Directed by John Badham (Bird On a Wire, Short Circuit, WarGames) and written by Robert Malcolm Young (Escape to Witch Mountain) from a Fritz Leiber story, this trip to the Night Gallery has photographer David Faulkner (James Farentino, Dead and Buried) becoming slowly obsessed with his new model. She has no name. Just eyes that want something. That’s where this gets its title, “The Girl With the Hungry Eyes.”
The Girl is played by Joanna Pettet, making this episode her fourth Night Gallery role. She’s also in The Evil which also makes use of her ethereal beauty as she plays a vampire who haunts every man that sees her. Helping her exactly that are the photos taken by Harry Langdon Jr., a legendary Hollywood photographer.
Pettet
told authors Scott Skelton and Jim Benson in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery An After Hours Tour, “Doing “The Girl With the Hungry Eyes” was just a total ego trip! I walked onto the set and there were floor-to-ceiling huge blowups of me! I looked out the window and they had literally made a huge billboard out of me, sipping beer, and erected it on a building across the street. And it was probably the best I ever looked in my life. We all go through our periods — “the look,” you know? It was just perfect. And for the rest of my career I got to use these incredible shots from Harry Langdon. When would I ever have had a chance to get an entire day with somebody like that?”
Plus, you get Night Gallery regular John Astin as a beer company owner desperate to meet The Girl and a script as packed with eroticism as 1972 network television will allow. Badham argued with Jack Laird for more money and more time, even going way over to capture the final scenes inferno which got him fired until, as he said, “the next time they needed somebody.” And they did just a few days later, working on an episode of Ozzie and Harriet.
As for the life-sized photos of Pettet, she wanted one for her own. By the time she asked for one, the crew had taken all of them. Somewhere in garages and dens across Hollywood, appreciative men were now staring at their very own girl with the hungry eyes.
With season 3 of Night Gallery, the show moved to half an hour and often only had one story per episode, which allows some of the better tales to breathe. Or so you’d think, until you realize they had only 24 minutes for each story.
Sadly, this is the last season of the show, but we’ll try not to be too broken up about it. But when you read about how this show was treated going into season 3, that gets a bit difficult.
According to Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour by Scott Skelton and Jim Benson, NBC wanted some changes with the show, as it kept coming in second place to CBS’s Mannix. Beyond the half an hour format, they also made the show more action and suspense instead of outright horror. And they moved it from Wednesday nights to Sundays, a night usually reserved for family viewing.
Serling was not pleased.
“I’m fucking furious. These people are taking what could have been a good series and are so commercializing it,” he told actress Tisha Sterling.
Instead of a battle between Laird and Serling, now he was facing Universal, who wanted to keep NBC happy so the show could be picked up for syndication and make them money. And NBC wanted “an action-packed horrorfest.”
After one of his scripts, “A View of Whatever” was rejected, Serling even wrote a resignation letter in May of 1972 and asked for his name to be taken off the show. However, he had a contract with Universal and he was stuck.
Now that there was one story per week, the creative budgeting that allowed for multiple stories to be shot all in the same larger budget went away. And Jeannot Szwarc said that the scripts weren’t the same quality because once the network stopped caring, everyone else seemed to. “The ratings were good enough, the demographics were sensational, but NBC never understood that show,” he said. “All those guys are heavily into control and there was something a little bit chaotic and anarchistic about Night Gallery that NBC didn’t like.”
CBS responded to the move by sending Mannix to Sundays and ABC had their Sunday Night Movie, which always got big numbers.
The funeral for Night Gallery started before the season did.
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by Halsted Welles from a story by Clark Ashton Smith, “The Return of the Sorcerer” finds Noel Evans (Bill Bixby) answering a want ad for an interpreter. He’s to work for John Carnby (Vincent Price), a sorcerer who is studying the Latin Necronomicon but has found a new Arabic book of spells. The last two men he hired have quit and he threatens Noel’s life to keep him on task.
