SUDDEN DEATH

d. Eddie Romero (1977)

We’re back in the Pearl of the Orient Seas* again, this time finding out about the hitherto hidden world of ruthless sugar barons, greedy, amoral men who are prepared to displace native people and destroy the environment in order to make a dollar, a sweet, sweet dollar. These men are so cartoonishly evil that, when their nice managing director tries to make reparations to the native people for the wholescale destruction of their homes and habitat, they have his entire family, including two little boys and a baby, shot to death, leaving the badly injured executive for dead.

Out of danger, but still full of grief and shotgun pellets, the man tracks down the legendary Harrison ‘Duke’ Smith (little Robert Conrad, wiry and in very tight trousers), a man who has had an illustrious career as a state sanctioned murderer, terrorist and all round good guy / undercover bastard. Now living out an idyllic retirement in a shack on the beach, he initially refuses to help, giving his about to graduate teenage daughter and a beautiful young girlfriend as reasons to stay alive.

When the man is subsequently burned alive, and Duke’s daughter tuts at him in disapproval, he finally decides to get involved, although his motivation is far from clear. I mean, firstly, teenage girls tut all the time and, even so, the guy is now a charcoal briquette and the rest of his family are already dead, and Duke didn’t know any of them, so what’s the point apart from the fact that feature films aren't usually twenty seven minutes long?

Enlisting the help of his old friend Wyatt, a sharp black martial arts expert, he roots out the conspiracy and takes out the nasty Sugar Barons one by one, at first almost by accident and then with accelerating zeal and sadism. Towards the end, you realise that this noble mission has unleashed a psychopath, a man who is so used to killing that it has become his default setting.

The film’s pacing is glacial for the most part, but then culminates in a spectacular last ten minutes, where even the camera struggles to keep up with the action. The last third of the film is greatly enlivened by the addition of ex-surfing champ and all round lunk / hunk Don Stroud, here playing a dandyish but socially awkward Corsican hitman called in to take Duke out before he can murder everyone in Manila. I like Stroud, but he often makes strange acting choices, here speaking in a weird, cotton-mouthed way, as if he wants to try an accent but is embarrassed by it. The battle between two professional killers ends in a bruising and very bloody encounter in an icehouse, where quick cutting is used to convey violence and to disguise the fact that Stroud is at least a foot taller than Conrad.  

The final moments are not entirely unexpected but are genuinely gut-wrenching, and the use of carousel music to accompany the horror is a masterstroke, symbolising both the grotesque tableau and the breaking of a over-stretched mind. It’s tough stuff.

*The Philippines, mate.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, USA

d. Denis Sanders (1959)

Dostoevsky goes beat, man. Well, sort of. George Hamilton plays Robert Cole, a beer can bongo playing high school drop out with a very punchable face and a massive superiority complex. Ray believes that he is special, an Alexander the Great, a Napoleon Bonaparte, albeit one who lives in a Los Angeles bedsit and spends most of his days either asleep or drifting aimlessly around amusement arcades. Cole believes that important people like him shouldn't have to operate within the normal moral framework of society and that, as they know best, they should do whatever the hell they like. Typical student, really. His view is that if, for example, he had beaten a pawnbroker to death, then he probably had a very good reason, and he's too clever to get caught, so let's leave it at that.    

I haven't read Dostoevsky's original novel (I haven't read ANY Dostoevsky, please don't tell my mates), but I am familiar with the basics, which is just as well as you certainly don't get any help from the film itself, which cleverly reconfigures the source material so that it becomes virtually incomprehensible. Despite the inherent drama of the storyline there is no tension here whatsoever and the narrative is reduced to a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes in which an out of their depth cast are left spouting cod philosophical non sequiturs in lieu of characterisation and dialogue. The music is quite good, though. 

The Cole/Raskolnikov character needs an actor able to convey a fierce intellect, a complex personality and a monstrous personal philosophy. Instead we get a very young George Hamilton, who looks a bit thick and keeps stiffly throwing his arms in the air and shouting. With a better actor the film might have had a chance but, as the producer later admitted, they simply couldn't afford Anthony Perkins.   

I didn't set up this blog to be mean to films, by the way, but Crime and Punishment, USA is pretentious and poorly executed and it would be dishonest of me not to say so - and I'm nothing if not a deeply moral and upright person.   

BABY FACE NELSON

d. Don Siegel (1957)

Americans love outlaws, and cinema, so it's not surprising that most notable American criminals have been commemorated on film. Yet these notorious people, whether they are Jesse James or John Dillinger, Butch and Sundance or Bonnie and Clyde, have something else in common besides celluloid immortality: they're all scum bags. Despite the glamour and mythology that springs up around them, outlaws are very rarely Robin Hood style philanthropists, or even oppressed people striking a blow against the system. Instead they are usually violent criminals, ruthless, amoral people who steal and kill and spread misery and fear: fascinating but not exactly admirable. 

Take Lester Gillis aka Baby Face Nelson, as played here by Mickey Rooney. This character has but one redeeming feature, the love of a beautiful woman (Carolyn Jones). By the end of the film, even she is becoming sickened by his blood lust and, it would seem, his death wish. Nelson is a monster, no-one is safe around him and no matter how much money he steals, how many people he kills, he never stops, he can't stop. The real Nelson died after being shot seventeen times. Even then he managed to make it home and die in his bed, a defiant final 'fuck you' to the world. Here, his wife administers the coup de grace in a graveyard after he is fatally wounded, which is a more obviously dramatic finale, but a less satisfying one.

Director for hire Don Siegel doesn't particularly distinguish himself here, but he keeps everything moving. Outlaws life stories always seem to have a kind of fatal momentum, anyway, a short, quick charge to death or imprisonment. Rooney is far too old to play Nelson (Nelson was dead at 25, Rooney is pushing 40) but has the right look and the right stature (throughout Nelson is referred to as 'shrimp' or, ironically, 'the big man' - he doesn't like it). His performance has two gears, a sort of closed off auto pilot that allows him to function on a day to day basis, and a murderous, explosive anger that drives him onwards. This uncontrollable ire is the focus of one of Siegel's few directorial flourishes, a big close up on Nelson's face as he swears revenge, his right eye twitching involuntarily with rage.       

THE COUCH

d. Owen Crump (1962)

Charles Campbell (Grant Williams) has issues: he's a thief and a fantasist with delusions of grandeur; he's choking with anger and sexual rage; he pretends that his hated dead father is alive, and his beloved alive sister is dead, and, every night at seven pm, he goes into the busy streets of the city and stabs a stranger to death with an ice pick. He's also in love with his psychiatrist's niece and, god help her, she feels the same way about him.

Nearly noir, nowhere near normal, most of the action takes place in public places rendered desolate and full of shadows: out of hours offices, a lonely spot overlooking the neon lit city, the busy streets at night where thousands of people walk shoulder to shoulder and fail to notice one another. No wonder some of them go a little crazy although, to be fair, our protagonist takes it as far as he can without actually falling off the edge of the planet.  

Grant Williams is a favourite actor of mine. He's somewhere between a matinee idol and a method actor, although he has a curiously pitted face, and his skin looks like a sheet of low density sandpaper. Williams plays the psycho killer as charming and weird, managing to keep his character constantly off beam but without ever rolling his eyes, gnashing his teeth and playing the obvious villain. You even feel sorry for him. When he hears something he doesn't like he shoves his fist in his mouth and bites down on it, a fairly standard bit of dramatic business apart from the fact that, when you see his hand a little later, he has actual bite marks on his knuckles. It's not necessarily acting, but it is impressive.

MANSON

d. Laurence Merrick / Robert Hendrickson (1973)

I actually first watched this a few weeks before Charles Manson died, so maybe I inadvertently dialled up the cosmos and reminded it that Manson was still around and needn’t be.  I don't feel bad, by the way, Manson was a nuisance, and never did anything good for anybody, least of all himself.

This well-made documentary, which benefits from archive footage made by The Manson Family themselves, was released two years after the longest trial in American history, a fraught, complex thing in which a man was convicted of heinous crimes which he encouraged but took no physical part in. Manson was the ultimate bad influence, a lifelong criminal and misfit who collected hippies and runaway kids and brainwashed them into becoming a nihilistic death cult using sex, drugs and endless rambling monologues / lectures about race wars, societal breakdown and how Hollywood needed to pay for ignoring his musical genius.*

If you were wondering how Manson, a short, scruffy bloke with anger issues (a bit like Hitler) managed to keep at least thirty people under his thrall, ultimately getting them to kill for him, just watch  the interview footage with some of the fringe Family members, the ones that didn’t murder anyone and drifted away from the core soon after. One of the guys tells a rambling and obviously untrue story about how he talked to squirrels and rabbits in the desert while his audience, a gang of barefoot, snaggle toothed long hairs, none older than 25, sit agape, occasionally guffawing with raucous laughter. They are either cretins who genuinely find this bullshit interesting and funny, or they’re too scared to show that they’re not hip enough to be in on the joke. Chemicals play a part, of course, but there’s also an active disavowal of intelligence, a suspension of disbelief and critical faculties in order to be part of something, to be included, to belong. For someone like Manson, 'a Venus Flytrap amongst the flower children', they were easy pickings.

We also see the girls Manson left behind, those fizzing with resentment at not being in jail but still worshipping at their guru’s feet. They pontificate and philosophise, posturing with weapons and acting tough. One of them, Squeaky Fromme, gives us a lecture about how you should know every part of your weapon intimately as she struggles to pull her knife out of its scabbard. In 1975, Fromme tried to shoot President Ford, but her gun didn’t go off.  

Cannily, the film makers withhold Manson's voice from us until the very end. When he speaks, you hear exactly where his acolytes have got their opinions, their attitudes, their words, even their intonations, cadences and pronunciations. Yes, he is charismatic, not least because he is deeply unusual and utterly self-possessed, but I don’t feel like I want to carve the word ‘pig’ on anyone’s stomach for him. Perhaps I need more drugs. Send more drugs. 

* There is a persistent rumour that Manson auditioned for The Monkees. He was actually in prison at the time. I don’t think he’d have got the job, anyway, they already had Davy Jones.

TEENAGE DOLL

d. Roger Corman (1957) 

I was going to start by saying what a strange little film this is but, of course, everything on here is a strange little film, that's sort of the point. So, instead, I will say that Teenage Doll is singular, odd, unusual, unsettling, whatever other synonyms I can dredge up to try and convey the fact that the film contains five minutes of plot and sixty five minutes of social commentary, and manages to be both as camp as a row of tents and depressing as hell. 

The story starts with the back door of a restaurant opening and a man throwing a bowl of dirty water out into the yard. He doesn't realise it, but the waste water splashes over the body of a young girl lying in an ignominious heap, dead as straw. We never see her face, just her blond, curled hair and a flash of thigh through a torn skirt. She was a member of teen girl gang the Black Widows (there's one in every city), and the rest of the gang are pretty sure that she was murdered by a nice middle class girl called Barbara Bonney. The motive: they were both in love with the same boy, the leader of a gang called The Vandals. The Black Widows decide to track Barbara down, and the rest of the film details their search. 

Teenage delinquency is described as a disease at the beginning of the film, and we are shown both the symptoms and the cause. We go to each of the Black Widows’ homes and see a little of the upbringings that have shaped their young minds, the circumstances that the girls are running from or rebelling against. 

Leader Helen's Dad is a lazy drunk with a penchant for prostitutes; Janet has a baby sister who takes up all her mother's time, and cop Dad is too busy fighting crime to notice that his daughter is a criminal; Eva's immigrant family are working and arguing themselves to early graves to make ends meet; May is so stifled by her dead end life and non-existent prospects that she no longer cares about anything but mindless kicks. In the most disturbing vignette, we go to the filthy shack where Lori lives. There, in the dark, is her five year old sister, chewing on a cardboard box because she is hungry. Lori gives her a packet of stale crackers and leaves, pausing only to switch the light off again. It's extraordinarily grim. 

