Dead Guys & Dolls: The Dead Don't Die

Now Playing: The Dead Don't Die (TV Movie; 1975)

Pros: Creates an atmosphere of darkness and dread in various spots; Some well-executed, spooky sequences.
Cons: The film's protagonist is miscast, and some veteran actors are wasted in small roles; awkward use of clunky expository dialog.

Okay, so I'm a sucker for the made-for-TV horror and sci-fi movies of the 70s. Life was good back then -- my parents broke down and got a color TV, so I could enjoy my favorite late night horror hosts, The Ghoul and Hoolihan and Big Chuck, in living color as they broadcast from the great metropolis of Cleveland.

When I wasn't looking forward to the hosted horror shows, the networks were tantalizing me with their movie of the week offerings that so often included horror, mystery-thrillers and sci-fi. The network execs had finally figured out that broadcasting movies in prime time could be lucrative, and by the early '70s, their own made-for-TV features were capturing eyeballs and in some cases generating eye-popping ratings. For example, as the vampire Janos Skorzeny was draining the blood of Las Vegans in the original airing of The Night Stalker in 1972, he was also racking up a 33.2 rating and 54 share -- monstrously large ratings almost unheard of for scripted TV at the time. Fortunately, the Night Stalker's success guaranteed that there would be many more TV fright features to come.

When I started this blog with the mission to revisit the nearly forgotten B horror and sci-fi flicks of my misspent youth, made-for-TV fright fare was in the mix, but my go-to titles were the generally low hanging fruit of things already in my DVD collection or readily available in cheap public domain collections. Over the years, the list of TV movies available on demand has grown exponentially, especially on YouTube (and with an honorable mention nod to Tubi). It's almost to the point that if you can remember it, you can watch it -- just don't expect a pristine copy in all cases. As a result, I've been wandering the made-for-TV corridors more and more: sample some of the posts here.

FYI, the subject of today's post is not one of those movies I recall fondly from my days in front of the Magnavox console TV. Somehow, The Dead Don't Die flew over my head, under my radar, and around whatever TV guide I was using, because I was completely unaware of the existence of this movie until recently. To further obscure matters, it shares a title with with the very peculiar Jim Jarmusch zombie film starring Bill Murray and Adam Driver (itself rapidly receding from collective memory, as it did not connect with audiences).

I think I was looking up the Jarmusch film when I stumbled, zombie-like, across a reference to the 1975 film and became intrigued. The cast was certainly interesting, with veterans Ray Milland, Ralph Meeker and Joan Blondell, eye candy in the persons of Linda Cristal and George Hamilton, and the always creepy character actor Reggie Nalder mixing things up in a horror tale set in 1930s Chicago.

"What's not to like?" I thought to myself (readers of this blog will probably understand, if not necessarily members of the population at large). Well, to trot out a time-worn cliche, the result is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Some of the parts are reasonably effective and atmospheric, but we'll get to that in short order.

George "Crispy Colonel" Hamilton plays Don Drake, a sailor who has taken leave to visit his brother, who unfortunately is on death row for the murder of his wife. Before being executed in Old Sparky, the brother (Jerry Douglas) swears his innocence and gets Don to promise that he will find the real murderer and clear his name.

Don is no private investigator, but reasonably, he starts his quest at the scene of the crime -- the Loveland Ballroom, where brother Ralph and his wife had been participating in a dance marathon, and where he had been found passed out in a back room next to his wife's body.

The ballroom owner Jim Moss (Ray Milland) is cooperative and sympathetic, even giving Don the money that his brother had earned in the competition. Something seems off however, when one of the near walking dead marathon contestants drops in a heap on the floor, and Moss roughly tells his attendants to get her out of there before genially resuming his conversation with Don. (For the uninitiated, dance marathons that lasted for days on end were an exploitative fad in the grim days of the the Great Depression, with desperate contestants willing to literally run themselves into the ground for the slim hope of winning prize money. They figure prominently in the celebrated novel and film adaptation of They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. The backdrop of the marathon in The Dead Don't Die helps set up its dark atmosphere and prefigures later developments.)

Don Drake (George Hamilton) has a conversation with ballroom owner Jim Moss (Ray Milland) as dance marathon contestants shuffle around like zombies in the background.

Moss sends Don on his way by suggesting he track down Frankie, the trainer who found Ralph with his wife's body -- although Frankie has mysteriously disappeared. At Ralph's gravesite, Don is shadowed by a mysterious and beautiful woman dressed in black. As Don is dining at his hotel, the mystery woman, Vera LaVelle (Linda Cristal), approaches Don and begs him to leave Chicago immediately for his own good. As they're conversing, Don glances out the window and sees what he thinks is his brother Ralph standing in the street.

Linda Cristal as Vera LaVelle looks absolutely funereal. 

Don rushes outside, following Ralph to a shop door, where he disappears. Don barges into the place, an antiques shop, where he is confronted by an old woman, Levenia (Joan Blondell) and the creepy-looking shop owner Perdido (Reggie Nalder). They insist no one came into the shop. Convinced they're hiding something, Don struggles with Perdido, who hits his head hard as the pair fall to the floor. Levenia insists Don has killed Perdido, and while he's looking for signs of life, the woman brains him with a lamp.

Don regains consciousness at Vera's place. The next morning, Don discovers Vera hurriedly packing to leave. She pulls a gun on him, which he grabs. Vera tells the disbelieving sailor that he is in grave danger from Varek, a voodoo zombie master who is enslaving the dead for his own evil purposes.

When Don insists upon meeting Varek, the pair take a cab to a funeral home (an appropriate enough place for a zombie-maker to hang out). The attending undertaker has never heard the name Varek, but directs Don to a room where Perdido's body is on display. As Don approaches the body in the casket, a hideous, rasping voice that seems to be coming from the body identifies itself as Varek, whereupon  the corpse reaches out and grabs Don by the throat.

Tearing himself away, Don is aghast as the dead (?) Perdido climbs out of the coffin and shambles toward him. The panicked man fires several shots into Perdido, to no avail, and then flees the room. 

Perdido (Reggie Nalder) decides to get up and greet the mourners at his own funeral.

Don breathlessly reports the strange events to Lt. Reardon (Ralph Meeker) at the local police station, who wearily decides he has to check it out. At the antiques shop Don is shocked to see that Perdido is very much alive and kicking. Reardon figures he's got a nutcase on his hands.

WARNING: Before you scroll zombie-like to the next paragraph be aware that there are spoilers ahead.

Before all is said and done and the last zombie has stopped shambling, our intrepid protagonist

• has another encounter with Vera, who tells him that she is one of Varek's zombies sent to kill him, but she has broken the Master's spell by falling in love;
• travels with Moss to the cemetery where Ralph is buried to dig up his body;
• is saved from another zombie attack by Frankie the trainer, who reveals that it is he who actually killed Ralph's wife while under Varek's spell;
• finally confronts the Zombie Master in an abandoned warehouse (that also doubles as a zombie cold storage unit), and learns of his plan to use a zombie army to take control of the city and eventually the world.

Ray Milland makes a wardrobe and attitude adjustment for the final act of the film.

If this sounds to you like an overheated Poverty Row B programmer on the order of something like King of the Zombies (1941), with a mad zombie-maker hell bent on world domination, you're not far off. The Dead Don't Die also indulges in a few film noir cliches, including a protagonist on a mission to clear a loved one's name, and a femme fatale who can't decide whether to kill him or kiss him. The plethora of scenes that take place in the dead of night further enhances the noirish atmosphere. 

The 1930s setting is somewhat curious -- the plot could just have easily fit into a contemporary setting. One wonders if the producers had ready access to period sets and costumes and chose the time period to set it off from the other TV movies that were being churned out. On the other hand, the Depression-era dance marathon, with its weary, desperate contestants shuffling like zombies around the dance floor, nicely foreshadows events to come.

Don's unjustly executed brother Ralph (Jerry Douglas) is somewhat miffed at being used as an unwitting pawn.

Unfortunately, fighting against the film's dark atmosphere is the casting of George Hamilton, whose fabulous California tan sticks out like a bronzed sore thumb in a night world populated with pallid zombies. Hamilton could be effective with the right material -- see my post on The Power (1967 -- but in this he wears a constant pained expression as he stumbles around, dazed and confused (at least his pencil mustache fits with the time period).

Playing coy with the villain role is veteran Ray Milland, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945), and in The Dead Don't Die portrays a madman drunk on power. Milland was one of those actors who didn't know how to quit working, and consequently over the years appeared in many beloved B horror and sci-fi movies, including X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963; see my post here) and The Thing with Two Heads (1972), among many others. 

The director, Curtis Harrington, recalled how he offered on the set to burnish Milland's image, but the old pro would have none of it:

"Ray Milland was well past his Academy Award-winning days, but I felt very privileged to work with such a distinguished actor. He was still very handsome and would have looked even more so if he had allowed us to put a toupee on him. But his attitude was the he should be accepted as he was, so he played the part entirely bald. He was open to accepting whatever parts came his way at this point in his career. He told me that he had been talking to his friend James Stewart, who expressed envy at the fact that Ray was working and he was not. James Stewart was still the bigger star, and I doubt anyone would have had the temerity to offer him a part in an ordinary television show." [Curtis Harrington, Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood: The Adventures of an Aesthete in the Movie Business, Drag City Incorporated, 2013, p. 172.]

Don Drake finally gets it: the dead really don't die.

Harrington also employed two other veterans, Joan Blondell and Ralph Meeker, presumably for their name value, but both are wasted in bit parts. Joan is just an appendage to Reggie Nalder's character Perdido, but at least as an actress whose heyday was in the '30s, she fits into the period ambience.

Meeker, who was so intense as PI Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), is reduced 20 years later to playing a stereotypical Irish cop whose function is to give the protagonist the stinkeye when he insists that there are dead guys walking around. 

Whatever chills The Dead Don't Die manages to conjure up is entirely due to boogeyman Reggie Nalder's presence. The Austrian-born actor suffered facial burns as a young man, which contributed to a distinctive, gaunt look that made him a natural for certain parts, especially menacing ones. Nalder appeared in a small but key role in Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and is perhaps best known for his work in the infamous exploitation film Mark of the Devil (1970), as well as for the Nosferatu-like vampire in the mini-series Salem's Lot (1979).

My heart would leap for joy when I saw ads like this.

For better or worse, Nalder didn't need much makeup to look like a walking corpse. The scene in which Varek's rasping voice seems to be coming from Perdido's dead body lying in the coffin, its mouth stretched back in a deathly rictus, induces real goosebumps. Knowing a good thing when they saw it, the producers recycled Perdido footage in a later nightmare sequence, which ends with a hackneyed shot of a hand breaking through the cemetery dirt to clutch Don's ankle.

Less effective in her part is leading zombie lady Linda Cristal. She starts out mysterious and enigmatic, but the Argentinian actress struggles with her thick accent in relating her incredible and complicated backstory to the disbelieving protagonist. Her character's final exit should have been one of the film's highlights, but crude practical effects and editing veer it into unintentional comedy. Let's just say that the scene brings new meaning to the phrase, "smoldering looks."

Suspense and horror master Robert "Psycho" Bloch wrote the teleplay from his short story. With its clueless, meandering protagonist and clunky expository dialog that slows down the proceedings, the film is not a highlight in the esteemed author's resume. Bloch would go on to contribute better material to such classic TV anthology shows as Boris Karloff's Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Hammer's Journey to the Unknown, Night Gallery, and Tales from the Darkside, among others. Bloch himself quipped, "Two years later we [Curtis Harrington] teamed up again for another TV movie, The Dead Don't Die. Maybe they don't but the show did." [RobertBloch.net]

The film may not have been a hit at the time, but over the years it has refused to die, clawing itself out of the grave of forgotten TV movies and into places like YouTube with the help of appreciative fans. If only for corpse-like Reggie Nalder menacing some familiar veteran actors, you should check it out.

Staying After Hours jn The Twilight Zone

It's March once again, time to do some Spring cleaning on the cobwebs of your mind and celebrate, along with blogathon host Terence Towles Canote at A Shroud of Thoughts, all those classic TV episodes that entranced us, entertained us, and even inspired us.

"Inspiring" isn't too strong a word in describing Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone, as it came along at just the right time for Boomer Monster Kids like myself, stimulating their sense of wonder, giving a slew of future star actors some unique, meaty roles, and showing the way for a new generation of fantasy authors and filmmakers.

Also inspiring was the way in which Sterling and his stable of writers could take elements and objects of ordinary middle class life, add a twist or two, and come up with intelligent, albeit sobering and often macabre, commentaries on the human condition.

The beauty of the series was that the lessons were often seamlessly woven into a dark tapestry of imagination that seemed far removed from any kind of forced social messaging. It's the kind of schooling through entertainment we could use more of today.

The Twilight Zone did its thing so well that it still.has a hold on the popular imagination over six decades later. Indicative of its stature is the series' continued use for New Year's Day broadcast marathons, such as the the recent fest on the Heroes and Icons (H&I) channel. Even though episodes are available on demand at other locations, I went old school, pretending it was still the VCR era, and recorded a bunch of them for bingeing. Somehow, just setting up the recordings gave me a warm, nostalgic feeling.

I've written before on this blog about "lost" Twilight Zone episodes -- lost in the sense that I don't remember seeing them as a kid, and only (re)discovered them in the streaming era (see my posts here and here). Now that the New Year's recordings have run out, I've been sampling episodes from TUBI's on demand stash.

Now Playing: "The After Hours," season 1, episode 34 of The Twilight Zone, first aired June 10, 1960. Written by Rod Serling, directed by Douglas Heyes, and starring Anne Francis, Elizabeth Allen and James Millhollin.

One of the episodes that I binged recently, "The After Hours," is something I definitely remember from those halcyon days sitting in front of the black and white console TV. While it doesn't have the surprise gut punch of more celebrated TZ episodes, "After Hours" effectively establishes a dark and creepy atmosphere, only to end on an unexpectedly upbeat note (in a twisted fairy tale sort of way).

Anne Francis plays Marsha White, an attractive but nervous young woman who is hoping to get a gift for her mother at a busy downtown department store. After distractedly perusing items in various display cases, she heads for the elevator, which seems to be running slow, as there is a crowd of shoppers huddling in front of it.

Fortuitously, an adjacent elevator door opens, and an operator in a dapper uniform beckons to Marsha. Marsha informs him she's after something very specific -- a gold thimble -- to which he dryly responds that she wants the "specialties" department on the 9th floor. Except, after the door closes and it cuts to a close-up of the floor indicators above the elevator, we see there is no 9th floor!

The elevator doors open on a dimly lit, seemingly abandoned floor with empty, dusty display cases. Even as Marsha protests that "there's nothing here," the operator silently closes the doors, stranding her on the mysterious 9th floor.

As Marsha nervously looks around, a figure emerges from the shadows in the form of an elegantly dressed woman (Elizabeth Allen), who asks Marsha, "Can I show you something?" Oddly, the only piece of merchandise is the very gold thimble that Marsha was looking for. More suspicious still, the sales woman knows Marsha's name.

Marsha, increasingly nervous, only wants to pay for the gift and get out of there. As she heads for the elevator, the woman calls after her, "Marsha, are you happy?," as if they've known each other for years. When Marsha retorts that it's none of her business, she reacts strangely, throwing up her hands in exasperation, "Alright Miss White, suit yourself, it's none of my business!"

In the elevator, Marsha notices that the thimble she just bought is scratched and dented. The equally exasperated elevator operator drops her off at the Complaints dept. on the 3rd floor, where she proceeds to harass the management with her story of being sold damaged goods by a very odd sales woman on the non-existent 9th floor. Assistant manager Mr. Armbruster (James Millhollin), already a nervous type himself, has his hands full with the dissatisfied customer.

As Armbruster and his boss the store manager try to make sense of Marsha's story, she spies the very woman who sold her the thimble, who is standing across the room, her back turned to her. Just as Marsha calls out, she gets a bad shock when a store employee literally picks up the mysterious sales woman, who turns out to be a very lifelike display mannequin.

Ready to faint, Marsha is deposited on a couch in a store office, while Armbruster complains about the young woman to another employee. As it nears closing time, both the nervous assistant manager and the employee are distracted by duties and forget about Marsha, who wakes up to find herself in an eerily still, shadowy room long after the store has closed.

If the 9th floor seemed odd, her present predicament is positively frightening, as the elevators aren't working and she's effectively locked in. The mannequins situated around the room certainly don't help ease her anxiety, and when she hears them calling out her name, she realizes in a panic that she's not in Kansas anymore, so to speak.

Many of the series' best episodes featured dark fairy tales superimposed on the most prosaic of mid-20th century settings, i.e., "After Hours'" downtown department store. The moment Marsha gets on the elevator, she, and we, know that something is very off, not the least of which is the stiff, laconic elevator jockey.

The deserted 9th floor ups the weirdness factor a notch or two, as does the materialization of the sales woman out of the shadows, as if she's not just an employee, but a part of the very building itself. Her penetrating stare as she "helps" Marsha find her thimble, and her more vulnerable reaction of exasperation as Marsha retreats to the exit, combine to unsettle both the viewer and the story's protagonist.

