Tinderbox Waltz appears on my album The Unreachable Sky reissue 2010
Celebrate Life all you Wonderful Freaks!
MonsterGirl ( Jo Gabriel )
Category: Directors and Filmmakers
Saturday Film Score: “Sweet Charlotte” by Jo Gabriel * Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte
“Sweet Charlotte” by Jo Gabriel from my Gothic Neo-Classical album The Last Drive In
Tribute to the great Bette Davis! and her performance in the Grande Gothic Cinema piece by director Robert Aldrich
The Film Score Freak recognizes: Firefly by Jo Gabriel * Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without A Face) 1960
Firefly by Jo Gabriel from my album Fools and Orphans & Eyes Without a Face (1960) directed by Georges Franju
This is my song Firefly which appears on my album Fools & Orphans, featuring the upright bass of Mark Urness, originally recorded at Coney Island Studios in Madison Wisconsin by Wendy Schneider. My tribute to a hauntingly beautiful horror story!
Thursday morning film score: Wuthering Heights 1939 & Jo Gabriel’s Of Love and Ether
Here’s to those immortal lovers Cathy and Heathcliff.
Of Love and Ether appears on my album Fools and Orphans
Wuthering Heights 1939
Starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier
MonsterGirl (Jo Gabriel)
Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 5 conclusion: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “Ruined finery…that’s all I have left”
Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 4: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “You’re my favorite living mystery” “Have you ever solved me?”
“From Belle to Outcast: Blood, Blame, and the Burden of Womanhood
Aging, Scandal, and the Specter of the ‘Hystericized Woman’ in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte”
Miriam is back on screen, she’s looking around as if searching for something. The tinkling flutters of incorporeal music still tipping back and forth. We are suspended in some kind of time frame ourselves. Captive. Again, as in Baby Jane? We, as spectators, are being held within the constructs of the visual narrative as much as the characters themselves. Aldrich uses his shadows to constrict our visual movement. So much of the plot is drenched in the mysterious cloaking of shadow that it obliterates our senses. The shadows formulate the environment to feel obstructive.
Once again, the blackest bar of shadow cuts across Miriam’s figure, casting an ominous 2nd Miriam luring behind herself. Throughout Charlotte, the camera/shadows have aggressively dissected the woman’s bodies in various parts. In advertising, there has been criticism aimed at Ads depicting women’s body parts being cut off as if to dehumanize them. I don’t think Aldrich’s intention was to dehumanize these female characters, but rather to show the fracturing of their ambivalent personalities.
The Manifest meaning behind the shadows could be as simple as framing these female characters in mystery, the ultimate question is one of the Latent meanings, in which we might as spectators come to understand the characters’ principal personalities and the underlying motivating forces that drive them.
And I’d like to think that the camera lens didn’t develop a bit of Acrotomophilia, the amputee fetish that sadly some people suffer from. Still, I found that it is something worth noting to observe how these shadows frame the female body in both films.
Even the plant seems to cut across Miriam’s torso.
Miriam knocks on Charlotte’s door. There is a quick jump cut; Charlotte is on the other side of the door. Miriam knocks once more and then walks away. She shuts the lights out and throws us into yet even more darkness than before. She walks over to the silky lace-covered windows. The dog is still barking outside near the graveyard.
A flute flutters the scales in an almost Middle Eastern mixed Phrygian mode, an exotic, mysterious motif, as Miriam peers through the curtains yet looks back behind her. She turns away and walks back into the room.
We hear a creaking door. It’s the large Armour as the door swings open to show that Miriam’s sequined dress has been slashed. With the use of an inner monologue we hear Miriam say, “My dress, somebody’s slashed my dress.” She stares at it. Again we see her in profile. the little pipe flutterings play again as she walks toward the shredded dress. Slowly ever so slowly build the tension.
The fluttering is now almost childlike. Is this to represent that a regressive childish acting out is responsible for this destructive behavior? Miriam’s head is in complete shadow, surrounded by the shiny sequins, dangling like torn fish gills and silk. She begins to handle the ruined fabric, the music still with us. The strings come in strident. Finally, we see Miriam in full face. She looks contained but shocked at the same time. Continue reading “Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 4: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “You’re my favorite living mystery” “Have you ever solved me?””
Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Aldrich’s Hag Cinema: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 Part 3 “Murder starts in the heart and it’s first weapon is a vicious tongue”
READ PART 2 HERE:
HUSH…HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964) – Continued
Charlotte is sipping her coffee and hears a car pull up. She’s holding her shotgun. She sets the china cup down and starts to get up, moving toward the door. We hear a small bird chirping, then the police vehicle comes up the drive, encircled by glorious oak trees. Charlotte closes the door and runs to the great hall, calling “Velma!” Velma comes to the top of the banister, looking through the wooden slats down at Charlotte. She hangs over the edge, “What?” in a long, drawn-out suspension of the word.
Velma is unpretentious and could be perceived as a crude woman. She’s like an unmade bed or someone who looks like she just rolled out of one, and she doesn’t throw away her words. She is strong, sensible, and reliable. Velma, disheveled, unkempt by the years of working as a caretaker to her Miss Charlotte, is misleadingly simple, yet she is sturdy and obviously faithful to her mistress. Continue reading “Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Aldrich’s Hag Cinema: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 Part 3 “Murder starts in the heart and it’s first weapon is a vicious tongue””
MonsterGirl’s Sunday Nite Surreal: Black Sunday/La Mashera del Demonio 1960
BLACK SUNDAY/LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO
Directed by Mario Bava & starring the immortal otherworldly – Barbara Steele!
This timeless Gothic masterpiece is also known as The Demon’s Mask, Revenge of the Vampire, and House of Fright. It is the Maestro Bava’s first film as a solo director, since first working as a cameraman with another auteur of the dark Riccardo Freda, Bava co-directed I Vampiri (1956)
With the presence of the enchanting & luscious beauty of Steele– the film becomes a romantic exercise in the Gothic style of European horror. Her eyes alone could mesmerize an audience with an effervescence that few possess with their gaze.
Bava also controlled the prowling camera style and Nedo Azzini’s sets are emblematic of the netherworld the story is steeped in.
Like a malefic allegory shown with gruesome keenness, Black Sunday is loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Vij.
Barbara Steele manifests two characters the mirror image of each other–Princess Asa Vajda is tortured and burned as a witch. This is how the film opens with a ferocity that propels the film to a whole other level of classical horror. It is the stuff that dark fairy tales are made of… and nightmares.
The iconic spiked Devil Mask that is pounded into Asa’s face for the crime of adultery, or what was considered to be an act of ‘witchery’ Women’s wiles have always been considered powerful, tempting, and dangerous to men.
The local Inquisitor calling Asa a witch, and condemning her to such a brutal death bears ironing for he is Asa’s own brother. Once Asa returns to claim her revenge she vampirizes Katia in order to rejuvenate her life force.
It is now 200 years later, and Katia Vajda the descendent of the persecuted Princess Asa, is the spitting image of the beautiful ‘witch.’ Asa and her lover Javuto (Arturo Dominici) rise up from the tomb, cobwebs, scorpions, and spiders to wreak revenge on the legacy of the Vajda family curse.
One of the most memorable scenes in horror film history is the resurrection of Javuto from the crumbling ground, the smoky dark clouds surround his devil-masked rotting visage underneath–as he claws his way out of his grave and lurches off into the ghostly night.
The special effects, masks, faces, matte painting, etc. were done by Bava himself with his brother Eugenio Bava. The face of Asa which bears the marks of the spike holes from the devil mask adds a chilling effect to the film. It also creates the image of the monstrous feminine that strives to conquer and drain the life of those she’s fixated on. The two characters that Steele plays are contradictory figures, one virginal and innocent, the other bloodthirsty and evil. Asa was unholy because of her sexual desires.
Black Sunday’s expressive influence and its grand sense of classical horror are rooted in the idea that a woman’s sexuality cannot be destroyed, and will always inevitably return by its own primacy enduring the scars of the violence inflicted upon her. That which the world order, particularly religious zealotry and patriarchal law attempt to oppress come back twofold just to shake up the order of things.
The ultimate threat appears as the merger of the two Vajda’s women Asa & Katia… the virgin and the whore. Bava continued to make films where men desperately tried to destroy the lure of women’s desire and their desirability…
STARE INTO THESE EYES… discover deep within them the unspeakable terrifying secret of BLACK SUNDAY… it will paralyze you with fright!
