The Long Arm of Coincidence: SCARED TO DEATH (1947)

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. 

Its blithe inconsistency of tone might all be a passive-aggressive attempt by Cabanne and Abbott to do as bad a job as possible to get out of a contract with Golden Gate, but I like to think they knew they had to get it done quick and cheap, and so just 'went for it,' throwing continuity to the wind and writing the whole script over one long whiskey and benzadrine bender. Sometimes a kind of loose deadpan Mad magazine irreverence takes over when freedom and speed make 'art' almost by the not wanting of it.  This is why Plan Nine from Outer Space is endlessly rewatchable, while 'better' films appall with their mediocre consistency. This being decades before Antonioni let us see through the cracks of cinema's symbolic code, we have to find these Brechtian post-modern 'see around the sets'-y kernels where we may, and--all through the 40s--poverty row Lugosi films were giving us instances thereto. One could view them as an expression of the producer's contempt for the subject matter, or as harbingers for the post-structuralist landscape to come:

 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. 

"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!

++

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.

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: 

VOODOO MAN: Patron Saint of Megalomaniacal Children and Torpor!  

RETURN OF THE APE MAN: Revisiting the Savage, from a Wartime Perspective 

and many the Woodisan gems from:

Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #8: 

The BRECHT, GODARD WOOD Issue

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.  

Kiss Me Del Rey

LtoR: Lana Del Rey, Gaby Rogers, Candace Hilligoss

Lana Del Rey's panned performance on SNL this past weekend wasn't all her fault -- the mixing was dreadful. I instantly imagined the sound tech guy had hit on her during rehearsal and decided to 'punish' her, as douche bags are wont to do, after she rebuffed his seedy offers. See how protective I am regarding Lana? I feel like she's someone I once loved but couldn't protect as douche bags circled her every step like Kenneth Cole-clad vultures. I cringed and hid behind my book as she stood paralyzed against a white spider web of lights on stage, her legs locked together in a vintage thrift store chanteuse evening dress; her lyrics stuck on the endless repeat of a melody that fades on close audience scrutiny, that only works with clips (she should have had rear projections) as in her "Video Games" video, wherein she was only there for scattered moments, half drunkenly falling over or singing alone-ish, half America's Next Top Model entrant selling the brand "haunted."

Once I heard how far down in the mix she sounded I was hoping for a  moment like the one in Road House (above) when Ida Lupino sings her first song at the lodge and the whole cast of regulars and staff eye her with concern as her frail voice, barely above a whisper and without a mic, clings like Grant on Lincoln's nose at the end of North by Northwest to the melody, a ghostly after-effect of pure will and brassy, nicotine-stained courage gradually cutting through even the staunchest of drunk background conversations. It didn't happen.


As I wrote earlier, I like Del Rey for her hand-crafted post-noir persona but that persona hinges on intimacy, which SNL lacks. Rey's a post-digital artist meant for late night headphones and tear-stained iPhone screens, not sound stages and fancy lighting rigs and an audience keyed up by comedy. Thus we're presented with the same conundrum that sinks Manhattan nightspots I visited in the 1990s, they're now prime real estate 'hot locations,' so the night spots elsewhere; the mainstream snaps at the lonesome artist gentrifier's heels, stealing our small good things and baking them into oversize crap. Well, you mainstream sycophants, some stuff can't just automatically make the jump. I've seen the best bands of my generation destroyed by bottom line AOR guys who brought them up too fast and dropped 'em twice as quick: from Nightingales to The Wetlands to Nassau Coliseum and then dropped from the Humpty Dumpty wall when their 15 minute egg timer clicked crack time. Yeah I mean the Spin Doctors.

In the end the mainstream wants all the things it takes from the fringe to be tailor-made for them, never considering whether or not we invited them to even try on a sample. Thus we make ourselves deliberately off-size to scare away customers, for success means having to be surrounded at all times by douche bag entourages and clingy fans and thus be unable to hone our craft in the isolated anguish cocoons and starving garrets that best nurture our wild gifts. So we let our sophomore album grow bloated, and the AOR guys throw us to the cut-out bins and now not even Nightingales wants us back. One two / princes who adore you / just go ahead now. Yaaaa badibidip Dip deepa doo do da.

Then there's the movies: I finally bought and saw Criterion's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Blu-ray which lived beyond expectations; I've had the MGM DVD awhile and watched it many times but it's a whole different movie now, like a crisp 3D diorama --now Mike Hammer's jazzy bi-level apartment seems to stretch deep inside the back wall at odd, skewed angles, and the sexy girl bare feet seem bigger than life, the treacherous west coast hills down which flimsy stairs carry tumbling thugs now recede deep down into the apartment below me. The two blonde girls who bookend the film are now extra insane: you can see the thin layer of sweat over their faces; when Gaby Rogers gets all glazed-eyed lunatic at the climax, you can practically smell the laudanum coming out of her pores; before that you can smell the sexual heat and traces of sodium pentathol pouring off Cloris Leachman, and later the toe-tingling chlorine and perfume aura of Marian Karr as the gambling kingpin's nympho poolside sister.

Spreading its influence out to post-nuclear Japan and films like Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967), and into Altman and the Coens, from its backwards credits to its doomsday ending, Deadly enfolds rather than unfolds, in that sacred timeless backwards space occupied by Jimmy Stewart's Vertigo fingernails and the electric chair-bound flashbacks of Edward G. Robinson in Two Seconds, or Lee Marvin's mysterious resurrection in Point Blank or Naomi Watts remembering her own parallel reality as Samara's mother in The Ring, or those suddenly interminable songs Lana Del Rey sang on SNL Saturday. Nothing is by chance when Death is sucking us up through her rear view mirror.

In the beginning/end of Kiss Me Deadly, Hammer is drugged, beaten, and driven off a cliff with his first lost blonde (Leachman), and maybe he's still dead at the bottom of a sandy ravine and the girls around him the Carnival of Souls reverse gender equivalent of the weird white skinned zombie guy with the crazy hair who follows Candace Hilligoss around. And maybe the big whatzit in the box is an atomic Skynet variation of the Hitchcockian Mcguffin grown suddenly aware of its abstract unimportance to the mise en scene and so deciding to change the game, swallows the universe whole and runs it backwards only in its guilty 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing' nightmares.

Now it all finally makes sense: here it is 2012 and the film 2012 is coming to TNT (my take on it here). The snake, having swallowed its own tail first, continues unknowingly along, its radius tightening, and only as it speeds up to the infinite point does memory finally catch up to its 'this is where we came in' crux apocalypse. Death is from here on out more a dawning awareness than a traumatizing finale, and a parting word to those who will be forced to watch the black hole close around us seems prudent. Thus, Christina Rosetti's (left) poem "Remember:"

  And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

         For if the darkness and corruption leave

         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

If we feel the final darkness closing around us, is it at all possible that we're remembering it rather than experiencing it now, and thus are immortal after all? Maybe we who will die in the coming floods will not our deaths remember but rather still live in a landlocked world where no further burgee cords and yacht club burgees unfurl but for the brief cocktail steward span that bridges sleep and death--that fluttering spasm of alertness; the forgotten hand that clutches once and having clutched drops its eternal bong --and watch will we instead as the blackened water's through the carpet soaked and gone? Soaked...

... and gone? As Mike Hammer says when giving up the key to the whatszit, "I didn't know... I didn't know..."

He didn't know he's been dead all along and the same girl twice has died with him in a drag race (left). As J.J. put it in Sweet Smell of Success, "You're dead son, get yourself buried." Mike Hammer didn't know he really was pulling a Lazarus Scotty Hilligoss Parker shuffle.

Right. Thing is, no one ever does.

So remember to "forget and smile" when the waters are rising higher than any hit count and our apocalypse year begins endlessly over with one January after the other, never reaching the dreaded December 21, 2012, all time slowing down like a black hole's infinite approach, remember what the fortune teller said when Lisa Simpson asked if there was any way to avoid her grim future, "No, but try to act surprised." All else is... Silencio... and those picky, tourist conqueror worms that just won't give it up... for Lana Del Rey!

