Dracula (1931)

Year 9, Day 278 - 10/5/17 - Movie #2,746           

BEFORE: I'm going to squeeze one more film in before New York Comic-Con really gets rolling, because I've got an eye on the calendar and how many days there are until our vacation, and I know how many films I want to cross off the list before that.  We'll be in Nashville on the weekend before Halloween, so we may do something holiday-related like go on a spooky pub crawl.  Also, I've got to remember to buy all my candy next week, because if I wait until after the vacation, it will be way too late to get the best treats.

Nosferatu aside, the last time I saw the Dracula character, he was mixed up with some crazy business with Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolf Man - it was the tail end of the Universal horror mash-up craze, where they threw all their monsters together ("Monster Mash-Up", get it?) in the futile hope of making something that was greater than the sum of its parts.  But over the course of 13 or 14 years, the convoluted history of what happened when Dracula met the other monsters, who played whom in which film, and so on pretty much imploded in on itself. I know I sure couldn't keep track of whose brain was inside the Monster's head on any given day, or which hunchbacked lab assistant was working for which mad scientist.

As I've stated before this year, my new policy is to allow films to link together based on shared characters, if actor linking is not available.  So for my purposes, I'm considering Nosferatu/Count Orlov to be essentially the same character as Count Dracula, since the Germans ripped off Bram Stoker's book to make that film.  But Hollywood based the more famous 1931 Bela Lugosi film on the 1924 stage play of "Dracula", not directly on the novel.  So there are bound to be some differences.  Oddly, although I've seen some of the later Universal sequels with Dracula in them, I've never seen the original - I rectify that tonight, though it seems like a bit of a fait accompli at this point.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "House of Frankenstein" (Movie #2,473)

THE PLOT: The ancient vampire Count Dracula arrives in England and begins to prey upon the virtuous young Mina.

AFTER: Yeah, they definitely shuffled the deck here in terms of the characters and their roles - the Bram Stoker novel has Jonathan Harker traveling to Transylvania to do business with Count Dracula, and even "Nosferatu" sent the Harker stand-in, Hutter, to do the same.  But this film (again, based on the stage play) sends Mr. Renfield out to meet the Count in his castle, and that's another way to get Renfield to become Dracula's servant and fixer, which does happen in the novel but much later in the story.  And both this film and "Nosferatu" then arrange for Dracula and his coffins to travel by boat from Romania to a new land, only it's Germany in "Nosferatu" and the U.K. here (and in the novel).

You see, it gets confusing really fast - all of the classic Dracula stories have the same elements, but they each throw them together in their own way.  I don't think any of the films had much interest in being faithful to the novel until that one in 1992 that Coppola directed - and even then, I'm not sure that one completely followed the same story track either.

But my point is that Renfield is given a much larger part here - whereas he didn't even make it to "Nosferatu" at all, Count Orlok acted pretty independently, except for a coachman.  And Renfield seems like the character who's the most fun, at least the actor seemed like he had a real ball playing a crazy man who eats bugs and spiders and warns all of the other humans that there is a vampire in their midst, while at the same time he's working for Dracula and trying not to get into trouble with his master.  If you notice, we never see Dracula bite Renfield, instead he only gets hypnotized into serving the Count, because a studio executive thought that Dracula should only bite women.  Hollywood, apparently, felt the audience was not ready for a vampire that bites both ways.

Lugosi, on the other hand, didn't seem like he was doing any heavy lifting, from an actor's perspective anyway, all he had to do was act charming in some scenes and then stare into the camera in others, with his supposed hypnotic glare.  So many acting choices to make, and yet the default position seemed to be a blank stare, it's an odd decision on the part of the director.  But we're talking about something that was done very, very early in the history of horror films, in the history of cinema even, and at the time there just wasn't a road map on how to make a horror film, so every decision was a ground-breaking one, in a way.

We all know the rules about vampires now, of course, thanks to movies, like how they hypnotize women to drink their blood, they can't be seen in mirrors, or how they can turn into bats and wolves (though that wolf-thing has been downplayed over the years, I think, to avoid confusion with werewolves).  You have to remember that this was mostly new to audiences in 1931, so this film really hammers home that mirror thing - we see Van Helsing looking at the mirror about four or five times, comparing the mirror image to what he sees in the room, just to insure the audience really GETS IT.  And the flying bat that is allegedly Dracula is so fake that it's not even funny - it just looks like a plastic toy on a fishing line that some poor gaffer had to dangle at the top of the frame while standing on a ladder.

