REAR WINDOW (1954) - Thelma Ritter as Stella

Thelma Ritter is always a joy to watch as well as listen to- as no one can quite deliver swifter dead pan humor like this lady-”We’ve become a race of peeping toms” from Alfred Hitchcock’s Read Window 1954

CRY OF THE CITY (1948)-Walter Baldwin as Orvy

Walter Baldwin is the lovable Orvy who might move a little slow in jail but brightens up the place in Robert Siodmak’s darkly powerful Cry of the City starring Richard Conte

THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957) Barbara Nichols as Rita the cigarette girl

Barbara Nichols getting pigeon holed all her career as the lovable blonde bombshell bimbo is just deliciously sympathetic  in the hostile & darkly satirical noir masterpiece The Sweet Smell of Success 1957

THE SWIMMER (1968) Janice Rule  as Shirley Abbott

Janice Rule gives one hell of a performance as the actress/ex-lover in Frank Perry’s transcendental The Swimmer ’68 starring Burt Lancaster. 

SHIP OF FOOLS (1965)- Michael Dunn as Glocken

Michael Dunn adds yet another layer of insight & fine character acting in the intensely dramatic social commentary Ship of Fools directed by Stanley Kramer

CAGED (1950)-Betty Garde as Kitty Stark

Betty Garde is truly an unsung character actor- here she gives a very compelling performance as Kitty Stark a woman who’s gotten used to life without men in John Cromwell’s prison noir sensation- Caged (1950)

THE TWO MRS CARROLLS  (1947) Anita Sharp-Bolster- Christine the maid

Anita Sharp-Bolster nearly steals the show in the dark suspense thriller The Two Mrs. Carrolls starring Barbara Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart as a deranged painter. Christina the maid adds much comic relief with her acerbic puss!

SOMEWHERE IN THE NIGHT (1946)- Fritz Kortner as Anzelmo – Dr. Oracle

Franz Kortner’s Anzelmo also known as Dr. Oracle is a mysterious and conniving villain who tries to run circles around poor John Hodiak who has lost his memory in Joseph L. Mankiewicz Somewhere in the Night 1946

THEY LIVE BY NIGHT  (1948) – Jay C Flippen as T-Dub

Jay C. Flippen always seems to be the guy whose got a mug only a mother could love. And in Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece They Live By Night his T-Dub is a pretty intimidating fellow!

ELMER GANTRY (1960)- Arthur Kennedy as Reporter Jim Lefferts

Arthur Kennedy lends his depth of acting to this powerful drama by Upton Sinclair co-starring Jean Simmons and Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry. Report Jim Lefferts is the clear voice that cuts through the malarkey as the moral compass

This has been a little bit of love to these fabulous character actors who make the cinematic world go round!-Your Ever Lovin’ MonsterGirl

This review is part of the Summer of MeTV Classic TV Blogathon hosted by the Classic TV Blog Association.

Click here CLASSIC TV ASSOCIATION BLOGSPOT 

to check out this blogathon’s complete schedule!

THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR

Concerto Sinostro- The Alfred Hitchcock Hour- Seven Exceptional Episodes

Alfred Hitchcock the television years: 8 indelible episodes!

There were 93 EPISODES in the series.

“GOOD EVENING… “

Hitchcock: “To be quite honest, I am not interested in content at all. I don’t give a damn what the film is about. I am more interested in how to handle the material to create an emotion in an audience.”

As a child of the 60s, as soon as the emblematic theme song and opening credits started to play, I would feel chills running up my spine. I remember the reruns were still broadcast late at night, I understood that each story had something foul afoot, a shadow of the uncanny loomed over my tiny shoulders and the room filled up with a sinister quiver. Even with it’s smart-alecky delivery and Hitchcock’s well placed tongue-in-cheek humor to offset some of the more gruesome aspects of the show, I couldn’t wait til 10pm and the idea of watching a dreadfully good mystery even for such a young impressionable mind as my own! The timpani as intermezzo between each thrilling scene to raise the goose bumps and keep the heart pounding!

Alfred Hitchcock transported his brand of cheeky suspense narratives from the big screen to the advent of the intimate living-room television experience of the 60s where tv stations were fertile with playhouse theater melodramas, stage play-esque stories featuring some of the most emotive and original character actors who’s careers were vibrant with possibility.

Using some of the most well known mystery writers, seriously cutting edge and unorthodox directors, and the best actors who could bring forth the most nuanced performances from the riveting scripts.

The show premiered on Thursday, September 20, 1962 from 10pm-11pm on CBS. It ran opposite Alcoa Premier Theater on ABC and The Andy Williams Show on NBC. from 1963 -1964 it moved to Friday nites and then from 1964-1965 it found it’s slot on Monday nites opposite Ben Casey on ABC.

The Alfred Hitchcock Hour ranks among the top fifty longest-running series in television history!

Robert Bloch talks about his years working with Hitch, starting out on the program in 1959. He was summoned to Shamley Productions office and offered an assignment to write a script based on Frank Mace’s story “The Cukoo Clock.” Bloch began adapting his own published stories along side the other writers on staff. Bloch’s work was only dramatized by other writers when his commitment with the competing anthology show wasn’t calling for his time. That show was Boris Karloff’s Thriller. Bloch recalls producer and part of the creative team Joan Harrison as a remarkable lady who went from secretary to screenwriter to independent producer with a unique vision.

Norman Lloyd had a certain style of speech and mannerism which might designate him an Englishman when in fact–he was born in Jersey City, New Jersey! Starting out as an unbelievably talented actor who worked several times with Hitchcock in film. Lloyd played Fry in Hitch’s Saboteur 1942, & Mr. Garmes in Spellbound 1945. 

Lloyd had been blacklisted and hadn’t been able to work in television for four or five years.

“Around 1955 they got Hitchcock to say he’d do television which was a big thing. And in ’57 the order for the half hour show was amplified, with a new series called Suspicion. I think Suspicion had many shows. Hour shows. And MCA took ten of them. New York took ten and so forth. And with the ten he was adding on they used to do 39 half hour shows a series. It was his producer Joan Harrison, is how I really learned how to be a producer. Divine. She was beautiful, exquisitely dressed, in perfect taste for the set. She was divine. She was a writer for him, and she was now his producer. And they needed someone else to come in an help her because of the quantity of the work not for the half hours, but now the hour. So she and Hitch decided, they wanted me to do it. Cause I also knew Joan very well. And so they presented my name… however… And this was told to me by Alan Miller who headed television at MCA, he came back, Alan Miller from the network and says ‘there seems to be a problem about Lloyd’ and Hitch said, ‘I want him!’ that was the end of the blacklist!” -Norman Lloyd

“Hitch was a world-figure. He was a man of great humor, had a very definite view of the world. He saw the world a certain way and we have as a result what is known as the Hitchcock film. It became the Hitchcock story, so to speak, almost like an Edgar Allen Poe story.” Directors try to imitate him but they never get the mixture right. Only Hitch had the mixture of the romance, the suspense, the humor, the twists” -Norman Lloyd

Joan Harrison started out as Hitchcock’s secretary, began reading scripts, writing synopses, and actually contributing to the scripts. She followed Hitchcock to Hollywood in 1939 working as his assistant and then was hired by MGM in 1941 as a scriptwriter. In 1943 she became a producer for Universal Studios. To her film credits, she produced some of the most compelling film noir/ mysteries. One of my personal favorites, Phantom Lady 1944 and then… The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry 1945, Nocturne 1946 They Won’t Believe Me 1947, Ride the Pink Horse 1947, Eye Witness 1950, and Circle of Danger 1951.

Director Robert Siodmak, producer Joan Harrison, Ella Raines and Franchot Tone on the set of Phantom Lady 1944

Executive Producers on the show, Norman Lloyd and Joan Harrison are partly what made the series so enigmatic. Producers included Herbert Coleman, Robert Douglas, David Friedkin, Gordon Hessler, Roland Kibbee and David Lowell Rich.

The cinematographers who worked on various episodes included Stanley Cortez, Benjamin Kline, Lionel Linden, William Margulies, Richard Rawlings, John L. Russell and John F. Warren. With art direction by John J Lloyd and Martin Obzina.

The magnificent musical contributions were offered by Hitchcock veteran Bernard Herrmann and a personal favorite of mine, Lyn Murray, whose stirring melodies recycle themselves in several of the most poignant episodes. The brilliant and prolific Pete Rugolo can be heard as well as Stanley Wilson.

Florence Bush was the hairstylist for the show, and she was very active during the 60s! You’ll spot her name listed in the credits on so many television programs of that era. Including Leave it to Beaver and Hitchcock’s film Psycho!

THE DIRECTORS- Bernard Girard, John Brahm, Alan Crosland Jr., Alf Kjellin, Norman Lloyd, Sydney Pollack, Jerry Hopper, Joseph Pevney, Leonard Horn, Jack Smight, Charles F. Haas, David Lowell Rich, James Sheldon, Herschel Daugherty, Robert Douglas, Joseph Newman, Harvey Hart, Laslo Benedek, William Whitney, Leo Penn, Harry Morgan, Philip Leacock, Lewis Teague, Arnold Laven, David Friedkin, James H. Brown, Alex March, Herbert Coleman, William Friedkin and Alfred Hitchcock…

THE WRITERS -Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Henry Slesar, Cornell Woolrich, Richard Matheson, Gilbert Ralston, Clark Howard, Richard Deming, Morton S. Fine, David Friedkin, Lewis Davidson, Larry M Harris, James Bridges, Selwyn Jepson, Andrew Benedict, Anthony Terpiloff, Avram Davidson, Alfred Hayes, James Holding, Helen Nielsen, Arthur A Ross, Stanley Abbott, Lee Kalcheim, Ethel Lina White, Oscar Millard, James Yaffe, Andre Maurois, Clyde Ware, Davis Grubb, Nigel Elliston, John Wyndham, Harlan Ellison, Robert Branson, C.B Gilford, Francis Gwaltney, Harold Swanton, Margaret Manners, William Fay, S.B. Hough, Emily Neff, Barré Lyndon, Jack Ritchie, Alvin Sargent, Hugh Wheeler, Veronica Parker Jones, Boris Sobelman, Joel Murcott, Margaret Millar, Richard Levinson, William Link, Thomas H Cannon Jr., Randall Hood, Gabrielle Upton, Robert Westerby, Miriam Allen DeFord, William D Gordon, John Collier, James Parish, Kenneth Fearing, Robert Gould, Robert Arthur, William Fay, George Bellak, Robert Twohy, Leigh Brackett, Frederick Dannay, Manfred Lee, Mann Rubin, Douglas Warner, Henry Kane, Alec Coppel, Amber Dean, Lou Rambeau, Edith Pargeter, Charles Beaumont, Francis Didelot, Celia Fremlin, Roland Kibbee, Lukas Heller, Elizabeth Hely, Rebecca West, Richard Fielder, Nicholas Blake, Lee Erwin, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Julian Symons, John Bingham, V.S.Pritchett, John D MacDonald, John Garden, Andrew Garve, Marc Brandell, Patricia Highsmith, Samuel Rogers, Oliver H. P. Garrett

Writer Robert Bloch- was a contributor to many of the shows spine chilling narratives!

Hitchcock first managed to develop an anthology series that drew from his magazine and radio stories of the macabre, suspenseful, crime drama and cheeky thriller, often lensed with a noir style. This show was of course Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Eventually in order to compete with the growing market of 50 minute teleplays, like Playhouse 90, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, The Twilight Zone etc, Hitchcock changed his format to meet an hours worth of programming, still employing Hitch’s classic introductory droll prologue. And where Karloff’s Thriller painted the stories with a more macabre brush stroke, Hitchcock’s anthology show presented these criminal acts in two parts in a most ironic and irreverent manner…

According to John McCarty, Hitchcock made the shift from half hour show to the hour format without much issue. “When we had a half-hour show, we could do short stories…{…} Now, in an hour, we have to go to novels.” His staff read through thousands of crime novels to find the right script. Yet frequently it became necessary to utilize a short story and expand it, in order to fill out the hour.

While Boris Karloff’s Thriller was pervasive with it’s stories of the macabre and the uncanny, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone with it’s more sociological morality with a heavy science fiction spin, Alfred Hitchcock maintained an ironic lens on very suspense/crime oriented material that kept the focus on human nature as perilous. He always provided the same sort of ‘twist’ at the end as in it’s pithy precedent Alfred Hitchcock Presents!

While Alfred Hitchcock Presents might have provided a shorter more enlivened ride to the turn of plot because it had to deliver the lightning in a more synoptic amount of time, the hour format allowed for more psychological background, with room to build the character study of the players involved.

Alfred Hitchcock is still the larger-than-life, Aesopsian voice of modern crime-infused with foul deeds springing from human nature and the darker sides of the mortal mind and how far it can reach when working under a compulsion, obsession or pathology. His vision created some of the most compelling little dramas for a ’60s audience to digest, still relevant after all these years.

Hitchcock’s brand of humor was dry and witty, ironic and fablist. Drawing from some of the finest mystery writers of the day, his little tour-de force dramatizations showcased some of the best examples of theatre and acting even on the small screen. His first show which gave us a 25 minute sequence that the series featured premiered on October 2, 1955 after Alfred Hitchcock had been directing mesmerizing films for over three decades!

“GOOD EVENING…..”

The iconic opening title sequence for the show has become unforgettably imposed in our psyches and in popular culture, as the simplistic yet mirthful intro possesses the camera fading upon an easily recognizable caricature of Hitchcock’s porcine yet endearing profile. Set against one of the most memorable musical themes written by Charles Gounod’s– the piece is called Funeral March of a Marionette. A type of adult nursery song that tickles the funny bone’s comparable curious bone… the one that gets triggered when there’s a marvelous mystery afoot! The theme– suggested by Hitchcock’s musical collaborator, the brilliant Bernard Hermann.

As if it couldn’t get any more smashingly wicked and alluring, Hitchcock himself takes shape behind the silhouette from the right of screen, then in grand theatrical style walks center stage to eclipse the drawing. He commences with his nightly, “Good evening…” and we are in for an irresistibly gripping treat!

The opening set of each episode, Hitchcock is given props against an empty stage. At times he himself becomes the prop, or main focal point where he imparts either sage elucidation, comical warning or sardonic advice. A witty prelude to the evening’s tale or just a frivolous bit of shenanigans to put one in the mood for the evening’s program. As he drolly introduces the night’s story, his monologues were conceived of by James B Allardice. Many of his missives took shots at the sponsors, spoofing the popular American fixation on commercials and commercialism.

Always at the end of the show, Hitchcock would re-appear to lead the audience out of the evening’s events. To either enlighten them on the aftermath of a story, the scenes they did not see, and to reassure us that the criminals featured did get their comeuppance. To tie up any loose ends within the question of morality’s swift hand.

Originally 25 minutes per episode, the series was expanded to 50 minutes in 1962. The show was then renamed The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Hitchcock directed 17 of the 268 filmed episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Hitchcock did direct one of the hour long episodes called “I Saw the Whole Thing” starring John Forsyth who is accused of hit and run, while several witnesses swear they saw him leave the scene of the accident.

Here is how the show was syndicated back in the 60s:

• Sunday at 9:30-10 p.m. on CBS: October 2, 1955—September 1960
• Tuesday at 8:30-9 p.m. on NBC: September 1960—September 1962
• Thursday at 10-11 p.m. on CBS: September—December 1962
• Friday at 9:30-10:30 p.m.on CBS: January— September 1963
• Friday at 10-11 p.m. on CBS: September 1963—September 1964
• Monday at 10-11 p.m. on NBC: October 1964—September 1965

The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, lasted three seasons from September 1962 to June 1965, There were 93 episodes in total. Alfred Hitchcock Presents had a total of 268 episodes.

Hitchcock directed two episodes of Presents that were nominated for Emmy Awards–“The Case of Mr. Pelham (1955) and one of the most popular stories with it’s fabulous dark humor, “Lamb to the Slaughter” (1958) starring Barbara Bel Geddes.

The episode that won an Emmy Award was one of my particular favorites as it is both poignant and eerie, “The Glass Eye” (1957) starring Jessica Tandy, Tom Conway and Billy Barty. Robert Stevens won for his direction.

Cinematographer John L. Russell’s incredible shots of Jessica Tandy in The Glass Eye

“An Unlocked Window” (1965) is one of the most starkly intense and transgressive in nature of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and won an Edgar Award for James Bridges writing in 1966. The episode stars Dana Wynter and Louise Latham, both wonderful unsung actresses!

Dana Wynter and T.C. Jones in An Unlocked Window–nurses in peril oh my!

Louise Latham in An Unlocked Window

THE ACTRESSES– Martha Hyer, Vera Miles, Patricia Breslin, Angie Dickinson, Carol Lynley, Carmen Phillips, Isobel Elsom, Charity Grace, Susan Oliver, Kathleen Nolan, Peggy McCay, Adele Mara, Lola Albright, Dee Hartford, Gena Rowlands, Jayne Mansfield, Dina Merrill, Patricia Collinge, Jan Sterling, Elizabeth Allen, Anne Francis, Ruth Roman, Gladys Cooper, Inger Stevens, Zohra Lampert, Diana Hyland, Joan Fontaine, Irene Tedrow, Sarah Marshall, Nancy Kelly, Betty Field, Katherine Squire, Martine Bartlett, Phyllis Thaxter, Natalie Trundy, Linda Christian, Laraine Day, Anna Lee, Lois Nettleton, Madlyn Rhue, Patricia Donahue, Diana Dors, Claire Griswold, Mary LaRoche, Virginia Gregg, Anne Baxter, Jacqueline Scott, Sondra Blake, Ruth McDevitt, Katharine Ross, Patricia Barry, Jane Withers, Joyce Jameson, Teresa Wright, Linda Lawson, Jean Hale, Mildred Dunnock, Felicia Farr, Kim Hunter, Collin Wilcox, Jane Darwell, Jocelyn Brando, Joan Hackett, Gloria Swanson, Lynn Loring, Pat Crowley, Juanita Moore, Naomi Stevens, Marjorie Bennett, Jessica Walter, Gia Scala, Joanna Moore, Kathie Browne, Ethel Griffies, Sharon Farrell, Nancy Kovack, Barbara Barrie, Doris Lloyd, Lillian Gish, Maggie McNamara, Josie Lloyd, Tisha Sterling, Ann Sothern, Patricia Medina, Elsa Lanchester, Jeannette Nolan, Ellen Corby, Julie London, Margaret Leighton, Lilia Skala, Olive Deering, Kathryn Hays, Dana Wynter, Louise Latham, Sally Kellerman, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Fay Bainter, Jane Wyatt, June Lockhart, Colleen Dewhurst…

MY SELECTED EPISODES THAT FEATURE THE HITCHCOCK LADIES OF THE EVENING!….

DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU (9/27/62) - VERA MILES as Daphne

Vera Miles as Daphne and devilishly handsome Jeff Hunter in Don’t Look Behind You

Fear grips the campus and Vera Miles… Abraham Sofaer watches Daphne go out into the dangerous night woods

Directed by John Brahm, written by Barré Lyndon (The War of the Worlds 1953) Based on Samuel Rogers novel co-stars Jeffrey Hunter, Abraham Sofaer, Dick Sargent, Alf Kjellin, Mary Scott, Madge Kennedy.

A small college campus is gripped by fear when a maniac is on the loose. Two young female students are slaughtered while walking home through the surrounding nefarious night time woods. All eyes are on several members of the faculty, though the police have no clues to go on. Alf Kjellin plays Edwin Volck an intense pianist/composer who seems very tightly wound, especially around women. Handsome Jeffrey Hunter is Harold the psychology professor who dabbles in abnormal behavior. Harold convinces his fiancée Daphne (the lovely Vera Miles) to act as bait to lure the killer out. Vera Miles is always possessed of a smart and inquisitive sensuality. In this episode she’s perfect as an academic who doesn’t shy from the idea of hunting a serial killer.

Harold-“Daphne, I know this man’s secret. I’ve studied these people, I know how they think!”

Daphne-“It’s frightening sometimes… how you know people.”

CAPTIVE AUDIENCE (10/18/62) -ANGIE DICKINSON as Janet West

Actors Ed Nelson and Arnold Moss listen to the recordings sent by the plagued Warren Barrow. Is he a murderer?

Angie Dickinson is the seductress and James Mason the tormented man

This episode is directed by actor turned director Alf Kjellin, based on the teleplay by Richard Levinson and William Link of Columbo! from a story by John Bingham.

James Mason plays mystery writer Warren Barrow a pseudonym he uses to contact his publisher with a series of tape recordings describing what is either the outline for his latest murder mystery or the details of an actual murder he himself is planning to commit. Barrow describes a relationship with an alluring woman named Janet West (the sexy Angie Dickinson) who wants Warren to kill her husband so they can be together. Ed Nelson plays another writer Tom Keller whom the publisher Victor Hartman (Arnold Moss) asks to review the tapes with him in order to help determine whether the impending murder is real or fictional. Angie Dickinson is so perfect as Janet West, the femme fatale Warren Barrow can’t resist.

Janet West- “You know there’s one part of the Bible I know by heart. I saw unto the sun, that the race is not too swift nor the battle too strong, but time and chance happen to them all. Means you can be as clever as you like but you gotta have luck. You gotta work for it and grab it when it comes. I was very poor when I was young. Very poor…”

FINAL VOW (10/25/62) -CAROL LYNLEY as Sister Pamela

“Oh sister not tears again… you’ve cried a whole river these past weeks”-Sister Jem

Directed by Norman Lloyd, story and teleplay by mystery writer Henry Slesar (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, Two on a Guillotine 1965, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. 1966, Batman 1966, Run For Your Life ’66-67 Circle of Fear 1972, McMillan & Wife 1974, Tales of the Unexpected 1981-1984) co-starring Clu Gulager  Isobel Elsom Carmine Phillips, Charity Grace.

Carol Lynley is Sister Pamela who on the eve of taking her final vows has a crisis of faith. Sister Pamela fears that she might just be hiding from the world. The Reverend Mother (Isobel Elsom) sends Pamela and Sister Jem (Charity Grace) on a mission to collect a valuable statue of Saint Francis that is being donated to the convent by reformed gangster William Downey (R.G. Armstrong).

On the way back to the convent, the lovely young novice is fooled by slick hoodlum/loser Jimmy Bresson (Clu Galager who is terrific at being smarmy) who stalks train stations stealing bags. Pamela is filled with guilt having let down her dying mentor Sister Lydia (Sara Taft) She leaves the order and submerges herself in the sleazy jungle where Jimmy works and socializes in order to find the statue and redeem herself. Lynley is another underrated actress who delivers an extremely poignant performance as a girl at the crossroads of her life. She has an endearing innocent beauty that is genuine and charismatic.

Sister Pamela-“Sorry Sister Jem, I have only myself to blame.”

Sister Jem-“You’re not thinking of… what we spoke of the other day?”

Sister Pamela-“I haven’t been thinking of anything Sister. I’ve tried not to think.”

Sister Jem-“Have you prayed?”

Sister Pamela-“Sister… I’ve prayed for humility and obedience. But there was no answer in my heart Sister Jem… only silence!

ANNABEL (11/1/62)- SUSAN OLIVER as Annabel Delaney

“you’ve been pretending so long… you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t”-Annabel

Annabel-“David, what is my picture doing here? David who lives here?”

Directed by Paul Henreid, written by Robert Bloch, novel by Patricia Highsmith (she wrote the original story for Hitchcock’s Strangers On a Train 1951) costarring Dean Stockwell, Kathleen Nolan, Gary Cockrell, Hank Brandt, Bert Remsen.

Dense browed Dean Stockwell plays research chemist David Kelsey who is hopelessly in love and obsessively fixated on Annabel (the wonderful Susan Oliver). But Annabel is married Gerald Delaney (Hank Brandt) Kelsey assumes a phony identity William Newmaster and pursues Annabel with a blind devotion that is downright creepy. He purchases a beautiful home that he has filled like a shrine to his great love, a place tucked away in the country where they can sojourn in their own private world. Trouble is Annabel isn’t in on the romance. But David isn’t taking no for an answer. Added to the web of obsessive love is the fact that Linda Brennan (Kathleen Nolan) is as fixated on David as he is on Annabel. What a mess!

BONFIRE (12/13/62)-DINA MERRILL as Nora & PATRICIA COLLINGE as Naomi Freshwater

Directed by Joseph Pevney teleplay William D Gordon and Alfred Hayes based on a story by V.S.Pritchett as published in The New Yorker and co-starring Peter Falk in one of his most impressive roles as the psychotic revivalist Robert Evans.

Falk plays a fire and brimstone fanatic who yearns for his own church and will kill in order to achieve his life’s dream. First he woos Patricia Collinge (The Little Foxes 1941, Shadow of a Doubt 1943, The Nuns Story 1959) as the wealthy Naomi Freshwater, murdering her one night in order to take over her large house he claims she promised to him in order to help him build his tabernacle. The scene is quite disturbing and fierce. a well done scene that predates many psycho-sexual narratives to follow.

When her niece, the world traveling Laura (Dina Merrill) comes to get her aunts things in order, Robert begins to romance her with the same bombastic fervor as he did her aunt Naomi. As Robert discloses his past to Laura, she discovers that he might have killed his first wife as well and that he has visions of his calling to be a great evangelist. Evans is a deranged ego-maniacal woman hater who mistakes his visions of glory for the need to be in control!

Robbie-“Sure the whole world is filled with problems Miss Naomi. We’ve all got to puzzle over what we’re supposed to think. None of us. There’s nobody that’s gotta puzzle over what we’re supposed to do!”

Naomi-“Oh that’s so clear to me Robbie, you know what to do and you do it… I feel so free! No more aches and pains.”

Robert- “Burn it… burn it. Take your whole past and burn it out there in that fire pit. Start a new life with me” Laura- “I don’t have your faith in new lives Robert.” Robert-“But I told you once… I’ve got the faith.”

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED (1/11/63)- ANN FRANCIS as Eve Raydon & RUTH ROMAN as Addie

Mrs Raydon (Gladys Cooper) ” I think he’s dead you’ve always wanted this to happen. You’ve done this to him. You’ve killed him!”

Directed by Jack Smight with a teleplay by Henry Slesar, based on the story by Mary Belloc Lowndes who wrote the novelette The Lodger, which was the inspiration for Hitchcock’s first suspense film in 1927 and of course the version with Jack Palance in 1953 called The Man in the Attic. 

One of my favorite episodes due to the presence of Ann Francis as Eve Raydon and Ruth Roman as her companion Adelaide ‘Addie’ Strain. Eve is framed as a jezebel by her nasty vicious old mother in law.The storyline has a definite undertone of lesbian desire, akin to Lillian Hellman’s A Children’s Hour. Eve is married to a stuffed shirt named Howard ( Gene Lyons-the commissioner -Ironside) who resents Addie’s presence and is still tied to his mommy’s (the great Gladys Cooper Rebecca 1940, Now, Voyager 1942, The Song of Bernadette 1943) apron strings. Howard fires Addie who has been hanging around Eve in the position as ‘maid’ who also happens to have a little boy name Gilly who breaks a valuable antique sending Howard into a rage and prompting him to fire her. Addie who is desperate to stay with her mistress, poisons Howard’s night time glass of milk by spiking it with some K9 liniment. But Eve is accused of the murder instead and her intolerable mother-in-law is all too happy to see her pay for the crime. co-starring Michael Strong as defense attorney Malloy, Stephen Dunn as Jack Wentworth, Tim O’Connor as Prosecutor Halstead.

Addy talks to Eve about Howard finally firing her-“He means it this time… things could have been so different!”

Addy Strain to Molloy- “I can’t believe that all this is happening it’s all that woman’s fault. That awful old woman… Mrs Raydon. She hates Eve. She’s always hated her. She hates Eve just because she married her son. That’s why she accused Eve of killing him.”

A TANGLED WEB (1/25/63)- ZOHRA LAMPERT as Marie

Gertrude Flynn as Ethel Chesterman “I heard you David. You’re going to marry the maid. At least this afternoon you’re going to marry the maid. My wedding present to you will be my absence.”

Marie-“Your eyes shine in the dark David. I think you are part Cat”. David -“A tiger a leopard ready to pounce.” Marie-“I’m going to have to get a wonderful cage to put you in.” David-“Nobody is going to put me in a cage!! Marie-“Stop David you’re hurting me…”

Directed by Alf Kjellin, with a teleplay by writer/director James Bridges (When Michael Calls 1972, The China Syndrome 1979) based on a story by Nicholas Blake.

Zohra Lampert plays Marie a naÏve french maid who runs off with the wealthy son David (Robert Redford) who is actually a compulsive cat burgler/jewel thief. David’s wealthy mother throws a few coins at them to buy a toaster, goes to Europe and changes the locks on the door. And so for money David runs to his partner in crime Karl.And so begins a queer struggle with David’s odd accomplice, a flamboyant wig designer Karl Gault played to the hilt by Barry Morse.

David cannot change the way he is, although he is truly in love with Marie he only knows how to steal and scheme. Karl falls in love with Marie creating the immortal triangle. In order to get his rival out of the way, Karl creates an elaborate ruse in order to trap David in a robbery gone wrong and have him arrested for the murder of a guard. Co-starring Gertrude Flynn as David’s mother Ethel Chesterman.

Marie-“Your eyes shine in the dark David… I think you are part cat.”

THE PARAGON (2/8/63) - JOAN FONTAINE as Alice Pemberton

John-“Alice have you ever read any fairy tales? There’s one about a princess. She was very beautiful. She lived in a beautiful castle. Had a beautiful garden. But her fairy godmother warned her not to do one thing. There was a particular flower in that garden that she wasn’t to pick. If she did… she’d lose everything. Her beauty, her castle… everything. Alice- “I don’t get the point”. John -“Alice princess… don’t touch that flower please” Alice- “oh please don’t be silly they only write fairy stories to keep children out of mischief.”

Directed by Jack Smight with a teleplay by Alfred Hayes and a story by Rebecca West. The Paragon allows screen legend Joan Fontaine to give what I feel is perhaps one of the most extraordinary performances of her career. As the infuriating perfectionist who meddles in everyone’s lives Alice Pemberton married to the beaten down John Pemberton played by the always wonderful Gary Merrill.

John loves his wife but is beginning to feel the strain from years of Alice’s intruding and dictating moral codes and her ideals to anyone within reach even the maid Ethel played with fabulous scorn by Irene Tedrow. All her friends and relatives cringe at the sight of Alice, for they know she will inject some sort of righteous advice and admonition. Alice is like a child who cannot see the damage she has done, or how she hurts the people around her. She believes that she is helping to improve themselves, though she alienates herself instead. John urges with a tender yet firm clue that she must stop her behavior before it’s too late. Even relating a fairy tale to her with a warning… Alice is very much like a character in a fable who does not heed the warnings or the signs that she is tempting the shadows to converge upon her!

THE LONELY HOURS (3/8/63)- NANCY KELLY as Mrs. J. A. Williams / Vera Brandon & GENA ROWLANDS as Louise Henderson

Vera-“Michael and I are leaving now Mrs Henderson, I’m taking him home with me. Oh I am sorry for you because I think in your own way, you’ve grown really fond of my baby. But you see Michael is my child. I’ve known that from the very beginning….”

Directed by Jack Smight with a teleplay by William D Gordon based on a story by Celia Fremlin.

Louise (Gena Rowlands) is a busy mother of two precocious young girls Jennifer Gillespie (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? young Jane) and a small infant boy. She rents the room upstairs to the mysterious Vera Bradley (Nancy Kelly) who is supposedly working on her thesis paper, but in fact has her eyes on Louise’s baby boy. She secrets him off each day to another room she is renting, that she has decorated for the little guy. She also calls him Michael. The child looks more like Vera as he has dark curly hair and both Louise and her husband are blonde. Is Vera there to steal the boy and claim him as her own? This is an extremely taut and well acted little story. The performances by both Kelly and Rowlands are stellar. The interplay between the two women brought me to tears, it was so poignantly played without being melodramatic or contrived. A truly heart wrenching experience, especially for fans of these fine actresses as well as one of the most effectively dramatic of all the episodes. Also watch for an appearance by the wonderful Juanita Moore as Mrs. McFarland and Joyce Van Patten as best friend Grace.

THE STAR JUROR (3/15/63) BETTY FIELD as Jenny Davies

Dean Jagger tries to quiet Jennifer West after he tries to steal more than a kiss from the town hussy Alice.

Betty Field plays George’s flakey nagging wife.

Slamming the fridge door and shuffling her feet.Jenny confronts George’s peculiar behavior on the jury Jenny - “Would the star juror care to give me some justification for his behavior. George- “what behavior?”  Jenny-“ What behavior! The behavior that has brought down ridicule and scandal over our heads!” George-“ What you talkin’ bout Jenny? Jenny- “Have you gone deaf and blind?… Unplug your ears… open your eyes! George Davies the most respected highly thought of citizen in this town protecting this infidel, this murderer… No wonder you get indigestion.”

Directed by Herschel Daugherty with a teleplay by James Bridges and story by Francis Didelot

Although this is very much Dean Jagger’s vehicle, Betty Field who is a wonderful actress stands out as the blowsy, whiney wife to George Davies, who becomes so aroused by the town hussy Alice (Jennifer West) while out at the lake during a picnic. When she rebuffs his advances he strangles her and allows her boyfriend JJ Fenton (Will Hutchins) to take the rap for her murder. JJ has been known to knock Alice around, and soon the town is out for his blood. But the guilt of what he has done, drives George to try and defend JJ to exasperating results. This is a quirky dark comedic episode that just seems to want to be kind to George. The show also co-stars Martine Bartlett as Flossie and the wonderful Crahan Denton as Sheriff Walter Watson who just won’t take George’s confessions serious.

THE LONG SILENCE (3/22/63)- PHYLLIS THAXTER as Nora Cory Manson

Nora’s inner monologue- “In heaven’s name Jean, don’t leave us here alone.”

Directed by Robert Douglas with a teleplay by William D. Gordon & Charles Beaumont based on a story by Hilda Lawrence.

Michael Rennie plays a con man Ralph Manson who marries Nora, (Phyllis Thaxter) for her money. When he screws up an elaborate scheme to embezzle funds from the bank, trying to pin it on her eldest son, he accidentally kills the boy. While trying to make it look like the young man hangs himself, Nora stumbles unto this horrific deed she winds up taking a fall down the stairs that paralyzes her and leaves her in an apparent catatonic state. Which is good for Ralph, as he needs this witness to be silent. But Nora, might not stay silent for long… The well crafted suspense yarn utilizes Nora’s inner monologue to help guide us through the tense narrative cues. This is such a tautly played suspense piece as Nora is conscious of her husbands murderous nature, and his desperation to keep Nora quiet. It;s only a matter of time before he finds of way of making it look like she dies of natural causes. Enter the pretty Natalie Trundy as her attending nurse Jean Dekker who senses something is wrong and stays close by! This one’s a nail biter!

THE DARK POOL-(5/3/63) LOIS NETTLETON as Dianne Castillejo & MADLYN RHUE as Consuela Sandino

Dianne-“Oh Nanny it’s wrong, I didn’t think he’d blame you” Nanny-“The important thing is that he isn’t blaming you” Dianne- “Oh I’m letting you be hurt and I can’t do that.. I didn’t think he’d react this way. Nanny I”m going to tell him the truth” Nanny-“What are ya going to tell him. That you were with the baby holding a drink!” Dianne-“But you’re not the guilty one, he mustn’t blame you Nanny-“Dear in the past when things went badly you know what happened. You don’t want that now You promised him that you’d give it up. Oh when the baby was here it was better… but better’s not what you promised!”

Lois Nettleton as Dianne and Doris Lloyd as Nurse Andrina Gibbs

Consuela- “She feels guilty, she feels responsible for the baby’s death. and the drinking helps her to forgot. so we’ll see that she continues to drink. And when the bottle is all gone. We’ll get more Vodka. Or whiskey or what ever she likes. She can hide it from Victor for a while I suppose. But he will find out-And then he’ll be terribly hurt. and disappointed in her. He’ll need help and sympathy from someone else!”

Directed by Jack Smight with a teleplay by Alec Coppel and William D. Gordon, based on a story by William D. Gordon.

Lois Nettleton plays Dianne Castillejo who adopts a little boy, who drowns in their swimming pool while she is sitting out in the sun with a coctail. Dianne is a recovering alcoholic and there is a question as to whether she was intoxicated when the tragic accident occurred. Dianne is visited by a mysterious woman, (Madlyn Rhue) Consuela Sandino who claims to be the little boys birth mother. She proceeds to blackmail Dianne about the circumstances of the little boys death. She convinces Dianne to allow to her stay in the house as a guest being an old school friend. Here she plans on helping Dianne submerge herself in booze so she’ll pay out loads of money and eventually have to be taken away to a sanatorium where she can then work on the handsome (Anthony George) Victor. Co-starring Doris Lloyd as Nanny. 

RUN FOR DOOM 5/17/63 DIANA DORS as Nickie Carole

John Gavin as Dr. Don Reed and Tom Skerritt as friend Dr. Frank Farmer… Don is just smitten.

scott brady as Nickies stand by boyfriend Bill

Nickie-singing Just One of Those Things-“so goodbye dear and amen… Bill- “Where you going?” Nickie-“Maybe California. You know I came back just to have a look at you. You got real weak eyes Bill. Here’s hoping we meet now and then.”  Bill- “But you haven’t asked me to come along “Nickie-“Well I came here thinking I’d have to, but I don’t need you anymore the boomerang’s broken baby’ Bill-“You wanna bet!” Nickie “Uhuh, It was great fun, but it was just one of those things.”

Directed by Bernard Girard with a teleplay by James Bridges and a story by Henry Kane.

Doctor Don Reed (John Gavin) falls head over heels for a sexy night club singer, the slinky Nickie Carole,(Diana Dors) who is just no good. Both his father and Nickie’s own band leader boyfriend try to warn Don. Nickie accepts Don’s proposal of marriage, and then his father drops dead after hearing the news. The newlyweds use the inheritance money to take a honeymoon cruise, in which Don stumbles upon his bride getting all snuggly with another passenger. In a rage, Don causes the man to fall overboard. Of course Nickie urges Don to keep his mouth shut. And he is now a murderer. Soon after Nickie grows tired of Don, as her old lover Bill warned would happen, and this hard edged old boyfriend (Scott Brady) Bill Floyd of the Bill Floyd Trio shows up in the picture again… What will happen to this dangerous triangle of lust and obsession…

THE SECOND SEASON!

A HOME AWAY FROM HOME (9/27/63)  CLAIRE GRISWOLD as Natalie Rivers

Natalie-“I understand, they’re patients aren’t they? Permissive therapy?” Dr. Fennick-“Yes that’s it exactly. A new method, an experiment. I wanted to prove that my patients would act normally if treated like normal human beings.”

Sarah-“Oh I feel fine doctor just fine. I always feel fine talking to you.”  Dr Fennick-“That’s what I’m here for’ Sarah-”Yes I know but… what am I here for? Beatrice Kay as Sarah Sanders the aging film star.

inmates Virginia Gregg as Miss Gibson and Ronald Long as The Major

The real doctors are locked up in the attic!

the deranged Ray Milland as Dr. Fennick who menaces Natalie (Claire Griswold ) in Home away from Home- The Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Virginia Gregg as Miss Gibson-“The doctors told everyone about you. I know they’re just CRAZY to meet you!!!”

Directed by Herschel Daugherty with a teleplay based on his story by Robert Bloch from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

This is one of those great ‘the inmates have taken over the asylum’ narratives starring Ray Milland. Milland plays Dr. Fenwick a mentally disturbed doctor who believes in role playing as a therapeutic means to unlocking a patients identity crisis and finding happiness. After he kills the director of the sanitarium, he assumes his identity! of course. He locks away the staff in the attic and allows the inmates to pick roles that would suit their desires. Things are going pretty well until the directors niece Claire shows up to visit her uncle. At least she has never seen her uncle before so she quickly assumes that Milland is who he says he is. Unfortunately Claire discovers the dead body of her real uncle and urges Fennick to call the police. Uh oh! What mayhem will ensue.

There are great little parts by Virginia Gregg as Miss Gibson roleplaying the nurse, Connie Gilchrist as Martha, Mary La Roche as Ruth… and Beatrice Kay as Sarah Sanders!

A NICE TOUCH 10/4/63  ANNE BAXTER as Janice Brandt

That’s actor Harry Townes lying dead under that shiny star pillow…

Janice referring to Larry (George Segal) -“He’s the kind of man who could make you do anything… anything at all…”

This episode is directed by Joseph Pevney with a teleplay by Mann Rubin

George Segal plays the young ambition actor who wins over casting agent Anne Baxter as Janice Brandt. Janice falls deeply in love with Larry the cocky and short tempered actor with whom she gets a screen test for in Hollywood and turns him into an upcoming male lead.

She has given up everything for this strong willed actor, her career, even sacrificing her marriage.

While back in New York, Janice calls Larry desperately telling him that her ex-husband Ed (Harry Townes) has tracked her down completely drunk and is now unconscious on the floor. Larry calming coaches Janice into finishing off the job by smothering him with a pillow, so she can finally be free and join him in Hollywood… But is that all there is to it?

TERROR AT NORTHFIELD (10/11/63)  JACQUELINE SCOTT as Susan Marsh & Katherine Squire as Mrs La Font

Sheriff Will- “You can’t think of anyone at all who might have had a grudge against Frenchie?” Katherine Squire as Mrs La Font- “Only one person Will, Myself. He was my son, I loved him … there was no harm in him he never hurt anyone but he was lazy. He would not accept responsibility. That’s why he wanted me at the restaurant so I could do all the work of running it, while he’d play Frenchie La Font for the public. I used to get so angry with him. So angry… (crying)

The creepy custodian of the library terrorized poor Susan with his tales of working the slaughterhouses

Directed by Harvey Hart with a teleplay by Leigh Brackett, and a story by Ellery Queen

In Northfield, a rural community in northern California a teenage boy Tommy Cooley is found brutally murdered. His father R.G. Armstrong, who is a religious fanatic goes on a mission to avenge his boy’s murder. There is only one piece of evidence, a broken off part of the car’s headlight found a the murder scene. First, believing that he is getting signs from God, he murders Frenchie La Font (Dennis Patrick) the person who owned the car. Then the car falls into the hands of an elderly librarian who considered purchasing the car and might have had access to it. The residents of Northfield become terrorized by the events and demand that (Dick York) Sheriff Will Pearce do something about it. Jacqueline Scott who plays Susan March a librarian and the Sheriff’s girlfriend is now the one who wound up with La Font’s car. Cooley now suspects her. He is on a mission from the lord to avenge his sons death. Will Susan be next? Co-stars Katherine Squire as Mrs.La Font who turns out a tremendous performance as the mother of a good for nothing son who winds up being the victim of Cooley’s wrath.

THE DIVIDING WALL (12/6/63) KATHERINE ROSS as Carol Brandt

Carol-“You don’t talk much do you?” Terry-”I guess not” Carol -“Is the rest of your family like that? Quiet I mean? Terry- I don’t know. I don’t even know who they were. I was raised in a county home” Carol- “You mean like an Orphanage? Terry “Now what else could it mean? I’m sorry maybe we oughta start back, it’s a long way” Carol -”We can take the subway Terry -“I wanna walk-you wanna take the subway go ahead if that’s the way you feel about it “Carol-“why did you come with me?” Terry- “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that it’s the rush hour now…. Look I gotta thing about being closed up in places is all.” Carol- “Claustrophobia?” Terry- “yeah” Carol- “So does Mr Calucci… He was a prisoner of war” Terry- “I was a prisoner once… No war though.” Carol -“You mean the home.” “Terry- “Home reformatory, state prison, take your pick. Anything else you’d like to know? Carol- “Some date huh?” Terry-Bet you don’t have any boyfriends like me.” Carol-” I don’t have any boyfriends”Terry- “come on” Carol- “I haven’t dated since high school.” Terry- “Girl like you why not? Carol-“what do you know about me?” Terry- “I could learn.”

Directed by Bernard Girard  (Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round 1966, The Mad Room 1969) with a teleplay by Joel Murcott based on a story by George Bellak.

Three paroled ex-convicts stage a heist but inadvertently unleash radioactive cobalt on a small urban city street. Actors Chris Robinson, Norman Fell and James Gregory who are now garage mechanics decide to rob the payroll office. When they can’t crack open the safe, they take it to their garage, which is adjoined to the little shop next store run by Carol.

Terry who is acutely claustrophobic (Chris Robinson) begins a romance with Carol, as he struggles between self preservations and his sense of humanity and love for this beautiful young woman. Katherine Ross is a particularly seductive pixie in this episode. Ross’ presence brings an element of realism and humanist equilibrium to the very nihilist tone of the story.

GOOD-BYE, GEORGE (12/13/63) PATRICIA BARRY is Lana Layne / Rosemary ‘Peaches’ Cassidy

Lana/Peaches-“You and snakebite are among the very few things that fail me in that respect.”

Directed by Robert Stevens with a teleplay by William Fay and story by Robert Arthur.

This is one of the more cheeky mystery installments of the show, and Patricia Barry is just superb as the brassy dame with a secret past who’s looking out for number one. The night she wins the Oscar, movie star Lana Layne is visited by her old ex-convict husband George (Stubby Kaye), who, she thought had died in a prison fight. Rosemary ‘Peaches’ Cassidy had married the bum when she was only seventeen and didn’t know any better. But George has plans of letting Lana remain his wife, since she’s so successful and wealthy, and if they did get divorced she’d owe him half of anything that was hers. She wants to marry handsome manager Harry Lawrence (Robert Culp). Lana clocks George on the head and accidentally kills him. Now Lana and Harry must try to hide the body while finding a place to have their honeymoon, assailed by gossip columnist Baila French (Alice Pearce- Bewitched’s neurotic neighbor Gladys Kravitz). It’s a comedy of errors!

HOW TO GET RID OF YOUR WIFE (12/20/63) JANE WITHERS as Edith Swinney

Rosie “You’ve had a narrow escape. Well life’s given you another chance. And you should take it… You should free yourself. When something’s over it’s over” The always delightful Joyce Jameson as Rosie Feather the ‘dancer’

Directed by Alf Kjellin story and teleplay by Robert Gould

Withers plays Edith Swinney the consummate nagging harpy who dominates her husband’s Gerald’s (Bob Newhart) mundane life. Gerald concocts a very elaborate plan to drive Edith mad using paranoia as he digs a grave like hole for a fish tank, leaving empty boxes of rat poison around the kitchen. Edith is so convinced that Gerald is out to kill her that she shares her fears with her friends and neighbors. Gerald purchases a pair of rats from a pet shop and plants them in the kitchen. She falls for the bait and puts rat poisoning in his cocoa making it look like murder made to look like suicide. She calls the police the next morning, but they find a very alive Gerald. Edith is arrested for attempted murder… but is that the end of the story. Joyce Jameson stars as dancer Rosie Feather, always fabulous, perhaps playing the featherbrained blonde bombshell –but always endearing!

THREE WIVES TOO MANY (1/3/64) TERESA WRIGHT as Marion Brown

Marion Brown tells her husband- “You been a bigamist 4 times. Now you can stay alive with me or be dead away from me!”

Directed by Joseph Newman with a teleplay by Arthur Ross and story by Kenneth Fearing.

Dan Duryea is a gambler and a proud bigamist name Raymond Brown. He truly loves his wife… I mean all four of them. But something is going quite wrong. One by one his wealthy meal tickets are all turning up dead. At first it appears that they are suicides. But the police start to suspect Brown of murder. Marion, (Teresa Wright) has been the long time dutiful wife who has waited and suffered through heart ache to finally have her philandering husband all to herself. Could she be the one who is bumping off all of Ray’s wives? Wright takes a much different approach from the gentle farm wife Stella and shows herself off to be quite resourceful when holding onto a philandering husband!

BEYOND THE SEA OF DEATH (1/24/64/) DIANA HYLAND as Grace Renford & MILDRED DUNNOCK as Minnie Briggs

Grace Renford- “All men are rotten aren’t they Minnie, as soon as they’re interested in me they’re no good!

Aunt Minnie-”If he’s a doctor at all he should be giving out pills not talking to dead people!”

Directed by Alf Kjellin with a teleplay by Alfred Hayes and William Gordon. Story by Miriam Allen de Ford.

Grace Renford (the haunting Diana Hyland) plays a wealthy and beautiful socialite who longs to meet the man of her dreams. Someone who will love her for who she is and not the money and status that is her legacy. The lonely Grace answers an ad in a spiritualist magazine where she begins to correspond with a young man named Keith Holloway (Jeremy Slate).

He is an engineer who does his work in Bolivia, or so he says. When he comes to the states to meet Grace for the first time, she has rented a modest apartment and pretends that she is just an ordinary working class girl. Minnie (Mildred Dunnock) acts as guardian to the lost waif, and knows something isn’t quite right with this man. But when Grace and Keith get engaged, she tells him about her true identity. Keith insists that he is not interested in her money, and that he has his own business ventures in Bolivia. Keith returns to South America, planning on having Grace join him soon. But Grace gets a telegram saying that he has been killed in a mining accident.

Sent into the world of spreading grief, Grace turns to spiritualism and mysticism to find a way to contact her lost love. Thus appears Dr.Shankara (Abraham Sofaer) who can connect Grace with her dead love. Wanting to shed her worldly goods, she gives away her possessions to the Dr and his temple. But Minnie suspects that Keith is very much alive and that a scam has been going on with the doctor for years. Minnie tries to intervene with disastrous results!

NIGHT CALLER (1/31/64) FELICIA FARR as Marcia Fowler

Roy- “A string of men friends all the time Mrs Fowler, a string of men friends, a string of men friends all the time ssh don’t tell anybody Roy this is your Uncle Joe from Kokomo Roy, why don’t you go outside in the yard for a little Roy huh!… {…} There’s a smell of death around women like you. Death and corruption. You corrupt people the way you go on all the time. So you better cut it out you understand that” Marcia Fowler-“Get away from me you’re out of your mind. Nobody would blame me now if I shot you now with your filthy phone calls, breaking in here like this. How exciting am I now with a gun pointing at you?”

Directed by Alf Kjellin with a teleplay by Robert Westerby & Gabrielle Upton based on Upton’s story.

Felicia Farr  plays the sexy Marcia Fowler who accuses the neighborhood thug Roy Bullock (Bruce Dern) of not only playing peeping tom, but sexually harassing her. Roy is a tightly wound teen filled with angst and rage and could possibly be a psychopath while we’re at it. He denies it, when confronted by Marcia’s husband. (David White)

Marcia does appear to be self-absorbed, neglecting to pay enough attention to her stepson. But when the obscene phone calls begin, Marcia convinces her hubby to confront Roy about it, who tells him she’s just looking for attention. When Roy Fowler goes away on a business trip he challenges Marcia calling her a tease and a lousy wife and mother, the way his own mother had failed. Okay, so the angry boy has mother issues. Things get out of hand when Marcia begins to feel threatened and takes out a gun. But is everything as it seems!

THE EVIL OF ADELAIDE WINTERS (2/7/64)- KIM HUNTER as Adelaide Winters

Directed by Laslo Benedek with a story and teleplay by Arthur Ross

Kim Hunter is stunning as a ruthless woman who has no conscience and borders on the sociopathic. At the end of WWII, Adelaide exploits the grief and loss of surviving members of family to act as a spiritual medium. She earns a nice living by taking money from these grieving people, claiming to ease their suffering by connecting them with their lost loved ones. Gene Lyons plays Adelaide’s bunko buddy Robert who helps set up the patsies for the taking.

The is nothing more heinous than bilking grieving families of soldiers killed in battle out of their money pretending that she can communicate with them.

Enter the wealthy widower Edward Porter (John Larkin) who has just lost his son in the war. Adelaide convinces him to join her in a séance. Desperately lonely and longing for his son’s return Edward begins to come around and embrace Adelaide’s powers. Edward has also fallen in love with Adelaide and wishes the three of them to be together…!

Robert (Gene Lyons)- “I taught you everything there is to know about this racket..” Adelaide “Profession Robert.” Robert – “That’s what you’d like to pretend, but it is a racket, a swindle a con game as any I ever did.” Adelaide-“ I only obtain the more crude aspects of the profession from you.” Robert-“Everything and I want you to stop pushing me around.” Adelaide-“You taught me a series of Halloween tricks. Carnival mumbo jumbo… I made it pay.” Robert -“They’re still carny tricks.” Adelaide-“Science!” Robert- ‘And you took them from me…”

BEAST IN VIEW 3/20/64- JOAN HACKETT as Helen Clarvoe

Directed by Joseph Newman with a teleplay by James Bridges and a story by Margaret Millar  (Rose’s Last Summer-Boris Karloff’s Thriller starring Mary Astor).

Joan Hackett, (The Group 1966) a very underrated actress of the 60s & 70s plays Helen Clarvoe a woman who is being tormented by phone calls from a menacing woman named Dorothy who is threatening her life. Kevin McCarthy is lawyer Paul Blackshear who agrees to investigate and track the maniacal Dorothy down. The crazy woman blames Helen for the break up of her wedding engagement. Paul finds a photographer for whom Dorothy recently posed, though she has destroyed any negatives and photos of herself. Then the photographer is murdered! While in the midst of his investigation, Paul receives a frantic call from Helen that Dorothy has broken into her apartment and is holding her at gunpoint!

BEHIND THE LOCKED DOOR( 3/27/64)- GLORIA SWANSON as Mrs. Daniels

Mrs. Daniels-“No Dave… this is your home now!”

Directed by Robert Douglas with a teleplay by Henry Slesar and Joel Murcott. Story by Slesar.

When Dave Snowden (James MacArthur) and his new bride Bonnie (the lovely and underrated Lynn Loring) visit the estate owned by Bonnie’s late father, Dave finds a mysterious locked door and surmises that there must be something of value hidden there. Bonnie tells her mother (Gloria Swanson) that they’ve just been married, who instantly assumes that Dave is after her inheritance. Mrs.Daniels tries to give the young man money to go away and annul the marriage. Dave is hungry for money and gets Bonnie to go along with a plan for her to fake a suicide attempt by overdosing on sleeping pills. This they hope will get the mother’s sympathy. Things go badly when a child hood illness leaves Bonnie allergic to sleeping pills. The climax is stunning as the great ironic natural law of justice is served. Swanson is marvelous as always as the elegant and protective Mrs Daniels!

THE GENTLEMAN CALLER (4/10/64) RUTH McDEVITT as Miss Emmy Wright

Miss Emmy Rice -“I was just thinking of how awful it is when people are so mean to each other. That’s one thing when you get to be seventy five, you see clearer than anything else. How mean people are to each other.”

Directed by Joseph Newman with a teleplay by James Bridges and story by Veronica Johns.

The delightful Ruth McDevitt plays Miss Emmy Wright, an elderly lady who sits in the park and is befriended by Gerald Musgrove (Roddy McDowall) who with his wife have just successfully robbed $100,000 but need a good place to hide the doe ’til the heat is off.

Emmy is a known pack rat, who invites the couple over to her cluttered and quirky place for many social dinners. Gerald gets the bright idea of stashing the loot inside the old dust covered magazines that Emmy has collected over the years. Gerald also convinces Emmy to draw up a will leaving him the beneficiary so that they can later kill her off and claim the clutter that holds their stolen cash. This is a dark comedic episode with stellar performances by both McDevitt playing off McDowell’s usual droll manner. Co-starring Juanita Moore as Mrs. Jones and Naomi Stevens as Mrs Goldy.

THE ORDEAL OF MRS. SNOW (4/14/64) PATRICIA COLLINGE as Adelaide Snow

Directed by Robert Stevens with a teleplay by Alvin Sargent and story by Patrick Quentin.

Patricia Collinge is one of my favorite character actors. Here she turns in quite a moving performance as a woman trapped in a safe with timing running out. And in this episode I’m particularly fond of her doting on her two siamese cats, being a staunch advocate for cats and someone who shares their home with let’s say a variety of pussycats, a siamese rescue being just one of them!

In The Ordeal of Mrs Snow Aunt Adelaide Snow is at the mercy of her scheming niece’s husband Bruce (Don Chastain) who is afraid that auntie will go to the police about his check forging. While away on a weekend vacation, he locks Mrs. Snow inside the bank vault in her house, hoping she’ll suffocate and it will look like an accident. But he has also locked one of her cats inside as well. Thank god, because these little felines are very smart indeed. Mrs Snow’s niece Lorna, (Jessica Walter) tries to call her aunt, worried that something is wrong, not realizing what her sneaky murderous husband has done… Don’t worry, the cats come to the rescue! Also co-staring George Macready as Adelaide’s dear friend Hillary Prine.

THE SECOND VERDICT (5/29/64) SHARON FARRELL as Melanie Rydell

Directed by Lewis Teague with a teleplay by Alfred Hayes and a story by Henry Slesar.

Sharon Farrell plays the seductive Melanie Rydell who doesn’t intentionally get men chasing after her. But her psychotic husband Lew Rydell (Frank Gorshin) gets off on a murder charge after Ned Murray (Martin Landau) successful gets him an innocent verdict. To Ned’s horror he learns that Lew is in fact a hot headed jealous nutcase who was guilty of murder and is now accusing him of going after his sexy wife. Ned is conflicted by law, but wants to bring this loaded canon to justice but can’t get him prosecuted for the same crime twice. He solicits the help of an old gangster friend who owes him one, but realizes that he has inadvertently put a hit out on the unstable Lew.

ISABEL (6/5/64) BARBARA BARRIE  is Isabel Smith

Directed by Alf Kjellin Teleplay by William Fay and Henry Slesar, from a story by S.B. Hough.

Again, the highly underrated Barbara Barrie, who has always given her all in any performance, notably several of The Naked City. Here she plays a very timid and unstable single woman, (I will not use the word spinster here, though most analysis makes use of the word, I find it offensive) Isabel wrongly accuses Howard Clemens (Bradford Dillman) of sexual assault. Howard Clemens is sentenced to two years in prison for the crime he didn’t commit. Once he is released, the first thing he does is steal a large amount of money. $13,000 which is the amount he would have drawn as a salary had he not been thrown in jail.

He comes back to the same town where Isabel teaches, and opens up a record shop. He purposefully manages to bump into Isabel until he finally gains her confidence. Eventually the pair become engaged. While on their honeymoon, Howard tampers with the fuel ignition switch on the boat which will cause the boat to explode. He tells Isabel to take the boat out alone. A bit later he hears the blast and is finally satisfied that he has gotten his revenge on her at last.

BODY IN THE BARN (7/3/64) LILLIAN GISH as Bessie Carnby

Directed by Joseph Newman (The Outcasts of Poker Flats 1952, The Human Jungle 1954, This Island Earth 1955, The Twilight Zone ’63-’64) with a teleplay by Harold Swanton and story by Margaret Manners.

I’ve written about this marvelous episode for Movie Silently’s The Gish Sisters Blogathon! Here Lillian Gish plays the sassy Bessie who lives with her daughter Camilla (Maggie McNamara) Bessie is a staple of the town, and when her handyman falls to his death because of the arrogance of her neighbor Samantha Wilkins (Patricia Cutts-The Tingler 1959) and her whipped husband Henry (Peter Lind Hayes) Bessie goes on a mission to try and bridge the feud with the couple by inviting them over for supper.

Samantha refuses to break bread with the Carnbys, but Henry starts to insinuate himself into Bessie and Camilla’s life. One night Henry disappears and Bessie sees Samantha digging a hole in the barn. She accuses the woman of murder and eventually Samantha is executed for killing her husband. But… Henry unexpectedly returns, claiming to have been on a long sea voyage not able to hear about his wife’s trial. Bessie suspects that Henry has staged the whole thing and begins to feel terrible guilt about what she has done. Will she be able to rectify the awful mistake she has made and bring Henry to justice?

Bessie-“To bring to the light of day the two lies that together make a truth. “

SEASON 3

CHANGE OF ADDRESS (10/12/64) PHYLLIS THAXTER as Elsa Hollands

Elsa -“There’s something wrong with this house, I lye awake at night and I can feel it. There’s is something wrong with this house Something we don’t know about.”

Elsa-”That’s the girl I saw at the beach, she’s lovely” Keith- “What I want, what I really want. What I’m sure as sitting here want… uhhh.” Elsa -“Keith it may be, it just very well may be I want the same thing”. Keith- “What are you talking about baby? what you were talking about… Elsa-“how we rid ourselves of each other… and when! Me of you and you of me.”

Michael Blodgett and Tisha Sterling do some mod dancing in Change of Address

Elsa… do you really need to go down to the basement to see what your adolescent husband wants to show you? Can’t you guess!!!!

Directed by David Friedkin with a teleplay by Morton Fine and David Friedkin and a story by Andrew Benedict.

Elsa Hollands (Phyllis Thaxter) hates the new beach house. Keith Hollands (Arthur Kennedy) refuses to grow older, and chases after the local beach hottie Tisha Sterling. The house gives Elsa the chills, and it doesn’t help that Keith starts digging a hole in the basement floor that he claims is for the new boiler. Elsa and Keith keep clashing over the strain in their marriage. She just wants to go back to her old apartment and senses something terribly wrong with the damp place.

While Keith is playing around with the young blonde beauty, Elsa contacts the ex-owner’s wife to discourage her from selling, and perhaps finds out the truth about the place. When Keith can’t take Elsa’s complaints anymore, finding her an obstruction into his world of new found vitamins, jumping jacks, young beach bunnies, hair dye, turtle necks, late nites out at the disco dancing along side the dreamy blued eyed Michael Blodgett, he kills her and buries her in that nice big hole he’s been digging. But will Elsa’s investigation come back to bite Keith in those awfully ugly jogging shorts?

WATER’S EDGE (10/19/64) -ANN SOTHERN as Helen Cox

Helen-“Funny you dreaming’ about me and here we are. Life’s a big surprise.”

Directed by Bernard Girard with a teleplay by Alfred Hayes and a story by the great Robert Bloch!

Rusty Connors (John Cassavetes) is newly released from prison. While in prison his mate Mike Krause (Rayford Barnes) talks incessantly about the perfect blonde he left behind. Krause dies in prison, and so while Rusty gets out he decides to look up this gorgeous dish that was married to his former cellmate. Krause had been in prison for robbery and murder, but neither the money nor the body of his partner have ever been found. Could Krause’s wife Helen know where the loot is stashed?

Rusty comes to find Helen (Ann Sothern) slinging hash at a greasy spoon, but she is far from the pin up that Mike Krause crooned about. Still Rusty plays up to her, thinking that she can lead him to the stolen money. The pair form a tumultuous sexual relationship, both greedy to find the hidden cash. Which they stumble onto in an abandoned boat house infested with starving rats. The two might just turn on each other, but you’ll have to see the episode and find out for yourself! This is a macabre and gritty story by the master of the suspense genre Robert Bloch author of Psycho…

LONELY PLACE (11/15/64) TERESA WRIGHT as Stella

Stella “I”m scared of Jesse… You scared of him too. You scared too. talking don’t help Emery I heard you talking to Jessie in the orchard. You told him you married me to have someone to feed ya. Is that why we ain’t ever have any children?”

Directed by Harvey Hart with a teleplay by Francis Gwaltney and a story by G.B Gilford

Teresa Wright is outstanding as poor Stella, married to a horrible dolt of a husband who doesn’t appreciate her. Emory (Pat Buttram is a weak and unloving bumpkin who owns a peach farm. This is a dark Americana tale about a quiet woman named Stella who suffers in silence but has a few joys, like the love of animals, in particular her little pet squirrel. One day an ominous drifter asks if he can work the farm for a bit. Bruce Dern plays Jesse, in a role that surpasses so many of the psychopaths he’s had opportunity to play. Jesse has a particular viciousness that is spine tingling. While he helps harvest the peach crop, he secretly torments Stella with his fondness for his sharp knife. Stella feels threatened but her husband acts clueless, while at times we see that he is very aware of what is going on, he just chooses not to intervene out of cowardice. The episode is perhaps one of the most psychologically enthralling, and it’s climax will leave you breathless. The performances are absolutely stunning. Just as frightening as any modern thriller on the screen today! And Wright turns in a performance that tugs at your heart with so many levels of emotional reflection as a woman trapped by her circumstances. John F. Warren’s cinematography portrays a rural hinterland that is otherworldly and melancholy.

MISADVENTURE (12/7/64) LOLA ALBRIGHT as Eva Martin

Eva-”You crying? You are crying Ha! What do you’ve got to cry about? If anybody’s gonna cry it should be me. Although I must say… You are a most unusual gas man!”

Directed by Joseph Newman with a story and teleplay by Lewis Davidson.

Eva (Lola Albright) is an adulterous wife to unsuspecting businessman (George Kennedy) who is a penny pincher though he is quite well to do. One day a mysterious stranger (Barry Nelson) manages to work his way into the house by claiming to be the gas man. He acts very peculiar, until finally he gets her into bed. Colin convinces Eva that it would be easy to kill her husband… This zany and interesting episode has a lot of twists so I won’t give anything away! Just watch for great performances by Nelson and in particular the lovely Lola Albright who can do comedic mystery thrillers with ease!

TRIUMPH (12/14/64)- JEANETTE NOLAN as Mary Fitzgibbons

Mary-“You are a vain man.” Brother Thomas-  “A minor vice.” Mary-“There is no such thing as a minor vice.” Brother Thomas “trimming a mustache harms no one.” Mary-“It’s so difficult for you to be the kind of missionary you should be.” Brother Thomas- “I have a good reputation.” Mary-“Because I have made sure of it.” Brother Thomas-“yes you have.” Mary-“you begrudge me that recognition.” Brother Thomas-“I’m the first to admit it.” Mary-“I have loved you.”

Mary- “I don’t know if I still do. I’ve had to forget my needs and devote myself to your work.”

Directed by Harvey Hart with a teleplay by Arthur Ross and story by Robert Branson.

This is a particularly intense addition to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour due to the fine performances by Ed Begley and one of my favorites Jeanette Nolan. Nolan plays Mary the enigmatic wife to a missionary medical man (Begley). The strong woman behind the man so to speak. Begley plays Brother Thomas Fitzgibbons who in actuality is an incompetent surgeon living in a primal world in the rugged terrain of India. Mary is ambitious and wants all the glory for her and her weak husband. When Tom Simcox and Maggie Pierce –Brother John Sprague and his wife Lucy come to help the mission, Mary fears they will expose the truth about Brother Thomas’ work, as well as usurp their position there. Oh what a tangled web we weave. Nolan almost reignites her Lady Macbeth with her role as the conniving and treacherous Mary Fitzgibbons– Her silver tongued laments as always put her at the top of my favorite character actors!

WHERE THE WOODBINE TWINETH (1/11/65)- MARGARET LEIGHTON as Nell Snyder & JUANITA MOORE as Suse

“would you like to meet Mingo when she comes? She’s not very big. She’s big enough to live in a bird cage and big enough to have a frog for a horse!”

“Do you believe me about Mingo?”

Eva-“Is it dark where daddy is?”-Nell ” I hope not… I don’t know.” -Eva “Numa knows… Mingo says it’s brighter than day!… they have bumble bees there too.”-Nell- “Who’s Mingo honey?”-Eva- “My best friend!”

This is one of Alfred Hitchcock Hour’s most supernatural of tales that breaks the mold of the crime/suspense drama. Along with The Sign of Satan, The Monkey’s Paw, and The Magic Shop by H.G Wells. Where the Woodbine Twineth could have fit nicely into Boris Karloff’s Thriller anthology series. A haunting tale that will stay with you for a long time. Margaret Leighton is mesmerizing as Aunt Nell, a woman who just cant embrace her little niece’s wild imaginative tales. I’ve recently become acquainted with Leighton’s work and have fallen in love with the actress!

Directed by Alf Kjellin with a teleplay by James Bridges and a story by Davis Grubb (wrote Night of the Hunter, The Cheyenne Social Club and a few short stories for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery 1971.

Leighton is marvelous as she coldly, rigidly lacks understanding of her recently orphaned niece who talks about fey people who live under the davenport and visit her at night. When Eve comes to live with the elderly Mississippi riverboat Captain Snyder, her grandfather, her aunt Nell just can’t break through.

Nell just believes the child to be willful and lazy trying to blame things on her imaginary friends like Mr. Peppercorn and Mingo… Aunt Nell just can’t handle the role of caretaker to a wily and free spirited child and begins to crack under the pressure. The conflict becomes very real when Nell challenges Eva at every turn.

When Eva (Eileen Baral) gets a wonderful Creole doll she names Numa from her riverboat King grandfather, tensions ignite  and Nell comes face to face with the mystical world where the woodbine twineth. A nether region between life, death and the realms you cannot see with the naked eye. To balance out the constant struggle between the suffering Nell and the precocious Eva, is the calming and level headed presence of Juanita Moore as Suse, who understands Eva and is more like a mother to the young girl than Nell can possibly manifest from her rigid identity.

Nell is obsessed with controlling Eva, and catching her at lies. She fears the child’s freedom, and resents how happy she can be. When she hears Eva chatting and playing with Numa, the doll grandfather had given Nell suspects that it is a child from the neighborhood.

Eva warns that if Nell takes Numa away, Eva will have to trade places with Numa and go to dwell “Where the Woodbine Twineth.”

But obstinate Aunt Nell defies Eva and puts Numa on top of the player piano, Eva steals Numa away and runs into the woods. Suddenly in an eerie haunting manner the player piano mysteriously starts up by itself. Nell desperate stumbles onto Eva in the backyard playing with a little black girl –they are dancing.

Nell chases the girl away, warning her to stay away but then Eva disappears. When Nell finds a doll in Numa’s box it looks exactly like a porcelain version of little Eva, Nell realizes that the magic was real and that she has lost her little niece forever to the ether world beyond the trees… A changeling in her place, never to return.

One of my all time favorite episodes. Just effectively creepy yet magical stuff… with a haunting quality that lingers…

FINAL PERFORMANCE (1/18/65) SHARON FARRELL as Rosie

This piece directed by John Brahm from a teleplay by Clyde Ware & Lee Kalcheim. (Let’s Scare Jessica To Death 1971, All in the Family 1972) is a story based on Robert Bloch.

Roger Perry plays Cliff Allen a television writer on his way to Hollywood who picks up a pretty hitchhiker named Rosie.(Sharon Farrell) Later Rosie accuses Cliff of abducting her when he is stopped by the local police. Of course Cliff denies the charges but the sheriff orders him to come back to town with him. Cliff’s car breaks down, and so he is forced to stay over in a very run down motel.

Off the beaten path Motels already smack of creepy so as you can imagine when it turns out that it is run by a washed up vaudeville actor name Rudolph Bitzner or Rudolph the Great ( great –for what you’ll find out! )

Rudolph is played by the wonderful Franchot Tone, who dreams of a comeback someday, and Rosie is the daughter of his dead wife who used to be his partner. Now Rosie not only works at the cafe/motel, but she’s being groomed to be part of the comeback act.

Rosie sneaks off to apologize to Cliff for lying but she is terrified of Rudolph who is forcing her to marry him once she turns 18 which is in a few days. Cliff agrees to help Rosie escape once his car is fixed. But when he goes to her cabin she is not there. Rudolph convinces him to sit out in the audience and watch his great comeback act with Rosie before he leaves for Hollywood.

One of the most subtly grotesque and atmospheric relics of the early 60s before psycho-sexual cinema hit the proverbial fan!

I won’t give it away, you must see this macabre and eerie instillation in The Alfred Hitchcock Hour collection.

ONE OF THE FAMILY (2/8/65) LILIA SKALA plays Nurse Frieda Schmidt

Directed by Joseph Pevney with a teleplay by Oscar Millard (Angel Face 1952, Dead Ringer 1964) and William Bast. Based on a story by James Yaffe

Dexter and Joyce Daily (Jeremy Slate and Kathryn Hays) hire Dexter’s old German nanny named Frieda (the inimitable Lilia Skala) to come and take care of their newborn baby boy. She did such a good job with Dexter when he was just a tot. But Joyce becomes suspicious when she hears a radio broadcast about a nurse who is wanted in the poisoning death of an infant in San Francisco. Frieda does have some peculiar ways, but Joyce goes as far as to contact the murdered baby’s aunt played by Olive Deering. Christine Callendar only confirms Joyce’s greatest fears that Frieda is the one the police are looking for and that she is a dangerous baby killer!

AN UNLOCKED WINDOW (2/15/65) DANA WYNTER as Stella & LOUISE LATHAM as Maude Isles

As Maude’s husband reads the newspaper about the recent strangulation murders –she comments-“I read a book about a man who only killed trombone players, he beat them to death with their own trombones.”

Directed by Joseph Newman with a teleplay by James Bridges and story by Ethel Lina White

Stella Crosson (Dana Wynter) is the nurse to an invalid heart patient (John Kerr) Stella needs help and is very happy to get some relief when Nurse Betty Ames (T.C. Jones) shows up to help. The large house is also inhabited by an alcoholic housekeeper Maude played by the wonderful Louise Latham. The night is fret filled with storms and the news has reported that a maniacal nurse killer is on the loose! Oh, and the power has gone out, so they’re all in the dark.

Maude sends her husband out in the storm to get some medicine, and Stella goes around the house locking all the windows and doors. Except she fails to secure one that is in the creepy basement. The shocking ending will catch you off guard.

THOU STILL UNRAVISHED BRIDE 3/22/65-SALLY KELLERMAN as Sally Benner

Directed by David Friedkin with a teleplay by Morton Fine and David Friedkin and story by Avram Davidson

American Sally Benner is soon to marry London policeman Tommy Bonn (Ron Randall) While on a transatlantic cruise they announce their engagement, but four hours before they are to be wed, Sally has pangs of doubt and goes out into the London fog.  There have been a series of murders and her family grow weary for her safety. Tommy and his partner Stephen Leslie (Michael Pate) go in search of Sally.

They eventually stumble on an odd young man named Edward Clarke (David Carradine) who they suspect might be the strangler, and with the description of the woman he confesses to murdering they fear Sally’s fate. The episode also stars Kent Smith and Edith Atwater as Sally’s parents. This episode is very atmospheric and Kellerman as usual does a wonderful job of manifesting a languid sensuality and longing that hangs like dew on the petal.

POWER OF ATTORNEY (4/5/65) GERALDINE FITZGERALD as Agatha Tomlin & FAY BAINTER as May Caulfield

Directed by Harvey Hart with a teleplay by James Bridges and story by Selwyn Jepson (Stage Fright! 1950)

Richard Johnson is a smooth con artist Jarvis Smith posing as a stock expert who insinuates himself into the lives of the wealthy Mary Caulfield and suspicious companion Agatha. It’s always wonderful to see Geraldine Fitzgerald in any performance, here it is no exception. She has an elegant and stayed sensibility that can be as poignant as it is sophisticated. She works well against Fay Bainter who is always enigmatic like a fine bit of silverware that is timeless and sturdy. Johnson sheds his kindly Dr Marquay (The Haunting) persona here and plays the perfect cad. Jarvis eventually romances Agatha and takes over the handling of Mary’s sizable fortune, pretending that he is investing it for her. When it comes to light what Jarvis has done, the drama becomes a taut little mystery melodrama.

THE SECOND WIFE 4/26/65 JUNE LOCKHART as Martha

Directed by Joseph Newman with a teleplay by Robert Bloch from a story by Richard Deming

June Lockhart plays Martha Peters. Martha has answered a lonely hearts and becomes a mail order bride she finally meets Luke Hunter (John Anderson) a miserly reserved sort of man who seems to have no joy in his life. Married once before, his first wife was a mail order bride as well who died under mysterious circumstances. When Luke goes to visit his relatives, Martha’s fears begin to build when she finds a coffin shaped box hidden in the garage. She also hears her husband digging all night down in the locked cellar.

Suddenly Luke insists that they go on vacation for the Christmas Holidays, and urges her to start packing so they can go visit his relatives. Before they leave the house, Luke unlocks the cellar door and insists that Martha go downstairs and see what he’s been working on!

NIGHT FEVER (5/3/65) COLLEEN DEWHURST as Nurse Ellen Hatch

Directed by Herbert Coleman with a teleplay by Gilbert Ralston and story by Clark Howard, this is a stand out story, with a sublime performance by the always compelling Dewhurst.

Here Dewhurst plays a very compassionate nurse Ellen Hatch who is taking care of a cop-killer Jerry Walsh (Tom Simcox) on his way to death row. Jerry manages to melt Ellen’s tough yet kind exterior and lure her into believing that he’s fallen in love with her so that she can help engineer his escape.

FROM IMDb HERE IS THE LISTING OF ALL 93 EPISODES CHRONOLOGICALLY, INCLUDING THE BRIEF SYNOPSIS LISTED ON THE SITE.

1962

“I was born a character actor. I was never really a leading man type.” -Burgess Meredith

Oliver Burgess Meredith

WHAT A CHARACTER! BLOGATHON 2014

It’s here again! The most fabulous blogathon honoring those unsung stars that add that certain singular glimmer to either the cinematic sphere or the small screen sky–The character actors we’ve grown to love and follow adoringly. Thanks so much to Aurora at Once Upon A Screen, Outspoken & Freckled and Paula’s Cinema Club  for hosting such a marvelous tribute once again!

This post’s title comes from the opening narrative for Rod Serling’s favorite Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last.”  ‘Witness Mr. Henry Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers’ From Season 1 episode 8 which aired on November 20th 1959.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE “TIME ENOUGH AT LAST”

Directed by John Brahm, “Time Enough At Last” tells the story of a little bespectacled bibliophile bank teller named Henry Bemis ,a bookworm, a slave to the iron fisted hand of time and all it’s dreary inescapable obligatory scars and yearnings.

Browbeaten by his wife, boss and even the public at large who see him as an outcast because of his ravenous appetite to read books! Henry can’t even sneak away to read a newspaper during work hours. He’s forced to resort to studying the labels on condiment bottles. She won’t even let him read the ketchup. His harpy of a wife Helen ( Jacqueline deWit) even blackens in the lines of his books at home, calling it “doggerel“– One day as fate would have it, he steals away to the basement vault of the bank to catch up on his beloved preoccupation, when –as many Twilight Zone episodes had been infused with a dose of Rod Serling’s nihilism (as much as there is his hopeful message), the feared 50’s bomb annihilates our vision of the world that was swarming just a few moments before. Suddenly poor Henry seems to be the last man on earth. But wait… perhaps not poor Henry.

As he stumbles through the debris and carefully placed set pieces– the remnants of man’s destructive force, Henry comes upon the city’s public library filled with BOOKS!!! Glorious books…

While he must struggle against the approaching loneliness of the bleak future ahead, he begins to see the possibility of a new world where he could dream, and wander through so many scrawled worlds. Already an outsider he could finally live a life free to be as his boss rebuked him, a “reader.’

Henry starts to amass various piles of selected readings. There was time now. Time enough at last to read every word on the written page without interruption, interference or judgement.

Yet…fate once again waves her fickle finger via The Twilight Zone and leaves bewildered Henry without his much needed glasses, now they have fallen on the great stone steps, crushed by Henry’s own feet. As with every role Meredith brings to life the character of Henry Bemis with so much mirth and pathos.

He’s always just a bit peculiar, idiosyncratic, eccentric, lyrical, salty, sometimes irascible, but always captivating and distinctive, His voice, his persona, his look, his style… Burgess Meredith could always play the Henry Bemises of the world and grab our hearts because he has that rare quality of being so damn genuine.

Let’s face it even when the prolific Burgess Meredith is playing a cackling penguin– nemesis to the caped crusader Batman or the devil himself (alias the dapper and eccentric Charles Chazen with Mortimer the canary and his black and white cat Jezebel in tow) in The Sentinel 1977 based on the novel by Jeffrey Konvitz and directed by Michael Winner–he’s lovable!

He always manages to just light me up. Ebullient, mischievous  and intellectually charming, a little impish, a dash of irresolute cynicism wavering between lyrical sentimentalism. He’s got this way of reaching in and grabbing the thinking person’s heart by the head and spinning it around in dazzling circles with his marvelously characteristic voice. A mellifluous tone which was used often to narrate throughout his career. (I smile even at the simplest nostalgic memory like his work on television commercials , as a kid growing up in the 60s and early 70s I fondly remember his voice for Skippy Peanut Butter. Meredith has a solicitous tone and whimsical, mirthful manner. Here’s a clip from a precious vintage commercial showcasing Meredith’s delightfully fleecy voice.

And his puckish demeanor hasn’t been missed considering he’s actually played Old Nick at least three times as I have counted. In The Sentinel 1977, The Twilight Zone and Torture Garden! While in Freddie Francis’ production he is the more carnivalesque Dr. Diabolo–a facsimile of the devil given the severely theatrical make-up, goatee and surrounding flames… he is far more menacing in Michael Winner’s 70s gem as the spiffy Charles Chazin.

Burgess Meredith as Dr. Diabolo in Torture Garden 1967

And while I resist even the notion of redoing Ira Levin/William Castle and Roman Polanski’s masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby if, and I’m only saying if… I could envision anyone else playing along side Ruth Gordon as the quirky and roguish Roman Castevet it could only be Burgess Meredith who could pull that off!

Also being a HUGE fan of Peter Falk’s inimitable Columbo- I ask why why WHY?! was Burgess Meredith never cast as a sympathetic murderer for that relentless and lovable detective in the rumpled rain coat to pursue! Could you imagine the chemistry between these two marvelous actors!

Burgess Meredith all of 5′ 5″ tall was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1907. His father was a doctor, his mother a Methodist revivalist. We lost him in 1997 at the age of 89. That’s when he took his “dirt nap…” the line and that memorable scene from Grumpier Old Men 1993 that still makes me burst out laughing from the outlandish joy of it all!… because as Grandpa Gustafson (Meredith) tells John Gustafson (Jack Lemmon) about how he’s managed to live so long eating bacon, smoking and drinking his dinner–what’s the point…? “I just like that story!”

Leading man material… Street of Chance 1942

Burgess Meredith said himself, that he wasn’t born to be a leading man, yet somehow he always managed to create a magnetic draw toward any performance of his. As if where ever his presence in the story was, it had the same effect as looking in a side view mirror of the car “Objects are closer than they appear”–What I mean by that is how I relate his contribution becoming larger than the part might have been, had it been a different actor. Like the illusion of the mirrored reflection , he always grew larger in significance within the story–because his charisma can’t help but consume the space.

He took over the landscape and planted himself there like a little metaphysical essence, animating the narrative to a higher level of reality.

Meredith started out working with the wonderful Eva Le Gallienne joining her stage company in New York City in 1933. His first film role was that of Mio Romagna in playwright Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset 1936 where Meredith plays the son of an immigrant wrongfully executed for a crime he did not commit. He also joined the ranks of those in Hollywood who were named as “unfriendly witnesses’ by the House Un-American Activities Committee finding no work, being blacklisted in the 1950s.  

During the 1960s Meredith found his way back in various television roles that gave us all a chance to see and hear his incredible spectrum of performances. One of my personal favorites, dramatically potent and vigorously absorbing was his portrayal of Duncan Kleist in  Naked City television series episode directed by Walter Grauman (Lady in A Cage 1964)  Hold For Gloria Christmas

The groundbreaking crime and human interest series THE NAKED CITY- cast Meredith as a 60s beat poet & derelict who is literally dying to leave the legacy of his words to a kindred spirit.

A powerful performance told through flashback sequences that recollect his murder as he storms through the gritty streets and alley ways of New York City  a volatile alcoholic Greenwich Village poet trying to get back his precious manuscript of poems that were stolen as he bartered them away bit by bit for booze -he has bequeathed his work to the anonymous Gloria Christmas. The chemistry between Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart who plays his estranged wife is magnificent. Heckart is another character actor who deserves a spotlight.

BURNT OFFERINGS 1976-Dan Curtis’ priceless treasure of creepy camp featuring Karen Black, Oliver Reed and once again uniting the incredible Eileen Heckart with our beloved Burgess Meredith as the ominous Roz and Arnold Allardyce.

Roz & Arnold… charming… creepy!

Another memorable role for me, is his spirited performance as Charles Chazin alias The Devil in one of my all time favorite horror classics The Sentinel. “Friendships often blossom into bliss.” – Charles Chazin. Ooh that line still gives me chills…

Many people will probably love him for his iconic character study of a crusty cantankerous washed up boxing trainer named Mickey in the Rocky series of films. Or perhaps, for his colorful cackling or should I say quacking villain in the television series Batman -his iconic malefactor — The Penguin!

IMDb fact-His character, the Penguin, was so popular as a villain on the television series Batman (1966), the producers always had a Penguin script ready in case Meredith wanted to appear as a guest star.

Burgess Meredith will always remain one of the greatest, most versatile & prolific actors, character in fact… beloved and eternal…

BURGESS MEREDITH TELEVISION & FILMOGRAPHY ON IMBD HERE

“Like the seasons of the year, life changes frequently and drastically. You enjoy it or endure it as it comes and goes, as it ebbs and flows.”- Burgess Meredith

“I’ll just take amusement at being a paradox.”- Burgess Meredith

[on his childhood] “All my life, to this day, the memory of my childhood remains grim and incoherent. If I close my eyes and think back, I see little except violence and fear. In those early years, I somehow came to understand I would have to draw from within myself whatever emotional resources I needed to go wherever I was headed. As a result, for years, I became a boy who lived almost totally within himself.”- Burgess Meredith

 

Burgess Meredith with Fritz Weaver in The Twilight Zone episode The Obsolete Man

Burgess Meredith directed as well as starred in the sensational thriller THE MAN ON THE EIFFEL TOWER 1949–co-starring Franchot Tone and Charles Laughton. Meredith is wonderful as the hapless Joseph Heurtin a working class knife grinder who is mistakenly blamed for the death of a woman, the wealthy aunt of Bill Kirby (Robert Hutton) who has paid the sinister medical student Johann Radek, marvelously played by Franchot Tone. Charles Laughton is Inspector Jules Maigret who hunts the real killer all over Paris, right up to… you guest it-the Eiffel Tower. Splendid cinematography and gorgeous color treatment by Stanley Cortez.

Burgess Meredith said of co-star Franchot Tone -“Franchot Tone is nuttier than a fruitcake, so don’t let the genteel frosting fool you.”

Burgess Meredith as Heurtin & Franchot Tone as the psychopathic Radek in the fabulous Gothic noir thriller The Man on the Eiffel Tower 1949

IRONSIDE-“THE MACABRE MR MICAWBER” Meredith plays Carney the faithful butler –predating his side kick prop of Mortimer the yellow canary in The Sentinel, this time he’s got a miner bird named Mr. Micawber who speaks volumes- The name Micawber being an interesting nod the name of a character in David Copperfield. The same name he invokes in The Twilight Zone’s episode “Time Enough At Last” when the day-dreaming Henry Bemis tries to converse at the bank tellers window with a very disinterested woman who is only concerned about him short changing her a dollar.

OF MICE AND MEN 1939

One of the most poignant and memorable cinematic duos Lon Chaney Jr. does a stunning job as John Steinbeck’s simple minded big lug Lennie Small and Burgess Meredith as companion George Milton during the Depression who hope to get a little ranch of their own one day so Lennie can raise those rabbits. They turn in a powerful performance that I dare anyone at the end not to need a full box of Kleenex. The film also co-stars the wonderful Betty Field.

THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING 1941

That Uncertain Feeling (1941) Ernst Lubitsch directs this “romantic triangle” comedy about marital trouble that leads the devastatingly  beautiful Merle Oberon  as Mrs. Jill Baker who gets psychosomatic hiccups, becomes enamored with Burgess Meredith’s adorable Alexander Sebastian, a pianist she meets in the doctor’s waiting room. The question is will Larry Baker (Melvyn Douglas) get his wife back? Meredith is truly capable of being the romantic cog in the wheel, both humorous and appealing. You can see a bit of his quirky kind of charisma emerge that would later become his faithful trademark.

MINE OWN EXECUTIONER 1947

Burgess Meredith as the brilliant, self-aware yet complex Felix Milne who tries to help the very troubled Kieron Moore-Mine Own Executioner 1947

Burgess Meredith may be the ultimate ‘character’ actor but in this tautly wound thriller which has now become a obscure noir favorite of mine, shows he’s every bit the charismatic leading man. As psycho-analyst Felix Milne who’s suffering in his own personal life within his marriage to Pat (Dulcie Gray), he tries to help a very disturbed Adam Lucian (Kieron Moore) things spiral dangerously out of control. It’s a fabulous noir gem which co-stars the beguiling beauty Christine Norden as Barbara Edge–the object of Felix’s fixation. Wilkie Cooper (Stage Fright 1950, Jason and the Argonauts 1963) offered some stunning cinematography for this edgy piece.

ROCKY 1976-Mickey

GRUMPY OLD MEN — OUTTAKES

“TIME ENOUGH AT LAST” The Twilight Zone -END SCENE.

PRINTERS DEVIL- The Twilight Zone- aired Feb. 26th 1963

CLASH OF THE TITANS 1981

Burgess Meredith is the sage Ammon with his trusted owl Bubo in Clash of the Titans 1981

TWILIGHT ZONE’S “THE OBSOLETE MAN” SEASON 2 EPISODE 29 as Romney Wordsworth  

Once again, Meredith plays another ‘reader’ Romney Wordsworth in an obscure totalitarian society where he has been condemned to death for being obsolete… cherishing the worth of books… books that have been banned.

TORTURE GARDEN 1967

Here again, Meredith manifests his more ‘wicked’ side as Dr. Diabolo in this Freddie Francis Amicus Anthology collection of horror vignettes that are told at a carnival side show. Co-starring Jack Palance.

ADVISE AND CONSENT 1962

Otto Preminger’s outstanding ensemble of actors come together in this masterwork adapted from Allen Drury’s bestselling novel that elucidates the behind the scenes workings of Washington D.C politics. The U.S. Senate is convened to confirm a very controversial nominee for Secretary of State (Henry Fonda). Fine performances all around-

Here Meredith inhabits the role of the meek Herbert Gelman, interrogated by a very self righteous Henry Fonda who exposes the truth behind Gelman’s supposed hospitalization for tuberculosis… that in fact he’s had a mental breakdown. Robert Leffingwell (Fonda) skewers the lamb-like Gelman in front of the entire Senate.The presence of Charles Laughton as a grizzled old senator from the south is marvelous and a standout performance. Laughton had co-starred with Meredith in The Man on the Eiffel Tower!

Captivating study of the inner-workings of Washington maneuvering that comes close to home considering Meredith had made that Red list in the frenzied 50s when everyone was under suspicion of being either a communist or a subversive. Otto Preminger was instrumental in reanimating Burgess Meredith’s career.

Also stars Franchot Tone as The President, Gene Tierney and watch for Betty White as Senator Bessie Adams!

THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID 1946-directed by Jean Renoir

Burgess Meredith and the adorable Paulette Goddard were married at the time they filmed Diary of a Chambermaid in 1946. Captain Mauger (Meredith) predates the rascally rock throwing Ernest T. Bass from The Andy Griffith Show.

Reginald Owen is Captain Lanlaire who calls Meredith’s character “a mosquito” because he flits around like a crazy gnat. It’s hilariously good fun. Goddard is gorgeous and Jean Renoir, yet another favorite director of mine, does a wonderful job of setting up the scenery for Goddard’s character-Celestine, an opportunistic chambermaid who takes a job in hopes of catching a wealthy man. She uses her beauty and feminine wiles to try to gain riches. Surrounded by various interesting characters much the same way Renoir’s The Southerner 1945  was inhabited by various quirky personalities.

Lucien N. Andriot did the cinematography painting the landscape with a similar lyrical quality as he used for The Southerner.
Meredith wrote the screenplay. Almira Sessions ( Lena Couvais Monsieur Verdoux 1947) who mostly either plays an old maid or a housekeeper is Marianne.

Francis Lederer who plays Joseph the Valet is wound very tightly and is as creepy as usual as he looms over Celestine like a dark shadow. Meredith is the wiley old Captain Mauger who struts around the Lanlaire’s property eating their roses and throwing rocks smashing the greenhouse windows. Will Celestine find wealth and love -well you’ll have to see the film… even if it’s just to watch Burgess Meredith play an eccentric nutter…

HURRY SUNDOWN 1967 -

Otto Preminger directs Burgess Meredith as the Southern bigoted Judge Purcell.

Here Meredith introduces the film’s theatrical trailer….

THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN 1970

I just love this film and this director. Joseph L Mankiewicz’s cynical fable-like western that takes place in a primitive Arizona prison populated by marvelous characters, the lead being Kirk Douglas who plays Paris Pitman Jr. a slick and shifty miscreant who bides his time in the jail that is over-seen by a self righteous warden named Woodward Lopeman (Henry Fonda.) Paris gets his cell mates to conspire in a break out with the promise that he’ll share his hidden loot… Never trust a charming criminal nor rattlesnakes.

Of particular comical aspect for me was the intimate relationship between Hume Cronyn’s whimpering Dudley Whinner and his complaining ‘pal’ Cyrus McNutt (John Randolph.) I’ll be adding them to my upcoming post about coded gay characters in cinema.

The film also co-stars Warren Oates, Lee Grant and Martin Gabel.

Burgess Meredith is a wily old coot— The Missouri Kid. Spouting clever dialogue with his usual ease. Meredith always manages to slant himself just a little differently with each performance, never seeming repetitive in any of the roles he inhabits, bringing a unique impression of each and every character he brings to life.

Paris Pittman Jr. (Plans his escape with his cellmates)  “Anyway, start smelling around, and don’t forget, I’m trusting you to keep quiet, all of you keep quiet.”

The Missouri Kid:  “Like askin’ a pack of coyotes to keep quiet about a dead horse.”

MAGIC 1978

Setting aside Anthony Hopkins’ out of this world –unreal performance as ventriloquist Corky Withers/ Voice of Fats in the late great Richard Attenborough’s adaptation of William Goldman’s book. Burgess Meredith embodies the more laid back slick agent Ben Greene who stumbles onto Corky’s dilemma–either Fats is real or Corky’s got a split personality. It’s one of the more chilling 70s horror films with an edge, partly due to the performances by the cast. Ann Margaret plays the love interest Peggy Ann Snow who starts to drive a wedge between Corky and Fats or rather Corky’s sanity or unreality. Meredith plays off Hopkins uncomfortable frenetic energy with the pitch perfect low key air of New York Jew Borscht Belt poise.

WINTERSET 1936  Burgess Meredith as Mio Romagna

DAY OF THE LOCUST 1975

Directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy 1969 ) adapted from Nathaniel West– a captivating look at the decadence, alienation & seedy often dim almost Grand Guignol world showcased with rather disturbing narratives of the struggling folk who haven’t made a go of it in 1930’s Hollywood. Starring Karen Black, Donald Sutherland Also stars Geraldine Page, Richard Dysart, William Atherton and Billy Barty. Cinematography by Conrad L. Hall. Though Schlesinger has a knack for filling his films with odd characters, I think Burgess Meredith’s performance is the one that captures the feeling of the lost and broken dreams.

And our guy Burgess Meredith was nominated for a BAFTA, Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Harry Greener a vaudeville leftover who is now a door to door salesman. He’s also father to Fay Greener (Karen Black) an aspiring starlet.

Particularly wonderful is how he still tries to use a kooky version of his old Vaudeville act as a sales pitch. Perhaps it’s a poignant yet grotesque “Baby Jane” moment for the character of Harry Greener. What’s special about Meredith’s performance is how his divine verve shines through, carrying with him the sentiment of the old stage laid out futilely for merely an audience of one.

With much love and adoration to you mirthful Mr. Meredith with love-Joey

Select filmography

Wiki–Film

Television

LOVE HAS MANY FACES 1965

Hugh O’Brian as the smarmy Hank Walker-“Haven’t I seen you around?”

Ruth Roman as the tough as nails Margot Eliot- “It’s possible. I’ve been there.”

Director Alexander Singer’s  melodrama (Singer’s Psyche 59 (1964) starring Patricia Neal who suffers from hysterical blindness, has a much more compelling frenetic slick psychology) Love Has Many Faces comes off as a meandering soap opera in balmy Acapulco Mexico… as Lana Turner plays Kit Jordan a millionairess who marries Cliff Robertson a self loathing malcontent who sold all 8 pints of his blood to be owned by her. Though her love is as ‘thin as ice…’

Enrique Lucero is marvelous as Lieutenant Riccardo Andrade a Mexican Columbo who is trying to get to the bottom of one of Lana’s young male lovers who apparently committed suicide over their break up.

Aside from wishing that the fabulous Ruth Roman and Virginia Grey had more of a presence in the film…

Virginia Grey was the audacious Candy in The Naked Kiss 1964 … God she was gorgeous!

… I was struck by two things…

If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I love Ruth Roman-she has a raw natural sensuality that dwells in her eyes and oozes out of her pores.

“Instant blackmail”

Kit is never without a drink or a flashy beach ensemble!

Beside the high melodrama… 1) Hugh O’Brian is a beach bum gigolo who spends the entire movie, well mostly… baring his sweaty hairy virile chest and 2) Lana Turner changes wardrobe more than there are cigarettes and cocktails in the picture… Wow that’s a lot of sexy beach wear and lamé, bare shoulders, back and leg… Lana! Thanks to Edith Head… you do look fabulous!

This is how I like my Lana Turner & my bare chested men (John Garfield) … from Tay Garnett’s noir masterpiece The Postman Always Rings Twice 1946

I’ll see you around… I’ve been there too! Cheers Joey

Thanks to Silver Screenings… A Small Press Life and Font & Frock–we’re celebrating the work of Miriam Hopkins!

Miriam Hopkins has a luminous, quiet dreamy beauty.

Born in Savannah Georgia Oct. 18th 1902 she died Oct 9, 1972-a chorus girl in New York city at the age of 20 she made her first motion picture after signing with Paramount Pictures called Fast and Loose (1930).

In 1931, she raised some eyebrows in 1931’s horror thriller Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde directed by Rouben Mamoulian’s.

In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Miriam Hopkins portrayed the character Ivy Pearson, a prostitute who becomes mesmerized by Jekyll and Hyde a tale of sexuality in revolt. Though many of her scenes were cut from the film she still managed to get rave reviews for the mere 5 minutes she spent on the screen.

Frederick March walked away with the Oscar for Best Leading Man in that horror gem. Miriam Hopkins had been up for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind being that she was an authentic Southern lady, but the part… of course went to Vivien Leigh… “As God as my witness they’re not going to lick me”

Miriam would make three pictures with  Ernst Lubitsch, The Smiling Lieutenant 1931, Trouble in Paradise 1932, and Design for Living 1933. Design for Living being my favorite!

From Wikipedia-Nevertheless her career ascended swiftly thereafter and in 1932 she scored her breakthrough in Ernst Lubitsch‘s Trouble in Paradise, where she proved her charm and wit as a beautiful and jealous pickpocket. During the pre-code Hollywood of the early 1930s, she appeared in The Smiling Lieutenant, The Story of Temple Drake and Design for Living, all of which were box office successes and critically acclaimed.^[4] Her pre-code films were also considered risqué for their time, with The Story of Temple Drake depicting a rape scene and Design for Living featuring a ménage à trois with Fredric March and Gary Cooper.

William Wyler revising the film release of The Children’s Hour 1961, had been based on his original theatrical presentation with Hopkin’s in what was called These Three (1936). In the remake, she plays Aunt Lily Mortar to Shirley MacLaine’s troubled Martha, stepping into the role that Hopkins once portrayed.

These Three (1936) starring Joel McCrea, Merle Oberon and our Miriam Hopkins as Martha Dobie in William Wyler’s toned down version of the Lillian Hellman play

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR 1961

IMDb trivia: William Wyler cut several scenes hinting at Martha’s homosexuality for fear of not receiving the seal of approval from the Motion Picture Production Code. At the time, any story about homosexuality was forbidden by the production code.  

Directed by William Wyler, cinematography by Franz Planer (Criss Cross 1949,Breakfast at Tiffany’s 1961) working with Wyler they used effective mood changes with his lighting, creating an often provocative atmosphere. The film showcases some truly great performances by the entire cast, Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine and James Garner (who sadly passed away on July 19th of this year.) Including Veronica Cartwright and Fay Bainter. Miriam Hopkins mixes a sad yet infuriating empathy toward her flighty judgmental and often elusive tie to the theatre she harkens back to. She is incapable of being there for her tormented niece.

The story concerns the struggle of two young and independent women trying to make a go of it by running a private boarding school for adolescent girls. The intrusion of a lie, ultimately founded on a malicious rumor concocted by the spoiled young niece Mary Tilford (Karen Balkin) begins to spread like deadly poison that Karen (Hepburn) and Martha (Maclean) are having a lesbian relationship. And the lie proceeds to ruin Karen’s engagement to Joe, worried parents flood to the school to pull out their children at risk of being exposed to that ‘love that dare not speak it’s name!’ and basically causes the ruination of Karen and Martha’s dream.

Whether the idea be true or not, the wake of the devastation of all the lives involved lead to poetic & unfortunate tragedy.

Martha and Karen’s quite independent business relationship and personal friendship seemed to challenge very conventional standards of a woman’s role, creating an uncomfortable pall over the town, the school and the women involved in the scandal, and we sense this dis-ease on film. This all seems to feed the accessibility of suspicion when Mary makes her accusation, fueled by things she’s overheard Aunt Lily recklessly say about Martha.

Mrs. Lily Mortar-“Friendship between women, yes. But not this insane devotion! Why, it’s unnatural. Just as unnatural as can be.”

Mrs. Lily Mortar: Any day that he’s in the house is a bad day. You can’t stand them being together and you’re taking out on me. You’ve always had a jealous, possessive nature even as a child. If you had a friend, you’d be upset if she liked anybody else. And that’s what’s happening now. And it’s unnatural. It’s just as unnatural as it can be.

Miriam Hopkins, is an added unpleasant moral eccentric and parasite who feeds off Karen and her niece Martha who have always had an apparently strained relationship because she’s money-grubbing, spineless and a user right from the beginning.

Miriam Hopkin’s Aunt Lily glides through the film like narcissus’ secretary waiting for that great part that is never coming. Supposedly on tour with a drama company, or just avoiding the scandal, when she could have cleared the women’s reputations and saved the school from being shut down.

At time’s she histrionic, over-theatrical, melodramatic and a relic of bygone days. Like an obsolete thespian Harpy who lingers around the house, tormenting poor Martha who is struggling with her own inner demons that Aunt Lily seems all too well to recognize.

Aunt Lily trying to stir up dramaturgical dust while teaching her pupils elocution, she shows herself to be out of fashion, a bit of an outcast, and as dried up as the dead flowers, the young conniving and at times socio-pathic Mary steals from the garbage to give to Lily as a ruse for being late to class.

Aunt Lily is needful, maneuvering and scheming as she insinuates herself into the lives of Karen (Audrey Hepburn) and her niece Martha (Shirley MacLaine) A non stop know it all… with a showy flare for dramatics.

At the school, Aunt Lily teaches the girl elocution lessons, music and theatre which is perfect for her narcissistic compulsion to inflate her own ego while pushing her highfalutin ideas of breeding “breeding is everything”. Lily is materialistic, money hungry and will use Martha for whatever she can get out of her.

