CURSE OF THE FACELESS MAN
1958
Directed by Edward L. Cahn
Written by Jerome Bixby
I think it has to be held as kind of remarkable that a cheapjack B-movie house decided that the best thing to do to exploit the teen drive-in market in 1958 was to make a straight-up knock-off of Universal Pictures' Mummy movies, a good fourteen years since their last one, The Mummy's Ghost, had slouched its way through theaters in 1944, and fully twenty-six years since the last good one, the original 1932 film, had premiered—and yet the year before Hammer did theirs!—but at least it's the kind of "remarkable" that history can explain to us. One's reflexive instinct is to assume that the impact of 1957's revival of off-brand "Universal" horror was the cause—Hammer's adaptation of Frankenstein, along with AIP's I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein—and somebody, maybe even director Edward L. Cahn, who after all had played his own part in AIP's "teen horror" insurgency in 1957 (he'd helmed Invasion of the Saucer-Men), had the idea to snatch the Mummy out from under the big(ger) dogs while they were all still busy with other movies that obviously didn't mind trading on folks' fond memories of the Universal monsters. (Indeed, it's not at all impossible that this cheapjack B-movie house, Vogue Pictures—effectively the alter ego of producer Robert E. Kent—really could have made their Mummy knock-off, soup-to-nuts, between Hammer's confirmation of the popularity of fake Universal Horror with Dracula, in May '58, and the release of their own film, Curse of the Faceless Man, in August. But if they'd started earlier, well, Hammer's Frankenstein adaptation was called The Curse of Frankenstein, wasn't it? In fairness, Curse of the Faceless Man does somewhat more regarding "actual curses," so it could be coincidental.) But maybe they didn't even have to be that savvy, they could've just seen the fervent response to Shock Theater!, Screen Gems' big-ass package of Universal Horror films leased out to television stations, and famously localized for individual markets with the first horror hosts like Zacherley; in any case, so armed with all this market research, I suppose it seemed like the most natural thing to do with the second half of a double-bill with It! The Terror From Beyond Space (itself also directed by Cahn) would be to fill it out with a contemporized Mummy riff. I mean, it makes some sense: despite radically different settings, they're each fundamentally about a guy in a cool, albeit not terribly expensive and prone-to-bending suit, menacing the shit out of people.
It would inevitably be on the underside of that double-bill, however, because while It! is decent, Curse is pretty bad, and not altogether explicably so. There's the fact it was fast and cheap, but it wasn't even that cheap—I hear $100,000, which wasn't a truly serious budget even for a 50s horror flick, but it wouldn't have been Filmgroup-style pocket change either—so in any case at a level where cost wasn't going to be the determinative factor. Nevertheless, it feels cheap, and cheaper than it actually was. What it feels like, really, is amateurish, in ways that shouldn't have been possible—starting with Cahn, who'd been a director for nearly twenty years—and also in ways that are maddeningly inconsistent, so it's not always just "bad," but flinging itself between bad and good, or mixing them together.
This can maybe be more frustrating than just being completely bad, because one of those inconsistent elements is the screenplay coming under an unusually celebrated name, Jerome Bixby—it was his first screenplay (unless It! was)—which is somehow managing to do "exactly 1932's The Mummy" while going off on a wild tangent to what you'd ever expect from a movie described as "exactly 1932's The Mummy." One of those things is what permits us to treat with it today under the Cardboard Science marquee, namely its gestures towards science fiction. This turns out to be likeably quaint, and very "of 1958," though it's a very modest gloss, and at all points it seems like the less stupid option would be to say that the mummy walks because the mummy is magic, not because the mummy is radioactive.
More prominently, anyway, is that Bixby's monster is not actually "a mummy," at least in anything akin to the classical sense, though he drops the word "mummy," and Egyptian mummification is invoked, just so the littler kids in the audience don't get lost. As a big fan of the mummy as a movie monster, despite the fact that the concept has produced very, very few great movies, I have to admit that this excited me; you simply don't get a lot of "our mummies are different."
So let's see how different: in southern Italy, in the shadow of a certain volcano of great repute, a workman on an archaeological team digs up a box full of treasures—including gold and jewels yet, curiously, also a medallion of mere bronze—as well as a corpse, encrusted with volcanic dust. This, we'll learn from the inscription on that medallion, is Quintillus Aurelius (Bob Bryant under what looks like ten or fifteen pounds of papier mache or an equivalent; it's also, presumably, only Bryant when he's mobile). The finds are carted off to the Pompeii museum in Naples, which I'm pretty sure is the Griffith Observatory, but en route the driver dies in an "accident." We already know the killing was effected by the corpse itself; even the cops figure out that it was a homicide, though they don't, at present, suspect the body encased in pumice ash. Leave that to the academics, the curator of the museum, Dr. Fiorello (Luis Van Rooten), and his Etruscan translator and part-time occultist/hypnotherapist, Dr. Emanuel (Felix Locher), who have somehow already developed suspicions regarding the continued life force of the corpse. It is to this end that they have engaged American medical doctor Paul Mallon (Richard Anderson), whose expertise is in determining minute signs of life, to examine this human artifact.
It is worth stopping for a moment to point out this is the fatal flaw of Bixby's script, or at least one of them (since I would argue it has fully two, and maybe three), but in any event it's the flaw that screws up the pacing of a movie that somehow manages to drag even at 67 minutes. This beginning is just so very rushed: we are shown, with great explicitness, that Quintillus can jolt back to life for brief stretches of mayhem, and, confusingly, the Italian scientists had developed their inkling of this even before the monster's done anything—even afterwards, it'd be a little Goddamn quick on the draw to start entertaining such suspicions—but that's how our movie's built for some reason, and the sensation it inflicts is that it's incredibly hasty with its exposition, yet it has nowhere it needs to actually get to until much later, so instead of being the careening leap into horror that I guess Bixby thought it'd be, it's more a matter of hurrying up and waiting while a baseline-setting first act plays out anyway. (Even so, it does cheer my heart that Bixby's whole half-century-spanning feature film career is bookended by movies that at their most basic level can be summarized as "a bunch of credulous academics discuss whether a character is actually immortal," though by God, The Man From Earth is a whole lot more fun.)
Back to the movie in progress, at least Paul is a tad skeptical, though that skepticism is annihilated pretty much immediately, because his painter girlfriend Tina Enright (Elaine Edwards) had a detailed dream about the faceless man—she's even started a painting of the figure—that tracks with uncanny exactitude to those aforementioned deadly events which she could not have then known about. So Paul's only a little surprised when Tina compulsively makes her way into the museum to get sketches, awakens Quintillus with her presence, and gets an intervening night watchman killed; Quintillus runs out of juice before he can do much more, though Tina faints at the sight, and Fiorello's daughter, Dr. Maria Fiorello (Adele Mara), diagnoses her with catatonia. (And as for Maria, she exists solely to have had a previous romance with Paul and to serve her side in the bare framework of a love triangle—or, Lordy, a love pentagon, since besides Quintillus, Maria's got her own suitor (Gar Moore)—whereas this web of relationships itself only exists to just give the principals something boring to occasionally mention.) The upshot, like I said, is The Mummy: Quintillus has, across the gulf of time, recognized in Tina a reincarnation of his lover, a patrician barred from him by his status as a gladiatorial slave—though this gets a spin, too, thanks to the supposition that Quintillus's mind is in fact still trapped there in August 24, A.D. 79, the day they both died.
So there's stuff the movie's up to that I like—there's a certain semi-erudition to its basic backstory, such as it expects you to have a comprehension of "ancient Rome" as a polity and it revolves around one of the last Etruscan speakers in the Empire who lives in Pompeii and worships an imported Egyptian god, explaining why he was at a temple of Isis and near mummification gunk when he died (and Bixby even mentions "Kem," and while of course he means "Kemet," one actual ancient name of Egypt, that's not too shabby considering he clearly didn't get a chance to look it up). Likewise, the set-up is just cool: exploiting a ghost of Pompeii is plain-and-simply a neat idea, and the iconic visual of the reconstructed victims of that disaster provides fodder for a unique movie monster that, from time to time—mainly depending on how much toplit mottled inkiness that Cahn is allowing cinematographer Kenneth Peach to treat the statue-man with in a horror film that's generally overlit, but at least always has the good sense to be in black-and-white—genuinely does manage to be horrifying in its evocation of a man that the passage of millennia has rendered into a blank space where only an unconscious yearning remains. This is not at The Mummy's level of quality, needless to say, and nothing here operates on that level of mythic undying love like Karl Freund and Boris Karloff and Zita Johann brought to the screen in 1932, but at least it activates "mythic undying love" as an idea; and while I would be very cautious to imply that Edwards is thoroughgoingly "good," her performance has beats, where her motivations start getting mixed up with her antecedent's, that are legitimately effective. (And if the movie depends on a threat that plods around town at speeds of up to one mile an hour, it is a mummy movie, after all, and it would be spectacularly ungenerous of us if we couldn't spot it that.)
The unfortunate thing is that Edwards is definitely the closest the movie gets to a good performance; the whole secondary cast is all varying degrees of unplayable, because the screenplay has accelerated them to third act levels of awareness before the ten minute mark, and as for our male lead, Anderson might well be playing more of a blank space than Bryant is. It's nuts how impersonal and emotionally inert the movie feels despite Bixby's provision of a store of melodrama beneath every relationship that never explodes, but this could be down to Cahn being about as plodding as his crypto-mummy is, only occasionally waking up and realizing he needs to whip his horror movie towards some sensation of urgency. He does at least wake up sometimes, but this is what I mean when I say Curse is prevailingly bad with tantalizing amounts of goodness within it: there's the sequence where Tina has, as a result of Quintillus's psychic call, come to sketch his corpse, and he moves incrementally while she's looking down at her drawing, that's got real scariness attached to it. (Now, I personally might not have shown his awkward waking motions myself, and simply cut back to each new slightly-different pose—but it is still, by far, the tightest piece of cutting that editor Grant Whytock gives us in the whole show, and probably the best strain of Edwards's performance, too, as she keeps silently asking herself if she did see this thing move and her dawning horror arrives with what might actually be the actor's real, personally-supplied forehead sweat.)
But it's so fucking logy, above and beyond "mummy movie problems," and frankly rather grating; that's where that second fatal flaw comes in and God knows what Bixby or Cahn could conceivably have been thinking when they inflicted it on themselves, this absolute film-consuming voiceover narration from a third party storyteller that I don't think manages to remain silent for even a ten-minute stretch. (IMDB says it's Morris Ankrum, others say it's Vic Perrin; but who'd want credit?) If there is an explanation, it's that (so I've heard) Cahn rewrote Bixby's overly-verbose script, and perhaps this was a compromise with an irate screenwriter who thought every word he'd put to paper was gold. But it's truly impossible to see how: this is beyond-incompetent voiceover narration, not just the kind that clutters the soundscape and condescends to tell you what the themes are, etc.; primarily, it's just describing what you're seeing in real time, an emblematic moment (though once the scene's been set by roughly the 120 second mark, every last line of narration is tied for "the worst") coming deep in the final third when Paul investigates a change to his girlfriend's painting of Quintillus, examines the paint, clearly finds it still wet and therefore new, and there Ankrum or Perrin is, fucking telling us, that's the painting, Paul's examining it, and, indeed, it is still wet and therefore new. It's the kind of narration you'd only think would happen to a movie that was missing whole scenes or they'd dropped large portions of the soundtrack into a lake or something (the preponderance is at least reminiscent of the fiasco of the sound recording on storied Z-movie, The Creeping Terror), but it happened to this one, apparently, on purpose.
Not that this movie, 1958 or not, actually does have professional-grade sound recording, which is the keenest way its grubbiness pops out at you: they get all the dialogue and everything, but it has a ridiculously tinny echo on any high-pitched noise, including women's screams and sometimes just women's more-or-less regular voices, but also including, like, stepping on the remains of prop doors that've been smashed open and things like that. Now, this is more charming than anything else, I suppose (though it's always fun when the sound's looped in and it's extremely noticeable because it's not been so badly-recorded), and it makes big chunks of the soundtrack sound like the creepy squeaking of the ant sound effects from Them!, but it goes to what a slapdash production we've got here. But then, muddling things all the way, because this cannot ever be straightforwardly bad, we've got the other half of the soundscape, Gerald Fried's score, and it's pretty damned amazing—loud and severe and perhaps a little campy (there's the opening theme, that's also used as the main danger theme that, in its doomy horns and manic xylophones, I would describe as "evil breaking news"), but it's exactly what a good or even great version of Curse of the Faceless Man would've deserved. For its sins, we're far away from that, and it's obnoxious that a movie that should be at least as good as any Hammer mummy movie arguably isn't even quite as good as any of Universal's post-'32 mummy sequels.
Score: 4/10
That which is indistinguishable from magic:
- I mentioned "semi-erudition" above, but it's still a movie where they had to name a Roman slave, and Bixby just remixed the name of a Roman emperor he thought you wouldn't recognize.
- Likewise, while describing the Egyptian mummification process, Bixby wheels out the word "phenylamine." It sure is a chemical's name.
- The sci-fi pseudo-explanation for Quintillus's continued albeit intermittent vitality is, however, laborious—I've already suggested it's rather overcomplicated—but the basic gist is that he got soaked at the temple of Isis during the disaster of A.D. 79, and the mummification fluids, combined with the heat, combined with Pompeii's natural radioactivity (?), preserved some measure of life, then the archaeologists' x-rays recharged him. Okay, but you gotta admit, it's a new one.
- But, obviously, outrageously nonsensical: Quintillus does not resemble one of Pompeii's bodies encrusted with ash, because the Pompeiians did not leave bodies encrusted with ash, they (eventually) left hollows in the cooling pyroclastic flow where their bodies once were, hollows which effectively created casting molds. All those Pompeiians you see, then, are casts (usually copies) of the plaster poured into those hollows. So Quintillus would be a skeleton, like anybody else, but I'm pretty sure Bixby knew this, given Quintillus's literally-overbaked origin, and that the Fiorellos homage the inventor of the casting technique, 19th century archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorello.
The morality of the past, in the future!:
- Preserving history is fine, but it still ought to have occurred to somebody to take a bandsaw to Quintillus's legs during one of those long stretches where he's incapacitated.
Sensawunda:
- The ending is a nicely tragic thing, that (maybe accidentally) goes so far as to indicate that basically none of this violence or fear was necessary in the first place; then again, something as lushly romantic as a love separated by millennia should make you think about crying, and it doesn't do that.
No comments:
Post a Comment