Author Archives: disinterested spectator

Calcutta (1946), Saigon (1947), and The Blue Dahlia (1946)

It was 1965, and I was in my second year of college.  Having just finished watching a monster movie on the Late Show on Saturday night, I changed channels and came in toward the end of another movie, starring Alan Ladd.  When I was just a child, I had seen him in Shane (1953) , which was great, and I might have seen another of his movies with my parents a couple of years later, but that one had left no impression on me.

Anyway, in this movie, Ladd walked into a room where several people were gathered, and someone said, “We were just talking about you.”

“My favorite subject,” Ladd replied.  He wasn’t smiling.

The scene was apparently one involving a double-cross.  Speaking to the beautiful woman in that room who had betrayed him, Ladd says, “Sorry you can’t join us in a glass of rat poison.”

Now, I’m not going to say that this was the greatest bit of hardboiled dialogue ever written for the big screen.  But it was the first I’d ever heard.  Besides, it had been delivered by Alan Ladd, with that voice of his and that look.  Wishing that I had seen the movie from the beginning, I merely made a mental note to watch it in its entirety the next time it was featured on the Late Show.  For some reason, I didn’t bother to check the newspaper to see the name of this movie, figuring I’d know it when I saw it.  Little did I realize that it would never be shown on television again.

The years passed, and in the 1980s, cable television and videocassette recorders expanded my viewing options.  Moreover, I became acquainted with the term film noir, and soon it was that I had seen the best of Ladd’s movies in this genre:  This Gun for Hire (1942), The Glass Key (1942), and The Blue Dahlia (1946), each costarring Veronica Lake.

But eventually, I began to think again about that movie I had seen in college.  I remembered the oriental setting, and so for a while, I wondered if the movie could be Calcutta (1946).  It wasn’t readily available, but it did finally show up on the internet. It’s about three commercial pilots transporting goods between Chungking and Calcutta.

Two of the pilots are played by Alan Ladd and William Bendix.  The third pilot, whose name is Bill, is murdered.  He was engaged to be married to Gail Russell, but she was just using him to smuggle jewels on his plane without his knowing about it, something she had done with other pilots.

At the end of the movie, Ladd beats a confession out of Russell, kills a casino operator named Lasser, who was the head of the smuggling ring, and then calls the police and has Russell arrested. And that wasn’t easy for him to do, since they had fallen in love with each other.  As Ladd says to Russell, “Does a guy have to trust a girl to fall for her?”  But he decides he had better not marry her.  The way he figures it, since she had already killed one man in order to steal the jewels she thought he had, and had helped Lasser murder Bill, someday she might decide to kill him too, and he might not get much sleep thinking about it.

That’s how hardboiled characters have to weigh the pros and cons of marriage in a film noir.  It reminds me of that incredible conversation between Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, which is in both the novel and the 1941 movie based on it.  Spade tells Brigid that she’s taking the fall because she killed his partner. Her feelings are hurt.  She accuses him of not loving her.  He admits that he probably does love her, and he accepts that she loves him.  But he won’t play the sap for her. Otherwise, as he points out in the novel, when the love wears off, she might kill him one day.  Still, he figures that if they don’t hang her by her pretty neck, she might get out of prison in twenty years, in which case he will wait for her.  Twice he says that he will wait for her!

So, like Sam Spade, Ladd chose to turn the woman he loved in to the police rather than marry her and take a chance of her murdering him one day.  Of course, Ladd had a dim view of marriage all along, quite apart from the question of whether his wife might someday kill him.  Earlier in the movie, when he and Bendix find out Bill is going to get married, they are appalled.  Ladd sneers, saying that what women want is “stability, to settle down.”  That would be like a slow death right there.

Ladd becomes suspicious about Bill’s murder because he still had money on him when his body was found. Whoever strangled Bill must not have watched many movies, or else he would have known this fundamental rule:  if you are going to commit a murder, be sure to remove all the money and jewelry from the person you kill so that the police will suspect that robbery was the motive and let it go at that. In any event, Ladd suspects Russell may have had something to do with it right from the beginning.  She protests that she would never have done anything to cause Bill a moment of unhappiness.

“Wouldn’t want to harm him, huh?” Ladd asks.  “Then why’d you want to marry him?”

In a later conversation, when Ladd says he doesn’t trust women, Russell asks, “What was she like?” referring to the woman she assumes must have walked off and left him bitter like that.

Ladd replies, “A woman always wants to blame a guy’s good judgment on a woman.”

And yet, while I enjoyed this movie, it was not the one I was looking for.  Having already seen several other Alan Ladd films set overseas, but to no avail, I had now eliminated every possibility except Saigon (1947). Of course, if I had remembered that the beautiful woman to whom Ladd had suggested a glass of rat poison was Veronica Lake, that would have helped me narrow it down. It was not available on Netflix, but it was available as a DVD, though of poor quality.  Anyway, I could hold out no longer, so I ordered it.

Saigon turned out to be the movie I was looking for.  I was pleased to see that I had not been misled by the brief impression I had formed of this movie while watching ten minutes of it over fifty years ago. It holds up throughout.

In this film, Alan Ladd plays a recently discharged major in the Army Air Forces.  He piloted a bomber during the war until his plane was shot down.  He finds out that a friend of his, Mike, who was a captain in his crew, has two or three months to live.  He suffered a severe head injury and now has a large piece of platinum as part of his skull. The doctor agrees to let Ladd tell him the grim prognosis, but Ladd tells another crew member, a sergeant named Pete, while they are sitting in a bar, that they aren’t going to tell Mike anything.  His parents are dead, and he has no wife.  So, they’ll just show him a good time for the next two or three months.  In order to have the money needed for this purpose, Ladd agrees to take a job flying a man to Saigon.  The man’s secretary is played by Veronica Lake.  As in Calcutta, Ladd and his pals end up inadvertently getting involved in a smuggling operation.

Regarding Mike’s prognosis, this is a Dark Victory (1939) situation: Mike will have no symptoms (or not many, at least) until he dies; the prognosis is precise in the time left for him to live (just a few months); and someone has taken it upon himself to keep him from knowing.  The key difference, however, is that Mike is killed by one of the bad guys before he ever finds out about that prognosis.

In a different way, this movie also reminded me of The Blue Dahlia, where during the war, Ladd was the leader of a flight crew, which included William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont.  In this movie, it is Bendix that has the plate in his skull.  His problem, however, is not that he has only a few months to live, but rather that he gets confused and forgetful. When the three men get off the bus at the beginning of the movie, after having been discharged at the end of the war, Ladd and Beaumont are wearing suits, but Bendix is wearing a leather jacket.  Though there is no reference to their rank in the service, yet we gather that Ladd and Beaumont were officers, while Bendix was an enlisted man.

If so, then once again we have two officers and an enlisted man, once members of a flight crew, and now able to fraternize as civilians.  Only in this case, it is the enlisted man who has the plate in his skull, whereas in Saigon, it was one of the officers.  There was never any reference to the war in Calcutta, but three young American pilots were bound to have flown combat missions.  And given Bendix’s screen persona, it is hard to imagine him being an officer.

Anyway, in Saigon, after Ladd and Pete agree not to tell Mike about his prognosis, Mike shows up at the bar and joins them.  Ladd leaves the table for some reason, and when Mike starts talking about going home, Pete gets Mike to agree to stay so they can cheer Ladd up by showing him a good time. It seems that Ladd was planning on getting married, but then he received a Dear John letter, breaking off their engagement.

And so, whereas Ladd was a misogamist in Calcutta, in Saigon he has been jilted by the woman he wanted to marry.  He got even further in The Blue Dahlia.  In that movie, he is married to a woman named Helen.  When he and his two friends say goodbye after getting off the bus, Beaumont advises Ladd not to just show up at his wife’s hotel room unexpectedly, but that he should phone first.  Ladd says, “Maybe,” but there is no maybe about it.  Only a wittol would do that, someone that might go on to become Ward Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver (1957-63), for instance.  But a real man just walks right in, and if he catches his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto, he can settle matters right then.

Instead, when he gets to Helen’s hotel room, which is more like an apartment, there is a swinging party underway.  He tells the inebriated woman who opens the door that he is looking for his wife. “We have lots of wives here,” she informs him.  A few minutes later, when Howard Da Silva, Helen’s lover, realizes that her husband has returned from the war, he decides to leave the party.  Helen kisses him goodbye, not realizing that Ladd can see her doing so.  “You’re wearing the wrong lipstick, Pal,” Ladd tells Da Silva seconds later as he punches him in the mouth.  Da Silva shows some class. Wiping the spot with a handkerchief where he was kissed and then punched, he says, “You’re right.”

After the guests leave, Ladd and Helen have an argument, during which she tells him, in order to hurt him, that their son died because she had an automobile accident one night while she’d been drinking.  He pulls out his 45, saying he should use it on her, but then tosses it on the couch and leaves.  Somewhat later, she is found murdered with that gun. Naturally, Ladd is suspected by the police, while we start suspecting Bendix.  He met Helen in the hotel bar after Ladd left, and then accepted her invitation to go back to her room, not realizing she was Ladd’s wife.

The original screenplay of The Blue Dahlia, as written by Raymond Chandler, had Bendix be the one who murdered Helen, but the Navy objected to having a veteran be the killer, so the script was changed to make “Dad,” the house detective, be the villain. It’s a better ending anyway. We would have felt sorry for Bendix, and that would have been depressing. Much better to have Bendix be suspected on account of his war injury, and then have the unlikable house detective be the murderer.

