A Night of Fun and GAMES

Last night I decided to spend a little time with Curtis Harrington by refreshing my memory of his first major studio production, GAMES (1967). Though the film was a critical favorite and a commercial success in its day, Universal has never given the film a proper DVD release, and its two pan&scan VHS releases (the most recent released in 2000, after the advent of the new format) are by definition unsatisfactory considering that it was filmed in Techniscope.

Actually, revisiting the movie eased my mind on this issue somewhat, because cameraman William A. Fraker took care to compose the picture at once for scope framing and for television cropping, reserving the periphery of most shots for set decoration accents. I twice noticed an art nouveau bust that I remembered seeing in Curtis' home hovering on the edge of a composition, just out of sight. (The golden helmeted mask worn by Katharine Ross, seen on the VHS cover shown here, also went on to proud placement on the wall of Curtis' living room.) But there is relatively little cutting from one side of the screen to the other -- at least on my copy, which I recorded from a pay cable channel in the 1980s.

Some quick thoughts: I don't think any single movie better embodies the great divide between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood than GAMES. It has an Old Hollywood sense of elegance and décor, all consciously indebted to the influence of the great European filmmakers who brought style to Hollywood from overseas and the plot (with its not-too-subtle tips of the hat to DIABOLIQUE) distinctly European in tenor. Meanwhile, the mise en scène -- with its references to Lichtenstein and Segal and other pop and postmodern art, is well ahead of the 1967 Hollywood curve and the film's interests in role playing, practical jokes, black magic and murder casts it as a clear-cut progenitor of PERFORMANCE. I can't remember ever reading anything that connected GAMES and PERFORMANCE, and this is undoubtedly due to Universal's seeming disregard for the film, which Curtis himself long petitioned for a proper LaserDisc or DVD release. People don't know the movie, and those who do find it hard to look past its allusions to DIABOLIQUE... yet Curtis was a personal friend of Donald Cammell and they had several other friends in common, making the notion of influence a tantalizing possibility, especially for GAMES' sake. Some viewers feel that the second half of the film is weaker than the first, but I disagree. There's no question that we know that a game is afoot in the second half, but we don't know who is involved, what the circumstances are, or the goal of the proceedings -- so the movie engages the viewer, or should, on a different tier (shall we say) in its second part.

As fine as GAMES is on the level of performance, direction, cinematography, wardrobe and set decoration, I feel it was let down in terms of its score by Samuel Matlovsky, which is borderline fussy and overstressed during the masterfully constructed suspense sequences, which would have been better served by having their accompaniment pared down to well-orchestrated sound effects. (Matlovsky had previously conducted Gustavo Cesár Carreón's score for THE FOOL KILLER [1964] -- a pioneering work of dark Americana scored with orchestra and crudely overlaid electric guitar parts. Flawed but fascinating, and with a staggering performance by former WEREWOLF OF LONDON Henry Hull, THE FOOL KILLER is far less well-known today than GAMES.) Movie musicologists will be amused by a scene in GAMES wherein the three principals (Simone Signoret, James Caan, and Katharine Ross looking her personal best) are dressed in costume and pantomiming some strange sacrificial ritual with a 78rpm record spinning on a Victrola, playing organ music. The scene is shot with a lot of panache and it would have been very effective indeed... had Matlovsky not used for this cue Vic Mizzy's "organ loft" piece from THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN!

GAMES is currently out of print on VHS. If anyone within range of this blog has any pull with Universal, please put a bug in their ear about releasing GAMES on DVD. There are few people around today under the age of 55 who can claim to have seen it as it was intended, and it shouldn't be overlooked by audiences or by history. It's a genuine American suspense classic, and a sophisticated foreshadowing of things to come.

Before Curtis

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?

Curtis Harrington (1928-2007)

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I have written much more than a thousand words today about film director Curtis Harrington -- who passed away yesterday morning at age 78 -- but having completed that task, I don't feel this is the correct place to present them.

I took this photo of Curtis (whom Bill Kelley and I interviewed in VIDEO WATCHDOG #14) in his living room in 1993. It's the way I'll always remember him: wise, warm, and relaxed, enthroned in a Spanish-style house built in the heyday of Old Hollywood. Many parties had been held there and there was a sense about the place of rhubarbing voices and clinking glasses and raucous merriment that carried from empty rooms into the tossing heights of the cypress trees lining his backyard. I'm sure that Curtis got out and about more than I do, nevertheless his house was a perfect extension of him -- with its framed Belle Epoque posters, Tiffany lamps, porcelain masks, and a stuffed and mounted raven standing vigilant on one endtable, his domicile had the feel of him, and the feel of one of his movies. I remember particularly the cracks in the ceilings, dealt to the property by California earthquakes over the years, and I feel in my bones that they were the inspiration for his last short film, USHER (2002).

Curtis was more than a film and television director; he was also the first film critic (of whom I am aware) to make the ascent into the director's chair. He wrote a book about his favorite director Josef von Sternberg in 1948 (very early for a book about an individual director) and he was also a contributor to FILMS & FILMING and FILMS ILLUSTRATED in the early 1950s. People talk about directors like Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese and DePalma being the first generation of directors raised on movies, but Curtis was making films before any of them -- and he was making films that were in their own way recursive, depending on the audience's knowledge of the screen languages formulated by Sternberg and by the great suspense masters Hitchcock, Lewton, and Clouzot.

A call I placed to his home today, in search of someone to whom I could express my regrets and learn more about the circumstances of his passing, found Curtis' easygoing voice still in absent residence, welcoming callers from his answering machine to send a fax or leave a message.

Here is mine: Farewell, my friend.