Mill Creek comedy classics #60: "Speak Easily" (1932)

Buster Keaton is a nerdy professor turned theatrical impresario in Speak Easily.

The flick: Speak Easily (MGM, 1932) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.9

Director: Edward Sedgwick (Riding on Air)

Actors of note:

• Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)

• Jimmy Durante (Palooka)

• Ruth Selwyn (Five and Ten, Polly of the Circus; film career in early 1930s was brief; best known as the wife of writer/director/producer Edgar Selywn)

• Thelma Todd (Palooka)

• Hedda Hopper (Nothing Sacred)

• William Pawley (The Grapes of Wrath, Angels with Dirty Faces)

• Sidney Toler (famously played Charlie Chan from 1938 to 1946 when ill health forced him to retire; died a year later)

• Oscar Apfel (The Nut Farm)

• Sidney Bracey (The Marx Brother's Duck Soup, Tod Browning's Freaks, much more)

• Edward Brophy (voice of Timothy Q. Mouse in Dumbo; also appeared in Freaks)

• Fred Kelsey (Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mildred Pierce)

Thelma Todd puts the moves on Buster Keaton.

The gist of it: Naive, unworldly Professor T.Z. Post (Keaton) receives a fraudulent letter from his well-meaning assistant, Jenkins (Bracey), informing him that he has inherited $750,000. Jenkins only means to get the shy academic to explore the world a little, but Professor Post soon goes too far. During a train trip, he takes a shining to a sweet, pretty dancer named Pansy Peets (Selwyn), the "star" of a third-rate theatrical troupe, and agrees to take her crummy show to Broadway and bankroll it with the money he thinks he has.

The rest of the cast, including comedian-pianist Jimmy (Durante), is thrilled about this, but Pansy is honest and doesn't want the Professor to waste his money on a show she knows is a bomb. But Post is undaunted and brings the entire cast to New York to start rehearsing, even though the newly-hired director (Toler) has no faith whatsoever in the show or in Pansy's marginal talents. A blonde vixen named Eleanore Espere (Todd) wins a role in the show and does her damnedest to seduce Professor Post and trick him into marrying her, even getting him drunk for the first time in his life. Eventually, reality catches up with this misbegotten show on its opening night when a lawyer's representative (Apfel) shows up and tells Jimmy that Post doesn't have any money and will be slapped with an injunction for non-payment of his bills if he appears at the theater. And, sure enough, an impatient process server (Kelsey) comes looking for the professor.

Knowing that the only chance to get some of Post's money back is for the show to go on as planned that night, Jimmy does his best to keep the professor away from the theater. But the hapless, totally-oblivious Professor Post wanders back to the theater and even bungles his way onto the stage many times during the evening, unintentionally sabotaging every scene. The audience thinks this is all part of the act, and the show becomes a fluke hit.

This movie did not end the Great Depression.

My take: Pop culture historians say that Buster Keaton's career went into decline in the 1930s when he signed a contract with MGM and lost creative control of his films. This humble 1932 MGM production, then, is part of Buster's downfall. And yet I found a lot to enjoy about Speak Easily. It's a breezy, good-natured backstage farce with some well-executed verbal and physical humor. Yes, verbal. Obviously, a big difference between Speak Easily and the movies Buster made in the 1920s for Joseph M. Schenck is that this one is a talkie.

Fortunately, the erstwhile silent comic has a knack for dialogue, delivering his lines in a charmingly bemused manner with just a hint of a Kansas drawl. His character here, prissy Professor Post, seems like the 1930s equivalent of David Hyde Pierce as Dr. Niles Crane on Fraiser. The script gives Keaton some good lines, especially in his exchanges with sexy Thelma Todd (more on those later). And while not as overtly physical as his short films of the 1920s, Speak Easily has a few impressive stunt sequences for Keaton to perform, like when he's dragged behind a moving train while trying to reach for his trunk or when he sneaks out of Todd's apartment via the fire escape.

But Buster is not the whole show here! Jimmy Durante is second-billed and gets a generous amount of screen time to do his high-energy, Vaudeville-style patter, performing with such enthusiasm and panache that you can't help but be won over. Durante's character is a hacky comedian whose jokes are intentionally awful, so his appeal comes from his desperation as he tries to sell his weak material and his indignation when his punchlines are met with annoyed silence. His frantic nature also makes a good counterpoint to Buster Keaton's practiced nonchalance. As a vintage ad for the film proclaims, "Nature meant them to co-star!" While nothing earth-shattering or game-changing, Speak Easily is a film worth salvaging from Buster's much-maligned tenure at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Is it funny: Yes! The laughs start right away, with a darkly humorous sequence in which Jenkins tries to warn Professor Post about the dangers of avoiding life and staying hidden away with books as one's only companions. Post's predecessor, Jenkins says, shot himself in the very chair where the introverted professor is now sitting. Buster Keaton then (wisely) gets out of that chair and lays down on a nearby couch... which Jenkins then informs him is where the poor guy died. Sometimes you just can't win, folks. Later, Keaton and Thelma Todd share some snappy banter:

SHE: (seductively draping her leg on his desk) Y'know, I've got legs. 

HE: (nervously) I assumed as much. 

And then there's this:

SHE: Have you ever seriously considered marriage? 

HE: Yes. (A beat.) That's why I'm single.

The film has several other sustained comedic sequences, too, namely one set at a railroad depot where Buster has all manner of trouble with his trunk and his ticket, incurring the wrath of the conductors. Maybe my favorite sight gag in the film comes when our hero, thinking he's finally sorted everything out, blithely sits down in an otherwise-empty car... as the rest of the train pulls away from the station without him.