Then there's Barbara, the pretty, polite girl with a nice house and a nice family who has just killed a love rival and is covered in her blood. Her home life is more subtly rendered, but no less horrible: a repressed, passive aggressive father, so distant that he might as well not be there; a mentally disturbed mother who wears her hair in pig tails and is stuck in the past, still obsessed with her own bad boy, a criminal she loved who died twenty years ago. 

All of this psychodrama builds to a meeting of the gangs and a rumble in a scrap yard, before the climax proper in which Barbara has to decide whether to leave everything, including her identity, behind, to turn herself in and potentially face the gas chamber, or to go out fighting, torn apart by the Black Widows. I won't reveal what she chooses to do, but her fate breaks up the gang. Those sad, mixed up girls who still have a chance opt to go home and stay there; the hopeless, angry ones go for a late beer and to plot more mayhem. 

 A quick word on Roger Corman. Simultaneously admired and despised for his quick, cheap, brazen exploitative films, I think he's an occasionally great director who gets a bad rap, even now. A sniffy article about him in The New Yorker last year was titled 'Surface, Not Depth'. They clearly haven't seen Teenage Doll, a film where all the characters are drowning. I'll come back to Roger. To be honest, this really wouldn't be much of a psychotronic film blog if I didn't.

GIRLS IN PRISON

d. Edward L. Cahn (1956)

There’s not much to distinguish Girls In Prison as anything other than a very generic b-movie: a mass stabbing, perhaps, a slight allusion to lesbianism, an earthquake that facilitates an escape, a prison chaplain who is a bit too interested in one of the new inmates. Much of the film is just as you’d expect, and given the advanced ages of most of the cast, the definition of 'girls' is fairly loose, to say the least.

The best thing in it is Adele Jergens as Jenny, top dog and matriarch of the prison. Jenny is fairly genial most of the time, even likeable and kind, but is hard as nails when it comes down to tin tacks, a gun wielding, wavy peroxided, scarlet lipped force of nature. She’s also absolutely gorgeous, even when chewing gum whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette (actually, especially when chewing gum whilst simultaneously smoking a cigarette). The film would be almost insufferably dull without her.

After an hour and twenty minutes of molasses slow mayhem, the film climaxes in a bruising brawl and a gun fight. It’s a good way to end any drama, I find. After the dust has settled and the wonderful Jenny has gone the way of all pistol packing mama's, we end on a close up of a church steeple while some quasi-religious music plays, as if God has in some way been responsible for the restoring the balance of law and order. Rubbish. God was not responsible, although maybe he set off the earthquake to punish some other sinners in the general area. As for the rest, omniscient he may be, but micro management is not exactly his style. 

THE BURGLAR

d. Paul Wendkos (1957)

'We, the dead, welcome you'.
 

Nat Harbin (Dan Duryea, weary as hell) is a career criminal, a break in expert. He has never been caught, never been photographed, never been finger printed. Neither has he ever been particularly successful, living in a series of crummy rooms in slummy streets, eking out a living for himself and his adopted sister, Gladden (Jayne Mansfield!). They are in love with each other, but something always gets in the way: life, usually, and Nat’s higher sense of obligation and morality to the girl he has looked after since she was a kid. Maybe if things were different they could be happy, live a different life. Maybe. Nat is like a sleepwalker, locked into himself, indifferent to almost everything apart from the instinct to put one foot in front of the other. Even love is a burden. 

Nat decides that he needs a big score, so forms an ‘organisation’: him, Gladden, a whining weakling called Baylock and a sleazy psychopath called Dohmer. Together they steal a sapphire necklace from a shifty spiritualist called Sister Phoebe. It’s worth a cool $150,000, and they think they can get $80,000 for it. What they actually get is death, hunted down by a crooked cop who wants the necklace for himself.

As you might expect from a film noir based, like Nightfall, on a book by arch fatalist David Goodis, The Burglar is dark, inky black in places. The characters are lost causes, stuck on predetermined routes to sordid ends. They all need someone to talk to, someone to listen. They will end up unsung, unremembered, unburied, left in crumpled heaps or in hastily dug holes by the side of the road. The drama is played out in huge sudden close ups and in flashing action cuts, all to the blaring of an occasionally intrusive brass and vibes score. Everything about this grim little story is played big, as if it mattered, as if any of it mattered.

