Bela Lugosi's only color film, and maybe the only horror film period from 1947, surreal poverty row quickie SCARED TO DEATH makes no concessions to atmosphere or tone. Why should it? It has no competition. Instead, along its zippy charge to the finish line, this unique poverty row original rounds an array of weird bases all its own, making it at true deadpan termite wonder, one that doesn't deign to even tag the usual bases as it rounds the diamond lest it lose the go-for-broke fuck-it momentum of someone stealing home on a loping base hit, then running off the field and into the parking lot after a referee in a green mask announces you've been "out" since second.
Director Christy (don't get excited - it's a guy) Cabanne's 162nd feature (it's also writer Walter Abbott's first, and Golden Gate Picture's last), Scared to Death doesn't really give a shit if it makes any sense but we in the Lugosi chat rooms don't care. Plenty of his poverty row films don't make any sense, but more than in some others we forgive the incoherence as it's never dull and--more importantly--it's surreal in that half-intentional (but which half?) zone where Bunuel meets Beaudine. It has the sort of deadpan irreverence we usually see only in international new wave breakthroughs that, if done independently, ala Godard's Alphaville, earn auteur acclaim, and if done for a major studio, like Suzuki's Branded to Kill, get their auteur fired.
Watched in this light, Scared to Death alchemically transcends its lowly state as a B-mystery Lugosi vehicle, and that's important because, on that level, it fails miserable. Seen the other way though, as a nonsensical exercise in Marx Bros/Beckett noir post-structuralism, it begins to loom wobbly and large
Set all in and around a single house, one that doubles as a clinic (though there's only one patient), ever-stumbling briskly through an ornate distinctly post-war plot full of gaslighting, shady pasts (what went on in Europe doesn't stay in Europe, even though you thought you left it to die in a concentration camp), lame comedy, exits and entrances, and signification-free fury, Scared to Death might seem incomprehensible the first dozen times you doze through it, but--and this is how you know it's a masterpiece-- the more times you see it, the weirder and more incomprehensible it gets, and the more you start to love it for resisting all analysis so vigorously. As Michael Weldon lovingly wondered in his Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film: "Were the people who made this on some strange, mind-bending drug?" [1]
Maybe we'll never know, but one thing we do, and that's that you should be on some strange, mind-bending drug when watching. It won't help, but then again, it can't hurt. Then again, the film itself might be enough. Maybe it's already bent your mind, made you strange. Maybe it made you afraid so your mind started to crack.
Set in a former (that was 'before the war') mental institution, now the office and home, of Dr. Van Ee (George Zucco), the film seems haunted by the WW2 in much the same way The Black Cat (1934) was haunted by WWI. Van Ee harbors strange secrets about his past, i.e. during or before the war, secrets the film never does deign delve into. We never learn why, for example, he needs a private duty policeman around (Nat Pendleton). As with the hiring of the Ritz Brothers in The Gorilla (1939), the answer may lie not in that Van Ee hired a private detective but whom he chose. Someone is going to murdered? But whom? Surely not the wife of Van Ee's son Ward (Roland Varno), the paranoid Laura (Molly Lamont), who claims she's being kept a virtual prisoner in her room, though Dr. van Ee and Ward both wish she'd leave (or so they see). Why, is she so anxious to stay in this gloom-less house if she knows whomever is after her has arrived and is somewhere in its walls right now? The suspicious way Van Ee acts, the weird double meanings and cryptic assurances in the initial scene where he's examining Laura (why would her fear of blindfolds even come up during a routine examination) do nothing to clarify anything. One could almost think one was in that post-structuralist Blow-Up blast radius, next to Elio Petri's A Quiet Day in the Country.
Though Zucco probably gets more screen time, Lugosi gets top-billing as 'wanted' magician-hypnotist Professor Leonide (Bela Lugosi) who shows up at the door with his mute assistant Ingo (Angelo Rossitto), "one of the little men." They invite themselves to stay a few days (Van Ee says "I can't very well refuse." "How true, cousin Joseph. How... true"). Leonide and Ingo spend most of the film creeping in and out of secret panels in search of some other unseen person or gesticulating at the moon. At one point Leonide watches Laura depart his presence, snarling a weird poetry chant: "Laurette... Laurette, I'll make a bet, the green masked man will get you yet."
