Burl reviews She Demons! (1958)

 

To the beat of the jungle drums it’s Burl, returning to the land of Cunha! Ha ha, we’re all very familiar with, and fond of, his work I’m sure, particularly the Great Quartet of Fifty-Et, which includes Giant from the Unknown, Frankenstein’s Daughter, Missile to the Moon, and the movie I’m gabbing about today, the exotic, buxotic, quixotic She Demons!

The plot is largely lifted from Eyes Without A Face, or would have been if Eyes Without A Face hadn’t come out a year later, ha ha! It seems that there’s been a Gilligan’s Island-style marine mishap, and the castaways include spoiled debutante Jerrie, played by beauteous Irish McCalla, most famous for playing the title role in Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and who, a trivia, was born exactly the same day as the great Dick Miller! The boat captain and generic hero type is Fred Macklin, played by Tod Griffin, who had, after all, already appeared in She Devil so should have known what to expect on this island! There are a couple of crew fellows too: Sammy Ching, played by Victor Sen Yung, famous for his role as number one son Jimmy Chan in the Charlie Chan film series and who also appeared in movies like Moontide, Soldier of Fortune and The Killer Elite; and Kris Kamana, played by Charles Opunui, who had appeared, very briefly, as an “Eskimo” in The Thing From Another World!

After exploring the beach, which looks a lot like Paradise Cove in Malibu, they venture into the island’s interior, which looks a lot like Griffith Park! Unfortunately their buddy Kris suffers a mishap that leaves him chock full of spears, ha ha, and it’s soon revealed that the perpetrators are a group of goochy-faced ladies who like to dance around and attack anyone who happens along! And these ladies, instantly dubbed “She Demons” by our intrepid castaways, turn out to have been created by Colonel Osler, of course!

But who is Colonel Osler? Well, he’s played by Rudolph Anders, who’d essayed plenty of Nazis and other assorted evil Germans before this, and was Dr. Louis Dupont in The Snow Creature, and here he delivers a particularly rootin’-tootin’ performance as a Mengele type guy acting out of the usual maniacal uxoriousness, which of course he’s happy to drop as soon as he claps eyes on Irish! It seems Osler’s wife Mona, played by Leni Tana from Torn Curtain, was involved in a lava accident and needs a replacement face, and local island ladies figure in this treatment somehow, and whenever the procedure fails, as it constantly does, the result, somehow, is a She Demon! The filmmakers don’t really explore the medical whys and wherefores of this, however!

Of course Osler has his Igor figure, here called, imaginatively enough, Igor, and played by familiar face Gene Roth of Strange Illusion, Jet Pilot and Zombies of Mora Tau; he also has a number of generic sub-henchmen who all try to keep their faces in those frowny expressions Nazi henchmen always seem to wear in B pictures! Ha ha! And as the island’s volcano gets rumblier, and Fred and Sammy are captured and tortured while Jerrie is captured and wooed, and then everybody escapes with help from the bandaged Mona, who has finally recognized what a monster her husband is (and whose face, partly revealed near the end, is genuinely gross), and Osler rants and raves and grins and grimaces, and the She Demons keep dancing around, we come to realize just how long 77 minutes can seem!

Nevertheless, I liked this little movie! After all, it starts from a pretty solid foundation, because I’m naturally fond of these little 50s programmers and always enjoy the world of Cunha! In the first half of the movie Jerrie is a supremely annoying spoiled rich girl, but it’s rewarding as she transforms into a regular person! Sammy, for his part, is just a regular sidekick sort of a guy instead of the Asian caricature I was fearing, and that was good too! He’s goofy, but also resourceful and brave! And then it’s always nice to see Nazis on the receiving end of a lava shower, ha ha! It won’t make you change your religion or anything, but you’ll probably enjoy the movie, so I give She Demons two powder-blue cashmere shorties!

Burl reviews Plan 9 from Outer Space! (1957)

 

Greetings, friends! I am Burl! We are all interested in movies - that is why you are here! And now, for the first time, based only on a recent VHS viewing experience and many previous viewings at home and at the cinema, I present to you a picture thought by many to be the worst film of all time! Ha ha, can your hearts stand the shocking facts about Plan 9 From Outer Space?

 

We’ve all seen it, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably attended a midnight screening or two of it, complete with the hooting and the howling and the sweet drifts of herbal smoke! But is this really the worst movie ever made? Of course not, and anyone who thinks it is simply hasn’t seen very many movies! It may have been made without skill or craft or art or resources, but it was made with heart and passion, and that alone puts it out in front of its deadly-dull compatriots like Manos: The Hands of Fate, or soulless and mercenary stinkers like, say, Jaws: The Revenge!

 

The heart and passion in the picture came from Writer-Producer-Director Edward D. Wood Jr., who, though it might be thought impossible, declined still further from pictures like this into worse ones – by the end, he was doing oddball pornoo of which The Young Marrieds is the ultimate example! But, if the biographical picture Ed Wood and the terrific book it’s based on, Nightmare of Ecstasy, are to be believed, Wood insisted Plan 9 was his masterpiece: his final statement on the human condition and the alien and zombie problems that occasionally beset it!

 

Bela Lugosi, of whom we all are very fond from his appearances in pictures like Island of Lost Souls and the wonderful The Black Cat, appears in a few scraps of near home-movie footage Wood shot a short while before the drug-addled boogey-actor’s death! The main story features a stolid pilot, Jeff Trent, who, based on the set dressing, is flying around not in an airplane but in a shower stall! He’s played by Gregory Walcott from Jet Attack and The Sugarland Express, and he can hardly believe his eyes when a paper-plate saucer dips and bobs in the sky beside his flying shower stall!

 

Yes, ha ha, saucers, seen over Hollywood! Trent and his wife, who live beside a cemetery, are puzzling over the sighting when some new problems raise their heads – right out of their graves, ha ha! It seems the saucer aliens are using revivication guns to animate corpses, like the old man played unwittingly by Lugosi, and his buxom wife, essayed by the proto-Elvira known as Vampira! Soon enough these two attack and kill a giant policeman, Inspector Daniel Clay, who is of course played by the mighty Tor Johnson, and the next thing you know he’s been zombified too! A full-bird colonel played by Tom Keene from Dick Tracy’s Dilemma gets involved, and soon there are repeated visits to the old cemetery, where the alien spacecraft somehow hides in a spinney and looks like a round pie plate in long shots and like a concrete bunker when seen in close-up sitting on the ground!

 

It all comes down to a gang of fey extraterrestrials with a crazy plan that’s evidently supposed to save the Earth from the dastardly power of the solemenite bomb! Ha ha, you say solemenite, but just what is it? Well, it hardly matters! Nothing the aliens do or say makes any sense at all, and the human characters are all boneheads who use handguns to gesture with and to scratch their foreheads! The filmmaking incompetence is bone-deep in this picture – even routine accomplishments like framing an image properly are beyond Wood’s abilities!

 

But I guess that’s the fun of it! Some people no doubt watch the picture to feel superior, or to exercise their insecurity-based desire to snark and scoff, but there’s also a terrible fascination and a great deal of entertainment to be had from the experience! Wood, of course, gets kicked around a lot, but he made movies at least, and for that he’s got my admiration! Ha ha! While it really exists outside of any possible rating system, even one as abstract as my own, I’m going to give Plan 9 From Outer Space two battle-axe jerkins!

Burl reviews Donovan's Brain! (1953)

 

With a glowing and a pulsing and a ha ha ha, it’s Burl, sending out brainwaves to be received by anyone in the vicinity! Yes, it’s time for me to catch up with a sci-fi classic of the 1950s, a picture I’ve always heard is good but never had a chance to see before now, or never took the chance because after all there were, so far as I was aware, no giant insects or aliens in it: Donovan’s Brain!

It’s based on a novel by the fellow who brought us The Wolf Man, Curt Siodmak, and its status as an Old Chestnut comes both from the basic and nearly primal obviousness of the concept, and how many times it’s been adapted for the screen, which is several! Because this version shares the title with the novel it comes from, and hews most closely to its story, I guess it’s considered the definitive one! Lew Ayres, whom we recall fondly from ‘Salem’s Lot, plays our – well, not hero, but main character, Dr. Pat Cory, a scientist pursuing, with a dedication just shy of obsessive, a project of extracranial brain revivification! He’s assisted in this by his wife Janice, played by Nancy Davis (that is, Nancy Reagan, ha ha!), who seems to be a scientist in her own right, but of course is always the one who has to go off and make the coffee when the men get sleepy; and a doctor called Frank, played by Gene Evans from Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, who serves as the moral barometer and is also a thoroughgoing inebriate!

One day there’s a plane crash in the vicinity, and the only survivor, a nasty, selfish, evidently libertarian millionaire called Donovan, is brought in to the ranch house laboratory! Well, he can’t be saved, but Dr. Pat, against the protests of Janice and Frank, pulls out his brain and puts it in a fishtank! Soon the brain is pulsing and glowing and increasing is size, and it begins sending out brainwaves and eventually takes over the mind of Dr. Pat! The doc begins walking with a limp and holding on to his kidneys, which were Donovan’s signature moves, and also starts treating people with incredible curtness: another Donovan characteristic! The wicked millionaire seems not the least fazed that he’s just a brain in a tank, and, through Dr. Pat, resumes what was evidently an ongoing curriculum of villainy!

Donovan’s evil plan revolves around boring financial moves and seems mostly to involve him writing a lot of cheques, or taking other people to task for cheques they’ve written in the past, or compelling these same people to write more cheques to some hazy purpose! After the third cheque-writing montage, it not only ceases to be compelling, but makes you realize it never was in the first place! Ha ha! Maybe this kind of thing works better in print, but it seems to me that in adapting the book the screenwriters might have come up with something a little more spectacular for the brain to be getting up to! Maybe he was cooking up a plan to put lead in gasoline or something like that!

Compared to most 50s sci-fi it’s a mature and adult work, but the closest it has to a special effect is the pulsing brain, and as I watched, in the company of a pair of bored-but-game ten year-olds, it should be noted, I came to realize that it was not merely a lowbrow impulse that had me avoiding the picture all these years! Ha ha, it really is a bit on the dry side, and by the second half of the picture – which seems a lot longer than its 84 minutes – I couldn’t help but notice and deplore its lack of monsters! On the other hand, as noted, there’s something appealing about a movie of this type that makes no concessions to the more juvenile viewer, and, too, the acting is unusually strong! Ayers in particular is good, rarely overplaying the Donovan takeover aspect, and maintaining an admirable consistency throughout!

