Nazis, Spies and Bikers - Adamson Style

Kent Taylor as New Nazi Party leader Count von Delberg in THE FAKERS.

Severin Films' AL ADAMSON MASTERPIECE COLLECTION permits an engrossing comparison between their choppy and discombobulated 1970 release HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS and the more organically pleasing picture it grew out of, a pleasantly engaging little spy picture called THE FAKERS (1967, 94m 49s). Filmed under the title OPERATION M, it opens with an immediately engaging animated title sequence, the first Bob Lebar created for Independent-International, bearing the reconsidered title SMASHING THE CRIME SYNDICATE and a copyright date of 1973. Further upping the ante is Adamson's first proper film score, suggesting that he (or perhaps production consultant Sam Sherman) had recognized that their previous use of library music had worked against the commercial viability of their product. A flashy montage of rotoscoped nude models in high contrast and psychedelic colors, animated USA flags, swastikas, hammer and sickles, Stars of David, inky handprints, and $20 bills, this stylish surge of creativity is given additional verve by the opening theme, "Faker," sung by Debbie Stuart (à la Shirley Bassey), which is credited to Nelson Riddle though the musical score, per se, was more economically provided by Don McGinnis, who made free use of Riddle's catchy motifs. 

John Gabriel eyes a counterfeit bill with mob boss Keith Andes.

The film opens, in a manner now evoking RESERVOIR DOGS, with our protagonist waking up in the back seat of a moving car with the heated story already in progress. We won't know this for awhile, but this is danger-man-for-hire Mark Adams, played by John Gabriel (credited as the lyricist of "Faker") - he arranges his escape from the car, upsetting the driver, who proceeds to spill over the side of a cliff, delivering immediate action and fatality. The unconscious Adams is picked up by a passing truck driver and taken to hospital, where the film embarks on a more-or-less feature-length flashback, complete with handy self-introduction. While comatose, he recounts the story of how he was hired by his boss Joe, "a very big man in the syndicate," who has been contacted by a Las Vegas branch of the New Nazi Party who need funding to put into action "an idea so big, only the syndicate could handle it." Joe wants Adams to meet with the man behind the New Reich, a Count von Delberg (Kent Taylor), who owns stolen money plates dating back to WWII capable of making fool-proof counterfeit currency, which he plans to circulate to refinance his army of goose-steppers. Joe wants those plates - probably more for his own gain than for any patriotic reason. 

Guest stars Broderick Crawford and John Carradine.

What's wrong with the film from the beginning is that Adams and his boss are so cordial and likable that we are left wondering why our putative hero wasn't conceived as a secret agent working on behalf of our government, rather than a charismatic hood working on behalf of a warm and friendly mob boss. As it happens, he actually is; this is just another curve thrown at us to make the story more "interesting." Adams has been working undercover for the past five years; his actual bosses are Gavin (Broderick Crawford, an implied FBI man, giving the same performance he always gives, but he's solid and ideal for the role) and his next-in-line Brand (Scott Brady, ditto). When one of "Why did they send you?" Gavin asks female agent Jill Harmon (Emily Banks), when Brand drags her into his office. "I don't like sending out female agents, especially when they're pretty." "Thanks for the left-handed compliment!" she fires back perkily. Gavin also "has a feeling the communists are in on this" - well, okay, why not? 

Vicki Volante hides from her pursuers at Marineland - a surprisingly Hitchcockian scene.

"Everything simple so far?" the suave Adams asks us from the depths of his coma, while neatly pocketing his gun in a shoulder holster onscreen. And so it goes, with our comatose hero supposedly reminiscing about how he got into this position, while also telling us about scenes and situations to which he was not privy. Adams also encounters more than his share of female trouble, courtesy of a jailbait femme fatale (Anne Randall), the competitive agent Harmon, the icy blonde Leni Marvenga (Jacklyn O'Donnell) and also the Count's apparently Nazi-friendly attaché Carol Bechtol (Vicki Volante), the Count's unknowing attaché and mistress, who becomes a target for the Communists whose bid for the plates was snubbed. The film reaches its genuinely engrossing high point as Carol flees her would-be assassins into the midst of a packed afternoon at Marineland, where Adamson, cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs, and editor John Winfield create a seriously good sequence, almost ten minutes in length, that proceeds without much dialogue and is inventively storyboarded on multiple levels of single compositions. Adams saves Carol, only to discover that she's assumed her position in the Count's employ because she wants to destroy him, actually a surviving Nazi war criminal who was responsible for her parents' death at Auschwitz.

Before he worked for Herschell Gordon Lewis, Col. Harlan Sanders made an Al Adamson cameo!

Adams' coma finally comes full circle around 74m into the picture, making us realize it was only a ploy to underline the fine points of an overcomplicated plot, which only served to make them more complicated in the process - but there is terrific stuff along the way, some of it quite quirkily funny, including a delightfully perverse encounter with a fellow undercover man posing as a pet shop dealer (John Carradine) bedeviled by a pair of ditzy twins (Alyce and Rhae Andrece) whose lovebirds aren't being very amorous, a bit of judo oneupmanship with Agent Harmon, and a romantic sidebar as Adams and Ms. Marvenga take a stroll through the park and meet Col. Harlan Sanders himself while having lunch at KFC.

Agent Harmon (Emily Banks) throws Adams for a loop.

