Guess the Secret Moiderer and Win $1000

Do You DARE Sit In One of These Chairs???

Shout Factory's YOU BET YOUR LIFE - THE BEST EPISODES came out three years ago, almost to the day, but it was only recently that I obtained it. Thirty or so years have passed since I last saw Groucho Marx's classic game show, and it was wonderful to see it again: every single episode made me laugh myself sick. In answer to everyone's first question: No, the Tor Johnson episode isn't included, but you do get appearances by Harpo Marx, Chico Marx (not onstage, but visible applauding in the audience), Johnny Weissmuller, Phyllis Diller, Joe Louis, Edgar & Candice Bergen, Harry Ruby and VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS' own Joy Harmon. Not a bad bang for the buck.

After making my way through all 18 episodes, and feeling more than a bit sorry to have finished so fast, I turned to the Bonus Features: three "stag reels" of bits that didn't make it to air, some outtakes that can be reintegrated into the episodes from which they were taken, various commercials (one featuring the three Marx Brothers), and last but not least, three Groucho-related pilots. There remain two of these I haven't watched yet, but the first of the pilots -- THE PLOT THICKENS (1963) -- turned out to be a revelation.

Why? Well, check out these credits from the end of the 29m episode:

I expect a lot of things when I delve into Bonus Features on a DVD, but discovering an obscure, forgotten game show pilot that is the only known collaboration of William Castle, Robert Bloch, and Groucho Marx is not one of them. This was the first Castle-Bloch collaboration, prior to Bloch's scripts for STRAIT-JACKET and THE NIGHT WALKER (both 1964).

Bailiff Warrene Ott, mascot Lucifer and district attorney Jack Linkletter.

THE PLOT THICKENS is an experimental combination of murder mystery/courtroom drama à la PERRY MASON and game show. It's hosted by "district attorney" Jack Linkletter and sidekick "bailiff" Warrene Ott), whose uniform is a black danceskin replete with tail, which Groucho pinches at one point; Warrene (THE PHANTOM PLANET, THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS PALS) is there mostly to lend the show sex appeal, while dutifully stroking the show's unhappy-looking black cat mascot, Lucifer. There's also a panel of four celebrity "detectives," one of whom (Richard Halley) is a real-life detective; the others are actress Jan Sterling (ACE IN THE HOLE, 1984), writer Stanley Ralph Ross (later of TV's BATMAN), and of course, Groucho.

Panelists Richard Halley, Stanley Ralph Ross, Jan Sterling, and the one, the only... Groucho.

The panel are shown a 10m mystery film ("Mystery in the Crystal Ball," featuring Joe Maross as a detective named Penfield) that involves a murder and four possible suspects, then those "suspects" are assembled in four empty seats onstage, where the celebrity detectives "grill" them before a live audience. Each of the suspects must tell the truth... except for the murderer, who is given permission to lie to conceal their identity. Any celebrity who correctly guesses the identity of the murderer wins $500... and if the real detective fails where the celebrity detectives succeed, their prize amount is doubled to $1000.

Two scenes from "Murder in the Crystal Ball," featuring James Callahan, Arthur Batanides, and Linda Bennett.

I grant that it's very odd to see celebrities vying for money they intend to win for themselves, but maybe there wasn't much of a salary involved. Then again -- and this is probably the real explanation, given the show's patrimony -- maybe it's all show business. The mystery film is practically indistinguishable from the first reel of a PERRY MASON episode, and directed by a veteran of 21 episodes of that series, William D. Russell. I personally found the mystery fairly easy to solve, but the pilot was a delight anyway for Groucho's interjections of humor, his flirtatiousness with the bailiff and suspect Linda Bennett (whose IMDb page credits her with this pilot, a movie called NAKED FLAME which I do believe features her, and a couple of Sixties grindhouse pictures in which another woman of her name appeared), and the "grilling" sequences, which required four actors to act in character but without a script -- a rarely witnessed dramatic exercise with actors of this vintage.

Suspects Jay Adler, Linda Bennett, James Callahan and Kathryn Giveney have a laugh when the real killer is unmasked.

YOU BET YOUR LIFE - THE BEST EPISODES would be well worth having even without this pilot, but knowing that THE PLOT THICKENS was included, and its specifics, would have made the set absolutely irresistable to me -- and perhaps to you, too, which is why I thought I'd share the news. There remain two more pilots in this set that I haven't watched: WHAT DO YOU WANT? and TELL IT TO GROUCHO. For all I know, they might guest star Delphine Seyrig and Wild Man Fischer and be directed by Sergei Parajanov.

Apparently, with Groucho, anything is possible.

The Other Addams Family

It is said that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is preparing a number of their Hammer Film holdings for release on DVD later in the year. Though it is not one of the most beloved films in this batch, I'm hopeful that Sony will get around, sooner or later, to William Castle's one-shot collaboration with the illustrious horror studio, THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1963). I watched this film last night, courtesy of a year's old Encore Mystery broadcast, as part of my ongoing tape-to-DVD-R conversion procedure, and was surprised that this movie, about which I've always been lukewarm at best, suddenly kicked in as puckish entertainment.

Scripted by Robert Dillon -- whose other credits include Roger Corman's X THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES (1963), PRIME CUT (1972) and FRENCH CONNECTION II (1975)-- Castle's THE OLD DARK HOUSE is not really a remake of the 1932 Universal classic directed by James Whale, though it too claims basis in J. B. Priestley's 1928 novel BENIGHTED. I'm told that the Whale film is very faithful to the novel until just before the end, and the Castle film's storyline bears only very loose similarities to the earlier narrative. Castle's film was not accorded much respect upon its release; in the United Kingdom, it was issued in a cut 76m version, while, in America, it was issued at its full 86 minute length. However, US distributor Columbia refused the expense of color prints, releasing it only in decidedly unlustrous black-and-white. It was shown this way on American television until sometime in the late 1980s, when it began to appear on premium cable channels and local commercial stations in color. It looks startlingly good in color, and I was also pleased to discover how much precision and compositional quality Arthur Grant's photography gained when I zoomed the full-frame picture up on my widescreen set. This, too, is the way THE OLD DARK HOUSE was meant to be seen and too often hasn't.

My newfound appreciation of THE OLD DARK HOUSE certainly doesn't extend to comparing it to the 1932 version, which is truly incomparable, nor would I compare it favorably to some of Castle's own work. It's not a perfect-of-its-kind confection as were THE TINGLER and HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL. However, it's fairly assuredly the finest of Castle's many attempts to fuse humor and horror, and the opportunity to work with a thoroughly experienced British cast and Hammer's top-flight technical crew (including production designer Bernard Robinson and composer Benjamin Frankel) put Castle ahead of his usual game, which often made use of some less-than-impressive American supporting players. Top-billed American actor Tom Poston, returning to the Castle ranks from the previous year's ZOTZ!, carries the film confidently and amiably. In the earlier film, Poston played a variation on the absent-minded professor character played so successfully by Fred MacMurray in two then-recent Walt Disney productions, and came off as a likeable if diluted eccentric; here, he's playing a role better suited to his range and qualities and he manages to navigate a narrow and sometimes treacherous path between drama and physical comedy. Surrounding Poston are a motley crew of British players as the creepy Femm family: Robert Morley, Peter Bull, Joyce Grenfell (who fears that, if she stops knitting, the world will end -- as indeed it does), Mervyn Johns, Fenella Fielding, Danny Green, and the seemingly normal Janette Scott. Castle obtains a stronger body of performances than he got in any of the other films he directed in the 1960s, and if truth be told, the performances are uniformly stronger here than they were in the average Hammer film of this period.

So... the performances are delightful, the script's dark comedy plays well, the art direction is splendid, the music is appropriately baroque and doomy -- what is it about THE OLD DARK HOUSE that doesn't quite work? Somehow, whatever was necessary to bond these elements into a happy, organic package simply isn't in evidence. It isn't just that Danny Green makes a poor Morgan when compared to Boris Karloff -- indeed, when this film was first released, the James Whale version was considered all but lost, and few who went to see it knew much more about the earlier adaptation than the stills they had seen; the Morgan in this film isn't even the Femm's butler but rather a super-strong, strangulation-happy family member. Castle was able to cast his films, knew the atmosphere he was after, and had the right sense of humor, but he simply wasn't capable to make all these components move as one. In some ways, he didn't develop as a director beyond the abilities he'd acquired while making films for the Whistler and Crime Doctor series at Columbia in the 1940s: here as there, actors are trotted out in character when they are needed, and one almost feels them disappear as they move offscreen. The action is too stagey to convincingly blend with the mise-en-scène.

The film includes the credit "drawn by Charles Addams" (a monstrous hand actually paints the great man's signature onscreen in moon-pale ink), though the great NEW YORKER cartoonist drew neither the film poster nor designed the production. What he drew was the old dark house visible behind the main titles -- and drawn black on a deep purple background, his work isn't terribly visible, at least not in the print I viewed. Nevertheless, his presence acknowledges the debt that the Femms played in developing his own Addams Family -- indeed, he openly acknowledged that his butler Lurch had been inspired by Karloff's Morgan in the original film. It was clever of Castle to hire Addams, not only for the coup of adding his name to the credits and advertising, but for recognizing the relationship that existed between Addams drawings and the movie that he wanted to make. If you think about it, all of Castle's earlier horror films had been comedic though in a non-diegetic sense; they were genuinely horrific, but comedic in the way he sold them. After the rip-roaring success of HOMICIDAL, Castle's work in horror sought to balance horror and humor; it's there in 13 GHOSTS, in MR. SARDONICUS (if we see the version including Castle's "Punishment Poll" footage), and in I SAW WHAT YOU DID -- and it's in THE OLD DARK HOUSE that this uneasy fusion works best. It works well enough, in fact, to have inspired in other people the idea of developing Addams' cartoons as a television series.

William Castle (who died in 1977) is still about as popular among movie fans as he ever was when he was alive. Most of his best movies are available on DVD and he inspired the character played by John Goodman in Joe Dante's terrific 1993 movie MATINEE. Neither Castle's nor Hammer's most devoted admirers have had much good to say about THE OLD DARK HOUSE over the years, but it's doubtful that a cut or cropped or colorless version of the experience really passes for an intended viewing of THE OLD DARK HOUSE. My memory suitably refreshed and corrected, I think it harbors enough of the mysterious and spooky and altogether ooky to warrant a closer look, should a Sony DVD ever wend our way.

Pan's Antecedent?

In the course of his marvelous audio commentary on Optimum Home Entertainment's two-disc import of PAN'S LABYRINTH, writer-director-producer Guillermo del Toro mentions during the harrowing Pale Man scene that its concept -- of an ogre who inserts a pair of disembodied eyes into the socket-like stigmata in the palms of his hands -- had its roots in a poster he once saw.

He doesn't name the poster, but when he said this, something immediately clicked with me. William Castle's film THE NIGHT WALKER opens with a creepy, Paul Frees-narrated prologue on the subject of nightmares. A key image from this sequence, used in some of its print advertising, depicted a fist balled around a staring eyeball. Eureka!

In fact, double eureka: The original poster art for THE NIGHT WALKER, I remembered, was a recreation of sorts of Henry Fuseli's famous 19th century painting "The Nightmare," which showed a puckish imp squatting atop a dreaming figure as a spectral mare glowered from the shadows of the sleep chamber. The poster for THE NIGHT WALKER, however, replaced the imp with... a faun.

In looking around the Internet, I found this fabulous Italian poster art for THE NIGHT WALKER, for which the artist combined both images on a single poster. I didn't bother to Photoshop-out the www.moviegoods.com watermark, so Movie Goods can consider this a free commercial -- and an endorsement too, because I was so enamored of this design, especially given its new currency, I ended up buying the poster. (Don't worry: it's still available, so you can buy one too, if it galvanizes you as it galvanized me.)

THE NIGHT WALKER was released in 1964, the year Guillermo del Toro was born. It's not a great movie, or even one of William Castle's better features, but it now becomes more important by virtue of carrying in its ad campaign the seed of a truly great film made in the following century. The faun and the seeing hand have nothing to do with THE NIGHT WALKER, and it took del Toro to make the masterpiece of fantasy that this memorable poster disingenuously promised.