Category: 1962

The Intruder vs. To Kill a Mockingbird

THE INTRUDER VS. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

A tale of two movies, both from 1962 and both dealing with racism.

Other than their year of release, some of their subject matter, and their being filmed in black-and-white, the films are worlds apart in virtually every other way, including how they have been received by the establishment and the general public.

Roger Corman directed and co-produced (alongside his younger brother Gene) THE INTRUDER for $80,000 and it was filmed on location for three-and-a-half weeks in Southeast Missouri towns East Prairie, Charleston, and Sikeston. William Shatner stars as race hate inciter and outside agitator Adam Cramer and the young Canadian actor was still years away from becoming a household name for “Star Trek.” THE INTRUDER takes place contemporaneously with the civil rights movement and school integration; Charles Beaumont adapted his screenplay from his own 1959 novel of the same name and he even plays school principal Mr. Paton in the film.

Robert Mulligan directed TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD behind a $2 million budget and major studio backing with a screenplay by future Pulitzer Prize winner Horton Foote adapted from Harper Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name that had already become an institution even before a prestigious film adaptation. Gregory Peck, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor four times before his most famous role (THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM, THE YEARLING, GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT, TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH), stars as noble lawyer Atticus Finch. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD filmed on Hollywood back lots and sets designed to recreate the Monroeville, Alabama of Lee’s Great Depression youth.

THE INTRUDER premiered May 14, 1962 in New York City and it would be reissued as I HATE YOUR GUTS and SHAME. In other words, it flopped and Corman has never quite made another picture like THE INTRUDER again. His later exploitation productions hid and obscured their social commentary behind and beneath protective layers of nudity, sex, and violence.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD debuted Dec. 25, 1962 and just like the Lee source material, it became an almost instantaneous social institution and beloved classic. It received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won three, including Best Actor for Peck. It has been a longtime staple of the American Film Institute: No. 34 on the 1997 “100 Years … 100 Movies” list and No. 25 on the 10th Anniversary list and the AFI voted it the No. 1 courtroom drama and Atticus Finch the No. 1 hero on its list of the 100 greatest heroes and villains.

I watched both films in close proximity of each other (both for the first time) and THE INTRUDER absolutely shames TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

Sorry, folks, Adam Cramer presents a far more interesting character than Atticus Finch and Shatner’s incendiary performance blows away Peck and its relentless note of nobility.

Cramer, a non-Southerner decked in a bright white suit, rides into the fictional small Southern town of Caxton and quickly comes on strong as a gentleman. This clever conman and charlatan then goes to work and preys on the racist, anti-integration sympathies of many of the residents to meet his goal of inciting a race war town-by-town. Cramer’s a master manipulator and rabble-rouser who also sets his sights on a high school girl and a frustrated housewife. His manipulative powers lead to one of the black students, Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), being falsely accused of rape by a white girl. That, of course, ties in with the absolute worst nightmare of a racist, one infinitely worse than integration. In a chilling final scene, the inflamed mob interrogates Mr. Greene about this rape. The mob believes it has become judge, jury, and executioner.

Fact and fiction must have blurred for novice actor Charles Barnes, a 19-year-old young man from Charleston (one of the three towns used in filming) whom Corman instructed to draw from real-life experiences attending an integrated high school in his hometown his senior year. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a story on Barnes in May 1962, headlined “Negro Actor’s Reel Role Too Real for Whites … And He Has to Leave Hometown.”

THE INTRUDER plays real, and that sealed its commercial doom and consignment to the dustbin (at least the margins) of cinematic history.

On the other hand, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD plays like a series of pat moral lessons for two hours, interrupted by youthful shenanigans and occasional voice-over narration to put us in a proper nostalgic mood.

Enter “To Kill a Mockingbird moral lessons” into a search engine and it returns 1,340,000 hits.

Is that why so many people love TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD?

Are fans of the film made to feel virtuous watching it?

Just asking for a friend.

Atticus Finch comes across so darn noble maybe because an older Scout Finch, his daughter, narrates the story.

She begins, “Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning; ladies bathed before noon, after their 3 o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go and nothing to buy … and no money to buy it with. Although Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself … That summer, I was six years old.”

The narration put me off right from the start and it all translated as “Grandma, tell me about the good ole days.”

Between the narration and the sets and the characters, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD feels like experiencing a show called “The South 1932” at Universal Studios Hollywood. LOOK! It’s a one-dimensional racist white trash caricature! LOOK! It’s busybody neighbors! LOOK! It’s a crotchety old bag! LOOK! It’s a sheriff named “Heck Tate”! FEEL GOOD ENTERTAINMENT! I don’t know why I need to pay money to see that when I could experience all that for real somewhere in Small Town U.S.A. Never mind, I’ll pass on both.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD stitches together multiple narrative threads, some more successfully than others.

— Scout (Mary Badham), her older brother Jem (Phillip Alford), and her best friend Dill (John Megna), and their larger-than-life misadventures.

— Scout and Jem and their relationship with Atticus, as well as their black maid Calpurnia (Estelle Evans).

— Atticus defends Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man falsely accused of rape by Mayella Ewell (Collin Wilcox) and her father Robert E. Lee “Bob” Ewell (James Anderson), during a trial when the odds are stacked dramatically against both men. Before the trial, townspeople — including Scout’s school mates — call Atticus a “nigger lover” and some of the most concerned citizens form a lynch mob.

— The children’s obsession with Boo Radley (Robert Duvall).

Badham and Alford both give very good performances and their rapport with each other and Peck forms the strongest part of the movie. Badham’s debut performance received a well-deserved nomination for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. I understand why multiple generations of young women have responded so favorably toward TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. (Mulligan later directed Reese Witherspoon in a similarly affecting performance in the 1991 film THE MAN IN THE MOON.)

On the race level, though, that’s where TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD fails and it fails miserably.

The black characters remain predominantly in the background, Tom Robinson dies offscreen, and Bob Ewell belongs to a movie racist tradition called “Ku Klux Klown.”

We also have quite possibly the only mob in history ever talked down by a 6- or 7-year-old girl.

By comparison, in THE INTRUDER, a mob burns a cross in a black neighborhood, blows up the local black church and kills the preacher in the blast, and severely beats up the white character who takes a stand alongside the blacks and encourages them to return to school after the bombing. This conscientious white character gets so beaten that he receives broken ribs and loses one eye.

Nobody lays a hand on Atticus.

Meanwhile, only Peters and Evans received screen credit among the black actors in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

All the others were not credited.

That includes William “Bill” Walker in the small but pivotal role of Reverend Sykes, who delivers the famous line “Miss Jean Louise? Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.” Peck himself said this scene — where all the black people in the balcony stand up for Atticus Finch after he defended Tom Robinson — wrapped up his Academy Award for Best Actor.

To be fair, some of the white actors, including Kim Stanley as the narrator, also were not credited.

By the point late in the movie when Bob Ewell attacks Jem and Scout and Boo Radley comes to their rescue, it was basically too little too late for this viewer. I was just ready for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD to be over.

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1963)

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (1963) Three stars

The Japanese champion Godzilla had last appeared in GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN in 1955 or in the American version GIGANTIS, THE FIRE MONSTER in 1959.

The American champion King Kong (guess we claim the big lug, though we kidnapped him from Skull Island and brought him to the Big Apple) had last appeared in SON OF KONG in 1933. Yes, they rushed out a sequel nine months after the seminal KING KONG.

With a title like KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, maybe we can take a guess at the content of the third GODZILLA and third KING KONG film. Three is the magic number, right? At least it was in Japan, where its success at the box office inspired Toho to continue the Godzilla series.

Both monsters appear in color for the first time.

Like a lot of Jackie Chan films, the Godzilla films appeared in radically different forms when they invaded America after their original release.

It started with the very first GODZILLA in 1954, released two years later in America as GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. This new version excised 16 minutes of footage from the original, mainly the political, social, and anti-nuclear themes so vital to the Japanese version. Remember that GODZILLA came out less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The American producers sponsored new footage and inserted American journalist Steve Martin (Raymond Burr), used mostly in flashbacks and voice-over narration. Japanese-American actors and look-alikes had to be used to attempt to make it seem like Martin had been in the original film. Martin speaks into a tape recorder, “George, here in Tokyo, time has been turned back two million years. This is my report as it happens. The prehistoric monster the Japanese call ‘Godzilla’ has just walked out of Tokyo Bay. He’s as tall as a 30-story building.”

In America, KING KONG VS. GODZILLA follows that KING OF THE MONSTERS format, as we get a series of talking head scenes before we finally get down to the heavy-duty monster battle royal in the let’s say last half. Several years ago, I wrote a negative review of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA because I wanted to yell at United Nations reporter Eric Carter to shut his big fat trap and just let the title characters fight. On the latest watch or two, after purchasing a VHS copy (GoodTimes big box, no less, with a blurb from Leonard Maltin, “Above average special effects”) recently, I enjoyed the film a lot more than I had before.

Now, I think of the Eric Carter and the blah, blah, blah gang as the wrestling commentators on a big pay-per-view hyping up Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant, for example. King Kong vs. Godzilla and Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant have equal stature in my estimation.

I just love monsters fighting and the Godzilla films delivered that for nearly a 15-year period beginning with KING KONG VS. GODZILLA and continuing through Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan, Ebirah, the Smog Monster, Gigan, Megalon, and Mechagodzilla. Technically, it started with GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN when Godzilla fought Anguirus … or when Kong battled a T-Rex in the original KONG.

What was the genesis of KING KONG VS. GODZILLA?

Stop motion animator pioneer Willis O’Brien (1886-1962), who did the work for both KONG films, created a story outline where Kong battled Frankenstein’s Monster. O’Brien gave the outline to producer John Beck to develop a project, but Beck took the project instead to Toho behind O’Brien’s back. The rest is history, including Frankenstein’s Monster.

Some of us are probably thinking right about now that it does not seem like a fair fight between Kong and Godzilla. Over the years, Godzilla’s size has varied greatly from 164 feet tall in 1954 to 492 feet tall 60 years later. Kong, meanwhile, stands at 24 feet at his highest height in 1933. KING KONG VS. GODZILLA makes Kong 147 feet tall.

Machine gun fire topples Kong from the Empire State Building, while Godzilla seems virtually indestructible despite the best efforts of the military. Well, let’s just say that lightning gives Kong incredible powers; later in the Godzilla series, lightning would have the same effect on Godzilla. Maybe one day we’ll have a film combining Frankenstein’s Monster, Godzilla, King Kong, and Jason Voorhees, and we’ll call it LIGHTNING STRIKES.

A legend grew up around KING KONG VS. GODZILLA that Kong won in the American version and Godzilla won in the Japanese version. That’s not true. I mean, for crying out loud, Kong gets top billing in the title.

Bette Davis: Tougher than Anybody Else

BETTE DAVIS: TOUGHER THAN ANYBODY ELSE
Like most people in my generation, I first encountered Bette Davis (1908-89) through popular music rather than her 123 movie or TV roles from 1931 through 1989.

Oh, let’s see, Davis made a starring performance in Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes,” a hit that spent nine weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and proved to be 1981’s biggest song. You might vividly remember that one and songwriters Donna Weiss and Jackie De Shannon gave their heroine — er, their femme fatale — not only Bette Davis eyes, but also “Harlow gold hair” and “Greta Garbo’s standoff sighs.”

Davis also made the hall of fame in songs by Madonna and the Kinks.

Madonna Ciccone and Step Pettibone (Ciccone-Pettibone has got a better ring to it than Lennon-McCartney or Strummer-Jones) co-wrote “Vogue” and Madonna’s rap (her best) finishes off with “Bette Davis, we love you” after running through Garbo, Monroe, Dietrich, DiMaggio, Brando, James Dean (called Jimmy Dean, not the sausage manufacturer), Kelly, Astaire, Hayworth, Bacall, Hepburn, and Lana Turner.

Like the other two songs that came later in time, Ray Davies’ lyrics on “Celluloid Heroes” mention Garbo and she gets top billing (first mention) before the song moves on to Rudolph Valentino, Bela Lugosi, Davis, George Sanders, Mickey Rooney, and Marilyn Monroe. Davies groups Davis with Valentino and Lugosi, capping off six lines with “But stand close by Bette Davis / Because hers was such a lonely life.” (Davis named her 1962 autobiography “The Lonely Life.”) For the record, Garbo gets six lines, Monroe four, and Valentino, Lugosi, Sanders, and Rooney two each.

— The first Bette Davis movies I saw were ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) and WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962), both highly enjoyable for different reasons.

Their common ground, though, centers around Davis.

ALL ABOUT EVE, that’s the one featuring her famous line “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” Margo Channing — a highly-regarded but aging and difficult stage actress — must not have been a great stretch for a Davis in her early 40s.

