Mill Creek comedy classics #15: "The Admiral Was a Lady" (1950)

That's right! Edmond Wanda and O'Brien Hendrix are together at last in The Admiral Was a Lady.

The flick: The Admiral Was a Lady (United Artists, 1950) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.6

Director: Albert S. Rogell (Universal's The Black Cat [not the Boris Karloff film, but the comedy-mystery with Basil Rathbone], In Old Oklahoma)

Actors of note: 

• Edmond O'Brien (The Wild Bunch, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance)

• Wanda Hendrix (Ride the Pink Horse, Prince of Foxes)

• Rudy Vallee (I Remember Mama, Unfaithfully Yours, famed megaphone crooner of the 1930s)

• Richard Erdman (Stalag 17, Tora! Tora! Tora!, played Leonard on Community)

• Steve Brodie (Out of the Past, The Giant Spider Invasion, The Wild World of Batwoman)

• Johnny Sands (Orson Welles' The Stranger, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer)

• Hillary Brooke (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Man Who Knew Too Much)

"Wandafull." Get it? Huh?

The gist of it: Wisecracking Jimmy Stevens (O'Brien) and his three pals (Brodie, Sands, and Erdman) were once a combat crew in WWII. Now the war is over, and they're back home doing everything they can to avoid work -- getting $20 a week from Uncle Sam, scrounging cheap (and past its sell-by date) food wherever they can get it, living in an abandoned aircraft plant (which they've converted into a mini-palace), and running any number of penny-ante scams.

Their slothful lifestyle is threatened, though, by jukebox tycoon Peter Pedigrew (Vallee) who threatens to put them to work—no! anything but that!—unless they can make sure a man named Henry marries pretty little Jean Madison (Hendrix), an ex-WAVE whom Jimmy kiddingly nicknames "the Admiral." But Henry turns out to be a tough guy to track down, thanks to Pedigrew's scheming ex-wife Shirley (Brooke) who has selfish reasons for keeping Jean and Henry apart. Meanwhile, Jimmy and "the Admiral" are getting awfully chummy, if you catch my drift, even though she can't abide his cheapskate lifestyle.

My take: Like Here Comes Trouble, The Admiral Was a Lady is a comedy focusing on the troubles our servicemen faced when they came back home and returned to civilian life. But Admiral is considerably more sentimental than Trouble, and it occasionally aims for poignancy. And that, in my opinion, is precisely where this film disappoints. Jimmy and his crew seem to have a swell thing going at the beginning of the story, but the script provides them with sad, serious backstories that detract from the overall enjoyment level of the flick. Admiral predates Phil Silvers' Sgt. Bilko by five years and Hanna Barbera's Top Cat by eleven, but what made those TV shows fun is that Bilko and T.C. never even considered going legit and giving up their scheming habits.

In a way, Admiral sort of echoes Peter Pan, especially the Disney animated version from 1953. Jimmy is the Pan figure, the eternal boy living a life of ease, and his buddies are like the Lost Boys, his enraptured followers. Unfortunately, this makes "the Admiral" the Wendy Darling of the story, i.e. the sensible woman who reminds Peter and the Lost Boys about the conventional, respectable lives they should be leading. Pedigrew is Captain Hook, the scoundrel who's too ineffectual to be much of a threat as the villain. I guess the sexy, duplicitous Shirley is the closest thing this movie has to Tinkerbell, since she and "the Admiral" have a bitchy, competitive relationship over a man.

I didn't find "the Admiral" all that alluring, even though every guy in this movie falls in love with her instantly. The ads above make her look like a scantily-clad sex bomb, but she's much more prim in the movie. She can be a lot of fun when she lightens up and starts enjoying life, though, and there are a couple of funny scenes in which she can no longer keep her anger and frustration in check.

Sgt. Bilko

Is it funny: Mildly so. I got a good chuckle out of The Admiral Was a Lady about once every five or ten minutes. Mainly, I liked seeing all the crazy little scams Jimmy was always trying to pull, like pretending to be a sophisticated millionaire in order to take a yacht out for a test drive or sneaking into a Broadway show at intermission or getting one of his buddies a job as a lifeguard so the gang can live it up at a ritzy country club (where you have to take a blood test just to be considered for membership!) once a week. But the Admiral sets the boys on the right path, and the fun kind of peters out. Giving Jimmy and his pals weepy backstories doesn't help matters either.

What's wrong with a comedy just being silly from beginning to end and letting its characters learn nothing? Groucho Marx wouldn't have sold out the way Edmond O'Brien seems to do in this picture! And if Bilko and his men had as sweet a setup as the guys in this movie do, they'd never let some dame louse it up.

My grade: B-

P.S. - Yet another stereotype-free comedy! We're on a roll! And, yes, there have been female admirals, but it would take another couple of decades.

Mill Creek comedy classics #7: "Affairs of Cappy Ricks" (1937)

Walter Brennan in Affairs of Cappy Ricks: Who's up for a threesome? No takers?

The flick: Affairs of Cappy Ricks (Republic, 1937) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.9

Director: Ralph Staub (Country Gentlemen)

Actors of note:

• Walter Brennan (Rio Bravo, Sergeant York, TV's The Real McCoys, three-time Oscar winner)

• Mary Brian (Brown of Harvard, The Front Page)

• Lyle Talbot (Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda?)

• Frank Shields (tennis pro and grandfather of Brooke Shields)

The gist of it: Cantankerous business mogul Cappy Ricks (Brennan) returns to San Francisco after a long sea voyage, only to find his house and his business have changed drastically for the worse in his absence. One of his daughters, Ellen, is unhappily married to Matt, the wimpy, sad-sack son of his late partner, and the son's unbearable, domineering mother, Mrs. Peasley, has moved into and redecorated the Ricks homestead. Worse yet, his other daughter Frankie (Brian) is engaged to the useless Waldo Bottomly, Jr. (Shields), the son of Cappy's business rival, pompous Waldo Bottomly, Sr., whose company manufactures modern "push-button" gadgets Cappy despises.

Aided by his crony -- and Frankie's ex-boyfriend -- Bill Peck (Talbot), Cappy launches an incredible plan to regain control of his life. He gathers Ellen, Matt, Mrs. Peasley, and Frankie on his boat, takes them way out into the ocean ("300 miles off the sea lanes"), and then arranges for them all, Cappy and Bill included, to be marooned on a deserted island so that they'll learn to be self-sufficient and not modernized, sissified "land lubbers."

It should be noted that this was the fifth of six movies about Cappy Ricks (each time he was played by a different actor), a once-popular character whose origins go back to a series of short stories written by Peter B. Kyne. The movie just assumes we know who he is and who the other characters are. For newbies like me, though it gets very confusing very quickly until a news broadcast late in the film sorts a lot of it out. If you want to read a whole book about Cappy's adventures for free, you can do so right here.

Walter Brennan skinny and not-so-skinny.

My take: Was Walter Brennan ever young, or was he born 60 years old? Cappy Ricks was released the year after Come and Get It earned him the first of his three Oscars. He was only 42 when he made this flick, but he appears much, much older. Apparently, he lost most of his teeth in an accident in '32 and played codgers and coots forever after. It worked for him, obviously, as he enjoyed decades of success in television and film. This film was a low-budget quickie, just another paycheck and a few days of filming for Walter.

His character here, both a captain of industry and an actual sea captain, seemed to me to be a bully, a cheat, a liar, and a Luddite. If the movie had thought of him that way, Affairs of Cappy Ricks would be somewhat more successful. But the movie considers him a hero, I think, a Quixote of the Sea, fighting valiantly against modern times and all these newfangled gadgets and ideas of ours. We're supposed to be rooting for him, and I spent the whole movie waiting for someone to sock him in the jaw, which is what he deserves. His plan is not only insane and illegal but cruel and controlling. I am not much of a fan of traveling, because it generally requires one to be confined to a rather limited space for long amounts of time. If I'd been on that boat of his for weeks on end, I'd have probably jumped overboard.

It's also unfair that most of the other characters are so silly and shrill, because it stacks the deck in Cappy's favor. Just because they're wrong doesn't make him right. More problematic is the film's nasty misogynist streak. One persistent theme is that women need macho men to yell at them, boss them around, and overtake them physically. "You have no choice" isn't a line that should be used in a romantic way, but it is here.

Anyway, this thing is strictly routine as far as production values and direction. It's obviously a vehicle for Brennan, who's a little scrawnier than I'm used to seeing him, but there are a couple of mildly interesting people in the cast. I'm probably one of the few people in the world who get excited when Lyle Talbot's name appears in the opening credits of a movie. A bland, somewhat stocky supporting actor, Talbot somehow became part of Ed Wood's repertory company in the 1950s. Stuffy, spoiled Mrs. Peasley should be a fun character, but the actress who plays her, Georgia Caine, is no Margaret Dumont, aka Hollywood's daffy dowager par excellence.

Meanwhile, though, Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans might just be interested to know that one of the smaller roles in the film, a sailor on Waldo Bottomly's ship, is played by the same guy who was the suck-up salesman Jimmy in the short industrial film Hired! (Jam Handy Productions, 1940).

Poopdeck Pappy

Is it funny: Sorry, but I'm going to have to say no. Affairs of Cappy Ricks broke a streak for me in that it was the first film in the collection that didn't make me laugh out loud even once.

Your appreciation for this flick will largely depend on your level of enjoyment of Walter Brennan in the title role. Me, I found him tiresome after a few minutes -- nowhere near as funny as The Simpsons' Captain McAllister. Some of the things that bother Cappy are so mild that I had no idea why he was making such a big deal of them. He comes home to find the place now has a few small knickknacks on the shelves and some modest paintings on the wall, and he rants about all the "trick decorations." The movie backs him up all the way on this, but I didn't see the problem.

The script has a few clever but not quite funny lines, as when Mrs. Peasley complains that she's tired of eating "fish and eggs and eggs and fish," and Ellen, her daughter-in law, reminds her: "You used to like caviar. That's eggs and fish in one!" As a lifelong Popeye fan, I suppose I should mention that Cappy Ricks reminded me a bit of Popeye's irascible father, the somewhat similarly-named Poopdeck Pappy, but E.C. Segar had the good sense to portray Pappy as a scoundrel and not a role model.

My grade: C+ (with regrets)

P.S. No negative Negro stereotypes here, but Mrs. Peasley does make some ill-advised comments about "cannibals."

Mill Creek comedy classics #33: "Never Wave at a WAC" (1953)

American hot WACs: Those dizzy dames won't leave soldiering to the menfolk in Never Wave at a WAC (1953).

"You know the glamour gals have stopped glamorizing. They're working in defense plants, wearing slacks. And some of the fine chicks are cutting out every day, joining the WAVES and the SPARS and the WACs."

Louis Jordan ("You Can't Get That No More," 1943)

The flick: Never Wave at a WAC (RKO Radio Pictures, 1953) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 6.1

Director: Norman Z. McLeod (The Marx Brothers' Horse Feathers and Monkey Business; W.C. Fields' It's a Gift; Bob Hope's Road to Rio and Paleface; also Topper, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, etc.)

General Omar Bradley

Actors of note:

• Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday, The Women, the title role in Auntie Mame)

• Paul Douglas (A Letter to Three Wives, Panic in the Streets, lots of TV anthologies)

• Marie Wilson (Babes in Toyland, Satan Met a Lady)

• Hillary Brooke (The Admiral Was a Lady)

• William Ching (In a Lonely Place, D.O.A.)

• Arleen Whelan (Young Mr. Lincoln)

• Leif Erickson (On the Waterfront, Invaders from Mars, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Snake Pit; shot down twice in WW2)

• Charles Dingle (Little Foxes, Duel in the Sun)

• Lurene Tuttle (Niagara, Sweet Smell of Success, Parts: The Clonus Horror; played Sheriff Chambers' wife in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho; did an ungodly amount of TV work)

• Regis Toomey (The Big Sleep, Guys and Dolls, Hitchcock's Spellbound, much more)

• Louise Beavers (Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus)

• General Omar Bradley ("the Soldier's General" portrays himself here; famed Army field commander in WW2 and last to receive five-star status; was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time he made this movie)

• Olan Soule (voice of Batman from 1968 to 1984; ubiquitous film/TV character actor; Hitchcock's North By Northwest, TV's Dragnet and The Andy Griffith Show, literally hundreds more credits)

Other notables: The score was composed by Elmer Bernstein, only his sixth movie. He did a couple hundred more over the next half-century, including Ghostbusters, To Kill a Mockingbird, Airplane!, The Great Escape, The Man with the Golden Arm, National Lampoon's Animal House, Stripes, Trading Places, The Magnificent Seven (probably his most famous score), and too many more to mention. Repeatedly hired by John Landis and Martin Scorsese. Won his only Oscar for Thoroughly Modern Millie, but was nominated ten more times. Worked his way up from Robot Monster to The Ten Commandments in just three years.

Roz Russell

The gist of it: Haughty Washington D.C. socialite Jo McBain (Russell), daughter of a prominent senator (Dingle), joins the Women's Army Corps in the hopes of reuniting with her boyfriend, Lt. Col. Sky Fairchild (Ching), at his post in Paris. The senator promises his daughter she'll be commissioned as an officer, but when she gets to Fort Lee, VA, she finds out she'll be serving Uncle Sam as a regular private. While constantly infuriating her superiors with her unorthodox ways, Jo does make friends with another unlikely recruit, ex-showgirl and pinup girl Clara Schneiderman (Wilson), who wants desperately to bury her past as "Danger O'Dowd" and who immediately takes to army life.

Sky promises Jo that she can still get her commission if she'll just be on good behavior during basic training, and for a while, she does try to do just that. But her ex-husband Andrew (Douglas), an ex-Army man and now a research scientist with whom Jo has a combative relationship, shows up at Fort Lee and decides he needs female soldiers for some tests he's running on various fabrics and goes out of his way to make sure Jo is one of the test subjects. He puts Jo through all kinds of endurance tests until she finally snaps. In front of her commanding officers, she slaps Andrew across the face and goes on a tirade about military life. After a hearing in which Andrew sticks up for Jo and places the blame on himself, our heroine is dismissed from service without graduating from basic training. Now "free," she's supposed to marry Sky, but she just can't leave the WACs -- or Andrew, for that matter -- behind her.

Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin

My take: Children of the Eighties might remember Private Benjamin, a 1980 Goldie Hawn vehicle that spawned a 1981-1983 TV series with Lorna Patterson. That hit movie was about a spoiled, silly woman who joins the U.S. Army and drives her superiors to distraction with her antics and general incompetence. People tend to forget that Goldie Hawn leaves the military midway through Private Benjamin and spends the last part of the movie mired in a lame story that has her almost marrying but then jilting total sleazeball Armand Assante.

Never Wave at a WAC, its title a reference to two organizations that were created so women could serve during World War II, plays like a 1950s  version of Private Benjamin, only without the unnecessary Assante character. Like Judy Benjamin after her, Jo McBain drops out of the Army and almost forsakes her patriotic duty for marriage, but both women ultimately discover that military service has changed them for the better and that they are now stronger and more independent because of their experiences in basic training.

The main difference is that Judy Benjamin is a directionless flake at the start of her movie, while Jo McBain is a force of nature from the moment we meet her. Roz Russell's first big scene in this movie is at a high society party she's hosting for all the movers and shakers in Washington. She glides from room to room, politicking, gossiping and networking like a seasoned professional. This was a few years before Ms. Russell would play her signature role, Mame Dennis in Auntie Mame, both on Broadway and onscreen, and it's easy to see Never Wave at a WAC as sort of a prequel to that famous film.

The real fun of a story like this is, naturally, the opportunity to see a unique individual whose quirky personality clashes with the rigidity of military life. That same basic idea has been the basis for, I'd estimate, a gazillion other movies, TV shows, cartoons, and comics -- everything from Beetle Bailey to Gomer Pyle USMC to Laverne and Shirley in the Army. Even Dobie Gillis and Maynard G. Krebs enlisted for a season of their show! This film is, plain and simple, Auntie Mame Joins the Army. Jo McBain arrives with lots of luggage and her own car at basic training and seems to regard the barracks as a kind of eccentric hotel, with the commanding officers as her personal servants. She calls lots of people "dahhhling" instead of "sir" or "ma'am" and frequently (and loudly) demands to speak to "someone in charge" whenever things don't go her way. In a war, she'd be about as useful as Lovey Howell from Gilligan's Island... until she learns her lesson.

I think by now you have an idea of what this film is like. If that description appeals to you, by all means watch Never Wave at a WAC. But you could skip it without missing anything vital. Incidentally, young Elmer Bernstein does establish himself as an up-and-comer with his witty and versatile score for this film. His music here is both comedic and militaristic, a combination that would serve him well many times in the future, particularly on Stripes (1981), another misfits-in-the-service comedy.

Is it funny: Sure, why not? This movie rests almost entirely on Roz Russell's broad shoulders. She is the star around whom the other characters all orbit, and the script seems tailor-made to suit her brassy-yet-refined personality. She's one of the few actresses who can make an air of regal superiority seem vaguely appealing. In the sidekick role, ditsy blonde Marie Wilson is just average in a role that Marilyn Monroe would have knocked out of the park. Wilson's romance with "singing sergeant" Noisy Jackson (Erickson) is largely a laughless, time-wasting enterprise.

I suppose the movie's funniest scenes are those in which Andrew puts his ex-wife through test after test in rain, snow, mud, freezing temperatures, etc. Russell proves a surprisingly adept physical comic here. If any image sticks with me from this movie, it'll be Jo McBain tromping around in snowshoes on a treadmill.

My grade: B

P.S. - In terms of stereotypes, Louise Beavers is back as yet another domestic. As far as I can remember, other than a personal assistant, Jo McBain's servants are all black. But this might be reflective of the reality of the time, and the characters are not presented in a demeaning or exaggerated way whatsoever.

Ed Wood Wednesdays, Week 13: "Shotgun Wedding" (1963)

Jenny Maxwell covers herself on the lurid poster for the very tame Shotgun Wedding (1963).

The Comedy of Terrors

Ed Wood's movie career slowed down considerably in the early 1960s. After The Sinister Urge (1960), he would never again direct a mainstream film, and in 1963, he embarked upon what turned out to be a long-lasting career as the author of sex-and-violence-strewn paperbacks. During the JFK years, most of Ed's proposed film projects went nowhere. He envisioned, for instance, a sequel to The Sinister Urge called The Peeper. Since all the villains from The Sinister Urge had been dispatched in one way or another during that film's eventful and violent third act, the dull detective characters played by Duke Moore and Kenne Duncan would have investigated a brand new sex-crazed fiend in the follow-up—a murderous peeping tom. Financing, again, proved elusive.

In 1961, in addition to filming some new sequences for The Sinister Urge (still apparently pinning his showbiz hopes on that one, little-loved film), Ed produced a couple of new screenplays that were fated to remain unproduced during his lifetime. Last Town North has been lost to time, I suppose, but The Silent Night evolved into one of Ed's most famous screenplays, I Awoke Early the Day I Died. That script took on a life of its own and became the basis for two separate adaptations in the late 1990s, long after Ed's death.

Perhaps the most fascinating of Ed's unrealized projects from this era is Invasion of the Gigantic Salami (aka Operation Salami and Attack of the Giant Salami), a sci-fi spoof intended for Joe E. Brown and Boris Karloff, both of whom had discussed the project with Wood. Friend Don Fellman informed biographer Rudolph Grey that Ed was inordinately "tickled" by that title and was especially eager to produce this movie.

Unfortunately for Ed, The Comedy of Terrors (American International Pictures, 1963) stole his thunder with a cast that included Brown and Karloff, plus Basil Rathbone, Peter Lorre, and Vincent Price. How could he compete with that? It is possible that AIP, the studio that owed its existence to Ed's Bride of the Monster, might have gotten the idea to put Boris Karloff and Joe E. Brown in a movie together from Ed Wood. That's just speculation, however, on Don Fellman's part. Either way, it didn't do Ed much good.

Tor Johnson is Lobo in Boris Petroff's The Unearthly.

One thing Ed had going for him, even during the lean years, was that he knew a lot of people in the entertainment field—actors, directors, writers, producers, and craftsmen of various descriptions. And all of those people knew even more people, thereby increasing Ed's professional circle exponentially. A lot of the crucial people in Ed's career were friends and friends of friends. Ed was clearly proud of this fact, since he shamelessly drops "famous" names throughout Hollywood Rat Race (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998), even if some of those names are so obscure today that they make no impact whatsoever when they drop.

Among Ed's professional contacts was a Russian-born filmmaker named Boris Petroff (1894-1972), who as "Brooke L. Peters" had a roughly decade-long run as the producer and director of low-budget independent films in the 1950s and early 1960s. Easily Petroff's best-known film is 1957's The Unearthly, a stultifying horror tale whose intriguing cast features legendary actor John Carradine, whom Ed later tried to wrangle for the lead role in To Kill a Saturday Night, plus one of Wood's best-known regulars, Tor Johnson, playing a somewhat-more-articulate version of his Lobo character from Wood's Bride of the Monster (1957) and Night of the Ghouls (1959).

The Unearthly has no narrative ties whatsoever to Ed's movies other than Lobo and owes most of its relative popularity to an appearance on MST3K in 1991, where it was deservedly savaged. Ed Wood later served as an uncredited "consultant" on Petroff's Anatomy of a Psycho (1961), and some film historians think Eddie either wrote or co-wrote it.

Boris Petroff ended his career two years later with a film that attempted to cash in on a trend then dominating American popular culture. And, as luck would have it, the unbilled (hopefully not unpaid) scenarist for this particular project was one Edward D. Wood, Jr.

SHOTGUN WEDDING (1963)

Alternate titles: Child Brides of the Ozarks; Talk Sexy, Y'all

Availability: I found my original bootleg on an internet auction site. Fleshbot Films planned to release a Shotgun Wedding DVD in the early 2000s, but it never happened. Another edition of the film was released on DVD by Films Around The World (FAT-W). It's available here. I'll discuss the pros and cons of that edition in the "viewing experience" section.

Al Capp's hillbilly sex goddess, Daisy Mae.

The backstory: Producer Paul Henning's The Beverly Hillbillies debuted on CBS in September 1962 and quickly became the #1 show on all of television, a title it would hold for two consecutive seasons. So popular was the series that the network commissioned two more hayseed sitcoms from Henning: Petticoat Junction and Green Acres. But Henning hadn't stumbled over anything new so much as he had reawakened America's interest in a long-gestating pop culture phenomenon. As late comics historian Don Markstein's invaluable Toonopedia puts it:

In the early-to-mid 1930s, hillbillies were becoming popular in American entertainment. In comic strips, Joe Palooka, did an extended sequence about a mountain man named Big Leviticus in 1933; and in '34 the author of that sequence, Al Capp, started his most famous work, Li'l Abner. And [Barney Google creator] Billy DeBeck was heavily researching Appalachian culture.

DeBeck handed the reins of his comic strip over to assistant Fred Lasswell, who shifted the focus of Barney Google to a hillbilly character called Snuffy Smith. The ornery, diminutive mooonshiner remains the star of that comic to this very day. The groundwork for this pop culture fad had been laid in the world of literature. Erskine Caldwell's hot-blooded early 1930s novels such as God's Little Acre and Tobacco Road (both highly recommended), gave readers a bleak yet also sexy and sordid view of the region and its people.

It was during the time of Caldwell's popularity that Al Capp launched his phenomenally successful strip, Li'l Abner, which presented a cheerier, cleaner, more abstract view of "hillbilly" life with a strong element of sex appeal. Specifically, the character of Daisy Mae Scragg—a busty, lusty, scantily-clad blonde with tremendous physical strength and a penchant for wearing cutoffs—became an archetype for hillbilly womanhood. There is little doubt in my mind than Henning created the Ellie Mae Clampett character on The Beverly Hillbillies as a reference to Capp's comic strip. 

As late as 1977, Hanna Barbera's Laff-A-Lympics contained a very Capp-esque character called Daisy Mayhem. (And it's no coincidence that the cutoff-wearing heroine of The Dukes of Hazzard was named Daisy either.) In fact, until the Henning sitcoms came along in the 1960s, Li'l Abner, which spawned a successful stage show and several movies, was the "gold standard" for depicting the poor whites of the South, as evidenced by this clearly Capp-influenced vintage Mountain Dew commercial.

Novak's hicksploitation.

With Jed Clampett and his countrified kinfolk dominating the airwaves, low-budget independent filmmakers were quick (some quicker than others) to jump on the "hillbilly" bandwagon. Such B-movie legends as Russ Meyer, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Harry H. Novak tried their hands at the so-called "hicksploitation" subgenre, sometimes invoking their progenitors directly. Novak, for instance, produced Tobacco Roody (1972), its title a pun on the Erskin Caldwell novel, and a rural female character in Lewis' Two-Thousand Maniacs (1964) is disparagingly referred to as "Daisy Mae."

It is little wonder, then, that a dyed-in-the-wool schlockmeister like Boris Petroff (working under his own name for a change) would want a piece of the action, yet his one attempt at this type of film is mild and wishy-washy when viewed next to those of his contemporaries. Hicksploitation films tend to be heavy on sex, violence, and mountain music. Shotgun Wedding is noticeably light on the first two and lacks the third entirely.

On the other hand, you will find some important mainstays of the subgenre here: a couple of scantily-clad blondes (in the Daisy Mae/Ellie Mae tradition), at least one strapping but oafish lad (in the Li'l Abner Yokum/Jethro Bodine mold,) plus some furtive moonshine-swigging and a long-standing feud between two families. Feuding is an important tradition in hillbilly-based popular culture. As Wikipedia helpfully informs us:

Due to the Celtic heritage of many whites living in Appalachia, a series of prolonged violent engagements in late- nineteenth-century Kentucky and West Virginia were referred to commonly as feuds, a tendency that was partly due to the nineteenth-century popularity of William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, both of whom wrote semi-historical accounts of blood feuds. These incidents, the most famous of which was the Hatfield-McCoy feud, were regularly featured in the newspapers of the eastern U.S. between the Reconstruction era and the early twentieth century, and are seen by some as linked to a Southern culture of honor with its roots in the Scots-Irish forebears of the residents of the area.

So there you have it, folks! The feuding subplot in Ed Wood's Shotgun Wedding is the result of a tradition going back to William Shakespeare. (Bet you didn't think Eddie and Bill had much in common!)

Interestingly, in the opening title sequence for Shotgun Wedding, the script is credited to "Larry Lee," supposedly working from a story by Jane Mann, Boris Petroff's wife. Jane's only other writing credits are on her husband's films (The Unearthly, Anatomy of a Psycho).

Ubiquitous William Schallert

To bring Shotgun Wedding to the screen, Boris Petroff recruited a cast teeming with familiar faces. Chief among these is veteran movie and TV stalwart William Schallert, right before he joined the cast of The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966) in what would become his most famous role. To give you some idea of this actor's career, he had 173 credits before this one and 189 after, including films like Singin' in the Rain (1952) and Gremlins (1984) plus recurring roles on TV shows like The Waltons and St. Elsewhere. And that's not to mention his extensive work in TV commercials, shilling for Pop Tarts and life insurance. Trust me, you've seen and heard this guy many times. Shotgun Wedding was likely just another assignment for him, a few days' work in a career that seemed to never stop.

I also immediately recognized veteran English-born character man J. Pat O'Malley, who gets a rare chance to be top-billed in this film. O'Malley's film career is dominated by his work in Walt Disney movies, both animated (The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians) and live-action (Son of Flubber). But that pales in comparison to his television work, guest-starring on... well, pretty much every popular network show you can remember from the 1950s to the early 1980s. In fact, I recognized O'Malley from his role on a very good Taxi two-parter called "The Road Not Taken" from 1982, in what turned out to be his very last screen appearance before his 1985 death.

Elsewhere in the cast, pretty Jenny Maxwell starred with Elvis Presley in 1961's Blue Hawaii. Shotgun Wedding was technically her last film role, but she kept working in television throughout the 1960s, guesting on My Three Sons, Death Valley Days, and The Wild Wild West. (In 1981, she was tragically killed in a botched robbery.) Other Shotgun Wedding cast members Valerie Allen, Jennie Maxwell, and Jackie Searl all did a lot of TV work in the 1960s, too. Allen, in fact, went on to marry and divorce Troy Donahue a few years after this picture.

A misleading ad for the film.

This movie's commercial fate is not terribly well documented, but Shotgun Wedding's almost total disappearance from the pop culture radar is a pretty good indication of its reception. Were it not for Ed Wood's involvement, the film might not even be available on the gray market as it is today. A major problem may have been that the film's sensational ad campaign set up unreasonable expectations that the movie itself could not possibly meet. One poster boldly proclaims that the movie will give us "the whole SHOCKING story of Child Brides of the Ozarks," which uncomfortably evokes a notorious and controversial 1938 exploitation film Child Bride (which billed itself as "a throbbing drama of shackled youth"). Shotgun Wedding offers nothing of the kind.

Unlike the cast of the 1938 film, which actually did feature some underaged performers in a sexualized context, the "gorgeous gals" of Petroff's movie are all easily in their 20s and don't reveal much more of themselves than you'd see at the beach. Yet one of the posters for Petroff's film lewdly asks, "Was she too old at 15?" Drive-in filmgoers lured to Shotgun Wedding with such panting taglines could not have been satisfied with Petroff's gentle film. It's much closer in spirit to The Beverly Hillbillies or Li'l Abner than to Child Bride and could easily play, unedited, on prime time network television. Word of mouth must have been disastrous. Boris Petroff never stepped behind a movie camera again. Ed Wood, as always, soldiered on despite the public's indifference.

