Man of Mystery: Why I Love the Falcon Series

I like to think of the Falcon movies as film noir lite.

When I can’t stomach the amoral bitterness and grisly endings of true noir, this mystery series still satisfies my craving for seductive low-key lighting, cynical dialogue, and underworld intrigue. With his Bond-like resilience and devil-may-care banter, the debonair amateur sleuth known as the Falcon makes the viewer feel reassured and protected as he leads us down those mean streets in search of answers—and gorgeous dames.

Between 1941 and 1946, RKO’s B-movie unit churned out thirteen Falcon programmers. Amazingly, the quantity did not undermine the quality of the thoroughly enjoyable films. Distinguished up-and-coming directors like Edward Dmytryk and Joseph H. Lewis helmed individual movies, and more workmanlike directors still served up polished, competently-made films that clock in at a little over an hour. On a broader level, I suspect that Val Lewton’s successful RKO horror cycle strongly influenced the sleek, shadowy look of the Falcon movies. In any case, one can only assume that the studio—which managed to produce The Stranger on the Third Floor (widely considered the first film noir), Citizen Kane, Cat People, and Out of the Past within a span of a few years—must’ve been an environment conducive to good ideas and an eye-catching, moody style.

Although the wry, purring George Sanders created the role of the Falcon, after just a few movies he moved on to more prestigious gigs and bequeathed the title to his equally wry and purring real-life brother Tom Conway. Years before, in 1937, when starting out on acting careers, the Russian-born, British-raised brothers had flipped a coin over who’d get to keep the family name. (The self-destructive genes in the family had already been split between them.) Well, George won the Sanders name, but Tom comes out the clear winner in the Falcon series.

Sanders might ooze deadly charm when playing bad guys, but he makes a less convincing ladies’ man on the right side of the law. By contrast, when Conway’s Falcon flirts with ladies, they stay flirted. (Warning: buckle up for fangirling, folks. This is a Tom-centric article and I feel no shame for it.)

Probably best known for his turn as the spectacularly unethical Dr. Judd in Cat People and The Seventh Victim, Conway delivered some fine performances, but didn’t possess the ample dramatic gifts of his younger brother. However, he proved much more adept at sustaining the Falcon series. As Kim Newman observes in The BFI Companion to Crime, “Conway was less sullen with material his brother clearly believed beneath him.”

Whereas much of Sanders’s star image depends on his disdainful aura of boredom, Conway’s less caustic brand of sprezzatura gave the Falcon persona a much-needed infusion of curiosity and energy. Over the years I’ve acquired a great deal of respect for actors who can play the same static character over and over while still making him amusing and engaging. Conway bore this onus brilliantly.

Conway’s work in the Falcon deserves the Errol Flynn Prize for Formulaic But Consistently Awesome Performances. I’d also award him the Ronald Colman Cup for Fine Moustaches. If anybody ever looked more badass holding a teacup, I’ve never seen it. It’s not difficult to understand how the Falcon series—which RKO initially planned on cancelling soon after Sanders left—actually grew more popular once Conway took it over.

Sanders and Conway appeared together in just one film, The Falcon’s Brother, and their collective swoon-worthiness might cause temporary blindness in certain scenes. Gay Lawrence (Sanders) begins the investigation when his brother, Tom, is falsely reported dead. In an interesting reversal, by the end of the movie, Nazi spies have killed off Gay, leaving Tom to inherit the mantle and seek out further adventures as the Falcon.

If taken out of context, audiences’ first glimpse of the future-Falcon Tom Lawrence wouldn’t seem out of place from any purebred noir. As policemen load into a car in pursuit of Gay Lawrence, a cut shows a presumably nearby alleyway—in almost total darkness. An indistinct movement, the sound of a match striking a wall, a spurt of flame, and there he is: coolly lighting his cigarette, the contours of his face flickering in the smoky glow.

In the initial installment of the series, The Gay Falcon, the other Lawrence brother was introduced to us as a mischievous, easily distracted white-collar socialite who works in an office but shirks his duties to go off hunting killers. By contrast, Tom Lawrence strikes the viewer from the first as a less frivolous sleuth, a slightly shadowy gentleman slummer with one foot in the noirverse.

 Adding to the more hard-boiled qualities of the series, a number of actors better remembered for their work in iconic films noirs—including Jane Greer, Elisha Cook Jr., Martha Vickers, and Sheldon Leonard—bring a darker acting style to individual movies. However, to take the edge off of that intensity, RKO drafted in a number of recognizable comic character actors, like Don Barclay, Edward Brophy, and Cliff Edwards, to play the Falcon’s sidekick.

The Falcon movies feature many classical noir plot tropes, such as psychotically jealous spouses, mercenary femmes fatales, and gangsters living under assumed identities. The better installments mesh noir elements more or less seamlessly with their high quotient of comic relief. For instance, in The Falcon and the Co-Eds, my favorite of the series, an idyllic school for girls offers plenty of opportunity for giggly hijinks, but the façade drops to reveal a roiling undercurrent of repressed passion and neuroticism.

The Falcon in San Francisco, with its urban environment and preponderance of thugs and baddies, channels the noir atmosphere the most distinctly, but even The Falcon in Mexico and The Falcon Out West manage to cull a noirish aesthetic out of atypical settings. The Falcon in Hollywood wins my personal recommendation as the series installment that most elegantly fuses incongruous elements of dark visual textures with pervasive light comedy.

Speaking of comedy, the main running gag of the Falcon series consists of bookending almost every film with glamorous ladies begging the sleuth for help with some conundrum or other. As the detective quips in The Falcon in Danger, cornered by a distraught stunner with a ransom demand for her father, “Why is it every beautiful girl I meet is in distress and has a note?” A Falcon movie usually finishes by opening the door for the next movie; just as the Falcon has cracked the case, a woman runs up to him and pleads for his help. Although these teasers seldom relate to the plot of the following film, they end the films on a high note of, “Here we go again!”

It’s a miracle that the Falcon can get any detecting done at all, what with the sundry dames clamoring for his attention. In one typical scene, from The Falcon Strikes Back, the sleuth tries to deter perky reporter Marcia Brooks (Jane Randolph) from meddling in his case by bestowing a generous smooch. The ploy works a little too well, because he then has to revive her from the resultant reverie with a snap, like a hypnotist!

I always used to wonder why men carried handkerchiefs in their pockets. After watching a few Falcon movies, I finally understood the reason: to wipe away bright traces of lipstick left on their faces by amorous ladies—or that was the hope, at any rate. Yet, as the films make clear, the Falcon is at heart a gentleman, not a playboy. For instance, when trapped among a coatrack of costumes in a dressing room full of chorus girls during The Falcon in Hollywood, he surreptitiously reaches from his hiding place to put in place a sagging shoulder strap and thus protect the young lady’s modesty.

