Damned Life Under the Sea

Beyond dark, rocky shores, his face awash in the glow of an active volcano, there dwells Vincent Price in 1965's City Under the Sea (aka War-Gods of the Deep). The final feature film of director Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past), it's far more beautiful than most of Price's Edgar Allan Poe movies of the period. Loosely inspired by Poe's "The City in the Sea" (very loosely), the writing isn't top notch, but atmosphere and performances just about make up for it.

Two Americans find each other living in Cornwall, a young engineer called Ben (Tab Hunter) and a heiress called Jill (Susan Hart). After finding a body on the beach, Ben goes up to the big manor house to talk over the matter. He finds Jill with a silly old painter played by David Tomlinson.

Someone thought it was a good idea to introduce Tomlinson with a low angle shot of him sitting on an armoire wearing a kilt. It was actually a bad idea.

This movie came out a year after Mary Poppins. Having Tomlinson onboard evidently made someone think the comic relief needed to be punched up and he's saddled with a lot of dopey lines. Even so, he's less annoying than Ben who tonally shifts all over the place. But once they find themselves trapped under the sea, Tomlinson's character thankfully shows a little mettle.

Jill is pretty and a nice enough subject for Price's mad obsession this time. He plays Sir Hugh, a sea captain who became stranded in the underwater city more than a hundred years earlier. The chemicals in the atmosphere have prevented him and his crew from aging.

The visuals in this film are really good and it's a delight just to hide behind a pillar of rock with Tomlinson and Hunter while a pirate crew talk killing amid strange horned statues.

City Under the Sea is available under the title War-Gods of the Deep on Amazon Prime.

The Mouse in the Deerstalker

What if Sherlock Holmes was a mouse? It's a question not often asked, but it was answered anyway by Disney's 1986 animated film The Great Mouse Detective. It's a homage not only to the original Sherlock Holmes stories but also to a specific, popular incarnation--Basil Rathbone. The children's books on which the film's based are even more explicit about it, being called Basil of Baker Street. A far less ambitious effort than The Black Cauldron, this Disney film achieves much greater success at being fun and exciting. It even succeeds at having a better villain, a Moriarty pastiche called Ratigan, voiced by none other than Vincent Price. Along with a peg-legged bat henchmen, the villains in this film significantly outshine its heroes.

Vincent Price carries off an extraordinarily manic, bombastic performance brilliantly, especially as it's matched by equally expressive animation. A big fellow crammed into a suit and cloak, he seems a combination of Lon Chaney in London After Midnight and Paul Muni in Scarface. Although he's clearly a rat, we discover at the end of his great musical number that he seeks to present himself as a mouse. He actually feeds a henchman, a mouse, to a cat when he dares call Ratigan a rat. I believe it's the only time I've ever seen a cartoon cat actually catch and devour a cartoon mouse.

Perhaps this is the lasting influence of The Black Cauldron and The Fox and the Hound. For a brief time, Disney was a little more comfortable showing death.

Ratigan's hangup about being seen as a rat takes us back to classism, though, especially since at one point Basil calls him a "sewer rat" in contrast to Ratigan's attempt to pass himself off as royalty. Again, I'm reminded of Paul Muni in the original Scarface, gesturing at the "World is Yours" sign.

As if Ratigan weren't enough, he's accompanied by a peculiar chief henchmen, a bat with a peg leg voiced by the legendary voice artist Candy Candido. The animation matches his inimitable voice well--jittery and aggressive, he also seems a bit like a 1930s gangster or Universal monster.

But what of Basil (Barrie Ingham) and Dawson (Val Bettin), the story's version of Holmes and Watson? They're . . . fine. Really kind of run of the mill, actually. Dawson isn't very interesting at all, not even being a lovable doofus like Nigel Bruce in the Rathbone films. He does have one amusing moment where he's carried away by a kick line, something that may have been consciously borrowed from 1970's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Basil is fun when he's energetically solving a problem though, surprisingly, he doesn't come off much like Basil Rathbone. Indeed, according to Wikipedia, his portrayal is based more on Leslie Howard.

The Great Mouse Detective invites obvious comparisons to The Rescuers though I can't say for sure which is the better film. Both have strong villains. The Rescuers has better protagonists but The Great Mouse Detective has better music. After the embarrassingly bad songs in The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound, Disney wasn't taking any chances--they got Elmer Bernstein for The Black Cauldron and Henry Mancini for The Great Mouse Detective. In the latter case, they were able to make it pay off for one really good musical number, "The World's Greatest Mind".

