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

Bull Durham (1988)

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As we’re nearing the midpoint of 2025, I’m making peace with the fact that my favorite new release so far this year is a movie about baseball. The laidback, casually philosophic baseball comedy Eephus finds tremendous thematic & spiritual significance in a sport that I’ve never really had much interest in before but now understand to be a rich cinematic subject. I was charmed by the team-camaraderie story told in A League of Their Own (both the 90s movie and the too-quickly cancelled TV show).  I had an unexpectedly emotional experience with the 90s baseball melodrama Field of Dreams as well, finding it to be a surprisingly affecting story about marriage, faith, and fatherhood – all filtered through the rhythms & spiritualism of baseball. My entire life, I’ve considered baseball to be about as boring of a spectator sport as watching someone assemble a jigsaw puzzle. I get that it’s an interesting strategic game for the players, but visually there’s just not much spectacle to it; it’s like watching competitive chess with the added excitement of … waiting around. All of that empty time spent loitering on the field and over-thinking game theory in the dugout does leave plenty of space for the transcendent poetry of cinema to flourish, though, and so I’m starting to appreciate the appeal of baseball movies these days even while still missing out on the appeal of baseball itself. As a result, it seemed like the perfect time to catch up with another classic example of the genre, the minor-league sex comedy Bull Durham.

Written & directed by former minor-league player Ron Shelton, Bull Durham attempts to provide behind-the-scenes insight to the general baseball-watching public of what it’s like to play for the minors. There are seemingly two career paths for competitive minor-league players, both defined by their relationship with The Major League (referred to in-film simply as “The Show”). Tim Robins is a young player on the upswing: a talented but undisciplined fuckboy who could earn his way into The Majors if he focused on honing his skills instead of bragging about what he’s already achieved. Kevin Costner is his older, wiser counterbalance: a dependable, level-headed player who’s aged out of his physical ability to compete in The Majors but is hopelessly addicted to the ritual of the game. Costner is hired to get Robins’s wildcard hotshot pitcher into shape as his more mature, grounded catcher, entering the scene with a verbatim “I’m too old for this shit” complaint of jaded exhaustion. Their old-timers vs. new blood conflict is quickly supercharged by the intrusion of Robins’s other unofficial sidelines coach: a fellow “too old for this shit” team groupie who sleeps with one promising player every season so she can help mold him into something great. Naturally, Susan Sarandon steals the heart of both men in that part, and the question of whether this will be her final season hangs just as heavily over her head as it does for Costner.

I might not ever fully understand the spiritual power of baseball, but I feel like I’ve intrinsically understood the full sexual dynamism of Susan Sarandon my entire life, so this is likely the most effective gateway to appreciating the sport as I’ll ever find. Sarandon is nuclear hot here, flavoring the cougar seductress role she later filled in White Palace with a thick Southern drawl, recalling Dolly Parton’s sweetly sexy narration track in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Her pursuit to reshape Robins’s wild horndog energy into something more purposeful & measured takes on a distinct BDSM power dynamic as soon as their first night together. He wants to tear his clothes off and immediately jump into bed, but she makes him slowly strip to really feel his body, then ties him to the bed and reads him classic poetry as foreplay. Later, she convinces him to wear black-lace lingerie under his uniform to help distract from the internal self-doubt monologue that throws off his pitches. When he first meets her, “he fucks like he pitches, all over the place,” but by the time they part she’s almost literally whipped him into shape. Meanwhile, her sexual dynamic with Costner is much more sincere & equitable. When Costner ties her to the same bed, it’s to paint her toenails as a visual substitute for cunnilingus. He’s mature enough to take things slow, all romantic-like, which is an energy Sarandon struggles to adjust to after “coaching” so many jumpy, undisciplined fuckboys over the years.

Bull Durham wastes no time to addressing the spiritual, transcendent aspects of baseball. In her opening narration, Sarandon explains that she has chosen to dedicate her spiritual life to the sport as a direct substitute for religion, musing about how the 108 beads in the Catholic rosary directly correspond to the 108 stitches in a regulation baseball. She’s not the only old-timer in the picture who pontificates about how The Church of Baseball is “the only thing that truly feeds the soul,” either. Whenever Costner gets misty-eyed bragging about his brief time playing in The Majors, he gets lost in the thought that “The ballparks are like cathedrals.” All of the game theory, philosophy, ritual, and superstition that goes into keeping even a mediocre minor-league team on its feet for a season gets away from everyone involved, and the genius of the film is in how it’s connected to Sarandon’s own complex theorizing on the transcendent poetry of casual sex. For his part, Ron Shelton brings all of this spiritual abstraction down to a tangible, real-world level once Costner & Sarandon make peace with their impending retirement. At the climax, Sarandon explains in narration, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a job.” Balancing that working-class practicality with the spiritually fulfilling poetry of the sport is something I’ve seen wrestled with in all of the various baseball movies I’ve been watching lately, so I suppose there’s an undeniable truth to the observation.

-Brandon Ledet

Beau Travail (1999)

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It’s no secret that I was no fan of Claire Denis’s High Life when I saw it nearly six years ago, but I had always heard the director’s name in conjunction with high praise for her work. Often foremost among those cited as her masterpieces is Beau Travail, a 1999 film loosely based on the (infamously unfinished) Herman Melville novel Billy Budd. And the people are right! Beau Travail is a ballet, a very simple story that plays out slowly over long tracking shots of desert topography and portraiture of stoic, unchanging faces, with very little dialogue. Instead, the narrative is composed almost entirely of internal monologue of Adjutant-Chef Galoup (Denis Lavant), as he recalls the last days he spent in Djibouti overseeing a division of the French Foreign Legion there, and the mistake that cost him his career. 

I’m going to relate to you the whole plot in this paragraph, because that’s not what’s important here, and there’s not much to it, really. In the desert, Galoup oversees a group of about fifteen Legionnaires. He has a heroic worship of his own superior, Commandant Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), which may verge on the romantic. Galoup’s life takes a turn with the arrival of Gilles Sentain, a new young Legionnaire. Galoup takes an instant dislike to the newest member of the team, which is exacerbated when he perceives that Forestier has a fondness for Sentain. While in the field at an abandoned barracks, Galoup goads Sentain into striking him by excessively punishing another Legionnaire and kicking a canteen out of Sentain’s hands when the boy attempts to give water to the man being punished. Sentain’s own disciplinary action takes the form of being stranded in the desert and forced to walk back to camp, but Sentain’s compass has been tampered with, and he becomes lost and apparently dies. Although most assume that Sentain simply deserted, a common practice among Legionnaires, Forestier nonetheless sends Galoup back to France to face court martial and dismissal for his actions; back in Marseille, Galoup recollects the events that we have just witnessed while demonstrating that he cannot shake the habits of a soldier, and the film ends ambiguously as Galoup dances alone in an empty nightclub. 

Beau Travail is a film about ambiguity. We know next to nothing about Galoup’s past, so everything that we learn about him is delivered through his narration, which is clearly not always reliable. Discussing his relationship with Forestier first, it’s clear that Galoup is, or at least was, in love with him at some point in time, but my interpretation is that there probably was some kind of sexual relationship in the past in which Galoup was more emotionally invested. He narrates that the commandant never confided in him, but he does so while lovingly coaxing a memento: a bracelet inscribed Bruno. This aligns with my interpretation of the scene between Forestier and Sentain while the latter is on night watch (one of very few scenes in which Galoup is not present to witness what is otherwise a fairly straightforward first-person perspective on his part). Forestier seems flirty with the twenty-two-year-old and beautiful Sentain, from which I infer that Forestier occasionally latches onto young and handsome recruits, with Galoup having been one of his previous conquests/victims, with Galoup still harboring feelings for the commandant. 

