Walter Graumen puts Olivia de Havilland in peril as a Lady in a Cage (1964) “Right now I am all animal” or “Oh, dear Lord… I am… a monster!”

THE GREAT VILLAIN BLOGATHON APRIL 20-26, 2014 hosted by SpeakeasyShadows and Satin Silver Screenings

“She was very badly raped, you see! We were assaulted by a gang of vicious, young, hoodlums in this house! In this very room, you are sitting in now! I was left a helpless cripple, but for her, the agony was too great! The doctor said it was pneumonia; because it happened some months later! During a flu epidemic! The doctors told me it was pneumonia, but I knew what it was! A VICTIM OF THE MODERN AGE! Poor, poor girl!”-quote from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Lady in a Cage is a nasty and vicious piece of work.

James Caan- is the violent anti-social ruffian Randall Simpson O’Connell and a good choice for ‘The Great Villain Blogathon’ Since I’ve covered two sympathetic antagonists, I thought it was necessary to write about a true villain in every sense of the word. He’s an *animal* as he calls himself. He is not an anti-hero, he is a sadistic, and violently wired punk, a vicious hoodlum, a product of a modern age.

The young James Caan embodies such a sociopathic, undomesticated menacing rage that even though the clichÃ© stocking on his face, it makes him all the more frightening. Randall is the axis of this amoral trio who are such anti-social, narcissistic degenerates that they do not evoke a smidgen of sympathy from the audience. Though he may come from troubled beginnings, his displaced rage pits him against Hilyard who represents everything he despises.

Randall is a misogynist brute who beats his girlfriend Elaine (we hear the blows from behind the door as she both screams and exults in sexual excitement), and would have probably sexually harassed Mrs. Hilyard but for the fact that he mentions how he hates his grandmother, an older and sexless figure. He is physically rough with her, feeling that she is an ‘old crow’ who is controlling and manipulative and has pushed her son to threaten suicide. Undertones of an Oedipal nature run through the plot line as Randall is raging against the devouring mother, that Hilyard represents in the story, which truly plays like a modern mythic tragedy. Randall traumatizes Hilyard until she is almost insane with fear.

Lady in a Cage is a grimy urban ordeal drenched in taboo and inhabited by drunken derelicts, boozy dames, doped-up delinquents, and menacing cruelty that escalates until it is almost unbearable.Â

de Havilland’s lovely face distorts in the reflected mirrored panel of the elevator as she begins to unravel from the brutality and captivity she confronts, all within the vanilla-white tonality of her quiet house. The interior shots alternate with the outer rat race, the urban grime, and modern desolation.

CapturFiles_158 — **Randall leers at Hilyard from under the stocking like a vicious hobgoblin.**

As Tony Williams writes in his chapter Trying to Survive on the Darker Side in The Dread of Difference-edited by Barry Keith Grant-where he cites Grauman’s film “The monstrous adult child product of a traumatic family situation existed in Earlier Decades, as works such as Curse of the Cat People 1944, Psycho, The Strangler 1963, Lady in a Cage 1964, Marnie 1964, I Dismember Mama 1972, The Killing Kind 1973.”
James Caan made an appearance as a soldier with radio in Billy Wilder’s Irma La Douce (1963)
Randall was James Caan’s first credited feature film role after getting his start with small television parts such as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, “Memo from Purgatory” where he plays a writer who goes undercover in a street gang so he can get inspiration for his book. Kraft Suspense Theatre in 1963, Dr. Kildare, Death Valley Days, Combat!, and the ruthless Marty Feketi in ‘Bullets Cost Too Much’ episode of The Naked City 1961 extraordinary social commentary police procedural tv series that ran from 1958-1963. I’m still working through my new DVD box set, and let me tell you, there ain’t nothing like this show with its incredible cast of character actors, dramatic storytelling, and on-location cinematography in New York City in the 60s.

A snippet of the exchange between Hilyard and Randall…

Mrs.Hilyard-“You’re from an asylum?”

Randall-“Asylum? Oh no, you don’t. Reformatory. Work farm. I have been inside every way there is to be inside. I have been some kind of inside since I was nine years old.“

Mrs. Hilyard-“Oh I see. You’re one of the many bits of offal produced by the welfare state. You’re what so much of my tax dollars goes for the care and feeding of.”

Caan, with his very ‘masculine’ hairy chest, was a much more subtle psychopath in Curtis Harrington’s psychological thriller Games 1967 where he gaslights the beautiful but emotionally delicate Katherine Ross with the help of sensual goddess Simone Signoret. BTW, I’ll be doing a special feature on the works of Curtis Harrington hopefully by the summer.

James Caan Games — **James Caan in Curtis Harrington’s Games 1967 with Katherine Ross**

Randall even takes off on Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski from Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire, as he belches, shirtless (most of the film), and leers and smirks in his outre tight jeans.

This evokes “I think I’m going to be sick” from the respectable Mrs. Hilyard who voices her scorn. Randall is in control and enjoys the power struggle, sadistically amused by her indignation and repulsion, “Watch the human being be sick in a cage.” He’s looking for any excuse to lash out.

Randall says [to George Brady the bum] “We’re gonna kill you. First you, then the pig (Sade)… and then, the human being!”

It is suggested that Randall also likes to beat up on his girlfriend Elaine, as she has a black eye. As I stated earlier, off camera while up in the master bathroom behind closed doors,Â it is implied that she actually vocalizes pleasure when he hits her. Elaine herself is an angry and hyper-sexual oddity, perhaps even aÂ sociopath as well, as she moves her body provocatively, quite aware of her seductive maneuvering. She enjoys watching violent acts and she dances to a small music box in a very sexually inappropriate way. Obviously, she is wired to believe that sexuality and violence go together.

Olivia de HavillandÂ as Mrs. Cornelia Hilyard is terrorized by James Caan as the violent Randall Simpson O’Connell and his gang of sociopathic miscreants.

de Havilland’s Cornelia Hilyard suffers from delusions toward the climax –that Randall is her son Malcolm. First when she faints after she speaks to Randall thinking he is Malcolm and then again when he reads the letter and uses the words ‘release’ – as the screen becomes all wavy, as she self-accuses that she is a ‘monster.’

de Havilland having taken the role after Joan Crawford turned down the part of Cornelia Hilyard, and then ironically stepping in a little later that year to fill Joan’s high heels in Hush Hush… Sweet Charlotte when personalities clashed on the set with Bette Davis and Robert Aldrich.

Walter Grauman (his first film obscure B cult classic- The Disembodied 1957, writing for television Peter Gunn, Matinee Theatre, Perry Mason, The New Breed, The Untouchables, Naked City, Twilight Zone (Miniature) Route 66, Burke’s Law, Kraft Suspense Theatre, Honey West, The Fugitive, The Streets of San Fransisco and Barnaby Jones- Directing tv movie horrors like Daughter of the Mind, The Man Who Cried Wolf, Crowhaven Farm, Paper Man, They Call it Murder and The Golden Gate Murders ’79, a terrific hard to find a film with David Janssen and Susannah York.

I just love Grauman’s realist style– it’s raw and captivating mise en scÃ¨ne and here he directs this very taut thriller, that somehow seems to elude a definitive genre category as it falls into place amongst the transgressive noir-hybrids of the 60s, its been linked with Grande Dame Guignol cinema, and it’s every bit a suspense crime drama but there is little written about it in any of my books on the THRILLER or NOIR film genres. Film historian Kim Newman points out that the sub-genre that was a popular psycho trend of the 1960s where “the aging actress as *monster* was inaugurated” by Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

It also showcases elements of the horror style rampant in the 60s and yet again, I’ve found it difficult to locate it in any index, and I’ve got a full library on that subject as you can imagine. The idea of home invasion and torture isn’t a subject that’s been missed this side of the 21st Century. It’s been a featured narrative on shows like Law and Order, Dexter, and Criminal Minds comes to mind.

Gregory A Waller writes in the introduction in American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film- “The 60’s provided a number of noteworthy horror films -still disturbing oddities like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Lady in a Cage (1964), and The Haunting (1964) with its restrained ‘adult’ major studio, quasi-Victorian terror.”

The idea of the home being invaded in an era that was coming off of the industrial age of suburban comforts, ice maker refrigerators, frozen dinners, air conditioners, and appliances for an easier way to be a homemaker. the notion of this once safe, comfortable, and innocent lifestyle is thus shattered by the intrusion of a doomed and violent world out of control. Even more stunning is that the action happens in broad daylight.

Martin Rubin sums it up in his book Thrillers-Lady in a Cage “epitomizes modern day social decay through the predicament of a cut-off shut-in Olivia de Havilland terrorized by lowlifes and juvenile delinquents.”

introducing James Caan-exteriors key to framing an atmosphere of symbolic visual entrapment — **The shots of exteriors, interiors, and certain objects are key to framing a visual atmosphere of entrapment.**

The script was written by writer/producer Luther DavisÂ The Hucksters 1047, B.F.’s Daughter 1948, Kismet 1965, Across 110th Street (1972, tv movies Daughter of the Mind 1969 with Ray Milland and Gene Tierney, The Old Man Who Cried Wolf 1970 with Edgar G. Robinson.

co-starring as Caan’s female sidekick is Jennifer Billingsly as Elaine, Rafael Campos is Essie (a very hard-working character actor in the sixties and seventies, I especially loved him as Little Emanuel with one leg shorter than the other in All in the Family), William Swan as Malcolm Hilyard, Scatman Crothers as the junkman’s assistant,

Lady in a Cage also includes Ann Sothern as the weary and wanton Sade, Jeff Corey as the derelict George L Brady/ who decries, “Repent, repent” the two outliers of society, taking advantage of Mrs. Hilyard’s predicament instead of helping her.

With art direction and production design by Hal Pereira who worked on such great Hitchcock thrillers as Rear Window ’54, Vertigo ’58, and Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s ’61

The evocative soundtrack of beat jazz and experimental nuances by composer Paul GlassÂ (Bunny Lake is Missing 1965, Five Desperate Women 1971 tv movie, To the Devil a Daughter 1976)

At times Glass underscores the world gone awry with sounds akin to the mechanism of social order having just snapped a spring, and becoming uncoiled and shorted out!

The opening credits are framed with the use of bar-like graphics symbolic of not only the literal plot entrapment but the atmosphere of being caged in as well. The linear graphics that interplay with the rolling list of credits remind me of the work of title designer Saul Bass.

CapturFiles_3 — **The titles are reminiscent of Saul Bass.**

Leon Barsha takes care of the tense editing. Barsha knows how to create claustrophobic chaos as he did with Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear 1952, Midnight Lace 1960, editing a few of the most outstanding episodes of The Twilight Zone– A Penny For Your Thoughts ’61, The Grave ’61 and Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up ’61.

Rudolph Sternad production designer/art director-died a year before the film was released. Just to mention a few of his credits-(Dead Reckoning 1947, Walk a Crooked Mile 1948, The Member of the Wedding 1952, High Noon 1952, The Wild One 1953, The Defiant Ones 1958, Inherit the Wind 1960, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World 1963) Set designers were Sam Comer and Joseph Kish.

Cinematographer Lee Garmes has a list of credits, having started as a painter’s assistant and prop boy. He lensed some of the most beautifully visual films,Â The Garden of Allah 1927, Lilies of the Field 1930, Scarface 1932, Call Her Savage 1932, Strange Interlude 1932 then later uncredited for Gone With the Wind, Guest in the House 1944, and of course some of my favorite films, Nightmare Alley 1947, The Paradine Case 1947 and Portrait of Jennie 1948 onto noirs, Detective Story and The Captive City.

Garmes sets up certain shots that give the impression of a brutally grotesque modern masqueradeÂ fÃªte of social misfits on a rampage in a woman-in-peril film.

