FAVORITE MOVIE PROPS: A DREAM WISH LIST

It’s been my experience that it’s the rare film enthusiast who doesn’t also possess a passing interest in (if not an outright mania for) those fascinating objects of tangible trivia associated with the making of motion pictures. I’m speaking, of course, about movie memorabilia.

And whether in the form of collecting marketing materials like posters, stills, pressbooks, and souvenir programs; attending museum exhibits displaying classic movie costumes and props; attending celebrity autograph conventions, or scouring online auction sites for items from celebrity estates or rare props and collectibles from favorite films – the motivation behind the actions is the same. It’s the desire to possess part of a dream. To rekindle and revisit the sensations inspired by a favorite film. The wish to bridge the gap between reality and the fantasy world of movies.

With only a few having access to actual movie sets, 

the collecting of movie marketing materials is the next best thing. 

I love movie giveaways to this day, but back in the day, a movie theater screening that offered a souvenir button or promotional sticker (like Pee Wee's bow tie) was high on my list

When I was a youngster, I really had a thing for movie posters and movie poster graphic design. I loved looking at the poster display cases outside movie theaters, and even had a scrapbook where I'd paste my favorite movie poster ads clipped from the entertainment section of the newspaper. In 1970, when I was 13, I purchased the original 1968 Barbarella poster for $8.50. It was my very first movie poster acquisition (I still have it, framed, in my home today) in what would grow to become a collection of movie promotional material so sizable that by 1975, I had more posters than wall space to accommodate them.

My bedroom during my senior year in high school.

My moving to Los Angeles in 1978 kick-started my autograph-collecting hobby. Essentially an industry town, working in the public sector, even in the most minor capacity, guaranteed the odd celebrity close encounter and the opportunity to get an autograph. As I worked many odd jobs while putting myself through film school (McDonald's, bookstore, Honda dealership, security guard, makeup artist, porno magazine shop), not a single job didn't have the occasional celebrity patron. My scrapbook overflowed. 

Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac popped into the McDonald's on Labrea Avenue on the evening of February 15, 1979. The night of the 21st Grammy Awards. "This is embarrassing," she said as she graciously signed her autograph. I remember seeing her leave and enter a big black limousine, but for the life of me, I can't remember what she ordered!

By the late '90s, with the advent of eBay and the decline in movie poster design (graphic art was replaced by Big Superimposed Heads), I wound up either selling off or donating to a local film museum the bulk of what had grown into a cumbersome movie poster and Lobby Card collection. I held onto the ones that meant the most to me: Barbarella, Rosemary’s Baby, The Day of the Locust, Bonnie & Clyde, Andy Warhol’s BAD, Myra Breckinridge, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and They Shoot Horses, Don’tThey?. The ones I regret selling?: Chinatown and Shampoo. What was I thinking? 

The collection is gone, but my fondness for movie memorabilia of all stripes has never abated. And, as one might guess, Los Angeles is a wellspring for movie memorabilia fans. Annually, the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising has an exhibit of Oscar-nominated costumes, the County Museum frequently has film-related exhibits featuring props and artifacts from classic films and filmmakers, and it's a trend now for movie theaters to have photo-op lobby displays of props, costumes, or set mockups of featured films.

The Only Pieces of Movie Memorabilia I Own 

The weirdest (and thus coolest) gift I ever received from my partner is this plaster-cast of the right side of Liza Minnelli's face from the Paramount Studios makeup department. It was used as a form to design and fit the acid burn prosthetic makeup for her role in Otto Preminger's Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970).  

This visually breathtaking piece of movie memorabilia is the aerobic-marathon-competition dance card pinned to my back when I appeared as a dance (exercise) extra in the 1985 James Bridges film Perfect. When filming was done, the costume supervisor let me keep this and the T-shirt it was pinned to... a gray tank top with the words "BODY BY JESSIE" printed on the front (Jessie Wilson being the name of Jamie Lee Curtis' aerobics instructor character). If I ever find the T-shirt, I'll add the image. I only hope I didn’t impulsively sell it on eBay and forget about it! 

It's because of my love of movie history and memorabilia that I decided to write this post after being contacted by the online auction site, Invaluable.com, and asked if I was interested in writing about what would be my dream movie prop or bit of memorabilia to find and pick up in an auction.
As I've only been to one auction in my entire life and wanted to bid on everything in sight (in 1984 Francis Ford Coppola's failed American Zoetrope Studios auctioned off tons of items from its films. I had my eye on all the miniature Las Vegas props from One From the Heart), I jumped at the opportunity to mount my own dream auction of movie props I would die for.


KEN'S TOP-TEN MOVIE MEMORABILIA AUCTION WISH LIST (money is no object):

1. The tannis root charm and chain from Rosemary's Baby (1968)

2. Any one of the futuristic, blatantly phallic weapons from Barbarella (1968).

3. The giant, inflatable easy chairs from Ken Russell's The Boy Friend (1971)

4. The miniature replica of the Hollywood Bowl Muse Fountain from Xanadu (1980) 

5. One of those belts worn by Judas and the angels in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (1973). Although difficult to make out, each belt has a rhinestone buckle in the shape of the "praying angels" logo. While I'm at it, Judas' white, fringed jumpsuit wouldn't be bad, either!

6. Those Op-Art sunglasses worn by Debbie Watson in The Cool Ones (1967)

7. One of those prop books with Faye Dunaway on the cover used in Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

8. One of those adorable bulbous Munchkinland taxicabs from The Wiz (1978)*

9. Eve Harrington's Sarah Siddons Award from All About Eve (1950)

10. Elton John's space-age Pinball Wizard machine from Ken Russell's Tommy (1975)

The above list encompasses everything from small props to items so huge they count as art direction or automotive. But a wish list is a wish list.

I'd be curious to find out whether any of you out there harbor any unrequited movie-prop or memorabilia desires from any of your favorite movies.

As stated, the idea for this post sprang from the marketing minds at Invaluable.com, which seems to be doing some research into the kinds of items film enthusiasts might find desirable. And if this post seems like the internet version of an infomercial, it's a one-sided one. I'm getting nothing out of promoting the site for free (which does have some pretty cool stuff. I'm no Star Wars fan, but a while back they auctioned off a prop gun used by Harrison Ford in the film -save perhaps their allowing me to steal their post idea.

If you're interested in seeing which movie items are currently up for auction, you can visit the movie memorabilia section of the site HERE.

On a closing note, here are two of the miniatures from One From the Heart  I had the opportunity to see in person back in 1984 at the American Zoetrope auction. I have no idea what they ultimately sold for, but they were featured in the film's title sequence. They couldn't have been more than 5 or 8 inches high.

*Update

Looks like one of those taxi cabs from The Wiz popped up in Atlantic Beach, NY. Story Here

MOVIE MEMORABILIA AUCTION ITEMS WISH LIST (Reader submissions):

The beaded wedding veil worn by Guenevere in the film Excalibur (1981)
(submitted by Joel)

Doris Day's mermaid outfit from The Glass Bottom Boat (1966)
(submitted by David Kucharski) Image: thewackytacky.blogspot.com 

An original Baby Jane Doll from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1961)
(submitted by Rick)

One of the Gothic ankh pendants/daggers from The Hunger (1983)
(submitted by Darin)

One of these futuristic team jerseys from Rollerball (1975)
(submitted by Mark V)

This ghost viewer was given out to patrons of William Castle's 13 Ghosts in 1960.
Pictured item is an original once up for auction at theauctionfloor.com
(submitted by MDG 14450)

Not a movie prop, but this 1957 Jayne Mansfield water bottle would keep many a collector warm
(submitted by Chris)

This Everlasting Gobstopper from the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory was sold at auction by actress Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca Salt) in 2012 for the tidy sum of $40,000.
(submitted by John)

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015

WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? 2015

The life and artistry of Nina Simone are illuminated in a poignant documentary

The best documentaries exist as something more allegorical than the rote, history-lesson cataloging of the biographical details of a public figure’s life. Also, in spite of the vast scope of the subject’s fame and influence, they tend to be more effective when honing in on a selective perspective or point of view. 

In the marvelous What Happened, Miss Simone?, documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus explores the personal and professional life of the legendary jazz/blues/ folk artist by submitting her film as the literal answer to the titular question, one originally asked by author/poet Maya Angelou in a 1970 article penned for Redbook magazine.

Angelou’s interview with Simone coincided with the famed singer/composer/musician's turbulent transformation from jazz concert poet to The High Priestess of Soul in the late '60s. A time when the Civil Rights Movement so significantly influenced her work that she alienated her pop music fan base while simultaneously giving voice and inspiration to the nation’s unsung with her Top 100 single, “Young, Gifted, & Black” -- a song co-written with Weldon Irvine to, as Simone put it, “Make Black children all around the world feel good about themselves forever.”

The question Angelou posed: “Miss Simone, you are idolized, even loved, by millions now. What happened, Miss Simone?” - is tellingly ambiguous and suggests perhaps a contradiction. Is it the typical press agent query, “How did you get to where you are?”, or the more complex and infinitely more difficult, “What happened to you in your life to make your music so raw and impassioned?” 

The High Priestess of Soul

Garbus’ documentary, co-produced by and currently streaming on Netflix, examines the life of Nina Simone by turning the story of her tumultuous career and private life into a larger examination of what can happen when an artist—an individual devoted to the freest expression of truth—is born into a society which tells them everything they are, everything that comprises their very essence and being, is unworthy of their dreams. Unworthy because of the color of their skin. The broadness of their nose. The thickness of their lips. That they are born female. As the film progresses and grows darker than you might expect, the social focus of the opening question morphs into the personal, "How did it come to this?"

As an African-American piano prodigy born in the Jim Crow-era South (“I played the boogie at (age) three and gave concerts at twelve”), Nina Simone, nee Eunice Waymon, was an anomaly in her small North Carolina hometown. Crossing train tracks to the “white” section of town to take piano lessons, practicing so much she barely had a childhood, Simone’s keenly felt separateness defined her attitude towards both her musical gift and her ambitions.

Simone dreamed big: she wanted more than anything to be the first Black female classical pianist to play Carnegie Hall. But when she was turned down by the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and had to take up performing jazz and pop music in clubs, the teenage Simone felt for the first time that most common, but nonetheless soul-killing, of African-American experiences- being certain but never truly knowing if race played a part in her rejection.

Nina Simone graduated valedictorian of her high school class and was awarded
a one-year scholarship at Juilliard School of Music in New York

With this, the seeds of rage, self-doubt, and indignation began to take root within her just as firmly as her talents as a singer and musician blossomed. Fueled by an ambition to succeed, blessed with a talent that couldn’t be ignored, yet led by circumstance down a path not wholly of her choosing, Nina Simone’s demons were manifest in the same questions that plagued many frustrated Black Americans in pursuit of the American dream in those nascent civil rights years. The lingering oppression of separatism and Jim Crow led Langston Hughes to pen the 1951 poem, “Harlem.” A poem whose words articulated the conundrum facing all Black artists and dreamers in America.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? 

Or fester like a sore

And then run? 

Does it stink like rotten meat? 

Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Throughout her life, Nina Simone’s mainstream success stood in the shadow of her unrealized dream to be a classical musician. Similarly, the material rewards of her success only reinforced her childhood sense of isolation… a gap she always sought to bridge through her music. Following the 1963 murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the Alabama church bombing that killed four little girls that same year, the discrepancy she felt between her quality of life and that of the average Black person living in America significantly altered and politicized her artistic expression.

We witness Nina Simone's transformation from demure, evening-gowned chanteuse performing to an all-white audience on TV's Playboy After Dark to a vibrant political activist joyously singing songs of protest and revolution (No pacifist, she; Simone believed in violent retaliation). The documentary juxtaposes these wildly contrasting professional images with equally at-odds-with-themselves accounts of her stormy private life.

