The House of the Seven Gables: Special Book Report Edition

Universal Pictures, 1940. Directed by Joe May.

Now that my wife and I have made one last daring grocery run (for awhile at least) and are hunkering down in self-imposed isolation with our stash of supplies, the comfortable home routines -- reading, writing, watching movies, painting, playing games -- are more important than ever in keeping us reasonably sane.

Fortunately we’ve both been retired for a couple of years, so we’re not having to learn a lot of new tricks to keep ourselves busy. And of course all the little home projects that had been sitting quietly in the corner are now staring us in the face and saying, “you have no more excuses.”

The other day I decided to tackle the project crying out loudest to be done: the Great Spring Cleaning and Ritual Purging of unused, unneeded stuff. Careful not to stir up so much dust that my coughing and sneezing would set off alarm bells, I got going on my remorseless purge.

I was so thorough that I discovered boxes hidden behind other boxes that hadn’t been moved in years. To my amazement, I found a box of old school papers from my junior high and high school days. It got me wondering -- who would have saved this stuff in the first place (I wasn’t the best of students to say the least), and how did I not manage to throw it all out ages ago?

My curiosity got the better of me, and I spent quite some time shuffling through yellowed pages that made me feel like I was 104 instead of … whatever. But lo and behold, I ran across an old book report on Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables that was preternaturally perfect for the Classic Literature on Film Blogathon (graciously hosted by Paul at Silver Screen Classics).

Perfect because I remember basing it on my memories of the Vincent Price movie I’d seen on the late show rather than the book itself, which I had brought home only to find a couple of days later that my dog had chewed it up along with a shoe and several Playboys that I’d hidden under the bed. The rest of my “research” for the report consisted of asking various family members about things in the film that confused me.

So, for what it’s worth, here is a 13-year-old’s perspective on classic literature on film from an alternate universe long, long ago and far away.

To capture the spirit of a simpler time and a simpler me, I decided not to correct any mistakes (except to add a few editor’s notes and screencaps from the film to provide additional context and clarifications). So, take everything that follows with a grain of salt. Or maybe a whole shaker.

One final warning. Spoilers abound, if you can make out what the 13-year-old me was trying to say. Spoilers or not, proceed at your own caution.

Book Report: The House of the Seven Gabels by Nathanel Hawthorn
By [Name Redacted]

Nathanel Hawthorn was an author born a long time ago when people mainly lived on the east coast and lived in log cabins and hunted bears and stuff. He wrote romantisism-type books. My mom really likes those kinds of books, but she hides them because my dad thinks their junk. I hide my horror comics because otherwise both my dad and my mom will throw them away.

His best known book is The Scary Letter, about a girl named Ester Primm who walks around with a big letter A pasted to her forehead and people make fun of her and stuff. He also wrote something called Twice Baked Tales. I don’t know much about it, exsept that it was made into a movie with my favorite horror star Vincent Price. I never saw it, but my friend Jerry saw it at the drive-in and said it sucked.

Another author who lived around the same time was Washington Erving, who joined the Philthydelphia ‘76ers and fought the redcoats during the Revolutionery War and then wrote some cool stories about a headless horseman and Jack The Ripper Van Winkel. I really wanted to do the report on The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Horror, but since somebody else checked it out, I guess House of the Severed Seven Gabels will do.

I asked my mom and dad if they had red the book, but they hadn’t. My dad said that it might be up my ally anyway, because he thought it might be about a haunted house or something. I was exsited since The Haunting is one of my all-time favorite movies ever, where the people stay in the creepy old haunted house and the one lady thinks she’s holding the hand of her friend in the dark but it turns out to be a ghost.

The Turner House, built in 1668 in Salem, MA, was the
inspiration for the Seven Gables house. (Photo: 1915)

It turns out the House of the Seven Gabels isn’t very scary. There’s a lot of talking but not much happens. There’s no nosy ghosts trying to break down doors like in The Haunting. And the house doesn’t look like much. The Munsters and the Addams Family houses are way cooler. [Editor’s note: at this point as I was rushing to get the report done, I abandoned all pretense that I had read the book and was desperately trying to describe the movie from memory. Needless to say, this did not earn any bonus points with my English teacher.]

The people in the story wear old-time cloths and talk real formal, but parts of it seem like it could happen in real life, like the one guy doing really mean things to his brother and getting him locked up and stuff. Like, my brother steals and breaks stuff of mine all the time, and when I try to get back at him, I’m the one who gets in trouble.

The two brothers live in this big old house with their dad who looks like he’s about 102 years old. Their names are Jeff and Cliff Pinchum. [Ed. - George Sanders as Jaffrey Pyncheon and Vincent Price as Clifford.] There’s also a cousin living there whose too poor to live on her own. Her name is Hapsiba. [Margaret Lindsay as Hepzibah].

Jeff is snooty and all about money, and Cliff is like this musican who plays on this tiny piano and sings songs. He wants his dad to sell the house so he can run off with his cousin to New York and sell his music or something.

Clifford plays the harpsichord in the house for Hepzibah. Say that three times real fast!

I kind of got confused about the cousin thing, because I thought you weren’t supposed to marry your cousin. When I asked my dad, he said that back in those days, there weren’t that many elagibel people to marry, so a lot of people married their cousins. He also said that mom’s family was mostly cousins who married each other. When mom heard that, she threw her Good Housekeeping at him.

At first the old dad wants to sell the house really bad, because he’s broke and the house is supposed to be cursed because his ansester got the land by accusing the owner, Mr. Mall, of whichcraft. After the ansester built the house he didn’t get to enjoy it much because he died from the curse. There’s a legend that he hid a lot of gold somewhere in the house before he croaked.

Jeff gets his dad to change his mind about selling because he wants to look for the gold. So then Cliff gets really mad because that means he can’t go to New York. The old man and him start yelling at each other, and then the old man grabs his throat and keels over, clunking his head on the desk as he goes down.

"It's okay Hepzibah, I was just helping Jaffrey adjust his tie."

Jeff comes into the room and then goes all Columbo on his brother, acusing him of murder. This gets Cliff all mad because he never even touched the old man, but he almost strangles Jeff instead. A bunch of townies and old biddies outside happen to be watching through an open window, and this does Cliff no good at all. I could relat a lot to this, since my brother does this to me all the time.

I asked my mom why so many nosy people would stand around an old house like that. She said that back in the old days, before there was any TV or even radio, people entertaned themselves by peeking in everybody’s windows and then blabbing about what they saw like it was Johnny Carson or something.

So then Cliff gets a speedy trial that we learned in Government class is everybody’s right. The trial is so speedy that the jury doesn’t even have to deliberat, they just pronounse him guilty, which I guess is their right to. So Cliff gets sent off to the pentitentury penatenatry state pen, and Hapsiba goes from being happy to being real sad.

Jeff thinks he’s in the catburg’s seat, but then gets a big surprize when he finds out the old man gave Hapsiba the house before he died. She throws him out and then closes all the shudders in the house and then sits around mopping for like the next 20 years.

This is where the story gets real hard to figure out. Cliff becomes friends with Mat [Ed. - Dick Foran as Matthew Maule] who is in jail with him. It turns out Mat is the desendent of the guy the Pinchums stole the land from and who cursed everybody, but they act like its no big deal.

"False accusations of witchcraft, land theft, curses... aw, what the heck,
let's let bygones be bygones..."

Mat gets out of jail and then goes and rents a room from Hapsiba at the Gabels house, exsept he uses a different last name, I guess because he doesn’t want to scare anybody. Mat is into a lot of stuff, like he’s one of those old-time photografers whose got one of those cameras that’s bigger than a TV set, and when he takes a picture the people have to sit there for two hours and not move.

He is also an abolishinist abolitstinist anti-slavery guy who meets with a bunch of other towns people to figure out how to help the slaves escape. So all in all he’s a pretty good guy.

Even with Mat paying rent and everything, Hapsiba opens up a store in her house to get more money. For some reason all the town busybuddies put her down for it, kind of like if she opened one of those shops with the funny pipes and incest sticks like the one at the mall that all the hippies go to.

Jaffrey wonders where he's going to get toilet paper and
hand sanitizer after Hepzibah tells him the store's all out.

Hapsiba calls it a cent store, which I figure is like a doller store because back in those days you could buy a lot more with a penny. Since he’s really, really old, I asked my grandpa how much a penny could buy back in those days, but he started talking about comminists and something called the federel reserve and how money isn’t worth the paper its printed on, so he didn’t really answer my question.

