The film opens with a black screen and the sounding of thirteen strikes on a tinny gong. If this baleful sound represents a deliberate step into the realm of bad luck, the gong tolls for Jerry—the protagonist of the film—rather than Ray Dennis Steckler, who plays him (under his alias “Cash Flagg”) and understood how fortunate he was to be able to direct and star in his own crazy movie, a dream that countless souls never get to realize. Jerry has not yet been introduced (and won’t be, until nearly eight minutes into the picture) but we’re already deep inside his head.
The images kick in with what could pass for an ambitious crane shot, looking down upon the Cyclone Racer, the wooden dual-track roller coaster at the Nu-Pike (originally The Pike) amusement park in Long Beach, California, which was in operation from 1902 to 1979. In 1954, The Nu-Pike was considered the fifth largest amusement park in America, but it wasn’t exactly a wholesome place. As this film’s weird dreamscape suggests, its family-friendly side went apace with a shadowy one that encompassed gambling, peep shows and prostitution. Then, in 1955, along came Disneyland and The Nu-Pike soon lost what little luster had. Notice that the screen is literally bisected diagonally between the park and the Pacific coast, the place where Jerry feels most alive and where he will die within slightly more than 81 minutes. Billed as “The World’s Greatest Ride,” the Cyclone Racer itself was itself on course to obsolescence; it was discontinued in 1968.
A pair of dissolves take us closer to the park and to the midway attraction identified as Madam Estrella, a gypsy fortune teller played by Brett O’Hara. She’s more interested in sitting in the lap of her boozy customer (producer George J. Morgan, in real life a teetotaler) and kissing him than in reading his fortune, but even pissed to the gills he has no interest in her or (as the trailer dubs it) her "wart of horror." He only comes around because he's got his eye out for her prettier sister Carmelita. Estrella is so incensed by this admission that she sics her hideous henchman Ortega (Jack Brady) on him. A misshapen funhouse mirror of a man, Ortega drags the boozehound into the next room and holds him down while Estrella dumps hydrochloric acid (helpfully labelled "Poison") on his face. As we’ll eventually find out, this is how Estrella has managed to hold onto a whole roomful of unwilling suitors.
If I read the palm of this scene, I see that Estrella is Spanish for “star,” and indeed her little hovel is decorated with a homely chart of the constellations. It’s interesting that Steckler would cast his producer (who gave him $38,000 to make the film and give him a small role) in opposition to the star, which can be read as a metaphor for himself, since his Cash Flagg persona is top-billed in this opus; though Morgan facilitated the making of this dream opportunity, the star nevertheless disfigures and consigns him to a closet along with several others of his own kind. Steckler is showing us that his path to this moment was paved with disappointments.
After the main titles we return to the Nu-Pike for another of this real place's imaginary attractions, namely the dancing duet of Marge Nielson and Bill Ward, headliners at its imaginary nightclub, the Hungry Mouth. Marge is played by Carolyn Brandt (Steckler’s wife at the time), a professional dancer under the name Carol Lynn who previously played the unbilled dancer accompanying Arch Hall Jr.’s performance of “Vickie” in WILD GUITAR (1962).
As soon as she gets offstage, we cut to her dressing room where we see a filthy teddy bear—there must be some personal story attached to this—and a pressbook for WILD GUITAR prominently affixed to a wall; they share virtually every shot of her. She seeks immediate refuge from some unaddressed heebie-jeebies in a bottle of booze. When she sees a harmless black cat in her dressing room, she literally screams and pleads with her boss (Gene Pollock) to take it away. He advises her to stop drinking; he reminds her that the mistakes in her last night’s performance nearly cost her her job. She promises to try “... just for you,” and he answers “I’d rather you do this just for yourself”—one of those rare lines that seem to hover, pregnant with a meaning whose clarification we will have to wait out. “Maybe so, maybe not,” she muses, taking another sip from her glass.
It’s at this intersection of indecision that the film belatedly introduces its best-bud protagonists, roommates Jerry (Flagg/Steckler) and Harold (Atlas King). It’s time to for them to pick up Jerry’s girlfriend Angie, but he’s hesitant as he sits in his favorite chair toying with a little puppet-like figure. Her mother hates him and he knows this. Harold, a Greek immigrant with a tall Pompadour and an amusingly thick accent, suggests that maybe they’d like him more if he got a job.