Meanwhile, a scowling green mask regularly looks in from outside the window, but no one sees it. (Though Laura, from beyond the grave, somehow knows it was there in her narration). Bodies appear in one room and wind up downstairs, covered in a sheet on the doctor's examination table, as if by magic. Heads--delivered in boxes left at the door--doth literally roll.
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| From top: The Voodoo Man's script is written after the 'real' events happen, the writer/hero even suggests Bela Lugosi to star; The Ape Man's author peers through windows all through the film, a kind of 'WTF' through-thread. As a kid, seeing these films on afternoonTV a lot, these kinds of moments were like insider winks. We didn't understand 90% of the dialogue, but these moments let us know we really weren't naive. We got post-modernism (We read Mad). That same kind of enshrined ambiguity of inference would become key European art cinema language, but until we learned it, only children and audiences seeing movies in languages they don't understand, in un-subtitled prints, could share our sweet mise-en-scene theory forming aesthetic arrest. |
And I make an Ed Wood association not lightly, and not just because there's a cross dressing surprise (SPOILER!) at the end. Lugosi's long downward slide really begins here, his leanest year. All he'd done in the last three years before Scared were some small roles in RKO B-movies, and one lead villain role, in the Val Lewton spoof-- Zombies on Broadway (1945). [2] Aside from Abbot and Costello Meets Frankenstein the year after Scared, times were only going to get leaner until Ed Wood came calling, like Bela's personal morphine-hallucinated cross-dressing angel of death. And though this isn't really a Lugosi showcase he does get star billing and it holds up today as a great example of how one might handle being handed a question mark of a role, with murky ambiguous motivations not even known to the writer, and turn it into a plum.
The unique things about Scared would go on to pepper later films, like Billy Wilder's 1950 show biz horror-drama, Sunset Boulevard -right), which is narrated, not from a face-up lady in the morgue but a face-down a man in a pool. Other than that, the same, though if you had to guess which film was set in an old dark house holding an ape funeral, how could you ever guess it wouldn't be the poverty row 40s Lugosi chiller, but an A-list Billy Wilder classic? This Lugosi chiller doesn't even have a single dark corner, or ominous statue: it's all light and normal decor, peppered with some heads and masks. But it doesn't matter. Sunset is brilliant even as it veers ever towards a kind of razzing ageist misogyny, while Scared to Death is brilliant because doesn't have enough of anything to be anti-something else. It stays constantly fluid, as if Holden, Von Stroheim, and Swanson, and Wilder couldn't decide if they were making Salome, a making-of documentary playing themselves playing roles, or the roles of Norma, Max and Joe amidst the haunted waxworks and--being clever--decided to keep events, dialogue and performance cryptic enough each line could serve all three or four different readings.
The dialing back and forth to Laurette on the slab, for example, becomes almost comically nonsensical and redundant, as if the editor is venting some irritation with having to spread the length to over an hour. Even with the all-knowing perspective of the unmoored soul, she couldn't possibly know a lot of the details she shows us. Not only that, her comments are often unrelated to the scenes we see. "I became afraid and my mind started to crack" for example, dials back out to Bill the cop (Pendleton) hang-doggedly hitting on the brassy maid Lilybeth (Gladys Blake), calling her his "melancholy baby," his "wild Irish rose." Then we dial back to Laurette on the slab: "Then came a sinister pair!" We see Indigo and Leonide enter through the front door, like a pair of trick-or-treating funeral attendants.
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| "then came a sinister pair' (centered) |
The paradoxical conundrums and obvious discrepancies continue to accrue. Regularly using big words and then wondering what they mean, Pendleton starts hamming it up to an WB cartoon-level height, even to the extent of saying "which way did they go? Which way did they go?" while waving his fists around. Dr. Van Ee calls the operator and asks for police but then is conked on the head before he can talk to them; the cops don't come but but reporter Terry Lee (Douglas Fowley - the guy who "likes 'em stupid" in Cat Women of the Moon) shows up anyway, and brings his fiancee, the operator who clued him in on the phone call, Jane Cornell (Joyce Compton). What clue he has that something newsworthy is going on seems vague, but he remembers all the headlines about the weird marriage between Laura and Van Ee's son (she got him drunk and married him on dare) and maybe more besides. Meanwhile a green death mask keeps 'looking' through the window (it has no eye holes), causing girls who see it to faint. And yet - if no one sees it but us, and it cannot see--for it has no eyeholes--how can a dead woman know it was there? Is this mask the embodiment of Laura's post-death all-seeing eye that allows her to comment on action she was upstairs for?
Maybe not, but this sort of thing, and fine paradoxical examples of Ed Woodian ouroboros dialogue, go looping around in lopsided orbit: Van Ee assures a mysterious lady in green that there are no abnormal things going on in his house, "nor will there ever be." She replies "Nevertheless, the way you were described to me, and the way your place was described to me, I am certain that I am in the right place!" Bull says to Laura he was hoping she'd get murdered so he could solve it and redeem himself with the homicide bureau ("who paid you to say these things to me?" she asks). He vows to cook and slave and buy Lilybeth furs and jewels, which leaves her cold ("I'd hate to hang by my neck until you got me those things...") Professor Leonide refuses to announce himself before coming in since "if I allowed myself to be announced I doubt I would be received anywhere" Van Ee lets us know Leonide (his cousin) helped pepper the house with secret panels when he was a "patient" there before the war. It was ostensibly so the guards could spy on the inmates, yet Leonide used one of the panels to escape! Who'd have thought!? Lilybeth drops dead after trying to blindfold Laura (her big phobia!) while in a hypnotic trance. She is then is revived by Leonide only because he can see that Bull "truly loves... this girl." Which is itself hilarious, and Lugosi knows it. Throughout his observations re: the women in the scene are bronzed in iron: he wryly calls Jane "delightful" and advises Lee "take good care... of her" and when Van Ee tells him Leonide he'll be staying in the room right next to Laura's, Van Ee adds, "I know you'll like that." Why or how is never elaborated. Alas!
And what does Lilybeth know, that she taunts Laura about the man in the green mask ("I let him in! Maybe he's here right now, Miss Lavalle!")
These crazy quotes are just off the top of my head, but I could write you out the whole script and get the same surreal buzz transcribing Joyce, Beckett, or Nat Perrin. That's why my heart always sinks when I hear strange canned/echo-drenched French accented voice for the first time that announces Renee is ready to perform the magic act that acts as the film's climax. Hidden in some secret passage while speaking to the gathered players, he sounds not unlike Mel Welles' crab consciousness in Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). There's no real build-up for this 'climax' and Laurette's past betrayal, odious thought it may be. In that weird sense, it's hard to find something genuinely scary or punishable. Past crimes don't resonate as well as seeing her kill someone new. Had post-war audiences seen enough murder?
No. Film noir was fading out, 50s drive in sci-fi was about to fade in. In between there was only Scared to Death, the missing link in a chain that connects Arsenic and Old Lace-inspired wartime 'horror-comedy' (ala the underrated Boogeyman will Get You) with the psychosexual Freud/Kinsey flood of the late 50s-60s ala Suddenly Last Summer, Lilith, Three Faces of Eve, Psycho, Repulsion and Robert Bloch's semi-remake of Cabinet of Caligari (1962) starring Glynnis Johns (below).
Actually Scared and the 1962 Caligari would make a fine double bill, allowing us to consider the 15 year gap between them just how readily the population flux in the wake of the Second World War led to the frustrations of the 50s housewife, forced to give up her riveting job and stay home with the kids. If unable to find recourse in satisfying sex lives or a posse of hyper-active children, she turned to murder and madness. Electro-shock and lobotomies, hysterectomies and, if all else failed, they may well escape, to a place where birth control and liberation from the confines of male 'protection' might be feasible, i.e. Maine.
