Director Robert MulliganDirector Robert Mulligan’s masterpiece based on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird
Based on actor/author Thomas Tryon’sbest-selling novel, about the duplicity of innocence and evil in the incarnation of twin boys. Set in the Depression era during a hot and dusty summer of 1935. The atmosphere of rural quaintness is painted beautifully by cinematographer Robert Surtees.
Niles and Holland Perry (Chris and Martin Udvanoky) live with their extended family on a rural farm. The boys are looked after by their old world and arcane, loving Russian Grandmother Ada (the extraordinary icon Uda Hagen.)
The sagely mysterious and angelic Ada has taught the boys a special and esoteric gift from the old country she calls ‘the game.’
When several inextricably grotesque accidents beset the town, the clues start to point toward Niles’ wicked brother Holland who may be responsible for the gruesome deaths.
Also starring Diana Muldaur as the boy’s hapless mother Alexandra.
Norma Connolly plays Aunt Vee, Victor French co-stars as the drunken swarthy handyman Angelini, Lou Frizzell is Uncle George, Portia Nelson as the uptight Mrs. Rowe, Jennie Sullivan as Torrie, and a young John Ritter as Rider.
Tryon’s story is a most hauntingly mysterious journey through the eyes of a child, a macabre and provocative psychological thriller from the 70s that has remained indelible in triggering my childhood fears, filled with wonder and the impenetrable world of the supernatural. I plan on doing a broader overview of this film as I am prone to be long-winded. But for now, The Film Score Freak would like to focus on the film’s hauntingly poignant score contributed by one of my favorite and in my opinion one of THE BEST composers of all time, Jerry Goldsmith.
The camera frame evolves into a most simplistic line drawing, a chubby caricature of Alfred Hitchcock’s endearing profile which then converges with Charles Gounod’s“Funeral March for a Marionette” as suggested by Bernard Herrmann. Bernard Herrmann had scored so many of Hitch’s feature films, as well as John Williams and Dimitri Tiompkin. Hitchcock appears at first in a shadowy silhouette from the corner of the screen, then stepping prominently into the outline, filling his place as the master of the evening’s suspenseful ceremonies.
Now, I offer a brief snapshot of my oeuvre featuring some of my very favorite episodes of both Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. They never stale, they always tickle and cause that most delicious little shudder, from some of the finest mystery and suspense writers and re-experiencing the delight of seeing how the show had given some of the best acting talents their very first start…right here.
Jim Whitely (William Shatner) and Dorothy (Rosemary Harris) begin cleaning out the apartment of his dead Cousin Julia (Jessica Tandy), Jim comes across a small wooden box that contains a mysterious glass eye and starts to relate the strange and macabre story to his wife of why it remains in Julia’s possession.
The proper, lonely, and romantically repressed Julia had fallen in love with a famous ventriloquist named Max Collodi (Tom Conway)Becoming obsessed with the performer she saw all his performances, sending him letters requesting to meet him. Eventually quitting her meager job, in order to follow his show around Europe, Max agrees to meet Julia, setting forth certain conditions upon their first encounter.
Once she arrives at his hotel room, she finds him sitting in a dimly lit atmosphere of mystery, surrounded by shadows and subterfuge. The darkness envelopes him, and he asks her to keep her distance. He sits at a table with his small dummy George.
Overcome with passion as the two begin to talk, Julia tries to reach out and touch the object of her undying passion -Max Collodi, but it comes along with grave consequences.
Nurse Killer-“You’re Such a Pretty Nurse, Freda” cackle, cackle.
Over the course of two weeks, a psychotic maniac is on the prowl, being reported all over the television and radio. The police are baffled by this madman who is preying exclusively on live-in nurses.
Set the stage for a dark and stormy night, where Nurse Stella Crosson (Dana Wynter) and Nurse Betty Ames (T.C. Jones) are held up by the storm at the house of the man they are taking care of (John Kerr) He’s got a bad heart and lives in a creepy old mansion on the outskirts of town.
Suddenly, the women get a phone call from the murderer telling them that he knows they’re alone, and is on his way over to kill them both. Stella goes around the house making sure all the windows and doors are locked tight, but discovers that they overlooked a small window in the basement that is flapping open from the storm. Is he already in the house?
Maude Isles-“I read a book about a man who only killed trombone players, he beat them to death with their own trombones.”
