Bela Lugosi's only color film, and maybe the only horror film (if it can be called that) to come out in the lean post-war, noir-stuffed year of 1947, there's a lot of "only" attached to SCARED TO DEATH, director Christy Cabanne's 162nd feature film (and writer Walter Abbott's first, and almost last, script). Uniquely neither quite comedy nor horror nor drama nor noir, it transcends its quickie tossed-off nature through recklessly genre-buckling surrealist brio. As Michael Weldon lovingly wondered "where the people who made this on some strange, mind-bending drug?" [1] Set at a former mental institution (that was 'before the war'), it's now the office and home of Dr. Van Ee (George Zucco) who harbors strange secrets about his household. Why does he need a private duty policeman if he, his son and his son's scheming war bride wife, and a brassy maid are the only residents? He clearly knows something, because he does need one. The goings on in the house are crammed with exits and entrances as befits a stage comedy: hypnotized maids drop dead at someone's feet after delivering cryptic messages; a European magician (his best trick," making the box office receipts 'disappear') Professor Leonide (Bela Lugosi) and his mute assistant Ingo (Angelo Rossitto), "one of the little men," creep in and out of secret panels in search of some other unseen person; a scowling green mask regularly looks in from outside the window; occasionally Leonide bays wordlessly at the moon and wave his arms. Bodies appear in one room and wind up downstairs, covered in a sheet on the doctor's examination table, as if by magic. Heads--delivered in boxes left at the door--doth roll.
Its blithe inconsistency of tone might all be a passive-aggressive attempt by Cabanne and Abbott to do as bad a job as possible to get out of a contract (it worked, this was the last film put out by 'Golden Gate' Pictures), but I like to think they just 'went for it' --that deadpan Mad magazine irreverence that crops up any time talented folks are given free reign to do whatever they want as long as comes in under budget and on time and is over 60 minutes long-- and they don't want to use that freedom to make 'art' (and so art is made almost by the not wanting of it).
Either way, they do one thing right and that's give Bela a good non-butler role. Still a red herring, in a way, but then again - there's no crime to solve, so he's no weirder or less weird than any other of the aspects. On those terms, he's still good. He needed this job too. All he'd done in the last three years were some RKO B-movies like the Val Lewton spoof-- Zombies on Broadway (1945). [2] In fact, Scared would be his only film in 1947. These were the beginning of the lean times and--aside from Abbot and Costello Meets Frankenstein in 1948, they were only going to get leaner from here on out... until Ed Wood came calling, like Bela's personal morphine-hallucinated cross-dressing angel of death.
And though this isn't really a Lugosi showcase he does get star billing and it holds up today as a surreal cross between a film noir, the usual Poverty Row "chiller" and a nonsensical exercise in Marx Bros/Beckett noir post-structuralism. Racing through an ornate plot full of maybe gaslighting, shady pasts (what went on in war-torn Europe doesn't stay in war-torn Europe), and idiot-told/nothing-signifying fury, it features the unique gimmick (borrowed three years later in Sunset Boulevard -right), of being narrated (sort of) from beyond the grave, this time from a face-up lady in the morgue rather than face-down a man in a sun-dapped pool. Huge difference! Funny that if you had to guess which film had the old dark house and an ape in a coffin, it wouldn't be the PRC Lugosi chiller, but an A-list Billy Wilder classic. That's Hollywood.
There's no pool in SCARED TO DEATH or even an outdoors, beyond a few front door/exterior secret panel shots that seem shot on indoor sets. Shot mostly on a few suspiciously nondescript yet garish sets evoking a nondescript pre-suburban townhouse, the sort old timey doctors would live in and work out of, with a downstairs examination room / office (with a wall that seems to change color to signify different times of day). Maybe that's why for me, here on the last day of spring, it's such a pleasure to think about. As I'm regularly sidelined from spring joy due to severe pollen allergies, films like this, wherein the out of doors seems to vanish along with any semblance of reality, I don't feel so bad. I see a sunny pool in movies and I get depressed. But when everything goes down in front of blue walls, doctor's offices, bedrooms, foyer and sitting rooms, and the plot and dialogue are this cock-eyed, I don't feel guilty about being an indoor kid warped on an array of drugs. I feel like all cozy. The slab is as cold as I'd like to be on a sticky humid afternoon. It's nice and dark and quiet in that morgue, the ghostly music and spectral voices that usher the dead body into focus are like sweet sirens. Everyone speaks in a low, respectful voice. Why, it's almost a vacation for Laura AKA Laurette (Molly Lamont) who lets us know via quick dial-in/out cuts that are not only superfluous but nonsensical (since she couldn't possibly know a lot of the details) random and superfluous things like "I became afraid and my mind started to crack" before dialing back out into the terrifying tableau of flatfooted security oaf Bull Raymond (Nat Pendleton) hang-doggedly hitting on the brassy maid Lilibeth (Gladys Blake, taking a break from playing her usual 'brassy hairdresser' and 'brassy telephone operator' parts), or "then came a sinister pair" before the sinister pair (of Leonide and Ingo) arrive at the front door, thus telling us and showing us back-to-back. |
| "then came a sinister pair' (centered) |
The paradoxical conundrums and obvious discrepancies accrue: Lara claims she's being kept a virtual prisoner in her room, though she's not locked in and her physician father-in-law, Dr. van Ee (George Zucco) and his son/ her unwilling husband Ward (Roland Varno), whom she tricked him into marriage on a drunk dare, both wish she'd leave. She's being kept a prisoner only by her own petty spite and greed, refusing to let Ward divorce her even though she doesn't love him or want to stay. Why, is she so anxious to stay in this gloomy house, even as events continue to terrorize her? Has Van Ee has got money? From where? He doesn't seem to have any patients in his little at home office. Did he steal some vast fortune? Is that why, even though there's no other patients or practice, he keeps a full-time hired detective/bodyguard (Pendleton)?