Also like The Rescuers, the case on which our protagonists are engaged involves a child in peril, though, in this instance, at least initially, it's the parent that's abducted, not the child herself. Her father is a Scottish mouse voiced by Alan Young, who also voiced Scrooge McDuck and he never quite succeeds at making the mouse sound any different, which is a bit distracting. He's a toy maker, captured by Ratigan so he can make a mechanical replacement for the Queen in a plot reminiscent of the Doctor Who serial The Androids of Tara.

The book has the mice consciously imitating Holmes while the film simply has Basil living in the same building with no explanation for his aping the human's style. There's a brief cameo by a recording of Basil Rathbone put into the mouth of Holmes, which is charming for those of us who love Basil Rathbone. And I do, though my favourite Holmes is still Jeremy Brett.

The Great Mouse Detective is available on Disney+.

The Not So Sweet Smell . . . of Murder

Vera Miles, Martin Sheen, and Vincent Price are in the impressive guest cast for 1973's third season premiere of Columbo. "Lovely but Lethal" has some things in common with the previous season's "Requiem for a Fallen Star", especially in that Columbo seems really star struck by the murderess. In this case, though, it's only because his wife is so into her beauty products and he sees Miles' face every time he uses the bathroom at home. She doesn't quite seem to know if she should be flattered when he mentions this.

Vera Miles gives a much better performance than Anne Baxter and even when she tips her hand, proudly telling Columbo (Peter Falk) that she can't be the killer because she's a redhead and the killer wrote a message in black eyebrow pencil, she still makes her mania subtle enough you can believe she'd fool a lesser detective. Sadly, she doesn't have much screentime with Vincent Price who turns in a reliably creative performance as a rival perfume manufacturer.

Young Martin Sheen, three years away from romancing Ava Gardner in The Cassandra Crossing, here already shows a predilection for older actresses and wants to extort sex as well as money from Miles. This is one of those cases where it's difficult to see the killer as a straight forward villain. It would be nice if the episode developed this a little more.

But in any case it's entertaining watching Columbo try to stay on Miles' trail while following her around a weight loss spa resort.

Columbo is available with commercials on Amazon Prime.

The Witch Trial Melee

Vincent Price tries his hand at witchfinding again in 1970's Cry of the Banshee, a movie that has nothing to do with banshees. It's closer to the movie audiences might have been expecting 1968's Witchfinder General to have been, with Price as a corrupt magistrate up against a forest coven of pagan witches. There's an exciting amorality in the film as well as terrific costumes and production design--in fact, I think the people who designed the costumes and sets knew more about the period than the screenwriters. The performances are pretty good and overall this movie's a good ride though in some ways one that doesn't make very much sense.

Lord Edward (Price) rules a small English town with almost unvarnished despotism, maintaining the thin veneer of the witch trials as a pretext for he and his sons to rape, torture, and murder local women. In the first part of the film we see a feast in Edward's hall where a young woman and her brother are tormented for the sadistic pleasure of those present and we see another young woman flogged through the streets before being put in stocks.

It's so flagrant that it's kind of weird most of the townspeople don't seem constantly on edge, particularly the young women. Public executions and torture of criminals was certainly a spectator sport in this period (the late 16th century) but I imagine the prospect of anyone being seized on any pretext would've soured the experience, particularly as the population of a small town couldn't hold out forever. But the film doesn't spend much time on the psychology of the peasantry.

Things go swimmingly for the "Establishment" as they're credited--a term that would certainly have tipped audiences off in 1970 though the film might not align with modern political factions as well as the viewer might expect. But when Edward and his sons make the mistake of killing some actual witches, a vaguely pre-Roman-ish forest coven led by a woman named Oona (Elizabeth Bergner), suddenly it's the witches who start doing the indiscriminate killing. Oona ominously tells Edward he should kill her, too, after he ordered the slaughter of some of her followers in an effective moment. She makes good on that threat by using voodoo dolls to direct a werewolf henchman to maul the women of Edward's household.

A surprising move considering these women had been shown to clearly disapprove of Edward's practices. A particularly egregious victim being Maureen, played by Hilary Dwyer, one of Price's co-stars from Witchfinder General. She looks amazing in this movie wearing a green velvet gown with amber brown fur trim.

There's a free for all quality to the film's last portion and I loved how there's no clear "right" side. It's just all bloody horror.

The opening credits are an animation by Terry Gilliam--they look exactly like something from Monty Python which I found a little jarring. But I suppose they also have the quality of antique illustration. Cry of the Banshee is available on Amazon Prime.

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Take Phibes

So you thought you'd seen the last of Dr. Phibes. 1972's Dr. Phibes Rises Again compels you to reassess that presumption. Gloriously campy with even less reservation than its predecessor, this sequel features Vincent Price again in the title role, now lusting for eternal life in an Egypt composed of flashy sound stages and second unit footage from Spain. The film is just as fun as it sounds.

