

According to studio production notes, Dvorak, Mack and Lane were all briefly apprehended by the police in Saugus, California during the filming of Girls of the Road; the lawmen thought the trio were genuine vagrants.

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Director Nick Grinde circa 1928.

Director Nick Grinde might not rate the accolades usually bestowed on directors like William Wellman and Howard Hawks but he was an efficient and prolific craftsman whose specialty was entertaining, fast-paced, assembly line genre pictures. Among his more recognizable credits are the Pre-Code Shopworn (1932) with Barbara Stanwyck, Public Enemy’s Wife (1936) starring Pat O’Brien, several Boris Karloff vehicles including Before I Hang (1940) and Hitler-Dead or Alive (1942), a bizarre WWII propaganda melodrama that remains an undiscovered cult gem.  Image may be NSFW.
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Girls of the Road is not available at this time on any format although it occasionally pops up on TCM, which is where I first saw it. It would make sense for a DVD/Blu-Ray distributor to package this title along with other B-movie rareties from Columbia into a “special collection” for classic film fans. Until that happens, you can view a mediocre print of it on Youtube.

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Ann Dvorak (left) and Helen Mack take shelter during a rainstorm with other homeless women in Girls of the Road (1940).Bruce

*This is a revised and updated version of a blog that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks (later renamed Streamline), the official blog of Turner Classic Movies

Other links of interest:

http://www.anndvorak.com/cms/biography/

http://greatentertainersarchives.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-lane-sisters-and-their-mark-in.html

https://collections.oscars.org/link/papers/63

https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/movies/how-the-great-depression-inspired-hollywoods-golden-age-26481978.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGx5k0-b6tE

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Clik here to view.Austrian director Jessica Hausner has been a favorite of the Cannes Film Festival ever since her 45 minute short Inter-View won a Special Mention in 1999. Since then her subsequent feature films, Lovely Rita (2001), Hotel (2004) and Amour fou (2014) have all been nominated for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard Award. And her new feature Little Joe was nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or award and won the Best Actress award for Emily Beecham. It is also worth noting that all of Hausner’s previous features with the exception of Lourdes (a French language production) have been in German. Little Joe, not to be confused with the 2008 documentary about Warhol star Joe Dallesandro also entitled Little Joe, marks Hausner’s English language debut and it is a remarkably self-assured and hypnotic work that displays none of the usual drawbacks that detract from a director’s first foray into a non-native language production.  

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Botany scientist Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) is in control at her work but at home she is more insecure in Little Joe (2019), directed by Jessica Hausner.

Like most of Hausner’s previous films, Little Joe features an idiosyncratic female protagonist. Alice (Beecham) is a highly respected botanist whose work at a plant research facility has produced a stunning hybrid. The flowering species which she calls “Little Joe” after her son Joe (Kit Connor) emits a scent that makes people happy. All it requires in return is water and attending to its needs which includes touching and talking to it.

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Scientist Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) creates an unusual plant hybrid (pictured) in Little Joe (2019), directed by Jessica Hausner.

What starts out as an ominous and chilling variation on The Little Shop of Horrors slowly plays out as a more cerebral consideration of the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers and then veers off into a paranoid psychological drama about a woman’s loss of control over her own life.

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Chris (Ben Whishaw), a work colleague, tries to interest Alice (Emily Beecham) in a social life outside of work in Little Joe (2019).

Alice, a divorced working mother, is supremely self-confident at her work place and seems too preoccupied with her research to care about a social life or even romance despite overtures from her colleague Chris (Ben Whishaw). At home with her son, however, there are obvious cracks in her armor. Alice feels guilty about their limited time together and even wonders during a session with her therapist (Lindsey Duncan) if her long hours at the lab were an ulterior motive for driving her husband away.

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Laboratory workers (from left) David Wilmot, Phenix Brossard, Emily Beecham and Ben Whislaw study the effects of botany bio-engineering on a monitor in Little Joe (2019).

Alice’s fears began to grow alarmingly as co-workers and even her own son begin to act differently after being exposed to pollen released by her laboratory-raised plants. Bella (Kerry Fox), a co-worker who previously suffered mental health issues, becomes convinced that her dog is no longer the same pet after spending time in the greenhouse with the plants. Instead of achieving a blissful or happy state, those exposed to “Little Joe” become strangers to those who knew them while maintaining that they have never felt more like themselves.

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Scientist Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) begins to have doubts about her new botany creation in Little Joe (2019).

Anyone expecting a traditional sci-fi or horror film will probably be disappointed in Little Joe since it clearly has no interest in following genre formulas after establishing its unsettling premise. In fact, Hausner’s film defies easy classification since it is more interested in maintaining a sense of dread instead of serving up a body count or apocalyptic mayhew. The director even injects unexpected humor during crucial dramatic moments to throw you off balance such as the scene where Joe and his girlfriend Selma admit to Alice that they have been infected by the plant.

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Divorce mom Emily Beecham worries that her workaholic nature is affecting her relationship with her son Kit Connor in the 2019 film, Little Joe.

Joe: All of us who have inhaled the pollen belong together now and will do anything to help Little Joe…If you inhale the pollen too, you’ll understand. It makes you feel happy. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?

Selma: It’s like being dead. You don’t notice you’re dead, do you?

When Alice looks shocked at their remarks, they both explode with laughter, saying, “It’s a joke. You don’t really believe that nonsense, do you?”

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Alice (Emily Beecham) shows little interest in getting romantically involved with co-worker Chris (Ben Whishaw) in Little Joe (2019), directed by Jessica Hausner.

In the end, Little Joe refuses to go where you may expect or want it to go but it also refrains from giving the viewer a sense of satisfying closure at the film’s fadeout. Is that a bad thing? That depends on if you like your endings neat and tidy or ambiguous and open-ended.

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Joe (Kit Connor) and his mother Alice (Emily Beecham) stare at the strange plant she has brought home in Little Joe (2019).

Some might see Little Joe as a cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific experimentation or an allegory about the long-term effects of a self-medicating society or maybe even a black comedy about the work place and the price of ambition. All of those are valid interpretations.

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When Alice’s new hybrid plants first flower they appear to be turquoise but later change to a bright red in the sci-fi drama, Little Joe (2019) starring Emily Beecham.

The beauty of Little Joe is that it is creates its own universe, where fantasy and reality bleed together in a dream state, seducing the viewer with its color-coordinated art direction and visual design. The hybrid plants are particularly mesmerizing. When first seen they sport beautiful turquoise blooms with purple centers but a later variety displays glowing red flowers with filament that clearly responses to mammals. These special effects are subtle but effectively creepy.

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Joe (Kit Connor) notices that the odd plant his mother brought home from the lab responds to human stimuli in Little Joe (2019).

The music score also provides the film with rare moments of dramatic intensity and shock effects. It seems partially inspired by the type of orchestration prevalent in kabuki theater presentations – ceremonial drum beats, shrill, piercing woodwinds and an occasional flute or oboe solo, which has a haunting effect.