Revolution Evolution

Through interview footage, rare recordings, snippets from her journals, and a mercifully sparse sprinkling of talking head commentary from her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly (the film’s executive-producer), husband /manager Andrew Stroud, and lifelong friends; we learn not only was Simone’s art and life matched in complexity and anguish but that each in many ways grew out of the other.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

What Happened, Miss Simone? is gratifying on many levels. As someone who knew of  Nina Simone but next to nothing about her, this look at her life is quite revelatory. Hats off to director Liz Garbus (Love, Marilyn) for mounting such a clear-eyed portrait of a legendary icon. I also like that it’s a fairly straightforward documentary. Eschewing the contemporary trend toward visual gimmickry and the overuse of showy graphics, What Happened, Miss Simone? deals with its subject in a direct, head-on manner, complementary to the great woman herself. Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, What Happened, Miss Simone? is merely honest. Honest in a way that ultimately proves very real and very moving.

What Happened, Miss Simone? has some exceptional interview footage

*Scary side-note (make that terrifying): Sobering and sad how so much of the film's difficult-to-watch violent footage from the '60s Civil Rights Movement looks like just America in 2015.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Although running a brisk 100 minutes, a major asset of What Happened, Miss Simone? is the amount of time it allocates to footage of Simone performing. Her voice has mesmerized me for years, but it's truly a remarkable experience watching her in action. She's electric and unpredictable. I especially got a charge out of a bit of concert footage showing Simone stopping mid-song to point to and shout authoritatively at someone in the audience, "Hey, girl, sit down!" followed by a loooong unbroken stare and a second demand, "Sit DOWN!" Following a satisfied nod of the head signifying either the patron's compliance or execution, Simone calmly resumes the song at the exact point she left off.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My mother loved Nina Simone and played her records constantly when I was growing up. But as a child, I actually thought Nina Simone’s music was kind of scary. Not scary as in frightening, but somehow deeply sad and troubling in a way I was too young to understand. Of course, in retrospect, I know now that it was because the songs were too real. They weren't pop; they weren't escapist... they were authentic. Authentic in a way that I must have sensed (in that way kids can) that, perhaps, in her songs, she was saying things my mom felt but could never say aloud.

Many years later, when the soundtrack to the 1993 movie, Point of No Return, introduced a whole new generation to Nina Simone (mostly hipsters and yuppies who, like those Playboy penthouse guests of yore, adored Black music but Black people, not so much), I seemed to listen to Nina Simone with fresh ears. In place of what I once heard in her voice that scared me, I heard the kind of naked self-exposure of a true artist. She wasn't just trying to make pretty sounds or package melodies for cocktail-party consumption.

She was sharing the dejection of a sensitive, impressionable child told by the country of her birth that she was somehow less valuable, less beautiful, because of her skin. She sang about being a Black woman of financial privilege who had to put on a smile and entertain while all around her, Black leaders and figures of hope were being killed off, one by one.

She opened up about her frustration in knowing that the more she sang about her personal truth as a black woman, the smaller her audiences would grow. In the midst of this was a woman battling a mental illness, a woman in an abusive relationship who visited that same violence onto her daughter. The dark, the light.

Nina Simone's genius lies in her ability to make poetry out of the contradictory and confounding ugliness and beauty that was her life. That triumph of What Happened, Miss Simone? is that it presents these sometimes unpleasant realities without ever diminishing the artistic legacy of this legendary woman with the soul-searing voice who was rightfully dubbed, The High Priestess of Soul.

Clip from the Documentary "What Happened, Miss Simone?" (2015)

PERSONAL FAVORITE NINA SIMONE RECORDINGS
Little Girl Blue (1958)
New World Coming (1971)
Just Like A Woman (1971)

Do What You Gotta Do (1968)
Sunday in Savannah (1968)
Here Comes the Sun (1971)

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1970)

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2015

DIE! DIE! MY DARLING! 1965

“Every play you send me is about a fiend! If I don’t murder somebody, I’m just about to. And if they are not after me, I’m after them. I tell you, I cannot stand it any longer! Don’t you think I’m human? Don’t you think I’m ever helpless?”

Tallulah Bankhead playing a parody of herself (her full-time career by this point) in the 1953 film, Main Street to Broadway. Her penultimate film before Die! Die! My Darling!

Although I don’t recall now which program I saw initially, but my first exposure to that legend of the American theater known as “The Alabama Foghorn”—Miss Tallulah Bankhead—was either when she portrayed the villainous Black Widow on TV’s Batman, or when she camped her way through a large-as-real-life impersonation of herself on reruns of 1957 The Celebrity Next Door episode of The Lucy & Desi Comedy Hour. The year was 1967. I was ten years old, and in both instances, what stands out most in my memory is that I’d never seen anything quite like her.

Possessed of a prodigious personality that all but dared you to watch anyone else, Tallulah Bankhead didn’t just occupy space onscreen; she filled it. Her one-of-a-kind persona fairly overwhelming the senses of sight and sound. There was that trademark thick mane of glamorous, movie-star hair; her broad range of almost-cartoonish facial expressions and reaction takes; the bold extravagance of her scene-stealing, flamboyant gestures. But of course, Bankhead's chief distinction was her voice. That famous basso-profundo, bourbon-and-cigarettes drawl eventually grew so slurred that just trying to decode her dialogue became part of the fun of seeing her onscreen.

Even at a time when distinctive, impersonation-worthy celebrities were in abundance (Garland, Merman, Hepburn, Liberace, etc.), Bankhead was still a heady dose of drag-queen bearing and outsize star quality.

Bankhead as Regina Giddens in the original 1939 Broadway production of The Little Foxes

As it would be several years before I’d see Bankhead playing it more or less straight in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), and even more before the internet made possible the availability of her 1954 TV adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, for the longest time, the exaggerated, panderingly self-parodic Tallulah Bankhead was the only Tallulah Bankhead I knew. A perception made indelible by the time Die! Die! My Darling!—Britain-based Hammer Films’ 1965 entry in the What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? / Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte psycho-biddy sweepstakes—began making the rounds on late-night TV.

Tallulah Bankhead as Mrs. Trefoile

Stefanie Powers as Patricia Carroll

Peter Vaughn as Harry

Yootha Joyce as Anna

Donald Sutherland as Joseph

Maurice Kaufmann as Alan Glentower

Adapted from the 1961 novel Nightmare by Elizabeth Linington (under the pseudonym, Anne Blaisdell), Die! Die! My Darling! is, as its UK title Fanatic suggests, something of the flip side to Hitchcock’s Psycho. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s a movie that takes on Psycho’s Oedipal conundrum from the perspective of Norman Bates’ mother.

A pre-The Girl from UNCLE Stefanie Powers stars as Patricia Carroll, an American of unspecified profession visiting London with her British fiancé, Alan (Maurice Kaufmann), who’s a TV producer of some sort. Although essentially on a pre-wedding holiday together, Patricia (who, perhaps in the spirit of tourist bonhomie and “When in Rome” kinship, frequently lapses into a British accent) abandons her fiancé and motors to the countryside in an effort to achieve whatever the '60s word for closure is with the mother of her deceased ex-fiancé, Stephen.

Tallulah Bankhead is, of course, Stephen’s grieving mother, one Mrs. Trefoile, a devoutly religious eccentric living in ascetic seclusion in a somewhat dilapidated Gothic-Revival country house, far from telephones, neighbors, or anything else that might prove beneficial to an individual soon to be held captive.

 The widow Trefoile shares her home with an imposing, rather grim, lifesize portrait of her late husband in full military regalia; innumerable shrines to her departed son (including, it would seem, his ghost); and a cowed and cowering household staff she keeps at her bellowing beck and call.
The staff, a vaguely sinister-looking trio, each member appearing to have stepped right out of a Charles Addams cartoon, consists of Harry (Peter Vaughn), the lecherous, eternally skulking handyman; Anna, his compliant, strapping wife (Yootha Joyce); and the lumbering groundskeeper, Lurch…I mean, Joseph (Donald Sutherland). 

