Boris Karloff’s Thriller 01x34: The Prisoner in the Mirror

I mentioned this episode in passing during the Mummy overview, and then I was like: “Hey me, you should recap that thing. Get back on the horse and so forth.”

Also, as I write this, my internet connection is once again down (I’m pretty sure that every single tree that could fall on a service line has fallen on a service line this year, and there was an actual blizzard last week, and I’m just furious about it), so if there are mistakes, I’m very sorry, I live in the woods and a bear stole my Google.

Thriller is a horror anthology series that’s seen something of a revival in recent years, and rightly so. It’s damn good television. Hosted by an elderly Boris Karloff, it was actually Karloff’s second attempt at getting a show like this off the ground. He did half a season of a “true paranormal” series called The Veil in 1958. Because of production troubles, The Veil was never picked up by a network. It’s not bad, but it’s not Thriller. Even the terrible episodes of Thriller are worth watching.

Today’s story is about notorious magician Cagliostro, played by Henry Daniell, a classic guy-who-was-in-everything of the 30’s and 40’s. He’ll be joined by a guy-who-was-in-everything of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, Lloyd Bochner, along with Mrs. Cunningham herself, Marion Ross, and Patricia Michon.

We begin in Paris, 1910, where a lovely young couple in evening clothes are toasting one another with champagne. The girl is a glittering, smiling blonde who makes you think she’s used to getting diamond bracelets as presents, but there’s no use being angry at her for it. Her date is… off somehow. His face is open and young, and he’s got the look of the earnest sidekick in a teen beach comedy, but his manner is slick, hungry, and crackling at the edges with something sinister. He tries to impress her with magic tricks, first producing a silver coin to her great delight, and then wowing her with a small bouquet of live flowers he seemingly plucks from thin air.

Mummy Movie Mayhem!

To keep a long story short, due to several factors my television recap plans are currently being rejigged. I’ll be looking at some more spooky October-themed movies than originally planned, maybe a couple bonus episodes of OTR, or vintage Donald Duck. I’ll do my best to make it work and try to keep a good balance.

But enough about scheduling hiccups! Let’s talk about something fun, like mummies!

Perhaps you’ve heard the announcement that Tom Cruise will be joining the Universal Horror revival sparked by Dracula Untold? If not, here’s a press release.

Regardless of your feelings about Tom Cruise, how disappointed you were in Dracula Untold, or your general skepticism about anyone ever capturing the glory days of Universal Monsters or early Hammer Horror again, it’s probably going to be a solid showcase for Sofia Boutella as the Mummy Queen, and she was pretty delightful in Star Trek Beyond. Silver linings, I guess.

So, to get everyone warmed up and ready for the next ill-advised excavation…

The Mummy (1932)

In the 1930’s, Boris Karloff’s career was hotter than a Scotch bonnet pepper on the surface of the sun. Eager to cast him in follow-up to The Old Dark House, Universal hired magazine writer/flapper gal Nina Wilcox Putnam and paired her with screenwriting pro Richard Schayer to come up with a story. They produced a nine-page treatment about the infamous court magician Cagliostro, with absolutely no elements of Egypt or mummies. In order to live through the centuries, Putnam’s version of Cagliostro injected himself with nitrate, and from what I gather the whole story sounds awesome and weird and more appropriate for a 1980’s audience than a 1930’s one.

(As a quick aside, Orson Welles played a horror-movie version of Cagliostro in 1949’s Black Magic, with Raymond Burr in a weird framing story about Alexandre Dumas fighting with his son. A version of Cagliostro also appeared in an episode of Boris Karloff’s 60’s TV show Thriller, “The Prisoner in the Mirror.” The historical Cagliostro is much less exciting than either depiction.)

Universal didn’t like a lot of the monster angles in the Cagliostro treatment, so they brought in John L. Balderson – who at that time was best known for his adaptation of Frankenstein, but would later go on to earn Academy Award noms for Gaslight and The Lives of a Bengal Lancer – to change things up. Back when he’d been working as a journalist, Balderson had covered the discovery of King Tut’s tomb, and the curse that seemed to befall those who opened it. The real-life story of ominous warnings on tablets and the possible reawakening of dormant, ancient evil was widely known. Balderson decided to use it as his jumping off point, scrapping the Italian magician angle altogether.

When everything was ironed out, the film became the tale of Imhotep, a man buried alive over 3000 years ago for daring to challenge the gods of death. When his mummy is discovered by gentleman archaeologists, he’s brought back to life by the reading aloud of the Scroll of Thoth by the youngest and least superstitious of the group. After regaining his strength, he reappears as a contemporary Egyptian using the name Ardath Bey, and begins leaving mysterious clues to new archaeologists about where certain tombs might be found.

Imhotep is easily my favourite of the Karloff creature roles. Back before Christopher Lee politely seized the crown, Karloff was the most versatile of the horror legends. Imhotep showcases that range as the Mummy gradually regains his strength and human form. You have everything from the mute shambling body language that Karloff invented and is still used as monster shorthand today, to his romantic side in the ancient Egypt sequence, and his remarkable gift for intensity in the stillest moments.

Zita Johann plays the object of Imhotep’s obsession, Helen Grovsner, a woman who bears a striking resemblance to his tragically deceased ancient lover Ankh-es-en-Amon (spellings on that one vary, but the character was named after King Tut’s wife). Johann was a fascinating actress of the period, often referred to as “The White Flame of the American Theater,” which was apparently some kind of compliment? Jazz Age lingo is weird. Anyway, she greatly disliked the process of making movies, and Mummy director Karl Freund didn’t do anything to help things along. He was a gigantic jerk to all of his actors, Johann especially.

Despite the difficult work circumstances, her performance is one of the most nuanced and interesting of all Universal horror leading ladies. Interestingly, she was heavily involved in the spiritualism movement of the time, and believed in reincarnation and a person’s ability to “carry” different souls. In the scenes where her large, glittering dark eyes seem to look thousands of years into the past, it’s easy to believe that’s what she’s doing.

The success of The Mummy was slow to spawn sequels, something unusual for Universal at the time, but it was rebooted a decade later, bringing us to…

The Mummy’s Hand (1940)

Spiderman films aren’t the only things to get started and restarted over and over again. The Mummy franchise has always been in a similar boat. Cast off all notions of the Mummy Imhotep being an elegant, tragic and obsessive figure. Those traits belong to Dracula. Mummies are prototypes for zombies now.

Imhotep is gone. The new Mummy is called Kharis and is played by Tom Tyler, who doesn’t have a hell of a lot to do since all the flashback scenes to Ancient Egypt are lifted directly from 1932’s The Mummy and have an uncredited Boris Karloff in them, and for some reason most of the story is about not trusting magicians.

(It’s weird, because the 1932 Mummy has no evil magicians in it, despite being rooted in the Cagliostro treatment, yet The Mummy’s Hand is loaded with modern day evil magicians. Not even corrupt ancient magicians. Evil 1940’s magicians. I don’t know why.)

But let’s back up a little and explain how we got here.

In the early 1930’s, Universal’s horror films were finely crafted works of art helmed by the likes of James Whale. Pioneers. Experimenters. Meticulous artists. And, jerkiness aside, Karl Freund’s direction in the original film is stunning. The use of atmosphere and the composition of shadow is hypnotic, particularly in the sequence when the mummy first awakes, and a later scene when Ardath Bey brings Helen to a fountain pond to hypnotize her.  

Then Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein managed to be a critical and cinematic hit, and the sequel train left the station. Everyone got a sequel. It didn’t matter if all your characters were dead at the end, it would just be about those character’s sons or something. No big deal.

Gradually, Universal’s interests and artistic levels slid into B-movie territory. Then everybody met Abbott and Costello, and while that is itself an awesomely fun movie, it also signals a change in the public perception of horror films. They weren’t art anymore, they were now schlock.

In 1940, The Mummy got a reboot. Not even a sequel, just a terrible rehashing of its plot, updated to be able to create a more profitable franchise. (What’s kind of funny about this is Nina Wilcox Putnam’s original Cagliostro idea was way better suited to having a series. In it, instead of having one reincarnated love, the monster would’ve been hunting the women of modern cities out of a spiteful need for revenge against the lover who had once spurned him.)

The Mummy’s Hand is bad.

It strips away all subtlety and ices the cake by foisting a “funny” sidekick upon us.

Crucially, though, it’s the actual starting point of Universal’s Mummy Movie Cycle. Also, fun fact: Tom Tyler only appeared as Kharis is this one film. Ever after, Lon Chaney Jr. was the mummy, except when Kharis met Abbott and Costello. That was Eddie Parker in a whole bunch of bandages.

So, after The Mummy’s Hand we got The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Ghost (I like that title best because it’s so ridiculously unclear about what the monster is, like wouldn’t it just be the Ghost of Kharis?), and The Mummy’s Curse. None of them winners until Hammer got the rights to The Mummy’s Hand and…

The Mummy (1959)

You would think that the second best Mummy movie of all time would’ve been a remake of the 1932 version and not of the craptacular 1940 film, but no. Due to rights issues, when Hammer finally added the Mummy to its own stable of monsters, it was with the express understanding that they would be remaking The Mummy’s Hand, and any sequels thereafter would be unrelated to the Universal Mummy franchise. That last part suited Hammer just fine, they weren’t big on sequential franchises. Films were linked more by monster type and theme than anything else.

Despite the inelegant pedigree, not only is 1959’s The Mummy a serious contender for the best Mummy movie, it’s a serious contender for the best Hammer Horror. (If you ask me, the best Hammer Horror is The Gorgon, but that’s 90% because of the fake moustaches and the part where… something ridiculous happens. It’s a huge spoiler. My point is that “best” is a subjective label.)

Christopher Lee plays Kharis, revived when archaeologists read from the Scroll of Life, a made-up artifact that acts as the opposite of the Book of the Dead. The cleverest and most likeable of the archaeologists, and the one that happens to be married to Kharis’s dead princess, is played by Peter Cushing. He calls everyone idiots for being murdered, and unnecessarily leaps over a desk while wearing a smoking jacket, proving yet again why you should always open-hand slap people who leave him off their lists of horror icons. 

1959's Mummy a fantastically moody film, full of shimmering golden treasures and plush Victorian furnishings. Plot-wise, it’s thin, but the photography and performances elevate it enormously. The only downside is the swamp at the end. I like my mummies to age rapidly and turn into dust. It’s a personal preference.

If you haven’t seen this one, most reliable movie channels play it at this time of year, so make it your business to check it out. It works especially well on those rainy autumn afternoons where the sky is a muddled grey turning into early twilight, and you happen to have a cozy blanket and some pumpkin spice popcorn.

Hammer being Hammer, there were a few sequels. The Curse of The Mummy’s Tomb, The Mummy’s Shroud, and lastly Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, which is the most quintessentially Hammer-sounding of the titles. We never got to “Seven Golden Mummies” or “Kiss of the Mummy Swingers” which is sad. People give up on their mummy franchises too soon.

They do run away with the trophy for quality-of-sequels, all jokes aside. The Mummy’s Shroud is a winner, and none of the series are as bad as the Brendan Fraser one in China. Yeesh.

Speaking of the Brendan Fraser series…

The Mummy (1999)

You know what doesn’t suck as much as people say? The 1999 version of The Mummy. (It’s barely eligible for discussion, but 1999 does count as 20^th Century, and that’s what’s in my tagline.)

