Kate is nonetheless sharp as always in her silk scarves and pants, and is beautiful and warm and nurturing and sweet and then menaced by a phantom in a pentagram-covered purple robe. Wagner drinks booze in the den and moons over the portrait, and screens her old films over and over on the wall and he calls Kate crazy. He starts having gold-tinted hallucinations whenever Kate's in danger, thus rendering him useless. In the most awesome moment, his lost Lorna comes to life in a slow mo gold-tinted mirage, smiling and calling his name from inside the film he's projecting! As someone who, as a child, believed he could make Kate Jackson fall in love with him if he stared hard enough at her pictures in Teen Beat, I caught the meta frisson from this scene, big time... projection, man, the anima.
Wagner gets rude, patronizing, and dismissive of Jackson's legitimate worry that someone is trying to kill her and has left a Satanic knife in her drawer and cut her face out of their author's photo. As Kate is so rational and intelligent you start to imagine what Charlie's Angels would be like if every suggestion, clue, or even event the Angels reported was dismissed by Bosley and Charlie as womanly hallucinations and hysterics. They'd need more than an hour to solve the case, that's for sure... or would they?
Anyway, despite all that, the pace is brisk and there's a whole cavalcade of pre-war Hollywood stars in cameos: John Carradine as Lorna's old Svengali-style director; Sylivia Sydney as the nicotine-voiced housekeeper; Joan Blondell as a deranged fan and coven member; Dorothy Lamour, I forget what she does. Marianna Hill is a fine choice as Lorna - a leggy tall blonde you may remember her as Fredo's rebellious Vegas wife in GODFATHER 2.
Being a confirmed sadomasochistic Charlie's Angels fan as a child in the 70s, writhing Sternberg-like on the vine of Kate Jackson pictures I ripped out of magazines on the sly at 7-11, you can imagine how I longed to see DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE, which was mentioned often in TV Guide along with the equally awesome sounding SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS, both TVMs that came and went before I was aware due to my parent's strict bedtime laws.That made me imagining of them all the sweeter. I desperately wanted a job at any school with a name like that.
In the pre-Xerox, pre-video 70s, the only way to acquire pictures, you must remember, was to take them with a camera yourself, or buy them, trade them, or steal them. Only with great difficulty could you reprint them (in schools copies were done on mimeograph machines - all the print was in blue smudgy ink). As for films, the best you could do was to get a super 8mm projector and buy little loops from the camera store. These loops had one or two key scenes from the film edited together and running maybe five or six minutes.
Due to that inability to 'own' movies or have instant access to zillions of photos of our favorite stars; our lack of access made images more sacred - more valuable due to their ephemeral nature. There was no way my parents would let me stay up that late, at that age... so I was forced to lie in bed in a prepubescent miasma, imagining Kate Jackson in all these ghostly, Satanic, and love-death situations.
You could say that obsessive, morbidly image-obsessed pagans like me have had the last laugh with DVD and the internet--having nearly every film we ever imagined or read about available at our fingertips, but it's a devil's bargain. The unbearable surplus, the vast, the staggering force of ever-expanding internet sites, online books, streaming films, etc., saturates the eye to the point of numb despair, robbing us of our grand masochistic longing, decreasing the value of everything. Sooner or later, all our deepest fantasies end up in the $1.99 Used -- Very Good bin at Amazon.
So Lorna Love died, for there were no more worlds to conquer. The center cannot hold and without that externalized desire, the subject implodes under its own horrid weight. Look at these recent revolting news stories about 'the Destruction Company' - where dumb rich kids need to pay someone else for the right to smash their own TV sets, and you see how universal availability forces the entitled into a crisis of desire. The more stuff we have, the less it has value... and for the person who constructs their whole identity around ego and ownership, this is a truth too horrible to face. The race is lost due to all the races being run simultaneously. So rather than go back and bet on Devout Non-Attachment in the Third, they just buy the horse that lost, and pay for the right to shoot it to death. Such people are what DEATH AT LOVE HOUSE are all about. Rather than admit they can't get their youth back, they try to stop time; to freeze themselves in amber; to go rigid in their glory rather than let go and flow in the current of anonymity, to relish the disillusionment that comes with attaining your desire in order to move into egolessness.
Of course, you can always pick your obsession more wisely - find something very hard to attain. Pine with me then for that legendary original edit of Orson Welles' MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), yet to be unearthed in some Brazilian vault, if it even exists.
As you may know, Welles' finished an original cut of the film, more or less, in Rio, while his studio butchered it all down to under two hours and dumped into theaters. So even though the version that sometimes shows up on TCM seems boring and indulgent, and leading star Tim Holt plays a drab and uninteresting fop. I pine and long for the day when the original cut is found... that is my film geek grail.
But! Confident they'll never find it, I'm spared the anxiety of having to actually buy it for $39.99 on Criterion Blu-ray if it ever is found, and since I paid so much, having to watch it, I'd have to endure and even like all three hours of claustrophobic late 19th century sound and shadow. AMBERSONS is Welles' AMARCORD, his FANNY AND ALEXANDER, his STAND BY ME, but with the selfish rich brat who taunts Spanky in OUR GANG as the star, the type who would surely join 'The Destruction Company' so he could wail on Joe Cotten's car.
And what is that crazy translation of the serpent Baudelaire poetry Wagner's reading? We get a long look at the page in his book:
Kisses will I give thee, chill as the moonand caresses shuddering and slow,
as a writhing serpent uncoiling a tomb.
Like angels with bright savage eyes
I will come treading phantom-wise
Hither where thou art wont to sleep
Amid the shadows hollow and deep.
Alas, the only DVD version of this film--or SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS--comes from the odious Cheezy Flix - those rats who release hard-to-find films on Public Domain multi-generational dupe-quality discs for premium prices-- and yet, perhaps that's for the best, again, for when desires are examined under a Blu-ray HD stethoscope, they tend to dissolve like million dollar ice sculptures in the fires of Hell of our gaze. So at least we can still long for a 'better' edition of these two films, the way Wagner longs for Lorna, even back from the grave trailing blurry clouds of shuddering, slow serpents, uncoiling from the tomb as she comes shambling like a 'Very Poor (VP)' quality first printing of her own sad fanzine.
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Great article !... Bright and clever... Thank you... I've just seen this movie today, and it was a tremendous experience. Sunset Boulevard meets Laura in the Hollywood Horror House... What a trip !...
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