Pg. 17 #10

 

Barber came to the controversy thanks to a girlie magazine. In the summer of 1979 Gallery offered its readers, amongst the nudes, a record of the section of the police Dictabelt that includes the noises said to be gunshots. He played it again and again, and detected something the experts had missed. What had been thought to be unintelligible “Cross-talk” — conversation coming in from another radio channel — Barber’s ear identified as the voice of Sheriff Bill Decker, in the lead car of the motorcade. The sheriff’s voice occurs on the recording at the same point as the impulses that the Committee’s experts said were gunshots. What he is saying is, “Move all men available out of my department back into the railroad yards there… to try to determine just what and where it happened down there. And hold everything secure until the homicide  and other investigators can get there.” Clearly Decker did not issue his orders till after the shooting.

*

It was Reverend Pettigrew who complained about Floyd Gummer carrying them in his drugstore. Of course I went right down and seized them. Floyd was a good old boy and I knew he wouldn’t go complaining to any American Civil Liberties Union or any of those Illuminatus-controlled eastern troublemakers. I just told him about the complaint and he handed them over gentle as a lamb. He didn’t want to be on the bad side of the Reverend any more than I did. You sure can learn more diplomacy in a small town than you can at the Paris peace talks.

*

All interesting, indeed. And yet all these findings taken together did not slimmest reed of evidence. The case for demonic possession had finally to rest on what was plentifully lacking at Loudun: the reliably witnessed and reported occurrence of so-called paranormal phenomena. Levitating mattresses are very out front.

*

I never took it as seriously as some people because of my insatiable curiosity about everything. This is why the moment I finished making a picture, I left California as quickly as I knew how, on a train in those days, and used that time in bed all the way across the continent for reading, because I didn’t have time to do it back there. I would see all the plays in New York, see all my friends and then maybe stay here or go abroad.

*

South Avenue northeast of the Village acquired a reputation not long after the Civil War as a competitor to the Bowery. Legend has it that the area was christened by the notoriously corrupt Police Captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams, when, upon being transferred in 1876 from the Oak Street Station in the drably commercial far downtown to West Thirtieth Street, he said, “I’ve been living on chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.”

*

Zukor not only gave Goldstein the money — which was an uncharacteristic gesture for someone as cautious as Zukor — but he visite the arcade and within a short time convinced Kohn they should set up one of their own on Fourteenth Street, which at that time was New York’s tenderloin, crammed with dance halls, saloons, and arcades and teeming with immigrants looking for inexpensive thrills. As he later recounted his inspiration to Michael Korda, “I looked around and said, ‘A Jew could make a lot of money at this.'”

*

“Aaron Wassertrum, for instance! He’s a millionaire. Owns a third of the Ghetto. Didn’t you know that, Herr Pernath?”

*

Seven extracts from seven page seventeens in seven books, plucked fairly randomly — but I, too, believe in the reality of accidents — from my bookshelves. The books were ~

Not in Your Lifetime, by Anthony Summers; Right Where You Are Sitting Now, by Robert Anton Wilson; William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist, From Novel to Film, by William Peter Blatty; People Will Talk, by John Kobal, interview with Gloria Swanson; Lowlife, by Luc Sante; An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, by Neal Gabler; The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink.

Semi-random illustration: the Kino-Babylon cinema, Berlin, designed by architect Hans Poelzig, also set designer of DER GOLEM.

Ten Bad Dates With Roddy McDowall

“It was all going so well! And then I had to say that thing about the bridge. Stupid! Stupid!”

From CURSE OF THE GOLEM, A.K.A. IT!

You really don’t need to see this film, unless like us at Shadowplay you grew up with a copy of Dennis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies in the house, or regularly borrowed from the library. Other monster movie books might also do the trick, or Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine (I only ever discovered one outlet that carried this publication as a kid. While on holiday. I could only afford two issues, which was a wrenching choice to make as they all looked so tasty. There was no possibility of buying more… There was a big article about BARBARELLA, which my mum wouldn’t let me watch when it came on TV, and an ad in the back for something called EQUINOX.)