I find the incessant flirtatiousness in the series somewhat refreshing because, just as much as the Falcon eyes women up, they eye him up right back. Cigarette girls, hotel maids, and random broads sitting around bars look him up and down and express their approval with an enthusiastic “mmm!” of delight.  When a mysterious lady bails Lawrence out of jail in The Falcon in San Francisco, she immediately pulls him into a liplock with nary a word of introduction. In The Falcon and the Co-Eds, Lawrence has to contend with classrooms full of googly-eyed maidens who instantly crush on him as hard as I do.

All the pretty girls that populate the Falcon’s universe are clearly furnished to satisfy the gentlemen in the audience, but you can’t mistake a robust female gaze implied in the series. I mean, how else can you explain the scene in The Falcon’s Alibi where Tom Conway is shirtless for about five minutes—freshly oiled from having a massage and wearing nothing but pajama bottoms? Sleuth that I am, I can detect no narrative rationale for this shirtlessness, apart from unabashed eye candy. (Then again, I lose consciousness whenever I watch that scene. Smelling salts must be sent for.) At the risk of rationalizing my guilty pleasure, I would argue that there’s something healthy about the equal-opportunity checking-out that the Falcon movies heartily encourage.

Like many programmer mystery series, the Falcon movies ride high on a breezy stock company ambiance. You can discern the sense of camaraderie and ease between performers who worked with each other practically every week. Keep your eyes peeled for repeating players, including Jean Brooks, Jane Randolph, Rita Corday, Barbara Hale, and, most frequently, Cliff Clark and Edward Gargan as the flatfooted policemen consistently flummoxed by the Falcon.

Raymond Chandler once wrote, “The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing.” I believe this statement applies equally to movies. Now, I’m pretty damn sure that Chandler wouldn’t have expected that statement to relate to the Falcon movies. Especially since the first film adaptation of a Chandler work was the mutilation of Farewell, My Lovely into The Falcon Takes Over. Needless to say, the already cranky author felt trivialized. I admit that the Falcon movies lack the dramatic architecture and emotional tension that supports a great screen or literary thriller, regardless of the conclusion.

But there’s a very different quality at work that would make me tune into a Falcon film even if the ending had been spliced away. It’s the cozy charm of the situations and the rapport of the characters that brings me back to these movies. The series invites you into its world and makes you feel right at home with a cluster of familiar tropes that grow more amusing with each Falcon movie you watch. You get in on the in-jokes and experience the vague feeling, when each film is over, that you’re expected at the cast party. In the end, try as I might to analyze why I find the series so appealing, I can’t get much further than to conclude, well, they’re darn fun to watch.

And apparently they were fun to make. Conway, often typecast as villains or tortured souls, relished his chance to play a witty detective and found the series cathartic. As he told Hollywood magazine in 1943, “every now and then I get a breather like one of the Falcon series, which acts as a purifying agent. Then I’m ready for a fresh dish of dastardly doings.”

I guess that when I need a break from noirdom, the Falcon movies are my “purifying agent,” too.

This post is part of the Sleuthathon, hosted by Movies Silently. Be sure to check out the other entries!

And for those of you who are interested, I’ll be hosting a tweetalong to two Falcon movies on March 19 in partnership with #Bond_Age. Click here for details!

The Haunted Palace (1963): A Portrait of Terror

“You do not know the extent of my appetite… I’ll not have my fill of revenge until this village is a graveyard, ’til they have felt, as I did, the kiss of fire on their soft bare flesh—all of them!”

Joseph Curwen has no chance of escape. Lashed to a tree and surrounded on all sides by a baying mob of illiterate peasants, the stately master of the occult looks helpless, defeated, and vaguely preposterous with his frilly cravat and polished costume.

Then, he steels himself against the indignity and brazenly returns the gaze of his persecutors.

“Have you anything to say, warlock?”

Curwen trains his icy blue eyes on the crowd. “Yes. As surely as the village of Arkham has risen against me, so shall I rise—from the dead—against the village of Arkham!”

The camera then assumes Curwen’s perspective, rapidly panning as he singles out the leaders of the riot. He pauses on each guilty, quaking face and levels his malediction. “From this night onward, you shall bear my curse!”

A torch is cast on the straw at his feet. The flames rise. Curwen looks about him in shock and disbelief, as though he cannot fathom his powers failing him. His face contorts as he attempts to bear the agony of the consuming blaze, but cannot. Curwen rears his head back, and a reedy, bellowing cry escapes him, mingling with the distant crackle of thunder.

So begins the The Haunted Palace, my pick for the most unsettling of the Corman-Price collaborations. To address this head-on, the film, though presenting itself as an adaptation of Poe’s “The Haunted Palace” and also of Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” doesn’t really fulfill either claim, on a narrative level, at least. Sure, it borrows the basic premise and a few tidbits of mythos from Lovecraft’s novella, but bulldozes the modernistic intricacy of the original.

Nevertheless, I relish the irony that this film, with its mutants and monstrous human-god couplings, is itself a misshapen hybrid, a cross-pollination of two American horror masters. Corman and screenwriter Charles Beaumont bred the cosmic weirdness of Lovecraft with the lusty revenge motifs of Poe to forge what I consider a truly disturbing movie. And Price’s virtuoso performance captures notes of the tormented conscience and the paranoid alienation that we tend to associate with Poe’s and Lovecraft’s antiheroes respectively. Not bad for a film shot in 15 days!

I think we can all agree that Vincent Price boosted the quality of basically every film he was ever in—and if you don’t agree, you shall bear my curse. He was the ultimate value-added actor, turning even the most threadbare of characters into tapestries of terror. However, for the film in question, his taxing role provided a perfect showcase for his considerable acting talents. As Roger Corman observed, “I think the concept of Vincent playing the dual role of Ward and Ward possessed was a challenge, but the kind of challenge an actor loves. It gives him the opportunity to work in a more complex way on camera.”

Price plays Joseph Curwen’s meek descendant Charles Dexter Ward who returns to Arkham to claim his ancestor’s palace. Despite the threats and protests of the village, Ward and his wife investigate the drafty mansion. Unsurprisingly, a haunted psychedelic portrait of Curwen soon gets hooks in Ward and, before long, the warlock is using Ward’s body to exact vengeance on the town and continue his attempts to mate the Old Ones with mortal women.

Foreshadowing his deadly earnest performance in Witchfinder General, Price wisely dialed down his camp sensibility to practically nothing for The Haunted Palace. I’m a huge fan of all things camp, but it does have a time and a place. In a Corman-Price picture, one might crave the comfort of wink-wink theatrics or the risible excess of some medieval debauchery. The absence of the cozy over-the-topness we expect makes The Haunted Palace doubly squirm-inducing.

If the audience wants ham, they’ll go hungry in this one. Even some exaggerated makeup design can’t defuse the chilling impact of Price’s serene wickedness. It’s the little things that make him so unnerving. The way he calmly pops a grape into his mouth as he connives to get his wife committed to an asylum. How he tosses a lit match onto an alcohol-soaked enemy without a twitch of sympathy. His sour wit as he lights ceremonial torches, cooing, “Well, I’ll admit the furnishings do leave something to be desired, but it has a lived-in quality, don’t you think? After all, home is where the heart is…” Curwen-as-Ward is no laughing matter.

As far as cinematic depictions of possession go, The Haunted Palace stands out as one of the most implacable and frightening ever captured on film, in my opinion. No projectile vomiting, no levitation, no special effects, merely a different entity taking up residence in someone else’s body. Whereas a great number of horror flicks focus on the consequences of possession, relatively few movies dwell on the process by which the physical being, mind, and soul of one decent man are progressively permeated and conquered by a force of darkness. I mean, The Shining portrayed this kind of transformation brilliantly, but was Jack Torrence ever a normal, lovable guy? I think not.

By contrast, Price’s Charles Dexter Ward immediately endears himself to the viewer. He is attentive and courtly towards his wife, polite to strangers, and, when the occasion calls for it, dryly humorous. The goody-two-shoes victims in classic horror movies tend to bore me to tears and have me rooting for evil in no time flat, but I appreciated how likable and initially unaware Price made his interpretation of Ward.

Several of the most important scenes in The Haunted Palace are essentially monologues—just Charles Dexter Ward standing in front of his ancestor’s portrait and gradually coming under its malign influence. There’s the occasional ghostly voice-over to raise the stakes, but these integral exchanges mostly consist of just one man standing alone in a room. Doesn’t sound particularly cinematic, does it? Yet, through Price’s eloquent pantomimes in these portrait soliloquies, we witness Curwen’s venom slowly digesting the mild, gentle Ward. I have a hard time imagining any other actor “selling” such a sustained transformation.

The first encounter with the portrait offers an introduction: Ward and his wife walk towards the lurid painting and one shot-reverse-shot exchange suggests Ward’s connection and resemblance to it.

When Ward next goes face-to-face with the eldritch portrait, we see Curwin’s spirit take root. Lighting his cigar, Ward glances at the painting. Then, in a closer shot, he stares up at the portrait with guileless blue eyes, but then winces, as a man might looking into a bright light or a heavy, hot wind.

We get a series of cuts back and forth from the painting and Ward, who tries to shield his eyes but can’t resist its lure. Ultimately, he looks straight at the portrait and his face ripples from within. The forehead seems to heighten, the eyes recede, and the mouth fixes itself into a line of immovable cunning. It’s like Barrymore’s famous no-cut transformation in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—but in close-up. (In fact, it was that famous horror performance that stoked Vincent’s childhood interest in acting; he emulated Barrymore’s Hyde in front of his mirror for hours.) By moving a few muscles, Price alters his character’s identity. The audience sees the badness of Curwen enter and possess him.

The third portrait scene is brief—a single frightening shot, after Simon tells Ward to “ask Mr. Corwen” the answer to a question. We see a long shot of the portrait and the camera tracks back to show Ward’s head in the bottom of the frame, dwarfed by the surroundings. The sudden intrusion of his head disorients the viewer, so that when Ward whirls around, revealing Curwen’s pallid, pitiless face, we’re all the more alarmed. Curwen has installed himself in Ward.

The fourth major portrait scene stresses the triumph of supernatural sin over a normal, healthy mind. Under Curwen’s control, Ward cruelly tells his wife not to pry into his affairs. She runs off to bed and Ward, momentarily regaining his free will, calls back to her when a disembodied, resonant version of his own voice calls to him. The camera reframes to remind us of the painting’s presence. Ward turns towards it fearfully, but bravely calls out, “Leave me alone!”

Two progressively closer shots of the portrait emphasize Curwen’s hypnotic power as the voice protests that he and Ward are really one. Corman cuts back to a shot of Ward, cowering slightly, as the camera sweeps down in a crane shot like a falcon in the dive. Cut to the painting: “My will is too strong…” Cut to Ward, whose face shows no fear, no love, nothing but a stony resolution as Curwen’s voice completes, “Too strong for you.” Price finishing that sentence in a slightly deeper, firmer voice scares the hell out of me; nothing has changed, yet we’re looking at a totally different individual. Ward’s own body is enunciating the victory of something that Ward hates and fears. The invasion is almost complete.

There’s more spooky portrait soliloquy turmoil, but that gives you a taste of Price’s extraordinary task of making scenes like this—which could’ve been boring—into mortifying depictions of evil winning out over good. And you might be surprised by how much evil does win in this game.

Some of the most effective horror stories I’ve read—Blackwood’s “The Secret Listener” and Onions’s “The Beloved Fair One” come to mind—derive their menace from repetition. A normal fellow explores and describes a confined location over and over and over again, eventually succumbing to its monotonous spell.

On film, it’s damned difficult to pull off this sort of horror that grows by almost imperceptible increments until the sum total of everything not-quite-right overwhelms the viewer.

Of course, Corman still throws in a few drive-in shocks, like one of the townsfolk’s deformed progeny reaching its grotesque hands through a slot to receive a dinner of giblets. Still, he patiently let Curwen’s creeping evil unfold through variations on these portrait scenes.

Intimate and almost anti-cinematic, these gripping passages of time spent alone (but not really!) with our tortured protagonist make us wriggle as we notice how Ward emerges from each scene having imbibed more of Curwen into his nature. Corman thus approximates a “flavor” of fear that I usually associate with top-notch macabre literature.

The performance has the meticulous shadings that come from strategic pre-planning. Roger Corman remembered, “Vincent and I would discuss in depth the character before each picture… In fifteen days, to shoot what were fairly complicated films, there was no time to have deep discussions about character. We had to go and shoot!”

Price and Corman (left) rehearsing the movie’s opening sequence

The tug-of-war for the mind, body, and soul of Charles Dexter Ward, as conveyed by Price, elevates the film to the level of psychological horror. A key strength of Price’s dual characterization resides in his ability to react to the wickedness that overtakes him. The actor communicates Ward’s horror at the horror he’s becoming, as the good man pitifully struggles with the spirit that’s colonizing him.

Not only does Price bring two distinct personalities to life, but he also suggests the relationship between them—condescending domination on one side and appalled resistance on the other. He’s a one-man dialectic!

In addition to Price, the film features some stunning wide-angle cinematography, by Corman veteran Floyd Crosby, that glints like a star sapphire. It also boasts a sublime score by Ronald Stein that conveys the otherworldly sweep of the narrative. An ill, woebegone Lon Chaney is appropriately raspy and lends his considerable horror cred to the mix, but doesn’t get much to do.

Apart from Price, the standout performance is Debra Paget as Ann Ward, who reacts poignantly to her changed husband and displays admirable fortitude and courage for a horror movie wife. She loves the man she married as much as she is disgusted by the belittling, lascivious Curwen.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, a delicate dance of eroticism and creepiness, Curwen-as-Ward tries to have his wicked way with her or, as he says, “exercise my husbandly prerogative.” All the great horror stars had a gift for suggesting both sexual attractiveness and repulsiveness and, if you watch this scene, you might conclude, as I did, that Price negotiated this balance most adroitly of all.

Be sure to unearth this underrated classic. I suspect that you too will fall under the spell of The Haunted Palace… though thankfully not to the extent of Charles Dexter Ward.

I did this post as part of the Vincent Price Blogathon, which also I hosted. I am honored by the amazing bloggers who participated, so be sure to check out their entries!

Free Friday Film: The Ghost Camera (1933)

Are you up for a quickie? No, not that kind. Wash your brain out with soap, you n’er-do-well. Today I’m tempting you with a quota quickie, a cheaply produced British B movie produced to satisfy English law.

In 1927, the Cinematographic Films Act required British movie theaters to exhibit a certain percentage (it rose to 20%) of British-made films in an attempt to lessen the influence of American culture, pouring into England through Hollywood films, like the Spanish Armada in celluloid form. Well, tempted by the guaranteed opportunity to have their films shown in cinemas, British studios churned out movies with insanely small budgets—about 1 pound per foot of film, according to the UK Guardian.

Rather like Poverty Row films, many of these quota quickies stank like gone-off Vegimite. However, plenty of them also offered burgeoning directors and actors Michael Powell, Errol Flynn, Vivien Leigh, and Ann Todd a chance to cut their teeth on their first cinematic experiences. And, what with necessity being the Queen Mum of invention, many quickies display creative stylistics and wacky plots—to cover up their budgetary shortages.

It breaks my heart to inform you that 60% of these movies are considered lost. But Martin Scorsese and the BFI are actively hunting for them. As it is, more and more of these are available on DVD and hopefully we’ll get a full-on quickie festival someday. Wait, that came out wrong…

So, in my usual roundabout way, I come to today’s sacrifice, The Ghost Camera, a 1933 mystery from debut director Bernard Vorhaus, a talented fellow whose Hollywood career was cut short by the blacklist. This entertaining, plot-packed thriller clocks in at about an hour, a refreshing feat in comparison to the bloated two-going-on-three hours spectacles that are showing at a movie theater near you nowadays.

The story follows John Gray (Henry Kendall), a bespectacled, preening intellectual who arrives home from his vacation to discover that someone dropped a camera in his luggage. Deciding to develop a picture in hopes of returning the camera to its owner, our hero discovers—gasp—a picture of a murder!

Before he can show the image to the police, though, someone nicks it, but leaves the amateur detective with the camera and the remaining undeveloped negatives within. Piqued by the theft and up for an adventure, Gray decides to retrace the photographer’s steps by tracking down the locations where the pictures in the camera were taken. In the process, he meets the camera owner’s troubled sister, Mary Elton, stumbles across a jewel heist, and finally roots out the killer.

As with many quota quickies, The Ghost Camera gives us a glimpse into the before-they-were-famous careers of big names in cinema history. A charmingly baby-faced Ida Lupino graces the screen with her discreet magnetism as Mary, the lady in distress. As she accompanies the sleuth, she both seeks and dreads the truth about her brother and his camera.

Unfortunately, the print of this film available on YouTube looks like it was strained through cheesecloth (which is why I didn’t pepper this post with screencaps). Nevertheless, the cinematography does shine. The director of photography, Oscar-winner Ernest Palmer, an American, shot the melodically lovely Borzage films Street Angel and Seventh Heaven, so it’s no surprise that he pulls out some bizarre visual poetry even for this cheapie. The scenes in the darkroom, almost total blackness except for a few starkly-lit faces, convey a spooky sense of dread that foreshadows the virtuoso lighting contrasts of mature British noir. Again, when the protagonist investigates an abandoned, ruined fortress, darkness prevails, plunging us viewers into a situation where we must stay riveted to the screen for the slightest flash of light or sound to know what’s going on.

Best of all, the great David Lean earned one of his first screen credits on this film as an editor. He later acknowledged director Bernard Vorhaus as a formative influence on his career. Indeed, combined with the cinematography, the editing here can only be described as audacious. For example, the movie starts with a low angle shot of a looming castle keep. The camera slowly tilts down and pans to a car on the road. Jump cut to the vine-covered walls of the ruin. Jump cut to the backseat of the car into which a camera tumbles. Where did it come from? Who dropped or threw it? Did the car pick it up on purpose or is the driver totally unaware? This pre-credit sequence leaves us intrigued, tantalized. Exactly what you desire from a mystery thriller!

The first time I watched The Ghost Camera, its visual flamboyance stunned me. Shaky handheld motions, jump cuts, swish pans, and disorienting shifts of focus: you’ll see a lot of things here that we tend to associate with the “groundbreaking” movies of mature European art cinema, especially French New Wave. The jarring, unstable camerawork also awakens the audience to the foibles and strangeness of mechanical recording. That is, we realize that we’re watching a movie, a reality filtered through a camera.

The camera as a recording instrument itself carries an uncanny aura. Think about how many meta-thrillers and horror films revolve around some variation of a ghostly, anxiety-inducing camera or pictures: The Big Sleep, Blow-Up, Chinatown, and The Eyes of Laura Mars, to name a few. The Ghost Camera actually amplifies its slapdash, B-movie discontinuity, its jerky camera movements and warping perspective, to generate fear. The movie camera takes on a life of its own. Meanwhile, the film’s plot, in which developed images serve as clues, shows us how photography’s special bond with reality can bear an alarming witness.

The camera’s truth speaks in tongues, though—as the weird, vertiginous cinematography of The Ghost Camera suggests—that need to be interpreted by human reasoning.

Mix all this innovative flair and love for the filmic medium with a droll script, really a parody of the whodunit, and you have a beguiling hour’s entertainment. Our mewling hero John Gray continuously treats us to his pessimistic, helpless commentaries. For instance,

“I really don’t know why I continue to go on holidays, Simms. They’re never adventurous. Just the usual people and happenings, unexciting, like myself. Man is an irrational animal, Simms, persisting to hope for what his reason has proven nonexistent.”

At another vexing moment, he humorously exclaims, “Oh but this is absurd! We’re beginning to talk like characters in a mystery melodrama.” If only he knew…

So, watch The Ghost Camera and celebrate this testament to what wonderful popular art a bunch of clever people can cobble together out of basically nothing. It’s certainly one of the most enduring and satisfying quickies you’ll ever enjoy. Click here to watch the film on YouTube.

N.B. I learned about the history of the quota quickie from these thoughtful sources. I didn’t pull those facts out of thin air and I gratefully and fully acknowledge these articles and their authors for their research and insights. I’m citing them informally, because this is a blog post, not a college paper!

“Fancy a Quickie?” by Matthew Sweet from U.K. Guardian Monday, 1 January 2007.

“In Praise of the Quota.” at British Pictures Article Archive.

Free Friday Film: Dead Men Walk (1943)

“You creatures of the light, how can you say with absolute certainty what does or does not dwell in the limitless ocean of the night? Are the dark and shrouded legions of evil not but figments of the imagination because you and your puny conceit say that they cannot exist?”

—Prologue, Dead Men Walk

The name George Zucco stokes the deepest reserves of my film geek love. This classically trained Englishman, with his cultured, grave baritone speaking voice and his startling black eyes, indecently bulging forward at will, is a veritable institution in horror.

Despite a distinguished stage career and several notable supporting roles in big Hollywood productions, Zucco found much of his work among B-movie chillers from Universal and cheap Poverty Row shockers. No matter how tawdry the material or how small the part, his effulgent glee in playing mad scientists, wicked priests, and all-round nasty rotters makes his performances richly pleasurable.

Unlike many of Zucco’s films, Dead Men Walk gave him substantial material that he could really sink his teeth into: a double role as an upstanding community doctor and his degenerate, occult-obsessed twin brother. The story starts with the funeral of Elwyn Clayton, as his brother Lloyd stands over the coffin. (Note to self: never name my child Elwyn.) Gee, Lloyd doesn’t look too broken up. Suddenly, the town crazy lady bursts into the chapel and announces that the dead man doesn’t deserve a Christian burial; he was an unnatural sinner. You know, I get the feeling that something’s not right here…

Sure enough, later that night, vampire Elwyn has risen from his tomb, abetted by his servant, Zolarr, played by Dwight Frye. Because of course he’s played by Dwight Frye. Who else would you call when you need a toady to the undead?

After feasting on a young maiden, Elwyn drops by his brother’s office the evening after. It turns out—rather surprisingly—that the good doctor Lloyd actually killed his blasphemous brother. Or tried to, not knowing that his twin had attained immortal life as a vampire. Gloating over his power, Elwyn throws down the gauntlet, vowing a horrible retribution:

“You’ll know that I am no intangible figment of your imagination when you feel the weight of my hatred. Your life will be a torment. I’ll strip you of everything you hold dear before I drag you down to a sordid death. You’ll pray you’re dead long before you die.”

Yeah, and you thought your sibling was a troublemaker! In all sincerity, Zucco’s bald-ish, chortling vampire scares me almost as much as prime Lugosi. As Frank Dello Stritto wrote, “If Lugosi’s vampire is something of a lounge lizard, Zucco’s is a dirty old man.” Indeed, he’s the unassuming retiree down the street who secretly wants to suck your blood. His aged, commonplace appearance renders his ugly, mirthless chuckle and his desire to corrupt and destroy young women all the more appalling. He glows with malice.

Rather like E.F. Benson’s chillingly ordinary vampire in “Mrs. Amworth,” Elwyn is a stealth threat. In fact, I wouldn’t be a bit shocked if the writer of Dead Men Walk was thinking of this particular image from “Mrs. Amworth” when dreaming up some scares: “I saw, with the indescribable horror of incipient nightmare, Mrs. Amworth’s face suspended close to the pane in the darkness outside, nodding and smiling at me…. [W]hichever window I opened Mrs. Amworth’s face would float in, like those noiseless black gnats that bit before one was aware.” Like the titular vampire in Benson’s tale, Elwyn is at his most creepy when hovering outside a victim’s window, bathed in moonlight.

So, who’s going to fight this menace? Surely we have some lovable Van Helsing figure, someone we can identify with and cheer on, right? Not exactly.

(Who knew Woodrow Wilson had an evil vampire twin? Which reminds me, does anyone want to greenlight my script for Woodrow Wilson: Vampire Hunter?)

While we expect the bad twin to be effectively spooky and awful, the “normal” twin in Dead Men Walk has a surprisingly grim side too. He murdered his brother, no matter how pure his motives might have been. The side of good isn’t so spotless as we might hope, raising questions about the corruption inherent even in fighting evil. The element of fratricide lends gravitas and ambiguity to this dark, dualistic tale of sibling rivalry, a muddied, supernatural Cain and Abel.

Is Dead Men Walk a great film? Well, no, it was made at PRC, and it’s not Detour. Directed by Sam Neufield, who’s probably best known for the dorky-as-hell I Accuse My Parents, this movie wasn’t worthy of its acting talent. The pacing definitely lags, and I’m phrasing that kindly.

Mary Carlisle turns in a likable performance, adding suspense to the story as we see her life essence waning under the vampire’s influence. Alas, her love interest could barely choke out his lines. And Dwight Frye does not get enough to do at all. The visuals are appropriately shadowy—often to the point of blacking out parts of faces to suggest the depravity of the villains. Not everyone agrees with me, unfortunately, and some of the reviews elsewhere are just plain cruel. This movie was probably shot in less time than it takes to coax some of today’s movie stars out of their trailers, so let’s cut it some slack, okay?

If you love horror and derive comfort from snuggling up with a slightly creaky but very creepy 1940s horror flick, you can watch this one for free. And if you don’t love that, I will totally haunt you after I’m gone.

This film is in the Public Domain, which means you can watch and download it at the Internet Archive, as well.

Daughter of Horror (1955): In the Shadows

“It stirred my blood and cleansed my libido.” —Preston Sturges on Daughter of Horror

As I sit down to write this, I want you to know that I’m rubbing my hands together gleefully and cackling like a mad scientist about to unleash some freakish terror upon the world. Because today I’m going to introduce you to one of the weirdest, most disturbing films I’ve ever seen. And I watch Dwain Esper movies for kicks.

Reader, meet Daughter of Horror. She’s the bastard child of Salvador Dali and Ed Wood. Or maybe H. P. Lovecraft and Mickey Spillane. This 1955 avant-garde independent film drags us through the nightmares and misadventures of an androgynous delinquent chick, “the Gamin,” as she ventures from her hotel bedroom to prowl down mazelike streets. Over the course of one night, she’s nearly assaulted by a drunken bum, gets pimped out to a fat man, commits a crime, and slips in and out of many hallucinations. But where can we draw the line between madness and the squalid horrors of reality?

Directed by the obscure John Parker and written by Z-grade producer/director Bruno Ve Sota (although there’s some debate as to who really deserves artistic credit), this oily, shoestring-cheap horror-noir contains not one line of dialogue. Yep, we’re dealing with a strangely contradictory silent film with a soundtrack. Apart from a few diegetic sounds—essentials like sobs, screams, laughter, and gunshots—you mostly hear a ghoulish atonal score by modernist composer George Antheil, filled with foreboding jazz and the occasional soprano wail.

And—here’s the real boon—there’s the occasional passage of voice-over narration by none other than Ed McMahon, who intones a menacing, ironic commentary over the violence of the action and the Gamin’s psychotic breaks. From what I understand, the original cut of the film, called Dementia, didn’t have that voice-over, but I like it. Most critics have argued that the narration detracts from the integrity of the film.

I would differ—it’s like a parody of Hollywood’s typically ethereal depiction of schizophrenia or characters who start “hearing voices.” Instead of the ghostly whispers of poetic insanity, the Gamin is haunted by an out-of-control melodramatic TV narration. The voice peppers the film with choice remarks like, “Yes, I am here. The demon that possesses your soul. Wait a bit. I have so much to show you. So much that you are afraid to see.” If I ever start hearing an unseen game show host announcer chiming in to narrate my unconscious, I will know that I’ve finally descended into madness. (I’m expecting that voice any day now.)

The muffled, doom-impregnated ambiance of Daughter of Horror truly escapes words. It digs up a seedy universe that’s at once utterly unreal and much more gritty and recognizable than the sanitized sordidness of most films noirs. Grotesques populate its dark corridors, mutant people who scuttle around in the night, like bedbugs on a cheap mattress.

The usual mechanisms of character identification grind to a halt. We struggle to form an attachment to the Gamin, since she’s all we have, but she’s inscrutable at best and monstrous at worse. We’re estranged from the Gamin just as she’s estranged from herself. This sense of alienation and neediness, of not being able to relate to the movie in a usual manner, plunges the viewer into a state of ambivalent confusion and unease.

Indeed, whereas film noir tends to lure us in with its smoke-ring glamour, Daughter of Horror keeps us perpetually at an arms length, disgusted but transfixed. It compels us to keep watching out of a balance of sheer unease and shock—from the very beginning, we know, as we do in nightmares, that something bad is going to happen. We’re only partially right. Lots of bad things are going to happen.

To classify this film as one of Caligari’s children would be to state the obvious; what’s fascinating is how the Gamin fuses the somnambulistic monster, the vile murderer, and the heroine in distress all into one disturbed personality. Freudian overtones also crowd into this dark night of the soul. For instance, the Gamin’s flashback to her ugly childhood with a brutish father and a trampy, self-absorbed mother takes place in a graveyard, no less, which the characters inhabit as though it were their living room.

Although the Gamin’s father died a long time ago, he returns from the grave as a sort of guilt complex incarnate—he appears as a leering patron at a sleazy restaurant and later takes the form of the policeman hunting the Gamin down. Heavy-handed? No doubt, but still powerful and frightening.

Whereas standard Hollywood flicks incorporated psychoanalysis as a means of explaining away complexes, as a kind of tool to decipher the world and make it safer, Daughter of Horror plunges us into a forest of smirking symbols. In this twisted cosmos, a cigar is never just a cigar.

Though drawn in broad, blown-up strokes, this movie still surprises you with subtle allusions and amusing touches. The generally transfixing cinematography shows what veteran director of photography William C. Thompson (Plan 9 From Outer Space, Glen or Glenda) could do when not saddled with Ed Wood’s trashy, inept vision. The film begins with a shot of a city at night with a flashing sign that reminds me very much of the flashing sign skyline opening of Hitchcock’s The Lodger. After that, we cut to a track-in camera movement that creeps past a flashing HOTEL sign into the cheap rented room of our sleeping heroine, where she clutches the bedclothes in the throes of a bad dream. The movie ends with a parallel camera movement, drifting away from the room, before cutting back to that chasm of starry sky. What fearful symmetry!

Leer Cam! The camera slips inside of the room where the Gamin is dreaming… then right into her consciousness.

If the lecherous fat man who picks up the Gamin resembles Orson Welles, as some have noted, the film also references Welles’ style with shots of striking depth, presenting multiple points of interest. In one of my favorite, the fat man gnaws away at a chicken leg while, in the background, the Gamin displays her own shapely legs as a temptation, then sneers when the corpulent creature keeps on chowing down.

This bizarro gem of a movie not only borrowed bits and pieces from great filmmakers, but also foreshadowed future masterpieces. Those track-ins on the hotel recall the probing high angle shots that you see at the start of Psycho. And you’ll definitely recognize the whole smoky, grungy atmosphere of Daughter of Horror in Touch of Evil—they were both films at Venice Beach, California.

So, today I’d like to invite you into this forbidding terrain of vast, cavernous spaces and hole-in-the-wall bars, of predatory men and even more predatory women. I offer you a superb, if sometimes clunky, wide-awake nightmare.

This film is in the Public Domain, which means you can watch and download it at the Internet Archive, as well.

When you’re done, please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the movie! 

Free Friday Film: Bluebeard (1944)

Rather like the whole universe (or so I’ve heard), Bluebeard was made in six days. Well, to be fair, it took a bit longer than that, since the film was only shot in six days, but still, even Roger Corman thinks that’s quick!

This serial killer drama with horror overtones emerged from PRC, Producers’ Releasing Corporation, one of classic Hollywood’s “Poverty Row” studios which churned out B-minus movies on shoestring budgets for the second half of double bills.  Ironically, these trashy studios often allowed greater artistic freedom to directors than more prestigious studios—if those directors could handle extreme budgetary constraints.

Edgar G. Ulmer negotiated those limitations better than any other director. A frighteningly creative set designer, Ulmer knew how to make a little money go a long way. Shadows are cheap, so he often staged action against sparsely decorated walls, using an expressive play of light and dark to substitute for fancy sets. If you watch Bluebeard, and I hope that you will, keep an eye out for the shadows of Gaston’s suspended collection of puppets. They dangle like an obscure gallows that both reminds Gaston of the victims that he strangled—and looms over his head like the threat of his own hanging. Powerfully creepy stuff for a shabby shocker.

The lead role provides a tour-de-force vehicle for the saturnine, long-faced John Carradine who considered it his favorite performance. It’s not hard to see why since, in place of the crazy, cardboard serial killer we’ve come to expect from modern movies, the script crafts a multi-faceted, albeit unhinged, gentleman. Unlike the brutish or mercenary conceptions of Bluebeard in folktales or true crime stories, Carradine’s 19th century romantic, Gaston Morel,  is a tortured lover of beauty. He’s a puppeteer, a gifted painter, and a brooding connoisseur of women’s charms… who moonlights as a murderer. In this character, we see love, art, and death bleed into each other. He kills the things he loves and must also kill in order to paint—it’s all interdependent.

Art, in various forms, abounds in Bluebeard. Gaston’s secret profession as a snuff painter treats us to a gallery of spooky canvases. His avocation as a puppet master shines when we watch his guignol production of Gounod’s opera of Faust—taking place in miniature. Most pervasively, Bluebeard’s painterly visuals glow with a canted, misty splendor that does remind me of the real Paris, thanks to the crack camerawork of émigré Eugen Schüfftan (Quai des Brumes, Yeux Sans Visage). I also wonder how much of himself Ulmer put into Gaston—a morbid genius, enslaved by poverty, ideals, and passion alike. Art is an addiction for Gaston, like it was for Ulmer the auteur. Just as Gaston’s obsessions force him into an underground existence, Ulmer preferred to work for PRC rather than “be ground up in the Hollywood hash machine” of the big studios.

As additional boni for watching this film, gorgeous ex-star Nils Asther doesn’t get much to do as a Inspector Lefevre, but still looks awfully pretty, and Jean Parker turns in a fine performance as Lucile—the only woman who can live up to Bluebeard’s ideal, but despises his true self.

Watch Bluebeard, drink in the atmosphere, and marvel that it all happened in six days.

This film is in the Public Domain, which means you can watch and download it at the Internet Archive, as well.

When you’re done, please leave a comment and tell me what you think of the movie! 

Heart of Darkness: The Vampire’s Ghost and Colonial Horror

Everything belonged to him—but that was a trifle. The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. That was the reflection that made you creepy all over. It was impossible—it was not good for one either—trying to imagine. He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land—I mean literally. 

                   — Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

The Vampire’s Ghost reeks of jungle rot, regrets, and that creeping evil that lives far beyond the gratification of its desires. Instead of the dark peacock virility of Lugosi’s Dracula, that lusty Deco reincarnation of European romanticism, this 1945 B-film offers up a bulbous-eyed, gaunt expat, Webb Fallon, as its parasitic antihero. Fallon is a vampire who is both moribund and mighty, weary yet insatiable. Ugly as gull, courtly as a prince, and efficient as a bureaucrat, he embodies the musty charm and banal wickedness of a decaying colonial empire.

In fact, running his shabby little casino and dive bar to keep afloat as he feeds on blood, Fallon (John Abbott) reminds me of what Conrad’s Mister Kurtz would have become if he had been doomed to eternal life. I suspect that Kurtz’ bravura would have mellowed into Fallon’s disillusionment if he had been forced to watch the downfall of his works and to observe for centuries “the horror, the horror” that he had only begun to conceive of on the brink of death.

Let’s take a look at how the movie, directed by Lesley Selander, begins. Rather like Casablanca, it begins with a map, the sound of drums, and an authoritative, cultured, newsreel-ish voice-over intoning, “Africa, the dark land where Voodoo drums beat in the night…”

In the context of 1940s cinema, we read this narrator not only as a nondiegetic element, but also as an element divorced from the story. In a way, the audience members think in the back of their minds, the movie hasn’t even started. This voice-over is here to situate the film with a few choice clichés, we assume. The camera focuses in on a specific town on the map as the voice continues to spout some vague scene-setting lines about “the mystic moon” and such. Now, dissolve to the village, the real thing, not a drawing, at night. The cluster of grass huts and a Christian mission squat bathed in moonlight as the camera pans ever so slowly around.

The drums beating constantly in the background may now be interpreted as diegetic, since they’re coming from the village. That subtle change forces us to readjust our assumptions as the narrator’s baritone keeps talking: “Africa… where men have not forgotten the evil they learnt in the dawn of time.” Okay, the narrator in Casablanca would never say that. Who the hell is this?

At this moment, the voice betrays itself. “I always come back to Africa… but even here there is no rest for me. The path of time is curved here like a sickle.” This mercurial shift from a relatively detached, conventional narrator to the narrator as an “I” hits home like a stealth attack. I felt as though the subjectivity of this character had been lying in wait, biding its time. Now the camera begins to really move in earnest, tracking towards a doorway and we understand that we’re in a point-of-view shot. Once again, we’ve been lulled into a false sense of a security and, in a way, what we see has suddenly been possessed by the intent of another. It’s quite a clever opening play and it only gets better.

This voice and this perspective stalk up to the door as the voice grows more emphatic, culminating in “I cannot die!” at the moment when a hand appears on a door handle, before trailing away with the hypnotic repetitions of “I cannot rest. I cannot rest. I cannot rest…”

Continuing from this perspective, there’s a cut to a little barking dog on the other side of the door. Cut to the hand opening the door. The dog cowers as the camera creeps towards a sleeping woman. She wakes. She looks terrified. The shadow falls over her. She screams. Fade to black.

We’re all used to the monster attack as an opener, a classic “curtain-raiser” in films, but here the unusual complicity with the vampire—a complicity that’s imposed upon us through a careful use of cinematic language and audience expectations—attracts me to this sequence. Not only do we experience the attack through the eyes of the predator, we also hear his plea for “rest” as he prepares to drain a human being of life. The viewer finds himself simultaneously drawn in and repelled.

The grave, sonorous voice of John Abbott certainly catalyzes this blend of fear and sympathy: he was a noted English actor of Shakespeare in the 1930s. My fondness for this film may be running away with me, but I’d say this opening speech recalls Richard III, who’s always trying evoke the pity and admiration of his audience—so that they become willing accomplices and victims. (This might be a good place to point out that the script was written in part by Ms. Leigh Brackett, based on her original story. You might know her from movies she went on to write for, including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.)

Fallon is not your ordinary vampire. Graf Orlock from Nosteratu definitely doesn’t tug at our heartstrings and Lugosi’s Dracula might make a single off-hand remark about “far worse things than death” but he never seeks to form a true of bond with the audience, to rest his head on the shoulder of our conscience and beg for a modicum of understanding. Not the Count.

In The Vampire’s Ghost, by contrast, we start with the vampire’s side of the story. And he doesn’t seem like such a soulless creature. Which is why he’s so very dangerous.

The Outsider

In case you’ve not seen this rare gem (so rare you can watch it on Netflix Instant, if you have 55 free minutes), here’s a quick synopsis: the wicked, undead nightclub-owner Fallon goes for Roy (Charles Gordon) the Good Guy’s innocent girl Julie (Peggy Stewart) and gets killed with help of silver spear-wielding natives and a Catholic priest.

That plot, minus a few specifics, could summarize almost all of the 1930s and early 1940s horror films, but this entry into the vampire cannon intrigues me because it takes Fallon quite a long time to do anything evil after that opening night sequence. In fact, he saves Roy’s life from a native jungle trap! Honestly, not many vampires come across as such consummate gentlemen. Even Julie tells him that he’s the nicest man she’s ever met.

In other words, chivalry is not dead. It’s undead.

We don’t learn very much about Fallon, but we do know that he’s actually over 400 years old and received the box in which he keeps his sacred earth from Queen Elizabeth, which hints that he was probably one of the early European explorers to colonize and enslave Africa.

So, in the midst of the thick, machete-impenetrable jungle, Fallon remains a throwback to the heart and heyday of Western civilization in all of its sin and glory. He’s part of the hegemony, a son of the British Empire. And yet, the white community doesn’t fully accept him. When Roy and Julie invite Fallon over for dinner with the other whites, the priest immediately gets judgmental, asking why “a man of your intelligence” spends his time running a saloon.

I just adore this shot, with the priest looking all… well, priestly, while Fallon lights his cigarette with a little lick of flame that reminds us of where he truly belongs in the Church’s eyes: Hell. However, the usual good-bad, white-black color iconography is reversed: the vampire wears white and the priest, the holy father, wears black. Morality seems clear-cut in The Vampire’s Ghost, but if you look harder, another layer of complexity arises.

To get back to Fallon’s saloon, it comes across as a subversive, transitional space, with the lithe, brown-skinned Leeza (Adele Mara) swirling around as a native temptress for drooling white workers and sailors.

I suppose that my point is, Fallon represents an unholy thing because he can be at once the familiar and the Other. Although he is rational and civilized, his existence defies rationality and his appetites are indeed savage.

The Return of the Repressed

By rising from his grave, Fallon disinterred that part of colonial history which many people would rather forget. His hunger and his need for conquest parallel a larger pattern of callous global vampirism: colonization. Which brings us back to Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness.

