Paul Wendkos and THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN (1975)
In Christopher Wicking and Tise Vahimagi’s auteurist study “The American Vein: Directors and Directions in Television”, the writers describe Paul Wendkos’ best work as “having a clinical detachment that prevents any easy transference onto the characters. It’s as if we’re viewing them as insects under a microscope.” While the authors may refer to THE LEGEND OF LIZZIE BORDEN as being a failure (while contending that it’s still an interesting one), this crucial precept is still firmly in place here. In Wendkos’ television movie, he presents a rather sobering character study of the supposed (if likely) hatchet murderer from Fall River, Massachusetts, played here in a career re-defining role by Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery.
Part courtroom drama, part foray into the basic psychology of the character, BORDEN really gets down to business during its last act, when screenwriter William Bast (HAMMERHEAD) has some fun with facts in this Edgar-winning teleplay and divulges that Borden (Montgomery) really did methodically slaughter her father (played by Fritz Weaver) and stepmother Abby (Helen Craig). Presupposing that Borden removed her clothing before picking up the axe, Wendkos visualizes a tour-de-force sequence in which Borden acts out the defining moment: the fateful weapon coming down as refracted flashes of history are scattered in front of our eyes – skirmishes of past arguments and never forgotten punished acts due to childhood disobedience.
It’s heightened, it’s intricate, it’s galvanizing, and it’s unadulterated Wendkos, calling to mind the best of his early crime features, THE MEPHISTO WALTZ and even his First Season episodes of “The Invaders”.
Sarris may have relegated him to the Oddities, One-Shots and Newcomers category in 1968, correctly assuming the influence of Orson Welles (in particular: KANE and TOUCH OF EVIL). It’s just that it took some time after ’68 (aka: the 1970s) for Wendkos to come to grips and assimilate any of those borrowed stylistic flourishes. And, for a time, flourish he did.
ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE (James William Guercio, 1973) USA
Recently acquiring the soundtrack only reawakened my desire to re-see this lost Americana classic, the only feature film to be directed by Chicago (the group, not the city) record producer James William Guercio. It’s a deliberately-paced meditation on the American Dream with Robert Blake as a moralistic motorcycle cop hankering to become a proper detective. He gets his chance when he’s the first to discover the body of a reclusive drifter, rightly suspecting it was murder while appearances (and a bottom-line coroner, played by Royal Dano) make it appear to be a shotgun suicide. Blake’s a force to be reckoned with here - an endless supply of insurmountable egomania; he quenches any desire to pick on his diminutive size by bringing up Hollywood folklore about Alan Ladd, his same height "down to the quarter inch".
Not commented in any review I’ve read is the fantastic soundtrack, which was largely recorded by Guercio himself (minus an old track by The Marcels). If the endless, sun-drenched vistas didn’t suggest that John Ford was an influence, then a track entitled “MonumentValley” surely will (at least it did until the release of the MGM DVD confirmed it via Guercio’s intro and audio commentary track).
The major influence on Rob Zombie’s THE DEVILS REJECTS final blaze-out (Zombie would later select it for hosting duties during his reign on TCM Underground). Photographed by Conrad Hall, his major contribution was selecting compositions for the interiors, while assisting and allowing (!) Guercio to have his way with the Ford-inspired exteriors.
With Billy Green Bush (FIVE EASY PIECES), Elisha Cook, Jr. (THE MALTESE FALCON), and Jeannine Riley (Carl Reiner’s THE COMIC).
PANIC (James Dearden, 1978) UK
James Dearden, son of Basil, attempts a horror tale that wouldn’t be so out of place in his dad’s anthology DEAD OF NIGHT. At 24 minutes, it’s the undemanding tale of a model (Julie Neesam) motoring to a late-night location from her boyfriend’s and encountering an unlikely machete-wielding psychopath.
It’s a rain-swept, pitch-black night, so Neesam feels she’s doing a good deed when she stops to pick up an elderly mysterious woman (Avis Bunnage, of MRS. BROWN YOU’VE GOT A LOVELY DAUGHTER). Except, of course, the lady’s got a chilling secret that is revealed, but not expounded upon, closer to the climax.
The last lingering shot makes this short work memorable: a stoplight turning green while the lady exits and the victim, presumably, slumps over in his seat (the transfer of this rarity makes it all too dark to see). It’s an arresting visual coda, and appears to have been shot whilst on a crane.
