peter-m-koch Reviews

Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth (1998)

This film should be an episode of "American Masters" on PBS

[13 September 2004]

if it isn't, already, and, along with the "Lenny Bruce Performance Film", may become known as the definitive video overview of the life and work of this iconic, visionary, controversial and seminal American artist, satirist and comedian.

Perhaps the one important event in Bruce's life, overlooked by, or perhaps deliberately excluded from, the film, is the near-fatal injury suffered by Bruce's wife, Honey, in a car accident.

It would have been good to see interviewed in the film, people that knew Bruce, that were heard in Larry Josephson's "Modern Times" radio documentary, "Lenny Bruce Remembered", such as Orin Keepnews, Sid Mark, Mort Sahl, Jean Shepherd, Albert Goldman, and Sherman Block, but I suppose one cannot have everything, and it IS Bob Weide's film, not Larry Josephson's. We DO hear from Bruce's mother, wife, and last girlfriend, Lotus Weinstock, in the film, as we do in the radio documentary.

It also would have been good to see and hear Bob Dylan talk about the real-life incident he mentions in his song "Lenny Bruce" :

"I rode with him, in a taxi once, only a mile and a half, seemed like it took a couple of months"

if indeed that did happen, but perhaps that was between the two of them only.

I will close by quoting from the end of Bruce's autobiography. I think the words are Dick Schaap's :

"Finally, one last four-letter word concerning Lenny Bruce : Dead. At forty. That's obscene."

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

Whaddya say we ball it up when we get to Albuquerque ? (spoilers possible)

[8 September 2004]

Thus said the airline pilot to the stewardess in this film, attempting to be charming, before the UFO's appear to them both.

Sadly, this "Albuquerque ball" never takes place, at least not on the screen.

Similarly, the pilot's wife tells him she keeps a pillow next to her in bed to feel, when he's away, so she won't feel so lonely.

The 1987 NYC Film Forum Summer Festival of Sci-Fi Program describes this film as "The Amazing Criswell, Bela Lugosi, Vampira, Tor Johnson, washed-up cowboy actors, and movie-crazy Baptists, in this tale of Earth's invasion by flying hubcaps and paper plates from outer space".

What could be more horrifying than Vampira's tiny wasp waist, and its implicit damage to her abdominal vital and reproductive organs ?

The film even has its own tautology ( a term from logic and philosophy, meaning a statement which, of necessity, is true, and which therefore may seem trivial) :

"Inspector Clay is dead ! He's been murdered ! And one thing's certain ! Someone's responsible !"

Lugosi died in 1956 while this film was being shot. Hence Mrs. Wood's chiropractor taking Lugosi's place, albeit being eight inches taller than Lugosi, etc. I have read that the film was not released until 1959, because Wood could not pay the lab bill to process the film until then.

No, sorry, that was "Plan 9"'s sequel, "Night Of The Ghouls", which is even worse, if you can believe that.

I've always enjoyed the resemblance of Eros and Alien Commander to Neil Sedaka and Truman Capote, respectively, with all that that implies.

The film could also be seen as Wood's version of "The Day The Earth Stood Still", which also concerns extraterrestrials attempting to get Earth's people to take them seriously, acknowledge their existence, and listen and respond to them. There is, of course, no comparison between the two films, and some may see it as nonsense, blasphemy, sacrilege, etc. to even mention them both in the same paragraph.

Perhaps the next step downward would be to mention the corpse-reviving radiation from the Venus Explorer satellite returning to Earth in "Night Of The Living Dead".

I wonder how much of Lugosi's real pain (from narcotic addiction, the pain the narcotic was prescribed for, what had happened to his life, and to his career) is visible in what little we see of him on screen in "Plan 9".

Having seen this film on "Chiller Theater" on Saturday evening as a youngster, and attending Mass the following morning, I could not help but remember, and ponder it, towards the end of the Nicene Creed :

"Ah yes ... Plan Nine ... the resurrection of the dead !"

"And I believe in the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen."

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Don Rickles meets Julia Roberts in the Romero Zone !(spoilers possible)

[24 August 2004]

Those are the two celebrities that Harry and Helen Cooper remind me of.

Specifically, an older, middle-aged, declining Julia Roberts, as she will perhaps be in ten to twenty years, as she's already described herself in the 1999 film "Notting Hill".

I am being subjective in this review, because I think my subjective reactions to, and memories of, this film, are the most unique thing I have to offer about it.

I remember being scared by ads for this film on the radio in November 1968. I think WMCA 570 Khz AM in NYC (home of "The Good Guys") played these ads. They contained horrible, jagged, five note (or chord) piano music, between the spoken words "Night" and "of the Living Dead". The radio ad also contained screams, and the tag line, "The living ... whose bodies are the only food for these ungodly creatures !"

I remember looking at a TV Guide cover while hearing these ads. The cover showed Robert Morse and E.J. Peaker, stars and co-hosts of the ABC variety show, "That's Life" ! The fear I felt from the radio ad made E.J. Peaker's smiling, big-toothed face, surmounted by a blond bangs and pony-tailed hairdo, look horrible and menacing, like that of a vampire. Date that TV Guide cover, and you've dated those radio ads.

I didn't see the film in a theater. Still haven't, to this day. I remember a Reader's Digest article about in, I think, their May 1969 issue. It summarized the film, described how children had been scared by it, urged more caution on the part of parents, and suggested that the then-new G M R X rating system may have been of some help, except that the Walter Reade Organization, the film's distributor, refused to subscribe to this system.

I first saw the film on ABC TV on a Friday night in mid-March 1973. I found it moderately scary, mostly because I saw it at night. I remember listening to the radio after the film was over, and thinking that the discordant vocalizing in War's single "The Cisco Kid", reminded me of the moans of the attacking ghouls in the film. A caller to a radio talk show said he'd just seen the film on TV, and had been sexually aroused by it, urging his fellow listeners to get off in one great orgasm of disgust. The talk show host told him he was sick.

A week later, when I attended college orientation, I saw that the newspaper of my college-to-be, had a brief humorous article about the film, with a photo of the face of the half-eaten "lady upstairs".

To quote Stephen King, in the film, Romero plays many taboos like a virtuoso, to the hilt. Not only of course cannibalism, being burned alive, necrophilia, matricide, patricide, fratricide, and sister-cide, but : a white woman at first apparently alone in a house at night with a black man, and a blond white woman, at that. When Ben puts the unconscious Barbara on a couch, then unbuttons and unbelts her overcoat to help her breathe more easily, does the racist in us ask : is he going to fondle, molest, rape her ? No, he's a man of honor, and too focused on barricading himself into the house to protect himself and Barbara against the marauding ghouls.

The film has a great economy of effect. Romero scares us, not only with the ghouls, but by making the "good guys" look grotesque also. There's Barbara's bulging forehead, high hairline, and weak chin. The black smudge on Harry Cooper's bald pate, that suggests a bullet hole. The sudden successive view of animal heads mounted on a den wall is reminiscent of a later scene, in a museum, in the "Escape Route" segment of the "Night Gallery" pilot TV movie.

In her review of "The Exorcist" for The New Yorker, Pauline Kael commented on the novel it was based on, remarking that, what Blatty did not have his characters do, he had them talk about, thereby providing flip-page torture, cannibalism, sadism, and lycanthropy. Romero does something similar in NOTLD, with the voices of the radio and, later, TV, announcers, speaking of victims showing signs of having been partially devoured (thereby confirming our worst fears concerning the half-eaten face of the lady upstairs, with its exposed eyeball, teeth, and gums, reminiscent of Bert I. Gordon's "The Cyclops") and of the corpse in the morgue from which the limbs had been amputated, which, nonetheless, opened its eyes, and tried to move its trunk.

There is also Ben's story of what happened to him at Beekman's Diner, all the more horrific, because we know its sole audience is the in-shock, and, at best, half-comprehending, Barbara. It also foreshadows Tom and Judy's fate in the ill-fated truck later on.

Speaking of "The Exorcist", junior ghoul Karen Cooper's trowel attack on her mother both prefigures and surpasses Regan MacNeil's attack on her mother in "The Exorcist", albeit without self-mutilation with a crucifix, followed by an invitation to cunnilingus and mother-daughter oral incest. One can't have everything, but, as a bonus and an aside, note the taboos that Blatty played like a virtuoso in HIS novel and film.

Humor ? Sure. Mostly the sheriff, and his numbnuts posse : "Get a club or a torch, beat 'em or burn 'em." "Kill the brain, and you kill the ghoul !" "These ghouls are slow-moving ?" "Yeah, they're dead, they're ... all messed up !"

Unanswered questions : who was the half-eaten lady upstairs, and how did she get there ? Where did all the ghouls that laid siege to the farmhouse come from, and why was there an ever-increasing number of them ? Did they come from the cemetery where Barbara's father was buried ? Did they unearth themselves ? They would have had a long walk ... er, lurch ... from the nearest hospital, morgue, or funeral home, to the abandoned farm house, and would have sought closer victims in adjacent towns and cities first.

American Masters: Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval (1995) Season 10, Episode 1

Rarely can "television" and "genius" be used in the same sentence (spoilers possible)

[18 August 2004]

So said the TV Guide ad for the initial November 29, 1995 broadcast of this wonderful and worthwhile program.

Twilight Zone-style music begins. Clock on wall reads 2:14. Scene is a hospital operating room in which open-heart surgery is being done.

Narrator's voice :

"Submitted for your approval : the man in cardiac crisis is Mr. Rod Serling : writer, producer, and agent provocateur of a certain electronic medium which he helped to create, and which, by way of thanks, kindly ushered him out the door. But that is of no particular concern to him at the moment, because this is Saturday, June 28, 1975, [the program said Tuesday, but that is wrong]and, thanks to a million cigarettes, and a heart with its own flair for the dramatic, Mr. Serling is on the cutting edge of infinity. Mr. Rod Serling, who once said, he just wanted to be remembered as a writer, is about to get his wish, in a small town called Yesterday, found on any map ... in The Twilight Zone."

[Heart monitor beeps wildly. Clock ticks. Twilight Zone theme music plays. Rushing up at us, then breaking up, a la Twilight Zone main title :]

ROD SERLING : SUBMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL

The show could have been done any number of ways. I like the way it WAS done, in black and white, as a Twilight Zone episode, because that show was Serling's masterpiece.

The show refers to television as the awkward (or orphaned) stepchild of radio. So I wish mention had been made of Serling's days as a radio staff writer in Cincinatti, Ohio, and of his initial attempt to do "Twilight Zone" on the radio, with script titles like "Panic At Zero Hour" and "The Button Pushers". Serling mentions his quitting the radio station, and why, in "The Mike Wallace Interview", excerpts of which are used in the show.

It would have been good to include mention of Serling's third Emmy, for "The Comedian", on "CBS Playhouse 90", parts of which are used in the show to portray what happens in a studio where live television drama is produced. Parts of "The Man In The Funny Suit", the show about the behind-the-scenes production of "Requiem For A Heavyweight", Serling's second Emmy, is also used in "Submitted For Your Approval"(SFYA).

The explanation of why Serling chose to do "The Twilight Zone" could have been made more direct. The replacement of Hubbell Robinson by James Aubrey as Director of Programming at CBS probably had much to with it, as well as commercial sponsor censorship of, and interference with, meaningful and socially relevant live television drama.

