Hanging out with Boris

The condemned man stands before the court of popular opinion, his head held high, his dignity still intact. A hush falls over the assembled witnesses as the sentence is pronounced:

“William Henry Pratt, also known as Boris Karloff, for the crime of scaring us silly by portraying the Frankenstein monster in three movies and searing the creature’s terrible image into our minds, the court condemns you to act in low-budget horror films for the rest of your natural life. May God have mercy on your actor’s soul.”

There is a mischievous gleam in the unrepentant man’s eyes as he addresses the court:

“[W]hat is typing? It is a trademark, a means by which the public recognizes you. Actors work all their lives to achieve that. I got mine with just one picture. It was a blessing.” [IMDb bio: personal quotes]

Later, surrounded by reporters, he reminisces,

“My dear old monster. I owe everything to him. He's my best friend.” [IMDb]

Boris was not one to complain about being consigned to B movie “jail.” Instead, he realized how spectacularly lucky he was that the role of his “dear old monster” led to a lifetime of secure, reliable work and worldwide fame.

Boris explains to the court why he's grateful for being sentenced to B movie jail.

Karloff was already 44 when lightning struck Frankenstein’s lab in 1931, jump starting the monster and the gentle Englishman’s career. After his last stint as the monster in Son of Frankenstein in 1939, he largely eschewed the heavy make-up to portray more down-to-earth, human menaces -- sometimes consciously evil, sometimes unwitting facilitators.

Boris was one of those types who seemed to have been born old. In the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, he was a 50-something actor who often played characters 10 or even 20 years older than his actual age.

Naturally, the shadow of Frankenstein loomed large over his career at this point. He was tapped again and again to play a doctor or scientist dabbling in things man was not meant to know.

With Karloff’s shock of white hair and craggy features, he was a natural for this new scientific film career. The studios would often outfit him with wire rim glasses to complete the scholarly look. Coupled with Boris’ gentle lisp, the effect was to often make his characters sympathetic even as their work led to mayhem and murder.

Between 1935 and 1945, Karloff had more mad scientist gigs than you could shake a beaker at:

• The Invisible Ray (1936) - A scientist goes on murderous rampage after being poisoned by radiation 
• The Man Who Lived Again (1936) - A brilliant but unstable doctor creates mayhem with his mind transference experiments 
• Black Friday (1940) - A doctor gets more than he bargained for when he transplants part of the brain of a gangster into the brain of a gentle college professor 
• The Man with Nine Lives (1940) - Things go south when the medical establishment condemns the cryogenic experiments of a well-meaning doctor 
• The Ape (1940) - A doctor resorts to murder to obtain the spinal fluid he needs to treat polio cases 
• The Devil Commands (1941) - A scientist devises a bizarre electrical contraption to communicate with the dead 
• House of Frankenstein (1945) - A demented doctor escapes from prison and revives Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster to take revenge on the town officials who condemned him

Predictably, in their attempts to push scientific and ethical envelopes, Karloff’s obsessed doctors would often run afoul of the legal establishment. But the seemingly gentle, elderly men of science were often hard to kill, judicially or extra-judicially.

Two of Karloff’s mad doctor movies stand out because they begin with the courts coming down like a ton of bricks on his characters for their overzealous experiments, with the mad, homicidal fun taking off from there.

Now Playing: The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)

Pros: More stylishly directed and photographed than most Bs of the era; Good acting; The climactic revenge sequence is well-conceived and suspenseful.
Cons: The revenge plan goes awry fairly quickly, leaving only a modest body count.

Boris plays Dr. Henryk Savaard, a brilliant but ethically challenged doctor who has developed an artificial heart that can restore the dead to life. When he enlists a healthy young medical student volunteer to be gassed to death then restored to life (!!), the doctor’s nurse (who is also the young man’s fiance) loses her nerve and calls in the police to stop the mad experiment. Tragically, the cops barge in and take Savaard away before he can bring the student back.

At his dramatic trial, Savaard, incensed that such plodding dullards would interrupt his work, blames the police, the medical examiner and the nurse for the student’s death. On the stand, he patiently tries to explain how his technique of stopping a patient’s heart and then reviving him again could revolutionize complicated surgeries:

"To operate on a living body, is like trying to repair a motor while it’s still running. But with a motor you can turn the power off, you can take it apart, find out what’s wrong, replace the worn and broken parts... it can be put back together and made to run just as good as new. … Our first great objective is the replacement of vital organs that have worn out. And with the body scientifically dead, the surgery in such operations is simple. But the real secret lies in the pumping of an artificial bloodstream through the body by means of a mechanical heart until the life functions pick up their own rhythm."

The jury and the court reject the good doctor’s auto mechanics theory of medicine, and he is sentenced to hang. After he is executed, prison officials blithely allow Savaard’s assistant Lang (Byron Foulger) to claim the body and take it back to the lab, where he fixes the doctor’s broken neck and restores him to life with the mechanical heart.

If looks could kill, the prosecutor would be a pile of ash.

Re-animated and righteously angry, Savaard sets about to exact his revenge. When a plucky reporter, “Scoop” Foley (Robert Wilcox) notices that the jurors from the trial are hanging themselves at an alarming rate, he figures something’s up (well yeah…)

Foley and the major trial participants -- the judge, the prosecutor, the jury foreman, the medical examiner and the skittish nurse, among others -- end up at the doctor’s mansion, lured by phony telegrams.

Savaard reveals himself to the startled assemblage, and proceeds to toy with them like a gaunt cat playing with trapped mice, ominously informing them, “If I decided to kill all of you tonight, who would believe I had done it?”

Soon, the group realizes they are trapped in the dining room, with an electrified floor-to-ceiling grill barring the main exit and steel shutters preventing escape through the windows. Name cards on the dining table specify the order in which each person will be killed, as well as the exact time.

Their only hope is Savaard’s innocent daughter Janet (Lorna Gray), who shows up at the mansion well after Savaard’s diabolical plan for revenge has kicked into high gear.

The Man They Couldn’t Hang packs a lot of mad doctor ideas, lab paraphernalia and a fiendishly diabolical revenge plan into its spare 65 minute runtime. Savaard’s idea of temporarily killing his patients in order to more effectively operate on them is fascinating and stupendously cracked at the same time.