The prolific Robert Bloch, a genius writer of the horror suspense genre
John Cassavetes plays Rusty Connors who tricks his prison cellmate Mike Krause (Rayford Barnes) into telling him every detail about his gorgeous girlfriend Helen Cox (Ann Sothern). On his deathbed, Mike reveals to Rusty that he’s got a stash of $56,000 hidden away with the help of his dead accomplice, Pete Taylor.
Once Rusty is released, he goes in search of the epic Helen and finds her in the small town of Hanesville working as a waitress in a greasy spoon diner slinging hash and, and not quite as divine as Mike had related in his verbal memoirs.
Rusty pretends to be enamored with the voluptuous Helen, in order to enlist her in helping him find the stashed cash from the robbery. The journey leads them to a ramshackle boat house on a lake, inhabited by a sea of hungry rats.
From Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Directed by Alfred Hitchcock himself with teleplay and story by the great darkly humorous British writer Roald Dahl.
Produced by Joan Harrison and associate producer/actor Norman Lloyd.
British writer of the darkly comedic fairy tale world, Roald Dahl
Barbara Bel Geddes plays the dutiful Mary Maloney, a devoted wife and housekeeper. Husband police chief Patrick Maloney comes home and coldly tells her that there’s another woman he wants to marry and that he wants a divorce. Oh, yeah and Mary’s pregnant with his child, but he’ll let her have the child, they’ll probably be okay.
The usually composed and polite Mary erupts in a moment of rage killing him by way of blunt force trauma to the head with a giant frozen leg of lamb.
She then calmly calls the police, giving them her quick alibi, a story that she’d been out shopping, while the murder occurred. Lieutenant Noonan is the investigating officer on the case. He is bewildered by the lack of a murder weapon missing from the scene of the crime.
Mary being the ultimate hostess and good cook invites the hard-working detective Noonan and the other police officers to stay for dinner. Noonan says while stuffing his face with Mary’s fine meal, “For all we know, it might be right under our very noses.”
“Old Mrs. Keating gave me the ring test today… dangled it over my tummy, and it’s a boy.”“I want a divorce…now we’ve got to be calm and sensible about it.” “You must have your supper darling, I wouldn’t ever let you go without your supper.”
”I won’t let you leave, you can’t… you can’t.”“Try and stop me.”
From Alfred Hitchcock Presents directed by Stuart Rosenberg, teleplay by Bill S. Ballingerfrom a story by Harold R. Daniels. Produced by Joan Harrison and associate producer/actor Norman Lloyd.
The world of academia is occupied by intellectual types, social misfits, and radical thinkers. At one such particular local college, there is a fiend ravaging women while they walk home through the neighboring woods. At a social gathering of faculty, they speculate the motives of the madman, using their knowledge of criminal psychology and floating theories around while drinking cocktails and fawning over the beautiful Daphne. Is Daphne going to be the maniac’s next victim?
The Alfred Hitchcock Hour directed by Arnold Lavin and based on a short story by Davis Grubb.
Peter Fondais Verge Likens a simple, respectable farmer’s boy whose father is murdered by a ruthless politician again perfectly befitting the acting chops of Robert Emhardt as Riley McGrath who thinks he can get away with anything. George ‘Goober’ Lindsay plays D.D. Martin, McGrath’s cutthroat flunky in a role that is quite a contrast from the oafish and good-natured Goober Pyle.
But Verge is smart, patient, and not impetuous when it comes to laying the blueprints for his master plan of revenge.
This is perhaps one of the most disturbing pieces of suspense television, that would quite aptly fit onto the larger screen adaptation as a major motion picture. The cinematography is stunning and Teresa Wright and Bruce Dern’s acting is so distinctively nuanced that it lifts the narrative beyond mere television drama. The theme of isolation, dread, and psychological/physical abuse by Emery and Jesse is stunning and at times nightmarish. Teresa Wrightplays the meek Stella, a woman who has been so beaten down by her obnoxious and domineering cretin of a husband Emery played by Pat Buttram. Stella is a gentle soul, who loves animals, befriending a little squirrel who becomes her only source of joy. Along comes the menacing Bruce Dern as the mysterious Jesse who is willing to work for $5 a day picking peaches, knowing all too well that Emery is exploiting his labor. He proceeds to terrorize Stella, kill her pet squirrel, and turn the ineffectual and spineless Emery against her, as he is unwilling to protect or defend his own wife, being a cowardly quasi-Neanderthal himself.
