The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (14 page)

As a film critic who sees several hundred movies a year, there are a couple of words that strike fear into my heart. The word “sequel” usually means that I'm going to spend a couple hours of my day sitting in a theater watching a bunch of Hollywood types thrashing away at a warmed-over concept. Another word is “remake” — I dread the inevitable ache of witnessing Guy Ritchie bungle
Swept Away
or watching a dead-eyed Sly Stallone in
Get Carter
.

Of course, not all sequels and remakes are train wrecks.
Godfather 2
is arguably a better film than the original, and Steve Martin's
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
vastly improves on the 1964 version of the same tale,
Bedtime Story
. The 1941 romantic fantasy
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
has been remade several times, with varying degrees of success. Six years after the original was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar the story resurfaced as a flashy Technicolor musical titled
Down to Earth
and earned favorable reviews for its star Rita Hayworth. In 1978 Warren Beatty retooled and retitled the story, scoring his biggest hit to date with
Heaven Can Wait
. In 2001 comedian Chris Rock took another kick at the can, but with far less satisfying results. His
Down to Earth
took a critical drubbing, with one noted critic calling it an “astonishingly bad movie.” It's time then to go back and have a look at the first and best version of the story.

Based on a popular stage play,
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
starred Robert Montgomery (father to
Bewitched
star Elizabeth Montgomery) as saxophone-playing boxer Joe Pendleton, who perishes in a plane crash on the way to his next fight. In Heaven he is told that there has been a mistake — he had been taken by an overzealous Heavenly Messenger (Edward Everett Horton) 50 years before his time. Looking for a way to right this wrong, angelic pencil pusher Mr. Jordan (Claude Raines) sends Pendleton's soul back to Earth. Unfortunately they are too late, and his body has already been cremated. The solution? Give him a new body.

Eventually they settle on the form of Oliver Farnsworth, a millionaire who has just been murdered by his wife. A new love and the scheming of the murderous wife complicate his new life as he prepares to win the prize fight he missed in his old body.

There are plot holes, some feel-good dramatics, and the occasional overwrought performance — check out Horton's contrite blubbering — but the light tone and breezy comic dialogue rise above the movie's shortcomings. So what if Robert Montgomery looks more like a matinee idol than prizefighter? This is a Hollywood screwball comedy, not
Raging Bull
. Taken for what it is, a charming romantic comedy without an ounce of irony or cynicism,
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
is a classic of its genre, and bears up to repeated viewings.

The credit sequence of
High School Confidential
kicks off with wildcat rocker Jerry Lee Lewis pounding out the title song while being driven through town on the back of a flatbed truck. He plays as though he has a fire in his belly, setting an unrestrained tone for the rest of the movie. Fasten your seat belts, daddy-o, it's gonna be a wild ride.

Tony Baker (Russ Tamblyn), a hip-talking transfer student, wastes no time in stirring things up at his new school, Santo Bello High. “I'm looking to graze on grass,” he tells a fellow pupil on his first day, making it known that he wants to score some marijuana. Baker is the epitome of hipster cool, a fast-talking juvenile delinquent who lives on the edge. He proves his juvie street cred by pulling a switchblade on his classmates and inviting his teacher Jan Sterling (Arlene Williams) back to his place to “live it up.” But there is something amiss: he also drinks milk, and refuses a toke from a joint.

After declining Baker's offer, Sterling attends a staff meeting with a federal agent. “In the language the addicts use, marijuana is referred to as Mary Jane, pot, weed, or tea,” the agent deadpans, before warning that a plague of drug use has happened in other schools and “it can happen here.”

Baker, meanwhile, has discovered an off-campus junkies' paradise, the local coffeehouse. A beatnik “doll” recites ridiculous rhymes — “We cough blood on this earth / Now there's a race for space / We can cough blood on the moon, soon / Tomorrow is dragsville, cats / Tomorrow is a king-sized drag” — while he tries to buy “some H, some coke, and some goofballs.” He meets the local drug kingpin, Mr. A (Jackie Coogan), who also runs a jukebox empire.

Okay, so far there are drugs and rock and roll, but where's the sex? That's where the randy Aunt Gwen (Mamie Van Doren) enters the picture. She's a torpedo-breasted sex kitten who tries to seduce her nephew Tony every chance she gets. Baker is too intent on buying drugs to have anything to do with his lascivious landlord, and her advances go unheeded.

Near the end of
High School Confidential
there is the inevitable showdown between good and evil, before a high-toned narrator tells us, “You have just seen an authentic disclosure of conditions which unfortunately exist in some of our high schools today. The job of policemen will not be finished until this insidious menace to the schools of our country is exposed and destroyed.”

High School Confidential
was produced by Albert Zugsmith, a journeyman journalist, producer, and director. “I don't make movies without a moral,” he said, “but you can't make a point for good unless you expose the evil.” To this end he made films (and fistfuls of money) about male impotence, racial bigotry, juvenile delinquency, sexual promiscuity, alcoholism, and of course, drug addiction. It may be hard to justify the contradiction of exploiting the lurid details of the human condition while at the same preaching against them, but Zugsmith is unrepentant. He fills
High School Confidential
with more hot-rod races, busty blondes in tight clothes, hip jargon, and drugs than any drive-in crowd could hope for, while at the same time bashing them over the head with a moral.
High School Confidential
outdoes other “just say no” movies like
Reefer Madness
for the sheer hilarious bludgeoning force of its anti-drug message.

While most of the ideas seem hopelessly outdated — one toke can lead to harder drugs; heroin, when thrown in the eyes, can cause blindness — I think the film makes one point that was years ahead of its time: the idea that bad kids can come from good homes. Even today, the topic is still viewed with bewilderment when shown on tabloid talk shows.
High School Confidential
suggests that everyone is susceptible to temptation, even middle-class kids who should know better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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