Cormania: The Intruder (Roger Corman, 1962)

Though not quite the overlooked masterpiece it is sometimes hailed as, this unique entry in Roger Corman’s filmography - a rare and impassioned excursion into the treacherous realm we would today call ‘non-genre’ - certainly still packs a punch, remaining as sickening, uncomfortable and difficult to shake off as a random kick to the kidneys.

One thing which must be understood straight away about ‘The Intruder’s status as a political / message movie, is that it is a diatribe. Anyone in search nuanced characterisations, multiple points of view, or a general recognition of the ever-shifting shades of grey which define the contours of our lives on earth, should probably look elsewhere.

Thankfully though, it is at least a diatribe with which I (and, I would suggest, all reasonable and right-thinking people across the globe) can wholeheartedly agree, and as an unflinching exposé of the manipulative tactics employed by self-serving demagogues seeking to squeeze personal power from the rotting fruit of pre-existing hatreds and social inequality, well… blindingly obvious though may be to say so, it remains as relevant to life in the western world circa 2024 as it was in 1962, if not more so.

Taking its cue to some extent from Orson Welles’ similarly button-pushing ‘The Stranger’ from 1946, ‘The Intruder’ takes us to the emblematic, petri dish-like environment of Caxton, Missouri, a small town into which a dangerous outside element has just been introduced - Adam Cramer, played by William Shatner, an agent provocateur apparently dispatched to the town from Washington DC on behalf of something called the “Patrick Henry Society” (a fairly obvious analogue for the far right John Birch Society).

Stepping off a Greyhound and checking into the town’s only hotel, Cramer, armed with a distinctive white suit and oversized personal confidence, immediately begins canvassing the local citizenry vis-à-vis their views on the Kennedy administration’s then-recent anti-segregation laws, which are due to result in a small number of black pupils soon beginning to attend the town’s previously all-white high school for the first time. Suffice to say, the down home folks’ responses to this topic prove a lot encouraging to Caxton’s purposes than they do to those of us implicitly liberal viewers.

In fact, Corman’s main jumping off point from the template laid down by ‘The Stranger’, and the element which ultimately makes ‘The Intruder’ so much more disturbing, is that, whereas Welles’ film began by evoking a familiar ‘white picket fence’ ideal of the benign American small town into which a corrupting fascist element is introduced, L.A. native Corman’s conception of down home Americana is already pretty close to hell on earth, even before the demonic influence of Shatner’s transient, shit-stirring carpet-bagger is added to the mix.

Shooting in the southeast Missouri towns of Charleston and East Prairie, it’s safe to assume that Corman and his brother Gene (credited as executive producer) very much hedged their bets when it came to letting the townsfolk know exactly what kind of film they were making here. Details of the script were kept a secret, but this reticence apparently didn’t prevent the filmmakers from being thrown out of the latter town by the sheriff on account of being “communists”, whilst Shatner has reported that the production also regularly needed to contend with threats of violence, sabotaged equipment and the like.

Whilst the film’s primary actors were cast in L.A., locals in Missouri were employed on an ad-hoc basis to fill out the rest of the supporting and non-speaking roles, and perhaps the single most disturbing aspect of ‘The Intruder’ when viewed today is that, after Shatner’s character has gotten warmed up and started delivering a series of anti-integration tirades, dropping the N-bomb incessantly as he demeans and demonises the town’s (thus far invisible) black population, the (presumably genuine, and minimally briefed) locals simply listen to him and nod in quiet, uncontested agreement, as if he were talking about repairing potholes, or repainting the local fire station or something.

None of the non-actors and white passers by bearing witness to his hate-filled oratory seem to register even the slightest surprise or unease, whether in the context of a hotel lobby, main street diner, or eventually, at a mass rally on the steps of the town hall. It’s pretty chilling stuff.

Retrospectively adding to this profound sense of discomfort of course is the casting of Shatner, seen here in one of his first significant screen role after a few years spent cutting his teeth in TV and the theatre. Of course, no one in 1962 could have known the path his career would take, but needless to say, the sight of the future Captain Kirk practically frothing at the mouth preaching racial hatred has the potential to prove pretty alarming to multiple generations of Americans, and this cognitive dissonance is only enhanced by the fact that Shatner’s performance here is absolutely superb.

In terms of conventional acting chops in fact, I think this is the best work I’ve ever seen from him by a country mile. Having apparently not yet developed the hammy, staccato diction which would make him such a beloved figure of fun in years to come, Shatner instead plays it totally straight, capturing that very particular brand of weaselly, ingratiating, blank-eyed intensity unique to psychopathic politicos and conmen to an extent which is little short of terrifying.

To 21st century eyes though, the most obvious failure of ‘The Intruder’ is the chronic absence of actual black characters, and the reluctance to assign much of a voice even to those who do appear on screen.

Early in the film, Cramer views the poverty of “N***ertown” through the glass of a taxi window - just as the filmmakers, capturing this more-or-less documentary footage, presumably also did - and effectively, that’s all we in the audience get to see of it for quite a long time thereafter. Eventually, we get a few scenes of a black family group, some more vérité footage of some suitably apprehensive, disheartened looking dudes silently hanging out on their stoops, and then - in the film’s primary image of Civil Rights era emancipation - the sight of a column of primly attired new black pupils, led by the handsome Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), making their way to high school for the first time, as the white populace radiates hatred in their general direction.

It’s a great sequence actually, orchestrated and edited by Corman with Eisensteinian immediacy, but, of all the black school pupils, Joey is the only one allotted much screen time or a role in the narrative - or even a name and personality for that matter. And, even he fits neatly into the reassuringly well spoken, well turned out mould established on screen in the preceding years by Sidney Poiter and Harry Belafonte - a decidedly conventional, unthreatening presence.

Very much the weakest aspect of the film, this limited engagement with actual black life can’t help but nail ‘The Intruder’ squarely as the work of the kind of well-intentioned white liberals who lack the experience or insight to actually conceive of black people as human beings, complete with flaws, complexities and ranges of interests and opinions which extend beyond a set of benign, outdated stereotypes. (Exactly the kind of attitude punctured so brilliantly in a SF/horror context by Jordan Peele in ‘Get Out’ a few years back, funnily enough.)

About the only moment in which the filmmakers even consider the possibility that young black people might want to do something other than be ‘integrated’ into the institutions of a cowardly and gullible white society inhabited by pinch-faced creeps who hate their guts, is the sole scene featuring by far ‘The Intruder’s best black character - Joey’s pre-teen younger brother (who sadly remains uncredited, insofar as I can tell).

A resplendent hep-cat in waiting, this kid is introduced licking on an ice lolly as he listens to blaring be-bop on the radio (“whatchu talkin’ about ‘junk’, that’s MUSIC, man”), and he clearly gets an almighty kick out of mocking his square older brother; “well it’s too bad I ain’t old enough to go to school, I wouldn’t be scared, that’s all … man, you know what you oughta do? I’ll tell you what you oughta do, get yourself a gun, play it cool see, and the first grey stud looks at ya sideways, BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM…”

A bit more time spent with this kid brother, or some similarly outspoken black adults, might have allowed the filmmakers to wrangle a hell of a lot more verisimilitude into ‘The Intruder’, but… what can you say - at the end of the day, they meant well.

I mean, it would certainly have been a lot easier, and a lot more profitable, for Roger, Gene and scriptwriter Charles Beaumont to chill out by the pool back in Hollywood and knock out a couple of radioactive monster flicks, so we at least owe them props for standing up and being counted, putting their careers, their money, and even their personal safety on the line to make a film like this one, live on the scene in the south, whilst the battles of the Civil Rights era were still raging.

A far more interesting element of Beaumont’s script meanwhile is the nature of Cramer’s main antagonist, Sam Griffin, played to perfection by Corman regular (and occasional script writer) Leo Gordon. Griffin and his demoralised wife Vi (Jeanne Cooper) are, ultimately, the only characters in the movie who become more than cyphers, developing an intriguing and contradictory mess of personality traits as we get to know them better, and the material dealing with Cramer’s interactions with them yields many of the film’s strongest dramatic moments.

Staying at the same rundown hotel as Cramer, Griffin is initially introduced as a loud-mouthed, drunken braggart, apparently employed as some kind of showman / barker charged with luring customers into a shop in a neighbouring town. Much to his chagrin, Cramer initially reads Griffin as a clown, and, as a result, hones in on the clearly-sick-of-it-all Vi with an especially predatory look in his eye.

After Cramer ‘seduces’ Vi in a horribly uncomfortable scene which modern audiences are liable to read less ambiguously as a ‘rape’, prompting her to flee the rest of the film in shame, her husband’s character turns on a dime, dropping the ‘comedy drunkard’ shtick and squaring his shoulders as if he’s suddenly realised he has seriously nasty little fucker to take care of here.

Evidently the immature Cramer’s superior in terms of guts and life experience, Griffin initially disarms and humiliates him in a sweaty hotel room confrontation that pushes the film about as close as it gets to the realm of film noir, whilst, back on the rails of the central political narrative, the decision to put Gordon up against Shatner during the story’s final act proves absolutely inspired.

More-so than a conventional liberal saviour (such as the film’s mild-mannered school principal), Griffin’s background as a store front barker and confidence man means that he instantly recognises the kind of two-bit crap Cramer is peddling, and knows how to deal with it too - publically tearing him down, exposing his lies and allowing the ephemeral power he holds over the suckers to drain away like filth down a storm drain, leaving Cramer sitting alone and forlorn on the high school swing-set from which, just a few short minutes earlier, he was orchestrating an out of control lynch mob baying for blood.

Viewed at this particular point in history, it’s nigh on impossible to get through this closing scene without fervently wishing that a similar scenario could play itself out on a nationwide scale in the USA today… but unfortunately, life is never quite that simple, is it? Just as it’s never as simple as the strawman-baiting and scapegoating of the ‘other’ peddled by Cramer and his ilk.

And just as, likewise, the true darkness of Corman’s film lays not in the spectre of Cramer himself, but in the spectacularly bleak fact that, when the would be lynchmobbers shamefacedly shamble away from their erstwhile leader, they’ve still learned nothing from the experience. They may have given this week’s demagogue the heave-ho, and they may be temporarily willing to observe the law and allow black people to remain alive and attend their schools… but there is no suggestion here at all here that the townsfolk are any less dyed-in-the-wool racists than they were at the start of the film.

The good looks and clear diction of Joey Greene have clearly not won over these representatives of Ugly America, and the town’s black population remains silent, cowed and fearful. After Cramer slinks off to nurse his psychic wounds like a defeated alley cat, how long will it be before the next mean-spirited agitator shows up, or until the next black boy gets accused of looking at a white girl the wrong way, as the fuse on that same old powder keg starts tediously fizzing away yet again?

Enjoy yr ‘happy ending’ whilst you can folks, the film seems to say, because in the long run, this shit is going nowhere, irrespective of who’s holding the mop and bucket at any given time.

AND SO, let’s pencil in a parallel discussion of exactly why this ended up being the only film Roger Corman made during the ‘50s and ‘60s which failed to turn a profit shall we? How about, ooh, let’s say, 4th July in a couple of week? See you there!

Horror Express: The Vampire’s Ghost (Lesley Selander, 1945)

I had a lot of fun with Lesley Selander’s The Catman of Paris earlier this month, so thought I’d make some time (only 58 minutes required) to check in on the other b-horror he directed for Republic Pictures in the mid ‘40s.

As with ‘Catman..’, the title is intriguingly silly, betraying an attempt to hang onto the coattails of Universal’s waning horror output (they’d released both ‘The Mummy’s Ghost’ and ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein’ in the proceeding years), but... mixed results here, I'd say.

From the outset, ‘The Vampire’s Ghost’ proves to be a rather inert and talky affair, set amid the confines of a pokey and generally uninspiring backlot version of darkest Africa, wherein a largely undistinguished cast of white colonial types trudge through their allotted paces with no great surfeit of enthusiasm.

On the plus side though, it sure has some interesting notions buried within it.

Though he’s certainly no ghost, our resident vampire here turns out to be a former member of Queen Elizabeth I’s court, who - perhaps uniquely in the annals of cinematic vampirism - now finds himself running a gin joint in a fictional central African state, fleecing sailors in dice games and ruing the weary burden of his immortal condition, like some cut-price, blood-drinking Rick Blaine.

An odd fit for the vampire role, John Abbott initially looks more like the kind of guy you’d cast as an accountant or an elevator operator. But, he has a deep, sonorous voice and Peter Lorre-worthy bug-eyes, and ultmately leans into his unusual characterisation very well.

There’s an absolutely sublime scene for instance where, after being wounded by a spear whilst out on ‘safari’, Abbott uses his powers of mental persuasion to command the film’s hero (Charles Gordon) to carry him to the summit of a nearby mountain, where he luxuriates in the healing light of the full moon, his head resting on the precious Elizabethan box containing the grave soil of his original resting place, presented to him by the Queen after the Armada. Great stuff.

At first, it seems as if the vampire is going to be characterised as a variation on the Wandering Jew/Wolfman archetype - condemned to walk the earth for all eternity whilst seeking an escape from his supernatural affliction, and trying to warn the other characters away from him, lest they fall victim to his curse.

Later on though, he seems to have lost this benevolent streak, and, having given fair warning, gets straight on with the business of dominating Gordon’s mind, reducing him to a brain-dead slave, whilst he claims the leading lady (Peggy Stewart) for himself, whisking her off to the remote, abandoned temple of a supposed “death cult”, where, inexplicably in view of the film’s geography, a four-armed Hindu idol awaits them. (I liked the way Abbott plays all this with  “another day, another dollar” resignation, as though he’s been through it all a hundred times before.)

Many of these interesting and unconventional story elements can presumably be traced back to legendary screenwriter and SF pioneer Leigh Brackett, who takes co-writer and original story credits here, the same year she worked for Howard Hawks on ‘The Big Sleep’. And, as I can’t locate any additional background on her involvement with this film... that’s about all I have to say about that.

Stylistically meanwhile, the movie seems to draw heavily from Val Lewton’s then-recent series of b-horror successes at RKO, even directly mimicking ‘I Walked With A Zombie’ (1943) during scenes in which the white folks sit nervously in their bamboo-shaded bungalows, muttering darkly about the jungle drums affecting the productivity of the natives down at the ol’ plantation and so on, whilst the presentation of the vampire’s killings seems to echo both ‘The Leopard Man’ (1943) and ‘Cat People’ (1942) in places.

Unfortunately though, Selander proves unable to muster even a fraction of the atmosphere Jacques Tourneur brought to those projects - largely through no fault of his own, I’m assuming, as a “first take, best take” policy clearly seems to have been in operation, whilst even the film’s best ‘horror’ moment (the vampire’s murder of the bar's sultry dancing girl Adele Mara, in a shadowed bedroom with the incessant pounding of the drums as a backdrop) is subjected to a disappointing early fade.

As ever with movies like this, I’m also obliged to note that events play out in what is very much the boilerplate “white man’s Africa” of the era’s pulp magazines and Jungle Jim serials. So, even if it can’t quite summon up the energy to be overtly racist about it, if you’re looking for sympathetic portrayals of indigenous African characters or veiled commentary on the vampiric nature of colonialism or somesuch, well, I’m afraid you won’t find it here, partner.

As usual with these things, the sight of African-American actors forced to play benign, half-witted tribespeople gabbling away in pidgin English also rather grates, especially in view of the film’s failure to conjure any of the gravitas or sense of place which Tourneur, or even Victor Halperin (‘White Zombie’), brought to their respective entries in the sub-genre. So, if you’re the sort of sensible viewer who doesn’t feel the need to tolerate this kind of crap when watching old movies - be forewarned.

Indeed, whilst dedicated scholars of pulp horror, vampire lore or off-beat poverty row programmers are sure to find enough intriguing content in ‘The Vampire’s Ghost’ to keep them occupied long after the credits have rolled, purely in terms of the film’s entertainment value, I’m going to have to close by suggesting that more general horror fans might want to think twice and/or keep their expectations in check when approaching this one.

Lovecraft on Film: Re-animator (1985) and the Great ‘70s Lovecraft Drought. (Part # 2 of 2)

III.

“I must say Dr. Hill, I'm very disappointed in you. You steal the secret of life and death, and here you are trysting with a bubble-headed co-ed. You're not even a second-rate scientist!”
- Herbert West, ‘Re-animator’ (1985)

[You can read Part # 1 of this post here.]

Prior to the surprise success of its film adaptation, H.P. Lovecraft’s six part serial ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ had remained a contentious and obscure item within the author’s bibliography.

Predating Lovecraft’s tenure as a doyen of the ‘Weird Tales’ demi-monde, the serial’s completion dates back to his earlier involvement in the slightly more genteel ‘amateur publishing’ scene, originally appearing in six monthly instalments in a periodical named ‘Home Brew’ between February and July 1922. In view of Home Brew’s “semipro” status, it has generally been assumed that the publication of ‘Herbert West..’ represented Lovecraft’s very first paid writing gig (he later boasted that he received five dollars per instalment).

Given that Home Brew appears to have been a primarily humourous / satirical publication, billing itself as ‘America’s Zippiest Pocket Magazine’, and sometimes ‘A Thirst Quencher for Lovers of Personal Liberty’ (whatever that was supposed to imply circa 1922), one wonders how its readership can possibly have reacted to the then-unknown Lovecraft exercising his liberty by banging out a series of inordinately gruesome and morbid variations on the Frankenstein mythos.

Presumably the response can’t have been entirely negative however, given that ‘Home Brew’ went on to publish HPL’s ‘The Lurking Fear’ the following year, prominently announcing it on the cover of their January 1923 edition.

The June 1922 edition of ‘Home Brew’, featuring the penultimate chapter of ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ – billed top left as “The HORROR from the SHADOWS – Better than Edgar Allen Poe [sic]” - alongside what look to be some “pungent jests” at the expense of the era's Women's Movement, and a “Humorous Tale of Hootchers”, whatever they might be.

In spite of this unlikely origin however, ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ remains one of the most alarming, gore-splattered and generally over-the-top horror stories Lovecraft ever signed his name to, as well as one of the most straight-forwardly commercial. In fact, it has often been suggested that Lovecraft composed the story as a deliberate parody of the kind of crude and blood-thirsty tales peddled by the era’s pulps - hence its presence in what was ostensibly a ‘humour’ magazine, I suppose.

Possibly the author even stated this himself at some point (having not ploughed through the entirety of his voluminous correspondence, I’m unsure), but even so, it’s a theory that has never really rung true to me.

For one thing, ‘Herbert West…’ is rendered in dense and atmospheric prose which, though certainly pretty bizarre, is no less tortuously worked over than that of Lovecraft’s quote-unquote ‘serious’ tales, betraying little sign of any obvious ‘gags’. And besides – were there really a sufficient number of similar tales being published in early ‘20s pulps for Lovecraft to undertake a ‘parody’ of them…?

Again, I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of the market for weird/macabre fiction in the early 1920s, but I find it hard to believe that there was much of this kind of anatomically explicit, corpse-mangling body horror doing the rounds at the time (indeed, the notorious ‘weird menace’ / ‘shudder-pulp’ subgenre didn’t even make an appearance on America’s newsstands until the 1930s).

In terms of the general extremity of its content in fact, ‘Herbert West..’ often feels shockingly ahead of its time. It’s certainly difficult to locate many parodic chuckles amongst the story’s cannibalised children and literally ankle-deep gore, or in such chilling observations as, “he usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough”.

At a push, you could perhaps detect a certain strain of humour in Herbert West’s obsessive single-mindedness, and in his repeated insistence that the horrors perpetrated by his reanimated corpses are simply the result of his being forced to work with raw materials which are “not fresh enough” – elements with could, at a stretch, have provided the impetus for the blackly comic tone which came to define Dennis Paoli’s script for Gordon’s film.

Either way, it is certainly easy to see the kernel of Jeffrey Combs’ performance as West in Lovecraft’s descriptions of the character as, “..a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment, a languid Elagabalus of the tombs”, “..gloat[ing] calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust”. (1)

For the most part though, as with much of Lovecraft’s later work, it is difficult to really judge how much of the laughter and disbelief engendered by the tale’s assorted craziness was intentional, and how much simply the result of HPL’s weird imagination shooting off sparks in random directions, overtaking his ability to effectively convey his ideas in words.

Are we meant to laugh at the idea of West absent-mindedly depositing the severed head of Major Sir Eric Clapham-Lee in a “hellish vat” of “reptile embryo tissue”? Or at the “shocking riot” later precipitated by the ragged platoon of misfit zombies led by the decapitated airman and his replica wax head, and the baffled press report of their activities recounted by our narrator (“..he was a menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried”)? In what tone of voice are we to read Lovecraft’s description of the final chapter’s titular ‘Tomb-Legions’ as being variously “human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all”?

From a modern perspective, it’s difficult not to find at least some amusement in all this (indeed, the OTT zaniness of the story’s final scenes was captured extremely well by Brain Yuzna’s sequel ‘Bride of Reanimator’ (1990), which incorporates quite a lot of the Lovecraft material excised from the first film), but really, these antics are no more surreal than the kind of off-kilter physical absurdities which frequently pop up in Lovecraft’s later, more ‘serious’ tales. (Just think for instance of the revelation of Wilbur Wheatley’s mutant pineapple body in ‘The Dunwich Horror’, or the wooden head and phonograph apparatus used by the alien Mi-Go to fool our protagonist into thinking he is conversing with a human being in ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, to name but a few.)

There is certainly little to laugh at however in the heady philosophical themes which ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ dabbles with. Both pre-figuring the bleak ‘cosmicism’ of Lovecraft’s later work and echoing the scientific angst of Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, the passages concerning Herbert West’s explicit desire to “..relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth” through his experiments speaks for themselves, with the mad medical student’s proclamations of his ultra-materialist beliefs feeling very much like a reflection of Lovecraft’s own - especially when our unnamed narrator begins railing bitterly against the cozy, superstitious illusions clung to by the complacent academic establishment, as represented by the Miskatonic University Medical School’s esteemed Dean Halsey.

In contrast to his friend’s militant insistence upon “..the essentially mechanistic nature of life,” our narrator’s nonetheless harbours some hopes of extracting news of the afterlife from the duo’s revitalised subjects (he “..yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers”, he admits), receiving nothing but chattering gibberish and howls of pain for his trouble (along with a memorable confession of his partners murderous intent). This feels like a dark and gloating dismissal of the ‘soul’ or divine spark within humanity on Lovecraft’s part, directly anticipating the grimly mechanistic view of life underpinning the post-Romero zombie mythos, into whose lineage Gordon’s film would neatly slot itself over six decades later.

However it was intended to be read though, one thing we know for certain about ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ is that Lovecraft didn’t like it, decrying it in later years as worthless hack work which he only bothered completing for the money. (That $5 a month must have bought a lot of ham n’ beans for a young bachelor of Providence in the early ‘20s.)

This distaste for the material was apparently shared by Lovecraft’s primary literary executor, August Derleth, who for decades pointedly excluded ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ from any of the collections of Lovecraft’s work posthumously published by his Arkham House imprint – an omission mirrored by the subsequent mass-market Lovecraft paperbacks of the ‘60s and ‘70s, which tended to replicate Arkham House’s texts wholesale. (2)

Recalling the origins of his film, Stuart Gordon has often stated that, though he’d read Lovecraft, he was entirely unaware of ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ until a conversation about the absence of any contemporary Frankenstein movies led a friend to suggest he check it out as a potential source for his new horror project.

Following up on this lead, Gordon recalls that he was forced to put in an inter-library loan request with the Chicago Public Library, and, six months later, found himself summoned by telephone to consult the dusty, yellowing pile of pulp magazines which the noble librarians had diligently tracked down for him (presumably either the original ‘Home Brew’ issues or a 1941 set of re-prints in ‘Weird Tales’). Impressed with what he read, Gordon convinced the library staff to let him take a xerox of the story’s six chapters, and it is from this copy that the project which eventually became ‘Re-animator’ began to take shape.(3)

IV.

“Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow!”
- Herbert West, ‘Re-animator’ (1985)

In looking at the way in which Lovecraft’s episodic, repetitious and frequently distasteful tale was transformed into a lean, commercially viable 90 minute feature film by ‘Re-animator’s production team, it will probably prove most instructive to consider the aspects of the story which were removed, and the ways in which their absence affected the remaining material as the project underwent a rather convoluted transition from a filmed theatrical production, to a proposed series of 30 minute TV episodes, to a stand-alone feature.

