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).

Revenge is a dish best served freezing cold: Winter Kill

Now Playing: Winter Kill (TV movie; 1974)

Pros: Solid cast of familiar ‘70s character actors led by Andy Griffith as a no-nonsense small town policeman
Cons: Drags in places; Some of the action scenes fall flat

This post is part of the Odd or Even Blogathon, stylishly hosted by bloggers Rebecca at Taking Up Room and Gill at Realweegiemidget Reviews. Participants were asked to come up with two possibilities for a movie or TV episode to review, one released on an odd year and one on an even year. A coin flip determined which one got the green light -- heads for the odd year and tails for even.

With Old Man Winter settling in, I selected two chilling TV movies full of ice, snow and … death: A Cold Night’s Death from 1973, featuring a bizarre mystery at a polar research station, and Winter Kill from 1974, about a rural police chief dealing with serial murders at a ski resort. I’m told the coin toss came up tails, so Winter Kill it is! (Who knows, maybe I’ll review A Cold Night’s Death sometime before winter is over.)

First, a bit of housekeeping. Winter Kill the TV movie should not be confused with Winter Kills, a 1979 thriller/black comedy about an impenetrable conspiracy surrounding the assassination of a John F. Kennedy-esque president. Winter Kills, starring Jeff Bridges and John Huston, has a modern Alice in Wonderland feel to it, and there are all kinds of strange backstories attached to the production, but that’s a story for another time.

Winter Kill stars Andy Griffith as Sam McNeill, the police chief of Eagle Lake, a mountain resort town. We’re not in Mayberry anymore, as the film wastes no time getting down to murderous business. In the middle of the night, a stealthy figure dressed in a bulky winter coat and ski mask and carrying a shotgun sneaks up to a luxurious cabin in the woods. The figure throws snowballs at a picture window until the sleeping woman inside is awakened. When the woman pauses momentarily at the window, she’s cut down by a shotgun blast. The killer spray paints “The First” into the snow outside the cabin and steals away.

Ski mask: $12.95. Insulated winter coat: $85.99. Shotgun: $749.99.
Revenge served cold: Priceless.

Even before the murder has been discovered, Sam’s day is off to a bad start when he discovers that the welcome sign just outside of town has been defaced, with the word “Death” spray painted over “Eagle” of Eagle Lake, and a “?” added to the end of the population number.

Once Sam is at the murder scene and examines the message in the snow painted in the same bright red as the sign, it’s apparent that he’s got a cold-blooded killer with a demented sense of humor on his hands.

Suspicion immediately falls on the murdered woman’s wealthy land developer husband, Bill Carter (Tim O’Connor). Sam discovers that Carter’s wife was having an affair with a ski instructor (Nick Nolte) and the husband knew about it. Even more suspiciously, Carter’s shotgun is missing and the only story he can come up with is that he threw it in the lake in frustration after a disappointing hunting trip.

The coup-de-grace comes when the ski instructor is shot while making a run down the slopes, and “The Second” is found painted in the snow nearby. Carter is just a little too convenient a suspect, and when a third murder occurs -- a pastor is gunned down in his own church -- it’s apparent that the new victim has no connection to the love triangle.

"Ha! You blinked first!"

From the get-go, the viewer is treated to clues to the killer's motive, as he/she is shown reading the diary of a young woman. Flashbacks progressively fill-in her sad story of falling in love with the ski instructor, getting pregnant, getting jilted and feeling that she was being mistreated by everyone around her.

Sam eventually figures out that the girl, Cynthia (Elayne Heilveil), is the connecting thread -- she was the daughter of the Carters’ maid, and had stayed with the couple for a year before mysteriously disappearing.

Now Sam must figure out why the people who interacted with Cynthia before she disappeared are being murdered. The investigation cuts too close to home when Sam finds out that his girlfriend Betty (Sheree North) was one of those people.

Despite the superficial similarities to The Andy Griffith Show -- the rural small town locale and colorful locals who all know one another -- Sam McNeill is no laid-back, avuncular Andy Taylor. He is all-business and not afraid to read the riot act to his bosses when they overstep.

Just a year before Jaws would portray civic leaders as greedy lunkheads willing to gamble with lives in order to protect the tourist trade, Winter Kill featured its own civics lesson. After the third person is killed, Sam is summoned to appear before the town council.

The anxious men are worried that the tourists will stop coming, and make it clear they’re losing faith in their police chief. The mayor informs Sam that “we hired you, and we can fire you,” and that they’ve decided to form a posse to hunt down the killer. Sam is having none of it:

“Whether any of you in this room believe it, I’m madder and more frustrated than all of you put together, but I’ll not run screaming down main street for you. And I’ll not allow any amateur policeman in this town to take the law into his own hands. And if any one of you tries it, I’ll squash you!”

Sam reads the riot act to the mayor (Eugene Roche).

This is not good ol’ Andy Taylor of Mayberry talking. The only thing missing is the mic drop as Sam leaves the men sitting in embarrassed silence.

Winter Kill, which was intended as a pilot for a TV series, was produced by Andy Griffith Enterprises in association with MGM Television. It’s interesting that Griffith chose to play an almost mirror image of Andy Taylor in a much darker universe. The part still fits him like an old shoe, but it also seems like an attempt to update the too-good-to-be-true Andy image of the ‘60s.

ABC, which broadcast Winter Kill, went ahead and developed it into a series in 1975, renaming Griffith’s character. But either the network executives or audiences balked at the "new" Andy Griffith, as Adams of Eagle Lake lasted only two episodes.

Although Nick Nolte had very little screen time in Winter Kill, he made a good enough impression that he was cast as one of Sam Adams’ deputies in the series. Just a couple of years later, Nolte vaulted into superstardom playing Tom Jordache in the Rich Man, Poor Man mini-series. Griffith would have to wait another decade before his big TV comeback with Matlock.

The murders in Winter Kill are done with a shotgun, which is loud and messy and more disgusting than scary as a way to kill someone. The movie tries to compensate by showing each murder in Peckinpah-style slow motion, but that just comes off as cheesy. However, Winter Kill generates some real suspense at the climax when Sam chases down one last red-herring, unwittingly leaving Betty a sitting duck for the real killer.

Betty (Sheree North) has to fend for herself while her boyfriend is off on a wild goose chase.

The movie’s biggest strength is Andy Griffith’s sober portrayal of a man under extreme pressure, trying to catch a cold-blooded killer while simultaneously navigating local politics and calming the townspeople’s fears. And then there’s the fun in trying to guess, along with Sam, who among the colorful residents of Mayberry, er, Eagle Lake, is capable of gunning down friends and neighbors in such a brutal fashion.

The line-up of suspects amounts to a sort of who’s who of ‘70s character actors: Tim O’Connor as Bill Carter the land developer; Lawrence Pressman as a browbeaten lawyer; Eugene Roche as the fidgety mayor; and Charles Tyner as Charley the amiable mailman, among others. If you’ve watched any ‘70s TV, there are more familiar faces than you can point a shotgun at.

Winter Kill is a solid, well-acted mystery-thriller that takes its time with local color and characters while gradually building suspense. The wintry vistas of the shooting locations, Big Bear and Snow Valley in California, provide a beautiful backdrop. It may be a bit too slow for some tastes, but it’s not a bad winter’s stroll down memory lane.

Where to find it: Streaming | DVD

New Year's Reading: Television Fright Films of the 1970s

Now that the blog is entering its 12th year (!!), I thought it was high time to do something different. I double-checked the archives, and sure enough, I’ve not done any book reviews up until now.

We have a family tradition of giving each other books for Christmas, and with both my wife’s and my birthdays falling well within the holiday season, at the end of the year new books (new to us anyway) take up all the available coffee table space and shout at us telepathically to “read me first!”

Being a movie nut, most of the books I get as gifts are film-related. I also buy books throughout the year, and those tend to be film-related too. I do read other things, but I tend to get a lot of my recreational reading from the library, and a lot of that in ebook form. The physical books that I return to time and again are almost all about films and filmmaking.

Back in October of 2020, I reviewed one of my favorite made-for-TV horror movies, Vampire (1979; starring Richard Lynch, Jason Miller and E.G. Marshall) for Horror and Sons’ month-long celebration of Halloween TV movies and specials.

This got me interested again in the classic TV movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and ever since I’ve been periodically checking YouTube for availability as I run across titles in my readings and research.

One particularly rich guidebook for this sort of nostalgic journey is something I picked up shortly before writing the Vampire review.

Television Fright Films of the 1970s. David Deal, McFarland & Co., 2007 (220 pp.)

If you’ve visited the site more than a few times, you may have noticed that I like to provide some production background on the film being reviewed if at all possible. A lot of that has come from the library of McFarland film books that I’ve collected over the years.

McFarland & Co., located in Jefferson, N.C., specializes in reference and scholarly works aimed at the academic and library markets. Founded in 1979, the publisher is particularly strong in the popular culture and performing arts areas.

The first McFarland title I bought for myself was Bill Warren’s classic 2 volume survey of American science fiction films of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, Keep Watching the Skies (originally published in 1982, and updated to one volume in 2010).

I read the immense thing cover to cover, and have been revisiting it regularly ever since. Warren’s love of the genre and the time period comes out in every entry, and even the stinkers get serious attention. In most cases, Warren includes detailed background on the production and key players and filmmakers -- a monumental effort considering all the research was done pre-internet.

In the same vein as Warren’s ‘50s sci-fi bible, but more specialized and a bit less detailed in terms of each entry, is David Deal’s survey of TV “fright” films of the 70s. Back when I was in junior high and high school, I was a huge fan of the original ABC Movie of the Week and the imitators that proliferated in the ‘70s. Some of these made-for-TV movies, like Steven Spielberg’s timeless Duel (1971), have achieved cult status and keep being “discovered” by successive generations of fans. 

Decades later, I still fondly remember such TV horror-thrillers as The Brotherhood of the Bell (1970; with Glenn Ford), The Deadly Dream (1971; Lloyd Bridges), Haunts of the Very Rich (1972; Lloyd Bridges again), Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973; Kim Darby), and countless others.

Many of these movies have never seen a home video release, or are long out of print. Thankfully, loyal fans have kept the flickering video flames alive by uploading recordings to YouTube, so that if you can remember it, there’s a good chance you can reconnect with it (as long as you’re not expecting a pristine high-res copy).

With information about the movies, and many of the movies themselves, being instantly available via the internet, a print book about vintage made-for-TV movies might seem superfluous.

Deal’s book came out in 2007, a couple of years after YouTube was created, and long before the loving labors of fans made the streaming service into a mixed bag of nostalgic gray market video content. Even in the rarefied tech environment of the 2020s, with colossal user-curated databases like YouTube and IMDb, I think there’s still a case to be made for printed filmographies like Deal’s that bring together films of a specific subgenre and add some value into the mix.

It’s nice to be able to leisurely thumb through a slice of TV history, with periodic “oh yeah, I remember that one!” moments adding to the enjoyment. Deal puts things into context with a preface that provides a short history of the golden age of telefilm, starting with the debut of ABC’s Movie of the Week in the late ‘60s, and a few words about some of the more prominent producers and directors who made the 90 minute TV movie into a popular art form.

The iconic intro to ABC's Movie of the Week.

As far as added value, the preface is bare bones, and I would have liked to have seen more on the influential behind-the-scenes people, their careers and what led to their participation in the emergence of the classic TV movie and its horror-suspense variants.

An additional small bone to pick with Deal is his definition of “fright” film. Deal admits that his definition of “fright” is pretty broad, and so along with the memorable horrors of the period like Salem’s Lot and The Night Stalker, there are a fair number of run-of-the-mill disaster movies involving doomed airliners, killer bees and several (!!) cable cars hanging by a thread.

But at least he has a sense of humor about it. “[T]here are also ‘ringers,’ films that entice viewers with scary titles such as Express to Terror and The Invasion of Carol Enders, yet contain very little to be scared of, except, perhaps, in the quality department.” [p. 3]

Deal also apologizes in advance that, while he tried to be as definitive as possible, some reader favorites may not have been included due to lack of availability. Almost all of my fondly remembered movies are covered, but considering the current supply available on YouTube, an expanded edition might be in order.

The entries, arranged alphabetically by title, are well-written and lively (for the historically-minded, there is also an appendix of the titles arranged chronologically by broadcast date). The author has a knack for brief summaries that get to the essence of even the most convoluted plots without giving the game away. 

He typically singles out a principal actor to expand on with career highlights and a scorecard of their participation in other TV movies of the decade, so that by the end of the book you have a much better sense of who the go-to actors of the period were, how they got there, and where they went.

Directors and in some cases producers also get their due. Several names, some famous, some not so much, keep popping up, e.g., Dan Curtis (producer/director, The Night Stalker, The Norliss Tapes, Trilogy of Terror, etc.) and John Llewellyn Moxey (director, A Taste of Evil, The Night Stalker, The Strange and Deadly Occurrence, Conspiracy of Terror, etc.).

Deal is also cognizant of the importance of music scores in creating an atmosphere of suspense, and, atypically for a collection of this sort, constantly cites the contributions and backgrounds of composers.

While the author’s default stance is one of respect for the medium and the genre(s), he doesn’t mince words calling out the junk that was dead on arrival even in its day. As mentioned above, the attempt by TV producers to capitalize on the popularity of big budget disaster movies like the Airport series often turned into minor artistic disasters.

Typical of Deal’s clear-eyed assessments of these botched small-screen epics is this one on SST - Death Flight (1977), an Airport imitator that features mechanical problems, a midair explosion, and the release of a deadly strain of exotic flu -- all on the same unlucky flight!

“One disaster wasn’t enough for this fim, so the combination of mechanical and medical problems land SST - Death Flight in the category of double jeopardy (see Fer de Lance, Mayday at 40,000 Feet). Doubling the problems, however, does not double the entertainment value of this tired thriller. Adding insult to injury are the not-so-special effects, which are among the cheapest and most unconvincing of the era. In this case, director David Lowell Rich’s familiarity with airborne frights breeds boredom.” [p.167]

While black and white stills and illustrations are sprinkled liberally throughout, Television Fright Films is not a coffee-table book. The strengths are in its lively, accessible writing, background details, and inclusion of obscure titles that serve to put a crazy decade into even better context.

If you love these movies like I do, this will make a great after-the-holidays gift to yourself. It's still in print, available directly from the publisher (see the link above) and major online sellers.