The Round-Up September 10-16

 Early in the week, I had to go to the archives and pulled up two pieces I'd posted about earlier, but that was four years ago, so who remembers that far back? It was also a bad week for horror, including what will likely be the worst film of the month, until I got to the end.

Hardcore

George C. Scott reacting to the second half of HARDCORE.

George C. Scott starts out smiling in Paul Schrader’s HARDCORE (1979, Tubi), and although he was often quite good in comedy, such is his image that it’s rather a shock. His smile points up a potential for his character that’s never fully realized in the script. The first half of the film offers a fascinating picture of Midwestern life within a faith-based community. There are moments of joy as people share meals or sing Christmas carols, and children play in the snow. There are also moments that poke fun at the strict religiosity of the characters’ world, as when one of the older men gets upset at the children’s watching a TV show with dancing Santas. And there are images of desolation as we see abandoned buildings, suggesting the slow death of middle America. You can understand why some people love it there and why others get away as quickly as they can. While Scott is home, the picture works very well. Then his daughter disappears while at a church conference in California, so he hires a private detective (Peter Boyle) to track her down. When Boyle shows up with a porn film featuring the young woman, it triggers a scene that was widely spoofed at the time but is actually quite powerful. Dissatisfied with Boyle’s further progress, Scott goes to L.A. to take up the case himself, and the film largely goes to pot. Part of the problem is that the horrified view of the porn world now seems rather dated. Schrader expects us to be shocked at things that aren’t that shocking anymore. And the plot doesn’t make sense. Scott tries to pass himself off as a porn producer and pulls off the masquerade too easily. Through a series of coincidences, he finds a sex worker (Season Hubley) who knows of the man who lured his daughter away, so he hires her to help him hunt the guy down. It’s an unlikely pairing that doesn’t go where you want it to. Hubley is a sweet-natured girl who may resent some aspects of her life in the sex trade but ultimately doesn’t consider the sex part that big a deal. Yet Scott never acknowledges her humanity. He won’t let her talk about her life and at one point, roughs her up to get information she’s withholding for no clear reason. It doesn’t bode well for his future relationship with his daughter, if he finds her, and the whole film goes sour in the wrong way. Schrader has said one influence on the film was John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956). It’s basically THE SEARCHERS with porn in place of racism. The problem is Schrader otherizes the sex workers the same way John Wayne’s character otherized Native Americans. I’m not advocating sympathy for the daughter’s exploiters, but the other people Scott meets have their stories as well. And without them, the film comes off rather one-sided and shallow.

The Phenix City Story

Meg Miles is only one of the sins run rampant in Phenix City, AL.

Although its 1950s depiction of depravity now seems almost quaint (the film opens with Meg Myles as a stripper who never takes off more than her gloves), Phil Karlson’s gritty film noir is still a pretty powerful condemnation of small-town depravity. It’s hard not to see the parallels to the U.S. today in this tale of how the good citizens of Phenix City (mainly father-and-son lawyers John McIntyre and Richard Kiley) take on local vice lords in Sin City, U.S.A. Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t have a fraction of the class Edward Andrews (in his feature debut) displays as the chief criminal, nor do we have a state governor to call on to help drain the swamp. Karlson shot the film while the story was unfolding and even turned up evidence that helped put some of the criminals behind bars. He also played a bit with the facts, inventing the murder of an African-American child to up the stakes and depicting Kiley’s character — future governor John Patterson, an ardent segregationist — as a friend to the city’s black community.

Ladies They Talk About

Lillian Roth and Barbara Stanwyck do hard time because they're LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT.

What a strange if often delightful film! Barbara Stanwyck is a gangster’s moll who helps set up a bank robbery. She’s caught, but an old friend turned preacher (Preston Foster) is about to get her off when she has a pang of conscience and confesses. That leads to a stay in women’s prison and the film’s best scenes. The inmates include Lillian Roth, who’s as lively and gritty as Stanwyck and even gets to sing, Madame Sul-Te-Wan as a sassy black woman named Mustard and the delightfully wacky Maude Eburne as a “beautician” whose parlor offered, shall we say, a different line of services. Ruth Donnelly is the assistant matron and in one scene walks around with a cockatoo on her shoulder, which somehow helps keep the inmates in line. There are also two jokes about a lesbian inmate who likes to wrestle and even seems to end up with a wrestling partner to call her own.

Mansion of the Doomed

Richard Basehart is no doubt distressed that

Gloria Grahame doesn't have to suffer through MANSION OF THE DOOMED any longer.

There’s something very sad about seeing Richard Basehart and Gloria Grahame stuck in a film as decrepit as Michael Pataki’s MANSION OF THE DOOMED (1976, Shudder), aka THE TERROR OF DR. CHANEY, aka MASSACRE MANSION, aka EYES, aka EYES OF DR. CHANEY aka HOUSE OF BLOOD. Both were gifted actors who didn’t play the Hollywood game and sank into B movies while lesser actors who did play the game rose to stardom. For that matter, it’s sad to see that a gifted character actor like Pataki turned out to be such a bad director, though the production here, an early film from Charles Band, has continuity issues at the end and is so choppy it looks at times as if they ran out of money and stitched together whatever footage they had. Basehart is a revered ophthalmologist whose daughter (Trish Stewart) is blinded in a car crash. With sister Grahame, he starts kidnapping people to transplant their eyes into Stewart’s head in vain hopes of curing her. Yes, it’s LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (1960) with eyes instead of faces, which, I suppose makes it “Les Visages sans Yeux.” Both stars do their best. Grahame’s role doesn’t have much of a throughline, but she plays each bit well and looks terrific. There’s a lot of narration, so you get to enjoy Basehart’s sonorous voice, even when the words are banal. And he makes Stewart look like a better actress in their scenes together. The film is ableist to a fault. There’s no thought of Stewart’s learning to live with blindness, and the people whose eyes Basehart steals are treated as monsters, albeit with good makeup by the young Stan Winston. Lance Henriksen is surprisingly pretty as a doctor engaged to Stewart who becomes Basehart’s first victim, and Vic Tayback is on hand briefly as a police detective whose dedication to his job is his salvation.

The Zombie Apocalypse in Apartment 14f

Sometimes I embarrass myself. My search for something different led me to Gilbert Allen’s THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE IN APARTMENT 14F (2019, Tubi, YouTube) because it had an interesting premise. Three losers (really one loser and two ultra-losers) using a drone to spy on the sex worker in the apartment below them accidentally send the drone a floor lower, where they discover what seems to be a zombie infestation. What do they do? Well, in this film the most interesting of the three (Wesley Sellick), the one who’s just a loser, tumbles to his death trying to retrieve the drone when it gets stuck in some netting. The remaining two (Griffin Cork and Ben Francis) snort endless lines of coke and talk…forever. They compare notes on zombie science (and get THE WALKING DEAD wrong) and discuss what they’d like to do to the sex worker. And that’s it. No action, no wit, nothing but what looks like bad improv for about an hour. It was all shot on a shoestring with a grant from the Alberta government and without a discernible lick of talent. In the U.S., we have a movement called mumblegore — low-budget, imaginative horror films rooted in improvisational theatre — and it’s produced some quite good films like A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE (2010) and YOU’RE NEXT (2011), along with some utter drek. This doesn’t even make it up to the drek level. It’s not mumblegore. It’s mumblesnore.

Blanche Fury

Illicit passion is deadly for Valerie Hobson and Stewart Granger.

Watching Marc Allegret’s BLANCHE FURY (1948, Criterion Channel, YouTube) is like eating an entire box of chocolates in one sitting. It’s a luscious wallow. Anthony Havelock-Ellis produced the film to cash in on the popularity of the Gainsboorough melodramas and provide a distraction for his wife, Valerie Hobson, who had just given birth to a child with Down’s syndrome. Her role as a poor relation hired as governess to her wealthy cousin’s motherless daughter certainly gives her a lot to work with, particularly when she’s torn between the cousin (Michael Gough, in his film debut; was he ever really that young?), who offers her security and wealth, and the groundsman (Stewart Granger), who offers her pure unbridled sex. She tries to have it both ways, with deadly results. The film has some interesting parallels to GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) in Hobson’s marriage of convenience, her grudging attraction to magnetic Granger and the presence of a female child obsessed with show jumping. There’s even a shot of Hobson in a 19^th-century bonnet turning to reveal her face to the camera that’s almost identical to a similar shot of Vivien Leigh. All that’s lacking is the passion. Hobson was a beautiful, intelligent actress and does a lot of solid work here, but it’s hard to believe she’s in the grips of uncontrollable ardor. Granger is quite good, and Gough is priggish enough you’re not going to miss him when he’s gone. And the whole thing looks scrumptious in Guy Green and Geoffrey Unsworth’s Technicolor cinematography. Clifton Parker did the lush, symphonic score that pushes the whole thing into the kingdom of divine decadence.

Tales of Terror

Vincent Price finds the perfect co-star in Peter Lorre and the perfect robe in "Morella."

If nothing else, the Criterion Channel’s festival of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations is a showcase for Vincent Price. In TALES OF TERROR (1962), he narrates and performs three roles: the morose, alcoholic widower of an evil spirit (“Morella), a pompous wine-taster modeled on Percy Dovetonsils (“The Black Cat”) and a good-hearted dying man who falls prey to evil hypnotist Basil Rathbone (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”). All three stories have their charms, and for once the normal characters are well-played, particularly by Debra Paget as Helen Valdemar and Joyce Jameson (who could play a lot more than dumb blondes) as Peter Lorre’s long-suffering wife in “The Black Cat.” That story also marked the fortuitous pairing of Price and Lorre, who bring a welcome touch of humor to the otherwise grisly story. Price never had another male co-star who could match his wit so well. For Lorre, Price was his second great acting partner after Sidney Greenstreet. Lorre’s role as an alcoholic lay about living off his wife’s meagre earnings would seem to be a turn-off by contemporary standards, but when he and Price engage in an hilarious wine-tasting contest, social conscience goes out the window. The two seem to be having a friendly competition to see who can get the most laughs, with Lorre’s underplaying of some of his lines, making them sound like ad libs, winning hands down. As in Corman’s other early Poe films, the picture benefits greatly from Floyd Crosby’s Technicolor cinematography, Les Baxter’s score and Daniel Haller’s art direction (though the sets in “Morella” don’t quite work; they seem like new sets quickly painted to look old). There’s also some good work from wardrobe supervisor Marjorie Corso, who spent most of her career in low-budget films. The women look terrific, and I’d move to a colder climate just for an excuse to wear Price’s wide-sleeved robe in “Morella.”