-MonsterGirl
Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ Celebrates 50 years of Winged Terror in 2013
Category: Literature The Novel and The Screenplay
From The Vault: The Long Dark Hall (1951)
Directed by Reginald Beck, and Anthony Bushell. Written by Nunnally Johnson, Edgar Lustgarten is based on his book “A Case To Answer” and W.E. Fairchild. With cinematography by Wilkie Cooper (Stage Fright 1950, Jason and The Argonauts 1963), granting wisps of shadowy montages that are equally noirish, suspenseful, and simply splendid.
Yielding and obsessive Rex Harrison plays Arthur Groome a London gentleman married to the devoted and lovely Mary (Lilli Palmer.)Unfortunately, Arthur becomes consumed by a flirtatious showgirl Rose Mallory (Patricia Cutts), who winds up being brutally knifed in her boarding house room, and left for the credulous Groome to become suspect one. First gets the splatter of Rose’s blood on his jacket, but then fails to prove his innocence in a sea of circumstantial evidence.
Condemned to hang, this allows the real serial killer played by the tall and eerie Anthony Dawson who looks frightened all the time, a destroyer of wanton women who sees himself as ‘an instrument of justice‘, still lurking about, first at the trial spouting off about his obvious philosophy on sexually independent women, and then creepily shadowing poor Mrs. Groome, whom he idealizes as the perfect woman.
I’ll be up the long dark hall til next time! -Yours always- MonsterGirl
Fiend of The Day! Hope Emerson as Matron Evelyn Harper: in the prison-noir classic Caged (1950)
“You may be just a number to them, but you’re more than that to me…here pull up a chair it’s nice and roomy.”
CAGED (1950)
Writer Virginia Kellogg (White Heat 1949) offers us a doozy with this story directed by John Cromwell (Dead Reckoning 1947)
Eleanor Parker is Maria Allen, thrust into the prison system run by a well-meaning warden Ruth Benton played by the inimitable Agnes Moorehead. As in any good women in prison flick, it requires the sadistic matron to roil the exploitation brew with lots of dehumanizing antics like a good head shaving or dare I mention it, a kitten killing. So here’s to Hope Emerson’s mean-spirited Evelyn Harper, kitten killing, bon bon eating, Midnight Romance reading, prison caboose with a mean on, that makes Ida Lupino look like Saint Joan. Also starring one of my new favorites and a staple to these great gritty noirs the sprite Jan Sterling, Betty Garde, Ellen Corby, and Jane Darwell.
Reccuring Iconography in Classic Noir, Suspense & Horror: Stairs…
Steps upon steps, leading to divinity, or leading to death?
Charlie Chaplin in City Lights 1931.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho 1960.
Jack Clayton’s The Innocents 1961 starring Deborah Kerr.
Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase 1946 Ethel Barrymore, Dorothy Maguire, & Elsa Lanchester.
Douglas Sirk’s Thunder on the Hill 1951 starring Claudette Colbert.
Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited 1945- Stars Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey.
The Picture of Dorian Gray 1945 with George Sanders and Hurd Hatfield.
MORE TO COME!!!!!!!
I’ll be heading back up the ‘steps’ here at the drive-in, be well- MonsterGirl!
Nightmare Alley (1949) In the cutting room with editor Barbara McLean. See the descent of man, the human condition up close, and throw in a Geek, please.
NIGHTMARE ALLEY 1947– Barbara McLean: Groundbreaking Film Editor
In Nightmare Alley Barbara McLean contributes to creating a landscape of a distorted reality alongside the dark, clandestine, and arcane carnival atmosphere. The film is beautifully woven, as the seamless images flow into one another. McLean blends together the invisible strands that only one’s dreams could effectively manifest. McLean’s editing constructs much of the surreal and tormented ‘movement’ of the film. It’s what transports each scene of the film, making it every bit as if WE were inhabiting someone’s nightmare.
With 62 film credits to her name, half of which were with filmmaker Henry King, Barbara McLean is a master of cutting and shaping. She’s worked on some of my all-time favorite films including this film, Goulding’s Nightmare Alley, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out (1950), Henry King’s The Song of Bernadette (1943), Robert Wise’s The Desert Rats (1953), John Ford’s Tobacco Road (1941) and again Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950). McLean also worked as an editor on Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata in 1953, and in 1954 with Michael Curtiz’s on The Egyptian. She edited the first movie filmed in CinemaScope, The Robe (1952), directed by Henry Koster.
Barbara McLean was one of the most recognized editors working during the reign of Darryl F. Zanuck at the 20th Century Fox Studio, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Eventually achieving the honor of division chief of the editing department in 1949. She joined Fox in 1935 as one of only eight female film editors working in Hollywood in the 1930s. McLean was part of a huge team of technicians, writers, directors, and collaborators that Zanuck went to for guidance. She was very influential in much of Zanuck’s decision-making process, as she often acted as an adviser to the Hollywood movie mogul, helping him coordinate even a single shot.
She won the 1944 Academy Award for Film Editing for her work on Wilson (1944) director Henry King’s biopic film of Woodrow Wilson’s political career. McLean was nominated another 6 times for that award, including her work on All About Eve. I think she should have won the 23rd annual Academy Award for All About Eve, but she lost to Ralph E Winters and Conrad A Nerig for their work on King Solomon’s Mines. It was a tough year to compete with nominations also going to The Third Man and Sunset Boulevard. McLean’s greatest collaboration was with filmmaker Henry King, a relationship that spanned over 29 films including Twelve O’Clock High 1949.
Her last editing credit was for Henry King’s Untamed (1955). In later years, McLean acted primarily in a supervisory and administrative capacity, eventually retiring from 20th Century Fox in 1969, due to her husband’s declining health. She received the inaugural American Cinema Editors Career Achievement Award in 1988. McLean died in Newport Beach, California in 1996.
Her impact was summarized by Adrian Dannatt in a 1996 obituary in The Independent: McLean was “a revered editor who perhaps single-handedly established women as vital creative figures in an otherwise patriarchal industry.” Writer Tom Stempel, in a piece about Darryl F. Zanuck, writes of McLean‘s influence on Zanuck‘s filmmaking; “For all her focus on keeping the narrative moving, McLean’s editing could dazzle if called for. In A Bell for Adano (1945), she took material director Henry King shot on the return of the Italian POWs to their village and put it together with such a pure sense of emotion that when she cut at exactly the right moment to King’s overhead shot of the prisoners and villagers coming together in the square, the cut was more heart-stopping than conventional close-ups would have been.”
McLean brings together the writer’s and director’s vision and gives it completeness, a cohesion, like alchemy with film footage, she creates cinema gold. According to Bright Lights Film Journal “the basic rules of film editing, first established in the silent era, still govern the industry today: maintain your eye lines, preserve continuity, respect planarity (the rules governing the transposition of three dimensions onto a two-dimensional plane), find a good rhythm, and, most important, always advance the story.” Here is where McLean excels. If you look at the variety of narratives, milieus, and landscapes McLean has stitched together in the editing room, you can see how expansive her vision explores the realms of the human condition, moral corruption, and redemption weaving together images that shape the story into ‘the big picture’, with all the little pieces of the intricate moments of the framework, revealing an intimate story, a memorable story, a universal notion of people living in a state of transformation.
If I could enter the film industry at this stage of my life, there would be one thing aside from my already being a music composer, of course, would be to sit in the editing chair. One of the things I look for in a film, and feel passionately certain about is the cinematography, scoring, and casting, if there is one singularly essential component to what makes a film greater…it’s the editing.
We should also celebrate the women working in the very male-dominated career of film editing, women like Barbara McLean and even Dorothy Spencer (Lifeboat 1944, Stagecoach 1939, and the film I recently blogged about Valley of The Dolls 1967).
I should also mention, Anne Bauchens, who was Cecil B. DeMille’s editor, cutting nearly all his movies from 1915 until his death in 1959, and Margaret Booth. Two women who haven’t been put in the greatest light in terms of their ‘difficult’ personalities and skill, something I’ll write about in future. But aren’t women always difficult to work with? Geez.
And so let’s raise a toast to Barbara McLean’s contributions to the cinema… a pioneer in the industry not only breaking the glass ceiling but taking all the pieces and putting them back together to make an indelible cinematic mural for ages to come.
And now for the Carnival ‘Geek’ in Nightmare Alley: Tyrone Power’s astonishing portrayal of Stanton ‘Stan’ Carlisle the ambitious carney who rises to evangelistic notoriety as a slick and cunning mentalist, only to descend into the realm of self-destruction when power corrupts, consumes and destroys his life, ultimately leading him back to sideshow freakery becoming the very ‘geek’ he once found repulsive. McLean’s treatment of the film’s climatic excursion into the bowels of the carnival and Stan’s diminution into the shadows is quite viscerally staggering.
According to the book Carny Sideshows by Tony Gangi, a ‘Geek’ is:
An unskilled performer whose performance consists of shocking, repulsive and repugnant acts. This “lowest of the low” member of the carny trade would commonly bite the head off a living chicken, or sit in a bed of snakes. Some historians distinguish between “geeks” who pretend to be wild men, and “glomming geeks” whose act includes eating disgusting things. See the 1949 movie “Nightmare Alley” for a good geek story as well as for an excellent depiction of the mentalist’s technique of “cold reading”. In later years the geek show turned into a “see the pitiful victim of drug abuse” show. “Geek” as a verb (“he geeked”) is one of several terms in use among wrestlers meaning to intentionally cut oneself to draw blood.
Either on the fairway or the cutting room floor, I’ll be there! Your ever-faithful -MonsterGirl!
From The Vault: Valley of the Dolls (1967) “Boobies, boobies, boobies. Nothin’ but boobies. Who needs ’em?”
Valley of The Dolls 1967
Directed by Mark Robson, produced by David Weisbart and Helen Deutsch, with a screenplay by Dorothy Kingsley and Harlan Ellison. Cinematography by William H. Daniels (CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF 1957, IN LIKE FLINT 1967).
Film editing by Dorothy Spencer (STAGECOACH 1939, TO BE OR NOT TO BE 1942, LIFEBOAT 1944 and CLEOPATRA 1963) Set Direction by Raphael Bretton (HUSH HUSH SWEET CHARLOTTE 1964 and THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE 1972) and Walter M Scott. (THE SOUND OF MUSIC 1965 and BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID 1969) Art Design by Richard Day (ON THE WATERFRONT 1954, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE 1951 and THE GRAPES OF WRATH 1940) and Jack Martin Smith (BATMAN 1966 and PLANET OF THE APES 1968) and wardrobe by Travilla.
With all that creative talent on board, you can call the film trashy, but it sure has a lot of style!
Starring Barbara Parkins (THE MEPHISTO WALTZ 1971 never looking more beautiful in my opinion. One of my favorite horror films of the 70s, I plan on doing a long winded overview of it this Winter 2012.)
as Anne Welles, Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara, Sharon Tate as Jennifer North, Susan Hayward as Helen Lawson, Paul Burke as Lyon Burke, Toni Scotti as Tony Polar, Lee Grant as Miriam Polar, Martin Milner as Mel Anderson, Alexander Davion as Neely’s 2nd husband the bisexual Ted Casablanca, Naomi Stevens as Miss Steinberg and Robert H Harris as Henry Bellamy.
From the moment the utter fabulousness of this tawdry pulp icon of the 60s starts rolling on screen with Barbara Parkin’s heavenly visage gazing out the train window, and Dionne Warwick starts confessing the movie’s theme song with her soulful voice… I get verklempt.
Doll a euphemism for little colored pills of varying types of barbiturates… ‘uppers’ and ‘downers.’
It is based on the best-selling explosively trashy novel by Jacqueline Susann and directed by, of all people, Mark Robson. (THE SEVENTH VICTIM 1943, THE GHOST SHIP 1943, ISLE OF THE DEAD 1945, and well his telltale progression into melodrama land with PEYTON PLACE 1957 and eventually into darker territories with DADDY’S GONE A- HUNTING 1969)
Growing up as a little girl in the ’60s, there wasn’t a coffee table or bookshelf that I didn’t see a copy of Valley of the Dolls sitting atop next to a hardcover of a best-selling self-help book by Dr. Thomas A. Harris’, I’m Okay You’re Okay which was first published in 1967, the year Valley of The Dolls was released.
There was certainly a copy of it in my own house and I remember seeing the film either during its theatrical release or later on the huge Magnavox cabinet tv with only three dials. At first, I was struck by the incredible score from composer John Williams and songs by Andre Previn and lyrics by Dory Previn. And then I fell under the spell of the badness and the beautifulness of it all…
Standing out is its vivid colors of the 60s film processing, the vogue style couture, flashy set design, and mod art direction. Populated by the campy, over-the-top acting in all the right places, of course, by the entire cast, it makes for one hell of a ride through the tunnel of tragic love in high-dramaville. As cliche after libidinous, compulsive, and histrionic cliche prance across the screen as a story of meandering disassembled desire by the needful women and their male companions.
It’s campy and tawdry and melodramatic trash, and that’s a GOOD THING for us junkies of melodramatic trashy & campy flicks from the 1940s -1960s.
Postcards From Shadowland No.7
Sunday Nite Surreal: The Last Man on Earth (1964): “Another day to live through. Better get started”
They want my blood. Their lives are mine. I still get squeamish.”
THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964)
Directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow The Last Man on Earth is based on the best-selling sci-fi/horror novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson who unhappy with the script, used the pseudonym Logan Swanson for the screenplay. The film remains pretty close to the book, and keep in mind that Last Man on Earth predates Night of The Living Dead (1968) by 4 years.
Piero Mecacci ( Suspiria 1977, Hatchet For A Honeymoon 1970, The Young, The Evil and The Savage 1968, was responsible for the film’s make-up.
Matheson’s story is perhaps the first involving vampire-like beings whose origin is not rooted in the supernatural but stems from a scientific, biological nature, an actual medical condition. It is also the first of three adaptations of Matheson’s book, and stands alone as the most striking, although I will always have a special kind of 70s love for director Boris Sagal’s version of The Omega Man 1971
Starring Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan, Franca Bettoia as Ruth Collins, Emma Danieli as Virginia Morgan, Umberto Raho as Dr. Mercer, and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as Ben Cortman. In 1971 it is the wonderful Anthony Zerbe as Matthias who reprises the role of the vengeful cult leader of ‘the family’ who craves Heston’s (Neville) lifeblood.
“Alive among the lifeless… alone among the crawling creatures of evil that make the night hideous with their inhuman craving!”
Synopsis:
“December 1965. Is that all it has been since I inherited the world? Only three years. Seems like 100 million.”
The year is 1968, Vincent Price in a somber fashion plays Dr. Robert Morgan who like Sisyphus is condemned to repeat his daily tasks of replenishing his stock of garlic and mirrors (the undead hate both), adding gasoline to his generators, collecting the dead bodies that lay strewn around his dismal and cluttered house, and throwing them into the enormous pit where he burns the remains while wearing a gas mask, which is effectively creepy on its own.
“I need more mirrors and this garlic has lost its pungency.”
For much of the film’s beginning, Morgan narrates his story for us as an inner dialogue, “An empty dead…silent world.”
“There was a time when eating was pleasurable now it bores me. just a fuel for survival, I’ll settle for coffee and orange juice this morning. But first, there’s my life to consider, I better replace that garlic I’ll need more lots more, better stop off and get ’em”
Morgan is the seemingly sole survivor in a global outbreak of an unknown bacterium. By day, he collects his needed supplies, tries to make contact by radio with any other survivors, makes repairs to his house, from the onslaught of undead who attack by night, and basically tries to maintain his sanity in the bleak environment of apocalyptic ruin.
Each day he wakes up, checks off the date on his primitively scrawled calendars, sharpens his wooden stakes, the weapons he uses to defend himself against a surviving race of Vampiric like undead that roams the night air calling out his name ‘Morgan, come out!’ pounding at his door. “Morgan! We’re going to kill you!,” they taunt him endlessly, led by his old colleague Ben Cortman.
Living Ben Cortman: There are stories being told, Bob.
Robert Morgan: By people who are out of their minds with fear.
Living Ben Cortman: Maybe. But there are too many to be just coincidental. Stories about people who have died and have come back.
Robert Morgan: They’re stories Ben, stories.
“I can’t afford the luxury of anger, anger can make me vulnerable. it can destroy my reason and reason is the only advantage I have over them. I’ve gotta find where they hide during the day. Uncover every one of them.”
“And how many more of these will I have to make before they’re all destroyed”
“More of them for the pit. tonight there’ll be more of them, they live off the weak ones., leave them for the pit.”
Less like a Gothic Hammer vampire epic or prior decades features from Universal and Bela Lugosi featuring swarthy eastern Europeans, The Last Man on Earth is set in a modern urban landscape and acts like a hybrid horror/science fiction morality play, as Morgan drudges on to persevere against the army of soulless humans that haunt his existence.
They have become inhuman things to hunt, and he has been transformed into a veritable Adam living in a post-nuclear anti-paradise with no companionship. It’s merely the primal need to survive that drives him. In this way, he has been reduced to a scavenging animal, living on instinct, with an inescapable mission to hunt and kill people who were once human like himself.
“I can’t live a heartbeat away from hell’
Morgan inhabits a world, where everyone else has been infected by the plague, they cannot tolerate sunlight, hate to see their own image in mirrors, and more likened to the ancient folklore of Vampires are repelled by garlic.
At night these undead civilians, try to get into Morgan’s house, they have a desire to kill him as much as he has to destroy every one of them.
Each day he gets in his large automobile in search of more lifeless bodies scattered around the city and seeks out those in hiding to use his wooden stakes to impale and then throw on the mass grave, fumes rising from the gasoline-soaked funeral pyre.
He finds a dead girl outside his house, and picks her up as she flops like a rag doll. He finds another one in his driveway. He loads them into the trunk of his car. He realizes that he’s out of gas. Dead bodies line the road.
“I can get rid of them later, right now I’m out of gas.”
As he drives over scattered bodies like human road kill he thinks to himself.
“They can wait too, I’ve got my life to worry about, those mirrors will have to be replaced before dark.”
The cinematography by Franck Delli Colli is stunning as it is stark. He paints an apocalyptic wasteland, with the addition of the mass graves and gas masks which to me, evoke the specter of war-torn Europe after WWII.
In flashback we see Morgan as a happily married man, with a beautiful wife and daughter. As the memory unfolds, we see that his wife and daughter have been effected by the plague. While his daughter is taken away to the public burning pit after she succumbs, Morgan secretly buries his wife, not knowing that the dead are coming back to life.
Once he returns home and is attacked by his dead wife, he realizes that he must dispose of all the plague victims before they reanimate themselves into zombies who can spread the plague. Morgan has a theory that his immunity to the bacteria is due to an infected bite he received from a vampire bat, while stationed in Panama. This prior exposure to the plague allowed his blood and immune system to build up a tolerance over time.
One day he finds a dog wandering and takes him home, joyous for the company the little guy will be, unfortunately he too has fallen ill from the plague and sadly, Morgan has to kill him too. Just to let you dog lovers know what to expect…
During one of his daylight excursions, he notices a woman moving around in the distance. It is Ruth Collins, who is terrified of Morgan when she first sees him, but he convinces her to come home with him. When Ruth becomes sickened by a string of garlic waved in her face, she claims she is just weak, but Morgan becomes suspicious of her.
Morgan catches Ruth trying to inject herself with the vaccine that he’s been working on, which seems to stave off the effects of the disease. At first, she attempts to point a gun at Morgan but eventually admits that she was sent to spy on him and that she is part of a secret group of people like her, who are infected by the plague but are using a treatment that restores their health while still in the bloodstream but wears off after a time only to be reinfected again.
Ruth tells Morgan that her group is trying to rebuild their wiped-out civilization, while destroying the remaining infected walking dead, also telling Morgan that many of the people he has killed were technical ‘still alive’
Morgan- “Your new society sounds charming.”
Ruth Collins: You can’t join us. You’re a monster to them. Why do you think I ran when I saw you, even though I was assigned to spy on you? Because I was so terrified, what I’d heard about you. You’re a legend in the city. Moving by day, instead of night, leaving as evidence of your existence bloodless corpses. Many of the people you destroyed were still alive! Many of them were loved ones of the people in my group.
Robert Morgan: I didn’t know.
Morgan transfuses his own blood into Ruth’s while she is asleep, and she is immediately cured.
This encourages Morgan as he sees hope that he can now cure the remainder of Ruth’s people, the surviving yet suffering group of humans between the living dead and Morgan, the last completely healthy survivor of the human race.
In the climatic ending, the hand of irony strikes Morgan’s triumph down, as Ruth’s people begin to attack, forcing Morgan to flee, leaving the band of Ruth’s survivors to kill off the rest of the undead who are aimlessly threatening, and menacing, and of course stalking Morgan’s house.
Ruth’s people see Morgan and begin chasing him, as he picks up tear gas and grenades from a police station arsenal, they exchange gunfire and Morgan is wounded.
He finds his way into a church, with Ruth begging her people to let Morgan live.
They finally impale him on the altar with a spear. Of course, a very Christ-like image the symbolism is not lost here, he has been sufficiently sacrificed, the only man who could truly save them.
Morgan’s last dying words are “You’re freaks, all of you! All of you, freaks, mutations!” and declares that he is “the last true man on earth.”
This is truly not the end my friends… -MonsterGirl
Begin ‘The Bagheeta’: Val Lewton’s fantasy/ reality world of Curse of The Cat People: fearing the female/feline monster and the engendering child. Part I
Val Lewton’s short story ‘The Bagheeta’ appeared in Farnsworth Wright’s July 1930 issue of Weird Tales Magazine. Lewton was dabbling in concepts of terror, before he even got to RKO.
The story takes place in the Ukraine (from which MonsterGirl’s people come!) and is a coming of age story about a 16 year old boy named Kolya who helps his Uncle forge armor. Someone comes into the village with a slaughtered sheep, who claims to have seen a Bagheeta, a monstrous black leopard that can change it’s form into a beautiful woman. Only one person can kill a Bagheeta, and that is a virgin male, for he needs to be able to resist her seductive powers. If he is seduced, the woman will change back into the black leopard and kill the boy and eat him! Lewton would eventually adapt and produce his story for RKO in the form of Cat People in 1942 starring Simone Simon the suggested embodiment of a Bagheeta.
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly–. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE 1944
Produced by Val Lewton and directed by Robert Wise and Gunther von Fritsch, scripted by DeWitt Bodeen, and stars Simone Simon as the ghost of Irena, Kent Smith as Oliver Reed, Jane Randolph as Alice Reed, Eve March as Miss Callahan, Julia Dean as Mrs. Julia Farren, Elizabeth Russell as Barbara Farren, Sir Lancelot as Edward, and Ann Carter as Amy Reed.
Ann Carter played Beatrice Carroll in the riveting noir classic The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947) with Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck.
Curse of the Cat People is filled with poignant original music by Roy Webb and with Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People 1942, The Fallen Sparrow 1943, The 7th Victim 1943, The Spiral Staircase 1945 Bedlam 1946 and Out of The Past 1947) It’s no wonder Curse of The Cat People has many of the elements of a classic film noir piece.
CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944) – A synopsis
After the tragic death of his wife Irena, played by the beautiful Simone Simon, Oliver Reed once again played by Kent Smtih has remarried his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph). They now have a very serious , yet gentle six year old little girl named Amy (Ann Carter) who is taken to day-dreaming and being a loner.
She does not mix in well with the other children at school who do not understand her sensitivity or her private world of fantasy that she has built around her as a survival mechanism.
Amy’s father, Oliver, is constantly wielding an authoritative criticism of his daughters day-dreaming, and wants her to play with the other children, and exist in the ‘real’ world. Amy has a birthday party for which she invites the children in her class, but no one shows up that day, and Oliver discovers that she has mailed out the invitations by placing them in the magic wishing-tree, which is a hollowed out knot of the large tree out behind the house.
waiting for her classmates to share her birthday wishes. But no one ever comes….
.
Oliver had told Amy this was a magic spot when she was younger, and she remembers it,understanding it to be true because her father told her it was. She was taught to believe in magic and then without preparation, is expected to denounce all things wondrous without any serious provocation on her part. She is only six years old after all.
Saddened by the absence of her classmates at her party, Oliver, Alice and Edward the manservant from Jamaica throw Amy a smaller party instead, equip with a birthday cake decorated with 6 little candles.
Amy is told to make a wish, but not to tell anyone what it is or it won’t come true. Again, Amy is conflicted by the mixed messages the adults in her life are giving her. She tells her father, that wishes don’t come true. Oliver tells her “some do.” And her mother Alice embellishes by saying that you just can’t say it out loud or it will nullify the magic wish.
Once again, there is a suspension of disbelief on their terms, disavowing Amy and her ability to develop a clearly defined sense of fantasy and reality. How can she properly order her world.
The children at school are furious with Amy for not inviting them as promised. As they shun her, they lead her to an old sinister looking mansion, where someone calls to her from the window. A voice calls out to her to come closer. Amy looks around and the unseen person throws down a white handkerchief threading a gold ring.
Monday Morning Mondo: Angel Angel Down We Go (1969) “My childhood was perfect. Paradise… lost. When you’re a fairy princess everyone dies on schedule, beautifully.”
“Why should Bogart Peter Stuyvesant go to war and kill strangers, when the pickings are better in his own bedroom?”
ANGEL ANGEL DOWN WE GO (1969) aka CULT OF THE DAMNED
Written and Directed by Robert Thom who is perhaps best known for his Wild In The Streets 1969. For me, the film that really struck a chord was his configuration of childhood abuse in , The Witch Who Came From The Sea 1976 while a little fractured, and slightly queasy in its linear storytelling, was a startling, unsettling, imaginary, and often disturbing piece of work, much thanks to Millie Perkins’ performance.
Consider that Thom also wrote the scripts for Bloody Mama 1970, Crazy Mama 1975, and Death Race 2000 (1975). Angel Angel Down We Go is perhaps a psychedelic take on the Rasputin archetype with a modern conflation of the Svengali mystique.
The film opens with Tara Nicole revealing to us, through Tara’s childlike imaginings, her childhood, and the mythical parentage by the outre wealthy Steeles, they are as Demi-Gods from Mount Olympus. We see her musings in flashback and via graphic collage work that depicts her life as it was, as it is now, and as it will be.
Tara Nicole recites a glorified fantasy completely contrary to what her life truly is. She is being sarcastic, she is teasing us with the truth. She is the cultivation of a female monster, whose lack of nurturing, and exposure to abuse and mistreatment has manifested something abhorrent to the world, but mostly to herself, a self-loathing, loveless thing, vulnerable to the dark prince in Bogart Peter Stuyvesant, who will come to the palace and awaken her sleeping rage.
On the surface, A perverse, grotesque fairy tale, about an over-weight heiress whose parents are hypocrites and superficial, living in a psychologically toxic battlefield of emotional turmoil, self-serving, repressed, and angry enough to create a bitter, ugly, and lonely world for their only child, a life Tara cannot live up to, nor can she satisfy the expectations put upon her nor fit into this artificial world.
Enter chaos, enter entropy, enter Bogart Peter Stuyvesant. Tara meets him at her coming out ball, a party was thrown by her mother Astrid, not to celebrate her glorious daughter’s coming of age, but as a showcase for Astrid’s bejeweled necklace that ‘Marie Antoinette wore at her beheading’. An opulent bauble, a shiny thing, a symbol of the empty and idle collectors, wealthy Americans become with their plunder of the poor masses. So the film will inform you over and over again.
A lysergic cinematic (ACID CINEMA) tale about a tragic fat princess who refers to herself as ‘Virgin Americanis.’ Until she sees Bogart gyrating his pelvis in skin-tight leather hip huggers on stage, she nearly swoons at the sight of his crotch. He is singing the film’s theme song, “Angel Angel Down We Go”. The theme is the Fall of The American Empire. The fall of the Steele family, the American Imperialist hypocrites who languish in their wealth, and self-hating misery. Hallucinogenics for the now generation, and booze and pills are still the drug of choice for the breed of uptight Americans.
Is there anti-fat sentiment in the film or is it as offensive as it intends to be so? As Tara represents the spoiled ‘fat’ and languid American Bourgeoisie when Roddy McDowall paws at Tara on the bed and spews out “God is America FAT!” while pawing her like a piece of meat.
