The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen

by Richard Crouse

  Zugsmith lays it on thick, but also offers some ridiculous solutions. Drug addiction can apparently be dealt with quite easily, once the problem is identified. Ms Sterling snaps a joint in half, forever curing teen pothead Diane Jergens of her habit. (If it were that easy, jails would be a lot emptier. Just ask Robert Downey Jr.)

  The actors manage to be convincing, although the script doesn't do them any favors. Littered with proto-hip lingo, the dialogue was designed to sound foreign to the average viewer, but today it sounds ridiculous because it is so obsolete. It's hard to imagine the actors keeping a straight face delivering lines like, “You're dragging your axle in waltz time.” There is a certain nostalgic appeal in these words, but mostly they sound crazy, man, crazy.

  Russ Tamblyn, despite being way too old for the role, hands in a nice performance, and is quite believable as the freckle-faced juvenile delinquent, but it is Mamie Van Doren that steals the show. She's the poor man's Jayne Mansfield, a Marilyn Monroe also-ran, but she is spunky and lights up the screen in her sexy scenes, especially when she takes a large, longing bite out of Tony's apple in the seduction scene.

  High School Confidential was banned in several countries upon its initial release — apparently there were some nervous nellies who didn't think Zugsmith went far enough with his anti-drug preaching — but luckily it is available on dvd and video.

  I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG (1932)

  “Well, there's just two ways to get outta here: work out and die out.”

  — Bomber (Edward Ellis)

  The success of early 1930s prison films such as The Big House, The Criminal Code, and Ladies of the Big House exposed the rough state of affairs of America's prisons. These socially aware movies led to an equally popular, but more hard-hitting subgenre known as chain gang films. The first of these was rko's Hell's Highway in 1932, starring the square-jawed Richard Dix. That same year Warner Brothers jumped on the bandwagon with a high quality melodrama called I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.

  Based on the real life experiences of Robert E. Burns, the movie starred Paul Muni, hot off the success of the ultra-violent Scarface: The Shame of the Nation. He plays James Allen, a returning veteran who dreams of becoming an engineer, but can find employment only in a shoe factory. The day-to-day drudgery of the job bores him, and he soon finds himself unemployed, a drifter who is reduced to unsuccessfully trying to hawk his war medals for money. When he witnesses another man commit a crime, he is mistakenly arrested and sentenced to 10 years on a chain gang. Beaten savagely by a sadistic guard, he vows to escape.

  With the aid of a fellow inmate he makes a break, eventually landing a job with a successful construction company in Chicago making $14 a day as an assistant superintendent. His past comes back to haunt him when his needy girlfriend Marie (Glenda Farrell) threatens to expose his shady past unless he marries her. Rather than risk being found out, he enters into a loveless marriage with Marie, who fritters away his hard earned money and cheats on him. His tenuous grip on his carefully constructed new life begins to disintegrate when he meets and falls in love with Helen (Helen Vinson), a beautiful society woman.

  The final third of the movie is a depressing medley of blackmail, arrest warrants, and broken promises. An unforgettable last scene between James and Helen is shot in shadows, reportedly because the studio's klieg lights failed just as Muni uttered the film's final and effective line. Director Mervyn LeRoy had the good sense to incorporate the technical difficulty into the film, as it provides an abrupt but unexpected closing image for the story of James Allen.

  Paul Muni's acting style owes much to the stage, and while he occasionally dips into a broad theatrical style, his portrayal of a man who has been betrayed by the justice system brims with bewilderment and loathing. LeRoy keeps things moving at a good clip, condensing 10 years of Allen's life into a quick and breezy 92 minutes. He also kept a tight rein on the preachy quality of the material, coating the movie's prison reform politics with a compelling human drama.

  The story rings true, in part due to the contribution of Burns, who consulted on the movie while still on the run from Georgia state officials. He smuggled himself into Los Angeles, working on the film before nervously running away after a few weeks. The film didn't win any fans in Georgia. Upset with the representation of their penal system, the state banned the film from theaters, and two wardens from the state prison unsuccessfully tried to sue Warner Brothers for defamation. The rest of the country, however, embraced the film, making it one of the biggest box office successes of the year.

  INCUBUS (1965)

  “Incubus, ah jes, as we'd say in Esperanto, the language employed in this thot-lost supernatural thriller. How lucky that Vilhelmo Shatner played in it. I attended the 100th anniversary of the creation of the universal language and for 10 tagoj (days) was amongst 7000 personoj (people) from 60 different landoj (countries) and if only they'd had a print of this picture, everyone could have understood it!”

  — Forrest J. Ackerman, founder and former editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland

  On the surface Incubus doesn't seem to offer up much to the modern moviegoer. It's 35 years old, in black and white, stars a pre-Star Trek William Shatner, and to boot, it's in Esperanto. Film buffs, however, will tingle at the chance to see this film, once believed to be lost forever.

  Incubus was written and directed by Washington, D.C.-born Leslie Stevens, the creator of the science-fiction program The Outer Limits. His interest in fantasy extended back to his early childhood. At age 15 Stevens wrote a play about robots titled The Mechanical Rat, which he entered in a contest sponsored by Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. He won, and his prize was the opportunity to meet the Mercury Players. He parlayed that lucky break into a six-month stint on the road with Welles, soaking up knowledge and reinforcing his love of show business. After a stint in the army he returned to the theater, penning several more plays including Champagne Complex, which ran on Broadway.

  By 1955 he had made inroads in the more lucrative business of writing scripts for television and film. By 1959 he was writing and directing, and looking to expand his repertoire. He created Daystar, Hollywood's first “free-independent” production company (that is, no soundstages or lot), which he named after a line from Shakespeare. He ran his company by keeping in mind the lessons he learned from Orson Welles. “Basically, I'm a writer,” he said at the time. “I became a director to protect the writer, and I became a producer to protect both of them, and a company owner to protect them all. The artist is in serious danger in this business.”

  Apart from The Outer Limits, Daystar's output remains obscure. Their first feature film, Private Property (1961), was a psycho-pathological thriller starring Warren Oates that has been unavailable since its initial release. Stoney Burke (1962-63), a rodeo series with Jack Lord in the lead role, has disappeared without a trace. Their next project, a pilot for a show called The Unknown, was scrapped and later re-edited as an episode of The Outer Limits. The Haunted, another pilot that featured Martin Landau as a psychic investigator, failed to get picked up. Nineteen sixty-two's feature-length Marriage-Go-Round met with less than enthusiastic reviews, and can occasionally be seen on late night television.

  None of Daystar's productions has created so much speculation as 1965's Incubus. Shot after the cancellation of The Outer Limits, Stevens admitted that he was “broke and out of it” as production began. Soon after he began writing the script about demonic women who “lure tainted souls into final degradation,” he also penned a second version called Religious Legends of Old Monterey. The second script was a treatment for a fake documentary, and was used as a diversion to keep any of the town's religious leaders from blowing the whistle that Big Sur Beach and the Mission of San Antonio were being used as locations for a film with a diabolical theme.

  Kia (Allyson Ames), a young, beautiful succubus, has grown tired of tempting weak, degenerate souls to the “Gods of Darkness.” She wants a challenge. “I'm weary of luring evil, ugl
y souls into the pit,” she complains to her sister. “They'll find their own way down to the sewers of hell.”

  She chooses Marc (William Shatner), a virtuous young man who lives with his sister Ardnis (Ann Atmar). Marc is an injured soldier who recently saved his comrades from a horrible fate. Kia tells her sister that she will “cut him down, corrupt him, crush him, put my foot on his holy neck, and make him rave and howl and bleed and weep.” Marc, of course, has no idea that Kia is evil. He believes his new friend is human, and takes her to a church while she is asleep.

  Kia wakes up understandably upset, and runs screaming from the church. She seeks revenge by summoning an incubus (Milos Milos), a young, buff male demon. He avenges Kia's “holy rape” by ravishing Marc's sister, who dies as a result of the attack. The climax of the film is the inevitable showdown between good (Marc) and evil (everyone else).

  Stevens wrote the script in English, only to have it later translated into Esperanto. “Esperanto was [Leslie's] new thing,” explained associate producer Elaine Michea, “and I desperately tried to talk him into shooting it two ways so he'd at least have something to market. But he's pretty stubborn when he makes up his mind.”

  Esperanto (translation: One Who Hopes) was first presented in 1887 by Polish oculist Ludwig L. Zamenhof as a universal second language, based on roots of several European languages. Despite opposition from Hitler, Stalin, and Joseph McCarthy, over 30,000 books have been published in Esperanto. All of the signs in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator were printed in the artificial language, a song written in it appeared in The Road to Singapore, and more recently the liner notes to Elvis Costello's album Blood and Chocolate were in Esperanto.

  While the language has never enjoyed wide use, Stevens was taken with the global village conceit, and insisted that the cast of Incubus take a weeklong crash course in Esperanto before shooting commenced. Even with the lessons, the actor's pronunciation is pretty awful (don't worry, it's subtitled), but the language adds an otherworldly feel to the film that lends weight to the strange story.

  The film was shot in just 10 days, but the cast and crew made the best of the hurried schedule. Cinematographer Conrad L. Hall (winner of Academy Awards for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and American Beauty) remembered the Big Sur setting as “a windswept forest of eucalyptus trees with gnarled limbs that looked like monsters looking down at you.” He took advantage of the moody landscape, often shooting through, or moving past foliage, adding a depth of feel within the frame.

  Another imaginative shot takes place in the Mission. The camera tracks a running man and does a rollover into an upside-down pov, all without a cut. Given the no-budget nature of the film, no expensive equipment was available, so Hall had to improvise to get his vision on the screen. For the upside-down shot he used a handheld camera, placing the cameraman on a blanket and dragging him across the floor. Hollywood is rarely that inventive. Hall's work intrigues, making Incubus visually exciting, given that there are no special effects, just tricks with light and smoke.

  Upon release the film was greeted with favorable reviews at several film festivals. In 1966 the San Francisco Film Festival program described the scene where the incubus emerges from the earth as “one of the most splendid pieces of horror since the late James Whale conceived the idea of Frankenstein's electronic monster.” More raves came from France. “The best fantasy film since Nosferatu,” said Paris Match. But despite good notices, nobody seemed to know what to do with the film. In the days before video, low-budget movies (other than drive-in fare or pornos) didn't have much of a chance against the major studios. Especially a strange horror film in an even stranger language.

  The film was placed into storage and forgotten. Incubus became known as a cursed film, and not just because of its poor financial showing. “Who knows if there's a curse or not,” producer Tony Taylor told Salon.com, “but a lot of stuff happened to a lot of people.”

  Ann Atmar, the former pin-up girl who played Shatner's sister, was the first to fall victim to the film's streak of bad luck. Just weeks after the shooting wrapped, she committed suicide.

  Next was the Hollywood Babylon-esque story of the Yugoslavian actor Milos Milos. Less than a year after playing the incubus he murdered his girlfriend, Barbara Ann Thompson Rooney (Mickey Rooney's estranged fifth wife), before taking his own life.

  Next came the kidnapping and murder of elder sister succubus Eloise Hardt's daughter. Taken from her driveway, her body was discovered weeks later decomposing in the Hollywood hills.

  While those were the sensational stories that set tongues wagging about the Incubus curse, there were more strange occurrences that suggested a hex, or just bad luck.

  At the film's premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival the print arrived sans sound. A last minute version had to be found, keeping the audience waiting for over an hour. Guests included Roman Polanski and his date Sharon Tate, who would later be the most famous victim of the most talked about killings of the 1960s — the Manson family murders. Later, due to the failure of the film in theaters, Stevens lost his company, Daystar. Perhaps the most bizarre manifestation of the evil eye was the story of music editor Dominic Frontiere, who was arrested and did prison time for scalping thousands of Super Bowl tickets.

  But for film fans there is a happy ending to this story. In 1993 producer Tony Taylor decided to take Incubus out of storage for a possible release on video. He was told that the print had disappeared during its 20-odd years in limbo. He sued and was awarded a large settlement, but really just wanted his film back. In 1996 a print surfaced at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. It turned out that the film had been screening there regularly for the past 30 years.

  Taylor had a copy of the print made, and now for the first time since its initial release, Incubus is available on video and dvd. While the print isn't perfect (French subtitles are simply covered by black bands containing an English translation), it is back where it belongs — in front of an audience.

  ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1933)

  “What is the law?”

  — From the Sayer of the Law scene, Island of Lost Souls

  One of the most compelling horror films ever made, 1933's Island of Lost Souls features memorable performances, a perfect villain, and great makeup effects, and was the inspiration for a classic new wave song in the 1970s.

  Paramount Studios brought this project together in 1932, under the direction of a former Mack Sennett comedian named Erle C. Kenton. Born in Montana in 1896, Kenton first made his mark in films appearing in pre-Hayes Code fare such as A Bath House Blunder, The Surf Girl, and His Speedy Finish. Throughout his career he was a jack-of-all-trades, performing, writing, and directing in everything from two-reel comedies to feature films, most notably Abbott and Costello's Pardon My Sarong and Who Done It?. Island of Lost Souls was his first and best attempt at horror, although he later revisited the genre with House of Dracula and House of Frankenstein.

  With a few small additions, the screenplay is a faithful adaptation of the H.G. Wells' novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, a book deemed so horrifying that it was banned in some countries, including parts of the United States. Charles Laughton plays Dr. Moreau, described in the book as “a benign-looking doctor who lives and works on his own private South Seas Island.” The doctor's creepy world and strange experiments are discovered by Edward Parker (Richard Arlen), a traveler lost at sea who is picked up by a ship heading for the uncharted island.

  At first Moreau is an accommodating host and offers Parker a shuttle back to the mainland the next day. The doctor even offers up some “feminine” companionship for his visitor in the form of Lota (Kathleen Burke), a panther-woman. You see, Moreau is playing God on his island, creating a race of half-human, half-animal creatures. Parker's arrival allows the evil doctor to fulfill his plan — to couple Parker and Lota and produce the world's first human/animal child. The matchmaking falls flat when Parker notices that Lota has claws rather than fingers. Spurned, Lota cries on Moreau
's shoulder. Far from being sympathetic, Moreau takes delight in her pain, impressed that his experiment has such emotional depth.

  Later, Parker investigates the island and discovers the building where Moreau performs his cruel work, The House of Pain, and a band of rebels (look for Buster Crabbe, Alan Ladd, and Randolph Scott under heavy makeup) led by Bela Lugosi, in a brief but memorable performance. The film's final moments are chilling.

  There are several elements that put this film on par with the horror films Universal was producing around the same time. The Universal movies — Frankenstein, The Mummy, and later, The Wolf Man — have become classics of atmospheric horror and favorite Halloween rentals at the video store. Island of Lost Souls deserves to be placed alongside these films for several reasons.

  First, the performances. Charles Laughton, fresh from shooting The Old Dark Horse, delivers the perfect villain in Dr. Moreau. Elegant and evil, Laughton shows us a man with a God complex who is ultimately destroyed by his self-loathing. Laughton says he based his portrayal on an oculist, and “has not been able to visit the zoo since.”

  The role of Lota the Panther Lady is the emotional core of the film; like the Frankenstein creature, she is a character that inspires pity rather than fear. Lota's character does not appear in Wells' book. Screenwriters Waldemar Young (The Unholy Three) and Philip Wylie (When Worlds Collide) added her to pump up the sex appeal of the film and add a dash of romance. Kathleen Burke won the role after Paramount staged a publicity-grabbing, nationwide “Panther Woman of America” contest. Burke acquits herself well, and parlayed this performance into a career that included 21 movies over the next five years.