Faded A List Stars in B Sci-fi and Horror Movies

Today's post is inspired by Andy over at Fandango Groovers and his idea for a "Mixtape Movies" blogathon. In the olden days before digital music and iPods, enterprising young audiophiles would spend hours on dual cassette tape decks dubbing their favorite songs onto a mix tape to share with friends, play at parties, or shove into the tape decks of their Camaros on the way to the drive-in. While not always obvious, there was usually some connecting theme that undulated its way through the various tracks. Andy's simple idea takes the retro concept of the mix tape and applies it to movies.

Without further ado, here is my "mix tape" of glamorous A list stars who explored strange new B movie worlds in the twilight of their careers…

Now Playing: Battle of the Worlds (aka Il pianeta degli uomini spenti, 1961)

Pros: Ambitious scope; Unambiguous celebration of science and knowledge; Good model work
Cons: Current prints are mediocre at best

In brief: A stray planetoid dubbed "the Outsider" wanders into our solar system and seems headed on a collision course with earth before changing course and and taking up a moon-like orbit. When humanity attempts to investigate the new "visitor" with its spaceships, a swarm of deadly flying saucers emerges from the planet as if from a colossal beehive. But Earth's intrepid heroes will not be deterred, and the rogue planet has even more secrets to reveal for those who dare explore it.

Veteran character actor Claude Rains was in his early seventies when he made this Italian sci-fi epic for Antonio Margheriti (credited as Anthony Dawson). He had reached the summit of his A-list career barely 20 years prior (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939, Casablanca and Now, Voyager, both 1942), but Battle of the Worlds is seemingly from another universe altogether, far, far away in space and time. Rains plays Prof. Benson, an irascible and arrogant scientist/mathematician whose genius is indispensable in helping the merely bright people of the world deal with the problematic planet.

Battle's ambition and scope belies its meager budget. The effects are about what you'd expect for the time. Where it parts company with many other B sci-fi pics is its depiction of a very strong scientist character, irritated, but not mad, who uses his prodigious mind to solve problems and make discoveries rather than turn monsters loose on humanity.

Key filmmaker: Due to his reputation as model maker (earned for his work on an earthquake documentary), Antonio Margheriti's first films as a director were sci-fi budget epics that required … you guessed it … lots of models. However, this inventive filmmaker refused to be tied down to one or even several genres, making dozens of films in about every category you can imagine. [Louis Paul, Italian Horror Film Directors, McFarland, 2005.]

For more on Margheriti and one of his very best horror films, see my post on Castle of Blood (aka Danza Macabra, 1964).

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Where to find it:

Amazon Instant Video

Now Playing: The Night Walker (1964)

Pros: Great photography and music score; Some surreal, spooky moments
Cons: Not a lot of chemistry between Stanwyck and Taylor

In brief: Irene Trent (Barbara Stanwyck) is unhappily married to a cruel, insanely jealous blind millionaire (Howard, played by Hayden Rorke) who keeps her a virtual prisoner in their old, creaky mansion. When her husband is killed in a mysterious explosion in his second floor laboratory, Irene consults with slick family lawyer Barry Morland (Robert Taylor) about selling the house and returning full time to her beauty parlor business. She wonders about her sanity when at first she hears her dead husband tapping his cane down the dark and gloomy hallways, then sees him, hideously disfigured and steamin' mad, in the burnt-out lab. Next, she has strange dreams about a tall, dark and handsome suitor who sweeps her off her feet and takes her on tours of a surreal, haunted nightworld. Is she losing her mind, or is something else going on?

The Night Walker was B movie impresario William Castle's answer to the highly successful casting of fading A list actresses in such hits as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) and Hush… Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964). In this case, he scored two former top shelf A listers, Stanwyck and Taylor, who had also been married at one time. While the on screen chemistry in Night Walker was only so-so, the two apparently hit it off reasonably well on the set. Taylor got a chance to exercise his dry humor when asked by reporters how he was getting along with his former wife. "It's as if we were never married," he replied. (For more on the film and a clip of its surreal prologue, see my earlier post "Fading Stars in the Dead of Night.")

Key supporting player: Hayden Rorke, best known for his role as Dr. Bellows on the '60s TV comedy I Dream of Jeannie, is almost unrecognizable as the repulsive, jealous Howard Trent. He makes the most out of the small role, and his scenes are some of the creepiest in the whole movie.

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Where to find it:

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Now Playing: The Witches (aka The Devil's Own, 1966)

Pros: Steadily builds up suspense; Good performance by Joan Fontaine
Cons: An unintentionally funny occult ceremony at the climax

In brief: After suffering a nervous breakdown in an encounter with a witch doctor in her missionary work in Africa, well-meaning teacher Gwen Mayfield (Joan Fontaine) secures a new job with a small private school in a remote English village. Her employers, eccentric and moody Alan Bax (Alec McCowen) and formidable author Stephanie (Kay Walsh), are the last siblings of a prominent, but declining family. At first gratified by the friendliness and support of the brother and sister and the local villagers, Gwen comes to find their behavior increasingly baffling and mysterious. As she begins to unravel a fiendish plot involving a local girl that seems to involve witchcraft, she suffers another breakdown…

After the tense Africa prologue scene, The Witches builds its suspense slowly and fitfully (it's somewhat reminiscent of the much better known The Wicker Man, 1973, but of course lacks Wicker's musical numbers). Some have found the sacrificial ceremony at the end to be anticlimactic and somewhat silly. There's enough simmering tension and good performances that I would advise keeping an open mind.

Already into her late '40s, Joan Fontaine apparently acquired the film rights to a fairly obscure novel, The Devil's Own, by Nora Loftus (writing under the pen name Peter Curtis). The project eventually found its way to Tony Hinds and Hammer for the studio's inimitable, but definitely low budget, treatment.

Key writer: While the brilliant Nigel Kneale was waiting for Hammer to gear up production of its adaptation of Quatermass and the Pit, Hinds gave him a job adapting Loftus' book. Although The Witches was certainly no highlight on his resume, Kneale was mostly satisfied with the screenplay and the resulting product in spite of the dubious source material: "The woman who wrote the book I don't think had written very much before. She knew very little about witches or anybody else. It was a very impractical thing. It was a very cheap little thing, which they shot down in Bray. Joan Fontaine had faded a bit as a star. She was good in it. It was a weirdly sinister film. I was perfectly happy with it." [Andy Murray, Into the Unknown: The Fanstastic Life of Nigel Kneale, Headpress, 2006.]

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Where to find it:

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Now Playing: The Frozen Dead (1966)

Pros: Mad doctors, frozen Nazis who won't stay dead, living heads... what's not to like?
Cons: Only if you're in the mood for schlock

In brief: Mad Doctor Norberg (Dana Andrews) has a simple mission: revive hundreds of elite Nazi officers and soldiers who, at the end of the war, volunteered to be frozen in suspended animation and stashed away for a rainy day. There's only one problem. None of the men Norberg has managed to revive have come out of it with their faculties intact -- and his laboratory basement is starting to fill up with pitiful, lumbering zombies. His nasty assistant Karl (Alan Tilvern) is managing to keep the zombie failures in line, but the post-war remnants of the Nazi high command are getting impatient and want a thawed cadre to help them start World War III.

Norberg complains that he doesn't know enough about the brain to succeed with his mission, and needs a living one to experiment on. Conveniently, Norberg's daughter Jean (Anna Palk) shows up with an old school chum, Elsa (Kathleen Breck). The next morning, Jean is told that her friend had to leave suddenly (uh-huh). Jean starts having nightmares that her friend is dead, but somehow still trying to talk to her. Meanwhile, eager (and naive) young brain expert Dr. Roberts (Phillip Gilbert) has shown up to get a load of what the esteemed Dr. Norberg is up to and provide needed assistance. Will Norberg succeed in reviving the Fourth Reich? What do you think?

Although Dana Andrews had leading roles in two of the most acclaimed movies of the 1940s, Laura (1944) and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), problems with alcoholism damaged his reputation in later years and the plum roles dried up. Inevitably, a number of horror, sci-fi and TV parts came his way. The results were decidedly mixed: Curse of the Demon (aka Night of the Demon; 1957) is one of the best horror films ever made, Crack in the World (1965) is a middling sci-fi "epic", and The Frozen Dead… well let's just say he didn't do it for the prestige.

Frozen Dead combines a number of B movie ingredients -- mad doctors, nefarious post-war Nazi plots and pitiable living heads -- into a bubbling and somewhat smelly sci-fi/horror stew. But if this sort of thing amuses you, go for it (if you can find it)! An added bonus is hearing All-American, Baptist born and raised Dana Andrews trying out his best mad German doctor accent.

Key supporting player: Debonair Edward Fox of The Day of the Jackal (1973) fame plays Norberg's zombified brother. Even as a zombie, he looks absolutely fabulous in uniform.

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Where to find it:

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Bonus Track: The Terror (1963)

Pros: Lush photography and sets belie its ultra-low budget
Cons: Confusing storyline; Don't close your eyes, or poof! ... it'll be gone!

B movies not only can salvage the finances of declining stars, they can also help propel promising young actors and actresses into the cinema stratosphere (or at least keep them working until they get their extra special lucky break). Roger Corman's The Terror is in the latter category, providing work for a very young Jack Nicholson, who was still several years away from his breakout roles in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970).

In brief: Andre Duvalier (Nicholson), a dashing young officer in Napoleon's army, has been separated from his regiment. He tries to get help from a beautiful, enigmatic young woman (Sandra Knight), but before he can even get her to talk she seems to vanish into the sea. The young soldier loses consciousness, and awakens in the house of an old woman (Dorothy Neumann with a distinctly witch-like appearance), who tells him he was hallucinating. When he regains his senses and leaves, he sees the young woman and nearly kills himself trying to follow her. He ends up at the decrepit castle of the even more decrepit Baron Von Leppe (Boris Karloff), and learns that the mysterious woman bears an uncanny resemblance to Von Leppe's wife, who died 20 years earlier…

The Terror is an especially low-budget knock off of Corman's own earlier Poe-inspired hits for AIP, rushed into production to take advantage of leftover sets (and actors) from The Raven (1963). Corman wanted to "out-Poe Poe himself" and create another Gothic hit from scratch, while, ever frugal, spending next to nothing. The result is rather dull and confusing, and as insubstantial as the mystery woman herself. If The Terror's audience was confused, the cast and crew were even more so when filming the thing.

According to Corman, "We did those two days on the Raven stages with the four principals. This wasn't easy. We had a roughed-out story line, but no one really knew what their characters' motivations were because we didn't exactly know what was supposed to happen to them. But I kept shooting. Pressed for time and with an hour of so left the second day, I told my d.p. (director of photography), 'Don't slate the shots. We'll worry later what to do with this film.'" [Roger Corman with Jim Jerome, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Da Capo Press, 1998.]

Key supporting player: Jonathan Haze, (somewhat) fresh from his role as Seymour in Corman's 2 day, ultra low budget wonder The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), plays the mute castle servant Gustaf (no Brooklyn accent in this one!).

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Where to find it:

Oldies.com

Fading Stars in the Dead of Night

Now Playing: The Night Walker (1964)

Pros: Very effective, spooky atmosphere and imagery; great music score
Cons: Plot holes and continuity errors

The 1950s and early '60s were an era of "creative destruction" for the movie business. With the oligarchic power of the big studios long broken (United States vs. Paramount Pictures, 1948) and the big bad wolf of television threatening to eat the industry's breakfast, lunch and dinner, a new generation of independent pitchmen and showmen (and some conmen) stepped in to demonstrate a different, but profitable business model. They cleverly recognized that the postwar youth of America actually had some extra cash to spend and needed an excuse -- any excuse -- to get away from their so-square parents. The result was a seemingly endless stream of low budget flicks aimed exclusively at the youth market. Exhibitors were ecstatic to get their hands on a steady supply of cheap product and teens were happy to fill their balconies and drive-ins and make out as movies made specifically for them played on the big screen.

Of course, these movies didn't scare up business with glamorous stars' names on theater marquees. They got the kids' posteriors into the seats with a combination of lurid titles (e.g., I Married a Monster from Outer Space; I Was a Teenage Werewolf), equally lurid posters, cheap tickets, and cheesy promotions. The Big Cheese of promotions in the late '50s and '60s was William Castle (born William Schloss in 1914), who at first labored anonymously in the business, directing programmers in the 1940s and doing some TV, before reinventing himself as the P.T. Barnum of B pictures with Macabre in 1958. Castle's first great gimmick was to issue $1000 life insurance policies to theater goers insuring them against death by fright. Some theaters also had nurses in the lobby and hearses parked outside, standing by. Macabre was more plodding and atmospheric than a real fright-inducer, but the gimmick sold tickets, making the film an unexpected success and spurring Castle on to more imaginative promotions.

The next three Castle productions cemented his reputation as the Grand Guignol impresario of low-budget movies. It's no coincidence that these three represent his cheesiest, most imaginative promotions, and are the films he's primarily known for today (excepting Rosemary's Baby, which he produced but did not direct). House on Haunted Hill (1959) introduced "Emergo," which consisted of a glow-in-the-dark skeleton on a wire that was hoisted above the audience at a key point in the film. The Tingler (1959), featuring Vincent Price in an early B horror film role, jolted theater goers with electric motors hidden in select seats; this was supposed to represent the "tingling" sensation all humans supposedly experience when they are about to be frightened to death. 13 Ghosts (1960) was filmed in "Illusion-O," which required audience members to don special "ghost viewers" (really 3D glasses) to see the ghastly ghosts that the characters were seeing in the movie.

Barbara and Robert had been long divorced when they met
on the set of The Night Walker, but got along quite well.

Several years later, the success of neo-gothic thrillers featuring aging glamour stars of the studio era -- What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964) with Bette and Olivia de Haviland -- had Castle scrambling to put together similar packages in the hopes of striking box office gold. The Grand Guignol master countered with his own versions: first Strait-Jacket (1964) with Joan Crawford as a reformed murderess who seems to have had a relapse, then another 1964 release, The Night Walker, with former A-list stars Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor (who had also been married in real life).

With the revival of big name glamor stars in decidedly non-glamorous roles (and the movies themselves aimed at an older audience), Castle skipped the juvenile promotional gimmicks for Night Walker. It was enough of a coup to score two of the biggest names that big studio Hollywood had ever produced. According to Castle biographer John W. Law (Scare Tactic: The Life and Films of William Castle, Writers Club Press, 2000), Stanwyck was easy to persuade for the role, having recently regretted turning down the Olivia de Haviland role in Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, which became a big hit. Castle wanted Stanwyck's ex Robert Taylor for the male leading role. Barbara was fine with the idea, but suggested Castle also get the blessing of Taylor's wife at the time. Taylor was also quite OK with playing opposite his ex-wife, telling the press, "Any actor who would turn down a chance to play opposite Barbara Stanwyck, under any circumstances, would have to be out of his head. She's certainly one of the pros in the business. I'm very enthusiastic about the film. It looks like it will be a pleasant experience." Later, asked how the production was going, he answered drily, "It's as if we were never married." (Ibid.)

The Night Walker was certainly different from anything Robert had made up to that time (elements of it are reminiscent of Stanwyck's role in the 1948 noir-suspenser Sorry, Wrong Number, but the overall tone is completely different). Stanwyck plays Irene, the oppressed wife of a blind, cruel millionaire, Howard Trent (Hayden Rorke). Castle and screenwriter Robert Bloch (author of Psycho) immediately put the audience on edge, as Trent is as ugly on the outside as he is on the inside-- wisps of hair cover his enormous, domed head, and he doesn't bother to hide his creepy, all-white occluded eyes behind dark glasses. (Rorke, best known for his role as the genial but befuddled psychiatrist on TV's I Dream of Jeannie, is unrecognizable under the heavy make-up.) Trent has been taping his wife as she talks in her sleep, and is convinced that she's having an affair. Except, Irene points out to him, that she practically never goes out of the house, and they never have people over, except for Trent's lawyer, Barry Moreland (Taylor). Trent confronts Moreland, but the lawyer indignantly denies any involvement with Irene.

The obsessed, jealous man can't let it go. His wife has clearly been dreaming about a lover night after night, and where there's smoke, there must be fire. After Moreland leaves, Trent confronts his harried wife again. He smirks like a snake as he tells Irene, "It's only because I love you darling, that I'm interested in everything you do and everyone you see." As the argument escalates and Trent demands to know who Irene's lover is, she screams at him, "My lover is only a dream, but he's still more of a man than you!" Ouch! Trent tries to strike her with his cane, but she flees the house. As the old man stands at the foot of the stairs calling to his wife, a muted explosion sounds from an upstairs laboratory (the reason for or purpose of the lab is never explained). Not seeing (and apparently not smelling) smoke pouring from the room, Trent enters and the door closes, whereupon he's apparently blown to bits in a much larger explosion.

Howard Trent seems a little worse for the wear
after his laboratory accident.

An arson investigator assures the new widow that, although there's a gaping 6 foot hole in the lab floor, the rest of the house is structurally sound and safe to live in. (He also tells her that the explosion and resulting fire was so intense, that Trent was literally blown into atoms-- an unlikely proposition.) The house may be structurally safe, but there's something wrong with it nonetheless. That night, Irene hears the tapping of her husband's cane, and sees the door to his study close. She hears yet another muffled explosion coming from the locked lab, and when she goes up to investigate, she encounters the animated corpse (?) of her husband shuffling toward her through the smoke, one side of his face hideously burned. She wakes up. Was it a dream?

Naturally spooked, she visits Barry the lawyer for help in selling the house. Barry explains that the house is tied up in probate and it will be months before she can put it on the market. Irene decides to move back to a small apartment in the back of her beauty parlor (she owned and ran the business before marrying the dreadful millionaire). The plot thickens as Barry starts to woo Irene. But he has a rival in Irene's dream lover (Lloyd Bochner), who seems to have become flesh and blood, calling on her in the dead of night to whisk her off to strange destinations. Irene's life has suddenly gotten very complicated-- she's gone from being a downtrodden housewife whose obsessive husband wouldn't even let her leave the house, to an attractive, rich widow with a real-life would-be suitor, a dream lover, and a dead husband who's still after her. Will she go mad, or perhaps suffer an even worse fate?

The Night Walker is long on eerie atmosphere and chock full of Barbara Stanwyck's throaty, blood-curdling screams. Like Psycho, Robert Bloch's screenplay hauls out its spooks and scares at odd points, never letting the audience settle into a predictable narrative flow. A bizarre wedding-from-Hell officiated and witnessed by wax figures is particularly creepy. The sound work is also quite effective, from the ghostly tapping of Trent's cane, to Irene's aforementioned screams, to the superb and moody score by Vic Mizzy. And of course, there's the inherent interest in seeing two former larger-than-life Hollywood stars working outside their comfort zones in a low-budget mystery-thriller.

The movie suffers from a few plot holes and continuity errors that occasionally spoil the carefully-built atmosphere. Trent's 2nd floor laboratory that figures into so much of the film's plot is never adequately explained-- what did he do there, what was it for? A character, Irene's beauty parlor assistant (Joyce, played by Judi Meredith) is introduced, seems to be nefariously involved in the mystery, and then is quickly and inexplicably dispatched. And at the climax, a character refers to some trick with the Trent mansion's clocks, which to that point had not figured in the plot at all (probably a scene that didn't make the final cut). On the other hand, the holes and inconsistencies add to the film's incoherent, dreamlike quality. Dreams within dreams.

If you see this in your dreams,
you need to wake up fast!

Speaking of dreams, Castle, always trying to do something different, inserted an odd, animated sequence between the film's opening titles and Act I. Narrated by Paul Frees (whose rich, deep voice was utilized in a number of genre movies of the time), the sequence lasts for several minutes, and is a surreal, somewhat rambling mini-essay on dreams and nightmares:

When you dream, you wander into another world where everything is strange and terrifying, a world that only exists at night. When you dream, you become… a night walker!

A woman's face, half hidden in shadows, is suddenly supplanted by a fist clenching a staring eyeball. The woman screams. The scene is irised out, then Act I begins with the hideous, sightless Trent advancing toward the camera. Damn, but that is some good, weird stuff-- classic William Castle! I know this is going to make me sound hopelessly old and out of touch, but I wish there were more William Castles in movies today, and fewer Michael Bays.

Long out of print in the U.S., The Night Walker is hard to find on DVD or for downloading/streaming. It deserves better. A few sites offer foreign DVD releases that are playable on North American machines. Google Night Walker DVD and see what you find.


The mystery of dreams is explored in a surreal introductory sequence: