...Because, Let's Face It, Cows Deserve It

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The Hitch-Hiker

These three actors are transfixing in one of those noirs that gets out of city limits and into our collective thoughts. Talman is disturbing as an original serial killer. The “good guys,” the hostages with families at home in Arizona, are not where they are supposed to be because they were planning on slipping down to Mexico to enjoy the prostitutes. Their desire to escape their suburban middle class lives is contrasted with Talman’s criminal freedom, a freedom doomed by being hunted by society. Who is worse off? Who lives more intelligently? Who is really sane? The device of Talman’s bad eye, which doesn’t close even when he’s sleeping, is distinct.

1953, directed by Ida Lupino

The Title Tells You All You Need to Know

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Two Wongs

Our bad boys of Halloween, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, have much in common, including, - well-duh-ishly - their status as icons of the early days of horror. While their most famous early roles are at Universal, they also made films for poverty row studio Monogram, and both played characters named Mr. Wong. The similarity in the two characters ends in the name, as Lugosi's Wong is kind of a small scale Fu Manchu, an Asian mastermind, while Karloff's Wong is a heroic detective in the mold of Charlie Chan, albeit more genteel, not as judgemental and less full of syntactically-challenged aphorisms.

Many reasons are given for Lugosi's loss of career momentum after his early Universal roles, but I would say one is that he never really got to play heroes. He seemed to always play unsympathetic villains, even alienating viewers in potentially sympathetic roles such as the mad scientist in the later film he made wth Ed Wood, Bride of the Monster. He delivers the famous "Hunted...despised..." soliliquy with such a palpable disdain for humanity that it is fascinating to watch but also genuinely frightening. Karloff, delivering a similar speech, would have evoked compassion. Partly this would be due to our own learned reception of a soft English accent versus a harsh Hungarian delivery. But only partly. It might be just in how they elected to play their characters. Karloff's Frankenstein monster, even when killing, seemed without guile. His habitual expressions are confusion and desperation. But for me the most lasting image of Lugosi's one foray into that role, in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, is his face slowly turning to the camera with an expression of pure malevolence. Delightful Lugosi malevolance, but it is a chilling leer. Some would argue that's what a horror movie should contain and I can't argue against that. But it's that horror aptitude that made a transfer into other genres and other types of characters less feasible for Bela than it was for Boris. That being said, as demonstrated in One Body Too Many, Lugosi could play comedy. What would have been difficult is for Bela to present a mad scientist as sympathetic as Karloff's in The Ape, as one example.

As for the two movies in question, both directed by the gifted William Nigh, both are very entertaining and much of that value is due to other players as well as Nigh's ability to create palpable comic strip atmosphere on the thread of a shoe string.

In The Mysterious Mr. Wong, Lugosi is seemingly mild mannered shopkeeper by day, but by early evening to night, depending when he gets off work, he is avidly pursuing relics known as the Coins of Confucious. This of course reminds us of our own lives as collectors with day jobs, though presumably none of us murder for it. Wallace Ford is the hardnosed, nosy, nasal-voiced reporter in pursuit of the story he smells as bodies start to pile up in Chinatown. He gets a lot of the best lines, and plays it with flair as he also purses the affections of office girl Arline Judge. One very clever shot is of the two of them in a tight frame with a third wheel, another suitor that Ford schemes to get rid of. We are looking at the three full on as they sit at a lunch counter. It's a simple shot but just think how impossible telling a story that way would have been just ten years earlier in the silent era, never mind before film. Eventually Ford and Judge come upon a secret passageway in the back of Wong's shop, natch, leading to cobwebs, one-liners, and the thrilling conclusion. This recalls to me how, as a youngster, I felt it was inevitable that I would end up in a similar adventure with various girls I had crushes on. No doubt I was at least in part under the influence of the climactic cave scenes in Tom Sawyer. And suddenly now I'm recalling a M*A*S*H episode where Hawkeye is looking into the back of a patient's throat and says he can still still see Becky and Tom wandering around back there. In many ways, that patient's throat is my mind.

