By Joe Bendel. Like many contemporary Iranian filmmakers, the late great Franstišek Vláčil often focused on ostensibly apolitical subjects, like children and animals. Yet, as a filmmaker in the vanguard of the Czech New Wave, his work was still considered suspect by the Communist power structure. Though his career would be put on hold for six years following the 1968 Soviet invasion, the international acclaim greeting his 1960 feature film debut The White Dove promised great things at the time for the filmmaker, making it the perfect selection to launch Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Fantastic World of Franstišek Vláčil retrospective.
A group of doves is released in Belgium. On a small Baltic island, their handlers eagerly anticipate their return. However, young Susan’s bird has a late start due to a twinge of the wing. While detouring through Prague, the wheelchair-bound Miša’s pellet gun nearly proves fatal. Shamed by Martin, the artist in the next door apartment, he nurses the bird back to health, while Susan faithfully keeps watching the skies.
Franstišek Vláčil.
Dove is a deceptively simple story, involving several themes Vláčil would return to in later films, such as the bond between children and animals. Reportedly reluctant to overwhelm his youthful cast with extensive lines to memorize, Vláčil makes his points visually rather than verbally. Stark but sensitive, nearly every artful black-and-white frame lensed by cinematographer Jan Čuřík is suitable for framing. Indeed, it is an arresting film to behold, effectively contrasting the claustrophobic, urbanized Prague with the idyllic sun and sea of Susan’s Baltic isle. Adding further texture, composer Zdenek Liska’s spritely jazz interludes and more suggestive chamber music nicely underscore and reinforce the power of the film’s speechless moments.
Vláčil elicits some natural yet restrained performances from Karel Smyczek and Katerina Irmanovová, as the dove’s two youthful caretakers. He also captures the artistic impulse better in Dove than nearly any other film, raptly observing as Martin creates a series of works inspired by Miša and the injured dove (which are credited to Czech artists Theodor Pištěk and Jan Kablasa).
At times, Dove seems to suggest deeper allegorical significance, but Vláčil judiciously keeps it all rather obscure—though perhaps not obscure enough, in retrospect. (Whenever you have a cat named Satan hunting a peaceful white dove, it could be rather awkward explaining what each represents to the occupying commissar .)
Many have likened Vláčil’s films to poetry. Indeed, like a good poem (at least by Poe’s standards) Dove is relatively short at seventy-five minutes. Though it memorably evokes a child’s perspective, it is unquestionably high art cinema, better suited to the discerning connoisseur. A major work from a filmmaker under-exposed on the American film scene during his own lifetime, Dove kicked-off the FSLC’s welcome reappraisal of Vláčil’s films yesterday at the Walter Reade Theater.
Okay, I’ll play:
3.) The Company She Keeps
4.) Man of a Thousand Faces
And, in a small role…
5.) 1973’s The Outfit. More on that last one in a bit.
(Also, her stint on Twin Peaks was nothing to sneeze at and kinda noirish in that weird, Lynchian way.)
She might not have made many memorable movies, but all it took for Jane Greer to become the queen of film noir was one role: Kathie Moffat in Jacques Tourner’s film noir masterpiece, Out of the Past.
Yes, Stanwyck was the ultimate spider woman as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, and made more half-baked films noir than Greer made films total. And yes, Gloria Grahame was the epitome of B-girl badness in films like The Big Heat and Human Desire. And, of course, glamourpusses like Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth both had signature roles in the dark den of Noir City.
But for me, Greer is the queen of noir because she was every dark dame wrapped into one. She was wicked temptress, misunderstood moll, glamour puss with a kiss of death, and also something even more off-kilter and sinister than her fellow femmes. Out of the Past‘s Kathie Moffat might just be more fatal than all of them because she isn’t just evil, she’s vulnerable too and that vulnerability – that quizzical beauty in her face, and pleading in her eyes – make her evil actions all the more horrible. We can tell that Stanwyck’s Phyllis – from the moment her anklet slithers across the screen – is definitely up to no good. We can tell she’s pure evil, even as Stanwyck imbues her with some small measure of humanity at the end. But Greer’s Kathie could have been good and that’s why she’s all the more terrifying. We want her to be good even as she lies, steals, and kills.