After Lily accuses Martha’s relationship with Karen as being ‘unnatural’ And how her mood changes when ever Joe, Karen’s fiance (James Garner) is in the house. Martha throws her out. Paying her off so she’ll stay away. Hopkins does a truly perfect job of being the parasitic opportunist who offers nothing but grief.

I loved Miriam Hopkins  as the gutsy Mrs. Shipton -‘The Duchess’ in The Outcasts of Poker Flats 1952.

Until 1970 when like most great screen sirens, who seemed to inevitably get handed that part of Grande Dame Guignol caricature of the fading Hollywood star. Hopkin’s last film was the brutally disturbing Strange Intruder in 1970. She playing the recluse Katharine Parker, who is befriended by a psychopathic woman hater, then terrorized by him- John David Garfield (Yes son of the great John Garfield). Gale Sondergaard plays her companion Leslie who staunchly remains at her side to no avail.

While Miriam Hopkins who played Martha in the original film These Three (1936) agreed to play the part of Martha’s Aunt Lily,  Merle Oberon, who played Karen in the original film, turned down the part of Mrs. Tilford.

Mr. Happy… Bosley Crowther once again fangs the performances of The Children’s Hour with his serpentine wit. Published in The New York Times review March 15th 1962

“But here it is, fidgeting and fuming, like some dotty old doll in bombazine with her mouth sagging open in shocked amazement at the batedly whispered hint that a couple of female schoolteachers could be attached to each other by an “unnatural” love.

If you remember the stage play, that was its delicate point, and it was handled even then with a degree of reticence that was a little behind the sophistication of the times. (Of course, the film made from the stage play in 1936 and called “These Three” avoided that dark hint altogether; it went for scandal down a commoner avenue.)

But here in this new film version, directed and produced by the same William Wyler who directed the precautionary “These Three,” the hint is intruded with such astonishment and it is made to seem such a shattering thing (even without evidence to support it) that it becomes socially absurd. It is incredable that educated people living in an urban American community today would react as violently and cruelly to a questionable innuendo as they are made to do in this film.

And that is not the only incredible thing in it. More incredible is its assumption of human credulity. It asks us to believe that the parents of all twenty pupils in a private school for girls would yank them out in a matter of hours on the slanderously spread advice of the grandmother of one of the pupils that two young teachers in the school were “unnatural.”

It asks us to believe the grandmother would have been convinced of this by what she hears from her 12-year-old granddaughter, who is a dubious little darling at best. And, most provokingly, it asks us to imagine that an American court of law would not protect the innocent victims of such a slander when all the evidence it had to go upon was the word of two children and the failure of a key witness to appear.

In short, there are several glaring holes in the fabric of the plot, and obviously Miss Hellman, who did the adaptation, and John Michael Hayes, who wrote the script, knew they were there, for they have plainly sidestepped the biggest of them. They have not let us know what the youngster whispered to the grandmother that made her hoot with startled indignation and go rushing to the telephone. Was it something that a 12-year-old girl could have conceivably made up out of her imagination (which is what she was doing in this scene)?

And they have not let us into the courtroom where the critical suit for slander was tried. They have only reported the trial and the verdict in one quickly tossed off line.

So this drama that was supposed to be so novel and daring because of its muted theme is really quite unrealistic and scandalous in a prim and priggish way. What’s more, it is not too well acted, except by Audrey Hepburn in the role of the younger of the school teachers. She gives the impression of being sensitive and pure.

Shirley MacLaine as the older school teacher, the one who eventually admits in a final scene with her companion that she did have a yen for her, inclines to be too kittenish in some scenes and do too much vocal hand-wringing toward the end.

Fay Bainter is fairly grim as the grandmother but little Karen Balkin as the mendacious child is simply not sufficiently tidy as a holy terror to make her seem formidable. James Garner as the fiancé of Miss Hepburn and Miriam Hopkins as the aunt of Miss MacLaine give performances of such artificial laboring that Mr. Wyler should hang his head in shame.”

 

THE OUTER LIMITS – DON’T OPEN TILL DOOMSDAY-

Season 1 Episode 17 broadcast on January 20th 1964 Written by Joseph Stefano (Psycho 1960) and directed by Gerd Oswald. (A Kiss Before Dying 1956, Crime of Passion 1957)

the episode co-stars John Hoyt, Nellie Burt and Russell Collins.

Miriam Hopkins inhabits one of THE most Grotesque characters two years after Bette Davis manifested Baby Jane Hudson in Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962.

The sirens of the silver screen were beginning to find roles of the silver scream! Grande Dame Guignol was born… when the great Gloria Swanson walked onto the screen as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard in 1950. And it wasn’t just Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Shelley Winters… no, just to name a few there was Jeanne Craine, Eleanor Parker, Dorothy Malone, Yvonne De Carlo, Gloria Grahame, Lana Turner, Joan Blondell, Ann Southern, Ruth Roman, Sandy Dennis, Geraldine Page, Patricia Neal, Elizabeth Taylor, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Bennett, Piper Laurie, Olivia de Havilland, Simone Signoret and Alida Valli.

In this bizarre and slightly perplexing story, that relies more on its potent atmosphere of decay and alienation thanks to the cinematography of Conrad L Hall, and less on a coherent plot-line. Hopkins plays an abandoned bride left in her honeymoon suite like a perishing bird in a broken gilded cage. As the years pass, time has ravaged the house, the bridal suite and Mary Kry who anxious and delusional, awaits the return of her beloved Harvey.

An ‘abandoned’ bride yet Mary Kry’s husband didn’t run off on the night of their wedding, rather he was sucked into an alternate universe within a 2X2 metal box with a peep hole–ruled over by a lump of months old Jello chocolate pudding and a rolling rubbery glass toy eyeball with a slit for a mouth. I might even go as far as to say that it resembles something I might find in the cat’s litter box with a scatterbrained face, it’s silly single fishy eyeball and jaunty yet menacing alien voice, but let’s keep it clean for Miriam’s blogathon! and stick to the references to Jello instead…

And for some opening fun with the Outer Limits control voice who always waxes prophetic and cautionary: as we are about to observe one who observes us from his little porthole.

“The Greatness of evil lies in its awful accuracy. Without that deadly talent for being in the right place at the right time, evil must suffer defeat. For unlike its opposite , good, evil is allowed no human failings, no miscalculations. Evil must be perfect…. or depend upon the imperfections of others.”

The inimitable Bette Davis who created her image as the infantile narcissistic lush Baby Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962

Miriam Hopkins in same grotesque pose of womanhood ravaged by cruel age and deceitful punishing vanity… As the eternal bride Mrs Mary Kry who has waited 35 years for her groom.

It’s 1929 and on the outskirts of town there’s a wedding bash full bells at an opulent mansion in a desolate part  of town called Winterfield. A young bridegroom named Harvey Kry (David Frankham) is getting ready to escape with his new bride Mary! (Miriam Hopkins) An odd old man delivers a wrapped box to the house, the butler hands the gift to the bridegroom. The card inscribed says DON’T OPEN TIL DOOMSDAY.

Harvey unwraps the box, next to a newspaper headline which reads ‘NOTED SCIENTIST DECLARES COUNTRY INVADED FROM OUTER SPACE’. -featured is a picture of the old man who delivered the package.

Suddenly Harvey is transported into the box by getting caught in the laser beam of light that re-assembles him inside the small stark space within the box, inhabited by the clay creature who wishes to destroy the universe. Mary is left to long for her love trapped in a crushing expanse of time, she is wasting away from a broken heart and the threat of bastard time that creeps like dust.

For the sake of the Miriam Hopkins Blogathon… I won’t get into the oogly googly sci-fi cautionary aspect of the episode, that I’ll save for another post for my series on The Outer Limits.

Allow me to showcase Miriam Hopkins participation in this grotesquely curious torment.

Hopkins evokes a deadly cunning, a pathological child like yearning… the arrested passions of a bride who never had her desires fulfilled. She’s pathetic, dour, ill tempered, desperate, obscene, insatiable, predatory and utterly depraved!

Mary Kry now demented from spending 35 years awaiting her grooms return, needs to find new life in exchange for her Harvey.

So she rents out her unused Bridal Suite kicking back money to the equally opportunistic Nellie Burt. the justice’s (Russell Collins) evil wife. Still sporting her black sequined flapper ensemble equip with feather boa and diamond tiara, Mary throws herself under the bed like a school girl looking for the right matching shoes.

The episode works partly because of the ambiance of purgatory— the untouched wedding gifts, the desiccated house that stands alone on a grey dusty road. The staircase that leads up to the limbo like Hell that Mary Kry has had to live alone inside instead of being with her flesh and blood husband Harvey who is still as young as the day they wed. Yet another twisted aspect of the story.

Much like the house being a reflection of Mary Kry’s madness, this reminds me of how Aldrich framed the claustrophobic & deteriorating structure of the Hudson Mansion which sang in tune with Jane’s utter delusional mania and gloom.

This story actually possesses two monsters. The literal one that hovers around in the box like something out of Gumby’s nightmare, and the second more potent monster. That Monstrous Feminine archetype who is waiting to devour all for love —her life spent as a sexless soul– locked away in a her own private purgatory on the other side of a dimension where her beloved too is a prisoner.

For in Mary Kry’s sick anxiety to hold onto her lost youth, trapped as a virgin awaiting her lover, enshrined in a bridal tomb, she has become a vampire. Lurking in the shadows, yanking out that musty wedding dress from the mothballs, hoping to find someone to trade places with her husband so she can finally have her nuptials.

Miriam Hopkins -while the ghoulish cousin to Bette Davis’ Baby Jane Hudson pushes our buttons marked -OUTRAGEOUS-and lights them up… blinking and ringing wildly… what’s more appalling than the self-delusion that she is still a blushing bride, is that she is now a darkly brooding gargoyle-esque out-moded flapper merely concerned with getting her husband out of that strange box at any price. Even if it means praying on two innocent young runaway teenagers who just want to marry for the same feelings of love… though without their parents consent.

The entire episode is loony & creepy and Miriam Hopkin’s immersion into the psycho-sexual persona of Grande Dame Guignol makes for a wicked excursion into The Outer Limits!

I hope you enjoyed my little tribute to Miriam Hopkins. She’s a very special lady, and it was wonderful to be able to participate in the Miriam Hopkins Blogathon!

Your EverLovin’ Joey saying be kind… and don’t let yourself get caught in a box!

12 Angry Men (1957) Directed by Sidney Lumet Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Jack Warden, Henry Fonda, Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley, George Voskovec… also stars John Fiedler, Martin Balsam and Robert Webber

Broken Blossoms (1919) Starring Lillian Gish as Lucy the girl.

The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom (Moscow) 1924 Directed by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky -starring Yuliya Solntseva as Zina Vesenina- the cigarette girl

Christmas Holiday (1944) Directed by Robert Siodmak-starring Deanna Durbin & Gene Kelly

Curse of the Demon (1957) Directed by Jacques Tourneur-Starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins and Niall MacGinnis

Diana Dors as Eunice Higginbotham in My Wife’s Lodger (1952)

Directed by Lew Landers Harry Woods is Borno in- Call of the Savage (1935)

L’Inferno 1911, Dante Alighieri “A Divina Comédia”, Directed by Giuseppe de Liguoro.

The Sea Hawk 1924 Directed by Frank Lloyd

Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) cinematic stage play with the vast scope of the Ocean and the claustrophobic air of desperation. Brilliant performances by Tallulah Bankhead and John Hodiak looking his hunkiest best…

The Virgin Spring (1960) directed by Ingmar Bergman-disturbing journey of revenge

Gilda (1946) directed by Charles VIdor and stars the magnificent Rita Hayworth in the title role Gilda Mundson Farrell, here dancing with Glenn Ford. A film noir classic

Last Tango in Paris 1972 directed by Bernardo Bertolucci-stars Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider as a pair of angst filled lovers whose relationship is based on sex & death

Man Made Monster 1941 starring Lionel Atwill as the deranged Dr Rigas

Monsieur Verdoux 1947 directed by and starring Charles Chaplin-brilliant dark comedy of murder and anti-conformity.

Charles Laughton’s oneric fable of childhood terrors, the bonds of friendship and the plight of Love vs Hate… Beautifully filmed- starring Lillian Gish as Rachel Cooper and Robert Mitchum as the diabolical Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter (1955)

Jane Eyre 1943 directed by Robert Stevenson starring Peggy Ann Garner is young Jane.

Plunder Road (1957) directed by Hubert Cornfeld, perhaps one of the most edgy crime story film noirs headed up Gene Raymond and Elisha Cook Jr.

The Set-Up (1949) Robert Ryan stars as boxer Stoker in Robert Wise’s extraordinary noir film centered around the boxing ring and a down on his luck fighter that still has a lot of fight left in him. One of my favorite film noir classics, much to do with Ryan’s performance and Milton R. Krasner’s cinematography…

the Wonderful Norman Lloyd in Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur 1942

Rock Hudson is psychologically and physically spun around on his head in Seconds 1966 by John Frankenheimer- A story about that precious commodity… one’s identity

SEEDS (1968) Directed by Andy Milligan- it’s seedy and low budget and the perfect exploitative indulgence…

Shack Out on 101 (1955) different styled film noir starring Lee Marvin as Slob.. directed by Edward Dein and co-stars Terry Moore and Frank Lovejoy

Stanley Kramer directs this incredible ensemble of actors in Ship of Fools (1965) Here showing George Segal, Michael Dunn and Lee Marvin

John Hodiak tries to remember in Somewhere in the Night (1946) -a taut amnesia themed noir with great characters. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Here with Fritz Kortner as Anzelmo or Dr Oracle.

Street With No Name (1948) starring Mark Stevens and directed by William Keighly -This film noir also stars Richard Widmark and Lloyd Nolan…

Sunrise (1927) directed by F.W. Murnau starring Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien-Beautifully filmed silent masterpiece

Nightbirds 1970 Andy Milligan’s gritty cult journey about two miscreants in London.

Terror in the Crypt aka Crypt of the Vampire 1964 directed by Camillo Mastrocinque based on the Karnstein saga with Adriana Ambesi and Ursula Davis and the immortal Christopher Lee

The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958) directed by Gordon Douglas and starring Hugh O’Brian and a really psychotic Robert Evans.

The Scavengers 1959 starring Carol Ohmart directed by John Cromwell -an obscure film noir also starring Vince Edwards

The Secret Garden 1949 starring Margaret O’Brien and a wonderful cast Herbert Marshall, Dean Stockwell, Gladys Cooper, Elsa Lanchester, Reginald Owen, Brian Roper, Aubrey Mather isobel Elsom and George Zucco fill out this fantasy drama directed by Fred M. Wilcox

The Seventh Sin (1957) directed by Ronald Neame and Vincente Minnelli starring Eleanor Parker and Françoise Rosay Françoise Rosay as Mother Superior

The Soft Skin 1964 Françoise Dorléac directed by François Truffaut

The Stranger 1946 directed by Orson Welles

The Terrible People (1960) directed by Harald Reinl adapted from the story by Edgar Wallace stars Joachim Fuchsberger

The Wild Boys of the Road 1933 directed by William Wellman

The Young One 1960 directed by Luis Buñuel starring Key Meersman as Evalyn. Also stars Zachary Scott and Bernie Hamilton

The Exterminating Angel (1962) directed by Luis Buñuel

The Twilight Girls (1957) by André Hunebelle

To Kill a Mockingbird 1962 directed by Robert Mulligan -John Megna as Dill and Phillip Alford as Jem. adapted from Harper Lee’s masterpiece

See you soon… Your EverLovin’ MonsterGirl!

Anne Bancroft as a lady who lunches and listens to gossip in The Pumpkin Eater – being held hostage by the intensely neurotic Yootha Joyce a lonely housewife sitting next to her while trapped under the hair dryer of life…

Woman at hair dressers-“It’s like I told you, my life is an empty place!” Jo-“Well what do you want me to do about it?”

“The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” - Ayn Rand

Cognition–ˌkägˈniSHən|
(noun)
the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
• a result of this; a perception, sensation, notion, or intuition.

These 4 particular films seem to be part of a trend of films that deal with either women’s brewing emotional turmoil or in the case of Jean Seberg’s Lilith- a creeping organic madness, perhaps from childhood trauma that is not delved into. 

Let’s consider women either in distress or the oft used “hysterical’ trademark that summons every neurotic ill associated with women. With these 4 films it’s the same root problem: Why should society determine what counts as an emotional problem? This is especially true for women, as if she was the engendering source of a specific kind of female mayhem, the creator of the tumult itself… Capable of giving birth, does she also give birth to a certain kind of madness directed inwardly or aimed outward at society and it’s unyielding ethical questions?

It’s not that I think Barbara Barrie is troubled because she falls in love with a black man. It’s that the world is troubled by her decision. Because of her choice -a society inherently cruel punishes her by taking away the one thing she had personal power over, to remove her child from her life. Although, she has a wonderful relationship with Frank both are being judged and condemned.

The judge who awards custody of her little girl to the biological father even though he is not the better parent. Not too long ago, women could be hospitalized just for being menopausal, based on what their husbands say.

Women were at the mercy of white male society’s judgment. So if a white woman loves and marries a black man in the volatile climate of the civil rights 60s it would absolutely cause turmoil and quite the commotion.

“she is shown as alienated and stricken with psychological torture”- {source Marlisa Santos The Dark Mirror; Psychiatry and Film Noir 

Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve 1957

Joan Marshall is Homicidal 1961 in William Castle’s answer to Psycho

Now… none of the 4 women I am covering here are homicidal or dangerous, all these women are experiencing a psychic struggle with issues that speak from their place in the world as women… who are defining somehow in their own way, what their identity means to them… Well, perhaps Lilith is a bit more volatile in terms of how she wields her sexuality and influences men & women both! But she is a divine innocent albeit-nymphomaniac living in a dreamy world of her own –not a homicidal vamp who devours men and spits them out… She is an innocent without malice. The men do the damage to themselves…

“And her eye has become accustomed to obvious ‘truths’ that actually hide what she is seeking. It is the very shadow of her gaze that must be explored”--Luce Irigaray

Max von Sydow,, Harriet Andersson and Gunnar Bjormstrand in -(1961)-Through the Glass Darkly directed by Ingmar Bergman

Gene Tierney as the murderously deranged Ellen Berent Harland in Leave Her to Heaven 1945

Seance on a wet afternoon 1964 previous post HERE

Kim Stanley gives an unnerving performance as a delusional and dangerous woman who plots to kidnap a child so she can claim her psychic powers then located her…

And of course the two titans of Grande Dame Guignol fêtes courtesy of Robert Aldrich…

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962 & Hush… Hush Sweet Charlotte 1964

Roman Polanski’s very post-modern almost Brechtian/Picassoesque ode to insanity starring Catherine Deneuve in his Repulsion 1965 -

Tippie Hedren and Louise Latham in Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964)

WOMEN ON THE VERGE… OF A BREAKTHROUGH!

Curt Jurgens carries Samantha Eggar after she has fallen off her horse. There is more going on that Patricia Neal’s blind eye can see

Psyche 59 (1964)

Patricia Neal and Samantha Eggar in Psyche 59 (1964)

The Pumpkin Eater 1964

Ann Bancroft and Peter Finch are a married couple in crisis. Having perpetually popped out a myriad of children she is yet again pregnant. Will this keep him home this time…? The Pumpkin Eater (1964)

One Potato Two Potato 1964

Barbara Barrie falls in love and marries Bernie Hamilton. Once her ex-husband realizes that his child is being brought up by a black man, times get even tougher for the couple

Lilith 1964

THE WOMEN!!!

Barbara Barrie

Patricia Neal

Anne Bancroft

Jean Seberg

LET’S BEGIN WITH…!

Alison Crawford (Patricia Neal) -“Love has to stop somewhere along the line otherwise it’s almost like… like committing suicide “

PSYCHE 59 (1964) - Alexander Singer (A Cold Wind in August 1961 with Lola Albright and Scott Marlowe) directs the remarkable Patricia Neal as Alison Crawford, a woman struck down with a form of psychosomatic or hysterical blindness. Alison is aware that the affliction is all in her mind since the doctors can’t find anything organically wrong with her sight. Her ‘hysterical blindness’ and memory loss of the events leading up to her accident follows a fall down the stairs while she is pregnant. When she awakens she is unable to see.

Alison “My Brain won’t accept the images that my eyes make.”

What is happening for Alison is that she is subconsciously blocking out the truth about her husband and her younger, coquettish sister Robin.

She is now living a very quaint life with her husband played by the austere Curd Jürgens (I love him as the devilishly urbane concert pianist Duncan Mowbray Ely in The Mephisto Waltz 1971).

Aside from her intense husband Eric, Alison’s very sexually charged sister Robin (Samantha Eggar) has now come to live with the couple after a divorce. Robin hovers very close to Eric like a carrion bird waiting to pick the bones of Alison’s troubled marriage. While Alison doesn’t have any cognitive memory of what led up to her fall, it’s obvious to us that she can sense the strong attraction between her husband and younger sister. At one time, her younger sister Robin and Eric and been involved before Alison caught and married him. Robin hasn’t stopped lusting after him. Slowly Alison’s memory comes back as the flashes and images of what she experienced right before she lost her sight literally comes into view.

Singer builds the tension in the air slowly, methodically until it all comes to a head set against the skillfully contained cinematography by Walter Lassally (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 1962, Zorba the Greek 1964, To Kill a Clown 1972).

IMDb tidbit-Patricia Neal was offered the lead in The Pumpkin Eater, but it was not 100% confirmed she would get the role. She then opted, to her later regret, to make Psyche 59 (1964) instead, since it was an official offer.

Neal gives a restrained yet powerful performance of a woman who is trapped in self imposed darkness by her fear of the truth…

There is very subtle theme of self-brutality that exists for each of the characters, Alison’s self imposed sightlessness, Eric’s indignant stoicism is palpable as he walks through the story like a trapped stray dog, He is agitated by Robin’s presence, because he can not resist her.

Robin, her younger sister who must have been quite young at the time of her relationship with Eric begs the question of appropriate behavior on his part. Robin is constantly asserting a seductive influence on Eric right in front of the disadvantaged Alison.

She is both a hyper-sexual narcissist and a bit self-destructive at the same time, either way she gets off on playing the seductress torturing Eric, right in front of her sister, dark sunglasses and delicate pout. Although Alison suffers from blindness, she maintains a certain dignity that although as all three characters seem like she is, one of the trapped animals in a psycho-melodramatic forest, we get a sense that she will one day regain her freedom and spread her wings and fly away from it all truth in hand.

Alison “We must be near the marshes” Robin “We just passed it … Coming to the old windmill soon…its still turning.. nothing’s changed” Alison “There’s a factory there now, Don’t protect me Robby. Don’t make up windmills.”

Based on the novel by Françoise des Ligneris, with a screenplay by Julian Zimet (who wrote Horror Express 1972 and one of the best atmospheric little horror obscurities The Death Wheelers 1973 formally called Psychomania about a group of British motor cycle thugs and their pretty birds who dabble in the occult. Beryl Reid and George Sanders being one of their relatives, they learn the secret of immortality. But you have to die first to obtain it.)

Psyche 59 is an interesting psychological mood piece, almost post modernly impressionistic with it’s stark and polished black and white photo work. And Patricia Neal who had just won an Oscar for her role as Alma Brown in Hud 1963 and gave a command performance in 1957 as Marcia Jeffries in A Face in the Crowd is just exceptional as Alison who is trying to navigate the dark world surrounding her.

The film is strange and at times subtly cruel yet Neal’s character relies on our visual journey which becomes quite painful at times yet beautiful as she begins to emerge. In the film Patricia Neal’s relationship with Curd Jürgens has an eerie parallel to real life marriage to writer/spy Roald Dahl, but I don’t want to get into the sensationalized tidbits of public people’s wreckage.

The Film also stars Ian Bannen as Alison’s poor befuddled boyfriend , Elspeth March and Beatrix Lehmann plays Alison’s staunch and science fiction reading grandmother-wish I had one of those!

Jo Armitage (Anne Bancroft)-“I HAD THEM OF MY OWN FREE WILL…”

THE PUMPKIN EATER (1964) directed by the wonderful Jack Clayton (The Story of Esther Costello 1956, Room at the Top 1959, The Innocents 1961, The Great Gatsby 1974, Something Wicked this Way Comes 1983) Clayton is perhaps one of the most underrated directors. He has always managed to create the perfect atmosphere to fit the story. Usually very powerful imagery yet psychological restrained that summons a loner’s quality for each character. An outsider narrative. Bancroft just emerges like a queen bee, with every facial expression an emotional tale. Much of the story is told by nuance…

Writer Penelope Mortimer was ‘fond of this quote from Raymond Chandler': ‘Scarcely anything in literature is worth a damn except what is written between the lines.’ – from Los Angeles Times -Elaine Woo

“The Electrifying Performance That Won Anne Bancroft the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival”

Clayton was also associate producer on The Queen of Spades 1949, one of the truly hidden masterpieces of psychological/supernatural horror. Harold Pinter adapted the screenplay from Penelope Mortimer’s novel. Jack Clayton adds his touch of intricate human behavior amidst the wonderfully shot scenes by cinematographer Oswald Morris adds a sharp eye for realism (Beat the Devil 1953, Look Back in Anger 1959, Lolita 1962, Reflections in a Golden Eye 1967). Some of the frames are like exquisite portraits that seem to capture Jo’s isolation and the separateness she feels from the world. The use of soft and somber grays is just breathtaking and shows off Bancroft’s dark and deep set eyes. The film co-stars one of THE greatest actors Peter Finch who is always compelling to watch although, my recent viewing of his Harry Field in Something to Hide 1972 had me white knuckled at his infuriating submissiveness to the dangers a foot. I’m still trying to figure out if that was the performance he intended, an odd casting choice or if it was a misfire for everyone. Shelley Winters has a small part as his shrewish wife… Of course Shelley was, well… perfectly Shelley! But I digress…back to Anne Bancroft and the allusion to nursery rhymes and pumpkin eaters.

The film is an almost cold, mocking and heartless examination of the art of marriage, motherhood and fidelity amidst the world of high society bourgeois malaise, melancholy and people wearing all their public disguises. Composer George Delerue  creates a perfectly moody, listless yet beautiful melody.

Bancroft plays Jo Armitage who might be practicing serial maternity in order to control her marriages. She it is also suggested that she suffers from a sexual dysfunction where the sex act is repulsive to her unless it is for the sake of bringing a child into the home. The interesting conflict in this story is the fact that while Jo goes through the motions of getting pregnant and initially playing house, she doesn’t seem to exude a strong sense of motherhood and often seems detached instead of nurturing. Which is an interesting statement for a film to make even in 1964.

In a flashback, Jo remembers a simpler time when she lived in the Barn with husband Giles (Richard Harris), and first met and instantly fell in love with Jake (Peter Finch), Giles’ friend. It’s where we see the children buzzing around like chickens in the cramped barn space, but the look on both Jo and Jake’s face tell us that they have been hit by the thunderbolt of love!

In The Pumpkin Eater  Anne Bancroft  occupies Jo Armitage with many layers that are unspoken-

She is a refined lady now on her 3rd marriage to Jake Armitage, a screenwriter. They live in London with six of Jo’s eight children. Jo has sent her two eldest boys away to boarding school. Her father funded this as he thought she had enough children invading her new marriage. She has been married several times and her brood are the offspring of each relationship. With the exception of the youngest being Jake’s child. Jo as I’ve said, has left her second husband Giles played with grit by Richard Johnson. Jo’s marriage to Giles had been a different sort of marriage , a more ruggedly organic kind of lifestyle, living in the large converted barn in the English countryside. Seeming like an ideal way to raise the children until Jo finds herself attracted to Jake. Once she leaves Giles and moves to London, she begins to suspect that Jake is now stepping out with other women.

“Do you realize what you’re saddling yourself with? A zoo a children’s zoo and their keeper. Are you reconciling yourself to keeping a zoo and it’s keeper?” Talking to his daughter Jake about marrying Jo

The premise of her dilemma is that she seems to negotiate her sexuality by getting pregnant, seeing the act as a means to childbirth and a means to secure a hold on her mate. The walls seem to be closing in on both Jo and Jake, as she must come to terms with her life and the choices she has made. 

Categorized as a ‘woman’s picture’ Jo is at the center of our gaze and the narrative makes it very ambiguous as to whether Jo maintains control over her own body self-consciously, claiming her primacy as a woman or if in fact she is practicing serial maternity as an enslavement.

She quietly watches her children with satisfaction. It’s uncomfortable moments that insinuate themselves into the story, such as her rigid unforgiving father and his critical paternalizing. It was his decision to send her two eldest boys away to boarding school. where eventually they become young gentlemen but virtual strangers to their mother.

As spectator to Jo’s life and the flutter of children she is surrounded by, she often seems conflicted either sad or content, but above all she is trying to find a place for herself in the world-even more than the quirky or selfish characters that satellite around her.

 You can see the puzzle of Jo’s life in her eyes as she stares out from under the hair dryer…

Bancroft conveys a rather austere yet engaging glimpse into her conflicted heart. While always self-contained, she exudes a vulnerable sadness, a longing that even she cannot seem to grasp at times. It’s obvious she never gained approval by her own rigidly cold father (Cedric Hardwicke). The narrative suggests to us that Jo can only find validation or let’s say control when she is pregnant or surrounded by her children, that it is a psychosis of strategic maternal need to keep her life revolving. And while her husband Jake does appear to love her, he is still a philanderer, and she seems determined to keep him.

Jo contemplates her dilemma–suspecting that Jake is having several affairs, and she must come to terms with whether her psychiatrist is right that she only uses pregnancy as a means to qualify the act of sex. The film doesn’t delve back into her past to find out why she finds sex so repugnant. Jo ultimately has a break down in Harrard’s. Of course back then, the husband spoke to the doctor instead of Jo speaking directly for herself. He asks if they’ve been having problems. He doesn’t tell him about the extra marital affairs that might be torturing poor Jo. The doctor suggests that she’s perfectly healthy maybe she wants to have a child. Jo overhears Jake say, “Have you counted them! We have enough!”

The couple seem to love each other and yet they also seem miles apart emotionally. At first we see them incredibly drawn to each other, but once Jake’s career takes off and Jo is stuck at home with the children she has birthed, her sense of isolation begins to weigh on her.

The doctor “So you do like children Mrs Armitage” Jo “Well they don’t do any harm” the doctor “Now let’s see you have…? Jo-“I had them of my own free will…”

Jake -“Now we’re trapped..” Jo is pregnant again…

Jake lectures Jo-“there’s a world apart from birth… we don’t want anymore…. how can we have anymore?”

She has a quickie with her ex hubby-Giles (Richard Johnson) for old time sake. She still comes across as in control of her body and her desire. I didn’t experience this film as an exercise in misogyny at all, rather a journey of a women who has been exploring her power from her womb trying to find connection to life. It’s what we women are taught right?

She finds her self worth by being needed, by the children and her husband. Yet she is very unrealistic as she desires the newness of the next pregnancy, the new marriage, this is exciting. But the work that goes into maintaining the family is a skill she hasn’t quite focused on. She is a shell. A fertile one, but she hasn’t taken the time to be present for her children and separate from her men.

James Mason plays a lecherous friend who wouldn’t mind getting into bed with Jo, yet he’s furiously possessive of his own younger wife that he thinks is having a fling with Jo’s husband. He’s quite satirically sinister as the hovering beast of prey who wants to cash in on the gossip and suspicion. But Jo has too much self restraint class and dignity. And so she spurns his advances that have an air of revenge to it.

Even if people think Jo is a brood sow. Particularly her father Cedric Hardwicke who doesn’t mince words– She has “too many kids and doesn’t need anymore”. It’s obvious that she hasn’t received a lot of warmth and acceptance from her own father, and a Freudian would most likely venture to say that’s at the root of her serial maternity.

Maggie Smith has a delightful little cameo as Philpot the flighty lodger who also slept with Jo’s husband Jake…

 “The worlds got more misery than joy in it…. Colored boy….  He’s got the most misery of all!”-Martha Richards (Vinnette Carroll)

Julie-“All my life people have been going away from me. First Joe and now you. I must have done something- it must be my fault. Frank-“It’s not your fault dammit … It just won’t work that’s all. it just won’t work” Julie-“ kindness won’t work … Love won’t work?” Frank-“There’s everything wrong about it” Julie-“Is there?” Frank-“You know what’s between us…  Hate… riots, lynchings , prejudice. I”m black, you’re white. Come on tell me where you wanna go!” Julie-“With you…”

ONE POTATO TWO POTATO (1964) directed by Larry Peerce the film stars three very powerful actors, Barbara Barrie, Bernie Hamilton (Luis Buñuel‘s The Young One 1960) and Richard Mulligan. Barrie plays Julie Cullen Richards a white woman who falls in love and marries a black man -Frank Richards (Bernie Hamilton who is so much more than his lovable forever bellyaching captain Dobey overseeing the slick cop duo Starsky & Hutch and that red stripped tomato). Richard Mulligan plays Julie’s ex-husband the immature, insecure and racist Joe Cullen who at first abandons Julie and his little girl in order to wander the world and make good money. Julie tells Frank how Joe Cullen had blamed her for getting pregnant, in order to trap him. She was left alone with a child and didn’t know what to do. He sent money at first but then the letters stopped coming.

Now after years of his absence he shows up looking for his daughter. When he learns that she is being raised in a black home, he fights for custody of their little girl Ellen.

Julie loves Frank and believes that kindness and love will help them overcome anything. Frank quite aptly says “I don’t have the privilege or the luxury of a white skin.” 

Barbara Barrie enters into the marriage filled with more optimism and an open heart. Ellen loves her grandparents and is very well adjusted and happy growing up on the farm. But once Joe Cullen shows up, life turns upside down for Julie and the threat of losing her little girl is very real.

Initially Frank too is met with resistance from his father and his mother, who sweat their lives away trying to make a better life for their son. Frank father is furious he asks if he’s been “running around with a white women”. Frank tells him that they’re in love and they want to get married. “What difference does it make if she’s black white purple or green?”

When Julie blames Joe for leaving them years ago, he turns it around and accuses her of ruining the family by marrying a black man and raising their little girl in an improper home.

The film starts out with Judge Powell’s voice over and use of flashback to show us the evolution of Julie and Frank’s relationship and what lead them to the courtroom. He is earnestly trying to rationalize his ill-conceived decision to award custody of the little girl Ellen to her father Joe Cullen.

Harry Bellaver from Naked City television series play Judge Powell. Inter-racial marriage was a very sensitive issue back in the early 60s. The film deals with the peripheral damage caused by racism and the outside pressures it puts on two people who genuinely love each other. Julie is a woman legitimately faced with life’s cruelties, the climax will haunt me forever. Part of what accentuates both the gut wrenching scenes and frames filled with incidental joys is due to Laszlo’s incredible eye for intimacy and sense of place.

Julie Cullen-“That movie, it’s like living in a … it’s like living a different life. You understand?” Frank Richards “In another place and in another time” Julie Cullen “Yes, that’s it exactly”

Dancing in the park…

A cop stops the couple and tells Julie to take her ‘john’ someplace else. Assumes that she’s a prostitute. He would not have stopped them if Frank were white.

Julie -“Now you just tell me please, what am I going to do. What am I going to do. I love you. How can I be afraid of somebody or something I love?” Frank-“Please Julie Please give me a break, Don’t make it so hard for me.” Julie-“Are you afraid of me? … do you love me? he shakes his head yes Well, we’re the same then… Were exactly the same…”

In fact the cinematography was filmed by Andrew Laszlo who actually photographed some fine episodes of Naked City, and the marvelous LOVERS AND OTHER STRANGERS 1970. THE WARRIORS 1979. The wonderful score was composed by the prolific Gerald Fried.

Barbara Barrie has always been the kind of actress that conveys such a genuineness, that it’s hard to believe she’s playing a part. Having already seen her in numerous parts, a few in particular that stand out for me– two superb episodes of Naked City. Barbara Barrie is so truly real that she can pull at your heart strings with one simple delivered piece of dialogue. As the sensitive Sarah Hinson in Oct. 10, 1962’s And By the Sweat of Thy Brow. And one of the best stories, called To Walk Like a Lion  where she plays the nonconformist girl-friend Rosalind Faber. Harry Bellaver who played the lovable Frank Arcaro in the same series is Judge Powell who decides whether or not Julies daughter Ellen from her first marriage should remain with her loving family or be placed in the care of her biological father who abandoned them years ago.

William -“For the love of god You went to school with white people. You go to work with them what’s it done to you? Put your brains to sleep. Make you forget the facts of life. They’re nice to you. They’re polite to you. But you still only have one place to go and that’s with your own kind. “ his mother adds, “Both of you are gonna be outcasts…”

The realness of the situation between Barrie and Hamilton’s characters is incredibly poignant and heart breaking, under the weight of the surrounding prejudice and the upheld legal belief that a wandering absent father would still be a better parent than a stable ‘ideal’ family — the decision is still based in hatred. The film also stars Robert Earl Jones as Frank’s father-William. He is the father of actor James Earl Jones. Vinnette Carroll is wonderful as Frank’s mother Martha.

This is what a family looks like

judge Powell comes to question Ellen at school. He tells her that William her brother is different than she is. Ellen answers him – She says “Of course he is. he’s a boy…”

Barbara Barrie won the Best Actress Award at Cannes for her remarkable portrayal of Julie Cullen Richards –a kind and loving woman who crosses the color-line in the volatile 60s. Barrie does a very serious and reverent job of being sensitive to the taboo subject of inter-racial marriage and bi-racial children.

There are many key scenes that focus on race relations that suggest the the climate of the 60s South and takes a step into the shoes of being black in the South without exuding that sort of white savior complex that makes me ill. While the film remained focused on the aspects of inter-racial marriage and not the harsh and brutal experiences that black people had to survive through during the battle for civil rights.

The film is not only thoughtful about this subject, but it allows so many nuanced performances surrounding different levels of the situation to unfold naturally. I’ve chosen to focus on is Barbara Barrie’s character because she was a very strong and optimistic woman. Filled with courage and the strong belief that love is all it takes to get by. To see her strength and her faith torn down by the existing hate and blind ignorance in the world is just punishing to watch.

How heart-wrenching it is to love her husband and want her family to stay together, and have to stand by and watch an ignorant law destroy not only her life, but instill her daughter Ellen’s perception that she is being sent away. It’s a devastating last scene that I dare anyone not to be silent, angry and devastated by it’s final impact.

Julie tries to plead with Joe not to take Ellen away. He doesn’t want her growing up in an unfit home and what she’ll learn from black people. Julie-“All she’ll learn is that there are people who love her. My husband gave her what you took away. A father, a family and the only home she’s ever really known. You can’t stand that someone else has succeeded where you failed”

Joe-“I want to know something. I want to know one thing…. All you talk about is how he loves the child and how he loves you…but you left something out about you… can you love a black man?” Julie-” I can,… and I do! Joe tries to force himself on her… his rage is rooted in his wounded masculinity. He’s not only racist but he’s using the child to hurt Julie.

Joe seeks council from a minister. He wants permission from God to take custody of Ellen . But the minister tells him that the teachings of the bible show to love thy neighbor as thy would yourself. We were all created equal, And that hes looking for a way out- Joe-. “I”m sorry reverend but all I can think of is my child living amongst black people”

“Do you know what she wants. Do you think they can cure this fire. She wants to leave the mark of her desire on every living creature in the world…

…If she were Caesar, she’d do it with a sword. If she were a poet, she’d do it with words. But she’s Lilith, so she has to do it with her body.” -Lilith (Jean Seberg)

“Somehow insanity seems a lot less sinister to watch in a man than a woman.” -Dr. Bea Brice (Kim Hunter)

LILITH (1964)  Directed by Robert Rossen (All the King’s Men 1949, The Hustler 1961, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers 1946, and Billy Budd 1962 one of my personal favorites of Rossen’s work next to The Hustler)

Seberg never looked better than when she wore her hair closely cropped to that fiery yet angelic face…

Jean Seberg  is the mysterious Lilith, a sylph like girl who inhabits the world of a more progressive sanitarium for the wealthy, luring everyone around her into her sensual and mystifying space. Both Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) and Stephen Evshevsky (Peter Fonda) fall under her spell.

Diane Baker had briefly been up for the role of Lilith. I think she’s a fine actress but the role truly was sculpted perfectly for the willowy Seberg.

“Somehow insanity seems a lot less sinister to watch in a man than a woman” Dr Bea Brice (Kim Hunter)

Directed and written for the screen by Robert Rossen Lilith 1964 was his last film. Based on the novel  by J.R. Salamanca, it tells the story of Vincent Bruce a returning veteran from war who is hired by Dr. Bea Brice  (Kim Hunter) to be trained as an occupational therapist at the sanitarium. The atmosphere is a closed off universe… closed off to reality and while there is freedom to roam amidst beautiful crashing waves and languid trees, there is still a sense of hollowness to the place. An aimless veil that suggests there is no escape.

Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) is about to walk into an enchanted madhouse

The cinematography is by Eugen Schüfftan  and editing by Aram Avakian. Music composed and conducted by Kenyon Hopkins  adds such an important layer to the moodiness of a closed in world slowly spirally out of control.

I do have one complaint. I wish hairstylist Frederic Jones would have envisioned something more beguiling & suitable for a mad enchantress with Seberg’s hair. It looks rather stuck in the territory or 60s coal mining-east village femme/butch mullet which covers up her pixie like features. After all Lilith dwells in an imaginary world with her own language and in the favor of unseen gods. She should have tendrils of golden locks that wisp just slightly over her wanting lips.

Vincent himself is a cryptic quiet sort of guy who doesn’t disclose much of himself but instead observes everyone at the Sanitarium especially developing a fixation on Lilith.

Vincent (Beatty) takes his new work very seriously wanting to help people more directly, and starts to get involved with several of the patients. Of course he is drawn to one in particular. The beautiful and enchanting young girl named Lilith. Peter Fonda plays Stephen Evshevsky a very sensitive soul who is madly in love with Lilith and shrinks and breathes and follows after her with obsessive worship. A lyrical sort of otherworldly boy who’s romanticism of Lilith clearly leads him down a dangerous path. Stephen says something very provocative at one point that makes you think…. maybe he’s right!

She plays the wooden flute like a siren song to lure Peter’s gaze to reinforce his fixation

Stephen Evshevsky: “How wonderful I feel when I’m happy. Do you think that insanity could be so simple a thing as unhappiness?”

Jean Seberg either succumbing to a spiteful hair stylist or perhaps wearing a very unattractive mullet wig (I will always love the Otto Preminger Joan of Arc crop) plays the schizophrenic hyper-sexual Lilith who slinks around the sanitarium like a lithe spider queen weaving golden threads in her wake, and captivating anyone caught in her beautiful web. “to leave the mark of her desire on every living creature.” The opening titles even suggest her as predatory by the use of graphic webs with a butterfly caught in it’s design.

Vincent tells his grandmother that he’s taking the job. There is no emotional connection in the scene. But as Vincent ascends the stairs having lost his appetite, granny tells him that his mother would be happy that he’s doing this kind of work… It is the first hint at Vincent’s back story and allusion to his own mother’s mental illness.

The interesting contrast to the narrative are the very few excursions to the outside. The outside world is filled with banal and shallow conventions. How equally sad life is suggested for Vincent when he visits with is his old girlfriend played by Jessica Walter who is tethered to a vulgar & brutish Gene Hackman. (Beatty met Hackman on the set of Lilith and eventually went on to film Bonnie & Clyde 3 years later.)

And seduce, Lilith does, the brooding, solitary and mysterious lesbian (Anne Meachum Dear Dead Delilah 1972, Garden of Death 1974), the shy intellectual Stephen (Peter Fonda) who idolizes Lilith from afar and Vincent (Warren Beatty) who steps over the boundaries of professionalism and also becomes not only her lover but completely possessive of her. It is hinted at from the beginning that his mother suffered from mental illness, was a similar looking blonde and we see that he has place both the photograph of Lilith next to a framed picture of his mother. Also Vincent’s grandmother tells him that his mother would be very pleased with the work he is doing. Vincent immerses himself too deeply into the confines of the sanitarium and begins to showcase neurosis of his own.

Jean Seberg as Lilith is a very provocative enigma on one hand an unwary child who speaks to otherworldly creatures in a cryptic language and is filled with affection and innocence yet this intoxicating nymph is in conflict as she harbors a volatile resentment toward an unimaginative and predictable society. She can not maintain a steady relationship with just one partner. She must be free.

Just briefly I have to say something about Eugen Schüfftan the brilliant cinematographer who also worked on The Hustler with Rossen as well as this incredible film. He has created an otherworldly atmosphere surrounding the sanitarium within & without. Schüfftan  is no stranger to filming a haunting and captivating landscape as he lensed Eyes Without a Face in 1960 for Georg Franju and created a very enkindled space in The Hustler with Steve McQueen in 1961.

Eugen Schüfftan‘s photo work in stark contrasts of sinister blacks & hazy creamy whites paint a very eerie hinter world, with faceless people except for the central object of our fixation –the emergence of the mythic Lilith and the few devotees who worship. She is an archetypal female succubus.

Lilith (Hebrew: לִילִית‎ Lîlîṯ) is a Hebrew name for a figure in Jewish mythology, developed earliest in the Babylonian Talmud, who is generally thought to be in part derived from a historically far earlier class of female demons a succubus a seducer.

At one point when Lilith, Peter and Vincent get stuck in the rain by the cliffs, Lilith pretends to drop her paint brush down onto the rocks below, near the rushing currents. Peter almost falls in trying to retrieve the paint brush for her. Later Vincent asks her why she let him risk his life. She answered, “Because he’s a fool” Vince asks again, “If he’s a fool then why do you lead him on like that?” Lilith-“Because I’m Mad.”

Vincent asks her why she let Peter risk his life. She answered, “Because he’s a fool” Vince asks again, “If he’s a fool then why do you lead him on like that?” Lilith-“Because I’m Mad”

The character of Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) walks into this almost enchanted world, a stranger himself looking for some kind of direction. The policy at this institution seems to rely on allowing the patients as much free expression within the parameters of the sanitarium. It gives them a sense of stability within the structures of their psychically constructed webs, as the motif was used at the beginning of the film. And then later alluded to by Dr Lavrier (James Patterson who sadly died that same year- Silent Night, Bloody Night 1972) who discusses with the staff how ‘normal’ spiders will spin out structured webs while schizophrenic spiders will weave asymmetrical webs that make no sense–fantastic, asymmetrical and rather nightmarish designs a… most unsettling fact.

“Look at her she’s lovely It’s like she wants to be just like me”... Narcissus as female

“My kisses kill her, just like all of them it destroys them to be loved”

Editor Aram Akavian quickly edits to frame Lilith sitting as if a spider in her lair waiting to catch a morsel of man or woman to feed on. She has the look of a luring insatiable creature. Lilith will tell you that you must be able to speak the language of her people –you have to demonstrate great courage and have a great capacity for joy.

As Lilith and Vincent spend more time together, Vincent becomes equally more drawn into her world. As her caretaker he arranges for them to have quiet romps through the woods, which is very conducive to private love making.

But Vincent begins to display signs of a powerfully possessive jealousy, and ownership. He follows her when she goes off with Yvonne Meaghan (Anne Meacham) for their lesbian triste in the barn. He pursues after them and has sex with Lilith right there as if to wipe out Yvonnes touch. He wants to dominate her completely. When the gentle Stephen finishes a beautifully carved cedar box for Lilith’s pastels, Vincent pretends that Lilith has rejected it. He lies to Stephen which leads to his committing suicide believing she had rejected him. Lilith was the only meaning to his life. Vincent obviously becoming more unstable goes to Lilith’s room and wants recognition from her…

Vincent-“I did the right thing… you wanted me to that say it… Just say I did the right thing…. tell me that… say you wanted me to do it….”

Lilith- “I don’t kill the things I love. I didn’t kill my brother… He jumped, because he didn’t dare to love me…! I wanted him to…. I wanted him to.”

Lilith isn’t insane she is ‘mad’… Society’s mad woman because her sexuality is ‘desire’ and what is desire is often shunned and then feared. For ages women who are desirable are made to appear dangerous.

That is not to say that she doesn’t have an inappropriate level of sexual dysfunction in her background with her brother, the incident with the small pre-teen boys where she whispers provocatively in their little ears and then kisses them. It’s a telling yet uncomfortable scene. Here is a the instance, on a public street, where Lilith kneels down to chat with two little boys, kisses his fingers, and whispers something presumably shocking into his ear. Vincent yanks her away, offended and possibly even challenged by the attention she is giving someone else.

Ultimately Vincent begins to unravel himself. While gazing at Lilith and finding himself during that journey he begins to annihilate her. He uses the phrases Bitch several times which leads me to believe he has a lot of unresolved issues with his mother having been absent because of her own mental illness. There is a frame where Vincent’s mother’s photograph in a frame is set next to a photo of Lilith. The two women look similar. Lilith has been a surrogate for his mother. Might explain his violent need to claim her.

Dr Lavrier even explains it early on to Vincent that she exudes a kind of ‘rapture’ which in Shakespearean times meant, innocence or ecstasy or madness…. and that when a man goes off to study this rapture he might become dispossessed by it. While Lilith the spirit of female desire embodies both creation and destruction in a preternatural esoteric world, Vincent the soldier pushes his way into her realm and is the force of destruction in the earthly realm.

Lilith -“Do you think loving me is sinful. Do you think I have a talent for love. If my talent were greater than you think would you stop loving me.?”

Lilith -“IF YOU SHOULD DISCOVER THAT YOUR GOD LOVED OTHERS AS MUCH AS HE LOVED YOU WOULD YOU HATE HIM FOR IT?… I SHOW MY LOVE FOR ALL OF YOU AND YOU DESPISE ME….”

SPECIAL LITTLE MENTION TO ♥

Special Mention for Arlene Martel  a quirky favorite character actress that has been in everything from Star Trek, The Fugitive, The Outer Limits to Columbo- In The Glass Cage 1964 She gives an outstanding leading actress performance as a very troubled young woman name Ellen Sawyer who has fled her evangelist father in Texas and is now living a measly little life amidst the dregs in California until she shoots her sisters boyfriend. This is a very excellent obscure psycho-noir study that has impressive photography and unconventional characters in particular King Moody who is unreal as a seedy voyeur that oozes pervert all over, dialogue and pretty taboo subject matter. Also given the fact that it stars John Hoyt who also directed– The Glass Cage (1964) is a memorable little gem. My only complaint is the sort of dark slap stick ending that spirals out of control abruptly at the climax to resolve the intense build up.

It also features another as always stand out performance by Elisha Cook Jr.

Arlene Martel in The Glass Cage 1964 tries to shake off the advances of King Moody

Greasy, low-life Kind Moody tries to assault poor Arlene Martel while she’s the more timid twin Ellen. Great obscure noir with split personality at it’s core.

Elisha Cook plays Ellen’s evangelist father who traumatized his daughter with sexual abuse, causing her to split off into two personalities.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the commotion here at The Last Drive In -Your EverLovin’ MonsterGirl

“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Ladies and gentlemen- welcome to violence; the word and the act. While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains sex.” — Narrator from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Tura Satana, Haji, and Lori Williams in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! 1965

Françoise Dorléac and Donald Pleasence in Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac 1966

Constance Towers kicks the crap out of her pimp for shaving off her hair in Sam Fuller’s provocative The Naked Kiss 1964

Peter Breck plays a journalist hungry for a story and gets more than a jolt of reality when he goes undercover in a Mental Institution in Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor 1963

Bobby Darin is a psychotic racist in Hubert Cornfield and Stanley Kramer’s explosive Pressure Point 1962 starring Sidney Poitier and Peter Falk.