In its original form, THE FAKERS is an engaging, neat little spy picture whose quirks are ultimately forgivable, even embraceable, but the story behind it is a tragic one. When it was still OPERATION M, it ran out of money mid-way through production, and other producers came into the project like Rex Carlton, who - when the film finally proved unsaleable - committed suicide, dropping roughly $40,000 of debt on Adamson's shoulders. To make a long story short, Adamson subsequently formed Independent-International with Sam Sherman as a means of repaying that debt to his investors, a scheme that was ultimately successful - and which explains why his shelf of work at that time became the raw material for drastic re-evaluation and reinvention.

Robert Dix at the head of HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS.

HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS (90m 11s) may be the crudest of the various reworkings, which takes the original's New Nazi Party plot and ties it to the swastikas paraded by a motorcycle gang led by the fairly straight-looking Cunk (Robert Dix). The movie - which cuts THE FAKERS down quite a bit and adds roughly 15 minutes of additional footage shot in Utah - opens with the Bloody Devils (played by an actual biker gang, the Hessians), who are in league with the Count's Master Race philosophy and on his payroll, tracking down a pair of commie hit men and treating them to a chain-beating until they are covered in blood ("Now everyone will know you're a red, ha ha ha," one observes.) The Bob Lebar titles are slightly reworked to incorporate biker graphics, and the original theme song is kept. 

Pick-up cameraman Frank Ruttencutter goes for the symbolism during a biker's love scene.

Whereas THE FAKERS looks beautiful, having been scanned and restored from its original 35mm negative, HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS was not so carefully preserved. The version presented makes extensive use of the FAKERS negative but the material unique to the revision is culled from various surviving 35mm prints, which are faded and scratchy as they looked the last time they played under the stars at various drive-in theaters.

The extras include a trailer and TV spot for HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS, as well as a feature-length commentary by Sam Sherman (incorporating a brief phoned-in addenda by John Gabriel), and an  hilarious featurette called "Sam Sherman Interviews Actor John Gabriel," in which the poor, smiling, dressed-up-to-be-interviewed-on-camera, and clearly suffering actor finds it all but impossible to get a word in. All in all, another entertaining, eye-opening, and educational evening with the AL ADAMSON MASTERPIECE COLLECTION.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

RIP Ennio Morricone: He Left Us Multitudes

Maestro Ennio Morricone has passed away at the age of 91, leaving behind some 400 feature film scores, miscellaneous experimental recordings and pop music arrangements, and more albums, retrospectives and compilations than anyone could count, much less own. It is a popular opinion that such prolificacy is its own worst enemy, that it spreads talent thin and wastes more time and ability in expenditure than in incubating - but if anyone could put the lie to this homespun wisdom, it was Morricone. There's a song on Bob Dylan's new album called "I Contain Multitudes," which derives its title and concept from a poem by Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself." Certainly Dylan has worn a variety of masks during his long career and used them to express a great variety of popular music and (sometimes unpopular) voices, but Morricone could have laid an even more valid claim to the title. It's interesting that both stories begin, more or less, from the same seed: Woody Guthrie. 

Bear with me. Woody Guthrie was Bob Dylan's hero; it's said that he - two generations away from Russian Jewish immigrants - left his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota to travel east and sing to the hospitalized Guthrie. He did his best to look, sound, walk, and talk like him; and because Guthrie's brain was dying in the throes of Huntington's Disease, Dylan carried his voice and his message forward like a torch. He called himself Woody's "disciple," but soon enough he had become more analogous to the voice of Christ for thousands of young folk. You could hear a pin drop in Carnegie Hall as he wove his spell, just one man and an old, beaten-up guitar. After his fabled motorcycle accident saved him from a self-destructive spiral on the road, he came back somewhat reborn in the image of American traditional music with the Band, then country music under the wing of Johnny Cash, and a whole procession of images from the clown-faced bandleader of the Rolling Thunder Revue, the sanctimonious front man of the GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY tour, stints with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and the Grateful Dead, the drunken-sounding uncle singing Christmas songs, the Sinatra-like crooner mooning over old lost loves, and most currently the songwriter whose sprawling cast of characters from the Marquis de Sade to the Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands have become synonymous with some kind of forsaken Americana, somehow synonymous with JFK's sadly exploding head. You might say he's a myth-maker as much as a writer of song; his first Number One was 17 minutes long. 

Morricone's Woody Guthrie connection, of course, was the 1941 song "Pastures of Plenty", which he - in his original status as an orchestral arranger of Italian pop music recordings - gave a special arrangement for a 1962 single by the expatriate American folk singer Peter Tevis. At this time, Morricone had already composed a couple of Italian Western scores in a more traditional vein, GUNFIGHT AT RED SANDS and and Tevis had sung themes for thebut had previously sung the title themes of Morricone's two previous Westerns, GUNFIGHT AT RED SANDS ("A Gringo Like Me") and BULLETS DON'T ARGUE ("Lonesome Billy"). So it was natural for Morricone to suggest a reprise of this successful template to Sergio Leone when he was approached to score FISTFUL OF DOLLARS - but Leone didn't want the Tevis voice - he wanted that Guthrie/Tevis sound, which somehow gathered the galloping of ghostly horses in a guitar's sultry strum, whip cracks, flute trills, the caws of men attempting to marshal an unruly nature, and the gentleness that was just a heartbeat away from cataclysmic violence. Morricone would later refer to FISTFUL, repeatedly, as the worst score he ever wrote, but it redefined the musical genre laid down by Aaron Copeland in his 1940s compositions like "Billy the Kid", "Hoedown", and "Appalachian Spring." 

