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, 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 The Celebrity Next Door episode of The Lucy & Desi Comedy Hour. The time was 1967, I was ten-years-old, and in both instances, what stands out strongest in my memory is that I’d never seen anything quite like her.

A prodigious personality who 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 flamboyance of her gestures. But of course, Bankhead's chief distinction was her voice. That famous basso-profundo, bourbon-&-cigarettes drawl which eventually grew so slurred, just trying to decode her dialog became part of the fun.

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 away from telephones, neighbors, or anything else that might come to prove beneficial to an individual 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, simpleminded 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, 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 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, and also sees 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 true Christian tradition, induce her spiritual redemption though means of torture, 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.

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 the female characters.
I generally tend to find movies about men holding women captive to be too laboriously misogynist 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 sex, 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 cliché’s 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 the genre. Playing a strong-willed, independent-minded character, her mode of dress, makeup, and coiffure are so highlighted by the film 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 the scene where Powers enters the room wearing a scarlet red 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 Bankheads'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 getout, 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 where she's genuinely quite 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 genre.

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 '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 out of 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. (My mind goes to that great femme fatale of the '40s, Jane Greer, abandoned to a nondescript "mom" role in 1965's 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 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 all during the 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

BERSERK 1967

Fans of late-career Joan Crawford (and who isn’t?) are sure to relish the sight of 61-year-old La Mommie Dearest as the mannish owner and ringmaster of a traveling circus. While juggling the books and two younger lovers (“I just may let you tuck me in tonight!” she threatens to one) performers in her employ fall victim to gruesome, far-fetched fatalities. Similarly, variety show fans nostalgic for the bygone days when animal acts ruled primetime TV variety programs like The Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace, are sure to get a vaudeville kick out of Berserk!'s interminable parade of capering horses, indifferent lions, playful elephants, and intelligent poodles. All used to pad out the film's already meager 96-minute running time.

But horror fans finding Berserk! to be a little tame and slow-moving by American Horror Story: Freak Show standards would do well to turn a viewing of this circus-set whodunit into a drinking game. As Crawford was still on the Board of Directors of Pepsi-Cola at the time this was made, so the film fairly overflows with Pepsi-related product placement. May I suggest taking a shot of 100-Proof vodka (Crawford’s much-preferred beverage of choice) every time there’s a Pepsi sighting?

Or perhaps you can take a swig each time a mysterious band of shadow materializes out of nowhere to provide our star with dramatic framing and flattering neck shade whenever in medium shot or closeup. But be aware, should you choose the latter option, you’re likely to find yourself plastered to the gills long before To Sir, With Love’s Judy Geeson makes her mid-film appearance as yet another in Joan Crawford’s long procession of troublesome onscreen/offscreen daughters.

Joan Crawford as Monica Rivers  
"We're running a circus, not a charm school!"

Ty Hardin as Frank Hawkins
"In this world, you only get what you deserve. No more, no less."

Judy Geeson as Angela Rivers
"I was shunted around from place to place like a piece of luggage with the wrong address pasted on it!" 

Michael Gough as Albert Dorando
"How can you be so cold-blooded?"

Diana Dors as Matilda
"The next time she puts her arms around you, make sure those lovely hands aren't carrying a knife!"

Although Berserk! (I’m never going to be able to keep up this exclamation point thing) is often lumped together with other entries in the popular What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? hag-horror/psycho-biddy genre; Joan Crawford’s dedication to being the world’s most glamorous, well-turned-out circus proprietress qualifies it more as a gilt-edged example of Grand Dame Guignol. Dressed in a fashion parade of vividly monochromatic cocktail suits (from milady’s own closet, may I add), Crawford magisterially strides about the horse and elephant dung-covered circus grounds‒head held aristocratically aloft, balancing a towering, tightly-braided bun‒barking out orders and wearing the daintiest of impractical, strappy high-heel sandals.

