kennethwright2612 Reviews

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Bad to the bones!

[19 March 2003]

WARNING: SPOILERS ALL THE WAY!

A splendidly entertaining exploitation chiller, constructed with cheerful contempt for the intelligence of its presumed teens-on-a-hot-date audience. I imagine it fulfilled more than adequately its generic purpose of making the girls scream and grab on to their boyfriends, but what distinguishes it from hundreds of scare shows of equally modest ambitions is its magnificent disdain - even by the standards of the genre - for plotting, structure, character, realism, consistency, and plausibility. Here are a few of its more noticeable liberties - and note that I don't call them "goofs". That would suggest that director William Castle and scriptwriter Robb White gave a tinker's cuss about whether it all made sense or not...

1) The title - neither the house nor the hill is haunted. 2) Exterior and interior matching - the house is a boldly modernist design (by Frank Lloyd Wright, apparently), but all the fittings and furnishings are junkshop Victoriana. 3) How come a house built in the 1930s isn't wired for electricity? 4) And if it isn't, what magic power controls the time-locked outer doors and gates? 5) Why does the script stipulate the lack of electricity, anyway? It doesn't have any plot significance at all. 6) In a story with only seven characters, three of them have no function in the plot - and one of them hardly gets to say a word. 7) How come, years after someone was murdered in it, that hole in the cellar floor is still full of acid? Poor housekeeping? 8) Ever tried making a rope coil up by pushing it from one end? 9) If no-one could get out of the house, how did villainess Carol Ohmart manage to appear outside Carolyn Craig's bedroom window? 10) Floating at least one storey off the ground, at that? 11) How did Vincent Price's wife know he would invite her lover (whom he shows no sign of having met before) to the party? 12) And how did Price know about their fiendishly complicated plot to bump him off in time to construct a still more fiendishly complicated plot of his own? 13) Both of these plots - just to be picky - require the unwitting co-operation of another guest whom none of the three principals has ever met before the party ... 14) ... and one of them requires a hysterical girl, who's never handled a gun before, to shoot a man dead, quite spontaneously and purely out of fright. Is her real name Annie Oakley? 15) How does the scary old housekeeper pull that glide-across-the-floor stunt? Does that long black dress conceal a unicycle? 16) And if the butler wanted to encourage Carolyn Craig to get out of the house, was there no way less oblique then menacing her from around a door with a rubber werewolf mitt? 17) And then he locks her and everyone else inside the house anyway... 18) Another murder method I wouldn't care to rely on: scaring someone with a plastic skeleton and hoping she won't notice it's moving on ropes you could use to dock an aircraft carrier, but run away from it - backwards - into that convenient vat of acid. There should have been a preparatory line in the script about how she'd lost her glasses, like Velma in Scooby Doo. 19) And another one, laying the foundations for the same scene, making casual mention of Price's prowess as an amateur ventriloquist. 20) Why couldn't Price - a millionaire industrialist - just have shot the guilty couple out of hand and hired a good lawyer?

Well, I'm glad he didn't, because that wouldn't have made half as delightful a film. House on Haunted Hill isn't the way it is through ineptitude, nor is it a spoof, nor is it a pioneering post-modernist essay in the so-bad-it's-good aesthetic. It's just a piece of strictly functional, disarmingly honest film-making that goes beyond mere unpretentiousness to deliberate disregard for craft, professionalism and sense - because it knows it doesn't need them. William Castle cuts to the chase and doesn't care how he gets there. His audience didn't care, either. Like me, though probably in a different way, they were too busy having fun.

The Devil Commands (1941)

Don't open that door!

[8/10 · 21 February 2003]

Corny and cliche'd as The Devil Commands may look to the superficial gaze, it's a powerful expression of the inextinguishable and far from trivial human wish to believe that death is not the end and that the dead we loved are not forever lost to us. Karloff starred in a whole sub-genre of films on this theme from the middle 1930s to the early 1940s (cf The Invisible Ray, Before I Hang, The Man They Could Not Hang, etc), invariably as a misunderstood scientific genius, embittered by tragedy or injustice, whose desire to conquer death clashes fatally with the prerogatives of the Almighty.

Whether one believes in an afterlife or not, it would be a coarsely reductionist mind that could consider the subject ridiculous. What gives these films (and this one in particular) their eerily modernist slant on the matter lies in the way they reflect the public's awe of science in the first half of the twentieth century, when astonishing developments such as radio and television (and that weird form of immortality, the motion picture), made it seem believable that technology might solve the supernatural as well as the physical mysteries. It is worth remembering in this context that the contemporary electrical wizards Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, classical Mad Scientists both, attempted to build machines with which to talk to the dead.

