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It was on my second viewing of RKO ‘s 1947 film noir They Won’t Believe Me that one scene stood out.  A brief one, of the film’s protagonist, Larry Ballantine (Robert Young), waiting at a roadside stop for the bus bringing his girlfriend.  It’s almost a throwaway; a setup for a squalid meeting between two conspiring lovers—one of whom (that being Larry) is married—who plan on absconding to Reno with stolen dough.  But on this viewing I saw in this scene something…different, something meaningful.  I think it’s how Young performs it:  Smoking and strolling, with a loose-louche stride, forehead wrinkling in sunlight (it’s filmed outdoors) as he peers down the road.  Young’s body language here says a lot about Larry, about his careless, dance-on-the-edge-of-a-dime outlook.  Larry smokes and strolls as if his whole life is still ahead of him.  Yet it’s really slipping away, in what is a tawdry, last-ditch attempt to gain what he wants—an Easeful Life.  That being one of no effort, no consequences, and no bills to pay.

But Fate, as it turns out, has something else in store for our anti-hero.  And that’s why, even in the full country sunshine, this scene is echt noir.

The viewpoint today on They Won’t Believe Me is a slightly different take:  It’s a noir, as Eddie Muller states in the film’s TCM intro, uniquely imbued with a feminine sensibility.  “It definitely feels like the work of a woman,” says Muller, “there’s no tough-guy posturing, and no gunplay.”  He links this attitude to the film’s producer, Joan Harrison, whose movie career, starting as Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant, expanded into writing and producing, and who, per her biographer, Christina Lane, should be considered a “producer-auteur.”  Harrison’s films, Lane writes, present “a singular distinctive vision: gritty, risky, wry portraits of love, marriage, and family,” instilled with “perverse textures and psychological violence” that “li[e] hidden beneath romantic, marital, and familial relations.”  You see such textures in Harrison’s best-known film, 1944’s Phantom Lady, whose female protagonist must negotiate a dangerous noir underworld to prove the innocence of the accused man she loves (he remaining passive and offscreen for much of the film).  Echt noir indeed.

Certainly TWBM’s three female protagonists are, as Lane says, “unusually three-dimensional and sympathetic”:  There’s Greta (Rita Johnson), Larry’s rich, manipulative, and neurotically needy socialite wife; Janice (Jane Greer), Larry’s sweet, sympathetic, and badly used girlfriend-on-the-side; and Verna (Susan Hayward), Larry’s hot-patootie other girlfriend, who won’t be used and ref-used like a spent tissue.  All three women revolve, like skirted satellites, around Larry—a prime example, says Muller, of the Homme Fatal (the first in film noir, says Lane).  Muller defines this Fatal Man as having “an insatiable sex drive,” and who, in TWBM, “wrecks the lives of [the female characters] who can’t resist his come-on.”  Further, says Muller, Larry is a Cad—”smooth, smarmy, and sartorially splendid, if a bit lacking in the ethics department.”  Indeed, the film, told almost entirely from Larry’s point of view, could be the Memoirs of a Fatal Cad—albeit one not so much in pursuit of women as he is of the Life of Ease.  Where there’s always someone else to sign the checks.

And that, as I see it, is really where the female point of view comes in—not as Larry the woman-hunting Lady Killer but as Larry the perpetual bane of female existence—the Man-Child.  Larry’s infected not so much by Priapism as Peter-Pannism—he just won’t grow up.  He’s a charming, ruthless, yet curiously sexless predator, who wants all the Nice Things but won’t work to get them; instead, he depends on women to do so.  Larry’s actually passive—he doesn’t chase women; they come after him.  All of which we learn when we meet him on the witness stand, as the only defense witness at his trial for the (possible) murder of one woman and his (possible) involvement in the death of another.  Larry’s testimony (basically a 90-minute flashback) is told at both a diegetic level, to a within-the-film jury, and a meta one, to “the audience,” says Lane, who “is solely at the mercy of [Larry’s] narration…whether to believe him is the film’s governing question.”  It’s left up to the spectator to determine Larry’s guilt or innocence—or even, Lane notes, if a crime has been committed.

Larry’s narrative, as James Agee describes it in his film review, is “a pretty nasty story”—of a man who “loves money and women almost equally well, and finds that they get in each other’s way.”  For Larry, however, the money always wins.  His nasty tale begins with his account of how he and nice-girl Janice plan to run off to Montreal.  It seems Janice loves Larry and Larry loves fishing—his ideal life is to lounge on a fishing boat (the yachtier, the better) with nothing to do.  Their plans go awry when Larry arrives home to discover Greta not only knows about his tryst but has packed his suitcase for his trip (sweetly reminding him to add his gold cufflinks).  Then she bribes Larry to stay with her by revealing she’s purchased for him a swanky California pad and a partnership in a Los Angeles brokerage firm.  Larry gives in, of course—he always does.  “The dough goes with Greta,” he sighs.  Above all else, Larry prizes the dough.  And the ease it brings.

Also prizing the dough is Verna, whom Larry meets (“glid[ing] out of a filing cabinet,” as Agee deliciously limns it) at his new job.  Verna puts the moves on our wandering boy, who, of course, can’t resist, and it’s only a matter of time before Greta, having sniffed out the Verna dalliance (Greta must own an early version of Palantir), moves her husband to a house way up in the hills where he’s to stay put and behave.  To which, of course, Larry agrees—where the dough goes, he goes, thus leaving Verna as much in the lurch as he left Janice.  But, after a few weeks amid acres of wholesomely dull scenery, a now very bored Larry figures he’ll somehow have to separate the money from Greta.  So he and the equally ruthless Verna concoct, as Agee puts it, a “complicated effor[t] to run away but stay rich.”  And, this being noir, the effort gets very complicated indeed.

I like that They Won’t Believe Me is nasty.  The best noir, like dirt under manicured fingernails, always undercuts its deceptively pristine gloss.  And TWBM’s stylish settings, of posh homes, elegant bars, gorgeous countrysides, and throngs of the well-dressed and lavishly coutured, can’t disguise, as Agee calls it, its “trashiness.”  I also like that no character is truly likable:  Janice is naïve yet duplicitous; Greta is calculating but clingy; and Verna—ah, Verna.  Nakedly ambitious and forthright, in that hard-nosed, when-it-serves-me manner that’s bracing to watch.  “If I go anywhere,” Verna says, “there’ll be orchids involved.”  Other characters, such as the hostile senior stockbroker, a not-too-bright shopkeeper, and an oily detective, evoke only distaste; and the cinematic jury looks like a collection of those Things small children imagine crouching under beds.  (As Agee notes, “it’s frightening to consider such a group holds [a life] in its hands.”)  The one truly good character is Greta’s beautiful Palamino horse, who remains faithful to her unto hers (and his) death.  You know the kingdom is rotten when your sympathy is all for an equine.

Frightening, indeed.

But the film pivots on Larry—lazy, philandering, self-serving Larry, of whose exploits and misdeeds we have only his spoken word.  Though the film’s mindset may be women-slanted, its central issue is, paradoxically, a reversal of Freud’s famous question:  What Does A Woman Want (which may be not to have to cater to infantile men) to—What Does Larry Want?  And Larry seems to want—All That a Woman (And Her Money) Can Buy.  Such as Greta’s offer of a fancy flat and a bought-and-paid job.  Significantly, Larry’s not even that interested in his new position; his affair with Verna begins when she bails him out of a job lapse caught by his boss.  For Larry, Sex is secondary, and little sex happens onscreen—in part due, Lane notes, to the censorious objections of Production Code pooh-bah Joseph Breen (worried, as usual, about lustful kissing witnessed by the masses); and in part to how Larry is scripted:  At the very moment he and Verna (who’s to embezzle Greta’s money at Larry’s request—the women do everything) are to hightail it to Reno, Larry…pauses.  He suggests they…take time for a swim.  The plot digression is puzzling (and annoying) and lacks a motive; why stop now?  As Lane notes (and Verna suspects), it’s as if Larry still doesn’t want to leave his marriage.  It’s…easier not to.

Despite his childlike passivity, I think Larry (nastily) fascinates us because he resonates instinctively as an archetype in male-female relations, of the man who effortlessly draws in and destroys his female prey.  Larry and his three gals recall another, earlier example of the predatory male, Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, a character who, like Larry, exploits three ladies to gain power, money, and an ascent up the social scale (it was adapted into a delectably cool, elegant, and ruthless film starring an equally cool, elegant, and witty George Sanders, the same year as TWBM—a great year for fatal men!).  Larry’s three women might also form another archetype, a variant on the Triple Goddess Persona—a faceted trio that, within Larry’s psychologically snarled narrative, maps out a kind of mental Rake’s Progress, from recreation to ruin:  There’s Virginal I-won’t-break-up-a-marriage Janice; Motherly I’ve-packed-your-trunk (as if Larry were headed for summer camp!) Greta; and, in a twist, Hot-Patootie Verna…ah, Verna.  A self-described “gold digger,” who looks as if she could dig the gold right out of your teeth.  Then plant orchids in them.

I emphasize Verna because the film’s at its best whenever she’s onscreen.  Once Verna enters the nasty picture (“neatly wrapped in nylon and silk,” Larry observes), the plot picks up in energy, sass, and sex.  Much of that comes from Haywards’s sensationally thrusting and brash performance, her tight-clad ass and sly, seductive smile swinging at the camera like an all-out come-on (no wonder Breen had palpitations).  Per IMDB, the film crew waited 12 days for Hayward to complete work on another film (Smash-Up).  You sense why they tarried:  Hayward’s presence snaps the movie to life.  Even the dialogue changes, becoming sharp, brittle, and quick—listen to Hayward’s throaty purr on the line “I hate busses” (hinting that Larry can give her a ride home anytime); or the hard, bright gloss she spins on “I prefer martinis—especially around 5:30.”  It’s like James M. Cain (to whose writing Muller compares the script) spiced with Anita Loos; it gives the film a feminine fizz that flashes before us like a dragonfly in the sun.  What a shame Verna/Hayward is written out some 15 minutes before the end!  When she exits, the fizz exits also.

Those final 15 minutes are the film’s weakest, coming right after its next weakest part, the way-drawn out and stickily sentimentalized Larry-Verna getaway.  I’ve always disliked a noir that goes gooey on me, and here TWBM seems to want a last-minute character redemption that’s neither persuasive nor necessary.  Too much plot is then crammed into that last quarter hour, with Larry caught up in two back-to-back deaths, a police investigation, a trip to South America, and a spy trap he could easily (easily!) have avoided.  Nothing is developed or seems plausible, and Irving Pichel’s slack direction doesn’t build the tension or suspense needed for such plot swerves.  I prefer a noir that’ll go straight down the line to its doom.  (Not only a good line but a good direction for how a noir should be made.)

Aside from these flaws, probably the film’s most debated feature is Robert Young’s casting as Larry.  Per Lane, RKO blamed the film’s box-office failure on Young’s casting, audiences being too accustomed to see him as ‘nice’ (an assessment Young agreed with in a 1968 interview); though Lane says Harrison wanted Young specifically to play against his ‘nice-guy’ type.  Jeff Stafford at the TCM blog thinks Young’s casting was “inspired,” and that his performance makes Larry “a sympathetic, almost tragic protagonist.”  I don’t disagree with either assessment:  Young is provocatively cast against his perceived ‘type,’ and his casting does add a certain poignancy to Larry.  It even leavens Larry’s whiny gripes of how he’s been “covered [by Greta] with signs marked no trespassing”—yet signs pasted on by his choosing.  And which no doubt seem easier not to peel off.

My own take is not that Young is too nice, but that he lacks what a hot-patootie Fatal Man requires—drop-dead sex appeal.  For the life of me, I couldn’t see why these three beautiful women hurl themselves onto Larry like blood-starved fleas onto warm flesh; onscreen, Young generates no erotic heat or allure.  He does project decency, likability, and calm (which served him well in his later TV series).  But they’re not ‘fatal’ qualities; they haven’t that Come-and-Grab-Your-Trophy allure for which a woman might commit a crime, a ruse, or a self-annihilation (Young projected that same blandness a couple of years later as hot-patootie-stud Bosinney in That Forsyte Woman, and it didn’t work in that film, either).  As I watched I kept imagining What-If casts:  What if sloe-eyed, sex-on-a-stick Robert Mitchum had played Larry?  Or dreamy Gregory Peck?  Or rugged Robert Ryan, with his boxer physique (shoulders the breadth of the Parthenon) and those seething undertones?  Or maybe smooooth, seductive James Mason, with that dark-chocolate-on-velvet voice and those sleek-satyr looks hinting at the erotically perverse?  (Or, damn, even scintillating George Sanders?)  Whereas Young seems already middle-aged and placid, ready to settle into suburban Dad-dom.  And accept his marital cage.

Maybe that was the point of casting the more sedate Young—of a nice, docile Larry settling into a convenient marriage to satisfy his material and financial needs while tolerating its constraints.  In a bid for jury (and audience) sympathy, Larry describes his marriage as a “prison,” but it’s one whose ease, comfort, and bottomless purse (managed by maternal purse keeper Greta) he’s agreed to.  Lane notes how in Harrison’s films, “marriage is best understood as a conspiracy between two people—a set of agreed-upon terms that are not always as pure and well intentioned as the church or law would have us to believe.”  And when Greta veers too far from those terms—when she insists on stashing the barhopping and nightclub-loving Larry in an isolated country cottage that lacks even a telephone (you’ve gotta wonder at Greta’s blindness to her husband’s character)—that’s when Larry decides to cut the purse strings and run.  But take the purse with him.

Per Lane, TWBM’s earlier script drafts might have tilted the Larry-Greta marriage towards a slightly more daring set of terms, with dialogue suggesting Greta may have subtly “condone[d]” Larry’s affairs.  Breen, of course, had the lines cut, balking at what Lane calls Harrison’s “cinematic challenge to traditional notions of romance and marriage.”  His objections (among many) to such a marital depiction—arising from his patriarchal Catholic viewpoint, as well as from what Lane describes as the era’s increasing conservatism—would also, in hindsight, have hacked away at not only a more nuanced marriage portrait, but, I sense, the female sensibility Harrison pioneered in her film work.  How might TWBM’s meaning (and its characters) have changed, were such lines (and tonal shadings) allowed?  That’s another big What-if about the film.  And, like Larry at that bus-stop crossroads, we can only peer back and wonder what might have been.  What a woman wants, indeed.

Bonus Clip:  Larry and Verna walk into a bar one day and plot to embezzle Greta out of lots of dough (though Verna’s to do all the work) in this archetypal scene from They Won’t Believe Me; “I can get orchids…a lot of orchids” (courtesy of HollywoodClassics33 Returns):

They Won’t Believe Me is available for free viewing on Tubi.tv when available.  It can also be viewed on Mubi when it’s playing.  (Make sure, wherever you watch the film, that it’s the full 95-minute print and not the cut 80-minute version.)

There’s always been bad Emperors.  Wait a minute, that’s redundant:  Emperors are always bad.  Period, full stop, end.  That’s because Empering is an occupation uniquely suited to narcissists, sociopaths, scoundrels, and fools (or combinations thereof).  Such Empiric excrescences occur, over-n-over, throughout history like a nasty cold; one which, every six months or so, will sneak into your immune system, then lodge deep into your sinuses like Lindsey Graham on Fox News.  No matter how much Vitamin C, DayQuil, Mucinex, or Tylenol (although I gather Tylenol is longer…acceptable) we take, we just can’t get rid of the dang thing for all and good.

These cynical thoughts were inspired by a recent (re-)viewing during the Easter holiday of the 1951 MGM Biblical flick Quo Vadis.  During which I had this uncanny sensation that what I was watching was not a 75-year-old movie epic but the nightly news.  I’m betting the filmmakers had no notion their celluloid opus would, three-quarters of a century on, prophetically display what life is like, right effin’ now, in the U.S. of A., in the year 2026.  But, boy, does it ever.  What can I say:  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Now, Quo Vadis is a film I enjoy immensely.  It’s a splendid example of the Hollywood Biblical Epic—which I define as a movie, made between the 1920s and the early 1960s, usually adapted from a Biblical text or inspired by such, that’s expensively, and expansively, produced; meticulously researched and designed for historical accuracy; and totally anachronistic in its presentation of Ancient World speech, behavior, and believability.  It’s a genre gloriously, even awe-inspiringly cheesy, excelling as both spectacle and kitsch.  (Check out my posts here and here and here and here and here.)  And it’s uniquely a product of Hollywood, USA—exquisitely attuned to a puritanically minded public that liked its Sex-n-Violence varnished with a sparkly religious gloss.  Just to give us that righteous feeling.  As the actor Peter Ustinov wrote in his autobiography, “no nation can make Roman pictures as well as the Americans … The inevitable vulgarities of the script[s] contributed as much to [their] authenticity as [their] rare felicities.”

As a “Roman picture,” Quo Vadis is one of the best.  Produced by MGM for a then-stupendous $7 million dollars, and filmed at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios and on Roman locations, it features boffo box-office stars; thousands of extras (up to 60,000 for one scene, per director Mervyn LeRoy); gazillions of animals, costumes, and chariots; humongous sets; special effects (especially the burning of Rome); lavish Technicolor; and even a section of the Appian Way, for which production crews built their own Roman ruins exclusive to the film (which strikes me as So ‘Hollywood’…).   Only one word can describe all this stupendousness:  Whopper.

And right in the middle of this overheated exhibition, camping it up to beat the band, is Peter Ustinov himself, having the time of his life as the tyrannical Emperor Nero.  Ustinov has the best role in the film:  Much of the movie centers on Nero’s life, leadership, and lunatic behavior, during which scenes Ustinov gets to enact all manner and variety of corruption, vice, persecution, deceit, venality, debauchery and general nastiness in the grand style.  And he makes it all look like fun.

Yet, as I rewatched the film (for maybe my 22nd viewing—I really do like it), I realized…we in 21st-century America are living pretty much under our own degenerate Emperor-in-Chief, who’s similarly indulging himself in Grand-Style Nastiness at our own Rome-like capital on the Potomac.  And it’s not fun at all.

Man, watching this movie now really is like…Déjà vu all over again.  I enumerate why below:

“Fool’s Gold”

The first parallel to our present time that struck me, amid the film’s sundry scenes of triumph, torture, and titillation, was a small but potent one:  All that Gold.

Gold is omnipresent in Nero’s domiciles—embedded in walls, furnishings, fabric, décor, and every trimming imaginable.  And, as filmed in glorious three-strip Technicolor, the metal just glows at you, like fluorescent paint on a lava lamp.  You can’t miss the stuff; it’s tacky and overdone and hits you like a sock in the eye.

Sure, it’s an exorbitant display of vulgar luxury and crude taste, but all this gold is also—a symbol, a signal, a sign, of Nero’s outer grandiosity and inner emptiness.  It’s a con man’s idea of beauty; slather it on your surroundings like ketchup on a certain kind of steak, and no one, presumably, will notice how crass it all is.  You sense that here’s a benighted individual who lives in such a bubble of wealth, privilege, prestige, and power, it blinds him not only to an inner life but to outer reality as well.  Just because it glitters doesn’t mean it’s any good…

“Gold Dust Woman”

Next, we have Mrs. Nero, meaning the empress Poppaea, a handsome lady of uncertain origins (the historic Poppaea was born in Pompeii, a city famous—even notorious—for its erotica) and secondary status (she’s not Nero’s first bride).  Alternately described in the film as a “priestess of Amun” and a “Harlot,” Poppaea hints to her husband (and others) of her talents for unmentioned—and apparently unmentionable—pleasures…

In the film Poppaea is acted, slyly, and wittily, by Patricia Laffan (she’d go on to play the Devil Girl From Mars which I wrote about here, another sly, witty performance), who portrays the Empress as scheming, manipulative, and (at least in this film) acidly funny.  She has a roving eye and a predilection for outlandish fashion and exotic accessories, including a splendid pair of matched cheetahs (by which I mean large cats—no, really, cats).  Her hair is styled into what I can only call a proto-mini-rollercoaster, of looped, coiled, and pretzeled-twisted locks (maybe glued into place with Roman concrete?);  and she wears—at least in this film—the most gorgeous gowns, which look nothing like the attire a respectable Roman matron would have worn.  One scene has her clad in this lilac-colored number with flowered platelets over the breasts—aMAzing; and there’s also a gown of gold lamé.  Laffan’s wardrobe is so gobsmackinlgly fabulous, I can overlook its historical anachronisms and just muse, in nostalgic mood, on how Hollywood fashion was once really something…

“House of the Rising Sun”

On a side note, the movie’s Nero also keeps (along with his wife/ves) a private brothel in his palace (oh, an emperor’s privileges…).  The film labels it outright “Nero’s house of women,” and that it is—a housed collection of lounging ladies who, willingly or not, are stored away, like out-of-season clothing, on couches and chaises longues, awaiting the Emperor’s seasonal pleasure; if they’re not being parceled out to the Emperor’s fellow debauchees as favors or gifts.  Or maybe bribes.  (And some of the ladies look young indeed.)

“The Boys in the Band”

Along with louche ladies, Nero’s also surrounded by his minions—flunkies, thugs, slaves, brownnosers, parasites, idiots, and grifters of all sorts (in other words, a presidential Cabinet).  He bullies and humiliates these leeches incessantly, elevating or banishing them at will, while also playing one against another—“I do not ask favors, I confer them.”  Yet he’s cravenly dependent on their loyalty, demanding their unstinting praise.  It’s power politics at its most raw, with random cruelty added for its own sake; the lackeys must compete in expressions of verbal servility in Nero’s presence, the more abject, the better.  They know this is expected of them, so they do their groveling ironically.  But still, they do grovel…

“C’est Moi”

When not served by the servile chants of his sycophants, Nero serves praise to himself, in bountiful measure—extolling his greatness as a poet and musician, lauding his (dubious) talents, and singing (literal) paeans to his glory.  Though Nero proclaims himself a God (underlings address him as “Divinity”), what we see, in truth, is a mediocre man caught up in a self-declared, and self-deceiving, notion of Grandeur, of which nothing is evident.  “I’ve been steeped in my genius,” he declares to a curious flunky.  Though I’ve a notion that flunky was thinking Nero was steeped in something else…

“Burning Down the House”

Nero’s grand ambition in the film is to rebuild the city of Rome.  Fancying a talent for architectural opulence, he maps out (with the help of yet another flunky) a grandiose construction to celebrate and memorialize himself.  Per Wikipedia, Nero’s building project was an historical fact; known as the Domus Aurea (‘Golden House’), it was a “vast landscaped complex” built in Rome’s center.  And indeed, the film’s architectural model spreads itself across a broad table, and includes, among its miniatures, what looks like an Ancient-World version of a ballroom, even if said concept did not then exist (though I did indicate the film is prescient).  Says Wikipedia, “Nero took great interest in every detail of the project,” which later became a “symbol of decadence that caused severe embarrassment to [his] successors” (an embarrassment that lingers to this day).  Per the film, Nero intends to name the new city after himself:  “Neropolis,” he declares—which, to my ears, sounds eerily like “necropolis.”  The aural similarity is more sinister when, as it happens, Nero intends to create his new Rome by demolishing the old one…by starting a fire…

“Dirty Little Secret”

After burning down Rome with incendiary relish (resulting in death, destruction, despair, and a lot of annoyed citizenry), Nero now has, shall we say, an awkward secret…one he needs to hide from an enraged public.  So, he starts a mass distraction campaign to entertain the masses—a series of savage recreational games in the Coliseum with specially selected scapegoats (substitute the victim, war, or genocide of your choice here).  The film gives us scenes of Christians tossed to lions, Christians immolated on stakes, and even one little Christian offered to a rather puzzled bull (to do what is not quite explained, though the crowd eats it up).  All this “spectacle of terror,” as Nero dubs it, is to conceal his pyromanic guilt while sidetracking his fans.  Though somewhere, I’m guessing, there must be files…

“Before the Parade Passes By”

Nasty Coliseum games are only a symptom of what Nero really loves, and that is—Spectacle.  He likes to stage big, brassy, boring parades (with or without squeaks), big, brash, boring parties (during which he…sings), and big, brazen, not-so-boring barbeques (of buildings, land, people…you name it).  Such phenomena have little meaning and less sense; they’re done to enhance Nero’s rapacious and ever-consuming sense of Selfhood, while also boring to (sometimes literal) death those who, for whatever rapacious reasons of their own, are willing to kiss his ample ass.

“The Court of Public Opinion”

All these displays of triumph, power, wealth, ambition, self-adulation…are symptoms of Nero’s obsession with public opinion—and the admiration—nay, the worship of the crowd.  Our Emperor, it seems, wants to be loved (the Ancient Roman version of high poll numbers, I guess), yet he despises those who love him—“they irk me,” he cries in regard to his (historically adoring) public (which, like the Emperor, is large, loud, and irksome).  His adulators wait on him to make a choice, make a rule, make a start; but the moment their attention lags, he serves up another exhibition, pageant, atrocity—anything to draw focus to himself.  After all, he is their “Emperor—who loves you”:   “Do I live for the people,” Nero cries, “or do the people live for me?”

“Break Stuff”

When not strutting his wee stuff in front of go-fers, subordinates, hangers-on, and any stray passer-by, Nero’s got a habit of flying into rants and rages into the wee hours of the morning.  He’ll prowl his elaborate palace rooms seeking patsies to outsource blame for his mistakes, or he’ll issue bizarre, destructive, impromptu proclamations to further whatever extravagant and useless schemes he’s devised.  “It’s lonely to be an emperor,” he bemoans.  It’s even lonelier to have to live under one.

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”

Thus, we have Nero—our all-powerful Emperor, who suffers no wants, indulges every need, and has nothing to say beyond bombast and bluster.  His historical reputation is of a ruler who’s “tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched”:  As a man, he’s loud, crude, and flashy; as an Emperor, he’s petulant, small-minded, and vicious.  With a short attention span and long demands for constant reassurance, he’s essentially an overgrown, overbearing, spiteful toddler, who’s been pampered, flattered, babied, manipulated, led by the nose, and made into a fool; and who’s surrounded by scheming menials pursuing their own underhanded, money-grubbing, and appalling goals.  In short—a Loser.  And he doesn’t even know it.  “I didn’t wish to be a monster,” Nero sobs out when, at film’s end, the fed-up masses are smashing through the palace doors—though by that point, we viewers are ready to join the smashing ourselves.

“I Touch Myself”

I’ll conclude with another telling bit from Ustinov’s autobiography, of  a discussion he had, of “unaccustomed earnestness,” with Mervyn LeRoy regarding Nero and his part in Quo Vadis.  Ustinov recalled asking the director, “’[I]s there any specific aspect of the man you wish me to bring out?’” …

“There was a long pause” …

“’Nero,’ said Mervyn.

I pricked up my ears.

“‘The way I see him…’

“‘Yes?’

“‘He’s a guy who plays with himself nights.’”

The way I see that is as the kind of priceless story that illuminates not only a character but the entire aesthetic of a film—and also as to how we can respond to it.  “At the time,” Ustinov writes, “I thought [LeRoy’s remark] a preposterous assessment,” but he later realized, “It was a profundity at its most workaday level.”  Which I’ve no doubt the actor incorporated (slyly, wittily) into his portrayal of the Emperor onscreen.

And while I possess no overt evidence as to whether LeRoy’s observation can be applied, today, to our own present, too-much-in-the-flesh Emperor…you certainly are free (for the time being, at least) to draw your own conclusions…

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

You can watch Quo Vadis on Tubi this month; free with ads (with log-in).  You can also buy or rent the complete film on YouTube Movies here.

Quo Vadis Bonus Clip:  Nero (Peter Ustinov) admires his new ballroom, er, city of Neropolis, while chief flunky Petronius (Leo Genn) demurs at what he sees (both actors received Oscar nominations for their performances).  Meanwhile, this fire starts…:

I know nothing about cars.  Nix, Nada, Nought; not a thing.  I don’t even drive one; and the iota of vehicular knowledge I do possess could fit into a mouse’s thimble.  So, all I can say is that the Green Car chases the Black Car, and the Green Car wins.  Not as in a race, no; I mean it—survives.  The Black Car blows up into flaming fragments, whereas the Green Car crashes into a ditch but stays in one piece.  I don’t know if it could ever be driven again—to paraphrase W.C. Fields, its resale value would probably be nil at this point—but the driver gets to walk away, his resale value presumably intact.  Being that the driver is the great Steve McQueen, his resale value is always good to me.

As astute readers may have guessed, I’m referring to the famous car chase in 1968’s Bullitt, one of the most celebrated vehicular pursuits in all cinema.  The premise is simple:  McQueen, as SFPD Lieutenant Bullitt, realizes two hitmen are following him in their car.  Eluding the hired killers in his, he reverses the order and starts following them.  And then—with a shriek of metal and a tear of rubber, the motors are off!, Black Car twisting round a corner and Green Car dogging like a furious greyhound after a very large mechanical hare.  They zoom up and down San Fran’s hilly streets, sprinting round cars, corners, and curves, bouncing, jouncing, and pounding asphalt like high-speed mobile hydraulic presses, clipping taillights and fenders off too-near vehicles, including a stray motorcycle (though, miraculously, pedestrians never appear), and leaping over hills like they’re on some mad roller-coaster ride piloted by Wile E. Coyote.  As the cars race, weave, wheel, wind, skitter, slide, skate, turn, zig-zag, and parry, the camera’s shifting POV, from overhead and side to right behind windshields, places us, in the audience, up, round, and inside the action, taking us along for one helluva ride; and, damn, is it Exciting!  And Thrilling!  And also…Scary.  To me, anyway.  I don’t care for cars, or car riding, and I hate when a driver goes fast, because I do not wish to end up as purée on the highway and turn into one of those delays-in-traffic reported on WINS radio news.  (Walking is much healthier, anyway…)

From a film history perspective, much of this iconic car chase reminds me of those iconic chases in westerns.  Bullitt/McQueen could be a righteous sheriff in pursuit of train robbers or cattle rustlers.  Black Car’s driver could be astride a stagecoach, substituting a steering wheel for reins and an accelerator for a whip; while his companion rides shotgun with what I think is a sawed-off variety (loaded with really large bullets).  The camera cuts between the two machines as westerns do between horses and coaches or between Indians and Cavalry, with smoke and tire screeches instead of sweat and clopping hooves.  And, just as a western director will use equine anatomy—pumping flanks and charging heads—to create excitement, director Peter Yates and editor Frank Keller (who won an Oscar here) use auto traits to build tension—such as that great shot of Green Car magically appearing in Black Car’s rearview mirror, as if prestidigitated out of air; or the constant rrrum-rrrumming of revving motors on the soundtrack (let’s applaud the sound technician, too).  I wince at every bump of chassis, screek of tire, and tear of metal, especially when Green Car deliberately crashes into Black Car—shades of Ben-Hur’s chariot race!—which sends Black Car rocking and rolling into a gas station (not recommended) to explode into fiery flakes and burning bits, like something at a badly planned July 4th party.  Exactly the sort of thing you’d hear on a WINS report.  And to think the drivers were even wearing their seat belts…

Yet despite the dramatic intercutting, the tight closeups of drivers (several shots indicating McQueen did do some of his own driving), the shifts and swings between pursuer and pursued—the chase, for me, is still between a Green Car and a Black Car, one following the other like hamsters sharing a wheel.  That’s because the only way I can differentiate cars is by their colors, and maybe by one vehicle being rounder or flatter than another, but otherwise—make, model, and year are utter blanks in my eyes.  To paraphrase the Bard, cars is Greek to me.  It’s like trying to tell one small bug from another small bug of the same species—six legs/four wheels, thorax/body, antennae/roof.  Kinda like watching the Ben-Hur chariot race—you know, Charlton Heston’s got the white horses and Stephen Boyd the black ones.  Fortunately, I am not color blind.

But regarding those cars—the Green and the Black—I did do some research on them.  Per the film’s Wikipedia article, McQueen’s Green Car is a 1968 Ford Mustang GT Fastback (actually, two cars of identical make/model, of 325 HP), and the baddies’ Black Car is a 1968 Dodge Charger (two of them also, 375 HP).  The Mustangs were enhanced by Max Balchowsky, a former race car driver and a vehicle supervisor on the film, and the cars were painted, respectively, green and black.  Speeds during the chase scene reached up to 110 MPH, which sounds zoomin’ fast to me—I who, when a roommate teaching me how to drive (or trying to) told me to drive faster, replied (vehemently) I am driving fast—“you’re driving 12 miles an hour,” she said.  Well, it felt fast to me.

I also asked my brother, who knows cars, about the Bullitt ones.  The Dodge Charger, he told me, was part of the Chrysler Corporation—“If you bought a Dodge, you bought a Chrysler”— which was a rival to Ford (they were two of the Big Three car companies of the mid-20th century, GM being the third).  Brand loyalty was fierce, he said; car owners got into fights over which company had the better product.  I sensed a hook here—could the Bullitt car chase be interpreted as a metaphorical extension of real-life corporate rivalry?  He demurred at my suggestion, instead noting that Mustangs and Chargers were grouped within what were then known as “Muscle Cars”—essentially, smaller cars with bigger, souped-up engines (300 HP and above) and hence more power.  I was trying to wrap my mind around an image of something with wheels and a Schwarzenegger physique when he added that Mustangs were also called “Pony Cars”—is that a reference to the Mustang horse logo, I asked; but, no, he didn’t mean that, not at all.  It’s the engine, see.  At which point my eyes started to cross and my brain to freeze.  “You need to do more research,” he advised.

So, I did do more research—beginning with this online article at the CPC website, titled (aptly) “What is a Pony Car?”  “When you first hear of a pony car,” it begins, “your immediate thought is either the animal [or] something cartoonish.”  Well, that hit the (equine) nose, for sure.

The article further explains that Ford first coined the name ‘Pony Car’ on introducing its Mustang in 1964, because the car “didn’t meet the design aesthetics necessary to be called a muscle car,” so, hence…’pony car.’  (No, it doesn’t make sense to me, either.)  Other companies followed with their own ponies (e.g., Camaro, Firebird) and the breeds—er, models—took off.  Pony cars featured a compact, streamlined body, a smaller engine, a long hood and open mouth with small grills (still Greek to me!), and marketing geared towards a younger demographic that “loved the open road and wanted the freedom of an open roof, a powerful engine and a smaller car.”  Production declined over time (fuel economics, rival European models, SUV popularity) but resurged in the early 2000s.  Not that I would still know a Pony Car.  Unless it neighed or something…

As for the Muscle Car,  Wikipedia notes it’s “an American-made two-door sports coupe with a powerful engine” (a coupe means it has “a sloping or truncated rear roofline”—who knew?).  The term ‘Muscle Car’ emerged in the 1960s, “enter[ing] the general vocabulary through car magazines and automobile marketing.”  Its ‘muscle’ factor was due to a powerful engine being installed in a smaller, lighter, more affordably priced vehicle, “designed for street and track drag racing.”  Muscle cars reached peak popularity from around 1964 to 1970 (Bullitt came out in 1968), top muscle models including the Thunderbolt, the Galaxie, the Road Runner, and the Pontiac GTO.  Popularity declined in the 1970s, due to new emission controls (affecting performance and pricing) and the energy crisis.  But, as with the pony vehicle, new muscular models re-emerged in the early 2000s.  No doubt equipped with gym shorts and barbells, for the physique-minded among us.

Central to these cars (whether a small-horse type or a body-builder type) is the engine—that being the source of power and, more importantly, speed.  According to Wikipedia, the first muscle car is dated to 1949, the year Oldsmobile installed a V-8 engine in its Rocket 88 model.  Wikipedia describes car and engine thus:

The Rocket 88 was the first time a powerful V8 engine was available in a smaller and lighter body style (in this case the 303 cu in (5.0 L) engine from the larger Oldsmobile 98 with the body from the six-cylinder Oldsmobile 76).  The Rocket 88 produced 135 hp (101 kW) at 3600 rpm and 263 lb⋅ft (357 N⋅m) at 1800 rpm and won eight out of ten races in the 1950 NASCAR season.

Yeah, sure… 303 cu; 5.0 L; 101 kW; 263 lb-ft;…and 357 N-m. Does anyone have any idea what this means?  It’d be easier to understand Greek via semaphore.

The one thing I infer from all the above is that—mid-20th-century middle-class Americans wanted cars (green, black, or dotted like an Appaloosa) invested with…Fantasy.  One that centered on big fast cars with big revving engines, only…smaller and cheaper.  And doable on fixed monthly payments.  Owners wanted to feel like they were Born to be Wild!; they wanted to be like playboy millionaires ensconced in huge, flashy machines that would Head Out On the Highway at speeds impermissible in the suburbs, while yet…living in those suburbs, on suburban-level salaries, settled in their split-level homes and driving the kids to Little League every Saturday after mowing the lawn.  Dare I say it—they wanted the illusion of being like those Beautiful, Fast, Muscled People in the movies?  Like, say…Steve McQueen in Bullitt?  Racing up and down those San Franciscan hills like one born to it?

Fantasy, I guess, is according to one’s taste.  To me, a car is a car—a vehicular device meant to take you from one place to another and (fingers crossed) get you there in one piece.  Otherwise, an automobile says nothing to me.  It touches nothing in my imagination, it sings no siren songs to my soul, it shapes no Technicolored images of Life Lived Large.  I can admire a horse—I can even admire a pony—but cars are only a moving hunk of metal to me.  They’re just not my thing.

A thing that is My Thing, though, is—Stars.  No, not Cars (and not astronomy), but Movie Stars.  Like—Steve McQueen.  The Man of Cool himself, casually ensconced in Bullitt’s snazzy navy blue cashmere turtleneck and brown herringbone tweed blazer (I hadda look that up; Fashion is also Greek to me), hands relaxed into pockets and face eased into a singularly cool expression, strolling through the film’s gritty street locations like a god among the groundlings:  Insouciant, confident, calm, as if all the World and its highways are his.  Like, damn!, who doesn’t want to be like that?  A car is just an articulated piece of steel, but Steve McQueen is…one sleek, muscled hunk of—Grace, Space, and Pace.  The Power of Dreams; the Pursuit of Perfection.  And definitely—Built for the Human Race.  Certainly mine.  Pedal to the Metal, I say.  Fantasy sped large, indeed.

You can watch the complete Bullitt car chase below.  Hold on to your hats—and seats!

Bullitt can be watched here on YouTube (for a fee).  It also plays on Tubi (free with ads) every few months or so; check schedules and listings.

We open on the hands of Oscar Levant.  At the piano, playing a Gershwin tune.  An offscreen voice announces it’s “The Oscar Levant Show,” with Oscar Levant, June Levant (his wife), and “Oscar’s special guest,” Fred Astaire.  As the camera pulls back, we see Oscar finish the piece, then rise from the piano bench as he grabs a lit cigarette from an ashtray.  A hand is pressed to his chest.  Heard offscreen is scattered applause.  “Thank you,” says Oscar, in that familiar, sing-song rasp.  “Gee, I forgot my name.”  His wife obligingly laughs.  Oscar continues:  “This is the first time I haven’t walked out on the show one minute before.  It’s an unprecedented situation,” he says, “but I quit.”  Then he introduces himself:  “This is Oscar Levant, the irreligious Billy Graham of Los Angeles.”  Now he sits down—”I’m worn out and I can’t think, talk, or breathe, and what an irresistible combination of events.”  And he inhales a slow drag on his cigarette.

Thus starts—in a uniquely stream-of-consciousness style—what may be the most unique American TV show ever.

I can’t think of a better way—or maybe a better antidote—to ring out the benighted year of 2025 than with Oscar Levant.  From 1958-1960, Oscar had his own TV talk show—called, unsurprisingly, The Oscar Levant Show—broadcast live, from one to three times a week, on a local Los Angeles TV station.  Only one complete kinescope of one show episode survives (in a wretched, wambly, watery print), recorded May 6, 1958, when guest Fred Astaire appeared.  It was Astaire’s first TV appearance, and his agent recorded the show (thank you, Mr. Agent, whoever you are) to, per Levant’s biographers, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, get an idea of how he came across on TV.

Astaire comes across as fine (the shows’s a must for Astaire fans).  He’s suave, charming, elegant, and (unlike Oscar) looks as calm as if reclining in his bath.  Astaire had been in show business, as he says on the show, since he was five-and-a-half-years old, and I’m sure little could faze him by now—not even one of Oscar’s out-of-left-field remarks:  “We’re now doing a show without the elements of time and space,” says Oscar, “we’re floating in our own orbit.”  Which could describe the experience of watching Oscar Levant…

Unlike the deft, dapper, impeccable Astaire, Oscar on TV is a mess.  A witty, caustic, endearing mess, but still…a mess.  From almost his opening shot, the rumpled, crumpled Oscar skews expectations of what a TV talk show host is like.  It doesn’t end there.  Oscar smokes—constantly, throughout the show’s 70-odd minutes (minus commercials), a cigarette always in hand.  If the hand isn’t holding a cigarette, then it’s pressed on the piano keys or against his chest.  He’ll also slouch, shake, blink, twitch, grimace, bare his teeth, and prowl restlessly around his tiny set, even walking off camera (much of the show is watching Oscar not keep still).  It’s the proverbial slo-mo train wreck from which you can’t shift your eyes; you watch because, as Oscar’s biographers note—you have no idea what’s coming next.  His performance is fascinating, if alarming, to watch.  Because you sense it’s not a performance.  Or, if such, it’s one springing from the reality happening within Oscar, right before us.  Oscar’s not acting; he’s being himself—pure Oscar.  You cannot…not watch.

For those who remember him, how best to describe Oscar Levant?  Composer, pianist, conductor, actor, writer, wit, raconteur—all true.  But beyond that, he might best be described by the title of a 1938 Broadway play on which he worked as a conductor:  The Fabulous Invalid.  Oscar was the nearest to a professional hypochondriac we had; “My health,” he said on a quiz show, “is the concern of the nation.”  He spent the latter part of his life, Josh Getlin writes, “as a confessional trailblazer, a man who spoke freely and outrageously about his deteriorating mental state.”  He was also, says NPR, “America’s first publicly dysfunctional celebrity.”  Today, says Getlin, he’d be “a social media star.”  But in the 1950s, such dysfunction—and the admittance of it—was unheard of.  Yet Oscar bared it all to the American public.  His TV appearances were revelations from the psychiatric couch for gossip-rag consumption; as his biographers observe, Oscar knew that “part of his whole appeal lay in his unpredictable behavior.”  Of which he took knowing advantage.

Though he was a reputed hypochondriac, Oscar was also really ill.  By 1958 he’d already suffered a major heart attack (rising from his sickbed literally six weeks later to make a film); he was in and out of at least five mental institutions for severe depression (the kind in which you literally can’t get out of bed) and undergone electric shock treatments (which affected his memory); and he was addicted to drugs, including Demerol, paraldehyde, Thorazine, Dexedrine, sodium amytal, chloral hydrate and god knows what else (per his biography, he took Thorazine before going on air).  Much of his last 20 years was spent in the constant pursuit of meds—even, per his biography, once desperately swallowing a friend’s wife’s birth control pills.  Anything to null the pain of his existence.

Despite it all—the depression, pills, shock treatments, mood swings—what comes through, as seen on his TV episode, is brilliant.  Oscar may have been in a drug fug while on air, but his mind, his timing, his wit, still work like razors.  As Oscar himself said, “functioning is the important thing.”  When, on the show, Astaire says he’s forgotten the words to a song, Oscar ripostes, “Have you had shock treatments, too?”  Asked at what age he started show biz—forty-five, Oscar replies; “I was a boy wonder.”  Taking a break from the piano, he announces, “I’m going out to take a saliva test.”  (That one sounds straight from the autobiography.)  Then he lights another cigarette.  You won’t see that on TV today.

In, around, and between the piano playing, the jokes, the prowls, the cigarette drags, are strange, striking, spontaneous moments.  As Fred plays the piano, Oscar tries out a weird, shuffling dance step that leaves him clutching the instrument (at the 14:30 mark).  Then he drops his cigarette to the floor and grinds it out with his shoe (you won’t see that on TV today, either).  Later he strolls off the set, telling June Levant (pertly chic and wickedly funny), who’s perched next to him as if soldered to her stool (to keep guard?), to read from a Time magazine profile of him.  June obeys.  The autobiography again peeks through (“It’s all about me,” says Oscar).  “But for Oscar, [age] 51,” June reads—“DON’T SAY THAT!” Oscar bellows suddenly off camera.  June grins, and reads further:  In 1953 Oscar was “packed off to a Pasadena sanitarium”; offstage, Oscar is heard yelling, “you packed me off, I didn’t even know where I was!”  “Somebody had to do it,” June sweetly replies.

And there’s Astaire, of course.  Oscar introduces him as “the greatest song and dance man in history,” a paean Astaire wears modestly.  He’s relaxed, informal, as natural as Spring rain; you sense, as with Oscar, something authentic here.  He sings several Great American Songbook songs, mainly from his movies—”They Can’t Take That Away From Me”; “Our Love is Here to Stay” (once as himself, once as how movie mogul Sam Goldwyn would sing it); “I Won’t Dance” (and Astaire doesn’t, he only sings); “They Didn’t Believe Me”; “A Fine Romance”; “Night and Day” (briefly).  His style is intimate, casual, off the cuff; he seems to be winging it, but he has the experience, the ease, the showmanship, to make it seem so.  If he forgets words, he just hums the tune.  Launching into “S’Wonderful”—“I’ll get there,” he says.  Singing “A Foggy Day in London Town,” Fred repeats the verse, varying the rhythm, the phrasing, the verbal stress.  It’s effortless, simple, almost improvisatory.  You have to remind yourself who this is—Fred Astaire, American Legend.  Watching him, as Oscar’s biographers note, is like being at “a kind of private Hollywood party at which the public was invited to eavesdrop.”  S’wonderful to behold.

Astaire’s appearance, and its significance (“an undeniable coup for Levant,” say Kashner and Schoenberger), similarly affects Oscar; his admiration, even adoration for him—“I’m a little overcome that Fred is here”—is as heartfelt as a child’s.  “You evoke a fervor in me.  I’ll have to go to Lourdes,” he says, “and confess and become a saint, I’m so overcome, I’m so thrilled with you.”  He then asks Fred to “talk to June a minute while I cry.”  Fred responds with affection (and a little patience).  But the prickliness also comes through.  When Fred corrects Oscar on a movie title, Oscar glares:  “You’re the first man who ever dared to correct me in public.”  The audience laughs, uneasily.  Oscar says he’s feeling “awfully tired and I’m sick”; “Oscar,” Fred replies, “you’re the strongest man I know”; “Well,” Oscar snaps back, “the strongest man who’s dying.”  Always there’s the autobiographical—asked what’s her favorite Astaire-Rogers film, June says it’s Carefree—“Because it’s about a psychiatrist,” she says, adding (with a sly look at her husband), “and you know what we’ve been through.”  If Astaire is a relaxed Hollywood party, are Oscar and June a tense evening chez Levants?

