International Horror Film Review: The Night Digger (dir by Alistair Reid)

Posted on October 15, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1971 British film, The Night Digger, revolves around three people.

Maura Prince (Patricia Neal) lives in a dilapidated mansion out of London. She has never married and spends almost all of her time taking care of her blind mother, Edith (Pamela Brown). Edith goes out of her way to make sure that Maura will never have the courage to leave her and find happiness on her own. However, with the mansion falling apart around them, it’s becoming obvious that Maura cannot take care of the entire place on her own. That’s when a mysterious but handsome man named Billy Jarvis (Nichols Clay) rides up on his motorcycle and asks if the women need a handyman.

Billy has a dramatic story about his past, claiming that he lost almost everything that he owned as the result of a fire in a barn, one which also led to the death of his mother. Billy is charming and handsome and he ride a really impressive motorcycle and he looks good in a leather jacket. He represents youth but he’s also the epitome of the rebel without a cause, the sensitive but inarticulate Marlon Brando of The Wild One or the biker played by Peter Fonda in The Wild Angels. Some may look at him and only see a somewhat seedy character on a motorcycle but others look at him and see someone who is running from something and needs someone to take care of him. They see the soul of poet within the body of a drifter, someone who needs to escape from his past and who can also provide a better future. He’s the rebel without a cause, the one that everyone dreams about, even if some of those dreams are dreamt in secret. Though one may have rode a bicycle and the other was knight of the round table, there is much Nicholas Clay’s future performance as Lancelot in John Boorman’s Excalibur to be found in his performance in The Night Digger. Much like a groundkeeper in a D.H. Lawrence novel, he represents the secret and potentially dangerous earthy sensuality of Britain.

As a result, You certainly can not blame Maura for starting to fall in love with him. Nor can you blame Edith for wanting to have an athletic young man around as there have been stories about a madman who stalks the night, killing women. The Traveling Maniac, some have taken to calling him. Complicating the matter, though, is the fact that Billy just happens to be The Traveling Maniac. With Maura falling in love with him, will she discover the truth or will she become his next victim?

The Night Digger took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting much from this film when I watched it last year but it turned out to be rather clever and suspenseful thriller, one that told its story with a good combination of black humor and emotional honesty. Atmospherically directed by Alistair Reid and featuring a trio of excellent lead performances, The Night Digger was compelling compelling thriller, a gothic horror story with a great ending. This is definitely one to keep an eye out for!

Horror On TV: Ghost Story 1.13 “Time of Terror” (dir by Robert Day)

Posted on October 13, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Tonight’s episode of Ghost Story stars Patricia Neal as a woman who wakes up one morning in a hotel and discovers that her husband is missing. She’s told that her husband checked out without her but no one will give her a straight answer as to where he went.

This episode was written by Jimmy Sangster, who also wrote several Hammer films. It originally aired on December 22nd, 1972.

Scenes I Love: Lonesome Rhodes Reveals His True Self In A Face In The Crowd

Posted on September 7, 2022 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The director Elia Kazan was born 113 years ago, in what was then the Ottoman Empire and what is today Turkey. Though he died in 2003, Kazan has remained a controversial figure and there’s still a lot of debate over what his artistic legacy should be. As a director, he revolutionized both Broadway and Hollywood. He made films about topics that other directors wouldn’t touch and he played a huge role in making Marlon Brando a star and popularizing the method. (I’ll allow you to decide whether that’s a good or a bad thing.) He won two Oscars and he’s been cited as an influence by some of the most important directors of the past century.

Kazan was also a former communist who, at the height of the 50s red scare, testified in front of the HUAC and who “named names.” Kazan often claimed that he only identified people who had already been named. Many of his former colleagues, however, felt that Kazan had betrayed them and never forgave him. Though Kazan always denied it, many felt that his decision to name names had more to do with settling personal scores than with any actual concern about national security. Not helping matters was that Kazan’s 1954 film, On The Waterfront, was widely viewed as being Kazan’s attempt to justify being an informer. Indeed, Kazan’s post-HUAC films seemed to alternate between thinly veiled attempts to paint himself as a hero and attempts to remind people that he was still a liberal.

That adds an interesting subtext to his best film, 1957’s A Face In The Crowd. In this film, Andy Griffith plays Lonesome Rhodes, the type of down-home entertainer who would probably have been quite popular with the supporters of HUAC. A reporter played by Patricia Neal falls in love with Lonesome and helps him become a celebrity with a national following but, too late, she discovers that Rhodes is hardly the folksy and naïve country boy that she originally believed him to be. Instead, he’s a master manipulator who, drunk on his own power and fame, makes plans to transform himself into a political power. Lonesome is portrayed as being a down-home fascist, a countryfied version of the infamous Father Charles Coughlin. At the same time, one could also argue that Rhodes, with his seething contempt for the people who follow him, was also meant as a commentary on the people who claimed to represent the workers but who only saw them and their struggle as a means to an end.