Be that as it may, and it may, we then come to Karloff's Mr. Wong movies, and this one in particular. This series mixed together the Asian sleuth genre with the girl reporter genre, ie Torchy Blane, to what I think is great effect. In this particular one, the blonde girl reporter's intrepidness is able to save Wong's life, as he is embroiled in the mysterious murder (of course it's mysterious, wouldn't be much of a movie without that), of a Chinese princess, leading to much skulking around in beautiful fog. Ah, fog, nature's secret passageway. Well, um, except for caves.

Karloff is charming as Wong, but it is really Marjorie Reynolds, and Grant Withers as her hardnosed cop antagonist/love interest that puts this one over.

Proto Disney Teen Noir Hamlet: Strange Illusion

1945, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

Ulmer has a permanent place in horror and noir history for The Black Cat and Detour respectively. But his lesser known Strange Illusion has much to recommend it, including a mixture of noir conventions with bizarre dream sequences and a plot involving teens trying to foil crooks that foreshadows such future Disney teen adventure masterworks as The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. The lead is played by James Lydon, surely the forties' precursor of Tommy Kirk. Lydon is perhaps best known as the Young Man in Love character in The Time of Your Life. The plot of this movie is Hamlet-esque, as Lydon is bothered by a dream that tells him that the man his mother is now involved with was the killer of his father. One advantage the Melancholy Dane never had in his pursuit of the king's true killer was a crack team of teen sleuths and one kindly older doctor. Strangely, another actor that Lydon retroactively reminds me of is James Franco in the similar role of Harry Osborn of the Spider-man movies. The look of glazed obsessiveness as a son pursues the true killer of his father is similar, and I got to wonder if Franco looked at this film, perhaps at director Sam Raimi's request or suggestion. Certainly much of the style of the Spidey films, from acting to scoring, channels forties movies.

Special mention should got to Jimmy Clark, as the friend of Lydon's character. With spunky good humour he steals every scene he's in and is unfortunately absent a lot of the time, as Lydon goes undercover at a mental institution. One of the many factors that makes this film interesting is hearing some teen lingo of the forties as teen culture was only beginning to exist. It would still be a few years until the appearances of Catcher in the Rye and films like The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause.

Come Out To Play

A&M Records, 1979
This record is a stone cold lava lamper, a fitting addition to any cat's collection for the groovy theme music and score composed by Barry De Vorzon as well as most of the other tunes, including an epic song performed by Joe Walsh called In the City, which is definitely I tune I want to hear when emerging from a subway at the crack of dawn. The only tune I could never get with is the cover of "Nowhere to Run", but even the original is one of those Motown moments I couldn't quite get with. What does work for me is the last tune, "Last of an Ancient Breed", credited to Desmond Child, which sets the tone for much of the closing credits songs of eighties action movies.

Also present are some sound bites from this classic flick, but some may be disappointed that "Can...you...dig it?" is not included; however, its other most quoted line, "Warriors!...come out to plaaaay!" is, with sound effects of those ominous bottles clanging together. Wow, that guy must have had tiny fingers.

Reason # 12,386 Why 1966 is the Coolest Year on Record

Nancy Sinatra and Ilya Kuryakin (David McCallum) duet on Man From U.N.C.L.E.!!!

Doomed Delambre

The only problem I have with this movie is really a strength, in that there is something so genuinely tragic about it. It sort of goes beyond those movies where you just watch as a monster is created and sit back and enjoy the ensuing craziness.

Occasionally there are movies , the ones that come to mind are Black Christmas and Devils Rejects, where I end up feeling more for the victims than normal in a horror film. You get a sense of Dr. Delambre having made such a terrible, irreversible mistake. He had high ideals but was too ambitious, did not proceed with due caution. It's another one of those fifties sci-fi movies, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that tells much about the anxieties of people living in the middle of the twentieth century. The Fly goes beyond sci-fi to express a universal human theme. As Cormac McCarthy put it, "Doomed enterprises divide lives forever into the then and the now."