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!)

---

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.

Crashing the Dude Man's Renegades

If you're a loyal Umbrellahead reader, you'll remember that a little while back we encountered a bit of a problem with Disc 46 of our 250-movie Horror Collection. Since this disc of "Western Legends" technically came as part of our beloved box, it seemed only right to give these next four films a proper viewing and an entry on the blog.

But westerns? Though we're grateful to other folks and their blogs for keeping them alive in our collective memories (and, on occasion, our interests do intersect), the oater isn't exactly our schtick. Certainly this was going to be a tedium of tumbleweeds, chiseled chins, drunken brawls, mob justice, and southern California being variously passed off as Texas, Colorado, Wyoming, or some other generic western locale.

Convinced that each movie would be a barely distinguishable carbon copy of the others, K googled "western movie cliches" and prepared a YEE-HAW bingo board (courtesy of buzzword/bullshit bingo) to add at least some measure of spice to the affair:



Ah, the best-laid plans. In went Disc 46, and out galloped:

---

Crashing Thru (1939)

Grade: C-



Mounties? Yes, Mounties, as in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police: Sergeant Renfrew (James Newill) and Constable Kelly (Warren Hull), cruising through the snow-capped peaks and lushly coniferous landscape of the Yukon.


Ha! It really is Southern California after all - Big Bear Lake, apparently.

So much for those tumbleweeds. But this Northwestern does tick a few of the boxes. There's a gold heist aboard the steamship, which is about as close as we're likely to get to a bank robbery in the Canadian wilderness.



Also, the inevitable unflattering native stereotypes, with characters named "Slant Eye"and "Eskimo Pete" alongside an old, pig-tailed, pipe-smoking First Nations woman, whose casting notice likely emphasized the word hag in boldface.



Not that we were still playing YEE-HAW bingo at that point; when Renfrew the Mountie started crooning his head off in a bid to woo the tricksy Ann 'Angel' Chambers (Jean Carmen), K. realized she'd been thinking John Ford or Clint Eastwood, when she should have channeled Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy. These are poverty row westerns, where the intentions are wholesome, the banter witty, and the cowboys (or Mounties) singing.



Anyway, considering it as a Monogram picture, there's nothing much to complain about with Crashing Thru. The plot has your standard elements -- the crime, the chase, the double-cross, the distressed damsel, the final showdown -- and they're dealt with in systematic and straightforward (and sometimes stylish) fashion.



The action is meted out judiciously between the more talky sequences, though the exposition never seems pointless. The piney wilderness setting is certainly a welcome change from the spooky old mansions or mean city streets of other '30s fare.



As heroes, Renfrew and Kelly are a bit of a goof -- the aforementioned crooning (to ladies, and to one another), plus an embarrassing hoodwink involving the boiler room -- but one must admit, there's something that's just inherently funny about Mounties.

---

The Dude Ranger (1935)

Grade: D+

If Complete: C-



George O'Brien is an assface. Granted, half our Umbrellahead team is of the opinion that Mr. O'Brien is, in fact, just fine in the looks department, but that half is not the half that is writing this review.



If your ideal rugged western protagonist is a slightly paunchy middle manager with a stupid haircut and weird mixture of fey smugness and dull-witted confusion permanently etched on his stupid assface, then The Dude Ranger is ready and waiting.



OK, the paunchy part isn't quite fair -- Georgie was apparently quite the athlete in his day, with some (nearly) nudie photos to prove the point. The haircut and the silly expressions may be holdovers from his silent film days, when that look was the thing.



And true, the point of the film is that George's character Ernest Selby, aka Dude Howard, is an ostensibly inexperienced Easterner come to collect his ranch inheritance, and not a dyed-in-the-denim, whip-thin, leanly muscled, life-long grizzled mountain man.


Y'know, like these other guys around the ranch.

But if we can comment upon all the boot-fa-chays and handsome features of the women we regularly encounter in our watchings, then George O'Brien is going to get his turn in the firing line.



With all that out of the way, the film itself, then -- again, it's poverty row, and a serviceable example. It has the usual tropes -- the comic relief sidekick (Syd Saylor, another singing cowboy), the double-cross, and even a perennial favorite of the period, the pretty girl with a male relative in a wheelchair (Irene Hervey as Anne, and Henry Hall as her dad Sam, respectively).



Unlike Crashing Thru, this one was a bit harder to follow at times, at one point necessitating a rewind so that K, perhaps overly distracted by the abundance of assface, could grasp the finer points of a cattle rustling arrangement. As we later found out, some of the confusion wasn't entirely our fault. As with many other Mill Creek offerings, this version of The Dude Ranger had several scenes cut, ranging from the relatively minor (Anne does some banking) to near-critical (the entire backstory to Anne's dance ruse).



Despite the hacks to the plot and the assface on parade, The Dude Ranger had enough of a story and consequent action to keep things interesting up until nearly the end. The denouement did feel a bit like they ran out of runtime and wanted to wrap things up quickly, but given the scenery on offer during the final chase (for once it's not California!), we're willing to cut a bit of slack.

---

When a Man's a Man (1935)

Grade: C

Literal assface

If, dear reader(s), you thought the negative reaction to George O'Brien in The Dude Ranger was a tad hyperbolic, then perhaps you'll understand why when you see who stars in the film immediately following:



Yup, here we go again with this assface playing yet another fresh-off-the-locomotive greenhorn -- this time Larry Knight, who's convinced his path to self fulfillment lies in the breaking of a charismatic bucking bronco.


Or wooing -- sometimes it's hard to tell.

After making an ass of his assface at the local ro-DAY-o (as in Drive) and missing his westbound train, Mr. Aw-Shucks bumbles his way to the ailing Cross Triangle Ranch, ingratiating himself with owner Dean Baldwin (Richard Carlyle), his conveniently of-age daughter Kitty (Dorothy Wilson), and inconveniently-in-love-with-said-daughter foreman, Phil Acton (Paul Kelly).



That last qualifier should clue you in to one of the major conflicts of this movie; the other concerns dastardly neighboring rancher Nick Gambert (Harry Woods) and his opportunistic water-hogging ways (score a point for YEE-HAW bingo).



The former of these conflicts is handled in rather gentlemanly fashion, with all parties having evidently graduated (with honors) from the school of No Hard Feelings.



And, without giving too much away, the latter conflict comes to an explosive head, thanks to Knight having also earned an advanced certificate from the Acme Corporation Academy in Suspenseful Deployment of Pyrotechnics.


meep meep

With an assist, naturally, from Chekhov's black stallion.



Despite being tired of looking at that face for two films in a row, we thought this one wasn't half bad. Production values seemed somewhat better than in Crashing Thru or The Dude Ranger, and there was the added benefit of no missing scenes (always a plus). And watching the final plan unfold  -- complete with gun fightin', tunnel crawlin', and a very clever way of escaping blame -- was, ahem, simply a blast.

---

Rock River Renegades (1942)

Grade: D



What does one say about a movie co-starring three grown-ass men whose real-life silly nicknames are also the names of their characters? A film where John "Dusty" King, Max "Alibi" Terhune, and Umbreallahead un-favorite Ray "As-I-Watched" "Ass-Faced Voyeur" "Always The Ape" Corrigan (modestly going by just "Crash") share top billing with a ventriloquist's dummy named Elmer Sneezeweed?



This was the western we'd been unconsciously bracing for from the outset. Hokier, jokier, and overall oatier, it's just one of two dozen Monogram-produced "Range Busters" films, the majority of which star the exact same trio, doing, we imagine, the exact same western-y things each time, with minor variations.


Y'know, western-y things, like light bondage.

So, what does one say? Not a whole lot.


And frankly, I'm just plain tired of writing about Westerns.

We've got some pretty typical stuff -- a lynch mob on horseback; the furniture-busting barroom brawl; Mr. Bad Guy attempting to pass as a law-abiding citizen (though maybe he should've reconsidered the black hat); and exactly one eligible spunky female in the 18-25 age range.


Alas, still no bingo.

Unfortunately, the ratio of talkiness to action is skewed in the wrong direction, without the benefit of a compelling plot. Yawn. Maybe the other Range Busters have something more exciting to offer, but if this one is a representative example, then we'd be dummies to keep watching.