Ostensibly, it stars Brendan “George of the Jungle” Fraser as an American adventurer in 1920’s Cairo, where he meets a very likeable librarian with cinema’s worst eyebrows. Rachel Weisz plays Evelyn Carnahan, whose name is a combination of the names of the people involved in the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. She takes command of the storyline in a way so far unseen since the 1932 version of the story, and becomes the heart of the film and the driving force of the plotline.

There are plenty of fun nods to the Karloff Mummy, many of them more referential than practical, and the flashback sequences borrow heavily from the Hammer films. Ultimately, though, it feels more like adventure than horror. There are elements that echo Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as well as several Humphrey Bogart films, but that’s not necessarily to its detriment. It knows what it is, and it expands on the idea and embraces it.

Like its predecessors, it spawned a series of sequels. One of them has pygmy mummies, which is the kind of thing you wonder about when you’re drunk but don’t ever expect to actually see in a real film, and another one has a magic pond that turns people into dragons.

Maybe stick with the first one?

Quiet, Please E60: The Thing on the Fourble Board

Horror and sci-fi were probably the two genres best served by the golden age of radio.

Other types of plays were successful, but TV and movies could do them better. A romance is more poignant when you see the kiss. But horror, sci-fi, fantasy, things that ask for a collaboration between your imagination and the story itself, those were the types of stories radio really excelled at. It helped that there wasn't much of a need to worry about the special effects budget.

One of my absolute favourite horror series (in any medium) is Wyllis Cooper's Quiet, Please. It's subtle and weird and very much in the tone of The Twilight Zone, which is another of my absolute faves.

The show has an unusual format in that the host, identified in the credits as "The Man Who Spoke to You" and voiced by Orson Welles collaborator Ernest Chappell, just tells you the story. It's a framing device with sound effects and other characters appearing as needed, but it's very bare-bones.

Stripping down the production helps to control the narrative perspective, and that control allowed for more effective twist endings and scares, as I hope you'll notice in this episode.

It's called "The Thing on the Fourble Board" and I'm not going to tell you anything else about it except that it frequently makes it onto Top Five Scariest Radio Episodes Ever lists, and those lists ain't for the faint of heart.

Hope you weren't planning to sleep any time soon!

Love At First Bite (1979)

October is here! This is the only time of year you can talk non-stop about werewolves and candy corn and Ray Bradbury and nobody looks at you sideways, and I intend to take full advantage of it!

We’re starting with an underrated gem in which George Hamilton plays Disco Dracula and Susan Saint James is his pot smoking lady love.

The 70’s were a culturally awesome time for horror, much in the way the 80’s would nail the fantasy genre. In 1972, American International Pictures made a movie about an African prince who visits Transylvania, gets turned into a vampire and sealed in a coffin until awakening in modern day Los Angeles. In 1974, the late, great, forever in our hearts Gene Wilder teamed up with Mel Brooks to astound one and all (including their investors) when they made a hit comedy out of a Christmastime release of a black and white spoof of Universal’s Son of Frankenstein. Sitting happily between Blacula and Young Frankenstein is 1979’s Love at First Bite.

I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s as good as either film, but it is good.

The story begins when the Romanian government commanders Dracula’s castle as a gymnastics training center for Nadia Comaneci. He has two days to pack up his coffin and his cobwebs and get out before they put in the balance beams.

It’s not the worst thing that could’ve happened to this version of Dracula. A sort of dusty gothic ennui has taken him over, and he’s been bored. Not to mention terribly lonely. One of his few enjoyments comes from American magazines that feature his latest obsession: fashion model Cindy Sondheim.

Dracula is convinced that Cindy is the reincarnation of his great love, and had been Mina Harker in a previous life. In order to turn her fully into a vampire so she can share his monstrous eternity with him, he has to bite her on the neck three separate times. Getting kicked out of the castle spurs him into action. He – along with his semi-immortal, bug eating sidekick Renfield (played delightfully to the hilt by Arte Johnson) – are going to hit up New York high society and find Cindy.

A lot of the comedy thereafter is about an out-of-touch European relic trying to blend into the nightlife. But even more of it is about how the expectations of movie audiences changed between 1931 and 1979, in the same way Young Frankenstein had explored genre shifts, but a little less elegantly. A running gag revolves around whether or not Dracula has seen Roots, and there are constant sly winks that hint the Hollywood version of 70’s New York is authentic as the Hollywood versions of 1930’s London or Transylvania in any time period.

There are terrific cameos from The Jeffersons; Sherman Hemsley turns up as a corrupt preacher whose funeral service is interrupted, and Isobel Sanford is an unsympathetic New York judge. Dick Shawn plays a haggard police detective who doesn’t particularly want to believe in vampires, but has to face facts, and Susan Tolsky gives a great, brief performance as Cindy’s agent. There’s more than a little Sue Mengers in it.

George Hamilton is a charming, clever Dracula, weighing the scales just right to evoke everyone’s memories of Bela Lugosi, but taking into account the necessary angles to make him seem both human enough to carry the story and inhuman enough to be funny.

If you’re of the camp that gets extremely annoyed by Susan Saint James, I’d still suggest giving this one a try. I know several people who can’t stand her, and a direct quote from one of them was: “I didn’t want to punch Susan Saint James in the face in that Dracula thing you lent me.” If you usually like her, you might enjoy seeing her with a very different look, as she sports fluffy blonde supermodel hair and ultra-glam nightwear throughout.