Anyway, the governer finaly comutates Cliff’s sentence and he gets out of jail and moves back in to the old Pinchum house. Mat is still trying to help the runaway slaves, but he doesn’t realize that one of the other rich anti-slavery guys has given their money to Jeff to invest, but that turns out not to be not such a good idea because Jeff is as crooked as a dog’s hind leg as my grandpa likes to say.

Mat starts telling everbody that Cliff is tearing up the house looking for the hidden gold, and Jeff gets the idea that he can get his brother comitted to the looney bin for tearing the house down, or something like that. There’s a lot of banging going on around the house, but Hapsiba finds out its Mat doing all the pounding, not Cliff. She’s really mad and tries to throw Mat out, but Cliff tells her it’s all right and its part of a plan to get back at Jeff, which I didn’t get at all.

Jeff shows up at the house to tell Cliff that he’s looney toons and he’s going to have him comitted, and Cliff tells his brother that he can have the house if he signs a paper saying that Cliff didn’t kill his dad. Then the guy who gave Jeff all the anti-slavery group’s money shows up, shouting about needing the money back. Jeff says he doesn’t have it, and the guy is so bummed he turns around and shoots himself.

Jaffrey chokes up when he realizes there's no hidden
treasure and no toilet paper.

Since nobody else saw what happened, Hapsiba starts calling Jeff a murderor, and then Jeff changes his toon and agrees to sign Cliff’s paper so long as they don’t accuse him of murder. When Cliff tells him that there was never any gold and it was all a trick that Cliff and Mat Mall pulled on him, he grabs his neck just like the old man and drops dead, probably from the curse, or maybe a heart attack, or maybe both.

So then Cliff and Hapsiba get married, and Matt marries the pretty girl Feebe [Ed. - Nan Grey as Phoebe Pyncheon] that Hapsiba hired to help her run the store, and they leave town in a fancy carriege.

The story was slow and confusing in places and not scary at all, but there was still some stuff you could learn from it. Like a speedy trial isn’t a good thing if you’re always getting blamed for the bad stuff your brother does. And in the old days before TV, people entertaned themselves by saying mean things about other people. And a penny could buy a lot more than today. And turnalot is fair pay. For my next report, I hope to learn a lot more about headless horsemen and that Sleepy Horror thing. 

The End.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, circa 1860s

[Editor’s postscript. Of course, there are risks in trying to pass off descriptions of movie adaptations for the real thing in book reports. In their lengthy analysis of the film, Tom Weaver and Michael and John Brunas note that “As is invariably the case when Hollywood undertakes to film a classic story, changes were required for the sake of dramatic interest. The Hawthorne novel is set up quite differently from the Universal film: Most of the action seen in this film transpired before the novel’s page one.” [Weaver, et. al., Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946, 2nd Edition, McFarland, 2007. p. 224.]

The novel starts out with Clifford, a broken man after all the years in jail, coming back to the house and finding Hepzibah has become a gloomy old spinster. Jaffrey shows up and threatens to institutionalize Clifford if he doesn’t reveal all he knows about the valuable land grant documents that are hidden in the house.

Also, the whole side plot of Matthew Maule/Holgrave being involved with the abolitionist cause and Jaffrey’s theft of their money leading to his downfall was absent in the book, being the brainchild of screenwriters Lester Cole and Harold Greene.

Weaver and the Brunases are on the whole complimentary of the film, observing that “Universal’s changes made for a tidy, streamlined drama with more incident and less wordy detours than Hawthorne’s original.” They also describe the acting of the leads, Price, Sanders and Lindsay as “first rate”: Sanders is a “dark, brooding cloud that hangs portentously over the heads of the other characters”; Lindsay is “ingenuous, intelligent and appealing”; and Price is “exuberant and impulsive -- but with more than a trace of repressed bitterness seething beneath the surface.” [Ibid., pp. 224 - 225]

My reaction, after watching the film for the first time in decades, is that the film, with its prim, nineteenth century setting and costumes, slow pace, and mannered acting, seems even older than its 1940 release date would indicate. One reason might be that House was directed by a traditional, old school veteran, Joe May (born Joseph Otto Mandel), a silent film pioneer who helped found the German film industry and who fled his native Austria when the Nazis took over. His lifelong discomfort with the English language and dictatorial style apparently did not endear him to a lot of folks in Hollywood, and House would be one of the last films he directed.

