I remarked yesterday that I could think of no film critic prior to Curtis Harrington who made the leap to directing features. Reader Richard Heft wrote to suggest that I check out the IMDb pages for producer-director Alexander Korda and writer-director Pare Lorentz, which proved educational indeed. Apparently, Korda wrote newspaper and magazine film criticism in Paris between 1911-18, while Lorentz' collected criticism was collected in book form in 1975 under the title LORENTZ ON FILM: MOVIES 1927 TO 1941.
I did some online exploring in regard to Curtis' published works and found that, in addition to writing a chapter for the 1972 book FOCUS ON THE HORROR FILM (not one that I own, unfortunately), he wrote a lengthy feature called "Ghoulies and Ghosties" which appeared in a special edition of THE QUARTERLY OF RADIO FILM AND TELEVISION (Winter 1952) devoted to horror cinema. I found the latter item for sale through abebooks.com and ordered it; if this item is all that the seller's description claimed it to be, it would precede in print the issue of the French magazine CINEMA devoted to "Le Fantastique" that is said to have inspired Forrest J Ackerman's FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND. (Curtis' article was more recently reprinted in THE HORROR FILM READER, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini.)
Novelizations also exist for two Curtis Harrington films: GAMES by Hal Ellson (Ace Books) and, the more desirable of the two, QUEEN OF BLOOD by Charles Nuetzel (Greenleaf Classics, one of those sexed-up items from the publishers of Ed Wood's novelization of ORGY OF THE DEAD). Does anyone out there know if Charles and Albert Nuetzel (FM cover artist) were related or perhaps even one and the same?