With various close-ups on the players’ faces, in particular, de Havilland as she begins to lose it. Often the trio are framed at angles where they look over Mrs. Hilyard who appears like a trapped animal in a cage, as they taunt her from above. She seems smaller and helpless. de Havilland begins to lose her coiffed appearance as she devolves, her hair becomes unkempt and she is drenched in perspiration. It’s quite visually disturbing and graphically unnerving. As these good shockers often are as Grauman and Garmes use extreme close-ups of de Havilland’s mouth when she screams for help. The emphasized shots of the alarm bell ringing to no avail, reminds of the detail that cinematographer Ernest Haller paid toward elements of communication and non-escape (the myriad shots of the phone, the stairs) in Aldrich’s What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

director of photog Lee Garmes — **Emphasis on anonymous hands blasting car horns all modern lines of communication that are chaotic and used in an audibly offensive way-dehumanizing noise.**

CapturFiles_11 — **To show the indifference and cruelty of the world, a little girl runs her roller skates along a bums leg…**

CapturFiles_24 — **As voyeurs we see Malcolm through window blinds, peering through the bars of his private world- He writes a letter to his mother-“Darling.”**

CapturFiles_55 — **Malcolm is a coded gay character in the film.**

CapturFiles_59 — **Malcolm’s misadventure with the car sets off a chain reaction of horrific events to follow–fate is in the driver’s seat.**

CapturFiles_63 — **throughout Lady in a Cage, *Lee Garme’s* camera focuses on objects of communication or the lack thereof… Modern conveniences and bourgeois trifle.**

CapturFiles_85 Twenty First Century Desolation — **Twenty-First Century Desolation.**

Lady in a Cage –Hal Pereira’s set is more modern, sterile, streamlined, inharmonious, and unwelcoming. There are many disturbing scenes with the subtle distinction of this hostility and inhumanity like the girl who runs her roller skates over the leg of an unconscious man, an evangelist spouting off about the evils of the world on the radio, a dog hit by a car that drivers keep passing by without stopping.

The date is the 4th of July, it is an extremely hot day, and people’s nerves are more sensitive and agitated during these heat waves which usually leads to more crime. There are exploding garbage cans in the street to mark the holiday.

Garmes focuses on Mrs. Hilyard through the bars of her cage and the reflections in the mirrored panel. We begin as voyeurs. Malcolm is writing his letter, addressing his mother as ‘darling.’ Perhaps a little undeveloped sub-text is to be discussed in a different kind of post. Considering that this one is in a series of ‘love notes’ he writes to her. “Darling” Hhmm???

It is made apparent though not explicitly, that Malcolm is in fact gay, and his mother’s domineering personality is at the source of his homosexuality, which is what films of the 60s & 70s would tend to illustrate.

de Havilland has a screen presence that is quite sophisticated and almost imposing with her sense of stylish intellect and decorum. This puts de Havilland’s Mrs. Hilyard in an interesting position on the graph of class struggle, as Randall and his gang aren’t just fighting amongst their own contemporaries, he is challenging an upper-class society lady and mother figure to attack back.

Ironically what sets off the sequence of actions that ensue is Malcolm whose car hits a ladder, that tears out wires that short out the power lines. He causes the accident that creates the electricity to go out leaving his mother stranded in her gilded prison. He is yet another character in the film who is distracted by his own agenda, self-absorbed carelessness, and indifference. Played out like a tragedy, it is at the chance moment when Malcolm causes the power outage that his mother wearing a sheer negligee gets into her elevated cage locking herself inside like a sitting canary. The ‘cage’ has a mirrored panel by the buttons, that allow for de Havilland/Mrs.Hilyard is to be seen from various angles and expressions.

With her in her gilded trap is a transistor radio, which is reporting about the uncovered murder victim, a woman who has been decapitated!

Mrs. Hilyard (Olivia de Havilland) is a poetess and a wealthy widow who lives in a stifling bourgeois mansion with her son Malcolm (William Swan) Cornelia, though she is never actually called by her first name, has had an elevator installed in her mansion after she breaks her hip. We see Malcolm writing a letter to his mother as he is about to go away for a weekend, leaving his mother all alone in the house. Malcolm appears to be stifled by his mother’s overbearing love, even to the point of her insisting that he drink his orange juice. As he leaves in his car, he backs into a ladder that nudges a wire that short circuits.

This subtle set of events triggering a negative chain reaction causing a power outage, only sparks the larger series of violent circumstances that begin to spiral out of control. Of course, Cornelia Hilyard is now trapped in her gilded cage of an elevator. She has an emergency alarm, which she uses while the electricity is out, but only one person is aroused by the alarm. A derelict wino named George L. Brady (Jeff Corey) hearing the alarm in the alley he ignores her cries for help, and instead helps himself to some of her things. Brady feigns muteness while he rummages around her things, as she is helpless to do anything about it. In desperation she tries to bargain with him to help her, “I will build a shrine to you.”

CapturFiles_43 — **The use of white is so vanilla–like Mrs. Hilyard.**

CapturFiles_47 — **Repent is tattooed on Brady’s hand.**

CapturFiles_62 — Much like Joan Crawford’s Blanche Hudson whose entrapment was because she was wheelchair-bound, the camera would often focus on the distance between the phone that was always out of reach. The lines of communication had been a constant hurdle to invoking the sense of dread and captivity.

CapturFiles_112 — **Randall and his little band of riff-raff wonder where the old bum stumbled onto a $40 toaster and packs of cigarettes.**

CapturFiles_154 — **Brady shows up at Sade’s apartment, telling her about the house filled with so much loot!**

But Brady is only the first character who will prey on the weakness and vulnerability of Mrs. Hilyard. The ferocious and unsympathetic opportunism is a theme that will carry through the film’s storytelling. And none is likable and no one is safe from harm. While we might feel slightly ambivalent toward the poor souls who are down and out on their luck, or the proper and uptight Mrs Hilyard who is the central sufferer in the piece, the narrative doesn’t allow much time for us to feel compassion which only illustrates that the message of nihilism translates with an authentic sting. Mrs. Hilyard is every bit part of the testimony of elitist apathy and arrogance that comes along with a hypocritical and so-called civilized modern society.

The film begins to escalate with a real sense of urgency and a smothering atmosphere of dread. The derelict Brady fences the goods and then pays a visit to his slovenly dame Sade (Ann Sothern). This sets off yet another ripple in the threatening current that is building in the narrative.

Following Brady from the junk dealer to Sade’s apartment the vicious trio learns about Mrs Hilyard’s house. The savage bunch of hoodlums Randall, Elaine, and Essie hang back and wait for the right time to strike. The three lowlifes follow George and Sade to the mansion wearing stockings to obscure their identities, as they start ravaging the place. Eventually, they kill the old bum George L Brady who is in a way the second catalyst for the crime of invading and tormenting the trapped Mrs. Hilyard. Hypocritical too as he decries, ‘repent’ though he not only ignores her pleadings for help, he engages the mechanism of ill-fate-he must also be the first to be disposed of. And although we do not see any of the gory details when they stab him to death, the murder is still quite gruesome, as the force of violence still permeates the screen with Paul Glass’ use of music box nuance to create contrast between the two experiences.

CapturFiles_49a — **When the phone rings, it startles both Sade and Brady.**

CapturFiles_50 — As Mrs.Hilyard yells into the phone after it rings she knocks it off the hook, but Sade rips the wire out of the wall. Hilyard starts to lose it, calling out for help, calling out **’emergency’.** Sade creeps up the stairs while Hilyard hangs in mid-air in her cage. Hilyard tells her “**This is my house, my sons, and mine. I broke my hip and am somewhat incapacitated.”**

CapturFiles_57 — **“Perfume, is that perfume? A woman, are you a woman?… Listen, Hello my name is Hilyard. I am Mrs. Hilyard.”** The bum Brady creeps around the stairs and cage. As if the house has been invaded by termites come to pick it clean. Hilyard continues to try and make contact with her intruders **“What’s your name? Won’t you answer me? Please answer me”** She moves around the inside confines of her gilded prison calling out for them to answer her. With no success.

CapturFiles_20 — **“Please help me get out of this horrible cage. Please, please PLEASE!!!!”**

CapturFiles_61 — Suddenly the moment is broken with a horrifying wail, as the three hoodlums rush the stairs wearing stocking masks. It’s an immobilizing stunner in the film, that breaks the initial inertia of Hilyard’s entrapment and the circular photography that creates a whirlpool effect. At first a mind-numbing monotony and then a blitz of chaos.

CapturFiles_147 — **Randall makes Sade his pickup truck.**

CapturFiles_148 — **Hilyard soaked in sweat and crazed has already been driven half mad. Now she is terrified.**

CapturFiles_176 — **“Who, what monsters… Do you stink… get out…. steal and get out. What sort of creatures are you?** Randall slithers over to her and pounds on the top of the cage. “Oh, even animals would have more civil compassion than you” Randall –**“What… what you. You’re something holier than thou? Huh… You’re something ah. You ain’t no animal?”** Hilyard- **“I am a human being… a thinking feeling creature”** He belches in her face. she winces. “**Ah well me I”m an animal. Right now I am all animal. Lot of times I can’t even make animal. A lot of times I’m what do ya call, an inmate? But animal’s better.”** Hilyard-“What do you mean inmate… asylum… you’re from some asylum?” He says-**“Asylum…**(tisk) **Oh no you don’t. hahaha… reformatory. Work farm. I been inside everywhere there is to be inside. I been some kind of inside since I was a, 9 years old.”** Hilyard with contempt in her voice-“Oh I see… you’re one of the many bits of offal produced by the welfare state. You’re what so much of my tax dollars go to the care and feeding of.” Randall answers her-“Well a, I don’t know from offal, but yeah… yeah. And I sure do want to thank you ma’am for all them tax dollars. The food is lousy though… belch, haha” He begins to literally rattle her cage.

CapturFiles_183 — This image of the ‘outside world’ gazing at us– the audience while they are confronting Hilyard creates a chilling moment that is truly indicative of a horror film– We too become voyeurs looking in on society as it implodes from violence and apathy The four intruders watch her with their masks on. As the monsters watch their prey lose control she cracks within her captivity. They study her. We study them watching her. The entire plot closes in on itself at that moment. The world turns –inside out from outside in.

CapturFiles_188 — She begins an inner monologue **“The world must have ended. Someone on one side or the other must have pushed the button. Dropped the bomb.”** She puts on her little transistor radio… She hears...”Ladies and gentlemen, here stands before us, the man of tomorrow” the radio spouts its media dogma. Modern experimental music underscores the insanity of the moment. The complete loss of rational thought. Civility and safety. Applause The sounds of haywire, slipped cogs, and shorted fuses. the noise of chaos. She laughs and drops the radio out of the elevator it lands on the floor and smashes. She begins to laugh heartily. She has lost it.

They lock Sade in the closet never to be heard from again–not before they rough her up a bit, pushing her into a mirrored dressing table, where she cuts herself. George Brady’s fate is much worse.

At this point, Randall sets his sights on Mrs.Hilyard who is trapped as the lady in said cage.

Mrs. Hilyard becomes less consequential at the moment the vicious trio arrives, as she is a symbol of the weakened society–the raw meat for the predatory wild animals, the more vulnerable of the modern jungle which will get picked off first. As Shelley so aptly notes, it’s very ‘Darwinian’ and the survival of the fittest. Mrs. Hilyard as much as refers to the city as a jungle.

Mrs. Hilyard-“I am a human being. A feeling, thinking, human being.”

Randall-mocking her- “Okay. I am *all* animal. Sure beats the hell outta being an inmate…”

Mrs. Hilyard ” … inmate?… Asylum?

Randall begins tormenting her, by playing head games. He shows her a note from her son Malcolm telling her he’s about to commit suicide because of her overbearing motherly love. “Release me from your generosity. Release me from your beauty. Release me from your love.”

The entire film’s universe is filled with deviant and transgressive characters. Sade is a self-hating woman who demeans herself because of her weight. Her ability to escape the chaos is hampered by her greed to take part in the looting of Mrs, Hilyard’s house. To add to the queasy touches, Sade wears a jeweled headband giving her an odd-ball air of eccentricity. She would again play a similar type of character as Thelma Lambert in Curtis Harrington’s The Killing Kind 1973-another mother who loves her son too well, he becomes a lady killer…

The pawnbroker Mr. Paul only has one eye. perhaps this is symbolic of a skewed vision of the world that surrounds him. He is also an opportunistic figure. Brady and Sade are afflicted with alcoholism.Â

As Peter Shelley says in Grande Dame Guignol Cinema the film is “A disturbing indictment of the amorality of 1964 American society, as well as a nightmare for those suffering from claustrophobia and vertigo, this film introduces Olivia de Havilland to the Grande Dame Guignol subgenre.”

