Sure, it’s an unrelieved woman’s movie, a weeper, a sentimental three-hankie film, but there’s no arguing that the storyline of Dark Victory, which initially made it to the movie screen in 1939, starring Warner Bros.’ queen Bette Davis, is riveting.  It’s playing on Friday, August 23rd, at 11:15am, and if you haven’t seen Bette Davis facing Death in her own hardly inimitable fashion, well, it’s a must-see.  It would be a dandy film for a hypochondriac to watch, too, if you happen to be so inclined.

Dark Victory first surfaced as a play written by Bertram Bloch.  It debuted on Broadway in early 1934 and ran for 51 performances; the role of the female lead character, Judith Traherne, was originated by the legendary Talullah Bankhead, a fiery actress who would never have the same impact in Hollywood that she had enjoyed onstage.  Of course, when Hollywood was trolling Broadway theater for movie-adaptable properties, this melodramatic play stood out.  Four years after it debuted on Broadway, Warners filmed Dark Victory with Bette Davis taking the Bankhead role, with suave George Brent as her leading man, in the role of her physician.

The plot, in a nutshell, is spoiled heiress gets humbled when she is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, but with her impending death finds true happiness at last with her doctor, though not for long.  A love story played out against a ticking clock, Dark Victory appeals to folks who love romantic movies, people who love a tragedy, and those of us who enjoy the bittersweet notion of fulfillment with a built-in expiration date.  We all know that nobody gets out of life alive, but take this inescapable fact, combine it with a story of a woman finding herself just as she is about to check out, and you’ve got the perfect Bette Davis movie.  Adding a little spice and nuance to the onscreen romance of Davis and Brent is the fact that they were involved in a real-life love affair at the time, too.

Dark Victory co-starred Humphrey Bogart – with an Irish accent – as one of Traherne’s stable boys who is her confidante, Ronald Reagan as one of her rich boy toys, and actress Geraldine Page as her best friend.  My favorite scenes – naturally – are the death scene and those immediately preceding it.; though perhaps medically far-too-tidy and unlikely, Davis is touching and serene, stopping to give a final pat to her beloved dogs, as she ascends the stairway for the last time.  I wouldn’t call it sad, particularly, but it is peaceful and sublime, her end, and Davis does a good job.

A great story bears repeating, so in 1963 actress Susan Hayward stepped into the shoes of the unhappy doomed heiress, only the movie was called Stolen Hours this time.  (Actually, Dark Victory had been adapted for TV several times during the 1950s, too).  Playing opposite Susan Hayward was British actor Michael Craig (Mysterious Island), with the character of the socialite’s best friend changed into her sister, played by Diane Baker.  This version took place in an English setting, with a background of car racing rather than horses, but it’s overall nicely done.  Same general idea, same falling in love, same walk up the stairway, only this time Susan Hayward is accompanied by a young boy, a friend, who tenderly tucks her under the coverlet and leaves her to her end.  It’s nicely done, just as with Davis’ end scene.

Though it hasn’t (to my knowledge) aired on TV in a very long time, actress Elizabeth Montgomery made the most recent Dark Victory in 1976, for NBC, in a three-hour movie-for-television.  In keeping with the times, Montgomery’s Katherine Merrill was a high-powered TV producer instead of a spoiled rich girl, and although it went on for a lot longer, the story was basically the same.  The female confidante was back to a friend, played by Michele Lee, and the doctor who both diagnoses and marries his patient was Anthony Hopkins, who had made a splash on U.S. a few years before with his role in the groundbreaking miniseries QB VII. 

Looks to me like Dark Victory is about due for a remake, wouldn’t you say?  

When I first read the title of Medusa’s Monday post, I thought OMG she’s happened upon the same topic as me, and the fact that she too was inspired by a movie from Rosalind Russell’s Summer Under the Stars night made it doubly ironic. However, after I changed the less-than-apt initial title of my article from "Sister Acts" to the above, I hope that you’ll find this post to be as interesting as it is different.

