The Ghost And Mr. Chicken has long been one of my favorite films. And it's clear that I'm not alone in my adoration, since Svengoolie often remarks that it's not only one of the most often requested movies on his his Saturday Night spook 'n' snicker show, over on MeTV, but it tends to reportedly bring some of his highest ratings when aired. In the age of DVD and on-demand digital streaming, that says something!
I have full-sized posters for the film all over my house, and thought I'd been privy to all of the variations out there, until I stumbled across these Italian release posters on the internet. Apparently it was released as 7 Days Of Fear (or so Google translate tells me), in Italy, which is a head-scratcher to say the least, since that title reads more like a Dana Andrews film-noir than a Mayberry-esque comic mystery.
The posters themselves are odd; particularly the top one. A just-been-goosed faced Joan Staley gawks from behind a curiously obscured ghost (I thought it was a plume of smoke or potentially an illustrated page roll to separate her from the Italo-obvious splash of vibrant yellow behind the other figures, but noted that the yellow bled above the ghost and that the white plume had little mitten hands). Why you would hide the ghost behind the title, I'm not sure. The whole composition seems oddly haphazard. Why Don Knotts is tied up and pleading to a bored Jim Begg, I don't know. This poster makes it seem like Knotts is the criminal, which, I suppose is a better marketing misdirection than the American poster hanging on the office wall beside me as I type this, which essentially reveals the mystery of the supposedly haunted Simmons house for all to see. And why the two bored cops? They couldn't work in a Burt Mustin or Dick Sargent in there?
The bottom example captures the comic book kookiness a little better with a John Stanley-esque patchwork ghost, but juxtaposed with a very dramatic depiction of our two leads; depicted as if Maurizio Merli were just off the page with a loaded machine gun or something. Oddly enough, this image of Knotts and Staley was used in the cover design for the cd release of the film's soundtrack, put out by Percepto records back in 2004. Even though I don't think the depiction of Don Knotts is particularly adroit, making him look sunken yet oddly muscular–like some sort of Frank Sinatra / Joe Piscopo hybrid.
I always enjoy seeing some yet-undiscovered piece of information or ephemera pop up for things like this; I suppose it's a way for the things that I love to be continuously-giving gifts.
And speaking of previously unseen ephemera, I was completely unaware of this Luther Heggs action figure put out by Brentz Dolz!
Some screenshots from the 1945 film The Spider, starring Richard Conte, Mantan Moreland, Faye Marlowe, Kurt Krueger and Martin Kosleck. I've always been interested in type and typefaces, the use of type design to convey a message. You wouldn't know it from looking at this ramshackle blog, but I even have a BFA in graphic design!
One thing I like about old movies is the art of type and title design that seems to have largely gone away or fallen to two or three presets. Maybe that's a gross overstatement or misdiagnosis. But even the worst Poverty Row (or sub-PR) picture could have a stunningly designed title or interesting title sequence to ease you into the sinkhole of the film. If you're interested in title design, type design, graphic design, I recommend looking up folks like Robert Brownjohn, Alvin Lustig, Saul Bass, Herb Luballin, Snap Wyatt, Susan Kare and April Greiman.
If you're interested in The Spider, you can stream it online. It's a tight little B-thriller that clocks in at under an hour. Not great--it has plot holes you can drive a Volkswagen bus through --but fun enough. No spider to be seen aside from the spider motif of the faux mind-reader played by Marlowe. If they addressed her as "the spider", I missed it.
Anywho, I've included some other great movie typefaces I've seen as of late, below:
Here is an odd little cinematic short from 1928, titled The Fresh Lobster. It's an insane little celluloid nightmare in the vein of Winsor McCay's absurd cartoon strip Dreams Of The Rarebit Fiend. Only in this novel little short, the trigger for the hallucinatory adventure isn't a dinner of melted cheese on bread, but the late night snack of a plate of lobster and a pickle.