Clifford hits rock bottom when he realizes he has
to share a double bill with Black Friday.

Interestingly, although the film was relatively costly for Universal and had higher than average production values, the studio showed little faith in it, releasing it at the bottom of a double bill with Black Friday, a gangster pic with horror elements starring Universal’s very bankable stars, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. [Weaver, et al., p. 228]

One wonders if Universal's execs thought they might get a two-fer: a borderline prestige picture -- an historical romance drama -- that could also be marketed to the faithful horror crowd (One of the film's taglines: "AN ANCIENT HOUSE! A MURDER SECRET! A HIDDEN TREASURE!")

What they and audiences ended up with was a film that was neither here nor there. Although the screenwriters' idea of fleshing out the novel's backstory to make it the centerpiece of the film was clever, House of the Seven Gables still falls flat in many areas. The house is an interesting architectural oddity, but it might as well be any old colonial manse, as it lacks any sort of dark, forbidding atmosphere. The "mystery" centers on the old cliche of hidden treasure, and prosaic treasure at that -- old land grant documents. And the best the curse can do is to have a couple of old men (who were probably already susceptible to heart attacks) clutch at their throats and die.

What's left are some good performances by a varied cast of leads and colorful character actors, and a production that nicely captures the mannerisms and fashions of Hawthorne's day.

Although critics of the time were mostly kind to it, and fans at IMDb have given it a very high rating, to me, The House of the Seven Gables strays too far from its source to be a good adaptation, lacks the energy to be a truly interesting historical drama, and hedges on too many opportunities to be an intriguing thriller.

The House of the Seven Gables is available for rental or purchase here.

Countdown to Halloween: "I Want My Universal Mummy!"

HAlloween MoVie rating:
The Mummy Attacks-- Not
for the Faint of Heart

I know that as a classic horror film connoisseur I'm supposed to admire Universal's The Mummy (1932) and turn my nose up at all the so-called sequels that the studio cranked out in the 1940s. Boris Karloff's Im-Ho-Tep is the definitive Mummy, and by contrast, Kharis is just a B movie afterthought (and a crude one at that). When I was a kid and the original film popped up on the late show, I would invariably fall asleep in the middle of it, and at best, only wake up for the last 10 minutes or so of the climax. With subsequent showings, I stayed awake long enough each time to piece together the plot. I don't think I actually saw the whole thing through until I was an adult and got a DVD copy for my birthday (along with the other celebrated monsters in the Universal Classic Monsters collection).

The problem for me with the original Mummy (and one that's been noted by countless critics) is that it's not much more than a remake of Dracula with Egyptian trappings. Like Browning's / Lugosi's Dracula, it starts off with with a great, memorable scene ("The Mummy walks!"), and then immediately settles into a rather moribund drawing room affair, with Im-Ho-Tep, like the vampire Count, stalking a nubile young woman as various chivalrous men, including a Van Helsing-type character, try to prevent her from falling under the monster's spell. Not to mention, Im-Ho-Tep transmutes early on from a spectacular, frightening-looking monster complete with decaying, musty bandages into a fairly ordinary-looking wrinkly old man (albeit with haunting, creepy eyes). Edward Van Sloan and David Manners slip easily from their roles in the previous year's vampire film into this one, featuring a sort of ancient Egyptian vampire (or at least a soul-stealer).

"Now where did I leave those keys to the temple of Karnak?"

Things got a little more interesting (at least for the kids in the audience) as Im-Ho-Tep morphed into Kharis and shuffled around in The Mummy's Hand, Tomb, Ghost and lastly, Curse. Even at a scant 73 minutes, the original Mummy seemed to go on and on and on. None of the Kharis incarnations lasts more than 67 minutes, and predictably, they all move along at a good, crisp pace. Better yet, Kharis is a legitimate 3000-year-old monster:  swathed in dirt-caked bandages, his face a ruined mud mask, he holds out a claw-like hand as he shuffles relentlessly forward, ready to strangle the first thing that comes between him and his precious tanna leaves. No monster-loving kid would have gone for a series of B programmers about a dried up old man with bloodshot eyes.

