7. Space: 1999 is a British science fiction TV series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. It originally ran from 1975 to 1977 and was budgeted in its first season at £3.25 million, making it the most expensive show in the history of British broadcasting. A comparative cash-in on Star Trek, Space: 1999 concerned the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, a scientific research station on the moon. A sudden explosion of humanity’s vast nuclear waste (which has been deposited on the moon’s dark side) causes Earth’s only natural satellite to be blasted out of its orbit and the hapless humans cast adrift in the uncharted reaches of the cosmos. Despite a cast headlined by American actors Martin Landau and Barbara Bain (a failed attempt to appeal to U.S. markets), Space: 1999 was derided by critics and sci-fi enthusiasts alike. Some of the show’s core scientific ideas (such as a thermonuclear explosion displacing the moon from its orbit and parsecs being employed as a velocity of speed rather than a unit of distance) were criticized by sci-fi authors Isaac Asimov and John Brosnan. Although these inaccuracies were compounded by some limp teleplays and stiff performances, Space: 1999 did boast lavish production values and accomplished visual effects and model work. Just ask Larry Cohen.
8. Gaspar Noé (b.1963) is a controversial Franco-Argentine director and screenwriter. His work, which has often polarized critics, has been associated with the New French Extremity, a transgressive style of cinema which deals with violence, nihilism, perversion, and psychosis. The son of the Argentine painter Luis Felipe Noé, he fled his native country in 1976 with his parents and is now based in France. After making the forty-minute film, Carne (1991), which opens with a horse being killed and butchered onscreen, Noé achieved notoriety for the feature films I Stand Alone (1998), Irreversible (2002), and Enter the Void (2009), each distinguished as much by their intense sexual violence and misanthropy as they are by their technical brilliance and narrative ingenuity. Noé has also directed music videos for Bone Fiction (Insanely Cheerful, 1997), Placebo (Protégé-Moi, 2003), Sebastian (Love in Motion, 2011), Animal Collective (Applesauce, 2012), and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (We No Who U R, 2012). As of this writing, Noé’s proposed remake of God Told Me To appears to be dead.
CHAPTER 9: THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER (1977)
1. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy and adapted for the screen by Richard L. Breen and John Twist from Don Whitehead’s 1956 book, The FBI Story (1959) is indeed a select and sanitized history of the Bureau. Featuring a strong cast headed by James Stewart as diligent Federal Agent Chip Hardesty, the film recounts one man’s colourful career spent confronting everyone from the Klu Klux Klan and machine-gun toting gangsters to the Nazi secret service. According to some sources, J. Edgar Hoover was a co-producer of the film and insisted that LeRoy re-shoot certain scenes that he felt depicted the FBI in a less than flattering light. Hoover also allegedly deployed two trusted FBI men to “supervise” the director on set.
2. The House on 92nd Street (1945), directed by Henry Hathaway, is a terrific semi-documentary espionage thriller lensed in New York. It concerns a young American college graduate (William Eythe) who is recruited and trained in Hamburg, Germany, to be a spy. However, in truth, he is actually working as a covert double agent for the FBI. The doom-laden narration, authentic locales and vérité approach (pioneered by producer Louis de Rochemont) proved highly influential on the post-war American crime film, inspiring the likes of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948).
3. The Street with No Name (1948), directed by William Keighley, features Richard Widmark as a psychotic, wife-beating, hypochondriac gangster (capitalizing on the actor’s star-making turn in Kiss Of Death two years earlier) whose mob outfit is infiltrated by an FBI agent (Mark Stevens). Entertaining and richly atmospheric, the film is still a stilted affair and was not greatly improved upon when loosely remade by Samuel Fuller as House of Bamboo (1955). Lloyd Nolan reprised the role of Inspector George A. Briggs which he had originated in The House on 92nd Street.
4. Walk East on Beacon (1952), directed by Alfred L. Werker, is a “red scare” spy thriller concerning an FBI agent (George Murphy) who is assigned to apprehend a ruthless communist mastermind who threatens the free world. Based on a Reader’s Digest article titled “The Crime of the Century” — penned by Hoover himself — the film registers as either a hysterical denouncement of Cold War communism or nothing more than a recruitment commercial for the Bureau.
5. Broderick Crawford (1911-1986) won an Academy Award for his role as politician Willie Stark in the political drama All the King’s Men (1949). The film also won Oscars for Best Motion Picture and Best Supporting Actress for Mercedes McCambridge.
6. Albert Finney played Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm (2002). A co-production between the BBC and HBO, it was directed by Richard Loncraine and written by Hugh Whitemore. The film begins in 1934 during Churchill’s “wilderness years” and ends in 1939 as World War II erupts and he assumes command of the Royal Navy as First Lord of the Admiralty. An equally impressive sequel, Into the Storm (2009), directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, starred Brendan Gleeson as Churchill.
7. Walter Winchell (1897-1972) was a powerful and highly controversial newspaper and radio gossip columnist. After working in Vaudeville for a decade from the age of thirteen, he began his career in journalism at the Evening Graphic, a newly-founded tabloid, when he was twenty-seven. Penning a syndicated column titled “Your Broadway and Mine,” Winchell invented the sensationalist gossip column with its tawdry titbits on celebrity activities when he joined the New York Daily Mirror in 1929. By the 1940s, he was at the height of his success with his column appearing in 2,000 newspapers and his radio show the top-rated program on the air. Often preferring salacious innuendo and idle talk to established facts, Winchell wielded considerable influence and counted President Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover as supporters. After the Daily Mirror ceased publication in 1963, Winchell lost his column and his platform, and was beset with a catalogue of personal miseries and tragedies. He divorced his third wife, lost one daughter to pneumonia and a son to suicide, and became a virtual recluse. Held accountable by some for the decline in ethical standards and quality of the American press, Winchell died of cancer with only his surviving daughter, Walda, attending his funeral.
8. Cohen elaborates further on Hoover and his relationship with Tolson during an interview with Tony Williams in The Radical Allegories of an Independent Filmmaker: “They were just two bachelors who liked to watch prize fights, football, and horseraces together …I think had he been openly homosexual, Hoover would have been a better person. He lived with such total repression that it made him an unhappy man and he made everyone around him unhappy. The most sad thing about him was that he was unable to express love openly. That was the tragedy of the man.”
9. Hoover’s long-time maid was Annie Fields, whom he left $3,000 in his will. Along with Hoover’s current chauffeur, Tom Moton, and former chauffeur, James Crawford, it was Annie who discovered the FBI Director’s body lying on his bedroom floor on May 2, 1972, after Hoover suffered a fatal heart attack.
10. Down Three Dark Streets (1954) is a suspenseful crime drama directed by Arnold Laven. Broderick Crawford stars as Ripley, an FBI agent who takes on the caseload of a deceased colleague and becomes mixed up in three investigations involving car theft, a gangster on the run and an extortion racket.
11. Then Came Bronson was an adventure drama series created by Denne Bart Petitclerc that ran on NBC for twenty-six episodes from 1969 to 1970. The show concerns James “Jim” Bronson, who quits his job as a journalist after his friend commits suicide, hops on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and begins roaming the highways and byways of America in search of his soul. As the soft-spoken nomadic drifter atop his metal steed, Michael Parks cut a memorable figure as Bronson and the series remains a sensitive, understated and affecting paean to 1960s counterculture values.
12. The inspirational poem that Hoover recites to the waiter is “If–” by Rudyard Kipling. First published in Rewards
and Fairies (1910), an historical fantasy book of verse and poetry, “If–” deftly captures the essence of “stiff upper-lip” British stoicism and masculinity. Although the poem is addressed to Kipling’s son, John, the author was moved to write it in honour of his friend, Leander Starr Jameson, the famous Scottish explorer and politician. Presented as a series of rules and motivational nuggets designed to impart wisdom and humility to the listener, “If–” remains one of the United Kingdom’s most beloved poems.
13. After a unanimous decision by the thirty-nine-member board of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, Elia Kazan (1909-2003) was presented his honorary Oscar by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro at the 71st Academy Awards ceremony in 1999. The award was a highly controversial one due to the fact that Kazan was amongst the first to cooperate with the House of Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, which ended the Hollywood careers of many people and caused “irrevocable harm.” Despite publicly stating that he deeply regretted his actions, the announcement of the award was met with opposition from the executive council of the Eastern unit of the Writer’s Guild of America. On Oscar night, a few hundred demonstrators, as well as at least 100 supporters, congregated outside the theater. Inside the theater, several of the attendees at the ceremony remained seated and stony-faced during the presentation, including Nick Nolte, Ed Harris, and Amy Madigan. Those who stood and applauded included Karl Malden, Warren Beatty, Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, Helen Hunt, Kathy Bates, and Lynn Redgrave. Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw remained in their seats but applauded.
14. Highway Patrol was a syndicated crime series that debuted on October 3, 1955, and ran for four seasons and 156 half-hour episodes. Broderick Crawford was the only series regular, starring as Fedora-wearing Captain Dan Matthews, the tough and irascible head of a police force serving a nameless western state. When asked for the reasons why Highway Patrol came to an unwelcome end in September 1959, Crawford famously joked, “[Because] we ran out of crimes.” In 1977, Crawford made an amusing uncredited cameo as Dan Matthews in a first season episode of the crime show CHiPS (titled “Hustle”) when he is stopped for a traffic violation by motorcycle cops Ponch (Erik Estrada) and Jonathan (Larry Wilcox) of the California Highway Patrol.
15. The writer of J. Edgar (2011) is Dustin Lance Black (b.1974). Black also wrote Pedro (2008), the life story of the openly-gay Cuban activist and TV personality Pedro Pablo Zamora, who was one of the first men with AIDS “to be portrayed in popular media,” and Milk (2008), a biographical film about politician and gay rights advocate Harvey Milk. Milk won Black the Writer’s Guild Award and Academy Award for his screenplay. He later wrote and directed Virginia (2010), which starred Jennifer Connelly as a mentally unstable woman, who conducts a twenty-year affair with a local married sheriff (played by Ed Harris). He also wrote 8 (2011), a Broadway play that dramatises the closing arguments of Perry vs. Schwarzenegger, a federal case that began in 2009 and led to the abolishment of Proposition 8, an amendment that eliminated the rights of same-sex couples to marry in the state of California. In the June/July 2009 issue of The Advocate, Black placed at number one on the “Forty Under 40” list of most influential gay people.
CHAPTER 10: IT LIVES AGAIN (1978)
1. Cat People (1942) is a horror film directed by Jacques Tourneur and is the first of Val Lewton’s series of B horror and suspense movies in which the terrors are suggested rather than seen. It tells the story of Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon), a fashion artist living in Manhattan, who fears that an ancient Serbian curse will transform her into a panther and she will kill those she loves. Tourneur’s deft use of shadows and sound to impart an unnerving sense of a looming unseen threat is hair-raising. The swimming pool scene that Cohen cites, where a woman is trapped by a beast prowling the surrounding shadows, is only bettered by an atmospheric sequence in which a woman is chased through Central Park at night by a hidden snarling creature.
2. The mob movie that Cohen is referring to here is most likely Richard Fleischer’s The Don is Dead (1973), which starred Anthony Quinn, Robert Forster and Frederic Forrest. It was released on November 14, 1973, more than a year and a half after The Godfather first hit theaters in March 1972. A hastily produced cash-in on Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, Fleischer’s film arrived a year before The Godfather: Part II, which starred Robert De Niro as the young Vito Corleone.
3. The Missouri Breaks (1976) is a revisionist Western directed by Arthur Penn and written by Thomas McGuane. The meandering plot concerns an eccentric bounty hunter named Clayton (Marlon Brando), who is hired by a wealthy Montana cattle baron to kill a gang of horse rustlers. The rabble is led by Tom Logan (Jack Nicholson), who is masquerading as an aspiring cattle-rancher on an adjacent property. Although dismissed by critics upon release, Penn achieves an authentic sense of time and place and the scenes between Brando and Nicholson hold a fascinating charge. The outstanding supporting cast includes Kathleen Lloyd, Harry Dean Stanton, John P. Ryan, as well as Lloyd’s It Lives Again co-star Frederic Forrest.
4. Lemmy Caution is a fictional FBI Agent created by British author and ex-policeman Peter Cheyney. The character first appeared in the book This Man is Dangerous (1936) and was followed by a further ten novels in the ensuing decade, culminating with I’ll Say She Does! (1945). Eddie Constantine (1917-1993) first appeared on screen as Lemmy Caution in La môme vert de gris (1953), but continued to play the role well into his seventies, his last turn in Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991) coming just two years before his death.
5. Jean Luc-Godard’s Alphaville (1965) is a dystopian science fiction film. By far the most celebrated work to feature the character of Lemmy Caution, it sees the world-weary, trenchcoat-wearing private eye searching the distant automated metropolis of Alpha 60 for scientist Henri Dickson (Akin Tamiroff). Adroitly combining elements of Film Noir, Greek mythology, pulp fiction, and comic books to create a thought-provoking hybrid, Alphaville remains a hypnotic and visceral experience that features the stunning cinematography of Raoul Coutard.
CHAPTER 11: FULL MOON HIGH (1981)
1. Teen Wolf (1985) is a comedy directed by Rod Daniel. Michael J. Fox plays a teenager who discovers he has inherited a family curse which transforms him into a werewolf. He then uses his newfound hirsuteness to secure a place on the school basketball team and improve his low social standing. A Xeroxed sequel followed in the form of Teen Wolf Too (1987) with Jason Bateman replacing Fox and boxing supplanting basketball.
2. The Mummy franchise is a series of American fantasy/adventure/period horror films that began with The Mummy (1999), an excessive if spirited special effects spectacle written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Owing more to Indiana Jones than Boris Karloff, the film was a surprise hit, grossing $43 million in its opening weekend and $416 million worldwide, leading Sommers and Universal to make a sequel, The Mummy Returns (2001). Chuck Russell then contributed a spin-off, The Scorpion King (2004), before Rob Cohen restored some of the original characters to the weakest offering in the series, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008).
3. The film appearances of Ed McMahon (1923-2009) include The Incident (1967), Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977), Butterfly (1982), Mixed Blessings (1998), The Vegas Connection (1999), Bewitched (2005), and The Weather Man (2005).
4. Paul Douglas (1907-1959) was a big and burly actor with an unexpected gift for playing comedy roles. His film appearances include It Happens Every Spring (1949), Panic in the Streets (1950), Angels on the Outfield (1951), We’re Not Married! (1952), When in Rome (1953), Green Fire (1954), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), This Could Be the Night (1957), and The Mating Game (1959). Douglas died of a heart attack a day after production began on the Twilight Zone episode “The Mighty Casey.” The role had been written especially for him by Rod Serling as a nod to Douglas’ celebrated turn as an irascible baseball team manager in Angels on the Outfield. He was later replaced by Jack Warden.
5. Elizabeth Hartman (1943-1987) e
arned an Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for her role as the blind teenager Selina D’Arcey in A Patch of Blue (1965). However, that same year, she did win the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer — Female and, in 1966, was nominated for the Golden Globe Best Actress Award in a Musical or Comedy for her performance in Francis Ford Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now (1966). Her other films include The Group (1966), The Fixer (1967), Walking Tall (1973), Love, American Style (1973), and The Secret of NIMH (1982).
6. Filmed in an antebellum plantation in Louisiana, The Beguiled (1971) is a psychological thriller/gothic Western directed by Don Siegel (1912-1991). Set during the closing days of the American Civil War, it is the story of John McBurney (Clint Eastwood), a wounded Unionist soldier, who arrives at a Southern all-ladies seminary school run by Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) and chaste instructor Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman). Taking refuge there, the women nurse McBurney back to health, but when several of the females show romantic inclinations towards him, suspicion, resentment and deceit rear their ugly heads, leading inexorably to his demise.
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