A French portmanteau of
five tales plus wrap-around segment, Dark Stories to Survive the Night
is cut together from episodes that were originally aired on a French TV
series roughly two years earlier. The driving creative forces behind the
series and compilation film seem to be directors François Descraques
(dir. of The Visitor from the Future [2022 / trailer])
and Guillame Lubrano. They never combine forces on an episode,
or at least aren't credited as having done so, but each does direct every other episode and usually co-wrote the given segment as well.
German trailer to
Dark Stories to Survive the Night:
The wrap-around, after an oddly sci-fi and out-of-the-blue opening scene that makes little sense until the closing scene of the movie, concerns MILF Christine (the decidedly not French Kristanna Loken of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [2003 / trailer], BloodRayne [2005 / trailer], Bounty Killer [2013 / trailer] and Darkness of Man [2024 / trailer]), who is confronted by a murderous, evil puppet and ends up bound to a chair. To buy time and distract the puppet, Christine start telling horror stories, ultimately spinning five tales of varying effectiveness.
Personally, we find the wrap-around the weakest tale of the movie: the acting and direction is more than competent, but the many aspects of the narrative are a tad too cheesy and the cheapness of the staging of the killer puppet — it is never shown moving, just in new positions and with new expressions — sorely undermines the scares. But seeing that they (Seriously!) didn't even bother to hire a real person to play Christine's son asleep in bed — the use of a dummy is a tick too obvious — the project was obviously hampered by a low budget (not that the special effects of later episodes were in any way even half as shabby). The tales vary from scary to funny to suspenseful to tragic, with most almost open-ended despite any given final resolution.
In the first tale, to save her pre-teen son a no-nonsense professional curator (Delphine Chanéac of Splice [2009 / trailer], The Big Black [2011 / trailer], Kickback [2015 / trailer] and Stranger in the Dunes [2016 / trailer]) has to team up with a museum guard (Julien Pestel) to fight human-eating demons that reside in the exhibition paintings. The narrative offers some surprises and good laughs, and is strong enough of a tale to not be completely undermined by the crappy CGI of the demons.
The next story — Spoilers! — of woman jogger in the park, is definitely horrific and tragic, but relies a bit too much on things that don't ring true. For one, contemporary women like the jogger Sophie (Dorylia Calmel of The Bloodettes [2005 / trailer] and Let the Corpses Tan [2017]) probably won't drink out of a bottle of water offered to them from a nice stranger (John Robinson of Something Wicked [2014 / trailer] and Seraphim Falls [2006 / trailer]) without at least first checking whether the seal is broken; secondly, it goes from day to night too quickly and no woman would wait that long in an emptying park, especially if she starts feeling dizzy, for a stranger to come back; thirdly, drugged or not, assuming that she jogs there every day, she proves amazingly incapable of finding the path(s) out of the park; and lastly, despite the horrors of the ghosts, she would have to be simple in the head not to have realized that the water was drugged, so to run so gladly to the guy who gave her the water is beyond belief.
The third story, one of the best, concerns a man (Sébastien Lalanne) who awakens as a super-powerful zombie and comes to realize that there are some nasty situations that he needs to correct. Opening with a splat, the segment has a lot of on-the-spot humor, interesting characterization, emotional resonance and action, and works its way to a satisfying conclusion that ultimately cannot be described as happy. The next episode, about a frightened young woman (Tiphaine Daviot of Goal of the Dead [2014 / trailer] and Girls with Balls [2018 / trailer]) haunted by a killer jinn, is the scariest and least humorous of the bunch, in contrast to that tale that follows, perhaps the most tightly scripted and humorous and scary and bloody of the five, which is about two young filmmakers who travel to a falling-apart farm to make a documentary about an apparently unhinged man (Dominique Pinon of Diva [1981 / trailer], Delicatessen [1991 / trailer], Dante 01 [2008] and our Short Film of the Month for August, 2016, Le Queloune [2008]) who claims that aliens have anointed him the new messiah.
While some episodes reveal the limitations of their budget more so than others, some are amazing examples of overcoming one's financial limitations. In general, the acting is convincing and the direction tight, and but for the tale about the jogger, the stories remain engaging and as "plausible" as a ghost/zombie/jinn/demon tale might be able to be. The sleaze factor is low, generally lacking in any of the nudity or gore excesses found on either the great portmanteau films of yesterday or today's pay-TV anthology horrors, but as is typical of the genre all episodes work towards and end with an EC Comics-like twist.
If you like portmanteau horror films, you can easily do a lot worse and would have some difficulty doing better. Dark Stories to Survive the Night ticks all the right boxes and makes for a good evening's entertainment; if you like the genre or the format, you should give it a go. And seeing that the movie is all violence and blood and no sex or nudity, it is perfect fodder for today's children in the USA.
"Your driver believed he saw dead men... walking." Dr. Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn)
This independently produced 1932 pre-Code horror film, eight years shy of a century old at the time of the writing of this entry, is a flawed but wonderful little gem that is unarguably of greater importance historically than it is watchable for those who are not partial to films of such age. (We here at a wasted life, we admit freely, are rather partial to good or noteworthy films of the past.)
Trailer to
White Zombie:
If Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the acknowledged progenitor of the genre staple that is the flesh-eating zombie, this movie here, White Zombie, deserves acknowledgement as the progenitor of the zombie genre, as it is the earliest (known and surviving) feature-length movie to feature zombies at all.* For that, however, the movie sticks far closer to the underlying if normally overlooked truth behind traditional, non-flesheating, beast-of-burden zombies so entwined in the religious lore of Voodoo: the thing truly to be feared is less the mindless, abulic and enslaved creature shambling your way than the person who has created and controls it.
*Okay, there were the dead soldiers returning in Abel Glance's anti-war film J'accuse [1918], but technically they weren't zombies.
"It's a funeral, ma'm'selle. They're afraid of the men who steal dead bodies, so they dig the graves in the middle of the road where people pass all the time." Coach Driver (Clarence Muse)
In White Zombie, for all the (traditional, mindless but not flesh-eating) zombies seen, the true threat of the movie is the man whose commands they follow and whose name is never uttered once throughout the movie (nor given in the credits), but whose presence dominates even when he isn't in a scene: the zombie master Murder Legendre, played by the great Bela Lugosi (20 Oct 1882 – 16 Aug 1956) in his prime. For whatever reason, and perhaps indicative of his future as an actor, Lugosi followed up his star-making turns in the financial and critical mainstream studio hits Dracula (1931 / trailer) and Murder on the Rue Morgue (1932 / trailer)* with the lead part in this decidedly low-rent independent project.** The rest of the cast, but for one exception, the then-popular comic actor Joseph Cawthorn (29 Mar 1868 – 21 Jan 1949),*** who plays the reverend Dr. Brunner, consists primarily of former silent film names whose fame and/or popularity was already waning when the film was cast. And when one considers the general thespian ineptitude most of them display, it is easy to understand why their careers dwindled with the advent of sound.
*In his later years, Lugosi was known to complain that he was seriously underpaid for the part, as he took a one-off payment instead of residuals, but documentation exists that indicate that he was paid a respectable $5,000 (approximately $115,000 in today's money) and not the measly $800 (approx. $18,500 in today's money) he tended to claim.
**The production company, Halperin Productions, consisted of the brothers Victor and Edward Halperin (12 May 1898 – 2 Mar 1981). Edward did the production duties, while Victor Halperin (24 Aug 1895 – 17 May 1983) the direction. The duo had worked together and alone as producers for other independent productions (e.g., She Goes to War [1929 / full short version]) prior to forming Halperin Productions. The company seems to have dissolved soon after White Zombie, as the firm apparently produced only two other movies thereafter, the loose sequel Revolt of the Zombies (1936 / trailer bottom of page) and Nation Aflame (1937 / full movie). Edward seems to have slowly drifted away, eventually to Rancho Mirage, while Victor, who had been a successful Broadway producer and director prior to entering the movie biz, continued making movies until 1942, when he retired to Benton, Arkansas. None of Halperin's other directorial efforts are as good as this one, though Supernatural (1933 / trailer below) comes close and both the confusing Torture Ship (1939 / film) and Revolt of the Zombies (1936) are at least watchable.
***A now more or less forgotten name and face, Cawthorn, like Lugosi, was at the height of his fame when he made this movie. While he treats his role and the film completely serious, he nevertheless offers moments of dry comedy that indicate his comedy background.
Trailer to
Supernatural (1933):
Inspired by the popularity of Kenneth S. Webb's (16 Oct 1885 – 6 Mar 1966) current Broadway hit Zombie, the two Halperins decided to make a horror movie around the legendary Caribbean creatures — and were even later sued by the playwright for supposed plagiarism. (Webb lost the case.) Be what it may, however, like Webb the Halperin Brothers turned to cannibal William Seabrook's (22 Feb 1884 – 20 Sept 1945) once-forgotten "non-fiction" book The Magic Island for the inspiration of their story, the screenplay of which was supplied by Garnett Weston (27 Jun 1890 – 4 Oct 1980).
"Just a pinpoint monsieur. In a flower. Or perhaps in a glass of wine." Legendre (Bela Lugosi)
The narrative that Weston came up with has some truly odd aspects and leaves many things unexplained, like why the young couple, blonde Betty Boop clone Madeline Parker (Madge Bellamy [30 Jun 1899 – 24 Jan 1990]*) and bank employee Neil Parker (John Harron [31 Mar 1904 – 24 Nov 1939]), even come to Haiti to marry. Once Madeline reaches Haiti, however, she and her fiancée take up the invitation to conduct the marriage at the home of the rich plantation owner Charles Beaument (Robert Frazer [29 Jun 1891 – 17 Aug 1944]), whom she met on the boat over, because he has promised her to find employment for Neil in New York. But despite the boat trip together, she is apparently ignorant of the fact that Charles is in love with her (vociferations of which he later exclaims as he plays best man at the wedding). Charles, in turn, is more than willing to make a bargain with the devil to get her in his hands — including making her zombie.
*Bellamy, born Margret Derden Philpott in Hillsboro, Planet Texas, received a star on the Walk of Stars (at 6517 Hollywood Blvd) in 1960, long after her career ended and she was more or less forgotten. An extremely popular star of the silent screen, she worked with names as illustrious as Thomas Ince, King Vidor, John Ford and Maurice Tourneur — by 1924's The White Sin (film), she was enough of a name draw to be the biggest name on the poster. Fox even chose her to be the star of their first-ever (and now lost) talkie, Mother Knows Best (1928). She was also famously difficult and demanding and ill-tempered — her 1928 marriage to stockbroker Logan Metcalf, for example, survived less than three days — and with the advent of sound her career nose-dived. She was forced to go independent and, with White Zombie, the only horror movie she ever made, she entered the realm of Poverty Row productions. Her performance, justifiably, was panned and by 1935 she was doing uncredited parts. The scandal that arose as of 20 January 1943, when she fired three .32 calibre revolver shots at her former lover, the married lumber executive Albert Stanwood Murphy (13 Jul 1892 – 9 Apr 1963), on an open street in San Francisco, put the final nail in the coffin of her already dead career. Her autobiography, A Darling of the Twenties, came out a month after she died, at the age of 90, of heart failure on 24 January 1990. (Trivia: Regarding Logan Metcalf, if he is remembered today at all for anything other than his short marriage to Madge, then it is for being the subsequently caught hit-and-run driver that almost killed Basil Rathbone (of Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet [1965], Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror [1942], Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon [1942], The Spider Woman [1943/44], The Scarlet Claw [1924] and so much more) on 15 January 1937 and did kill the actor John Milton (13 Jul 1870 – 15 Jan 1937).
"I kissed her as she lay there in the coffin; and her lips were cold." Neil Parker (John Harron*)
*John Harron, whose performance in White Zombie is as equally inept as that of Ms. Bellamy, was a busy actor as of his second film, Through the Back Door (1921 / full film), up until he died of spinal meningitis in 1940. His roles substantially diminished in size with the advent of sound, many not even being credited. Some claim that the start of his career had less to do with thespian talent than the publicity of the "mysterious" shooting death of his then far more famous and successful brother Robert "Bobby" Harron (12 Apr 1893 – 5 Sep 1920). While some claim it suicide, Harron's death may have simply been bad luck (re: stupidity): unpacking in a hotel, his loaded gun dropped from his suitcase and shot him in the chest. Look hard and you might see John Harron in The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938 / trailer), They Made Me a Criminal (1939 / trailer) and The Return of Dr X (1939 / trailer).
As appropriate to the times it was made, White Zombie is one of those films that involves an almost totally white cast despite being set in an Afro-Caribbean country — the only Black cast member to have any dialogue is the coachman played by Clarence Muse (14 Oct 1889 – 13 Oct 1979),* while the only other "Black" character of note, the witch doctor Piere, is played by a black-faced Dan Crimmins ([18 May 1863 – 12 Jul 1945] of Seven Footprints to Satan [1929 / reconstruction]). In theory, a few of Legendre's zombies could be of mixed or Afro-Caribbean blood — for example, Ledot (John T. Prince [11 Sept 1871 – 23 Dec 1937]), the zombiefied former witch doctor that was once Legendre's master, or Chauvin (Frederick Peters [30 Jun 1884 – 23 Apr 1963]), the former high executioner — but none truly look it. But when they and their like stumble forwards, unfeeling and unthinking and unstoppable, they do (usually) manage to make an unpleasantly dire and dreadful appearance. (Although, actually, Chauvin might have been far more effective had he not been played with such a ridiculous facial expression.) Black or white or race undetermined, Bela Lugosi excels as the suave voodoo master Legendre, at times dripping contempt, superciliousness, fury, resentment, power, evilness and narcissism.As florid as his performance sometimes is, it never devolves into caricature.
*Muse was the first African American to appear in a starring role in a talkie, 1929's Hearts in Dixie, which is also considered the first all-Black sound film. ("Hearts in Dixie unfolds as a series of sketches of life among American blacks. Although the characters are not slaves they are nevertheless racial stereotypes in terms of the contemporary white images of the period.") Steadily employed till his death, he can be found (if often briefly) in movies as diverse as Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932 / trailer), Roy William Neill's underappreciated Black Moon (1934 / full film) and far-less-interesting Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943 / full movie), Invisible Ghost (1941 / trailer), Lang's Scarlet Street (1945 / trailer), Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943 / trailer), Buck and the Preacher (1972 / trailer) and Car Wash (1976 / trailer).
Roy William Neill's Black Moon:
"I thought that beauty alone would satisfy. But the soul is gone. I can't bear those empty, staring eyes." Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer*)
*Like John Harron, Robert Frazer died of unlucky and unpredictable bad health: at the age of 53, he died of leukaemia in Los Angeles, California. The first person known to have played Robin Hood on screen (in Robin Hood [1912]) and, possibly, Jesus Christ (in the lost 1912 short, The Holy City), he was never a major player at the majors but, until he became ill, he was busy throughout his career, if usually in supporting parts and as "the bad guy" after the advent of sound. His movies include Black Dragons (1942), the classic Vampire Bat (1933), Condemned to Live (1935 / full movie), the exploiter Gambling with Souls (1936 / full movie), and Found Alive (1933 / scene). A somewhat stoic actor, he fares better in White Zombie than either Harron or Bellamy.
Halperin's direction is oddly inconsistent but often notably experimental and moody. If he initially resorts (and occasionally returns) to some dull unmoving camera shots, he also uses some pretty wild wipes and split screen shots, not to mention some inspired placement of the camera (none so effective as those in the crypt and in Legendre's mill). The scene in which Neil is drowning his widowed sorrows in a bar populated only by music and shadows is a visual treat that works well at overcoming the obvious budget limitations that probably inspired it. Halperin often achieves a notable eerie moodiness and sense of dread and/or despair, particularly during Beaumont's initial visit to Legendre's sugar mill manned only by zombies and after Madeline has been zombified. If Halperin is obviously lacking in the ability of directing actors, he must be given credit for his ability to create atmosphere. (Aside from Lugosi and Cawthorn, the only other actor to give a halfway nuanced and/or professional performance is Brandon Hurst [30 Nov 1866 – 15 Jul 1947], who plays Silver, Beaumont's loyal butler whose loyalty is rewarded with an unpleasant death.) It is initially a bit odd, of course, when the setting turns to a European-looking castle set high on a cliff (in Haiti?), but the gothic setting and interior work well with the overall otherworldliness of the film.
"Surely you don't think she's alive, in the hands of natives. Oh no! Better dead than that." Neil Parker (John Harron)
Basically, White Zombie is a good movie despite itself. More creepy and atmospheric than truly scary, occasional flashes of visual brilliance give the often static movie some memorable scenes. Still, White Zombie is noticeably creaky and a bit slow moving, while the acting is mostly wanting and the script woozy, but despite all its obvious limitations the historically important movie remains highly watchable despite itself and ultimately offers a fun ride, especially in the restored form currently available. (The copy we saw was screened as part of the exhibition "Zombies: Death Is Not the End?" at the Musee du Quai Brany in Paris in October of 2024.) We give the movie four out of five voodoo dolls, and not just because of the for-the-time racy (and subsequently often cut) but now rather tame scene of Madeline walking around her bedroom in her white knickers.
If you haven't seen Iron Sky (2012 / trailer), the movie that preceded this one, do so. Wonderfully tasteless, at times sweet, still timely (in reflecting American political bent), broadly but generally well-acted and funny as hell, the Finnish film deserved to be the hit that it was and can easily be re-watched time and again. We did so recently for [only] the third time, but then, we caught it the first time during its initial cinema run over a decade ago.
Jesus never made it into the movie*:
*For that, seven year's earlier, in 2012, he did fight zombies in Fist of Jesus.
As to be expected when a movie is a hit, it wasn't long before a sequel was announced. What took a lot longer was getting the sequel, Iron Sky: The Coming Race, made and released, as the production suffered endless delays and problems. It ended up taking seven years before The Coming Race hit the screens — unluckily without Jesus — and then, unlike its predecessor, it tanked. And it bombed so badly that the main production company, Blind Spot Pictures, and Iron Sky Universe, the owners of the franchise itself, both subsequently declared bankruptcy. Thus, one can pretty much rest assured that neither Iron Sky 3: The Ark (uninteresting teaser), announced online, or Iron Sky: The End Game (the narrative of which is teased in The Coming Race's end credits sequence) will ever see the light of day.
First trailer to
Iron Sky – The Coming Race:
The Coming Race transpires 29 years after the events in Iron Sky, which (Spoiler!) ends with the Earth falling to nuclear war, the only survivors being those humans on the Nazi base on the dark side of the moon, the heroes and nice couple of that movie, Afro American model cum astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby of Daybreakers [2009], Upgrade [2018 / trailer], and Blood Vessel [2019 / trailer]) and good gal reformed Nazi Renate Richter (Julia Dietze also of Monrak[2017 / trailer], Bullet [2014 / trailer] and the pointless and pointlessly pimped out remake of Room 205 [2007], 205: Room of Fear [2011/ trailer]) smooching away amidst the ruins of the moonbase as the nuclear bombs crisscross the Earth. (Causing an older German woman to stand up and ask, "Are you aware you are kissing a Black man?")
In 2047, James is gone, and the old and ill and disillusioned Renate, appears to be the head of the now overpopulated and falling-apart moonbase, which is under the sway of Jobsism, a religion based on the words and wisdom of Steve Jobs and Apple led by the Jobs-clone Donald (Drew Barrymore's ex-husband Tom Green of Freddy Got Fingered [2001 / trailer] and Bethany [2017 / trailer]). When Obi Washington (Lara Rossi of You (Us) Me [2014 / trailer] and Robin Hood [2018 / trailer]), the daughter of James and Renate, and the base's all-purpose handywoman, helps save an incoming Russian refugee ship, she subsequently meets a few of the passengers, including Iron Sky's Wolfgang Kortzfleisch (Euro-actor icon Udo Kier of Shamlos (1968 / scene), Mark of the Devil (1970 / trailer), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973 / trailer), Blood for Dracula (1974 / trailer), Trauma (1976 / trailer), Spermula (1976 / French trailer), Insel der blutigen Plantage (1983 / trailer), Europa [1991 / trailer], Blade [1998] and so much more), the moombase's long presumed dead previous Fuehrer, who ultimately reveals that he is a Vril, one of the alien reptilian race that inhabit the Earth's hollow core...
Long story short: Obi, refugee-ship pilot Sasha (Vladimir Burlakov of The Darker the Lake [2022 / trailer]), security office Malcolm ("martial arts expert, fashion designer, gay activist, OnlyFans male monster" Kit Dale [YouTube]") and some of the Jobsists fly to the underground city of Agartha to steal the Holy Grail, the vessel of the city's never-ending energy supply, Vrilia, in the hope of saving their moon colony. Naturally, the shit hits the fan everywhere, all the time.
As bizarre and over-the-top as Iron Sky is, it is also a well-made movie that successfully satirizes numerous aspects of American culture, politics, sexual politics, concepts and thought patterns, taking the piss out of everything with a continuous series of grotesqueries and hilarious jabs, many of which remain valid today. For all its stupidity, it is also an amazingly insightful movie. Unluckily, the same cannot be said of the sequel — which doesn't mean The Coming Race isn't enjoyable on its own terms.
The Coming Race replaces the contemporary political subtexts of Iron Sky with one of the more popular conspiracy theories currently, that of an alien reptilian race that pulls all the strings — a fictional concept originally introduced in 1871 in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Vril: The Power of the Coming Race that has since come to be taken as true by many, especially those US Americans who vote Republican — to create a fun, joke-filled and kinetic action movie. The narrative uses a lot of tweaked but timeworn movie clichés, which makes the movie comes across almost like a contemporary reboot of any number of hollow-Earth movies, like At the Earth's Core (1976 / trailer) or Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959 / trailer or 2008 / trailer) or — to a far lesser extent — What Waits Below (1984 / trailer).
Structurally, once too often it relies on voiceover to keep the viewer informed about things, past and present and relevant and irrelevant, which conveys the feeling that the budgetary problems the production faced cost the movie some scenes. The scattershot script pretty much takes everything and puts it in the blender, which means that a lot happens quickly and there are a lot of throwaway jokes.
In that sense, although it really doesn't throw everything at the wall like, say, Airplane! (1980 / trailer) or the a wasted life fave Top Secret (1984 / trailer) does, the scriptwriter Dalan Musson obviously found no joke too stupid to be included. The three leads don't embarrass themselves as actors and make a likable trio, while Udo Kier, as perhaps to be expected, is spot-on as the duplicitous Kortzfleisch and his far more evil Vril twin brother, Adolf Hitler. Unlike in the first movie but appropriate to her character, Julia Dietze is rather drab and lacking in that special aura she exuded in Iron Sky, but is truly is fun to see her attack a tyrannosaurus rex with her high heels. In regards to the CGI, like the first movie it varies in quality and effectiveness, but works on the whole.
The Coming Race pales in every way when compared to Iron Sky, but at the same time it is a bit more fun in an almost kiddy-film way. Kids who like over-the-top and ridiculous movies will probably enjoy the movie as much as any given adult, especially since it basically moves from action scene to action scene without pausing to breathe. Stupid, The Coming Race might be, but it is also action- and laugh-packed, so it has everything needed for an evening's entertainment. About the only thing we here at a wasted life could think of that the movie truly lacks is a nude full frontal of the dim but buff Kit Dale, whom we would bend over for any day.
Director Timo Vuorensola has since gone on to direct Jeepers Creepers: Reborn (2022 / trailer), the latest and most pointless entry in a franchise created by a pedophile, and the bucket of clichés that is 97 Minutes (2023 / trailer). One hopes that he might one day do something really great again.
Allison Hayes (6 Mar 1930 – 27 Feb 1977), was an American film and television actress and model who could perhaps be described as a poor man's Jane Russell (21 Jun 1921 – 28 Feb 2011) — ironically, seeing that Russell was actually born to white trash and Hayes was decidedly middle class. Born Mary Jane Hayes in Charleston, West Virginia, her father, William E. Hayes, worked for the Navy and her mother, W.E. Hayes's second wife Charlotte Gibson Hayes, appears to have been a homemaker. The family later moved to Washington, D.C, living at 4127 New Hampshire Avenue NW. She attended the Academy of the Holy Cross before entering public school, and graduated from Calvin Coolidge High School in 1948. As Miss District of Columbia, she represented D.C. in the 1949 Miss America pageant, which she did not win. She did a stint as a radio co-host, then worked on local television, and enrolled at the Catholic University of America (majoring in music), all the while working as a model (36-23-36).
In 1953, after doing a screen test for Warner's in NYC, she was approached by a Universal talent scout visiting D.C., which eventually led to her signing a seven-year contract. Despite an auspicious beginning in a Douglas Sirk slab of costume melodrama and a Tony Curtis musical(see Part I) and swashbuckler, Allison Hayes quickly became a B-movie staple. On the big screen, she never managed to leave the realm of low-budget films and second features, but on the small screen she was busy as a guest star and in soaps. A lifelong health fanatic, she regularly took vitamins and supplements, which was to be her undoing: at the advice of Dr. Henry Bieler (2 Apr 1893 – 11 Oct 1975), "an American physician and germ-theory denialist", she began taking calcium supplements made from the bones of horses. Unluckily, they were also lead-contaminated, and by the time she stopped taking them she could barely walk, was losing her hair, and was extremely ill. She later developed leukemia, from which she eventually died. The beautiful and striking actress with an amazing figure would probably be forgotten today were it not for the trash classic, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), in which she plays the titular woman. Her death led the FDA to introduce (non-enforceable) regulations guaranteeing quality standards in supplements — but as late as 2003, two out 15 products tested by the nongovernmental testing agency ConsumerLab still had high levels of lead in them.
Allison Hayes,a true Babe of Yesteryear, had her career and life cut tragically short. A wasted life
would like to honor her with one of our typically meandering career
reviews of her short but surprisingly busy movie-making career,
beginning with:
Another one that may have gotten away. (In other words: she isn't in it.) Released 13 July 1955. As mentioned earlier, in those pre-#MeToo days, just like in these post-#MeToo days, making the kind of waves Allison Hayes did in Sign of the Pagan [see Allison Hayes, Part I: 1953-54] had repercussions. Like being pulled from, or not given, an upcoming project — not that there is any proof that happened...
Trailer to
Foxfire:
Still, Foxfire could well be another Universal production that got away: "Actress Mara Corday has said that director Joseph Pevney (15 Sept 1911 – 18 May 2008) wanted Allison for the role that she ended up playing in Foxfire. Corday isn't sure why she was cast instead of Allison, but that threat of a lawsuit may have been a black mark against Allison. [...] Corday has declared that U-I just 'threw [Allison] away' without realizing her potential. Corday told writer Tom Weaver in an interview published in his book It Came From Horrorwood: 'Oh, I adored Allison. She and I were very dear friends. I didn't make very many friends over there [Universal-International], but Allison did become a friend for some reason. I don't know why. I guess it was because she was so genuine, she had not a jealous bone in her body. She was a giving person. But she wasn't used nearly enough by Universal. She was one of the ones they cast aside, they never really pushed her over there. Very statuesque, beautiful face — but they didn't push her. She didn't get any real credit until after she left Universal. [...]. [Raz's Midnight Macabre]"
Here it might be added, for the benefit of the doubt, that on 27 July 1955, the LA Times published a blurb about the film, stating "Linda Christian Role Goes to Corday", so it could be that multiple female contract players were considered at different times.
Director Pevney, with 14 episodes to his name, is tied with director Marc Daniels (27 Jan 1912 – 23 Apr 1989) when it comes to directing the most episodes of the original Star Trek (1966-69) series. He began his career as an actor, most notably in Thieves' Highway (1949 / trailer) and Body and Soul (1947 / full movie), before turning to feature films — The Strange Door (1951 / trailer below) being his only "horror" movie — and, in his twilight years, to TV projects. Foxfire is a mid-career, and middling, contemporary Arizona-set romance melodrama loosely based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Anya Seton (23 Jan 1906 – 8 Nov 1990) starring, as evident by the posters, Jeff Chandler and Jane Russell — though Mara Corday (in the role she says Pevney wanted to give Hayes) makes the small print at the bottom.
Trailer to
The Strange Door:
The plot, found at Laura's Miscellaneous Musings: "[Jane] Russell plays Amanda Lawrence, who's vacationing in the desert when a tire blows on her car. She's given a lift by mining engineer Jonathan Dartland (Chandler) and his friend, an alcoholic doctor named Hugh Slater (Dan Duryea of The Burglar [1957] and more). Amanda and 'Dart' fall in love — or lust — almost at first sight and quickly marry. Amanda may be a fish out of water in Dart's tiny mining town, but she's friendly and eager to fit in. She and Dart are happy, but she struggles to understand her insecure husband's darker moods and emotional reserve, finally understanding him better when she visits an Indian reservation and meets the mother (Celia Lovsky) who abandoned him. [...] Duryea plays somewhat of an odd character, who carries a torch for Amanda, despite the fact that she only sees him as a friend — and despite the fact his beautiful nurse (Mara Corday) clearly loves him. Although he can be charming when sober, it's never made clear just why she's hung up on him."
Early marital bliss between Amanda and Dart is not helped by the fact that Amanda's mother, (Frieda Inescort [29 Jun 1901 – 26 Feb 1976] of The Alligator People [1959 / trailer] and The Return of the Vampire [1943 / trailer]), is less than thrilled by Dartland's less than clean bloodline...
Jeff Chandler sings the title track:
"Foxfire is kind of an interesting entry in what might be thought of as the 'reassessment' of certain Western tropes during the 1950s, though the film is not 'really' a Western, at least in terms of the old 'Cowboys versus Indians' angle. Instead, it attempts to wrangle with what a certain chanteuse named Cher once sang about in a tune called Half Breed, as focal male character Jonathan Dartland (Jeff Chandler) grapples with the fact that his father was a Caucasian and his mother an Apache. [...] What's kind of ironic about the whole 'reassessment' angle [...] is how the film is almost callously disrespectful to some of its Native American characters (mostly cameos, it should be mentioned) while it purports to evoke empathy and/or sympathy for a main character who is himself half Native American. [...] If the Apache aspect gives Foxfire its putative 'local flavor', in other ways the film plays out in a rather rote manner, especially with regard to the mining subplot [...]. Director Joseph Pevney makes the most of his widescreen framings, working with noted cinematographer William H. Daniels to provide nice vistas of the well done location work. Pevney and Daniels also aren't shy about framing Jane Russell in a variety of appealing ways, often accentuating her more than famous figure. [Blue Ray Com]"
Cher sings
Half Breed:
"Is there ever a movie about a mining town that somehow doesn't involve a mining disaster? [...] If you're going to have a drama, particularly a melodrama, set in a mining town, you're going to have to have a final act in which there's a cave-in, an accident, a death, or a horrible something else transpiring in a mineshaft. (For supernatural tales, there's always going to be a creature lurking in a mineshaft). Foxfire, a slightly lurid, slightly campy melodrama, is about as far away from the horror genre as you can get. [...] The movie's view on race relations and the smugness and insular nature of small town 1950s America reminded me very much of Douglas Sirk's films from the same era. Foxfire, with a strong supporting cast [...], is indeed both a melodrama and a penchant critique of bourgeois societal expectations regarding romance and marriage. But it plays in 2019 more like pure camp than like anything one would take remotely seriously. Still, with a particularly effective use of color, it's a beautiful movie to look at. [Mystery File]"
"The fascinating time capsule of racial attitudes and social mores — as reinforced by a supporting performance from Mara Corday as Duryea's similarly mixed heritage (and love-unrequited) nurse; along with a film passage where Russell has an unnerving encounter with Chandler's absent mother [...] at the nearby Apache reservation — gains much in viewing today from its wonderfully bursting-at-the-seams style of mid-50s' (over-)production values; the clashing multi-tones of Foxfire's setting, moods, personalities, and themes nonetheless held together by an unusually frank story aesthetic and (especially) by the honesty and believability of its two leads. [Zeke Film]"
Player with Railroads and the Nations Freight Handler.
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders."
A Sam Katzman (7 Jul 1901 – 4 Aug 1973) production; released July 1955. Considering the size and importance of her part, Allison Hayes, on loan to Columbia from U-I, is notably under-billed on the poster — many of which feature her image but not her name.
Abbe Lane, nee Abigail Francine Lassman, who did get poster credit, was married (1952–64) to her more-than-30-years-older co-star Xavier Cugat (1 Jan 1900 – 27 Oct 1990) at the time the movie was made; she was eventually replaced in the marital bed (1966–78) by the then possibly 15-year old Charo. (Charo has so many birthdates, who knows when she was actually born.) Back in those days, it should be noted, a woman's age was the contemporary equivalent of Viagra, providing it was low enough.
From the movie —
Abbe Lane sings One at a Time:
"At Columbia she had one of best roles as Joyce Kern in Chicago Syndicate. Looking lovely in evening gowns and beautifully coiffed, Allison played a young lady who was out to get the mob for killing her father. She played opposite '40s leading man Dennis O'Keefe (29 Mar 1908 – 31 Aug 1968). [...] Some of the film was shot on location in the Windy City. [Chris] Alcaide (22 Oct 1923 – 30 Jun 2004), who played a gangster's goon in the film, told [...] that while filming one particular scene, Allison and Abbe [Lane] got the giggles. They were supposed to smash a vase over Alcaide's head as he threatens them, and Abbe had fallen onto her ample rumba shaker on the first take. Director Fred F. Sears (7 Jul 1912 – 30 Nov 1957) was furious, it took several takes to get the scene in the can before the girls could contain their laughter. As it is, the scene ends abruptly with Allison avoiding Abbe's eye, and looking down quickly. [An Internet Biography]"
A tune played in the movie —
Cugat's cover of Greek Bolero:
Prolific director Fred F. Sears was both an actor and quick deliverer of cheap and under-budget product who, after his death at the young age of 44 of either a heart attack or cerebral hemorrhage (online sources disagree) was quickly forgotten. For that, he delivered the goods sometimes, including Cell 2455, Death Row (1955, with William Campbell); one of the great disasterpieces of the 50s, The Giant Claw (1957); Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956 / trailer), which is generally considered his best film, possibly due to Ray Harryhausen's special effects; and the wonderfully less-than-spectacular The Night the World Exploded (1957 / trailer) as well as the science-turned-him-into The Werewolf (1956 / trailer).
A tune played in the movie —
Cugat's cover of La Cumparsita:
The plot, from Blueprint: Review: "Chicago Syndicate sees accountant Barry Amsterdam (Dennis O'Keefe of The Leopard Man [1943] and Sirens of Atlantis [1949 / full movie]) talked by the authorities into working undercover for a crime syndicate run by Arnold Valent (Paul Stewart*), after the boss's previous accountant Nelson Kern is murdered. Amsterdam slowly gains Valent's trust and is brought into his inner circle as his chief accountant. In this role, Amsterdam works to try and find evidence of the gangster's criminal dealings, which proves tricky seeing as Valent cunningly keeps his name off the books. Amsterdam discovers there may be evidence of Kern's old accounts still available though, in Valent's name, which could bring down the syndicate. The undercover accountant enlists the help of the mysterious Sue Morton (Allison Hayes) who, we discover, is also keen to bring Valent down. Connie Peters (Abbe Lane), Valent's girl, also proves to be a valuable asset, particularly after Sue pushes her man away from her. [...]"
*Paul Stewart nee Paul Sternberg (13 Mar 1908 – 17 Feb 1986), character actor extraordinary, is found in a number of movies a wasted life is always willing to watch again, and that you should see if you haven't yet, including: Citizen Kane (1941 / trailer), The Window (1949 / murder!), Kiss Me Deadly (1955 / trailer), In Cold Blood (1957 / trailer) and The Day of the Locust (1975 / trailer)...
"This is a fast-paced 83-minute movie [...]. It's done in classic docu-noir style, with the voice of an omniscient narrator (Richard Cutting [31 Oct 1912 – 7 Mar 1972] of The Girl in Black Stockings [1957]) filling in the blanks as Barry works his way up through Valent's organization. There's also a lot of great footage shot in Chicago, with the final confrontation between Barry and Valent making especially good use of locations. [...] Abbe Lane (below, not from the film) does a good job with a flashy role as Valent's spurned mistress, a singer with a drinking problem. [Laura's Miscellaneous Musings]"
(Spoiler!) "Allison Hayes plays a tricky role here, as Sue Morton is only an alias, she's really somebody else. That reveal comes at the halfway point of the movie, both for Barry Amsterdam and the viewer. It adds an extra plotline to the movie, and Hayes pulls it off well. I also liked that her character and Amsterdam have obvious chemistry, but don't really do anything about it, they're both 'all business' in a sense. Contrast that with Abbe Lane's Connie, who is only about one thing, her relationship with Valent and more importantly, everything that comes with it. She's jealous and suspicious, trusting nobody except Valent and her bandleader, played by Lane's husband Xavier Cugat. Cugat was a bandleader in real life, he and his orchestra appeared in several movies, primarily those with Lane in them. They also do a few musical numbers here, with Abbe Lane singing, she's not dubbed as was often the case in these noirs. Lane does a nice job of portraying a beautiful and jealous woman, including a scene where Connie and Sue exchange catty remarks back and forth before engaging in a catfight. [Reviews from the Bottom of the Barrel]"
Released 23 June 1955, a.k.a. Crooked Ring. Was not remade in 1999 as Double Jeopardy (trailer). Allison Hayes, gone blondish with highlights, makes it onto the poster! She has a lead role as the Good Gal in Double Jeopardy, a typical crime drama from one of the biggest Poverty Row production firms, Republic Pictures.
Director Springsteen (8 Sept 1904 – 9 Dec 1989) spent most of his career at Republic, never graduating above the Bs, and his most interesting project as far as a wasted life is concerned is probably his assistant direction job on The Lady and the Monster (1944 / full movie below), the first and mostly forgotten adaptation of Curt Siodmak's 1943 novel Donavan's Brain.
The full movie —
The Lady and the Monster:
"A 70-min B-feature from Republic Pictures, Double Jeopardy is an unpretentious thriller, only tangentially noir, and with a high sleaze factor. The good guys are wooden and boring, and the bad guys irredeemably bad. A boozy blackmailer and his cheap wife are the focus and carry the picture. Pulp heaven. [Film Noir Net]"
The full movie —
Double Jeopardy:
A blow-by-blow plot description can be found at the AFI Catalog, but here's a shorter version: "Lawyer Marc Hill (Rod Cameron) helps clear the name of his girlfriend's father (John Litel of The Return of Dr. X [1939 / trailer], Invisible Agent [1942 / trailer] and Runaway Daughters [1956 / full movie]), who is accused of murdering a man (Robert Armstrong) that was blackmailing him. [Mubi]"
Trailer to
The Girl with an Itch:
Busy Robert Armstrong (20 Nov 1890 – 20 Apr 1973), most famous for exclaiming "It wasn't the airplanes; it was beauty killed the beast" in the original King Kong (1933 / trailer), died early in The Most Dangerous Game (1932 / a colorized trailer) and somewhat later in The Mad Ghoul (1943 / trailer), and appears in the greatest film ever made about nymphomania, The Girl with an Itch (1958 / trailer above). In January 1940, he married his fourth and final wife (i.e., the one he stayed with till the end) Claire Louise "Frisbie" Armstrong (14 Oct 1892 – 16 Sept 1990), who had just divorced Armstrong's own uncle, the artist Rolf Armstrong (21 Apr 1889 – 22 Feb 1960), the previous month. Below is an example of Uncle Rolf's art...
Allison Hayes plays good gal Barbara Devery, the girlfriend; Marge Baggot, the gold-digging lady of easy virtue married to the blackmailer, is played by Gale Robbins (7 May 1921 – 18 Feb 1980); Marge's man of manly comfort, the used-car salesman Jeff, is played by Jack Kelly (16 Sept 1927 – 7 Nov 1992), of The Human Tornado (1976 / trailer), a wasted life's Short Film of the Month for May 2017, Red Nightmare (1962), the unjustly forgotten She Devil (1957 / trailer), Forbidden Planet (1956, with Anne Francis and Leslie Nielsen), and Cult of the Cobra (1955 / trailer).
Not from the movie —
Gale Robbins sings Best of All:
"Double Jeopardy is well-acted for the most part, [...] and Hayes offers a lovely and sympathetic portrayal for a change, but Robbins is just a bit superficial as the femme fatale and Cameron* is as stiff as a board. Minerva Urecal adds some spice in her portrayal of a disapproving landlady. There are a couple of tense sequences but the script lets the audience down in the long run. There's some suspense but no surprises. From Republic studios. [Great Old Movies]"
*[Rod] Cameron [b. Nathan Roderick Cox] was married three times. His married his second wife, Angela Alves-Lico, in 1950. They divorced in 1960 so that he could marry her mother, actress Dorothy Alves-Lico (née Dorothy Eveleigh), though they kept the marriage a secret until 1961. [Wikipedia]." Among the enjoyable trash of Cameron's long career: Al Adamson's Jessi's Girl (1975 / trailer), Psychic Killer (1975 / trailer), The Electric Monster (1958 / full movie) and The Monster and the Girl (1941 / main theme).
H. Bruce "Lucky" Humberstone (18 Nov 1901 – 11 Oct 1984), a mostly forgotten film director today, has the distinction of having directed one of a wasted life's favorite film noirs, the seminal and highly influential I Wake Up Screaming (1941), based on the eponymous novel by the underappreciated Stephen Fischer.
Trailer to
I Wake Up Screaming (1941):
Allison Hayes has a minor part as Irene de Bournotte, a woman who almost loses her head, in this swashbuckler of sorts, The Purple Mask, one of Universal's bigger, fluffier projects of 1955, starring Tony Curtis (nee Bernard Schwartz [3 Jun 1925 – 29 Sept 2010]) with Colleen Miller at his side.
The photo above, taken a year earlier (and also seen in Part I), shows a group of competing pulchritude recently signed by Universal. Bottom right to the left and then back: Colleen Miller, Myrna Hansen, Mamie van Doren, and Allison Hayes. They started around the same time, but some names were already bigger on the posters... not Allison's.
The Purple Mask —
the full movie:
The Plot: "France, 1803, is under Napoleon Bonaparte's rule, but royalist adversaries rally behind the mysterious Purple Mask, whose daring feats give them hope. A police captain, Rochet (John Hoyt), goes after the Purple Mask only to be taken captive by him, whereupon Napoleon assigns the expert swordsman Brisquet (Dan Herlihy of Robo Cop [1987 / trailer] and Halloween III: Season of the Witch [1982 / trailers]) to go after him. The lovely Laurette de Latour (Miller), daughter of a duke (Paul Cavanaugh of the forgotten gem Sin of Nora Drake [1933 / full film], Bride of the Gorilla [1951 / trailer] and more) and romantic interest of Captain Laverne (Gene Barry of Guyana: Cult of the Damned [1979 / trailer]), is on the side of the royalists. She helps hatch a scheme in which the foppish René de Traviere (Curtis), who seems able with a sword, impersonates the Purple Mask to infiltrate Napoleon's ranks and free her kidnapped father. Laurette is unaware that René is, in fact, the Purple Mask, who continues his charade, drawing ridicule on himself, until ultimately he is imprisoned along with the duke. Laurette discovers his true identity while imprisoned. On their way to the guillotine, Rene, Laurette and the duke are rescued in a pre-arranged raid through the sewers of Paris by the royalist rebels. Napoleon (Robert Cornthwaite of The Peace Killers [1971, with Lavelle Roby] and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962 / trailer]), glad to be rid of the troublemakers, permits René and Laurette to leave the country for England. [Wikipedia]"
Some people might recognize the police captain Rochet, otherwise known as the actor John Hoyt (5 Oct 1905 – 15 Sept 1991) from Bert I Gordon's Attack of the Puppet People (1958),Curse of the Undead (1959 / trailer),Two on a Guillotine (1965 / trailer), and that classic slab of exploitation known as Flesh Gordon (1974)...
Trailer to
Flesh Gordon:
"The story is based on a 1913 French play [by Paul Armont and Jean Manoussi], itself probably indebted to the Scarlet Pimpernel books and movies of the previous decade. Where the Pimpernel concerned himself with saving royal figures from the merciless guillotine during the Terror, the Purple Mask devotes himself to saving royal figures victimized during the later era of Napoleon [...]. This plotline, which concentrates more on evasion than on violence, probably played well on stage, but said plot proves a slow one for a colorful swashbuckler movie. There's also a romantic subplot, when a young woman falls for Rene and tries to prevent his sacrifice. [Naturalistic! Uncanny! Marvelous!]"
Derek Winnert is somewhat kinder: "Humberstone's fast-moving, surprisingly short (82 minutes) movie for Universal International Pictures is a rip-roaring action adventure (set in 1803). Although not exactly covering new ground [...] it is full of fun and packed with high spirits. [...] An infectiously appealing Curtis looks great and gives extremely zesty, athletic performance. But Angela Lansbury (16 Oct 1925 – 11 Oct 2022) is wasted in the smallish star role of Madame Valentine, and was apparently unhappy with being in the movie, complaining that at this point her career had sunk so low as to appear in a Tony Curtis movie, a casual throwaway remark that Curtis took as an insult and never forgave. Indeed, she described The Purple Mask as 'the worst movie I ever made'."
The Prodigal
(1955, dir. Richard Thorpe)
An MGM production, diverse sources list Allison Hayes as filling in the background somewhere in this Lana Turner (8 Feb 1921 – 29 June 1995) vehicle, though no one has yet said where. Released in the US on 6 May 1955, The Prodigal was a bit of a financial flop, causing the then head of the studio, Dore Schary, to later claim it as the worst film he had ever greenlighted while head of MGM.
Trailer to
The Prodigal:
Director Richard Thorpe, born Rollo Smolt Thorpe (24 Feb 1896 – 1 May 1991), an A-movie director, made films at the speed of a B-movie hack — but then he did start off at early Poverty Row production house, Chesterfield Pictures. By the time Thorpe died, he had directed over 180 projects, 66 of which were for MGM (admittedly, early on most were also lower-echelon productions). Thorpe was famously cranky and dour, and his wife Belva McKay (9 Jan 1904 – 20 Oct 1975) was granted a divorce in 1959 on the grounds of cruelty.
The plot, from Dennis Schwarz, who calls The Prodigal "a dumb and unconvincing Bible flick"*: "The film is set in the seaport of Joppa in 70 BC. It follows the story of Micah (Edmund Purdom), the titled character, a devout believer in Jehovah who comes from a wealthy farming family. His dad (Walter Hampden) arranges for him to marry his neighbor's nice Jewish girl neighbor Ruth (Audrey Dalton of Mr. Sardonicus [1961 / trailer] & The Monster that Challenged the World [1957 / trailer]). But first Micah goes to sin city Damascus and meets the sultry pagan priestess Samarra (Lana Turner) and lusts after her. He returns home to get his inheritance and leaves Ruth waiting at the altar to run after Samarra. The pagan priestess works with the evil Nahreeb (Louis Calhern of The Asphalt Jungle [1950 / trailer]), who aims to get even with Micah for freeing his runaway mute slave Asham (James Mitchell) in the marketplace. Everyone Micah encounters here is a scoundrel trying to rip him off. Bosra (Francis L. Sullivan) is a loan shark, who sets up a phony deal for him. Samsarra demands an expensive pearl as an appreciation of his love for her. When out of funds and unable to pay his IOUs, Micah is sold into slavery. His captors offer to free him if he will give up Judaism, but he refuses. Believing he's dead, they throw him into a pit of vultures where he defeats the creatures and returns to Damascus to lead a slave rebellion. It results in the priestess getting stoned to death by the people (supposedly a good religious lesson on justice!) and Micah is welcomed back home by his family and the forgiving Ruth (the prodigal son returns!)."
*Are Bible movies anything but that? With the possible exception of that Danish Jesus movie, Ib Fyrsting's Jeg så Jesus dø a.k.a. I Saw Jesus Die (1975), a "deviant chunk of religious-trash [that] mixes early-porn aesthetics with Christian-propaganda, and emerges as 84-minutes of sacrilegious slop that melds Ron Ormond with Al Goldstein. [Shock Cinema]"
"Director Richard Thorpe's hysterical, outrageous 1955 Eastmancolor and CinemaScope biblical epic The Prodigal makes only a passing nod at anything biblical and concentrates instead on exoticism, in this loose adaptation of Jesus Christ's famous New Testament parable about the selfish prodigal son who leaves his family to pursue a life of pleasure [...]. [Derek Winnert]"
According to the great blog Poseidon's Underworld, Lana Turner was not thrilled by the movie: "MGM studio chief Dore Schary told the press he hoped to make The Prodigal one of 'the really significant spectacles of all time.' But when I read the script I wondered what he'd been drinking... To play him (the prodigal son) (they) chose Edmund Purdom, a young man with a remarkably high opinion of himself. His pomposity was hard enough to bear; worse yet was the garlic breath he brought back from lunch. My lines were so stupid I hated to go to work in the morning. Even the costumes were atrocious."
Speaking of Edmund Anthony Cutlar Purdom (19 Dec 1924 – 1 Jan 2009), MGM soon released him from his contract. His only film prior to The Prodigal was The Student Prince (1954 / trailer), a minor hit in which he mouthed to the vocals of Mario Lanza (31 Jan 1921 – 7 Oct 1959). "Lanza's recordings were the prime ingredient for the picture's success, and that success went to Purdom's head. He believed he was responsible for the happy result. He asked for a new contract. We denied it. He asked for a release. We granted it. [Dore Schary in Heyday: An Autoboigraphy]" A scandalous affair and divorce soon followed, and Purdom's career was dead in Hollywood, and before long he was in Europe, where he had a long and productive career making the type of Eurotrash that a wasted life so loves, like Juan Piquer Simón's The Rift (1990 / trailer) and Pieces (1982 / trailer); his own Don't Open Till Christmas (1984 / trailer); Sergio Martino's 2019, After the Fall of New York (1983 / trailer), playing a president modeled after Ronald Reagan; Joe D'Amato's Ator, the Fighting Eagle (1982 / trailer) & Absurd (1981 / trailer); the truly obscure Lucifera: Demon Lover (1972 / trailer) and Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1974 / trailer); Jess Franco's Sinister Eyes of Dr Orloff (1973 / trailer), with Lina Romay; and so much more... including the narration to four mondos, Martino's Wages of Sin (1969 / stolen music), The Queer... The Erotic (1969 / music), Naked and Violent (1970 / 9.27 mins in Italian), and...
Sweden: Heaven and Hell (1968),
whence a famous tune came:
Lana Turner also spent a time in Europe for a few films, returning to the United States in September 1953, promptly marrying her fourth of seven husbands, the actor Lex Barker (of The Girl in Black Stockings[1957]); they divorced 22 July 1957. In her 1988 autobiography, Detour: A Hollywood Story, Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane, revealed that Barker repeatedly raped her when she was between the ages of 10½ and 13. Crane's life as a Hollywood child went further downhill when, in 1958, she stabbed Turner's abusive lover Johnny Stompanato to death during a domestic situation. (That Crane eventually ever found happiness is amazing.) Turner's first film after the stabbing, Imitation of Life (1959 / trailer), proved to be one of the greatest commercial successes of her career.
I Died a Thousand Times
(1955, dir. Stuart Heisler)
Released 9 November 1955. Another one that may have gotten away (see Smoke Signal [1954] in Part Iand Foxfire [1955] further above — possibly because the movies stars Jack Palance (see Sign of the Pagan [1954] further above).
Trailer to
I Died a Thousand Times:
An Internet Biography of Allison Hays quotes, without source, the fact-challenged Walter Winchell as having joked, on 31 Jan 1955: "Allison Hayes, Warner actress in I Died a Thousand Times, has enrolled for a night course at UCLA on A Psychological Study on the Motivations of Entertainment People. Bet she finds out, it's sex." Likewise, the [unreliable] "Trivia" page at imdbto the movie currently (1 Feb 24) states: "Actresses Beverly Garland and Allison Hayes were once publicized as being featured in this film prior to production" — and that, at least, is sort of true. At an early point in the film's development, Vol 133 (1955) of The Hollywood Reporterreported that Walter Doniger would direct Perry Lopez, Walter Abel, Beverly Garland, Ted de Corsia, Ken Tobey, Gregory Walcott and Allison Hayes in I Died A Thousand Times. Of all the names, only Perry Lopez made it into the I Died A Thousand Times directed by Stuart Heisler... but all of those listed did appear in Walter Doniger's The Steel Jungle (1956), a movie a.k.a. I Died a Thousand Times... whence the film still below comes.
Heisler's I Died A Thousand Times, the film Allison Hayes is not in, is the third version of W.R. Burnett's novel, High Sierra; it was preceded by Raoul Walsh's crime flick High Sierra (1940 / trailer) and Raoul Walsh's western Colorado Territory (1949 / trailer). Years earlier, the first novel of the productive writer, Burnett, was also adapted as a film, the classic Little Caesar (1931).
The plot of the movie Allison wasn't in and, perhaps, was never even considered for: "I Died a Thousand Times is a scene-by-scene remake of the 1941 crime-drama classic High Sierra. Jack Palance steps into the old Humphrey Bogart role as Roy 'Mad Dog' Earle, the ageing bank robber who intends to pull off one last heist before retiring. Sprung from prison by likeable crime boss Big Mac (Lon Chaney Jr. of Dracula vs. Frankenstein [1971] and House of Frankenstein [1944]), Earle is commissioned to mastermind the robbery of a resort hotel. His partners in crime include the hotheaded, immature Babe (Lee Marvin) and Red (Earl Holliman), as well as 'inside man' Mendoza (Perry Lopez). Also along for the ride is Marie (Shelley Winters of Cleopatra Jones [1973]), a dance-hall girl whom Babe has picked up. Marie falls in love with Earle, but he has eyes only for Velma (Lori Nelson), the club-footed daughter of a farmer (Ralph Moody) whom Earle had earlier befriended. Intending to use his share of the loot to finance Velma's operation, Earle goes through with the robbery, only to be thwarted by the ineptitude of his partners, the treachery of the late Big Mac's successors, and, finally, the fickle Velma. With the faithful Marie by his side, Earle makes a desperate escape into the High Sierras, but fate is still against him. [...] [Hal Erickson @ All Movie]"
Happyotterreally likes the movie: "This is one of the best remakes I've ever seen. The original High Sierra is a great film, but I think this retelling of the same story might even be better! [...] Being made 14 years later, the subject matter is a little more mature and fleshed out than the original and it helps a lot. Jack Palance and Shelley Winters' performances were so good that I'm surprised that they weren't both nominated for an Academy Awards, but then again 1955 was a really good year for the movies..."
Mondo 70 is less impressed: "While the location work often looks good, Heisler lack's Walsh's more poetic sensibility and his feel for atmosphere. [...] He usually stages scenes in long shots that emphasize the wide screen in a way that makes the sets, particularly the criminals' quarters, look oversized and artificial. The color throughout is overly bright and garish. The most interestingly thing Heisler does occasionally is tilt his camera, but you get the impression that he does that mainly so he can fit the heads of tall actors into shots where other performers are laying down. That and the actors are what you'll most likely remember about this film. [...] Palance is too strange a figure with his height and his angular face to match Bogart's everyman gravitas — in his dark suits in the film's bright settings he becomes something like a piece of abstract animation. [...] If Palance seems too young for his part Winters definitely seems too old for the role Lupino played. She's too intense, compared to Lupino's slow burn, yet without achieving any real chemistry with Palance. I suppose her performance does help you understand why this film's Earle is initially more interested in the clubfooted but pretty Velma (Lori Nelson replaces Joan Leslie), whose surgery he pays for only to be rebuffed by the shallow girl. [...] Otherwise, this film is a feast of familiar faces, from Lon Chaney Jr. having an easy time (and a good scene) as a bedridden, boozing gangster to Lee Marvin implausibly cast as a mere 'punk' whom Palance pistol-whips in one of the few scenes more impressively staged here than by Walsh, to fleeting glances of Warners prospects Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams. The cast deserves a better film than Heisler made[...]."
BTW: If you're of the type that enjoyed Wille "Sleep 'n' Eat" Best (27 May 1916 – 27 Feb 1962), of The Smiling Ghost (1941 / trailer), playing yet another Black stereotype in the original High Sierra, then you'll love I Died a Thousand Death's modernization of the part, which has Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez (24 May 1925 – 6 Feb 2006), of Lust in the Dust (1984), do a comically negative stereotype of a Hispanic man.
As for director Heisler — the man who also directed the exploitation shocker Hitler (1962 / trailer) and the classic crime drama The Glass Key (1942 / trailer) — in 2011, a short film of his was inducted into the National Film Registry as "culturally, historically or aesthetically" and of "enduring significance to American culture". The 40-minute propaganda short in question, released in 1944, "became mandatory viewing for all soldiers in American replacement centers from spring 1944 until [WWII's] end." Enjoy...
The Negro Soldier
(full short from 1944):
Four Star Playhouse — "Here Comes the Suit"
(1955, dir. Richard Kinon)
An important role in a popular television program. Four Star Playhouse was an anthology series that ran from 25 Sept 1952 to 27 Sept 1955, originally airing every two weeks but, by autumn 1953, it was weekly. This episode, a comedy titled Here Comes the Suit, aired 17 Nov 1955. Director Richard Kinon (17 Aug 1924 – 11 Mar 2004), an eternal bachelor who went on to be a dependable TV director, began his career on Four Star Playhouse, directing between seven to ten episodes (sources vary the amount). This episode was written Frederick Brady (29 Mar 1912 – 11 Nov 1961), a former actor (i.e., The Cat Creeps [1946 / trailer]) who segued into scriptwriting, and an unknown named Douglas Welch.
To elaborate upon the most common plot description to be found online (for example, at imdb): "Phillip (David Niven), a milquetoast employee at a novelty company, is overlooked by everyone from his boss to his boss's secretary Christine (Allison Hayes), the woman he has a crush on. But after being suckered by a shady tailor (Jesse White of The Bad Seed [1956 / trailer]) into getting a shockingly garish suit, he's whistled at by woman and mistaken for a gangster. His newly found self-confidence fits him well."
Another plotline elsewhere is a bit less indicative of comic potential: "Because of his thrift, a very conservative and proper young man finds himself forced into wearing a rather garish suit. As a result, his personality undergoes a remarkable change. [ctva]"
For whatever odd reason, for Vol. 4 of the multi-volume David Niven Collection, this episode was chosen as the reference point for the cover image further above, which as you can see features a photoshopped collage of David Niven with Allison Hayes...
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