HOT RODS TO HELL 1967

Well, if you’re going to hell, I guess a hot rod is as good a means of transportation as any.

1967 was a banner year at the movies for me. I was just ten years old, but in that single year I saw Casino Royale; Valley of the Dolls; Bonnie& Clyde; Wait Until Dark; Far From the Madding Crowd; To Sir, With Love; Up the Down Staircase; Barefoot in the Park; Thoroughly Modern Millie; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?; and The Happening. Barely a kiddie movie in the bunch! Each was a film I was dying to see, and each, save for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, has become a lifelong favorite. (Good intentions notwithstanding, that movie really hasn’t aged well for me. 108 minutes of watching human paragon, practically-perfect-in-every-way, Sidney Poitier having his feet put to the fire for the privilege of marrying, as one critic put it, “vapid virgin” Katharine Houghton, begs a tolerance of a sort different from what that movie was endorsing.) 

On the Road
Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac...or an unreasonable facsimile thereof

These days, I’d consider it a small miracle if I see even TWO memorable films in the same year, much less the bumper crop of greats 1967 yielded. But thanks to the lax admission policies of movie theaters in those pre-ratings code days, I was able, in spite of my tender years, to see practically any film I had a mind to…and usually did. But no matter how mature I imagined myself to be at the time, I was still only a kid, so on occasion, my budding aesthetics didn't always steer me toward the quality stuff. For example: in spite of my weakness for movies with mature themes that were way over my head, The Graduate, Two for the Road, and Reflections in a Golden Eye – films I now consider to be among the best that 1967 had to offer – held absolutely no interest for me during their initial theatrical runs. Instead, my imagination and attentions were seized by two Drive-In caliber B-movies that were being given the big push on TV back then: Born Losers and Hot Rods to Hell. 

Get Your Kicks on Route 66

Why, you ask? Well, for starters, the commercials for Born Losers (Tom Laughlin’s biker flick that marked the debut of his Billy Jack character) prominently featured a girl on a motorcycle in a bikini and go-go boots (Elizabeth James) who looked a lot like Liza Minnelli (oddly enough, a crush of mine even at that early age). While Hot Rods to Hell had, in addition to that simply irresistible title, commercials showcasing a screaming teenager (Laurie Mock) who bore a strong resemblance to another one of my preteen, gay-in-training crushes, Cher. Unfortunately, both films came and went from the local moviehouse so quickly that I never got to see them until many years later. 

Psycho-Chick

While my interest in Born Losers dissipated as Billy Jack grew into a pretentious vigilante franchise during the '70s (I finally got around to seeing Born Losers on TCM a year or so ago, and while it’s a lot of lurid fun - especially full-figured gal, Jane Russell, in a small role – once is definitely enough), Hot Rods to Hell, which I was lucky enough to see at a revival theater in Los Angeles sometime in the 80s, was well worth the wait. An example of Grade-A, Drive-In kitsch at its finest, Hot Rods to Hell-arious is a camp hybrid of 1950s drag race exploitation films and those reactionary, youth-gone-wild, juvenile delinquency social problem flicks - all with a suburban midlife-crisis “reclaim your manhood” domestic melodrama thrown in for good measure. It’s a gas!

Dana Andrews as Tom Phillips

Jeanne Crain as Peg Phillips

Laurie Mock as Tina Phillips

Mimsy Farmer as Gloria

After suffering a spinal injury in a nasty Christmas season auto accident, Boston traveling salesman, Tom Phillips (Andrews), emerges a broken and shaken man (“It all came back to me. The horns blowing, the lights, the brakes… ‘Jingle Bells’…”). On the mend from his external injuries, Tom nevertheless carries within him an ugly, shameful disease. A pitiable malady bordering on the abhorrent if discovered, even in minuscule traces, within the stoic, bread-winning, man-of-the-house, post-50s suburban macho American male.
That disease is insecurity. Yes, folks, Tom’s self-image and the entire foundation of his '60s-mandated nuclear family teeter on the verge of collapse under the strain of Daddy actually having an emotional reaction to almost losing his life in an auto accident. How dare he! Men just don't DO that! 

