A New England witch-burning, with consequences for
the town. A professor of history in this latter day explains, “superstition,
fear and jealousy drove the Puritans to accuse their friends and relatives of consorting
with the Devil.”
A precise analysis of Hitchcock’s Psycho
in terms of Massachusetts witches old and new, the connection is made by way of
Clair’s I Married a Witch, not
to put too fine a point on it. “It must have been a beautiful building.”
“To me it is still beautiful.”
“I’m sorry. What a shame the people
have let it fall into such a state.” The coed’s closed trapdoor at
The Raven’s Inn with singing below is an implication of Rosemary’s Baby (dir. Roman
Polanski) and The Sentinel (dir.
Michael Winner). “I know a great deal about Whitewood.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“Now and then.”
The crash of the college boy’s car is precipitated
by a vision of the burning that appears in the road before him. The Russell
door with its extraordinary inset glass pane recalls Dreyer’s Vampyr, through it blind Rev. Russell enters
quite like God in Bergman’s Fanny
and Alexander.
The mainly British cast led by Christopher Lee give
a laudable impression of Americans, the filming is often remarked upon for its
sinister gloom (cf. Castle’s Macabre) and it’s quite an elegant
treatise all around, edited slightly for Yankee audiences as Horror Hotel. Truffaut remembers the burning
of Elizabeth Selwyn in Fahrenheit 451
(perhaps from Bergman’s The Seventh
Seal).
TV Guide, “an
effective, quite atmospheric witchcraft film”. Britmovie, “extraordinarily atmospheric chiller... stylishly
directed”. Robert Firsching (All
Movie Guide), “extraordinarily good chiller... required viewing”.
Halliwell’s Film Guide, “a
superior horror comic.”
Foxhole in Cairo
based on a true story of the War
“But our forces successfully disengaged
themselves, and withdrew to prepared positions.” Operation Salaam, as it
was called, or the tribute of hypocrisy. “Seriously, Sir, d’you
think Rommel is gonna kick us out of
Egypt?” A German expedition two thousand miles across the Sahara to plant
two spies in British G.H.Q. whose code each day is drawn from Du
Maurier’s Rebecca,
“inside the book are the words that are gonna take Rommel and you to
Cairo.” Operation Condor, once there. Half-Egyptian, the principal spy.
The Justine
theme at Club Iris, shortly taken up by Cukor from the source. A Mata Hari
there, and Hitchcock’s seely Scotsman (Bon Voyage).
Rapid, exacting screenplay by Leonard Mosley and
Donald Taylor, cinematography Desmond Dickinson, editor Oswald Hafenrichter.
Howard Thompson of the New York Times, “pat, slick and predictable.” Leonard
Maltin, “sensibly told account”. TV Guide, “overlong, confusing and ultimately dull”.
Hal Erickson (All Movie Guide),
“instructive if not overly suspenseful”. Halliwell’s Film Guide, “deflated by muddy
handling.”
The £20,000 Kiss
The Q.C., M.P. and future Whitehall officeholder
doesn’t know that the blackmailer has a partner, who is the
victim’s husband, and that the victim set the thing up, he pays and kills
until trapped with a clever ploy.
An Edgar Wallace Mystery.
Circus of Fear
Mr. Big turned out to be so small, after all, that
the initial great losses in the war seem hardly credible, and that is the
metaphor, from the lightning-quick Tower Bridge robbery to the Barberini
Circus, “largest in the world”.
Time Out Film Guide has
“confused”.
The Glass Cage
Mission: Impossible
An automated prison, absolutely unbreakable, behind
the Iron Curtain, and a resistance leader kept there in a glass cell atop a
pylon. To him Barney and Willy, effecting the appearance that he is a double,
whereupon all three are released into the custody of Cinnamon as a prison
inspector, for further questioning.
It is to be noted that Barney’s
dual-chambered device for altering the surveillance tapes is visually thematic.
Doomsday
Mission: Impossible
This is the one about the Latin American military
attaché, played by Rollin, the Near Eastern diplomat and the two Oriental
emissaries, who all bid on a two-megaton bomb fabricated by a bankrupt
industrialist.
While Barney replaces the plutonium with an inert
substance, Jim plays an oil man and Cinnamon his Ph.D., upping the Near
Easterner’s bid so as to protect their interests in his country. Their
money and his turns to ashes in the industrialist’s wall safe, after the
discovery that the bomb is valueless, and the high bidder kills the scoundrel.
The Bunker
Mission: Impossible
Moxey has found a
whip pan that conceals a cut to be very effective in constructing the doubles
that appear, but he also employs a false mirror, i.e., the second actor,
and above all he has simply taken into account the artistic problem of the
quick-change artist, which he renders as a panoply of recognitions first solved
in casting.
There is an
assassin prone to disguises who is seen in snapshots of various actors with a
likeness that makes for a possibility of identity. Later, in a major coup,
Cinnamon plays another woman, and the second actress with her back to the
camera turns around in her prison cell with no makeup on, wild-eyed and yet
expressionless, to let the imagination focus on the possibilities of her face
(it is Lee Meriwether).
In this
feature-length episode, January Suborbital Denomination is the
voiceprinted phrase allowing only three men to enter the underground laboratory
where a captive scientist works under duress, an installation whose surface
portal is the Bronson Caves. The project is a missile, the scientist’s
imprisoned wife is the “lever of love”, and there is an assassin in
service to a second hostile government.
Flip Side
Mission: Impossible
A clever business
arrangement has a Los Angeles record producer selling pills shipped from Mexico
by a distributor who gets them from a manufacturer in St. Louis eager to make a
name for himself as a Third World benefactor, and to all intents and purposes
ignorant of the retail trade in his foreign shipments.
The Impossible
Missions Force eliminate the middleman and the retailer as well. Dana as a
lounge singer picks up the married industrialist and dies of an overdose in his
hotel room. This gets back to the producer, who needs a snap order shipped air
freight direct from St. Louis, his Mexico truck apparently hijacked and a deal
in the works with the mob, represented by Phelps.
The police catch
all parties red-handed.
The Innocent
Mission: Impossible
An Arabian
chemical firm, Interoco, is helped by the Russians to make Dehominant-A, a
slow-acting toxin, into much faster Dehominant-B. Barney gets a dose of the
first while trying to reach the computer that controls production and stores
the formula.
Another expert
must be found at once, the Pentagon knows a “near genius” familiar
with the KAZAN IV computer language, but he’s not gung ho. Paris and Doug
as Feds arrest his girlfriend for heroin possession.
“I’ve
been had!”, he screams during the operation at Interoco, seeing the two
Feds on the team, and presses the alarm. Everybody’s weapons are bad, he
agrees. A lab chimpanzee is found by security guards.
Phelps is
prepared to go into the computer on jargon from Barney, the sight of this
desperation moves the expert. Production is stopped, the formula is erased, and
the scientist in charge (called from Stockholm by Phelps earlier) is whisked
away.
Time and Memories
Hawaii Five-O
Jerry
Ludwig’s three-ring circus, brilliantly directed by Moxey.
In the center
ring, a girl loved and lost by McGarrett in Naval Intelligence. She has a
brother on the Arizona she never met.
She married the
head of a law firm, he’s murdered. The evidence points to her.
There is a
partner in the firm, about to lose a boardroom vote. The victim’s
stepdaughter wished to marry a junior member, her father refused.
McGarrett is up
in the air, visibly wracked, plays his cards and arrests the wife.
This proves
decisive in a way, the wife accuses the stepdaughter. McGarrett finds another
answer, however. The junior member used an office “tie-line” to
place a call from the mainland when he was in Honolulu.
The parting this
time is bittersweet, McGarrett wins a wave from the top of the steps to the
airliner just before departure.
The Bride
Mission: Impossible
The convent-bred
wife of a crime kingpin surprises him by dying of a heroin overdose. From this
he is gradually led to conclude that, if he cannot send mob money to
Switzerland by diplomatic pouch as before, owing to special searches for
terrorist activity, still he can make this large shipment of cash by way of her
coffin.
It falls and
breaks on the tarmac, exposing a dummy. Barney counts the cash a little later,
once Casey as the wife puts in an appearance for the mobster’s
associates, with two tickets to Miami in her possession.
Phelps works for
an airline, gets the dope and squires the money, Barney is the new man at the embassy
since his predecessor got the shaft for skimming.
Where Have All the People Gone
Solar flares,
earthquakes, virus.
Depopulation,
wild dogs, “a handful of dust.”
Filmed along the
lines of Milland’s Panic in Year
Zero, to which it bears a close kinship (the relation to Rod
Serling’s “Where Is Everybody?”, dir. Robert Stevens, is much
more remote).
The structure is
very long and very arduous in the setup, replete with horrors in the telling,
until it snaps as hysteria, “nothing”, and that is the cue for the
punchline from Candide.