None of this is explicit, however, and there’s a great deal left up to interpretation. Their relationship could very easily be the purely professional one that we actually witness onscreen, and it’s entirely possible that the scene in which Forestier coyly interacts with Sentain happened entirely in Galoup’s imagination. The departure from the “Galoup’s perspective” format could be implying this; even though he isn’t present in the scene, this is still his story, it’s just one that’s created by him rather than one that is being recalled. That’s another level of the film’s ambiguity, as much of it plays out as if what we’re seeing is the truth while what we’re hearing are Galoup’s internal rationalizations and judgments. In nothing that we see does Sentain do anything to earn Galoup’s scorn, we are merely told that Sentain was inordinately popular with the other Legionnaires, and we are told that Sentain goads Galoup. Yet there are other large sections of the film in which what we’re seeing feels more representational, most notably the various choreographed exercises that the Legionnaires do, glistening beneath the hot African sun. They are more dance than training, and there’s one sequence in which the group is doing a series of stretches which ends with all of them in a position that makes them appear dead, the camera winding about slowly to ensure we see the entire squad in a synchronized death pose. Are these scenes “real”? Why does Galoup go out one night in his uniform but is in his all-black civvies the next morning when he encounters the other Legionnaires? The reality being conveyed here isn’t important, the truth is, at least as far as what’s true for Galoup. 

As we catch up narratively to Galoup back home in Marseille, we see that the man may leave the military but the military does not leave the man. He irons his civilian clothing to a perfectly crisp press and in the penultimate scene makes his bed with the precision of man who’s faced inspection. Once this is complete, he sets his pistol next to the bed and lies down on it, the camera passing over his chest tattoo which reads “”Sert la bonne cause et meurt” (“Serve the good cause and die”) before finally closing in on a pulsing vein in his bicep that feels ominous, as if we are waiting for that movement to stop. Instead, the film cuts to Galoup in a nightclub. We know that he’s alone as he stands before a wall of diamond shaped mirrors, beveled at the edges, which we’ve seen a few times throughout the film, as through starts and fits, he dances alone to “Rhythm of the Night.” I thought that the mirrored wall was in the club in Djibouti, which would imply that this is a dream sequence, but is it? Or does Galoup just fill in the details with the familiar when his memory fails him? Did he kill himself, or is he finally just loosening up? I couldn’t tell you; I can only convey my interpretation, and it would be better for you to find this one and let it wash over you so that you can make your own judgments. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quadrophenia (1979)

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I’ve never fully understood where Quadrophenia fits in the grand rock ‘n’ roll continuum. A love-letter to the Mod craze among UK rockers in the 1960s, it was made in a time when that fad’s clean-cut, tailored look had already been nostalgically reclaimed by British punk acts like The Damned. As a result, it’s difficult to tell whether some of the jerky, pogo-style dance moves the Mod kids pull in the film are period-accurate to 1960s rock shows, or if the punks filling out the crowd scenes were bringing some contemporary energy to the production that blurred those temporal boundaries. It’s just as likely the teenage reprobates of both eras happened to dance like that because they were on the same drugs—namely, a combination of cheap beer & stolen amphetamines—so it’s an impossible distinction to make. The project was strangely out of sync with itself since the point of conception, though, considering that it’s a bloated stadium-rock opera adapted from a concept album by The Who at their most overwrought, but it’s set in a time when The Who were a definitive force of ramshackle, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll. One of the most iconic scenes in the film features a Mods-only house party in which the entire crowd erupts into chaos when someone spins The Who’s proto-punk classic “My Generation” on the turntable, which is in disorienting aural contrast to the sleepier, sappier Who tunes that score the soundtrack proper. It’s a picture entirely out of time, evenly split between its setting and the era when it was made. That usually is the case with period pieces, but the ever-evolving trends & deviations of rock ‘n’ roll just makes the dissonance ring even louder than usual.

Perusing the extra features of the Criterion DVD copy of Quadrophenia I recently found at a Public Library liquidation sale, it seems that being out-of-sync with current rock ‘n’ roll trends was inherent to the Mod subculture from the start. Distinguished by their tailored suits, their rejection of early-50s rock ‘n’ roll, and their choice to ride motorized scooters instead of roadster motorbikes, Mods were in direct, violent opposition with the macho, leather-jacketed rockers that kept older rock traditions alive in the years before glam & punk changed everything. In addition to the usual talking-head interviews with the filmmakers, the Criterion discs include several French television news reports about these violent clashes, justifying the film’s third-act, beachside gang war with extratextual evidence that the two subcultures’ rumble was relatively credible to real-life events. However, what struck me most about those news reports was the culturally scattered, postmodern nature of their very existence. Here we have archived broadcasts from French journalists who are fascinated with the hard-edged lifestyle of British teens whose obsession with Italian fashion has spawned a newly mutated subspecies of American rock ‘n’ roll. The French reporters land a few zingers against Mod culture as a “new dandyism” that contextualizes it within older traditions of British counterculture. The postmodern multi-nationality of the phenomenon added an entirely new layer to rock ‘n’ roll cultural identity, though, whereas the motorcycle-riding rockers that the Mods clashed against were only one layer deep, idolizing American rock & fashion from earlier decades.

Appropriately, the strung-out protagonist who guides our tour through the Mods vs Rockers moment of the then-recent past is, himself, out of sync with the world around him. Phil Daniels stars as Jimmy Cooper, a pill-popping teenage Mod who can barely hold onto his entry-level mailroom job because he spends all of his nights sweating through his suits and jumping around to rock ‘n’ roll music with his dirtbag friends. Jimmy is constantly on the search for drugs he cannot find and cannot afford. He’s constantly crushing on a girl who’s only looking for a bit of fun, while constantly ignoring the flirtations of the other girl who actually wants him back. His desperation for Mod-scene notoriety (mostly so he can land his dream girl) only manifests in useless acts of teenage rebellion, like dragging his scooter through more uptight Brits’ flowerbeds, until he’s really given a chance to shine at a town-wide gang fight with rockers that ends in mass arrest. Only, when he’s released from jail, he’s found that his moment of fame was fleeting, his dream girl has already moved on, and the drugs are starting to weigh heavily on his fragile, hormone-addled psyche. In an early, telling scene he has a loud argument about music tastes with a rocker at the local baths (heads up for anyone who’d like to catch a glimpse of a young Ray Winstone’s cock & balls) that ends with the opposing Mod & rocker realizing that they were childhood friends, and there’s no substantial difference between them once stripped of their respective paraphernalia. The tragedy of the film is that Jimmy wants that subcultural distinction to signify a substantial difference between them; he relies on Mod-culture insignia to give his days & persona meaning, only to inevitably find it another empty frivolity, just like everything else in life.

Of course, Quadrophenia itself became a cultural touchstone to be disseminated in the great rock ‘n’ roll diaspora. The reviews & marketing for Jon Moritsugu’s 1994 punk-scene whatsit Mod Fuck Explosion reference West Side Story as the source of inspiration for its fictional gang war, but since the gangs in those films are the titular scooter-riding Mods vs. motorcycle-riding rock ‘n’ rollers, it’s a lot more likely Mortisugu was pulling directly (and cheekily) from The Who’s rock opera. So, there you have a snotty 90s-punk reiteration of a 70s-punk echo of a 60s-rock fad that split from 50s-rocker roots. It’s an out-of-sync rock cinema tradition you’ll find in other beloved period pieces like American Graffiti, Velvet Goldmine, and 24 Hour Party People — all precariously balanced between the eras they depict and the eras in which they were made. If there’s anything positive to glean from that temporal precarity, it’s the overall sense that rock ‘n’ roll never dies; it just tries on different silly outfits from time to time. The Mods’ outfits just happened to be sillier than most. I mean, who wears a tailored suit to a punk show?

-Brandon Ledet