Passages of Hot Rods to Hell's screenplay reads like a Ward Cleaver lecture on the perils of middle-class/middle-aged men having their masculinity usurped due to the enfeebling act of having feelings. To make his humiliation complete, not only is it his wife Peg who decides to make the move to California, but en route (*gasp*), she does all the driving! 

The subtext of this film seems to be that this nation is going to hell in a hot rod because manhood is under threat.

Boss Finley Can't Cut the Mustard
Or so wrote Miss Lucy in lipstick on the ladies room mirror at the Royal Palms Hotel in "Sweet Bird of Youth." The topic then was sexual impotence, and Tennessee Williams couldn't address it with any more candor in 1963 than this 1966 TV movie (Hot Rods to Hell was originally intended to be a television release). There's a lot of talk about Tom's bad back, but it's pretty clear that there's also some trouble up front. Here Dana Andrews uses his semi-stiff, trembling hand as a metaphor for his underperforming man parts. Jeanne Crain's look sums it up.

Under the advisement of his physician to take things easier (“What does the doctor think he is, a MENTAL case?” bellows Tom’s compassionate brother), Tom agrees to leave Boston and assume management duties at a thriving motel in the small desert community of Mayville, California. On board with the whole relocation thing are supportive wife, Peg (Crain), and freckle-faced, “all-boy” towhead son, Jamie (Jeffrey Byron). The sole holdout is daughter Tina: an early prototype of the sullen, eye-rolling Goth teen and walking Petrie dish of festering hormonal agitation. "All the kids drag, Dad!" she spews, with typical adolescent bile, in reference to short-distance car racing, not (as I'd hoped) an unknown to me '60s trend in teenage cross-dressing. 

Little Jamie's dominant character trait is taking frequent
 passive-aggressive swipes at his father's masculinity

With everyone loaded into their pre-seatbelts station wagon, the Phillips' motor cross-country to Mayville. We aren't shown anything of the first leg of their road trip, but things take an instant turn for the melodramatic once they hit California. Depicted as a vast landscape of open roads devoted to car culture and thrill-seeking teens, 1960s California takes on the feel of the Old West once the Phillips’ gas-powered covered wagon catches the attention of a trio of exceptionally clean-cut juvenile delinquents (they all come from "good" wealthy families).

The Mild Bunch
Gene Kirkwood as Ernie / Paul Bertoya as Duke

What follows is a comically escalating game of cat-and-mouse where what began as high-spirited, run 'em off the road kicks (“Everybody’s out for kicks. What else is there?”), gets rapidly out of hand. Soon the road-hogging hot-rodders make it their business to see that Tom Phillips and family never reach their destination (square Mr. Phillips plans to crack down on the "fun" once he takes over that motel) or get the chance to squeal to the police (or “Poh-lease” as Dana Andrews peculiarly intones).
Passions flare, dust flies, tires screech, rock music blares, and everybody either overacts shamelessly or unconvincingly. Meanwhile, many questions arise: Will Peg ever stop treating Tina like a child? Will good-girl Tina succumb to the skeevy lure of bad boys? Will little Jamie’s respect for his father ever be restored? Does Tom still have the ol’ poop, or has he lost it forever? The answers to these, and several other questions you don't really care about, are answered in Hot Rods to Hell.

I don't know what backlot was used, but the hospital Dana Andrews convalesces in (top) pops up in a lot of '60s television shows. Here it plays a High School in the "Ring-A-Ding Girl" episode of The Twilight Zone -1963

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS MOVIE

Hot Rods to Hell is based on the 1956 Saturday Evening Post short story "The Red Car / Fifty-Two Miles to Terror"  by Alex Gaby), and every frame feels like it comes from a fifties mindset. Adapted from a story written at the height of the mid-50s juvenile delinquency panic that spawned Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, Hot Rods to Hell elicits laughs and inspires giggles because it feels so out of step with the more motorcycle-centric late-'60s. It comes across as the kind of programmer Mamie Van Doren would have starred in ten years prior. 

George Ives (giving the only decent performance in the film) as motel proprietor, Lank Dailey 

There once was a time when feature films and TV sitcoms like Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver promoted male patriarchy, suburbia, and middle-class values as the American ideal. This attitude shifted significantly by the late-'60s. So much so that this becomes one of the more glaring reasons Hot Rods to Hell feels so curiously out of step--it has to be one of the last movies of the era to depict the "establishment" set as heroes. 

In 1967, movies like The Graduate and You’re a Big Boy Now were starting to reflect a youth-centric worldview in which uptight, staunchly judgmental, suburbanite “squares” like Hot Rods to Hell’s Tom and Peg Phillips were regarded with suspicion. By 1968, the onscreen glorification of youth was so prevalent that anarchic scenarios: a la  Angel, Angel, Down We Go and Wild in the Streets --would normalize outlaws and make heroes out of the kind of teens that Hot Rods to Hell sees only as troublemakers. 

Judging You
The dramatic stakes of Hot Rods to Hell are seriously undermined by the pleasure to be had
in watching this smug suburban family being taken down a notch. 

PERFORMANCES
If you've never seen veteran actors Dana Andrews or Jeanne Crain in a film before, I beg you, don't start with this one. Hot Rods to Hell will leave you wondering how they ever had careers in the first place. This is their fourth film together (State Fair - 1945 / Duel in the Jungle -1954/ Madison Avenue -1962), and to say the photogenic duo went out with a whimper would be a gross understatement. Andrews, hampered by a makeup artist who must have been trained during the days of the silents, is so unrelentingly stiff and gruff, he's a figure of derision long before his character has a chance to be made sympathetic. Hammily scowling and grimacing in his Sansabelt slacks, this is far from Andrews' finest hour, but he's awfully entertaining.

The Saga of an Emasculated Male

In this artfully composed shot worthy of Kubrick, Tom nurses his bad back 
while being silently mocked by his wife's handbag

Tom threatening to scratch out the eyes of his tormentors?

Personal faves are B-Movie starlets, Mimsy Farmer and Laurie Mock, each playing yin and yang ends of the exploitation movie female spectrum (they would reunite with co-star Gene Kirkwood in 1967s Riot on Sunset Strip). As actresses, both are severely limited, but what they lack in talent they more than make up for in their grasp of knowing exactly what kind of overheated histrionics a movie like this requires. Farmer in particular (who would reinvent herself as an arthouse and Giallo darling in a few years) gives her discontented small-town teen the kind of edgy Ann-Margret overkill that's the stuff of bad-movie legend.

Showing respect and giving props to her homegirl

But a special Oscar should have been awarded to Jeanne Crain, who not only looks lovely in her matronly Sydney Guilaroff coiffure, but overacts so strenuously she takes the entire film to a level of hilarity unimaginable without her devoted contribution. Let's take a moment to pay tribute:

It's A Grand Night For Screaming

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Aside from the creaky source material, what further contributes to Hot Rods to Hell feeling like a movie made at least ten years earlier is the fact that its 55-year-old screenwriter, Robert E. Kent  (co-writer of Dana Andrews' vastly superior 1950 film, Where the Sidewalk Ends) was probably drawing his knowledge of teenage behavior from screenplays he wrote for a slew of early 60s / late-50 rock & roll exploitation films. Movies with sound-alike titles (and look-alike plots): Twist Around the Clock (1961), Don't Knock the Twist (1962), Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Don't Knock The Rock (1956). All containing portrayals of teenage life firmly entrenched in the Eisenhower years. Similarly, Hot Rods to Hell's potential for even a moderately authentic depiction of teen behavior was no-doubt hampered by having a director in his 70s at the helm (John Brahm, surprisingly, the man behind the marvelous 1944 version of The Lodger).

Burlesque star, cult figure (John Waters' Desperate Living) and mobster sweetheart, Liz Renay appears all-too-briefly as a bar patron. 

The many decades of behind-the-camera moviemaking experience involved in Hot Rods to Hell lends the film a professional gloss frequently at odds with its small-budget incompetence. The film's poorly executed day-for-night effects play havoc with the time-frame continuity of the film's third-act action setpiece. What time of day is it actually - is it dawn...is it dusk...is it midnight?