The War Against Normal: A STRAW DOGS remake and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN

I just saw there's a remake of Sam Peckinpah's great misunderstood masterpiece STRAW DOGS. Take a look at this poster:

First of all, what is up with that reflection of a face when we can see clearly that the chunk of glasses where said reflection would be has broken off? Did this guy get a tattoo of a dude's face on his eye? Did only his reverse clip-on shades get broken? See the original poster below and wonder to yourself what kind of poster artist would think lenses that have broken off still reflect?

And of course, no crap remake poster would be the same without a meaningless tag line. Are they asking us or telling us about this breaking point? Have they tested every man for one? What about women?  Sexist bastards.... Deconstructed, the tag intends to align the viewer with 'everyone' - indicating the sneering contempt the copywriter feels for their target demographic: "Don't worry, the hero of this movie isn't going to get pushed around for long!" Chances are the author of that tag didn't even see it, or the original, or any movie made before 1993, the year punk broke! 

The original poster was terrifying since if you look at Dustin's expression it's calm, even smiling, and compacted down to resemble Roman Polanski after a night of some energy expenditure. His eye behind the broken glass is dead like a shark's, or as if its been gouged out at the pre-photoshop art department then pasted back in by a nervous intern hoping the boss wouldn't notice. Yet he's smiling.

The weird thing is most people don't realize that Peckinpah considered Dustin's STRAW DOG math professor 'everyman' (who breaks the point and kills a bunch of locals to protect a child murderer), to be the bad guy, a self-satisfied liberal who considers himself six cuts above the riff-raff of the icky rural England locale that he settles in with his hot young wife (Susan George). See, she's easily the cutest bird inside a 60 mile radius of this Cornwall dump. She was born there so everyone knows her; she even left behind several strapping ex-boyfriends when she escaped. Now she's back. Some call this a rape-revenge film, but Hoffman never finds out about her being raped (by her ex-boyfriend and his sadistic pal after they trick Dustin into going quail hunting with them and leave him stranded way out in the middle of nowhere, then double back to the alone and kinda terrified George) and his refusal to turn the caught-red-handed pederast (David Warner) over to the mob for a right proper lynching is what sets the bloodbath in motion. Mostly, I'm betting Hoffman goes ballistic because of the dead cat (discovered hanging in the closet) - that would surely get me fired up too. If someone killed my cat I'd probably raze the whole town.

Long lumped by the literally-minded critics (how small town riff-raffish of them!) in the category of vengeful ass-kickers like Buford Pusser in WALKING TALL, and Cameron Mitchell in any AIP biker film, one can only assume the complex shadings of self-righteous lefty nerd narcissism in Hoffman's smug everyman will be weeded out in the remake until he's American Average like "everyone" with their "breaking points."

I've been reading the new Pauline Kael collection, so forgive me if I sound astringent, but apparently the idea that the one educated man who stands alone against the many armed yokels might actually be the bad guy (or at least not a cut-and-dry hero) in a film is beyond the average (petit-bourgeois) movie critic unless it's spelled out with ominous music cues and sudden outbursts of misogynistic violence. It hasn't been done to death so they don't believe it even exists. The fools! The bombastic ignoramuses!

And then there's the reverse: sometimes the villain everyone presumes is evil is actually the only sane, sympathetic person around!

Kim Morgan and the Self-Styled Siren discuss one such film, LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945) across both Kim Morgan's site, Sunset Gun, and Siren's classic self-titled blog, and the realization that Gene Tierney's murderous bride is actually the complex heroine of the film, which is a kind of horror story about a beautiful bi-polar artist who gets trapped in a stiflingly normal marriage with a husband who hides behind Norman Rockwell facades and close extended family sing-a-longs to avoid being intimate (hinting he might not even know he's really gay). Here's a sample from Morgan's side: 

Gene/Ellen is a modern type of woman, a poetic, ingenious woman, and I always get the sense that her inner struggle to express whatever power or talent she has, well beyond her beauty, is pure torture. Many may look in her eyes and see cold orbs of hate, but I see… Wagner's entire Ring Cycle, and beautiful, damnable Richard W. seems especially appropriate since, for some crazy reason, he also managed to write, in 'Lohengrin,' 'Here Comes the Bride' amidst his Götterdämmerung. 

Is this an excuse for her dastardly acts? No, but she does serve to symbolize every trapped, powerful woman flapping around her white picket fenced-in bird cage. That war raging inside her twists into a a full-scale blitzkrieg on the… normal people. Her revenge is her final work of art! Her masterpiece! (more here - Siren)

 And from la Siren:

I always wait for that staircase, for Gene hurling herself down it after carefully leaving one slipper on the top step, like a psychopathic Cinderella. It's a wicked act, but she tells Ruth just before she does it, "sometimes the truth IS wicked." Along with Mildred Pierce, Leave Her to Heaven dares to go down some dark maternal byways, into things some may feel, but no one wants to admit--in this case, pregnancy as a cage, one that's about to slam shut for oh, about 21 years. Ellen's on bedrest, its own kind of "Yellow Wallpaper" hell. (Those insipid posies on Ellen's dressing-room wallpaper could drive a lot of women to the brink.) Look at what she's doing beforehand. She's talking to her own sister about the stroll the girl just took with her husband. Couldn't Richard be upstairs talking to his wife? Making sure she isn't bored and terrified, instead of taking it for granted for that she's rubbing her belly and practicing lullabies? So she grabs her most beautiful robe, and re-applies her lipstick, and she even puts on perfume--because she's about to go back to Ellen, the beauty, and leave behind Ellen, the terrarium. (More here / Sunset Gun)

"Psychopath Cinderella" - awesome. And here's something I wrote (link here) on the same subject for Bright Lights in March of 2010 when Film Forum screened LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN for a special week-long revival screening:

Wilde's straight-edge kid brother gets killed first after he decides to hang around the lodge like a third wheel albatross on Ellen’s neck. The way Stahl frames this event, in the peace and quiet of the lake,  makes a great ironic comment on the production code-approved craze for “discovering the great national parks” that was going on all over cinema in the late 1940s, early 1950s. I always root for Tierney in these scenes. I too know the frustration of having to run a cock-blocking gauntlet of resentfully undersexed friends and relatives every time you want to get your lover up to bed, or having to drag your urbane self out to buggy campsites to pacify your spouse’s yen for convention.

The drowning of the brother is nothing compared to the glorious moment when Gene throws herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage (Wilde must have waited until she was ovulating to slip her one). That's incredibly hard to do, and I think it's heroic, in its own twisted way, symbolic of her yen for flight and mastery over her own self-preservation instincts (I tried to throw myself down the stairs every week as a kid, to avoid soccer practice, and just physically couldn't--my body wouldn't let me).  Meanwhile if Wilde had bothered to pay attention to her in bed and maybe even give her an orgasm, none of this mayhem may have been necessary.

If we, living as relatively relative free as we do today, were suddenly stuck in a post-code extended family Americana hell hole like Gene's in HEAVEN, would we act any different? Or would we just quietly disappear–like Lea Massari in L’AVENTURA (1960)– before the bores could catch us and smother us back into Stepfordville? Maybe I’m just unusually squirrelly when it comes to the sorts of color schemes at work in the film; as Village Voice scribe Melissa Anderson notes, the color scheme “redefines mauve.” I hate mauve. It's telling that  Gene, whom Anderson calls “one of cinema’s most chilling psychopaths,” grew up with an intellectual, adventurous father who raised her far outside the claustrophobically chipmunk cheeked tedium of “sanitized” American small town life,  No wonder she can't adapt! Like those poor once-professionally employed heroines who had to give up their jobs, get married, and dutifully cook, clean, and obey their husbands, once the code took effect in 1934.

Where I’m going with all this is to analyze the ultimately corrupting nature of post-1934 cinema’s phony morals; the “as long as you feel bad about it, it’s okay to kill” sort of compromise with the censors. You can see this in two roles played by Winona Ryder: HEATHERS, with Winona's refusal to 'enjoy' the killing of the evil jocks and janes nonetheless orchestrated by herself and Slater; and SEX AND DEATH 101 (which I decried in "Why Can't We All Just Morally Compromise - Bright Lights 4/10/08), where she only drugs her sleazy would-be lovers into a restful coma from which they awake at the happy ending. We need more LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN-style sociopaths, by which I man girls with cajones enough kill those who would hobble and baby them with prefab beige rusticity, and critics with the cajones to applaud them, to see purveyors of mauve domesticity as just as deserving of death as cannibal rapists. We had THELMA AND LOUISE to inspire us in this way for awhile in the early 90s, but somehow the drippy third wave feminism of Sex and the City gourmet shopping swept over that fire like a flood of designer bottled water and soggy Stepford ash is all that remains. 

Figures like Gene are essential because they blur the line of good and evil, and help us extoll revenge using art. A murder in the movies is not the same as real life, so let it be cathartic and wild. In this sense Ellen is just such a wild  artist, a frustrated panther goddess trapped in the hell of some L.L. Bean adman’s pre-presentation nightmare and busting out of the net through any means necessary. It’s just too bad she couldn’t take a few more of those little bastards out before the inevitable mauve ocean swallowed her in its tranq dart credits. 

*****
That may sound hardcore, but I embrace the Camille Paglia/ Nietzschean vantage point --beyond good and evil, baby. So how about a LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN remake, directed by Darren Aronofsky, starring Vera Farmiga as Ellen/Gene Berent? And thank God that there are still women out there like Kim and la Siren who aren't scared to call a spade a spade, and then bury you with it.  Sometimes when life gives you lemons it's far more noble--well, not noble, but certainly more exciting and cinematic--to put them in a pillowcase and beat someone up with them than to make lemonade... especially if you're all out of sugar. Ellen is all out of sugar, America,  so take your lumps!

Somnolente Noir: THE GLASS KEY (1942)

Alan Ladd is "tired of hick town stuff" in a weird tale of brotherly love and deceit called THE GLASS KEY (1942). The "hick town" is run by racketeer Brian Donlevy as a kind of less comedic version of THE GREAT MCGINTY (1940). In fact, KEY and MCGINTY go well together, recalling a time in film when shady local politicians could still climb city hall ladders and backstab and make friends with slap-happy gangsters like Akim Tamiroff and William Bendix. Male friendship is what it's all about, as in the loosely post modern remake of KEY, the Coen Brothers' MILLER'S CROSSING (1990), but it's no-good scheming women that set the world tumbling in motion, to its knees and beyond.

There were enough rich femme fatale poor detective romances going on in the 1940s that there was even a word for it, "slumming." The detective could let go of his hardscrabble life and live like Nick Charles, presuming he didn't get double-crossed, or even worse- she loses interest in him now that he's not poor, and gets contemptuous of his sponging. Part of the appeal of THE GLASS KEY lies in Alan Ladd's stoic rejection of this destiny, via the much richer Veronica Lake. Like many film lovers, I've long been fascinated by the weird chemistry the pair exhibit, and how other similar pairs, such as Claire Trevor with Laurence Tierney (BORN TO KILL) or Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews (LAURA), lack that same chemistry, much as they may have chemistry on their own. Ladd and Lake seem to be born in a different time than those around them, a different projection speed, both blonde-haired, alcoholic and short (him 5'5" she 4'11"), isolated as a separate alien race, a pair of lost Nordic hybrids (which I've written of here) trapped in the sticky webs of human desire, villainy, and wretchedness... but never complaining or tolerating wrongness when they see it.

THE GLASS KEY is the perfect Lake-Ladd film second only to THIS GUN FOR HIRE (the same year as KEY, 1942) In GUN, they're just pals who come to trust each other in a world full of duplicitous poisonous snakes (which in a way makes it even sexier and sadder). But in KEY they have such a great sleepy chemistry, it's like they're dreaming while awake and whenever they're together they're packing or leaving or otherwise hanging out in empty rooms. You just get used to seeing one or the other's leaving trunks dead center in the room whenever they're together.  You don't have to read Wikipedia to know that both of them had hard childhoods. You can feel it in their shy delivery and wary glares. Ladd and Lake are two damaged souls recognizing each themselves in one another, and the aloof posturing, verbal attacks and avoidance strategies they used to keep the world at bay couldn't fool each other for a minute.