Let Us Prey

The initial meet-and-greet scenes between Patricia and Mrs. Trefoile are played for dark comedy and uneasy culture-clash laughs, with the old woman’s despotic hospitality and strict religious adherence—no mirrors, makeup, or physical adornments of any kind—presented as whimsical eccentricity. But it isn't long before it becomes obvious that Mrs. Tefoile's pious exterior masks a pathological religious fanaticism broaching no leniency in matters perceived as sinful or morally transgressive. In addition, Mrs. Trefoile’s devotion to her late son reveals a smothering maternal attachment rivaling that of Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. 

It seems Mrs. Trefoile blames Patricia for her son’s abandonment and premature demise, while also seeing the once-betrothed bride as her son’s rightful, eternal wife in the eyes of God. Confident in the belief that her son died a virgin (“So much more beloved by the almighty"), Mrs. Trefoile takes it upon herself to “cleanse” the soul of the deep-in-error Patricia by holding her captive. And in the true Christian tradition, believes she can bring about this kind of spiritual redemption through violence, torture, physical abuse, and waving firearms about.

Although never seen, the presence of the much-discussed Stephen Trefoile is keenly felt throughout.
The too-pretty face staring out from the many portraits and paintings 
on first viewing had me anticipating a third-act revelation that Stephen was gay.

Die! Die! My Darling! is an amusingly outré damsel in distress melodrama whose potential as an unsettling exercise in Gothic grotesquery is consistently undermined by Hammer Films’ characteristic insistence on giving the material its customary Vincent Price-style, tongue-in-cheek/ high-camp horror treatment. Indeed, part of what contributes to Die! Die! My Darling! eliciting more giggles than gasps is how there is rarely a moment in the film where one feels the cast, director Silvio Narizzano (Georgy Girl), screenwriter Richard Matheson (Trilogy of Terror), and composer Wilfred Josephs are all working in concert. No two people are making the same film at the same time.

Either that or everybody involved had the good sense not to take any of it very seriously.  

Happily, the pitfalls of repetition that usually bedevil films in the cat-and-mouse genre (the wittily literal-minded title sequence features a demonic green cat in pursuit of a fuzzy pink mouse) are largely absent in Die! Die! My Darling! thanks to the appealing performances of the lead players and the dominant role afforded to its female characters.

I generally tend to find movies about men holding women captive to be too laboriously misogynistic in their execution to inspire anything other than indifference or impatience on my part (I disliked William Wyler’s masterly The Collector [1965] as intensely as I did the infinitely inferior Tattoo [1981] and Boxing Helena [1993]). But when captive and captor are of the same gender, the sight of a loony bible-thumper and her butch maid taking the starch out of a genteel sophisticate proves not only a lot less problematic, but said spectacle is substantially sillier and more entertaining than it has any right to be. 

Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves

Had Die! Die! My Darling! been released in the US under its UK title, Fanatic, perhaps one could entertain the idea of a serious-minded thriller about a mentally unbalanced religious fanatic enacting revenge on the woman she deems responsible for her son’s death. After all, films like The Haunting, Psycho, The Innocents, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and the aforementioned Suddenly Last Summer have shown that bizarre themes don’t automatically lend themselves to the exploitation treatment. However, a title like Die! Die! My Darling! primes you for one thing and one thing only: Craptacular entertainment. Thus, with the horror genre bar set roughly around ankle height, and tongue lodged firmly in cheek, Bankhead & Co. head off to Camp Hammer.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Considered to be the first color film in the Horror Hag genre, Die! Die! My Darling! is a straightforward, if tonally at-odds-with-itself, exercise in funhouse terror. Self-aware to the point of self-parody, Die! Die! My Darling!, in its attempt to cash in on the '60s trend of casting aging leading ladies of the silver screen as human gargoyles, dusts off every cliché in the damsel-in-distress book and employs them with the dutiful compliance to format as a child with a paint-by-numbers set.

After an efficient, exposition-filled opening sequence, Die! Die! My Darling! quickly gets down to the business of clocking up as many genre clichés as its 97-minute running time will allow. First, there’s the lovely and refined Stefanie Powers as the victim/heroine, embodying just the right balance of resourcefulness and dumb-as-a-doornail stupidity necessary to pad out the film's running time. 

Playing a strong-willed, independent-minded woman, her mode of dress, makeup, and coiffure are so spotlighted that we know right off the bat that the film will soon ask us to revel (a la Tippi Hedren in The Birds) in her ultimate humbling and degradation. Fans of glamorous suffering are certain to enjoy monitoring the effect prolonged captivity and abuse have on Powers’ pouffy ’60s hairdo and tastefully natural makeup.

Stefanie Powers, Seized By Panic Upon Discovering 
She's Been Forcefully Imprisoned Without Any Moisturizer

Next in line, appearing in what Hammer Films at this point might as well have labeled "The Vincent Price Role," is the absolutely splendid Tallulah Bankhead. Splendid, not because her performance is especially nuanced, but because, for the material at hand, she's 100% on the money. Like Price, Bankhead has the gift of deliberate excess; she pitches her Mrs. Trefoile forcefully and hammily over-the-top, yet it lands precisely at the level of serio-comic histrionics a chunk of chiller-diller cheese like this calls for.

Tallulah Bankhead, who once said to a director, "Don't talk to me about camp, dahling, I invented it!" gives a terrifically raw and epically theatrical performance in Die! Die! My Darling!  Her delivery and facial expressions alone being worth the price of admission. If you've ever wondered what it would look like for a human being to react in the pop-eyed, exaggerated manner of a Tex Avery cartoon character, just get a load of La Bankhead's reaction in this scene where Powers enters the room wearing a scandalously scarlet sweater. She's pure camp cinema gold!

"The Devil's Entertainment!"
Legendary hedonist Bankhead is cast as a former stage actress saved from a life of sin by religion.
The in-joke irony was not lost on audiences

PERFORMANCES

Had director Silvio Narizzano been granted his wish of casting British stage actress Flora Robson (Black Narcissus) in the role of Mrs. Trefoile, Die! Die! My Darling! would have been a very different film indeed. A director from television making his first feature film, the openly gay Narizzano had no interest in turning his debut effort into a flaming camp-fest, but Bankhead's attachment to the project made it a fait accompli. Narizzano has gone on record as not being very fond of Bankhead’s performance here (not surprisingly, the actress was intoxicated a great deal of the time) and for finding the hyperactive musical score more appropriate to a cartoon than a suspense thriller. 

Similar Themes - Similar Posters

As psychological thrillers go, Die! Die! My Darling! suffers a bit from having an atmosphere that's neither afoot nor horseback. It’s not sufficiently committed to the genuinely dramatic potential of its premise, nor is it truly willing to just go for broke and be the full-on black comedy self-sendup it keeps flirting with. For a sense of what Die! Die! My Darling! could have been had they played it straight, check out the terrific 1972 Patty Duke thriller You'll Like My Mother. Stabbing suspense! Shear shock!

Personally, I think Bankhead totally slays as Mrs. Trefoile (no pun intended). Sure, she's camp as all get-out, but I don't find her performance to be any more overcooked than, say, Al Pacino in Scarface or Jack Nicholson in The Shining. In fact, she has quite a few moments that are genuinely affecting (her reading of the line "This was his room" while showing Patricia the house is heartbreaking). I relish every minute she's onscreen.
Meanwhile, the likable and always appealing Stefanie Powers—a Columbia Pictures contract player at the time and assigned to the film—relies a bit too heavily on "indicating" her emotions. When in peril, her eyes widen, her mouth falls agape, she even trembles...But I never believe for a minute she's ever in the throes of any kind of anguish.
After reading her memoirs, in which she comes across as smart and self-aware, I wonder if she simply knew exactly what kind of film she was making and merely played to the material.

Harry & Anna
Game of Thrones' Peter Vaughn and the late Yootha Joyce are first-rate as the bickering couple drawn into Mrs. Trefoile's plot. Bankhead's oft-repeated baritone bellow, "ANNA!" is a thing of beauty.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Hammer Films are known for their low-budget extravagance and overripe Gothic style. Die! Die! My Darling! is no exception.

This Psycho-inspired scene makes stylized, vivid use of color

The dramatic visual compositions of cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,  A Little Night Music) are often at odds with the film's overly jaunty musical score.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

What is the whole Grand Dame Guignol genre but an amplification of the movie industry’s (society’s?) fear & loathing of women no longer young and desirable? Is the popularity and proliferation of  “Hagsploitation” films in the '60s directly attributable to the boxoffice clout of the youth market—a generation of moviegoers disdainful and distrustful of the elderly? Can the genre’s deep-rooted fear of women, specifically those perceived as threatening due to an absence of male-defined role identification (the villains in these films are always single, widowed, divorced, or spinsters), be traced to that gynophobic film noir archetype, the femme fatale? 

I daresay that even my own lazy signifier, camp, when attributed to these films and their stars, betrays a somewhat dismissive attitude toward the depiction of female aggression. 

I don’t know if the genre began with Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in 1950s Sunset Boulevard (“There’s nothing tragic about turning fifty. Unless you’re trying to be twenty-five!”), a film that subtly exploited Gloria Swanson’s age and real-life status as a silent movie queen. But like that film, Die! Die! My Darling! relies, at least in part, on getting subliminal mileage out of the public’s awareness of Tallulah Bankhead’s fading theatrical renown and visible decline.
The horror genre has never been particularly kind to women anyway, but if one can extract a positive from this curiously popular subgenre, it's that it provided some marvelously juicy lead roles to many actresses who'd otherwise be relegated to the sidelines in mainstream fare. 

Roles for older female actors were scarce and rarely showcased Golden Age stars to their advantage. The same year Die, Die, My Darling was released, 1940s film noir goddess and femme fatale extraordinaire Jane Greer was relegated to a thankless "wife and mother" role (opposite Jim Backus) in the sitcom-y Patty Duke movie Billie. 

In a world of Tallulah Bankhead imitators (Lucille Ball on her TV show, Bette Davis in All About Eve, and my favorite, Roddy McDowall in Evil Under the Sun), Tallulah Bankhead was still the best Tallulah Bankhead impersonator around. Which is precisely why I can enjoy her work in Die! Die! My Darling! without a trace of pity or sense that she is being exploited. I can’t help but take my hat off to the actress, plagued as she was by addictions and fears, coming back to films after so many years and still able to wipe everybody else off the screen. She was camp, she was over-the-top, but she was her own creation…one of the first genuine divas, and a true original.

Although she did voice work for a stop-animation children's film in 1966, Die! Die! My Darling! was Tallulah Bankhead's final feature film appearance. She died in 1968 at the age of 66.

BONUS MATERIAL

Looped

In 2013, Stefanie Powers, stepping in for an ailing Valerie Harper, portrayed Tallulah Bankhead in Looped. A Broadway play based on the real-life events surrounding an inebriated Bankhead being called in to loop a line of dialogue for Die! Die! My Darling!

The single line of dialogue: “And Patricia, as I was telling you, even though that deluded rector has in literal effect closed the church to me, I have, as you’ll note, tried to maintain proper service to the Lord in my own home." - allegedly took eight hours to record.

Bankhead's triumphant return to London in August of 1964 to begin filming on Die! Die! My Darling! hit a literal snag when (according to Powers) the actress's foot caught on the lip of a stair at the entrance to The Ritz Hotel, with cameras present to capture the event. Of course, the press had a field day, resulting in the already nervous and insecure Bankhead developing an instant case of laryngitis.

Unless it's been removed, somewhere online is a marvelous video of Stefanie Powers speaking at a screening of Die! Die! My Darling! She relates many amusing anecdotes about Bankhead and the making of the film. For instance, Bankhead and Powers developed a friendship while making the movie, and throughout filming and for years after, Bankhead referred to Powers exclusively by her screen name, Patricia. 

Tallulah takes a trip to The Automat  1957

UK Quad Poster with Original Title 

Die! Die! My Darling! opened in Los Angeles 

on Wednesday, June 16, 1965, at the Pix Theater on Hollywood Blvd. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015