The doctor’s mechanical heart is indeed an elegant-looking piece of equipment, with two large glass “chambers” and a plethora of tubing to circulate the life-restoring fluid. Karloff is especially good in the courtroom scene, alternately calmly explaining his theories to the jury, and then becoming maniacally intense as he condemns the fools who interrupted his work.

"So Lang, remind me again what barking mad scheme this is. I've
done so many I can't keep 'em all straight."

We’re even treated to a fly-on-the-wall look at the jury’s deliberations, as a couple of hold-outs sympathetic to the doctor cause frustration for their fellow jurors. They eventually relent, but I couldn’t help thinking that if Savaar’s lawyer had somehow arranged to show the jury the elegant artificial heart, they might have been moved to acquit (and it would have been a much less interesting movie).

The elaborate trap Savaard sets for his judicial tormentors plays out very suspensefully. The sequence owes a bit to old dark house conventions, where the unwary prospective victims are summoned to their doom, but the means of that doom are elaborate, cunning and cruel, more reminiscent of the fiendish machinations of an exotic villain like Fu Manchu (which Karloff played in 1932’s The Mask of Fu Manchu).

The anxiety is heightened by Savaard’s disembodied voice emanating from the mansion’s intercom, calmly informing his involuntary guests whose turn it is to die. An ornate clock in the dining room ticks down the minutes and seconds to the next murder. Dick Curtis as the jury foreman gives it his all as a particularly agitated victim. When his turn is announced, the sweat beads on his face, his eyes bulge, and he bobs his head around like a chicken as he desperately tries to find a way out.

"Hello, Domino's? Can you tell the delivery person to slip the pizza down the chimney?"

Nick Grinde’s direction is uncommonly stylish for a knock-off B movie. He makes liberal use of worm’s eye shots to create a sinister, oppressive mood, and bird’s eye shots to emphasize the prospective victims’ helplessness against an unseen, almost god-like executioner watching their every move.

One knock on the movie is that time constraints prevent Savaard’s diabolical plans from going very far. We get a taste of Savaard’s cruel deceit and ingenious methods for bumping people off, and then it’s on to serving the vengeful doctor his just deserts. Some horror fans (perhaps most) will feel a bit cheated.

According to Richard Bojarski and Kenneth Beals (The Films of Boris Karloff, Citadel Press, 1974), “The film’s success encouraged Columbia to sign Karloff for several more films in the same theme, launching the actor onto his second ‘crazed scientist’ cycle which lasted until Karloff returned to the stage in early 1941.” [p. 144]

Some of that success was undoubtedly due to the then public notoriety of a real mad scientist, Dr. Robert Cornish. 

“The biochemist attracted publicity during the thirties by restoring dead dogs back to life after gassing them with nitrogen gas. Cornish also tried to obtain permission to restore life to executed convicts in order to further test his theories. But he did not obtain the opportunity to do so.” [Bojarski & Beals, p. 144]

Yikes! Thankfully, there is no record of Cornish exacting a fiendish revenge on the disbelieving authorities who frustrated his plans for human experimentation.

Regardless of the inspiration, The Man They Couldn’t Hang is a cracking good, well-paced horror-thriller, one of the best of Boris’ crazed scientist pictures.

Bonus Review: Before I Hang (1940)

Pros: Karloff turns in a very solid performance in a more sympathetic role.
Cons: The murders are repetitive and relatively lacking in excitement or suspense.

A year later and Boris is back in court, answering for yet another death connected to unconventional medical experiments. This time, Boris is Dr. John Garth, a kindlier, less arrogant version of his previous role, who is nonetheless on trial for his life. Garth had tried to reverse the aging process in a dying man through a revolutionary new blood serum, but was forced to perform a mercy killing after the experiments failed and the patient was in unbearable pain.

Apparently back then they executed people for anything more severe than unpaid parking tickets, so naturally Garth has to die. While Garth is cooling his heels on death row, the prison doctor (Edward Van Sloan) talks the incredibly permissive warden into letting Garth continue the experiments with his assistance until the execution date.

Right before he’s scheduled to be executed, Garth injects himself with the serum in the hopes that the prison doctor can get usable data even after he’s dead. The governor’s pardon comes through with only minutes to spare, but Garth collapses and is taken to the infirmary.

When Garth comes to, he’s amazed to find that he no longer needs his thick glasses, and his prison friends remark that he looks twenty years younger. There’s just one catch. In order to make the new batch of serum, they had to draw blood from a condemned murderer.

Garth and his assistant put the final touches on their Visible Man model.
Show of hands: who had one as a kid?

In a Jekyll and Hyde moment, Garth kills the prison doctor, but another inmate is blamed. He becomes a free man, obsessed with the idea of inoculating his wealthy and accomplished friends against the ravages of old age. But every time he tries to perform the procedure, blind, murderous instincts take over.

It’s deja vu all over again for another of Boris’ patented mad doctor / hangin’ pictures:

• Released by Columbia Pictures - ✓
• Directed by Nick Grinde - ✓
• Dramatic courtroom scene - ✓ (even the judge is the same, played by Charles Trowbridge) 
• Small-minded, uncomprehending judicial and medical authorities - ✓
• Death sentence by hanging - ✓
• Loyal, loving daughter - ✓ (played by Evelyn Keyes) 
• Crazy lab equipment - ✓ (in this case, a half-lifesize replica of the human body with a working heart and circulatory system) 
• Bodies start piling up post-trial - ✓

For all its similarities, Before I Hang lacks the cracked energy of its immediate predecessor. The revenge plot of The Man They Couldn’t Hang is fiendishly complex, and the victims’ desperate attempts to escape and protect each other from sudden death add greatly to the suspense. In contrast, Garth’s murders are repetitive and not all that exciting. The well meaning doctor contacts old friends, tries to convince them to try the anti-aging serum, and when they balk, murderous instincts (born of contaminated blood!) take over. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Dr. Garth can't remember if he came to his friend's house
to save his life or to kill him.

The elderly victims are seemingly incapable of defending themselves, making the scenes even more anti-climactic. In the previous film, Savaard becomes a cold, calculating, remorseless villain who makes you wonder what he’ll do next. Garth is well meaning but clueless, and knocks off his colleagues in a fugue state with comparatively little muss or fuss. One has you on the edge of your seat, the other, not so much.