Walter Grauman creates an atmosphere of deafening nihilism that is so harsh and brutal it is almost hard to watch it at times. An indictment of modernity, opportunism, and the industrial age, the use of sound with the car horns blaring in clusters of traffic, the sounds from the streets that invade Mrs. Hilyard’s closed-in world is exhausting. The film delivers a sense that all of life is a furious, insensitive rhythm of hostility and discord. There is no empathy toward the individual and people are merely anonymous faces making the strident and shrill noise and disturbing the quietude of civilized life.

What makes this a suspense/noir hybrid is the environment of entrapment and flawed characters, with Lee Garmes’ camera angles and Leon Barsha’s razor-sharp editing that keeps the pacing at an uncomfortable beat. Even the graphics that follow the credits representative of the bars of a cage symbolizing the narrative’s imprisonment. Cinematic bars were deftly used in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? as Aldrich wanted us to feel at every turn the same sense of captivity that Blanche as well as Jane’s state of mind, and the landscape of the old Gothic mansion which felt like it was desolate and decaying.

And much like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane’s use of the outer world excursions Jane would take that would constantly throw light into the closed-in universe of Hudson’s mansion, Grauman and Garmes utilize shots of the ever-turning world outside Mrs. Hilyard’s captivity to emphasize this contrast visually reinforcing the horror that is taking place within the confines of the house that is shut off. We feel that every frame has a sense of intrusion.

CapturFiles_31 — **The film has so much cruelty in it… it’s an exercise in Nihilism.**

CapturFiles_72 — **Outside the house, the world goes on spinning, the paper boy delivers the news on an ordinary street.**

CapturFiles_99 — Essie finds the letter. **“Darling Mom… “Hey, how bout that it sounds real a …. gay,”** Mrs Hilyard asks Essie-**“What is that that you’re holding? Where did you get it?”** Essie-**“What am I holding, a letter that was on the desk upstairs, do you want to hear it?”** Randall tells Essie-**“Ah, let her die curious.”**

CapturFiles_101a — Randall asks her-**“Is your little boy married?”**

CapturFiles_22 — **“I bet you had him at it til he was about twelve didn’t ya?… kept him sucking”** She slaps him hard across the face. He grabs her violently, pushing his arm across her throat.

CapturFiles_111 — He begins to taunt her with the letter. **“Darling Mom,”** She tries to grab it away from him. He slams her hard against the wall of the cage. with his forearm pressed against her neck. His hairy sweaty chest is exposed, like he’s a pirate, his white shirt tied at the waist. Randall continues reading the letter from Malcolm **-“I’ll be thirty next Wednesday, and I won’t have many more chances in life.”**

CapturFiles_34 — Mrs Hilyard confused says-**“What, what”**Randall continues to read– **“Every time I try to leave you, you add a room or dress up the house, or charm me…”**

CapturFiles_36 — He looks straight at her. She looks horrified. “No…” Randall says-” I thought you only had him at it til he was twelve. But you still got him at it… How do you charm him baby” He pulls her back by her hair… “I had a holier than thou old crow of a grandmother. She tried to keep me at it too. I’d a killed her if she hadn’t died… Like she was trying to kill me. Like you kill this um what’s his name… uhm Malcolm.” Mrs Hilyard begs, **“No, no this is his too you know he decorated it himself. Complete freedom to come and go he wanted to stay here. Why would he write me a letter? We’re as close as…”** She pauses and looks into Randall’s eyes. He smiles quietly at her as she begins to have an awareness. Randall asks her again, **“He’s not married is he? Does he even have a girl?”** **“He has many women friends”** **“Oh yeah yeah yeah, all his friends are from public shower rooms I bet”** She struggles but he continues to hold her up by her hair. It’s barbaric. He continues to torment her with her son’s letter. “Uhm, give me my half of what’s in the living room safe. What safe!!!!!!!” He repeats that line again…”Release me from your generosity, release me from your beauty, release me from your love.” Now she has truly begun to confuse reality and fantasy after she hears him say the word love. She says **“Oh love”** and touches his face as if it is Malcolm’s. **“Oh love, love you could have your half any time you wanted. My half too for that matter.”** Essie interrupts. **“Read her the P.S. It’s got what they call some real buckshot in it… real loaded. Read it to her”** Randall finishes the letter-**“P.S. Think it over. I’ll call in a little while. Please make it yes or quite simply I’ll kill myself.”**

CapturFiles_38 — The interplay between Caan and de Havilland is utterly realistic. A volatile and primal confrontation between young and old, civil society and the disillusioned masses, and paternal and maternal law. fear and compassion.

CapturFiles_46 — Elaine and Essie go to look for the safe. Randall is left alone in the cage with Mrs.Hilyard who has fainted. For a brief moment, it almost appears as if Randall feels sorry for her. He touches her face and neck. He looks the most thoughtful he’s been. He whispers to himself. “Old crow baby.” This is a hint at Randall’s mother’s issues which does not excuse his violent abuse of women.

The film was refused a cinema certificate in the UK by the BBFC and remained unavailable until 2000.

Reviews courtesy of Paul Shelley’s Grande Dame Guignol Cinema- The picture was released on July 8, 1964.

“Lady in a Cage adds Olivia de Havilland to the list of cinema actresses who would apparently rather be freaks than be forgotten … a grande chance to go ape. Attagirl, Ollie“- Time, June 19, 1964

“…{S}ordid, if suspenseful, exercise in aimless brutality… A discerning viewer is left curious and repelled… Olivia de Havilland as the trapped ‘Lady’ does project a sense of fear and self-appraisal … a surface, somewhat obvious portrayal.” -A. H. Weller, The New York Times, July 11, 1964

“…{A} noxious, repulsive, grueling experience… Davis’s sensationalistically vulgar screenplay is haphazardly constructed, full of holes, sometimes pretentious, and in bad taste. {de Havilland} gives one of those ranting, raving wild-eyed performances often thought of as Academy Award oriented. {She} does about as well as possible under the dire circumstances.” Variety May 25, 1964

**Â Right now I’m all MonsterGirl Hope you’ve enjoyed this post for The Great Villain Blogathon!**

When the Spider Woman Looks: Two Glorias- “Wicked Love, Close ups & Old Jewels”- The sympathetically tragic villainesses of Sunset Blvd (1950) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

**This is part of the Great Villain Blogathon hosted by Speakeasy* Shadows and Satin & *Silver Screenings from April 20th – 26th 2014**

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”– T.E. Lawrence

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”- Mark Twain

IT’S ALL IN THE EYES! -THE LEGACY OF GLORIA SWANSON/NORMA DESMOND & GLORIA HOLDEN/COUNTESS ZALESKA

Are these wicked women? Do they exemplify the monstrous feminine? I dare say NO! They are sensual yet tragic figures!

Gloria Holden’s Countess Zaleska is a victim of her bloodline (literally)–her father Dracula’s legacy, desperately seeking out redemption and’ release’ from the torture of her relentless desires. (lesbianism in the form of blood lust) And Gloria Swanson‘s enduring Norma Desmond an aging silent screen star pushed out by talkies-a victim of a punishing Hollywood institution that forces older women into self-delusion. Though her beauty did not fade, the praise and recognition have.

Both women are literally immortal!

Ironically without realizing the connection, there are two threads of synchronicity that revealed themselves after I decided to pair both Glorias. A) Both women have male servants who show a stoic undying co-dependent worship of their mistress and B) Hedda Hopper appears in both films…

“She gives you that weird feeling!” –tagline from Dracula’s Daughter

Two Glorias, two dynamic forces on screen- Written about endlessly, on the surface spider women, vamps and villainesses perhaps… but to the thoughtful observer and film fanatic like myself… they are sympathetic figures in a cruel world…

“Cast out this wicked dream that has seized my heart.”- subtitle from one of Gloria/Norma’s silent films.

First, let’s begin with our ‘close-up’- on Gloria Swanson as the eternally mesmerizing Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece! Norma is in actuality the one trapped in an orbit of ambivalence about her own primacy which ultimately devolves into a vulnerable, needy, discontented, and brooding personality whose dependency upon men and (one opportunistic man in particular) is self-destructiveness turned outward.

SUNSET BOULEVARD 1950

Written and directed by auteur Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity 1944, The Lost Weekend 1945, Ace in the Hole 1951, Stalag 17 (1953), Witness for the Prosecution 1957, Some Like It Hot 1959, The Apartment 1960, which won BEST PICTURE that year, beating out ELMER GANTRY!).

Considered the last motion picture in the film noir canon. The first is Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity 1944 with his notoriously sexified femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson, who’s got a great pair of gams showcasing that diamond ankle bracelet, dark sunglasses, and Barbara Stanwyck’s cool exterior. And Wilder’s last noir, Sunset Boulevard, unofficially marked the end of classical noir’s heyday. Sunset Boulevard truly pushes the conventions of noir to its limits.

Written for the screen by Wilder and Charles Brackett (The Lost Weekend ’45, Edge of Doom, ’50, Niagara ’53).

Music by Franz Waxman (Magnificent Obsession ’35, The Invisible Ray ’36, A Day at the Races ’37, The Man Who Cried Wolf ’37, Gone With the Wind -uncredited, Humoresque ’46 I Married a Monster From Outer Space, Home Before Dark, there’s so much more– see IMDb profile).Waxman’s score is superb, from the exhilarating opening sequence that accompanies the flurry of police and newsreel camera trucks racing to the crime scene, the vibrant strings and strident horns that accentuate modernity, to the more subtle, poignant moments that underscore Norma’s internal agony.

John Seitz is responsible for the evocative and quirky noir-esque cinematography (Sullivan’s Travels ‘4I, Double Indemnity ’44, The Lost Weekend ’45).

The use of light in key frames showcases Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond who exults whenever she is either watching herself or is thrust into sudden illumination rendering her as somehow lost. The use of shadows and oddly lit spaces evoke the sense of her tragic misconstruction of reality.

Bruce Crowther on- Cinematographer Seitz who helped to define some of the memorable images of Sunset Boulevard– “Rarely does full light intrude upon this movie… Seitz handles the often cluttered sets using lighting to direct the eye to each scene’s key areas. Even when light is used fully, as when Norma steps into the beam of her home movie projector or when a lighting technician at the studio turns the spotlight on her, it serves a dark purpose… Here it shows with appalling clarity the incipient madness that will eventually destroy Norma.”

Arthur P Schmidt, the film editor, died at age 52 (worked on Ace in the Hole and Some Like it Hot with Wilder).

Art direction by Hans Dreier and John Meehan, fabulous mise-en-scène by set designers Sam Comer & Ray Moyer who both worked on (Read Window 1954, Vertigo 1958, Breakfast at Tiffany’s 1961) Which arranges the landscape of Norma’s World with Art Deco style furnishing, elaborate candelabras, wrought iron scrolled staircases, tapestries, and ornate lighting fixtures. Norma’s bedroom is something out of a Gothic fairytale with its superfluous ruffles and claustrophobic pageantry.

Wilder and his artistic design team create an atmosphere of decadence and decay. Using an ornate baroque visual style that puts emphasis on the surroundings which are careful set pieces of time-worn opulence. The scenes are filled with a cluttered and suffocating mise-en-scène. Sunset Boulevard reveals the conflict of the old grandeur of the silent era with the hollow clamor of modernity, as a ‘clash of styles and eras.’

Once Joe walks in from the brightly lit Los Angeles hustle and bustle, the tone turns darker, as he steps inside the confines of the mansion, crowded with the serpentine wrought iron staircase, large yet dim light fixtures, and ancient-looking columns that appear to be disintegrating in small scattered parts. Set against the crispness of Max’s white gloves and Norma’s black sateen lounging pajamas, it offsets the sense of a perishing house oddly and creepily. Again, this is where noir meets horror by the elements combined in the visual style.

Most effectively is the central character of Norma Desmond whose electrifying intensity and melodramatic flare projects an other-world style in contrast with the biting and cynical, dispassionate humor of the younger screenwriter from the age of talkies.

According to Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair, many of the film’s props came from own Swanson’s home and scrapbooks. “One shot pans across the table covered with Swanson’s film stills, the photographs in old frames capturing her young face and heavily painted eyes.”

The portrait in Norma’s living room was painted by Geza Kende. Wilder also borrowed a film clip of “Norma” in her prime from a Swanson film Erich Von Stroheim directed, Queen Kelly 1929.

