Tower of London (Rowland V. Lee, 1939)

1939 was a busy year for filmmaker Rowland V. Lee. After Son of Frankenstein (reviewed on this site last month), he made the drama The Sun Never Sets before returning to the darker stuff with Tower of London, an epic but concise fictionalized historical action-drama with plenty of horror movie elements and Son of Frankenstein cast members Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff, with added Vincent Price. 

Like Son of Frankenstein, it's an emotionally and narratively complex story skillfully told, with charismatic actors who, true or not, look like they're having the time of their lives. It was a passion project for Lee, who had been planning it for years. I had a great time with it.

The feeble king of England, Henry VI (Miles Mander), has been deposed by King Edward IV (Ian Hunter, not the Mott the Hoople singer) and locked up in the Tower of London, albeit in a comfortable room, unlike many of the other prisoners, who are shackled and tortured by the chief executioner and head of the prison guards, Mord (Boris Karloff), a bald, club-footed beast of a man who spends his downtime sharpening his blades with a raven on his shoulder and inflicting the aforementioned torture. As our lame duck president once said about Corn Pop, Mord is a bad dude. (The election was horrifying, the country is toast, both major parties are moral failures, nothing I can say about it here will be enjoyable, I hope a better system rises from the ashes or a meteor hits us, back to the movie.)

Henry's brother, Richard (Basil Rathbone), the duke of Gloucester, is a treacherous, scheming little freak who wants the throne and is willing to do anything to get it, often in cahoots with the bloodthirsty Mord. Richard has a secret dollhouse with a doll for each person in the line of succession. When he succeeds at removing the obstacle, the doll is chucked into his fireplace with much glee. 

Those obstacles include Henry, his own brother Edward, Edward's two young sons, the prince of Wales (G.P. Huntley) (he wants to snag the prince's wife, Anne Neville, played by Rose Hobart, who was the subject of a fascinating early experimental film by Joseph Cornell), the queen's cousin John Wyatt (John Sutton), and the Duke of Clarence (Vincent Price). Richard has everyone fooled except for Queen Elyzabeth (Barbara O'Neil), who has a visceral distrust of the man and is especially unnerved when he spends time with her sons. (Also in 1939, O'Neil played Scarlett O'Hara's mother in Gone with the Wind despite being only three years older than Vivien Leigh.) We also get substantial supporting parts for Nan Grey as Lady Alice Barton, John Wyatt's betrothed, and Ernest Cossart as Tom Clink, a sassy chimney sweep who gets mixed up in the intrigue.

This cast has the juice, as the perpetually online like to say. Rathbone, Hunter, Karloff, Sutton, Cossart, and Price tear into these roles, and O'Neil gets a surprising amount to do despite her more grounded part. (She's basically the straight woman for a bunch of wild dudes.) Hunter plays King Edward as a politically effective but goofy party animal in it for the good times and the prestige of power, lacking in empathy and easily manipulated by Richard. He's hilarious and knows how to ham it up just enough without wearing out his welcome. 

Karloff's role is pretty one-note but exceedingly memorable in its physicality and menace, and he's a major reason the film works as a horror film as well as a historical drama. Price and Rathbone are fantastic and immensely skilled at nailing that sweet spot between sincerity and camp. The scene where the two men have a wine-drinking contest to determine the fate of the duke's fortune is one of the great two-person scenes. Price would later play Rathbone's part in Roger Corman's 1962 remake of this movie, which also incorporated some of Shakespeare's Richard III.

Director Lee, so adept at handling the complex, competing interests of his characters in Son of Frankenstein, is equally adept at taking on the large canvas here, which includes all the palace intrigue in the tower, the love and family lives of multiple sets of characters, murders, executions, several exciting swordfights, and two epic battle scenes. He manages all this in just over ninety minutes, without letting the pace drag or hurrying the action along too swiftly. Nearly every major character is explored in depth, and even the minor characters get their moments. Lee had a reputation for going over schedule and over budget, but he got results. (He was also one of the founders of the Directors Guild of America, which was originally called the Screen Directors Guild, a union protecting filmmakers' rights.)

I don't know if 1939 was just a fluke or if most Lee films are as solid as Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London. If they are, I definitely need to dip into the catalog. Based on the two films of his I've seen, the dude had the goods. Lee retired from filmmaking in 1945, with the Charles Laughton-starring swashbuckler Captain Kidd his last movie as director. He spent the rest of his life ranching in the San Fernando Valley, though he turned part of the ranch into filming location property and rented it out to productions, including Laughton's only film as director, the masterpiece The Night of the Hunter, and continued to sell parts of it to developers for corporate offices and family homes. He made a short-lived return to the movies with the Biblical epic The Big Fisherman in 1959, producing and cowriting the screenplay but hiring Frank Borzage to direct. He died in 1975.

Dead Man Walking (Gregory Brown aka Gregory Dark, 1988)

This week, I'm writing about another apocalyptic sci-fi/action/thriller, 1988's Dead Man Walking, made by porn film director turned b-movie filmmaker turned A-list music video director Gregory Dark under his birth name of Gregory Brown. (He switched from Dark to Brown to differentiate his "legit" movies from his pornos but mostly went back to Dark for his later films and music videos. His employers for the latter career include such varied artists as the Melvins, OutKast, Cherry Poppin' Daddies, Britney Spears, Counting Crows, Orgy, Ice Cube, Sublime, The Shins, Busta Rhymes, Mandy Moore, and Snoop Dogg.)