The normal 'sex appeal' of screen sirens is kind of transcended by Lake, a very heavy drinker who once noted "I wasn't a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie." Ladd seems a bit of a zombie himself, and together they stand as undead outsiders in a noir world never quite asleep enough to suit them.

Perhaps that's why Lake-Ladd films are, for me anyway, ideally seen when at home, sick with a cold, as I was all this past week. THE GLASS KEY goes down smooth and easy, with William Bendix's fists standing in for the effects of influenza, and Veronica Lake's smooth alcoholic tones as gentle as a shot of Tussinex Suspension.

The sadomasochistic pair bond between Alan Ladd and Bendix is also something very special, and an interesting echo of the rough and tough fight at the drop of a hat rapport between Donlevy and Tamiroff's mobster in the GREAT MCGINTY (directed by Preston Sturges who also directed Lake in the previous year's SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS). The willingness to fight and 'take' punishment is often decoded as being allusions to homosexuality, but I would disagree. I'd say it's more of a kind of code of masculine ethics ala FIGHT CLUB or A MAN CALLED HORSE. Taking a beating is what makes a man tough, fighting back until all that's left of you is fingernails. Bendix's sick excitement over 'bouncing' Alan Ladd around the room "like a ping pong ball" is contagious, and in one of the big climactic scenes it's hilarious and heartening to watch Ladd calmly, like a patient cobra, draw out the sadistic tough talk of Bendix in an upstairs barroom. Bendix hams it up, but is a delight, playing basically the same brute he'd ushered in with THE HAIRY APE (1944) and the later Lake-Ladd film, THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946). 

The Great McGinty (1940)

And Ladd's canny beating-taking for his dim-witted boss buddy is therefore a cool triumph. This, like Hammett's other novels mirrors later films like THE GODFATHER, where we're introduced to the machinations of power and feel lucky we're not involved: it's too dangerous grabbing at the big brass ring, and you have to presume your enemies have already planned six moves ahead, and you need to plan the seventh in advance or else take your face smashing-in stoic like a brave. It's not often either you see a movie where the good guys have the district attorney in their pocket, and people wage war via whole newspapers and elections the way we argue in chat rooms today.

Last interesting anecdote: I've always been upset there's really one or two films where Lake has her signature hair over the eye. According to Susan Kelly: By this time the peek-a-boo hairstyle had become a nationwide fad, so much so that government officials actually had to request that Ms. Lake stop wearing her signature style because women in war plants who were copying it were catching their hair in the machines!

Well, that explains a lot, but I still regret the abundance of skull-tightening headgear Lake wears, as it seems to all but castrate her for the bulk of KEY's running time. On the other hand, the film's really about the buddyhood of two men, and how one should never let a girl who doesn't even like you interfere with your 'bros before ho's' mentality, especially right before an election. Got that? On the other hand, I'm sick so don't listen to me, and Lake went on to drunken despair, getting kicked off pictures, and tending bar in women's hotels after the 1940s wore themselves out, but she still had her pilot's license, and I would like to know why I can't seem to find a good old-fashioned pulp-art covered paperback version of Hammett's original Glass Key anywhere and last I checked this 1944 version is not on R1 DVD. What gives... pally?

Degenerate Drums of the Leopard Woman: PHANTOM LADY (1944)

One of the coolest frisson effects in film noir is the sense of collapsing time, the melting clock warp as an incriminating love letter is accidentally found by the heroine on a brutal killer's desk right as he quietly lets himself in downstairs, switchblade flicking from his trench coat; it only takes a few seconds to climb stairs or shut a drawer but noir time carries a heady, melted, drugged drink feeling, here 'drying out' facilities double as blackmail fronts with drug dens with cots full of people with half-lit opium pipes; cat houses are barely disguised as dance clubs; drugs and sex are fogged away by censorship to make the whole thing as coded and symbolically abstract as a Dali painting reproduced on cheap newspaper. Nothing ever means only one thing, but neither is it ever fully known, so bathed in shimmer and shadows it blurs the idea of 'known' until its indistinguishable from a fever dream.

The cult noir classic PHANTOM LADY (1944) shows director Robert Siodmak to be not only a master of this druggy slowed-down form, but of a weird side current of humanity that's reminiscent of Val Lewton's 1940s RKO horror films like THE SEVENTH VICTIM and THE LEOPARD MAN (here), wherein compassionate poetry and the iconography of B-list film noir/horror hybrid thriller are merged, creating an amplified feeling of being alone and in danger with nary but a clicking footstep and a few shadows, which makes the warm havens all the warmer by contrast. When characters are suddenly isolated along a lonely stretch of train platform, you feel it extra deep. We're so used to our horror victims being cardboard shooting gallery ducks that we're not prepared for the shock of genuine (rather than sentimental) emotion.

Like THE LEOPARD MAN, PHANTOM LADY comes from a source novel by Cornell Woolrich and contains a high-strung Latin cabaret singer (Aurora Miranda, Carmen's sister), and an unseen killer that moves through the scenes like an collective unconscious eruption of the death drive. Throughout both films a sense of feminine strength abounds, the heroine's ability to mix maternal compassion with icy resolve in both films shows that terror can be enhanced--rather than diluted--when femininity is revealed to enhance one's steely courage rather than detract from it.


I'd never really focused in on Robert Siodmak as a notable auteur (I got him mixed up with his brainy brother Curt) but after seeing PHANTOM, I looked him up in David Thomson's Biography of Film:

"He (Siodmak's) was never more than an assignment director but he never lost a mordant sense of humor, narrative economy, a relish for actors and actresses, a special care for interiors, and a readiness to extract the best from the system... He was an artist, and he deserves fuller retrospectives."

Man, now I agree. What I love about PHANTOM also is the linchpin it provides in better linking wartime noir to anti-Nazi propaganda. Like Siodmak himself, Weimar era artists had fled to Hollywood in droves in the mid thirties when the Nazi writing was on the wall. After they left, the German films under Goebbels were all sunlight, health, mountains, and music with shadows and urban blight reserved for negative depictions of Jews. Over in America the 'degenerate' German emigres used their intellect and surrealistic shadowplay to mock--via the 'film noir'--Goebbel's ideals, relishing the chance offered by the B-movie to throw logic and sanity to the wind and create funhouse opposites of Nazi sanctioned art. Aware of censorship's sticky hypocrisy, even in free speech America, Weimar-expats like Siodmak proved too smart for the heimliche morons at the ratings board: dangerous political statements were sewn into details as small as spotlights on strangling hands and sweat on bartenders' shirts. Even today, or last week when I saw it on TCM, LADY works a surrealist sucker punch that would make a healthy Aryan buckle to his knees and a censor do a spit-take, if they knew how to read a leer.

Perhaps this is why noir films generally taunted the outdoors (as in the subversive anti-Abercrombe subtexts of LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN), mocking health and sunlight, frolicking instead in shadows and sleaze, petty crime, sexual deviance and relentless drinking, running rat-like through mazes of dark deserted cities where no one had a job or anything resembling a strong Aryan ideal. In this mirrored alley route you can measure in India ink gouache the way calamity fuels creativity. Would we have modernism without WWI? Would we have noir without WWII? Would we have subversion without censorship? No. Before the war, men in movies were either rich saps in tuxes, poor young saps in overalls with big dreams, or suspicious train conductors --all were obliged to heed their elders and get married and obey all laws and curfews as gospel. But the men came home from the war with .45 automatics and German Luger souvenirs and combat experience, and were in no mood to starve on the street. Combat had eradicated their moral squeamishness; robbing a bank to make ends meet or smashing in a window to get a hot girl a bracelet, that was okay --the standing laws were wrong if they meant war heroes collapsing from hunger outside pastry shop windows. And if they came home from the war to find their wife shacked up with some Laird Cregar-ish masher and holding cocktail hour in their honeymoon apartment, look out.

