Vampire hotties

Marie-Pierre Castel and Jean Rollin while filming Rollin’s Le Frisson des Vampires (1971), via Lunettes Noires; click to enlarge. You can see the film right now @ Netflix.

Vegetable man, where are you?

Syd Barrett, David Gilmour, Rick Wright and Nick Mason (circa 1968) via Barrett: the definitive visual companion to the life of Syd Barrett; click to enlarge.

Third eye blind

Awake from *her* surgery (an ‘Addadicktome’?), via Comically Vintage; click to enlarge.

Sophia with her corset on

Sophia Loren in The Millionairess (1960) via VintageGal; click to enlarge.

No argument from me

Perused this in my dentist’s waiting room — short on substance, a little flighty, but the title’s cool. Click for more info.

Flower Powers

Stephanie Powers, via Simply Sassy; click to enlarge. For anyone who’s wondering what to get me for Christmas, Warner Archive has just released the complete Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Stephanie’s spy series from the 60s!

Suddenly, Last Summer

Labor Day arrives like an unloved in-law next weekend, closing down my favorite season to usher us none too gracefully into falling leaves, ice and snow — and, to the chagrin of my neck, back and arm, painfully unpleasant arthritis. Why I’ve allowed myself to live in the northeast region of the United States is a mystery, especially to me. (I’d be much happier in a shack out in the desert.) These things considered, the one title (not the play, not the film, but the title) that can stir up all sorts of melancholy in my head is Suddenly, Last Summer, as it denotes the passing of those sultry three months into history. Because the summer of today will be, suddenly, last summer a week from now — despite the fact that autumn proper doesn’t begin until the 23rd. Thanks to Pirates and Revolutionaries for the screen grabs above (all of which click to enlarge) of Liz Taylor in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1959 film of the Tennessee Williams drama.

Back to school

Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks
via Polyhymnia; click to enlarge.

It’s, like, a total catharsis, baby

Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Jerry Lewis on the set of One More Time, the very strange sequel to Salt & Pepper via Drew Friedman; click to enlarge. As I wrote in a previous post:

“The only film directed by Jerry Lewis in which he does not appear, One More Time (1970) sits, just waiting for a cult to germinate. The 1960s were chockablock with cinematic weirdness, but few pushed the envelope as far or in as many unexpected directions. It was a sequel to a static faux Rat Pack movie, Salt & Pepper (1968), where a young Richard Donner laid the groundwork for his oeuvre of mediocrity. It starred Peter Lawford as ‘Pepper’ and Sammy Davis, Jr. as ‘Salt’ (yuk! yuk!…get it?), two swingin’ cats operating a swingin’ nightclub in a swingin’ London decidedly void of mods and rockers. The hipster-geezer fever dream continued in One More Time, with Jerry shaping their relationship into a clone of his long-since-deceased partnership with Dean Martin — Peter as Deano, Sammy as Jer. The screenplay by Michael Pertwee (The Mouse on the Moon, Strange Bedfellows) was wrung dry for both maudlin pathos and bizarre slapstick, putting Sammy in the unenviable position of transferring the bipolar situations in a performance that glides uneasily from weepy insincerity to something hideously abstract (re: “Here come da judge, here come da judge, here come da judge…”). Upon seeing this the first time, I believed a lengthy (albeit insane) thesis could be composed on its daring and… brilliance? But who in their right mind would believe me?”

Back to school

Via Pretty Pictures.

Sophia ‘with her face on’

Sophia Loren via VintageGal; click to enlarge.

Viaggio in Italia

Michelangelo Antonioni, Marisa Mell and Federico Fellini via Uncle Sid; click to enlarge.

Hello Dali!

Salvador Dali appears on What's My Line? (1952).

Art appreciation

Kelsey and the statue; click to enlarge.

Great abdomens of the 21st century

Sheridyn Fisher via Girl in Photo; click to enlarge.

Poolside with Carol

Lynley, that is, via Yello!; click to enlarge.

Happy Birthday, Honor Blackman!

Via Pretty Pictures; click to enlarge.

Romy Schneider l’enfer

Via Old Hollywood; click to enlarge.

Her eyes were filled with feathers

“Lord of the Reedy River” composed and recorded by Donovan, from the album HMS Donovan (1971). He also performed a shortened version in the film, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969).

Digging the Stones

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 is certainly worthy of attention. I first became aware of him and his wife, Virginia (his editor and collaborator), via 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 Stone made during his peak years. After a string of mediocre musical comedies hacked out in the ‘30s and ‘40s — one notable exception being Stormy Weather (1943) — Stone evinced a predilection for sweaty melodrama in Highway 301 (1950), a tough bank robbery picture with trigger-happy crooks. It inaugurated a decades’ worth of claustrophobic suspense yarns (nearly all of them shot on location, inside real houses and buildings, a rickety bridge connecting late 40s Fox noir with the nouvelle vague) in which personal relationships are whittled down to fundamentals, converting any given scenario into a showcase of pluck, quick wits and frayed nerves.

    There are obvious parallels to Louis Feuillade, Fritz Lang, Sam Fuller and Hitchcock — Shadow of a Doubt’s Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright were reunited for Stone’s The Steel Trap (1952). 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 collapse. 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.

    Stone’s interest isn’t so much in the heart as it is in the hardware. With his wife helplessly pinned under a steel beam, Stack spends most of The Last Voyage hunting down its pivotal, mechanical main character: the acetylene torch needed to cut her to a dubious ‘freedom’ — 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 Stone’s The Decks Ran Red

    For the square-jawed hero, they hired Stack; for pride and vanity, they were rewarded with Sanders. The Stones took advantage of Hollywood’s then-vast supply of familiar character actors, seasoned vets 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) — Stone alluding to interracial sex when it was taboo; 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 manage through extended scenes of wide-eyed fear that appear barely rehearsed; in lesser hands, these moments could easily exile the work to self parody. This benign neglect of Stone’s coincides with a visible (though unspoken) belief in compassionate authority figures watching over a nervous collective whose ethics are built upon the imagined trust and decency within a white, middle-class utopia. Bravura performances here 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 (very) 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 deterioration. Shreds of xenophobia hang over the latter, Louis Jordan’s oily Frenchman, a cliché stereotype reminiscent of Sanders’s stuffy Brit in Last Voyage and perhaps an indication of distrust of Europeans on Stone’s part. Stalked to the point of madness, Doris nonetheless clocks in at her job and ends up piloting a passenger plane after the cockpit crew’s been shot. Absurd without apology, Julie — like so much of Stone’s oeuvre — is a compelling ride from start to finish.

Both Julie and Cry Terror! are now available on DVD-R from Warner Archive.

“Smart people don’t live here”

Click to enlarge

Flagrantly anti-capitalist, regarding the police as power-driven fascists and the clergy as money-grubbing hypocrites, Edge of Doom (1950) underlines the bleakness of its noir backdrop by casting Dana Andrews and Farley Granger — two faces wrought with quiet desperation, anxiety and decadence — as, respectively, a “two-fisted” parish priest and a young delivery boy whose rather unhealthy fixation on mom gets him into very hot water. He lives in a low-rent shithole where Paul Stewart’s in a jam with his bookie and Adele Jergens is the local talent looking to get laid. There’s a murder plot that becomes something of a red herring once we’re hit with all the sour allusions to back-stabbing employers, bullies with badges, and a cranky old monsignor who, in all truth, deserves a good beating. I won’t reveal what the murder weapon is, but I’d be surprised if the Catholic Legion of Decency didn’t slap this with a “C” rating (for “condemned”). Based on a novel I’ve never read by Leo Brady, the hard-as-nails screenplay was written by Philip Yordan, with a tacked-on (and tacky) framing device — Andrews having tea with a young priest questioning his value in this urban hell — whipped up by Ben Hecht. A Sam Goldwyn production, it’s directed by Mark Robson, and it may be the best film I’ve seen by him yet. You can watch it now via Netflix Instant. Suggested co-feature: Give Us This Day (1949).

Dead stylish

Above, an interesting montage from The Pyjama Girl Case (1977), a scene of the public invited to look over the charred remains of an unknown murder victim in the hopes of establishing an identification — a weird situation inspired by the real-life crime the film is (very) loosely based on. The catchy club music was composed by Riz Ortolani (whose song “More” from the film Mondo Cane was, in my youth, piped over every supermarket and elevator PA system in the country). Seasoned with ‘moments of hallucinatory clarity’ (I may trademark that), it was originally released in Italy as La Ragazza dal Pigiama Giallo (“the girl in the yellow pyjamas”) and co-stars former King of Paramount Ray Milland (who pumps the ‘high-sign’ at a chronic masturbator), former Mr. Audrey Hepburn Mel Ferrar, and Dalila Di Lazzaro as the damsel in perpetual distress. You can watch it now @ Netflix.