The Great Nick D’s Great Expectations

Now Playing: The Great Nick D (2024)

Pros: Refreshingly original comedy-drama that respects its quirky characters and its audience; Lead Nathan Wilson creates an endearingly eccentric character without resorting to complete parody
Cons: Occasionally succumbs to cheap laughs; a couple of scenes fall flat

Hollywood can be very hard on also-rans. As one character in The Great Nick D puts it bluntly, “Once you fly off the radar, there’s no coming back.”

In Ansel Faraj’s and Nathan Wilson’s cinematic love letter to the eccentric denizens of Southern California, the titular character (Wilson) has been off the radar long enough to grow a sizeable paunch, abandon even the tiniest scrap of fashion sense, and take up roaming the beach front in the company of his equally eccentric (and seemingly mute) buddy Aldo (Douglas M. Eames).

Even when Nick was on the radar, it wasn’t the kind of attention most people would seek out. As an aspiring young actor desperate to get into the movies, Nick took the easy path to “stardom,” falling in with a cheesy porn impresario (Justin Dray) and metamorphosing from eager young Nicholas Hatton to Nick Dick, star of such porn classics as The Good, the Bad and the Boobies.

It's Nick D-Day on the beaches of Venice, California.

In a flashback sequence, we find out that Nick’s plunge into porn had been precipitated when his beautiful roommate and fellow would-be actor Faye Davenport (Alexa Wisener) got The Call that she’d secured a plum part in Interview with the Vampire, and needed to get down to New Orleans post haste for location shooting. To add insult to injury, Nick had just purchased a ring and was getting ready to propose.

In his bitter disappointment, Nick chose the road to nowhere, with a short, exhilarating stop in the grimy alleyways of video porn along the way. In the meantime, Faye had climbed the ladder of success to the point of an academy award nomination and the limelight of national media attention.

But a chance encounter on the beach shakes Nick up and suggests that redemption might not be as out of reach as he thought.

When Nick and Aldo run across a couple of punks shaking down a trembling young man on the beach, Nick, almost as an afterthought, scares off the would-be thieves. The kid, looking like a Harry Potter clone inexpicably transported to sunny southern Cal, recognizes the great Nick Dick, and introduces himself as Ned Zimmerman (George Russing), son of Helen Zimmerman (Kathryn Leigh Scott), who runs a major talent agency. While Ned looks like he’s 15, we later learn he’s in his early ‘30s, and an uber film nerd to the point of apparently being familiar with the video porn era.

It's good to be recognized.

Ned is fed up with being a glorified gopher at his mom’s agency, and wants to resurrect Nick as a mainstream star to prove himself. Mom couldn’t disagree more, barely able to hide her revulsion at the idea, but ultimately relents, telling Ned to his face that when it fails, it will be a good lesson for him (she’s not exactly the most supportive or diplomatic of mothers).

What happens next is not the rapid succession of gross-out jokes and one-liners that you might expect of a comedy about a washed-up porn actor. Instead, we see Nick, his optimism rekindled and practically immune to anything that threatens to snuff it out, wandering into a number of gently humorous, bittersweet encounters.

At first, Nick struck me as an over-the-top parody of a SoCal street person, with his rasping voice and straight-from-the-dumpster outfit of cheap Venice Beach ballcap, animal print shirt and purple pants. To top it off, he gets around on a scooter that doesn’t even have the dignity of being electric.

But somehow Nathan Wilson makes you believe in a character who’s been down so long, he doesn’t have the sense to dress for success (to say the least) or think twice about introducing himself as “Nick Dick” to the people who hold the key to his future prospects.

There’s a great scene when Nick first shows up at Ned’s talent agency. The receptionist takes one look at Nick and curtly tells him that “the free clinic is across the street.” As the building security guard steps in to give Nick the bum’s rush, the receptionist, a look of surprised disgust on her face, confirms that Nick indeed has an appointment. Nick, grinning broadly, asks the guard to look after his scooter as he heads off to the elevators.

Not everyone at the talent agency is a fan of the Great Nick D.

The film takes that initial scene and runs with it by having the various young, professional women that Nick encounters -- the receptionist, an assistant director, and a casting assistant -- respond to him as if he were dog excrement that they’d just wiped off their shoes. But Nick also has his fans: Phyllis (O-Lan Jones), an old hand at the talent agency, is a Nick D fangirl, and the fraternity-bro director of a TV commercial gig that Ned gets for Nick similarly gushes over him. It’s a running joke that highlights the post Me-Too era generation gap.

As Nick scoots his way around the greater LA area in search of redemption, we get quite a tour of the city’s “coulda been a contender” underbelly. At one point, Nick drags Aldo along to his old producer’s house in search of porn footage from which to make an acting demo reel (not exactly a stellar plan, but then Nick hasn’t had to sell himself for a long time).

When the producer goes off to look for Nick’s tapes, Aldo, curious about a stuffed rattlesnake sitting on an end table, reaches out tentatively to touch it. Nick quickly cuts him off: “Don’t… touch … it… you don’t know where it’s been.” That goes doubly for Aunt Judy (Lisa Blake Richards), an ageing bargain basement diva who shows up out of nowhere and wants someone to rub lotion on her back before she goes out to sunbathe.

Nick reminisces with his former producer about the good ol' bad ol' days

While that scene flirts with cheap laughs, a later sequence involving Nick’s dad seems to be going in a similar direction, but ends up in decidedly different territory. Nick, energized with his new prospects and unable to forget about the girl who got away, visits his dad in search of the ring he was going to give Faye.

The set-up is ripe. Like his son, Jim Hatton (David Selby) hasn’t exactly set the world on fire, but he does have a cozy place in the canyon and is married to an ex-exotic dancer (Kelly Kitko) who is younger than Nick, and happens to be celebrating her birthday in a highly inebriated state when Nick shows up.

Instead of going overboard with obvious jokes, co-writers Faraj and Wilson play it very straight with their characters. Sure they’re eccentric -- from the elder Hatton’s get-up, you can see where Nick got his fashion sense. But this family is more than a collection of sit-com-ish cliches.

Jim reminds his son that in his hurt and anger after the breakup, Nick had buried the engagment ring in the old man’s back yard. After digging around all night and turning Jim’s yard into a moonscape, Nick triumphantly unearths the ring, and father and son quietly celebrate as Starla sleeps off her big day in a lawn chair.

The scene is appropriately low-key, and veteran David Selby gives a great, moving performance as a dad who still believes in his son and has high hopes for him; “You’re a Hatton, don’t ever forget that,” he tells Nick.

Nick is a chip off the old block, fashion-wise.

Of course, not everything in Nick’s journey is kumbaya. Ned calls in a favor and books Nick on an entertainment podcast run by Bucky Shultz (Ben Solenberger), the entitled son of an influential Hollywood producer (Nick’s response: “What’s a podcast?).

The face-off between Bucky and Nick (over the merits of Robert Redford of all things) has a lot of comic potential, but somehow falls flat (Robert Redford, really?), although it does take shots at Hollywood’s rampant nepotism and the tendency of social media to divide nerds over the most trivial pop culture minutiae.

Similarly, Nick’s demo reel scraped together from clips of his porn movies should be funnier, but the clips themselves (and the “movies” that they’re pulled from) are so over-the-top that they induce eye-rolls instead of chuckles (although, the porn parody of the Phantom the Opera is clever in a very crude way).

The Great Nick D utilizes one of the oldest plot tropes in the book, turning “boy meets girl, boy loses girl” into “boy meets girl, boy loses girl and self-respect, boy has chance to get his self-respect back and maybe even the girl.”

There’s the requisite set-back when Ned is forced to let Nick go after the podcast debacle, but Nick’s new-found friends aren’t ready to give up, and Ned and Phyllis go behind Helen’s back to somehow get Nick an audition with a major HBO production.

Nick, ever the fashion disaster, shows up to his potential big break wearing a pale blue tux suitable for an ‘80s high school prom. To add to the tension, the casting director thinks he’s seen Nick before, but can’t quite remember where… Without going into too much spoiler detail, Nathan Wilson/Nick D performs an eye-opening audition.

Rockin' retro tux: check. Hair parted neatly down the middle: check. Acting A-game: ?

The film mostly avoids the twin pitfalls of cheap laughs and cloying sentimentality in taking its main character on his redemptive journey, and it has a great eye for the common humanity behind even the most eccentric characters.

The cast is very much up to the task of portraying that authentic eccentricity. A lot of familiar faces from previous Faraj directed productions are here, including Dark Shadows alums Kathryn Leigh Scott, David Selby, Lisa Blake Richards and Lara Parker. (Sadly, this was Lara Parker’s last role. She filmed her part some three months before passing away in October, 2023 at the age of 84. She appears in a short but very moving scene as Nick’s old acting coach, with whom he has a heart-to-heart talk.)

Another Faraj regular, Douglas M. Eames, has hardly a word to say as Nick’s buddy Aldo, but his looks of resolute loyalty and empathy under his signature lumberjack hat makes him a memorable character.

Alexa Wisener as Faye appears in intermittent flashbacks until the very end, when Nick finally catches up with her in “real” time. Even with her relatively limited screen time, it’s easy to see how Nick could become obsessed. Faye is a character that, in another filmmaker’s hands, might easily have been twisted into an egotistical, self-involved caricature, but surprise, behind the success is a real, sincere person. And Nick’s redemption vis-à-vis Faye is very honest and un-Hollywoodish.

Good times right before Faye gets The Call.

The Great Nick D is something of a departure for Hollinsworth Productions and the creative team of Faraj, Wilson and Kitko. In recent years they’ve specialized in dark fantasy and horror -- see my reviews of Loon Lake (2019) and Todd Tarantula (2023).

Nick D’s development journey has been a long one, starting with Nathan Wilson’s pitch to Faraj in 2012, and flirting with the short film and web series formats before finally making it as a feature film. Wilson and Faraj ended up co-writing and co-directing.

It’s harder than ever for a low-budget, independent film to get even a moment’s attention in today’s firehose stream of media content. With its originality and self-deprecating humor, The Great Nick D is a refreshing change from the endless cheap franchise rip-offs and exploitation flicks (Amityville Bigfoot anyone?) that shout at you like carnival barkers from streamer catalogs.

Where to find it: DVD/Blu-ray

That ‘70s Sci-fi TV Movie #5: The People

Now Playing: The People (1972)

Pros: Gentle, cerebral sci-fi that subverts TV movie expectations
Cons: Some character interactions and motivations seem implausible and forced

This is the final entry in a series inspired by a challenge from Barry at Cinematic Catharsis. See the end of this post for more details and my challenge to a new set of bloggers.

A long, long time ago, somewhere between the late Pleistocene era and the invention of the smartphone, I lived practically a stone’s throw from Amish country.

The city I lived and worked in is no tourist destination, but to the south, the “simple” life of the Amish attracts people from far and wide during the summer months. (Of course, it’s anything but simple to forsake modern amenities, grow your own food, be prepared to build or fix almost anything, and maintain strong bonds with family and neighbors, but I digress.)

A trip to Amish country allows us 21st century netizens a break from our ubiquitous screens to taste real food made from scratch, admire crafts and furniture skillfully fashioned by hand, and marvel at the stately unhurriedness of travel by horse and buggy.

It’s the closest thing to actual time travel we have, made all the more intriguing because, unlike such historic destinations as colonial Williamsburg or Mystic Seaport, the locals are the real deal, not paid reenactors who shed their costumes at the end of the day, pop open a canned cocktail and fire up the smart TV to binge Ted Lasso episodes.

But being the real deal (and stubbornly wanting to remain that way), the Amish seem to have achieved a good balancing act, allowing just enough of a sampling of their way of life to satisfy the tourists without being sucked into the voracious maw of technocapitalism.

The People in the 1972 TV movie of the same name look like the Amish and act (to an extent) like the Amish, but they are decidedly not Amish. They live in a secluded valley in the middle of nowhere (looking very much like rural California), and allow only a select few outsiders into their community. These people don’t do tourism.