My grade: B+

P.S. - No African-American stereotypes, but Brophy's nervous, bug-eyed character appears to be an ethnic stereotype of some kind. What exactly he's supposed to be is beyond me, though. Spanish? Italian? Also, Durante makes a joke about the supposed cheapness of Scotsmen. ("In Scotland, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde is playing as a double feature!" Get it?)

Ed Wood Wednesdays, Week 14: "Orgy of the Dead" (1965)

"Are You Heterosexual...?" - Orgy of the Dead (1965) had one of the great taglines of all time.

"Eddie would go home and tell Kathy everything that happened during the day. She started calling Steve, 'That Bulgarian Bastard! That no good piece of shit!' And just go on and on. If it wasn't for Steve employing Eddie, I don't know what the hell they would have done." 

-Actor John Andrews on Ed Wood's relationship with Stephen Apostolof

Morticia Addams: sexual archetype.

Let's get right down to it: sex with dead people. I'm about to discuss a movie called Orgy of the Dead, so there's no getting around the issue. Necrophilia is one of society's most famous and widely agreed-upon sexual taboos. It is, along with bestiality and pedophilia, one of the three fetishes of which Dan Savage officially and unequivocally disapproves. The famed sex columnist's objection to all three is basically the same: a lack of consent on behalf of all involved parties. Simply put, a corpse has no say in the matter. Anything you do to one is essentially rape. But if there's one thing I know about human nature, it's this: the more "taboo" a particular predilection is, the more we become fascinated with it.

As far as necrophilia is concerned, we have found arguably tasteful/acceptable ways of indulging this collective fantasy in the realm of fiction through the creation of characters who are not "living" in a traditional sense but who can talk, move, and think for themselves. Can there be any doubt that this is the underlying appeal of vampires, who were romantic antiheroes long before Stephenie Meyer ever started writing about them? Conceived by novelist Bram Stoker in 1897 and indelibly depicted onscreen by Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in 1931, Count Dracula is far from a passive corpse at the mercy of mortal humans. In fact, he is an aggressor and an instigator... at least during nighttime hours.

In 1938, seven years after Lugosi's performance as the Count in Tod Browning's Dracula, cartoonist Charles Addams introduced, via one of his morbidly funny New Yorker cartoons, a character who would eventually come to be known as Morticia Addams and in so doing popularized a sexual archetype which has been used as as the basic template for any number of similar characters, from Lily Munster and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark to Vampirella and, of course, our very own Vampira. These women, with their pitch-black hair and pale, corpse-like complexions, are vivid manifestations of our erotic fixation with the dead -- sex and death at once!

Ed Wood pretty much lived at the intersection of Sex & Death for his entire career. Take his most famous creation, 1959's Plan 9 from Outer Space. At the nexus of the film's truly convoluted plot is a married couple: an old man (Lugosi) and his much-younger, recently deceased wife (Vampira). Overcome with grief for his wife to the point that he dangerously disregards his own safety and dies in an traffic accident, Lugosi is reminiscent of the brooding, lovestruck characters created by Edgar Allan Poe, an author whose work was also marked by morbid eroticism. It is not coincidental that the old man and his wife are played by performers whose careers hinged on the combination of sex and death. Necrophilia is in the DNA of Plan 9 from Outer Space, as it is with so much of horror culture. It's a theme Eddie would return to again and again in his own films, plus his novels, short stories, and the screenplays he wrote for other directors.

Perhaps the most outstanding example of this tendency in his writing is a 1965 production which would be the first of many collaborations between Wood and an eccentric Bulgarian filmmaker who was nearly as extraordinary a character as Eddie himself.

ORGY OF THE DEAD (1965)



Alternate titles: Nudie Ghoulies, Ghouls & Dolls, Orgy of the Damned

Availability: The film is available as a standalone DVD (Rhino Video, 2004), though this disc is now out-of-print and getting rather pricey. Rhino's edition, with a sharp-looking digital transfer supervised by director Stephen Apostolof, includes the film's theatrical trailer and an exclusive interview with Apostolof. Thankfully, like many of the films discussed in this series, Orgy of the Dead is now also available as part of the Big Box of Wood DVD collection (S'more Entertainment 2011). Supplements there include an introduction by filmmaker Ted Newsom and some silent behind-the-scenes footage from the set of the film.

The film that brought Ed & Steve together.

The backstory: Stephen C. Apostolof (1928-2005) lived one hell of a life. Born in Bulgaria during a time of great political tumult, he saw a Communist regime come to power during his youth and by the tender age of 17 had joined a guerrilla resistance force in a futile effort to curb the Red Menace. (In the first of many parallels, Eddie Wood was about 17 when he joined the Marines to fight in WWII.) Stephen ultimately succumbed to the inevitable and hopped a Finnish freighter to escape his now-shackled homeland just three years later, only to be thrown into a Turkish jail for several months on suspicion of being a spy. From there, within a span of just a few years, he leapfrogged from country to country and lifestyle to lifestyle: Istanbul! Then Paris! A stint in the French Foreign Legion! Westward to Canada! And finally, the promised land.... Los Angeles, USA!

Finding work initially as a bank clerk, Stephen used his newly-acquired financial acumen to gain employment as a production accountant at 20th Century Fox. At the age of 25, only five years after departing Bulgaria, Stephen C. Apostolof was part of the motion picture industry. Interestingly, Apostolof toiled at Fox during roughly the same period that Ed Wood was working as a night production coordinator at Universal. These two men would take vaguely similar career paths. Eddie's debut as a writer/director/actor, Glen or Glenda? (1953), was a highly personal and autobiographical film.

