Son of Gun in Cheek
Page 16
Never mind, too, that some of us needed those films.
Those dark months of 1973–1974 were when my craving began to get out of hand. I bought a powerful antenna for my TV set so I could pick up a San Jose UHF channel that occasionally, being far enough south of San Francisco to embolden its ownership, showed a Chan film. But then I moved to a different neighborhood, and no manner of antenna could pick up the San Jose station. (This was in the days before cable hookups, remember.) My desire increased twofold. I would travel around to the homes of friends and relatives, arriving at opportune times and casually suggesting that we “watch a few minutes of one of those old, you know, Charlie Chan movies” that “just happened” to be on. And I wouldn’t take no for an answer either.
There’s no telling what might have happened if it hadn’t been for the advent of the video recorder. This wonderful machine was my salvation. Oh, not at first; at first, as you might expect, it seemed a Chan addict’s dream come true—a means of providing myself with a permanent, inexpensive, and inexhaustible supply of his cinematic adventures. I bought some tapes here and there and made arrangements with a friend in Washington, D.C., where many of the Chans were being shown on a regular basis, to tape others for me. Before long I had forty-two of the forty-seven Chan films made between 1926 and 1949. And before long, too, I was lying blear-eyed in front of the flickering tube for days on end, watching one film after another, some of them again and again and again, until—
Until there was no longer any rush, any kick, any high.
Until I began to lose interest.
I knew all the plots by heart, down to the minutest detail in those of my favorites—Charlie Chan at the Circus, Charlie Chan in Reno, Charlie Chan on Treasure Island. I could recite lengthyexchanges of dialogue verbatim. I knew the exact moment Rita Hayworth (then billed as Rita Cansino) would make her entry in Charlie Chan in Egypt, her first film role. I knew that Boris Karloff would get shot in the head near the end of Charlie Chan at the Opera and that he would miraculously survive. I had timed to the second the appearance of Erik Rhodes in Charlie Chan in Paris, so I could tune out what is surely the worst drunk act ever committed to film. I knew that Charlie Chan on Treasure Island, with CesarRomero and Douglas Dumbrille, not only had the best script of all the Chan movies but also had the best atmosphere; and that the one with the worst script and atmosphere, other than the six Roland Winters debacles made on minuscule budgets in the late forties, was Charlie Chan in Rio—a film exactly one hour in length, fifty-nine minutes of which contain nothing of any interest. Yes, and I knew something else, too, something very few people alive today know: the exact wording of nearly every aphorism and pithy observation uttered by a screen Charlie for the enlightenment and amusement of millions since 1931.
I had, truly, ODed on Charlie Chan. And as a result, I had kicked the Chan habit—or, more properly, it had kicked me!
I’d be a liar if I said that I’ve never backslid just a little, never watched a Chan film since. I have, but only on rare occasions, only as a detached observer, only in the company of others, and only one at a sitting. I’m not afraid of becoming addicted again; but I am afraid of reliving all those familiar plots, hearing all that familiar dialogue. It’s bad enough that even now, with no effort whatsoever, I can recall the wit and wisdom of Charlie Chan from more than fifteen of his screen cases. . . .
The Black Camel, (1931)
Always harder to keep murder secrets than for eggs to bounce on sidewalk.
Sometimes very difficult to pick up pumpkin with one finger.
Cashimo, you are zebra—sport-model jackass.
Soap and water can never change perfume of billy-goat.
Only very clever man can bite pie without breaking crust.
Charlie Chan in Paris (1935)
Joy in heart better than bullet.
Many strange crimes have been committed in sewers of Paris.
Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935)
Cannot believe piece of carved stone contain evil—unless dropped on foot.
Charlie Chan’s Secret (1936)
Most precious gift to be able to cross bridge to honorable ancesters before arriving. (?)
Punch in ribs more desirable than shot in back.
Charlie Chan at the Circus (1936)
Facts like photographic film—must be exposed before developing.
Hm, very peculiar. Man already married announce engagement to trapeze lady.
Evidence like nose on anteater—very plain.
Charlie Chan at the Racetrack (1936)
Most murders result from violence—and murder without bloodstains like Amos without Andy.
Charlie Chan at the Opera (1936)
When fear attack brain, tongue wave distress signal.
Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937)
Truth like football—receive many kicks before reaching goal.
Letter like banana—outer skin must be removed before contents revealed.
Charlie Chan on Broadway (1937)
Mud of bewilderment now begin to clear from pool of thought.
Murder case like revolving door—when one side close, other side open.
Charlie Chan in Honolulu (1938)
When money talks, few are deaf. (E. F. Hutton himself must have watched this film.)
Have humble impression psychiatry of no value when brain cease to function.
Pardon, gentleman, was of opinion this cabin only occupied by corpse.
Opinion like tea leaf in hot water—both need time for brewing.
Charlie Chan in Panama (1940)
No heart strong enough to hold bullet.
Dividing line between folly and wisdom very faint in dark tomb.
Murder Over New York (1940)
Canary unlike faithful dog—do not die for sympathy.
Aid from Number Two Son like interest on mortgage— impossible to escape.
Kitchen stove most excellent weapon—good for cooking goose.
Chan: Number Two Son recognize (Hindu) assailant?
Number Two Son: No. They all look alike to me.
Dead Men Tell (1941)
Corpse have no place on honeymoon.
Charlie Chan in Rio (1941)
Interesting problem in chemistry: sweet wine often turn woman sour.
Pretty girl, like lap dog, sometimes go mad.
Castle in the Desert (1942)
Man who walk have both feet on ground.
Lovers use element of surprise . . . also criminals.
Guilty conscience like dog in circus—many tricks.
Offspring [Number Two Son] sound like chip off old chopstick.
Dark Alibi (1946)
Skeletons in closets always speak loudest to police.
Son Tommy is noisy woodpecker on family tree.
For time I nurse theory—very excellent theory—but now instead of nurse, I fear theory need undertaker.
Tommy, you sit down so much you get concussion of brain.
No experiment is failure until last experiment is success. (?)
Shadows Over Chinatown (1946)
Mutilation is usual pattern when motive is murder for profit.
Confucius say, “Sleep only escape from yesterday.”
Perhaps voice from dim past may lift curtain to oblivion.
Private detective like influenza epidemic—he cover wide territory but do very little good.
I may no longer carry the Chan monkey on my back, but there’s no question of my unshakable addiction to other B crime films— series and one-shots alike. I own upwards of a hundred and have watched scores more on borrowed tapes and on the Late Late Show. If that doesn’t make me an expert, it at least allows me to offer an informed opinion when I’m asked such vitally important questions as: What is the alternative B classic, the worst crime melodrama ever made?
My answer: Any film starring Bela Lugosi, take your pick. But if you back me into a corner and force me to select just one, it would have to be Scared to Death.
What makes Scared to Death such a magnificent piece of alternative filmmaking is not Lugosi, who doesn’t have much to do in it except slink around in bushes swirling his cape, and as a result is somewhat less hammy than usual. Nor is it the rest of the cast, which with a couple of exceptions isn’t too bad; the other featured players include such B crime/horror veterans of the thirties and forties as George Zucco (everybody’s favorite mad doctor, typecast again here), Douglas Fowley (some people’s favorite wisecracking newspaper reporter, ditto), Nat Pendleton (not too many people’s favorite dumb cop despite his roles in a couple of Thin Man flicks, ditto), and Joyce Compton (nobody’s favorite dumb blonde except mine, ditto again). Nor are the photography, the direction (by Christy Cabanne), or the “production values” to blame—although each does contribute its fair share. No, the real genius behind Scared to Death is somebody named W. J. Abbott, who invented the storyline and wrote the script.
Abbott’s muse must have been either drunk or badly hung over when he sat down to create this thanksgiving turkey. The story makes precious little sense, and what there is of it is as riddled with holes as the villains in a Fearless Fosdick caper. Characters act and react to situations and other stimuli with no more logic than the populace of Harry Stephen Keeler’s private universe. And the dialogue . . . well, you can literally see Zucco and some of the other vets trying not to cringe when uttering, or listening to others utter, some of Abbott’s more inspired witlessisms. Even Lugosi, who would later sink to even greater depths in Ed Wood, Jr.’s stunningly awful Plan Nine from Outer Space (mercifully, his last film), seems a tad embarrassed by his role in this Looney Tunes production.
How alternative is it? Well, to begin with, the story is narrated by a corpse. The opening scene takes place in the “autopsy room” of the Central City morgue, where the body of a young woman is stretched out on a table. Seems nobody has any idea of how she died, so the coroner and his assistant are getting ready to carve her up in order to find out. But before they commence, the coroner muses as follows: “And yet . . . one often wonders what could have caused the last thought that was cut off by death. If it were spoken now, what would it be . . . ?” Whereupon some weird music starts up (there is a lot of weird music in Scared to Death, all of it comprised of the same seven or eight discordant notes), the camera moves in for a close-up of the corpse, we hear her voice— presumably from the Great Beyond—and bingo, we’re into an extended flashback of the events that led to her demise.
All these events take place in the house of the supposedly mad and sinister Doctor Van Ee (George Zucco)—a combination living quarters, clinic, and one-time insane asylum. There are no exterior shots of the house, the grounds, or anything except some bushes (usually with Lugosi lurking in them) seen through the living room window. We’re talking low budget here, most of the production money having gone into the pocket of the con artist who sold Golden Gate Pictures and William B. David the “natural color” film. Also on hand are Dr. Van Ee’s son, Ward (played by either Roland Varno or Angelo Rossitto, it isn’t clear which and it doesn’t matter anyway); Ward’s wife, Laura (or Laurel or Laurette, as she is also known now and then), histrionically portrayed by Molly Lamont, who is in fact the imminent corpse on the slab in the Central City morgue doing the voice-over narration; a mysterious patient of Dr. Van Ee’s named Mrs. Williams (it isn’t clear who plays her, either), who is “decked out like she’s going to a horse show”; a private patrol officer, Bill Raymond (Nat Pendleton), “who’s always hanging around hoping somebody gets murdered” and who is present to provide some dubious comic relief (he got kicked off the Central City homicide squad for shooting up a dressmaker’s dummy instead of a murder suspect and he’s real anxious to have his old job back, which isn’t likely because in the first place he’s incredibly stupid and in the second place he wears a derby hat that makes him look even stupider than he acts or talks); and the maid, Lilly Beth (Gladys Blake), whose job it is to snoop around, act as a foil for Raymond’s moronic dumb-cop routine, get herself hypnotized so she looks dead, and try to stay in character in a scene where Raymond props her up against the wall with one hand sneakily groping her left breast.
Are you with me so far?
Pretty soon Dr. Van Ee’s sinister cousin, Leonide (Lugosi), shows up. He is supposed to be an illusionist with a checkered past; he is also purported to have been an inmate of the place when it was a nuthouse and to have “engineered an immense number of secret passages through which guards could watch inmates at night,” until finally he took one of these passages “into the outside world” and was next heard of running around Europe. With him on his return to the old homestead is his “inseparable companion,” a deaf-and-dumb dwarf named Igor (no kidding), who has no plot function whatsoever—unless you count scurrying around a lot, almost tripping a couple of people, and trying to look sinister at more or less opportune moments. The other two main characters, and nominal “heroes,” don’t put in an appearance until the halfway point. These are reporter Terry Lee of the Central City Times (Douglas Fowley), who insists on pronouncing the word “homicide” as “homo-cide”; and his fiancée, Jane Cornell (Joyce Compton), “who is good for dull days in a man’s life.” Jane is even dumber than Bill Raymond, though in a much more lovable way, and is considerably more attractive: she has blond hair, a cute mouth, a nice figure, and she doesn’t wear a derby hat.
The “story” and the “action” revolve around a revenge motive from the past, involving the fact that Laura/Laurette/Laurel was once the dance partner of a guy named René in France before or during the war. Seems they did this swell improv routine called the “Dance of the Green Mask” in the Green Room of the Parisian Something-or-other (the word is spoken only once, in voice-over narration—not the corpse’s, the murderer’s at the “climax”—and is so badly pronounced that you can’t understand what it is or even what it might be no matter how many times you listen to it). Then something terrible happened: Laurette/Laura/Laurel betrayed René to the Nazis as a spy because she hated him even though he was good and kind, and then sent him a green scarf to put over his eyes when he was shot at a concentration camp; only he wasn’t shot, he “had ideas of his own” and escaped somehow, but Laurel/Laura/Laurette didn’t find that out until much later, after she’d come to this country and first got a job as a singer and then coerced Ward into marrying her on a dare so she could get all the Van Ee money and, not incidentally, the house with the secret passages that used to be an insane asylum.
Are you still with me?
Well, now Laurette/Laurel/Laura has been getting mysterious letters from abroad and is worried that somebody is (1) trying to drive her bonkers, or (2) intends to murder her most foully, or (3) both of the above. She’s especially fearful of green masks and blindfolds, because of the scarf that she sent René in the concentration camp when she thought he was going to be executed by the Nazis. And she becomes even more terrified when she receives a package containing a severed head—a dummy’s head, as it turns out, from “a group of Dr. Van Ee’s anatomical specimens” locked in the cellar—and bearing a cryptic warning in green ink on the outside of the package: “Look for the man with the green mask.”
Things really start to pop at this point. Doctor Van Ee gets whacked over the head in his office, for no reason that is ever explained. Leonide commences lurking in the bushes outside. Igor runs around tripping people. A weird, disembodied, bilious-green mask keeps appearing and disappearing at the same living room window—sort of l
ike a green Halloween mask attached to the end of a stick. One time it seems about to fall off the stick, but the camera deftly cuts away in time so that you can’t be sure. Some shots ring out, for no reason except that shots are supposed to ring out in B melodramas like this. Lilly Beth gets hypnotized “by mental telepathy” into trying to place a green blindfold over Laura/Laurette/Laurel’s eyes and then falls down and Doctor Van Ee says she’s dead, even though he knows she isn’t. Leonide lurks in the bushes some more. The weird mask keeps flashing people from outside the window, to the tune of more weird music. Doctor Van Ee gets hit on the head again, this time out in the bushes (evidently to prove that they are not just Leonide’s domain). Leonide appears from inside a secret passage and swipes Lilly Beth’s “corpse.” Raymond gets drugged and tied to a chair. Leonide unhypnotizes Lilly Beth. The lights go out and come back on again. A strange foreign voice seems to issue from behind the living room walls. And then—