Most obviously, we have the filmmakers’ decision to shift the action to the present day – a budgetary necessity which allows Herbert West’s depredations to play out against a drab backdrop of generic hospital corridors, basement operating rooms and college dorms, immediately reclaiming the vast quantities of dough which would no doubt have been shelled out on vintage sets, costumes and period appropriate medical equipment, but perhaps also jettisoning Lovecraft’s wildly-wrought atmosphere of squalid, Edwardian gothic creepery in the process, foregrounding realism and losing that cherished sense of a world in which pieces of crockery, minor ailments and weather alike can all be justifiably described as ‘unnameable’.

Naturally, modernising the story meant ditching the outbreak of ‘plague’ which consumes Arkham in the story’s second chapter (‘The Plague-Daemon’), claiming the life of the esteemed Dean Halsey. (In typically over-wrought fashion, Lovecraft here make it sound as if the Black Death has finally reached New England – “..and then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus,” etc.) Also crossed out at this point, one assumes, was the entirety of chapter #5 (‘The Horror from the Shadows’), which sees West and his unnamed assistant enrolling in the Canadian Army as volunteer medics prior to the U.S.A.’s entry into World War One, thus allowing them to take advantage of the steady supply of fresh meat offered by the carnage of the Western Front. (4)

Though elements from both these chapters were cleverly integrated into Paoli’s eventual shooting script, we can nonetheless imagine the profound sense of relief producer Brian Yuzna must have felt as he consigned the pages detailing these assorted episodes to the office waste paper bin.

When interviewed by the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast in 2009, Stuart Gordon also made clear that another section of Lovecraft’s tale never considered for adaptation was chapter # 3 (‘Six Shots by Moonlight’), in which West and the story’s narrator find themselves providing medical assistance to an illegal boxing ring, eventually administering their re-agent to the body of a deceased black pugilist, with predictably catastrophic results. (5)

Though this chapter is rich in potentially cinematic imagery, the main reason for its omission will, I think, be immediately clear to most modern readers. Namely, it represents one of the most noxious examples of racism in Lovecraft’s fiction, rivalled only by his singularly disturbing 1925 tale ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Alongside the inevitable outburst of choice ‘othering’/dehumanising verbiage thrown in the direction of the “negro” boxer here furthermore, it’s interesting to note an even greater quantity of hatred is directed toward the Italian and Irish population who comprise the “polyglot” labour force of the fictional factory town of Bolton.

Forcibly reminding us of Lovecraft’s deep-rooted fear and loathing of pretty much everything in the world except Anglo-Saxon men of proven aristocratic lineage, his characterisation of these recent immigrants as a kind of brutal, barely sentient under-class is spiteful and ignorant in the extreme, leaving a bad taste in the mouth which significantly undermines the ghoulish pleasure we might otherwise take in the chapter’s memorably horrific finale – an image which in itself would likely have proved a bit too much for even the most liberal of rating/censorship boards, had it made it to the screen in the mid ‘80s. All in all then, no surprise perhaps that this entire episode met with a clear “no f-ing way” from the budding filmmakers.

Further changes meanwhile were necessitated by the casting of Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West, as the actor’s dark complexion and commanding presence immediately contrasted with Lovecraft’s repeated descriptions of his character’s “yellow hair, pale blue eyes and soft voice” – an example of the curious ambiguity Lovecraft’s work of this era seems to express toward the Teutonic racial ideals one would naturally have expected him to gravitate toward, given his virulent white supremacism. (See also his fascinating 1920 story ‘The Temple’, which seems to fall back on left-over WWI propaganda portrayals of the dastardly Hun, and the disquiet he apparently expressed to friends regarding the rise of Nazism during the 1930s.)

Yet another element excised from the film meanwhile was the story’s aforementioned philosophical angle, with the tightly paced horror/action/comedy formula understandably offering little opportunity to mull over the finer points of West’s materialist zealotry (although the motif of the re-animators attempting to obtain a message from the after-life is amusingly reprised in the “you…. BASTARD” exchange between West and Dr Hill’s severed noggin).

Rather than being consciously rejected by Gordon and Paoli however, one imagines that this aspect of the story was side-lined simply because it felt unnecessary to re-state it in the context of the mid 1980s.

When Lovecraft was writing, his strident expression of an almost misanthropically cruel scientific atheism, alongside his portrayal of the human body as profane, dead clay powered only by crude, electrical impulses, must have seemed a shocking, or at least provocative, statement of intent. Sixty years later however, such a stance was pretty much the default expectation for an audience of horror fans shaped by the work of Romero, Fulci and Cronenberg (not to mention the increasingly grotesque run of European Frankenstein movies which proceeded them in the ‘60s and ‘70s). Wasting time allowing the characters to pontificate about it would simply have been surplus to requirements. Zombies, man - we get it.

Far more of a shocker for the Lovecraft purists who dutifully rocked up to witness ‘Re-animator’ upon its release in 1985 must have been – brace yourselves – the addition of a female character to the story… and one who persists in going to bed with men, and taking her clothes off, even!

We needn’t dwell too much here upon Lovecraft’s pointed avoidance of the feminine within his fiction, but suffice to say, whilst nine out of ten horror fans would probably agree that Barbara Crampton’s performance as Megan Halsey adds immeasurably to ‘Re-animator’s success as a movie, her presence must similarly have proved the last straw for some of the dustier defenders of the author’s literary legacy.

Whilst most of us can likewise agree that the future of Lovecraftian cinema was better off without such hypothetical outraged purists however, there is immense irony in the fact that, although he would go on to establish himself as the greatest booster for Lovecraft’s work cinema has yet known, Stuart Gordon initially succeeded in putting ol’ H.P. back on the filmic map with an adaptation entirely lacking in any of the ideas or aesthetic tropes we would generally consider “Lovecraftian”.

Indeed, by systematically nixing the story’s gothic/period atmosphere, metaphysical pondering and overtones of racist/classist white male hysteria, Gordon and his collaborators transformed ‘Re-animator’ into a sleek, contemporary, audience-pleasing horror movie, so far removed from the ‘feel’ of its contentious literary precursor that, given the story’s obscurity at the time the film was made, they could probably have gotten away with not crediting their source material at all, had they wished to. Scrub out the script’s references to Arkham and Miskatonic, and in all likelihood, only a handful of scholars and ‘Weird Tales’ obsessives would even have noticed the theft. And, in the pre-internet era, what would a few spluttering editorials in ‘Crypt of Cthulhu’ have mattered anyway?

But, Gordon and Yuzna are honest gents, and they did credit their sources, even allowing executive producer/Empire Pictures head honcho Charles Band to proudly trumpet “H.P. Lovecraft’s classic tale of terror..” on the film’s posters and other marketing materials. In fact, this billing gels rather nicely with the film’s bold, orchestral score (from Band’s brother Richard), it’s luminescent animated credits sequence, and the broad, theatrical acting styles favoured by Gordon, all of which help lend a touch of literary ‘classicism’ to proceedings, squaring the circle of Lovecraftian cinema to that date by evoking the conventions of the Corman/Poe cycle of the 1960s, whilst at the same time rekindling the frayed links between horror cinema and Lovecraft/Weird Tales fandom for a new generation of insurgent, VHS-rocking gorehounds.

Whether any of the comparative flood of Lovecraft adaptations that have made it to the screen in subsequent decades have matched up to ‘Re-animator’s success as a perfectly formed entertainment is debatable, but making a Lovecraft movie is always a bold move, and I’d contest that even the wonkiest and most misguided attempts to do so have helped enrich our culture in some small fashion. Certainly more-so than the yawning void which preceded ‘Re-animator’s release through the ‘70s, that’s for sure, and for breaking the “unfilmable” curse, we owe Gordon, Yuzna, Paoli and co. a mighty thanks.

---

(1) Elagabalus = Roman emperor from 218 to 222AD who rose to power aged 14, and died aged 18 in an assassination plot reportedly orchestrated by his own grandmother, following a reign characterised by an unprecedented degree of sexual depravity and religious idolatry. Boy, those Romans, eh? (Thanks Wikipedia.)