At the climax, in the bustling amusement arcades and tourist attractions of Atlantic City (‘the playground of the world’) the characters play out their last scenes in sudden isolation, as if they are the only people on the planet. In the end, Nat finally gets what he wanted all along: he is put of his misery. Gladden survives, the only one young enough and innocent enough to still have a shot at something else, at someone else. What happens to the necklace? Who cares?

NIGHTFALL

d. Jacques Tourneur (1957)

'That's your whole trouble, you know that? The top of your head never closed up when you were a kid. Neither did your mouth.'

Film Noir often hinges on coincidence or, perhaps more in keeping with the idiom, dumb luck. Nightfall contains a plot that is so convoluted it can scarcely be believed - but it works, it just works, and it makes for the most under-rated film I know.

I'm not going to summarise the story, other than to say it comes from the typewriter of arch pulp writer David Goodis and involves $350,000 of stolen money, a murder, two ruthless villains, a beautiful girl and an innocent man trying to clear his name, played by that most believable of fall guys, Aldo Ray*. Most of the action plays out in Wyoming, a stunning looking state of deep snow, tall mountains and great swathes of beautiful wilderness. It's not quite breathless, but it is relentless, a film of great verve and energy and momentum that is greatly aided by superb performances from just about everyone in the cast.   

I'm pretty sure that the Coen brothers watched this film before they wrote Fargo. It's by no means a rip off, but there are too many recurring elements for it to be a coincidence: a man running across a snow covered field; money buried, waiting for a thaw; a double act of killers who hate and mistrust each other, one voluble, almost reasonable, the other a psychopath; bloody death by machinery (a snow plough here, not a wood chipper). It's not a problem, it's just interesting. The Coen's clearly know their stuff, or, at least, they did: they've ploughed a very arid furrow indeed since The Big Lebowski.  

* Aldo Ray is great. Tall, heavy set, tough, but with a broken, raspy voice and blue eyes that seem permanently on the verge of tears. When he smiles, he looks about six years old. 

TEEN-AGE CRIME WAVE

d. Fred F. Sears (1955)

According to the prologue of this film, teenage delinquency is ‘a plague’. I don’t disagree with that but I always think of delinquency as being no worse than some petty crime and vandalism, maybe some minor violence, somewhere between high spirits and childish frustration at the adult world. I'm clearly very naïve as here the teens start off with armed robbery before very quickly moving on to several murders, including the shooting of a police man.

The protagonists are Mike Denton and Terry Marsh, a teenage Bonnie and Clyde with a penchant for guns and heavy petting in public. Mike is about five foot four, has a scar on his face and a chip on his shoulder. He’s the sort of person for whom it’s not enough to have a gun, he has to keep pushing it in people’s faces. You can’t want for the tough guy act to slip and for him to start snivelling and bawling.

His girlfriend Terry wears a satin blouse and talks out of the side of her mouth in a clipped hardboiled tone, like Mae West and Jimmy Cagney's lovechild. She has no intention of being taken alive, which is just as well, as she won't be. A victim of sorts, she’s had a tough upbringing (think Cinderella but without any of the magic stuff, especially not a handsome prince) and cries and moans in her sleep.

Most of the film is taken up with a siege at a mid-west farmhouse. It all gets pretty intense, so it’s a relief when the duo and their hostages break out and take to the road. The climax takes place at the Griffith Observatory, more famously used at the end of Rebel Without A Cause*. There’s a real humdinger of a fist fight in one of the rotating telescope domes, and Terry gets her wish, evading capture by being shot in the back and killed. The beaten and bloodied Mike, under arrest, breaks down and cries like a big old baby, or rather like the little kid he actually is - and well he might, as his next stop will be the gas chamber.

* The James Dean film came out barely a month before Teenage Crime Wave, so it may have even been a coincidence. But I doubt it.