A Face In The Crowd may have been Kazan’s attempt to remind his detractors that he was still a man of the Left but it’s far more interesting as a work of prophecy. There’s really not much difference between Lonesome Rhodes and the modern day celebrities and influencers who are currently famous simply for being famous and who, for the right amount of money and ego-stroking, are more than willing to propagandize for one side or the other.

In this wonderfully acted and directed scene, Lonesome Rhodes gets drunk on his own power and reveals just how corrupt his outlook has become. Making this scene all the more powerful is that it’s easy to imagine our current leaders springing something like Secretary of National Morale on us today.

Film Review: The Fountainhead (dir by King Vidor)

Posted on February 13, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Gary Cooper look as miserable in any film as he did in the 1949 film, The Fountainhead.

In The Fountainhead, Gary Cooper plays Howard Roark. Roark is an architect who we are repeatedly told is brilliant. However, he’s always has to go his own way, even if it means damaging his career. At the start of the film, we watch a montage of Howard Roark losing one opportunity after another. He gets kicked out of school. He gets kicked out of the top design firms. Howard Roark has his own vision and he’s not going to compromise. Roark’s a modernist, who creates sleek, powerful buildings that exist in defiance of the drab, collectivist architecture that surrounds them.

Howard Roark’s refusal to even consider compromising his vision threatens the rich and the powerful. A socialist architecture critic with the unfortunate name of Ellsworth Toohey (Robert Douglas) leads a crusade against Roark. And yet, even with the world against him, Roark’s obvious talent cannot be denied. Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal) finds herself enthralled by the sight of him working in a quarry. Fellow architect Peter Keating (Kent Smith) begs Howard to help him design a building. Newspaper publisher Gail Wynard (Raymond Massey) goes from criticizing Howard to worshipping him.

Have I mentioned that Howard Roark doesn’t believe in compromise? If you have any doubts about this, they’ll be erased about halfway through the movie. That’s when Roark responds to a company altering one of his designs by blowing up a housing project. Roark is arrested and his subsequent trial soon turns into a debate between two opposite philosophies: individualism vs. collectivism.

So, let’s just start with the obvious. Gary Cooper is all wrong for the role of Howard Roark. As envisioned by Ayn Rand (who wrote both the screenplay and the novel upon which it was based), Roark was meant to be the ideal man, a creative individualist who has no doubt about his vision and his abilities. Cooper, with his down-to-Earth and rather modest screen persona, often seems to be confused as to how to play such a dynamic (some might say arrogant) character. When Roark is meant to come across as being uncompromising, Cooper comes across as being mildly annoyed. When Roark explains why his designs must be followed exactly, Cooper seems to be as confused as the people with whom Roark is speaking. It doesn’t help that the 47 year-old Cooper seemed a bit too old to be playing an “up-and-coming” architect. In the book, Roark was in his 20s and certainly no older than his early 30s. Cooper looks like he should be relaxing in a Florida condo.

Who, among those available in 1949, could have been convincing in the role of Howard Roark? King Vidor wanted Humphrey Bogart for the role but if Cooper seemed to old for the part, one can only imagine what it would have been like with Bogart instead. Henry Fonda probably could have played the role. For that matter, William Holden would have been an interesting pick. Montgomery Clift and John Garfield would have been intriguing, though Garfield’s politics probably wouldn’t have made Ayn Rand happy. If Warner Bros. had been willing to wait for just a few years, they could have cast a young Marlon Brando or perhaps they could have let Douglas Sirk make the movie with Rock Hudson and Lana Turner. (Or, if you really wanted to achieve peak camp, they could have let Delmer Daves do it with Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee.)

If you can overlook the miscasting of Gary Cooper, The Fountainhead‘s an entertaining film. King Vidor directs the film as if it’s a fever dream. The film’s dialogue may be philosophical but the visuals are all about lust, with Pat Neal hungrily watching as a shirtless Gary Cooper breaks up rocks in the quarry and Vidor filling the film with almost fetishistic shots of phallic Howard Roark designs reaching high into the sky. If Cooper seems confused, Neal seems to be instinctively understand that there is no place for underplaying in the world of The Fountainhead. The same also holds true of Robert Douglas, who is a wonderfully hissable villain as the smug Ellsworth Toohey. Interestingly, the film ends with a suicide whereas the novel ended with a divorce because, under the production code, suicide was apparently preferable to divorce. I guess that’s 1949, for you.