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Emily Beecham (left), Phenix Brossard and director Jessica Hausner appear at the Cannes film festival premiere of Little Joe (2019).

Of course Little Joe wouldn’t work as well without the excellent acting ensemble that Hausner has assembled (Many of the actors are from the U.K.). Emily Beecham (Hail, Caesar!, 28 Weeks Later) deserves her Cannes Best Actress award for a challenging role that requires her to transition from a formidable botany expert to a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Ben Whishaw is particularly well cast for his geeky fanboy intelligence (Q in the James Bond films, Skyfall and Spectre) and deceitfulness (the 2015 BBC series, London Spy) and Kerry Fox (Bright Star, An Angel at My Table) hits all the right notes as a troubled, irksome colleague.

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Ben Whishaw (pictured) plays a botany specialist whose behavior appears to change after being exposed to a new hybrid in Little Joe (2019).

Little Joe isn’t likely to reach audiences beyond the small art house circuit but it is promising that the film is even being distributed in the U.S. If it does manage to attract any attention during Oscar awards season, that might help stimulate interest in Hausner’s earlier work and result in opportunities for film lovers to see acclaimed titles like Lourdes and Hotel. On the basis of Little Joe alone, Hausner is a clearly remarkable visual stylist and provocateur who deserves wider exposure.  Image may be NSFW.
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Little Joe is currently in release at selected theaters across the U.S.

Other websites of interest:

https://collider.com/little-joe-jessica-hausner-interview/

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/jessica-hausner-little-joe-cannes-film-festival-interview-1203219442/

http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2016/the-10-best-ben-whishaw-movie-performances/

http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2016/the-10-best-ben-whishaw-movie-performances/

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Clik here to view.We’ve all heard the famous quote “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” which came from the 1697 play The Mourning Bride by William Congreve, but what are the options for the discarded one? Shame the perpetrator in public? Internalize the rage? Become detached? Laugh it off? In Hollywood, the idea of the scorned woman bent on revenge is usually depicted more along the lines of Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me (1971) and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987) but you really don’t have to wield a knife and go berserk to redeem your self-respect. Instead, you can be creative, unpredictable and non-threatening in appearance like Emily (Geraldine Chaplin), the protagonist of Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name (1978).  

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Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) plans a new life for herself after her release from jail in Remember My Name (1978), directed by Alan Rudolph.

Emily is tough, independent, cunning and manipulative in the style of such film noir heroines as Joan Crawford (The Damned Don’t Cry, 1950), Rita Hayworth (Gilda, 1946) and Ann Sheridan (Nora Prentiss, 1947) and that association is completely intentional as Rudolph once stated that Remember My Name was “an update on the themes of the classic woman’s melodramas of the Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford era.”

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Ex-jailbird Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) reports to the store manager Mr. Nudd (Jeff Goldblum) in Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name (1978).

A brief description of the bare bones plot also suggests a vintage Warner Bros. melodrama on the surface: Emily, a recent parolee from prison after a 12-year sentence, arrives in a small town and takes a room in a local boarding house. She wrangles a job at the local Thrifty Mart and initiates an affair with her landlord (Moses Gunn) in order to receive additional amenities. But her real focus is Neil (Anthony Perkins), a married construction worker, who shares a secret past with Emily and may have been the reason for her imprisonment. She stalks Neil and his wife Barbara (Berry Berenson), breaks into their home, commits petty, malicious acts like destroying a flower bed or making prank calls, upsets the balance of their shaky relationship and generally instills fear and panic before ending her visit.

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Emily (Geraldine Chaplin, left) creeps into the Curry household and scares Barbara (Berry Berenson), who holds her at bay with a knife in Remember My Name (1978).

In tone and execution, Remember My Name is abstract and free-form, a mood piece that is more interested in penetrating Emily’s psyche than following a conventional narrative. And Geraldine Chaplin is mesmerizing in what might be the finest performance of her career. Veering from looking lost and wounded to exploding in violent outbursts, she might very well be psychotic and dangerous…or maybe it’s all an act.

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The soundtrack album of Remember My Name featuring songs by Alberta Hunter.

Rudolph keeps you guessing as he underscores Emily’s transitory emotional state with the songs of blues singer Alberta Hunter. Such tunes as “You Reap Just What You Sow,” “My Castle’s Rockin'” and “I’ve Got a Mind to Ramble” not only comment on Emily’s state of mind but also propel the quirky narrative along toward a final resolution of sorts between Emily and Neil.

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Director/screenwriter Alan Rudolph in the 1970s.

Rudolph, who began his film career as an assistant director and worked for Robert Altman on several films, moved into writing and directing in 1972 with his low-budget debut feature, Premonition, a hippie drug culture cautionary tale. His second feature, Terror Circus (aka The Barn of the Naked Dead aka Nightmare Circus, 1974) with Andrew Prine as a psycho with a troupe of enslaved women performing weird sideshow acts, certainly didn’t encourage any positive encouragement either.  Image may be NSFW.
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It wasn’t until 1976 that Rudolph began to develop his own distinctive style and themes with Welcome to L.A., a film that put him on the radar of most major film critics, despite the mixed reviews. According to the director, the idea for Remember My Name popped into his head while he was driving in Los Angeles. He was on his way to meet with Altman to discuss a project and he passed a theatre marquee in Los Angeles promoting a series of “femme fatale” films.

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Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) pays a surprise visit to her ex-lover’s construction site in Remember My Name (1978), directed by Alan Rudolph.

Altman agreed to serve as the producer on Remember My Name and both filmmakers felt Geraldine Chaplin was the ideal actress for Emily, having worked with her previously on Nashville (1975), Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) and Welcome to L.A. (in which Altman also served as producer).

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Berry Berenson and her husband Anthony Perkins on the set of Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name (1978).

Anthony Perkins was cast on the basis of his brilliant performance in the stage production of Equus, which Rudolph’s wife had recently seen and suggested him for the part. Perkins also had a suggestion of his own; he recommended his own wife, Berry Berenson, for the part of Barbara, his screen wife.

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Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) and Neil (Anthony Perkins) drink each other under the table in Remember My Name (1978).

Rudolph stated that,”if Tony was comfortable with her, there was something that might come out of it that I wouldn’t have to guide.” (from Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins by Charles Winecoff). Ironically, Berenson was natural and confident for her first film role but Perkins felt completely insecure about his performance. Altman recalls that the actor was nervous about the film: “He was doing double duty, worrying about himself and his wife. And I think the blue-collar aspect of it worried him. I told him, ‘You don’t have to be born with a hammer in your hand to take on that situation. This guy’s got a strange past.'”

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Husband and wife Barbara (Berry Berenson) and Neil (Anthony Perkins) talk in the checkout line while employee Emily (Geraldine Chaplin, background) tries to be inconspicuous in Remember My Name (1978).

When Perkins was encouraged to watch the day’s rushes, something he normally avoided, he became convinced he was completely wrong for the part and wanted to quit. When Rudolph threatened to quit too if Perkins did, the actor was genuinely moved and decided to stay. “From that moment on,” the director said, “he became our number one cheerleader…Everyone loved him. Geraldine just adored him. He went from being insecure to being the most stabilizing factor in our film.”  Image may be NSFW.
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For the scene in Remember My Name when Neil and Emily get drunk in a bar before going to bed together, Perkins requested real alcohol. Rudolph recalled, “He was drinking for real, and we did it just in two takes…It wasn’t acting, it was meta-acting. There was nothing unprofessional about it; they were both amazing. The exit from the bar was the last thing we did before lunch, and Tony was getting pale. Finally he said, ‘Did you get what you need? Do you want us to do it again?’ I said no. So he got up from the table, grabbed a trash can, barely made it outside, and vomited. He spent lunch lying down somewhere, then he was fine. He continually added that something extra.”

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Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) has problems with her supervisor Rita (Alfre Woodard) in Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name (1978).

Remember My Name is worth seeing alone for the inspired performances of Perkins and Chaplin and the rich blues score by the 83-year-old Alberta Hunter who wrote new compositions for the movie. But it yields the additional pleasures of seeing a cast of up-and-coming actors in distinctive supporting roles: Jeff Goldblum as a harried store manager and Alfre Woodard as a suspicious co-worker of Emily. In small bit parts you can spot Dennis Franz (in his feature film debut) as Neil’s hard-ass boss and Tim Thomerson (Carny, Trancers) as a construction worker.

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Berry Berenson had a small role in Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake of Cat People.

There is also the curiosity of seeing Berry Berenson in her only major part (she also had cameos in Winter Kills [1979] and Cat People [1982]). She died on Sept. 11, 2001 as one of the passengers aboard the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the World Trade Center.

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Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) and Neil (Anthony Perkins) play reunited former lovers in Remember My Name (1978), directed by Alan Rudolph.

When Remember My Name was released, it suffered the same fate as Rudolph’s previous feature, Welcome to L.A. – mixed reviews and a poor box office reception. The Variety reviewer wrote, “Whatever the generic goal, the end product is an incomprehensible melange of striking imagery, obscure dialog, a powerful score, and a script that doesn’t known how to go from A to B…If done on a traditional, linear level, Remember My Name might have induced some interest as a moderate chiller with emotional undertones.”

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Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) manipulates her landlord Pike (Moses Gunn) to her advantage in Remember My Name (1978).

There were advocates of the film as well such as Tom Milne of Sight and Sound who called it a “brilliantly realized exercise…whose emotional truth becomes devastatingly real.” Dave Kehr of Chicago Reader wrote, “The film isn’t devoid of humor, but its overriding tones are of passion and pain: Chaplin gives a performance that’s so wired and immediate it almost hurts.” But clearly Remember My Name was not understood or fully appreciated at the time.  Image may be NSFW.
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Rudolph once said he saw the movie as “a metaphor for whatever impact the women’s movement as a public forum had on me.” Still, feminists criticized the film, and the director noted, “They said Emily…was too much like a man in her vengeance. I pointed out that if she were like a man, she would have killed her ex-husband, and shame on them for not understanding that.”

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Emily (Geraldine Chaplin) vamps it up and stalks a former lover in Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name (1978).

Possibly the best endorsement and defense of Remember My Name came from film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum who wrote, “It strikes me as the most exciting Hollywood fantasy to come along in quite some time…Remember My Name deliberately suspends narrative clarity for the better part of its running time, and never entirely eliminates the ambiguities that keep it alive and unpredictable – even though its themes, thanks to Alberta Hunter’s offscreen blues songs, are never really in question. It will only confound spectators and critics who perceive movies chiefly through their plots…Settling on a tight yet relaxed framework where the anger and passion of a wounded outsider can define its own awesome limits….the results are spellbinding.”

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Cinematographer Tak Fujimoto takes a light reading on the set of Remember My Name (1978), directed by Alan Rudolph.

While some of Alan Rudolph’s better known films like Welcome to L.A. (1976), Trouble in Mind (1985) and Afterglow (1997) are still available on DVD at selected online stores, Remember My Name has remained missing in action on DVD or Blu-Ray for years. If you’re listening Kino Lorber, Arrow Films or The Criterion Collection, please consider making this available in the near future.Image may be NSFW.
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*This is an updated and revised version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other websites of interest:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/apr/30/alan-rudolph-film-robert-altman-interview

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-alan-rudolph/

https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2018/03/remember-my-name-1979-review/

http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/great-directors/alan-rudolph/

https://www.efe.com/efe/english/entertainment/actress-geraldine-chaplin-old-age-is-horrible-it-drives-me-crazy/50000264-3897822#

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6mamLdYraU

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Clik here to view.When the United States officially entered World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hollywood got busy producing morale-boosting entertainments with a heavy accent on flag-waving patriotism and pro-American propaganda. One of the stranger efforts to emerge from this uncertain time in U.S. history was First Yank in Tokyo (1945), a B-movie espionage thriller directed by Gordon Douglas and set inside a Japanese concentration camp. 

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Major Steve Ross (Tom Neal, right) and his co-pilot are on a top secret mission to Japan in the WW2 drama, First Yank in Tokyo (1945).

The outlandish plot follows Major Steve Ross (Tom Neal) as he volunteers for an undercover mission behind enemy lines that requires him to alter his face via plastic surgery in order to pass as a Japanese soldier. The surgeon cautions him, “I feel it is my duty to again warn you that once your features are changed, they can never be changed back.” So why does Ross do it? To gain access to Captain Andrew Kent (Michael St. Angel), a captured American physicist who was working on the formula for the atomic bomb.

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Major Steve Ross (Tom Neal) is unrecognizable to his former fiancee Abby (Barbara Hale) after having plastic surgery to look like a Japanese solder in First Yank in Tokyo (1945). WHAT?

It’s no secret that Ross speaks fluent Japanese from residing there in 1936 so he’s clearly the perfect man to infiltrate the concentration camp where Kent is held. Regarding the enemy, Ross tells his superior, “I think I know every kink in their corkscrew psychology, sir.” But there are two developments he didn’t count on – running into his former fiancee Abby (Barbara Hale) at the camp (he thought she was killed in Bataan) and encountering his former Japanese roommate Okaruna (Richard Loo) from college, now an insidiously evil camp commandant.

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Major Steve Ross (Tom Neal, reading letter) infiltrates a Japanese prison camp after his plastic surgery in First Yank in Tokyo (1945), directed by Gordon Douglas.

It turns out that Abby was captured and placed in the camp to tend to the American prisoners. Of course, neither she nor Okaruna recognize Ross in his new identity but there is something so familiar about him that disturbs them both. Oh, we forgot to tell you the most important part. The sinister Okaruna has designs on Abby who is now in love with Kent – all of this being observed by Ross who stands by, waiting for the right moment to spring Kent from the camp.

