Quote of the Day: The Human Torch

 

Two public school boys and a torch (or flashlight, if you will): 

“And now something of the real and peculiar horror of the situation was communicated to Bell. The horror was of a peculiar nature because of the character and reputation of Ryan’s torch. Ryan’s torch, in fact, dwelt in a heavenly realm above and beyond all other torches — was famous, one might say fabulous, in the school at just this time. To be permitted to look at it was a privilege, to hold it was an honour; to use it, even with its owner’s sanction, was almost a blasphemy, frightening. This was to a certain extent because it was so wonderfully thin and small and covered with imitation crocodile leather; but principally because it had, at the top, a sliding apparatus which enabled its user to change the white light to red, and then to white again, and then again to green! What specific purpose, if any, this was intended to serve, nobody had as yet asked: everyone simply and instinctively knew that no one could ask for more. During the whole week it had been the making of Ryan: Ryan’s being was the torch and the torch was Ryan’s being. Ryan was a torch. If, then, the torch was lost, was not Ryan utterly lost, suddenly a nothing?”

~ From The West Pier, a novel by Patrick Hamilton.

Images from SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR and HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD.

The Reveal

Keep your eye on the suitcase, and watch for the slightest hint… of hanky panky.

This is all one shot. He goes to the drinking fountain, stoops to drink, occluding our view of the case…

…then straightens up and finds it gone!

I love this kind of reveal, both for the spooky onscreen effect, and for the thought of the props guy carefully crawling in while the actor is blocking our view. These kind of things are great fun to do.

This is from Mirror Image, a Twilight Zone episode directed by John Brahm. I’d been impressed by Brahm’s visuals on THE LODGER and HANGOVER SQUARE — he has a great sense of noir. But I’d also been distressed to read Brahm’s defence of 20th Century Fox’s bowdlerizing of Patrick Hamilton’s source novel Hangover Square. When Hamilton complained in the press, Brahm wrote back to argue that the studio’s changes, such as transplanting the book to a period setting, were necessary, since modern detection methods would prevent a serial killer from operating for long. Now, not only has Brahm been proven tragically wrong in his faith in “modern methods,” he’s missing the obvious point that there IS no serial killer in Hamilton’s book. He obviously hadn’t even read it.

Although it boasts great visuals and Bernard Herrmann’s walloping score, HANGOVER SQUARE is a travesty, and it’s all the more tragic since Linda Darnell and Dan Duryea are perfectly cast, and the wonderful Laird Cregar crash-dieted himself to death to play the lead part. He loved the book, and actually went on suspension from the studio when he saw the script they’d made of it (despite the title, there’s hardly even any drinking in the film). Cregar had earlier reported to Gorgeous George Sanders his intention to become “as slender as a sapling,” (despite the fact that Hamilton’s protagonist is always called “the  big drinking man”).

Cregar damaged his heart losing weight in a hurry, and HANGOVER SQUARE was his last film.

So anyhow, I kind of took it against Brahm on account of those comments, and dismissed him as a filmmaker with a great eye but nothing behind it. A sort of ’40s Ridley Scott, maybe. But the above sequence is not only graceful and eerily effective, it’s genuinely CLEVER. Brahm’s thoughtful and restrained work, along with Vera Miles and Martin Milner’s intense performances, elevates a routine doppelganger yarn into something memorable and impressive. One of Rod Serling’s archtypal Twilight Zone themes is at work — the hand of the irrational reaching into ordinary lives and inexplicably twisting everything around. Had David Lynch seen the climax before directing the last episode of Twin Peaks? (Or did his inspiration come from Bava’s KILL, BABY, KILL or Powell and Pressburger’s TALES OF HOFFMAN?)

 

I’m going to watch more of Brahm’s Twilight Zone episodes now (he did quite a few), paying particular attention to the one called… Shadowplay.

“We know that a dream can be real, but who ever thought that reality could be a dream? We exist, of course, but how, in what way? As we believe, as flesh-and-blood human beings, or are we simply parts of someone’s feverish, complicated nightmare? Think about it and then ask yourself, do you live here, in this country, in this world, or do you live instead… in the Twilight Zone?”