THE DARK PAGES NEWSLETTER  a condensed article was featured in The Dark Pages: You can click on the link for all back issues or to sign up for upcoming issues to this wonderful newsletter for all your noir needs!

Constance Towers as Kelly from The Naked Kiss (1964): “I saw a broken down piece of machinery. Nothing but the buck, the bed and the bottle for the rest of my life. That’s what I saw.”

Griff (Anthony Eisley) The Naked Kiss (1964): “Your body is your only passport!”

Catherine Deneuve as Carole Ledoux in Repulsion (1965): “I must get this crack mended.”

Monty Clift Dr. Cukrowicz Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) : “Nature is not made in the image of man’s compassion.”

Patricia Morán as Rita Ugalde: The Exterminating Angel 1962:“I believe the common people, the lower class people, are less sensitive to pain. Haven’t you ever seen a wounded bull? Not a trace of pain.”

Ann Baxter as Teresina Vidaverri Walk on the Wild Side 1962–“When People are Kind to each other why do they have to find a dirty word for it.”

The Naked Venus 1959-“I repeat she is a gold digger! Europe’s full of them, they’re tramps… they’ll do anything to get a man. They even pose in the NUDE!!!!”

Darren McGavin as Louie–The Man With the Golden Arm (1955): “The monkey is never dead, Dealer. The monkey never dies. When you kick him off, he just hides in a corner, waiting his turn.”

Baby Boy Franky Buono-Blast of Silence (1961) “The targets names is Troiano, you know the type, second string syndicate boss with too much ambition and a mustache to hide the facts he’s got lips like a woman… the kind of face you hate!”

Lorna (1964)- “Thy form is fair to look upon, but thy heart is filled with carcasses and dead man’s bones”

Peter Fonda as Stephen Evshevsky in Lilith (1964): “How wonderful I feel when I’m happy. Do you think that insanity could be so simple a thing as unhappiness?”

Glen or Glenda (1953)- “Give this man satin undies, a dress, a sweater and a skirt, or even a lounging outfit and he’s the happiest individual in the world.”

Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda 1953

Johnny Cash as Johnny Cabot in Five Minutes to Live (1961):“I like a messy bed.”

Dr. Moreau (Charles Laughton) Island of Lost Souls: “Do you know what it means to feel like God?”

The Curious Dr. Humpp (1969): “Sex dominates the world! And now, I dominate sex!”

The Snake Pit (1948): Jacqueline deWit as Celia Sommerville “And we’re so crowded already. I just don’t know where it’s all gonna end!” Olivia de Havilland as Virginia Stuart Cunningham “I’ll tell you where it’s gonna end, Miss Somerville… When there are more sick ones than well ones, the sick ones will lock the well ones up.”

Delphine Seyrig as Countess Bathory in Daughters of Darkness (1971)- “Aren’t those crimes horrifying. And yet -so fascinating!”

Julien Gulomar as Bishop Daisy to the Barber (Michel Serrault) King of Hearts (1966)-“I was so young. I already knew that to love the world you have to get away from it.”

The Killing of Sister George (1968) -Suzanna York as Alice ‘CHILDIE’: “Not all women are raving bloody lesbians, you know” Beryl Reid as George: “That is a misfortune I am perfectly well aware of!”

Susannah York (right) with Beryl Reid in The Killing of Sister George Susannah York and Beryl Reid in Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George 1960

The Lickerish Quartet (1970)-“You can’t get blood out of an illusion.”

THE SWEET SOUND OF DEATH (1965)- Dominique-“I’m attracted” Pablo-” To Bullfights?” Dominique-” No, I meant to death. I’ve always thought it… The state of perfection for all men.”

Peter O’Toole as Sir Charles Ferguson Brotherly Love (1970): “Remember the nice things. Reared in exile by a card-cheating, scandal ruined daddy. A mummy who gave us gin for milk. Ours was such a beautifully disgusting childhood.”

Maximillian Schell as Stanislaus Pilgrin in Return From The Ashes 1965: “If there is no God, no devil, no heaven, no hell, and no immortality, then anything is permissible.”

Euripides 425 B.C.-“Whom God wishes to destroy… he first makes mad.”

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford bring to life two of the most outrageously memorable characters in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962

WHAT DOES PSYCHOTRONIC MEAN?

psychotronic |ˌsīkəˈtränik| adjective denoting or relating to a genre of movies, typically with a science fiction, horror, or fantasy theme, that were made on a low budget or poorly received by critics. [1980s: coined in this sense by Michael Weldon, who edited a weekly New York guide to the best and worst films on local television.] Source: Wikipedia

In the scope of these transitioning often radical films, where once, men and women aspired for the moon and the stars and the whole ball of wax. in the newer scheme of things they aspired for you know… “kicks” yes that word comes up in every film from the 50s and 60s… I’d like to have a buck for every time a character opines that collective craving… from juvenile delinquent to smarmy jet setter!

FILM NOIR HAD AN INEVITABLE TRAJECTORY…

THE ECCENTRIC & OFTEN GUTSY STYLE OF FILM NOIR HAD NO WHERE ELSE TO GO… BUT TO REACH FOR EVEN MORE OFF-BEAT, DEVIANT– ENDLESSLY RISKY & TABOO ORIENTED SET OF NARRATIVES FOUND IN THE SUBVERSIVE AND EXPLOITATIVE CULT FILMS OF THE MID TO LATE 50s through the 60s and into the early 70s!

I just got myself this collection of goodies from Something Weird!

There’s even this dvd that points to the connection between the two genres – Here it’s labeled WEIRD. I like transgressive… They all sort of have a whiff of noir.

Grayson Hall -Satan in High Heels 1962

Gerd Oswald adapts Fredrick Brown’s titillating novel — bringing to the screen the gorgeous Anita Ekberg, Phillip Carey and Gypsy Rose Lee and Harry Townes in the sensational, obscure and psycho-sexual thriller Screaming Mimi 1958

Victor Buono is a deranged mama’s boy in Burt Topper’s fabulous The Strangler 1964

Catherine Deneuve is extraordinary as the unhinged nymph in Roman Polanski’s psycho-sexual tale of growing madness in Repulsion 1965

Just like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, Noir took a journey through an even darker lens… Out of the shadows of 40s Noir cinema, European New Wave, fringe directors, and Hollywood auteurs, brought more violent, sexual, transgressive, and socially transformative narratives into the cold light of day with a creeping sense of verité. While Film Noir pushed the boundaries of taboo subject matter and familiar Hollywood archetypes it wasn’t until later that we are able to visualize the advancement of transgressive topics.

The start of 50s psychological noir already began to present shocking and stirring films like Losey’s version of M (1951) and The Prowler (1951), Marilyn Monroe gave a spirited performance as the deranged Nell Forbes in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), Ida Lupino and Collier Young brought us psychopath Emmett Myers (William Talman) in the taut film noir thriller– The Hitch-Hiker (1953).

David Wayne reprises the role of a tortured pedophile in Joseph Losey’s version of M (1951)

Henry Jones is a most unsavory character in Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed 1956 but it’s Patty McCormack’s chilling performance as the socio-pathic Rhoda Penmark

Marylin Monroe stretches the dimensions of her acting ability as the unstable Nell Forbes in Roy Ward Baker’s taut psycho-thriller Don’t Bother To Knock 1952

A progression of heterogeneous films emerged that would manifest certain qualities of Noir, Suspense and even elements of Horror relating to such themes as–the older woman/younger man, mental illness, child bride, female promiscuity, sexual anxiety & delusions, mania, the death penalty, drug addiction, abortion, rape, sadism, cannibalism and even a socio-pathic little girl named Rhoda. Female on the Beach (1955), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), Baby Doll (1956), Autumn Leaves (1956), The Killer is Loose (1956), The Bad Seed (1956), The Tattered Dress (1957), The Last Mile (1959), Night of Evil (1962), The L Shaped Room (1962), A Taste for Women (1964), Shock Treatment (1964), The Night Walker (1964). As Noir began to spread outward, many themes became hybridized, incorporating several postulations and diluted genre patterns which insinuated itself in the cult film. Cult films share a distilled vision of Horror, Suspense or Fantasy that drew inspiration from the Noir canon inserting itself into the broadening spectrum of cult cinema.

The psycho-sexual melodramas seem to lead to psycho-sexual thrillers which were more graphic and that fed the tributary to the overflow of transgressive exploitation films of the 60s –experimental and low budget films alike.

Joan Crawford and Jeff Chandler in Female on the Beach

the always provocative Carroll Baker is Baby Doll 1956 in Tennessee Williams story directed by Elia Kazan. Eli Wallach stars as Silva Vacarro -also stars Karl Malden

Bryan Forbes directs Leslie Caron in The L-Shaped Room 1962 –the story of a french woman pregnant and unmarried living with a building filled with societal misfits

Directed by Jack Garfein–Ben Gazzara plays a belligerent cadet bordering on socio-path at a Southern Military School.

Robert Aldrich directed Joan Crawford in the role of an older woman in love with a very disturbed younger Cliff Robertson. in Autumn Leaves 1956

Otto Preminger’s gritty portrayal of heroine addiction starring Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker in The Man With The Golden Arm 1955

Into it’s next incarnation, film noir reached for even more off-beat, deviant, endlessly risky, and taboo narratives which the subversive and exploitative cult films of those eras centered around. The Very Edge 1963, The Naked Kiss (1964) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), and Bunny Lake is Missing 1965 are some of my favorites and best examples of this conversion.

Anne Heywood is terrorized in The Very Edge 1963

Film Noir derived some of it’s darkest shades from human nature, ‘crime’, and the personal and collective angst of paranoia world wide. (Pressure Point 1962, Bunny Lake is Missing 1965, Night of the Living Dead 1968, Shock Corridor 1963). As Noir explored and exposed post-war sentiments of American culture, cult films opened Pandora’s Box even wider, setting loose upon the screen even more extreme social taboos (The Lonely Sex 1959, Homicidal 1961, Satan in High Heels 1962, The World, the Flesh and the Devil 1959). Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Tennessee Williams’ harrowing story of heroine addiction, cannibalism, shock therapy, lobotomy self-loathing homosexuality and the archetypal devouring mother. Sam Fuller, places Constance Towers, a beautiful prostitute on the road to redemption in mainstream America, only to uncover a dark secret— that the town’s beloved benefactor is a pedophile who proposes marriage to use her as a kindred spirit in Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964). There’s a powerful scene with Madam Candy (Virginia Grey) who gets the tar beaten out of her by Kelly (Constance Towers)… while Kelly shoves dirty money in Candy’s mouth….

Bunny Lake is Missing 1965 Carol Lynley is a panicked mother Ann Lake looking for her little girl in England after she goes missing from school. Noel Coward is her creepy landlord-Directed by Otto Preminger, perhaps one of my favorite psycho-thrillers from the 60s

Night of the Living Dead 1968 George A Romero’s disturbing watershed moment in indie horror film… acts as social commentary horrifically mirrors anti-consumerism and racism.

Suddenly, Last Summer 1959 Tennessee Williams scathing criticism of the institution of mental health motherhood, and self loathing homosexuality…

Sand down the edges of Noir’s shapes and shadows until they’re refined by the harsh florescent lights of modernity and combine with a movie-going audience hungering to be titillated, repulsed and transformed. Art and style had to go through certain transformation in order to meet up with an ever changing and new culture. Some of these re-inventive cult films drew from Noir’s deep well of infinite cultural dynamism and can be considered serious masterpieces (Night of the Hunter 1955, Sweet Smell of Success 1957, Blast of Silence 1961, Lady in a Cage 1964). Many low budget sleepers found their way on screen falling into the niche of art-house and others are just down right delicious schlock (Violated 1953, Jail Bait 1954, The Lonely Sex 1959, The Sinister Urge 1960, Glen or Glenda 1963, Five Minutes to Live 1961, Stark Fear 1962, The Sadist 1963, Teenage Strangler 1964, Strange Compulsion 1964, Motorpsycho! 1965, The Defilers 1965, Two Girls for a Madman 1968). Even with low budgets, the cult film managed to represent our deepest fears and desires, which repulsed and released us from it’s brief influence as with Georges Franju’s surreal Eye’s Without a Face (1960) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique (1955). They all possess a rejuvenated boldness from a Noir sensibility.

Two Girls for a Madman 1968

Strange Compulsion 1964 Fred is a Peeping Tom!

The Sadist 1963 Arch Hall as mad dog killer Charlie Tibbs

The Lonely Sex 1959

Transgressive films reflected changing social morays— more sexual freedom, shifts in the American family, and boundaries pushed farther toward the dark and tragic complexities of the iconic Noir characters and themes of alienated individuals that preceded the outré cult evolution. Cult films traded in suggestive innuendo for cogent, potent, and often lurid themes, deviant characterizations in graphic detail. And traded on Noir’s haunting chiaroscuro, for cult’s gutsy revelations. Noir had an elegant yet neurotic mystique, whereas the evolution of the cult crime story discloses a society partly infected by modernity, lacking the grand style of the old, introducing fast cars, skimpy outfits, and a generation of rebels looking for ‘kicks.’

Brute Force 1947 Jules Dassin directs Burt Lancaster and a slew of fine actors in this savage indictment of the prison system. Hume Cronyn plays a particularly sadistic guard.

Women’s Prison 1955 Ida Lupino directs -a beaten down Phyllis Thaxter

Certain Noir films possessed powerfully evocative scenes more than just implying violence (Brute Force 1947, Woman’s Prison 1950), but latter films present more brutal moments occurring under bleached white hot light in the openness of day (Lady in a Cage 1964, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962). The truly transgressive territories of socially acceptable norms were being blown out of the water and splattered into different spheres of violence and psychological dimensions (The Mark 1961, The Couch 1962, Screaming Mimi 1958, Five Minutes to Live 1961, Walk on the Wild Side 1962, Look in Any Window, Who Killed Teddy Bear? 1965, Strait-Jacket 1964, Compulsion 1959, The Girl in the Black Stockings 1957, The Strange One 1957, The Mugger 1958).

Look in Any Window 1961 Paul Anka and Ruth Roman–there’s a queasy sense of voyeurism and a Pal that hangs over suburbia and the unhappy marriages of the middle class who aren’t what they appear to be on the surface keeping up with the Jones….

While Noir has the walking wounded, cult films have the often sleazy band of human wreckage. These films gave us such themes of — desire and deviant behavior, sexual & social contradiction, mania, phobia, the subconscious id, irrational obsession, neurosis, fixation, fetish, subversion, exploitation, objectification, hostility, conflict, reactionism, the hint of soft-core pornography, and raw images of sexuality or social deviation. Many films were also psycho-sexual thrillers exploring the fractured psyche up close (The Strangler 1964, Repulsion 1965). Hitchcock took a risk with Norman Bates as the poster child for psychopathic innocence in Psycho (1960) and Vertigo (1958) with the bold swagger of transgressive themes necrophilia, Oedipal complex, transvestism, psychosis, obsession and pathological objectification, and sublimation of the female figure. Although a horror picture, Psycho still possesses many elements of a great Noir film.

These films transfigured into the realm of exploitation, making the transition while utilizing indistinguishable elements of classical Noir. The most rudimentary aspects of noir metamorphosed into a radically altered state of complex and often graphic illustrations of sexualized characters, violent behavior, and offbeat story lines that expanded the scope of Noir’s already quirky style. Instead of the camera just suggestively brushing against Phyllis Dietrichson’s (Barbara Stanwyck’s) ankle bracelet in Double Indemnity (1944), Russ Meyer’s cult film shows us Lorna Maitland’s full and faithful breasts in the trashy treasure Mudhoney (1965).

Russ Meyer’s Mudhoney 1965 Lorna Maitland as Clara Belle

Sin in the Suburbs-Joe Sarno

Cult films were a contemporary Sturm und Drang that had the artistic freedom like a revival of the Pre-Code imagination. Busting wide open the illusion of heteronormativity, issues of race, class, misogyny, and women’s sexual liberation (Kitten with a Whip 1964, … And the Wild Wild Women 1959, starring the incredible Anna Magnani. Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! 1965, Something Wild 1961,The Killing of Sister George 1960, Lolita 1962, Sin in the Suburbs 1964). While motherhood and the American family reared its ugly head in the sensationalized Mildred Pierce (1945),

Anna Magnani and Guilietta Masina

Robert Aldrich came along and took the notion of dysfunctional family to the level of melodramatic opera by casting two of Hollywood’s most shining stars not only making them grotesque caricatures of themselves but thereby starting a trend of Grande Dame Cinema with his notoriously splendid What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962. Reaching deeper into human vulnerability and collective dis-ease, they revealed more of a change as directors populated their world with subversive, deviant, outliers of society (Victim 1961, Seance on a Wet Afternoon 1964, Cul-de-sac 1966, The Honeymoon Killers 1969, Seconds 1966, The Thrill Killers 1964, Lilith 1964 Aroused 1966, The Incident 1967, The World’s Greatest Sinner 1962, Never Take Candy From A Stranger 1960, The Bloody Brood 1959, Mister Buddwing 1966). No longer just crime-based stories with treacherous femme fatales and broken masculine types. The misunderstood anti-hero, the wrongly hunted man, the woman in peril still existed, and the derivative tales still explored areas of life vs death, opportunism vs victimization, human relationships, human psyche, temptation, seduction, blurred identity, fate and redemption.

Taboo as Objective:

“Violent acts compel an aesthetic response in the beholder of awe, admiration or bafflement. If an action evokes an aesthetic response then it is logical to assume that this action–even if it is murder–must have been the work of an artist.”- (Joel Black from the aesthetics of murder 1991)

No longer allusions of a romanticized form of mental illness now lay bare the true psychosis, brutality & prison reform, homosexuality out of that stifling old closet, socio-pathic violence, cannibalism, castration complex, Oedipal and Paternal fixations, incest, rape, racism, prostitution, drug addiction, religious delusion and zealotry- They illustrated the supposed Hysteria of women, fetishism, soft core pornography, white slavery, anti-establishmentism, fear of immigrants, abortion, unwed mothers, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency. voyeurism, pedophilia, sexual sadism, s&m–female sexuality, male impotence. swinging, folie a deux, thrill killings, murderous children, menage a trois -interracial marriage, exhibitionism.and aggressive individualism.

Tony Musante and Martin Sheen are sociopathic thrill seekers who torment a subway car filled with New Yorkers. The Incident (1967)

James Garner & Angela Lansbury in Mister Buddwing 1966

A Streetcar Named Desire 1951 Brando & Leigh in Tennessee William’s volatile story

Val Lewton seemed to understand the complexities of gender and the machinations of the human animal struggling against conformity and taboo. His films dealt with female sexuality, arousal, women’s sexual primacy as dangerous especially to men or impressionable girls at the crossroads. A preoccupation with death, suicide, and even clandestine & esoteric religious cults that worshiped human sacrifice and the devil. Truly transgressive themes for a small studio like RKO supposedly competing with Universal’s monster factory. But Lewton set forth a small treasure trove of masterpieces that still hold up to contemporary viewing and fed the reservoir of cult films to follow. Lewton and Fritz Lang, both infused their work with an abundance of psychology and deviance that predisposed the cinematic subject matter found in film noir as well as the psycho-sexual thrillers. There was an often noticeable intersectionality of both genres.

Jean Brooks is Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim 1943 directed by Mark Robson

Simone Simon is Val Lewton’s haunted Irena in- Cat People 1942

Directors like John Frankenheimer, Otto Preminger, Sam Fuller, Joseph Losey, and Robert Aldrich gave us expansive, experimental, reflexive, subversive, bizarre, brutal and often shocking films. Even Todd Browning (Freaks 1932), and Val Lewton (I Walked with a Zombie 1943) envisioned taboo themes and outlier tableaus within the universe of their great bodies of work that predate later cult paragons. During the 50s and 60s some dramatic tour-de-forces arose— Tennessee Williams’ sympathetic portrayal of women in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Night of the Iguana (1964) and Suddenly, Last Summer, or Aldrich’s contribution with his focus on a repulsive brand of narcissism and madness with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. They push boundaries of conventional narratives and explore deeper veins of dark human nature, compulsions, weakness, desires, fears, and taboos. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) broke the mold of traditional Noir by setting Gloria Swanson’s brilliant performance as Norma Desmond in the spotlight, hinting at the atmosphere of things to come…

Gloria Swanson set the scene for years to come… when she inhabited the likes of Norma Desmond and set the screen ablaze with an all consuming narcissism that reaches out and touches you! A growing Gothic trend of Hollywood anxiety and agism….

From The Cult Film Reader by Mathjis, Ernest, Mendik and Xavier. Chapter Sleaze Mania, Euro-Trash and High Art–they cite S.S.Prawer’s notes–

“In a way, hybrid genres like art-horror films simply point up the problems which have historically characterized all attempts at genre definition.”

(i) Every worthwhile work modifies the genre {horror} to some extent, brings something new to it. and therefor forces us to rethink definitions and delimitations. (ii) There are borderline cases, works that belong to more than on genre-the overlap between the “fantastic terror” film and the “science-fiction” film is particularly large. (iii) Wide variations in quality are possible within a given genre. (iv) There are works which as a whole clearly do not belong to the genre in question but which embody references to that genre, or contain sequences that derive from, allude to, or influence it.

In the same way, noir seems to have been modified or rethought in ways that are harder to define falling into many realms that can be considered cult. Prawer tends to endorse my view of noir’s transitioning exhibition, narratives and genre-overlapping.

These cinematic archetypes, phantoms and anti-heroes existed in the liminal spaces of the narrative. Toward the end of Noir’s hey-day when most of the motifs and plot designs had been over used, you can find much of the dynamic sensibilities cropping up in cult, b-movie and transgressive underground films, many with little to no budgets. Films that made great use in paying homage to odd angles and specifically lit camera work. There were even odder character studies with texturally complex psyches. A rebellion of sorts. More renegade outliers reaching beyond the framework of the norm. Hollywood didn’t have a strangle hold on what could be said or shown, and so pulp novels and screenplays were tapped that could express a whole different angle of story telling, cinema’s characters, narratives, and landscapes were all to push the limits of expectation, and often what emerged was a type of noir on acid, violently at odds with the world, and telling it like it is, without the subtle and classic nuance.

Characters were more extreme forms of their former archetypes, gay characters were not as coded, the violence was shown on screen, and the transgressive dialogue spoke it’s mind. We went from Floradora Girls, Femme Fatales and Floozies to Bikers Queens, Bitches and Babes!…. From the ‘girl next door’ to ‘That Kind of Girl.’ Guys didn’t just have traces of mother complexes, they literally had their mommy’s mummified body stuffed and rotting in the basement cellar! But that didn’t stop Mommy from holding sway over sunny boy!

In his jail cell, blanket-wrapped Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins, but “Mother’s” voice supplied by Virginia Gregg) offered his final internal thoughts after being overtaken by Mother, in voice-over. The voice of “Mother” spoke in Norman’s head, and condemned her son for the crimes, while she claimed that she was harmless:

“It’s sad when a Mother has to speak the words that condemn her own son, but I couldn’t allow them to believe that I would commit murder. They’ll put him away now, as I should have years ago. He was always bad and in the end, he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man, as if I could do anything except just sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds. Oh, they know I can’t even move a finger, and I won’t. I’ll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do suspect me. They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am.

I’m not even gonna swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, ‘Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly.”

Flawed anti-heroes, the private eye and guys down on their luck became juvenile delinquents and flagrant social outcasts and rebels in dirty undershirts.

The other thing that became transformed was the level of graphic violence. The murders and murderers themselves seemed unleashed from cinema’s Id. As if all the fear and collective repression opened Pandora’s Box and the brutality that emerged on screen began to eclipse the implied narratives.

Story lines—about con men, killers, cigarette girls, crooked cops, down-and-out boxers, and calculating, scheming, deadly broads of noir melted into the. B Movies, now a cinema of transgression.

Transformed into story lines about—thrill killers, addicted females. disillusioned rogue cops, and calculating, scheming hyper violent and deadly serious women with the same psychological complexities yet they literally found their freedom to compete with the volatile hyper-male archetypes. Less locked into the civil conformity that was imposed on women in the 40s & 50s women started to really show themselves as more than housewives, mistresses or mysterious women in black!

During the 60s the aesthetics of a changing culture reflected itself back at us from up on the screen. The Production Code had lost it’s grip on the system and that Studio System… was collapsing.

What stands out for me since I’ve been spending months exploring the transformation of not only the subject matter, framework, narrative and depiction of transgressive themes, is watching particular actresses and their brave performances around the time the studio system and the transfiguration of film had also started to change for film stars as well, allowing for expressive, experimental acting. I have found that often the more obscure yet brilliant roles for women were the ones that have drawn me into their orbit… like Shirley Jones and Jean Simmons in Elmer Gantry 1960…

Piper Laurie in The Hustler 1961. — All these women are phenomenal… Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth 1962, Simone Signoret in Ship of Fools 1965, Ruby Dee and Ellen Holly in Take a Giant Step 1959, Lola Albright in A Cold Wind in August 1961— and the collective of fine actresses in Sidney Lumet’s The Group 1966 Joanna Pettet, Joan Hackett, Shirley Knight, Jessica Walter, Candice Bergen, Elizabeth Hartman, and Kathleen Widdoes.

Anne Bancroft in The Pumpkin Eater, Jean Seaberg in Lilith, Barbara Barrie in One Potato Two Potato and Carol Lynley in Bunny Lake is Missing, Patricia Neal in Psyche 59 (1964) and-Joanne Woodward in The Stripper.

A few more personal favorites Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind 1960 and …And the Wild Wild Women 1959, and while I’m on my Anna Magnani kick-The Rose Tattoo 1955–of course Kim Stanley in Seance on a Wet Afternoon 1964. Jean Simmons in Home Before Dark 1958, Eleanor Parker in Lizzie 1957

Molly Haskell used these terms to qualify the roles that actresses were now delving into the post Hollywood glamor machine…

‘But even with these great women’s roles of the decade what were they for the most part. Whores, quasi-whores jilted mistresses emotional cripples, drunks daffy ingénues | Lolitas, kooks, sex starved spinsters psychotics Icebergs, ZOMBIES AND BALLBREAKERS’

As Mr. Vogler (Gunner Bjornstrand) says in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) “The important thing is the effort, not what we achieve.”