But it's not just the sales woman who is odd. Marsha's quest for a gold thimble for her mother seems a bit peculiar (although you can never tell what a collector might obsess over). This is a strange object to be looking for in a bustling urban department store, which reinforces the folk tale quality of the story.

Sterling's script wisely interposes the comic relief of assistant manager Armbruster between the weirdness of the 9th floor and the terror of the shadowy Complaints department. Actor James Millhollin, with his doughy, everyman face and nervous ticks, perfectly captures a character who has neither the time, inclination or imagination to solve his problem customer's mystery. Armbruster is emblematic of the ordinariness of busy, everyday life that is in stark contrast to the haunted fantasy world that Marsha experiences when she becomes trapped in the deserted store.

On the other hand, the mannequins in "After Hours" represent a bridge from the prosaic world we all know to Marsha's nightmare world. They are the ultimate uncanny objects -- at a glance they look like real, honest-to-goodness people, but upon closer examination, the differences become more than a little unnerving, especially in the stillness of the night.

Japanese robot expert Midi Mashahiro called the instinctive repulsion toward things that appear almost but not quite human the "uncanny valley." (Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai, University of California Press, 2024, p. 105.) Recently, AI generated "people" have taken over from mannequins and robots in plumbing the depths of the valley, resulting in a good deal of public backlash.

"After Hours" exploits that natural repulsion, effectively raising goosebumps when night falls on the department store and its spooky denizens. But by the conclusion, Serling is winking at us, turning the lights on after figuratively yelling "Boo!" and transforming shudders into a sense of wonder. What if something made to be so very lifelike could actually capture the essence of life, if even for a short time? And what if, like in any society, there were rules for using that gift?

In The Twilight Zone Companion, author Marc Scott Zicree has high praise for the people who helped Serling turn his ordinary department store into a dark fantasy world. Zicree credits director Douglas Heyes with making "use of a wide variety of shots to create tension: long shots of silhouetted figures, closeups of Anne Francis's feet as she walks down darkened aisles, shots through pebbled glass of her face -- and through all of this, the camera is almost always in motion, as though it were itself a character, nervously stalking."

As for Anne Francis, at the time of this episode, her iconic appearance in Forbidden Planet (1956) was behind her, and her starring role in in the trailblazing TV show Honey West was several years in the future. Zicree sings her praises: "No amount of visual flair could make this episode work without a strong central presence, and this is where the contribution of Anne Francis comes in. ... There's an energy about her and a freshness, an individuality."

He also quotes Francis herself as saying, "I still have people who walk up to me and say 'The favorite show that I ever saw was that ["After Hours"].' It did make a mark, it did make an impression." (Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 3rd Edition, Silman-James Press, 2018, pp. 117-118.)

Credit too goes to actress Elizabeth Allen for making a big impression in a small part as the enigmatic sales woman on the 9th floor. Her strange familiarity helps build the atmosphere of unease and mystery. (See also my post about Allen's contribution to the creepy Thriller episode "The Grim Reaper.")

All this talent coalesced into the making of a unique modern fairy tale of an unseen world within a world, one of the better episodes of the series.

Sleuthing with the B Movie Stars: Ginger Rogers in The Thirteenth Guest

Now Playing: The Thirteenth Guest (1932)

Pros: Good, energetic cast seems to be having fun with the material; The mad killer has a highly unusual modus operandi.
Cons: Plot is bewilderingly complex and ultimately doesn't make much sense

This post is part of the second annual "Favorite Stars in B Movies" blogathon hosted by Yours Truly. You won't want to miss all the other great posts about the stars who lit up the Bs, right here on this site!

"Sure he [Fred Astaire] was great, but don't forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, ...backwards and in high heels." - Bob Thaves, Frank and Ernest (cartoon, 1982)

Ginger Rogers, the epitome of grace and beauty in some of Hollywood’s greatest, most beloved musicals, was apparently born to dance: "My mother told me I was dancing before I was born. She could feel my toes tapping wildly inside her for months." [Ginger Rogers, Ginger Rogers: My Story, 1991)

But in the Hollywood of the 1930s, desire and natural ability were not nearly enough -- to become a larger-than-life dancer on the big screen, you had to have the grit and determination of a Visigoth, and Rogers had that in spades.

Even though Rogers won a best actress Oscar for her dramatic portrayal of Kitty Foyle (1940), for better or worse (for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, for as long as there are fans who remember…) she will always be best known for tripping the light fantastic with Fred Astaire in ten films.

Interestingly, it was Ginger Rogers -- barely into her 20s and 12 years younger than her new dance partner -- who was the grizzled movie veteran when she and Astaire first paired up in Flying Down to Rio (1933). Rogers had over two dozen movies on her resume at the time, while Astaire was just getting started, having appeared in only one other.

Leading up to that breakout appearance, Rogers might have thought she was moving backwards in high heels as far as her movie career was concerned. For every small part in an A picture like 42nd Street or Gold Diggers of 1933, there was seemingly an endless supply of roles (albeit some leading ones) in uninspired Bs like The Sap from Syracuse or Carnival Boat.

The Thirteenth Guest came a little over mid-way through Roger’s marathon run through the Bs in the early part of her career. But unlike The Sap from Syracuse and its ilk, The Thirteenth Guest has stayed around, kicked up its feet and made itself at home -- as in home video releases.

At first glance, it may not be exactly clear why The Thirteenth Guest made it all the way to home video while most of Rogers’ other Bs fell by the wayside. Produced at Monogram Pictures, one of the  “Poverty Row” studios of Hollywood’s Golden Age that specialized in churning out Bs, The Thirteenth Guest was based on a 1929 novel by noted crime author Armitage Trail (aka, Maurice R. Coons, best known for his novel Scarface, later turned into the hit 1932 movie with Paul Muni).

