Allan Nixon | Through the Shattered Lens

“Have you ever been kissed by a girl like this?” a disembodied voice asks at the start of 1953’s Mesa For Lost Women as a pair hands with claw-like fingernails caresses the face of someone who is later identified as being “Doc” Tucker (Allan Nixon).

Things get stranger from there. A couple is found lost and dehydrated in the Mexican desert. Grant Phillips (Robert Knapp) rambles about “super bugs” out in the desert and how they have to be destroyed. American land surveyor Frank (John Martin) assumes that Grant must be delirious but Frank’s assistant, Pepe (Chris Pin Martin), knows differently. We know that Pepe knows differently because the narrator tells us that Pepe had heard all about the monsters in the desert but Pepe keeps that information to himself….

Who is this narrator and why is he so condescending? (For the record, he’s actor Lyle Talbot, who split his career between major, Oscar-winning productions and stuff like this.) Have you ever noticed that a narrator usually just leaves you feeling even more confused by what you just watched? There’s a trailer playing right now for a film called Ella McCay that opens with Julie Kavner saying, “Hi, I’m the narrator!” and whenever I hear that line, I’m just like, “Oh, this film is going to be so bad!”

I think it’s because most narrators are added after the fact, in an attempt to give some sort of uniformity to a badly constructed movie. The narrator is there to tell us stuff that a good movie would be able to show us. For instance, in the trailer for Ella McCay, Julie Kavner tells us that “I’m nuts about her,” as a way to assure us that Ella McCay is someone worth making a movie about. Now, ideally, you wouldn’t have to have someone tell you that. You would just watch the movie and say, “Hey, Ella McCay! She deserves all the happiness in the world!” But when your trailer is a bunch of scenes of Ella McCay acting a bit immature for someone who is destined to become “governor of the state you were born and raised in,” you need that narrator to say, “No, she’s likable, I promise!”

By that same logic, Mesa of Lost Women was apparently a mash-up of several different films, none of which had a complete script. Narrator Lyle Talbot is here to tell us that, despite what we’re seeing, Mesa of Lost Women is an actual movie with an actual story as opposed to just a bunch of random scenes that were haphazardly crammed together. We get a flashback of a scientist named Masterson (Harmon Stevens) traveling to the laboratory of Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan) and discovering that Aranya is creating giant tarantulas and transforming human women into mind-controlled slaves with the instincts of a spider. Masterson doesn’t think that’s ethical so Aranya’s assistant, Tarantella (Tandra Quinn), gives him an injection that turns him into a simpleton. Masterson ends up in a mental hospital, though he later escapes. Meanwhile, an American businessman and his girlfriend (Mary Hill) come to Mexico and witness Tarantella dancing in a bar. Masterson shows up and shoots Tarantella and then takes everyone hostage so that he can force Grant, who we now discover is a pilot, to fly him to the mesa of lost women …. or something.

Despite the best efforts of the narrator, the film is impossible to follow. A big problem is that Dr. Aarnya’s plan never makes much sense. How is creating a giant spider and a bunch of women who think that they’re spiders going to help him conquer the world? The other problem is that the film had two directors, one of whom was an enigmatic German named Herbert Tevos who got the job by claiming to have directed Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel. Tevos’s footage of Dr. Aranya, the giant tarantula, and the “lost women” was not enough to secure the film distribution so a second director, Ron Ormond, was brought in to shoot a bunch of new footage to make the film more commercial. Tevos’s film became an extended flashback in the middle of Ormond’s film and the whole thing is a big mess.

In fact, the film is such a mess that some people insist Ed Wood must have been involved. It is true that narrator Lyle Talbot also appeared in Plan 9 From Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. Plan 9‘s Mona McKinnon appears as a spider woman. So does Dolores Fuller, who was Wood’s girlfriend at the time. Wood later “borrowed” Mesa of Lost Women‘s score for Jail Bait. Mesa of Lost Women was definitely Wood-adjacent but, by all accounts, Wood didn’t actually do any work on the film. This mess of a film belongs to Tevos and Ormond.

And it is a mess. It’s a watchable mess, in much the same way that a nuclear meltdown would probably be watchable. But, nonetheless, it’s still a mess and the incoherence of the plot really does get on one’s nerves, despite the best efforts of Lyle Talbot. Talbot can’t sell the viewer on Mesa of Lost Women. Maybe he would have had better luck with Ella McCay.

Once upon a time, there was a man who lived by the railroad tracks. He was a station agent and his name was Jan Horak (Hugo Haas) but everyone just called him “Hunky.” He was a middle-aged man, originally from Eastern Europe. He lived in a little house and basically kept to himself. His only friends were a slang-spouting hobo known as The Professor (Howland Chamberlain) and his assistant, the young and handsome Steve (Allan Nixon). With no family in the United States, Hunky was frequently lonely so he decided to go to the town carnival and buy a puppy. Instead, he ended up meeting the woman who will not only become his wife but who would also eventually plot his murder.

And so begins the low-budget 1951 film, Pickup.

The woman who Hunky meets is Betty (Beverly Michaels). When we first see Betty, she’s riding on a miracle-go-round with a rather bored look on her face. (The camera lingers on her legs, which was the traditional way that films introduced “dangerous” women in the late 40s and 50s.) We know that Betty is probably bad news because she chews gum with her mouth open and she smirks as soon as she sees Hunky stumbling around the carnival. She approaches him and starts to flirt with him. Hunky is so smitten that he forgets about buying a puppy.

Instead, he returns home and prepares for a wedding. However, what Hunky doesn’t know is that Betty is in desperate need of money and the only reason that she’s showing any interest in him is because she’s under the impression that he’s rich. As soon as they get married, Betty starts planning for a way to lose a husband while still getting to keep his money. Not surprisingly, it involves Steve….

It also involves a sudden case of deafness. Even before Hunky marries Betty, he suffers from a persistent ringing in his ears. It only gets worse as it becomes more and more obvious just how unhappy Betty is in their marriage. One day, while standing on the railroad tracks, Hunky loses his hearing all together.

He screams at the sky and hears nothing.

He grabs a sledgehammer and starts pounding it against the tracks and, again, he hears nothing.

He tells Betty and Steve that he can’t hear and, when they reply, he can see their lips move but he can’t hear a word that they say.

Hunky’s gone deaf! Steve moves in to help Betty take care of her husband. He also moves in because he’s been having an affair with Betty for quite some time. They openly discuss murdering Hunky in front of him, confident that he can’t hear a word that they’re saying. What they don’t realize, though, is that Hunky’s deafness was only temporary and he knows exactly what they’re planning to do….

I really liked Pickup. Plotwise, it’s not the most original film ever made. In fact, the film is often described as being an unofficial remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice (this despite the fact that Pickup is based on a novel that was published before James Cain’s famous story). But that said, the film has enough odd and quirky moments to make it stand out.

For instance, there’s the character of the Professor, who comes across like some sort of early beatnik who has somehow found himself in a hard-boiled crime film. There’s the scenes of Hunky not only losing his hearing but also slowly recovering it, with dialogue fading in and out as if it was recorded underwater. And then there’s Beverly Michaels, giving an absolutely wonderful performance as Betty. As played by Michaels, Betty is someone who is very much aware that she’s playing a role. She delivers every sarcastic put-down with confidence and style but, throughout the film, there are hints that Betty is not quite as sure-of-herself as she seems to be. (Just watch the scene where she nervously tries to light a cigarette.)

There’s a profound sense of melancholy running through Pickup, one that only really becomes clear after the film ends. For that, we must credit director and star Hugo Haas. Originally hailing from what is now the Czech Republic, Hugo Haas came to Hollywood to escape the Nazis and he plays Hunky with the sad weariness of a man who understands that the world can be a dark place. As written, Hunky seems incredibly naive but, as played by Haas, he’s just a man so desperate to believe in love and kindness that he allows himself to tricked. However, as the film makes clear, he’s never as much of a fool as the people around him believe him to be. Before eventually returning to Europe, Haas made a handful of successful (if not quite critically acclaimed) films in America. Almost all of them seemed to return to the same theme of outsiders searching for love.

Personally, I recommend picking up Pickup. It’s a classic B-noir, worth seeing for both Beverly Michaels and Hugo Haas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbZxQ0NuyCU