(2) As far as I’m aware, the first publication of ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ subsequent to it’s original appearance in ‘Home Brew’ and the 1942 re-print in ‘Weird Tales’ came in Arkham House’s 1987 anthology ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’, the final collection in a three volume set of Lovecraft’s work edited by S.T. Joshi, which has been widely reprinted ever since. Though Arkham House claimed the contents of these collections were “selected by August Derleth” (who passed away in 1971), one naturally suspects that the inclusion of ‘Herbert West..’ must have been influenced by the recent success of Gordon’s film. (Source.)

(3) Although I don’t have a print source for this story, you can hear Gordon reiterate it in various place – the 2007 ‘Re-animator: Ressurectus’ documentary, his director’s commentary track for the film, and during his aforementioned guest appearance on the above-mentioned H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, to name but a few.

(4) One writer who clearly did recall Herbert West’s adventures on the Western Front is Kim Newman, who includes West as a minor character in his WWI-set ‘Anno Dracula’ sequel ‘The Bloody Red Baron’ (1994), which sees him operating a deranged field hospital of pain, working under the tutelage of his equally misunderstood predecessor, the notorious Dr Moreau.

(5) Episodes 24 and 25 of the podcast, for the record – if you’ve enjoyed reading all this, you’ll probably find them worth a listen.

Noir Diary # 8: Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959)

So here’s a question for you: when did Film Noir – in its original, American iteration - end?

Many fans and critics understandably regard Orson Welles’ masterful ‘Touch of Evil’ (released in April 1958) as the big full stop separating the genre’s core canon from the more self-conscious revivals and reinventions which began almost immediately after its demise, and indeed, the sight of Marlene Dietrich in her final screen role, striding off toward those looming Texas oil wells after delivering her concise final words on Welles’ Hank Quinlan, feels not only like the perfect epitaph for the noir world, but a darkly poetic kiss off for the Golden Age of Hollywood as a whole. Adios, indeed.

Nothing in culture is ever quite that neat and tidy though, and some filmmakers clearly missed the memo, leaving us with a few fascinating, transitional stragglers to try to awkwardly cram into noir’s core time-frame, Robert Wise’s ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ (released November 1959) foremost amongst them.

Before we begin discussing the film itself, a quick word on the title, as coined by William P. McGivern for his 1955 source novel. I’ve spoken before about how much I love the raw pulp poetry of these generic, one-size-fits-all crime story titles, and ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ is one of my absolute favourites in this regard. Hopefully I won’t need to elaborate too much on why that’s the case – it speaks for itself pretty well, although knowledge of the fact that one of the central characters is a compulsive gambler adds some helpful context.

Combine it with the poster image of a desperate-looking Harry Belafonte, raising his revolver toward the heavens with gritted teeth, and you’ll appreciate that the film has long been high on my “must watch” list, be it a noir, a modern crime film, or whatever else. It’s just a stunning word/image combo, irrespective of how you’d care to classify it.

In truth, most classic noirs from the mid/late ‘50s were to some extent aware of the genre/style they were working within, and in some cases, aware of the need to bend and reshape its conventions to reflect the uncertain socio-political realities of their era. By the end of the decade, making a film in black & white, in 4:3 academy ratio, was a conscious choice, rather than the default, for an American film. (In retrospect, it’s strange to reflect on the fact that such key late period noirs as ‘The Big Combo’ and ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ were actually shot widescreen.)

By keeping the action in ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ monochrome, confined to the tight limitations of a ‘square’ frame, Robert Wise and executive producer Belafonte seem to have been making a deliberate statement - we’re doing this one the old fashioned way. No fancy business, no bells n’ whistles – just a simple, blue collar crime flick with a minimal cast and a straight-forward, grab-the-money-and-run storyline.

This proposition is immediately confused however by the fact that ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’s credits sequence simultaneously takes a strikingly modernist stance, suggesting a film that’s setting out to get progressive in more ways than one. A veritable riot of animated, Saul Bass-esque text and kaleidoscopic, abstract imagery, the credits are cut to an impeccably sharp jazz score, composed by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet and recorded by an ensemble including such luminaries as Bill Evans and Milt Jackson.

Such stylistic choices may not raise too many eye-brows these days, but in the context of a ‘50s Hollywood crime film, they scream MOD as clearly as a Small Faces reunion in a Lambretta factory, immediately placing the film in the same envelope-pushing category as Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ or Preminger’s ‘The Man with The Golden Arm’.

Once the story itself gets underway however, the approach is defiantly old school. Our setting is Upper Manhattan, and our characters exist in a world of cramped tenement apartments, down-at-heel bars and ill-lit back offices, with only the occasional bit of early morning location shooting in central park allowing them a breather. None of them are exactly what you’d call professional criminals, but they’ve all had their run-ins with the criminal underworld, skirting its perimeters like losers and misfits have since time immemorial - and when we join them, they’re each sufficiently desperate to take the plunge full time.

An ex-cop who got nailed on corruption charges at some point in the past, Burke (perennial ‘cop actor’ Ed Begley, whom we last encountered on the blog playing an unlikely Dr Henry Armitage in AIP’s The Dunwich Horror) now finds himself living in reduced circumstances in a pokey one-room office/apartment, trying to figure out a way to improve his lot and avenge himself against his former colleagues in the process.

The net result of Burke’s figurin’ is what he considers a fool-proof plan to turn over a bank in a small upstate industrial town, making use of an unguarded side door and a regular 6pm coffee delivery to swipe the entirety of the local factory’s weekly payroll whilst the doddering old clerks are busy counting it. Why, it’ll be like taking candy from a a baby etc etc, but naturally he still needs a couple of guys to help him out with the job. For obvious reasons, he can’t call on the services of any professional crooks, but… he’s got the number of a couple of schmucks who just might fit the bill.

Say hello then to Earl Slater (Robert Ryan), a middle-aged WWII vet with crippling anger management issues and an inability to hold down a legit job, who’s just served a stretch in the slammer for accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, and also to Johnny Ingram (Belafonte), a wild-living nightclub musician whose addiction to gambling has led him to a separation from his wife and child and left him heavily in debt to a local mobster.

Initially, both Slater and Ingram turn down Burke’s proposition cold after he invites them to his ‘office’ for a quiet chat. But, as their own individual circumstances deteriorate further over the coming days, they both feel they have no other choice but to slink back and reluctantly declare themselves ‘in’.

For a clearly delighted Burke, the game is on, but although the robbery he has in mind is one of the simplest in crime fiction history, this wouldn’t be a heist movie if inter-personal conflict didn’t threaten to bring down the whole operation before it’s even begun, and this is certainly telegraphed loud and clear in ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’.

Both Slater and Ingram are inexperienced, unpredictable and hate each other’s guts. Burke however is so enthused by the prospect of pulling off his big job that he turns a blind eye to this obvious problem, putting the plan into action with a bare minimum of preparation. What could possibly go wrong…?

So far then, we have a quintessential hard-boiled crime yarn – exactly the kind of solid, low budget programmer which could have emerged from RKO or Warners ten or fifteen years earlier. What sets ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ apart however, justifying the film’s painfully hip opening credits, explaining Belafonte’s interest in the material and shifting the action definitively toward the milieu of the late ‘50s, is the reason why Slater and Ingram hate each other’s guts.

As you will no doubt have observed, Harry Belafonte is black, which means that Johnny Ingram is also black. Earl Slater meanwhile is a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying racist, who has only consented to work with “a coloured boy” on the job with extreme reluctance. (Ryan voices Slater with a thick, southern twang that speaks of an ugly Confederate upbringing before war and/or marriage (we presume) eventually washed him up on the shores of the Hudson.) So, you can see where this train is headed.

For all that film noir may have purported to expose the ugly underbelly of American life during the the ‘40s and earlier ‘50s, issues of racial prejudice and inequality were rarely, if ever, allowed to intrude upon the genre’s exposure of an ugly white underbelly. Whilst I’m sure there must be exceptions, off the top of my head I find it difficult to come up with any examples of pre-1955 noir in which black characters play a larger role in the narrative than that of servants, sidekicks or one-scene-wonder bit players.

(Admittedly, noir did sometimes touch upon the travails of immigrants or ethnic minorities [see ‘Cry of the City’ (1948) or Thieves’ Highway (1949) for instance], but these stories tended to concern Italian, Irish or variously European characters; all groups which modern American viewers will no doubt consider as having been fully integrated into a more monolithic demographic of undifferentiated whiteness.)

Meanwhile, the only noirs I can think of in which racism features as a plot point are other self-aware, late period examples of the genre, made by directors known for their liberal / humane beliefs, and falling comfortably within a post-Civil Rights Movement timeframe.

(Specifically, I’m thinking here of Captain Quinlan’s victimisation of his town’s Mexican populace in the aforementioned ‘Touch of Evil’ – a brilliant depiction of the kind of ‘soft’/oblique racism that has made such a regrettable comeback in 21st century political discourse, incidentally - and Timothy Carey’s memorably nasty use of a racist insult to dismiss an over-attentive parking attendant in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Killing’ (1956).)

Abraham Polonsky’s script for ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ however is consistently, and unapologetically, preoccupied with issues of race, as is made clear from the film’s very first scene, which finds Slater jovially employing a racist epithet to refer to a little girl who bumps into him on the street as he approaches Burke’s office.

In throwing together a black man and a southern racist and ostensibly forcing them to work together, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ has sometimes found itself labelled as the hard-boiled crime genre’s answer to Stanley Kramer’s ‘The Defiant Ones’ (1958) – a label presumably applied by writers who have never actually seen the film, given that, in true noir tradition, it actually presents nothing less than a cruel, pessimistic reversal of Kramer’s ode to mutual respect and co-operation.

Here, our two central characters embody the masculine traditions of their respective cultures at their craven, self-destructive worst; right from the outset, there is ZERO prospect of Ingram and Slater coming together and settling their differences. When these men have been so twisted and chewed up by the socio-political dead-ends they were born into that they can’t respect themselves, Polonsky’s characteristically schematic script seems to be asking us, what chance could they possibly have of learning to respect each other?

(Still blacklisted on account of the socialist beliefs he articulated so clearly in his pre-HUAC one-two punch of ‘Body & Soul (1947) and ‘Force of Evil’ (1948), Polonsky pulled off a neat irony by using the name of a genuine black writer, John O. Killens, as his ‘beard’ on the ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ script.)

Structurally, the film’s pacing is deliberately uneven, with the first hour taking the form of a long, leisurely slow-burn, as we follow Ingram and Slater through their respective daily routines and dilemmas in the days leading up to the robbery, sticking so closely to the characters that we soon feel as if we know their lives inside out.

Once they leave the city and head upstate to carry out the robbery however, the pacing tightens up considerably, Robert Wise flexing his well-oiled ‘thriller’ muscles as the shit quickly, inevitably, and fatally hits the fan, from the worst possible combination of angles.

At this point, we have no expectation that Slater and Ingram will manage to cooperate for more than a matter of seconds before they’re at each other’s throats, and indeed this turns out to be the case. If the conclusion, which sees Ryan and Belafonte blasting away at each other whilst almost literally dancing on top of a powder keg, seems fairly heavy-handed in allegorical terms, the breathless fatalism of the film’s crazed, maniacal final minutes still stuns.

It is during the long, slow build up which precedes all this however that the film’s most compelling drama is really played out; as in his earlier scripts, Polonsky’s systematic demarcation of the social and financial pressures which have driven the film’s characters into a corner is both detailed and exhaustive.

A forerunner of the kind of battle-scarred, emasculated males who would stalk their way through cinema of the post-Vietnam era, Earl Slater is tormented by his inability to earn an honest living, and feels humiliated by the fact that his younger wife (a fairly thankless role for the great Shelley Winters) is effectively ‘keeping’ him, having just won a promotion in her uptown office job.

Earl’s only outlets are drink and violence, and when – in one of the film’s best scenes – he finds himself combining the two by clobbering a feckless young solider in a neighbourhood bar, we feel as if he signs on for Burke’s robbery scheme more just to keep himself busy before depression and idleness land him back in prison than anything else.

Few American actors have been able to convey a sense of disappointment and self-disgust quite as convincingly, or with as much subtlety, as Robert Ryan, and his performance here is one of his very best (which is saying something), managing to almost wordlessly draw out the sympathetic, human side of what by any yardstick is a singularly dislikeable, wrong-headed character.

Belafonte’s character meanwhile is equally pathetic in his own way, functioning as a case study in how the proud rebellion of an urban, black male can so easily be detourned into futile self-destruction. In a key scene, Ingram mocks his wife (Kim Hamilton) for hosting the “ofay” attendees of a local PTA meeting at her apartment, sneering at what he sees as her attempts at social climbing, and the accompanying dilution of her black identity.

Whites can’t be trusted, seems to be his essential point; they’ll never share their shit with us, the only thing we can do is smash through and take it in the only way we can [for which read: crime and associated pursuits]. In this, Ingram is restating an already age-old argument which continued to echo through black American culture in the coming decades, from the startlingly heartfelt monologue delivered by Antonio Fargas as Pam Grier’s brother in Jack Hill’s ‘Foxy Brown’ (1974), to Paul Benjamin’s similar justification for the robbery he’s carried out in Barry Shear’s brilliant ‘Across 110th Street’ (1972), right through to the self-image projected by Ice T, N.W.A. and host of other gangsta-inclined MCs in the ‘90s and beyond.

The irony here of course is that Ingram’s attempts to battle the white system lead him straight into all the pitfalls The Man has left in wait for him. Certainly, this defiant hipster’s track record at the point at which we meet him offers little to be proud of – a debilitating gambling addiction, unpayable debts owed to an Italian mobster, estrangement from his family, and a tendency to work out his frustrations by getting drunk and clowning around on stage, humiliating his fellow musicians and potentially earning him the bums-rush from the one decent gig his talent actually has brought him. In his own way, he’s just as much of a hopeless loser as his opposite number, the stubborn bigot and convicted killer Slater.

Interestingly, in both of these parallel character studies, it is the example provided by women that seems to offer the only glimmer of hope in a story which – no spoiler here, I’m assuming – leaves its troubled male characters unredeemed, unrewarded and stone-cold dead.

Within the schema of Polonsky’s script, Winters’ character seems to represent the potential of an upwardly mobile female workforce, whilst Ingram’s wife’s presumed attempts to build a better life for her children through education and racial integration are contrasted with her husband’s selfish and immature attempts at rebellion.

Even noir fan favourite Gloria Grahame (‘The Big Heat’, ‘In a Lonely Place’ etc), who makes the best of an enjoyable though narratively irrelevant cameo as a neighbour with whom Ryan enjoys an extra-marital tryst, seems to present an unusually positive portrayal of female sexual independence, highlighting the pointed absence from this story of the traditional “femme fatale” figure, ready to soak up male guilt like a sponge.

All in all, this makes for a surprisingly strong line-up of progressive female role models for a ‘50s crime movie, and, though underwritten, these characters all seem designed to provide an optimistic counterpoint to what is otherwise a relentlessly bleak tale of doomed masculinity oozing toward the plug-hole.

We may have focused more on Polonsky’s input thus far, but, if you’ve kept reading up to this point, chances are you’ll be equally aware of Robert Wise’s formidable talents. One of those directors who seems doomed to be perpetually under-appreciated, condemned to “journeyman” rather than “auteur” status, Wise was one of the most articulate technicians of cinematic language to arise from Hollywood’s golden era, and his contributions to the noir canon in particular were exceptional. (1949’s ‘The Set-Up’, also starring Robert Ryan, would definitely find a place on my All Time Top 10 Noirs list, should I ever bother to make one.)

Suffice to say, Wise (who completed ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ shortly before getting to work on ‘West Side Story’) is at the top of his game here, whilst Joseph Brun’s photography is sharp and stark as it gets - probably veering closer to the ‘realist’ as opposed to ‘expressionist’ end of the noir spectrum, but certainly not lacking in style – the set-bound scenes in particular have all the angular shadows, venetian blinds and confining vertical lines a film studies class could ask for. Dede Allen also deserves a shout-out too for her impactful editing, which in turn is perfectly matched by the rhythms of Lewis’s flawlessly cool score.

For all that it stands out as a superior piece of film artistry however, and in spite of the exhaustive length at which I appear to have written about it, I must confess that, at times, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ still somehow left me cold. Like ‘Force of Evil’ [which I wrote about as part of this post] before it, it’s a film I appreciated more than loved.

Though Polonsky’s script here lacks that earlier film’s indigestible, Brechtian dialogue (thank god), something about the systematic, almost bullet-pointed, way in which he defines his characters based upon their social and economic circumstances threatens to leave them lacking individual agency, curiously drained of some essential spark of humanity. Fine performances from the cast can always help to mitigate this of course, and god knows, Polonksy’s work certainly offers actors more to chew on than most Hollywood screenwriters, but another thing that didn’t quite work for me here, sad to say, is Harry Belafonte.

Don’t get me wrong here, I have great regard for Belafonte as an actor and human being, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that he’s not quite right for the part of Ingram, despite of the fact that he provided the main impetus for actually getting this film off the ground.

(‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ was shot independently for Belafonte’s HarBel production company after he personally acquired the rights to the book, and he retains an executive producer credit.)

It’s not that his performance is bad as such – indeed, he emphasises the essential gentleness and fragility of character extremely well, and portrays his blind fear very effectively. From a modern perspective though at least, Belafonte seems too squeaky clean, too polite, too eloquent to really convince as a young Harlem hipster with a gambling habit and a grudge against the white world.

In fairness though, what now seems like miscasting here was not necessarily the fault of either Belafonte or his collaborators. Lest we forget, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ dates from an era in which merely putting a black actor centre stage in a straight drama was considered extremely daring.

Belafonte, like Sidney Poitier, may seem to project a mannered, rather quaint screen presence to us these days, but we must remember that as a fully-fledged black movie star during the ‘50s, he was stepping up to fill a space that previously didn’t even exist. Things would change immeasurably over the next few decades, of course, but it’s 1959 here folks, and realistically, getting a guy who was anything other than well-scrubbed with a nice smile in for this part was just NOT going to happen.

Though movie fans may have had a lot of good reasons to mourn the passing of the era of dark, monochrome glamour of which ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ represents perhaps the very last gasp, by presenting viewers with a provocative amalgam of the American movie’s past, present and future, the film simultaneously succeeds in drawing our attention to at least a few reasons for dancing on the Golden Age’s grave, marking it out as both a key transitional moment in the history of the American crime film, and a uniquely progressive and provocative addition to the noir canon.

Bloody NEL: House of Bondage by Alfred Bercovici (1979)

As I'm sure any collector of pulp paperbacks would, I instantly grabbed this one when I saw it rise to the top of the £1 bin at a charity book fair recently, and didn’t really give it a second thought until I got it home and, upon closer inspection, realised that it must rank as one of the most horrid volumes to have ever graced my library.

The icky tagline and weirdly unappealing artwork perhaps don't bode well, but when it comes to the actual content of the book… good god. Basically, this thing reads as if Guy N. Smith had turned his hand to writing a soft porn novel in the spirit of the briefly ascendant ‘Mandingo’ / ‘Goodbye Uncle Tom’ “slavesploitation” sub-genre.

Skimming through, you’ll find toe-curlingly cheery descriptions of non-consensual slave/master sex, interspersed with sadistic punishments, and seemingly endless melodramatic diatribes from a variety of comically stereotyped ‘Southern Gothic’ character types, all dished up in what seems to be a spirit of bottomless cynicism, with any fig-leaf of anti-racist sentiment crucially undermined by the author’s decision to voice the black characters with a kind of childish, nattering, broken English dialect that makes them all sound like congenital idiots.

Goofy, barrel-scarping trash of the lowest order this may be, but I’m afraid I just can’t dial my sense of humour dark enough to extract any yukks from it; there’s a feeling of sheer nastiness here that just plain stinks.

A quick web search doesn’t turn up any info on Alfred Bercovici, and this seems to have been his only published work, under that name at least.

Another American reprint, ‘House of Bondage’ originally came out via Popular Library in 1978. Their version has a slightly more respectable “bodice ripper” type cover, but I’d still sure hate to see a map of the U.S.A. detailing the areas in which it sold best.

Two-Fisted Tales: Kill Me On The Ginza by Earl Norman (Erle Books, 1969 / first published 1961)

Hunting for English language volumes in the dozens of second hand book shops that fill the Jimbocho area (colloquially known as “old book town”) in Tokyo’s Kanda district can be an interesting experience.

At one end of the scale, the area boasts several beautiful, Art Deco shops whose interiors seem to have been carefully preserved since the 1920s. Therein, impeccably-dressed staff wearing disposable white gloves will guide the curious gaijin visitor toward floors housing carefully selected (and ear-wateringly expensive) hardback volumes dealing with specific areas of Asian history, sociology and culture, divided into English, French or German, and seemingly intended to cater to visiting foreign dignitaries who feel the shelves at the embassy are looking a little bare these days.

Needless to say, it was the other end of the scale that was of more immediate interest to your humble correspondent. Down on the street, the English language offerings within the cramped, almost impossibly dusty confines of the smaller, independent shops fall largely into two categories, both priced in such a manner that buying them for fuel or toilet paper would not seem entirely uneconomical, should living conditions in the city take a turn for the worse.

On the one hand, there are masses of largely obsolete, 70s/80s era monographs and text books, many covering such time-specific areas as economics, sociology, engineering and (for some reason) British and Canadian politics. These I take to be either detritus left behind by generations of foreign students and visiting academics passing through Tokyo’s universities, or perhaps reflective of the scholarly interests of the relatively small number of Japanese with both the ability to read English books and the inclination to import them. (Possibly some of the pop economics books could even have originated with bubble-economy era fortune hunters in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or, given the preponderance of hardbacks and the irrelevance of the subject matter, it even occurred to me that some of these books might have entered the country as ballast on ships, or something like that? Who knows.)

And then, on the other hand, we have pulp. Masses and masses of pulp fiction, primarily American, ranging all the way from the ‘50s to the ‘90s.

Although you’ll be lucky to find anything genuinely collectable or valuable in this vein in Kanda (that stuff has presumably already been harvested by dealers by this point), if you duck down the right alleyways you’ll stuff find racks of Carter Browns and Shell Scotts falling apart in the summer sun, together with more Nick Carter: Killmaster’s and other “men’s adventure” series entries than I have ever before seen in one place and a fair smattering of ‘80s/’90s UFO and True Crime titles.

In one inauspicious corner bookshop apparently operated by a pair of elderly ladies meanwhile, I found an entire bookcase filled with nothing but hardcore porn paperbacks. Hundreds of ‘em. (Sadly none of these dated from the smut/sleaze era in which such books had wild n’ zany cover artwork and were quite possibly written by Ed Wood – we’re talking more the blank covers and/or random nudie photos era of the ‘70s. I picked up a couple of the weirder/funnier looking ones, but didn’t fancy having to explain to friends and family my reasoning for cramming ‘Nobody Does It Like Daddy’ or ‘Ski Lodge Orgy’ or whatever in my suitcase, so they’re all still there for the taking, dear readers, if that’s your particular bag. I’d imagine you could probably make enough back on Ebay to cover your plane ticket.)

Of course, the reason all of these books all ended up in Japan is pretty obvious. It lives behind barbed wire in places like Yokosuka and Okinawa, wears khakis and ray-bans, and until recently could be seen cruising the streets in jeeps, probably whilst yelling “yee-ha” and looking for the nearest girls school, if the unflattering caricatures presented in Japanese popular culture are to be believed.

Clearly, the market for pulp fiction (and, no doubt, pornography) amongst U.S. servicemen in Asia in the mid-20th century was vast. So much so that, in the late 1950s, one Norman Thomson, an “old Japan hand [and] well-connected member of the post-World War II American occupation” [source], decided to take advantage of the situation, and began writing a series of low-brow detective novels specifically catering to soldiers stationed in Japan.

Beginning with ‘Kill Me in Tokyo’, six “Earl Norman thrill books” were published by Berkeley in the US between 1958 and 1962, all featuring the ‘Kill Me..’ prefix in the title and recounting the exploits of Norman/Thomson’s series character Burns Bannion, a Tokyo-based Private Eye whose lecherous, bantering first person narration seems modelled fairly closely on that of Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott.

An easy identification figure for the books’ intended audience, Bannion is a dishonourably discharged U.S. marine who used G.I. bill funds to enrol at a Japanese university, but soon dropped out to set up shop as a PI, making no bones about the fact that his reasons for staying on in Japan are limited to perfecting his mastery of karate and, as he charmingly puts it in ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’, “..anthropological studies, restricted to the female 15 to 40 category”. (Insert your prefered cringe/shudder emoticon here.)