Valerie Allen, the film's vixen.

The viewing experience: Light, fun, and charming if a bit preposterous. Compared to Russ Meyer's lusty, violent hicksploitation films (Lorna, Mudhoney, etc.) and Herschell Gordon Lewis's gory contributions to the subgenre (This Stuf'll Kill Ya, Moonshine Mountain, etc.), Shotgun Wedding is supremely goofy and naïve. By the end, it's revealed itself as merely a mild comedy of errors, hardly the daring exposé promised on the posters.

Take, for example, the pivotal character of Melanie (Valerie Allen), a brunette vixen who serves as the catalyst for most of the plot. She's shacked up in a rickety houseboat with doughy, unkempt "river rat" Buford (J. Pat O'Malley), but she's having an affair with Buford's handsome-yet-dim son Shub (Peter Colt). Buford's daughter Lucianne (Nan Peterson) knows all about the extracurricular hanky panky, but she doesn't tell her father. Instead, Lucianne uses her knowledge to blackmail her own brother out of $100.

Speaking of blackmail, the only reason gorgeous Melanie stays with Buford is that the old coot knows that Melanie killed a circus strongman named Steelo (Edward Fitz), and he's hiding Melanie's money somewhere on the property. While she and Shub conspire to find the money and get away from the small town, Melanie tricks Buford into marrying her by falsely claiming to be pregnant. The only clergyman nearby to perform the service, however, is the two-faced hypocrite Preacher Parsons (Schallert), a con man who recognizes Melanie from their days on the carnival circuit (when she was "Tiger Rose") and threatens to expose her unless he gets some of that money.

Now, if this were a Russ Meyer or H.G. Lewis film, several of these characters would probably be murdered... and "fallen woman" Melanie would definitely be among them. Her dark hair and sultry manner would make her a good contrast for the film's resident ingenue, Honey Bee (Jenny Maxwell), a guileless but sexy blonde whose sweet-natured romance with Buford's other son, Rafe (Buzz Martin), is sort of a hillbilly variation on Romeo & Juliet. Honey Bee's small-minded father, Silas (Jack Searl), despises Buford and even forms a lynch mob to kill the river dweller and his whole good-for-nothing clan, women included. Meyer and Lewis would definitely use the third act to dole out some punishment to these characters for their various sins. Perhaps Rafe and Honey Bee would be spared, thus wiping the moral slate clean.

But Ed Wood's script for Shotgun Wedding goes in an entirely different, much more forgiving direction. No one is killed. No one is punished. Old sins are forgiven. (Continuing Ed's "resurrection" motif, strongman Steelo is found to be alive and well, not even holding a grudge against Melanie.) Feuds are set aside. Truths emerge. Most of the characters seem to be headed toward brighter, more optimistic futures at the end of this movie. During Shotgun Wedding's final scene, Buford may be on the verge of repeating his past mistakes with a new woman, just as he did with Melanie, but the movie treats this like one of those "here we go again!" endings from a sitcom.

The ladies of Petticoat Junction, minus their petticoats.

Boris Petroff was a much more conventional, traditional director than Ed Wood, so Shotgun Wedding feels more like a "normal" movie than Ed's own efforts from the 1950s. There are no glaring continuity errors, crazy visual mismatches, or impossible narrative leaps here. Police cars do not zoom across the screen with their sirens blaring, and the gods do not demonstrate their disapproval of the characters through bursts of thunder and lightning. The editing, framing, and composition are all very standard, similar to what you'd see on a network television show of the era.

While Peter Colt and Buzz Martin give the stilted, unconvincing performances you'd expect in an Ed Wood movie, most of the small-ish cast is very professional. J. Pat O'Malley and William Schallert are even good! It's great fun to see Schallert, often cast as a bland, wholesome sitcom dad, play a real sleazeball here—a one-time grifter named "Stacko" Parsons now pretending to be a man of the cloth so he can sponge off this obscure rural community. And as the incorrigible Buford, J. Pat O'Malley is in clover, clearly having fun with the mostly-comedic part.

While hardly the backwoods bacchanal promised by the posters, Shotgun Wedding does feature some lovely young ladies of the type you'd expect to see bathing in the water tower on Petticoat Junction. In fact, Honey Bee has a (quite chaste) shower scene that seems like a precursor to that series.

The deluxe Shotgun Wedding special edition DVD.

If Ed Wood has an onscreen surrogate in this movie, it's probably Melanie, the worldly-wise outsider who finds herself stranded (and bored) in an isolated rural community but still has a taste for the finer things in life. Significantly, Melanie does not dress like the other characters in the movie and enjoys turning the heads of the local menfolk as she wiggles seductively past them. One of the first things we see her do is air out her sexy lingerie on a clothesline. Ed was definitely a connoisseur of women's undergarments, so this is not terribly surprising.

Moreover, Melanie's background in the carnival circuit all but certainly owes its existence to Ed's own (alleged) experiences touring with a freak show as a "half-man, half-woman" before going to Hollywood in 1948. Circuses and carnivals are frequent motifs in Ed's writing, more so in his paperbacks than in his film scripts. Having apparently done no research for this project, Ed the screenwriter makes not the slightest effort to realistically capture the rural dialect of Appalachia, and the movie actually seems to go out of its way to avoid using any "mountain music" on the soundtrack. Petroff obviously did not notice that The Beverly Hillbillies made prominent use of bluegrass music by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.

There are two credited composers for Shotgun Wedding, by the way. Alexander Starr, who is so obscure that he does not even merit an IMDb entry, wrote the somewhat jazzy, often comical background score for most of the movie. The film's provocative "dance music," on the other hand, is attributed to Jerry Capehart (1928-1998), a prominent songwriter and producer in the early days of rock & roll. Interestingly, Capehart wrote "Come On, Everybody" and the perennial favorite "Summertime Blues" for Eddie Cochran in the 1950s. His Shotgun Wedding music is awesomely catchy, but it is in no way appropriate for this film. In one big dance scene, we see a bluegrass band playing, including one guy strumming a banjo, but what we hear is electric guitar-driven rock. Does this town even have electrical outlets?

During the title sequence, which also features Capehart's rock music, we get a look at the main street of "Mudcat Landing," the incredibly small community (pop. 47) where these characters all reputedly live, and it's quite obviously a façade from the set of a Western. The place resembles Disney's Frontierland rather than the hill country of the Southeastern United States. In terms of authenticity, Shotgun Wedding makes The Beverly Hillbillies look like Winter's Bone.

But that's part of what makes this film so much fun. If you like stories about bumpkins, rubes, and hayseeds, but you've never actually been south of the Mason-Dixon line, this is the movie for you!

ADDENDUM: Viewers who choose to purchase Shotgun Wedding on DVD have two options: the bootleg version and the Films Around The World (FAT-W) version. Ed Wood fans should know what they're getting into either way. Neither edition is perfect. Far from it. The bootleg version is very badly faded, for instance, to the point that it's almost in black-and-white, while the FAT-W version is considerably more colorful and vibrant, if not sharp. But the bootleg version is only slightly cropped, while the FAT-W version is more severely cropped. The bootleg version is also more stable, too, while the FAT-W version is more wobbly, with the picture bobbing up and down. In addition, the FAT-W version has a major skip during the opening credits sequence, as Valerie Allen exits a store and walks by the menfolk in town.

Here's a side-by-side comparison:

(left to right) The bootleg version and the the FAT-W version.

Now at first glance, you'll probably think that the FAT-W version is superior. And, in many ways, it is. But take a look at that milk jug in the lower right hand corner by Valerie Allen's leg. You can see the whole thing in the bootleg version, but only a corner of it in the FAT-W version. And how do I know both versions are cropped? From these credits:

(left to right) Same comparison as above. 

Both are bad, but the FAT-W version is worse. At least in the bootleg version, the actors names are intact, if not their character names. In the end, you pick your poison.

Next week: He was Criswell. For years he told the almost unbelievable, related the unreal, and showed it to be more... than a fact! Then, almost 50 years ago, he told a tale of the threshold people so astounding that some of you may have fainted if you had been there. This was a story of those in the twilight time... once human, then monsters... who were caught in a void between the living and the dead. Monsters to have been pitied! Monsters to have been despised! A night with the ghouls.. the ghouls who had been reborn... from the innermost depths of the world! And now, my friends, we will dare to revisit that infamous tale. Let us reconvene in seven days for an appraisal of Orgy of the Dead (1965)!

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 33: "Anatomy of a Psycho" (1961)

Anatomy of a Psycho has an extremely opportunistic title, wouldn't you say?

"I walked down the alley and through the door of this little studio, and there behind a desk in this very dingy, small office sat Boris Petroff, who wanted me to write an ad. I said, 'It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Petroff,' and did all the bullshit that you usually do when you're trying to get as many ads out of somebody as you possibly can so that you can make a little more commission."

-writer and director John D.F. Black

Tor Johnson as Lobo in The Unearthly.

Producer/Director Boris Petroff was a significant player in the Ed Wood story, though his name doesn't show up until page 207 (out of 231) in Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. and even then makes only a fleeting appearance.  Ed and Boris were both low-budget independent filmmakers struggling to make it in Hollywood, and they crossed paths several times in the late 1950s and early 1960s, perhaps more often than has been documented.

On his resume, for example, Eddie proudly credited himself with writing the screenplay for the Petroff-directed hillbilly comedy Shotgun Wedding (1963), along with another supposed Petroff production called Talk Sexy, Y'all, which Grey speculates is merely an alternate title for Shotgun Wedding. Since Talk Sexy has never surfaced in any form, it seems Grey was correct in his assumption. 

Moreover, Boris' supernatural thriller, The Unearthly (1957), features Wood regular Tor Johnson as a lumbering henchman named Lobo, the very same character name Johnson used in Ed's films Bride of the Monster (1955) and Night of the Ghouls (1959). The only difference between the Lobo in Petroff's movie and the Lobo in Ed's movies is that the former can (sort of) talk. No true fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 will ever forget Johnson's immortal line, "Time for go to bed!" Otherwise, the characters are nearly identical, and Johnson never played Lobo in any other films.

According to its credits, The Unearthly was co-written by someone called "Geoffrey Dennis" -- a pseudonym for erstwhile Star Trek scribe John D.F. Black -- and Boris Petroff's wife, Jane Mann. Jane was the one who, along with the elusive and likely nonexistent "Larry Lee," a man with no other titles in his filmography, got onscreen credit for writing Shotgun Wedding. Since Ed Wood was eager to claim authorship of that film, it is possible that Jane Mann was given a vanity credit by virtue of being the director's wife. As for her supposed contributions to The Unearthly, here's what John D.F. Black had to say on the subject in an interview with author Tom Weaver in a book called Science Fiction Confidential: Interviews with 23 Monster Stars and Filmmakers (McFarland, 2002):

I was working on the script [for The Unearthly], delivering pages, and then I realized it would become a nightmare if I kept doing it that way. So I just didn't show up for ten days, and finished it. I delivered it to Mr. Petroff, who gave it to Jane, his wife, who typed it. I can't type. [...] And then it was time for the picture to be edited and for credits to be discussed, and it turns out that Jane Mann, who was the one who typed the script last, put her name on it. And Mr. Petroff was not gonna pay me.

Writer-actor Don Devlin

Very interesting, wouldn't you say?

John D.F. Black has an extensive, thirty-year career as a writer in film (Shaft) and television (everything from Charlie's Angels to Murder She Wrote), while Jane Mann has only three movies to her name... all of them directed by her husband. If Black is to be believed, Mann was nothing more than a typist on The Unearthly. And if Ed Wood is to be believed, Shotgun Wedding's script was all his doing. So if Jane Mann didn't really write The Unearthly or Shotgun Wedding, it is reasonable to assume that she didn't write Anatomy of a Psycho either. Then who did? Well, one obvious answer is the film's credited co-writer, Don Devlin (1930-2000), who has an interesting and varied filmography as an actor, including a pivotal role in Anatomy of a Psycho, along with credits as a producer (The Witches of Eastwick) and a screenwriter (Thunder Island, which he co-wrote with Jack Nicholson). But a dark horse candidate for the film's authorship is Edward D. Wood, Jr.

The IMDb doesn't list Anatomy of a Psycho among Eddie's writing credits, and neither Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy nor Rob Craig's Ed Wood, Mad Genius include it in their coverage of Wood's career. But Philip R. Frey's invaluable website Ed Wood Online does include Anatomy in its filmography section, and the film isn't even shunted off to the "Apocrypha" there but instead is nestled between Shotgun Wedding and Married Too Young (1962), the film I'll be covering next week.

Incidentally, if you are at all curious about the career of the Russian-born director Boris Petroff, who almost always worked under the pseudonym "Brooke L. Peters," I'd highly recommend that you locate a copy of Tom Weaver's Science Fiction Confidential. In its chapter about The Unearthly, John D.F. Black comments in more detail about Petroff's appearance and personality than I was able to find anywhere else.

After poking a little fun at Petroff's heavy Russian accent, Black recalls, "He was a charming man, I would guess somewhere between five-ten and six feet; on the heavy side but not fat." Black also supplies an intriguing little anecdote about actor Tor Johnson:

He was playing Lobo... and he was sick of playing characters named Lobo. [...] He asked, "Why did you name me Lobo?" and I said, "I didn't. Boris did!" He had his "Lobo suit," which was slightly adapted, and that's what you see in the picture [The Unearthly]. That was his own wardrobe. He was a sweetheart. 

Again, let me say that I can find no record of Tor Johnson playing Lobo in anything other than the two Ed Wood movies and the one Boris Petroff movie. Apparently for Tor, those were more than enough.

ANATOMY OF A PSYCHO (1961)

A misleadingly racy lobby card for Anatomy of a Psycho.

The best DVD of the film.

Alternate titles: This film's title is its best selling point. Why give it any other name? In South America, though, the title translated as Young People Without Conscience.

Availability: As a public domain movie, Anatomy of a Psycho is widely and freely available. You can stream or download it from Archive.org if you so desire, for instance. It's also been included in any number of boxed sets, including Psycho-Rama (St. Clair Entertainment, 2009), Pure Terror (Mill Creek, 2010) and Psychos (BCI/Eclipse, 2003). It's available alongside Mario Bava's Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970) on a DVD called Killer Creature Double Feature (Madacy Records, 2001), which also contains some extra cartoons. In addition, Anatomy of a Psycho has been released as a standalone disc (Alpha Video, 2006). By all accounts, however, the DVD that offers the clearest, sharpest print of the film is a double-feature Drive-In Collection disc (Vinegar Syndrome, 2013) which pairs it with Richard Hilliard's The Lonely Sex (1959). Although the disc is light on special features, its picture quality far surpasses that of the public domain versions floating around out there.

The backstory: Why am I including this movie in my survey of Ed Wood's career when both Rudolph Grey and Rob Craig skipped right past it in theirs? The culprit is probably writer David C. Hayes, who included this speculative passage about Anatomy of a Psycho in his book, Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. in a chapter temptingly titled "The 'Lost' Films." Here's what Hayes has to say about the subject:

This film has been on the tail end of drive in double bills for years. It contains juvenile delinquency (what else) and has the patented crazy Wood characters, senseless violence, and an ambiguous moral. For novelty effect, Ronnie Burns stars as the delinquent (he is the real-life son of George Burns and Gracie Allen). Directed by Boris Petroff (for whom Ed had worked previously), the writing is credited to Larry Lee. Poor Larry must have been shunned in Hollywood after Anatomy because he has written nothing since. Unless... yes! Larry Lee is another Ed Wood pseudonym! Here is the evidence: there is a character named Duke (after Wood's friend, Duke Moore), there is a character named Marco (after Wood's friend Paul Marco), there is a character named Shirlee (because Wood loves that name), the film uses the same music as Plan 9 from Outer Space and the characters and dialogue is [sic] really awful and strange. Besides, Rudolph Gray [sic] (a noted Wood expert) also believes that Ed Wood wrote Anatomy of a Psycho. 

That's a densely-layered paragraph, so let me address some of the salient points individually:

• Since Anatomy was a cheaply-available exploitation film, the assertion that it played for years on the drive-in circuit seems quite plausible.

• Like many of the writers and directors of his era, Wood did tackle the issue of juvenile delinquency in such films as Jail Bait, The Violent Years, The Sinister Urge, Night of the Ghouls, and the unfinished Hellborn, as well as such pulp novels as Devil Girls and Hell Chicks.

• It's a matter of personal taste whether the "crazy characters" and "senseless violence" in Anatomy of a Psycho are particularly Wood-ian in nature. We'll discuss that in the "viewing experience" section. As for the issue of morals, Ed Wood was in many ways a very conservative man, and he had no tolerance whatsoever for juvenile delinquency. His films and novels, therefore, often employ a no-nonsense brand of justice with severe penalties for wrongdoers.

George & Ronnie Burns

• Ronald Jon "Ronnie" Burns (1935-2007), the adopted son of George Burns and Gracie Allen, is the top-billed actor in the film, but his character is the wholesome hero, not a delinquent. Although a rather uninspiring presence onscreen, Burns is nevertheless an intriguing pop culture footnote. He may have been one of the first high-profile examples of a child being adopted by celebrities, thus making him a role model or icon to other adopted children. Ronnie, who according to his wife "lived a pretty charmed life growing up," is probably best known for appearing as a fictionalized version of himself on his parents' 1950s TV show. Anatomy was one of his few film roles, but he worked in television into the 1960s, including his own short-lived vehicle called Happy, then ditched acting to pursue boat racing and real estate.

• Anatomy of a Psycho was released two years before the first documented Wood/Petroff collaboration, i.e. Shotgun Wedding. The Unearthly predates them both, but there is no evidence that Wood had any direct involvement in that film. So the assertion that Eddie had worked for Boris Petroff previously is dubious.

• One-and-done screenwriter Larry Lee is the credited co-author of Shotgun Wedding, not Anatomy of a Psycho. Jane Mann and Don Devlin are the writers whose names appear at the end of the film.

• The movie does have a character named Duke Marco (played by William Salzwedel) as well as Duke's two siblings: Pat (Pamela Lincoln) and Chet (Darrell Howe). There's no Shirlee or Shirley in the film, however. The closest is a duplicitous girl named Sandra, whom the IMDb calls "Sandy." However, the fact that the character Patricia shortens her girly-sounding first name to the androgynous nickname "Pat" is reminiscent of the female characters in The Violent Years.

• Though the film has a credited composer, Manuel Francisco (aka Michael Terr), there is some unmistakable stock/library music on the soundtrack, including "Grip of the Law" by Trevor Duncan, which also served as the title music in Plan 9. Furthermore, a party scene in Anatomy of a Psycho uses some of the same gushy romantic music heard at the home of Jeff and Paula Trent in Plan 9. Elsewhere in the film, it's possible to hear some of the same music Ed Wood used in Final Curtain (1957). So Petroff and Wood were definitely drawing from the same music library, but I think these directors generally delegated such responsibilities to their respective music supervisors.

• Again, it's up to the individual viewer to decide whether the plot and characters of Anatomy of a Psycho are "awful and strange" in the Ed Wood tradition. I'm more comfortable with the second adjective than the first.

• If Rudolph Grey (whose last name is spelled with an e) is convinced of Ed Wood's authorship of Anatomy of a Psycho, he doesn't bring it up in Nightmare of Ecstasy. Like I said, Boris Petroff himself barely merits a mention there. Perhaps Hayes is referring to a printed interview or even a personal conversation with Mr. Grey.

Pamela Lincoln

Make of all that what you will. In any case, while Ronnie Burns is the most notable member of the cast of Anatomy of a Psycho, there are others in the film worth mentioning as well. I've already alerted you to the fact that the film's co-screenwriter, Don Devlin, gave himself a good-sized role as an ex-Marine turned thug named Moe. Resident "good girl" Pamela Lincoln  (b. 1937) was once the sister-in-law of TV's Dobie Gillis, Dwayne Hickman, and made sporadic film and television appearances from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Readers of this blog will probably be most interested to know that she was in William Castle's The Tingler.

Resident "bad girl" Judy Howard had a less-impressive film and TV career, the highlight of which is probably a one-off role on The Monkees. She dropped off the Hollywood radar sometime during Richard Nixon's first term. Ruddy-faced, barrel-chested Michael Granger (1923-1981), who portrays a streetwise but good-hearted police lieutenant here, spent most of his 25-year career on the small screen and seems to have played an awful lot of cops during that time.

The titular psycho is played by Darrell Howe, for whom this movie is most certainly the highlight of his largely-undistinguished career. Anatomy is the first and last of his theatrically-released feature films. His only other big shot at stardom came in the form of an unsold pilot (directed by Ida Lupino, no less!) called Teenage Idol in 1958, a year when the pop charts were dominated by the likes of Fabian and Frankie Avalon, i.e pretty boys with pompadours. This failed, forgotten attempt at a rock 'n' roll sitcom would have featured Howe as the awesomely-named Swivelhips Jackson, but it never got past one episode. Apart from that and a few scattered TV guest shots in the 1960s, Howe's cupboard is bare, daddy-o.

A tale of two anatomies. 

The viewing experience: Though its title obviously evokes both Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Anatomy of a Psycho has very little in common with either of those films, which at the time were recent and controversial hits. About the closest this rather quaint movie comes to those groundbreaking classics is the "jazzy" lettering of the main title, which is vaguely similar to the Saul Bass title sequence from Anatomy of a Murder. 

Okay, while we're being extremely generous, let's point out that Boris Petroff's film does have a sensational murder trial, like the Preminger film, and features a thin, dark-haired young man who holds a knife at least once, just as in the Hitchcock film. But, really, drawing any other connections between them would be stretching it.

At heart, Anatomy of a Psycho is not a courtroom drama, nor is it a psycho-sexual horror film. Instead, this is a pretty straightforward, revenge-themed juvenile delinquent film, and until the last reel, its central character is more of a brooding, sullen young antihero in the Brando/Dean/Mineo mold than he is a psychotic maniac. Anatomy of a Psycho is technically a youth-oriented film, but neither Petroff nor his screenwriters have much of a feel for American teenage culture. The actors, as you might guess, are largely too old for their parts, and there is only the barest hint that rock 'n' roll music exists. We hear one rock tune -- a catchy number called "Round Round Round" -- in the background at an otherwise quite square party. But more importantly, the film is old-fashioned, even reactionary, at the genetic level.

