Crazy, Cool Sue Cabot: SORORITY GIRL (1957), MACHINE-GUN KELLY (1958)

Raise the roof! Because under it Shout Factory TV via Prime have dislodged some of the long buried Corman gems from the late-50s beatnik Corman AIP days, including three of his very best: THE UNDEAD (1957), SORORITY GIRL (1957) and MACHINE GUN KELLY (1958). Long unseen by anyone not expressly looking for them (they've never been on DVD) the sudden availability of these three gems, ready to stream and looking great, should be great news to weird movie fans like myself. The dialogue and plots are go-for-broke inspired (Undead being a crazy riff on Bergman's Seventh Seal crossed with a Bridey Murphy hypnotist angle that prefigures The Terminator) and Corman's cadre of genius hipster actors are all here: Barboura Morris, Dick Miller, Richard Devon, and --of course--the divine Susan Cabot. She's not in The Undead but she leads the pack in Girl and Gun, wherein though she's the bad guy in both we root for her straight down the line. Cabot plays Corman's characters with such modulated catlike finesse, we don't blame him for letting her take oer the picture, even if it means stealing the show from Charles Bronson. 

I kept trying to get really good screenshots for this post but it's hard to nail down Cabot's expressive features in a single shot, as she has a way of running through an array of moods and sly glances while doing a kind of restless movement thing with her head bending low and snaking sidewise towards her prey. Both playful and a little macabre, consider, for example, when someone threatens to rat her out to the dean in Sorority Girl: Cabot's face first displays a brief animal rage as she knocks the rat out, to determination while rummaging through the rat's things while she's unconscious, to triumph when she finds some incriminating evidence that will hold the rat's tongue in a blackmail quid pro quo, to playful cool once she has the rat under her control. What matters isn't the evidence she finds, or the absurd idea someone could get kicked out of school for spanking a pledge--it's the irresistible way Cabot has with controlling a scene, with goading the other characters into pushing back, then taking their slaps or incriminations with a cat who swallowed the canary smile. It's theatrical, but it's a special kind of movie-style theatricality that scriptwriters and directors and actors can't often predict, but love when it happens as suddenly their lines take wing. Sue Cabot soars with Corman's dialogue; she susses out all the fissures and peaks and moments the writer maybe didn't even know were there because they couldn't get high enough. 

She got a contract with Universal earlier in the decade but they didn't know what they had, so they loaded her into the background of a bunch of forgettable westerns. She went back to NYC to act on the stage and then Corman came. He recognized a tough confidence in her, she was tough enough to be sensitive and open, that kind of courageous raw nerve that lets her saunter up to a cop and make small talk while her man's robbing the bank next door, if you know what I mean. He put her in the lead, Sorority Girl, then she stayed with him to make six films within a three year period of 1957-59: Sorority Girl, Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Carnival Rock, War of the Satellites, Machine Gun Kelly and The Wasp Woman.  She could be the girlfriend of a tough guy like Charles Bronson and not even gripe or sob if he socked her for taunting him and teasing him in front of the other guys, and she could be manipulative sadistic sorority girl determined to abuse her hazing privileges. And she could win our admiration almost in spite of ourselves, every time.

SORORITY GIRL

(1957) Dr. Roger Corman

***/  Amazon/Shout Image - A

From the title, we kind of expect a bunch of malt hops and mixers, with Tab Hunter giving our heroine a pledge pin and maybe getting her pregnant the night Chubby Checker or Bill Haley come to town to play at the big beachside fraternity party. Thankfully, it's not that. And we can tell just from the mysterious animated collage credits: a surrealist figure stands, alienated from the bunch, reacting with a cat o'nine tails to those who'd ignore her, becoming a kind of surrogate harpy. It's haunting and totally unique, seriously, there is no comparison to other films. No Tab Hunter tonight. What Freud fan Corman is bringing us under that innocuous title is a strangely sexy psychodrama about a disturbed young woman named Sabra (Cabot), from an affluent but loveless home, who struggles against a deep Sadean impulse to hurt and destroy. Clearly she should see a shrink, but we must remember that back then shrinks were considered a shameful secret. If it got out you'd been to one it could ruin your reputation (a stigma that persisted through into the 70s), and chances are the analyst would be some smug male who'd decree you had 'lady part issues' and needed to get married or, on the other side, have electroshock treatment and be committed. I mention this to temper the scenes of her begging for help from her distant loveless mom, to the point we shout at the screen: see a shrink and get some anti-depressants! But antidepressants are still decades away.

Pity them, the fucked-up children in a time before Prozac.

She tries, in all the wrong ways to connect. I can certainly relate, and maybe you can to, to not realizing that your mistreatment of the one person who does want to hang out with you, just because they're a stupid loser, is the reason you are shunned by everyone else. With her schemes and bizarre psychosexual sadism Sabra prefigures Tippi Hedren in Marnie and Sara Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions. And during a surprise visit home to beg for help and/or affection from mom, we don't need our Penguin Freud to see where Sabra gets her inability to tolerate or express affection. It might be obvious, but it's still relentless and true, to the bone.

Thanks to the insights of her voiceover and that heartbreaking visit home, we have endless sympathy for Sabra, which makes her odious behavior all the harder to accept or understand. What sets all this above the average 'co-ed' movie (even above Corman's later nurse pics for New World) is the sober intellect and overall supportiveness of the student body amongst each other. The fear of public gossip---this being the age of strict codes of conduct, where getting pregnant can mean disgrace, when abortions are illegal-- is just a few rings more moderate than Peyton Place, making blackmail and other nefarious evils all too easy.

One of Corman's ingenious tricks is to plant his films with a very strong and entertaining centerpiece scene (i.e. the fight over the fur in St. Valentine's Day Massacre). Usually this scene has only has a moderate amount to do with the rest of the film but it packs in sex and tough, awesome talk, as if Russ Meyer took over for a middle reel. Here, it's an extended scene that goes from Sabra trying to steal her roommate Rita's (Barboura Morris') man (Dick Miller, modulating his /beat swagger to seem like a gadfly about town) downstairs in the drawing room of the sorority house while the other sisters are at a pledge party, to trying to help dowdy pledge Tina (Barbara Cowan) lose a few pounds by forcing her to do some crunches / sit-ups, to eventually becoming so incensed by Tina's defeatist childish attitude, Sabra reaches for the sorority pledge paddle. Suddenly the flow stops cold. You can almost hear the blood rushing in their ears.

 What follows is a very erotically charged sorority paddling, ingeniously edited to focus on Cabot's face, lost in a haze of suppressed lesbian (?) and Sadean desire, worthy of Petra von Kant, especially considering Tina's complicity. She meekly submits, lying face down on the ottoman as if enraptured and trying not to blow the mood. There's clearly some darkly erotic Freudian/repressed sapphic undertones as she submits. A kind of sub/dom unspoken sublimated lesbian moment that, again, is unique to the drive-in, but after all, why we're here.

Corman films this paddling from two angles-- behind Cabot and looking down to the side at the submissive pledge and then an reverse, looking up at Cabot's face, which seems to be hiding an unholy mix of sadistic lesbian relish, all done very subtly (there's no moaning or screaming in pleasure or pain). The quiet sobbing of the pledge afterwards sounds more ashamed of some secret masochistic enjoyment than of trauma. In this repressed world, paddling is about the only means of sexual contact these two maybe gay women are allowed, and even then, it's warped by social repression (cruelty is less abject that lesbianism); neither one has a boyfriend or seems interested in such things (unless, for Sabra, any man is only valuable as a tool of power over other girls). They are their only human companions, two outsiders bound in a coded sapphic master-slave relationship neither one quite understands (this being America and not Germany).

