Exploitation Explosion

Last night, I was up late and I fell asleep while watching Vidal Raski’s The Sinful Dwarf. The Sinful Dwarf, a notorious, sleazy, apparently Danish-British co-production, is about a destitute British couple who take a cheap room in a boarding house run by an ex-cabaret singer and her depraved son Olaf, the titular sinful dwarf. The story involves kidnapping and heroin-assisted sex slavery, and various forms of rape – which I suppose is redundant – and the whole thing is really sort of objectively nasty and unappealing. And I fell asleep during it. If the watching of The Sinful Dwarf is going to be stopped before its natural conclusion, one would assume this would come about because the “stop” button on the remote had been frantically mashed down in disgust. But no, in my case, I just dozed. Here I thought I was going to watching something truly appalling, and instead the most horrible moments are obscured by camera trickery! Yawn.

I’m not going to pretend to be more disturbed about this than I really am, or, actually, that I’m disturbed by this at all. I’ve become convinced that what happens in movies isn’t real, to begin with, and also that depicting a thing is not the same thing as advocating that thing. There are limits, certainly, but despite its infamy The Sinful Dwarf does not reach, let alone exceed, those limits (despite what Severin Films, the company that released the 1973 film on DVD, would like you to believe, as expressed on a DVD extra called “The Severin Controversy”. In this, a couple of pothead movie fans of dubious sincerity are interviewed and explain why they think The Sinful Dwarf should not be released on DVD. This extra also repeats rumors about Torben Bille, who plays Olaf, as fact, and misidentifies actress Anne Sparrow). It’s rather less disturbing than comparatively mainstream films like the original The Last House on the Left, but it does have a crazy dwarf in it, which for whatever reason has a tendency to cause people to regard the sleaze quotient as significantly upped.

But regardless. My experience with The Sinful Dwarf (I finished watching it this morning, you’ll be relieved to hear) was only highlighted by the fact that I realized I watched a lot of exploitation films this weekend, to the near exclusion of any other kind of film. Again, I don’t think much of this, nor am I the kind of person who would try to explain the existence of a film like The Sinful Dwarf by saying “Well, Vietnam.” What does strike me about my recent viewing habits is the variety of both types of film and of my personal motives for watching them, as well as how closely those films met expectations, or were even interested in meeting them. Take A Boy and His Dog, for instance, L. Q. Jones’s adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s classic science fiction novella. The fact that A Boy and His Dog is often referred to as an “exploitation film” makes me think that it’s just possible that the definition of “exploitation film” is an "R-rated genre film that was made back when they used to make films called 'exploitation films'.” Because A Boy and His Dog is simply an excellent piece of science fiction that has a little nudity and a little violence. Jones doesn’t slather his film with either. See also William Lustig’s Maniac Cop – this one is made by the same guy who made Maniac, a true exploitation film, and yet it plays like a straight suspense/horror film. A film about a possibly supernatural, undead New York cop hacking up fellow cops and innocent citizens, it’s actually remarkably unbloody. Films like Maniac Cop supposedly exist to sate the public’s desire for viscera, but this one doesn’t really do that – it didn’t do it for me, okay? – and further doesn’t actually want to. It’s an exploitation film only based on genre and budget. There aren’t even any boobs in it!

At the same time that civil rights and Vietnam were forcing independent filmmakers to make violent movies, Hollywood studios developed their own brand of exploitation film known as the “disaster movie.” And currently I find this to be the most interesting, if far from the best, type. I was watching Robert Wise’s The Hindenburg, you see, and as I read the credits I took note of the list of famous names – somewhat shorter than those in other disaster movies, but long enough – and found myself thinking things like “Hm, René Auberjonois…I wonder how he dies in this.” Because that’s the exploitation thrill of the disaster movie: watching movie stars and famous character actors get crushed or burned alive or drowned. If anything, disaster movies are maybe a bit less respectable than…well, not than The Sinful Dwarf, but Maniac Cop, at least, because disaster movies, with their A list stars (George C. Scott and Anne Bancroft in this case) and big budgets (and, in Robert Wise, even sometimes Oscar-winning directors) they try to pretend that you’re watching for more high-minded reasons. It doesn’t even have to be very high-minded; wanting to watching stuff blow up is less uncomfortably low-brow than wanting to watch Robert Wagner burn to death.
And then when a disaster movie fails to provide what the genre surreptitiously promises, the viewer’s shameful desires are exposed. Because you know how René Auberjonois dies in The Hindenburg? He doesn’t! Nor does Burgess Meredith or Charles Durning or Anne Bancroft. Plus, those famous actors who are shown across are done so artfully – once the zeppelin ignites, Wise switches the film, inexplicably, to black and white (because 1937 was in black and white maybe?), and I guess because The Hindenburg is a highly fictionalized account of a true disaster, all the lowdown thrills are leeched away because now we have to feel bad. Yet for a serious-minded disaster film, The Hindenburg is curiously, or maybe not so curiously, inert – you can practically see George C. Scott cashing his check – and while Robert Wise’s The Hindenburg beats Mark Robson’s Earthquake in the Disaster Movie Directed by Someone Who Once Stabbed Val Lewton in the Back and Helped Drive Him Into an Early Grave Sweepstakes*, it’s also occasionally laughable (when it’s not being inert, I mean), such as at the end when still photos of all the characters are shown, and a narrator provides their names and then says either “Dead” or “Survived” – the list ends with a photo of a dog and the audience-relaxing announcement “Survived.”

So I was annoyed that Burgess Meredith didn’t get crushed by a burning girder, and I fell asleep during The Sinful Dwarf. But it may not just be the desensitizing effect of cinematic sex and violence at play – The Sinful Dwarf’s unsurprising incompetence didn’t enliven me any, either. Even my favorite bad movie thing, idiotic dialogue, left me largely unmoved (the film includes one of my favorite types of bad dialogue, which is a two person exchange where the response to a question doesn’t quite match the question, as in: “Do you know how to use a gun?” “You’re damn right I can!”). I suspect that “exploitation film” being a meaningless phrase, certainly now and to a degree even when the phrase became popular, is just as big an influence. Exploitation audiences simply didn’t kid themselves – this, I suppose, is the difference. And wanting what such films offer is no different, in the end, from wanting what a comedy offers. Also, when it gets late, you get sleepy.

*I get very angry about what happened to Val Lewton.

Turnips: A Preamble

.Most men are, according to the ladies at the beginning of Robert Wise’s Born to Kill, turnips. The women are Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell), Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard) who runs the boarding house in whose parlor this conversation takes place, and Helen Brent (Claire Trevor), and a turnip is any man who can be pushed around, who doesn’t take what he wants, and who – although this idea is never spoken, and would probably be sincerely if naively rejected by Laury and Mrs. Kraft – aren’t constrained by such useless emotions as guilt and regret. Whatever the polar opposite of a turnip is, both Laury and Helen have found their king in Sam Wild (Lawrence Tierney), a man so completely unconstrained by guilt and regret that very soon he will murder Laury and Danny (Tony Barrett), the man Sam believed was “cutting in on” Sam’s claim to Laury, on impulse. Later, when Sam tells Marty (Elisha Cook, Jr.) -- who is sort of like Jiminy Cricket if Jiminy Cricket was the last guy you’d want for that job – what he did, Marty tells him that he can’t go around killing people like that. Sam wants to know who says he can’t, and Marty concedes that nobody does.

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So Sam’s no turnip, but there are several on the periphery of Born to Kill, and of film noir in general. In one sense, they exist in films like Born to Kill (and Danny was one, and Helen’s fiancé Fred, played by Philip Terry, is another) because, you know, without evil we would never understand good, although in noir that formula is often reversed. Film noir is, more often than not, not about the quest for justice by good men (there are actually a lot of noirs of this sort, but some time back a lot of people decided they’d rather not define the genre like that), but rather about the struggle of bad people – the struggle to live (or, more precisely, to not die), or to flip the course of their morality. Born to Kill is about both kinds of struggle, because while Sam fights to gain money and power and not die along the way, Helen Brent – who finds the bodies of Danny and Laury, and comes to love Sam not despite of, but because of what she knows about him, going so far at one point as to threaten the life of an old rummy (this would be Mrs. Kraft) if she ever yaps to anyone – is astonished to discover that her own soul is corrupt, that she is “rotten inside”. Throughout the film, Helen will alternate between trying to stamp out that corruption, and desperately embracing it.
.In Born to Kill, you have this core evil – Sam Wild – that radiates out, until it becomes diminished to nothing on the fringes. Just outside that core are Helen and Marty, and on the fringes are good people, turnips, like Fred and Audrey Long’s Georgia (good, but not always smart or perceptive, as Georgia, who is Helen’s sister, actually marries Sam). In between are folks like Arnett (William Slezak), the private eye hired by Mrs. Kraft to find out who killed Laury. Arnett is on Sam’s trail, but the audience can’t put a lot of moral faith into him, because we eventually learn that he is in possession of a soul only slightly blackened, in comparison to your Sams or Helens anyway, but blackened all the same. And of the points of view the film makes us privy to, Arnett’s is as close to coming from a decent person as we get. Oh, there’s Mrs. Kraft, but she’s a drunk (she’s good, though, and Howard is terrific in the role – her breakdown before Helen’s ruthlessness is perfect) and we don’t really follow her the way we do Arnett. Arnett's mixture of optimism in the face of poverty (Mrs. Kraft's patronage comes at a very good time) and cynical greed could mirror certain incongruous branches of Hollywood filmmaking at the time, if you wanted it to, but it more precisely and specifically encompasses the tug-of-war within film noir. Born to Kill isn't exactly the cheeriest of all such films (what would that be, I wonder? The Big Steal?), but outside of Danny and Laury (and even Danny was kind of a prick), those behind whom the big door is slammed pretty much, as is so often the case, have it coming.

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Meanwhile, the turnips -- Fred, for example, who eventually breaks it off with Helen because he can see the blackness welling up within her, and he can even see it winning against her better self -- make it out okay. Not without some scarring (Georgia's going to have to learn to pick better, for one thing) but their essential goodness saves them. They're not quite so fated, as Sam and Helen and Marty are, by the lives they've chosen, at least not negatively, and it's the bad kind of fate that is such a big deal in noir. But I don't know if it's fate so much as it is just plain begging for it. With Helen, it's fate -- her taste for the mean and bloody side of life surprises even her, which implies it's been dormant in her for a long time -- but Sam Wild seems content to pull on the various threads that will eventually leave his life completely unraveled. He's not terribly introspective, and there's a funny scene where he and Georgia have just come back from their honeymoon, cut short because the big dunce got angry that Georgia, who is quite rich, doesn't think it's such a swell idea for him to take over running the newspaper she owns. Clearly, Sam thought this position would be his right by marriage, and seeing his brick-like face cloud over with confused anger would be sad if we didn't remember poor Laury and Danny. Even so, Sam keeps plugging away with one thoughtless or stupid or violent action or reaction until he finds himself on the wrong side of a revolver. The only way his end can be called fate is if you take into account how blind he is. Otherwise, it almost looks like he's deliberately digging his own grave.

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This line of thinking is helped along when you have a figure like Lawrence Tierney planted front and center; he's one of the legends of film noir. Like Robert Mitchum with every ounce of warmth and basic human decency removed, Tierney lumbered through his films like a blank-faced ape made out of concrete. Someone with a keen eye and a sharp sense of character gave Tierney his big break in Dillinger from 1945, directed by Max Nosseck, and his reputation would be pinned by his subsequent work in Born to Kill and The Devil Thumbs a Ride, but sometime in the 1950s he turned into a less murderous, and less ambitious, version of Sam Wild, screwing himself over with a series of drunken brawls (he once apparently got into a street fight with ex-con, crime writer, and future Tierney co-star Edward Bunker), effectively killing his chances for a serious film career until Quentin Tarantino briefly revived him in 1992's Reservoir Dogs (and let us not forget Tierney's subsequent voice work on The Simpsons as Don Brodka, the Try-N-Save's head of security).

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I first heard of Tierney through Barry Gifford's book The Devil Thumbs a Ride & Other Unforgettable Films, in which Gifford pumps up the 1947 Felix Feist movie starring Tierney ("He'll Kill Until He Dies!") as one of the blackest, looniest noirs ever made. I was able to see The Devil Thumbs a Ride about ten-plus years ago, but the copy was beat-down, the sound and image were shot, and I found it to be a very frustrating experience, with that frustration being my primary memory of it. I do remember something of Tierney, however, far less of the surrounding turnips, who are generally too busy trying to stay out of the way of guys like Tierney, or being uprooted and chopped up, to try to be interesting. Of course, though it would be boring to admit it, and regardless of the gender specifics of the ladies' conversation at the beginning of Born to Kill, we're the turnips, in reality scrambling out of the way of killers and thieves, and through the vicarious medium of film we're maybe following some kind of death fantasy (this turnip metaphor is threatening to break down) as we stare, through glass, in fascination (there it goes) at the prowling likes of Tierney, or the deceptively alluring and conflicted Claire Trevor.
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Back to Tierney, though: he made a lot of movies, but, in terms of availability, even the small handful of his early classics seems rather thin when we can't view a sharp, clean print of The Devil Thumbs a Ride, one of those notorious shithouse B-movies that seem to die off by the dozens every year. Well, but hey! As it happens there's going to be a fundraiser to help curb this very thing. This coming February, Marilyn of Ferdy on Films and The Siren will be hosting the For the Love of Film Noir blogathon (click on either of the preceding links), in support of the Film Noir Foundation. Give your money, or give your blogspace to it, whatever you can do. This post is but a taste of what I hope to bring to the table in praise of a film genre that is near and dear to my heart. And if you hate the shit I write, well, my guess is everybody-but-everybody is going to jump in this thing, and the riches will be positively embarrassing. Until then...

Hangmen

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This post is part of the Boris Karloff blogathon being hosted by Pierre Fournier at Frankensteinia. Spoilers for The Man They Could Not Hang and Before I Hang follow.

Boris Karloff spent a lot of time trying to defeat death. Often in his films, leaps in medical technology offered the possibility of erasing death as a biological necessity, or at least a reversal of the aging process to such a degree that a person's lifespan could be doubled. Karloff's involvement in these breakthroughs could range from the driving intelligence to the assistant to the driving intelligence to the guinea pig. Whatever his place, Karloff always, finally, realized that death cannot be beaten, and to even try is an immoral act.
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Karloff's career in anti-morbidity began, of course, in James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, where he played the stitched-together prototype of immortality to Colin Clive's basically decent, yet deluded, title scientific pioneer. One of Karloff's own first forays into the kind of role Clive portrayed in the earlier film was in Nick Grindé's 1939 The Man They Could Not Hang, in which Karloff plays Dr. Henryk Savaard. Cutting through the script's pseudo-science, Savaard's idea is basically that the heart of a deceased individual, with the kind of medical assistance that includes lots of electricity and beakers, and provided the initial cause of death did not damage the heart, can be restarted, and the deceased can actually be brought back to life. He's attempting to prove this as the film begins, with one of his medical students cheerfully acting as a guinea pig, but he is thwarted by a police raid which has been instigated by the guinea pig's fianceé (and Savaard's nurse), who chose the exact wrong time to turn her private misgivings into action. When the police stop Savaard, he has just killed his assistant, with the intent of bringing him back to life. But the police do not allow him to do this, so the dead stays dead, and Savaard is tried and convicted of murder, sentenced to hang, and hanged. Only, of course, to be brought back to life by one of his partners in science.
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Before he's hanged, and before he goes all Dr. Phibes on everybody, Dr. Savaard is given the opportunity to speak in court. Here, Karloff is allowed to rage with moral indignation and frustration at everyone who has allowed the boy to die and condemned him, Savaard, for trying to save humanity from mortality. He tells the judge, the prosecutor, the foolish woman who called the police and ensured the death of her fiancé, that when their time comes, in the moments before they each breathe their last, they will remember him, and what he could have done for them. It is with Savaard's conviction, and with his outraged and bitter words directed at all those who he believes, correctly, to be far stupider than he, that all the love for the human race that might have originally spurred him to pursue his theories, drains away from him forever. When he returns from the dead, he is physically as fit as he was the moment before his appointment with the gallows; however, mentally, even philosophically, he is a changed man. His entire existence at this point is given over to exacting vengeance on everyone he blames for his death.
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The thing is, though, now he has proof! His every breath is a slap to the face of the doctors, judges and policemen who laughed at what he claimed were his motives for killing the young man. When presented with this unavoidable proof, each of these men and women is properly thunderstruck, but Savaard does not use this to push his new technology forward. He uses it to mock his enemies, and throw them off-balance long enough to kill them. When his revenge plans inevitably fall short of his ambitions, and Savaard has to use his invention to resuscitate his own daughter before expiring from a gunshot wound himself, his last act with his second life is to destroy all his work so that it can never be reproduced. The last line in the film is delivered to Savaard a split second before he dies, by one of his intended victims: "Why did you destroy it?" No answer is forthcoming, but the only possibility is that Savaard has decided that, outside of his daughter, mankind doesn't deserve what he's offered them.
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Had Savaard not been sentenced to hang, but rather given life imprisonment, an imprisonment from which he escaped, would he spend any time seeking revenge, or would he instead retreat to his lab to continue his life's work? Some of Savaard's bloodthirstiness can of course be explained by the gross injustice he suffered, but isn't it also possible that he lost something in the days he spent dead to the world? If a return from the dead is possible, might not something still be lost? In Before I Hang (1940), also directed by Nick Grindé, this question, or some loose variation of it, is also posed. This time playing the far more gentle-of-spirit Dr. John Garth, Karloff is attempting to reverse the aging process. His work, like that of Savaard, is brought to a halt by a death, this time that of an elderly patient. Dr. Garth could not help this man, who was suffering great pain due to his advanced years, so Dr. Garth performed euthanasia. Again, like Savaard, Garth is convicted and sentenced to hang. While in prison, he is allowed to work with the prison doctor, who is convinced that Dr. Garth's new anti-aging, serum-based methods can succeed, and that Garth must be allowed to complete his work. The serum requires blood, and Garth chooses to test the serum on himself, shortly before he's set to hang, using the blood of a recently executed multiple murderer. As it happens, though, Garth's sentences is soon commuted to life imprisonment, which is followed up by a full pardon. As the years Garth has piled up begin to fall away -- he no longer needs eyeglasses, his hair darkens -- he is, like Savaard, walking proof that his crazy ideas aren't so crazy after all. Except that any time he tries to perform his procedure on a patient, he finds himself strangling them to death instead.

Why? Because, in a tip of the cap to the creature's abnormal brain, of the killer's blood now running through his veins. Garth does no choose to murder -- he's overcome by an unstoppable impulse. When he realizes what he's been doing, he begs to be apprehended, even killed himself, so that he won't harm anyone else. His wish is granted, but his work is carried on by his daughter and young apprentice, and the film ends on a note of optimism completely absent from the climax of The Man They Could Not Hang.

Even so, in both films, the best of intentions -- to help mankind live well beyond their natural allotment of years -- results in horror and death. And before Dr. Garth's serum kicks in, both returning Garth to his youth and instilling him with a bloodlust he'd never known before, he spends several weeks in a coma, a condition often referred to as a "living death". Savaard and Garth both return from their graves with a desire to kill that in one case replaces, and in another case betrays, both men's original desire to give life and health to their patients. They don't return from the dead the same men they were when they began that last great journey we will all face, and which we all dread. In perverting nature, the capital N kind, Savaard and Garth also pervert their own private natures, and that piece of themselves that they left behind in their different deaths was their core humanity.

And now look at Karloff in Val Lewton and Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher, from 1945. Five years after Karloff died as the kindly Dr. Garth, he was revived as the cynically and gleefully amoral John Gray, who will do anything to provide his employer, Dr. MacFarlane, with fresh corpses. MacFarlane is a cold man of science who cares only to solve the puzzles that medical science lays before him. He has nothing of the care for mankind shared by Dr. Savaard and Dr. Garth, and Karloff's Gray is amused as he commits the murders that provide the bodies that allow MacFarlane to continue his research. He's further amused by MacFarlane's belief in his own goodness, as well as Gray's essential evilness. Gray knows that MacFarlane is just as nasty and unpleasant a figure, and every bit as culpable in the murders, as Gray himself. Gray also knows where MacFarlane's own brand of medical drive and ambition will lead him. Gray knows how this will end. He's been here before.