Andrew and Virginia Stone

Of the scores of ignored artisans toiling below the radar of the front office, those independent spirits who manipulated Hollywood’s vast resources to realize exotic personal visions on ‘b’ budgets, writer/producer/director Andrew L. Stone certainly deserves our attention. I first became aware of him and his wife, Virginia (his editor and collaborator), through The Last Voyage (1960), a disaster film set aboard a sinking ocean liner. Shot in real time, Stone filmed on a genuine ship that was actually sinking. Irwin Allen, meet Werner Herzog.

It contains most all of the script and visual elements to be found in the other pictures made during the director’s peak years. After a string of mediocre musical comedies hacked out in the ‘30s and ‘40s—with Stormy Weather (1943) a notable exception—Stone evinced a predilection for sweaty melodrama in Highway 301 (1950), a tough bank robbery picture with a keen eye for trigger-happy crooks. It inaugurated a decade’s worth of claustrophobic suspense yarns (nearly always shot on location, inside real houses and buildings, a precursor to the nouvelle vague) in which interpersonal relationships are whittled down to fundamentals, converting the screen into a display of pluck, quick wits and frayed nerves.

There are obvious parallels to Feuillade, Lang, Sam Fuller and Hitchcock (Shadow of a Doubt’s Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright were reunited for Stone’s The Steel Trap [1952]), though without the flourish, visual style and progressive character development. Most reminiscent of Lang, several of Stone’s scripts (which were often based on true events) recognize love, marriage, children and home life as ornaments teetering on the brink of apocalypse. The husband (Robert Stack), wife (Dorothy Malone) and daughter (Tammy Marihugh) taking The Last Voyage are hollow and bland, while the ship’s captain (George Sanders) and his grizzled engineer (Edmond O’Brien) dance a crude, formulaic power play.

Most unlike Lang, though, Stone’s interest isn’t in the heart but in the hardware. With his wife helplessly pinned under a beam, Stack spends most of the picture hunting down it’s pivotal, mechanical main character: the acetylene torch to cut her out to ‘freedom’—in this case, the arduous, potentially deadly search for a lifeboat. Myopic in its obsessions, the screenplay’s too preoccupied to notice the irony of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Dorothy Dandridge in The Decks Ran Red

For the square-jawed hero, they hired Stack; needing pride and vanity, they got Sanders. The Stones enjoyed Hollywood’s then-vast supply of familiar character actors who could project panic in lieu of personality: Doris Day, Louis Jordan, Barry Sullivan and Frank Lovejoy in Julie (1956); James Mason, Inger Stevens, Rod Steiger, Neville Brand and Angie Dickinson in Cry Terror! (1958); Mason again, with Broderick Crawford, Dorothy Dandridge and Stuart Whitman in The Decks Ran Red (1958); David Janssen, Joyce Taylor and Frank Gorshin in Ring of Fire (1961).

Capable players all, they’re occasionally stranded by the director, especially the women. Day, Dandridge and Stevens pull through extended scenes of wide-eyed panic that appear barely rehearsed; in lesser hands, these moments could easily send the films into self parody. Stone’s benign neglect of his actors coincides with a visible (though unspoken) belief in compassionate authority figures watching over a collective whose ethics are built upon trust and decency, motherhood and the flag, a white, middle-class utopia. Bravura performances would simply undermine all purpose. When Cry Terror!’s Inger Stevens races against the clock to fulfill a commitment to kidnappers, the cinema’s been artfully rigged to a state of unyielding emergency.

In the case of Julie, Stone cast Day as a stewardess tiptoeing around her husband’s mental collapse. Shreds of xenophobia hang over the latter, Louis Jordan’s cliché oily Frenchman, a stereotype reminiscent of Sanders’s stuffy Brit in Last Voyage and indication of Stone’s distrust of Europeans. Stalked to the point of madness, she’s nonetheless called into work and ends up piloting a passenger plane after the crew’s been shot. Absurd without apology, Julie—like so much of Stone’s oeuvre—is a compelling ride from start to finish.

Andrew L. Stone at IMDb

Virginia Stone at IMDb