Flicker (24 page)

“Free?”

“Yeah. See, we took over some Jungle Jim set; that's where we got the scenery from. The natives, too, buncha blacked-up extras in grass skirts. Maxie and me, we got in fast and told 'em to stay in their makeup while we shot some mob scenes. That's how we had to work on these cheapies. Used whatever was left over or layin' around. Right off, Max spots these couple of black guys—real blacks, I mean. From Jamaica they was, extras from the other movie. They was jam-min' away on tom-toms in the alley outside. Just horsin' around. Max give 'em fifty bucks outa his own pocket, rustled 'em off to a soundstage, and asked 'em to knock out some music for us. Everything you heard there was from maybe an hour of recordin'. That's all the time Max could wangle. 'Gimme some voices too,' Max told 'em. 'But no English, just mumbo jumbo.' So the black guys threw that in too. Really cut loose, yippin' and howlin'. Christ! Maybe they thought Max was auditionin' them for a Tarzan movie or somethin'. He saw right away that was the music we needed. Real savage stuff. Terrific, huh?”

“And that tracking shot at the beginning?”

Zip gave a hoot. “Oh, that was a sucker! Nobody ever figured out how to do a shot like that on a studio lot except Max. We had it all planned out, Max and me. Spent a whole night settin' it up. See, we ran it in a figure eight, with all the phoney trees and vines blockin' in on all sides. Just kept that black guy runnin' around in circles, me on the hand dolly aimin' down his throat. Got the whole thing on the second try. But it was half a day's shootin'. Wasn't perfect, but that's all we had time for. Hell, nobody wasted dough back then on a credit sequence. But Max said, best thing we could do was start by scarin' the shit outa the audience. Maybe they wouldn't notice what a crummy movie this was. You see that little touch at the end, where I swish the camera? Hundred-eighty degrees, right on the button. I was layin' flat underneath, in between the actors. First time anybody ever pulled that off without a cut. I had to come right down off the dolly and make the pan just like that, one clean move, bull's-eye! And back then, the cameras was lots heavier too.”

He let his mind drift back, his eyes squinching up as he reflected. “That black guy, the actor there … he was damn good. Looked just as scared as Max wanted. Forget his name. Never heard of him again.” Then, belligerently, “I suppose that wasn't 'arty' enough for you. But lemme tell you, it was a plenty good movie for what we had to work
with, which was next to nothin'. We got whatever cast the studio had standin' by on the payroll that week. And film stock—strictly rationed. So much and no more. You think your Ing-o-mar Bergman could work with the spare change they give us? Ha!”

No matter how often I tried to assure Zip that I admired the movies he was showing me, he couldn't get over his defensiveness. “Really, Mr. Lipsky, I enjoyed the film. It had lots of good touches in it. Castle could certainly get a lot out of his actors. That was the best thing I ever saw Kent Taylor do. I'm just sorry the film's been damaged, if this is the only copy of the original … ”

“Damaged! What d'you mean damaged?”

“The sprocket breaks in those two scenes. They come at important points. Even so,” I hastened to assure him, “those sections have a tremendous impact. Really blood-curdling. But I think you'll admit, they'd be even better if they were repaired. You might want to let our projectionist, Don Sharkey, take care of that for you. That's his specialty, fixing up damaged films.”

Zip let out a sour hiss. “You think I'd let one of Max's movies get damaged? Listen, sonny, every picture I got here is perfect. Mint condition. You don't believe me? Call Yoshi out here. Go on!”

Zip's lungs were too weak to do the job, so I gave a shout and old Yoshi came trudging in looking as fatigued and grouchy as ever.

“The big-cheese fil-um expert here,” Zip said nodding toward me, “thinks he saw some torn sprockets there in the picture.”

“Sprockets okay,” Yoshi insisted.

“You show that part again,” Zip instructed him. “Go on. Let him look for any torn sprockets. Tell you what, kiddo, I'll give you a hundred bucks for every one you find.”

Puzzled, I followed Yoshi back to the booth where, reluctantly and letting me know it, he set up to rerun the last reel. When we got to the scene where the film skidded, he stopped and opened the projector. “Sprockets okay,” he repeated angrily.