Apparently, PANIC played before John Carpenter’s original HALLOWEEN in UK theatres.
SPLIT IMAGE (Ted Kotcheff, 1982) USA
Surprised to see the credit of screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen, especially considering that the plot – a young Olympic hopeful (Michael O’Keefe) is introduced to a religious cult, led by Peter Fonda, through a wide-eyed beauty (Karen Allen) – could almost be considered a distant cousin of this year’s TAKEN (co-written by Kamen, with Luc Besson). Certainly there are some of the same genre attributes, as O’Keefe’s father (Brian Dennehy) and a hardnosed and vigilant hired gun (James Woods) track O’Keefe down inside the cult’s expansive compound, sharing the similar conceit with TAKEN of locating an exploited loved one.
The film stays with O’Keefe during his indoctrination process, in an attempt to answer any audience questions about exactly why he would stick around; ostensibly it’s because of Allen, but Fonda’s blue eyes and his eternal understanding help to seal the deal (even if we're not totally buying it). The finale’s a bit of a let-down – after a harrowing experience in which O’Keefe is deprogrammed by Woods, we’re left to wonder why Allen is able to drop her cult association so quickly.
Kotcheff’s tight direction works well, despite not having viewed it on an optimum source: a muddy, non-widescreen VHS transfer. Dennehy’s performance as the confounded patriarch is another lynchpin into why it works. Primed for rediscovery.
RETURN OF THE EWOK (David Tomblin, 1982) USA
A fan film sometimes unearthed at conventions. It's the only one that can boast an appearance by all of STAR WAR’s leading cast (including Carrie Fisher in the metallic bikini). The rags-to-riches spoof concerns the casting of Warwick Davis as Wicket. Director Tomblin first-assisted on both EMPIRE and RETURN OF THE JEDI; he also helmed two episodes of “The Prisoner” in the ‘60s.
YOUNG AGAIN (Steven Hilliard Stern, 1986) USA
A maudlin and mediocre body-switch variant made for the Wonderful World of Disney TV movie series. The main problem is the lethargic pace - scenes go on for up to 10 minutes at a time. Robert Urich’s the father craving another chance at adolescence, while Keanu Reeves is the younger self.
“Arena” – PHILIP K. DICK: A DAY IN THE AFTERLIFE (Nicola Roberts, 1994) UK
A so-so overview of Dick’s work, but it mostly deals with his impoverished, erratic lifestyle. Interviews feature the likes of Terry Gilliam, Elvis Costello (inexplicable), Thomas M. Disch, and Brian Aldiss. Lame ads attempting to replicate Dick’s signature condemnation of contemporary life and commercialism come off as immensely insipid. Why bother?
Masochistic Merriment: NIGHT WORLD (Hobart Henley, 1932)
A snappy, concise (58 minutes!) pre-code from Universal with several main attractions, first and foremost being Boris Karloff as the perverse, merciless ‘Happy’ MacDonald, owner of a prohibition-era nightclub with the obvious name of Happy’s Place.
Adding to the darkly comic fun is an unsympathetic performance by actress-later-gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and an early stylized, if predictable, dance number by Busby Berkeley.
Set over the course of one extended evening, NIGHT WORLD’s ostensible (though immobilized) hero is Happy’s regular Michael Rand (Lew Ayres), the son of a cold-blooded matriarch (Hedda Hopper!) who’s been acquitted for the murder of her husband / Michael’s father.
Suspecting Ruth Taylor (Mae Clarke) to be his father’s former mistress, Rand aims a few barbed comments her way before relenting to her charms after she convinces him that she’d just been a good friend to his deceased dad. After a tense, terse confrontation with Hopper, Rand and Taylor attempt to make their escape out of the dreary, boozy atmosphere and onto a new life.
With his neatly trimmed moustache, Karloff surveys his patrons with glee, engaging in casual conversation and in-jokes, even lying about the whereabouts of one of his female customers who had been there earlier in the week with another man that’s not her husband. His joviality is but a charade though, as his wife, Mrs. Mac (Dorothy Revier), is carrying on an affair of her own. When he’s accosted by gunpoint in the finale by a couple of his former booze bootleggers, watch the almost masochistic merriment he takes in being shot to death – just as long as his wife is by his side, getting her just desserts.