Dern inhabits one of the most striking performances as a vicious socio-pathic drifter, so transcendent for its day that it’s utterly chilling to watch the narrative come to force. Dern’s Jesse makes his sleazy character Keeg in Cycle Savages1969 pale in comparison.
Amelia van Zandt in Women’s Prison Ida Lupino’s first incarnation as a brutal prison matron.Chief Cell Block Matron Claire Tyson is portrayed by the steely Ida Lupino The Iron Maiden extraordinaire.
Now, it’s 1972 and IDA LUPINO reprises her role as brutal chief matron of her cell block, the new distinction is that of Claire Tyson. Tyson is a modern transformation from her original role as Amelia van Zandt in Women’s Prison 1955.She is as wicked as her last incarnation as cruel prison Matron, possessing that reptilian stare that could smack down the orneriest of Glory Stompers, Cycle Savage, Devil’s Angel, or Mini Skirt Mobber, on a rampage, with just one look from those cold-blooded eyes.
Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski(Attack of The Giant Leeches 1959), produced by Edward K Milkiand, and written by Rita Lakin (Peyton Place, Mod Squad) With a collection of 7os actresses to fill up the septic green environs of the prison system with their archetypal guises, The sage, and kindly old timer, the tough loner black female outsider, a woman, but a ‘black woman’ doing time for her old man, in the pecking order there’s also the disturbed sylph who wanders aimlessly until provoked by any random act, and of course, let us not forget the essential queen bee who has a direct pipeline to the savage Claire Tyson. New in the mix is the bewildered new fish who has to learn the ropes fast if she’s to survive, and the renegade newcomer undercover, who dares to challenge the system’s status quo.
Parole officer Sandra Parker/ Sally Porter played by the unsung wonderful Lois Nettleton
This ABC Movie of the Week entry stars the great Lois Nettleton as Sandra Parker an employee of the parole department who decides to go undercover as Sally Porter, so she can infiltrate Tyson’s den of maltreatment and sadistic foreplay that she wages over and engenders in the inmates of her cell block. After witnessing the result of a brutal beating death of one of Sandra’s parolees a returning inmate at the prison, Sandra plants herself undercover to try and unearth the prison brutality and bring it to light. She wants Claire Tyson prosecuted for the death of Ginger Stratton.
Edwina Williams with little Rose and Tennessee.Catherine Holly:“Cut the truth out of my brain… is that what you want Aunt Vi ? Well you can’t. Not even God can change the truth that we were nothing but a pair of-“ Mrs. Venable:“Doctor! “ Catherine Holly: “It’s the truth! “ Mrs. Venable: “See how she destroys us with her tongue for a hatchet? You’ve got to cut this hideous story out of her brain. “ Catherine Holly:“How much are you willing to pay for that Aunt Vi?”
“She’s right about that, I failed him, I wasn’t able to keep the web from breaking, I saw it breaking but I couldn’t save it or repair it.”“There, now the truth coming out, now maybe she’ll admit what really happened.” “How she killed him, how she murdered him at… ask her!!”“Catherine, what did really happen?”
Mervyn LeRoy’sbold psychological thriller adapted from Maxwell Anderson’s play.
Nancy Kelly confronts her crispy clean dress wearin’ skipping little psychopathic child Rhoda (Patty McCormack) in a scene where both mother and child devolve into the realm of ‘hysterical’ over the truth behind poor Claude Daigle’s brutal death, prompted by his winning the penmanship medal.
“I have the prettiest mother in the world”
I was going to use Eileen Heckert’scompelling performance as the besotted mournful Hortense Daigle, but I couldn’t resist this climactic scene instead…
What’ll you give me for a basket of kisses?, I’ll give you a basket of hugs -MonsterGirl
"Most people's lives"¦what are they but trails of debris, each day, more debris… more debris"¦ all long trails of debris. With nothing to clean it all up. Finally death."
To me no other playwright manifests more compelling characters, turns a phrase or extracts a poignant moment quite like Tennessee Williams. I want to continue discussing Suddenly, Last Summer, however sensationalist the films climax chooses to eradicate any trace of the central albeit unseen character’s transgression of homosexuality, Tennessee Williams the tormented, sensitive genius who’s homosexuality informed much of his work, also wrote short stories that explore isolation and disconnection within the family dynamic and fringe collections of misfits and loners, somewhat comparative to the characterizations by Edgar Allan Poe or Robert Aldrich.
Tennessee Williams, Paris, 1959 photo by Gisèle Freund.
In a 1948 essay in The New York Times, Williams wrote about the questions that people would ask him about his plays and his characters: "Why do you always write about frustrated women?"
“To say that floored me is to put it mildly, because I would say that frustrated is almost exactly what the women I write about are not. What was frustrated about Amanda Wingfield? Circumstances, yes! But spirit? See Helen Hayes in London's Glass Menagerie if you still think Amanda was a frustrated spirit! No, there is nothing interesting about frustration, per se. I could not write a line about it for the simple reason that I can't write a line about anything that bores me. Was Blanche of A Streetcar Named Desire frustrated? About as frustrated as a beast of the jungle! And Alma Winemiller? (Summer and Smoke) What is frustrated about loving with such white hot intensity that it alters the whole direction of your life, and removes you from the parlor of the Episcopal rectory to a secret room above Moon Lake Casino?”
Geraldine Page as Alexandra Del Lago and Paul Newman as Chance Wayne in Tennessee William’s Sweet Bird of Youth 1962
I think it’s such a seminal piece of work by Williams because it places the conversation in the mainstream of a very culturally conservative 1957. So to continue with my thoughts and impressions about this nuanced melodrama that at times behaves like Grande Guignol.
Party grotesque because of its dealings with American psychiatry and asylums, Williams’ struggle to embrace his homosexuality while entering into psychoanalysis with the famous Dr.Lawrence Kubie whose work included many closeted writers of that time period, it’s been said that it was playwright William Inge who actually made the introductions to Kubie who had also held a position as a military psychologist in the 1940s working to keep homosexuals out of the service.
Tennessee Williams scaring the pigeons in Jackson Square New Orleans – thank god it’s not a flock of vicious devouring black birds going for the soft under belly!
It was during the arduous therapy sessions that Kubie urged Williams to not only give up his sexual proclivities but to abandon his writing as well. Williams ignored the advice of his analyst and remained with his long-time lover Frank Merlo, In fact as I stated in Part I, he actually finished Suddenly, Last Summer at the end of their work together. It was ultimately his writing that served as catharsis, than any prescribed deprivation by Kubie. The one positive by-product of their discussions about William’s dysfunctional family life helped spark a re-energized creative force that proved prolific.
Williams does seem to charge his story with a negative view of American psychiatry. Using the threat of a lobotomy as a weapon is pivotal to the narrative. It is not only William’s condemnation of neurosurgery as a tool of eradicating the identity of the self, his sister Rose and Catherine Holly, but it goes to the argument that the mental health establishment was attacking homosexuality by wiping out the ‘desire’, his choice to live his life the way he wanted to, and was too comfortably supported by the norms of a society that would rather have ‘homosexuals’ just disappear, ‘the cure’ essentially being the same as wiping out the ‘disease’ from the soul. Violet insists that Sebastian was “chaste.” In death, he could remain so.
The incarnation of Sebastian Venable- A white silk suit with no face
Suddenly, Last Summer’s protagonist Sebastian is literally and figuratively absent. He has died before the film begins. There is something to the narrative that makes him somewhat of a blank page, not unlike or symbolically like the empty pages of his yearly poetry notebook that Mother Violet carries around with her like the bible. She assaults Catherine with it, furiously, as a testimony to his inability to write his last Poem of Summer without his mother there to support his creative force. The very books of poetry themselves are "˜ambiguous.'
In this story, Sebastian’s persona, his physical body haunts the narrative, veiled, disambiguate, and elusive. As Violet describes him to Dr. Cukrowicz it is as if she is discussing a ‘work of art’, almost unreal, inhuman, superlative, and divine.
Sebastian Venable is not present as a stable or unifying entity, he merely represents the fragmented consequence of his desires, therefore you cannot assign any definitive boundaries around his identity. The one constant that is pervasive is that he is an absolute symbol of ‘desire’. He and it are one and the same.-though veiled in secrecy and only revealed at the end. The only evidence or declaration of his existence is his white silk suit, cultured accouterments, and ob*je d’art cluttering his Atelier.
Since Williams did cease working with Kubie, and he continued to self-identify as a queer man, it has to conflict with Williams’ detractors who claim, Suddenly, Last Summer was a condemnation of his own homosexuality. The film creates too much of a negative and sinister environment surrounding Lions View, demonizing lobotomies and it’s inherent medieval barbarism, and rallying against the self-denial of Violet Venable. All factors explore how the world imposes it’s will on an individual’s personal freedom.
THE SELF-LOATHING HOMOSEXUAL AND WILLIAM’S STORY OF THE VENABLES.
THE TRUE MONSTERS OF SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER. The Hollies, Dr. Lawrence J. Hockstader: head of Lions View Sanitarium who seeks funding for barbaric surgeries, the Devouring Mother Violet Venable, the Natural World, the Lady Venus Fly Trap, and God himself.
Norman Bates’s mom. An archetypal devouring mother, based on a historical serial killer from Wisconsin Ed Gein’s domineering yet stuffed mother.
So this leads to another lurking question about the play, the story, and the film’s adaptation. Is Suddenly, Last Summer the ultimate example of The Self Loathing Queer? While Sebastian Venable is a character who might be considered a predator, a parasite, a procure, or a user, who ‘baits’ the objects of his desire with the women in his life. The truth is he is not the only focal point of the story, he is the impetus, the catalyst, with which the story sparks.
 “Blondes were next on the menu,” Catherine explains to Dr Cukrowicz, “He was fed up with the dark ones and was famished for blondes….that’s how he talked about people, as if they were – items on a menu. – ‘That one’s delicious looking, that one is appetizing’…”
He is also a figure manifested and manufactured by a devouring mother incestuous and domineering who taught her son well, how to use his social capital to manipulate, exploit, and ultimately consume. Even to the exclusion of her deceased husband whom she abandoned while he was dying, just so she could be with her son when he had considered renouncing all his worldly possessions and becoming a Tibetan Monk. We see through a spectrum of maternal monologues the tenuous line between motherly love and oedipal internment. A devouring mother with a goddess complex who intones the ritualistic invocation of his name – "My son, Sebastian” – throughout the film setting forth a solid declaration of ownership to her son as well as giving him a place in the framework of her life’s meaning.
“Sebastian always said, ‘Mother when you descend it’s like the Goddess from the Machine’… it seems that the Emperor of Byzantium – when he received people in audience – had a throne which, during the conversation, would rise mysteriously into the air to the consternation of his visitors. But as we are living in a democracy, I reverse the procedure. I don’t rise, I come down.”
In fact, William’s portrayal of mostly all the heterosexual characters in the story radiates a nature that can be qualified as reprehensible, greedy, vicious, and downright morbid. Violet Venable is as much or more a grotesque character than Sebastian’s homosexuality, she is the striking monster of the story if you will.
Catherine Holly is literally raped surrounded by the wild Oaks, the image evoked as if it were a rite performed by evil spirits emanating from the ancient Oaks themselves, although she was violated by a married man of low stature in the community no less. Catherine’s violation itself is a monstrous aspect of the story and might harken back to the accusation of rape that William’s sister Rose made toward her own father, the reason, Edwina wanted her daughter quieted.
Catherine’s own mother and brother easily tune out the reality of the invasive and irreversible brain damage that drilling into her skull would cause, just so they can grab their piece of the Venable fortune. The Hollies are all too eager and willing to sign commitment papers from the malevolent Aunt Violet not only to confine her to Lion’s View but subject her to a lobotomy in order to get their hands on Sebastian’s inheritance. Monstrous.
Directed by Barry Shear, (Wild in the Streets 1968,Across 110th Street 1972) written by Joel Oliansky, Dennis Murphy and Mann Rubin. It stars Robert F. Lyons  as the infamous true life serial killer (Charles Schmid) Skipper Todd. The film hosts an incredible cast of actors, Richard Thomas, Belinda Montgomery, Sherry Miles, Joyce Ames, Holly Near, James Broderick, Gloria Grahame, Fay Spain, Edward Asner, Barbara Bel Geddes, Michael Conrad and Meg Foster.
Based on the real life character of 60s thrill killer, Charles Schmid also dubbed the Pied Piper of Tucson who was found guilty of murder in 1966 and sentenced to death, but wound up getting 50 years to life, when the state of Arizona temporarily abolished the death penalty in 1971. Eventually Schmid himself was murdered in prison.
Lyons worldly ruthlessly inhospitable persona channels a charismatic young philosophical misanthrope who embodies the 60s attitude of the anti establishment credo, taking it to a violent level of psychotic abandon. Todd becomes an anti- hero to the local youth who worship him, in particular the very young women he easily beds, who treat him like a deity. He exhibits the qualities of a Svengali as he manipulates both male and female devotees. Todd is cool and urbane, charming his way into the lives of several high school teenagers in a small California town. There is a jaundiced atmosphere to this community, as the complacency and rumbling undercurrent of disturbed restlessness paint a very uneasy portrait of American life off kilter.
When the film opens, Todd has killed a 16 year old girl named Sue Ellen Mack, having recruited two other teenagers to help cover up the crime by burying the body in the vast and ceaseless desert, the perfect place to lose a body. One teen is an overweight girl Norma (Holly Near) who hangs on Skipper like a minion, clinging to him like a swooning groupie and the other a scraggy termite called Andy.
Shear directs each scene with a heartless realism. The three while leaving the desert just having buried Sue Ellen, pick up Billy Roy ( Richard Thomas) who is hitchhiking, just having been released from reform school. There is the sensibility to the film that exposes a mob mentality. This heightened sense of a younger fringe craving to dwell aimlessly outside of society, the phrase used often to signify an opposition to society or being a ‘citizen’ is prevalent in sub genre films, such as the biker genre. In this environment it is feasible that an awakening adolescence would be mesmerized by an outlier, a bad boy, and therefore aide in concealing the crime. It’s conceivable that a flock of youths could be present at the scene of a murder, not only do nothing to stop it, and in fact, help in it’s surreptitious design to cover it up, and allude the police. The unrepentant complicity to the crimes bares a similarity to the working dynamic of the 1986 film The River’s Edge
Robert Thom wrote Angel Angel Down We Go. He envisions the anti hero as a guitar strumming Svengali-Here Robert F.Lyons is the songwriting/psychopath Skipper ToddJordan Christopher portrays the similarly brutal misanthropic sociopath Bogart Peter Stuyvesant in Robert Thom’s Angel Angel Down We Go 1969. Both peddlers of sex and death, wielding guitars as their weapon of seduction.
Skipper Todd manipulates Richard Thomas‘ character Billy like a master puppeteer, dangling the potential for romance with his former classmate Amata. Billy has been obsessed with Amata since High School. Unfortunately Amata only has eyes for Skipper, and poor naive Billy is so easily influenced and blinded by his attraction to this girl that he doesn’t see how Todd is using him as yet another pawn in his coterie.
Belinda Montgomery plays Roberta a pretty 16 year old girl from an affluent family, who is less pliant and impressionable at first. It is her rebellious attitude and her blatant defiance toward Skipper’s malevolent magnetism, which charge his advances which become more potent, as he becomes drawn to her the more she resists.
She’s the one female who appears immune at first to Skipper’s charms. Although she restrains from falling into the same infatuated vapidness like the other girls, ultimately after Skipper breaks into her house one night, beats and rapes her, she finally breaks down and succumbs to his control and decries that she loves him. The manifest use of violence against women as sexual stimulation, and the tenet of annihilating women’s power through control, not love is another inherent trope of the story. Skipper mother as a role model only teaches him to take, to make money, and skews the boundaries of love for him by bestowing upon him an odd, underlying sexualized affection.
We are clued into Skipper Todd’s evolution as a misogynist, as an Oedipal nightmare, who fancies himself an elitist an Ãœbermensch, Friedrich Nietzsche’s superman who poses as anti-hero, bemoaning the state of society and it’s lemmings who conform, yet ironically depending on the very thing he condemns in order to suck the life force out of it. This he needs for his egoist dogma to be able to thrive, feeding off the susceptible, and violating the vulnerable, just as Mrs. Todd picks the bones clean of the elderly men she is charged to take care of.
Though living as an outsider, he needs followers to facilitate his crimes. To help him bury the bodies. He espouses that people have ‘stale dreams’ and that society is riddled with lying and selfishness. In this he is a true Sociopath, as he is the most selfish phony of them all. As self deluded as was Charles Manson who consider himself to be a songwriter and profit, Todd also writes songs on his guitar, recording himself singing glorifying lyrics about his strangulations of the girls he kills. A minstrel madman, strumming and fucking his way through Tucson.
As I’ve said earlier, Todd’s followers include a young Richard Thomas as Billy Roy a guileless yet loyal young man, who unwittingly enables Todd to continue his blood lust and ravaging of young girls. Billy remains naive until the end, when he finally sees the true evil nature of his friend Skipper Todd, and ultimately turns on him.
Shear’s The Todd Killings conveys the feeling of hopelessness and hollow confinement which pervade much of the film and the collective scenes of impulsive brutality. Whether or not the story is historically accurate to the events that led up to Scmid’s capture is unclear, regardless the narrative is a somber, chilling mood piece about society and the attractive monsters it sometimes breeds.