The film was supposedly released in theaters in 1928, then re-released twenty years later in 1948, this time with sound. All sources seem to agree that there isn't much known about the production of this oddity, nor the impetus for its creation; perhaps it was McCay's popular newspaper strip. The cinematographer is listed as Harry Forbes, who has camera credits for a number of shorts between 1915 and 1931, and quickie b-westerns and adventure films in the 1930s, before his passing in 1939. The producers credited in the title card are Harvey Pergament and Max Alexander. Pergament seems to have had a limited career in the industry, if his IMDB credits are indicative of his involvement, as he's only listed with one other producer credit, and that's co-producer of a 1954 UK title about South Africa titled Flame Of Africa. Max Alexander has quite the list of production credits to his name, largely b-grade crime and western pictures throughout the 1930s and 40s.
The star of this piece is Billie Bletcher, who started in vaudeville and worked his way steadily from 1914 through the early 1970s in silent films, shorts, voicing characters in Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons, 1960s television appearances in shows like Get Smart and Dennis The Menace, and even had a bit part in the 1940 Boris Karloff thriller The Ape.
The infamous cover image of the first Fantomas novel;
the name of the cover artist, sadly, appears lost to time.
Kino Lorber has just released the entire1960s André Hunebelle Fantomas film trilogy on Blu-Ray and DVD; all three films remastered and available with English subtitles for American audiences for the first time. It seemed a good a time as any to take a little journey down the rabbit hole of French cinema and the history of the pulp hero (and villain) and its odd relation to the American material of the same ilk.
Pierre Souvestre
For those who aren't familiar with the character, Fantomas is a pulp villain created by authors Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre in an attempt to provide their publisher with a popular and enduring pulp magazine for the general market. The pair authored thirty-two adventures for their shadowy character between 1911 and 1913, which seems preposterously prodigious, but understandable when you note the fuel behind such a drive consisted of one part public obsession with the material and the almost factory-like method of production the two authors used for writing the books: Souvestre and Allain would formulate a general plot outline, and then break off to write alternate chapters, which allowed them to complete an entire novel in less than a month. After Pierre Souvestre passed in 1914 of lung congestion, his parter in pulp penned an additional eleven volumes of the Fantomas series. Only the first two volumes of the series were translated and printed for the English market, though the subsequent volumes have been since translated and made available in a digital format, all of which (and much more) can be found at the Fantomas Lives! website, which has essentially any and all information you could want on the character and his various iterations throughout history and mediums.
Marcel Allain
The important thing to note is that the American pulp and serial market primarily focused on heroes and their superhuman ability to overcome some diabolical menace each month. Of course there are exceptions, like Republic's magnificent serial The Crimson Ghost (1946) and their evil space invader serial The Purple Monster Strikes (1945), but the market predominantly focused on the likes of The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage and The Lone Ranger. Even Fantomas's French criminal predecessor, Arsene Lupin, was a gentlemanly rogue who would not kill or seriously injure an individual (though this appeared to have its caveats at points), and even eventually became friend to the police who so ardently sought to capture him, eventually assisting them in solving crimes (though usually while perpetrating another theft in the process). Fantomas was not a rogue. He is a sadistic, anarchistic serial killer who kills and steals because it amuses him. He is a master of disguise who leaves the world–and the reader–wondering exactly who he is or whom is being impersonated by him. Without Fantomas, there would likely be no Diabolik and no Joker. Fantomas became the rage with artists and French society, serving as subject matter for paintings by Juan Gris (below) and René Magritte.
Cubist painter Juan Gris's piece Fantomas (Pipe and Newspaper) 1915.
Poster for Feuillade's first Fantomas serial.
To move right along, a film serial was made in 1913, titled, simply, Fantomas. It was directed by French filmmaker Louis Feuillade, and was popular enough to spawn four sequel serials. Feuillade also directed a highly influential and downright amazing silent serial, playing heavily off of the Fantomas success, titled Les Vampires (1915-16) (also available from Kino Lorber). It centers not around actual vampires, but a covert gang of ruthless, underground criminals who give the appearance of being vampires to put fear into the hearts and minds of the police and the frantic public. The primary figure of this series is the shadowy criminal Irma Vep, dressed primarily in her body-stocking catsuit and built very much in the Fantomas vein.
Poster for Louis Feuillade's silent serial Les Vampires.
Naturally, after the success of his Fantomas and Les Vampires serials, Feuillade sought to keep the ball of his success rolling by attempting to add a third shadowy character to his repertoire, but by this time, public sensationalism had somewhat given way to criticism of Feuillade's films glorifying murderers and criminals, so Feuillade got together with writer and playwright Arthur Bernéde to create Judex, a shadowy avenger who (initially) sets the sights of justice on a malevolent banker who caused the death of his father.
René Cresté as the shadowy vigilante Judex (left) in his super-
scientific underground lair in Feuillade's 1914 (released in 1916)
serial.
Looking at the figure of Judex in his black suit and cape, his black slouch hat pulled down over his eyes, his network of helpers, it's hard to imagine that it didn't overtly inform the design of the prolific American pulp character The Shadow. In further comparison, Judex makes his lair in an underground hideout filled with technological gadgets that help him interrogate criminals and aid in his efforts, much like Batman's renowned Batcave. Like Fantomas, Judex is a master of disguise, a man who keeps to the shadows to achieve his goals and uses subterfuge to stay ahead of the law. Irma Vep is resurrected as conniving criminal Diana Monti, trying to blackmail the banker Favraux and outwit Judex at the same time, in her black catsuit and domino mask.
Maxwell Grant's The Shadow, one of radio and pulp
literature's most enduring characters.
Embedded below is the first chapter of the silent 1916 Judex serial.
Let us jump nearly half a decade into the future. The 1960s saw a revival of both Judex and Fantomas, released only a year apart from each other, but with drastically different leanings.
Poster for Judex, 1963.
Director Georges Franju, perhaps best known, if at all in the States, by horror fans for his shocking 1959 film Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without A Face). Franju injected a heavy German Expressionist influence into the French New Wave of cinema. Looking at his films it's easy to see the lighting and set design aesthetics gleaned from the likes of Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. In 1963, Franju reintroduced Judex to audiences in a surreal black and white adventure/drama with American magician Channing Pollock as the titular character. Inspired by Feuillade's early serials, Franju stays true to the tone of the character and the shadowy world he inhabits, but injects some dreamlike imagery into the fold. Particularly the famous costume party bird scene. Franju's Judex is definitely in the top five favorite film list for me. There are so many elements colliding in Judex, that it could very easily be an aesthetic mess, but the individual elements seem to compel each other into favorable unification.
Below is a scene from the film where Judex infiltrates a costume party thrown by his enemy, the unscrupulous banker Favraux.
Aside: Fans of comic artist/author Richard Sala will recognize many of the elements of Judex and Franju's 1974 Fantomas homas Nuits rouges repeated in his work. He has stated in interviews over the years how Franju's work has been inspirational to his own work, and I strongly recommend checking out, well, everything that Sala has produced. You can find his work on Monsters Illustrated and his Official Tumblr, which also directs you to his ongoing webcomics.
Francine Bergé as Diana Monti, a proto-Catwoman character in
Georges Franju's Judex, 1963.
Jean Marais doing double duty as the sensationalist
reporter protagonist Fandor, and as the master of disguise
monster Fantomas (above).
It was Fantomas that Franju had wanted to remake, but after he relented to helm Judex, director-for-hire André Hunebelle, who had made everything from swashbucklers to a few of the entries in the OSS 117 spy series, picked up the Fantomas baton. A far cry from Feuillade's shadowy world of black masked killers, moody lighting and serious melodrama, the first in Hunebelle's Fantomas series, simply titled Fantomas, arrived on the screen less than two months after the trend-setting Goldfinger, with as much droll humor, bombastic action, explosive pop color and bizarre spy-fi gadget fetishism as any entry in the Bond franchise. Predicating the Adam West "Batman" series by two years, the film plays like a Bond film mashed with an episode of the William Dozier tongue-in-cheek superhero series, pitting reporter Fandor (played by actor Jean Marais), his photographer fiancee Hélene (Myléne Demongeot) and bumbling Inspector Juve (Louis de Funés) against the malevolent super-criminal Fantomas (also Marais). Unlike Feuillade's simple black cowled murderer, Fantomas is now an almost alien looking blue-faced super-villain who has exotic hideouts in dormant volcanoes and beneath the Catacombs of Paris, armed with infinite wealth, and a slew of Batman villain-esque indefatigable henchmen.
Here, below, is an albeit grainy French-language trailer for the first Hunebelle Fantomas film, I find it curious that they show you most of the stunt-based action in the film, much like the Bond picture trailers, but go out of their way not to reveal the titular character's face at all.
You can see from the trailer how heavy situational humor was kneaded into the script, which actually helps the picture. If it had been a strait-laced action film about a garish, hip super-villain, the film would have been pretty to look at but less engaging to watch.
Fantomas introduces the character who has gained notoriety through various crimes, but his existence remains ambiguous, as Fantomas desires. The public see him everywhere, though they've never actually seen him at all. The police think he's an invention of the sensationalist press. After reporter Fandor tries to cash in on the Fantomas fervor with a mock interview, Fantomas kidnaps him and commits crimes using Fandor's face, setting the stage for Fandor to try and clear his identity by apprehending the criminal while evading the police, and the police to pursue Fandor with some mistaken identity hijinks.
The film had two sequels, both directed by Hunebelle: Fantômas se déchaîne (Fantomas Unleashed) hit screens in December of 1965, and Fantômas contre Scotland Yard (Fantomas Against Scotland Yard) in March of '67.
Below is the trailer for Fantômas se déchaîne.
Fantomas Unleashed picks up where the first film left off, literally. Inspector Juve and Fandor are receiving medals for their attempt to apprehend Fantomas when the criminal makes his presence known again. He attempts to kidnap a scientist, Professor Lefevbre (Marais in a third role, for Pete's sake) who has developed a ray that can induce a hypnotic trance in a subject and forces them to adhere to commands. Obviously Fantomas wants this to take over the world. The third film is easily the weakest in the series and plays to the Old Dark House scenario that Agatha Christie made famous with And Then There Were None (previously titled a series of very offensive epithets based on horribly racist children's rhymes of the time of publication), with the cast being confined to a large, secluded manor with a killer (this time Fantomas in the guise of the head of the household whom he has done away with). In Fantomas Against Scotland Yard, Juve and Fandor have followed Fantomas to Britain where he's surfaced in an extortion deal to wheedle exorbitant amounts of money from the country's wealthiest citizens (Mafia included).
Below is the trailer for Fantômas contre Scotland Yard.
Georges Franju, clearly deeply and lastingly inspired by the Fantomas mythos, finding himself instead helming Judex, which he described as (paraphrasing) "the Feuillade serial that was the least Fueillade", finally got to try his hand at his preferred faceless maniac with his 1974 made-for-television feature Nuits Rouges (literally translated to Red Nights, titled Shadowman in the 1975 US dubbed version). While the character isn't named Fantomas, the ruthless red-masked L'homme sans visage (The Man Without A Face) and his army of zombies seek the lost treasure of the Knights Templar, killing anyone who gets in their way. We see the Diana Monti character repurposed from Judex, here in the form of a cat-suited woman simply named La femme. Again we have an intrepid hero, this time a sailor, and his girlfriend teaming up with a police inspector, here played by Goldfinger himself, Gert Frobe, to try to bring the criminal to justice. The screenplay for Nuits Rouges was written by Jacques Champreux, who is none other than Louis Feuillade's grandson, and had previously worked with Franju on the 1963 adaptation of his grandfather's original Judex.
It didn't fare well with critics and is still unavailable in a format outside of Youtube here in the U.S.
Below is a trailer of Nuits Rouges cut together for a public showing somewhere at some point. Enjoy the funky Goblin-like soundtrack!
Far from being completist, I hope this article either piqued your interest in the fun–and finally readily available!–world of French pulp cinema. Maybe someday I'll get into the films of American actor-cum-French film star, Eddie Constantine. That, however, is for a different time.
Another blast in Minnesota's perpetual snowstorm cycle kept me indoors yesterday, so I set myself up in front of the television with a 50s b-movie double feature. I suppose the folks over at MGM already knew when assembling the Midnite Movies double-feature disc of The Vampire (1957) and The Return Of Dracula (1958), what I stumbled upon watching it, thus rendering this whole article pointless and meandering in its minutiae breakdown, but that's what I do; so here we go.
The art of recycling isn't anything new in the world of entertainment. The Mayberry set from "The Andy Griffith Show" has been famously repurposed a number of times for "Star Trek", from "The Adventures of Superman", and so on. There's more info in this MeTV article. When you watch enough television from the same era, or movies produced by the same studios, especially low budget ones, you begin to notice familiar landmarks and objects popping up over and over again. For example the computers in Adam West's Bat Cave doubling as the sonar equipment in The Seaview on "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea" or as miscellaneous set dressing in "Lost In Space".
There was one small split-second shot in The Return Of Dracula that caused me to pause and consider if the two films had more in common than just shared space on a DVD. This shot below, of an establishing shot of a doctor's shingle near the forty-five minute mark.
Actor Robert Lynn plays a minor, uncredited character in the film named Dr. Paul Beecher. Now I wasn't as familiar with The Return Of Dracula as I was with the second feature, having seen The Vampire a number of times (it's kind of a favorite of mine). I hadn't seen The Return Of Dracula in probably ten years. But the shot piqued my interest, because I knew that John Beal, the principal actor and titular monster in The Vampire, played a doctor named Paul Beecher. Sure enough, as you can see below, we see Coleen Gray (Paul's nurse Carol Butler) walking past the exact same sign, in front of the exact same house!
Well, I hadn't even bothered to note the opening credits of the films, but sure enough, both were produced for Gramercy Pictures and distributed by Universal. Both films were directed by Paul Landres, who did a number of low budget genre pictures and directed quite a few episodes of television shows like "Flipper" and "77 Sunset Strip". Both pictures were produced by Arthur Gardner and Jules V. Levy of the Gardner-Lavin-Levy production team that produced genre pictures for Gramercy in the 1950s, as well as television shows like "The Rifleman", "The Big Valley" and "The A-Team". Both pictures were written by Pat Fielder, a screenwriter-for-hire who wrote dozens of television show episodes and four Gardner-Lavin-Levy produced Gramercy pictures: The Vampire (1957), The Monster Who Challenged The World (1957), The Return Of Dracula (1958) and The Fire Barrier (1958).
The Return Of Dracula came out a scant ten months after The Vampire, so Gramercy undoubtedly scrambled to pad out a feature fraught with time and financial constraints, as the pictures were reportedly received rather poorly and made poor box office returns. It's likely that Gardner and Levy were cranking out these little noir-horror thrillers to see if one would stick and recoup the losses from the previous one(s).
Both films also feature great music by (and in the case of The Return Of Dracula, is improved by) Gerald Fried. If you haven't seen either film and you're a fan of 1950s b horror and science-fiction pictures, I definitely urge you check out The Vampire. It's similar in tone to the Sam Katzman-produced The Werewolf from the year before, mixing mid-century science-fiction elements in to explain the origin of the film's creature. This vampire in question's transformation is brought on by pill addiction and a reversal of the character to primitive instincts (similar to Arthur Franz in 1958's Monster On The Campus ) rather than needing sustenance to bring life to an undead body.
Trailer for The Vampire starring John Beal, Coleen Gray
and Dabbs Greer
The Return Of Dracula, on the other hand, has all the thrills and suspense of a lackluster episode of NBC's Boris Karloff-hosted "Thriller". There isn't much there beyond Fried's score until you reach the end. Similar to the famous bathtub scene in William Castle's The Tingler, which came out the following year, we get a color insert used for the staking scene, which the trailer has the audacity to show, but in black-and-white!
Trailer for The Return Of Dracula starring Francis Lederer
and Norma Eberhardt
Color insert shot of staking scene, jolting enough to be effective
and probably the only really interesting thing about the film.
Day Three needs no explanation. I could go into the pre-code madness that is the great The Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. I could point out how the opening title sequence alone is better than the sum total of most movies in the cineplex this very moment. I could gabba-gabba on and on about how it was directed by Karl Freund, who was the director of photography on Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Tod Browning's Dracula and John Huston's Key Largo.
Lobby card for Karl Freund's 1932 film The Mummy. Boris Karloff is wonderfully billed here as "Karloff The Uncanny"!
I could do all of this, or I could just show you my meager marker scribblin's in the semi-form of Boris Karloff as Adreth Bay / Imhotep, the titular Mummy.
One of the amazing things that I've gotten to do over the last few years (this was the fourth, I believe) that falls into the category of "I can't believe I get to experience this!" but somehow had the good fortune to be a part of, is the Trylon Cinema and The Friends of the Cemetery "Cinema In The Cemetery" event. Over the last four Septembers I've gotten to sit in Minneapolis's oldest cemetery, the Pioneers and Soldiers Cemetery on Cedar Avenue, and watch old horror films screened on a small screen erected directly in front of the caretaker's cottage. If you had told monster movie-obsessed child-me that I'd get to sit and watch Vincent Price in The Last Man On Earth or Hammer Films' Dracula in a cemetery, I'd have thought you were either bonkers or trying to sell me a line.
Not only did that happen, but twice–during the first year, watching El Santo And Blue Demon Against The Monsters, and the following year during Dracula, of all things–the scene was complete with a full, blood-red harvest moon!
This year the program was a little different. The Trylon usually creates a theme, and runs one film per Saturday along that theme for the month of September. One year it was all Hammer Films productions; last year was a month of Vincent Price films, etcetera. This year there was only one outing scheduled, for whatever reason, and it was a showing of the 1924 silent classic The Hands Of Orlac, directed by Robert Wiene and starring Conrad Veidt as the titular Orlac. Being a silent film, of course, the music was crucial, and this was supplied not by pre-recorded soundtrack, but by a live ensemble called Spider Hospital. You can hear a piece of the music here.
I took my sketchbook along and did some doodling during the brief period of waning daylight before the show started. I didn't get much on paper before it was too dark to see, but that's fine. I was there to watch the movie, and the movie was great. The only irksome thing cantankerous old me finds with these outdoor screenings, is the crowd is often a mixed bag. Some old folks who remember the films and have remained fans, some film buffs out to catch a classic in an unique environment, and those who've shown up for a novel experience–usually families looking for something to do besides sit around the house and ask what there is to do. I generally have my Svengoolie shirt on at these things (solidarity is important) and usually get one or two middle-aged guys who point at the glow-in-the-dark design and say "That's what I'd be watching if I wasn't here tonight."
Some sketches of headstones.
I'm no puritan when it comes to the film viewing experience; unless there's someone gabbing on their cell phone during the picture, or standing in front of the screen, everyone's allowed to have a good time watching a movie. But I've found these things have a tendency to turn into amateur Mystery Science Theater 3000 events. Yes, films from the beginning or middle of the last century have elements that don't translate well to people who don't have the context or reverence for the material that I or other fans of the films might have. Especially when the film is a silent film. Of course there's no dialogue for the actors to utilize to help convey emotion or context, so they have to over emphasize body language and facial expression. Every concerned character becomes a wide-eyed, chest-clutching basket case on the verge of a nervous breakdown, every swooning lover becomes a creepily melodramatic, bewildered caricature. It looks goofy to the CGI generations and that's understandable, but to constantly lambast and heckle the material and performances as if we were sitting around at the Internet Cat Video Festival gets a bit irritating after a while. Same goes for the guy sitting next to me who spent nearly all of the ninety-two minute running time scrolling through his various social media streams on his cell phone. Apparently the comments he was receiving in response to the comments he made on some picture of something was more riveting than what he'd paid $10 to experience.
I don't know why there aren't more events scheduled this month. Hopefully disgraceful acts like this won't prevent future screenings.
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