(T)error Attack

I’ve recut THE TERROR to give a sense of the way it looked in rushes.

This involved throwing out everything except the stuff in Boris Karloff’s castle, particularly that which involves wandering about in hallways. Corman’s period horror movies — this one is co-directed by Corman with Francis Ford Coppola (three or four days’ directing), Jack Hale (one day ), Monte Hellman (five days), Jack Hill (unknown days), Dennis Jakob (one day ) and Jack Nicholson (one day) — typically involve a lot of wandering in corridors. Wandering in corridors is cheap, if you’ve built some corridors and hired some actors. THE HAUNTED PALACE seems to be mostly constructed out of wandering in corridors, and for long stretches there aren’t even any actors: the camera wanders alone.

Star Jack Nicholson would recall, “I believe the funniest hour I have ever spent in a projection room was watching the dailies for THE TERROR. You first saw Boris coming down the hallway in the Baron’s blue coat. Then he’d move out of the frame — Roger didn’t even bother to cut the camera and slate the shots — Sandra would come down the hallway. Then it was Dick’s turn looking weird in his servant suit. And then Boris would come down AGAIN, this time in his red coat. All of this shot as if in one take and with no cut.”

Unfortunately without multiple takes (though I’m sure Corman didn’t shoot many) we can’t enjoy the full madness. It was tempting to duplicate the takes we have, but that would be cheating. Also, a lot of the interstitial material has been chopped out, so we don’t get quite the same sense of demented continuity, oneiric ourobourosity.

But suddenly the thing seems even more dreamlike than before, and we can sense why Nicholson looks puzzled and Karloff seems grouchy. They’re trapped in a labyrinth of painted flats, possibly forever.

I found myself reminded of THE TALES OF HOFFMANN, KILL, BABY, KILL! and the final episodes of both The Prisoner and Twin Peaks season 2. Chases without beginning or end, with the pursuer and the pursued blurring together, logic and continuity thrown out the window into the dry ice night.

THE TERROR stars Hjalmar Poelzig; Jack Torrence; Mistress Shore; Walter Paisley; Meg Maud – a Witch; and Seymour Krelborn — no strangers, any of them, to jerry-built labyrinths.

Character

When I was changing from a kid who liked movies, kinda like any kid but a little weirder, into an actual I-supposed-you’d-have-to-say cinephile, I noticed a guy who seemed to turn up a lot. Not at the movies, IN the movies. Here he is in AFTER HOURS, which was the first Scorsese film that came out properly during this formative period. (I was aware of THE KING OF COMEDY but I don’t think it even made it to Edinburgh screens as part of its actual release).

It was a while before I learned his name, and when I did I kept forgetting it, because it was so ordinary. Dick Miller. It suited his blue-collar, tough-but-decent, warmly paternal aspect, but it took a while to catch. So me and my movie-going chum Robert called him The Character Actor. He was turning up in Joe Dante films, of course, but also in 1941, THE TERMINATOR, early Zemeckis and Demme, a lot of recent things we were catching up with. I’d seen a scattered bunch of Corman films but maybe not the ones that featured him prominently so I don’t think I knew how far back he went. He was one of those guys, like Charles Napier, who just turned up in stuff and gave a pleasurable glow of recognition along with a no-nonsense performance, the eighties equivalents of the Preston Sturges stock company.

Here’s Dick Miller catching an airborne kiss blown by Rosanna Arquette in the manliest manner possible, and with fucking APLOMB.

 

RIP Dick Miller. 90 is a good age, and you seem to have enjoyed life all the way through. A great way to go, but I wish you didn’t have to.

The Obligatory Dick Miller

When my school friend Robert and I first became aware of Dick Miller, being impressed by him in AFTER HOURS (“He said the title!”) but realizing that somehow we already knew him from many films, we had trouble remembering his name. It seemed too ordinary for him. So we called him The Character Actor.

One thing we quickly realized is that The Character Actor nearly always turned up in Joe Dante films, as a kind of Added Treat.

Here he is (left)  making his obligatory appearance in Joe Dante’s excoriating satire THE SECOND CIVIL WAR, the timely subject of this fortnight’s edition of The Forgotten. Now THAT’S character!