So, too, was Journey to Freedom (1957), an independent film written and produced by Apostolof and based somewhat on his own incredible life story. The cast of Journey included at least one prominent member of the Ed Wood repertory company, Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson, but the true link between Apostolof and Wood was a member of the film's crew, namely our old pal William C. "Bill" Thompson, the one-eyed colorblind cameraman for Glenda, Plan 9, Bride of the Monster, Final Curtain, and The Violent Years.

"I am tired of this usual type of entertainment. I want a decided change."

-Criswell in Orgy of the Dead (1965)

Apostolof saw where movies were headed in the '60s.

By the 1960s, Apostolof had adopted the more American-sounding pseudonym A.C. Stephen (sometimes A.C. Stephens) and had transitioned from writing to directing. Like Ed Wood, Steve saw where the film business was going and wanted to take advantage of it. The advent of television hit the motion picture business hard in the 1950s and Hollywood was still scrambling to recover in the next decade. Gimmicks like 3D and Cinerama had lured Americans away from their BarcaLoungers and into the theaters, but only temporarily. (Note the recent revival of 3D and the expansion of IMAX technology as modern-day cognates of the historical phenomenon.) Producers and backers wanted to know: what could movies offer viewers that television couldn't?

The answer, obviously, was sex -- and by "sex," I mean nudity. And by "nudity," I mean topless women. Ed Wood writes a lot about this transition towards sex and nudity in the movie business as part of his semi-autobiographical book, Hollywood Rat Race. Of course, so-called "stag" films and filmed burlesque routines had been around for decades. But in 1959, a photographer turned director named Russ Meyer had given (male) audiences a new kind of diversion with The Immoral Mr. Teas, which was termed a "nudie cutie," i.e. a feature-length narrative with a hint of female nudity (bare breasts and bottoms) but no actual onscreen intercourse.

Nudie cuties became the standard in adult entertainment for a few years in the 1960s, and Meyer was at the forefront of the movement.  Mr. Teas may not actually have been the very first of its type*, but it defined the "nudie cutie" subgenre. It wouldn't be long before both Ed and Steve were following Russ Meyer's siren song. While such movies could not necessarily play alongside mainstream fare, they could at least be exhibited more widely and freely than the truly seedy porn films of the past, thanks in some part to lenient rulings on obscenity by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Goldfinger (1964) inspired one of Orgy's scenes.

In 1965, Ed was 41 years old, and his directing and producing careers were essentially finished as far as theatrical features were concerned. His principal sources of income were his paperback novels and the very occasional sale of screenplays to low-budget, independent producers. But he had a property he felt was salable: a 19-page script called Nudie Ghoulies which would incorporate topless dancing into a vaguely Gothic, Universal-esque horror scenario. As it happened, Stephen Apostolof was in the market for just such a property. It was Bill Thompson (not long before his passing in 1963) who had first introduced Steve to Eddie and had convinced Apostolof that a partnership with Wood would be mutually beneficial. Ed and Steve's first meeting occurred at -- where else? -- the Brown Derby in Hollywood. Nudie Ghoulies aka Ghouls and Dolls had been moldering in Ed's filing cabinet for a while before Steve agreed to find the financing to turn it into a motion picture.

While the script was entirely Eddie's, Steve (like Donald McCoy before him) had some requests for revisions. The James Bond film Goldfinger (1964) had been a pop culture sensation, and Apostolof wanted to include the image of a woman painted entirely gold somewhere in the movie. Likewise, the Bulgarian filmmaker had been very impressed by some Hawaiian dancers he had seen and requested that Eddie add at least one such performer to the film. Eddie complied eagerly, and he became Apostolof's production manager and assistant casting director on the film as well.

For the central role of the Emperor, a spectral ruler who presides over the dead from his throne in a graveyard, Eddie recruited one of his old cronies: the eccentric TV psychic Criswell, whose delirious presence had previously graced Plan 9 from Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls. Director Apostolof agreed to hire the infamous Indiana-born prognosticator, perhaps because Criswell had gained national fame through talk show appearances and could thus attract attention to a small, independent film. Steve ultimately regretted this decision, as he found working with the dotty, absent-minded "son of a bitch" Criswell -- who never knew his lines (his cue-card reading is obvious throughout Orgy) and would occasionally fall asleep in his coffin -- quite a chore. Still in all, Cris did his part for the film, promoting it enthusiastically during his appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and even helping to name the picture.

Since Steve declared Ed's original titles (Nudie Ghoulies and Ghouls and Dolls) unsatisfactory for his film, Criswell suggested Orgy of the Damned. Apostolof refined this to Orgy of the Dead, the title under which it was released and is still known today.

Ed Wood himself was on set for at least part of the making of Orgy of the Dead, though his drinking was getting the best of him by 1965. Stephen Apostolof later told Rudolph Grey that he had to send Eddie home one day because he was too drunk on Old Crow bourbon to work . But there are still-existent photographs and 8mm home movies which show a smiling Ed as part of the Orgy crew, which also included Ted V. Mikels, who in a few years' time would be directing cult films of his own, like The Astro-Zombies (1968) and The Corpse Grinders (1971).

For his part, Eddie was thrilled to be a member of the Orgy team. In Hollywood Rat Race, which was written around the same time this movie was released (but not published for several decades), he wrote about the production with modest enthusiasm, commenting along the way about his writing career and the changing face of motion pictures:

Ed's tie-in novel from 1966.

Perhaps none of our films have, so far, been up for awards, But they are entertaining pictures. Our newly released Orgy of the Dead will be a pleasant surprise; it was filmed using a wide screen process and exciting color. It could well become a classic in its field. As well as enjoying the film, you might like to read my novel from which the screenplay was written. (It, too, is entitled Orgy of the Dead.)  

Of course, the legitimate, independent producer has been forced to change with the times also. We've had to use a certain amount of nudity along with realistic violence in our pictures. However, we try not to put in nudity for nudity's sake. If nudity is used for ultraviolence, it has to mean something to the progression of the story. This is the same reasoning by which the major studios arrive at their decisions. 

And it is not always an easy decision to come by. What may look excellent on paper may look pretty crummy on the screen. By the same token, the reverse is true. From where I stood beside the camera, watching a director with a series of dancers, they looked pretty bad, but when the film was shown, it turned out to be a classic of beauty and grace -- a credit to the director, certainly not to the writer: me! (pgs. 115-116)

Those who have already seen Orgy of the Dead will find some points of interest in Ed's account of the film's prodction. First, the tie-in paperback appeared in 1966, a year after the movie's debut. It incorporated several of Ed's already-existing short stories, including "Final Curtain," "The Day the Mummy Danced," and "The Night the Banshee Cried." Second, although this book and the Orgy of the Dead trailer both describe the film as being in widescreen, all of the transfers I've ever seen (one on VHS; two on DVD) have been 1.33:1.

As for the nudity issue, topless dancing accounts for about 75% of the movie's running time. The script's threadbare plot does not make a great attempt to justify the nudity or incorporate it into the story. It's just sort of there. Finally, while I agree with Ed that the film looks magnificent, I would give the credit to ace cinematographer Robert Caramico (Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive; an astonishing 123 episodes of TV's Dallas) and the design team of Robert Lathrop and Ernest Bouvenkamp (neither of whom ever worked on a movie again), as much as the film's director. In the supplemental material on the Orgy DVD, Apostolof admitted that he knew little about the technical aspects of filmmaking and said he was happy to delegate those responsibilities to others. What did he bring to the production, then? "Feeling," he said, something which one cannot learn in film school.

Pat Barringer wanted to be "a big fucking star."

As befits an Ed Wood movie, the making of Orgy of the Dead was typically scattershot and chaotic, mostly due to the personalities of its cast members. The film's loose plot follows a horror author named Bob (producer William Bates) who drags his skeptical girlfriend, Shirley (Pat Barringer), along with him when he visits an old cemetery to get inspiration for his next scary story. After a vaguely-implied car crash, the couple find themselves on the outskirts of a mysterious, fog-shrouded graveyard from which odd music is emanating.

Following this sound, they happen upon a bizarre, cult-like ritual in which the Emperor of the Dead (Criswell) and his assistant, the Princess of Darkness (Fawn Silver -- an exciting new discovery in the Vampira tradition), sit in judgment over the souls of those hovering between life and death. These unfortunate beings, all female, must dance topless for the Emperor to gain his approval. Watching the proceedings from a distance, Bob and Shirley are captured by the Emperor's henchmen, the Mummy (Lou Ojena) and the Werewolf (John Andrews). The two are tied to twin monuments in the cemetery and forced to watch the rest of the ritual, escaping doom only when the morning sun reduces the Emperor and his ilk to lifeless skeletons.

The topless dance routines, ten in all, take up the vast majority of Orgy's running time and were performed by models and go-go dancers from the Los Angeles entertainment scene. One such neophyte actress, pin-up girl and topless dancer Pat Barringer (who can also be seen in Russ Meyer's 1966 film Mondo Topless), did double duty in this film, playing not only the romantic lead character of Shirley (which was Ed Wood's drag name), but also one of the poor women who dance for Criswell. In fact, she ended up being the gold-painted girl that Apostolof had requested. Fellow cast member John Andrews was not a fan of this would-be diva. "Poor Pat Barringer," he told Rudy Grey. "She had the Lou Ojena syndrome. She thought she was going to be a big fucking star. And she couldn't even scream and make it convincing. She couldn't do shit. And those tits are plastic, by the way." While Ms. Barringer worked steadily in low-budget films throughout the mid-to-late 1960s, her screen career evaporated before the dawn of the 1970s. Big fucking stardom eluded her, as it did everyone else in the cast. Several of the dancers, though, did reemerge in a subsequent Apostolof film, The Bachelor's Dreams (1967). And, of course, Eddie and Steve's professional association would continue for over a decade.

* Fascinatingly, Ed Wood might have been the pseudonymous author of a slightly earlier nudie cutie, an oddball topless western called Revenge of the Virgins (1959), directed by Peter Perry, Jr. Time permitting, I may eventually cover this film as part of an article on the Ed Wood apocrypha.

The viewing experience: Sort of like eating an entire wedding cake in one sitting. A delight when savored in small portions, Orgy of the Dead can be excruciating when consumed in its entirety without a break. Rob Craig, author of the incredibly thorough guidebook Ed Wood, Mad Genius: A Study of the Films, declares that this film inspires both intense love and fierce hatred among viewers. I'd suggest that those who fall into the latter category have made the fatal mistake of trying to watch all of Orgy of the Dead in a single session with the expectation that the film's story will eventually pick up.

At roughly 90 minutes, this film is substantially longer than Plan 9 from Outer Space or Glen or Glenda?, yet it takes place almost entirely in one setting and is extremely repetitive and slow-moving. Therefore, many viewers will find the film utterly maddening and almost perversely tedious. Craig astutely points out that, for most of the film, the characters of Bob and Shirley are tied up and forced to watch the proceedings against their will and thus act as surrogates for the tortured audience.

Did Johnny Carson's Tonight Show inspire Ed Wood?

So why should one bother with Orgy of the Dead at all? Because it is a magnificent, one-of-a-kind film which could only have come from Ed Wood. In its utter strangeness, Orgy rivals even the unclassifiable Glenda. I have already written an article for the Zed Word Zombie Blog in which I semi-seriously suggest that the movie's strange structure is based on the format of a late night talk show. We have all the essentials: a host (Criswell) who starts the proceedings with a monologue, a subservient sidekick (the Princess of Darkness), numerous guests (the dancers), and an audience (Bob and Shirley).

In addition to serving as a Vaudeville-esque comedy team with their famous "Cleopatra and the snake" routine, the Mummy and the Werewolf also function as the host's backstage crew. It is suggested that the Mummy is the one who has been selecting the various women who emerge into the graveyard to dance for Criswell's approval, just as standup comics once hoped to win a thumbs-up from Johnny Carson. We are also told that there are many more souls who are waiting for an audience with the Emperor but that they will have to be dismissed for now. This is reminiscent of The Tonight Show's famed green room, where guests wait until they are summoned to the set. Apparently, if this film is to be believed, there is a "green room of the damned" in the shadowy void between life and death.

Of course, as on talk shows, there is a great deal of discussion of time in Orgy of the Dead, specifically how much of it is left. Unfortunately for them -- and luckily for us -- many of the Emperor's prospective "guests" are bumped from the evening's lineup. They share this fate with many would-be talk show guests who never make it to the panel with the host.

Certainly, like any good late night chat show, Orgy knows the importance of a flashy, eye-catching set. I said previously that most of the film's action is limited to one single location -- and it is -- but what a location! The phony cemetery in this film is so rich with details -- headstones, cobwebs, monuments, vampire bats (lifeless and rubbery), crypts, and a constantly-working fog machine -- that it has eclipsed even the patently false graveyard from Plan 9 in my imagination. If I ever become insanely, unfairly wealthy, I will have this entire set reconstructed in my home. That is a promise.

Much has already been written by others about the film's acting and its wonderfully ludicrous script, so I will attempt to be brief when addressing these points. If viewers become frustrated with the circular nature of Orgy of the Dead, I suggest a simple remedy: fast-forward through the nude dancing to get to the dialogue. You will find much to savor here. Criswell begins the film with the third iteration of Eddie's "monsters to be pitied" speech. Getting longer and more ornate with each appearance, this bit of cosmic doggerel began as simple onscreen text in Final Curtain (1957), then was recited by Criswell in Night of the Ghouls (1959), and is again performed by Criswell here in what must be considered the speech's final form. I can recite it by heart, should anyone ever need me to do so. Other famous Criswell lines are here as well:

• "Torture! Torture! It pleasures me!"

• "A pussycat is born to be whooped."

• "No one wishes to see a man dance."

• "Throw gold at her! More gold! More gold!! MORE GOLD!!!"

Two marvelous couples in Orgy of the Dead.

Among the other performers, clearly the most intriguing is Fawn Silver (aka Fawn Silverton) as the pale-skinned Princess of Darkness. An obvious attempt by Wood and Apostolof to manufacture a new Vampira, she is the film's most compelling and dynamic character, and the scenes in which she erotically menaces Shirley with a knife are the dramatic highlights of the entire production. It's a pity Silver's screen career wasn't longer.

It's easy to see, however, why neither Pat Barringer nor William Bates really made it in the movies. She's mannered and whiny here, while he has the personality of drywall. Like Anthony Cardoza and Tony McCoy, Bates was a pay-to-play performer who got a plum role in the production because he helped fund it. Barringer, of course, was hired for her surgically-enhanced chest and perfunctory dancing skills.

Together, these two zeroes somehow add up to one, as Bob and Shirley are among my favorite couples in the entire Ed Wood canon. It helps that Ed assigns them some of the film's ripest dialogue. (Example: "Your puritan upbringing holds you back from my monsters, but it certainly doesn't hurt your art of kissing." "That's life. My kisses are alive.") Being completely hopeless as actors, they read these lines in a very flat, literal way, like schoolkids reluctantly taking part in a holiday pageant.

And if those two weren't enough, Wood has given us another extraordinary couple with the Mummy and the Wolfman, cheapskate replicas of characters from the more innocent Universal horror films that Ed grew up loving. They really don't belong in Orgy of the Dead -- which, paradoxically, is exactly why they belong in Orgy of the Dead. The Mummy's dialogue is very badly and strangely dubbed, while the Wolfman seems to communicate only in grunts and howls. (When he howls, of course, actor John Andrews tilts back his head and inadvertently reveals his neck under the mask.)

Lovely still of Nadejda Dobrev on the set of Orgy.

As for the dancers themselves, who have the lion's share of the screen time, their quality varies. Some observers have declared that Orgy utterly fails as erotica, but I would not necessarily agree with that assessment. Indeed, at least two of the dancers -- Colleen O'Brien (Street Walker Dance) and Nadejda Dobrev (Slave Dance) -- are quite sexy, and all of the women are pleasing to look at as they gyrate in the near-nude for our entertainment. The dances go on too long, and the number of performers probably should have been trimmed from ten to, say, six or seven. One definite keeper is Texas Starr, who performs her memorable Cat Dance in a ridiculous full-body cat costume to the strains of a song which is as close to legally possible to "Alley Cat" without actually being "Alley Cat." The scene and the music are so unabashedly comic that they completely break the spooky, eerie vibe the film had been attempting to cultivate.

