"Mommie Dearest, please put down that axe!"

Now Playing: Strait-Jacket (1964)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Where to find it:

Amazon Instant Video

Amazon (The William Castle Collection)


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

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:

Grand Guignol Gimmickry

Chamber of Horrors (1966)

Movies have always been a volatile mix of art, craft, and dog-eat-dog commerce. As in any flourishing industry, clever people put in long hours to achieve just the right mix of innovation and marketing to distinguish their products and attract consumers. And, like most industries, it's often difficult to sort out the real innovation from the same old marketing hype. Sometimes, the synthesis of a new idea and clever marketing achieves great success -- for example, it's hard to imagine trying to capture the epic sweep of the great historical dramas of the '50s and '60s (or any current blockbuster for that matter) without anamorphic widescreen. (The Robe, released in 1953, had already begun pre-production for a standard shoot when Twentieth Century-Fox president Spyros Skouras ordered that it be done in the new CinemaScope process. The rest, as they say, is history, if not particularly compelling Biblical history.)

Sometimes, an innovation debuts to great fanfare, sputters out, then comes roaring back as the technology is refined and the kinks are worked out (yep, I'm talking about 3-D). 3-D caused a brief stir in the early to mid 1950s, with horror and sci-fi often leading the charge with titles like House of Wax (1953), Cat Women of the Moon (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and Revenge of the Creature (1955; Revenge was the last 3-D feature to be released in that era). With inevitable improvements in the process and audience experience, 3-D has come back in a big way. After Avatar's record-breaking box office receipts, it wasn't long before every big effects blockbuster and animated movie was being released in 3-D. However, it remains to be seen if the technology will endure or simply die out the way its '50s ancestor did. (Indications are that audiences are increasingly resisting the higher ticket prices and opting for 2-D versions of their favorite blockbusters.)

And then there are the "innovations" that are somewhat less than earth-shattering or industry-changing, but are nonetheless amusing and quirky. In the movie biz, these lesser light-bulb moments have often emerged out of marketing and promotions. William Castle, the P.T. Barnum of B movies, gained a great deal of notoriety for his highly original and eccentric promotions. Castle got the ball rolling with 1958's Macabre, doling out $1,000 life insurance certificates covering "death by fright" to ticket holders. Other infamous Castle stunts/promotions include "Emergo," where an inflatable, glow-in-the-dark skeleton on a wire would fly out over the audience during showings of House on Haunted Hill (1959); "Percepto," whereby vibrating motors were attached under select theater seats and activated when The Tingler (1959) was set loose on the screen; and the "punishment poll" of 1961's Mr. Sardonicus, whereby audience members with glow-in-the-dark thumbs up or thumbs down cards would decide the fate of the title character at the film's climax.

Even by William Castle standards, Chamber of Horrors' promotional gimmick, the "Fear Flasher and Horror Horn," is cheesy. That's a shame, because without the gimmickry, Chamber is a very effective, well-designed, and well-acted costume horror-thriller. Like the previous year's Dark Intruder (1965; covered in this blog back in December, 2010), Chamber started out as a pilot for a suspense TV series entitled "House of Wax." However, executives deemed it "too intense" for television audiences, and it was expanded and the gimmicks added to recoup production costs as a theatrical release. I remember seeing it at a matinee with some elementary school buddies and feeling that we'd been thoroughly ripped off. After being warned by the somber narrator to cover our eyes and ears at each of the "Four Supreme Fright Points" when the Fear Flasher and Horror Horn went off, we were looking forward to seeing some good, ghastly stuff that we'd never be able to see on TV. Each "fright point" was a big cheat, however, with the gory action taking place off-camera (see the clip below). Bummer!

Madman Jason Cravatte is in a hurry to get married.

Seen with older, wiser, and more appreciative eyes, Chamber of Horrors stands up very well, even with the inane gimmick and a somewhat derivative plot. Chamber is set in late 19th century America, and features an early American serial killer in the form of suave but mad Jason Cravatte, the dreaded "Baltimore Strangler." It starts out in a very intense way with a macabre wedding tableau: Cravatte, his steel-blue eyes glittering, is standing in front of a shaking reverend, holding up what appears to be the fresh corpse of a young blonde. The terrified reverend has just started the ceremony, but protests that he can't possibly continue. Cravatte trains a revolver on the man, who decides he can continue after all. When he gets to the part where the bride-to-be must affirm her consent, we see an extreme close-up of her dead, staring eyes. Cravatte nods his head for her. With the wedding from hell wrapped up, the madman kisses his dead bride, compliments the reverend and tips him. The shaking minister makes a quick exit. Next, Cravatte carries his dead bride up to a second floor "honeymoon suite" where he carefully places her on the bed, tenderly wrapping one of her long blonde tresses around her throat. He celebrates with champagne.

The Fear Flasher/Horror Horn doesn't pop up to warn us about this scene, but perhaps it should have. In some ways it's the best scene in the movie, done to dark, disturbing perfection. (A comparably disquieting opening wedding scene comes from -- you guessed it--  a William Castle film, Homicidal, 1961. Homicidal's gimmick was a "Fright Break" before the climax in which terrified moviegoers could bail on the movie and supposedly get a refund.) Given the opening scene, with the suggestion of necrophilia on top of homicide, it's no wonder the TV execs nixed it as a pilot.

Cravatte must be mad indeed, for in letting the reverend go with a tip instead of a bullet, he's effectively led the police straight to his door. We're quickly introduced to Baltimore police sergeant Jim Albertson (Wayne Rogers of TV M*A*S*H fame), and amateur criminologists and wax museum proprietors Anthony Draco (Cesare Danova) and Harold Blount (Wilfrid Hyde-White). Draco and Blount have a cozy relationship with Sgt. Albertson, who happily turns evidence from solved murder cases over to the amateurs so they can build detailed and accurate displays for their museum (of course, the film is set in a time before 24-hour TV news, when the morbidly curious no doubt supplemented newspaper accounts of sensational murder cases with trips to the wax museum).

By being in the right place at the right time, our enterprising criminologists/museum owners get in on the ground floor of the bizarre Baltimore Strangler case. With some determined footwork, Draco and his cohorts track Cravatte to brothel where he is trying to replicate in great detail his wedding night crime with a spooked prostitute. Confronted by Sgt. Albertson, hands in the air, Cravatte blithely asks the confused woman to excuse him while he surrenders to the authorities. So far so good.

In an expressionistic courtroom scene back lit in deep red, we see frequent close-ups of Cravatte's mad eyes darting to and fro as the case is relentlessly presented against him. The judge sentences Cravatte to death, then praises Draco for his invaluable help in apprehending the murderer. Cut to a train transporting Cravatte and his law enforcement escort to prison. The official handcuffs the condemned man to one of the train's coupling wheels while he attends to some business.  Ever resourceful, Cravatte manages to grab an axe hanging nearby. He frantically tries to chop at the handcuff, to no avail. Finally, in desperation, he unscrews the wheel, and still clutching the axe, jumps from the train just as it's crossing a river. This is the first of the "Supreme Fright Points" -- we get the Fear Flasher and the Horror Horn moments before the drowning Cravatte struggles to sever his hand from the heavy wheel that's dragging him to the bottom of the river. A cloud of blood obscures the details of the gruesome act.

Having dragged the river and found the wheel with a decomposed hand, the authorities are eager to close the books on the Cravatte case, assuming his decomposed body washed out to sea. Cut to Cravatte lighting a cigar in a dark New Orleans alleyway. He's visiting an exotic part of town to be fitted with a special set of "tools" to take the place of his hand. It appears he's going to be doing some chopping and dicing, but he's definitely not auditioning for The Next Food Network Star!  At the same time he runs into a beautiful, working class "artist's model," Marie Champlain (Laura Devon) who evidently reminds him of his dead bride. Waving his hook-for-a-hand in her face, he tells her that she is going to help him with some plans, and that she'll be paid very well: "Now, you'll never be a lady, but only you and I will know the difference… My dear Marie, we have much to do… it takes time for a crawling caterpillar to become a true butterfly…"

The "master-criminal-wreaking-vengeance-on-the-people-who-captured-and-sentenced-him" plot is nothing new, but Cravatte executes his  plans with a delirious panache that is fun and a little chilling to watch. He uses his new beautiful butterfly to lure the imperious judge who sentenced him to death into a trap. "You're dead!" the judge sputters when confronted by the madman. "Yes I am… won't you join me?" Cravatte responds as he prepares to deliver his own demented form of justice (see the clip below).

The proposed TV pilot "House of Wax" became
"Chamber of Horrors" for theatrical release.

Another nice touch is that Draco and Blount feature Cravatte's bloody handiwork (e.g., the judge's dismembered body wrapped in butcher's paper) in their Wax Museum of horrors without at first realizing who is responsible. Of course, Cravatte's ultimate goal is to revenge himself upon Draco, the man primarily responsible for his capture. Good melodrama dictates that the two adversaries have their final showdown in the wax museum itself. Cravatte's fate in the museum climax is especially ironic.

Horror writer Ray Russell teamed up with TV writer Stephen Kandel on the story. Russell is most famous for his neo-gothic horror story Sardonicus, published in Playboy in 1961, and adapted for the screen by Russell himself for William Castle's Mr. Sardonicus (there's that Castle connection again!). Russell also contributed to the screenplays for Roger Corman's X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963) and The Premature Burial (1962). The prolific Kandel, already a TV veteran at this point, would go on to write and produce for such various and sundry shows as Batman, Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, Mission Impossible, Mannix, and MacGyver.

Patrick O'Neal, so smoothly evil in Chamber, alternated between movies and TV through nearly five decades of acting work. He was adaptable and competent, but never caught fire as a leading man. IMDb's mini-biography cites Chamber as "probably" his best known film (it's certainly one of his better performances).

Cesare Danova (Anthony Draco) is perhaps more interesting for his accomplishments outside of acting. There was apparently little he couldn't do: he was a fencing champion and world class rugby player in his teens, studied to be a doctor, spoke five languages, painted, collected antiques and rare books, won a top prize in archery, and piloted his own planes (whew!). In Chamber, he is the perfect "exotic" European foil for the cold, blue-eyed O'Neal.

The ravishing Laura Devon (Marie Champlain) appeared in a handful of films and did a fair amount of television in the 1960s before retiring from acting after her second marriage.

Don't let the cheesy Fear Flasher and Horror Horn deter you-- Chamber of Horrors is a solid horror-thriller with some stylish, inventive touches, great camerawork, and acting to match. It's available on a Warner Home Video double feature DVD along with another thriller from 1966, The Brides of Fu Manchu.


Cover your eyes and ears when Jason Cravette (Patrick O'Neal) goes to work on the unfortunate residents of Baltimore: