Spies (1928)

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I am excited to watch what’s being marketed as the final chapter in the Mission: Impossible saga later this week, but I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to be able to clear an entire evening for it. Clocking in at 169 minutes of Hollywood action spectacle, The Final Reckoning is easily the longest Mission: Impossible sequel to date. Likewise, the most recent James Bond sequel, 2021’s No Time to Die, clocked in at 163 minutes as the longest of its own decades-spanning franchise. The Fast and Furious series is following the same trend, with both 2021’s F9 and 2023’s Fast X breaking the 140min barrier because two hours is no longer enough space to tell the epic story of black-market street-racers who found a second life as international superspies. I have no doubt that its own upcoming finale, Fast 11, will be even longer. It’s clear that these decades-running espionage thriller series have become bloated through the virtue of their success, racking up enough international box office to earn a blank-check approval for every imaginable indulgence, supercharged by the egos of Hollywood Elite freaks like Tom Cruise & Vin Diesel. In a roundabout way, though, their exponentially expanding runtimes do call back to the earliest days of spy-thriller cinema, both in the episodic “Until next time…” storytelling of pre-show serials and in the epic scale of Fritz Lang’s 1928 genre landmark Spies (aka Spione), which in its original exhibition ran for an impressive 178 minutes, putting all of its modern decedents to shame. Even its incomplete, surviving prints stretch past the 140 minute mark, trimmed down by half an hour but still meeting the modern Hollywood standard.

Despite its near-three-hour runtime, Spies is not an especially self-serious or prestigious work. Lang sets his espionage saga against the same kind of impossible, expressionist backdrops crafted for his sci-fi epic Metropolis the previous year, but it’s all in service of telling a low-brow, pulpy romance between undercover spies. If the film has earned any historical or artistic prestige outside the typically masterful imagery of Lang’s monocled eye, it’s all due to the fact that it is almost a century old. Co-written with his wife & collaborator Thea von Harbou, Spies pioneers a long list of genre tropes both big (referring to the protagonist only by his agent number, 326) and small (comically tiny cameras, disappearing ink, etc). As a result, it now plays heavily tropey, taking three hours to tell a fairly simple love story between two spies who work for opposing agencies. Our somewhat heroic Agent No. 326 (Willy Fritsch) is employed by the German Secret Service to thwart the criminal-mastermind plans of Haghi (Rudolf “Dr. Mabuse” Klien-Rogge) to intercept a top secret British-Japanese peace treaty. Not nearly as suave nor as talented as he thinks, No. 326 is already on the Russian enemy’s radar at the start of his mission, and he’s assigned to be taken down by the femme fatale counterspy Sonja (Gerda Maurus), who’s always two steps ahead of his plan. Only, Sonja is secretly a bit of a softie, blackmailed by Haghi to commit evil deeds. Naturally, she immediately falls in love with No. 326, constantly saving his ass in times of crisis and engineering a scheme to free them both from their professional obligations so they can spend the rest of their lives in each other’s arms.

This airport paperback plot doesn’t sound especially substantial in the abstract, at least not when compared to other, juicier Fritz Lang triumphs of its era like Metropolis, Destiny, and M. It’s illustrated with the same German Expressionist gloom & grandeur as those more infamous works, however, finding Lang at the height of his powers (long before he sleepwalked through late-career studio noirs like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt). The opening prologue and explosive climax are especially stunning, kicking things off with a rapid-fire montage of espionage action and closing things out with a literal circus of violence. It’s at those bookends where Lang crafts isolated images in inserts that rival the beauty of any individual frame of classic cinema: a spy posing atop the rubble of an exploded bank wall, a low-angle close-up of an assassin on a motorcycle, a woman’s hands posed with gun & cigarette. There are a few other scenes sprinkled throughout the sprawling runtime that rival those images (namely, the makeup rituals of a creepy secret agent named Nemo the Clown and a boxing ring encircled by ballroom dancers), but much of the drama between those spectacular bookends takes on stage-play feel. Whereas Ernst Lubitsch would’ve turned No. 326 & Sonja’s ill-advised romance into a perverse romp (see: Trouble in Paradise), Lang & von Harbou craft a fairly somber story rife with blackmail, prostitution, opium addiction, and suicide. The old-fashioned sweetness of the central romance can’t help but be marred by the grim practicalities of spy work, which sometimes leads to bursts of violent visual poetry but often leads to conflicted players clawing their own faces in agony over who to be loyal to – lover or employer.

Even the relatively shortened Restored Cut of Spies was a little trying on my 21st Century attention span, which began to waver any time Lang strayed from grand German Expressionist spectacle to stage-bound melodrama. At the same time, I’ve seen plenty of Ethan Hunt, James Bond, and Dom Toretto spy thrillers in recent years that are just as long but not half as cool. It would’ve taken the same time commitment for me to catch up with the most recent Fast & Furious film, which I never got around to because nothing from the previous, even-longer one lingered with me past the end credits; they even found a way to make a forgettably dull image out of the Fast Family finally launching a car into space. Meanwhile, there are at least a dozen individual frames from Spies that will be burned into the back of my skull forever, even if it’s telling an equally inconsequential story as most of its modern equivalents. All that these bloated spy-thriller sequels need to do to earn their ever-expanding runtimes is take a page from Fritz Lang’s book and craft some of the most fantastic, gorgeously composed images in the history of cinema. It’s that simple.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)

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1956’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a late-career noir directed by Fritz Lang, his very last production for an American studio. It’s weirdly flat in style for Lang, whose early triumphs M & Metropolois helped establish foundational cinematic language that pushed the still-young artform to its furthest extremes. Here, he’s so bored with the form that he goes through the motions of a legal procedural as if he were making a televised Movie of the Week, give or take a few lateral camera maneuvers that attempt to liven up long scenes of men talking at desks & tables. Lang even calls attention to this TV-movie quality by speeding along witness testimony in montage as presented on a local news broadcast, shot in the same multi-camera style as the film proper. However, the longer you stick with Beyond a Reasonable Doubt‘s preposterous, only-in-the-movies courtroom drama the more complicated its moral & narrative implications become, until it spirals out into a big-picture indictment of the entire American justice system and then, ultimately, lands a few unexpected jabs as a twist-a-minute thriller. What I’m getting at here is that it’s Fritz Lang’s Juror #2.

