Chester Morris – R. Emmet Sweeney

September 1, 2015

In 1956 the hip new fad was past life regression, thanks to the story of Bridey Murphy. In Colorado, amateur hypnotist Morey Bernstein had been experimenting his craft with Virginia Mae Morrow, who claimed to have died in Ireland in 1864, when she was known as Bridey Murphy. The story was reported in the Denver Post, and then published as a best-selling book authored by Bernstein in 1956, The Search for Bridey Murphy. It was briefly on everybody’s lips, with the New York Times reporting, “there were Bridey Murphy parties (‘come as you were’) and Bridey Murphy jokes (parents greeting newborns with ‘Welcome back’).” Hollywood wanted to cash-in on the craze while it was still relevant, so Paramount rushed their official adaptation of The Search for Bridey Murphy, starring Teresa Wright, into production. It was released on October 1st of 1956. American International Pictures worked a little quicker, cranking their past life regression monster movie The She-Creature (1956) out in nine days, and getting it into theaters on July 25th. Though beset by casting troubles and budget restrictions, The She-Creature manages to create an atmosphere of voluptuous dread, aided by Paul Blaisdell’s insectoid creature design and efficient direction from bargain basement king Edward L. Cahn.

Wanting to profit while past life regression was still all the rage, AIP president Jim Nicholson assigned Lou Rusoff to put together a treatment for a film with hypnotism as its theme. The project didn’t have a clear shape until Nicholson and producer Alex Gordon were at a party where local exhibitor Jerry Zigmond mentioned The She-Creature as a possible title that could sell the Bridey Murphy hook. With the title in place, Rusoff then built the story around a prehistoric female monster, the endpoint of a past-life regression that goes back to the beginning of time. Andrea (Marla English) is the suggestive woman under the power of carny mesmerist Dr. Carlo Lombardi (Chester Morris), who is able to take her back through all of her past lives back into a primordial creature. The power of this hypnotic trance is so strong that the monster gains physical form, killing socialites on the California beaches with its thudding she-claws before disappearing back into the ocean. Lombardi builds his psychic reputation by predicting these murders, and starts to make millions with his business patron Timothy Chappel (Tom Conway). The one skeptic is Dr. Ted Erickson (Lance Fuller), a strait-laced academic who studies psychic phenomena. He is out to debunk Lombardi and free Andrea from his thrall.

The budget was $104,000 and the shoot was set for nine days. Director Edward L. Cahn had just completed Girls in Prison (1956) for AIP, and rolled right into The She-Creature, on which he wrings a lot out of abandoned beaches and double exposures – representing all the souls of Andrea’s past. Gordon wanted to get Peter Lorre for the Carlo Lombardi part, and Edward Arnold for Chappel. Both actors had worked together before in Josef Von Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment (1935). But Lorre backed out after reading the script, and Arnold died soon before shooting was set to begin. So they scrambled and hired Chester Morris and Tom Conway. Morris, best known for his starring role in the Columbia Boston Blackie series, was an experienced amateur magician, and brought an enthusiasm for prestidigitation to the role. His wide-set eyes and rumbling voice made for convincing hypnotics, even when he’s trying to mesmerize a dog. Tom Conway had his own series, as The Falcon for RKO, and looks to be having fun in deploying his plummy British accent in service of a scummy exploitation entrepreneur making a fortune off of Lombardi’s morally dubious act – not unlike how AIP was cashing in on the whole Bridey Murphy affair. This might have been an in-joke on Rusoff’s part (he was executive producer Sam Arkoff’s brother-in-law). Lance Fuller (This Island Earth) was another last-minute addition to the cast, and he looks jet-lagged and morose throughout, the dead space in an otherwise well-acted film. vOsaE