From Foster Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen- he cites Amir Karimi in Toward a Definition of the American Film Noir as the true period of noir beginning with Wilder’s Double Indemnity and ending with the same directors Sunset Boulevard 1950. He goes on to say that Wilder’s noir drama’s contain “the biting social comment, the stinging disapproval of the American way” Sunset Boulevard “transfers noir psychology to a novel setting, the decaying mansion of a once-grand film star. Wilder’s portrait of the megalomaniacal Norma Desmond is etched in acid; she is the embodiment of Hollywood’s rotting foundations, its terminal narcissism, it’s isolation from reality.”

Norma’s sensational costumes were created by prolific designer Edith Head, who resurrected Swanson’s silent era look, the exotic and exaggerated costumes and fashions of an ex-screen Goddess, which point back toward Swanson’s past. She wears a hat, adorned with a peacock feather, in the scene where she is reunited with Cecil B. DeMille. This is a visual homage to a headdress she wore in Male and Female 1919 one of the first films in which she was directed in.

The silent movie queen Norma Talmadge is reported as “the obvious if the unacknowledged source of Norma Desmond, the grotesque, predatory silent movie queen” – Dave Kehr, “An independent woman, nobly suffering in silents”, New York Times, 11 March 2010.

Sunset Boulevard could not have been cast with anyone better than the dynamic and grande actress who in 1919 was signed to a contract by Cecil B. DeMille.With this, her comeback role, Gloria Swanson ignites the screen with her eponymous Norma Desmond -star of the silent screen -Norma Desmond, the tragic central satellite of the story, who herself is dreaming of a comeback. Swanson’s performance is as much transfixing as it is exquisite.

gloria swanson- — **The intoxicating beauty of Gloria Swanson from the silent era.**

Swanson herself was a very hard-working actress in the 1910s and 1920s with Mack Sennett before joining Paramount Studios. She started her own production company in the mid-’20s but only made a few talkies in the 1930s. She made six silent films with Cecil B. DeMille.

As Leo Braudy says in his insightful book, The World in a Frame: What We See– Aesthetically, Swanson faces into the film as the fictional character Norma Desmond and faces outward toward us as the star. He calls her role a ‘meditation’ on her screen image and the relationship between the old world of silent films and the new world of 1950s Hollywood. He refers to the other actors who were her contemporaries playing themselves as ’embalmed’ with her in the past, losing their relevance to the audience and ultimately their power.

Billy Wilder’s film is, as James Naremore says in his book More Than Night- Film Noir in its Contents, an “iconoclastic satire” and “a savage critique of modernity.” Much like Aldrich’s The Big Knife, it is a condemnation of Hollywood in the cycle of films released in the 1950s. Also notable is The Bad and The Beautiful 1952. Naremore points out that these films coincided with the blacklist and the decline of studio-owned theater chains, marking the end of an era. Norma’s character is a casualty of changing times.

Co-starring as the ill-fated, gutless, ‘big dope’, unemployed screenwriter who becomes Norma’s gigolo is smooth and sexy William Holden as Joe Gillis. Erich Von Stroheim plays Norma’s devoted butler and ex-hubby Max Von Mayerling. Erich Von Stroheim who had directed Swanson in Queen Kelly ’29 is perfectly suited to play her servant/ex-husband/devotee.

The film also co-stars Nancy Olson (Union Station 1950) as Betty Schaefer, Fred Clark as Sheldrake, Lloyd Gough as Morino, Jack Webb as Artie Green, Franklyn Farnum as the undertaker, and special appearances as themselves, Cecil B. DeMille, Hedda Hopper, Buster Keaton, Anna Q Nilsson, H.B. Warner, and composers Ray Evans and Jay Livingston.

The film is a Gothic, poetic nightmare in noir that so often evinces a sympathetic lens toward the forgotten characters who engage the audience like apparitions of another time in Hollywood. The unorthodox narrative embraces a vividly unstable noir identity that dwells within the constructs of American life, pushing the limits of social and sexual convention to a dark place of obsession and excess. However, Wilder scripted this as a black comedy, the noir stylization that had by now run through its recurring patterns still manages to create the incessant mood of bleak cynicism and a distant vulgarity.

Bruce Crowthers Reflections in a Dark Mirror- “Of the other German emigres who worked in Hollywood the most significant contributor to the film noir is Billy Wilder, whose Ace in the Hole perhaps the most cynical movie ever to come out of Hollywood, Double Indemnity with its mesmerizing manipulative spider-woman and Sunset Blvd with its atmosphere of brooding baroque insanity are classics of the genre.”

“Wilder introduces a creepy atmosphere of eccentric ruin that’s strange and destroys lives, yet hypnotically alluring and seductive from a lost indulgent age.”– Alain Silver & James Ursini from The Encyclopedia of Film Noir-The Directors

Wilder wanted stark reality and realism to pierce the veil of illusion and fantasy that was the dream factory of Hollywood in the 1950s. He portrays a corrupt landscape of used-up people, conniving agents, writers hustling to get their scripts sold, and the loneliness and alienation that permeates a world of broken dreams and perpetual struggle.Â Andrew DickosÂ in Street With No Name callsÂ Wilder’sÂ noir films “visions are steeped in cruel and corrosive humor, distinctive in its own right and its ability to function apart from the noir universe.”

In this provocative masterpiece, Billy Wilder masterfully evokes a shudder in us, “by emphasizing its verisimilitude, though, Wilder reveals the hidden truths of the world’s cruelest company town- from the isolation of forgotten celebrities to the crass efficiency of producers. Not only a thrilling and strange piece of entertainment, the film also is an indictment of Hollywood.” –Kashner & MacNair

Louis B. Mayer, at a private screening of Sunset Boulevard, was furious with Wilder for his cruel portrayal of the industry that supported him. At the party before the various celebrities, he reproached him, “You have disgraced the industry that made and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood!”Wilder kept the script hush-hush using the innocuous code title A Can of Beans. Wilder and Brackett feared that Hollywood would respond negatively to their damning portrayal of Hollywood.

He offers us the very typified archetypes of classical noir with his doomed anti-hero, the dangerous femme fatale, and the good girl redeemer. Also present are the familiar themes of entrapment, claustrophobia, instability, corruption, flawed character, psychological crime melodrama and even the police procedural with it’s thrilling opening sequence as the newsreel cameras and police cars, their sirens blaring, tear up the streets as they speed toward the murder scene.

Originally, Billy Wilder wanted the legendary & incomparably sexy and suggestive writer/actress Mae West to play Norma. West declined because she found the story to be ‘too dark’. She also didn’t want a film that portrayed the relationship between an older woman and a younger man that reflected itself as hideous. The two approached Greta Garbo, who also declined the offer. Wilder also approached Mary Pickford , who was appalled by the offer, and they had to apologize to her. It was George Cukor who suggested Gloria Swanson. Wilder asked Gloria Swanson to screen test for the part in 1949, and she almost said no. She had worked with Wilde, who had adapted the screenplay for her film Music in the Air 1934. Norma is a larger-than-life film character, though an exaggeration of reality, considering Swanson wasn’t ancient, she was only fifty at the time!

Wilder had contracted Montgomery Clift to play Joe Gillis. Clift left the picture, finding it too uncomfortably close to his own life, because of the younger man’s relationship- he allegedly had an affair with Libby Holman, a popular singer of the 20s whose career was ruined by the scandal surrounding the shooting death of her husband. Clift had spent time with Holman, who also lived in a sprawling mansion much like Norma’s. Wilder worried that the age difference between Swanson and Holden wasn’t big enough; Swanson was fifty, and Holden was thirty-one.Wilder hadn’t been impressed with some of Holden’s more mediocre films of the ’40s, even though he had starred in Rouben Mamoulian’s Golden Boy (1939) with co-star Barbara Stanwyck. Sunset Boulevard made William Holden’s career. While I find Joe Gillis to be a dismissive, smarmy ass who sort of had it coming to him, in this picture, I let it be known that I’m a huge fan of William Holden!- he did a superb job of playing it cagey, opportunistic, and sarcastic as hell.

WilderÂ mirrors Joe Gillis’ from his own start as a shaky Hollywood writer having moved from Germany to America after Hitler’s rise to power, He used to be a “˜taxi dancer’ who would dance with any unattached older women who were willing to pay for his services.

One of the most iconic scenes from Sunset Boulevard, aside from the film’s fever dream climax where Norma descends the grand staircase, plunging into her gathering madness, is the scene that illustrates the withering passage of a lost era. The three fading silent film stars play bridge in the parlor of Norma’s decaying Gothic mausoleum. During the scene with the old stars playing bridge, the collectors come and take Joe’s car away, the only passport to freedom he has.

“˜The wax works’ cracks-wise, struggling snarky screenwriter Joe Gillis, referring to Norma’s bridge party guests. Wilder envisioned this scene as purposefully macabre, or as Kashner and MacNair call it, “ghastly.” See figures gathered around the table, as the sequence unfolds, it is revealed that these actors are actually playing themselves. Silent screen actress Anna Q. Nilsson and H.B. Warner, who had played Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 picture The King of Kings. And the Legendary actor of silent cinema, Buster Keaton, is there too. Kashner and MacNair describe his features ravaged by alcohol abuse.” Even Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in a way is paying tribute to herself by recalling the bridge game in the parlor scene-“Came close to giving us all the creeps.”

Like the bridge guests, DeMille plays himself with scenes shot on the real set of his 1949 motion picture Samson and Delilah. Erich Von Stroheim, himself a once great director, Wilder uses him poignantly as Max, who mourns his former life. Wilder touches on the fact that Stroheim in real life had a rough time with his career, often going over budget and ultimately making box office flops.

As I’ve pointed out here in this piece for The Great Villain Blogathon, I am using Norma Desmond to argue that she isn’t the psychotic spider woman or villainess that she’s been referred to and that the film neither makes fun of her, yet creates a sense of sympathetic apology to this grande dame mostly revealing her as quite a tragic figure. I neither see her as washed up nor grotesque, but a beautifully powerful woman possessed of intensity. She is the one who is ‘trapped’ in the web of an unforgiving culture that demonizes women for their sexual primacy. Norma is possessed of desire. The desire to still be adored. The desire to make a ‘return’ to motion pictures. The desire to be loved as a great star. The desire to be loved by Joe.

It’s Joe Gillis that is not a very likable guy, who is uncaring, weak, too shallow, and powerless. Let’s face it he’s a self-acknowledged heel. Ironically, sadly it is Norma’s story that is being told through this guy’s voice and perspective yet another way that her character is silenced, her personae distorted and perverted through the male gaze.

Once again Silver & Ward point out eloquently-

“Norma herself as portrayed by Gloria Swanson is a tragic figure. imbued by Wilder with powerful romantic presence… A woman obsessed, she clings to her vision with a tenacity that must ultimately be granted a grudging admiration and she is the only character in the film with the possible exception of Erich Von Stroheim’s fanatically loyal Max, who inspires genuine sympathy. Watching herself on screen in an old movie, she leaps into the projector’s murderous blast of light and cries, ‘They don’t make faces like that anymore!’ It is difficult for the viewer to favor Joe’s cynicism over her fervor, however misguided or self-centered it may be…”

THERE’S A MONSTROUS FEMALE IN OUR MIDST- SOME CHARACTERIZATIONS OF NORMA:

Continue reading “When the Spider Woman Looks: Two Glorias- “Wicked Love, Close ups & Old Jewels”- The sympathetically tragic villainesses of Sunset Blvd (1950) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936)” →

From The Vault: The Naked Edge 1961

THE NAKED EDGE 1961

“ONLY THE MAN WHO WROTE PSYCHO COULD JOLT YOU LIKE THIS”

Director Michael Anderson ( The House of the Arrow 1953, The Dam Busters 1955, Chase a Crooked Shadow 1958, Conduct Unbecoming 1975, Logan’s Run 1976, Dominique is Dead 1979 ) creates a wavelength of dark tension and monochromatic extremes in this atmospheric post noir suspense yarn.

Adapted for the screen by Joseph Stefano’s (The Outer Limits 60s & Psycho 1960) based on the novel by Max Ehrlich (The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, The Glass Web, various dramatic television series)

The Naked Edge opens as the credits roll in a manner similar to Saul Bass, we are dropped into a gruesome stabbing in the darkly lit office building, where George Radcliffe (Gary Cooper)is the key witness.

Sadly, This would be Gary Coopers last film, after battling cancer. The Naked Edge was released a month after his death, but was not received well at the box office.