Dana Andrews (of Laura fame) stars as a hotshot novelist who’s eager to score a big hit with his second book so he can afford a high-society marriage to his newspaper heiress fiancée (Joan Fontaine, of Rebecca fame). His best lead is a hairbrained idea cooked up by his father-in-law-to-be, a newspaper man who’s in constant public battle with the local DA over the ethics of capital punishment. Incensed that the DA is “trying to reach the governor’s chair over the bodies of executed men,” the father-in-law schemes to trick the aspiring politician into sentencing a provably innocent man to death based on planted, circumstantial evidence. Convinced that the scheme has the potential for national publicity, the novelist foolishly agrees to frame himself for the murder of a burlesque dancer, hoping to turn the experience into his next hit book (and, why not, make a political statement against capital punishment too, if it’s convenient enough). As anyone who’s ever seen a movie before would guess, things go awry when the evidence proving his innocence is destroyed, and his fated date with an electric chair becomes more inevitable than theoretical.

It’s how Douglas Morrow’s script disappears that exonerating evidence and what happens to the novelist once it’s gone that makes Beyond a Reasonable Doubt narratively tricky. The 80-minute potboiler doesn’t fully get cooking until the final quarter, when Morrow throws in at least one twist too many and the pot boils over. The first twist is a violent shock. The second is a disappointingly conventional cop-out that defuses the tension. Then, the third twist desperately attempts to add some traditional thriller tension back into the plot, calling the movie’s morals & politics into question in a way that can’t fully be reconciled because it happens at the very last moment. At the start, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a thought experiment cooked up by noble writers who aim to take down wicked politicians who use state-sanctioned murder to further their careers. Since the objectively evil practice of capital punishment is still alive & well today (with Louisiana & other states gassing prisoners and subjecting them to firing squads again), maybe it’s to the movie’s benefit that it ends as a cheap-thrills mystery plot instead. Lang & Morrow made no detectable impact on the American justice system, but they did pull a few gasps out of an unsuspecting audience, even if entirely out of incredulity. Like with Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2, I doubt it would’ve been notable to anyone if it were filed under a workman director’s name instead of Lang’s, but there is something to its moral precarity that can’t be fully dismissed.

-Brandon Ledet

The Dark Mirror (1946)

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I was recently so impressed with The Spiral Staircase that I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole seeking out other films from director Robert Siodmak. Just a year after Staircase, he helmed another shockingly modern proto-slasher entitled The Dark Mirror. The film stars Olivia de Havilland in dual roles as twin sisters Ruth and Terry Collins, one of whom is concealing a dark secret. You see, Terry is a sweet girl working at a lobby newspaper stand and has fallen for the beguiling charms of one Dr. Frank Peralta, who has an office in the building. When she’s seen leaving his apartment the very night on which he was found stabbed to death, multiple eyewitnesses can account for her presence — except that her alibi is rock solid, as she was also seen at the exact same time in the park by her butcher and a patrolman. Befuddled police lieutenant Stevenson (Thomas Mitchell) can’t make heads or tails of it until he visits Terry one night and meets her twin sister, Ruth, learning that the two live together and even trade off the “Terry” identity in public so that they only have to have one job. When the district attorney admits that they can’t make a case against either woman as they’d each be covered by the proverbial shadow of a doubt, Stevenson enlists the help of Dr. Scott Elliott (Lew Ayres), who coincidentally has an office in the same building as the late Peralta and happens to be a specialist in the field of twin studies, to surreptitiously study the two and find out which of them is the killer. 

The duplication special effects in this one are fantastic, give or take a couple of dodgier scenes where the intercutting and blocking don’t quite measure up. As the title would suggest, there are numerous sequences in which mirrors are a focal point, including several in which both Ruth sits at a vanity mirror and has a conversation with Terry while the latter reclines in bed behind her, both of them visible in the reflection. It was a technical marvel, and I kept trying to figure out how it was done, getting a little lost in trying to tease out the details (I decided it must have been that the Terry segment was shot first and then projected on a screen behind de Havilland while she shot the Ruth portion). Regardless of how it was accomplished, it looks amazing, and when the two are in the same shot using split screen tech, it’s also very well done. Of course, all of that movie magic would be wasted were it not for de Havilland’s strong performances as each sister, as there’s never any real doubt about who’s who. The film often differentiates them through their monogrammed bathrobes, Ruth’s “R” brooch, and a pair of extremely tacky necklaces that bear their full first names, but de Havilland plays each woman so that these visual cues are largely unnecessary. Terry seems forthright and personable while also clearly being the steelier, stronger woman; Ruth appears to be extremely kind-hearted and verging on the naive, and clearly more troubled by the situation in which the twins find themselves than her sister. 

Contemporary reviews of the film were mixed, but one of the ones that stood out to me was from Variety, which stated that the film “runs the full gamut of themes currently in vogue at the box office — from psychiatry to romance back again to the double identity gimmick and murder mystery.” I was struck a bit by this reference to “psychiatry” as a common film topic, since I’ve not run across many films of this era in which this was a common element or theme. M certainly had an element of psychological detective work at play, and there was a series of films based on an earlier radio series that began with 1943’s Crime Doctor (all ten films in the series were released before 1949). If anything, I associate suspense thrillers of the 1960s with direct references to psychiatry: hitting the ground running in 1960 with Psycho devoting its closing moments to a psychologist explaining Norman’s particular maladies; the ongoing exploration of the psychological profiles of the dueling personalities at the center of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962; the journey to the heart of the mental health hospital system in 1963’s Shock Corridor. On further reflection, though, this one came very close on the heels of Gaslight in 1944 and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 feature Spellbound, the latter of which featured Ingrid Bergman as a psychoanalyst who falls for her amnesiac patient played by Gregory Peck (who wouldn’t?), so I suppose there is a possibility that this was, at the time, a gimmicky attempt to cash in on a recent craze (no pun intended). It even features a Rorschach test, although they refer to it only as an “inkblot test,” as perhaps the Swiss inventor’s name hit the post-war American ear as a little too Germanic. 

Where this one fell a little short of Staircase’s greatness was in its failure to live up to my expectations, which is hardly the film’s fault. I’m eighty years removed from when this was made, so it may be unfair of me to resent that the twists in this one didn’t go as far as I would have liked. I would have appreciated the film more had it spent some small amount of time on the possibility that neither sister was Peralta’s murderer, as it would have been fun to see de Havilland playing off of herself in scenes in which both sisters wonder if the other is a killer. I’ve also seen “Treehouse of Horror VII” (the one with Bart’s evil twin Hugo locked in the attic) more times than I could possibly recall, so there’s a part of my brain that kept waiting for the twist that the supposed “good” twin was the killer and that the “bad” twin was covering for them, or that one of the twins had some history of violence but not the one we think. Maybe the twins were both trolling Dr. Elliott all this time and occasionally impersonating one another in their sessions with him. Any one of those would have pushed my rating a little higher; instead, once Dr. Elliott establishes that one of the women is a one-in-a-kajillion sociopath, it’s clear which one is virtuous and which one is responsible for all their troubles, and it’s a little rote from there. What keeps it from falling off completely is that this revelation allows more insight into just how manipulative one sister is of the other, and the final scene is still a phenomenal showcase for de Havilland. This one has been slightly difficult to find at times, but is currently available on the Roku app. If you, like me, don’t have that, then maybe you can find it at your local library. I did!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

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In my review of The Spiral Staircase, I mentioned Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers, and that I expected I would soon be getting to #61 on that list, Roger Corman’s adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” It is the only film from Corman to make the list, and although I am reviewing it last in my Corman/Poe series of reviews, it’s notable that this was only the second of these adaptations, following House of Usher by about a year. It was itself followed by Premature Burial, and having viewed those out of order, I made a joke in my Usher review that it and Burial follow a fairly similar and specific sequence of events. I’m glad I didn’t watch them in release order, because I might have given up on Burial, given that Pendulum follows almost the exact same stations of the plot. 

As the film opens, a man approaches a seaside castle (different from Usher and Burial in that the character does not approach the lead’s home from across a foggy moor), knocks upon the door and demands to see the home’s owner, and is initially rebuffed by the servant who answers the door, but is then allowed in to the home by the sister of Vincent Price’s (and in the case of Burial, Ray Milland’s) character. It’s genuinely shocking that so little effort was made to differentiate this from its immediate predecessor, and that the film that immediately followed would adhere so closely to the same structure. Here, our hero is Francis Barnard (John Kerr), who has come to see the widower of his late sister Elizabeth (Barbara Steele). He is allowed entry by his sister-in-law, the Donna Catherine Medina (Luana Anders), who tells him that her brother Don Nicholas (Price) is resting, but allows him inside nonetheless. Barnard asks to see his sister’s grave, but Catherine tells him that she is not buried in some churchyard and is instead interred in the crypts beneath the castle; as she escorts him to Elizabeth’s resting place, the two pass another room in the catacombs from which a great racket emerges. Nicholas exits the door and tells Barnard that it conceals a contraption, the ceaseless operation of which he is responsible for. 

Although the Medinas are reticent to reveal every detail of Elizabeth’s death, the arrival of family friend Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) leads him to drop some information that prompts Barnard to demand explanation. As it turns out, although theirs was a good and loving marriage, Nicholas’s beloved bride was ultimately affected by the evil that is present in the Medina estate, as Nicholas and Catherine’s father, Sebastian (also Price) was a member of the Spanish Inquisition. An untold number of people were tortured and killed in the castle’s catacombs, where Sebastian’s implements of torture remain. Apparently, the sleepwalking Elizabeth made her way to this chamber and somehow got herself stuck in an iron maiden, and when she awoke there, she died of heart failure from the fright of it all. Of course, Nicholas himself fears that Elizabeth was not truly dead when she was buried (again, just as in Usher and Burial), despite Dr. Leon’s willingness to stake his reputation on his confirmation of her death, and that her spirit haunts the castle as a result. There are spooky things about, after all. Elizabeth would play the harpsichord nightly for her husband, and when the instrument is heard late at night and one of her rings found atop it despite the apparent absence of any people or even a way in or out of the room, it raises questions. A kind of explanation is found when Barnard discovers a series of secret passageways that connect locked rooms to Nicholas’s own chambers, with Nicholas himself fearing that he may be losing his mind and performing as Elizabeth. 

This one is pretty fun, and it probably is the best thriller of Corman’s Poe cycle. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers as much as I can for these but I don’t seem to be able to find a way to talk “around” another of the recurring elements here, so I’ll just have to come right out with it: it’s very strange how often the resolution to the apparent mystery is that Vincent Price’s character’s wife isn’t as in love with him as he was with her, and also that reports of her death are greatly exaggerated. As in The Raven, we’re never given any reason to think that Elizabeth here, Lenore there, or Emily in Burial are anything other than the loving, adoring spouses that they appear to be, until the sudden revelation that all of the gaslighting being performed against the lead is being done by his wife. And it’s Hazel Court two of those times! (She also appeared in Masque of the Red Death, but her villainous nature is on display from her first moment on screen therein.) It stands to reason that making eight of these movies in four years would be bound to lead to some recycling of plots, especially given that the specific Poe works being “adapted” also have large Venn diagram overlaps in their narratives, but viewing this one as the finale in an attempt to save the best for last ends up doing it a disservice. It’s not a bad movie, but it feels repetitive, which isn’t fair to hold against Pendulum because it was only the second one of these that Corman made and is thus responsible for setting the standard which was copied, not vice versa. But hey, at least the Medina castle doesn’t get burned to the ground at the end.

One of the recurring elements present here that really works is the use of the oversaturated nightmare sequence, although here it’s more of an oversaturated flashback. As Nicholas reveals the details of the halcyon days that he and Elizabeth had together, everything is bathed in greens and blues, which turn to purple when Elizabeth “takes ill.” There’s also a fun iris-in transition to this flashback, which happens again when Catherine reveals to Barnard that Nicholas actually bore witness to the murder of his mother and uncle Bartolome at the hands of their father, who discovered his wife and brother were adulterers. In this sequence, the saturation color turns to a bloody, angry red, and it works remarkably well. (For those like me whom I would lovingly refer to as “Belle & Sebastian-pilled,” think of it as going from the cover of The Boy With the Arab Strap to Write About Love to If You’re Feeling Sinister.) Of course, this all comes back around when it’s revealed just who’s behind everything, only for Nicholas to fall backward down some stairs in fright at the sudden reappearance of Elizabeth and, concussed (or more), descends into the belief that he is Sebastian and that Elizabeth and her lover are the late Mrs. Medina and Bartolome and exacts his revenge accordingly, not entirely unlike Dexter Ward being overtaken by the spirit of his ancestor in The Haunted Palace. 

Another notable element of these, now having seen all of them, is how variably effective they work as mystery thrillers. Other than Masque with its large ensemble, the cast of all of these films has been relatively small, in line with Corman’s notoriously spendthrift nature. As a result, the extremely limited number of characters can curtail the film’s ability to provide sufficient red herrings or otherwise conceal the identity of the film’s villain or villains. Pendulum certainly does the best job of keeping one guessing as to what’s really happening in the stately mansion in which all the events occur, playing things close enough to the vest that the reveal of Elizabeth’s co-conspirator feels satisfying but not obvious. That’s probably why Brode selected this one for inclusion in Edge of Your Seat, even though I wouldn’t call this the best of the Corman-Poe cycle overall. In his “also recommended” section, however, I found that he agreed with me overall, writing “Among the other Poe adaptations, by far the best two are The Masque of the Red Death […] and Tomb of Ligeia,” the latter of which he calls “an intelligent, restrained suspense tale.” 

You may be asking yourself where the pendulum is in all of this, or the pit, for that matter. For that, my friend, you will have to watch for yourself.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Raven (1963)

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Fair warning: The friend with whom I have been watching these Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work hated this one. I pointed out that the presence of Peter Lorre here should have been an early indication that this was going to be a more comedic outing, like Tales of Terror, but this was still a disappointment to him even with that qualification. During the viewing this was referred to as a “Scooby Doo ass movie” and the final verdict from my friend was “I like Looney Tunes; I don’t like Scooby-Doo.” Take from that what you will, and keep it in mind for your viewing decision. 

This movie is so much fun. From the film’s opening moments, in which Vincent Price’s dulcet tones recite Poe’s “The Raven” while we see him fiddling his fingers around in the air and drawing a neon bird in the room with magic, I was enraptured. Within moments, a raven appears at his window and taps at it; upon being let in, said bird begins talking with Peter Lorre’s voice, identifying himself as a fellow sorcerer and demanding assistance with being returned to human form. Once he’s back in his true body (after an interlude in which insufficient potion ingredients rendered him back into Lorre-form, but with bird wings), he introduces himself as Dr. Adolphus Bedlo, while Price’s character is revealed to be called Dr. Erasmus Craven. Bedlo recognizes the name and identifies Craven as the son of the late leader of the wizard order and asks him why he has never sought to take his father’s place, instead allowing the organization to be controlled by the late elder Craven’s lifelong enemy Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff). Craven demurs, saying that since he lost his wife, he’d really rather stay home near her body and do little magic tricks rather than any powerful sorcery. Upon viewing her portrait, Bedlo swears he has seen the late Lenore that very night at Scarabus’s castle. Craven’s daughter Estelle (Olive Sturgess)—who is notably stated to have been the daughter of Craven’s unnamed first wife, not Lenore—demands that she be allowed to accompany them, although Craven only relents when his coachman becomes enchanted and must remain behind. This lack of someone to drive the coach is resolved by the sudden appearance of Bedlo’s son Rexford (Jack Nicholson!), who takes the quartet to Scarabus’s castle. What secrets lie there in wait? 

This is another Corman-Poe feature penned by Richard Matheson, and was apparently based on his desire to do a full comedy feature following how much fun it was to put Lorre and Price together in the “Black Cat” section of Tales of Terror. As you can tell from the preface above, my friend and viewing companion did not find this to be a successful endeavor, while I can say that it totally worked for me. Price and Lorre are once again a terrific double act, and they ham it up here for much of the first half. The audience that will enjoy watching Craven attempt to dress Bedlo in some of his clothes so that they can go and face off against Scarabus may be small, but I’m in it; Lorre’s clear smaller stature trying to pull up the sleeves and hem of clothes designed to fit Price (or even exaggerated from there) is very funny, and it doesn’t hurt that the two of them end the scene wearing the most ridiculous hats one could imagine. In fact, by the time that the quartet of Craven and daughter, Bedlo, and Rexford arrive at Scarabus’s castle, all four of them are wearing extremely stupid headgear, and I got a real kick out of that. 

Where most Poe heads may find greatest displeasure in this one is in just how far it strays from the source material. All of these do, really, but most of them at least maintain some kind of atmosphere and are relatively respectful to the intent of the stories from which they draw their origins; Raven is arguably disrespectful in how it treats Lenore. In a plot that recurs from Pit and the Pendulum, it turns out that Lenore isn’t dead; she simply faked her death in order to move in with Scarabus and learn “greater magic” from him. One can only assume that Lenore initially got together with Craven expecting that he would assume his place at the head of the wizard guild, and when he didn’t, she glommed onto his father’s successor instead, making her a philosopher’s stone-digger from the outset. This becomes more clear at the end when Scarabus’s apparent death leads her to immediately claim that she was with him because she was bewitched and that his death has released her from his thrall, but luckily no one buys it. “The Raven” is a poem that is so deeply about anguish, longing, and grief, one can’t help but find that this subversion of the lost Lenore, whose representation of this feeling is so foundational to western literature that there’s a whole TV Trope about it, to be moderately controversial. 

The nature of this film makes it one that provides little opportunity for criticism. We’ve said it before here, in both reviews and on the podcast, that sometimes a comedy film can be the hardest to review because one simply finds themself recapitulating and restating the jokes within the film that one found funny. With Tales of Terror, that comedy was in the prolonged middle segment and bracketed by more self-serious fare, so there was still much to discuss. Here, this one is a straight comedy all the way through. Where it fails is in its insistence on the insertion of the magician’s offspring. Estelle has little to do here, and although it makes sense that it would be established that Lenore was merely her stepmother so that she’s not as heartbroken as her father is, one could argue that making Lenore her mother might have given the film something more in the way of emotional stakes. Her presence is really only justified in the end so that a threat against her safety is used to attempt to extort Craven into giving up his magical secrets. In turn, Rexford is really only an appendage to her story, padding out the runtime with a sequence in which he’s driving the coach from Craven’s to Scarabus’s and becomes apparently possessed by some wild force before he regains his composure. 

I’d also say that Karloff is underused here. He doesn’t appear until halfway through the film, but when he does, he’s great. His feigned friendliness in his greeting of Craven and his waving away of Bedlo’s charges as being the result of a social visit that turned sour because of the latter’s excessive drinking are fun, but one wishes that he might have been present a bit earlier in the runtime. He is used to great comedic effect in the film’s finale, however, as Craven and Scarabus get into a wizard’s duel that presages wuxia wizard battles in the vein of Buddha’s Palm (in fact, there are some special effects that appear to have been used part and parcel in Buddha’s Palm). It’s magnificent, and even my friend who hated the movie couldn’t help but enjoy himself as Price and Karloff flit around on hovering chairs and turn magic missiles into harmless plastic bats, etc. If that’s all that you’re interested in, you can find that in isolation on YouTube, but I would recommend giving this one a full watch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: X – The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Roger Corman’s psychedelic sci-fi crime thriller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963).

00:00 Sinners (2025)
08:48 Secret Mall Apartment (2025)
13:50 The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
19:15 Beau Travail (1999)
25:28 Strawberry Mansion (2022)
33:01 The Haunted Palace (1963)

37:20 X – The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Doll (1919)

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There’s a naive impulse in modern audiences to look back to the early, silent days of cinema as harmless & quaint. Something about the stage-bound sets, for-the-back-rows vaudevillian performances, and hand-cranked camera speeds leads people to dismiss the early decades of cinema as being out of date to the point of total irrelevance. When you actually watch those movies in full, however, you’ll find they often deal in spectacle, politics, and humor with the same sharpness as any modern work (the good ones, anyway). For instance, one of the better Hollywood studio pictures of the year so far is the technophobic horror romcom Companion, starring Sophie Thatcher as an AI sexbot who’s unaware that she’s not a fully autonomous human being. Her artificiality is a major point of attraction for the tech-bro incel who purchased her (for selfish schemes not worth fully outlining here), raising questions about how the misogynist radicalization of young men has corrupted modern gender dynamics to the point where true, genuine love is a cultural impossibility. The political arguments & technological details of that premise may sound like they could only belong to a movie from the 2020s, but they’re also present in Ernst Lubitsch’s silent comedy The Doll, made in Germany over a century ago.

In The Doll, a pampered young man is pressured by his dying baron uncle to get married, so that he can properly claim his noble inheritance. The fop responds to this request with revulsion, as he is both afraid & spiteful of women. After being chased around his little German village—Scooby-Doo style—by every marriageable maiden in shouting distance, he finds sanctuary among monks in a local monastery, where finds the comforts of things he loves almost as much as he loathes women: meat, beer, and men. While in hiding he is handed an advertisement for a mad-scientist dollmaker (named Hilarius) who makes lifelike automatons resembling flesh-and-blood women, marketed to “bachelors, widows, and misogynists.” He answers the ad in a scheme to pass off the automaton as his fiancée and fool his uncle so that he doesn’t have to interact with any actual women. Things immediately go awry when the doll is broken before purchase and replaced with the dollmaker’s anarchically bratty daughter, who’s more prone to misbehave than any of the maidens he was in danger of marrying in the first place. As the dandy misogynist attempts to treat his new, control-operated bride like a piece of furniture, she finds ways to undermine his caddish behavior and stand up for herself as a fellow human being, with her own needs & desires, all while keeping up the ruse that she’s a wind-up doll.

It would be foolish to assume that Lubitsch was somehow unaware of the political or sexual implications in this antique relic, which is just as much of a high-style gender warfare comedy as Companion. True to the sex-positive mayhem of the more famous farces he’d later make in Hollywood (Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, To Be Or Not to Be, etc.), The Doll‘s human-posing-as-an-automaton conceit leads to a myriad of sex gags in which “the doll” is placed in men’s intimate spaces within the monastery where no proper woman would ever be allowed unsupervised. The comedian playing that doll, Ossi Oswalda, also starred in a Lubitsch picture the previous year titled I Don’t Want to be a Man! that features her in drag, drunkenly making out with a fellow man at an all-night ball in some proto-Victor/Victoria genderfuckery. In both cases, it’s clear to me that sneaking those sex jokes past moralistic censorship was Lubitsch’s primary goal, but he justified those jokes by couching them in the general political gender commentary that afford the films their social value (beyond just being funny). In I Don’t Want to be a Man, that commentary is mostly about how men’s societal privileges come with their own set of stressful societal pressures, while The Doll is about those privileged men’s bone-deep misogyny — identifying it as a rightful target for mockery.

I’m used to Lubitsch’s comedies being sexually & politically pointed in this way, but I’m not used to them being as outright fantastical as The Doll. He’s practically doing a George Méliès impersonation here, leaning into the illusionary magic of early, inventive cinema with color-tinted frames and hand-built fantasy sets. The very first scene features Lubitsch himself constructing a dollhouse set for the audience’s entertainment, which he then populates with two inanimate dolls. From there, we’re immersed inside that artificial dollhouse world, with the dolls from the opening replaced by real-life human actors. Cardboard cutouts of the sun, the moon, trees, and clouds decorate the backdrops of every exterior scene with hand-illustrated detail. Horses are never actually horses; they’re humans in a shared costume, complete with the tacked-on tail of a stuffed animal. This artificiality is wonderfully carried over to Oswalda’s performance as the non-automaton feminist, as she moves in jerky, robotic obedience whenever her husband is looking but immediately switches to wild, animalistic behavior whenever on her own. It’s a gorgeous, imaginative work of visual art that’s been echoed in modern films from directors like Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, and—in the case of Beau is Afraid—Ari Aster. Once you look past the technical markers of its era, there’s nothing outdated or quaint about it.

-Brandon Ledet

Belle de Jour (1967)

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When writing about The Spiral Staircase, I mentioned that I was working on filling out some of the gaps in Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers. I have a few in the top twenty that I still hadn’t seen, so when deciding what to pick up at my local video store recently, I settled on Brode’s #17, Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour. The title is a play on the French idiom “belle de nuit,” literally meaning beauty or lady of the night but colloquially meaning a prostitute. In Belle de Jour, Catherine Deneuve plays a woman whose repressed sexuality leads her to seeking employment with a madame, but only until 5:00pm each day, as she must get home before her husband returns from work. Hence, lady of the day. 

Séverine Serizy (Deneuve, fresh off of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) is seemingly happily married to handsome doctor Pierre (Jean Sorel), but her inability to be intimate with him belies a deviant, vivid sexual fantasy life. On their anniversary, the two go to a ski town, where they run into Séverine’s friend Renée (Macha Méril) and her boyfriend, an acquaintance of Pierre’s named Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), whom Pierre has no real interest in befriending and whom Séverine despises because of his constant leering at her. While the two women are out shopping, Renée reveals that another friend of theirs has recently started working as a prostitute, and Séverine is surprised to learn that whorehouses are still in operation in such a modern era. Later, Henri reveals to her the location of one such place, and out of compulsion and curiosity, Séverine finds herself there, meeting Madame Anaïs (Geneviève Page), who offers her employment. Séverine is the blonde employed alongside a redhead and a brunette also working for Anaïs, and after some initial hesitation, finds herself in demand and successful, until she finds herself entangled with the criminal Marcel (Pierre Clémenti), who refuses to accept her work/life balance, to disastrous results. 

I was disappointed with this one initially. The truth of the matter is that this isn’t really a thriller, and when you expect that going in, you should be prepared to be disappointed. Most contemporary reviews cite the film as an erotic romance, and it’s not really that, either; it’s much more surreal, and defies traditional classification. It’s not very romantic, and I didn’t find it particularly erotic either, although I understand that it probably is for some people. If you’ve somehow come to Swampflix to find out if you’re going to see some areolas in this movie, I can tell you now that the answer is “No.” Séverine’s fantasies (and there is some argument to be made as to which scenes are fantasies and which really “happened”) are of a sadomasochistic nature, largely about being bound and whipped, but it’s quite tame to the sensibilities of a modern viewer. As the film opens, Séverine and Pierre enjoy a nice countryside carriage ride, until he complains about her frigidity and has the coachmen pull the carriage over and drag her into the nearby woods, where he ties Séverine’s hands above her head and has the coachmen whip her, then tells them to have their way with her before Séverine suddenly awakens from her daydream. 

As I went into this with the notion that this was going to be a thriller, I was pre-emptively wincing at the wounds I expected to see appear on Deneuve’s bare back as she was whipped, but none appeared. That would ruin the fantasy, both for Séverine and for the audience members who are experiencing this thrill vicariously through her. But it also reveals something about her psychology, that she’s not really interested in intimacy, just into being forced into doing something. When Renée first tells her about their mutual friend’s sex work, they both shudder at the idea of not having a choice in whom they sleep with; Renée saying “It can be unpleasant enough with a man that you like,” but the shudder that runs down Séverine’s spine is different. She’s interested in what it would be like to have no choice, at least in the abstract. When it comes time to actually perform services for clients, what she imagined and the reality of the situation come crashing together, and it’s much less pleasant, especially when Henri appears at the bordello one day and insists that she give herself to him. It’s much less fun than she had hoped, even if it does open her up to finally sleeping with her long-suffering husband. 

This is far too surreal a picture to easily slot itself into a genre category. There’s no real suspense at play for most of it, as Séverine merely wanders through one escapade after another, with it being unclear just how much of it is happening only in her mind. The film is bookended by the aforementioned appearance of countryside carriage riding, as the image repeats while Séverine hears the bells on the horses and looks out her window and seems to see the carriage approaching up a country lane, despite the fact that what lies outside is an urban Parisian street. At another point in the film, a man credited as “The Duke” arrives via the same carriage (including the same coachmen as in her earlier daydreaming) and invites her to come to his home for some “work.” This turns out to be dressing in a sheer black veil that covers her entire body and lying in a coffin, where he enters and addresses her as his dear departed daughter before descending out of frame and, one implies, masturbating. There are some reviews I’ve read of this that question the reality of this sequence, which I interpret to be purely fantasy based on the reappearing coachmen, but I suppose it’s up to the individual viewer. Each of the johns that she meets is screwed up in one way or another. The world-famous gynecologist known only as “the professor” has specific demands for a scene in which the “Marquisse” whips him. One client shows up with a box that he shows the contents of to one of the other girls, which she rejects for use in their bedplay (we never learn what it is, but after his session with Séverine, there is a little blood on one of the towels in the room). Marcel, of course, is the worst, the brutish thug of a much more civilized-seeming mobster, who has a lean and hungry look to him that’s attractive despite his unkempt hygiene. He even has several gold teeth as the result of a fight, which he bears at Séverine like the Bond villain Jaws at one point. 

That surreality is what makes the film interesting, to those of whom it may be of interest. We learn nothing of Séverine’s backstory or history, with all that is revealed of her happening in two separate flashes under five seconds, one of which shows her receiving communion as a child and the other of which shows her being kissed inappropriately by an adult man. There’s also something interesting happening in the way that Henri is infatuated with Séverine and even all but sends her to Madame Anaïs, but as soon as he learns that she’s working there, his interest dries up. It reminded me of something I read of John Berger’s years ago, about sexism of an older era in which a man would paint an image of a nude woman and then “put a mirror in her hand and [call] the painting ‘Vanity.’” Henri desires the observable woman, with her lack of sexual interest and apparent virginity, but as soon as she is like the women that he can attain, he has nothing but disdain for her, and he goes from one extreme to the other without ever getting even the tiniest glimpse into her internal life. 

When returning the DVD to the video store after watching it, both of the clerks volunteering that evening asked me how I had liked it, with one of them noting that he had rented it before and then simply run out of time to watch it, while the other was disappointed to learn that I hadn’t been thrilled with it. The truth was, it simply wasn’t what I was expecting. In many ways, it is the quintessential European art film that cinephiles are often mocked for enjoying. For me, I think that I’ll be digesting this one for a long time to come, but can reasonably say that it wasn’t for me, and it’s certainly not a thriller in any meaningful way.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Spiral Staircase (1946)

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I’ve brought up in previous reviews that, for many of my teenage years, Douglas Brode’s Edge of Your Seat: The 100 Greatest Movie Thrillers was a treasury of knowledge for me. I’ve had the book for decades, making notes in it that go back to 2003 about when I watched a film on the list, what my personal rating was, that sort of thing. I’m still working my way through it, having seen about half of them. Some of these were fairly recent, like The Conversation (#60) and The Last of Sheila (#88), with my Roger Corman Poe adaptation journey meaning that The Pit and the Pendulum (#61) soon to be added to that list. Just ahead of that one and The Conversation, at #59, is 1946’s The Spiral Staircase, and I’m delighted to report that it does not disappoint. Just as a forewarning to anyone who may be interested and has access to Brode’s book, however, please note that the film’s synopsis does spoil the identity of the killer, so make sure to view the film before reading that section. 

Set some years before the film’s actual production date (more on that later), the film opens on Helen (Dorothy McGuire) attending a screening of the silent 1896 film The Kiss, although the movie treats this as a feature rather than the 18 second featurette that it really is. The screening is being held just off of the lobby of a hotel, and upstairs, a woman is strangled to death. The constable (James Bell) arrives and speaks with Dr. Parry (Kent Smith), a relative newcomer in town who wishes to offer his opinion, even though the town’s primary physician is already on-site. Parry then offers to give Helen a ride home in his horse-and-buggy, and it becomes apparent that Helen is mute, and Parry regards her with some affection and has attempted to interest her in seeing a Bostonian doctor friend of his about treatment for her condition. He’s pulled away by a medical emergency before getting her all the way home, but she’s fine to walk the rest of the way, at least until a sudden thunderstorm occurs. As Helen races back to the mansion in which she is employed as a servant, we see that she is being watched by a rain-drenched man in a slicker and hat. There’s great concern that Helen may be the killer’s next victim, as each of the previous killings were of women with some kind of disability. 

The mansion itself is a great set, with the spiral staircase that Helen ascends and descends throughout taking center stage. Even though we spend an unbroken hour within its walls, the house’s expansiveness means that it never becomes boring visually, and we learn the place’s general layout fairly quickly, which makes the breakneck pace of the final act easy to follow as Helen rushes about, pursued by her would-be killer. It also means that there’s plenty of room for a smorgasbord of characters, any one of which could be the murderer. There’s Dr. Parry, of course, whose recent arrival to the community marks him as a kind of outsider, and whose interest in Helen could be more than merely medical or social. The house’s matriarch is Mrs. Warren (Ethel Barrymore), apparently bedridden and requiring nursing care, but who prefers the ministrations of Helen, although she warns the girl several times that she should flee the house and never come back, if she can. The house is also occupied by Professor Albert Warren (George Brent), Mrs. Warren’s stepson, an upstanding member of the community who nonetheless has some resentment for his stepbrother Steven (Gordon Oliver), who has all but abandoned his mother to Albert’s care while he lives prodigally on the family’s money, only taking time from philandering around Europe with loose women when he needs to return home to refresh his accounts. This means that he, too, has only recently returned, and his arrival’s overlap with the sudden rash of killings makes him suspicious, and although he tells the constable that he didn’t leave the house the whole of that day, Professor Warren notes that his shoes are muddied, and questions why he would lie. Of course, one wonders when he would have time to get away when he’s so smitten with Blanche (Rhonda Fleming), the professor’s assistant/secretary. For the most part, the women are above suspicion, except for Mrs. Warren’s nurse, Barker (Sara Allgood, just a few years after her Best Support Actress win for How Green Was My Valley), whom one character refers to as being just as good as a man in a fight. Also not a likely suspect is Mrs. Oates (the Bride of Frankenstein herself Elsa Lanchester), the housekeeper, although her groundskeeper husband, Mr. Oates has suspicion cast upon him from the moment he appears, as he enters the house wearing a raincoat and hat just like the person stalking Helen in the yard. 

It’s a decent cast for a mystery that takes place over the course of a single evening in a single locale, creating a great sense of suspense. Clues are planted throughout (like the early foreshadowing of the use of ether as a medicine for Mrs. Warren), doubts are raised about everyone’s activities (like who has the missing ether), and characters are given good reasons to be leave the vicinity just long enough to be suspicious (like Mr. Oates being sent to the next town over to get more ether; it’s a rather ether heavy plot). We learn fairly early on that Mrs. Warren is a crack shot and may be less enfeebled than she lets on, as she keeps a gun next to her bed that Helen is unable to wrest from her grasp, and she boasts about having slain the tiger that gave its life for her bedroom rug. She even notes that her late husband used to tell her that although she was not as pretty as his first wife, she was a much better shot. That late Mr. Warren, though long passed, cast a pall over the house that is still very much in effect. A man of much machismo, he resented that neither of his sons had much interest in sport or riflery as he did, and thought little of both of them as they instead chose academia and ribaldry as their passions instead. That paternal disappointment is at play in the behavior of both living Warren men, and a revelation that a woman was murdered at the house years before casts further suspicion on them both. It’s great character work that effectively keeps you guessing until the moment that the killer is revealed. 

We often talk about Psycho as the sort of decades-early prototype of the slasher genre, but there are a lot of novel, modern elements here that are also clearly part of that same genealogy, and even earlier to boot. Images of the slicker-wearing killer hiding just where Helen cannot see him, framed from the back, have a very slasher vibe, with the first image that comes to mind being the hook-wielding killer in exactly the same outfit in I Know What You Did Last Summer. As Dario Argento later would, director Robert Siodmak used himself to represent the killer before the reveal, most notably in several moments where there is an extreme close up of the killer’s eye. Sometimes, we get to see the reflection of a victim in said eye, which is not something I expected to see in a film produced in 1945. It’s so modern that it feels almost too far ahead of its time. We even get several first-person shots from the killer as he snuffs out his victims. In the first, they attack the woman when she’s changing clothes and is halfway through getting her dress on, her arms pinned in an overhead position, her long-nailed hands grasping at the air as she struggles; in the second, the victim plays the old “Oh! It’s you! You scared me!” routine until the killer lunges and strangles her in a chiaroscuro-lit cellar, with the actual murder happening in the darkened, unlit center of the frame, her seemingly disembodied hands likewise clawing at nothing from opposite sides of the image. 

The imagery is potent, and the film isn’t afraid to occasionally go for the surreal. When Helen first returns to the Warren estate and is making her way up the grand central staircase, she stops for a moment to look into the mirror mounted on the landing (which will later make for some very cool angles in the chase scenes), and the camera crawls along the floor of the upstairs to reveal a pair of feet, letting us know that the killer is already in the house and is watching. As the killer watches, we see from their perspective that Helen has no mouth, and although the effect is rather limited, it’s still very creepy. Later still, when Parry has convinced Helen to run away with him, we get to see her imagine a brief, sweet courtship that leads right up to a wedding, the daydream turning into a nightmare when she is unable to say “I do,” as even in her fantasy she is unable to speak. 

Helen is a very cool final girl, and McGuire imbues a character who has no lines before the film’s final moment with a great deal of life and vivaciousness, conveying a lot through her body language and expressions. In one of the film’s most exciting moments, Helen is alone in the house with the killer as everyone else is dead, gone, imprisoned, or bedbound, and the constable comes to relay that Dr. Parry will not be returning that evening as he is attending a medical emergency, and Helen, in an upstairs room, beats against the window to get the lawman’s attention to no avail, and her desperation and frustration as he leaves are palpable. We see her playfulness with Mrs. Warren, her professionalism with Professor Warren, and her warmth and affection with Mr. and Mrs. Oates, and there’s a tangible difference in the way that she “speaks” to each of them. It’s damn fine acting work. The two best on-screen pairings are McGuire with Barrymore and McGuire with Lanchester. For the former, there’s an authentic sense of maternal warmth and protectiveness that Mrs. Warren has for Helen, and Helen seems to be the only person in the house whose company Mrs. Warren genuinely enjoys. With the latter, a lot of that is simply that Mrs. Oates is my favorite character here, and she was a delight every moment that she was present. Her rambling to Helen when she first returns home is quite fun, as is her antipathy toward her husband’s lazy dog. There’s a very fun bit in which she goes for her hidden brandy and finds it empty, to which Mr. Oates replies that he got rid of it because of her temperament. Later, when Professor Warren needs her help retrieving a bottle of brandy from the cellar, she fakes dropping the candle in order to steal another bottle for herself. It’s a helpful addition of some physical comedy to the proceedings while also setting up a scene later in which Helen locks her potential killer in the same underground room (and also a scene in which Helen is unable to rouse Mrs. Oates to help her with the killer as the older woman is passed out drunk). 

One thing that seems to be a point of contention is exactly when the film is supposed to be set. It’s clearly some time before the actual production date, as there is not a single automobile in sight, with characters riding around in horses and buggies. There’s no on-screen confirmation of an exact year, but Wikipedia lists it as 1906, as does TVTropes (although I assume the latter gets this from the former). Brode’s book lists it as 1916, and in fact makes some hay with the fact that this would have been right in the middle of the Great War, at a time when Freudian theory was becoming somewhat mainstream and that the film’s text is about Freudian themes of suppression and desire. It doesn’t really matter in the end, but thought it was worth mentioning, as I sometimes wonder where we get these “facts” about movies, and the way that something you might only learn in a now long-lost press kit have somehow been passed down as paratext and become unclear over time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #238: The Cremator (1969) & Wartime Traitors

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Welcome to Episode #238 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of dramas about wartime traitors, treasonists, quislings, and collaborators, starting with the Czech New Wave classic The Cremator (1969).

00:00 Welcome

04:40 The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man (2025)
07:56 Children of a Lesser God (1986)
11:51 The Passionate Friends (1949)
13:05 Hobson’s Choice (1954)
17:08 Date Movie (2006)
23:15 Bull Durham (1988)
26:36 Vision Quest (1985)

32:30 The Cremator (1969)
52:16 The Ascent (1977)
1:11:41 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
1:26:47 The Good German (2006)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew