Read The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen Online
Authors: Richard Crouse
The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (23 page)
“Titus, this is a job for You Know and Who!”
â Rat Pfink (Vin Saxon)
In recent years a number of directors have become known for taking an improvisational approach to their films. British filmmaker Mike Leigh never starts with a locked script, preferring to improvise with his actors until the story fleshes itself out. Ditto Mike Figgis, whose film
Timecode
was made up on the spot. The granddaddy of this technique may well be a man who made 26 no-budget films with a minimum of pre-production. “I like things to just happen,” says Ray Dennis Steckler. “I hate to plan things.”
Pioneer or crackpot â you be the judge. Steckler (who often multi-tasked, working as director, actor, and cinematographer on his movies) is best known for his 1963 horror musical,
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
. Not only does it have one of the longest (and wildest) titles in movie history, it also established his modus operandi. Shot in a matter of days with an improvised script and a cast that included friends and family, the film wasn't going to win any Academy Awards, but would make a few bucks at the drive-in. Like all his films,
Incredibly Strange Creatures
may be bad, but it's never boring.
His loopiest movie came two years later.
Rat Pfink A Boo Boo
is a classic example of what happens when a director gets bored midway through a project. Initially called
The Depraved
, it was inspired by a series of obscene phone calls made to Steckler's wife. He imagined a gritty crime drama centering on rock-and-roll duo Cee Bee Beaumont (Carolyn Brandt) and Lonnie Lord (Vin Saxon). Lonnie carries his guitar with him everywhere, because, as the narrator explains, “he never knows when he'll be called upon to sing a song.” In a parallel story three thugs are seen vandalizing the city. One night they choose Cee Bee's name at random from the phone book and begin making menacing calls to her. Their reign of terror escalates, and soon they start stalking Cee Bee, banging on her patio door and harassing her.
Steckler breaks the tension here, inserting a song by Lonnie â “You Ain't Nothin' But a Rat Pfink.” Back to the action. After another phone call, Cee Bee is abducted, despite the best efforts of her gardener Titus (Titus Moede) to rescue her. While waiting for the bad guys to contact him, Lonnie sings another song â mysteriously backed by an invisible quartet â as Titus nurses his bruised head and ego. The kidnappers demand $50,000, far more money than Lonnie can raise in a few short hours.
It's at this point that Steckler says he became tired of the story, and really started to improvise. One night after shooting he let his imagination run wild and came up with the most ridiculous idea imaginable. Lonnie and Titus would step into a closet, only to emerge as superheroes Rat Pfink and Boo Boo. Here the tone changes completely; it's like a whole new film. The grainy black and white of the first half inexplicably gives way to green, yellow, and orange tints as good versus evil.
Rat Pfink A Boo Boo
is a very weird movie, but contains some classic cult dialogue:
Rat Pfink: Remember Boo Boo, we only have one weakness.
Boo Boo: What's that?
Rat Pfink: Mmm . . . bullets.
While this movie betrays every inch of its low-budget origins, it actually contains some pretty good camera work. When not making movies Steckler worked as a director of photography for abc's
Wide World of Sports
and a variety of Warner Brother's television shows. He knew where to put a camera; too bad he didn't have money for second takes, decent props, or lighting.
Rumor has it that the movie's unusual title was also the result of financial restraint. Not so, says Steckler. “The first story was that the artist made a mistake, printed
Rat Pfink A Boo Boo
instead of
Rat Pfink And Boo Boo
and I just didn't have the money to fix it. The real story is that my little girl, when we were shooting this one fight scene, kept chanting, ârat pfink a boo boo, rat pfink a boo boo . . .' And that sounded great.” Is this a good movie? No, not really, but I guarantee you've never seen anything like it.
1. “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” â Alfred Hitchcock
2. “In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.” â Roger Corman
3. “The camera lies all the time â lies 24 times a second.” â Brian De Palma
4. “The only thing an actor owes the public is not to bore them.” â Marlon Brando
5. “Anyone can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery. It's not an art. The main thing about directing is . . . photograph the people's eyes.” â John Ford
6. “If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something and if it ain't â take two!” â Jack Nicholson
7. “I cut my finger â that's a tragedy. A man walks into an open sewer â that's comedy.” â Mel Brooks
8. “There's a fine line between being a Method actor and being a schizophrenic.” â Nicolas Cage
9. “Making a martial arts film in English, is to me, like seeing John Wayne speaking Chinese in a Western.” â Ang Lee
10. “Come to work on time, know your lines, and don't bump into the other actors.” â Spencer Tracy on acting.
“All this trouble over a fat little man in a red suit!”
â Volgar, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
The Monster Times
called this one “the worst science-fiction flick ever made, bar none!” I don't agree. I would say that
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
is one of those films that ping-pongs back and forth from so bad it's good right back to bad again. This may be the biggest Christmas turkey ever . . . either way, it is a lot of fun.
This movie started with the best of intentions. Producer Paul Jacobson wanted to make a movie for kids to see during their Christmas holidays. “Except for the Disneys, there is very little in film houses during the season that the kids can recognize and call their own,” he said. Jacobson had a background in kid's entertainment, having served as unit manager on
Howdy Doody
. He set off to make a film that would entertain and delight kids, and perhaps make him a few dollars in the process.
Jacobson outlined the story, a genre-buster he described as a “Yuletide science-fiction fantasy.” In his fable, Martian elders, concerned that their offspring are becoming obsessed with Christmas television shows from Earth, hatch a nefarious plot to kidnap Santa Claus. Their plan is to bring him to Mars to make toys for the alien children. A convoy of evil Martian henchmen is sent to Earth, but the dozens of street-corner Santas confuse them. Who is the real Santa? They abduct two spirited human kids, Billy and Betty, who are able to lead them to the North Pole and identify the real St. Nick. Voldar, the grumpy Martian expedition leader, is ordered to bring the hostages back to the red planet, but en route tries, unsuccessfully, to eject them from the spacecraft. This earns the ire of the head Martian Kimar, who exiles Voldar. Santa, meanwhile, having gone where no magical elf has gone before, quickly sets up his intergalactic Toy Shop with the help of the dopey Martian Dropo.
While Santa teaches the gospel of good cheer to the extraterrestrials, Voldar is busy plotting revenge. His planned coup d'état is foiled by Santa and his new Martian friends using “weapons” from the Toy Shop â ping pong balls and soap bubbles. Having battled evil, spread the message of Christmas, and taught the Martians how to build toys, Santa and the kids return to Earth, leaving Dropo in charge as the new outerspace Santa.
Glenville Mareth was hired to refine Jacobson's plot outline and add some “hilarious” dialogue. Here's a taste:
KIMAR: Dropo, you are the laziest man on Mars. Why are you sleeping during working hours?
DROPO: I wasn't sleeping, chief. It's just that I haven't been able to sleep these last few months. I forgot how. So I was just practicing.
BETTY: What are those funny things sticking out of your head?
MARTIAN: Those are our antennae.
BETTY: Are you a television set?
With the script in place, Jacobson set out to raise the $200,000 needed to produce the picture. Private investors anted up most of the money, providing him with the means to rent a converted aircraft hanger at Roosevelt Field on Long Island to act as his studio. There, using an inexperienced, non-union crew, Jacobson and director Nicholas Webster started rolling film.
There is a high-school drama club quality to the production that I find quite charming. Given the quality of the script and the actors, this movie would still be bad even if it had good sets and some level of production value, but the shoddy nature of the movie actually works to its advantage, lending it an appealingly earnest, “Hey kids, let's put on a show!” feel. The green-skinned aliens look like they were hanged by their heels and dipped in large vats of green goo, their helmets resembling a curious hybrid of a colander, some exhaust tubing, and a scuba mask. Cardboard sets waver and bend and the special effects are mostly out-of-focus shots of miniature models. Continuity and logic seem to have been lost on the filmmakers â a snow-covered man goes inside, but why doesn't the snow on his shoulders melt?
It's easy to poke fun at the performances in
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
, so let's get on with it. The cast was new to moviemaking, and it shows. As Santa Claus, John Call, a minor-league Broadway actor, certainly looks the part, but in a drunken mall-Santa kind of way. His incessant “Ho, ho, ho” isn't the comforting chuckle of the Jolly Old Man in the Red Suit, but rather a risqué titter from an old lecherous uncle.
An eight-year-old Pia Zadora makes her film debut as one of the Martian girls.
Santa Conquers the Martians
did not give the boost to Zadora's career that she might have hoped; she would have to wait until 1982 to find fame. Zadora's career highlight was also her undoing. She won a Golden Globe for Best New Female Star for her trashy turn in
Butterfly
, but became a laughing stock when it was suggested that her billionaire husband might have bought her the award. She has since appeared in several straight-to-video B-movies.
Both Call and Zadora's characterizations, however, come off like Academy Award winners when compared to Bill McCutcheon's portrayal of Dropo. This goofy character is meant to appeal to the childish side of all of us, but only manages to be annoying instead of endearing.
Some people connected with
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians
went on to have productive careers. Actor Ned Wertimer surfaced on
The Jeffersons
, and Martian-extra Josip Elic appeared in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. The score was composed by Milton DeLugg, who later wrote the theme songs for
The Gong Show
and
The $1.98 Beauty Show
. Just be careful with DeLugg's closing song, “Hooray for Santa Claus.” It's one of those tunes that you will find yourself thinking about months after you see the movie, and try as you might, you won't get it out of your head.
No one sets out to make a bad movie, and in Paul Jacobson's case he thought he was making a really good movie. He may have been deluded on that score, but his movie has turned a profit many times over, been released on video, and become something of a camp classic. There has even been some talk of doing a remake, written by
The Tick
creator Ben Edlund, with James Doohan (Scotty from the original
Star Trek
) starring as Santa.
“This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty. Every incident in this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this picture is to demand of the government: âWhat are you going to do about it?' The government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?”
â Opening statement from Scarface: The Shame of the Nation
This movie may seem tame by today's standards, but it was considered so controversial in 1930 when it was shot, that its release was delayed for two years while director Howard Hawkes retooled it to meet the approval of industry censors. The thinly veiled story of Mafioso gang lord Al Capone features 28 onscreen murders (and several more off-screen), the first use of machine guns in a movie, and the troubling notion that crime does pay. The bullet-ridden brutality of
Scarface
certainly made this the most violent film of the 1930s.
The film opens with a protracted moral statement that describes the movie as an “indictment of gang rule in America.” From there it takes off like a rocket. In the opening scene we see the shadowy figure of Tony Comonte (Paul Muni), whistling an Italian aria before executing someone with a shot to the head and calmly walking away. Hawkes quickly establishes Comonte as the proto-gangster, a flashily dressed homicidal maniac with a fondness for fast cars and life's fast lane â the kind of wise guy who prefers machine guns because their rapid rat-a-tat-tat is a more time-efficient way to off one's enemies.
His human side is reflected in his affection for his sister (Ann Dvorak). Insanely protective of her, he doesn't seem to just love her, but actually seems to be
in
love with her. Tony's underworld boss is Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), a sophisticated con who reports to Big Louis (Harry Vejar), the Mafia kingpin.
Tony's Napoleonic urge to fight his way up to number one is kicked into overdrive after he is arrested for the murder shown in the first scene. When he is released from jail on a special writ he tries to convince Johnny to kill Louis because of the big boss's reluctance to cash in on Prohibition law and get into bootlegging. When Johnny tells Tony to lay off, all hell breaks loose.
Paul Muni seems born to play the role of the savage Comonte, but he very nearly passed on the role. He had only made two films (but had been nominated for his first screen role in 1929's
The Valiant
) and was a star in Yiddish theater and a hit on Broadway when Hawkes approached him. “I'm not that kind of guy,” Muni reportedly told the director when offered the role. He explained that he was a sedentary man, not at all the tightly coiled character in the script. Hawkes wouldn't take no for an answer, and even hired a former middleweight boxing champion to teach Muni to punch and look vicious. It worked. His Tony is an animal, and unlike the mobsters played by Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Armed with a bad attitude and a machine gun, he is more than just a caricature; in Muni's hands Tony becomes a layered character with many idiosyncrasies, and it is these foibles that lead to his comeuppance.
A strong supporting cast includes Boris Karloff (
Scarface
was shot before, but released after
Frankenstein
) as the thug Gaffney, and George Raft (who was friends with many real-life mobsters) as Tony's coin-flipping righthand man. Visually the film impresses, with Hawkes taking advantage of dramatic truck-and-dolly shots often left out of early talkies due to technical concerns. Perhaps the most startling image to emerge from the film is the “X” motif Hawkes used to signify imminent death. It takes many forms â gown straps, Raft's apartment number, a facial scar, and even wooden rafters on a ceiling. Perhaps the most inventive use of the “X” symbol is in a bowling alley scene when Boris Karloff is killed. The camera shows his ball hitting the pins, and as the last pin drops, so does he. It's a strike, which, of course, is denoted by an “X” on the score sheet.
Producer Howard Hughes ponied up the reported one million dollars to make the film, and encouraged Hawkes to tone down the violence to make the movie more marketable and less susceptible to the censor's scissors. This resulted in two versions of the film, the original ending where Tony is hanged for his crimes, and an alternate in which Tony dies a cowardly, but dreadful death, gunned down by police as onlookers cheer. The latter was shot without the help of Hawkes or Muni, and has thankfully been shelved.
Scarface: The Shame of the Nation
(the subtitle was added to appease the censors) is as exciting as any gangster film of its time, and impressed director Brian De Palma enough to mount a bloody update of it in 1983 starring Al Pacino.