Dead Man Walking makes the Roger Corman production in my last post, Deathsport, look like a glossy, expensive studio prestige picture, and it's probably safe to assume that the majority of the budget went to the hiring of the cult character actors in the lead roles, which is not a criticism. That's money well spent. The movie has a great premise and a pedestrian visual style clearly hampered by the obvious production budget limitations, but the mostly exciting cast does a lot to keep a film-loving viewer interested.

In the terrifying future of 1997, a world hit hard by a deadly plague is in the process of rebuilding itself. The infected plague victims, who look like sufferers of leprosy (or at least a community theater playhouse version of leprosy), have been confined to heavily guarded shanty towns/slums called plague zones. The uninfected and immune live freely in a society that's close to ours, far away from the plague zones. Wealthy corporations swooped in and consolidated even more power during the pandemic phase (sound familiar?), and the biggest corporation, Unitus, has just begun a process to build housing projects in the plague zones, giving plague sufferers an apartment for their final few years in exchange for cheap labor for Unitus.

Besides the healthy and the plague-infected, a third group of humans called zero men are free to do their freaky thing. Zero men have the plague and will eventually die of it but are non-contagious and don't show any outward symptoms. A healthy person could hang with zero men and not get infected, but would any of them want to? Most of the zero men live lives of reckless abandon and erratic craziness.

John Luger (b-movie legend Wings Hauser) is a zero man who spends his days and nights giving zero effs and drinking at Club Zero, a freaky bar for zero men. We meet him at Club Zero playing chainsaw roulette with another crazy zero man. Hoisted from the ceiling is a chainsaw with a cranky pull starter. The roulette players take turns holding the saw to their opponent's neck and pulling the chain. If you can get the touchy starter to kick on and shred your opponent's neck, you win the game. Luger plays calmly while puffing a cigar and kissing his lady friend Rika (Tasia Valenza) in between turns. To no one's surprise, especially anyone who looked at the credits and saw Hauser's name at the top, Luger wins the game as blood spurts on the fellow patrons.

Meanwhile, Unitus executive Mr. Shahn (John Petlock) and his daughter Leila (Pamela Ludwig) are taking a ride through a plague zone in Shahn's limo, driven by Shahn's chauffeur Chaz (Re-Animator's Jeffrey Combs), to inspect the site of one of the future housing projects. The unlucky trio is set upon by three escaped prisoners, Decker (the late, great Brion James, who eats this role alive), Snake (the great Sy Richardson, who doesn't get enough to do in this movie), and Gordon (Joe D'Angerio). Snake and Gordon are run-of-the-mill criminals, but Decker is a crazed, violence-loving maniac as well as being a zero man. 

Decker kills Shahn, leaves Chaz for dead, and kidnaps Leila, taking her deep into the plague zone. A rescued Chaz tries to get the cops to go after them, but no authority will enter the zone, so Chaz tries his luck at finding a mercenary for hire at Club Zero. Luger likes the idea of heading into the zone on a crazy adventure, so he joins Chaz in the search for Leila. Lots of freaky post-apocalyptic shenanigans ensue, including a visit to Café Death, a plague zone bar that, according to Decker, "makes Club Zero look like Disneyland." (Neither of these bars will win any production design awards, but they have a low-budget charm.) Café Death has a more punk rock vibe than Club Zero's biker bar without the bikes feel, as well as live entertainment from a performance artist/emcee who sets a guy on fire. My wife recognized that emcee as Diz McNally, the co-host along with Dave Coulier of Nickelodeon's Out of Control. We didn't have Nickelodeon in my hometown when I was growing up, so my wife's Nickelodeon references frequently sail right over my head.

This is the kind of premise that's crying out for a decent production design budget and a strong director (imagine what Brian Trenchard-Smith could do with a story like this), but Brown, who hadn't made many non-porn films at this point in his career, doesn't really have the resources or the experience to make this look better than a random A-Team episode. Still, he knows the power of his actors' faces and lets Hauser, Combs, and especially James turn this mother out. (Again, I wish Richardson had more to do.) Hauser gets some great closeups in his early Club Zero scenes, stogie in mouth and chainsaw in hand (or at neck), James takes full advantage of his villainous charisma throughout, and Combs is perfect for playing a conflict-avoiding wimp who discovers his inner strength (though I never quite understood why he was so hellbent on saving his boss's daughter at all costs other than some unexplored relationship or unrequited love angle).

Dead Man Walking is not a great movie. You've seen the apocalyptic road movie done much better and much worse if you've been around enough. Still, I couldn't help but enjoy myself watching these actors navigate this story, and I liked the touch of having actual newscasters turned actors (Mario Machado and Mary Ingersoll) deliver the post-apocalyptic network news in between scenes. Actors always sound wrong when they pretend to be newscasters, but actual newscasters or actors with broadcast news experience have an instinctive feel for newscaster voice. I think you have to be born with it. So, Dead Man Walking. If you're a b-movie fan who digs the '80s low-budget sci-fi/action straight-to-video aesthetic, give this one a go. It's solid.