Statements by Serling as to the speed at which he wrote scripts for Twilight Zone, compared to those he wrote for Playhouse 90, were moved from the context in which I had originally seen them, in Marc Scott Zicree's "Twilight Zone Companion", about the beginning of Twilight Zone, to another context, about how Serling was tired of Twilight Zone, and burned out by it, towards its end. This context on SFYA included Serling's statement : "It's a schedule in which, if I stop to pick up a pencil I've dropped, I'm two weeks behind !" and relevant excerpts from Twilight Zone's "A Stop At Willoughby".

I thought a distinction should have been made between the "Night Gallery" pilot movie, written and narrated by Serling, from two of the three novellas in his 1967 book, "The Season To Be Wary", the top-rated program of Saturday, November 8, 1969 (its original air date) and starring Roddy McDowall, Ossie Davis, Joan Crawford, Tom Bosley, Richard Kiley, and Sam Jaffe, and the "Night Gallery" TV series, which Serling complained so bitterly and vehemently, and so rightly so, about.

Use might have been made in "SFYA" of the "curious triad", mentioned by Zicree in his "Twilight Zone Companion", formed by three Serling teleplays :

"Patterns" (Kraft Television Theater) : a bright young executive on his way up faces a future of challenges and successes. This play made Serling famous overnight as a television dramatist.

"Walking Distance" (from The Twilight Zone's first season) : Older, more thoughtful, having achieved some measure of success, Serling, as Martin Sloan, experiences a bittersweet longing for the bygone days of his youth.

"They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar"(Emmy-nominated, from "Night Gallery") : An older man, his chief successes now a thing of the past, longs for the days in which he achieved them, unhappy in an uncaring present, in which "he is hustled to death in the daytime and dies of loneliness at night".

Serling's younger daughter, Anne, adapted two of her father's Twilight Zone teleplays, "One For The Angels" and "The Changing Of The Guard", into short stories for the Avon 1985 paperback, "Twilight Zone : The Original Stories". Excerpts from these two Twilight Zone teleplays were used in "SFYA" to illustrate Serling's character, and his fears about himself becoming a has-been, unloved, unwanted, and unremembered.

Closing narration : (ending music from TZ's "Walking Distance" plays in background, with end of "One For The Angels" on screen, in which pitchman Lew Bookman walks into the distance with Mr. Death)

"Some achievements can be measured in Nielsen ratings, and some neatly summarized on a balance sheet. A word to the wise : ordinary benchmarks cannot be used to measure artistry. Case in point : Mr. Rod Serling : occupation : writer. A modern-day Aesop, who, by tickling our imaginations, slipped a little wisdom into our pockets, and then, slipped away, a little too early. Perhaps an appointment to keep ... in the Twilight Zone."

Blood Money (1957 TV Movie)

Original 11 October 1956 teleplay superior to 1962 film, overall (spoilers possible)

[11 August 2004]

The version of the 1962 film I have seen, taped off WNET Channel 13 in spring 1994, lacks one of the trainer, Army's, strongest speeches, rendered very movingly by Ed Wynn in the live 1956 teleplay :

Army (to Maish) : What is this kid to you, huh ? A hunk of flesh ? A cross to bear ? (in Maish's face) : Listen to me ! I'll tell you what he is ! He's a decent man, with a heart ! He's somebody's flesh and blood ! You can't sell this on the street by the pound ! (crying)'Cause if you do, Maish, if you do, you'll rot in hell for it ! Ya hear me ! You'll rot !

Later, more quietly :

Army : Why is it, Maish, tell me, why is it that so many people have to feed off of one guy's misery. Tell me, Maish, doesn't it make you want to die ?

These lines would have been incredibly powerful, delivered by Mickey Rooney, who could have, and to some extent, did, give the role of Army, to use Rod Serling's words, a grittiness and toughness that Ed Wynn just didn't have to give it.

The TV teleplay has the washed-up boxer, Mountain McClintock, played so well by Jack Palance, escape the "graveyard" of punchy ex-boxers in the sports bar in the seedy hotel, and the humiliation of "fixed" championship wrestling.

The film, with Anthony Quinn as Mountain Rivera, ends with Rivera becoming a phony wrestler, a clown, and laughing stock, a much more pessimistic ending, which says that money DOES have the power to rob a man of his last remaining shred of dignity.

The film has the dark, urban cinematography of many episodes of "The Twilight Zone", and is cleaner and sharper than the kinescope of the TV play, but perhaps the original live broadcast of the TV play was sharp and clear as well.

If anyone knows of a technique whereby kinescopes of TV plays can be restored to the clarity of their original live broadcast, please comment.

I prefer the pathos of Palance as Mountain McClintock, his shy, hesitant, yet clear way of speaking, to the labored, wheezing diction of Quinn as Rivera. Similarly, I prefer Kim Hunter to Julie Harris as the social worker who tries to help Mountain escape the degradation and living death of the professional fight business, though both actresses did a fine job. Kim Hunter's costume became softer and more feminine in the teleplay, going from the initial meeting with Mountain in her office, to her one-on-one meetings with him in the sports bar, and on the street.

The film, however, has a confrontation between the social worker, and Mountain's manager, Maish, that the teleplay does not have. The teleplay, however, has a dialogue between the social worker and Army, Mountain's handler, that the film does not have.

I think Edgar Stehli's performance as the doctor in the teleplay was stronger than the one in the film, with its mention of, "Where do you buy your cigars, Maish ? Tell me, and I'll condemn the store !", live and dead ones, "you, too, can become pathological", meat inspection, stamping carcasses, and "Joker ? Who's laughing ?"

However, I find Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney in the film to be a much starker character and physiognomy contrast, and much stronger character definition, than father and son Ed and Keenan Wynn in the teleplay.

