Yes, last night I found myself liberated from work once again—but because my day off came too soon, I have to rely on the voluminous Thrilling Days of Yesteryear DVD archives for entertainment, since my Netflix shipment has yet to arrive.

I started pretty early in the evening—the ‘rents are back from an extended tour of the Mountain State (our yearly family reunion—in beautiful downtown Dailey, WV—was this past Saturday) and Mom asked if I wouldn’t mind putting on a movie…because she didn’t think the Braves were playing this evening. (She specifically requested that it not be one of the Tarzan flicks from the box set I recently bought her—I think she’s become disillusioned that the movies aren’t as good as she remembered.)

Fortunately, she still enjoys the Universal Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, so we went with 1944’s The Pearl of Death. Many fans of this movie series often pick The Scarlet Claw as the best of the bunch, but sometimes I’m not so certain Pearl isn’t an itsy bit bitter. In this one, loosely based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Six Napoleons,” Holmes engages in a race against time to locate the famed—and cursed—Borgia Pearl before master criminal Giles Conover (Miles Mander) gets his skeevy paws on the jewel. It’s a standout Holmes entry for several reasons; the first being that it showcases character actor/cult figure Rondo Hatton as “The Hoxton Creeper.” Hatton was a bit player whose unusual physical appearance was brought about by acromegaly, and though he passed away in 1946 (from a heart attack) he made two more appearances as a character dubbed “The Creeper” in House of Horrors and The Brute Man (both released in 1946).

Universal’s “scream queen” Evelyn Ankers is also in Pearl, playing an atypically villainous role—Ankers had a long history at Universal with films like The Wolf Man (1941) and Son of Dracula (1943) to her credit. (Ankers also appeared in the first of that studio's Holmes series, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror.) Throughout the series, Rathbone (as Holmes) often appeared in a variety of disguises and I think it’s kind of interesting that in this entry both Ankers and Mander are masters of disguise as well. What I dearly love about the Sherlock Holmes movies is that even though they were made as B-features, they have a sort of gloss that often makes them indistinguishable from their A-product; I think this is due in enormous part to the talents of Roy William Neill, who helmed all of the Holmes entries save the first. Neill had been a veteran of silent films, and his best work includes the 1935 Boris Karloff thriller The Black Room (an underrated goody) and Black Angel (1946), a great little noir that will be released on DVD next week.

A recent comment from my good pal Pete M. about the 1955 classic The Night of the Hunter had a rather subliminal effect on me—namely, it made me want to watch it again, and I did so after the folks retired for the evening. (I watched this movie once with my father; I thought he would enjoy it since it takes place in West Virginia. But Dad failed to grasp the expressionistic feel of the film—he took one look at the river that the kids are floating down and cracked, “That’s the Ohio? I could step over that.”) Hunter was adapted from the novel by Davis Grubb, a WV native and an individual whom I got the opportunity to meet while I was still in high school. I know the proper way to describe authors who are a little off-the-beaten-path is usually “eccentric,” but I think in Grubb’s case the better appellation is “squirrelly.” Dad got roped into driving Grubb from the airport (which was about an hour from where we lived) and Davis apparently would not allow my father to drive over 35 miles an hour on Interstate 77. (Grubb also stayed at a friend of mine’s house while in town; she says the only one he would communicate with during his stay was the family dog.) Anyway, the film is the story of a slightly psychotic preacher named Harry Powell (played by “Big Bad” Bob Mitchum in the performance of his career) who marries a widow (Shelley Winters) in an effort to locate a stash of $10,000 that her late husband (Peter Graves) has hidden. Graves has entrusted his son (Billy Chapin) with the money, hiding it in his young daughter (Sally Bruce)’s doll—and when Mitchum kills Winters the kids have to hightail it away from him, and end up being protected and adopted by a kindly farmwoman/earth mother played by Lillian Gish.

In his book The Great Movies, Roger Ebert notes that Night of the Hunter doesn’t get a lot of respect, due in part that it was directed by actor Charles Laughton—his first and only feature film. (Hunter was a box-office turkey at the time of its release, scotching Charles' plans to do a second movie which was supposedly going to be The Naked and the Dead.) And even though Laughton didn’t get the opportunity to make another film, he still has a 1.000 batting average—because Hunter is nothing short of a genuine movie classic. It’s a very stylized morality-fairy tale, loaded with sexual symbolism, with Mitchum (an actor who never got any respect, either—it’s possible he made acting look too easy) in peak form as the seriously disturbed Powell (I love that tone of his voice he uses when he’s calling the kids: “Chiiilll...dren!”). Laughton studied many of D.W. Griffith’s best work in preparation for this movie, and you can definitely see a lot of Griffith-inspired influence in the finished project, most notably Laughton’s choice of Gish for the role of Rachel Cooper. The nifty thing is, Night of the Hunter has gone on to influence other films like Do the Right Thing (1988), which copped its L-O-V-E/H-A-T-E-right hand/left hand riff. The screenplay is credited to film critic James Agee (although there’s a good deal of controversy behind this) and features a great supporting cast in James Gleason, Evelyn Varden, Don Beddoe and a pre-Family Affair Kathy Garver as one of Mrs. Cooper’s charges.

I brought the proceedings to a close by opening up The Best of Abbott & Costello Volume 2 collection—it’s been a while since I’ve seen their 1947 Western comedy The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap. Widow is one of my favorite A&C films, and its ingenuous story actually has a basis in fact—in the movie, Lou accidentally kills a man and under Montana law, he must atone by taking over the responsibility of providing for his wife (played in superb battleaxe fashion by Marjorie Main) and family. Lou hits upon a brainstorm; he becomes sheriff of Wagon Gap, knowing that any man gunning for him would have to be crazy to shoot him since that individual would end up inheriting his position as Main & Company’s guardian (my favorite scene is where Costello, pushing his weight around, forces an entire saloon to drink milk). It’s got a heck of a lot more plot than the usual A&C fare, and was written (with supervision from John Grant) by Robert Lees and Frederic I. Rinaldo, a team of scribes responsible for many of the best Bud & Lou features, including Buck Privates Come Home (1947) and the classic Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). Speaking of Frankenstein, the actor who played the monster in that film—Glenn Strange—has a bit part in this one as one of the bad guys, who are led by Gordon Jones—he later showed up on A&C’s television show as “Mike the Cop.”
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