After Mr. Evan Wrack (the marvelous Peter Cushing) grills the only witness to murder in court Gary Cooper in his last role plays American George Radcliffe whose testimony helps bring a guilty verdict for murder and theft of his co-worker Donald Heath (Ray MacAnally) who then gets sent to prison.

There’s a question as to whether Heath actually committed the crime???

Years later…

George’s wife Martha, the always enchanting Deborah Kerr begins to suspect her husband when various clues start pointing in his direction… Is she married to a cold blooded killer?

With a fantastic supporting cast, Peter Cushing, Michael Wilding, Eric Portman, Diane Cilento,Hermione Gingold, as Lilly Harris, Ronald Howard, Helen Cherry, Wilfrid Lawson and Diane Clare.

Dramatic musical score by William Alwyn (The Fallen Idol 1948, She Played with Fire 1957, I Accuse! 1958, A Night to Remember 1958, Burn Witch Burn 1962)

Most impressive is the offbeat cinematography by Erwin HillierÂ (The Mark of Cain 1947, The House of the Arrow 1953, Chase a Crooked Shadow 1958, and perhaps his best–the extraordinary Eye of the Devil 1966 again with Deborah Kerr, David Niven and Sharon Tate)

Hillier’s quirky angles and low lighting add an apprehensive atmosphere, and loads of key frames that are just beautifully shot as a refrain to the tension. Both Anderson & Hillier love to emphasize faces… it’s a touch that I love about their work together.

CapturFiles_41 — George Radcliffe:**“Do you think a woman could live with a man and sleep with him and not know she was sleeping with a murderer?”** Martha Radcliffe: **“Do murderers make love differently?**“

CapturFiles_3 He implied that the fear of giving had something to do with the fear of giving... sexually that is — Lilly Harris-“He implied that the fear of talking, had something to do with the fear of giving… sexually that is”

There are thousands of films in my collection… this has been one of them! Your ever lovin’ MonsterGirl

Saturday Afternoon: Men Doing Science Again….!!!

Four Sided Triangle (1953)

Based on the novel by William Temple and adapted to the screen and directed by Terence Fisher, this intriguing, thought provoking British sci-fi melodrama invokes the question of creation, playing god, obsession and fate.

Barbara PaytonÂ (Bad Blonde 1953) plays both Lena and Helen a beautiful women caught between two friends who have adored her since they were children. The brilliant Bill (Stephen Murray) invents a duplication machine, and has pined for Lena since he and Bill used to vie for her affections playing knights with wooden swords. But Lena has always been in love with Robin (John Van Eyssen) the other friend that make up the love triangle.

After succeeding in duplicating watches and rabbits Bill wants to try a human subject. One in particular! Tinges of Lang’s Metropolis...

When Lena and Robin get married, Bill asks Lena to allow him to reproduce her in his contraption so he can possess her too. And Lena agrees… the results are disastrous. Co-starring James Hayter as the sympathetic Dr. Harvey.

Frankenstein 70 (1958)

Karloff still possesses that lyrical majesty and does the best job he can with this slightly meandering 50’s schlocky script, directed by noir, cult, television drama and big box office–producer/director Howard W. Koch and written by Richard H Landau who scripted The Quartermass Experiment 1955, The Girl in the Black Stockings 1957

As always Karloff’s presence makes any film a joy to watch. He always took his acting seriously and it shows here, which makes this odd little modernity meets old mad science horror flick with some interesting set design and chilling moments worth watching.

Karloff plays the last of the line of Frankensteins who desperately needs money in order to continue his arcane experiments on the reanimation of the monster, he has hidden beneath the family crypt in the Castle. The monster is kept bandaged through out the film, (saves on make-up) and becomes a lumbering bandaged plaster of Paris block head with two hollow holes for eyes. Is it effective or defective… well, I focused on Boris Karloff most of the time.

Frankenstein is now using atomic energy to resurrect his ancestors creation (the lab is actually very groovy Strickfaden would approve), but needs a few more things, like an atomic reactor, brains, eyeballs etc.

Baron Von Frankenstein whose face is badly scarred from the Nazi’s who tortured when he refused to experiment on their victims, allows a film maker and his crew to shoot their low budget horror picture on the grounds, finds their presence an immortal intrusion but he is broke and must put up with the nuisance.

But– the aggressive and meddlesome bunch uncover Dr. Frankenstein’s secret laboratory and it just gets chaotic from there…

Rudolph Anders plays the Baron’s confidante Wilhelm Gottfried, and Norbert Schiller plays the very simple butler Shuter… poor poor Shuter…

The Mask of Fu Manchu 1932

Directed by Charles Brabin and an uncredited Charles Vidor they offer this highly stylized horror/sci-fi-/fantasy hybrid from the 30s!

Boris Karloff is the diabolical genius Fu Manchu who only wishes to conquer the world with the help of his beautiful but equally nefarious daughter Fah Lo See played by the exquisite Myrna Loy.

Sir Nayland Smith of the British Secret Service played by Lewis Stone rushes to the Gobi Desert to find the mysterious mask and sword of Genghis Khan. He must get there before Fu Manchu possesses it’s power.

Fu Manchu kidnaps Sir Lionel Barton and tortures him in order to find out where the great treasures of Genghis Khan are buried in his lost tomb, but Barton refuses to tell…

Mean Sir Lionel’s daughter Sheila (Karen Morely) Sir Nayland Smith, Terrence Granville (Charles Starrett) and Von Berg (Jean Hersholt) set out to uncover the whereabouts of the relics before the evil menace can use them in his diabolical plan to conquer the world!

The Mask of Fu Manchu boasts the wonderful Kenneth Strickfaden designs!

Your Ever Lovin’ MonsterGirl!

From The Vault-My Name is Julia Ross (1945)

MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (1945)

“She went to sleep as a secretary… and woke up a madman’s bride!”

“I don’t know what this is all about, but I promise you some very serious trouble unless you stop it immediately. You know perfectly well I’m Julia Ross.”

Directed by Joseph H. LewisÂ (The Mad Doctor of Market Street 1942, So Dark the Night 1946, Gun Crazy 1950, A Lady Without Passport 1950, The Big Combo 1955) Screenplay by Muriel Roy Bolton from the novel The Woman in Red by Anthony Gilbert. With a fabulous odd-angled, shadow-stricken spin by cinematographerBurnett Guffey, it’s no wonder this suspense thriller has the elements of a stylized psychological noir. Â

Nina Foch is Julia Ross, a young English girl seeking employment. She answers an ad at a fake employment agency run by none other than Anita Sharp-Bolster as Sparkes, who’s even more cantankerous in this role. Julia, saddened by the news that the guy she loves is marrying another girl, thinks she’s found the perfect job working for a wealthy widow Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Witty), whose son, the creepy Ralph (George Macready), lives with her.

George Macready is exceptional as a psychotic murderer who is prone to fits of violence. He has already killed his wife, stabbing her to death and throwing her body into the quiet sea.

Ralph Hughes– {Looking out at the ocean] “Beautiful, isn’t it? Would you like to listen to the sea and hear what it says? It doesn’t say anything, does it? That’s what I like about the sea. It never tells its secrets, and it has many – very many secrets.”

Ralph has a thing for knives, and Mommy Hughes has to keep taking sharp objects away from him and locking them away in a drawer. Dame May Witty is superb as his overprotective mother, who is willing to concoct an elaborate scheme and even kill in order to cover up her son’s murder.

Ralph Hughes- “It’s all Marion’s fault. She shouldn’t have cried.”

Mrs. Hughes- “Ralph, you never told me – was it an accident, or did you intend to kill her after she made her will?”

Ralph- “I didn’t plan it. I liked her well enough, but when she found out I’d been lying about my income, she accused me of marrying her for her money. I said of course that was what I’d married her for. Then she cried. She was always crying. Then she slapped me. I had my knife in my hand, and I…” [He begins slashing at the sofa cushion with his knife, slicing it over and over]

Mrs. Hughes- “Stop it, stop it!” (she tries to take the knife away)

Ralph- “Don’t do that!”

Mrs. Hughes- “Put that away! Ralph, I’m trying to help you.”

Ralph- “I still say we should have called the police and told them a prowler broke in and killed her.”

Mrs. Hughes- “With the marks of your fingers on her? The scratches on your face?”

Julia goes to live at the house, but once she’s there, Mrs. Hughes, Ralph, and Sparkes drug her tea and spirit her off to the ocean village of Cornwall.

They’ve burned her clothes, stopped any means of communication from getting through, put bars on her windows, and convinced the village that she’s out of her mind so no one believes her story about being held prisoner by these seemingly well-bred murderous grifters.

There, they gaslight Julia, telling her that she is the first Mrs. Marion Hughes who has had a nervous breakdown. They’ve even convinced Alice, the maid (Queenie Leonard), that she’s going mad and that she’s suicidal. Alice gossips around town, and soon after, everyone, even the police, the doctors, and the reverend and his wife, believe Hughes’ story. It seems like there’s no escape for Julia in sight. Along the path to doom, Ralph torments Julia with his menacing presence, and every attempt Julia makes to escape is thwarted.

They plan on making it look like she’s committed suicide so they can bury her as Mrs. Hughes since the real wife is lost at sea – and take her money.

After, it looks like Julia has taken an overdose of poison… Ralph –“Why try to save her? Let her die. That’s what we want.” Mrs. Hughes- ” Don’t be stupid, Ralph. If she’s taken poison, we must act as though we cared!”

This is a very taut little suspense yarn that keeps you on the edge up until the end. With some extraordinary camera work and a very simple tale of murder, mistaken identity, and mayhem!

Co-starring Ottola Nesmith as Mrs. Robinson, Joy Harrington as the resentfully sullen Bertha, Doris Lloyd is marvelous as Mrs. Mackie, Julia’s landlady, Roland Varno and as Julia’s love interest Dennis Bruce, Olaf Hytten as Reverend Lewis and Leonard Mudie as Peters.

Women-in-Peril – 4 Obscure Gothic Thrillers of the 1940s!

As a treat I thought I’d talk about 4 really interesting films that were released amidst the slew of suspense thrillers of the 1940s. Some Gothic melodrama and a few perhaps conveying an almost hybrid sense of noir with their use of flashback, shadow, odd camera angles and elements of transgressive crime. I’ll just be giving a brief overview of the plot, but no worries there are no spoilers!

I recently had the chance to sit with each film and said to myself… Joey, these would make for a nice collection of obscure thrillers so without further adieu, I offer for your enjoyment, The Suspect, Love From A Stranger 1947, Moss Rose & The Sign of the Ram!

THE SUSPECT 1944

Directed by Robert Siodmak (The Spiral Staircase 1945, The Killers 1946, Criss Cross 1949, The Dark Mirror, Cry of the City, The File on Thelma Jordan 1950) and adapted to the screen by Bertram Millhauser and Arthur T Horman from the novel This Way Out written by James Ronald. This film, very loosely based on Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen’s murder of his wife, was sensationalized at trial in 1910.

The Suspect stars the inimitable Charles Laughton (Dr. Moreau – Island of Lost Souls 1932, my favorite Quasimodo in William Dieterle’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1939, the most lovable ghost Sir Simon in The Canterville Ghost 1944, The Paradine Case 1947, The Strange Door 1951, Witness for the Prosecution 1957, Spartacus 1960, Advise and Consent 1962 and notably–director of two films–his masterpiece Night of the Hunter and his uncredited The Man on the Eiffel Tower 1949)

The film also stars the underrated Ella Raines (Phantom Lady 1944, Impact 1949), Dean Harens, Stanley Ridges (Possessed 1949, The File on Thelma Jordan and No Way Out 1950) Henry Daniell, Rosalind Ivan and Molly Lamont (The Dark Corner 1946, Devil Bat’s Daughter 1946) Raymond Severn plays the delicious little urchin Merridew who works for Phillip as he tries to keep the little guy on the straight and narrow. Merridew would make the perfect name for a little tabby cat!

Charles Laughton gives one of his most subtle performances as a kindly man trapped by an abusive wife. Siodmak, as usual, creates a dynamic framework for this psychological thriller, lensed in shades of darkly ominous spaces that seem to shape themselves around Laugton’s comfortable face and Ella Raines’ intricate beauty.