George Raft’s Ed Powell gets to be as mean a bastard as he wants to be, running the gamut from insulting the size of an older chorus girl’s ass to abruptly cutting off conversations he doesn’t want to be having.
Comical folly is represented by a drunk, played by Bert Roach, repeatedly asking characters for a ride home to Schenectady (including querying a fey gay man and a foreigner, to no avail) and a black Doorman, played by Clarence Muse, who marvels and rhapsodizes all too briefly about the swinging patrons of the club as they enter and leave the swank location. Although the portrait of the latter is surprisingly inoffensive and even remotely noble considering the period in which the picture was made, it’s unfortunate that the filmmakers more than make up for it by having a black woman the butt of a horribly unpleasant joke by Raft.
There's also a rather random callback to Karloff's most famous role: reacting to Roach's face after it's been scribbled on by a couple of off-hours girls, the gay man declares him Frankenstein.
NIGHT WORLD’s heroes and villains all partake in either suspected or real infidelities, from Karloff’s put-upon owner on down. Happy’s is a place where women will leave their husbands with the bill while they go outside to cavort in cars with their boyfriends. The nightclub ambiance of seedy sex and illegal drinking fuels these seemingly unending evenings.
The story’s by the combined team of Allen Rivkin and P.J. Wolfson, with the film marking the first writing credit of either. Both would sustain careers in the industry until the early 1960s on a variety of assignments that couldn’t be said to be defining achievements. Still, with such capableness and journeyman adaptability on such a sheer amount of diverse projects, their work speaks for itself.
Richard Schayer, the obvious veteran of the three, is credited as the screenwriter. Although best known as one of the two Story progenitors on Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY, Schayer seemed to specialize in westerns. Born in 1880, he’d end his career in the 1940s and early 1950s on uninspired B fare for actor George Montgomery, from Phil Karlson’s THE TEXAS RANGERS (1951) to THE LONE GUN (Ray Nazarro, 1954).
Director Henley was a silent film actor turned director. NIGHT WORLD would mark his second last feature, even though he was but 45 at the time of its filming. It’s just as well – whatever sparks of ingenuity NIGHT WORLD has going for it has little to do with Henley’s tepid staging.
Auteurs and TV -- Incident at a Corner (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
Hitchcock’s sole foray into color for episodic television came with the hour-long variety series “Ford Startime”; it was filmed roughly a week after PSYCHO and aired the same year on April 5, 1960.
Centering on a nasty, untrue rumor that works overtime in North Hollywood (a street sign for Radford Ave. is prominently displayed in the titular occurrence, see below), Hitchcock opens Charlotte Armstrong’s story in an inventive way: by showing the rather simple event of a woman disobeying a manned traffic sign from vastly different vantage points, revealing a second set of observers only in the third cinematic re-telling. It’s the explicit antithesis of RASHOMON as the events stay the same; just one solitary detail’s been occluded from the overall picture.
Angle on Incident # 2 (#3, below, to the left).
The incident, as recounted, has to do with a well-heeled, “officious” woman, Mrs. Tawley (Leora Dana), as she ignores an elderly crossing guard, James Medwick (Paul Hartman) and his outstretched, flailing arms protesting her to stop in order to allow a teacher, Grimes (Jerry Paris), to safely pass. She’s late to her PTA meeting, and so ignores Medwick’s proclamations; Grimes doesn’t seem to mind either way, instead commentating warily to Medwick about her official position for the school. The two shrug it off once she exits.
Hitchcock lets us observe this exchange play out three times in unhurried long-shots that move into mediums, with the audio being identical each time. Firstly, he focuses on the car as it reaches its parking spot; secondly, Hitch favors the jaunty stroll of Grimes, using a conveniently placed stop sign to obscure the mysterious second parties and their automobile, and thirdly, across the street as the middle-aged man, Harry (Jack Albertson), looks on. His companion, an older redhead whose name we later learn is Georgia (Eve McVeagh), rushes into their home, undetected and clearly concerned as to whether the participants in the minor scuffle have noticed her. They haven’t.
Fade out, and commercial break.
Pat (Peppard) and Jean (Miles) interview Grimes (Paris), a teacher.
Once Mr. Medwick arrives home, we’re introduced to what will become the unofficial detectives of the piece, soon-to-be-married couple (and Medwick’s daughter) Jean (Vera Miles) and Pat Laurence (George Peppard). As a wry nod to Hitchcock’s playful device of re-showing the incident times three, Jean is a geometry tutor, going over mathematical angles with Ron (Warren Berlinger), the teenaged son of Mrs. Tawley. A phone call is placed by the latter, all off-screen, demanding Ron to leave for home and to sever ties with Jean’s skillful tutoring. Jean’s naturally upset by this unforeseen turn-of-events, figuring a misunderstanding somewhere, but Pat comforts her with notions that everybody gets fired, sooner or later.
Later that night, during the course of a birthday celebration for Mr. Medwick, also attended by other relatives (Bob Sweeney, Alice Backes) and Medwick’s good-natured wife, Elsa (Charity Grace), principal Rigsby (Wendell Holmes) lands on the family porch to drop a bombshell: a note’s been found in Mrs. Tawley’s automobile, accusing the elder Medwick of being a “vicious old man” fond of “little girls”.
The rest of the episode adapts to Jean and Pat in a series of talky sequences reminiscent of Simon Oakland’s psychological profile of Norman Bates at the close of PSYCHO. The two question Uncle Jeffrey (Sweeney)’s belief that it’s best that this untruth be best forgotten about, lest it cast a pale glimmer on his business or on Jean’s and Pat’s upcoming nuptials. Uncle Jeffrey figures the grandfatherly figure is old enough to move in with them, and quietly live out the rest of his years rather than fight a battle that’s been tainted with such unseemly accusations. Pat’s the one who spearheads an inquisition into the matter: learning of the spat that Medwick had with Mrs. Tawley from Grimes makes him assume that she’s responsible for the note. Corroborating with her is Mrs. Sinden (Hollis Irving), a hysterical mother with an overbearing, huffing-and-puffing husband, Sidney (Joe Flynn).
The piece de resistance in these lengthy dialogue back-and-forths is the frank discussion between Pat, Jean, Principal Rigsby and the President of the PDA, Mrs. Parker (Mary Alan Hokanson). Mrs. Parker’s phoniness is readily apparent, as she calmly suggests that Mr. Medwick’s theoretical pedophilia is “an illness” and, accordingly, “you must think of it that way”. She’s not keen on attempting to get to the bottom of the matter, preferring rote, unimaginative answers to actually questioning the validity of the accusations.
Even when Pat assumes he has Mr. and Mrs. Tawley over a barrel (their young son is caught spying and, accidentally, harms Jean), his lawyer suggests that he wouldn’t touch the case because Medwick’s on “the wrong side of social opinion”.
The actual note-writer is a bit of a cheat and is played for whimsy with a dramatic tonal shift from the otherwise tense scenario. One can infer that Hitchcock figured it a cheap trick: why else would he foreground the facts so closely in the opening scene(s)? We know who it is, but half the fun is watching Pat and Jean righteously assume the worst in everyone, clinging to straw man theories before the actualities are revealed almost accidentally by happenstance. Pat and Jean pigheadedly refrain from even considering the possibility that Medwick may not be innocent, and their forthrightness is something that Hitchcock obviously doesn’t condone: they’re guilty in their own way for following simple logistics without giving thought that the reality may be a tad more complicated.
Hitchcock manages to discuss such a disturbing issue in 1960 an evenhanded way – we all know what “fond of little girls” equals without getting into the indecent specifics (something a newer program like “Law and Order: SVU” has no problem in doing, week to week). Even more are the subtle suspicious actions from secondary characters, like Ron and Sidney: why does the former spy on the Medwick household, is he afraid of being found out for something similar to what Medwick’s been accused of? And Sidney’s unwillingness to speak to his daughter, coupled with his wife’s frenzied demeanor, could very well be interpreted in a different, more sinister way.
So far, a North American DVD has yet to be released with the episode, but “Incident” was collected in France in a box-set comprised entirely of the 17 Hitch-directed half-hours of “Presents”, the one “Hitchcock Hour” (“I Saw The Whole Thing” starring THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY and TOPAZ’s John Forsythe), and his solitary “Suspense” (“Four O’Clock” featuring E.G. Marshall and Harry Dean Stanton).