I unlocked the gate and slid my finger down the edge of the film inside, then looked closely. There was no sign of a single tear. I shrugged my shoulders at Yoshi and gave an embarrassed smile. “Well, it certainly
looks
like a tear,” I told Zip when I returned, “but I can't find it.”

Zip was amused by my confusion. “Of course you can't find it. Cause it ain't there, is why. That's no tear. That's a
slide.
It's s'posed to look like that.” He gave a dry laugh.

“A slide?”

“Yeah, a slide. Sure you never heard of that. That's Max up to his tricks.”

“But why would he want the film to look damaged?”

“Throws you off guard, don't it?” Zip replied slyly. “You think there's a tear, but your eye keeps watchin', right?” He gestured me back to the booth, saying, “You tell Yoshi to back that film up to the slide and run it again.” He paused, eyeing me thoughtfully, then added, “And tell him I want the sallyrand.”

“The what?”

“Sallyrand. Just tell him.”

I did as I was told. In the booth, Yoshi fetched a small cardboard box down from a high shelf and sent me back with it. From the box Zip removed an object about the size of a flashlight and handed it to me for inspection. “Okay, Professor Know-it-all,” he said in his most abrasively wise-guy voice, “this time take a gander through that.” What he'd given me was a sort of viewer, rather like a kaleidoscope. Peering into it, I could see nothing but blurred white light.

“What's this?” I asked.

“Just point it at the screen and take a squint,” Zip snapped impatiently, giving Yoshi the signal to run the film again. When
Zombie Doctor
returned to the screen, I stared through the device as instructed. I never saw it coming, but what happened next was an important moment, like the scene in Cocteau's
Orphée
when the hero steps through the mirror and enters the underworld. For the first time I was about to see beyond the surface of a Max Castle movie.

What I discovered there was a second series of images lightly but distinctly blurred across the screen. The images jittered vertically as if they were stuttering through a run of torn sprockets, but they nonetheless had a definite coherence. And what I saw—or thought I saw—in this bit of ghostly visual scoring radically deepened the story. It was nothing I could have taken in consciously, but I realized that the inexplicable impact of
Zombie Doctor
arose from this second, invisible, movie I was now watching, or rather now realized that I had been watching all along.

As Zip eventually explained it to me, Castle had been offered
Zombie Doctor
as a patch job. Edgar Ulmer, one of Universal's dependable hacks and a pal of Castle's from the old country, had shot some half-dozen scenes before he was taken off the picture. He recommended Castle as his replacement. It was a demeaning assignment,
but Castle needed the work and the studio knew it. He was paid next to nothing and put on a bare-bones budget. At the time, zombies were a hot new item in the horror inventory. The movie was meant to capitalize on the success of
White Zombie,
a particularly lecherous Bela Lugosi vehicle of the year before. Castle was supplied with Ulmer's leavings, a half-baked screenplay, and a hard deadline. Two weeks.

The story was supposed to have something to do with Caribbean jungles, voodoo spells, and rampaging natives. Castle rapidly reworked the script, as he often did, to give it a distinctly more serious twist. In the film, a young American doctor—the Kent Taylor role—and his nurse-wife are brought to an unnamed island by missionaries to help them stop the spread of voodoo rites. The missionaries believe that poverty and disease are turning the natives back to the superstition of their tribal ancestors. The doctor is supposed to restore confidence in civilization. He does his best, but soon finds himself baffled by a strange plague that is sweeping the islands, turning the natives into walking dead men. He discovers that the problem is not a disease but a diabolical plot. There is a local plantation owner who has messianic ambitions in the islands. Castle became fascinated with this role and decided to develop it. Zip recalled that Castle tried to enlist his comrade Erich Von Stroheim for the part, seeking to give the role an ominous Germanic slant, but the imperious Von Stroheim considered the film beneath his dignity. Castle settled for George Zucco with a German accent, who put in a highly creditable performance, possibly his best.

As the story unfolds, the plantation boss is assisted by a voodoo priest who has the power to turn the natives into zombies willing to obey their master's commands without question. As Castle skewed the story, the petty island dictator takes on the megalomaniacal dimensions of a Hitlerian
Führer.
Recall, this was the early thirties; Castle's trashy little thriller may have been one of the earliest comments on totalitarianism to reach the American screen.

The film culminates in the usual clichéd action ending. The zombies carry off the doctor's wife, who is placed at the mercy of the voodoo priest. He threatens her with snakes and poison darts, and finally hypnotizes her into becoming the plantation boss's willing slave. There are sequences here that outdo the sexy suggestiveness of
White Zombie
and that were crudely edited by the studio before release. Our hero shows up in the nick of time to confront the boss. He has
concocted a drug that cures the zombiism and brings people back to their senses. But the boss scoffs, telling the doctor that his mission is helpless. He—the boss—has discovered a greater secret than the doctor's medicine. Men
want
to be zombies; they will never accept the freedom the doctor offers them.

At this point, while the doctor and the boss scuffle, we have the first “slide,” as Zip called it: a lightning-quick montage of mob scenes—massed throngs cheering, saluting, marching. They weren't distinct enough to be identified even when the film was clicked through frame by frame, but I took them to be newsreel clips of recent events, mainly Nazi rallies. Later, when the zombies, released from their spell, rise up to attack the doctor who has liberated them, we get the second slide. This time Zip's strange instrument revealed a blur of images showing men at war, charging across a battlefield, being gunned down by the hundreds. This might have been actual World War I newsreel footage. Here, in the middle of a second-rate horror movie, Castle had introduced an astonishingly original interpretation of zombiism. He'd fixed upon it as a symbol of the human desire for enslavement that was sweeping the world of his day.

“That's Max all over,” Zip observed triumphantly. “He used everything. Everything a camera or a projector can do—he used it. Even the mistakes, the screw-ups. You should see what he could do with a flare on the film, or a ragged splice, like in the
Judas
there. Movin' pictures—Max knew 'em inside out.” He gave a laugh. “I told Max, hey, we're gonna drive them projectionists nuts lookin' for that tear and not findin' it. Nah, says Max, they won't waste their time, not on crapola like this. That's what he was counting on. They'd run the picture, tears and all. Hell, they didn't care if it burned up in the machine. Back in those days, they wasn't even takin' trouble to save big-budget pictures once they got shown. What happened mostly with
Zombie Doctor
here was they just cut out the slides, which really loused up the story, y'know. They cut all that out with the witch doctor and the girl. Too sexy. Probably the best scene Wanda McKay ever did, too. Cut that. Cut the endin'—where the zombies gang up on the doctor an' knock him off. Studio said we couldn't make no picture where the zombies win. So chop! Off goes the great finish where they lynch the doctor. That's how Max saw it. He told 'em. The zombies're takin' over. Just look around you. People
like
bein' zombies.' They chopped it anyway. Movie didn't make any sense with
the last scene cut out, but what'd they care? Pigs! Garbage was all they wanted.”

“How did you do that—the slide?” Zip must have expected the question, but I might have predicted his response.

“Ha! Wouldn't you like to know?” He gave a stubborn sniff. “Nobody's gonna find out from me.”

“And this?” I asked, holding up the viewer. “What did you say this was?”

He didn't answer until he had reached over and snatched it from me. “A sallyrand,” he said. “That's what Max called it. You don't get that, do you? Don't know who Sally Rand was.”

“I've heard the name,” I said. “She was a dancer.”

“A stripper she was. Get it? That's what this is: a stripper. It strips the film, so you can see what's underneath.”

“I've never seen anything like that,” I told him.

“Course not,” Zip answered smugly. “And you won't never. Max invented that, so's he could do the secret stuff. Only his eye was so good, he didn't even need it. Second sight he had, when it come to movies.”

“Secret stuff? Like what?”

“Like what you just seen there with the stripper.” He was already stashing the odd little instrument away in its box.

“How is it made?” I asked. “Do you know?”

“Sure I do. Any shooter could make one. Just a couple lenses and a diffuser is all it is. Plus this little refractin' gizmo Max invented. Course you gotta position everything just right, which is tricky. But if that's all you got, you got nothin'.”