Similarly, every time that Dracula bites someone in the neck, it happens behind a tree, or just out of frame, or even completely off-screen.  We never even get to see him turn into a wolf, or even see Lugosi with FANGS, for cripes sake. What's a vampire without fangs, or I should say with just implied fangs and not visible ones?  Pretty darn toothless, it turns out.  This is really the charming, suave, sophisticated Dracula, the one who dressed really well (compared to Nosferatu's rather shabby clothing) and while it really set the standard for future movie vampires for a good long time, there's really not much horror in this horror film, not by today's standards, anyway.  My score below is really given more out of respect than anything else.

The decision to base this film on the stage play rather than the novel was apparently one made for financial considerations - fewer locations in a stage play, plus they probably re-used the Transylvanian castle set to double as the British abbey set.  Bear in mind this was made during the Great Depression, so there you go.

NITPICK POINT: To introduce Dracula as a vampire who has an appetite for blood, Renfield is shown to have cut himself - not with a knife, but with a paper clip, while doing paperwork.  How is that even possible?  Were paper clips different in 1930, like were they super-sharp or something?  As far as I know, they've always been the familiar rounded metal "trombone" shape - and it's essentially impossible to draw blood with a paper clip under normal usage, or even accidentally.  Wouldn't a letter opener or a sharp pair of scissors been more believable?

Starring Bela Lugosi (last seen in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man"), Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye (also last seen in "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man"), Edward Van Sloan, Herbert Bunston, Frances Dade, Joan Standing, Charles K. Gerrard.

RATING: 4 out of 10 sprigs of wolfsbane

Nosferatu (1922)

Year 9, Day 277 - 10/4/17 - Movie #2,745        

BEFORE: Today is load-in day for the New York Comic-Con.  So I feel like I just got back after my break, and it's almost time to shut down again for a few more days.  There's no way I can stay up late to watch movies if I have to be at the booth every morning by 9.  OK, 9:15.  But I have been catching up on TV lately, during my time off I binged the final season of "Mad Men" on Netflix, since waiting for AMC to post the episodes On Demand was taking way too long.  What a disappointing final episode, but I guess maybe there was no satisfying way to end such a long-running, complicated show. Since I finished that I've been focused on clearing my tapes of July shows, and then the other night I started watching "Stranger Things".  Appropriate for Halloween month, plus the 2nd season is starting at the end of the month, so I might as well get Season 1 watched.  It's too much a part of pop culture for me to avoid it any longer - when the MAD Magazine parody comes out, I feel I should probably watch the damn show.  But I feel like maybe I've read too much about it to fully enjoy it.

Today I'm finishing up my three-film exploration of early horror films that were part of the German Expressionist Movement - hey, it's high time we had some class around here, right?  I admit, TCM ran these three films together about 2 years ago, as part of their "From Caligari to Hitler" programming, based off the 1947 book by Siegfried Kracauer that was a psychological history of pre-World War II Germany.  Apparently the films of the Wiemar Republic provided insight to the unconscious motivations of the German people, so really, anyone who watched these last three films should have seen Hitler coming, right?

Ah, if only it were that easy.  That's a bit like saying that anyone who watched "Zoolander", "The Associate" and "Home Alone 2" should have known that Donald Trump would be elected President and screw up the whole country.  It's just too pat of an answer.

THE PLOT: Vampire Count Orlok expresses interest in a new residence and real estate agent Hutter's wife.

AFTER: If this plot seems very familiar to you, there's a very good reason - it's basically Bram Stoker's "Dracula", with all the character names changed.  But it got filmed first in Germany, so when Universal made the famous 1931 film "Dracula", there might have been a few people who thought the plot was too derivative of "Nosferatu".  Now I'm not sure what the copyright laws were like back in 1922, but this represents typical German behavior, taking another person's story and changing the title - they basically pulled the same sort of thing in World War II, taking over Poland and Austria and changing those countries' names to "Germany".