As an added bonus, '40s Mummy fans were treated to a succession of great character actors -- George Zucco, Turhan Bey, John Carradine, Martin Koslek, and others -- trying to aid Kharis in his pursuit of the beloved Ananka and defend the old Egyptian faith (and letting Kharis and themselves down every time). Great filmmaking? I think not. Great entertainment? You bet! (...especially for hour-long, low-budget quickies designed for the bottom of a double bill).

The Mummy: The Legacy Collection, with all five Universal Mummy movies, trailers, and assorted extras, is like tanna leaves for a mummy maven. Check it out.

#11: The Mummy's Hand (1940)

If your life is so hectic that you can only fit one mummy movie into your Halloween viewing schedule, this is the one. Part comedy, part horror, Mummy's Hand retooled boring Im-Ho-Tep into honest-to-goodness monster Kharis, and threw tanna leaves into the mythos to boot. Affable adventurers Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and Babe Jensen (Wallace Ford) enlist the aid of a stage magician, The Great Solvani (the great Cecil Kellaway) and his daughter Marta (Peggy Moran), in unearthing the ancient Egyptian tomb of Princess Ananka. They run afoul of the sinister Prof. Andoheb (George Zucco), who revives the mummified corpse of Ananka's lover Kharis (cowboy star Tom Tyler) to avenge the desecration.

Pharaonic Phactoid: This would be the last time that the mummy a.) had two good eyes (he emerges in Tomb a little worse for the wear from having been set on fire in Hand); and b.) would be portrayed at Universal by anyone other than Lon Chaney, Jr.

Key Kharis Kollaborator: George Zucco's film career began in England in the early '30s-- his American film debut was in After the Thin Man (1936). His career really took off when he appeared as Prof. Moriarity opposite Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939). Although he appeared in numerous dramas and costumers, at the end of his career he was remembered almost exclusively for the sinister villains he portrayed in B thrillers and horror movies. One of Zucco's co-stars in the 1930s, John Howard, summed him up this way: "George was a strange fellow but awfully nice. Completely different from the characters he played. He wasn't the slightest bit menacing at all. He was a pussycat." (Tom Weaver, et. al., Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946, 2nd. Ed., McFarland, 2007)

#10: The Mummy's Tomb (1942)

Dispensing with the comic elements of the previous picture, Tomb is all terror as Andoheb (Zucco) and Kharis (Lon Chaney, Jr.) somehow survive gunshots and fire, and after many years, pursue the tomb defilers Banning (Foran) and Jensen (Ford) to their comfortable homes in America. The aging and feeble Andoheb turns the vengeful dirty work over to a new agent of the old religion, Mehemet Bey (Turhan Bey), who screws up his assignment big time (but not before causing the requisite Kharis-based carnage). Tomb's spare 60 minutes is still padded with archive footage from the previous film!

Key Kharis Kollaborator: Born in 1922 in Vienna, Austria, Turhan Bey's parents were very well-off -- his mother's family owned large glass factories and his father was a Turkish diplomat in Austria. He arrived in Hollywood knowing very little English, but by the early 1940s had secured a contract with Universal. By all accounts, Bey's off screen romancing eclipsed that of his big screen roles. After retiring from movies, he ended up back in Vienna as a freelance photographer for soft-core magazines like Penthouse. (?!!) He especially liked The Mummy's Tomb, telling an interviewer, "I guess it's my favorite because it was a part closest to my own nationality-- it was a young Egyptian who believed in something which we couldn't comprehend with our five senses…" (Ibid.)

#9: The Mummy's Ghost (1944)

Yet another high priest, Yousef Bey (John Carradine) travels to America to pick up where the last Bey left off. An idyllic college campus is disrupted in a big way as Kharis tries to reunite with his beloved Ananka, reincarnated in the form of a college co-ed of Egyptian background, Amina Mansouri (Ramsay Ames, filling in at the last moment for one-name bombshell Acquanetta when she fell on the first day of shooting and suffered a concussion). Yousef's own lust for the shapely Amina / Ananka proves his undoing.

Pharaonic Phactoid: In one scene, Lon Chaney got carried away and squeezed fellow actor Frank Reicher's throat so hard that he nearly fainted. According to director Reginald Le Borg, "Reicher was very nearly unconscious! … We massaged his neck and gave him some water. But the next day, when I saw him again, I spied a look at Reicher's neck, and you could see he had spots there, from the strangling!" (Ibid.)

Key Kharis Kollaborator: Around the same time as Mummy's Ghost, veteran B actor John Carradine portrayed a dapper Dracula in two Universal monster rallies-- House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945). According to House of Frankenstein co-star Peter Coe, Carradine hammed up his small role so badly, his scenes had to be reshot. Coe read Carradine the riot act, John toned it down, and they became good friends. In spite of (or perhaps because of) John's affinity for ham, he went on to appear in literally hundreds of low-budget films and TV shows through the end of the '80s. (Ibid.)

#8: The Mummy's Curse (1944)

The last chapter of the Kharis saga takes place in the haunted bayous of Louisiana. For a scintillating synopsis and key facts about the production, see my post at Mr. Movie Fiend.

See also Films From Beyond on YouTube for an amazing clip from Mummy's Curse, as well clips from other films featured in this blog.

"That's a face?"

The Atomic Submarine (1960)

After the Soviet Union's launch of the first orbiting satellite Sputnik in late 1957, the U.S. had a sort of collective nervous breakdown over the nation's ability to compete in the all-important area of technology, and especially military technology. Many darkly predicted that before long, the Soviets would be lobbing atomic bombs at us from space. Bomb shelters and duck-and-cover exercises at schools became all the rage. One bright spot in the midst of the doom and gloom in 1958 was the first successful submerged voyage across the North Pole by the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571). All but forgotten now, the Nautilus' exploits were big, welcome news to worried Americans, boosting faith in the country's technological future at a time when it seemed all of our space rockets were exploding on their launch pads.

Naturally, the movie industry zealously capitalized on the headlines, turning America's worries into celluloid entertainments featuring atomic mutations, threats from outer space, and, in honor of an American first, atomic submarines. Disney launched the big-budget 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1954, around the same time that the U.S. Navy launched their nuclear-powered version of Jules Verne's Nautilus. Several years later, the real-life Nautilus' record-breaking voyages inspired such films as 1961's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and the subject of this post, The Atomic Submarine (1960).

Atomic Submarine is set in a not-too-distant future (not too distant from 1960, that is), where nuclear-powered military, scientific, and commercial subs and ships routinely transit the world's oceans, and in particular take convenient short cuts under the polar ice cap. When dozens of these vessels turn up missing or mysteriously destroyed, the military brass summons top scientists and the crew of America's premier atomic sub, the Tigershark, to investigate. The call to duty tears Lt. Commander Richard "Reef" Holloway (Arthur Franz) away from his pursuit of a shapely peroxide blonde, which does not make him very happy (more on the Lt. Commander's, and the actor's, unhappiness later).

The slowest parts of the movie involve the Tigershark's search for a mysterious underwater craft near the North Pole that may be responsible for the mischief, with lots of stock footage and shots of maps with dotted lines tracing the sub's routes, and a portentous narrator solemnly describing the action (or lack of it). Things don't pick up until the crew and the scientists stumble onto a pattern behind the mysterious craft's appearances and subsequent maritime disasters-- a pattern that traces a circle around the North Pole. (Shades of the real-life Nautilus!) They race to the next point where the pattern suggests the unearthly visitor should be, and sure enough, encounter a submerged saucer that they dub "Cyclops" (for the single eye-like light in the middle of its dome).

What Atomic Submarine lacks in budget ($135,000), it makes up for (somewhat) in imagination. Sci-fi flicks of the time were full of needle-nosed spaceships and flying saucers, but this is the only one that I can think of to feature an Unidentified Submerged Object (USO) -- and to top it off, the USO turns out to be a living organism as well!  When the Tigershark's torpedoes fail to do the trick, the Commander (Dick Foran) rams the Cyclops, but can't extricate his sub, and the two sink to the bottom of the icy depths.

The intrepid crew figures out a way to puncture the Cyclops' "eye," providing a way into the craft. But, much to hard-charging Lt. Cmdr. Holloway's chagrin, the only person qualified to steer an experimental diving bell into the eye of the Cyclops is civilian scientist and (gasp!) pacifist Carl Neilson, Jr. (Brett Halsey), son of Holloway's mentor. Holloway mercilessly chides the earnest and idealistic Neilson about his naive views on peace and disarmament. At this point, the film seems more like crude cold war propaganda than entertainment. 

Off camera, relations between the two actors weren't much better. In a DVD extra interview, Halsey described Franz as cold and aloof. Halsey speculated that Franz thought that the low-budget production was beneath him. Similarly, producer Alex Gordon found Franz "neurotic," and was irritated that Franz insisted on seeing his rushes-- unusual for a modest production on a tight schedule (The Astounding B Monster Book, Dinoship, 2005)

Pacifist or not, Neilson/Halsey performs his job like a trooper, enabling Holloway to lead a crew aboard the Cyclops to see if they can cut the Tigershark loose from the alien ship. The Navy frogmen assigned to the task of freeing the Tigershark note that the area seems more like the ruptured flesh of a gigantic animal than a torn metal hull. Holloway and one of the frogmen hear a disembodied voice that their skeptical companions for some reason can't hear. Like so many extras in sci-fi thrillers, the frogmen work hard to save the day, and get dispatched in grisly ways for their efforts.

At one and the same time, Atomic Submarine reveals its stark low budget, yet manages visuals that had me hiding my eyes as a kid, and stayed with me long after. The Cyclops' interior is a simple sound stage with a couple of ramps, lit in stark black and white. With most of the unearthly ship in total blackness, and disembodied voices calling to select Tigershark crew members, the scene is simply and eerily effective. The ways in which the hapless frogmen meet their demise are particularly gruesome for a movie of this era (if you're curious, see the clip below).

The climactic meeting between the Cyclops' guiding intelligence and Holloway is also quite effective, considering the shoestring effects budget. The creature was an elaborate sock puppet built up around effects man Irving Block's arm, with rubber tentacles around the base manipulated by wires. The whole sequence aboard the Cyclops submersible spacecraft is so tight and effective, that it almost seems part of another, more expensive and sophisticated production. Needless to say, Earth is saved in typical B fashion by well-placed shots-- the first, a shot from Holloway's pistol into the gaping eye of the Cyclops creature, and the coup de grace: one of Tigershark's torpedoes quickly reconfigured as an anti-ballistic missile to intercept the fleeing alien ship in mid-air.

Another reason Atomic Submarine stands out from similar B pictures of the day is its veteran cast. Arthur Franz may have had good reason to be grumpy about being in this shoestringer. By 1960, he already had a long string of leads in B movies, secondary parts in bigger budget movies, and TV roles behind him. Early in his career, he gained notice for his portrayal of a mentally unstable war veteran who snaps and begins shooting women with a high-powered rifle (The Sniper, 1952). While other actors parlayed such noticeable roles into fame and A-list careers, Franz never broke out of the B-list and TV doldrums.

The presence of veterans Dick Foran (as the Tigershark's commander) and Tom Conway (as a member of the scientific team) adds to the fun. Foran is 50 years young in Submarine, and instantly recognizable to fans of old Universal programmers like The Mummy's Hand (1940) and Horror Island (1941) -- not to mention countless westerns. Conway, debonair brother of equally debonair George Sanders, went from genre picture highs like Val Lewton's Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), to lows like Bride of the Gorilla (1951) and Voodoo Woman (1957). He made only a couple more films and some TV after Atomic Submarine.

Bill Warren, in his monumental and highly entertaining compilation Keep Watching the Skies: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (McFarland), pithily sizes up The Atomic Submarine:

[I]t has a certain odd likability that makes it a more watchable film than it has any right to be. Despite a shortage of action, and especially lame direction by veteran Spencer Gordon Bennet, the film is relatively brisk, and the acting by a crew of old (and young) pros is considerably above average for a low-budget film, although the script by Orville H. Hampton is so full of clunker lines and wildly wrong character reactions as to be frequently hilarious.

Unintentionally hilarious or not, how can you not like a movie with lines like these?

Cyclops creature: At last Commander, we meet as your people say... face to face!
Lt. Cmdr. Holloway: That's a face?

The Atomic Submarine is available for immediate free online viewing at Internet Archive.

Unlucky Tigershark crew members have a bad day aboard the alien craft: