The 24-hour myth

And now, two films where someone goes to the police for help in finding a vanished lover, but gets turned away for lack of evidence -- at least initially. In one, you already know the plot; in the other, we can hardly say a thing without spoiling it.

---

The Tell-Tale Heart (1960)

Grade: D+

Well, as we're drawing near the end of the Night Screams subset of the 250-pack (only six left!), it's fair enough to have a film that gives us a real-deal, full-throated night scream.

Of course you already know the plot of The Tell-Tale Heart -- and if somehow you don't, then the opening scene's pulsing floorboards and thumping bass drums constitute advance notice (and a literal flash-forward). It even comes with a warning:

So we have Laurence Payne as Edgar (ha ha), the painfully shy librarian, smitten at first sight by the charms of new neighbor Betty (Adrienne Corri) whom he creepily spies on from his window.

For the inside scoop on Betty, Edgar hits up her landlady (Annette Carell), whose fine-featured face somehow took us by surprise, if only for its unexpected unmatronliness. She looks more like an aristocratic German woman in her mid-thirties, or maybe a teacher at a high-end boarding school, than a working-class property manager.

Anyway, Betty agrees to go out with Edgar, and the ensuing date rivals "Ralph Wiggum walks Lisa Simpson home" for sheer awkwardness.

Still, Betty is the very picture of patience and tolerance -- until Edgar abruptly puts the moves on her at her doorstep. It's pretty gross, and while the idea is clearly to keep Edgar from becoming too sympathetic a character, it also exhausts our ability to care that much about his plight.

On the other hand, he has this great friend, Carl. Everyone likes Carl!

From the moment Edgar starts heaping praise on his friend's head, we know where this is inevitably going, the only mystery being whether the ultimate body count is 1, 2, or 3. The real question is, will getting there be half the fun, or not?

Well, the answer in this case is mostly "not". Though atmospheric and competently made, The Tell-Tale Heart is too obvious for its own good, and too emotionally uninvolving to succeed. The score is particularly heavy-handed, with silly "ba-woomp!" timpani glisses that, in trying to evoke some transfigured version of a heartbeat, end up being just a bit too on the nose.

If we already know what's going to happen, where's the tension in watching Edgar's mind unravel? Is sheer expectation meant to be enough here?

The Tell-Tale Heart does attempt a last-minute Hail Mary to solve its central problem, but as with any other work of fiction that tries the same thing, it just leaves the audience feeling baffled and betrayed. What's left is, as so often the case, a passel of interesting faces, like this overly attached barfly/prostitute --

-- and this blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance by Frank Thornton, aka Captain Peacock from Are You Being Served?, as a barman:

---

Wanted: Babysitter (1975)
[aka La Baby Sitter, Scar Tissue, etc.]

Grade: C

It's very difficult to know how to talk about Wanted: Babysitter without completely spoiling it. One thing to say upfront is that this was indeed a color production and is available elsewhere in full color, but -- much like Hannah, Queen of the Vampires -- the Mill Creek copy is in black-and-white for some reason.

Then again, when you're talking about one of the most confusing movies we've seen in recent memory, perhaps the black-and-white isn't such a bad thing -- helping the film to seem unmoored and surreal, rather than just muddled. (It also takes the edge off the score's more saccharine moments.)

There's some real star power aboard in Wanted: Babysitter, like:

• Maria Schneider, whom you know from that movie (and kudos for her witty remark that she only cooks with olive oil now);
• Vic Morrow, whom you know because he died in that horrible helicopter accident;
• and Robert Vaughn, whom you know because his picture is in the dictionary next to the word "glower".

As Michelle, a French sculptor living and working in Rome, Schneider seems likely to be the protagonist. But a lot of the film's initial attention goes to Ann (Sydne Rome), a wounded, vengeful actress whose secrets comprise the movie's two titles (more or less).

Wanted: Babysitter tanked on release, and was given an especially harsh rating by Leonard Maltin, who dismissed it as a "misfired melodrama" with "non-acting" from Schneider. He also criticizes the "miscasting of chubby Italian comedian Renato Pozzetto" as Michelle's boyfriend, which is a fair cop -- his presence is weird and hard to parse, though it's oddly appealing that the guy in her corner is a schlubby albeit determined goofball. Chubby guys with dad bods can be heroes too, after all.

It's quite obvious that the fragmented narrative in Wanted: Babysitter is a deliberate stylistic choice whose consequences, love 'em or hate 'em, are central to the film's structure.

However, the jury's still out when it comes to the movie's persistent failure to establish a clear sense of place -- by which we mean that we often didn't understand where the hell we were, and worse yet, sometimes thought we were in one place before realizing we'd been in another for a good five minutes.

So, is this an intentional move, a question of style...or a sign of directorial incompetence and/or laziness? (Or maybe it's the black-and-white?)

In the midst of all this, we have bunnies, puppies --

-- and a young boy named Boots, which when written out has about the same resonance as "a homeless girl named Dave" (speaking of Britcoms). The child actor playing Boots even gets his very own "introducing John Whittington" moment in the credits, so naturally he doesn't have any other roles to his credit. Maybe he's an assistant manager at a car wash now.

We can tell you that Wanted: Babysitter is a complex, thoughtful movie of the kind that probably rewards multiple viewings. Even watching just the first few minutes over again, we were able to catch numerous details that eluded us -- no doubt intentionally -- on our first pass. It's always nice to watch a film that assumes its viewers are smart, and gives itself permission to imply a great deal more than it says outright. (Think of the brief exchange in Citizen Kane that lays bare the anti-Semitism of his first wife, even though the word "Jew" is never uttered.)

If the movie does have a fatal flaw, though, it probably is somewhere in that combination of Schneider and Pozzetto, especially the former. In situations where Michelle ought to display a sense of urgency and purpose, she instead seems detached and resigned -- so much so that one ends up rolling one's eyes, swearing at the screen, or simply losing one's suspension of disbelief.

Anyway, here's a funny picture of Robert Vaughn in period costume.

And here's a bunny.

Where there's a will, there's a plot

That is: for all three of these films, not only is their story heavily shaped by somebody's last will and testament, but a character within the film concocts a scheme -- a plot, if you will (and who cares if you won't) -- that interferes with another character's inheritance.

---

Green Eyes (1934)

Grade: D

Well, Green Eyes tries, there's no denying that. After suffering through a passel of "old dark house" mysteries that seem to be making things up as they go along, it's nice to see one that steers with a surer hand.

No doubt it helps to base your movie on a novel -- in this case The Murder of Steven Kester, by one H. Ashbrook -- since the author's already put in the proverbial hard yards to ensure everything makes sense, and every Chekhovian gun gets fired.

Still, Green Eyes drags. Its talky tale of a miserly old man murdered at his own costume party may not be as predictable as some, but still failed to really engage us. The performances are largely rote, the direction is workmanlike, and the mystery itself is ultimately the sort where you shrug and say "OK, sure, whatever" rather than feeling like you've witnessed a satisfying resolution of inevitabilities.

And then there's this guy:

In our entry for A Shot in the Dark we noted our amusement at how much Charles Starrett looks like John de Lancie, aka Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But we didn't expect that we'd subsequently see him in a role where he acts like Q. Sure, he's billed as "mystery writer Bill Tracy", but what about the funny anachronistic costume -- a Q penchant?

Or his habit of popping up randomly, à la creepy Watson, to offer advice to the real detectives?

Or his insufferably cocksure, almost omniscient demeanor -- as though he were a fly on every wall and already knew everything about the case?

No, friends, what we have here is an early non-canon appearance of Picard's most irritating adversary (and least-wanted ally), doing research in 1934 to better prepare for 2364. One assumes that the other actors knew something was amiss with their costar but -- since crossing de Lancie can easily put you in a pickle -- it's probably best that no one called him out on his time-traveling escapades.

---

Son of Ingagi (1940)

Grade: D+

Wait, a movie about newlyweds trying to spend their honeymoon at home, before a zany cast of characters barges in to their chagrin? Didn't we just see this one -- twice?

But Son of Ingagi goes in a wholly different direction, and to the film's credit we really weren't sure what was coming until about halfway through. We might have expected the crucial plot twist had we seen Ingagi, a 1930 film that doesn't seem to be available anywhere, though multiple copies survive. Then again, maybe not, since Son appears to be an unauthorized, in-name-only sequel.

(By the way, the scarcity of Ingagi may not be unrelated to the producers' appropriation of someone else's ethnographic footage -- for which they were promptly sued and lost big: oops.)

In any event, this "race film" (as they were once called) is a somewhat threadbare effort, but clearly a notch or two better than, say, The Devil's Daughter, and umpteen notches above the likes of Midnight Shadow. It doesn't compare unfavorably with a lot of what came out of Poverty Row around the same time.

It's also difficult to talk much about Son of Ingagi without spoiling the aforementioned surprise, not that it's anything all that earth-shaking. (But it involves a sandwich, a gong, and a cut finger.)

Among the cast members of Son of Ingagi, let's single two out for special discussion -- both women, as it happens. (Hey, now that we think of it, Son of Ingagi passes the Bechdel test with flying colors.)

First is Laura Bowman as Dr. Helen Jackson, portraying that rarest of cinematic birds: a black female scientist. Who knows if Son of Ingagi was the very first film to have such a character, but surely it has to be among the earliest. Dr. Jackson apparently makes a brilliant discovery in the course of the film; pity the script never bothers to tell us exactly what it is.

Second, we have Daisy Bufford as the bride, Eleanor Lindsay. Her facial muscles must have gotten a workout during this one, as we haven't seen this much smiling since Monster from a Prehistoric Planet. She smiles when things are very good, when things are very bad, and everywhere in between. She even smiles to herself when she's all alone, à la Rose Nylund.

It wouldn't surprise us at all if Son of Ingagi is a far better film than its namesake (using that word in its less-common, contronymic sense). Whatever its shortcomings, at least it's not unpleasant to watch, and the bit with the sandwich was vaguely amusing in a sub-Chaplin-esque way.

---

The Thirteenth Guest (1932)

Grade: D+

It's hard to look at Ginger Rogers the same way once you've seen her "We're in the Money" opener from The Gold Diggers of 1933, wherein she praises the merits of liquid assets by staring at the camera and unleashing a torrent of Pig Latin. Somewhere between Sinéad and Samwell, I think, is our basic response here -- by which we mean the uncomfortable feeling of having a kind of unwanted, insincere, perverse intimacy thrust upon us, via a performer's insistent gaze. 'Swonderful, to quote another "stare"? No, 'screepy.

Anyway, it took us by surprise when she got killed off about five minutes into The Thirteenth Guest. She may look alive, but it's death by electrocution, you see:

One ought to be clever about such things, though, and while our guess wasn't quite correct, we had the right idea. Like Teller, and maybe Penn, 'tis hard to fool us.

In any event, had we been fated not to see Ginger's face again in what remained of The Thirteenth Guest, we certainly had some other familiar faces to enjoy, like Lyle "Not Two Goldfish" Talbot and the guy who played Smokey in that railroad flick we liked.

As crime solver Phil Winston, Talbot draws from much the same well of arrogance as Charles Starrett's peripatetic mystery writer. But as he's speaking ex cathedra, his pronouncements are backed up by the boys in actual blue -- though, in trying to unravel the webs of intrigue that surround a deeply dysfunctional family, he occasionally demonstrates a decided lack of papal infallibility.

Another face we thought familiar was that of Frances Rich, who plays the breezily amoral Marjorie. We could've sworn she was the nurse in Buried Alive, but nope -- that was Beverly Roberts, whom Rich resembles in appearance and, especially, voice.

In fact Rich's career spanned only six movies before she packed it in and became a sculptor, living to the ripe old age of 97. No word on whether she was responsible for the Lard Lad, but voice aside, she clearly didn't eat his products too often.

The best thing we can say about The Thirteenth Guest may sound like faint praise, but it's actually not: right about the time we thought we were halfway done with the movie, it turned out we were more like two-thirds done with it. So -- though the overall impression is still of a very talky, fairly cheap production -- there are parts that actually move along nicely, and a few stylish shots to boot.

Not that that's enough to overcome The Thirteenth Guest's draggy bits and incoherent plot elements (i.e. why would someone wear a disguise when no one can see them?). But it's always a plus when a film doesn't make us want to off ourselves while we're in the act of watching it.

Sight unseen, laughs unlaughed

Our menu this evening features two films from 1943 that are so similar in some respects, we can't help but believe some producer at Mill Creek felt impishly clever by putting them together on Disc 46. Why? Well, let's see -- we have two "horror comedies" that include:

• a pair of newlyweds who for some stupid reason plan to move into a country house, sight unseen (!!), immediately after their wedding;
• a zany cast of characters (one of whom is black) who intrude on the just-married couple, thereby putting a major damper on the honeymoon, and end up wildly overstaying their welcome;
• a group of hardened criminals who, when it comes to the old property, have an agenda all their own;
• plus so much more:
• confusion over addresses;
• wacky, clueless cops;
• menacing eyes staring out of hidden alcoves;
• heavy objects with felonious content, the transportation of which becomes a major plot point;
• repeated malapropisms for common words and phrases;
• etc., etc., etc.

But just as two garments cut from the same cloth can fit very differently, so too did these movies elicit very divergent reactions from us.

---

The Ghost and the Guest (1943)

Grade: F

When we read a review of a film like The Ghost and the Guest that describes it as "harmless fun", or "an amusing comedy", or (God help us) "a movie that you just never get tired of", we can't help but speculate:

Are these people really describing their experience of this actual, specific film, The Ghost and the Guest, from 1943? Or are they actually responding to the signifier they think it represents? 

And by that we don't mean some uncharitable, Archie-and-Edith-Bunker-at-the-piano "Those Were the Days" longing for a time when everyone knew their place (and no one was, uh, uppity) -- at least not necessarily.

Rather, we simply mean to ask: do the people who watch this film, and claim to have the above reactions, really have those reactions, to this film? Or are they just saying what they think they're supposed to say, socially speaking? Did they really see the film, or just the idea of the film -- leaving them to vaguely recall a collection of signifiers that, in turn, prompt the automatic output of a pre-ordained set of phrases?

Because the thing is, The Ghost and the Guest isn't "fun" or "amusing" or "a movie that you never get tired of". It's a complete and utter piece of garbage. It's painfully unfunny, horribly written, insultingly stupid, and even downright offensive in places. Laboring through its 55 minutes was one of the most unpleasant tasks we've yet faced in our Umbrellahead journey. Every scene felt contrived, every plot point felt like it had just been extracted from a rhino's posterior, and every character's behavior was either stereotyped or arbitrary. As another reviewer points out, quite rightly:

"This film has been put together by someone who seems to know nothing about how people really behave. Look at the scene where the bride-to-be is yapping away on the phone with her friends; do people really stand around like that in real life as one of their number talks nonstop on the phone?"

From the very beginning, the motivation of our principals makes no sense. First, the wife (Florence Rice) is hell-bent on having them spend their honeymoon in the old house, though the reason she's so insistent is left totally opaque to us. Then, they swap places, and now it's the husband (James Dunn) who insists they stay. Are they both idiots? Yes, yes, they are.

Worst of all is the running gag about a retired executioner (Robert Dudley) who constantly chirps about how much he'd like their valet Harmony (Sam McDaniel) to try on one of his nooses, just for funsies. As we said last entry, we're hardly the sort to go looking for things to be offended by, but somehow it crosses a line to have a black man be the butt of a recurring, unfunny joke about lynching in 1940s America.

In short, there was nothing good about this film, unless you count a single half-smirk elicited by a line of dialogue from McDaniel -- and that's not enough, not remotely enough. We don't want to talk about The Ghost and the Guest anymore. It's a sad, dead film that doesn't deserve to be watched. Would that it were lost, so another, better film could be found instead.

---

Ghosts on the Loose (1943)

Grade: D

Well, that's more like it. Not that Ghosts on the Loose is a great film, or even a passable 1940s comedy: it's an inoffensive but dull piece of work that got, at most, two vague chuckles out of us. But the inclusion of Béla Lugosi immediately ups the ante, and more or less ensures that something onscreen will be worth watching.

That said, Béla doesn't get much screentime at all, as the real stars are the East Side Kids -- a bunch of not-so-lovable, well-meaning hooligans. Their 22 (!) films demonstrate that, like the Dead End Kids and Bowery Boys, they were quite a profitable film franchise.

And, now and then, they bust into an 18th-century song with organ accompaniment.

One odd thing is that Ghosts on the Loose -- which, to be clear, has no actual ghosts on the actual loose -- bizarrely spends about half its running time on wedding preparations and rehearsals. Somehow it's not really a problem, but from a formal perspective it's hard to fathom...

...unless, of course, they set out to make a wedding picture and only then found out Lugosi was available. (But we have no evidence of that.)

It's a pleasant surprise -- and a big contrast with The Ghost and the Guest -- that the film's lone black character, Scruno (Ernest Morrison), isn't really singled out or treated differently in any obvious way: he's just another one of the East Side Kids. Is there a faint whiff of the cowardly, wide-eyed stereotype that mars many black characters in horror films? Well, maybe -- but it also clings to several of the other Kids, so it's a wash.

This movie is probably most famous for Béla's sneeze, and without knowing anything about it beforehand, we sure looked at each other afterwards: "Didn't he just say 'Aw, shit?'"

Allegedly it was a joke on his part, done for what he assumed would be a throwaway first take -- leaving him stunned when the take was declared final, and used in the film. Maybe it's an apocryphal story, who knows, but the word itself is pretty unambiguous.

Wait, does that mean that -- outside of a few lip-readable expletives in silent films -- Lugosi was the first person to knowingly use one of George Carlin's "seven words you can't say on TV" in a feature film? If so, that's awesome. (And a split infinitive, but this ain't Latin.)

Oh, and then there's Ava Gardner. Not our type, but beats a screaming skull, I guess.

And boy, was she thrilled to be cast in a Monogram picture!