Tag Archives: Elisha Cook Jr

One-Eyed Jacks (1961, directed by Marlon Brando)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Rio (Marlon Brando), a young outlaw in the Old West, is betrayed by his partner and mentor Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) and ends up spending five years in a Mexican prison.  When Rio escapes, he gets together a new gang and heads for Monterey, California.  He wants to both get his revenge on Longworth and also rob the local bank.  Things get complicated when Rio actually confronts Longworth and suddenly realizes that he can’t bring himself just to gun the man down in cold blood.  Rio is not as ruthless of an outlaw as he thought he was.

However, Rio then meets and falls in love with Louisa (Pina Pellicer), Longworth’s stepdaughter  Longworth is willing to do whatever he has to keep Rio away from Louisa and, when Rio starts to think about going straight in an effort to win Louisa’s love, his new gang turn out to be even less trustworthy than his old partners.

A teenage rebellion film disguised as a western (and it’s not a coincidence that the main bad guy is named Dad), One-Eyed Jacks was Marlon Brando’s only film as a director.  The film was originally meant to be directed by Stanley Kubrick, who was working from a script written by a once-in-a-lifetime combination of Rod Serling and Sam Peckinpah.  Kubrick and Brando worked together to develop the film, with Brando insisting on Karl Malden as Dad.  (Kubrick wanted to cast Spencer Tracy.)  Ultimately realizing that working on One-Eyed Jacks would mean essentially taking orders from his star, Kubrick stepped down from directing so he could focus on Lolita and Brando took over as director.  The film finally went into production in 1958 and would not be released until 1961.  Brando’s perfectionism was blamed for the film going massively overbudget and, when it was finally released, One-Eyed Jacks was the first of Brando’s films to lose money.  The combined box office failures of One-Eyed Jacks and the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty left Brando in the cinematic wilderness for much of the 60s.

As for the film itself, One-Eyed Jacks takes what should have been a simple story and attempts to turn into an epic.  Rio spends a good deal of time brooding and the film seems to brood right along with him.  What starts out as a western becomes a forbidden love story as Rio and Louisa fall for each other.  Dad Longworth may be an outlaw-turned-sheriff but Malden plays him more as a possessive father who can’t handle that his two stepchildren — Rio and Louisa — are both turning against him and his strict rules.  Brando obviously viewed the film as being something bigger than a standard western.  Sometimes, his direction works and he does manage to get the epic feel that he was going for.  Other times, the film itself seems to be unsure what direction it wants to go in telling its story.  This is method directing.

Ultimately, One-Eyed Jacks is an interesting experiment, one that doesn’t really work but which still features Charles Lang’s outstanding cinematography and one of Karl Malden’s best performances.  As Brando’s only directorial effort, the film is a curiosity piece, one that will be best enjoyed by western fans who have the patience for something a little different.  And, for what it’s worth, based on the film’s visual beauty and the performances that he gets from the cat, I think Brando could have developed into a fine director with a little more experience.  However, it was not to be.

 

Horror Film Review: The Haunted Palace (dir by Roger Corman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 18th century, the inhabitants of Arkham, Massachusetts yank Joseph Curwen (Vincent Price) out of his mansion and tie him to a tree.  They accuse Curwen of being a warlock who is in league with the devil and who has been bringing young women to his “palace,” and putting them in a trance.  They burn Curwen alive but, before the flames are lit, they also give Curwen a chance to speak and curse both them and their descendants.

You really do have to wonder about the logic behind witch (and warlock) burnings.  They seem counter-productive because they always give the accused just enough time to cast one final curse before being burned to a crisp.  Indeed, you have to wonder why witches and warlock were allowed any final words to begin with.  I mean, at some point, you would think everyone would notice that the final words were always a curse.

Anyway. 110 years later, Joseph Curwen’s descendant, Charles Dexter Ward (Vincent Price, again) rides into town with his wife, Anne (Debra Paget).  He is stunned to see that Arkham has apparently fallen on hard times, with many of the town’s people being horribly disfigured.  It’s explain to him that the disfigurements and the poverty are all a result of his ancestor’s curse.  That’s going to make things a bit awkward, considering that Charles Dexter Ward has not only inherited the Palace but he’s also inherited a copy of Necronomicon and a legacy of messing with Cthulhu.  The townspeople don’t want Ward around but he and Anne decide to spend the night in the Place regardless.

Of course, it doesn’t take long for Curwen’s spirit to possess Charles.  Soon, Charles is trying to resurrect Curwen’s mistress, Hester (Cathie Merchant) and pursuing Curwen’s goals of breeding a race of super humans by forcing the women of the town to mate with the fearsome Yog-Sothoth.  Charles also seeks vengeance on the descendants of those who burned Curwen at the stake, as if all of the poverty and the deformities aren’t punishment enough.  Again, this is why you don’t give warlocks and witches a chance to get out one last curse before being executed.

Though The Haunted Palace is usually considered to be a part of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe cycle, the story itself is actually based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.  (In Lovecraft’s novella, Ward seeks out his evil ancestor whereas, in the film, Ward is more or less an innocent victim.)  The film’s title comes from a Poe poem, which is recited at both the beginning and the end of the film.  But the film itself, with its references to the Cthulhu mythos and its hideous New England setting, is definitely a work of Lovecraftian horror.

Fortunately, it’s an effective work of Lovecraftian horror, one that captures the feeling of people unwisely trying to control a force of evil that they cannot begin to comprehend.  Roger Corman keeps the action moving quickly and creates a gothic atmosphere of impending doom.  Vincent Price, toning down his usual theatrics, is chillingly evil as Curwen and sympathetic as Charles.  The film’s strongest performance, however, comes from Debra Paget, who desperately tries to free her husband from Curwen’s control.  Any woman who has suddenly felt as if she can no longer recognize the man who she once loved will be able to relate to Paget’s performance.

The Haunted Palace is a strong entry in the films of Roger Corman and Vincent Price and one of the better adaptations of the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

Scenes That I Love: Marilyn Monroe in Don’t Bother To Knock

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Marilyn Monroe would have been 94 years old today.

Unfortunately, Marilyn died when she was just 36 years old and also when she was only starting to get a chance to reveal what she was truly capable of as an actress.  It’s a shame, because I would have liked to have seen what type of roles she would have played in her 40s and her 50s.  Would she have eventually become a respected, award-winning character actor or would she have ended up like Bette Davis, doing cameos in films that weren’t particularly worthy of her talents?  Who knows but it’s a shame that the world will never get to find out.

For her birthday, I’m going to share a scene from one of her earlier films, 1952’s Don’t Bother To Knock.  In this film, Marilyn plays an unstable woman who is staying at a hotel.  Her cousin (played by Elisha Cook, Jr.) gets her job as a babysitter but is shocked to find out that Marilyn has been trying on her employer’s clothes.  After getting admonished by her cousin and pretending to be sorry, she proceeds to then summon another gust (played by Richard Widmark) over to her room.

It’s a simple scene but it’s wonderfully played by Monroe.  This was one of her first truly dramatic roles and she does a good job with it.

From Don’t Bother To Knock, here is a scene that I love:

Tom Horn (1980, directed by William Wiard)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today would have been Steve McQueen’s 90th birthday.

Sadly, McQueen died in 1980 at the absurdly young age of 50.  In life, McQueen never got as much respect as he deserved as an actor but in death, he’s been rediscovered as not just an icon of cool but also as an underrated actor who, much like Clint Eastwood, could say a lot without uttering a word.  (Be sure to read Marshall Terrill’s biography of McQueen.)  When Steve McQueen (as played by Damian Lewis) showed up in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, it seemed appropriate.  McQueen and Tarantino both seem made for each other, even if McQueen died long before Tarantino even wrote his first screenplay.

McQueen made two films shortly before he died, The Hunter and Tom Horn. Unfortunately, neither one of them was a hit with audiences or critics.  The Hunter, which was McQueen’s last film, is a forgettable movie that features McQueen as a bounty hunter who can’t drive.  Tom Horn, however, was an underrated western that features one of McQueen’s best performances.

In Tom Horn, McQueen plays the title character, a legendary frontier scout who is known for the role he played in the capture of Geronimo.  When the film opens, Tom Horn has seen better days.  With the frontier changing and the old west being replaced by the modern age, Horn has been reduced to being almost a vagrant, wandering from town to town in search of work.  When the film begins, Horn has found employment as a “stock detective.”  He’s employed by the local cattlemen to keep rustlers from stealing their stock.  Horn uses the same violent methods that he’s always used, gunning down rustlers and often doing so in public.  What Horn doesn’t realize is that times have changed and the methods that previously made him a legend are now making him a pariah.  When the cattlemen realize that the townspeople are turning against them because of Horn’s activities, they conspire to take out Horn themselves.

Tom Horn is based on a true story.  In 1903, Tom Horn was hung for shooting a 15 year-old boy.  While it is agreed that Horn killed many men over the course of his life, he was undoubtedly framed for the murder for which he was executed.  While sitting in his jail cell, waiting to be executed, Horn wrote the autobiography upon which this movie is based.  The movie makes the argument that Horn was executed because he was a reminder of what the West used to be like.  In order to prove that they were now ready to be members of civilized society, the cattleman had to sacrifice Horn in the most public way possible.

The film does a good job of capturing the final days of the old west and Steve McQueen does an even better job of playing a man who doesn’t realize that his time has come to a close.  Horn often seems to be the only man who doesn’t understand that the time of outlaws and the gunslingers is coming to a close and that leaves him defenseless when he’s put on trial.  Even after found guilty, Horn remains confident that he will somehow escape the hangman’s noose.  Tragically, it’s not until time is up that Horn truly comes to understand that the world has changed and civilization no longer has place for men like him.  The same people who used to depend on men like Tom Horn now just want to forget that he ever existed.  McQueen took a long break between making The Towering Inferno and Tom Horn and dropped out of the public eye.  The only film he made during that period was a barely released version of Enemy of the People.  When McQueen made Tom Horn, he was also a man out of time and he brings a sense of resignation and loss to the role that he might not have been capable of doing earlier in his career.

Sadly, it was while filming Tom Horn that McQueen first started to show symptoms of the cancer that would eventually kill him.  Tom Horn was released in 1980 and never got the attention that it deserved.  It’s a minor western classic and features Steve McQueen at his best.