The absolute highlight of Love at First Bite, for me at least, is Richard Benjamin as Dr. Jeffrey Rosenberg. Jeffrey comes from the Van Helsing family, but changed his name for professional purposes. He’s a psychiatrist to the rich and famous, and very happily strings Cindy along in a commitment-free affair – until Dracula appears and he almost instinctively transforms into an obsessive vampire hunter. Except he can't quite remember how it's supposed to work. Vampires are the silver bullet ones, right?

It’s worth adding, though, that a serious familiarity with Universal’s 1931 Dracula helps the humour a lot. So if you’ve never seen the movie that started the sexy vampire craze to begin with, start there. (Interesting tidbit: makeup artist William Tuttle worked on both the 1931 Dracula and Love At First Bite!) Otherwise, consider adding this one to your lighthearted Halloween roster.

Cry For the Strangers (1982)

Is it ghosts or madness?

It’s one of the core questions of paranormal plotlines. In Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and in John Saul’s Cry For the Strangers. Is it ghosts or madness? And which one is scarier?

This post is for Realweegiemidget’s Darlin’ DallasersBlogathon, an event dedicated to checking out the non-Dallas work of Dallas regulars. I picked Patrick Duffy, who starred as Bobby Ewing – the initial main character of the lauded primetime soap, and originator of the “it was just a dream” shower reveal. Also, he sometimes hangs around with this crab:

In 1982, Duffy starred in a TV movie adaptation of Cry for the Strangers.

He played psychologist Brad Randall, a man tired of the Frasier Crane Seattle psych scene and in the mood to shake things up in his life. He and his wife, Elaine, decide to move down the Olympic peninsula to a creepy little town called Clark’s Harbor. Having lived my entire life in the PNW, I can tell you straight up that Clark’s Harbor is a weird place, and not just because of the looming threat of the supernatural.

It’s described in the original novel thusly:

“And it did look like a picture-postcard New England town. The buildings that clustered along the waterfront were all of a type: neat clapboards, brightly painted, with manicured gardens flowering gaily in the spring air.”

The film faithfully represents this, making Clark’s Harbor look and feel like Cabot Cove’s prettier, more bedevilled cousin. It’s bizarre. I have no idea why you’d go to all the trouble of setting something in Washington just so you could make it look like New England. Why wouldn’t you just set it in New England?

Anyway, the town is peopled with the usual New Englanders, including a reticent sheriff played by Brian Keith, fishwives and fishermen in northeast garb, gossipy café waitresses, and a whole bunch of multi-generational locals who give Brad and Elaine a frosty reception.

But that’s the town’s way. Newcomers aren’t welcome.

Newcomers aren’t safe.

Not when the storms are coming.

Clark’s Harbor, turns out, is beset by Gothic weather that would make the Brontë sisters go: “Hey, cool it with the atmospheric symbolism.” Lightning forks across moody purple skies, clouds roll in over swaying fishing boats, and storms break… and break… and break… against the strangely abandoned Victorian mansion that Brad has decided he has to live in. It’s on a hill called Devil’s Elbow. Across the bay from Devil’s Kneecap, I’m guessing. Just up the coastline from That Bruise the Devil Can’t Remember How He Got.

Everyone loves a massive coincidence, and in this story, the coincidence is the Palmer family. Their son, Robby, was diagnosed in Seattle as being severely autistic (this was in the early, early days of modern autism research, and it was kind of a hot topic in literature for a while. It was only three years after autism was officially separated from schizophrenia in medical literature, and horror writers in particular latched onto it).

You’ll never guess who Robby’s Seattle therapist was.

Dr. Brad Randall.

The Palmers, wanting a quiet and more easily structured life away from the city, moved down to Clark’s Harbor the year before. Since then, Robby’s made a miraculous transformation. He now behaves like any other boy his age, as though he’d never been anything different.

Brad right away finds this impossibly suspicious, but he can’t ignore that it seems to be happening.

Like any reasonable mental health expert, Brad begins to wonder if Robby’s recovery might be related to the high number of storms. It’s not totally out of left field, on the first night the Palmers rolled into town, they camped on the beach during a terrible storm – because if there’s one thing parents of autistic children know is a good idea it’s moving houses without a plan and sleeping in an unfamiliar setting during a thunderstorm. The Palmers are on the ball. Weirdly, though, that first night is when Robby started to change for the better.

In a casual session with Brad, Robby explains that he finds the storms soothing, but they put him in a kind of trance, and afterwards he doesn’t remember anything he did during the night before. (Storms only happen at night, you see.) At least once he’s snuck out with his younger sister Missy, and during a recent storm they lost track of the family dog…

The whole thing would just be a small peculiarity if it wasn’t for the murders. Every storm, a stranger dies. Someone from out of town, or not originally from Clark’s Harbor, turns up extremely dead in the morning. It’s pretty gruesome stuff, too. They’re usually found buried up to their necks in pits on the beach, then slowly drowned as the tide comes in. This is why the locals don’t like getting too close to newcomers, and also why Brad, Elaine, and the Palmers are all in more danger than they know.

There might be ghosts. Maybe. It's probably a serial killer, or the spirits that killed the last couple to live in Devil's Elbow, it's all very vague.

Which brings us to the biggest trouble with Cry for the Strangers. In its efforts to leave things eerily unexplained, keeping the madness door and the ghost door open at the same time for as long as possible, it doesn’t explain much. Or anything, really. Events just happen. Tension builds, but never suspense. The plotting is muddled and unsatisfying. The ending literally has Elaine asking about the many plot holes while Brad stares into the distance and tells us we’ll never know the answers.

It’s worth checking out only if you’re extremely bored, or if you find Patrick Duffy with a cheesy academic-type beard hilarious, which I do. (It looks very Amityville Horror, but like the low-fat yogurt version. Brad is the diet soda of horror protagonists. I love him.)

What’s totally worth checking out, regardless of your boredom levels, are the other posts in this blogathon! Yay! The master list posts on Sept. 22 on Realweegiemidget’s blog, so be sure to stop by. And if you’re in the mood for more Dallas tie-ins while you wait, you can check out Larry Hagman in these I Dream of Jeannie recaps.

Midnight Lace (1960)

Despite her pivotal role in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and starring in the underrated Julie, Doris Day isn’t commonly thought of as an actress who appeared in thrillers. Especially not during her seven year reign as queen of the rom-coms. But it was smack dab in the middle of her frolics with Rock Hudson and her tiffs with James Garner that Day starred in a Gaslight-style thriller called Midnight Lace.

She plays an American heiress named Kit Preston, recently married to financier Tony and living in a wealthy and glamorous London neighbourhood. Tony is a middle-aged Rex Harrison, in a role that harkens back to his early British films like Blithe Spirit. Both of them do a fine job, even with their notable lack of chemical reaction.

Part of the trouble, I think, is at this point, Day was primarily a sex comedienne and Harrison had been spending a good deal of his time on the Broadway stage. His distant theatricality and her newly acquired habit of playing bedroom moments for laughs kicks the “sizzling newlyweds” angle right in the stomach.

On a particularly foggy evening, Kit is on her way home when an unseen voice calls to her by name. It’s a bizarre, disguised voice that sounds like it belongs to a marionette. And this creepy marionette says it wants to kill her.

She rushes home in terror to find Tony waiting for her, and he quickly soothes her and suggests that it was just some prankster taking advantage of the fog. This manages to comfort her, and all seems well.

Until the puppet-voiced weirdo starts phoning her.

Scotland Yard insist that this is a simple case of a lonely housewife imagining sinister goings-on while she flirts with a nervous breakdown. No need for police involvement, just take her to a good head shrinker, guv.

Trying to ignore the constant harassment from the evil version of Topo Gigio, Kit manages to plan a much-anticipated honeymoon with Tony. She even buys an elegant negligee in a style called “midnight lace” giving us our title. (The film was adapted from a play called Matilda Shouted Fire, so a title change was well in order.) But Tony is terribly busy with work, and the honeymoon keeps being delayed while Kit wonders if she’s going slowly insane.

An early red-herring culprit is presented to us by way of Roddy McDowell, being his usual dependable self in a role that could’ve used some expansion. It isn’t much of a spoiler to announce his innocence, since anybody who’s seen even a handful of these types of stories will be able to guess the ending from go.

An ally arrives in the form of Kit’s Aunt Bea, played by Myrna Loy. (Chairs spin as all of my readers now run to find copies of this because Myrna Loy is in it.) Aunt Bea is a fabulous character with a fabulous life full of jet-setting to obscure places, collecting strange curios, and being delightfully open-minded about the possibility of telephone stalkers. So, a little different from the Aunt Bea of Mayberry.

Aunt Bea is a soothing presence. She believes Kit actually is getting upsetting calls, but thinks it’s more of a harmless weirdo than a homicidal one. Slowly, Tony manages to turn Bea to his view of things, and has her convinced that all of this might just be in Kit’s head.

The whole thing culminates in a gripping breakdown sequence that really took it out of Doris Day. In her autobiography, she wrote in order to prepare she recalled a specific moment from her marriage to Al Jordan. While she was pregnant and on bedrest, Jordan burst into the room, pulled her up from bed and threw her against the wall. This bit of method acting resulted in the best scene of the film, but also caused Doris Day to collapse in emotional exhaustion after filming it was complete. Production was shut down for two days, and the experience was so unpleasant she decided to never do another drama. It was comedies from then on out.

One of the best reasons to check out Midnight Lace is the wardrobe designed by Irene.

The former head of the costume department at MGM, Irene also designed the incredible costumes for 1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis. She had been operating her own fashion house, when her friend Doris Day asked her to design her looks for Midnight Lace. The outfits were so elegant and well-made that Harry Winston jewellery was rented for Day to wear, because the usual costume jewels looked extremely fake against the couture fabrics.

One dress in particular, a white evening gown, blew the star away. She was so enamoured with it, she asked if she could borrow it for the Academy Awards ceremony. Kind of fun for a normal red-carpet appearance, but this was the year she was nominated for Pillow Talk, so that dress was in all the magazines.

In contrast to the hyper-real regal wardrobe, the London of Midnight Lace looks about as convincing as a ride at Disneyland. Which is to say, it’s charming but clearly fake.

Budgetary constraints forced the production, originally slated to film on location in England, to shoot on the Universal fake-London soundstages. It’s a shame, because two years later, director David Miller showed how well he could do when given real landscapes to work with. He helmed one of my all-time faves, Lonely Are the Brave.

Midnight Lace isn’t as good as Julie, or any Hitchcock film, and it’s a little paint-by-numbers in terms of the plot, but it’s got its selling points. The creepy puppet voice is creepy, the clothes are magnificent, and Myrna Loy is in it. It’s worth a watch if you come across it on your travels, particularly if you’re a Doris Day completionist.

Night Gallery 01x00: Eyes

This is my post for the Joan Crawford Blogathon, celebrating the life and work of one of Old Hollywood’s most legendary actresses. It’s an event well worth checking out, full of great entries looking at all aspects of her career, hosted by the wonderful In The Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.

Steven Spielberg was only twenty-one years old when he was hired to direct a segment for Rod Serling’s new series, Night Gallery. It was Spielberg’s very first paid directing gig, and he was going to be working with Joan Crawford on the story of a blind woman receiving an ocular nerve transplant.

Joan Crawford.

The grande dame of the classic era. Mildred Pierce. Sadie Thompson. Daisy Kenyon. The woman F. Scott Fitzgerald had once written about as “the best example of the flapper.” The legendary rival of Bette Davis and chairwoman of the Pepsi Cola board of directors.

It was a little intimidating.

Sid Sheinberg, head of Universal’s television division at the time and the guy who’d given Spielberg the assignment, suggested it might be a good idea for the young director to take his star to dinner. So, Spielberg, under-dressed and fresh-faced, found himself ringing the doorbell of a bona fide legend.

A voice called to him from inside, telling him the door was open and he could come right in. So that’s what he did, and he found Joan Crawford with bandages around her eyes, getting a feeling for how a blind woman would work her way around a room. Neither producer William Sackheim (producer of Night Gallery) nor Sheinberg had told Crawford her director was going to be a guy who, according to Spielberg, “looked like he was fourteen.”

“She was hoping they would hire George Marshall, Henry King, or Henry Hathaway, or King Vidor,” he told TheHollywood Reporter.

“She finally walked over to me,” Spielberg remembered in a 1982 interview with Gene Shalit, “Undid her wrappings, and she looked at me, and she almost screamed, and she said: ‘My god! We can’t go out for dinner! People will think you’re my son!’”

By this point in her career, Crawford was taking fewer and fewer acting jobs. She was mostly focused on her work at Pepsi, and she’d had an absolutely terrible experience on Hush… Hush Sweet Charlotte, which resulted in her being replaced by newly minted centenarian Olivia de Havilland. She’d experienced illness and personal turmoil through the 60’s, and now in 1969, she was willing (and excited) to take the part of Miss Menlo for the Night Gallery pilot.

By all accounts, she was the consummate professional on set, treating Spielberg with respect and encouraging the crew to do the same. Also by all accounts, she had tried in vain up to the eleventh hour to get him replaced with someone more experienced.

“I think he’ll be great someday,” she told Universal, in most versions of the story, “But can’t we get somebody who’s great right now?”

When all was said and done, she was pleased enough that she did a small cameo for him on his episode of The Name of the Game, and the two of them corresponded on and off until Crawford’s death in 1977.

Are You Afraid of the Dark? 01x02: The Tale of Laughing in the Dark

We’re celebrating Canada Day with this nation’s greatest contribution to the history of television: Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Did you know, non-Canadian friends, that many of the most popular children’s shows were and are Canadian co-productions? It's true! We're really good at stuff for kids!

Are You Afraid of the Dark? was co-funded by Nickelodeon and Cinar to capitalize on the juvenile horror craze of the early 90’s. Scholastic’s Goosebumps series was flying out of book fairs, and everyone wanted to capitalize on the trend. Later on, Goosebumps itself would be adapted into a Canadian TV show, but it wouldn’t be very good.

Debuting on YTV in 1991, Are You Afraid of the Dark? is an anthology series about the Midnight Society, a group of pre-teens from different backgrounds and different schools, who sneak out one night a week to meet around a campfire in the woods. There, they tell one another spine-tingling stories appropriate for ages seven and up.

The leader of the Midnight Society is Gary, son of the owner of a magic shop, and grandson of a member of the original Midnight Society. It’s kind of implied that this first incarnation was like the real life Lovecraft Circle, which consisted of writers like Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and H.P. Lovecraft himself.

Tonight’s story teller is Betty Ann, probably my all-time favourite of the kids. A shy, sweet girl, Betty Ann likes exploring deep-seated fears and monsters and disturbing implications. When her stories end, everything’s always just fine… or IS IT?!

Suspense: A Friend to Alexander

“Alexander Hamilton is so hot right now,” historians probably say at historian parties, holding their champagne glasses while a string quartet plays chamber music.

With Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop biography of the first secretary of the treasure cleaning up at the Tonys, A-Ham is the current historical celebrity craze. Soon, he’ll be fighting vampires. You haven’t really made it until everyone forgets why you’re important.

In 1942, James Thurber – who you might know best as the author of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” – wrote one of his darkest, weirdest short stories. In it, an unhappy man is plagued by dreams of Aaron Burr, and becomes gradually obsessed with the duel that killed Alexander Hamilton. Things only go downhill from there, getting all fantastical and grim.

Popular radio series Suspense adapted the story no less than three times. 

It's called “A Friend to Alexander” and the version below is from August of 1943. It stars Geraldine Fitzgerald and Robert Young, and was adapted very faithfully by Fria Howard. Her script would also be used for the 1944 broadcast of the story, which featured Geraldine Fitzgerald reprising her role, but saw Robert Young replaced with Richard Whorf.

Click the video to listen:

The third broadcast featured a new script by Fran Von Hardesfelt, with John Dehner and Paula Winslow as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. Howard's adaptation is extremely faithful to the short story, while Von Hardesfelt's is a little more loosey goosey.

If you'd like to read the original short story, it's anthologized in My World, and Welcome to It alongside less gothic stuff. 

‘Way Out 01x06: The Croaker

Nowadays, Roald Dahl is best remembered for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach and his other novels for children, but there was a time when he was known exclusively for his creepy little fables. Stories like “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “Man From the South” and “Dip in the Pool” were all highly regarded for their bitingly ironic endings.

In 1961, this reputation made Dahl an interesting fit for a horror anthology show called ‘Way Out (with the apostrophe, not sure why). The show was a quick-fix replacement for a Jackie Gleason gameshow, You’re in the Picture, which was such a disaster that Gleason apologized to the American public and it was cancelled after a single episode. Anthology shows were relatively easy to put together – you didn’t need to negotiate with a recurring star, you could change gears on a weekly basis, and you could crib sets on the backlots. Plus, people really liked The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, so it was a good solution for that unsightly gap on Friday nights.

Dahl would host in the hands-off manner of Alfred Hitchcock, as well as contribute some of his stories for adaptation, most notably “William and Mary” for the premiere.