Still, Before I Hang is worth watching for another solid Karloff performance, one that allows him to ride an emotional roller coaster, from regret at not being able to complete his life’s work, to joy at being pardoned, to remorse and despair as he realizes what he has done. And while the murders are somewhat sedate, the emotions that play out on his face in just those scenes are worth the price of admission.

In their entry on the film, Bojarski and Beals quoted a contemporaneous review from the New York Post:

“No matter how well Boris Karloff starts out, he ends up bad… The picture is fanciful pseudo-science which builds to an exciting murder orgy. Poor Boris. Once a movie murderer, always a movie murder.” [p. 166]

The Post reviewer needn’t have felt sorry for Boris. As he murdered his way through movie after movie, he was laughing all the way to the bank.

Where to find them: The Man They Could Not Hang and Before I Hang are included on Mill Creek’s Boris Karloff Collection, available here. 

A Kinder, Gentler Psycho for the Small Screen

Now Playing: How Awful About Allan (1970)

Pros: Good, veteran "suspense" cast; Effective (but brief) dream sequences; Clever allusion to Psycho at the very end
Cons: Perkins' character is hard to sympathize with; Unmasking of the culprit is anticlimactic

Note to my readers: After recently reading director Curtis Harrington's very entertaining memoir, Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood (more info below), I wanted to review one of his movies sooner than later. Harrington's Queen of Blood appealed, since, a.) I haven't reviewed any sci-fi in awhile; b.) it's also a nifty horror story, and so fits right into the Halloween high season; c.) I hadn't seen it for some time; and d.) it was readily available through Amazon Instant Video. Or so I thought. I fired up my networked Blu-ray player, searched for Queen of Blood, and promptly got a "Video currently unavailable" message. It had been there just a week ago when I checked. Being just a dumb, naive consumer who wants to watch what he wants to watch, I am getting soooo tired of these licensing follies (as are quite a few other folks out there). At any rate, I'm nothing if not flexible, so I quickly pivoted to a backup, How Awful About Allan, a pretty decent thriller and perhaps even more fitting for Halloween. You're welcome.

A thoroughly bummed-out Allan (Anthony Perkins)
succumbs to hysterical blindness.

The story. In an effectively disturbing pre-title sequence, Allan (Anthony Perkins) awakens to the sight of a strange orange light flickering under his bedroom door and the crackling sound of fire. He rushes to the master bedroom, which is ablaze. His father (Kent Smith) is encircled by flames, pathetically calling for Allan's help. He's frozen at the door, uncertain about what to do (or is it that he's uncertain he wants to do anything?). Allan's sister Katherine (Julie Harris) runs up to the door screaming Allan's name, then plunges into the fiery room to try to save her father. As flames shoot out of the second story windows, a neighbor (Olive, played by Joan Hackett) calls the fire department, then runs over to the house just as a dazed Allan stumbles out the front door. Allan mumbles that his father is dead. "Where's Katherine?" Olive asks in a near panic. Just then, a good samaritan carries Katherine out of the house and lays her down on the front lawn. Katherine's head lolls to one side, and the spectators are horrified to see that the right side of her face is horribly blackened and burnt. As they stare down at the poor woman, Allan stares straight ahead. "Olive… I can't see… I can't see… I'm blind…" he says in a creepy monotone. Roll the titles.

Fast forward 8 months. Allan is ready to be released from the mental hospital. In a bit of exposition, Allan's doctor (William Erwin) reminds him that his blindness is psychosomatic, probably brought on by shock and guilt over his father's death and his sister's disfigurement. In his therapy, Allan has owned up to the doctor about his resentment of his sister's special relationship with his high achieving father, and in so doing has begun to deal with the guilt. The doctor reassures him that it was an accident-- of course he didn't mean to put the combustible paint so close to the heater in his father's room (hmmmmmm…..) And, he adds, Katherine has done well with her injuries-- the appliance she wears over her burn scars is "barely noticeable." Allan's eyesight has improved marginally -- he can see colors and shapes -- but he's still legally (if not somatically) blind. (In a shot from Allan's POV, we see the indistinct features of the doctor as he talks to his patient. The effect is like looking at someone behind a thick pane of leaded glass.) Allan listens stoically, if not quite believing everything the shrink is telling him. It's time to go home again…

Katherine picks him up from the hospital and drives him home. As they get out of the car, Allan pauses and looks up in the direction of the second story where the tragedy occurred. In a POV shot, only the indistinct outlines of the house are visible. Then it switches to a clear shot of the second story windows, which still bear the scorch marks of the fire. (If I'd been Allan's doctor, I think I would have recommended a change of scenery, but then, that's probably why I'm just a blogger, damn it!) As Katherine leads him up to the front porch, Allan stumbles against a sign in the yard, "Room for rent." "What's that?" he asks Katherine. "Oh, just a stick some neighbor kids left," she lies. Uh-oh, turbulence ahead!

Allan hears a shadowy figure whispering his name.

Later, the old sibling tensions reemerge as Katherine explains to her dour brother that she's had to take in student borders to supplement her meager salary at the university. At first Allan is alright with the plan, but the new student renter -- a young man who can barely speak above a whisper due to a throat injury -- starts to get on the vulnerable man's nerves. The student is like a ghost, disappearing in the morning and only coming back late at night. Soon, Allan's paranoia takes full flight when he hears a voice late at night calling his name and perceives a shadowy figure on the stairs.

Neighbor Olive (who we learn was once engaged to Allan) is, like Katherine, concerned for Allan's mental state. She persuades him to go along for a ride to the university (everyone in the small town seems to be employed there) to get him out of the musty house. Sitting in the car, Allan hears some students laughing on the library steps, and in his paranoid state, thinks they're laughing at him. Then, the creepy voice calls his name again and he sees a shape approaching the car window. Panicked, he takes the wheel, guns the car engine and drives off, running other cars off the road before crashing into a lamppost.

In the aftermath of the crash, Allan talks to Olive about the mysterious border no one ever sees, and the recent return of Katherine's former fiancee, Eric, who Olive has seen, but who Katherine claims moved to Australia and hasn't come back. Allan puts two and two together, and comes up with Katherine and Eric in a "secret living arrangement in a narrow-minded university town." Allan starts grilling Katherine about the student renter and Eric. But that night, when Allan is nearly pulled down the steep stairs by the dark figure whispering his name, it appears there's more at work than just two lovers living secretly together under Allan's nose. With Allan out of the way, the secret living arrangement might not have to be so secret.

Three creepy men in black witness Allan's car crash.
A trio of red herrings, or something else?

After an intense conversation with Katherine about his relapse and possibly returning to the hospital, the paranoid man slips out of the house in the middle of a violent electrical storm and is promptly hit by a falling branch. In a subsequent delirium, he dreams of a much younger Katherine and his father holding a secret conversation in the study, then turning and malevolently laughing together at the young boy (Allan) standing in the doorway.

After this, Katherine and Olive tag team up on Allan to convince him to go back to the hospital. Allan is resigned to it, but before he can pack up, the shadowy figure strikes again. Who's trying to drive poor Allan mad, or worse yet, trying to kill him? The mysterious student boarder? Katherine's estranged fiancee Eric? What's a poor paranoid former mental patient to do?

In a way, this Aaron Spelling-produced TV movie is almost done in by its stellar cast. One could be forgiven for expecting great things of a production starring "Psycho" Anthony Perkins and Julie Harris of "The Haunting" fame. What you get is a competent, low-key thriller with some genuinely creepy moments, several dull stretches, and an effective music track by Laurence Rosenthal that keeps the viewer uneasy even during the dull parts.

To viewers raised on a diet of egregious TV gore like Dexter and The Following, How Awful About Allan no doubt will seem hopelessly staid and genteel. It's a slow-building neo-Gothic that features a "heroine" in the form of the gaunt, habitually nervous Anthony Perkins. There are no shocks to speak of, but rather just some well-crafted, dark-at-the-top-of-the-stairs spooky atmosphere for Anthony's character (and presumably the audience) to shiver at. The unease is effectively supplemented by POV shots from Allan's near-blind perspective. The dark at the top of the stairs is scary enough, but when all the figures you encounter, even in broad daylight, are indistinct shapes, even normal every-day life can get real scary real fast.

In the fevered dream sequence, young Katherine (Jeannette Howe)
and Allan's father Raymond (Kent Smith) share a jolly, malicious secret.

Scary too are the bizarre, fevered dreams Allan has as he lies unconscious after his encounter out in the storm. In this too brief sequence, we get a taste for how disturbed Allan was over the bond that Katherine shared with her father, the "great" man and scholar. In his dream, a young Allan walks down the darkened corridors of the house and encounters a sister and father who have been transformed into leering, laughing, evil versions of themselves. Kent Smith of Cat People fame makes a brief but memorably malignant appearance in the sequence.

But even as we're tempted to sympathize with poor Allan, the character is at the same time maddeningly obtuse and unappreciative. As Katherine and Olive hover around him, fixing him meals, taking him on drives, and almost desperately trying to do right by him, he pouts and confronts and retreats to his room to spew his paranoid rants into his tape recorder. It gets to the point where even the most patient, forbearing viewer must be tempted to cheer for the shadowy figure to pull Allan's scrawny frame down the stairs and break his neck.

Given that there are only a handful of characters in the movie and the few red herrings are weak, the denouement is unsurprising and disappointing. But don't be tempted to shut it off before the end credits. The final minute or so is a wonderful, eccentric homage to Perkins' Psycho role, and saves the movie from what otherwise would have been a blah ending.

In addition to the star-power presence of Perkins and Harris, Joan Hackett is well cast as the kindly but unappreciated Olive. If you've seen any TV from the '60s and '70s, you've probably seen Joan. She was attractive without being Hollywood "beautiful," which allowed her to get roles that highlighted her versatility, from westerns to thrillers to sci-fi and everything in between. Tragically, she died of cancer in 1983 at the very young age of 49.

In his memoir Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood, director and ever-aspiring auteur Curtis Harrington said of the production, "This television experience was a relatively painless and even enjoyable one. I thought I was only killing time and making a few bucks between real work. If only I had known." (Curtis Harrington, Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood: The Adventures of an Aesthete in the Movie Business, Drag City Inc., 2013.)

Harrington is one of the more interesting directors that the average film fan has maybe-possibly-probably never heard of. His journey from a gangly middle class film buff, to experimental filmmaker, to hobnobber with such luminaries as Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote and James Whale, to feature film director, to frustrated TV director, is an interesting one to say the least! Along the way, he made such fascinating and varied films as Night Tide (his ultra low budget feature debut with Dennis Hopper released in 1961), the Roger Corman-produced Queen of Blood (1966; with Hopper and Basil Rathbone), Games (1967; with Simone Signoret and James Caan), What's the Matter with Helen (1971; with Debbie Reynolds and Shelly Winters), and, to his everlasting regret, Devil Dog: Hound of Hell (TV movie with Richard Crenna and Yvette Mimieux; 1978).

How Awful was Anthony Perkins' first TV movie, and Harrington was worried that the actor would be uncomfortable with the rushed shooting schedule. But Harrington was relieved to find out that his leading man was the consummate professional. To achieve more realism, Perkins had opaque contact lenses made and wore them every day to the set, so that his blindness was authentic. Julie Harris and Kent Smith were also involved in scenes that were a little too authentic for comfort. In Harris' case, in a driving scene with a side-mounted camera, Julie forgot the camera was there and smashed it into a parked car. (Otherwise, Harrington noted, she was a "marvel of an actress and an angel of a person.")

Kent Smith does his own fiery stunt work in the opening scene.

And Kent Smith insisted on doing the dangerous fire scene himself. Harrington: 

"I was fascinated by the way the special effects men smeared the walls with rubber glue, which is highly flammable but easily extinguished. The set was designed so that as the flames seem to engulf him, Kent would fall to his knees and crawl out the bottom of the set. It looked so real I was terrified that something had gone wrong during filming. But Kent emerged from the flames smiling and unsinged." [Ibid.]

Harrington may have viewed How Awful About Allan as nothing more than a pleasant diversion between "real work," but it's a very competent, atmospheric thriller made all the more enjoyable with the presence of top-flight professionals Anthony Perkins, Julie Harris and Joan Hackett. Fortunately, it's widely available online and on DVD.

---

Where to find it:

Amazon Instant Video

Oldies.com


A "How Awful About Allan" sampler:

Lions and tigers and Atwill, oh my!

Now Playing: Murders in the Zoo (1933)

Pros: Lionel Atwill is pitch-perfect as the quietly menacing villain; Shock scenes keep the viewer off balance; Kathleen Burke is captivating
Cons: Charlie Ruggles quickly becomes tiresome in his comic relief role

Did you hear the one about the Chinese zoo officials who tried to pass off a dog, a large Tibetan mastiff, as a lion? Apparently they got away with it for awhile until the "lion" started barking at the zoo visitors.  The official explanation was that the real lion had been temporarily sent off to another facility to breed. Apparently it didn't occur to them to put up a sign. Although, switcheroos like this have apparently been a common practice. The same zoo people placed a white fox in a leopard den and another dog in the wolf enclosure. (To be fair, the Tibetan mastiff is a spectacular-looking animal. I'd never seen one, even in photographs, before reading the article. It might just be worth a couple of bucks to see one up close.)

I was tempted to think that this was all a big put-on, that the zoo officials were just having some fun and the visitors were being spoilsports. But then it occurred to me that there has never been an official or bureaucrat in the history of the human race that had anything that could remotely be called a sense of humor. That is exactly why they get put in charge of things -- someone has to pretend to be the adult while the rest of us are lobbing spitballs and running with scissors. So how to explain such a lame charade?

The Tibetan Mastiff is a magnificent-looking beast.

I can't speak to China, but its seems that in this country, officials at every level harbor a deep, abiding disrespect for the intelligence of the common folk. Magnificent, meretricious b*st*rds like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Anthony Wiener dare the commoners not to vote for them. And in between marathon viewings of The Kardashians and Honey Boo Boo, we fall for these con artists (almost) every time. Passing a dog off as a lion is kids' stuff compared to the epic cons that are run every day in the good ol' US of A.

Murders in the Zoo features a.) a zoo (duh!), and b.) a con of sorts on the part of one of the characters, but in this case the dishonesty is just the tip of a jealous, raging psychotic iceberg…

The film opens in an especially gruesome fashion -- so much so, you may wonder how it could be an American movie of the 1930s. (It's important to note that it was released by Paramount in Hollywood's pre-Code days, before the Motion Picture Production Code -- devised by chief censor Will H. Hays and others with 19th century Victorian sensibilities -- went into practical effect. The Code aimed to protect innocent moviegoers from scenes just like this and other Very Bad Things.) After establishing the setting as the jungles of French Indo-China (later to become Vietnam), we see a couple of native men holding the legs of a man struggling on the ground, while another older man (Eric Gorman, played by Lionel Atwill), is positioned at the victim's head, furiously working his arms up and down. A native and some conveniently placed vegetation in the foreground screens most of what is going on, but it doesn't look good.

As he finishes up and observes his work, Gorman blithely observes, "he'll never lie to a friend again… or kiss another man's wife!" After Gorman and his henchmen leave, the man, his hands bound, struggles up, and we see to our horror that Gorman has been practicing his cross-stitching-- on the poor man's mouth! Back at camp, when Gorman's wife Evelyn (Kathleen Burke) wonders where Bob Taylor is, Gorman tells her that he ventured out on his own. "Well what did he say?" she asks. "He didn't say anything," Gorman responds, barely suppressing the faintest of evil smiles.

Millionaire sportsman Eric Gorman (Lionel Atwill) looks very much
in his element surrounded by wild animals of every description.

On board the ship bound for home, we learn that Eric Gorman is a millionaire "sportsman" who has collected a menagerie of wild animals for the Municipal Zoo. He may be good at capturing animals, but he's not so good at capturing young women's hearts -- Evelyn seems to gravitate to just about anything wearing pants except her creepy husband (and who can blame her?). First she gets poor Bob killed, then, on the ship, she meets secretly with debonair young Roger Hewitt (John Lodge), who's also wealthy, but better yet, not psychotically jealous. Hewitt tries to convince Evelyn to leave the madman, but she is justly afraid… very afraid.

When the ship arrives in port, the zoo's new press agent Peter Yates (Charles "Charlie" Ruggles) is dispatched to meet Gorman and the zoo's latest acquisitions. Peter apparently has a problem with the bottle, and has gotten himself fired from every newsroom in town-- the zoo press agent gig is his last chance. He also is afraid of his own shadow. So naturally much of the film -- way too much -- is devoted to Yates' not-so-hilarious encounters with a varied assortment of wild things. (We also have to forgive the filmmakers and moviegoers of the era for thinking that alcoholism was something of a hoot.)

Along the way we also meet the zoo's resident toxicologist, Dr. Jack Woodford (Randolph Scott) and his assistant (and naturally his fiancee), Jerry Evans (Gail Patrick). Gorman introduces Woodford to one of his acquisitions from India, a new, deadly species of green Mamba snake, telling him that it's responsible for hundreds of deaths a year. Woodford good-naturedly takes on the assignment of finding an antidote for the venom (which will save his life later).

Randolph Scott looks a bit out of his element surrounded
by lab equipment. Where's the cowboy hat?

After inspecting Gorman's menagerie, the zoo curator Dr. Evans (Harry Beresford) expresses his concern that due to recent budget cuts, the zoo doesn't have the resources to take them all. Bumbling but good-hearted Yates proposes that they hold a fund-raising dinner for generous society types-- to be held right in the zoo among all the lions and tigers and bears. After a brief pause, the curator and Gorman pronounce it a splendid idea-- Gorman in particular is very keen on it, so we know he's up to no good.

Gorman makes a special trip to Hewitt's penthouse apartment to persuade the young millionaire to come to the fundraiser and help out the zoo. While he's talking with Hewitt, he sees lipstick on a glass on the coffee table, confirming his suspicions that his wife is seeing the young man. Hewitt will pay for his indiscretions--- bwwwaaahahahahahahahha!!!

And pay he does. At the gala affair, held appropriately enough in the carnivore house, the cream of the city's financial elite gathers to partake of a sumptuous banquet amidst the caged big cats and other assorted beasts. Yates rises to make his clumsy opening remarks, trying desperately to get the bored newspapermen in attendance to take photos. In the middle of his speech, Hewitt yells, then drops to the floor, shaking uncontrollably. It looks like he's been bitten, but by what? The staff quickly discover that the green mamba is not in its box, and all hell breaks loose as the society guests scramble for the exits.

Evelyn (Kathleen Burke) is bummed by the death of her
lover. (Actor John Lodge would ultimately recover and
become a congressman and governor of Connecticut.)

For Evelyn Gorman, her lover's death by escaped mamba is just a bit too convenient. Alone with Gorman, she accuses him outright of killing Hewitt. "Evelyn!" he protests, "you don't think I sat there all evening with an eight foot mamba in my pocket, do you?" (Freud help us! As we see later, it wasn't the mamba, but rather a mechanical, pocket-sized snake's head devised to inject venom through needle fangs.)

While Dr. Woodford, who wasn't born yesterday, is pondering why the spread of the puncture wounds in Hewitt's leg don't match the fang spread of the real mamba, Evelyn decides she can't wait any longer-- in the dead of night she hurries to Woodford's lab on the zoo grounds to tell him her suspicions. Gorman follows and intercepts her on the quaint wooden bridge that spans -- of all things -- the zoo's alligator pit (where is OSHA when you need 'em?). His efforts to placate her are to no avail. It looks like the alligators might just get an unexpected midnight snack… Before it's all over, Woodford gets to test his new mamba venom antidote on himself, and a desperate Gorman really gets in touch with his wild side by releasing all his animal friends from their cages.

In my last post on Dead Men Walk (1943), I related how that film, with its leisurely pace and action taking place off screen, seemed to be about 10 years behind its time. Murders in the Zoo seems vastly ahead of its time, and perhaps from a different universe altogether. For the gore hounds, it's got that unforgettable opening shock scene. It dispenses with the traditional whodunnit mystery, choosing instead to let us know right upfront how psychotic Gorman really is. Instead of wondering whodunnit, we wonder who he's going to do next and how. It unsentimentally takes the most beautiful and sympathetic character (Kathleen Burke, who the year before had been the Panther Woman on Island of Lost Souls) and literally feeds her to the alligators. And it features some of the more uncomfortable "strange" lust scenes between a husband and wife you're likely to see.

Kathleen Burke seems to be pondering how she got stuck
in the second depressing horror film in as many years.

Murders in the Zoo does make some concessions to its decade. The most egregious is the presence of character actor Charles Ruggles in an unfortunate comic relief (or should I say grief?) role. Charlie must be in about 2/3 of the movie's 62 minute runtime, bumbling around, stammering and getting spooked by the zoo's inhabitants at every turn. Like Jerry Lewis, a little of Charlie goes a long way. A scene or two of his shtick might have been acceptable, but he's so ubiquitous in this thing, he's given top billing! Charlie would go on to bigger and more popular films like Ruggles of Red Gap (1935, with Charles Laughton) and Bringing Up Baby (1938 with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant), but in Murders he kills the menacing mood and suspense at every turn.

Ruggles does have at least one good moment. After the disastrous banquet, he's enlisted by the curator to help clean out the animal cages. As he's moving some straw around, he looks down and realizes the escaped deadly green mamba is trapped under his pitchfork. Paralyzed with fear, he yells for help. After the mamba is recaptured, he still seems unable to move.

Jerry Evans: Peter, Peter, listen to me! Say something to me!
Yates: Is there a good laundry in this town?

Hey, who let the Tibetan Mastiffs out?
Wait, those are lions! Run!!!

But of course, the real morbid attraction of Murders in the Zoo is the slimy, psycho presence of Lionel Atwill. He cavalierly dispatches perceived rivals for Evelyn's affections, while reserving his most passionate intensity for clumsy attempts to woo back the woman who's come to loathe him. In an early scene with Ruggles in the hold of the ship, surrounded by caged beasts, he sums up his philosophy of the jungle:

Gorman: Mr. Yates, never be afraid of a wild animal. If you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone-- that's more than you can say of most humans.
Yates: You don't mean to say you really like these beasts?
Gorman: I love them. Their honesty, their simplicity, their primitive emotions… they love, they hate, they kill.

Eric Gorman is faithful to his philosophy through the entire film -- he loves, he hates, he kills. In his book Hollywood's Maddest Doctors: A Biography of Lionel Atwill, Colin Clive and George Zucco (Luminary Press, 1998), Gregory William Mank suggests that the real Atwill was not all that different from the villains he portrayed (or at least that's what he wanted his public to think). Mank quotes liberally from an interview Atwill gave to Motion Picture magazine around the time of Murders in the Zoo. Atwill sounds like he's channeling Eric Gorman as he tells the reporter about his home life:

"My wife tells me that I am cruel -- that I have a streak of cruelty. And what do I do when I am cruel? Nothing. NOTHING! To do nothing is the most blood-curdling, most demoniacal form of cruelty there is. Because it is mental cruelty… And so, I do nothing when I am being cruel. I am cold. I am silent."

Is he acting, or is this the real Lionel Atwill?
Who cares? Enjoy the show!

Later in the early '40s, Atwill's eccentricities would get him in hot water. An orgy held at his home resulted in sensational rape charges. Mank details how Atwill bribed friends into lying to the grand jury. He plead guilty to perjury charges, but a loophole in the law allowed him to withdraw his plea and he was ultimately exonerated by a lenient judge. However, by the beginning of 1943 the disgraced actor was finding it hard to get work except in ultra-low budget Poverty Row studio films. He died on April 22, 1946, at the age of 61.

Whatever you think of his personal life, Atwill -- one of the best B movie villains ever -- gives one of his most masterful performances in an unusual horror-thriller that managed to test boundaries right before Will Hays and his gang stepped in and killed all the fun. Fortunately, a very nice print is available from TCM's Universal Cult Horror Collection.

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Where to find it:

TCM Shop


"He'll never lie to a friend again… or kiss another man's wife!" WARNING: Contains graphic depiction of cross-stitching!

"Mommie Dearest, please put down that axe!"

Now Playing: Strait-Jacket (1964)

Pros: Joan Crawford breathes wonderful, flamboyant life into the character of Lucy Harbin; Diane Baker is the perfect foil to Joan's histrionics.
Cons: Derivative of earlier films, even screenwriter Robert Bloch's own previous work.

Note:This is my contribution to the William Castle Blogathon, hosted by Joey at The Last Drive-in and Goregirl at her Dungeon. They've lined up an all-star cast of movie bloggers to storm the Castle for your entertainment and edification. Don't miss a single post!!