In this morbidly obsessive cinematic byway The Devil Commands stands out as one of the most insidiously poignant and nearly blasphemous films of its kind, sailing very close to the emotional and spiritual wind in its depiction of Karloff's bizarre attempts to communicate with his dead wife. As a mad-scientist entertainment it contains some of the most magnificently deranged laboratory scenes ever filmed, surpassed in this context only by James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride Of Frankenstein. I still succumb to its mournful fascination. And if your first viewing doesn't scare you half to death, you can't be more than half alive.

Zig Zag (1970)

There was more to the 1970s than funny hair and leisurewear

[7/10 · 14 February 2003]

From the perspective of 2003, the saddest thing about this very downbeat picture is that it could never get made as a commercial production these days - certainly not with a middle-aged and far from beautiful character player in the lead. Although its structure relies on two large implausibilities, the story, characters and motivations are unashamedly adult and human: Zigzag takes life seriously, and when was the last mainstream picture you saw that did that?

The versatile and sympathetic heavy George Kennedy (if I'm ever on a passenger plane that's in trouble, I'd want him at the controls) gives an honest, understated performance as a flawed family man who takes a desperate road to a strange kind of redemption. The way he does that would have made a terrific lower-depths 1940s noir for a second-division star like Dana Andrews or Edmond O'Brien, but Zigzag loses nothing from its setting in the less obviously cinematic milieu of respectable lower-middle-class life in an up-and-up America that was just beginning to turn Dayglo.

I don't say it's a neglected classic - there's not the slightest touch of humour, the supporting cast aren't trying very hard, and the look of the film is reminiscent of an old episode of Kojak (so are most of the actors). Zigzag is just a solid piece of grown-up dramatic entertainment whose modest ambitions are positively Shakesperean compared to almost anything you could get insulted by at your local multiplex this weekend.

Carlito's Way (1993)

The best gangster movie of 1935

[9/10 · 23 January 2003]

****WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD****



Whoever said they don't make them like they used to obviously never saw Brian de Palma's loving and totally non-ironic homage to the great Warner Brothers bullet ballets of yore. Al Pacino's Carlito - a good bad guy who wants to go straight but isn't allowed to ("Just when I'm trying to get out, they drag me back in!", as he said in Godfather III) - would have been a natural for the young James Cagney, much of whose exhilarating on-screen vitality Pacino shares. De Palma as usual devotes most of his attention and talent to the action set-pieces (especially the joltingly violent pool-room shoot-out and the tour-de-force chase sequence through Grand Central Station), not saving much for the sometimes very lazily handled bits that go in between, but gangster aficionados won't care about that.

Tell you how good a movie this is: when Carlito Brigante got whacked in the final scene, the girl sitting next to me in the cinema gasped "Oh, no!" and nearly started crying. Not the most sophisticated reaction in the world, but a more telling guide to a film's powers of emotional engagement than 100 blase reviews in the New Yorker. If you're too smart to enjoy Carlito's Way, you're too smart.

The Dead (1987)

Does justice to a sublime original

[9/10 · 23 January 2003]

A rare exception to the rule that great literature makes disappointing films, John Huston's beautiful farewell to life and the movies is almost entirely true to the narrative and the spirit of James Joyce's short story, a tender meditation on love, death and time expressed in the events of a Twelfth Night party in middle-class Dublin circa 1910. Unpromising as the material might appear, the film succeeds by its willingness to tell the story on its own quiet, apparently inconsequential terms, rather than force a conventional cinematic shape of plot points and dramatic incidents upon it. Only once is the wrong note struck, when old Miss Julia (a trained singer and music teacher whose voice is supposed to have been cracked by age, not shattered) sings so badly that the audience burst out laughing when I saw this at the cinema. Fortunately, the mood of hushed and gentle melancholy is re-established in plenty of time for the moment of revelation between the married couple Gabriel and Gretta Conroy in a hotel bedroom as snow begins to fall outside. It's a sad story, I suppose, but the kind that leaves you feeling better, not blue. Especially recommended as a date movie - for people in love who aren't frightened of confronting the sweetness and sadness of life.

Fedora (1978)

Keep young and beautiful!

