BARBARA SHELLEY: 'SHADOW OF THE CAT' BLACKBOXCLUB PIN UP NUMBER FIVE

Barbara Shelley blackboxclub Pin Up Number Five. Publicty shot from 'The Shadow of the Cat' (1961)

More pin ups to come!

JANETTE SCOTT : 'PARANOIAC' 'TRIFFIDS' : BLACKBOXCLUB PIN GALLEY NUMBER FOUR

JANETTE SCOTT star of 'DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS' (1962)  'THE OLD DARK HOUSE' (1963) and 'PARANOIAC' (1963) Number Four in our role call of Fantasy Femme Fatales!

DIANE CLAIRE: GREAT PORTRATE AT HAMMER FILMS BRAY STUDIOS

Here's actresses DIANE CLAIRE star of Hammer Film Productions PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES in the props room at BRAY STUDIOS. Unbelievably, most of the contents of this room, the glass mattes and most of scenery store went into skips just after the move of the production office to Elstree Studios. Even more unbelievable, the same fate happened to the contents of the Hammer Office at Elstree. A few things were rescued from a skip outside the office in March 1980 including, the clapper board for 'Rasputin the Mad monk', the original Banda Machine script for 'Twins of Evil'.... all of which are now in the hands of 'collectors'.

CAROLINE MUNRO 'CAPTAIN KRONOS': BLACKBOXCLUB PIN UPS NUMBER THREE

CAROLINE MUNRO AS CARLA IN A PUBLICITY SHOT FROM HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS 'CAPTAIN KRONOS : VAMPIRE HUNTER' (1974)

HAZEL COURT : ANTON DIFFRING : CHRISTOPHER LEE: 'THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH' REVIEW AND STILLS GALLERY

Hammer’s 1959 production The Man Who Could Cheat Death was a sobering lesson in how the British studios unique brand of gothic horror could easily become stilted and uninteresting. There were warning signs in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) which was sluggish and long-winded in places, but the appetite of cinema patrons for a sensational colour horror film in the dour and dreary late 1950’s, to a certain degree papered over the negative consequences of Terence Fisher’s unadventurous, unobtrusive and minimalist attitude to film direction. Fisher’s style however was particularly suited to Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), and this trilogy of excellent gothic pictures did what a Fisher film does best; shows off and celebrates other aspects of the production. 

Fisher was an extremely generous filmmaker, and one who instinctively knew that certain aspects of a film should be highlighted, while others should be left to linger in the shadows. A casualty of this approach was Fisher himself, whose status as a director was never recognised by contemporary culture. The Man Who Could Cheat Death was Hammer’s fifth departure into the Victorian trappings of gothic horror, and on almost every level is an unqualified failure; and while defenders of Hammer may argue that it fails in spite of Terence Fisher’s best efforts, I think Fisher needs to take his share of the blame.

Jimmy Sangster provides yet another pared down screenplay for Hammer; on this occasion his source of inspiration was Barré Lyndon’s fable exploring the price of immortality The Man in Half Moon Street, itself an unimaginative riff on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), which was made into a film in 1945 by Paramount Pictures. One of the most bizarre alterations made by Sangster/Hammer to the source material was to resituate the narrative from London to Paris. The decision to set the movie in France adds nothing to the story. The film was shot entirely at Bray Studios in England, and the small cast is made up of British and German actors, with the former making no effort whatsoever to conceal their accent, or even attempt to communicate a sense of place through their performances. This decision speaks of incompetence, but the film suffered genuine misfortune when Peter Cushing chose not too accept the role of Dr. Georges Bonner. Instead the role went to the cold and mechanical German actor Anton Diffring. Diffring has ice water running through his veins, and the actor’s obvious discomfort with the romantic subplot featuring the buxom Hazel Court leaves a gaping emotional vacuum at the heart of the film. But Diffring does bring a climate of desperation, vulnerability, and anguish to the role, especially when faced with the encroachment of the 104 years he has been holding at bay. Every ten years Bonner must undergo surgery, and have a new gland transplanted into his body, and with each passing day his old colleague Dr. Ludwig Weiss (Arnold Marlé) doesn’t turn up to perform the deed, so his mania increases.