BRIDES OF HORROR – Scream Queens of the 1960s! – Part 4: The Dark Goddess-This Dark Mirror
Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 2 Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “He’ll Love You Til He Dies”
Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)
Directed by Robert Aldrich, written by Henry Farrell, who also wrote What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), How Awful About Allan (1970) and the made-for-tv film The Eyes of Charles Sand (1972) scripted by Lukas Heller and Farrell. Starring the legendary Bette Davis as Charlotte Hollis, Olivia de Havilland as cousin Miriam Dearing, and Joseph Cotten as Drew. The inimitable Agnes Moorehead as Velma Cruthers. Cecil Kellaway as Harry Mills, Victor Buono as Big Sam Hollis, Mary Astor as Jewel Mayhew, and a very young Bruce Dern as John Mayhew. George Kennedy as the foreman and extra recasting of Wesley Addy as Sheriff Luke Standish, and Dave Willock from Baby Jane?
Aldrich apparently had another hit with his 2nd genre film, which opened to generally positive reviews. With the exception of this scathing review in The New York Times, by Bosley Crowther who couldn’t have been more off the mark, he writes “So calculated and coldly carpentered is the tale of murder, mayhem, and deceit that Mr. Aldrich stages in this mansion that it soon appears grossly contrived, purposely sadistic and brutally sickening. So, instead of coming out funny, as did Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? it comes out grisly, pretentious, disgusting, and profoundly annoying.”
Again, I wholly disagree with Crowther, as this film wasn’t meant to be as campy as Baby Jane, and “funny” is an odd word for the film as well, nor was there an unwritten rule that said Aldrich had to restrain some of the grisly details from this picture. I don’t believe chaining an invalid to a bed, feeding them road kill, and slowly starving them to death is the less disgusting proposal. And as far as being brutally sickening, I see Charlotte as a hauntingly nightmarish allegory.
Let me say that I loved Peter Shelley’s book. He compiled some great examples of the genre and added a lot of information and insight to the subject matter; I was with him all the way, so there were a few points of divergence in our opinions of Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte isn’t a slight to the author at all. According to Peter Shelley in his Grande Dame Guignol Cinema: A History of Hag Horror from Baby Jane to Mother, the chapter on Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, the film suffered from the absence of Joan Crawford. Shelley considered the follow-up film to be a “bloated reprisal of the pivotal components of the earlier film” (pg.57). Actually, I think quite the contrary about this suspenseful, understated film. It has less of a feeling of a”bloated” extension of the first Hag film, as Charlotte appears more distilled, virtually more refined in its subtle use of hallucinatory machinations, with a very cogent argument for Charlotte’s sustained ire and melancholy. Shelley considers the location an attempt to surpass the Grande Guignol aspect of its predecessor by placing it in a southern Gothic milieu, the Ascension Parish, but he thinks it fails with its “florid exoticism” again because it lacks the electrifying cast choice by not reuniting Crawford and Davis. Additionally, I say too much of a good thing becomes a device therefore a reuniting of the two would have minimized the impact that the prior collaboration by both film stars made on Baby Jane. I think that Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte is perhaps even an elegant piece and stands well on its own, as a taut psychological portrayal of the regressive woman, and at its very essence is an ideal Grande Dame film.
I think Crawford would have brought a certain purposeful intensity that worked for her in so many films, but would have overshadowed the interplay between Davis’s Charlotte and Olivia de Havilland’s subtle, malignant charm in her characterization of cousin Miriam. Supposedly, after the great success of Baby Jane, Crawford agreed to do a follow-up film. Aldrich encouraged writer Henry Farrell to create a new story called “What Ever Happened To Cousin Charlotte?” Bette Davis asked that the title be changed to fit the line from the song. So Aldrich agreed, and Davis signed on. Crawford, however, wanted her name to come first on the credits, unlike Baby Jane, where Davis’s name appeared left of the screen or side by side. Leftward is the more pronounced association as the star. Bette Davis even agreed to this provision. Once the shooting began in Baton Rouge on June 4th, 1964, Davis only got to film one scene with Crawford, where she watches Crawford enter the mansion. Otherwise, they never did another scene together from that point on. The production was put on hold because Davis was called away to finish some re-shoots on Where Love Has Gone in Los Angeles. Continue reading “Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 2 Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “He’ll Love You Til He Dies””
Boris Karloff’s Thrilling: Another Visit with Boris Karloff’s Cinematic Television Masterpiece
When I first started blogging on The Last Drive In, I chose one of my most beloved memories, a thing of nostalgia for me, and what I consider to be one of the greatest television programs that contained not only the classic crime mystery drama, but Gothic horrors based on some of the most prolific writers of these genres back then, such as Cornell Woolrich , Robert Bloch and August Derleth.
I recently covered episodes like The Hungry Glass, The Hollow Watcher, The Grim Reaper, The Cheaters, The Incredible Doktor Markesan and Pigeons From Hell.
This time I will be blogging about a few more interesting tales such as The Ordeal of Dr Cordell starring Robert Vaughn. The Remarkable Mrs. Hawk starring Jo Van Fleet and John Carradine, The Premature Burial starring Sidney Blackmer (the piercing Roman Casstavette in Rosemary’s Baby) and Boris himself as Dr. Thorne. And finally Rose’s Last Summer starring Mary Astor since I’m on a Mary Astor kick what with working on my Aldrich series and Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte post that’s giving me an infarction, it’s so detailed, yet I don’t know how to write any other way.
I’ll be periodically choosing other great episodes from the series,but these were the ones I thought would be really interesting to cover right now.
I am talking about Boris Karloff’s television series that ran from 1960-1962: Thriller: The Complete Series.
Also the contributions by directors like John Brahm, Ida Lupino , Herschel Daugherty, Arthur Hiller and Paul Henreid who had a unique visual perspective that created creepy landscapes and lighting that would fit the noir canon very well.Also very notable for me as a musician are the musical scores by Mort Stevens, Pete Rugolo and Jerry Goldsmith that were nothing short of stunning, evocative melodies that tore at your soul and fit the mood of each episode,adding another vivid dimension to the atmospherics.
I have written earlier about some of my favorite episodes from Boris Karloff’s anthology series Thriller, which was an unusual collection of mixed genres. The series seems to be a very popular one here at The Drive In, so I’ve decided to write about a few more that have stayed with me over time, not that I didn’t absolutely love every single episode, all 67 of them. I only wish there had been more, or that someone would discover lost episodes that were never released. I have virtually watched each episode hundreds of times, not only catching little details for the first time with each reviewing, but never do I grow tired of them. That is the sign of something timeless, and masterful. And the more time goes by, I realize even further how preeminent this body of work truly is.
I can only imagine how excited fans like me were when they finally released the box set.I cried, I am not even kidding you. I, like many other devotees, waited a very long time for them to release this masterpiece on DVD. I used to have to wait up until 3am back in the day so that I could set my VCR to record when the Sci-Fi Channel had the good sense to run the episodes. Although I’d always get hocked off that the commercials were ads with nude girls telling me to “pick up the phone” while they were sliding up and down a pole. I know that boys and men love sci-fi and horror, but news flash! girls and women actually can have an avid appreciation for all things scary, thrilling and wondrous like the marvels of science, just as much. We can have a visceral passion for action and frightmares just like anyone else. So having to endure the “babes” of late night Sci-Fi Channel commercial land was irksome. Now I can watch Boris with some undisturbed dignity and I don’t have to be told to “pick up the phone” by some bimbo jutting her tongue over her shiny lip gloss, as if that were sexy to me. I’d rather watch Marisa Mell or Barbara Steele sitting under a tree reading a book. But again I digress as by now you know I am apt to do. Forgive MonsterGirl her little occasional rants.
So anyway, not only was there unmistakable atmosphere to each of Thriller’s episodes, but the stories themselves were lensed in a unique way that was very ahead of it’s time. The actors brought a serious attitude to their characters and the plot development, and didn’t treat them as merely short pulp stories as fodder for the tv masses. This was an intelligent show, and the presence of Boris Karloff only added a charming sage fabulist narration that was like being tucked in by your remarkable grandfather who loved to tell a good spooky tale to you right before bedtime. I’ve said this plenty, I wish Boris Karloff had been my grandfather.
MonsterGirl