Lux Radio Theater held broadcast of a 60-minute radio adaptation of the movie on April 9, 1945, with Charles Laughton, Ella Raines, and Rosalind Ivan reprising their film roles.

Music by Frank Skinner (Blond Alibi 1946, Johnny Stool Pigeon, The Brute Man, The Spider Woman Strikes Back, and way more ) with cinematography by Paul Ivano. Who did the camera work on director Hugo Haas’s treasures like Strange Fascination 1952, One Girl’s Confession 1953, and Hold Back Tomorrow 1955!

And marvelous gowns and hats by Vera West. (The Wolf Man 1941, Shadow of a Doubt 1943, Flesh and Fantasy 1943, Son of Dracula & The Mad Ghoul 1943, Phantom Lady 1944, Strange Confession 1944, Murder in the Blue Room ’44, House of Frankenstein ’44, The Woman in Green 1945, Terror by Night 1946, The Cat Creeps, She-Wolf of London, Dressed to Kill, Danger Woman & Slightly Scandalous 1946.)

In 1902 London, a respected middle-class Englishman but unhappily married shopkeeper Phillip Marshall (Charles Laughton) develops a loving and warm friendship with young and beautiful Mary Gray (Ella Raines), whose father has recently died, leaving her down on her luck and looking for a job. Phillip Marshall is such a kind and genteel man he stops to say a kind word about his neighbor Mrs Simmon’s garden, loves his son, and shows real affection. He is like a father to young Merridew, and beloved by the community. Even when he approaches Mary, and she hasn’t yet looked up from her tear-soaked hanky, thinking a lecherous man in the park is approaching her, “I’m not that sort,” tells her, only wanting to see if she needs help.

Mary, like Phillip, is lonely. The first night, Phillip begins to walk her home —“A cup of tea, a six-pence novel and a good cry.”
Mary- “I’m afraid you’ve been looking in my window.”

Phillip’s dreadful wife Cora (Rosalind Ivan –ideally suited to play the emasculating harpy-she had a similar role tormenting Edward G Robinson in Scarlet Street 1945) is a reprehensible shrew who humiliates and demeans both her husband and her son (Dean Harens who had more room to act in Siodmak’s terrific noir Christmas Holiday 1944 which starred a very different kind of Gene Kelly and the self-persecuting Deanna Durbin) John is shown moving out of the house because his horrible mother has burned some important papers of his. She got into one of her rages, and before he could stop her, she burned a whole week’s work.

Cora Marshall is vicious and cruel, showing no maternal feeling and caring little that her son is leaving home.

CapturFiles_7 — Cora-**“That’s just what young hopeful did, he’s clearing out bag and baggage that selfish ungrateful good for nothing.”**
Phillip-“**What did you do to him?”**
Cora- “What did I do to him… that’s right, put the blame on me. All I did was bring him into the world, nurse him, and make myself a doormat for him to walk on!… Go on, go to him and tell him from me that when he leaves this house, needn’t think he can come crawling back. Deserting his own mother!… And what do you think you’re doing now?”
Phillip- **“I’m moving into John’s room.”**
Cora- **“Of all the indecent…we’re married, aren’t we?”**
Phillip (deep sigh)- **“Oh, we’re married, all right.”**Cora –**“Then how dare you! I forbid it do you hear me. I forbid you to treat me like this.”** Phillip says, **“Now Cora, that’s all over now that John’s gone. It’s all over and done with, do you understand me?… I’m moving out of here, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”** Cora- **“Oh yes, there is. There’s plenty I can do!”**

They wrestle with his clean, folded white shirts, which he’s busy moving out of the bedroom. She tries to grab them, but he finally loses his composure and yanks them away.

CapturFiles_8 — Cora- **“What’s got into you? I’d like to know what’s going on in your head.”**

CapturFiles_9 — Phillip- **“It’s much better that you shouldn’t, Cora, it might frighten you…”**

Saddened by John’s departure, whom he loves and will miss, Phillip prompts Cora to move into his son’s room. Cora, so bent on appearances, is driven to tirades of abusiveness toward the meek and genteel Phillip, harassing him at every turn. I might have thrown her down the stairs myself or given her one of those late-night glasses of milk!

The scene with Merridew tickles me and shows how kind, compassionate, and caring Phillip is. He calls Merridew over talking to him in a quite earnest and fatherly tone, all the while you can tell he’s quite fond of the little fellow and visa versa.

CapturFiles_16 — Phillip- **“Merridew, I have to bring a very serious matter to your attention. I regret to say there’s a shortage in your accounts there’s a penny missing from the stamp box.”**
Merridew- **“It… it was for a sugar bun this morning, but I’ll put it back on pay day, honest Mr. Marshall.”**
Phillip- **“And the tuppence the day before yesterday, what was that for?”**
Merridew- “**Acid drops, sir.”**
Phillip- **“Acid drops???** Quizzically… **that’s very serious. And the hay penny the day before?”**
Merridew- **“For the monkey with the hurdy-gurdy, but I’ll put it all back Saturday every last farthing. “**
Phillip- **“That’s what all embezzlers plan to do.”**

tears in Merridew’s voice make it quiver as the camera shows Mary listening in, she smiles and laughs at this whimsical inquisition.

Merridew- “But I’m not an embezzler.”

Phillip- “Yes, but you can get started that way. It’s the first step that counts… after that, it all becomes too easy. Six pence tomorrow, half a crown the day after… then a five-pound note… I know you’ll always mean to pay it back, but I’m afraid you’ll finish by paying it back in the Portland quarries.”

Merridew- “Don’t send me to no quarries, please, Mr. Marshall (sniffling).”

Phillip- “Well, not this time, Merridew. Now stop sniffling and wipe your eyes.” he hands him a hanky.

Mary has come into the shop looking for employment. When Phillip tells her there isn’t a position available, he later finds her crying on a park bench. He takes her to dinner, gets her a job with a colleague and the two begin a very tender friendship.

Phillip continues his platonic relationship with Mary, but once his wife finds out that he’s been seen supping with the young lady, he breaks it off, as he’s a gentleman who truly thought his wife would want out of a loveless marriage.

Still, Cora threatens him with scandal as well as making trouble for Mary. When Cora refuses to divorce him, worried that gossip will spread that she has failed to hold onto a husband, he is driven to the point of frustration and despair. She tells him the neighbors are all beginning to gossip about him coming in at all hours.

Phillip- “None of that business, Cora.”

Cora- “Ha! Married people’s lives is everyone’s business, and I’m not going to be made an object of pity in front of my friends, do you hear!… I wonder what ever possessed me to tie myself up with a poor stink like you… walked through the forest and picked a crooked tree that’s what I did. A crooked, fat, ugly tree.”

Even after she’s been so cruel, he tries to reason with her about getting a divorce and face things honestly by admitting that they’ve never been happy together. He asks her to let him go. But she wants to punish him because she is a bitter and cruel woman, calling him immoral and indecent.

Phillip is very decent; in fact, even though there’s only been friendship between him and Mary, he breaks it off with her so as to do what’s expected of him, telling Mary that he behaved badly, but he was afraid that she wouldn’t want to see him again. He was sure Cora would let him go… Phillip tells Mary, “And I couldn’t let you go once I’d met you.”

But Cora won’t be happy til she drives them both ‘into the gutter where you belong!”

Because of his gentle nature, Laughton is affable and wonderfully believable as a romantic figure.

His murderous response is more to protect Mary from Cora’s wrath, who tells him with a face like a Victorian harridan spewing poisonous vitriol.

CapturFiles_52 — **Paul Ivano’s brilliant camera angle frames Laughton as somewhat diminished, seemingly trapped or rather oppressed by the space around him.**

And so, Phillip murders his wife. We see him grab one of his canes and assume, though we don’t see him actually bashing her head in with it, that he has, in fact, brained her. The next morning, she is found dead at the bottom of the stairs, and it is deemed an accident.

Added to the plot’s layering of Sturm & Drang is the always wonderful scoundrel in Henry Daniell’s Gilbert Simmons, Phillip’s neighbor a stumbling drunkard who also beats his wife (Molly Lamont) Mrs Simmons and Phillip also have a very sweet relationship, one that ultimately anchors Phillip to his integrity. But I won’t reveal the outcome of the story. The miserable Gilbert Simmons also has the distinction of turning to blackmail, adding to his other earthly vices.

Amidst all these dreary, grim, and dark ideas, the film still emerges as a beautiful story, partly due to Siodmak’s ability to guide suspense along its way with an appealing cadence. As Foster Hirsch states in his must-read Film Noir-The Dark Side of the Screen, “Siodmak films like Christmas Holiday and The Killers have an extremely intricate narrative development…{…} the relative extremeness of Siodmak’s style is reflected in his obsessive characters.”

The Suspect works as a great piece of Melo-Noir mostly due to Laughton’s absolute perfection as the sympathetic, trapped gentle-man. As always, he is masterful with his intonations, sharpened wit, and ability to induce fellowship with the characters he’s playing… well, maybe not so much with Dr. Moreau, Capt. Bligh, Judge Lord Thomas Horfield or Sire Alaine de Maledroit in The Strange Door. But he’s a lovable sort most of the time, one can’t deny.

The Canterville Ghost-Margaret O'Brien & Charles Laughton — **Charles Laughton and Margaret O’Brien in Jules Dassins’ The Canterville Ghost, 1944-based on the story by Oscar Wilde.**

Ella Raines is just delightful as Mary. She’s such a treat to watch as you start to believe that this beautiful young woman genuinely has fallen for this older, portly, yet kind-hearted misfit. You find yourself hoping that he gets away with his wife’s murder and that the two find happiness together.

Phillip is staunchly pursued by Scotland Yard Inspector Huxley (Stanley Ridges), who has the tenacity of Columbo. Speaking of which, a poster of The Suspect appears in an episode of Columbo – “How to Dial a Murder” in 1978.

LOVE FROM A STRANGER 1947

On the darker, more sinister side of these suspense yarns, we find Sylvia Sidney as Cecily Harrington at the mercy of a very deranged bluebeard in John Hodiak as Manuel Cortez.

Directed by Richard Whorf, who became more fluent in television directing. Written for the screen by Philip MacDonald (Rebecca 1940, The Body Snatcher 1945 for Val Lewton, The Dark Past 1948, Boris Karloff’s Thriller episode The Fingers of Fear 1961, The List of Adrian Messenger 1963) based on Agatha Christie’s short story Philomel Cottage. Hair Stylist Eunice Helene King is responsible for slicking back Hodiak’s swarthy and murderously Lothario hair, he’s almost Draculian. He definitely covets his slickety hair as he shows his first sign of deranged pathology when Cecily tries to stroke his locks, and he lashes out at her, telling her not to touch it.

The marvelous costumes equipped with capes, sequins, and ostrich feathers are by Michael Woulfe (Blood on the Sun 1945, Macao 1952, Beware, My Lovely 1952).

Isobel Elsom plays Auntie Loo Loo with her usual exuberance; Ann Richards is Mavis Wilson’s faithful friend. Anita Sharp-Bolster as Ethel the maid (wonderfully crabby Christine in The Two Mrs Carrolls)

And again, a terrific score by Hans J. Salter. This period piece is lavishly framed by Tony Gaudio (The Letter 1940, High Sierra 1941, The Man Who Came to Dinner 1942). Once the protagonist and her murderous husband honeymoon at their hideaway cottage, the lens turns the film into an almost chamber piece, becoming more claustrophobic as Manuel and Cecily begin to awaken to the revelation of his dangerous nature.

Sylvia Sidney plays Cecily Harrington, an unassuming English girl in Liverpool who has just won £50,000 in the Calcutta Sweepstakes, which was a fortune in turn-of-the-century England. Cecily meets Manuel Cortez (John Hodiak) when he sees her name in the newspaper next to the headline of his latest murder. He follows her and then arranges to make it appear as if he’s looking to rent her flat. She is taken with this mysterious stranger and suddenly breaks off her engagement to her fiancee Nigel Lawrence (John Howard), rushing into marriage with the mysterious stranger, who turns out to be a Bluebeard who is after her money.

The swarthy Manuel Cortez has already alluded the police for the murder of three women believed to have drowned while trying to escape. He has changed his appearance, with darker hair and no beard. Dr Gribble (Philip Tonge), who is a crime connoisseur, collects journals and books, one with a drawing of him showing his beard. It also mentions his earlier crimes in South America and New York (Hodiak’s character is given several Spanish aliases- Pedro Ferrara and Vasco Carrera).

