The great graphic designer and iconic film TITLE master SAUL BASS
Saul Bassborn in my beloved New York City in 1920 is regarded as not only one of the finest graphic designers, was also an illustrator, film producer and director, publicist,and film editor but monumentally known for changing the look of opening sequences in the film industry and as THE man who created the ultimate film titles. Once you’ve seen a Saul Bass opening sequence, title and credits, you feel immediately drawn into the storytelling infrastructure, with just a few symbolic prompts.
He has created film credits and title sequences of over 60 films, and has often worked with directors such as Otto Preminger, Stanley Kramer just to mention a few. Especially notable for his work with Alfred Hitchcock on Hitch’s most memorable film Psycho, of which Bass designed the titles.
His trademark was to contribute Avant-garde title sequences and symbolic posters to a timeless art form, resonant, vibrantly reverberant and memorable, even still. Symbols have been a powerful, motivating and inspiring tool as far back as the creation of Runes. One single image can evoke an entire ethos into the collective consciousness.
His evocative opening sequences not only draw the audience in but Bass himself theorized that captivating the viewer, bringing the audience in right from the top , would make it so that you could tell what was going to happen in the story within the first few moments of the film.
The wonderful opening sequence in Walk On The Wild Side is particularly evocative for me, as it uses the fetish of female sexuality=feline energy. The black cat slinks across the screen as the titles roll-provocative as hell
He was also integral in helping out with visual concepts, storyboards but most significantly he created the titles for some of the biggest cinematic hit movies of the 20th century. Saul died in 1996.
Some of his other unmistakable title credits are for BONJOUR TRISTESSE, ONE,TWO THREE, THE CARDINAL, NINE HOURS TO RAMA, EDGE OF THE CITY (1957) SOMETHING WILD (1961) and he was uncredited for his work on ALIEN (1979) and the poster design for NO WAY OUT (1950)
Later on in his career he worked with Martin Scorsese on his remake of Cape Fear 1991, and his crime drama Goodfellas 1990.
So how did he get involved with TITLES? He began as a graphic designer, as part of his work he created many film symbols as part of the Advertising campaigns.
During that period he happened to be working on a symbol for Carmen Jones (1954) and Man With The Golden Arm for Otto Preminger. At one point in their working relationship Preminger and Saul Bass just looked at each other and said
“Why not make it move!… And it was really as simple as that"¦.”–Saul Bass
Saul thought to himself that initially the audience involvement with any film should and would really start with the very first frame"¦“You have to remember that until then titles had been a list of dull credits, mostly ignored or used for POPCORN TIME… So there seemed to be a real opportunity to use TITLES in a new way, to actually create a climate for the story that was about to unfold.”-Saul Bass
Just to show how effective using merely a powerful symbol to define a film’s motivation or theme, you could use the example of Man With The Golden Arm which opened in New York City in 1952. The only advertising gimmick used on the Marquee was the disjointed image of the illustrated arm, to suggest the subject of drug addiction.
When asked how the symbol functioned when translating it to the film’s narrative, Bass answered by saying this “Well you remember that the film was about drug addiction. And the symbol"¦that is"¦THE ARM"¦in it’s jagged form expressed the jarring disjointed existence of a drug addict. Now to the extent that it was an accurate and telling synthesis of the film in the Ad campaign, these same qualities came to it in the theater and of course with the addition of the motion of sound really came alive and set off the mood and the texture of the film.”
At some point in Bass’s career he made the transition of using a purely static graphic device, to creating movement and a choreography of postulations, evolving with IN HARMS WAY 1965 and SECONDS 1966.
“I started in graphics. Then as you’ve seen I began to move that graphic image in film. Somewhere down the line I felt the need to come to grips with the realistic or live action image which seemed to me at the time to be central to the notion of film"¦ Of course then, a whole new world was open to me.”
“Keep in mind however, despite my fascination with this, I still felt CONTENT was the key issue. I continued to look for simple, direct ideas. For example IN HARMS WAY 1965, the story about the sea war in the pacific, I used the violent and the eternal qualities of the sea, as a metaphor for the people in the events of the story.”
“In SECONDS 1966, a sixty year old man goes into a hospital, and through advanced surgical techniques is reconstituted in his entirety. And he comes out twenty five years old, and looking like Rock Hudson. Now tampering with humanity that way is pretty scary. So in the title, I broke apart,distorted and reconstituted the human face to set the stage symbolically for what was to come.”
the opening sequence from John Frankenheimer’s Seconds with Rock Hudson
Titles for William Wyler’s western starring Gregory Peck and Jean Simmons, THE BIG COUNTRY 1958, Carl Foreman’s intelligent war drama THE VICTORS 1963 and John Frankenheimer’sGRAND PRIX 1966 starring one of my favorite guys in the world, James Garner, seem to stretch the action even further toward total integration of the title and credits as they merge into the beginning of these films. With GRAND PRIXBass uses multiple identical images in one frame, much in the way the split screen is used. He also introduces the notion of the spectator, joining us as spectator.
Saul Bass, went through an evolutionary process as he embraced the art of ceremoniously attracting us into the story. in his own words, “Absolutely, previously I used title to symbolize, summarize, establish mood or establish attitude. At one point it occurred to me that a title could make a more significant contribution to the storytelling process. It could act as a prologue. It could deal with the time before. For instance in BIG COUNTRY, I tried to establish the notion of an Island of people in a sea of land. The vastness of which is penetrated by a stage coach. After an endless journey it reaches this isolated group of people and only then does the story begin. So THE BIG COUNTRY was the free months before, and THE VICTORS it was twenty five years before. WWI and the middle of WWII, and in GRAND PRIX it was a moment before the preparation for the Monte Carlo race.”
The end credits utilizing graffiti for the textual content of Jerome Robbins and Robert Wises masterpiece West Side Story. Saul Bass’ brilliant idea to end the film with the long credits in order to ease the audience out of the violent deaths of the main characters in the film.
TRIVIA: Bass not only designed the title sequence in Psycho (1960) he has been attributed to helping conceptualize the scene where Arbogast (Martin Balsam) ascends those fateful stairs to his unwitting doom. He also was responsible for drawing the storyboards for the shower scene under the specific directions of Hitchcock himself. Although as referenced in the book Truffaut on Hitchcock it is stated that he didn’t wind up using those sketches as they “weren’t right.”
Here are some examples of the moody, the powerful, the evocative, the iconic work of Mr Saul Bass-
It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)-directed by Stanley Kramer music by Ernest Gold
Psycho 196o – directed by Alfred Hitchcock music by Bernard Herrmann using only string instruments.
Anatomy of A Murder (1959) – director by Otto Preminger with original music by Duke EllingtonÂ
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)-directed by Otto Preminger with original music by Paul Glass
Oceans 11 (1960)-directed by Lewis Milestone with music by Nelson Riddle
The Victors (1963)-directed by Carl Foreman music by Sol Kaplan
Seconds (1966) – directed by John Frankenheimer music by Jerry Goldsmith
The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) – directed by Otto Preminger with music by Elmer Bernstein
Walk on The Wild Side (1962)– directed by Edward Dmytryk music by Elmer Bernstein
Vertigo (1958) – directed by Alfred Hitchcock with music by Bernard Herrmann
North by Northwest (1959) – directed by Alfred Hitchock music by Bernard Herrmann
Not With My Wife, You Don’t (1966)-directed by Norman Panama and music by John Williams with lyrics Johnny Mercer
Saint Joan (1957) – directed by Otto Preminger with music by Mischa Spoilansky
Storm Center (1956) – directed by Daniel Taradash music by George Duning
Such Good Friends (1971)-directed by Otto Preminger music by Thomas Z. Shepard
The Big Knife (1955)-directed by Robert Aldrich with music by Frank De Vol
The Seven Year Itch (1955)– directed by Billy Wilder with music by Alfred Newman
Spartacus (1960)-directed by Stanley Kubrick with music by Alex North
PHASE IV (1974)– Saul Bass directing with music by Brian Gasgoigne
West Side Story (1961)– directed by Jerome Robbins & Robert Wise with music by Leonard Bernstein and Irwin Kostal
As of late, I am finding myself drawn to David Janssen, his quiet charisma and sexy self-restrained smile that just kind of makes me swoon. I’ve been devouring as much of his work as I can, guilty pleasures like Once is Not Enough 1975, and tv movies like The Golden Gate Murders 1979, Warning Shot 1967, and his other tv persona as cheeky private eye, Harry O.Each night I coil up with an episode of that quintessential noir television thriller, The Fugitive to waltz me into slumberland.
And so, in honor of this wonderful actor who left us way too early …I’m kicking off this new Last Drive-In offering, Hysterical Woman of the Week, with one of the most powerful episodes from the series about the man who runs away a lot… the valiant and zen Dr Richard Kimble.
So with just a little further MG ramblings here’s a little ‘hysteria’ god how I resent, no!…abhor this archetype which is why I harp on it perhaps way too much, The Hysterical Woman…!
Here’s the pretty and unsung Louise Sorel portraying Edith Waverly getting a little upset with mother Edith (Ruth White)
*years later she would do hysterical brilliantly yet again as Velia Redford in one of my favorite episodes of Rod Serling’sNight Gallery’sThe Dead Man.
1) The tragically poetic Pete Krumbein in Edmund Goulding’sNightmare Alley 1947 played by Ian Keith.2) The flamboyant Franzi Kartos in Caught 1949 portrayed by Curt Bois ‘darling’3) Stauffer, alias Fred Foss in The Dark Corner 1946-played by the wonderful William Bendix in the white linen suit…4) Good-hearted kite hanger, Brenda Martin in Women’s Prison 1955 – the eternal pixie Jan Sterling.5) Jeff Corey, as the cringing, cowardly informer ‘Freshman’ Stack in Brute Force 1947.6) Beulah Bondi as spiittin’ Granny Tucker in Jean Renoir’sThe Southerner 1945 ‘Ah shuckity’7) Ma Stone in William Dieterle’sThe Devil and Daniel Webster 1941– the grand Jane Darwell.8) Cecil Kellaway as Harry Wills and Mary Astor as Jewel Mayhew in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte 1964.9) Cliff the jazz sexed drummer in Phantom Lady 1944– the ubiquitous Elisha Cook Jr.10) Quirky sisters Louisa and Emily Creed in Ladies in Retirement 1941–Edith Barrett & Elsa Lanchester.11) The wonderful stoolie Mo whose saves for her headstone and plot out on Long Island played with that razor-sharp wit of Thelma Ritter in Pickup on South Street (1953).12) Jack Oakie as Slob in Jules Dassin’s realism masterpiece Thieves’ Highway (1949).
Susan Gordon plays Susan Shelley a demented child not unlike Jan Brady, just released from a convent/ institution run by nuns…where she’s been placed after suffering from the shock of seeing her mother, (the flamboyant Zsa Zsa Gabor) Jessica Flagmore Shelley be consumed by flames in her opulent bedroom.
Susan still traumatized by the haunting memories of her mother’s horrific death and surrounded by some of the creepiest toys in all tarnation, comes home to the palatial hearth with father Don Amecheas Edward Shelley and his new lusty, conniving second wife Francene played by sexy Martha Hyer. Edward is so blinded by his desire for Francene that he’d sell out the whole estate contents and all to give his conspiring hussy all the money, vacations, and furs she wants.
Francene starts sneaking around again with brother-in-law Anthony Flagmore played by Maxwell Reed. Flagmore’s face has been charred from that fateful night when Mommy went up in flames. His odd presence and faithfulness to his pet hawk, add an air of the macabre to the already heady script.
The brazen couple plot to drive little Susan over the edge, while trying to get her to reveal the whereabouts of her mother’s missing diamond necklace.
This Grande Dame horror film is a little gem from the vintage 60s, by director Bert I Gordon, and also boasts a great supporting cast with, Wendell Corey, Signe Hasso, and Anna Lee. It’s creepy, it’s campy and a wonderfully colorful psychosomatic romp. Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks, who was director of photography on Invasion of The Body Snatchers 1956 and the sublime Mister Buddwing 1966 which I’ll be writing about soon) The soundtrack includes The Hearse Song sung by Gordon…‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.’
Hedy Lamarr gets passed over by Bert I. Gordon.
“Through a Child’s Eyes You Will See Torment … Murder … And Flaming Passion!”
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’smean-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.
A martyr (Greek : μάÏÏ„Ï…Ï‚, mártys, “witness”; stem μάÏÏ„Ï…Ï-, mártyr-) is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce …
Mysticism ( pronunciation (help·info); from the Greek μυστικός, mystikos, meaning ‘an initiate’) is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, or levels of being, or aspects of reality, beyond normal human perception, sometimes including experience of and communion with a supreme being.
Fifteen years after Lucie escapes a horrific abduction in which she is subjected to prolonged torture and deprivation, she goes on a mission of revenge on the couple who brutally held her captive. She calls upon her faithful friend from the orphanage, Anna, who was also a victim of child abuse and utterly worships Lucie, to help her clean up after the massacre at the seemingly upper-class home.
Lucie slowly devolves into madness, as she cannot exorcise the demon who has been haunting her, a nightmarish and violent phantom born out of Lucie’s guilt for having left another little girl at the mercy of their abductors. If you enter into watching Martyrs thinking that it’s a straight out of the French New Wave of Torture Porn films, you’ll miss a transformative piece of filmmaking.
The Bride of Frankenstein 1935
From the time Colin Clive utters “It’s alive, It’s alive” in James Whale’s seminal classic Frankenstein 1931, the tone is set. Whale’s campier adaptation from Mary Shelley’s more meditative novel, is still self-possessed of science, the origin of being human, the question of ‘a’ God’s role in this existence, and ultimately, reflectively, ‘man’s’ (I loathe using normative masculine case ugh.) relationship to himself, his creator and the universe that bore him.
Anna in chains12-year-old Lucie in chains
Frankenstein is an existential science-fiction fantasy with multiple layers and questions that can not be answered in 70 minutes on camera. But the images, the spirit of the story, and the characters can serve to evoke these primal questions and fears that have been built into our natures as human subjects.
Anna with her head shaved appears as a Joan of Arc figure.
Now, if you abstract Shelley’s allegory and invert the narrative to where the matter of science does not seek out the mysteries of life in terms of how to create it from “the electrical secrets of heaven“ and an infinity of atoms, harness it, control it, thereby becoming god-like yourself …momentarily.
The film’s antagonists are a group of clandestine, ultra-wealthy, suggestive of high up in government, perhaps even royalty, seemingly above the law and untouchable, apparently with a hierarchy of leaders of advanced age. They are consumed with Mysticism orSpiritualism, (not to be confused with spirituality) a modernized form of a movement that was pervasive around the end of the 19th century and continuing around the early 1900s, and which this cabal, assumes a very clinical, anthropologically scientific approach.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and The Theosophical Movement -table rappings, etc.
The film’s narrative uses science vs. religion (although the act of faith in their mission becomes emblematic itself of fanaticism and religious avidity) because it bares an almost anthropological approach; a modern form of ’empirical’ torture, a method of collecting data. The end result is the creation of a theoretical equation, that asserts, if you dehumanize, brutalize, and cause the body enough pain, the subject’s psyche and physical being has nowhere else to go but toward an elevated sense of euphoria, to become Transfigured, like that of Christ on the cross, or Saint Joan de Arc.
Saint-Joan Mother Joan of the Angels 1960 Directed by Jerzy KawalerowiczFlavia The Heretic Nun (1974) is also doomed to be flayed alive.
The subjects of their research also, at this point, become objects. An anonymous and beautiful little girl becomes, at first, a helpless victim, then a monstrous ‘thing’, and then is exalted to a heroic saint and visionary figure.
Their methods, while equally brutal, stand in contrast with the motivations of the Medieval scourge of inflicting pain that was for the sole purpose of punishing, eliminating your enemies, relishing in sadism, barbarism, suffering, and bloodshed, merely to bringing about death slowly.
Transfiguration |transËŒfigyəˈrÄSHÉ™n| noun a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state: in this light the junk undergoes a transfiguration; it shines. "¢ (the Transfiguration) Christ’s appearance in radiant glory to three of his disciples (Matthew 17:2, Mark 9:2"“3, Luke 9:28"“36).
In contrast to the angelic martyred figure, Vanessa Redgrave plays a devil-possessed, sexually repressed nun. Directed by Ken Russell and based on Huxley’s Devils of Loudon. Power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu seeks to bring down the group of nuns and take control of France.
This Cult of Transfiguration uses pain, deprivation, and ultimately a carefully constructed clinical form of torture which for them is the road in which to search for the ‘secrets of life.’ But unlike Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein who sought to create life on this earthly plane, Mademoiselle’s quest is to reach past this plane to the other side… of the veil, the borderland, that thing we call ‘life after death’, the exalted state of being, where we go after we literally ‘shed our skin.’
The head of this Cult of Transfiguration, Mademoiselle, is archetypal of Nazi experimenters. As a French filmmaker, Pascal understands the deeply scarred history of WWII and the profound ramifications that the Nazi’s presence left. She is like the embodiment of the Nazi doctors who often used human subjects for ‘medical research.’
The infamous Dr. Herta Oberheuser, a Nazi physician who experimented on numerous children.
The cult finds that young girls are the most inherently geared to becoming Martyrs, so they set out abducting their ‘specimens’, subjecting them to the most brutal, yet very clinical, torture in order to bring their human subjects to the state of grace and transformation. Then, right before their deaths, they can communicate what they see in the ‘ether world.’
Anna whispers to Mademoiselle… what if anything has she revealed? What has she seen… through her transfiguration?
I use the word clinical to describe the conditions, the beatings, and the gruesome and ultra ‘extreme’ pain they subject the girls too. This clinical torture diverges from the grittier serial killer film, where the interaction is often personal, self-satisfying, and subjective, sublimating the victim’s pain, and devouring it like a cannibal to feed their blood lust.
This cult shows no sign of emotion at all. They do not become aroused or responsive. They do, however, possess an eerily quiet fixation on their victims, as they start to enter Martyrdom. It is then they become, revered much again like a Saint, an icon, an object. But that is only when the experiment has been perceived to have worked. None of their subjects, except for Anna, utters a word before death. At the end of the film, we are left not knowing what Anna whispers to Mademoiselle.
Right after receiving the cryptic message from Anna, Mademoiselle locks herself in her room. She, too, strips away all her superficial layers, her amber-colored lenses, her head scarf, and almost all her earthly signifiers, Like Anna’s flayed body, Mademoiselle prepares herself for the other world. She only tells the man in black awaiting the news of what Anna has shared, “keep doubting” and then puts the revolver in her mouth and blows her brains out.
Viewers are left to conjecture what Anna has shared. Was it that she met Lucie on the other side and found such peace everlasting? Did she meet ‘god’? Did she experience an ecstasy beyond description? It is better not to know because that would disallow Laugier’s point. That WE cannot ever know. And if we spend our days here on this earth using other people to gain that knowledge, we’ll have not only missed the point, but we’ll become monsters ourselves. Seeking out figures to crucify on behalf of a manufactured faith, damned to uncertainty and taking victims along with us…
As Mademoiselle tells Anna “We’ve created more victims than Martyrs.”
I fear that’s how it’s been in history with human subjects and animals alike in such cases where science becomes a monstrous mechanism for knowledge, or when religion sacrifices innocent blood in the name of an ambiguous morality relying on its faith.
It’s the clinical brutality that makes the film all the more disturbing. But when I say disturbing, I do not imply that this is a film that wants to disturb you in only a visceral way. As the protagonist, Anna suffers and ultimately does become transformed, but I found myself becoming altered by the film’s end. And still days after, I have been feeling and processing what I saw on screen.
A good horror film can take an utterly monstrous, abjectly frightening, nightmarish, and at times grotesque situation, and transform itself into a thing of beauty. I truly believe that Martyrs is a horrifically beautiful film.
Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face 1960 comes to mind, the darkly bleak yet mesmerizing, haunting and yes, a clinical setting where a daughter’s dedicated father, a medical doctor abducts young women and skins them in order to give his beloved little girl a new face.
When a film can be so horrific that it taps into our primal fears and what Kristevacalls abjection (a hell of a read if you’re interested), anything that makes us feel something plucking at the core of our senses, perhaps not quite know what it is, but truly alters us somehow. Then when it manages to transcend the horrifying aspects of its story the visceral reactions we experience and goes on to cause an odd symbiosis with the images and the story.. .then to me… it becomes a work of art.
Martyrs evoke themes and images from Clive Barker’sHellraiser, (1987) the hellish underworld society of Cenobites, that seek out and cause pain to acquire the ultimate exquisite pleasure.
But in Martyrs the exquisite release is that of the knowing… what is on the other side of this world. And it is THIS world that is HELL…
Dear readers, I am grateful to finally be back on line, after some of the devastation that so many people experienced from this past storm.
We got a little thrown back into the primitive days of reading ghost stories by candle light instead of watching them on TV, and huddling together with the cats to stay warm.
Others in New York and New Jersey did not fair as well. I send so much peace and healing to those who have been adversely affected.
If there is anything I can do, please reach out. Now that PSE&G has thrown us back into Modernity, I can not only feel my fingertips again, I can also continue to blog once again.
Also of special note: While I was out of communication, I missed out on so many lovely sentiments about my contribution to the Val Lewton Blogathon as well as some of the nifty things I posted before all went BLACK!
Thank you all for being so kind and supportive to my blog. Every comment means a lot, and makes me smile so wholeheartedly.
My heart goes out to my friends and neighbors here in the Tri State Area. We are strong, we have our senses of humor and we stick together in times like this. Be well, be safe, be happy until all is restored again.
With much peace, Joey MonsterGirl
I’ll leave you with a wonderful mascot of energy Behold Eck!
Based on a true crime, A nice suburban family man Gene Courtier makes the mistake of picking up a hitch-hiker who turns out to be dangerous escaped convict Victor Gosset, on the run from the police.Â
His gang proceeds to hold Courtier’s family hostage at their home at gunpoint.
As time ticks on, the situation becomes more tense and volatile culminating into a living nightmare!
Directed and written by Andrew L. Stone as a crime noir thriller, it stars Jack Kelly and Hildy Parks as the Courtiers and Vince Edwards as the ruthless woman hungry Victor Gosset.
At first Gosset wants Courtier to sell his car for the cash, but Batsford (Cassavettes) wants to hold the family hostage for the ransom money instead…
Also stars John Cassavettes as Robert Batsford. and David Cross as Luther Logan the other two men in Gosset’s gang. A real gripping thriller!
“With a gasp in your throat… and a gun at your back!”
Don’t pick up any hitch-hikers, but of course you knew that by now-MonsterGirl cares!
A Cry in The Night (1956) Directed by Frank Tuttle, and starring Natalie Wood, Edmond O’Brien and Brian DonlevyCurse of The Cat People 1944 directed by Robert Wise, produced by Val Lewton, and starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Ann CarterThe Sea Beast 1926 directed by Millard Webb, written by Herman Melville and starring Dolores Costello and John Barrymore.La Belle et la Bête 1946 directed by Jean Cocteau starring Jean Marais and Josette Day.The Big Heat (1953) directed by Fritz Lang and Starring Gloria Grahame, Glenn Ford and Jocelyn Brando.Body and Soul 1947 directed by Robert Rossen, starring John Garfield, Lilli Palmer and Hazel BrooksBury Me Dead (1947) directed by Bernard Vorhaus starring Cathy O’Donnell, June Lockart and Hugh Beaumont.Curse of The Cat People 1944 directed by Robert Wise, and produced by Val Lewton. Starring Simone Simon, Kent Smith and Ann Carter.Dead of Night (1945) directed by Alberto Cavalcanti,Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer. With stories by H.G.Wells, E.F.Benson, John Baines and Angus MacPhail.Dracula’s Daughter 1936 directed by Lambert Hillyer, and starring Otto Kruger, Gloria Holden, Marguerite Churchill and Edward Van Sloan.The Penalty 1920 directed by Wallace Worsley and starring Lon Chaney as Blizzard. With Charles Clary, Doris Pawn, Jim Mason and Ethel Grey Terry.Eye of The Devil 1966 directed by J.Lee Thompson and starring Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Sharon Tate, Donald Pleasance, Flora Robson and David Hemmings.Each Dawn I Die (1939) directed by William Keighley and starring George Raft and James Cagney.Horror Hotel (1960) aka City of The Dead directed by John Llewellyn Moxey and starring Christopher Lee, Patricia Jessel, Dennis Lotis and Betta St. JohnThe Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Ivor Novello as the mysterious Lodger.I Wake Up Screaming (1941) directed by H.Bruce Humberstone and starring Victor Mature, Betty Grable and Carol Landis.Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Film Noir Kiss Me Deadly starring Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer.MAD LOVE (1935) directed by Karl Freund starring Peter Lorre, Frances Drake and Colin Clive.The Man Who Laughs 1928 directed by Paul Leni and starring Conrad Veidt as Gwynplaine, and Mary Philbin as Dea.Fritz Lang’s German Expressionist masterpiece of futuristic entropy blending element of Sci-Fi and hints of Film Noir to come. Metropolis (1927) Starring Brigitte Helm and Alfred Abel.William Castle’s The Night Walker (1964) starring Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, Judi Meredith, Lloyd Bochner and Marjorie Bennett.
