"Put the Mask on NOW!"

The Mask (1961)

I recently had a spirited discussion with my stepson about Inception (2010). Like many IMDb users, he thought it was the stand-out movie in a fairly mediocre set of best picture Oscar nominees. He was wowed by the special effects and impressed by the story's complexity. While conceding the mastery of its visual design, I told him I was somewhat put-off by the cold, analytical nature of the whole thing. The characters are mostly arrogant, grim, and unlikable. The movie and its protagonists move along like a computer program from one visual set piece to the next with not even a smidgeon of humor or humanity to offset the relentless, oppressive atmosphere. But perhaps the movie's worst failing for me is its treatment of dreams. In Inception's universe, dreams, like real life, obey physical laws that can be managed if you only know the rules. They're just another tool for some "Impossible Dream Missions" team to exploit in a dog-eat-dog world. Yuck! In my universe, dreams are fascinating because they don't follow any discernible rules, and you never know what to expect when your head hits the pillow. And they can't be managed by grim technocrats.  If you want to see the latest tech effects wizardry applied to some imaginative concepts, i.e., the city of Paris folding in on itself, then see Inception. But there are other, older movies out there that do a much better job of capturing the awe and mystery of dreams (and the horror of nightmares) with a fraction of a fraction of Inception's budget.

The Mask, made for around $250,000, does a damn good job of spooking the viewer with visions that seem like a mad blending of Salvador Dali, Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft. One of its alternate titles describes it succinctly: The Spooky Movie Show (I can just imagine an ad man furiously jotting down the reactions of wide-eyed kids as they exited the theater and voila! -- coming up with that gem). The Mask's wild visions/dreams/nightmares definitely do not follow any discernible rules, and they most certainly are beyond any human control. Mask does share one theme with Inception-- it too has a self-confident professional who is fascinated by the power of the dream visions, and who thinks he can ultimately understand and harness them. Predictably, this arrogance and overconfidence very quickly leads to his undoing. There are no dream "architects" here-- just hapless humans in thrall to ancient, evil forces beyond their comprehension.

In good "Screenwriting 101" fashion, the movie starts out with action and suspense -- in the dead of night, a terrified woman is pursued by a pale, hypnotized-looking man. He catches her and starts to strangle her. In the struggle, she rakes the side of his face with her fingernails. Cut to an office in mid-day, where young archaeologist Michael Radin (Martin Lavut), scratches on his face, is trying to tell psychiatrist Allan Barnes (Paul Stevens) that he is trapped in a "living nightmare." He's certain he's being hypnotized by an ancient South American ceremonial mask recently acquired by his museum-- and it's commanding him to do horrible things. Like all good, rational doctors, Barnes tries to calm Michael down, reassuring him that the horrors are not real, but rather creations of his mind. Frustrated that Barnes doesn't believe him and can't possibly help, Michael storms out.

The desperate Michael packs up the evil artifact and mails it to Barnes. Mission accomplished, he shoots himself. The police are called in, and in spite of the obvious physical evidence of suicide, Lt. Martin (Bill Walker) senses something else going on, and sets out to investigate further. He starts at Radin's museum, where the director fills him in on the legend of the ceremonial mask-- how it was connected with human sacrifice, and how it can put its wearer into a trance and get him/her to do unspeakable things. Martin moves on to the psychiatrist, who was one of the last people to see Radin alive. In a nice Hitchcock-like touch, Detective Martin interviews the doctor with the unopened box containing the mask right there in plain view on his desk.

After the interview, Barnes opens the box and stares at the key to his patient's suicide. The package also comes with a letter from Michael --  a disturbing testament to the Mask's evil power, and a kind of mocking challenge to the skeptical doctor to see for himself (see the clip below). Michael's words from beyond the grave turn into a forceful command -- "Put the mask on NOW!"  -- and we realize that it's now the Mask itself that is speaking.  Barnes of course heeds the command, and we're off to the races -- the command is also the audience's cue to put on their 3-D glasses (in my case, a pair of the classic anaglyph red-blue glasses that came with the DVD).

The Mask breathes fire at the viewer.

The nightmarish world that we and Barnes experience is shot in 3-D, while the "real" world is shot in flat, washed-out black and white. The irony -- surely intentional? -- is that the nightmares seem more real (or at least more solid) to the viewer. Disembodied eyeballs fly out of the screen; a giant skull breathes fire into the viewer's face; severed hands clutch at the air -- and meanwhile in the supposedly real world, worried "flat-landers" scurry around, trying to make sense of it all. Interestingly, almost all of  the denizens of the Mask's hellish world themselves wear masks. A mute, youngish (?) man with a Beatles haircut and outfitted with a mask and tattered, shredded clothes wanders through all of the dream sequences, bouncing like a hypnotized ping-pong ball from one horror to another. He seems to represent the ego (or perhaps the subconscious) of the person wearing the mask (Barnes).

Rather than being horrified and repulsed after his initial trip into the Mask's world, a flushed and enthusiastic Barnes declares to his girlfriend Pam (Claudette Nevins) that "there's much to be learned here, of man's most secret mind, of a world that exists even deeper than the subconscious!"  Pam responds: "I only see that it's ugly and cruel." Like a powerful narcotic, the Mask has hooked the overconfident doctor, who, as a trained psychiatrist, thinks he can handle it. Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for the viewer), he's dead wrong, and as a result, an increasingly obsessed, manic Barnes takes repeated trips into the hellish dreamworld. Meanwhile, Pam and Barnes' mentor Prof. Quincey (Norman Ettlinger) become increasingly worried, and take desperate measures to wean him from the evil thing. Also closing in on Barnes is the dogged Lt. Martin, who begins to understand that the young archaeologist's suicide was not the end of the Mask's malign influence. As the film builds to its climax, the nightmare sequences become even more bizarre and horrifying. The burning question: is there enough of Barnes' rational brain left to resist the Mask, or will he too succumb to murder and suicide?

Beware the hypnotic "eyes of light"!

From the user reviews I've read on IMDb and elsewhere, the consensus among the small group of dedicated horror fans who've managed to watch it recently is that while the dream sequences are quirky and interesting, the rest of it is dull, and the acting is average to poor. This seems to me way too harsh, and is probably due to the tendency of many to judge yesterday's films by today's standards. While it may not be a forgotten masterpiece, all aspects of Mask's production are at least competent, and the eerily imaginative dream sequences are as unique as anything I've seen in commercial film (with the exception of Eraserhead). Slavko Vorkapich (gotta love that name!) is credited with the surreal sequences, but the IMDb trivia section for the film quotes an article in Filmfax (#25) as saying that Slavko's concepts were judged too expensive to execute, and that director Julian Roffman did much of the work himself. (Vorkapich's resume includes a number of "montages" and "montage effects" for films in the 1930's and '40s.)

Canadian Julian Roffman directed only one other film, The Bloody Brood (1959), a "juvenile-delinquents-gone-wrong" B movie starring Peter Falk in the early phase of his career. He also wrote and produced; a producer credit that horror buffs might recognize is The Pyx (1973) starring Karen Black and Christopher Plummer. That one is about a detective who uncovers evidence of a murderous devil cult while investigating the death of a prostitute.

Despite the IMDb user consensus, I think the acting ranges from average to quite good. Paul Stevens (Dr. Barnes) is a very recognizable face to anyone who watched a lot of TV (like me) in the 1960s and '70s. He is very good as the overconfident scientist who thinks he can handle and even learn from the evil power of the mask. Claudette Nevins is also quite good as the girlfriend trying to save Barnes from himself and the malevolent artifact. And Norman Ettlinger is very believable as Barnes' mentor Prof. Quincy, who, with Pam, intervenes to try to get Barnes off this otherworldly "drug."

I first saw The Mask in the late 1960s (or thereabouts). A local TV station teamed up with the area's Burger Chef restaurants to distribute 3-D glasses for their upcoming broadcast. While I was disappointed then with the 3-D effects -- as you might expect, cheap glasses combined with an old, slightly fuzzy TV does not work that well --  I was still intrigued by it. Seeing it again recently (this time on DVD, a flat screen TV, and… the same old cheap glasses), I was struck by how well it held up after all that time, even with primitive anaglyph 3-D effects. The Mask is available in a couple of DVD editions. If any of the above sounds interesting, I urge you to see for yourself… and "put the Mask on NOW!"

"Get ready... Steel your nerves... and put the Mask on NOW!"

Giant Ambitions and Small Budgets

The Cyclops (1957)

I doubt that the critics who came up with the auteur theory of film had Bert I. Gordon in mind, but Bert is the very definition of an auteur. The Cyclops credits say it all: Written, produced, directed, and special effects by Bert I. Gordon. Movies rarely get more personal than this.

Bert earned the nickname Mr. B.I.G. for the string of giant monster movies he churned out like sausages starting in the 1950s. His list of writer-producer-director credits is somewhere between humongous and ginormous:

• King Dinosaur (1955) - You guessed it-- extraterrestrial dinosaurs
• Beginning of the End (1957) - Giant grasshoppers threaten Chicago
• The Cyclops (1957) - More below
• The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) - A military man exposed to an atomic test starts to grow and grow
• Attack of the Puppet People (1958) - People become small as the world around them turns gigantic
• War of the Colossal Beast (1958) - The protagonist from The Amazing Colossal Man returns after a fall off Hoover Dam-- madder than ever
• Earth vs. the Spider (1958) - You guessed it again-- giant spiders
• Village of the Giants (1965) - Mutated 30 foot tall teens take over a small town
• Food of the Gods (1976) - From the H.G. Wells story, the wildlife on an island (including rats) grow to enormous size from a mysterious food supply

Note the 6 B.I.G. creature features released in the space of a couple of years!  While perhaps only Bert's psychoanalyst truly understands his fixation on gigantism, a simple explanation is that a very canny B movie entrepreneur made some quick bucks off the public's fascination with (and fear of) science run amok. Bert's giants are stand-ins for the enormous problems that a naive 1950s American populace read about in the newspapers: nuclear bombs and radiation, Communist infiltration, the Cold war, etc.

The Cyclops is not Bert's best work. The plot construction is amateurish, the acting spotty, and the technical effects are weak (more on that later). But Gordon valiantly tries to make the most of limited resources, making L.A.'s Bronson Caves and County Arboretum stand-in for the wilds of Mexico. He sprinkles in a little mythology to add some class to the proceedings. And it doesn't hurt that the movie features a cool, hideous monster that scared the heck out of me when I was a kid.

Cyclops starts out in a small Mexican town, where Susan Winters (Gloria Talbott) is trying to convince the governor to approve her trip into a remote area to look for her fiance, whose plane crashed there 3 years before. (You have to wonder why it took her so long to get the search party organized!) The governor not only tells her that there is no chance her fiance could still be alive, but the area is off-limits to everyone, and he will supply a security guard to fly back to the states with Susan and her party "just to make sure they don't go in the wrong direction." Susan, however, is undeterred, and she and her companions hatch a plan to ditch the security man and take off in their Cessna.

Susan's purpose is clear and simple: to find her fiance, Bruce Barton, who she is certain is still alive. The motivations of her companions are varied: Russ Bradford (James Craig) is a microbiologist and friend of the fiance (and, we find out later, in love with Susan); Marty Melville (Lon Chaney Jr.) is a wealthy financier who's convinced that the wild country they plan to search is full of uranium; and the pilot Lee Brand (Tom Drake) is a devil-may-care type who recently lost a bundle of money and needs the job. The tension in the first part of the movie, such as it is, grows out of the incompatible goals and motivations of the group. What makes Cyclops stand out from the typical fifties B movie fare is that from beginning to end Susan is by far the strongest member of the group, and enforces her will on the reluctant, distracted men. She WILL find her fiance, come hell or high water! She is Ulysses in this poor-man's Odyssey.

On the flight into the Mexican interior, Melville panics after a little turbulence and thrashes around the small cockpit, knocking the pilot out! Susan, sitting in the back seat, manages to revive him just in time to land the plane safely on a large, grassy field. Inexplicably, the other members of the expedition don't even seem to be perturbed that the unstable man has almost gotten them killed! Perhaps they're in shock, or they're just grateful to be alive (and Melville is supposed to be rich after all; maybe they think he'll compensate them). 

The scene and its predecessors illustrate Gordon's weaknesses in story construction. A substantial chunk of the movie is drab exposition: Susan talking to the Mexican official; the group telling their sad life stories over drinks at a cantina; Bradford spending an interminable amount of time trying to buy an American magazine from a young woman who speaks little English; and so on. I got to wondering if Bert took some money from Mexican backers in return for playing up the local color and culture. Melville's tantrum and the near crash seems like a lame, contrived way to generate a little suspense after the tedium of the first 20 minutes of so of the movie. Forget the travelogue, forget Melville -- let's get to the monsters already!

Melville has brought along a spiffy scintillator counter, and he excitedly reports that the whole area is lousy with uranium. As Susan and Russ go off to look for Bruce, he unsuccessfully tries to convince the pilot to fly him back to civilization to stake his uranium claim. In the meantime, Susan and Russ witness a twelve foot tall hawk devour a mouse the size of a large dog. Pretty soon, the group is being menaced by giant spiders, lizards, and other assorted creepy-crawlies that are scary enough normal-sized.

Russ and Susan play fetch with a giant lizard

Writing, producing, and directing on the same film is onerous enough for one person, but add technical effects on top of it all, and you can bet somewhere along the line something's going to suffer. And yes, the technical effects, especially the matte work, are subpar even for the 1950s. The monsters are washed out and differently lit than the backgrounds and the human figures. I can imagine kids at a '50s matinee getting really impatient with the pale, sleepy-looking "giant" lizards to the point of throwing popcorn at the screen and at each other (not that I did any of that).

Approximately 40 minutes into this short 66 minute feature, Gordon finally comes through with the goods, and we (and the expedition) get to meet the titular character. So, is all the clumsy build-up worth the pay-off? At my first viewing (around the age of 10), I jumped at the first appearance of the Cyclops, and was alternately fascinated and repulsed. Jack Young's make-up is startling, imaginative, and just plain gross. A huge fold of skin covers the right eye, as if the creature's forehead had melted. The remaining eye is lidless and bloodshot, and pops out of the skull like a watery ping-pong ball. The right side of the mouth and jaw have been ripped away, displaying enormous teeth. Voice artist Paul Frees provided the monster's caveman-like grunts, groans, and screams.  Frees contributed to countless movies, cartoons and TV shows, including scads of 50s sci-fi movies where he was often featured as a portentous narrator: The Thing From Another World (1951), When Worlds Collide (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), The Deadly Mantis (1956), Beginning of the End (1957), etc. His talents are wasted here, as almost anyone (perhaps including Bert himself) could have grunted to similar effect.

A lot of action is packed into the movie's last 25 minutes. Amazingly, the expedition finds the wreckage of Bruce's plane (either Susan is incredibly lucky or she's psychic). A nifty p.o.v. shot has the monster staring down at Susan as she examines the wreckage (complete with a watery-looking film over the camera lens). As she becomes aware of the thing looking down on her, she slowly looks up, and screams. The monster takes her to a cave, where the rest of the group find her. Gordon cleverly makes us feel sympathy for the hideous thing. This is no unthinking, homicidal beast, but rather a bewildered, injured man stumbling about, his brain turned to mush and his body horribly mutated. In a purely physical role, Duncan "Dean" Parkin does a good job of conveying the Cyclops' confusion and frustration with gestures and facial tics, while still chilling the viewer to the bone.

The radiation, or whatever it is that's mutating all the wildlife in the area, must work very quickly on the brain as well as the body, as the expedition members seem almost as confused as the Cyclops. It takes science-wiz Russ a… very … long … time… to put two and two together: the radiation readings, and the huge animals, and the plane wreckage, and the 25 foot tall, disfigured man hanging around the wreckage... hmmmmm.... Russ doesn't seem to be the whippiest Ph.d on the block. Stoic Susan doesn't seem to get it at all -- or maybe the point is she doesn't want to get it.  At any rate, the characters are so dimwitted that the viewer is tempted to yell at the screen and/or throw popcorn.

Gloria Talbott appeared in countless TV shows in the 50s and 60s, taking time out to make a few B sci-fi and horror movies here and there:  Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957; which played on a double-bill with The Cyclops); I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958; great fun and a near-classic), and The Leech Woman (1960; a nothing role as a scientist's assistant). While certainly not a great actress, her jet-black hair and strong, attractive features make quite an impression.

By the time of Cyclops, Lon Chaney Jr. was tipping the bottle quite a bit, demonstrated by his bloated features and stumbling delivery. He is wildly miscast as a wealthy financier lusting for uranium. Rough, alcoholic cowhand I could believe -- financier… I don't think so. Adding insult to injury, his character is just plain unbelievable, doing incredibly stupid things seemingly just to get some action going.

Tom Drake as the alcoholic pilot Lee Brand lends a little comic relief to the film, joking at one point that once his bottle of hooch is done, it's time to go home. Trapped in the cave by the Cyclops, he reaches for his bottle only to find it empty. "Time to go home," he says bitterly.

So, if The Cyclops is so weak, why include it in a blog dedicated to obscure but worthwhile B movies? Let's let Gloria Talbott have the last say. In Tom Weaver's Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers (McFarland, 2006) she talks in some detail about the making of The Cyclops and the audience reception at its premiere. Her judgment:

Were you happy with the results on The Cyclops?
   I was amazed. There are parts that are corny, but considering the time involved; the amount of locations we went on; how quickly we did it; some of the not-too-reliable actors; and Bert I. Gordon's personality-- considering all that, I think it's not bad. I'm not ashamed of the film; and I'm not ashamed of Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, either.

Indeed! There's a lot to love about little movies that attempt big things on minuscule budgets that would drive mainstream filmmakers into rehab or retirement. If you're interested, a DVD-R copy is available from Oldies.com.

"Unknown terror stalks a forbidden land!"