This week's Saturday Night Special is an interesting film on multiple levels, one being that it was directed by future horror gimmick-meister William Castle!
The gimmick here is that the lead role is really a fat man, a character created by Dashiell Hammett, the author of "The Maltese Falcon."
"Let's see, who shall I kill today?"
The poor unsuspecting dentist is then murdered........
.....And unceremoniously dumped out the window!
All because of some stupid dental records!
So, now we have to backtrack to find out what's going on!
The joke was making chefs look like surgeons in the middle of some serious operation!
Jayne (Undercurrent) Meadows is Jane Adams. She worked for the Doctor when he was alive.
Jayne was married to the extremely funny Steve Allen and was older sister to actress Audrey (Alice Kramden) Meadows.
J. Scott Smart is "The Fat Man," Detective Brad Runyon. He played the role on radio for five years before they decided to make it into a movie.
"The Fat Man" has a great cast that includes Rock Hudson as Roy Clark, a down and out guy who needs some dental work real bad!
A couple days later, he's rolling in the dough, and a few more days after that, he comes up missing!
"The Fat Man's" rather strange partner is Clinton Sundberg as Bill Norton!
The stunning Julie London has the role of Pat Boyd, Roy Clark's future wife!
Actually my favorite part of the whole movie is this scene where "The Fat Man" asks Pat Boyd if she'd like to dance, and the big guy goes out and cuts a mean rug! He's pretty light on his feet!
It wasn't exactly love at first sight for Pat and Roy!
But they warm up to each other pretty fast, and the next thing you know......
.........They get married, and he disppears!
The million dollar caper includes heisting an armored car, and making off with the daily receipts from the track!
Sure guys you don't look the least bit suspicious!
The world famous clown Emmett Kelly plays a clown named Deets using a different makeup from his normal routine!
Yeah, it's a little slow in places, and at times, it feels real odd, and then you remember,
Oh, Yeah, William Castle!
I'm probably one of the very few people who prefers William Castle's costume dramas and film noir-ish b-flicks over his horror gimmick movies. He made a bunch of wild color films for Columbia in the early 1950s that were period films, westerns, biblical movies, etc. It's a shame, I think, that he spent the latter years of his career trying to be the poor man's Hitchcock.
ReplyDeleteWell, he DID do Rosemary's Baby, arguably his biggest hit.
ReplyDeleteCurrently available to watch on YouTube,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed BUG back in the mid-'70s (a drive-in double feature with SSSSS) as a crazy half-horror film which my date didn't like at all, but Castle's strangest film was PROJECT X (1968). The most entertaining (strictly for me) were silly things like ZOTZ! (incredible to see at a kiddie matinee in 1963, and a real hoot at that!), but among the most fun were his very early films like TEXAS, BROOKLYN AND HEAVEN (1948) which is still on Archive.org.
ReplyDeleteI'm not that much of a horror fan, and not into stuff like ROSEMARY'S BABY, but I know that a lot of folks consider it a classic, and that's cool. :) The only Polanski films I really like are CHINATOWN and KNIFE IN THE WATER.
If into vintage comedy silliness with a fantastic (!!!) cast, here's William Castle's 1948 TEXAS, BROOKLYN AND HEAVEN:
https://archive.org/details/TexasBrooklynAndHeavenVideoQualityUpgrade
PS: I especially like Polanski's KNIFE IN THE WATER, which was apparently greatly inspired by Roger Corman's earlier LAST WOMAN ON EARTH (I had a long discussion about this connection with a seasoned longtime pro film writer-director friend, who tended to agree with my idea of Polanski being inspired by Corman and by the LWOE screenwriter Robert Towne toward his making of KNIFE IN THE WATER and later CHINATOWN, also written by Towne!)
ReplyDelete"Everything is connected" some might even say...