There are solid craft credits too – the photography is by Joseph Biroc, who had a long and glorious career behind the camera, and gives the desert locations a nearly Jack Arnold-level starkness; and the production design is by Boris Levin, who was later designing movies like New York, New York and other Scorsese works! The script and direction is reasonably tight, but that doesn’t improve the movie’s main problems: its stubborn lack of eventfulness, and the hopelessly confounding scheme of the baneful cerebellum! Yes, it’s as intelligent as you would hope a brain movie would be, but cinematically speaking it could be so much more clever! I give Donovan’s Brain two inflating medulla oblongatas!

Burl reviews Monkey Business! (1952)

 

Chee chee chee everybody, it’s Burl, here with a review of monkey madness! Ha ha, yes, it’s a 1950s picture featuring a chimpanzee, but no, it’s not Bedtime for Bonzo! In fact it’s a Howard Hawks movie, but not one of his great classics like Twentieth Century or Rio Bravo! No, this one is called Monkey Business!

If you’ve seen Bringing Up Baby, you might wonder to yourself if this is Hawks taking that story for another go ‘round the block! Well, it is similar, being as it also has Cary Grant from North By Northwest playing a scientist, who here is named Dr. Barnaby Fulton instead of Dr. David Huxley; and the key animal in the film is a chimp rather than a leopard! Altogether they’re similar enough to make a good double feature, and different enough to not feel you’re repeating yourself if you do program such a double header!

Grant’s scientist is very much of the absent-minded variety here, and Ginger Rogers from Top Hat is his patient wife Edwina! Grant runs a team of scientists at Oxly Chemicals, run by Charles Coburn from Heaven Can Wait in the role of Mr. Oxley, and the project he’s trying to work out is a sort of a youth formula! Marilyn Monroe from Niagara is the beauteous Oxly Chemical secretary Miss Lois; Hugh Marlowe from The Day the Earth Stood Still is a sort of frenemy of Grant’s, and is Rogers’s old flame; and Robert Cornthwaite from The War of the Worlds is one of the scientists! There are also wee cameo appearances by Harry Carey Jr. from Gremlins and Dabbs Greer from Con Air!

What happens is this: Grant has been having trouble perfecting his mixture, and this is greatly increasing his neglect of every other element of his life! After another failure, it’s left to one of the laboratory chimps to bust out of her cage and start mixing with the vials and the beakers and the tubes, and doing a really terrific job of it! Ha ha, it’s some of the best chimp acting I’ve seen, and they’re always very  impressive performers! Of course, it’s hard to push away the idea that they shouldn’t be performing at all, but to whatever extent you can, you’ll be charmed by this smilin’ simian!

And the chimp’s mixture is just right: she doses the lab’s water cooler, and whoever drinks from it first complains of a bitter taste and then regresses, mentally and emotionally at least, to some earlier age! We get to see Cary as an insouciant twenty year-old and later as a pretty aggressive eight year-old! And Rogers follows suit, ha ha, and later, after he does the fish-in-your-pants dance, old Coburn too begins to act like a kid, along with all the scientists! Ha ha! I have to applaud all the acting in this picture: everyone is really good at acting younger! It’s multilevel thespianship, and I dug it!

The movie really is much a series of these instances of regression, but that’s not a bad thing! It opens with some amusing credits (“Not yet, Cary!”) and then a long, single-location dialogue scene, like a Tarantino movie often has, with some nice innuendo salted in, and then the chimp gets to work; and after a series of embarrassing regressions, the remaining mixture is poured down the sink, and fini! It’s a pretty basic story after initially seeming complicated, and it does often get very funny! There’s a long cowboys-and-Indians scene that had me cringing, me with my modern thinking, ha ha! That went on for quite a while, but it did have a punchline!

Again I must laud the performing, and by extension Hawks! Ha ha, and don’t believe the DVD cover when it tells you this is a Marilyn Monroe picture! She’s in it, but doesn’t get much more to do than show off her gams and ride around in a car! An opportunity missed there, but ha ha, that’s hindsight for you! I give Monkey Business two and a half becoming chimp smiles!

Burl reviews Pier 5, Havana! (1959)

 

Ày-üho, it’s Burl, here to review a picture shot, at least partially, in good old Havana, Cuba, reportedly in that small window of time between when Castro took power and when Americans figured out that he was a Communist! Ha ha, so it was against the odds, in an era when anti-Communist sentiment was still pretty strong and capitalism venerated as a universal balm, that a funny little anti-Bastista, pro-Revolution mystery-actioner was produced, which we now know as Pier 5, Havana!

It’s a picture made with economy by Edward L. Cahn, who also brought us Creature With the Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau, but they nevertheless did get down to Cuba for some location work, and I even recognized some of the locations! Ha ha, I went to Havana in the 1990s and really enjoyed myself there, and one of the amazing things is that the city, its buildings and its vehicles, its bars and hotels and museums, and even many of its people, seem to have been preserved as in aspic from the very time period depicted in this picture! It’s quite a fascinating place, and I recommend a visit!

Pier 5, Havana is more or less a budget version of The Third Man, with a pugnacious American not overburdened by brains on the search for an old friend who has disappeared! There are big differences, though: here, the American is Steve Daggett, played by Cameron Mitchell from movies as diverse as Deadly Prey, Action U.S.A., Without Warning and Raw Force, and he’s more proactive than old Holly Martins was; while the missing figure, Hank, is a souse, but otherwise a jolly enough fellow rather than a murderous, amoral dealer of bad black market medicines!

Steve Daggett’s adventure through Cuba in its immediate post-revolution aftermath takes him first into the custody of amiable, crafty policeman Lt. Garcia, played by non-Hispanic Michael Granger from Murder By Contract! Garcia in turn takes Daggett to see his old love Monica, essayed by willowy Allison Hayes, perhaps most famous from Gunslinger; she had first married the disappeared Hank and then taken up with a penthouse smoothie called Ricardo, played by Eduardo Noriega from High Risk!

Daggett runs into trouble with a gang of Batista supporters, who put a brutal punching on him and leave him to crawl around on the floor like a hen! Nestor Paiva from Tarantula and Otto Waldis from Artists and Models are part of this gang’s brain trust, and their plot involves bombing various buildings being used by the new Castro administration! Ha ha, by Guevara!

When Hank, a man barely alive, stumbles out of the jeep with which he narrowly escaped from the Batista-ites, he turns out to be played by Logan Field from Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers! Ha ha, by this time Daggett is in full noir detective mode and the picture offers double dealings, phone booth knifings, fake crates of chocolate, gangplank rolldowns, and pierside punchfights: the whole bit! The action gets a little talky here and there, and the narrative complexity the picture initially teases us with has dissolved into beardwax by the conclusion! Still, the pro-Castro take is just so unexpected and strange that interest is maintained throughout, and it’s nice to see Mitchell in an heroic role, even if he comes off as a bit of a dimbulb! I enjoyed my viewing, and I give Pier 5, Havana a couple of aspirin!

Burl reviews Jet Pilot! (1957)

 

Up up and away, it’s Burl, here to review aeronautical derring-do! Ha ha, we’re all familiar with the Duke, which is to say John Wayne, and his many horse operas, from Randy Rides Alone to Rio Bravo! But in today’s picture he’s bestride a different sort of saddle: the pilot’s seat of the latest in jet fighter technology! The picture in question is titled, with admirable prosy, Jet Pilot!  

The Duke stars as Jim Shannon, one of the Air Force’s top wingsmen! When a pretty pilot called Anna, played by Janet Leigh from Halloween H20 and The Fog, drops into the Alaskan air base run by General Jay C. Flippen (an actor we may recall from Thunder Bay) and requests political sanctuary, Shannon is enlisted to keep her company! They fly around together and of course fall in love! Ha ha, but is she truly sweet Anna, wholeheartedly wanting to defect, or is she the duplicitous Olga, sent in order to lure the lovestruck Duke back to Mother Russia?

The answer, it turns out, is “both!” But there’s a lot of back and forth along the way, and plans within plans, and chumps made on both sides! Ha ha, Anna and Shannon even get married, and you know what that means - blanket hornpipe! Considering the political leanings of both the Duke and of Howard Hughes, who produced, or anyway “presents” the picture, we can be pretty sure from the start which side will prevail! In the meantime, some fun is made of Anna’s socialist values, as when she notes that a hotel suite is far too large for just two people, so invites a number of other, including Paul Fix from Night of the Lepus, to bunk with them!

Ha ha, the picture was released in 1957, but a little research taught me that it was shot in 1950, so that all the cutting-edge technology it wanted to show off had long passed its sell-by date! At this remove of course that doesn’t matter much, and so we’re left with a whole heck of a lot of excellent flying footage, with the pilots doing little rollover tricks, and voiceover radio chat between “A for Anna” and “S for Shannon!” But the aeronauts seem to fly everywhere all the time, and it eventually gets tiresome!

When the Duke follows his bride back to Russia, he finds Hans Conried from Summer Stock, The Monster that Challenged the World and The Twonky running the show, and that Anna has reverted to her more Soviet persona, Olga! She flips back and forth between these identities, even seeming to change her hair colour sometimes, and I found it as confusing as the Duke did! Leigh’s character is as split as that of her later co-star in Psycho, ha ha, and when she starts casually murdering people at the end, by tricking them into pulling ejection seat handles at inopportune moments for example, she seems more a narrative instrument than a character at all!

A funny thing about Jet Pilot is that it was directed, nominally at any rate, by Josef Von Sternberg! Ha ha! It really doesn’t seem like his sort of picture, and the picture itself doesn’t seem much like it was directed by von Sternberg! Still and all, that’s a pretty interesting fact! Hughes was the real auteur here, I suppose! But the overlapping part of a Hughes/von Sternberg Venn diagram is eroticism, and somehow this is a strangely sexy movie! Leigh looks great in her flight suit; she loses her harem pants at one point and is almost spotted trouserless by a marching band; and after their marriage, there are several references to the notion that Leigh and Wayne are doing nothing besides bohankie all the day long! It starts right from the beginning, as the Duke observes Leigh warming her bum at a stove and musing “This might be some new form of Russian propaganda!”

 

 

The flying scenes are impressive, but too long and too numerous; the geopolitics are childish and binary of course; and the characters are little more than blank figures moved around the landscape like quoits! It’s entertaining in its 1950s way, but seems more an interesting relic than a piece of cinema! But if you like watching jets fly around, this is the motion picture for you! I give Jet Pilot one and a half barrel rolls!

Burl reviews It Came From Outer Space! (1953)

 

Ooo-wee-ooo, cried the theremin! Yes, it’s Burl with a 1950s sci-fi classic under review, and one from one of my favourite directors of that form, Jack Arnold! Mr. Arnold seems to have loved the desert, and as I don’t live anywhere near a desert, or at least not one of any size, my own love for the desert is really a proxy love, constructed and prosecuted not by me but by Arnold! That may seem a lot to lay on a talented director of monochromatic genre movies, but I think it’s so! At any rate, like Tarantula, this fits right into the beloved sub-sub-sub genre of Sci-Fi Movies By Jack Arnold That Are Set In A Desert, and the picture is It Came From Outer Space!

The story begins in a terrific little desert house that contains article-writer and amateur astronomer John Putnam, played by Richard Carlson from The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Hold That Ghost!, and his visiting girlfriend Ellen, as portrayed by Barbara Rush from Bigger Than Life and When Worlds Collide! Ha ha, they see a fiery object crash land out of the sky, and when they investigate, John observes a strange spherical ship embedded in the crater! There’s an open portal in the side, but as he approaches the door closes up, as though the inhabitants were saying “None for us today, thanks!” Then a big earthslide covers the orb!

Well, ha ha, nobody else has seen the thing but John, and most of the next hour of the picture is people doubting John’s story, scorning him as a publicity seeker, or just relentlessly making fun of him! He’s dismissed in the popular press as a crank or worse, and Sheriff Matt, the local law played by Charles Drake from My Brother’s Wedding, who already seems to have something against our overearnest hero, possibly fueled by romantic jealousy, almost considers him a threat to the town’s moral health!

Finally events take place which at least slightly mute the snarky comments and side-eye! An oddball creature with fish-vision floats about the desert kidnapping people and occasionally adopting their forms, as might the alien from The Thing! But fortunately these are not malevolent aliens, though they don’t hesitate to rattle their sabres a bit to make sure they get their way!

When two telephone linemen of Putnam’s acquaintance - a pair of mugs called Frank and George, played by Joe Sawyer from The Killing and Russell Johnson from Rock All Night - are snatched by the aliens, matters reach a boiling point! The sheriff has had enough, an anti-alien mob is formed, and things look dire for all concerned! Ha ha, I won’t give away the end, but those who like images of awestruck townsfolk won’t be disappointed!

It goes without saying that the desert atmosphere is great here, and represents a major part of my appreciation for the picture! I was less taken with the character of John Putnam, who seemed too often in the helpless thrall of his own urges and emotions! He’s one of those characters who never quite say what you want them to say, but don’t surprise you either! It’s a Ray Bradbury story, and his touch seems evident; that’s all to the good as well! It’s a minor key story, told well, very theremin-flavoured, steely black-and-white with the best desert atmosphere since Them! How can you go wrong? You can’t! Ha ha, I give It Came From Outer Space two and a half Joshua trees!

Burl reviews A Lawless Street! (1955)

 

Boy howdy, it’s Burl, here to review a pistol-packin’ oater for you! This one features that cowboy non compare Randolph Scott, whose long career in Westerns ended with the great Ride the High Country! In today's duster he plays the legendary Marshal of Medicine Bend, and indeed the book the picture is based on was titled just that, The Marshal of Medicine Bend! But in its journey to the big screen, the title was changed to A Lawless Street!

Now, I’d seen A Lawless Street before, being as how it was made by a director I admire, Joseph H. Lewis! I watched it again the other day, having just found a used DVD of it, and afterward realized that I had the book around somewhere, so I found it and over the next day or so I read The Marshal of Medicine Bend! So I’m well steeped in this particular story at the moment, though there are still one or two things I can’t quite figure out about it, even after reading the book! I’ll get to that in a moment!

Scott plays Calem Ware, whose assiduous marshalry has helped the Colorado town of Medicine Bend on its way to peace and respectability and the sort of long life and steady growth that places like Dodge City, Deadwood, and Tombstone never got! He has a fearsome reputation as a gunfighter and is the sort of peacemaker who won’t hesitate to spill blood all over the floor! He doesn’t have many friends; his only buddies are the local doctor, played by Wallace Ford from Freaks, and his landlady, played by perennial fussbudget Ruth Donnelly, who of course appeared with Ford in Scatterbrain!

But trouble’s a-brewing in Medicine Bend! A local badman rides into town looking for trouble, but before he can gun down old Calem Ware (and he is old - in the book he’s thirty-six, but Scott here was pushing sixty!), the Marshal, draped in a sheet getting a shave in the barber’s chair, pulls a High Plains Drifter on him! There are more badmen where he came from, however, and it transpires that a pair of sharpies, played by Warner Anderson from Bad Bascomb and Week-End at the Waldorf, and John Emery from Spellbound and Rocketship X-M, are in some strange and ill-defined way hoping to take advantage of the town’s impending boom status by taking it over by killing the Marshall and keeping it lawless, and this in some way will hugely enrich them! Ha ha, I never did figure out the precise workings of their scheme, though it also involved terrorizing the local rich rancher, played by James Bell, who played doctors for Val Lewton in pictures like I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man! Ha ha!

Calem Ware’s life is further complicated by the arrival in town of his estranged wife, a songbird played by Angela Lansbury, whom we know so well from The Manchurian Candidate, The Company of Wolves, and The Mirror Crack’d! She warbles a tune or two, but the reunion is fraught because she doesn’t want to be married to a man who might be killed at any moment! The risk of this worsens still when Calem first has to fight a scarred Mongo figure played by Don Megowan from The Werewolf and Truck Turner, and then must battle hatchet-faced gunman Harley Baskam, played by Michael Pate from Howling III! And let me tell you, it looks bad for Calem Ware!

A strange thing is that the characters say Calem Ware’s name over and over again: everybody from the landlady to the doctor to the bad guys and the hired guns and a widow played by Jeanette Nolan from The Manitou and Cloak & Dagger seem to want to say his name, usually in full, as many times as they can! Calem Ware, Calem Ware, Calem Ware! And yet the plot synopsis on the back of my DVD earnestly explains that the movie is about the tribulations of a Wild West Marshal by the name of “Coleen Wave!” Ha ha! How they got that one wrong, I do not know!

That aside, A Lawless Street is a strong little horse opera! It moves at a good pace, and Scott, despite being twenty years older than the character is meant to be, does his usual upright job; and the plot, no matter the confusion it invites, is compelling! And while we think of Joseph H. Lewis as an artiste du noir, with moody pictures like My Name is Julia Ross, The Big Combo, and of course Gun Crazy to his credit, he was originally a thoroughgoing oatsman! Ha ha, after all, he made The Man From Tumbleweeds! He did a terrific job here, anyway, and I very much enjoyed A Lawless Street! I give it three flaming tar barrels!

Burl reviews Creature with the Atom Brain! (1955)

 

By the atom brains it’s Burl, here to review a tale of nuclear zombie-men! Yes, we’re in the low-budget realm here, the territory of the little genre programmer, talking about an ephemeral movie that was never intended to be watched, spoken of or written about beyond its initial theatrical release, or possibly a television sale later on! Of course the picture I’m talking about is Creature with the Atom Brain, and how could it be any other? Ha ha!

We open with what turns out to be the most atmospheric shot in the entire movie: a bulky, pudding-faced man clumps up the street, looking and acting halfway between Boris Karloff and Tor Johnson! He’s an atomic zombie on a mission, putting a casino baron into a fatal bundabeya, then lumbering back to his car oblivious to the hail of lead being fired into his back by henchmen! Ha ha, turns out he's being radio-controlled by a formerly exiled gangster who, having hooked up with an ex-Nazi scientist and covertly returned to America, is stealing corpses, wiring up their brains, and sending them out to fold, spindle and mutilate the people responsible for his conviction and deportation!

Richard Denning from The Black Scorpion and The Oklahoma Woman, and of course The Creature from the Black Lagoon, plays the police laboratory man who’s puzzled by the strange clues left behind at the murder scenes: splashes of radioactive blood, glow-in-the-dark footprints, victims whose bones have been crushed! And there’s what seems like a separate mystery, but isn’t: the bodies of gangsters gone missing from the morgue! Denning's atomic zombie theories are made fun of by a local television anchor, but the newspaper writers seem to swallow them whole! Why, just look at those headlines!

 

 

The gangster behind it all is named Frank Buchanan, and he’s played by Michael Granger from Murder By Contract! Buchanan and his scientist pal have holed themselves up in a lead-lined mansion within which they and their equipment are undetectable by the boogie-cars roaming the city in search of telltale radioactivities! Meanwhile Denning and his partner/buddy Uncle Dave (as he’s known in the Denning household) try to convince the local newshounds that there really are atomic zombies, and do their darndest to find Granger’s hideout!

There’s lots of pipe smoking in this picture, but also some actual detective work, which, in concert with the goofy premise, gives the picture a unique tone that straddles police noirs like The Big Heat and genre goofs like producer Sam Katzman’s Zombies of Mora Tau! It gets some extra credit from me for using squibs to illustrate bullet hits when the zombies are shot - ha ha, I can’t think of any earlier movies that did that! And it gets more credit still for inspiring a fine Roky Erickson song!

It’s a little poky and repetitive, and the tiny budget hurts it occasionally, but I do tend to go easy on movies that take ridiculous ideas seriously! There’s some good ‘50s domestic stuff, but it bugged me whenever Denning, who blabs freely about the case to everyone else, shooed his wife from the room so he could talk about new developments with Uncle Dave! I think the way the wife is treated must have seemed old-fashioned and cruelly dismissive even at the time! Well, Curt Siodmack, who wrote the picture, was an old-ish guy by the mid 50s, I suppose, and not too hep! All things considered, and with due acknowledgement of its low-track enjoyability, I give Creature with the Atom Brain one and a half emanations!

Burl reviews North By Northwest! (1959)

 

Hi, I’m Roger Thornhill! Ha ha, no, I’m Burl, but I feel like Roger Thornhill after my recent viewing of North By Northwest! Yes, it’s a comfy old favourite, a highly rewatchable thrill-omedy-omance, and always pretty fun! There’s not much more to it than that, other than some romantic scenes that go on a bit too long for young new viewers of Hitchcock; but by garr it’s a pleasantly airy jaunt! It feels a bit silly to review it, because everyone’s seen it and everyone more or less likes it!