The she-creature herself is doubled as Marla English in the human present, and Paul Blaisdell in the foam rubber suit as her prehistoric avatar. English was a San Diego beauty queen, whose career, at the age of 21, was already over. Previously signed to Paramount Pictures, they dropped her contract after she refused a lead role in The Mountain alongside Spencer Tracy, either due to falling ill from a smallpox vaccine, orbecause they would not cast her boyfriend Larry Pennell, causing her to quit in protest. She would retire from acting soon after shooting The She-Creature, and she looks ready to leave Hollywood for good, dazed but distantly beautiful — appropriate for a character in a hypnotic trance for most of the film’s running time. There is something elemental about English’s connection to the creature, depicted in double exposures as a foggy excrescence on the ocean until it takes physical form, her thoughts taking shape. It is an embodiment of the rage she has suppressed, her loss of power diverted into the creature’s superpower. And though Lombardi guides Andrea to call this being to life, it is not his creation – so he cannot control it. The most affecting moment in the film occurs when the monster, after scaring off one of Chappel’s rich regression parties, kneels worshipfully next to Andrea, as if in some kind of mind meld, sharing each other’s pain.

The monster itself is another remarkable creation by Paul Blaisdell, the unsung hero of 1950s science fiction (read Randy Palmer’s Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker for the full story – it is the main source of information for this post). Blaisdell was a creature designer and builder for AIP who made something out of next-to-nothing, working in close concert with his wife, Jackie. They designed monsters for The Day the World Ended, It Conquered the World, Invasion of the Saucer Men, It The Terror From Beyond Space and many more. The She-Creature was “the best one I’ve ever done”, Blaisdell said. He built the creature on a pair of old long-johns, with the body a jigsaw puzzle of foam rubber made to look like the seabed floor. Its chest was made of “sea hooks” which could be used for disemboweling, its arms were clubbing crab-like claws built around a pair of welding gloves, while the face is a cat-lizard-insect combo with stringy blonde hair made for man-devouring. The compressed time schedule kept Cahn from utilizing all of the creature’s capabilities (swinging tail, chewing sea hooks), but it is a striking, unearthly creature that somehow has a spark of humanity in it. Blaisdell built the costume to fit his own body, he literally knew it inside and out, so there was no better person to give the She-Creature life.

May 13, 2014

Any movie in which a hardened inmate slams his tin cup against a cafeteria table and agitates for revolt can trace its roots back to The Big House, the film that popularized the prison riot movie. A sensation in 1930, it paired slam-bang action with a social conscience to attract both audiences and Academy voters. The Oscar-winning script by Frances Marion (the first woman to win the “Writing” award), railed against overpopulation in the unnamed jail, which teems with resentments and untapped violence. Hit and run society boy Kent (Robert Montgomery) is thrown into a cell with machine gun murderer Butch (Wallace Beery) and prolific thief Morgan (Chester Morris). Butch is scheming an escape, Morgan is waiting for parole, and Kent is trying to stay alive, and might snitch on his roommates to insure it. It was up and coming director George W. Hill’s first sound feature, after the huge silent success of Tell it to the Marines (1926), and it features bold off-screen sonic experiments as well as awkwardly static scenes of dialogue exposition. It ends in an overwhelming fusillade of gunfire, an aural assault that might make Michael Mann blush, that netted it the Best Sound Recording Oscar.

The Warner Archive has released The Big House in a fascinating two-disc set, featuring Hill’s English language feature, as well as two foreign-language versions (French and Spanish) that were shot for international release (it was also made in German, but that variant is not included). In order to take advantage of the booming worldwide market, studios would hire completely different casts and crews to shoot the script in multiple languages, using the existing sets, and sometimes even the shot lists, of the English original. The director of the French version of The Big House was Paul Fejos, the restless Hungarian-American innovator who made the miraculous proto-neo-realist Lonesome (1928) at Universal, and who was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the film business. He would eventually retire from movies and divert his interest in people to becoming the president for the Wenner-Grenn Foundation for Anthropological Research. Fejos’ Big House shows few of his visual gifts, as he was tasked with rushing through dialogue scenes, while the more elaborate tracking shots were simply imported from the English version. In many ways it’s even stuffier than George Hill’s Big House, a document of Fejos giving up on Hollywood. What charm the Fejos version does have derives from Charles Boyer, who plays Morgan in the French version, adding a smooth sophistication to the character whom Chester Morris plays as a simple street tough.

Prison riots were a major story in 1929, with huge uprisings occurring across the country, from Colorado to New York. President Hoover launched an investigation into its causes. George Hill believed a major problem was mixing hardened criminals with first-time offenders, and wrote a 27-page story treatment called The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment. Irving Thalberg liked the idea, and assigned Hill’s friend Frances Marion to help him work out an outline for a script (they enjoyed their work together and married soon after production in 1930). The potentially controversial subject was cleared with the Hays Office, who provided Marion and Hill with an “expert”, one P.W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Marion wanted more than second-hand information, however, and arranged to receive a tour of San Quentin. In her biography of Marion, Cari Beauchamp quotes her as feeling she was an object of “repressed ridicule” in the male-dominated institution. She trudged ahead anyway, and was inspired to cast the comedian Roscoe Ates when she met a stuttering inmate in the prison garden.

Hill was personally invested in the material, and was intent on presenting a starkly realistic portrait of prison life. It is strongest in its earlier stages, when its emphasis is on the procedural day-to-day of the jail. The movie begins with the processing of Kent, the wilted playboy convicted for a ten-year stretch for a New Year’s Eve hit and run. In head-on, planimetric compositions, Kent is poked and prodded and set on the assembly line from man to number. He gets his mug shot, is measured for clothes, and is spit out as another faceless inmate, just another pair of gray pants and plodding shoes trudging in circles, which is the image that runs underneath the title. Kent’s final initiation is a walk up a spiral staircase to his room, which the camera follows in an rising crane shot. It’s one that Fejos would probably scoff at, after the 50ft camera crane he constructed for Broadway (’29), but Hill’s is effective in its own modest way, Kent’s rise up the stairs sealing his fall from grace.

The strongest impact in The Big House is felt through the sound, whether its Wallace Beery thundering against the “swill” he’s forced to eat at meal times (a scene memorably parodied in Naked Gun 33 1/3), or the metronome of marching feet that morphs into that of machine guns at the film’s close. The most experimental use of sound occurs in solitary, or the “dungeon”, as its called in the movie. After Morgan is denied parole for a crime he didn’t commit, he is shoved into a cell, right next door to Butch. After the door seals him in, the camera does not cut to the interior. Instead it stays on the darkened hallway with no human activity. No words are spoken for fifteen seconds, the image a silent tomb. Then Butch bellows “Hello!”, and begins a bull session with Morgan, the camera remaining in the static hallway. For two minutes the camera doesn’t move, nor is an actor shown. All of the action is off-screen and in the viewer’s head. It’s a challenging gesture, and one only possible in the early days of sound, when the status quo had yet to be defined.

The Paul Fejos version is exactly the same in almost every particular. The only freedom Fejos seems to have been given is the ability to position actors in the frame, as even the camera positions are nearly identical. Fejos recalled little of the project: “Possibly the only interesting thing in it was that I imported for Big House an actor who afterwards became quite a potentate in Hollywood – Charles Boyer.” Boyer gives a more dashing rendition of Morgan, more of a witty Lubitsch thief than the working class thug that Hill elicited from Morris. Morris recalled Hill’s requests for unadorned performance: “If someone overacted, he had the scene done over, scoffing, ‘You did that like a New York actor.’ His technique was like Spencer Tracy’s – underacting.”

Both Fejos and Hill were not long for Hollywood. After Fejos was denied the directing job on All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, directed by Lewis Milestone), he lost interest in dealing with the studio machine, and his fortunes dwindled respectively. His unfond memories: “I found Hollywood phony. I found everything artificial. I found the people impossible . . . writers—so-called writers—utterly unintelligent, utterly uneducated, stupid hacks.” He wanted to return closer to the world, without interference, and he did so in his few films abroad, including the Austrian production Ray of Sunshine (1933). He eventually ditched artifice altogether to study anthropology. He stopped making films in 1941 to study his new obsession, which he later taught at Yale, Stanford and Columbia, and became the president of the Wenner-Grenn Foundation for Anthropological Research. George W. Hill had no such second life. His alcoholism busted up the marriage to Frances Marion, and sabotaged his work. After he suffered a concussion and cracked ribs in a car accident, he sunk into a depression. He died at the age of 39 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Tag: Chester Morris

PAST LIVES: THE SHE-CREATURE (1956)

BEHIND BARS: THE BIG HOUSE (1930)