Oscar did get into trouble on his show, however; not due to his health nor his hospital-bed revelations, but to his wit.  Oscar was just—too ready with the quip.  His comment, per his biographers, on the rabbi-blessed marriage between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller—“Now that Marilyn is kosher, Arthur Miller can eat her”—brought on audience gasps.  The show was cancelled (Oscar protested he didn’t mean his remark literally, but “in connection with the kosher dietary laws”!), loyal fans picketing the studio.  A well-received TV guest stint led to the show’s renewal, on which Oscar continued his “adder-tongued comments about Hollywood’s celebrities” (“Lenny [Bernstein] has no humor about his egomania; I do”).  Celebrities continued to appear, including Christopher Isherwood, Linus Pauling, James Mason, Dean Martin, Dmitri Tiomkin, Eddie Cantor, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Dempsey, Walter Winchell, and Aldous Huxley, who discussed hallucinogens—which, says Levant’s bio, “was daring, exotic stuff in 1959.”  Per Oscar, Huxley “’not only made converts on that show, he made addicts.’”  Oscar continued irrepressible.

Also continuing were the controversies.  The show was cancelled yet again when its sponsor, Philco, withdrew support after Oscar needled a company representative on air.  An infuriated Oscar called for a Philco boycott, fans again protested, while no less a personage than Frank Lloyd Wright announced he was cancelling his Philco order.  Once more the show was renewed, but Oscar began to lose interest.  His increasing addictions lent a “wild tilt” to his behavior (like when he smashed a corporate-sponsored radio to “smithereens” on set), which caused wary producers to tape Oscar’s show for broadcast, to control him.  “[I]t was no longer,” write Kashner and Schoenberger, “the live and dangerous enterprise…[but] had become a chore.”  Soon Oscar walked away from his show for good.

But Oscar was still seen on TV.  Jack Paar invited him onto his own show, which, unlike Oscar’s, was nationally broadcast.  Levant’s appearance there, say his biographers, “came as a shock to the rest of the country,” as the rumply, scruffy Oscar “clearly lacked the groomed, unctuous, ‘cult of sincerity’ manner that even in 1958 marked the average television personality.”  Audiences still laughed, albeit nervously, at Oscar’s confessional jokes, such as his revelation he was in the middle of a nervous breakdown, “’my fifth in two years'”; yet they “enjoyed being shocked by his black humor.”  “For the first time in the country’s popular media,” says his biography, “mental illness and its various treatments were coming out of the closet.”  And Oscar bodaciously led the way.

There were additional television appearances, including on the stylish quiz show What’s My Line, during which panelists collectively gasped after removing their masks to view Oscar in the flesh.  Making what turned out to be his final televised appearance, on the Merv Griffin show in 1965, Oscar then chose to remain in seclusion at his home, writing two autobiographies, Memoirs of an Amnesiac (transcribing his tape-recorded reminiscences) and The Unimportance of Being Oscar.  His last public appearance was in 1972, a surprise attendee at a luncheon honoring Charlie Chaplin.  He died later that year, peacefully in bed; the young policeman who responded to the emergency call took down his name with “no sign of recognition…The forgetting had begun.”

I suppose most people today have forgotten Oscar Levant.  About the most anyone will know of him are the 17 Hollywood movies he made, sometimes shown on TCM, some of them classics—Humoresque; The Barkleys of Broadway; An American in Paris; The Band Wagon, which I think is the greatest of the MGM Freed musicals.  (There’s also his last film, the glossy, high-budget, definitely non-classic The Cobweb, in which Oscar plays a convincing version of his neurotic self and which I wrote about here.)  Yet a man of Levant’s fearsome wit should be remembered.  Oscar wasn’t merely funny; during the purse-lipped 1950s, he was an astute, and deadly, commentator on his era’s idiocies.  One noted jibe, made in 1956 on the CBS TV panel show Words About Music (on which Oscar appeared regularly), referred to then-Vice President Richard Nixon:  “’He swings a big mouth,’” went the crack, “’and carries a little stick.’”  Network honchos, per the bio, purse-lipped about Oscar’s “too risky” wit, pressured the show to tamp down its star.  In response, Oscar quit; bereft of his presence, the program went off the air three weeks later.

We could use another Oscar Levant.  Seven decades after his show, TV programs are still being pressured, and censorship is still real, and omnipresent.  One can only dream how Oscar would comment on America, its culture and its politicians, today (that Nixon gag could certainly apply to the current White House occupant).  The more proper citizenry will no doubt point out Oscar’s (very real, and sad) mental and pharmacological issues, and dismiss his commentary as diseased, distorted, and…well, improper.  As Oscar himself said, he “’made insanity America’s favorite hobby.’”  Is it any different today?

Yet Oscar’s illnesses paradoxically freed his wit; they “’giv[e] me insight,’” he claimed.  “There is a thin line between genius and insanity,” went his most famous quote, and “I erased that line.”  For an insane man, though, his madness was very sane.  I’m tempted to see in Oscar—pounding at his piano, incessantly smoking, incessantly wheezing, in all his rumpled, crumpled, declining glory—a representation of an America also in decline.  As Oscar said about himself, we’re in “’a state of ‘chaos in search in frenzy.’”

Yet Oscar had the wit, the self-awareness, and the courage to observe, and jab, such chaotic frenzy—a quality so needed today.  Maybe Levant was nuts, but it’s the nuttiness of Lear’s Fool, speaking edgy truths to the mad king; and I wish he was here now, to observe, report, and skewer with a poniard’s thrust.  As I look back on 2025 and wonder, with trepidation, what’s in store for 2026, I can only hope for another Oscarian wit to arise, floating in its own orbit.  Yes, Oscar displayed his brilliance under less-than-ideal circumstances (protesting letter writers called his program “a sick-sick show”)—but boy, what a swell party he threw.

Good night, Oscar Levant, wherever you are.  And Happy New Year.

You can watch the complete (decaying) print of The Oscar Levant Show with Fred Astaire here.  Courtesy of the Richard Glazier YouTube channel.

Bonus Clip:  Here’s Fred Astaire with Oscar and June Levant on The Oscar Levant Show, singing “Isn’t It a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain,” which he originally sang in Top Hat.  Moments like this one are meant to be preserved:

Bonus Clip 2:  Here’s Oscar Levant’s appearance on the TV show What’s My Line, October 17, 1965.  Oscar enters at the 22-minute mark—blinks, twitches, cigarettes, and all:

I’m tossing out a suggestion (free of charge!) to the makers of FX’s Feud.  You know, that TV anthology series about bitchy, dishy quarrels between rich, famous, and sometimes Beautiful People, which result in—disputes, disasters, and epic loss.  My recommendation is just perfect for that kind of televised bitchfest.  And that is:  The Feud Between Frank Capra and Glenn Ford During the Making of Pocketful of Miracles.

I know what you’re all saying:  “Frank Who?  Glenn Who?  Pocket What?”

But what if I tell ya Bette Davis is also part of the mix?

Now, no one’s gonna say, “Bette Who?”

Thus begins a saga worthy of Feudable coverage.  Trust me.

The saga begins with Frank Capra, legendary Hollywood director (the word “Legendary” appearing so many times before his name in my research, I began to think it was part of his title), whose career includes such classics as It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, You Can’t Take It with You, and It’s A Wonderful Life.  Now, back in 1933, Capra had made a movie titled Lady for a Day.  Based on a Damon Runyon story, the plot’s a sentimental urban fairy tale about a group of New York gangsters, led by bootlegger Dave the Dude, who come together to help an elderly, apple-selling bag lady nicknamed Apple Annie transform into an elegant society matriarch—one refined enough to persuade her innocent, convent-raised daughter and her aristocratic fiancé into thinking Annie’s the Real Deal.  Which can certainly be said of the film itself.

Lady is important in Capra’s career history, not only for establishing his emblematic style blending satire, comedy, and dewy-eyed sentiment (giving rise to the expressions “Capraesque” and “Capracorn”), but also for garnering him his first Oscar nomination for Direction.  And its positive reception foreshadowed Capra’s own, almost fairy-tale-like career, during which he would win three Academy Awards, achieve boffo box-office success, gain a slew of other prizes and citations, and become the Legendary artist he’s known as today.  What you might call his (seemingly) Wonderful Life.

However, nearly thirty years after he made Lady for a Day—a movie so nearly perfect in writing, direction, cinematography, and acting, it should be acknowledged as a bona-fide classic—Capra decided to remake it, in big shiny Panavision and Technicolor, with big shiny stars Glenn Ford and Bette Davis, and with a big shiny title, Pocketful of Miracles.  It even has big, shiny apples.  The result was anything but miraculous.  Indeed, the one standout about this film is how its making induced within its director not a sense of the marvelous but rather—“maniacal hankerings to murder Glenn Ford.”

Hence we have our Feudian set-up—which , like a Greek drama, contains tragic flaws, excessive pride, a change in fortunes, a moment of recognition, and the downfall its main character.  Even pity and fear.  An epic, indeed…

Capra’s homicidal yearnings, as well as his detailed, and somewhat self-flagellating (and self-pitying) descriptions of his Pocketful of Miracles ordeal, are divulged at length in his 1971 autobiography, The Name Above the Title.  Its name is indicative of Capra’s filmmaking philosophy:  “That simple notion” he writes, “of ‘one man, one film’ (a credo for important filmmakers since D.W. Griffith)…became for me a fixation, an article of faith.”  To which Capra adds—“I walked away from the shows I could not control completely from conception to delivery.”  Right up to 1961, when he began filming his Lady for a Day remake, Capra insisted on full, creative control over his films.  He was to be—the Man in Charge.

Unfortunately, Glenn Ford seems to have had a similar idea…

To be fair, Ford didn’t put the kibosh on Capra’s ‘One Man—One Film’ idea.  For much of the 1950s, Capra had withdrawn from feature-length filmmaking, during which period, Capra’s biographer, Joseph McBride, observes, a “new, decentralized Hollywood” had emerged, “in which the stars called the shots and powerful agents…served as arbiters of creative disputes.”  And this new power structure viewed Capra and his movies as “no longer in step with the times.”  To make his 1959 release, A Hole in the Head, Capra had to accept its star, Frank Sinatra, as his senior producing partner, an arrangement, says McBride, that “galled Capra mightily.”  A modest box-office success, AHITH seems a harbinger of Capra’s future difficulties.  To get United Artists to back his Lady remake, now titled Pocketful of Miracles, Capra says he had to agree to “sign up one incandescent superstar, or two workaday stars that could twinkle but not dazzle.”  No longer, it seems, would he be the one in charge.

That One-Man-One-Film credo wasn’t quite working out…

As part of his UA deal, Capra hoped to cast (for the role of Dave the Dude) incandescent superstar Sinatra, who bowed out (he disliked the script).  Other big stars Capra tried to interest, including Dean Martin, Jackie Gleason, and Kirk Douglas, also turned him down.  Then, Glenn Ford stepped into Capra’s life (almost literally, the actor approaching him, says Capra, in a restaurant).  Ford wanted to make the film—but only as a co-producer (joining his production company with Capra’s).  Unable to find another actor UA would approve, and desperate to secure financing, Capra agreed.  The upshot, he notes, was that Ford legally “had a voice equal to mine in all film production decisions,” with agent Abe Lastfogel (who represented both Capra and Ford) as the tie-breaking vote in any disputes.  Capra calls it “my first and last professional compromise”—and a “fateful” one.  In effect, he’d have to share (or even surrender) any real decision-making power with partner Ford.

Glenn Ford bio in ‘Pocketful of Miracles’ pressbook.

It was a power the partner soon made known.  Capra wanted to cast Shirley Jones (who’d won an Oscar playing a hooker in Elmer Gantry) as Dave the Dude’s wised-up, wisecracking romantic interest, but Ford demanded his then-girlfriend, Hope Lange, be given the part.  Capra deemed Lange’s “callow innocence” unsuitable, but Lastfogel claimed Ford would pull out if he didn’t get his way (in essence, siding with the actor).  “Ten years earlier,” a crestfallen Capra writes, his response would have been “To hell with Ford.”  But now, at age sixty-four, responsible for a quarter of a million dollars in costs, and no other stars in sight—Capra caved.  Thus Ford (a “garden-variety star,” Capra notes dismissively) had “accomplished what neither Mack Sennett, Harry Cohn, L. B. Mayer, nor Jack Warner had ever once been able to do:  Compel me to shoot a film not my way but his.”

But Capra’s problems were just beginning…

Under UA’s stipulation, Capra had to get another star (Ford’s box-office wattage apparently not incandescent enough) for the film’s other main role, of panhandling Apple Annie.  First choice:  Shirley Booth, who, says Capra, after viewing May Robson’s (truly incandescent) performance in the 1933 original, raced out of the projection room in tears, declaring she could never match May.  Helen Hayes then accepted the role, only to withdraw due to scheduling conflicts, after Capra postponed production three months to rewrite the script (to accommodate, he says, the not-ideal Lange).  At this point, Capra complains, “I could have strangled Glenn Ford” — “Because he wanted Hope Lange, I lost Helen Hayes.  Now who could play Apple Annie?”

In clichéd Hollywood fashion, the plot thickens:  A Capra associate suggested fifty-three-year-old Bette Davis for Annie, to which Capra agreed (“a much bigger star than Ford,” he sniffs).  Also agreeing was Ford; having worked with Davis in 1946’s A Stolen Life, he welcomed an opportunity to work with her again.  As for Davis herself…she accepted the role, not for the chance to play “a sixty-year-old Cinderella” (why didn’t Capra just re-release Lady for a Day, Bette grumbled), but because she hadn’t made a movie in a year and, per McBride, needed the $100,000 paycheck.  Capra, however, could finally start the film—with a rewritten script, two middling-big stars, a prickly production deal, and an unwanted ingenue whose compromised choice, Capra groused, “still stuck in my craw.”  But at least he had a package for UA and could start work.

Then the migraines began.

Outwardly, Capra writes, “I was a calm producer-director; inwardly, a vat of seething sour wine.”  The vat overflowed:  On New Year’s Eve, 1960-1961, Capra was attending a party with his family “when suddenly—a huge phantom bird sank three talons of its angry claw deep into my head.”  Neurological tests showed nothing physically wrong, but the attacks, in multiples, continued.  Capra believed his cluster headaches were psychological—a kind of self-judgment on his artistic pusillanimity.  “[T]he Judas pain,” he called them; “You welched; compromised; sold out.”  He dragged himself through daily filming, the headaches returning nightly (“I climbed the walls”), arriving on the set each day “with a face that looked…etched in over-ripe liver.”

And if that wasn’t enough—Glenn Ford then gave a press interview.  Which, says Capra, opened “a bigger can of worms.”  During the exchange, Ford magnanimously claimed he had chosen Davis for the Apple Annie role, not only in gratitude for giving him his career break way back in 1946, but to give her a chance to restore her now-faded cinematic glory.  The implication was clear:  Ford was doing the poor old forgotten girl…a favor.

