Round Up 1945, Part Four: Pillow Of Death?

Ah, yes. The Picture Of Dorian Gray. I developed a prejudice against Oscar Wilde's story when I was a kid, having caught one or another of the versions of it on television. The honest truth is that while I didn't much like the central conceit of the portrait that showed the ravages of the dissipations of its subject while the original did not age, what I really objected to was the fact that there was nobody in the movie to really like. I still need a reason to care about what's going on in a film or novel, and if I can't sympathise with someone in the story, I find it difficult to care about what happens in the story. Which, I suppose, limits me somewhat. That said, reading about the Albert Lewin directed version made of 1945, with George Sanders in the role of the decadent, witty cynic Lord Wooton to Hurd Hatfield's empty, vain Dorian, it sounds as if I may have been hasty. I didn't think I was a fan of Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde (one of the major influences on Wilde's tale) either, but have since been shown the error of my ways.

The thing is, I've only read two of Wilde's works, and I remember being scandalised at recognising recycled witticisms -- identical memorable dialogue shared in common between Dorian Gray and The Importance Of Being Earnest. Can anyone confirm this, or did I somehow imagine it? Not that it would be out of character for Wilde, who regularly espoused a love of the artificial and empty: on the contrary, if he didn't do it, I imagine that if it were possible for him to read this he would wish that he had done. After all, as one of the characters in Dorian Gray so archly puts it, "I like persons better than principles, and persons with no principles better than anything in the world." AMG's Hal Erickson calls this version Lewins' "fascinating follow-up to his expressive-esoterica masterpiece The Moon and Sixpence" which I have never seen, but that phrase 'expressive-esoterica' certainly piques the curiousity. Is his Dorian Gray a piece of expressive-esoterica, too? One certainly hopes so, as the only thing worse than a film being expressive-esoterica would be its not being expressive-esoterica.

Huh. Here's an odd one. The British They Came to a City is an Ealing production, based on a play by J.B. Priestley, who also appears in the framing sequence. A disparate group of people from various social strata stand outside the gates of Utopia and discuss which, if any of them, might be able to adjust to life within it. George Perry, quoted at Britmovie.co.uk, says of the film:

It is a tract for socialism, presented in allegorical form, with... a city wherein poverty, exploitation, slums, class distinctions and the profit motive have all been abolished...  The film’s action – if that is not a misnomer – is confined to stylistic sets. It is one of Ealing’s most unsatisfactory films, a venture into an area that would be fairly difficult for any filmmaker, but one which for this studio, with its tradition of realism and a view of ordinary lives, was a disaster. Priestley’s radicalism was based on the concept of universal friendship, but this play failed to offer any ideas as to how his Utopia could be achieved. And because we are never given a chance to see inside the city we have no way of knowing whether its idealism works or not.

Call me crazy, but I find utopian discussion of interest, and this sounds so weird it's actually kind of compelling, though quite possibly more fun to think about than to actually watch. I do like to see fantasy pressed into the dead serious service of philosophy/politics, even if it proves deadly earnest and deadlier dull.

Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase is supposed to be the protoypical gothic romance film. I find it difficult to get worked up over the very familiar plot wherein the pretty young nurse falls for the possibly murderous son of the mysterious manor. There's no supernatural element here, just some nut killing the neighbourhood cripples. However, this particular nurse is a mute played, by all accounts, to great effect by Dorothy McGuire (pictured nearby) using only her piercing eyes, the direction is said to be noirishly expressionistic, and if it sounds cliche it's only because it was so successful is spawned legions of imitators, so, yeah, worth a try.

Finally, yes: Pillow Of Death. And, no, it isn't of even mild interest, at least not to me. Another of the six Inner Sanctum programmers starring Lon Chaney Jr, I only mention it here because the title amuses me, and because reading a description of its plot has helped me solidify my personal definition of what constitutes a horror film, for the narrow purposes of this narrow-minded blog anyway.

A man smothering his wife with a pillow is horrible, certainly, but it's exactly the kind of horror that appears in the newspaper every day, which I look to the movies to escape. It's not fantastic, it's all too sadly real. The same goes for torture, sadism, and most particuarly sexual violence. These things scare me profoundly, but to be honest, my interest in horror as a genre has little to do with a desire to be frightened, and nothing whatsoever to do with being disgusted. What I want is wonder: a darker, perhaps meaner, but no less wonderful form of the strange, alien, and essentially out of the realm of ordinary existence that fantasy and science fiction, at their best, provide. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Dario Argento's Suspiria, for instance, though it has his trademark nasty sadism, also has scary witches. That's a horror film, and in my opinion his very best. But his repellant The Stendhal Syndrome, which involves Argento's own lovely daughter, Asia, being repeatedly raped by a sadistic psychopath, while certainly disturbing and horrible, is not what I'm looking for in a horror film, because there's no fantasy element (at least, not my idea of fantasy). All of Argento's black gloved killers deserve to be relegated to the separate genre the Italians class them as: not horror, but giallo.

Now, I love a good detective film, and a particularly dark crime makes for a particularly urgent investigation (ala Silence Of The Lambs, Seven, or my favourite, Citizen X), which is good, but I don't take pleasure in watching people die, particularly in terror, and certainly don't wish to see them do so for protracted periods, least of all women. The crime under investigation can be brutal, it helps my involvement in the investigation that I'm afraid of violent crime, but I'm much happier having the horror suggested than being subjected to it myself at length, particularly if it's already been established once: I certainly don't need to be subjected to it twice, let alone three or four times. I also have a real aversion to the sound of screaming, and tend to turn down the volume until it's over, and I'll fast forward through lengthy depictions of human suffering to get it over with. If there's simply too much of it (or if I just know it's going to end badly, and there's no chance our hero is going to catch the psycho or our heroine is going to escape) I will simply give up and turn the thing off. I just don't like to feel abused when a movie is over. That isn't to say that I think a film shouldn't deal with serious subject matter, or that the viewer shouldn't be made to feel the violence with which our cinema is so replete. David Cronenberg has recently made two very fine films in which violence is at the heart of the narrative, and in which the prospect of violence is a source of great anxiety for the audience, as it should be. I think we should fear the consequences of violence.

It's just that there are things I don't feel the need to experience. I won't watch terrorists cutting off the heads of real live journalists on the internet, nor the simulated snuff of The Guinea Pig films (almost certainly one of the spiritual inspirations for Eli Roth's Hostel, and thus indirectly the mainstream American genre dubbed torture porn), for instance, because neither is something I want in my head. I am actually less bothered by the prospect of seeing the latter than by the fact that someone wanted to make them, and even moreso that they were correct in thinking there was an audience for them. On the other hand, I'm in the minority who liked Joel Silver's 8MM, which involves a private detective tracking down the sick vermin responsible for having made a genuine snuff film, and killing them for it. This I freely admit to finding most satisfying.

To digress a bit further, I'd like to say that you hear a lot of psychobabble in regard to horror films and the tendency of beautiful young women to get cut up in them. There are entire unversity dissertations dedicated to this theme, carefully tabulating the male/female ratio of victims and concluding with the assertion that the slasher film in particular contains an ingrained conservatism that punishes modern sexual freedom with death. Gene Siskel was a particularly vocal proponent of the idea that such films revealed a deep hatred of women in both their creators and the audiences who consume them. While I don't deny that some film makers may dislike women -- a great many males do -- and I am not a fan of the slasher genre myself, I think these critics overlook a fairly obvious motive for so many axe murders coming hot on the heels of some young lovely taking off her shirt.

Both explicit gore and explicit sex on film made their first appearances in exploitation films, for the simple reason that these ingredients were forbidden in mainstream movies, and therefore offered a sure way for small independent productions to compete. Producer David Friedman, a carny before he got into movies, knew that the darker thrills offered by the carnival -- the strip show tent, the freak show tent, and the geek show tent (where some mental deficient would bite the heads off live chickens) -- were money makers because what they contained couldn't be had elsewhere, and it was just good economic sense for him to get his start in features with nudie cuties: benign films, often shot in nudist colonies, with a lot of skin but no actual sex. The problem was that once exploitation film makers got their hands on something lucrative they would run it into the ground, and not only would the audience become numbed to that particular thrill, the bar would thereby naturally be lowered for Hollywood as well. Mainstream films gradually became more risque, and exploitation film makers had to find something else that would fill those seats. Friedman and his buddy Herschell Gordon Lewis sat down to try to figure out their next move, and came to a sound business decision: they would make horror movies, and what would distinguish them (because it certainly wouldn't be the writing, directing, acting or production values) would be gore.

The merchantability of this kind of extreme bloodletting had been proven by the success of Paris' Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, founded in 1894, where audiences, male and female, had gone to enjoy graphic and shocking plays depicting horrible crimes ripped from the headlines and from history. These were geek shows, pure and simple, and so are the Lewis gore films. But once Friedman and Lewis had thrown open the doors to more extreme violence, international films and the mainstream, inevitably, began to close the divide between them again, Sam Peckinpah began spraying blood in slow motion, and there was only one choice left for the true exploitation merchants who didn't have the chops necessary to sell a film on any merits but the fact that Hollywood simply couldn't follow where they were going: hardcore pornography or retirement. Friedman, at least, bought himself a carnival.

Meanwhile, however, low budget independents had learned that two affordable ingredients could almost guarantee a return on a minimal investment. You might not have the money for established actors, but pretty nobodies would do just as well, if not better, as long as they would agree to take off their blouses. The supporting characters, such as they were, were mainly there to have simulated sex. The leading lady, for whom it was perhaps more important that she be able to act, might not have to strip, which has the effect of making her look virtuous, essentially by accident. The other sure fire money maker being violence, it was necessarily the sexy supporting cast who had to do the dying, usually after they had done the thing they'd really been hired to do: get naked. Not very psychological at all, more of an accident really.

Pure economics, in fact, because that's entirely what those films were all about.