While watching the TCM premiere of My Sister Eileen (1942) on August 20th, I recalled several other similar comedies and dramas which utilize the much copied (and now cliched) plot of a woman whose (typically younger) sister steals her man or boyfriend. The older sister is usually (if not homely, then) somewhat less attractive than her sibling, and is frequently protective of her (to the point of self-sacrifice) as well. When Henry VIII shed his mistress Mary Boleyn (and his first wife – Queen Catherine) for her younger more comely sister Anne, he probably set the precedent, and the countless films are just examples of art imitating life.  Excluding silents (and about half a dozen other B pictures), I found these:

Several B movies incorporated the cliche in the same way, having the younger sister be a tomboy that’s seemingly uninterested in men until she blossoms (e.g. when she first puts on a dress, like Cinderella) into a beautiful young girl. In the nurse drama Four Girls in White (1939), Florence Rice brings her sister Ann Rutherford along on a voyage that she and her beau Kent Taylor are taking, but he promptly falls for the swimsuit clad Rutherford. Laraine Day is a grease monkey that works on cars, but that doesn’t keep her from attracting Robert Cummings away from her older sister Jean Muir in And One Was Beautiful (1940).

Russell’s titled younger sister (Janet Blair) easily charms every man that visits the cheap New York basement apartment that the two Columbus, Ohio Sherwood sisters find, and appears to be on the verge of inadvertently stealing Brian Aherne’s affections as well, in My Sister Eileen (1942), until the very end of the comedy. Dennis Morgan’s character eventually comes between two different small town sisters (he and Jack Carson had helped them escape from their squalid steel town) – Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie – in the drama The Hard Way (1943), and June Allyson finds herself in the most refined version of the cliched situation in the musical Two Girls and a Sailor (1944), but the mystery man in uniform that she loves (Van Johnson) is so down-to-earth himself that he actually prefers the older less attractive Allyson to her beautiful "man magnet" Deyo sister Gloria DeHaven.

A couple of earlier dramas had explored the protective older sister angle found in Allyson’s character – Norma Shearer wanted to save her younger sister (Maureen O’Sullivan) from the same kind of incestuous advances that she’d suffered from their father (Charles Laughton) in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and working girl Bette Davis wished to keep her virgin sister (Jane Bryan) away from her sordid life and lecherous gangster boss (Eduardo Ciannelli), in Marked Woman (1937). Digressing, another Davis character steals sister Olivia de Havilland’s husband (George Brent) in the drama In This Our Life (1942) and then, playing both parts, Davis steals her twin sister’s husband (Glenn Ford) in A Stolen Life (1946). Though Lauren Bacall’s character has obviously suffered because of her father’s preference for (and tolerance of) her irresponsible younger sister (Martha Vickers) in The Big Sleep (1946), it’s clear that detective Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart, naturally) only has eyes for Bacall.

But older sisters haven’t always been discarded in favor of their more comely younger sisters: for instance, in the comedy Double Wedding (1937), William Powell woes Florence Rice until he meets her older sister Myrna Loy, whom he much prefers (remember that Rice lost Taylor to Rutherford just two years later in Four Girls in White (1939); you’d think she was auditioning to become the female Ralph Bellamy). Katharine Hepburn also flipped the cliche by doing the reverse to her younger sister (Doris Nolan) when she finally won Cary Grant in Holiday (1938); then Grant also found an older Loy preferable to (and more age appropriate than) Shirley Temple in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947). Of course, these are comedies;-)

The period drama Green Dolphin Street (1947) pretty much avoids the cliche altogether by having both daughters (Lana Turner and Donna Reed) be beautiful; then, after they fall in love with the same man (Richard Hart), a mistake akin to a typo leads to his marrying the wrong sister! The man was less attracted to the brainier sister (Turner, believe it or not), and that same dated cliche was the problem for Joyce Reynolds in the B comedy Wallflower (1948); her beau (Robert Hutton) initially preferred her beautiful if dim-witted sister (Janis Page). By the 1950's, little sister Joan Evans had such a crush on older sister Ann Blyth’s would-be fiance (Farley Granger) that she reveals the fact of her adopted sister’s parentage hoping to steal him away from her, in Our Very Own (1950). The Tennessee Williams drama A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) also twisted the standard – Kim Hunter’s older sister Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) causes her husband Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando) to stray and, similarly, Ginger Rogers inadvertently draws unwanted attention from the husband (Steve Cochran) of her baby sister Doris Day in Storm Warning (1951).

I’ll stop here, but feel free to continue the chronology if you’d like.

About 25 years ago I spent some time in Hannover, Germany. As a stranger in a strange land I was often alone and found myself going to the movie theaters a lot. I’d watch anything. All the films were dubbed into German, and you could buy beer along with your movie ticket. What little German I did pick up was mostly from watching movies. Even though I did not know the language, the moving pictures told their own story and I could figure out what was going on, although I’ll admit that sometimes that was just the beer talking. Other times, like while watching Jodorowsky films, no amount of beer was going to help me understand what the heck was going on. Still, as a result of all my time watching dubbed German films I did pick up what the locals call “doof Deutsch” – German that sounds okay phonetically but that stumbles with syntax so badly that most Germans usually think I have a brain injury. My stomping grounds for many brain injuries was Das Apollokino in Hannover Linden, an eclectic calendar film series that mixed in arthouse fare with repertory and some more current and accessible titles. It was about a half-hour tram ride from downtown Hannover.

As I write this article and look it up online I’m thrilled to see that Das Apollokino is not only still around, it’s also been fixed up. When I was there it looked a bit long in the tooth (it’s been around since 1945) and had already gone through its share of calamities, including at least one fire (given the relaxed atmosphere for smoking inside the theater, back in the day, this probably wasn’t so unusual). It appears to be one of the last of its kind still around in Germany and, sure enough, its lineup is as eclectic as ever; a little revival counter-culture here; Easy Rider (1969), the latest Tarantino there; Deathproof (2007), and German films are also well represented with things like the unforgettable documentary Our Daily Bread (2005) and the award-winning The Lives of Others (2006), an so forth.

One of the things that I always found fascinating about the film programming for this German calendar house, during my time there, was the regularity with which spaghetti westerns were shown. Half of my “doof-Deutsch” alone probably comes from repeat screenings of Once Upon a Time in the West (C’era una volt ail West, 1968), Sergio Leone’s classic epic based on a story written by Leone himself alongside Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, and with a script by Sergio Donati. But I didn’t know it under its Italian or English title. I knew this film as Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod, which translates into “Play me the Song of Death.” And, to this day, THAT title is the one that still gives me goosebumps. Looking at all the other options, I have to say that, in my book, it wins – hands down – over all other entries. Huuliharppukostaja… ? C’mon, Finland! You can do better than that! Spain snoozes on the job with Hasta que llego su hora (“Until his time came,” yawn). Most translations just shoot for the equivalent of “It was once a western,” and let me tell you that whether you’re in Hungary (Volt egyszer egy vadnyugat) or the Netherlands (Het Gebeurde in het westen), that’s just not putting a gun to your temple and urging you to take a seat.

For those who have not seen the film, stop reading now, for this is where I feel obliged to put in the requisite spoiler alert. For everyone else…

… the key image that Leone slowly weaves through the film is an indelible one that I could not possibly spoil as it etches itself so thoroughly into the mind. It shows a thin image on the horizon, made hazy by the heat of the desert sun. Charles Bronson’s character, “Harmonica,” keeps thinking of this image throughout the film. He also thinks of himself as a helpless child facing that image as it comes into focus and reveals itself: Frank (Henry Fonda). And that lonesome wail of the harmonica that we’ve heard throughout the film finally makes sense as we see that the child has his older brother on his shoulders, with a noose around his neck that is tied to the bell at the high point of a gateway arch. And that’s when Frank shoves a harmonica in the child’s mouth and say’s “Spiel mir das lied vom Tod.”

Play me the song of Death.