“You gotta do something, y’know?” Harold presses him.
“Why?” Jerry questions. “The world’s here to be enjoyed, not to make you depressed. That’s what work does, Harold. It makes you feel depressed.”
He turns the nose of the doll in his hand down so that its sulking attitude matches that of a dour sculpture on the end table beside him. These are bad mojo objects that resonate with the gong, Estrella’s crystal ball, the alcohol and the black cat. The scenes seem to be lining up and locking together, like the constellations charted on Estrella’s wall.
Jerry and Harold agree to seize the day. They burst out of their sad little apartment (which, according to Steckler's commentary was his and Carolyn's own residence at the time) and drive out to Angie’s more cheerful-looking suburban home.
As we meet Angie (Sharon Walsh), she’s on the phone, turning down a date to go to the beach with another boy, Phil. When she hangs up, her conservative and overly worried mother (Joan Howard) speaks up for Phil—“such a nice boy”—and denigrates Jerry for having “no education, he’ll never be able to make a living.” Angela counters that Jerry is “fun and exciting” and that her mother is “way ahead” of her or any plans she might have. They're “just having fun, that’s all.”
Jerry arrives and honks. “He doesn’t even come to the door for you!” her mother exclaims. We cut to an underlining close-up of Angela as she counters, “He wouldn’t be Jerry if he did.”
Legend has it that Sharon Walsh stepped into the role of Angela at the last minute, literally recruited by Steckler from the film's dancing girls when his first choice preferred to keep a date with her drummer boyfriend than star in his film. Walsh nails this scene and every other and the film is inconceivable without her inner strength and moral compass.
“Fine, you should try it sometime,” he answers.
“No, thanks,” Jerry grins, sliding onto the ground. “The world’s my college.”
And then our three protagonists—Jerry, Angie and Walter—head out into the world… but settle on the Nu-Pike, which of course isn’t the world at all. However, it will represent an education for Jerry. As the friends approach the park’s entrance, Steckler allows the entire word ENTRANCE to fill the wide screen so that the dual, more baleful meaning of the word has a chance to sink in. Directly below the word we see two slightly overlapping parked cars, one black and the other white, which seem to propose a kind of crossroads.
These may be nothing more than accidental details, but I would admit that a good deal of the meaning I’m reading into the film is probably accidental. Nevertheless, this material didn’t just happen. It didn't feel right to Steckler until it was framed and cut this way. According to him, he took a completely intuitive approach to directing the picture—arriving on the set each morning and only deciding what he was going to do that day after he'd spent some time on his own, absorbing the feel of the set or location.
They bypass the rides to go directly to the beach, where Walter stands apart as Jerry and Angie frolic, actually running and skipping along the water’s edge like a couple of kids. These same three characters will converge here again as the sand in Jerry’s hourglass finally runs out, and once the sea’s eventual meaning is known to us, we can read these images of Jerry and Angie as two people skirting the very edge of death. Steckler said that, as a teenager, he was greatly influenced by James Dean and his last film REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, which was released only after his premature death at the age of 24. He made this film at the age of 25 and I suspect that his feelings about Dean’s premature death are somehow tied up in the fabric of this film and its implicit recommendation of using, rather than wasting, one’s time. In so doing, Steckler seems to have accidentally (or intuitively) become one of the earliest American directors—if not the first—to incorporate a “romp” sequence, which would be so important as a filmic expression of the 1960s zeitgeist, and so central to the mythos of The Beatles, The Monkees, and other pop groups yet to emerge. (Appropriately, one of Steckler's sidelines to his feature career would be as a director of music videos.)
