Cinéma Inhabituel for April 1-15

A Guide to the Interesting and Unusual on TCM

By Ed Garea

We begin with some sad news. Colin Dexter, the author who created Inspector Morse, the irascible, poetry-loving detective who listened to Wagner while pursuing clues and fine ale through a series of 13 novels and a critically-praised TV show, died March 21 at his home in Oxford, England. He was 86.

Dexter, a former classics teacher, was suffering through a rainy family vacation in North Wales in the early ‘70s when he decided to kill some time by reading a detective novel left in the hotel. After he was finished, he decided he could do better and began sketching out an outline of a mystery about a young woman murdered while hitchhiking. The novel, Last Bus to Woodstock, was published in 1975, introducing readers to a new detective team of Inspector Morse and his good-natured, long-suffering detective sergeant, Robbie Lewis. 

ITV brought the books to television in the series Inspector Morse, which ran from 1987 to 2000, and was seen here on PBS. John Thaw played Morse while Kevin Whatley was cast as Lewis. After the series ran its course, a sequel followed, Lewis, with Whatley’s character now promoted to Inspector. A prequel, Endeavor, also appeared, with Shaun Evans portraying Morse at the beginning of his career.

The series achieved a popularity beyond Dexter’s wildest dreams, with Thaw’s brilliant interpretation of the gruff inspector bringing hordes of tourists to Oxford, where the series was set. The local tourist board seized the opportunity and created a series of Morse walks to meet the demand.

Dexter tore a page from Hitchcock’s book and appeared in cameos in various episodes of the series as a tourist, bum, doctor, prisoner, bishop, and professor, among others. 

Who would’ve thought that one of the most celebrated detectives in literary history came about because of a lousy vacation? They say necessity is the mother of invention, but sometimes boredom can also play a huge role.

TRUFFAUT

April 2: A double helping of Francois Truffaut begins at 2:00 am with The 400 Blows (1959). A brilliant examination of a troubled adolescent, it was the first effort at filmmaking for the former critic for Cahiers du Cinema (Notebooks on Cinema). It’s followed at 4:00 am by what may have been his best effort, Day For Night (1973), a lively, light-hearted look at the everyday perils of filmmaking, when everything seems to go wrong and a director can only shake his head and trudge on. The title comes from the practice of shooting a night scene during the day using a special lens filter. For those interested in Truffaut, David, Christine and I listed our favorite films from the director. You can find it here.

CARTOON ALLEY

April 9: Beginning at 8:00 pm it’s a night of rare animation, featuring independently made cartoons from Canada. Not only for fans of animation, but for anyone interested in the rare and different. In other words, the readers of this column.

FRANKIE!

April 12: OMG! It’s an entire evening devoted to films starring the one and only Frankie Avalon. Lest one assume the evening will be filled with “Beach Party” movies, it actually begins at 8:00 pm with 1962’s Panic in the Year Zero. Directed by and starring Ray Milland, this AIP production is about a vacationing family leaving Los Angeles for a camping trip just as a nuclear bomb wipes out the city. Ray and his family (Jean Hagen, Frankie Avalon, and Mary Mitchel) must suddenly fight to stay alive. Those new to it will find it watchable and interesting. To quote critic Michael Weldon: “All this would be very depressing except for the raucous music by Les Baxter and the bad acting by Frankie. Listen to the kids have friendly arguments about whether the canned food is radioactive or not.” On a side note, the film inspired the Steely Dan song “King of the World” on their second album “Countdown to Ecstasy.” 

At 10:00 pm comes the original Beach Party from 1963. A huge success when released it began a short-lived trend of follow-ups, none as bouncy or as totally enjoyable. Co-starring Annette Funicello, who popularized the bikini in America with this movie, as Frankie’s girl, Dolores. It also co-stars Bob Cummings (who walks away with the picture), Dorothy Malone, Morey Amsterdam, and Harvey Lembeck as the most inept biker that ever lived: Eric Von Zipper. Watch it, if not for the antics of Frankie and Annette, then for the wonderful music of surf guitar legend Dick Dale.

At midnight comes Frankie’s first real film, Guns of the Timberland (1960). He had earlier appeared as himself in the teen musical Jamboree! (1957). In this tepid Western, Alan Ladd and Gilbert Roland are partners in a timber concern who have a contract to cut logs in a territory abutting Jeanne Crain's ranch. Jeanne and the rest of the valley are opposed to the loggers for fear that it will leave no watershed for flooding, resulting in an ecological disaster. Frankie and Alan Ladd’s daughter Alana play a pair of young lovers. Frankie also gets to warble a couple of songs by Jerry Livingston and Mack David including “The Faithful Kind,” and one called "Gee Whizz Whilikens Golly Gee." 

2:00 am finds Frankie teamed with Dwayne Hickman as a pair of secret agents hot on the trail of the nefarious Vincent Price in AIP’s Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965). It seems that Dr. Goldfoot has created an army of bikini-clad robots programmed to seek out wealthy men and charm them into signing over their assets to the doctor. It’s up to Frankie and Dwayne to stop him.

And finally, for those still awake after all this, it’s Drums of Africa (1963) at 4:00 am. There’s a good reason for showing this mess from MGM at this late hour. It stinks. Lloyd Bochner is an engineer traveling to East Africa with Frankie, the owner’s nephew, to his employer’s railway construction site. Mariette Hartley provides the eye candy as a mission worker who, along with guide Torin Thatcher, warn the duo not to proceed until the Arab slavers have left the area. Do they listen? Not on your life, and are soon lost in the wilderness until rescued by Hartley and Thatcher. When Hartley is kidnapped by said slave traders, the three men team up to rescue her. This synopsis actually sounds better than the movie. Besides Frankie singing a song, the highlight comes when, about almost 70 minutes into the movie, a group of white men in blackface appear as “Masai warriors” in caveman outfits. Produced by the duo of Philip N. Krasne and Alfred Zimbalist and loaded with footage from King Solomon’s Mines, this epic was shot in the dark wilds of Bronson Canyon.

IT’S ZSA ZSA, DAHLINK

April 5: As if an entire evening devoted to Frankie Avalon wasn’t enough, TCM goes one further with an evening devoted to Zsa Zsa Gabor, a failed actress more noted for being Zsa Zsa than anything else. We begin at 8:00 as Zsa Zsa stars with ex-husband George Sanders in Death of a Scoundrel (1956), a rather entertaining B-movie from RKO that was one of the last to come from the dying studio. Sanders stars as the rich Clementi Suborin. When he’s found dead in his New York apartment, his secretary (Yvonne DeCarlo) recounts his story to the police about his rise from Czech refugee to rich New Yorker and the trail of betrayal, womanizing and fraud along the way that confirms the fact that almost everyone who knew him wanted him dead. Sanders is at his best as the scheming Suborin with Zsa Zsa as one of his victims. To make it a family affair, Sanders’ brother, Tom Conway, co-stars as the brother Suborin double-crosses back in Czechoslovakia. 

At 10:15 pm Zsa Zsa stars along with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in 3 Ring Circus (1954). Martin and Lewis are a pair of veterans who join the circus and predictably wreak havoc throughout the picture. Jerry wants to be a clown. Zsa Zsa is an egotistical trapeze artist.

The highlight of the evening takes place at 12:15 am with the screening of 1958’s Queen of Outer Space. Zsa Zsa is one of a population of women inhabiting Venus whose man-hating queen (Laurie Mitchell) has plans to disintegrate the Earth. The queen hates men because her face, hidden behind a mask, was scarred in a war with the planet’s men. The queen wants to kill a group of male astronauts who have landed there, but Zsa Zsa leads a rebellion to save them. Fans will quickly recognize the space suits left over from Forbidden Planet and the sets and giant spider from World Without End. Directed by Edward Bernds, who formerly directed the Bowery Boys and the Three Stooges.

At 2:00 am Zsa Zsa may be seen in a decent, if uneven, film from director John Huston: 1952’s Moulin Rouge. It’s the story of painter Toulouse-Lautrec, as interpreted by Jose Ferrer. The sets and the musical numbers are wonderful, as is Huston’s use of Technicolor, but Ferrer’s performance leaves something to be desired.

And finally, at 4:15 pm, comes Lili (1953) starring Leslie Caron as an orphan in France who gets a job with a carnival puppet show and forms a relationship with a crippled and embittered puppeteer, played superbly by Mel Welles. Zsa Zsa is the assistant to womanizing magician Jean-Pierre Aumont. It is a delightful film, highlighted by Caron’s singing of “Hi Lili, Hi Lo.” Due to the late hour, it should be recorded and saved for later. 

PRE-CODE

April 4: An interesting Ruth Chatterton film makes its appearance at 3:30 am, Journal of a Crime (1934). When Chatterton discovers that playwright husband Adolphe Menjou is in love with his mistress, Claire Dodd, and wants a divorce, Ruth takes matters into her own hands and shoots Dodd. Although hubby knows who did it, he decides to remain silent, waiting for his wife to crack under the guilt. But when a man named Costello (Noel Madison) is arrested for the murder, she visits him in prison and confesses. But he gallantly decides that as he’s responsible for another murder he might as well remain silent and face death. But the guilt overtakes Ruth and she decides to confess, but on the way to the prosecutor’s office she is hit by a car and develops amnesia. Her loss of memory leads to unseen consequences for the couple. It’s a pretty silly Pre-Code feature notable only for the superb performance of Chatterton, who plays it straight instead of simply hamming it up and chewing scenery. This was her last picture for Warner Bros. Declining box office and her outspoken attitude over the studio’s attempt to cut salaries at the height of the Depression led the studio to declare her as excess baggage. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss Melvyn Douglas as an actor in Menjou’s stage play.

April 5: At 6:00 am Ann Harding travels to French Indochina to be with fiancee Melvyn Douglas, commandant of a prison camp, only to find he’s now an alcoholic, in Prestige, a hackneyed melodrama from 1932. With Adolphe Menjou and Clarance Muse.

April 6: Slimy and corrupt night court judge Walter Huston will stop at nothing to avoid the clutches of watchdog Lewis Stone – and that includes framing innocent couple Phillips Holmes and Anita Page in the entertaining, though minor effort, Night Court (1932), airing at 11:15 am. Huston and Stone are worth the time expended.

PSYCHOTRONICA AND THE B HIVE

April 1: The Maisie series continues with 1941’s Maisie Was a Lady at 10:30 am, followed by Lon Chaney, Jr. and Claude Rains in The Wolf Man (1941) at noon. Fashion models are the focus of late night, with a deranged murderer running amok in Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace at 2:45 am, followed by Peter Cushing as a doctor looking for suitable replacements for his wife’s (Sue Lloyd) scarred face in Corruption (1967) at 4:30 am.

April 6: Walter Huston gives one of the great despicable performances in 1932’s Kongo, a remake of 1927’s West of Zanzibar, with the one-and-only Lon Chaney in the role. One might think it difficult to follow in Chaney’s footsteps, but Huston does it brilliantly as the crippled madman who seeks revenge on the daughter of the man who took his wife away, with unseen and tragic results following. It was strong stuff when released and has lost none of its punch over the years, thinks to Huston’s performance.

April 8: At 7:30 am it’s Bela Lugosi vs. Boris Karloff in Edgar G. Ulmer’s underrated expressionistic horror, The Black Cat (1934).

Ann Sothern again takes center stage in Ringside Maisie (1941) at 10:30 am.

Late night begins at 2:30 am with The Zodiac Killer, a 1971 low-budget exploitation film about the serial killer who was never caught. Despite some terrible acting and writing, it deserves a look, but keep in mind that it is disturbing, with lots of hateful anti-female dialogue. The narrator warns us that “Somebody sitting next to you or behind you had killed!” Consider yourself warned. Seeking of woman killers, following at 4:15 am is Hitchcock’s 1960 macabre masterpiece, Psycho.

April 15: Hammer Studios’ version of One Million B.C. (1966), a remake of Hal Roach’s One Million B.C. (1940), airs at 8:30 am. Featuring stop-motion animation by Ray Harryhausen and Raquel Welch as the world’s sexiest cavewoman traipsing about in a fur bikini, it’s also notable for the appearance of cult actress Martine Beswick as Raquel’s rival. The poster featuring Welch in her fur bikini was a best seller and helped the actress establish herself as an instant sex-symbol. 

Maisie Gets Her Man from 1942, airs at 10:30 am, with the irrepressible Brooklyn showgirl launching a star act with Red Skelton. Look for Leo Gorcey as Cecil.

Late night features the laff riot, Night of the Lepus (1972) at 11:30 pm. (Read our essay on it here.) It’s followed by two MGM cartoons, The Hound and the Rabbit (1937) and The Hungry Wolf (1942) from director Hugh Harman.

At 2:00 am comes a most unusual film from director Bertrand Tavernier. Death Watch (La mort en direct, 1980). Taking place in the future, when medical advances have made premature death a rarity, the reality show Death Watch, a voyeuristic look at how people cope with the end of life, is a ratings hit. In the search for more and more events to televise, a reporter, Roddy (Harvey Keitel), has a camera implanted in his head that broadcasts everything he sees to a television station in Glasgow. His assignment is to show the audience the journey of Katherine (Romy Schneider), who's been recently informed that she's terminally ill, as she prepares for her last days. Complications ensue from the fact that Katherine has no idea she's being filmed. She previously rejected an offer from the show's producer (Harry Dean Stanton) to appear on it. This places Roddy in an uncomfortable position as he becomes close to his subject. This sad – and long – film was shot around Glasgow (in English) and was based on a novel by David Guy Compton. Ironically, two years after its release, Romy Schneider died at the age of 43 from cardiac arrest due to a weakened heart caused by a kidney operation she had months before.