Britain's Billy Smart Circus plays the role of Berserk's The Great Rivers Circus
Smart's Circus (note the BS emblems) was also used in 1960s similar Circus of Horrors 

In contrast to the usual abasement heaped upon the typical hagsploitation heroine, every effort in Berserk! is made to make Crawford look good. Not only is she the center of the drama and propels the narrative, but she's also the only character afforded an active love life or much in the way of a backstory ("Long ago I lost the capacity to love..." she intones at one point; her words instantly making me aware of the weight of my eyelids). Unfortunately, due to the film’s obviously sparse budget and perhaps an over-determination on the filmmakers’ part to make its sexagenarian leading lady’s age into a non-issue (one of the more conspicuous Crawford-mandated script additions is a character voicing the opinion, "Your mother will never grow old, she has the gift of eternal youth!" ), the sheer amount of attention paid to showcasing Crawford’s three-ring matronly glamour actually results in a kind of inverse-derogation. 

"Find your happiest colors - the ones that make you feel good."
Joan Crawford - My Way of Life 1971
Joan in her happy colors (given her expression, I guess that's something we'll have to take her word for)

Even if you'd never seen a movie before in your life, you could probably guess the plot of Berserk from its setting alone. A traveling circus plagued by a series of grisly murders finds the deaths have a gruesome side-effect: a boost in attendance. This turn of events means the shadow of suspicion falls (usually across the neck) upon hard-as-nails, cool-as-a-cucumber circus owner, Monica Rivers (Crawford). Especially since, some six years prior, Monica’s husband died in a mysterious trapeze accident. Since that time, Monica has been “comforted” by dour-faced business partner Albert Dorando (Gough). Meanwhile, Monica's only child, Angela (Geeson), has been stowed away at a hoity-toity boarding school.

As the body count rises, within the ranks of the circus’ motley troupe of performers, low levels of British panic reigns, motives are plentiful, and red herrings abound. Figuring prominently amongst those most likely to have "dunit" are Bruno (George Claydon), the circus' dwarf clown/toady who’s a tad over-enamored of his leggy employer. Then there’s brassy Matilda (Dors), the in-your-face, peroxided two-thirds of a sawing-a-woman-in-half illusionist act. She's skeptical of Monica from the start, but this may have more to do with Monica's habit of addressing Matilda as "You slut!”. And finally, there's the circus's most recent arrival, high-wire walker Frank Hawkins (Hardin); a six-foot-two hunk of flavorless beefcake with a sketchy past, hair-trigger temper, and a thing for women old enough to be his mother. Especially if they own their own circus.

Mommie Likes

The lack of urgency displayed by the veddy-British investigating detective in the case (Robert Hardy) mirrors that of Berserk!'s director Jim O’ Connolly.  O' Connolly somehow imagines Berserk’s tepid tension and sluggish suspense as engaging enough to withstand the mood-killing interjection of several adorable animal acts (in their entirety!) and a comic musical interlude.
Still, thanks to Joan Crawford’s sometimes baffling acting choices (“You’re crrrrazy!”) and the always-welcome presence of British bombshell Diana Dors, Berserk!’s 40-minutes of plot padded out to 96-minutes of movie flows painlessly enough to its abrupt, highly-preposterous conclusion. One in which the surprise-reveal killer has to utter the great-granddaddy of unutterable, self-expository outbursts:

“Kill! Kill! Kill! That’s all I have inside me!” 

And if you think that line reads ridiculous, wait until you hear someone actually try to deliver it with a modicum of sincerity.

Trog co-star Michael Gough braces himself while a frisky Joan Crawford moves in for the kill. 
As a side note, is there anything more terrifying than a clown painting?

Berserk! Began life as Circus of Terror and Circus of Blood before Crawford vetoed those crude, cut-to-the-chase options in favor of the infinitely more marketable, Psycho-friendly single name tag (see: Homicidal, Hysteria, Repulsion, Paranoiac, and Fanatic [the British title for Tallulah Bankhead’s loony masterwork, Die, Die My Darling!]). 

As Crawford’s first film in a two-picture deal arranged by personal friend/producer Herman Cohen (the man who gave the world I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla), the British-made Berserk! was undertaken when Crawford’s reputation as a heavy drinker rendered her an unacceptable insurance risk, stateside.