Later, on the beach, they are still sitting together. Tina is doing sit-ups and even dryly noting she's gotten tougher. She's used the incident in a productive manner. It's toughened her up.

Perhaps Cabot drew from experience, having grown up in a series of 13 foster homes in Boston before getting married at 17 in order to escape the havoc. We can feel in her eyes: the round-and-round mix of need/desire for acceptance and companionship ever at odds with a total contempt for weakness and loathing for any kind of physical affection.  When Sabra goes home, hoping in vain to get some sympathy from her socialite mother (Fay Baker), only to find mom would never let her daughter's nervous breakdown and craving for love and connection interfere with her plans for cocktails with the neighbors. It's a devastating, stand-alone scene that tells us everything we need to know and instills the utmost sympathy for this "evil" sorority sister. Cabot brings such raw hurt and psychological complexity to the scene it's simply astonishing for a 1957 drive-in picture. 

In addition to Barbara Mouris, we get Dick Miller as a bar-owning man about campus who rejects Sabra's advances so she blackmails a pregnant waitress (June Kenney) into blackmailing him, even though they both know he's not the one who got her pregnant. The music is by Ronald Stein; Monroe Askins' photography brings an airy depth to the sorority house's close quarters, and a misty mountain marvelousness to the climactic beach scene. The print on Shout TV/via Prime, is ungodly great. And so welcome. Barely clocking in at over an hour, there's not an ounce of fat on this strange cinematic event, which had a male military school version with even more kinky sadism and blackmail, the same year, The Strange One, starring the comparable Ben Gazzara. If you saw them both as a double feature you'd never send your child to school again! 

 MACHINE-GUN KELLY

(1958) Dir. Roger Corman

*** 1/2 / Amazon Stream image - A

Though Charles Bronson gets the title billing, Corman lets Susan Cabot be the real show, the real leader of Kelly's gang, and Cabot has a field day! Her character, Florence "Flo" Becker, is based loosely (one presumes) on the real-life Kelly's wife Kathryn: the brains of the organization and apparently the one who styled her husband's public image, even convincing him to adopt a machine gun as a talisman. Why isn't she the title character? Because she was too smart even for that. Instead, well, Cabot's Flo gets as many--if not more lines--as Bronson's Kelly, who suffers from a major yellow streak. She's way more courageous, witty, and pro-active than everyone else in the film. She keeps reminding Bronson he's her "little baby," and her "gun arm," and she chose him because he was so weak and pliable! She tells him that in front of the other members of the gang, including the Morey Amsterdam as a dime-dropping fink mad at Kelly for ripping his arm off via cougar!

Bronson plays Kelly with a kind of functional sadism atop the fear and, surprise, and a streak of niceness as well as cowardice. It's a full 3D performance with Bronson even playing paddy cake with their kidnap victim and thrashing Richard Devon when tries to rape the kid's nanny (Barbara Mouris).

Some elements of the true story have been shifted around (here Kelly and co. kidnap a rich guy's child -- in real life they kidnapped the rich guy himself) and it's a bit rough on our modern sensibility to see cougars and other beasts in tiny cages but Corman films it all with a punchy urgency so there's no time for feeling glum. This is no plodding origin story. This is just a few crazy heists, and then the cops get 'em, the end. Bang! Credits! Corman has no time for tedious art or Big Statements, and in the process of stripping things down he's way more insightful and illuminating than most of the overblown prestige gangster pics.

To get back to Cabot's Flo, what lets the audience know she's the real leader of the gang is the way only she seems totally at ease with danger. And she's always dressed to the nines, sauntering in and out of the hideout, trailing her fur stoles, while the men all have to lay super low, bickering and playing cards behind closed curtains. As luxuriant and catlike as one could ask for in a super moll, she's the one casing out banks, drawing out maps, and flirting with the guards. Kelly is prone to freezing and running away when confronted with any memento mori (a coffin, skull paperweight, or obituary column), so he needs constant propping up his ego, flirting with his outlaw cronies (none of them have molls) to make him jealous. After he blows a big heist (a coffin passes by in front of him on the way to the bank) the couple hide out at a small brotherl run by her Mom (Connie Gilchrist), almost as cool as Flo herself. Unfazed by Kelly's tough guy veneer, realizing he's no good and telling him so. We see where Flo gets her her scathing wit and her lack of fear when it comes to antagonizing tough-talking, hard-hitting men.

Cabot relishes her character, investing so much playful nuance and force it's amazing. Part of it, I imagine, is her theatrical background: the ability to play extended single takes covering a lot of different emotional moments, and she does it daringly well. Unlike most 'moll' characters in crime movies, her Flo enjoys the life of crime. She's a long way from being just Warner Bros-style trophy wife, sulking around on the couch, eating bon-bons, whining about how much she misses nightclubs, irritating a pacing James Cagney .Corman and Cabot's Flo is the one going out and doing all the work. And when push come to shove she's the one ready to go down swinging.

Gerald Fried whips up some really peppy rich jazz for the score, a million miles from the phoned in Dixieland ragtime generic nonsense usually played in the 70s during their 20s-30s nostalgia kick. I mean, man, this stuff rips, I found myself unable to stop snapping my fingers and at one point was lifted out of my recliner as if on the wings of Gene Krupa. And Corman makes sure it's all edited tight as bank heists and the elaborate getaways come off like clockwork tied to the precision jump-back crackerjack flap the pack rack rhythm of the band. Fried had just done the score for Kubrick's The Killing a couple years earlier and the buzz was still generating. It's 61 years later and he's still working! Every day is Fried day!

Alas, aside from this small period of working with Corman (six films in three years: 1957-59), Cabot never really made the lasting mark she should and could have. She went back to NYC and Boston after The Wasp Woman to do mostly theater, and then there's her tragic death at the hands of her deranged son (1).

As for that, well, I don't like to dwell in my favorite stars' murky home lives, lest some detail or other ruin their viability as a screen for some archetypal projection of my own. Cabot is just such a screen, that mix of anima, trickster, cougar and devouring mom I have deep in the collective cinema unconscious. She could embody all these archetypes and more, in a single scene, perfectly modulated, all with a catty class and oomph that reminds us strong cool women come in all decades, shapes, and sizes. That a short brunette with shark eyes, clunky shoes, and a weird smile can wow us to core--even in a B-list gangster movie, or a sorority sister psychodrama meant to fill in a B-slot at a drive-in--proves greatness always eventually finds its way to the light... no matter what happens offscreen. Thanks Shout Factory! We got our Cabot back.

NOTES:
1. See Tom Weaver's piece "The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Cabot" for the full sad tale
2. And to prove the powerful effect of this kind of strange, deeply Freudian scene, Corman recreated it 13 years later in Bloody Mama this time in a holding cell between Bruce Dern and Robert Walden with a wet towel instead of a paddle, and the desire/fear-paralyzed Walden gently singing a religious spiritual as the 'whacks' come down.  In getting at the deep Freudian root, in these two scenes Corman creates moments we find confusing in their eroticism. We're hypnotized and dimly--on a subconscious, precambrian level--even turned on, albeit in the way we may have been as a child imagining such punishments inflicted on others. So often in film these kinds of incidents are filmed all wrong. An auteur like Bunuel or Von Sternberg focuses more on the psychological sort of masochism, and some, like Alain Robbe-Grillet, get too hung up on the bondage gear and class. In these two examples, Corman somehow manages to stage the abuse in a way that captures all the Freudian intensity without ever tumbling into the void of either Shades of Grey softcore tackiness or Girl with a Dragon Tattoo misogynistic trauma. See: Taming the Tittering Tourists: 50 Shades of Grey for the one type (tacky), Butterfly Moanin' - Duke of Burgundy and Fairie Bower Cinema (inert) for the other.