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A flashback to happier times between Abby (Barbara Hale) and Steve (Tom Neal) in the B-movie WW2 espionage drama, First Yank into Tokyo (1945).

First Yank in Tokyo has enough plot contrivances for ten films but director Douglas juggles them all so effectively and with such breathless pacing that you rarely have time to consider the implausibility of the basic premise. And the film’s blatant anti-Japanese posturing along with Tom Neal’s crazy slant-eyed makeup, several nutty flashback sequences and unsubtle stock footage inserts provides a measure of politically incorrect fun that should come as a surprise to anyone who was expecting a conventional war drama.

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Major Steve Ross (Tom Neal, center) successfully infiltrates a Japanese prison camp thanks to plastic surgery in First Yank in Tokyo (1945).

At times, First Yank in Tokyo degenerates into pure camp with dialogue exchanges like the plastic surgeon telling Ross, “You’re as perfect a Jap as we can turn out.” And the film is chock full of ethnic stereotypes with all the Japanese characters depicted as deceitful, sadistic, arrogant and fond of pithy sayings like “Your country is an overripe plum. It will be shaken to the earth by the winds sweeping from Japan.” If nothing else, you have to love the frantic climax which borrows brilliantly and shamelessly from the airport farewell in Casablanca (1942) and the machine-gun fadeout of Bataan (1943).  Image may be NSFW.
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Interestingly enough, First Yank in Tokyo went through some last minute changes before it was released. The studio wanted to make it more topical, due to recent events, so Captain Kent, the American prisoner, was transformed into a scientist who holds the formula to the atomic bomb thus justifying the final shot of the famous mushroom cloud. The film is also unique in that it makes a reference to the Bataan Death March, a notorious event which was only referenced in one other American war movie, Back to Bataan (1945).

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Film director Gordon Douglas (center) on the set of a movie with Alan Ladd.

Gordon Douglas would helm several more B-pictures for RKO followed by a short tenure at Columbia Pictures and then graduate to bigger budgets and A-list stars at Warner Bros. where he made such films as Come Fill the Cup (1951) featuring James Cagney, Mara Maru (1952) with Errol Flynn and Young at Heart (1954) starring Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. Some of his assignments at that studio have achieved cult status and include the sci-fi classic Them! (1954), Sincerely Yours (1955) featuring Liberace in a rare dramatic, infamously laughable performance as an egotistical pianist, and The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) in which the title villain is played by the late Robert Evans, former studio mogul of Paramount in the late sixties.

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Al Roberts (Tom Neal) makes the mistake of his life when he picks up hitchhiker Vera (Ann Savage) in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945).

As for leading man Tom Neal, he would become a film noir icon with his next picture, Edgar J. Ulmer’s Detour (1945). Unfortunately, Neal’s life would become just as hopelessly doomed as the character he played in that poverty row classic through his own reckless behavior. He became tabloid fodder after his notorious affair with actress Barbara Payton which resulted in a public brawl with her husband-to-be Franchot Tone in 1951. Neal sent Tone to the hospital with a broken nose, crushed cheekbone and a concussion. The scandal effectively got Neal blackballed from working at any of the major studios and he ended up making bottom of the barrel indies like Fingerprints Don’t Lie (1951) for Lippert Pictures and other minor distributors. He was soon forced to find another line of work and started his own landscaping company. When that failed, he declared bankruptcy but his troubles increased in 1965 when he was accused of shooting and killing his third wife. The charges were reduced to involuntary manslaughter and he ended up serving six years of a ten year sentence. Shortly after he was released on parole, he died of heart failure at the age of 58.

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Tom Neal plays an American educated Japanese man who becomes a dangerous militant in Behind the Rising Sun (1943).

By the way, First Yank into Tokyo was not the first time Neal had impersonated a Japanese man. In 1943, he played a Cornell University graduate who returns to his native Japan and becomes a sadistic militant in Behind the Rising Sun, Edward Dmytryk’s sensationalistic drama about the mistreatment of American and Chinese prisoners during World War II.  Image may be NSFW.
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First Yank into Tokyo first appeared on VHS from Warner Home Video in 1990 but it has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray in the U.S. The film has aired on TCM in the past so check their programming schedule regularly for future showings.

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*This is a revised and expanded version of an article that previously appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other websites of interest:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gordon-Douglas

https://www.palmspringslife.com/killer-career-actor-tom-neal/

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/31/barbara-hale-obituary

https://historycollection.co/10-anti-japanese-propaganda-films-from-wwii-filled-with-racist-messages/

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Clik here to view.Why does it often seem like the accumulation of great wealth and power by individuals does not necessarily come with an equal respect for ethics and morality? For Marion (Nadja Tiller), the heroine of Rolf Thiele’s Moral 63, the path to unbridled success is merely an escalating series of business transactions with rich and influential men who reward her for being beautiful, accommodating and discreet. Who cares about honor or virtue in a society where those attributes have no monetary value?

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Marion Hafner (Nadja Tiller) improves her social status during the German economic miracle of the late ’50s-early ’60s in Moral 63, directed by Rolf Thiele in 1963.

As you have probably guessed, Marion is little more than an expensive, high-class call girl but almost all of her friends and clients are from the upper echelons of West German society and the government. When we are first introduced to her she is dressed like a drum majorette and leading a parade before being whisked off to the authorities, jailed and charged with public misconduct and prostitution. Enter Axel (Mario Adorf), an opportunistic photographer/reporter, who sees Marion as a potential goldmine if he can convince her to give him an exclusive interview on her rise to fame.

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Marion (Nadja Tiller) tells all to tabloid journalist Axel (Mario Adorf) during her imprisonment in Moral 63, directed by Rolf Thiele.

Most of Moral 63, which was released in 1963, is told in flashback as Marion shares key moments in her life that made her the scandalous woman she is today. Unlike many women of her profession, Marion came from a well-to-do family and enjoyed a privileged lifestyle but Axel wants her to spice up her autobiography: “Your bourgeois upbringing won’t interest anyone. Bring in the social morass.” He encourages her to embellish or alter details about her life that would titillate the readers of tabloids so the flashbacks become a cheat, a mixture of the truth and wish fulfillment and that is part of Moral 63’s offbeat appeal.  Image may be NSFW.
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Director Rolf Thiele is little known outside Germany today but in 1958 he made a big splash with the expose drama Rosemary, based on the life and murder of Rosemarie Nitribitt, a top tier prostitute whose clients included the West German industrial elite. That film also proved to be a breakthrough role for Austrian actress Nadja Tiller who would work with Thiele on numerous films including this one, the psychological drama Labyrinth (1959), and the critically acclaimed adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger (1964).   Image may be NSFW.
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While Rosemary is a bleak and hard-edged critique of West Germany in the late fifties, Moral 63 is a much more gleefully cynical and flippant satire on the same topic of corruption and amorality in high places. It may lack the laugh out loud hilarity of Billy Wilder’s Cold War satire, One, Two, Three (1961), also set in West Berlin, but it is played lightly and provides a fascinating window into West German pop culture and politics at the time.  Image may be NSFW.
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When Thiele’s breakthrough film Rosemary was released, West Germany was still ascending as an economic superpower thanks to a currency reform in 1948 that put an end to post-war rationing directives, allocation edicts and price and wage controls. By 1962, however, Germany’s economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) was beginning to stall and it would soon result in a recession that lasted until 1967. (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s famous BRD Trilogy – The Marriage of Maria Braun, Veronika Voss and Lola – takes place during this formative period.).

