FAREWELL TO THE MASTER

I finished downloading the magnificent soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann for THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD to my digital music player the other day, just a few minutes prior to finding out that Ray Harryhausen has left us at the age of 92. It's impossible to measure the influence that this man's lifework has had on not only the motion picture industry but upon an entire generation of fans, many of whom went on to fashion their own careers in the movie business. Ray Harryhausen was the first special effects technician in film history to rightly earn the distinction of "auteur" because even though other people were credited as director, every film that featured his stop-motion animation effects was, forever and always, a Ray Harryhausen film.

I first encountered the magic of Harryhausen at a very young age. It was a Friday night in the early 1960s in Fort Worth, Texas. I was about five, maybe six-years-old at the time. The local independent television station, Channel 11, broadcast a late-night horror film every Friday night at 10:30 p.m. The show was entitled "Nightmare" and the on-camera host was the same gentleman who donned a fright-wig and played the part of Icky Twerp on that station's "Slam-Bang Theatre", a Monday-Friday afternoon program that featured Three Stooges shorts. I was a die-hard fan of that program, as well as the one that came on after it, THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, starring George Reeves. At a very early age, my formative influences were already locked into place: the Stooges, Superman and monster movies. Not a bad combination. I loved them then. I love them now.

One of the things I'm eternally grateful to my late father for is the fact that he would stay up with me on those Friday nights and watch the monster movies with me. I recall seeing THEM! (which scared the hell out of me), GOG and the Steve Reeves HERCULES movie this way and during the same time period, watching THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL on NBC's SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES. 

One of the films I saw on "Nightmare" was THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. I had no idea who Ray Harryhausen was at the time. All I knew was that there was a living, breathing dinosaur (another one of my major childhood (and adult) passions) on the rampage in New York City. Part of my young mind imagined that this was somehow real, a documentary of an actual event. But no, I knew that dinosaurs no longer existed. This was some kind of movie magic that I simply could not fathom (pardon the pun) but which nevertheless held me spellbound until the end of the film.

I watched BEAST again the other day in celebration of Harryhausen's life. I hadn't seen it in years and while it's far from his best work, it is nevertheless a good, solid effort. BEAST was the first film in which Harryhausen provided the stop motion effects entirely on his own. Using only one model, he delivered an unforgettable creature (the Rhedosaurus) that has more life in it than many modern CGI creations. The story is pretty standard stuff: a nuclear blast near the North Pole frees a frozen dinosaur from the ice who then makes its' way down the east coast to New York City. The human players are secondary to the beast but they do okay with what's given them. Genre icon Kenneth Tobey is the military man of action, Paul Christian the atomic scientist who first sees the beast, Cecil Kelloway the delightful (and doomed) paleontologist and the lovely Paula Raymond his assistant (and love interest for Christian).

The film's climax takes place at a deserted amusement park at night where the beast is trapped within the tracks of a roller coaster. Hawk faced Lee Van Cleef is the military sharpshooter who must fire a radioactive isotope into the beast and kill him. He does so, the beast has a spectacular demise and when the monster is dead, the movie is over.

I find it interesting that both Lee Van Cleef and Clint Eastwood killed giant monsters (Eastwood in TARANTULA) in their early film roles before teaming up years later in the classic spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone: FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. I wonder if they ever compared notes about monster killing? Also of interest is the fact that director Eugene Lourie, who does a competent job with BEAST, went on to make the same movie not once but twice with THE GIANT BEHEMOTH and GORGO. Maybe he was seen as the best director to handle this type of material. Either that, or he just couldn't get those big uglies out of his system.

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS was independently produced at an astonishing cost of $200,000 before being sold to Warner Brothers where it turned a nice profit for the studio and led to the production of THEM! a couple of years later. 

I knew none of this when I was a kid watching this black-and-white monster movie for the first time on a late-night horror movie television show. I only knew that there was wonder and magic on display thanks to the Promethean talents of a gentleman named Ray Harryhausen. Thank you Mr. Harryhausen, thank you so very, very much for your gift not only to me but to a generation of "monster kids." We all love you and miss you but your films will live forever in our hearts and souls. 

THE ASTOUNDING, THE AMAZING, AND THE UNKNOWN

"Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a pulp science fiction writer out of my hat!"

"Again?"

Author Paul Malmont knows his pulp stuff, no doubt about it. He's that really bright kid sitting in the back of the class, frantically waving his hand in the air, desperately hoping that the teacher will call on him so he'll be able to stand up and announce to one and all: "look how much I know!"

THE ASTOUNDING, THE AMAZING, AND THE UNKNOWN, his 2011 novel, is built upon a corker of a premise. Set smack dab in the middle of WWII, the story centers upon three of the greatest pulp science fiction authors of all time: Robert Heinlein (whose work appeared in the magazine ASTOUNDING, Isaac Asimov, whose early stories were published in AMAZING and L. Sprague de Camp, whose work was regularly published in UNKNOWN. By the way, I met L. Sprague de Camp once, remind me to write about that encounter sometime in the future). 

These three men were actually assigned to the U.S. Naval Yards in Philadelphia during the war. They were tasked with the mission of brainstorming super weapons (both offensive and defensive) that could be used to defeat the Axis powers. They, along with a team of scientists, worked on various experimental devices and prototypes that had their basis in the wonder weapons found in the pages of the pulp science fiction magazines. That much is true and here's a photo of the three men from that time period.

Left to right: Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asimov

In the novel, the three men get wind of a mysterious experiment conducted by Nikola Tesla in 1908. It seems that Tesla's bold attempt to harness electricity inadvertently created a "death-ray" which may or may not have caused the explosion in Tunguska, Russia that year. Tesla's laboratory and his "power tower" were shut down but his notes and some of the technology used in the experiment are rumored to still exist. The three sf writers/scientists quickly seize upon the notion of finding the lost technology and recreating it to use the "death-ray" against the Nazis.

That's enough right there to spin a pretty good pulp yarn and Malmont does so to a point. The trouble is, he's so intoxicated with his love of the era, the men, the magazines, the stories, the whole pulp milieu, that he simply can't leave well-enough alone. It's not enough to have just Heinlein, de Camp and Asimov involved in this adventure. Oh, no. Malmont gives us a veritable who's who of both pulp writers and other famous figures from history. Who else is in this book? Hell, who isn't?

All three of the men's wives are in here, as are pulp writers and editors including L. Ron Hubbard (who is sort of the D'Artagnan, Fourth Musketeer of the group), Walter Gibson (THE SHADOW), Lester and Norma Dent (DOC SAVAGE), Norvell Page (THE SPIDER), Hugh B. Cave, John W. Campbell, Jr., Hugo Gernsbeck, Frederick Pohl, Ray Bradbury, Forrest Ackerman and Cleve Cartmill. Plus, James Stewart (yes, that James Stewart), Nikola Tesla, Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein. I suspect that many of the other characters are real people as well but these are the names I recognized and Malmont does not include a "who's who" addendum (which is sorely needed, as was one more really good, thorough edit; there are several mistakes a sharp editor would have caught and fixed).

The result is that there's just too damn much going on here and most of it gets in the way of the main narrative. The story is told in a series of stops and starts, a herky-jerky rhythm made up of one part plot advancement, three parts information dump (if you listen carefully, you'll swear you can hear Malmont yelling "look what I know!"). For instance, the Philadelphia Experiment, an attempt to make a U.S. warship invisible to radar, is in here (which alone would make a pretty good yarn) and it's revealed to be a magic trick essayed by Walter Gibson but the explanation is clumsy and really doesn't figure in the overall story.

Throughout the book, people keep talking about the future, about making it happen, about living to see it, to see something that only exists on the printed page, given life, shape and form. About halfway through the book, I too started thinking about the future. Mainly, the next  book I'm going to read when I finally finish this one. A book by one of the writers in this story, a writer who knew how to tell a story and not get bogged down with too much extraneous detail. 