The film creates an eerie, often brutally unsettling tone that unleashes a sense that there is no way out of conformity. You either live an existence of an ugly sterile complacency or wind up being sacrificed on the altar of individual freedom.
The use of the desert as a playground/killing field for Todd and his followers creates an alienating environment. Todd’s compulsion sets the tone for a fraying wire of isolation, in which a barren land of free love and reckless idolatry ultimately lead Todd and his followers to devolve by the film’s tragic end.
At the root of Todd’s twisted nature lies that hint of Oedipal fixation, as his relationship with his mother portrayed by Barbara Bel Geddes bares the reflections of an incestuous partnership. Todd’s conflation of sex and violence, his natural adeptness at manipulation and psycho-sexual violation ultimately make him a serial killer who thrives on destroying that which he is fixated on. The film provides us with an insight into his hatred of women, American motherhood, and the society that engenders both to be simple offerings for the slaughter.
Bel Geddes as Mother Todd –“I could use a little of your help around here you know” Skipper-“robbing the cadavers?”Mrs. Todd’s unbounded greed in one single minute-“now that juice comes to forty cents a quart young man so drink up “Mrs Todd-“the lord put me on this earth, just to support you”"¦. Skipper “If I do not get my allowance in four seconds flat I’ll (he whispers in her ear, then she smiles ) Mrs Todd- “uh hum, I think you’re capable of that.”Mother giving her little angel his milk money for the week
Mrs. Todd’s, Skipper’s money hungry mother owns a nursing home for elderly men running it like a military complex, all of who’s family members never visit. She manages this ‘institution’ like a waiting room for decaying livestock, providing minimal comforts, she’s more militant in her administrations than compassionate as a care giver. For her this is nothing but a business arrangement that supports her simple lifestyle. She shows no emotional connection to the elderly men in her care, nor for her son, who visits periodically, skulking around for hand outs. No emotional maternal outpouring, yet a queer romantic sort of banter.
Skipper tells her that he would ‘rather die than make my living that way.’ She tells him that he is in fact ‘living off them…We all make our lives that way, that’s what life is all about.”
Skipper treats her more like one of the many girlfriends he uses in order to cop some ready spending money. Mrs Todd spouts off about life like an unemotional puritanical hen, urging him to find employment or at least help her out there at the home, which he violently rejects.
The entire atmosphere of the old age home and the town, is disparaging of the human condition and gives us a little insight into Skipper Todd’s lack of empathy, largely pronounced by the contrasting verve of the youth culture shown asphyxiating by the small -town’s conservatism.
Todd’s mother is a clinically acidic detached, and cold-blooded ‘mother figure’ and a reminder that though Skipper seems repulsed by the way the old men have been abandoned by their families, it is still their money that he virtually parasites off of when he comes calling for a hand out from his confederate mother.
Without giving away the climax of the film, I will say that there is a particular scene towards the end that is so savage, framed with such a starkly simple realism, that it is utterly jarring.
The Todd Killings creates a story telling that fuses together our very real fears of the social boogeyman who lurk amidst all us ‘normal’ seeming folk, and although filmed in the 70s, it makes a timeless leap into a contemporary arena without loosing any of its thrust. It tells the story of a monster like Charles Schmid, without feeling outdated or hazy around the edges due to lack of a more graphic or gore drenched narrative.
The film also doesn’t rely on police procedural to fill us in on the details, it is told partly from the perspective of Todd’s own dystopian psyche and partly from the victims themselves. In particular Montgomery’s portrayal of Roberta which is nuanced, strikingly dramatic and ultimately heart wrenching.
The film also stars one of my favorite unsung actresses Gloria Grahame as Billy Roy’s mother. It also co-stars the wonderful Edward Asner, Fay Spain, James Broderick, Michael Conrad as Detective Shaw, and good old Holly Near as Norma ( just can’t forget her in Angel, Angel Down We Go 1969)as one of Skippers nubile sycophants.
Holly Near as Norma
“Teenage girls looking for the body of Alleen Rowe, in connection with murderer Charles Schmid.” Photo from LIFE magazine., via Sweetheart of the Rodeo’s blog post: Hell among the yearlings
On March 10, 1975, Schmid was stabbed 47 times by two fellow prisoners, he died almost a month later.
Notorious Pied Piper of Tucson killer of teenage girls-Charles Schmid
Skipper Todd: I try not to. But sometimes there’s a guy who’s really sweet… it’s so easy. We’re both men… we both know where it’s at. Personally, you’re not giving anything away.
