Have a little Faith: or, here comes the choo choo anew

If The Umbrellahead Review had to be represented by just one actress -- if our reasons for doing this could be summed up by one woman's cinematic oeuvre and its lasting effect on us -- then, naturally, that divine emissary would be Faith Clift, aka Faith Yordan.

True, we haven't seen much of her work, but films like The Nightmare Never Ends and Savage Journey are the epitome of why we love to watch movies "from the wrong side of the tracks", so to speak. And her marriage to screenwriter Philip Yordan, why, how felicitous that it offered recurring opportunities to practice her craft!

Now, we find ourselves here once more, summoned back to her warm and apple-cheeked embrace. And -- speaking of tracks -- it's all thanks to that steamiest form of transportation, the locomotive.

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Horror Express (1972)

Grade: C+

It's a lazy cliché to point it out, but lazy clichés are often true: the presence of actors like Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing pretty much ensures this tale of glowing eyes, smooth brains, and hairy hands will be at least watchable.

In fact, the equation cuts both ways: having those two legends on board probably encouraged the film's screenwriters to make an extra effort beyond just saying "Hey, let's put a monster on a train!" 

The extra drafts were worth it, as from the beginning, the script is noticeably more crisp and intelligent than your average, brainless horror fodder.

True, there are occasional dud lines, as when the striking Countess Petrovska (Silvia Tortosa) greets Lee's character, Prof. Saxton, by reeling off a series of banalities about his home country:

"Ah, yes, England. Queen Victoria, crumpets, Shakespeare."

And Shakespeare this ain't.

On the other hand, take the scene where Dr. Wells (Cushing) is enjoying the dining car's services with the mysterious Natasha (Helga Liné), who looks a bit too much like the Countess for the film's own good.

(Things got confusing as hell when one of them got killed off: only then did we realize they were two separate characters. Isn't it a casting director's job to foresee this kind of thing?)

When his pleasant meal is interrupted by a request for his medical services, he asks his colleague and assistant Miss Jones (Alice Reinheart) for help, and she gets off a nice one-liner at his expense:

Wells: "Miss Jones, I shall need your assistance."

Jones (glances at Natasha, then smirks): "Yes, well, at your age I'm not surprised."

Wells (indignantly): "With an autopsy!" 

Jones: "Oh, well, that's different."

That said, at least one review of Horror Express describes the first half as banal, the second as riveting. We found it rather the other way around: the first half was intriguing, but after the all-important halfway point, the film's plot began to get mired in silliness.

The second half is also marred by the abrupt arrival of a character who gets shoehorned in, hogging the spotlight for several minutes while adding little to the proceedings...

...but we don't mean Faith Clift! She does make her first appearance in the second half, true, as an American traveler. However she only gets a few lines of dialogue over the course of a few scattered scenes, and her delivery of those lines is -- dare we say it? -- utterly unremarkable. Competent, even.

The only odd thing about Ms. Clift's performance is that she blinks so frequently that it's hard to get a screenshot that doesn't look like she's drugged, or half-asleep.

Then again, in one of her scenes, she actually is asleep -- which is a very effective way to minimize awkward line readings.

No, the unwelcome interloper is Telly Savalas as Captain Kazan -- an irreverent, sadistic martinet who spends most of his limited screen time chewing the scenery. Some reviewers seem to have thought highly of Savalas's work in Horror Express, but from our point of view, he's an annoyance whose boorish screen presence breaks the movie's spell.

And -- speaking of irreverence -- Horror Express continues the trope, seemingly inevitable in Yordan-related films, of featuring a conflict between science/atheism and piety/religion. Our spokesperson for the latter group is mad monk Father Pujardov (Alberto de Mendoza), who bears a vague resemblance to the perennially put-upon Spanish tennis ace, David Ferrer.

For further background on Horror Express, and all things Yordan, we warmly recommend Bernard Gordon's book Hollywood Exile: or How I Learned to Love the Blacklist. Many of the stories Gordon tells are illuminating or funny, but at least one is rather sad: apparently this was Peter Cushing's first film after the death of his wife Helen. Cushing always struggled with nerves right up until the start of shooting (after which he was fine), but in this case his depression was so crushing that he was determined to back out at the last minute.

Some clever tactics from Christopher Lee rescued the situation, and shooting began the next day as scheduled. Still, one hopes that Cushing -- who outlived his wife by two decades, but once said that "the heart, quite simply, [had] gone out of everything" after Helen's death -- took some comfort, or at least found temporary relief, in his work and the company of his colleagues.

Oh, and a word to the wise: if sharp things going into eyes make you uncomfortable, you might want to skip this one.

You also might want to avoid ordering the whole fish, just in case the knife slips. (Pop!)

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Night Train to Terror (1985)

Grade: F

Variety Is the Spice of Life Bonus: D-

And now the Class-O-Meter takes a precipitous dive -- which (once again) could be foreseen if you knew in advance that Night Train to Terror is essentially a salvage job. It takes two movies that had already been released, plus one unfinished project sitting on the shelf, and mashes them all together into a 90-minute anthology film.

And how does it accomplish this? Why, with that freshest of devices, the wraparound story -- though at first it seems like a wraparound song, since Night Train to Terror starts proceedings by offering up this troupe of fresh-faced youngsters:

You see, this is a family affair in more ways than one: young Byron Yordan (front and center above), son of Philip and Faith, is the leader of the "rock band" riding Night Train to Terror's titular locomotive.

The band pops up again after each segment, gamely dancing and lip-synching their way in piecemeal fashion -- one verse at a time -- through the only song they know how to play, "Everybody But You".

This number, a kind of 1950s throwback using 1980s instruments, deserves to have its lyrics documented in full somewhere on the Internet:

Daddy's in the dining room, sorting through the news

Mama's at the shopping mall, buying new shoes

Everybody's got something to do -- everybody but you!

Come on and dance with me, dance with me, dance with me, dance with me [x2]

Everybody's got something to do -- everybody but you!

Sister's on the telephone, gossiping again

Junior's at the arcade, smoking with his friends

Everybody's got something to do -- everybody but you!

(chorus)

Johnny's been a bad boy, staying after school

Principal is working hard, making new rules

Everybody's got something to do -- everybody but you!

(chorus)

It pretty much defines "incessant repetition". And splitting it up into a total of four discrete appearances over the course of the film? Not such a clever idea.

His costuming may have zero continuity, but at least Byron Yordan is handsome enough in a clean-cut way -- and a passable enough breakdancer -- that he doesn't make an ass of himself.

Anyway, the VIPs on this train ride are God and Satan, credited as "Himself" and "Lu Sifer" onscreen, but actually played by Ferdy Mayne and Tony Giorgio, respectively. They spend the ride arguing over the characters in the recycled segments, and whether their souls should go to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory.

All setup for an "As I watched..." routine, naturally.

We've read that Mayne was, justifiably, embarrassed when he saw the finished film. No word on whether it was because the script required him to describe the band's music as "quite touching".

We also get a serenely imperturbable and impeccably polite black conductor (Gabriel Whitehouse), which vaguely feels like a lazy racist trope, though it's hard to pin down exactly why.

Then again, given that the only other black character in Night Train to Terror is named "Prince Flubutu" (Mark E. Ridley), maybe it's not that hard to figure out.

He shows up in the second segment -- adapted from the 1984 film Gretta aka The Death Wish Club, which pretty much tells you the plot of that one -- and they don't even get his exit line right: "Excuse me while I smoke!" should clearly have been "I hope you don't mind if I smoke!", don't you agree?

Some of the decisions that went into compiling Night Train to Terror go well beyond the bizarre. One of them is the inclusion of two different segments in which Richard Moll (here billed as "Charles") is a major character. Did they think we wouldn't notice that the murderous orderly in the first segment --

-- is the same, incredibly distinctive-looking man who plays a strident atheist in The Nightmare Never Ends?

Yes, we're blissfully reunited with that watershed film, though here it gets hacked down to about a third of its original length -- which still gives it a higher percentage of Night Train's running time than any other segment.

As a result, the Nightmare narrative is largely undamaged, with all our favorite Papini moments intact. (Brigham Young sure is looking rough these days.)

In fact, we get bonus content of a sort, as The Nightmare Never Ends has now been augmented by some seriously off-the-wall claymation sequences. They showed up earlier in Gretta, and we don't know if that film already had 'em, though it's hard to imagine how the scene with the killer fly played out otherwise.

But they sure do add an odd twist to Nightmare -- even if the net effect is to make us expect a California Raisins cameo.

The other weird thing about Nightmare is that several characters' lines have clearly been overdubbed by a different voice actor. Once again, this had already happened in Gretta, as whenever the loony Mr. Schmidt (William Charles) speaks, it's with a thick pseudo-Russian accent and a totally different acoustic from the other characters.

But things strike much closer to home, for -- brace yourselves -- Faith Clift has had all her lines replaced by another actress! We were wondering why her performance seemed so un-cervine and cortically intact.

Given that a few tweaks were made to the Nightmare plot, maybe it was necessary for continuity purposes. But still, is there no justice? Is there no exemption for family?

Comfort her, "Charles". Comfort your apple-cheeked truelove.

The (inadvertent) gold diggers of 1932

In 1933, Busby Berkeley and Mervyn LeRoy struck gold at the intersection of economic hardship and showgirl opportunism, beginning with that triumphant -- and ironic -- clarion call: "We're in the money!" When times are tough, marry rich, and figure the rest out later. (If that sounds awfully cynical, it probably is -- but hey, it worked out perfectly for one of our grandmothers.)

But though these two films also use Gold Diggers of 1933's secret-millionaire trope, they don't crow about cash at all, whether at the start or the end. Maybe an extra year of Depression-era desperation made the difference, but in this case, the women lucky enough to end up with Mr. Moneybags just seem glad to have found themselves a nice fella. 

---

Strangers of the Evening (1932)

Grade: C-

This confusing tale of morgues, mayhem, and mistaken identity took us quite a while to unpack, though by the end we'd finally sussed it all out (more or less).

From the opening sequence -- in which the body of a man who allegedly fell asleep at the wheel is deposited at a morgue -- it's clear something sketchy is afoot...

...and if our intuition didn't tell us that, we certainly know it explicitly once Dr. Chandler the undertaker (Warner Richmond) finishes a phone call with his unsuspecting assistant Tommy (Harold Waldridge), turns to his friends, and triumphantly says "They fell for it."

But even though we understood the basic trajectory of the plot, something in the telling of Strangers of the Evening left us very confused as to its mechanics. OK, it's a story of mistaken identity, but how exactly did the swap happen? Were we supposed to infer that certain key items changed hands, or was it depicted in some non-obvious, veiled way?

Similarly, though it may appear Dr. Raymond Everette (Theodore von Eltz) has murdered the father of his fiancée (Miriam Seegar), there's little doubt that all is not as it seems. You're meant to feel clever at moments like those, but instead we had the nagging feeling that we'd missed something -- something that would bring coherence to events themselves, rather than an explication of the underlying scheme (which would obviously be premature at the sub-10-minute mark).

These issues -- and others, like a medical-experimentation subplot that goes nowhere -- are probably down to subpar direction and scriptwriting, in whatever proportions. A second viewing makes things clearer, of course, but that's hardly the standard...or is it? Perhaps some of these films were meant to be seen more than once, by truant schoolchildren and unemployed workers desperate for distraction.

The main selling point for many prospective viewers of Strangers of the Evening was probably the presence of Zasu Pitts -- pronounced "say-zoo", if you didn't know (and we didn't). She's Sybil, the flaky girlfriend of a befuddled amnesiac (Lucien Littlefield) who wanders through the movie in search of his real identity. Pitts does about what you'd expect, and does it as mournfully as ever.

In several details Strangers of the Evening bears an unexpected resemblance to The Midnight Warning, right down to the "dead body rising from a table" and "let us never speak of this again" tropes that shape a significant chunk of its narrative. Maybe it's instructive to compare the two films, since while Strangers of the Evening throws a lot of seemingly unrelated information at the viewer and gradually reveals the underlying structure, we had an easier time following The Midnight Warning's more parsimonious approach, starting with a firm foundation and then introducing new facts one at a time until the picture was complete.

All this probably gives the impression that we didn't like Strangers of the Evening -- which is literally true, but we didn't dislike it either. It's not stupid or irritating, just poorly made in certain respects. (Plus a few flubbed lines here and there, but that's hardly unusual in films from this period.) And we were able to differentiate between at least some of the white guys in hats, which is a nice change of pace.

One can hardly recommend this film, but it's reasonably watchable and not unpleasant -- putting it miles ahead of, say, The Phantom or The Midnight Phantom.

And hey, that's a nice segue into:

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The Phantom Express (1932)

Grade: B

There are too damn many films with words like "phantom" and "midnight" in their names, leaving our heads filled with a muskless miasma of monikers: how to differentiate between The Midnight Phantom, The Midnight Shadow, and The Phantom Shadow?

(OK, that last one is actually a Scooby-Doo villain, but you get the point.)

So -- with one foot already in that river of titles untethered to their filmic content -- it's easy to assume The Phantom Express is yet another interchangeable Poverty Row effort, a poorly-acted Sack special, or any number of other been-there done-thats.

That'd be a shame, though, as we were rather charmed by this modest but engaging little movie. True, the plot itself mostly colors inside the lines, and could be summed up like so: a small railroad, plagued with derailments caused by the phenomenon in the film's title, will soon be sold for pennies on the dollar unless the owner's son can solve the mystery.

In all honesty, that mystery isn't terribly hard to unravel, and we guessed its basic outlines well before the final denouement. That said, The Phantom Express doesn't really depend on a whodunit (or a who-conducted-it) to sustain our interest.

Rather, a combination of elements made The Phantom Express a pleasant surprise. One is the skillful cinematography, yielding set-pieces that, for a film of this vintage and budget, are impressively striking.

The biggest factor, though, is the film's unexpected decision not to focus myopically on the hero's quest to save his inheritance. Sure, it's predictably fun to see the boyish Bruce Harrington (William Collier Jr.) go undercover, disguising himself as a grease-blackened railroad worker to find out what's really happening -- and, when the opportunity arises, play a prank on the only person around who knows his true identity.

But instead, The Phantom Express devotes a surprising amount of time to the plight of Smokey (J. Farrell MacDonald), the veteran engineer who's dedicated his life to Southwestern Pacific, only to come under fire when a major derailment happens on his watch. Then as now, loyalty and seniority are no guarantee.

Of course, Smokey's daughter Carolyn (Sally Blane) also turns out to be young Mr. Harrington's love interest (having ditched the heavy-duty RBF you saw a few screenshots ago). Even better for him that he's boarding in their house, for propinquity without iniquity.

Still, The Phantom Express puts Smokey -- and his grief -- front and center for a good portion of its running time. Seldom have we seen a film devote this much care to showing how completely a middle-aged man can be crushed by the loss of his job.

The pathos and intensity here is genuine, and unflinching enough in its depiction that we dreaded -- but half-expected -- the looming prospect of a slow pan and out-of-frame gunshot.

However, a friend in need is a friendly Swede, and none more so than Smokey's irrepressible pal Axel. Played by an actor billed as Axel Axelson (!), with no other credits on IMDb, we have no idea whether we're dealing with a genuine one-shot, or an actor working under a blatant pseudonym for contractual reasons. Either way, Axel's the kind of guy who, if you need him, will show up to help save the day faster than you can say tutenbobels. (Or jazz hands.)

All this means that the closing act of The Phantom Express isn't just a standard boy-solves-crime-and-gets-girl affair, but is as much -- or more so -- about whether Smokey's hopes for redemption will be fulfilled.

Of course, we get the obligatory Scooby Doo action, since these meddling kids still have to solve the crime, unmask the culprit(s), and race against time -- in whatever order. (Bet you thought that "Phantom Shadow" reference was just a one-off!)

But one suspects that, with its frank depiction of a grown man's pain, a film like The Phantom Express may have meant a lot to thousands of aging male moviegoers. With no other socially acceptable way to work through the crushing experience of losing their livelihoods after age 40, at least they could see someone else's grief mirroring their own, while trying to find a way forward in a dark, friendless time.

And sadly, that's still as relevant now as it's ever been.