Hitchcock's Psycho gave audiences a glimpse of the future and might thus be termed the first "modern" horror film. Petroff's Psycho, on the other hand, is firmly rooted in the past, its stodgy storytelling style lifted from the chintzy, second-tier noir films of the 1940s and 1950s. This is one of those pictures in which much of the narrative heavy lifting is done by screaming newspaper headlines and blaring radio announcers. Want to show that time is passing? Easy. Just have one of those montages with the flipping calendar pages. Want to establish that a character is in prison? No sweat. Just rig up one of those lighting effects that casts a big striped shadow across the actors' faces.

After a few viewings, I can't really agree with David C. Hayes' assessment that the film is "really awful and strange." Apart from a couple of wonky process shots and some stilted line readings by secondary characters (particularly two little kids who run away from danger), Anatomy of a Psycho is a perfunctory, almost anonymous, by-the-numbers JD flick. Its one big concession to the youth audience is its lingering focus on violence, which as usual is nominally "justified" through a lot of preaching from adult authority figures and the unsubtle message that breaking the law has serious consequences.

Our main character gets his face cut up pretty badly a few minutes into the proceedings and goes through the rest of the movie with a nasty scar on his face as he commits a few brutish if commonplace acts -- one deliberate beating, a few messy scuffles, one debatable act of arson, and a single, semi-intentional stabbing. Hardly the kind of numbers that get you into the Hall of Fame, so to speak. If this is the "pornography of violence," it's strictly softcore. And if you're thinking of that other kind of pornography, forget it. Anatomy of a Psycho is studiously sexless.

I won't waste much of your time or mine with a rehashing of the frankly not-that-interesting plot. The basic setup is not a million miles away from the more serious entries in the East Side Kids franchise. We have a lot of the common ingredients of those films here, including (but not limited to):

• An at-risk youth who has a bunch of loyal friends and hangs out with them in a sort of clubhouse atmosphere, in this case a dilapidated residence called "the Shack."

• A brother in the death house for a crime he says he didn't commit.

• A morally-upright older sister who frets over the at-risk youth and is romantically involved with a very moral and very dull man.

• A cop who is unusually involved in the lives of the youngsters on his beat and is able to banter back and forth with them.

The obvious difference is that Petroff's film takes these elements and tells a pessimistic, consequence-heavy story with them (it's no coincidence that one character name checks Crime & Punishment), while the ESK films preached redemption and rehabilitation.  In Anatomy of a Psycho, a career hoodlum named Duke Marco (William Salzwedel), who stole to support his siblings after the death of their parents, is now on death row awaiting execution for murder.

Back on the homefront, straight-laced sister Pat Marco (Pamela Lincoln) -- who is convinced Duke is guilty and deserves to die -- tries in vain to keep her wild-card younger brother, Chet Marco (Darrell Howe), in line. Against Pat's wishes, Chet visits his older brother right before he's sent to the gas chamber, and Duke swears that he's innocent. (The movie never really does come right out and say whether or not Duke was lying, but all of the movie's most "respectable" characters say that he is.) After the execution, Chet vows revenge on everyone who sent poor Duke to a premature grave, including the judge, the District Attorney, and the trial's star witness.

But here's the catch: Pat is first dating and then engaged to Mickey (Ronnie Burns), the star witness's son! And here's the other catch: Chet's social-climbing, materialistic girlfriend Sandra (Judy Howard) has just ditched him in favor of sleazy rich kid Arthur (Pat McMahon), the son of the judge! You sometimes get the sense that maybe there are only about twelve people in this town. Considering how intermingled their lives are, the characters are remarkably clueless about the true nature of their own relationships. The situation is exacerbated by a script that requires them to withhold information for no good reason, then reveal shocking truths at very inconvenient moments. Mickey, for instance, tells fiancée Pat about his father's involvement at Duke's trial while the couple is attending a fancy party at the home of a judge!

Anyway, vengeance-hungry Chet beats the living snot out of the DA's son, puts Arthur's head through a mirror, and starts a fire at the home of the judge. Mickey, Pat, and local beat cop Mac (Michael Granger) all suspect that Chet is committing these antisocial acts, but nobody can prove nothin', see? Things get too hot to handle when Chet's best friend, Moe (Don Devlin), winds up on the wrong end of a knife, and pure-as-the-driven-snow Mickey goes on trial for his murder.

The film's third act is of particular interest because this is the point in the film at which Chet finally strips his gears and goes into histrionic, pseudo-Brando ("Steeeellllaaaaaaa!") mode. You have to slog through a lot of workaday exposition to get there, though. After 73 or so minutes, all of these story threads are either resolved or abandoned, and the audience is allowed to leave.

Chet, Sandra, and a soon-to-be-broken mirror.

But you don't care about any of that, do you? What you want to know is whether or not Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s influence can be felt in Anatomy of a Psycho. Though the dialogue and plot aren't nearly as baroque or ornate as prime Wood, there is a hint of the master's touch here. Most obviously, the film is a good companion or twin to Ed Wood's Jail Bait (1954). Just like Clancy Malone's Don Gregor in the earlier film, Darrell Howe's character, Chet Marco, leads a restless, haunted existence and spends a lot of time wandering the dark, shadowy streets of an unnamed city, unsure of what to do next.

The relationship between the Marco siblings in Anatomy is very similar to that of brother and sister Clancy Malone and Dolores Fuller in Jail Bait. The older sister worries, but the younger brother just won't toe the line. Like Fuller, who falls for cop Steve Reeves, Pamela Lincoln's "responsible older sister" character is also romantically linked to the squarest, dullest character in her movie, in this case Ronnie Burns' colorless dullard. Anatomy concerns a young man who avenges the death of his criminal brother who became a substitute father to him. In so doing, he takes out his anger on the sons of the men responsible for his older sibling's death. This is another iteration of the "sins of the father" theme which popped up in both Jail Bait and Son of the Renegade (1953).

The film's most deliriously Wood-ian creation is the money-crazed, status-seeking blonde Sandra, who throws Chet over for wealthy cad Arthur because he has "class -- something you wouldn't know anything about!" Sandra, easily the film's most fun (and underused) character is an obvious cognate of the gold-seeking women in both Revenge of the Virgins (1959) and Orgy of the Dead (1965). If Eddie has an onscreen surrogate in Anatomy of a Psycho, it's Sandra.

Other Wood-ian touches pop up here and there. Like Eddie himself, Don Devlin's character is described as an ex-Marine, for instance, and it's noteworthy that psycho-boy Chet takes solace in alcohol in his lowest moments. The District Attorney in Mickey's trial makes a textbook Wood-ian demand for "the facts!"

And I'd like to think that it was Ed Wood who crafted the film's single most memorable line of dialogue. When Pat Marco is trying to convince Chet that he should return to school, her reasoning is airtight: "I'm a girl. I don't need to go."

Next week: Another week, another disputed Ed Wood movie starring the son of a famous screen comedian! What can I tell you, folks? It's an awfully small world. And to make things even more confusing, the movie I'm about to review has a title nearly identical to that of a completely different Ed Wood movie which was made a full decade later! Are you still following me? No? Don't worry. In seven short days, this will all make sense. I promise. That's when you and I will travel back in time to the magical year of 1962, when in order to have sex with your girlfriend, you had to marry her. No, really. That's how it worked back then. Bras literally would not open unless you had a marriage certificate. Those were tough times for horny guys, and you can read all about them when I cover Married Too Young (1962).