Meanwhile, Carnby’s assistant Fern (Tisha Sterling, The Coming) has dinner with Noel. joined by her Carnaby’s goat father. There, he learns that the warlock has already killed and dismembered his twin. But more importantly, Fern wants him. She wants him bad.
The translation of the Arabic book frightens Carnaby more than Noel, as it discusses that some magic users can keep their power. Even after death. Even after dismemberment. He cries of his brother, “I hated him because his magic was stronger. But Fern — she caused it! She wanted to be stronger than both of us.”
What follows is a Black Mass — on a Sunday night on NBC no less — where the two brothers are reunited and, one assumes, Fern finally has the power she craves. Now, spider to the fly, she wants to lead Noel to her bed.
What a wild story to start this season off with. The sets were designed by Joseph Alves, who worked with Szwarc on Jaws 2and ended up directing Jaws 3, as well as building the model New York City for Escape from New York and many other production design miracles. Szwarc showed him the art of William Blake and Aleister Crowley, which led Alves to Dennis Moore and Babetta Lanzilli, the witch owner of the Sorcerer’s Shop in Hollywood.
The Black Mass in the show really does have the names off Astototh, Asmodeus, Baal, Belial and more. It was all too much for Serling, who said “I believed those words we were saying were really powerful and meaningful, and one shouldn’t conjure up that kind of energy. It frightened me. I felt I was giving myself over to some dark. horrible force.”
Again, in 1972, this could air on prime time. At the start of the next decade, the Satanic Panic would be in full bloom.
Despite how dour season 3 will get, this is a great start filled with talent. Let’s see how things progress.
We’ve arrived at the end of the second season of Night Gallery. Don’t be sad — there are a few more episodes to go for season 3.
“The Caterpillar” is a classic story for this show, one that gets repeated often and even has entered into being an urban legend. Directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by Rod Serling from the story by Oscar Cook — who actually served in its setting, Borneo — this is the story of British civil servant — and new man in Borneo — Stephen Macy (Laurence Harvey). He’s moved into the home of Mr. Warwick (Tom Helmore) and his much younger wife Rhona (Joanna Pettet,The Evil) and as you can imagine, quickly makes a move on Mrs. Warwick. He hires Tommy Robinson (Don Knight) to place an earwig — a small bug that burrows into the brain and death is always the end of its work — on the pillow of Warwick.
Except that Macy’s pillow is used. Somehow, the evil man survives and even confesses that he did what he did for love. Sadly, the worse is yet to come, as the earwig that went through his brain — giving “agonizing, driving, itching pain” — was female.
And she laid eggs.
Just a perfect Night Gallery story, directed and told by the two of the best talents on the show. No gore, just a spot of blood and plenty of acting gives this the kind of darkness that some turn away from.
“Little Girl Lost” was directed by Timothy Galfas (Black Fist) and written by Stanford Whitmore (The Dark) from a E.C. Tubb story. Professor Putman (William Windom) was once a brilliant military physicist but the death of his daughter Ginny after a hit and run accident has destroyed him. A psychologist, Dr. Charles Cottrell (Ivor Francis), wants an injured test pilot, Tom Burke (Ed Nelson), to bond with the man, help him think his daughter is still alive and keep him working on the weapon the government needs.
It works at least until they go out in public and someone sits where Putman’s daughter is supposedly sitting. He then realizes what they want. “Bigger and better bombs at a fraction of the cost.”
So he gives it to them. He really does.
This is one of the best Night Gallery episodes as it dispenses with the silliness and gives us dread and darkness. There are no black out gags here, just the end of the world for one man and, well, for everyone, all told in the moral play style that Serling pioneered for television.
Arrow Video continues its exploration of giallo with its fourth box set after the Black, Red, Yellow and White editions of Giallo Essentials.
In the early 1970s, when the giallo boom was at its peak, producer-turned-director Luciano Ercoli made three standalone — but thematically linked — giallo films all starring his wife Nieves Navarro under the name Susan Scott. This set shares those movies in one convenient and well-priced edition.
The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970): Minou (Dagmar Lassander, The House by the Cemetery) loves her husband, Peter. But Peter is cold and only really seems to care about work. All she does all day is pine for her husband and take care of a turtle. Yep. You just read that correctly.
One night, a mysterious stranger attacks her, cuts open her clothes and then warns her: her husband is a killer.
The mysterious man is proven correct when a man who owed Peter money shows up dead. He demands that she come to his home, where he blackmails her into sleeping with him. Seeing as how he has recorded their tryst, he now has more material on her.
Even her friend Dominique (Nieves Navarro, All the Colors of the Dark, who was married to the director, Luciano Ercoli) can’t be trusted, as Minou finds photos of the blackmailer in provocative poses in her possession. When she finally gets the police to investigate, the man’s home is empty and Dominique tells the police he never even existed. Oh yeah. Dominique was once Peter’s woman before Minou. So there’s that.
Minou has a nervous breakdown and overdoses on tranquilizers before sobering up and learning that it’s all been a plot against her from the beginning. But come on — if you’ve watched any giallo, you knew that going in.
Despite its lurid title, Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion isn’t filled with sex or even all that much violence. It’s more about alcoholism and how women were taught that they had to have the skills to land a man, but not what to do with their lives to make them fulfilled beyond just a relationship.
Director Luciano Ercoli has some gorgeous shots in here that really take advantage of the space age 1960’s aesthetic. And a bossa nova score by Ennio Morricone keeps this film bouncing. It wouldn’t be the first giallo I’d recommend, but it’s not the last, either.
Extras include commentary by Kat Ellinger; Private Pictures, a documentary featuring interviews with Navarro, Ercoli and Gastaldi; an appreciation of the music of 70s Italian cult cinema by musician and soundtrack collector Lovely Jon; a Q&A with Lassander; the Italian and English trailers and an image gallery.
Death Walks On High Heels (1970):
A man is stabbed on a train, leading the police to question Nicole (giallo queen Nieves Navarro) about diamonds that are missing. Her life turns upside down, as she begins to receive disguised phone calls asking about the diamonds and a blue-eyed masked man attacks her in her boudoir. She then remembers that her jealous lover Michel owns contact lenses in that color, so she runs away with an older eye surgeon to the coast of England. But Michel isn’t far behind…
The first of three giallo directed by Navarro’s husband, Luciano Ercoli, this is what the genre should be: shocking, lurid, bloody and oh so fashionable. It also makes a deft turn from what we expect from the form into an actual mystery film.
There’s a plot twist here that honestly shocked me, so I won’t spoil it. While the other two films in the Ercoli giallo trilogy are much better, this is still a quality film worthy of your time. Some critics decry them as Ercoli making movies just to feature his wife, but if you had a quality woman like Navarro in your life, I bet you’d do the same.
This comes with audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas, an introduction to the film by screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, an interview with Ercoli and actress Navarro, Gastaldi explaining how to write a successful giallo, an interview with composer Stelvio Cipriani and Italian and English trailers. These extras are a sheer joy for giallo lovers and what an opportunity to hear from Ercoli, Navarro and Gastaldi.
In this one, she plays a fashion model named Valentina who agrees to help her journalist beau study LSD. But while she’s dosed and in the middle of a photo shoot, she watches a man brutally murder a woman with a spiked gauntlet. He thinks she’s just hallucinating and publishes her account, but she believes it’s real. And when the killer starts stalking her, she really starts to worry.
The entire opening of the film is one big acid freakout and everything that follows is the bad trip, the comedown and reality brutally intruding into drugged out bliss. This is a film packed with brutal violence and plenty of gore, but it makes sense. The movie demands it.
The end, when everything is wrapped up by the killer (killers?) is pretty great, as the many red herrings are discussed and the entire plot is finally explained to us. If everything before felt like a nightmare, this is bracingly cold water directly to the face.
Even better, Navarro portrays a heroine who doesn’t faint at the first sign of danger. She deals with the ineffectual police and indifference of her boyfriend with aplomb.