Playhouse 90 (1956–1961)

Correction to my previous comment (spoilers possible)

[2 August 2004]

After having once again watched both the 1959 "Mike Wallace Interview" with Rod Serling, and the PBS bio of Serling, "Submitted For Your Approval", I now see that it was "Noon On Doomsday", Serling's first attempt to dramatize the tragic 1955 Emmett Till case, from the U.S. Steel Hour, that Serling was referring to in the "Mike Wallace Interview", as a "weak, lukewarm, emasculated, vitiated (not eviscerated, although that would, arguably, be appropriate) kind of play." It was "Noon On Doomsday" that was moved to New England, and "A Town Has Turned To Dust" that was moved to the American Southwest, with Emmett Till becoming "a romantic Mexican, who loved the sheriff's wife, but only with his eyes". It was still a story about a lynching, and about a sheriff who did nothing to prevent it, but it was so far removed from the true story of Emmett Till so as to be almost meaningless.

It was Serling's battle with the sponsors over "A Town Has Turned To Dust" that was mentioned and dramatized on the PBS bio of Serling, showing closeups of key words from executive memos, "eliminate", "modify" etc. with Serling, dramatized, saying, "They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer" along with a short clip from the play itself.

I am not sure to what extent "A Town Has Turned To Dust" led to the later Twilight Zone episode, "Dust", if at all. Both are set in the American Southwest and include Mexicans as characters.

Pressure Point (1962)

Sidney Poitier's punch line (spoilers possible)

[30 July 2004]

What follows is the approximate wording of the Sidney Poitier character's rebuttal to the racism and anatagonism of the American Nazi played by Bobby Darin :

"Now let me tell you something ! This is my country ! This is where I've done what I've done ! And if there were a million cruds like you, all sick like you, all shouting down, "Destroy ! Degrade !", and, if there were twenty million more sick enough to listen to you, you are still gonna lose, because there is something in this country, so big, so strong, that you don't even know, that can take it from all of you and still nail you into the ground ! You are walking out of here but YOU ARE GOING NOWHERE ! NOW GET OUT ! GET OUT !"

One more similarity between the Bobby Darin character and the American neo-Nazi in the Twilight Zone episode "He's Alive" is that both say that a man must act according to what he believes. The Darin character adds that, if he doesn't, either he's no good, or his beliefs are no good.

This is not to suggest that Serling plagiarized the movie script or even the central idea, but to show the strengths in both stories by showing their similarities.

Playhouse 90 (1956–1961)

"In The Presence Of Mine Enemies" was the last CBS "Playhouse 90"(spoilers possible)

[29 July 2004]

Written by Rod Serling, and originally aired on May 18, 1960, it was perhaps the first television play, with the possible exception of Abby Mann's "Judgment At Nuremburg", to deal meaningfully with the Nazi holocaust. Serling said he researched it eight months before writing it. Charles Laughton was memorable in it as Rabbi Adam Heller, as was a young Robert Redford as Sergeant Lutz, a sympathetic Nazi soldier, and George Macready as his superior, who explains to him the nation-unifying "morality of hating Jews."

The character of the sympathetic Nazi soldier aroused the ire of Leon Uris, author of "Exodus", who called the play "the most disgusting dramatic presentation in the history of live television", and demanded that CBS publicly apologize for it, then burn the negative of it. Hopefully, CBS did not do this. Charles Beaumont, one of Serling's fellow Twilight Zone mainstays, remarked drily in response to Uris' demand, that "book burning was a favorite hobby of the late Herr Goebbels [Hitler's minister of propaganda ?]."

I discussed this play with a good Jewish friend of mine, whose late mother was a holocaust survivor, and she said that her mother had said that there were both kind and cruel Nazi soldiers in the camps she was in.

The PBS biography of Rod Serling, "Submitted For Your Approval", in the American Masters series, used "In The Presence ..." to epitomize and dramatize the death of live television drama.

"In The Presence Of Mine Enemies" was re-done in 1997, with Armin Mueller-Stahl in the role of rabbi Adam Heller, and aired, I think, on HBO on Sunday April 20, 1997.

I think "Noon On Doomsday", on the U.S. Steel Hour, may have been Rod Serling's first attempt to dramatize the tragic Emmett Till case. Next, of course, as noted elsewhere, he wrote "A Town Has Turned To Dust", then his script promptly turned to dust. As Serling himself said of the network sponsors and censors, "They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer." He discussed this at length with Mike Wallace on "The Mike Wallace Interview" in 1959 shortly before undertaking "The Twilight Zone", admitting that he went along with the censorship, "all the way", albeit fighting, thinking, in some strange, oblique, philosophical way, that it was better to say something, than nothing at all, yet admitting that his original powerful script had become a "weak, lukewarm, emasculated, eviscerated" play.

It is quite true, as previously commented by F Gwynplaine MacIntyre, of Wales, that it was precisely this type of sponsor interference that led Serling to undertake "The Twilight Zone" : make it Martians and robots, instead of Republicans and Democrats, put it in the future, it'll get by the sponsors, but the viewing public will still get the moral point of the story. Thus, "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" was a covert indictment of the McCarthy-led Communist witch hunt in the USA of the early 1950's.

There was a remake of "A Town Has Turned To Dust" on the Sci Fi Channel on June 27 1998, starring Ron Perlman of "Beauty And The Beast", but it came nowhere near the raw power Serling's original script must have had, and which, to my knowledge, has never been filmed in its original form.

Nor has "Color Scheme", the second novella in Serling's 1967 book, "The Season To Be Wary", which, to quote the jacket copy, "recounts the life and times of King Connacher, who makes his living on the stump circuit, preaching the lynching gospel, only to find himself one night the victim of an extraordinary case of mistaken identity." Connacher finds he has become black, after a near fatal car crash, and falls prey to the white lynch mob he had incited to violence earlier with one of his speeches. The nadir of that violence was the burning of a black pastor's home, and the resulting death by fire of his four-year-old daughter. While Connacher has become black, this black pastor has also, inexplicably, become white.