It’s the type of performance for which the word “enigma” was invented. The intoxicating allure of Kathie Moffat is summed up when she pleadingly tells Robert Mitchum that she’s not a thief. His response: “Baby, I don’t care.” She could be good, she could be bad, but in the end it doesn’t matter: she’s irresistible. And that is what makes la femme so fatal.
Greer’s teenage bout with Bell’s palsy is part of the mystique. It left half of her face paralyzed and it was only through tireless muscle exercises that she was able to recover movement in her face. But it also left Greer with a permanent, slightly lopsided smile. This lilt in her lips gives her face a certain mystery, as if we’re never quite sure what she’s thinking.
Jane Greer in "Out of the Past."
One of the best places to find out what the real Jane Greer was thinking is Eddie Muller’s delicious book, Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir. It compiles Muller’s interviews with Greer, as well as noirish dames Audrey Totter, Marie Windsor, Evelyn Keyes, Ann Savage, and Coleen Gray. If you are a fan of film noir, this book is a must-read. For one thing, we learn that Jane Greer was married to Rudy Vallee (a man twice her age!) when she was in her early twenties, and that he was a fetishistic creep with a bad porn habit who made Greer dye her hair an unflattering raven-black to suit his own predilections.
Greer was pursued by no less than Howard Hughes himself, but she ultimately rejected him and he in turn pretty much stalled her career at RKO just as she was coming off that career-making performance in Out of the Past.
So we can thank Howard Hughes and his wounded, paranoid heart for hampering the career of Jane Greer, queen of noir.
Jane Greer with Robert Mitchum in "Out of the Past."
But even though she never made another film noir as brilliant as Out of the Past, she never completely abandoned the dark streets of the crime drama. Enter The Outfit, a 1970s second-wave color noir that has enough cameos of old stars and character actors to make any classic movie fan point and cheer: Robert Ryan, Elisha Cook Jr., Marie Windsor, Timothy Carey, and of course … Jane Greer.
It’s a small part, but she still captivates. In fact, all of the old timers captivate, whether it’s the brief appearance of world weary Marie Windsor, pouring drinks behind a bar; or Elisha Cook, Jr. getting bossed around by the heavies (as usual); or Robert Ryan and Timothy Carey playing poker and planning hits.
The film stars Robert Duvall and Joe Don Baker as two gunmen who go after a powerful crime syndicate for money and revenge. It’s combination heist flick, revenge story, and gritty crime noir. Written and directed by the underrated John Flynn, and based on a story by Donald Westlake, The Outfit is a solid example of the violent second-wave noir of the 1970s. It’s bloodier than an old school noir, and even more amoral. Duvall’s criminal, Earl Macklin, is not a good man. He’s not even a “misunderstood” criminal. He’s a bad guy who kills with ruthless ease. Even his cause – revenge for the murder of his brother – is tainted by the fact that his brother was murdered precisely because he and Duvall robbed a syndicate bank.
Jane Greer in "The Outfit."
Jane Greer plays Alma, the widow of the murdered brother, and for a change of pace she’s not a femme fatale or a dangerous woman. She’s simply a woman beaten down by the despair and death of the criminal world. There’s a certain tiredness to Alma’s character, and to Greer’s performance, that puts the lie to all of that noir cool we usually see in these types of films. Yeah, okay, Duvall and Baker embody charismatic criminal cool as they attempt to take down the Outfit. But that earlier scene with Alma is still hanging around the edges, reminding us that it all ends up tired and empty in the end. And who better to deliver that message than the former Kathie Moffat? The Outfit is now newly remastered and available on DVD through the Warner Archive Vault Collection.
I’ll be contributing a couple of posts, both here at Libertas and at my own blog, and I would encourage everyone who loves movies and film noir to contribute what they can to the fundraiser. The last time, “For the Love of Film” raised $30,000 for the National Film Preservation Foundation, and that money went towards the preservation of two early short films. Hopefully we can equal or surpass that amount this time. As I’ve written before, film preservation is a naturally conservative cause, so mark your calendars for February 14 and check out “For the Love of Film (Noir).”
By Jason Apuzzo. “Well, the time has come to ask, is ‘dehumanization’ such a bad thing? Because good or bad, that’s what’s so. The whole world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren’t. The whole world, not just us. We’re just the most advanced country, so we’re getting there first. The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things useful only to produce and consume other mass-produced things, all of them unnecessary and useless as we are …”– Howard Beale, from Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976).
“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.” – Michel Foucault.
I thought I would take a little time out today from the usual run of events here at Libertas to review a favorite film of mine that for various reasons I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: George Lucas’ THX: 1138 from 1971. There is an excellent, new Blu-ray edition of the film available out there for you collectors right now, and I recommend it highly.
Future shock: from George Lucas' "THX: 1138."
THX: 1138 is probably best known as the film that started – and almost ended – George Lucas’ directing career. The film was based on a student short Lucas did at the USC Cinema School called “Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138:4EB” (the “EB” standing for “Earth Born”; THX-1138 was actually Lucas’ phone number at the time). That student short, incidentally, happens to be included in the Blu-ray edition, and is definitely worth watching. Around USC Cinema circles the short is something of a legend – in large part because it does everything a short is supposed to do: tell a powerful story quickly, visually, by ‘cutting to the chase’ as fast as possible. In fact, the original “Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138:4EB” is nothing but a chase, involving a lone future-worker’s escape from a totalitarian society.
The story of how “Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138:4EB” got translated into a feature is a long and complex one; suffice it to say the crucial players were Francis Coppola and his newly formed American Zoetrope Studios, plus the cabal of USC Cinema friends Lucas dragged up to the Bay Area with him (most notably Walter Murch), plus a few key executives at Warner Brothers like John Calley – who would later stab Lucas and Coppola in the back once the film was completed. And actually the fascinating, behind-the-scenes story of THX: 1138‘s creation is essentially the story of American Zoetrope itself – the fledgling dream of Francis Coppola to found a Bay Area filmmaking colony of independent artists, set up in opposition to the factory-mentality of Hollywood. Appropriately, the Blu-ray features a great documentary on the founding of American Zoetrope, and the role THX: 1138 played in that company’s rise and fall … and rise again.
Bad day at the office: Robert Duvall in "THX: 1138."
So what, then, is THX: 1138 about? The film focuses on a worker in a futuristic, dystopian, police-state underworld who begins to have a crisis of conscience about his meaningless life and the oppressive, stultifying world he lives in. He rebels – awkwardly at first (he stops taking his tranquilizers, makes illicit love to his roommate, etc.) – and then finally decides to escape.
And that’s really it – the entire film in a nutshell.
What makes THX: 1138 worthwhile and interesting as a film is the striking world Lucas creates out of what was a very modest budget at the time – exactly $777,777, to be precise (executive producer Coppola was superstitious about numbers). The key to the film’s arresting, futuristic ‘look’ – a look that now seems prescient – is what might be described as a Japanese minimalism, combined with a similarly Japanese emphasis on bold, static compositions and a simple color palette.
Lucas initially wanted to film THX: 1138 in Japan, for two reasons. First, Japan seemed at the time to be the most futuristic of countries with respect to its integration of technology into the normal flow of living. (It still seems to be that today.) Secondly, Lucas and Walter Murch (who edited and co-wrote the film) were into Japanese movies at the time – particularly those of Kurosawa and Ozu. They were fascinated by the ‘alien,’ non-Western quality of Japanese rituals – and the degree to which Japanese filmmakers made no effort to explain these rituals for non-Japanese audiences. This ‘alien’ quality was exactly what Lucas and Murch were looking for in order to depict a futuristic society in which individual identity was put in jeopardy.
One is tempted to think here of Marshall McLuhan, who around the time of THX was proposing that the whole world was becoming “orientalized,” and that in the future none of us would be able to retain his or her cultural identity – “not even the Orientals.”
Static compositions, featuring static people.
We begin the film with THX (played with subdued intensity by Robert Duvall) at work on an assembly line, helping to put together what basically look like droids. He’s having a tough time of it, though, not able to maintain his concentration or focus. Is he having psychological problems? We don’t yet know. In THX’s world, all emotions are suppressed through the compulsory use of drugs – drugs that resemble “soma” from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
An early crisis comes in the film when THX’s female roommate ‘LUH 3417’ (Maggie McOmie) stops taking her drugs, and secretly substitutes a placebo for THX’s normal tranquilizer. As THX’s sedative wears off, he finds himself experiencing emotions, doubts, even sexual desire. Chief among these emotions is anxiety, and his work at this point definitely begins to be affected.
Nothing he tries helps. THX goes home, for example, to watch TV – actually holograms. TV in the future, however, has basically been reduced to three different sorts of programming: 1) mindless, sadistic violence; 2) porn; 3) glib, meaningless ‘talk shows.’ Sound familiar?
Everything in THX’s world, incidentally, is impersonal and automated. For example, looking for solace, poor THX visits a kind of high-tech confessional booth which features a generic religious icon (known as “Ohm”) who mutters impersonal, pre-recorded platitudes. “My time is your time … blessings of the State, blessings of the Masses … work hard, and be happy.” THX vomits in one of the confessionals, so disgusted is he by what he hears. He goes home to masturbate (off-screen) – although he’s only able to do so with help of an automated machine. In Lucas’ future, all forms of private experience have been automated, regulated, rendered ‘technological.’
THX is eventually incarcerated for his ‘bad behavior,’ and dragged off to a white limbo prison – where he encounters a group of maladjusted freaks similar to the crowd Jack Nicholson encounters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. My favorite in this group is Donald Pleasence playing ‘SEN 5241’ – a cliché-spouting, bureaucratic functionary. Pleasence’s dialogue in this portion of the film is really delicious, filled with ridiculous platitudes and non-sequiturs. It’s actually some of the funniest stuff Lucas has ever written.
The ‘prison’ in this portion of the film has a Waiting for Godot/existentialist quality to it, in so far as there are no walls of any kind. In fact, THX’s big decision to ‘escape’ the prison consists merely in Duvall’s deciding to walk away into the unseen distance. That’s it. Lucas’ point here could not be clearer: most of the walls we experience in life are illusory, and self-created. Sometimes all we need do is walk away from what’s holding us back.
And, interestingly, most of the prisoners in THX’s white limbo prison are afraid to escape – even though nothing is physically holding them back. Eventually THX and SEN make their way out into limbo on their own, where they encounter ‘SRT’ (Don Pedro Colley), who is actually a hologram who’s managed to escape the underground world’s computer network. SRT reminds one here of the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz, or of C-3PO from Lucas’ later Star Wars. Even robots apparently need a little freedom, too.
A future in which love is forbidden.
THX eventually discovers LUH’s tragic fate, which has a little bit of a ‘Lot’s wife’ feel to it, and then an extended escape sequence begins through the city’s vast underground road network. THX is chased here by android police on motorcycles, and to this day I’ve never understood how Lucas got guys to drive that fast on motorcycles with faceplates on. Weird.
The robot police pursue THX up toward the surface, but – and this is one of the film’s more arch, ironic touches – the budget expenditure allotted to capture THX becomes too great, so the computers tell the robot cops to stand down! Beautiful. Those future dystopias are always running out of money, aren’t they?
We finish the film with an incredible shot that is best appreciated on Blu-ray. After spending the entire film underground, in artificial lighting, THX emerges onto the surface of the Earth in front of an enormous, orange, blazing sun – photographed with what must have been a 1000mm lens. It’s a striking scene that is repeated in 1977’s Star Wars, when Luke Skywalker gazes out on the twin setting suns of Tatooine, contemplating a future of adventure and freedom he doesn’t believe he’ll ever have. In THX’s case, he certainly does achieve his freedom – although the exact nature of that freedom, and of his future, remains unclear.
Thus ends THX: 1138. And now comes the $64 million question: on the whole, is the world of THX relevant to the world of today?
I think the answer must be: yes.
Are we currently living in a world in which the government is intruding into too many aspects of our daily lives – and using advanced technologies to pry into our privacy … even beneath our clothing? Of course we are. And why do we allow this? Because we’ve been brainwashed into believing that it’s necessary, and that a benevolent state apparatus has our best interests in mind.
I’m reminded here, among so many other things, of what is currently going on at our nation’s airports. All of us are now being scanned, X-rayed and disrobed at our airports if we commit the crime of wanting to fly. Book a flight to New York, for example, and you’re likely to find yourself stripped in public – or having your naked form recorded onto a government hard drive. (“Don’t worry – we’ll make sure it gets erased!”) And so a commercial flight can now turn into an exercise in exhibitionism, an opportunity to get scoped-out and humiliated by a government official – all for the crime of traveling.
But that’s not all. New devices are now being marketed that conduct psychometric exams of airline passengers, who are required to answer a battery of questions (to a computer) to determine whether they fit a pre-defined psychological ‘profile’ of someone wanting to blow-up an airplane. Our own Homeland Defense officials are apparently very interested in this technology. And why wouldn’t they be? (After all, perhaps they could even determine if someone might attend a Tea Party rally.)
As citizens and as customers, why do we put up with this? We do so because we’ve been brainwashed, made docile (and literally, in many cases, sedated with drugs), and ultimately because we want to put up with it. Because we’ve been sold the politically correct bill-of-goods that all ‘humanoids’ – whether they be Gramma Betsy from Kenosha, or 18-year old Ahmed from Lahore – are just as likely to blow up a plane as anyone else. Why? Because bureaucratically we’re all the same – just numbers in a system. And if you happen stand up and protest this madness, if you complain about ‘the system’ and its obvious inadequacies and dangers – you can expect to be accused of being a bad person. You’re not with the program! You’re ‘off your meds,’ ‘hateful,’ ‘paranoid’ and a danger to public safety.
This is the world we live in, and this is the world of THX. Indeed it’s altogether amazing – and unnerving – how almost everything about Lucas’ film seems appropriate today.
The experience of freedom.
A few final words about the Blu-ray itself: the image on this film is fantastic; also, Walter Murch did some of the most striking sound design work of his career on this film, and there are superb documentaries (”Master Sessions”) on the Blu-ray that cover that subject for the cinephiles out there.
One quibble I have with the film is its portrayal of sex in the future: namely, there is none. Lucas decided to go the Orwell/1984 route and predict a ’sexless’ future in which children are created primarily in test tubes. Needless to say, I don’t think a sexless future is on our horizon – at least here in the West. Sex is omnipresent and omnipotent today, so Lucas probably would’ve been shrewder to go with Aldous Huxley and Brave New World, or with Yevgeny Zamyatin and We, and predict an orgiastic/promiscuous future in which monogamy is forbidden and children are collectively raised ‘by a village.’ (Lucas otherwise seems to have borrowed the shaved heads and number-names from Zamyatin, or perhaps from Ayn Rand’s Anthem?) This orgiastic/group-sex/collective consciousness future seems much closer to where we’re headed, and the subject of sexual relations is the only area where THX: 1138 seems off-kilter.
THX: 1138 is a great experimental film, however, with a lively and sardonic sense of humor about our world. Underneath that humor, of course, is an authentic social critique of our society – as we march happily toward a future of conformism, sedation, docility and political correctness.
By Jennifer Baldwin. Watching old movies has been a spotty pastime for me these last few months. Working full-time as a high school English teacher leaves me with less free time than I’d like to work on my “Classic Cinema Obsession” articles, so that’s why I’ve been pretty much absent from Libertas since Mad Men ended.
I also began writing for a new film website called Fandor, an amazing new site that allows subscribers to watch a wide variety of classic, foreign, and indie films directly on their computers. No downloads, everything is streamed on the site. And first-time subscribers get a one-month free trial, which is a great incentive to join.
Along with the films, Fandor also provides written commentary and informative essays about the films and filmmakers, including articles by yours truly. My first article for Fandor was on Tarkovsky’s haunting dream film The Mirror, while my second article was on the Josef Von Sternberg/Marlene Dietrich classic, The Blue Angel. I’m also a participant in Fandor’s syndication program, which allows me to embed their films directly on my own personal blog, Dereliction Row. You can watch any of the films anytime you want if you’re a subscriber, or you can watch an individual film for a small rental fee. I’d encourage anyone who is interested in great cinema to check out Fandor.
So even though I have been overly busy with my day job as a teacher, I haven’t completely neglected my passion for classic films. And that’s what this “Classic Movie Journal” is all about. It’s my way to keep writing about old movies for Libertas, but in a more informal, less time intensive manner. Consider these my unvarnished, rambling, and passionate musings on all things old movies. Emphasis on the unvarnished and rambling, please.
So what’s rattling round in my brain this week? Well, as I mentioned above, I have been watching the new TCM documentary series about the history of Hollywood, and I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed. Normally I fall down at the feet of everything TCM does, but this time I’m not feeling it.
I don’t know if my expectations were too high, but the series has not lived up to them. I just finished watching episode four, “Brother Can You Spare a Dream,” which focused on the years 1929 to 1941, and I’ve found that the show doesn’t seem able to get to the essence of its topic each week. This week’s episode was all about Hollywood during the Depression, and how sound technology revolutionized the industry – and yet it never really delved into the cultural impact of the Talkies or the way the movies affected Depression audiences. It gave a little lip service to these topics, but I never felt the grand sweep, the overall impact that the movies had during these years. Through four episodes so far, there’s been nothing epic about this series.
From "The Great Train Robbery," (1903).
Part of the problem is that the show is divided in its attentions right from the start. It’s “Moguls and Movie Stars,” so the focus must be split between the businessmen and the artists. This is a pretty standard approach as far as an appraisal of Hollywood history goes, but the writing of the show has been muddled because of it. It keeps jumping back and forth between the machinations of the moguls and the rise and fall of various stars, but there’s no “through line” that connects everything to something larger. I was expecting a sort of myth-building history of America, as told through the history of Hollywood (something along the lines of Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary). Instead, it’s just a very rote, very surface documentary that breezes through its topic like a Cliffs Notes version of history.
Maybe each episode isn’t long enough? Maybe it was a mistake to break down each episode by decade? I know I would have liked more than an hour to cover the tumultuous and groundbreaking 1920s. I’m not sure how to fix the problem, but I’ve found that each episode is highly disposable and I haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know from my Film Studies 101 class. What’s even more annoying is that I was expecting these earlier episodes to be the strongest of the series, since they would be dealing with the earliest years of Hollywood in which I know very little in comparison to the more popular decades of the ‘30s, ’40, and ‘50s.
Ginger Rogers in "Gold Diggers of 1933."
In last week’s episode, Shirley Temple was given about three minutes of screen time at most. Fred Astaire got maybe a minute. The few clips that we got were brief and usually did not include much dialogue. I mean, this is the 1930s, when dialogue was everything – and snappy, quintessentially American dialogue was the great innovation of the age. Instead, everything was pretty much thrown at the viewer in a helter skelter manner, the only guiding framework being chronology. This series needs more clever montages and filmmaking chops. As it is, it’s kinda boring.
Maybe I’m being too hard. The series is certainly professionally produced and the interviews with the relatives and descendants of the moguls at least provide some new, unique perspectives. Occasionally the documentary will delve into some little known area, such as the career of female director Alice Guy, or the pioneering work of African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. But overall, it’s familiar stuff. And it’s not even presented in a thrilling or heart-swelling way. If a documentary like this can’t even get a classic movie obsessed gal like me to swoon, then there’s something wrong. A series like this should get me all psyched up to go watch the movies that get mentioned in each episode. Instead, I find myself relieved when the episodes are over and not really in the mood to watch any of the movies discussed.
Maybe the final three episodes will surprise me. I haven’t watched the newest one that just aired on November 29, so there’s still time for redemption. As it stands now, though, this series has been a disappointment. Normally I worship at the altar of TCM, but not this time.
Incidentally, you can read LFM Contributor Jennifer Baldwin’s review of the newly restored, ‘complete’ Metropolishere, and you can also read my long-ago review of the ‘original’ cut of Metropolishere.
SPECIAL NOTE: DON’T FORGET TO SET YOUR CLOCKS BACK AN HOUR TODAY.
By Jason Apuzzo. With a little help from Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, we wanted to wish our Libertas readers a Happy Halloween!