As can be imagined, Bette didn’t take Ford’s condescension lightly (“shitheel” and “son of a bitch,” just for starters).  It wasn’t the only Fordian slight.  A week into filming, Lange asked for the star dressing room next to Ford—occupied by Davis herself.  Now Capra’s migraines flared up in the daytime; he had to take daily sodium phosphate injections to mitigate his agonies.  The set, he writes, was “torn with discord and loathings, directed by a walking zombie,” with Bette hating both Ford and Capra, and with Ford “tying a knot in my guts every time he bounced into a scene like a musical comedy funny-man.”  Capra’s only solace was Peter Falk, cast as Dave the Dude’s henchman; his comic performance was “my joy, my anchor to reality.”  “Thank you, Peter Falk,” Capra gratefully concludes.

But could Peter Falk, if not Davis or Ford, save the day?

August 1961:  POM’s first preview screening takes place, and the omens were hopeful.  Viewer ratings, says Capra, were, at 91 percent, exceptionally high; his wife wept with joy as she told him of ecstatic audience reactions.  Two more previews were equally encouraging:  “[T]he audience roared their way through the showing and applauded loud and long when it ended.”  Additional showings for the press and for Hollywood elites augured similar success, leading UA brass to conclude POM would be “a hit of enormous magnitude!”  As salivating salesmen estimated grosses of up to $25 million (over $275 million in 2025 dollars), UA decided to open POM during Christmas week—in 600 cities, blanketing the country with pockets of miraculous cheer.  “Could it be,” Capra breathlessly writes, “that my kind of sentiment and humor was still wanted—and needed?”

I won’t keep you in suspense.  After a week’s run in two New York theaters, POM premiered nationwide on Christmas Day 1961, and…“opened soft.”  Or so Capra was informed by UA execs on the phone.  Calling the next day, he was told “[a]ll executives were ‘in conference.’”  Further UA phone calls were not returned.  Instead of the anticipated smash, POM opened and closed almost right away in all 600 cities, to then “pla[y] the cheap ‘nabe’ houses and the all-night ‘dirties’—then finis.  Gone.”  The film, Capra starkly notes, “was the flop of the year,” returning only $2.5 million of its $2.9 million cost.  In his four decades as a filmmaker, never had one of his films been so completely rejected by audiences.  “My shocked mind withdrew into a vacuum of white silence.”

What went wrong?  Two friends, Capra recalls, had warned him about opening the film in so many cities, advising a gradual buildup instead.  Corny pressbook marketing suggested wordplay taglines like “You have to see it to belove it!” and “It delights up the screen!”, along with weird “apple stunts,” such as placing crates of apples in theater lobbies.  Not helping sales, writes McBride, “were…bizarre advertisements…featuring a grinning photo of Richard Nixon:  ‘When Richard Nixon Laughs, Everybody in Los Angeles Laughs!…He’s just seen Frank Capra’s newest picture…Pocketful of Miracles!’”  And some reviews were scathing, such as Elaine Rothschild’s in Films in Review, who described POM as “’this unbelievable and unfunny comedy” and “watching it [as] a painful experience.”

Suggested ‘apple stunts’ from the ‘Pocketful of Miracles’ pressbook.

In true theatrical parlance, POM had laid, if not an apple, then an egg…

In the end, Capra blamed himself.  The final product “was not the film I set out to make; it was the picture I chose to make for fear of losing a few bucks.  And by that choice I sold out the artistic integrity that had been my trademark for forty years.”  For Capra, POM‘s failure was “deeply personal [and] deeply moral”; audiences “sensed when Glenn Ford made me lick his boots—I had lost that precious quality that endows dreams with purport and purpose.  I had lost my courage.”  He also felt he had let down his fans, those “worlds’ average guy[s]” who “had crowned me king of the filmmakers.”  But his defeat, Capra mawkishly (and a bit pompously) declared, was more than personal:  “When Pocketful came up empty there was dancing in the streets among the disciples of lewdness and violence.  Sentiment was dead, they cried.”  All Capra now wanted was a chance to make “[o]ne more film.  And make it my way, with no Glenn Fords around to change my mind.”

Even in his self-pitying dregs, Capra brought the whole fiasco back to Glenn Ford…

From today’s perspective, the reason to watch Pocketful of Miracles is out of car-wreck curiosity—to see how, despite so much money, talent, expertise, and clout, a seemingly surefire hit was flushed straight down the toilet.  But you also have to ask:  Why did Capra want to remake Lady for a Day?  Why this film?  What did he think he could say with a new version?  What vision had he for its redoing?

The original Lady for a Day, released during the Depression’s darkest depths, really is miraculous—evoking within a gritty urban milieu a delicate, dreamy fairy tale that brings, says McBride, “just the right blend of sarcasm and sentiment, a skeptical, wise-guy veneer perfectly balancing, but not cancelling out, the story’s essentially schmaltzy heart.”  As McBride perceptively notes, the story “was not a conventional star vehicle.  It was a truly democratic story.  Each character was equally important,” with the film’s credibility depending “on the interaction of an entire community of characters.”  It was this “heartening reaffirmation of communal spirit” to which, McBride writes, its “battered audience” responded:  “If even the gangsters and corrupt politicians of America’s most heartless metropolis could put aside their selfish grievances…there just might be some hope for the rest of the country.”

Whereas Pocketful of Miracles comes across as not from the heart, but as a confused, joyless, dreary mashup of tintype crooks and tinfoil mush.  McBride considers Capra’s (“shockingly inferior”) remake a reflection of the director’s “inability to cope with the changing times in a meaningful way.”  Indeed, in his autobiography, Capra can’t seem to settle on what he wants to say—claiming he aimed to “retel[l] Damon Runyon’s fairy tale with rock-hard, non-hero gangsters,” yet still wanting to “make sentimental films”—“I’ll be the maverick,” he writes, and let other directors “tak[e] the violent route.”  His remake lacks the honest, tender sweetness of its original but neither does it achieve an updated mobster cool.  Its dominant impression is ugliness—of seeing nasty, frantic characters yell and flail across the screen.  In one scene Capra literally has Ford throw Lange to the floor and tear off her clothes, and, what’s worse, play it for laughs.  The overall tone is not one of ironic sentiment but of panic—of an artist who’s lost faith in the material because he’s lost faith in himself.

Visually, too, POM is ugly.  The 1933 film, shot by Joe Walker through a soft, gauzy lens, endows its bedraggled heroine with a melancholy beauty in the midst of its grimy depression setting (Walker and Capra bestow so many loving closeups on May Robson, I sensed they were half in love with her).  Whereas POM, shot in widescreen and gaudy color, looks as flat and garish as a cheap postcard.  The city scenes are obvious sets, cars and people crossing clean, fake streets; even Annie’s apples look fake, looming at you like big red plastic balls waiting to be strung up on plastic trees.  Capra was clearly uncomfortable with the widescreen process, clustering his actors in the middle or to the sides; when Davis hobbles across screen length, you wonder why this poor old dame is made to do this.  The result is ersatz in tone and spirit; you sense behind it a director who can’t find the balance between fairy dust and grounded reality.  And no longer knows the difference.

And then, sticking out like that proverbial sore thumb, is Glenn Ford…

Capra…really had it in for Glenn Ford.  Claiming the actor “used” POM to “make himself a big man with a young chick,” Capra rages how Ford “forced me to compromise…that grinning, boyish Apollo galled me down to my last Sicilian chromosome.”  But, says McBride, in his uncut manuscript Capra admits he scapegoated Ford for his own shortcomings, avoiding any confrontations with his star about production or casting.  Per Peter Ford’s biography of his father, Glenn was not aware of Capra’s desire to cast Shirley Jones; when Capra’s book came out in 1971, Ford “sent Frank a telegram:  ‘What a shame you did not have the guts to say this to my face—what you said in the book.’”  And Peter echoes McBride regarding Capra’s inability to deal with post-WW2 Hollywood, noting that, although “Capra was a living legend…his heyday had been the 1930s and 1940s.  It was my father’s name attached to the project that got the film financed”; adding (somewhat brutally), “Old Frank arrived with memories of his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington days, when he had boasted near complete control of his projects, but he soon found that those days were long ago.”  Ultimately, “[w]hatever their differences,” says Peter, “my father had enabled Capra to make one last film—there would be no more.”

Even before filming started, though, Ford rubbed Capra the wrong way.  McBride quotes the UA producer Max Youngstein on how Ford was “’the only guy we could find,’” and whose casting “’threw everything out of kilter, including [Capra’s] own enthusiasm.’”  Ford was not the easiest man to work with—the director David Swift likened him to “‘a twelve-year-old temperamental child'”—yet, despite Capra’s “garden variety” disparagement, Ford was no run-of-the-mill actor.  Wikipedia notes he “was listed in Quigley’s Annual List of Top Ten Box Office Champions in 1956, 1958, and 1959, topping the list in 1958.”  Ford’s box-office clout was real; “[a]t the end of the 1950s, [he] was among the greatest stars in Hollywood.”  In hindsight, his casting was probably the best of a bad deal Capra could get under the new Hollywood regime—one he’d have to work with to get his film made.

Yet Ford is, frankly, miscast.  His Dave the Dude is neither dapper nor cool, nor does he have that loveable-lug persona so essential to Runyonesque Neverland.  Instead, he’s loud and crude, falling way short of what McBride calls the “unexpected authority and charm” Warren William brought to the role in 1933.  Per Wikipedia, Ford did establish himself as a comic actor in such hit films as Teahouse of the August Moon and Don’t Go Near the Water (he even won a Golden Globe award for comedy in POM!), conveying onscreen “a beleaguered, well-meaning but nonplussed straight man,” who, says David Shipman, is “a bumbling ordinary guy.”  Such qualities, however, are not suited to the debonair Dude; Ford hasn’t William’s poise nor his ability to skate over Dude’s less pleasant aspects with panache (I’m truly puzzled by that Golden Globe award).  The more harassed Ford is in POM, the more bullying and blustering he becomes.  His performance doesn’t beguile so much as repel.

How much of Ford’s clueless performance in POM can be blamed on Capra?  The director was famed for his rapport with actors; on set he was “said to be gentle and considerate” in working with his casts.  Capra tells a charming story of coaching May Robson on Lady:  A stage-trained actress, Robson first “boomed her lines in a voice that could be heard in the next county!”  Capra encouraged her to think of Annie being followed by two detectives; Robson then “reread her lines in an anxious sotto voice that conveyed urgency, dread, [and] a despairing fear…she was perfect.”  Did Capra provide similar guidance to Ford, or to his other POM actors?  Granted, Capra was incapacitated by headaches during the shoot.  But would that explain Ford’s unlikeable performance; or the way, as the Playboy review of POM puts it, he’ll lumber into a scene “like a very nice fellow from the studio accounting department who stumbled onto the set by accident”?  Was Capra, in his anger and resentment, hoping to sabotage his star?

One other factor to note is—the making of Lady for a Day was also a compromise.  Capra wanted Marie Dressler for Annie, W.C. Fields for the Judge, and Robert Montgomery or James Cagney for Dave the Dude; he settled for Robson, Guy Kibbee, and Warren William.  Yet, as McBride notes, this second-choice cast “of has-beens, hand-me-downs, and also-rans…rose to the magnificent occasion and gave the performance[s] of a lifetime.”  But Capra couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make it work for POM; his hostility towards Lange, for example, seems to have knocked his artistic judgment askew.  His rewritten POM script, meant, Capra says, to explain Lange’s “callow innocence,” adds a dull and superfluous half-hour opening that distracts from, and delays, its real story of Annie and her daughter.  I also question Capra’s assessment of Lange’s acting range.  A few years earlier she’d received an Oscar nomination for Peyton Place, playing an abused rape victim who kills her attacker.  Surely that indicates an acting capability beyond girlish ingenuehood?  Or was Capra just unwilling to work with a performer he viewed as foisted upon him?

Whatever the reason/s for POM’s ultimate bust, its failure comes down to Capra’s filmmaking dictum—of One-Man-One-Film, the responsibility belonging to the Name Above the Title.  But, alas—unable to stand up to his star (who, himself coming off a box-office flop, the 1960 failed remake of Cimarron, was, I’m guessing, in need of a hit as much as Capra); and faced with age, a slowing career, financial pressure, an unequal production partnership, and a new, unfriendly Hollywood—Capra felt, as Abe Lastfogel said, that “’[t]he fun’s gone out of picture-making.’”  As Capra saw it, movies were once “shaped in the forge of enthusiasm and filmed in an environment of gaiety”; whereas POM “was shaped in the fires of discord and filmed in an atmosphere of pain, strain, and loathing.”  Was Capra’s nostalgia regarding ‘old’ Hollywood ever true?  I’m sure not.  But his struggles in the ‘new’ Hollywood, first with A Hole in the Head, and then with POM, left him flailing; it was a shock to which he could not adjust.  Nor, perhaps to his credit, conform.

Thus ends the saga—and the Feud—of Pocketful of Miracles—a movie now known for ending Frank Capra’s storied and, yes, Legendary career.  It was a collapse from which Capra never recovered.  Glenn Ford’s own career did push on; after surviving POM (as well as the “notorious box-office fiasco” of the 1962 remake of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—whose idea was it to cast Ford as a Valentino-manqué?), Ford resolved, per his son, “to make a “‘fresh start,’” and starred in two successful films, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father and Experiment in Terror.  Thereafter, his career slowly wound down; today he’s best remembered for his iconic films noir Gilda, The Big Heat, and The Blackboard Jungle, as well as Clark Kent’s farmer dad in the 1978 version of Superman.  Per a 1981 interview, Ford’s “favorites of his own films were The Blackboard Jungle, Gilda, Cowboy, 3:10 to Yuma, The Sheepman, and The Gazebo,” saying, “’they’re the ones I remember most fondly because of the people involved.’”  Unsurprisingly, POM is not on his list.

About the only nice thing anyone had to say about the film came from Ann-Margret, who, at age nineteen, made her film debut in POM as Annie’s daughter.  In her autobiography the actress gratefully recalls Bette Davis’s kindness and generosity towards her; “’You’ll do just fine,’” Bette reassured.  As Ann was about to receive her first closeup, Davis stopped the proceedings, demanding of Capra, “’Where’s Ann-Margret’s hairdresser? …And her makeup person?  This just doesn’t look right.’”  Says Ann:  “People came running [and] fussed over my hair and face.”  Bette “inspected the work”—“’Ann-Margret,’ she explained, ‘this is your close-up.  And you want to look the very best you possibly can.’”  Then, with a look at Capra, Bette announced, “’Now, we can shoot it.’”  Reading this, you can’t help but recall Bette’s experience with the great George Arliss, who also took the time and patience on the set of The Man Who Played God to make sure a young Miss Davis also looked her best.  It’s a lovely moment of a legendary actress paying it forward.

Otherwise…this whole Feudin’ Pocketful saga leaves me sad.  I wish I could end it with a Capraesque finale—all the backbiting set aside, everyone pulling together to put on a show, and the film’s Christmas Day opening a box-office smash.  Instead, except for an undistinguished short made for the 1964 World’s Fair, Capra never made another movie.  After a few, flagging years trying to raise interest in other projects, he withdrew to write his autobiography.  With its 1971 publication—a work of “’autohagiography,’” says McBride—as well as the 1970s rediscovery of his films on TV (I vividly recall seeing It’s a Wonderful Life on late-night-TV Christmas broadcasts, it knocking my proverbial socks off), Capra’s reputation was soon restored.  He became the darling of TV talk shows and college lecture circuits; he received numberless awards, including the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award (a gracious Bette Davis spoke at the ceremony) and the National Medal of the Arts; and he became the unofficial spokesman of the American Dream—a mythic representative of a vanishing archetype of what this country was once said to be.  It’s a sharp irony that this Capracornish myth no longer applies.  It may never have.

But, as the Season of Good Will now approaches, my suggestion for holiday cheer is—go watch a Frank Capra movie.  I mean it; he made many great films.  Start with that Yuletide perennial, It’s A Wonderful Life.  Then see It Happened One Night; Mr. Deeds Go to Town; the jolly You Can’t Take It With You.  Even that strange, melancholy, and oddly prescient view of American Fascism (so sadly pertinent to our present times…)—Meet John Doe.