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Tabloid journalist Axel (Mario Adorf) likes interviewing people about controversial topics in Moral 63, directed by Rolf Thiele in 1963.

Moral 63 not only revels in the behind-the-scenes excesses of the rich and powerful but even directly references some of the more famous political scandals of the era like the Spiegel case and the Fibag affair which aroused public outrage at the actions of specific government officials like Franz Josef Strauss, the Federal Minister of Defense.

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The Italian film poster for the 1963 West German satire Moral 63.

Marion becomes a willing pawn in the dirty tricks and games that drive the narrative of Moral 63 and Tiller is both beguiling and insouciant. She accepts her defeats as easily as her triumphs and only in her final scene do you detect a slight sense of loss or regret. Or is that merely a reaction to being splashed with soot-colored rainwater by a passing motorist?

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Marion (Nadja Tiller) and her mentor, Dr. Kampfer (Charles Regnier) in the 1963 critique of Germany’s economic miracle, Moral 63.

The most intriguing part of her climb to fame is her relationship with wealthy publisher Dr. Kampfer (Charles Regnier), who becomes an influential mentor, schooling her in the ways of the world with philosophical tidbits like “Be as clever as the snakes and as innocent as the doves” or “Beware of people for they will hand you over to the courts.” He first installs her in his gaudy penthouse, complete with a fancy indoor pool, white marble statues, erotic wall art and a ceiling mirror over his circular bed. Then Dr. Kampfer sets Marion up in a satellite office of his publishing firm in Bonn, Germany. Eventually he finances her move to a lavish country estate which she transforms into an exclusive brothel. Meanwhile, her next door neighbor, an ex-army general (Rudolf Forster), monitors her every move like an obsessed voyeur.

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Marion (Nadja Tiller) surveys the excessive garishness of her mentor’s penthouse in Moral 63, directed by Rolf Thiele.

The other crucial relationship in Moral 63 involves industrial tycoon Eduard Meyer-Cleve (Fritz Tillmann), who hires Marion to seduce his idealistic son Hans (Peter Parten) and convince him to become a capitalist and accept his fate as his father’s business successor. Will the mouse take the bait?

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Marion (Nadja Tiller) seals her business relationship with tycoon Meyer-Cleve (Fritz Tillmann) over a planned seduction of his son in Moral 63.

What gives the movie a solid jolt of energy and immediacy is Thiele’s almost breathless pacing and the dazzling black and white cinematography of Wolf Wirth, who appears to have adopted several visual techniques used previously by French New Wave directors. There are street scenes in real locations and shaky hand-held camera movements that have a documentary-like drama. Floor level shots introduce imposing characters while overhead views emphasize something decadent like Marion lying drunk on the floor while masked revelers dance around her. Thiele even has Wirth place actors in front of obvious rear screen projections to make satiric points about what is being said. In one scene, Axel even breaks the fourth wall when he addresses the audience and comments about the actress Najda Tiller while Marion looks on smiling.

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French New Wave techniques inform the visual look of Rolf Thiele’s Moral 63 with cinematography by Wolf Wirth.

The most visually dazzling set piece might be a masked ball at Marion’s country mansion which looks like it was modeled on Hieronymus Bosch’s famous painting, The Garden of Earthy Delights. The effect is both hallucinatory and grotesque.

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A madcap masked ball against rear screen projection is one of the visual highlights of Rolf Thiele’s Moral 63.

Sadly, Moral 63 is not currently available on DVD or Blu-ray in the U.S. although you might be able to find a bootleg copy somewhere (European Trash Cinema has a decent print taken from a German television broadcast).

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Film director Rolf Thiele

In fact, with the exception of Rosemary, most of Rolf Thiele’s work is not available domestically on any format. This is a real loss for classic cinema because Thiele was a key German director between the late fifties and mid-sixties. Unfortunately his later work often veered off into soft core exploitation like Grimm’s Fairy Tales for Adults (1969) and Sex Olympics (1972).   Image may be NSFW.
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Other web links of interest:

https://www.dw.com/en/actor-with-a-thousand-faces-mario-adorf-turns-85/a-18698291

https://www.allmovie.com/artist/nadja-tiller-p71005

https://www.fandango.com/people/rolf-thiele-669804/biography

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GermanEconomicMiracle.html

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/50th-anniversary-of-the-spiegel-affair-a-857030.html

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The story goes like this. German director Werner Herzog made a bet with aspiring filmmaker Errol Morris that if the latter ever completed the film he was working on – which was inspired by a news story about the mass relocation of the graves from a California pet cemetery – he would eat his shoe. Morris did indeed complete his film, which was called Gates of Heaven (1978) and, true to his word, Herzog boiled and ate his show at the film’s premiere in Berkeley. Filmmaker Les Blank recorded the event and turned it into a documentary short entitled Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe in 1980.  

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Pet cemetery owner Floyd McClure ponders the fate of Foothill Memorial Gardens in Gates of Heaven (1978), directed by Errol Morris.

The real surprise is that Gates of Heaven does not feel like a debut film or a movie made by a first time director. The film’s highly idiosyncratic and original approach to its subject moved German director Wim Wenders to proclaim it “a masterpiece” in its rough cut form and Roger Ebert became an early champion of the film. But Morris had difficulty getting the film distributed and it would be years before Gates of Heaven would be acknowledged as a film ahead of its time, one that was a true independent film before Sundance and IFC were brand names. In fact, Sundance was launched the year that Gates of Heaven was released.

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A scene from the Errol Morris documentary, Gates of Heaven (1978).

Often categorized by critics and reviewers as a documentary film, Gates of Heaven does not lend itself to easy categorization. For one thing, the movie doesn’t conform to any of the standard techniques we expect from documentaries; there is no clear agenda or editorial context from the get-go, there is no narrator and you never hear Morris asking his interviewees questions. There is also nothing natural about the way Morris chooses to light and frame his interview subjects.

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A typical example of Errol Floyd’s distinctive framing of subjects in Gates of Heaven (1978).

On the surface, Gates of Heaven has two stories to tell. The first one is about Floyd McClure, the owner of the Foothill Memorial Gardens pet cemetery near San Francisco. It was his lifelong dream to give deceased animals the sort of peaceful and pastoral resting place for his clients that is typical of human cemeteries. Unfortunately McClure went bankrupt, his property was rezoned for a housing project and the remains of the 450 pets buried there were relocated to another cemetery, the Bubbling Well Memorial Park in the Napa Valley, which was owned and operated by a father and his two sons.