Regularly using big words and then wondering what they mean, Pendleton's Bull is almost the whole show, running in and out of rooms, hamming it up (at what point he even says "Which way did they go? Which way did they go?" while waving his fists around). But there's also a lady in green trying to shake down Dr. Van E with implied secrets, and Leonide sneaking around secret panels and making cryptic rhymes like: "Laurette... Laurette... I'll make a bet, Laurette." The dead narrator Laura is so afraid of someone coming to get her from those rough years that she can't even remember who it is. But he must be in town, or someone else is sending her things like a life-size replica of her severed head (upper left). She throws at at Bull ("who paid you to say these things to me?"), who juggles it while falling backwards down the stairs and into Dr. Van Ee's office, who dryly notes it must have escaped from its locked room. Someone calls the operator to ask for the cops in an overreacting panic, then says it was a false alarm, but reporter Terry Lee (Douglas Fowley - the guy who "likes 'em stupid" in Cat Women of the Moon) shows up anyway, and brings his fiancee, the operator who clued him in on the phone call, Jane Cornell (Joyce Compton). What clue he has that something newsworthy is going on seems vague, and the way he shakes it out of people seems intrusive, like a homicide detective trying to solve a murder in advance. Meanwhile a green death mask keeps 'looking' through the window (it has no eye holes), causing girls who see it to faint. And yet - if no one sees it but us, and it cannot see, how can Laura even know it was there when narrating her tale from the slab in the morgue? Is this mask the embodiment of Laura's post-death all-seeing eye that allows her to comment on action she was upstairs for?
Maybe not, but this sort of thing, and fine paradoxical examples of Ed Woodian ouroboros dialogue go looping around in lopsided orbit: Van Ee assures a mysterious lady in green that there are no abnormal things going on in his house, "nor will there ever be." She replies "Nevertheless, the way you were described to me, and the way your place was described to me, I am certain that I am in the right place!" Then (SPOILER) later she turns out to be a man in drag (though the actress in the first scene is definitely not the same person). Bull says to Laura he was hoping she'd get murdered so he could solve it and redeem himself with the homicide bureau. He uses big words like "longitude" and "metabolism" then wonders what they mean. He calls Lilibeth "my melancholy baby," and "my wild Irish rose" while she bemoans his capacity to guzzle her coffee, and endures his constant mopey protestations the way women at workplaces were compelled to, until Anita Hill finally stood her ground (applause), dismissing his vows to ply her with furs and jewels and breakfast-in -bed: "I'd hate to hang by my neck until you got me those things..." Professor Leonide refuses to announce himself before coming in since "if I allowed myself to be announced I doubt I would be received anywhere" Van Ee lets us know Leonide (his cousin) helped pepper the house with secret panels when he was a "patient" there before the war. It was ostensibly so the guards could spy on the inmates, yet Leonide used one of the panels to escape and made his way to Europe and fame. These panels serve no real purpose other than to allow Lugosi to be almost everywhere, though for no real reason other than Lugosi always has secret panels, they're practically synonymous. Lillibeth drops dead after trying to blindfold Laura (her big phobia!) while in a hypnotic trance. She is then is revived by Leonide only because he can see that Bull "truly loves... this girl." When Leonide meets brassy Jane Cornell, he says to Lee: "Delightful. I suggest you take good care... of her." When Van Ee tells him he'll be staying in the room right next to Laura, he adds "I know you'll like that." It turns out, Leonide has heard of her fear of being blindfolded, though, as if it's such a crippling phobia (blindfolding being such a daily thing), it's made it to all the psychiatric journals. (Or did he hear it while hiding in the secret passages?) And just what does Lilibeth know that she taunts "Miss Lavalle" with the man in the green mask ("I let him in! Maybe he's here right now, Miss Lavalle!")
There are no clear answers, nor relatives to this weird film. After enough bits of stage entrance and exeunt we hear a strange canned/echo-drenched French accented voice that sounds not unlike Mel Welles' after he's been eaten and absorbed in Corman's indespensible Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) calling the cast into the other room for the performance of the Green Mask by a hypnotized Laurette, who confesses her crimes while wearing a green blindfold. There's no real build-up or reason for it, as it's hardly a capital crime, nor one imagines, might be her death (the titular way). In that weird sense, the antecedents of this film include only a handful of Italian faux-giallo, two from Elio Petri (A Quiet Place in the Country, Death Laid an Egg) and Umberto Lenzi's anti-memorable Spasmo.
But during its unique "only" child date of release this must have been a hard film to place. Today it's clearly a link between the end of the Arsenic and Old Lace-inspired wartime 'horror-comedy' (ala the underrated Boogeyman will Get You), the pre-psychosexual Freud/Kinsey flood of the late 50s-" 60s, ala Suddenly Last Summer, Lilith, Three Faces of Eve, The Cobweb, Psycho, and Robert Bloch's semi-remake of Cabinet of Caligari (1962) starring Glynnis Johns (below) as a girl trapped in a strange house, in the grip of a strange live-in doctor who may be out to drive her mad, or maybe cure her.
Weird that of all those films I've probably seen Scared to Death the most. I've seen it over 20 times! Probably. That's what's so amazing about it. I can't remember if I've seen it at all, not really. It's not boring, but it is incomprehensible, yet so full of frantic incident it passes like the kind of dream that seems most urgent at the time, but is forgotten the moment you awake.
I recently saw Dinner at Eight for the zillionth time and this time what I really noticed is the loving and nostalgic way the dialogue focuses on the good old days before the Crash, evoking the romantic heyday of Marie Dressler and Lionel Barrymore as they shoot the shit in his office, or the golden matinee idol years of brother John trying to work up the energy to make love to his brother's daughter (the gorgeous Madge Evans) without even a cent to pay for the liquor he needs to avoid cracking up. It's a rough picture in that regard, discussing the past so glowingly illuminates the desperate straits of the present. Scared could almost be a deadpan satirical update, looking back to the intrigue and betrayal of the Second World War, stealing box office receipts and betraying one's dance partner/lover to the Gestapo for money, all leading to a return to America and this strange former asylum with its wandering characters all itching for something to happen, the duplicitous and spiteful war bride ex-collaborator and stolen loot embezzlers, though instead of monologues about the good old days, everyone plays their pasts as cards close to the vest. Collaborators still being ferreted out by newly-discharged camp survivors.
Some, even civilians, refugees, war brides, and con artists wind up trapped in theater fires or bombing raids and are presumed dead. Some wind up in houses that are really sanitariums, where they are the only patient. Or is it just a house with a doctor's office downstairs, one who never has any other patients but you? Maybe it's really a trap. We'd seen Murder My Sweet (1944 - left) with its shady sanitarium, a half-way house from hell for keeping people drugged and tied to beds as alleged alcoholics, where Marlowe wakes and escapes from, the doctor working downstairs trying to convince him he's a sick man and is about to faint (left).And anyway, she's already dead. What can she do about it? Miss Lavalle...
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| Women from Scared to Death used to date Cary Gant in The Awful Truth: Molly Lamont, Joyce Compton |
You only get these nuggets of wisdom over several viewings of Scared to Death, so get cracking. It's the same with The Awful Truth -- it gets better and better as the layered fine print can be shuckered loose from the intricate, deceptively shallow shell. Death's plot only begins to make sense after about eleventeen viewings, by which time it's all so deep it needs flow charts. As I point in my award-skipping 2003 film The Lacan Hour where I do a whole segment on its use "Momento Mori" skulls, masks, and head effigies, Scared is a movie that has Death on its mind, even though only one person dies, and they do it before the film begins. It begins to make sense only after you've seen it so many times it ceases to make sense at all.
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| Bela gets impatient for a point to ever be made. |
Press play
again,
and it's a whole different movie.
I know/knew at least two other writers who love/d this film as much as I do (it's the kind of movie only a writers could love): beloved and renowned raconteur d'horreur classique David Del Valle (though even he admits it's "not Voodo Man") and my belated Scarlet Street mentor, Ken Hanke, who steered me to the best available transfer of this often-crappy PD title (PS, it's the 1999 Sling Shot DVD w/ Devil Bat). We're a dying breed we lovers of Scared to Death.
Soon no one will be left to love this cockeyed film unless... maybe... you, dear reader, take up the cudgel. It's got a great story! From what I can gather it's about...
what I can tell... so far... Hmm.
I guess I need to see it again. Anyway, nobody paid me to say this.
I just heard you yell
And thought there'd be a murder at least....
--
NOTES:
1. Weldon, Michael Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983)
2. See: At Long Last Lost Lewtons