Now THAT’S a title! And it’s ripped directly from the dubbed mouth of Henry Fonda – playing one of the most evil men to ever walk the earth. The actual line that Frank says in the English version when he stuffs the harmonica in the child’s mouth is “Keep your loving brother happy.” That would NOT have been a good title. “Play me the Song of Death,” on the other hand, shares in the gritty feel of something like A Fistful of Dynamite (or dollars, as the case may be). I sometimes wondered if just the power of the title alone is what made the film so popular in Germany, but no. I had a German friend who was quick to point out that you could fit all of Germany into Texas, and that Germans were fascinated with the wide-open spaces and vistas that we North Americans have and take for granted, and that theses vistas also happen to be a staple of widescreen westerns. Think of it as topographical voyeurism. But I also think that other parts of western mythology must have captured their fancy, how else to explain “Old Texas Town?” (“Howdy und herzlich willkommen auf der homepage: http://www.old-texas-town.de/)

One last anecdote: Seven years after seeing Spiel mir das Lied vom Tod one too many times in Germany I decided to watch it again, in English, and programmed it for the campus series I was working for at the time. I was disappointed with the turnout. Unlike the screenings in Hannover, where the house was often packed, this particular show was a bust with only about thirty people in attendance. And I should not have been surprised, but was nonetheless, when the lights came on and the audience got up and started talking about the film – in German. As it turned out, over two-thirds of the audience was composed of exchange students from Germany.

Please forgive the subject header of this post – but there is a thought behind it.

As part of the American Cinematheque ’s annual Fantasy, Sci-Fi & Horror Festival, held at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre and Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre, the British science fiction films Crack in the World (1965) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) were shown as a double bill last Friday night. Quatermass is a childhood favorite, which I first saw under its American release title Five Million Years to Earth; I’ve owned the movie on VHS and currently keep the Anchor Bay DVD close by but it’s still a treat to see this crackling thriller on a big screen. It’s perfectly cast (Andrew Keir, James Donald, Barbara Shelley and Julian Glover, whose death scene brought cheers from the crowd on Friday), snappily written by the late, and literally great Nigel Kneale, and played to the hilt by director Roy Ward Baker. A lesser work but a lot of fun in its own way is Crack in the World, which I hadn’t seen in over twenty years. Dana Andrews plays a brilliant physicist attempting to solve the world’s energy crisis by tapping into the magma at the earth’s core; instead of saving the world, he winds up causing a… well you know. Some dodgy science here but good actors, inventive special effects by Eugene Lourie, and a great popcorn disaster scenario courtesy of peripatetic executive producer Philip Yordan.  Although both movies have abundant charms, the jewels in their respective crowns are their leading ladies. READ MORE

One of the titles in tonight’s salute to actress Rosalind Russell is The Trouble with Angels from 1966, directed by Ida Lupino.  It’s the story of two rebellious teenage girls, played by Hayley Mills and June Harding, who turn a Catholic school upside down as they bedevil the various nuns who teach them.  For many real-life teen girls at the time, this was a popular comedy, even for non- or barely-Catholics.  For me, in the later category, it was one of the movies that fueled my fascination with nuns in the movies.

Though the plotline is filled with exactly the kind of shenanigans you’d expect, the movie is lifted up through nice performances by Russell as the Mother Superior, and a cast full of interesting actresses playing the rest of the sisters, including the always-excellent Mary Wickes, Binnie Barnes, Camilla Sparv and Marge Redmond (who would later play another sister in TV’s The Flying Nun).  A more frantic sequel came around in 1968, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows, with Stella Stevens playing a hep nun who by picture’s end encourages Mother Russell to give up the traditional habit and join the 20th Century.  Nuns as plucky leading characters also pop up when Mary Tyler Moore – the epitome of pluck – starred opposite Elvis Presley in A Change of Habit in 1969, where’s he’s a doctor and she’s a social worker nun working in the inner city.  Despite a premise that sounds laughable, it’s not nearly as bad as it could be, especially as a relic of late 1960s American urban policy. 

Another super-plucky nun is Debbie Reynolds playing The Singing Nun, inspired by the actually eventually quite tragic life of the nun who had the hit song “Dominique” back in the mid-60s.  Is there anything more cutesy than the incessant image of Debbie in her habit, driving around on her little scooter?  Not one of my favorite nuns, that’s for sure.  My tastes ran more to the more adult depictions of nuns, like one movie that I used to watch many times a week when it would play on the Million Dollar Movie – Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison from 1957.  Directed by John Huston, it starred Robert Mitchum as Mr. Allison, a grizzled WW II Marine stranded on an island with Sister Angela, played by the capable and dignified yet never stuffy Deborah Kerr.  In lesser directorial hands and played by average thespians, this might have been unbearable, but these movie veterans manage to rise above the clichés and turn out a subtle tale of adventure and personal discovery.  I haven’t seen this in quite a while and maybe it wouldn’t pack the punch it used to have for me as a kid, but you don’t get better actors than Mitchum and Kerr and I imagine I’d still find the movie fascinating.  (Deborah Kerr received an Academy Award nomination for her role, btw.) 

