The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Charles B. Griffith
Stars: Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph and Mel Welles

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh, it’s been a long while since I’ve seen this little gem, though I revisited A Bucket of Blood a lot more recently, a thematic predecessor on whose sets it was shot. It was the first of four films Jack Nicholson made with Roger Corman in the director’s chair; Corman had produced his debut, The Cry Baby Killer. He isn’t the lead, but he does have a highly memorable role.

For a throwaway B-movie feature made on a budget of under $30,000 and shot in only two days (because that’s how long those sets were going to be up), The Little Shop of Horrors has found some major legs. It built a cult audience quickly, continued to build it on television (it’s in the public domain) and eventually exploded in popularity after it was given the Broadway musical treatment which was filmed in 1986 by Frank Oz. It even became an animated show on Fox Kids, horror removed.

I much prefer the original, not only because it isn’t a musical but because it does so much with so little. Corman didn’t give much effort to making the sets look grand, so Mushnick’s Florists has a sign reading “Lots Plants Cheap” and almost everything we see takes place in it, almost like a play. However, the screenplay, by regular Corman writer Charles B. Griffith, is darkly witty, full of New York Jewish dialect, black humour and malapropisms, and the big cast of character actors nail the delivery. “It’s a finger of speech!”

The Big Gundown (1967)

Director: Sergio Sollima
Writers: Franco Solinas and Fernando Morandi, based on a story by Sergio Donati and Franco Solinas
Stars: Lee Van Cleef, Tomas Milian and Walter Barnes

I remember learning from Alex Cox that all the great spaghetti westerns are directed by a man named Sergio. There’s Leone, of course, but Corbucci and Sollima as well. This is one of the latter’s greatest films and it stands up well to my memory of it from two decades ago.

I’m watching it because 9th January would be Lee Van Cleef’s hundredth birthday and so chose the English dub rather than the original Italian language version. It’s an odd dub that shifts now and then back to Italian, with Van Cleef’s voice dubbed, but it mostly features his memorably deep voice.

He’s the hero of the film, Jonathan Corbett, but one of the best things about it is that he’s not a clear hero. He has honour and integrity and he’s cleaned up his part of the west, with the sheriff’s wall now free of wanted posters. His friends are keen for him to run for senator. However, he gets suckered into going after a Mexican who supposedly raped and murdered a twelve year old girl, without seeking proof first, becoming a rather flawed arm of justice. We may not be in on the real story yet, but we can see that it’s clearly a setup from the start.

The Wild Ride (1960)

Director: Harvey Berman
Writers: Marion Rothman and Ann Potter, based on a story by Burt Topper
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Georgianna Carter and Robert Bean

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh boy! Everything I expected from obscure teen exploitation films like The Cry Baby Killer and Too Soon for Love manifested here instead. I stand by both of those being better than we’re conditioned to expect. I can’t say that here.

This is a pretty dismal and rather unlikeable teen exploitation flick, only an hour long and that at least half an hour too much. Most of it boils down to a dick measuring contest for no particular title except that of far out stud in a small town juvenile delinquent clique.

Top stud when we begin is Jack Nicholson as Johnny Varron, who’s done precisely nothing at this point except force a motorcycle cop off the road. “Chicken!” he says, as the cop hits a tree, and then he goes about his day. We learn a little later that it’s Officer Neely who’s now fighting for his life in hospital.

Too Soon to Love (1960)

Director: Richard Rush
Writers: Laszlo Gorog and Richard Rush
Stars: Jennifer West and Richard Evans

Index: The First Thirty.

Jack Nicholson doesn’t have much of a part to play in Too Soon to Love, here and gone again in a few short scenes at a drive-in theatre. The rest of the cast are nobodies, as indeed he was at the time, though a couple of the supporting adult characters went on to parts of note.

The director is the other big name, though he was debuting here. Richard Rush went on to direct The Stunt Man, Freebie and the Bean and a couple of other Nicholson pictures, Psych-Out and Hell’s Angels on Wheels. He co-wrote it with László Görög, who had penned The Mole People and Earth vs. The Spider, hardly nuanced fare.

It would be easy to automatically write this off, but that would be unfair, because it turns out to be a surprisingly effective drama that persists in going further than I expected it to. I don’t know how many times I said “Damn!” during the second half but it had to be a lot.

The Cry Baby Killer (1958)

Director: Justus Addiss
Writer: Leo Gordon and Melvin Lavy
Stars: Harry Lauter, Jack Nicholson and Carolyn Mitchell

Index: The First Thirty.

Yes, Jack Nicholson, star of so many eighties and nineties movies, started out way back in the fifties, when he was shockingly young but still recognisable. His name surely eclipses all the others above today but he was very much a new kid in 1958 working on his first picture.

The biggest name other than Nicholson’s to our eyes today is that of the producer, Roger Corman, for whom Nicholson worked in many of his early films, not only as an actor but as whatever a film needed at any particular time. If you know Corman’s name, then it shouldn’t surprise you to find that this is an exploitation film, but it doesn’t do a bad job at mimicking the effects of Ace in the Hole on a tiny budget.

Other than the opening scene, which is set in a dark alley, the whole picture unfolds in or around Pete Gambelli’s café. There are a lot of characters, meaning that a lot of actors get to have moments in the spotlight. Nicholson gets surprisingly little to do, but he’s arguably the lead character, even with second billing after Harry Lauter, and his character is absolutely the driving force of the entire picture.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars (1985)

Director: Sammo Hung
Writer: Barry Wong, based on a story by Lo Kin, Barry Wong, and Roy Sze-To
Stars: Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao

Index: The First Thirty.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars may not be quite as varied as The Owl vs. Bumbo but it’s far more schizophenic. In fact, it feels like two different features were spliced together into a new one featuring a notable all-star cast.

Half of it is an action movie and this half is fantastic stuff, even if the story behind it isn’t particularly clear. Then again, it’s the third of seven films in the Lucky Stars series of movies and it’s been rather a long time since I last saw the first, Winners and Sinners. I remember that one a lot more fondly than I’ll remember this.

Sibelle Hu is Chief Inspector Woo Ba-wah of Special Unit CID and she’s after the MacGuffin of the movie, a letter sent by Ma in Thailand to Wang Yi-ching in Hong Kong right before he’s assassinated. That’s a memorable scene right there, because he’s parasailing at the time and the trio of assassins take to the sky too, merely armed with machine guns and bazookas. Most notably, one of them is Richard Norton firmly in extra-villainous mode.

The Owl vs. Bumbo (1984)

Director: Sammo Hung Kam-Bo
Writer: Lai Ling Cheung
Stars: Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, George Lam, Deannie Ip and Michelle Khan

Index: The First Thirty.

Everyone has to begin somewhere and Yeoh Choo Kheng began by becoming Miss Malaysia in 1983. She was born in Malaysia, to a senator and his wife, so grew up speaking English but only understood a little Malaysian Cantonese. So, when she was offered a TV commercial for Guy Laroche watches with Sing Long on a call in Cantonese, she had no idea who that was. That commercial led to this picture and four decades later she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, breaking a lot of glass ceilings in the process.

Of course, if you’re reading this zine, you’ll know Yeoh Choo Kheng as Michelle Yeoh and may well know that Sing Long is Jackie Chan. He isn’t in this film but it was directed by and stars Sammo Hung, who grew up with Chan in the Seven Little Fortunes group at the Chinese Drama Academy in Kowloon, so there’s a clear connection there. He’d also appear in Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars, her second film.

Sammo plays Bombo from the title, who’s a thief. This picture begins with his final job, to rob a bank, for which he’s well armed indeed, with a crazy amount of ammo, grenades and a bunch of explosives, lots of which turn out to be fake, as we discover when he strafes a fish tank with a machine gun and nothing breaks.

I Bury the Living (1958)

Director: Albert Band
Writer: Louis Garfinkle
Stars: Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel and Peggy Maurer

Index: 2024 Centennials.

Robert Kraft is the new chairman of the Management Committee of the Immortal Hills cemetery in Milford so Andy McKee, who’s been its caretaker for as long as anyone can remember, shows him around. Bob Kraft is Richard Boone, well known on TV in 1958 for his role in Medic, which landed him a 1955 Emmy nomination, but was becoming a bigger star through roles in westerns like The Tall T, Ten Wanted Men and Man without a Star, along with a new TV show for 1957 called Have Gun – Will Travel, in which he played a gentleman wandering the West as a gun for hire to help people in need. McKee, an old Scot with a thick accent whose retirement is one of Kraft’s first priorities, is Theodore Bikel, then a thirty-four year old Austrian Jew. He was born in Vienna but moved to what was then Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), learning acting there and later in London, to which he moved at twenty-one to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He racked up many European nationalities in movies. A Scot was just one more.

The easiest way to see I Bury the Living is as an unassociated feature length episode of The Twilight Zone, so it doesn’t hurt that Boone bore a resemblance to Rod Serling. He had similar rugged good looks, a similarly serious attitude and, of course, a similar suit given that Bob is also the president of the Kraft department store. The Kraft family run the town of Milford and Bob’s Uncle George, who was chairman two years prior, explains to him how they maintain their level of prestige. Every man in the family “served on every community project, board and committee that was ever created. They served for free but they did it for business.” So, even though Bob is busy with the store, he’s now going to have to dedicate a few hours a week to the cemetery. Given that most of the feature is set at Immortal Hills and we never see the store, you can imagine how well that doesn’t go for him. There’s a reason for that and it is inherently tied to the big board on the far wall of the cemetery’s office that McKee talks him through on that first fateful visit.

Two for the Road (1967)

Director: Stanley Donen
Writer: Frederic Raphael
Stars: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney

I had never heard of Two for the Road before plucking it out of Stanley Donen’s filmography for this project, but I’m very happy that I did. It’s technically a British film, but the funding came from a Hollywood studio—20th Century Fox—and it was primarily shot in France, so it’s an international picture and that’s highly appropriate because it feels like an international film, a romantic comedy obviously influenced by the French New Wave. It was shot in 1966 and, while it certainly looks like it was shot in 1966, it also feels like it could have been made yesterday because it’s that timeless; and let’s be honest, how many films shot in 1966 can you say that about? It wasn’t much of a commercial success, making back $12m on a $5m budget, but it was highly regarded by the critics. More than one has described it as Donen’s best movie, even though he also directed Singin’ in the Rain; it’s often been described as having Audrey Hepburn’s greatest performance; and Henry Mancini has claimed that his theme is his personal favourite from his work.

Clearly I should take a look at it to remember Donen and his career, on what would have been his centennial; he came pretty close to celebrating it too, passing in 2019 at the age of 94. The lead actors are Hepburn and Albert Finney, the latter of which was fresh from the success of Tom Jones and the former very close to her initial retirement, with only Wait Until Dark following it until a much anticipated return a decade later in 1976’s Robin and Marian. The most important name, though, at least to this particular picture, is that of Frederic Raphael, who wrote the original screenplay. It’s not exactly autobiographical, but it was sparked by a road trip that he and his wife took through France, some of the script taken from things that they did but much of it taken from things that they didn’t do but could well have done in a parallel universe. He received an Oscar nomination for his work, the film’s only nomination as Hepburn was nominated for Wait Until Dark instead, but he lost to William Rose for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951)

Director: William Marshall
Writer: Errol Flynn
Stars: Errol Flynn, Micheline Prelle, Vincent Price, Agnes Moorehead and Victor Franken

Index: The First Thirty.

It’s a shame that Adventures of Captain Fabian isn’t a better movie to wrap up the First Thirty of Vincent Price, but, as we all know, he went on to much better things, not least the horror genre that turned him into an icon. At least that gives me a start for this review, because it would otherwise be awkward.

This ought to be an Errol Flynn film, partly because he’s the star, top billed and in the title role, but also because he wrote the screenplay. It may be telling that he never wrote another one, though he did write whatever counted as a script for Cuban Rebel Girls, his final feature which is so utterly bonkers I included it as my Q for Quickie chapter in my first book, Huh?

However, he simply isn’t notable here. The film establishes itself before he shows up, but he does have an impact when he does. He’s an older seafarer, not remotely as ripped as he is in the poster but still dashing and charming. However, he’s also annoyingly calm, whatever else is happening at the time, leaving every bit of drama to his co-stars.

He also vanishes again for a while, as events play out, because he isn’t the protagonist, just a character who sticks his nose into something he shouldn’t and thus enables a whole bunch of chaos and heartbreak. What’s telling is that, had he left well alone, we wouldn’t have a film but a lot of fictional people would still be alive. Is that what Flynn saw as adventure?