Other actresses considered for the role were Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Susan Hayward, Gertrude Lawrence, and Barbara Stanwyck. Think we can all agree that Davis was the perfect choice for Margo Channing.

You can almost feel Davis herself speaking through dialogue like “Lloyd, I am not twenty-ish. I am not thirty-ish. Three months ago I was forty years old. Forty. 4-0. That slipped out. I hadn’t quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I’ve taken all my clothes off” and “Bill’s 32. He looks 32. He looked it five years ago. He’ll look it twenty years from now. I hate men.”

BABY JANE capitalized on the real-life feud between Davis and Joan Crawford, where most of the fun comes from speculating how much reality crossed over into their fictional characters.

Just a casual search on the Internet will bring up all sorts of quotes from Davis on Crawford and I might as well as share a few within this space: “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good … Joan Crawford is dead. Good”; “There may be a heaven, but if Joan Crawford is there, I’m not going”; “Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it’s because I’m not a bitch. Maybe that’s why Miss Crawford always plays ladies”; and “The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?”

Davis never had a problem being the villain and that’s one of the things that made her so great. Let’s face it, sometimes we like the villains infinitely more than bland, square heroes.

She played a strong character in almost every single role.

Davis became the first performer to be nominated for 10 Academy Awards, all for Best Actress, and she won statuettes for DANGEROUS (1935) and JEZEBEL (1938), her first two nominations.

— Recently, I caught up with OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934), FOG OVER FRISCO (1934), and THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936).

OF HUMAN BONDAGE — her 22nd film — is renowned for being the film that made Davis a star.

Davis’ character Mildred Rogers has been described as “callous,” “manipulative,”  “cold,” “shrewish,” et cetera, and Davis really sinks her teeth into “You cad, you dirty swine! I never cared for you, not once! I was always makin’ a fool of ya! Ya bored me stiff; I hated ya! It made me SICK when I had to let ya kiss me. I only did it because ya begged me, ya hounded me, and drove me crazy! And after ya kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth! WIPE MY MOUTH!”

That’s her big scene with Leslie Howard’s Philip Carey, an overly sensitive, club-footed man who’s in love with Mildred despite the fact that she treats him like trash.

— FOG OVER FRISCO came out 26 days before OF HUMAN BONDAGE in 1934 and it’s a fast-moving crime melodrama over in 68 minutes. Action-packed and the big chase scene called to mind BULLITT and THE DEAD POOL, believe it or not.

Davis considered this one of her favorite pictures, though her character Arlene Bradford does not make it to the final reel.

Maybe here’s why FOG OVER FRISCO rated among her favorites: Davis received top billing after Warner Bros. boss Jack Warner caught drift of the Bette buzz from rushes of the film and she found out while filming FOG OVER FRISCO that Warner agreed to loan Davis out to RKO to make OF HUMAN BONDAGE.

Davis also said that FOG OVER FRISCO had a good script and that it was superbly directed by William Dieterle over a shoot that lasted around 20 days (Monday, January 22, 1934 through Saturday, February 10, 1934).

Davis plays characters on opposing ends of the social spectrum in FOG OVER FRISCO and OF HUMAN BONDAGE. In both films, though, she has a weak male admirer. She’s the stronger character, as usual.

— A lot of the fascination watching THE PETRIFIED FOREST came from seeing both Davis and Humphrey Bogart in roles early in their career.

Bogart had done 10 feature films before THE PETRIFIED FOREST and he first played the Duke Mantee role in the 1935 Broadway production alongside Leslie Howard. Warner Bros. wanted Edward G. Robinson (LITTLE CAESAR) for the film adaptation, but Howard refused to appear in the film unless Bogart got the chance to revisit Mantee, a character and performance inspired by John Dillinger. The rest was history. (Bogart and Lauren Bacall named their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart, born 1952, in honor of their friend.)

Bogart is just dynamite in THE PETRIFIED FOREST.

Like OF HUMAN BONDAGE, Davis plays a waitress and Howard’s love interest. Unlike that earlier movie, however, her Gabrielle Maple’s almost instantly smitten with Howard’s Alan Squier and their fates are reversed from OF HUMAN BONDAGE.

The New York Times’ review of the film said of her performance in THE PETRIFIED FOREST, “There should be a large measure of praise for Bette Davis, who demonstrates that she does not have to be hysterical to be credited with a grand portrayal.”

Gabrielle’s a very sympathetic character, a dreamer and an aspiring artist.

— Davis once said, “I survived because I was tougher than anybody else.”

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) Four stars; WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962) Four stars; OF HUMAN BONDAGE (1934) Three-and-a-half stars; FOG OVER FRISCO (1934) Three-and-a-half stars; THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936) Three-and-a-half stars

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

DAY 81, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) Four stars
John Frankenheimer’s political thriller is one ripped, twisted movie, borrowing famous words from Hunter S. Thompson.

It should make one reconsider both Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, for example.

I did.

Before I first watched THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, I held Sinatra in very little (miniscule) esteem. Maybe it was Phil Hartman’s savage impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” Maybe it was Sinatra’s appearances on Jerry Lewis’ MDA telethon on Labor Day and when you only have three channels and one of them’s gone all weekend, all booked up, man, we’re talking about Pits City. Maybe it was his crooning that provided the soundtrack for seemingly innocuous yuppie consumption (we all know what seemingly innocuous really means) and little old swooning ladies and every movie that wants to evoke a certain mood just by slapping one of Ol’ Blue Eyes’ standards on every few minutes. Maybe it was the fact that he lived and breathed crusty, old guard establishment, whose reactions to Elvis and the Beatles were not surprising. There was just something about that man that gave me the creeps.

Why, of course, like any child of the 1980s and 1990s, I knew Lansbury from “Murder, She Wrote” and I know I saw her in old Disney entertainments somewhere along the line. I knew that she wasn’t quite this doddering old lady, because, man, if I saw her Jessica Fletcher coming my way, I would have moved to another town or put a down payment on a passport and an one-way plane ticket and move to another country because I know that homicide’s afoot and I want no damn part of it. The homicide rate in Cabot Cove, Maine, must have rivaled Chicago.

So, yeah, in many different ways, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE warped my fragile little mind, including seeing Sinatra as a legitimate dramatic actor and Lansbury as the most wicked mother in screen history. I have no doubt she plays the most wicked mother in screen history, because I don’t want to see anybody else more wicked.

I don’t know if reading or having somebody tell you the plot summary for THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE can even adequately convey how messed up the movie’s events are, like this one I just read on the Internets: “Near the end of the Korean War, a platoon of U.S. soldiers is captured by communists and brainwashed. Following the war, the platoon is returned home, and Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is lauded as a hero by the rest of his platoon. However, the platoon commander, Captain Bennett Marco (Sinatra), finds himself plagued by strange nightmares and, together with fellow soldier Allen Melvin (James Edwards), races to uncover a terrible plot.”

Strange nightmares, you can say that again, because they incorporate those Communist brainwashing sessions.

It seems that Shaw’s platoon are surrounded by sweet little old ladies, when in fact they are Chinese and Soviet officials performing their brainwashing routine. Shaw murders two of his men, one by strangulation and one by gunshot through the head. Yet when they come back home, Shaw’s a military hero, just all part of the plan.

These nightmares are very disturbing to watch, of course, and establish the movie’s disorienting tone. We rarely catch a break.

This was one dark movie for 1962 and like DR. STRANGELOVE (1964), it holds up today because of that darkness. In her 1962 review, Pauline Kael said that it may be the most sophisticated political satire ever made in Hollywood. Here we are, decades later, and her statement holds true.

There’s a lot about the plot I don’t want to consider in this space, but there’s still a lot one can discuss considering THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.

For example, it was released October 24, 1962, right in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis during which Cold War tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached their coldest.

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE builds up to an assassination.)

For over two decades, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE became withdrawn from circulation.

Some believe it was because JFK’s assassination had such a toll on Sinatra that he sat on the film.

Apparently, Sinatra had made such a poor deal with United Artists on the film that his attorneys planned for Sinatra to buy the movie’s rights himself and bury his mistake. Sinatra’s plan succeeded in 1972.

Eventually, though, the New York Film Festival organized a 25th anniversary screening of the movie in 1987 and its success led to a theatrical re-release in 1988. Apparently, Sinatra got a better deal this second time. We all got a better deal when THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE saw the light of day once again.

The film’s tagline certainly gets at the truth of the matter: “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about! When you’ve seen it all, you’ll swear there’s never been anything like it!”