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A scene from Errol Morris’s surreal documentary, Gates of Heaven (1978), his debut feature.

They occupy the second part of the story but bridging the two stories are interviews with McClure’s business partner, pet owners who buried their animals at the Foothill Memorial Gardens, a renderer who is completely candid about collecting dead pets and reprocessing animal byproducts, and other people who have some connection to the pet cemetery business. The movie could be described as American Gothic and it has the same unsettling and hypnotic effect that you experience while looking through a collection of Diane Arbus photographs.

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A pet cemetery figures prominently in Gates of Heaven (1978), the directorial debut of Errol Morris.

In an interview with Noel Murray for the A.V. Club, Morris described Gates of Heaven as “an excursion into some very odd dreamscapes, connected with some weird version of reality. From the beginning, I would always object when people would say, “It’s the pet-cemetery movie.” No, no, no, no! It’s not about pet cemeteries. And the next question is always, “If it’s not about pet cemeteries, what is it about?” Well, that’s tricky! In essence, it embodies many of the ideas that are in every single film I’ve made. The obsession with language. Eye contact. An interest in accounts of subjective experience rather than objective reporting. The fundamental belief that if you scratch the surface of any person, you will find a world of the insane, very close to that surface.”

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A pet owner and her beloved dog have a conversation in Gates of Heaven (1978), directed by Errol Morris.

Gates of Heaven continues to provoke mixed and unexpected reactions from viewers whenever it is shown. Some find it a static and uneventful talking-heads assemblage, others find moments of deadpan absurdity and high comedy in its stylized presentation and there are those who find it bleak, despairing but also quite moving. “I would call it hopeless,” Morris stated in the A.V. Club interview. “There’s a perverted hopelessness that runs through Gates of Heaven, and you have to wonder…hope for what? Life after death? Reunion with our loved ones? Hope for some kind of love, mortal or otherwise? For business success? For meaning? Hope for anything!”

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A cemetery caretaker blasts his rock music across the California landscape in Gates of Heaven (1978).

Despite the fact that Morris continues to be identified as a documentary filmmaker, his unique approach to subject matter separates him from the pack. (His 2003 feature, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, won the Oscar for Best Documentary and, more recently, The Unknown Known [2013] about former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was nominated for a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.)

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Film director Errol Morris

In an interview with The Believer in April 2004, Morris stated, “I like to think that I have invented a different style of documentary. Maybe I’m not the best one to say it, it’s better if others say it, but from Gates of Heaven on – and Gates of Heaven, in its own perverse way, was in my mind anti-verite in the sense of, let’s imagine all of the stylistic requirements of verite and let’s do the exact opposite; instead of being unobtrusive, let’s be as obtrusive as possible. Put people right in front of the camera, looking directly into the lens or close to it. Light everything. Add reenacted material, or constructed material of one kind or another. The naïve idea is that because this is so much different than verite, that it’s less truthful. But that’s only because of the spurious claim that verite makes in the first place. Claims about truth-telling. But style doesn’t guarantee truth. Godard is quoted as saying, “Film is truth at 24 frames a second.’ I prefer, “Film is lies at 24 frames a second.”

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A couple is interviewed by Errol Morris for his debut documentary, Gates of Heaven (1978).

At the same time, Morris doesn’t completely dismiss any adherence to the documentary tradition. “There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that’s out of control, that’s not controlled by me. And that element is the words, the language that people use, what they say in an interview. They’re not written, not rehearsed. It’s spontaneous, extemporaneous material.”

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Floyd McClure, owner of a bankrupt pet cemetery, is interviewed in Errol Morris’s Gates of Heaven (1978).

Although Gates of Heaven had its official premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1978, it didn’t get a theatrical release in the city until 1980. And when it did, The New York Times reviewer wasn’t duly impressed. Tom Buckley wrote, “Gates of Heaven is another cinema look at California grotesquerie that is rather self-consciously reminiscent of such novels as Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. What is missing is the mediation of an artistic sensibility…The film…makes its points in endless monologues that might better have provided a starting point. Everybody has a story to tell, it is said, but Gates of Heaven proves that not all of them are worth listening to, at least for an hour and a half.”

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Phillip Harbert is one of the interviewees in Gates of Heaven (1978), directed by Errol Morris.

Much more receptive was this review by Michael Corvino for Film Quarterly: “This documentary doesn’t look like a documentary. Just the opposite. Gates of Heaven is beautifully filmed and edited, and composed almost entirely of long, intercut monologues that manage to hold your interest, that are compelling not because what is being said is so fascinating, or absorbing, or informative (it almost never is), but because it is being said at all, in the manner in which it is being said. People speak English but is an English so imprecise, so inexpressive, so mangled, as to have lost all meaning. One woman speaks of establishing a deep and meaningful relationship with her poodle. A young man talks about the anxiety, the fear involved in trying to find the right exit off the expressway – a real ontological ordeal! – and he sounds like Kierkegaard after a bad head injury…. The movie-goer feels like he’s occupying a listening post on the border of a foreign land inhabited by sad sacks and maniacs.”

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Floyd McClure is interviewed by Errol Morris in his surreal 1978 documentary, Gates of Heavens.

The final word belongs to Roger Ebert who has remained a longtime fan of the movie and has included it in his Overlooked Film Festival in past years: “There are many invitations to laughter during this remarkable documentary, but what Gates of Heaven finally made me feel was an aching poignancy about its subjects. They say you can make a great documentary about almost anything, if only you see it well enough and truly, and this film proves it….It was filmed in Southern California, so of course we immediately anticipate a sardonic look at peculiarities of the Moonbeam State. But then Gates of Heaven grows ever so much more complicated and frightening, until at the end it is about such large issues as love, immortality, failure, and the dogged elusiveness of the American Dream.”   Image may be NSFW.
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Gates of Heaven was first released on DVD in 2005 by MGM. Ten years later The Criterion Collection released Gates of Heaven on Blu-ray with Morris’s second film, the equally surreal Vernon, Florida [1981], in March 2015. Supplemental features include the Les Blank short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, two new interviews with Morris and other extras.

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Werner Herzog prepares his shoe for a meal in Les Blank’s short, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1981).

Morris’s most recent film is American Dharma (2018) about Donald Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon. It was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2018 Chicago International Film Festival.

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*This is an updated and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.

Other links of interest:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3508-errol-morris-on-gates-of-heaven-and-nonfiction-filmmaking

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3501-gates-of-heaven-and-vernon-florida-bullshitting-a-bullshitter

https://errolmorris.com/biography.html

https://www.thewrap.com/every-errol-morris-documentary-ranked-from-gates-of-heaven-to-the-b-side-photos/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L972JZM7xms

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When I think of LSD depictions in the movies, American International Pictures immediately comes to mind with actors like Peter Fonda (The Trip), Susan Strasberg (Psych-Out) and Mimsy Farmer (Riot on Sunset Strip) blowing their minds amid the counterculture of the sixties. Of course, other more unlikely actors have been dosed with the hallucinogen on screen such as Vincent Price (The Tingler), Lana Turner (The Big Cube) and Jackie Gleason (Skidoo) but probably the most unexpected one of all is Dirk Bogarde in Sebastian (1967), a fascinating curiosity released in the waning days of “Swinging London” cinema which has been unaccountably forgotten since its release.  