Mister Kurtz, the unconscionably evil ivory trader from Conrad’s novella, has also projected himself into the field of the Other. He embodies the pinnacle of European talents and European cruelty—and uses these traits to set himself up as a tyrant god to the natives. The narrator of the novella, Marlowe, recoils from Kurtz’ atrocities and yet he cannot deny the personal magnetism of this human monster who brought the logical extension of “civilization” to fruition in pure savagery.

In a famous scene from the book, Kurtz, dying of a jungle sickness, tries to crawl away from camp rather than leave the heart of the Congo where he rules supreme:

“He rose, unsteady, long, pale, indistinct, like a vapour exhaled by the earth, and swayed slightly, misty and silent before me; while at my back the fires loomed between the trees, and the murmur of many voices issued from the forest…

‘I was on the threshold of great things,’ he pleaded, in a voice of longing, with a wistfulness of tone that made my blood run cold.

I tried to break the spell—the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions.”

This passage has much of the visuality of horror about it and makes me think particularly of the scene in The Vampire’s Ghost where Fallon reveals his vampirism.

So, in Fallon’s tent, Roy realizes what his “friend” is and first stuns him with the image of the cross, then tries to kill him with a silver-tipped spear. However, Fallon fixes his staring eyes on Roy and the weak-willed juvenile leading man caves under their force.

The low-key chiaroscuro, the Christian iconography, and the dramatic poses, reminiscent of Renaissance paintings or of the tapestry in Fallon’s bedroom, enhance the feeling of a regression to an older time, as though Fallon has suddenly reached the point where his primal hunger and his refined European wickedness intersect.

For most of The Vampire’s Ghost, Fallon appears as a declining power, which makes his force seem all the more diabolical when he finally pushes aside all of his compunction and world-weariness. He unleashes the single-minded imperialist he once was, the conqueror who lives only by the law of might. He tells Roy point-blank that he’ll do as he pleases because he is beyond humanity. “You’re seeing a creature that doesn’t exist. You’re looking at a legend… You can’t fight me. I have walked the earth for 400 years. I’ve learned things that no human being can ever know.”

This speech rings frighteningly close to Kurtz’ delusions  of grandeur. Both of them, no doubt, recognize the pain they cause—as the priest points out, in his own sanctimonious way, they’re intelligent enough to be self-aware. Even so, both Kurtz and Fallon would rather kill to feed their appetites than die: a choice that makes them perfect imperialists and perfect animals, predators who belong in the jungle.

It’s fitting, then, that Fallon rejuvenates in the forest, where he makes Roy carry him, just as Kurtz knows that, once separated from the jungle, he’ll die. Fallon bathes in the moonlight, where he can truly dismiss all his pretenses, and thus provides the focus for one of the most lyrical moments of the film.

The Fallen Idol

Fallon’s uncanniness resides in the fact that we identify him with the Other while he also strikes us as human in so many ways. However, like Kurtz, he becomes truly godlike at the conclusion when he resolves to bestow eternal life (or eternal death—ah! I’m having a Mummy flashback from my last blog post here!) upon Julie.

Fallon leads the compliant maiden into the heart of the jungle to an old pagan temple. The scene begins with a shot of the “savage” large-breasted goddess statue, an image that melds the erotic with the exotic, then the camera pans pans to reveal Fallon locked in a reciprocal gaze with this statue.

Again, the lanky, pale Fallon visually comes across as the polar opposite of this sensual indigenous idol (and yes, it is a very ersatz Hindu-African hybrid idol, but let’s take it at face value). Yet, like Kurtz, who joins the pantheon of capricious, wrathful native deities, Fallon has much more in common with a morbid god than with the stiff cast of Europeans that dominate the plot. And, like a decaying culture or a dismembered empire (Were you ever bitten by a dead bee?), Fallon draws us in with his tragic need to expire—which will always be trumped by the consumption necessary to survive.

Ruthlessness, as Nietzsche (surely Kurtz’ favorite author!) tells us, requires a lot of strength and a surprising amount of self-control.  Fallon the tempter is himself tempted by death, but keeps killing to stay alive. Throughout the film we wonder why, and it boils down to an addiction. A behavior pattern of exploitation that perpetuates itself. Every “memory of gratification and monstrous passions” lures Fallon back to that same desire for power. He’s too strong to let himself die.

He’s not without a conscience, like Dracula seemingly is, but, having largely mastered his conscience, Fallon can stomach destroying a few lives to preserve his own intoxicating authority over others. We catch a glimpse of that side of Fallon when he sadistically gloats by Roy’s bedside, giving Julie his shoulder to cry on and then, when alone with the poor boy, gloating over his imminent victory.

The complexity of Fallon’s character as a sort of fallen idol imbues the film with added depth. He doesn’t put everyone in his thrall but once he does, as with Roy, he goes all-out, gleefully making them his slaves. He doesn’t like the fact that he hurts people, but he certainly enjoys doing it. We, as an audience, also enjoy it, I’d point out, since his most sinister scenes stand out as the best in the film.

But back to the grand finale. As he prepares to treat Julie to The Fate Worse Than Death, Fallon repeats his line from the opening monologue, “the path of time is curved like a sickle…” but this time he ends his speech by saying that a man need not walk that time alone and that he wants Julie to be his companion for all eternity. He seduced the audience with this line. Now he tries it on a new victim and it seems to be working. The repetition also reinforces the idea of vampirism as an addiction, as a compulsive behavior pattern which, like imperialism, once set into swing, cannot easily be halted.

That is, until Roy, the priest, and his native friend show up with crucifixes, silver-tipped spears, and torches, as we knew they would.

I can’t help but find it amusing that that the hardcore Catholic priest teams up with the much-maligned “superstitious” native leader, to roast the vampire. But, then again, the indigenous people understandably hate Fallon for exploiting them (literally sucking their blood) and hypocritical whites hate Fallon for giving away their much more subtle vampirism (Who’s tapping the rubber out of those trees?) as well as for “luring” away their pure young girl (You can’t make the whites into your slaves!). It’s only right that they should band together to forever destroy this blasphemous creature who’s neither us nor them.

Nevertheless, just as it’s difficult to forget our twisted admiration for Kurtz, who was, to his credit, honest about his barbaric methods, Fallon similarly invites the viewer to sympathize with him while he never hides what he does. He may be homely, corrupted, and poisonous, but his superhuman insight and his ability to cling onto life—even when part of him tragically craves death—these qualities hold us spellbound.

As Marlowe laments the loss of Kurtz’ originality in Heart of Darkness, “Ah! but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.”

Fallon acknowledged his own status as something better off dead, but we respect his fierce implacability in getting what he wants. Isn’t that the same ineffable motive that drives all of us to keep on living, even as other things—perhaps better things—die? Vampirism. Imperialism. Both warped versions of the same survival instinct. And both really human to the core.

Heaven knows what devils we might all aspire to be if plunged into the heart of darkness.