22. PRONOUNCEMENTS: Wordplay! He/she/they/it and an action word in the title.
In 1962, director David Bradley shot a tight, 74-minute espionage flick under the working title The Return of Mr. H, eventually released in 1963 as Madmen of Mandoras. It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it was a complete film. Fast forward a few years and distributor Paragon Films buys the rights to sell it to television. The problem? TV stations wanted feature films to clock in closer to 90 minutes so they could pack in those sweet, sweet commercial breaks.
So, what did Paragon do? They hired a crew of UCLA film students in 1968 to shoot roughly 18 to 20 minutes of brand-new footage, slapped it onto the beginning of Madmen of Mandoras, spliced in stock footage from Robert Mitchum’s Thunder Road, recycled a score from The Devil’s Hand (1961) and named it They Saved Hitler’s Brain.
The film kicks off with the 1968 insert footage featuring two CID agents, Vic and Toni. You can instantly tell this footage was shot half a decade later because of the late-60s sideburns, mop-top hair and groovy fashions that look wildly out of place against the black-and-white 1963 footage. After some sluggish driving and a deadly car crash (courtesy of that Thunder Road stock clip), we finally segue into the main story. World War II is over, but the Führer isn’t entirely gone. High-ranking Nazi officers managed to preserve Adolf Hitler’s still-living, grimacing head in a glass aquarium and smuggled it off to the fictional South American nation of Mandoras.
By the 1960s, these tropical Nazis needed to launch their world-conquest plan using nerve gas. Naturally, they kidnap top nerve-gas scientist Professor John Coleman (John Holland). Enter the professor’s daughter, Kathy (Audrey Caire) and her square-jawed security-operative husband, Phil (Walter Stocker). Phil and K.C. head down to Mandoras to rescue her dad, team up with local freedom fighters and face down the ultimate evil: a shouting head in a jar played with intensity by Bill Freed.
Can you imagine fighting a war, then coming home, working at the mill all day and this is what’s on TV when you get home?
You can watch this on YouTube.