I thought I'd watched the first movie a year, maybe two years ago, but consulting my blog I see it was in fact five years ago. Most of the cast who survived the first film return for the second with the notable exception of Joseph Cotten who, I'm guessing for legal reasons, is absent even from the recap at the beginning of the sequel.

Now instead of killing off the surgeons Phibes blames for his wife being stuck in suspended animation in a glass coffin he's murdering the associates of Darius Biederbeck (Robert Quarry). The already centuries old Biederbeck seeks to prolong his life with an elixir hidden beneath a mountain in Egypt. Phibes seeks the water to revive his wife, played once again by Caroline Munro, who actually has lines and moves around in other films--those who watched the revived season of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 will remember her from the Star Wars knock off Starcrash.

Phibes is once again assisted by his mute, beautiful, robot assistant Vulnavia, now played by Valli Kemp, and he carries around with him a house band of robots, though there are fewer musical numbers in this film. The improbability of Phibes carting around all this stuff is matched again by the flamboyant intricacy of his murders. One man is beset by a harmless mechanical snake (that looks perfectly lifelike) to lull him into a false sense of security for the real snake before he's speared to death through the skull by a mechanism Vulnavia installed in his phone. Another gets caught in a golden scorpion statue and that's just the beginning of his troubles.

There are very brief cameos from Peter Cushing and Terry-Thomas (who played a different character in the first film) and a larger role for Hugh Griffith whose delivery of the one word line "Pity" when he discovers a giant bottle of gin is empty in itself justifies his presence. The police inspectors from the first film are back but with cornier jokes and Darius has a strikingly beautiful lover named Diana (Fiona Lewis) who's constantly pleading with him to give up this mad pursuit of she knows not what.

It's a good film, more relaxed than the first, though the first one had more exteriors. I kind of liked the minimal exteriors in the second film, though, it helps the thing feel all of a piece, a complete love letter to artifice.

The American Barony

There are many strange and sinister tales of European settlers in America, perhaps none stranger than that of James Reavis. His scheme in the 19th century to establish a claim on Arizona based on ties to 18th century Spanish nobility formed the basis of Samuel Fuller's very strange 1950 film The Baron of Arizona. An off-puttingly uneven film I suspect was borne of conflicted motives, some that might have been intentionally buried, it nonetheless has a solid foundation in a lead performance from Vincent Price as Reavis.

There's a striking similarity to Citizen Kane in an early scene where Reavis shows up on dark, rainy night to the home of a young girl in order to bestow upon her an inheritance that will drastically change her life. Poor Sofia (Ellen Drew) is just one part of Reavis' intricate, brilliant swindle.

While Sofia is being educated to act like and truly believe herself to be a Baroness, Reavis travels to Spain and joins a monastery with the sole purpose of infiltrating the monastery's library to falsify a one hundred year old record. He seeks to establish Sofia's ancestor as being granted a claim to the Arizona territory by the king of Spain. The real Reavis' scheme was about as intricate except the real life version of Sofia entered the story much later.

Fuller gives us something creepier, a story Price is certainly suited for. When Reavis returns from his adventures in Spain, he finds Sofia a full grown woman who gazes on him with unabashed rapture as one of the only two men she's known all her life. He shifts from the role of father to that of husband, thus making himself Baron of Arizona.

The film formed the basis of Quentin Tarantino and Matt Wagner's Django/Zorro, a comic series in which Tarantino's cinematic hero teamed up with Zorro against a Duke of Arizona. Django/Zorro's version of Sofia is far less complicit, as might be expected of a Tarantino heroine, and the Duke is far more clearly a villain than Price's Reavis. But a more striking difference is in how the Duke's defeat is partly accomplished by Django and Zorro aiding an uprising of Hispanic labourers. Whether Fuller had considered how the story of The Baron of Arizona connected thematically to disenfranchised American peoples is unclear. White land owners rebel against Reavis in the film, as they did in real life, and in one shot we do see a Native American man seemingly allied with them but not speaking.

Maybe this was the most Fuller could do in the era of the Hays Code. It was fourteen years before John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn, a western that portrayed the Northern Cheyenne Exodus as part of the long term crimes committed against Native Americans by European colonists and the United States.

Maybe Fuller had something like that in mind, though, when it's revealed late in the film that Sofia has Indian blood. This is partly why the latter portion of the film feels completely destabilised and the viewer is left uncertain as to who the heroes and villains are. Sofia's claim is part of a swindle and yet maybe she has the most honest claim of all.

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