The Words Get Stuck in my Throat

Montecito is a movie town in many respects, and that is a marvelous thing. Yes, I’m a cinephile! My creative hero has long been the director/auteur – an art rebel with the heart, spine and creative ballast to swim upstream in pursuit of a singularly iconoclastic vision. David Lean, Truffaut, Campion, Bogdanovich, Welles, Ephron, Gerwig, Coppola, Scorsese, Parks, Lee – yes, these earnest might-have-beens also have something to offer the odd filmgoer interested in “plots,” “scripts,” and other throwaway cinematic arcana. But we’re talking auteur, people. Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif on desert horseback yelling “Let’s go get ‘em!” or whatever; mildly diverting. A hurriedly concocted, rubberized monster breaking out of the lab to terrorize the ineptly filmed, scrubby hills of outer Los Angeles? Gimme gimme! We’re talking Beast with a Million Eyes, Night of the Blood Beast, Beast in the Cellar – it is a genre that depends for its success on our childlike interest in beasts. But look – do you want Streisand delicately brushing aside a lock of Redford’s impossibly golden hair in a poignant gesture of farewell, or a giant leech emerging from the swampy shadows, croaking and waddling and easily escapable if the heroine would but turn and walk briskly away? Thought so.

Budget Schmudget

You see, the true auteur is dedicated to a very particular genre, one that teems with sloppily constructed horrors that wouldn’t frighten a seven-year-old. These brilliant œuvres d’art  typically emerge from rancorous meetings that conclude with the director hollering some angrier, more adult variation of “budget schmudget!” That’s right; take away the Machiavellian purse strings of the controlling Hollywood Dream Machine™ and what do you get? Unfettered genius! Robert Gaffney’s Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (whose title almost suggests the May-December frolic of a Doris Day/Rock Hudson vehicle), Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Wizard of Gore, Arch Hall’s Eegah! Or how’s about Atom Age Vampire, or the picnic-ruining Basket Case, whose antagonist is a … um … well, watch the movie and you tell me. 

These unsung fear-jerkers have long since made their collective mark in the cultural weldüngschpetzl — a Freudian-sounding term I’ve only just coined. Oh, but maybe you’re too good for movies that so strikingly affect the weldüngschpetzl. You want the traditionalist big shots; your Eastwoods and Lancasters and Newmans and Monroes, gazing meaningfully at each other and remembering their lines. Ho hum! Well – as it happens, many of today’s Hollywood legends and show biz asterisks got their start in the papier-mâché-and-zippers monster movie biz. Before Sergio Leone aggrandized Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name, Clint was that Fighter Pilot with No Name, pouring hot lead into a tarantula the size of Milwaukee. The movie? Tarantula (pick up the pace here, people). Future game show smarm-charmer Bert Convy got lethally cracked with a frying pan and turned into a statue in horror-spendthrift Roger Corman’s Bucket of Blood. Before his four-decade stage-run as folksy American humorist Will Rogers, James Whitmore earned his screaming thespian stripes in the jaws of a wooden-looking giant ant in Them. 

Writers and directors? Exalted Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne got his start scribing for such Corman fare as Creature from the Haunted Sea. Francis Ford Coppola was a UCLA grad looking for movie work when self-same budget horror maestro Roger Corman took him on as an assistant. A decade later, Corman’s kind gesture brought us Coppola’s The Godfather. What insufferable snobbery to venerate James Dean weeping on Raymond Massey’s unyielding shoulder in East of Eden and ignore the fine work of Jason Evers dialoging with his girlfriend’s cantankerous severed head in The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. And what about Donald Pleasence being eaten by that gigantic white corpuscle in Fantastic Voyage? One can forgive a more generous production budget when it pays for a house-sized, madly-devouring white corpuscle. 

“Madness!”

Okay, okay, okay, okay: we all love the mesmerizing Oscar collage, the plangent five minute pastiche of classic, breath-deepening movie moments we’ve all taken into our hearts, and which bracingly stir us to tears – Sir Alec Guinness collapsing atop the detonator at the end of Bridge On the River Kwai (“Madness!”); Newman and Redford’s guns blazing in freeze frame as the camera ratchets back to capture the scale of Butch and Sundance’s denouement — Bacharach’s haunting “Where There’s a Heartache” timidly arriving with funerary flowers and wrapping the film in salving gauze. 

The history of cinema is the history of the human heart, writ 40 feet tall on the silver screen to our common exaltation. Yes; like every other emotional wreck in Moviedom, I go completely to pieces at Fonda’s heart-seizing goodbye speech to Ma in The Grapes of Wrath. “I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready…” [Oh good grief, here I go]. But why not follow that up with Peter Cushing having the bones sucked out of his arm by irradiated, snake-headed tortoises in Island of Terror? Now there was some acting! “It’s got me! Cut off my hand! CUT OFF MY HAND!” *sigh* And who can forget actress Kipp Hamilton’s doomed cruise ship gig in The War of the Gargantuas, her act interrupted by screaming bedlam when – yeah, a Gargantua – rises from the sea and wrecks the mood? Her song? A macabre, strangely catchy little number called “The Words Get Stuck in My Throat”; written for this Japanese monster movie and later immortalized by an
amused Devo.

I’m sure we can all agree on this: the most memorable movies are those where the hideous creature’s zipper is as plain as day, and the script seems to have been typed out during a bathroom break on set. Jack Nicholson petulantly ordering his chicken sandwich in Five Easy Pieces (“hold the chicken…”) is, of course, immortal. But so is the insulting remonstration from the balding alien in Plan 9 From Outer Space. “You see! You see! Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!” And then the Earth hunk punches him. 

Save me a seat.