By Hank Reineke

The Asphyx Will Rip You Apart… The Asphyx Will Invade Your Mind… The Asphyx Will Destroy Your Soul… If It Were In Your Power… Would You Sacrifice Your Wife… Your Children For Immortality?

The answers to the questions posed above by the advertising campaign for Peter Newbrook’s The Asphyx (1972) was a resounding “yes.” As the gifted but obsessed psychic-research scientist Hugo Cunningham, celebrated British actor Robert Stephens puts everyone in his family through the proverbial ringer by film’s end. Such single-minded research on his part is not accomplished without a measure of personal guilt, mind you. But as a curious man of science – and one obsessed with paranormal exploration - Cunningham pushes forward determinedly with increasingly morbid experimentations.

Such “experiments” include the exhuming of his dead son for some post-mortem testing, the photographing of a condemned man at a public hanging, a self-administered electrocution, putting his daughter’s head through a guillotine pillory and even willfully torturing a tubercular pauper. Hey, the last guy, a poorhouse resident, had only forty-eight hours to live anyway… so he was fair game.

Like Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, Cunningham is a man driven by obsession. Appearing before members of the Psychic Research Society, the scientist presents to colleagues a series of slides depicting a trio of unfortunates photographed at the precise moment of their deaths. Each photograph has a “smudge” present, a sort of phantasmagorical protoplasmic image hovering nearby. It’s Cunningham’s theory that the image is an Asphyx, a creature of Greek mythology. The Asphyx is a visual manifestation of one’s tortured “soul the moment it departs the body.” It’s the scientists’ belief that if one could pre-emptively isolate and imprison the Asphyx prior to expiration, that person might carry on as an immortal. This appears to be Cunningham’s endgame interest.

Though adopted son Giles (Robert Powell) is wary of his father’s dark experiments (“This isn’t science!” he warns), he begrudgingly becomes one-half of Cunningham’s research team – to disastrous results as one might expect. Since Cunningham, to his credit I guess, puts his own life on the line in pursuit of science and immortality, it seems only fair to him that members of the family do the same - and without complaint. Which certainly makes the case that, on some occasions, father doesn’t know best.

Cameras began rolling on the The Asphyx on Monday, February 7, 1972, at Surrey, England’s Shepperton Studios. Shooting wrapped a mere five weeks following first photography. The film was to be helmed by first time director Peter Newbrook, a former cameraman and cinematographer who boasted a filmography dating back to the early 1940s. The film certainly looks great, even if the pacing of Newbrook’s direction is somewhat suspect. The Academy Award-winning Cinematographer Freddie Young (B.S.C.) - of Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Battle of Britain and You Only Live Twice fame - would use the newish Todd-AO 35mm anamorphic system to great effect. In many respects, Newbrook’s The Asphyx is of similar construct to such British parlour-horror films being churned out by Hammer and Amicus in the late 1960s/early 1970s.

The question now was whether or not a Victorian-era set horror picture would make any money in 1972? The horror biz was already moving away from stately, moody gothic films to more exploitative blood-splattered fare. Nevertheless, upon the film’s completion, it was announced The Asphyx was to be distributed in the British market by Scotia-Barber. On week later, Variety reported that Martin Grasgreen, President of Paragon Pictures, had managed a deal with Glendale Film Productions (London) to handle distribution of The Asphyx in both the U.S. and Canada. In early winter of 1972, Paragon already had a number of exploitative horror-thrillers in release, including Blood Suckers, Blood Thirst and Death by Invitation.

In August of 1972 the Independent Film Journal announced that The Asphyx, described as a “science-fiction suspense thriller,” would be released the following month, the first of twenty-two films that Paragon had waiting in the queue. Box Office promised the film would be the recipient of “an extensive national advertising and promotion campaign,” with “key theater” roll-outs in Dallas, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.

Upon its September release, Variety noted The Asphyx was – welcomingly - bucking the recent trend of blood and gore horrors: Newbrook had intentionally delivered a more “cerebral” or “thinking man’s horror film.” Acknowledging the film was well cast and beautifully photographed, the trade review did rue that Brian Comport’s verbiage-laden screenplay was slow going and riddled with historical improbabilities. Other critics noted Robert Stephen’s mad scientist was one seemingly gifted with precognitive invention.

It was true. As The Asphyx is set in the year 1875, scientist Cunningham had somehow managed to prefigure such mechanical appliances as the first motion picture camera (not actually developed until 1888) and an electric chair (not developed into the early 1880s). To the credit of Box Office, the trade paper cautiously suggested that, “Selling the film as a monster movie would not be to its advantage: a more intelligent approach to sci-fi fans is indicated.” I imagine “less-intelligent” monster movie fans might have shifted restlessly in their seats back in ’72, awaiting even the mildest of jump-scares.

The Asphyx was the fourth and final of writer Brian Comport’s screenplays to be produced. His first screenwriting effort, Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (Cinerama Releasing Corp., 1970), was an out-and-out freaky and grisly exploitation film. Technically speaking, Girly wasn’t a completely original invention of Comport’s. The original story was loosely based on the stage play Happy Family (aka All Fall Down) by the novelist and BBC radio playwright Maisie Mosco. His second screen credit was a co-authorship with director Pete Walker on Man of Violence (later re-titled The Sex Racketeers). That film was a convoluted and overly talky international-gold smuggling-racketeer-caper-thriller with a pronounced sixties swagger.

In one of those local-lad-makes-good-type newspaper items, journalist Anthony Cardew of the Surrey Mirror and County Post, shared an hour with Comport, then basking in the success of his industry breakthrough with Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly. “I was offered a script which a producer wanted lived up,” the writer told Cardew. “He wanted a bit more action or something. I took the script apart and rewrote it completely. I added new characters, took some out and changed the thing entirely. I wrote it in note form, just suggesting the way I thought it should go.”

The producer was pleased with Comport’s revised scenario and formally commissioned him to draft a new screenplay, in the scripters own words, “from the beginning, according to my own ideas.” With the film in production, Comport was also approached by a representative from London’s Sphere books to turn his screenplay into a novelization, a six-week effort bringing in a bit of extra cash.

Many film critics found Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly – later retitled simply as Girly –aggressively unpleasant in its lurid, sexually suggestive subject matter - and decidedly distasteful in its depiction of depravity and violence. One critic would unflatteringly suggest Comport as a leading “candidate for sickest mind of the year award.” Another nonplussed reviewer thought the film as “Theater of the absurd… absurdly vicious.”

Scolding reviews aside, Comport’s star seemed to be on the rise. In October of 1970, only shortly following the release of Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly, production had already started on Robert Hartford-Davis’ thriller Beware My Brethren (Cinerama Releasing Corp., 1972) also from a Comport script. Things then cooled for an interim but, following a year or so of film-work drought, Comport was back with The Asphyx.

Though Comport’s script – adapted from a story provided by Christina and Laurence Beers – would appropriate more than a few elements from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Independent Film Journal interestingly suggested The Asphyx was of similar construct to William Castle’s B-movie classic The Tingler (1959): “There too a visible spirit of sorts popped up; but that one was of fear rather than death.” Though some wondered why a classically-trained actor of Robert Stephens’s caliber would agree to appear in a film clearly beneath his station, the former board-trotter of the Royal National Theatre thought The Asphyx “rather good.” He told journalist Neville Nisse of Staffordshire’s Evening Sentinel, “I really enjoyed making it because I liked the script and the people involved.”

The Asphyx performed reasonably well at the box office – not boffo perhaps, but reasonably well. So much so that in January of 1973, Paragon announced they were going to enter into a co-production deal with Glendale for two additional features. Paragon would, of course, retain all U.S. distribution rights, but would now also share in a generous slice of a film’s international profit. When U.S. box office receipts measurably dipped following the film’s initial run, The Asphyx was often paired on the secondary market with other indie horrors: Night of the Living Dead, Son of Blob and Blood Suckers among them.

(Variety trade advertisement)

In Australia, The Asphyx was given the more compelling title Spirit of the Dead, the adverts teasing an audience confrontation with “The Horror That Lurks Halfway Between Heaven and Hell!” The campaign posters for Spirit of the Dead featured accompanying artwork promising a more ghoulish monster than the film would deliver. The Asphyx would also enjoy a sustained life in the United Kingdom. Exploitatively re-titled The Horror of Death on its re-release, the film would play in cinemas throughout the 1970s. It was often incongruously paired on multi-bills with such chop-socky fare as Kung Fu Virgins and The Angry Dragon.

This 2023 Kino Lorber Studio Classics edition of The Asphyx replaces the Kino/Redemption Films co-issue of 2012. The only really new “Special Features” offered is the commentary track provided by film historians Kim Newman and Stephen Jones and six trailers promoting other Kino Product. This new edition is also packaged in a protective slipcase that mimics the artwork of the case insert. Both the 86 minute U.K. theatrical cut and 99 minute U.S. expanded cut are made available to view. But, as the package warns, the “reconstruction of the extended version blends HD footage mastered from the 35mm negative with SD footage mastered from the U.S. release print.” The changes in visual quality are very significant as forewarned.

For the record, I watched the extended version. Though the inclusion of an additional thirteen minutes is welcome, these extra fragments are of no great interest. In fact, it’s possible the added running time further slows down a film already in desperate need of judicious editing. Newbrook’s direction is competent, but Comport’s screenplay is weighed down by too many sermons: the film’s main characters continually perseverate on the moral misguiding’s of Cunningham’s tampering with spiritual and life-and-death issues. Such hand-wringing tires after a while. Having said all this, The Asphyx is an interesting film, if far from a forgotten classic. While aficionados of British horror should certainly add the title to their watch list, it might be best to screen the film with muted expectation.

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By Fred Blosser

Scores of modestly budgeted, black-and-white Noir movies about gangsters, cops, private eyes, and murderous love affairs were produced in France in the 1950s, but only a few crossed the Atlantic in dubbed prints. Some were dumped in second-run movie houses, where they were often labeled and advertised “for adults only,” emphasising their sexual content (tame now but steamy back then, when TV routinely depicted married couples in separate beds). I discussed one such Noir, released in France in 1959 as “Du Rififi Chez Les Femmes” and in the U.S. in 1962 as “Riff Raff Girls,” HERE. In the later ‘60s, others were bundled with other foreign B-movies for broadcast on local television stations, hardly a prestigious showcase either. Coming off the midnight shift, a bleary-eyed factory worker might see the end of an Eddie Constantine movie with mediocre dubbing in a late-nite time slot, just before the station signed off for the night. With a mug that looked like a bad night on the town, Eddie was even more popular than Humphrey Bogart in the France of the Charles De Gaulle era, but his tough-guy pictures as wisecracking, two-fisted FBI agent Lemmy Caution hardly made a ripple here. To the extent Constantine and Caution are remembered in the U.S. at all, it’s because Eddie reprised the role in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” (1965). But “Alphaville,” although wonderful, was a New Wave absurdist parody and not part of the original series.

Only with the advent of home video and social media since the 1990s have films like “Touchez Pas au Grisbi” (1954), “Bob Le Flambeur” (1956), “Any Number Can Win” (1963), and “Le Circle Rouge” (1970) been rescued from obscurity, packaged with care, and re-evaluated by a modern, more receptive audience. With many more pictures of this type yet to be rediscovered and restored, the release of “French Noir Collection” on Blu-ray is a step in the right direction. The Kino Lorber Studio Classics set includes three dramas that will be new to all but the most tenacious fans of the genre.

In “Speaking of Murder” (1957), Louis Bertain (Jean Gabin) seems to be a stolid, middle-aged Parisian whose garage caters to high-end customers. The appearance is deceiving. Louis, an ambitious high roller, needs more money than the garage earns. He makes it as the leader of a four-man theft ring, targeting deliveries of cash and securities at banks. The robberies are grab-and-run jobs, based on insider tips about delivery schedules, and carefully planned with the exacting attention to detail that fans expect from stories like this about heists. Louis and his partners Fredo, Pepito, and Raymond have been together for more than ten years, but fractures have begun to appear. The volatile Pepito (Lino Ventura) distrusts Fredo, who developed a bad case of the shakes on their last job. Worse, Pepito also has suspicious eyes on Louis’ younger brother, Pierre (Marcel Bozzuffi), a petty offender vulnerable to police pressure. For good measure, Louis is determined to retire after the next job, and we know how that usually turns out in gangster pictures. With a sliced-to-the-bone plot and almost documentarian black-and-white cinematography on the streets of Paris, the film is as good as the genre gets, even if it is saddled with a lacklustre title, apparently tacked on for release in English-speaking markets back in the day. “Speaking of Murder’ would lead you to expect a sedate episode of “Columbo” or “Murder, She Wrote,” not a hardboiled heist drama like this one. The original French title, “Le Rouge Est Mis,” or “The Red Is On” (referring to the light that comes on outside Louis’ garage when the gang meets there) isn’t any more compelling in direct translation. If Marcel Bozzuffi looks familiar, you probably remember his later role in a much more famous crime drama. In “The French Connection” (1971), the prolific French actor played Pierre Nicoli or “Frog Two,” the sniper who flees from Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle in William Friedkin’s iconic car and train chase.

The other two films in the Kino Lorber set follow the pattern of James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity,” in which murder results when one spouse cheats on another with an extramarital lover. In “Back to the Wall” (original title, “Le Dos au Mur,” 1958), Jacques (Gerard Oury), a wealthy construction tycoon, discovers that his wife Gloria (Jeanne Moreau) has resumed an old affair with Yves, a small-time actor. The vengeful millionaire assumes a false identity to blackmail the lovers and humiliate his errant wife. He doesn’t need the blackmail payments; he just wants to see her squirm. It isn’t a spoiler to note that Yves is murdered in the course of the scheme, since the film opens with Jacques disposing of his body. We presume that the millionaire was the murderer, but if so, how does that square with his extortion game, once it begins to unfold in a long back story we follow through Jacques’ eyes? In “Witness in the City” (“Un Témoin Dans La Ville,” 1959), another millionaire, Pierre, kills his mistress Jeanne by throwing her off a moving train. In turn, Jeanne’s husband Ancelin (Lino Ventura again—the Roy Scheider of French crime pictures) murders Pierre after the millionaire is acquitted in court for Jeanne’s death. Ancelin thinks he’s committed the perfect crime when he makes Pierre’s death scene look like a suicide instead of a murder, but as someone tells him, “No crime is perfect.” Ancelin becomes desperate when a cab driver sees him outside Pierre’s house, just before the dead man’s body is found. Since the driver was a witness, Ancelin decides he has to get rid of him too. The film reaches for the tension of an Alfred Hitchcock or Fritz Lang picture as Ancelin stalks the cabby, but doesn’t quite succeed; but then, nobody ever quite matched Hitchcock or Lang. Still, both it and “Back to the Wall” will be welcomed by suspense fans in search of obscure works in the genre, and both benefit from glistening nighttime scenes in actual Parisian locations. Nostalgists will enjoy the wet streets and neon at actual locations, the Midcentury interiors, trenchcoats—plenty of trenchcoats—and classic product placements in all three films. When was the last time, if ever, you saw an Esso sign?

The three movies, licensed from Gaumont Films, are presented in sharp, restored prints, with French voice tracks and crisp English subtitles. One of the two discs in the set contains “Speaking of Murder” alone, and the second contains the other two films. Trailers for “Speaking of Murder” and “Back to the Wall” are included. The Blu-ray can be ordered HERE.

Now, when can we see a Lemmy Caution Collection of comparable quality?

Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)

In this excerpt from the U.S. PBS series, "Pioneers of Television", Peter Graves discusses his long career from "B" sci-fi movies to his success on "Mission: Impossible" and even his comedic appearance in the "Airplane!" feature film. He also chats about the career of his brother, James Arness, another true icon of television.

By Lee Pfeiffer

"Good Day for a Hanging" is minor 1959 color Western elevated by an unusually intelligent script and an impressive cast of veteran actors and a couple of up-and-comers who would find stardom in the 1960s. Fred MacMurray plays former town marshal Ben Cutler, a widower who is living a serene small town life in the company of his fiancee Ruth (Maggie Hayes) and his teenage daughter Laurie (Joan Blackman). Their peaceful existence is shattered when Laurie's former beau Eddie Campbell (Robert Vaughn) arrives in town in the company of some shady bandits. While Laurie tries to reignite the romance with Eddie, his companions are pulling off a robbery of the bank which goes wrong very quickly when a shootout ensues. Eddie and his companions flea the scene with a posse in hot pursuit led by Marshal Cain (Emile Meyer). Another shootout follows with some of the gang killed and others escaping with half the loot from the bank. In the melee, Ben witnesses Eddie fatally shooting Marshal Cain before Eddie is wounded and captured. When he is brought back to town, Eddie is nursed back to health, in part by Laurie, and admits the obvious- he took part in the robbery. However, he insists that he did not shoot the marshal and that he must have been hit by gunfire from another gang member. Ben knows this is untrue and tells the townspeople as much. He also reluctantly agrees to temporarily resume serving as town marshal until a permanent replacement can be found. Eddie is put on trial and plays the victim, recounting a hardscrabble upbringing and turning on the charm. Nevertheless, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. From his jail cell, he can see the gallows being built. However, he begins to convince the townspeople that he is not guilty of murder and his death sentence should be changed to serving time in jail. Soon, many of the town's most prominent citizens are buying his story and they force Ben to take a petition bearing many signatures to the governor asking him to grant Eddie's request. Laurie, blinded by her romantic interest in Eddie, is his chief defender- a fact that causes Ben great consternation. Because this is a Western, there are dramatic developments that result in an action-packed climax.

What sets "Good Day for a Hanging" apart from many other minor Westerns of the period is the fact that it has a compelling and interesting script that touches upon sociological factors such as the ability of one person to manipulate many others, often against common sense, by using charisma and a strong will. Eddie has both and you can't help but be reminded of how many contemporary people, often in public service, are excused for all sorts of behavior simply because people find them personally likable or intimidating. Doubtless, there have been times when all of us have seen such scenarios and wondered how intelligent people can ignore established facts in their defense of someone whose actions are indefensible. In this case, Ben Cutler is 100% right in his testimony against Eddie but before long he is the odd man out, criticized and resented by the very people who only recently begged him to serve as marshal. Fred MacMurray gives a strong performance as the protagonist- a man who has lost the respect of his own daughter in her misguided quest to benefit a killer. Robert Vaughn gives an excellent, understated performance that allows the viewer to understand why he is able to win over so many townspeople.

It's interesting to analyze the career trajectories of several actors who appear in the film. Fred MacMurray had been going through somewhat of a minor career slump at the time but it would be short-lived. Later in 1959, he starred in his first Walt Disney movie, "The Shaggy Dog", which was a major hit. He would star in many other Disney films over the next decade. Additionally, he would give an outstanding performance as a misogynistic heel in Billy Wilder's Oscar winner, "The Apartment". Capping off his career turnaround, he would also star in the long-running sitcom "My Three Sons". Robert Vaughn would rise to stardom with his performance later that year in "The Young Philadelphians", earning an Oscar nomination for his work. That, in turn, led him to be cast as one of "The Magnificent Seven" and he would reach the level of international teen idol in the mid-Sixties due to his starring role in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E". Some of the fine character actors who would appear in the film would also find major success over the next few years. Howard McNear, who plays one of the prominent townsmen, would create his iconic comedic role as the eccentric Floyd the barber the next year in "The Andy Griffith Show". Denver Pyle, who plays  deputy in the film, would also make periodic appearances in the show as the lovably loony hillbilly patriarch Briscoe Darling, as well as appear in two major John Wayne films, "The Horse Soldiers" and "The Alamo" before landing his most memorable role as Sheriff Frank Hammer in "Bonnie and Clyde". James Drury, who would go on to star in "The Virginian" TV series, also has a supporting role. Special mention should be made of Edmon Ryan, who is especially good, portraying Eddie's defense counsel. One more note of interest: the film was produced by Charles H. Schneer, a respected figure in the British film industry who was most often associated with the films of special effects master Ray Harryhausen.

The Sony DVD has a reasonably good transfer, if a bit soft. The only extras are original trailers for "Silverado" and "The Professionals", both on Sony Home Video. Strangely enough, the trailer for "Good Day for a Hanging" isn't included, but we found it on YouTube and are providing it here. 

I don't want to exaggerate the merits of "Good Day for a Hanging". It isn't a great movie by any means, just a good Western- but it's loaded with fine actors who were on the cusp of major career successes.

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ViaVision/Imprint is releasing the superb 1984 film "The Bounty" starring Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins as a limited edition (1500) Blu-ray. Here are the details:

THEY BEGAN THEIR EPIC VOYAGE AS FRIENDS… IT ENDED IN HATRED AND BLOODSHED

William Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) was a real-life sea captain who, in 1787, steered HMS Bounty on a 27,000 mile voyage into danger, chaos and madness. After 31 days battling severe sea squalls and Bligh’s ever-increasing cruelty, the weary crew is relieved to land on the tropical island of Tahiti. But soon their tyrannical captain wants to set sail again and the desperate men turn to first mate Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson) to help take the ship by force.

Originally, “The Bounty” was a longstanding project of Director David Lean who ultimately left the project in 1981 and was replaced by Australian Director Roger Donaldson.

Starring: Mel Gibson, Anthony Hopkins, Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson, Laurence Olivier, and Edward Fox.

Strictly Limited Edition Hardbox set with unique artwork & booklet featuring the original press kit. 1500 copies only.

Special Features and Technical Specs:

Disc One:

• 1080p High-definition presentation on Blu-ray from a 4K scan of the original negative
• Audio Commentary by director Roger Donaldson, producer Bernard Williams, and production designer John Graysmark
• Audio Commentary by historical consultant Stephen Walters
• Making of The Bounty – 1984 documentary narrated by Edward Fox
• 2004 Visual Essay narrated by Stephen Walters
• Isolated Score (in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Stereo)
• Audio English DTS-HD 5.1 Surround + LPCM 2.0 Stereo
• Original Aspect ratio 2.35:1
• English subtitles

Disc Two: Bonus Disc

• NEW Interview with Director Roger Donaldson
• NEW Featurette on the history of film adaptations of “The Bounty“
• NEW Featurette on the Vangelis film score
• A Fated Ship – 1981 documentary surrounding the construction of “The Bounty” replica ship and the early development of the film
• In Bligh’s Wake – 1984 documentary charting the voyage from New Zealand to Tahiti to deliver “The Bounty” replica for shooting the film
• NEW Interview with Maritime historian & film producer Stephen Walters
• NEW 90 min feature with the cast & crew

Any pre-order titles will be dispatched in the week leading up to its aforementioned release date. Special features and artwork are subject to change.

Note: Imprint limited editions tend to sell out quickly. The Blu-ray is Region-Free.

Keep in mind that prices are quoted in Australian dollars. Use a currency converter to see what the price is in your national currency.

To pre-order, click this link: https://viavision.com.au/shop/the-bounty-1984-imprint-collection-225/

By Hank Reineke

In early December of 1947 Box Office made note that producer Ben Stoloff’s Eagle Lion “film factory” – an American arm of Britain’s Rank Organisation - was to begin production of two new pictures. The first was Brooklyn U.S.A, a dramatic film to recount the Ebbets Field barrier-shattering saga of Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson. The second was Bernard Vorhaus’s The Spiritualist, a mystery to serve as a starring vehicle for Turhan Bey, the suave actor having recently been released from his contract at Universal. December of ’47 had already been a busy period for Eagle Lion, the company having rushed through the noir crime-dramas The Cobra Strikes and Assigned to Danger. Stoloff assured the studio would remain busy following the holidays. Principal photography on The Spiritualist was scheduled to commence in January of 1948.

The primary castings for The Spiritualist were soon being announced in the trades. Lynn Bari was cast in the principal role of Christine Faber, a grieving well-to-do widow who lives in a sprawling mansion on the Pacific cliffs. Her proximity to the ocean is a mixed blessing. Faber hears the ghostly voice of her beloved dead husband Paul (Donald Curtis) – reportedly killed in a fiery automobile accident -rolling in with the evening tide. The role of the lawyer Martin Abbott, the kind current paramour of the widow Faber, was filled on January 10 when it was announced that Richard Carlson had been cast as the “top male” in the feature.

The earliest scenario of The Spiritualist was drafted by Crane Wilbur, a journeyman writer-director-actor-playwright who had been kicking around Hollywood since the silent era. Muriel Roy Bolton was commissioned to write the screenplay from Crane’s treatment. Director Vorhaus thought the ideas behind The Spiritualist intriguing, but was of the opinion Bolton’s script lacked “characterization and humor.” The screenplay’s absence of humor was odd, especially as Bolton was primarily known for her scripting of several “Henry Aldrich” comedies of the 1940s. In any case, Vorhaus belatedly brought Brit Ian McLellan Hunter onto the project. Vorhaus was familiar with Hunter’s work: the two had collaborated on a trio of films in the years 1939-1940. In Vorhaus’s memory, Hunter’s reworking of the script necessitated the drafted scenarist to labor a full week’s time, working both “day and night,” to tidy and tighten things up.

The basic premise of The Spiritualist was Christine’s falling for the con of the flimflamming trickster known simply as “Alexis” (Turhan Bey). Taking advantage of his grieving clients, Alexis – whose calling card advertises his services as “Psychic Consultant” - uses all sorts of supernatural malarkey to convince his clientele that he possesses “secrets of the outer world.” Amongst his subterfuges to gain “insight” into his patsies is a rigged spirit cabinet, a closed-circuit television monitor, wire recorders, room temperature regulators, and projection cameras. He even secrets an earpiece beneath his turban, a hidden confederate slipping him information from a remote location.

The influence of Alexis’s “readings” on the emotionally-distressed Christine raises the concern – and suspicion – of boyfriend Martin and Faber’s younger sister, Janet (Cathy O’Donnell). They hire a private detective (Harry Mendoza) to investigate the background of this alleged “spookchaser.” But there’s a second, and more nefarious, development they miss entirely. They soon learn that the emotional manipulation of Christine is more than a simple money-grabbing swindle. The initial ruse serves only as a prelude to a far darker plan orchestrated by a second mysterious figure in the shadows.

Just as The Spiritualist was starting production, a United Press Hollywood correspondent reported that the office of producer Stoloff was under siege. Hundreds of phone calls and letters were – reportedly – pouring in from enraged members of the National Associations of American Spiritualists as well as from other devout practitioners. It’s hard to separate the reality from the ballyhoo of such reporting, but Stoloff allegedly tried to salve the fears of complainants by assuring his film was only interested in exposing “crooked” mediums, not all. But a secretary at Eagle Lion suggested the angry spiritualists were not easily appeased. She reported that, “Mr. Stoloff’s received countless letters placing a ‘hex’ on him.”

On May Day of 1948, it was announced The Spiritualist was to be released on July 7, the trades trumpeting the Hollywood’s summer schedule of 1948 was shaping up to be a more profitable season than that of the previous year. (In actuality, the film’s release appears to have been pushed back to early August). In any case, the “hex” put on the film seems to have been at least partly successful. Though Variety was impressed, describing the picture as “a whale of a yarn,” “expertly directed” and featuring “topflight performances,” exhibitors and audiences seemed nonplussed as the film rolled out regionally across the U.S. and overseas throughout 1948-1949.

London’s Picturegoer thought the film, a “Poor spiritualistic melodrama, wholly unconvincing, with the artists concerned completely at sea owing to the ineffectiveness of both characterization and direction.” One exhibitor told Box Office sighed that while The Spiritualist had attracted only an “average draw” during screenings, he thought the film deserved better. It was, in his opinion, well done if perhaps reminiscent of that same year’s noir Sleep, My Love featuring Claudette Colbert and Robert Cummings.

The producers of The Spiritualist – mindful of their accounting ledgers - were of the surprised opinion that such superstitious belief in mediums and séances was more deeply entrenched than anyone guessed. So, in February of 1949 with plenty of markets still unvisited, Eagle Lion made a decision to re-title The Spiritualist to The Amazing Mr. X. In the end, the name change did not appear to make much of a difference at the box office. By May of 1949 the film was still on the circuit but still not doing particularly well.

One Kentucky-based exhibitor decried the picture’s walk-up business as “simply awful.” He also opined the film’s lack of dramatic action – as well as “poor” sound and too-dark photography - was to blame. He counseled other “small town exhibitors” to “lay off this one” as it “laid an egg at the box office.” With the film was still making the rounds in August of ‘49, other exhibitors complained the picture, while generally solid, was “too talky in parts and the sound was very low.” It was thought the spiritualism hoax was given up to early in the film, removing any sense of a suspenseful reveal. Both were valid criticisms. It’s true that most of the films on-screen time was consigned to intimate parlour discussions.

The film suffered overseas as well. In England, the Rank Organisation and British Board of Film Censors were also inundated with complaints by spiritualists, though censors ultimately chose to allow the film to be exhibited as issued. This caused an aggrieved “former president of the Spiritualist National Union” to sulk, “I am amazed that such a malicious and offensive statement about spiritualism should be passed for exhibition purposes.”

Though not a lost classic, The Spiritualist/The Amazing Mr. X has a lot going for it. The film is wonderfully shot and the film’s spooky and spectral optical effects are certainly effective. In an interview with the Australian journalist John Baxter, Vorhaus gave all credit to Director of Photography John Alton for the film’s dark and moody visuals. Vorhaus recalled Alton as, “faster and more talented than any other cameraman I’d ever worked with, partly because he used so little lighting… He regarded shadow and darkness as just as important as light. So you never had a fully lit set; you had this mix of highlights and darkness.” The film is also made interesting by Vorhaus’s interesting camera placements. The film is sprinkled with a number of creative attention-getting and undeniably unusual camera angles. The film’s acting troupe are uniformly top-notch in their performances.

The Spiritualist would sadly be among the last few films Vorhaus would direct in America – or anywhere. On April 25, 1951, director Edward Dmytryk – a member of the infamous Hollywood Ten who served a six-month prison sentence for his “uncooperative” testimonials - chose to salvage his career by ingratiating himself with the House Un-American Committee. In new testimony, Dmytryk gave the Committee the names of seven members of the Screen Directors Guild who he alleged were members of the Communist Party in 1945. Vorhaus’s name was among them.

With the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases being reported daily and the war in Korea grabbing headlines, Vorhaus saw little reason to stay in Hollywood. The director chose to live out his life as an American exile, doing a bit of film work in Europe before quitting the movie business altogether. He would later settle in London and be granted British citizenship. There was no reason or benefit of returning to America - at least not at the height of red scare paranoia. It was our loss, as well as his.

This Blu-ray issue of The Amazing Mr. X from the folks at The Film Detective is top-notch, a 4K transfer mastered from restored original 35mm elements and presented in an aspect ratio of 1.37:1. The B&W film looks wonderful, film grain present and Alton’s exquisite photography bringing out the almost unnaturally soft facial features of the film’s featured players, especially the ladies. Special features include Daniel Griffith’s interesting twenty-minute featurette, Mysteries Exposed. The documentary offers a brief primer on the history of spiritualism and its subsequent exploitation by filmmakers: from the silent short camera trickeries of George Méliès to RKO’s You’ll Find Out (1940) through such Universal features as The Devil Commands (1941) to various entries in their Inner Sanctum series to Paramount’s The Uninvited (1944).

The documentary features some interesting background on spiritualism, séances and mediums – and of the practice’s historical debunkers, many of whom were magicians wise to their slight-of-hand methodologies. The featurette offers commentaries courtesy of Lisa Morton, author of Calling the Spirits: A History of Séance’s, and of film historian C. Courtney Joyner. The set also includes a commentary by film scholar Jason A. Ney and ten-page booklet, mostly recounting the star-crossed career of Turhan Bey, written by Don Stradley. As always, The Film Detective delivers a very nice, lovingly assembled package of a film too often misused due to its public-domain status.

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By Hank Reineke

The scenario of Mad Love was adapted from Maurice Renard’s Grand Guignol thriller of 1920 Les Mains d'Orlac (The Hands of Orlac). Renard (born 1875) was an author of science-fiction and fantasy tales. Not surprisingly, he was an ardent admirer of literary forebears Edgar Allan Poe and H.G. Wells. Both of these authors – similarly to Renard – contributed to the pulp publications of their day. Les Mains d'Orlac was Renard’s third pulp to be published. It was also his most famous.

Renard’s novel tells the story of a world-famous pianist, Stephen Orlac, whose hands are tragically severed in a train wreck outside Paris. A surgeon, Dr. Gogol, grafts a new set of hands on the gifted Orlac, having not advised the pianist his “new” hands once belonged to a notorious – and recently guillotined - murderer. Orlac is, not unreasonably, frightened when he discovers the grafts are seemingly directing him to do evil things, the bidding of the devil.

Upon Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s announcement that esteemed director and cinematographer Karl Freund was planning on shooting the first sound version of The Hands of Orlac – a silent featuring Conrad Veidt had already seen light as early as 1924 – the studio’s publicity department went into full press. They excitingly described Renard’s yarn, as “the weirdest and most novel of all thriller mystery stories.”

Freund very much wanted the Hungarian actor Peter Lorre to play Doctor Gogol, the mad surgeon. Lorre had already established a reputation as an impressive figure in European – and especially German – cinema. But following his international success as the psychotic child murderer of Fritz Lang’s grim M (1931) and in Alfred Hitchcock’s production of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), executives at Columbia were eager to put the exotic Lorre under contract for his first U.S. film assignment.

They were, perhaps, too eager to bring him to Hollywood. Columbia had not yet found a project for him – and the actor’s command of the English language was still in a nascent stage. Though offered a role in one of the studio’s adventure dramas featuring action-star Jack Holt, Lorre demurred: he wasn’t interested in such low-brow fare. He was pressing Columbia to cast him in a more high-minded production, a film for the ages: an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Lorre was also insistent that esteemed director Josef von Sternberg should helm the prospective epic.

There was a problem with this demand. Columbia’s co-founder and president, Harry Cohn, wasn’t interested in such a project – nor was von Sternberg for that matter. This resulted in Lorre sitting in a state of contractual limbo of some “eight months,” at least by the actor’s recollection. So it came as a relief when MGM approached Cohn and Columbia asking for an inter-studio loan of Lorre for Mad Love. Though not particularly a fan of horror movies - then a recent box office rage thanks to Universal’s Frankenstein and Dracula pictures – the actor agreed to the one-off trade.

There was one condition of acceptance: that Columbia put Crime and Punishment on their production schedule of 1935. Cohn agreed, without enthusiasm, to greenlight the project. Though a New York Times interview suggested Lorre’s subsequent relationship with Von Sternberg was a “happy one,” the sentiment may not have been reciprocal. Though Von Sternberg would express admiration that Lorre was the only actor on set who had actually read Crime and Punishment, he felt the actor was completely miscast, “unsuitable” for the role he was awarded.

In any event, on April 23, 1935, Variety reported Metro having secured Lorre’s loan from Columbia. Things moved quickly following that announcement. By May 1^st, MGM had signed Ted Healy, Billy Gilbert and May Beatty to the cast. Screenwriter John L. Balderston was tapped to freshen up the adaptive scenario of Guy Endore and the actual script of P.J. Wolfson. Another source would report that actress Francis Drake, on loan from Paramount, was also to be brought aboard, as Yvonne, a Grand Guignol performer in Paris and the primary target of Gogol’s romantic overtures and obsessions.

The final principal casting announcement was reported on May 2 when Colin Clive – Dr. Henry Frankenstein himself - was conscripted to play Yvonne’s husband, the amputee Stephen Orlac. With their star-studded cast in place, on May 3^rd, Greg Toland was announced as a photographer on the project. Toland would work alongside both Chester Lyons and director Freund. Freund was, of course, the acclaimed cinematographer of such classics as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931).

Freund was certainly taking the Mad Love project seriously. On May 8, Variety reported he and Lorre had visited California’s Lutheran Hospital, sitting quietly through several surgeries “to get atmosphere” for the forthcoming production of Mad Love. A subsequent item in the Los Angeles Times noted the pair attended the gruesome surgeries as the invited guests of Dr. Albert and Francis Alton. It was explained the director and his star were to witness “the performing of several operations… in order to study certain technical details of surgery for the picture.”

Though Lorre was pleased to be in front of cameras again, he made it plain early on that he wasn’t a fan of horror pictures, steadfast in his conviction that he would not be typecast as an actor of the genre. He needn’t have worried as a variety of interesting work offers were coming his way. Just as production on Mad Love was set to roll, the actor was visited by the British producer Michael Balcon. Balcon had been spending a lot of time in Hollywood looking to ingratiate himself with U.S. film executives. On May 6, 1935, Balcon announced he had managed to sign Lorre and reigning boogeyman Boris Karloff for a pair of London-based projects – both of which would come to fruition: Lorre would act a second time for Hitchcock in Secret Agent (1936), Karloff for Robert Stevenson’s The Man Who Changed His Mind (Gaumont-British Film Corporation, 1936).

With some of the film earnings and personal savings he had accrued, it was reported that the savvy, self-starting Lorre had recently purchased no fewer than three stage plays of European origin for development as possible Hollywood films. The scripts, it was noted, would be peddled to producers only “on the condition that he is spotted in if and when made.” But first the famously diminutive, pop-eyed actor, once described by Charlie Chaplin, as “the world’s greatest living character actor,” had to get through the filming of the Mad Love chiller.

Members of the Hollywood press were invited to visit the set on May 8, the first day of shooting. Gossip wag George Lewis who, like Lorre, was no fan of horror movies, arrived just as poor Francis Drake was trussed to a wheel and branded with a hot iron at a grim Grand Guignol staging at Paris’s Théâtre des Horreurs. Lewis made note that Freund appeared “quite cheerful” as the macabre scenario played out before him. Freund trumpeted his picture was to be “the most colossal horror yet presented to the civilized world.” But following the preview screening of Mad Love on July 1, 1935, critic Lewis remained nonplussed, sniffing the film only “capable of scaring to death at least a few timid people.”

A more savvy reporter from the Oakland Tribune, also in attendance at the first-day shoot, saw MGM’s renewed interest in horror pictures as the studio’s attempt to give Universal “a little competition in the matter of fantastic films and regain, if possible, the position it held when Lon Chaney was alive and Tod Browning in his prime.” Both Universal and Paramount had done very well with their recent chillers, and MGM sensibly wanted a little taste.

Nothing if not a method actor, Lorre consented to shave his head for the role of Dr. Gogol. Such a dramatic shorn required the actor to visit the studio barbershop every morning prior to shooting. Resting between takes on set, Lorre needed to apply a wet chamois cloth on his eggshell skull to protect him from the burn of the hot klieg lights hanging overhead.

The consummate cinematographer, Freund expertly executed an eerie monochrome contrasting of “hard lights and shadows” to create a moody and mysterious ambience - one befitting Gogol’s personal gallery of horrors. Continuing to do his part, the roly-poly Lorre, thinking himself too heavy-set to play the mad surgeon convincingly, went on a crash diet. On alternate days, the actor would eat only fruit, then vegetables, then dried meat, then boiled potatoes. He reportedly dropped a total of nine pounds in four days’ time.

One journalist would go on to describe Lorre as “the finest scarer of woman-and-children and even grown up men since Lon Chaney.” Which was high praise indeed. Chaney’s reputation in and around Hollywood was as exalted as ever despite his having passed on August 26, 1930, age 47. Though Lorre graciously acknowledged the compliment, he nevertheless was of the opinion that grotesque make-up appliances often disguised “an excuse for an ability to act… An actor should find his expressions in his naked face.” The one exception to that rule, Lorre then sensibly corrected, was the great Chaney since “He was an artist.” As a recent transplant to Tinseltown it was best not to kick up dust at the expense of one of Hollywood’s most mourned and respected figures.

Despite Lorre’s disdain of make-up appliances, there was a lot of press in the lead-up to the production of Mad Love that the filmmakers planned on using a series of Grand Guignol style masks in their upcoming production. “Intensive experiment went into the perfection of the new masks,” noted the Los Angeles Times, suggesting such ghoulish set decorations were “often suggested in fiction but never before worked out on a practical basis.” Such artful masks are scattered about and used as macabre decoration for the Théâtre des Horreurs sequences near the film’s beginning. Otherwise they play little role in the storyline.

June 15 would mark the final day of shooting, the Hollywood press again invited to attend. It was a less exciting day to be on set, the film crew mostly finishing up on various insert shots, the journalists watching Lorre’s double, “Raspy” Rasputin, menacing Drake’s distressed double. The genuine Lorre was on set as well, pacing about in silence, occasionally breaking a studious concentration to relax and joke with members of the crew with whom he had become friendly.

Following an industry preview of the film at Glendale’s Alexander Theatre, Billboard was certain Mad Love would score at the box office, citing the “masterful performance” of Lorre in his U.S. film debut. The critic did astutely rue, “the significance of this grotesque film is likely to be obscured by its flimsy title. It will take a change of title or heavy promotion to gain for this eerie but well-done production the grosses it warrants.” This title change did, in fact, transpire.

In certain markets the title was changed to The Hands of Orlac in the hope of increasing audience interest and box office revenue. With a production budget of just over $217,000, domestic receipts of Mad Love had totaled a disappointing $164,000. Some blamed the unrepresentative title of Mad Love for the film’s underwhelming performance. It was believed that the audiences who routinely flocked to horror pictures passed on Mad Love due to bad marketing. The title Mad Love suggested the film was merely one-more dreary Hollywood romantic drama.

London’s Picturegoer thought the film a serviceable thriller, but little more. Acknowledging that Lorre’s performance carried the production, the film otherwise “fails to grip to any great extent.” Variety’s opinion was much the same. Suggesting Lorre’s role as the villainous Dr. Gogol was an ideal one for the actor’s American film bow, “the results in screen potency are disappointing. Being a chiller, much will depend on exploitation.” The trade predicted Mad Love would “probably will do fair biz on the whole.”

Subsequent reviews of Mad Love were mostly positive, though some thought the grim subject matter too sadistic and intense for the impressionable young and any patron with a weak constitution. Lorre’s notices were uniformly positive, one critic writing – likely to the actor’s chagrin – that he had managed a spine-chilling performance both “menacing and sinister. Karloff and Lugosi, erstwhile nonpareil bogey-men of the movies, have a doughty rival.” Interestingly, Mad Love was released within weeks of Universal’s faux-Poe thriller, The Raven featuring Messrs. Karloff and Lugosi. Such release date synchronicity might have hurt the box-office receipts of both films. There was, apparently, only so much sadism audiences could sit through in the summer of 1935.

This Warner Bros. Archive Collectionregion-free issue of Mad Love is presented in 1080p High Definition 16x9 with an aspect 1.37:1 and in DTS-HD Master mono audio. The transfer is excellent. As is often the case with these Warner Archive Blu ray issues, there’s no abundance of special features offered outside of the film’s trailer and a highly informative second-life commentary track courtesy of Steve Haberman (screenwriter of Dracula: Dead and Loving It), ported over from the six-film Hollywood Legends of Horror Collection DVD box set of 2006.

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By Hank Reineke

On March 31, 1931 Variety reported that Paramount had secured, for an undisclosed sum, the sound rights to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the estate of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson’s classic short story of 1886, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, had already been filmed by Paramount as a well-regarded 1920 silent featuring John Barrymore. But it was curious to some industry watchers why Paramount went to the trouble to secure rights: the novella was, after all, already in U.S. public domain status.

Though true, it soon became apparent why Paramount’s legal team wisely chose a formal rights lockdown. One week following the studio’s announcement – to feature actor Fredric March in the titular double-role – a British filmmaker, I.E. Chadwick (described by Variety as “an independent producer inactive three years”), announced he too was planning a sound version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Chadwick’s competing version would not see the light of day. On June 23, the trades reported his production had been summarily derailed by Paramount’s buying out all British rights to the story.

Though Fredric March was touted as Paramount’s new Dr. Jekyll as early as April 1931, a challenger would soon surface. On May 12, Variety picked up on a syndicated Hollywood gossip report that Paramount was interested in having John Barrymore reprise the role. Though a Barrymore reconsideration seemed an unlikely prospect, on May 5, Louela O. Parsons of the Motion Picture Editor Universal Services teased that Paramount was looking to woo Barrymore from Warner Bros. for their new “talkie” version of Hyde.

It’s altogether possible that Parsons, an old friend of Barrymore’s, was sending out a trial balloon on the actor’s behalf. Barrymore’s contract with Warner Bros. had in fact not been renewed following completion of Michael Curtiz’s The Mad Genius in May of 1931. The high- salaried and hard drinking actor was now casting about for new work and a new contract. Warner Bros. was already expressing unhappiness with the dwindling box office appeal of the former matinee idol. In the final tally, Barrymore’s last two pictures for Warner’s, The Mad Genius and its predecessor Svengali (1931), had combined for revenue losses totaling a reported half-million dollars. Following his ousting, Variety was kinder in their assessment of the actor’s continuing public appeal, reporting only that, “Sales reports on Barrymore have been mild.”

There had to be a measure of professional disappointment on Barrymore’s part. While Fredric March’s star was in the ascendant, his own was dimming. March, an equally handsome and talented actor, had even played a thinly-disguised character based on Barrymore in both the stage and film versions of The Royal Family of Broadway. Barrymore was good-naturedly impressed by March’s gift of impersonation and mimicry. Following his attendance at a stage performance of The Royal Family of Broadway, Barrymore conceded March’s performance had captured, “my mannerisms, exaggerated but true to life.”

But by May’s end it was clear that Barrymore would not be returning to the Jekyll/Hyde role. Gossiper Parson sourly rued that while, “never has any actor had more matinee fans flocking to his side than our John, […] the flapper age yearns for Fredric March and Paramount knows it.” In fact, “flapper” appeal aside, March wasn’t the first pick of Paramount co-founder Adolph Zukor or of West coast studio boss B.P. Schulberg. Paramount’s front-office had initially considered either Barrymore or contract actor Irving Pichel considered for the role. But director Rouben Mamoulian insisted that while the naturally sinister-looking Pichel might have made a suitable Mr. Hyde, he simply couldn’t convincingly pull off the handsome, pheromone-inducing romantic that was Dr. Jekyll.

It was a bold if immovable position for Mamoulian to take. The director had only recently signed with Paramount, delivering two Pre-Code pictures of modest success: Applause (1929) and City Streets (1931). He had also boldly demanded – and was granted - a stipulation in his contract that he be given extended leave-of-absences from Paramount so he could continue working on Broadway back in his beloved New York City. Stagecraft aside, Mamoulian did possess an eye for filmmaking. Upon the news that Mamoulian was to direct Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the editors of Film Weekly cheered, calling him, “a wizard with the camera.” They promised the Mamoulian Dr. Jekyll, “promises to outdo even the weirdness of the celebrated “Dr. Caligari.”

March was to return to Hollywood from Astoria, Queens, New York, to begin production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde directly following work on George Abbott’s Morals and Marriage (later re-titled as My Sin). Production on Jekyll was originally slated to commence on August 3, though delays seemingly caused a schedule push-back to September 1935.

In August it was announced one of March’s doomed victims, Ivy Pierson, was to be played by the fetching blond ingénue Miriam Hopkins, just off her assignment playing opposite Maurice Chevalier in Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant. By late summer nearly all of the film’s principal and auxiliary players had been cast: Rose Hobart, Edgar Norton, and Halliwell Hobbes among them. This was to be a production of major scope. There were reports that Paramount was planning the hire of some six hundred screen extras, with as many as eighty-one to be given speaking parts. Both of those estimates were certainly possible: the film features large crowds attending both prim society dinner parties and déclassé backstreet London music halls.

To successfully mount such an unwieldy production, director Mamoulian desperately wanted a trusted assistant, in this case Robert Lee, to help him out. Though the trades reported Lee had only recently been given “full director” status at Paramount, the budding helmsman agreed to put off this promotion – an opportunity which was, sadly, not offered again. Mamoulian’s direction was – as always - nothing if not inventive, with Karl Strauss’s acrobatic camera roaming restlessly through POV tracking shoots, half-screen swipes and the sorts of extreme close-ups later found in Sergio Leone films.

Though some film historians and fans believe – not unreasonably – that John S. Robertson’s silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the more groundbreaking effort, few would argue that Mamoulian’s was the finest of the several sound versions that would follow. Though the various film adaptations were not always true to Stevenson’s original storyline, they were far more cinematic in presentation. Following in the wake of Universal’s horrific caricatures of Dracula and Frankenstein, Paramount chose to eschew the original tale’s Jekyll’s split-psychologic dichotomies and instead highlight Mr. Hyde’s physical appearance as a hideous, feral beast. Mamoulian’s film was also envelope-pushing in its Pre-Code depictions of implied - and sometimes more- than-implied – scenes of on-screen debauchery and salacious sexuality.

The iconic make-up conjured by Wally Westmore for March’s Hyde was certainly top-notch, as great as anything Jack Pierce had conjured for Universal. Newspaper accounts contemporary to the film’s production suggested March withstood nearly two-hundred hours in both Westmore’s make-up chair and on set for the filming of the “eight” mind-blowing transformation sequences expertly rigged by Mamaoulian and Struss. (If eight transformations were photographed as reported, only six would make pass the film’s final cut, the final one a mostly unconvincing time-lapse).

It was later revealed by Strauss that the justifiably famous transformation sequences near the film’s beginnings had been created by a novel use of panchromatic film stock and a blend of colored filters. Strauss was certainly the man for this particular photographic effect. The cinematographer had had already earned a well-deserved Academy Award for his photographic work on F.W. Murnau’s German Expressionism masterpiece Sunrise (1927). Upon completion of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s fifty-one shooting days, Mamoulian celebrated in style, throwing a huge party for the film’s cast and crew members at Hollywood’s swanky Russian-American club.

Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was released during Christmas week of 1931. It was off to a good start, though Universal’s Frankenstein (released November 21, 1931) was still holding strong at cinema box-offices. Paramount brass continued to hold their collective breaths through mid-January to see if Jekyll might have the same staying power. The film proved that it had, ultimately bringing in earnings that made it one of studio’s highest grossing successes of 1932. One casualty of the runaway box-office successes of Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was, sadly and ironically, Barrymore’s The Mad Genius, released only a couple of weeks previous to the former. It’s interesting to note that both Frankenstein and The Mad Genius featured a struggling, middle-aged actor who would receive absolutely no screen credit for the latter and only back-end credits of the former – Boris Karloff.

Though Paramount would never become the fright-factory that Universal was in the 1930s and 1940s, the studio would follow Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a few genre classics and semi-classics of their own: Island of Lost Souls (1932), Murders in the Zoo (1934) and The Monster and the Girl (1941). No subsequent Paramount horror other than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would earn the prestige of the Academy however. The film would earn no fewer than three Oscar nominations at the 1932 ceremony (Best Actor, Best Cinematography and Best Adaptive Writing). But only March would walk off with the coveted trophy in the first category.

This Warner Bros. Archive Collection issue of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is presented in 1080p High Definition 16x9 with an aspect 1.19:1 and in DTS-HD Master 2.0 mono audio. The film looks brilliant; if there was a single visual on-screen blemish, it escaped my notice. Ported over from the film’s digital DVD issue of 2004 is a commentary by Author/Film Historian Greg Mank and the Friz Freleng/Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes cartoon short Hyde and Hare (1955). New to this Region-free Blu-ray set is a second impressive commentary featuring screenwriter Steve Haberman and filmmaker Constantine Nasr. A very special feature included is a Theatre Guild of America radio play of the tale, first broadcast on November 19, 1950. This radio show is of particular interest since it finds Fredric March reprising his role as Jekyll/Hyde nearly twenty-years on, with Barbara Bel Geddes and Hugh Williams assisting in the principal supporting roles. Essential.

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By Lee Pfeiffer

Over the years, Cinema Retro magazine has covered the various WWII films released by Oakmont Productions, the British film company that produced mid-range budget action movies that were released by United Artists. The movies all had a couple of factors in common: aside from their somewhat modest production values, each starred an actor of sufficient popularity to add a bit of luster to the overall marketing campaign. Between 1968-1970, Oakmont produced six feature films. Some were released as the main feature on double bills and sometimes each movie served as the second feature. The Oakmont films and stars were:

• "Attack on the Iron Coast" (Lloyd Bridges)
• "The Thousand Plane Raid" (Christopher George)
• "Mosquito Squadron" (David McCallum)
• "Hell Boats" (James Franciscus)
• "The Last Escape" (Stuart Whitman)
• "Submarine X-1" (James Caan)
  

Cinema Retro has received the following press release from Paramount Home Video:

All four big-screen adventures featuring fan-favorite Star Trek characters Picard, Riker, Data, LaForge, Worf, Troi, and Dr. Crusher arrive for the first time ever on 4K Ultra HD™ with Dolby Vision™* and HDR-10 on April 4, 2023, just in time for First Contact Day (April 5^th, the day Vulcans first made contact with humans).

The journey begins with original cast members Kirk, Scott, and Chekov in a story that spans space and time in STAR TREK: GENERATIONS, continuing with a terrifying face off against the Borg in STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT, a dangerous plot against a peaceful planet in STAR TREK: INSURRECTION, and a familiar old foe returning in STAR TREK: NEMESIS. 

All four films will be available together in the STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION 4-MOVIE COLLECTION.  The 4-Movie Collection includes each film on 4K Ultra HD, as well as fully remastered on Blu-ray™, plus all legacy bonus content and access to Digital copies of each film.  The Collection is presented in a slipcase beautifully illustrated to complement the STAR TREK: THE ORIGINAL 6-MOVIE COLLECTION, making this a must-own set to complete every fan’s collection.

In addition, each film will be available individually on 4K Ultra HD with a bonus Blu-ray featuring the fully remastered film, along with all legacy bonus content and access to a Digital copy of the film. 

Special features are detailed below.

STAR TREK: GENERATIONS Bonus Content

• Commentary by director David Carson and Manny Coto
• Commentary by Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore
• Text Commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda
• Library Computer
• Production
• Uniting Two Legends
• Stellar Cartography: Creating the Illusion
• Strange New Worlds: The Valley of Fire
• Scoring Trek
• Visual Effects
• Inside ILM: Models & Miniatures
• Crashing the Enterprise
• Scene Deconstruction     
• Main Title Sequence
• The Nexus Ribbon
• Saucer Crash Sequence
• The Star Trek Universe
• A Tribute to Matt Jefferies 
• The Enterprise Lineage
• Captain Picard’s Family Album
• Creating 24^th Century Weapons
• Next Generation Designer Flashback Andrew Probert
• Stellar Cartography on Earth
• Brent Spiner - Data and Beyond Part 1
• Trek Roundtable: Generations
• Starfleet Academy SCISEC Brief 007: Trilithium
• Deleted Scenes
• Archives
• Trailers

STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT Bonus Content

• Commentary by director and actor Jonathan Frakes
• Commentary by screenplay writers Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore
• Commentary by Damon Lindelof and Anthony Pascale
• Text commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda
• Library Computer
• Production
• Making First Contact
• The Art of First Contact
• The Story
• The Missile Silo
• The Deflector Dish
• From “A” to “E”
• Scene Deconstruction
• Borg Queen Assembly
• Escape Pod Launch
• Borg Queen’s Demise
• The Star Trek Universe
• Jerry Goldsmith: A Tribute
• The Legacy of Zefram Cochrane
• First Contact: The Possibilities
• Industrial Light & Magic - The Next Generation
• Greetings from the International Space Station
• SpaceShipOne’s Historic Flight
• Brent Spiner - Data and Beyond Part 2
• Trek Roundtable: First Contact
• Starfleet Academy SCISEC Brief 008: Temporal Vortex
• The Borg Collective
• Unimatrix One
• The Queen
• Design Matrix
• Archives
• Trailers

STAR TREK: INSURRECTION Bonus Content

• Commentary by Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis
• Text Commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda
• Library Computer
• Production
• It Takes a Village
• Location, Location, Location
• The Art of Insurrection
• Anatomy of a Stunt
• The Story
• Making Star Trek: Insurrection
• Director’s Notebook
• The Star Trek Universe
• Westmore’s Aliens
• Westmore’s Legacy
• Star Trek’s Beautiful Alien Women
• Marina Sirtis - The Counselor Is In
• Brent Spiner - Data and Beyond Part 3
• Trek Roundtable: Insurrection
• Starfleet Academy SCISEC Brief 009: The Origins of the Ba’ku and Son’a Conflict
• Creating the Illusion
• Shuttle Chase
• Drones
• Duck Blind
• Deleted Scenes
• Archives
• Advertising

STAR TREK: NEMESIS Bonus Content

• Commentary by director Stuart Baird
• Commentary by producer Rick Berman
• Commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda
• Text Commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda
• Library Computer
• Production
• Nemesis Revisited
• New Frontiers – Stuart Baird on Directing Nemesis
• Storyboarding the Action
• Red Alert! Shooting the Action of Nemesis
• Build and Rebuild
• Four-Wheeling in the Final Frontier
• Screen Test: Shinzon
• The Star Trek Universe
• A Star Trek Family’s Final Journey
• A Bold Vision of The Final Frontier
• The Enterprise E
• Reunion with The Rikers
• Today’s Tech Tomorrow’s Data
• Robot Hall of Fame
• Brent Spiner - Data and Beyond Part 4
• Trek Roundtable: Nemesis
• Starfleet Academy SCISEC Brief 010: Thalaron Radiation
• The Romulan Empire
• Romulan Lore
• Shinzon & the Viceroy
• Romulan Design
• The Romulan Senate
• The Scimitar
• Deleted Scenes
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Cinema Retro has received the following press release relating to the UK release of "Frankenstein: The True Story":

Presented for the first time in high definition and featuring some incredible bonus material and stunning new artwork by Graham Humphreys, Frankenstein: The True Story is one of the most acclaimed versions of Mary Shelley's masterpiece.

The film features an all-star cast led by James Mason, Leonard Whiting, David McCallum, Jane Seymour, Michael Sarrazin, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Tom Baker.

Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) inspired author Anne Rice to write Interview with the Vampire, the movie of which starred Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

Having finished The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, having wrapped up Deliverance were both keen to direct Frankenstein: The True Story as a theatrical release but it was decided to keep it as a made-for-television movie directed by Jack Smight.

Writers Christopher Isherwood (Forever and a Day, The Great Sinner, A Single Man, and author of Goodbye to Berlin, the novel on which the musical Cabaret was based) and Don Bachardy (Isherwood’s longtime lover and chief creative consultant) weren’t happy that Smight played down the homo-eroticism they’d written in to the screenplay and so published it separately.

Leonard Whiting, who stars as Victor Frankenstein, is currently in the process of suing Paramount Studios for ‘forcing them into a nude scene’ in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Zeffirelli chose Whiting for the part of Romeo because he had “a magnificent face, gentle melancholy, sweet, the kind of idealistic young man Romeo ought to be." The role of Frankenstein saw Whiting growing increasingly hideous as the film progresses. The make-up was by Hammer horror veteran artist Roy Ashton.

Synopsis: In 19th Century England, Dr Victor Frankenstein, bitter over his brother's death, voices his wish that men could have power over life and death. Following a chance encounter with Dr Henry Clerval, a surgeon experimenting in this very field, they begin to work together. Victor achieves the impossible, the creation of life, but with it comes unforeseen and unimaginable terror.

Cast: James Mason, Leonard Whiting, David McCallum, Jane Seymour, Michael Sarrazin, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Tom Baker, Nicola Pagett, Michael Wilding, Clarissa Kaye, Agnes Moorhead and Margaret Leighton.

Extras: Film Introduction from James Mason; Off with Her Head - An Interview with Jane Seymour; Victor's Story- An Interview with Actor Leonard Whiting; Frankenstein's Diary- A Conversation with Writer Don Bachardy; A Double-Sided Fold Out Poster of the All New Graham Humphreys Artwork; Audio commentary with Filmmaker/Film Historian Sam Irvin.

(This Blu-ray is a Region-2 release.) 

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By  Lee Pfeiffer

"Alvarez Kelly" is a 1966 Civil War adventure that blends in considerable elements of the traditional Western, primarily its emphasis on a cattle drive. William Holden plays the title role of a Mexican national of Mexican-Irish heritage. He's also a hard-nosed businessman who has recently overseen the arduous move of a herd of 2500 cattle from Mexico to Virginia, where he fulfills a contract with Union forces to provide the herd as a source of food for General Grant's troops who have encircled the Confederate capital of Richmond. For his efforts, Kelly is paid the princely sum of $50,000 through his Army liaison, Major Albert Stedman  (Patrick O'Neal), who takes an instant dislike to Kelly. He accurately views him as a financial opportunist who is completely apolitical in terms of the issues associated with the war. Kelly tells Stedman that he would just as easily have sold the herd to the Confederates but their currency is declining in value along with their odds of winning the conflict. Stedman's men park the herd at the stately home of local belle Charity Warwick (Victoria Shaw), who is not happy about Union forces using her land. Still, she uses her good looks and flirtatious tactics to charm both Kelly and Stedman- though both men don't realize that she is feeding any relevant information she obtains to Col. Tom Rossiter (an eye-patching wearing Richard Widmark), a local officer in the Confederate army. Rossiter has been assigned a difficult mission: to help relieve the starving and blockaded citizens of Richmond by stealing the herd and finding a way to get it to the city, despite the overwhelming numbers of Union troops in the area.

Rossiter and a handful of men succeed in kidnapping Kelly and bringing him to the War Department in Richmond where he is asked to provide assistance in enacting the audacious plan to steal the herd. If he agrees to do so, he will get $100,000- though it will be paid in Confederate money, an offer that Kelly can refuse. Rossiter places him in jail and has to finally shoot off one of his fingers to elicit reluctant cooperation from Kelly, whose first job is to train Rossiter's cavalrymen to be effective trail drivers. Kelly finds a way to exact revenge on Rossiter by seducing his girlfriend, Liz Pickering (Janice Rule), a once-wealthy woman who has seen her fortunes and lifestyle diminish as Grant's forces tighten the noose on Richmond. In return for sleeping with Kelly, he pays a Scottish riverboat merchant to take her away from the city without Rossiter's knowledge. This plot point becomes pivotal toward the end of the movie. The film shifts into high gear with the realization of the cattle raid, which Kelly and Rossiter orchestrate successfully. The problem is getting the herd into Richmond, which will require a seemingly impossible cattle drive through a notoriously dangerous swamp and across a rickety bridge- all the while with Major Stedman and his men in hot pursuit.

I had originally seen the film as a kid when it was first released but had no lingering memories of it. Having discovered it on Screenpix, I thought I'd give it try. I almost gave up when I heard the title song, which is played over the opening credits. It's the very definition of "cornball" to the point of being almost laughable. Only my belief that any movie featuring William Holden is worth watching convinced me to hang in there. I'm glad I did because "Alvarez Kelly" is quite a good, off-beat film. The teaming of Holden and Widmark is very effective. Holden was once again playing the type of character that was becoming his trademark, namely, a likable rogue with great courage but seemingly no moral principals. Holden was 48 years-old at the time but looked older, probably due to his well-known penchant for heavy drinking. Thus, the concept of presenting him as a Civil War era Matt Helm or Derek Flint, with gorgeous and willing women being easily beguiled by him seemed a bit of a stretch at this point in his career. Still, he gives a marvelous performance, as does Widmark, who could be problematic and somewhat hammy if not under the proper direction. Fortunately, veteran director Edward Dmytryk is up to the task. The film gains momentum as it moves along and climaxes with a terrific, ambitious action scene that incorporates a major battle and a thrilling cattle stampede.

The production was a troubled one, however. The script by Franklin Coen was deemed to be unsatisfactory and uncredited rewrites were done by Elliott Arnold and Daniel Taradash. There were also delays in filming caused by weather and illness. When the film was released, it was met with mixed reviews, though Holden and Widmark received good notices.

I should point out what some film fans have observed: "Alvarez Kelly" has much in common with John Ford's 1959 production of "The Horse Soldiers" in which Holden co-starred with John Wayne. Namely:

• Both movies were inspired by daring raids conducted in the South during the Civil War. "Alvarez Kelly" is based on what is known as "The Beefsteak Raid" of 1864 in which Confederate raiders successfully stole about 2500 cattle from Union forces and provided them as food for starving Richmond.The raid was so daring that it won reluctant praise from its execution from none other than President Lincoln.
  
• Both movies feature a beautiful blonde southern belle whose property is utilized by Union officers, who she charms even as she spies for the South.
• Both movies were shot in Louisiana.
• Both movies feature a climactic battle at a bridge which has been mined to prevent pursuing forces from catching them.
  
• Both films feature William Holden in a tense relationship with an army officer who both come to respect each other at the film's conclusion.
  

"Alvarez Kelly" isn't a great film but it's a good one. It deserved a better fate in 1966 but, through streaming and home video, hopefully more people can appreciate its merits today.

The Sony DVD from many years ago is the only home video release to date in the U.S.A. The picture quality is good but the film really deserves an upgrade to Blu-ray. However, the only Blu-ray editions have been released outside of the U.S. The only bonus features are fact files about the stars and director and the original trailer along with bonus trailers for "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and "Silverado".

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By Hank Reineke

Attack of the 50ft. Woman is by no measure the finest science-fiction film to emerge from 1950’s Hollywood. It may, however, be one of the most iconic. I suspect the film’s notoriety is partly due to Reynold Brown’s eye-catching one-sheet poster design: a grimacing, gargantuan deep-cleavaged Allison Hayes hovering over a city highway picking off random automobiles. That nothing like this actually happens in the movie is mostly forgivable. If we were to judge any film by its true delivery-of-on-screen mayhem against the false promises of its imaginative publicity campaign, a lot of press agents would be serving time.

Having said that, Brown’s artwork is an inseparable component of the film’s status among fans of Silver Age sci-fi. The poster design has been both parodied and mimicked, plastered on coffee mugs, jewelry, wristwatches, puzzles, t-shirts, model kits, fridge magnets and book covers. Reynold’s empowering image has even seen adoption as a feminist-rallying call-to-arms. Which is a pretty amazing feat for a film dashed off in little more than a week’s time, with less than stellar optical effects and at a budget of some $88,000.

Attack of the 50ft. Woman was directed by Nathan Juran who is credited on this particular film - for no reason I could source or conjure - as “Nathan Hertz.” It’s not as if Juran was a fallen helmsman of high-budget studio “prestige” pictures. He wasn’t a director reflexively protective of a former glory, someone defensive that his once glittering career had somehow descended into directing 50s sci-fi fodder. Juran’s first directorial assignment was, in fact, for Universal’s The Black Castle (1953) a mostly glossed-over gothic B-film featuring Richard Greene and Boris Karloff. From 1953 on, Juran subsequently bounced between directing low-budget feature films and studiously working on early television.

But by 1957 Juran had become semi-typecast as a successful auteur of low-budget sci-fi films, his streak beginning with 1957’s The Deadly Mantis. Over the course of the next several years (1957-1964), Juran directed a number of features and television episodes, many of which could be categorized as falling under the umbrella of sci-fi and fantasy. These would include such offerings as 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), The Brain from Planet Arous (1957) and, perhaps most famously, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958).

The screenwriter of Attack of the 50ft. Woman was Mark Hanna. Hanna had already displayed a modicum of insight in his crafting of bigger-than-life-size monster movies. The writer had collaborated the previous year with producer/director Bert I. Gordon on A.I.P.’s The Amazing Colossal Man. There’s little arguing that Allied Artist’s decision to back Attack of the 50ft. Woman was simply an opportunity to coat-tail Gordon’s recent string of successful “giant monster” pics. There had been plenty of them, some having already seen issue, others in the can being rush-readied for release: King Dinosaur (1955), Beginning of the End (1957), The Cyclops (1957), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), Attack of the Puppet People (1958), War of the Colossal Beast (1958) and The Spider (1958).

Jacques R. Marquette and Bernard Woolner’s production of Attack of the 50 ft. Woman would start on Wednesday, January 8, 1958, under the working title of The Astounding Giant Woman. It wasn’t a great title, but Allied Artist’s had been bandied a pair of alternates, both of which were also subsequently rejected: The Mammoth Female Monster and The Colossal Female Monster. The film was still being touted in the trades as The Astounding Giant Woman through March of 1958. In April of 1958 the film was finally and permanently re-titled Attack of the 50ft. Woman.

Actress Yvette Vickers, who plays sultry sex-kitten Honey Parker in the film, recalls the entire picture was shot in eight days, with no one under the illusion they were making cinematic history. Allied Artists were interested in quick returns on their investments. By January’s end of 1958, no fewer than ten of their projects were reported as being “in various stages of editing,” including Attack of the 50ft. Woman and Howard W. Koch’s Frankenstein 1970. It was also during the last week of January that Ronald Stein was brought onboard to compose the film’s engaging and jazzy soundtrack.

One intriguing aspect of Attack of the 50ft. Woman is that the film’s sci-fi elements would often play second fiddle to the script’s domestic drama. Allison Hays plays Nancy Archer, a wealthy but alcoholic socialite whose marriage is in shambles. The cruel ways of her unfaithful and conniving husband, Harry (William Hudson) has already driven her to a sanatorium. While his wife is away (unsuccessfully) convalescing from her binge-drinking and mental frailties, Harry has taken up with the “red-headed wench” Honey Parker (Vickers). Harry and Honey spend an inordinate amount of time at Tony’s Bar and Grill, drinking, listening to jazz, dancing, and plotting a comfortable future together - a future to be financed by Nancy’ loss of stewardship of the family fortune due to her faltering mental health capacities.

This scenario on paper, of course, appears very film-noir in construction. But Hanna’s script upends the film’s love triangle aspect almost from the very beginning. There have been worldwide news broadcasts describing a “strange red fireball in the sky” hurtling towards earth. Driving back on Route 66 to her tony home upon release from the sanatorium, Nancy unluckily encounters an alien craft somewhere in a remote section of the Californian desert. No saucer-shaped spacecraft, this particular vehicle arrives as a 30-foot high sphere resembling a weather balloon. As if suffering from “mental exhaustion and alcoholism” was not enough, Nancy now finds herself in the clutches of giant hand with hairy knuckles.

Unfortunately, this alien contact has left Nancy with blue-green traces of radiation on her throat which brings about the onset of “giantism.” Though doctors are summoned to try to figure out why the poor and delirious Nancy is increasing in size at an alarming rate, husband Harry and mistress Honey care not one whit, still duplicitously scheming at Tony’s bar and grill. But the two of them – as well as the local sheriff and police department – will soon find themselves no match for a lady scorned: a wrathful woman who now stands 5o ft. tall, is wrapped in an over-sized white bed sheet and appears angry as Hell.

The earliest press screenings for Attack of the 50ft. Woman were held in Los Angeles on May 8, 1958. The film was screened with Roger Corman’s War of the Satellites, a second sci-fi feature that was to be paired with Woman on national release. In the view of the Variety critic, both genre offerings were “on weak side.” The trade cited Mark Hanna’s “corny dialogue” and Hertz’s “routine” direction on Woman as the film’s primary deficiencies, dismissing the film as “a minor offering for the scifi trade where demands aren’t too great.”

Well, maybe I’ve simply just sat through too many Silver Age sci-fi films to be objective, but I didn’t find Hanna’s script necessarily corny – but I did find the screenplay absent of likable characters worth caring about. Although I am a fan of Attack of the 50ft. Woman, I can understand the sulking review given the film upon release by critic Margaret Harford of the Los Angeles Mirror: “Attack of the 50ft. Woman has so few idealists on hand that the survival rate is lamentably low.” She goes on to describe the three romantic-triangle leads as “unregenerative types” possessing souls not worthy of salvation. The unrelenting unwholesomeness of the aforementioned trio ultimately inspires, “a wholesale blood bath that amounts to an extra dividend for scare-traders on the horror market.”

While Attack of the 50ft. Woman would not be the last sci-fi/horror flick in which Hayes would be cast, the actress happily moved over to dramatic work on television. She was enjoying the variety of roles such new castings offered. It wasn’t surprising. Shortly following the release of Attack of the 50ft. Woman, one journalist met with Hayes for a brief interview. The gossip writer thought Hayes “a fugitive from ‘Monster’ pictures,” a talented actress looking to take an extended break from such desultory features. The actress had, in fact, racked up a score of horror credits in recent years, appearing in a quartet of exploitation pictures in 1957 alone: The Undead, The Zombies of Mora Tau, The Unearthly, and The Disembodied. In 1958 this former 50 ft. giant was looking for roles more befitting a woman of her stature.

Shortly following her work on Woman, the saucy Yvette Vickers was cast in the feature The Saga of Hemp Brown and an episode of TV’s Dragnet. In the years 1958-1961 most of Vickers’ casting was on various television dramas, though a few feature film roles were mixed in as well. She would also, more infamously, appear as a “bottoms up” “Playmate of the Month” centerfold in the July 1959 issue of Playboy magazine, the photo spread courtesy of Russ Meyer. Of course, I’m just noting the above for the historical record, not to suggest anyone should rush off to eBay to source a back copy. But if you’re looking to add something new to your collection…

This region-free Warner Bros. Archive Collection issue of Attack of the 50ft. Woman is presented in 1080p High Definition 16x9 with an aspect 1.85:1 and in DTS-HD Master mono audio. As is often the case with these Warner Bros. Archive Blu releases, there’s not an abundance of special features offered outside of the film’s trailer and a commentary track. The latter item is particularly special, if not unfamiliar to serious collectors.

The commentary track on this new Blu release has been ported over from Warner’s DVD box set of 2007, Cult Camp Classics, Viol. 1: Sci-Fi Thrillers. On the bright side, the commentaries of film historian Tom Weaver and actress Vickers are certainly worthy of preservation on this second digital go round, the film’s first appearance in HD. Both Weaver, likely the finest author-commentator of vintage Hollywood sci-fi and horror, and Vickers – present on set back in 1958 - offer wonderfully playful and often prescient insights and memories on the making of the film. Vickers’s contributions are now made all more special in 2023 as the actress/pin-up girl with the great sense of humor has since passed.

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By Lee Pfeiffer

Before Burt Reynolds became a bankable leading man with the release of "Deliverance" in 1972, he toiled for years through mostly "B" movies, some of which were designed to be secondary films in double features. A rare exception was "100 Rifles", which afforded him a prominent role opposite Jim Brown and Raquel Welch. However, films such as "Navajo Joe", "Sam Whiskey", "Operation C.I.A.", "Shark" and "Skullduggery" may have kept him employed but only as a leading man in minor features. After reaching superstar status, Reynolds would look back on these films with self-deprecating humor. He needn't have. These minor features were generally highly enjoyable and efficiently made. They also allowed him to hone his skills as an actor rather than just another tough guy. The best of this lot of films was "Impasse", a 1969 production that I've only caught up with recently. The plot finds Reynolds well-cast as Pat Morrison, a hunky, lovable rogue who is in the Philippines to enact an audacious heist on the island of Corregidor. For historical context, it was at Corregidor that U.S. forces and their Filippino allies put up a historic and stubborn resistance against overwhelming numbers of Japanese troops in early 1942. Although the island ultimately fell to the Japanese, the starving and weary American and Filipino forces had put what the Japanese felt would be a quick victory far behind schedule. Before the battle began, American forces had moved a substantial amount of gold from Manila banks to Corregidor, where it was stored in the elaborate system of tunnels under the gun batteries. (Presumably, the Japanese took possession of this gold after seizing the island.) In the film, the hidden gold is a big secret and its location has never been found. Morrison rounds up some of the former U.S. and Filipino soldiers who were brought blindfolded to a certain location during the war and instructed to hide a large stash of gold bricks behind a wall and seal it up. He's betting that if they are able to revisit the caverns, they will be able to piece together the approximate location of the gold, which is estimated to weight 6,000 pounds. The disparate group is being advised by a sickly WWII veteran, Trev Jones (Clarke Gordon), who has a strategy for getting everyone into the tunnels despite the fact that the island still maintains a military garrison. 

Morrison's team also consists of Draco (Rodolfo Acosta), a hard-drinking, violent Apache who is inspired to take part in the caper because he wants to return to Manila and track down a woman he had been obsessed with during the war; Hansen (Lyle Betteger), a similarly hot-tempered man with racist tendencies toward Draco and Jesus (Vic Diaz), native Filipino who played a key role in secreting the gold. To add a bit of spice to the testosterone-laden scenario, Anne Francis pops up as Bobby Jones, Trev's daughter, who is a tennis ace participating in a tournament in Manila. Naturally, she meets Morrison and the sparks fly. Morrison is also involved with his married mistress Mariko (Miko Mayama), and the relationship will pose a serious problem later in the film. Complications ensue when Trev is kidnapped by local crime boss Wombat (Jeff Corey), which adds a subplot in which Morrison has to rescue him. This results in Morrison taking on one of Wombat's paid killers in an incredibly complex and exciting chase scene. It begins in a packed cockfight stadium, leads to moving vehicles and an extended foot chase in a high rise apartment. It's quite incredible to watch and the scene is superbly staged by director Richard Benedict, who impresses throughout the film by getting the most from his eclectic cast members. The only flaw in the casting is Vic Diaz as Jesus. He gives a fine performance but he is far too young to have been in the battle for Corregidor. In fact, he was born in 1932, which means he was ten years-old at the time.The always-addictive Anne Francis displays good chemistry with Reynolds and although there are no steamy love scenes depicted, there is a very funny vulgar quip tied in with the couple entering an elevator. Reynolds is in top form throughout and the film benefits from his experience as a stunt man, as he performs most of the hard stuff himself. The caper itself is believably scripted by John C. Higgins right down to the mishaps and unexpected events and Mars B. Rasca's cinematography does justice to the Philippine locations.

"Impasse" has been released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber in a very fine transfer. The only bonus extras are the original trailer and a generous and fun gallery of other Reynolds trailers for films released by KL. The film is also currently streaming on Screenpix.

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