But I digress.  Enough about Hitler, and for that matter, enough about Twitler, aka Orange Hitler, aka Donald Drumpf.  He's got nothing to do with Nosferatu/Dracula, right?  I mean, one of them is a parasite that drains people of their resources, lives in a castle and seduces young, beautiful women - and the other one, of course, is Nosferatu.  Seriously, though, in this film Nosferatu wants to buy some real estate (uh oh...) in Germany and contacts an agent named Knock about some depressed properties across the street.  Presumably he wants to tear them down and build a casino (seriously, like THE BEST casino, it's going to be yuuuuge.)  So Knock sends his man Hutter to Trumpsylvania to meet with Count Orlov.

Hutter is warned by the townspeople not to travel the countryside at night, because of the "werewolf", but that's a different film, right?  They really should have warned him about Orlov, who welcomes Hutter to his castle and then feeds him dinner and gives him a really sharp knife to cut his meat.  Hutter manages to cut himself with the dinner knife (Seriously? Who does that? I've been cutting my food with knives for at least 45 years and I've never drawn blood...) and Orlov offers to clean up the blood with his tongue, which for some reason is not any kind of red flag.  Later on, Hutter wonders why he's got two giant mosquito bites on his neck, since he doesn't recall being bitten.  NITPICK POINT: Hutter says these two puncture marks are on "both sides" of his neck, but given the placement of most vampires' fangs, that's darn near impossible.

Some strange behavior is acceptable on Hutter's part, because Orlov/Nosferatu probably has him under his sway at this point.  But to see a bunch of coffins loading themselves on to a coach and NOT say anything?  Way to not take a stand, Hutter.  Even when Hutter sees that Nosferatu sleeps in a coffin, and we all know now that's the time that a vampire is most vulnerable, he does nothing but run back to his room and hide.  Germans, am I right?  They just can't stand up to authority...

Nosferatu also seems able to entrance Hutter's lady, Ellen, from a distance, even though he's never met her and has no idea where she lives.  I think in other versions of the "Dracula" story, Mina Harker comes to Dracula's castle with her husband, and this seems more believable when she gets entranced. Most hypnosis, even vampire hypnosis, probably requires that the subject be in the same room at some point.

Nosferatu's coffins are then shipped by boat to Germany (NITPICK POINT: Why so many coffins?  Does he sleep in several of them, or is he bringing along some vampire pals?) and Nosferatu manages to find something to eat along the way by drinking the blood of the ship's crew, so by the time the ship lands in port at Wisborg, he's the sole passenger - because that's not suspicious at all.   He enjoys the German food in town (Germans, of course) and the citizens start to believe that a plague has hit town.  Turns out that when the Transylvanians come to town, they're not sending their best people - they're sending vampires, rapists - and some, I assume, are good people.  But you can't build a wall to keep out vampires if they're going to come to town by boat.  Anyway, I think a vampire could probably just turn into a bat and fly over a wall, right?

There are some differences between "Nosferatu" and Bram Stoker's novel, most notably the ending, and the fact that Nosferatu drinks blood but does not turn other people into vampires - what is a vampire without his cult following?  Still, Bram Stoker's widow ended up suing the company that made this film, and as a result all known prints and negatives were destroyed.  However, there were unknown prints in other countries, so the film survived.  And then in a display of karmic irony, "Nosferatu" itself fell out of copyright protection and into the public domain.  So Werner Herzog was able to direct a remake in 1979.  Just like vampires themselves, this film was notoriously hard to kill.

Starring Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Georg H. Schnell, Ruth Landshoff, Gustav Botz, Alexander Granach (last seen in "For Whom the Bell Tolls"), John Gottowt, Max Nemetz, Wolfgang Heinz, Guido Herzfeld.

RATING: 4 out of 10 swarming rats

Faust

Year 9, Day 276 - 10/3/17 - Movie #2,744

BEFORE: There's a lot that happened while my blog was dark for three weeks.  Some things were minor changes, like finally getting a new driveway - the old one's bugged us since we bought the house in 2004, especially when it came time to shovel the sidewalk each winter, a process made nearly impossible by its uneven surface.  More importantly, my father-in-law passed away, and though my wife wasn't speaking to him often, it's still significant when a family member is no longer part of one's life.  Even though I tend not to believe in things like the afterlife and final judgements, I was raised Catholic so those beliefs, mistaken as they may be, are still a part of my programming.  So I feel conflicted when I go to a funeral and people talk about the deceased being in a better place, because that sort of goes against what I believe, unless they mean that things are so bad right now on Spaceship Earth that it's better to not exist at all than to be alive.

I'm always the one saying, "Well, we don't know for SURE what happens after we die..." and that's a statement that cuts both ways.  Maybe nothing happens, maybe corporeal non-existence is just an eternal blank void, but isn't that nothing then technically something?  Maybe it's like the movies, where your consciousness floats up (or sinks down) and you meet angels or devils and they've got a whole record of what you've done and what it adds up to.  Or maybe religion's just a crutch, an antiquated belief system to keep the masses in line - that's my current belief, but if there is an eternal, long dark tea-time of the soul, that's not something I should be gambling with, right?  How do I react as an agnostic in a way that also hedges my bets?

I'm sticking with German expressionist films tonight, and while this may not be a straight-out "horror" movie in the vein of last night's film, it's about the devil, right?  Or at least a demon, so I think that qualifies.  Actor linking is suspended for a few days, but I should be able to get back to it shortly.  At least tonight's director will appear again tomorrow.

THE PLOT: The demon Mephisto wagers with God that he can corrupt a mortal man's soul.

AFTER: "Faust" is a classic story, rooted in German legend, which may be an off-shoot of the Biblical parable about Job, who suffers greatly but refuses to give up his faith.  (Umm, I think, it's been a while...).  There are several versions of "Faust", but this 1926 film is partially based on Goethe's re-working of the story in the early 1800's, as opposed to Christopher Marlowe's version from the 1500's.  But this is the root of the "Devil temptation" story, which later manifested in works like "Damn Yankees", "Bedazzled", "Needful Things" and so on.

In this version, Faust is an aged scholar and alchemist, who is unable to help when a plague falls across his land - and this was back in the day when illness was believed to come from the Devil, not from germs or parasites or lack of sanitation.  So when the plague hits, it's clearly the work of Satan, and since God created Satan, and doesn't seem to be taking a hand to stop the plague, then God is ultimately at fault. I mean, come on, God works in mysterious ways and all that, but help out some sick people once in a while, would it kill you, God?  So Faust realizes that his learning is all for naught, and simultaneously loses his faith.

However, since the agents of the Devil do seem to play a more active role in the fates of Man, Faust contacts Mephisto, here an agent of Satan or some form of lesser demon, who agrees to serve Faust for 24 hours, granting him the power to save his people.  Though the people shun his help, simply because his power comes from evil - OK, that's a hard lesson to learn.  But soon the 24 hours are up, and that should be the end of the story, right?  Faust goes to hell, we all learn not to make deals with the devil, case closed.

Only here in this version, that's NOT the end - Mephisto keeps tempting Faust for some reason, even though by my reasoning, he's already fulfilled the terms of the agreement, he gave Faust power, it didn't work out, so pack your bags, Faust, we're off to the netherworld.  Mephisto then gives Faust back his youth, and takes him to a wedding feast in Italy, where Faust seduces the bride, a duchess, and Mephisto kills the groom.  In order to make love to the Duchess, Faust has to sign over his soul.  (Hey, we've all been there, am I right?)  OK, game over, Faust gives up his soul, gets his freak on, and then he goes to Hell, end of story.

Only that's not the end either - these Germans LOVE to drag out a good temptation story, apparently. Faust returns home and Mephisto's dating service (like a netherworld Tinder, maybe it's called "Cinder") sets him up with another young beauty named Gretchen, and Mephisto gives her a golden chain so she'll fall in love with Faust.  Faust sleeping with Gretchen causes Gretchen's mother to die from shock, and her brother Valentin dies in a duel with Faust, defending her honor.  (Mephisto totally sucker-stabs him, but we should expect no less from the devil, right?).

It doesn't end well for Gretchen, either - she ends up in the stocks and then gives birth to Faust's baby (man, a lot happens during this 24-hour bet, right?) and I can only assume that Mephisto kept Faust on the hook all this time - after winning his soul, like THREE times over - because doing so caused so much chaos in the world.  God may work in mysterious ways, but the devil's plans are a lot easier to figure out, I suspect.  Faust loses his regained youth, and returns to her just as she is about to be burned at the stake - so really, this is a happy kind of German story, all things considered.

But if last night's film was really about post-WWI Germany, and the inability of the German people to rebel against authority, which set the stage for Hitler, then by extension, Faust is similarly about those citizens who are helpless to rise up against a tyrant, just as Faust is merely a pawn in the chess game between God and Satan.  That seems to be the underlying fear here, that humans are not really in control, we think we have free will and control, but we're constantly surrounded by temptation, shortcuts to power or financial gain, or powerful figures making empty promises that will cost us more in the long run than we realize.  And that's what Hitler took advantage of, promising to make the trains run on time, making Germany great again, just don't think about what happened to those Jewish neighbors you used to have.

I think you may realize where I'm going with this, because since Nazis are (apparently) fashionable again in our country, anything that's about Hitler is now about Trump by extension.  The Devil comes along and offers you riches, power, even your lost youth, and all you have to do is sign this contract in blood, don't bother to read it.  And Trump comes along and says he's going to cut taxes, fix healthcare, re-build our infrastructure, and there's going to be so much winning that you may get tired of winning, just don't think about what happened to all those immigrant neighbors that you used to have.  And enough people fell for it, even though he might as well have been wearing a red suit with horns and forked tail.  Damn it, people, if an offer sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

But sure, keep on believing that climate change isn't real, and doing nothing to fix the problem - just stop for a second and think about who benefits when next summer, it's hot as Hades. Coincidence?

NITPICK POINT: The whole side storyline with Gretchen's aunt goes absolutely nowhere - Gretchen visits her to bring her Satan's necklace - why?  We're told that Gretchen's aunt makes love potions for the villagers - so what?  Mephisto makes her a drink and makes goo-goo eyes at her - for what purpose?  These seem like they could be important story elements, like maybe a love potion will be important, but none of these things turn out to be relevant, so why introduce them?  This is 10 minutes of the story that could have been excised with no effect, it's just time-filler, right?

Starring Gösta Ekman, Emil Jannings, Camilla Horn, Frida Richard, William Dieterle, Yvette Guilbert, Eric Barclay, Hanna Ralph, Werner Fuetterer

RATING: 4 out of 10 archangels

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Year 9, Day 275 - 10/2/17 - Movie #2,743

BEFORE: "Scared Stiff" was a linking dead-end for me, but I'm sort of suspending my linking for the duration of the October horror-movie marathon - although many of these horror films WILL link together, not all of them will, which is why I'll consider two films that both feature Dracula, or, say, the Frankenstein Monster, to be linked in spirit.  Go ahead, you try and find another horror film with Carmen Miranda in it.  Can't be done.

"Scared Stiff" was also a carry-over from last year's Halloween-themed chain - I just didn't have room for it, and there are three other films I didn't have room for, they're three German expressionist films from the very early days of filmmaking itself.  TCM ran them in 2016 and I tried very hard to work them it - but again, they just don't seem to link to anything else, or even to each other.  So I'm just going to watch them now and get them out of the way, then I can deal with all things vampire or alien or creature-related.

Oh, yeah, here's what's being pushed back to Movie Year 10: 3 films about zombies, "Swamp Thing", and the 1941 version of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde".  Also "Salem's Lot", which you might think belongs with this year's vampire films, but maybe next year I can cross off the last few Stephen King films, so I don't have to watch the new version of "It" or the recently released "Dark Tower" for another 12 months.  Maybe then I can work in "Creepshow" and "The Children of the Corn" or something.

THE PLOT: Hypnotist Dr. Caligari uses a somnambulist, Cesare, to commit murders.

AFTER: Ugh, this one was really hard to follow - and not just because this is a silent film from 1920, and I had to read English subtitles over the German titles, which meant I couldn't do a jigsaw puzzle on my iPad while watching, I had to really concentrate on the film.  I tried, I really did, but it was so hard to understand what was going on that I had to really focus, and that usually makes me fall asleep that much sooner.  So I guess I took a little nap after about 30 minutes, then I woke up and went back to where I left off, and I tried again.  It turns out that in 1920, much of the "language" of film was still being worked out, and they used a lot of techniques like iris shots, where the screen gets dark except for a circle that gets progressively smaller - and the overuse of that technique makes me very tired too.

From what I understand about the plot, there's a framing sequence where a guy points out his fiancee, who's walking around in a zombie-like state, and then the story flashes back to tell us how she came to be in that condition - so it turns out this non-linear storytelling thing has been around for a long, long, time, even though I tend to think of it as a recent trend to ruin biopics with.  The narrator, Francis, then weaves a tale about a German village that has an annual fair, or "Jahrmarkt", and a hypnotist named Dr. Caligari applies for a permit to appear at the fair, to put on a "spectacle".  His act involves an entranced man, Cesare, who sleeps in a coffin, but is woken up to answer questions from the audience - that's pretty standard side-show, stuff, right?  I mean, how do you prove that the assistant is NOT hypnotized.

But then people start turning up dead, starting with the rude government clerk who wouldn't issue the permit at first.  Because who hasn't had problems at a government office, am I right?  Next up is the narrator's best friend, Alan, who had asked the hypnotized man how long he would live - killing him is a long way to go to make a prediction come true, but I guess if you're running a sideshow act, you do what you have to do.  The police apprehend a man with a knife who was trying to kill an old lady and try to pin the other two murders on him, but he denies it.

The hypnotized man then goes after the narrator's girlfriend, and instead of killing her he kidnaps her, which seems to be a strange shift in his M.O.  Maybe Caligari told Cesare to not kill the pretty girls?  Anyway, there's a strange carry-over from last night's Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis film, "Scared Stiff", which also featured an underling that had no mind of his own, though in that comedy, the man was called a "zombie". Which shows that this term had a very different meaning decades ago, referring to a mindless slave, not an undead brain-eating aberration.  It seems that the worse possible fate that horror fanatics could envision in the 1920's was to be not in control of one's actions, to be bonded to an evil man and forced to do his chores.  Only later did someone determine that it might be much, much worse to not be allowed to die, and instead to live on, shuffling across a deserted landscape, looking for flesh to eat.

Another possible interpretation is that Cesare represents the common man, and Dr. Caligari represents the German war government, conditioning mindless slaves into soldiers who will kill all of its enemies.  According to Siegfried Kracauer's book "From Caligari to Hitler", we see here the subconscious need for a tyrant in German society, and gain an understanding that the average German would be obedient in the face of authority and unlikely to rebel against it.  I don't know about this, because it sounds an awful lot like being apologetic to the citizens of Nazi Germany - oh, they let Hitler take over because standing up to a tyrant isn't a very "German" thing to do.

But then there's a twist in the story, something very David Lynch-like (or probably, more accurately, David Lynch's films are very "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"-like...) because the narrator follows Dr. Caligari to an insane asylum, where he finds out that Caligari is the director.  While Caligari sleeps, a look through his diary reveals that he is obsessed with the story of ANOTHER man named Caligari, who also used a hypnotized man to commit murders in another town, some years before. And then the police come to arrest the current (2nd) Caligari, and he becomes an inmate in his own asylum - and honestly, aren't we all just inmates in our own asylums?

But then there's ANOTHER twist, which is also very David Lynch-like, and honestly, this is all starting to resemble the recent season finale of "Twin Peaks", where it was (sort of) revealed that reality can be changed, and that all of the characters were going to be different in a new timeline, umm, I think.  Or maybe the point of it was that all of them, and us, are living inside of a dream, and we just don't know who the dreamer is.  Or that we're all delusional in thinking that life has meaning, which it doesn't, and nobody should have expected David Lynch to produce something that had a resolution and a coherent point.

Anyway, back to "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" - the Germans apparently have a word for the concept of a framing story, because of course they do - and that word is "Rahmenerzählung". The opening sequence was reportedly suggested by Fritz Lang after he read the script, and the director agreed that adding the framing story would make the film more commercially successful overall - but reportedly, when it opened at the Capitol Theater in New York in 1921, some audience members booed and demanded their money back.  I can certainly get behind that sentiment - if this film weren't on that list of "1,001 Movies to See Before You Die", I think I would have given it a pass.

Also starring Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt (last seen in "Casablanca"), Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (also last seen in "Casablanca"), Rudolf Lettinger, Ludwig Rex.

RATING: 3 out of 10 straitjackets

Scared Stiff

Year 9, Day 274 - 10/1/17 - Movie #2,742

BEFORE: I'm back from my break with the start of this year's Halloween-themed October chain, with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin carrying over from "You're Never Too Young".  But I'll get back to Raymond Burr at the end of the month, and Bryan Cranston from "Trumbo" also.  But before that, I've got to survive New York Comic-Con (Oct. 5-8), two birthdays and a real vacation, which my wife and I have not taken in about four years.  It's bound to be a busy month - which is why I might have started watching these films a few days early, but if so, I'm not telling....

I also sort of set my choices for this October's films in stone a couple of months ago, so that I would know that my chain would get me to the end of the year, and this determined how many films were needed for October, which worked out great.  Putting off a dozen or so films until October 2018 gave me enough slots to get to most of the films I wanted to get to, but that coupled with the upcoming vacation means I won't be able to take December off from movies this year.  Now, a lot of these films came from TCM's new habit of running horror films in the spring ("March Malice") and I didn't find out until the last minute what films they're running in October, so there's no way for me to work those in now.  The die is cast....

THE PLOT: Fleeing a murder charge, a busboy and a nightclub singer wind up on a spooky Caribbean island inherited by an heiress.

AFTER:  This one's not any scarier than your average "Scooby-Doo" story, in fact it bears some resemblance to your average "Mystery Machine" mystery - just follow the money, figure out who wants the property in question, that's probably the person who's dressing up like a ghost pirate or whatever.

But this film takes a LONG time to get to the spooky mansion - they don't get there until about 80 minutes in.  First they have to set up that Dean's a nightclub singer (isn't he always) and Jerry's character is very clumsy (again, duh...) and also give them a motivation to want to get out of town - here it's the fact that Dean's character has been seen romancing a gangster's girlfriend.  He also mistakenly believes that he killed a guy and that the cops are looking for him, and for good measure, he's also falling for a woman who's on her way to Cuba, where she's inherited an island with a haunted castle.  Meanwhile, Jerry's character is just along for the ride, he apparently can't get a job without following Dean around, and shouting, "Larry! Hey, LAAA-RRYYY!" every few minutes.

On the way to Cuba, they meet Carmen Miranda on the boat, who just happens to know Jerry's character, Myron, from somewhere.  I never really understood her act - why did she wear fruit on her head?  Was this some weird trend in the 1950's, to make a hat out of fruit?  I just looked it up - apparently there was a trend of trimming hats with fruit, but it was back in 1918, and again in 1941, which is weird because you'd think they would need all the fruit for the war effort, and putting it on hats would be considered wasteful.  But it seems that Miranda's act came from her appearance in the 1943 film "The Gang's All Here", which had a musical number choreographed by Busby Berkeley, called "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat", and I guess she got pigeon-holed after that. This seems a little sad to me, if I imagine that by 1953 she was probably continuing to wear the fruit hats everywhere, for fear that she wouldn't be recognized without one.

When her character briefly disappears in this film (they never really say whether she was kidnapped, or fell off the boat, or just accidentally locked herself in the bathroom or something) then Jerry Lewis is forced to put on her famous fruit headdress and lip-sync to a record of her music, because if she (or apparently, someone acting like her) doesn't perform first, then he and Dean can't do a number after that.  The song that he lip-syncs to, "Mamae Eu Quero", is one that I know from one of my favorite cartoons, "Magical Maestro", where this dog uses a magic wand to turn The Great Poochini into various characters (including one that sings like Carmen Miranda, of course...).

Like "You're Never Too Young", this film was sort of a remake of an earlier film, in this case "The Ghost Breakers" from 1940, which could also be seen as a precursor to "Ghostbusters".  But our heroes here don't seem very interested in debunking ghosts, in fact they assume that in the mansion they'll probably just see a guy in a fake ghost costume or something, but instead they seem to encounter a genuine spirit, and also a "zombie" of sorts - not like modern zombies, that walk slowly and eat human flesh, though.  Back in the 1950's a zombie was just a resurrected guy who had no free will, so that someone could make him do anything, even employ him as cheap labor.  I guess that beats being dead somehow?  Or is it a trade-off, you get to come back from the dead, but only if you agree to do someone's chores and odd jobs?

Also starring Lizabeth Scott, Carmen Miranda, George Dolenz, Dorothy Malone (last seen in "Artists and Models"), William Ching (last seen in "Pat and Mike"), Paul Marion, Jack Lambert, Tony Barr, Leonard Strong (last seen in "Shane"), Henry Brandon, Frank Fontaine, with cameos from Bing Crosby (last seen in "High Society"), Bob Hope.

RATING: 4 out of 10 steamer trunks