The House of Fear (Joe May, 1939)

A remake of the 1928 Paul Leni silent film The Last Warning (reviewed on this site several years ago), The House of Fear is yet another thriller set in the backstage world of the theater, a popular setting for mysteries and horror films in the '20s and '30s. It's a pleasantly entertaining movie that is not particularly special or memorable except in fleeting moments, and I don't have much to say about it, so this may be a shorter post than usual.

Retaining most of the 1928 film's narrative, The House of Fear is about an actor who drops dead mid-performance at a Broadway theater. His body disappears by the time the police arrive and is never found. The theater, owned by a pair of polar-opposite brothers (one a brusque, hulking middle-aged man with a tough-guy East Coast accent and the other a wimpy young guy with an inexplicable British accent), closes its doors after the scandal until an enterprising regional theatrical producer scrounges up enough financing to stage the same cursed play in the same location, with as much of the surviving cast as he can rehire. (The silent film had the reopening take place five years after the mysterious death, but this version shortens it to one year.)

The "producer" is actually an undercover detective trying to solve the murder, and he commits fully to the theatrical life, charging expensive cigars to his department so he can look the part of a Broadway producer. Oh, this makes his chief so mad. The guy's about to blow his top at these expenses! It's funny that the exasperated police chief has been a stock character in film for at least a century. These guys are always so mad at their detectives' antics while having to acknowledge that their unorthodox methods get results, damn it. It doesn't matter what decade it is or what's going on politically. Something about this cliché is deeply comforting to filmgoers' psyches. It's not just American movies, either. I've seen these characters pop up again and again in so much of world cinema.

Once most of the actors and crew are rehired and rehearsals start rolling, weird threats in the dead man's handwriting and even his own voice begin to appear. Could it be a gh-gh-gh-ghost? Soon, secrets about love triangles and feuds are revealed and hidden passageways are found. Another murder takes place under everyone's noses, and nefarious schemes are revealed, leading to much action and frantic exposition. The police chief gets even more exasperated. A character swings on curtains and ropes with considerable pizzazz while being chased. It all wraps up in an economical 67 minutes.

The House of Fear is difficult to write about. It's enjoyable and breezy, a couple clicks above mediocre, but it's not particularly special. (It did go over budget and over schedule, though, so there may be some behind-the-scenes juicy gossip.) This kind of thing has been done much better and much worse, and Joe May is neither a cinematic genius nor a soulless hack. It's a movie! You may like it if you like movies!

Joe May was an Austrian (real name Joseph Mandl) who got his start in the film business in Germany. May had a great reputation as a pioneer of German film, and he gave Fritz Lang his big break when he hired Lang as a screenwriter. Fleeing Germany for the United States in 1933, May ended up making b-movies for Universal.

More of a director-for-hire in the States, May saw many of his European peers eclipse him in Hollywood, and his life was full of hardships, particularly the death of his actress daughter Eva in 1924, whose biographical details seem ripped from a paperback melodrama (she was divorced three times from three different movie directors by age 22 and had one boyfriend leave her for Marlene Dietrich and another refuse her marriage proposal; she survived one suicide attempt and died from the other), his 1933 exile from Germany due to the Nazi regime, the business failure of the unsuccessful restaurant he and his wife opened in Los Angeles after he retired from filmmaking in the mid-1940s, bankruptcy, and a lengthy illness.

Dark Tower (Freddie Francis as Ken Barnett, 1987)

It's always an odd feeling to know that the director of the movie you just clicked play on requested that his name be removed from the finished product. You suspect something went wrong behind the scenes but how that manifests in the viewing experience is a fun little game of low-stakes Russian roulette I like to call Will This Be Bad, And, If So, How Bad Will This Be? Dark Tower is hardly a disaster, but it's a little too lifeless and inert. It's a movie where everyone involved seems to be on heavy doses of anti-anxiety medication, but not as interesting as that sounds. It has a couple of decent scenes and some effective moments, but it's just a little too slow and dull for my taste, and I usually love slowly paced, atmospheric movies.

The elements were all there for Dark Tower to be something special: a great cast, an offbeat story and location, and a director who usually gives his material flavor and energy. Unfortunately, things started to go wrong on the production before the director and the two leads were even involved. Ken Wiederhorn, the cowriter of the screenplay, was initially hired to direct. He had previously directed the Nazi zombie movie Shock Waves, King Frat (plot description: "frat boys compete in a farting contest"), slasher movie Eyes of a Stranger (starring Jennifer Jason Leigh), and Meatballs Part II (the one with a space alien and Richard Mulligan instead of Bill Murray). A decidedly mixed bag, for sure. For his leads, Wiederhorn hired British television veteran and costar of Top Secret Lucy Gutteridge and The Who's Roger Daltrey ("yeaaaaahhhhhhhhh!"). Wiederhorn threw himself into preproduction work, but the producers took so long getting the financing that the movie was indefinitely delayed. As a consolation, those same producers gave Wiederhorn Return of the Living Dead Part II instead.

When the money finally came through to shoot Dark Tower, Wiederhorn, Gutteridge, and Daltrey were no longer available. The legendary cinematographer Freddie Francis, who had a parallel career as a director of pulpy and darkly comic horror movies, replaced Wiederhorn. As a cinematographer, Francis worked for many great filmmakers, including Joseph Losey, Jack Clayton, Charles Crichton, Jack Cardiff, Karel Reisz, David Lynch, Robert Mulligan, and Martin Scorsese, and his directing credits include Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, 1972's Tales from the Crypt, Craze (a personal favorite), and the notorious Trog (with Joan Crawford). Francis filled the roles vacated by Gutteridge and Daltrey with two of my cult favorites, Jenny Agutter and Michael Moriarty (whose name is misspelled in the opening credits as "Moriarity," as a sort of warning of what's to come).

These all seem like upgrades to me (though I like Daltrey, too), but, sadly, Francis was dealing with a reduced budget, especially in the special effects department, and couldn't bring the fullness of his ideas to life. No one seems to have their heart in their performances, except for Theodor Bikel, who has a lot of pep in his step, and Francis' direction is surprisingly perfunctory and anonymous.

Disappointed in the look of the film and angered by the lack of effects money, Francis had his name removed prior to release, and the fictional Ken Barnett received the directorial credit. Francis was so pissed about the whole experience that he quit directing, focusing on cinematography full-time. His only directing credit for the rest of his life was an episode of HBO's Tales from the Crypt in 1996. Dark Tower got a theatrical run in Europe, but it went straight to video in the U.S. two years after its initial release overseas.

The promisingly strange narrative is about British architect Carolyn Page (Agutter), who works for the Barcelona branch of a U.S. corporation. She has designed the megalo-conglomerate's new Barcelona high-rise office complex, which is partially open, though some of the interior floors are still under construction, including, oddly, the floors above and below Carolyn's office. That can't be legit, right? I don't know 1980s Spanish building codes, but that seems off. Carolyn's late husband shared her profession, and she replaced him as architect of the office complex after his mysterious death at sea, though the body was never recovered.

For some reason, the U.S. corporation has a staff of ex-NYPD private investigators in Barcelona to investigate any potentially criminal shenanigans occurring on its property. The head of this investigating team is Dennis Randall (Moriarty), an oddball ex-cop with psychic powers. He enters Carolyn's orbit after the building's window washer falls to his death while washing Carolyn's office windows. It looks to Carolyn like some mysterious force hurled the man to his death. The investigators are condescending and skeptical, even psychic Dennis, until he starts having weird premonitions and more people die. Other cast members include parapsychologist Max Gold (Bikel), beret-wearing drunken clairvoyant Sergie (Kevin McCarthy, hell yeah), and Carolyn's secretary Tilly (Carol Lynley).

This all sounds like the makings of one hell of a b-movie, but the narrative mostly limps along aside from a few exciting or weird moments, Agutter and Moriarty bring less pizzazz than usual (but still can't help being fascinating screen presences), and the skimpy production budget means the effects are mostly inconsistent and underwhelming. There are a few too many wandering in under-construction corridor scenes, and the same damn elevator footage is used and reused umpteen times.

I wanted to like this more, and I'm a champion of messy movies with bad reputations, but it never quite landed for me. My wife liked it more than I did, though, so you may be in her rarefied company if you appreciate it. It does have a certain narcotized dreamlike atmosphere, which I usually go for, but it was just a little too boring for me.

Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

David Cronenberg is a director driven by his own curiosities and instincts rather than the whims of the marketplace (one of the many reasons he's one of my favorite filmmakers), but it was still a considerably gutsy move to follow The Fly, a big hit that managed to work beautifully as both a popcorn monster-movie flick and a purely Cronenbergian art-horror movie about illness and loving someone who's ill, with Dead Ringers, the polar opposite of a popcorn flick. This is a movie that can't help but push the popular audience away, and though it was a critical success, Dead Ringers did not make The Fly's big bucks.

Good stuff lasts, though, and Dead Ringers has remained a cult favorite, even inspiring a gender-flipped TV miniseries remake a few years ago. It's a complex, chilly, uncomfortable movie, but there's vitality and humor underneath the chill, and Cronenberg is one of the great visual stylists who understands better than most how to marry content and form.

Loosely based on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland (which was itself loosely based on the true story of Cyril and Stewart Marcus ⸺ look that up if you want your mind blown), Dead Ringers almost happened in 1981, the rushed nature of the financing forcing Cronenberg to delegate screenplay duties to a writer he'd worked with in Canadian television, Norman Snider. The financing evaporated as quickly as it arrived, and Cronenberg extensively rewrote Snider's screenplay when he was finally able to make the film in 1988. After William Hurt and Robert De Niro turned down the parts (De Niro was uncomfortable with the subject matter while Hurt told Cronenberg it was hard enough to play one role), Cronenberg struck gold with his third choice, Jeremy Irons. It's hard to imagine anyone else in these roles.

Irons plays identical twin brothers Beverly and Elliot Mantle, Toronto gynecologists who share a high-rise apartment, a private practice that specializes in improving fertility in women who are having trouble getting pregnant, and (without the other parties' knowledge) patients and romantic partners (who, wildly unethically, are sometimes patients). Elliot is outwardly more confident, outgoing, schmoozy, and manipulative, while Beverly is introverted, more research-focused, and insecure in social situations. In what could have been a stupid evil-twin/good-twin gimmick in a much stupider film, the twins in Cronenberg's movie are complex, disturbed, and fragilely human, and Irons pulls off the extremely difficult job of making each twin distinct in scenes where you need to know which man is which and making it hard to tell them apart in scenes where it's vital their identities be fuzzier.

Geneviéve Bujold plays Claire Niveau, a famous actress shooting a miniseries in Toronto and the newest patient at the Mantles' clinic. She hasn't been able to conceive, and the brothers discover she has a rare mutation that has created three cervixes. Claire is a highly intelligent woman and almost as unconventional as the Mantles (she's sympathetic but mysterious, and her character is further complicated when we see her icily and calmly verbally destroy the miniseries' costume designer). She begins dating Beverly despite him being her gynecologist (she's excited by how beautiful he finds her internal mutation; classic Cronenberg), but once she learns about the existence of Elliot, she catches on almost immediately to being the victim of the ol' switcheroo and drops the brothers fast.

Unlike their previous double acts with women, this one has shockingly and unexpectedly turned into love. After Claire dumps them, Elliot chuckles and moves on, but Beverly is devastated. Elliot is deeply disturbed by Beverly's devastation (even though he's the more controlling and seemingly independent of the brothers, Elliot is the one who is unable to imagine them having separate lives), and the brothers begin a slow descent into drug use, mental collapse, and even more heightened levels of enmeshment. Claire later decides she's not quite done with Beverly, either, and, for the first time, the brothers have something in their life that separates them from each other, which only accelerates their decline.

Cronenberg avoids some of the wild set-piece scenes from his previous work in favor of a quieter, subtler, and more claustrophobic dread. It's a very still, controlled film, almost all tension with almost no release, though the editing gets quicker and the scenes shorter as the brothers unravel. It's still unmistakably a Cronenberg film, but it also marks the transition in his work from his incredible body horror films (with the exception of 1979's Fast Company, a drive-in movie outlier about race car drivers that's more of a fun little un-Cronenbergian b-movie except for the very Cronenbergian approach to filming the races) to movies that are harder to place in specific genres and that emphasize psychology just as much as or more than biology (his next three movies were Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, and Crash, the J.G. Ballard adaptation about people aroused by car accidents, not the horrible Paul Haggis pandering white liberal Oscarbait movie of the same title). Some people prefer '70s and '80s Cronenberg, some people like the later stuff, but I'm a huge fan of his whole career.

This movie could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but Cronenberg maintains such delicate control of the tone, Irons and Bujold nail the tone (Irons as Elliot delivering the line "thank you, Shawn" to a waiter is one of my favorite line deliveries in cinema), and the set decorations, costume design (by Cronenberg's sister Denise), cinematography (the first of many Cronenberg collaborations with Peter Suschitzky), and smaller supporting performances (especially Heidi von Palleske and Canadian painter Stephen Lack, delivering the second of his two small but memorable Cronenberg roles (he was also in Scanners)) all come together beautifully. This is another great movie from my boy DC. It plays better every time I watch it. He has a new one coming soon called The Shrouds and you know I'll be there on opening weekend.

I'll leave you with a couple of wild connections between Dead Ringers and big-budget Hollywood comedies of the '80s. Despite looking like Cronenberg-designed creations, the bizarre stainless steel gynecological instruments Beverly creates after he starts losing control were actually borrowed props from Little Shop of Horrors, where they were the dental tools wielded by Steve Martin's sadistic dentist character. They were reused the next year as plastic surgery instruments in Tim Burton's Batman. Those are some versatile tools.

Here's another one. Ivan Reitman was preparing to shoot his Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito long-lost-brother comedy Twins at the same time Cronenberg was prepping his Twins. Reitman asked Cronenberg to change his title, and Cronenberg agreed. I'm glad this happened because Dead Ringers is a much more evocative title than the basic Twins, which works great as the punchline on the poster for the Reitman movie, with Arnold and DeVito in matching suits. Before Reitman was a big-shot director of Hollywood comedies, he was an independent producer/director in Canada and produced two early Cronenberg movies, Shivers and Rabid.