The Thirteenth Guest is highly reminiscent of 1927’s popular mystery-thriller The Cat and the Canary, which itself was based on a successful play from the early ‘20s. (The Cat and the Canary is supposed to have influenced James Whale’s brilliant dark comedy The Old Dark House, and both in turn influenced a whole generation of “old dark house” films.)

Guest and Cat rely on a familiar set-up: after the death of a wealthy patriarch, the potential heirs gather like vultures at the creepy old ancestral mansion to find out who is to inherit the fortune. When the guests start getting bumped off one-by-one, fear, loathing and suspicion erupt among the survivors.

The Cat and the Canary set the stage for the madness of The Thirteenth Guest.

Whereas The Cat and The Canary injected yet another soon-to-be cliche into the mix -- a homicidal maniac on the loose -- The Thirteenth Guest went with a more subtle (?) form of madness.

Guest tries to distinguish itself with about as complicated a plot as you could possibly cram into a 70 minute B picture. Thirteen years ago the patriarch of the Morgan family had invited thirteen of his closest friends, relatives and confidantes (including the family lawyer Barksdale) to his mansion for a dinner party, where he was to reveal the details of his will. It seems the bulk of his estate was to go to a mysterious, unnamed thirteenth guest, but the guest never showed up and the elderly Morgan died (or was murdered) before the person’s identity could be revealed.

In the film’s present day, Marie Morgan (Rogers), daughter of the deceased millionaire, has just turned 21, and for some reason is poking around the now deserted mansion. Although the house was long ago abandoned after the elder Morgan’s death, someone has turned the electricity back on, installed a working telephone, and set up the dining room exactly as it was thirteen years ago.

In classic old dark house fashion, a scream rips the night, whereupon the panicked cab driver who delivered Marie to the house takes off to summon the police. Police Captain Ryan (J. Farrell MacDonald) and his numbskull assistant Detective Grump (Paul Hurst) discover Marie’s dead body, seated at the dining table as if waiting for other guests to arrive.

"She died waiting for the hors d'oeuvres to be served..."

Captain Ryan, who immediately realizes he needs more brain power on the case, calls in a brilliant, snarky playboy/private investigator, Phil Winston (Lyle Talbot) to help sort it all out. Marie’s brother Harold (James Eagles) identifies his sister’s body, but soon everyone is floored when Marie, very much alive, shows up at the scene of the murder.

What ensues next is a crazy, serpentine plot involving cryptic notes, a surgically altered double of Marie (the first dead body), the arrival of the rest of the guests who had attended the original dinner party, multiple people conspiring to get their hands on the will, more dead bodies neatly placed in the spots at the table that they had occupied thirteen years ago, and a masked, hooded killer who spies on people from a hidden room and electrocutes his victims with the normal-looking telephone that he has wired up to a switch.

Whew! You need a scorecard to keep track of it all (but then, I’m at that age where I sometimes lose the plot just watching TV commercials). Fortunately, Detective Grump is around to provide comic relief and reassure those of us who worry about losing it that there are always unfortunate souls in a sorrier state.

Grump is so oafish and inept that he seems outrageous even for a pre-code B movie, but at one point a character helpfully points out that he got his position through an influential family member. You will either cringe or smile in wry bemusement at Grump’s attempts at comic relief. Subtle he is not. In one scene, a telephone rings, and distracted, Grump picks up his revolver and puts it to his ear. In another that has to be seen to be believed, he tries to imitate a strange cry he heard emanating from the mansion for the benefit of Capt. Ryan and Winston:

Supplementing Grump’s antics is the usual assortment of ‘30s character cut-outs. The police captain is both out of his depth and constantly exasperated by the even greater incompetence of his subordinates. Winston, the playboy police consultant, has more smarts in his little finger than the entire police force, and wears a knowing smirk along with the chic suits he sports throughout the film. (A relative newcomer in 1932, Lyle Talbot would go on to become one of the most dependable and long-lasting character actors in Hollywood history, racking up hundreds of movie and TV appearances before retiring in the late ‘80s.)

And of course, no film like this would be complete without a wisecracking dame or two. In a great scene that sums up the less-than-stellar collective character of the Morgan family and its hangers-on (Marie excepted of course), Marjorie (Frances Rich), one of the original thirteen guests, blithely comments to Winston: “We’d all cut each other’s throats for a dime…” -- to which Marie’s brother responds, “Why a dime? I’d cut yours for the fun of it!” (No doubt, Depression-era audiences were amused by seeing how petty and cutthroat high society types could be.)

"Let's raise a glass to all the little people who helped make this picture a success!"

At this juncture in her career, Rogers’ bright, engaging presence had earned her star billing in smaller films like this. In The Thirteenth Guest, she got the opportunity to play dual roles: as Lela, the unfortunate imposter who is the first victim of the masked killer, and as Marie, the innocent, good-hearted heiress who is the last intended victim.

Rogers breezes in and out of scenes with panache, wearing the latest ‘30s fashions and providing a beaming, blonde contrast to the rest of the sour, dark-haired women of the Morgan clan. But this is not a Ginger Rogers movie per se -- some of the cast members, including Talbot/Winston and Hurst/Grump have as much or more screen time. But of course Rogers is there at the climax to escape certain death, and to fall languorously into the arms of Winston at the end.

"You're alright even if you can't dance."

The Thirteenth Guest got a fairly positive reception in its day. Variety’s reviewer found the movie “vastly superior to many of the mystery themes produced by major companies during the past two years. Its story is even more complex, but it is so brought to the screen that it disentangles without befuddling entertainment qualities and confusing the audience to the point of distraction.” [Waly, Variety, September, 1932, p. 20] (The film proved popular enough to inspire another low-budget remake, The Mystery of the Thirteenth Guest, released in 1943.)

I can’t guarantee you won’t be befuddled -- I felt more like Grump than Winston at various points in the movie -- but if you can appreciate things like a masked madman electrocuting unsuspecting high society types and carefully placing their corpses at a decked-out dinner table, it’s an entertaining form of befuddlement. And of course, there’s the presence of future superstar Ginger Rogers to make you forget that it doesn’t make any sense.

Where to find it: Streaming | DVD

In the era before social media apps, intrepid madmen had to rely on secret rooms and peepholes to spy on their intended victims.

"The calls are coming from inside the house!" Oops, wrong movie.

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 #2: A Cold Night's Death

Now Playing: A Cold Night's Death (TV movie, 1973)

Pros: Establishes a dark, moody atmosphere and nicely ratchets up the tension; the leads are absolutely believable as two men trying to hold onto their sanity
Cons: Occasional clumsy bits of dialog

This suspense-thriller starts off very much like an Outer Limits episode -- Mr. “Control Voice” voice himself, Vic Perrin, narrates (in voiceover) the recent history of a remote mountain research station as we see a helicopter delivering a new pair of scientists to the station in the middle of a snowstorm.

The facility, located at the permanently snowy peak of Tower Mountain, is being used to house chimpanzees and monkeys involved in space medicine research, testing the limits of primate endurance under extreme conditions. (My biggest beef with the movie is that you don’t need to locate your lab on top of a nearly inaccessible mountain to simulate extreme conditions for experimental purposes, but we’ll set that aside for now.)

Regular contact with the sole scientist running the lab, Dr. Vogel, has been lost, and in his last communication, the man seemed to be losing his mind, insisting that he had been talking with Alexander the Great and Napoleon.

The replacement team, Robert Jones (Robert Culp) and Frank Enari (Eli Wallach) find the facility in total chaos, equipment and papers scattered, the heat off, and the monkeys nearly frozen to death in their cages. Most horrific, they find Vogel completely frozen in a chair in the electronics room, a nearby window open to the elements.

The replacement team gets a chilly reception at the research station.

After restoring heat and order to the facility, Robert and Frank resume the experiments (apparently the show must go on). But soon, a series of incidents -- the monkeys screaming in the night, equipment mysteriously turned on, windows opened and the generator turned off by an unseen hand, food stores ripped apart and scattered across the kitchen -- cause the two scientists to turn on each other. Or is there someone or something else hiding out at the station?

A Cold Night’s Death is dark and chilling (no pun intended). After the departure of the helicopter pilot, the movie is all Culp’s and Wallach’s, and the two veteran actors do a superb job of gradually surrendering their characters to paranoia and suspicion.

There are some awkward moments. Twice in the 70 minute long movie, Frank talks at length about how he is a by-the-book type who just wants to keep his head down and do the work, while Robert is an intellectual dreamer who needs mysteries and challenges to stay engaged. Under the circumstances, it’s not necessary for the two men to have such wildly divergent personalities to begin suspecting one another, but the dialog hammers the point home.

Frank and Robert wonder who's been monkeying around with their stuff.

It’s enough that the characters demonstrate their differences by their actions: Robert goes into detective mode, wondering why Vogel shut himself up in the only room that could be locked from the inside to freeze to death, while fussy Frank immerses himself in finishing the experiments, cooking the meals and pretending nothing out of the ordinary is happening (until, as things get really bad, he becomes convinced that Robert is off his rocker and staging everything).

While there are subtle clues dropped throughout, many viewers will probably still be surprised by Robert’s late epiphany regarding the locked electronics room and Vogel’s last, crazy communications with the outside world -- not to mention the surprise ending.

In his book Television Fright Films of the 1970s, David Deal praises A Cold Night’s Death, calling it “...one of the leanest telefrights of the era. It is essentially a two-man show and the bulk of the action takes place on a single set. Regardless, it is a crackerjack production boasting a tight script, good acting and a feel for psychological isolation.” He also relates that screenwriter Christopher Knopf earned an Edgar Award nomination from the Mystery Writers of America for his efforts. [McFarland, 2007, p. 18.; see also my review of the book on this site]

At this point in his career, Robert Culp was no stranger to TV sci-fi, having appeared in no fewer than 3 episodes of The Outer Limits series (including the Harlan Ellison-scripted fan favorite Demon with a Glass Hand). Later in the ‘70s he played an occult investigator in Spectre (1977), a Gene Roddenberry TV pilot that went nowhere but has since earned a minor cult reputation.

Public Service Announcement: When shoveling snow, don't overdo it.

Eli Wallach of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly fame (1966) spent the ‘70s appearing in a succession of smaller films and TV movies and series, with occasional stopovers in Italy to do westerns and suspense thrillers. One of his oddest roles was as “the man in oil” in the David Carradine martial arts fantasy-adventure Circle of Iron (1978).

Where to find it: A watchable copy can be streamed here.

“If your number’s up, why fight it?” : Fate Is the Hunter

Now Playing: Fate Is the Hunter (1964)

Pros: Haunting, character-driven story; Great cast; Excellent widescreen cinematography
Cons: Plot implausibilities and a slow-burn mystery may send some looking for the emergency exits

This post is part of the Aviation in Film blogathon hosted by Rebecca Deniston at her Taking Up Room blog. After you’ve boarded the flight here at Films From Beyond, don’t forget to make connections to the other great flight film posts at the blog hub.

Back in August 2019, I wrote about a couple of TV movies -- The Horror at 37,000 Feet and The Ghost of Flight 401 -- featuring supernatural occurrences on airliners ("Fear of Flying: Special TV Movie Double Feature Edition").

For a lot of people, you don’t need to introduce ghosts or demons to make air travel scary. If you think too hard about it, there’s something unnatural (if not downright supernatural) about taking a 50 ton jet airliner up to 35,000 feet and cruising merrily along at 600 mph. Considering that it’s been a little over the span of a single lifetime since the Wright brothers flew their motorized equivalent of a kite for a few seconds, it doesn’t seem like jet airliners should be possible. (Okay, maybe a Betty White lifetime, but still…)

Covid only added to the ranks of the fear-of-flying club, with many folks reluctant to share a cramped airliner cabin and recirculated air with a hundred other people wearing cheap disposable masks dangling from their chins.

For all the misgivings, air travel remains the safest way to get around. If you’re nervous, but you absolutely, positively have to get there overnight, it’s best to think of other things and board that flight -- the statistics are overwhelmingly on your side. 

But whatever you do, don’t screen any of the dozens of airline disaster flicks before your trip. They depict a distressingly large number of ways for a flight to go wrong, each one more heart-stoppingly frightful than the last.

Sit back, relax, and leave the flying to us!

In just the infamous 1970s Airport series alone, there are mad bombers, hijackers, heat-seeking missiles and mid-air collisions to send fear-of-flying into the stratosphere. The ridiculous culmination of the '70s fascination with air disasters was the made-for-TV SST - Death Flight (1977), which, not content just to feature mechanical problems and a mid-air explosion, upped the ante with a deadly virus outbreak.

Even before the golden age of flight frights, films like No Highway in the Sky (1951), The High and the Mighty (1954) and Zero Hour! (1957) explored more mundane but no less frightening sets of circumstances that could potentially send a multi-ton aircraft plunging to earth. (Zero Hour, with its premise of food poisoning taking out an airliner flight crew and many of the passengers, was hilariously lampooned by Airplane! a couple of decades later.)

It’s one thing when evildoers conspire against us -- where humans are involved, the best laid plans often go astray and the good guys at least have a fighting chance of prevailing.

But when Fate comes calling in the form of a loose fuselage bolt, or an unnoticed computer glitch, or sudden wind shear, or all of the above adding up to a perfect storm of disastrous failure, we start to lose confidence in ourselves and our vaunted technology to keep us safe and secure. We need a convenient scapegoat to restore our faith.

Fate Is the Hunter jettisons the long, nail-biting build-up to disaster of a Zero Hour! or Airport to tell a much more somber story of the aftermath of a tragic crash, and one investigator’s determination to explain the inexplicable and salvage the reputation of his friend, the captain of the doomed plane.

The horrific crash that propels Fate Is the Hunter’s drama is shown in a pre-titles sequence. Captain Jack Savage (Rod Taylor) and Sam McBane (Glenn Ford) are old buddies who flew army transport back in the war, and are now employees of Consolidated Airlines. McBane is a desk jockey working as the airline’s director of flight operations. They exchange pleasantries as Savage gets ready to pilot a routine flight from Los Angeles to Seattle.

Consolidated Airlines flight 22 is getting ready for its rendezvous with Fate.

Shortly after take-off, one of the plane’s engines catches fire. The ship is still airworthy, but three other planes are in the vicinity, and Savage has to fly a holding pattern while the traffic clears. The crisis escalates as an alarm bell sounds that the plane's only remaining engine is on fire. Savage has no choice but to try to land on a stretch of beach, and almost makes it safely before plowing into a pier. The toll is 53 dead, with only a flight attendant, Martha Webster (Suzanne Pleshette) surviving when she is miraculously thrown clear.

A detailed examination of the wreckage reveals that a seagull got sucked up into one engine, causing it to jam and catch fire. But mysteriously, the other engine is in perfect working order. Webster, who was in the cockpit when everything hit the fan, swears that alarm bells for both engines were going off shortly before the crash, but still suffering from shock, her testimony is discounted.

Savage’s posthumous reputation takes a big hit when a bartender contacts the investigators, saying that Savage was in his bar buying drinks only a couple of hours before the flight. Savage was well-known for his womanizing and hard partying, so the airline executives, wanting to cut their losses, are prepared to pin everything on the captain. Everyone except McBane, who co-piloted transport planes with Savage over the treacherous Himalayan “Hump” route during the war, and knew that under his care-free exterior, Jack was an extremely skilled and responsible pilot.

McBane conducts his own investigation to get to the truth and head off the scapegoating of his friend. In trying to reconstruct Savage’s movements in the last few hours before the flight, McBane interviews several people, all of whom provide important insights into the kind of man Jack was: Lisa Bond (Dorothy Malone), a wealthy socialite and Jack’s fiancée for a short time; Sally Fraser (Nancy Kwan), an oceanographer who came to know the dashing pilot as a tender, compassionate man; Ralph Bundy (Wally Cox), whose life Savage heroically saved during the war; and Mickey Doolan (Mark Stevens), another wartime co-pilot who owed his life to Savage, and later knew him as non-judgmental friend when Doolan became an alcoholic.

McBane, a rational, by-the-numbers sort of guy, is thrown when Sally, a sober scientist, suggests that Fate can explain the seemingly senseless tragedy.

Sally: "…There must be faith attached, the acceptance of a divine operation, a plan."
McBane: "Fifty-three people were destroyed! If you can see the divinity in that..."
Sally: "As I said, there must be faith."
McBane: "Alright, suppose you use that instead of logic, I’m sorry, I can’t."
Sally: "Once you can, so many things will fall into place. It may even occur to you then that Fate has been moving you too."

Sally and McBane reflect on the vagaries of Fate.

But as McBane delves more deeply into the mystery and prepares to testify before the Civil Aeronautics Board, the bizarre chain of events that contributed to the crash has him coming around to Sally’s way of thinking:

• The type of seagull that got sucked into the engine was normally not found in the area
• Three other aircraft being in the same vicinity at the same time, forcing the crippled airliner into a holding pattern, was a 1 in 1000 occurrence [Note: people in the know report that a crippled plane would always, always, always take landing priority over other air traffic, so this is a problematic plot point.]
• The pier that ultimately caused the aircraft to crack-up and burn had been scheduled to be taken down just days before, but the contractor had decided to go fishing instead

At the hearing, McBane doubles down on the idea that Fate was behind the crash, causing consternation among the board members, the victims’ families and the press. The embarrassed airline executives can’t wait to fire him, but somehow he manages to convince the bigwigs to let him recreate the flight down to the last detail in a last ditch attempt to solve the mystery of the flight’s final moments.

Martha, the sole survivor, is terrified of getting back on board an identical airplane and tempting Fate all over again, but at the last minute agrees to come along to help reconstruct the flight as accurately as possible. It’s a million-to-one shot, but it’s McBane’s only chance to get Fate to show all of its cards and save Savage’s reputation.

It's deja vu all over again for Martha (Suzanne Pleshette).

Fate Is the Hunter is only nominally based on the best-selling 1961 book of the same title by Ernest K. Gann. The book is a fascinating account of Gann’s aviation career, piloting commercial passenger DC-2s and DC-3s in the rough-and-tumble 1930s, and then during WWII flying army air transport in the north and south Atlantic and over the infamous “Hump” route across the Himalayas to China. 

Gann was an all-American go-getter and renaissance man, a type that has become all but extinct in the 21st century. Before becoming a pilot, he worked as a movie cartoonist and helped make documentary newsreels. He was also an accomplished sailor, and even tried running his own commercial fishing business for a short time. But his biggest fame came as a best-selling author and screenwriter.

By the time that the movie Fate Is the Hunter was released in 1964, six of Gann’s novels had been made into motion pictures, and he had contributed screenplays to five of them. Fate the book, a memoir with numerous anecdotes ranging over several decades, was more of a challenge to turn into a coherent drama.

Gann tried his hand at some early drafts of the screenplay, but the author was so disappointed with the final version, credited to screenwriter Harold Medford, that he asked that his name be removed from the film. He lamented in a later autobiography that this was a bad move, as Fate Is the Hunter played constantly on TV for many years, and by having his name removed he missed out on some healthy TV residuals.

Fate the book is a compelling read. Gann had a knack for sizing up people, especially his fellow pilots, in just a colorful sentence or two. He could also wax eloquent about a profession that was 99.8% boring routine, but then could send your heart in your throat at a moment’s notice. He knew very well that when tragedy strikes, rational people do everything in their power to deny that sometimes, the difference between delivering a plane safely to its destination and crashing it is a matter of sheer luck:

“An airplane crashes. There is a most thorough investigation. Experts analyze every particle, every torn remnant of the machine and what is left of those within it. Every pertinent device of science is employed in reconstructing the incident and searching for the cause. Sometimes the investigators wait for weeks until the weather is exactly the same as it was during the crash. They fly exactly the same route in exactly the same kind of airplane and they go to elaborate trouble trying to duplicate the thinking of the pilot, who can no longer communicate his thinking. Often at considerable risk to themselves, the investigators attempt what have been reported as the final tragic maneuvers of the crashed airplane. And sometimes they discover a truth which they can explain in the hard, clear terms of mechanical science. They must never, regardless of their discoveries, write off the crash as simply a case of bad luck. They must never, for fear of official ridicule, admit other than to themselves, which they all do, that some totally unrecognizable genie has once again unbuttoned his pants and urinated on the pillar of science.” [Ernest K. Gann, Fate Is the Hunter, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961/2011, p 8.]

In spite of Gann’s disappointment, Fate the movie expands on and effectively dramatizes the author’s central thesis.

It’s all there: the inexplicable tragedy, the rush to judgment to explain it away as pilot error, McBane’s lonely crusade to defend Savage’s reputation, the meticulous reconstruction of the flight, and ultimately, awe and wonder at the workings of remorseless Fate.

Lonely is the man who talks about Fate when everyone else wants a rational explanation.

Whatever you think of the Fickle Finger of Fate premise, the film’s stellar cast helps to sell it as a serious drama instead of cheap melodrama. Glenn Ford is just the right mixture of intense determination in defending his friend’s reputation, and vulnerability as his faith in science and statistics turns to humble acknowledgement of a universe that has its own plans, humanity be damned.

Nancy Kwan has a challenging role as McBane’s philosophy “tutor,” delivering lines that are only a step or two above a carnival fortune teller’s schtick. It doesn’t help that her character is introduced as a Chinese war orphan who was adopted and brought to the States, furthering the hackneyed notion of Asian inscrutability. To the film’s credit, she is also presented as a capable and knowledgeable scientist, an oceanographer, which helps tamp down the banality.

In the flashback scenes, Rod Taylor walks the devil-may-care pilot routine right up to the point of being insufferable, but when called on to interact with honest emotion, he’s very good. Suzanne Pleshette’s role as Martha, the flight attendant and sole survivor, is a relatively small one, but allows for some vivid emoting, from casual banter to pure terror in the pre-titles sequence, to survivor’s guilt when she is interviewed by McBane, and back to terror at the climax when history seems to be repeating itself during the test flight.

Fans of non-stop, pulse-pounding action will want to book a different cinematic flight, but those who go along for the ride will enjoy a great cast at the peak of their games, Oscar-nominated black and white widescreen photography courtesy of Milton Krasner, an evocative music score by Jerry Goldsmith, and a haunting, character-driven story.

McBane is not very appreciative of Savage's rendition of "Blue Moon" as
they fly over the Himalayas.

Where to find it: A very good copy is currently streaming on YouTube (but hurry, that flight could be canceled at any time, and affordable DVD copies are hard to find).