Joan Harrison (Hitchcock's former script doctor) produced PHANTOM LADY, leavening and increasing the Hitchcockian suspense simultaneously by making villain more human and the detective (Thomas Gomez) a warm human being who genuinely cares about helping Ella Raines catch  her man. By the time the climax rolls around, all you need is a shadow falling over her beautiful face to put the whole thing into 'go' mode, and Siodmak knows it, so that's all you get, 'cuz there's a war on, and props are scarce. Franchot Tone's bizarre sculptures draw odd associations to Pabst and Von Sternberg, but with a sparse empty-ish set B-film austerity that shows off the masterful and economic lighting, and I mean that as a compliment, as I meant it for the sculpture studio in another Universal film from the same era, HOUSE OF HORRORS (1946).

Best of all is the gorgeous Ella Raines who brings such a wealth of attitudes to her character that you fall in love with her badassedness. She spends an entire evening just staring dead-eyed at a bartender until he practically craps his pants, and it leads to a tense silent subway scene ala the one in SEVENTH VICTIM. And as in Lewton's best films, the unrelenting heroine can chill the heart of the killer even more than vice versa.  Raines isn't the atypical adoring wallflower secretary, when her boss is out she slides into his chair with a cigarette and starts giving dictation, and look a the way she rips chunks out of Elisha Cook with her eyes (below). That is fierce! She can out-fatale any femme fatale on a dime. And yet she's the good girl heroine!

The notorious bits of PHANTOM LADY are the justly celebrated sequences with Elisha Cook Jr. as a lascivious jazzbo drummer. Personal anecdote: somewhere on the NJ shore around 1991 our band was playing and a pack of Jersey Shore-style girls were there, drinking and cheering, and one caught the eye of our Elisha Cook-ish keyboardist. His last name was Freund, so I dubbed him Sigmud and he was sweet and capable on his Korgi but being short and a ginger was not used to such open interest from an  attractive female in the audience. He was so turned on by her dancing right by the stage and giving him the eye that he launched into one of the most blazing solos of his career, he was crushing it! Her friends were excited and she was turned on, for a second, then he kept going, faster and crazier, and she gradually went from turned on to thrilled to a little creeped out, to wanting to leave, to leaving, all within the space of a song. Elijah at the drums in PHANTOM reminds me instantly of that 20-year old moment! In short, Cook's insane Gene Krupa-dubbed solo in the basement bar is one of the most gloriously unseemly bits of sexual sublimation in sound cinema. And as I said, it happens! It's totally understandable, that's the genius! It's sexual sublimation gone horribly right and wrong at the same time. And though Ella Raines is basically cozying up to him to get information. She still turns herself so well into a kind of creepy jazz-loving libertine it's more than an act, it's like she's conjuring up his solo like she's a crazy Bruja at her pot, and the sound of his frenzied solo is like a spirit borne wailing from her fallopian tubes to his drum sticks and back again. This one sequence seems to capture all that the jazz club basement finale of DEMENTIA (1955) was trying for.

 

In sum, PHANTOM LADY is awesome, and the print on TCM is crisp enough that the white lighting on the heroine burns your mind. What RAW DEAL was for Anthony Mann, or DETOUR for Ulmer, PHANTOM LADY is for Siodmak, with its tender, twisted foot planted just deep enough in B-movie minimalism to make every bizarre touch stand out. Can I suggest a Blu-ray Criterion Robert Siodmak boxed set with PHANTOM, COBRA WOMAN, and CRISS CROSS? There's a Siodmak set in region 4, meanwhile, proving once again Europe and South America are better at discerning our art than we are. Get it together, USA! Somewhere in Buenos Aires a short bald musician who can really swing is getting it on with a foxy jazz fan, and that's how it should be here, instead of that fox just running away from our poor Sigmud. Mis Estatos Unidos, sometimes you're just a stinker.