Deborah Kerr also played a nun years before in the fantastic and imaginative Black Narcissus from 1947.  Directed by the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, this is the tale of a convent high in the Himalayas where the nuns get hot and bothered.  Highly recommended, especially so for its beautiful color photography by Jack Cardiff, this is one of the more complex depictions of nuns without descending into the mad nun genre, of which there are more than a few entries.  (More on them another time, perhaps.) 

My favorite nun movie is, of course, The Nun’s Story starring Audrey Hepburn, from 1959.  Directed by Fred Zinneman, this movie, while as glossy and opulent as you’d expect from a major studio release with a major star, is fascinating, thoughtful, sometimes horrifying, and completely memorable, probably mostly thanks to its tremendous array of great performances, starting with Hepburn’s intelligent Sister Luke.  Peter Finch is dynamic as the cynical doctor who is intrigued by her as they serve together in the Congo, and of course the cast is filled with amazing actresses such as Dame Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Beatrice Straight, Mildred Dunnock, and a small role for Colleen Dewhurst as the Archangel, a female inmate of the insane asylum where Sister Luke is assigned for a time.  This movie has everything: pageantry, a great deal of detail about nun’s getting outfitted and hair cut and all that fascinating stuff, unfortunate and equally fascinating jungle diseases like leprosy, a wonderful depiction of the brilliant and headstrong mind of Sister Luke required to be obedient rather than expedient, some subtle personal attraction between the doctor and Sister Luke, and a couple of fairly violent encounters, including Sister Luke getting viciously attacked by the aforementioned Archangel, and most horribly, a sweet sister gets shockingly murdered by a crazed villager, — bashed in the head — but stays on her feet walking for longer than you can stand.  Yikes.  It’s pretty unforgettable. 

You may have your own nun favorites.  There are so very many movies to choose from, but these are a few from my own memory book.   

While some married movie women cheat on their husbands with other men, and others are bad mothers (or stepmothers) to their children, the truly evil spouses are those who act like a cancer to their man, kicking him when he’d down and failing to provide him with encouragement when he needs it most or vindictively working against him (and even her own better interests) out of spite just to keep him from experiencing the happiness that has eluded her.

One of the first films that comes to mind is the aptly titled drama In Name Only (1939), which is one of Carole Lombard’s best movies despite the fact that it’s not a comedy. Her debonair co-star Cary Grant, also better known for more comedic roles, plays a well-to-do man stuck in a loveless (e.g. name only) marriage to Kay Francis. Grant meets Lombard because she’s renting a house he owns that reminds him of happier times; she’s a beautiful widower who’s also a nice person, so naturally he’s attracted to her. They spend some happy platonic times together with her young child, and Grant realizes what he’s been missing in life. But when Lombard finds out that he’s married, she stops dating him. So he asks his social climbing bore of a wife (Francis) for a divorce, and she’s willing to end their sham until she finds out about Lombard and realizes that her husband might live happily ever after with another woman. She then conspires against the lovebirds while exploiting her victim-hood status with Grant’s parents (Charles Coburn plays his father), entrapping her husband once again. Fortunately, her true character (and Lombard’s) is exposed in time for the requisite Hollywood ending.

Another woman who married for wealth, and its power, without having any real interest in her husband (other than his ability to enable her to procreate) was Regina Giddens (in the Samuel Goldwyn produced The Little Foxes (1941)) – you knew that a Bette Davis character had to make this list, right? Regina ruthlessly fights for everything she can against her brothers, played by Charles Dingle & Carl Benton Reid, and her domineering nature has so weakened her husband (Herbert Marshall) that he has to live elsewhere. When Regina and her brothers need Marshall’s money for their latest scheme, she manipulates his return. Though he’s finally able to resist his wife’s plans, it takes all of his strength. She seizes upon the opportunity to be rid of him by refusing to get his heart medicine, and he dies pleading for her assistance – after collapsing on the stairway – while she’d remained seated in the living room. Regina’s uncharacteristic yet timely passivity helped her to earn the forty-third position on the American Film Institute’s 50 movie villains list.

Goldwyn produced another gem which features the unsupportive wife that prompted me to write this article in the first place. The producer’s greatest achievement was arguably The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture; it’s an essential "coming home" from war (in this case, World War II) picture, #37 on AFI's 100 Greatest Movies list and #11 on AFI's 100 Most Inspiring Movies list, and it was among the twenty-five inaugural inductees into the National Film Registry in 1989. Struggling with assimilation back into society after being an officer and bombardier in the Air Force, Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) finds that his wife (Virginia Mayo) had gotten on fine without him during his absence (to the point that she’s not exactly excited about his return). In fact, now that he’s no longer in uniform, she’s not really attracted to him anymore (they’d married hastily before he’d left), feels no real loyalty to him, and derides his unsuccessful efforts to find a substantial job outside of the service.

For many, the poster child character for this topic would be Elizabeth Taylor’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966); her professor husband George (Richard Burton) made the mistake of marrying the daughter of the man (the president of the university) that employs him, an oft repeated mistake by men in movies (and out?). Therefore, she runs roughshod over his fragile ego and he drinks to assuage his pain and self-loathing; the booze also gives him the courage to fight back, and the couple quarrels incessantly during this emotional draining drama. Taylor’s performance earned her a second Oscar (for the last of five Best Actress nominations).

I think I’ll save Barbara Stanwyck’s wicked wife characters for a possible future article because she played so many heartless, self-centered, power hungry women that emasculated (or even killed) their husbands for money, or her own malevolent satisfaction, in films from Double Indemnity (1944) and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) to Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) and Clash By Night (1952).

After recently watching I SHOT JESSE JAMES, which is new on DVD from Criterion’s Eclipse label courtesy of Kit Parker Films, I couldn’t get a certain scene out of my head. As you may know, this 1949 film is Samuel Fuller’s directorial debut about Robert Ford, the “dirty little coward” who assassinated the frontier legend in 1882 and the scene that pops out occurs not long after Jesse is dead and buried. Ford (played by John Ireland) begins performing re-enactments of the event on stages for money as he travels around capitalizing on his notoriety. At first I thought this was just a fantasy from Fuller’s fevered, pulp fiction imagination but after doing some research it appears to be true. Robert Ford really did take his act on the road, billing it as “Outlaws of Missouri,” and night after night before paying audiences he would act out that fateful day when he shot Jesse James (photo of the real outlaw awaiting burial below).   READ MORE

Like an alcoholic prone to binging, I go through a Carnival of Souls jag every couple of years. This time around it was sparked by the assignment of having to write about the 1962 movie for the TCM Underground program of cult films and genre classics that runs on Friday nights. I meant to just throw the DVD on so I could capture some of its dialogue, not really watch it, just listen in… but I got hooked. Again. Visually and aurally, Carnival of Souls commands my attention every time, it mesmerizes me, it stops me cold. I’ve been living with its magic for almost 20 years.

I saw the movie for the first time when it was revived in 1989 and played the midnight show circuit. It may even have been my first midnight movie ever. My roommate and I hunkered down in our seats at The Angelika in lower Manhattan and let this fever dream wash over us. (We were fortunate to have a quiet audience that night and not one desperate to assert its superiority by busting a gut over every clumsily-delivered line.) I can’t actually remember anyone else in the cinema that night. It was… perfect. I’ve owned Carnival of Souls on video cassette, I have the 2-disc Criterion collector’s edition DVD (which I reviewed for Video Watchdog in 2000), I have Gene Moore’s organ score (with dialogue!) on CD and the graphic novel director Herk Harvey licensed in 1990.

Todd Camp’s pen and ink drawings are to me reminiscent of R. Crumb and also, in their black and white starkness, of those Jack Chick religious comic books we always seemed to find wedged under our windshield wipers back in the 1970s. Even that seems oddly appropriate, as Carnival of Souls has a definite damned-soul-goes-to-Hell vibe to it. Even though Herk Harvey had never made and would never make another feature film a lot of this so-called B-grade movie seems technically assured and even impressive. Harvey was a busy educational and industrial filmmaker in the Lawrence, Kansas area circa 1961 (coincidentally, just as I was spending my first days on earth) and Carnival carries a bit of the stiffness, the awkwardness, and the tone deaf line readings of industrial films. But rather than making the film seem cheap and amateurish, these qualities give it the patina of a dream in which seemingly mundane words and sentences have a suspiciously symbolic weight.

As much as I admire Carnival of Souls visually, the big attraction to me is the lead performance of Candace Hilligoss. A Copacabana dancer at the time she was cast, the Huron, South Dakota native had never acted before on film. Above average height for a woman, with features that meld strong male and female attributes, Candace Hilligoss is strangely attractive, just offbeat enough to be convincing as someone out of time and out of place and yet with an innate vulnerability that makes her sympathetic. And there’s something about the actress’ essential rarity (she made only one other feature after Carnival before retiring to raise a family and support her then-husband, actor Nicholas Coster) that makes the character of Mary Henry so compelling. I can’t take my eyes off of her. And when she mutters the line, “I don’t belong in the world,” she echoes Boris Karloff’s immortal "We belong dead" from Bride of Frankenstein.

I've always wanted to save Mary Henry from her fate and prove to her that she does belong in this world… and for 20 straight years I've failed her, again and again. But there's always next time. If Carnival of Souls has shown me nothing else, it's shown me there's always a next time.

Carnival of Souls plays on TCM on October 26^th at 2am Eastern Time, 11pm Pacific Time. Be there… and be scared.

I firmly and enthusiastically believe that the internet is a wonderful time-waster, to wit, the hours I spent today happily watching oodles of fascinating clips on YouTube.  Mega-corporation party-pooper grumbling notwithstanding, YouTube is a wonderful way for enthusiasts to share video that is simply unavailable anywhere else.  Period.  For lovers of musicals, and dance and all things show biz, it’s a miracle.

The only problem with YouTubing is that you can get so lost clicking from one interesting vid to another that you forget what you went in search of in the first place – and isn’t that just what makes it so fantastic?  I can’t even remember what I was looking for today, but came upon a great clip from a 1985 TV special Night of 100 Stars, an elaborate dance number called “Pair of Shoes” which features a slew of celebrity dancers strutting their stuff in a nice long sequence.  Some of the movie star-type names appearing are Donald O’ Connor, Ginger Rogers, Van Johnson, Jane Powell, and Gwen Verdon, as well as loads of other names that you will recognize.  One of the most electrifying moments comes when actor Christopher Walken dances out and tears up the stage with his particular brand of loose-limbed, exuberant hoofing. 

Maybe he’s no better than other dancers (he is, though), but boy, does he have style.  And it’s perhaps all the more thrilling for its unexpectedness.  Those of us who loved his performance in 1981’s Pennies from Heaven as a high-kicking lothario already knew he was a talented dancer, but it’s still always a total treat to watch this serious and gifted actor make with the syncopation.  A few years ago he was mesmerizing starring in and dancing through Fatboy Slim’s award-winning Spike Jonze-directed music video “Weapon of Choice.”  Walken, who’s currently starring in the screen version of the musical Hairspray, is also a multi-appearance host of Saturday Night Live, and spoofed his dancing reputation in this appearance.

Tap dancing is nothing new in the movies, though you don’t see much of it these days.  Probably a lot of us have our favorite film tap routines; one of mine is certainly Fred Astaire’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from Blue Skies, a swell, fiercely-executed number that still impresses.  And I do love Gene Kelly tapping in skates in It’s Always Fair Weather, Gene, Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd tapping with trash can lids from the same movie, and so many more.  Tap does seem to be undergoing a bit of a popular renaissance, and you can find several “how to” videos available which might help turn you into your very own favorite tap dancer.  I have a pair of tap shoes in my closest from a mostly unsuccessful attempt to learn back in the 1980s, but it’s a testament to my continuing wish to someday take it up again that they remain safe and secure, waiting to be called into duty again.  After watching great tapping in movies, on the internet, or perhaps even live, you might be bit by the tap bug, too.  I hope so!