I met Paul Malmont once. He was a nice, sincere guy and his deeply felt devotion to the same stuff I like was abundantly clear. His previous novel, THE CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL, used the same concept of having real pulp writers involved in an adventure story. In that book, set in the 1930s, Lester Dent, Walter Gibson and L. Ron Hubbard (along with Louis L'Amour) teamed up in a story that was equal parts adventure and pulp history lesson. I wanted desperately to love both that book and THE ASTOUNDING... but I just can't. I respect Paul Malmont and his work. I love the idea of these books, but the execution leaves something to be desired. I like reading about the history of the pulps. I like reading pulp fiction. There's a great book out there that combines both subjects (ala Michael Chabon's brilliant THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY) but neither one of Malmont's novels is that book. Enthusiasm, affection and knowledge of the pulps is great. But you've still got to tell me a corking good story, one that keeps me turning the pages to find out what happens next and sadly neither of Malmont's books do that. 

They're both still well worth reading for pulp aficionados but readers who don't already get the pulps will wonder what all of the noise is about.

HOLDING MY BRONZE BREATH

Well, that's what $175 million (and counting) will get you. Following the blockbuster opening of IRON MAN 3 (second only to last year's THE AVENGERS), Sony Pictures announced this week that writer/director Shane Black has been given the green light to move forward with his long rumored DOC SAVAGE film. 

I must confess here and now that a well-done Doc Savage movie is at the top of my list of films I really want to see before I die. When I saw RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK for the first time, I sat there with my jaw on the theater floor, saying over and over (to myself, of course), "this is what George Pal's DOC SAVAGE movie could have been and this is what any future Doc Savage movie should look like."

Well, it's been more than thirty years since Indy first cracked his whip and it looks like we are finally that much closer to a big budget, big screen Doc adventure film. 

I have no problem with Black as the writer/director of this project. His work on IRON MAN 3 was solid and I enjoyed that movie. Secondly, the special effects should be no problem given current technology. It should be easy to recreate the New York City of the 1930s (look at Peter Jackson's KING KONG) so that's not a problem. CGI should do wonders for this material.

My reservations are in two areas. First, the script. Will this be an adaptation of an existing super-saga? Will we see THE MAN OF BRONZE or some other story brought to the screen or will it be a totally new, original story? For the story (adapted or original) to work, it absolutely must be set in the 1930s. Doc is forever and always a product of his time and to try and update him to the 21st century simply will not work. And I know humor will be an element of the film but I pray to the spirit of Lester Dent that it's not overdone and god forbid if the film veers into camp territory. 

Second, there are many elements of the Doc mythos that could be included but I don't want the film to be overcrowded. Will we see the 86th floor headquarters, the Fortress of Solitude,the Crime College, the Hidalgo Trading Company, Doc's airplanes and dirigible, the Helldiver submersible, etc? I'm assuming all five members of his team will be in the film but what about Pat? Will she be in the film?

Finally, who in the world will they get to play Doc? I cannot think of any actor currently working whom I can envision as the Man of Bronze. I'm tempted to say go with an unknown but that won't happen. The Doc Savage brand is not well-known enough to the general movie-going public to risk a multi-million dollar project on an unknown actor. They have to have a name player in the part and let's just pray (pray hard) it's not Tom Cruise. Who will play the Fabulous Five? Who will play Pat (providing she's in the film)? Casting is an essential element here and it's one of the things the Pal DOC SAVAGE film got wrong. Ron Ely made a passable Doc but the five were all hopelessly miscast. I can think of several actors who are either dead or too old for the parts of Doc and his men but contemporary actors? No clue.

I will certainly see this film when it's released and I have nothing but the best expectations that given enough money, time, and talent, we'll see a satisfying DOC SAVAGE film. The film should be visually stunning but the script and the players are all going to have be worthy of the name of the greatest adventure hero of all time.

 Mr. Black, the next chapter of the Doc Savage saga is in your hands. I wish you well.

DAN ADKINS, R.I.P.

Comic book artist Dan Adkins passed away this week and while he never achieved top ranking status in the annals of comic book artists, I always found his work to be a pleasure to look at. His clean style was well suited to science fiction and horror stories and he always delivered top-notch work.

I first encountered Adkins' work in the pages of various Marvel comics published in the late 1960s. He drew a couple of issues of X-MEN, the Sub-Mariner series in TALES TO ASTONISH and the Dr. Strange feature in STRANGE TALES and again in DOCTOR STRANGE. After penciling a few titles here and there, Adkins switched to inking and he did a superlative job, bringing the pencils of every artist he worked with to vivid life. 

My favorite Dan Adkins work can be found in the magazine pictured above. It's CREEPY #28 published in August, 1969. Adkins did some of his best work for the black-and-white horror comic magazines that James Warren put out. The cover art is by Vic Prezio but it illustrates the story THE DOORWAY by Archie Goodwin and Adkins. It's a terrific little science fiction/horror story that features what I consider to be some of Adkins' finest work. There's something about those images that has stayed with me for all of these years. 

Rest in peace Mr. Adkins and thanks for the good work and the great memories.

THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF

Here's something else I picked up at the last City Wide Garage Sale. 

A very elderly woman had the window card pictured above on display in her booth. The poster was framed and both the wooden frame and backing paper were quite old. I inspected the poster as closely as I could but I could not find a date on it. It looks like it might have been lightly folded at one time. Everything about this item looked like the real deal and not a reproduction.

"What can you tell me about this item?" I asked the woman in my best AMERICAN PICKERS style (Frank and Mike would have been proud of me).

"I don't know anything about it," she replied. "It's been in my house for years. I'm 86 years old and just trying to get rid of as much of this stuff as I can."

The price tag on the poster read $18.00. I looked her in the eye and asked "would you take fifteen dollars for this?"

She said yes immediately (I probably should have asked for a lower price!). Nevertheless, we shook hands on it (I broke the ice!) and I gave her fifteen in cash. I walked away happy and the framed poster is now on display in our den alongside my drive-in movie theater speaker and my film reel transport can. 

I'm no expert on vintage movie paper but I feel like this is an original of some sort. Perhaps not from the 1941 first release of the film but maybe from a later re-release. I find it odd that the image of Bogart used on the poster is not from THE MALTESE FALCON but instead from either THE PETRIFIED FOREST or HIGH SIERRA, both Warner Brothers crime films in which Bogie played bad guys. I don't recall Mary Astor wearing anything in FALCON as revealing as what she's wearing in the poster art. And the tag line "he's a killer when he hates" makes me wonder if the people in the Warners art department (or whoever put this piece together) had actually seen the film or knew anything about the storyline. If anyone reading this has some information to share about this treasure, I'd love to hear what you have to say. 

TORMENTED

"I always wanted to get a head in the world..."

I watched TORMENTED (1960) the other night. I had recorded it off of  TCM. I'd seen this one years ago but it was fun to revisit it.

The film deals with a jazz concert pianist Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson), who is about to be married. Trouble is, his old girlfriend, Vi (the voluptuous Juli Reding, whose head is seen above) threatens to reveal that Tom and Vi are still an item to his fiancee Meg (Lugene Sanders) and ruin his impending nuptials. Tom and Vi confront each other at an abandoned lighthouse at the beginning of the film. Vi accidentally falls to her death and Tom is freed from her threats. But before long, Tom is haunted by visions of Vi which drive him crazy.

Is Tom really haunted by Vi's ghost or is it all in his imagination? The evidence points to a real haunt and Tom becomes increasingly agitated. A ferry boat skipper (Joe Turkel) whom Vi owed money to shows up and figures out that since Vi hasn't left the island, something must have happened to her. He starts to blackmail Tom and Tom is driven by Vi's ghost to murder the man. Unknown to Tom, there is a witness to his evil deed, Sandy (Susan Gordon), Meg's little sister. Now with two deaths on his conscience and a witness to one of the deaths, Tom is on the verge of a complete crack-up. Tom and Sandy find themselves back at the lighthouse at the film's climax where Tom is forced to try and murder the little girl. Of course, the vengeful ghost of Vi shows up and causes Tom to tumble into the sea and to his death. 

TORMENTED is one strange little film. Two of the actors bear uncanny resemblances to other people. Richard Carlson looks just like the late comic actor Phil Hartman. I always thought that should there ever be a remake of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, Hartman would be a shoo-in for the Richard Carlson part. Alas, that's never to be. Joe Turkel is a dead-ringer for a young Harlan Ellison. Ellison, is of course,a writer of science fiction and other works and is one of my personal favorite authors. .And Juli Reding, who plays Vi, could have been voted by ten out of ten men as the "ghost they'd most like to be haunted by."

Then there's the blind real-estate lady. I'm not making this up. How does a blind realtor "show" a property? She may be blind but she can, of course, sense that there is something otherworldly at play. And how about the bizarre relationship between Carlson and young Susan Gordon, who plays his fiancees' little sister? Gordon, the daughter of director Bert I. Gordon, is a surprisingly competent little actress but Carlson and Gordon have more chemistry and strange attraction between them than Carlson and Sanders. 

Of course, this being a Bert I. Gordon film, the special effects are cheap, ineffective and laughable. TORMENTED may be one of the very few films that Gordon made that didn't involve size permutations  of one sort or another. His filmography is loaded with such B-movie classics as KING DINOSAUR, THE CYCLOPS, THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, BEGINNING OF THE END, EARTH VS. THE SPIDER, WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST, ATTACK OF THE PUPPET PEOPLE, VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS, THE FOOD OF THE GODS and EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, all of which feature either very large (or, in one case, very small) human and animal menaces. 

TORMENTED has a mercifully short running time of 75 minutes and the material would have worked just as well as an episode of any hour-long television anthology show. Worth seeing if you're a genre fan. If not, forget it.

IRON MAN 3

"I would not go in there for the next twenty minutes."

My apologies for not getting this post up sooner since it's now been a couple of days since I saw IRON MAN 3. Here are my thoughts on the film.

Even using my AARP membership card at the box office, my ticket for the 10:15 showing of the film still cost $10.25. Granted, it was for the 3-D version of the film which I didn't have to choose to see but I figured "in for a penny, in for a pound". Add a small Dr. Pepper and small popcorn for $10.75 and I'm out twenty-one bucks before the film even starts. Regular readers of this blog will recall a previous posting about how cheap I am. This is one of the reasons why I don't see as many new, first-run films in the theaters as I used to. I've become spoiled by not having to pay to see classic films at the Paramount during the summers and I enjoy watching films at home on DVD where I can turn around and sell the DVD (if II so desire) on eBay. There are a few other films that I want to see this year but I won't be going to the theaters just to be going to a movie.

I liked the fact that A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) is in this film but I really wish the minions had been shown in their distinctive, screaming yellow hazmat suits with the bee-keeper headgear. 

I liked the fact that Roxxon Oil Company (the Marvel Universe version of Exxon) is in this film.

The Mandarin is in this film. The Mandarin is not in this film. Both of those statements are correct.

Falseface, a villain from the old BATMAN TV show is in this film. No, wait, that's Joan Rivers. Sorry.

I really dug the closing title sequence featuring a montage of scenes from all three IRON MAN films set to a driving, jazzy score that had the feel and vibe of a '60s spy film soundtrack.

Tony Stark spends a great deal of time out of his armor and at times the film plays like a James Bond adventure. That's not necessarily a bad thing. When Tony does suit up, the action set pieces are pretty damn spectacular.

Overall I'd give the film a solid B+. It's not AVENGERS great. It's not CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER great and it's not SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE great. But it is a well-written, directed and acted super-hero action/adventure film. The special effects are dazzling (as we've come to expect) and the ten-year-old me that still exists within my soul is just jazzed to be able to sit in a theater and watch a big-budget IRON MAN film on the screen.

This is something I used to dream about and for years, that's all I could do: dream. Iron Man was one of my favorite Marvel superheroes when I was a kid and I was privileged to read his adventures over the course of several years during which three top-notch artists were drawing the book: Don Heck, Gene Colan and George Tuska. There have been many, many other Iron Man artists over the years, some good, some not-so-good , but none (in my opinion) have defined the character as well as those three men did. Thanks for the great work and the great memories gentlemen.