Random sexual assaults are pretty much regulation for '60s exploitation movies 

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
A prime ingredient for the enjoyment of any bad film is often the degree of earnestness displayed by those involved. Like Joan Crawford in the Grade-Z cheapie, Trog, I don’t believe anyone in Hot Rods to Hell had any illusions about the caliber of film they were making, yet that didn't prevent them from pulling out all the acting stops and carrying on as though they were appearing in The Grapes of Wrath. Professional ineptitude without some kind of artistic aspiration or pretension is simply boring, so what qualifies Hot Rods to Hell as one of those top-notch bad movies I can watch over and over again is the sense that everyone in it is clearly giving it all they've got...and THIS is the best they were able to come up with.

Mickey Rooney Jr (right) & His Combo contribute several (un)memorable rock tunes 
to the soundtrack,  here they perform that timeless classic,  "Do the Chicken Walk"

As stated, Hot Rods to Hell has long been a favorite of mine, but an extra layer of enjoyment has emerged now that I'm almost as old as Dana Andrews when he made the film. It cracks me up when I catch traces of my own reactions to today's youth in the humorless outbursts of our stuffed-shirt hero (don't get me started on teenagers and their smartphones). Happily, my fussing and fuming are mostly internal harangues or confined to the relative safety of social media. These days, not only has road rage grown to be a more dangerous game to be bullied into (no one in this movie brandishes a firearm), but traffic here in Los Angeles is so congested that any hot rodder would be hard pressed to find ANY stretch of rod where they could open up at all. 

BONUS MATERIAL

A great review of Born Losers can be found HERE

Mickey Rooney Jr. guests on the pop music variety show SHINDIG HERE

Hot Rods to Hell opened in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 17, 1967. 

It had opened in Los Angeles four months earlier.  

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 -  2014

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN 1945

"Leave her to heaven, and to those thorns that in her
 bosom lodge to prick and sting her."
                                                                 William Shakespeare "Hamlet"

One area in which old movies effortlessly surpass contemporary motion pictures is in their ability to render the grotesque glamorous. The value of such facility is debatable, but sometimes I want my movies realistic, and other times I want my movies to be MOVIES...in big capital letters. Due to censorship and social mores of the time, older movies had to be very artful in how they dealt with unpleasant subjects. And whether it was murder, jealousy, obsession, or infanticide; when buffed to a high gloss by the Hollywood Dream Machine, bad never looked so good.

Gene Tierney as Ellen Berent

Cornel Wilde as Richard Harland

Jeanne Crain as Ruth Berent

Vincent Price as Russell Quinton

No film better exemplifies this than that Technicolor noir classic, Leave Her to Heaven. A film of such alluring visual overripeness that one can easily forget that it is probably one of the darkest and most twisted visions of familial dysfunction ever to come out of post-war era Hollywood.

Leave Her to Heaven is a rarity in the world of 40s film noir: the darkness occurs in the bright (and colorful) daylight. And at the center of this bright-hued nightmare is perhaps one of cinema's most relentlessly evil monsters. The monster in question? None other than the austerely exquisite Gene Tierney (saved from bland perfection by a charming overbite), fulfilling, in her role as socialite Ellen Berent, the long-standing film noir edict that any female that desirable has got to spell nothing but trouble.

Femme Fatale Red Flag #23: Really big monogram 

And trouble she is, for Ellen is nothing short of a walking “attractive nuisance” violation waiting to happen. Smart, lovely and affectionate on the surface, underneath all that window dressing lies a woman with a doozy of a father fixation and a psychopathically obsessive idea of love. The object of Ellen’s affection is author Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde, a worthy competitor to Tierney in the beauty department), whom she meets briefly on a train and who soon thereafter becomes the one she MUST have.

Babe Alert! We feel your pain, Ellen.

Never mind a pesky little detail like her already having a fiancé (a wounded-looking Vincent Price).

Russell- "I'm not a man who loves often, Ellen. I love once."
Ellen- "Thank you, Russ. That's quite a concession."
Russell- "I loved you and I'm still in love with you."
Ellen- "That's a tribute!"
Russ- "And I always will be...remember that."
Ellen- "Russ, is that a threat?"

To say that Ellen’s love for Richard grows after they get married is not to state the half of it. Ellen will be satisfied with nothing less than having Richard to herself 24/7, and woe betide the woebegone (be it family members, caretakers, or wheelchair–bound little brothers) foolish enough to think she’ll allow it to be otherwise.

Wedded Bliss...or else!

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
The '30s and '40s may have been boom years for the “women’s film” (movies with female protagonists, told from a woman’s point of view, marketed to a female audience) but film noir always seemed to be lurking in the shadows, contrasting all those sunny Mrs. Miniver & I Remember Mama images of femininity with vitriolic visions of women intent on the destruction of the male.

Indeed, the fear of women is what sex in film noir is all about. The twist in Leave Her to Heaven is that the almost ethereally beautiful Tierney lacks the obvious sexual threat of, say, a Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, or Barbara Stanwyck— all of whom looked as if they’d just as soon plunge a pair of scissors into your back as look at you. Tierney's Ellen Berent is the ultra- scary female writ large because she looks like so many of the pin-ups and girls-next-door of the era. Made up to resemble every brunette Gene Kelly ever pursued in a wholesome musical, it’s quite startling when Tierney reveals herself to be a sick ticket of the order rarely seen in Production Code era movies.

Sweet as pie

The "crazy eyes" first make their appearance

PERFORMANCES
Gene Tierney gives the performance of her career and is the absolute embodiment of star power in this, her Academy Award nominated role. Though her character has all the trappings of overheated melodrama (overblown emotions, ostentatious glamour), she brings a level of assuredness to her portrayal that dares you to turn it into camp. Scene after scene dances right on the edge of being a real howler on par with Lana Turner during her Ross Hunter period - or any period Douglas Sirk - but there's something about the truth of her characterization (we don't like Ellen, but we "get" her) that keeps the film on track. She's terrific.

 The famous "Swim in the Lake" sequence

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Who else? Gene Tierney. Outside of Vanessa Redgrave in Camelot, Julie Christie in Petulia, or Faye Dunaway in that big party scene in The Towering Inferno, I can’t think of another film in which a mere mortal was made to look like a fairy-tale goddess. (And if you haven’t seen Ms. Dunaway in that movie, do yourself a favor and rent it for that sequence alone. She and her cheekbones manage to upstage both Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, and she should have won a special Oscar just for keeping that jaw-dropping gown up.)

 Now THIS is what a movie star looks like!

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

If it was the intention of the filmmakers to put us off our guard by making this bleakly downbeat psychological thriller look like a picture postcard, then they succeeded. The gorgeous visuals: from art direction to costumes to locations, serve to create an almost David Lynchian look at the dark underside of a certain kind of privileged life. A certain kind of only-in-the-movies life. The effect of seeing such horrible things perpetrated by pretty people in glorious surroundings is both confounding and unsettling.

 The cinematography in Leave Her to Heaven -

David Lean meets Alfred Hitchcock

I came across this film relatively recently, and as a big fan of movies featuring overdressed bad girls, I was stunned that I had somehow missed Leave Her to Heaven in my youth (I mean, did Carol Burnett ever do a parody of this movie?). Anyway, fully expecting to be treated to a howling camp-fest of lacquered cheese, I was surprised, if not shocked, at what a powerful film it is. I mean, the various conflicts and tragedies are the stuff of melodrama, but they somehow have real emotional bite...a palpable feeling of despair. I was overwhelmed by how artfully the film was constructed and how daring its themes were. Who would ever think a major motion picture from the 1940s would include this exchange:

 Ellen- (Referring to her unborn child) "I hate the little beast, I wish it would die!"

Ruth- "How can you say such wicked things?"

Ellen- "Sometimes the truth is wicked."

YIKES! Even after watching it several times over the years, the film never seems dated (the clothes, yes, the emotions, no) and it remains one of my favorite melodramas to this day. Near perfect, its only misstep is a courtroom scene in which Vincent Price seems to be (over)acting in a different film entirely.

Undeniably dark, Leave Her to Heaven is the best example of what I call classic moviemaking: solid cast, top-notch technicians, sure-footed director, and a great script. The basics. All the CGI and 3-D in the world isn't gonna help a movie if it doesn't have these.

And I'll never let you go. Never, never, never... 

Copyright © Ken Anderson