The series ran for sixteen episodes, but it wasn’t a hit with audiences. It’s not hard to see why, it’s a really weird show. It’s not bad, but it’s weird. In the late ‘70s, Dahl would work on a more successful television vehicle for his stories, ITV’s Tales of the Unexpected. (Not to be confused with the American Quinn Martin Production of the same name.) Meanwhile, ‘Way Out would become an oddity, and a bit of a holy grail for a certain kind of television fan.

Twilight Zone 01x21: Mirror Image

This is one of the more understated episodes of The Twilight Zone, especially of the ones that were penned by Rod Serling. There’s no grand soapbox moment at the end where twist and narration combine to tell you what’s what, and maybe that’s why it’s so effective and timeless.

Sometimes on TZ, the morality got in the way of the story. Sometimes the brilliant twist closed too many doors. In “Mirror Image” the point is in the wondering, and it’s that wondering that wakes people up at 2:05 in the morning, just to listen to the wind and make sure that they’re still who they think they are.

And there’s a tremendous cast! Our leading lady is Vera Miles, enigmatic and cool as always. She’s probably best remembered today for her supporting role in Psycho (even though she crushed it in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance). Plus, we’ve got TV legend Martin Milner, who somehow hasn’t been in a recap yet, which makes me think I’ve been falling down on the job.

The episode opens with a dark and stormy night. Lightning cracks across a deluging sky. But it’s not the couple who finds the bridge washed out, or the once-wealthy residents of a Gothic manor house we’re concerning ourselves with. It’s a young woman – Millicent Barnes, played by Miles – waiting in a dreary bus depot in upstate New York.

Ghost Story/Circle of Fear 01x06: Alter-Ego

1972’s Ghost Story is a complicated show.  

For the first thirteen episodes, it’s what I like to think of as “relaxedly paranormal” – there’s not a lot of blood or trauma, and the endings are usually more depressing than ironic. And there are framing segments featuring Sebastian Cabot as your host Winston Essex, a mysterious author who lives in a great big mansion full of weirdos who come to be his guests and tell him spooky stories.

Then, all of a sudden, Sebastian Cabot is gone. The show’s title is changed to Circle of Fear, and the promotional materials insist that there’s less emphasis on the supernatural. Just things like cursed wooden horses, a satanic office cult, more ghosts than ever before, and some elemental demons trapped in glasswork. Straightforward, scary situations anybody could find themselves in.

Producer William Castle – responsible for some of the most fun you can have with Vincent Price – had decided that a change was needed. While he’d patterned the host segments on his idol Alfred Hitchcock, he quickly had second thoughts. The radical changes to the genre brought about by Rosemary’s Baby in 1968 were trickling into television, and nobody could make up their mind what that would look like.

Down These Mean Streets, A Camera Rolls

There’s some buzz surrounding the gimmick for Hardcore Henry, an action flick that captures the first person chaos of the video game experience. But it’s not the first movie to make a go of what the kids call “subjective camera.” It’s generally agreed on that there were two major moments for the technique in American film, and both of them happened in those heady days of black and white.

In 1931, director Rouben Mamoulian experimented with first person during the opening sequence for his remake of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mamoulian was something of a genius, and fond of pushing the limits. (It worked out great until his career ended with back-to-back firings off of Porgy and Bess and then Cleopatra. Being a genius is a messy business.)

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starts with leading man Fredric March’s shadow cast on sheet music as we watch his hands play the organ. When the doctor’s butler enters, the camera-as-your-eyes swerves to look at him, then quickly returns to the hands. This swerving motion doesn’t have anything in common with how a human head turns, so it’s a really disorienting sequence.

Dr. Jekyll moves to the hallway mirror next, where we first see him through his own eyes as he looks at his reflection and puts on his hat and cloak. We stay in his perspective for a few minutes, but not the whole movie. That’s a relief, because there’s a sluggishness to the forward motion of the camera. Dr. Jekyll seems to be taking very careful steps as he slowly, slowly makes his way out of the house.

(Jsyk, the rest of the movie is fantastic. Once you get to feast your eyes on March’s performance, it’s one for the ages.)

The decision to use first person does add an intriguing element to the story of Dr. Jekyll. Are we, the audience, supposed to feel as vulnerable as he is to his darker nature? Or are we trapped in Jekyll’s vision of the world – that there is bad within everyone – whether we think it’s true or not?

For me, as somebody who doesn’t see anything like Fredric March when I look in my hallway mirror, it makes the character curiously hollow. There isn’t anything inside Jekyll. It’s almost as though Hyde becomes inevitable, potion or not, simply because he’s the one who desires existence.

Henry Jekyll isn’t a relatable man, he’s a man eager to be possessed by anything that’s willing to take up residence behind his eyes.

It makes the film more eerie than tragic, and even though it’s a bumpy start, it sets the audience thinking about what they know about the story they’re about to see and what they might not have thought of. For an adaptation of a book that had already been successfully brought to the screen once before, it’s a refreshing idea.

By the by, the earlier version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made in 1920, starred John Barrymore, was directed by John S. Roberston, and features its own quick moment of subjective camera in its opening sequence. Dr. Jekyll is at his microscope, and as he looks through we’re treated to an image of what he’s looking at on his slide. Nowadays, that’s not such a big deal, but for 1920, that was some ingenious filmmaking.

Rouben Mamoulian said many times that his interest wasn’t in creating realism in his films, but what he called “visual poetry.” In that sense, the ominous strangeness of his opening sequence is a success. It really does feel like the personal, mysterious pull of a poem with no particular meaning.