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Dirk Bogarde plays a master cryptologist in the espionage comedy-drama Sebastian (1968), directed by David Greene.

As a high level government specialist employed by the Civil Service, Sebastian (Bogarde) is one of the best cryptologists in the espionage business and oversees an office of women (why no men?), all of them skilled in unraveling secret messages and codes. Like a scene out of George Orwell’s 1984, Sebastian has an office that looks out over a sea of fashionably dressed female workers, scribbling away furiously at their tasks like manic crossword puzzle junkies. He could be Big Brother but his gaze is almost always directed inward, more absorbed by his own thought processes than the surveillance or micromanagement of his staff.  Image may be NSFW.
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It’s rare for a movie to revolve around such a cerebral character as Sebastian but part of the film’s fascination and success is the way it brings this cold, analytical character to startling life. Bogarde can say more with an arched eyebrow, a slight half smile or a cynical sneer than most actors armed with brilliant dialogue by Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams or Harold Pinter. And for the first fourty-five minutes of Sebastian, the movie plays a cool, dispassionate game of cat and mouse with the viewer. It is a satire? Is is a spy film? Is it simply an exercise in style?

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Susannah York and Dirk Bogarde star in the 1968 film Sebastian, which is part espionage drama, part romance and part satire.

Then, rather unexpectedly, it switches gears and drives head-on into a romance subplot but a decidedly unsentimental one. Later on, it drops that angle and swerves back into the espionage game, adding a sinister note of real danger. Yet it all ends up as frenetic and freewheeling as its fluid overhead opening shot of Bogarde racing through the streets (Dirk Bogarde running!) in a red academic gown for a university ceremony.

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The cold, sterile landscape of urban London as depicted in the espionage comedy-drama Sebastian (1968), directed by David Greene.

On the surface Sebastian is a bright, colorful bauble of a film, very much in the flashy style of its era when London was a pop art playground in such films as Blow-Up, Kaleidoscope, Bedazzled, Otley and others. Despite the light tone and upbeat, whimsical music score by Jerry Goldsmith, however, Sebastian is not set in the tourist postcard version of London but a sterile concrete, glass and steel landscape with ugly high rise buildings, mazes of staircases and walkways and hardly a tree or a park in sight (The only exceptions are a few brief scenes of Sebastian walking through a park, deep in thought). Within this antiseptic environment, the characters in the film often fail to click or connect with each other which further points out the irony of humans who are skilled in deciphering codes but less successful in “reading” each other.

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Lilli Palmer and Dirk Bogarde play co-workers who decipher codes in the 1968 film, Sebastian.

The dialogue has a wonderful ping-pong quality in which characters often have exchanges where a question is answered by a different question as the response. There is also a sense of the absurd at work and some lines could have come straight out of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. A case in point is a job interview scene between Rebecca Howard (Susannah York) and Sebastian’s personal assistant, Miss Elliott (Margaret Johnston):

Miss Elliott: “Rebecca Howard, age 21. Studied mathematics at Oxford. Left without taking a degree. Why was that?

Rebecca: “I got bored with it. Would I have to work in this place?

Miss Elliott: “Do you like music?”

Rebecca: “Look, what is this job?”

Miss Elliott: “Do you do crossword puzzles?”

Rebecca: “I was born under Capricorn. I do crossword puzzles. I like music. I don’t like snakes or custard. WHAT IS THIS JOB? Who is this Sebastian?”

Miss Elliott: “You’ll find him more whimsical than predatory if that’s any comfort to you.”

Rebecca: “Well, I like them more predatory than whimsical if that’s any comfort to you.”

Miss Elliott: “Yes, I’d say you were aggressive, temperamental and quick-witted. You seem to have the knack. I think you’ll probably do.”

Rebecca: “DO WHAT?”

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Susannah York plays Rebecca, a code decrypter, in Sebastian (1968), which is set in London during the swinging sixties.

At which point there is a quick cut to the next scene which provides us with a visual answer to the question. The overall rhythm of the film, the competitive banter, the bright colors against the drab settings, the playful exposition of essentially serious material – all of it creates a compelling tension from scene to scene while somehow maintaining a certain emotional detachment in regards to the story’s protagonist. The emphasis on language, words, letters, anagrams, encoding and decoding is also pervasive and transforms the movie into a puzzle. (Most critics at the time didn’t get it at all).

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Lilli Palmer (far left) and Dirk Bogarde spend their days deciphering codes in the 1968 film, Sebastian, directed by David Greene.

At first the slow to boil romantic relationship between Sebastian and Rebecca seems artificially grafted onto the film as if imposed by the studio (Paramount) as a ploy to attract female moviegoers.  On closer inspection though it actually adds a deeper resonance to the film because Sebastian is an indecipherable code himself and Rebecca’s seduction of him is her attempt to crack the formula.

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Dirk Bogarde and Susannah York co-star in the odd 1968 film Sebastian, which mixes romance, espionage, satire and drama in equal parts.

In the opening scenes of the movie, they “meet cute” – he is dashing across a street without looking and she almost runs him over in her car. They meet again later the same day with Sebastian foregoing any introduction to ask, “How many words can you make out of thorough.” Rebecca almost scores a perfect ten and is given a card and an invitation, “If you want a job call me there.” Several months later, she does comes calling and winds up with a job in Sebastian’s high security decoding division.  Image may be NSFW.
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Unlike some of the other free spirits who breezed through swinging London cinema like Vanessa Redgrave in Morgan! or Rita Tushingham in The Knack…and How to Get It, Susannah York’s Rebecca is no kook but a calculating, ambitious career girl who also happens to be sexy and gorgeous, even with that unflattering sixties’ do.  But seducing Sebastian turns out to be hard work indeed with Rebecca playing the pursuer and Sebastian the obstinate love object.

Rebecca: “Are you scared of women?”

Sebastian: “No.”

Rebecca: “Shall I give you some advice?”

Sebastian: “No.”

Rebecca: “Oh. What are you doing this evening?”

Sebastian: “I shall go to a nice, quiet gaming club and play a nice, quiet game of baccarat.”

Rebecca: “I don’t think you will.”

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On the set of Sebastian (1968) with Lilli Palmer (second from left), Susannah York and Dirk Bogarde.

It’s obvious Sebastian is so deeply buried inside himself that to reciprocate any kind of emotional or physical response to Rebecca after years of denial is probably impossible. Rebecca seems to realize it too but some women just won’t give up even when it’s a losing game.

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A mixture of espionage intrigue and comedy-romance, Sebastian stars Dirk Bogarde and Susannah York.