If, like me, you were exposed to the right kind of literature in childhood, you probably saw a still of the big stone guy in this movie. You probably marvelled at his massive stone body, mighty stone limbs, big stone skirt and pointy stone head. He doesn’t look like any other monster. And what you demand most of all from your monsters is NOVELTY, so that has to be good. Having seen quite a bit of Dr. Who, you might have suspected that the Golem would be less impressive in motion that he is in a still image. And you’d have been right. But children of the pre-C.G.I. age, we expected our monsters to lumber, didn’t we? If they jerked across the screen in a Harryhausen strobe of animation, so much the better. But we certainly never wanted them to slink around, weightless, in a series of algorithms.

Anyhow, CURSE OF THE GOLEM is written and directed by Herbert J. Leder, auteur of such cinematic goitres as THE FROZEN DEAD and THE CHILD MOLESTOR.  Good luck with that career, Herbert.

One hates to judge a film-maker’s personality by their work (gloomy Bergman was known to his friends for a great deal of jollity, sentimental Frank Capra once punched his wife unconscious), but going by this film I would probably characterise Mr. Leder as a BIG IDIOT. Roddy McDowall, as Arthur Gordon Pym (!) finds he can command an ancient Jewish statue to do his bidding. Since he lives with his mother’s decayed corpse (though this has no real bearing on the story, and no explanation), he’s probably not the best person to be granted this awesome power. He uses it to kill his boss, and in a failed attempt to impress Otto Preminger babe Jill Haworth. It seems golems are good at bludgeoning irksome employers, but utterly useless as an aid to modern dating.

Paul Wegener doing his cute, Susannah Hoffs-style look-to-the-side.

The golem seem to me an underused monster. Paul Wegener portrayed the animate clay statue thrice, in DER GOLEM of 1915, sequel THE GOLEM AND THE DANCING GIRL two years later, and prequel/secret origin THE GOLEM: HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD, which is the version that survives.

Although he was certainly some kind of influence on Hollywood’s FRANKENSTEIN, the golem never surfaced in a bona fide Hollywood remake, instead emigrating to France, where he raises his ugly head in Julien Duvivier’s characteristically stylish LE GOLEM of 1936, which incorporates imagery from FRANKENSTEIN while essentially reprising the original Golem legend dramatised by Wegener. Many of the pre-Nouvelle Vague filmmakers deserve to be rediscovered, and I carry a special torch for Duvivier, whose PANIQUE and LA FIN DU JOUR strike me as truly major works, on the verge of being completely forgotten.

1951 gives us an authentic Czech golem at last, in THE EMPEROR’S BAKER AND THE GOLEM, a comic fantasy directed by Martin Fric, which guest-stars a wonderfully monumental golem who can’t actually articulate his limbs, and therefore walks like a chair.

Since then, there doesn’t seem to have been a really truly golem-centred movie, although ceramic heavies have occasionally disported themselves upon the screen in a supporting capacity. I’d welcome a good remake, or else an adaptation of Gustav Meyrink’s fantastic novel The Golem, in which the colossus does not actually appear, but assumes a kind of allegorical omnipresence in the story. My colleague, B. Kite, the Brooklyn Behemoth, himself a stony homunculus enlivened by rabbinical sorcery, once co-authored an atmospheric and highly imaginative screenplay based on this work.

Anyhoo. Some Youtubing genius has helpfully provided this abridged version that allows you to consume the whole thing at a single, ten-minute sitting. Had I realised this I could have saved myself eighty minutes or so.

Here, by way of a palette-cleanser, is the great Jiri Barta’s animated THE GOLEM, a pilot/trailer for a feature Barta hopes to complete. The collapse of communism in Europe (a good thing in itself, don’t get me wrong) has left many brilliant artists like Barta and the incomparable Yuri Norstein stranded in a marketplace they have no experience dealing with. Somebody help!

The more numerate Shadowplayers among you may have noticed that this post contains only one bad date with Roddy MacDowall. I maintain that one bad date with Roddy is worth ten with anyone else, but I’m happy for you to nominate nine more if you feel up to it.

STOP PRESS! What the heck is THIS?

And THIS?

“Try to be sane.”

“You say your soul was killed, that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmorus 15 years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead? And now you come to me, playing at being an avenging angel, childishly thirsting for my blood. We understand each other too well. We know too much of life.” ~ Karloff in THE BLACK CAT.

You couldn’t get a more obvious Fever Dream Double Feature than the pairing of Edgar Ulmer’s THE BLACK CAT and Lew Landers’ THE RAVEN. But nor could you get a more feverish or dreamy one.

The films are a matching pair, each using Karloff and Lugosi and each “suggested” by an “immortal classic” by Edgar Allan Poe. So immortal and so classic that the filmmakers have thrown away all but the title, as was customary in Olde Hollywood (oh, to read Preston Sturges’ treatment for THE INVISIBLE MAN, set in Revolutionary Russia “The director said it was a piece of cheese.”)

THE BLACK CAT is clearly the superior film, mainly because it came first and set the pattern, and THE RAVEN is a blatant attempt to follow that pattern exactly: a mixture of the horrible, the downright bizarre and the seriously silly. The mix of humour and horror in these Universal horrors is if anything more disturbing and strange than that in James Whales’ more famous classics: when Ernest Thesiger or Una O’Connor go into their thing, it’s pretty clear there’s intentional humour afoot and we the dazzling sophisticates in the audience are invited to share in it (while turning up our noses at those louts who see only ham and grue), but Ulmer’s film repeatedly hits us with moments pitched at some unknown region between serious and hilarious. Plus there’s the discomfort of Lugosi. Laugh with Lugosi! But somehow we cannot, without the fear that maybe he really means it. Karloff used to laugh at himself and say “Here comes the heavy,” as he entered a scene, so that Ulmer’s biggest job with the actor was to keep him in character. “Not the Hungarian, of course. You had to cut away from Lugosi continuously, to cut him down.” Lugosi’s horrified reaction to the titular pussy is pure Spike Milligan, a kind of melodramatic spasm so far over the top it punches a hole in the sky.

And by the way, who is John Belton? His little book in the Hollywood Professionals series, Howard Hawks Frank Borzage Edgar Ulmer, is very good. Shoehorning three major filmmakers into one slender volume prevents a serious in-depth analysis, but Belton’s good at the snappy summary (he’d make a fine blogger). Here he is on Ulmer:

‘The world around Ulmer’s characters has no fixity and is incomprehensible. Ulmer’s world, like Poelzig’s (Karloff’s) house in THE BLACK CAT, stands upon a battlefield, is surrounded by a graveyard of the soldiers who died there and is undermined with dynamite. As one character, remarking on the presence of the dynamite, points out, “the slightest mistake by one of us could cause the destruction of all.” Ulmer’s characters, living on the brink of insanity, constantly run the risk of making that one mistake and of unleashing fantastically chaotic forces that will hound them to their own destruction.’

Beautiful — that one paragraph serves as a key to Ulmer’s best films, unlocking the meaning of their nightmarish scenarios and settings, as well as binding them together thematically into a coherent body of work (sort of like a key with a length of twine attached, or something).

That instability is only emphasised by the fact that many of Ulmer’s landscapes are tabletop miniatures, tiny and vulnerable. I particularly like the Scottish scenery of THE MAN FROM PLANET X — an arrangement of soil and twigs reminiscent of the “sculpture” Henry Spencer keeps in his bedroom in ERASERHEAD.

THE BLACK CAT throws a disparate throng of characters together in the Bauhaus castle of of Karloff (influenced by Ulmer’s conversations with author Gustav Meyrink, whose work loosely “inspired” an earlier horror classic, Paul Wegener’s DER GOLEM), leading to a black mass in cod Latin (“In vino veritas”, Karloff intones solemnly) and a flaying alive.

Ulmer’s masterstroke is the modernist design of the “castle”, a neo-brutalist affair with a concrete bunker down below (floating female corpses provide a feminine touch) and a sort of Ginger-and-Fred elegance in the living quarters. Ulmer’s background in German cinema appears to have had to do with production design, although it’s hard to work out exactly what his uncredited contributions to films like METROPOLIS and SUNRISE may have consisted of. The inspired futuristic approach here makes THE BLACK CAT look quite different from every other horror film of the period, and is responsible for much of the uncanny, oneiric ambience. Ulmer’s camera abandons the cast to drift unmoored through haunted, near-abstract spaces that retain some of the specificity of nightmare.

Further weirdness is induced by the haphazard but endlessly creative plotting. The film is great at presenting freaky ideas, weaker on follow-through, but that actually helps. Just when you expect the idea of a chess game with human lives at stake to be developed, it’s abandoned and a new wrinkle is introduced. The film jolts along like an dodgem car powered by defibrillator pads.

The goofy names (Hjalmar Poelzig and Vitus Werdegast), incongruous classical score, lumbering comedy relief and genuine eeriness — impossible to enumerate or explain the many plot turns and tonal shifts, which leave one disorientated — add up to an impossible crime of the cinema, the kind of thing no film-maker can expect to get away with. Means, motive and opportunity simply do not present themselves for a movie like this. Stumbling across it is like finding a vicar decapitated at close range in a snowy field with no footprints.

And, incredibly, Universal attempted to do it again, shamelessly, with THE RAVEN. With a peculiar approach to adaptation, this film starts by nodding its head in a friendly-but-distant manner to Poe’s poem, then proceeds to make off with most of The Pit and the Pendulum instead. Lugosi, a more-or-less sympathetic species of lunatic in THE BLACK CAT, here plays a Poe-obsessed, lovelorn neurologist with a torture chamber in his cellar. A curious hobby, someone says. “Much more than a hobby,” replies Lugosi, with sinister emphasis, and then, brightly, “Goodbye!”

“Much more than a hobby.”

“Goodbye!”

A casual, cheery line-reading is always lurking around the corner with Lugosi, ready to knock us all sideways. He gives it the sepulchral creep for three lines, then flattens you with a chirpy aside. My favourite example is heard in THE INVISIBLE GHOST (directed by Joseph H. Lewis, this is a stone-cold masterpiece assembled from stray bits of crap) — describing to his family over breakfast how a murder victim came back to life in the morgue, only to die of shock upon seeing his killer, Lugosi shrugs, “It was horrible!” with the tone of one describing a bad omelet.

Karloff shows up as a wanted man desperate for a new face. Lugosi is intrigued by the notorious maniac’s history of iniquity — blasting a bank teller in the eyes with an oxy-acetylene torch, for instance. “Well, sometimes you can’t help…things like that,” grumbles Karloff, rather weakly. Turns out the fugitive loon wants not only a new mug, but a total change of identity — Karloff theorises that a more handsome kisser might make him a better guy all round. Lugosi, accepting this logic with surprising ease, decides to instead wantonly disfigure Karloff and use the resulting depraved freak to revenge himself on those who have blighted his putative love-life.

It’s not one of the better ’30s horror makeups. Reminds me a little of the unintentionally comic lopsided look Karloff sported in GRIP OF THE STRANGLER, decades later. But the mutant Karloff actually proves nicer than the original version, and Lugosi’s bestial plans gang aft aglae. The ending involves a room with walls that close in, supposedly recreating a Poe story, though the script acts shifty around the question of which story exactly…

My fave bit in Landers’ film (he made many many B-movies and TV episodes — the IMDb lists 163), asides from the line “Try to be sane!”, spoken to Lugosi in a fit of wild optimism by the chap above, is a moment when Lugosi is surprised, then indignant, at being caught emerging from his secret bookcase passageway by his manservant, who in turn also looks surprised, then indignant. The effect is hilarious in a curiously abstract way. Was it intended to be funny? There is no way to be sure. But it feels as if something genuinely unexpected has just happened and nobody knows what to do.

Both films are short (THE BLACK CAT was much hacked about by censors, due to its Satanism and sadism), around an hour apiece, making them ideal double feature material. Ulmer’s film is the real deal, a demented journey into warped inner space, while the follow-up is a too-obvious attempt to follow up with the same elements, differently configured, but both are hugely idiosyncratic entertainments from an era when the job of the horror film was not to recycle genre elements but to deliver the new and freakish and unfathomable, logic and taste be damned.

“Supernatural, perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not.”