The music that Morricone wrote for Italian Westerns of the 1960s was as defining of them as their look, their stars, their direction. It was lusty, sweaty, humorous, even spiritual music with a hair-trigger temper. His sixteen-year membership in the ensemble Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, which explored improvised experimental music, kept him vigilant on the edge of musical frontiers. It was with his scores for THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST that his movie music became too brilliant to ignore; Sergio Leone himself saw to that, using his brooding, roiling, suspenseful, harrowing, even mournful music to embrace long silences, as the cinema he created returned periodically to the purity of the silent era. One critic noted about the latter film that it was like an opera in which the arias were stared. 

But we mustn't forget that Morricone's music also paraded itself in a series of masks. There are not only compilations of Morricone's music, but compilations of distinct genres of his music. He contained it all. There are collections of his love themes, his themes of violence, his work as a pop music composer and arranger (topped by Mina's astonishing and much-covered "Se telefonando"); there are three volumes of MONDO MORRICONE containing his masterful and elegant pop and shake instrumentals for "Continental Op" pictures; there is MORRICONE GIALLO, CRIME AND DISSONANCE, MORRICONE BOSSA, PSICODELICO JAZZISTICO, even a 24-disc ULTIMATE COLLECTION that doesn't begin to cover even a quarter of it. He left us any number of worlds to get lost in, not least of all the world of collecting his vast archive of recorded works.

If the work had been unsigned, it would take an ear far more skilled than mine to identify the common author of the scores for Elio Petri's A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY, Edouard Molinaro's LA CAGE AUX FOLLES, John Carpenter's THE THING, and Wolfgang Petersen's IN THE LINE OF FIRE. In these and other scores, we find Morricone stepping not only outside his usual perimeters but his unique personality as well, always with bold distinction, and he managed to do so at the same time he was writing the more readily identifiable scores of such films as Mario Bava's DANGER: DIABOLIK, Luciano Ercoli's FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION (with its killer track, "Amore come dolore", Franco Rossi's MOSES THE LAWGIVER, Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, Roland Joffe's THE MISSION, Giuseppe Tornatore's CINEMA PARADISO, and Quentin Tarantino's THE HATEFUL EIGHT. Readily identifiable, yes, but at the same time wholly original and another step in his evolution as an artist. One might reasonably call him a music factory, but the phrase gives a false impression of faceless, impersonal work. The base materials that passed through Morricone's loom were never less than serviceable and almost invariably came out as woven gold.

Time will tell, but when the definitive history of contemporary music is written, Ennio Morricone may well be cited as the most significant classical composer of his lifetime. I can think of no other composer who was more capable of galvanizing and raising orchestras to a higher calling, unleashing tides of profound emotion wherever he conducted. But even this heroic accomplishment is just one of the many faces he wore. In a world of heroes, Ennio Morricone was the rarest of the rare - a Titan - and the odds are seriously against our seeing his like again.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.    

50 Years Ago This Weekend... in Cincinnati

Tim Lucas Guests on THE FILM CULT PODCAST

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down for an hour or so of conversation with Robert Lalonde for his FILM CULT PODCAST. It can be found at this link or at this directory, or it can be found on Spotify, Google Play and PodBean. It went live today, so set aside some time and give it a listen!

50 Years Ago: Now Playing in Cincinnati

For a couple of years now, I've been faithfully posting on my Facebook page each week's new openings in Cincinnati theaters as they took place... 50 years ago. This is what was on offer to local movie goers half a century ago tonight.

1968 to 1975 was a very important period in my own development as a movie-goer, the years that led up to JAWS really (which changed the industry completely and the way it made films), and it's often astonishing to be reminded how fertile and open to experimentation this period really was, before it all became about spending and making enormous sums of money. At the time, Friday was just beginning to become the day when new movies hit our local screens, but some were still opening on Wednesday. We had only two Adults Only screens - the Royal and the Imperial Follies - and, as you will see in weeks to come - the rules of our local paper THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER often censored their titles for print.  

I'm going to start sharing these posts here at Video WatchBlog (as I really always should have done), because it's instructive not only to see which films are hitting the half-century mark but also the films with which these movies competed for the biggest share of the weekend box office.


(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.  

FIVE BLOODY GRAVES - A Desecrated Western Masterpiece?

Shreveport, LA ad 14 August 1970.

What I was hoping might happen at some point during my journey through Severin Films' AL ADAMSON - THE MASTERPIECE COLLECTION box set (32 films across 14 different Blu-ray discs) happened with Disc Three, where HALFWAY TO HELL (a 1958 Western directed by Adamson's father, Denver Dixon, and starring Adamson as "Rick Adams") shares the bill with Adamson's Western FIVE BLOODY GRAVES. Filmed in 1966 as THE LONELY MAN and subsequently retitled 5 BLOODY DAYS TO TOMBSTONE, there is no real exposition about how Adamson's original film went on to become FIVE BLOODY GRAVES but, by this point in the ongoing story, it's easy to surmise the probable truth. 