[8/10 · 23 January 2003]

Billy Wilder revisits the territory of his Hollywood Babylon classic Sunset Boulevard, with the same male lead (William Holden) in an almost identical role as a washed-up screenwriter trying to get to a reclusive and mysteriously ageless one-time screen queen in order to pitch her a comeback script. Story elements include Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and (off-screen) the many mad-doctor yarns of the 1930s and 1940s in which Boris Karloff messes about with Things We Were Never Meant To Know. Looks great in a brittle and glitzy 1970s way, as befits its scornfully depicted international-rich-white-trash milieu. Essentially it's a sombre but humanistic sermon on the hopeless worship of physical youth and beauty: as a medieval English writer put it, "who sows hope in the flesh reaps bones". A very relevant film for our narcissistic times, its only big flaw is that it's a mighty chilly piece of work, easier to admire than to love.

The Killing (1956)

A classic caper

[8/10 · 23 January 2003]

Stanley Kubrick's best and least pretentious film, largely because - unlike all his other work, with the exception of Paths of Glory - it has human beings in it. The choice of a formulaic genre, that of the Heist Gone Wrong, leaves no room for ponderous pseudo-significance and forces his creativity into the more interesting areas of character, motivation, and cinematic narrative. Sterling Hayden's personal disillusionment with the whole business of movies gives a melancholy integrity to his performance as the world-weary leader of the gang; Elisha Cook elicits true sympathy as the weakling of the mob, a decent little man who's in above his head in both love and crime. Kubrick's trademark brilliance in shot selection, montage and show-not-tell story development were never put to more entertaining use.

On the Waterfront (1954)

Utterly despicable

[1/10 · 23 January 2003]

It's bad enough to be a fink, and worse not to be ashamed of it - but to tell the world you're proud to be a fink . . . that's lower than a snake's vest pocket. Director/screenwriter Elia Kazan was one of many (including Waterfront actors Karl Malden and Lee J Cobb) who ratted their left-wing movie buddies out to the pathetic drunk Senator Joe McCarthy and the idiotically named House Un-American Activities Committee, ruining many lives and careers, but he was unique in making a film about what a hero he was for doing it. Let's remember that Kazan's victims in real life weren't gangsters, like Johnny Friendly and company, but idealistic, law-abiding citizens who were exercising their thoroughly American freedoms of speech, belief and association - people who, right or wrong, wanted the world to be better than it is.

Politics and morals aside, simply as a motion-picture entertainment On the Waterfront is wildly overrated, and I thought so even when I was a kid who knew nothing about the facts behind the story. Marlon Brando overbalances the film (as he does every film he's ever been in) with his faux-heroic idealisation of Terry Malloy, one of the long line of sullen, self-pitying egotists in whose portrayal he specialises. You could kick most of Brando's characters for an awfully long time before you got tired. With a star a little less in love with himself, and capable of a more nuanced performance, Waterfront would be a watchable enough 1950s lowlife drama, the run of what was a pretty enjoyable mill. But as a classic, it isn't remotely a contender.

Force of Evil (1948)

Top Marx!

[23 January 2003]

McCarthy blacklist victim Abraham Polonsky's angry and poetic film noir is perhaps the most candidly subversive picture ever made in a commercial genre, almost explicitly equating capitalism with crime in the metaphor of the numbers racket. It belongs on the face of it to the post-war-disillusionment school of American thrillers (eg The Blue Dahlia, Key Largo), in which the evils that ordinary Joes spent the war fighting turn out to be business as usual when they get back home. But what makes it so unusual is its insistence, contrary to the message of other social-comment crime thrillers of the 1940s, that it's a bad system, rather than bad people, that's to blame for the woes of the world. The fate of Mob lawyer John Garfield's decent, kind-hearted brother Thomas Gomez, a small-time policy banker, shows us what happens to good people who try to play straight in a crooked game. If the bad guys in the film turned good, Polonsky implies, they'd only get the same. Polonsky described the source novel, Tucker's People, as "an autopsy on capitalism".

Sermon over: none of the above gets in the way of a raging, doom-laden crime melo that, like a snowball, gets faster and weightier as it barrels along. Superb New York location photography, a vitriolic script, and committed, sincere performances lock our attention to every second of its 81 New York minutes. If it weren't for Gun Crazy (scripted under a front name by another dangerous pinko, Dalton Trumbo), Force of Evil would be the best film noir ever made.

Vampyr (1932)

Pop video connection

[22 January 2003]

Admirers of this film and of the better class of pop promo films may enjoy the video for the Pet Shop Boys' late-1980s single Heart, which pastiches - as well as scenes from Nosferatu and the 1931 Universal film of Dracula - the image in Vampyr in which Grey stares out helplessly from a window in his coffin. (Pet Shop Boys: Videography [1991] [V].) As a four-minute homage to vampire cinema and its time-honoured riffs on love, sex and death, it plays better than a whole lot of feature-length bloodsucker movies I've had the misfortune to witness.