The newlyweds spend the summer at their secret honeymoon cottage, where he’s been planning to kill her and bury her body in the cellar.

CapturFiles_12 — **Isobel Elsom plays Auntie Loo Loo with her usual exuberance, Ann Richards is the faithful friend Mavis Wilson.**

CapturFiles_13 — **Manuel Cortez pretends to be looking for a flat to rent, showing up at Cecily’s door; he has actually followed her from their ‘accidental’ meeting at the post.**

CapturFiles_15 — **Cortez begins to work his Bluebeard charms on Cecily.**

CapturFiles_17 — **Neither Nigel nor Mavis trust this mysterious stranger with the slickety hair and cape.**

CapturFiles_18 — **Everyone around Cecily knows there’s something not quite right.**

CapturFiles_24 ethel and billings the gardener — **Ethel and Billings, the gardener, greet the newlyweds at the cottage they’ve spirited off to.**

CapturFiles_27b — **Which poisons to use, decisions, and decisions.**

CapturFiles_28 — **Manuel warns Cecily to stay away from his experiments in the cellar.**

CapturFiles_33 — **Auntie Loo Loo is worried!**

Dr Gribble- Walking over to the book shelf- **“Ah criminology are you interested in criminology Mr Cortez?”**
Cortez- **“Yes, it’s a sort of hobby of mine, doctor.”**
Dr Gribble- **“Well, we’re fellow enthusiasts”**
Cecily: **“Yes, I think it’s a horrid morbid pastime.”**Dr. Gribble “But fascinating Mrs. Cortez. Here’s a great favorite of mine. Criminals and their mentality. That’s great psychology… Bless my soul, the latest journal of Medical Jurisprudence and the Criminal. I should have thought I was the only person within a hundred-mile radius who ever so much as heard of this publication.”
Manuel Cortez-**“Really, I’ve subscribed to it for years”**
Dr Gribble: **“Let’s see, did I read this issue?** **Ah, yes, this is the one with the account of that South American Carrera. It’s a very interesting case.”**
Manuel Cortez- **“I don’t believe I’ve read it.”**
Dr Gribble- **“You should have. This fellow Carrera was a professional wife murderer. They caught him after he completed his third crime. Then he was drowned trying to escape.”**
Manuel Cortez- **“Oh yes, I remember. They never found the body, did they?”**
Dr Gribble- **“No, as a matter of fact, they didn’t.** **I don’t think there’s any real doubt he’s dead!”**

Love From A Stranger is perhaps the more melodramatic and Gothic of all these films I’ve talked about in this post, but perhaps the most unrewarding in terms of its depth. While there are some truly terrifying scenes, the queer chemistry between Sidney and Hodiak creates a distance from the narrative. It’s still worth watching as part of the canon of 40s suspense melodramas.

Sylvia Sidney has a certain edgy sensuality to her that doesn’t make her performance thoroughly implausible for the story, but perhaps a different actress might have brought another style of vulnerability to the role. And Hodiak has an unctuous, gritty sort of sex appeal, which makes his part as a psychopath believable. He’s got intensely dark, focused eyes, sharply defined features, and an iron jawline that slams shut when he’s internally scheming. Toward the end, he brings it a bit over the top, but he’s sort of good at playing a surly mad dog.

CapturFiles_40 He posed as a great world traveler women even those from a cultured background succumbed very quickly to his perculiar charms — Told to read aloud from the Journal of Criminology- “There is no doubt at all that Vasco Carrera, the last name he was known by, is a truly remarkable character. “He posed as a great world traveler; women, even those from a cultured background, succumbed very quickly to his peculiar charms, possessed of a remarkable charm of manner, Carrera exerted an extraordinary fascination over women.”

YOU AND ME 1938-Sidney, Sylvia and George Raft — **YOU AND ME 1938- Sidney, Sylvia, and George Raft- Now that’s chemistry!**

Perhaps the one issue I have with the casting is the chemistry between Sidney and Hodiak, which never truly rings authentic. He’s too internally frenetic to be romantic. It’s mysterious, but he’s not convincing in his wooing of Cecily. The character of Cecily doesn’t seem to have the layers that peel innocence away, unveiling a vulnerable yet eruptive sensuality that would be unconsciously drawn to the scent of a dangerous man. That’s why Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight and Joan Bennett in Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door 1947 work so well.

John Hodiak is a puzzle for me. I’ve been trying to decide whether he’s one of the most intriguingly sexy men I’ve come across in a while or if I find him completely cold and waxen in his delivery as a leading man. I’m leaning toward sexy.

Hodiak and Bankhead in Lifeboat — **John Hodiak and Tallulah Bankhead in Alfred Hitchcock’s marvelous floating chamber piece Lifeboat 1944.**

He had me going in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat 1944. I would have thrown my diamond Cartier bracelet over the bow to tumble under the tarp for a few hours with that sun-kissed, salt-sprayed crude adonis, sweaty, brash, unshaven -the whole deal. I just watched him in Somewhere in the Night 1946, and once again, I found Hodiak’s character of George Taylor compelling in his odd way of conveying vulnerability but faithful to the lure of the noir machismo. I felt sorry for a guy who can’t remember who he is or if he should stay forgetting- in case he was a rotten human being.

But as the cunning and psychopathic lady killer in Love From A Stranger, he sort of makes my skin crawl, which I suppose means he did a fabulous job of inhabiting the role of Manuel Cortez. Maybe he would have had better chemistry with someone like Alexis Smith or Audrey Dalton.

Now, I haven’t yet seen Basil Rathbone’s version in director Rowland V Lee’s 1937, also known as A Night of Terror with Ann Harding -still based on the short story by Agatha Christie but set in contemporary England, Rathbone plays the intrepid type of urbane gentleman who sweeps Ann Harding off her feet and plunges her into a sudden and dangerous marriage. Where he then plots to kill her and take her money. In the earlier version, the heroine gradually realizes that she’s in danger.

Rathbone and Harding — **Basil Rathbone and Ann Harding in the 1937 version of Love From a Stranger.**

Sylvia Sidney looks stunning as the new bride who begins to notice her husband’s strange behavior and realizes once she goes down into the cellar that Manuel is hiding something. He spends hours locked away down there, preparing for the moment he will kill Cecily, and has forbidden her to go down there, claiming that he’s doing experiments that are dangerous. Well, that’s true since he’s mixing poisons and digging her grave.

This version places it back in Victorian England, perhaps due to the success of the melodramatic thrillers that were proving to be so successful in the 40s like, Rebecca, Gaslight, The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Woman in White, Fritz Lang’s The Secret Beyond the Door 1947, and The Two Mrs Carrolls 1947.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) The ‘Angel of Death’ and a nice glass of warm milk!

Continue reading “Women-in-Peril – 4 Obscure Gothic Thrillers of the 1940s!” →

Fiend of the Day! Hope Emerson as Madame Rose Given in -Cry of the City (1948)

HOPE EMERSONÂ (Caged 1950, House of Strangers 1949, Thieves Highway 1949, Adam’s Rib 1949) is a pretty formidable lady. Hope Emerson is 6’2″, 230 pounds of actress as she reprises her fluent ‘vicious & sadistic’ characterization of larger-than-life-evil incarnate-much in the vein of her cruel bon bon eatin’ prison matron Evelyn Harper who tortured poor Eleanor Parker in Caged 1950. Oh that hair shaving scene just sticks with ya…

In Robert Siodmak’s sublime noir Cry of the City 1948 Emerson plays Madame Rose Given who runs a massage parlor, loves to cook, is a pancake eatin’ -looming ‘heavy’… who loves jewels and just wants a little place in the country where she can cook, eat pancakes and fresh eggs… yeah that’s livin’. From her brawny swagger to her grumbling yet leisurely voice, Emerson is the highlight of the film!

That’s why she didn’t even break a sweat when she strangled old lady DeGrasia for her jewelry. Darn old gal had the nerve to put up a struggle! And does she give self-serving on lam career criminal Marty Rome (Richard Conte) some neck rub while he’s hiding out at her place trying to make a deal. Rose finally gets the jewels as a trade for money and some wheels to get out of town with his girl Debra Paget…

Marty-“Pearl choker with a Ruby pendant. Seven rings. Diamond bracelet with the clasp broken. You must have been in a hurry ha?”

Rose-“Where are they?”

Marty- “In a locker in the subway station… I thought if you went to all that trouble to get ’em once you may wanna get ’em again.”

Rose chuckles-“You’re a cute little man Martin..”

Rose ‘massaging’ Martin- “Hmmm…It is good, isn’t it? I have the touch. It’s only given to a few. It’s a matter of knowing the currents of the body. Why waste this on fat old women who think they can lose a few pounds and be beautiful again… Fat old women who have too much money and too many jewels. They think the jewels make them beautiful and they fight to keep them like they fight the years that make them ugly.”

Rose ain’t someone I’d want giving me a rub down, and I sure wouldn’t want to meet her at the door as the Avon Lady either- Gee wiz.. that woman could scare the horns off the devil- She’s got a smirk & leer that makes her seem like she could eat small children. This pistol-packing, masseuse whose hands should be registered as lethal weapons- is one menacing lady who has earned her place here at The Last Drive In as Fiend of the Day!

Hope Emerson Richard Conte Cry of the City — **Rose Given (Hope Emerson) gives Marty Rome (Richard Conte) a massage he’ll not soon forget!!!**

Just look at that mug! Nah, I bet she was really a pussycat. I mean she was the voice of Borden’s Else the Cow after all! Sadly-Hope Emerson died of liver disease in 1960… Here’s to you Hope Emerson-and your bigger-than-life acting style!-Love Joey

PS: Cry of the City is perhaps one of my new favorite film noirs in Siodmak’s collection. I’m going to have to cover it, because of the great acting, from the entire cast-small parts even for Shelley Winters to the gritty dialogue and sensational cinematography so stay tuned!- Your ever-lovin’ MonsterGirl in the city.

A Trailer a day keeps the Boogeyman Away! The Undead (1957)

THE UNDEAD 1957

“See the tortured undulations of the unwanted virgins”

One of Roger Corman’s most campy & creepy tale of witchcraft and past life regression. In a claustrophobic world of doom and dread, where a battle of witch’s wills and sadistic pleasures abound. Pamela Duncan (Attack of the Crab Monsters 1957) is Diana Love/ Helene who visits a psychiatrist and when hypnotized is transported back into the brutal and bedeviled Middle Ages.

Suspected of being a witch she is sentenced to death by beheading with a large executioners axe. Richard GarlandÂ (Attack of the Crab Monsters, Panic in the Year O) plays Pendragon. Also starring is Allison Hayes Â who’s come back down to size from 50 feet. Here she plays Livia, the witch in conflict with Dorothy Neumann (Otis Campbell’s wife on Andy Griffith, The Terror, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Snake Pit ) as the witch Meg Maude. Mel Welles as Smolkin the grave digger, Billy Barty as a devil imp!Â Bruno VeSota as Scroop the innkeeper… and Richard Devon as the Devil.

I had a collection of Super 8 reels when I was just a little MonsterGirl. The Undead was one that I would play in my basement theater along with a host of other classic horror and Abbott & Costello features. I used to find this particular film of Corman’s a truly creepy experience and still do. It’s timeless, macabre and hilariously campy. In fact I think this poster is still one of my favorite vintage classic horror posters.