Vilmos Zsigmond actually took his 16mm camera aboard the Cyclone Racer to joltingly chronicle its death-defying descents. In 1958, 19 year-old George Doig of Torrence, California’s defiance of death was itself defied when he fainted aboard the harrowing ride, his head tipping outside the car at a steep turn and getting crushed when it slammed into a rail. This incident would surely have been part of the ride’s legend at the time of filming, and perhaps a close correlative in Steckler's mind to the autocrash fate of James Dean on September 30, 1955—67 years ago to the day of this very posting. On the Severin disc at 14:18, you’ll notice the star poised at the very peak of the ride’s ascent, which can be read as an indication of the ups and downs of playing the Hollywood game or may also suggest that Jerry and his friends are already in the thrall of Madam Estrella several minutes before meeting her.
Another ride on the lot, a double-decker ferris wheel known as the Sky Wheel, claimed its own share of lives in 1949-50. As described in an account posted online at polaris93.livejournal.com, the author’s cousin and her date were aboard the ride, their seat almost at the top of its wheel when “the seat just ahead of theirs broke away from its mount and, invested with a large freight of angular momentum, shot out into the night and plunged down in a long ballistic arc to the concrete, over a hundred feet below. The four young people in that seat died horribly, crushed under their seat and/or splashed across the concrete, blood leaking everywhere… Anne and her date, wondering if they’d be next to fly off into the night and down to their deaths, hung there close to the top of the ferris wheel for some time as the employees and managers of the Pike figured out what to do.”
Meanwhile, in her dressing room, Marge continues to drink as the lame house comedian (James Bowie) gives others reason to. Marge’s alcoholism inevitably ruins her performance—which Steckler depicts with dizzy POV shots that break the fourth wall to reveal production lighting—and she dashes offstage in embarrassment. Her boss catches her taking another drink and orders her to take the next show off and come back for the third; if she screws that one up, she’s fired. She puts down her drink and turns to the nearest source of solace available to her: an astrology magazine that inspires her to consult Madam Estrella.
After some additional views aboard the Cyclone Racer as night falls, we see Jerry attracted to the hootchie girl stage as Marge, dressed in a dark hat and coat, urgently cuts across the midway toward Estrella’s tent. Though the following scene's master shot encompasses the entire scene, Marge’s card reading (supposedly a Tarot reading, though Estrella deals out round playing cards) is covered with an impressive variety of high and low angles. When her inquiries are answered with an Ace of Spades (the “death” card), the master shot crosses the line by reversing the seated positions of the two characters, disorienting to the scene’s defined geography but necessary to show Marge running out through the wrong door, which occupies the space previously defined by the camera's placement. Finding herself in Estrella’s private apartment, she finds another door indicating an exit but, as she opens it, a crazed hand thrusts out through cell bars! Terrified, she turns and runs past Estrella, making her escape but dropping her purse in the process. As she bolts out of Estrella’s showfront, she accidentally knocks Harold to the ground, and at last our binary storylines—one embracing life, the other eluding death—finally intersect like crossed stars.
For the price of “feefty cents,” Madam Estrella reads Angela’s palm. Once again, the film's three man camera crew of Joseph V. Mascelli, Vilmos Zsigmond and Laslow Kovacs offer up a spellbinding array of camera angles within the tight space. Estella foresees that Angie will be “lucky in love… I see only one husband for you… I see your mother will not approve of man you choose for a husband.”
Jerry pats Angie Baby’s hand smugly.
Estrella then looks into her crystal ball for insights into her more immediate future. Watching the film for the first time, we may be forgiven for distrusting Estrella’s crystal ball predictions as midway phony baloney—after all, she’s been introduced as a carny hooker not above disfiguring the would-be clients who reject her advances; however, on secondary viewings, we realize her forecast (“someone… yes, it is you… by water… now I see a man… I can no longer see you… now a man moves… yes, you are lying on the ground… by water…”) is genuine prophecy and this deepens our perception of her as someone forced into the peripheral shadows and horrors of life by her gift (or curse), her powers of perception.
It’s generally accepted that most 80-to-90-minute films should state (or at least allude) to their story's theme before the end of Act 1 (ie., about 20-30 minutes into the picture). As we arrive at the end of this film’s first third, what this seemingly meandering but actually quite focused narrative is telling us is that amusement is evasion. Evade the real world long enough and it will come looking for you, and the bait on its hook will be your own idle curiosity.
To be continued...
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