When the couple finally retire to Sebastian’s dreary bachelor apartment – the wallpaper looks like old newspapers plastered everywhere – the terse conversation continues with Sebastian cautioning, “This is where we have to pick our words…very carefully.”

Rebecca: “I could ever so easily love you…like anything. Like absolutely anything.”

Sebastian: (sarcastically) “Well, I wouldn’t rupture yourself.”

Rebecca: “Did you pick those pretty words carefully?”

Sebastian: “Not very. They tend to lack the old careless charm.”

Rebecca: “Nothing you do lacks the old careless charm. (yelling) You’re COATED in the old careless charm, like bloody icing sugar. I hate your bloody wallpaper.”

Then she flies at him in a rage, he catches her, they kiss passionately, and he confesses, “I haven’t been raped for years.”

This is light romantic comedy? It’s played as such but a sense of disillusionment and cynicism underscores everything in Sebastian.

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Janet Munro plays a deceitful girlfriend of Dirk Bogarde in Sebastian (1968), directed by Daid Greene.

In juxtaposition to the Rebecca-Sebastian relationship is the pathetic, inert affair the master cryptologist has been carrying on with Carol Fancy (Janet Munro), a former pop singer now living in a haze of alcohol and past memories. Surrounded by images of herself in her prime (poster size photographs on her walls and reruns of herself on television), Carol also plays her old recordings repeatedly on a record player. Mirroring the film’s protagonist, the viewer is given the opportunity to decode this relationship without the aid of a backstory.

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Janet Munro plays the fetching Katie O’Gill in the 1959 Walt Disney fantasy, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, directed by Robert Stevenson.

This odd sidebar is particularly poignant in unexpected ways due to Janet Munro’s presence. Once the fresh-faced, pretty ingénue of such Walt Disney features as Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Third Man on the Mountain and Swiss Family Robinson, Munro looks like a true alcoholic with her once delicate features beginning to bloat. Sadly enough, in real life she was a heavy drinker and Sebastian was made at the end of her film career; it was her next to last feature. Married at the time to actor Ian Hendry, her second husband, Munro had just returned to the screen after a three year absence. She had taken time off to raise her two daughters but Sebastian was hardly a comeback vehicle and her role seems eerily prophetic, even a little cruel,  considering her fate. Her marriage to Hendry, also a known alcoholic, would end badly in 1971 and Munro died of heart disease the following year at the young age of 38.

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Someone slips Dirk Bogarde some LSD and he begins to hallucinate in Sebastian (1968), set in swinging London in the ’60s.

[Spoiler alert] Her final scene in the film requires her to betray Sebastian after being threatened with bodily harm by Toby (Ronald Fraser), a sinister espionage agent.  She gives him a glass of champagne spiked with a hallucinogen like LSD, and the movie morphs into a bizarre, decadent party scene observed through Sebastian’s stoned eyes. While not quite as outlandish as the drug-induced Fellini segment of Spirits of the Dead, this memorable freakout sequence ends on the rooftop of Carol’s penthouse with Sebastian tettering on the edge of the high rise and Toby encouraging him to fly.

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Film & TV director David Greene

Reportedly Michael Powell was originally slated to direct Sebastian before it was taken away from him and given to David Greene instead (Powell stayed on as a producer on the film). The once revered director was still finding it difficult to get work after the critical and commercial debacle of Peeping Tom (1960) and we can see why he was attracted to this project. It was co-written by Leo Marks, who penned the original story and screenplay for Peeping Tom, and Sebastian is just as compulsive and obsessive a character as the latter film’s psychotic photographer.

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Former cryptologist and screenwriter Leo Marks penned the original story for Sebastian (1968).

Marks was the head of code development and security for the SOE (Special Operations Executive) during WWII and, in the film Carve Her Name With Pride (1958), which focused on the real-life espionage exploits of Violette Szabo, one of his coded poems figured prominently in the plot.

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Dirk Bogarde plays an expert code breaker in the 1968 film, Sebastian, directed by David Greene.

While it’s hard to imagine what Powell would have done with Sebastian, David Greene’s direction is undeniably impressive. The film has a playful visual style (cinematography by Gerry Fisher, his debut film) and percolating pace that is deceptively casual and lightweight and just as often at odds with what is actually happening on the screen.  Image may be NSFW.
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Greene would go on to direct a visually jazzy version of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shuttered Room and The Strange Affair (1968), a stylish urban crime thriller starring Michael York, Jeremy Kemp and Susan George that had many critics predicting great things for Mr. Greene. Despite a few other feature films, including the ludicrous anti-drug melodrama, The People Next Door (1970), Greene seemed content to specialize in TV movies and series and some may remember his contributions to Roots, Rich Man, Poor Man, and the made-for-TV camp delight Madame Sin (1972) starring Bette Davis, Robert Wagner and Denholm Elliott.

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Nigel Davenport (right) co-stars with Dirk Bogarde in Sebastian (1968), a semi-espionage thriller/romantic comedy set in London.

One last thing to mention about Sebastian is the excellent supporting cast. Nigel Davenport makes an ideal adversary, a by-the-book fellow colleague at the Civil Service who resents Sebastian’s rarefied treatment. Donald Sutherland turns up in a bit toward the end as an American computer whiz of some sort and John Guilgud, in little more than a cameo as Sebastian’s boss, is as unflappable and sarcastic as always. He also gets one of the best lines in response to news of Sebastian’s LSD trip: “Well, we all need taking out of ourselves from time to time.”

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John Gielgud (left) has a memorable minor role in Sebastian (1968), starring Dirk Bogarde and directed by David Greene.

Lilli Palmer and her portrayal of Elsa Shahn, a former communist who jumped sides, is also a welcome addition to the storyline and provides further insight into Sebastian’s character with whom she has a “history.” During a cigarette break between her and Rebecca, we get more clues, even if they’re obvious.

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Co-workers Susannah York (left) and Lilli Palmer share a cigarette and discuss the mysterious Sebastian (played by Dirk Bogarde) in the 1968 film.

Rebecca: “What’s Sebastian like?”

Elsa: “He’s a poor lost lamb like the rest of us. He has a freak talent. Trouble is it’s making a freak out of him. He’s been in the trade too long. Can’t stay.

Rebecca: “They can’t keep him here.”

Elsa: “They don’t have to. Be careful or you’ll end up like one of us.”

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Dirk Bogarde is a master code breaker who heads up an all-women decrypter organization in Sebastian (1968).

When Sebastian was released in England in late 1967 (it opened in the U.S. of January 1968), it was generally perceived as a weak spy parody and quickly dismissed. In the U.S. the reception wasn’t any better. Roger Ebert announced his bafflement over the film in his opening review in The Chicago Sun-Times: “Early in the production of “Sebastian,” somebody should have called a meeting to figure out what the movie was about. I guess nobody did. What we are stuck with, then, is a movie that moves confidently in three directions, arriving nowhere with a splendid show of style.”