The film's uncredited score, is by Bolivian composer Jaime Mendoza-Nava, who also worked on such well-known films as The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976) and The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972). While author Rob Craig is highly critical of Mendoza-Nava's work, dismissing it as schlock, I unabashedly love this faux-exotic "lounge lizard" Muzak and am a proud owner of the Orgy of the Dead soundtrack album (Strangelove Records, 1995). Here, you will find Spanish bullfighting themes, a truly lovely Arabian melody (reminiscent of the one Tchaikovsky wrote for The Nutcracker) carried by the oboe and accented with finger cymbals, a trumpet-heavy funeral dirge, patently counterfeit "Native American" chanting ("Ya-ho! Wa-ho!"), Mancini-style pop jazz, sleazy burlesque "bump 'n' grind" music, and much more. What's not to love?

Before I leave Orgy of the Dead, I'd like to point out the way that Ed Wood's script uncannily presages two prime examples of midnight cinema, namely Hal Warren's "Manos" The Hands of Fate (1966) and Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

From the first time I saw Orgy on VHS in the 1990s, I could not help but notice how similar Bob and Shirley were to Brad and Janet from Rocky Horror. A prototypical all-American couple, they have car trouble, go searching for a telephone, and wind up witnessing and participating in a night of supernatural debauchery. Their squareness, naivete, and total misreading of the situation ("Could it be some kind of college initiation?") make Bob and Shirley the spiritual ancestors of Brad and Janet. The classic 1930s and 1940s horror films of Universal are repeatedly evoked by both Orgy and Rocky as well.

Meanwhile, just like the infamous "Manos," Orgy of the Dead features pagan rituals, human sacrifice, and a weirdly sexual cult in which women vie for the affections of a robe-wearing older man. (The cape in Orgy, by the way, was supposedly Bela Lugosi's from Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein. Believe that if you choose. I do.) Even Criswell's title, the Emperor, is suggestive of the Master from "Manos." More intriguing yet is the complicated relationship between the Emperor and the Princess, which grows more antagonistic as the night wears on. The plots of both Orgy and "Manos" unfold with Aristotelian unity over the course of a single evening. Fawn Silver repeatedly petitions her boss, Criswell, for her "own pleasures," just as Torgo ceaselessly begs the Master to grant him a bride.

For these reasons (and others), Orgy of the Dead would make an ideal double feature with either Warren's film or Sharman's film... if someone could just cut it down to 60 minutes.

NEXT WEEK: Orgy of the Dead would prove to be Criswell's last appearance in any film, Ed Wood-related or otherwise, although he would loan Eddie one of his caskets for Necromania (1971), a film we'll get to in due time. But Ed and Cris were good friends off the set as well, and the outlandish prognosticator looms large in the Ed Wood legend. So I thought it was only fitting that I should devote at least one week of this project to the strange, wonderful career of Jeron Criswell Koning aka Jeron Criswell King aka Charles Criswell King aka The Amazing Criswell. While the famed psychic's Los Angeles-based television show seems not to have survived into our time, one can still track down the great man's bestselling books from the late 1960s. And this I have done, my friends. In a week's time, you can read all about my findings as I explore the fascinating and mind-boggling world of... CRISWELL PREDICTS! 

Dirty Made Dirty Movies can be ordered at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, IndieBound, BAM!, Bookworks, McFarland, Waterstones, Indigo, Kinokuniya, and other retailers.

Is "Gravity" a great movie? Depends what you mean by great, I guess.

An untethered Sandra Bullock tumbles through space in Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity.

I have now seen at least three Alfonso Cuaron movies—Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and now Gravity (2013)—and I'll be damned if I can find any thematic connection between them. The guy gets around, that's for sure. As I'm writing this, I've just come back from the experience of seeing Gravity in IMAX 3D, mainly because this review in The AV Club told me to. (What can I say? I'm a mindless sheep sometimes and can be easily led by just about anyone who sounds even halfway convincing.) The movie couldn't be any fresher in my memory than it is now, so I figured I'd write about it sooner rather than later. As you may notice, most of the flicks I review around here are 50 years old or more, so this is a rare occasion indeed.

I suppose I wanted to write about whether or not Gravity can be truly considered a "great" movie. Matt Pais, the often-contrarian critic for Chicago's feisty Red Eye, made a special point in his three-star review to declare it "not a great film." Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern has been making the rounds to discuss his review in which he declares Gravity to be unlike any movie that has ever been released before, a true landmark in cinema. Obviously, the greatness or not-greatness of Gravity will be decided by history. In our instant-oatmeal society (thanks for that analogy, Lisa Simpson), we're often too eager to rank every new movie that comes out and determine its place in the pantheon. Cuaron's picture has been out for about three or four days now. All we can do is guess. History makes monkeys of us all, so we should prepare to be wrong whenever we start prognosticating.

2001 clearly influenced Gravity.

Based on my initial impression, I can say that Gravity is indeed an impressive technical achievement and is frequently something marvelous to look at. One of my core beliefs about movies is that they should provide us with "extraordinary things to see and to hear," and Gravity accomplishes that. Offhand, I can't think of a recent film which used special effects more convincingly in service of a compelling story. 

Gravity is a very effects-heavy film that tries not to look like an effects-heavy film. Cuaron is going for realism and plausibility here rather than impossible fantasy, and I believes he succeeds at that. In that sense, his film is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was obviously one of the inspirations for Gravity. At one point, Sandra Bullock's character, stranded first-time astronaut Ryan Stone, is seen curled up in the fetal position attached to an umbilical-cord-like tether, and it's damned near impossible not to think about Kubrick's space baby. (Speaking of homages, is it possible that the scene of Bullock removing her space suit in zero gravity is a descendant of Jane Fonda's free-floating striptease in Barbarella? Just a thought.) 