Coming as it did on the heels of the double-barreled horror blitz of William Castle’s Strait-Jacket (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965), Berserk! may have further distanced Crawford from her glory days at MGM in the mind of the public, but it did serve to indelibly cement her status as Hollywood’s then-reigning scream queen. A reputation reinforced by her appearances on supernatural-themed TV shows like Night Gallery and The Sixth Sense. And while rival Bette Davis may have appeared in a couple of slightly more upscale UK features at this time (The Nanny -1965 and The Anniversary-1968), Berserk! and Trog gave Crawford what she needed: employment (at a time when many of her peers had been forced into early retirement), leading lady status, and above-the-title billing.

"This is APPALLING! I have devoted myself to making Christina...er, Angela a proper young lady!"

In a moment redolent of Mommie Dearest's infamous Chadwick expulsion scene, Monica's daughter Angela is expelled from The Fenmore School for Young Ladies. In real life, Joan's daughter Christina campaigned unsuccessfully for the Judy Geeson role, to which Crawford responded to the press, "Christina is not ready to have such responsibility. To co-star with 'Joan Crawford'? Isn't that a lot of pressure to put on the girl?"

The aforementioned Trog (1970) was the second vehicle in Crawford’s contract with Herman Cohen and her last feature film appearance. In the 1994 book, Attack of the Monster Movie Makers by Tom Weaver, producer Cohen refutes claims that Crawford was ever subjected to the kind of on-a-shoestring treatment his low-budget films suggest (namely, the oft-repeated rumor that Crawford had to dress in the back of a station wagon while making Trog).

According to Cohen, Crawford always insisted on being treated like a major star, and to make her happy he was glad to stretch the budgets of both Berserk! and Trog to accommodate the Crawford-mandated expense of: a Rolls Royce and driver, an apartment with a maid and cook, and a large location dressing room caravan. Anything to make Miss Crawford feel like the star she was (or used to be). 

Cohen also relates that it was important he never use the term “horror film” when talking to Crawford about their professional collaborations. Joan, it seems, hated the idea of horror films and considered her films for Cohen to be dramas with “…some horrific moments.”

Scream Queen
At this stage, it didn't matter to Joan what her name appeared on,
just so long as it appeared on SOMETHING....preferably in big letters

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’m pretty much an all-around Joan Crawford fan, but a glance at my DVD collection reveals a decided preference for late-career Crawford. To me, Joan at her worst is actually Joan at her best. I don’t deny the appeal of her early films, but in them, I've always sensed the indelible imprint of the MGM assembly line. She comes across too similar (looks, mannerisms, and speech) to every other major actress on the roaring lion’s payroll at the time. However, the over-the-top, almost frightening Joan Crawford unveiled in Torch Song (1953) and movies thereafter, is another Joan altogether.

Seeming to purposefully shed all those soft and vulnerable qualities evident in her performances in movies like Possessed (1947) and Daisy Kenyon (1947), late-career Crawford retained–if not emphasized–the hardness and severity she brought to her roles in Flamingo Road (1949) and Harriet Craig (1950). Post-1950s Joan Crawford had transmogrified into a being of her own creation. A being who was not so much an actress as the human embodiment of the principles of hard work, discipline, determination, and self-delusion. Joan was no longer just a star; she was stardom triumphant. A larger-than-life entity so committed to giving her fans The Joan They Knew And Loved, her performances took on the quality of grand opera. A quality blissfully ignorant of things like camp sensibilities, drag queen aesthetics, or modulating a performance to the appropriate scale of the film at hand.

Berserk! is a thoroughly harmless (one might say affectless) suspenser that’s a great deal of silly fun in that way unique to low-budget genre flicks that harbor few illusions about themselves and harbor no objectives beyond giving the audience a good scare. But as pleasant as it is to play “whodunit” in a colorful setting brimming with red herrings and hoary fright effects; Joan Crawford is the entire show. And for me, she alone is what makes Berserk! worth watching at all. As efficiently as she carries out her ringmaster duties while showing off her handsome legs in that Edith Head-designed leotard, Crawford single-handedly turns the mediocre Berserk! into a masterpiece of high drama and unintentional circus camp.

Diana Dors, about to be sawed in half as magician's assistant to Philip Madoc in Berserk! 1967 

Diana Dors, about to be sawed in half as magician's assistant to David J. Stewart
in the unaired 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

PERFORMANCES

In Berserk!, if Joan is less than 100% convincing as the owner of a traveling circus, it’s only because she runs it with an aggressive authority and Machiavellian cunning more appropriate to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Plus, it's hard to imagine Joan putting up with untidy elephants. 

I can’t say anything about her performance here that I haven’t already covered in previous posts on Queen Bee, Strait-Jacket, and Harriet Craig. Only to add that I get a particular kick out of the way Crawford's studied line readings in Berserk! have a way of sliding from her usual over-enunciated, studio-groomed elocution, into a curious brand of Texas-accented dialect:
“That’s JUST whadda mean!”
“Want me to spell it out fuh ya?”
“He’s just mah business partner!”

With dinner over, Hardin's ready for dessert 

The supporting cast of Berserk! is quite good, what with each actor wisely giving the film’s star as wide a berth as possible for the histrionic grandstanding that inevitably shows up. My favorites are Diana Dors, saddled with a truly awful wig but giving each of her scenes an enjoyably bitchy vitriolic punch. The appealing Judy Geeson is given scant to do, but does so with a level of genuineness that almost feels out of place for a movie like this (“Geeson’s pretty but doesn't have the stuff to make it for the long haul,” sniffed Crawford in an interview). And the regrettably-named Ty Hardin (that is, until you learn his real name is Orison Whipple Hungerford …JR!!!) makes an appropriately incongruous choice for Crawford’s love interest. Although I guess his towering frame and obvious youth serve to cast just the right amount of suspicion on his character’s motives.

Ted Lune, Golda Casimir, George Claydon & Milton Reid
Berserk! grinds to a screeching halt in order to accommodate
the cutesy musical number, "It Might Be Me"

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Contractual show-biz pairings are nothing new. If you hired TV personality, Steve Allen, you had to take Jayne Meadows. British director Bryan Forbes never worked without his wife Nanette Newman. And, pre-split-up, getting Tim Burton always meant Helena Bonham Carter was not far behind. In the 60s, Joan Crawford and Pepsi were an onscreen pair made in product-placement heaven.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
I was ten years old when Berserk! was released in theaters, and I recall how disturbing I found the TV commercials and newspaper ads that prominently featured the image of a man about to have a stake driven through his head by a hammer. I was actually too afraid to see the movie at the time, but I wonder what I would have made of it. As silly as it seems to me now, I might have actually gotten into it then.

This is one of several different "Shock-Limit" quiz teaser ads that
appeared in local newspapers in January 1968

Watching the film today, the plot, such as it is, really fades into the distance, and the entirety of my enjoyment is centered exclusively around Crawford and the Crawford mystique. Like a solar eclipse, Joan Crawford and all she has come to represent as a gay icon and camp godsend blots out everything else. Every aspect of Crawford and her life have been parodied and talked about for so long that it's hard for me to even see her as a human being, much less a fictional character. One she plays as pretty much as a template of her Joan Crawford image. 

As I find with all of Crawford's late-career films, watching Berserk! is like being given a tour of a Joan Crawford tribute museum. And I honestly wouldn't have it any other way.

There are scenes infused with near-confessional references to her real-life failed romances, dedication to work over all else, and her "problematic" mothering skills. 

Joan and Ty adopt a pose ripped from countless vintage movie posters
 (not to mention paperback romance novels)

Indeed, every one of Geeson's scenes with Crawford subliminally calls to mind Mommie Dearest:

"And what about your Christmas card list?"

"Because I'm not one of your FAAAANS!"

"You know, Christina, flirting can be taken the wrong way...."

Perhaps a stronger film than Berserk! could surmount these distractions, but Berserk! has so little going for it that's really compelling; one can't help but welcome every self-referential, over-acted, self-serious moment the great Miss Joan Crawford provides. So, for fans of the best that camp has to offer...Step right up!

BONUS MATERIAL
The original (spoiler-filled) Berserk! trailer that scared me as a kid.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents; "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (1961) - Diana Dors stars in this circus-themed episode that was never aired because sponsors deemed it too gruesome.

George Claydon, who played Bruno the clown in Berserk! appeared as the
first Oompa Loompa on the left in 1971's Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

Diana Dors was not only quite the bombshell in her youth, but in later years became one of television's most articulate, witty, and charming talk show guests. Here's a clip of a 1971 television interview.

Wikipedia biography of actor Ty Hardin referencing his 8 marriages and eventual descent into right-wing, nutjob, ultra-conservatism.

Given how much Joan Crawford favored the dramatic lighting which cast a shadow across her neck,  I suppose it's only fitting that on the day I took this photo of her star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame (in front of the Capitol Records building near Hollywood & Vine) I was unable to avoid this band of shadow falling across it. I can imagine Crawford in heaven telling God how to light her correctly. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2015

MAPS TO THE STARS 2014

Warning: Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay on David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, not a review, therefore many crucial plot points are revealed for the purpose of analysis. 

A treasured volume in my library is a hardbound copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology, gifted to me by my sweetheart countless birthdays ago. This entertaining, exhaustively encyclopedic collection of classical Greek and Roman myths (with the mysteries of the universe interpreted and scaled to human dimensions) is something of a folkloric map to the stars itself. Here, the inexplicable is named, given human form, and all that is mysterious and random in the galaxy is attributed to the capricious whims and petty rivalries of an incestuous clan of demigods and goddesses holding forth from their thrones in the heavens. At their core, these ancient fables are operatic family dramas and morality tales about overindulged gods & goddesses with too much power and too few boundaries. Leading insular lives of emotional inertia, these mythical deities manipulate the elements (e.g., fire and water) for amusement, and are not above creating chaos out of boredom.

The unfettered moral license of these gods (who have the power to reward favored mortals by turning them into constellations) leads to the marrying of siblings; the abandoning of their temperaments to fervid jealousies and rivalries over imagined slights; and, more often than not, the sort of violent and bloody final-act retribution that gives Greek Tragedy its name.

All of this filled my mind and fueled my thoughts while watching David Cronenberg’s brilliant Maps to the Stars. A modern mythological family tragedy set amongst the flawed, emotionally disfigured gods and goddesses of contemporary pop culture (movie stars) from the airless heights of that insulated Mount Olympus known as Hollywood. 

Julianne Moore as Havana Segrand

Mia Wasikowska as Agatha Weiss

Olivia Williams as Cristina Weiss

John Cusak as Dr. Stafford Weiss

Robert Pattinson as Jerome Fontana

Evan Bird as Benjamin Weiss

Havana Segrand (Moore) is a Hollywood falling-star suffering the first pangs of impending obsolescence, and, consequently, lives in a near-constant state of naked desperation. A desperation not quelled by yoga, meditation, narcotics, age-regression therapy, or “purpose fucking” (sex with well-placed industry types for the purpose of their putting in a good word for you when they can). In a town where the question, “Isn’t she old?” ‒ the definitive dismissal ‒ is asked in relation to 23-year-olds, Havana literally clings to her prominently-displayed Genie (Canadian Film Award) while discussing dwindling career options with her pragmatic agent, whose name is, oddly enough, Genie. 

Hungry for career rejuvenation, Havana fixates on landing the starring role in Stolen Waters, a reimagining (Hollywood-speak for remake) of a 60s cult film which starred her late mother, actress Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon) who died tragically in a fire in 1976. Havana’s desire to be cast in a role that would in effect have her playing her mother, is an obsession unabated by claims on Havana’s part that she was a victim of her mother’s physical and sexual abuse as a child. Nor the distressing fact that her mother – abusive as ever  –  has begun to appear to her as a ghost. 

Clarice Taggert in Stolen Waters

This film within a film, which gets its title from the biblical proverb "Stolen waters are sweet, bread eaten in secret is pleasant," figures prominently in the lives of several characters in Maps to the Stars. 
The film itself, which seems to be about a seductive, schizophrenic patient at a mental institution, not only carries allusions to the character of Agatha (Wasikowska), but reminded me a great deal of the 1964 Jean Seberg/Warren Beatty film, Lilith. In that film, Seberg plays a schizophrenic patient in a mental institution and Beatty a therapist who's doomed by his obsession with her. In Hebrew mythology, Lilith is the name for a female demon representing seduction and chaos.

Astronomy maps may reveal the gravitational interlink of star clusters in the heavens, but the boulevards and intersections on those geographical maps to the stars’ homes sold on Los Angeles street corners can’t begin to chart the inbred network of aligned interests and commingled gene pools that make up Hollywood. In Maps to the Stars, Havana’s central storyline is orbited by a cast of characters whose lives at first seem unrelated, but later reveal themselves, in almost Altmanesque fashion, to be just as incestuously interconnected as everything else in the City of Angels.

First, there’s Benjie Weiss (Bird), the obnoxious child star of a lucrative movie franchise. A recovering drug addict at thirteen, Benjie is already beset by the fear of being replaced by a new and younger model, and his nights are haunted by visions of the ghosts of two dead children. His ambitious stage mother (an anxiously flinty Olivia Williams) dotes on him as one would a valuable commodity, while his narcissistic father (Cusak) is too busy managing his career as the nation’s best-selling self-help guru (“Secrets Kill!”) to be of much help to anyone beyond his high-profile clients.

The Magical Child
The ghosts that appear to Benjie are those of the drowned child of a rival (another of Havana's manifest wishes - like the fiery death of her mother), and a cancer victim whose body in death is adorned with tattoos of maps to the stars. Tattoo patterns that look unsettlingly similar to Agatha's disfiguring burns.

The mysterious catalyst for joining these individuals is Agatha (Wasikowska), a schizophrenic teenage burn victim of mysterious origin who comes to town to, in her words, Make amends,” but serves as the narrative’s uniting thread and unwitting agent of chaos. Representative of the interrelated nature of this city of beautiful grotesques itself, Agatha is biologically linked to some characters, spiritually linked to others.
 Agatha’s journey from Florida to Los Angeles by bus suggests a meagerness of funds contradicting her engagement of the film’s final character, Jerome Fontana (Pattinson), the limousine chauffeur with the celebrity-ready name, to escort her to a particularly significant Hollywood site upon arrival. Fontana, like everyone else in Hollywood who isn’t already actually in the film business, is a wannabe. In this case a wannabe actor/screenwriter hired to drive the chariot for someone who turns out to be this modern myth’s angel of doom/redeemer.

A cast-out *angel surveys the ruins of Mount Olympus (aka the Hollywood Hills)
*After I posted this screencap, my partner brought my attention to the fact that the holes in Agatha's top create "wings" on her back (or the scars of the wings lost after breaking the rules of heaven)...how did I miss that? 

Written by one-time Hollywood chauffeur Bruce Wagner (who penned 1989s rather awful but marvelously titled, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills), Maps to the Stars has the wittily bilious tone of the work of a Hollywood barely-insider: someone close enough to get the details right, but not so favored by the gods as to have been ensnared and blinded by the intoxicating siren song of fame, wealth, and status.

Less a Hollywood satire than a fame culture fable with elements of magic realism, Maps to the Stars is my kind of movie…which isn’t the same thing as saying it’s a slam dunk crowd-pleaser I’d recommend to everyone. Like a great many of David Cronenberg’s films, your appreciation of it has a lot to do with how comfortable you are being made uncomfortable.

But like the dream fantasies of Robert Altman (Images, 3 Women) or Polanski’s raw glimpses into the dark nature of relationships (Venus in Fur, Carnage), Maps to the Stars is an exploration of the condition I find most compelling in films: humanity in extremis.

Worshiping at the Altar of Fame

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Whether a genuine part of Cronenberg’s vision or merely a projection born of my fondness for Greek mythology (I suspect it’s a little of both), I love the idea of Maps to the Stars being something of a modern take on the classic Greek tragedy. 

Hollywood, with its temporal gods and goddesses engaged in hollow conflicts in pursuit of ignoble victories, makes for a terrific modern-day Mount Olympus, just as the town’s self-centeredness and overabundance of swimming pools suggest the reflective springs of Mount Helicon which seduced (and ultimately drowned) Narcissus. 

Wash Away My Sins
Plagued by guilt and the burden of secrets, Cristina suffers an emotional breakdown. The dual elements of fire and water - to either purify or destroy - are recurring motifs running throughout Maps to the Stars. 

In the interwoven stories of the protagonists, all the elements of Greek tragedy are there: Secrets, ambition, incest, jealousies, violence, ghosts, visions, morality, purification through self-immolation, redemption, liberation, and the godlike summoning of the elements of fire and water. 

Agatha, whose name means “good” in Greek, arrives in Hollywood dressed in a manner to conceal the scars from burns suffered in a fire she started as a child. Among the Hollywood trendoids, she looks as if she's from another planet. In fact, when asked where she’s from, she responds, “Jupiter.” We know she's been institutionalized for arson in Florida, so we take it to mean she’s from the city of Jupiter, Florida. But Jupiter is also the name of the Greek god who married his sister, Juno. And as we later learn, Agatha is a child born of incest.

Carrie Fisher as Herself
A central theme of Maps to the Stars is the incestuous nature of Hollywood. Havana Segrand is an actress haunted (literally) by her actress mother, yet longs to play her in a film. Carrie Fisher, daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds, wrote Postcards from the Edge, a semi-autobiographical book and film about the troubled relationship between an actress and her considerably more-famous mother. The presence of Carrie Fisher in the film can't help but also evoke thoughts of Star Wars and all those incestuous Leia/Luke/Vader familial subthemes. 

PERFORMANCES

Maps to the Stars reminds me so much of those 70s films that made me fall in love with movies in the first place. Of course, a major selling point from the getgo is the absence of anything Comic-Con suitable in the narrative, but I really found the characters and the film’s attempt to say something real about our culture incredibly fascinating. It's a funny, frightening, ugly, sad, brutal film that is ultimately very moving (and touching). And the film earns bonus points for doing so in a way that refuses to spell everything out. 

Best of all are the performances of the uniformly excellent cast. John Cusak oozes smug menace, Evan Bird’s repellent child star shows the wounds of neglect, and in the film’s least-developed role, Robert Pattinson (this is the first film I’ve ever seen him in) is so good you wish he’d been given more to do.

However, Maps to the Stars really belongs to the women. Oscar-winner Julianne Moore gives one of those totally raw, risk-taking performances that's likely to divide audiences. Me, I've met my share of Havana Segrands in my time, and Moore seriously nails it in her willingness to “go there” in her searingly naked depiction of the ugliest aspects of what it has come to mean to be a movie star.

False idol?
Havana's Genie award plays too significant a role in her life.
Incidentally, director David Cronenberg is a five-time Genie Award winner 

I first saw Mia Wasikowska many years ago on the superb HBO series, In Treatment. She impressed me then, as she does now, with her natural presence on the screen. A calming presence that nevertheless has an edge to it. An edge bordering on mystery, vulnerability, and a lurking sense of something perhaps unsavory in her nature. She's quite hypnotic here, appearing open yet as closed off as a clam.
Love how when we first see her she is cloaked in a souvenir crew jacket for "Bad Babysitter," Benjamin's endangered movie franchise. Of course, we later discover find out Agatha herself was the ultimate bad babysitter; almost killing her brother when they were children and he was left in her charge.

Rounding out this trifecta of female perfection is Olivia Williams. Long one of my favorite actresses, Williams balances out Moore's scattered self-enchantment and Wasikowska's cloaked inscrutability with an intense characterization of a woman hanging on by a thread on the verge of an abyss. As one of those armies of bright, intelligent women whose every waking moment is devoted to the career of her child (Hollywood is loaded with them), Williams is a vibrating livewire of frustrations and barely contained tensions, Williams is both terrifying and heartbreaking as the stage mother whose fatal flaw is that, deep beneath her steely facade, she may not be quite soulless enough to survive in Hollywood. 

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

A major asset to any film is having a director in control of what message they’re trying to convey. Like many films set in the world of privilege and power, Maps to the Stars is an indictment of the malignant allure of wealth and fame and its potential to foster delusions and corrupt the soul. But Canadian-born David Cronenberg - this is his first film [partially] shot in the US - succeeds where Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street so miserably failed: he’s able to depict the excesses of extensive wealth without simultaneously glamorizing it.  

On the Rodeo Road to Recovery
Havana (seen here with brand-new personal assistant, Agatha) self-medicates
by spending $18,000 on clothes at Valentino

As a longtime LA resident who’s worked for many years as a personal trainer in the same peripheral capacity to celebrities as Map to the Stars’ interchangeable chauffeurs and “chore whores” (personal assistants); trust me, there’s nothing satiric or exaggerated about the details of celebrity life depicted in this movie.

The grotesquely oversized homes feel sterile and devoid of inhabitants; the children who act like adults, the adults who like children; entire identities are invested in one’s desirability or employability (often one and the same); and everybody feels so guilty for living lives of such undeserved privilege they seek absolution in self-serving spirituality, health foods,  narcotics, holistic drugs, and alcohol. Better than any film I’ve seen in recent years, Maps to the Stars captures the isolated, bubble-like existence of Hollywood’s rich and famous. A space so airless and devoid of perspective or self-awareness it actually could be what so many already assume it to be…another planet.

Stafford Weiss, self-help shaman-to-the-stars, guides Havana through one of her body's
"Personal history points." *Note the barefoot shoes - an instant douchebag signifier

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Maybe it’s just me, but movies set in Hollywood seem to take on a mythological quality without even trying. The stuff of Greek tragedy: fate, love, loss, retribution, redemption, ambition, hubris, abuse of power – sounds like your typical studio pitch meeting!

What makes Hollywood so ripe for mythologizing is the city, in its present incarnation anyway, represents something of a Paradise Lost. It's a place blessed by the gods with ideal weather and sublime vistas, yet it's also a community of artists with the potential to globally elevate and inspire (figuratively speaking, people in the film business make dreams for a living). But what is Hollywood in reality? A place where everyone has smiled into the face of the devil and allowed themselves to be blinded by the golden glare of fame and wealth.

Inner Peace
Movie stars tend to use spirituality as a means to justify self-absorption and rationalize materialism.
Here Havana's tranquility takes a major hit with the news that she's lost out on a coveted movie role 

David Cronenberg, master of the “body horror” genre, parallels Agatha’s external disfigurement (which she goes to great pains to conceal) with the internal spiritual decay of Hollywood’s beautiful people (which they make no effort to conceal at all). Agatha’s arrival is disruptive because her desire to make amends really means forcing others to confront and/or expose their secrets.  

Just as Havana’s regression therapy is a means of confronting her past through the reliving of it; Agatha ritualistically recites Paul Éluard’s poem, Liberty, while one pair of siblings ceremoniously restages the wedding of another pair of siblings (their parents), in order to free themselves from the toxic damage of that bond. To free themselves from the chain of addiction, cycle of abuse, legacy of mental illness, and the curse of ghostly hauntings.

Dressed for A Date With Destiny

The burning of Los Angeles is a vivid metaphor of purification in Nathanael West's classic novel, The Day of the Locust. In that book and in the brilliant 1975 film, West depicted a Hollywood devoid of love and undeserving of redemption. David Cronenberg finds contemporary Hollywood to be at least as monstrously grotesque as West did back in 1939, but he also posits the possibility that it is a city capable of reclamation.

"Love is Stronger than Death"

On my school notebooks
On my desk and on the trees
On the sand and on the snow
I write your name

On all the flesh that says yes
On the forehead of my friends
On every hand held out
I write your name

Liberty

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2015