In fact Bonner has frequently resorted to murder, and a pattern of killings every ten years ultimately leads to a moral impasse with the aged Dr. Weiss, and to his own downfall at the hands of the amateur detection of Dr. Pierre Gerard (Christopher Lee). Bonner is a paradoxical character, a driven scientist determined to secure the secret to eternal life, and a sensitive artist who sculpts the feminine beauty he sees around him. Of course the sculpture is also a scapegoat for the pressing need that arises every ten years. Bonner’s has been a life of loneliness and isolation, able only to confide in Dr. Weiss. In this respect the remoteness of Diffring works in the characters favour, but ultimately it is impossible to find a shred of sympathy for this putrid and vain man of science. The philanthropic scientific ideals that motivated Bonner and Weiss on their quest for immortality has been completely engulfed by Bonner’s deluded sense of grandeur and power, an attitude which has convinced him that his life has more importance than any other. Much of the philosophical substance of the narrative is communicated through dialogue…and lots of it! The film betrays its theatrical originals at every turn. The only excitement we are gifted in the first half is Bonner’s frequent science-fictional visitations to his safe, whereupon he consumes a green potion to ward off the spectre of old age.

Fisher seems entirely comfortable for his camera to be as static as possible, and many of the interminable scenes set in drawing rooms are little more than lifeless tableaux; sometimes such methods make a film stately, elegant, and dignified, here it is just simply boring. However what it does do, as I alluded too earlier, is to show off the gorgeous production design of Bernard Robinson, and the Technicolor brilliance of Jack Asher. The cast is bulked out with Christopher Lee phoning in one of his typically dull and fastidious good guy roles, is it any wonder on the evidence of this that Lee was generally cast as a villain! Francis De Wolf turns up as a clueless flatfoot who is only able to solve the riddle of Dr. Bonner through Dr. Gerard’s deductions; Hazel Court is an unlikely love interest, are we seriously to believe she would go to such lengths in order to ensnare the repulsively taciturn Dr. Bonner? 

The one thing then we can surely rely on with Hammer is the excitement of seeing Bonner age seventy years in the space of seconds, and the makeup work is fairly good, but it is entirely undermined by having Bonner engulfed in flames before one of the most abrupt endings in movie history. The Man Who Could Cheat Death has become something of an obscurity from Hammer’s gothic golden age (despite a blu-ray release!) and this is where it deserves to stay.

Review: Shaun Anderson
HERE
Images: Marcus Brooks

URSULA ANDRESS: BLACKBOXCLUB PIN UP NUMBER TWO

URSULA ANDRESS BLACKBOXCLUB FANTASY ACTRESSES PIN UP NUMBER TWO

NEW GALLERY:DAWN ADDAMS 'BLACKBOXCLUB PIN UPS' STARTS TODAY:

DAWN ADDAMS IN HAMMER FILMS 1960 'THE TWO FACE OF DR JEKYLL'

MORE TO COME . . . 

CHRISTOPHER LEE VERONICA CARLSON: THE 'DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE' BEHIND THE SCENES GALLERY UPDATED DAILY: HAMMER FILMS

A NEW HAMMER FILMS BEHIND THE SCENES GALLERY FROM THEBLACKBOXCLUB.COM: CHRISTOPHER LEE AND VERONICA CARLSON 'DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE' PHOTOGRAPHS ADDED DAILY.

MORE TO COME!

'DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE' . . . .BUT WITHOUT VERONICA CARLSON : HAMMER FILM PRODUCTIONS

There are many Hammer Films Fans who will quite rabidly stand you a bet and wager that the classic Hammer Films Promotional poster with the band aids, features the neck of VERONICA CARLSON. If you are one of the few who holds the opinion that it isn't the lovely Veronica and have also placed your wager on that fact...

.....it's time to collect!

Images: Marcus Brooks

PETER CUSHING: THE UK PETER CUSHING APPRECIATION SOCIETY WEBSITE AND FACEBOOK PAGE

WORTH A LOOK. A STUFFED ARCHIVE OF PHOTOGRAPHS AND STILLS, FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS: JUST CLICK HERE: THE UK PETER CUSHING APPRECIATION SOCIETY FACEBOOK PAGE

and the website

EVERYTHING FROM THE FACEBOOK PAGE PLUS A WHOLE LOT MORE! JUST CLICK HERE: THE UK PETER CUSHING APPRECIATION SOCIETY WEBSITE

CHRISTOPHER LEE: 'REAR WINDOW'

"Acting is like a snowstorm or perhaps a large empty vacuum. I`m not deluded by the fact that I`m getting all these offers for work, I`m very happy about it, but I know also that there is the other side and who knows, next year, they may not offer me anything. You never know. "

- Christopher Lee

BILLY WILDER: THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES: ROBERT STEPHENS CHRISTOPHER LEE FEATURE AND STILLS GALLERY

When looking at Billy Wilder’s films as director, there are four that especially stick out in terms of incompatibility with the rest. The Emperor Waltz is a Bing Crosby musical and generally regarded as unsuccessful on most every level. The Spirit of St. Louis, despite being a fine film, puts Wilder in studio-constricted biopic land. Witness for the Prosecution, another excellent movie, has few, if any, of Wilder’s signatures and seems like it could have been made by at least half a dozen other competent directors. Then there’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, Wilder’s 1970 needling of Arthur Conan Doyle’s mythic detective. The film exists only in a version that was drastically shortened from the original intentions of Wilder and his longtime screenwriting partner I.A.L. Diamond, but it still manages to feel like a cohesive, brilliantly executed whole.

There are certainly several of Wilder’s fingerprints in the picture, it’s just that the use of such a well-known character and the Scottish locations, among other things, feels like fresh dust. It’s a perfect marriage of classic Hollywood filmmaking with the newfound freedoms that resulted from an especially creative period in American movies. For some people, the problem may be that it’s not entirely either one of those. The pacing is deliberate and relaxed, yet the first half hour has little to do with the remainder of the film. Holmes and the trusty Dr. Watson may be familiar names ingrained in most of our memories, but the portrayals are hardly consistent with interpretations up to that point. Holmes, in particular, is much more ambiguous and complex, with noncommittal sexual preference, questionable decision making, and an unapologetic dependency on cocaine.

These are attributes parsed from the original stories, to be sure, but they still vary significantly from the consensus of Holmes as an infallible master of deduction. Robert Stephens, whose cocktail of whiskey and sleeping pills during the shoot delayed production for weeks, plays Holmes as prim, proper and arrogant, all attempts to mask the character’s sadness. Colin Blakely’s Watson is just the opposite, convivial and slightly bumbling. Both performances are perfectly used by Wilder, regardless of how they fit in with Conan Doyle’s mythology. As we see in the film, Holmes scolds Watson repeatedly about his extreme glamorization of the detective’s work. Considering these are two of the most famous fictional characters in literary history, it’s undeniable that Wilder and Diamond had a difficult task in bringing their skewed version of Holmes and Watson to the screen. The interesting thing is that the film seems destined to disappoint both those looking for a Sherlock Holmes movie and the ones interested in a typical Billy Wilder effort. And yet The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is an exceptional film. No wonder it was a commercial disappointment! Who’s supposed to embrace this thing again?

People who enjoy quality filmmaking, for starters. That initial half hour, when Holmes and Watson are mysteriously summoned to a Russian performance of Swan Lake so that the star can request the detective’s paternal seed, is so good that you wonder why other films don’t frequently employ episodic structures. Of course, that was Wilder’s intention, to present a series of four episodes, all of which were filmed and ready to go. A story about a Belgian woman dropped on the doorstep of Holmes and Watson, leading the trio to Scotland and an apparent encounter with the Loch Ness Monster, comprises the remaining hour and a half while the other two portions were cut. In terms of holy grails of lost footage, as much as I’d like to see Orson Welles’ more complete version of The Magnificent Ambersons, I think I’d be equally anxious to see the full version of Wilder’s film. It’s a huge credit to Wilder’s ability as a director that even with the severe edits he was able to produce something as brilliant as the existing cut is here.

After Gabrielle Valladon (played by the lovely Genevieve Page) is deposited at Holmes’ Baker Street address, Wilder does well to produce a subversion of the famous character’s well-documented skills, veiled in a pretty good mystery. At some point, it seems natural to try and understand why Wilder and Diamond would bother in making a fairly difficult film with Holmes as the center. The best explanation I can come up with would be the desire to portray Holmes as a man wrongly described, whose actual attributes are far more humanlike than what’s shown in the stories. It’s the burden of brilliance, but also the inconvenience of not being as intelligent as your superhuman reputation. There are several chuckles, but the film certainly isn’t a comedy so I don’t think that was ever the aim, to place Holmes in a simple and slightly comic series of situations. It would seem more that the idea was for a repositioning of the Holmes character as a man unable to deal with his basic loneliness and alienation, soothed only by pompous one-upping of his sidekick Watson and frequent drug use.

The Holmes here is ultimately a failure at the hands of technology, bested by his brother Mycroft, who, in turn, suffers a major miscalculation of his own. So is it the dissolving of myths that Wilder is interested in? Is this his Liberty Valance? Yeah, I sort of think so. Though he was only 64 at the film’s release, and would churn out four more pictures afterwards, Wilder created his definitive “old man” movie here. The call-backs to a more classic style even than in his previous few efforts and the patience of experience he displays are both important elements to bridging the old with the new. Even when Wilder was younger, he didn’t normally employ the classical and calculated sense of purpose seen here. The structure is considered and nearly perfect. This is part of why it’s so incredible to think that the film was initially envisioned as much longer. The existing version feels appropriate as it is, only marred, in my opinion, a little by the first part of the Loch Ness Monster bit.

When Sherlock Holmes fails to really do much of anything right, despite his predictably shortsighted detective work, it’s at the expense of volumes of lionizing literature. The film thus works as a warning against the perils of smug overconfidence. For Holmes, the sticky truth isn’t that he’s a failure (something he seems to be fighting against throughout), but that a promising opportunity for romance has been squandered. It’s a slow realization, but by the end it’s obvious that he’s in movie love with the not-really Belgian Gabrielle/Ilse. The sexuality aspect here is interesting because Wilder and Diamond put it at the forefront for the viewer. Holmes’ reluctance to declare his heterosexuality to Watson early on seems to be due to one of three reasons: 1.) He’s being coy; 2.) He’s unsure himself as to his current feelings; or 3.) He’s so desexualized as to make it seemingly irrelevant. I think any of these three explanations work perfectly fine. With any of them, Holmes makes it obvious that he’s not actively searching for female companionship, making the presence of Gabrielle/Ilse a difficult situation.

The forced push at the end, when Holmes seems to realize his feelings for her just when she’s no longer attainable, serves as another reminder of how empty his life is. Watson and his silly stories are just about all the character has going for him. Then when it looks like the audience will be treated to the usual ending wrapped in sentimentality, Wilder continues the film and, in so doing, removes any trace of happiness. Watson is little more than a hyper-intelligent canine with a medical bag and Holmes the junkie can only shoot up and pass out (off-screen, of course). In essence, this is Wilder’s most daring film since Ace in the Hole, and it appeals to generally no one outside the director’s most devoted followers. He was able to completely demystify a legendary character with a huge following, using a fully sincere approach, while also putting together a deceptive genre story that proves quite entertaining. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is destined to remain largely unappreciated because it has few of the attributes Wilder is most known for, but it’s nevertheless an atypical slice of brilliance from the director.

Wilder himself apparently disagreed. In Cameron Crowe’s book Conversations with Wilder, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is characterized by its creator as basically a great film ruined by later editing after the director went off to another country (shades of Ambersons). Wilder retained final cut in his contract, but a terrible test screening and a supposedly misplaced negative resulted in the trimmed version, topping out at 125 minutes, being what hit theaters. Other reports seem to indicate Wilder was agreeable with the existing edit. Regardless, upon release it promptly sank, just like Ace in the Hole. Wilder had gone four years since the release of his last film, The Fortune Cookie, and it’s not surprising that audiences mostly stayed away from this one. The financially successful films of 1970 were either epic spectacles like Aiport and Patton or then-daring expressions of a new generation like M*A*S*H and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Ironically, despite the freedom afforded Wilder that probably would have been unimaginable a decade or two earlier, his audience was no longer interested.

The saga of the film’s different incarnations is well documented on the R1 DVD, which ported over several of the laserdisc extras. A new 15-minute interview (from 2003) with Christopher Lee, who plays Mycroft Holmes, doesn’t shed a lot of light on the various cuts, but it does give Lee the chance to single out Wilder as the best director he’s ever worked with, and it also lets the actor reminisce on his own turns playing Sherlock Holmes. The film’s editor Ernest Walter, the man referred to by Wilder in Crowe’s book, goes into great detail about what was cut and so forth in a half-hour interview from the mid-nineties that was originally on the laserdisc. Then, you can see for yourself much of what was removed. A prologue with Colin Blakely as Watson’s modern-day grandson would have further set up the idea that these four episodes derived from material deemed too private to be published in Holmes’ lifetime. This particular portion is told on the DVD from still photos and script excerpts, but the viewer definitely gets a good feeling of how it might have turned out.

The crude reconstruction continues with one of the excised sequences, a lengthy story involving an upside down room. It has audio, but only photographs instead of video. I think this would have been an exceptionally strong portion of the film had it remained because it reinforces the idea that Watson cares deeply for Holmes and that the detective is sort of miserably entwined in his own intelligence. The next scene removed was a brief flashback where Holmes and Gabrielle/Ilsa are just about to go to sleep on the train. The scene was intended as a means for explaining some of Holmes’ reluctance to become romantically involved, stemming from an incident with a schoolboy crush who turned out to be a prostitute. This too would have fit perfectly within the film and improved the existing scene without bogging it down.

The final episode not in the finished film exists on the DVD in letterboxed video, but is missing the audio. The dialogue from the script has been inserted as subtitles. The scene is very funny and concerns Watson putting on Holmes’ hat (literally) and trying to solve a murder. In relation to the rest of the film, it seems to fit the least of the cut portions. If the movie had been made today, this little bit could have worked perfectly as a DVD-only extra or even a short intended to run before the film. All total, there’s over an hour of extra material here, all of which was shot and excluded from the final cut. The inclusion of this footage on the DVD is really something to be thankful for, but the hope that somehow Wilder’s full version could be restored still nags.

Feature: link

Images: Marcus Brooks 

JANETTE SCOTT: THE OLD DARK HOUSE: REVIEW AND LOBBY CARD GALLERY

I wish I knew what James Carreras and Anthony Hinds were thinking in 1962, when they decided to bring William Castle over from America to produce and direct their remake of James Whale’s The Old Dark House. Everything I’ve read about the studio’s history devotes as little attention as possible to The Old Dark House, and I can totally understand that. It’s a dreadful, shameful movie, a humiliating blot on two otherwise remarkably consistent records. But you know there has to be a story here, and I’d love to hear it. Hammer, after all, was not in the habit of handing creative control of their products over to people from outside their usual stable of producers, directors, and writers. They’d imported plenty of American talent over the years, but only for jobs in front of the camera. 

The Hammer regulars had very carefullly developed an instantly recognizable house style since the studio’s rise to international prominence in 1957, and if it’s true what they say about imitation, then that style was among the most sincerely flattered all over the horror-film-producing world. Castle, too, had an unmistakable style, and it could not possibly have been any further at variance from Hammer’s. Although luridness was surely a core Hammer characteristic, filmmakers like Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis, Val Guest, and Jimmy Sangster almost always managed to make it look classy and well-mannered. 

Castle’s luridness was of an unapologetically boorish and thoroughly American stripe. Having him over to make a Hammer film was like hiring a carnival barker to sell Jaguars. All I can think of to explain it is the fact that The Old Dark House was a co-production with Hammer’s latest transatlantic partners, Columbia Pictures; Castle was arguably Columbia’s star horror director in the early 60’s, and I can imagine that studio’s leadership snowballing Hinds and Carreras with some bunch of bullshit about creative synergy or whatever. What this most unlikely of alliances produced, however, was something close to the exact opposite of synergy. Castle and Hammer turn out to be the two great tastes that induce gagging and nausea together.

Tom Penderel (Tom Poston, of Zotz!) is an American car salesman living in London. Specifically, he seems to work at a Lincoln dealership, which I didn’t know they had over there. His living arrangements are rather peculiar, for although he shares his flat with another man, Penderel and Casper Femm (Peter Bull, from The 3 Worlds of Gulliver and Footsteps in the Fog) have never actually met. This is possible because Casper occupies the flat only during the day while Tom is at work, vacating it each evening to go… well, somewhere. The two sort-of roommates are about to make each other’s acquaintance at last, however, for Casper has lately gotten it into his head to buy one of Tom’s extravagantly huge and powerful vehicles. To that end, Tom leaves the lot at quitting time in a powder-blue Continental convertible, and drives it to the private club where Casper does his gambling. Penderel has a hard time talking his way past the concierge (whose whole job, after all, is to keep the club free of rabble like Tom), but eventually gets in with a stern warning not to take part in any of the games. The meeting does not go quite as Tom expects. Casper is enchanted with the car, alright, but he wants Penderel to drive it home for him. And by “home,” Casper means not the apartment that he and Tom share, but rather the ancestral manse of the Femm family, far away in Dartmoor. That, apparently, is where he disappears to every night. Tom will have to make the drive alone, too, because pressing time constraints about which Casper feels himself not at liberty to speak here demand that he himself return by airplane. Penderel understandably balks at this onerous stipulation, but Casper wins him over partly by appealing to a wildly exaggerated conception of their friendship and partly by mentioning his lovely cousin, Cecily.

The drive to Dartmoor is uneventful until Tom comes to the end of it. An intense, persistent thunderstorm breaks out during the home stretch of the journey, Femm Manor turns out to be accessible only via a winding dirt track through the center of an immense marsh, and the front gate is stuck shut when Penderel finally arrives before it. His efforts to unstick the gate have the collateral effect of dislodging the enormous granite gargoyle atop one of the masonry columns anchoring it, and while Tom dodges the falling statue handily enough, Casper’s Lincoln isn’t so fortunate. Also, the knocker on Femm Manor’s front door was booby-trapped by Casper’s Uncle Potiphar (Mervyn Johns, from Dead of Night and The Confessional) so as to dump anyone who tries to use it through a trapdoor into the cellar, where he can safely interrogate them about their business at the house. Oh— and Casper’s dead, too.

Wait— what?! Yes, Casper is dead, and although none of his relatives profess to know how, they are virtually unanimous in suspecting foul play. Tom gets the latter information (or at least some hints in its direction) from Cecily (Janette Scott, from Paranoiac and The Day of the Triffids)— who, incidentally, pretty well lives up to her billing and marks herself out thereby as Penderel’s natural love-interest. The prime suspect appears to be Cecily’s father, Roderick (Robert Morley, of A Study in Terror and Theater of Blood), de facto head of the Femm clan, and she makes every effort to hustle Tom out the door before her old man returns home. No such luck there. Roderick’s arrival is not without its upside, however, for it means that at last there’s someone able and willing to answer a few of the 11,000 questions that Tom has formulated since being dragooned into delivering Casper’s car to the chateau.

To begin at the beginning, the Femm family is obviously very rich, but that wealth was not gained legitimately. The founder of the line was a notorious pirate called Morgan— whom we are indeed apparently supposed to identify with that Captain Morgan, even though the timeline and biography for the Femms’ Morgan don’t remotely line up with his. Building this house in the middle of a swamp was Morgan’s way of going belatedly straight, and the terms of the trust in which he put his plundered riches were intended to keep all of his descendants out of the buccaneering business, too. In order to maintain any claim to a share of the family fortune, a Femm must meet at least a minimal standard of permanent residence within the old manse; they must be present beneath its roof each midnight, which is obviously incompatible with a life of piracy on the high seas. That it would also be incompatible with many other totally legitimate lifestyles was apparently of no concern to Morgan. The trust is inalterable so long as the house remains within the family, which is the next best thing to saying it’s inalterable forever, since there’s also a clause forbidding its sale. Not even arson would get the clan out from under their ancestor’s thumb, since the only fire that could harm the fortress-like walls of Femm Manor is the volcanic variety from which the basalt blocks originally sprang. Meanwhile, the funds disbursed from the trust as an allowance to the heirs are equally divided among all of them who play by its rules, so that they each have an obvious incentive to engineer each other’s disinheritance.

That last is why Casper’s death has everyone so worried. It’s hard to think of a more efficient means of engineering someone’s disinheritance than murdering them, and sanity is unmistakably in short supply among the Femms. To all outward appearances, the younger generation— Casper and his twin brother, Jasper (also Peter Bull); Cecily; the predatorily amorous Morgana (Carry On Screaming’s Fenella Fielding)— are merely eccentric, but their elders to a one are loonier than Harley Quinn. Potiphar is expecting the end of the world any day now, and has an ark built and stocked to Biblical specifications in the backyard, all ready for the rains to float it. (The funniest scene in the movie— funny for all the wrong reasons— concerns a meeting between Penderel and one of Potiphar’s hyenas. It’s right up there with the taxidermy attack in Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula.) The twins’ mother, Agatha (Joyce Grenfell), looks harmless enough, channeling her craziness into literally hundreds of miles per annum of useless knitting, but the way she talks about her perpetual project puts me strongly in mind of the three Fates— and you remember what was supposed to happen when Atropos snipped off her sisters’ threads. Morgana’s father, Morgan (Danny Green, from Murder at the Baskervilles and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), is the most visibly dangerous of the lot, harboring a psychotic jealousy of his daughter, and being generally assumed to have killed all of her previous suitors. As for Roderick, his gun collection could outfit a respectable Third World military, and of all the Femms, he’s the most openly conscious of the family legacy as a zero-sum game. Now ordinarily it might seem that Tom personally has nothing to worry about except for steering clear of Morgan after Morgana sets her sights on him, even once Casper’s killer begins working on the rest of the clan. However, there happens to be a legend about a little-known American side of the family, and Roderick thinks he detects a resemblance between Penderel and the portrait of old Morgan the Pirate that hangs in the chateau’s drawing room.

Before we go any further, I want to remind you all of my utter loathing for James Whale’s interpretation of The Old Dark House. I consider it easily the worst major-studio horror movie of an era in which major-studio horror movies more often than not were clumsy, anemic affairs, of more academic interest than actual artistry or entertainment value. So when I tell you that William Castle’s The Old Dark House reeks in the nostrils of the Muses, you will know that it is not just loyalty to the original talking. Whatever imagined benefit of a Castle-Hammer alliance might draw you to this movie, I assure you, you won’t find it here. The only trace of normative Hammer-ness is a genuinely terrific set— and it was used to much better effect a bit later in The Kiss of the Vampire, anyway. The Castle touch, meanwhile, is represented only by a very modest gimmick indeed, an animated main title sequence by Charles Addams, which is far and away the best thing about the film. Otherwise, The Old Dark House is the kind of mess that any two-bit hack could have made. Danny Green, to begin with, is no Boris Karloff, and Tom Poston is no anybody— although he seems, horrifyingly enough, to be aiming vaguely in the direction of Kay Kyser! Story logic is thin nearly to the point of nonexistence. Most notably, there’s no apparent reason at all for the Femms to pick this night in particular to begin exterminating each other. 

If you fail to unravel the mystery of the killer’s identity, it will be only because you stopped giving a shit well before anything in the way of a clue was presented. The remake manages to be just as boring and pointless as the original, even despite having both five times the body count (including a double knitting-needle throat-stabbing!) and something faintly resembling a plot. And as with the old version, it’s a tough call which is the bigger affront, that soul-sapping dreariness and inanity, or all the noxious anti-comedy. Whale at least was trying for something sort of sophisticated by the standards of his day, alternating poisonously unfunny comedy of manners with poisonously unfunny camp. Castle and screenwriter Robert Dillon, on the other hand, mostly just substitute random zaniness on the Crane Wilbur model, shameless reusing not a few gags that had been polluting the atmosphere of horror comedies at least as far back as The Monster in 1925. To be fair, there are also a few thoroughly botched attempts at the sort of gallows humor that AIP’s writers were proving so adept with around the same time, but not enough to have rescued The Old Dark House from itself even if they had worked. Frankly, I’m not a bit surprised that the Hammer leadership’s reaction to the finished product was to send it straight to the vault, not releasing it domestically until 1966. Columbia— perhaps also not surprisingly— showed no such discernment.

REVIEW: Scott Ashlin

Scott's Excellent Website: Click Here

IMAGES: Marcus Brooks

VINCENT PRICE KARLOFF LORRE RATHBONE: 'THE COMEDY OF TERRORS' REVIEW AND LOBBY PHOTOGRAPHS

CAST:
Vincent Price (Waldo Trumbull), Peter Lorre (Felix Gillie), Basil Rathbone (John F. Black), Boris Karloff (Amos Hinchley), Joyce Jameson (Amaryllis Trumbull)

PRODUCTION:
Director – Jacques Tourneur, Screenplay – Richard Matheson, Producer – Anthony Carras, Photography – Floyd Crosby, Music – Les Baxter, Special Effects – Pat Dinga, Art Direction – Daniel Haller. Production Company – AIP. USA 1963

SYNOPSIS:
Alcoholic wife-beater Waldo Trumbull has run the funeral business he inherited from his father-in-law into the ground. His landlord John F. Black threatens to foreclose unless Trumbull comes up with a year’s unpaid rent. And so Trumbull and his assistant Felix Gillie decide to resort to murder in order to drum up some business. When the wife of their first victim leaves town without paying their bill, they decide they can kill two birds with one stone by making Black into their next victim.

COMMENTARY:
The Comedy of Terrors was not one of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films but has enough in common that it could easily have been. It has more or less the same credits as Corman’s comedic Poe effort The Raven (1963), including stars Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Vincent Price – who is playing essentially the same part that Lorre did in the similarly comedic The Black Cat episode of Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962), screenwriter Richard Matheson, production designer Daniel Haller, musician Les Baxter and photographer Floyd Crosby.

The Comedy of Terrors was directed by Jacques Tourneur, who a couple of decades earlier had made distinction with two of Val Lewton’s finest psychological horror films Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Here Tourneur is in broad burlesque mode and the film is aimed at a frequently buffoonish level of knockabout comedy. What saves The Comedy of Terrors from total silliness is a witty and adept script from Richard Matheson who wrote most of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe films. 

All the cast are on fine form – Vincent Price is in full fruity flight with some hilarious scenes threatening to poison Boris Karloff off, while Peter Lorre does his craven cringing thing with equally hilarious regard. There are some mercilessly funny scenes with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre trying to force Basil Rathbone to stay in his coffin. The film reaches an especially hilarious ending with Basil Rathbone maniacally quoting Shakespeare, everybody being killed off (sometimes multiply so) and an especially droll final scene where Boris Karloff feeds Vincent Price some ‘medicine’.

Jacques Tourneur made several excellent psychological horror films – namely Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943) and Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon (1957), as well as the lost city sf film The City Under the Sea/War Gods from the Deep (1965). 

REVIEW: Richard Scheib 
IMAGES: Marcus Brooks