This is all just beginning to happen in 1947, where we find Laura in Scared to Death. Her Paris-under-occupation hypnotist act is in the past and now she has no role other than scheming bitch wife. So she hides in hr room, freaks out over branches at the window, stands up to cryptic threats from her father-in-law, and harasses the household staff. AND YET! Laurette/Laura is, a trailblazer -- her paranoia and madness, like a slowly gathering storm, will move across the warm ocean to the Freudian 50s, the bra-burning 60s, and finally blossom into a full on 70s women's lib typhoon!
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HOLD ONTO THE PAST BEFORE THE PRESENT BECOMES IT.
What makes Scared resonate as indoor-child beloved art is its ability to be seen again and again, each new viewing doing little to shed light on the cryptic allusions to war crimes never fully elaborated on. I recently saw Dinner at Eight (1933) for the zillionth time and this time what I noticed was how the good old days before the Crash are recalled so glowingly it illuminates the desperate straits of the present, of aging and death in general --as if remembering bright lights helping ease the descent into darkness. Scared to Death could almost be Dinner's deadpan satirical inverse. For Scared to Death it's the reverse, focusing on the bright present to avoid the murky past, trying not to look back to the darkness of the Second World War, to--at least between Leonide and cousin Joseph--let bygones be bygones, and trade the self-destructive intellectual gamesmanship of old Europe for the mire of grinning middle class American New World idiocy. But, they spend their time itching for something to happen, trying to generate tension with screams and faints, almost grateful that Rene with his green mask and back from Europe for revenge motif has come to leaven the small town sameness. Instead of Dinner at Eight-style monologues about the good old days, everyone plays their pasts as cards close to the vest and then, the big reveal as collaborators are ferreted out by presumed-dead concentration camp escapees, i.e. dinner is cancelled. But Desert is served.
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RECOMMENDATIONS:
If yer scared of a little Caligari semi-remake, you should also see on a double bill with The Awful Truth (with which it shares two actresses- above - each playing a Cary Grant rebound (hint: Joyce Compton sings "Gone with the Wind"). Like Scared to Death, Awful Truth gets better and better as the layers of cool little termite moments are shuckered loose from their deceptively shallow shells. As I point in my award-skipping 2003 film The Lacan Hour there are so many "Momento Mori" skulls, masks, and head effigies in Scared one can't help but read the obvious meaning behind them, and the meaning is that obvious meaning itself has no meaning. The quick dick pic sketched and pocketed by Jackie Treehorn in The Big Lebowski is the ultimate in phallic signifiers when using this yardstick to measure.
Of course in order to 'get' this truth, you need to have seen Scared to Death so many times it ceases to make sense at all. Is staying indoors, strung out on allergy medicine, watching this film obsessively, over and over, a kind of secret pathway to post-structuralist enlightenment? Or is it a living death which, nonetheless, like the lowering of the shroud, may bring air conditioned peace? (3) See it on a triple bill with the 1962 Caligari and Antonioi's Red Desert -in that order, while comfortable and, ideally, alone and strung out... See if I'm wrong! |
I know I'm not alone in loving this cockeyed caravan of a film: shout outs to renowned raconteur d'horreur classique David Del Valle (though even he admits it's "not Voodo Man") and a thanks and RIP to my old Scarlet Street mentor, Ken Hanke, who steered me to the best available transfer of this often-crappy PD title back in 2000 (PS, it's the 1999 Sling Shot DVD w/ Devil Bat "The Bela Lugosi Collection - Vol. 1" - worth getting, as the colors are upgraded and the detail is sharp. I think you can get it for $8 on Amazon -- yer welcome. )
SEE ALSO:
and many the Woodisan gems from:
NOTES:
1. Weldon, Michael Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983)
2. See: At Long Last Lost Lewtons
3. Allergy sufferers know that 'air conditioning season' usually signals the end of allergy trouble. What pollen remains is filtered out of the air during the AC process and for those of us with Nordic blood and allergies who hate humidity and heat, air conditioning + Bela Lugosi = nirvana.