It’s a curious warm-up for Psycho, ha ha! Our main character, played by the one and only Cary Grant, is a happy-go-lucky Madison Avenue man who gets mistaken for a government spy called George Kaplan! Immediately he is wrapped in a web of intrigue: kidnapped and assaulted with a gun and a car and a bourbon by nefarious bad guy James Mason, whom we know from ffolkes and Bigger Than Life; his dapper, Smithers-type minion Martin Landau, an actor we recollect from his appearance in Without Warning; and two sinister, hatched-faced sub-minions! Poor perplexed Thornhill is soon accused of a United Nations murder, and he flees to Chicago on a cross-country train! On board he meets an almost psychotically flirtatious blonde beauty played by Eva Marie Saint from The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, whose extreme willingness to shelter an accused murderer arouses only mild additional bewilderment in Thornhill!

Leo G. Carroll from Tarantula is meanwhile a government spymaster who knows what’s going on, but is initially pleased to hear that Thornhill is believed to be Kaplan, who is not a real person but a fictional CIA confabulation! Ha ha, I think the movie could have waited on this revelation and presented it as a twist going into the third act, instead of revealing it in the first, but that’s just one Burl’s opinion! Anyway, with crop duster cornfield chases and hotel room duplicities and the finale in that fantastic modern house apparently perched near the top of Mount Rushmore, we barely notice!

Ha ha, there is so much window dressing to love about this movie - the great Saul Bass titles, the fantastic Bernard Herrman score, the clever Ernest Lehman script, and of course Hitch’s confident direction and the suspense scenes he pulls off with typical wizardry - that we don’t quite mind realizing later that it’s pretty much all window dressing! However, aside from the romantic longeurs mentioned earlier, it’s a top-flight Hollywood entertainment, attractive and shiny, gripping and funny; and when it’s over, it’s over - ha ha, until the next time! It’s far from my favourite Hitchcock picture, but it’s like a gooseberry you keep under your armpit: always there for you! I give North By Northwest three complaints of dan-druff!

Burl reviews April in Paris! (1952)

With a handful of posies, it’s Burl, here to review a spring musical for you! Yes, you’ve guessed right: it’s April in Paris, as, currently, it’s April everywhere, for a few more days at least! Ha ha! This picture features the unlikely romantic pairing of Doris Day, whom we know so well from suspense thrillers like Midnight Lace, and Ray Bolger, whose shirt here is stuffed even more than it was in The Wizard of Oz! Ha ha!

The plot is rather contrived, even for a musical! Bolger’s character, S. Winthrop Putnam, is an uptight nebbish who works in the State Department, in the position of Assistant to the assistant to the Deputy Undersecretary to the Assistant to the Secretary of State, or something like that! His grumpy boss is played by Paul Harvey, who sounds just like a more polished Lon Chaney Jr. if you close your eyes! Anyway, they’re planning some kind of arts festival in Paris, for which they propose to gather the crème de la crème of American culture and ship them all to France! But the invitation to Ethel Barrymore goes by mistake to a brassy chorine named Ethel “Dynamite” Jackson, played of course by Day!

After a touching goodbye party from her theatre pals, Bolger arrives to inform her of the mistake, which of course devastates her! Up to this point, I had assumed Bolger’s character was a secondary fussbudget character of the type that used to be played by Franklin Pangborn or Mischa Auer or Edward Everett Horton, and that the romantic lead had simply not showed up yet! Of course I knew Bolger was a great entertainer, and in particular a fantastic dancer, but I was still expecting the real hero to show up any minute, ha ha!

But no! Anyway, after the old “The boss thinks the underling’s decision to represent America with an everywoman instead of a star is inspired” plot twist, Dynamite is back in (Ethel Barrymore’s reaction to the mix-up is never recorded), and the long middle section of the picture takes place (rather unconvincingly) aboard ship! Ha ha, here the Frenchman character played ingratiatingly by Claude Dauphin, whom we know from Phantom of the Rue Morgue, and who later became President of Earth in Barbarella, comes to the fore! Having earlier sung a song apparently called “Give Me Your Lips,” he plays matchmaker, sort of, and this leads to a long scene in the passage outside the adjacent cabins of Day and Bolger, in which their mutual lust is turned up to eleven!

Then we get a fake wedding, which means, by the puritanical rules of the period, that Dauphin and his pal have to act in a very un-French  manner and prevent Day and Bolger from consummating their non-marriage! Their cabins are rigged by the crafty Frenchmen, and this leads to several laffs and some outrage from Bolger’s boss! Finally everybody gets to Paris, which is represented by stock footage and stage sets, and there are further complications and an excellent nightclub number from Dauphin and Day! Ha ha, it’s one of the highlights! There’s also a surprising revelation about our Frenchman, Dauphin, and the last shot is of course set before a dropsheet depiction of the Eiffel Tower!

All of this is fine, even if the whole thing seems to lack the authorial voice a director other than David Butler might have given it! For most of the picture Day and Bolger seem an ill-fitting couple, it being particularly hard to see what the likeably bland Dynamite would see in a nervous prig like S. Winthrop Putnam! Ha ha! But the scene in the passage is a most definite exception: the air is thick with erotic feeling, and one can see reflected in their eyes the sideways bedroom waltz each craves to perform with the other!

It’s a pretty standard 1950s Hollywood musical: bright and colourful; tedious at times, but also occasionally funny; bizarrely moralistic; rah-rah American, though not too obnoxious with it; a few good numbers and some impressive dancing! One wishes the loose-limbed Bolger was given more to do, but after all, he was straitjacketed by his character! He does get a decent tap number in! Ha ha, I give April in Paris two collapsing beds!

Burl reviews Rio Bravo! (1959)

The sun is sinkin’ in the west, the cattle look out at the view, the red bird settles in her nest, and it’s time for a Burl to review! Ha ha, yes, I’m here to talk about that great late-period Howard Hawks picture Rio Bravo, a longtime favourite of mine! Now, I don’t think I’ve reviewed a Hawks picture yet, but rest assured, he’s a director I admire!

And this was one of his best! Yes, it’s got John Wayne, whom we all know so well from Randy Rides Alone, in one of his finest roles in all of Dukedom! He plays Sheriff John T. Chance, who finds himself in a typically Hawksian siege situation with a colourful passel of allies! There’s a great, wordless opening in which Chance’s deputy, a bestubbled inebriate played by Dean Martin in perhaps his finest performance ever, scrounges for a silver dollar tossed into a used spittoon by Claude Akins of TV’s Lobo; this leads to a sudden, pointless murder and the jailing of Lobo!

The movie gets right to it from the beginning, and then unfolds at a leisurely but never draggy pace! In fact, the pace of things is one of this movie’s greatest achievements! Ha ha, all credit to Hawks, screenwriters Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, and editor Folmar Blangsted, who has one of the great names in Hollywood editorial department history, for this accomplishment!

The situation comes down to this: Chance with help from his deputy Dude (that’s the shaky-hands played by Dino), his other deputy Stumpy, played by Walter Brennan, the young pistoleer Colorado, essayed by Ricky Nelson, and a cardsmith called Feathers played by Angie Dickenson from Dressed to Kill, must keep Claude Akins in jail long enough for the Marshalls to collect him, without getting plugged by all the fellas who want to break Akins out! Because Akins, you see, is Joe Burdette, brother of Nathan Burdette a local richman with enough fifty dollar gold pieces to hire all the gunmen he wants!

There are all sorts of terrific scenes in the movie, and one of the best is when Chance and Dude follow a muddy-booted gunman into a Burdette saloon! Dude takes the lead in unearthing the fugitive and the scene unfolds beautifully, thanks to some blood dripping into a mug of beer! And of course you can’t have Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson in a movie without a couple of songs, and we get the marvelous “My Rifle, My Pony, And Me,” which I used to sing to my son every night at bedtime! Ha ha, I really do love all the scenes where the fellows are just hanging out in the jailhouse, kicking back, drinking beer and kicking back, waiting to see what will happen!

And there’s a solid gold climax with shootings, punchfights, and explosions! Ha ha, it’s kind of amusing how many Burdette men get plugged by our heroes throughout the movie, in fact, and by the end the bad guys are slinking out with their hands up, claiming to have simply had enough!

It’s one of the most purely enjoyable Westerns ever made, relaxed, professional and beautifully done in every respect! No doubt just about all of you have seen it before, but it’s intensely rewatchable, so I recommend giving it another spin whenever you get the chance! I give Rio Bravo four tumbleweeds and an extra donkey face suddenly appearing at the window! Ha ha!

Burl reviews Frankenstein's Daughter! (1958)

Ha ha and monster makers, it’s Burl, here with a review of another of the Four Cunhas! That is to say, another one of the quartet of movies made by Richard Cunha in 1958! I’ve already reviewed Giant From the Unknown for you, and today it’ll be Frankenstein’s Daughter! (Ha ha, She Demons and Missile to the Moon will come along sometime in the future, I’m sure!)

This one is maybe not the best of them, but it’s got a certain something! Our story is set in the house of a scientist, an elderly German called Carter, the type of kindly scientist who’s trying to perfect a serum for the good of mankind! But his assistant, Oliver Frank, has a different sort of project in mind! Oliver is nightly turning Carter’s niece Trudy (played by Sandra Knight from The Terror, the future ex-Mrs. Jack Nicholson) into a monster, in which form she roams the streets scaring her friends with booga-booga! Oliver spends much of his time either gaslighting Trudy or clumsily macking on her, and her boyfriend, played by John Ashley from Beach Blanket Bingo, unwittingly helps the bad guy out! Frankly the boyfriend does not seem like the swiftest boat in the fleet, ha ha!

Oliver Frank, who's an especially prickish bad guy, abuses his goblin-like assistant and says things like “From here on in I decide what’s evil!” Of course he turns out to be not Oliver Frank but Oliver Frankenstein, and soon he's constructed a monster out of some of Trudy’s friends! There’s a rampage, some biffing and bashing and some pretty stiff neck-twists, and finally rough justice is meted out when Oliver Frankenstein gets a face full of acid!

There are some real 1950s delights on view here, like a boss pool party at where a clean-cut band keeps the groove, while enormous skewers are barbequed and the twentysomethings dance like apes! But we’re expecting the Frankenstein monster to rampage through the party and biff people into the pool, and it just never happens! There’s a lost opportunity for you, ha ha!

And speaking of the monster: this picture has taken a lot of grief for the gooper-faced makeup, even from Cunha himself, but you know what? I like this monster, and I even think it’s kind of scary! Ha ha, still, I can’t deny it’s a little chonky! But it’s chonky-charming, if you know what I mean! The acid-burn makeup and the monster-Trudy makeup (all fangs and heavy eyebrows) are less endearing though!

It’s a modest little picture, and it seems to go on forever, and it’s got some major missed opportunities too! But it also has the 1950s monster charm I love so well - the kind you find in pictures like Monster of Piedras Blancas or Monster on the Campus! I give Frankenstein’s Daughter one and a half swinging bookshelves!