As with ECHO OF TERROR, a competent heist thriller that went on to become a mostly incompetent sci-fi zombie mess called BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR, the elements of THE LONELY MAN likely shaped up into a beautifully photographed, albeit unavoidably minor, Western. For a director like Adamson, this was no mean accomplishment though his considerable accomplishment certainly turned meaner at it was subsequently finessed into something releasable. The film was made in partnership with its screenwriter Robert Dix (the son of actor Richard Dix), who likely insisted on playing the historically authentic lead role of Ben Thompson himself; this was the first of the production's missteps as Dix was not quite a name actor and doesn't really have the screen presence to stand out amidst the other players. The money set aside for music and had to be assembled from library tracks, some of which are identifiable from cartoons and most of which simply detracts from what's onscreen.

Put together before Independent-International Pictures properly existed, the film nevertheless had the benefit of Samuel M. Sherman's casting input, which brought Adamson together for the first time with numerous members of his subsequent repertory company - John Carradine, Paula Raymond, jack-of-all-trades John "Bud" Cardos, and Vicki Volante (all of whom would appear, along with Dix, in the subsequently filmed BLOOD OF DRACULA'S CASTLE, 1967) as well as established character actor Jim Davis (who would subsequently co-star in DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, 1971). The real ace in the deck, however, is returning cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who - I never would have believed it - makes nearly the entire film a captivating treat for the eye in its judicious use of Utah locations spread across a wide Techniscope screen in Technicolor. Furthermore, the stunts supervised by production manager Cardos are excellent.

The story is fairly basic: Ben Thompson, a man who considers himself half-dead since the love of his life was felled by a bullet intended for him, is awakened to his sense of responsibility and also romance when he is placed to become the only possible rescue of a coach load of working girls and other travelers attacked by a bloodthirsty Yaqui tribe. (You remember that story about how Roger Corman cast Dick Miller, in APACHE WOMAN back in 1955, as both an Indian and a cowboy and gave him the privilege of shooting himself? John "Bud" Cardos is given the very same opportunity here.) Carradine is a dissolute Bible thumper in Gothic threads, Raymond is the Madam of the brothel-in-transit, and Brady is the entrepreneur anticipating wealth from this new enterprise. An interesting, if overdone, unifying touch is the narration by Death itself, as personified by the voice of Gene Raymond, which articulates his particular bond with Thompson in a way that looks forward to the notion of spectral gunfighters that came along later.

Al Adamson steps in to play a bloodthirsty Yaqui warrior who gets his mitts on Vicki Volante.

Available here for the first time in its original 2.35:1 Techniscope ratio and its full-strength Technicolor intensity, the movie is a modest but still impressive revelation. It might have found a market in 1964 or 1965, but it was instantly out-of-date once the Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone Westerns hit American screens. Nothing Sam Sherman could have suggested as commercial augmentations would have helped. Right off the bat, the version known as FIVE BLOODY GRAVES stumbles with a lengthy pre-credits sequence (apparently shot circa early to mid 1969 by someone other than Vilmos Zsigmond) showing Dix and starlet Jill Woelfel naked in bed, making love as a grinding acid rock guitar freaks out in such a way as to anchor the scene in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Especially with the music shoved down our ears this way, their post-coital dialogue about Thompson's return from "the war" we assume to mean Vietnam; there is literally nothing about this opening scene to establish anything except a contemporary time frame. Then, after the main titles (which retain the 5 BLOODY DAYS TO TOMBSTONE title), the film and its lead character seem to fall back in time by about a century, with references to "the war" now meaning the Civil one. I listened to Samuel M. Sherman's "partial" audio commentary, which is partly shared with telephone input from Dix and runs about an hour, and it's dead quiet during the entire intro and no explanation is ever given. It should be noted that no previous US video release of this title has ever included this introductory footage.

Jill Woelfel and Robert Dix in FIVE BLOODY GRAVES' opening sequence - clearly not Zsigmond's work.

It's my suspicion that it was decided the film needed some nudity and anything else it might incorporate to appeal to more contemporary viewers. It would have been least challenging to add a sequence like this to the opening - and there are also signs that gore and minimal nudity were added to subsequent scenes; a fairly coy rape scene involving an Indian woman (Maria Polo) spread-eagled on the ground shows a glimpse of nipple in the medium close-up while her torso remains covered in the long shots.  There is also a section of the film that doesn't quite feel organic to the rest, in which Thompson returns from the "war" to reunite with a former love, Nora (Volante), who married the cruel Dave Miller (Ken Osborne) in his absence. Is this sequence intended to illustrate Thompson's lost love? If so, two problems: It is already discussed as something that's happened in the past in the pre-credits sequence, and there is nothing about this sequence to suggest that we have transitioned to telling a story from Thompson's past. Consequently, he's given two lost loves and the second one (if indeed it is a second one) he never finds out about! In her brief appearance, Vicki Volante gives a spirited performance reminiscent of Julie Adams' work in Anthony Mann's BEND OF THE RIVER (1952), and when Thompson finds another short-lived love in Althea, brunette Darlene Lucht (former blonde AIP starlet and future Mrs. Robert Dix) also does a fine job.

I wish the box set contained more rigorous contextualizing for this picture; once again, a recreated version of THE LONELY MAN would have been useful, or even a proper history of how and when the initially old-fashioned Western was tampered with. The IMDb mentions an initial November 1969 playdate in New Orleans, while newspapers.com shows that it had its earliest theatrical playdates come May 1970, at which time it mostly played as a second- or even third-run feature to other movies, such as HELL ON WHEELS (1967), SATAN'S CYCLES (an early release title for Adamson's SATAN'S SADISTS), and HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS (originally THE FAKERS, made by Adamson in 1967 and subsequently retrofitted with material advised by Sam Sherman). FIVE BLOODY GRAVES played some theaters as a lead title during "Free In-Car Heater" season - late January 1971 - with Antonio Margheriti's CASTLE OF BLOOD (1964) and William Grefé's STING OF DEATH (1966) playing in cheap support. When it reappeared around the country as early as March through September '71, it was once again the support feature, playing under Independent-Internation releases HELL'S BLOODY DEVILS and FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR. Therefore, despite its inherent and unusual production quality, possibly the finest technical work Adamson ever achieved, it missed its window of opportunity and was never exhibited with any commercial confidence. That said, it was exhibited and exploited over the years in drive-in theme packages that earned back millions of dollars, which leaves little room to accommodate a valid Art vs. Commerce debate.

Am I saying FIVE BLOODY GRAVES is a desecrated Western masterpiece? Not quite; what was desecrated was a B- or C-grade Western that transcended its modest origins. It's heavily anchored in the familiar but raised above its station by a few engaging performances and, especially, remarkable location photography that sometimes rivals the cinematography of such established Western classics of its time period as Monte Hellmann's THE SHOOTING or RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND. As restored here by Severin Films, it's a must for large screen viewing and - in the context in which it's presented - a most pleasant surprise.

Feedback from reader Chris Koenig: "In regards to the 5-minute opening that was not present in previous home video releases of FIVE BLOODY GRAVES, I'm willing to bet the reason for that is the early home video releases utilized an edited TV print panned-scanned and that scene was edited out (that would also explain why Sam Sherman's audio commentary starts exactly during the title sequence; his commentary was from an old Brentwood DVD release. Considering that actress Jill Woelfel is credited in the animated title sequence by Bob LeBar, it confirms that opening scene was present in its original 1969-1970 theatrical release. Also, what's interesting about the 5 BLOODY DAYS TO TOMBSTONE credit sequence (presented as an extra and carrying a 1968 copyright date) is that some of the credits are slightly bogus: Vilmos Zsigmond is credited as 'Magic Photography' (WHAT?!?!), Robert W. Brimmer is credited as writing the screenplay and not Robert Dix, Alfred J. Ferrara and Ernest J. Caringi are credited as 'producers,' and Jill Woelfel's name is not present indicating this was the original title sequence before Sherman and Adamson added that 5-minute opening and the 'new' Bob LeBar animated credits. I believe when FIVE BLOODY GRAVES was re-released on DVD from Subversive Cinema, that 5-minute sequence was presented as a 'deleted scene'."

Much appreciated insights, Chris! I can add this much, that Robert W. Brimmer was in fact the birth name of writer-actor Robert Dix.

Feedback from reader Mark Young: "You might be interested to know that the pre credit sequence was included in the 2008 German Eyecatcher widescreen DVD but with German audio only (English subtitles provided), before leading into a German title sequence that then cuts abruptly to the US print at the DOP credit. The end credit sequence is not the animated one but a lengthy printed crawl which cuts out during the cast list. Lewis Guinn is credited with Additional Photography here. There are various cuts to the film included as cropped extended/deleted scenes. It also includes an alternate title sequence (GUN RIDERS) which I believe was the TV title..?"

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.



    

Dipping Into Al Adamson's Masterpiece Collection

Truth be told, I've never been a particular fan of Al Adamson's movies; however, from the moment Severin Films announced their MASTERPIECE COLLECTION box set - encompassing 32 films over 14 discs, along with extras and a detailed 126-page paperback guide by Bill Ackerman and Amanda Reyes - I knew I had to have it. Such a thing is more object than product and mysteriously more than the considerable sum of its parts; it is a cart before the horse, a fetish that embodies one's love of all that is scraggly and strange about our favorite genre. For those of us who carry that additional OC gene (which, let's face it, is much too fanatical about order to be called a "disorder"), such an object becomes at least twice as attractive. It embodies a curative interest given full reign, tied up in a neat little bow. What's not to love? 

I can hear the wittier among you grumbling "the movies themselves," and on some days I might be inclined to agree with you. However, one thing I am learning from the MASTERPIECE COLLECTION already is that a love for Al Adamson's films doesn't have a whole lot to do with the movies themselves. In some ways, Adamson was the last real drive-in movie director; I've checked some old newspaper archives and was surprised to discover that Independent-International's double feature of HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS and BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR was booked into drive-ins in the early months of 1974 - when THE EXORCIST had already redefined the horror film for audiences world-wide. On the second of our two visits to Chicago, in the late 1970s, Donna and I decided to spend an afternoon at the movies and happened to catch a double bill of a very faded print of Argento's SUSPIRIA (1977) and Adamson's DEATH DIMENSION (1978) - and with the former disavailed of its original Technicolor palette, the Adamson picture was plainly the one that won over our inner city audience, especially when the lady tied to her chair was threatened by the OMFG production of a gigantic snapping turtle held suspended over her by its tail. The place went crazy, and it's shared memories like this that bind certain movies to us forever. 

The cold-blooded jewel thieves of PSYCHO A GO GO, with Al Adamson in the middle and lead psycho Ray Morton at right.

Before proceeding any further, I must mention that this limited edition box set is already officially out-of-print, so your best bet to find it is probably on eBay, where I have already seen Buy It Now prices topping $300. That's the going price for the unlimited edition that CBS Video just released of GUNSMOKE: THE COMPLETE SERIES, which is 143 DVDs... not 14 Blu-rays.

As Adamson's frequent producer and collaborator Samuel M. Sherman remembers it, Al Adamson came into his life one day after driving the first 35mm print of his directorial debut, a heist thriller called ECHO OF TERROR, cross-country to screen for him in New York. Why Adamson went straight to Sherman, in the unfamiliar east coast side of the film business, rather than drive his movie across town to show to Roger Corman or Sam Arkoff, I don't know - but it changed his career in incalculable ways. In Sherman's hands, or at least under his direction, ECHO OF TERROR - a surprisingly competent B-picture (thanks in no small part to being photographed by the great Vilmos Zsigmond prior to his proper discovery in Hollywood), though it had no stars and no specific genre alliance to make it easily exploitable - underwent a series of fine (de)tunings that lasted from 1965 through 1971 as it was serially tweaked and retweaked into PSYCHO A GO GO, THE FIEND WITH THE ELECTRONIC BRAIN, MAN WITH THE SYNTHETIC BRAIN, and BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR. Sherman's slowly dawning eureka about the picture was to make it more commercial by bringing it down to the lowest common denominator of taste; he advised Adamson to turn it into a psycho thriller, then a mad science thriller "featuring" John Carradine, and finally a kind of "Mad Doctor of Long Island" picture adding Kent Taylor and Tommy Kirk (both sweating like mad on cardboard sets that make PRC labs from the 1940s look like rooms in Jay Gatsby's summer house), a zombie that set the style for those we see in ZOMBIE LAKE, and Adamson's poor wife Regina Carrol turned into what the trailer called a "1,000 year-old mummy." I can't help but think that either Corman or Arkoff would have agreed to hiring Carradine or Taylor for reshoots, but toward the end of making it a better, more playable picture. This was not the advice Adamson received and I don't think he should be blamed for wanting to do whatever was being offered him to help repay his original investors. And speaking of Regina Carrol, though I have no idea what Adamson saw in her, she gives the only halfway decent performance in this mish-mosh of a picture.

Green-faced zombie Richard Smedley probes helpless Regina Carrol in BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR. 

For all the troubles taken, ECHO, PSYCHO A GO GO, and FIEND WITH THE ELECTRONIC BRAIN never did see the light of day, and the TV version of BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR (entitled MAN WITH THE SYNTHETIC BRAIN) got shown before GHASTLY HORROR ever turned up in theaters, which as I've said didn't happen till years after its completion. It was never the A-picture on a double bill (at least not until random dusk-till-dawn packages in 1978!) and, in looking through the newspaper archives, I can't find a single ad for it that shows more than a printed title for it, though a Gray Morrow-illustrated campaign was designed for its press book. In his rambling audio commentary for the film's final and messiest draft, Sherman goes into some detail about the costly punishment that he and Adamson ended up taking over Al's early decision to shoot in Technicolor and two-perf Techniscope, which was a retired format by the time the zombies came into their rewrite. Even with three version of the film included in this set, it's a shame that the cut Sherman originally saw as ECHO OF TERROR was not reconstructed, as changes based on his advice were made even well before the decision to turn it into PSYCHO A GO GO.  The commentary was originally recorded for an early Troma DVD release of BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR and much of what Sherman envisions as a future possibility for releasing the picture in a fully restored and properly contextualized format comes true, thanks to Severin's dedication to the cause.

All of this is included on the second disc in the set. The first disc pairs David Gregory's Adamson documentary BLOOD AND FLESH (which I reviewed for THE CHISLER over here) with another Adamson feature, THE FEMALE BUNCH (1971). Shot under the title TWO TICKETS TO TERROR, the latter film shoehorns Russ Tamblyn and Lon Chaney into a story about a group of Las Vegas showgirls who form a guerrilla girl gang to run roughshod over men from a headquarters out in the desert. Made in a modern Western format, with lots of sloppy, fumbly sex scenes and "cantina" fights and frightening scenes of empowered women "taking control," the movie is pretty much a working class male's fantasy of this time period, as well as a catalogue of his worst fears about women - all of them comfortably overcome by the finale. The movie has an almost feature-length, odd (and oddly unnecessary) flashback structure that encompasses story elements not involving the character telling the story, and in a bonus visit with surviving BUNCH members, Jenifer Bishop recalls her surprise when, attending a New Beverly screening with her son, she suddenly saw a body double adding nudity to her love scenes - so it would appear Mr. Sherman had some notes for Al on this one, as well.

I was surprised by the sex scenes as well, because their content somewhat surpasses what the MPAA would reward with an R rating in those days, venturing into territory shared with soft-X movies like THE SCAVENGERS, FANDANGO or HOT SPUR. It's possible that, in their reconstruction of a most complete copy from a number of choppy surviving 35mm prints, that Severin ended up putting back some material that was cut from the print screened for the MPAA. As a frequent drive-in attendee of this period, I can attest that even the newest R-rated movies being shown in those days would be fraught with once-spicy, now-splicy passages, either because projectionists kept collections of such stuff or because the law was cracking down on drive-in screens that faced the open road. While I can't say THE FEMALE BUNCH is a good film, watching it definitely gave me the feeling of sitting out under the stars with a concession stand nearby - and what it inadvertently tells us about the secret hopes and fears of the average 1971 man gives us something to chew on for days thereafter.

With two discs down and a dozen left to go, I can already feel my feelings and assumptions about this filmmaker changing - not really becoming more enthusiastic, but certainly more appreciative and sympathetic. As I continue to make my way through Severin's AL ADAMSON - THE MASTERPIECE COLLECTION, I'll be sharing notes here with you. Stay tuned.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

GUNSMOKE: An Overdue Reckoning

In the early part of my life, I had very little time for Westerns - and even less for television Westerns. When I saw Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST about 50 years ago, in 1970 second run, I was enormously impressed; it was a turning point for me, but it did not make other Westerns more available to me. I actually made a point of not seeking out Leone's other work until another ten years had passed, just using that time to absorb OUATITW again and again, whenever an opportunity arose - sadly, mostly on television until the 1990s, with that climactic zoom into Charles Bronson's eyes had to make a pan & scan choice between one eye or the other. That said, once I got into my 30s and 40s, Westerns began making more sense to me as a genre, and directors like John Ford, Budd Boetticher, Sam Fuller, Sam Peckinpah, Joseph H. Lewis, Monte Hellmann, and particularly Anthony Mann began showing me the way to classic Westerns and also those special examples that Kevin Grant and Clay Hodgkiss call the "renegade" Westerns.

My interest in television Westerns has deepened from the time I realized they were a place to find some great performances by actors and character actors  hiding in plain sight. THE RIFLEMAN had always been something of an exception to my general lack of interest because it had a young character I could identify with, but as the years passed I developed additional interest in WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE, THE REBEL, LAWMAN, HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL and that wonderfully baroque example, YANCY DERRINGER. 

In the back of my mind, as this education proceeded, were the imposing figures of the two biggest TV Westerns, BONANZA and GUNSMOKE, for which I had never felt any particular interest. I've seen my share of BONANZA episodes and, while I'm sure there must be fine performances along the very long way, the formula of that show just doesn't work for me - it may have something to do with the lead characters' casting and it may also have something to do with it all being in color. Black-and-white seems so essential to my appreciation of this world in which so much is said about a character by whether they wear a white hat or a black hat.

John Dehner in "Ash."

Then, not too long ago, over on Facebook, my friend (and VW "Star Turn" columnist) Larry Blamire caught my attention with a posting about his acquisition of CBS Video's massive new GUNSMOKE - THE COMPLETE SERIES box set. He wrote a memorable posting about his initial plunge into this accumulation of riches by revisiting an episode entitled "Ash," from GUNSMOKE's first hour-long season. Here's what Larry posted, reproduced with his permission: 

Decided to jump into the complete GUNSMOKE set with an 8th season episode called "Ash" that I'd seen on the Westerns Channel several years back. John Dehner is one of my favorite actors and I had been blown away by his performance.

I was this time too. For all the times I've seen him--heroic, villainous, comedic--I don't recall ever seeing him quite like this.

Dehner plays a rowdy rough-edged buffalo hunter with a lot of heart who decides to open a freight business with an equally rough and tumble trapper (Anthony Caruso). A blow on the head for Dehner's character puts the skids on things and when he wakes he's a different person--surly, cold, grim. Thanks to Dehner and director Harry Harris it's a fascinating study of a Jekyll-Hyde sort where something buried within the man's psyche has come to the surface.

If I were still writing my "Star Turn" column for Video Watchdog I may well have covered this performance. Dehner is very much in control of the subtle shades on display and there's an unpredictability to his work that keeps us on edge. He makes some unusual choices and by doing so commands our attention. Dehner manages such amazing subtlety it's like a camera-acting master class.

I was captivated by what Larry had written and happened to mention to him in my reply that I had always sort of missed the boat with GUNSMOKE. Learning this, Larry made me a spontaneous gift of an introductory assortment of no-longer-needed DVD-Rs he had recorded from Encore's Western Channel, along with a now-spare set of Volumes 1 and 2 of Season 11. I promptly dipped in and recognized that these were indeed a profound gift.

I've been watching at least an episode each evening since that time. I haven't written about everything I've watched, and nothing really at the depth these programs deserve, but I thought my readers here might like to have a peek at my process of discovery. Here are some of my early notes on GUNSMOKE, which I may have treated here and there to some additional polish. Perhaps they will stoke your interest in exploring this filmed legacy as well:    

* * *

Virginia Gregg and James Arness in "Phoebe Strunk."

Since learning that my knowledge of GUNSMOKE was nearly nil, Larry Blamire has been providing me with some essential episodes - and I must say I'm impressed. My problem with GUNSMOKE was always a persistent conviction that James Arness, Amanda Blake, and Dennis Weaver were just not very interesting in their roles. Someone like John Russell in LAWMAN or Chuck Connors in THE RIFLEMAN - now those were and are top drawer Western heroes! Arness's Marshall Dillon never did it for me... but thanks to Larry's gift, I am learning that Arness, Blake, and Weaver were the binding, the framing device for episodes that told stories often involving the people who live or ride through Dodge City. I've watched a few of these, with great appreciation for guest performers like John Dehner and Strother Martin and their respective episodes, but last night's viewing - "Phoebe Strunk" (Season 8, Episode 9) - was especially powerful stuff. Virginia Gregg starred as a completely deglamorized, pipe-smoking, face-slapping, mother of a murderous brood of overgrown boys (including Don McGowan and COMBAT!'s Dick Peabody) who rob a farmhouse, leaving a couple murdered and their only daughter (Joan Freeman) orphaned. She is taken in by a kindly couple (IN COLD BLOOD's John McLiam and a very welcome Phyllis Coates) who want to adopt her, but history repeats itself when the Strunk boys can't get that pretty little girl out of their heads and they abduct her. Director Andrew V. McLaglan keeps a violent story presentable without pulling any punches, and Marshall Dillon has some welcome help in pursuing justice with half-Indian companion Quint (Burt Reynolds). Full marks to writer John Meston (the show's creator) for a taut script and the cast are uniformly at their best. You can find it streaming.

* * *

John Drew Barrymore (right) and gang in "Seven Hours To Dawn."

The best of last night’s GUNSMOKE viewing was the 11th season opener, “Seven Hours To Dawn.” A nattily-dressed, still-contemporary-looking John Drew Barrymore heads a professional army bandits who effectively isolate and take over Dodge City, milking it of all its citizens’ cash and valuables. In an attempt to ride out to get help, Matt Dillon is shot four times and presumed dead. It’s up to Festus and Doc to turn around a grim and seemingly hopeless situation. I’ve never seen Barrymore give a better performance than here, and the baleful situation ratchets its intensity steadily right up to the finish, giving all the principals a chance to shine more than usual dramatically. In the background there’s an early screen credit for Al Lettieri (THE GODFATHER), credited as “Al Lettier.”

* * *

Argumentative aces in the deck: Ken Curtis as Festus Haggen, Milburn Stone as Doc Adams.

Didn’t want to go to bed sad last night, so I stayed up to watch an extra GUNSMOKE episode. So yesterday I saw two episodes focusing on Ken Curtis as Festus. The first, “Killer At Large” (Season 11, Episode 20), was a remarkable drama in which Festus is goaded into shooting a man dead and flees the consequences, finding his way to a widow’s homestead where he is pushed once again to the point of finding his bravery. There is a scene of Festus getting covered in flour and mollasses by a group of sadistic gunmen that is an extraordinary piece of acting by Curtis.

Slim Pickens and Brooke Bundy in "Sweet Billy."

The other, “Sweet Billy, Singer of Songs” (Season 11, Episode 17), was more of a comic piece about Festus’ relatives urging him to help his nephew Billy to find a girl from Dodge to marry up with. The relatives include Royal Dano, Shug Fisher (from Curtis’ THE GIANT GILA MONSTER), and Robert Random (THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND) as Sweet Billy, who - after being turned down by Diane Ladd - has the unbelievable luck to find a much more willing Brooke Bundy, who is just unbelievably gorgeous. Add Slim Pickens as Brooke’s scheming widdered pa and you’ve got yourself purdy darn near perfick slice o’ silliness.


* * *

Anne Helm and John Drew Barrymore.

When I saw that “One Killer On Ice” (Season 10, Episode 18) was directed by Joseph H. Lewis (GUN CRAZY), I had an inkling this would be something special. This was another guest star spot for John Drew Barrymore, who seems to be still wearing his WAR OF THE ZOMBIES beard while playing a charming Southern gentleman who has retired his sheriff’s badget to set out on the more lucrative life of a bounty hunter. He rides into Dodge, charms everyone but Matt (who has learned not to accept people on first impressions), and engages the Marshal to accompany him to where he’s secured a wanted desperado as his first bounty. (It would be too dangerous to bring him into Dodge and risk attack by the outlaw’s still-marauding kid brother and other gang members.) The brother is played by Dennis Hopper, already near the height of his powers, and it’s truly a shame that he and Barrymore have no proper scenes together. Hopper’s farmgirl flame is played by Anne Helm (THE MAGIC SWORD, THE COUCH), a complex sullen girl made amoral by a restrictive upbringing whose isolation and fantasies of escape are sorely disappointed. I still prefer Barrymore’s more overtly villainous, yet still charismatic, clean-shaven performance in “Seven Hours To Dawn” but this one may well be the richer and more dimensional; he turns out to be a villain here too, but due to a very delicate shading of immorality rather than something more operatically egregious. He doesn’t become fully-fledged as such till his last moments in the episode. It’s kind of a remarkable dramatic achievement for a show juggling so many interesting characters in less than an hour.

* * *

Festus susses out what Warren Oates, Zalman King and Bruce Dern might be up to.

Another great Season 11 GUNSMOKE: “Ten Little Indians” (Episode 10). Outside of town, Matt is forced ot a threatening young gunman (Manuel Padilla, Jr.) and returns to Dodge to find the Long Branch Saloon playing host to three other notorious gunmen (get this: Bruce Dern, Warren Oates, and... Zalman King???), just biding their time and getting on each other’s nerves. The episode has already delivered everything it needs to, but the plot thickens. It seems they have all been lured to Dodge by a $25,000 price on the Marshal’s head. Unfortunately, these big names were all young ‘uns at the time, already brilliant and the sparks between Dern and Oates are incredible... but they are not the stars of the episode, which boils down to a bigger conflict between Nehemiah Persoff and John Marley. In looking at the packaging, guest stars were listed for the other shows on this disc: John Drew Barrymore, Forrest Tucker... but this one mentioned NO special points of interest, not even for the previous okay episode “Clayton Thaddeus Greenwood,” which featured Jack Elam as the spearhead of a cattle rustling gang and Paul Fix. Go figure.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.