The Spiral Staircase (1945), Robert Siodmak.

From the start of The Spiral Staircase, this guy is always watching.

Congratulations, Robert Siodmak, your 66 year-old movie scared the bejeezus out of us!  The Spiral Staircase takes place over the course of one evening, in a small village at the turn of the century.   One of the inhabitants, the police are warning, is a serial murderer who targets young women with physical handicaps.  The central character Helen (played by Dorothy McGuire) has lost her voice after a traumatic experience -- and is the killer's next target.  The pace is relentless (the film is only 84 minutes long) and the dialogue simply repeats, repeats, repeats that Helen is in danger.  They joke that she will be murdered next.  The police warn her.  Her employers tell her they will protect her.  The threat moves from something generic and impersonal to something very real - almost entirely through dialogue alone.  While watching the film, it occurred to me that the word "murderer" must have been spoken almost as many times as the F word was in The Big Lebowski!  Ethel Barrymore (looking like one of her brothers in drag, I hope she was a lovelier in her youth) was for our money the most frightening character in the picture - a dying elderly woman whose mind is unraveling.  For anyone who has had to witness the mental decline of an elderly family member her performance will be eerily chilling.  This film is a testament to how terror can be instilled more easily with fewer tricks.  A dark basement with a winding staircase is all you need.

Dorothy McGuire as Helen

Vincent Price: The Art of Fear (2003), Denis Meikle.

Jane Asher and Vincent Price, antique shopping in London while filming The Masque of the Red Death (1964).

I had always taken Vincent Price's place in the Hollywood pantheon for granted.  Yet in his book Vincent Price: The Art of Fear Denis Meikle ably points out that Price was almost a victim of bad timing, maturing as an actor while the studio system he came from was collapsing.  "Like those of his contemporaries who similarly were moulded by the studio system," he writes, "Price's screen persona was larger than life, and he was best suited to roles which were larger than life also... he was not the kind of actor to whom naturalism came easily, and this ensured that he would be sidelined by the horror cinema of the mid-fifties until a vehicle came his way for which he was better fitted."  The acting styles coming into favour during this time period - the method acting of James Dean or Marlon Brando - was in complete contrast to Price's.  This book explores how Price managed his film career in the margins by sticking for so many years with low budget masters like William Castle and Roger Corman.

As I was unfamiliar with his writing, Denis Meikle's assertive, intelligent prose took me slightly by surprise.  For example, I'd never thought of Price as "gangling." "Like many tall men weighed down by their own stature," Meikle reveals, "Price was not a very physical actor and the more strenuous were the requirements of a specific script the more incapable he became of fulfilling them.  He was at his best moving stealthily around a stylish set, relying on gesture and facial expression."  Meikle repeatedly makes sharp-eyed observations that (like his central thesis about Price's genre work) go beyond the cliche.   The relationship between Price and American International Pictures group consumes the most pages and Meikle also devotes attention to the British reception to these films, many of which were filmed in the UK (and many of which were themselves butchered by a British censor unfriendly towards the horror genre).

The book has been thoughtfully constructed: Meikle has bookended his work with essays by Richard Matheson (author of I Am Legend; he also adapted many of the Poe works used in AIP films) and Roger Corman.  I'm a strong believer in the value of photographs as supporting documents that bolster good research (especially for books on visual topics like film - it never ceases to surprise me the number of books dedicated to film that seem to take no interest in images!) and The Art of Fear is full of photos, including the delightful one shown above.  I'll be sure to be hunting out Meikle's other books.  I'm really hoping that maybe if I read more Meikle, maybe the ability to construct a smart sentence or think an original thought will rub off on me!

The Town Went Wild (1944), Ralph Murphy.

Something tells me there's no such guy as Tyremus! 

The Town Went Wild is a goofy teen date movie (I can just hear "Wake up, Little Suzie" in my head now).  The teenage kids of two feuding families go out to get a marriage license behind their parents' back.  But the city clerk discovers that the teens may have been switched at birth, meaning the husband and wife-to-be may actually be brother and sister!  Is this movie an effort to get teenagers to think twice before getting hitched (or worse)?  Aside from the teens (who are fairly natural) the acting is across-the-board hammy resulting in a lot of forced levity.

The script for The Town Went Wild  is attributed to Clarence Greene, Bernard Roth and Russell Rouse, who were all thirty years old at the time the film was released.  Roth had been working for an agent who represented both Freddie Bartholomew and Jimmy Lydon (both of whom appear in the film) and gave Greene and Rouse their "in" in the industry (at PRC).  Even though they started their work in a bottom-of-the-barrel poverty row studio, Greene and Rouse went on to collaborate on a number of classic scripts including D.O.A. and Pillow Talk.  Gotta start somewhere!

This is how teenagers dressed in the 40s!