TORMENTED

d. Bert I. Gordon (1960)

Craggy middle aged Tom Stewart (craggy middle aged Richard Carlson) has it all: a beautiful young fiancée, a great career playing somewhat prosaic jazz piano, a cool pad, tight swimming trunks. The only insect in his unguent is Vi (Julie Reding), an old flame who loves him so much she’s prepared to wreck his life. Vi is pretty attractive in all sorts of ways (most of them sexual), and is quite obviously a bad lot as it's 1960 and her dress is so low cut that we can see her brassiere and several acres of her extensive bosom.  

They meet, as secret ex-lovers do, at the top of an abandoned lighthouse. It’s poorly maintained (bloody Council!), so a section of the guard rail gives way and leaves Vi hanging precariously over the raging sea. Stewart doesn’t kill her, but neither does he help her and so she falls screaming to her death: end of problem; start of story.

From here on in, despite being dead, Vi makes an awful nuisance of herself. Her ghostly footprints appear in the sand, bits of her jewellery keeping washing ashore, she covers her rivals wedding dress in seaweed and steals her engagement ring, and her disembodied head keeps appearing to Stewart to conduct increasingly bitter arguments with him. Some of these beyond the grave shenanigans are seen by others, some are not, so it’s hard to tell what is supernatural and what is psychological, whatever the difference is, although, either way, Stewart unravels pretty quickly.

In any event, by the end of the film an unhinged Stewart has killed a blackmailing beatnik (the great Joseph Turkel, one of Kubrick’s favourite actors) and is just about to murder a seven year old girl when Vi’s ghost swoops in and pushes him from the top of the lighthouse. The Council should have fixed that guard rail, or at least put some tape across the gap.

In a memorable coda, rescuers pull both Stewart's and Vi’s bodies from the sea and place them next to each other on the beach. Vi’s dead arm somehow flops onto Stewart’s corpse, revealing the stolen ring on her hand. It’s going to be a very long engagement.  

TALK ABOUT A STRANGER

d. David Bradley (1952)

An unexpectedly fantastic little film, barely an hour long, full of shadows and suspense and atmosphere, great noir-ish shots and good performances, including one from Nancy Davis, in the year that she married fading star and rising Republican Ronald Reagan.

When a young boy (Billy Gray, who is great) finds his beloved dog poisoned, he is sure that his new neighbour, a dark eyed, beetle browed man with a foreign accent who keeps himself to himself and doesn't like dogs, is responsible. Billy channels his rage and distress into investigating the mysterious man, turning the rest of the town against the new arrival in the process. In the end, his obsession almost causes a tragedy.

This film pushes all the right buttons: it spends almost half of its running time showing us how happy Billy and his scruffy little dog are together, and these scenes are so amusing and touching that when the dog is killed, we are almost as devastated as Billy. From here on, the film gathers momentum, driven by Billy who seethes with anger and fizzes with the injustice of it all. The adults he comes across (with the exception of his parents), eager for sensation, rather irresponsibly stoke up this fury and soon the town is gossiping about the new neighbour, dissecting everything from his grocery order to the cost of his watch to the stubbiness of his thumbs - 'oh, and did you know that he murdered Billy's dog?'. You know how these things go in small towns.

In the end, disaster is averted and a perfectly logical (if rather dark) answer is found. Billy calms down and, in the process, acquires not only a new dog but a new sister and a new girlfriend, so it's a happy ending of sorts, just not for the old dog.

THE ATOMIC CITY

d. Jerry Hopper (1952)

The Atomic City starts with footage of test explosions and Hiroshima and of the men and women who live and work at the Los Alamos Atomic Research Site, their faces blacked out ‘for security reasons’. Obviously, they don’t really want to be developing weaponry with the capacity to destroy the world and everything on it, but, while the ‘spirit of aggression is not yet dead in the world’ they simply have to do it.

When leading scientist Frank Harrington’s son Tommy is kidnapped, Harrington knows immediately what the ransom will be: secrets. He and his wife try to handle things without informing the authorities but, very quickly, the Harringtons learn that they themselves are under constant observation, and even their best friend is an undercover FBI agent who has infiltrated their family in order to keep a close eye on them. What follows is a taut, well scripted story with some surprising flashes of violence and cruelty: a communist courier is killed by a car bomb once he delivers his message; Dr Harrington extracts a confession using his fists; the boy, Tommy, is bricked up in a cave in the Jemez mountains* and left to die (this last one is hard to take, he’s a nice little feller) .

The Harringtons are only interested in getting their son back, of course, but, for more or less everybody else the stated priorities are, in order of importance: maintain security; catch the spies; save the kid. Cold or not, it’s still a war. In the end, they manage to more or less do all three, but not until after a great climax in which Tommy is left hanging from a cliff face.  Even though you know it will work out in the end, it’s genuinely breathless stuff, particularly as Tommy is just so gosh darned cute.    

* This area is a designated national park, and the mountains, caves and the ruins of Pueblo American civilisation here are used to provide a fascinating and unusual backdrop to the action.  

THE CRAWLING HAND

d. Herbert L. Strock (1963)

The Crawling Hand is a low budget film which uses the space race to colour a fairly traditional horror story. In it, a moon shoot ends in disaster when, on the return journey,  the rocket goes haywire. Despite having run out of oxygen some twenty minutes previously, the Astronaut's frightened (and frightening) face appears on the mission control monitors, alternately hissing ‘kill!’ and ‘press the red’, i.e. the button that will destroy him and his ship. As the ship is about to crash into a populated area, mission control press the button and the ship explodes, showering debris all over the coastline including, on a secluded beach, the Astronaut’s arm, sheared off at the elbow, but still wearing its glove and spacesuit sleeve (I was reminded of J.G Ballard at this stage, almost certainly not the film makers intention).

A brilliant but brooding young science student (‘I’m going to the top – and I’m making it on my own!’) wraps the severed arm in a shower curtain and takes it back to his digs where it promptly strangles his landlady and then takes him over: forcing him to do bad things until he gets flu and his high temperature weakens the arm to the extent that he can break the link and stab the severed limb repeatedly with a broken bottle. Hungry junkyard cats finish the job. Or do they? No, not really. The uncanny is not so easily disposed of.     

The Crawling Hand has a sliver of science behind the narrative, the reasoning being that mixing Earth molecules (pronounced ‘mole-ecules’ by the Chief Scientist) with space matter might possibly result in a hybrid life form that grows incredibly quickly and wants to kill everything. Yes, it’s tenuous, but this isn’t the sort of film that has to try and justify itself, so the vague attempt is actually rather charming. 

The best scenes feature the creepy hand crawling around, using its burned and degraded fingers to pull itself towards the next throat it wants to throttle. Full of filler and filmed on the hoof (the actors don't stop when they make mistakes) the concept of a parasitic virus from space owes a  lot to Quatermass, but mainly resembles a slightly wonky ghost train ride. Tellingly, the protagonists are attractive teenagers, hopped up on soda pop, young love and The Bird Is The Word by The Rivingtons, which features heavily throughout.

There is probably a monograph to be written about crawling hands in the movies, from The Beast With Five Fingers through to The Evil Dead and beyond. They're mainly horror films, of course, severed hands don't normally creep around in anything else. 

THE DEVIL'S HAND

d. William J. Hole, Junior (1961)

Robert Alda plays Rick Turner, a somewhat feckless electronics engineer with a penchant for panelled cardigans and lots and lots of pomade. Rick is disturbed by dreams of a beautiful, exotic woman, something that his less beautiful and less exotic fiancée is surprisingly sanguine about.

The story gets interesting when it is revealed that the beautiful dream woman is actually astrally projecting herself into Rick’s life by talking to a doll that has his face. It’s all part of the recruitment process for a cult run by creepy doll maker Neil Hamilton (perhaps best known as genial Commissioner Gordon from the Adam West Batman series)*. The cult is ostensibly about voodoo (hence the dolls), as personified by Gamba, ‘the Devil-God of Evil’, but it’s a somewhat ramshackle group, seemingly having no real purpose outside of being a cult, i.e. they sit around on bean bags listening to bongo music and watching interpretive dance.

Every now and again someone is killed for revealing the dark secrets of the cult, i.e. that they sit around on bean bags listening to bongo music and watching interpretive dance. It’s not the greatest film in the history of cinema (there are no monkeys in it for a start) but it has momentum, its own crazy logic and occasional flashes of style, as well as ticking four of my (multitudinous) boxes: it begins with a dream sequence; it ends in a fire; there is slinky ethnic music, and the ending hints at a sequel that is never, ever, ever going to happen.

* The dolls are creepy, and so is Hamilton, so that sentence works in all sorts of ways. I particularly like the scene where the creepy creepy doll maker, surrounded by his hideous homunculi, is interrupted mid rant by a ringing telephone: 'hello', he purrs, 'doll shop'

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN

d. Jack Arnold (1957)

'Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too'.

Despite it's sensational title, 'The Incredible Shrinking Man' is an astonishingly thoughtful, even profound film, especially at its conclusion, where our hapless hero, now less an inch high, stoicly accepts his fate and embraces the process of slowly melding into the Universe. 

It starts, like so many stories, with a normal person (blog fave Grant Williams, who is excellent) being made abnormal by exposure to radioactivity, in this case via a dirty cloud that sweeps over him while he's out yachting. Shortly afterwards, he notices that his clothes are becoming looser and, ominously, his wedding ring falls from his finger. Medical science are baffled and pretty useless as 'people just don't get shorter' (actually, they get shorter all the time, particularly as they get older. In fact, people get shorter over the course of a normal day, and are always tallest when they get out bed: fact).  

Within a few months, he's incredibly angry and living a wretched life barricaded in a dolls house under constant threat of dismemberment by his own pet cat. It's terribly sad, especially as the mysterious condition diminishes him in every way except mentally, leaving him all the time in the world to question himself as a husband, as a man, as a human being.

Eventually, he ends up lost in the basement, presumed dead by his family and locked into a life or death battle with a resident spider. He drinks water that drips from the boiler and lives on crumbs from a slab of stale cake. It's a hard, miserable existence, and there is a palpable sense of relief when he finally realises that his normal life is gone forever and that whatever his future brings will be at a sub-atomic level. So, he raises his eyes to the night sky and accepts he will go from microscopic to submicroscopic, from quark to proton, finally becoming an infinitesimally small, nameless particle known only to God, to whom 'there is no zero'. 

I'd like to have that sort of courage and spiritual depth, but I'm a bit of a 'fuck it' person, so I'd probably just impale myself on a needle or jump on a mouse trap. We all have our own way of shrinking away to nothing, I suppose.