I searched the web to find something classic to show everybody on Halloween, and discovered to my pleasant surprise that an old favorite of mine from the 1950s – The Hideous Sun Demon – was available in its entirety over at YouTube. The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) is an atom age cult classic that was written, produced, and directed by Robert Clarke – who also stars in the film (you can see him below, more or less, wearing the rubber ‘sun demon’ mask).
In good Roger Corman style, Clarke shot The Hideous Sun Demon for under $50,000 – which included the $500 he spent on the rubberized lizard suit. The movie was shot exclusively on weekends (12 of them, to be exact) so Clarke could get two days’ use of rental equipment for only one day’s fee! If you’ve ever been a low-budget filmmaker, you know exactly what that type of experience is like. [I know because I used the same trick on Kalifornistan.]
The Hideous Sun Demon stalks Nan Peterson.
As an actor Robert Clarke was a staple figure in 1950s science fiction films, and some of his best work includes The Man from Planet X (1951), The Incredible Petrified World (1957) and The Astounding She-Monster (1957). He would later do a lot of TV work, appearing on such big-time shows as: The Lone Ranger, Dragnet, Perry Mason, Sea Hunt, General Hospital, Marcus Welby, M.D., Adam-12, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Hawaii Five-O, Fantasy Island, Dallas, Knight Rider, Murder She Wrote, Falcon Crest and Dynasty. So all in all he had a pretty good career, given that he started it wearing a rubber lizard suit.
*** SPOILERS BELOW***
The premise of The Hideous Sun Demon is cool: research scientist Dr. Gilbert McKenna (Clarke) falls unconscious after accidentally being exposed to radiation during an experiment with a new radioactive isotope. Later, while recuperating in a nearby hospital, ‘Gil’ is taken to a solarium to receive the sun’s healing rays … but while he naps, he metamorphoses into a hideous, lizard-like creature! Fortunately, when out of the sunlight, Gil reverts back to his normal human form.
We eventually learn that Gil has actually experienced an evolutionary ‘regression’ back through the chain of mankind’s ancestors (primitive mammals, reptiles and amphibians) triggered by his exposure to the sun’s radiation. In order to control this regression, Gil has to stay out of the sunlight – and effectively live a completely nocturnal existence.
So what would any swinging 50s bachelor do, under such awkward circumstances? Why, Dr. Gil hits the bar scene – and becomes, in effect, a nocturnal ‘lounge lizard’! Haunting the nighttime bars, Gil drifts away from his repressed, brunette lab assistant, played by Patricia Manning – who loves him from afar, but can’t bring herself to express it – and takes up with a busty, atom age blonde bombshell played by Nan Peterson. The decidedly unrepressed Nan brings out the animal in Dr. Gil, you might say, in a way that the poor drab lab assistant can’t.
The morning after: Nan Peterson after a date gone horribly wrong!
Peterson, for her part, plays a torch-song lounge singer who finds Gil dark and dangerous – of course, she has no idea how dangerous – and eventually she spends a many-splendored night with Gil on the beach … before he has to run off just as the sun comes up (aren’t men always like that?). Gil, you see, doesn’t want her to glimpse his ‘lizard’ side. Whew! The problems couples had back in those days! [And you thought things were complicated on Mad Men!]
Though Gil is able to hide his animalistic side from Nan and the police for a while, his life spins out of control as his ‘lizard’ side eventually takes over – with things leading to an explosive climax after Gil goes on a murderous rampage one day in broad daylight. And we learn, after all the mayhem subsides, that not only is mankind’s tampering with nature a very dangerous thing – but those Marilyn Monroe-style blondes can sometimes bring out the worst in a man …
***END OF SPOILERS***
The Hideous Sun Demon is a lot of fun; it’s campy, sexy, and is probably best enjoyed with a few adult beverages on hand – yet the film has an interesting subtext that makes it almost (if not quite) on a par with similar sci-fi classics from its era, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s a pity the movie wasn’t done in 3D, although Ms. Peterson certainly provides her own version of a third dimension. This version of The Hideous Sun Demon on YouTube lacks the Elvira opening, but you can probably imagine what the Mistress of the Dark would say about the film – and in particular what she might say about the plenteous Ms. Peterson …
We hope you enjoy the film in its entirety, and a Happy Halloween to everybody!
