Flicker (19 page)

It was something like this: imagine confronting the first human being who spoke. Nothing the creature said, no matter how eloquent, would be as important as the blunt fact of its speaking. This, apart from anything it said, would itself be a statement. And that statement would be:
I am human.
That was how Castle had used the medium of film. To say something that only this cunning art of light and darkness could say. Which was … ?

There I went blank. Only a spinning confusion filled my thoughts, as if I were staring down into an abyss. At some point along the line, one word flashed into my mind and I clung to it.
Unclean.
Unclean, meaning unholy, meaning profane, meaning hopelessly fallen. Unclean meaning taboo. I couldn't recall ever using the word in this sense. It was part of a religious vocabulary I knew only from books or from courses in school. I realized the experience was one of the world's oldest teachings—that a thing, an act, a person may be un-clean, therefore abominable, therefore cast out and damned. I knew this, but had never felt it. Now the crime of Judas had rubbed off on me, and I could feel in the deep fibers of my being what it meant to be so indelibly sullied that the flesh itself would have to be peeled away to remove the stain.

While Clare and Sharkey debated the intricacies of Castle's art, this one thought echoed through me, a nagging disturbance.
The flesh itself… the flesh itself.

On the day we first screened the
Judas,
as we sat through more viewings and endless analysis, we heard nothing more from Shannon after her one naively perceptive comment. While the rest of us—mainly Clare and Sharkey—talked away, she reverted to her vacant and airy lassitude. But she had one more thought about
Judas Everyman.
She offered it with her characteristic abstraction as we left the theater after our final screening of the film.

“Gee,” she said, “it's enough to put you off sex for the rest of your life.”

We waited for her to say more.

She didn't.

I never mentioned it to Clare, but on the night following that first screening of
Judas Everyman,
Max Castle entered my dream life, where he has remained, off and on, ever since. Again and again, the now classic Castlean images which have been so often and expertly analyzed by film scholars—the crystal cup, the broken mirror, the ghostly play of moonlight refracted in water or vapor—haunted my sleep, convincing me that they had “taken” at some deep, psychic level and would stay with me, work at me. This was troubling, but it was also special. It was the first time anything about the art of film had penetrated my life so effectively. In an odd, secret sense, this made the movie “mine.” I owned it in a way I felt Clare didn't, determined as she was to resist Castle's work. I couldn't know it at the time, but this difference of perception would one day lead to our parting of the ways. For the first time since I had met Clare, I knew I'd discovered something of my own.

Meanwhile, I remained her obedient pupil, learning all she had to tell me about Castle, mimicking her views. We knew the
Judas
was a great find. Of course, it would be shown at The Classic—an exclusive run that would be one of Clare's great coups. In those days, in the art-film business, a big success meant receiving the acclaim of a few dozen fellow fanatics. But Clare insisted the movie mustn't be shown by itself. She wanted something more scholarly and ceremonial. Her idea was: we'd rent as many of Castle's films as we could find and present the
Judas
as part of a festival—the world's first Max Castle film festival. She knew his silent films would probably be unavailable; perhaps they'd all been destroyed during the Nazi years. But she was sure we could round up some of his later American work. Her confidence puzzled me.

“Where are we going to get these movies?” I asked, bewildered by the ambition of her plans. “All you've been able to turn up is one burned-out print of
Feast of the Undead
,” I reminded her, “which you scrapped.”

She gave me a sly wink. “I've made further inquiries. Turns out your friend Geoff may be of some help.”

Now that caught me off guard. Usually when she mentioned Geoff Reuben at all, which was rarely, Clare referred to him as “Geoff the jerk,” someone for whom she never had a good word. A film-lore pack rat, Geoff could be the life of the party with his inexhaustible store of in-jokes and anecdotes; but whenever he approached Clare, whom he vastly admired, she brushed him off like two-legged dandruff. “He cheapens the art,” she answered when I asked her one day why she treated him so wretchedly. “I'm sure he knows the brassiere size of every starlet in the business, but when it comes to talent, he couldn't tell Garbo from Harlow.” Frivolous Geoff and sober Clare were hardly a compatible pair. What kind of help would she expect from him?

“After my French friends came visiting,” she explained, “I got to wondering how Geoff happened to know so much about Castle. So I asked. Guess what? Your pal is helping catalogue a couple of studio libraries. A good job for a mental pygmy. He tells me he's gotten together a small cache of Castle films, mainly from Universal and Monogram. Not in good shape, he says—but maybe projectable with repairs.”

No doubt Geoff got hired through family connections, but Clare was right: he was the ideal choice for the job, especially since the assignment had nothing to do with taste. On the contrary, what the studios needed was someone whose natural habitat was the cinematic garbage dump. Their object at that point in the industry's history was to get as much of their decaying inventory as possible off their shelves. This had nothing to do with the needs of repertory houses like The Classic. The reason was television. Thanks to the one-eyed monster, there was a booming market for vintage films, particularly old B-movies. These were being printed off in sixteen-millimeter by the carload and sold in package deals to run as filler material between commercials on the late show or Saturday children's programs. The studios were delighted to recycle such moldering antiquities, which they'd long since written off as a dead loss not even worth the cost of storage. Hopalong Cassidys, Tailspin Tommys, Andy Hardys, Charlie Chans … films that had died unmourned and been buried in unmarked graves were suddenly given a second life. But what this merchandising campaign required was a mindless enthusiast well-endowed with low commercial instincts who would delight in sorting
through the junk; someone who could wander through acres of old celluloid and sing out, “Oh boy, Boston Blackie!” They couldn't have found a better man than Geoff Reuben. That was how he'd happened upon Max Castle's stuff, all but lost amid the dregs of the vault.

As instructed, I got in touch with Geoff and discovered he had about a half-dozen of Castle's quickie thrillers bundled up with some Bulldog Drummonds and Lone Wolfs waiting to be sold off to television distributors at rock-bottom prices. Flattered to be of service to Clare, he eagerly sent us everything he had for previewing, though with the warning that we might not find it in the best condition. That was a gross understatement. One film,
Kiss of the Vampire,
showed up missing two reels; another,
Count Lazarus,
turned out to be a mislabeled canister containing Abbott and Costello. Others were so stretched and curled they couldn't be fed through the projector.

For Clare, making the selections for our festival turned out to be an ordeal by aesthetic misery. It hurt her almost physically to look at damaged film—
any
film, even those of Max Castle, about whom she had such marked reservations. Clare registered every least jiggle in a reasonably good print as if it were a needle jab in the eye; a popping sound track was sheer torture for her. I was with her in one of the city's better first-run theaters when the movie slipped out of sync for not much longer than thirty seconds. Clare rose from her seat to shout obscenities at the nodding projectionist, and then chastised the audience on all sides for being too timid to speak up.

Picking our way through the remnants of Castle's work was especially tormenting for her, since she knew, with old films like these, every cut meant that something had vanished from the world forever; a scene shortened, a shot lost could never be made good. The one battered print there on the screen before us might be the last of the Mohicans. “Poor guy!” I heard her mutter more than once, meaning Castle, whose films, long neglected in the vaults of crassly uncaring studios, chopped and butchered by callous projectionists, had been pushed as close to the edge of extinction as a work of art can get.

It wasn't just Castle she was mourning; it was the terrible fragility of film—good film, bad film, all film. She'd raised the point with me many times. Movies are the most delicate of all human works. Paper and parchment can be cheaply replaced; sculpture lasts for centuries, architecture for millennia. But the plastic to which a movie clings so precariously is vulnerable to a hundred lethal hazards; to restore or reshoot is too costly except for the few films that can still earn the
price of their survival at the box office. Whole scenes had been senselessly amputated from Castle's work, often leaving what survived incoherent. Where repairs had been attempted, they were slapdash. “Nobody deserves to be manhandled like that,” Clare insisted, sometimes visibly wincing as if she really cared about what had been lost. And yet, in the next breath, she might blithely refer to what she'd just watched with such furious concentration as “such shit.” Her ambivalence kept me off balance. Why was she giving such close attention to work she seemed to despise?

Finally, with Sharkey's expert help, we managed to patch together six of the B-movies Castle had made between 1931 and 1941. Geoff, ransacking the vault at Universal, was able to unearth a presentable print of
Count Lazarus
and restore the missing reels of
Kiss of the Vampire.
Lucky for us. No sampling of Castle's films could do without a bloodsucker or two. Then there was
Shadows over Sing Sing,
Geoff's favorite Castle film. On first viewing, this seemed to be a standard thirties prison saga distinguished only by traces of some startling camera work: blazing hot highlights played off against shadows thick as oil. Clare must have viewed its closing sequence a dozen times, looking for more than I could find there, and once again coming away with an uncharacteristic indecision. “I don't know,” she remarked more to herself than me the last time we sat through the movie, “there's something going on there. I wish I knew what.”

She had the same uneasy response to
The Ripper Strikes,
the oldest of our Castle discoveries, dating back to 1931. One of the earliest Paramount B-movies, Geoff had picked it up at a film swap. I would have set it down as nothing more than a formula chiller featuring a dozen or so stiffly elegant representatives of the old Hollywood Raj plodding through an uninspired script with a studied British forbearance. But halfway along, Clare turned to me to say, “Look what you're doing.”

What was I doing? I wasn't aware until she called my attention to it. I was distractedly rubbing my hands over my arms, down my neck. She'd caught herself doing the same thing. Why?

“It's the fog,” she said enigmatically, leaving me to work it out.

After a few moments of reflection, I saw what she meant. As trashy as
The Ripper Strikes
might have been, it was a study in the cinematics of fog. Not real fog, of course, but the billowy cotton-candy exhaust that gets blown out of a dry-ice machine. The film was filled with this
usually negligible effect, not just the streets of the back-lot London sets, but the interiors as well. Rooms, corridors, staircases were lit with a hazy, swirling chiaroscuro that brought the 'terror of Ripper-haunted Whitechapel indoors. The fog seemed to be leaking off the screen, permeating the air about us, leaving a clammy scum upon the skin. Worse than unpleasant, the fog was threatening, I'd even have said evil. An appetite for blood inhabited it. And this had its effect on the story. The Ripper, played by a game but somewhat depleted Clive Brook, emerged as a tormented soul driven to kill by the fog which was, at one point in the film, referred to as “the devil's own breath.”

“You're right,” I told Clare. “I can almost feel it. Isn't that remarkable!”

But Clare was trying hard not to be sucked in. “Movies are for seeing,” she grumbled. “Not for feeling or getting felt by. I like them to stay up there on the screen where they belong.”

The Ripper Strikes
was in such dreadful condition she was tempted to leave it out of our festival. But it was the first of Castle's cheapies, so it went in simply to balance
Axis Agent,
a run-of-the-mill wartime spy chase that was the last film Castle made before his death. By that late stage of his faltering career, he wasn't above “stealing from his betters,” as Clare put it, eager to score some critical points against the man.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“You mean you didn't notice? God, you're hopeless. All that deep focus, the shots from the floor, the camera peek-a-booing through the transom: it was all lifted straight out of
Citizen Kane.
A cut-rate version, but still recognizable. Also the sequence where all the German war vets get older and nastier each time the camera pans around the dinner table. That's the famous ten-year-breakfast scene from
Kane.
How could you miss it?”

Now that she mentioned it, I saw she was right and apologized. Apology not accepted. “Don't tell me you're sorry. Just learn!”

Much to my surprise and Clare's, the most distinguished of our discoveries turned out to be a 1935 Universal film with the unpromising title
Man into Monster.
This wasn't a monster film at all, but as Clare recognized about a half hour into the story, a retelling of Georg Büchner's
Wozzeck,
the strange tale of victimization that Alban Berg had turned into a controversial opera some ten years before the
movie was made. Castle, who scripted the picture, had transposed the story to New York's Lower East Side and given it a brutal, journalistic realism that was well ahead of its time.