Reeling Backward: "The Legend of Hell House" (1973)

In 1973, horror was transitioning into its modern form. Prior to that it had always been a marginalized, rather sedate genre -- closer to fantasy than sheer terror. Killer blobs, killer birds, Byron-esque vampires. Horror movies often seemed to feature an erudite male authority figure trying to explain all the weird phenomena away, at least until he gets his comeuppance.

Roger Corman, Hammer Films and a few others were decidedly different with a gleeful, schlocky approach, though they rarely punctuated the upper levels of mainstream cinematic consciousness. Horror was seen as kiddie movies, and were pitched as such: scary, but not too scary.

George Romero changed things with 1968's "Night of the Living Dead," which actually tickled the primeval fear centers of the brain, not to mention featuring some rather gory violence. But Romero's next few films were fairly forgettable until the "Dead" sequel came a decade later.

Things really got kicked into high gear with the December 1973 release of "The Exorcist," followed by "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" the following year, and "The Shining" the year after that. Six months before "Exorcist" came "The Legend of Hell House," which in many ways stands as the dividing line between new and old horror.

The film, directed by John Hough from a screenplay by Richard Matheson, based on his own book, can be seen today as the wellspring of the "haunted house" subgenre, in which all the action (or nearly so) takes place in a single supernatural location. We can see a lot of its features in subsequent films, from "Poltergeist" on up.

The setup is straightforward: four people spend a week in the Belasco House, the "Mount Everest of haunted houses," at the behest of a decrepit old tycoon (Roland Culver). Each of three experts is to be paid £100,000 -- almost $1.5 million in today's dollars -- to discover if "survival after death" is factually possible. The lineup:

• Dr. Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), a renowned physicist specializing in the study of the occult. He plays the role of the rational doubter, always tut-tutting others' fears.
• Ann Barrett (Gayle Hunnicutt), Dr. Barrett's wife and extraordinarily unwise +1. 
• Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), a young medium and spirtualist who is the most attuned to the house's evil emanations.
• Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowell), another medium and the only survivor -- of sound mind and body, anyway -- from the last attempt to penetrate the mysteries of Belasco House 20 years ago, when he was just a teenager.

The one thing I couldn't help noticing about the story is that the investigators fulfill their contractual obligations within the first day or two, as objects start flying and voices begin moaning. Barrett is using cameras, microphones and more sophisticated equipment to record it all. So they could all have decamped by Tuesday supper, collected their fees and lived happily ever after.

Instead, they determine to solve the puzzle of "Roaring Giant" Emeric Belasco, the debauched millionaire who built the house decades earlier and disappeared after his family was massacred. For some reason this involves spending nights at the house, where they're more vulnerable to the nefarious energies that swirl about there, particularly of the erotic kind. 

Both Hunnicutt and Franklin have nude scenes -- rather chaste by today's standards, as the film did carry a PG rating from the then-new MPAA -- and experience invasions by spirits that compel them to engage in sexual endeavors. 

Ann, rebuffed by her unaffectionate husband, throws herself at Ben, not once but twice, including a memorable suggestion that the four visitors engage in an orgy. Florence, convinced that the primary presence in the house is Daniel Belasco, the lord's tortured son, agrees to let him have ghost-sex with her if it'll calm his restless spirit.

(Spoiler: it doesn't. Whether corporeal or not, men will say anything to a woman to get laid.)

Interestingly, the events take place in the days leading up to Christmas, though the significance of that is never commented upon. The days of the week would put the story as set in 1971 rather than '72.

It's an interesting movie, though not a particularly scary one by modern standards or even, I should think, those of its day. It's a whole lot of talking, questioning, arguing, with a few interruptions by doors that open and close themselves, falling chandeliers, that sort of thing. There's never any sort of physical manifestations of the Belasco spirits. 

The performances are enervating, especially Franklin as a nascent goth girl type of figure, dressing in witch-y clothing. As Ben, McDowell seems largely constipated during most of the film, concentrating his energies internally rather than outward in a protective stance. Given he barely survived his last encounter with the house, we're never provided a compelling reason why he would return.

Much is made in the story about the difference between Ben and Florence's abilities, with the former being a physical medium and the latter a mental medium. These terms are banded about nonchalantly, as if the audience should understand the difference -- or even what a medium is, for that matter. The distinction also grows increasingly meaningless as the movie goes on, with Florence manifesting physical effects of her communion with lost souls, and Ben engaging directly with the spirit of Belasco in the final confrontation.

Speaking of which, the final battle and outcome is rather disappointing. It seems the great mystery of Belasco (spoiler ahead) is that he was actually short, rather than the 6-foot-5 behemoth he purported to be. Ben taunts him as a sawed-off runt he doubts was five feet tall. Belasco even took the dire measure of amputating his own legs so longer prosthetic ones could be installed. 

Talk about the mother of all Napoleon complexes. But I have to say, "He killed because he was wee" does not exactly make for a compelling keystone for a vortex of supernatural evil.

Barrett's plan is to use his big whirring machine as a "reverser" to drain the house of the electromagnetic energy that has built up there over the years. It's totally gobbledygook, but it works, or at least mostly but not entirely, for reasons we shall see.

"The Legend of Hell House" is an interesting film, though not an especially good one. It's more notable for its place in the history of horror than any substantial terror generated. Brasher, wetter fare was still just around the corner.

Reeling Backward: "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" (1974)

If "Easy Rider," "Vanishing Point" and "Two-Lane Blacktop" form the triumvirate of iconic counterculture road pictures of the late 1960s and early '70s, then "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" is the sellout poseur, tagging along in their wake with hollow mimicry.

Made in 1974 with a budget of $2 million -- extravagant compared to those other films -- it rode the popularity of Peter Fonda at its zenith, pairing him up with a hippy chickie blonde in a denim halter top (actually British actress Susan George, well concealing her accent but not wonky teeth).

The title and the posters of the comely couple, perched on top of their getaway car or running from a police helicopter, make it seem so exciting and even romantic: impetuous race car driver on the lam with beautiful petty thief. The combination made it a successful commercial hit.

Except there's a third character in the car with them the whole time, and he's actually the most interesting person in the movie.

But I guess "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and Taciturn Deke" doesn't make for a very memorable title.

Played by Adam Raorke, Deke is the mechanic to Fonda's wheel man Larry, much like the clearly demarcated roles in "Two-Lane Blacktop." They have dreams of getting to the NASCAR circuit. Deke's already been there, but drank his way out. Larry has the talent and the requisite complete lack of fear. All they need is money for "real speed."

They steal $150,000 from a supermarket by Deke holding the wife and daughter of the manager (Roddy McDowall) captive at home while Larry saunters into his office for the cash out of the safe. They don't even have guns, or bother to wear masks/disguises, using a fancy phone voice message machine to make the manager think they've still got his family.

A couple of questions:

• 150 grand is $732,000 in today's dollars. What the hell kind of grocery store keeps that kind of cash on hand?
• If their scheme is successful and they make it big in NASCAR, wouldn't that mean Larry would at least get famous enough to be recognized as the perpetrator?

You could ask these sorts of questions all day long about the movie. Larry makes a terrible effort at being inconspicuous on the road, jumping his blue 1966 Chevy Impala off a tractor ramp right after the robbery, and otherwise tearing up the street wherever he goes. You get the sense of it's part of his impulsive nature and desire to be a show-off, but that doesn't make the repeated willful stupidity of his actions any easier to swallow.

Later Deke and Larry switch to another car they thought ahead to have ready. Except they apparently parked it 50 miles away in the middle of a small town. When they arrive to retrieve it, there's a large street market going on to draw a lot of attention. If that weren't enough, the other car is a bright yellow 1969 Dodge Charger that any half-blind cop could see coming a mile away.

Often, it seems like they're trying to get caught.

(The Charger's color was actually Citron Yella, which has a lot of green in it, and indeed one police officer describes it over the two-way radio as "light green." Interestingly, the technicians who developed the film thought the greenish tint was a mistake and incorrectly corrected it -- so the movie was always presented with the wrong color palette. It was finally fixed for its DVD release in 2005.)

Larry and Deke's relationship is fraught. They clearly respect each other's skills, but Deke resents Larry's gregarious recklessness while Larry sees Deke as a killjoy, often derisively addressing him as "Bunky." Deke is supposed to be much older (though the actors were really on three years apart in age) and world-weary. Neither ever really tries to order the other one around.

When Larry pulls one of his frequent just-for-the-hell-of-it maneuvers, like slaloming between two semis and earning a cracked windshield in the process, Deke just shakes his head and frets about the damage.

Mary shows up right after the robbery. Much like the Girl in "Two-Lane Blacktop," she squats in his car uninvited and gets sucked up into the action. As she herself says, she didn't really have anything better to do.

She's not a stranger, though: Larry just had a one night stand with her, and she's pissed about being dumped and seeks him out. How she found him, other than his rather ubiquitous-looking Chevy, is left a mystery.

The relationship of the trio gradually evolves as the miles go by. Mary initially finds Deke creepy -- we get the sense most people do -- but comes to resent Larry for making his disdain for her clear. She's a fiery ball of independence who secretly wants desperately to be needed by somebody. When her confrontation with Larry reaches a point of (mild) physical violence, it's Deke who comes to her defense.

The other major character is Captain Franklin, played by Vic Morrow. He's a surly state patrol officer who refuses to wear a badge or gun, talks back to his superior (Kenneth Tobey) and grows his hair out long  underneath his cowboy hat. But he's got serious law enforcement know-how, and leads the chase to catch the miscreants, eventually climbing into a helicopter to personally take on Larry's yellow Charger.

Soon Franklin figures out that the robbers have been monitoring his orders over the CB, and they start to have a running game of taunts and one-upsmanship. It's fun, for a little while.

Larry and company also get a (brief) challenge in the form of an aggressive young cop with a talent behind the wheel named Hank (played by Eugene Daniels, who could be Channing Tatum's dad for the eerie resemblance). Initially crashed by Larry, Hank gets himself a new souped-up police Interceptor and makes a go of it after the robbers flee into a labyrinth of walnut groves.

Director John Hough has a decent eye for the action scenes and car chases. He had a quirky career, mostly bouncing back and forth between horror films and family-friendly stuff for Disney, including both the "Witch Mountain" movies later in the '70s.

Based on the novel "The Chase" by Richard Unekis, which came out in 1963 at the dawn of the muscle car era, "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" helps mark the end of it. Big V-8 engines would soon go underground for awhile, so neither cops or robbers had them to command.

It would take until the "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Cannonball" movies for car chase flicks to become popular again, this time as escapist entertainment rather than commentary on America's competing appetites for freedom and law & order. "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" serves as something of a bridge between the two.

Reeling Backward: "Cleopatra" (1963)

"Cleopatra" is remembered today almost entirely for its largeness -- its budget, its ambition, its length, the ego of its two stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the scope of its fiscal disaster. It was the top-grossing film of 1963 but still nearly put 20th Century-Fox out of business due to spiraling costs: $44 million for production and marketing, the equivalent of $340 million in 2016 dollars.

The film single-handedly killed off the big-budget Hollywood period epic for a couple generations. Many careers were sunk or least laid low for a time, including director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Though not Taylor and Burton, who scandalously carried on a public affair during the shoot while married to other people, eventually leaving their spouses to wed and star in a number of other notable pictures together.

Its name has become synonymous with the term "flop," often mentioned in the same breath as "Waterworld," "Ishtar" and "Heaven's Gate." Taylor's health often delayed shooting, including an emergency visit to the hospital where she received a tracheotomy, resulting in a scar that's visible in many shots. Her weight also fluctuated dramatically over more than a year of shooting as a result of her medical issues -- the London sets were torn down and rebuilt in Italy during the hiatus -- so that Cleopatra's double chin and waistline come and go from scene to scene.

There is in fact so much ridicule associated with "Cleopatra" that people tend to look past its magnificence.

Yes, at four hours and change it is entirely too long (especially with the curious omission of an intermission, direly testing patience and bladders). Things flow well until about the 2½ hour mark, when the brooding romance between the Egyptian queen and Mark Antony sends the film into a torpor, revived only at the end with the pair's dramatic deaths, recalling Romeo and Juliet.

It seems like there is a solid hour of screen time in which Burton does little more than swig from his ever-present flagon of wine and shout ineffectually at those around him.

Yet the grandness of its spectacle cannot be denied. The procession of Cleopatra into Rome should rightly be regarded as one of the most opulent, jaw-dropping moment in cinematic history. The scale of the sets, thousands of extras, Cleopatra's moving sphinx stage -- the mind boggles trying to take it all in at once.

"Cleopatra" may have cost a boatload, but the millions are right there on the screen to behold.

The story actually covers about 20 years of history, and fairly faithfully. Julius Caesar -- played by Rex Harrison in one of his best performances, I think -- comes to Alexandria while fighting enemies on all sides. He had previously installed teenage siblings Cleopatra and Ptolemy as co-rulers of Egypt, but the brother had pushed her out.

The much-older Caesar regards the young Egyptian girl as an impertinent pest, but in time he comes to see her as a prized pupil in the ways of leadership, and eventually something more intimate. Taylor plays Cleopatra as an intensely intelligent and calculating person, who absorbs the wisdom of Caesar and then puts it to her own use.

She bore him a son, Caesarion, and they wed despite Caesar already being married to a proper Roman woman. Upon being named dictator for life -- but still requiring the consent of the Senate to do anything -- he summons Cleopatra to Rome, resulting in the spectacle mentioned above. She is at the height of her powers, and Taylor positively thrums with authority and confidence.

Eventually Caesar is brought down and assassinated, and loyal right-hand man Antony shares leadership for a time with two others, notably Octavian, Caesar's cunning nephew. He's played by Roddy McDowell in a coy turn, clearly presented as homosexual, but a far superior politician and tactician than Antony.

Given stewardship of the eastern portion of the Roman Empire, Antony soon falls into Cleopatra's arms himself. Here, rather than using her wiles to distract a potential conqueror, Cleopatra seems to genuinely fall in love with the complex, proud Antony. Like Caesar he is accused by his peers of "going native," and is later summoned back to Rome and forced into a political marriage to Octavian's widowed sister.

Eventually Octavian, who would go on to become the first Roman Emperor, solidifies his power and maneuvers Antony into war, where his overconfidence undoes him in the naval Battle of Actium. It's an amazing sequence, with full-size ship replicas, flaming ballistas, the works.

Unmanned in defeat, Antony's despondency increases when his troops abandon him before a bold land attack against Octavian's legions. He took his own life and then Cleopatra took hers.

This all sounds fairly incredible, one woman at the center of so much pivotal history, but as I said the movie is actually pretty accurate to the known historical record. The film's major omission is removing any reference to the three children the pair had together, who were spared by Octavian and brought to Rome to be raised by his sister.

(Caesarion and Antony's other son by a previous marriage did not fare so well, literally dragged screaming to their executions.)

The cinematography, sets, special effects and costumes are lavish beyond imagining. The film won Oscars in all four categories, setting industry standards that could only be achieved today through the extensive use of CGI. "Cleopatra" also earned Academy Award nominations for best picture, sound, editing, music score and best supporting actor, for Harrison.

I was surprised by how much flesh there is in the film. Taylor appears nude twice, obscured by a towel during a massage and by the water of a bath. Various servants and such in the background are often scantily dressed. A dancer during the procession appears wearing only a thong and pasties over her nipples, which must have made quite an impression in 1963.

Martin Landau and Hume Cronyn are solid in supporting roles as cagey advisors to Antony and Cleopatra, respectively. Carroll O'Connor turns up as Casca, one of Caesar's leading murderers, and I admit encountering Archie Bunker in a toga was disconcerting.  Andrew Keir is a stalwart presence as Agrippa, a longtime foe of Antony's.

I'd been meaning to get to "Cleopatra" for several years, and am pleased by what I found. Like "Gone With the Wind," it's a terrific movie that got swallowed by a much longer film. The difference being that while the former is lavishly overpraised, "Cleopatra" deserves much better than to be regarded as a cinematic punchline.

Here is Hollywood moviemaking teetering at the end of its golden age, grand and gaudy, its flaws inseparable from its many virtues.

Reeling Backward: "Man Hunt"

Boy, what a great movie "Man Hunt" could have been.

This 1941 historical thriller had a great concept: A famous British hunter takes a shot at Adolf Hitler before the outbreak of war, and then is hunted down by German thugs who want to make a political spectacle out of him. And it's directed by the great German filmmaker Fritz Lang ("Metropolis"), who was a master of mood and shadow.

Unfortunately, the film suffers from a series of bad missteps.

Start with the terrible performance by Walter Pidgeon, whose Alan Thorndike is a puckish rogue one minute, then a mournful victim the next, and finally a stalwart hero. There's no anguish to the man, so that even when the Nazis are beating him mercilessly or tracking Thorndike through the streets of London, we don't really feel his peril. Pidgeon was certainly no hack, but I think he was badly miscast in this movie.

The romance portion of the film also brings it to a dead stop every time Joan Bennett is onscreen, playing a Cockney girl who lends Thorndike a hand. She falls in love with him almost instantly, and keeps stubbornly insisting that he bring her along while he flees the Germans. He protests, but keeps giving in to the pouty, pathetic masher.

The Nazis, being no fools, eventually catch up with and kill her. I silently cheered.

There are some other nice supporting performances. George Sanders is great as a Nazi (who just happens to speak with a perfect British accent), wears a monocle (didn't all Germans?) and fashions himself to be a hunter the equal of Thorndike. And a very young Roddy McDowall has a neat turn as a cabin boy who smuggles Thorndike aboard his ship during his escape.

What "Man Hunt" does have is the visual genius of Fritz Lang. The great director seemed to command shadows to bend to his will, pooling in inky depths or slitting across an alley scene in a way that subtly throws everything into a creepy off-kilter slant.

The film's signature scene is when Thorndike flees into a subway tunnel while being chased by a never-named villain, played by John Carradine in a nearly wordless role. Dressed all in black, his famously spare frame and skull-like face looming, Carradine stalks Thorndike with a sword-cane. The way the circular maw of the tunnel envelops the villain is signature Lang, who had a talent for making inanimate objects take on a life of their own.

The opening sequence is quite gripping. Thorndike, a great hunter who has grown bored with killing animals, decides to conduct a "sporting stalk" of the most challenging game in the world: Hitler himself. He stealthily makes his way to Hitler's Bavarian chateau, carefully lines up a shot through his telescopic rifle sights, pulls the trigger and... nothing but a click. He's doing it merely to prove to himself that he can, throwing a little mock salute at the Fuhrer before starting to depart.

But then there's a great moment where he pauses, returns to his sights and loads a cartridge into his rifle. He's just starting to line up a live shot when a German soldier spots him and pounces on him.

Would Thorndike really have assassinated Hitler? If screenwriter Dudley Nichols, working from the novel by Geoffrey Household, had had a little more imagination, he would have made this the central question of the film -- Thorndike, who considers himself a gentleman, tortured by the notion that he could be just as murderous as the men now pursuing him.

"Man Hunt" is still a worthwhile film, if only to adore Fritz Lang's gorgeous black-and-white compositions, and to consider what might have been.

2.5 stars