Understandably, Serling wrote of "Color Scheme", by way of introduction : "TV wouldn't touch it." Duh !

I have owned "The Comedian", also written by Rod Serling, and his third Emmy, and starring Mickey Rooney, from CBS "Playhouse 90", since mid-June 1996. It is in the "Golden Age Of Television" series on Rhino / Fantasy home video. "Requiem For A Heavyweight", also from Playhouse 90 (Serling's second Emmy)is also apparently in this series, which seems to date from as far back as the early 80's. WNET-13 Newark NJ aired the original kinescope of "Requiem" the night of Wednesday November 29, 1995, right after its initial airing of the PBS Serling bio, "Submitted For Your Approval". The videos have an opening segment in which the actors and directors involved in the play give their thoughts and perspectives on it, decades after it was produced live. Jack Klugman introduces "Requiem", and Carl Reiner introduces "The Comedian".

Needless to say, given the above, and what others have posted about this series, CBS Playhouse 90 cannot, I think, ever be praised too highly, or too much, or perhaps even enough. To quote another poster, it "was and is drama at its best".

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

A few comments, then a comparison of this film with the novel it was based on (spoilers possible)

[28 July 2004]

I liked the music, by Paul Sawtell and Burt Shefter, reminiscent, in one passage, of their music for "It ! The Terror From Beyond Space !"

(alternating woodwind chords) but disliked the clumsy, intrusive "ghostly chorus" vocalizing. Hearing it was like being elbowed in the ribs, and told, un-necessarily, "This is scary ! Now be scared !" similar to canned laughter on a TV sitcom.

Good internal monologue at the beginning :

"How long ? How many days, since I inherited the world ?"

"I can't live a heartbeat from hell, and be careless."

Here are ways the film went "beyond" the novel ("I Am Legend") that it was based on : Morgan watches old home movies, providing a good segue into the flashback sequences. He goes from laughter to tears. In the novel, Neville watches Laurel and Hardy one-reelers, first laughing lightly, then explosively, when he notices the resemblance between hardy and Ben Cortman : "He couldn't stop laughing, because it was more than laughter, it was release." Good insight into how humor asserts itself, even in the most gruesome and heartbreaking situations, like Van Helsing's mention of "King Laugh" in the Bram Stoker novel, "Dracula".

"Later, he cried."

Morgan (Neville) and Cortman work together at research on the plague, rather than the unspecified "plant" of the novel. This enables some dialogue about the plague. Later, Cortman, in the film, barricades himself in his house, out of a superstitious fear of vampires.

In the film, Morgan is attacked immediately after leaving the crypt where his wife lies. In the novel, Neville is attacked by his "neighbors" outside his home.

In the film, Cortman breaks in, attacks Ruth, which gets Morgan outside to face the "Council Of Justice". In the novel, Cortman only gets in when Neville lets him in, to experiment on him.

In the film, plague victims go blind right before they die, echoing 1962's "The Day Of The Triffids". Also, Morgan cures Ruth with a transfusion of his blood, making his death seem even more senseless than in the novel. (This also happens with Neville and Richie, the black teen, in "The Omega Man".) Morgan dies on a church altar, ironically staked, just like the vampires he hunted, like a modern-day Christ, whose blood can save mankind, if not from eternal damnation, then at least from the mobile living death of vampirism. This final scene in the church is like a funeral mass, with the "new people" (the infected living) dressed in black. The crying baby heard right before "The End" looms onto the screen suggests that the new people have already begun to reproduce themselves.

Here are ways in which the film fell short of the novel :

There are no scenes at the peephole, of Neville/Morgan sexually enticed by female vampires "striking lewd postures" to coax him into coming out. This could have been done even in 1964. Witness Hazel Court nearly popping out of the top of her dress in "The Raven". There is no portrayal of the wild revival meeting Robert Neville stumbles into, nor any interior monologue about why vampires fear the cross. More generally, the film portrays only sketchily and incompletely Neville's research, and the important "scientific detective story" element of the novel.

Here is my rewrite of a key sentence in the novel :

"Once they [plague victims] had been forced to accept vindication of a dread brought about by dire preaching, closely associated with an object [the cross] that had been a focal point of worship, their minds could have snapped. Dread of the cross sprang up."

Also, the film does not show Morgan staking children, or experimenting on women, as Neville did in the novel. The former is the most unbearable part of Neville's daily routine ("Why do they all look like Kathy to me ? he asked himself, as he drew out the next stake, with shaking hands.") The latter gives Neville cause for some inner dialogue and soul-searching about his sexual desires, which he then pushes aside.

Finally, I do not think the film has Morgan telling Ruth "in a terrible voice" how he had to put a stake through his own wife, after trying to keep her with him, and finding all she wanted to do was drink his blood.

Pressure Point (1962)

Sidney Poitier meets Bobby Darin in "The Twilight Zone" (spoilers possible)

[28 July 2004]

I find an interesting and significant parallel between "Pressure Point" and "Twilight Zone", specifically, the "Twilight Zone" episode, "He's Alive". Ernest Gold's score, using high, quavering theremin, to suggest insanity and panic, is extremely reminiscent of Van Cleave's music for the TZ episode, "Perchance To Dream", enough to make me check that Van Cleave and Gold were not one and the same (they're not !) The dark, urban, high contrast cinematography of the film is also very Twilight-Zone like.

The first anti-Jewish speech that the Darin character is shown listening to has an odd Twilight-Zonish twist in it : "They [Jews] want to take the nails and crucify him all over again !" At first you think he's talking about Jesus Christ, and is about to denounce Jews as "Christ-killers", but then you hear he's really talking about Adolf Hitler ! It's like in "The Twilight Zone" when you learn that "To Serve Man" is a cookbook !

Both "Pressure Point" and "He's Alive" are both, at least in part, a dialogue between two men : an American Nazi, and a man who represents Judeo-Christian morality. Both American Nazis were abused children, "slammed" around by drunken fathers, with cowardly, weak, and/or mentally absent mothers. Both, as children and as adults, "cry on the couches of" the men representing morality. In "Pressure Point", it is the couch of the prison psychiatrist played so well by Poitier. In "He's Alive", it is the living room couch of Ernst Ganz, an elderly Jewish concentration camp survivor, played by Austrian actor Ludwig Donath, who lets Peter Vollmer, the young American neo-Nazi, played by Dennis Hopper, stay the night in his home, however much he despises Peter's views.

Both American Nazis boast, "There's no stopping us !", but both are stopped, and told so, by the men representing morality. The prison psychiatrist tells the Darin character, "We stopped you, didn't we ?". Later, when the Darin character wheedles his way out of the prison on parole, by being a model prisoner, the doctor roars at him, "You can walk out of here, but you are going NOWHERE ! NOW GET OUT !" He does, and is later hanged for beating a stranger to death. Ganz tells Vollmer, after denouncing him before his previously rapt audience, "An old man stopped you tonight, with a few words. He stopped you with the truth !"

In an odd coincidence, actor Howard Caine appears in both stories. In "Pressure Point", he is the bartender / owner in whose bar the Darin character and his construction crew play their destructive game of "Tic Tac Toe". In "He's Alive", Caine plays Nick Bloss, a devoted but none-too-bright neo-Nazi, whom Peter Vollmer orders loyal deputy Frank to murder, so as to make a martyr out of him for their movement to advance.

Both "Pressure Point" and "He's Alive" de-construct Nazism by showing it capturing, and being a haven for, immature, insecure, desperate, and mentally and emotionally unstable people. In the words of Ernst Ganz in "He's Alive" : "Problem children ! Sick, sad neurotics, who take applause like a needle !" The psychiatrist played by Poitier repeatedly uses the term "psychopath" in referring to the Nazis.

There is an explanation of the dynamic of ever-growing American Nazi membership in both "Pressure Point" and "He's Alive". In the film, it is the Darin character explaining to the black psychiatrist how members bring other members, with ever-increasing financial support. In the TZ episode, it is Vollmer's shadowy advisor and benefactor explaining how to move and excite a mob.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

Ataje De La Mujera De 15 Metros (Aviso : los spoileros es possible !)

[23 July 2004]

My title is to emphasize that my recent interest in this film was triggered by seeing it on TeleMundo 13 months ago. I got more than I bargained for : a conversion to metric units, as well as a small Spanish lesson (I know much of the dialogue in this film by heart).

For me, one of the scarier moments in this film, is not only the sight of the ugly nurse screaming when she sees that Nancy Archer has become a giant, as has been commented already, but the concurrent hissing exclamation from Dr. Cushing :

"ASSSSSSSSSSStounding rate of growth !!!"

One of the better working sequences of this film is when Jess, the butler, and Sheriff Dubbitt, venture into the spherical spacecraft (or is it a funhouse, with its hissing, dry ice vapor jets, and distorting transparent globes ?) and peer into said globes, which distort their faces into grotesque circular images, reminiscent of the head and face of the Martian leader in another cult classic film, the original "Invaders From Mars". Sheriff Dubbitt's ugly, over-intense, scrunched-up, thin-lipped "cross face" (that's the best I can describe what I mean)in close-up can be almost as frightening as the similar thin-lipped face of Paul Birch in "Not Of This Earth", or, more recently, the grim, bloodless thin-lipped face of Rich Cooper in "American Beauty" and "October Sky". Then, of course, the butler's and sheriff's sudden reaction of horror and surprise, maintained as they back out of the spacecraft the way they came .... to what ?

We're kept in suspense a little while, then we're allowed to see it's a pale, glowing, transparent, bald, ugly, thirty-foot high, hairy-handed giant, in arm bracelets and Roman soldier under garb, with a bull on his back, who smashes their car, then leaves it to return to his craft, with an expression of disgust on his face, although he's just handled wet sticky turds of dog waste, or something equally unpleasant.

There's also a bit of unease and sense of menace as the equally ugly Dr. Heinrich Van Loeb discusses the blue-green color around the scratches on Mrs. Archer's throat, and utters the dread word "radiation" : the "baddie" in so many of those 50's monster B flicks with Cold War-nuclear threat subtexts.

I think it's been commented already that Yvette Vickers, who plays the slatternly mistress of Harry, Honey Parker, was Playboy's "Beat" Playmate of July 1959, photographed by Russ Meyer, of "Vixen" et al fame. I had the good fortune to tape this film off TNT's "Best Of The Worst", hosted by Penn and Teller, June 19-20 1993, and Penn has this issue of Playboy, and shows its centerfold to the camera, and, if you use your pause or slow VCR remote button, you can catch a glimpse of Ms. Vickers' derriere before Penn covers it. And that's all there is to see that's not PG, as Ms. Vickers is wearing a shirt in that centerfold shot.

My wife has commented to me on Allison Hayes' resemblance to the pouty, dark, buxom Jane Russell, star of "The Outlaw", and other 1950's films.

One can, of course, almost never write enough about such a cinematic anti-masterpiece, so I will end by saying that "Attack" is one of maybe twenty or so 50's B horror films I "grew up" watching on WPIX Chiller Theater, 1961-65. Others are the work of the infamous Edward D. Wood Jr. (himself the subject of a feature film) or of Richard E. Cunha, described in the program of NYC Film Forum's 1989 summer sci-fi and horror festival, as "the poor man's Ed Wood". How apt !

That summer 1989 festival featured a Chiller Theater / Richard E. Cunha triple bill of "Frankenstein's Daughter", "She Demons", and "Giant From The Unknown."

It is perhaps going too far to suggest that "Attack Of The Fifty Foot Woman" served as the inspiration for the latter 1990's film, "In The Company Of Men", even though the unfortunate Nancy Archer is abused and victimized, not only by her gigolo, gold-digger, husband-in-name-only, but also by the pale, ugly, bald etc. thirty-foot giant from outer space. She's treated somewhat better by Deputy Charlie (comic relief in the form of a poor man's Wally Cox : "I can't shoot a lady !) and Jess, her butler, who perhaps should have been her husband in the first place, as even suggested by Harry, her husband, but it's not enough to prevent the doom she eventually suffers.

Queen of Outer Space (1958)

Boccino ! Boccino ! (Little green men !) Dahling ! ... (Possible spoilers)

[20 July 2004]

According to Marc Scott Zicree's "Twilight Zone Companion", screenwriter Charles Beaumont wrote the screenplay of this film as a spoof, problem was, (according to Beaumont)too many people who worked on the film didn't seem to realize it. Perhaps Zsa Zsa Gabor, who played her role in it as straight drama, as noted in another comment, is an example of this.

The scene near the beginning, in which the girlfriend of one of the astronauts watches his rocket take off, after a passionate goodbye clinch with her man, wearing deep red lipstick and a bright green dress, which billows "dramatically" around her from the wind of the takeoff, is reminiscent of the famous and iconic scene of Marilyn Monroe with her skirt billowing up around her while standing on the subway grating, in "The Seven Year Itch".

The surface of "Venus", seen spinning at, and rushing up to, the rocket right before it crashes, is really a photograph of the moon taken from one of the larger Earth-based telescopes - one at Lick Observatory, perhaps ?

The "beta disintegrator" the Queen intends to use to destroy the Earth reminds me of a giant kid's beanie with a propeller on top. The image of Earth as seen from Venus that appears in the weapon's view screen is of fair quality, and may even include some cloud cover.

Like "World Without End", I think this film may have been shown on TV laterally compressed, to fit the wide screen image into a narrower TV screen format without losing any of it. In the case of "World Without End", it made my dad ask me if I'd been fooling with the knobs on the back of the set, when I watched it on TV. Cue the "Outer Limits" control voice :

"There is nothing wrong with your television set ..."

The big fight near the end, which seems to consist of almost the entire cast shoving each other about in an annoyed, girlish way, is what Stephen King referred to in his novel "Christine" as a "pushy pushy" : an expression of annoyance without any serious intent or attempt to inflict harm.

The friend who mentioned this to me, once saw "Queen" on a double bill with the original "Attack Of The Fifty Foot Woman" in a NYC revival cinema. She remarked that the audience was almost as much fun as the film, as it consisted mostly of gay male couples doing Zsa Zsa Gabor impersonations all over each other !

Joe (1970)

Perhaps the ultimate 60's generation gap exploitation film ...

[27 April 2004]

... "Joe" captures the spirit, fears, angers, and prejudices of the time as perhaps no other film does. Joe Curran, as played by Peter Boyle, is a super-malevolent Archie Bunker to the n-th degree. He makes the Carroll O'Connor - Norman Lear TV character seem as lovable and cuddly as Tickle Me Elmo by comparison. In contrast to Bunker, Joe Curran most definitely would burn a cross on your front lawn, instead of just toasting a marshmallow on one he found already burning there, to borrow the words of young Lionel Jefferson, spoken to Sammy Davis Jr. about Archie Bunker. Released hard on the heels of the Kent State University "massacre", and the CSNY track "Ohio", and the Isley Bros. medley of "Ohio" and Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun", it's as hard-hitting as the probably by now mostly forgotten fall 1968 CBS TV play, "The People Next Door". Bill Compton's ironic comment about the vacuity of much upper-echelon white-collar work, "All we do is sit around all day making little paper airplanes and sail them up people's asses !" is as relevant today as it was then. Equally memorable is the retort of the hippie girl Joe has just had sex with, "How could I lie to you ? You just balled me !" Free love as a hippie litmus of truth ? The film is as much a part, and sign of, its times, as Altamont, "Gimme Shelter", "Putney Swope", and "M.A.S.H." and "Patton" playing on the same bill in many theaters in 1971. Joe Curran's "42 % of all liberals are queer !" is a worthy companion prejudice to Archie Bunker's "England is a fag country !"

Joe (1970)

Perhaps the ultimate 60's generation gap exploitation film ...

[27 April 2004]

... "Joe" captures the spirit, fears, angers, and prejudices of the time as perhaps no other film does. Joe Curran, as played by Peter Boyle, is a super-malevolent Archie Bunker to the n-th degree. He makes the Carroll O'Connor - Norman Lear TV character seem as loveable and cuddly as Tickle Me Elmo by comparison. In contrast to Bunker, Joe Curran most definitely would burn a cross on your front lawn, instead of just toasting a marshmallow on one he found already burning there, to borrow the words of young Lionel Jefferson, spoken to Sammy Davis Jr. about Archie Bunker. Released hard on the heels of the Kent State University "massacre", and the CSNY track "Ohio", and the Isley Bros. medley of "Ohio" and Jimi Hendrix's "Machine Gun", it's as hard-hitting as the probably by now mostly forgotten CBS TV play, "The People Next Door". Bill Compton's ironic comment about the vacuity of much upper-echelon white-collar work, "All we do is sit around all day making little paper airplanes and sail them up people's asses !" is as relevant today as it was then. Equally memorable is the retort of the hippie girl Joe has just had sex with, "How could I lie to you ? You just balled me !" Free love as a hippie litmus of truth ? The film is as much a part, and sign of,its times, as Altamont, "Gimme Shelter", "Putney Swope", and "M.A.S.H." and "Patton" playing on the same bill in many theaters in 1971. Joe Curran's "42 % of all liberals are queer !" is a worthy companion prejudice to Archie Bunker's "England is a fag country !"

Psycho (1998)

Here is my idea for the remaking of "Psycho" :

[10 March 2004]

Brian DePalma would direct. He's been trying to remake "Psycho" at least since he did "Sisters" (1973)so I say he should re-do the original. I would cast Melanie Griffith as Marion Crane, because I think she would be as sexy and as believable in the role as Janet Leigh was in the original. I would cast Meg Ryan as her sister, Leila Crane, because I have never seen Griffith and Ryan in the same film, and I think it would be fun. There would also be the resultant irony of Griffith's mother, Tippi Hedren, having played "Melanie Daniels" in the Hitchcock classic, "The Birds". I won't touch the story of Hitch having given 3 or 4 year old Melanie G. a doll inside a coffin as a gift, and the resulting misunderstanding.

I would cast Liam Neeson as Sam Loomis, having thoroughly enjoyed him playing good guys very believably in "Rob Roy" and "Schindler's List".

I would cast John Malkovich as Norman Bates. I think he would make a very scary Norman, based on how scary he was as the evil, psychotic ex-CIA agent in "In The Line of Fire".

I would re-use the original Bernard Herrmann score. I am not sure if the remake should be in black and white or color. A drab, "reduced" color, such as was used in the 1984 version of "1984", with Richard Burton and John Hurt, and 1998's "Saving Private Ryan", might be best.

Hitchcock's "Psycho" is a classic, and a masterpiece that could never be surpassed, or even approached, by any remake, but this DePalma remake I have envisioned here would, I think, have been a far more interesting tribute to the Hitchcock original than Van Sant's remake was.

Sisters (1972)

DePalma's first remake of Hitchcock's "Psycho", is also probably his best.

[9 March 2004]

I don't mean this as a put-down. "Psycho" is a classic, and, as such, is very hard to improve upon. DePalma did this by enlisting the aid of veteran Hitchcock film composer Bernard Herrmann, who also of course did the score for "Psycho". The opening title theme of "Psycho" is tense, jabbing, suggesting flight, but the opening title theme of "Sisters" is frightening, haunting, and taunting, "only" four notes (like the opening two phrases of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony) in a great "nyah nyah" motif, like a child's playground "you can't catch me!" taunt. It is heightened by the repeated gruesome medical slides of Siamese Twins in utero, shown as background to the credits. In the murder scene, DePalma goes several steps beyond Hitchcock's famous shower scene, by showing us the demonic, hate-filled, crazed face of murderess Dominique/Danielle, reminiscent of the Paul Klee painting, "A Girl Possessed", and of Linda Blair in the most advanced stages of possession in "The Exorcist". There is also a witness, neighbor and newspaper columnist Grace Collier, who sees the victim write "Help me" on the window in his own blood. We also see the knife going into the victim's groin. The surprise murder is "provoked" by the victim attempting to surprise Dominique/Danielle with a birthday cake. This is several quantum leaps of grue and shock beyond the shower scene in "Psycho".

I also found the asylum patient who angrily declaims, "That's how I got so sick !", to probing reporter Grace, to be very frightening. In "Psycho", we hear Norman Bates talk about how horrific it is inside a madhouse, and that is scary enough, due to Perkins' marvelous acting, Herrmann's great music, and of course Hitchcock's great directing, but DePalma shows us the madhouse at length, and, in it, reporter Grace silenced, forced to be a patient, parts of her memory temporarily erased. To me, this was reminiscent of the scene in "Rosemary's Baby", in which Rosemary, having gone to Dr. Hill for help, is bullied into silence by Dr. Sapirstein, who threatens to have her committed to an insane asylum, if she says any more about witches or covens.

I won't belabor the obvious parallels to "Psycho" in the opening "Peeping Tom" TV show, and closing bloody couch at the garbage dump.

Neighbors (1971 TV Movie)

I saw "Neighbors" on public TV, summer 1972, and it packed a punch !

[4 March 2004]

I agree with the comment already posted. Besides being similar to "All In The Family", it was also like an inter-racial "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?", also involving two couples, one couple the "guest" of the other, the difference being, the illusions being stripped away (the "game playing") have to do chiefly with racial identity instead of family life. I thought particularly eloquent the black man's cathartic, confessional statement that, while still working in the fields and illiterate, before confessing that his wife, Vikki, taught him to read, he was merely "one jackass behind another". Vikki seems dismayed to the bottom of her soul that her husband has to go through this painful, too-revealing process of self-revelation, yet again, and Cicely Tyson, in playing her, shows this very well.

I find it interesting that the music that the black man dances to, and tries to get his wife, and the white couple, to dance to, as well, is Otis Redding's version of "Satisfaction", a black man's rendition of a blues rock standard composed and popularized by white men (The Rolling Stones)in emulation of black American music. This, rather than music both composed and performed by blacks. It underscores the theme of black-white relations, borrowing, theft, identity, hinting at white men equating being cool with acting black.

I was pleased to find a reference to "Neighbors" on the IMDb, because it was a play I saw only once or twice more than thirty years ago, yet it made such an impression on me. I found myself using the black man's phrase, "I got me one hunk of woman !" for several years afterward when I wanted to come off as tough, cool and macho. I was also pleased to read on IMDb that "Neighbors" was directed by Fielder Cook, who did such a great job directing the ground-breaking Rod Serling teleplay, "Patterns", in 1955.

Speaking of television in the 1950's, I find the presence of Jane Wyatt in "Neighbors" to be welcome, as she had starred alongside Robert Young in one of the classic, iconic "serene and silly" TV family sitcoms of all time, "Father Knows Best".

I thank IMDb for this opportunity to comment on a play I saw so long ago, yet which made such a great impression on me. My thanks to Arkady Leokum, the cast of "Neighbors", and WNET Channel 13, as well.