As a side note, in Dark City:  The Lost World of Film Noir, Eddie Muller, in discussing The Blue Dahlia, says that in general, there was an unwritten law that a veteran in a movie must never be found guilty of a crime. He overlooked Crossfire (1947), however, in which Robert Ryan plays a veteran who commits a murder.  And this is a peculiar oversight, since Muller discusses this movie in the same book.  I suspect that the difference had to do with the reason for the murder.  In the case of The Blue Dahlia, the Navy did not want a man to commit a murder because of an injury sustained during the war, whereas the Army could accept that Robert Ryan’s character had been evil before he enlisted, and his service during the war had nothing to do with it.

So, whether as a confirmed bachelor, jilted fiancé, or cuckolded husband, Ladd seems to have good reasons for being cynical about women and having a dim view of marriage.  Not that these movies could end on that note, though.  In Calcutta, after sending Russell away with the police, Ladd is comforted by another woman, Marina, from whom he regularly gets a little uncomplicated nookie. We get the sense that he might just marry that girl one of these days.  In The Blue Dahlia, Ladd and Veronica Lake, who was Da Silva’s wife, have fallen in love, so the good spouses from the two marriages will now presumably make one good marriage, and they will live happily ever after. We also figure that Ladd will marry Lake at the end of Saigon too, but only after first offering her that glass of rat poison.

Stage Fright (1950)

There is a recurring plot in crime dramas: an innocent man is suspected of committing a murder, and he tries to evade the police long enough to prove his own innocence. Alfred Hitchcock often used it, as in The 39 Steps. This plot requires us to suspend disbelief, because no one has ever proved his innocence in real life by avoiding the police long enough to find out who really did it and getting evidence to prove it. Stage Fright, also directed by Hitchcock, is a slight variation on this plot. In this case, the suspect’s friend tries to hide him from the police long enough to prove the murder was committed by someone else. Once again, no one in real life has ever managed to do that.

In a really good movie, like The 39 Steps, suspending disbelief is easy, and we are well rewarded for doing so. But in a mediocre film like Stage Fright, we are only partially engaged in the movie, and thus find ourselves comparing what happens with reality, and being a little put off by the difference. Instead of suspending disbelief, we find ourselves simply disbelieving.

Maybe it is just me, but if I were suspected of a crime I did not commit, I would get myself a lawyer and turn myself in to the police. The movie begins with Jonathan (Richard Todd) telling Eve (Jane Wyman) that Charlotte (Marlene Dietrich) came over to his apartment with blood on her dress, saying she killed her husband in self-defense during an argument. He says he agreed to help her establish an alibi, and he goes back to her place to get another dress, and while he is there, tries to make it look like a burglary. However, Charlotte’s maid shows up, sees him, and is able to identify him to the police. Now, we later find out that this story is a lie, but while I was watching it, taking this story seriously, I thought to myself that I would have simply advised Charlotte to get a lawyer and turn herself in to the police. And if she refused, I would have notified the police anyway.

Furthermore, when Jonathan shows up at the theater where Eve, an actress, is in rehearsal, he tells her that the police want him for something he didn’t do, and she agrees to help him escape. She should have told Jonathan to get a lawyer and turn himself in to the police. If he refused to do so, she should have notified the police herself.

She takes Jonathan to her father’s place, where the father agrees to help Eve hide Jonathan. By this time, it will come as no surprise when I say that if I had been Eve’s father, I would have told Jonathan to get a lawyer and turn himself in to the police. If Jonathan and Eve refused to go along with this idea, I would have notified the police anyway.

Later, we find out that it was Jonathan who killed Charlotte’s husband. But that only allows for one more iteration of my general advice. In that case, Charlotte should have gotten a lawyer and gone to the police. Even if she did instigate the murder, as Jonathan claims, she could have denied involvement, and Jonathan would have been the one to go to prison.

Now, it might be argued that if any one of these characters had gone to the police, as I say they should have, there would have been no movie. But any movie that is lackluster enough to allow for disbelief, rather than inspire the willing suspension thereof, is a movie we would have been better off without.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

There seems to be a consensus in Wild Strawberries that Isak (Victor Sjöström) is lonely and isolated because he is cold and aloof. Actually, he does not seem so bad. He is friendly enough with other people, and he appears to be content with his relatively solitary existence. Anyway, Sara (Bibi Andersson), the woman he loved when he was young, married his brother, and somehow that was Isak’s fault, because he was cold and aloof. And Karin (Gertrud Fridh), the woman he ended up being married to, cuckolded him, but that was also Isak’s fault, because he was cold and aloof. He visits his mother, who is cold and aloof. His son Evald is cold and aloof.