From Robert Louis Stevenson to Raymond Chandler and 1947’s The Lady in the Lake, and the first full-length film done in subjective camera. And it was directed by none other than the father of Elizabeth “Samantha Stephens” Montgomery! He wasn’t trying for poetry, though. He was trying to capture the experience of sharing a narrator’s memories – which is a substantially more elusive goal, and sounds kind of bonkers.

Robert Montgomery had been a cheerful rom-com star in the 30’s, had gone to war, and come home wanting to make a shift in his career. In 1945, he gave a haunting turn as a PT boat commander in John Ford’s They Were Expendable. During the shoot, Ford broke his leg, and asked Montgomery to take over while he was recovering. It went extremely well, and led to Montgomery’s brief career as a director.

He started with an adaptation of The Lady in the Lake, the fourth of Chandler’s novels featuring private detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe had made it to the screen before, in The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart, and again in Farewell, My Lovely with Dick Powell. General consensus was that while the films were satisfying in their own right, they were disappointing adaptations. They lacked the feeling of the novels.

Montgomery’s solution was daring, and also a total mess. Marlowe’s strength as a first person narrator, he thought, could be captured with a film from his perspective. Like his physical perspective. Unfortunately, this totally misses the mark, because the best part about being in Marlowe’s head was his wry observations and insightful descriptions, which is why previous films had leaned heavily on narration.

Just prior to release, two breaks were inserted into Lady in the Lake where Montgomery-as-Marlowe sat at his desk and explained pieces of the story that couldn’t be captured with the limitations on the camera. This was a major warning sign that the film wasn’t going to work.

But, of course, that didn’t stop MGM hyping the crap out of it as the first movie starring… YOU! Like it was some choose your own adventure book where you got to solve a really boring murder.

There are a lot of unique choices in The Lady in the Lake, including eschewing conventional orchestration for a choir (the movie takes place at Christmas, and employs something between a Greek chorus and office carollers), and attempting long, hyper-real sequences. It’s these unblinking shots that create the most problems. They force you to notice the theatricality of leading lady Audrey Totter, who can’t really get up close and personal with Marlowe if he’s a camera that’s far away enough to capture her costume and all the nifty lighting tricks that are setting the noir mood.

Totter, along with Leon Ames and Dick Simmons, is stuck as a talking head with limited range of motion and emotion. Instead of being visually interesting, it makes the scenes with other characters dull and repetitive. And it's not like these were bad actors who weren't trying. The deck was really stacked against them.

The sluggishness that plagued Mamoulian wasn’t solved by Montgomery, either. Marlowe lumbers, vision too high, hands out of place, until it becomes a way better movie if you just imagine that you’re not a private detective at all, you’re Lurch from The Addams Family, and that’s why everyone is standing so far away from you.

When Marlowe stands by mirrors – three times to let us get a look at our leading man – it feels like his eyes are in the wrong spot. Less like the fascinating twist of character we suddenly experience with Dr. Jekyll, and more like the audience is actually his invisible best friend. Or possibly an imp riding on his shoulder.

There’s one sequence that works wonderfully, though.

Marlowe is making his second visit to a gigolo named Chris Lavery when he finds the front door unlocked. The steady, careful motions that make the camera’s view unnatural in other moments gives us a chance to notice all the little things that are strange and wrong.

Lampshades askew. Two empty glasses on a living room table. An unmade bed late in the day. The choir starts to vocalize softly. Ominously. Somewhere, a faucet is running. Marlowe finds that the tap is turned on in the upstairs bathroom. He swings the door open wider, and there are cracks and holes in the glass of the shower. Five of them.

Two bullets are lodged in the tiles.

The rest are lodged in Chris Lavery.

The predictability of the discovery is what creates the suspense. We – the audience, Marlowe, anybody tuning in by chance – all know that Lavery is dead. We know it as soon as the camera takes us into the house. But we all have to look at him, to confirm his death, in order to proceed.

There’s no watching someone’s horrified expression, there’s no hearing it from a secondary character. There’s just the dead man, and our obligation to the story to see him.

Ultimately, in both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Lady in the Lake, it’s the unnaturalness that does the most harm. Everybody watching a movie knows how it feels to be behind a set of eyeballs, even if we don’t consciously think of it. So all the little falsehoods that don’t seem wrong or out of place when we’re thinking of the movie as a movie are glaringly weird when we’re thinking of the movie as the physical view of a single character.

Since Lady in the Lake, FPS games and RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout have ironed out a good deal of how we expect first person to be blocked. Hardcore Henry will no doubt be benefitting from this progress more than it’ll owe any debt to Robert Montgomery. But games have something that films lack – the anticipation of a choice. You choose to how respond in the dialogue wheel or whether or not you want to cast a spell or hide from that attacking dragon. That’s what makes them immersive.

So while Hardcore Henry has probably overcome the Lurch-cam and the Zoolanderesque inability of its predecessors to turn left, it has a whole new stack of problems to contend with. Mainly a target audience that’s going to get bored with someone else calling all the shots.

One day, subjective camera might be legitimized the way 3D has. But until then, it’s just the latest Smell-O-Vision.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents 07x39: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

There’s an old urban legend about an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that was so gruesome – so disturbing – that it was never aired on network television. Of course, we all know that urban legends are blown out of proportion, and whatever kernel of truth they were based on is buried under years and years of exaggeration.

But this urban legend is true.

By 1962, Robert Bloch had a nice sideline as a screenwriter. As a teenager, he had become the youngest member of the Lovecraft Circle, and had since published countless short stories and novels. One of those novels, Psycho, had been adapted by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960, and it made quite the splash. After that, Hollywood came calling and Bloch quickly established himself as a reliable source of spine-chilling scripts.

A good number of those scripts were adaptations of his own short stories, so when he was asked to pen an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents based on his 1942 tale “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” it didn’t seem like it was going to be anything but another paycheck for a job well done.