I know that Lon Chaney Jr.’s career highlight was being in the Universal monster movies. I realize that the end of his life seems sad — he suffered from throat cancer and heart disease after decades of hard drinking and smoking. In fact, Robert Stack claimed in his autobiography that Chaney and Broderick Crawford were known around the Universal lot as “the monsters” due to how much they drank and raised hell.
Despite living in his father’s shadow, Chaney could be one hell of an actor. After all, he played Lennie Small in the original Of Mice and Men. You get reminded of that when you watch late period Chaney and he has to use his voice and body instead of makeup in films like Spider Baby.
That brings us to The Devil’s Messenger, a 1961 anthology that takes three episodes of the Swedish TV series 13 Demon Street. From the tale of a 50,000-year-old woman trapped in ice bewitching scientists to a man who learns of his death in a dream to a photographer who attacks a woman in teh snow and can’t escape her, these are some pretty decent stories. And oh yeah — there’s a framing device starring Chaney, Karen Kadler and John Crawford that was directed by Herbert L. Strock (I Was a Teenage Frankenstein).
Starting with Todd Slaughter at the BBC, talking about his first two movies (Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street), this has him playing Stephen Hawke, a money lender who loves his daughter Julia (Marjorie Taylor). He’s also the Spine-Breaker, a serial killer who is the opposite of his friendly self.
He ends up murdering Joshua Trimble (D J Williams), the father of his daughter’s fiancee Matthew (Eric Portman). Miles Archer (Gerald Barry), another suitor, finds out and tries to blackmail Julia into marrying him instead, so Hawke kills him, but falls off a roof to his death.
It’s a stage play, like Slaughter’s other films, but he’s so strong in this that he can snap a man with his bare hands. Director George King and Slaughter teamed for several of these films, which were encouraged by the British government so that not every movie was made in Hollywood that screened in the UK.
Based on The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, this was directed by George King and written by Edward Dryhurst, Frederick Hayward and H. F. Maltby. It stars Tod Slaughter as a man taking the place of Sir Percival Glyde, trying to take his estate, Blackwater Park. It starts with him hammering a tent stake into the man’s ear and continues to have him murder many people who think that he’s an imposter. Who knew that slashers started in 1940?
Maybe the estate is bankrupt, so despite all the killing that the fake Sir Percival has already done, he has to romance and marry heiress Laurie Fairlie (Sylvia Marriott), then he plans to murder her and replace her with a mental patient who looks just like her.
Slaughter was known as the villain in Victorian stage plays, which were all about him being over the top. He does that here, strangling people, shouting about “beastly germs” when someone sneezes and being haunted by the woman in white. He’s the best.
Based on an original story by writer and critic Walter C. Mycroft, this was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who co-wrote it with Eliot Stannard. This is the second comedy that Hitchcock made after The Farmer’s Wife; he later voiced his unhappiness with the film in François Truffaut’s Hitchcock/Truffaut, saying that the movie had no story. During a press conference for Family Plot, he again said that it was his least favorite movie.
Betty (Betty Balfour) uses a plane to fly to see her boyfriend (Jean Bradin) in France, which upsets her wealthy father (Gordon Harker). She meets a mysterious stranger (Ferdinand von Alten) and breaks up with her boyfriend just as her family loses all their money. But it’s all a lie; the father has hired the man and has tipped off the boyfriend.
Not my favorite Hitchcock, but he would be OK with me saying that.
Have you ever seen Night Train to Terror and wondered — what would one of that film’s portmanteau sequences be like if they were expanded to an entire movie? Good news! Well, maybe. Your wishes have come true.
The final story of Night Train, “The Case of Claire Hansen”, was really a film called The Nightmare Never Ends (alternatively known as Cataclysm and Satan’s Supper). It boasts three directors. Amazingly, it was written by Philip Yordan, who not only won the Academy Award for Broken Lance in 1954, but also provided a front for blacklisted Hollywood writers (he was Bernard Gordon’s front for The Day of the Triffids)!
This is my favorite kind of movies — a film I discover at 5 a.m. when the rest of the world is asleep, and I wonder if it can really be true and if I am not still asleep. To say that this is a batshit insane film is to do a disservice to the phrase batshit insane. I feel ill-prepared to share its wonder with you, but I’m sure going to try.
Two stories are going on here:
Nobel Prize-winning author James Hansen (Richard Moll of TV’s Night Court and House) and his devoutly Catholic wife Claire (who is a surgeon, which totally comes into play later) decide to go to Vegas to both celebrate James’ new book and to get away from Claire’s nightmares. Wondering what James won the Nobel Prize for? He wrote a book that proved that God is dead. Now, he’s planning a TV special to tell the whole story to the entire world (he’s preaching the bad news!). Well, alright. And that Claire — seems that she’s been dreaming about volcanoes. They decide to go see a magician, who puts Claire into a trance in seconds.
That’s when we learn the real secret of what has been bothering Claire — Nazis! She dreams of a handsome young officer who kills a room of other officers and an all-female string orchestra. After the show, Claire invites him to dinner after he tells her that a demon is after her. He never makes it — he is killed and a 666 tattoo is left on his scalp.
Remember when I said there was a second story?
Mr. Weiss is super old and out of it, but totally recognizes a Nazi when he sees one. Pretty and rich Olivier is being interviewed during the intermission of the New York Ballet, and he looks exactly like the Nazi officer who killed Weiss’ parents at Auschwitz (and he’s also the Nazi from Claire’s dream). Weiss is a Nazi hunter, believe it or not, and he calls in his neighbor, Lieutenant Stern (Cameron Mitchell, who has been in more movies than there have been movies, but let’s call out Blood and Black Lace as one of the best of his films). They go to the ballet and follow Olivier to his extravagant mansion, all the while Stern tries to convince the old man that this cannot be the man who tormented his childhood. Weiss grabs his Luger and goes to kill Olivier, but an unseen demon kills him and leaves a 666 on his body.
Oh yeah, there’s also a homeless priest named Papini who tries to protect James and Claire, even telling her how to kill Olivier.
Numerous characters show up and just die, like Stern’s partner and Claire’s nephew. Even better, there are multiple disco scenes, which feature some wonderfully horrid songs and Olivier seducing Claire’s nephew’s fiancée (so many degrees of separation) until he takes off his shoe to reveal a furry hoof!
As to not skip any exploitation genre — we’ve already had Nazis, tough cops, disco and the occult — Claire goes to visit a black spiritualist who unexpectedly goes off on a rampage, pushing the film toward blaxploitation! “I am a black man–a (N WORD) in your country. You are a rich woman; I’m sure you have many powerful friends… but they couldn’t help you! You had to seek the help of a (N WORD)!” It’s so insane and doesn’t fit into the movie at all.
Neither does the scene where Papini is killed by Ishtar, Olivier’s assistant (who is only in this one scene). It’s the chance to add some skin to the film and even more blasphemy.
Seriously — this film has blasphemy in spades. If you’re in a metal band that needs samples about religion and the devil, you should totally give this a watch. You’re going to find tons of samples.
Every single actor in this film either reads their lines in monotone or screams them as loudly as possible — sometimes within the same sentence. The lone exceptions are Richard Moll, who is the best actor here and Mitchell, who is the gruffest cop of all time.
Nearly everyone in this movie (and the related Night Train to Terror) was also involved in another film that destroyed my brain cells, Cry Wilderness, which was featured on the latest season of Mystery Science Theater. A Bigfoot meets E.T. epic of pure maniacal weirdness, it was also written by Yordan and was directed by Jay Schlossberg-Cohen, who created the wraparound story for Night Train to Terror. Seems that Visto International Inc., a small theatrical motion picture production and distribution company, produced these films in the early 80s, a magical era of cheaply made independent films. Plus, both films (or all three, if we can cross over between Night Train, Nightmare and Wilderness) feature the acting skills, if you will, of Tony Giorgio, Maurice Grandmaison and Faith Clift.
Let me see if I can summarize the ending of this — after Oliver kills everyone else, Claire hits him with her car. She throws the body in the trunk and takes him to surgery, where she and her nephew’s girlfriend give him open heart surgery, complete with blood spraying and puking. Oh yeah, there’s also stabbing and slapping and screaming. And the bad guy wins!
Holy fuck — this is certainly a slice of cinematic goofball awesome that I won’t soon forget. Make no mistake — it’s a horrible film. But at the same time, it’s also a great one!
Criminology professor Brenner (Bela Lugosi) is also Karl Wagner and in addition to teaching, he also runs the Bowery Friendly Mission, where he feeds the unhoused but is also getting new members of his criminal army, which includes Doc Brooks (Lew Kelly), an alcoholic drug addict who knows how to make zombies.
Sure, alright.
Somehow, Bela’s character is able to do all of that and be a happily married man and he’s not exhausted by all of that. I mean, I’m tired just typing that out.
Meanwhile, Richard Dennison (John Archer) gets involved as his girlfriend Judy (Wanda McKay) works in the soup kitchen. He also gets killed, brought back as a zombie and somehow ends this film feeling perfectly fine. You know, he got better. He’s also a student of Brenner, so coincidences are everywhere in this.
Zombies in the basement are effective at eliminating corpses. That’s the lesson from this movie. Monogram is pretty great because their movies exist in the universe of their films, as East End Kids and The Corpse Vanishes posters are visible.
Detective Dan Turner (William Marshall) has been hired by movie exec Ziggy Cranston (Ricardo Cortez) to stop a blackmail plot against him by Carla (Stephanie Bachelor), who has photos of him but is soon murdered. He’s also being set up by some mobsters.
Based on Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, a pulp story that ran in Spicy Detective and Hollywood Detective. This story came from “Stock Shot” by Robert Leslie Bellem, which was in the June 1944 issue of the latter magazine. The character was also played by Marc Singer in The Raven Red Kiss-Off, which was also released as Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective.
This is just 67 minutes, which is perfect for a quick film noir. This has a lead that says, “Don’t move, sweetheart, this thing doesn’t shoot marshmallows.” It was directed by Lesley Selander, who did more than fifty episodes of Lassie and ended his career working in Westerns. Writers included Royal K. Cole (who did the Captain America, Blackhawk, Superman and Tex Granger movie serials, as well as Valley of the Zombies, The Tiger Woman and The Monster and the Ape) and Albert DeMond (who wrote The Crimson Ghost and D-Day On Mars).
Based on “They Creep in the Dark” by Karl Brown, this William Beaudine-directed, Barney Sarecky-written film stars Bela Lugosi as Dr. James Brewster, a scientist whose experiments have turned him into an ape man. He needs human spinal fluid to transform back to a man again, which as you can imagine, leads to him killing all manner of people when he becomes the ape (Emil Van Horn) version of himself.
By the end, his assistant Dr. Randall (Henry Hall) has been forced to keep injecting the quickly going mad doctor, ending with him breaking what’s left of it in their lab. The ape Randall flips out and strangles him then goes wild killing everyone he can to get that spine juice.
The next year, Monogram released Return of the Ape Man as a sequel to this, even if it has nothing to do with it.
This has the weirdest ending, as the protagonists escape and a man shows up in their car. They ask who he is and he says, “Me? I’m the author of the story! Screwy idea, wasn’t it?”
Based on The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan, this is the story of Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a normal man who somehow gets caught up in the evil deeds of spies who call themselves The 39 Steps. They’re stealing British military secrets, and when he tries to stop them, he’s accused of killing an agent. Richard has to run to Scotland, where he meets Pamela (Madeleine Carroll), falls in love and works to prove his innocence.
Like many Hitchcock movies, this is about an innocent man on the run, trying to prove that he didn’t commit a crime. It also has one of the first of many Hitchcock blondes, of which Roger Ebert said, “The female characters in his films reflected the same qualities over and over again: They were blonde. They were icy and remote. They were imprisoned in costumes that subtly combined fashion with fetishism. They mesmerized the men, who often had physical or psychological handicaps. Sooner or later, every Hitchcock woman was humiliated.”
That said, while Pamela doesn’t believe Richard and thinks he must be a criminal, she comes to his side by the end of the movie.
Back to the writer of the original story, John Buchan. The character of Hannay would appear in five more books, which made Ian Fleming a fan, who claimed, “Without him, there is no Bond.” Another fan is Holden Caulfield and his sister Phoebe. In The Catcher In the Rye, he remembers “Her favorite is The 39 Steps, though, with Robert Donat. She knows the whole goddam movie by heart, because I’ve taken her to see it about ten times. When old Donat comes up to this Scotch farmhouse, for instance, when he’s running away from the cops and all, Phoebe’ll say right out loud in the movie, right when the Scotch guy in the picture says it, “Can you eat the herring?” She knows all the talk by heart.”
Bewitched aired throughout the most tumultuous time in modern history — hyperbole, that could also be today, but true, as rehearsals for this show’s first episode were on the day Kennedy was shot and the episode “I Confess” was interuppted by Martin Luther King Jr.’s death — from September 17, 1964, to March 25, 1972. The #2 show in the country for its first season and remaining in the top ten until its fifth season, it presents a sanitized and fictional world that at the time may have seemed contrary and fake to the simmering 60s, but today feels like the balm I need and an escape.
