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| Dana Andrews makes a homecoming to an America he wasn't fighting for. |
The film opens with a montage of a bearded, long-haired Andrews being beaten and tortured as a prisoner of war in North Korea—an under-the-titles sequence that now recalls the similarly disorienting pre-credits sequence of 2002's James Bond offering DIE ANOTHER DAY. After the titles, Andrew's character Alan Eaton is reintroduced shaved, well-groomed, but obviously affected by his ordeal on a flight back to his home base of Washington DC, where he intends to rejoin his partner in their public opinion polling business. He spends the long flight enduring another form of torture, the talkative seating companion, who in this case is of the "small world" variety: he's a professor affiliated with a committee for nuclear disarmament, who recommends a place to stay and quotes Shakespeare by way of saying goodnight with Eaton escapes into a nap. (The Shakespeare quotation is perhaps the only moment in the film when we feel the "vesperal" tone of Tourneur's films for producer Val Lewton, as described by J.P. Velotte in his book DREAMS OF DARKNESS—and it's used here to underscore a character's obnoxiousness.) Back on terra firma, Eaton goes to his former office, finds his former partner one year dead, and the business signed over to an overbearing stranger (Dick Foran as Dick McGinnis), who has taken this once-honest business in the "new" direction of designing pre-determined polling—a first step in proposing "alternative facts" in postwar America. After bungling into another room where Eaton finds an anti-Semitic poll in progress, he starts digging into his company's current affairs and finds them dedicated to fomenting fear in the general public to prime them for buying a peace that only their paying associates can assure them.
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| Marilee Earle, Dana Andrews, and Mel Tormé. |
The film is based on a 1945 novel of the same name written by Darwin L. Teilhet, which must have been quite a shocker in its day. Seen today, it's not the idea of rigged public opinion polls that startles, because these have become such a big part of American life; rather, the startling part is that the film so frankly depicts the people behind such scams as murderers, criminals, spies, and thugs—un-American to a man. It's hard to believe that in just 64 years, the brainwashing of Americans by predetermined polling and biased broadcasting has become accepted by a large share of the country as its fundamental source of news and information.
The casting of Dana Andrews (the homecoming star of William Wyler's early postwar masterpiece THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES) in the lead role lends Eaton a special resonance the character would not otherwise have had. Singer Mel Tormé has a rare dramatic role as a compromised employee in bottle-thick eyeglasses whose susceptibility to criminal overtures is psychologically tied to his sexual insecurities. The leading lady, Marilee Earle, isn't much of one; she has a completely inexpressive face and, when Tormé makes a sweaty pass at her, we get the impression she's the only woman he's ever been near. While Dick Foran plays his role competently, the only roles with any impact are those of the Loders, the husband-and-wife whose B&B is recommended to Eaton by his flight companion, and who turn out to be stooges of McGinnis. They are played by Kelly Thordsen (who, in his later scenes, appears to be wearing Orson Welles' clothes from TOUCH OF EVIL) and sultry Veda Ann Borg, who don't bother to conceal their beer-fueled fights from their guests.
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| A Hitchcockian climax at the Lincoln Memorial. |
If the main feature falls short of our expectations, the audio commentary by Professor and film scholar Jason A. Ney repays its debt as a whole. With his engaging energy and smooth delivery, Ney covers the film's fascinating production history (it passed through a number of other hands before reaching Tourneur's desk), its cast (with a startling sidebar on Veda Ann Borg), its historical situation, its adaptation and the omissions from the source novel, its critical reception, and its place on the margins of noir, all the while grappling with the ideas it puts across and the occasional flaws in its makeup and rhetoric. In the only book about Tourneur's films published to date (Chris Fujiwara's otherwise appetizing JACQUES TOURNEUR: THE CINEMA OF NIGHTFALL), THE FEARMAKERS gets six discouraging pages. Here you get a lot more to chew on.
(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
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| Richard Hale as horror star Ernst von Kroft in "The Greatest Monster of Them All." |
This episode, directed by Robert Stevens, is about a trashy independent production company specializing in cheap horror pictures, as exemplified by disguised campaign art for Universal’s MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS and THE MONOLITH MONSTERS scattered around the office of producer Sam Jaffee. For their next picture, they decide to bring back ancient horror star Ernst von Croft (Richard Hale), who remembers making some of his greatest pictures at this studio (Universal, I presume, not the AIP wannabe). Von Croft is obviously a spin on Karloff but, to make matters more vague, he is depicted as having found fame playing vampires, à la Lugosi. He makes the picture, only to discover at the preview screening that the company has turned his masterpiece into a joke by having Mel Blanc loop all of his dialogue with the voice of Bugs Bunny!
What leaped out of this episode for me was the following scene, when the equally betrayed screenwriter (William Redfield) gets smashed and pays a visit to the rooming house abode of a very depressed Von Croft. The actor “never drinks,” but Redfield is smashed enough for the two of them as they settle into a rueful conversation about the shabby state of modern horror.
This short scene (which Redfield overplays shamelessly) now stands as a remarkable premonition of the drunken scene played by Boris Karloff (as horror star Byron Orlock) and Peter Bogdanovich (as director Sammy Michaels) in TARGETS! In the scene, Orlock is determined to retire, feeling that his brand of old-fashioned horror can no longer compete with the real-life horrors of the world in which we live. Sammy wants him to star in his next picture. In the HITCHCOCK episode, it is von Kroft who tries to convince the young screenwriter that he is still relevant, but he's preaching to the choir; the Redfield character feels just as betrayed by the final cut as the film's star.
Had Bogdanovich lucked into this episode while spinning the dial one night, while trying to think up a plot for the new movie Roger Corman invited him to make, making use of footage from THE TERROR and a few still-owed days of Boris Karloff’s time, this episode would have handed him half the idea for TARGETS on a silver platter!
The inspiration for the other half, the story of the sniper, came from the Charles Whitman sniping murders in Texas, as is well-known.
While there are some hunting and skinning scenes, they are not described in the detail found in Verne's earlier THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN HATTERAS, for example. It is more the book's point to tell a more engrossing story of families and co-workers fighting the elements to survive, and the deepening sense of community that is fostered by their collective endurance of harsh winters, volcanic disturbances, threatening iceberg collisions, and more.
I don’t want to spoil what should come as a major surprise but a major upheaval occurs halfway through the book, altering the entire dimension (indeed, the geography) of the story and taking the tension to a much higher level. My only criticism of the book is that its large cast of some twenty-one characters is thinly rendered. While Verne's depiction of the courtly civility and emotions of various protagonists is at times moving, he never really stops documenting the minutiae of environmental causes-and-effects long enough to bring any individual character substantially to life. A lone polar bear foraging on the story's periphery is better delineated than many of its people. An interesting side-effect of not introducing a traditional love story into the account is that Verne instead writes a stirring account of how platonic friendship are enriched and strengthened under tremendous pressure and adversity. Finally, a methodical and brilliantly detailed first half builds to a startling change of... well, everything in the second. While the book overall is not one of Verne’s best, it's nonetheless a worthy addition to his inspired initial run of Extraordinary Voyages.
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| Gilbert Roland and the children from THE MIRACLE OF OUR LADY OF FATIMA. |
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| Carroll Baker and her Representative in THE MIRACLE. |
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| Spanish poster. |
I've been able to find some information online about this English-dubbed version. It was "directed" by Joseph Breen Jr., the son of the infamous enforcer of the Motion Picture Production Code for many years, whose prolonged sanitation of American films gave this country such a distorted, delusional idea of itself. It was also "produced" by the Rev. Patrick J. Peyton, C.S.C. and was dubbed by some well-known actors, with Sebastian Cabot narrating the picture and the role of Jesus Christ voiced by THESE ARE THE DAMNED's MacDonald Carey. Just today, I found a copy of this elusive film's US poster on eBay, which identifies it as a 1965 release through Empire Pictures Distributing Company, Inc. The poster mentions neither Cabot or Carey in its fine print; the only credit mentioned is for its music by David Raksin (best-known for his LAURA theme), which implies that Reverend Peyton had the entire Spanish soundtrack—including its original score by José Muños Molleda—wiped to better accommodate the English dub.
The film both captivated and haunted me. I remember later telling my mother about it (she had never seen it) and asking her why a film about Jesus would shy away from showing his face. She thought it was peculiar, but she felt obliged to give me a reason and ended up telling me that maybe the filmmakers thought it would be a sin to depict the son of God with an actor's face. This opened a whole other can of worms concerning the movies that were her religion ("Then why do we see get to see his face in the movies you watch on TV?"), but I let the matter drop.
Of all this long-sought-after film's revelations, the biggest surprise (at least for me) was seeing that the credits of El redentor were reserved for the very end of the picture. Included with the names of the Spanish cast members are several of the credits from the English versions, which must mean that El redentor is actually a post-1965 Spanish reissue of the original film, featuring the Raksin score and possibly other tinkering, as well. This means that Fernando Palacios' Un hombre tiene que morir (whatever it may have been) no longer exists as such, and leaves us with the open question of why it was changed and replaced with what Hollywood had done with it.
(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