I suppose the point is that if Isak’s mother had been warm and friendly, then she would have raised him to be warm and friendly, and then Sara would have married him and they would have lived happily ever after. Or Karin would have been faithful to him and they would have lived happily ever after. And they would have raised their son Evald to be warm and friendly, so that he and his wife Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) could have lived happily ever after. And being warm and friendly, Evald would have been happy to hear that Marianne was pregnant, so that they would have a child of their own, whom they could raise to be warm and friendly.

Having seen the error of his ways, Isak decides that he will henceforth become warm and friendly. Better late than never. So, he asks Agda (Jullan Kindahl), his maid of forty years, if she would like to be on a first-name basis. She rebuffs him.

Sergeant Rutledge (1960)

Throughout American history, there has been prejudice of various sorts, which has been reflected in the movies.  In an effort to make amends for discrimination against one group, however, a movie may end up being oblivious to the prejudice it shows toward another.

In particular, in a movie in which a black man is put on trial for raping a white woman, he always turns out to be innocent at the expense of the woman.  Given all the black men that have been lynched in America for supposedly raping white women, perhaps these movies were thought necessary as a way of condemning this practice.

On the other hand, we have recently been made aware of just how much prejudice there is against women who have been raped, making it difficult for them to get justice. Our belated enlightenment on this issue makes us reevaluate the movies in which white women were to blame in some way whenever black men ended up being tried for raping them.

There are basically three ways in which women are to blame in these movies:  the woman lied; the woman imagined it; the woman was provocative.

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is the most well-known movie in which a white woman lies about being raped by a black man.  Another is Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys (1976).  In this movie, two white women lie about being raped by nine black boys. Now, it might be pointed out that since the movie was based on a true story, we can hardly criticize those who made this movie for making the women to blame for the false accusation.  On the other hand, had the two white women been telling the truth, and were indeed raped by nine black boys, we would never have seen a movie about that story because it would never have been made.  This true story was selected as the basis for a movie precisely because the white women could be blamed for the black boys being tried for rape.

In A Passage to India (1984), it is not an African American who is accused of raping a white woman. But the man is a native of India and has dark skin.  Moreover, the movie takes place when India is still a colony of Great Britain, and the British are prejudiced against the natives.  So, it’s close enough.  In this movie, the woman becomes hysterical, owing to repressed sexual urges on her part, and imagines that she was raped so vividly that she believes it actually happened.

Sergeant Rutledge (1960) falls into the third category, in which, unlike in the first two categories, where no rape actually occurs, in this movie, a woman really is raped. Because she is also murdered, she is not the one that accuses a black man. Nevertheless, she is still at fault for being raped because she was asking for it.

The movie is set in Arizona in 1881.  Much of the story is told by witnesses testifying during a court martial. One of those witnesses is Mary Beecher (Constance Towers), who comes across as a strong, independent woman, who also serves as the love interest for Lieutenant Tom Cantrell (Jeffrey Hunter).  As depicted in a flashback during her testimony, we see that Mary has been left alone at a train station in the middle of the night.  She discovers that the man running the station is dead, an arrow sticking out of his chest.  As she runs out of the station, Sergeant Braxton Rutledge (Woody Strode) grabs her and puts his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming. Although Mary is not the woman in this movie that is raped, the idea of a white woman being raped by a black man is suggested by this scene, and that is certainly what Mary thinks is about to happen to her.  He explains to her that she mustn’t scream because there are Apaches nearby.  He hands her a revolver, saying she is a Western woman, implying competence with a gun, and that she will need it because the Apaches will show her no mercy. This too suggests the possibility of rape by men that are not white. Minutes later, when a couple of Apaches attack, she shoots one of them before he can kill Rutledge.

As we later find out, Lucy Dabney, a young white girl, has been beaten, raped, and strangled. Rutledge, a first sergeant in a colored regiment of the United States Cavalry, accidentally came upon her dead, naked body.  As he covered her with a blanket, her father, Major Dabney, Rutledge’s commanding officer, entered the room, and, believing Rutledge to be attacking Lucy, pulled out his pistol and shot him, causing a minor wound.  In self-defense, Rutledge shot Major Dabney in return, killing him. Realizing he would be blamed for Lucy’s rape and murder, as well as for killing her father, he decided to desert.  That is why he happens to be at the station in the middle of the night.

Most of the women we see in this movie are the officers’ wives, led by Mrs. Fosgate (Billie Burke), wife of Colonel Fosgate (Willis Bouchey), who presides over the trial.  The women are a bunch of simpleminded biddies, whose purpose in life is to be scandalized by the shameless behavior of others, and who are obviously overprotected by their husbands. No, I take that back.  These women are so addled and confused that they need protecting.  They seem to be of a totally different species than Mary.  We cannot imagine Rutledge handing Mrs. Fosgate a revolver, saying she is a Western woman, and expecting her to kill an Apache, if need be.

During another flashback, representing Mrs. Fosgate’s testimony, we find that one of the things that met with the disapproval of these women was the behavior of Lucy. The women chastised her for riding a horse astride. But Lucy said, in front of Chandler Hubble, who we eventually find out is the one that actually raped and strangled her, that as long as she says her prayers and behaves herself, her father doesn’t care if she rides around like Lady Godiva. It is also worked into the conversation that her mother is dead, which explains why she does not behave with the proper sense of decorum. And those women also express misgivings about how friendly Lucy is with Rutledge, which is just one of the ways the movie lets us know that white folks regard black men as being a threat to white women.

The soldiers of the colored regiment are intelligent, brave, and of good moral character.  In praising this movie for how it portrayed African Americans, critics fail to notice, or prefer to overlook, just how demeaning this movie is in its portrayal of women.  And while on the subject, we never see the wives of any of the black soldiers. We have to wonder, if there had been black women in this movie, would they too have been simpleminded biddies?  Alternatively, since this movie is at pains to present a positive portrayal of African Americans, would the black women have been depicted as fair-minded and intelligent, and thus superior to the white women?  This movie escapes the horns of that dilemma by not having any black women in the movie at all.

Toward the end of the trial, Cantrell, whose job it is to defend Rutledge, beats a confession out of Hubble while he is on the witness stand, forcing him to admit that he was the one that raped Lucy. But while the blame has shifted from Rutledge to Hubble, the movie qualifies that blame by portraying Hubble as having acted under a sexual compulsion, triggered by Lucy’s behavior.  He pleas for understanding:

Don’t you understand?  She…, the way she walked!  The way her body moved. She drove me crazy! I had to have her!  I had to! I had to!  You know I had to!  God help me! God, help me!

You see, what with Lucy having her legs spread-eagled when she rode a horse and putting the image into his head of her being naked on that horse, well, it was just too much for him, especially since his wife is deceased, thereby depriving him of a normal sexual outlet.  The point seems to be that it is up to women to comport themselves in such a way as to not unleash the demon in men such as Hubble.  Of course, we accept this only because Hubble is white.  It would be unthinkable to have it turn out that Rutledge, a black man, had such a strong desire for Lucy that he just couldn’t help himself.

And so, just as Rutledge, a black man, had to be found innocent of raping and killing Lucy, so too was it felt necessary to make excuses for Hubble, a white man, who actually did what Rutledge had been accused of. Toward that end, those that wrote and directed this movie showed no hesitation in blaming Lucy for what happened to her.

Being a relic of its time, there will never be a remake of this movie.  It was praised back then, and to some extent still is, not for its entertainment value, which is minimal, but for having the correct moral posture regarding African Americans.  This was not entirely new in 1960, but is now something that has been routine in movies for decades, so a remake would serve no useful function.

But let us imagine a remake anyway.  There would have to be a complete reworking of the way women are portrayed.  In this imaginary remake, the officers’ wives are intelligent, and in many ways wiser than their husbands, to whom they give sound advice.  They are shown to have doubts as to Rutledge’s guilt, whereas most of the white men are prejudiced against him.  Because the white women are portrayed in a positive manner, it is safe to have black women in the movie too, the wives of the black soldiers, and they too are shown to be just as intelligent as the white women.

Lucy’s mother is still be alive and has raised her properly.  Lucy is just an innocent young girl who never dresses, talks, or acts in a provocative way.

As for Hubble, his wife is still alive, and she is an attractive woman, thus providing him with a normal sexual outlet.  Nevertheless, he rapes and murders Lucy simply because he feels like it, not acting under a compulsion, but of his own free will.  Such men exist in the world and always will.  The fact that Hubble is a white male means it is perfectly safe to make him an unregenerate villain. It would have been safe to make Hubble such a villain in 1960 too, but those making the original movie had such disregard for women that they preferred to apologize for him at the expense of the rape victim.

By making the updated version this way, the black man accused of raping a white woman could be shown to be innocent of the charge without making it be the woman’s fault, which would be more in keeping with twenty-first century sensitivities.

Rock Around the Clock (1956)

In this movie, a lifeless and somewhat ridiculous plot acts as a frame story to showcase some rock-and-roll bands when that kind of music was becoming popular in the 1950s. Young people in their rebellious stage like to shock their elders, so naturally we have a scene in which Bill Haley and the Comets perform at a prestigious and very proper girls’ school, which scandalizes the matronly chaperones. The Comets wear suits and are clean-cut, singing songs without suggestive lyrics, but no matter, because the beat alone is indecent. So the movie has it both ways, allowing teenagers to enjoy the fantasy of shocking their elders, while the real elders watching the movie in the theaters would be reassured that rock and roll was quite harmless.

Part of the plot of this movie is that dancing is on its way out, by which is meant ballroom dancing. But the dancing done by teenagers to rock and roll is alive and well. It is basically jitterbug (also known as swing, boogie-woogie, and the bop). In a sense, however, this died too. Once the twist became popular in the early 1960s, partner dancing, in which couples make contact with each other, pretty much came to an end, to be replaced by various forms of free style, in which couples never touch each other. To see partner dancing any more, other than for slow songs, you either have to go to a country-western nightclub or to a dance studio where ballroom dancing still lingers on.

Partner dancing in the movies is one of two kinds: either the dancers are professionals, or they are just barely able to shuffle around the dance floor. The reality would be somewhere in between, with amateurs doing a fairly decent job of cutting a rug. In this movie, the brother and sister who dance together are obviously professionals. They become part of the act with the Comets, the idea being that they will show teenagers at the performances how to dance to rock and roll, to break the ice and get others on the dance floor. Of course, all those supposedly novice teenagers who venture onto the dance floor are professional dancers themselves. In fact, having that brother-and-sister team dance like that in real life would intimidate ordinary would-be dancers, making it less likely for them to get out on the floor.

Unfortunately, most of the songs performed in this movie are not that good, and in several cases, no one dances at all, usually because the beat is too fast, even for professionals. There are a couple of good numbers from the Comets and a couple from the Platters. The rest are mediocre, which, when combined with the boring plot, makes the movie a disappointment.

Repulsion (1965)

In Repulsion, a movie written and directed by Roman Polanski, Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is a woman with some kind of psychological problem concerning sex. She lives with her sister, whose sexual relations with her lover disturb Carol. Carol is very much upset that her sister is going on a two-week vacation. During that vacation, Carol descends into madness. A man who has been harassing her and stalking her breaks into her apartment because he just had to see her. She bludgeons him to death. Then the landlord stops by to get the rent and decides to rape her as long as he is there. She slices him up with a razor and he bleeds to death. Then her sister returns to find the corpses and a catatonic Carol. In the very last scene, we see a photograph, previously alluded to from a distance, of her family taken years ago. In it, we see everyone smiling and looking at the camera, except for a pre-adolescent Carol, who is looking with dread at a man to her left, presumably her father. In real life, such a picture would mean nothing, but its emphasis in the movie after what we have seen tells us that she was molested as a child, which further explains why she was so upset that her sister was going away. As a child, she would have been safe from her father as long as her sister was around.

The idea that Polanski, having made this movie illustrating the terrible consequences of child molestation, would then go on to molest a child himself is ghastly. Having made such a movie, he doubtlessly had thought the matter through. For him to molest a thirteen-year-old girl when he believed that such an act could produce consequences like those in this movie is especially disturbing.

Re-Animator (1985)

There are two mad scientists at Miskatonic University, and that is one too many.  First, there is Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), a brain surgeon and a member of the faculty, who is motivated by sex, fame, and power.  The principal goal of his research is the location of the will in the brain.

The other mad scientist is Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs), a medical student. He cares nothing about women or fame, being single-mindedly dedicated to conquering death.  Toward that end, he has developed a reagent, a green, glowing liquid with powers of reanimation, capable of bring the dead back to life. Hence, he is the title character in Re-Animator, the movie loosely based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft. West is so cold and devoid of feeling that he is indifferent to the pain he causes when he reanimates the dead, supposing himself to be doing them a favor.  Throughout the movie, when West injects his reagent into a corpse or a dead cat, he brings them back to life all right, but they are screaming in agony.  This Grand Guignol masterpiece is replete with hilarious scenes of horror and gore.  I especially liked the one where Hill inserts a cue tip deep into the brain of a cadaver.  Perhaps he was hoping to find some will-residue on the cue tip when he pulled it back out.

West is openly contemptuous of Hill, whose intellect he regards as inferior to his own. Having previously accused him of plagiarism, he says to him, right in front of the other students in Hill’s class, “You should have stolen more of Dr. Gruber’s ideas.  Then at least you’d have ideas.”

Hill finds out about West’s reagent and tries to coerce West into letting Hill get credit for it. While Hill’s back is turned, West whacks him in the head with a shovel and then uses that shovel to chop his head off. He places the head in a bowl, but it keeps falling over.  Off to one side, there is a paper spike.  West puts that in the bowl and jams Hill’s head down on it, making it stand upright.  Ah, that’s much better!

He reanimates the separated head and body, all in the name of scientific research, of course. The body knocks West out while he is examining the head, and then it picks up the head and the bowl it is in, steals all of West’s reagent, and leaves. After kidnapping Dean Halsey’s daughter, Megan (Barbara Crampton), with whom Hill is obsessed, he has her stripped naked and strapped to a table. Then Hill’s head lasciviously watches as his headless body feels her up.  After that, Hill’s body holds Hill’s severed head and moves it around so that he can violate Megan with his tongue.  This scene of ludicrous love is interrupted when West shows up, leading to a final struggle between the two mad scientists, with Hill in control of reanimated corpses from the morgue.

During the final struggle, West overdoses Hill’s body with two syringes full of reagent.  In response, the intestines of Hill’s body wrap around West, dragging him to his doom.  Unfortunately, Megan is also killed in the chaos.  Dan (Bruce Abbott), another medical student, who is in love with her, rushes her to the emergency room.  Standard methods are employed to revive her, but all fail.  Dan looks at Megan, brings his lips to hers, and tenderly kisses her.  For a moment, we think that she will be revived in a fairy-tale way, like Sleeping Beauty.  But no, she’s still dead.  With grim determination, Dan picks up a syringe and fills it with the reagent.  He injects it into her brain.  Darkness closes around.  And then we hear her scream.

There are many versions of this movie.  Usually, a director’s cut has more than was shown theatrically, but not so here, where the director’s cut resulted in many scenes being deleted that should have been left in. First of all, these include scenes that make it clear that Hill has mesmeric powers. It is fitting that the man whose research focuses on the location of the will in the brain should have the power to control the will of others. More importantly, it helps us understand why Hill has so much influence over Dean Halsey, Megan, and even West, though only briefly; we understand how he can control his own body with his severed head; and we understand how he can control the corpses he has reanimated in the morgue. Without these scenes of mesmerism, we don’t fully understand how he can do these things.

Second, the deleted scenes make for a smoother plot.  For example, Hill is jealous of Dan because he is Megan’s boyfriend.  In the director’s cut, when West tells Dan that Hill wanted to make him “disappear,” we wonder if West is just making that up; in a deleted scene, we see Hill telling West that Dan will be made to disappear.

Third, several of the deleted scenes further develop West’s character. Both in his physical appearance and his manner, he reminds me of Dean Stockwell’s portrayal of Judd in Compulsion (1959). Judd, of course, was that movie’s version of Leopold in the notorious Loeb and Leopold case, in which two psychopathic geniuses from wealthy families decide to commit the perfect crime in order to prove they are Nietzschean supermen. Without seeing the deleted scenes, I might not have made that connection.  It may be that the director, Stuart Gordon, never intended such a connection, but he should have, because it fits perfectly.

Fourth, there is a deleted scene where West is discussing with Dan what they are going to do about Dr. Hill. West seems to be bothered in some way, and he lurches toward his room. When Dan goes to see what West is doing, he finds him with a syringe and a bottle of reagent, about to mainline himself. West assures him it is just a weak solution, only enough to keep the brain sharp, so he won’t have to sleep. Dan helps his shoot up, after which West is rejuvenated, in complete command of every faculty, and ready to make a plan.

Gordon said he deleted these scenes because he felt that they slowed down the pacing, and that is a shame. The scenes are included in the DVD, and it is worth making the effort to watch them. Not every deleted scene should have been kept in, of course. The dream sequence, in particular, does not belong in the movie, and its deletion was appropriate.  Supposedly, there is a version called the “integral cut” that puts the deleted scenes back in.  That sounds great, but as I have not seen it, I cannot vouch for it.

Rancho Deluxe (1975)

In the late sixties and early seventies, the anti-establishment feelings engendered by opposition to the Vietnam War resulted in a lot of movies that equated crime with freedom. Somehow, those who broke the law and flouted convention were better than those who obeyed the law, held down regular jobs, and led respectable lives. Rancho Deluxe is clearly in that mold.

In particular, Jack (Jeff Bridges) and Cecil (Sam Waterston) are small-time cattle rustlers, who kill a cow every now and then and sell the meat. John Brown (Clifton James) owns the cattle and wants to catch whoever is stealing them. When Jack and Cecil steal Brown’s prize bull and ransom him for a great deal of money, they begin to think about making a bigger haul.

Meanwhile, Curt (Harry Dean Stanton) and Burt (Richard Bright), ranch hands who work for Brown, figure out that Jack and Cecil are the rustlers. Instead of telling their boss, they end up agreeing to work with Jack and Cecil to make a big score. And while this is going on, Brown hires Henry (Slim Pickens), a senile old detective who can hardly walk, to solve the crime. He is so feeble he has to be helped by his niece Laura (Charlene Dallas), who is an innocent do-gooder. At least, so it appears. In reality, Henry is neither senile nor crippled, and Laura is not his niece, but his partner. Henry knows that a big-time heist is always an inside job, and he arranges to have Laura seduce Curt and get the information from him about the caper. They foil the thieves, who are sent off to prison.

But as I said, this movie was made back when criminals were romanticized as free spirits. Consequently, it would not do to send them to a real prison. Instead, they are sent to a ranch penitentiary, where they ride the range herding cattle for the state of Montana, so it really does not seem like punishment at all, but just another way of being free.

Jaws (1975) and Poltergeist (1982)

In producing the movie Poltergeist, Steven Spielberg employed the structure that worked for him in Jaws. In the latter movie, there is an Everyman, Sheriff Brody (Roy Scheider), and his family, corresponding to Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams) and her family in the former. The shark is a monstrous creature terrorizing Amity Island just as the demons terrorize the Freeling household. In Jaws, we have the mayor who lets the expected revenue from tourism jeopardize the safety of those who plan to swim in the ocean, while in Poltergeist, Steve Freeling’s boss jeopardizes the safety of the Freeling house and the entire neighborhood in an effort to save money by not moving the bodies of a cemetery before building houses on top of them.

Once the shark proves to be too menacing to ignore, a scientist, Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), is called in from the Oceanographic Institute, just as three parapsychologists are called in to investigate the weird happenings in the Freeling house (one gets the feeling they inspired the movie Ghostbusters (1984)). But science alone cannot do the job. Therefore, someone with personal, practical experience is needed. In Jaws, this takes the form of Quint (Robert Shaw), an old salt who has been a sailor all his life and has dealt with sharks many times. In Poltergeist, we have Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein), a woman with psychic powers, who knows how the other world operates.

Ultimately, however, it is Everyman Brody who kills the shark, when science and practical experience fail, just as Diane must save her children herself after the parapsychologists and the psychic have failed to completely do the job.

Unfortunately, the final attack by the demons after everyone thinks it is safe is a little too much. It would be like having the shark make one more attack after Brody thought he had finally killed it.

Phantom Lady (1944)

Phantom Lady has one of the most contrived and illogical plots in cinematic history. Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis) and his wife have an argument, and he leaves their apartment and goes to a bar. Shortly after, his wife is strangled by Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone), with whom she was having an affair. Because there is no evidence connecting him with her murder, the police never suspect him, and so all he has to do is take the trip to Brazil as he already planned to.

But no! He decides that he must make sure that Henderson is suspected of the crime. So, he only pretends to get on the ship going to Brazil so that he can follow Henderson around (he catches up with the ship later by taking a plane to Havana). He sees that Henderson meets a woman (Fay Helm) in a bar, whom he persuades to go to a show with him, inasmuch as he already has tickets. She agrees, and they take a cab. They sit right up front, and it turns out that she is wearing the same unusual hat worn by the star of the show, Miss Montiero (Aurora Miranda). The drummer (Elisha Cook Jr.) takes a fancy to the woman with Henderson and flirts with her.

So, Marlow figures he must bribe the bartender, the cabdriver, and the drummer to say they never saw the woman, thereby depriving Henderson of his alibi. Marlow does not have to bribe Miss Montiero, because her vanity won’t let her admit that someone in the audience wore the same hat that she did, which she apparently disposed of. Of course, other women in the show might have remembered Miss Montiero’s hat, and other members of the band might have noticed the woman in the front row with the hat, but Marlow does not bother to bribe any of them.

As a result, the bartender says he saw Henderson at the bar, but not the woman; and the cabdriver says he picked up Henderson and drove him to the show, but there was no woman with him. And so, without an alibi, Henderson is convicted of murder on the flimsiest of circumstantial cases and sentenced to be executed. However, no one in the movie seems to realize that the bartender and cabdriver have provided Henderson with an alibi anyway. Whether he had a woman with him is irrelevant. For that matter, if Marlow was going to bribe these characters, he should have told them to deny seeing Henderson rather than deny seeing the woman with him. Had he done that, then the woman would be the only one who could provide Henderson with an alibi, and the frantic search for her by Carol “Kansas” Richman (Ella Raines), Henderson’s secretary, would have made sense.

It gets worse. Although there are only a few weeks until Henderson will be executed, Marlow returns from Brazil and decides to murder the drummer when he sees Carol trying to get information out of him. Even so, there still would be no evidence connecting him with that murder either, except that he picks up Carol’s purse, which she left behind when the drummer became angry, and puts it in a drawer in his apartment.

These do not exhaust the absurdities in this movie, which pile up on top of the ones already discussed, but there is no point in beating a dead horse. And because we immediately become aware of these absurdities as they unfold, watching the movie can be an exasperating experience.