See it with someone you love… and please… don’t lose your head during the scary parts!-Your ever lovin’ MonsterGirl

Recurring Iconography-The Cinematic Mirror

**Vivien Leigh as Blanch Dubois in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire 1951**

IsobelaCorona is Sara the witch-the witches mirror — **Isobela Corona is Sara the witch-The Witches Mirror 1962**

Repulsion- Catherine — **Catherine Deneuve as the demented Carol in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion 1965**

Bette Davis in Deception — **Bette Davis as Christine Radcliffe in Irving Rapper’s Deception 1946**

Robert Cummings in The Chase — **Robert Cummings is Chuck Scott in Arthur Ripley’s The Chase 1946**

citizen-kane-1941-orson-welles- — **Citizen Kane-1941-Orson Welles**

Corridor of Mirrors 2 — **Terence Young’s Corridor of Mirrors 1948 Edana Romney as Mifanwy Conway**

**Paul Henreid’s Dead Ringer 1964 starring Bette Davis & Bette Davis as twin sisters Margaret DeLorca / Edith Phillips**

**Jack Bernhard’s film noir classic Decoy 1946** **Herbert Rudley as Dr. Craig**

fritz lang's M — **Fritz Lang’s M (1931) starring Peter Lorre**

Ida On Dangerous Ground — **Ida Lupino is blind Mary Malden in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground 1951**

Jane Wyman Stage Fright — **Jane Wyman is Eve Gill in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Stage Fright 1950**

Jean Simmons and Dan O'Herlihey Home After Dark — **Jean Simmons is Charlotte Bronn and Dan O’Herlihy as Arnold Bronn in Mervyn LeRoy’s psychological melodrama Home Before Dark 1958**

jean-marais-Orpeus '50 — **Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (OrphÃ©e)1950 starring Jean Marais**

Kiss Before The Mirror '33 James Whale — **The Kiss Before the Mirror 1933 directed by James Whale** **Gloria Stuart and Paul Lukas**

**Robert Montgomery is Phillip Marlowe in Lady in the Lake 1947**

Marilyn Don't Bother to Knock-mirror — **Marilyn Monroe is the disturbed babysitter Nell Forbes in Roy Ward Baker’s Don’t Bother to Knock 1952**

Psycho-Janet Leigh Marion Crane — **Janet Leigh plays the ill fated Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s classic horror Psycho 1960**

Renoir's The Rules of the Game 39 — **Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game 1939**

She Wolf of London — **June Lockhart is Phyllis Allenby in Jean Yarbrough’s She-Wolf of London 1946**

sin in the suburbs — **Joe Sarno’s Sin in the Suburbs 1946**

Somewhere in the night Hodiak — **Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Somewhere in the Night 1946 starring John Hodiak as George Taylor and Nancy Guild (rhymes with Wild) as Christy Smith**

**Gloria Swanson is the sensational Norma Desmond and William Holden is Joe Gillis in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. 1950**

**Robert Mitchum is Lt. Duke Halliday and William Bendix as Capt. Vincent Blake in Don Siegel’s The Big Steal 1949**

**Olivia de Havilland & Olivia de Havilland star as Terry and Ruth Collins in Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror 1946**

**Rita Hayworth is Elsa Bannister in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai 1947**

The Queen of Spades mirror — **Yvonne Mitchell is Lizaveta Ivanova in Thorold Dickinson’s The Queen of Spades 1949**

Thomas Mitchell in The Dark Mirror — **Thomas Mitchell is Lt Stevenson in Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror 1946**

what ever happened to baby jane — **Bette Davis is the outrageous Baby Jane Hudson in Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? 1962**

Here’s looking back at ya!-Your ever lovin’ monstergirl

Lemora: a Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) & Dream No Evil (1970) Journeys of: The Innocent/Absent Father Archetype & Curse of the Lamia or “Please don’t tresspass on my nightmare!”

"For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it."
"• Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’

LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 1973

Run, little girl! Innocence is in peril tonight!

The Light in the Window … The Lock on the Door … The Sounds in the Night! A Possession is Taking Place!

A while ago I double featured Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) and The Night God Screamed (1971). I made it clear that I felt Let’s Scare Jessica to Death was the superior film but somehow they made good companion pieces. And since I’m a child of the 70s, those days of the double bill, musty theaters, milk duds, and groovy posters, I’ve decided to pair these particular films. And once again, I’ll emphasize now that I believe Lemora to be by far not only the superior film but one of the MOST uniquely beautiful horror/fantasy films I’ve ever seen.

Because the film hit a very bumpy road on its release, it wound up being passed around like an orphan from one distributor to another. Thus is the reason for several titles over the years. It has been called The Legendary Curse of Lemora and Lemora, Lady Dracula, the latter hoping to ride the wave of low-budget vampire films that have now also attained cult status such as Bob Kelljan’s authentically potent Count Yorga Vampire 1970 starring Robert Quarry, and the equally stylish Blacula 1972 and of course the Gothic vampire pageantry of Hammer Studios churning out stylish costume melodramas with a lesbian vampire sub-text like The Vampire Lovers 1970 and Lust For a Vampire 1971, Stephanie Rothman’s The Velvet Vampire 1971, and Vicente Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride 1972. The liner notes written by Richard Harland Smith of Video Watchdog & Chris Poggiali of Fangoria and Shock Cinema interviewed Richard Blackburn and Byrd Holland and point out that Blackburn’s film is “less exploitative” yet “not unerotic” while using the “fragility of innocence.”

From the Journal of Horror and Erotic Cinema-Edited Andy Black
Bev Zalock’s- Girl Power From The Crypt

“In a sense, horror more than any of the other exploitation genres, with its monsters of the imagination, feeds fantasy and configures fear in a very direct way. With its linking of sex and death, horror taps into the unconscious and is associated with surrealism and the fantastic in both literature and cinema. Desire becomes the primary mise-en-scene within the realm of the supernatural and, as David Pirie observes in his excellent book The Vampire Cinema’ there is a strong cultural connection between our perception of sex and the supernatural. Pirie cites an article by Susan Sontag written in 1967 entitled “The Pornographic Imagination” in which she locates the fantastical realm of the human imagination as the site in which the two are classically connected.” – from Susan Sontag’s piece–Styles of Radical Will 1966

Celeste Yarnall is the dark lady vampire in Stephanie Rothman’s -The Velvet Vampire-co-starring Sherriy Miles.

In addition to these lesbian vampire narratives, you have Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos 1970 and auteur Jean Rollin’s distinctive style who like Hammer connected suggestions of the ‘pornographic imagination’ that Susan Sontag describes. Films that use the spectrum of surrealist imagery from the Gothic to the gory. What they share is a ferocious appetite for power and the desire for sexual freedom.

Directed and written by Richard BlackburnÂ (Eating Raoul 1982 with cult idol Mary Woronov and co-written with director Paul Bartel) fresh out of UCLA film school, with his pal Robert Fern. Blackburn has said in interviews that there are things he would have done differently with a better budget and more time. He shot Lemora in a month. I think the crudely macabre tonality of Lemora is what makes films like these from the good old ’70s oneiric, quintessential, haunting, and flawless as is.

There is a discrepancy as to whether the running time of the film is either 85 minutes or 113 minutes (uncut). The remastered DVD through Synapse Films took the original 35mm negatives and brought this film back to its ‘never before seen clarity.’ The prints were presumed lost for over 30 years.

lemora-1973

The hauntingly macabre and somber music is by Dan Neufeld who crafted electronica and claviers and what I think might be a Melatron to evoke the eerie essence of the story is absolutely brilliant. With crying strings that fortify distorted wails and moans. With music box tinkling, poignant yet eerie flutes, and piano, muted horns-noises that shimmer and reverberate on cue with the dialogue or surreal set piece- I wish Dan Neufeld had done more movie scores. The sound design, the dysmorphic groans-unearthly wails- they’re the sounds you’d imagine the ‘old ones’ make in a Lovecraftian tale. Even the crickets and chorus frogs of the swamp sound metamorphosized into frightening aberrations.

Continue reading “Lemora: a Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) & Dream No Evil (1970) Journeys of: The Innocent/Absent Father Archetype & Curse of the Lamia or “Please don’t tresspass on my nightmare!”” →

Category: Directors and Filmmakers

Walter Graumen puts Olivia de Havilland in peril as a Lady in a Cage (1964) “Right now I am all animal” or “Oh, dear Lord… I am… a monster!”

THE GREAT VILLAIN BLOGATHON APRIL 20-26, 2014 hosted by SpeakeasyShadows and Satin Silver Screenings

**Â Right now I’m all MonsterGirl Hope you’ve enjoyed this post for The Great Villain Blogathon!**

When the Spider Woman Looks: Two Glorias- “Wicked Love, Close ups & Old Jewels”- The sympathetically tragic villainesses of Sunset Blvd (1950) and Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

**This is part of the Great Villain Blogathon hosted by Speakeasy* Shadows and Satin & *Silver Screenings from April 20th – 26th 2014**

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”– T.E. Lawrence

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”- Mark Twain

IT’S ALL IN THE EYES! -THE LEGACY OF GLORIA SWANSON/NORMA DESMOND & GLORIA HOLDEN/COUNTESS ZALESKA

Are these wicked women? Do they exemplify the monstrous feminine? I dare say NO! They are sensual yet tragic figures!

SUNSET BOULEVARD 1950

THERE’S A MONSTROUS FEMALE IN OUR MIDST- SOME CHARACTERIZATIONS OF NORMA:

From The Vault: The Naked Edge 1961

THE NAKED EDGE 1961

“ONLY THE MAN WHO WROTE PSYCHO COULD JOLT YOU LIKE THIS”

Saturday Afternoon: Men Doing Science Again….!!!

Four Sided Triangle (1953)

Frankenstein 70 (1958)

The Mask of Fu Manchu 1932

From The Vault-My Name is Julia Ross (1945)

MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS (1945)

“She went to sleep as a secretary… and woke up a madman’s bride!”

“I don’t know what this is all about, but I promise you some very serious trouble unless you stop it immediately. You know perfectly well I’m Julia Ross.”

Women-in-Peril – 4 Obscure Gothic Thrillers of the 1940s!

I recently had the chance to sit with each film and said to myself… Joey, these would make for a nice collection of obscure thrillers so without further adieu, I offer for your enjoyment, The Suspect, Love From A Stranger 1947, Moss Rose & The Sign of the Ram!

THE SUSPECT 1944

LOVE FROM A STRANGER 1947

Fiend of the Day! Hope Emerson as Madame Rose Given in -Cry of the City (1948)

A Trailer a day keeps the Boogeyman Away! The Undead (1957)

THE UNDEAD 1957

“See the tortured undulations of the unwanted virgins”

Recurring Iconography-The Cinematic Mirror

Lemora: a Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973) & Dream No Evil (1970) Journeys of: The Innocent/Absent Father Archetype & Curse of the Lamia or “Please don’t tresspass on my nightmare!”

LEMORA: A CHILD’S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL 1973

Run, little girl! Innocence is in peril tonight!

The Light in the Window … The Lock on the Door … The Sounds in the Night! A Possession is Taking Place!

THE GREAT VILLAIN BLOGATHON APRIL 20-26, 2014 hosted by Speakeasy*Shadows and Satin * Silver Screenings

Â Right now I’m all *MonsterGirl* Hope you’ve enjoyed this post for The Great Villain Blogathon!

This is part of the Great Villain Blogathon hosted by Speakeasy* Shadows and Satin & *Silver Screenings from April 20th – 26th 2014

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”– T.E. Lawrence

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”- Mark Twain

IT’S ALL IN THE EYES! -THE LEGACY OF GLORIA SWANSON/NORMA DESMOND & GLORIA HOLDEN/COUNTESS ZALESKA

Are these wicked women? Do they exemplify the monstrous feminine? I dare say NO! They are sensual yet tragic figures!

THERE’S A MONSTROUS FEMALE IN OUR MIDST- SOME CHARACTERIZATIONS OF NORMA:

“ONLY THE MAN WHO WROTE PSYCHO COULD JOLT YOU LIKE THIS”

Four Sided Triangle (1953)

Frankenstein 70 (1958)

The Mask of Fu Manchu 1932

“She went to sleep as a secretary… and woke up a madman’s bride!”

“I don’t know what this is all about, but I promise you some very serious trouble unless you stop it immediately. You know perfectly well I’m Julia Ross.”

I recently had the chance to sit with each film and said to myself… Joey, these would make for a nice collection of obscure thrillers so without further adieu, I offer for your enjoyment, The Suspect, Love From A Stranger 1947, Moss Rose & The Sign of the Ram!

THE SUSPECT 1944

LOVE FROM A STRANGER 1947

“See the tortured undulations of the unwanted virgins”

Run, little girl! Innocence is in peril tonight!

The Light in the Window … The Lock on the Door … The Sounds in the Night! A Possession is Taking Place!

THE GREAT VILLAIN BLOGATHON APRIL 20-26, 2014 hosted by SpeakeasyShadows and Satin Silver Screenings

**Â Right now I’m all MonsterGirl Hope you’ve enjoyed this post for The Great Villain Blogathon!**

**This is part of the Great Villain Blogathon hosted by Speakeasy* Shadows and Satin & *Silver Screenings from April 20th – 26th 2014**