After starring in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Joseph Cotten was so creeped out by his own portrayal of "The Merry Widow Killer" that he decamped to the anonymity of his sister's Frederick, Maryland apartment, where he spent an idle summer sunbathing in a backyard hammock while the local girls gawked, starstruck.

No wonder the genteel actor gave himself the willies… his predatory Uncle Charlie is one of cinema's most unforgettable serial killers. The character hints at his coldblooded worldview in this scene of bland dinner table chatter that turns unexpectedly chilly as the murderer's innocent namesake niece (Teresa Wright) sees her idol in a cold new light.

UNCLE CHARLIE: Women keep busy in towns like this. The cities are different. The cities are full of women… middle-aged widows, husbands dead, husbands who've spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women?

UNCLE CHARLIE: You see them in the hotels, the best hotels, every day by the thousands… drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night, smelling of money, proud of their jewelry but of nothing else. Horrible, faded, fat, greedy women…

YOUNG CHARLIE: They're alive… they're human beings.

UNCLE CHARLIE: Are they? Are they, Charlie?

UNCLE CHARLIE: Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?

The question goes unanswered as comic relief character Hume Cronyn makes a tangent shattering entrance, allowing Uncle Charlie's heartless harangue to hang in the air like so much acrid cigar smoke. Charles Oakley may be Joseph Cotten's finest hour (and forty-eight minutes). Unlike such modern masters of mayhem as The Hitcher and Hannibal Lecter, Charlie doesn't possess superhuman strength or a freakishly high IQ. He's an average situational killer, more on par with Reginald Christie (played by Richard Attenborough in 10 Rillington Place) or Henry (played by Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer). His crimes depend on a proper alignment of common circumstance necessary to key his rage via an essential cynicism ("Do you know that if you ripped the fronts off houses you'd find swine?") not so different from the cruel comments you hear from people every day – especially on the Internet. And that makes him far more frightening than a villain who just wants to eat your face. Charlie Oakley would never eat your face. He'd consider that rude.

Although it may at first bring back more memories of Charo than of classic cinema, the long-running television series The Love Boat did a great service to Hollywood during its ten plus years on the air starting in 1977.  Along with spurring a resurgence of interest in cruise vacations — good for the Princess Line, at least — The Love Boat provided frequent acting gigs for some of the favorite performers from the movies’ golden age.

Created by legendary TV producer Aaron Spelling (Charlie’s Angels, Starsky and Hutch, Fantasy Island, Dynasty and many others), The Love Boat was a lush and lightweight hour of romance — requited and un — where the small core group of regular cast members were joined every week by a fistful or two of guest stars playing the various passengers who came aboard the Pacific Princess.  Familiar faces were the norm, drawn from both television and many times from the world of old movies.  Former matinee idols joined newly minted TV faces to bring the frothy tales to life.  Remember that this was still the time when classic movies were being rediscovered — MGM’s That’s Entertainment look back at the glory days of musicals had come out in 1974 — and many of the talented stars who had appeared in those films were still alive and high-kicking.

Looking over the list of guest stars for The Love Boat is like perusing a Who’s Who of Hollywood.  Even just unspooled alphabetically, the collection of classic big screen performers who did time on TLB is impressive:  Eddie Albert, June Allyson, Don Ameche, Eve Arden, Lew Ayres, Billy Barty, Ralph Bellamy, Anne Baxter, Polly Bergen, Milton Berle, Vivian Blaine, Joan Blondell, Ray Bolger, Ernest Borgnine, Rossano Brazzi, Raymond Burr, Judy Canova, Carol Channing, Cyd Charisse, Robert Cummings, Arlene Dahl, Gloria DeHaven, Patty Duke, Nanette Fabray, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Alice Faye, Rhonda Fleming, Anne Francis, Betty Garrett, Greer Garson, Janet Gaynor, Lillian Gish, Arthur Godfrey, Ruth Gordon, Farley Granger, Helen Hayes, Celeste Holm, Tab Hunter, Van Johnson, Allan Jones, Jack Jones, Shirley Jones, Howard Keel, Gene Kelly, Patsy Kelly, Evelyn Keyes, Fernando Lamas, Dorothy Lamour, Hope Lange, Peter Lawford, Janet Leigh, Eva Marie Saint, Roddy McDowall, Dorothy McGuire, Ethel Merman, Vera Miles, Ray Milland, Ann Miller, John Mills, Yvette Mimieux, Harriet Nelson, Julie Newman, Donald O’ Connor, Janis Paige, Eleanor Parker, Jane Powell, Vincent Price, Luise Rainer, Martha Raye, Donna Reed, Debbie Reynolds, Ginger Rogers, Mickey Rooney, Phil Silvers, Walter Slezak, Alexis Smith, Robert Stack, Craig Stevens, Gale Storm, Claire Trevor, Forest Tucket, Lana Turner, Bobby Van, Nancy Walker, Ruth Warrick, Cornel Wilde, Shelley Winters, Jane Withers, Teresa Wright, Jane Wyatt, Jane Wyman, Keenan Wynn, Dana Wynter and others.

In addition to the sheer number of them, it’s startling to think that most of these actors and actresses are gone now, not all of course, but a sad and growing number.  There are some very interesting names in there — the almost reclusive (and still living) Academy Award-wining actress Luise Rainer, the then 88-year-old Lillian Gish, Janet Gaynor a year or so before the devastating run-in with a taxi cab that nearly killed her, and so many musical comedy stars, almost a roll call of MGM’s finest singers and dancers who were again being appreciated after That’s Entertainment brought them back to prominence.

It was obviously thrilling to have these legends appearing on the small screen, and it must have also been heartening for them to know that they still had fans who wanted to see them on this top-rated TV show.  Many of the musical performers were drafted to appear in song-and-dance numbers on The Love Boat, including Ethel Merman and Ann Miller who, along with Carol Channing and Della Reese, sing “I’m The Greatest Star” and you almost still believe them.  Merman would appear a total of five times on TLB as character Roz Smith, Gopher's mom; the brassy singer became a perennial favorite on the show, thanks to a career surge which had been jump-started in 1980 by her appearance in the hit comedy Airplane.

The Love Boat is slowly being released on video; part of Season one is out now, and more volumes will undoubtedly follow.  As an unlikely but highly valuable repository of the last performances of some of Hollywood’s greatest, The Love Boat deserves our attention and gratitude.  It may not have been cutting edge, but it is a sweet reminder of an amiable time when even movie stars in their golden years could hope to board and find love, exciting and new.

Part of the American Dream (and I’m not talking about our freedoms and opportunities, or even Dusty Rhodes here) is homeownership; more than two thirds of us live in homes that we own.  There is something magical about looking at houses, picturing ourselves living in a particular place, and the people that work in the housing industry know it.  In Atlanta there is an annual ‘Street of Dreams’ event where several local homebuilders and decorators create the illusion of a near perfect neighborhood.  It features brand new higher end houses that have been lavishly furnished and appointed with virtually every upgrade option (probably more than almost any prospective homeowner would ever buy) available.  Did anyone see Strangers When We Meet (1960) on TCM the other night?  But purchasing a resale, especially an older ‘fixer upper’, is fraught with much greater risk, and filmmakers have utilized this fact to simultaneously frighten and amuse us. 

Two of the best ‘American Homeownership Dream Gone Sour’ comedies were made in the 1940’s; both feature city slickers as the targets of some rather unscrupulous sellers and subsequent contractors.  The first was George Washington Slept Here (1942), which was directed by William Keighley and scripted by Everett Freeman from a Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman play.  Jack Benny and Ann Sheridan play an urban apartment dwelling couple that has always wanted a place of their own.  They find one in the country that was ostensibly visited by George Washington during the Revolutionary War, hence the film’s title.  Of course, the local hayseed contractors see them coming, and take full advantage of the Fullers, Bill (Benny) and Connie (Sheridan).  Connie actually finds the ramshackle home after the Fullers’ dog gets them evicted from their apartment by its fussy superintendent (played by Franklin Pangborn, naturally); the house looks every bit its 200 years in age.   For the significant work required to make it livable for themselves, Connie's teenage sister (Joyce Reynolds) and their maid (Hattie McDaniel), the Fullers hire Mr. Kimber, played by "Pa Kettle" Percy Kilbride (reprising his role in the play).  Kilbride is perfect for the handyman role given his deadpan drawl and easygoing manner, a sharp contrast to the faster moving city folk that he’s more than willing to help, for a price.  His character ‘nickel and dimes’ them to death while sporting a blank or dumb expression on his face.  Charles Coburn enriches the cast as Connie's ‘rich’ Uncle Stanley, who eventually comes to visit the Fullers in their renovated country home which, even though the holes in its ceiling and floors have been fixed, still doesn't have its own well for water. Charles Dingle plays the unfriendly neighbor that won't let the Fullers use ‘his’ road to get to their house, nor ‘his’ well’s water etc.  All in all, it’s a less than ideal homeownership experience for the couple as they approach bankruptcy, until a Hollywood ending that includes a property line revelation and the Fullers’ dog saving the day.  If you’re not in the market for a home (and aren’t superstitious), see it on TCM this coming June 13th at 9:30 AM EDT.

The other – and perhaps best known such comedy – was Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), which featured Cary Grant and Myrna Loy; it was later remade rather poorly (though aptly titled) in the 1980's as The Money Pit (1986), with Tom Hanks and Shelley Long.  It’s about a businessman – Grant in the title role – who dreams about having a house in the country. It includes an unforgettable sequence between Mrs. Blandings (Loy), their contractor and the painter, she says:

“I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin's egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. Now, the only sample I could get is a little too yellow, but don't let whoever does it go to the other extreme and get it too blue. It should just be a sort of grayish-yellow-green. Now, the dining room. I'd like yellow. Not just yellow; a very gay yellow. Something bright and sunshiny. I tell you, Mr. PeDelford (Emory Parnell), if you'll send one of your men to the grocer for a pound of their best butter, and match that exactly, you can't go wrong! Now, this is the paper we're going to use in the hall. It's flowered, but I don't want the ceiling to match any of the colors of the flowers. There are some little dots in the background, and it's these dots I want you to match. Not the little greenish dot near the hollyhock leaf, but the little bluish dot between the rosebud and the delphinium blossom. Is that clear? Now the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white. Now for the powder room – in here – I want you to match this thread, and don't lose it. It's the only spool I have and I had an awful time finding it! As you can see, it's practically an apple red. Somewhere between a healthy wine sap and an un-ripened Jonathan.”

And the contractor says to the painter:  “You got that Charlie?” to which the painter replies:  “Red, green, blue, yellow, white.”  There’s so much truth in this exchange that you’ll either be laughing or crying depending upon your own personal experience building a house and working with contractors.

Melvyn Douglas plays Bill Cole, a close friend of the Blandings who’s also their attorney; the movie appears on the American Film Institute’s 100 Funniest Movies list (at #72).  It was directed by H.C. Potter and based on Eric Hodgins’ (semi-autobiographical) novel; Crosby & Hope “Road” writers (and this film’s producers) Melvin Frank and Norman Panama wrote the screenplay.  Though it’s not currently on the channel’s 3-month out schedule, it does air fairly frequently.

Although much of the dark comedy The Gazebo (1959) is unrelated to the topic at hand, I wanted to highlight John McGiver’s part as the contractor in that one.  Though his character is markedly different from Kilbride’s, he imbued his country contractor role with so much believability and in just the right context to contrast Glenn Ford’s character that this reviewer can remember the performance many years later.

To exploit the fears that are inherent in the home buying process, Hollywood released these comedies which show that (supposedly dumb) country bumpkins can have the upper hand when they’re dealing with (more sophisticated?) urban dwellers that are ‘babes in their woods’.

The film world has been hard hit these past few months with the passing of so many great and influential members of that creative community. Although some of those who left us received front page headlines and a generous amount of tribute coverage such as Charlton Heston, Richard Widmark, Arthur C. Clarke and Anthony Minghella, it still felt too brief and rushed to take in the full measure of these individuals. And even more regretful were the brief mentions or barely publicized reports of others who died during the same time period such as composer Leonard Rosenman, actor/director/producer Ivan Dixon and screenwriter Rafael Azcona to mention a few.  Lest we too quickly forget some of those who inspired, entertained and fascinated us through the medium of film, I wanted to pay my own small tribute to some of these talented filmmakers by focusing on either a favorite film or ones that are often overlooked and worth seeking out. 

LEONARD ROSENMAN (died 3/4/2008)

He was a friend of James Dean and a young unknown composer when Dean introduced him to director Elia Kazan. The result of that meeting led to Rosenman scoring Kazan’s EAST OF EDEN (1955) and then Nicholas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), two scores which announced the arrival of a brilliant new talent in Hollywood music circles. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the industry, his insistence on experimenting and trying new approaches to film soundtracks made him something of a maverick in the industry and working with him could be a challenge to any director or producer with set ideas about a film score. Yet, he managed to rank up four Oscar nominations for Best Music Score during his career, winning for both BARRY LYNDON (1975) and BOUND FOR GLORY (1976). My favorite Rosenman scores, however, are probably the intensely dramatic music he composed for THE SAVAGE EYE in 1960 and the startlingly modern, futuristic sounds of FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966). The latter film, about a team of doctors who are reduced to microscopic size and sent inside the body of a top secret scientist to operate on his injured brain, reminds me of a famous Rosenman anecdote about it:  “A producer asked me to write a jazz score, and I asked him why. He said he wanted the picture to be the first hip science fiction movie. I said that’s a great idea for an advertising agency, but it doesn’t fit the film.” THE SAVAGE EYE, on the other hand, creates a musical landscape of urban alienation and clashing cultures struggling for dominance in an experimental narrative (a collaboration between Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick) that charts a divorced woman’s journey through a Los Angeles that verges on the freakish.  In some ways Rosenman’s score for this anticipates Philip Glass’s soundtrack for KOYAANISQATSI (1982), another film about life out of balance on this planet. To read more about Rosenman, check out this blog by fellow morlock Medusa – http://www.moviemorlocks.com/blog?action=detail&entry_id=8a25caac1887b199011887f5f4c00002

MALVIN WALD (died 3/6/2008)

The brother of producer Jerry Wald, Malvin was a busy screenwriter who is best known for authoring the story for THE NAKED CITY (1948) and co-writing the script with Albert Maltz (soon to be blacklisted as one of the “Hollywood Ten”), which was nominated for an Academy Award. Most of Malvin’s later work was in television but I like that brief period from 1948-1950 when he worked on some very offbeat and intriguing B-movies including two projects for director Ida Lupino, the story of NOT WANTED (1949), featuring Sally Forrest as a desperate unwed mother, and the original screenplay for OUTRAGE (1950), in collaboration with Lupino and her husband Collier Young. The latter film, starring Mala Powers as a rape victim whose life is shattered by the incident, was a daring, non-commercial topic for a Hollywood film and suffered for that very reason, receiving scant distribution. Less controversial and more accessible is Wald’s story and screenplay (Eugene Ling also worked on it) for Budd Boetticher’s BEHIND LOCKED DOORS (1948), an entertaining suspense thriller that anticipates Sam Fuller’s SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963) in its storyline: a reporter (Richard Carlson) pretends to be insane in order to be committed to a mental institution where he believes a fugitive from justice is hiding. And of course Tor Johnson of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE fame is one of the inmates which confirms this film’s status as an under-the-radar theatrical release.  

IVAN DIXON (died 3/16)

Any television junkie of the sixties knows Dixon as ‘Kinch’ from the “Hogan’s Heroes” TV series and countless other appearances in shows such as “Have Gun – Will Travel,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Dr. Kildare,” etc. His directorial credits are almost as lengthy as his acting credits and few people seem to know that he helmed and produced one of the least seen but most potentially explosive of the Black-oriented audience films of the early ‘70s – THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR (1973) in which an ex-veteran (Lawrence Cook) uses his CIA training to plot the overthrow of the White power elite. I still look forward to seeing that but am here to tell you that his performance in NOTHING BUT A MAN (1964) is my favorite memory of Dixon as an actor. As a man who’s been disillusioned but not defeated by his lack of opportunities and second class status in the pre-Civil Rights era South, Dixon creates an unforgettable portrait of a stubbornly determined and proud individual. When he falls in love with a schoolteacher (Abbey Lincoln, equally eloquent) in a small Alabama town and they eventually marry, he is forced to take stock of his life and finally deal with some unresolved issues such as his strained relationship with his father and his illegitimate 4-year-old son. This is an incredibly moving and subtle drama that still holds up extremely well because the focus is on the human condition and not just the issue of race relations which is only part of Dixon’s troubles. Some critics have compared the movie (directed by Michael Roemer) to the Italian neorealism films and the comparison is apt. But it’s Dixon’s Duff Anderson who will live on in your memory of the film long after ”The End” fades on the screen.

PAUL SCOFIELD (died 3/19)

He was one of the great stage actors of the British theatre and preferred that venue to acting in movies but he made his mark in cinema nevertheless with a small body of work that reflected his discriminating good taste in selecting roles that played to his strengths. Most people remember him as Sir Thomas More, refusing to bend to the will of the heretical King Henry VII (Robert Shaw) in A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS (1966), a role that won him the Best Actor Oscar in only his fourth film appearance. He also garnered praise for several Shakespearian film adaptations (KING LEAR in 1970, HENRY V in 1989, HAMLET in 1990) and a supporting role in Robert Redford’s QUIZ SHOW (another Oscar nomination for him) but it’s his performance in BARTLEBY (1970) that I feel has been overlooked. That’s probably because it was a small, independent production that was based on a Herman Melville short story (“Bartleby, the Scrivener, A Story of Wall-street”) and couldn’t be a more uncinematic subject for a movie. While the true meaning of Melville’s story continues to be debated, many critics have interpreted it as an allegory about the futility of modern life and the soul-crushing drudgery of the workplace. The title character, Bartleby, is no more than a cipher, a quiet, rather forlorn young man (John McEnery) who is hired by an accounting firm and performs well at first. Then he begins to refuse specific tasks saying “I would prefer not to” until it becomes his mantra and he is eventually doing nothing except sitting mute and inactive at his desk. Scofield, simply named The Accountant, narrates the entire absurdist tale but also gives it life and a fascination that other film versions haven’t been able to pull off (the 2001 version with Crispin Glover in the title role was an interminable one-joke sitcom). As Scofield goes from exasperation to anger to disgust and finally pity for this baffling employee who continues to come to work even after being fired, he makes the situation real. So real, in fact, that you become emotionally invested in trying to uncover the mystery of Bartleby’s behavior. Is he mentally ill? Is he playing a game? In the end, as Bartleby wastes away – he prefers not to eat – Scofield’s accountant becomes almost desperate in his need to save this lost soul and in the process discovers his own humanity. A performance for the time capsule. 

RAFAEL AZCONA (died 3/23/2008)

A critically lauded and award-winning screenwriter in Europe, this Spanish scenarist is practically unknown in this country yet has worked on some of the seminal Italian and Spanish films of the sixties and seventies and is comparable to Luis Bunuel in his appreciation of the surreal and the darkly comic. He had a hand in writing Alberto Lattuada’s recently revived black farce MAFIOSO (1962) and penning screenplays for such renowned directors as Carlos Saura (COUSIN ANGELICA, 1974), Luis Garcia Berlanga (LIFE SIZE, 1974 – Michel Piccoli plays a dentist in love with a life-size doll, more than 30 years before LARS AND THE REAL GIRL), and Fernando Trueba (BELLE EPOQUE, the Oscar-winning Best Foreign Language Film of 1994). More than any other director, however, he has worked with Marco Ferreri, collaborating with him on one of the most outrageous and scandalous films of the ‘70s – LA GRAND BOUFFE (1973) in which four men hole up in a remote villa, vowing to gorge themselves to death – on food, alcohol and sex. Azcona’s other joint projects with Ferreri are equally memorable if not always successful such as THE LAST WOMAN (1976) where Gerard Depardieu slices off his penis with an electric carving knife

in the film’s climax because he can’t deal with his girlfriend becoming independent, the result of the feminist movement. For me, the entry point was LA DONNA SCIMMA (1964, aka THE APE WOMAN). I saw a still from the movie in an issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland (posted below) when I was a kid and became obsessed with it, eventually tracking it down on VHS in a dubbed print from Something Weird video almost 20 years ago. It’s an oddly compelling film about a sideshow barker who discovers, marries and exploits for profit a freak of nature, a woman completely covered in body hair. It’s like an even more extreme version of the master-slave relationship in Fellini’s LA STRADA except that the carnival hustler (played by the great Ugo Tognazzi) is harder to read than Anthony Quinn’s Zampano. He can be kind and compassionate but more likely exploitative and greedy and there is a motive behind his every gesture. The film was distributed with two endings – one which had a more poignant, humane finale (the Something Weird version features this one) and one which remained true to Ferreri and Azcona’s more cynical but honest view of Tognazzi’s true nature. The film was supposedly inspired by real life freak Julia Pastrana, the famous “Gorilla Woman” whose husband exhibited her mummified body after she died (Ferreri & Azcona utilized this gruesome bit of trivia for their alternate ending). Not a masterpiece but a genuine original. 

RICHARD WIDMARK (died 3/24/2008)

Who doesn’t have a favorite Richard Widmark performance? The problem is it’s very difficult to choose the most iconic one. KISS OF DEATH, PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET, NIGHT AND THE CITY and PANIC IN THE STREETS are probably the top ranked titles but I also have to add to the list his crazy-as-a-fox performance as Jefty in the film noir ROAD HOUSE (1948) – it was only his third film role – and a late career highlight, WHEN THE LEGENDS DIE (1972). The latter film, a contemporary western, features Widmark as a conniving, manipulative ex-rodeo star who becomes the guardian of a young Native American (Frederic Forrest in his first major role) who is an expert horseman and trains him to be a rodeo champion. Essentially a two-character study in which the landscape of two-bit rural towns and sleazy bars becomes a prison for these two travelers bound by financial need, the film was not a commercial success but it contains one of Widmark’s finest performances. His character, whose alcoholism brings out his demonic side, is not one who will go gentle into that good night (and get a load of that wicked drunken laugh – shades of Tommy Udo!). But he’s not all bad and over the course of the two characters’ backroads ramble, a genuine but weary friendship develops between the unlikely pair that results in a satisfying and unpredictable fadeout. We’ll miss you Richard!  For another favorite Widmark performance, check out this entry by Medusa -

http://www.moviemorlocks.com/blog?action=detail&entry_id=8a258bcb18f38f8d0118f3a1d2de0002

Come back for Part 2 next Saturday.

While you’re waiting for Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) to make itself available in your Netflix queue, you might want to check out some other stabs at the story. For me, the one and only true Sweeney Todd is Tod Slaughter, a barnstorming British actor-manager who worked in theatre and film in the early part of the 20th Century. Although Slaughter had begun his career as a leading man, he shifted to villainous roles as he matured to middle age and grew thick about the middle. Slaughter and his troupe of actors revived an English storytelling tradition known as “blood and thunder,” akin to the French Grand Guignol in its celebration of murder and mayhem. Among Slaughter’s stock roles were Jack the Ripper, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Sweeney Todd, a barber/surgeon turned mass murderer who may or may not have existed but whose exploits began appearing in penny dreadful stories in England as early as 1846. Slaughter played Todd on the stage and brought the character to the big screen in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), directed by George King. To contemporary eyes, Slaughter is an acquired taste whose unabashedly florid style of performance will either make the party or clear the room outright. As a bona fide Slaughterian, I make no apologizes for enjoying his boisterous, winking, larger than life film thesping. The cheapness of George King’s film helps sell the dark tale, too, cloaked as it is in cost effective shadows that lend to the proceedings an appropriate nightmarish quality.

Even as early as 1936, Tod Slaughter’s take on Sweeney Todd was not cinema’s first or even second. Two prior film adaptations had been mounted, the first in 1926 (starring one G. A. Baughan) and the second (with Moore Marriott in the title role) two years later. Both of these silent and now presumably lost films were adapted from the play A String of Pearls by George Dibden-Pitt, itself adapted from the first serialization of the tale. In these early versions of the Sweeney Todd story, up to and including Slaughter’s, the demon barber’s motivation was unadulterated greed. Z-grade American filmmaker Andy Milligan relied on this popular interpretation with his own low budget attempt, Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970), starring John Miranda as a muttonchopped Sweeney T. That same year, Freddie Jones (pictured above) played a similarly diabolical cutthroat in a 75 minute episode of the British anthology series Mystery and Imagination, produced by Thames Television. When playwright Christopher Bond took a turn at the tale in 1968, he brought to the narrative a motive of revenge, which itself has been interpreted in many different ways. Stephen Sondheim’s hugely successful 1979 musical carried this theme forward, making Todd a deranged but romantic figure whose tragic past owes more than a nod to Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.

In 1998, Ben Kingsley tackled the Toddster in a production made for British television by John Schlesinger, with a horse-toothed Joanna Lumley (Absolutely Fabulous) cast as the demon barber’s partner in crime, the pie-making Mrs. Lovett (a role played on Broadway by Angela Lansbury). Nearly a decade later, with Tim Burton’s version of the musical looming on the horizon, the BBC commissioned a dour, dramatic spin on the tale starring Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast). While this 2006 film can’t compete with Burton’s multi-million dollar extravaganza, it does rework the familiar story in intriguing ways, making Sweeney Todd not a villainous cad nor a wronged man out for blood… but a pious and good-hearted businessman who ultimately cannot overcome the intense psychological damage inflicted upon him by society or his own venal thief of father. Shaved bald for the role, Winstone recalls the true life child killer/cannibal Fritz Haarmann, played by Kurt Raab in Ulli Lommel’s chilling The Tenderness of the Wolves (1973). This adaptation features what is likely to be the most tortured of all the Sweeney Todds, a former child inmate of Newgate Prison whose murderous rage is ignited in a flash on an otherwise ordinary day when a Newgate gaoler steps into his shop for a shave. Suffering an extreme reaction to the stench of that infamous gaol on the turnkey’s jacket, the “quietest barber in London” slashes the man’s throat before an uncurtained window, the crime concealed from passersby by nothing more than a thick London fog. And thus begins the tale of this Sweeney Todd.

What the BBC’s Sweeney Todd can’t deliver in jaunty production numbers it does offer as compensation a thoughtful and not infrequently grotesque adaptation, with Todd polishing off any man who dares to lie with his beloved Mrs. Lovett (played this time around by Essie Davis) but ultimately unable to save her from the pustular hell of the Pox, her skin splitting open like a ripe berry. Later, as the bodies begin to pile up, Todd breaks through the wall of his cellar to the adjoining church crypt, where he hides the cadavers in a long unused vault… until the stench of their aggregate corruption rises high enough to chase the congregation from their pews and set the karma ball rolling. The film is never graphic but often quite disturbing, with many unnerving close-ups of Todd’s straight razor scraping the extended throats of his doomed customers in the silent moments before the deed is done. (Worse yet is a bit of vengeful tongue cutting, by which Sweeney silences a prospective Judas.) Veteran British actor David Warner contributes an amusing cameo as historic figure John Fielding, a magistrate and founder of The Bow Street Runners who, despite blindness, won acclaim as a crime fighter and social reformer known among the non-law-abiding as the Blind Beak.

Even though Tim Burton misses for me more often than he hits I was looking forward to his big budget mounting of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It seemed a perfect role for Johnny Depp after two many trips to the well as tosspot buccaneer Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films and the desaturated, graphic novel look of the cinematography of Dariusz Wolski (The Crow, Dark City) looked neat as all Hell. I regret to inform, however, that this Sweeney Todd left me feeling antsy and unsatisfied throughout. Depp’s vengeful hater is distinctly one-note, not nearly as interesting as Winstone’s flawed Puritan and his backstory of betrayal feels thin on the ground. Despite the buckets of money thrown onto the screen the film feels even smaller than the BBC quickie. Depp and costar Helena Bonham Carter acquit themselves well as amateur singers and standout numbers include their pieshop duet “A Little Priest” and Depp’s duo with baddie Alan Rickman, “Pretty Women,” but from collar to cuffs the film struggled to hold my attention. Things get excessively gruesome in the last act but the throat-slittings and sundry slayings are a lumpy variety of gallows humor that I just couldn’t swallow.

Whether he lived or not, that bloody bugger Sweeney Todd has left us with a rich legacy of performance, from stage to screen and everything in between, including radio plays, operas, ballets and graphic novels. If nothing else, maybe Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street will urge the curious to seek out other versions of the gory tale and decide for themselves which is the best.

Over the years you become fond of performers you see in the movies, and you just plain like them no matter what they do.  I can’t recall when I first became of aware of Patric Knowles — actually, I can…one of the very minor independent TV stations in Los Angeles used to run a lot of the classic Warner Brothers titles, and he kept popping up in them.  And once upon a time I attended an extensive Errol Flynn film festival at one of the revival houses, cementing my love for Flynn and exposing me once again to the considerable charms of Flynn friend and costar Knowles.  Even more amazingly, at the time Knowles was still very much alive and frequently appearing in movies and TV series.  Here he was, a contemporary of the long-dead Errol Flynn, and you could see him an episode of Marcus Welby, M.D. if you cared to. 

The former Reginald Knowles was born in England in 1911, a child of Irish descent and next in line to begin work at his family bookbindery, but he was having none of it.  While still a teen he expressed a desire to run away and become an actor, and he eventually made good on his vow, changing his name to Patric and finding work in local theater.  He transitioned easily into movie work, making his first film in Britain in 1932 and quickly becoming established as a very competent lead actor.  His 6’2” handsome good looks didn’t hurt, of course, and he soon came to the attention of Warner Brothers in the UK and appeared in several films for them there.  Over the next four years he made fifteen movies, and in 1935 he was tapped by Warners to cross the pond and enter into a contract with the studio, just as fellow WB Brit discovery Errol Flynn had at about the same time.

The two men’s careers were to have a related trajectory, although it was Flynn, with his extraordinary charisma and flamboyant good looks who would enjoy the rapid ascent into genuine movie star status.  In 1936 they both appeared in The Charge of the Light Brigade, starting a lifelong friendship (Flynn was godfather to one of Knowles’ children) and it was the first of four films they’d make together.  Knowles, a sedate and stalwart rather than particularly swashbuckling presence onscreen, continued to star in light romantic comedies, including the charming It’s Love I’m After with Olivia DeHavilland, Bette Davis and Leslie Howard, and in 1938 he was re-teamed with Flynn in the gorgeous Technicolor medieval action-romance The Adventures of Robin Hood.  In what’s certainly his best known role, Knowles, his hair an intense blonde and wearing rosy duds, plays Robin’s ally Will Scarlett, an amiable part-time troubadour/full-time Merry Man who’s ever at the noble outlaw’s elbow helping him dispense justice to the downtrodden.  The camaraderie between the two characters — and indeed the two actors — is palpable and Patric Knowles is a delightful addition to the film.

Knowles and Flynn appeared together that same year in screwball comedy Four’s a Crowd, a high-spirited and fairly delightful romp with Olivia DeHavilland and Rosalind Russell as the female costars.   Knowles was next up as a Mountie in the lavish color production of Heart of the North, and then he was back in another Flynn movie The Sisters, though in a decidedly supporting role.  At this point he separated from Warners and went freelance, making his way around all the studios and getting a wide variety of roles, varying in stature, such as his 1938 stint at Republic for the Light Brigade-ish Storm Over Bengal.  He was a solid working actor, getting good notices for his work in 1939’s interesting plane crash survival movie Five Came Back, starring Lucille Ball and Chester Morris, but more often blending seamlessly into the fabric of genre pictures like Torchy Blaine in Chinatown, or opposite Lucille Ball again in the romantic drama Beauty for the Asking in 1939, or the courtroom drama The Spellbinder that same year, all three for RKO.  More RKO titles like Women in War, Married and in Love, and The Honeymoon’s Over followed, as well as a small role in MGM’s 1939 Another Thin Man.  It’s not that Patric Knowles wasn’t good, or wasn’t working, but compared to his pal Flynn, his was a solid but not spectacular career, rather more befitting the family man that Knowles was compared to the headline-grabbing matinee idol lifestyle that consumed Flynn.

In 1940 he appeared for RKO in Anne of Windy Poplars, sequel to the successful adaptation of Canadian Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, and then in 1941 had a memorable and important role in director John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley as Ivor, one of the coal miner sons of Welsh coal mining father Mr. Morgan.  Unfortunately for Patric Knowles fans, his character is killed in a mining accident some time into the movie, but his presence in the Best Picture Oscar-winner is also a high point of his career.  It was also in 1941 that Patric went under contract to Universal where he achieved a good measure of success and a dazzling array of credits in an interesting mix of titles, most prominently in — and we wonder if back then anyone would have predicted their continued popularity and notoriety to this day — roles in several of the studio’s trademark horror movies.  He had a major role in 1941’s original The Wolf Man, its cast a veritable who’s who of respected mainstream actors like Claude Rains, Warren William, Knowles and Ralph Bellamy, and talented character actors such as Lon Chaney Jr. as the title character, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Bela Lugosi. 

Roles in a string of Universal thrillers followed — the lead in The Strange Case of Dr. Rx in 1942, The Mystery of Marie Roget in 1942, and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man in 1943.  Universal didn’t relegate the dapper and versatile Knowles merely to the horror genre, but starred him in everything from comedies like Lady in a Jam opposite Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy, to the romantic lead in Abbott and Costello movies Who Done It? And Hit the Ice, and opposite comics Oleson and Johnson in Crazy House. He had a good supporting role in the Paulette Goddard in the saucy 1945 costumer Kitty (with Ray Milland), and in 1946’s Alan Ladd spy drama O.S.S., along with many roles as fathers and uncles and other authority figures for which Knowles’ gentility and solid reputation were great matches.  He made a brief return to Warner Brothers for a role in the 1947 Paul Henreid/Eleanor Parker Of Human Bondage, but returned to Universal for a delightful role in the (unfortunately) black and white costume comedy Monsieur Beaucaire starring Bob Hope, Joan Caulfield and Marjorie Reynolds.  In 1947 Knowles was the male lead opposite Joan Fontaine in the Victorian mystery Ivy, in 1949 he made the spiffy noir The Big Steal starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer.  In 1950 he gave terrific support to star Claudette Colbert in Three Came Home, the harrowing film adaptation of author Agnes Newton Keith’s WW II prison camp memoir.

About this time Patric Knowles fully embraced the new medium of television, interspersing movie roles — mainly in serviceable B-grade adventure tales with titles like Mutiny, Flame of Calcutta, Jamaica Run, Khyber Patrol — with a dazzling array of  appearances in all the exciting dramatic programs of the 1950s.  Studio One, Robert Montgomery Presents, The United States Steel Hour and many more benefited from Knowles’ accomplished presence, but occasionally a good movie role came along for the still handsome and dapper actor, such as suitor to Rosalind Russell in her triumphant role as Auntie Mame or appearing with Clark Gable and Sidney Poitier in 1957’s Band of Angels.  But television was Knowles’ main venue during the 1960s into the 1970s, as he played guest roles series such as Wagon Train, Peter Gunn, Have Gun – Will Travel, Gunsmoke, Family Affair and many more.  Now and again he’d make another solid motion picture, like his small but memorable role as Lord Mountbatten in the 1968 WW II action pic The Devil’s Brigade with William Holden and Cliff Robertson (and many more terrific actors) and a nice supporting turn in the popular John Wayne western Chisum in 1970.

Patric Knowles’ last movie appearance was in the black comedy Arnold in 1973, but he was never far away from show business, dividing his retirement years between lecture appearances, commercial work, and spending a lot of time volunteering at the Motion Picture Country Home, where so many of his contemporaries lived out their last days.  He also famously came to the defense of his old and long dead friend Errol Flynn, who had been the subject of a book declaring him to have been a Nazi spy.  Knowles wrote a personal piece for a book rebutting the claim — Tony Thomas’ Errol Flynn: The Spy Who Never Was, from 1990 — and it was a fitting tribute to their longtime association. 

The classy Patric Knowles was married to the same woman for 60 years, from 1935 until his death at the age of 84, a charmer until the end, a hard-working actor who took on every role with a grace and skill that’s clearly evident on the screen in all his movies.  He’s well worth watching in everything, even if perhaps some of the movies are less than fascinating; he made it look so easy to be so versatile. 

Patric Knowles, 1911 – 1995.

I’d be curious to know how many movie reviews Roger Ebert has written, and of that number what the exact tally would be for the times he has revisited a film and changed the star rating. I seem to recall him having a pretty militant view about not tinkering with his stars and, according to Wikepedia, “Ebert stood by his opinions with one notable exception: when Stern pointed out that he’d given The Godfather Part II a three-star rating, but had given The Godfather Part III three and a half stars.” And yet, despite this, an internet search reveals that the three-and-a-half stars remains! So the tinkered star must be rare indeed, and The Whole Shootin’ Match (1979) is one of the few films to get the bump; Ebert originally gave it three stars after seeing it at the Telluride Film Festival in 1980, and upon a recent screening of its restoration changed his rating to four stars. READ MORE

He seems to be just a regular guy, that Hoagy Carmichael. There he is on screen, hunched over the piano, hat tipped back, in his shirtsleeves, wearing a matching series of monikers from the down home to the outlandish, playing characters called Cricket, Celestial, Hi, Butch, Willie, Smoke or Happy. I’m not sure when I first became aware of his calm, bemused presence and air of tolerance in movies, but he always struck me as the kind of guy you’d wish were your worldly uncle; the slightly disreputable family member who understands all, with that undeniable gift for music.

Yet, unlike the troubled heroes or villains that might populate the center of the screen in the movies he appeared in, he seems to lack their tension or ambition. There’s little or no romantic involvement or intrigue for him in these movies. He’s invariably the good guy or gal’s best buddy, even if that person doesn’t always have the good sense to know that immutable fact. Hoagy on screen appears to be the most relaxed man in movies from the thirties to the fifties, despite the fact that he was never hired as an on screen performer in the mid-thirties. When he landed in Hollywood as a songwriter, the place was, as Hoagy said, “where the rainbow hit the ground.” While his contemporary Oscar Levant brought an edgy wit to more musically highbrow movies, Hoagy Carmichael added a laid back sagacity and watchfulness while weaving a few bars of his own inimitable, slightly off-kilter classic standards into a movie. READ MORE

This past Sunday night at Hollywood's historic Egyptian Theatre, as part of Noir City 10, the tenth annual festival of film noir (13 Nights… 27 films… NO HAPPY ENDINGS!"), I saw a double bill of obscure "swamp noir" features from the 1950s. I'm a sucker for any movie set in a swamp. It's part and parcel of being a New England Swamp Yankee relocated to arid Los Angeles. I love me some tales of passion and lust set down in bayou country or the steamy everglades. Gators, snakes, kudzu, quicksand and sweat stains galore… I just can't get enough of dat old "swamp noir." Last night's pairing was kicked off with MGM's Cry of the Hunted (1953). Directed by Joseph H. Lewis (Gun Crazy), the film was written by Jack Leonard, who had contributed to the original story for The Narrow Margin (1952) the year before and was one of several scribes on Columbia's interesting Man in the Dark (1953), in which career criminal Edmund O'Brien undergoes experimental brain surgery to remove the criminal urge. There's a similar psychological kink to Cry of the Hunted, which begins with the standard crime film trope of a desperate but essentially honorable criminal (Vittorio Gassman, playing a Cajun) going on the run from the law and pursued by weary cop Barry Sullivan.

Leonard's script is rife with cracking dialogue and probably too many one-liners but Cry of the Hunted is so out of left field in its second act complication that you hate to assign it demerits for occasionally spinning its wheels. Tracking Gassman to his Louisiana backwater, Sullivan trades barbs with local cop Harry Shannon (Citizen Kane) and with city detective William Conrad (The Killers), who has his sights fixed on taking Sullivan's job. Catching up with Gassman at his bayou shack, Sullivan allows the fugitive a final romantic clutch with his Creole wife (Mary Zavian) but is double crossed with a conk on the head. Coming to, he unwisely drinks swamp water and experiences the koo-koo craziest of fever dreams in which the banked homoeroticism that has shadowed his relationship with Gassman boils over in some near-dance choreography, rolling ground fog and potted explosions that stop this chase drama cold and turn the whole affair into a case history of thwarted passions.

Who the hell knows what Cry of the Hunted is really about but it has some interesting and even (for the time) daring ideas about societal norms of behavior and affection versus what actually goes on when the structures of society fade away, leaving us at the mercy of raw emotion and instinct. The film juxtaposes Sullivan's playfully querulous home life with a pert, cocktail jiggering Polly Bergen (the pair share a surprisingly naughty sexual repartee in one scene that concludes with Sullivan sticking a phallic celery stalk between Bergen's teeth and Bergen delivering a castrating bite) and Gassman's stormy relationship to Zavian, whose naive and even crude performance nonetheless reveals a ferality that makes her character tougher than all of the menfolk combined. The film ends with a surprisingly soft (and not very persuasive) coda but the 75 minutes leading up to it is fascinatingly bizarre and off the wall. Cry of the Hunted is not available on DVD and perhaps never will be, making last night's screening especially valuable.

Far more obscure (and equally unavailable on DVD) is the low budget Regal Films production Lure of the Swamp (1957), which was distributed (but probably not well) by 20th Century Fox. Hubert Cornfield (Night of the Following Day) directed a script by William George (of the TV series Highway Patrol), adapted from the novel by pulp novelist Gil Brewer. There are echoes of A Simple Plan (1998) in this tale of a suitcase full of ill-gotten cash moldering in the Florida everglades as a trio of criminals vie for possession of the booty by cozying up to swamp guide Marshall Thompson, the only man who can get them to the hiding place deep inside the brush. The film's cheapness limits the number of settings, which gives the production a dream-like quality as various disparate (and desperate) characters pop up without introduction in and around Thompson's shack like symbols from his subconscious, shattering the simplicity of his life and queering his relationship to local girl Joan Lora (Bloodlust!). The cast is small but when Jack Elam (Kiss Me Deadly) and Leo Gordon (Riot in Cellblock 11) are in the same room nobody's complaining. A bespectacled Willard Parker (The Earth Dies Screaming) turns up early on and icy Joan Vohs (seen in 3D in William Castle's Fort Ti) slinks in later on as an Older Other Woman for Marshall to get all hot and bothered about for all the wrong reasons. As in Cry of the Hunted, characters circle one another, sweating bullets and spitting ultimatums while quicksand is again employed as a sucking deus ex machina, bringing this mossy morality tale to a memorably outre finish. I'm not saying Lure of the Swamp is must-see cinema but, boy, you should've seen it!

Noir City 10 runs at The Egyptian until April 24th. Some upcoming theme nights include a Steve Cochran double bill of Tomorrow is Another Day (1951) and Highway 301, the pairing of the "unjustly accused" dramas lBoomerang! (1942) and Count the Hours (1953) and an Edward G. Robinson two-fer consisting of Night has a Thousand Eyes (1948) and The Red House (1947). (1950).

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