We're a fickle and petty lot, we commoners. When a new royal is born, we hang on every word of the talking, babbling heads of the 24 hour news outlets, and gorge on every image we can lay our bug eyes on:

• "Wow, doesn't she look absolutely fabulous even with that baby bump thing going!" 
• "She is just so brilliant for delivering a boy on the first go round!" 
• "Now remind me, where is this kid in the royal line of succession?"

And when these poor, overprivileged, overexposed creatures reveal themselves to be human just like the rest of us, we consume every sordid detail of every scandal large and small, and can't get enough of the humiliation and degradation.

• "Can you believe he went clubbing with that Russian ex-porn actress the other night?" 
• "Who in the world let him show up in that Charlie Chan costume for the Chinese ambassador's reception? Where are his handlers?" 
• "Did you see those beach photos of him with those rolls of fat? Why would show yourself in public if you were gonna let yourself go like that?"

But I suppose this is the price you pay for being the wealthiest, most glamorous public welfare recipients in the world. With apologies to all my readers in the UK, here in the good ol' U.S. of A. we have a much better system for anointing our royalty. At least until recently, qualifying for American nobility meant more than just being born into a certain family. You actually had to accomplish things, like building large profitable businesses, or playing a sport with consummate skill, or developing a screen persona that sold tickets by the millions. Better still, American nobles were crowned by the good, common people with their hard-earned money.

There was arguably no greater queen reigning over the country's Golden Age of movies than Joan Crawford -- and she "reigned" not once, but twice. In a prototypical rags to riches story, Lucille LeSeur, who had once worked with her mother in a laundry, parlayed her song and dance talents into a contract with MGM in the mid-'20s. (Joan Crawford, a name she disliked her entire career, was given to her early through a contest in Photoplay magazine.) Dissatisfied with the early roles the studio gave her, she tirelessly lobbied for bigger and better ones, to the point where, in 1932, she starred with such screen immortals as Greta Garbo and John Barrymore in MGM's lush, all-star picture Grand Hotel (1932).

The same year she was cited by the Motion Picture Herald as one of Hollywood's Top Ten Moneymaking Stars, and in 1937 Life magazine crowned her the "Queen of the Movies." But her first go round on the throne was to be short-lived. Even as Life was celebrating her screen royalty, her not-so-loyal subjects, the movie going public, were staying away from her pictures in droves. 1937's The Bride Wore Red was a huge flop for MGM, and she fell precipitously out of the money makers' top ten list, making instead the Independent Film Journal's list of actors and actresses labeled "box office poison."

Joan Crawford, circa 1934. "Bow before
the Queen you peasants!"
(Courtesy of Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans)

Although she made something of a comeback in pictures like The Women (1939) and Strange Cargo (1940; with Clark Gable), her fate with MGM was sealed, and she left the studio in 1943 to sign with Warner Brothers. The move turned out to be the start of her new reign as Hollywood royalty. Against all odds, she secured the lead role in Mildred Pierce (1945) -- Bette Davis was the studio's first choice, but turned it down, and director Michael Curtiz wanted just about anybody but Joan. After collecting the Oscar for best actress, she appeared in a string of hits opposite some of the very best leading men of the era, including John Garfield in Humoresque (1946), Van Heflin in Possessed (1947), and Dana Andrews and Henry Fonda in Daisy Kenyon (1947).

Nothing lasts forever, and by the time she turned 50 in the '50s, the former screen queen had long been deposed, and was serving with the commoners in the antechambers of B movie melodramas. Of course, A-types like Joan don't just stop working, and like many aging actors and actresses of the time, her determination to keep making movies led her down some strange and interesting genre paths.

Years before the "Summer of Love," the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention, and Woodstock, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) ushered in America's most subversive decade. The brutality with which Hitch quickly dispatched starlet Janet Leigh in that film prefigured the passionate overturning of tradition and convention that would come to characterize the decade. The common folk had taken up their pitchforks, determined to storm the Hollywood palace and skewer any last vestige of the old glamor.

The skewering of the old icons was truly a sight to behold (and a lot of fun if you were in the right frame of mind). A few years after Psycho, director Robert Aldrich managed to get bitter real-life rivals Joan and Bette Davis into the same eccentric, neo-Gothic production, and somehow lived to tell the tale. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1964) was a very dark epitaph for the old Hollywood system, turning the two former glamor queens into repulsive hags who just happened to be … you guessed it … faded actresses. Its success at the box office spawned a wave of neo-Gothics featuring aging glamor queens in unflattering and sometimes grotesque roles: Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964, with Bette Davis and Olivia DeHavilland), The Night Walker (1964, with Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor), What's the Matter with Helen? (1971, with Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters), and many more.

Joan herself made more then her share of these things. She almost teamed up again with nemesis Bette in Hush…Hush, but when she took ill (some say after being unmercifully harassed by Davis), she was unceremoniously dumped from the production in favor of Olivia DeHavilland. No matter, she managed to appear in several more memorable (and not-so-memorable) horror-thrillers through the end of the decade, unfortunately culminating with the execrable Trog (1970), her last feature film role.

Joan suddenly realizes that her career has taken a turn
for the worse, and she's now starring in B horror movies.

Of these, Strait-Jacket is by far the best and most fun. Written by Psycho author Robert Bloch and produced and directed by the circus ringmaster of B horror movies, William Castle, Strait-Jacket features a dual role of sorts for Joan. In the movie's prologue, we're introduced to lusty, working class gal Lucy Harbin in a flashback sequence narrated by her daughter Carol (Diane Baker). Lucy makes her grand entrance to the sound of a train whistle and a bleating saxophone: "Lucy Harbin, born and raised on a farm, parents poor, education meager, very much a woman, and very much aware of the fact."

This Lucy, wearing too much makeup, a hideous print dress, cheap, jangling bracelets, and high-heeled shoes, confidently struts her stuff -- until she catches her no-good second husband (Lee Majors in an early uncredited role), seven years her junior, in bed with a former girlfriend. With young Carol watching, she cuts off this liaison for good with several well-aimed axe strokes. Cut to Lucy twenty years later (okay, okay, enough with the cheap puns!), after she's been released from the asylum to the care of her farmer brother and sister-in-law. She's now haggard, grey-haired, meek, and depressed, wearing a dress that looks like it was made out of an old sack. Both Lucys are a far cry from the sleek, chic glamor roles of Crawford's heyday. Moviegoers of the '60s, especially the drive-in crowd, did their best imitation of French revolutionary peasants, spurning the high class glamor crap and screaming "off with their heads!"

Jolly, cigar-chomping William Castle was always happy to feed the riffraff their red meat in the form of B movie horrors. He combined an innate instinct for mass taste with P.T. Barnum-like promotions, starting with an insurance policy against death by fright for his first breakout hit Macabre (1958), and following up with such gimmicks as floating skeletons and theater seat buzzers that were employed during the high points of his 1959 films House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler.

By 1964 and Strait-Jacket, Castle had dispensed with the gimmicks, and was content to follow the successful Baby Jane formula of featuring former A-list leading actors and actresses in B thrillers. The formula was indeed successful, enough so that for his next project, Castle secured not one but two fading A-listers, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor (see my earlier post on The Night Walker). In spite of the difficulties in working with the imperious Joan (more on that later), Castle, under pressure to have a big name in the credits, enlisted her yet again for I Saw What You Did (1965) with John Ireland. Although the role was a small one and she's killed off pretty quickly (a bit of director's revenge?), she reportedly got as much for it, $50K, as she did for the far meatier role in Strait-Jacket. [John W. Law, Scare Tactic: The Life and Films of William Castle, Writers Club Press, 2000.]

Estranged mother and daughter bond over a cool, refreshing bottle of Pepsi.
(Joan was on the board of PepsiCo at the time, thus the product placement.)

Strait-Jacket, while not innovative or particularly surprising, sets itself apart from the run-of-the-mill B thriller by exploiting the deep-seated fears we all (or at least most of us) have about our place in society. It's a horror story about social class as much as it is about mental illness. Both incarnations of Lucy -- the brash, lusty broad from the wrong side of the tracks, and the quietly grim ex-mental patient -- are awkward and stick out like a sore thumb in polite society. By contrast, her daughter Carol, in spite of having witnessed her mother's gruesome killings 20 years earlier, is seemingly happy and well-adjusted, not to mention gorgeous.

Carol lives contentedly on a small farm with her aunt and uncle (Emily and Bill Cutler, played by Rochelle Hudson and Leif Erickson), has converted one of the farm sheds into a sculpture studio, and is on the verge of getting engaged to the handsome son of one of the richest men in the county (Michael Fields, played by John Anthony Hayes). At the point where it seems life couldn't get any better for Carol, Mommie Dearest shows up, fresh from the sanitarium and wearing a sack-cloth dress and a frown.

At first, Carol reacts coldly to this veritable stranger, but then, taking pity on her haggard mom, decides to turn the frown upside down. She takes Lucy into town to go shopping and get a makeover. The result is almost an exact copy of the old five and dime sultry dame, right down to the noisy, jangling costume jewelry and the dreadful print dress. But Lucy's newfound joy and vigor don't last for long. She has nightmares, waking up next to the headless bodies of her victims from 20 years ago. She imagines that children playing in the street are chanting the Lizzie Bordon nursery rhyme, updated specifically for her. The doctor from the asylum who pays a surprise visit to check up on her suddenly, mysteriously turns up missing. She completely blows her first meeting with Carol's prospective fiance, drinking too much, playing music too loud, and coming on to the young man in spite of herself. And most terrifyingly, she learns that she will be meeting Michael's rich, snooty parents at their house for cocktails and dinner.

Somehow, Castle got permission from the bigwigs at distributor Columbia Pictures
to cut their icon's head off at the end of the film.

Yep, we've all been there, playing the role of the awkward outsider at a gathering of chic, self-confident people who are much, much better than we are. Short of having your head lopped off with an axe, few things are more uncomfortable. And though there are a number of bloody murders throughout the film, none are as cringe-inducing as the scene in which a flat-out drunk Lucy slobbers over Carol's weirded-out fiance. Thankfully, Joan goes right up to the edge of overplaying the part but never quite oversteps, and Lucy keeps our sympathy throughout the film. (Diane Baker also plays her role to near perfection. Underneath the pretty, smiling, forgiving daughter act lurks something not so pretty or forgiving. At first, the bright white headband that she wears throughout much of the film seems like a symbolic halo. By the end of the film, we're thinking it's a device for keeping her head from exploding…)

Apparently the former glamor queen had the normally ebullient Bill Castle cringing (and perhaps bowing and scraping) throughout the production. IMDb's trivia section for the film is filled with her demands and conditions:

• She had script and cast approval. 
• She had a fellow Pepsi board member and vice-president of the company, Mitchell Cox, play the asylum doctor. 
• She had a carton of Pepsi displayed prominently in an early kitchen scene (an early product placement!). 
• She had the actress originally slated to play daughter Carol fired. Diane Baker stepped in front of the cameras only a day after she accepted the role.

And according to John Law, she forced Castle to adopt the A-list way of making movies:

"'Joan asked me when you plan to start rehearsals," asked [Associate Producer] Holloway to Castle. 'Rehearsals?' hollered Castle. 'Who said anything about rehearsals? I just want to start shooting…. No goddamn rehearsals. I never have rehearsals before I shoot!' But this time he would. On an empty stage with only folding chairs, the cast began rehearsals for the film." [Ibid.]

Joan admires her beautiful, glamorous former self in
the tacked-on ending of Strait-Jacket.

More momentous still, she had the ending of the film changed. The film was originally supposed to end with a very effective close-up of Carol/Diane Baker. Her Highness had a scene tacked on in which Lucy desultorily sums up the nefarious goings-on in a discussion with her brother. In a Joan Crawford picture, no younger, prettier actress was going to steal the final scene! (Interestingly in this scene, Joan's character, once more dressed primly and clearly showing her age, poses with a glamorous bust of herself. For the storyline, the sculpture was fashioned by Carol, but in real life, it was done by Yugoslav artist Yucca Salamunich, and presented to Joan on the set of A Woman's Face, 1941. For a moment, Crawford seems to be lost in reverie, dreaming of the days when she ruled the silver screen.)

The axe murders in Strait-Jacket are almost incidental. The real fun is in watching Joan and Diane Baker go toe-to-toe, Mommie Dearest-style. I suspect Producer/Director/Showman Bill Castle scarcely knew what he was getting into when he signed Joan, but the results are a very worthy addition to his cinematic B ring circus.

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Where to find it:

Amazon Instant Video

Amazon (The William Castle Collection)


"So shocking, it slashes through the limits of suspense!"