Two tricks, two treats

Image courtesy John McElwee; click to enlarge.

As a kid in the 1960s and ‘70s I loved horror movies, or more specifically, monster movies, and there’s still the urge to see one or two for Halloween. One problem being a film junkie, however, is the repetition that goes with the turf, and after you’ve watched Bride of Frankenstein and Nosferatu ad nauseam, the thrill has a tendency to fly out the window. Hence, we try to track down titles unseen…or at least unseen for many years.

    TCM recently broadcast Zombies of Mora Tau (1957) as part of a day-long zombie marathon. During Hollywood’s studio years, zombies and gorilla movies were the ghetto of the horror genre. Universal Pictures specialized in monster movies, but even they soft-peddled zombies and gorillas. I last saw Zombies of Mora Tau about forty years ago and thought it was cool…no doubt swayed by its star, sultry Allison Hayes, she of Attack of the 50ft Woman.

    My feelings for Ms. Hayes have woefully abated and the situation seems far clearer: the film’s dull, stupid and entirely uninspired. Things work so much better in a young, unfettered mind. Now, however, I could barely get through its seventy coma inducing minutes without nodding off.

    I don’t know whether to thank or blame Peter at Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee for inadvertently reminding me that I’d never seen Gorilla at Large (1954). Twenty-three-year-old Anne Bancroft in trapeze tights, along with Cameron Mitchell, Raymond Burr, Lee J. Cobb, Lee Marvin and a guy in a gorilla suit. I figured, how could you possibly go wrong? Sorry to report, the movie is dullsville from start to finish. It was directed by Harmon Jones, and I’ve always wondered if there was a connection between him and the character Oliver Harmon Jones in M*A*S*H*.

    Two vampire pictures from the ‘50s that still hold up rather well have come out together on a double feature DVD: The Vampire (1957) and Return of Dracula (1958). Both have musical scores by Gerald Fried, both were written by Pat Fielder, directed by Paul Landres, and produced by Arthur Gardner and Jules Levy. Modestly budgeted and competently made, they’re small gems with intelligent scripts that quietly address post-World War II concerns.

    They’re both set in rural American towns whose deeply rooted traditions are challenged by unwanted change and parasitic threats. In The Vampire, it’s the onset of drugs, anti-social behavior and the breakdown of the family unit; in Return of Dracula, xenophobia, communist infiltration and nonconformist aliens. Residents of lily-white Norman Rockwell utopias try to work their tidy Christian ethics on dicey people and situations far beyond their ken. Both films end similarly: lives and dreams are shattered, characters are stunned into submission by opposing values, all pointing toward the cultural upheaval to come throughout the next decade.

John McElwee recently wrote about Return of Dracula at Greenbriar Picture Shows—check it out!

Going in Stiles

Perfect material for a TV movie: “Grady Franklin Stiles, Jr., was born in Pittsburgh on July 18, 1937, the sixth in a long line of lobster-men…When his eldest daughter Donna was engaged to marry a boy of whom Grady disapproved, Grady shot and killed the boy.” Read more at Elizabeth Anderson’s Phreequeshow. (Thanx, Steve!)

Double Bill-a-Thon: Strand in line…

My thoughts and exploits in and of San Francisco’s late, lamented Strand Theatre have been documented here and here, so no need to repeat myself…other than to reiterate the fact that that those who ‘came of age’ with home video could never fully appreciate what it and others of its kind provided for those of us with voracious movie appetites before the VCR, when network broadcasts of cut pan-and-scan prints were riddled with commercials. (Think: AMC after the late 1980s.) For this week’s Double Bill-a-Thon hosted by Gautam at Broken Projector, I submit the following scans of vintage Strand schedules, jam-packed with double (and triple and quadruple) bills. Unemployed and deranged (like so many in the audience), I saw most of these, perched in the balcony’s front row. I’ve arranged the 8 1/2" x 14" sheets as tops and bottoms, fronts and backs, which can be clicked to enlarge.

Oct. 14 — Dec. 22, 1978

        

        

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Dec. 23, 1978 — Mar. 1, 1979

        

        

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Mar. 2 — May 3, 1979

        

        

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May 4 — July 5, 1979

        

        

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July 6 — Sept. 6, 1979

        

        

A recent photo of The Strand, boarded up but guarded by a sentry. (Oh! Those crazy Californians!)

Previous double-bill galleries on Flickhead:

Art of the double bill, part 1

Art of the double bill, part 2

Art of the double bill, part 3

Art of the double bill, part 4

Kitschy coup

Artwork copyright © 2007 Lance Laurie.
Click to enlarge

Reminiscent of early 20th century sideshow banners for miracle elixirs and freak shows, the art of Lance Laurie has its own distinct flavor. You can view samples of his paintings and sign work on his website, Art au GoGo, or go to his blog, Lance’s Art Page, where the motif is Tiki Lounge Halloween. Lance also publishes a digest-size zine called Snackbar Confidential, a cut-n’-paste affair jam-packed with movie, concert and product ads from the 1960s and early 70s: Phantom Tollbooth matinees, talking G.I. Joe dolls, Connie Stevens TV shows, Muddy Waters opening for Iron Butterfly, and Pink Floyd for five bucks a ticket. (That’s Vicki Lawrence on the cover of the new issue, below.) A must for your bathroom reading material, Snackbar Confidential is available for $3.00 from Lance Laurie, P.O. Box 1359, Huntington, N.Y. 11743-0730.

Deborah Kerr 1921—2007

“Rhymes with star,” according to the MGM publicity back in the late 1940s. She was elegant, refined…yet you knew she knew more than she was letting onto—especially when holding her own as the ‘spinster pushing 40’ against earthy Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana. (They formed an intriguing yin and yang in The Hucksters as well.) Deborah Kerr may have looked like delicate china, but there was a goodtime girl percolating in there for sure—the mind does cartwheels imagining her on location with Robert Mitchum and John Huston and Heaven knows! how many cases of booze. She was tough, resourceful and quite beautiful under the dust in The Sundowners and King Solomon’s Mines; an Irish fireball ingénue in I See a Dark Stranger (Kerr was Scottish by birth); a hot tomato in the surf in From Here to Eternity; aware of what was flowing between the lines of Bonjour tristesse. Plus her work for the Archers, Colonel Blimp and Black Narcissus, tickets to timelessness. She could make dross and mediocrity worth watching, recognized quality in the making, and held the lens with ease.

Art by Jim McDermott

Artwork copyright © 2007 Jim McDermott

With his penchant for film stars and classic monster movies, artist Jim McDermott—self described as “the man who put the ‘ill’ in illustrator”—specializes in eye-popping portraiture. (That’s his take on Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto, above.) To see more of Jim’s work, go to his website, Illustrations by McDermott on MySpace, or visit his blog Denizens of the Dark.

Art by Steve Fiorilla

Above: Kerouac by Fiorilla. (Artwork copyright © 2007 Steve Fiorilla.)

Artist and film fan Steve Fiorilla has been a friend and contributor to most of my creative pursuits since the 1980s. Just recently he wrote a review of the book, Boy on a String, for Flickhead. Fellow artist Jim McDermott has assembled two online galleries of Steve’s work:

Denizens of the Dark

The Art of Fiorilla

Close-Up Blogathon #3: done away by Faye

This is becoming a bit of an addiction, so I’ll have to stop…but just one more for Matt’s Close-Up Blogathon: Faye and Steve via Haskell Wexler, The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).

Close-Up Blogathon #2: Parasite in heat

Another contribution to Matt‘s ever-growing Close-Up Blogathon, horror icon Christopher Lee bearing his fangs in an effective zoom shot that sent hundreds of screaming kids running up theatre aisles during matinee shows of Horror of Dracula (1958). I remember, I was there. To this day it’s probably the best Dracula movie I’ve ever seen.