Where else did Film Noir have to go but into the cultural gutter…?

Femme Fatales didn’t use purse guns anymore, they used their bare hands…

She Devil’s on Wheels 1968 -Betty Connell as “Queen” of the Man-Eaters

Carroll Baker in Something Wild 1961 a film dealing with the trauma of rape

Gun Crazy 1950 or Deadly is the Female= John Dahl and Peggy Cummins play a dangerous game of Folie_à_deux

Barrie Chase in Cape Fear 1962

Ross Martin as the psychopathic asthmatic in Experiment in Terror 1962

Some films were still part of the Noir canon even as they pushed the boundaries further. John Cromwell’s brutal Caged (1950) put an ugly face to the horrors of women’s prisons. Joseph E Lewis‘ classic noir Gun Crazy (1950) flirted with Folie à deux as the beautiful yet menacing pistol happy Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) seduces John Dall’s Barton Tare into a life of robberies and murder. Robert Aldrich opens that Pandora’s Box with his nihilistic thriller Kiss Me Deadly (1955). There’s an unseen split differentiating these films from classical Noir. Some psychological thrillers look like Noir films (Something Wild 1961, Cape Fear 1962, Experiment in Terror 1962, In Cold Blood 1967, Anatomy of a Murder 1959) and some Noir films appear psychological suspense thrillers as in Louise Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows 1957 or Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel 1962, The Very Edge 1963 and the odd indie psycho-thriller with a streak of vérité, and gritty realism Heat of Madness 1966–that contrary to detracting from the thing, acts more like a stage play in 60s Manhattan, with real actors. The lead Kevin Scott plays a tortured artist who makes a living shooting nude calenders. The object of his affection is the only sore point for me, but he as the afflicted John Wilright with bad comb over and creeping halitosis is just vile enough to be believable. It’s a very odd and compelling little piece.

Robert Blake gives an astounding performance as killer Perry in Richard Brooks adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1967)

Harry Wuest’s starkly real Heat of Madness (1966)

From gritty streets, smokey lounges five o’clock shadows, fedoras and sensual starlets who were furious femme fatales showing a hint of leg and singing torchy lullabies like the mythical Lorelei luring damaged men to their lonely deaths. From shadowy alley ways where down on their luck fella’s meet with fickle fate–from flash backs, desperate dames, mistaken identity to the wrongfully accused, Film Noir had all the sharp and dark angles that twisted itself around the mantle of Hollywood’s dream factory. Film Noir with its suggestive Chiaroscuro, polished and highly stylized archetypes that at times flirted with certain cultural taboos moved in shadowy spheres and explored the internalized fears, anxieties and desires that challenged society, yet it’s allusions only touched the surface. Most Film Noir hadn’t entered the arena of the profane as of yet.

Women were getting more viscerally visual power, rather than cliched femme fatales they could flex a primal imagery just out of reach of the male gaze. And they didn’t always get crucified by a malefic identity. She led her own narrative, owned her body, was at times the unstable hysterical psychotic and at times the central foci and as powerful if not more than their male co-stars. In as much as certain roles cast them in disparaging positions of objectification, the cult female character had the ability to break out of the traditional role as either, mother, saint, wife, woman-in-peril, girl next door, extraneous ‘nice girl’ or iconic cliche of the ‘bad girl.’ And the male characters became more conflicted, flawed, degenerate, sweaty bare chested, psychologically complex, psychotic freaks with their own set of fixations and fetishes. There were no Cary Grants or Gregory Pecks in the cult cinema world. A different sort of male figure rose from the Noir ashes. Perhaps Robert Ryan came the closest to illuminating the complex hyper masculine psyche in noir.

Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter 1955

Max Von Sydow as the quietly vengeful father in The Virgin Spring 1960

Men like Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell was a masterful enigma of immortal turpitude proving to be a more menacing force than even Bela Lugosi’s Dracula with his performance in -Night of the Hunter 1955, or his Max Cady in Cape Fear 1962. The bizarre Garland Humphrey ‘Red’ Lynch played perfectly by Ross Martin in Experiment in Terror 1962. Max Von Sydow’s stoic performance as a father filled with grief, retribution and an icy blood lust against the men who attacked and murdered his precious daughter in Bergman’s somber and stunning The Virgin Spring 1960.

Norman Bates’ iconic persona of a gentle innocence that masked yet a deranged and twisted soul in Hitchcock’s Psycho 1960 Wendell Corey’s sublime and reserved performance of a man out of control in The Killer is Loose 1956.

Wendell Corey is chilling as the detached psychopath -and has flipped his lid in Budd Boetticher’s terrific thriller- The Killer is Loose 1956

A world of indulgence, decadence, inherent misogyny, defiled innocence, deflated paternal archetypes, not so coded gay characters, man eaters, men with not so subtle castration anxiety and sexually expressive and responsive females all could go back to being as free as they were Pre-Code Hollywood.

So can even an intoxicating formula run out of it’s vitality?

“In a casual, cursory portrait of the ‘other’ let us tap at the door of decadence apropos of these subversive films. Culturally, decadence reflects the concept that there are epochs in art when, after magnificent achievements and innovations, a fashionable degeneration begins among artists, exposing a putrid, final stage of living for a leading nation.” — Allan Havis

The reaction to this transgressive ideology was to further push the envelope and displace these key paradigms and archetypes to a new level of cinematic freedom. Playing with the already existing expressiveness of the Noir character broke the mold of the old Hollywood formula. The new wave of transgressive films that developed in the late 50’s and 60s possess these Noir elements transmogrified into an entirely more volatile world, intimately or universally, through inner machination or collective consciousness. Film Noir’s ‘fall from grace to grind-house’ offers a fascinating evolution from stylized elegance to sadistic escapism.

Catherine Deneuve must fend off the lewd advances from her landlord Patrick Wymark

From Reverence to Rape- The Treatment of Women in the Movies by Molly Haskell

“As the sixties opened, the Production Code was relaxing inch by inch. With successive revelations on the screen, the decade progressed like a stripper, though awkwardly like a novice on the stage in a hurry to get off the stage”

As Haskell puts it so aptly about women’s roles in the sixties:

“But even these the great women’s roles of the decade, what are they for the most part? Whores, quasi-whores, jilted mistresses, emotional cripples, drunks. Daffy ingenues, Lolitas, kooks, sex-starved spinsters, Psychotics, Icebergs, zombies and ball-breakers”

For better or worse… the 60s flipped certain roles for women on their heads revealing them in the narrative as the primary strong character, autonomous about her own or perceived gaze. Whether she still was a man-eater, femme fatale, fallen angel, hysterical mess or downright psychotic, there were women’s roles that kicked serious some ass.! There was more room to exhale a bit and let some of the intrigue, some of the inspiration splay itself wide open.

Carroll Baker-Something Wild 1961

Sue Lyon in Stanley Kubrick’s LOLITA 1962

Ann -Margret is a Kitten with a Whip taunting John Forsyth in Douglas Heyes’ film 1964

Cult Films Taboo and Transgression– Allan Havis–

—“Many of these alternate-realm films explore knowingly or inadvertently powerful social taboos. We can define taboos in the context of social codes and anthropological phobias… It is this very contradiction of taboos and their transgressions that thrusts this particular and irreverent study of favorite cult films” —Allan Havis

—”Cult films became branded in the late 1960s and flourished as a trendy, social activity for nearly twenty years… How do we explain this odd paradoxical feeling when an excellent cult film entertains and disturbs us in the same way?”

One of the sentient points that Havis makes in his marvelous book is the idea of ‘escape and return’, where the film goer experiences these offbeat films going in willingly to navigate strange new territories that invert familiar or alternately comfortable themes, because they trust that they are safe and reality will be restored at the end of the film.

In any epoch we can find film makers who understood as Picasso once said- “Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth” and “Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing. Taste is the enemy of creativity.”

Thus we see expansive, experimental, reflexsive, subversive, bizarre, brutal and the often shocking films from directors like John Frankenheimer Sam Fuller, Roger Corman, George Romero, Russ Meyer, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jerzy Kawalerowicz Robert Aldrich,Roman Polanski Radley Metzger, yes even… Ed Wood, Jean Luc Goddard, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Hugo Haas, Budd Botteicher, Walter Grauman, Edward L Cahn, Joseph Pevney, and one of my favorites Joseph Losey.

The years generally thought of for Noir’s most relevant reign was between 1945 -1955

From the Chapter-LOUNGE TIME Postwar Crisis and the Chronotope of Film Noir by Vivian Sobchack in the book RECONFIGURING AMERICAN GENRES: HISTORY AND THEORY-edited by Nick Browne

“To locate and ground that heterogeneous and ambiguous cinematic grouping called film noir in it’s contemporaneous social context…{…} attempting to relate the films to changes in American culture during the second World War and its aftermath.”

Quoting Joan Copjec from Shades of Noir—

“Film noir criticism correlates filmic elements with historical “sources”: World War II, and increase in crime, mounting paranoia regarding the working woman’s place in society, and so on-thinking that it has thereby located the “generative principle” of the films. But this reference to external sources in no way resolves the question of the internal logic of the films.”

Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece, and perhaps one of Humphrey Bogarts finest performances as Dixon Steele a screenwriter with a volatile personality who falls for Gloria Grahame in the melo-noir gem–In A Lonely Place 1950

Essentially Sobchack points out how heterogeneous and ambivalent the Film Noir genre started to reflect the American cultural climate in a social context showing the attitudes of the nation after the war.

But these films became hybridizations, influenced, and transfigured making the transition while utilizing indistinguishable elements of classical noir. Somehow, certain of the most rudimentary aspects of noir metamorphosed into a radically altered state of complex and often graphic illustrations of sexualized characters, violent behavior, pathologically fixated narratives, and offbeat story lines that expanded the scope of an already quirky style or genre. Film noir often deriving some of it’s darkest shades from human nature, ‘crime’, and the personal and collective angst of paranoia in this country. The role of women was confusing, as they were returning back to take care of hearth and home after having been productive supporters on the war front as Rosy the Riveters. Where was their place in society now? Considering the two contrasting roles of women in noir, the innocent/marrying type/ nice girl on the sidelines contrasted with the dark bad girl, femme fatale, predatory dangerous and sexually unredeemable– Heading toward the sexual revolution of the 60s, a woman’s place in film and society would go through many phases.

As I’ve already cited, men proved to be a more menacing force-Night of the Hunter, Experiment in Terror, Cape Fear, Psycho, Five Minutes to Live & The Killer is Loose.

Once again from Vivien Sobchack-

“Let us start with the context. It is now a commonplace to regard film noir during the peak years of its production as a pessimistic cinematic response to volatile social and economic conditions of the decade immediately after WWII Whether considered a genre or a style, the films circumscribed as noir are seen as playing out negative dramas of postwar masculine trauma and gender anxiety brought on by wartime destablization of the culture’s domestic economy and a consequence “deregulation” of the institutionalized and patriarchally informed relationship between men and women. The social context in which noir emerged is marked as “transitional’ and it’s overarching themes are the recovery of a lost patriarchal order and the need for the country to literally and metaphorically ‘settle down’ “

Interesting is in retrospect, certain of these obscure B cult films that were low budget, considered cheap and sophomoric, contain horrid acting and an erratic storyline, at times possess a natural art-house quality that film makers today try to emulate yet miss the mark by miles. What comes to mind just to give one example is Ray Dennis Steckler aka Cash Flagg’s interesting The Thrill Killers. In one scene where Steckler himself plays Mad Dog Click a psychotic freak, brutally attacks a dance hall hostess in a hotel room. The scene is framed so well that I was actually taken aback by its raw savagery and outre violent realism. While parts of the film are a bit asinine, there’s a lot of interesting and quirky scenes and odd characters that I think deserve a look at.

Another aspect of many of these films which help make them stand apart and cry out for attention is the musical scores that companion the pace and tone as the music began to mirror the mood, it became more off beat, utilizing modern jazz and disjointed out of step beats that clashes with mainstream society. The music often underscored the sentiment of these film’s discordant nature, emphasized chaos, rebellion and alienation, an atmosphere of unsettling freedom. Composers added to the landscape–like Jerry Goldsmith, Mort Stevens , Gil Melle and Lionel Newman. Walter Schumann, Paul Glass, Frank De Vol, Mischa Bakaleinikoff , Henri Mancini, Bernard Herrmann. John Barry and Elmer Bernstein, Miles Davis, Hans J, Salter. Pete Rugulo, Miklós Rózsa , Paul Dunlop, John Williams and Lalo Schifrin.

THE FILMS: the breadth of my attentions seem to span from 1952-1969- with the exception of a few films that started early on exploring, brutal, psychological and avant-garde spaces… I list these films that are uniquely irreverent & enigmatic. In other words they possess the principles of both cult and noir styles. Here’s Joey’s Corollary Compendium!

1920

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI 1919–directed by Robert Wiene- expressionistic shadows and avante garde angles and architecture. Nightmarish, sonombulism, mind control, obsession and necrophilia. Shades of taboo & themes in a dark dreamy cinematic poem.

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI 1919

1931

SAFE IN HELL 1931 directed by William Wellman

Safe in Hell 1931 Dorothy Mackaill directed by William Wellman

After Dorothy Machaill as Gilda Carlson kills the man who forces her into prostitution and rapes her, she flees to a Caribbean island, where there’s no escape from danger!

M (1931) -directed by Fritz Lang

Peter Lorre embodies repulsion and sympathetic psychosis as child murderer Hans Beckert hunted through out the streets of the German city by the police and a mob of its criminal element seething with a blood lust for justice and revenge!

1932

FREAKS 1932 -directed by Tod Browning

Controversial at the time Tod Browning cast his masterpiece with circus folk. The story centers around Hans (Harry Earls) who is wooed by the ruthless Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) for his money. Slowly trying to poison the love -struck Hans, the family of freaks decide to exact their own revenge on this conniving vulturine.

Tod Browning’s FREAKS (1932)

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS 1932 -directed by Erle C.Kenton

Charles Laughton is utterly chilling as Dr. Moreau who plays god with the Islanders by tampering with the genetics of man/woman & beast. Using profane experiments he lauds his power over them by threatening to take them to the ‘house of pain’… It’s a nightmarish and provocative masterpiece. Also starring Bela Lugosi as Sayer of the Law…

Kathleen Burke Island of Lost Souls -the sensual Panther Woman… brings an element of Beastiality to the already provocative theme.

1934

THE BLACK CAT 1934–directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

One of the best pairings of Karloff and Lugosi, the story of an old friendship that has brewed revenge and immortal retribution for having turned traitor and committed genocide on so many of his own people, also having stolen Dr Werdergast’s (Bela Lugosi) wife. There are so many controversial elements to the story. Not least which is the idea of Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) dabbling in satanic worship and necrophilia.

Lugosi & Karloff in Ulmer’s outstanding atmospheric The Black Cat 1934

1935

MAD LOVE (1935)- Directed by Karl Freund starring Peter Lorre

“His love was pitiful…hopeless…madness…yet “The Thing” tired of pity – and demanded love!”

This creepy film falling into the sub-genre of medical nightmare horror. has Peter Lorre as Doctor Gogol, an insane surgeon who is so obsessed with the object of his desire Frances Drake as gorgeous stage actress Yvonne Orloc. Gogol performs an emergency surgery on Yvonne’s concert piansit husband, but he uses the hands of a knife wielding murderer to replace them. This film too has a subtle hint of necrophilia and fetishism…

1936

DRACULA’S DAUGHTER 1936 – directed by Lambert Hillyer

“She gives you that weird feeling!”

This subtly erotic tale of a powerful woman’s sexual primacy cloaked in the fairy tale of Dracula’s Daughter, gives Gloria Holden a marvelous opportunity to wax tragically romantic. Beyond a fine classical horror story, the dark dreamy cinematography by George Robinson. A story that dares first invoke the idea of Lesbian attraction.

Gloria Holden as Contessa Marya Zeleska in Dracula’s Daughter 1936

1937

NIGHT MUST FALL 1937 – directed by Richard Thorpe

A most disturbing story of a hatbox killer of older women. Michael Redgrave is ideal as the impish bad boy with a fetishistic lethal Oedipal complex. When a rich but cantankerous dowager Dame May Witty on an isolated estates hires him as he acts the engaging handyman, her niece/companion Rosalind Russell becomes suspicious of his motives.

Robert Montgomery Night Must Fall 1937 with Dame May Witty

1943

FLESH AND FANTASY 1943-directed by Julien Duvivier

An oneric anthology of three loosely connected occult tales, with ironic and romantic twists. Stories by Oscar Wilde, Ellis St. Joseph, László Vadnay, Ernest Pascal and Samuel Hoffenstein. Starring Betty Fields, Edward G. Robinson, Charles Boyer, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Cummings, Dame May Witty and Anna Lee. The film emanates a shadowy otherworldly film noir sensibility, and also features themes of necromancy, fetish and homicidal obsession. Surreal cinematography by Stanley Cortez

Betty Field in the hauntingly beautiful Flesh & Fantasy

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE 1943-directed by Jacques Tourneur

Written by Curt Siodmak, this is a tale of naive nurse Betsy Connell (Francis Dee) who travels to the West Indies to care for Jessica the wife of plantation owner Paul Holland (Tom Conway) Jessica (Christine Gordon) suffers from a kind of somnambulism cause by either a fever or a mysterious link to island Voodoo. Frances Dee and Tom Conway play out a tormented love affair in the midst of eerie circumstances. Ritualistic voodoo, necrophilia, and themes of ‘otherizing’ colonialism & racism pervade this heady gorgeous masterpiece.

Frances Dee in I Walked With a Zombie 1943 directed by the great Jacques Tourneur

1944

PHANTOM LADY 1944–directed by Robert Siodmak–Franchot Tone and Ella Raines are superb in this unmistakable gem for it’s quirky and disturbing sense of place. A great story by Cornell Woolrich. Ella plays Carol Richman a dedicated secretary who goes on the hunt for the truth to prove that her boss is not a murderer. She must find the woman in the beautiful hat, while putting herself in real danger by the killer! Fetishism, psychosis, sexual themes and mania fill in the dark spaces of this brilliant and over-looked Film Noir gem.

Amazing yet overlooked Robert Siodmak noir gem Phantom Lady–Elisha Cook Jr. as Cliff the sex-mad drummer

I ACCUSE MY PARENTS 1944-directed by Sam Neufeld

Robert Lowell is James Wilson a young man abused and neglected by his alcoholic parents. He submerges himself in a world of crime, and falls in love with lounge singer Kitty Reed (Mary Beth Hughes)

I Accuse My Parents already has that whiff of exploitation even for a 1944 audience.

1946

THE DARK CORNER (1946) - directed by Henry Hathaway

Perhaps one of my all time favorite Film Noirs, it’s packed with catchy dialogue great acting, quirky characters and some suggestively kinky bits. Starring Lucille Ball who’s fabulous as Kathleen Stewart who is devoted to her gumshoe boss, the underrated Mark Stevens who gives one hell of a performance as the tragically flawed noir figure trapped in a bizarre and deadly set of circumstances. Standout performances by William Bendix as Fred Foss who should know better than to wear a white linen suit after Labor Day… and has a propensity for smashing thumbs… Also memorable is Clifton Webb as the coded gay Hardy Cathcart who worships his wife in an unnatural way. It’s brutal and grimy and delivers some memorable goods… and

Features one hell of a great defenestration scene!

William Bendix in The Dark Corner 1946

1947

THE RED HOUSE 1947–directed by Delmer Daves

An old man Edward G Robinson as Pete Morgan and his sister Ellen (Judith Anderson) are concealing a terrible secret from their adopted teen daughter, concerning a hidden abandon farmhouse, located deep in the woods. Stars Allene Roberts, Julie London, Rory Calhoun, Lon McCallister and Ona Munson.

BRUTE FORCE 1947–directed by Jules Dassin–cinematography by William H. Daniels

Burt Lancaster plays inmate Joe Collins a prisoner at the disorderly run Westgate Penitentiary who plans a prison break under the tyrannical and sadistic rule of Capt. Munsey (Hume Cronyn) who wields his billy club like a homo-erotically phallic weapon.

Munsey controls the men through intimidation and brutality. Joe and his fellow cell mates construct a plan to escape through the drain pipe. Dassin directs this volatile powder keg with a savage eye on the injustices of a cruel institutionalized and flawed prison system. The ensemble cast is damn perfection in action… Featuring Vince Barnett, John Hoyt, Whit Bissell, Jeff Corey, and Lancaster from left to right. Also stars Charles Bickford, Jay C. Flippen, Howard Duff, Sam Levene, Ella Raines and Yvonne De Carlo.

“MEN CAGED ON THE INSIDE… driven by the thought of their women on the loose!”

Jules Dassin directs this incredible ensemble film noir set in the boiling maze of men’s prison starring Burt Lancaster in Brute Force 1947

SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR 1947-directed by Fritz Lang

“Some Men Destroy What They Love Most! “

The Master Fritz Lang blends a haunting nightmarish love story of horror and suspense in this psycho-noir dreamscape. Starring one of the ultimate noir goddesses Joan Bennett who embodies the sufferance of lonely new wife Celia Lamphere who has a whirlwind marriage to Mark (Michael Redgrave who gives a chilling performance as a Bluebeardesque psychopathic fetishist. Celia meets this mysterious stranger who hides many secrets behind several unopened doors… How’s that for a metaphor. Engaging script by Silvia Richards (Possessed 1947)

Weaving in Freudian imagery, this is one of the best Film Noir’s that utilizes psychology & depravity as it’s root theme.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY-1947–directed by Edmund Goulding-

“He was all things to all men … but only one thing to all women!”

Edmund Goulding’s Faustian Carnival Noir masterpiece starring Tyrone Power as the opportunistic mentalist Stanton Carlisle who takes a journey through hell and may or my not find redemption, Also starring Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray and Helen Walker. Nightmare Alley, (1947) Director Edmund Goulding’s vision is one of the more moody, nightmarish and sophisticated Noir films of it’s time.

An expose of the seedier aspects of carnival life, threaded with romance, both surreal and unseemly. Based on William Lindsay Gresham’s book and scripted by Jules Furthman (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep), the film is a grim and somber look inside the lives of carnival folk and the demons who ride their backs with drug and alcohol abuse, which breeds inhumanity and the nadir that people are capable of reaching. This beautiful nightmare is both picturesque and polluted with angst, yet a story that is cathartic and enthralling. Standout performance by Ian Keith as Pete Krumbein a hopeless alcholic both tragic and wise. The themes that inhabit the sideshow, such as the ‘geek’ act is enough to qualify this film as an early exploitation experience! Masterful editing by Barbara McLean

THE TWO MRS CARROLLS 1947

Peter Godfrey directed Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck deadly game of poison in the milk! and psychotic obsession.

Geoffrey Carroll: “I have a feeling this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful hatred.”

Bogie is terrific as tortured artist Geoffrey Carroll a dark soul… who must destroy the object of his desire by painting them as the angel of death first… Yet another truly suspenseful and genuinely creepy psycho-noir… Stanny is vulnerable yet fortified as ever as Sally Morton Carroll, wife number two who begins to suspect her husband might be deranged. The film contains both fetishitic mania, adultery and fine performances by the entire cast including Alexis Smith as the mistress and potential wife number 3. Plus Isobel Elsom, Nigel Bruce and Ann Carter as Geoffrey’s very sophisticated young daughter Beatrice.

1948

CRY OF THE CITY 1948- Robert Siodmak’s directs Richard Conte and Hope Emerson… you don’t want one of Rose’s neck rubs…!

A narcissistic thug & cop killer Marty Rome (Richard Conte) breaks out of a prison hospital, defies his poor Italian Mama, police Lieut. Candella (Victor Mature) long time friend of the Rome family and die hard cynic who must find Marty and get to the truth behind allegations of another murder. Shelly Winters has a small role as Brenda Martingale, but Hope Emerson steals the show as big Rose Given, neck cracker and masseuse. Siodmak’s film is layered with the essence of exploitation once Rose steps onto the screen! I love this film for all it’s little volatile bursts of high octane crime-drama fueled by the feverish chemistry in the air.

Richard Conte and Hope Emerson in Robert Siodmak’s taut Cry of the City 1948

THE SNAKE PIT 1948–directed by Anatole Litvak-

“Married and in Love . . . with a Man She Didn’t Know or Want!”

The Snake Pit goes directly to the last resting place of insanity and reveals life within the walls of a mental institution, in this psycho-noir drama starring Olivia de Havilland as Virginia Stuart Cunningham, a woman married to Robert (Mark Stevens) who suffers a nervous breakdown.

1949

THE QUEEN OF SPADES 1949 directed by Thorold Dickinson

A surreal noirish film with an occult overtone, with some of the most visually beautiful scenes since Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête 1946 which is pure fantasy.

Anton Walbrook is Captain Herman Suvorin who is obsessed with playing cards here’s the tale of the elderly countess who has struck a bargain with the devil and sells her soul for the sake of always winning at cards!

When he murders her trying to gain the secret to the pact, her spirit haunts him endlessly til he goes mad… The wonderful Yvonne Mitchell (Blonde Sinner) plays the beautiful Lizaveta Ivanova. Edith Evans is the old Countess Ranevskaya

CAUGHT 1949 directed by Max Ophüls this is a noir dark fairy-tale of an abusive, controlling megalomaniac as Robert Ryan turns in one hell of a nuanced performance as millionaire Smith Ohlrig who impulsively marries Leonora Eames (Barbara Belle Geddes) a naive store model and then proceeds to psychologically and mentally abuse her as an object he owns.

Robert Ryan and Barbara Belle Geddes in Max Ophüls psychological noir classic