I don’t know how well these books did for Berkeley (suffice to say, they’re fairly scarce on the market these days, going for between $15 and $40 apiece), but whatever the case, Thomson seems to have decided at some point in the sixties that he could cash in more effectively by publishing them himself and selling them direct to oversees servicemen stationed in Asia, a decision perhaps influenced by the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, which greatly increased the number of US personnel passing through Japan.

As such, cheaply printed new editions of all the books previously published by Berkeley appeared in the late ‘60s, courtesy of the ‘Erle Publishing Corp’ of Minato-Ko, Tokyo. It is at this point that the books, perhaps benefitting from being on the other side of the Pacific from anyone liable to take legal action, adopted the blatant rip-off of the Carter Brown series logo seen on the edition above, whilst the fact that cover prices are given in cents despite the books being printed and published in Tokyo signals pretty clearly that they were never intended for sale outside of American bases and their immediate environs.

Whilst the Berkeley editions of the ‘Kill Me..’ books had pretty lively, comic book style cover art (watch this space for more on that), the Erle reprints feature garish, rather primitive renderings such as the one seen above. God only knows who produced this artwork but, given the expectations created in paperback fans by the ‘Carter Brown’ styled logo, the contrast between this and the immaculate stylings of Robert McGinnis is almost comical.

The Erle editions are printed on the kind of thin, silky paper stock commonly used by Japanese publishers, whilst the prints for many of the pages are lined up in extremely wonky fashion, giving the books a unique, mutant vibe that serves to differentiate them from more professionally produced American or European paperbacks. (The multiple exclamation marks on the back cover copy are a classy touch too.) Financially speaking, they must have done pretty well, as several new Bannion adventures (inviting killings in Yokosuka and Roppongi) were published by Erle alongside the Berkeley reprints.

As regards the actual content of the books meanwhile, aside from the Japanese setting, the only significant differences between Burns Bannion and Shell Scott seem to be that, instead of knuckle sandwiches, Bannion dishes out karate chops to his antagonists, and, no doubt in deference to the demands of his intended audience, Bannion gets his leg over with a far higher number of ‘exotic’ dames than Scott, whose amorous escapades often ended in slapstick disappointment, ever managed to.

To a significant extent in fact, the Norman books I’ve skim-read are as much tame, comically-inclined smut as they are detective stories, with Bannion spending the bulk of his time frequenting hostess bars, night clubs, strip joints, bath houses, massage parlours and pretty much anywhere else where he might conceivably get the opportunity to leer at some women, whilst meanwhile taking full advantage of the feminine attention that a square-jawed, Caucasian stud might reasonable expect to attract in such establishments (in the hetero male fantasy world of a pulp detective novel, at least).

Showing at least a little more imagination in its relentless pursuit of lechery, ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ finds Bannion at one point pursuing a flighty young lady to the ‘Oppai Jinja’ or ‘Temple of the Breast’, a sacred site allegedly located in the Ogikubo district, wherein expectant mothers are apparently encouraged to stimulate their production of breast milk by making enlarged casts of their breasts from clay and hanging them from the walls.

Hilarity, needless to say, ensues, but fear not – Bannion’s girl is not pregnant (because that would be a bit of a buzz-kill for the G.I. crowd), she’s merely trying to heal the anatomical peculiarities that have helped her make a living through the preceding years. (According to our narrator, “..many G.I.s on leave from Korea have taken photos with their service hats hanging from her knotty protuberances”.) Laugh? Why I nearly… etc.

Elsewhere, the book is thankfully rich in all kinds of other random weirdness, the like of which you’d be unlikely to encounter in even the zaniest of purely American detective novels. The central plotline, if you have the patience to locate it amongst all the leering an shagging, concerns Bannion’s hunt for the killer of a fellow American whose severed head has been found in a duffle bag, a quest that leads him to reluctantly team up with an elderly gentleman who claims to be a master of “ninjutsu”. A lengthy digression outlining the history and practice of this art follows, which must have been eye-opening stuff for Norman’s readers, many years before the ninja first became a regular presence in international pop culture in the late 1970s.

Thereafter, the ninjutsu gentleman hires Bannion to aid him in his investigation of something called the ‘Oshira’ cult – an outlawed group who seemingly practice an unspeakably ancient fetish/fertility rite dating from the very earliest days of Japanese civilisation, in which a sacred wooden pole is wrapped in silk.

Whilst I confess I’m unsure whether the ‘Oppai Jinja’ is a genuine eccentricity of Japanese culture or just something Norman made up for laughs, the whole Oshira business is actually rooted in authentic folklore, and is pretty fascinating, even though Norman, naturally enough, ramps up the sensationalism by assigning the practice of human sacrifice and all-purpose sexual deviance to the cult - which , by the way, turns out to be masterminded by a villain going by the unlikely name of House Charnel, and is operating rather incongruously from a secret meeting place in the urban sprawl of West Ginza.

Other odd, page-filling tangents along the way include discussion of Shinto ‘toilet gods’ and some novel methods for taking finger prints directly from a live human body, but, despite this evidence that the author is at least somewhat engaged with the culture of his adopted home, anyone approaching the Bannion books in the hope that Norman might have taken the opportunity to present his fellow Americans with a sympathetic alternative portrait of life in Japan will be cruelly disappointed.

Indeed, as far as East-meets-West type stuff goes, Bannion’s interactions with the world around him are about as crass as it gets. As the capsule biography of the author I quoted above concisely notes, the books are “..filled with stereotypes and caricatures, and the Japanese women are treated with an outlandish chauvinism, as if the country were one giant geisha house”.

The opening of ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ very much sets the tone in this regard, as the “oriental doll” Bannion finds himself fooling around with is referred to as “slant-eyed” or variations thereof no less than three times in the space of a single page. It’s… ghastly, to be perfectly honest.

If, as has often been remarked, Japanese pop culture of the 1960s had a tendency to fan the flames of public anger (of both left and right wing varieties) by portraying the American military as a barbaric occupying force engaged almost solely in acts of rape and cultural desecration, it’s safe to say that the fictional antics of Burns Bannion can’t have done much to help matters.

One can easily imagine the kind of controversy that might have resulted had the local media got wind of the content of these books, but perhaps Norman/Thomson was simply confident that the good old language barrier (and perhaps the disinclination of the Japanese establishment to rock the U.S. boat) would save him from adverse publicity.

Speaking of which, worse is yet to come – in terms of the book’s readability more than anything else - as our hero begins to engage in some verbal (as opposed to merely physical) interaction with the populace of the city in which he has apparently lived for many years without getting murdered. (Given the way Bannion behaves, the books’ titles seem more like taunts to random passers-by than anything more dramatic.)

Although Norman sometimes has a decency to record sentences in romanised Japanese, which Bannion then conscientiously translates for his readers (which is both nice, and potentially educational), more often than not the protagonist’s Japanese friends and enemies address him in the kind of pidgin English that would make Charlie Chan blush, whilst he in turn mocks their pronunciation, throwing phrases like “hando baggo” and “iceo boxo” into his bantering narration whilst simultaneously expressing frustration at their failure to grasp the precise meaning of the dense passages of wise-crackin’, tough guy slang he rattles off, irrespective of his listeners’ level of comprehension.

If you can overlook the relentless misogyny and racial insensitivity of Bannion’s banter however (and that’s a pretty big IF, I’ll grant you), ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ actually holds up as an enjoyably off-beat timewaster. Although Norman lacks the chops of a Prather or Spillane, his prose is certainly never less than lively, and the sheer novelty of the socio-cultural circumstances under which these books were produced makes them – to me, at least – far more interesting reading than the rather smug and interchangeable Shell Scott books.

Both as detritus of an age long gone and as bracing evidence of a variety of inter-cultural exchange that those men in white gloves in the nice bookshops could scarcely imagine, they are actually quite fascinating, and I’ll be sharing a few more scans of other volumes in the series with you over the coming days/weeks.

As a final note, I’ll also draw your attention to the fact that someone has used a biro to etch what seems to be a woman’s phone number onto the back cover of my copy of ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’; perhaps evidence of a previous owner aspiring toward the lifestyle celebrated by the book’s hero, for better or (more likely) for worse.