And yes — this film is packed with bonkers crazy fashion — a metal/glass silver wig and a strange sculpted wall feature prominently — so if that’s why you love giallo, you’ll be quite happy here. Me? I loved every minute.
This release comes with audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas, an introduction by screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, an extended TV version, a reflection by Gastaldi reflects on his career in the crime film-writing business and Desperately Seeking Susan, a visual essay by Michael Mackenzie exploring the distinctive giallo collaborations between director Luciano Ercoli and star Nieves Navarro. If you love giallo — or are just getting into it — all of these extras will open deepen your love for the form; Lucas is one of the best commentary track experts there is.
This limited edition Arrow Video box set comes in rigid packaging with the original poster artwork in a windowed Giallo Essentials Collection slipcover. You’ll enjoy 2K restorations for all three films as well as reversible sleeves for each film featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by The Twins of Evil and Gilles Vranckx.
There aren’t many episodes left in season 2 of Night Gallery. With each new installment, I feel a pang of sadness, as only one season remains.
“I’ll Never Leave You — Ever” was directed by Daniel Haller and written by Jack Laird from a story by Rene Morris. It starts in the middle of lovemaking between Moragh (Lois Nettleton) and Ianto (John Saxon) and we quickly learn that she’s married to a dying man, Owen (Royal Dano), and the two wish that he would just take that turn for the worse so they could finally be together.
As she returns home, we can feel both her guilt and her disgust at the man she once loved slowly succumbing to illness. I don’t know if you can blame her for going to an old woman (Peggy Webber) and receives a doll that she can use to destroy her husband once and for all.
As you can imagine, nothing goes according to plan.
I loved that Laird actually concentrated on making an actually eerie story instead of a joke. Wow — it feels like more than one episode now that I’ve said something nice about him.
“There Aren’t Any More MacBanes” was directed by John Newland and written by Alvin Sapinsley from the story “By One, by Two and by Three” by Stephen Hall.
Bard College is celebrating graduation, which includes Elie Green (Darrell Larson), Mickey Standish (Barry Higgins) and — if he can pass his classes and earn his Master’s in Philosophy — Andrew MacBane (Joel Grey). Yet it may never happen, as the man paying his way, his Uncle Arthur (Howard Duff) is frustrated by his progress. He finally delivers a new rule: Andrew must find a job within six months or be completely cut off, not just for his stipend but for his inheritance.
Yet Andrew doesn’t care. He’s more concerned with discovering the ten pages that are missing from the spellbook of his ancestor Jedediah MacBane, who died after using a spell to murder his worst enemy, his best friend and his best friend’s wife — yes, three people, all at the same time — centuries ago. The friends laugh about this and plan to meet in six months.
As you can figure, Andrew doesn’t have a job in six months. Instead, his uncle soon is torn to pieces by something that seems like a wild animal. Mickey dies next as he works in Africa. And now, the creature is coming for Elie and, as you may have surmised, Andrew.
The messenger who delivers the letter for Elie? Mark Hamill.
This one has some real tension but the final reveal is laughable when it should terrify.
This is one of the few episodes I’ve seen where Rod Serling hostd and didn’t write anything. The stories are fine, but this show should be better than just simply good. It aspires to be great at times and when it just coasts, it feels like a waste.
VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the April 15, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.
The Video Archives podcast really hit a lot of Roger Aldrich movies this season. The director told Film Comment, “From the time we started to the time we finished the picture, I’d say fifty, sixty percent of it was changed. Alan Sharp, the writer, was very amenable and terribly helpful. And terribly prolific. He can write twenty-five pages a day. He couldn’t agree more with my political viewpoint—so that was no problem. And fortunately, Lancaster and I felt pretty much the same about the picture. It was good that I had support from Sharp and Lancaster, because I don’t have the highest regard for Carter DeHaven, the producer.”
The first time Aldrich and Burt Lancaster worked together since Vera Cruz, this was a Western released after Italy had its way with the genre, which gave birth to the American revisionist Western.
It’s a definite Tarantino favorite, who said in a New Beverly blog article said that it was “hands down Aldrich’s best film of the seventies, as well as being one of the greatest westerns of the seventies. One of the things that makes the movie so remarkable is it isn’t just a western; it combines the two genres that Aldrich was most known for, westerns and war films.”
That’s because it’s just as much a movie about Vietnam as it is the West.
Ulzana (Joaquin Martinez) has taken a Chiricahua war party and escaped captivity. This puts the fear of, well, Native American vengeance into most of the army that faces them, as one even kills himself and the woman he is escorting than face them. The unlucky man to try and stop him is McIntosh (Burt Lancaster). Near the end of his service, he only has a few dozen men to win this skirmish, including Apache scout — and Ulzana’s brother-in-law Ke-Ni-Tay (Jorge Luke) and a way too young soldier named Garnett DeBuin (Bruce Davidson).
Where this becomes Vietnam, obviously, is because the Native Americans have known this land for hundreds of years and the better armed Americans aren’t better trained. They just have nicer guns. DeBuin isn’t ready for the way that war will change him and McIntosh is just ready to die by the end of the film. Even Ke-Ni-Tay lays down his weapons, knowing he’s done, but he’s changed each and every person who has faced him.
VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the April 11, 2023 episode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.
There are several phases to the career of Lindsay Shonteff. He started making cheap horror like Devil Doll and Voodoo Blood Death before making two Eurospy films — The Second Best Secret Agent In the World and The Million Eyes of Sumaru — a genre he would return to several time, making Spy Story, Undercover Lover, No. 1 of the Secret Service and Number One Gun, usually going back to his Bond character Charles Bind every few years or so. He even had a Shot On Video period, in which he kind of remade Night, After Night, After Night as Lipstick and Bloodas well as a post-nuke wandering in the boredom movie called The Killing Edge. Oh yeah! He also made Permissive and The Yes Girls, two sexploitation movies about groupies. And I forgot Big Zapper and the sequel, The Swordsman, which are about the adventures of Harriest Zapper.
Max Stein (Tom Adams) is a ruthless criminal who has put together the perfect team to pull off the perfect crime, which happens in the early part of this movie. What follows is Stein killing off the team as they all fall out from one another. Jeremy Dryden (Michael Culver) is the only member of the gang that might have something close to a soul, but that won’t help you in this dark world of stealing and selling one another out.
Supposedly, Ingrid Pitt was going to be in this, but her husband George Pinches told her she wasn’t permitted.
Stealing 4 million pounds worth of diamonds was supposed to be the hardest part of this heist. Trust me, that was the easy part.
I would say that Shonteff does well with a small budget, but I don’t think he ever had a decent one to work with.
VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the January 17, 2023 and January 24, 2023 episodes of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.
Quentin Tarantino has referred to Sergio Corbucci as the second-best director of Italian westerns, but he didn’t choose to remake any of Leone’s movies, you know?
Jed (Thomas Milian) robs from the rich, gives to the poor and treats the woman who loves him, Sonny (Susan George), like dirt. She dreams of him marrying her, which he does, but still abuses her. Anyways, he’s on the run from Sheriff Franciscus (Telly Savalas) when he isn’t trying to woo Linda (Rosanna Yanni, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror) the wife of land baron Don Garcia (Eduardo Fajardo), who has what he really wants: more money.
Look, I get that Rosanna Yanni is buxom and gorgeous, but the idea that Susan George is seen as an ugly duckling quite frankly makes this movie into science fiction.
Actually, it’s difficult to like Jed, because he started his relationship by assaulting Sonny and now he demands that she always stays three feet behind him and even kneel in subjugation to him. She falls in love and cries every time he treats her horribly and you just want to scream at the screen. And this is the hero!
How often can you hear someone call a woman lower than a dog before you start to wish that Telly Savalas blows his brains out?
I mean, this is the movie that George made after Straw Dogs, Did every casting director say, “This movie has a ton of rape in it. Call Susan George?”
That said, the Morricone soundtrack is great and I’m always fascinated by K-Tel Records starting a studio and distributing movies. They started by selling greatest hits albums and products like the Record Selector, the Veg-O-Matic and the Miracle Brush. In 1970, they started bringing foreign films to North America, including Mr. Superinvisible, Showdown In Little Tokyo and A Reason to Live, a Reason to Die. K-Tel still exists today, but instead of TV sold products, they make their money by outright owning songs like “What I Like About You” by The Romantics, “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard and “Surfin’ Bird” by The Trashmen.
VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the December 20, 2022 and December 27, 2022 episodes of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.
It’s hard to be a gunslinger who gets tired of violence.
Billy (Cliff Potts) is that person.
After meeting a group of Apache prisoners being held by a racist U.S. Army sergeant (Don Wilbanks) and his troops, Billy tries to get far away. Then he learns that all of the men were killed and the only survivor, Little Sparrow (Maria Potts), is saved as a sex slave. He rescues her and they run across the plains, riding on one horse until Billy domesticates a wild one for her. They still meet horrible people, like the owner of a cabin who tries to kill them and then tries to have sex with Flower.
This being a 70s Western, you know that the army catches up to our protagonists. She gets assaulted, he gets beat up and restrained and when she unties him later, she kills herself. That sends him on a path of revenge and then out of town, only to be shot by that same cabin owner from earlier in the movie.
Director William A. Graham made some quality TV movies like Beyond the Bermuda Triangle and Death of a Cheerleader. The script was by David Markson.
It looks gorgeous, Harry Dean Stanton is awesome in his short role and man is it bleak. 1972 Westerns were all about just pain for everyone.
After two nearly Jack Laird-less episodes, I knew my luck would not hold out. Yet I don’t plan to go into the Night Gallery close-minded. Perhaps this will be a good episode.
Directed by Jeff Corey and written by Rod Serling, “Delivers In the Rear” starts with a body being delivered for Dr. John Fletcher (Cornel Wilde) of the Macmillan School of Medicine. The image of a dead person is so shocking that one of his students, Tuttle (Gerald McRaney in his first TV appearance), faints. The bodies that he gets seem to have been dead only a few hours. Sure, the men delivering them could be murderers. But science…
That night, while eating dinner with his fiancee Barbara Bennett (Rosemary Forsyth) and her family, her father Bennett (Kent Smith) brings this fact up, wondering about grave robbing. What fun dinner talk…
Fletcher believes that “no individual life is of any consequence if it means the saving of many lives.” So when the cops close in — a woman believes that he has the body of her murdered husband — he asks his grave robbers to get rid of the body and supply him with a woman so that the police no longer suspect him. Of course, the woman they kill and bring to him is…his fiancee.
As always, Serling brings his darkest tales to the party.
Frances Turchin (Geraldine Page) believes that her husband is trying to kill her, a plot that she describes in grand detail to Sergeant Stanley Bevelow (James Gregory). Of course, she goes on so much that she reminds the officer of his wife and he wonders how he can get away with it as well. “Stop Killing Me” was directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by Jack Laird from a story by Hal Dresner. It is, as you can figure, another blackout sketch but stretched way longer than it has any right to be enlongated.
“Dead Weight” concerns Landau (Bobby Darin), a criminal involved in a bank heist gone wrong who needs to escape the attention of the police. That’s where Mr. Bullivant (Jack Albertson) comes in, as he has a history of helping get thugs out of jams just like this.
The truth? The fixer kills off the criminals, grinds them up and sends them away as dog food.
This was directed by Timothy Galfas, who also made Black Fist and also served as the cinematographer for the live action scenes that were rotoscoped over for the 70s animated Lord of the Rings. If you guessed that this was another Jack Laird script, based on the story “Out of the Country” by Jeffry Scott, you would be correct.
After two weeks of solid episodes, Night Gallery reminds us that it was a constant push and pull between the elegant and bleak world of Serling and the hackneyed and prosaic work of Laird. I wanted more this time and was left, well, wishing.
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