Within the home on 1164 Morning Glory Circle, Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) and Darrin Stephens (Dick York, later Dick Sargent) have just had a whirlwind romance and ended up as husband and wife. At some point, she had to tell him that she was a witch, a fact that he disapproved of, and that she should be a normal housewife instead of using her powers. Yet she often must solve their problems — usually caused by her family, such as her mother Endora (Agnes Moorehead) — with a twitch of her nose.
Creator Sol Saks was inspired by I Married a Witch and Bell, Book and Candle, which luckily were owned by Columbia, the same studio that owned Screen Gems, which produced this show. You could use either of those movies as a prologue for this, which starts in media res — I like that I can use such a highbrow term to talk of sitcoms — with our loving couple already settling into the suburbs.
Author Walter Metz claims in his book Bewitched that the first episode, narrated by José Ferrer, is about “the occult destabilization of the conformist life of an upwardly mobile advertising man.” As someone who has spent most of his life in marketing, maybe I should look deeply into the TV I watched as a child. Bewitched was there all the time in my life, wallpaper that I perhaps never considered.
Head writer Danny Arnold, who led the show for its first season, considered the show about a mixed marriage. Gradually, as director and producer William Asher (also Montgomery’s husband at the time) took more control of the show, the magical elements became more prevalent. What I also find intriguing is that with the length of this show’s run, it had to deal with the deaths of its actors and York’s increasing back issues, which finally forced him to leave the show and another Dick, Dick Sargent, stepping in as Darren, a fact that we were to just accept.
That long run, the end of Montgomery and Asher’s marriage and slipping ratings led to the end of the show, despite ABC saying they would do two more seasons. Instead, Asher produced The Paul Lynde Show, using the sets and much of the supporting cast of this show. He also produced Temperatures Rising, which was the last show on his ABC contract, which ended in 1974.
Feminist Betty Friedan’s two-part essay “Television and the Feminine Mystique” for TV Guide asked why so many sitcoms presented insecure women as the heads of households. None of this has changed much, as the majority of sitcoms typically feature attractive women and funny but large husbands, a theme created by The Honeymooners, and the battles between spouses. I always think of I Dream of Jeannie, a show where a powerful magical being is subservient to, well, a jerk. At least on Bewitched, Samantha is a powerful, in-control woman with a mother who critiques the housewife paradigm.
Plus, unlike so many other couples on TV at the time, they slept in the same bed.
Bewitched‘s influence stretched beyond the movie remake. The show has had local versions in Japan, Russia, India, Argentina and the UK, while daughter Tabitha had a spin-off. There was even a Flintstones crossover episode!
Plus, WandaVision takes its central conceit — a witch hiding in the suburbs — from this show. And Dr. Bombay was on Passions!
This is the kind of show that has always been — and will always be — in our lives. Despite my dislike of Darren’s wedding vows of no magic, there’s still, well, some magic in this show. Just look at how late in its run it went on location to Salem for a multi-episode arc, something unthought of in other sitcoms.
You can watch this just for the show itself, to see the differences between the two Darrens and when Dick York had to film episodes in special chairs because of his back pain, when the show did tricks like have Montgomery (using the name Pandora Spocks) playing Samantha’s cousin Serena to do episodes without York or just imagine that the world was changing outside. Yet, magic and laughter were always there on the show, throughout the lives, divorces and deaths of its principals and supporting cast.
The Mill Creek box set is an excellent, high-quality way to just sit back, twitch your nose and get away from it all. This 22-disc set has everything you’d want on Bewitched, including extras like Bewitched: Behind the Magic, an all-new documentary about the making of Bewitched, featuring special guest appearances by actor David Mandel (Adam Stephens), Steve Olim (who worked in the make-up department at Columbia), Bewitched historian Herbie J Pilato, film and television historian Robert S. Ray, Bewitched guest star Eric Scott (later of The Waltons) and Chris York, son of D. York (the first Darrin). There are also sixteen new episodic audio commentaries, moderated by Herbie J Pilato that include behind-the-scenes conversations with Peter Ackerman (son of Bewitched executive producer Harry Ackerman), David Mandel, Bewitched guest star Janee Michelle (from “Sisters at Heart”), Steve Olim, Robert S. Ray, former child TV actors and Bewitched guest stars Ricky Powell (The Smith Family), Eric Scott (The Waltons), and Johnny Whitaker (Family Affair and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters) and Chris York (son of D. York). There’s also an exclusive 36-page booklet featuring pieces by Bewitched historian Herbie J. Pilato, as well as an episode guide. You can order it from Deep Discount.
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