The Cinematography of Roger Corman : Exploitation Filmmaker or Auteur? [1 ed.] 9781443843614, 9781443899475

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The Cinematography of Roger Corman

The Cinematography of Roger Corman: Exploitation Filmmaker or Auteur? By

Pawel Aleksandrowicz

The Cinematography of Roger Corman: Exploitation Filmmaker or Auteur? By Pawel Aleksandrowicz This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Pawel Aleksandrowicz All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9947-X ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9947-5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 6 Auteur Theory and Exploitation Films 1. Introduction........................................................................................ 6 2. Auteur theory ..................................................................................... 6 3. Exploitation cinema ......................................................................... 14 4. Exploitation filmmakers as auteurs? ................................................ 20 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 Corman and his Production Processes 1. Introduction ...................................................................................... 23 2. Corman’s filmmaking career ........................................................... 23 3. Corman’s production process........................................................... 28 3.1. Choosing and financing a film idea ......................................... 29 3.2. Scriptwriting ............................................................................ 31 3.3. Casting..................................................................................... 31 3.4. Direction .................................................................................. 33 3.5. Post-production ....................................................................... 36 4. Conclusion ....................................................................................... 37 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 39 Exploitation and its Different Faces 1. Fads as exploitable topics ................................................................ 41 1.1. Rock and roll ........................................................................... 41 1.2. Reincarnation .......................................................................... 42 1.3. Royal jelly cosmetics............................................................... 44 1.4. Summary ................................................................................. 45 2. Exploitation and genre ..................................................................... 45 2.1. Science-fiction films ............................................................... 45 2.2. Teen film (juvenile delinquency) ........................................... 83 2.3. The gangster film .................................................................... 92 2.4 Summary .................................................................................. 98

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3. “Deep” exploitation ......................................................................... 98 3.1. Racial desegregation................................................................ 99 3.2. Counterculture ....................................................................... 106 3.3. Summary ............................................................................... 122 Conclusion ......................................................................................... 122 Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 125 Recurring Thematic Motifs and Artistic Triumph 1. Introduction .................................................................................... 125 2. Female empowerment .................................................................... 125 3. Outsider protagonist ....................................................................... 140 4. Gothic horror.................................................................................. 149 4.1. Poe’s motifs ........................................................................... 151 4.2. Freudian motifs ..................................................................... 156 4.3. Corman’s motifs .................................................................... 159 5. Conclusion ..................................................................................... 163 Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 165 Style 1. Early films, 1955-1958 .................................................................. 167 2. Mature style ................................................................................... 170 2.1. Movement ............................................................................. 171 2.2. Deep shot ............................................................................... 175 2.3. Ambience, symbolism and expressionism............................. 178 3. Conclusion ..................................................................................... 182 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 184 Filmography ............................................................................................ 188 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 200

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank prof. Christopher Garbowski, without whom this book would not be possible. I would also like to thank prof. Zbigniew Mazur for his invaluable remarks.

INTRODUCTION

At the beginning of the twenty first century, a number of film scholars have focused their academic interest towards exploitation cinema. Exploitation – until then neglected and underrated – suddenly saw the publishing of voluminous academic works on its history in Hollywood,1 Europe2 and even Latin America,3 collections of interviews with the filmmakers that worked within its genres, encyclopedic studies on the topic in general,4 as well as comprehensive analyzes of individual genres,5 works on the cultural phenomenon of cult film,6 books7 and articles investigating exploitation film posters, feminist analyzes,8 and many more. Of course, scholars and film aficionados also examined the works of particular directors9 as well as producers,10 including one of the most prolific representatives of exploitation – Roger Corman. As Corman has 1 See, for example: Eric Shaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 2 See, for example: Danny Shipka, Perverse Titillation: The Exploitation Cinema of Italy, Spain and France (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), or Ernest Mathijs, ed, Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (London: Wallflower Press, 2004). 3 Victoria Ruétalo and Dolores Tierney, eds, Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2009). 4 See, for example: Ric Meyers, For One Week Only: The World of Exploitation Films (Guilford, CT: Emery Books, 2011) or Mike Quarles, Down and Dirty: Hollywood’s Exploitation Filmmakers and Their Movies (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993). 5 See, for example: Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 6 See, for example: Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2011). 7 Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh and Dave Kehr, Film Posters Exploitation (Berlin: Taschen, 2006). 8 Henry Jenkins, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 9 See, for example: Calum Waddell, Jack Hill: The Exploitation and Blaxploitation Master, Film by Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009). 10 See, for example: John Hamilton, Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser (Godalming, UK: FAB Press, 2005).

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Introduction

been working in the exploitation business since 1955, having directed 50 films himself and produced another 400 features by other directors, numerous publications on his topic are available. They include (in chronological order): x J. Philip Di Franco, Karyn G. Browne and Roger Corman, The Movie World of Roger Corman (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1979) – an early publication which contains a biography of the director, a description of his films and a plethora of Corman-related materials: posters, photos, one-sheets and much more; x Ed Naha and Roger Corman, The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget (New York: Arco Pub, 1982) – a presentation of Corman’s career and of his works supplied with Corman’s own commentaries; x Gary Morris, Roger Corman (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 1985) – a critical analysis of Corman’s career; x Mark Thomas McGee, Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997) – a film-by-film analysis complete with biographies of Corman and his collaborators; x Alan G. Frank, The Films of Roger Corman: shooting my way out of trouble (London: BT Batsford, 1998) – another film-by-film treatment complete with stills, photographs and newspaper reviews; x Mark Whitehead, Roger Corman (Harpenden, UK: Pocket Essentials, 2003) – a concise description of Corman and his works; x Beverly Gray, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesheating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004) – a collection of interviews with eighty of Corman’s collaborators; x Alain Silver and James Ursini, Roger Corman: Metaphysics on a Shoestring (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2006). Though all of these publications – in one way of another – consider Corman to be an exceptional filmmaker, none of them embarks on a comprehensive, academic analysis to determine whether he is also an artist, i.e. an auteur. This might stem from the fact that Corman is an ambiguous artistic figure. On the one hand, he directed films like Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), She Gods from Shark Reef (1958) or Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961) and produced such “masterpieces” as The Brain Eaters (1958), Queen of Blood (1966), Slumber Party Massacre (1982) or Dinocroc vs. Supergator (2010) – films whose very titles already

The Cinematography of Roger Corman

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suggest their artistic deficiencies. He is also notorious for shooting and producing his films quickly, cheaply and with blatant disregard for safety measures, which – together with his ability to issue a dozen new films every year and his impressive production filmography (most of which is on the artistic level of Dinocroc vs. Supergator) – have earned him the titles of “shlockmeister”11 or “the King of the B’s”12 among film journalists. On the other hand, however, Corman can boast of extraordinary merits both as a director and as a producer. In 1964, he became the youngest American director to be given a film retrospective at the prestigious Cinématèque Française in Paris. In 2008, one of his directorial efforts – House of Usher – was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. As a producer, he discovered and promoted such directorial talents as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Curtis Hanson, Ron Howard or Jonathan Demme, to name just the directors whose later works were awarded Academy Awards. His production-distribution company, New World Pictures, was the first to release the films of Bergman, Fellini and Kurosawa (and countless other European artists) on the American market. Finally, in 2010, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him with an Academy Honorary Award “for his rich engendering of films and filmmakers.” Which of these two faces of Corman is his real one? Is he an exploitation shlockmeister or a great filmmaker worthy of critical recognition? The following study shall strive to answer that question. Yet, before it can be addressed, there are two issues which need to be addressed. The first issue pertains to Corman’s copious filmography. The sheer number of films he produced makes the task of analyzing all of them virtually insurmountable. Merely watching them would require a scholar to spend about 500-600 hours in the projection room, and their subsequent analysis would generate a rather cumbersome volume. Moreover, not all of these productions are available for analysis as many of them received limited distribution in American drive-in cinemas, after which they vanished into oblivion. Finally, and most importantly, it would be difficult 11

Phelim O’Neill, “Revenge of the shlockmeister: Roger Corman gets his due,” The Guardian, November 25, 2009. http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/nov/25/roger-corman-oscar. Accessed December 10, 2013. 12 John Hiscock, “Roger Corman is still prolific at the age of 87,” The Telegraph, September 19, 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/10318784/ Roger-Corman-is-still-prolific-at-age-of-87.html. Accessed December 10, 2013.

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Introduction

– if not impossible – to assess the degree of Corman’s participation in each of the features he produced, as he indeed masterminded some of them (like The Fast and the Furious) but only financed some others (like Il castello dalle porte di fuoco).13 Therefore, a scholarly examination of all ca. 400 of his productions could cause justifiable doubts whether these films are truly his. For these reasons, the films Corman produced shall be excluded from analysis in the following study. Instead, it shall focus on the features he directed himself, for there is initially far less doubt whether he is their artistic creator. Yet, his directorial filmography poses its own problem – it varies from one source to another. This stems from the fact that when Corman was running a production company, he would sometimes be required to step in and help his director finish the film. As a result, five films issued by New World Pictures – A Time for Killing (1967), The Wild Racers (1968), De Sade (1969), Deathsport (1978) and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) – were co-directed by Corman. However, it is difficult to determine the level of his directorial involvement in each of these films, and analyzing them would again raise justifiable doubts whether he is indeed their author. Consequently, this study shall focus only on the films in which he was the sole director.14 Limiting the scope of this study to Corman’s directorial efforts excludes the majority of his low-cost exploitive productions as well as some of his artistic merits (an extraordinary eye for talent, the promotion of European art cinema in America), but the question of whether Corman is a shlockmeister or a true artist still remains unanswered. After all, his 13 Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), 226. 14 They include exactly fifty titles: Five Guns West; Apache Woman; Day the World Ended; Swamp Women; The Oklahoma Woman; The Gunslinger; It Conquered the World; Not of This Earth; Attack of the Crab Monsters; Teenage Doll; Rock All Night; The Undead; She Gods of Shark Reef; Naked Paradise; Sorority Girl; Carnival Rock; War of the Satellites; The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent; Teenage Caveman; Machine Gun Kelly; I, Mobster; A Bucket of Blood; The Wasp Woman; Ski Troop Attack; House of Usher; The Little Shop of Horrors; The Last Woman on Earth; Creature from the Haunted Sea; Atlas; Pit and the Pendulum; The Intruder; The Premature Burial; Tales of Terror; The Tower of London; The Young Racers; The Raven; The Terror; X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes; The Haunted Palace; The Secret Invasion; The Masque of the Red Death; The Tomb of Ligeia; The Wild Angels; The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; The Trip; Target: Harry; Bloody Mama; Gas-s-s!; Von Richthofen and Brown; and Frankenstein Unbound. See filmography for details.

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directorial filmography is also full of contradictions, with typically exploitive The Wasp Woman on the one hand, and the acclaimed House of Usher on the other. This leads us to the second important issue: how can it be academically determined whether a director is an artist or just a craftsman/craftswoman? The auteur theory can help solve this problem. Formed in the 1950s by French film critics and subsequently developed by British and American thinkers, it provides a set of theoretical tools which can be used to determine if a director is the major creative force behind his/her films and whether these films reflect his/her artistic vision. Using these tools, a scholar can determine whether a director is an extraordinary artist or just a journeyman at a film studio’s service. The aim of this study is, therefore, to investigate the directorial works of Corman using the tools provided by the auteur theory and to determine whether his films are merely exploitation features or whether at some point they bear the hallmarks of auteur cinema. As for the structure of the following study, Chapter 1 briefly presents the history of the auteur theory and chooses its structuralist version as the most suitable for the analysis herein. It also explains the notion of exploitation cinema and delves into a preliminary discussion whether an exploitation filmmaker can be deemed an auteur. Chapter 2 includes a concise biography of Corman and describes the production process of his motion pictures in a chronological manner: from choosing a film idea, through scriptwriting, casting and direction, until post-production. Chapter 3 focuses on Corman’s exploitation output and analyzes the way in which he exploited popular social and political topics. Chapter 4 presents the two most common motifs in his filmography – female empowerment and outsider protagonists. It also separately examines his most famous film series – the adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic horror short stories. Chapter 5 investigates Corman’s early and mature film styles. In the latter, it identifies three key stylistic features of his direction: camera movement, deep shot and symbolism. Finally, the conclusion shall try to answer the question posed in this introduction: is Corman an exploitation filmmaker or an auteur, and consequently, is he an artist or a shlockmeister?

CHAPTER ONE AUTEUR THEORY AND EXPLOITATION FILMS

1. Introduction The following theoretical chapter is comprised of three sections. The first section discusses the auteur theory, its provenance and key concepts. It also strives to establish an evaluation system consistent with the auteur theory which could be applied in order to discern whether particular film directors are auteurs or not.1 The second section presents the term “exploitation cinema” and aims at defining it. The final part delves into preliminary deliberations whether an exploitation director can be considered an auteur.

2. The auteur theory Film is a specific artistic discipline in that it is usually a joint enterprise of many artists. There is no denying the fact the director is an artist, the writer is an artist, the actors and actresses are artists, but there are probably even more people within the film crew who could be deemed artists: costume and set designers, CGI specialists, make-up artists (they are even called “artists” when the credits roll) and so on. Which of these artists is the author of the film? In the case of other arts there is no such problem: the writer is the author of a novel, the painter – of a painting, the composer – of a piece of music, etc. But how to attribute the authorship of a film to anyone if the credit list comprises several hundred names of people who contributed to the creation of this film? Who is the author? The scriptwriter who wrote the screenplay for the film? The director who realized it? The actors who we can actually see? Or the producer who bound all these people together and financed the project? Maybe they are all authors? Or there is none?

1

The concept of auteurism is relatively well-known, so the following chapter shall present its history only briefly, and concentrate on the version which is the most useful for the analysis herein.

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The auteur theory makes an effort to answer this question. It was conceived at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s on the pages of French film periodical Cahiers du cinéma, which hosted such names as Jean-Luc Godard, André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, Fereydoon Hoveyda, François Truffaut or Claude Chabrol. The auteur theory has its roots in the French existentialist philosophy, notably the works of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre posited that “existence precedes essence” (French: “l’existence précède l’essence”2) and that “man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself” (French: “l’homme n’est rien d’autre que ce qu’il se fait”3). This is how Sartre explains these notions: What do we mean here by “existence precedes essence”? We mean that man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterward defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.4

These philosophical concepts were soon applied to cinema by André Bazin, who advocated that “cinema’s existence precedes its essence.”5 This means that we can talk about the features, or the essence, of particular cinema only after the films pertaining to this cinema were created. The same principle applies to filmmakers: their artistry, or essence, will become visible only after they film their pictures. Sartre’s approach also paved the way for another French novelist and film critic: Alexandre Astruc, who conceived the concept of camera-pen (French: caméra-stylo). According to Astruc, a camera works for a filmmaker in a similar way in which a pen works for a writer: the filmmaker does not simply capture pictures but rather creates art. He wrote: The cinema is simply becoming a means of expression, something which all other art has been before, especially painting and novel. After successively being trash entertainment, a leisure activity similar to boulevard theatre and a means to capture the images of the epoch, it has become a language – a form in which and through which an artist can 2

Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme (Paris : Editions Nagel, 1946), 21. 3 Ibid., 22. 4 Jean- Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 21. 5 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (London: University of California Press Ltd, 1967), 71.

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Chapter One express his thoughts, however abstract, and translate his obsessions exactly as if he was writing an essay or a novel. That is why I call this new age of cinema the age of camera-pen.6

However, unlike a painting or a novel, a film is a joint effort, so which member of the film crew is the artist expressing their thoughts? Who writes with the camera-pen: the director who directs the camera, or the cameraman who operates it? Or perhaps the scriptwriter who writes the story, or the actor who gives it his face? According to Astruc, the filmmaker who wields the camera-pen is the director: This of course implies that the scriptwriter directs his own scripts; or rather, that the scriptwriter ceases to exist, for in this kind of filmmaking the distinction between author and director loses all meaning. Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing. The auteur writes with a camera as the writer writes with a pen.7

If directors use the camera just like writers use the pen, then gifted directors must possess their own distinct style which operates like the style of gifted writers: it has its distinguishing characteristics, it progresses from one work to another, emanates from every film and allows the viewers to recognize the author. The ideas posited by Astruc were developed by François Truffaut in his essay “Une certaine tendence du cinéma français,” where he used the term “auteur cinema,” which he contrasted with commercial cinema. In his view, commercial cinema, which attracts flocks of viewers, offers them very little: “its habitual dose of smut, non-conformity and facile audacity.”8 He was particularly shocked by one such film: “In the same reel of film, by the end, you can hear in less than ten minutes such words as: prostitute, whore, slut and bitchiness.”9 Auteur cinema, on the other hand, is audacious in a different way. Auteur-directors, or “men of cinema” as Truffaut calls them, are audacious in the way they realize their mise-en-scène. In other words, their audacity is strictly related to the medium they work in – the camerawork, light, pacing, control over their actors, editing, etc. – not to other media, like the script.10 6

Alexandre Astruc, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra stylo,” L’écran français 144 (30 March 1948): 20 [translation mine]. 7 Ibid., 22. 8 François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” Cahiers du cinema in English (January 1967), 35. 9 Ibid., 36. 10 Ibid., 39.

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Truffaut’s article was a turning point for auteur theory not only because it featured the concept of “auteur cinema” for the first time and established the director as the unquestionable auteur, but also because it commenced the discussion on the mise-en-scène as a means to identify auteurs. After Truffaut had written “it is not so much the choice of subject which characterizes Becker as how he chooses to treat his subject,”11 others followed his line of reasoning. Taking Truffaut’s remark on Becker and Sartre’s philosophy as starting points, Hoveyda wrote the following about the relation between mise-en-scène and auteurism: The originality of the auteur lies not in the subject matter he chooses, but in the technique he employs, i.e. the mise-en-scène, through which everything on the screen is expressed… As Sartre said: “One isn’t a writer for having chosen to say certain things, but for having chosen to say them in a certain way.” Why should it be different for cinema? … the thought of a cinéaste appears through his mise-en-scène. What matters in a film is the desire for order, composition, harmony, the placing of actors and objects, the movements within the frame, the capturing of a moment or a look; in short, the intellectual operation which has put an initial emotion and a general idea to work. Mise-en-scène is nothing other than the technique invented by each director to express the idea and establish the specific quality of his work… The task of the critic thus becomes immense: to discover behind the images the particular “manner” of the auteur and, thanks to this knowledge, to be able to elucidate the meaning of the work in question.12

In short, directors can be recognized as auteurs solely on the basis of their directing, and not, for example, on the basis of scripting or casting, which are not the tasks of a director as such. Moreover, their directing should be more than technically competent; it should contain a distinguishable, personal vision progressing from one film to another. It must be also highlighted at this point that superior directors are auteurs despite their working conditions; despite the script, the actors’ performance, the interference on the part of their studios. If the director can retain their artistry in defiance of these difficulties, it is a proof of their talent. As Hoveyda wrote: “in the hands of a great director, even the most insignificant

11 François Truffaut, “Les Truands sont fatigues,” Cahiers du cinéma 34, (April 1954). 12 Fereydoon Hoveyda, “Les Taches du soleil,” translated as “Sunspots” in Cahiers du cinéma:the 1960s, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 141-142.

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detective story can be transformed into a work of art.”13 This approach also stems from Truffaut’s “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” where he accused French scriptwriters of stifling directors’ inspiration and impeding their work. This accusation is even more accurate in relation to Hollywood and its studio system: Given the fact that in Hollywood the director often had no more than token control over the choice of subject, the cast, the quality of the dialogue, all the weight of creativity, all the evidence of personal expression and statement had to be found in the mise-en-scène, the visual orchestration of the story, the rhythm of the action, the plasticity and dynamism of the image, the pace and the causality introduced through the editing.14

Establishing the mise-en-scène as the key factor in assessing director’s authorship brings about certain problems, though. First of all, criteria like “the desire for order, composition, harmony, the placing of actors and objects, the movements within the frame, the capturing of a moment or a look” or “the visual orchestration of the story, the rhythm of the action, the plasticity and dynamism of the image, the pace and the causality introduced through the editing” are too general and imprecise, and refer to the subjective sense of esthetics of the viewer. As a result, film criticism would resemble watching pictures in an art gallery, moving pictures, and deciding whether they look beautiful or not. Directors, however, as Astruc himself asserted, have more in common with writers rather than with painters, and just like there is more to books than their style, there is more to films than their form. Secondly, the auteur theory conceived by Cahiers favors the directors of genres in which camerawork and editing play a major role (action, western, crime, horror, etc), at the same time discriminating against directors of genres which rely on different aspects of film production (comedies – script and dialogue;15 musicals – music, choreography and actor performance; etc). It is, therefore, of little surprise that the French auteur theory provoked an extensive debate once it had spread outside the borders of France. A British critic, Penelope Houston, for example, argued that “cinema is about the human situation, not about ‘spatial relationships.’”16 But the first 13

Ibid., 38. Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face With Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 244. 15 For instance, currently there are probably very few critics who would deny the opinion that Woody Allen is an auteur. 16 Penelope Houston, “The Critical Question,” Sight and Sound, vol. 29, no. 4 (Autumn 1960): 163. 14

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non-French critic to thoroughly embark on the topic and develop his own version of the auteur theory was Andrew Sarris. Sarris’ merits for the auteur theory are twofold. First, he introduced it to America and the entire English-speaking critical community, and gave it its present “English” name, “auteur theory,” for it had been previously known under the French term “la politique des auteurs.” This step not only helped to broaden the discussion on auteurism but in fact allowed it to continue, as the critical impetus of the Cahiers had already started to decline.17 Second, he contributed into auteurism himself, shaping the theory, which he considered to be “so vague at the present time.”18 Notably, he proposed three “premises” useful in distinguishing auteur-directors, which I would like to extensively quote below: The first premise of the auteur theory is the technical competence of a director as a criterion of value. A badly directed or undirected film has no importance in a critical scale of values, but one can make interesting conversation about the subject, the script, the acting, the color, the photography, the editing, the music, the costumes, the décor, and so forth. […] Now, by the auteur theory, if a director has no technical competence, no elementary flair for the cinema, he is automatically cast out from the pantheon of directors. A great director has to be at least a good director. This is true in any art. The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to a way the director thinks and feels. The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.19

Sarris’ “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962” began a new chapter for auteur theory as it spawned countless publications by various critics and theorists. Many of them regarded the question of authorship in a radically different way when compared to what Sarris and Cahiers had proposed, 17 Jim Miller, Cahiers du Cinéma: Volume I: The 1950s. Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1985), 11. 18 Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the auteur theory in 1962,” in Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed. John Caughie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1981), 63. 19 Ibid., 63-64.

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Chapter One

claiming, for example, that individual authors do not exist because authorship is corporate (Andrew Darley20) or because it is the audience which creates the meaning of a text (Roland Barthes21). Among those scholars who did recognize individual auteurs in directors, structuralists Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Peter Wollen stand out. In his book on Luchino Visconti, Nowell-Smith wrote off all the nonstructuralist approaches that had been conceived before, except for the very basic foundation of the auteur theory – that the director-as-auteur exists: The so-called auteur theory can be understood in three ways: as a set of empirical assertions to the effect that every detail of a film is the direct and sole responsibility of its author, who is the director; as a standard of value, according to which every film that is a film d’auteur is good, and every film that is not is bad; and as a principle of method, which provides a basis for a more scientific form of criticism that has existed hitherto. The first interpretation is manifestly absurd. Any proponent of the theory who puts it forward uncompromisingly in that form both trivialises the theory and commits himself to a statement that is demonstrably untrue. The second is simply gratuitous and leads only to a purposeless and anti-critical aesthetic dogmatism. It is only in the third interpretation that the theory has any validity. As a principle of method the theory requires the critic to recognize one basic fact, which is that the author exists, and to organize his analysis of the work round that fact.22

Next he explained how he really saw the task of a critic: [O]ne essential corollary of the theory as it has been developed is the discovery that the defining characteristics of an author’s work are not always those that are most readily apparent. The purpose of criticism becomes therefore to uncover behind the superficial contrasts of subject and treatment a structural hard core of basic and often recondite motifs. The pattern formed by these motifs, which may be stylistic or thematic, is what gives an author’s work its particular structure, both defining it internally and distinguishing one body of work from another.23

20

See: Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London: Routledge, 2000). 21 See: Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). 22 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Visconti (London: Secker & Warburg, 1967), 7. 23 Ibid., Visconti, 8.

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Nowell-Smith’s laconic mention of “basic and often recondite motifs […] which may be stylistic or thematic” was developed in the works of Peter Wollen. Wollen wrote a number of publications in which he conducted structural examinations of directors he deemed auteurs, thus creating model analyses other structuralists could follow. He looked closely at the thematic motifs in the works of Hawks and Curtiz and noticed these motifs are mostly independent of the type of film: Hawks worked in almost all the genres, treating them pretty much the same – the group could be cow-punchers or pilots delivering the mail or Free French patriots – it didn’t much matter as long as there was danger and loyalty and sacrifice and a romance, salted with wisecracks and gimmicks, or, in the case of a comedy, plagued by humiliation, misunderstanding and descent into chaos.24

In fact, he argued that a true auteur transcends genre and that the recurring plot elements like loyalty or romance are merely used to build deeper, more sophisticated and indeed “recondite” themes which are related to, among others, interpersonal relationships (especially between men and women) in the face of danger, the role and place of an individual in a society or a group in a society, the hierarchy of values, the nature of death, of friendship, of bravery, of love, of responsibility, and so on.25 It is in these little bits of philosophy that we can recognize the personality of the auteur. It is also a proof of authorship, Wollen suggests, when the director includes elements of their personal life/experience in the film. Hawks, for example, had a “liking for scenes which mirrored or even parodied the behavior of people he personally knew.”26 Lastly, an auteur-director should control the film production process to a considerable degree, preferably choosing the scripts they want to shoot and working on them before filming.27 Such an approach to authorship allowed Wollen to analyze film plots, extensively quoting dialogue lines – a method unthinkable for the Cahiers critics.

24

Peter Wollen, “Who The Hell Is Howard Hawks?” in Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film, ed. Peter Wollen (London & New York: Verso, 2002), 56-57. 25 Peter Wollen, “The auteur theory” in Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, ed. Peter Wollen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972). 26 Wollen, “Who The Hell Is Howard Hawks?”, 55. 27 Peter Wollen, “The auteur theory: Michael Curtiz and Casablanca,” in Authorship and Film, ed. David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (London: Routledge, 2003), 63.

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It is clearly visible that, unlike Sarris and the Cahiers critics, Wollen and the structuralists created a practicably applicable method of author analysis, which could be broken down into three areas of interest: x work ethic – personal elements in the films, personal control over and commitment to the production process outside direction; x themes – topics and concerns common for all/many of the films regardless of the film genre; x style – recurring stylistic motifs/elements in the camerawork, editing, framing, etc. Although it might be unjust to say that the structuralist version of the auteur theory is superior over the theories conceived by Sarris or the Cahiers, it is beyond doubt that his approach is more holistic, encompassing all the concerns put forward by the other two theories. Of course, Wollen’s methodology received its share of criticism.28 Yet, it is not the ambition of this chapter to indicate “the best” version of the auteur theory but to find a critical tool to analyze the works by Corman. Nor is it the ambition of this study to prove that the filmmaker is an auteur beyond any doubt but rather that he is more than just an exploitation filmmaker. The essence of the methodology proposed by Wollen and Nowell-Smith fits this task very well as it necessitates an examination of the entire body of work from the perspectives of content (recurring thematic motifs), style (recurrent stylistic motifs) and production (control and involvement in the filmmaking process). For this reason, the analysis of the body of works by Corman herein is based on the methodology proposed by these two structuralists.

3. Exploitation cinema Although Roger Corman shot films falling into different genres – westerns, dramas, horrors, science-fiction, black comedies, fantasy, action and adventure – his pictures could primarily be classified as exploitation cinema. In fact, whenever film scholars analyze exploitation cinema, sooner or later the name “Roger Corman” appears in their deliberations as well. Exploitation is not a film genre per se, as it is sometimes treated, but rather a method of making moving pictures in such a way that, when 28 See: Brian Henderson, “Critique of Ciné-Structuralism,” part 1, Film Quarterly, 27/1 (Winter, 1973-1974), 25-34.

Auteur Theory and Exploitation Films

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released, they bring the highest possible profit in relation to their costs. An exploitation picture is, therefore, made explicitly to earn money. Obviously, by this definition most films would fall into the exploitation category, as “film in general is exploitive.”29 Since film is the most expensive art form, it is more of an investment than any other piece of art, and, unless the picture is subsidized, its maker almost always aims at earning some profit from it. But what differentiates exploitation from the rest of the cinema is the fact that it exploits its certain feature. This may be a controversial topic, special effects, sex, violence, a film star or a particular film character. Again, there might be some confusion between exploitation cinema and “quality films,” especially modern blockbusters, some of which do exploit particular topics primarily to achieve success at the box office. Superhero movies exploit the recent superhero craze, Sherlock Holmes (2009) exploits a popular character, and all the sequels and prequels exploit the success of their predecessors. So, is there a difference between, say, Green Lantern (2011) and Piranha (1978) if both of them relied on the success of their predecessors and were made primarily to earn profit? There is and it lies in the budget. While Green Lantern’s $200,000,000 budget was comparable or even bigger than the budgets of earlier superhero movies ($150,000,000 for XMen Origins or $185,000,000 for The Dark Knight), Piranha’s $600,000 budget accounted to less than ten percent of the money spent to make Jaws.30 Unlike quality pictures, exploitation films are usually made cheaply to maximize the difference between costs and income,31 which often results in their low quality. Another distinctive feature of exploitation films is that their exploited topic constitutes the main element of their advertising campaign. The title should already be meaningful: Blood Beast Terror, Creature from Black Lake and Monster from Green Hell are all creature features, Slaughter High, Hospital Massacre and The Dorm that Dripped Blood are slasher films while Black Caesar, Boss Nigger and Hell Up in Harlem are destined for the African American audience. The tagline should further highlight the topic. For example, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), a rape and revenge movie, was advertised with the following sentence: “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition... 29

Jeremy Richey, “Exploitation USA” in Directory of World Cinema: American Independent, ed. John Berra (Malta: Gutenberg Press, 2010), 145. 30 Figures quoted after Internet Movie Database: www.IMDb.com. 8 January 2012. 31 Interestingly, if the primary difference between exploitation cinema and some modern, quality cinema blockbuster is the funds, then perhaps those blockbusters can be referred to as “quality exploitation cinema.”

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Chapter One

but no jury in America would ever convict her! I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE ... an act of revenge,” while Grizzly (1976), a Jaws spin-off, had the tagline “The most dangerous jaws on land.” Moreover, exploitation films often aim at outperforming one another as far as their topic is concerned. A film about violence will generally try to show more of it or make it more brutal in order to outdo its predecessors while a nudist film will attempt to reveal more skin than other productions on the same subject matter. Obviously, this is a strategy that can lead to diminishing returns, which accounts for the fact that many exploitation subgenres, like cannibal films or rape-and-revenge films, were so shortlived. Another difference between a quality film and an exploitation picture lies in the film crew. Exploitation films are usually produced by smaller, independent companies rather than major studios. Consequently, prominent A-film stars, directors and screenwriters tend to steer clear of the exploitation cinema, most probably due to the salaries which seem low in comparison with those offered by big studios, or because they consider such work degrading. As a result, exploitation cinema has developed its own pool of filmmakers, consisting mostly of young talents or people rejected by or unappreciated in A-grade cinema. Jack Hill, Jess Franco or Lucio Fulci, for example, are considered exclusively exploitation directors. Many of these filmmakers are usually tied to one particular subgenre; for example, Pam Grier is typically a blaxploitation actress while Tinto Brass focuses on erotic cinema. However, there is some degree of personnel fluctuation between exploitation and “quality cinema.” Young filmmakers often start their careers in the former, achieve success, draw the attention of wealthy producers and get “promoted” to the latter, as in the case of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese or James Cameron, to name just the artists discovered by Corman. Conversely, filmmakers who suffer financial difficulties, are down on their luck or at the end of their careers are often forced to earn their living in lower-class, exploitive cinema outside their major studios, as it was with the last films by Bela Lugosi or Lon Chaney Jr., for example. Finally, exploitation films are distributed differently. Before the 1980s, they were almost never released in theatres affiliated with major studios. Instead, a separate branch of cinemas, grindhouses and drive-ins existed, which specialized in screening exploitation films. From time to time, standard theatres would also take a break from the regular Hollywood repertoire to show an exploitation picture. Because of such limited distribution, there were far fewer exploitation prints than “quality film”

Auteur Theory and Exploitation Films

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prints.32 In the 1980s, with the advent of the VHS technology, exploitation was slowly squeezed out of the theatres and its producers were forced to shoot pictures straight-to-VHS, and later on straight-to-DVD. As Corman says: When I started in the late 1950s, every film I made--no matter how low the budget--got a theatrical release. Today, less that 20-percent of our films get a theatrical release. The major studios have dominated the theatrical market.33

Bearing in mind all the features of exploitation cinema, one can draw a conclusion that it is as old as film itself. Indeed, it dates back as far as to early 1890s, when Thomas Edison constructed his first Kinetoscope, a device which showed fifteen second footage recorded on perforated film. The picture had to be viewed through a peephole by one person at a time and Edison would charge one nickel for every screening. These “Nickelodeons” proved to be a commercial success: “when the first Kinetoscope Parlor opened in New York’s Union Square on April 14, 1894, the curious queued around the block to drop a nickel into one of the ten available machines and watch the pictures come to life. Across its first day of business, the parlor grossed $155.70 from the ten machines – equivalent to 3,114 separate viewings.”34 Sensing high profit, Edison started to look for topics which would be more attractive to his audiences than a record of a person sneezing or a bird flying. Soon enough, his film studio, Black Maria, hosted a prizefighting match and, later on, a cockfight, both of which were illegal at that time, to shoot and show them in the parlors for money. Edison’s most popular repertoire also featured a vast array of dancing girls. Films like Annabelle Butterfly Dance or Dolorita’s Passion Dance attracted even more viewers than their violent counterparts. In fact, Dolorita’s Passion Dance was considered so obscene for that time that it got banned from public viewing in New Jersey,35

32

Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!, 4. Roger Corman, interview by Andrew J. Rausch, “Roger Corman on The Blair Witch Project and Why Mean Streets Would Have Made a Great Blaxploitation Film,” Images, 26 February 2004, accessed May 10, 2012, http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue09/features/rogercorman/. 34 Dave Thompson, Black and White and Blue: Adult Cinema from the Victorian Age to VCR (Toronto: ECW Press, 2007), 18. 35 Ibid., 19. 33

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which only made it even more sought-after.36 All in all, Edison and his coworkers seemed to follow a typically exploitive principle of filmmaking: the more sex and violence, the better. To quote Charles Musser: Sex and violence figured prominently in American motion pictures from the outset. In fact, such subjects were consistent with the individualized, peephole nature of the viewing experience: they showed amusements that often offended polite and/or religious Americans. COCK FIGHT was taken close up against a black background that made the roosters stand out. Terriers were filmed attacking rats. Petit and Kessler appeared in WRESTLING MATCH, while Madame Ruth did the hoochie-coochie for DANCE DE VENTRE. Women dancers often wore skimpy attire. Although many of these films appealed specifically to male voyeurism, they also attracted women with brief glimpses of the usually forbidden world of masculine amusement.37

As far as the history of the first projected films is concerned, it does not look much different. The first moving picture to be projected dates back to 1895, whereas the first erotic movie, La coucher de la mariée, was shot merely one year later by Eugène Pirou and Albert Kirchner.38 Although the first erotic films by Pirou might be considered a form of artistic expression, they inspired numerous European filmmakers to exploit the topic of nudity in order to make profits. Soon enough, while some of the early filmmakers, like Georges Méliès, were exploring the possibilities of the new artistic medium, others were looking for means to lure as many viewers as possible to their “cinemas” and earn as much money on the film as they could, usually by hiring actors and actresses (who were often prostitutes) for next to nothing and producing a ludicrous screenplay, the only aim of which was to show a lot of nakedness and sex scenes. Exploitation cinema has not changed much since the times of Edison and Pirou. Although it has branched out into dozens of subgenres, it still follows the same principle – the more sex and violence, the better. This does not mean, however, that exploitation is mindless and unworthy of analysis.

36 Many exploitation films thrive on their notoriety, like Cannibal Holocaust, whose director was arrested on suspicion of actually murdering his actors on screen. 37 Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 78. 38 Laurent Mannoni, “Kircher, Albert,” in Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 518.

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19

Exploitation had long existed outside the margins of scholarly discourse. Academics neglected this branch of cinema, preferring to focus on films they deemed important and esthetically significant. The reason was probably simple: film was a relatively new art domain and there was still a lot to be discovered, described, analyzed and categorized.39 Critics acted in a similar way: they ostracized exploitation, which they considered inferior, and drew the public’s attention to “quality cinema.” The reason was even simpler: this is the task of a critic. The advent of postmodernism brought about its main principle, relativism, which questioned the academic status quo. Advocates of relativism argued that all products of culture, be they high or low, are equally significant and worth analyzing. Only then has exploitation film entered the circle of interests of the academy and revealed its cultural importance. Existing outside the major studio system, exploitation filmmakers enjoyed a greater deal of freedom, so they could embark on themes the majors considered bad taste at a particular time: mostly sex and violence but also counterculture and antiestablishment. These themes, though segregated from mainstream cinema, still pertained to society or comprised an element of human nature. If it is understandable that a brutally raped woman seeks violent revenge on her persecutors, why not show it on film? Moreover, while the major studios tried to appeal to universal tastes of the audience, exploitation filmmakers targeted particular tastes of particular audiences, which was financially feasible because they operated within a small budget and needed fewer viewers to make a profit. As a result, they shot numerous pictures for people whose problems and tastes were neglected by mainstream cinema: dramas about discriminated working women, action films about freelance truckers fighting with dishonest trucking corporations, and so on. Every aspect of these subgenres, from the script and choice of actors to music and setting, was precisely tailored to cater to the needs of their respective audiences. Blaxploitation films, for example, were set in typically African American urban milieu (e.g. Harlem) or a Southern plantation, told a story of a black hero who would fight hostile and often white authority (plantation owners or organized crime like drug pushers, pimps, gangsters, corrupted policemen and politicians), and featured typical African American slang (like the word “honky”) and black music (soul and funk). 39

It is enough to say that as late as in 2008 Noël Carroll published a book entitled The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), which still focused on the most basic question in film theory: is film art or not?

20

Chapter One

Independence from the studio system also allowed exploitation filmmakers to employ their own esthetics, or rather anti-esthetics, to shock their viewers. Shocksploitation as well as splatter, rape-and-revenge and cannibal films vividly presented extreme violence unseen anywhere else in cinema, fueling the natural human fascination with the aberrant, morbid, anomalous and gruesome, and providing refuge from the orderly everyday life. The same principle concerned nudity in film. While the major studios, obliged by the Motion Picture Production Code, could not reveal too much female skin, parallel independent companies shot allegedly educational films about drug abuse or prostitution, which were dotted with nude scenes. It is obvious now that exploitation has always existed hand in hand with the mainstream cinema, feeding on everything the mainstream would reject. Nowadays, exploitation cinema is in decline, mainly due to the aforementioned distribution hindrances, but also because many themes previously reserved for exploitation have been incorporated into the mainstream: extreme and even sadistic violence is no longer a taboo subject, even some of the highest paid actresses do not shy away from getting undressed in front of the camera, and the major studios themselves excel at exploiting popular subjects, shooting remakes, prequels and sequels of the highest grossing pictures.

4. Exploitation filmmakers as auteurs? At the beginnings of the auteur theory, authorship was reserved for a particular brand of director: prolific, successful, popular with the audiences and recognized by the critics, well-established within the film business, and, if American, holding a strong position in their big studios. The names Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Welles or Aldrich would most often pop up as examples of Hollywood auteurs, which was understandable: the new theory needed clear-cut evidence to authenticate itself. Later on, critics and academics would argue whether this or that director is/was an auteur or not, but again they used to choose recognized, mainstream, popular figures like Curtiz.40 The most recent publications on directors-asauteurs also analyze critically-acclaimed and well-established filmmakers like Eastwood,41 or, surprisingly enough, evaluate the works of directors who were already recognized as auteurs by the previous generation of 40

See: Wollen, “The auteur theory: Michael Curtiz and Casablanca.” See: Paul Smith, Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production (London: UCL Press, 1993). 41

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21

scholars (Ford,42 Fellini43). Nevertheless, there exists a number of directors who would pose an interesting challenge to auteur theorists: blockbuster directors like Michael Bay, decidedly bad directors like Uwe Boll, or exploitation filmmakers like Corman. It is here that we arrive at the main question of this paper: can an exploitation director be an auteur? The answer that initially comes to mind is “no.” If exploitation films are schematic and audience-oriented, how can they reflect the personality of the director? Well, paradoxically, such a director can fulfil the three authorship criteria proposed by Wollen as well as (and sometimes even better than) a mainstream director. Criterion number one: work ethic. Exploitation directors enjoy far more freedom than mainstream ones because, beside directing, they often produce their own movies as well and, consequently, hold the entire decisive power in their hands. Even if it is not the case and there is an external producer, the budget of an exploitation picture is usually too small to allow for a numerous film crew, which forces the director to perform the functions normally reserved for other crewmembers, like casting and even scriptwriting or acting. There is often no second directing unit either, so that the entire direction is the responsibility of one person only. Independent directors, like Tinto Brass or Uwe Boll, who work outside the studio system, first conceive a film (and sometimes write the script themselves) and then look for the means to finance it. As the budget of such pictures is relatively low, it is easier for directors to convince the producers to their own vision and make them finance the film without too much interference in the creative process. All in all, exploitation directors exert considerable influence not only on the artistic side but also on preparation and production. Criterion number two: recurring themes. Bearing the afore-mentioned artistic freedom in mind, it is visible that the potential creativity of a director is not hampered too much by the influence of third parties. However, is self-expression through exploitation film at all possible? According to the auteur theory, it is as the “basic and recondite motifs,” which reflect director’s personality and provide evidence for authorship, transcend genres. The genre remains unimportant as long as it allows the director to express their thoughts, bear their personal expression and stamp their individuality and character. Criterion number three: style. Style is even more detached from film genre than thematic notions. A truly gifted director can shoot a beautiful 42

See: Brian Spittles, John Ford (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2002). See: John C. Stubbs, Federico Fellini As Auteur: Seven Aspects of His Films (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2006).

43

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Chapter One

movie regardless of the topic, just like a truly talented painter can paint virtually anything in a beautiful way. In both cases, the topic is secondary and it is the technique that matters. If, as Hoveyda claimed, “in the hands of a great director, even the most insignificant detective story can be transformed into a work of art,” then so can a biker story, cannibal story or nudist story. It is, therefore, possible for an exploitation director to be an auteur, at least in theory. In practice, it does not mean that such a director does indeed exist, or ever existed, since many renowned and recognized directors who shot exploitation films and could be considered auteurs (Coppola, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Demme) quickly moved to the major studios and earned their reputation making A-grade films.44 However, if “pure” exploitation-auteurs do exist, Roger Corman could be one of them. With 50 directed motion pictures (many of which he also produced or coproduced), 60 years’ work in the exploitation business, an Honorary Oscar for Lifetime Achievement and the title “B-movie king” awarded by the press, Roger Corman, if anyone, might be a true exploitation auteur.

44

Yet, numerous B-films from the major studios (such as Val Lewton’s RKO productions) as well as some motion pictures from the “poverty row” (Stranger on the Third Floor, Detour, The Hitch-Hiker) are critically acclaimed and considered classics. Though they are not strictly exploitation, their status suggests that some low-budget filmmakers might indeed be considered auteurs.

CHAPTER TWO CORMAN AND HIS PRODUCTION PROCESS

1. Introduction Roger Corman has by far one of the most interesting and impressive CVs in the filmmaking business, having directed over fifty films himself and produced around four hundred by other directors, and having tutored such great names of American cinematography as Scorsese, Coppola or Cameron. The following chapter aims at presenting a short biography of Corman which shall focus mostly on the years spent at American International Pictures, where he directed his own motion pictures. The second part of the chapter shall examine the production process his films underwent and trace his influence throughout.1

2. Corman’s filmmaking career Roger Corman was born April 5, 1926 in Detroit, and was meant to become an engineer like his father. However, when the Cormans moved to Beverly Hills, young Roger fell in love with cinema. He finished his science studies and got employed in Electrical Motors as an engineer, but his passion for motion pictures was so strong that he left the company after three days and applied for the messenger position at 20th Century Fox. Since he was hardworking, he steadily climbed up the corporate ladder until he got promoted to a story analyst. All this time, he was also trying to write and sell his first script, alas, to no avail. When his corporate career reached a stagnant point, he left the studio and moved to Europe. He spent

1

The information on Corman and his production process included in both sections of this chapter comes primarily from his autobiography How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, and two series of interviews: one collected by Constantine Nasr in Roger Corman Interviews and one collected by Beverly Gray in Roger Corman: Blood-sucking Vampires, Flesh-eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers.

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Chapter Two

a year on the old continent, where he studied literature at Oxford University and travelled around, eking out a living as a petty smuggler. When Corman returned to the States, he wrote and sold his first script, House by the Sea. The buyer, Allied Artists studio, made a number of changes and issued the film under the title Highway Dragnet (1954). Corman was so appalled at the difference between the original version and the final product that he decided to produce his films by himself in order to have full control over them. He cashed his fee for the script and, with a budget of $12,000, produced his first motion picture, The Monster from Ocean Floor (1954), which he later sold to a distribution company for $60,000 – a 500% profit. This was the first mark of Corman’s modus operandi as a producer: to shoot a film as cheaply as possible and to sell it to the distributor with a double, triple or quadruple profit. Corman invested the money he had earned into another production, The Fast and the Furious (1955). When the film was ready, he signed a distribution contract with Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson, the proprietors of American Releasing Company, later renamed American International Pictures. His relationship with ARC/AIP lasted fifteen years and was remarkable by any standards: from 1955 to 1970, Corman directed about 50 films, producing most of them himself, and he produced dozens of pictures by other directors. However, the beginnings at AIP were rather modest. For his first film, Five Guns West, Corman operated within a budget of a mere $60,000, and the budgets of his later productions oscillated around $60,000-80,000. They were genre films: westerns (Apache Woman, The Oklahoma Woman, The Gunslinger), horror-SF (Day the World Ended, It Conquered the World, Not of This Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, War of the Satellites, Teenage Caveman), crime dramas with scantily clad women (Swamp Women, She Gods of Shark Reef, Naked Paradise), fantasy films (The Undead, The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent) and teenage films (Teenage Doll, Rock All Night, Sorority Girl, Carnival Rock). Although they were low-quality, mostly black-and-white, with unknown actors, amateur stunts and cheap special effects, they were entertaining enough to bring Corman a hefty profit and keep him in the filmmaking business. By the end of 1958, Corman had directed twenty-one feature films (in 1957, he managed to set his personal record of eleven productions released in a single year), and one of his motion pictures – 1958’s Machine-Gun Kelly – showed the first signs of directorial talent. The year 1959 brought two more exploitation films (I, Mobster and The Wasp Woman) as well as the first black comedy, A Bucket of Blood, which was followed a year later

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by another black comedy – The Little Shop of Horrors – the first film by Corman which achieved a long-lasting commercial and critical success. By 1960, Corman decided to move to quality color productions because, having shot twenty-five low-budget films, he had grown tired of cheap exploitation, and he also realized the era of black-and-white films was drawing to an end. Therefore, when AIP commissioned him to shoot a double black-and-white feature, he persuaded them to combine the budgets planned for the two films and produce a single quality color film, House of Usher – an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. Though Nicholson and Arkoff were initially reluctant to gamble so much money on a single project, they finally gave it the green light. The film was released in 1960 and achieved an unprecedented critical and commercial success, grossing more profit than AIP had made before. The producers proposed that Corman should shoot another adaptation, and, when this one also achieved a similar success, yet another and another, eventually leading to an entire gothic horror series comprising ten films and spanning from 1960 to 1965. The series included: House of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Tower of London (1962), The Raven (1963), The Terror (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1965). It is now considered Corman’s magnum opus and, in 2005, its first installment was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. During that period, Corman also shot and released other films beside the gothic horror series. In 1960, they included Ski Troop Attack, The Last Woman on Earth, Creature from the Haunted Sea and Atlas; in 1961 – The Intruder, in 1962 – The Young Racers, in 1963 – X: The Man with the XRay Eyes and The Secret Invasion. They were mostly exploitive features, except Creature from the Haunted Sea – the third and last of Corman’s black comedies, X – a stylish sci-fi with production value on the level of House of Usher, and The Intruder – a serious drama about the issue of racial segregation in schools. The latter garnered rave critical reviews but flopped at the box office, becoming the first film by Corman to lose money. This incident made him rethink his filmmaking strategy: from that moment on, he would never include an overt social commentary but rather try to slip it in entertainment films. By 1965, he had grown tired of the gothic horror series as well and was looking for a topic that would allow him to direct on location instead in a studio. He decided to shoot a story about a motorcycle gang, The Hell’s Angels, which was in the papers at that time, and to depict the rebellious youth counterculture that was just being born. The Wild Angels were

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Chapter Two

released in 1966 and grossed even more money than House of Usher. Its content was shocking: the bikers constantly drink alcohol, take drugs and fornicate, and the film ends with a scene in which they desecrate a church during a funeral ceremony and rape the widow on the altar. Its violence and nihilistic tone resulted in negative reviews in America, but the film received some praise in Europe. It opened the Venice Film Festival, where it caused a scandal and protests from the American ambassador. This further fueled the public interest in the film, making it one of the most successful productions AIP had ever made and sparking an entire subgenre of biker films. The Wild Angels, beside the gothic horror series, also remain one of Corman’s best remembered motion pictures. After a brief cooperation with the 20th Century Fox, for which he shot a gangster feature entitled The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, his most expensive and technically elaborate film, Corman returned to directing counterculture films for AIP. In 1967 he released The Trip, a feature about the use of LSD; in 1970 – Bloody Mama, a nihilistic film about the depraved Barker family gang; and in 1971 – Gas-s-s!, a teenage counterculture film about a military gas which kills everyone above thirty years of age. These films grew increasingly leftist and anti-establishment, which attracted the attention of James Nicholson. Nicholson, known for his conservative outlook, altered the ending of The Trip in postproduction to make it more anti-drug, and completely recut Gas-s-s!, eliminating entire scenes and characters from the picture without the consent of the director. Corman, who had vowed not to tolerate intrusion in his films, was appalled and decided that Von Richthofen and Brown, a war film about World War I pilots that he was making at that time, would be his last motion picture done for AIP. Throughout his career at AIP, Corman kept refining his filmmaking technique and slowly increasing the budget of his productions. Consequently, his films got progressively better, and from the year 1960 onwards he was able to deliver a quality product on a relatively modest budget. When he left AIP, he decided to take a brief hiatus from directing and focus on producing. However, production and distribution engrossed him completely, and he sat on the director’s chair only once, in 1990, when Universal offered him more money than he had ever made on a single project in return for directing Frankenstein Unbound. Yet, when he ended his cooperation with AIP in 1970 and formed his own production-distribution company, New World Pictures, investing his personal savings, he had to start from the bottom again. His aim was to produce films of young talented directors and distribute them nationally and overseas, but he had only ten domestic offices and one overseas office

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at his disposal. Therefore, taking The Wild Angels and The Trip as models, he devised a film formula which his productions would have to follow – they were to be “contemporary dramas with a liberal to left-wing viewpoint and some R-rated sex and humor.”2 NWP’s first release followed that formula. The Student Nurses, directed by Stephanie Rothman, was a drama with feminist themes and some mild nudity. Though shot on a budget of $125,000, which looked meager when compared to the budget of $925,000 for Von Richthofen and Brown, it performed very well at the box office (over $1 million in rentals), sparking an entire cycle of films about young working women, and kick-starting the company. The next year brought another box office winner, The Big Doll House, which earned $3 million in rentals (but cost only $125,000) and sparked another popular cycle – women-in-prison films. Combining Corman’s entrepreneurial skills and the talents of young directors, NWP soon produced a dozen profitable films every year and distributed them in the entire country, and became the biggest independent production-distribution company. When Corman sold it in 1983, it was worth $16.5 million. As the head of NWP, Corman did two important things for American cinematography. First, he hired unknown young directors and allowed them to direct films, thus starting the careers of such renown filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Curtis Hanson and Ron Howard, but also of lesser known directors: Joe Dante, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, John Sayles, Jonathan Kaplan, Armondo Linus Acosta, Paul Bartel, Donald G. Jackson, George Armitage and Jack Hickenlooper. Corman can also be credited with launching or helping the careers of several famous actors, including Robert de Niro, Jack Nicholson, David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern, as well as producers (Gale Ann Hurd) and scriptwriters (Robert Towne). Second, as he did not want to be associated with exploitation only, he also distributed the works of great non-American directors such as Federico Fellini (Amarcord), Ingmar Bergman (Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata), François Truffaut (The Story of Adele H. and Small Change), Alain Resnais (Mon oncle d’Amérique), René Laloux (Fantastic Planet), Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum), Werner Herzog (Fitzcarraldo), Akira Kurosawa (Dersu Uzala) and a dozen more. On the American market, European art cinema used to be screened in small independent theatres frequented by art film aficionados, but Corman put it through his regular distribution chain – the drive-ins. Astoundingly 2

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 181.

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enough, he earned a hefty profit from the screenings of these films ($1.5 million in rentals for Cries and Whispers, $2 million for The Tin Drum), at the same time acquainting ordinary American movie-goers with highquality art cinema from Europe. When Corman sold New World Pictures to a group of investors, he set up two other distribution-production companies – Concorde and New Horizons – which he later merged into one enterprise. The company used video cassettes as its distribution tool and focused on straight-to-video releases in the 1980s and 1990s, but the decline of the VCR market made it switch to cable TV productions. As the head of Concorde-New Horizons, Corman is professionally active up to this day and, although he does not work as much as he used to, he still produces 3-4 films a year. With the increasing interest in camp and cult cinema, his works are being revisited for artistic merit and entertainment value, and he makes frequent appearances in documentary films3 as well as at festivals and galas where he collects life achievement awards like the Honorary Oscar in 2009 for his contribution to American cinematography.

3. Corman’s production process Auteur theorists realized the artistic limitations a director was restricted to within the studio system – little control over the choice of the script, the crewmembers to work with, the casting. They claimed that a director could be deemed an auteur despite these confines provided he or she expressed his/her personality through the mise-en-scène. However, they also asserted that the more control a director had over the production process, the better for his/her artistic self-expression and, consequently, for his/her potential authorship. Obviously, they favored the personal films over the ones that resembled studio products. Eric Rohmer, for instance, held Mr Arkadin – which he considered Welles’s personal effort – in higher esteem than Citizen Kane, which he deemed to be a studio film.4 Even Jack Stillinger, who is very critical of the concept of the director as a sole creative force, admits that film authorship is invariably linked with control over the production process. He points out that the directors whose authorship is widely accepted were either writer-directors or producer-directors, or held an important position in their studios, which allowed them to exercise 3

See, for example Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies, directed by Ray Green (2001; Venice, CA: Pathfinder Home Ent, 2003), DVD. 4 For more, see: Eric Rohmer, “A Twentieth Century Tale: Orson Welles’s Mr Arkadin,” in Eric Rohmer, The Taste for Beauty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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considerable control over the choice of topic, scriptwriting, casting, editing, set design, etc.5 Peter Wollen, whose approach to auteur theory serves as the framework for this study, also seconds that opinion.6 Simply put, the more control a director had over the production process, the easier it was for him/her to realize his/her artistic vision, and the higher the chances that he/she can be considered an auteur. The following subchapter traces Corman’s influence over the production process in a chronological order – that is starting from conceiving the film’s basic concept, the scriptwriting, the casting, the control on the set, and so on – to prove that he had outstanding, almost total control over the entire filmmaking process.

3.1. Choosing and financing a film idea After Corman produced The Fast and the Furious in 1954, his second film after The Monster from the Ocean Floor, he signed a contract with AIP (then known as ARC) for the distribution of this film and two others. The contract was a breakthrough for Corman for two reasons: first, it allowed him to gain a serious foothold in the filmmaking business; and second, it involved financial backing from the sub-distributors (usually theatre chain owners) for his prospective projects. Whenever Corman completed a film, the sub-distributors would advance some money – between $5000 and $15000, depending on the size of their territory – to receive the finished picture for distribution. This money would allow him to launch another project and work continuously without waiting for the film to bring box office profits. Therefore such an agreement provided him with financial security and – as a consequence – with artistic independence. The atmosphere at AIP was that of camaraderie and partnership. Nicholson and Arkoff were in charge of the distribution and promotion while Corman focused on direction, enjoying almost complete artistic and organizational control over his projects. AIP had different types of contracts with Corman: sometimes he would both produce and direct and they would only distribute and return the costs, sometimes they would produce and he would direct, and occasionally they would propose him a title or present him with a ready poster and he would create a story and direct it. But the choice of the film idea was always up to Corman. If he felt he artistically repeated himself, he would reject the project, and AIP 5

See: Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 6 Wollen, “Michael Curtiz and Casablanca,” 70.

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would have to hire a different director – as it happened with later Poe adaptations and sequels to The Wild Angels. Moreover, the films that achieved the greatest commercial and/or critical success – House of Usher and the subsequent gothic horror series, The Intruder, The Wild Angels – were conceived entirely by Corman. In fact, in all these cases he had to persuade Nicholson and Arkoff to accept his ideas, intuitively sensing the success behind these motion pictures. The cooperation with major studios was not that fruitful. When Corman signed a contract with Columbia, he hoped he would “graduate to more important pictures.”7 However, Columbia rejected his two ideas – a film adaptation of the BBC teleplay Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the adaptation of Kafka’s Penal Colony, proposing a war epic about the battle of Iwo Jima instead. The project has never been shot, as the studio’s vision of the film differed substantially from that of Corman, who refused to comply.8 Finally, both parties agreed to coproduce the western A Time for Killing; yet again the artistic differences between Corman and the executives were substantial, which resulted in the former quitting after the film was finished. Corman would never tolerate intrusion in his films on the part of the producers. When Nicholson altered The Trip and Gas-s-s!, entirely changing the message of both films, Corman ended the cooperation with AIP as well, and set up his own production company, where no-one would change the vision he had for his motion pictures. Being a very costeffective producer, neither would he tolerate wasting money. When he was directing St. Valentine’s Day Massacre for Twentieth Century Fox, the financial prodigality related to the project sickened him. Even though St. Valentine’s Day Massacre brought a hefty profit, received enthusiastic reviews, looked much more substantial than any other film Corman had made before and could entail a transition to more serious, big-budget filmmaking, he left Fox and returned to cheaper productions in which he held total control over artistic and financial matters. One could argue that, craving artistic and financial independence, Corman was destined to establish his own production company sooner or later and to work for himself.

7

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood, 123. The Battle of Iwo Jima was later brought on screen in two films by Clint Eastwood: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (both 2006).

8

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3.2. Scriptwriting Once Corman chose a film idea, he would contact a scriptwriter – usually one of his regular collaborators like Charles B. Griffith, Leo Gordon or R. Wright Campbell – and arrange a meeting at which he would lay out the basic concept and his vision of the film. Then he would leave the scriptwriter alone and let him do his job: “I gave great freedom to writers, since I myself do not like when people tell me what to do when I’m filming.”9 After the scriptwriter finished, Corman would introduce his own corrections and the script would go through the second, the third, the fourth draft, sometimes through major rewritings if necessary, until it was consistent with the director’s vision of the film. Only professional fiction writers like Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson were able to deliver a first draft which was good enough in Corman’s opinion that it required little changing. Despite the above, Corman could only be credited with cowriting the scripts to A Bucket of Blood and The Little Shop of Horrors. Both stories were conceived when he and Griffith went bar-hopping in Hollywood and brainstorming ideas. By morning, the film plots were almost ready and a considerable number of the jokes and gags were invented by Corman himself. The script would undergo further changes on the set, for Corman was never too devoted to it. He would come up with new ideas, he would take advantage of unforeseen occurrences,10 or he would allow his coworkers to give their suggestions and his actors to improvise. In short, he would accept anything he thought worked in favor of the story, and incorporate it as he directed. As a result, the finished film was based in 80-90% on the script while the rest was improvisation and the work on the set.

3.3. Casting At the beginning of his directorial career, Corman quickly formed a group of actors whom he would regularly cast in his early pictures – Dick Miller, Jonathan Haze, Susan Cabot, Barboura Morris. They were not all 9

Roger Corman in Constantine Nasr, ed. Roger Corman Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 7. 10 For instance, when Corman was filming House of Usher, there was a forest fire in Hollywood Hills. Corman took a skeleton crew to the premises and filmed an unscripted sequence of Winthrop riding a horse through the dead forest – the trees were all blackened and charred, the horse’s hooves stirred clouds of ash. The scene proved to be a great opening for the film (Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood, 81).

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professional actors – Miller, for example, was a scriptwriter – but that did not bother Corman as long as he could hire them for a relatively small fee and as long as they would deliver performances solid enough to please him. Some of his early actors moved to higher quality productions (Mike Connors, for instance, enjoyed a television career as the title private detective in Mannix), but some, like Morris and Miller, would continue working for Corman, playing small roles even in the films produced by major studios. There were virtually no casting procedures. This is how Miller recounts his job application: “What do you do?” “I’m a writer. Need any scripts?” “No, I’ve got scripts. I need actors.” “Fine, I’m an actor.” That’s exactly how it went. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll put you in a picture and you’ll play an Indian in Apache Woman.”11

It is clear that once an actor proved himself, Corman would hire him for his further motion pictures. When Bruce Dern delivered a solid performance as Loser in The Wild Angels, he was also given supporting roles in The Trip, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and Bloody Mama. This allowed many actors to continue appearing on screen, build a reputation and start a career. Jack Nicholson, for instance, was hired mostly by Corman in his early acting days, starring in such Cormandirected or Corman-produced films as: The Cry Baby Killer, The Little Shop of Horrors, The Raven, The Terror, The Shooting, Ride in the Whirlwind, Hell’s Angels on Wheels and The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Whenever Corman needed extras, he did not shy away from reusing actors in his motion pictures (in Teenage Caveman Beach Dickerson played three death scenes and attended his own funeral), casting his own producer (Arkoff played a small role in She Gods of Shark Reef) or his own scriptwriter (Griffith played a small role in The Little Shop of Horrors), employing an actor’s family members, or playing a role himself. His attitude towards casting changed around the year 1960, when he decided to make quality pictures on a budget. Though he would still cast his regulars in supporting roles, he started hiring renowned, talented actors for the leads, wanting to secure strong performances for the films’ protagonists. The actor whom he chose for the lead in his first quality color picture, House of Usher, was Vincent Price. Nicholson and Arkoff accepted this decision with reluctance: the film cost $270,000 – more 11

Dick Miller in Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood, 30.

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money than AIP had ever gambled on a single project – and most of that sum was Price’s salary. The choice, however, was perfect. Price added a distinctive sense of macabre and fiendish intelligence to his character, creating a memorable performance and helping the film earn $1,000,000 in rentals. From that moment on, Corman would almost exclusively cast renown actors in lead roles: Price, Basil Rathbone, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Shelley Winters, Jason Robards, Ray Milland – usually with a great effect on the story. He would also continue casting aspiring young actors, partially because he had an eye for talent but most importantly because he could pay them a relatively low fee. He discovered several talented actors – Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Robert de Niro – and helped them jumpstart their careers, but on the other hand some of his actors like Clint Kimbrough (one of the Barker brothers in Bloody Mama) or Robert Corff (the lead in Gas-s-s!) never rose above the level of exploitation films. Another change which came around the year 1960 was that Corman attended Jeff Corey’s school of acting as a student actor. Studying Method acting allowed him to better understand the work of his actors and, consequently, make deeper, more subtle films. It also harmonized with Corman’s fascination with Freud. Combining Method with psychoanalysis, he could develop multidimensional film characters with complex motivation and difficult relations with their surroundings. Corman began to have a vision of every important character in his films and, as a result, he started discussing the roles with his actors in detail not only to obtain a good performance of the scripted role but also to make them deliver particular sub-text messages. For this reason, characters like Nicholas Medina, Blues or Ma Baker seem so lifelike and more complicated than the script would suggest.

3.4. Direction Before he started directing, Corman would rehearse a little with his actors. The amount of rehearsal depended on the schedule of the film – the shorter the schedule, the longer the rehearsal. In the case of The Little Shop of Horrors, the film with the shortest schedule, he rehearsed a great deal before shooting could begin. This way he could film quickly without retakes, and fit in the timetable. Normally, however, he would rehearse only several scenes to obtain a desirable level of performance from his actors, which allowed him to come to the studio and start shooting right away.

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Despite short schedules and occasional delays, he would never rush his actors when they were in front of the camera. Being a Method student himself, he understood the way actors work and cooperated with them accordingly. He was decisive and confident of his vision, but he collaborated with his cast much like with his scriptwriters – he would explain his ideas and then step back to let the actors do their job without being interrupted. Corman believed both in preparation and in spontaneity. Before he started directing, he would present his vision of the characters to his actors and rehearse with them to some degree, he would scout all the shooting locations and decide exactly where to shoot, and he would design from 50% to 70% of his shots. Preparing so much in advance, he would often shoot the footage uninterrupted and within a tight schedule, saving on the costs of hiring a crew and renting a studio: “I believe the only way to make a film efficiently on a low budget is with a tremendous amount of preparation […]. That is one of the greatest advantages to shooting well on a low-budget film, knowing exactly what you’re going to do in advance.”12 On the other hand, he was ready to resign from the prepared material – even if it meant several weeks of work going to waste – if he had a better idea or if his previously prepared concepts would not work. Unlike Hitchcock, for instance, who planned every shot in advance before he came on the set, Corman remained flexible and adaptable to change. In fact, with films like The Intruder or The Wild Angels, which were shot in hostile territory, often without any permit, and with unprofessional actors, he had little choice. Directing The Wild Angels, for example, he had to systematically rewrite the script due to unforeseen circumstances, and the finished product differed significantly from the original script. He would also allow his actors to improvise, suggest their own ideas or get carried away by the role they were playing. Peter Lorre, who starred in The Raven and “The Black Cat” segment of Corman’s Tales of Terror was the most creative. He would come to the set knowing his role only roughly and improvise a great deal of his scenes, which Corman would gladly accept as they added a further comedic touch to the script. In The Wild Angels, many of the church party scenes – for instance putting the preacher into the coffin – were unscripted. The Angels simply got carried away by the scene they were staging, and Corman included it in the film as he would include anything he thought worked in favor of the story. Finally, Corman would rarely do retakes. Unless the scene was spoilt by, for instance, the boom mike dipping into the frame, he would 12

Corman in Nasr, Roger Corman Interviews, 51.

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immediately move to the next shot. In one of the interviews, he complained he had never got perfect performances from his actors,13 but the fact is he had rarely tried. Once he got a solid performance – and actors like Price, Karloff, Robards, Rathbone, Winters, Milland, Lorre or Fonda would deliver a solid performance in the first take – he would promptly shoot the next scene, unlike, for instance, Kubrick, who was notorious for retaking each scene until he got the exact performance he wanted. The reason behind Corman’s actions was obviously financial – more takes meant longer schedules and thus higher costs of renting the studio and hiring the crew and the actors. Moreover, Corman hated falling behind schedule, which was usually set for three weeks – just enough to shoot the entire film. When he felt he was falling behind, he would tear pages out from the script and rework the remaining story to catch up. Shelley Winters recounts that after the shooting finished, the actors from Bloody Mama begged Corman for three more days to polish the film, but he refused.14 So strong was his unwillingness to go over schedule that he was ready to sacrifice part of the film’s artistic value. Corman’s definition of a solid film would make serious critics tear their hair out. He believed a solid film should have a good first reel, so that the audience understands what the film is about, and a good last reel, so that the audience knows how the film ended. The middle is relatively unimportant. Working according to his theory, Corman would often shoot the beginning and the ending first, and only after that would he proceed to the middle scenes. This gave him the possibility to tear pages out of the script and rework the middle if he was falling behind schedule. Years after this theory was formed, Martin Scorsese admitted that it was probably “the best sense [he has] ever heard in the movies.”15 In most cases though, Corman would manage to shoot the entire script or at least rewrite the middle part of the story in such a way that any alterations were invisible and the entire film was coherent. The only film which visibly follows this theory is The Creature from the Haunted Sea – a comedy which, despite the absurd and slightly incomprehensible middle, remains a very entertaining motion picture. The readiness to accept unscripted material and the unwillingness to do retakes gave his films spontaneity as well as unpolished and improvised acting, thus imbuing his productions with realism. This realism, much like the sense of involvement created by his camerawork, was quite effective in his socially conscious films. It made them similar to cinéma vérité, 13

Corman in ibid., 37. Shelley Winters in Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 162. 15 Martin Scorsese in Nasr, Roger Corman Interviews, vii. 14

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creating an impression that the story presented on screen had really happened16 and thus helping the social message of the film reverberate to a greater extent.

3.5. Post-production Once all the footage was shot, Corman would immediately start working in the editing studio with the editor. Excluding big-budgeted productions like The St. Valentine’s Massacre, in which multiple cameras were used, the editing process would be relatively short and – because Corman rarely did retakes – limited mostly to cropping and rearranging the existing scenes. When the footage was put together and edited, Corman would work toward the final print. He would show the edit to the composer and discuss what music he wanted. Occasionally, as it was in the case of The Wild Angels and Bloody Mama, he would hire professional musicians to write and record a title song. He would then take the edit to a graphic designer and discuss the title sequences. Corman was in control over the entire production process, he would personally supervise everything right until the moment when the final print was ready. Then he would leave it in the hands of his distribution partners and begin preparing another film. However, the final cut approval was never in his contract with AIP but rather worked as a gentlemen’s agreement: Corman would leave the finished print, and Nicholson and Arkoff would put it to distribution. Yet, the two producer-distributors would sometimes take the liberty of altering the film without asking for Corman’s consent. It began with Prehistoric World, the title of which was changed into Teenage Caveman to lure teenage audiences and to capitalize on the success of AIP’s own series of teenager-oriented films: I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). When Teenage Caveman was released, Corman intervened at AIP, and the title was changed back to Prehistoric World, allowing AIP to re-release the same film under a different title and market it as an entirely new product. A serious change was introduced in The Trip. When Corman submitted the final print and flew to Europe to shoot another motion picture, the producers at AIP – fearing the treatment of the topic might be too liberal – added an anti-drug crawl text at the beginning, and froze the final frame of the film and projected a crack image on it, utterly changing 16 The stories presented in Corman’s socially conscious films such as The Intruder, The Wild Angels and The Trip were all based on true stories to a varying degree.

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the significance of the film from open-ended to anti-drug. Corman and his cast protested, but the film was not re-released in its original cut. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Gas-s-s-s!, the film AIP completely re-edited without the director’s consent (again, they waited until he left the country), cutting out entire sections and removing voice-over narration. Corman was furious. He left AIP to form his own production-distribution company – New World Pictures – and secure complete artistic independence for the films he would direct in the future. However, having new duties and responsibilities as the company’s president, he never returned to directing motion pictures on a full scale.

4. Conclusion Being a producer-director, Corman exercised almost total control over his projects from the choice of topic to the final edit. He would execute his own ideas or the ideas of others that appealed to him, and, in the later stage of his career, he would reject the concepts he considered artistically void, unfeasible or repetitive. He showed great determination to execute the projects he believed in, even if it meant mortgaging his own house to finance it. Working for Columbia in 1965-1966, a major studio where the director’s creativity is stifled by the producers, he strove to retain his artistic independence and never yielded to the pressure from the producers, even if it meant constant arguments and a year of artistic idleness. If he was not allowed to accomplish his vision of a film, he would simply terminate the contract and look for a studio which would respect his independence. He would never tolerate intrusion in his motion pictures. When AIP – the only studio that had provided him with creative autonomy – started altering his films without his consent, he preferred to quit directing and form his own production-distribution company rather than succumb to the changes and renounce his artistic independence. Having so much freedom, Corman could actually do whatever he wanted. He chose the cast and crew himself, with which he would closely cooperate on the film. He had his own vision of every film and he shared it with his collaborators; however, he was not authoritative and accepted any suggestion that in his mind benefited the project. He also provided other artists working on the film – the scriptwriter, the actors, the set designer, etc. – with considerable artistic independence within the limits of his vision. Nevertheless, the final decision was always in his hands. Wheeler Winston Dixon accurately summarized Corman’s directorial career in Senses of Cinema:

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Chapter Two Along with John Cassavetes, Roger Corman was one of the first American independent filmmakers to create work entirely on his own terms and turf. Much like producer Val Lewton in the 1940s at RKO, […] Corman, once the film’s title and the subject matter had been approved, answered to no one but himself, with guaranteed distribution for the finished product, and immediate financing for his next project.17

When discussing authorship, auteur theorists and critics argue whether this or that film of a director is an emanation of his/her artistic excellence or merely a skillfully directed studio product, if it expresses the director or the executives, whether the director worked against the system or embraced it, if his/her films stand out from the studio output or not. In the case of Corman, however, such dilemmas are non-existent. He was entirely independent, completely exempt from external control of his executives, and the films he directed – be they artistically valuable or “schlocky” and unworthy of critical attention – are fully his own work. There exists, however, a different problem. Though Corman never answered to any studio or producer, he did conform to the standards of exploitation. In fact, he would often set these standards above his artistic fulfilment. The unwillingness to do retakes, refusal to exceed the budget in order to improve the film, hasty script modifications done to fit it in the schedule – all of this must have impaired the artistic quality of his output and, as a consequence, jeopardize his possible authorship. In the case of a studio director, auteur theorists try to determine whether s/he is able to express his/her artistic vision despite the studio requirements. In the case of Corman, however, it should be determined whether he was able to express himself despite the standards of exploitation.

17

Wheeler Winston Dixon, “Roger Corman,” Senses of Cinema 38, February 2006. Accessed November 1, 2013. http://sensesofcinema.com/2006/greatdirectors/corman/

CHAPTER THREE EXPLOITATION AND ITS DIFFERENT FACES

It can be said that having no experience in filmmaking and operating within meager budgets Corma had little choice but to shoot exploitation films from the start if he wanted to make any profit. He was an unknown director who could not afford film stars or impressive special effects. He had nothing to lure the audiences into the cinemas except the topic of the film. Therefore, he chose the topics that interested or concerned the American audience, shot films as quickly and cheaply as he could, and put them into distribution when the topic was still in the headlines. Normally, this would be difficult to achieve as it takes filmmakers considerable time to comment upon contemporary events. This delay is understandable as filmmaking is comprised of numerous processes, each of which is time-consuming. If a director decides to refer to a present-day event, they have to write a script first, or hire a scriptwriter to do it for them. When the script is ready, it goes to the producer, who often introduces their own corrections. The text undergoes a second and a third reading, sometimes more, especially in major film studios. When the script is finally ready, the casting can begin. After the filmmakers choose appropriate actors, they give them time to prepare for their roles. Finally, shooting can commence, followed by editing and other post-production activities. In short, making a moving picture takes a lot of time, and the world goes on. Therefore, when the film is finally screened, the events it comments on are often already history. Such was the case, for instance, with 20th Century Fox’s Vanishing Point, which was supposed to catch the spirit of the 1960s’ cultural revolution, but was released in 1971, when the revolution was almost over. However, using simple methods, Corman was able to minimize this delay. Firstly, he often produced the films himself, so there was no other producer he would answer to when it came to scripting matters. If he did have an external producer, he always secured complete artistic freedom for himself. At any time during his directing career, he worked with his regular actors, whom he knew very well, so he felt no need for any casting procedures. He seldom bothered with building sets for his pictures – he

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preferred using existing sets from other films. If he did build a set, he shot two films on it in order to cut time and costs. The same principle applied to filming on distant locations: two films for the price (and time) of one trip. All these simple devices allowed Corman to shoot and issue his films almost instantly when compared to major studio productions, which resulted in his socially concerned movies appearing in cinemas still “on time.” By the mid-1960s, Corman had made a name for himself and had become a respectable director. His films had earned considerable profits and he had been recognized by film critics both in the USA and in Europe. He could leave exploitation and move on to quality films, but he did not. As mentioned above, his reasons were, paradoxically, artistic – the major studios he wanted to work for tried to impose their decisions on him, limiting his creativity. He reached no consensus with Columbia and left without directing a single motion picture, after which he shot only one film for 20th Century Fox and left as well. He returned to exploitation films where he could create films on his own terms and realize his own artistic vision. The following chapter presents those films by Corman which exploited social and political topics, as well as the events that led to their creation. Because the link between the events and the films’ subject matter is of vital importance here, the chapter shall also delve into the social history of America in detail, and it shall also summarize the plots of the films in question. The author realizes that such an approach will make this chapter very descriptive and voluminous, and partly unbalance the study, but there exists no other method to treat this issue. It is necessary to investigate the plot of these films in their social context because they constitute almost a half of Corman’s entire filmography: out of fifty films he directed, twenty are inspired by their contemporary sociopolitical context. Film plots should be summarized for yet another reason: the exploitive works of Corman are relatively unknown and many of the prints are very difficult to obtain on the market. Therefore, summarizing the plots can acquaint the reader with Corman’s unavailable filmography. The following chapter shall also show that Corman treated popular topics in three different ways, and that there is a certain gradation in the depth of their treatment. First, he used fads as exploitable gimmicks that would lure the audiences into the cinemas. Second, he shot exploitation films falling into established or emerging genres. Third, he created motion pictures which were seemingly exploitive but, in fact, treated their topics in a deep and insightful manner. The conclusion to this chapter shall try to

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determine whether Corman was able to realize a personal vision through his exploitation films.

1. Fads as exploitable topics Like many other exploitation filmmakers, Corman was looking for popular topics to capitalize on, and he found some of them among the fads which were popular in America in the 1950s: rock and roll, reincarnation, and royal jelly cosmetics.

1.1. Rock and roll There existed numerous teen genres in the 1950s, including the rock and roll picture. At the beginning of the decade, rock ‘n’ roll remained an underground style of music. The charts for white listeners where occupied by soothing, romantic, mood music performed by Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Percy Faith or George Cates. Even as late as in 1955, the top five pop chart included “Unchained Melody,” “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” “Cherry Pink and Apple-Blossom White,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Melody of Love.”1 And then the song “Rock Around The Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets appeared on the Billboard chart. It was radically different from its contemporary pop songs. It was fast, ferocious, with a high-pitched guitar solo. It became a best-selling single, stayed on the Billboard chart for twenty-nine weeks, elevated Bill Haley to international stardom and, most importantly, commenced the rock ‘n’ roll era as American teenagers wholeheartedly embraced the new music style.2 Interestingly, “Rock Around The Clock” was actually recorded a year before and met with relatively little response. It did not become popular until the following year, when it was used for the opening credits of – quite surprisingly – a juvenile delinquency film, Blackboard Jungle, which is about an English teacher who tries to reach his difficult students, interest them in learning and eradicate their inclination to violence. Ironically enough, the picture itself would inspire fights as teenagers flocked into cinemas, danced in the aisles and stirred up brawls.3

1

Glenn C. Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock ’n’ Roll Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10-11. 2 Lev, The Fifties, 246. 3 Todd Leopold, “The 50-year-old song that started it all,” CNN.com, July 8, 2005, accessed October 3, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Music/07/07/haley.rock/

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After the success of Blackboard Jungle, “Rock Around The Clock” was played everywhere. The song was so popular that Sam Katzman, Corman’s B movie competitor, produced a film by the same title, starring, among other rock artists, Bill Haley and His Comets. Unsurprisingly, Rock Around The Clock (1956), the first rock ‘n’ roll film in the history of cinema, became a box office hit and was immediately followed by another picture with Haley and other rock stars – Don’t Knock The Rock (1956). The following year, Corman, always keeping a watchful eye on the teenage market, decided to capitalize on the new craze himself: “the song ‘Rock Around The Clock’ had been quite a hit, so I came up with a similar title: Rock All Night.”4 To lure a larger teen audience, he employed the popular music group The Platters, as well as other, less known artists from the same recording studio: Nora Hayes and a rock group called The Blockbusters, to perform on screen. The Platters, who also starred in Rock Around The Clock, were a widely popular band at that time, having released their #1 chart hit “The Great Pretender” in 1956. In a typically exploitive manner, the film was advertised “see and hear The Platters and the Blockbusters,” and the poster depicted a mixed crowd of teenagers dancing to rock ‘n’ roll. However, apart from the onscreen performance by the bands, the film has little to do with this musical genre. It tells a story of two criminals who seek shelter in a bar with live music and hold the customers hostage. After the commercial success of Rock All Night, Corman shot another picture with rock ‘n’ roll performers – Carnival Rock. Again he invited The Platters, as well as David Houston, Bob Luman and His Shadows and The Blockbusters, to perform on screen. As in the case of Rock All Night, the film itself has little in common with rock music apart from the performances of the artists and the title, but it exploited the music in its promotional campaign. The poster again depicts dancing teenagers and encourages the viewers to “rock ‘n’ roll to” the bands featured in the film. Other than the promotion, the title and the music acts on screen, the picture bears no relation with the teen film genre and should rather be classified under the women’s film genre.

1.2. Reincarnation In 1952, a Colorado businessman and hypnotist, Morey Bernstein, hypnotized a local housewife by the name of Virginia Tighe to make her talk about her past lives. In a trance, Mrs. Tighe revealed in a strong Irish 4

Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 68.

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accent that she used to be an Irish peasant girl in Cork, Ireland, in one of her past 19th century incarnations, and that her name used to be Bridey Murphy. Mrs. Tighe provided a detailed description of her house in Cork, her family history, her daily errands as well as traditional Irish customs – information very unlikely to be possessed by a simple housewife.5 Tighe’s account was serialized in Denver’s Post Sunday supplement in 1954 under the title “The Strange Search for Bridey Murphy,” and received a very warm response from the readers, which, in turn, persuaded Bernstein to write a book by the same title.6 The Strange Search for Bridey Murphy was published in 1956 and turned out to be a major success, sparking a new craze for reincarnation, past lives, hypnosis and hypnotic regression. The book sold over 170,000 hardcover copies alone,7 topping the country’s bestseller list for weeks. Tens of thousands of recordings with one of Tighe’s hypnosis sessions were sold as well. A film adaptation, The Search for Bridey Murphy, was shot and released the same year. Songs like “Do you believe in reincarnation?”, “The Love of Bridey Murphy” or “Bridey Murphy Rock and Roll” were recorded on the subject. “Come as you were” parties were thrown, for which guests were supposed to dress as their past incarnations. Amateur hypnotists, who previously had had little work, suddenly realized people were queuing to their parlors. In Shawnee, Oklahoma, a teenager shot himself, leaving a note that he had been intrigued by the story of Bridey Murphy and wanted to check it in person.8 Demand on anything connected with hypnosis, hypnotic regression and reincarnation was high. Corman was, of course, more than eager to supply this demand and released a reincarnation film, The Undead, in 1957. Other films by his competitors would soon follow, notably The Aztec Mummy and Hold That Hypnotist released the same year, but it was Corman’s picture which reached the theatres as the first reincarnation film after The Search for Bridey Murphy. The Undead tells a story of Diana Love (Pamela Duncan), a prostitute who is paid by two scientists to undergo a session of hypnotic regression. She moves back in time to the Middle Ages where she is forced to fight for her freedom and love. The topic of hypnotic regression serves only as a 5

Emily D. Edwards, Metaphysical Media: The Occult Experience in Popular Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2005), 174. 6 Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1957), 315. 7 Brant Wenegrat, Theater of Disorder: Patients, Doctors, and the Construction of Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 67. 8 Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, 315-316.

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pretext to tell a story about female strength and empowerment, therefore, the film’s plot shall be analyzed in Chapter 4.

1.3. Royal jelly cosmetics In the early 1950s, cosmetic companies in Europe began adding royal jelly extracted from nurse bees to their cosmetic products. At that time, royal jelly was believed to have rejuvenating properties. European scientific studies suggested it prevented wrinkles, rejuvenated skin, cured acne and helped male pattern baldness9 (under detailed scrutiny, this research was later proven sham). Cosmetic companies advertised their royal jelly products accordingly, further contributing to the popularity of this substance. Soon enough, the royal jelly vogue reached the United States, and American cosmetic manufacturers, such as Alexandra de Markoff, Marie Earle, Du Barry or Germain Monteil, embraced the trend wholeheartedly, launching entire series of “royal” products.10 Du Barry’s offer, for instance, included “Royal Velvet” make-up, “Royal Nectar” lotion, “Royal Lipstick,” “Royal Treatment Cream” and “Royal Balm” hand lotion. The fact that these cosmetics contained royal jelly was, obviously, the most important advertising asset, highlighting the words “royal,” “jelly,” “queen” and “bee” in every commercial. Du Barry marketed one of their products as “Royal Lipstick with Royal Jelly of the Queen Bee […] in 8 fit-for-a-queen colors,” whereas Germain Monteil stated that “Bee is for beauty… so is Super-Royal Cream” and that their Super-Royal Make-up “is designed to bring your skin the benefits of Royal Jelly.” The popularity of royal jelly cosmetics encouraged Corman to exploit the topic in The Wasp Woman (1959). The heroine of the picture, Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot), is an aging CEO of a cosmetics company. The aging process affects her twofold: personally – because she is a single woman who is losing her once great beauty; and professionally – because she has always been the face of her company’s advertising campaign and now the first signs of aging on her look entail a drop in the sales of the cosmetics her company manufactures. Poor sales figures lead to a meeting of the management board, during which Starlin is informed (by a male member of the board!) that it is her fading youth which is responsible for the decrease in revenues. Starlin, deeply touched and embarrassed, 9

Maison G. De Navarre, The chemistry and manufacture of cosmetics, 2nd. ed., Vol II (Orlando, FL: Continental Press, 1962), 163. 10 James Bennett, “Royal Jelly,” Cosmetics and skin (2012), accessed October 31, 2012. http://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/bcb/royal-jelly.php

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dismisses the meeting, but the two aspects of her aging, the personal and the professional one, are now interlocked in a vicious circle of mutual feedback. To escape her torment, she enlists the help of Dr. Zinthrop (Michael Mark), who creates a concoction from wasp royal jelly which reverses the process of aging but also turns Starlin into a man-hunting wasp-monster. The film includes strong feminist overtones and its plot shall be analyzed in Chapter 4.

1.4. Summary It is clear that Corman did not explore the above topics thoroughly – possibly because there was little to explore in the case of reincarnation and royal jelly cosmetics anyway – but rather used them as exploitable gimmicks to lure the audiences into the cinemas. Thus, at first glance these motion pictures seem to be pure exploitation – a popular topic is chosen and extensively advertised to attract the viewers and bring profits, but its treatment is superficial or even minimal. On a deeper level, however, these topics seem to be primarily pretexts for stories about female empowerment and outcast protagonists and, as such, they shall be further analyzed in Chapter 4.

2. Exploitation and genre Taking up topics popular in the 1950s, such as juvenile delinquency or the fear of nuclear destruction, Corman shot films which pertained to genres prevalent among other low-budget filmmakers as well – science fiction, teen and gangster films. These productions constituted typical exploitation output – cheap, hasty, black and white, and aimed at shocking or evoking wonder in the viewer.

2.1. Science-fiction films Of all the fifty films Corman directed, as many as ten pertain to the science-fiction genre or openly employ sci-fi motifs. This overrepresentation stems from the enormous popularity that sci-fi enjoyed in the 1950s and early 1960s, but also from the fact that Corman displayed an inclination to observe the reality around him, and the science-fiction genre was a particularly potent vessel in which he could convey his observations. Sci-fi excels at commenting on the here and now because, paradoxically, it usually deals with the future, distant or near. No-one knows what is going to happen in an hour, let alone in a few years’ time, but we can

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hypothesize about it, basing our predictions on the present, and that is generally what science-fiction does. Thereby, a writer who fantasizes about the future actually portrays their contemporary reality. For example, eighteenth century French futurologists prognosticated that, taking into account the development of carriage communication, in the year 1960 Paris will be covered in horse dung because street cleaners will be unable to keep up with the cleaning. Obviously, the prediction did not prove correct. But we can infer from it that horse dung was already a noticeable problem in the eighteenth century and evoked the concern of scientific minds. This is so because, as historian Paul Boyer notes, “for all its exotic trappings, science fiction is best understood as a commentary on contemporary issues.”11 But the science-fiction genre does not only illustrate the present, it also “tends to engage us cognitively […] – to make us thoughtful and to evoke wonder.”12 It is through encouraging us to think about the future that it also refers to and makes us think about the present. For example, in 1966, at the very beginning of space travel, Stanisáaw Lem wrote a short story entitled “Save the Space,” in which the future outer space was littered with such an amount of rubbish that it was not possible to watch stars anymore. But the moral of the story concerned not only the future but also the present: wherever people go, they leave rubbish, and outer space will be no exception. Science-fiction is also the only genre which is so closely related to technology and progress, and through that relationship it remains their primary critic. “If science fiction is about science at all, it is not about abstract science, science in a vacuum. In the SF film, science is always related to society, and its positive and negative aspects are seen in light of their social effect.”13 Finally, science-fiction allows its creators to portray and capture that which is invisible or elusive. To quote Vivian Sobchack: “SF films tell stories about and give concrete and visible form to that which is not concrete and visible in our daily existence and under our historical and cultural conditions of knowledge, but which, nevertheless, we feel is there.”14 With the use of science-fiction, writers and directors can portray 11 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 257-258. 12 Vivian Sobchack, “The Fantastic” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 316. 13 Vivian Sobchack, The Limits of Infinity: the American Science Fiction Film 1950-1975 (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1980), 63. 14 Sobchack, “The Fantastic,” 312.

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such immaterial things as, for example, social systems: the classical literary dystopias like 1984 or Brave New World pertain precisely to the science-fiction genre. As far as themes are concerned, the 1950s were a particularly fruitful decade for the science-fiction genre. The alleged UFO crash in Roswell in 1947, the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1, in 1957, the Cold War and the witch hunts, and the entire atomic age with its “nuclear technology of the future,” bomb tests, radiation and Civil Defense alerts – this proved ideal fodder for science-fiction writers. Thereby, it is of no surprise that the 1950s mark the domination of the science-fiction genre in American cinema. An estimated 500 films produced from 1948 to 1962 can be placed in the broadly defined category of science fiction. Therefore, even from the purely statistical point of view, one can convincingly argue that so many sci-fi features have not been produced ever before or ever since.15 It is of no surprise either that all these films seem to revolve around only a handful of themes, all of which were the products of the 1950s political and social climate. To quote Matthews for explanation: The science fiction boom of the ’50s owed its existence to several reasons: World War II and the advent of atomic bomb; a change in the public’s attitude towards scientists, which elevated such figures as Wernher von Braun and Albert Einstein to celebrity status; the Cold War between East and West, and Soviet and American competition in rocket technology; anxiety over nuclear war and paranoia over communist subversion; and the “flying saucer” scare. Consequently, ‘50s science fiction films were characterized by several themes: the atomic bomb and its consequences; the effects of atomic radiation; alien invasion and alien possession; and world of destruction.16

Victoria O’Donnell distinguishes four other key themes in the 1950s science fiction, but she also sees their roots in the sociopolitical atmosphere of the period and provides a more detailed explanation: Four major themes can be seen in the science fiction films of the fifties: (1) Extraterrestrial travel, (2) Alien invasion and infiltration, (3) Mutants, metamorphosis and resurrection of extinct species, and (4) Near annihilation or the end of the Earth. Each of these theme related, at least indirectly, to the world events of the 1950s and reflected the fear and 15

Patrick Luciano, Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1. 16 Melvin E. Matthews, Hostile Aliens, Hollywood and Today’s News: 1950s science fiction films and 9/11 (New York: Algora Publishing, 2007), 8.

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True enough, by 1954, the year in which Corman started his career, such science-fiction classics as The Thing from Another World (1951), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) or Them! (1954) had enjoyed wide popularity and brought their studios considerable profits. These pictures did not feature film stars, but based their success on original ideas and, at times, on special effects. Corman quickly realized that he could achieve success in sci-fi even with his modest budgets. As he could not – and maybe did not even want to – employ famous actors or afford stunning special effects, Corman tried to focus his attention on the plot to make it as interesting and original as possible, but still keep it within the confines of the popular themes. As a result, he shot ten sci-fi pictures in which he related to almost all his contemporary sci-fi themes: nuclear destruction, alien invasion, adverse effects of radiation, space travel and the position of scientists in society. 2.1.1. Nuclear destruction Zero hour. First, a flash and a bang. Next, the thermal, shock and radiation waves. Finally, the majestic atom cloud of radioactive fallout. This scene was first observed in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945, then over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, the same year. With these events began the era of the atom which, as one could argue, turned out to be a mixed blessing due to the dual character of nuclear power. However, despite the initial apprehension, the following decade, the 1950s, is generally considered to be a period of common optimism towards atomic power. At that time it was widely believed that nuclear power would render coal and oil obsolete, and that virtually everything would be propelled by atomic drives of some sort. Nuclear science would 17

Victoria O’Donnell, “Science Fiction Films and Cold War Anxiety,” in The Fifties: Transforming the Screen 1950-1959, ed. Peter Lev (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 170.

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also come in handy in medicine – to treat cancer, and in agriculture – to produce bigger and richer crops. This optimism emanated from many political, cultural and commercial activities of that period. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower launched a help program for developing countries, “Atoms for Peace,” the goal of which was to provide them with nuclear power. In 1951, U.S. Air Force began the development of an aircraft with a nuclear engine, in 1954 the first nuclear submarine was launched, and in 1958 Ford created a visualization of Ford Nucleon, a car that would be propelled by a small atomic reactor. In 1951, scientists managed to turn atomic energy into electricity, and in 1958 the first commercial nuclear plant was opened by President Eisenhower. Yet, all these events should not overshadow the fact that the general public was, nonetheless, aware of the dangers associated with nuclear energy. As Dr. Heinz Haber explained in Our Friend the Atom, a 1957 Walt Disney documentary targeted at the teenage audience and glorifying atomic energy, “the atom story is almost like a fairy tale, […] the old fable from Arabian Nights – The Fisherman and the Genie.” The atom, like the genie, can realize good wishes: wishes for unlimited power, food and health, but it can also grant the wish for destruction. It all depends on what is wished for.18 The apprehension that Americans could have wished for destruction was fueled by historic events. In 1949, the Soviets tested their first atom bomb and equaled the Americans, which pushed President Truman into authorizing a scientific program bent on creating an even more powerful weapon: the hydrogen bomb. Thus began the arms race. Soon enough, both the USA and the Soviet Union had their own H-bombs and were flexing their nuclear muscles at each other. It became evident that the eventual conflict escalation could finish with other Hiroshimas and Nagasakis. Therefore, at the beginning of the 1950s, the American State issued a series of training films on what to do in case of a nuclear attack. Duck and Cover (1951) and Atomic Alert (1951) taught children and teenagers how to behave when they hear a bomb alarm or see a flash in the sky “brighter than the sun,”19 while films like The House in The Middle (1954) lectured the adults, for example, on how to protect their homes “from the heat

18

Our Friend the Atom, directed by Hamilton Luske directed by Hamilton Luske (1957; Bayonne, NJ: Media Outlet, 2010), DVD. 19 Atomic Alert, director unknown (1951; Bayonne, NJ: Media Outlet, 2010), DVD.

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effects of atomic explosion.”20 The selection of films (but also of books, booklets, pamphlets, comics and so on) available and recommended for teachers, students, community organizations and the general public was enormous.21 These films expressed hope that a nuclear attack would never happen, but they also made it clear that “good sense requires that we prepare for any eventuality,”22 as there might always be a “bombing that comes without a warning”23 and “in this early and troubled stage of the atomic age our very lives may depend on always being alert.”24 These statements must have caused some dose of apprehension because they added a new, unpredictable life threat. As Susan Sontag explains it: There is a historically specifiable twist which intensifies the anxiety. I mean, the trauma suffered by everyone in the middle of the 20th century when it became clear that, from now on to the end of human history, every person would spend his individual life under the threat not only of individual death, which is certain, but of something almost insupportable psychologically – collective incineration and extinction which could come at any time, virtually without warning.25

The dual nature of the atom, its benefits coupled with its destructive potential, resulted in a similar rupture in social attitudes towards the atom and the bomb. On the one hand, Americans were grateful for all the potential profit nuclear technology could provide them with in any field of science and any branch of industry, be it medicine, agriculture, power production or engineering. It was this typical American optimism characterized by uncritical faith that, no matter what, progress always leads to prosperity; the same optimism that accompanied America throughout its history: during the settlers era, the railway development, the industrial revolution, and so on. Moreover, the atomic bomb definitely broke America’s political isolationism. All of a sudden, the US became the only country equipped with the most powerful weapon on Earth, and developed into a military power everybody would hold in high esteem. In 20 The House in The Middle, director unknown (1954; Bayonne, NJ: Media Outlet, 2010), DVD. 21 For a complete selection of these texts see Appendix 1 in: Michael Scheibach, Atomic Narratives and American Youth: Coming of Age with the Atom, 1945-1955 (Jefferson, NC.: McFarland, 2003). 22 A is for Atom, directed by Hamilton Luske (1957; Bayonne, NJ: Media Outlet, 2010), DVD. 23 Atomic Alert. 24 Atomic Alert. 25 Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary (October 1965): 45.

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this respect, it is hardly surprising that a great deal of American society embraced the bomb and there were no antinuclear organizations, groups or protests up until the 1980s.26 For this reason, a number of scholars believe that the four decades before the 1980s constitute a period of indifference, ignorance or consent for the existence of atomic warfare.27 This claim is not fully true as there existed dissent, apprehension and protest against the atom and the nuclear bomb, though not in the form of organized opposition. These feelings found their vent in culture – an entire counterculture emerged and existed in opposition to the atmosphere of nuclear optimism. While the “nuclear culture” propagated progress and stability thanks to atomic technology, the “anti-nuclear counterculture” prophesied chaos and destruction caused by the same source. The former expressed itself through traditional means of communication like television, radio, newspapers, documentaries, as well as the car (Ford Nucleon) and clothing industries (the bikini swimsuit). The latter adopted “new cultural products and genres – film noir and roman film noir, science fiction films, pulp crime literature, beat poetry, rock n roll, and black humor.”28 Science-fiction films became a particularly potent vessel for antinuclear messages. Firstly, SF pictures enjoyed an “unserious” reputation which “allowed these films a freedom not possessed by the more serious realistic dramas of the time.”29 Secondly, only this genre could encompass filmmakers’ wild fantasies about nuclear destruction or the unforeseen effects of radiation on humans and animals (this worked the other way as well: how else could one classify these films if not science-fiction?). As a result, the SF films of the 1950s nolens volens had to bear the stamp of the atomic anxiety. As the editor of Overlook Film Encyclopedia, Phil Hardy, noticed: “Lurking behind every frame of the fifties Science Fiction… is the fear of nuclear Armageddon.”30 26 Margot A. Henriksen, Doctor Strangelove’s America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), xx. 27 For more, see: Robert Jay Lifton, Richard Falk, Indefensible Weapons: The Political and Psychological Case Against Nuclearism, (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Jonathan Schell, The Abolition, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1986); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1985. 28 Henriksen, Doctor Strangelove’s America, XXII. 29 Cynthia Hendershot, Paranoia, the Bomb, and 1950s Science Fiction Films (Bowling Green, KT: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), 2. 30 Phil Hardy, ed. The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction, 3rd. ed. (New York: Overlook Press, 1995), xv.

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Most of these films presented it covertly, like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), in which nuclear tests awaken a frozen dinosaur that heads for New York City wreaking havoc on its way. The covert moral of the story: atomic tests will bring chaos and destruction instead of peace.31 Other, less numerous films, presented the atomic threat directly – as visions of nuclear holocaust and human life in its aftermath. Unsurprisingly, the covert ones were usually produced by major studios (Warner Bros’s Them! can serve as an example) while the overt ones – by independent producers like Arch Oboler, Stanley Kramer or, obviously, Roger Corman. Corman shot three films about a nuclear holocaust. His first picture, Day the World Ended (1955), begins with a warning as if taken straight from an atomic alert training film: .

What you are about to see may never happen… but to this anxious age in which we live, it presents a fearsome warning… Our story begins with… THE END!

After a sequence with a nuclear explosion, the title Day the World Ended appears in the foreground accompanied by ominous music. Then, a passage from the Bible is quoted (2 Pt 3:10): Elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

Next, the camera shows a city in ruin and the narrator continues: This is TD-Day – total destruction by nuclear weapons. And from this hour forward, the world as we know it no longer exists. And over all the lands and waters of the Earth hangs the atomic haze… of death. Man has done his best to destroy himself. But there is a force more powerful than man and in His infinite wisdom he has spared a few.

This passage is spoken in a dry, matter-of-fact, informative tone which was used by voice-over TV speakers in documentary programs about the marvels of the atomic age technology. This emotionless tone creates a clash with the dreadful images on screen. The plot begins with seven main characters taking refuge in a fallout shelter. The group includes Jim Maddison (Paul Birch) – the owner and designer of the shelter; Louise Maddison (Lori Nelson) – his beautiful 31

Ibid., 77.

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daughter; Rick (Richard Denning) – a geologist; Tony Lamont (Touch Connors) – a gangster; Ruby (Adele Jergens) – a striptease dancer and Tony’s girlfriend, Radek (Paul Dubov) – a contaminated man; and Pete (Raymond Hatton) – a gold digger with a donkey for comic relief. The shelter is built in a valley surrounded by hills “full of lead-bearing ore” which “act as a barrier for radioactivity.” Its interior is equipped in accordance with the atomic alert training films: there is food, water, a radio and a Geiger counter. The atmosphere of the film is dismal. The nuclear holocaust was a personal tragedy for the characters: Louise lost her lover and Rick – his brother. Radio news from the world is bad: “there are no radio signals, long or short wave, from any city in the world.” Each of the characters, except the contaminated man, reached the safe valley just in time to escape the deadly radioactive wave. The rest of humanity was probably annihilated. Now, the seven people are stuck in a shelter with provisions for only three of them and little hope for survival. And to add to the trouble, there is a fearsome mutant stalking them. In this dead-end situation, Rick and Jim try to find comfort in the Bible (Jer 1:8): I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the Lord. And I will deliver thee out of the hand of the wicked, and I will redeem thee out of the hand of the terrible.

However, before the day of the deliverance comes, characters start dying. Radek is killed by the mutant, Pete wanders off into the radioactive mist and perishes, and Ruby becomes so jealous of his boyfriend that Tony finally loses his nerves and stabs her. In the grande finale, the mutant kidnaps Louise, and Rick comes after it with a rifle to rescue her. The mutant, however, turns out to be impervious to bullets. When the couple seems doomed and the monster is about to kill them, clean rain falls from the sky, dissolving the creature. Back at the shelter, Tony sets a trap to kill Rick and take Louise for himself, but he is shot by Jim. Jim informs Rick and Louise that he caught a signal on the radio from some other survivors. He also says that the clean rain washed radiation away and probably killed all the dangerous creatures, so it is safe for the couple to leave in search of any remnants of civilization. Next, Jim, who had been previously exposed to a large dose of radiation, dies. Louise and Rick, like the biblical Adam and Eve, set off into the unknown to build a new world on the ruins of the old one. Untypically, the film ends with the word: “the beginning.”

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The beginning of Day the World Ended must have been a shock to its contemporary audience. Firstly, it directly shows what the audience imagined and feared at that time: total nuclear destruction and its consequences for ordinary individuals. Secondly, it describes the destruction of the world using the rhetoric of Civil Defense training pictures like Atomic Alert or The House in the Middle: “this may never happen,” “anxious age,” “fearsome warning.” The items the shelter was equipped with were also familiar to the audience: sealed jars with water, radio transmitter and receiver, and the typical 1950s Civil Defense Geiger counter CD V-700 used in atomic alert training films and at school presentations. So were the protective actions undertaken by the characters, like washing oneself and changing clothes after exposure to radioactivity. Even scientific information included in the film could have been known to the viewers; for instance, that a dose of 500 roentgens is considered lethal for human beings. In fact, the beginning of this film is so accurate in depicting the protective measures typical for 1950s and 1960s nuclear precautions that it could have been used as a training film back then, and it constitutes a historical account on that period nowadays. Lastly, Day the World Ended is one of the first commercial feature films which bring up the theme of total destruction of our world with nuclear weapons. The forerunner of this sub-genre was a Czechoslovakian SF drama Krakatit from 1948, which tells a story of a genius inventor who constructs a mass destruction weapon which later falls in the hands of a ruthless dictator. The film finishes with a nuclear disaster. The next motion picture on this topic, and the first American effort, is similar in plot to Day the World Ended. Five (1951) is the film that created an archetypical situation: an unlikely group of people (in this case, five) survived the atomic war (the causes of which are unknown) in a fallout shelter. Each of the characters is unique and has a different recipe for coping with the situation. Micheal (Willian Phipps) is an idealist propagating the return to nature; Roseanne (Susan Douglas) is pregnant and tries to save as much of the past as possible; Fric (James Anderson) is a fascist who dreams of building a new, ideal society; Mr Bernstaple (Earl Lee) suffers from radiation sickness and soon dies; and Charles (Charles Lampkin) is a black blue collar worker. Fric does not believe in the total annihilation of humanity. When Roseanne gives birth to her baby, he convinces her to venture into the city with him. When Charles tries to stop them, Fric kills him in cold blood. Roseanne agrees to go to the city, hoping to find her husband. The city, however, lies in ruin and Roseanne now loses her baby to radiation sickness. The past is done and gone and

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there is no return. Fric, showing the first symptoms of radiation sickness, orders Roseanne to return to the shelter and join Michael in creating a new world. Day the World Ended was, therefore, the third film worldwide, and the second in the United States, to bring up the Earth-after-nuclear-destruction theme32, and although it copies a lot from its American predecessor, it must have had an impact on the audience nonetheless due to its realism.33 Day the World Ended is plentiful in religious references. It was God who spared a few human beings, although they did their best to destroy themselves. The valley in which the shelter stands is referred to as “Noah’s Ark” because it gives refuge not only to people but to animals as well. In the trying, post-nuclear times, characters find solace reading the Bible. Finally, it is God, acting through nature, who destroys the threatening mutant, cleanses the Earth from radiation and other dangers, and allows Rick and Louise, in the likeness of biblical Adam and Eve, to venture into the unknown and create a new society. The moral of the story is, therefore, consistent with the social attitudes of the general public in the 1950s: if the nuclear war breaks out, God help us. The curious operation of reversing the story is worth mentioning. The plot “begins with the end”: the Earth had been destroyed and only a handful of people has survived. The atmosphere in the shelter is grim as the survivors’ families and friends are dead, and the characters themselves are unsure of their future existence. Rick deplores: “My brother is dead out there. He was only 30 feet from me. He died and I didn’t… Can’t understand it… 22 years old… […] You know the irony? He was studying for the ministry. He was going to be a man of God.”34 Jim is equally disillusioned and cynical: “We may live, we may not. […] Some of us may be dying now.” However, as the level of radiation becomes lower, survivors regain their faith. Jim devises plans to grow crops and encourages the women to have children. Finally, the rain cleans the land

32 Andrzej KoáodyĔski, Dziedzictwo wyobraĨni: historia filmu SF (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Alfa, 1989), 121-123. 33 Although there are sci-fi films between Krakatit and Day the World Ended which tackle with world’s destruction. Its protagonists are invariably human space explorers that come across a distant planet whose inhabitants are either decimated by a nuclear war and resulting radiation sickness, or reduced to a primitive society as in Rocketship XM. These films, however, show the destruction of human civilization only figuratively, not literally. 34 Interestingly enough, the characters of the film are as guilt-ridden that they survived as was frequently enough the case with actual Holocaust survivors.

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and the good couple can set off to build a new civilization, which is “the beginning.” The ending-as-beginning theme was present in all post-apocalyptic works by Corman due to his ontological philosophy: My belief, in general, is that civilization moves forward: old civilizations end and new civilizations start. From this overall concept of the movement of civilizations, it seemed natural enough to speculate that the atomic age could make such a theory a reality.35

The circle of civilization is best expressed in Corman’s next postapocalyptic picture, Prehistoric World (aka Teenage Caveman) from 1958. Similarly to Day the World Ended, this film begins with a reading from the Bible – a much altered Genesis, which gives the viewer an impression that they are watching a film about the dawn of time. The plot tells a story of a young caveman and his people. The tribe lives on the land of “dead trees and few animals” beside a river. The other side of the river abounds in fruit and game, but “the old law” prohibits the tribesmen from venturing there, in order to protect them from dinosaurs and “an evil god.” The title teenage caveman, a typical young rebel, makes numerous “illegal” trips into the “forbidden zone”; first alone, later with his father and fellow tribesmen. When the boy encounters “the evil god,” a hairy humanoid, his tribesmen kill the creature, revealing that it was merely a man in a costume. Examining the body, the boy discovers a book with pictures of modern military officials, the UN building, towns and cities, facilities labeled “the atomic era” and, finally, a picture of an atomic blast. The characters cannot decipher their meanings, but the audience can. This is not the past but the future when human civilization was reduced to a primitive state as a result of a nuclear war or catastrophe.36 When the boy with his tribe departs, the film cuts to sequences of atomic explosions and leveled cities while “the evil god,” in a long voiceover, reveals the true nature of the world: I and a party of 23 others were on a scientific expedition when the bombs began to fall... nuclear weapon was unleashed all over the world. Retaliation added to retaliation, until all traces of man’s works had been wiped from the face of the Earth... Things that escaped the blast, some grew huge beyond all reason and formed into the dinosaurs of pre-history, or took on new shapes altogether, mad and shapen purpose. My comrades 35

Corman quoted in: Silver, Ursini, Roger Corman, 33. It is worth noting that the film was shot in 1958, five years before Pierre Boulle wrote Planet of the Apes. 36

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and I, half-protected by our radiation suits, found ourselves given an age far beyond the span allowed. Out of all the sprawling millions of the Earth, a handful escaped all harm through fortune or design.

And the true nature of the people that inhabit it: After the holocaust, the wisest of them set down a long list of taboos. Our laws are in the form of a religion now. It’s strange to see them living the life of Cro-Magnon man and not knowing why. On occasion, we tried to contact them, but they feared us. And the radiation killed those that came too close. Now, only I’m left, and the radiation has worn away these long, long years. Now a new one thinks and wonders about the truth of the law. Perhaps man will dare to try again. I am very lonely, very, very tired. This happened a long time ago, and as you know, men did meet other men, and fire smelted metal, made explosives. The wheel turned machines and made gun barrels. The towers were built and flattened. How many times will it happen again? And if it does, will any at all survive the next time, or will it be the end?

The twist at the ending of the film is “wonderfully ironic”37 as the seemingly prehistoric picture becomes a warning about the atomic war and its disastrous consequences. The war itself is described as something soulless and impersonal – “retaliation added to retaliation” – as if war was a chain of imminent events, a chemical reaction, a falling domino, or a machine which is unstoppable once set in motion. But the moral is also thought-provoking: “How many times will it happen again?” Therefore, the film is also critical of humanity itself and of its inclination for selfdestruction. We gradually destroy and rebuild ourselves – in a cycle of civilizations – but, as it is suggested, we never learn from our own mistakes. This moral is consistent with the famous saying by Albert Einstein: “The bomb has changed everything except the nature of man.”38 Yet, there is a flicker of hope which lies within people like the title teenage caveman, people with natural curiosity who want to learn because knowledge leads to prosperity. These people, unlike their savage entourage, do not destroy everything they fear or do not understand, and it is their leadership that can preserve us from war catastrophes. Corman’s final post-nuclear picture, Last Woman on Earth (1960), also focuses on the question of life after a nuclear tragedy. It tells a story of a trio of characters: Harold (Anthony Carbone), a self-made entrepreneur 37 38

Corman quoted in: Silver, Ursini, Roger Corman, 103. Albert Einstein quoted in: Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light, 36.

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who achieved success through shifty business affairs; Evelyn (Betsy Jones-Moreland), his wife; and Martin (Robert Towne), his lawyer. The plot begins with the protagonists meeting during a cockfight in Puerto Rico. Harold is so engrossed in the fight and the betting that he pays little attention either to his wife, who is bored and fed up with her husband, or to his lawyer, who brings him dire news about the police and the media being interested in his shady transactions. In the subsequent scene in Harold’s apartment, Evelyn, lonely, drunk and flirtatious, reveals to Martin that she is unhappy in her relationship because her husband neglects her. To compensate for his behavior towards his wife, Harold takes Evelyn on a boat trip the following day. But, connecting pleasure with business, he also invites Martin. The atmosphere remains grim, so Harold proposes the others to go scuba-diving. When the protagonists resurface after having spent a period of time underwater, they notice that something is wrong with the air. Keeping their breathing equipment on, they investigate the boat to find their captain dead of suffocation. The boat engine does not start, matches do not light – there is no oxygen in the air. The characters take a dinghy and row to the shore. Once they reach the green beaches, the air becomes breathable again. Not all news is good, though. With bodies dotting the streets, Puerto Rico turns out to be dead. There is no radio or telephone signal, which means that the catastrophe was global. Each of the male protagonists undergoes a change of character. Harold sees the situation as an entrepreneurial challenge and starts organizing a new life: he learns navigation to travel, and fishing to become selfsufficient when the food runs out. Martin, on the other hand, loses faith and becomes a disillusioned cynic whose only purpose is to live the rest of his days partying. At first, Evelyn, still disappointed with her husband, sides with Martin, but when the two lovers run away from Harold, she learns that Martin does not want to have children. She realizes that this would render her life purposeless and that only her husband can provide the continuity of the species. When Harold catches up with the fugitives, a fight over the title last woman on Earth ensues between the two men in which Martin is knocked down and dies in Evelyn’s arms. The final dialogue between the two survivors delivers the moral of the film: Harold: I killed him. Will we never learn? Evelyn: He didn’t think so. Harold: Let’s go home. Evelyn: Where is that? Harold: Help me find out.

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Harold gently pulls Evelyn away from Martin’s body, leading her from death to a new life. The film ends on a Darwinian note, with the fittest male surviving and claiming the female, thus ensuring the continuity of the species. The dominant male has possibly learned a lesson about control and violence, which allows the film to end on a positive note as well.39 Corman, like many of his contemporaries, was ambivalent about the atom: I was in training to participate in the invasion of Japan in 1945, when the Bomb went off, so I’m part of that group that said, “Thank God for the atomic bomb.” It very possibly saved my life. But at the same time, I also had to say, “My God, what a monstrous, terrible thing!” 40

The pent-up negative emotions he shared for the bomb found an outlet in his post-nuclear pictures in which the bomb destroys modern civilization, either dooming ordinary citizens like lawyers, businessmen or geologists to life in severe and dangerous post-nuclear environment, or pulling man’s development back millions of years to its prehistoric state. Unlike Krakatit (1948), On The Beach (1959) or Dr. Strangelove (1964), Corman’s films do not feature military or government officials or nuclear scientists who could be blamed for the disaster or who could witness the destruction and suffer or repent on screen. In Dr. Strangelove the bomb is neutral, just a dead object lying in the plane’s cargo hold, and it is man and man-created, absurd procedures that lead to atomic apocalypse. But in Day the World Ended and Last Woman on Earth the holocaust is impersonal. There is noone behind it, no-one is blamed for it. It just happens. This suggests that it is the bomb itself which is evil: “A monstrous, terrible thing.” Prehistoric World does not blame any specific professional groups either in the manner of Dr. Strangelove, but it rather points the finger at humanity as such or, to be more specific, at mankind’s vice of warring with each other. Corman addresses the entire human race because he wants to caution us about the possibility of nuclear holocaust: I was, and still am, very much interested in the concept of nuclear holocaust. I think the possibility of it happening is there. Personally, I don’t think it’s going to occur, but I think that, through film, we should keep on cautioning and warning people that it might.41

39

Silver, Ursini, Roger Corman, 138. Corman quoted in: Silver, Ursini, Roger Corman, 51. 41 Corman in: Nasr, Roger Corman Interviews, 132. 40

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Between 1950 and 1960, seven films about a nuclear holocaust on Earth were shot in America and as many as three were directed by Corman.42 Excluding On The Beach, the six remaining films follow a similar plot pattern: a small group of people struggles for life after surviving an atomic cataclysm, some of them die in the process, but the good and virtuous couple survives to renew the civilization. If Corman’s films follow the same repetitive pattern, a question arises if there is any authenticity in them or are they merely exploiting the topic? Corman was the second in the history of American cinema to shoot a nuclear holocaust film, and it is debatable whether he had seen the first picture on the topic, Five, and had drawn on it when shooting his own. However, bearing in mind the fact that his films reflect his own philosophical views on the nature of civilization and his personal attitude towards the atomic bomb, it is probably safe to claim that there is a good dose of authenticity in them, and perhaps the films subsequent to Day the World Ended drew upon Corman’s vision. 2.1.2. Radiation and the bomb The fear of nuclear destruction was not the only anxiety entailed by the development of the atomic bomb. The other one was the apprehension of nuclear radiation. These invisible, odorless, deathly radioactive rays which could pass through walls fired filmmakers’ imagination. Yet, radiation was rarely depicted in its true form, which might stem from any or all three reasons given below. Firstly, the actual threat radiation poses is uncinematic. Exposure to radioactivity causes radiation sickness, the symptoms of which include, depending on the dose absorbed: nausea, vomiting, fever, headache, diarrhea and, ultimately, death. These symptoms (except death, of course) can also be associated with a common cold or food poisoning and, thereby, are not too scary or dramatic.43 On the Beach, a film which seems to put great emphasis on realism, presents radiation sickness in a factual way. Affected characters feel “a little nauseous” but otherwise fine, and although the audience is aware that their fate is sealed, the course of the sickness itself does not evoke strong reactions like repugnance or disgust. Secondly, no-one can actually see radiation. It would be difficult for filmmakers to show a premise in broad daylight where everything seems perfectly all right and still convey an unsettling atmosphere of omnipresent, invisible death. Therefore, filmmakers usually introduce a 42

The four non-Corman films include: Five (1951), The World Without End (1959), The World, The Flesh, The Devil (1959) and On The Beach (1959). 43 Contrary to the skin decay disease in Cabin Fever (2002), for example.

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visual representation of this threat – a radiation-produced monster – which is, in turn, consistent with the science fiction and horror theory: “Horror, SF […] films, […] attempt to imagine and literally to picture what escapes personal, social, and institutional knowledge, control, and visibility and, through making the invisible visible, to name, contain, and control it.”44 Not only are the monster and the havoc it wreaks visible and, thereby, far more frightening, but the audience also has something concrete to focus their emotions on. Moreover, a monster can be destroyed, usually in a spectacular, cinematic way, to offer reassurance and catharsis through a happy ending, which would not be possible if the threat of radiation was presented realistically. Finally, the allegoric, non-direct representation of the threat of radioactivity might have resulted from self-censorship. In the 1950s, all the produced films had to pass through the House Un-American Activity Committee (HUAC), a governmental body which checked whether film, radio and TV productions did not interfere with American interest. At the same time, American authorities went to great lengths to conceal the true nature of radioactive fallout from the general public.45 Whatever the truth may be, the 1950s SF, with several exceptions only, presented the threat of radioactivity in the form of giant monsters. Radiation in these films had a strange tendency of enlarging to gigantic proportions everything it came in contact with: grasshoppers in Beginning of the End (1957) after they feasted on radioactive wheat, ants in Them! (1954), an octopus in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) or a man in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) after they had been exposed to fallout from a nuclear test. It is worthy of notice that some of these creatures are peaceful living beings which would cause no harm unless irradiated.46 Therefore, most of the giant radiation-produced monster movies are, in fact, a critique of the atomic bomb tests. If a monster causes destruction and chaos, and it was created through exposure to radioactive fallout which, in turn, was produced by a nuclear bomb test, then the tests are, in fact, responsible for this chaos. Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) is just such a critique. Like Day the World Ended, the film opens with a piece of text, some

44

Sobchack, “The Fantastic,” 316. O’Donnell, “Science Fiction Films and Cold War Anxiety,” 185-186. 46 However, many filmmakers enlarged dangerous creatures to gigantic proportions in order to make them even more frightening and dangerous, hence films like Tarantula (1955), Earth vs. The Spider (1958), The Black Scorpion (1957), Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959). 45

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sequences of atomic explosions, and a quote from the Bible. The opening crawl: You are about to land in a lonely zone of terror… on an uncharted atoll in the Pacific! You are part of The Second Scientific Expedition dispatched to this mysterious bit of Coral reef and volcanic rock. The first group has disappeared without a trace! Your job is to find out why! There have been rumors about this strange atoll… frightening rumors about happenings way out beyond the laws of nature…

The Biblical quote (Gn 6:7): And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

The plot wastes no more time for introduction. When “The Second Scientific Expedition” – composed of a dozen or so scientists and seamen – is landing in “a lonely zone of terror,” which looks like a common, runof-the-mill beach, one of the seamen accidentally falls overboard and gets decapitated underwater by the eponymous crab monster. As the rest of the crew prepares for the funeral, Hank Chapman (Russell Johnson), a technician and a handyman, explains the purpose of the expedition to rank and file seamen: Well, you remember that first big H-bomb test – the one that blew Elugelab Island right out of the ocean? […] A tremendous amount of the radioactive fallout came this way. A great seething, burning cloud of it sank into this area, blanketing the island with hot ashes and seawater. Dr. Weigand's group is here to study fallout effects at their worst. Dr. James Carson is a geologist. He’ll try to learn what’s happening to the soil. The botanist, Jules Deveroux, will examine all the plant life for radiation poisoning. Martha Hunter and Dale Brewer are biologists. He works on land animalism while she takes care of the seafood. Dr. Karl Weigand is a nuclear physicist. He'll collect their findings and relate them to the present theories on the effects of too-much radiation.

After the scientific equipment is set up, some of the seamen return to the seaplane, which brought the expedition. The seaplane takes off and… explodes in the air for no apparent reason. To add to the problems, the island is slowly but steadily sinking in water and its only inhabitants, aside from the scientists, are giant intelligent crabs. Eating their victims, the crabs absorb their minds as well, which allows them to imitate the voices

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of the dead to lure more prey. Soon enough, the crabs pick the scientists and the seamen one by one until only three members of the expedition are left: Hank, Dale (Richard Garland) and Martha (Pamela Duncan). As the island sinks, the trio, chased by flesh-hungry crabs, makes its way to the highest peak topped with a transmission tower. When the protagonists reach the summit, there is nowhere else to run. However, earlier in the film, the scientists learned that electricity reduces the crabs to ash. Remembering that, Hank tilts the transmitter on the crabs and, sacrificing himself, electrocutes the creatures. Ridiculous as the film may seem at first glance, its message matches the anti-militaristic trend in the 1950s science fiction. While many giant monster movies like The Black Scorpion or The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) aim at a mere thrill-and-chill spectacle of mayhem and devastation, Attack of the Crab Monsters also tries to convey a deeper meaning to the audience. “As far as this being an end-of-the-world picture, I would say that the philosophical and psychological considerations were in there,”47 claims Corman. Although there are no overt philosophical deliberations, the film’s action makes the point: as a result of a prior nuclear explosion, almost all the film characters are eliminated and the small universe of the film almost ceases to exist. This plot, accompanied by the biblical introduction, delivers a clear-cut moral: the atomic bomb will bring death to (almost) everyone and destruction of (almost) everything because it defies the laws of God. Therefore, Alain Silver and James Ursini justly regard this film as a “mini-apocalypse”: Although Attack of the Crab Monsters is technically not an apocalyptic film, in that the rest of the world is not touched by the nuclear disaster that devastates the island in the film, it is an allegory of nuclear folly, a microcosm of what might occur on a larger scale if humanity does not reign in its violent nature. It is at bottom a cautionary tale.48

It must be noted, however, that this time the nuclear apocalypse has a divine background. This is hinted not only by the Biblical introduction but also by other motifs from the Book of Revelation, like the dead calling the living. And if the film apocalypse is divine and biblical, then it is just and well-deserved. In Day the World Ended, humanity destroyed itself and God “in His infinite wisdom he has spared a few.” In Attack of the Crab Monsters, He is angry with humans because they built the bomb, and punishes them with the bomb’s side effects. 47 48

Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 60. Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 57.

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2.1.3. Fear of alien invasion The hype around aliens began with the infamous UFO incident at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, when, allegedly, a spaceship from outer space carrying real live aliens crashed. The vessel and its crew were said to have been recovered by the government officials and a whole installation at a nearby base, Area 51, was set up to study them. The military officials denied it all, stating that the US Army Air Force recovered debris from an Army Air Force balloon-borne research project, whereas the alien bodies observed in the New Mexico desert were actually anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research.49 The public opinion, however, remained unconvinced. Newspapers at that time supported the version about the UFO crash, citing the testimonies of eye witnesses as evidence: “I didn’t know what we were picking up. I still don’t know what it was... it could not have been part of an aircraft, not part of any kind of weather balloon or experimental balloon... I’ve seen rockets... sent up at the White Sands Testing Grounds. It definitely was not part of an aircraft or missile or rocket.”50 Whatever the truth may be, American culture quickly developed an interest in extraterrestrials and flying saucers. Sniffing profit in this new craze, film producers began supplying the public with alien films. Having no shape or form, no particular set of features, existing more as a concept rather than reality, aliens could represent or embody anything the screenwriter would want them to. The extraterrestial “is such a basic metaphor, so primal an allegory that it can be reworked to serve in many ways.”51 And with only a few notable exceptions, these aliens were portrayed as enemies, not friends. On their own planets, they were desperate to eliminate the human newcomers. Coming to Earth, they were mostly invaders and conquerors themselves. They were intelligent, cunning, technologically advanced and bound on destroying or subjugating humanity. Sometimes they gave unconditional ultimatums (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 1956), sometimes they attacked without any warning, and sometimes they resorted to deceit (Killers from Space, 1954). In any case, 49

The Roswell Report: Case Closed Headquarters United States Air Force; Book & VHS edition (June 1997) 50 Major Jeske Marcel quoted in Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle, A History of UFO Crashes (New York: Avon Books, 1994), 65. 51 Ziauddin Sardar, Sean Cubitt, eds., Aliens R Us: The Other in Science Fiction Cinema (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 10.

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reasoning with them was futile and violence proved to be the only solution. This is best portrayed by the final scene from The Thing From Another World (1951), in which a scientist, Dr Arthur Carrington, tries to appeal to the alien to stop the rampage: I’m your friend. I have no weapons. I’m your friend. You’re wiser than I. You must understand what I’m trying to tell you. Don’t go farther. They’ll kill you. They think you’ll harm us. But I want to know you, to help you. Believe that. You’re wiser than anything on earth. Use that intelligence. Look and know what I’m telling you.

For a split second the scientist’s fellow crew members (and the audience) hope the extraterrestrial will indeed understand and the situation will be resolved in a peaceful manner; but, alas, it kills Carrington and has to be annihilated. Many researchers see these alien films as a product of the 1950s political climate. Arguably, this trend in academic writing was commenced by Susan Sontag in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster,”52 in which she treated the topic in a rather general manner: For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors, real or anticipated – by an escape into exotic dangerous situations which have last minute happy endings. But another one of the things that fantasy can do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it. In the one case, fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it. The fantasy to be discovered in science fiction films does both jobs. These films reflect world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction.53

For many scholars, “world-wide anxieties” in the case of the 1950s science fiction films meant the Cold War tension between The Soviet Union and the US. For instance, Christine Cornea argues that “early films like The Flying Saucers, Red Planet Mars and Invasion USA drew a direct connection between a Soviet threat and the arrival of an alien force.”54 Mark Jancovich says they are regarded as “examples of Cold War ideology in which the fear of alien invasion is seen as merely a code for 52

Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 32. 53 Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” 42. 54 Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema, 37.

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fears of Soviet aggression.”55 Victoria O’Donnell points out that in the 1950s “aliens were frequently portrayed as superior to earthlings in intelligence and technology, perhaps representing what Americans feared in the Soviets.”56 Dominic Strinati claims that they “supply representations of Cold War politics, since the threat of alien invasion was said to invoke anxieties about invasion and annihilation by the Soviet Union.” He even goes as far as to argue that “it may therefore be no accident that the planet thought to contain the greatest threat to Earth was Mars, the ‘red’ planet.”57 According to Peter Biskind, SF cinema from the 1950s purposely depicted Communists as aliens or monsters in order to highlight their difference from Americans, to demonstrate that the Soviets were nothing like US citizens: Sci-fi films that represented Communists directly, like Invasion U.S.A. and The Red Planet Mars, were rare. The analogy was usually oblique, but so close to the surface […] as to be just below the level of consciousness. Presenting Reds as ants or aliens served to establish their Otherness. As Gerhard Niemeyer of Notre Dame put it, the Red mind “shares neither truth nor logic nor morality with the rest of the mankind.” They were not just like Us.58

Some scholars adopt a broader approach and claim that these films reflect not so much the fear of the Soviet Union itself but rather any potential opposition to the American state. Therefore, they glorify the governmental institutions depicting them as infallible, all-powerful, all-wise and allknowing organizations to which average citizens should recourse in case of trouble. To quote Andrew Tudor: In this xenophobic universe we can do nothing but rely on the state, in the form of military, scientific and governmental elites. Only they have the recourse to the technical knowledge and coercive resources necessary for our defense. In this respect, then, fifties SF/horror movies teach us not so much ‘to stop worrying and love the bomb’ as ‘to keep worrying and love

55

Mark Jancovich, Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 15. 56 O’Donnell, “Science Fiction Films and Cold War Anxiety,” 170. 57 Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Studying Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), 92. 58 Biskind, Seeing is Believing, 132.

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the state,’ an admonition which accords perfectly with the nuclear conscious Cold War culture of the period.59

The film Tarantula (1955) immediately comes to mind as an example supporting this theory. It tells a story of a giant spider wreaking havoc in a small Arizona community. When the local authorities fail to resolve the problem themselves, Washington is asked for help. The governmental elites send a squadron of jets which simply gun down the giant arachnid. Within the 1950s alien invasion film, a subgenre dealing with the internal invasion of the human body can be discerned: “Replicated bodies, invasions of bodies, and lone individuals who recognize the transformations are taking place – these elements clearly describe 1950s alien-invasion films.”60 Psychologically, these ideas stem from the fear of self-loss, loss of identity and consequent loss of humanity,61 and in the case of this particular film subgenre they always come together with inability to feel emotions, love and sexual desire. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the most popular and widely cited exemplar, alien plant pods give birth to human replicas, substituting the originals. Dehumanization is apparent as sexual intercourse and childbirth are replaced with plant-like reproduction, there is no childhood (popularly associated with carefree joy of life) and the replicas feel no human emotions. One of the characters remarks: “There’s no emotion. None. Just the pretense of it. The words, the gesture, the tone of voice, everything else is the same, but not the feeling.” A replicated human agrees: “Love, desire, ambition, faith – without them, life’s so simple, believe me.” Interestingly, the lack of ability to feel emotions was also attributed to Communists. To quote M. Keith Booker: The replicants, who look the same as everyone else but feel no emotion and have no individuality, directly echo the era’s most prevalent stereotypes about Communists. Thus, the repeated assurances given Miles [the main character] by the replacements that his life will be far more pleasant if he goes along with the crowd and learns to live without emotion can be taken as echoes of supposed seductions offered by Communist Utopianism.62

59

Andrew Tudor, Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1989), 55. 60 Hendershot, Paranoia, the bomb, and 1950s science fiction films, 40. 61 Ibid., 42. 62 M. Keith Booker “Science Fiction and the Cold War” in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed, (Oxford : Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 179.

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Not only are the “pod people” different from humans in their inability to feel but also in their behavior. Although they go to work and do typical human errands during the day, they spend their free time differently. At night, when no human can see them, they get together and work for the good of their race: they look after the pods, they attend to the replication of humans, they send the pods to other nearby towns. In short, they perform an undercover invasion. Biskind compares this consistent replication with the expansion of Communism: Possession by pods – mind stealing, brain eating, and body snatching – had the added advantage of being an overt metaphor for Communist brainwashing, which had turned GIs into Reds in Korea […]. The pod society is the familiar mechanistic utopia usually (and rightly) taken as a metaphor for Communism. This is a world in which “everyone is the same,” a collectivist millennium to which all citizens contribute, as they do here, systematically distributing pods in a parody of political activism.63

Booker and Biskind, as well as other scholars, believe that this film reflects the Russophobe paranoid anxiety Americans shared in the 1950s: that your neighbor, a seemingly normal and law-abiding citizen who lent you the lawnmower and with whom you sometimes discuss weather and football, may lead a second, secret life in which he or she, probably together with other seemingly law-abiding citizens, discloses confidential information to the Russians and generally helps in weakening Uncle Sam and in preparing a communist invasion on the US. That he or she is one of “them.” Unsurprisingly, the 1950s alien films usually divided its characters into two groups, “Us” and “Them,” with no one in-between, as if their makers wanted to say “you’re either with us or against us.” To quote Jancovich: They [1950s SF films] portrayed a world of stark choices, a Cold War world in which there was no room for neutrality: one either swore allegiance to American institutions and authorities or was seen to be aiding and abetting the enemy. In this world, there was a clear distinction between right and wrong, order and chaos, the self and the other.64

Corman shot three alien films in the 1950s: It Conquered the World (1956), Not of This Earth (1957) and War of the Satellites (1957), all three of which could be interpreted as products of the early Cold War era. The protagonist of It Conquered the World, Dr Tom Anderson (Lee Van 63 64

Biskind, Seeing is Believing, 140. Jancovich, Rational Fears, 15.

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Cleef), is a well-educated scientist “with every degree imaginable.” However, his views are controversial and in contrast with the mainstream science. He believes, for example, that man should not launch rockets into space because it can anger “an alien force” which “watches us constantly.” Obviously, he is ridiculed by the authorities and, disgruntled, returns home, where he comes in contact with an alien from Venus via radio. Fed up with the attitude of those in power, he allies with the alien, helps it land on the Earth and prepare a take-over. He makes it clear to his doubtful wife (Beverly Garland) that the alien is “good instead of evil,” that it “will save us” and that “the whole world is sick, it always has been, but that’s all over now.” As soon as the alien lands, all the electricity and mechanical equipment stop working. The invasion has begun. Then, Anderson discloses names of the most influential people in the vicinity – the mayor, chief of police, chief security officer in the military installation, and head of the satellite project, Dr Paul Nelson (Peter Graves), who is also a close friend of Anderson. The alien launches eight bat-like devices which will plant mind controlling mechanisms in the necks of these influential people and their wives. As the devices fulfill their tasks on other characters, Nelson meets with Anderson in his house. They discuss the alien and the new world order it is about to impose. Anderson defines the alien (whom he calls “the benefactor”) as a “personal friend” of his and he believes the creature “is here to rescue mankind, not to conquer it.” It will eliminate such obstacles in the development of mankind as stupidity, fear and greed. Nelson, though, remains skeptical, saying that he “would have to take a long hard look at anything that’s gonna change the world and me so completely.” Meanwhile in town chaos ensues. Controlled “leaders” evacuate the inhabitants from the city into the desert. In one meaningful scene the editor of the local newspaper refuses to go. The “possessed” chief of the police says: “There’s no need of papers now. They’re just a stack of ideas and notions. Useless,” and shoots the editor. When Nelson comes home, his mind-controlled wife releases the batlike thing to possess him and leaves the room. Nelson fights it and manages to nail it to the wall with a poker. When his wife returns, he pretends to be controlled as well but then takes out his gun and shoots her. The camera cuts to her falling body as he catches it and caresses for the last time. With the bat-like device destroyed and Nelson still “at large,” Anderson is ordered to kill the scientist himself. He prepares a shotgun and invites his friend over for a talk. Having learned that her husband

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wants to kill his best friend, Mrs Anderson is furious with him. She criticizes him, then tries to reason with him; alas, all to no avail. However, she learns a great deal about the creature, including its location, and decides to take matters into her own hands. When Anderson leaves the room, she takes the shotgun and ventures to meet the monster. Nelson arrives and the two scientists have a long chat. Anderson is shocked that Nelson killed his wife, but Nelson opposes: “She wasn’t my wife. She was a product of your work, a member of the society of the new world.” Anderson insists: “She was still your wife, still Joan, you would’ve been with her if you hadn’t…” But Nelson clarifies: “if I hadn’t destroyed the thing that was trying to control me? Why shouldn’t I destroy it? It was my enemy. You don’t seem to realize we’re at war. You made Joan my enemy, my enemy forever. And I had to kill her. My own wife!” Step by step, Nelson convinces Anderson the alien is an evil being bent on world domination and that it is using Anderson for this fiendish purpose. Anderson undergoes a change of heart and decides to shoot the monster. It is at this point that he realizes his wife took the rifle and is on her way to destroy the creature. As the two set out to the monster’s hideout, killing “possessed” officials on their way, Claire Anderson arrives at its hiding hovel first. Seeing the alien, she says: “So that’s what you look like. You’re ugly! Horrible!” She shoots at the being, but bullets do it no harm and she is killed. Anderson, armed with an improvised flamethrower, is the second to arrive at the hideout. As he faces the creature, he says: “I made it possible for you to come here... I made you welcome to this Earth... You made it a charnel house.” He burns the monster as it grips him with its claws. They both die in each other’s deathly clutches. Nelson arrives when it is already over, just in time to deliver the moral to the audience: He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature... and because of it, the greatest in the universe. He learned too late for himself that men have to find their own way, to make their own mistakes. There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection... they find only death... fire... loss... disillusionment... the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to the toil and misery, but it can’t be given, it has to be achieved. There is hope, but it has to come from inside, from Man himself.

It Conquered the World can easily be interpreted as an anti-Communist film. In fact, it is sufficient to substitute the word “alien” with the word “Communism” in the dialogues to see the historical analogy. Launching rockets into space angers “an alien force” which “watches us constantly” –

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a clear reference to the arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. The alien “is here to rescue mankind, not to conquer it” and yet its servants ruthlessly kill anyone who does not obey – another analogy to the Communist bloc which waged war under the banner of peace. The alien wants to impose a new order just like Communism was supposed to be a new and better world. Like the Rosenberg family, Anderson is depicted as an alien (Communist) spy, disclosing crucial information and enabling the invasion. There are also other, smaller hints, pointing to the relation between the alien and Communism. For instance, when the extraterrestrial lands, all the mechanical and electric devices stop working, but not Anderson’s and those of the controlled leaders – they, similarly to the party members and functionaries in the countries of the Communist bloc, can enjoy the amenities inaccessible to unassociated citizens. Or when the “possessed” policeman shoots the newspaper editor, metaphorically killing the free press. More importantly, however, It Conquered the World epitomizes all the motifs of the 1950s internal invasion films which directly refer to Communism or the Cold War atmosphere. The first of them is the need of unity. Anderson is a well-educated and knowledgeable scientist, but his ideas are not well received by the authorities. “It’s years since anyone believed me,” he complains. Rejected by the American governmental institutions, he turns to an alien force. The alien gives him a feeling of importance, of making contribution. Anderson can take revenge on those who cast him off, which fills him with the sense of triumph. Nelson is merciless when he comments on Anderson’s activities: And you want me to condone this reign of terror? To swear allegiance to this monstrous king of yours? To kill my own soul and all within reach? Well, I won’t, Anderson. I’ll fight it ‘til the last breath in my body. And I’ll fight you, too, because you’re part of it – the worst part. Because you belong to a living race, not a dying one. This is your land, your world. Your hands are human but your mind is enemy. You’re a traitor, Anderson. The greatest traitor of all time. And you know why? Because you’re not betraying part of mankind – you’re betraying all of it.

But Anderson remains imperturbable, so convinced of this rightness that he is even willing to kill his close friend. Only when people he cherishes start dying, his wife included, does he realize he was wrong all the time. He confronts the alien and they both die in a deathly grip – a metaphor for their emotional relationship.65 65

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Regardless whether we understand the alien literally or as a metaphor for the Soviets, the moral of this story is obvious: even if you are unhappy with the state, with its decisions or with its treatment of you, allying with an external force against the governmental institutions will do you and your environment much more harm. Maybe the state is imperfect, official decisions may sometimes be inaccurate, the status quo may leave a lot to be desired, but, although faulty or unsatisfactory at times, it is still the best system America can get, and imposing anything from outside can only lead to trouble. “There can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. And when men seek such perfection... they find only death... fire... loss... disillusionment... the end of everything that’s gone forward” – to quote Nelson again. In this respect, the film fits both theories presented above: it can be interpreted generally as pro-government and antiopposition, or specifically as anti-Communist. The second typical motif is radical dichotomy. Although Anderson has some scruples before shooting Nelson, the mind controlled “leaders” feel no mercy. They ruthlessly kill anyone who poses a threat to their operations or disobeys their orders. The situation looks similar on the other side of the barricade where Nelson shoots his own wife after she becomes “possessed.” “She wasn’t my wife. You made her my enemy,” he explains. “You are either with us or against us” applies to both sides of the conflict to such an extent that in this “world of stark choices” you may even face the ones you love in order to protect the values you believe in. It is friend vs. friend, wife vs. husband – the drama behind the Cold War paranoia. Another typical motif is the use of mind control. There is just one member of the alien race in It Conquered The World. Its aim is to create favorable conditions for the other members to come to Earth, leaving their dying planet. The alien hides in a cave and cajoles Anderson into helping it. Then it releases mind controlling devices to possess key officials in its vicinity. Its “servants” are convinced they are building a new world order, but this belief is not substantiated by facts: none of them has ever been to the “brave new world” they are creating, or even seen their “benefactor.” When Claire Anderson does finally see it, she is terrified: “So that’s what you look like. You’re ugly! Horrible!” This is another metaphor for Communism, or any totalitarian regime for that matter, in which monstrosity, hideousness and inhumanity are concealed under lofty slogans and ideas. The final motif is impassivity. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers impassivity seems to be a by-product of the assault on Earth. The replicas’ only task is to tend to the pods and ensure the proper course of the

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invasion. With only mechanic activities to perform, emotions are redundant. In It Conquered the World, however, impassivity is the explicit goal of the alien. Anderson is well aware of that, but, being a rational man of science and perceiving emotions such as fear as obstacles in scientific work, he embraces the idea without a shadow of doubt. Only this monologue by Nelson does he realize he is being used: You think one of your controlled people would resist? No, not a chance. Courage is an emotion. […] There’s no group feeling, no patriotism, no cooperation of any kind. […] He’s using your human emotions, your loyalty, your desire to help your race, your dreams of freedom to get his own ends. He doesn’t feel all these things. Somebody else has to do it for him.

Summing up, It Conquered the World is a film full of symbolism that fits the Communists-as-aliens theory. As such it would be very critical of the Communist regime, calling it “a reign of terror,” “monstrous king,” “ugly” and “horrible” to quote only a few adjectives. It would also accuse Communists of killing innocent people and breaking up families and relationships in the process of building the “brave new world” which, in fact, is not that great after all but rather “ugly” and “horrible” in its true form. However, Corman himself does not clarify whether It Conquered the World is an anti-Communist film or not, focusing on the ambivalence of science (which will be discussed in another segment of this study) when commenting on this film, so its conscious or unconscious anti-Communist references remain debatable. Yet, Ursini and Silver rightly remark that it is “a philosophical tale of […] incipient fascism.”66 And indeed, It Conquered the World does depict the birth of an authoritarian regime, and in the 1950s America the general public would identify any authoritarian regime as Communism. The following year Corman issued another film about an undercover invader, Not of This Earth, but this time in a lighter tone. Its protagonist, Paul Johnson (Paul Birch), is an emissary from a planet called Davanna, who comes to Earth on a reconnaissance mission. Davanna’s inhabitants are dying of a strange and deadly blood disease caused by long-term exposure to nuclear radiation. Paul’s task is to gather human blood as well as a “live specimen” and send them to his home planet for analysis. He

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also has to observe the human society so as to be able to provide crucial strategic information in the case of eventual conquest. Paul’s character is a mixture of dread and ridiculousness. On the one hand, he seems to be lost on Earth which is a foreign environment for him. Therefore, he literally behaves like an alien: he cannot properly drive or park a car, he speaks artificial language (saying, for instance, “an automobile” instead of “a car”) and commits faux pas wherever he goes. But he is always very polite, a little old-fashioned in behavior and always impeccably dressed in a neat suit, which evokes a feeling of affinity in other characters and in the audience. He also has a number of health problems: he suffers from the strange blood disease and has to undergo daily blood transfusions, lying helplessly in bed; and he cannot stand highpitched sounds which cause him severe pain. His plight evokes sympathy even after he is exposed and killed: “In a way I feel sorry for him […]. So far from home, so far from everyone he knew,” says one of the characters over Paul’s grave. But the others cannot find any compassion for their persecutor and neither should the audience: “I can’t feel sorry for him. He had no emotions as we know them. He was a foreign thing come here to destroy us.” Paul is not even perceived as a person but as a “thing.” Indeed, Paul is a typical 1950s alien, similar to the extraterrestrials featured in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – lifeless, hollow, dehumanized – and also behaves in a similar fashion. Firstly, he leads a double life: by day a neat elderly man undergoing therapy at a local hospital, by night a vicious killer and plotter against humanity, and when unseen and locked safely in his room, he contacts his alien superiors to report on his infiltration mission. Secondly, he feels no emotions, which makes him ruthlessly hunt down and kill his victims with no fear for his own life. Finally, he is technologically advanced and possesses unearthly powers: he hides terrifying pupilless eyes under his dark sunglasses, with a mere glance of which he burns the brains of his victims in order to extract blood from their dead bodies. Similar to the alien from It Conquered the World, he also has means to hypnotize people and give them orders in their trance. The antagonists from It Conquered the World and Not of This Earth share the same characteristics. They are ruthless, emotionless, dehumanized, they come from dying worlds, they hide their ugliness and brutality under their attractive exterior, they plot against the USA to conquer and subjugate it, they brainwash and incapacitate righteous and law-biding American citizens, in other words they appear and behave much as 1950s Americans perceived Communists. Neither of them succeeds in their conquest, though, which conveys a message to the

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audience: anyone or anything trying to destroy us, Americans, is bound to fail. They may be technologically superior and more intelligent, it may damage us and even hurt individuals, but it will eventually fail because it has to be so. Corman returns to the motif of an undercover invader in his final alien film – War of the Satellites. The plot revolves around a group of scientists and astronauts involved in a space program, the aim of which is to send a manned satellite into the Earth’s orbit. However, the planet is encircled by a strange barrier of energy and every spaceship which comes in contact with it – explodes. The situation clears up when the United Nations receive a message from outer space – humans have to stop their exploration of the cosmos: We, the Masters of the Spiral Nebula Ghana, have been observing your actions. Understand, earthlings, that we look with disfavor upon your persistent efforts to depart from your planet and infest other areas of the universe. We have, therefore, set quarantine measures to ensure that this contamination shall not be allowed to spread. We shall frustrate your every attempt in the future as we have those in the past. Knowing that earthlings are equipped with rudimentary reflex-type intelligence, we are taking this means of conveying our command that all such efforts to expand and depart from the infected planet Earth shall from this moment be stopped.

The leading scientists of the project, Dr. Van Ponder (Richard Devon), considers the message authentic but informs the media that it is a hoax. Then, he gathers the crew for another manned expedition into space – an expedition he plans to lead himself. However, when he is driving to a UN summit, a mysterious force pushes his car off the road and he dies in a horrible crash. After his death is announced at the UN forum, the door to the plenary room suddenly opens revealing… Dr. Van Ponder, alive, safe and sound, without a single scratch or a blotch of dirt on his impeccable suit. The oblivious UN delegates applaud, but the viewers know better: Van Ponder is stiff, emotionless and gloomy, “like a vampire risen from the grave”67 – control over his body has been assumed and he is now an undercover alien planning to subvert the space program from within. With Van Ponder back in his place, the UN approve a further manned mission into space, which Van Ponder promptly reports to the aliens. The extraterrestrials decide to take drastic actions and show humanity a sample of their destructive abilities – they trigger earthquakes and storms, set 67

Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 92.

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forests on fire and sink ships. Van Ponder tries to use these occurrences to convince his crewmembers to quit the project: We’re up against a race of beings whose intelligence is as ours to ants and bacteria. We have the choice of continuing to exist under whatever conditions they may name… or being exterminated. It’s that simple.

He writes a speech in that tone and hands it to his best astronaut, Dave Boyer (Dick Miller), to read at another UN summit. Boyer, however, disobeys and gives a passionate oration in favor of the space program: The delegate has spoken of naked survival. Gentlemen, you do not survive by abject surrender. Nations and worlds must fight for survival. If we give up now, let down our defenses, give this alien planet full control over our actions and our lives for mere survival, won’t they take even that from us? Did the gentlemen here ask themselves why the aliens are so concerned we do not penetrate the Sigma barrier? Isn’t it peculiar that this action alone excites them to retaliation? They consider us a danger if we break out the quarantine as they so tactfully put it. They haven’t even bothered to find out if our motives are peaceful or not. They don’t know we want to collaborate and share knowledge, treat them as equal partners in the universe. But we can’t show them this by surrendering. It is precisely because they do not wish us to travel the skies that we must do so. Gentlemen, we must proceed with project Sigma at all costs.

The two speeches, Boyer’s and Van Ponder’s, echo the political atmosphere of the 1950s. If aliens in science fiction films from that period are a metaphor of Communists, then Van Ponder, a Communist spy, wants Americans to acknowledge the superiority of the Soviets and discourage them from any political or military interference outside the borders of America. Patriotic Boyer, on the other hand, wants the USA to oppose their adversary, show strength and determination, and continue their actions regardless of the consequences – an attitude surprisingly similar to the policy of “brinkmanship” formulated by the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles a year before War of the Satellites was produced, which maintained that America should push the Soviets up to a brink of war in order to force necessary concessions and preserve the free world.68 Corman also reflected the conflicting attitudes of Boyer and Van Ponder in the cast as they are polar opposites: the latter is played by tall and slim Richard Devon while the former – by short and robust Dick Miller. 68 William Kellogg, American History the Easy Way, 3rd ed. (New York: Barron’s Educational Series, 2003), 284.

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Boyer’s speech convinces the UN officials to give another green light to the space program, which forces the fake Van Ponder to participate. As he works on the project, his lack of emotions starts giving him away. At one moment in the film, when he is supervising one of his subordinates, he accidentally puts his hand under a blowtorch and, unaware of this, keeps it in the flame for several seconds. His hand is scorched black and he has to use his powers to regenerate it before other members of the personnel notice. When the spaceship, complete with the entire crew, is already on the orbit, Boyer, who is suspicious of Van Ponder, asks the deck physician, Doctor Lazar (Eric Sinclair), to give Van Ponder a medical test and listen to his heart. Van Ponder, wishing to conceal the truth that he is in fact an animated corpse controlled by alien powers, uses his regenerative powers to restart his heart, which has not been beating – literally and symbolically – since the car accident. This step proves to be his undoing as human emotions immediately fog his rational mind and he rushes to Sybil (Susan Cabot), an attractive female crewmember he now wishes to court. As the earthly emotion of love takes control over his rationality, he feels lost and uneasy, and neglects his duties as the captain of the ship. Unable to woo Sybil and supervise the mission at the same time, he decides to replicate himself and send his other self to control the spacecraft. When Sybil asks him who or what he is, he answers: “I’m human. Because of you I’m human.” Meanwhile, his twin self is confronted by Boyer and a fight ensues in which Boyer shoots “the twin.” The original Van Ponder, also dying, clutches Sybil in his last desperate attempt to quench his pent-up passion but eventually perishes. The ship, now controlled by Boyer, safely passes the deadly energy barrier. Boyer’s “brinkmanship” attitude proved to be successful. He reports to the base: “We made it. The whole universe is our new frontier.” War of the Satellites exploits similar motifs as It Conquered the World, Not of This Earth and other SF narratives from the period do. Van Ponder, the main antagonist, is an emotionless construct, a human corpse animated and controlled by an alien force. He is dead literally – because he does not feel pain and his heart does not beat – and symbolically – he cannot experience emotions and, consequently, his existence constitutes a parody of human life, for he is just a flesh golem (though a highly intelligent one) whose only purpose is to sabotage his enemies, even at the cost of his own life. As in the case of other possession films, the features this alien possesses coincide with the popular image of Communists in the 1950s – ruthless, emotionless, highly-organized ant-like society bent on eliminating any form of individuality. At one point in the film when Van

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Ponder tries to convince a crewmember to join him, the man replies: “You can go to hell! I was born a human and I’ll die one before I join a race that kills innocent people for abstract ideas.” This sentence must have rung a bell for the 1950s audience: the Soviets were considered to kill innocent people to spread or sustain socialism – an idea Americans deemed abstract and artificial. However, Corman did not intend to shoot an anti-Communist film, it was rather a subconscious product of the sociopolitical atmosphere of the era. “Anybody working in a creative fashion works partly out of their conscious mind and partially out of their unconscious mind,”69 Corman used to say. His conscious intention, though, also stemmed from historic events – the day after the Sputnik launch (October 4, 1957) he went to the producers and convinced them to shoot a picture about artificial satellites: I talked Allied Artists into backing War of the Satellites without having any story whatsoever, just on the promise of turning out a picture in a very short period of time to capitalize on the public interest following the Sputnik launch. When they said, “Okay, make the picture,” the first thing I had to do was find out what a satellite looked like.70

The story behind War of the Satellites shows Corman’s modus operandi as a director and producer: immediately react to any social, political or historical events that the audience might be interested in, schedule a picture, do some quick research, prepare the script and shoot the film to profit from the public interest before any other producer/director does. War of the Satellites was in theatres exactly eight weeks after the Sputnik launch and did very well commercially.71 Released already in 1957, it was the first picture to tap into the Sputnik interest, preceding all the other “satellite” films like Space Master X-7 (1958) or Satellite of Blood (1959). At first, the Sputnik launch filled Americans with pride and optimism – man has crossed the barrier of outer space and put a man-made satellite on the Earth’s orbit, which was the first step of space exploration. When Sputnik was passing over the territory of the United States, people went into the streets with telescopes and binoculars to spot it in the sky. Some of them were crying.72 Newspapers and futurists were very optimistic as well: “Soviet scientists launched a symbol of man’s liberation from the 69

Corman in Nasr, Roger Corman Interviews, 203. Roger Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 94. 71 Corman in Nasr, ed. Roger Corman Interviews, 77. 72 Sputnik Mania, directed by David Hoffman (2007; New York: History, 2008), DVD. 70

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forces which have hitherto bound him to Earth” – New York Times; “The launch of Sputnik is like the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus” – The New Republic; “The launch of Sputnik is one of the greatest scientific moments is world history” – Arthur C. Clarke.73 Soon enough, however, American political and military leaders realized the hazard the launch of Sputnik carried. Up until then, neither the US nor the Soviet Union possessed bombers capable of carrying nuclear charges to the other side of the globe, but with Sputnik so effortlessly circling the Earth, Americans began to fear that the Soviets might drop nuclear bombs on the USA from their satellites.74 President Eisenhower ordered the acceleration of the American space program and, after the initial failure of Project Vanguard in December 1957, Americans managed to put their own satellite on the Earth’s orbit four months after the launch of Sputnik. In this historical context, Corman’s War of the Satellites hit the bull’s eye – the few months following the release of the film were indeed a war of the satellites. 2.1.4. Science and scientists Scientists are usually presented in a twofold manner in modern culture: either as saviors or as villains. A savior scientist creates medication, cures diseases, stimulates technological progress, invents devices which protect his/her fellow citizens and/or fight their enemies. Numerous examples of savior scientists can be found throughout the history of cinema: Sam Daniels in Outbreak (1995), the scientific team in Andromeda Strain (1971), Matt Hooper in Jaws (1975), Robert Neville in Omega Man (1971), Daisuke Serizawa in Godzilla (1954), the list goes on. On the other side of the spectrum, however, there is a villain – or mad – scientist, who uses science not to cure, save and help but to torment, enslave or destroy. Villain scientists include Rotwang in Metropolis (1927), Lex Luthor in the Superman movies (1978 and 1980) or the eponymous scientist in Dr. Strangelove. However, scientists do not have to necessarily be evil at heart to unleash peril onto their surroundings or onto the unsuspecting world itself. They can break ethical rules in pursuit of scientific success (Victor Frankenstein or the team of scientists in Jurassic Park), recklessly experiment on themselves (Dr. Jekyll or Dr. Delambre in The Fly), act irresponsibly and allow accidents to happen (Watchers), or perform experiments without considering the consequences. In all these cases, they 73 74

All quotes after Sputnik Mania. Sputnik Mania.

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are not downright evil, but their violation of the scientific code of conduct still makes them “bad” scientists. The late 1940s and the 1950s are a particularly interesting period to observe the depiction of scientists by the mass culture. For the first time in history, scientists developed an extraordinary tool – atomic power – which could bring exceptional benefits to humanity but could also wreak unprecedented destruction. In popular opinion, scientists were in charge of that tool, responsible for thousands if not millions human lives. In reality though, they had merely token control of the actual usage of their atomic devices by the army. Although some of them were very vocal about their ethical concerns (the Szilard petition), military officials as well as politicians would hardly ever listen.75 Nevertheless, scientists became prominent persons in the early postwar America and while some of them were elevated to public figures who would work for the common good of the Americans, others betrayed Uncle Sam and secretly worked for the Communist Bloc, which would shock the public opinion when their machinations were exposed. The former group included, among others, Albert Einstein, not only a brilliant scientist but also a man of ethics, who founded the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists in 1946. Its purpose was to educate the general public on the dangers and benefits of atomic energy as well as to work towards international peace so as not to allow the use of nuclear weapons ever again. Einstein’s preoccupations with the misuse of atomic energy and the need for public education are visible in the following fragment of “A Message from Albert Einstein” printed in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: We scientists believe that a clear and widespread understanding of the facts and implications of the atomic discoveries is indispensible to a reasonable public stand on questions of international politics. We believe that with such understanding, the American people will choose from among many paths to reach a peaceful solution and that they will move toward such a solution and not toward war. And we believe that, in the long run, security for all nations demands a supra-national solution.76

On the other side of the spectrum, there was Klaus Fuchs, a brilliant mathematician, who, like Einstein, worked on the development of the atomic bomb and, subsequently, the hydrogen bomb. However, Fuchs also 75

Hendershot, Paranoia, the bomb, and 1950s science fiction films, 24. Albert Einstein, “A Message from Albert Einstein,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (January 1948), 33.

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disclosed confidential information on the Manhattan Project to the Soviets, allowing them to build their own atomic bomb, Joe-1, an almost exact copy of the bombs the Americans dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although historians argue whether the knowledge Fuchs had divulged helped or hampered the development of the Soviet atomic bomb,77 his treason was still a shock for the American public. Hollywood science fiction films of the 1950s reflected the popularity of scientists and their importance in international policy: “the heyday of the atomic scientist as a potential world-policy shaper extended from approximately 1945 to 1963, and sf continually explored the ramifications of the atomic scientist and his place in postwar American society.”78 They also mirrored the dual nature of the American men of science, the Einstein-Fuchs juxtaposition, and deep inside some of these narratives a question is embedded: can Americans trust their scientists? The answer to this question depended on the political attitude of the filmmakers. In the liberal The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), for example, when a flying saucer lands in President’s Park in Washington, unimaginative government and military officials try to kill its peaceful pilot, thus putting the whole planet in danger. Fortunately, the situation is resolved by Professor Barnhardt, a character probably modeled on Einstein, who gathers an assembly of scientists and resolves the crisis. Conversely, in the conservative The Thing from Another World (1951), when the military personnel of an Arctic station discovers and accidentally revives a dangerous extraterrestrial monster, Dr. Carrington, the leading scientist with a beard and a Russian fur hat, secretly sabotages the military’s efforts to contain and annihilate the alien, putting the station – the entire film universe – in grave danger.79 Corman would also pose the same question in his own pictures, which is all the more interesting due to the fact that, with a degree in engineering, he was a man of science himself. The first scientist in Corman’s films, Paul Maddison, appears as early as in Day the World Ended and, according to Silver and Ursini, opens “Corman’s long series of arrogant, fascistic, hypocritical scientists-preachers who try to impose their will on the community around them.”80 Indeed, Maddison is a disgruntled, strict and down-to-earth person with a fixed scientific plan for survival he is unwilling to change even at the cost of human lives. He is reluctant to 77 Jeremy Bernstein, “John von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs: An Unlikely Collaboration,” Physics in Perspective 12, no. 1 (March 2010), 36-50. 78 Hendershot, Paranoia, the Bomb, and 1950s Science Fiction Films, 23. 79 Richard Alan Schwartz, The 1950s (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 106. 80 Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 30.

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allow other survivors into his fallout shelter for fear that such a numerous group would not have enough provisions to get by on until radiation died out, and it is only after the pleas of his daughter that he changes his mind. He still remains arrogant and convinced of his own infallibility and omniscience. “If I want an opinion, I’ll ask for it,” he says when somebody has the cheek to disagree with him. Being a scientist, he is simply too rational and scientific, up to the point where he disregards human life for the sake of his rational, planned, scientific undertakings. However, he undergoes a change of heart which is caused by two reasons: he starts reading the Bible, and he observes the blooming romance between his daughter and Rick, one of the survivors he initially did not want to shelter. In short, he lets some metaphysics into his rational mind and, over time, he begins to understand that there are matters which elude science: love, compassion (and humanism in general) and mysticism. He decides to foster and protect the new couple, hoping they will rebuild human civilization like the new Adam and Eve. “You’ve given me a new sense of responsibility,” he tells Rick. And indeed, he manages to save Rick’s life by shooting the gangster Tony, thus removing the last obstacle separating the couple from happiness. Dr. Tom Anderson from It Conquered the World also undergoes a change of heart, though his “sins” are far greater than those of Maddison: he cooperates with an alien invader and allows it to assume control over his hometown. Anderson is not too rational like Maddison; he is, in fact, irrational, believing in his cause so strongly that he refuses any evidence, even the most solid and evident, which does not concur with his convictions, and in this sense he is a “bad” scientist. Like Maddison, he holds no regard for human life, believing that a few deaths constitute a necessary evil on the way to a greater good. And just as in Day the World Ended, it is Anderson’s close ones, this time his wife and his best friend, that break through his shroud of arrogance and open his eyes on the evil he permitted. As far as Anderson is just an American led astray (who manages to redeem himself at the end, at least partially), Dr. Van Ponder from War of the Satellites is an outright alien spy and saboteur. He discloses confidential information, kills the innocent and disrupts a vital scientific project in the name of his alien superiors. Both Anderson and Van Ponder are closer to Fuchs than to Einstein, and represent the scientists America cannot trust. Little can be said about the scientific team from Attack of the Crab Monsters as these characters are mostly expendable and die early in the film. Although they do manage to solve the mystery and devise a method

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to destroy the monsters, the true hero of the film who sacrifices himself to eliminate the threat is not a scientist but a technician. The moral of the story is ambivalent: science (nuclear tests in this case) can bring death and destruction onto the world, but when this happens, science can also correct its errors and save at least a part of the world and a part of the population (symbolized here by a man and a woman – the new Adam and Eve – Corman’s typical happy ending and a promise of a new beginning), which will be able to rebuild civilization. Corman concurs with this interpretation: Like the characters in my science-fiction films, I am somewhat ambivalent about science. I have a degree in engineering and a minor in physics, and I have always been interested in science. I even think of science as a potential savior of the human race. Yet, I am also aware of its potential for destruction.81

2.2. Teen film (juvenile delinquency) In the 1950s, the USA saw a steep rise in the number of teenagers. Between 1946 and 1960 their population increased from 5.6 million to 11.8 million.82 This should have filled Americans with optimism – the nation was growing strong and healing the wounds left by World War II – but it did not. Teenagers developed their own culture with their own music, clothing, dancing and leisure activities, and their parents were appalled to discover that they no longer understood their children, not only in terms of the behavior but even literally, in conversation, when their kids used vocabulary like “blast,” “dig,” or “hip.” “Kids were aliens.” 83 This is how James Gilbert recounts the adult reaction to teenager culture: First came incredulity and amazement. In the immediate postwar years, the energy of teenagers, expressed in outlandish fads, both fascinated and appalled adults. Practically every periodical article devoted to adolescence recorded clothing, dancing, and language fads that changed with bewildering speed, for no apparent reason. […] By the mid-1950s, growing fear that a whole generation had turned sour overlaid this initial bewilderment and curiosity. The frenzied dances, music, and ritualized family rebellions forewarned of a larger and very serious social problem. Stories of mindless gang violence, inspired by such occasions as the arrest and trial of four boys in Brooklyn in 1954 for the murder of a vagrant; led 81

Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 51. William Clark, “The Kids Really Fit: Rock Text and Rock Practice in Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock,” Popular Music and Society 18.4 (1994): 69. 83 Biskind, Seeing is Believing, 197. 82

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Indeed, only between 1948-1953 the rate of juvenile delinquency rose by as much as forty-five percent.85 In 1953, a special subcommittee called The United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency was created to investigate the phenomenon. The problem also found its way into the media: “juvenile delinquency was headline news in American newspapers in the mid-1950s and was covered extensively by prestigious magazines including the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Life, Time, Newsweek, Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly.”86 The media pointed to the fact that teenagers could no longer discern the line between having fun and perpetrating crime, for which fact broken families, mobility and absent, working mothers were blamed.87 Opinions on the phenomenon were very harsh: Saturday Evening Post, for example, called juvenile delinquency “the Shame of America.”88 The topic soon sifted to Hollywood. Film producers were torn between teenagers and their critics. On the one hand, they did not want to be suspected of popularizing or exonerating juvenile delinquency, and antagonize their adult spectators. On the other hand, they realized the purchasing power of the newly-emerged teenage audience – an audience which had disposable income and wanted to spend it on entertainment. The result was an array of films which tried to appease both age groups. These narratives mostly presented rebellious teenagers as normal, intelligent young people (something the teenage audience appreciated). According to Biskind, the teenagers from Rebel Without a Cause (1955) “sound as if they spend more time reading Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard than smoking in the bathroom or making out on Lover’s Lane,”89 and the film itself “so sentimentalizes its delinquents that although they may be angry and (self-)destructive, they are more moral, upstanding and lawabiding than anyone else.”90 Indeed, they are a little misfortunate or misguided, that is a fact, but it is not their own fault, it is the fault of their 84

James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 13. 85 Gaile McGregor, “Domestic Blitz: A Revisionist History of the Fifties,” American Studies 34.1 (Spring 1993): 22. 86 Lev, The Fifties, 245. 87 Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 14. 88 Biskind, Seeing is Believing, 197. 89 Biskind, Seeing is Believing, 200. 90 Ibid., 200.

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parents. In Rebel Without a Cause, for example, all the young characters come from dysfunctional families: Jim’s parents keep fighting and he has a poor father figure, Judy’s father is an authoritarian brute, and Plato’s parents are divorced and he is devoid of parental love; in The Delinquents (1957) Scotty and Janice rebel because their parents are against their relationship; and so on. As Biskind notes “families had occasionally been targeted in thirties and forties films like McCarey’s Wild Company (1930) or I Accuse My Parents (1944), but it wasn’t until the postwar period that they routinely took the blame.”91 Many of the 1950s juvenile delinquency films, like Rebel Without a Cause, The Delinquents, Blackboard Jungle (1955), Crime in the Streets (1956), Rumble on the Docks (1956), end with a happy these-kids-are-allright ending, promising the reintegration of the rebellious youth into the law-abiding society (something the adult audience appreciated). Obviously, there existed more one-sided pictures. In The Unguarded Moment (1956), young John Saxon is a dangerous sex maniac and has to be unconditionally separated from the society, but this is also a result of inept parenthood – his father is a misogynist. Corman, who would never shy away from social issues in his films, shot two juvenile delinquency pictures: Teenage Doll (1957) and Sorority Girl (1957), both of which contain a serious social commentary. Teenage Doll opens with a text crawl: This is not a pretty picture… it could not be pretty and still be true. What happens to the girl is unimportant… What happens to the others is more than important; it is the most vital issue of our time. This story is about a sickness, a spreading epidemic that threatens to destroy our very way of life. We are not doctors… we can offer no cure… but we know that a cure must be found.

Corman would often use crawls, voice-overs or spoken prologues at the beginning of his pictures as they were a cheap and easy way to introduce the story, set the mood and get the audience focused on the film. Five Guns West, Teenage Doll, The Trip, Attack of the Crab Monsters, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre open with text crawls; Prehistoric World, Creature from the Haunted Sea, The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, The Raven, Tales of Terror start with a voice-over; Day the World Ended begins with both, while The Undead opens with a prologue spoken directly into the camera. The crawl from Teenage Doll shifts the attention from the main female protagonist, 91

Ibid., 199.

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who, as the audience is about to see, is just a good, moral and law-abiding kid in trouble, to other characters in the film, the gang members who are far more spoilt and corrupt. It is they who constitute a problem for the society. A problem the society must somehow solve. The plot begins as in a noir picture: a half-naked body of a beautiful young girl lies in a gutter of a dark alley, near some bins overflowing with rubbish, perhaps as a symbol of “white trash.” When the members of two allied gangs, male Tarantulas and female Black Widows, arrive at the crime scene, the audience learns that the victim’s name was Nan and she was a member of the Widows. The female gang members also identify the culprit – Barbara Bonney (June Kenney), a local girl who courts the leader of another male gang, the Vandals (their female counterpart being the Vandalettes), whom Nan would also flirt with. A conclusion is drawn: the two girls had a row about the boy and Barbara killed Nan to have him only for herself. The Black Widows plan to get even and avenge their friend. They are going to visit the leader of the Vandals, Eddie Rand (John Brinkley), and pay him a large sum of money to give Barbara away. The gang girls disperse and each one heads home to get some money, which allows Corman to set the social context by examining their family life. Lorrie (Sandy Smith) comes from a broken family. She lives in a rickety, dirty, littered flat together with her little sister. Her sister is also dirty and unkempt, and probably does not go to school as she should. She speaks very little, only to beg her older sister for food, to which her sister responds by giving her a box of crackers and reprimanding her not to pester her again. Their father lives away and occasionally sends them an envelope with cash to get by on. May (Colette Jackson) also lives with her sister only, but here roles are reversed: she is the younger one. Her older sister, Janet (Barboura Morris), is the bread-winner in the duo. Janet has dreams and aspirations, she would like to move uptown and lead a better life. She is so desperate for a mere taste of a better existence that she decides to date her own boss. “I admit I’m going out with my boss tonight because for once in my life I want to eat caviar instead of meat loaf,” she confesses. May is skeptical about her sister’s plan. She believes the boss will take advantage of Janet and lure her to bed, and even if Janet does have luck and one day moves with him uptown, she will live the rest of her life with an ugly bore for a husband. May concludes her argument: “Maybe I look like a piece of junk to you. That’s because I was born in this hole and I was raised in this dump […]. Only I’m hip to where I am, I’m hip and I’m gonna stay here.” She then takes some money and leaves her sister crying.

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Squirrel (Ziva Rodann) comes from a hard-working Latino family. Her family members are so engrossed in running their own business, a bakery of some sort, that they do not seem to notice her. They even use a different language than the one Squirrel uses when talking with her friends – an allegory for the lack of communication between generations. Betty (Barbara Wilson) gets no attention from her family either. Her parents are too busy with their other duties to spend time with the girl. Her father is a hard-working policeman, while her mother devotes all her time to her new-born baby. Betty steals her father’s service gun to use it against Barbara. When Hel (Fay Spain), the gang leader, returns home, she sees her father caressing a young woman in the shadows of the apartment. She launches into a moral tirade from which the audience learns that her father is ill and unable to work. Her mother is the only bread-winner and when she is working her fingers to the bone to put food in her husband’s mouth, he is meeting younger women on the side. “You’re sick,” Hel accuses him and it is clear now that she is far more moral and fair than him. When she leaves the house, her father’s lover comes back and they resume their interrupted love affair. Meanwhile, the film cuts to Barbara, who is fleeing the crime scene. We can tell at first sight that she is “a good kid next door.” She has blond hair and fair complexion and is wearing a white dress and a creamy sweater (unlike the gang girls who dress in their gang uniform: black trousers with rolled up pant legs plus brown jacket with the words “Black Widow” and a spider on the back). With her childlike face and naivety in her eyes, she epitomizes the virginal middle-class girl. When she flees her pursuers through the dim, gloomy alleys, she looks like a bright spot among darkness – a symbol of innocence in a cruel world. Barbara is the only middle-class character in the film. She lives in a suburban-style house with both parents. However, her family has its share of problems, too. Her father is strict and authoritarian. He shows his daughter no affection; he does not even praise her: “She didn’t graduate. She was graduated.” Barbara gets along well with her mother, though, and they both confide their deepest dreams and secrets in each other: the mother – that she does not love her husband and that she wishes she had married another man, and Barbara – that she fell in love with a gang leader, something her father would never understand, let alone approve of. Barbara, however, does not confess to her mother that she accidentally killed Nan. She knows her mother is helpless, as in the 1950s it was the father who was the head of the family and who would deal with such serious matters. If her father was more lenient, caring and understanding,

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she would probably admit to being in trouble and the situation would be resolved in accordance with the law. But Barbara knows she cannot expect any sympathy or compassion and decides to turn to Eddie for help. When she arrives at the Vandals’ hideout, Eddie is just as unsympathetic as her father would be. When she needs comfort and support, he teases and taunts her together with the other gang members, and it turns out he revealed her most private and intimate secrets to the group, making her more vulnerable to peer mockery. He refuses to help Barbara until it becomes evident that the Tarantulas and the Black Widows followed her and are on their way to the Vandals’ hovel. Then he decides to confront them, although again not to help her, but because he likes fights. When the brawl finally ensues, it is interrupted by the police under the command of detective Dunston (Richard Devon), who has been investigating Nan’s death. As the Black Widows watch from a distance, Barbara turns herself in and – let down by the people close to her and on the verge of a nervous breakdown – falls into the arms of Dunston, the only male character in the film who truly cared for her. Meanwhile, some of the Black Widows begin to reconsider their way of life. Hel tries to stop them, saying: “It’s too late for me, for all of us.” But Squirrel and Betty turn themselves in, too. Unsurprisingly, they are the ones with complete, mostly “normal” families. True enough, they feel alienated from the other family members, but this is not something that cannot be undone. In the case of Hel, Lorry and May, who come from broken families, there is indeed no hope for familial reconciliation. As Betty surrenders to the police, she hands her father his gun. This act violates the old rule of narratives which says that if a pistol appears in a story, it has to be fired at one time or another. Corman shows that this is not always the case and that juvenile delinquents are not doomed to go down the spiral of crime. They have free will and their lives depend on their decisions. At first glance, Teenage Doll seems to be a schematic juvenile delinquency movie with all its typical elements: misguided-but-goodhearted teenagers (Barbara, Squirrel, Betty), a sympathetic state official (detective Dunston), broken or dysfunctional families which are to blame for producing juvenile delinquents, and a happy ending which brings optimism about the future of the apologetic delinquents. However, Corman goes beyond the scheme and touches upon social issues absent in other teen films. The first of them is class struggle. When Eddie ridicules Barbara, he tells her: “You did one thing wrong. The worst thing anyone can do. You stepped out of your class.” According to Silver and Ursini, “this Marxist perspective radiates from the film’s implied criticism of a society that

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leaves its children to the vagaries of poverty and dysfunctional families. Corman, with his prescience, tapped into an issue that would become more crucial in American society as time went on.”92 Indeed, in 1964 President Johnson announced a War on Poverty, which introduced legislation allocating federal funds to fight against poverty. The second of them is the criticism of traditional gender roles, an issue Corman would touch upon in many of his films regardless of the genre. In Teenage Doll, he targets men and their role in a family and in man-woman relations. All the men in the film are bad partners: Hel’s father cheats on his wife and exploits her financially; Barbara’s father is cold and dispassionate toward his wife, so she feels no love for him; Eddie is cynical, callous and mean to his girlfriend. Moreover, all of the men in the film are also bad fathers and none of them manages to protect their daughters from street life. Barbara is the most misfortunate, for when she gets into serious trouble, neither her father nor her boyfriend come to her aid. Corman thus criticizes his male characters for not fulfilling their most basic and traditional gender role in a man-woman relation – to protect and support the female. Barbara, by the way, is not a typical Corman heroine. She is emotional, weak, naïve and dependent, instead of being strong and dominant like his other female protagonists. As she has no inner strength to overcome her problems, she seeks security in the men around her, which proves to be the reason for her undoing. Corman’s films thus carry a clear message to their female audience – in the twentieth century, women need to be strong and rely on themselves. Sorority Girl also revolves around the topics of juvenile violence and familial disunity, although the film itself is far less schematic than Teenage Doll. Its title sequences contain a series of drawings of a woman – the film’s protagonist – which metaphorically present her personality: she wears masks; she has two profiles, light and dark; she is a demon and a monster; she burns in flames; she whips an innocent woman; and she falls down a whirl of darkness. The drawings ill dispose the audience towards the protagonist; however, the cinematic sequence opens with her kneeling in beach sand, crying, resembling a victim rather than a torturer. She (her name is Sabra Tanner and she is played by Susan Cabot) says: “if everything could only start from the beginning, then I could stop what I have already done. It’s terrible to be hated the way people hate me. My life is like that nightmare which has always haunted me.” Showing the protagonist like that, broken and regretful, Corman asks the viewers to pity, not to condemn her. The filmmaker would never ostracize his 92

Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 63.

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misguided characters, neither Sabra from Sorority Girl nor the delinquents from Teenage Doll or the bikers from Wild Angels. Sabra awakes from the nightmare with a scream. She is in her dormitory. Ellie (Barbara Crane), her dorm mate, rushes inside to caress her. Ellie is chubby, insecure, and a bit dim. She is also a freshman – an ideal candidate for Sabra to torment, haze and exploit. Sabra recoils from the gentle touch of her friend and immediately starts reprimanding her. Ellie explains apologetically: “I only wanted to make you feel better,” to which Sabra replies “Why, Ellie? What do you want? Don’t tell me you care about me.” Sabra is unable to understand that people can be altruistic, she is mistrustful and she always suspects deceit. Her behavior stems from the difficult relations with her mother, which are presented in a later scene when she meets her mother at a café. Mrs. Tanner (Fay Baker) is a wealthy widow. She wears posh, upper-class garments and speaks cultivated English. The two women treat each other with cold formality, their contact lacks the warmth, closeness and understanding typical for mother-daughter relations. It becomes evident that the mother tolerates her daughter only because of their common inheritance. When Mrs. Tanner actually uses the word “mother,” Sabra replies: “I know how to spell it, but what does it mean?” Soon enough, the two women start arguing about the inherited money and possessions, and their cultured masks come off. “You were a rat the day you were born. It was in your eyes,” says the mother, to which Sabra replies: “I inherited it. It was your genes, I guess.” Her angry mother produces an allowance check that she was about to give to Sabra, but now she tears it to pieces, leaving her daughter with no means to get by on. Sabra concludes the scene: “I hate you, mother.” Being cut off from her late father’s money is a serious blow for Sabra, who is accustomed to a life of luxury. She reacts by hazing Ellie even harder. She forces her to wash her underwear even though Ellie has to study for an exam, she slaps her face when Ellie says something silly, she keeps picking on her figure and she orders her to do strenuous exercises. During one of such “sport sessions,” when Ellie cannot carry on doing situps, Sabra takes a cricket bat and spanks her hard several times. At this point, Rita (Barboura Morris), another dorm mate, accidentally comes into Sabra’s room and witnesses the scene. She reprimands Sabra and declares she will report her to the dean. This forces Sabra to blackmail Rita that, in return, she will publicly reveal embarrassing facts from Rita’s life. Sabra is appalled by her own behavior, by the violence and blackmail. “Something kept driving me to hurt others. I knew I was sick. I needed someone to help me, even if it was mother,” she admits in a voice-over. She finds her mother at their estate, lounging by the pool. She sits next to

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her and immediately goes to pieces. “I need you,” she sobs. Her mother replies: “You drove a hundred miles just to tell me that?” This question sobers Sabra up. She gets up and walks a few steps away, increasing – literally and symbolically – the distance from Mrs Tanner. She does not resign from her attempt at reconciliation, though. She apologizes for her behavior at the café and starts explaining her problems but falls to pieces again and hugs her mother. An interesting dialog ensues: Mother: “Don’t do that.” Sabra [sobbing]: “It’s just your love… It’s all I want.” Mother: “You have my love. Now stop acting like an infant.” Sabra [mumbling]: “If you don’t help… I don’t know…” Mother: “Now what kind of help is it you’re after? Is it money? You want your allowance back? Is that what you want?” Sabra [shaking her head]: “No.” Mother: “I am not ready to restore it.” Sabra [screaming]: “Please, listen to me” Mother: […] “In plain, everyday language, what is it you’re after? What do you want?” Sabra [resigned]: “It’s… It doesn’t matter.” [walks away]

The failure to receive any form of love, support or compassion from her mother drives Sabra to do more evil. When she learns that a female student, Tina (June Kenney), is pregnant, she persuades her to blackmail one of the male students, Mort (Dick Miller), to extort money from him even though he is not the father. In the final scenes of the film, all the sorority girls are at the beach we saw at the beginning of the film. Guilt-ridden Tina tries to jump off a cliff and commit suicide, but she is rescued by Mort. Then she confesses to him and the other girls that blackmailing him was Sabra’s idea. The girls form a circle around Sabra, expose her schemes and call her names. Ellie hits her, taking revenge for the hazing and humiliation. Sabra tries to defend herself: “You never bothered to find out what my story was.” When the girls leave her alone, in voice-over Sabra again regrets the things she did. Then she walks into the ocean and drowns herself. Sorority Girl is above all a blatant criticism of bad parenthood. Although Sabra has “everything money can buy,” she is deprived of motherly love, which makes her physically and psychologically abuse the people around her, perpetrate crimes and, ultimately, commit suicide. In short, due to inept upbringing, Sabra is an individual incapable of existing in society. Obviously, this is nothing new in the delinquency genre of the period. Lack of love and compassion would often be the prime mover for teenage rebellion. “I’ll never be close to anyone,” weeps Judy from Rebel

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Without a Cause, and her concerns are also true for other film characters in the genre. But Sorority Girl also touches upon another issue which, unlike the criticism of irresponsible parents, was absent from the films of the period: the dark side of college life with its hazing activities, and abuse of and cruelty towards freshmen, which are seen in Sabra’s treatment of Ellie. Other juvenile delinquency films – Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, High School Hellcats, High School Confidential – would focus on high school students gone awry, sometimes presenting college as a land of opportunities. In Blackboard Jungle, the English teacher encourages his black student to study harder and be admitted to college because it will allow the student to get a well-paid job. However, Corman, educated in Stanford and Oxford, was well aware of the fact that life in college is not necessarily rosy, which he later presented in Sorority Girl. In this respect, Sorority Girl is ahead of its time for the system of dormitories was criticized as elitist and cruel as late as in the 1960s.93

2.3. The gangster film Juvenile delinquency was not the only problem the 1950s law enforcement was facing, as the decade also experienced the resurfacing of organized crime. In 1950, The United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce – popularly known as the Kefauver Committee because of its chairman, Senator Estes Kefauver – was established to reveal a nationwide network of organized criminal operations led by the Mafia. For this reason, the committee summoned and questioned such prominent crime bosses and functionaries like Frank Costello, Tony Accardo or Meyer Lansky.94 The “Kefauver Hearings” lasted 15 months, were held in 14 cities, involved over 600 witnesses and were widely broadcast on national television, attaining an astonishing 30 million viewers, the largest audience in the history of television.95 Time magazine wrote that: “Dishes stood in sinks, babies went unfed, business sagged, and department stores emptied while the hearings were on.”96 It was also a significant lesson for the American society, introducing it for the first time to such a term as “Mafia,” and revealing the details of how criminal organizations worked. 93

Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 82. Jack Doyle, “The Kefauver Hearings, 1950-1951,” PopHistoryDig.com, April 17, 2008. Accessed October 8, 2012. http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=organized-crime-1950s 95 Biskind, Seeing Is Believing, 168. 96 “The Rise of Senator Legend,” Time (cover story), Monday, March 24, 1952. 94

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Although the Kefauver committee exposed the identity of major criminals, which hampered their illegal operations, most of the questioned hoodlums took the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify on the grounds that their testimonies might incriminate them. As a result, the courts were unable to sentence the mobsters for anything more serious than tax evasion and, in consequence, the gangsters were free to operate shortly after the hearings. But the Mafia was soon to suffer another serious blow. In 1957, an underworld convention was held in a small hamlet of Apalachin, New York. The convention was attended by an estimated one hundred crime family members from around the country. Unfortunately for the mobsters, the local police learned about the reunion and the roads around the estate where the meeting was being held were blocked, which got the mobsters into a panic. The situation that ensued resembled something of a slapstick comedy: “immaculately groomed crime bosses, who, in their fifties and older, were hardly fleet of foot but were scurrying about, climbing out windows, bolting through back doors and diving through bushes, burrs and undergrowth while trying to escape.”97 The exact number of the mobsters who did manage to get away is unknown, but the police arrested 58 people. The detainees included four family bosses as well as men the police had been trying to capture for years: “of the 58, […] eighteen had been involved in murder investigations, 15 netted for narcotics violation, 30 for gambling and 23 for illegal use of firearms.”98 The Apalachin incident was widely publicized and had a profound effect on the war against the crime syndicate. The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, could no longer turn a blind eye to the existence of the Mafia and organized crime, and had to focus on combating the problem. With the public interest in the Mafia came Hollywood films about mobsters: Hoodlum Empire (1952), Kansas City Confidential (1952), The Miami Story (1954), New Orleans Uncensored (1955), Chicago Syndicate (1955), Phoenix City Story (1955), Inside Detroit (1955), The Houston Story (1956), Portland Expose (1957) and The Case Against Brooklyn (1958).99 Corman, obviously, would not fall behind, so he shot two Mafia pictures: Machine Gun Kelly and I, Mobster (both in 1958). Of the two films, I, Mobster is later, but it differs significantly from other gangster pictures by Corman, in that it sympathizes with the gangster. The film begins with a scene in which the gangster protagonist, Joe Sante (Steve Cochran), is questioned by a Kefauver-style commission. He 97

Carl Sifakis, The Mafia Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. (New York: Facts On File, 2005), 22. 98 Ibid., 22. 99 Biskind, Seeing Is Believing, 168.

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repeatedly invokes the Fifth Amendment and refuses to testify, just as his real-life equivalents did in 1950 and 1951. When the interrogator asks the question: “How long have you been a mobster, a hoodlum?” Sante’s thoughts drift away to his childhood and the audience can take a peek at his familial background. Sante’s parents are direct immigrants from Italy. His father is the bread-winner, but he earns very little. The family eats low-quality food, their flat is furnished with rickety furniture and the roof leaks. Sante, not older than 13, rebels against his father, claiming he could do better than him. “He never gives you anything,” he tells his mother lovingly. The mother (Celia Lovsky) pampers her son and dissuades her husband from punishing the boy whenever the two males have an argument. Through the coddling of his mother, Sante has developed an Oedipus complex and now fights with his father, whom he hates, to win the favors of the sole female in the house. The only area where Sante can beat his father is the family budget. He thus chooses a career which can grant him big money in the shortest time – crime. Again, just as in Corman’s juvenile delinquency films, it is inept parenting (on the side of the mother, who is overprotective, and the father, who is too weak to clash with his wife) which pushes the protagonist onto the path of crime. Adult Sante’s criminal activity resembles business dealings rather than typical mobster operations. He acts within labor unions through which he extorts money from companies and industrialists, so his work involves travelling by plane and “persuading” labor union leaders to join his corrupt organization. Always neatly dressed, calm, polite and succinct, he bears more resemblance to an entrepreneur than to a common hoodlum. Obviously, his “persuasions” sometimes require the use of brute force and batteries of the more persistent unionists are a common element of his profession, but his activity is still mostly white-collar crime which is relatively harmless, especially when compared with the crimes in other Corman films: assassination, armed robbery, rape or kidnapping. When Sante becomes a successful hoodlum, his Oedipus complex remains strong: he buys his mother good food as well as beautiful new curtains, a sofa and other new furniture – everything she has always dreamed of. When his father is on his deathbed, Sante refuses to pay him his last visit. And after the burial ceremony of his father, all he can say is: “It was a beautiful funeral.” It could not have been different – he paid for it with his gangster money, thinking a lavish ceremony would please his mother. However, she is dissatisfied with her son’s criminal career. Throughout the film, she repeatedly asks him to change his profession, but he never does. At the climactic finale of their relationship, she crashes the party Joe threw for his fellow mobsters after gunning down the crime boss

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to take his place and gain full control of the criminal organization. She reprimands him for his behavior – something she has never done before. Then she turns her back at him and leaves his life forever. Sante did not manage to satisfy his mother and satisfy his Oedipus complex. He failed her. But Mama Sante is not the only woman in Joe’s life. There is also Teresa (Lita Milan), a local girl who professes the simple, conservative values his idealized mother embodies. Sante loves her but fears that his life of crime could spoil her. “I don’t want to make you a moll,” he tells her. So he stays away from her but does not flirt with typical molls either. Yet, when Teresa loses her job and is no longer able to support her sick mother, Joe employs her as a bookkeeper and her brother, Ernie, as a gang soldier. When Ernie develops a drug habit, he becomes dangerous to the people around him, and Sante is forced to shoot him dead in front of Teresa’s eyes. Teresa then runs away from Joe and is subsequently caught and interrogated by the police but lies and covers up for Joe, betraying the values she has cherished so far. So when she returns to Sante, she is wearing a provocative, flashy dress instead of her traditional, low-key clothes. Unwillingly, Joe has turned her into a moll. Sante has one more close person, his partner and friend Black Freddie (Robert Strauss). Sante begins as Freddie’s subordinate, but he soon gains more power and influence than Freddie has ever had. Sante becomes the underboss, and the crime syndicate flourishes under his reign. Yet, he never forgets his former superior and makes Freddie his close partner and #3 in the syndicate. Freddie: “When you were twelve years old I used to be the boss man, now it’s the other way round. Somewhere along the stretch you pulled out in front of me and you took me with you. You didn’t have to, but you did.” Freddie seemingly pays Sante off with his loyalty: he accompanies him everywhere and is always there to help. At one point, he reveals to Joe that he was ordered to eliminate him by the crime boss, Paul Moran. He admits he would not do it and cajoles Joe into killing the boss. With Moran dead, Freddie turns against Joe and guns him down, becoming number one in the syndicate. Thus, Joe loses everything that was dear to him: his mother, his idealized girl, his closest friend and, ultimately, his own life. Crime does not pay. However, the audience cannot help feeling sorry for the gangster protagonist as he attempts to do as much good as his profession allows. He cares for the people around him, gives them jobs, never stints on money for anyone and never harms the innocent, killing only rival mobsters. “You’re not one man but two – good and bad,” Teresa remarks. Sante is a tragic anti-hero, a goodhearted man destroyed by an inappropriate career.

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This dual nature is absent in other Corman’s films – Machine Gun Kelly, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) or Bloody Mama (1970) – in which the gangsters perpetrate criminal acts because they are cruel, twisted and depraved. Unlike the “conventional”100 I, Mobster, the three remaining films de-idealize the myth of romantic gangsters. Corman: “I don’t think gangsters should be romanticized.”101 The eponymous Machine Gun Kelly (played by Charles Bronson) is obsessively afraid of dying. Anything connected with death – a funeral wreath, a coffin, a skull tattoo – can throw him off balance and paralyze with fear. He compensates his inner fright and self-loathing with misogyny and acts of brutality. However, Kelly can only be violent and selfconfident when he holds the advantage over the others: aiming a gun at a crowd of innocent bank customers, making a surprise attack on unarmed mobsters, or drawing a pistol against a knife-wielding assailant. For this reason, he always carries a Thompson machine gun as if its phallic shape bestowed courage on him. Stephen Prince notices that “the camerawork frames the gun with close attention, giving it a visual prominence and sexualized aura that anticipates the kind of visual fetish that high-tech weaponry has become in cinema today.”102 Kelly’s need for the gun is also expressed in the film’s tagline: “Without his machine gun he was naked yellow.” Yet, Corman goes even further at demythologizing Kelly. By the end of the film, it turns out that it was Flo (Susan Cabot), Kelly’s moll, who masterminded all or almost all of Kelly’s actions. She gave him “the machine gun, the name, the reputation, […] a backbone.” She manipulated him because he was “dumb and scared enough.” Without her, Kelly would be nobody, a small-time offender watering down gin somewhere in Tennessee. The gangsters from St. Valentine’s Day Massacre are not romantic heroes either. On the first appearance on screen of every gang member, his crimes and faults are recalled in a voice-over, for example: “Peter Gusenberg, […] ex-convict, mail-robber, burglar, hijacker, professional killer. When at the age of 13 he came home from school to find his mother dead, his first act was to pry a wedding ring from her finger and pawn it.” Even when one of the gangsters gets wounded from a gunshot, the voiceover leaves no room for sympathy: “Machine Gun Jack McGurn […]. When he was nine years old, his father was murdered. By the time he was 100

Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 111. Ibid., 250. 102 Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968 (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 134. 101

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twenty, he had personally killed every man connected with his father’s death. He has recently become a top trigger man and extortionist in the Capone organization.”103 Al Capone (played by Jason Robards) is the protagonist of the film, and he is the most ruthless and repulsive of the mobsters. He rarely speaks, mostly shouts with his husky voice, often throwing fits of rage, flailing arms, hitting the desk with his fists and hurling or destroying the things around him. He is sarcastic, violent and permanently angry – at least until he eliminates Moran’s key men in the title massacre. He never shies away from brutality and when he gets particularly furious, he personally kills the men who crossed him. In one scene when two traitors kneel before him and start praying, he goes into a frenzy and mercilessly clubs them to death. The universe of St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is devoid of everything but violence. The mobsters in the film have no private life, no interior feelings, their existence only revolves around their gang matters. For this reason, the hoodlums’ actions seem to echo each other: a scene with Capone plotting against his rival Moran is followed by a scene with Moran plotting against his rival Capone. However, the most vile, twisted and wicked hoodlums are the members of the Barker family gang in Bloody Mama. The title Bloody Mama Barker and her four boys – Herman, Arthur, Fred and Lloyd – together with an ex-convict named Kevin and a moll called Mona they terrorize Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1920s and early 1930s. There is nothing romantic or poetic about their activities. Conversely, these characters are demented in every way possible. Ma Barker (Shelley Winters) is a sexual dominatrix who has sex with each of her boys as well as with other men who are around – her partner in crime Kevin or the kidnapped businessman Sam (in the latter case she does it in front of her sons’ eyes). Whenever any of the men in the gang makes a mistake, Ma Barker slaps his face as a punishment, and when the gang fares really badly, she forces everyone to sing religious or patriotic songs. Herman (Don Stroud) is a sadist likely to throw fits of rage and beat his enemies to a pulp. Lloyd (Robert De Niro) is a drug addict who sniffs glue and takes 103

Corman parodied such a litany of crimes in one of his dark comedies, Creature from the Haunted Sea, in which criminals have silly aliases and absurd criminal past, for example “The big cheese was Renzo Capetto, alias Capo Rosetto, alias Ratto Pazetti, alias Zeppo Staccato alias Shirley Lamour. At 15, he had served his first stretch for rolling a drunk in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria on New Year's Eve, 1934. In 1940, he was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to nominate Benito Mussolini for the Republican ticket. During the war, he was rejected by the Navy, the Marines and the SS. Now deported, he has maintained his contacts with the Syndicate and is still regarded as a dangerous character.”

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heroin. Fred (Robert Walden) and Kevin (Bruce Dern) are homosexual lovers, but the bisexual Kevin enjoys psychologically tormenting his partner by having intercourse with his mother. Mona (Diane Varsi) is officially Herman’s girlfriend, but she also has sex with his brothers, sometimes with several in a row and sometimes in front of her boyfriend’s eyes. In short, everything that could have been good, romantic or poetic in the Barker gang – motherly love, man-woman relationships, brotherhood, friendship, parenting, religion, patriotism – is twisted, degenerate and grotesque. Silver and Ursini claim that Bloody Mama is “Corman’s most perverse film,”104 and it is difficult not to concur. This perversity and moral decay, emphasized by the cinema vérité visual style, account for a more authentic presentation of the Depression-era gangsters than the romantic and nostalgic Bonnie & Clyde. When compared with Machine Gun Kelly, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and Bloody Mama with their sadistic, wicked, twisted or pitiful gangsters, with its ambivalent protagonist and tame violence I, Mobster seems to constitute an exception to the rule. Yet, it still avoids romanticizing crime and, therefore, fulfils Corman’s approach to the gangster genre.

2.4 Summary Corman’s genre films treat their topics far more thoroughly than his rock and roll or reincarnation motion pictures. They include deeper reflections on their respective issues, sometimes with astoundingly original results. The ending of Teenage Caveman, for example, features a similar plot twist as the ending of Planet of the Apes, but precedes Boulle’s novel by five years. However, most of the films do not stand out thematically from the rest of the genre. In fact, Corman gladly makes use of previously established plot formulas (Day the World Ended, The Last Woman on Earth) as well as concepts (the presentation of the alien vs human conflict in It Conquered the World, the dual nature of science and scientists). Even if he is the first to treat a new topic – as with War of the Satellites – his films vanish in the subsequent glut of imitators.

3. “Deep” exploitation By the dawn of the 1960s, Corman had mastered the film medium and become capable of shooting profound, stylistically exquisite motion 104

Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 246.

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pictures. At the same time, his political views started drifting left, imbuing his productions with a strong leftist/liberal social viewpoint, which in turn resulted in cutting-edge feature films on racial desegregation and the counterculture of the 1960s. These films are seemingly exploitive in that they are hastily shot on shoestring budgets and refer to popular social topics. However, they treat these topics thoroughly and insightfully, which hardly ever happens in typical exploitation films. Therefore, for the lack of a better term, they shall be referred to as “deep” exploitation herein.

3.1. Racial desegregation One of the major changes that took place in the 1960s pertained to the civil rights of African-Americans. The struggle for racial equality of blacks was as old as the United States itself. Although slavery had been abolished almost a hundred years prior to the dawn of the 1960s, the social status of the Negros was far inferior to the one whites enjoyed. Jim Crow laws would remain in force, not allowing blacks to use the same facilities – buses, restaurants, hotels, waiting rooms, drinking fountains, and so on – the whites used. Instead, blacks were provided with their own, inferior, facilities. All-black schools were the worst, with inferior teaching staff, out-of-date equipment and hand-me-down books. In practice, this destined African-Americans not only to poor education but, consequently, inferior jobs, low salary, and life at the bottom of the society. The situation changed a little after the Supreme Court had ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional in the famous case Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. However, the court softened its decision the next year, allowing schools to eliminate segregation not immediately but “with all deliberate speed,” which, in practice, permitted local governments to infinitely delay the integration. As a result, less than 1 percent of black pupils attended white schools in the South between 1954 and 1964.105 One of such schools was Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, which adopted a plan of gradual de-segregation, and enrolled its first nine black students in September 1957. However, the opposition to integration was strong both in the local authorities and among regular citizens. The first attempts by the blacks to enter the school were hampered by mass protest on the civilian side, and a National Guard blockade ordered by the authorities. As the word of the events got to 105 Stephanie Fitzgerald, The Little Rock Nine: Struggle for Integration (Minneapolis, MN: Compass Point Books, 2007), 21-22.

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Washington, President Eisenhower federalized Arkansas National Guard and ordered it to defend and escort the black students. Finally, on September 23, protected by over a thousand soldiers, the nine African American kids could enter the school. The beginning of the 1960s brought mass protests aimed at ending racial segregation. On February 1, 1960, young blacks entered an all-white restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina, and, when refused service, they sat at the table, refusing to leave until served like other customers. This event inspired other African-Americans to organize similar sit-ins in allwhite facilities. The movement garnered 70,000 people in 150 Southern cities. Although several of these protests made it to the headlines, like the attack on Freedom Riders in Birmingham, Alabama, prominent politicians tried to avoid the topic of the civil rights movement.106 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were still very far away. At these times, when few white people cared for the plight of the blacks, Corman decided to shoot a picture about racial injustice and the opposition to desegregation in the South – The Intruder. This is how Corman explains his motivation: “The Intruder was the film that most represented my personal feelings in my early films. I was very involved in the civil rights movement and strongly believed in the concepts of integration and racial equality.”107 His film partners did not feel the same, however. Neither AIP nor United Artists wanted to finance the film, and Allied Artists considered the topic too controversial.108 However, so deep was Corman’s belief in this story that he spent his life savings and mortgaged his house to finance the project, which won him the admiration of his cast: Making films is a dedication, it has to be possessed. At some point there, I realized they [Roger and Gene Corman] mortgaged their home for that film. That perhaps was the most admirable thing of all. Because it’s one thing to be cavalier about spending money that isn’t yours, but to be so adamant as to put your house on the line that’s extraordinary.109

To be truthful to his audience, Corman filmed on location, in a Southern town of Sikeston, Missouri, which was not far from Little Rock, and 106

Farber, Bailey, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s, 15-17. Corman in: Silver, Ursini, Metaphysics on a Shoestring, 162. 108 Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 98. 109 William Shatner in Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel, directed by Alex Stapleton (2011; Beverly Hills, CA: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2012), DVD. 107

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employed local citizens as extras to give his film even more natural feel. The film opens with the eponymous intruder, Adam Cramer (William Shatner), arriving at a small Southern town called Caxton, which is getting ready for the integration of blacks into a previously all-white school. Cramer is neatly dressed, polite and helpful, always shakes hands with everybody and proposes his friendship – briefly put, he seems to be the ostensible hero of the film. He is, however, a wolf in sheep’s clothing as he seduces the daughters and wives of the men he earlier fraternized with, and incites the locals against desegregation. First, he befriends the most powerful man in the region, Verne Shipman (Robert Emhardt), and brings him over to his side. Then, he telephones the locals to spread his views. The white citizens of Caxton were against de-segregation all the time, but they did not want to oppose the law. There are great dialogue sequences which reveal their stance. For example: Cramer: “Sir, I represent the Patrick Henry Society and what we’d like to know is how you stand on integration. Are you for integration, or against it?” Shipman: “Well, that’s a stupid question, young man. I’m a southerner.” Now, incited by Cramer, they are willing to stand in the way of de-segregation. Interestingly enough, the elderly black citizens, who remember “the old days,” do not support integration either. When one of the black students, Joey Green (Charles Barnes), prepares to leave for the all-white school, his grandfather says: “You negroes gonna cause some of us niggers to get killed.” He knows there is great hatred in the whites, which can easily explode. Before the black students leave for school, they meet at the black church. Churches were centers of civil rights planning for AfricanAmericans, and the non-violent approach the blacks adopted was based on Christian teachings. The reverend tries to bestow courage on the students. He advises them to “be strong, not muscle and pride strong, but manstrong,” then he prays: “Lord, protect these ten lambs. When they walk in the valley of the shadow, comfort them.” Indeed, the ten young blacks are followed by the whites’ hateful stares when they walk through the white district to school. In front of the building, they are welcomed by a white blockade holding signs like: “No Niggers here” or “Coons go home.” They are called names and ridiculed, much like James Meredith was on his way to university a year later, but they do reach the entrance of the school. That night, Cramer rallies white Caxton citizens and gives a six-minute hate speech to the crowd. Here is a fragment: Now you all know there was peace and quiet in the south until the NAACP started stirring up trouble. But what you don’t know is that this so-called advancement of colored people is now, and has always been, nothing but a

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Cramer’s words meet with a favorable response and, in fact, so did Shatner’s on the set. The extras assumed Shatner was the hero of the film. They would respond to his accusations, yelling “That’s right!” with complete conviction. “They knew it was a movie, they were paid extras, but they believed in Bill Shatner. They loved him as Cramer the racist,”110 recalls Corman. Incited by the speech, these law-abiding American citizens turn into an angry mob and attack a peaceful black family for “being in our street.” The family is not lynched only because Tom McDaniel (Frank Maxwell), the editor of the local newspaper, intervenes at the right time and diffuses the situation. The family is released unharmed, but there is nothing Tom can do to punish its persecutors. The sheriff asks him: “Do you want me to arrest everybody?” The whites then dress in Ku Klux Klan hoods and ride into “Nigger town,” where, before the eyes of its black inhabitants, they erect a fiery cross. Next, two of the racists secretly bomb the black church, killing the reverend. In real life, segregationists understood that churches served as centers of civil right activism and conducted a series of church bombings, especially in Arkansas and Alabama. The deadliest attack occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, two years after the release of The Intruder, killing four girls aged ten to fourteen.111 The black students – and virtually every black person in town – feel intimidated by the recent attacks and unwilling to go to white school again. At this point, they are visited by Tom, who persuades them to attend the school despite the odds. Tom acts as white Americans’ conscience in the film. Though he is initially against desegregation, being born and raised in a society in which blacks live separately from whites, he turns 110 111

10.

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 100. Edward J. Rielly, The 1960s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 2003), 9-

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pro-integration when he witnesses the racial violence stirred by Cramer. Siding with the blacks, he risks losing his family (his wife is antiintegration and her father is a racial bigot) and his job (Shipman is the owner of the newspaper Tom works in), but he believes in the rightness of his decision. He thus becomes an unlikely hero, which is a typical motif in a Corman film. In a powerful scene, Tom escorts the black students through the town, scrutinized by the hateful stare of its white inhabitants. For this act of courage, his fellow citizens beat him into a pulp, shouting: “kill him! kill him! kill him!” When his father-in-law learns that Tom has four broken ribs, internal injury and lost one eye, he says: “He was lucky. Back in my days he would end up at the end of the rope. What’s the matter with him anyhow? How am I gonna face my friends? I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.” Tom’s sacrifice has not gone entirely to waste, though. Cramer lost much support in the town as the violence directed at Tom, a respected – and white! – citizen, had opened the eyes of the less fanatic segregationists. Cramer, however, has one more stratagem up his sleeve. Promising the safety of Tom, who is at hospital, he cajoles his daughter to lie to the police that Joey Green tried to rape her. As she does so, an angry mob gathers in front of the school to punish the black wrongdoer. At this point, the perspective of the film shifts from the white people to blacks – the real subject of the picture. Joey courageously leaves the protection of the school principal’s office and casually walks towards the mob, which leaves it bewildered. Shipman does not lose his cool, though, and starts interrogating Joey. Whenever Shipman believes Joey is lying and whenever Joey is not servile enough, Shipman slaps him in the face. When the boy does not plead guilty, the whites drag him to the playground, tie to a swing and start rocking him in an allegory of hanging. All the whites – young, old, women, children – now laugh at the “dangling nigger.” Before they can go any further and truly hang Joey, Sam Griffin (Leo Gordon), Cramer’s neighbor, appears on the spot with Tom’s daughter. The girl admits to having lied about the rape and to being blackmailed by Cramer. As Shipman lowers his head in shame, Griffin unties the boy and lets him go. Then he begins his own j’accuse: Right now you good people are probably telling yourselves you were gonna take this boy down to jail and see a little justice done. But that ain’t the truth. You were gonna kill this boy. You know it and I know it. You’ll know it the rest of your lives.

The scene is powerfully shot: Corman cuts from Griffin snarling his accusations to the close-ups of the Southern faces of the locals. Cramer

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attempts to address the crowd, but nobody listens to him any longer. When he pleads for Shipman to do something, Shipman slaps him in the face. The crowd slowly disperses, leaving Cramer alone, defeated. The Intruder is the first motion picture shot by Corman which is not an exploitation film. In fact, it is so well-scripted, well-performed and welldirected, and the problem it tackles with is so audacious that the final result resembles rather an art film. Perversely enough, its greatest merit lies in the fact that, to a considerable extent, it is not acted. Much of what happens in the film – the people’s reactions, the animosity, the anxiety – is genuine. Corman extensively uses the close-up shots, and several closeups on the authentic, hardened, weather-beaten Southern faces convey more message than a hundred lines of dialogue. Their stares at the blacks walking to school are enough to augment the tension and make the racial animosity on screen seem almost palpable. This profound authenticity ranks The Intruder among one of the best cinema verité films in the history of American cinematography. What further adds to the film’s genuineness is the fact that neither of the characters – black or white – is romanticized. Tom, the positive white protagonist, is not an anti-segregation idealist and the valiant hero of the film. On the contrary, he does not believe in desegregation but wants to uphold the law and becomes the unlikely integration hero fairly by chance. The blacks are not content with integration either, sensing that it might even bring death on their families. In short, it seems that both communities are left alone to cope with a decision made by a distant, almost mythical governing body – a decision none of the communities supports. The Intruder is also the first film in a series of Corman’s openly antimainstream pictures. Just like subsequent The Wild Angels and The Trip, it chooses a socially conscious topic which is neglected or outright ignored by mainstream Hollywood, and treats it with great realism. The Intruder is filmed on location in the South with real Southerners as extras. The streets, the cars, the shops, the shanty black neighborhood, and the people with their southern accent, their rural, weather-beaten, toothless, unshaven faces, their checked shirts under dirty working clothes – everything is genuine and adds to the film’s credibility. The contemporariness and genuineness of the problem are best reflected in the stories from the shooting set, many of which are far more shocking than the film’s plot itself – because they are true. The school of Sikeston had been integrated a year prior to the shooting of the film, but there was still opposition to desegregation. Corman kept the local extras in the dark by giving them an altered version of the script. The ruse initially worked: given Corman’s reputation as a drive-in film director and the title

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of the project – The Intruder – the locals believed it to be another of his alien sci-fi films. However, when the true nature of the film did finally emerge, “things soon turned uglier.”112 The crew was constantly driven out of locations, harassed by the local police, or forced to change motels. Shatner recalls the following story: “We shot a white supremacy parade through the black part of town and a cross-burning scene at night and while this was being shot, someone watching in the crowd was knifed. The whites thought we were with the blacks and they hated us.”113 There were instances of tussles, beating, intimidation and hails of abuse directed at the film crew, and the crewmembers feared for their lives until the shooting finished.114 But Corman’s problems with The Intruder did not finish together with the shooting schedule as he had further trouble with releasing the film. First, the Motion Picture Association of America denied it its seal of approval. Once Corman acquired the seal, the distributor withdrew from distributing the film, leaving him with a finished motion picture and no means to release it. He finally had to distribute the film through his own company, Filmgroup. Corman wanted to release the film in drive-ins – as he had done with his previous motion pictures – to acquaint the widest audience possible with the plight of African-Americans. Gene Corman, Roger’s brother and a co-producer of The Intruder, justifies this decision in the following way: “This is what was going on in America and somebody had to say: ‘stop, this is not the American way!’”115 However, the sneak previews with Pacific Theatres turned into a riot: “People were screaming ‘Communists!’ and one of the ushers […] came up to me, pinned me against the wall and said ‘You’re a communist! You don’t belong in this country!’”116 The film was released four times under different titles – as The Intruder, I Hate Your Guts!, Shame and The Stranger – and although it was critically successful, it was also the first picture in Corman’s long streak of films that brought financial loss.117 According to Corman, the reason behind its failure lies in the film’s contemporariness:

112

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 99. William Shatner quoted in Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 102. 114 Shatner in ibid., 102. 115 Gene Corman in Corman’s World. 116 Ibid. 117 Though in one of the newer interviews, Corman admits that with the recent DVD sales and rentals, The Intruder finally broke even. 113

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Indeed, watching The Intruder, audiences had to confront their own views on the denial of civil rights for the blacks and, judging from the incidents at sneak previews, this confrontation was painful. The Intruder, with its difficult production history and unprecedented realism, remains one of the most truthful and audacious accounts of the complicated racial relations in the American south. Even set out of its historical context, The Intruder remains a great film about fanaticism, which changes man into beast and people into mob, and turns neighbors and family members against each other.

3.2. Counterculture American economy was still soaring in the 1960s: unemployment leveled at 4 percent, personal income kept rising, the official poverty rate dwindled, the GNP nearly doubled, production and export remained strong as the US continued to be the world’s largest producer of cars, steel, electric appliances and textiles.119 Ordinary citizens possessed unprecedented amounts of disposable money, which they spent on practical and timesaving household appliances and leisure activities: bowling, hunting, fishing, DIY, cinema and professional sporting events. Travelling, previously reserved only for the wealthy, became accessible to middleclass Americans as well: the number of passport applications increased from 300,000 in the year 1950 to over 2 million in 1970. Cars constituted another symbol of America’s economic affluence as the car industry released the so-called muscle cars: sports-like vehicles fitted with enormous engines which could attain the speed of professional racing cars. University education became more widespread: the 1965’s Higher Education Act introduced a system of loans, grants and scholarships, which allowed low-income families to send their children to college. The lives of poorer Americans improved in another way as well because the 1960s saw the creation of the first discount chains, the famous Wal-Mart including – stores of vast commercial area which bought their merchandise

118 119

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 103. Farber and Bailey, The Columbia Guide to America in the 1960s, 5.

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directly from manufacturers and offered it at low prices and as attractive bargains.120 However, although the majority of Americans reveled in the material abundance, a large proportion of the society, especially the baby boomers who just reached their adolescence, began contesting the pursuit of wealth and the traditional ways of life, regarding them as soulless and mindless. Looking back at his traditional way of life, Timothy Leary, the rebel Harvard professor, described himself as an “anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots.”121 The baby boomers sought a more meaningful way of life which would constitute an alternative to the career-oriented, materialistic approach proposed by the mainstream culture. They dressed differently, spoke differently, created their own art and music, adopted their own ethics and moral values, created their own life philosophy, society organization and law (or the lack of thereof), revised their religious views, invented their own diets, and so on – all of this to distance themselves from the mainstream culture and everything they resented in it: monotony, restrictiveness, consumerism, conformity and behavioral bandwagons. Thus, the counterculture of the 1960s was born. Mainstream Hollywood was slow to acknowledge the changes the society had undergone. Bolder films with more explicit sexual content, coarse language, vivid violence and audacious subject matter did not come out of major film studios until 1969 (Bonnie and Clyde of 1967 being the only exception), when a new, young generation of filmmakers was allowed to execute their ideas. In the words of Peter Biskind, “because movies are expensive and time-consuming to make, Hollywood is always the last to know, the slowest to respond, and in those years it was at least half a decade behind the other popular arts.”122 Besides the fact that filmmaking is time-consuming, there was another reason for Hollywood lagging behind cultural changes: the major film studio executives, all of whom were over 60 years old, subscribed to mainstream, conservative views, and experienced difficulties accepting the liberal, countermainstream approach of the young audience.123 As a result, except Bonnie 120

Rielly, The 1960s, 5. Timothy Leary, High Priest (Berkeley: Ronin Publishing, 1968), 4. 122 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998), 14. 123 Ibid., 16. 121

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and Clyde, all the pre-1969 counterculture films were produced by smaller, independent studios: Embassy’s The Graduate (1967), AIP’s Psych-Out (1968) and William Castle’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968). But the first director to tap into the cultural changes was Roger Corman with his 1966 biker movie The Wild Angels, which was later followed by an LSD film The Trip (1967) and a youth film Gas-s-s (1971). The gangster picture Bloody Mama (1970) also has more in common with the New Hollywood than with the “old” one due to its graphic violence and unprecedented sexual perversion. Having noticed the first symptoms of the youth rebellion, Corman intended to shoot a picture about this social phenomenon. When he met with the producers, Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson, they proposed him to make a horror film instead. Corman, however, persuaded them to finance a contemporary film on the anti-establishment rebellion, starring the members of Hell’s Angels, a motorcycle gang that had just come into national prominence.124 After obtaining the producers’ consent, he contacted the Angels and arranged a meeting, to which he took his scriptwriter, Charles Griffith. Not only did the gang members agree to participate in the picture, but they also provided Corman and Griffith with much of the script, recounting the stories and events they had lived through in the gang.125 The originality of The Wild Angels is, therefore, twofold: it is the first film to capture the anti-establishment spirit of the 1960s, and it is based on actual events. The picture opens with a symbolic scene: a young boy, not older than five, rides a tricycle in the backyard. The camera films him from behind the yard’s wooden fence, creating an impression, intended by Corman,126 that the boy is confined to – or imprisoned in – the yard’s space (there is another, smaller enclosure in the yard with two toddlers inside). The boy rides out of the backyard through an open gate and speeds along the fence. His mother notices his escape and gives chase, shouting the boy’s name. The kid reaches the end of the pavement and almost bumps into a chopper motorbike. His mother catches on, scolds the child and takes him back to the enclosed backyard. This scene sets the theme of the entire film: young people break away from authority figures, rebel against the traditional 124

On Monterey Labor Day of 1964, a group of Hell’s Angels allegedly gang raped two girls. The crime sparked an official investigation into the Angels activities, and its findings, shocking but questionable, were published the following year. The report was widely commented by magazines and newspapers across the country. 125 Corman in: Nasr, Roger Corman Interview, 63-64. 126 Ibid., 64.

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society, which is safe but also boring, monotonous and, above all, confining, and search for unlimited freedom, speeding on their bikes through the country. The chopper motorbike the child almost bumps into belongs to Blues (Peter Fonda), the leader of the Hell’s Angels. Blues observes the scene sitting nonchalantly on his bike, a cigarette in his mouth, then starts his motorcycle and rides away. He is established as a symbol of freedom, he embodies the rejection of the traditional way of life and the confining structure of society. The title sequence follows: credits appear on the footage of Blues riding his chopper through the city. This seemingly simple sequence was brilliant and groundbreaking for its time. Firstly, it was the first to play contemporary music against a natural background, a practice commonly used in today’s cinema. The track was very wisely chosen: it is “The Wild Angels” by The Arrows, an instrumental rock song with a catchy melody played on an electric guitar tuned to produce low, gritty sound. The composition is effective enough that it became a radio hit in the country and reached Billboard’s top 20 list. Interestingly enough, radio stations played the mixed version used in the picture, and the listeners could hear Blues’ chopper roaring in the background.127 Secondly, the way the sequence was shot was trendsetting: the camera was mounted on a vehicle and, moving next to Fonda’s bike with the same speed, shot him ride. As a result, Fonda and his chopper remain static against a moving background, which creates the impression that the viewer rides along the film protagonist through the country (in one take the camera is even placed just behind the handlebars, with the handlebars still in the frame, as if the viewers were riding the bike themselves). Such camerawork allows the viewer to identify with Fonda’s character and, paired with the catchy rock music, partially feel the freedom experience of riding a chopper motorbike. Such shooting technique had never been used prior to The Wild Angels. Out of the two biker pictures which preceded Corman’s film, The Wild One (1953) used rear projection for the close-ups of bikers with a very artificial effect, and Motor Psycho (1965) used a steady, groundbased camera to film moving bikers. The technique Corman had patented in The Wild Angels was later copied by countless other biker films, including the famous Easy Rider (1969). Blues arrives at an oil drilling plant where his close friend, Loser (Bruce Dern), works. He informs him that he found his motorbike, which had previously been stolen. He is also immediately accosted by one of 127

Ibid., 68.

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Loser’s co-workers about his outfit, the leather jacket and the Iron Cross, and called “one of those dumb Angels.” A brawl ensues between the three men. The plant’s foreman interrupts the fight and fires Loser from work. As the two Angels are leaving the plant, Loser’s co-worker shouts: “we used to kill guys who wore that kind of garbage!” The Angels are the baby boomers born after the war and they fail to understand or care about the symbolic meaning of their Nazi insignias. Adopting them as their “colors,” they rejected their symbolism, just as they rejected other concepts shared by the traditional society. The duo arrives at Loser’s place, which allows Corman to take a peek at the Angels’ economic background. Loser’s wife, Gaysh (Diana Ladd), is dissatisfied with the fact that her husband lost his job for the fourth time in five months, clearly because of insubordination. She reproaches him that they will never be able to fix their house, a rickety wooden hut in a poor neighborhood, to which he simply replies: “Who cares? We’re going to get my chopper back.” Blues, Loser and Gaysh join the rest of the Angels and the gang rides to Mecca, California, where Loser’s chopper was last seen. In Mecca, Loser notices a horse tied to a wooden fence. He unleashes it and says “Go. You’re free,” but the domesticated animal does not move, which Loser comments: “That’s the most pitiful thing I’ve ever seen. He’s free and he doesn’t wanna go.” The symbolism of this scene is evident: the horse (and in a metaphorical way – the humanity) became inured to the restrain, which, on the one hand, provides it with food, shelter, warmth and comfort but, on the other hand, limits it and makes it work for “The Man,” and this habit is so strong that the horse – which is, by the way, a symbol of freedom – forgot how to be free. The gang storms the garage in which, they believe, the stolen chopper is kept. They question the owners, who deny having stolen anything. Yet, upon inspection it turns out Loser’s bike has been dismantled to pieces. A fistfight ensues and the resulting rumpus alerts two biker policemen passing by. The Angels run out of the garage, each to his motorcycle, but Loser – who has split from the group – seeing no other alternative, steals one of the police bikes. The other lawman gives chase, catches up with the fugitive and shoots him down, wounding him seriously. When the gang learns Loser awaits trial at hospital, they decide to “bust him out.” The rescue does not go as planned, though. The nurse on duty is alarmed by Loser’s moaning and enters the ward. The Angel guarding the door catches her and, when the others are outside carrying Loser to the car, he knocks her unconscious and tries to rape her. Blues comes back and throws him out of the ward, and exactly at that moment

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the nurse regains her senses to see Blues plainly and clearly. She will later identify him on a police photograph. Meanwhile, however, the other Angels accidentally break Loser’s drip feed. With his medication destroyed, Loser soon dies. Loser’s death is a serious blow for Blues, who felt responsible for him twofold: as the leader of the gang and as his closest friend. Loser was also the freest spirit in the band and Blues’s soul mate, and with his death, Blues perhaps noticed the futility of the existence they have been leading, the fact that unlimited freedom is unattainable and that the oppressive society sooner or later claims its free spirits in one way or another, just like that mother caught her runaway kid. The Angels arrange a funeral in Loser’s hometown. They drape the coffin in a swastika flag, and, dressed in their everyday motorcycle jackets, sit nonchalantly on the church pews, awaiting the preacher to deliver his sermon. During the preacher’s sermon about God, Blues jumps up from his pew. The pent-up frustration, anguish and guilt connected with Loser’s death finally erupted in him, and he delivers the speech that has gone down in the history of popular cinema: The Lord never did nothing for the Loser. What’s all this stuff about Lord gave and Lord taketh away? […] Let me tell you what life made of him, ‘bout how life never left him alone to do what he wanted to do, ‘bout life always made him be good, always pay the rent. […] We’re not children of God, we’re Hell’s Angels. […] We don’t want anybody telling us what to do. We don’t want anybody pushing us around. […] We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. We wanna be free to ride. We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man! And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that’s what we are gonna do. We are gonna have a good time... We are gonna have a party.

The speech is wavered, spoken without confidence and shallow in meaning as if Blues was unable to orally express his rebellion, to convey the feelings that tormented his soul. It is enough to rouse the Angels, though, and a party indeed begins. The bikers start demolishing the church and smash the pews to smithereens. The preacher gets beaten and tied up. Whiskey and bongo drums are delivered from outside the church. Dancing, drinking, smoking dope, making out and playing music begins. The bikers have no respect for anything that is sacred, no sense of decency, no observance for any law, custom or tradition. They catch the mourning Gaysh, force drugs on her, and then rape her unconscious body on the church altar. They take Loser’s body out of the coffin, pour alcohol into his open mouth and stick a joint in it. Then, amidst laughs and jokes,

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they put the tied preacher into the coffin. Blues also sinks into the uncontrolled hedonism. He sniffs amphetamine, something he has always punished his bikers for. When his girlfriend, Mike (Nancy Sinatra), tries to stop him, he shoves her away and goes to make love to a different woman. Mike, feeling rejected, finds comfort in the arms of another Angel. Thus, the last sanctity among the Angels, Blues and Mike’s mutual love, is defiled. After the party is finished, the bikers put Loser back into the coffin and leave the church. They form a funeral procession with their motorcycles and ride through the town towards the cemetery, escorted by the hateful stare of the townsfolk. At the cemetery, they put the coffin into an open grave but do not manage to bury it as one of the locals throws a stone at them. Thus, the burial ceremony turns into a fist fight between the Angels and the bystanders. Only Blues, Mike and Gaysh stay out of the brawl. The police soon arrives, so the bikers run to their machines and begin to flee. Blues puts Mike and Gaysh on a motorbike and orders them to scram. When Mike pleads him to go with her, he replies “there’s nowhere to go.” He stays alone and begins covering the grave. As he does so, the camera films him from behind the cemetery fence as if he was behind bars, imprisoned. This last scene together with the first scene create the framework of the film. According to Corman himself, the ending can be interpreted twofold. In the pessimistic interpretation, freedom is unattainable within a society, which will either imprison its free spirits (Blues) or kill them (Loser), and “there’s nowhere to go” where they would be free. The pursuit of unlimited freedom is also futile: Blues broke all the rules, defiled every sanctity, rejected every tradition, tried hard drugs and casual sex, sunk into hedonism so deep to see that there is nothing on the other side, that “there’s nowhere to go.” But in the optimistic version, by doing so, he learned that his existence is futile and this newly-acquired knowledge constitutes a foundation for change for the better.128 The Wild Angels opened the 1966 Venice Film Festival and provoked fierce controversy among its participants. The American ambassador to Italy attacked the picture for presenting American culture as amoral, violent and depraved, which sparked a heated debate between politicians, critics and filmmakers. According to Corman, the festival director, Luigi Chiarini, defended the picture as “one of the most important American

128

Ibid., 65-66.

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films of the last ten years.”129 The film was nominated for the Golden Lion but lost to The Battle of Algiers. It received mixed reviews, many of which revealed that critics did not understand the message behind the picture but superficially focused on its shock factor. Bosley Crowther of New York Times, for instance, wrote: This is the brutal little picture about a California motorcycle gang and its violent depredations that was shown at the Venice festival as an American entry (by invitation) and caused quite a few diplomats to mop their brows. It is an embarrassment all right – a vicious account of the boozing, fighting, “pot”-smoking, vandalizing and raping done by a gang of “sickle riders” who are obviously drawn to represent the swastika-wearing Hell’s Angels… And despite an implausible ending and some rather amateurish acting… it gives a pretty good picture of what these militant motorcyclecult gangs are.130

Crowther focuses solely on the bikers, who, indeed, indulge in consumption of drugs and alcohol, fornication, sometimes even rape and misogyny. He fails to notice, however, the deeper – and noble – motivation behind the actions of the two protagonists, Blues and Loser. He fails to notice the fact that they are intended as quixotic, romantic heroes, that they embody the all-American fantasy of a free, lone, rootless cowboy riding the plains,131 that there is something glamorous and romantic about their lifestyle. He fails to notice the other side of the conflict: the regular, law-abiding citizens who do not have enough decency to allow the Angels bury their friend in peace but throw stones at the burial procession; or the police officers who constantly hassle the bikers because of their outfit. In fact, Corman recounts an interesting anecdote from the shooting location: I think several local cities sent their policemen out to keep us under guard at all times, and I felt this was a little out of hand, and I explained it to one of the guys from San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department – he wanted to arrest some of them on some charges they had – I said, hey look, these guys are just doing a job. As a matter of fact, for some of them, for the first time in their lives, they are getting paid to do a job and do what they want to do. They’re riding their bikes, having fun, being out in the desert and getting paid – what do you guys want to bust them for?132

129

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, 143. 130 Bosley Crowther, „The Wild Angels,” New York Times, 22 December 1966, 40. 131 Corman in: Nasr, Roger Corman Interviews, 69. 132 Ibid., 70.

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All in all, The Wild Angels is not a one-sided, simple shockfest, but a complex, multidimensional picture. Corman: “I was trying both with Wild Angels and The Trip to document a certain aspect of the counterculture and to tell the story as honestly as I could. I didn’t want to praise or condemn.”133 For this reason, Corman adopted the cinéma vérité style and invested the film with an objective, documentary feel. And there are other reasons which prove that it is also a good picture. It was the first film to capture the anti-establishment rebellion, sexual revolution and drug use, all of which were already present in American society… and growing strong. For this reason, the film became an outstanding commercial success, earning an impressive $5 million in rentals alone134 and achieving the status of the most successful independently produced picture (it was beat three years later by Easy Rider, another biker picture). The character of Blues turned into a cult icon, and the film posters featuring Peter Fonda and Nancy Sinatra dressed in their leather jackets sold rapidly and adorned the rooms of American teenagers. Interestingly enough, the film’s release coincided with Fonda being arrested and tried for possession of marijuana, blurring the boundary between the character and the actor, which Fonda used to his advantage later on during the filming of Easy Rider. As the authorities were trying to sweep the counterculture revolution under the rug, it was an audacious decision on the part of Corman to put that very same revolution on screen. The same counter-mainstream audacity had earlier pushed Corman to reverse gender roles and people his westerns with strong female characters, or to uncompromisingly reproach Americans for their racism in The Intruder, or to picture the use of LSD as something harmless, if not even beneficial, in The Trip. In fact, it was his treatment by the mainstream that made Corman shoot The Wild Angels: My recent attempts to work with the majors had led to disillusionment, some bitterness, and anger. It was apparent that I was not about to emerge as a “star” director in the Hollywood Establishment. Perhaps that is why the photograph of those outrageous and defiant bikers, living as outlaws on the fringe, openly flaunting society’s conventions, so intrigued me. I wanted to make a realistic, possibly even sympathetic, film about them.135

133

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, 143. 134 R. Serge Denisoff and William D. Romanowski, Risky Business: Rock in Film (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 157. 135 Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 132.

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The Wild Angels was also a trendsetting picture and created a formula the subsequent biker films followed. On the story level, every biker film would now include a romantic gang leader who “is distanced from the violent extremities of his fellow Angels, but remains an uncontainable rebel,”136 some hassles with police, batteries, fistfights, emancipated women, drug and alcohol abuse, and a rape scene. On the artistic level, they would include scenes of bikers roaring their steel stallions against the beautiful and barren American deserts, with rock music playing in the background. This formula was to a varying degree followed by Hells Angels On Wheels, Born Losers, The Glory Stompers, Devil’s Angels (all 1967), The Savage Seven (1968), The Cycle Savages (1969) and Angels Die Hard (1970). The classic Easy Rider – which draws considerable inspiration from The Wild Angels, features Corman’s actors (Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson) and was supposed to be financed by Corman at one point of the production process – is sometimes called “the bastard child of Roger Corman.”137 Finally, The Wild Angels, which brought the counterculture revolution to the silver screen, also foreshadowed its demise. Just like Blues reached a spiritual and moral dead end after the hedonistic party in the church, the 1960s rebels realized the utopianism of their ideas after the events at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, during which four people died (including one murder), performers were injured and property was damaged. After the commercial success of The Wild Angels, Corman returned to the topic of the 1960s social changes in The Trip, in which he dealt with another element of the counterculture: LSD. This psychedelic drug was as widespread in hippie communities as marijuana. Its use was supposed to expand consciousness, reveal unknown, fantastic visual experiences to the eye, open the mind to an unseen – and better – part of the reality. It was considered crucial for the counterculture as it was deemed to enlighten and change its users, and thus make them reject everything traditional and form a new, better society. In the words of Jay Stevens, “it was the hippie sacrament, a mind detergent capable of washing away years of social

136

Xavier Mendik, Steven Jay Schneider, Underground U.S.A.: Filmmaking Beyond the Hollywood Canon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 131. 137 Michael P. DiPaolo, The Six Day Horror Movie: A No-Nonsense Guide to NoBudget Filmmaking (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004), 46.

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programming, a re-imprinting device, a consciousness-expander, a tool that would push us up the evolutionary ladder.”138 Prior to 1963, LSD got good press. In 1959, readers of This Week newspaper learned that LSD “has rescued many drug addicts, alcoholics, and neurotics from their private hells—and holds promise for curing tomorrow’s mental ills.”139 The pattern shifted in 1963, the year when Timothy Leary was relieved from his teaching duty as a Harvard lecturer. Leary was a psychologist working on the medical use of psychedelic drugs, mainly LSD and psilocybin. His experiments involved administering the drug to volunteers and noting their reactions. They attracted so much popular attention that he was unable to accommodate all the people who wanted to participate in his research. As a result, the black market for psychedelic substances flourished in Harvard to cater for all the curious but rejected volunteers, which was probably the unofficial reason behind Leary’s dismissal. After his removal from the university, he illegally continued his experiments in his mansion in Millbrook, which soon turned into a drug den with frequent parties and equally frequent police raids. The Millbrook excesses received extensive press coverage and LSD became gradually associated with Leary, and started getting bad press as well. Already in 1963, Washington Post wrote that psychedelics “have been blamed for at least one suicide, and for causing a respectable married secretary to appear nude in public.”140 The following years brought further warnings on the part of the authorities and the press. In 1966, for example, the chairman of the New Jersey Narcotic Drug Study Commission described LSD as “the greatest threat facing the country today... more dangerous than the Vietnam war.”141 At the same time, the use of LSD was propagated by “regular citizens,” including such renown and respectable figures as Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg and, obviously, Timothy Leary. The combination of official warnings and public praise constituted the most effective lure to try the drug oneself. It is estimated that between

138

Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1987), xiv. 139 Michaël Hicks, Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999), 59. 140 William Braden, “LSD and the Press,” International Substance Use Library, March 1, 2011. Accessed December 15, 2012. http://www.drugtext.org/ThePsychedelics/lsd-and-the-press.html. 141 C. NV. Sandman, Jr., in: William H. McGlothlin, “Toward a Rational View of Hallucinogenic Drugs,” Journal of Psychedelic Drugs (August 1966), 4.

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1,000,000 and 2,000,000 Americans had taken LSD by 1970.142 Those Americans who did not find the courage to try the drug themselves but were still curious about its effects could watch Corman’s The Trip. Corman wanted to be truthful to his audience, so he decided to take LSD himself and base the picture on his visions. Following the direction from one of Leary’s books, he went to a picturesque location and dropped acid. He claimed his own experience was wonderful, but, to be evenhanded, he talked to people who had bad trips and incorporated their testimonies in the film. Therefore, just as The Wild Angels are based on true biker stories, The Trip is based on actual LSD hallucinations. The picture begins with a foreword which was not intended by Corman but was added in postproduction by James Nicholson, the more conservative of the producer duo Nicholson-Arkoff, who was probably afraid the film might be construed as pro-LSD.143 You are about to be involved in a most unusual motion picture experience. It deals fictionally with the hallucinogenic drug, LSD. Today, the extensive use in black market production of this and other such “mind-bending” chemicals is of great concern to medical and civil authorities. The illegal manufacture and distribution of these drugs is dangerous and can have fatal consequences. Many have been hospitalized as a result. This picture represents a shocking commentary on a prevalent trend of our time and one that must be of great concern to all.

Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) is an ad director who leads a well-off, upperclass, bourgeois life which does not bring him happiness. His work engrosses him completely, which has led his wife (Susan Strasberg) to file for divorce against him. Paul begins questioning his lifestyle and the meaning of his existence. He asks his friend, John (Bruce Dern), to participate in a controlled LSD session, hoping it will help him solve his existential problems. They both drive to a tripper den, which is either genuine or very meticulously imitated by the art directors. The walls are painted in psychedelic, contrasting colors; the hippies are sitting in a circle and passing a joint, while the proprietor, Max (Dennis Hopper) recounts some of his drug experience, speaking hippie slang (he uses the word “man” 37 times!).

142

William H. McGlothlin, David O. Arnold, “LSD Revisited: A Ten-Year Follow-up of Medical LSD Use,” Archives of General Psychiatry (24 January 1971): 35. 143 Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 152.

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John prepares Paul for the trip, explaining the ins and outs of the LSD to him. He is probably modeled after Timothy Leary: bearded, dressed in a cream jacket, down-to-earth, speaking scientific language, he resembles a psychologist rather than a tripper. He even uses Leary’s exact vocabulary: “you gotta turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.” After Paul ingests the pill, everything seems blissful and flowing with energy. He experiences an extravaganza of colors he has never seen before. Abstract patterns of lights and colors are, at varying tempos, intertwined with seemingly random images of Paul walking through a forest, a sea shore or a sand dune. His visions are inhabited by two women: Sally, his wife, and Glenn, a blonde he met in the tripper den. He makes love to the former under colorful, hippie lighting, while the latter is watching. In a subsequent vision, Paul observes his wife cheating on him and making love to another man. Gradually, his hallucinations include frightening elements: he is haunted by monsters, chased by hooded horsemen, executed in half a dozen ways, and his body is burnt to ashes. From time to time, he returns to reality to recount his feeling to John (and the audience), who comforts and advises him. In his key vision, Paul sits on a merry-go-round surrounded by images from his life and the culture of his times: his wife, Paul with a camera, TV commercials he directed, a dollar bill, a crucifix, Timothy Leary, Malcolm X, a baby, a starving man, an American flag. He realizes he is on trial here for his lifestyle, and that Max, the local hippie guru, is going to judge him. Paul is accused of lying to people through his commercials. Although he initially pleads not guilty, saying: “It’s a living, everybody’s got to make a living. What choice do I have? What else is there that I can do that’s any better?” he finally understands he is wasting his life: Max: “I wish there was some hip way of telling you this, baby, but, ah... you’re one with and part of an ever-expanding, loving, joyful, glorious, and harmonious universe.” Paul: “Funny.” Max: “Yeah, in a way. But, you play your personal games.” Paul: “Alright, I know. Everybody knows. But nobody lives that way.” Max: “Is that your defense, man?” Paul: “Yes. I mean, no. I’m guilty. I’m guilty.” Max: “Right! But don’t wallow because it’s fake and disgusting!”

This sequence reflects the hippie philosophy of the era and criticizes the rampart materialism, the pursuit of money, the total and uncritical involvement in one’s job. It also advises the audience to enjoy life and all its wonders.

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Paul returns to reality and, frightened, runs away from the apartment into the city, where, again, he experiences an extravaganza of shapes and colors. The sequence is executed similarly to the famous scene in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000) – the camera, moving together with the actor, films Fonda’s head and torso from the level of his abdomen. Needless to say, The Trip precedes Requiem for a Dream by over 30 years. Paul stumbles into a discotheque, sits at a table and watches the dancing crowd with fascination. A waitress tries to serve him but realizes he is drugged. She scolds him: “What’s the matter with you people? Isn’t the real world good enough for you?” However, when Paul presents her with his money, asking: “Is that what you want?” her eyes widen and her attitude changes immediately: she becomes helpful, polite and sympathetic. The “real world” is venal and greedy. Paul finally bumps into Glenn, they go to her place and make love. When Paul wakes up in the morning, his trip is over. He goes out of the room into the terrace. When Glenn asks him whether he found the insight, he says that he did and that he loves everyone. Shallow as his last lines may seem, Paul has clearly been changed by his LSD experience. He touches his body as if he was born anew, and gazes into the distance, that is, metaphorically, into his future. His trip exploited his guilty conscience and has made him reevaluate his lifestyle, giving him wisdom for his future life. Corman concurs with this interpretation: “Even if acid seemed bad, Groves had possibly learned something about himself by taking acid. And in fact, so had I.”144 However, the ending has been altered in postproduction by James Nicholson: the final frame is frozen and then cracked to imply that Paul’s life has been shattered by drugs. The change was protested by all the people involved in the shooting – Corman, Fonda, Hopper, Dern and Jack Nicholson (the scriptwriter) – to no avail. The Trip is a statement of its era. It was the first film to treat the topic of narcotics objectively, without demonizing or misjudging them. In fact, although it had been envisaged as balanced, the outcome turned out to be favorable to LSD. Despite the fact that Paul experiences some frightening hallucinations, he comes off well from the experiment, with new knowledge and the will to change for the better. In fact, if one understands the positive message behind the picture, they might feel inclined to try the drug themselves, or to reevaluate their lifestyles. And it is impossible to reproach the film with dishonesty, on the contrary, the picture can boast of genuineness unprecedented in drug films as all the key figures involved in 144

Ibid., 153.

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the film – Corman, Fonda, Hopper and Jack Nicholson – tried the drug and experienced the LSD trip first hand. As a result, the LSD effects and the tripper community are imitated with meticulous detail. In fact, The Trip constitutes a “time capsule” which allows the audience to peek into 1960s America with its drug culture, hippie philosophy, language, clothes, art and music. The history behind the film – conservative James Nicholson altering the ending to make LSD look harmful – also mirrors the tensions the US was going through in the 1960s. Corman’s final commentary on the counterculture reverberates in Gass-s-s, also known under the title Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (1970). The film was conceived as a Strangelovian satire, but it falls far behind its noble predecessor. Although it was undermined by production problems and sabotaged by James Nicholson in postproduction, its main drawback lies in the faulty script. Consequently, the plot seems artificial – events in the film happen one after another without any logic, reason or motivation, just because they are in the script. When historical figures like Billy the Kid, JFK, Martin Luther King, Gandhi or Lincoln show up on screen, the symbolism behind their appearance is either obscure or plainly incomprehensible. Some jokes are too hermetic, like Edgar Allan Poe escaping the red death on a chopper motorbike (sic!), other jokes simply fall flat. The acting is stiff and amateurish at times, and even the camerawork, intricate and brilliant in Corman’s previous films, is unsteady and sloppy. Nevertheless, Gas-s-s-s manages to deliver some of its counterculture points across and as such is important for this analysis. The picture opens with an animated sequence in which a politician and a military official (modeled on John Wayne), in an act of sheer idiocy, release the title gas onto the unsuspecting world. The gas is a chemical weapon which kills everybody over the age of 25. This concept refers to the famous sentence uttered by Jack Weinberg during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” It also puts together the ideas from Corman’s earlier films: anti-Establishment, youth rebellion, mass apocalypse and the rebirth of civilization. With the elders gone, the twenty-year-olds raid unattended shops and throw a “free beer party.” However, the duo of protagonists, Coel (Bob Corff) and Cilla (Elaine Giftos), are too sophisticated and sensitive to party senselessly on the graves of their parents, so they set out to find a better society which would not duplicate the errors of their forefathers. On their journey, they come across various social orders, mostly based on autocracy in one way or another, until they reach El Paso, a peaceful

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hippie commune with free love, hallucinogens and ecological agriculture. El Paso is the blissful utopia they have been looking for. However, one of the dictators the duo met on their way follows them to the commune and decides to destroy it. The confrontation proves that the new society has learned from the mistakes of their elders as Coel proposes a pacifistic solution: “Let’s try and talk to them. We’ve done it the other way for ten thousand years.” The members of the commune put Red Cross helmets on and approach their aggressors with an enormous peace sign, mimicking the anti-Vietnam War protests. The dictator is too chivalrous to attack the Red Cross, and surrenders. In the grande finale, enemies become friends, villains repent, guns are thrown away, all the characters from the film arrive to the commune to participate in the creation of the new world, and great peace figures like JFK, Martin Luther King, Gandhi or Lincoln appear as well to be welcomed into El Paso (which is probably a metaphor for the communitarians accepting their peaceful ideals), and everybody has a party, but with fresh produce instead of alcohol. When one of the bystanders onlooking the feast asks Poe the question: “Aren’t they going to rape, cheat and steal, Edgar?” Poe’s raven replies “Nevermore!” Naïve as it is, Gas-s-s-s allows the audience to take a peek at the 1960s America. Everything is here: peace activism, free love, rock music, ecological agriculture, beneficial hallucinogens, anti-war protests, long hair, hippies, racial equality, anti-Establishment ideals, and so on. Yet, failing to provide any deeper meaning behind those symbols, the film presents the counterculture in a very superficial way. In fact, it reduces it to empty symbols, which appear on screen and miraculously perform the function they symbolize: peace sign appears – fighting stops; ecological agriculture is used – everybody is fed and healthy; Martin Luther King shows up – all people are equal; and so on. The idealistic, utopian, even gullible ending makes the film resemble a fairy tale rather than a social commentary, but it corresponds to the popular hippie belief about world peace and global brotherhood. It could be said that, devoid of any deeper thought or analysis, Gas-s-s-s renders the aim and the sense of the youth rebellion better than any other film. However, despite its many flaws and general shallowness, Gas-s-s-s is still a pro-counterculture movie and as such represents the political views of its creator: Hollywood was deeply split during Vietnam between two camps. The power structure, the financial people and some conservative big-time actors – John Waynes, Charlton Hestons – generally supported the war and

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3.3. Summary The Intruder, The Wild Angels and The Trip manage to present their respective issues with considerable insight. They all avoid simplistic divisions and clichéd endings, and the cinéma vérité style adds further realism. Shooting these films, Corman wanted to remain truthful to his audience and to make his films as realistic as possible. For this reason, The Wild Angels are based on actual Hell’s Angels’ stories and employ the members of the gang as extras, The Intruder is set in a town near Little Rock and employs locals as actors and extras, and The Trip is based on Corman’s actual LSD experience. Conversely, Gas-s-s-s, his final counterculture film, is a polar opposite to the previous three – shallow, naïve and idealistic.

4. Conclusion Corman was a keen observer of the reality surrounding him, from which he often drew ideas for his films. He paid great attention to the political climate of his times, the events which hit the headlines, the social attitudes of his fellow Americans and the movements those attitudes gave rise to, the teenage culture with its fads and problems, even the seemingly insignificant trends in the cosmetic industry – all of these constituted a source of inspiration for Corman. “I like to have a certain social viewpoint within the film itself, even if it’s a light comedy, even if it’s an exploitation film,”146 says Corman in one of the interviews. Indeed, a close scrutiny reveals that of the fifty films he directed, as many as twenty directly involve social or political motifs of their times. These motifs are the common element that binds these films together regardless of their genre – a fact that cannot be omitted in the investigation of Corman’s authorship. One may counter, however, that all Corman did was merely exploit popular themes for easy profit. This accusation seems just, considering the fact that he frequently repeats that he shot certain movies to capitalize on contemporary trends. Yet, according to Corman himself, these films are equally personal as his other pictures because when it comes to socially 145 146

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 166. Corman in Nasr, Roger Corman Interviews, 100.

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conscious films, the demand of the market is often identical with the will of the artist: I think that every artist blends his own experience and the inspiration that he takes from the society and the culture that surrounds him. […] It goes hand in hand with the evolution of the market, which influences the creator as much as the creator influences it himself. In the sixties [for example], audiences wanted a more radical cinema, and so did the filmmaker.147

In other words, the popular topics Corman capitalized on in his films interested not only the viewers but also the director himself, or at least so he claims. After all, the director is immersed in the same sociopolitical reality as his or her audience. In this respect, one may say that the director shoots films he/she would like to watch himself/herself. The events that remained a growing concern for ordinary Americans, like the threat of a nuclear holocaust or the increase in juvenile delinquency, also fretted Corman personally. The films he shot basing on these anxieties were thus inasmuch motivated by the external factors as they were personal. Some of these topics were treated carefully and with great insight. The Intruder presents the complexity of the racial desegregation conflict without facile divisions into good blacks and bad whites. In The Wild Angels, the director sympathizes with the ideal of unimpeded freedom shared by the bikers, but he is also well aware of its futility and foreshadows the inevitable demise of the counterculture as well as the events that happened in Altamont on December 9, 1969. The Trip tries to present the effects of LSD objectively and leaves the story open-ended so that the audience can judge the drug themselves. Therefore, though the subject matter of these films, especially The Wild Angels and The Trip, can be considered exploitive, its treatment is not exploitive but thoughtful. Thus, it seems that Corman succeeded in using the exploitation formula to lure the audiences into cinemas without becoming its hostage. On the contrary, he managed to express his own deliberate vision. Of course, the exploitation element is still very much present in Corman’s filmography. Films like War of the Satellites or Attack of the Crab Monsters are clearly exploitive features which have very little to offer beside entertainment. The treatment of the topic in these films is so superficial and schematic that it is difficult to believe Corman had any other motivation than financial while shooting these motion pictures. Moreover, he sometimes included an exploitable gimmick only to make the film successful at the box office. For instance, Carnival Rock was 147

Ibid., 153.

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marketed as a rock and roll picture, but, except for the rock music performances, it is a romantic drama centered on a femme fatale. In The Undead, the exploited topic of hypnotic regression serves merely as a starting point for a story about female empowerment. Therefore, although these films should still be considered exploitation, their exploited topics are not their main themes. This, in turn, means that Corman again managed to fulfil the requirements posed by exploitation without becoming their hostage. According to auteur theorists, an auteur-director can realize his/her personal vision despite the confines of the genre. Corman – it seems – is able to realize his vision despite the confines of exploitation. Summing up, there is no doubt that Corman is an exploitation director, as films like Day the World Ended, Not of This Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, War of the Satellites, or The Last Woman on Earth clearly exploited popular topics and have very little to offer thematically, besides being cultural curiosities of a by-gone era. Though the director can argue that these themes were very personal for him, it is definitely too little to fulfil the requirements posed by the auteur theory. Yet, Corman sometimes used exploitation only as an excuse to refer to something entirely different than the topic he seemed to be exploiting. In other words, he touched different themes than the ones he marketed and he bypassed the conventions of exploitation to express a personal vision. These themes might constitute a stronger argument in favor of his possible authorship and shall be investigated in Chapter 4.

CHAPTER FOUR RECURRING THEMATIC MOTIFS AND ARTISTIC TRIUMPH

1. Introduction Chapter 3 showed that many exploitation films by Corman refer to different themes than the ones they seem to be “exploiting.” If the exploited topic served primarily as a money-making device, what are his films truly about? The following chapter shall strive to answer that question by investigating his works for the basic recondite motifs which are necessary for a director to be deemed auteur. A separate section is devoted to the analysis of his magnum opus – the gothic horror series.

2. Female empowerment The 1950s male-dominated film industry relatively rarely cast women as film protagonists in action-oriented pictures: westerns, horrors, crime, fantasy, science-fiction or gangster films. In these genres, actresses would star mainly in minor roles, usually as beautiful but insignificant additions to the male lead, objects of desire for men to fight for, or damsels in distress for the valiant hero to save. Obviously, there were exceptions, like Warner’s Them!, in which a female scientist opposes the this-is-no-placefor-a-woman rhetoric, assumes control over a military squad, boldly descends into a dangerous sewer system, and orders the soldiers to burn a giant ant nest, thus saving Los Angeles, if not the whole world. However, for every Them! there were at least a dozen of films like The Thing from Another World, in which the only creative activity a woman could perform to help solve the plot’s problem was brewing coffee for the tired males. The only action-oriented genre in which women were regularly cast as strong characters in the 1950s was the crime drama retrospectively named film noir. The females in film noir would often play femme fatales: characters aware of their sexuality, cunning and intelligent, manipulating and dominating men, and thus driving the plot forward, like Diane in

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Angel Face (1952) or Lily/Gabrielle in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Still, even the actresses in the central and crucial roles for the film’s plot were billed second, after the male protagonist, just like Jean Simmons, whose character steers the plot in Angel Face, was billed after Robert Mitchum, whose character is passive. One of very few directors in the 1950s, if not the only one, who would shoot action-oriented films with strong female protagonists billed first and consciously reverse gender roles (but not for comical effect) was Corman. He claims that “it is noteworthy that no one else at the time was making action pictures with female leads. In all the stories we tried to make the women genuinely the protagonists in that they initiated the action.”1 Naysayers would argue that he just found a niche and exploited it to earn easy profit, and that his films, advertised with slogans like “HER GAME WAS MEN…ANY KIND OF MEN,” actually addressed male fantasies and portrayed women through exactly these fantasies. This is not, however, entirely true. Firstly, Corman would also include strong and bright females in films which did not necessarily exploit man-woman relations, but rather monsters, special effects or cultural themes. Secondly, he admitted in his autobiography: “I do believe in the feminist movement.”2 However, let us not take his words for a fact – after all, he could have written anything in his autobiography – and listen to what one of his female co-workers, Gale Anne Hurd, has to say: One extraordinary aspect to Roger is that he is and has always been, without question, a great champion of women in film, 100 percent. I went on to produce Aliens, The Terminator, and The Abyss in the studio system. When I left Roger, I thought all of Hollywood was going to be like that, that women would be given opportunities and even considered better candidates for the job than most men. I think Roger prefers to work with women. I never even realized sexism existed in Hollywood until I got outside New World. Roger had no problem, continues to have no problem, hiring women directors, women editors, women art directors, producers, writers. Through my experiences at New World, Roger gave me this naïve idealism that this was an industry with no barriers to sex or age. Initially, when I went to studios after Roger, I got a lot of “How can a little girl like you expect to do a big movie like this?” which is a comment on my age and my sex.3

1

Roger Corman quoted in J. Philip DiFranco and Karyn G. Browne, The Movie World of Roger Corman (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1979), 162. 2 Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 34. 3 Gale Anne Hurd in Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 235-236.

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But Gale Ann Hurd – who, by the way, received the Women in Film Crystal Award, a prize for people who help promote women in the entertainment industry – is not the only feminist filmmaker discovered and elevated by Corman. The films Stephanie Rothman realized under the auspices of Corman have been widely analyzed by feminist scholars like Pam Cook, Claire Johnson or Terry Curtis Fox and praised for their protofeminist themes.4 Henry Jenkins believes that these themes – “strong female protagonists, stories of exploitation and resistance, victimization and empowerment”5 – were borrowed from Corman himself. The director can, therefore, boast a long list of genuinely pro-feminist films which spans his entire career both as a director and as a producer. Corman’s first strong female already appears in his first film, Five Guns West (1955), although she is still not fully developed. Shalee (Dorothy Malone) runs a stagecoach station together with her uncle (James Stone). He is an alcoholic, so it is up to Shalee to manage the station, the household, the horses, which she does with perfection. The duo establishes a pattern – a bright, independent, attractive, strong female and her inept male sidekick – that Corman will use in his subsequent films. When the eponymous five cowboys arrive to the station, Shalee shows that she is as skilled with a gun as she is with running the station’s affairs, which wins her the respect of the gunmen. After the tension between her and the newcomers subsides, she is not afraid to use her feminine charms on the love-starved cowboys to learn the purpose of their arrival. Unlike in other westerns, where women are the passive side of courting, in Five Guns West it is Shalee who is dealing the cards. However, when she finally falls in love with the male protagonist, she claims in an unfeminist way that all she really craves is marriage and family.6 Corman considerably spices the plot up in his subsequent film, Apache Woman (1955), in which the eponymous character is not only a strong female but also a half-breed Apache. Thus, he combines feminist themes with the study of racism, the two topics he would separately revisit in his subsequent films. He also explores the strong female – weak male pattern 4

See: Pam Cook, The Cinema Book, 3rd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 2007); Claire Johnston, Notes on Women’s Cinema (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973); Terry Curtis Fox, “Fully Female,” Film Comment 12. 6 (Nov/Dec 1976). 5 Jenkins, “Exploiting Feminism in Stephanie Rothman’s Terminal Island,” 124. 6 Then again, her dream is neither counterintuitive nor historically inaccurate. Taking into consideration the fact that the station is surrounded by barren landscape and that her drunken uncle is not much of a farmhand, it is of no surprise that she looks for a husband who would provide her with help and support.

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he established in Five Guns West, which is reflected in the relationship between Anne, the eponymous Apache Woman (Joan Taylor), and her brother Armand (Lance Fuller). Anne, dressed in pants and a work shirt, runs the ranch and orders her brother around. She can also take care of herself in a brawl. In fact, the film opens with a knife fight between Anne and Tom, the film’s racist, which remains unsettled, proving that Anne is as skilled in armed combat as any man. Armand is a dreamy, irresolute character, who keeps fantasizing about being an Apache chief. Wearing a soft-skinned vest, a floppy hat as well as feather and fur ornaments, he is the less masculine in the half-breed duo. Both of them are caught between two cultures and belong to neither, but it is Anne who handles this situation better. While Armand resigns from the pursuit of his own place in the world and locks himself in his anguish and bitterness, Anne, having a stronger personality, considers her life to be filled with opportunities, and ultimately finds happiness in the arms of a tolerant government agent (Lloyd Bridges). The two subsequent films, Swamp Women and Oklahoma Woman, reverse the patriarchy by introducing female dominance and male servility. Swamp Women’s heroine, Lee (Carole Matthews), is a police officer. The film immediately establishes her as a strong woman: the first time she is shown on screen, she is wearing a masculine police uniform and the commissioner compliments her on her strength of character, wits, bravery and the ability to keep the streets safe.7 He also assigns her an important mission: to infiltrate an imprisoned female gang, stage an escape and make the gang members lead her to a cache of stolen diamonds hidden somewhere on the Louisiana bayou. The gang comprises three females: Josie (Marie Windsor), who is the sensible leader, Vera (Beverly Garland) and Billie (Jil Jarmyn). The latter two are polar opposites: Vera is a redheaded, trigger-happy, unstable sadist, who loves guns and enjoys verbally and physically abusing everybody around her, even Josie; Billie is a more traditional fifties woman, she is blonde, sensual and dreamy. After Lee stages the breakout, Vera immediately demands a gun, while Billie asks for make-up. When the girls get drunk around a campfire, they start talking about the dreams they will realize after they fence the diamonds: Billie will undergo plastic surgery, while Vera will buy an entire town with all its inhabitants so that she can push them around. Despite personality differences, however, all the women are equally strong. They steal, kill, cuss, argue or even fistfight when they disagree. As the Apache 7

A woman doing a typical male job (in uniformed forces!) in an exemplary way – one of the rarest sights in 1950s cinema.

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Woman, they wear pants and work shirts, but during the drunken episode at the campfire, they cut their pant legs off and spend the rest of the film wearing sexy shorts, even though it is a counterintuitive thing to do when being on a bayou. This way, however, Corman manifests the feminist ideas pertaining to the second wave of feminism – his women are independent and sexually attractive. When the four females reach the area where the diamonds are stashed, they accidentally bump into an attractive hiker, Bob (Mike Connors), whom they decide to take hostage just in case. From that moment on, Bob spends most of the film bound, literally and symbolically, while all the gang women exercise their power over him through insulting, slapping or pushing him around. Yet, they are all somewhat sexually attracted to him. Vera, for instance, alternately slaps his face and caresses it with her phallic gun. Her sexual dominance over him is apparent. Although Bob is completely at the mercy of his captors, he fails to realize the gravity of the situation. In fact, he enjoys being dominated, flirtatiously smiles at the women and drops unambiguous remarks in their direction. Through the character of Bob, Corman criticizes male sexual obsession and egoism. Even after Lee dispatches all the gang members, Bob still believes she is an evildoer and offers to defend her when the police arrive, to which she only laughs. In short, he is intellectually, emotionally and physically inferior to all the “swamp women.” There are several scenes in this picture referring to the mythological nation of Amazons and its popular depiction, which further reinforces the female dominance – male servility theme. In one, two women wade in a dense bog, pulling the boat in which the other two guard their male “property.” In another one, Vera steals the diamonds and kidnaps Bob, whom she intends to turn into a sex slave, then climbs a tree to have a better shooting position at the oncoming posse. Sitting at the tree in her skimpy outfit and with a bound captive at the bottom, she resembles an Amazon queen with a male slave at the foot of her throne. The film finishes on a Darwinian note, but again with gender role reversal: the fittest female, Lee, dispatches the competition in close combat and claims the male. The themes of female dominance and male servility touched upon in Swamp Women are further explored in The Oklahoma Woman (1956). After being released from prison, the picture’s protagonist, Steve Ward (Richard Denning), returns to his hometown to find it divided between two factions. The eponymous Marie “Oklahoma” Saunders (Peggie Castle), who also happens to be Ward’s ex-girlfriend, runs a saloon for shifty characters and wants the town to remain lawless. The law-abiding citizens

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led by politician Ed Grant (Tudor Owen) and his daughter Susan (Cathy Downs) wish to establish law and order by driving the saloon owner away from the town. Saunders stops at nothing to reach her goal: though dressed like a lady, she does not shy away from beating or gunning down her enemies. She surrounds herself with servile employees who are at her every beck and call and constantly crawl to her. Saunders tries to court her ex-boyfriend Ward but to no avail: after serving his prison sentence, Ward has no willingness for conflict. He has turned mellow and indifferent, lost all the ambition he had. He also feels no desire for his sultry ex-girlfriend and remains unresponsive to her charms, as if prison turned him into an eunuch – their mutual relations repeat Corman’s active female – feeble male pattern. When Saunders grows angry with Ward’s indifference, she orders her henchmen to kill Ed Grant and frame Ward. Ward is unable to defend himself when the time comes, so Grant’s daughter, Susan, who is also enamored with Ward, springs to his defense. She gets into a fistfight with Saunders, beats her and extorts a confession to everything. Like in Swamp Women, the fittest female defeats the competition and claims the male, who was just a plaything in the hands of strong, dominant women. Gender role reversal is also the leading motif in Corman’s subsequent film, The Gunslinger (1956). The picture is set in a small Texas town and begins with its Sheriff discussing the saloon problem with his wife, Rose (Beverly Garland). When Rose offers to help her husband, he replies: “You stick to making coffee, Rose,” reinforcing the patriarchal gender role system and hinting the topic of the film à rebours. Soon after, the sheriff is shot through the window. Though Rose grabs a rifle and guns the killers down, she is too late to save her husband. At the funeral ceremony, she addresses the assembled crowd to appoint a new lawman, but none of the men has enough courage to face the outlaws. The only thing she can do to avenge the death of her husband is to become a sheriff herself. She thus changes her usual feminine dress for pants and shirt – as is typical of Corman’s heroines – to which she pins the tin star. The funeral scene can be interpreted twofold: either as a critique of men, who cowardly hide behind theoretically weaker women; or a praise of women – that an average coffee-making housewife can have a stronger character than many of the men. The person responsible for the death of Rose’s husband is the saloon owner, Erica (Allison Hayes). Erica is an exact copy of “Oklahoma” Saunders: dressed seductively, sexually liberated, dominant, surrounded by servile men (one of whom she calls “little man”), cunning and ambitious. She is also a resilient businesswoman, buying up the land in town in order to sell it with a profit to a railroad company. When she hires

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a gunman, Cane (John Ireland) to kill Rose, she combines business with pleasure – she assigns him the murder and then takes him to bed. The gender role reversal in The Gunslinger is complete as both women, the heroine and the villain, do precisely what their male equivalents would do: gun people down, chase each other on horses, claim their love interests, even brawl in the saloon. Rose and Cane fall in love with each other, but Rose does not let her feminine emotions stand in the way of her duty. Even though falling in love and getting married was every woman’s dream in a 1950s Western,8 Rose overcomes her feelings and shoots villainous Cane down, becoming “the best sheriff this town has ever had.” According to the prevailing Western custom, she rides away into the sunset after fulfilling her duty. Though gender roles are not reversed in Not of This Earth, the film can still boast a beautiful and bright female protagonist. Nadine is much more feminine than the characters Beverly Garland played in Corman’s previous films. She dresses womanly, and Corman lets the audience take a glimpse at her well-shaped body when she puts stockings on her shapely legs or sunbathes by the pool. She uses her sex appeal to gain control over the men around her, especially her co-worker Jeremy, whom she seduces into obedience. But visual attractiveness is not the only one of Nadine’s advantages: she is also the smartest character in the film. It is she who pieces all the facts together and unravels the film’s mystery. Together with her boyfriend policeman, she creates a complementary man-woman couple uncommon in the 1950s cinema: she has the brains, he has the brawn. Teenage Doll has already been examined from the perspective of its female characters in the previous chapter, but it is worth adding that this portrayal of juvenile delinquency through female gangs is unique in the 1950s cinema. The film shows gang girls (again manly dressed in pants and jackets) as physically and psychologically strong. When they find their friend dead, none of the girls has a fit of hysteria as one would expect from a 1950s female character. Instead, they set their feminine emotions aside and start planning revenge with cold logic. The girls are also capable of everything their male equivalents indulge in: smoking, drinking, stealing, fighting. In the latter case, however, it is important to note men and women brawl separately.

8

And not only western, but virtually every genre in the 1950s. As Alma (Thelma Ritter) said in Pillow Talk (1959): “If there’s anything worse than a woman living alone, it’s a woman saying she likes it.”

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The Undead can boast of two strong females. One of them is the protagonist, Diana9 (Pamela Duncan), who is hypnotically regressed to her previous incarnation – Helena. Helena has been accused of witchcraft and imprisoned in a tower to await execution. To escape, she seduces the prison guard with her sexual charms, then bashes him unconscious with her shackles. Like Corman’s previous heroines, she needs to use her wits and sex appeal to gain advantage over men and attain her own goals. But the true act of heroism is yet to come. When she is finally reunited with her lover, Pendragon (Richard Garland), and escapes the persecutors who want to behead her, she learns that she must be executed before dawn in order not to interrupt her future incarnations. Just like Rose in The Gunslinger, Helena overcomes her feminine emotions and the desire to get married shared by almost all 1950s female characters. Instead, she acts rationally and chooses a greater good over her love affair. What is more, she does so despite her lover’s insistence, proving that she is an independent woman who acts according to her own conscience. The execution scene is also a tour de force of her strong character. The woman to be executed before her screams and tussles, while the crowd of onlookers laugh and deride her. However, when Helena bravely and proudly steps on the scaffold, the crowd falls silent, astonished and respectful. The camera films her from below to show that Helena towers over the puny rabble intellectually and psychologically. Livia (Allison Hayes) is a sultry succubus who competes with Helena for the film’s male, Pendragon, since gender roles in The Undead are reversed and it is women who claim men, not the opposite. She uses her sexual charms to seduce him, and when that does not bring the desired effect, she resorts to a deceit: framing Helena for witchcraft. Like the previous female antagonists in Corman’s films, she has a little servile man, an imp, who defers to her every wish. She is also sexually attractive, cunning and dangerous, and does not shy away from brutally murdering any men who stand in her way. Carnival Rock is another film which revolves around a female protagonist. Natalie (Susan Cabot) is complex and difficult to pigeonhole, unlike other Corman’s females. The director plays with his audience, at first presenting the female lead as a femme fatale taken directly from the film noir genre: attractive, bright, independent and self-centered. There is even a catfight scene from which Natalie emerges victorious because she fights like a man. However, she changes halfway through the story and 9

Diana is a prostitute and, at the same time, a positive protagonist. The film does not criticize her occupation, neither does it moralize or caution the audience – an extremely rare occurrence for a 1950s feature film.

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becomes compassionate, sensitive and affectionate. In short, the affair she has with her boss makes her “grow up” mentally and emotionally, and develop into a complete modern woman, who embodies both male and female characteristics: reason, ambition and independence – traditionally associated with men; emotion, tenderness and empathy – traditionally associated with women. The story also reveals that beauty – the attribute customarily desired by women – can bring misfortune upon them. Despite the title and several rock’n’roll performances during the film, Carnival Rock is not a rock’n’roll picture, nor is it a circus film as Silver and Ursini suggest.10 The subject matter rather resembles the melodramas retrospectively named “woman’s films,” as Carnival Rock is centered on the female lead and touches upon typically feminine concerns: romance, love triangle, and the love-career dilemma. A real tribute to gender role reversal and female strength is paid by Corman in his fantasy film with a truly epic title: The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. The plot begins in medias res as the eponymous Viking women grow impatient with waiting for their men to return from an overseas journey. Sensing that their spouses might be in danger, the females put a rescue mission to the vote, which is conducted by throwing a spear at either of two targets. The voting procedure is absurd – it would be easier and more convenient to just raise hands – but it establishes the women as skilled and strong warriors, and their society as open and democratic. Having decided in favor of the rescue operation, the females build a longship from scratch, proving they are equally proficient at typically male activities. But Corman does not stop at this point in emancipating his women, and includes one male character, Ottar, who was probably too young to join the male expedition when it set sails. Ottar is ignored by the women and spends the entire film trying to match or impress them. When the females discover him on the longship, he explains: “Somebody has to protect you women.” However, he is so hotheaded, especially in comparison with the sensible women, that he gets mercilessly beaten by his enemies whenever he tries to prove his manhood, and it is often he who requires female help. After the longship is destroyed by the sea serpent, the protagonists are cast ashore and taken captive by the Grimolts. The Grimolts are an overstereotyped patriarchal society, their warriors indulge in gluttony and drunkenness, and when they finish feasting, they grab hold of any woman they fancy and carry her to their chambers to fornicate. Other activities performed by Grimolt women – aside copulating on demand – include 10

Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 85.

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dancing for the pleasure of the men and serving food and wine to them. The possessive attitude towards females is also portrayed during the ritual burning of the late Grimolt prince: first his sword is tossed into the fire, then his kicking concubine, and then his body. It is also interesting to note that the Grimolts are ruled by a king and a prince, but there is no queen (or princesses, for that matter) – women simply do not rise to any power in this society. This way, Corman juxtaposes a more backward, chauvinist society to a more progressive society based on gender equality. The latter is depicted as noble, sensible, democratic and idealistic. The former is criticized through revealing its barbarity, authoritarianism and the utter lack of respect towards the opposite sex. Corman also goes as far as to claim that not all the chauvinists are as manly as they say or pretend to be. The Grimolt prince, Senya, boasts of being a great warrior but is in fact childish and immature, even effeminate (notice the feminine name), whining whenever in any real peril. He tries to impress the Viking women during a ritual boar hunt but only puts himself in danger and has to be saved by one of them. Disgraced, he challenges the woman who saved him to arm wrestling… and loses. In short, the chauvinist Grimolts are ruled by an inept hypocrite. Ultimately, the progressive Viking society wins, as its women fight side by side with their newly liberated men and manage to vanquish the Grimolts, killing their prince and king in the process. The strong character of Flo, the moll from Machine Gun Kelly, and her importance for the film’s eponymous anti-hero have already been mentioned in the previous chapter. Kelly calls her a “kitten” and she indeed struts their hideout dressed in furs, taunting the gangsters and inciting them against one another like a classical film noir femme fatale. She cunningly maneuvers between the mobsters in her gang, always siding with the strongest hoodlum and trying to control him from behind. Flo is also the mastermind behind Kelly’s actions and, in fact, his entire image as a criminal. In one lengthy scene, she bitterly makes him realize her superiority, while he listens with a lowered head: You had been watering down gin when I picked you up. I gave you the machine gun, the name, the reputation. I gave you a backbone. […] You were dumb enough and scared enough. I could use you, make you do anything I wanted to do. You were my gunhand. […] I could have had fifty better than you, and I still can, but they wouldn’t push around so easily. […] I mothered you until you were brave enough to be a man. Everybody knows you’re not.

Flo indeed uses her men for her own purposes, feeling no emotional attachment to their partners – a very atypical attitude for a 1950s female

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character. When the couple is surrounded by the police, Kelly wants to surrender to avoid being killed. Flo, however, wants to kill their hostages, frame him for the murder and pretend an innocent, intimidated woman. It was also unlike for the 1950s and 1960s films to show women on executive posts in companies, but Janice Starlin from The Wasp Woman is precisely that: a CEO of a successful cosmetic company who has men as her subordinates. Starlin has led her company to the top through hard work and diligence but also on account of her extraordinary beauty. Her later story, however, is rather unfeminist: as her pretty face constitutes the foundation of her company’s success, she is unable to maintain the sales profit when her beauty begins to fade away. Therefore, much as in the mainstream pictures of the 1950s and 1960s, in The Wasp Woman a woman’s life success is indivisibly connected with her looks. The plot of the film resembles that of a film noir: as getting old constitutes an inseparable element of human life, Starlin is in a cul-de-sac situation, doomed to imminent failure. Consequently, the film might be interpreted as a criticism of the cult of beauty and its disastrous consequences, much like the later French-Italian production, Eyes Without a Face (1960).11 But despite the fatum hanging over Starlin, Corman is sympathetic toward this female protagonist. Starlin’s male subordinates constantly try to undermine her position and authority, either because of the company’s financial results or their bruised male ego. In revenge, when she becomes the eponymous monster, she kills and eats the males just like some species of insects and arachnids, ultimately regaining and reinforcing her female dominance over her subordinate men. It should also be noted that insect cannibalism is often paired with mating. Though no sexual activities are portrayed on the footage (except victim consummation which might be an allegory for a sexual act), they are hinted by the film’s tagline: “A beautiful woman by day – a lusting queen wasp by night” and that “strong men [were] forced to satisfy a passion no human knows.” This exploitive take on the Jekyll/Hyde motif suggests Starlin’s sexual dominance, animalistic desire and rapist/victim gender role reversal. In this respect, the film might realize the male fantasy of a woman as a monster, who disempowers and incapacitates her male victims and “threatens to devour [them], to castrate via incorporation.”12 In this respect, the film is rather unfeminist and, according to Chrystine Berzsenyi, belongs to the typical trend of male-oriented 1950s horrors, 11

For further details on such interpretation, see: Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 118. 12 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1993), 157.

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together with films like The Astounding She-Monster (1958), She-Devil (1957), Invasion of She-Creatures (1962), or Cat Women of the Moon (1953).13 Yet, it is the eponymous Bloody Mama who is the strongest of Corman’s female – physically, psychologically and sexually. She exercises her authority over every man in the film: her submissive husband, whom she leaves at the very beginning of the film because he is unable to provide her with the luxury she craves; her four sons, whom she controls, mothers, fornicates with and, if necessary, punishes; her male hostage, whom she binds, feeds, fornicates with, and then orders to be killed. Ma Barker always chooses her lovers herself and initiates every intercourse. It is also she who masterminds all of her gang’s heists and constitutes a necessary element for the gang’s well-being, so when one of her sons usurps her authority, the group begins to crumble. Ma Barker is different from any previous film heroine in her physical, psychological and sexual hegemony and control over all the male characters. She is a synthesis of Corman’s earlier ideas on a female protagonist and their best exemplar. Summing up, Corman’s women are unlike most other female characters of the period. They constitute real protagonists in his films when it comes to their role in the plot, the screening time, the billing, even the title. In a cinematic milieu where a woman’s only features were her beauty and sexual availability, Corman’s females epitomize the image of a modern woman as seen by the second wave of feminism – sexually attractive but also intelligent, independent, reasonable, outgoing, showing initiative, psychologically and physically strong – before the second wave was even born. He rejects the then accepted female passivity, as his action women shoot guns, fistfight, swordfight, ride horses, solve murders and are never inferior to men in any typically male activities. The director also depicts his women as figures of authority, often superior to men, whom they control: Sheriff Rose and her male deputies as well as saloon owner Erica and her male workers in The Gunslinger, nurse Nadine and her helper Jeremy in Not of This Earth, CEO Janice Starlin and her male subordinates, the Viking women and their helper Ottar in The Saga of Viking Women. When it comes to female villains, the same relation is kept, though distorted into authoritarianism-servility: female convicts and their hostage Bob in Swamp Women, Oklahoma Saunders and Erica with their bartenders in The Oklahoma Woman and The Gunslinger respectively, Livia and her imp in The Undead, Ma Barker and her sons in 13

Chrystine Berzsenyi “Evil, Beautiful, Deadly: Publicity Posters of Drive-In Horror’s Monstrous Women” in Gary D. Rhodes, ed., Horror at the Drive-In: Essays in Popular Americana (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 180.

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Bloody Mama. Corman also enjoys reversing gender attributes, creating manly women who are strong and reasonable, and feminine men who are fragile, emotional and dreamy (Armand in The Apache Woman or Senya in The Saga of Viking Women). Interestingly enough, the male subordinate/slave is often visually smaller than the woman, who towers over him in the frame, as in the case of Oklahoma Saunders and her bartender, whom she nicknames “little man,” or Nadine and her helper Jeremy (both of them are played by petite Jonathan Haze), Erica and her barkeeper played by short Dick Miller, Livia and her dwarfish imp, and the Viking women and short Ottar and petite prince Senya. Even when the actor is tall and well-built like Mike Connors in Swamp Women, he spends the film sitting or kneeling at the feet of standing women, who tower over him in the frame. This type of frame composition was ahead of its time and would not appear in Hollywood cinema until the 1970s. Up until then, most directors would put together a tall actor with a shorter actress, like in the classic kissing scene in Gone with the Wind or the goodbye scene in Casablanca. In fact, the entire concept of a strong female character brandishing guns was innovative. Prior to Corman’s arrival to the filmmaking business, few women would resort to violence on screen, as womanhood was – and still is – traditionally associated with tenderness and care, in opposition to manhood associated with strength and aggression.14 Obviously, desperate Western heroines would sometimes pick a gun up to defend their close ones from bandits or Indians, like Amy (Grace Kelly) in High Noon, Tess (Joanne Dru) in Red River, or Mike (Anne Baxter) in Yellow Sky (the plot of which is similar to Five Guns West, which it predates by seven years); and film noir’s femmes fatales would occasionally produce a pistol to enforce their will, like Kathie (Jane Green) in Out of the Past, but these incidents were exceptions to the general rule of female pacifism. It was not until Corman that the cinematic women were shaped into action heroines and got fully acquainted with various weaponry. His directorial efforts as well as his later New World productions,15 such as Student Nurses (1970), The Velvet Vampire (1971) 14

Martha McCaughey and Neal King, Reel Knockouts: Violent Women in the Movies (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 2. 15 Though Corman’s productions are not the subject of this study, it is still worth mentioning that he remained consistent with his approach to strong heroines even after he stopped directing films himself. His production company, New World Pictures, issued a wide range of films featuring strong female characters. They included series about working women: nurses (The Student Nurses, Private Duty Nurses, Night Call Nurses, The Young Nurses, Candy Stripe Nurses), teachers (The

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or Boxcar Bertha (1972), popularized the action woman theme and commenced the march of strong film heroines, who – after passing through the women-in-prison, blaxploitation, rape-and-revenge and slasher subgenres in the 1970s and 1980s – finally reached the mainstream and the big-budgeted major studio productions such as Aliens (1986) or The Silence of the Lambs (1991)16 and later Aeon Flux (2005) or Salt (2010). The Corman origin of contemporary strong heroines is so observable that Brian Henderson and Ann Martin even go as far as to believe that “had it been written twenty years [earlier], Thelma & Louise might well have ended up as a Roger Corman picture; it would have fit right in with Corman’s own Bloody Mama and the Corman-produced Boxcar Bertha and Crazy Mama.”17 Indeed, Thelma & Louise, and especially the aforementioned Aeon Flux and Salt, bear remarkable resemblance to Corman productions. Everything is there: the story is heroine-centered to such an extent that her name constitutes the entirety of the film’s title; the female lead is billed first and plays a strong, independent, intelligent and sexually attractive character who intellectually outsmarts and physically overpowers all the men around her, proving her unchallenged superiority in the entire film’s universe; male characters perform the function of mere story background; and so on. In short, Corman can be credited with creating an action heroine film pattern. So far there has been no feminist analysis of Corman’s films and it remains debatable whether feminist scholars would appreciate these narratives. It is beyond doubt, however, that Corman was one of the first directors to openly and extensively question the then accepted models of gender features and gender roles, as well as the role of a female character in a moving picture. He was the first to liberate and empower the cinematic woman, the first to center her in an action-oriented picture, the first to persistently show that women can defeat or outsmart men, and the first to demonstrate that a woman can succeed at a typically male job or at typically male activities.

Student Teachers, Summer School Teachers), stewardesses (Fly Me), models (Cover Girl Models) and actresses (Hollywood Boulevard); a series about women in prison starring Pam Grier (The Big Doll House, Women in Cages, The Hot Box, The Big Bird Cage, The Big Bust Out, Caged Heat); a series featuring female criminals (Boxcar Bertha, Big Bad Mama, Crazy Mama) and films with action heroines (TNT Jackson, Too Hot to Handle). 16 Ibid., 4. 17 Brian Henderson and Ann Martin, Film Quarterly: Forty Years, a Selection (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 505.

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Feminist scholars criticize classic Hollywood cinema, in which “men act and women appear”18 and “narrative[s] portray women as subordinate to men,”19 as well as Hollywood filming conventions like make-up, lighting and close ups which are intended to show female beauty – instead of character, as they do for men – and necessitate that women not move.20 Yet, in a Corman film, the situation is converse: women are active and emanate character strength (though they are not devoid of their natural attractiveness), while men are their passive additions. This approach is nothing alike the presentation of women in the films by major studios and even the actresses working with Corman appreciated this shift – Susan Cabot says: “he gave me […] a chance to play parts Universal would never have given me.”21 Feminist scholars might reproach Corman that his films contain violence. Many feminists reject it as patriarchal and masculinist, and insist that films about women should portray heroism in female terms, taking up topics like motherhood, childbirth or forming families.22 However, films with violent heroines prove beneficial for women communities as well. According to a study carried out by Martha McCaughney and Neal King, these films help their female viewers believe that women can defend themselves if attacked, and warn the male viewers “not to mess with the wrong female.”23 Feminist scholars might also reproach Corman that his female characters are one-dimensional, cardboard and not interesting as people. However, it has to be remembered that genres like the western, horror, scifi or action film – with a few notable exceptions – do not devote much screen time to developing character personality nor do they feature characters with a complex psyche. On the contrary, they usually employ schematic characters, like valiant heroes and ruthless villains in the case of westerns and action films, and focus on plot development, special effects, action sequences or creating atmosphere. As much as Corman wanted to

18

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1972), 47. Patricia Mellencamp, A Fine Romance: Five Ages of Film Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 23-24. 20 Ibid., 30-31. 21 Susan Cabot in Tom Weaver, Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000), 66. 22 See, for example: Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989). 23 Martha McCaughney and Neal King, “Rape Education Videos: Presenting Mean Women Instead of Dangerous Men,” Teaching Sociology 23, no 4, (1995): 380. 19

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portray strong and independent female protagonists, he did not wish to depart from the conventions of the genres he worked in. Summing up, women’s cinema unknowingly owes a great deal to Corman not only when it comes to him changing the perception of a cinematic woman and paving the way for strong women in the roles of police officers, secret agents, assassins, martial arts experts and so on, which were previously reserved for an exclusively male cast, but also – as Gale Ann Hurd said – beyond the screen: for giving young female directors, writers and other film crew members an opportunity to perform in their desired profession – an opportunity they could not get anywhere else. Sadly, however, most of these films suffered from serious stylistic deficiencies (see Chapter 5) and, consequently, vanished into oblivion.

3. Outsider protagonist Corman’s films are not peopled only by strong females but also – even to a greater degree – by outsider protagonists. “The outcast, the outsider, is a character that has always fascinated me and appears in some form in just about all of my pictures,”24 admits Corman. Indeed, most of his heroes and heroines are in one way or another excluded from the mainstream of society and often in conflict with it.25 The outlaws in Five Guns West; Swamp Women; Machine Gun Kelly; I, Mobster; The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and Bloody Mama as well as the juvenile delinquents in Teenage Doll and the bikers in The Wild Angels are expelled to the margins of society and in conflict with the law-abiding majority by definition, but the examples do not end there. The half-breed siblings from Apache Woman belong neither to white settlers nor to native Indians, and they meet hostility and racism from both sides. Ultimately, the need for belonging tears the family apart: Anne joins the settlers while Armand joins the Indians and is later killed by Anne’s white fiancé. The same 24

Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 28. Films including outsider protagonists are the following: Five Guns West; Apache Woman; Swamp Women; It Conquered the World; Not of This Earth; Teenage Doll; Rock All Night; The Undead; She Gods of Shark Reef; Naked Paradise; Sorority Girl; Carnival Rock; Teenage Caveman; Machine Gun Kelly; I, Mobster; A Bucket of Blood; The Wasp Woman; House of Usher; The Little Shop of Horrors; Creature from the Haunted Sea; Atlas; Pit and the Pendulum, The Intruder; The Premature Burial; Tales of Terror; The Tower of London; Young Racers; The Raven; The Terror; X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes; The Haunted Palace; The Tomb of Ligeia; The Wild Angels; The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; The Trip; Bloody Mama; Gas-s-s; Von Richthofen and Brown. 25

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themes of racial exclusion are tackled in The Intruder, in which the black community is forced to live in a dilapidated neighborhood on the outskirts of town, without access to first rate facilities and services – especially education – the white majority enjoys. In this film, integration also has its price: a bombed church, a dead minister and an attempted lynching. Corman almost always sides with the underprivileged outsider – even if he or she commits criminal offences – which is done through shooting the film from the outsider’s perspective and including the reasons behind their misbehavior. This way the audience can identify with the film’s underdog and understand the motivation for their actions. Therefore, the protagonist’s blame is always externalized: the girls in Teenage Doll are juvenile delinquents because of inept parenting, and Sabra from Sorority Girl is a sadist for virtually the same reason; the eponymous Wild Angels want to be free from the constraints of the oppressive society; Janice Starlin in The Wasp Woman tries to defend her position in the company, save it from bankruptcy and take revenge on her sneaky workmates; and so on. In short, the violence the underdog perpetrates is often exonerated or justified at least to some degree. The fact of being rejected can also account for the trouble caused by the protagonist. In It Conquered the World, the film’s scientist is excluded from the mainstream of the scientific community, which makes him bitter and disgruntled. In revenge, he sides with a murderous extraterrestrial and brings peril onto the society that rejected him. Crimes motivated by exclusion are also presented in Corman’s comedies, the protagonists of which are invariably rejected, naïve oafs, whose need for belonging is so strong it pushes them to murder. Walter from A Bucket of Blood wishes so much to become like one of the beatnik artists he looks up to that he resorts to killing people, covering them in clay and presenting them as sculptures. Seymour from The Little Shop of Horrors accidentally grows an exotic plant, which puts him in the spotlight, but he needs to supply it with dead bodies to keep it alive. In both films, the protagonists are likeable characters and their decent down the spiral of crime is gradual: the first bodies they acquire are victims of accidents, then they kill in selfdefense, and only at the very end are their killings premeditated. Corman’s protagonist is sometimes rejected because he or she sees and understands more from the world around them than their entourage. Dr. Xavier from X:Man with the X-Ray Eyes is the most obvious example here, as he can literally see more than regular people, for which reason he is expelled from the scientific community and forced to eke out a living as a shaman-like carnival performer. In his case, improved vision leads to a gradual degradation in social status and psychological well-being, and,

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ultimately, drives him to plucking out his own eyes. Paul Groves from The Trip also artificially enhances his vision through experimentation – this time with drugs – but his change is positive. The first sentence he utters after dropping acid is “I can see.” Indeed, the drug opens his eyes and allows him to analyze and reevaluate his past existence, reconsider his life priorities, and change for the better. Enhancing his vision through LSD also makes him reject some elements of the materialistic mainstream culture and become an outsider. The theme of eyes and vision is present in several of Corman’s films: the alien in Not of This Earth uses his pupilless eyes to murder his victims; Herman in Bloody Mama becomes obsessed with looking his hostage in the eyes; both Roderick Usher from House of Usher and Verden Fell from Tomb of Ligeia have very sensitive vision; Ligeia casts a spell on Verden with her eyes; and the mutated children from The Haunted Palace have bare skin instead of eye sockets. Corman concurs: The concept of a character with sensitive vision is in several of my films. I don’t know where my fascination with vision is rooted; but it is clear that I have come back to it over and over again. It’s in all sorts of films, in different themes, because it is something inside of me. […] And fortunately the fact that I work in motion pictures, which are a visual medium, supports my fascination with sight.26

A protagonist can also consciously reject the mainstream and become an outsider because he or she can see more than others. In this respect, sensitive vision induces rebellion. The eponymous Teenage Caveman questions the accepted dogmas and thinking patterns of his people, rejects the authority of the elders, and willingly leaves his tribe because he sees that their “old ways” are pointless and harmful. Blues from The Wild Angels is a rebel for virtually the same reason. However, he also stands out from the other bikers because he thinks, sees and understands the world to a greater extent than his violent and mindlessly nihilistic buddies. He observes and reflects more and, contrary to the rest, actually has some ideals and a vision of his life. In a way, Blues is, therefore, an outsider among outsiders. In his sympathy towards the outsiders, Corman’s goes as far as to make them his heroes against all odds. In one of his films, Rock All Night (1957), a gang of robbers find their hiding-place in a rock bar, taking all the patrons hostage. Although there are a macho boxer and a muscular bodyguard among the hostages, none of them has enough strength of 26

Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 204.

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character to oppose the criminals. Salvation comes from the least expected direction: Shorty – a short man with such a severe inferiority complex that he is rejected by every bar patron (and at one time literally ejected from the premises) – disarms and intimidates the robbers, becoming the films unlikely hero and claiming the girl. Corman explains his reluctance towards typical heroes in the following manner: I personally may rebel against the concept of the hero. It may be that I dislike the hero. And so I deliberately play up people other than the hero. I figure that if you’ve gone through school and the halfback is getting all the girls, and you get a chance to make films, and the format of the film is that the halfback gets the girl, you may deliberately undercut him.27

However, in his films there are more characters like Shorty, whose unattractive or repulsive exteriors hide kind and noble interiors, better selves: Natalie from Carnival Rock, Blues and Loser from The Wild Angels or Brown from Von Richthofen and Brown. Through these characters – seemingly ugly but in fact beautiful – Corman may subconsciously represent his attitude towards his own creative work, which is, according to him, mere exploitation at first glance but in fact deeper in meaning.28 The sympathy for rebels and outsiders, the conflict between individualism and collectiveness and the related rejection or self-exclusion are new concepts neither in Hollywood cinema nor in American culture in general. Wilfred McClay claims that the conflict between the individual and the collective constitutes one of the basic foundations of American society,29 and Robert Ray argues that it is also a fundamental theme in Hollywood cinema since its classic period: The movies traded on one opposition in particular, American culture’s traditional dichotomy of individual and community that had generated the most significant pair of competing myths: the outlaw hero and the official hero. Embodied in the adventurer, explorer, gunfighter, wanderer, and loner, the outlaw hero stood for that part of the American imagination valuing self-determination and freedom from entanglements. By contrast, the official hero, normally portrayed as a teacher, lawyer, politician, farmer, or family man, represented the American belief in collective action,

27

Corman in Nasr, Roger Corman, 79. Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 84. 29 Wilfred M. McClay, “Individualism and its discontents,” Virginia Quarterly Review 77, no. 3 (Summer 2001): 391-406. 28

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Corman may to some extent be subconsciously influenced by this basic motif as many American directors probably are. However, his fascination with being and becoming an outcast, as well as with the outcast’s relation to the mainstream stems mainly from the fact that he was an outsider himself, both when it comes to his personality and his creative work: Despite knowing plenty of young writers, actors and actresses, and directors working in Hollywood at the time, it was evident that I was not part of the mainstream. This was, in a sense, a pattern through childhood all the way into college. I had never been an outright loner. I had friends all my life; I belonged to […] a fraternity at Stanford. But deeper down, I never felt part of the “in group.”31

But the similarities between his characters and himself do not end there. When Corman talks about his inability to work within the mainstream his confessions are bittersweet. On the one hand, he wishes he worked for the major studios, which would allow him to move to “a higher, more sophisticated artistic level” and function “artistically and personally to [his] fullest potential.” 32 But on the other hand, he was afraid of “losing [his] artistic and financial autonomy”33 that he enjoyed as an independent director/producer. After every time he worked for the majors, he gladly returned to his own individual projects, building a reputation of a “Hollywood rebel or maverick.”34 The same conflicting attitudes – belonging to or rebellion against the mainstream – are expressed by his protagonists: the cult of freedom is shared by the teenage caveman, Blues or Paul Groves; and the unfulfilled need for belonging haunts Dr. Anderson, Dr. Xavier, Teenage Doll’s juvenile delinquents, Sabra, Seymour and Walter. Virtually each of Corman’s outsider characters is bestowed with some portion of the director’s personality as Corman consciously and subconsciously projected his own professional aspirations onto his films. However, the film with his most personal characters is Von Richthofen and Brown (1971) – the motion picture Corman had wanted to shoot since 30

Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 59. 31 Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood, 104. 32 Ibid., 104. 33 Ibid., 104. 34 Ibid., 104.

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the 1960s, and, at the same time, the final film after which he retired from directing. It tells a story of two World War I pilots: Manfred von Richthofen – the famous German pilot nicknamed the Red Baron, and Arthur Brown – the pilot acknowledged for shooting von Richthofen down. Both of them represent Corman himself, and their attitude to war mimics his attitude to filmmaking. Von Richthofen is a chivalrous, honorable and dignified Prussian nobleman, who regards war as sophisticated, knightly and noble, almost as an art. He epitomizes Corman’s ambition to become an elitist artist filmmaker. Brown is a Canadian outcast among British soldiers, a nervous garage worker who, nonetheless, possesses superior reflexes and is a natural born pilot. He understands that war is nothing like the well-mannered jousting duels, it is rather a cunning, merciless act based on exploiting the enemy’s every weakness and seizing every opportunity to strike and gain advantage. He represents Corman as an astute maverick. Needless to say, Brown won and so did the maverick personality of the director, who never really became an elitist artist. Corman’s filmmaking never resembled a sophisticated, nearly divine act of creation which should be characteristic of making art, but – with all the cost-cutting techniques and tight schedules – was closer to frantic fighting during a war. The director himself is, by the way, notorious for using combat vocabulary. He defines himself as a “guerilla filmmaker” and his professional motto is the following: “a small band of efficient, dedicated, highly trained warriors could defeat any number of rabble.”35 It seems, therefore, that some of Corman’s films border on reflexivity and that the director is very self-conscious. Von Richthofen and Brown reflects on Corman as a filmmaker and on filmmaking in general, but it is not the only example. A much earlier black comedy, Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961), also deals with his attitude toward moviemaking. It tells a story of Cuban generals making their escape with a crate of gold just before the fall of Batista’s regime. They hire a mobster with a yacht, who decides to dispatch the generals and claim the treasure for himself. To cover up for the murders, he invents a story about a creature from the Haunted Sea, which he blames the responsibility for every death. The trouble is, however, that the monster does indeed exist and eventually slays almost every character in the film, claiming the gold in the process. Obviously, the monster is an allegory for exploitation cinema – ugly but very efficient and profitable (which is why it is the monster that gets the loot). The conflict between the humans and the creature – much like between Von Richthofen and Brown – is the conflict between quality 35

Ibid., xiii.

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motion pictures and exploitation in Corman’s career, which the latter eventually won. For this reason, the director ranges Creature from the Haunted Sea among his most personal films: “It’s been suggested that Creature from the Haunted Sea is my most personal film. That’s actually not a bad suggestion, considering it’s got my favorite ending of them all – a last scene I invented on a whim […]. The monster wins.”36 The comedy is also a conscious self-parody. The monster is ostensibly inexpensive and artificial – made of Brillo pads and with ping-pong balls as bulgy eyes – which satirizes the low-budget special effects of Corman’s earlier productions, notably It Conquered the World, Day the World Ended and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Other elements are parodied as well: the valiant hero, the romance, and the litany of crimes the director used earlier in Five Guns West and House of Usher, and later in St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. However, the film which is the most reflexive is his first black comedy, A Bucket of Blood (1959). The action of the film takes place in a stereotypical beat café, where customers can listen to live music and poetic improvisations, admire the works of local painters and sculptors, discuss art and, obviously, drink coffee and take drugs. The patrons all dress extravagantly or inadequately, for instance in sheepskin coats, and wear a vast range of headgear: berets, Stetson hats or even vintage US cavalry hats. The most prominent personality of the café is bearded beat poet Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton), who opens the film with a poetic improvisation recited to saxophone jazz, much as Kerouac and musician David Amram used to do.37 The poem38 is a pastiche satirizing beat poetry 36

Ibid., 237. William Lawlor, Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons, and Impact (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 111. 38 The complete text of the poem: “I will talk to you of Art, for there is nothing else to talk about, for there is nothing else... Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of Art. Burn gas, buggies, and whip your sour cream of circumstance and hope, and go ahead and sleep your bloody heads off. Creation is, all else is not. Creation is graham crackers; let it all crumble to feed the creator; feed him that he may be satisfied. The Artist is, all others are not. A canvas is a canvas or a painting. A rock is a rock or a statue. A sound is a sound or is music. A preacher is a preacher, or an Artist. Where are john, joe, jake, jim, jerk? dead, dead, dead. They were not born before they were born, they were not born... Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig? Alive! Alive! Alive! They were born! Bring on the multitudes with a multitude of fishes: feed them with the fishes for liver oil to nourish the Artist, stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas, crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them. Let them die, and by their miserable deaths become the clay within his hands that he might form an ashtray or 37

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with its characteristic repetitions (like the word “who” in Ginsberg’s Howl) and seeming absurdity; as well as the fascination with this art form: the person touched by the poem the most is dimwitted busboy Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), who keeps repeating the verses in mindless awe. On the other hand, it foreshadows the story of Walter, who desperately wants to become an acclaimed sculptor but completely lacks talent. When he accidentally stabs his landlady’s cat with a knife, he covers it in clay and exhibits it as his first piece of art – “Dead cat.” The sculpture is deemed brilliant by the beatniks and by Maxwell himself who, in an impassioned speech addressed at the patrons of the café, calls this “transfixed effigy to be the work of a master sculptor […] whose hands of genius have been carrying away the empty cups of your frustration.” Walter’s “masterpiece” also provokes discussions about sculpture, through which Corman can criticize modern art: Patron #1: “I saw a statue once. It was called, ‘the third time Phyllis saw me, she exploded.” Patron #2: “Man, what kind of statue was that?” Patron #1: “I dunno, it was made out of driftwood and dipped in fluoric acid. Very wild.”

Corman’s criticism of the faux art world continues when Walter supplies the beatniks with further “sculptures,” this time with people inside them. His admirers are so impressed they throw a party at the café to honor their master artist. Walter, a dimwit and an impostor, drunk with champagne, is seated on a makeshift throne, wearing a paper crown and holding a plunger for a scepter – blatant criticism of the artists contemporary to Corman. Heralded an artist, Walter starts showing off and acting pretentiously, even though he “sculpted” only two statues so far: he wears a beret, a scarf, a striped shirt and a long cigarette holder, and he fraternizes with all the beatniks as if he has been one of them for years. At the café, he orders “a cappuccino, and a piece of papaya cheesecake... and, uh, and a bottle of Yugoslavian white wine.” The beatniks are no less pretentious, as they eat “some soy and wheat germ pancakes, organic guava nectar, calcium lactate and tomato juice, and garbanzo omelets sprinkled with smoked

an ark. Pray that you may be his diadem: gold, glory, paint, clay, that he might take you in his magic hands and wring from your marrow wonder. For all that is comes through the eye of the Artist. The rest are blind fish swimming in the cave of aloneness. Swim on you maudlin, muddling, maddened fools, and dream that one bright, sunny night the Artist will bait a hook and let you bite upon it. Bite hard and die!... in his stomach you are very close to immortality.”

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yeast.” Obviously, they think very highly of themselves. One of the female patrons who fails to acknowledge Walter as an artist tells him, “You’re just a simple farm boy, and the rest of us are sophisticated beatniks” even though she is not really sophisticated herself, being a mere nude model whose only ability is getting naked. Corman also points an accusing finger at art dealers: the owner of the beat café, though well aware of the nature of Walter’s sculptures, sells “Dead cat” to an interested art collector when the price is sufficiently high. When Walter becomes a star, the owner organizes an art exhibition. He invites critics and art collectors but not the regulars of the café, whom he now considers plebeians. The exhibition scene is a mockery of the art world as well. All the neatly-dressed guests (Brock changed into a smart business suit but left the sandals on) eat caviar, drink champagne and discuss Walter’s “sculptures.” It turns out that a piece of art becomes great art only after it is praised by a knowledgeable and respected critic: Art collector: “I’d give fifteen hundred for this.” Art critic: “After you read my review, it will probably cost you five thousand.”

When big money comes into play, even the anti-materialistic beatniks start being greedy, which reveals that anti-materialism is inversely proportional to the amount of money one has: Brock: “You can make 25 thousand on these pieces alone!” Walter: “I thought you put money down.” Brock: “I do! But 25 thou!”

However, one of the guests notices Walter’s fraud and police officers set off in pursuit of the impostor. The law enforcers are followed by the guests of the exhibition: cultivated critics, posh art collectors and peaceful beatniks turn into an angry mob. But it is not justice for the death of Walter’s victims they want, it is revenge for the loss of their reputation. They have been cheated and ridiculed, their pretentiousness has been exposed and now they crave lynching the culprit. Yet, Walter escapes their blood thirst. He runs into his apartment, covers his body in clay and hangs himself. It is his final opus magnum: “The Hanging Man.” A Bucket of Blood is a blatant criticism of the entire art world, the film industry included. Corman: “when a critic wrote that the art world was a metaphor for the movie world, I didn’t deny it.”39 Much like painters and 39

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 63.

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sculptors, filmmakers have to fawn over critics and commit artistic atrocities to retain their popularity. In fact, there are numerous similarities between Paisley and Corman and, in this respect, Corman proves that he can be self-conscious and self-reflexive as a director. Both he and Paisley feel a need to belong among respected artists and aspire to creating great art.40 Both of them create makeshift art from whatever materials they have at their disposal. Paisley’s first piece – “Dead cat” – is badly executed, with tufts of fur sticking out from under the plaster, and so are many of Corman’s early films, with silly dialogue lines, monsters made of papiermâché or rubber, non-matching backgrounds and continuity errors. Finally, both of them have no artistic education but enjoy a career “from rags to riches.”41

4. Gothic horror Corman is best known for his series of gothic horror films, which were a commercial and critical success, and are considered to be his opus magnum. It could not have been otherwise, however, as the films were made of elements of the highest quality. Most of them were based on or inspired by Poe’s short stories – writing of the utmost literary value which has been deemed classic since the nineteenth century. The scripts were written by professional American writers: Richard Matheson (the author of, among others, The Shrinking Man, I Am Legend, Hell House and Duel – all of which were adapted to film) and Charles Beaumont (the Twilight Zone episodes based on his scripts are popularly considered the best in the series). The films starred mainly Vincent Price – an icon of American horror film – supported by a host of renowned and respected actors: Boris 40

However, here Corman criticizes the so-called high art, accusing it of being pretentious, superficial and worthless at its core, and the unreflective drive of the artist to high art may lead to his/her undoing. 41 On a side note, it is worth adding that the unofficial trilogy of black comedies – A Bucket of Blood, The Little Shop of Horrors and Creature from the Haunted Sea – had a great impact on the genre. Corman even boasts of being “the first and only director to work in the black comedy genre for some time” (Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 62). This is an obvious overstatement – it is enough to mention the popular comedy horror series with Abbott and Costello – but Corman did revolutionize the genre by introducing humorous macabre. Prior to his films, audiences were not used to seeing severed limbs as comedy props or sadomasochistic acts and maiming treated as situational comedy. His films added a darker, ghoulish tone to the black comedy and changed the genre forever [Bruce G. Hallenbeck, Comedy-horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914-2008 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 65].

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Karloff, Peter Lorre, Barbara Steele, Basil Rathbone, Ray Milland and Lon Chaney Jr. The actors worked on the stylish and opulent gothic sets pieced together by the talented art director Daniel Haller. The footage was shot in color by Floyd Crosby (awarded an Oscar for the cinematography to Tabu, and widely recognized for the camera work in High Noon) using the widescreen Cinemascope technique, and the filmmaking process was supervised by Roger Corman at his peak. The idea to shoot Poe came from Corman himself. When Nicholson and Arkoff suggested that he should make two more black-and-white films worth $100,000 each – like Machine Gun Kelly or I, Mobster – which AIP could sell as a double feature, Corman opposed the idea, proposing to combine the two budgets and shoot a single color film – an adaptation of the classic Poe story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”42 In the DVD commentary to The Masque of the Red Death, Corman admits to being an avid fan of Poe’s fiction since his school years and to his long desire to adapt these stories to film.43 For this reason, perhaps, he made an extraordinary effort shooting the Poe cycle, and directed and produced the gothic series at the height of his creative ability, making the films artistically stand out among his previous work. Initially, Corman planned to shoot only one Poe adaptation, but the enormous commercial success of the first film – well over $1 million in rentals alone44 – encouraged him and the AIP producers to make further films, eventually leading to a streak of gothic horrors, comprising ten moving pictures shot between 1960 and 1965. The series opens with House of Usher (1960) and Pit and the Pendulum (1961), both scripted by Matheson and starring Price, followed by The Premature Burial (1962), scripted by Beaumont and starring Milland. After those three initial films, Corman felt that he was repeating himself and that their novelty was beginning to wear off. To change the pattern and refresh the topic, he adapted three short stories – “Morella,” “The Black Cat” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” – into three short films bound together with voice-over narration by Price and released under the title Tales of Terror (1962). The subsequent motion picture – The Tower of London (1962) – evolved from the Poe series but was an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III and a remake of a film by the same title directed by Rowland Lee in 1939. To refresh the Poe formula even more, Corman shot The Raven (1962), a comedy in which he satirized the Poe conventions, thus 42

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood, 78. Roger Corman, Roger Corman Behind the Masque, directed by Greg Carson (2002; Beverly Hills, CA: MGM Home Entertainment, 2002), DVD. 44 Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood, 82. 43

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self-parodying his own adaptations. Unwilling to scrap the intricate sets built for The Raven, he decided to reuse them and shoot another gothic horror. The script was written in ten days by one of Corman’s actors, and the footage was shot in two days. The haste had its negative effect on production values, making The Terror (1962) one of Corman’s weaker efforts. Having shot five Poe adaptations by 1963, Corman grew tired of the author and decided to adapt Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. However, the Poe cycle had been so successful that the AIP producers changed the original title for the title of one of Poe’s poems – The Haunted Palace – added the poem in a text crawl at the end of the film and marketed the product as another movie in the series. The penultimate film of the cycle – The Masque of the Red Death (1964) – was supposed to be shot immediately after House of Usher, in 1960. However, Corman was afraid that moviegoers might accuse him of plagiarizing Ingmar Bergman, whose The Seventh Seal had been made three years earlier and included similar motifs. But when AIP commissioned him to shoot a film in Britain, where they could profit from a government subsidy (Eady plan), he decided it was high time he made The Masque of the Red Death.45 The final film in the series – The Tomb of Ligeia (1965) – was also shot in England and conceived to be sold as a double-bill with The Masque. Obviously, stories like “The Pit and the Pendulum” or “The Premature Burial” are impossible to adapt as such due to their brevity or descriptive nature. Corman claims he asked his scriptwriters to use Poe’s stories as the script’s climax, and write a beginning and a middle section leading to this climax. In the theatrical terms Corman uses, the writers were to produce Act I and II, and use Poe as Act III.46 In reality, however, the original stories were sometimes completely distorted, so it is inappropriate to talk of adaptation, but rather of inspiration. Still, the films do manage to convey Poe’s motifs and the atmosphere of his horror short stories.

4.1. Poe’s motifs When Corman presented the AIP executives with the concept script for House of Usher, Arkoff reportedly asked him: “But where’s the monster?”47 The lack of a physical manifestation of evil – in the form of a monster – is a typical Poe motif. Poe’s evil is intangible, and so it is in 45

Ibid., 87. Corman, Roger Corman Behind the Masque. 47 Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood, 78. 46

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Corman’s gothic horrors: a curse in House of Usher and The Haunted Palace, an obsession in The Premature Burial, The Terror and the “Morella” segment in Tales of Terror. Alternatively, evil may reside within the human mind and will, but again Poe’s (and thus Corman’s) villains are not physical: burly, strong, overpowering, reveling in physical destruction; but rather intellectual: cunning, sneaky, deceitful and fiendish. Such intellectual evil – similarly to intangible evil – is difficult to protect oneself from and, therefore, far more terrifying. Sebastian Medina from Pit and the Pendulum, Richard III from Tower of London, Joseph Curwen from The Haunted Palace and Prince Prospero from The Masque of the Red Death are all excellent examples of intelligent sadists who can use their extraordinary minds against the people around them. What adds to their character creation is the superb acting by Vincent Price, renowned for his villain roles. With menacing expression, creaky voice and a grin of fiendish satisfaction, he creates characters who relish every opportunity to do evil. Corman justifies the choice of Price for the villain roles in the following way: I was looking to create a sense of horror not on the basis of a man coming at you with a sledgehammer or a knife but a man coming after you, as it were, with a superior mind. You can deal with the guy who comes at you with the knife or the sledgehammer. I think it is more frightening to know that there is a mind stalking you that is more subtle and intelligent and that knows its own horrors and can turn those horrors on you. Vincent could give me that.48

Another Poe motif (present in such short stories as “The Island of the Fay,” “Shadow – A Parable” or “The Fall of the House of Usher”) which Corman adapted to his films is that natural surroundings may reflect the mental state of the story’s protagonist. In House of Usher, just as in its literary original, the family mansion begins to crumble as the Usher line is dying, and this motif is transferred onto other adaptations. The dark, decaying, filthy, unkempt and labyrinthine estates in “Morella,” The Terror, The Haunted Mansion and Tomb of Ligeia reflect the troubled (sometimes outright mad) minds of their inhabitants, and perish together with their last owners.49

48

Corman in Silver and Ursini, Roger Corman, 183. Film sets which convey a message are an expressionist motif, and Corman seems to draw considerable inspiration from expressionism. Their expressionist nature shall be tackled in the chapter devoted to style.

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From the rational point of view, this is inexplicable, and some of Poe’s stories are exactly about the failure of reason when faced with the supernatural: “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “Metzengerstein” or “Ligeia,” to mention just a few.50 Corman gladly accepts this motif, and often places rational characters inside a supernatural, inexplicable or illogical milieu. Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) arrives to the mysterious Usher residence and tries to reason with the obviously tormented Roderick Usher (Price). His logical arguments, however, are opposed with Roderick’s tale of a family curse: in the final run, it is Roderick’s counter-logic story that comes true. Lieutenant Andre Duvalier (Jack Nicholson), the rational protagonist of The Terror, when told about his lover being possessed by a spirit of a dead woman, dismisses the condition as a mere psychological disorder and suggests seeing a specialist in Paris. However, he quickly learns about the magical provenance of the possession and realizes that science is futile here. In The Haunted Palace, Dr. Willet – a man of reason and science – fails to believe in the Arkham curse and rationalizes all the supernatural happenings, unknowingly helping Arkham’s evil warlock. Verden Fell does not wish to accept the idea of a supernatural resurrection of Ligeia to such an extent that he diagnoses himself with a mental disorder to explain all the paranormal events. In all of these cases, the rational, scientific, logical reasoning fails when confronted with the supernatural. Love as an unattainable object of desire and a vessel of destruction is another Poe’s motif brought on screen by Corman. D.H. Lawrence wrote about Poe’s attitude towards love in the following manner: “Doomed he was. He died wanting more love, and love killed him. A ghastly disease, love.”51 Thus, almost all of Corman’s gothic horror heroes crave love but never achieve it, or lose love to mourn it forever more: Madeline Usher fights with her possessive brother for the right to marry her beloved Winthrop, and both siblings die in the process, leaving Winthrop to grieve over his dead lover; Elizabeth Medina, Annabel Herringbone (“The Black Cat”) and Emily Gault (The Premature Burial) engage in clandestine love affairs but are killed by their husbands; Eric’s lover is killed when the couple is discovered by her husband, leaving Eric to mourn her until he goes insane; Locke and Verden Fell are incapacitated by the grief over

50

Though some Poe stories do deal with rationalizing the inexplicable and with the consequent triumph of the human mind; e.g. the series of stories featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin. 51 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42.

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their dead wives. Only in The Masque of the Red Death are the two lovers reunited at the end to live happily forever after. In The Raven, Corman plays with Poe’s poem, changing the text into a farce. For example, when the raven flies into Dr. Erasmus’s study, he asks the bird if he will ever see his beloved Lenore again. Instead of answering “nevermore” – like in the original – it shrieks “How the hell should I know? What am I, a fortune-teller?” for it is in fact Dr. Bedlo (Peter Lorre), an inept magician turned into a bird. Or when Erasmus caresses the picture of Lenore, his wife presumed dead, he says: “That woman was my wife,” to which Bedlo smiles stupidly and says “Left you, ah?” The cinematic Lenore herself is nothing like the delicate, angelic Lenore of Poe’s poem. She is buxom, unscrupulous and greedy: faking her own death in order to romance with a richer and more powerful warlock. This way Corman parodies Poe’s concept of love as the perfect, almost divine feeling. Both Poe and Corman are preoccupied with death. Much of Poe’s fiction taps into one of the most primordial of human fears – the fear of dying. But not the peaceful passing away of old age, which is a natural course of events and which is easier to come to terms with, but rather dying a premature death which involves great suffering. This is the type of dying Poe uses to evoke fright – a slow, imminent, premature and conscious death is a universal fear common to all the people despite their cultures.52 Therefore, Poe’s characters are buried or entombed alive (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Premature Burial,” “The Black Cat”) or subjected to sophisticated torture of being slowly killed (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), and his readers are expected to relive their terror. The longer and the more violent a death is, the more fright it evokes. Corman renders the same motif on screen when adapting these short stories, and adds his own ideas to it. In Pit and the Pendulum, for example, Elizabeth Medina is said to have been buried alive. When her grave is exhumed, her alleged corpse looks horrible: the fingers stretched out and clawing at the lid, the mouth open and gasping for air, the eyes bulged out in agony. The sight is a terrible experience for the characters and – according to Barbara Steele,53 who played Elizabeth – it was also a terrifying moment in the film for the audiences back in 1961.54 Eventually, the corpse turns out to be fake.

52

This might be one of the keys to Poe’s worldwide popularity. “Home Countries Horror,” A History of Horror with Mark Gatiss, directed by Rachel Jardine. Written by Mark Gatiss. BBC Four, November 18, 2010. 54 Stephen King called this scene “the most important moment in the post-1960 horror film, signaling a return to an all-out effort to terrify the audience… and a 53

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However, when Catherine Medina locks the torture chambers, saying “No one will enter this room again,” the camera quickly pans to the terrified eyes of Elizabeth, who had been earlier trapped in an iron maiden unbeknownst to Catherine. Elizabeth is thus literally sentenced to a slow and conscious death of thirst and hunger, and the fake corpse foreshadows the torment she is about to suffer. The two scenes visually render Poe’s dreary descriptions of the terrors of slow and conscious dying, and they do it perfectly, even adding a sense of black irony. Finally, the storyline of the adaptations resemble the “motley drama” from Poe’s poem “The Conqueror Worm.” Its two key stanzas are quoted below: That motley drama—oh, be sure It shall not be forgot! With its Phantom chased for evermore By a crowd that seize it not, Through a circle that ever returneth in To the self-same spot, And much of Madness, and more of Sin, And Horror the soul of the plot. But see, amid the mimic rout, A crawling shape intrude! A blood-red thing that writhes from out The scenic solitude! It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs The mimes become its food, And seraphs sob at vermin fangs In human gore imbued.

When analyzed verse by verse, it reveals astounding similarity to the plot of Corman’s gothic horror. “With its Phantom chased for evermore / By a crowd that seize it not” – the characters of the adaptations do try to catch, defeat or harness the intangible: in Pit and the Pendulum – the ghost of Elizabeth, in The Terror – the spirit of the baroness, in The Tomb of Ligeia – the spirit of Ligeia, in The Haunted Palace – the spirit of Joseph Curwen, in The Tower of London – the ghosts of Richard’s victims. “Through a circle that ever returneth in / To the self-same spot” – Corman favors the concept of time as a circle of repetitive events, he even used it prior to the Poe adaptations, in Teenage Caveman. History also repeats willingness to use any means at hand to do it.” [Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Galery Books, 1981), 143.]

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itself in Pit and the Pendulum, where Nicholas absorbs the personality of his sadistic father and reenacts the tortures his mother was put to by his father; in “Morella” and The Tomb of Ligeia, in which the title females rise from the dead to reunite with their husbands; in The Haunted Palace, in which the citizens of Arkham are forced to repeat the witch hunt after 110 years and re-attempt to burn warlock Joseph Curwen. “And much of Madness, and more of Sin, / And Horror the soul of the plot” – madness, sin and horror are indeed the soul of Corman’s gothic horrors. “It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs / The mimes become its food, / And seraphs sob at vermin fangs / In human gore imbued” – excluding the black comedies, Corman’s gothic horrors invariably end pessimistically, with evil achieving triumph over the characters, most of whom die in the process.

4.2. Freudian motifs Just before shooting the gothic horror series, Corman became fascinated with psychoanalysis, started reading Freud and even attended psychoanalytical sessions to better understand himself.55 For this reason, Freudian motifs are aplenty in his 1960s horror films. In fact, Corman believes that the writings of Freud and Poe have a great deal in common: “I felt that Freud and Poe had been working in different ways toward a concept of the unconscious mind, so I tried to use Freud’s theories to interpret the work of Poe.”56 Thus, Corman’s characters suffer from various obsessions and fixations. Roderick Usher is obsessed with selfdestruction. Nicholas Medina is fixated on the thought of having buried his beloved wife alive, and Guy Carrell (The Premature Burial) is paranoid about being buried alive himself. Locke from “Morella” and Verden Fell are gripped by the death of their wives. Montresor (“Black Cat”) and Richard III are both haunted by the visions of their victims, while Joseph Curwen is obsessed with revenge. The character with the most tormented mind is Eric (The Terror). He was caught romancing with the baroness von Leppe by the baron. The infuriated husband killed his unfaithful wife and assaulted Eric, who, defending himself, killed the attacker. Afraid of being punished for the death of an aristocrat, he assumed his identity and, over time, became absolutely convinced he is the baron. Believing himself to be von Leppe, he started tormenting himself for killing his own wife – an act which he, in fact, did not commit. Another instance of personality 55 56

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood, 77-78. Ibid., 78.

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absorption takes place in Pit and the Pendulum. Nicholas Medina is a son of Sebastian Medina, a brutal church inquisitor who, upon discovering a romance between his wife and his brother,57 tortured the brother to death and buried his wife alive in the very sight of young Nicholas. Adult Nicholas repressed these memories into his subconscious – a typical Freudian element – until his own wife, Elizabeth, succumbed to a strange disease, was declared dead by the local doctor, and entombed in the family crypt. Since that moment, Nicholas’s repressed memories resurfaced in his mind and he became obsessed with the thought of having buried her alive – like his father had done with his mother – and haunted by her spirit. Ultimately, it is all a ruse: together with her clandestine lover, Dr. Leon, Elizabeth faked her death to distress Nicholas58 and drive him insane in order to take over his wealth. Nicholas does go mad: his repressed childhood memories overcome his mind and he absorbs the personality of his father. In Nicholas’s mind, his wife becomes his mother, which refers to the Oedipus complex Freud had written so much about. In revenge, he locks his wife/mother in an iron maiden, which symbolically represents the values he wishes his unfaithful wife and mother had cherished.59 It is obvious from the analysis above that Corman’s gothic horrors deal extensively with the fragility of the human mind, stating that there is a thin line between sanity and madness, which is also one of Poe’s motifs. Poe’s prose tackles both the mind’s weaknesses and its powers, and Corman reflected this in his films. Apart from the characters who go insane or succumb to delusions, obsessions or fixations, there are also characters like Joseph Curwen, M. Valdermar or Ligeia, whose minds and wills are so strong they are able to overcome death itself. Another typically Freudian motif is repressed sexual emotions which govern the characters’ behavior. Roderick Usher feels quasi-incestuous love for his sister Madeline, and once her fiancé arrives at the Usher residence, he lets the visitor know he is unwelcome by behaving sullenly and resentfully. When this does not discourage the admirer, he buries 57

Though not siblings genetically, they are still closely related by family ties and their relationship is only a trifle less incestuous than that of the Ushers. 58 Elizabeth must have known about Nicholas’s repressed past as her faked illness was supposed to be caused by the atmosphere of his father’s torture chamber – the very same room where Nicholas witnessed the tortures of his mother done by his father – “as if the aura of pain and suffering which surrounded [the devices] was leading her to sickness and death.” 59 However, in “Morella” segment of Tales of Terror, the Electra complex is reversed: the mother sucks the life out of her daughter to rise from the grave and rejoin her husband.

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Madeline alive to prevent her from marrying her loved one. She survives the burial, escapes from the crypt and attacks Roderick. They become clenched in a deathly grip which symbolizes their tormented kinship, and the house – as if answering to Roderick’s repressed sexual passions – suddenly bursts into flames, providing a fiery consummation of their relationship. Such fiery outbursts of repressed sexual desire can also be found in other Corman’s horrors. When Morella rises from the dead to rejoin her husband after several years of death, her pent-up sexual passions set their bedroom alight. Though Locke tries to escape, the fire is everywhere. They grapple and are soon consumed by the flames. Verden and Ligeia also die in a fire symbolizing their mutual passion after Ligeia, having been dead for many years, is resurrected. A similar situation occurs in The Terror – in which Eric/baron is reunited with his long dead lover in a deathly grip – but Corman did not wish to be repetitive and burn the set, so he flooded it. Every Poe adaptation features a dreamlike sequence. Like in Freud’s writing, these dreams constitute a key to the characters’ subconscious. Therefore, in the dream sequences, the characters relive traumatic experience from their childhood (Pit and the Pendulum), feel pangs of guilt for the crimes they committed (“The Black Cat”) or have morbid fantasies (The Masque of the Red Death). The latter case is consciously full of Freudian symbolism. After Juliana performs a satanic ritual and gets married to the devil, she dreams about lying on a bed – helpless and panting – while a man repeatedly stabs her with a long dagger. This is clearly an allegory of a sexual act, maybe even a rape. Finally, even the very way of shooting the films bears some Freudian influence. The film’s action is often presented from the point of view of the protagonist, usually a man/woman of reason and logic, exploring the unknown – represented by a dark mansion/castle – in the pursuit of truth. This exploration is a metaphor for the clash between reason (the explorer) and non-reason (the estate). If reason is opposite to urges in psychoanalysis, the exploration thus symbolizes the clash between the superego and the id. Venturing into the unknown is enticing and horrifying at the same time, so the protagonist simultaneously must and mustn’t go, and the audience feels the same. If he or she (but usually a he) decides to go – and they always do because the desire to investigate is irresistible – they experience conflicting emotions (wonder and excitement, but also terrible fear) when they explore – or penetrate – the mansion. For the mansion is actually a woman, its dark corridors the protagonist penetrates being her orifices; and the classical gothic horror sequence is actually the first teenage sexual act, filled with conflicting emotions: the uncontrollable

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desire on the one hand, and the fear of the illicit and unknown on the other. When the tension is built up to the maximum, the sequence ends with a sharp, sudden incident which releases the pressure – often with a scream from the protagonist and, preferably, from the audience – in an equivalent of orgasmic climax.60

4.3. Corman’s motifs Finally, the gothic horror series is not devoid of typical Corman’s motifs. The films are peopled with strong, intelligent and sexually liberated women who are often juxtaposed with feeble men. The entire plot of Pit and the Pendulum revolves around independent women who are not afraid to leave, cheat or kill their husbands to secure their own happiness in the arms of their lovers. For example, after tormenting Nicholas so much that he is rendered helpless, Elizabeth mocks him like a sexual dominatrix from some cuckold fantasy: “I have you exactly as I want you – helpless. Is it not ironic, oh my husband? Your wife an adulteress, your mother an adulteress, your uncle an adulterer, your closest friend an adulterer – do you not find that amusing, dear Nicholas?”61 The behavior of these women is strongly marked by sexual hegemony and gender role reversal, though ultimately it is the traditional gender roles which are reaffirmed: one woman is walled in alive, the other is locked in an iron maiden without food and water. They are symbolically trapped and immobilized until death by their husbands or, to be more precise, by the same persona – Sebastian Medina, who, being the Grand Inquisitor, represents the Catholic Church and enforces its traditional attitude to gender roles and marriage. The “Black Cat” segment of Tales of Terror features a similar plot: Montresor (Peter Lorre) is a useless drunk who neglects his wife, spends entire days wasting her money on drink in pubs and kicks up tremendous rows when she refuses to give him her hard-earned coin. It is of no surprise that she begins having an affair with a much more cultivated lover. When Montresor discovers their romance, she walls them both in, ironically making them inseparable. But the couple exacts their revenge from beyond the grave, haunting Montresor with horrible visions until he gives himself in to the police.

60

Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 78. In an earlier sequence, she is seen in the dungeon caressing torture devices, whips and pokers with an almost sexual passion. 61

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In The Premature Burial, Guy’s wife takes advantage of her husband’s cataleptic disorder and buries him alive in order to inherit his wealth and live comfortably with her lover. Guy escapes from his tomb to take revenge in a manner worthy of Montresor and Sebastian Medina: he catches his unfaithful wife, drags her to his former grave and buries her alive, symbolically trapping and immobilizing her to secure her faithfulness. Unfaithful women also appear in The Terror, in which the baroness is caught cheating and killed by the baron, and in The Raven, in which Lenore Craven (Hazel Court), having faked her death, leaves her husband for a more powerful warlock, Scarabus (Boris Karloff). She tells Scarabus: “Did I ever pretend I came here for your charm? I came here because of your wealth and power.” Corman also satirizes the blind love felt by the gullible Erasmus Craven towards his wife: when she admits she left him for Scarabus, Erasmus asks: “Are you under a spell?” to which she replies: “Oh, Erasmus, you’re just as much a boy as ever.” Thus, gender approaches to love are reversed: the man is naïve, idealistic, passive and childish, whereas the woman is independent, active and sexually liberated. Morella and Ligeia are also strong and active female characters whose wills and minds are so powerful they are able to overcome death and torment their men from beyond the grave. Morella’s husband mourns by her dead body – which he keeps in their matrimonial bed – as if he was incapacitated, unable to perform anything else other than paying respect to his dead wife. Ligeia literally enslaved her husband, bent his will to do her bidding, made him her own mindless puppet: “Every night he must come and care for her, be with her. And during the day, he must forget the nights. And he would forget, yet sometimes I see him struggle to remember. […] He is held by her word and only she can release him.” For some reason, strong and positive females are scarce in Corman’s gothic horrors. Perhaps it is the influence of Poe, whose heroines often constitute a source of terror for the male protagonist (“Morella” and “Ligeia”), that Corman departed from his usual presentation of cinematic women. He introduced only one such heroine, Lady Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd), whose character was conceived to oppose the evil Ligeia (played by the same actress). Rowena is a typical Corman’s female: strong, brave, independent, curious and intelligent. Whatever the men around her do, she can do it equally well if not better: riding horses, hunting foxes or solving mysteries. She is also the active side of courting, which is an uncommon thing if you bear in mind the fact that the film is set in the nineteenth century. Intrigued by Verden Fell, she uses every pretext to visit him, for example, takes the place of the messenger who

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was supposed to deliver him a message (and it is uncommon for an aristocrat lady to relieve her servants at their duty). She makes advances to him, spies on him, courts him, flirts with him, makes him unambiguous propositions with her soft voice, smiling flirtatiously. Verden: “Why did you come here?” Rowena: “To deliver Christopher’s reply to your note. Really, to see you.” Verden: “I have nothing to offer.” Rowena: “You make me want to offer you something.”

She is open, direct, adventurous and well-aware of the fact that she does not fit the rigid aristocrat society of her epoch, which she anticipates by at least a century. Rowena: “I even pity Christopher. He is blind in his way too, you know. His life being simply law and logic. And he’s so limited.” Verden: “The beauty of such life lies in its limitation… and in accepting it.” Rowena: “Oh, I know. I suppose I’m spoilt and terribly willful.”

The nineteenth century social norms and gender roles are tackled in House of Usher as well, in which Roderick Usher incapacitates his sister Madeline, upholding the traditional custom which allows the older brother in an orphaned family to control his younger sister.62 Madeline opposes the rigid patriarchal and sexist social system that stands in the way to her happiness: “You cannot order my life, Roderick,” but Roderick masks his possessiveness with love: “Don’t you know I love you more than anything in the world? Can’t you see it’s my love for you that makes me act as I do?” Feeling that he loses his grip on his sister, he buries her alive to ultimately immobilize and incapacitate her. In a desperate act of freedom and independence, Madeline escapes from her tomb, attacks and kills her brother, the symbol of her sexist oppression. David Hogan believes that it was this rebellion against the fatherly authority of Roderick, who tries to suppress Madeline’s youthful sexual urges, that appealed to teenage audience and helped the commercial success of the film.63 If there are strong women, it is typical of Corman to juxtapose them with weak men, and the weakest male character in the gothic horrors is Nicholas Medina. He is a sickly, physically weak dandy with a whiny 62

Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, Women in the Horror Films of Vincent Price (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 50. 63 David J. Hogan, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1986), 212.

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voice and a dolorous facial expression which imply a lack of masculine vigor. He reveals his servility and submission to his allegedly dead wife, Elizabeth, in one of the first conversations: “I worshipped her.” His servile attitude towards her might stem from his childhood experience, when he witnessed the tortures done by his father to his mother. Though he repressed these memories into the subconscious, he remains guilt-ridden and expiates for the deeds of his father by submission and servility to his own wife, who – uncoincidentally – looks much like his mother. Perhaps, it was his effeminate behavior and her desire for a strong and wholesome lover which pushed Elizabeth into faking her own death and conspiring against her husband.64 Ultimately (and ironically), she receives what she wished for. When Nicholas loses his mind and becomes his father, Sebastian, he also turns into Elizabeth’s sadomasochistic master. This way, the innocent and guilt-ridden man is forced by the cunning woman to develop into a monster. Outsider protagonists are plentiful in Corman’s gothic horrors, and all of them are outsiders by their own choosing. Reclusiveness mostly stems from obsession – obsession with self-destruction (Roderick Usher), with being buried alive (Guy), or obsession about a dead spouse: Verden Fell, Locke, Nicholas Medina and Eric/Baron von Leppe all rejected their once lavish social lives to grieve the death of their wives in solitude. In The Raven, Corman criticizes this withdrawal – Dr. Erasmus regrets the reclusion he fell into after the death of his spouse: “You’re not alone in guilt, sir. I too have failed at the task of living. Instead of facing life, I turned my back on it.” Lastly, recurrent Corman’s motifs reappear in his gothic horror series as well. As in his post-apocalyptic motion pictures, there is destruction of the entire film universe: the House of Usher burns down “and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of Usher”; Locke’s mansion, Verden Fell’s abbey and the eponymous Haunted Palace burn down to the ground as well. Inept parenting and broken families are again responsible for the crimes of the children: Nicholas Medina lives a tormented life after witnessing his sadistic father torture and kill his unfaithful mother; and Roderick Usher is convinced of being afflicted with a curse brought onto him by his villainous ancestors,65 which pushes him into a murder attempt directed at 64

Lampley, Women in the Horror Films of Vincent Price, 58. This is how Roderick presents his family tree: “Anthony Usher – thief, usurer, merchant of flesh. Bernard Usher – swindler, forger, jewel thief, drug addict. Francis Usher – professional assassin. Vivian Usher – blackmailer, harlot, murderess. She died in a madhouse. Captain David Usher – smuggler, slave trader, 65

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his sister. Text crawls and voice-overs are used, but they do not appear as prologues setting the atmosphere of the film, but rather as epilogues highlighting the point of the story. They are invariably fragments of Poe’s poems or short stories, creating a direct link between his writings and their cinematic adaptations. Eyes and sight again play a part in the story: Roderick Usher and Verden Fell suffer from oversensitive vision which confines them to living in the dark and, consequently, in reclusion. Eyes are also the focus of Corman’s camera as the close-up on character’s eyes is used to convey their terror: for example, in The Premature Burial the only sign that Guy is about to be buried alive is his frantic eyes; and Pit and the Pendulum ends with a close-up on the terrified eyes of Elizabeth, who is doomed to die of thirst and hunger in an iron maiden. Summing up, Corman’s gothic horror series is excellent on the surface and in the subtext. On the surface, it can boast high production values, skillful acting, opulent gothic sets, good story lines and a plethora of proven horror elements, like creepy castles, dark family secrets, sinister wailing music, poorly-lit and cobwebbed corridors, and so on. For these reasons, the series appealed to the horror-loving audiences and was much more successful than Corman’s earlier films, bringing AIP considerably more profit than any other film they had previously released. In the subtext, the horrors’ intricate scripts abound in hidden motifs for the critics and scholars to decipher, making the films his most analyzed works, and ranging them as his first motion pictures which combined commercial success with critical acclaim. Their popular and critical allure saved them from vanishing into obscurity – the fate that a number of his films shared – ultimately placing them among the classics of American horror films.

5. Conclusion Wollen and Nowell-Smith claimed that the director’s works have to exhibit recurring thematic elements in order for that director to be considered an auteur. These themes should appear throughout his/her entire filmography and should transcend genres. It is also a proof of authorship if some of these recurring elements are connected with director’s personal life or experience. The above analysis of the body of work by Corman shows that he seems to fulfil this thematic requirement to a surprisingly large extent. mass murderer.” Corman used such a litany of crimes in three other films: Five Guns West, The Secret Invasion and The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

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Corman’s films – be they westerns, horrors, dramas, sci-fi, fantasy or crime, be they cheap or relatively expensive – revolve mainly around two themes. The first theme pertains to female empowerment, gender role reversal, and women equating with or outperforming men in intelligence, skill and heroism. The second theme refers to exclusion and to outsider’s relation with the mainstream of society. Both of these themes transcend genres and prevail in his entire filmography, from his first motion pictures to the last ones. There are also other themes which appear less frequently but transcend genres nonetheless: fascination with eyes and sight, a liberal or leftist social viewpoint, history repeating itself, elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, and perverse sexual practices. Many of these themes stem from Corman’s personal beliefs or experience. He was a maverick director forced to operate outside mainstream Hollywood, hence the theme of exclusion. In the 1960s, his political views started turning left and so did his films. He also became fascinated with psychoanalysis and began including some of Freud’s concepts in his films together with the sexual practices Freud and other psychoanalysts were investigating: incest, adultery, rape and necrophilia. Finally, his collaborators admit that he was shy with women,66 hence perhaps the fantasies about strong females taking initiative. Corman was able to express these personal themes despite the requirements of exploitation. Though he did exploit popular topics, their role was usually limited to the following: they either constituted an attractive element vaguely related to the film’s plot (like the rock and roll performances in Rock All Night and Carnival Rock), or served as a framework or context for stories about exclusion or female empowerment (like hypnotic regression in The Undead or queen jelly cosmetics in The Wasp Woman). This does not mean, however, that Corman cynically used these topics to lure audiences to the cinemas and make his films profitable. In fact, it is probably safe to take him at his word when he claims that these topics did interest him and that he did want to shoot films about them. However, he must have intuitively or subconsciously drifted towards the two themes that interested him the most – exclusion and female empowerment – neglecting the exploitation topic in the process. Therefore, there are only four films that do not include either of these two themes to any extent: Day the World Ended, Attack of the Crab Monsters, War of the Satellites and Ski Troop Attack.

66

Jay Sayer in Tom Weaver, I Talked with a Zombie: Interviews with 23 Veterans of Horror and Sci-Fi Films and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 289.

CHAPTER FIVE STYLE

In order to be deemed an auteur, a director needs to possess a unique style of direction. To repeat the words of Sarris, “a great director has to be at least a good director.”1 In other words, he or she should master the medium in such a way to be able to create films which would technically and artistically stand out from most other filmmaker’s works when it comes to direction: the camerawork, light, pacing, control over the actors, the set, and so on. The director should be consistent in their style regardless of the genre, though the style can evolve and progress from one motion picture to another.2 Consequently, each director-as-auteur should possess their own individual style of direction, through which he or she can be discerned from the others. To quote Sarris once again, “over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature.” Ideally, when watching a film by an auteur, the audience (or at least the critics) should be able to recognize its director. But what is style and how can one analyze it? Peter Wollen, whose approach to the auteur theory serves as the theoretical framework for this study, wrote that the notion of style seems self-explanatory, but when one tries to define it, it becomes elusive; and he himself focused on style from the perspective of semiotics.3 Yet, the auteur theory requires an analysis of style that would focus on its aesthetics and its functions in the film, and such an approach is proposed by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson in Film Art, where they put forward the following definition of style: Style is that formal system of the film that organizes film techniques. Any one film will tend to rely on particular technical options in creating its style, and these are chosen by the filmmaker within the constraints of historical circumstances. We may also extend the term ‘style’ the 1

Italics mine. However, it is possible for a director to adopt a different style and create a pastiche. 3 Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, 116-154. 2

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Chapter Five characteristic use of techniques made by a single filmmaker or a group of filmmakers.4

When examining style – Bordwell and Thompson continue – one has to identify and trace salient techniques which the work or the body of work relies on to a considerable extent. These can pertain to camerawork, editing, lighting, sound, or any other aspect of filmmaking. For instance, in A Beautiful Mind (2001) the camera often encircles the protagonist, in Sergio Leone’s westerns extreme close-ups are often used in duel scenes, in The Haunting (1963) scared characters are filmed in low camera angles, bird attack scenes in The Birds (1963) are rapidly cut, and so on. Once these techniques are identified, the analyst should determine what role they play in the film. For example, they can highlight an emotional aspect of the film: the rapid editing in The Birds and the low angle shots in The Haunting enhance the atmosphere of horror. They can also express meaning: encircling camera movements are used in A Beautiful Mind to indicate that the protagonist suffers from schizophrenia. Camerawork may also convey the mood of the character, spatial relationships between characters can mirror their actual relationships, framing the character can reflect their personality and place in the world, etc. The possibilities are virtually limitless. However, not every stylistic element should express meaning or emotions. Bordwell and Thompson argue that “style will often function simply perceptually – to get us to notice things, to emphasize one thing over another, to misdirect our attention, to clarify, intensify, or complicate our understanding of the action.”5 Following this definition, the style of a prospective auteur director should exhibit a corpus of repeated salient techniques that serve some narrative or aesthetic purpose in their films. It should be individual, recognizable and technically accurate, and it should at least partially transcend genres. Ideally, the style of an auteur-director is also intricate, innovative and influential at least to some degree. When Bordwell analyzes the famous deep focus style of Citizen Kane, he remarks that Welles and Toland – despite them claiming the reverse – were not the first in the history of cinematography to use such camerawork. However, he also points out that the style of Citizen Kane influenced numerous

4

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 329. 5 Ibid., 331.

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Hollywood directors and that “the ability to execute a shot in depth became one more mark of the expert cinematographer.”6 The following chapter investigates the film style of Roger Corman with the aim of tracing the salient cinematic techniques in his films and establishing the function they perform in his narratives. His style is also briefly analyzed in the context of other films from that period and genres to determine the degree of its originality.

1. Early films, 1955-1958 Corman’s early films leave a lot to be desired when their style is taken into consideration, which stems from two main reasons. First, shooting schedules of his early motion pictures were really tight, ranging from nine days for Five Guns West to about two weeks for his later productions. Such schedules allowed AIP to release an astounding number of eleven feature films by Corman in 1957 alone but prevented him from delivering a quality product. He could not afford the time to pause and see if the scenes he had just shot were satisfactory or not. In fact, having an entrepreneurial attitude towards his work, he cared little. According to Beverly Garland, his behavior on set was: “Let’s get it done, bang-bangbang, move to the next shot.”7 Second, Corman had no formal preparation to direct films. Prior to working on Five Guns West, he merely took some friends to the beach to shoot an 8-minute short film to learn the ropes of direction. The rest had to be mastered on the set, which he admits without any shame: Five Guns West was a breakthrough for me. Without almost no training or preparation whatsoever, I was literally learning how to direct motion pictures on the job. It took me four or five of these “training films” to learn what a film school student knows when he graduates. But while the mistakes they make in student films are usually lost forever, mine were immortalized.8

The results were indeed deplorable – his early films are riddled with blatant composition and continuity errors. In The Gunslinger, for example, when Rose is galloping through a valley, the background changes from 6

David Bordwell, “The Classical Hollywood Style, 1917-1960,” in The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, ed. David Bordwell, Janet Steiger and Kristin Thompson (London: Routledge, 1985), 352. 7 Beverly Garland in Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies, 30. 8 Ibid., 26.

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shot to shot: first the grass is lavishly green, then dry and brown as if seasons changed within seconds. In Viking Women, when the two main characters are to be burned at stake, the poles they are tied to were placed a few feet behind the burning wood. On a two dimensional screen, this creates an impression that the wood and the poles are in the same place. However, one angle shot clearly reveals the trick – with an unintentional comical effect. Corman’s early style is unimaginative and lacks dynamism. In dialogue sequences, the static camera shoots actors/actresses from the waist up as they motionlessly deliver their lines. All the interlocutors usually fit within the frame; if this is not the case, a shot/reverse shot sequence is used. Occasionally, the actors/actresses might move a little within the frame, but these scenes are very repetitive as well: a person enters a room and delivers a line of dialogue, or delivers a line and exits the room. Camera movement as well as the movement within the frame are very limited, making the dialogue sequences monotonous. Action sequences are not much more dynamic. Many of them involve the characters walking, running, driving, riding or even skiing from one side of the frame to the other, with the camera remaining static or slightly tracking their movement from a static tripod. In The Teenage Caveman and The Viking Women, which, by the way, were both shot in Bronson Canyon and feature identical backgrounds, the characters trudge from one side of the frame, stop in the middle to deliver some dialogue, and continue trudging to exit the frame on the other side. Such scenes are so common for Corman’s early films that the comedians from Mystery Science Theater 3000 ridiculed them in one of the episodes, calling one such scene “the famous Roger Corman walking scene.”9 Fighting scenes lack dynamism as well. The camera usually encompasses the entire fighting ground, and the fighters wrestle within the static frame. Choreography is rather limited: the characters mostly tussle in a grip, often rolling on the ground with a very artificial effect. Corman is very economical in cuts, which intrinsically is an excellent idea, but, given the fact that very little happens within the frame in terms of movement, his fighting scenes fail to engage the viewer. Numerous scenes are simply redundant, meaningless or unnecessary for the story. Swamp Women features a number of shots of the swamp – water, trees, flocks of birds, swamp flora and fauna – which serve no purpose but are inserted in between the plot scenes. If these frames 9 Mystery Science Theater 3000, “The Teenage Caveman.” Directed by Joel Hodgson. Written by Michael J. Nelson. Comedy Central, November 9, 1991.

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included the characters as well (as in Apocalypse Now, for example), they could convey the relation between the people in the film and their surroundings. As it is not the case, they are clearly filler material. Sometimes, the meaning of some shots is impossible to decipher. The Gunslinger includes several underlit scenes in which the viewer is unable to distinguish the characters. In The Undead, which is shot entirely in a studio, there are several interior sets but only one road set. Because every character travels between different interiors on the same “road,” it quickly becomes confusing who is going where. In short, Corman’s early style is amateurish. The director simply points the camera to what he wants to shoot and captures it. The shots are repetitive and interchange between medium shot, full shot and medium close-up. Camera movement is restricted, and almost exclusively relies on panning. Dolly shots are scarce, crane shots and establishing shots are non-existent – probably due to tight schedules and limited production values. Shots and sequences are deficient in dynamics; the dynamics that shall become Corman’s trademark later on. Not everything is without value, though, and Corman does manage to deliver several intriguing shots in his early films. Swamp Women can boast of interesting frames depicting the dominance-submission relation between women and men. In one scene between sadistic Vera (Beverly Garland) and her captive man, Bob (Mike Connors), Corman is able to capture the essence of their relationship. Everything in this frame is ideal: the woman towering over the man with her phallic gun, the man backed on a tree with no means of escaping, his hands tied behind his back, and their facial expressions conveying eroticism, passion, dominance and dependence. Corman used a similar composition in Pit and the Pendulum, another motion picture with themes of female dominance and male submission. As Corman progressively improved his style over the course of his filmmaking, several of his 1957 productions can boast skillful shots and sequences with the intricate use of contrast and shadowing. Teenage Doll, for example, draws stylistic inspiration from film noir. Set entirely at night like a proper noir, it employs black-and-white contrasts to convey meaning. In the first scene of the film, a white corpse of a beautiful young woman is juxtaposed with a dirty black alley, which symbolizes an innocent victim in a cruel world. Such meaningful contrasts are used throughout the entire film, as the female protagonist, also clad in white, runs against a dark urban background (an innocent, virginal girl lost in a dangerous concrete jungle). In these pursuit scenes, lighting is set in such a

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way that the lead actress casts a shadow behind her, giving an impression that she is chased by shadows.10 Lighting is also used creatively in Sorority Girl, in the scene in which Sabra incites Tina to blackmail Mort. A shadow is cast on dark-haired Sabra, whereas fair-haired Tina is well-lit – such a composition reveals to the audience who is innocent and gullible in the duo, and who is cunning and deceitful. The camera frames both girls in a low-angle shot, giving Sabra an image of power and authority. Moreover, the background is a blank white wall with dramatic shadows of the girls on it. The entire scene seems nightmarish and anti-realistic (and thus expressionist) as if Sabra was a demon trying to deprave an innocent virgin. Such imaginative scenes and sequences are scarce and do not suffice to efface the impression that Corman’s early films are artistically bland and technically flawed. However, they anticipate his mature style of filmmaking, which relies on three key elements: movement, deep composition and symbolic frames.

2. Mature style The years 1958-1960 were a period of artistic breakthrough for Corman. By late 1958, he had released nineteen films, which had taught him technical skills in filmmaking and imbued him with artistic competences necessary to create stylistically imaginative and ingenious productions. Machine-Gun Kelly was the first of such productions. Released in late 1958, it exhibited Corman’s mature filmmaking style when it comes to deep composition and fluid camera movements. It was also his first film to be successful not only commercially but also critically. Its critical praise encouraged Corman to treat his films more seriously and helped him believe he could deliver quality product, which proved vital for his later career. The years 1959 and 1960 brought two black comedies shot on a challenge: A Bucket of Blood and The Little Shop of Horrors. In the case of A Bucket of Blood, AIP had only $50,000 available but wanted Corman 10

Not only is the style of Teenage Doll noir, but the plot also features typical noir motifs. The heroine is a regular American girl who makes a fatal mistake at the beginning of the film – she accidentally kills another girl – and is doomed from the start with no prospects for a happy ending. The atmosphere of the film is claustrophobic, as the trap closes around the protagonist, who is refused help by everyone she loves; and pessimistic, as every character leads a gloomy, unsatisfying existence. Even the film’s detective wears a trench coat and a fedora hat typical for noir detectives.

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to produce a film. He concurred and managed to shoot it in five days. A year later he accepted another challenge – or actually a bet – that he could direct an entire motion picture in three days. He won the bet and beat his personal speed record, shooting The Little Shop of Horrors in only two days and a night. The two productions provided him with invaluable filmmaking experience. To meet the challenges, he had to carefully prepare the shooting, sketching the scenes and rehearsing them with his actors. As the action mostly took place in a single interior, he was forced to maximally vary his directional style and render the camerawork as dynamic as possible in order not to make the scenes repetitive or static, and thus monotonous. Cutting also had to be extensively used to diversify dialogue sequences. Such directional work brought him further experience on composition and dynamics, and taught him to engage the viewer’s attention even on a greatly limited set. Finally, the year 1960 saw the release of House of Usher – the first in the series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, with which Corman achieved unprecedented commercial and critical success and which is now considered his magnum opus. The series also allowed Corman’s directional style to blossom and unite his three trademark shooting techniques: movement, deep shots and symbolic frames. From that moment on, Corman’s films exhibit the same distinct style regardless of the genre, and the question of him being an auteur can finally be taken into serious consideration.

2.1. Movement Since 1958, and especially 1960, Corman had paid extraordinary attention to the dynamics in his films. Jonathan Demme, one of the “graduates” of “Corman film school,” recalls his advice on movement in the following manner: He wanted me to focus on the whole idea of the eyeball – the human eye. That’s the primary organ involved in movie going. You’ve got to keep the eyeball of the viewer stimulated. That’s why we move the camera round to keep the eye engaged.11

11

Jonathan Demme in Ryan Lambie, “8 Hollywood directors from the Roger Corman film school,” Den of Geek, 21 November 2012. Accessed 11 November 2013, http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/23528/8-hollywood-directors-from-theroger-corman-film-school.

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Indeed, Corman tried to move the camera whenever it was possible. Therefore, whenever the characters moved, he moved the camera with them. Such a technique performed two functions: first, it made the footage more attractive visually, and second, it also augmented the story. Let us consider an example. When Machine-Gun Kelly is walking to a bank to perform a heist, the camera moves parallel to him, making the scene more dynamic. Kelly is framed in a low-angle shot, which gives him an image of power and determination as he is walking to the bank. The camera films him out front, so the viewer does not know where Kelly is walking (this is the opening scene). Paired with dramatic music, such camerawork makes the scene very tense. The same device was used in horror films with a brilliant suspenseful effect, for example in the sequence from Pit and the Pendulum in which Nicholas Medina hears the voice of his dead wife and decides to investigate. When he enters the dark and cobwebbed crypts under his estate, he is filmed out front in a dolly shot, and the camera moves in the same direction as he does, always allowing the audience to observe his troubled facial expression and body language. Suddenly, the doors behind him close with a loud thump. He does not see it coming (but the audience does), so he jumps, startled, and drops his torch, which extinguishes. He continues his investigation, and the camera continues to film him out front. The audience sees he is frightened but cannot see what he can. In a way, the viewers are like Nicholas – they hear Elizabeth but do not see her. As Nicholas ventures deeper into the crypt, Corman varies the shots, intermitting the out-front dolly shot with side dolly shots, close-ups of Nicholas’s troubled facial expression or his feet as he steps between rats. When he reaches a juncture where the corridor branches out in different directions, Elizabeth’s voice is heard again. The camera immediately pans to the direction from which the sound came from – as if the viewer suddenly turned their head – to reveal the passage to Elizabeth’s exhumed grave. The film cuts back to Nicholas, who is shot again in an out-front dolly, as he carefully moves toward the grave. When he is at the entrance to the tomb, he is framed like John Wayne in the final scene of The Searchers – the edges of the tomb are also the edges of the frame. By this time, Corman has raised the tension to the maximum and it is high time he revealed the monster – the camera cuts back and forth from Elizabeth slowly rising from her grave to Nicholas, who is more and more terrified. The crypt scene is a masterful example of suspenseful filmmaking: the pacing is excellent, as Corman always changes the shot just in time not to let the tension decrease, and the fluid camera movements create an impression that the viewer is in the crypt together with the hero.

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Furthermore, since Nicholas’s distressed facial expression and body language are always in the frame, the sequence is also a study of human fright. Such scenes appear numerous times in the Poe adaptations, and always work according to the same model: the character (and the audience) learns that there is some horrible secret, he/she goes to investigate in a long and suspenseful sequence until he/she finally discovers the nature of the secret – which is usually ghastly indeed – and the accumulated tension is released with a shock. It is also worth noting that the characters always see and react to the horrible secret just before the audience sees it, which allows the viewers to wonder for a few seconds about its real nature and intensifies the tension. But movement and dynamics do not merely serve a single purpose. To avoid static dialogue scenes, Corman told his actors to walk about the set and followed them with a camera on a dolly. Such filming technique proved particularly useful in the Poe adaptations. Though these films are packed with dialogue, they never get visually monotonous because there is always plenty of movement and dynamics on screen. For example, in Pit and the Pendulum the characters go down to the torture chamber to discuss Nicholas’s past. The camera tracks them as they descend the staircase and stop at the bottom to engage in dialogue in a group. Then Nicholas leaves the group and walks around the chamber, talking and fiddling with the devices. He stops and Francis enters the frame to comment on his words. They talk in a series of shots/reverse shots, then Nicholas starts walking and talking on his own again. Working this way, Corman can deal with extensive dialogue parts, at the same time keeping the viewers engaged in the visuals on screen. Such dynamic dialogue scene choreography also has a positive effect on the story’s dramatic nature. Whenever a character is asked a difficult question – and Corman’s gothic horror characters invariably hide disturbing secrets they do not wish to reveal – he starts walking around and fiddling with things, which is a natural reaction when dealing with stress. The audience is thus aware that he struggles with the answer which causes him problems. It also allows Corman to extract the entire acting potential from the actors, especially Vincent Price. When Corman cannot move his characters for some reason grounded in the narrative, he tries to make the scene dynamic by moving the camera around them. Again, this not only adds visual attractiveness and composition depth to the footage but can also help the story. Let us consider three examples. In Gas-s-s, there is a series of scenes through which Corman portrays the mass extinction of people over thirty years old. One such scene depicts an elderly couple: the old man lies dead on the pavement while the woman kneels beside him and weeps. To add more

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dynamics to this otherwise static scene, Corman films the actors from a vehicle passing right by them. Such technique evokes a sense of participation, produces a feeling of helplessness and thus intensifies the scene’s sadness. When Roderick and Winthrop pray over the casket of Madeline in House of Usher, the camera starts filming them from behind, then slowly circles them around and gently settles behind the casket. Such camerawork gives the audience a sense of participation, offers them a better look at the mourning chapel, renders the feeling of religious concentration, and – from the practical point of view – prepares a dialogue scene, as the shot finishes by filming both men en face. This technique of filming motionless actors, now known as arcing, did not become widespread until middle 1970s,12 over 10 years after Corman used it in House of Usher. It would probably be too risky to credit him with inventing the shot, but his films might have foreshadowed the trend that was yet to come. Bordwell claims that the tactic of circling around motionless characters, like an embracing couple, can be traced at least to Vertigo (1957) and Hiroshima mon amour (1959), but he also points out that Corman’s The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), together with Lumet’s The Group (1966), was one of the first films to use arcing around people sitting at a table – a filming device that is prevalent in today’s cinema.13 Corman did not merely use arcing – he also modified it. In one of the first scenes of The Trip, the characters sit in a circle in a tripper den to smoke a joint. The leader of the trippers, Max, lights a joint and passes it on. Corman places the camera in the middle of the circle, and follows the joint – which is passed from one person to another while Max delivers a monologue – until it returns to Max (who puts it out), achieving an elaborate 360 degree shot of the entire group. With this shot, he captures the feeling of community between the trippers, portrays the “life cycle” of a joint, and stresses the importance of narcotics for the trippers (people in the frame change, but the joint is the same). The shot can be described as arcing à rebours – it does not circle the group on the outside but rotates in the middle of it. Besides arcing, two other dynamic sequences might have influenced future films. The first one is the title sequence from The Wild Angels (1966). The camera is mounted on a vehicle and, moving next to Blues’s bike with the same speed, shoots him from the side as he rides. Therefore, in the frame, Blues remains static against a moving landscape, while gritty 12

David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 135. 13 Ibid., 144.

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rock music plays in the background. Such camerawork glorifies the biker and his machine, even worships them. Filming the chopper from the side, it emphasizes its massiveness and power. It also evokes a sense of participation as if the audience rode side by side with the protagonist (in one take the camera is even placed just behind the handlebars, with the handlebars still in the frame, as if the viewers were riding the bike themselves). This technique might have set the trend for filming motorbikes and was later employed by countless other biker films. The motion picture which capitalized on it the most was Easy Rider – it extensively copies the scene, also playing contemporary rock music in the background. The other scene comes from The Trip. When Paul walks through the city intoxicated, the camera, moving together with the actor, films his head and torso from the level of his abdomen. This scene was reworked 30 years later by Darren Aronofsky in Requiem for a Dream – another film about drugs – to depict his character walking intoxicated.

2.2. Deep shot Prior to 1958, Corman would mostly take two dimensional shots, but from Machine-Gun Kelly onwards he strove for a deeper composition and paid more attention to shot background. Instead of placing actors in a line – like he did in, for example, Swamp Women – he tried to place them deeper within the frame. He also attempted to make the background as interesting and dynamic as possible. In The Little Shop of Horrors, for instance, when the action takes place in the shop, there is frequently somebody walking behind the shop window to make the background more lively and to add credibility to the setting. Like camera movement, deep shots not only make the film visually more attractive but also contribute the story. In the crowd scene of The Intruder in which Cramer incites the citizens of Caxton against blacks, the camera is placed at the end or in the middle of the crowd, giving the viewers an impression that they are also present at the rally. In MachineGun Kelly, when the title mobster storms the hideout of a rival gang and guns them down with his Thompson, the camera films the scene from his shoulder’s perspective, siding the audience with the gangster and evoking a sense of participation as well. Corman also combines camera movement with shot depth to create an illusion of involvement. In The Masque of the Red Death, as the characters saunter around the castle talking, the director moves the camera parallel to them but at a distance, allowing pillars, candlesticks, sculptures and other obstacles placed between the camera

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and the actors to freely pass through the frame. This creates an impression that the audience observes – or spies on – the characters, and that the viewers are also among the guests in Prince Prospero’s castle. Similar deep shots were used by Welles and praised by Bazin for forcing the spectator “to participate in the meaning of the film by distinguishing the implicit relations” and creating “a psychological realism which brings the spectator back to the real conditions of perception.”14 Camera angle is also used to evoke a sense of engagement in conversation scenes. When one interlocutor is placed higher than the other, the camera changes the angle whenever the shot changes from one person to the other. For example, when Scarlatti arrives at the gates of Prospero’s castle, the prince greets him standing on the castle walls, and a dialogue scene ensues. Whenever Scarlatti speaks, the camera films him from up high, as if from the point of view of Prospero (though it is not a typical POV shot); when the shot cuts to Prospero, he is filmed from the level of the ground. The viewers have an illusion that they participate in the scene. Creating a sense of involvement in the audience through his camerawork, Corman – consciously or not – added great value both to his horrors and to his socially concerned films, in both cases increasing the viewers’ engagement in the films. In socially concerned motion pictures, this involvement allows the audience to empathize with the characters, thus making the film’s message reverberate to a larger degree. In horror films, it intensifies the feeling of fright and, consequently, makes the horror a better horror. Moreover, one has to bear in mind that Poe wrote mostly in the first person and that his short stories were very personal. By evoking a sense of participation in the audience, Corman renders this literary approach on screen. Corman also combines deep composition with wide shots. In the Poe adaptations, this combination works for him twofold. First, when he places a character in the middle of a deep, wide shot, it conveys a feeling of loneliness and loss. Second, it allows him to further profit from the elaborate sets with all their ominous décor, dark recesses, grotesque shadows and lingering darkness, and further intensify the atmosphere of anxiety. Deep, wide shots are also used in the desert scenes of The Wild Angels to show that the bikers come from the boundlessness of the American landscape. Finally, Corman uses camera movement to build deep frame composition. He usually starts from a narrow shot – a close-up or a medium shot – and 14 André Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View (Los Angeles: Acrobat Books, 1991), 80.

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works towards a long shot. For example, when gang members plan a bank job in Machine-Gun Kelly, the camera starts with a close-up on the heist schematics, then pans up to the face of Flo, who is explaining the details of the robbery, and finally retracts to encompass all the mobsters in their hide-away. By the time the camera reaches the long shot, Flo finishes her monologue and a dialogue between all the characters can begin without a single cut. This sequence instinctively copies the movement of the human eye – from the item being talked about, to the person talking, and finally to the others in the room. This creates an illusion that the audience is there together with the gangsters. In another scene, Kelly and Flo enter the house of her mother. The camera films them from outside, then cuts into the hall. The three characters exchange some dialogue lines, from which it turns out the mother is unhappy that Flo chose a gangster like Kelly for a boyfriend. When Kelly and Flo enter the hall talking, the camera retracts on a dolly to shoot them in the doorway to one of the rooms. After more dialogue is exchanged, the camera retracts even more to reveal the entire living room – it is a brothel and Flo’s mother turns out to be its madam. It turns out that she despises Kelly not because he is a gangster but because he is a poor gangster. Working with the camera this way, Corman achieves an element of surprise since the audience instinctively believes that she is a law-abiding woman concerned about her daughter. Corman’s later films feature numerous scenes in which the director builds the depth of his shots in a similar way. Many of these scenes do not serve any purpose in the film’s plot but are nonetheless well conceived and executed. In The Masque of the Red Death, for example, Hop and Albert talk and a table, then walk towards the camera. The camera zooms out to build one of Corman’s favorite deep shots: from behind a fireplace. The characters are framed in a two-shot, with flames blazing between them – a foreshadowing of the trap Hop sets for Albert xxx. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is probably Corman’s most accomplished film from the technical point of view, with its fluid camera movements, intricate dolly and crane shots and economy of cuts. For example, in the gangster meeting scene, Corman starts from a close-up on Capone looking through a window. Then, following Capone, the camera enters the meeting room through the window and establishes a deep shot with Capone’s back in the foreground and the other gangsters sitting at the table in the background. As Capone walks towards the table, a full shot of the room is established. All these shots – close-up, deep shot and full shot – are done without a single cut, dynamizing the otherwise static conversation scene. In another dynamic shot from the same film, the camera films a hotel lobby when

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Capone and his henchmen enter in the background (a deep establishing shot). As they walk towards the foreground, the camera arcs around a cigar stand in the middle of the lobby to capture Capone buying a cigar in amerykaĔski plan xxx, and them follows the gangsters in a tracking shot as they walk towards the elevators.

2.3. Ambience, symbolism and expressionism When film critics present the works of Corman to the public, they frequently praise his gothic horror series for their stylish setting and the atmosphere of dread,15 which stems from the fact that the series bears remarkable resemblance to expressionism on numerous stylistic and dramatic levels. Firstly, all the films in the series except The Terror and The Tomb of Ligeia are shot entirely in the studio,16 even when the script requires the characters to venture outside. The opulent gothic interiors as well as the artificial studio exteriors evince no idea of reality, rendering the films surreal and dreamlike – or rather nightmarish. The sets fit the plots, which deal with such otherworldly matters as curses, mysticism, black magic, satanism or overcoming one’s death. Therefore, the films fulfill the principle of decorum – their form reflects their content. The action is set entirely in interiors – as studio exteriors are de facto interiors as well – and there is no open space the characters could freely roam. This creates an impression that they are trapped, imprisoned inside the film’s universe with no means of escaping. The feeling is intensified by the sets’ décor: labyrinthine corridors, clusters of rooms, mazes of secret passages, twisted stairways, extensive dark dungeons – all of this resembles a labyrinth, an intricate trap in which the characters have been captured. The sense of imprisonment is also reflected in the films’ plots, so the decorum principle is fulfilled again: Madeleine Usher is forbidden to leave her family estate with her lover because she is said to be under a family curse, Baron von Leppe cannot leave his castle for he is tormented by pangs of guilt for killing his wife.17 Neither of them escapes their prison and they both perish when their estates crumble upon them – “and the deep and dark tarn closed silently over the fragments of the House of 15

See for example: Dixon, “Roger Corman.” Though the opening sequence of House of Usher is shot outdoors, the entire film was planned to be shot in a studio. 17 The set is also a trap for Locke in „Morella,” who grieves his dead wife, for Charles in The Haunted Palace, whom the palace changes into Joseph Curwen, and for Prince Prospero and his guests, who shelter from the red death as it ravages the countryside. 16

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Usher,” Corman imprecisely quotes Poe – as if their traps literally closed over them. Therefore, like in expressionism, the set is not merely pure decoration or background, it becomes part of the action. This is the most evident in House of Usher, where the walls crack menacingly, chandeliers fall down to kill, fireplaces spit sparks on the characters. It can be said that the house is a character as well, in fact a very important one, even superior to the others. It pushes the action forward and seems to possess all the “decisive power” in the Usher family, incapacitating its inhabitants and deciding on their fate. When the house rumbles, Winthrop has the following conversation with Bristol, the Ushers’ servant, in which the house is even referred to as a living being: Philip Winthrop: “How long has that been going on?” Bristol: “So long I’m hardly aware of it anymore. It’s just the settling of the house.” Philip Winthrop: “That settling could cause this entire structure to collapse. That doesn’t worry you?” Bristol: “Oh no, sir. If the house dies, I shall die with it.”

The set may also play a symbolic role and reflect the mental state of the characters. Labyrinthine corridors, secret passages, chaotic furniture layout, dimly lit chambers, lingering darkness, dusty utensils of long forgotten purpose – all of this symbolizes the disorderly minds of the inhabitants, their dark secrets, sinister subconscious, possibly even concealed mental illness. When Winthrop arrives at the Usher residence, he finds dust and disorder; and when he meets Roderick Usher and looks into his mind, he finds madness and obsession. So do Francis in the Medina’s estate, Lenora in her father’s mansion, Duvalier in von Leppe’s castle and Elizabeth in Verden Fell’s abbey. Since the set is in fact the mind of the protagonist, when Nicholas Medina explores the depths of his estate, he in fact explores the depths of his subconscious and dreads the monstrosities he may find there. And he does find them – the exploration finally drives him to complete insanity and he assumes the personality of his sadistic father, which has lurked in his subconscious since early childhood. The sets’ décor also bears numerous similarities with expressionism. Expressionist filmmakers were obsessed with corridors and staircases,18 18

Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 119-127.

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which also abound in Corman’s gothic horror series. If – according to Sigmund Freud – stairways are representations of sexual acts and corridors stand for female sex organs,19 then twisted stairways and corridors stand for twisted sexual practices. This would correspond to the films’ plots as the storyline in House of Usher implies incest, in Pit and the Pendulum – domination and submission, in “Morella” and The Haunted Palace – necrophilia, and in The Masque of the Red Death – rape. Even the portraits of the Usher family or of Joseph Curwen are painted in an expressionist style (albeit a modern one) – with distorted proportions, sharp contrasts, unnatural colors, a sense of menace and anxiety. What is more, the dream sequences, which are present in almost each of Corman’s gothic horrors, closely resemble the works of German expressionist filmmakers. Like their predecessors from the 1920s, they are silent, with no sound but the music in the background. They feature exaggerated theatrical acting and facial expressions so typical for the silent era.20 They are shot through color filters which render the footage not colorful but black and green, black and blue or black and violet. Distorted lenses, gels, smoke and other optical effects are used to further deform the shot. All these technical and dramatic measures serve to intensify the unreal and nightmarish atmosphere worthy of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. These similarities to expressionism are no coincidence – prior to shooting the Poe series, Corman studied the works of German expressionists.21 Though Corman does not mention them as a source of inspiration, it seems he – consciously or subconsciously – models his ominous sets on the classic Universal horror films as well.22 He uses the decorative and acoustic techniques typical for gothic horror that were tried and tested in such films like Dracula, Frankenstein or The Wolf Man. They include low-key lighting, abundance of dark colors, smoke, fog, atmospheric matte paintings, cobwebs, dead vegetation twisted into grotesque shapes, howling wind, clattering shutters, lightning, thunder roaring in the distance, ominous graveyards, sinister music.

19

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Sioux Falls, SD: Nu Vision Publications, 2004), 675. 20 A similar scene is used in the grande finale of The Masque of the Red Death: the victims of the plague rise from the dead and claw at Prospero – much like the dead Ushers claw at Winthrop when he has a nightmare at the Usher residence – only this time it is not a dream. 21 Corman, Roger Corman Behind the Masque. 22 Though some of the sets look as if they were inspired by the works of Caspar David Friedrich.

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Colors are especially important in The Masque of the Red Death, in which Corman uses different color patterns to juxtapose the sets. The countryside, which is ravaged by the plague, is kept in toned and dark colors. By contrast, Prospero’s castle, a safe haven from the disease, is bright and colorful. These opposite color patterns also emphasize the economic disproportion between the countryside and Prospero’s estate; Prospero accumulated his fortune, exploiting the peasants. The red color is highlighted whenever it appears on screen – it is always glaring and even relatively small red objects like flowers attract the viewers’ eyes. Being so unnatural and overexposed, it creates tense atmosphere and always anticipates something frightening. Drawing considerable aesthetic inspiration from classic expressionist horror films, classic Universal horrors films and classic literary horror stories, Corman creates a gothic horror series which is almost perfect visually, in which every shot or sequence conveys a feeling of nearly palpable menace. However, Corman is not just a skilled imitator. As it has been pointed out above, his dynamic filming technique and deep composition shots add great value to his horror films. In fact, his best scenes combine all his three stylistic trademarks mentioned earlier: movement, composition depth and symbolism. In The Masque of the Red Death, for example, after Juliana performed a satanic rite and offered herself to Satan, she looks for Prospero to tell him the news. As she enters one of the rooms, the camera films her from behind a clock pendulum which looks similar to the torture device from Pit and the Pendulum. The scene combines movement – the actress walks as the pendulum sways back and forth; composition in depth – the pendulum in the foreground and the actress in the background; and symbolism – anticipates her death and is also a reference to Corman’s previous film. Or when Charles Dexter Ward and Ann Ward enter the title Haunted Palace, the camera follows them on a dolly in a deep and wide shot, as they immerse – literally and symbolically – into the darkness. Corman’s three stylistic trademarks are also combined outside the horror genre. The Wild Angels, for example, can boast a framework composition that features movement, depth and symbolism. In the opening scene, the camera rises from behind a garden fence to film a boy escaping the enclosure and speeding away on his tricycle. His escape symbolizes the rejection of authority and rebellion against the confines of the traditional society. In the closing sequence, the camera does the reverse: it films Blues digging a grave and retracts behind a cemetery fence to

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symbolize his imminent imprisonment and the loss of freedom he has cherished so much.

3. Conclusion Corman’s early films are faulty and stylistically simplistic. Shot quickly and recklessly to bring profits as soon as possible, they epitomize the style and spirit of exploitation filmmaking. Sparks of artistic genius can be found in some of them, but they are only isolated scenes that cannot change the overall evaluation of his early work. However, these films served as learning material to Corman – a young director whose talent would yet flourish: Among all the films I’ve made, many (God knows how many) were bad films. But each time, I did my best. There are some I never should have done, but even with those, I learned something, so I have nothing to regret.23

The breakthrough came in late 1958 with Machine-Gun Kelly, though Corman himself claims that he reached his stylistic proficiency two years later: “By the beginning of the 60s, I began to have confidence in my ability to master the craft.”24 In Machine-gun Kelly, he displayed artistic maturity for the first time in his career, and fully presented his directional style which was based on fluid camera movement and deep compositions that often evoked a sense of viewer participation. The series of Poe adaptations, which began in 1960, added a third trademark element – symbolism worthy of expressionism – which later spread outside gothic horror into socially conscious counter-culture films like The Wild Angels or The Trip. The blossoming of stylistic artistry earned him a prestigious retrospective at Cinémathèque Française in 1964, making him the youngest director who had that distinction. This does not mean, however, that every motion picture Corman directed from Machine-Gun Kelly onwards is artistically worthy. Probably due to tight production schedules and thrifty budgets, his artistic prowess fluctuated, intertwining outstanding productions like Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death with chaotic ones like The Terror or The Secret Invasion. Still, the films that do possess exquisite style are in the majority, which proves they are not accidental masterpieces but products of artistic maturity. 23 24

Corman in Nasr, Roger Corman Interviews, 17. Corman in Corman’s World.

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Corman’s mature style is distinctive and distinguishes his films from the works of other directors from that period. This is the most visible when comparing his Poe adaptations with the Poe adaptations by other filmmakers. When Corman declined to shoot another Poe film after The Tomb of Ligeia, AIP decided to continue the franchise nonetheless, wishing to capitalize on the popularity of the original series and the stardom of Vincent Price. However, the four films that ensued –The Oblong Box, Scream and Scream Again and Cry of the Banshee by Gordon Hessler as well as The Witchfinder General (a film produced by Tigon and distributed by AIP under the title The Conqueror Worm) by Michael Reeves – lacked the artistic allure, the stylized camerawork and the expressionist touch of the original, even though they dealt with similar topics. It is obvious that they were directed by a different person. Similarly, the biker films that followed The Wild Angels in hopes of repeating its commercial success were no match to its predecessor in artistic terms. The distinctiveness of Corman’s style goes hand in hand with its innovativeness. His later films can boast numerous sequences with ingenious camerawork. The exploration scenes from Pit and the Pendulum and The Haunted Palace, the bike riding scenes from The Wild Angels, the joint smoking scene and the city scene from The Trip are all examples of technical mastery combined with artistic intuition. Summing up, Corman’s mature cinematic style fulfills every requirement posited by the structuralists in their approach to the auteur theory: it is technically accurate as well as artistically distinguishable, unique and innovative, it can convey meaning and mood or be visually beautiful, and it transcends genres. The question whether Corman is an outstanding artist remains open to debate, but the condition set by Sarris – that a great director has to be at least a good director – is definitely met here.

CONCLUSION

Roger Corman’s contribution to the American cinematography is indisputable. He discovered such film talents as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Jack Nicholson or Robert De Niro. He also promoted European art cinema in the USA, distributing the works of Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini, among others. However, as a director he remains an artistically ambiguous figure. On the one hand, the artistic deficiencies of some of his films are obvious and were often ridiculed, for instance by the comedians of Mystery Science Theater 3000. On the other hand, he was the youngest American director to be given a film retrospective at the prestigious Cinématèque Française in Paris, one of his directorial efforts – House of Usher – was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, and he received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The aim of this study has been to determine which face of Corman is his real one: is he an outstanding artist or merely a bungler? To accomplish it, the auteur theory was chosen as the investigative tool, because it allows a scholar to decide if the films by a director reflect his/her personal artistic vision and – as a consequence – if this director is an extraordinary artist or just a craftsman/craftswoman. Chapter 1 analyzed various versions of the auteur theory, choosing the structuralist approach formulated by Peter Wollen and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith as the most suitable. They postulated that – in order to be deemed auteurs – directors should fulfill three requirements: 1) they should exercise considerable control over the production process and their influence should extend beyond mere direction; 2) they should realize their personal vision and incorporate their personal themes in their body of work despite the confines of the genre or the pressure from studios; 3) their motion pictures should express a distinct style which proves their mastery of the film medium. At first glance, it seems that the directorial works of Corman fulfill every one of the three requirements, and that Corman can easily be considered auteur. Chapter 2 showed that he exercised almost total control over every aspect of the production process, from the film’s conception to the editing. He would not tolerate intrusion in his films to the point where he preferred to resign from directing rather than succumb to external

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influence. He would execute his own ideas as well as the ideas proposed by his collaborators if they appealed to him, but he would reject any concepts he considered artistically void, unfeasible or repetitive. Chapters 3 and 4 revealed two recondite personal themes – exclusion and female empowerment – which are common to almost all of his motion pictures regardless of the genre, as well as several less frequent motifs: fascination with eyes and sight, a liberal or leftist social viewpoint, history repeating itself, elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, and perverse sexual practices. They also proved that he was able to incorporate these themes in his films despite the confines of exploitation, since the exploited topic would serve only as an element which attracted audiences to the cinemas and/or as a context for the above themes. Finally, Chapter 5 depicted the typical features of Corman’s mature style. They include fluid camera movement, deep shot and symbolism/expressionism. The chapter also pointed out that some of his filming techniques, like arcing, were ahead of their time and were later reworked by other directors. However, the main problem is that many of his motion pictures do not meet all the three requirements simultaneously. All of his films fulfill criterion one, most of them include his personal themes at least to some extent (criterion two), but relatively few films are stylistically excellent as well (criterion three). They include: Machine-Gun Kelly (1958), House of Usher (1960), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Intruder (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Wild Angels (1966), and The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967). The main reason behind this situation is that Corman had not received any professional education in terms of filmmaking. Before he mastered the craft and developed a personal style, he shot twenty motion pictures which were artistically inept and riddled with technical errors, and which cannot serve as a proof of authorship, even though they display the themes personal for Corman. Consequently, his filmography can be divided into two parts: early training films, and mature films. When Tag Gallagher investigates the works of John Ford, he dismisses his early motion pictures as apprenticeship films (even though he admits that they foreshadow Ford’s typical themes) and proves that Ford is an extraordinary director only on the basis of his later, mature films.1 Yet, a similar conclusion cannot be drawn about the works of Corman, who would intermingle skillful films like The Haunted Palace and The Masque 1

Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

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of the Red Death with lesser efforts like The Terror and The Secret Invasion even in the later stage of his directorial career. If the criterion of time fails to explain the artistic discrepancies in Corman’s filmography, perhaps the financial criterion shall be more appropriate. Maybe he was unable to deliver quality product on a meager budget but scaled artistic heights when provided with substantial funds? This is only partially true, however. Bigger budgets undoubtedly raised the production value of his films, allowing Corman to hire skilled actors and extend the shooting schedule, and, as a consequence, there are statistically more quality films on higher budgets than on lower ones. Moreover, a considerable shift in artistic quality is visible between The Wasp Woman ($50,000 budget) and House of Usher ($270,000 budget), even though both were shot in a studio almost one after another. Yet, Corman was able to deliver both excellent motion pictures on measly funds as well as costly artistic flops. The Little Shop of Horrors, for example, cost merely $30,000, almost next to nothing in the filmmaking business, but garnered rave reviews from the critics, gained a cult following among the public, sparked a remake, an Off-Broadway musical and a cartoon, and became one of Corman’s most successful films both critically and commercially. His other artistic achievements on a budget include The Intruder ($80,000) and Machine-Gun Kelly ($100,000). On the other hand, The Secret Invasion and Von Richthofen and Brown are stylistically bland, even though their budgets were very high by Corman’s standards ($590,000 and $925,000 respectively). There seems to be no clear-cut pattern which would explain why some of his films are stylistically admirable whereas others are not. The outcome seems to be independent of the budget, the schedule, the genre, or the crewmembers Corman worked with.2 The problem might, therefore, lie in the director himself. One plausible explanation is provided by Corman’s working methods. He was notorious for his unwillingness to do retakes and for tearing out middle pages of the script whenever he was falling behind schedule, which may explain the artistic deficiencies of some of his films. Whatever the truth may be – whether his inferior films are a result of his filmmaking malpractice or some bizarre mischance – one thing is certain: once Corman reached a higher artistic level, he was unable to maintain it.

2

Though it must be noted that these factors influenced his body of work statistically: films with higher budgets, longer schedules, renowned actors and scripts by prominent scriptwriters are more likely to be artistically worthy. Nevertheless, this is not always the case.

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A question arises: can a director who cannot retain the artistic level of his/her films still be considered an auteur? Neither Wollen nor NowellSmith addressed this question. In fact, when debating the authorship of Hawks or Curtiz, Wollen never analyzed their films one by one for auteur elements and never revealed whether some efforts were better than others, but rather focused on the entire filmography to prove his point. In this respect, Corman can be treated as an auteur too. In a larger sense, however, the issue remains open-ended and amounts to a more general question: can an uneven artist still be deemed great? Though there is no easy answer to this question and every artist should be treated individually, the history of American art knows such cases: Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell and, most importantly, Jackson Pollock. According to Clement Greenberg, these artists created many uneven paintings but achieved a high status due to their few masterpieces: Gottlieb’s “landscapes” and “seascapes,” Pollock’s “numbers” and “murals.”3 The works of Corman could be treated similarly as among his many bland exploitation films are several masterpieces which reveal directorial genius and are too numerous to be merely a coincidence.

3 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1993), 223-225.

FILMOGRAPHY

The following films were directed exclusively by Roger Corman: 1955 Five Guns West Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: R. Wright Campbell Cast: John Lund (Govern Sturges), Dorothy Malone (Shalee), Bob Campbell (John Morgan Candy), Jonathan Haze (William Parcel Candy), Paul Birch (J.C. Haggard), Mike “Touch” Connors (Hale Clinton) Running time: 78 minutes Budget: $60,000 Distributed by: American Releasing Corporation (ARC) Apache Woman Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Lou Rusoff Cast: Joan Taylor (Anne LeBeau), Lloyd Bridges (Rex), Lance Fuller (Armand LeBeau) Running time: 69 minutes Budget: $80,000 Distributed by: American Releasing Corporation (ARC) Day the World Ended Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Lou Rusoff Cast: Richard Denning (Rick), Lori Nelson (Louise), Paul Birch (Maddison), Mike “Touch” Connors (Tony) Running time: 78 minutes Budget: $85,000 Distributed by: American Releasing Corporation (ARC) Swamp Women Produced by: Bernard Woolner Screenplay: David Stern Cast: Carole Matthews (Lee), Marie Windsor (Josie), Jil Jarmyn (Billie), Mike “Touch” Connors (Bob), Beverly Garland (Vera) Running time: 70 minutes

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Budget: unknown Distributed by: Favorite Films Corporation/Woolner Bros. Pictures, Inc. 1956 The Oklahoma Woman Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Lou Rusoff Cast: Peggie Castle (Oklahoma Saunders), Cathy Downs (Susan Grant) Running time: 73 minutes Budget: $65,000 Distributed by: American Releasing Corporation (ARC) The Gunslinger Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Beverly Garland (Rose), Allison Hayes (Erica), John Ireland (Cane), Jonathan Haze (Jack) Running time: 76 minutes Distributed by: American Releasing Corporation (ARC) It Conquered the Earth Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Lou Rusoff Cast: Peter Graves (Paul Nelson), Lee Van Cleef (Dr. Tom Anderson), Beverly Garland (Claire Anderson) Running time: 68 minutes Budget: $85,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) 1957 Not of This Earth Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Paul Birch (Paul Johnson), Beverly Garland (Nadine), Jonathan Haze (Jeremy) Running time: 67 minutes Budget: $80,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) Attack of the Crab Monsters Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Richard Garland (Dale), Pamela Duncan (Martha Hunter), Russell Johnson (Hank Chapman)

190

Filmography

Running time: 62 minutes Budget: $70,000 Distributed by: Allied Artists Teenage Doll Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: June Kenney (Barbara), Fay Spain (Hel), Colette Jackson (May), Barbara Wilson (Betty), Richard Devon (Detective Dunston) Running time: 68 minutes Budget: $70,000 Distributed by: Allied Artists Rock All Night Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Dick Miller (Shorty), Abbie Dalton (Julie), The Platters, The Blockbusters Running time: 62 minutes Budget: $30,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Undead Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Pamela Duncan (Helena/Diana), Richard Garland (Pendragon), Allison Hayes (Livia) Running time: 71 minutes Budget: $70,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) She Gods of Shark Reef Produced by: Ludwig H. Gerber Screenplay: Robert Hill Cast: Don Durant (Lee), Bill Cord (Chris), Lisa Montell (Mahia) Running time: 63 minutes Budget: $100,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) Naked Paradise Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Richard Denning, (Duke Bradley), Beverly Garland (Max McKenzie), Leslie Bradley (Zac) Running time: 68 minutes Budget: $90,000

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Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) Sorority Girl Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Ed Waters Cast: Susan Cabot (Sabra), Dick Miller (Mort), Barboura Morris (Rita), June Kenney (Tina) Running time: 61 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) Carnival Rock Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Leo Lieberman Cast: Susan Cabot (Natalie), Brian Hutton (Stanley), David J. Stewart (Christy), The Platters, Bob Luman, The Shadows, The Blockbusters Running time: 75 minutes Budget: $70,000 Distributed by: Howco International War of the Satellites Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Lawrence Goldman Cast: Dick Miller (Dave Boyer), Susan Cabot (Sybil), Richard Devon (Dr. Van Ponder) Running time: 66 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: Allied Artists The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Lawrence Goldman Cast: Abby Dalton (Desir), Susan Cabot (Enger), Richard Devon (Stark), Jay Sayer (Senya) Running time: 67 minutes Budget: $100,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) 1958 Teenage Caveman Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: R. Wright Campbell Cast: Robert Vaughn (Teenage caveman) Running time: 65 minutes

192

Filmography

Budget: $70,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) Machine-Gun Kelly Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: R. Wright Campbell Cast: Charles Bronson (“Machine-Gun” Kelly), Susan Cabot (Flo) Running time: 84 minutes Budget: $100,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) I, Mobster Produced by: Roger Corman, Gene Corman Screenplay: Steve Fisher Cast: Steve Cochran (Joe Sante), Lita Milan (Teresa), Robert Strauss (Frankie), Celia Lovsky (Mrs. Sante) Running time: 80 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: 20th Century Fox 1959 A Bucket of Blood Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Dick Miller (Walter Paisley), Barboura Morris (Carla), Julian Burton (Maxwell Brock) Running time: 66 minutes Budget: $50,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Wasp Woman Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Leo Gordon Cast: Susan Cabot (Janice Starlin), Michael Mark (Dr. Zinthrop) Running time: 66 minutes Budget: $50,000 Distributed by: Filmgroup 1960 Ski Troop Attack Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Michael Forest (Factor), Frank Wolff (Potter) Running time: 63 minutes

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193

Budget: unknown Distributed by: Filmgroup House of Usher Produced by: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Roger Corman Screenplay: Richard Matheson Based on a story by: Edgar Allan Poe Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: Vincent Price (Roderick Usher), Mark Damon (Philip Winthrop), Myrna Fahey (Madeline Usher) Running time: 80 minutes Budget: $270,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Little Shop of Horrors Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Jonathan Haze (Seymour), Jackie Joseph (Audrey), Mel Welles (Mushnik) Running time: 70 minutes Budget: $30,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Last Woman on Earth Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Robert Towne Cast: Antony Carbone (Harold), Betsy Jones-Moreland (Evelyn), Robert Towne (Martin) Running time: 71 minutes Budget: $45,000 Distributed by: Filmgroup Creature from the Haunted Sea Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Antony Carbone (Renzo Capeto), Betsy Jones-Moreland (MaryBelle Monahan), Robert Towne (Sparks Moran) Running time: 63 minutes Budget: $25,000 Distributed by: Filmgroup Atlas Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Michael Forest (Atlas), Barboura Morris (Candia), Frank Wolff (Praximedes)

194

Filmography

Running time: 79 minutes Budget: $70,000 Distributed by: Filmgroup 1961 Pit and the Pendulum Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Richard Matheson Based on a story by: Edgar Allan Poe Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: Vincent Price (Nicholas Medina), John Kerr (Francis), Barbara Steele (Elizabeth Medina), Luana Anders (Catherine Medina), Antony Carbone (Dr. Leon) Running time: 85 minutes Budget: $220,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Intruder Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles Beaumont (from his novel) Cast: William Shatner (Adam Cramer), Frank Maxwell (Tom McDaniel), Charles Barnes (Joey Green), Robert Emhardt (Verne Shipman), Leo Gordon (Sam Griffin) Running time: 84 minutes Budget: $80,000 Distributed by: Filmgroup 1962 The Premature Burial Produced by: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Gene Corman Screenplay: Charles Beaumont Based on a story by: Edgar Allan Poe Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: Ray Milland (Guy Carrell), Hazel Court (Emily Gault), Richard Ney (Miles Archer) Running time: 81 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) Tales of Terror Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Richard Matheson Based on stories by: Edgar Allan Poe

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Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: “Morella”: Vincent Price (Locke), Maggie Pierce (Lenora), Leona Gage (Morella), Luana “Black Cat”: Vincent Price (Fortunato), Peter Lorre (Montresor), Joyce Jameson (Annabel) “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”: Vincent Price (M. Valdemar), Basil Rathbone (Carmichael), Debra Paget (Helene Valdemar) Running time: 89 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Tower of London Produced by: Gene Corman Screenplay: Leo Gordon Cast: Vincent Price (Richard of Gloucester), Michael Pate (Sir Ratcliff), Joan Freeman (Lady Margaret) Running time: 79 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: United Artists The Young Racers Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: R. Wright Campbell Cast: Mark Damon (Stephen Children), William Campbell (Joe Machin), Marie Versini (Sesia Machin) Running time: 84 minutes Budget: $90,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) 1963 The Raven Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Richard Matheson Based on a poem by: Edgar Allan Poe Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: Vincent Price (Erasmus Craven), Peter Lorre (Dr. Bedlo), Boris Karloff (Scarabus), Hazel Court (Lenore), Jack Nicholson (Rexford Bedlo), Olive Sturgess (Estelle) Running time: 86 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Terror Produced by: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Roger Corman

196

Filmography

Screenplay: Roger Corman, Leo Gordon, Jack Hill Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: Boris Karloff (Baron von Leppe/Eric), Jack Nicholson (Andre Duvalier), Sandra Knight (Helene/Ilse), Dick Miller (Stefan) Running time: 81 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Robert Dillon, Ray Russell Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: Ray Milland (Dr. James Xavier), Diana Van der Vlis (Dr. Diane Fairfax), Harold Stone (Dr. Sam Brant), Don Rickles (Crane) Running time: 76 minutes Budget: $250,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Haunted Palace Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles Beaumont Based on a story by: H.P. Lovecraft Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: Vincent Price (Charles Dexter Ward/Joseph Curwen), Debra Paget (Ann Ward), Frank Maxwell (Dr. Willet), Leo Gordon (Ezra Weeden), Lon Chaney Jr. (Simon) Running time: 87 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) The Secret Invasion Produced by: Gene Corman Screenplay: R. Wright Campbell Cast: Stewart Granger (Richard Mace), Raf Vallone (Roberto Rocca), Edd Byrnes (Simon Fell), Mickey Rooney (Terence Scanlon) Running time: 95 minutes Budget: $590,000 Distributed by: United Artists 1964 The Masque of the Red Death Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles Beaumont Based on a story by: Edgar Allan Poe

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197

Production Design: Daniel Haller Cast: Vincent Price (Prince Prospereo), Hazel Court (Juliana), Jane Asher (Francesca), Patrick Magee (Alfredo), David Weston (Gino) Running time: 89 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) 1965 The Tomb of Ligeia Produced by: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Pat Green Screenplay: Robert Towne Based on a story by: Edgar Allan Poe Cast: Vincent Price (Verden Fell), Elizabeth Shepherd (Ligeia/Rowena), John Westbrook (Christopher), Oliver Johnston (Kenrick) Running time: 81 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) 1966 The Wild Angels Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Charles B. Griffith Cast: Peter Fonda (Blues), Bruce Dern (Loser), Nancy Sinatra (Mike) Running time: 82 minutes Budget: $360,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) 1967 The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Howard Browne Cast: Jason Robards (Al Capone), George Segal (Peter Gusenberg), Ralph Meeker (Bugs Moran), Clint Richie (Jack McGurn), David Canary (Frank Gusenberg), Bruce Dern (May) Running time: 99 minutes Budget: $1,100,000 Distributed by: 20th Century Fox The Trip Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Jack Nicholson

198

Filmography

Cast: Peter Fonda (Paul Groves), Susan Strasberg (Sally Groves), Bruce Dern (John), Dennis Hopper (Max) Running time: 85 minutes Budget: $350,000 Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) 1969 Target: Harry Produced by: Gene Corman Screenplay: Bob Barbash Cast: Vic Morrow (Harry Black), Suzanne Pleshette (Diane Reed), Victor Buono (Mosul Rashi), Cesar Romero (George Duval) Running time: 79 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: ABC Pictures International 1970 Bloody Mama Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: Robert Thom Cast: Shelley Winters (Ma Barker), Robert De Niro (Lloyd Barker), Don Stroud (Herman Barker), Robert Walden (Fred Barker), Clint Kimbrough (Arthur Barker), Bruce Dern (Kevin), Pat Hingle (Sam Pendlebury), Diane Varsi (Mona) Running time: 90 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) Gas-s-s-s! Produced by: Roger Corman Screenplay: George Armitage Cast: Robert Corff (Coel), Elaine Giftos (Cilla), Bud Cort (Hooper) Running time: 79 minutes Budget: unknown Distributed by: American International Pictures (AIP) 1971 Von Richthofen and Brown Produced by: Gene Corman Screenplay: John William Corrington, Joyce Hooper Corrington Cast: John Phillip Law (Baron von Richthofen), Don Stroud (Roy Brown), Barry Primus (Herman Goering), Hurt Hatfield (Fokker)

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Running time: 97 minutes Budget: $925,000 Distributed by: United Artists 1990 Frankenstein Unbound Produced by: Roger Corman, Kobi Jaeger, Thom Mount Screenplay: Roger Corman, F.X. Feeney Based on a story by: Brian Aldiss Cast: John Hurt (Buchanan), Raul Julia (Victor Frankenstein), Nick Brimble (The Monster), Bridget Fonda (Mary Shelley) Running time: 82 minutes Budget: $6,000,000 Distributed by: Universal

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