The
Nazi Plan
The NSDAP 1927-44
in film footage of a public character secured during or after the war, evidence
at the Nuremberg Trials.
Lt. Budd
Schulberg, U.S.N.R., commanded the search team, Chief Petty Officers Robert Webb
and Robert Parrish (also John McCafferty) edited the two-hour film, Commander
Kellogg was also the producer.
Col. Darryl F.
Zanuck and Twentieth Century-Fox assisted in the English voiceover narration of
the adapted version.
The
Killer Shrews
The script
conception is so beautiful that it is filmed minimally. An elder scientist, who
is concerned with overpopulation, envisions a biological mutation that would
eventually reduce humans to half their size and slow their metabolism, so as to
extend available resources (cp. Tod Browning’s The Devil-Doll). The
experimental animal is a shrew, and by a drunken assistant’s error, the lab
shrews grow as big as large dogs or small bears. They begin to swarm, ravenous
as wolves.
This is like
something Rimbaud would come up with, if he thought of writing a screenplay in
this genre, a sea-captain-and-mad-scientist’s-daughter thing, quite serious in
the end.
|
Songster, your goddaughter |
The
Giant Gila Monster
The voluble,
witty and proficient script has plenty to say about a small farming town and
young people who soup up old cars and go to the drive-in (“we have them in
France too,” says rich man Wheeler’s au
pair, “I went with my brother on his motor scooter,” the other kids groan)
and dance to the latest records. There’s nothing outré about them, the only
thing grandiose in the area is a freak of nature, a rare case of gigantism (and
not caused by anything catastrophic).
The director
films his lizard in miniature sets as champ
contre champ to the human action. The animal actor performs ideally for the
camera with appreciative eyes surveying the scene. Kellogg achieves a coup de cinéma at the dance, the lizard
outside among the parked cars produces a splendid effect and he pokes his head
through the wall like Jack in The Shining.
Another carefully
built effect in this much-overlooked and therefore surprisingly complex film is the music motif that rises from a
young garage-mechanic’s little song while pounding out a dent to his rendition
with a miniature banjo of a little gospel ballad called “Laugh Children Laugh”
and then his first record, a bopper tune.
Wheeler is an oil
man, his son is dating a poor farm girl, the two kids are parked in the son’s coupe
when the monster strikes with an upraised claw.
The mysterious
sequence that follows has the sheriff investigate a car found in a ditch, “the
car was stolen out-of-state, the plates were stolen in-state”, the missing
driver is probably the man seen hitchhiking on the highway with an
imitation-leather suitcase that remains behind when the monster gets him.
Nitro for an oil
fire does the Gila monster in, a hot rod full of it blows him up (observe the
creature’s wearied expression in its final moments, after being hit with
several rounds from a pump-action shotgun).