While reviewing the new Dark Sky Films DVD of Dan Curtis’ DEAD OF NIGHT (1977), a failed pilot for a proposed weekly anthology series, I caught up with an old memory.  Included with this release is a bonus feature, another pilot for a horror anthology series that failed to sell back in 1969 and also called DEAD OF NIGHT.  Called for the purposes of this release DEAD OF NIGHT: A DARKNESS AT BLAISEDON, the pilot concerns a team of psychic researchers (THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD’s Kerwin Matthews and Cal Bellini, who went from this to a role in LITTLE BIG MAN, as Dustin Hoffman’s bass-ackwards antagonist) brought in at the behest of a San Francisco secretary (Marj Dusay) who has come into possession of a haunted old house on the Hudson River.  It’s a pretty standard affair from the folks who brought you DARK SHADOWS – presented on video tape and a bit ragged and old hat but still fun if you don’t expect too much.  (DARK SHADOWS fans will also enjoy seeing series regulars Thayer David and Louis Edmonds in pivotal roles.)  For years, I had a memory of a horror show on TV that I’d seen as a kid where a car drives up to the iron gate of a creepy old house and someone gets out of the car and pushes the gate open, allowing the car to pass through.  That’s all I remembered.  I also had a vague memory that the show was called DEAD OF NIGHT but when I checked the IMDb many years ago I was brought to the 1977 telefilm.  I had no way of knowing this wasn’t the movie I remembered but it was only while working my way through the DVD release that I came face to face with those familiar frames.

And that’s all I remember.  If I had to hazard a guess as to why I retained so little of this “spookshow” (as my Dad would have called it), I’d wager I was sent to bed for fear it would give me nightmares.  But it’s funny how inconsequential a moment remained branded upon my brain for forty years.  This got me to thinking about movies from which I took very little – in fact of which I remember only one moment, which has slumbered in my mind ever since.  Here are a few:

RETURN FROM THE ASHES (1965).  I know that this J. Lee Thompson movie (adapted from a Hubert Monteilhet novel by Julius J. Epstein, of CASABLANCA fame) is about a Holocaust survivor (Ingrid Thulin) who returns from Dachau to find that her husband (Maximillian Schell) has taken up with her now adult daughter (Samantha Eggar) – but I’ve never seen the whole thing.  The only scene I remember, perhaps the only scene I actually saw, is of Thulin’s journey home.  The setting is a European style train, a wagon-lit compartment, with the door that opens to the outside.  Thulin is lost in her thoughts, crammed in the compartment with strangers and a child of six or seven years.  Thulin is dealing with her mental anguish, which is being aggravated but also neatly symbolized, by the kid kicking at the external door.  The scene, as I remember, goes on forever… the kid kicks and kicks and kicks and you feel like those kicks are going through your head and you want somebody to stop that little shit… and before you can say “exit- stage left” the doors open and the boy falls out to his death.  Again, that’s all I remember.  Haven’t had the opportunity to see RETURN FROM THE ASHES since.

I saw a few minutes of Bobby Roth’s BRAINWASH (aka MYSTIQUE, aka CIRCLE OF POWER, aka THE NAKED WEEKEND 1981) many years ago when I was sick.  The film concerns an consciousness raising seminar held in a city hotel that subjects a handful of corporate types to “psychological pressure” techniques that will, they are told, unlock their banked potential.  All weaknesses (alcoholism, obesity, cross-dressing) are exploited as the executives secret shames are revealed.  Roger Ebert gave this film (produced by Anthony Quinn!) three stars and I’m sure it’s, as The New York Times averred, “a worthwhile movie” but I found the experience of watching this in the condition I was in at the time to be unbearable.  The only scene I remember is of actor Walter Olkewicz being put naked inside a dog cage and humiliated in front of the others.  I may have seen more than this but I’ve retained only this image (visible in the ad art for the old VHS tape at the right) and within a few tortured minutes I slid off the couch and crawled, crawled to the TV and turned it off.  I just couldn’t take it.  Roth’s HEARTBREAKERS is one of my favorite films so I really owe it to myself to revisit this… when I’m feeling really good.

THE NEON CEILING is a 1971 TV movie starring Lee Grant as a bored middle class housewife who jumps ship on her failed marriage and carts her young daughter (Denise Nickerson) out to the desert, where they counter grizzled diner owner Gig Young.  Young’s character is depicted as slovenly and crude but ultimately it is revealed that he is the most genuine man Grant has ever met and a relationship blooms.  Young’s grubbiness is telegraphed early on in the film as his fry cook character is shown grilling hamburgers for his customers.  Smoking like the proverbial chimney the whole while, he actually takes a moment to lay his half-smoked cigarette down on top of one of the hamburger patties.  While this moment didn’t put me off greasy spoon diners, it did stick in my memory.  Years later a friend recalled the film and that exact same moment, which had stuck with him, too.

All I remember from BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (1944), Warner Brothers’ remake of their 1930 film OUTWARD BOUND (and based on the same 1923 stage play by Sutton Vane), is a scene at the bar of a steamship loaded with refugees from war-ravaged London who are pointed towards a better life in America.  Very early in the story, you find out that everyone on the ship is dead and that the cruiser is ferrying them to their Final Judgment (doled out by Sydney Greenstreet no less!).  John Garfield is top-billed as a sardonic journalist, who strikes up a conversation with Eleanor Parker (playing the wife of pianist Paul Henreid) and the two are smoking, as everybody did back then.  Unfiltered Luckys or something.  Parker absently picks bits of cigarette paper from her heavily-made up lips and Garfield makes some comment about it.  And that’s all I remember.

I’m sure many of you have nursed similar movie moments over the years.  Let’s hear about them.  Tell me All You Remember!