A major difference, though, between Kubrick's film and Cuaron's is that 2001 is open-ended, philosophical, and abstract, while Gravity is sentimental, inspirational, and uplifting, complete with heartwarming music and a sympathy-building backstory for its lead character. Did Cuaron, who also cowrote the script with his son Jonas, add these conventional storytelling elements because he truly believed in them... or was it just to make Gravity (which must have been expensive and time-consuming to produce) more commercial? Either way, the very traditional plot of this film will probably make many viewers enjoy Gravity more, but it sort of lessened my enjoyment. I'll put it this way: Gravity didn't shake me to my core and make me re-examine life or anything. When it was over, my thought was, "Hmmm. That was pretty neat," and not, "I have just seen a masterpiece." I might not have gone in the direction Cuaron did, but then again, my version of Gravity might have lost $100 million.

I thought about Dark Star during Gravity.

The other movie that I was thinking about during Gravity was John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974), a satirical sci-fi film with a vaguely similar "we're stranded in space and what the hell are we going to do?" plot. Very briefly, Carpenter's film—set in the 22nd century—centers around the crew of a scout ship whose mission is to destroy "unstable planets" in the deepest reaches of explored space. These men have been out in space so long that they've lost all interest in each other and in the mission. Frankly, they've all gone a little crazy—in some cases, a lot crazy—from isolation and boredom. 

Without spoiling things, a life-threatening crisis arises aboard the ship, and we see how these men deal with it. Or, more accurately, how they fail to deal with it effectively. Made very cheaply (an alleged "alien" is quite obviously a beach ball), Dark Star is one of those films which did manage to rattle around in my subconscious after I saw it. That's probably why I've revisited it periodically over the years. I can't see myself doing that with Gravity. Does that mean Gravity is not a "great" movie? Hell, I don't know. Time, my dear readers, is the only true indicator of that, and I just don't have enough of it. But I wanted to record my initial impression. Let's check back in ten, maybe twenty years and see if I was right. Deal?

By the way, if you're wondering whether it's worth the extra dough to see this flick in IMAX 3D, I'd say sure. Visually, it's trippy and transportive, and it's worthwhile to see the film in the immersive surrounding that an IMAX theater can provide. But, if you're running a little light on cash this month, you can live without it. The AV Club says that, if you don't view this movie on the largest-possible screen, you're not really seeing it at all. But I don't necessarily agree with that. You can see Gravity in a regular theater, and you'd still get the film's single-best element: a career-best performance by Sandra Bullock, who spends a great deal of screen time alone and conveys a lot of her character's emotions not through words but through facial expressions. You don't need IMAX or 3D for that.

Mill Creek comedy classics #59: "As You Like It" (1936)

ELISABETH BERGNER (and some dude named Laurence Olivier) star in As You Like It.

The flick: As You Like It (Twentieth Century Fox, 1936; United Artists, 1949) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.9

Director: Paul Czinner (The Rise of Catherine the Great; Romeo & Juliet [1966 version])

Actors of note:

• Elisabeth Bergner (49th Parallel; Oscar-nominated for Escape Me Never, which was directed by her husband, Paul Czinner, who also directed this movie)

• Laurence Olivier (Spartacus, Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, Marathon Man, Clash of the Titans, The Betsy, much more; won directing and acting Oscars for 1948's Hamlet; nominated ten more times; often cited as the greatest Shakespearean actor of the 20th century)

• Sophie Stewart (Things to Come, Devil Girl from Mars), Henry Ainley (British stage actor; played "Victor Drew" in a series of 1920s mystery films; this was his last and best-known picture)

• Leon Quartermaine (another British stage actor; didn't do many movies but appeared in Escape Me Never with Elisabeth Bergner; served as a dialogue supervisor on this movie)

• Peter Bull (best known as Russian Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove; appeared in The African Queen, Yellowbeard, Hitchcock's Sabotage, The Lavender Hill Mob, etc.)

• John Laurie (Hitchcock's The 39 Steps; Olivier's Hamlet; played Darrow in The Abominable Dr. Phibes)

• Felix Aylmer (Becket, Olivier's Hamlet)

• Mackenzie Ward (Caesar and Cleopatra, The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll)

Other notables: The play was adapted (in part) by J.M. Barrie, who was the creator of Peter Pan and the subject of the 2004 biopic Finding Neverland, in which he was portrayed by Johnny Depp. The editor was David Lean, who went on to direct Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, A Passage to India, and much more. Lean won Best Director twice and was nominated several more times; he was also an Oscar-nomated editor and screenwriter. Not exactly a lightweight. The score was by William Walton, who would become Laurence Olivier's go-to composer for such Shakespeare adaptations as Hamlet, Henry V, and Richard III.

A poster highlighting Laurence Olivier.

The gist of it: France, early 1600s. Handsome, virile Orlando (Olivier) is sick of being treated like a peasant by his vengeful older brother, Oliver (Laurie), so he decides to leave home. Elsewhere, fair Rosalind (Bergner), is living with her uncle, Duke Frederick (Aylmer), who usurped Rosalind's father, the rightful duke (Ainley). Obviously, Frederick doesn't get along well with Rosalind's dad, but he lets his niece stay with him because she's such close friends with Celia (Stewart), his own daughter. Meanwhile, the exiled duke is living in the enchanted Forest of Arden with a loyal band of merry men, like Robin Hood.

Orlando travels to Frederick's castle and wins a big wrestling tournament, instantly winning the love of Rosalind. Grouchy Duke Frederick kicks his niece out, and she takes Celia with her, along with a jester named Touchstone (Ward), who acts as the duo's sassy gay friend. Rosalind and Celia travel under false names to the Forest of Arden, with Rosalind taking on the male persona of "Ganymede." Orlando's also in the forest, pining for the lost Rosalind and writing poems about her, which he hangs on the trees. Before long, "Ganymede" and Orlando run into each other, and the former gives the latter some "macho" advice about romance.

Still, Orlando pines for his one true love. Luckily, he then saves Oliver from a lioness, thus winning back his brother's affection. All the major characters reconvene in the town for a big wedding, in which Rosalind and Orlando -- along with several other, lesser couples in the story -- are married. The celebration is made all the happier by the news that Frederick has renounced his dukedom, so Rosalind's father can reclaim his former title.

My take: There is little doubt that Laurence Olivier was one of the most acclaimed stage actors of the previous century. His movie career, though, is a bit spotty. Truth is, Sir Larry never quite got the hang of screen acting, even though he made dozens of films from the 1930s to the 1980s. Minimalism and naturalism aren't his strong suits. He's stiff, stentorian, and pompous, never seeming truly "human" or relatable on camera. He carefully recites his lines in that perfectly-enunciated Masterpiece Theater accent of his, as if he's trying to project his voice to the back of a crowded theater. In his campy later films, like The Boys from Brazil (1978) and Clash of the Titans (1981), his acting is shamelessly hammy and over-the-top, making him an unintentional figure of fun. As You Like It was one of Olivier's earlier movies (only six years into a six-decade career) and his very first Shakespearean role in a film. This fact alone makes it a historical curiosity.

The film's critical reputation isn't so great, though, and it's easy to see why.

This film has a bad case of "Clark Kent Syndrome."

To be blunt, As You Like It is not a very good movie. At times, it's even outright bad. Part of the problem, alas, might be the source material. This feather-light, extremely contrived comedy cannot be one of Shakespeare's very best, even though it contains his immortal "all the world's a stage" speech. The plotting is especially torturous, and Shakespeare isn't shy about having otherwise-useless characters shuffle onstage to explain certain plot points to one another. Yep, the Bard was the king of the so-called "infodump."

Olivier's a dullard as Orlando, but maybe there's not much he -- or anyone -- could do with such a bland, shallow role. The character has all the emotional depth of a cocktail napkin. Most of the actors here overplay their roles a bit, to little comedic or dramatic effect. Touchstone should, by all rights, be the life of the party, but instead he's a dreary drag.

The film's chief asset -- and simultaneously its chief liability -- is Elisabeth Bergner as Rosalind. I say "asset" because, in many scenes, she's the only one keeping this rather lethargic film's energy level up. Plus, the camera adores her, so she at least commands the audience's interest when she's onscreen. Had this been a silent movie with subtitles, As You Like It might have been a minor success. As it is, though, it's a misfire. Bergner hails from a region of Austria-Hungary we now call the Ukraine, and her thick accent sets her very noticeably apart from everyone else in the cast.

Plus, even more problematically, Bergner makes little to no effort to differentiate between Rosalind and "Ganymede." That duality is crucial for this plot to work, but Bergner doesn't sell it at all. The wardrobe, hair, and makeup people have done her  no favors either, because they strive at all times to make the actress look glamorous. As a viewer, I couldn't help but wonder why Orlando was fooled by "Ganymede" for even half a second. Is he blind and deaf? Maybe this kind of thing plays on the stage, but it just doesn't work in a movie. To put it simply, Rosalind makes Clark Kent look like a master of disguise in comparison.

NOTE: Matthew M. Foster's brutally honest review will tell you everything you need to know about this misbegotten movie. Go read it.

Wrestling As You Like It magazine.

Is it funny: Decidedly not. Touchstone's catty putdowns are poisonously unfunny, and some of the film's extended comedy sequences are excruciating. In particular, there is one scene in which several of the characters gather in the forest and publicly declare their love for various other characters. This person loves that person, who in turn loves that other person, etc. The conversation goes in a loop, always coming back to "Ganymede," who proudly declares that "he" feels love "for no woman." It's like the "Janet! Dr. Scott! Janet! Brad! Rocky!" scene from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, only much wordier. By the third moronic variation on this tiresome joke, I was audibly heckling the actors, all of whom are long dead.

In truth, I did find some amusement -- if not exactly laugh-out-loud humor -- in certain elements of the story.

Of all the things I expected to find in a Shakespeare film, wrestling was not among them. I honestly had no idea that wrestling was such a big sport in Bill's day. I could not help but compare the highly theatrical, carefully scripted professional wrestling of our time with the public performances of Shakespeare's plays at the Globe Theater in the 1600s. They both serve the same basic function, don't they? Shakespeare "belongs" to the academics and the intellectuals now, but his work was originally intended as popular entertainment. After all, this very play is called As You Like It, with the word "you" likely referring to the audience, i.e. "this is the kind of story you, the public, will enjoy." Then I remembered something extraordinary: there was actually a wrestling magazine called Wrestling As You Like It. This seemed too good to be true, like my memory was playing tricks on me. But a quick Google Image search showed me I was right.

So is wrestling the Shakespeare of our time, or was Shakespeare the wrestling of his time? Either way, the Bard and Vince McMahon are pretty much in the same profession. When you think about it, Shakespearean actors and professional wrestlers are both famous for wearing tights!

My grade: C-



P.S.  - No racial stereotypes here, but this movie does reinforce the stereotype that Shakespeare's plays are about a bunch of sissified morons prancing around in the forest, spouting flowery gibberish to one another.

Citizen Kane Action Comics!

Orson Welles' masterpiece reimagined as a newspaper comic.

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)!