"Okay everybody, smile for the camera!"
"We ARE smiling."

One of those outsiders is Melodye Anderson (Kim Darby), a young, emotionally vulnerable school teacher who has dumped her boyfriend and agreed to move to the mysterious community to teach. Melodye herself is something of a voluntary outcast, as she eventually reveals that she decided to make the move to “find herself” amidst the “peace and quiet.”

She finds something alright, but at least initially, it’s not herself. Unsurprisingly, the People are taciturn and the children suppressed. There is a one-room schoolhouse, a former church, that is clean and well cared for, and appears to be the center point of the community.

Melodye’s speech to the assembled townspeople about her philosophy of allowing students the freedom to “explore the world around them in order to discover their full potential” predictably goes over like a lead balloon. She visibly wilts under the withering stares of the parents. The People don’t go in for that New Agey touchy-feely stuff, or music, singing or dancing for that matter. A young town leader, Valency (Diane Varsi) gently tells the naive schoolteacher that she needs to “listen deeply” rather than going off half-cocked, but nonetheless, Melodye dives right in with her modern, liberal approach.

When she has her students introduce themselves by saying what sort of animal they’d like to be, one of them protests that “we’re not supposed to pretend.” Worse still, the youngsters shuffle their feet everywhere they go, as if lifting them for a moment will result in something horrible.

Melodye begins to get it that she’s not in Kansas anymore when one of the girls, Bethie (Johanna Baer), inexplicably starts writhing on the ground, as if her arm is trapped under an invisible weight. Another outsider, Dr. Curtis (William Shatner) is called in, but he is out of his depth, finding no cause for her pain. Valency speaks cryptically of Bethie needing to be “sorted.” She tells the doctor that Bethie’s only chance is to find and treat another local, a boy named Bram, whom they soon discover trapped underneath a tractor that has rolled over. Hmmmmm…

The People are ruled by the oldest and grumpiest members of the community.

This isn’t the only oddity Dr. Curtis has noticed in his time spent among the People. He’s curious that no one in town ever seems to get sick, and jokes that if he didn’t also double as a veterinarian, he’d have nothing to do. When Melodye asks him if he’s not just a little unnerved by the locals, he responds that “I’ve learned to respect these people, even when I didn’t have the foggiest idea what they were doing, or why.”

Melodye’s tenure as the town’s school teacher is hanging by a thread, but her nurturing heart has overridden her sense of self-preservation. She senses an untamed spirit in one of the boys, Francher (Chris Valentine), and tries to get him to open up by gifting him a harmonica and quoting Henry David Thoreau about stepping to the beat of a different drummer (helloooo Melodye, are you trying to get fired?).

Little does she know that her gift and encouraging words will lift up Francher, literally as well as figuratively, and eventually uncover the town’s fantastic secret.

At first glance, The People appears to be a suspense thriller with sci-fi overtones. All the elements are there: a vulnerable stranger in a strange land; enigmatic locals with dark secrets to hide, perhaps at all costs; and the gradual unraveling of those secrets.

But despite her stubborn forays into New Age schooling in a decidedly old school community, Melodye is never in any danger from the town elders or anything else. Instead, The People is a flawed, yet affecting study of clashing cultures and the age-old tension between community obligations and the urge to be yourself.

Melodye starts out hesitant and unsure of herself, but as she gets to know the children better, her determination grows to upend the seemingly senseless rules that keep the children from being all that they can be (and this being sci-fi, what they can be is eye-opening).

In contrast, the other outsider, Dr. Curtis is genial and bright, but also ineffectual in the face of an extraordinary situation his science can’t account for. This is not the hard-charging Captain Kirk we’re used to -- it’s Melodye who has all the agency, and she is the one wantonly violating the Prime Directive as the Doc mostly stands around passively observing (although he does get a chance toward the end to exercise his surgical chops).

Captain Kirk advises Melodye on the hazards of violating the Prime Directive.

TAKE HEED: THE PEOPLE SHALL GIVE UP THEIR MILD SPOILERS

If there’s a singular flaw in The People, it’s the reactions of the elders to this petite bull in their china shop. Melodye’s actions not only awaken something that can potentially put them all in grave danger, but eventually she is indirectly responsible for a serious injury to one of the children. The locals’ hesitancy in doing anything about her meddling, and a too-abrupt resolution featuring a kumbaya moment of reconciliation seems forced and implausible.

But the film also has its inspired moments, not the least of which is the way in which Melodye finally discovers the People’s secret past. Another concern of the elders is that the children stay grounded in the present, and not try to remember the time before the founding of their little community. Melodye, wanting to throw a monkey wrench into that suppressive business, stimulates the children’s memories by having them draw. The reveal of the People’s backstory through the kids’ art is clever and poignant.

"That's a beautiful picture Bethie, but the assignment was to draw a horse."

Towards the end of the film, the idealistic teacher, having inadvertently (?) exposed the People’s secrets to a potentially hostile outer world, glumly admits to Doc Curtis that she feels more of an outsider than ever. When he points out that she can help them share their wisdom and knowledge with humanity, she counters, “And what do you think the outside world will do with that? Probably turn them into a tourist attraction… or maybe they’ll massacre them all this time out of fear and jealousy.”

I can picture a fitting epilogue: The People fire Melodye and bring in Amish consultants to help them figure out how to distract the outsiders with tourism while keeping their real lives private.

Kim Darby, who made a career out of vulnerable, girl-next-door roles, guest starred on a number of hit ‘60s TV shows until vaulting to fame as the preternaturally stubborn Mattie opposite John Wayne’s Rooster Cogburn in the original True Grit (1969).

She made a string of less successful feature films after True Grit, and by 1972 she was back to guesting on TV. In 1973 she played the paranoid lead to perfection in what some consider the preeminent ‘70s made-for-TV horror film, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.

In 1972, William Shatner was still relatively fresh from command of the starship Enterprise, but unfortunately the obvious toupee for which he has been ribbed unmercifully was on full display. By the mid-70s he had made several TV movies which are still remembered fondly, including Go Ask Alice (1973), The Horror at 37,000 Feet (1973; see my review here), and Pray for the Wildcats (1974; with Andy Griffith, Robert Reed and Marjoe Gortner). Star Trek fans will fondly remember the first time Shatner and Darby teamed up, in the original series episode “Miri” (1966).

The People was adapted from a popular series of stories by Zenna Henderson. The TV movie, which came out the same year as The Godfather, was executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola under the auspices of Coppola’s American Zoetrope studios. Zoetrope was founded in 1969 and was involved with, among other things, George Lucas’ first feature film THX 1138 and films by international superstars Jean-Luc Godard and Akira Kurosawa. Between The Godfather and The People, it’s hard to imagine two more different films.

Kim wonders how she ended up in a low-budget TV movie so soon after
her breakout role in True Grit.

Where to find it: Streaming 1 | Streaming 2

Passing the baton in the movie blogger challenge

As I mentioned in the first entry in this series back in January, this was the result of a challenge from Barry at Cinematic Catharsis to review my Top Five underrated/overlooked ‘70s sci-fi TV movies. After all this time, I need to pass on the baton to the next group of bloggers. (Note to my fellow bloggers: although I turned Barry’s challenge into a 5 part series, if you choose to take up the new challenge, please DO NOT feel obligated to follow that lead -- one post will suffice very nicely!)

Dustin from Horror and Sons: Favorite underrated ‘80s horror movies; or Favorite episodes from horror anthologies or TV shows

Mike from Mike’s Movie Room: Favorite Universal horror movies not featuring Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf man or the Mummy; or Favorite moments from Universal horror movies

Marianne from Make Mine Film Noir: Favorite noirs set somewhere other than the United States; or Favorite moments from classic noir

Russian Rued Bet: The Queen of Spades

Now Playing: The Queen of Spades (1949)

Pros: Atmospheric sets, costumes, cinematography and direction; Edith Evans is perfect as the dour, fussy old Countess
Cons: The second act lags as a love triangle plays out; some performances approach theatrical hamminess

I'm very happy to be participating for the fourth straight year in The Classic Literature on Film Blogathon hosted by Paul at Silver Screen Classics. Please visit Paul's site for many more intriguing posts on film adaptations of classic works.

Card playing is one of those mundane activities we take for granted, but its origins, obscured by the mists of time, are full of intrigue and mystery. According to a very interesting article in The Atlantic, scholars variously pin down the beginnings to a game of “paper tiles” invented during China’s Tang dynasty, the import of “Saracen’s Game” from the Middle East to medieval Europe, or the emergence of card-based fortune telling in India. [Adrienne Bernhard, “The Lost Origins of Playing-card Symbols,” The Atlantic, Aug. 27, 2017]

Like chess, the card deck reflects the social hierarchy of the society in which it was developed. Some historians suggest that the suits represent the four classes of medieval society: cups and chalices (modern hearts) correspond to the clergy, swords (spades) to the military, coins (diamonds) the merchant class, and batons (clubs) represent the rest of us peasants.

But unlike chess, where the queen has long been the most powerful piece on the board, playing card queens have had an up and down history. At one point the Spanish replaced them with mounted knights (caballeros), and the Germans saw fit to exclude the women in favor of such macho representations as upper man (obermann) and lower man (untermann). On the other hand, in Britain, playing card queens trumped kings during those periods when an actual queen was sitting on the throne. [Ibid.]

Among her regal cohorts, the queen of spades has distinguished herself as the most powerful, and at times, the most ominous female in the deck. In cartomancy (for the uninitiated, fortune telling using playing cards), the queen of spades represents intelligence, logic, pragmatism, and planning for the future. But she has a dark side too -- she can quickly ruin a hand of Hearts or Crazy Eights for unlucky players.

In The Queen of Spades, she is true to her reputation and makes a brief but key appearance that has monumental consequences for the protagonist.

The 1949 film is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the story written by the esteemed Russian poet, playwright and novelist Alexander Pushkin in 1833. Pushkin’s tale, with its classic themes of greed and obsession tinged with the supernatural, resonated with Russian and European readers and became the inspiration for a number of operas, and eventually, films and radio plays (the 1949 version is the only British adaptation).

Pushkin and his horse - wall art inspired by the story

Herman Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) is a Captain in the army engineers stationed in St. Petersburg in the early 1800s. Something of a sullen odd duck, he spends his nights watching his fellow officers drunkenly wager large sums at cards. When challenged about never playing himself, Suvorin demurs that he doesn’t have the money to gamble (although we learn a little later that he’s been regularly saving a substantial portion of his pay and has a significant nest egg).

Suvorin is very cognizant of his fellow junior officers’ wealth and aristocratic backgrounds, and embarrassed by his own humble roots. One night as the card game is breaking up, he overhears his cohorts talking about the legend of the elderly Countess Ranevskaya (Edith Evans), who as a young woman was rumored to have sold her soul for the secret of winning at cards, and had amassed a fortune.

A short while later Suvorin is browsing at a bookshop, and stumbles upon a rare book, “The Strange Secrets of the Count de Saint Germain,” with an intriguing subtitle, “People who sold their souls for wealth, power or influence.” Thumbing through it, he happens upon Chapter 4, “The Secret of the Cards,” which seems to confirm the rumor, telling of a Countess R***, who, as a young married woman had lost a significant amount of money in an illicit affair, and in desperation had turned to the mysterious Saint Germain to learn the occult secret and win the money back.

Now obsessed with winning his own fortune and the respect he's been denied, Suvorin cooks up a plan to worm his way into the elderly Countess’ residence and get her to divulge the secret. Stationing himself outside the Countess’ mansion, he catches sight of the Countess’ young, single lady-in-waiting, Lizaveta (Yvonne Mitchell), who spends a lot of time staring forlornly out the window, longing to be free of her dour, unappreciative mistress.

Hoping that she can smuggle him in to see the Countess, Suvorin composes love letters to Lizaveta with the unwitting aid of his friend Andrei (Ronald Howard), who himself is falling in love with the beautiful, lonely girl.

The two rivals for Lizaveta's affections square off in Suvorin's apartment.

Suvorin’s stream of letters, and his ultimatum that he will die if he can’t see Lizaveta, finally break down her resistance. When Andrei discovers that the letters Suvorin has been composing are to Lizaveta, he figures out what the scheming Captain is up to and tries to warn the vulnerable girl about him, to no avail.

Suvorin finally gains access to the Countess, but the interview goes badly -- very badly -- and Lizaveta rejects him in disgust. He seems to be a dead odd duck, until a ghostly visitation gives him renewed hope. He decides to wager his savings on a high stakes game of Faro after all. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve been an avid fan of classic ghost stories for as long as I can remember. And yet, I only just encountered Pushkin’s wonderful Gothic story a year or so ago in an anthology. The character of the old Countess was inspired by a real-life Russian noblewoman, Natalya Petrovna, who was a lady-in-waiting to emperors and a socialite of the highest order. And like Pushkin’s Countess, in her youth she was an enormously successful gambler, supposedly due to the mentorship of -- wait for it -- the Count of Saint Germain.

Readers of Pushkin’s time would have been very familiar with Saint Germain. Hobnobbing with 18th century European high society under a number of different aliases and titles, Saint Germain was a philosopher, mystic and patron of the arts who claimed to be the 500 year old son of Transylvanian royalty (Holy shades of Dracula Batman!). Saint Germain’s unseen presence adds to the story’s and film’s atmosphere of mounting dread.

The 1949 film pulls out all the stops in capturing the darkness and decadence of early 19th century St. Petersburg. Art director William Kellner oversaw the meticulous (and expensive) recreation of the former Russian capital on the sound stages of Welwyn Studio in the UK.

An extended gypsy dance number adds to the atmosphere.

Cinematographer Otto Heller’s camera prowls around the dimly lit environs of the tavern where gypsies perform and the gambling takes place, Suvorin’s apartment, and the equally dark chambers of the Countess’ mansion, teasing out shadows that seem to embody the characters’ secret lives.

Supernatural forces emerge in the film’s final act as the consequences of the Captain’s obsessive greed play out (or is it all happening in the murky depths of Suvorin’s fevered mind?). Contributing to the blood-chilling denouement is a corpse that seems to stare accusingly with lifeless eyes, a sudden gust of wind that announces the arrival of a spectral presence, and the sounds of a heavy garment, its wearer unseen, dragging along a shadowy corridor.

As noted previously, the film is a faithful adaptation of Pushkin’s Gothic story with some embellishments that, among other things, play up the romantic angle of two dashing officers, one duplicitous and one genuine, vying for the attention of lonely, lovely Lizaveta. (If anything, the intrigue and machinations around Lizaveta are too drawn out, slowing down the second act and leaving Mitchell with not much more to do than look worried and harried.)

Lizaveta is too trusting for her own good.

Another embellishment is a flashback scene of the Countess as a young married woman, desperate to replace the money belonging to her husband that a secret lover has stolen. She visits the palace of Saint Germain, which is the epitome of high Gothic strangeness with a carved winged skull leering out from the main door, cowled manservants showing her the way down darkened, torch-lit corridors, and the Count’s chambers themselves, decorated with woebegone dolls trapped in bell jars, representing those unfortunates who have sold their souls.

Also nicely done is an early scene in which Suvorin is browsing in a bookshop. As he reaches for a book on military tactics, The Campaigns of Napoleon, the Saint Germain book drops to the floor with a thud, attracting his attention. As he leafs through the chapters, they seem to spell out his coming obsession, and his fate.

Austrian actor Anton Walbrook’s performance as the brooding Suvorin is a little overdone at the edges, but fits right in with the stylized melodrama. At this point Walbrook was at the height of his film career, having just come off a leading role in the critically acclaimed adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes (1948).

By contrast, Yvonne Mitchell (Lizaveta) and Ronald Howard (Andrei) are stuck with far less glamorous roles as, respectively, a bothered and bewildered object of debased obsession and a standard-issue earnest suitor. Horror fans may remember Mitchell for her roles in Crucible of Horror (1971) and Hammer’s surrealistic psycho-thriller Demons of the Mind (1972). Ronald Howard, son of Leslie, would appear nearly a decade later in another film with Anton Walbrook, I Accuse (1958; based on the Dreyfus affair); horror and fantasy credits include guest stints on the TV shows One Step Beyond and Boris Karloff’s Thriller, and a plum role in Hammer’s glorious and underrated Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964).

But the real show-stealer is Dame Edith Evans in her feature film debut. In the role of the Countess, the legendary stage actress and eventual 3-time Oscar nominee is imperious, prickly and unreasonably demanding of poor Lizaveta, but at the same time possesses a vulnerability borne of sad regret and fear for her own bartered soul. The scene in which she sits enigmatically silent as Suvorin desperately pleads with her to reveal the secret of the cards, her face fixed like a mask and her eyes heavy-lidded and unreadable, is hard to forget.

"Listen to me Countess, you can't be turned down for coverage,
and your premiums will never go up!"

Like the Countess, The Queen of Spades has sumptuous trappings, but also a troubled history. After the film’s budget-busting sets were completed and just before shooting was to begin, the original director had to pull out due to ill-health. Producer Anatole de Grunwald wasted no time in finding a replacement, the brilliant Thorold Dickinson, who “was offered the job on Tuesday, read the Pushkin story and the screenplay by Friday, met the cast and crew over the weekend and began filming on Monday, re-writing what he considered a solid but not quite good enough script on a daily basis.” [“Tale of luckless director dealt a bad hand,” The Herald, Glasgow, Scotland, Dec. 24, 2009]

The film earned a BAFTA nomination for best film in the UK, but elsewhere in Europe its Baroque theatricality met with a chilly reception from critics who were enamored of post-war Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave movement. [Ibid.]

For a time, prints of The Queen of Spades were thought to be lost, but thankfully in the late 2000s it was rediscovered and released theatrically and on DVD. It’s also currently playing on a number of streaming and VOD services.

"Is this your card?"
"Er, no."

Where to find it: DVD/Blu-ray | Streaming

That ‘70s Sci-Fi TV Movie #4: The Astronaut

Now Playing: The Astronaut (1972)

Pros: Good, affecting performances by Monte Markham and Susan Clark as two lonely people caught up in a government conspiracy
Cons: The rationale for the conspiracy and its incompetent execution strain credulity

Back in 2019, a YouGov poll commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing found that 20% of respondents believed that it was definitely or probably true that the landing was faked. Such skepticism has existed almost since the moment Neil Armstrong took that “one small step” on the lunar surface, but many were dismayed that 50 years on, the endlessly debunked theory still had traction.

In 1977 the conspiracy theory reached its entertainment apogee with Capricorn One, about NASA officials secretly scrapping a mission to Mars when defects in the spacecraft are discovered, but staging a landing in order to ensure further program funding. When an investigative reporter (Elliott Gould) starts snooping around, and the empty returning capsule burns up in the atmosphere on re-entry, the fake mission’s astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O.J. Simpson) realize they have become a liability the agency will have to deal with in order to keep its secrets.

A full five years before Capricorn One (and while the Apollo program was still sending men to the moon), a TV movie, The Astronaut, featured yet another convoluted government plot to snow the public.

In this one, the heads of the Mars mission at the U.S. Department of Space (renamed perhaps to spare the feelings of real-life NASA administrators) implement a back-up plan when the first man on Mars, Col. Brice Randolph, mysteriously dies during an EVA on the surface (they’re able to cut the video feed before the public can figure out what’s going on).

In order to buy time to find the cause of the astronaut’s death and prevent the President from shutting down the program altogether, the administrators implement a back-up plan: find a double for Randolph, sneak him into the spacecraft when it splashes down with the surviving astronaut, pretend the mission was a success, parade the double around for the benefit of the public, stage a boating accident in which “Randolph” goes permanently missing, and finally, give the double a new face and a new life. (Whew! I think I’d just take the “win” of having successfully landed an astronaut on Mars, acknowledge that there are many dangerous unknowns in spaceflight, and wait for a new president who is more pro-space program. But then, that would make for a very dull movie.)

They find a look-alike, Eddie Reese (Monte Markham), who is a disgraced ex-pilot who ejected from a jet that crashed and killed three people on the ground, and has been wandering from job to job ever since. As the spacecraft with the surviving astronaut heads home, Reese’s face is altered to be identical to Randolph’s (“We have the technology!”), and from tapes, he learns to talk, walk and act like Randolph.

"We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was..."
Oops, wrong TV show!

As if that weren’t enough disbelief to suspend, the mission head honcho Kurt Anderson (Jackie Cooper), delays telling Randolph's wife Gail (Susan Clark) the bad news, as she has recently had a miscarriage and is emotionally vulnerable. So, once the plan is put into effect and the mission is publicly celebrated as a success, Anderson sends Reese/Randolph home to Gail, much to Reese’s extreme discomfort. (!?)

The Astronaut indulges in the old Hollywood fantasy that plastic surgery can create a double so exact that (s)he can fool even people who know them intimately. I’m prepared to accept that you could put one over on the public whose only exposure to the celebrity was through grainy TV broadcasts and newspaper photos (this was 1972 after all), but fooling a wife who knows all her husband’s moles and various other (ahem) idiosyncrasies … I don’t think so.

And then there’s the idea of rushing plan B into action based on the certainty that the program will be toast once the news of Randolph’s death breaks. A couple of times Anderson talks about “buying time” until they can figure out what killed the Colonel, as if the moment it became public knowledge funds would be completely cut off (and as if the senior Congresspeople whose districts benefited from the space program wouldn’t have a say in it). This seems to be a very naive view of how government works.

Mission head Kurt Anderson (Jackie Cooper, left) contemplates saying goodbye
to his pension if word gets out.

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM WITH SOME MILD SPOILERS

Shaky premise or not, the movie builds to a very effective (and affecting) crisis when Gail recovers enough from the loss of her baby to discover that her husband is not her husband. The movie suggests that it’s not so much minute physical differences that betray the imposter (although at one point, while Eddie and Gail are holding hands, Gail remarks that his hands seem somehow smaller… okay people, get your minds out of the gutter!).

Gail tells Eddie that she knew he couldn’t be Randolph, because he's been too kind and gentle with her. It seems the Colonel was, like a good military man and astronaut, all about the work, and to add insult to injury had spent most of the marriage belittling Gail’s hopes and dreams, including her desire for a family.

In an irony of ironies, the space program, like some behemoth fairy godmother, has sent Gail a tender, caring version of her husband at the time of her greatest need. And Reese, who has been shunned by society for a moment of tragic weakness, has found a reason to live in Gail.

Gail (Susan Clark) starts to figure out this man is not her husband.

When the couple inform the higher-ups that Gail is in on the plot, Anderson graciously agrees to let the two disappear together in the boating accident. But complications ensue when Eddie and Gail find out that by going ahead with the plan, lives will be put in danger (and that’s all the spoilers you’re going to get).

Susan Clark is wonderful as a woman who, on the verge of a breakdown, recovers her equanimity and self-respect under the most unusual of circumstances. Trained at the London’s prestigious Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts, Clark secured a contract with Universal Studios in the mid-’60s, eventually playing opposite the likes of Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda in Madigan (1968), and Robert Redford in Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969).

Television dominated in the ‘70s, which saw her in such high profile TV movie roles as Babe (1976; playing the golfing legend “Babe” Zaharias) and the title role of Amelia Earhart the following year. Two years before The Astronaut, she co-starred with Eric Braeden in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), the sci-fi classic about artificial intelligence run-amok (timelier than ever!).

In The Astronaut, Monte Markham has the singular challenge of being an actor playing a disgraced pilot pretending to be an astronaut. Now in his late 80s, Markham has done it all, with multitudinous acting, producing and directing credits. He even started his own production company in the early ‘90s.

Monte’s big break came as the lead in the TV comedy The Second Hundred Years (1967-68) playing a man who is revived after spending decades in accidental suspended animation. After that he parlayed his stolid, “Everyman” presence into dozens upon dozens of movie and TV roles in every genre. And like the Energizer Bunny, he’s still going, with IMDb listing acting credits as recent as this year, and as if that’s not enough, 5 upcoming projects.

"To be Brice Randolph or not to be Brice Randolph, that is the question..."

Where to find it: Streaming (low-res and soft-looking copy, but watchable)

The android as a blank slate: Prototype

Now Playing: Prototype (TV movie, 1983)

Pros: Intelligent, poignant script; Great, nuanced performances, especially by leads Christopher Plummer and David Morse
Cons: Certain plot elements, such as the authorities’ measured, non-violent response to a rogue scientist running off with a top-secret military project, may seem quaint in these anxious times

This post is part of the Charismatic Christopher Plummer Blogathon hosted by Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews and Gabriela at Pale Writer. In a brilliant career spanning over 6 decades, Plummer played a dizzying array of characters in almost every movie genre, from Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965), to Sherlock Holmes in Murder by Decree (1979), to billionaire oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World (2017). Prototype is a nearly forgotten TV movie, but it’s a great example of how this extraordinary actor could make any role something special.

In 1920, Czech playwright Karel Capek introduced the word robot to the world in his play R.U.R. (aka Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti or Rossum's Universal Robots). Even before that, filmmakers were fascinated with the idea of artificial humanoids. In 1918, Der Herr der Welt treated German audiences to the idea of “machine people” performing society’s hard labor; in the United States, the great Harry Houdini faced off against a criminal cartel employing an “automaton” in the serial The Master Mystery (also 1918).

It didn’t take long for clunky, box-like robots to evolve into androids indistinguishable from real people. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a deranged inventor (Rotwang) fashions an exact duplicate of Utopian prophet Maria, which proceeds to wreak all kinds of havoc in its human guise.

While the traditional movie robot can be either intimidating or ludicrous depending upon its look, androids are uncanny and potentially insidious, calling into question what it means to be human … and possibly representing the next stage of evolution that threatens to leave frail, error-prone homo sapiens in the dust.

Okay, so I doubt this specimen will be replacing humanity anytime soon...

Blade Runner (1982), based on a novel by the visionary author Philip K. Dick, depicted a future (i.e., 2019) in which replicant androids are perceived to be such a threat that they’ve been banned from Earth. ”Blade runners” -- futuristic bounty hunters -- are employed to eliminate any replicants that have slipped through the net and are passing themselves off as human.

More recently, Ex Machina (2014) dealt with the near future of android research, in which a young computer programmer spends a week with a Zuckerberg-like tech mogul and his beautiful (and devious) android creation.

Prototype exists in a brighter, more hopeful world than the dystopian Los Angeles of Blade Runner or the tech-dominated surveillance state of Ex Machina. Nobel award-winning scientist Dr. Carl Forrester (Christopher Plummer) and his team have put the finishing touches on Michael (David Morse), the world’s first full-fledged, high functioning android. In his excitement at the success of the project, Forrester bends the lab rules and takes Michael out for a “field trip” to a department store and then dinner at the scientist's home. Forrester tells his wife Dorothy (Frances Sternhagen), a linguistics professor, that Michael is a work colleague.

Tall, lanky, polite to a fault and with an almost cherubic face, Michael is the very picture of a socially awkward, nerdy young scientist. The improvised Turing test goes off almost without a hitch, except for Michael’s inability to eat or drink -- Forrester’s solution is to distract his wife and pile Michael’s salad onto his own plate. Michael offhandedly comments that he should have been designed to ingest food.

Dr. Forrester is worried that he will have to eat his dinner and Michael's.

Back at the lab, Forrester brags to his colleague Dr. Pressman (James Sutorius) that on the field trip “it [Michael] handled a crisis and made associations!” The laboratory director, Dr. Arthur Jarrett (Stephen Elliot) is not nearly so sanguine about the test, chewing out his chief scientist for exposing the secret government project to such risk. Forrester, flush with success and the natural arrogance of an elite scientist, brushes off Jarrett’s protests.

Forrester’s brashness turns to alarm when a military detachment pays a visit to the lab and whisks Michael off to Washington for further tests. When they return Michael to the lab, Forrester and his team examine him from head to toe, concerned about what the military may have done to their creation.

They discover gunpowder residue on Michael’s hand, and Forrester goes ballistic (no pun intended) on Jarrett and General Keating (Arthur Hill), the Pentagon’s liaison to the project. Keating, trying to calm the situation, admits that among many tests they had Michael fire a weapon, pointing out that the project team has given them something “with a thousand uses.”

Unmollified, Forrester fears the worst -- that the Pentagon is planning to use Michael as an assassin or super-soldier. Exasperated, Keating hints that even project heads can have their security clearances revoked.

Forrester and his team are highly suspicious of the Pentagon's plans for Michael.

When Forrester learns that Keating is planning to take Michael back to Washington, possibly indefinitely, he enlists the aid of Pressman to sneak Michael out of the lab one more time. The pair go on a road trip, ultimately ending up at the quiet little campus where Forrester got his start. But their hideout won’t last, as the military isn’t going to let a top secret project slip through their fingers for long.

Sandwiched in between Blade Runner (1982) and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator (1984), Prototype was first broadcast on CBS on December 7, 1983. In contrast to the two cult hits, Prototype doesn't bother with any shootings, explosions, car chases or any kind of physical violence. (But that didn’t prevent the marketing people from creating very Terminator-like art for Prototype’s home video release and adding the ominous tagline “The future is not friendly”.)

Instead, writers/producers Richard Levinson and William Link, who, among other things, gave the world Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, opted for a poignant drama that explores the varied ways human beings might react when faced with an artificial intelligence that looks like us, acts like us and can pass for us -- and how that intelligence might evolve and view us in turn.

The lead characters, Forrester and Michael, make journeys of self-discovery through the course of the movie. In the opening scene, the first stop on Michael’s field trip to the outside world is a busy department store during the Christmas season. Michael, over 6 ft. tall and dressed in a turtle-neck sweater and slacks, is a wide-eyed man-child captivated by a model train display. Forrester lurks in the background like a bemused parent -- a foreshadowing of the relationship to come -- and has to urge Michael along, as they have a dinner date to keep at the good doctor’s house.

Even 6' 4" tall androids can be fascinated by model trains.

At first, Forrester is the gruff and demanding scientist, obsessed with putting Michael through his paces and proving that he is indistinguishable from the real thing. In the presence of colleagues Forrester refers to Michael as “it,” and barely notices when Michael expresses amazing, human-like longings, like wishing they would let him read books in the regular, linear way instead of downloading them directly into his artificial brain.

When they go on the run, the scientist becomes a stern parent. In one instance, Michael is watching a rerun of the 1931 Frankenstein in their hotel room. Forrester tells Michael to shut off the TV, snapping that he shouldn't be watching something that “trivializes science.” Michael innocently responds, “It was a sad story -- do they kill him? [the monster]” Forrester pretends not to notice the association that Michael is making.

Later, at their hideout at Forrester’s alma mater, Frankenstein comes up again. Like any rebellious teenager, Michael rejects his mentor's advice and reads Shelley’s novel. He confesses that he’s having “very strange thoughts” as a result. He tells Forrester that the book is nothing like the movie, and at the end the creature chooses to lose himself in the ice flows of the North Pole. He sadly concludes that Frankenstein’s monster was luckier -- he followed his own nature. “I’m not anything, I’m whatever anyone wants me to be.”

Ironically, Michael’s growing self-awareness breaks down Forrester’s own automaton-like rigidness. Living in close quarters with Michael and witnessing so many aspects of his humanness opens up the dour scientist’s eyes. Forrester evolves from the stereotypical scientist only interested in numbers and benchmarks, to a worried, proscriptive parent, to a man humbled and in awe of the gentle, sensitive being he has brought to life.

Father and artificial son go fishing.

Forrester realizes that Michael is not just a blank slate for himself and others to write upon and nurture, but also the author of his own life. Plummer is pitch perfect throughout his character’s transition. Forrester’s best moments come when, toward the end of the film, with the government tightening the net around them, he gleams with fatherly pride even knowing that their relationship is hanging by a thread.

David Morse also gives an outstanding performance as Michael. There is no makeup involved in making Michael look just a tiny bit off. It’s all on Morse, who gets it just right: he's a bit too wide-eyed, he doesn’t blink, his posture is a little too straight, his movements and speech a little too precise. But he’s not so off that he can’t pass for human. In other words, he’s the stereotypical socially awkward nerd.

Michael has a number of poignant moments as his personality blossoms from child-like enthusiasm for a toy train to growing independence as he takes an unauthorized trip to a campus bookstore and chats innocently with an attractive store clerk.

Another thing that separates Prototype from the run-of-the-mill sci-fi movie is its treatment of the antagonists, lab director Jarrett and General Keating. These are not one-dimensional B movie villains.

Jarrett is a harried administrator, caught between his passionate star scientist and the Pentagon. He’s also a little sensitive about his status as a paper pusher who doesn’t do “real science,” but his heart is in the right place, and he doesn’t want to see Forrester blow up his career.

One of the film’s most heartbreaking scenes comes after Forrester and Michael have fled, and Jarrett is talking with Dorothy. As delicately as possible, Jarrett suggests to her that, since the couple never had a child, Michael may have become a surrogate son for her husband. Dorothy ruefully concedes that “at this moment, he must love Michael more.”

Dorothy is suddenly surrounded by government officials concerned for her welfare...
and wanting to know where her husband is.

Similarly, Arthur Hill as General Keating is not your standard cigar-chomping, bullying military man, but rather an urbane, articulate technocrat who seems genuinely honored to meet Forrester. He wants to reassure the scientist, but is honest enough to admit he doesn’t know what the Pentagon will ultimately do with Michael.

In fact, the authorities in Prototype are so reasonable (and the lab’s security so lax, with Forrester managing to sneak Michael out not once but twice), a contemporary viewer could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing takes place on another planet. Prototype is a far cry from our current 24/7 surveillance world, where authorities are more disposed to locking up whistleblowers and protesters for long prison stretches than humoring them.

At this point in his career, Plummer was taking work where he could get it, staying busy with TV series and TV movies, the occasional feature film, and even lending his distinctive voice to animated family movies. Sci-fi was in the mix here and there -- several years before Prototype, he appeared as The Emperor of the Galaxy in the ultra-cheesy, low-budget Star Wars rip-off Starcrash, co-starring Caroline Munroe and David Hasselhoff. In 1984, he co-starred as a villainous government official opposite Dennis Quaid and Max von Sydow in the underrated sci-fi thriller Dreamscape.

Prototype was one of David Morse’s first screen credits, but by the time it went into production, he was already making a name for himself as Dr. Jack Morrison in the TV series St. Elsewhere, which lasted six seasons. Since then, Morse, like Plummer, has appeared in a wide variety of roles on TV and in feature films, and, despite his boyish, All-American looks, has proved to be as adept at playing creepy villains (e.g., 12 Monkeys, Disturbia) as stand-up good guys.

Michael develops a sudden interest in reading and girls, in that order.

With this modest, character-driven TV production, Levinson and Link took the opportunity to play with themes and ideas that are definitely not the stuff of blockbuster movie hits. They wisely avoided loading down Prototype with too many lengthy philosophical exchanges, instead letting the great cast reveal their characters just as much or more through looks, gestures and offhand comments. The result is one deeply affecting moment after another.

If you see Prototype and it doesn’t bring even the tiniest hint of a tear to your eye, you should get over to your local AI-Robotics lab for testing. You might just be an android with a defective emotion chip.

Where to find it: Streaming