Because America is currently having a socialist moment, there’s a tendency among critics to be dismissive of Ayn Rand and her worship of the individual above all else. Rand’s novels are often dismissed as just being psychobabble, despite the fact that, in some ways, they often seem to be borderline prophetic. (Barack Obama’s infamous “You didn’t build that!” speech from 2012 could have just as easily been uttered by Ellsworth Toohey or one of the many bureaucrats who pop up in Atlas Shrugged.) Here’s the thing, though — as critical as one can be of Rand’s philosophy, there’s still something undeniably appealing about someone who will not compromise their vision to the whims of the establishment. It’s goes beyond politics and it gets to heart of human nature. We like the people who know they’re talented and aren’t afraid to proclaim it. (Modesty, whether false or sincere, is a huge turn off.) We like the people who take control of situations. We like the people who are willing to say, “If you don’t do it my way, I’m leaving.” In a way, we’re all like Dominique Francon, running our hands over architectural models while trying to resist the temptation to compromise and accept something less than what we desire. We may not want to admit it but we like the Howard Roarks of the world.

Even when they’re played by Gary Cooper.

My Huckleberry Friend: BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (Paramount 1961)

Posted on June 12, 2017 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

(“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” airs tonight, 6/12/17 at 8:00 EST on TCM as part of their month-long salute to Audrey Hepburn.)

“You mustn’t give your heart to a wild thing. The more you do, the stronger they get, until they’re strong enough to run into the woods or fly into a tree. And then to a higher tree and then to the sky” – Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S.

From it’s hauntingly romantic theme “Moon River” to it’s sophisticated screenplay by George Axelrod, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S is a near-perfect movie. The bittersweet comedy-drama stars Audrey Hepburn in an Oscar nominated performance as Holly Golightly, a New York “party girl” who winds up falling for struggling writer George Peppard. That Hepburn didn’t get the Oscar (Sophia Loren took it home that year for TWO WOMEN) is one of the Academy’s greatest crimes. The film has a very personal connection with…

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Horror Film Review: Ghost Story (dir by John Irvin)

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A Fred Astaire horror movie!?

Yes, indeed. Ghost Story is a horror movie and it does indeed star Fred Astaire. However, Fred doesn’t dance or anything like that in Ghost Story. This movie was made in 1981 and Fred was 82 years old when he appeared in it. Fred still gave an energetic and likable performance and, in fact, his performance is one of the few things that really does work in Ghost Story.

Fred Astaire isn’t the only veteran of Hollywood’s Golden Age to appear in Ghost Story. Melvyn Douglas, John Houseman, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. all appear in the movie as well. They play four lifelong friends, wealthy men who have formed an informal little club called The Chowder Society. They gather one a week and tell ghost stories. Myself, I’m wondering why these four intelligent and accomplished men (one is a lawyer, another a doctor, another a politician, and another is Fred Astaire) couldn’t come up with a better name than Chowder Society.

(But I guess that’s something that people do up north. Harvard has something called the Hasty Pudding Club, which just sounds amazingly annoying.)

Unfortunately, the members of the Chowder Society have a deep, dark secret. Way back in the 1930s, the boys listening to too much jazz and they all ended up lusting after the mysterious and beautiful Eva Galli (Alice Krige). As Astaire explains it, “We killed her, the Chowder Society.”

(Of course, there’s more to the story. It was more manslaughter than murder but either way, it was pretty much the fault of the Chowder Society.)

And now, decades later, a woman named Alma (Alica Krige, again) has mysteriously appeared. When she sleeps with David (Craig Wasson), the son of a member of the Chowder Society, David falls out of a window and ends up splattered on the ground below. David’s twin brother, Don (also played by Craig Wasson), returns to their childhood home and attempts to make peace with his estranged father.

However, now the member of the Chowder Society are starting to die. One falls off a bridge. Another has a heart attack in the middle of the night. Fred Astaire thinks that Eva has come back for revenge. John Houseman is a little more skeptical…

I pretty much went into Ghost Story with next to no knowledge concerning what the film was about. I thought the plot desription sounded intriguing. As a classic film lover, I appreciated that Ghost Story was not only Fred Astaire’s final film but the final film of Douglas and Fairbanks as well. Before he deleted his account, I had some pleasant interactions with Craig Wasson on Facebook. I was really hoping that Ghost Story would be a horror classic.

Bleh.

Considering all the talent involved, Ghost Story should have been great but instead, it just fell flat. Alice Krige is properly enigmatic as both Alma and Galli and really, the entire cast does a pretty good job. But, with the exception of exactly three scenes, the film itself is never that scary. (Two of those scary scenes involve a decaying corpse and it’s not that hard to make decay scary. The other is a fairly intense nightmare sequence.) Largely due to John Irvin’s detached direction, you never really feel any type of connection with the characters. I mean, obviously, you don’t want to see the star of Top Hat die a terrible death but that has more to do with the eternal charm of Fred Astaire than anything that happens in Ghost Story.

Add to that, Ghost Story‘s special effects have aged terribly. There are two scenes in which we watch different characters fall to their death and both times, you can see that little green outline that always used to appear whenever one image was super imposed on another. It makes it a little hard to take the movie seriously.

Sadly, Ghost Story did not live up to my expectations. At least Fred Astaire was good…

The Medium is the Message: Andy Griffith in A FACE IN THE CROWD (Warner Brothers 1957)

Posted on February 2, 2016 by gary loggins

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If you only know Andy Griffith from his genial TV Southerners in THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW and MATLOCK, brace yourself for A FACE IN THE CROWD. Griffith’s folksy monologues had landed him a starring role in the hit Broadway comedy NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS. The vicious, wild-eyed Lonesome Rhodes was thousands of miles away from anything he had done before, and the actor, guided by the sure hand of director Elia Kazan, gives us a searing performance in this satire of the power of the media, and the menace of the demagogue.

When we first meet Larry Rhodes, he’s in the drunk tank in rural Pickett, Arkansas, a small town not unlike Mayberry. Local radio host Marcia Jeffries is doing a remote broadcast there, hoping to catch some ratings. The no-account drifter is hostile at first, but when the sheriff promises him an early release, you can practically see the wheels spinning…

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44 Days of Paranoia #29: A Face In The Crowd (dir by Elia Kazan)

Posted on December 19, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For our latest entry in the 44 Days of Paranoia, we take a look at Elia Kazan’s 1957 political satire, A Face In The Crowd.

The film opens with radio producer Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) visiting a local jail in Arkansas. She’s looking for human interest stories that she can feature on her show and she discovers one when she meets an imprisoned drifter named Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith). When Marcia interviews him, Rhodes proves himself to be a natural performer, telling folksy jokes and launching into a song about being a “free man in the morning.” Rhodes proves to be so popular that, after he’s released from jail, he pursues a career in show business with Marcia as both his manager and, eventually, his lover.

Moving to Memphis, a renamed Lonesome Rhodes eventually lands his own television variety show and he soon starts doing irreverent commercials for local companies. Along the way, Rhodes also finds a new manager, the glib and manic Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa). With the help of Joey, Rhodes becomes the spokesman for a fake energy supplement, Vitajex.

As Rhodes’ fame grows, so does his ego. After dumping Jeffries, Rhodes impulsively marries a 17 year-old majorette (Lee Remick). His show also goes national and Rhodes soon starts to use his influence to try to both promote an incompetent, business-backed Presidential candidate and to destroy anyone who he considers to be an enemy. As his show’s disillusioned head writer (Walter Matthau) puts it, Rhodes has become a “demagogue in denim.”

A Face In The Crowd is a personal favorite of mine. Director Kazan deftly mixes satire with melodrama and, with the exception of the weak ending, the film’s vision of media manipulation and demagogic celebrities probably feels more plausible today than when it was first released. The film is full of great performances, from the avuncular Walter Matthau to vulnerable Patricia Neal to the innocent-and-then-not-so-innocent Lee Remick. Anthony Franciosa is wonderfully glib and sleazy and it’s a lot of fun to watch his joy at discovering how easy it is to manipulate the world.

Ultimately, however, the film’s success is mostly due to Andy Griffith’s amazing performance as Lonesome Rhodes. Griffith, displaying all of the folksiness but none of the empathy that would be displayed in his later television show, turns Rhodes into a force of nature, a smiling charlatan and a charismatic sociopath who manipulates for the pure enjoyment of manipulation.

To make the obvious comparison, it’s very easy to imagine Lonesome Rhodes getting his own show on MSNBC, where on a nightly basis he could bark orders at his followers and ridicule anyone who dares to question him. But even beyond that, the character of Lonesome Rhodes resonates. I’m from the South. I grew up down here and I live down here. I can tell you, from my own personal observations and experiences, that we still have our share of demagogues. Some of them run in elections and some of them preach on Sunday but all of them have got a bit of Lonesome Rhodes inside of them.

For that reason, A Face In The Crowd is probably more relevent today than it’s ever been.

Other Entries In The 44 Days of Paranoia

Scenes I Love: A Face In The Crowd

Posted on August 31, 2010 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Located below is the famous Vitajex advertising montage from Elia Kazan’s 1957 film, A Face In The Crowd. Everytime I see this, I wonder if maybe American audiences in the 50s were smarter than we give them credit for.

Then again, A Face in The Crowd was a notorious financial and critical failure when it was first released. It’s actually one of the best and most influential movies ever made. Certainly, it’s one of the few Kazan films that still seems artistically relevent today. It should also be noted that A Face in the Crowd features Anthony Franciosa years before his starring turn in Dario Argento’s Tenebrae, Andy Griffith playing a villain, the film debut of Lee Remick, Walter Matthau as a tv writer, and Patricia Neal having a nervous breakdown. Supposedly, a very young Rip Torn is somewhere in this film as well but I’ve never been able to spot him.