Winters’ Bones
This is a prosthetic Shelley Winters, constructed by makeup effects supremo Maurice Seiderman (CITIZEN KANE, BRIDE OF THE MONSTER) for NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. The kind of thing you really don’t expect to see in a ’50s movie, and it’s so convincing you don’t realise you are seeing it. Easier to believe Shelley has an oxygen tank hidden just out of sight. I think it’s often evidence of a good film, when the crew find themselves doing unconventional things, or finding new ways to solve old problems.
Shelley never had much luck in the water, did she? Asides from the hauntingly evoked watery grave above, she suffered an aquatic heart attack in THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and drowned in A PLACE IN THE SUN. I assume something bad happens to her in TENTACLES, and even in LOLITA, where her character’s death by drowning was altered by Kubrick so he wouldn’t have to film on an unconvincing studio lake, James Mason responds to her passing by taking a bath.
Seiderman is a fascinating figure. He was employed by RKO to sweep the floor in the hair and makeup department, when Welles spotted his talent and allowed him to design the old-age makeup for KANE. Seiderman invented the soft contact lens as part of his work. Later he designed Welles’ prosthetics for TOUCH OF EVIL, but his IMDb credits look painfully incomplete: even some of the films listed, he received no credit for.
Hollywood lore (it’s still lore if I just make it up, isn’t it?) asserts that Seiderman, like Pygmalion, fell in love with his creation and absconded with the latex-coated Shelley Winters dummy after filming was completed, later marrying it in a blasphemous nuptial mass presided over by Bud Westmore.
January 21, 2011 at 12:30 pm
I always did think it was really Shelley Winters didn’t know it was a prosthetic. It’s an incredible job by Mr. Seiderman, I don’t blame him for falling in love with it one bit.
That scene is one of those “key” NoTH moments. It’s as much a representative image as “Love” and “Hate” on the knuckles. It takes the movie on to another level evoking Ophelia’s death in Hamlet(or that famous painting by Millais) or the silent cinema. It’s an awful tragic death and dispersal of a corpse but in-and-itself it’s a haunting image.
January 21, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Mark me down as another many-time viewer of NOTH who thought that was really Winters. It’s just so convincingly beautiful, and wow, the way that hair drifts in the water. It’s less like a dummy and more like an apparition. Worst of all is when James Gleason sees her, but since we’ve seen her too, we KNOW why he’s driven to stupefy himself with alcohol: that body is captivating and terrifying, like a siren with a slit throat.
Speaking of Winters in the water, don’t forget that her fatal accident in Lolita is caused by a heavy rain. And as for the made-up Hollywood lore… be careful! It might be because I’ve been up all night, but the first time I read that sentence, I took it as true (if preposterous).
January 21, 2011 at 12:59 pm
Shelley Winters, refreshingly, is merely strangled to death in her early appearance in George Cukor’s A DOUBLE LIFE
January 21, 2011 at 2:18 pm
I was fooled, too. That’s the scene that always comes to mind first when I think of that film: it encapsulates its gothic strangeness and dreamlike tone–the silent waving of the hair, that sense that the horrors of life are hidden just below our line of sight. Creepy, and wow, it’s amazing that it’s a dummy.
Next thing you’re going to tell me that Kim Cattrall was played by a dummy in every scene in Mannequin!
January 21, 2011 at 2:19 pm
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January 21, 2011 at 2:55 pm
“Poor Birdie”. This is the scene that moves the film from suspense thriller to horror movie. The hair floats and undulates like seaweed around her head. In a film full of creepy scenes, this is no doubt the creepiest.
January 21, 2011 at 3:14 pm
You’re quite right about Seiderman’s genius. I don’t know of anyone who has seen the scene who didn’t think it was Shelley Winters herself. And its an image of incredible poetic beauty and strangeness.
January 21, 2011 at 3:47 pm
It’s still a great performance by Winters, since when her face was cast she’s obviously assumed an amazing, lopsided, lifeless expression. Transferring that onto an inanimate object makes for one of the most convincing and tragic corpses in cinema.
January 21, 2011 at 4:22 pm
When watching Night recently, I couldn’t help but think of the theater artist Robert Wilson, whose work has a similar strangeness that’s in this image. There’s also the many silhouetted images in the film, like when Powell is riding a horse along the horizon.
January 21, 2011 at 7:18 pm
Ah yes, the famous midget-on-a-donkey shot.
I wanted to talk about the wild geograohy of that scene, with the landscape around the barn seen from the outside looking as flat as Holland, whereas the view from the top looks out on this crazy high horizon which looks like a cliff edge. I love this.
Wilson’s tricks with scale and use of big shadows is pretty cinematic and connects to the surreal and expressionistic traditions NOTH also touches upon.
January 21, 2011 at 10:21 pm
Still one of the top disturbing moments in Film.
I’d holler like Mitchem too if I knew I was in the same water with that.
January 22, 2011 at 12:34 am
NOTH is a work of many auteurs – Laughton, Agee, and Cortez all made their contributions – but Davis Grubb the author of the book was as significant as any of them. According to the Criterion extras, the two key images cited above – the image of Willa underwater, and the image of Powell riding his horse along the horizon as seen by the children – were both closely based on sketches drawn by Davis Grubb.
January 22, 2011 at 1:21 am
Nor was Grubb a one-shot – among other things, he provided the original story for a memorable episode of THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR, “Where the Woodbine Twineth,” which, like NOTH, is a Southern Gothic tale centered around a child. It can be viewed in full here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0394103/
January 22, 2011 at 3:37 am
Robert Wilson is differently scaled than Charles Laughton — and anyone else in cinema. No one who saw his epic Deafman Glance with it’s tropical rainforests, giant sinking Egytian pyaramid, chorus-line of dancing Mammies, giant bunnies cavorting to “We Belong to a Mutual Admiration Society” and Jack Smith (yes himself!) declaiming stage center has ever forgotten it.
Only Chereau’s rendition of the Ring Cycle comes close.
January 22, 2011 at 9:13 am
DE- I think I was referring to a general “stage picture” quality in some of the scenes…probably being too general.
There’s that anecdote about Robert Wilson having a problem with a scene in a production, asking Jack Smith what he should do. “Why don’t you try it much slower Bob, much slower.” I don’t know if this happened during Deafman or not.
That you saw Deafman Glance- wow!
January 22, 2011 at 1:08 pm
C. Jerry — thanks, I’ll check that out.
DE and Tom — wish I COULD check that out!
That last passage of Grubb’s book brings tears to my eyes.
January 22, 2011 at 3:08 pm
isn’t the awful haze woman killed by a car in the novel too? i think humbert is planning to kill her in the lake but it doesn’t quite happen.
January 22, 2011 at 6:44 pm
Ah, you may be right. I just recall reading about how Kubrick struggled to find a way to avoid shooting a lake scene.
January 22, 2011 at 7:30 pm
Bob Wilson definitely learned how to do slooooooow from Jack Smith.
January 22, 2011 at 7:34 pm
Wilson and I also had the same boyfriend back in the day.
January 23, 2011 at 4:01 am
There’s a condensed video version of Deafman Glance in video, that is really another work. With the early original productions, I think they were more temperal- specific; if you weren’t there, you missed it.
There are photos of the ’71 D/G productions on the Wilson website. I wonder if there’s a full film or video of the full 7hrs.
t attended a small seminar that Wilson gave about ten years ago. I can just say, it seemed as though the emperor had lost his clothes somewhere along the way.
Deafman
January 23, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Thanks for links! That Drexel looks like a sly one!
January 23, 2011 at 3:02 pm
I read that Mitchum HATED working with Winters so much, he suggested to Laughton to have her underwater for that scene.
January 23, 2011 at 3:19 pm
I’ve seen Wilson much more recently and he’s fully clothed.
January 23, 2011 at 3:21 pm
Those stills are nice but they only give a vague suggestion of what Deafman Glance was like.
Yes, Joe was very sly.
May 5, 2011 at 3:01 am
I was told CHARLIE GEMORA made this dummy of Shelly under the supervision of Wally Westmore. Do you really think she would remain under water like that for the scene? It would seem more practical to make a dummy likeness of her. Where is this oxygen tank and prosthetic information coming from?
May 5, 2011 at 10:37 am
The information re Seiderman comes from Robert Gitt’s documentary on the Criterion DVD of Night of the Hunter, which is extremely well researched, to say the least. But what’s your source? It may be that you can correct him.
There’s no “oxygen tank information” — read what it says above. The dummy is so convincing, and prosthetic actors so uncommon in the 50s, that I and many viewers were taken in and thought it was somehow the real Shelley (as Laughton intended). As I clearly say, we were wrong. There was an incorrect “oxygen tank supposition.”
Hopefully it’s obvious that the bit at the end is a joke.