Close-up Blogathon: anatomy in a murder

Click images to enlarge

Prompted by Matt at The House Next Door, the Close-Up Blogathon leads me back to sometime in the mid-1960s when, not yet ten-years-old, I was momentarily held spellbound by Hitchcock, a knife, and one of my favorite areas of female anatomy. Cue the strings.

From the life of the marionettes

“Recalling a transient life and the hours spent alone in bedrooms he couldn’t consider his own, [Joseph] Jacoby would sculpt miniature clay actors with clay cameras directing imaginary scenarios, a make believe rehearsal for when it would happen for real.” A book review by Steve Fiorilla now on Flickhead.

Realist redux

“Hello and Welcome to THE REALIST ARCHIVE PROJECT—a complete republishing of all 146 issues of Paul Krassner's Classic and Uncompromising The Realist Magazine.” (Via mardecortesbaja.com.)

Traveling <--NxNW--> toward Saul Bass @ Potrzebie.

The Paris when it sizzled

Click image to enlarge. Photo Copyright © The Estate of Dr. Ralph Alexander. Courtesy of Steve Fiorilla.

Above: A worker during the construction of Manhattan’s Paris Theatre, circa 1947. Discovered in a stack of 8x10’s rescued from the trash by a Rochester, New York, shop owner, the image was taken by Dr. Ralph Alexander, a former radiologist, archeologist and photographer who passed away at the age of 91 in 2002. One of the few functioning single-screen venues remaining from the World War II era, The Paris is located on 58th Street near 5th Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Plaza Hotel. It still carries the aura of metropolitan grace, charm and exclusivity of an earlier time…or is that just my imagination? Below are scans of pages from the gratis programs once handed out by their groomed and uniformed ushers: Le Bourgeois gentlewomen (The Would-Be Gentleman; 1958), a film of a Comédie française stage production; and Lo Straniero (The Stranger; 1967), Visconti’s interpretation of the Camus novel.

Click images to enlarge

Prior to moving to Pennsylvania, the last film I saw at The Paris was Danièle Thompson’s Décalage horaire (Jet Lag; 2002), a 90-minute meet-cute pitting cranky Jean Reno against persnickety Juliette Binoche. It may be a little static and full of holes, but the picture is dear to me if just for the memory of the day, time and place it was seen. And Ms. Binoche, though heavily made up, left an indelible mark on my libido. (Thompson thankfully allows the camera to dwell on her preening in front of a mirror.) Because the theatre attracted an upscale and educated crowd, there was a rolling reaction to the comedy: French-speaking patrons laughed first, followed moments later by the subtitle readers. (This post written by Steve Fiorilla & Flickhead.)

For further information and reminiscences of The Paris, click here

Beau jest

On the QT: During the late 1950s, lowbrow auteur Bert I. Gordon (a/k/a Mr. B.I.G.) specialized in giant monster movies. In 1965 he threw carefree, dance-crazed kids into a (vast) rethinking of H.G. Wells’s Food of the Gods and called it Village of the Giants. This clip features the thumping twang of Jack Nitzsche’s death-proof “The Last Race”, with a rather dorky Beau Bridges getting down, much to the chagrin of Tommy Kirk and Johnny Crawford. The fleshy blonde with the great tan is Joy Harmon, better known as the sudsy ‘Loo-ceel’ to all you Cool Hand Luke fans.

Of age and innocence

“A film fecund with the passions that pulse beneath its fabulous surfaces…[The Age of Innocence] arrays a precise hieroglyphics of appearances beneath which lies a sea of overwhelming desire and eviscerating pain.” Richard Armstrong on Edith Wharton, Martin Scorsese and love—a new article on Flickhead

Muchas gracias, but woe to swine

I’d like to thank all of you who participated in the Luis Buñuel Blogathon. Your enthusiasm for this dear man and his art is stirring; your criticisms and observations enlightening.

    To the high and mighty who decided to snub Don Luis: your cold indifference and lack of respect will not go unpunished. May a deranged ostrich saunter into your bedroom in the wee hours and encase your lower torso with an irremovable corset.

— Flickhead