“The Crime of Dr. Crespi starts where Frankenstein left off!” — advertising tagline for The Crime of Dr. Crespi
In front of the camera Erich von Stroheim was known to the public as “The Man You Love to Hate.” Behind it he might have been known as “The Man the Studios Love to Hate” because of his haughty attitude and disregard for the Tinseltown power structure.
In a Hollywood career that spanned forty years the Austrian-born director and actor saw his stock rise and fall many times. He first made a name for himself during WWI playing cruel aristocratic German villains — in one film he actually throws a crying baby out a window! — the stereotype which earned him the title “The Man You Love to Hate.”
In the silent era he was also a much sought after director until his arrogance (he made a nine-hour movie called Greed),budgetary follies (he was the first director to spend over one million dollars on a film) and attention to detail (his scripts were often as long as the novels he was adapting) made him unemployable by the big studios. Unable to find important work behind the camera he was forced to concentrate on performing.
Despite his hatred for acting — he couldn’t remember his lines and didn’t like taking orders — he was a striking screen presence. His well-crafted pompous screen persona was put to good use in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but it is a little seen 1935 film that captures von Stroheim at his ominous best.
In The Crime of Dr. Crespi, loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial,Von Stroheim plays the embittered titular character, a chain-smoking doctor consumed by thoughts of revenge against Stephen Ross (John Bohn), the current husband of Crespi’s former flame (Harriet Russell). He’d give everything to be her everything again, and hatches a twisted plan to win her back.
The mad doctor gets the chance at vengeance when Ross comes down with a mysterious disease which only Dr. Crespi’s surgical skills can remedy. Unfortunately the operation is not a success and Ross dies shortly after the procedure . . . or does he? In fact Crespi has secretly administered a powerful drug that placed his patient in suspended animation which apes the signs of death. His lifeless body belies the fact that he, horrifyingly, he has all his faculties about him. Knowing that the drug will wear off after a few days Crespi rushes things along, forgoing an autopsy or embalming and makes arrangements to have the sentient man buried alive! Before the funeral Crespi visits Ross at the morgue to gloat over his fate; when the casket is lowered into the grave Crespi’s insane revenge plot is complete.
It isn’t until Crespi’s colleagues, Dr. Arnold (Paul Guilfoyle) and Dr. Thomas (Dwight Frye), become suspicious of the alleged death and have the body exhumed that lovesick doctor is exposed as a murderer.
The Crime of Dr. Crespi makes the best of its poverty row production standards, resourcefully using lighting effects to create a unique visual style that is part Universal Horror and part film noir to create a memorable looking film. As was often the case with these low budget thrillers, there’s little in the way of a musical score, just some stock music that undoubtedly cost the film’s producers little or nothing. No matter, the movie makes an impression because of the twisted story and even more twisted performance from von Stroheim.
The former director’s presence elevates what could have been a run-of-the-mill, bottom of the bill shocker. His characterization of the eccentric doctor is outrageous, a completely unsympathetic bad guy. He portrays mood swings that range from calm and controlled to full-out ballistic. In the latter mode his voice becomes a shrill staccato, a vocal representation of his fractured state of mind.
Director John Auer emphasizes Crespi’s mania with the use of extreme close-ups. The up-close-and-personal shots reveal Crespi’s craziness in riveting detail. The camera work creates an atmosphere of dread and doom that maximizes the story’s thrills and chills.
The supporting actors are fine; they’re journeymen actors who could be relied on to hand in decent performances while working quickly and for little money.
The standout of the secondary cast is Dwight Frye, the character actor who was usually typecast in oddball riffs on his famous roles from Dracula and Frankenstein. In Crespi he is allowed to, for once, strut his stuff as the hero, and sink his teeth into something other than the lunatic roles he usually played. He even gets to flirt with a pretty nurse, something that his most famous alter ego, Fritz the vicious hunchbacked lab assistant in James Whale’s Frankenstein, would never do.
The Crime of Dr. Crespi was likely made as a throwaway, a movie for “the shirtsleeve audience” and not the critics, but it transcends its humble origins by way of inventive direction and an unforgettable central performance from “The Man You Love to Hate.”
A Saturday matinee screening of Paranormal Activity was the first and only time I have ever heard anyone actually scream in a theatre. I don’t mean a quiet whimper followed by an embarrassed laugh or a frightened little squeal. No, I mean a full-on, open throated howl of terror.
The release of Paranormal’s prequel last weekend got me thinking about other big screen scream worthy scenes. So just in time for Halloween are some leave-the-lights-on movie moments.
If Alfred Hitchcock had any doubts about the effectiveness of the shower sequence in Psycho they must have been put to bed when he received an angry letter from the father whose daughter stopped bathing after seeing the bathtub murder scene in Les Diaboliques and then, more distressingly, refused to shower after seeing Psycho. Hitch’s response to the concerned dad? “Send her to the dry cleaners.”
The shower scene was terrifying but at least it was allowed to stay in the movie. In 1931, Frankenstein star Boris Karloff demanded the scene in the movie where the monster plays with a little girl, throwing flowers in a pond be cut from the picture. It’s a cute scene until the beast runs out of flowers and tosses the little girl into the water, leaving her to drown. Karloff, and audiences, objected to the violence against the youngster and the scene was shortened, then removed altogether and remained unseen until a special videotape release 48 years later.
More recently, The Exorcist (now beautifully restored on Blu Ray) so traumatized audiences with shots of the possessed Regan MacNeil’s 360-degree head spinning that in the U.K. the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade were on-call at screenings to tend to fainters. Star Linda Blair says she wasn’t traumatized by the film, but admits there has been one long lasting side effect. “You wouldn’t believe how often people ask me to make my head spin around,” she says.
Blair may have been unfazed while shooting her gruesome scenes, but not all actors emerge unscathed. Elisha Cuthbert was so grossed out while shooting the notorious blender scene in the down-and-dirty flick Captivity she says she felt “physically ill twice” and had to have a bucket nearby.
Scary scenes one and all, but recounting them begs the question, why are we drawn to them?
The quick answer comes from Alfred Hitchcock who said, “People like to be scared when they feel safe.”
1. Romero’s zombies don’t eat brains. “I’ve never had a zombie eat a brain! I don’t know where that comes from,” he told Vanity Fair. “Who says zombies eat brains?”
2. Romero didn’t even call his undead characters zombies in his first movie. “When I did Night of the Living Dead,” he told About.com, “I called them ghouls, flesh-eaters. I didn’t think they were. Back then zombies were still those boys in the Caribbean doing the wet work for Lugosi. So I never thought of them as zombies. I thought they were just back from the dead.”
3. Romero doesn’t watch The Walking Dead. “I love the books,” he said to io9.com. “I haven’t seen any of the episodes.”
4. Romero has had it with people asking him about zombies. When asked by eatsleeplkivefilm.com if he is tired of zombie queries he said, “Yes. But you know what are you going to do?”
5. Romero wears his famous thick-rimmed black glasses mostly for show these days. “I don’t need them anymore. I mean I don’t need them to read, I mean these are bifocals. I used to need them for reading and for middle-distance. Now I’m a little fuzzy on the long-distance, but I guess that all turned around with old age, so I don’t need for these reading but I’m thinking of just taking the lenses out, because I’ve got to wear them for photographs; everybody says, ‘Where’s your glasses?’“
6. Romero wears Goliath brand glasses. From barimavox.blogspot.ca: “The Goliath is favoured by famed horror filmmaker and Grandfather of the Zombie, George A. Romero and worn by Elliot Gould in the Ocean’s 11 trilogy and Robert De Niro in Casino, as well as by the late flamboyant actor and game show host Charles Nelson Reilly.”
7. Quentin Tarantino says the “A” in George A. Romero stands for “A fucking genius,” when actually it stands for Andrew.
8. Romero calls the 1951 Michael Powell film The Tales of Hoffman, “the movie that made me want to make movies. I was dragged kicking and screaming by an aunt and uncle. I wanted to go see the new Tarzan; the new Lex Barker movie to see how he stacked up against Weissmuller and they said, ‘No! We’re going to see this,’ and I fell in love with it. It’s just beautiful. Completley captivating. It’s all sung. It’s all opera. It’s not like The Red Shoes where there is a story running through it and then Léonide Massine does a ballet at the end. I just fell in love with it from the pop.”
9. Romero is of Cuban and Lithuanian descent. His father was Cuban-born of Castilian Spanish parentage, his mother Lithuanian-American.
10. At age 19 he worked as a gofer on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest but was unimpressed with the director’s mechanical and passionless directorial style. He was there for the train station scene shot in New York City’s Grand Central Terminal. Also among the onlookers was future It’s Alive director Larry Cohen.
“If this movie doesn’t make your skin crawl . . . it’s on too tight!” — advertising tagline for Black Christmas
Canada is a nation of firsts. Torontonian Don Munroe built the first table hockey game here in the early 1930s. Other parts of the country can lay claim to the Jolly Jumper, the celebration of Labour Day, artificial hearts, the Robertson square-head screwdriver, and it was a Canadian who mixed the world’s first Bloody Caesar. The country has broken ground in many fields, including film. Florence Lawrence, the first performer to be identified by name on screen, was born in Hamilton, Ontario, while the first aboriginal actor to portray a Native American on television, Jay Silverheels, hailed from the Six Nations Indian Reserve in Brantford, Ontario.
In a more macabre vein, without a groundbreaking 1974 Canadian horror film there might never have been a Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. Between them the gruesome threesome have sliced and diced their way through at least two dozen movies, but the mayhem they imposed on promiscuous college girls and studly teens owes much to one film made in Toronto, a movie Film Threat magazine calls “the first modern slasher movie.”
Director Bob Clark didn’t invent the slasher film with Black Christmas — arguably Psycho, Peeping Tom or Bay of Blood (Reazione a catena) were the granddaddies of gore — but he did establish the format. Mix and match the fear of an unwelcome visitor to a sorority house brimming with randy college girls, a holiday-turned-violent theme, the anonymous phone call used to terrorize girls, a motiveless killer, a mysterious male stalking young women, and a female lead who must conquer her own fear in order to stay alive and you have the plot of dozens of films that were to follow.
Shot in Toronto between February and May 1974 on a budget of roughly $600,000, Black Christmas is about an unseen psychotic killer named Billy who makes disturbing, obscenity laced phone calls to a group of sorority girls. Soon he escalates from one-sided phone sex to dispatching the girls one by one in brutal fashion.
“It was originally called Stop Me,” says Clark, who was killed in an April 2007 car accident, “I don’t think I’m taking unfair credit, but Black Christmas was my title, my idea. I love the contrast of the idea of Christmas, the jolliest of all seasons with this dark kind of imagery. Both a horror film and Christmas have tremendous trappings that make a nice juxtaposition.”
Apparently others agreed with him. In the next two decades a tsunami of holiday themed horrors — Christmas and otherwise — drifted into theaters; My Bloody Valentine, New Year’s Evil, April Fools Day and a Santa’s sack of movies featuring death by Christmas tree light.
What sets Black Christmas apart from the rest of the Christmas horror pack are the memorable characters. The standout is a pre-Lois Lane Margot Kidder as the sharp-featured brunette Barb, whose alcoholic tendencies foreshadowed the actress’s troubled real life. “One of my favorite memories is Margot coming to the set for her famous turtles-screwing-for-three-days scene,” says Clark. “She was supposed to be imbibing, and she was, to get in character. She was definitely there.”
As Barb she thumbs her nose at any form of authority — be it the thick as a brick Sgt. Nash or the threatening caller — and steals every scene she’s in with her reckless energy. When she slurs, “This is a sorority house, not a convent,” it is lewd, raunchy and sexy-funny.
Argentine-born Olivia Hussey as Jess is not the typical sorority slasher movie heroine. Hussey brings a quiet strength to Jess that hints at a fountain of inner resolve. It has often been said that slasher films are the most Republican of genres because of the punishment meted out on people who go against conservative middle-American values. In other words smoking pot and jumping from bed to bed is bound to earn you a one way ticket to hell courtesy of some masked madman, while the virgin of the group usually makes it through bloodied but unbowed. In Black Christmas Jess rebels against her boyfriend, and is planning to have an abortion. Clearly she is no virgin, and yet she is the sole survivor of Billy’s rampage.
The boyfriends of Claire and Jess — Chris Hayden(Art Hindle) and Peter Smythe(Keir Dullea) — are studies in opposites. The Halifax-born Hindle plays Chris as earnest and loving (although he does wear a raccoon coat), a stand-up guy who loves his girlfriend even if their relationship is chaste.
Keir Dullea as Peter is a different story. Peter is an eccentric musician who realizes too late that he has traded one passion for another. His love of music overshadowed his feelings for Jess and now she is backing away from him. He is prone to fits of anger, and this hot-headed behavior is the perfect red herring (or McGuffin as Hitchcock used to call them) to make us think he is the killer. It is interesting to imagine how the character might have differed if Clark’s first choice for Peter, Malcolm McDowell, had accepted the part.
During shooting Dullea was only available for a week as he had other commitments in Europe. In his short time on the film, he never met Margot Kidder and worked with John Saxon only briefly. “My total experience with working with anybody was Olivia Hussey,” he says. Clark shot all of Dullea’s scenes first and in editing made it appear as though he was there for the whole time.
Like Black Christmas’s other imported movie star, Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea’s early career showed great promise, but didn’t mature into full-blown movie stardom. Two films hinted at his star potential — 1963’s Lisa and David and Bunny Lake is Missing in 1965 — but it wasn’t until he played astronaut Dave Bowman in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 that his full promise was reached. He failed to really capitalize on the notoriety that movie earned him, leading Noel Coward to famously quip, “Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow.”
Uncredited but very effective are the actors who voiced the obscene phone calls. The disembodied voices of unseen evil were supplied by a number of people including Bob Clark, actor Nick Mancuso and several female actors. “[The phone calls are] a compilation of about five actor’s voices,” says Clark. “I remember what Nick brought it to was an intensity that certainly I had never seen before,” said sound designer and composer Carl Zitrer who engineered the calls, mixing in reverb and an array of spooky sounds.
Was Black Christmas the inspiration for John Carpenter’s seminal slasher flick Halloween? It’s a question that has sparked a fair amount of debate, so let’s break it down. There are similarities that cannot be denied between the two films.
Most obviously both films open with a point of view shot of the killer creeping around the outside of a house at night. Clark uses this shot, and many POV angles to great effect in Black Christmas, but he wasn’t the first to use the subjective camera to create fear. Clark simply took an old idea and put a new spin on it. He would later say that he hoped to break new ground by “employing some, if not new, certainly reworked and rethought cinematic ideas.” Mario Bava used distorted POV in Blood and Black Lace, and Hitchcock used it in the shower scene in Psycho, just to name a couple famous examples. Clark’s innovation in Black Christmas was to make the point of view shot his centerpiece, using it create a mood of terror rather than a secondary complement to the horror already on screen.
Clark’s film is unique in that we never see the killer, he moves in the shadows, a subliminal figure of terror unlike the very visible Michael Myers in Halloween. What they share, however, is motive – neither of them has one. They are striking out at these victims for no reason. Carpenter says he modelled Michael Myers’ relentless passion for killing on a film by Michael Crichton. “I must tell you that I cribbed from Westworld – Yul Brynner as a robot gunfighter who malfunctions and keeps coming after them. I just took it a step further, but I gave you no explanation.” Pre-Black Christmas movie homicidal maniacs always had a motive, but we never know why Billy targeted the Pi Kappa Sig house or its inhabitants.
There is one major difference between the two – Billy is literally a raving lunatic, screaming and grunting his way through the film, whereas Michael Myers (and later, Jason Voorhees) is unnaturally silent.
It may have just been weird synchronicity that two films about homicidal maniacs open with unusual POV shots, and share an ideological bent, but there is no question that Black Christmas and Halloween are similar.
“I absolve John Carpenter every time,” says Clark. “The facts are that I was going to direct a film John wrote a couple of years after Black Christmas. He was a big fan of Black Christmas… and he asked me if I was ever going to do a sequel.
“I said, ‘I would make it the following fall and somehow in the interim the killer had been caught and had been institutionalized. I would have him escape one night, and now he is free in the community… and he starts staking them again at the Black Christmas sorority house, and I was going to call it Halloween.’
“I think he was influenced by it, as were a few others. When you think about what John Carpenter did, [however], wrote a script — really quite different from that idea —directed it, edited it and did the music. It was a terrific piece of work. Maybe the title Halloween he should have given me a little of, but I didn’t own that either.”
Despite the rave reviews, and the prediction of Olivia Hussey’s personal psychic that the film would make a bundle, Black Christmas didn’t fare well at the box-office in the USA. To boost admissions, in some markets the movie’s name was changed to A Stranger in the House to avoid confusion with the flurry of blaxploitation films that were appearing at the time. It was also released as Silent Night, Evil Night.
Viewed through today’s eyes the movie holds up. It is very stylish, although slower in sections, and with a lower body count than modern horror fans are used to, but it is still capable, more than three decades after its conception, to raise goose bumps. A testament to the film’s enduring ability to scare came when NBC cancelled an airing of the film because they felt it was too intense for television audiences. It has also earned the seal of approval from Quentin Tarantino, who cites it as one of his favorite movies.
“It’s an interesting film.” says Clark, “I thought it was a good, scary, classic horror story, and those have a way of surviving.”
Richard joins NewsTalk 1010 host Jim Richards on the coast-to-coast-to-coast late night “Showgram” to talk about the best movies to watch on Halloween, why Canada makes great horror movies and why “Frankenstein” is still scary 88 years after its release.
Richard writes about five cars made popular by the movies.
“Often the biggest star in a movie isn’t the one with their name in the title. Will Smith, Kate Winslet and Tom Cruise are big stars, but the cars they drive frequently get as much attention as they do. Many of the bestselling cars in history vaulted to iconic status after appearing as product placement on the big screen. It’s called “brand awareness,” and Mike Jackson, GM North America vice-president for marketing and advertising, said that the right car in the right movie “represents the perfect intersection of entertainment, marketing and design.” It can also lead to big sales, as these examples show…” Read the whole thing HERE!
Richard speaks to “CTV News at Six” anchor Andria Case about the best movies and television to watch this weekend. This week we have a look at the scary series “Welcome to the Blumhouse” on Amazon Prime Video, the literary documentary “The Capote Tapes,” now on VOD and the biggest movies on screens this weekend, “Dune.”
Richard speaks to “CTV News at Six” anchor Andria Case about the best movies and television to watch this weekend including the return of the nastiest family on television in Crave’s “Succession,” season two of the Crave comedy “Awkwafina is Nora from Queens” and the six part Disney+ docu-series “Among the Stars.”
On this week’s Richard Crouse Show Podcast we get to know Hilary Brown, author of the new book War Tourist, available now on Amazon and Barnes and Nobel. In a career that spanned almost four decades, she was ABC’s first female foreign correspondent, and reported from every continent except Antarctica. TVO’s “The Agenda” called her “Canada’s best-ever female foreign correspondent.”
She was one of the last journalists to be lifted by helicopter from the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon in 1975, during the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. One of her ABC reports later appeared in the motion picture “The Deer Hunter” in what Brown calls her “fifteen seconds of fame.”
She has interviewed everyone from President Hamid Karzai, Condoleeza Rice and the Shah of Iran to Sidney Poitier, Lawrence Oliver and John le Carre.
She retired from what she calls “the best job in the world” in 2009, and has now documented her life in her fascinating new memoir, “War Tourist.”
Then Samantha Fish, a guitarist, songwriter and singer, voted by guitarworld.com as oner of the 10 best blues guitarists in the world today joins us. Calling her a blues guitarist is a little misleading because in a career spanning over 10 years, the Kansas City, Missouri musician music features multiple genres, including blues but also rock, country, funk, bluegrass and ballads.
Her latest album, “Faster,” available now wherever you buy fine records, adds a new twist or two… On the new record she explores new ground adding in elements of pop, contemporary R & B and hip-hop into the music.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Ethan Hawke, director Brad Bird, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, Eric Roberts, Brian Henson, Jonathan Goldsmith a.k.a. “The most interesting man in the world,” and best selling author Linwood Barclay.
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“The Crime of Dr. Crespi starts where Frankenstein left off!” — advertising tagline for The Crime of Dr. Crespi