But whatever Capra films you do watch, make sure your watchlist includes…Lady for a Day.

You won’t regret seeing this one.  Trust me.

Merry Christmas.

You can watch an excellent (and complete) print of Lady for a Day on YouTube here, while available.  You will make yourself very happy by doing so.

For the car-wreck curious, you can watch Pocketful of Miracles on Pluto.TV here, or a complete print on YouTube here, while available.  With ads.

Bonus Clip:  Here’s the original trailer for Pocketful of Miracles, introduced by Ed Sullivan (no doubt an improvment on Richard Nixon).  It even has its own theme song:

“Imagine you’re on vacation,” says the anesthesiologist to me at the start of an anodyne, but embarrassingly intimate procedure about which I don’t care to elaborate, “imagine you’re in a place you want to visit, and you’re now there…”.    “I’m in Paris,” I think to myself, “and I’m strolling down the Champs-Élysées with Buster Keaton…”

So, in case you’re wondering—yes, Buster Keaton did once stroll down the Champs-Élysées in Paris.  It was in a French movie.  Titled, not so coincidentally, Le Roi des Champs-Élysées.  So now you know…

Le Roi [The King] des Champs-Élysées was more than the usual venture for Buster; it marked a grim turning point in his career.  He made the film between 1933 and 1935, a period Keaton described in his autobiography as “the two worst years of my life”—when he’d not only hit bottom but kept descending.  He’d been hauled through an ugly divorce (followed by a shoddy, if mercifully short, second marriage), he was drinking, he was broke, and he’d been fired from MGM, which had just released his latest feature, What-No Beer?, a depressive horror I saw some thirty-odd years ago and don’t care to see again.  That last, dismal MGM flick is, for me, a rotting cherry atop a sundae—the godawful cutoff to a once-brilliant career.  And career-wise Keaton never fully recovered.  Le Roi would be the last feature-length film giving him star billing.  Never again would Keaton have the space, the freedom, the creative control to make films his way, as in his glorious 1920s silents.

What to make of Le Roi’s timing in Buster’s life?  In Keatonian chronology, the film is part of Keaton’s sound era; it came after MGM’s firing and around when he’d started working at low-budget Educational Pictures.  As detailed in James Curtis’s massive 2022 Keaton biography, Buster’s new agent, Leo Morrison, had gotten Keaton the Educational contract, to produce cheap two-reel comedies on a strict schedule.  Those films were dim copies of former Keaton masterworks, recycling old plots and gags, but at least Educational left Buster pretty much alone to do his own thing.  And the shorts, per Curtis, were well received (as well as profitable).  Audiences were glad to see Buster again onscreen.

Maybe Keaton’s renewed popularity is what led to the French film offer.  It’s not clear how or why, and Keaton’s own memoirs don’t explain.  Per Rudi Blesh’s 1967 Keaton biography (Blesh knew Keaton personally; his book is based largely on subject interviews), the offer came “out of the blue”; per Curtis, Morrison negotiated the contract, initially with Les Films Margot (not Pathé, as Blesh writes).  Keaton’s $15,000 salary ($363,000+ in 2025 dollars) did not include travel; a near-penniless Buster had to sell his war bonds to raise the fare.  Taking a freighter via the Panama Canal (the cheapest boat possible; it took over three weeks), Keaton then journeyed through Scotland and England before reaching Paris, where he learned that funding for Le Roi had fallen through, and that another company, Nero Film, had taken over production and replaced the original director.

It’s starting to sound like the plot of a Buster Keaton film…

Miraculously, Le Roi is not a disaster; a passable gloss on Keatonesque routines and humor, it musters enough energy and comic skill around its skimpy plot, of a shy, wanna-be actor mistaken for a crime boss, to almost pass for the real thing.  In terms of Keaton’s overall output, though, how does it fit in?  Produced on the cheap in Paris and released in Europe in 1934, the film never saw an American release during Keaton’s lifetime, apparently not reaching U.S. shores until 1992.  (I first saw the film at Film Forum’s comprehensive 1991-1992 “The Most of Buster Keaton” retrospective, which showcased just about every piece of then-known footage with Buster.)  Le Roi is rare, infrequently mentioned (Buster doesn’t even name the film in his autobiography), and a check on Amazon doesn’t show a DVD.  It’s gotten some notice, though; an Internet search reveals a smattering of blog articles on it; and a few weeks back I found a copy on YouTube and was able to rewatch it.

And the film does start with Buster strolling down the Champs-Élysées.  Working at a lowly job at an automobile company, he’s out and about distributing its advertising flyers, not realizing he’d grabbed a stack of money instead of paper; and now he’s scattering thousand-franc notes like birdseed (told by his employers to spread the flyers like a millionaire giving away his fortune, Buster succeeds beyond his dreams…).  It’s a typical Keaton situation—that of a naïf bungling the simplest of tasks—and the French actors enthusiastically get into the scene’s spirit, the camera cutting rapidly on shots of bystanders in lustful pursuit of cash; one man even dives to the sidewalk to grab a bill, a gag that could have come straight out of any Keaton film.

Though the film’s direction is credited to Max Nosseck, I’m sure Keaton devised and staged its gags, comic sequences, and comic business.  A bit, for example, of Buster attempting to climb a ladder for a stage entrance—getting his head caught in the rungs, slipping down, and then getting his head caught in a chair—is pure Keaton, showing he hadn’t lost his physical agility nor his inventive structuring of a routine.  In true Keaton fashion, the gag expands, building in complexity, space, and rhythm:  Two stagehands toss a now-disentangled Buster onstage; on landing, he forgets his lines, instead repeating the prompter’s exasperated “Mon Dieu!”; then, in response to his watching girlfriend’s enthusiastic clapping,…he takes a bow.  Whenever Keaton appears, the film is handed over to him, and he’s once more doing what he does best—making us laugh.

But, as Curtis notes, “the strength of Le Roi des Champs-Élysées would lie not so much in the gags as in Keaton’s own expert performance.”  The film’s unusual in that Keaton plays two roles, as the simpleton and as the lookalike gang boss, who’s just escaped from prison, only for his gang to grab the naïf instead of him.  “The two roles,” notes Curtis, “are largely silent turns,” with Keaton playing them in opposition, the wide-eyed innocent versus the gangster, who’s done almost straight.  It’s like the film reveals a new facet of the Keaton persona, that of a “distinctive and menacing” heavy, says Curtis.  And for each part Buster etches a sharp-edged portrait, each with individual expressions, gestures, and movement:  The naïf is slow and hesitant, with wafting arms and hands; the gangster is harsh and abrupt, his eyes angry lasers, his limbs a slash through space.  The plot may be slight—really an excuse to perform a string of gags—but Keaton’s acting beautifully fills out each role, distilling the film’s humor into an acutely observed character study.

And it’s this distilled distinction, if you will, that allows Keaton to show something vital—his understanding of not only how comedy, but how character is expressed through the body; how movement defines a person, and how the body in motion is also…the utterance of a soul.  Whether in comedy or drama, the body is the core, the engine, for character; personality may be formed in the mind, but it’s expressed through the physique.  The film’s double role displays Keaton’s skills as both a comic and dramatic actor; and is it any accident, or irony, that a French word for ‘actor’ is ‘comédien’?  “The body doesn’t lie,” Martha Graham said; nowhere is this more evident than in Keaton’s own instrument.

What also comes through in Keaton’s performance is—how out of place he is in the realm of sound.  If Buster always seemed a little apart from ordinary mortals in his silent films, sound emphasized it.  You see this alienation in his MGM talkies, and it’s even more distinct in Le Roi, filmed in another language (Keaton’s few lines of French dialogue were mostly dubbed).  Buster’s like an inhabitant from the Moon dropped down to earth, an Otherworld Being politely, if awkwardly, existing in ours.  In part, as Curtis notes, that’s due to his performance registering as in a silent film, through physical means:  When, for instance, he’s among the gang members (who think he’s their chief), Buster stares in puzzlement, his face solemn and attentive, his thoughts private.  Nor does he understand their actions; given a gun and told to use it, he examines it as if he has no idea what this object does.  Aimlessly squeezing the trigger, he’s amazed to find out.

But what’s funny about Keaton’s alienation is that the other characters don’t notice it.  When Buster’s bullet fortuitously blows out a cop car’s tire, the gang cheers him (“Bravo!” shouts one), with no idea the shot was accidental.  Keaton’s estrangement is directed solely towards the spectators.  The sound world may accept him, but he still exists in the silent one, where motion counts for so much more.  And it’s within that silence we grasp Keaton’s essence, of his outsiderness, his bafflement, his going-along-to-get-along.  Keaton honed this persona throughout his films, but sound was the alien environment that defined it.  Though Keaton was said to be eager to work in sound, he never really fit in.  Sound film’s rhythm is different, its concreteness and noise add something solid, ponderous, and weighty; it lacks the gliding underwater grace of silence.  Sound made Keaton’s separateness more obvious to us, the viewer (if not the diegetic characters), as of one touching down from another world.  Maybe from the Elysian Fields themselves.

And what is Le Roi within Keaton’s art?  Buster dismissed the film with, “I had to take anything I could get”; Blesh described it as “a poor picture” Buster made as “a truce with his conscience.  It was sink or swim…”; whereas Curtis considers it “entertaining and frequently funny.”  Me, I’m just grateful to have it.  No, it’s not prime Buster, but I’m grateful Keaton was able to get the work, get some dough, and get a chance to exercise his genius.  I’m also grateful to the French actors who all seem to adore him.  Unlike the MGM honchos, with their beady eyes glued to the bottom line (and their directors telling Buster how to ‘make’ a Keaton movie), the French, I sense, appreciated Buster for his artistry, and for his art.  And maybe that was all he needed.

As a personal note, writing this piece was emotional for me.  Because, like the French, I also adore Buster Keaton (even to conjuring him under anesthesia).  For me, as for so many, he’s a funnyman but he’s also a great, beloved artist and filmmaker—a modern genius who helped to create, and elevate, the modern art of film.  Reading about his travails during his “worst years,” how can you not be moved and saddened by such despair?  But also—how can you not be awed?  At the time of making Le Roi, Keaton was at the nadir of both life and career, but he kept on—he found work, he made funny films.  I can’t imagine the courage and resilience it took to keep going.  Even at poverty-row studios, even in product unworthy of him, Buster still kept on, creating for us an art of life, laughter, and beauty.  We can only be thankful these movies exist—and that, as etched on celluloid, we can all watch Buster strolling down the Champs-Élysées.  Elysian indeed.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Courtesy of the Лиза Никулина YouTube channel (which features a lot of Keaton films, both silent and sound, including the 1930s shorts), you can watch an extremely blurred, decayed-looking copy of Le Roi des Champs-Élysées here.  It ain’t great, but I’ll take Keaton any way I can.  Please note, the film is in French with Spanish subtitles on the print (or French subtitles if you click the YT subtitle icon).  Keep Google Translate open nearby, if needed.

Bonus Clip:  Here’s the (somewhat shocking!) last scene of Le Roi des Champs-Élysées, during which a dubbed-voice Keaton, embracing co-star Paulette Dubost (and at director Nosseck’s request)…smiles.  Be prepared:

In his autobiography Charles Chaplin writes how, in his early days at Keystone, he taught himself film technique, learning that:  “Because economy of movement is important you don’t want an actor to walk any unnecessary distance unless there is a special reason, for walking is not dramatic.”   

Which brings me to two thoughts:  1) how walking can be not only dramatic but also funny; and, 2) how there’s all this funny walking in The Rounders.

Co-starring Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle, The Rounders is a mini-Ministry of Funny Walks.  Chaplin walks drunk; Arbuckle walks drunk; but each walks drunk with a difference.  Chaplin staggers, stumbles, slips, and sprawls, with the grace of the ballet dancer W.C. Fields snarlingly described him as; while Arbuckle swaggers, sways, serpentines, and does this little side-to-side dog-brushing-grass-with-hind-legs step that’s delicate, funny, and weird all at once.  And they both fall.  They fall splat onto their behinds, their legs flying up in the air like the letter V caught in surprise.  Or they tumble into somersaults that destroy all dignity yet leave us marveling at their comic grace.  When Chaplin tumbles, he flips over and ends up ass-backwards, indelicately facing the screen.  Whereas Arbuckle upends like Humpty Dumpty off his wall; it’s mighty, tumultuous, and final.  The Big Bang in reverse. 

But the funniest walk is the one they do together.  As they stroll down a street, Chaplin trips, and Arbuckle, unthinkingly holding him by one arm, zigzags Chaplin across the asphalt, like a tipsy Volga boatman hauling a small, sozzled barge.  Entering a café, Arbuckle suddenly lets Chaplin go, and there follows a delicious moment that stood out for me:  Chaplin, on the floor, sloooowly drops his upper torso to the ground while his legs rise in counterbalance like a pendulum weight (9:25 mark in film).  It’s beautifully timed and balanced, like a dance; you marvel not only at Chaplin’s bodily control but at how he makes it funny.  A lesser comic would have just dropped flat; but Chaplin turns this moment into a small, graceful, teeter-totter cameo, incised on nitrate stock. 

Produced at Keystone by Mack Sennett, and directed by Chaplin, The Rounders—per Wikipedia, the title “used to mean ‘a habitual drunkard or wastrel,’” hence all that silly walking—was released in 1914, when cinema was still fairly new, and the moving onscreen body was the source of comedic performance.  This source is used by our two stars in all ways possible—in big, broad, slapsticky stunts, or in small, expressive gestures of face and hands that skim past us like hummingbirds.  What’s also funny is how they use their physical contrast—the small, dainty Chaplin against the large, imposing Arbuckle—not only for comic opposition but to form a single unit of grace, precision, and timing.  Our guys may be corporeal counterparts, but they’re united in an almost magical lightness of motion, like strange, beautiful beings from another realm who’ve just happened to manifest on celluloid, to delight our eyes.

The film has only a wisp of a story.  Per Chaplin, Sennett told him Keystone films never relied on a scenario; instead, the cast would “get an idea and then follow the natural sequence of events until it leads up to a chase.”  But Chaplin “hated a chase.  It dissipates one’s personality; little as I knew about movies, I knew that nothing transcended personality.”  He “tried to suggest subtler business” to Sennett, to little avail.  Yet Chaplin also appreciated how “films were freer [than theater].  They gave me a sense of adventure.”  And he realized “this charming alfresco spirit…was a delight – a challenge to one’s creativeness.  It was so free and easy – no literature, no writers, we just had a notion around which we built gags, then made up the story as we went along.”  More than anything, Chaplin saw the cinematic process not as work but—as fun. 

That’s how The Rounders proceeds—as the joy of tomfoolery, propelled by an antic spirit.  What plot there is starts with the two title characters returning home drunk to the same hotel where they live with their angry wives (Phyllis Allen, Minta Durfee).  At first each man quarrels with his wife; then the wives quarrel with each other; finally the (still intoxicated) pair meet and realize—they’re twin souls.  They then head off to further adventures in a café before the final chase and finish.  It’s echt Keystone:  No story, just a situation, from which spring jokes, gags, pranks, and endless comical business.  And it’s rooted in personality—in Arbuckle and Chaplin playing off each other, the comedy rising from their unique comic styles and ways of moving, relying on their very bodies for laughs.

You sense how the two actors were improvising throughout the shoot, trying out new moves and ideas to see what flies, always mindful of their props and how to work them in.  The props are few:  Top hats, canes, cigars, matches, chairs, floors.  They’re simple but effective—and funny.  Note just the hats, such as the bit when Chaplin temporarily rests his on Arbuckle’s obliging backside.  Or how the pair, in affirming their alliance, shake hands and then twirl arms and hats together, a small, deft whirligig of motion and rapport.  The film may have been made waaay back in1914 but its humor, its prop use, its physical gags, its overall balance and rhythm, are as sophisticated, and as funny, as anything you’ll see in Lubitsch, Sturges, or Wilder.  Sure, we’ve now got sound, color, wide screen, and CGI, but we’ll still laugh at a top hat balanced atop a pair of buttocks.  Some things will always be funny, and the human gluteus maximus is one of them.

What’s also funny is the human face—something Chaplin and Arbuckle both understood deep in their comic souls, and which was centered in their comedy.  We’re familiar with Chaplin’s face; his huge, dark eyes, his twitchy mustache, and his smile, of melancholy sweetness or satyr-like impishness.  It’s a face of singular beauty and expression, suggesting, as the critic Stanley Kauffman wrote, an angel in a pratfall.  Combined with his marvelous physical instrument, it produces a comedy of inneffable charm and wonder.  In his drunk scenes Chaplin’s body will cant forward, fixed at a separate angle to the stable world beneath him, while his small, exquisite face turns blissful, the mouth smiling, the eyes fogging out, as if tuned in towards some private, happy vision. 

But also note Arbuckle’s visage—large, round, innocent, like a child’s idea of the Man in the Moon.  Arbuckle does this one comic bit with his face that’s so small and quiet, you might miss it, but it’s artlessly beautiful.  Seated in a café chair (at the 10:15 mark), Arbuckle sips from what I’m guessing is a bottle of tabasco sauce.  As the sauce takes effect we see Arbuckle’s reaction:  A slight burp, a slight grimace, a slight quiver and moue, as of a vast, placid landscape gradually registering a ripple of distress.  It’s a tiny moment done with delicacy and grace, flitting by like a sudden, spontaneous shift in light that’s yet telling.  Note also how, just before sipping, Arbuckle drops his cigar from his mouth onto his waistcoat.  For the character it’s a loss of control, but for Arbuckle it shows how supremely he is in control, of both his instrument and of the situation he’s portraying. 

All of The Rounders (which runs only about 13 minutes) is like that—small moments that are hugely funny.  Such as Chaplin’s irritated wife setting out a chair for him to sit on, only to immediately pull it away and sit on it herself.  Or when Chaplin strikes a match on a bald man’s head (I think he did a similar gag in City Lights).  Or the hilarious, simultaneous business in the café scene, with Arbuckle settling in his chair for a nap, pulling the tablecloth over him for a sheet (then blowing out a small table lamp as if it were a candle), while Chaplin blows his nose on a diner’s napkin, then tosses the used cloth back to its indignant owner.  And note the film’s overall architecture, its clear back-and-forth editing of scenes, and how its gags move swiftly but are allowed to play out.  Already Chaplin the director was demonstrating control of pacing and contrast, linking action from one scene to the next.  The technique is so simple as to be invisible to 21st-century eyes, but the film accomplishes, with clarity and focus, its one goal—of bringing these two characters together to create comedy.

The film ends, typically, with a (brief) Keystone chase, but you can see how Chaplin was already moving away from such hurly-burly to something subtler, finer, more expressive.  Pursued by a mob of angry wives, waiters, diners, and passers-by, Chaplin and Arbuckle escape in a rowboat and stop in the middle of a lake (one of the locations used was in Echo Park).  In the film’s only midshot, Arbuckle and Chaplin toss away the oars and ease down for a nap.  The camera cuts to shore, where angry pursuers shake their fists in impotent fury.  Then it cuts back to our carefree rounders asleep in the boat…while the craft slowly sinks beneath the lake’s surface, only a battered top hat marking their passing.  As perfect (and subtle) an ending as there is. 

Moving Picture World described The Rounders as “a rough picture for rough people, that people, whether rough or gentle, will probably have to laugh over while it is on the screen.”  I agree about the laughter but not about the roughness.  The film is gossamer and bubbles, a construction in, and of, air, foregrounding two young artists at the start of their cinematic careers:  Roscoe Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin, making gags like nobody’s business, to spin a playful tale packed with gems of skill and humor that delight us for 13 larky minutes without a dull one therein, before rounding it all off with a little sleep.  It’s the least one can ask for in these strange, dark times.

Courtesy of Silver Screen Filmothèque, here’s a complete print of The Rounders, beautifully tinted in sepia.  Enjoy!

Check out more of Silver Screen Filmothèque’s entries by clicking here.  A YouTube channel focusing on silent films, it has many more early silent-comedy/drama gems, including films of Arbuckle, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mabel Normand, Max Linder, Al St. John, Harold Lloyd, D.W. Griffith, Edgar Kennedy, Ford Sterling, Alice Guy, Stan Laurel, Charley Chase, Mack Swain, Georges Méliès, Mary Pickford, Mae Marsh, and the amazing Luke the Dog!

Also check out my post on another delightful Arbuckle movie, The Cook, co-starring another comic genius, Buster Keaton.  Along with canine Luke!

Zohra Lampert, who plays the title character in the moody 1971 horror film Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, is not a beauty.  She’s tall, thin, a little clunky, and, seen in long shots, walks (and runs) like a gawky colt that hasn’t quite grown into its legs.  She’s not your typical Hollywood Heroine.  In closeups, though, I found Lampert’s face oddly appealing.  Her eyes are wide, soft, and friendly, and her smile is sweet and open, seemingly ready to accept you, as with a shy child.  Her character Jessica smiles a lot in this film, only it’s the kind of tentative smiling you do when you can’t read a situation but feel pressured to play along.  “Don’t you feel happy?” Jessica will cry out, as if to convince herself, desperately, that all is well, all is well…

Unfortunately for Jessica, nothing is. 

As a horror film, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is what’s called a slow burn.  It takes its time to get to its shocks, and once we get there, they might leave you unsure as to what, exactly, is going on.  The film alludes rather than states; it’s well into its story before we learn that Jessica was “away” for six months, presumably due to a nervous breakdown, and that her husband, Duncan, and their best friend, Woody, have moved to an isolated Connecticut farm to help her rehabilitate.  Information on Jessica comes out in bits and pieces, often via abrupt phrases or odd glances; when Jessica sees a mysterious figure suddenly rush up the stairs in their newly entered house, Duncan immediately responds, “It’s ok, I saw it, too.”  Then creepy music plays on the soundtrack to let us know it’s not ok…

On a first viewing, I found the film frustratingly elusive, its narrative structure and camera work almost too fragmented.  For example, the small town where Jessica and her husband and friend relocate is inhabited by only a few grumpy old men (literally), and no explanation why.  There’s also a mute young blonde woman whom Jessica frequently sees (often flitting about a cemetery) but who is never identified.  You can argue the non-explanations create mystery, but they also make for plot holes:  Did Duncan buy this farm sight unseen?  Was he unaware of who (or what) lived in the town?  As H.P. Lovecraft (who knew a thing or two about horror) once wrote to a friend, “no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax.”  A few more details—if not about the location, then at least about what Duncan was thinking when making his purchase—might have been appreciated.

But I do find the film eerie and even uncomfortable; and its slow buildup and weird ending do unnerve.  The story concerns Jessica who, on being moved to her new Connecticut home, meets Emily, a young, red-haired hippie squatting in their farmhouse.  Emily’s a free spirit, unconventional and unattached; but Jessica, with an impulsive (and ill-advised) generosity, invites her to stay.  Her decision will bear ill fruit, for Emily proves to be a dangerous, disruptive force.  Not only does Emily flirt with Duncan (who responds to her advances), she uncannily intuits what will unsettle Jessica’s fragile psyche—such as suggesting they all conduct a séance right after Jessica admits she once saw her recently deceased father’s ghost.  And you wonder—was that part of Jessica’s breakdown?  Unlike her stolid husband, Jessica is unusually sensitive to what might be connoted as unseen influences.  She’s never sure of the reality of what she sees, and the film plays out as a slow unraveling of her sanity as she starts to believe she’s once again succumbing to madness…

My reactions on viewing Jessica have been a mix of confusion, puzzlement, enjoyment, and random musings.  Such as regarding the two women Jessica encounters, the flitting blonde girl and the redhaired Emily.  On a first viewing I thought they might be the same person (Gretchen Corbett as the blonde girl and Mariclare Costello as Emily do have a physical resemblance).  Then there’s Jessica’s discovery of an antique photograph of a young woman in Victorian dress—why does it take her so long to recognize this person looks like Emily?  And why are certain plot points (e.g., Jessica’s hobby of gravestone rubbings, or the used hearse Duncan and Woody drive) not followed up? 

On a second viewing, though, I found these plots points either 1) cleared up (no, the blonde and the redhead are not the same), or 2) didn’t matter.  That Jessica likes to make tombstone impressions or that the guys like to drive a hearse doesn’t really need explaining.  These actions function less as plot points and more like musical motifs; they’re meant to set a mood, identify a theme…perhaps of an underlying, disquieting sense of life’s briefness entwined with death’s nearness.  As Jess Goldschmidt at the Bloodlines Newsletter notes, Jessica’s initially carefree attitude towards tombstones might “fee[l] like a comment on hippie culture’s whimsical approach to the big facts of life: love, death”; but it might also evolve, into an acknowledgment of “the living, the dead, and everyone in between.”  It’s not so much a statement as an inference, emerging from within the film’s gaps and interstices, like putting together a puzzle to make the image whole.

In that sense Jessica was, for its era, ahead of its time.  Initially it received a mixed critical reception, naysayers disliking its ambiguity (its reputation is now that of a cult classic).  Horror movies of the 1970s-80s, such as the slasher genre, tended to lay out their premises like slabs of bacon on a plate (when a guy comes after you with a knife, you know where you’re at).  Jessica, however, is styled more like 21st-century cinematic horror, such as The Blackcoat’s Daughter or Butterfly Kisses—films that don’t telegraph plot twists or chop up random bodies, but rely more on mood, image, and the viewer’s own reactions for impact.  Such films can be odd, disturbing, maddeningly obscure, yet terrifying; they’re akin to reading modern poetry or the “strange stories” of the great Robert Aickman—watching them is like a free-association exercise, the viewer left to tease out meaning through allusion, juxtaposition, and emotional response.  You may not know what these films ‘literally’ mean, but you know you’ve encountered something…different.

However, Jessica’s original marketing (including its title) seemed unsure as to what this film was.  If an early poster is any indication, the film was sold as a blood-n-gore slasher fest, with a boathook-wielding lady stabbing a skeleton.  But it was also marketed as a vampire movie; pressbooks to theater managers suggested tie-ins with local blood banks (apparently to encourage blood donations!).  Anyone looking for macabre thrills, though, was going to be disappointed; and I wonder if Jessica’s original audiences were thrown for a loop.  The film’s pace is deliberate, almost…meditative; it has little carnage, its kills flashing by in quick takes the eye doesn’t quite register.  And the typical horror tropes are missing—no jump cuts or scares, no fangs, bats, stakes, or shots of bitten throats.  But its most untypical element (spoilers ahead) is—its vampire.  Who happens to be Emily herself (those hippie-counterculture vibes are more counter to the culture than I’d thought).

Emily the Vampire is the film’s element I found the most perplexing; she threw me for a loop.  The director, John Hancock, cast Mariclare Costello specifically for her “physical features, which included bright red hair and a pale complexion, which he felt was befitting of the vampiric Emily.”  Yet for me, Costello was so—unvampiric, her thick, curly hair and luminous skin atypical of what I thought of as movie vampires.  Maybe unconsciously I associate vampires, especially female ones, with something closer to Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride—wan, pale, etiolated like a light-deprived plant.  Costello, however, is clean and healthy; with her strong neck and sturdy build, she could be a country lass fresh from a bout of cow-milking and ready for an early-morning tramp through five miles of rough hills.  Chalk up these impressions to my imaginative limits, if you will.  As I had written in an earlier post about solid Lon Chaney, Jr. essaying the role of Son of Dracula—no one expects a plump vampire.  And I hadn’t expected Costello.

Costello’s great advantage in the role, however, are those very physical attributes.  I’d like to think she’s meant to throw off audiences; how could anyone with freckles be vampiric?  Hancock took advantage of such assets as Costello’s piercing blue eyes, lighting them like shards of blue ice against pale light.  And in that moment when Emily rises from a lake, her wet dress clinging to her potently feminine body, outlining every curve…that’s when you grasp, almost at a somatic level, the sexual and seductive power of the corporeal female form.  Costello’s body, its very flesh and bone, embody an eroticism that’s concrete, impersonal, yet overwhelming.  It could tempt the saints…as well as frighten…

Costello’s vampiric ‘femaleness’ effectively centers the narrative on female sensibility—and desire.  Though Jessica is with two men (both of whom are seduced by Emily), her core relationship is with the vampire.  Unlike with either Duncan or Woody, Jessica responds, almost viscerally, to Emily right from the start, exchanging long, and longing looks with her, their physical contrasts (lean, tense, dark Jessica versus compact, relaxed, rosy Emily) creating a visually compelling dyad.  But their relationship extends beyond the visual; the film’s sound design brilliantly weaves into Jessica’s internal monologues (voiced over throughout the film) Emily’s intruding voice in a kind of antiphonal call-and-response dialogue:  “I’ll never go away, Jessica,” Emily murmurs; then, in a whisper, “I’m still here”; or, seductively, —”I’m in your blood.”  Has Jessica finally gone over the edge?  Or has she been drawn into a private world, even a private language, formed and shaped by female perception and experience?  One from which the men are kept out—or don’t even matter?

What Hancock’s female focus (he co-wrote the script) also hints at is the lesbian-tinged nature of Emily’s vampirism.  It’s not done via penetrative (phallic) attacks with teeth.  Instead, Emily…insinuates herself, like what Erin at thehauntedvalley YouTube channel calls an “emotional vampire.”  She feeds off Jessica’s anxieties and needs, yet offers her the caressing physical affection her husband won’t.  The film, as Wikipedia notes, has been compared  to Sheridan Le Fanu’s famous vampire novella Carmilla, in which Carmilla’s attacks on her female victim are, in Le Fanu’s heated prose, swoonily erotic (the victim conscious only of her emotional pleasure…).  “Emily,” Erin points out, “wants Jessica”; and the moment of Emily’s emergence from lake water to summon Jessica is when all those implied life-and-death motifs also rise, to merge—water-as-life changing into death, woman-as-life becoming death, and death itself an erotic pleasure, of tender caresses, soothing voices, and peace…the one thing poor, scared Jessica can’t find but desires.

The film ends ambiguously (how could it not?) with Jessica alone in a rowboat in the middle of the lake, musing if what she’s been experiencing has been “Nightmares or dreams?  Madness or sanity?  I don’t know which is which.”  Is Jessica about to escape?  Or is she, like another Emily, stopping for death, as she considers her options?  While on shore Emily…lush, louche, vampiric Emily, her hair as loose and wild as a Bacchante’s, waits…   

Jess Goldschmidt prefers to think Jessica chooses to survive, concluding she “was not—and maybe never will be—scared to death.”  YouTuber Erin says she re-watches the film at least once a year, to glean new insights into its unstated meanings.  I haven’t made up my own mind yet as to which way Jessica and Let’s Scare Jessica to Death tend, but I do know it’s not your typical horror film.  And further viewings of it, to track my future reactions (especially around the spooky season), do seem…appealing. 

Happy Halloween.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death can be viewed on YouTube Movies in a good print here (as of this article’s posting it’s currently free with ads, though I don’t know how long that will last).  You can also view the film in a not-so-good cropped print on the Internet Archive here (definitely for free).

Below is the official trailer for Let’s Scare Jessica to Death—”I’m still alive!”:  

I do recall, many years ago—around the time the first amoeba tried an experiment in cell division—seeing the actor John Carradine on The Dick Cavett Show, during which Cavett asked his guest:  Which of the actor’s (350+) films he wished he hadn’t done?  Carradine’s answer, accompanied, if memory serves, by a look of agonized embarrassment:  Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula.

A title that, depending on one’s taste, can read as either totally schlock or totally awesome.

So, of course, I’ve gotta write a blog post about it. 

Carradine’s disdain for this strange filmic mix of horror and western genres was apparently not unknown.  He’s quoted by Johnny D. Boggs in Billy the Kid on Film, 1911-2012 that, of all his movies, “…I only regret Billy the Kid Versus Dracula.  Otherwise, I regret nothing.”  And—”My worst film? That’s easy, a thing called Billy the Kid Versus Dracula…It was a bad film.  I don’t even remember it.  I was absolutely numb!”  (Although, per a Richard Bojarski article in the September 1971 issue of For Monsters Only Magazine, Carradine declared Voodoo Man as “the worst movie I ever made.”  Just so happens I also wrote a post on that film…)

Online reactions to Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula, whether as pretty awful or pretty amazing, do tilt at a certain angle.  The film’s scant story concerns Billy—no longer a notorious outlaw but now a reformed ranch hand, who knew?—encountering the equally notorious Count D—who, oddly enough, is never named as such—as he greedily eyes Billy’s fiancée for his next victim.  Not much else happens, but at least there is a plot.  But how bad has the film been judged?  Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 17% Popcornmeter rating—wow, I’m thinking, that many viewers liked it?—while IMDB rates it 3.9 out of 10, and Letterboxd awards it 2.2 stars out of 5.  That last is a rating of nearly half, which is…not too bad, I guess.  Though being Letterboxd gives the same rating to Plan 9 From Outer Space, and everyone says Plan 9 is about the worst flick ever, maybe that’s…not too encouraging, either.

I’m starting to realize from whence came that mortified look on Carradine’s face.

However, I will point out that Billy/Dracula does have some solid cred behind it.  It was directed by the veteran William Beaudine, whose career tracks back to the silent era and includes Sparrows, one of Mary Pickford’s best films.  Beaudine might have continued to direct such reputable movies if he hadn’t lost his money, and it was due to financial pressures that he became, per his Wikipedia profile, “a low-budget specialist, forsaking his artistic ambitions in favor of strictly commercial film fare, and recouping his financial losses through sheer volume of work.”  So Beaudine wasn’t a hack but more a victim of unfortunate circumstances, through which he had to take what he could get to survive.

Also unfortunate was that most of Beaudine’s B-movie work was done not at the majors but at poverty-row studios (Monogram, PRC) and was pretty dire (I wrote about an East Side Kids comedy he directed here; I do seem drawn to such films…).  Yet no matter the budget, Beaudine, as Wikipedia notes, “was always professional,” shooting on time and below costs.  As is demonstrated in Billy/Dracula, which, per the AFI Catalog, was “completed with a budget surplus of $25,000.”  That was in 1965 (the film was released in 1966); in 2025 dollars that’s over a quarter of a million bucks saved.  Which must’ve made the producers, Circle Productions, extremely happy, wallet-wise.  If not the abashed Mr. Carradine.

When John met Olive…

When John met Harry…

Beaudine’s professionalism and economic style are evident from the film’s opening shot, of a parked Conestoga wagon, above which flaps a bat (theremin and squeak noises heard on the soundtrack); soon there emerges a familiar caped figure, ready to feast on the first available neck.  The opening credits haven’t yet rolled and we’re already into our story.  Nor does Beaudine waste footage on unnecessary linking sequences, such as when the camera cuts abruptly to Dracula inside a stagecoach, the ensuing dialogue used to explain how he got there.  It’s a cinematic economy that’s almost…Godardian.  (That Godard had dedicated his breakout film, Breathless, to “Monogram Pictures”—where Beaudine frequently worked—makes me wonder if Beaudine could have influenced the French auteur.)

Still, with $25 Gs to spare, couldn’t Mr. Beaudine have pushed a little more on the art and a little less on the savings?  The film’s lighting crudely alternates between very bright (as in 1960s television, where Beaudine frequently worked) or very dark (as in…really cheap); the very fake-looking bat looks like what it is, rubber on a string; and Beaudine’s unflattering moniker, “One-Shot,” is justified by one that makes the female lead look like a squinting rabbit biting into a lemon.  (What, not one lil’ retake allowed?)  Even the outdoor scenery looks stale and second-hand, as if bought wholesale from a used-scenery lot.  The film’s undistinguished cinematographer, Lothrop Worth, may be partly to blame (like Beaudine, his career was in low-budget movies and TV), but Beaudine was ultimately in charge.

Most dismaying about the film is Carradine himself as half the title role.  The actor had already played Dracula twice in two Universal Monster-Rally films (House of Frankenstein, 1944, and House of Dracula, 1945) in which, at his insistence, he was made up to look like Stoker’s count—elegant, suave, impeccably dressed, with sleek grey hair and mustache, and acted with a restrained if menacing dignity.  But Billy’s Dracula is gaunt and sallow, the cheap color process not helping (he looks positively yellow in some shots); and, with his dyed hair and goatee, his tatty dark suit decked with a flaming red tie, and a persistent, bulging-eyed leer, Carradine resembles, and acts like, not so much an undead aristocrat as an elderly sideshow magician crossed with a pimp.  (The way those eyes protrude, I got this weird notion that someone had grabbed him by the tender parts and…squeezed…)

Was it the film’s cheapness?  Its lousy production values?  Its uninspired story, a bland mashup of standard Western tropes (fistfights, shoot-em-ups, showdowns) and clichéd vampire lore (bats, bat thorn, batting eyes)?  Was it age and weariness, the state of being “absolutely numb” that Carradine claimed the production left him in?  Or was he not so subtly sending up the film, playing it for camp instead of horror?  His vampire here isn’t so much undead as never quite alive; his performance slogs through stale mannerisms and half-remembered gestures with just enough energy to justify a paycheck (that probably wasn’t large enough to begin with).

Yet beneath the ham acting, the bad cinematography (Dracula looks as if he hasn’t been out of his coffin since the end of the Civil War), there’s still a recognizable Carradine—still with that resonant whiskey-and-black-coffee-soaked voice and those amazing cheekbones that sit high on his face and curve down his long, bony visage to cup it like jagged parentheses.  As a young actor Carradine was as thin and tensile as a whip, his lean, lanky body gliding across the screen like a solidified shadow; now in Billy/Dracula, as he was approaching sixty, his elongated physique is drawn out to such El Greco-esque extremes it seems to extend, then vanish, beyond the film frame. 

Weirdly, echoes of that younger, dashing Carradine peek through the dreck of this film.  Such as that flouncy tie and the mustache and goatee—was it inspired, consciously or not, by Carradine’s costume and make-up from the 1939 John Ford classic, Stagecoach?  (No doubt sheer coincidence, but I do wonder.)  Even odder is that, along with Carradine, two other Ford alumni appear:  Harry Carey, Jr. plays, briefly, a wagon master, and Olive Carey is a pioneer doctor (who gets to speak the line, “You think it could be the work of a vampire?”…a line I never thought I’d hear from Olive Carey).  Almost enough of the old John Ford Stock Company is here to stage a John Ford Old Home Week.  Which might’ve been more fun than the movie that would house it.

Olive belts one down

Two other Billy/Dracula cast members of note:  First is Virginia Christine as a German maid on the lookout for vampires, who brings more conviction and feeling to her part than the film deserves.  Boomers know Ms. Christine from those 1960s-70s coffee commercials (and, yeah, several times in the film she’s addressed by other actors as “Mrs. Olson” rather than as her film character’s name—One Shot, indeed).  However, I know Christine from her impressive performance as a reincarnated Egyptian princess in the last of Universal’s Mummy sequels, the 1944 fun horror The Mummy’s Curse—in which, wrapped in enough bandages to fill a hospital ward, she has to crawl out of a mud-slogged swamp that resembles an oatmeal dumping ground.  In one take.  The lady was a total pro.

Of second note is the delightful Marjorie Bennett as a stagecoach passenger who’s unaware of the identity of the gaunt gentleman sitting across from her.  Like Christine (and Carradine), Bennett was another busy performer with a l-o-o-o-ng career in film and TV; she’s beloved by boomers for her unforgettable bit as Victor Buono’s chatty mum in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?  She’s equally chatty (and unforgettable) upon meeting Dracula (“I’m afraid I am talking too much”).  Another total pro.  So c’mon, Mr. “I was absolutely numb” Carradine—what’s there to be numb about?  With actors like Olive, Harry, Virginia, and Marjorie, we’ve got here a cast of immortals!  Like, Utter Wow!

You know, this film might just be totally awesome after all.

You can watch Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula (my eyebrows never cease to lift at that title) on Tubi here (free with ads); on the Internet Archive here (free); or a pretty good print on YouTube here, while available (free, possible ads, depending on YouTube’s mood…).

Here’s a (very) washed-out trailer for Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula (spelled ‘Versus’ in the trailer).  “The Gun-Fighter Against the Ghoul!”:

Robin Bailes at Dark Corners Reviews looks at movie posters for several ‘Dracula Versus’ films, including Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula; Bonnie and Clyde Vs. Dracula; and Batman Fights Dracula—like, how totally awesome can you get?

So, The Living Dead Girl is…really something.  A 1982 French horror film, directed by Jean Rollin—an auteur with whom I’m not familiar but who I gather has a huge cult reputation—the film starts innocuously enough, with three men depositing tubs of chemical waste in an aristocratic family’s crypt, then proceeding to rob the well-to-do deceased within.  An earth tremor knocks over one waste-filled barrel (I didn’t know earth tremors were a thing in France, but now I do), and the released toxic fumes revive the title character, the young and beautiful Catherine.  It’s never explained how, or why, the fumes bring Catherine back from the dead, but then, do we ever question why Dr. Frankenstein likes to stitch up corpses?  In any case, the now undead Catherine, still dressed in her frilly white burial gown and looking surprisingly fresh and dewy despite being dead for some years, kills the three grave robbers for their blood (which she needs to live).  After which she wanders off into the gorgeous French countryside and we are off to a bang-up start.

I watched The Living Dead Girl (its original French title, La Morte Vivante, sounds so much classier) because it was recommended by several YouTube horror-film channels—as I recall, the young male hosts were enthusiastic about its gore—and what with waste-dumping, grave-robbing, corpse-reviving, thief-slaying, and blood-drinking—and that’s just the first ten minutes—I can see why.  Per his Wikipedia profile, Jean Rollin specialized in what’s called “fantastique” horror, gruesome tales that, in Rollin’s case, are marked by do-you-get-my-meaning titles.  Such, for example, as The Grapes of Death (reading that, I get this mental image of John Steinbeck rolling in his grave), about people drinking poisoned wine and turning into zombies.  Other Rollin films (and titles) include The Nude Vampire; Shiver of the Vampires; Requiem for a Vampire; The Two Orphan Vampires (D.W. Griffith must be rolling in his), The Rape of the Vampire; Lips of Blood; Dracula’s Fiancée, and like-minded others.  I’m sensing a theme here.  I haven’t seen Rollin’s other films (not sure if I want to) but his output, at least per the titles, does possess a certain consistency.  (And I haven’t even mentioned the porn…)

Based on this one film, Rollin strikes me as kind of a low-budget French version of Ken Russell, lacking Russell’s flamboyant camera technique and set designs but serving up the flamboyant color palette and frenzied passions.  If The Living Dead Girl is anything to go by, Rollin goes in for frenzy in many forms:  Full-frontal female nudity, graphic gore and violence, soft-core sex scenes, softer-core lesbianism, and a crude but effective cinematic style.  It’s not elegant but it gets its point across (according to this interview, Rollin was a self-taught filmmaker).  The movie is certainly brutal (our blonde, buxom Catherine kills a lot of people, drinks a lot of blood, and tears a lot of bodies into bloody pieces…with her teeth), but it’s also…oddly beautiful.  I think that’s because its emphasis is not on blood per se but rather on—feeling.  What separates The Living Dead Girl from standard splatter-fests is Rollin’s interest in film as an aesthetic tool, in which, he says, “ideas, images…represent an emotion” conveyed “visually.”  The splatter, the full-bore excess, are a means of expressing passions lived at life’s edge—indeed, to the limits of existence itself.

It’s within such excess that the film’s central relationship between Catherine and her still-living lover, Helene, is framed.  Rollin shows us, via flashback, how the pair had, as schoolgirls, shared a literal blood oath of undying love; and blood, as both metaphor and physical substance, still unites them.  Discovering Catherine’s miraculous resurrection, the still-besotted Helene rushes to join her (at Catherine’s fabulous chateau), willing to do anything to keep Catherine alive.  Her devotion extends to capturing humans for Catherine to feed on, even to meal-prepping the bodies to sate her beloved’s hunger.  There’s nothing subtle or sexy, à la Christopher Lee’s Dracula, about this couple’s vampiric love; Helene slices open victims so Catherine can feast—lapping up blood and gorging on organs, flesh, and veins.  These scenes are gross and disturbing, yet compelling; despite their carnage and crudity, they come across as perversely romantic.  The gore, the slaughter, the over-the-top bloodlust, are not just for grisly spectacle but to convey the couple’s deeper, overwrought ardor—of love lived at the extremes of sex, desire, and surrender, even unto death.

In a way, I think the film’s bizarre, if sensual content, its unblinking gore, and its willingness to upset, even disgust viewers, are its main strengths.  What drags it down are ancillary plot lines that seem added for convention’s sake, perhaps to fill out standardized running times.  Chief among such is that of an amateur photographer who, snapping a photo of Catherine meandering through sun-kissed fields, becomes obsessed with finding out who (and what) she is.  You could argue the photographer plot provides us some background info on Catherine, but was there a need to add her very annoying, mansplaining American boyfriend?  I’ve a notion the boyfriend was inserted mainly to set up a nasty (and spectacular) kill scene towards the end, when (spoiler alert) the guy receives a battle axe to the forehead.  Rollin wasn’t above shooting gore for gore’s sake, but in this case, I’ll overlook the lapse.

So, yeah, the movie may be schlocky, Rollin filming it with the delicacy of that axe aimed at the brow (blood gushing as if pumped with a bellows).  Yet beyond such flaws, the director brings a true emotional conviction and believability to his two main characters.  And his two actresses, Françoise Blanchard (Catherine) and Marina Pierro (Helene), respond to their roles with a full-blooded commitment that’s weird yet wrenching to watch.  The final scene (another spoiler), when Helene offers herself as a literal sacrifice to Catherine—the latter tearing out her throat and abdomen, gulping down her blood, and gobbling her flesh—is both horrifying and pitiful; and Blanchard’s final howl of anguish is the cry of a lost soul to the night.  I’ll go further; Blanchard’s performance at that moment is downright—awesome.  (Per Rollin, “nobody [on the set] was sure whether she was just acting or collapsing for real.”)  It’s the kind of acting done by a performer willing to plunge into the grimmest depths to bring out a raw, lived truth; and it elevates this film beyond soft-core vampire porn to genuine art.  All hail Rollin and the Ladies! 

You can watch The Living Dead Girl on Tubi here (free with ads, in French, English subtitles).  You can also watch a good print on YouTube here while available (in French, Spanish subtitles).  Trigger warning:  The film contains graphic nudity, gore, and violence, plus scenes of a peculiar, passionate beauty…

Bonus Clip:  The scene when Helene discovers Catherine is again alive (in a manner of speaking):