Skipper Todd: I can sleep with them once because it degrades them. It makes them dirty. The worst thing about it is… you meet a chick who isn’t… bad. You can’t screw her because you don’t want to make her “dirty.”
Belinda J Montgomery 70s staple television actress and film star. Giving a brilliantly nuanced performance as Roberta, the object of Skippers affection/annihilation desire.
Roberta: You actually came to see me without any of your baby-pimps? Wow. How do I rate that honor?
Skipper Todd: I just loved your performance at the pool.
Roberta: So, you’re the one who rides the dune buggy and “services” the little girls huh?
Skipper Todd: Oh yes… and speaking of little girls, how old are you?
Doreen Lang designated ‘the Hysterical Mother in the diner’ on IMDb. From Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) A cautionary tale based on friend Daphne Du Maurier’s book about nature gone wild. With the screenplay penned by Evan Hunter.
Watch the hysterical woman in the diner accuse Tippi Hedren’s character Melanie Daniels of practically being the Whore of Babylon, having brought upon this flying wrath from the sky, as all the winged mayhem began the moment she stepped onto the dock of the pristine and pious sleeping fishing village of Bodega Bay.
Bette Davis plays Alicia Hull a librarian who is labeled a Communist by local politicians when she refuses to remove a controversial book from the library’s shelves. Directed by Daniel Taradash who wrote the screenplay for From Here To Eternity 1953, Picnic 1955, Don’t Bother To Knock 1952Â and Bell, Book and Candle 1958. Also starring Brian Keith and Kim Hunter.
Suddenly, Last Summer was a one-act play by Tennessee Williams. It opened off-Broadway on January 7, 1958. It was part of a double bill with another one-act play of Williams’ called Something Unspoken. Suddenly, Last Summer is considered one of Williams’ starkest and most poetic works, and I tend to agree.
While writing this post, I discovered the same story surfacing about the working atmosphere on the set of the film, concerning the tensions between film stars Katharine Hepburn as well as Liz Taylor toward Mankiewicz’s abominable treatment of actor Monty Clift who had been struggling on the set with alcohol and drug use due to a car accident that disfigured his face. The actors had grown increasingly disgusted with the director’s blatant homophobic abuse of Clift who was openly gay.
Film director-Joseph L. Mankiewicz.Montgomery Clift in I Confess (1964).Dr. Cukrowicz talks with Catherine at the convent.Liz and Monty on the set of Place In The Sun 1950
Apparently, this tension culminated in a moment of rebellion by Ms. Hepburn, who waited til the final scene was shot, and then proceeded to spit in Mankiewicz’s face. I have to say, that while Hepburn is not on my list of actors that I idolize nor whose film career I follow closely, I commend her intrepid defense, and would have expected more of a face slap with a long white linen glove. I am saddened by the revelation, if it is accurate that Mankiewicz was a homophobe. I just finished watching his film, Letter to Three Wives 1949 with 3 of my best-loved actresses Ann Southern, Jeanne Crain, and Linda Darnell. Not to mention his contribution to All About Eve 1950. It’s often hard to separate the person from the work, and while I will always admire his work as a director, it does taint the waters to think that Mankiewicz could be a Neanderthal in his thinking.
Letter to Three Wives (1949) starring Ann Southern, Linda Darnell, and Jeanne Crain.All About Eve 1950.Joseph L. Mankiewicz on the set of Suddenly Last Summer with Elizabeth Taylor.
Producer Sam Spiegel submitted Gore Vidal’s screenplay to the MPAA’s review board before production began, the board having expressed objections to the story’s subject matter. Spiegel wanted to let Joseph Mankiewicz shoot the film as it was intended. Although the board first refused to approve the film, they gave the go-ahead, after a few minor changes were made. Thus, the word homosexual never materialized at any time in the film.
The movie supposedly differs from the stage version, using added scenes, and characters. Also adding a few subplots. Due to the strict Hollywood Production Codes that were enforced, they had to cut out any explicit references to homosexuality.
Elizabeth Taylorconjures the psychically injured Catherine Holly with a volatile poignancy, Katharine Hepburn icy and filled with misconstructions about the relationship with her son Sebastian, emerges from her gilded elevator like a throne, as Mrs.Violet Venable. Both stars were up for Academy Awards for Best Actress in A Leading Role that year, but both lost to Simone Signoret for her role in Room at The Top (1959).
